Sir Francis Drake

Drake, conquering Drake …

In strength of men he putteth not his trust,

But to his God and cause which still is just.

He learned hath that God is our chieftain,

Who brings him forth and safely back again.

FROM THE DESOLATE granite uplands of Dartmoor – then as now a wild expanse of rock, heather and swamp – the River Tavy ran south-westerly until it emptied into the estuary of the Tamar north of Plymouth. Where the river abandoned the moor it enriched the lowlands and encouraged the development of agriculture on substantial estates that were once owned by the Benedictine monks of Tavistock Abbey, in its day the largest monastic house in Devonshire and for hundreds of years the nucleus of settlement in the beautiful and varied valley of the Tavy. From this country came Francis Drake. At the time of his birth the abbey and its lands no longer belonged to the Church, for they had suffered the fate of other religious houses during the tempestuous and reforming reign of Henry VIII. They had been confiscated and in 1539 had passed into the hands of the powerful Russell family.

The town of Tavistock continued to thrive, sitting on the north bank of the Tavy. Its locals farmed lands once leased from the abbey, scratched a living from tin workings on the south-western edge of Dartmoor, produced the coarse woollen cloths known as ‘straits’, fished for salmon in the river or provided an assortment of local crafts and services. Their goods might be sent down-river to Plymouth for export, or carried overland on pack-horses or carts. Not a few men of Tavistock eventually found themselves a trade at sea, either fishing for pilchards and herrings from Plymouth, Exeter or Dartmouth, or plying between south-west France and England with cloth, tin and wine.

The Drakes had lived at Tavistock for a century or more.¹ Before the dissolution of the monasteries, Francis Drake’s grandparents, John and Margery Drake, held a lease from the abbot providing them with the buildings and lands of the part of Crowndale, a mile below Tavistock, that was within the parish of Tavistock – a farm on the west bank of the Tavy known simply as Crowndale. The lease was good for the lives of John and Margery and their eldest son, John. Such leases were not uncommon in sixteenth-century Devon, and marked the Drakes as members of the class of yeoman farmers, those more substantial and secure small farmers who were becoming the mainstay of rural communities and supplying the incumbents of parish posts from churchwardens to constables. Some have said that the origins of Francis Drake were mean, but they were not of the meanest kind. John and Margery Drake held about 180 acres. Typical copyholders, from whose ranks the Drakes had undoubtedly sprung, farmed rather less, and their title depended upon customary right only, and was not, like that of the Drakes, fully defensible in law. About three-quarters of manorial tenants in the sixteenth century were copyholders, and in Devon there was also a swelling number of wage-earners with little or no land whatever who sought work where it could be found. They knew hardship and insecurity of a kind that John and Margery Drake would not have experienced.

When John, Lord Russell (later the first Earl of Bedford) and his wife, Anne, obtained the wealthy lands of Tavistock Abbey they renewed the lease to the Drakes in 1546. The tenants agreed to maintain the hedges and ditches on their land and to keep the buildings in good repair. They paid an immediate sum of £6 13s 4d and a yearly rent of £4 6s 8d, and upon Margery or John junior succeeding to the property they would have to give up their ‘best beast’ as heriot.² Here, in the valley of the Tavy, the Drakes raised their family. A second son, Edmund, was born to John and Margery, as well as two other sons and two or three daughters, one of them named Anna. It was Edmund who was to be the father of Francis Drake.

Edmund had not the security of his eldest brother, who would inherit the Crowndale farm, but he was allocated some land by his father. Thus, the Lay Subsidy rolls of 1544 rate the holdings of John and Margery at £20; those of the heir, John, at £5; and some belonging to Edmund at £4. Occasional contemporary comment, both English and Spanish, referred to Francis Drake’s father as a sailor, but the Lay Subsidy rolls and a legal document of 1548 suggest that he derived a living from the land, and in the latter he was expressly described as a shearman.

The year of Francis Drake’s birth is not known. Edmund married one of the Mylwaye family, as we may infer from his will, and he had by her twelve sons in all, of whom the eldest was Francis and the youngest surviving Thomas. A portrait which Nicholas Hilliard painted of Sir Francis in 1581 declared the admiral then to be forty-two years of age, an estimate the artist presumably obtained from his subject. It would place Drake’s birth about 1538 or 1539. However, in 1586 a Spaniard wrote that Drake ‘admits he is 46 years old’, which suggests his birthdate was 1540.³ Other, circumstantial, evidence points to a later date. Drake’s nephew implied that his uncle was not born earlier than 1542, and Edmund Howes, a contemporary of the admiral, tells us that Drake was twenty at the time of his first voyage to the Guinea coast in 1566. Distressing as it may be, we must frankly admit that none of this establishes the year of Drake’s nativity.

