II

Whichis the greatest name upon the roll of English ships? Which is the most sure of a lasting and effectual renown? There was a day when all England would have given but one answer. If you ask the Elizabethan of 1580, you will find him very positive upon the point, and not a little exalted. Drawn round the world by the Divine

Hand, under the Northern and Southern Pole stars, victor over a hundred enemies, ballasted with royal treasure, & steered by the captured charts of Spanish Admirals, the little ship that sailed as thePelican, comes home again as theGolden Hind. She brings her fabulous booty and her still more fabulous romance from Plymouth Sound to Deptford, and then and there the great names of the past—theChristophers, theGreat Harrys, theDragonsand theSwans—are all finally eclipsed. Drake, kneeling upon her deck, receives his knighthood from the hand of Gloriana, and theGolden Hindherself, bidding farewell for ever to wind and wave, is laid up as a national monument—“consecrated to perpetuall Memory.”

QUEEN ELIZABETH GOING ON BOARD THE GOLDEN HIND

She is remembered still, but it is hardly for her own sake; her story is a part of Drake’s, and not the greatest part. Question your Elizabethan again some ten years later, and hers is no longer the name that he will give you; he will speak of things that are even nearer to his heart, and to ours; for though an Englishman will always, I suppose, lick his lips over a tale of treasure, it is the fighting and not the plunder that he is really fitted to enjoy, and in his imagination even the jewels of theGolden Hindwill shine with a less bright and steady glow than the battle-lanterns of theRevenge.

TheRevengeis a part of no man; she saw many captains and more triumphs than one. She had a personality, as great ships always have; she had a career, a life of her own. She has a life after death; not only a posterity but a true survival.

She may be said, in no merely figurative sense, to be on active service still. If the day ever comes when she no longer helps to keep the sea for us, it can only be when Time shall have paid off the British Navy.

The last of her successes is more freshly remembered by our friends than by ourselves. A neighbouring potentate, whom pride in his English descent had exhilarated to a pitch of splendid audacity worthy of an Elizabethan, challenged us by a telegram encouraging a vassal State to throw off the suzerainty of the Queen. If the message meant anything, it was a promise of armed support; but the promise had none of the Elizabethan hardihood to back it, and proved bankrupt as soon as the Flying Squadron put to

sea. It was not that this force was unknown, or suddenly created; the ships had long been on the Navy List, their names, guns, tonnage and complement all as familiar to the German Kaiser as to the rest of the world. But there was a sense abroad of something more than brute strength: a memory of great traditions, of inherited skill, of undaunted and indomitable tenacity. When on that January 15, 1896, the English Admiral hoisted his flag in theRevenge, and Her Majesty’s Marines marched on board under the command of Captain Drake, the enemy disappeared from the seas, and we made haste to forget another naval victory.

The lesson, we may hope, remains; this was not a triumph of physical force. The challenger’s nerve, and not his ships, failed him; he feared his

own destruction more than he desired ours. In an age even more materially minded, if possible, than those which went before it, we are increasingly diligent to measure our armour and our guns, to reckon up our horse-power and the number of our hits at target practice. It is not for any man to blame us; we should be wrong if we neglected these things, but we should be still more wrong if we forgot for a moment that there were years in our history when it was not we but our enemies who had the advantage of armament, and that whether by combination or otherwise, such a time may come upon us again. Build as we will, we cannot secure ourselves against it for ever; but we can forestall it by facing it with the remembrance of the past. It was by moral superiority that the

Elizabethans came through their trial. The Spaniards were contending to maintain their hold upon the wealth of the world, and they fought as men will fight in such a cause—courageously, but not desperately; the English fought as, at sea, they must always be fighting, for national existence, and they took care—it was a great part of their strength—to leave their enemies in no doubt that they meant in every engagement to make the affair fatal to one side or the other. This is a policy which we did not follow in the latest of our wars; we may have been justified, we had our reasons, and we paid the full price; but on the day when we abandon it upon the sea, we shall have thrown away our only sure defence and our deadliest weapon. Men and nations are never so nearly invincible and neverhalf so terrible as when they are armed with contempt of death; and that such an ardent temper can defy, discourage and destroy mere bulk or numbers, “even beyond credit and to the Height of some Heroicall Fable”—this is the meaning of the last fight of theRevenge.

