Hind_ was hauled on to the slips at Deptford, and Gloriana and her
court dined on board. When the dinner was over she bade her Little
Pirate kneel before her, touched him on the shoulder with his own sword
and bade him rise Sir Francis Drake. The Spaniards, by the way, had
another title for him, no less honourable in his eyes, and this was
“the Master-Thief of the New World.”
For some considerable time nothing happened beyond the failure of one
or two trifling expeditions--which failure was Gloriana’s fault, and
not Drake’s--and the setting of a price of £40,000 by favour of the
King of Spain on the Little Pirate’s head--an investment of which Drake
was soon to pay the dividend in the craft-crowded harbour of Cadiz.
Meanwhile, matters between England and Spain were going from bad to
worse. For a few months unscrupulous intrigue, backed up by wholesale
lying, hampered Drake most sorely in the preparation of that great
work which was nothing less than the establishment of the sea-power
of England. Everything that the fickleness of his mistress, the
weathercock support of so-called friends at court, and the still more
dangerous machinations of English statesmen in the pay of Spain could
do, was done. The fleet, to his unutterable rage and disgust, was
even placed on a peace-footing, despite the fact that the noise of the
Armada’s preparations was still sounding across the Narrow Seas.
But at last, by some means or other, a certain Spanish spy had got
himself suspected and stretched on the rack. Now the rack, as an aid
to cross-examination, is not an ideal instrument, but it certainly
served its purpose this time, for the spy in his torment gave away
all the details of a vast scheme which embraced an alliance between
France, Spain, and Scotland, together with a general Catholic uprising
in England, which was to take place simultaneously with the Triple
Invasion.
Never had England, and with her the cause of liberty, stood in such
great and deadly peril. Gloriana at last flung diplomatic dalliance
to the winds, stopped her lying and chicanery, kicked the Spanish
Ambassador out of the country, and let her Little Pirate loose. Yet
even now there was another lull before the storm, and this lull Philip
took advantage of to invite a fleet of English corn-ships to his ports,
where he seized them to feed that ever-growing sea-monster which he was
going to pit against El Draque.
This settled the matter. Drake, only half ready for sea, put out with
every ship that could move for fear more orders would come to stop
him and, with an insolent assurance which augured well for the great
things that he was about to do, actually ran his ships into Vigo Bay
and forced the Spanish Governor to allow him to finish his preparations
in Spanish waters. Then he turned his eager prows westward, stopping
on the way at the Cape Verde Islands to lay waste Vera Cruz and make
Santiago a heap of ashes.
Five years before young William Hawkins had been taken prisoner here
and burnt alive with several of his crew, and this was El Draque’s way
of wiping out the old score.
Then he sped on again, spent Christmas at Santa Dominica, refitted
his ships and refreshed his men, and then fell like a thunderbolt on
the famous city of Santo Domingo, the oldest in the Indies, founded
by Columbus himself and ruled over by his brother. It was this that
the Little Pirate had been preparing for during those other mysterious
voyages of his. The blow was as crushing as it was unexpected, and the
prestige of Spain in the West never recovered from it. The town was
utterly stripped and dismantled by the victors. Fifty thousand pounds
in cash, two hundred and forty guns of all calibres, and an immense
amount of other spoil was brought away, and the whole fleet, after
living at free quarters for a month, sailed southward, completely
refitted and re-victualled, as usual, at the Spaniards’ expense.
When the news got to Europe, it was said that Philip had had “such
a cooling as he had never had since he was King of Spain.” It is
both interesting and instructive to learn that not the least part of
the booty took the shape of a hundred English sailors who were found
toiling as slaves in the Spanish galleys.
Reinforced by these, Gloriana’s Little Pirate crossed the Caribbean Sea
and fell on Cartagena, the capital of the Spanish Main, and now the
richest city in the Indies. Paralysed by the insolence of the attack,
it soon fell under its fury and real strength. The booty was enormous,
but the moral effect was still greater. The new-born sea-power of
England had vindicated itself with triumphant suddenness, and Drake,
having picked up the unfortunate remnants of Raleigh’s colony in
Virginia--the time for colonising not having come yet--entered
Plymouth Sound again in the _Elizabeth Bonaventura_ at the head of his
loot-laden fleet, and reported his arrival, piously regretting that on
the way home he had missed the Spanish plate-fleet by twelve hours “for
reasons best known to God.”
