[Illustration: Cover art]
STORIES OF
ELIZABETHAN HEROES
STIRRING RECORDS OF THE INTREPID BRAVERY
AND BOUNDLESS RESOURCE OF THE MEN
OF QUEEN ELIZABETH'S REIGN
BY
EDWARD GILLIAT, M.A. (Oxon.)
SOMETIME MASTER AT HARROW SCHOOL
AUTHOR OF "FOREST OUTLAWS," "HEROES OF MODERN INDIA,"
"ROMANCE OF MODERN SIEGES," &c. &c.
WITH FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS
LONDON
SEELEY, SERVICE & CO. LIMITED
38 GREAT RUSSELL STREET
1914
_UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME_
THE RUSSELL LIBRARY
FOR
BOYS & GIRLS
A SERIES OF COPYRIGHT VOLUMES OF TRUE
STORIES OF ADVENTURE
_Fully Illustrated. Extra crown 8vo, 2s. 6d. each_
STORIES OF RED INDIAN ADVENTURE.
By H. W. G. HYRST, Author of "Adventures in the
Arctic Regions," &c.
STORIES OF ELIZABETHAN HEROES.
By Rev. EDWARD GILLIAT, M.A., sometime Master at
Harrow School, Author of "In Lincoln Green,"
"Heroes of the Indian Mutiny," &c., &c.
SEELEY, SERVICE & CO. LIMITED
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
The Elizabethan World
CHAPTER II
Sir John Hawkins, Seaman and Administrator
CHAPTER III
George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, the Champion of the Tilt-yard
CHAPTER IV
Sir Martin Frobisher, the Explorer of the Northern Seas
CHAPTER V
Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the Founder of Newfoundland
CHAPTER VI
Lord Howard of Effingham, the Trusted of the Queen
CHAPTER VII
Sir Richard Grenville, the Hero of Flores
CHAPTER VIII
John Davis, the Hero of the Arctic and Pacific
CHAPTER IX
Francis Drake, the Scourge of Spain
CHAPTER X
Sir Francis Drake, the Queen's Greatest Seaman
CHAPTER XI
Sir Richard Hawkins, Seaman and Geographer
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
"Sir Francis" ... Coloured Frontispiece [missing from source book]
Attempt on Sir John Hawkins' Life
Fire-Ships
Capture of an Eskimo
England's First Colony
The Blowing-up of the "San Felipe"
Sir Richard Grenville and the "Revenge"
Drake captures Nombre de Dios
Angling for Albatross
_PUBLISHERS' NOTE_
_The contents of this volume have been taken from Mr. Gilliat's
larger book entitled "Heroes of the Elizabethan Age," published at
five shillings._
STORIES OF ELIZABETHAN HEROES
CHAPTER I
THE ELIZABETHAN WORLD
Before we touch upon the lives of some of the heroes of the Maiden
Queen, it were well to consider briefly what life was like in those
days, and how it differed from our own.
When on a November day in 1558 Sir Nicholas Throckmorton spurred his
steaming horse to Hatfield, in haste to inform the Princess Elizabeth
that Queen Mary was dead, he was bidden to ride back to the Palace of
St. James's and request one of the ladies of the bedchamber to give
him, if the Queen were really dead, the black enamelled ring which
her Majesty wore night and day. So cautious had the constant fear of
death made Anne Boleyn's daughter.
Meanwhile a deputation from the Council had arrived at Hatfield to
offer to the new Queen their dutiful homage.
Elizabeth sank upon her knees and exclaimed: "A Domino factum est
istud, et est mirabile in oculis nostris" ("This is the Lord's doing,
and it is marvellous in our eyes")--a text which the Queen caused to
be engraved on her gold coins, in memory of that day of release from
anxiety. For the poor young Princess had lived for years in a state
of alarm; she had been imprisoned in the Tower, the victim of plots
for and against her; she had been kept under severe control at
Woodstock under Sir Henry Bedingfeld, where she once saw a milkmaid
singing merrily as she milked the cows in the Park, and exclaimed,
"That milkmaid's lot is better than mine, and her life far merrier."
