CHAPTER SEVEN
SERVICES ASHORE AND AFLOAT
IF DRAKE WAS rich and the hero of the West Country mariners, the havoc he had wrought on the Main had marked him as an enemy of the King of Spain, and it was singularly unfortunate that the corsair’s return to Plymouth coincided with an improvement in Elizabeth’s relations with Philip. In the Netherlands the Duke of Alba now had a full-scale insurrection on his hands, and he doubted that he could restore obedience while Elizabeth remained unfriendly and the English Channel was effectively closed to Spanish shipping. Nor was Alba alone in wishing an end to his damaging dispute with England. About the queen herself there was, it is true, a bellicose cabal of councillors headed by the Joint Principal Secretary, Francis Walsingham, who urged greater English intervention on the part of embattled Protestants in France and the Netherlands. But Elizabeth had burned her fingers in foreign adventures before, and instinctively shrank from extreme measures. Unofficially, she permitted her subjects to assist the Huguenots, but she would not commit herself any further to their cause.
Spain and England did the sensible thing, and came to terms. Both agreed not to harbour aliens unfriendly to the other, and Philip promised to afford the Netherlands greater liberties and to prevent the Inquisition further molesting English sailors. For her part, Elizabeth undertook to settle the matter of her seizure of the Spanish ships and to discourage her seamen from raiding Philip’s commerce as pirates or privateers. The arrival of the most dangerous of her corsairs at such a time was, to say the least, impolitic. It appears that, soon after his return, Drake was advised to keep a low profile and that he was at sea and out of harm’s way until the convention of Bristol had successfully restored a degree of amity between Spain and England in 1574.
Drake was so quiet, in fact, that nothing is known about his activities for almost two years after his triumphant return to Plymouth. When he did reappear it was as a supporting actor in the tawdry work that the Elizabethans were then undertaking in Ireland. This troubled land possessed an obvious strategic interest to England, for it guarded her vulnerable western flank, and were it to be occupied by a rival like Spain or France it would admirably serve them as a base for invasion. Unfortunately, the English found Ireland stubbornly resistant to their own influence. They administered ‘the Pale’, at that time a patch on the east coast embracing little more than Dublin, Kildare, Meath and Louth, but elsewhere a Gaelic society prevailed. This society was true to its own notions of succession, law and land tenure; a pastoral peasantry sustained itself by the raising and bartering of agricultural produce and livestock and was dominated by landed freeholders who recognized as their chieftain one of a ruling family, whether it be an O’Reilly of Cavan or an O’Neill of Tyrone. Even Irishmen of English descent, the so-called Anglo-Irish, frequently imbibed Gaelic rather than English traditions. Between the two very different communities, the Gaelic and the English, the Reformation added a religious wedge. In time Catholic Ireland was seen by the counter-reformers as a means by which England might be threatened through the back door.1
King Henry VIII had declared Ireland a kingdom united to the English Crown and had attempted to persuade the Irish chiefs to receive English title to the land they controlled, providing they introduced English law and religion and swore fealty to the king. But the ‘surrender and regrant’ policy, which sought to acculturate the Irish and bring them within England’s orbit, made little progress, and more uncompromising methods were soon adopted. To the Elizabethans a combination of confiscation, colonization and plantation seemed an answer to the Irish problem. The lands of recalcitrant Irish would be seized and assigned to English adventurers, who undertook to settle the land with immigrants from England, grant them title, and develop in Ireland loyal communities which might support the English army against the Irish in times of difficulty.
It was a policy which bred conflict, of course. Across the Atlantic a similar practice later led to the dispossession and ultimate destruction of the aboriginal culture. In Ireland it created two communities nurtured in traditional hostility and ripe for discontent for centuries to come. Elizabeth had inherited in Ireland a land over which England had declared her authority but still exercised a fragile hold, and its conquest encompassed the whole of the queen’s long reign. In so protracted a struggle it is not surprising that Drake, like so many other notable Elizabethans – Gilbert and Grenville, Ralegh and Spenser, Mountjoy and Sidney – became embroiled in the Irish campaigns. Of Drake’s part little was said at the time. Edmund Howes, who may have obtained his information from the man himself, wrote that Drake voluntarily provided three frigates for the Earl of Essex’s forces in Ireland, and that he served Essex with distinction by sea and land in the capture of ‘divers’ strong fortresses. This is an exaggeration, because familiarity with Essex’s forays in Ireland reveals few encounters with stone houses, let alone enemy fortresses, and little in the way of naval action. There is one exception: the capture of Rathlin Island, and the records of Essex’s expedition confirm that Drake was indeed engaged for that service and discharged soon after it was completed. The Irish interlude in Drake’s life has been virtually ignored by biographers, and we here offer the first full account to be written of it.