What is certain is that the Drakes stood in good stead with the Russells, their landlords, sufficiently so for Lord Russell’s son, the youth Francis Russell, to stand as godfather to Edmund’s eldest son and to provide him with his Christian name. Edmund understood the importance of patronage, for in Tudor England a man’s prospects depended much upon the claims he held upon the attention and favour of the mighty. In this instance many years would pass before this scant connection with the Russells yielded dividends, but that may be because tenant Edmund Drake took his family from Devon while his eldest son was only a boy.

The flight of Edmund Drake to Kent has been misinterpreted by previous biographers. They have accepted the story that Edmund passed to his sons and they to others – Francis to William Camden and Thomas to his own son – that Edmund fled from Devon because of religious persecution. ‘His father,’ Camden wrote of the admiral, ‘embracing the Protestants’ doctrine … fled his country and withdrew himself into Kent.’⁴ Repeating the family tradition, Sir Francis’s nephew spoke of Edmund suffering for his faith and ‘being forced to fly from his house near South Tavistock in Devon, into Kent.’⁵ There is no doubt that, like Russell, Edmund Drake became a good Protestant, but that this version was less than the truth, and that the increasingly pious Edmund Drake harboured a dark secret even from his sons seems evident from the following entry in the patent rolls for 1548:

December 21, 1548. Whereas Edmund Drake, shearman, and John Hawkyng, alias Harte, tailor, late of Tavistock, Devon, are indicted of having on 25 April 2 Edward VI, at Tavistock, stolen a horse worth £3, of one John Harte; and whereas William Master, cordyner, and Edmund Drake, shearman, late of Tavistock, are indicted of having on 16 April 2 Edward VI, at Peter Tavy, Devon, in the king’s highway (via regia) called ‘le Crose Lane’ assaulted Roger Langisforde and stolen 21s 7d which he had in his purse.

Pardon to the said Drake, Hawkynge and Master of all felonies before 20 Oct. last. By p.s. (II. 893. Westm. 18 Dec.).⁶

From this we learn that in 1548 Edmund was indicted for two offences of robbery – stealing a horse and beating Roger Langisforde and rifling his purse on the highway, petty and sordid sixteenth-century crimes. He was described as being ‘late of Tavistock’ before the end of the year, which suggests that although he was pardoned he had already bolted. It is also worth noting here Edmund Drake’s association with one ‘Hawkyng’ or ‘Hawkynge’. This may be a reference to the famous seafaring family whose destiny was to be so entwined with Drake’s, for the grandfather of John Hawkins, the great seaman, was a John Hawkins of Tavistock. He was not, apparently, the alleged horse-thief, but probably a relation. There was a family connexion between the Drake and the Hawkins lineages, and this document is the first that brings the two celebrated names together.

But before we hastily conclude that Edmund’s story of religious persecution was a total fiction designed to mask a more ignoble flight, it should be emphasized that there were religious disturbances in 1549 and they evidently drove the Drake family, if not Edmund himself, from Tavistock. While this unrest does not explain Edmund’s flight, it provided him with his excuse and may have warned him against any precipitate return to his native county.

It is difficult now for many people to understand the intense religious ferment of Reformation England. To do so one must be aware of the part played by religion in the sixteenth-century world, and the many functions it served. Religion explained the mysteries of life and creation, underpinned the social order, protected people from the powers of evil, and comforted the distressed and bereaved. Ultimately it dispensed justice in the hereafter. Relatively unchallenged by the rudimentary sciences of the day, it was not something about which men could be complacent, for it governed life upon earth and the prospects for the soul beyond death.

