All the Queen's Men (12 page)

By now Cecil's coldly penetrating gaze had moved northwards, away from a Queen in the sunset of her reign as he happily orchestrated something Elizabeth had never been prepared to contemplate – her successor on the English throne. The well-being of the state combined with self-interest had supplanted everything else in Cecil's cool and calculating mind. No longer the Queen's man, he had begun directing all his energies into ensuring that James VI of Scotland became James I of England. ‘All are in a dump at Court. Some from present danger, others doubt that she will not continue past the month of May, but generally all are of the opinion she cannot overpass another winter',
²²
wrote Antony Rivers to Giacomo Creleto in Venice.

Elizabeth, the last and most successful of all the Tudor monarchs lay on a pile of cushions in the Privy Chamber at her favourite Palace of Richmond staring into space, saying nothing. ‘Madam,' said Cecil, ‘to content the people you must go to bed.' ‘Little man,' retorted the Queen frostily, ‘the word “must” is not to be used to Princes.'
²³
Perhaps, like the rest of her Court, Elizabeth did not like Robert Cecil very much either.

D
rake, Hawkins, Ralegh, Grenville, Frobisher – these names still reverberate down the centuries, names that feature proudly on modern-day warships and naval bases, the memories of their exploits remaining inspirational to sailors of the present day. They were the leading figures among a host of professional seafarers whose swashbuckling actions initiated the nation's long tradition as a major naval power yet raised many eyebrows at the time and, viewed from today's different moral perspective, are constantly open to question. John Hawkins had begun life as a slave trader, ‘being amongst other particulars assured that negroes were very good merchandise in Hispaniola'.
¹
The Spanish regarded Francis Drake as a pirate ‘
El Draques
', ‘master thief of the unknown world', viewing Frobisher and Grenville in much the same vein, constantly immersed in piratical enterprise. At times, the collective exploits of Elizabethan seafarers could prove highly embarrassing to both the Queen and her Privy Council; judged by today's standards these activities would be seen as highly questionable, in many instances totally illegal. Elizabeth alternated between encouraging their efforts and distancing herself from them as her policies towards Spain oscillated wildly between aggression and appeasement. Generally, England benefited from the adventures of these seafarers and the Queen was fortunate to have so many available for her services, yet their aggressive actions towards Spain, most particularly those of Drake, were one of the major factors which inevitably led to war – the seafarers could indeed be a two-edged sword.

Many of these seafarers were from the West Country, sailing out of the Port of Plymouth. Hawkins, Drake and Ralegh were all born in Devon, tough, resourceful, determined to use their seafaring qualities to acquire both fame and fortune aided by the improved technical knowledge of deep-sea shipping, by then more readily available in Elizabeth's kingdom. Hawkins came from a seafaring family – his father, William Hawkins, had been an enterprising maritime merchant during the reign of Henry VIII. Drake came from farming stock on the edge of Dartmoor and Ralegh was descended from impoverished gentry in East Devon.

Hawkins and Drake were cousins; the younger Drake came under the more experienced Hawkins's influence and they voyaged offshore together to the west coast of Africa, then across the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean in order to seek rich pickings in the Spanish colonies which had become well established in that region. It was here in 1568 in a small coastal port named San Juan de Ulua, on the shores of Mexico, that an incident occurred which was to haunt Drake for the rest of his life and cast a massive stain on his reputation. Hawkins's and Drake's ships, anchored together in harbour, were subject to a sudden surprise attack by the Spaniards, causing Drake to seek his own safety and sail away into the night on his ship
The Judith
, leaving Hawkins to his fate. The latter, on
The Minion
, was very lucky to escape and his subsequent bitter comments put Drake in a very poor light: ‘So with The Minion only and The Judith, a small bark of 50 tons, we escaped, which bark the same night forsook us in our great misery.'
²
Hawkins never asked Drake to sail with him again.

John Hawkins prospered and became both a Member of Parliament and a friend of Lord Burghley, subsequently coming to the attention of Queen Elizabeth, who with a characteristic flash of inspiration appointed him her Navy Treasurer responsible for the development and maintenance of her fleet. This appointment was made in 1577, by which time Elizabeth had come to realize that a strong navy was essential for the defence of her realm against the growing threat from Spain, a view shared by Lord Burghley. ‘Her Majesties special and most proper defence must be her ships,'
³
declared the Queen's most influential Privy Councillor. Today Hawkins's transformation from slave trader to government civil servant might seem extraordinary, a classic case of turning the poacher into a gamekeeper; quite an unorthodox move yet nevertheless one which showed the Queen's acute perception of human nature together with an appreciation of a man's essential qualities to fulfil her requirements in important matters affecting the security of her nation.