And now on a sudden her terrors were turned into a great joy; and
what the Princess felt all England was soon experiencing, as soon as
men realised that the tyranny of Rome and of Spain was shattered and
gone.
Elizabeth was now at the close of her twenty-fifth year, of striking
beauty and commanding presence, tall and comely, with a wealth of
hair, yellow tinged with red; she inherited from her mother an air of
coquetry, and her affable manners soon endeared her to her people.
The English were tired of Smithfield fires and foreign priests and
princes; a new era seemed to be dawning upon them at last--an era of
freedom for soul and body; and imagination ran riot with hope to
forecast a new and happier world. The homage of an admiring nation
was stirred by her young beauty; and wild ambition, not content with
the quiet fields of England, turned adventurously to the New World
beyond the Atlantic, where men dreamed of real cities paved with
gold. It is true that the Pope had given all the great West to his
faithful daughter, Spain; but Englishmen thought they had as much
right to colonise America as any son of Spain, and they soon obtained
their Queen's leave to land and explore. But the first merchants who
ventured west found that Spanish policy forbade "Christians to trade
with heretics." Nay, if they were taken prisoners by the Spaniards
they suffered the punishment of the rack and the stake; and if they
escaped, they came home with tales of cruelty that set all England
ablaze to take revenge. "Abroad, the sky is dark and wild," writes
Kingsley, "and yet full of fantastic splendour. Spain stands strong
and awful, a rising world-tyranny, with its dark-souled Cortezes and
Pizarros, Alvas, Don Johns and Parmas, men whose path is like the
lava stream: who go forth slaying and to slay in the names of their
Gods.... Close to our own shores the Netherlands are struggling
vainly for their liberties: abroad, the Western Islands, and the
whole trade of Africa and India, will in a few years be hers ... and
already Englishmen who go out to trade in Guinea, in the Azores and
New Spain, are answered by shot and steel."
We know a good deal of the life in Elizabethan England from an
account written by Harrison, Household Chaplain to Lord Cobham. He
was an admirer of still older days, as we see from his complaint
about improved houses: "See the change, for when our houses were
builded of willow, then had we oaken men; but now that our houses are
come to be made of oak, our men are not only become willow, but a
great manie, through Persian delicacie crept in among us, altogether
of straw, which is a sore alteration.... Now have we manie chimnies;
and yet our tenderlings complain of rheumes, catarhs and poses. Then
had we none but reredosses, and our heads did never ache. For as the
smoke in those daies was supposed to be a sufficient hardning for the
timber of the house, so it was reputed a far better medicine to keep
the goodman and his family from the quake or pose."
Harrison notes how rich men were beginning to use stoves for sweating
baths, how glass was beginning to be used instead of lattice, which
was made out of wicker or rifts of oak chequer-wise, how panels of
horn for windows had been going out for beryl or fine crystal, as at
Sudeley Castle. Then for furniture, it was not rare to see abundance
of arras in noblemen's houses, with such store of silver vessels as
might fill sundry cupboards. There were three things that old men
remembered to have been marvellously changed; one was the multitude
of chimneys lately erected, whereas only the great religious houses
and manor places of the lords had formerly possessed them, but each
one made his fire against a reredosse in the hall, where he dined and
dressed his meat in the smoke and smother; the second thing was the
improved bedding. Formerly folks slept on straw pallets covered only
with a sheet, and a good round log under their heads for a bolster.
"As for servants, if they had anie sheet above them, it was well, for
seldom had they any under them to keep them from the pricking straws
that ran oft through the canvas and rased their hardened hides."
The third thing was the exchange from wooden cups and platters into
pewter or tin. Now the farmers had featherbeds and carpets of
tapestry instead of straw, sometimes even silver salt-cellars and a
dozen spoons of pewter.