The early sixteenth century had witnessed strong criticism of the Roman Church and an exaggerated anti-clericalism that depicted the clergy as greedy, corrupt, sinful and hypocritical. The Drakes must have heard of many of the charges that were brought against priests: of exorbitant fees, rents and tithes; of clergy securing several benefices when they could occupy but one; of the vindictiveness of the ecclesiastical courts; and of all manner of immoralities taking place behind the monastery doors. In harness with this popular anti-clericalism there was growing intellectual criticism of Catholicism itself. A more personal religion was advocated which devalued the role of the priest as an intermediary between God and man and condemned the excessive ceremonialism of the Roman religion. These criticisms took several forms, but one of the most influential was Lutheranism. It asserted that only through faith in Christ did people win salvation, and that attempts to solicit divine favour by other means – by venerating images, saints and shrines; by performing penances or receiving blessings; by enjoining the prayers of others; even by carrying out good works – were superfluous. Protestant teachers denied the concept of purgatory, and sought to replace Latin services and scriptures with vernacular versions that might be more accessible to the people. And they attacked Catholic doctrine and ritual, denied transubstantiation, reduced the sacraments, and endeavoured to abolish papal taxation. All this struck at the heart of the Catholic Church.

Henry VIII gave an important impetus to the Reformation in England when, unable to obtain a male heir from his wife, Katherine of Aragon, he tried to induce the Church to annul his marriage so that he could take Anne Boleyn as a new bride. The Pope resisted, and a series of acts of Parliament in the 1530s and 1540s detached England’s Church from the obedience of Rome and invested the right to define doctrine and forms of religion with the English Crown. Once the control of Rome had been severed, it was easier for the reformers slowly to recast England’s religion in a Protestant character.⁷

Probably it was the king’s attacks on the property of the Church that brought the Reformation home to the people of Devon. In 1536 small priories like those at Barnstaple, Exeter and Totnes were confiscated by the Crown, and three years later so were the larger religious houses, including Tavistock Abbey. After Henry’s death, Protector Somerset confiscated the chantries, chapels endowed to enable priests to pray for the souls of the departed founders. He promoted the Reformation more vigorously still, inveighing against the use of images and reducing the number of holy days. In 1549 he imposed a new Prayer Book and replaced the Latin service by one in English.

Staunch Catholics inevitably reacted, and it was a rebellion in 1549 against the Act of Uniformity that drove the Drakes from Tavistock. Even before the flight of Edmund the family had heard the rumbling discontent. In 1548 conservatives in Cornwall had resisted the government’s injunctions to remove images from churches and chapels, only to be speedily suppressed. Young Francis Drake may have seen the warning to rebels exhibited in the town of Tavistock, one of the withered limbs of an executed insurgent brought from Plymouth for the purpose, after the fashion of the day. In the summer of 1549, a few months after Edmund Drake’s pardon, the greater rebellion occurred, one that was short-lived but bloody. Members of the Cornish peasantry, encouraged by a few gentry, rejected the new Prayer Book and, gathering arms, marched into Devon. On the way they captured Trematon Castle, across the Tamar estuary from Plymouth, and it was said that

they seized on the castle, and exercised the uttermost of their barbarous cruelty (death excepted) on the surprised prisoners. The seely gentlewomen, without regard of sex or shame, were stripped from their apparel to their very smocks, and some of their fingers broken, to pluck away their rings.⁸

Fear spread before the rebel force, and some of the locals in its path sought refuge in Plymouth Castle or on the island of St Nicholas in Plymouth Sound. Some of the rebels remained at Plymouth, but others marched north-east, by way of Tavistock, and then struck out across the wilds of Dartmoor to join a force of Devonshire rebels from Sampford Courtenay at Crediton. The Drakes, it may be presumed, fled, for the family disappears from the Lay Subsidy rolls of Tavistock after 1549. Unable to capture Exeter, the insurgents were soon suppressed by an army of Italian mercenaries commanded by none other than the Drakes’ landlord, Lord Russell. He had an additional satisfaction in putting down the revolt, because among the demands of the rebels had been the restitution to the Church of Tavistock Abbey.

How did the rising affect Edmund Drake and his son? We cannot be sure, because there is no information about their whereabouts in 1549. It seems likely that Edmund had not returned to Tavistock after leaving the parish under a cloud the previous year. However, one point is certain. Years later Sir Francis spoke of the western rebellion, and blamed it for his father’s flight to Kent. He must have heard stories of the rising from many people, perhaps from his father and other members of his family. Drake’s grandfather, John, lived until 1566, and his grandmother until 1571. The boy’s oldest uncle died in the 1560s. Another uncle, Robert, married Anna Luxmore, and their son, another John, served under Francis Drake in some of his voyages. The admiral’s youngest uncle, also John, outlived most of his nephews and died in the early years of the seventeenth century. These Drakes remained in Devon, and after Francis returned to the county as a young man he must have met them again, and he may have learned more fully from them of the Drakes’ flight from Tavistock in the heady days of the Edwardian Reformation.