Itwas in 1577, the year in which theGolden Hindsailed from Plymouth on her ever-memorable voyage, that theRevengefirst took the water. Probably, says Arber (but I cannot find upon what authority), she was built at Chatham by Sir John Hawkins. According to Sir John Laughton she was launched at Deptford. Ships

are the children of predestination, as every sailor knows: from the moment when they leave the slips they are either lucky or unlucky. In the opinion of the younger Hawkins theRevenge“was ever the unfortunatest Ship the late Queene’s Majestie had during her Raigne.” He supports this view by a list of hairbreadth escapes, which might as easily be quoted to prove her the especial care of Providence, many times miraculously preserved to be the scourge and dishonour of the Queen’s enemies. First, says Sir Richard, “Comming out of Ireland with Sir John Parrot, she was like to be [but was not] cast away upon the Kentish coast.” Then, in 1586, “in the Voyage of Sir John Hawkins, she struck aground coming into Plimouth, before her going

to Sea”; but to sea she went nevertheless. Upon the coast of Spain she was “readie to sinke with a great Leake,” and (though she did not sink) “at her return into the harbour of Plimouth, she beat upon Winter Stone”—again without fatality. She escaped a still greater danger when, soon after, she twice ran aground in going out of Portsmouth Haven, lay twenty-two hours beating upon the shore, and was forced off with eight feet of water in her, only to ground again “upon the Oose,” where she stuck for six months, until the following spring, testifying to the skill of those who built and the clumsiness of those who sailed her. Being at last got off and brought round into the Thames to be docked, “her old Leake breaking upon her, had like to

have drowned all those which were in her.” Neither then, however, nor in any of her mishaps, does she appear to have actually drowned anyone, not even when, in 1591, “with a storme of wind and weather, riding at her moorings in the river of Rochester, nothing but her bare Masts overhead, shee was turned topse-turvie, her Kele uppermost.” One might have thought that this final proof of her indestructibility would convince her detractor. Drake, at any rate, knew a good sea-boat when he saw one, for he chose her for his flagship when he sailed against the Armada as Vice-Admiral, and the Calendar of State Papers contains, under the date of November, 1588, a “Device of Lord Admiral Howard, Sir F. Drake, Sir W. Wynter, Sir John Hawkyns, Capt. Wm. Borough and others, for the construction of four new ships to be built on the

model of theRevenge, but exceeding her in burthen.” (She was but of 500 tons herself, and carried at most 260 men and forty guns.) To this evidence we may add the statement of a Spanish prisoner, bearing the delightful name of Gonsalo Gonsalez del Castillo, who writes in 1592 that in England “they have been much pained by the loss of one of the Queen’s galleons, called theRevenge; they say she was the best ship the Queen had, and the one in which they had the most confidence for her defence.”

Such was theRevenge, and, if she had her share of misfortune she had also her full share of prosperous service. She bore Drake’s flag as Vice-Admiral from January 3, 1588. On May 23, at the head of sixty sail, she escorted the Lord Admiral Howard into Plymouth; then, till July 12,

she watched and longed for the “felicisima Armada.” On Saturday the 20th, while the enemy crept up Channel in heavy rain, and the wind fell lighter and lighter, she tacked and tacked her way out painfully through a night of deadly anxiety. She had her reward. On Sunday, “conspicuous with an extravagant pennant and a banner on her mizzen, and fighting almost at grappling distance,” she battered Don Juan Martinez de Recalde in theSanta Anna. Towards evening the Admirals held Council on board her; when night fell her lantern led the fleet, until Drake, finding himself among strange sail, extinguished it and lay by for daylight. Howard and the rest went after the Spanish lights, and when dawn came theRevengefound herself alone,

and drifting within a few cables of the hugeNuestra Señora del Rosario, flagship of Don Pedro de Valdes, Captain-General of the Andalusian Squadron and one of Sidonia’s best officers. The Captain-General was “spoiled of his mast the day before,” and had smashed his bowsprit in collision; but he tried to stand out for conditions of surrender. The Vice-Admiral replied that he was Drake, and had no time to parley. That ended the matter; the galleon went into Dartmouth “under the conduction of theRoebuck” and theRevenge“bare with the Lord Admiral, and recovered his Lordship that night, being Monday.” Aboard of her went poor Don Pedro and forty of his officers; also their cash, to the tune of fifty thousand ducats.