“A great gap hath been opened which is very little to the King of
Spain’s liking,” was the Little Pirate’s own comment on the brilliant
achievement which had ushered a new power into the world. He might also
have put it another way, and said that with his well-directed shot
he had plugged the source whence flowed the golden stream of Spanish
wealth, for indeed it was nothing less than this. The Spanish Colossus
suddenly found itself with empty pockets, Spanish credit was ruined
at a single blow, the Bank of Seville closed its doors, and when King
Philip tried to raise a loan of half a million ducats, he was flatly
refused.
How hard hit he was may be seen from the fact that instead of hurling
the whole strength of his laboriously-prepared Armada on the English
coasts, he asked for explanations. Gloriana, with an almost splendid
mendacity, disowned her Little Pirate once more and swore she had
nothing whatever to do with him. But this Drake expected, and went on
with his own plans, having no doubt honestly paid up the Queen’s full
share of the plunder.
A few months more of diplomatic dodgery followed, and then came the
final opening of Gloriana’s eyes. A letter stolen from the Pope’s own
cabinet proved to her beyond all possibility of doubt that the Great
Armada was intended for the invasion of England and nothing else.
Then she called her Little Pirate to her again and took counsel with
him, with the result that the next time he hoisted his flag he did
so on board the great _Merchant Royal_ at the head of twenty-three
sail including five battleships, two first-class cruisers, seven
second-class, and about a dozen gunboats. Nor did he go this time as
the Queen’s licensed pirate but as her Admiral of the Fleet, duly
commissioned in her name to burn, sink, and destroy, and to use all
means whatever to prevent the various divisions of the Armada coming
together.
Even now, at the last minute of the eleventh hour, treachery almost did
its work, for there was an Opposition and Peace-at-any-price Party in
those days, as there has been in later ones. Drake seems to have known
what was coming, for, when the Queen’s messenger dashed into Plymouth
bearing the fatal orders, he had gone.
Happily there was no telegraph in those days. If there had been it
would probably have proved the ruin of England and the triumph of
Spain. As it was the next news that came was from Drake himself,
telling, laconically as usual, how he had “singed the King of Spain’s
beard in Cadiz.” When the facts came out, the said singeing was seen
to amount to the destruction by burning and sinking of 12,000 tons
of shipping, including some of the finest ships of war that floated.
The whole English fleet had, as had now become the custom on such
occasions, been revictualled at Spanish expense, and four large ships
full of provisions were captured intact.
From Cadiz the triumphant Admiral raged up and down the terror-stricken
coast, storming strongholds, and burning and scuttling the store-ships
of the Great Armada. He went to Lisbon, where Santa Cruz, said to be
the greatest sea-captain in Europe, lay, and, after vainly challenging
him to come out and fight, politely offered to convoy him and his
fleet to England “if by chance his course should lie that way.” The
fact was that the Colossus was paralysed. Drake had struck out straight
at its heart, and so doing had proved two principles of no small moment
to the making of the British Empire: first, the true frontiers of a
maritime nation are its enemies’ coasts; second, the only effective
method of defence for such a nation is attack.
It was on his way home from this expedition, storm-shattered and
disgusted at missing the Plate-Fleet, which had once more slipped
through his fingers, that Gloriana’s Little Pirate took the richest
prize of his life. This was the _San Felipe_. She was the King of
Spain’s own treasure-ship, and she came, not from the West, but from
the East. Though he knew it not, Drake had that day done a very great
thing for England and the making of her Empire, for not only did the
_San Felipe_ carry treasure and rich stuffs to the value of something
like a million and a quarter of our money, but she had on board
dispatches, letters, and account-books which let the English merchants
into all the secrets of Spain’s East Indian trade, and led to the
almost instant formation of the Honourable East India Company, itself
an Empire-Maker of no small account.