Hawkins discovered corruption to be rife among many of those directly responsible for the building and repairing of Elizabeth's ships, which, combined with inefficient practices, meant that the whole process of maintaining the navy was costing considerably more than necessary. Warships were being constructed with unsuitable or even rotten timbers which, together with many other questionable methods, greatly prejudiced the construction of a sound and suitable fleet. Hawkins fearlessly routed out corruption to the highest level, even accusing Sir William Wynter, at the time Surveyor of the Queen's ships. Hawkins was able to reduce costs considerably and to produce far better quality ships but in the process he made some very powerful enemies and in turn was accused of malpractice. The Queen convened a high-level inquiry to examine these grave charges. The inquiry board, consisting of Burghley, Walsingham, Earl Lincoln, Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain and Sir Walter Mildmay, Chancellor of the Exchequer, met in order to enquire into ‘the articles of discovery in the unjust mind and deceitful dealings of John Hawkins'.
⁴
His accusers were numerous: ‘I was also an eye witness of a great abuse committed in the store house by the said Mr Hawkins,'
⁵
proclaimed one of his many detractors. The charges proved groundless and Hawkins was completely exonerated, much to the Queen's great delight, as by then he was engaged in the vital task of preparing her navy to meet the Spanish Armada.

A man of considerable vision, Hawkins both revolutionized maritime construction and pioneered naval warfare.
The Revenge
, a warship that Francis Drake was to command against the Armada, became the model for successive generations of English fighting vessels. His concepts for the tactical deployment of the English fleet ushered in a totally new approach to war at sea, which was still in use during Nelson's time, three hundred years later.

Bold and brilliant in his approach, Hawkins was a consummate seaman and a hugely competent navigator, yet at the same time both cautious and methodical in the execution of his plans. Above all, he was deeply patriotic, a fanatical Protestant and fiercely loyal to the Queen, to whom he was deeply devoted. ‘There is hardly any time left to serve God,'
⁶
he declared towards the end of his life. As he lay dying, Hawkins commanded one of his subordinates, Captain Troughton, to write a long letter to the Queen on his behalf, its contents eloquently conveying the sentiments of Elizabeth's veteran commander at the end of his days: ‘Sir John Hawkins upon his deathbed willed me to use the best means I could to equate your highness with his loyal service and good meaning towards your majesty . . .'
⁷
He apologized to Elizabeth for the failure of his last mission, yet another attack on the Spanish Main, and left her a considerable sum of money in his will to compensate for her lack of financial return from this voyage. Hawkins's loyalty was unquestionable – he was modest but at the same time hugely ambitious, astute and utterly fearless, with a profound belief in his Maker. He commanded his crews to serve God daily, love one another, preserve their victuals, beware of fire and keep good company. He was always one of the most serious and scholarly of Elizabeth's seafarers, educated, articulate, meticulous both in appearance and action. His relationship with Elizabeth was at all times punctilious yet persuasive and in turn she held him in great regard during all his years of service.

The defeat of the Spanish Armada proved a high spot for both Queen and country and so it was for John Hawkins, Vice Admiral of Elizabeth's fleet in this epic sea battle. The English commander, Lord Charles Howard of Effingham, exercised his right to knight a number of his officers on the spot for supreme gallantry while on active service. Hawkins was among those chosen and on a bright summer's day as the fleet drifted slowly on the morning tide off the coast near Dover, it seemed that the Royal Court had come to sea, as with due pomp and ceremony Lord Howard dubbed Hawkins with his sword before an assembled crowd of captains and nobility, the
Ark Royal
dressed overall and everyone in their finery. Other recipients of knighthoods included Lord Sheffield and Lord Thomas Howard, for whom the award was an equally great honour – their titles had been hereditary, but a knighthood had to be earned and to be created a knight on the field of battle was a singular honour even for the aristocracy.

Francis Drake had achieved his knighthood via an altogether different route after he had parted company with Hawkins on the Spanish Main in such ignominious circumstances and returned to England. Drake was also a supreme seaman, arguably the greatest of the age, but a very different character to his mentor Hawkins, in many respects the total opposite. Unlike Hawkins, Drake was impulsive and impetuous, most of his actions being wholly unplanned and many of his most daring manoeuvres purely instinctive. Whereas Hawkins was a modest man, modesty was never among Drake's attributes, being a tremendous self-publicist. He was quick-tempered, opportunistic, imaginative and boundlessly self-confident, with a deeply held hatred of Catholicism and Spain, against whom he had waged a relentless one-man Holy War ever since the time of the San Juan de Ulua incident, when Drake was still in his early twenties.