On Tuesday the 23rd, the prisoners, or those of them who were allowed on deck, witnessed the battle off the Isle of Wight, the failure of the galleasses with their countless oars, and the rescue of theTriumph, in which our firstVictoryand our firstDreadnoughtdistinguished themselves. They saw, too, in the bird-like line-ahead flights of theRevengeand her consorts, their quick concentrations and dispersals, what Mr Julian Corbett has described as “the first dawn of those modern tactics which Blake and Monk were to develop and Nelson to perfect.” By the end of the day they were probably all deaf; the unknown eyewitness who wrote theRelation of Proceedingsfor Howard, declares that “there was never seen a more terrible value of great shot, nor more hot fight than this was; for although the musketeers

and harquebusiers of crock were then infinite, yet could they not be discerned nor heard for that the great ordnance came so thick that a man would have judged it to have been a hot skirmish of small shot, being all the fight long within half musket shot of the enemy.”

On the 24th fresh ammunition arrived, and the fleet was divided into four squadrons, of whichRevengewas to lead the second.

On Thursday the 25th, in a calm, the galleasses ventured again and were finally knocked out of the fight. For the next two days “the Spaniards went always before the English Army like sheep” until on Saturday evening they suddenly came to an anchor off Calais.

On the night of Sunday the 28th, the Lord Admiral “caused eight ships to be fired and letdrive amongst the Spanish fleet; whereupon they were forced to let slip or cut cables at half and to set sail.” When day came, Howard stopped to take a prize, and it was theRevengewho led the last great chase northwards, pounding Sidonia himself in the hugeSan Martin, sinking, scattering and driving ashore his followers. “It was the hour,” says Mr Corbett, “for which Francis Drake had been born.” But glorious as it was, it was not yet the hour for which theRevengehad been built.

Drakewas beyond doubt the greatest man who ever set foot in theRevenge, but it was not for him, or any like him, to sail her to the fulfilment of her unparalleled destiny. The imagination of two great peoples has made of him an almost supernatural hero, a gigantic figure of romance; but in spite of his inexhaustible courage,

his dazzling fortune, and the touch of extravagance which he caught from the spirit of his time, he was neither a Don Quixote nor a Prince Fortunate of mere adventures. For him there was nothing that could not be dared, but it must be dared with method and for an end in view; for him wisdom could never be “wisdom in the scorn of consequence.” Setting aside their natural bravery and the fashion of the day, there was little in common between this heroic prototype of the modern Englishman, and Sir Richard Grenville, the inheritor of a temperament which has long been practically extinct among us, and was even then the characteristic of a dwindling

class. The men of courage without discipline, of enthusiasm without reason, of will without science—a type of arrested development surviving from the days beyond the Renaissance—fell with the Stuart Kings and were finally buried with the rebels of the ’45. It is easy to say that they were of no use, these turbulent, insensate, self-willed children of aristocracy; at the least they added colour and vivacity to life, and these are something; now and again they had their great moments, when folly touched the height of tragedy, and left a true inspiration for those who are not too sober or too senile to receive it.

Men have always liked to think of definite characteristics as the hereditary possession of certain families—often, no doubt, without much justification, but surely not altogether so in the

case of the Grenvilles. Reading their records without any preconceived belief, we cannot but hear one note ringing out again & again through at least three centuries and a half. We hear Sir Richard’s grandson, Sir Bevil—it goes without saying that he was a Cavalier—swearing “to fetch those traitors out of their nest at Launceston, or fire them in it.” We see him, “after solemn prayers,” charging furiously “both down the one hill and up the other” at Bradock Down; or again dying on the brow of Lansdowne Hill, after he had stormed it in the face of cannon, “small shot from the breastworks” and “two full charges from the enemy’s horse.”

His brother, another Sir Richard, was a Cavalier, too, and a Grenville to the backbone; hated by his men for his iron discipline—“no doubt,”

says Clarendon, “the man had behaved himself with great pride and tyranny over them”—he was even more intolerable to his superiors; he flatly refused to act under Hopton, and drove the Prince of Wales to imprison him in despair. A more attractive, but still characteristic, member of the family was Bevil’s son, Denis, Archdeacon of Durham, whom we find, after James II had already fled the kingdom, preaching in the midst of his enemies “a seasonable loyall Sermon”; collecting a war fund from the prebendaries for his fallen sovereign; bolting to Scotland on horseback; captured, but escaping to France; coming back incognito and escaping again. Ardent Jacobite and equally ardent Protestant, he defied the Court at St Germain to convert him to Romanism, and when they would

not allow him to read the English Service, consoled himself by publishing at Rouen a manifesto with the exquisite title of “The Resigned and Resolved Christian and Faithful and Undaunted Royalist in two plain farewell Sermons and a loyal farewell Visitation Speech.”