Harrison bewails the decay of archery, and says that all the young
fellows above eighteen wear a dagger. Noblemen wear a sword too,
while desperate cutters carry two rapiers, "wherewith in every
drunken fray they are known to work much mischief"; and as the
trampers carry long staves, the honest traveller is obliged to carry
horse-pistols; for the tapsters and ostlers are in league with the
highway robbers who rob chiefly at Christmas time, "till they be
trussed up in a Tyburn tippet."
There was a proverb, "Young serving-men, old beggars," because
servants were spoilt for any other service or craft; so that the
country swarmed with idle serving-men, who often became highwaymen.
A German traveller writes of England thus: "The women there are
charming, and by nature so mighty pretty as I have scarcely ever
beheld, for they do not falsify, paint or bedaub themselves as they
do in Italy or other places, but they are some deal awkward in their
style of dress; for they dress in splendid stuffs, and many a one
wears three cloth gowns, one over the other. Then, when a stranger
goeth to a citizen's house on business, or is invited as a guest, he
is received by the master of the house and the ladies and by them
welcomed: he has even a right to take them by the arm and to kiss
them, which is the custom of the country; and if any one doth not do
this, it is regarded and imputed as ignorance and ill-breeding on his
part."
Erasmus, writing in 1500, after a visit to Sir Thomas More, exclaims
merrily: "There is a custom which it would be impossible to praise
too much. Wherever you go, every one welcomes you with a kiss, and
the same on bidding you farewell. You call again, when there is more
kissing.... You meet an acquaintance anywhere, you are kissed till
you are tired. In short, turn where you will, there are kisses,
kisses everywhere."
It was the same before and after a dance: you bowed, or curtseyed,
and kissed your partner in all formal ceremony. So Shakespeare--
"Come unto these yellow sands,
And then take hands:
Curtseyed when you have, and kissed,
The wild waves whist" (hushed).
Another foreigner describes the English as serious, like the Germans,
liking to be followed by hosts of servants who wear their masters'
arms in silver, fastened to their left arms: they excel in music and
dancing, and their favourite sport is hawking: they are more polite
than the French in eating, devour less bread but more meat, which
they roast in perfection. They put a great deal of sugar in their
drink, a habit which may account for their teeth turning black in
age. Harrison tells us that the nobles had "for cooks
musicall-headed Frenchmen, who concocted sundrie delicacies: every
dish being first taken to the greatest personage at the table."
We are told that Sir Walter Raleigh was once staying with a noble
lady, whom he heard in the morning scolding her servant and crying,
"Have the pigs been fed? have the pigs been fed?"
At eleven o'clock Master Walter came down to dinner, and could not
resist a sly remark to his hostess, "Have the pigs been fed?" The
lady drew herself up haughtily and rejoined, "You should know best,
Sir Walter, whether you have had your breakfast or no." So the laugh
was turned on the wit for once: for indeed it had become unusual for
people to require any breakfast before eleven o'clock in Queen
Elizabeth's time. Formerly they had four meals a day, consisting of
breakfast, dinner, nuntion or beverage, and supper. "Now these odd
repasts," says Harrison, "thanked be God! are very well left, and
each one (except here and there some young hungrie stomach that
cannot fast till dinner-time) contenteth himself with dinner and
supper only." It was the custom at table amongst yeomen and
merchants for the guest to call for such drink as he desired, when a
servant would bring him a cup from the cupboard; but when he had
tasted of it, he delivered it again to the servant, who made it clean
and restored it to the cupboard. "By this device much idle tippling
is cut off, for if the full pots should continually stand neare the
trencher, divers would be alwaies dealing with them." Yet in the
houses of the nobles it was not so, but silver goblets or glasses of
Venice graced the tables.
They were content with four or six dishes, finishing with jellies and
march-paine "wrought with no small curiosity"; potatoes, too, began
to be brought from Spain and the Indies. The best beer was usually
kept for two years and brewed in March; of light wines there were
fifty-six kinds, mostly foreign, from Italy, Greece, and Spain,
clarets from France, and Malmsey wine.
