All the Queen's Men (14 page)

Howard was invariably calm under pressure, displaying an excellent sense of humour during times of stress: ‘we have danced as lustily as the gallantest dancers in the Court',
²⁴
he reported to the Queen as the fleet rode uneasily at anchor in Plymouth Sound, buffeted by strong winds, unprotected by the breakwater that now exists, during a time when ‘the oldest fisherman could not remember such a summer season'.
²⁵
The English naval commander dealt patiently with the anxious Queen's request for information about the whereabouts of the Armada. ‘I am very sorry to perceive by your letter that her Majesty doth think that we have not sufficiently sought to understand some certainty of the Spanish fleet',
²⁶
he communicated to Walsingham. Howard was at all times acutely aware of the quality and requirements of his men. ‘My good Lord, there is here the gallantest company of captains, soldiers and mariners that we have ever seen in England,'
²⁷
he told Lord Burghley, while constantly badgering the Council for extra food and other supplies, continually caring for the needs of his crews and ships.

Charles Howard was particularly appreciative of his Vice-Admiral, the volatile Drake, and anxious to maintain his support. ‘Sir, I must not omit to let you know how loving and kindly Sir Francis Drake bareth himself and also how dutifully to her Majesty's service and unto me, being in the place I am in, which I pray you he may receive thanks for, by some private letter from you,'
²⁸
he requested Walsingham.

Howard was equally supportive of his other senior commander, Sir John Hawkins, conscious of the fact that his Rear Admiral had been subject to criticism while building and maintaining the fleet. Thus Howard was at pains to point out that, ‘the four great ships,
The Triumph
,
The Elizabeth Jonas
,
The Bear
and
The Victory
are in most Royal and perfect state'.
²⁹
These were the four biggest vessels in his fleet and their successful performance was vital to English prospects in the coming encounter with the Spanish.
Victory
was Hawkins's ship,
White Bear
was commanded by Lord Sheffield,
Triumph
by Martin Frobisher and the
Elizabeth Jonas
by Sir Robert Southwell.

Howard's dry sense of humour was maintained when hostilities finally commenced after the agonizingly long wait for the Armada to appear off the Cornish coast. ‘I will not trouble you with any long letter we are at present otherwise occupied than with writing',
³⁰
was his laconic dispatch to Walsingham as the English fleet manoeuvred to engage the Armada from a favourable vantage point. The dispatches between Howard and the Queen and her Council have all the authoritative urgency of a modern-day television newscast and brilliantly capture the mood of the moment. Like Eisenhower more than 300 years later, Howard had lacked previous combat experience but this proved to be no handicap when it came to war. He was a natural leader of men, firm yet courteous, approachable, always keen to seek out advice from his more experienced commanders, yet he alone always made the ultimate choice of action. Howard was crisp and decisive, but never impulsive or headstrong, and he successfully avoided any major mistakes. The history of warfare invariably demonstrates that great military encounters are usually won by the side which commits the fewest errors.

Howard always maintained the Queen's confidence along with that of her most senior ministers. Equally importantly, he commanded the respect of his own senior commanders together with the confidence of the rest of the fleet. Elizabeth was indeed fortunate to have such a capable leader during this crucial conflict and his undoubted qualities ensured he obtained the best from his men with the limited resources at his disposal, thereby achieving ultimate success in one of the most decisive battles in the history of our island nation. Here was a commander destined to become supreme among the greatest of Elizabeth's seafarers, a talented yet temperamental bunch of buccaneers whom the Queen skilfully used in order to further her fortune and fight her cause. England had stood alone against the might of Spain and rose from a nondescript second-rate power to become the envy of the civilized world. However, Elizabeth lacked soldiers of equal skill to her seafarers, possessing no outstanding generals to command her armies, no Marlborough or Wellington to achieve dazzlingly decisive victories in continental Europe. Battles could be decided at sea but wars were normally won on dry land, so the stirring deeds of Elizabethan sailors were never fully consolidated or exploited during her reign with a Crecy, Agincourt or Waterloo. Perhaps that is how the Queen would have wished it; she had no desire to conquer the world yet was fiercely protective of her own kingdom, ably guarded by her seafarers.