It must be admitted that even so late as the eighteenth century—the Venerable Denis lived till 1703—these gentlemen were the opposite of tame; even when they were “Resigned” they were at the same time “Resolved” and “Undaunted.” This is even more true of their fourteenth-century ancestor, Sir Theobald, the first Grenville of whom I have found anything essential to relate. He, at the age of twenty-two, thought fit to rebel against the paternal despotism of John Grandison, Bishop of Exeter, who had

instituted a nominee of Sir John Raleigh’s to the Grenville family living of Kilkhampton, in defiance, it would appear, of the lawful patron’s rights. Sir Theobald made war at once in the best Grenville manner. At dawn on Sunday, March 24, 1347, he invaded the Manor of Bishop’s Tawton with 500 followers “armed with divers kinds of weapons, offensive and defensive, after the fashion of men going to mortal war.” They stormed the Manor-house, the Sanctuary and the Manse; killed some of the defenders, took plunder to the value of two hundred marks (the Bishop’s estimate) and otherwise “multipliciter perturbarunt pacem et tranquillitatem Domini nostri Regis.” The Bishop’s peace and tranquillity being also disturbed, he at once excommunicated the entire army. Sir Theobald

then brought and won an action against Raleigh in the King’s Bench; the Bishop’s man appealed to Rome, with the inevitable result; the King’s Bench judgement was annulled, with costs against Sir Theobald. Cheered by this, the Bishop sent the Abbot of Hartland and the Prior of Launceston to Kilkhampton one fine July day to put things to rights. The Grenville army, with faces masked and painted, bows bent and arrows notched, met the Church Militant in a narrow lane and routed it shamefully; the pursuit lasted for a mile, and Sir Theobald then fortified and held Kilkhampton Church for several days. After eighteen months more of contumacy, peace was made; from the terms we may judge how hard the Grenville had pressed his tremendous adversary. He knelt, it is true, and confessed his guilt—there

there was no denying that—but the Bishop, in return for this preservation of his dignity, had to revoke his own institution and admit a new rector upon Sir Theobald’s presentation; Raleigh got nothing but the barren pleasure of reading aloud the Act of Submission. The significant points of the story are to me, first, that this boy of twenty-two gained his end in the teeth of all Rome; second, that to gain it he cared not what he did or suffered; and last, that it was never worth the money or the crimes it cost him.

It is vain, I think, to deny that in such a family group as this, Sir Richard Grenville of theRevengewould be in every sense at home. His record is plain. In 1585, when Raleigh’s first colony for Virginia set out from Plymouth in seven ships, it was Sir Richard who took command of it,

though he knew little of seamanship, and still less, apparently, of government. Letters from Lane, the head of the colony, to Secretary Walsingham, and dispatches from the treasurer to Raleigh himself, set forth Grenville’s “intolerable pride” and his “insatiable ambition.” His behaviour to his subordinates was such that they desire to be freed from any place where he is to carry any authority in chief. But what an irresistible fighter he is! On the homeward voyage he falls in with “a Spanish ship of 300 tunne, richly loaden”; having no boats, he boards her with an improvised one, “made with boards of chests, which fell a sunder, and sunke at the shippes side as soone as ever he and his men were out of it.” He reached

home at the end of October, and was off again in the following April, when the Justices of Cornwall report to the Council, Sir Richard having evidently neglected to do so, that, “being about to depart to sea, he has left his charge of 300 men to George Greynvil.” On this voyage he sacked the Azores, took “divers Spanyardes” and performed “many other exploytes,” but he reached Virginia too late to be of any service to the colony, which had already left for England. Then came the business of the Armada, in which he had at least three ships of his own engaged, though he got little chance of distinguishing himself in his station off the coast of Devon and Cornwall. His next voyage was that in theRevenge: and here again, in the one memorable action of his life, we cannot but see the workingof the peculiar character which is visible in all the rest.