Drake developed an easy rapport with the Queen, who regarded him as a winner, an all-purpose action man to be fully exploited to suit her own needs, yet he was viewed with misgiving by many of her Privy Councillors who were jealous of his direct access to Elizabeth. They regarded him as too much of a maverick, a loose cannon, capable of single-handedly blowing apart the nation's fragile relationship with Spain. ‘The Queen shows extraordinary favour to Drake and never fails to speak to him when she goes out in public, conversing with him for a long time,'
⁸
muttered Mendoza. The Spanish ambassador's distrust of Drake was one of the few things that he would have shared with the peace-loving Lord Burghley. A feature of the middle period of Elizabeth's reign was the rise of a growing number of aggressive Privy Councillors – men like Walsingham and Hatton – coinciding with the belligerent actions of seafarers like Drake, Frobisher, Grenville and their followers, linking up to constantly goad Spain. Hatton was Drake's major patron, and Walsingham shared Hawkins's belief that the enemies of England were the enemies of God. This abrasive combination of statesmen and seafarers proved a mixed blessing for the Queen: when hostilities with Spain began, she could count on a resolute government and a combative group of seafarers to become her swordbearers, yet it may well have been that without Spain being continually harassed and antagonized there might never have been a war. Drake's personal contribution to this scenario was immense. His voyage around the world, his plundering on the Spanish Main, his surprise attack on Cadiz, that celebrated ‘singeing of the King of Spain's beard',
⁹
were all seen as acts of supreme provocation by Philip II of Spain. To brand Drake as a pirate is conceivably too harsh, yet he was undoubtedly a privateer, licensed by the Queen to carry out unprovoked attacks on Spanish ships and territories at a time of peace between the two nations.

In many respects Drake and the Queen were made for each other, and suited each other's purposes. She gave Drake a licence to kill, launching him like a long-range guided missile to strike with terrifying suddenness on the far side of the world – and he became extremely wealthy in the process. Yet if Drake grew rich then the Queen became even richer, while basking in the glory of his achievements. It remained a convenient partnership for a considerable number of years, but the price was a costly war lasting until after both of them were dead. Drake's value to the Queen, both actual and psychological, was immense in those distant days before radar, satellite observation or any scientific spotting aid other than a telescope. Drake was the sixteenth-century forerunner of the nuclear submarine, cruising vast, empty oceans, to appear undetected, suddenly and unexpectedly with devastating effect. The Spanish possessed no effective remedy against him, no seafarer equivalent to him who could be launched in retaliation. No comparable Spanish reprisal raids were launched against the English coast until towards the end of the century, and even these were on a small scale compared to the savage assaults mounted by Drake.

Drake was short and stocky with a jaunty stance and a cocky, rather arrogant face, sharing a similar stature with other men of military genius – Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Nelson and Montgomery. However, while Drake possessed many of their warrior attributes, he displayed considerable shortcomings as a commander on any scale. Drake was at his best commanding a single ship or at most a limited strike force such as that used for the 1587 raid on Cadiz. Unlike Nelson, he lacked strategic vision, and was a poor planner, without any sense of detail or the ability to remain focused. He could easily be diverted from the task in hand by secondary considerations and his sense of patriotism was almost always accompanied by an insatiable pursuit for personal profit; for example, when Lord Admiral Howard had instructed the English fleet to follow Drake's stern lantern in pursuit of the Armada at night. Drake extinguished the light in order to go off and capture a crippled Spanish galleon. Frobisher was one of Drake's fellow seafarers who was deeply incensed by his actions at this time, ‘calling him a cowardly knave or traitor and that he only remained by the great Spanish carack to have the spoil of her'.
¹⁰
Frobisher vowed Drake should eat his words, ‘or he should make him spend the best blood in his belly'.
¹¹
Fortunately Drake's diversion had no detrimental effect on the outcome of the battle but certainly furthered his personal fortune once victory had been secured. He had wanted to introduce to the Queen, Don Pedro de Valdès, commander of the
Nuestra Señora del Rosario
, the flagship of the squadron of Andalusia which Drake had captured. Elizabeth declined to meet Don Pedro, but indicated to Drake that he was free to extract as much ransom from the Spaniard as possible.