The epic of the Elizabethan era was now beginning to hurry towards its
climax. But Gloriana was still surrounded by traitors, and even now
temporising was the order of the day. She was cast down by remorse
for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, and she even reprimanded her
Little Pirate for doing her too good service, and told Philip that he
was in disgrace for exceeding instructions.
It was in vain that Drake and the other friends of England prayed
and entreated and stormed and swore. In vain they pointed across the
Narrow Seas to Parma in the Netherlands at the head of 30,000 of the
finest troops in Europe, and to the ports of Spain and Portugal, once
more swarming with shipping and echoing with the noise of warlike
preparations. For a time the liars and traitors had things their own
way again. Drake and Howard implored her to let them get their ships
fitted and go and fight the Armada in its own ports. No, she would do
nothing. And she did nothing till at last arrived that fatal evening on
which--
“There came a gallant merchant-ship full sail to Plymouth Bay.”
Golden weeks and priceless opportunities had been wasted by the fatal
lethargy of the Court. Drake and Howard, instead of falling, as they
longed to do, on the wind-bound Armada in Vigo Bay, and doing with it
as Drake had done at Cadiz, were kept on the defensive, straining like
bloodhounds at the leash, knowing that every moment that the good wind
lasted was heavily fraught with fate for England and perhaps the world.
At length the wind went round, and Drake, marvelling in angry wonder
“how God could have sent a south-west wind just then,” found himself
baffled and beaten back, while Medina-Sidonia with his released Armada
sailed triumphantly for the Channel. There was only one thing now to
do if England was to be saved. Valour and heroism, self-devotion and
skill, must repair the damage that treason, lying, and weakness of
head or heart had done. By this time the Armada should have been a
crushed and tangled mass of burning wreckage, and so it would have
been if Drake had had his way, and now here it was stronger than ever,
its ships covering the hitherto Inviolate Sea; and there was Parma,
with his transports still undestroyed, only waiting to join hands with
Sidonia to once for all strangle the Heretic in their pitiless grip.
In the mighty and memorable fight that followed, our Little Pirate
commanded on his own ship, the immortal _Revenge_. With almost
incredible labour and skill the English fleet was somehow worked and
warped out to the westward until, when that famous Sunday morning
dawned, the sun looked, as has been truly said, upon a sight glorious
for England. There was the great Armada, crescent-shaped, rolling up
the Channel, and there, right in the wind’s eye and on its rear, were
two English squadrons, and a third was gallantly advancing out of
Plymouth.
This one, with true Elizabethan insolence, steered right across the
front of the huge fleet, firing into such of the Dons as came within
range. Then it went about, and joined the other English ships to
windward.
Every one has read of the long, running, seven-day fight that followed;
every one knows how the little, light-heeled English ships ran in and
out among the great unwieldy galleons, tempting them out of their
formation, and, having isolated one, fell on her like a pack of dogs
on a wolf; and how, in spite of all that the English Admiral and his
captains could do, the ever-changing wind and the ever-succeeding calms
so helped the Spaniards, that in the end they reached the Straits of
Dover but little worse off than they started.
If Drake could have had his way, these tactics would have been pushed
farther, and every mile of the way would have been disputed; but Lord
Howard, though a brave man, lacked the all-daring assurance of the
conqueror of Santo Domingo and Cartagena. He would not fight until he
had joined with Seymour and Wynter in the Straits. So it came about
that on the seventh day--that is to say, Saturday afternoon--the Great
Armada, the poorer only by some dozen craft that had been captured
or battered into wreck and ruin, was sailing gloriously past Calais
with the French and English land well in sight, and Dunkirk, the
trysting-place with Parma, only eighteen miles away.
England has never passed through such anxious hours as she did that
afternoon and night. It seemed as though, after all, her new-found
sea-strength had failed her, and that, despite all the brilliant
exploits of Gloriana’s Little Pirate in the West, he was powerless
to protect her nearer home. What would have happened in the ordinary
course of events no one now knows, for the Spaniards, stricken by some
inexplicable madness, suddenly altered the whole course of events by
what can only be called a freak of idiocy.
Medina-Sidonia, after having accomplished the most brilliant feat of
seamanship that his age had seen, gave orders for the Armada to anchor!