O
ur island kingdom has long enjoyed a well-justified reputation as a seafaring nation, so it is perhaps surprising that English sailors had seemed so reluctant to voyage far beyond their shores during the early part of the sixteenth century. The Portuguese, Spanish and French navigators were far more keen to journey into the unknown, leaving the English floundering in the wake of Columbus, Cortés, Pizarro, Magellan, Bartolomeu Diaz, Vasco da Gama and Jacques Cartier, as they voyaged across great oceans to discover new lands far beyond the horizon while England's sailors remained largely in home waters.

Christopher Columbus's pioneering journey across the Atlantic Ocean inaugurated a great age of discovery which considerably extended the frontiers of the known world. At the same time, the financial fortunes of the nations involved were greatly benefited, as overseas empires were created and important new sources of wealth came into existence. A few years after Columbus had arrived in the New World, the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama followed his fellow countryman Diaz around the Cape of Good Hope and, on Christmas Day 1497, landed on the south-eastern coast of Africa, naming it Natal. Vasco da Gama then crossed the Indian Ocean, reaching Calicut on the subcontinent of India the following year, thereby paving the way for Portuguese colonies in Africa and the East.

At this crucial period in the history of exploration, England had been preoccupied with the War of the Roses and although Elizabeth's grandfather, Henry VII, had commissioned John Cabot to conduct exploratory voyages westward across the Atlantic, little was to transpire. Like Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci, the Florentine merchant who gave his name to America, Cabot was of Italian extraction, born in Venice, Giovanni Caboto. When Cabot arrived at Cape Breton Island on 24 June 1497, he was the first European to reach the North American mainland. The journey was made without maps, where none had previously ventured, so it was not surprising that Cabot believed he was in north-east Asia, an area of the globe long familiar to Venetians on account of Marco Polo's extensive journeys overland to that region several centuries before. The cautious Henry was too involved with the internal matters of his kingdom to follow up Cabot's pioneering efforts with any degree of seriousness. Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII, employed Sebastian Cabot, John's son, who was living in Bristol at the time, to undertake a number of expeditions on his behalf, but Henry displayed little enthusiasm for this type of venture and Sebastian soon transferred his services to the Spanish.

A greater degree of English enterprise had begun during the short reign of Elizabeth's half-brother Edward VI, when the newly formed Company of Merchant Adventurers dispatched three ships under the command of Richard Chancellor and Hugh Willoughby to try and find a north-east passage around Europe in order to develop trade with the Orient. Willoughby was the Captain General sailing in the
Bona Esperanza
, while Chancellor was Pilot General captaining the
Edward Bonaventure
. The pair reached the Court of Ivan the Terrible in the spring of 1554 and successfully initiated trade with Russia, thereby breaking the monopoly of the German Hanseatic towns on the Baltic. Another fearless explorer, Anthony Jenkinson, carried on the pioneering activities which had been initiated by Willoughby and Chancellor, visiting Russia on three occasions during Elizabeth's reign, travelling down the Volga to Astrakhan and the Caspian Sea: ‘The nineteenth day the winde being West, and we winding east south east, we sailed tenne leagues, and passed by a great river, which hath his spring in the lande of Siberia.'
¹
Jenkinson travelled widely on the Queen's behalf, while in Syria he encountered the Turkish sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, whose Ottoman Empire stretched from Persia to North Africa and the Balkans:

I have travelled forty daies journey beyond the said sea, towards the Oriental India, and Cathaia, through divers deserts and wildernesses and passed through five kingdomes of the Tartars, and all the lands of Turceman and Zagatay, and so to the great city of Bokhar in Bactria, not without great perils and dangers sundry times.
²

These journeys were hazardous in the extreme, across trackless wastes, often among hostile tribes or in places where new and unforeseen dangers could loom suddenly and unexpectedly:

The same day, at a southwest sunne, there was a monstrous Whale aboard of us, so neare to our side that we might have thrust a sworde or any other weapon in him, which we durst not doe for feare hee should have overthrown our shippe: and then I called my company together, and all of us shouted, and with the crie we made he departed from us.
³

Other explorers were not so lucky. Hugh Willoughby and his crew froze to death in Lapland during the winter of 1554. His ship, containing the ice-encrusted bodies, together with Willoughby's diary, was discovered by Russian fishermen the following spring. Richard Chancellor was drowned off the coast of Scotland. Ferdinand Magellan, the Portuguese navigator, credited with being the first person to circumnavigate the globe, was massacred by islanders in the Philippines, and Francisco Pizarro, the Spanish explorer who conquered the Inca Empire in Peru, was assassinated in 1541. Vasco da Gama perished in the Portuguese colony of Goa, while John Hawkins and Francis Drake died aboard their ships anchored off the coast of Puerto Rico. However, the nomadic Arthur Jenkinson was to outlive Elizabeth by eight years, having begun his foreign travels when she was merely thirteen years old.