When Edmund Drake quitted Devon he made his way to Kent, and set up home in the hull of a ship, probably a hulk, moored or beached in the River Medway. Here Edmund’s younger sons were born, and here he found employment. Somerset’s government had begun to use the Medway as a place to lay up and repair the ships of the new Royal Navy, and vessels were being transferred from various ports to Gillingham Reach, where the high tides and extensive mud flats made it convenient for grounding. With the ships came sailors, and Edmund found a precarious living at Gillingham, reading prayers to the seamen of the king’s navy. A literate man, he was able to live down his shady past and emerge a preacher of the new faith.

In Kent, more so than in Devon, young Francis absorbed the sights and sounds of the sea. He saw the king’s ships, large and small – the sailing ships of the battlefleet, the small pinnaces and the oared barges. He watched tiny merchantmen of 20 to 80 tons, two- and three-masters, shipping provisions to London or picking their way along the coasts or across the Channel to France, Picardy and the Low Countries. He became familiar with the thriving fishing vessels.

Here, too, Drake passed from childhood to youth against the background of religious unrest that continued to trouble the nation. Throughout Europe the middle ground between Catholic and Protestant, between Rome and Geneva, was beginning to fall away, and extremists burned with the desire to impress their faith upon others, believing that religious uniformity was essential to both salvation and a stable society and that it was better to brutalize one’s fellows than to suffer them to die in an erroneous faith. In 1553 Mary, the daughter of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon, succeeded to the throne after the short reign of her weak half-brother. Staunchly Catholic, she was determined to restore her realm’s links with Rome and to set aside the Reformation, and she repealed the Act of Uniformity and Prayer Book of 1552, the twin peaks of Edwardian reform. Worse still, Mary proposed to marry Philip of Spain, the son of and heir to Charles V, King of Castile and Holy Roman Emperor. To fears for the Reformation and of the restitution of church property were now added traditional English suspicions of the foreigner, and religion and xenophobia combined to produce Wyatt’s rebellion.

It germinated in Kent, and drew most of its leaders from the Medway valley and its close hinterland. Some of the rebels believed that the Spanish marriage would bring to England a coterie of foreign favourites who would supplant the likes of themselves in offices of honour and profit. Others had religious motives. It is believed that there were hopes that Mary could be unseated and replaced by her sister, the young Princess Elizabeth. Although simultaneous risings were planned in Devon, Hertfordshire and Leicestershire, it was in Kent that Sir Thomas Wyatt raised his standard in January of 1554 and gathered the only forces that constituted much of a threat. Some of them were from Gillingham, where the Drakes lived. It was a weak enough force, a mere few thousand men, but Wyatt led them to London where he was defeated without much difficulty in February.

Francis Drake would have heard of Wyatt’s rebellion, and probably of the execution of some of the rebels in Kent. Whether or not he made much of it, Mary’s reign cannot have left him untroubled. The queen did indeed marry Philip, and presided over the persecution of heretics. Some Protestants fled abroad, to Frankfurt, Zurich and Geneva. Others, like Edmund Drake, remained, living as quietly as they could, no easy matter for the man who read prayers for a living. The least fortunate were seized and burned, perhaps three hundred in all, fifty-four of them in Kent. As a youth Drake saw the work of the twin forces that he eventually dedicated himself to overthrow: Rome and Spain. Exactly how they affected him must remain a matter of speculation, but in his maturity one of his favourite books, and one of the few he took with him around the world, was John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, published in 1563, a history of the Protestant martyrs of the reign of Queen Mary.