A few hours more and its work would have been done, with what results
to England one scarcely cares to picture. So unexpected was this piece
of priceless good fortune by the English captains that they had to drop
their own anchors within range of the Spanish guns to save entangling
themselves with the big Spanish ships.
All Sunday the two fleets lay within sight of each other; anxious
councils of war were held on both sides, and so night fell without a
shot being fired or anything done. By midnight the tide was swirling
strong and swift from the English to the Spanish ships, and Drake was
busy preparing his crowning piece of devilry for the edification of the
Dons.
At about one o’clock on that calm, moonless morning, patches of
flickering, leaping flame began to show among the twinkling English
lights, and these grew swiftly higher and broader, and a few minutes
later the terrified Dons saw eight fire-ships crowned mast-high with
leaping flames, come reeling and roaring into their midst.
Then there was cutting of cables and slipping of moorings, and
labouring with frantic haste to get the ships under sail. Galleon
crashed into galleasse, and galleasse into cruiser in the wild haste
and fatal confusion.
Marvellous to say, not a single Spanish ship took fire, but behind
the fire-craft there was something more terrible and deadly still--El
Draque and his guns. At the supreme moment Lord Howard weakly and
foolishly turned aside to capture or sink a disabled galleasse. If the
rest of the fleet had followed him there might have been no Battle of
Gravelines, and the Trafalgar of the Sixteenth Century might never have
been fought. But, as has been well said, it was the hour for which
Francis Drake had been born. He set the _Revenge_ on the wind, and,
followed by the rest of the squadron, bore down in grim and ominous
silence on the huddled, entangled Dons. Within pistol range of the
great _San Martin_ the _Revenge_ burst into sudden thunder and flame,
and drove on enwreathed in smoke. In her wake ship after ship came
on in perfect order, each raining her iron storm into the rent and
splintering sides of the Dons as they passed.
Then from Dover way came the roar of guns telling that Wynter and
Seymour had got to work, and so for three hours they went at it, the
Little Pirate ever first, and revelling in the work that he loved to
do for his dear England. He had forgotten all his mistress’s slights
and fickleness, all the harm that Court traitors had done him, all his
suffering and privation on the windless seas and burning lands of the
West. It was the hour of England’s fate and his own, and there he was
in the thick of it, and he was happy.
After three hours Howard and his laggards came up, and the fight roared
on flank and front and rear. Although the school-books say but little
about it, there had never been such a sea-fight in the world before,
nor one on whose end such great issues hung. The Spaniards, caught
between El Draque and the sands of Dunkirk--which to them was something
worse than being between the devil and the deep sea--fought with all
their ancient valour, but ship after ship, as the battle roared on
through the day, went down riddled with shot or took fire and blew up,
till at length out of the forty battleships and cruisers which Sidonia
had somehow got together to protect his rear, only sixteen were left,
and they were little better than shot-shattered, fire-blackened hulks.
The powder on both sides was nearly done, but so too was the work of
Drake and his ships. Fathom by fathom the north-west wind was driving
the Dons on to the mud-banks of the Netherland shore, and the Little
Pirate in his well-named _Revenge_ was hanging on their weather quarter
watching--and I doubt not praying--for the moment of their final ruin.
And yet he was not to see it, for when there was but five fathoms of
water between the Spanish keels and the Dutch mud the north-wester
dropped to a calm, a fresh south-wester sprang up in its place, and
for the fourth time in seven days the Armada was saved from utter
destruction by those fickle winds to which a pious sentiment has
ascribed its ruin.
Down went the Spanish helms, and round came the dripping, labouring,
Spanish prows, and ere long all that was left of King Philip’s fleet
was staggering away to the northward to begin that awful voyage round
the north of Scotland and past the wild Irish coast from which so few
were to return. Meanwhile the Little Pirate hung on to the heels of the
flying Armada for two days and nights, until at length a tempest came
rolling up over the Dogger Bank, and he ran in for safety under the
Scottish shore, cheerfully leaving the Dons to the winds of heaven, and
the rocks that were waiting to finish what his own guns had begun.