Explorers needed rich patrons and people in high places with an enthusiasm for discovery, together with an appreciation of the benefits that it might bring. Portuguese exploration had originally been masterminded by Prince Henry the Navigator, whose inspiration led to the progressive colonization of Madeira, the Cape Verde Islands and the Azores. He was also able to persuade Portuguese seafarers to voyage down the west coast of Africa as far as Sierra Leone. Christopher Columbus had been fortunate enough to attract the support of the Spanish King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, the parents of Catherine of Aragon. This was fairly remarkable as the last of the Moorish invaders had only just been expelled from Granada, and Spain was not a fully unified nation at that time. The elaborate tomb in the Cathedral of Seville shows ‘Christobal Colon' as he is known in Spain, guarded by the Kings of Leon, Castille, Aragon and Navara. The French King François I employed the Italian Giovanni da Verrazano to explore the North American coastline on his behalf. Jacques Cartier was in the services of François when he sailed up the St Lawrence River and established Canada as a French possession.

To some extent, England's late entry into the field of exploration may have been the result of geographical accident, which gave Spain and Portugal a decided advantage. Being much further south, the Spanish and the Portuguese navigators could depart from their home ports of Oporto, Lisbon, Lagos and Cadiz on the long transatlantic voyage to the New World, wafted westwards on a warm and favourable tradewind. On reaching the far side, they would have encountered plenty of suitable harbours in the West Indies or Central and South America, together with a welcoming climate. The less fortunate English would usually find themselves punching into the teeth of a westerly gale towards a much bleaker northerly shore: ‘The very same day in the afternoone about foure of the clocke, so great a tempest suddenly arose, and the seas were so outrageous that the ships could not keepe their intended course, but some were peforce driven one way, and some another way, to their great perill and hazard.'
⁴
The direct route across the Atlantic Ocean would bring them into that treacherous area of the Newfoundland Banks where thick fog concealed the icebergs that continually drifted down from polar regions on the cold Labrador counter-current. These icebergs could be as high as the tallest top mast of a Tudor ship; they would loom out of the fog with such speed that if a sharp lookout was not being kept, the ensuing collision would very likely take the ship down to the bottom of the ocean with all hands.

Ashore there were no hoards of silver or mountains of gold awaiting them, as there had been for the early Spanish and Portuguese explorers further south. The barren coastline held no such promise, nor did the interior of the continent, impenetrable forests full of hostile Indians, far more difficult to overcome than the Incas or Aztecs with which the Spanish conquistadors had to contend.

The decided lack of enthusiasm for exploration that had been displayed by England's monarchs prior to Elizabeth's arrival on the throne produced considerable difficulties when the English finally did become predisposed to journey offshore on any meaningful scale. By then, the Spanish and Portuguese had established a virtual monopoly over the majority of the New World, the French were firmly entrenched in Canada and the Portuguese exercised a similar control over the sea routes to India and the Far East. This led to the heroic, yet futile, attempts by the Yorkshire-born Martin Frobisher to try to find an alternative way to the Orient. Frobisher was an orphan who had become the ward of Sir John York, Master of the Mint and a merchant venturer in the Muscovy Company trading with Russia. York had been involved in the abortive attempt to have Lady Jane Grey crowned Queen of England in 1553 and had lost both his freedom and his fortune as a result of supporting this foolish venture. Young Frobisher was sent to sea at the age of eleven on a voyage to Guinea, an experience not uncommon in those days. Drake was a similar age when he first went to sea, as was Horatio Nelson when he joined the Navy. Frobisher traded along the North African coast as far eastward as the Levant in various enterprises that were not always completely lawful. Later, he was closely questioned, ‘on suspicion of having fitted out his vessel as a pirate'. Frobisher was merely one of many English sea captains of the Elizabethan era suspected of being involved in piracy, among them John Hawkins and Francis Drake.