Throughout his life, Drake’s profound faith was arguably his most salient characteristic, and it provided the mainspring of his tempestuous career. There would be other motivations – patriotism, profit and personal grievances against the Spaniards – but none was greater than his Protestantism. Those who have portrayed him purely as an avaricious freebooter have underestimated both the religious climate of the day and Drake’s own intense piety. It was his confidence in God’s protection and the belief that God worked through him that gave him the courage to brave the greatest dangers. His favourite oaths were ‘By God’s Faith!’ or ‘If God Wills’. In his prime he spent several hours a day in worship, and his surviving letters are replete with references to his God. His common dispatches were frequently prayers. In one typical example he addressed Francis Walsingham, one of Queen Elizabeth’s greatest ministers, in 1588:

Let us all, with one consent, both high and low, magnify and praise our most gracious and merciful God for his infinite and unspeakable goodness towards us; which I protest … that my belief is that our most gracious Sovereign, her poor subjects, and the church of God hath opened the heavens in divers places, and pierced the ears of our most merciful Father, unto whom, in Christ Jesu, be all honour and glory. So be it, Amen, Amen.⁹

Drake was never a penman, but from such tortuous passages emerges something of the homage he paid to his Lord. Indeed, at the height of his career, when he stood as the most famous of Englishmen, he troubled to write to the same John Foxe whose book had so inspired him, reminding him that ‘our enemies are many but our Protector commandeth the whole world’ and exhorting all to ‘pray continually, and our Lord Jesus will hear us in good time mercifully.’¹⁰

The earliest evidence, from the 1560s, shows that Drake’s religious convictions were not only deep but extreme and uncompromising. In time he would find himself a spiritual home among the Elizabethan Puritans, for to Drake the Roman Church was not merely corrupted by the excrescences of the centuries and in need of reform; it was a false church, administered, as he said, by Antichrist, and fit only to be eschewed and condemned. The foundations of such extremism were laid in Kent by Edmund Drake at the time of the Marian counter-Reformation.

In 1558 Elizabeth became Queen of England, and at once, but with tact and moderation, busied herself in establishing the Church of England, for all its spirit of compromise still a Protestant church independent of Rome. The change boded well for Edmund, and he was ordained a deacon and made Vicar of Upchurch in Kent on 25 January, 1561, a position he held until his death. Upchurch was a quiet parish lying south of the Medway estuary, situated on the salt marshes that pass along Kent’s northern coast. It had some of the wildness of Devon, although it was different in character, with wide grassy flats broken by creeks and inlets that teemed with birdlife. The post promised some security for Edmund, but little for his substantial brood. True, there was a small income to be had from tithes, and Edmund would have possessed a piece of church land – the ‘glebe’ – to farm himself or lease out. But the land was not very productive, and unlike many yeoman farmers of his native Devon Edmund Drake had only a life tenure; upon his death his house and land would pass to the succeeding incumbent. There would be little to bequeath to his sons.

Providing for the latter must indeed have been a considerable difficulty for the needy preacher. Although some of the twelve sons probably died in infancy, sufficient remained to tax a man of such modest means, and Edmund’s burden was increased by the early death of his wife.¹¹ Most of the boys were sent to sea; one, Edward, died at Upchurch, and the youngest, Thomas, was placed with a Mr Thomas Baker of London. By the time of his death Edmund had them off his hands, and willed most of his possessions to his youngest son, bequeathing nothing to the others.

Something of the atmosphere of the old man’s household can be glimpsed from his will, made on 26 December, 1566, shortly before his death. Like a true Protestant he committed his spirit to God, and omitted the once customary references to the saints. A chair and a cushion passed to Richard Mylwaye, a relative of his wife, and all unmentioned property to the nurse who had tended him in his last illness. His son, Thomas, received a feather bed and two pillows; a basin; platters; pewter dishes and pots; pen and ink; candlesticks; kettles; a mortar and pestle; five shirts; and something more important than all of them:

I give unto the same Thomas, my son, two chests with all my books, which, my son, I would he should make of them above all other goods. But remember my wish to be new set in the beginnings of the Romans and so trim the book and keep in bosom and feed upon; make much of the Bible that I do here send thee with all the rest of the goodly books.¹²

Francis Drake had been taught to read and write by his father, but he was then put to schooling of a different kind, in the tides and shoals of the Medway and the choppy waters of the North Sea and the English Channel. Sometime in the 1550s Edmund had found his eldest son a position with the owner and master of a small coasting bark which carried freight about the region, occasionally sailed to France and the Low Countries, and helped to pilot ships in and out of ports. Although our source does not specifically say so, it is probable that the young Drake was apprenticed to the skipper, that is, Edmund would have paid him a sum of money in return for a formal indenture of his son upon stipulated terms. Such apprentices were often taken as young as eleven years of age, and might serve from seven to twelve years more, but they enjoyed security of employment and could not, like other hands, be dismissed when a voyage ended.