"I might here talk somewhat of the great silence that is used at the
tables of the honourable and wiser sort, likewise of the moderate
eating and drinking that is daily seen, and finally of the regard
that each one hath to keep himself from the note of surfeiting and
drunkennesse."
They were a proud, self-respecting people in those spacious times,
and even the poorer sort, when they could get a time to be merry,
thought it no small disgrace if they happened to be "cup-shotten."
In regard to their dress the English at that time seem to have been
somewhat extravagant, copying first the Spanish guise, then the
French, anon the Italian or German--nay, even Turkish and Moorish
fashions gained favour; "so that except it were a dog in a doublet,
you shall not see any so disguised as are my countrymen of England."
Our good friend Harrison waxes quite sarcastic as he describes, "What
chafing, what fretting, what reproachful language doth the poor
workman bear away! ... Then must we put it on, then must the long
seams of our hose be set by a plumb-line: then we puff, then we blow,
and finally sweat till we drop, that our clothes may stand well upon
us."
It became the fashion for ladies to dye their hair yellow out of
compliment to the Queen, who however in her later years used wigs,
and was reputed to have a choice of eighty attires of false hair.
In 1579 the Queen gave her command to the Privy Council to prevent
excesses of apparel, and it was ordered that "No one shall use or
wear such excessive long cloaks; being in common sight monstrous."
Neither were they to wear such high ruffs of cambric about their
necks as were growing common, both with men and women. Quilted
doublets, curiously slashed, and lined with figured lace, Venetian
hose and stockings of the finest black yarn, with shoes of white
leather, betokened the courtier, the clank of whose gilded spurs
announced his coming.
In regard to weapons, the long-bow had gone out of use, but they shot
with the caliver, a clumsy musket with a short butt, and handled the
pike with dexterity. Corslets and shirts of mail still remained;
every village could furnish forth three or four soldiers, as one
archer, one gunner, one pikeman, and a bill-man. As to artillery,
the falconet weighed five hundred pounds, with a diameter of two
inches at the mouth; the culverin weighed four thousand pounds,
having a diameter of five inches and a half; the cannon weighed seven
thousand, and the basilisk nine thousand pounds.
In 1582 Queen Elizabeth had twenty-five great ships of war, the
largest being of 1000 tons burden, besides three galleys: there were
135 ships that exceeded 500 tons, which could fight at a pinch, for
many private owners possessed ships of their own.
A man-of-war in those days was well worth two thousand pounds, and
"it is incredible to say how greatly her Grace was delighted with her
fleet." After all, it is the men that count most, and the men of
that day were as full of good courage as the best of us.
On the Continent they had a saying that "England is a paradise for
women, a prison for servants, and a purgatory for horses"; for the
females had more liberty in England than on the Continent, and were
almost like masters; while the servants could not escape from England
without a passport, and the poor horses were worked all too hard.
For instance, when the Queen broke up her Court to go on progress,
there commonly followed her more than three hundred carts laden with
bag and baggage. For you must know that in Tudor England, besides
coaches, they used no waggons for their goods, but had only
two-wheeled carts, which were so large that they could carry quite as
much as waggons, and as many as five or six horses were needed to
draw them.
In those days they knew full well what deep ruts could do in the way
of lowering speed, and the jaded horses must sometimes have thought
that they were pulling a plough, and not a coach.
Fynes Moryson, a traveller, gives a pleasant account of his
journeyings: "The world affords not such Innes as England hath,
either for good and cheap entertainment after the guests' own
pleasure, or for humble attendance upon passengers. For as soon as a
traveller comes to an Inne, the servants run to him, and one takes
his horse and walks him till he be cold, then rubs him and gives him
meat. Another servant gives the traveller his private chamber and
kindles his fire: the third pulls off his boots and makes them
cleane. Then the Host or Hostess visits him; and if he will eat with
the Host, or at a common table with others, his meal will cost him
six pence, or in some places but four pence: but if he will eat in
his chamber, the which course is more honourable, he commands what
meat he will, according to his appetite, and when he sits at table
the Host or Hostess will visit him, taking it for courtesie to be bid
sit downe: while he eats he shall have musicke offered him: if he be
solitary the musicians will give him the good day with musicke in the
morning. It is the custom to set up part of supper for his
breakfast. Ere he goeth he shall have a reckoning in writing, which
the Host will abate, if it seem unreasonable. At parting, if he give
some few pence to the chamberlain and ostler they wish him a happy
journey."