With the victory of Gravelines, Drake’s work as an Empire-maker comes
to an end. The expedition to Portugal, for all its booty, was a failure
and did nothing to enhance his fame. If his advice had been taken
Spain might have been crushed and humbled for ever, but such was
the hopeless weakness and vacillation at Court that, even after the
Armada had shown her the true designs of Philip, Gloriana got into
negotiations with him again. Over and over again her Little Pirate
besought her to give him the means of striking the blow that should
crush Spain and make England undisputed mistress of the seas, but it
was not to be, and so at length, sick and sore at heart, he sailed away
again to his beloved West, never to return.
There is nothing in this last expedition of his that is noteworthy
save its continued misfortunes. It seemed as though when the little
_Revenge_ went down, as she did in the midst of the fifty-three Spanish
ships which she had fought “for a day and a night,” she had taken her
old commander’s good luck down with her. At last on the deadly island
of Escudo de Veragua the two guardian demons of El Dorado, fever and
dysentry, struck him down with many another of his men. He lived to get
away, but not for long, and six days afterwards, when his fleet came to
anchor off Puerto Bello, the heroic Little Pirate breathed his last and
his gallant soul went to its account, passing away from earth on the
very spot that had been the scene of his first sea-fight and his first
victory.
IV
_OLIVER CROMWELL_
“_HEALER AND SETTLER_”
IV
OLIVER CROMWELL
“He is perhaps the only example which history affords of one man having
governed the most opposite events and proved sufficient for the most
various destinies.”
No man’s character was ever so completely and so tersely summed up as
the great Oliver’s is here in these few words of a critic belonging
to another race and nation, and, as regards his varied destinies, it
may be added that no man ever was raised up and set to work by the
Controller of human destinies as opportunely as he was.
History shows no parallel to it, not even in the oft-quoted story of
Cincinnatus, and certainly in all the long array of our rulers there
is none other whose story is so crammed with wonders or who crowded so
many notable and pregnant acts into the busy days of a few years as
this gentleman-farmer of Huntingdonshire, who at forty-three left his
farming and vestry-meetings and the like and girded on his sword to go
and fight the good fight of freedom, and who at fifty-two laid it aside
to prove himself as good a statesman and ruler as he had been soldier
and general.
His claim to a foremost place among the Makers of Britain is a twofold
one, for he was a restorer, a reinvigorator, as it were, of this realm,
as well as a very considerable widener of it. When the futile and
inglorious reign of “the most learned fool in Christendom” came to an
end, all the brilliant promise of the Elizabethan age had been wofully
obscured, and the glories of the great Queen and her pirates looked
like those of a summer sun setting behind a bank of fog.
As Macaulay justly put the case: “On the day of the accession of James
I. England descended from the rank which she had hitherto held and
began to be regarded as a Power hardly of the second order.... He
began his administration by putting an end to the war which had raged
many years between England and Spain, and from that time he shunned
hostilities with a caution which was proof against the insults of his
neighbours and the clamour of his subjects.”
How different this from the gallant days of Gloriana and her knights!
And yet this poor crowned and sceptred ninny aspired to be a despot
even as his son after him did. It is true that these realms were
beginning to need a despot and that badly, but not such a one as could
ever have been born of that hopeless House of Stuart. A despot who is
a strong man may be good or evil as he uses his opportunities and his
powers, but the whole stage of history has not yet held a despot who
was also a weak man who did not prove himself at once a curse to his
country and the world.
The story of the feeble violence and silly cunning with which Charles
the First sought to enforce that ridiculous theory of his about the
Divine Right of Kings has been too often and too variously told for us
to need to trouble with it here. There _is_ a Divine Right of Kings, as
the great Oliver was very soon to show with most unmistakable and most
unanswerable logic, but the kind of king who really has Divine rights
does not usually have them because he is the son of his father, and
especially of such a father as James the First of England and Sixth of
Scotland.
Our present concern is with the fact that this Empire of ours, in a
most critical state of its process of making which came very near to
one of unmaking, was saved and transformed from weakness to strength by
the substitution of the real despotism of the Lord Protector from the
sham or histrionic despotism of Charles the First.