“This Sir Richard Greenfield was a great and a rich Gentleman in England,” says a contemporary, the Dutchman Linschoten, “and had great yearly revenewes of his owne inheritance: but he was a man very unquiet in his minde, and greatly affected to warre: in so much as of his owne private motion he offered his service to the Queene: he had performed many valiant acts, and was greatly feared in these Islands [i.e., the Azores], and knowne of every man, but of nature very severe, so that his owne people hated him for his fiercenes and spake verie hardly of him: for when they first entered into the Fleete or Armado, they had their great sayle in a readinesse, and might possiblie enough have sayled

away: for it [i.e., theRevenge] was one of the best ships for sayle in England, and the Master perceiving that the other shippes had left them, and followed not after, commanded the great sayle to be cut, that they might make away: but Sir Richard Greenfield threatened both him, and all the rest that were in the ship, that if any man laid hand upon it, he would cause him to be hanged, and so by that occasion they were compelled to fight, and in the end were taken.”

Sir William Monson, another contemporary, has left behind him a similar account, first printed in 1682. “Upon view of the Spaniards, which were 55 sail, the Lord Thomas warily, and like a discreet General, weighed Anchor, and made

signs to the rest of his Fleet to do the like, with a purpose to get the wind of them: but Sir Richard Grenvile, being a stubborn man, ... would by no means be persuaded by his Master, or Company, to cut his main Sail, to follow the Admiral: nay, so headstrong and rash he was, that he offered violence to those that counselled him thereto.”

Sir Walter Raleigh, Grenville’s kinsman, friend and apologist, tells substantially the same story, but he endeavours to throw a different complexion upon it, by representing Sir Richard as being in the first instance trapped in the fulfilment of a duty. He declares that theRevenge“was the last waied, to recover the men that were upon the Island, which otherwise had been

lost.” Unfortunately, this contention is negatived by the numbers of the men captured in her; and, indeed, he goes on to say that Grenville afterwards “utterly refused to turn from the enemy” and boasted that he would “enforce those of Sivill to give him way.” Sir Richard Hawkins is more whole-hearted. “At the Ile of Flores, Sir Richard Greenfield got eternall honour and reputation of great valour, and of an experimented Soldier, chusing rather to sacrifice his life, and to passe all danger whatsoever, than to fayle in his Obligation, by gathering together those which had remained ashore in that place, though with the hazard of his ship and companie: and rather we ought to imbracean honourable death than to live with infamie and dishonour, by fayling in dutie.”

No man would have been quicker to lay down such a principle than Grenville, but it is clear that on this occasion he did not observe it, and to maintain that he did so would be to mistake the nature of the man. He was no quiet resolute victim of duty: his stubbornness was not that of faithful endurance. If the evidence we have quoted goes for anything he was then, as ever, proud, rash, headstrong and tyrannical, and he remained true to himself even in his famous dying speech, which has been garbled by every translator for 300 years. “Here die I, Richard Greenfield, with a joyfull and quiet mind, for that I have ended my life as a true soldierought to do, that hath fought for his country, Queene, religion, and honor, whereby my soule most joyfull departeth out of this bodie, and shall alwaies leave behind it an everlasting fame of a valiant and true soldier, that hath done his dutie, as he was bound to do.” So it has always run; it was not until 1897 that Mr David Hannay first translated and replaced the fierce concluding sentence: “But the others of my company have done as traitors and dogs, for which they shall be reproached all their lives and leave a shameful name for ever.” That, to my ear, is the authentic voice of the Grenville.

Isthis a condemnation? Is Sir Richard Grenville of theRevenge, after three centuries of fame, to be summed up as a ferocious and domineering fire-eater, hateful to his subordinates and disobedient to his chief? I do not think so. It is true that we cannot look to him for an example of what a seaman should be, or what an officershould do, but he is none the less a beacon to all Englishmen, because he was a great fighter and above the fear of death. To breathe the inspiration of his genius, it is not necessary to tamper with the record of his character; we have but to look at him as he was, with open eyes, to think what we will of his faults, and then to turn once more to the story of his superb valour and his supreme achievement. Beyond question, he and all his company are among the Immortals.

Heroes of old! We humbly layThe laurels on your graves again;Whatever men have done, men may—The deeds you wrought are not in vain.AHENRY NEWBOLT

Heroes of old! We humbly layThe laurels on your graves again;Whatever men have done, men may—The deeds you wrought are not in vain.A

Heroes of old! We humbly lay

The laurels on your graves again;

Whatever men have done, men may—

The deeds you wrought are not in vain.A

HENRY NEWBOLT

AAustin Dobson,A Ballad of Heroes.

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