We may add that folk did not use night-gowns, as we see from George
Cavendishes "Life of Wolsey": "My master went to his naked bed." But
a night-gown in those days meant a dressing-gown. Hentzner gives us
a description of the life at Court, from which we will take a few
passages. He was at Greenwich Palace, being admitted to the
presence-chamber, which was hung with rich tapestry and strewn with
hay, or rushes. After noticing the small hands and tapering fingers
of the Queen, her stately air and pleasing speech, he says: "As she
went along in all this state and magnificence, she spoke very
graciously, first to one foreign Minister, then to another: for,
besides being well skilled in Greek, Latin, and French, she is
mistress of Spanish, Scotch, and Dutch. Whoever speaks to her, it is
kneeling: now and then she will pull off her glove and give her hand
to kiss, sparkling, with rings and jewels. The Ladies of the Court
that followed her, very handsome and well-shaped, were dressed in
white, while she was guarded on either side by her gentlemen
Pensioners, fifty in number, with gilt battle-axes."
What a marvellous lady was this Queen, so taught by suffering to
dissemble and deceive, so trained by her tutors, Ascham and others,
that she could make a speech in Latin to the Doctors of Cambridge and
Oxford, or converse with a Dutchman, nay, even with a Scot in his own
tongue.
We rather suspect that Hentzner may have been mistaken about the
Scot; for surely she could not speak with a Highlander in Gaelic, and
to understand a Lowland Scot could not have taxed her royal powers
much.
England was a strange mixture of richness and poverty, of learning
and superstition, of refined luxury and brutal amusements at that
age. Hentzner describes how in a theatre built of wood he one day
sat to listen to excellent music and noble poetry of tragedy or
comedy, the next time he witnessed the cruel baiting of bulls and
bears by English bull-dogs. "To this entertainment there often
follows that of whipping a blinded bear, which is performed by five
or six men standing around in a circle with whips, which they
exercise upon him without any mercy, as he cannot escape from them
because of his chain: he defends himself with all his force and
skill, throwing down all who come within his reach, and tearing the
whips out of their hands and breaking them. At these spectacles" (he
writes in 1598) "the English are constantly smoking tobacco, and in
this manner: they have pipes on purpose made of clay, into the
farther end of which they put the herb, so dry that it may be rubbed
into powder; putting fire to it they draw the smoke into their
mouths, which they puff out again through their nostrils, like to
funnels."
The writer has one of these Elizabethan pipes: it is made with an
exceedingly small bowl, showing how precious was the weed which
Raleigh had recently introduced. The pipes have been found by
workmen employed on the banks of the Thames in Southwark.
We must remember, in criticising the conduct of Elizabethan heroes,
that they lived in a cruel age; that torture was still employed by
the law, even to delicate ladies; that much of their sport was
brutal, and much of their merriment gross and indelicate. There is,
and there has been, a decided progress in the manners of Europeans;
so that it is with a moral effort that we try to see things with
their eyes and judge them with discrimination. For instance, many of
their great seamen may in one aspect be regarded as pirates; for the
great Queen sometimes did not sanction their raids over western
waters until they had brought her some priceless spoil. The pirate
was then knighted and commended for his valiant deeds of patriotism.
Even along the coasts of England local jealousy set the galleys of
the Cinque Ports in the south at making reprisals upon the traders of
Yarmouth. When these depredations were made upon foreigners there
were few who denounced them; for it became a kind of sport, an
adventure well worth the attention of any squire's son, to snatch
some rich prize from the wide ocean and distribute largesse on safely
coming to port.