In the next few years the boy proved himself an apt enough pupil, and he won the affection and respect of the bark’s owner, an old man who had no wife or family of his own and who seems to have regarded Francis as his son. There was much to learn about tides and currents, shoals and landfalls and the prevailing winds. Francis found out how to box the compass, sound for depth, and make use of the sun and stars, and he learned to handle a bark in all weathers. He must also have endured the hardships of life at sea, the uncomfortable and crowded accommodation, the cold food and wet clothing when storms prevented fires from being lit, the stale beer and victuals, and the seven-day week.

For all that, Drake’s prospects were not negligible; like the Church that was Edmund’s calling, the sea did not debar those humbly born from achieving some status. Rank and wealth were important, surely, but wind and wave favoured no man above another, while a sailor of small account, if he was able, conscientious and lucky, might become a master, an officer responsible for the handling or, in smaller vessels, the command of a ship. Masters earned higher pay than ordinary seamen as well as the privilege of drawing additional allowances, and not a few of them, among whom was probably Drake’s captain, eventually owned ships of their own. And between master and common mariner intermediary posts were to be had, like that of boatswain or master’s mate. Drake was to be particularly fortunate, because the old man with whom he served his apprenticeship died and, having no other to receive his possessions, willed his bark to the boy he had trained.¹³

Alone now, Drake determined to return to his native county, and perhaps to call to account some family connections. He sold the bark but retained a few of the men, whom he brought to Plymouth, and here he evidently contacted his kinsmen, the prosperous shipowning brothers William and John Hawkins. It was probably for them that he served as a purser on a trading voyage to north-eastern Spain in about 1564. The purser represented those owners who did not accompany their ships and safeguarded their interests, superintending the financial aspects of a voyage, paying crews, discharging customs duties and accounting for cargoes. Drake, as a man of education and experience, and through his relationship to the Hawkins brothers, would have been a natural choice for such a position. When the trip was over he was recruited for another adventure under the auspices of the brothers, but this one took him further than he had been before, to territories claimed exclusively by the greatest of nations, imperial Spain.

¹ Original sources for Drake’s childhood are the outlines in Camden, Annals, and in Edmund Howes’s continuation of John Stow’s Chronicles. Eliott-Drake, Family and Heirs of Sir Francis Drake, is the standard work on the family. The first important biography of Drake was Barrow’s Life, Voyages and Exploits of Admiral Sir Francis Drake, but the author found difficulty in gaining access to important manuscript materials. Julian Corbett’s masterly Drake and the Tudor Navy was not only the foundation for modern scholarship in the subject but remains the only comprehensive biography. It is in great need of revision, but still repays study. Of scholarly outlines of Drake’s career published since, Andrews, Drake’s Voyages, is outstanding. There have been many popular biographies, of which the best as well as the most readable is Mason, Life of Francis Drake.

² Leases of Crowndale to John and Margery Drake, and to their son John, 8 September, 1519, and 8 October, 1546, Drake Papers, Devon County Record Office, 346M/F599–600, T973–974; Eliott-Drake, 1:4–6.

³ Diego Hidalgo Montemayon in Wright, ed., Further English Voyages to Spanish America, 129.

⁵ Sir Francis Drake Revived (1626), reprinted in Wright, ed., Documents Concerning English Voyages to the Spanish Main, 251.

⁷ For the English background to Drake’s career, see Elton, England Under the Tudors; Youings, Sixteenth Century England; Mackie, The Earlier Tudors; and Black, The Reign of Elizabeth.

⁸ Rose-Troup, The Western Rebellion of 1549, 129. See also Cornwall, Revolt of the Peasantry, 1549.

⁹ Drake to Walsingham, 10 August, 1588, Laughton, ed., Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 2:97–100.

¹¹ Drake’s mother seems to have died before 1558. The youngest son, Thomas, was born about 1556. In his will Edmund Drake, then Vicar of Upchurch, made no provision for his wife, who must have been dead. He also asked that he be buried in his churchyard beside his son, Edward, which suggests that his wife had not died at Upchurch. Edmund probably moved to Upchurch from Gillingham in 1561, but the parish registers for Gillingham, which survive from 1558 and are deposited at the Kent Record Office at Maidstone, contain no references to the Drakes during this period.

¹³ Valuable explorations of Elizabethan seafaring are Scammell, ‘Manning the English Merchant Service in the Sixteenth Century’, and Andrews, ‘The Elizabethan Seaman’.