These men were the Robin Hoods of the sea, and when from selfish
plunderings they rose to be champions of religious freedom as well,
their career seemed in most men's minds to be worthy of all
admiration. But in order to understand fully the motives which
induced the more noble spirits to go forth and do battle with Spain
on private grounds, and at their own expense, we ought to have sat at
the Mermaid, or other taverns, and heard the mariners' tales as they
told them fresh from the salt sea. We should have listened to
stories of cruel wrongs inflicted on the brave Indians of South
America, which would have stirred any dormant spirit of chivalry
within us, and made us long to champion the weak.
We should have heard the story of the Indian chief who was taken
prisoner by the Spaniards, and suffered the penalty of losing his
hands because he had fought so strenuously for his mother-land. This
Indian returned to his people, and devoted the rest of his life to
encouraging and heartening his countrymen to the great work of
fighting for life and liberty, showing his maimed arms, and calling
to mind how many others had had half a foot hacked off by the
Spaniards that they might not sit on horseback. Then, when a battle
was being fought, we should have been told how this chief loaded his
two stumps with bundles of arrows and supplied the fighters with
fresh store, as they lacked them. Surely men so brave as this man
challenged admiration and deserved succour.
The young Queen of England had suffered herself, and these stories
must have stirred her heart to say with the Dido of Virgil--
"Haud ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco."
Raleigh and Drake, Hawkins and Frobisher, Shakespeare and Spenser may
have sat by a coal-fire and heard or told such stories; for Raleigh
writes: "Who will not be persuaded that now at length the great Judge
of the world hath heard the sighs, groans, and lamentations, hath
seen the tears and blood of so many millions of innocent men, women,
and children, afflicted, robbed, reviled, branded with hot irons,
roasted, dismembered, mangled, stabbed, whipped, racked, scalded with
hot oil, put to the strapado, ripped alive, beheaded in sport,
drowned, dashed against the rocks, famished, devoured by mastiffs,
burned, and by infinite cruelties consumed,--and purposeth to scourge
and plague that cursed nation, and to take the yoke of servitude from
that distressed people, as free by nature as any Christian."
It was not the massacres under Cortez and Pizarro, earlier in this
century, which roused the deepest indignation; it was the tales of
inhuman cruelty perpetrated by Spanish colonists in time of peace,
and of the noble conduct of the conquered Indians under the degrading
conditions of their slavery, which most moved pity and wrath and
feelings of revenge.
Men told the story of the Cacique who was forced to labour in the
mines with his former subjects, how he called the miners
together--ninety-five in all--and with a dignity befitting a prince
made them the following speech:--
"My worthy companions and friends, why desire we to live any longer
under so cruel a servitude? Let us now go unto the perpetual seat of
our ancestors, for we shall there have rest from these intolerable
cares and grievances which we endure under the subjection of the
unthankful. Go ye before, I will presently follow." So speaking,
the Indian chief held out handfuls of those leaves which take away
life, prepared for the purpose; so they disdainfully sought in death
relief from the cruel bondage of their Spanish masters.
Again, an officer named Orlando had taken to wife the daughter of a
Cuban Cacique; but, because he was jealous, he caused her to be
fastened to two wooden spits, set her before the fire to roast, and
ordered the kitchen servants to keep her turning. The poor girl,
either through panic, fear, or the torment of heat, swooned away and
died. Now the Cacique her father, on hearing this, took thirty of
his men, went to the officer's house and slew the woman whom he had
married after torturing his former wife, slew her women and all her
servants; then he shut the doors of the house and burnt himself and
all his companions. Tales such as these might well sting a generous
and kindly people into doing harsh actions. Froude says in his
"Forgotten Worthies": "On the whole, the conduct and character of the
English sailors present us all through that age with such a picture
of gallantry and high heroic energy as has never been over-matched."
So, when we feel inclined to pass judgment upon our "heroes" for
their misdeeds, we must remember the spirit of the time, and the
wrongs of the weaker, and the promptings of generosity and religion.