A man of about Drake’s age, Walter Devereux, created the first Earl of Essex in 1572, was a rising star of Elizabeth’s court, a dashing, commanding figure, elegant, brave, and, it soon appeared, ruthless. To strengthen his credit with the queen, he proposed to pacify and colonize Ulster, the most troublesome part of Ireland. The Crown granted Essex the lands in Ireland from Belfast Lough to Lough Sidney and the lower Bann, and the areas in the north-east known as the Glens of Antrim, the Route and Rathlin Island. He agreed to colonize the territory at his own risk, clearing away the rights of its Irish occupants and granting title to his English supporters who would bring over farmers and artisans to develop the settlement. It was typical of the queen and her parsimonious government that the conquest of Ireland was consigned to private enterprise. Essex invested his personal fortune in the expedition, and drew resources – capital, men and services – from the many who hoped to profit from his venture, including members of the government: William Cecil (now Lord Burghley and Lord Treasurer); Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester; and Thomas Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex. The queen herself loaned Essex £10,000.
Essex’s expedition sailed from Liverpool in August 1573, about the time of Drake’s return from the West Indies. The earl spent the next two years trying to subjugate the area west of the Blackwater and the Bann rivers, but the Irish were slippery adversaries, avoiding full-scale engagements but adeptly using their knowledge of the woods, hills and bogs to ambush and harass the English. Eventually, Essex realized that only permanent garrisons could hold the country, but these were beyond his resources and he began to complain of inadequate support. Many of the gentlemen with him had been lured there by the prospect of quick returns, and the little enthusiasm they had displayed for the hard work of colonization wilted with the slow progress. Soldiers whose pay went into arrears grew mutinous. Essex asked the government to subsidize his efforts, but his pains obtained for him little more than the empty title of Governor of Ulster, and this he soon resigned in the bitter belief that while he was in Ireland he was being undermined by his enemies at court.
The principal resistance to Essex’s ‘plantation’ came from the powerful lords of Tyrone, the O’Neills, who claimed sway in Ulster west of the Bann and Lough Neagh, and whose leader was Turlough O’Neill. There was also the problem of the mercenary Scots who had settled the Glens of Antrim, the Route and Rathlin Island, and who regarded as their head Sorley Boy MacDonnell, the son of the Lord of Islay and Kintyre. In 1575 Essex enjoyed some success against O’Neill, and turned upon MacDonnell, driving his Scots out of Clandeboy. It was at this point that Essex’s attention focused upon Rathlin, a rugged, storm-swept island off north-eastern Antrim, which the Scots were using as a staging post between Ireland and Kintyre.
It was a craggy, L-shaped rock, four miles along one leg and three along the other, the home of thousands of seabirds – shearwaters, cormorants, razorbills, guillemots, puffins and gulls – but few people. Legend has it that the ancient castle that stood on the cliffs of its north-eastern shoreline had once been the refuge of no less a person than Robert the Bruce. Now Sorley Boy and his chiefs also considered Rathlin a safe sanctuary, and had sent their wives and children there, not without good reason, for the castle was assisted by considerable natural advantages. Thirteen miles from Scotland and three from Ireland, Rathlin was surrounded by waters that were notoriously dangerous, with eddies, currents and tides that even today not uncommonly claim their shipwrecks. In many cases the picturesque cliffs – white limestone crowned with contrasting black basalt under a wind-ravaged carpet of grass – rose sheer and smooth from the sea, up to 300 feet or more in height. And the castle itself, stretching from the summit of the cliffs, could only be approached from the west, and even there a swampy depression hindered any attack. Nonetheless, Essex reasoned that if he could seize and hold the island it would deal the morale of the Scots a hard blow, eliminate an enemy base, and cut communications between Sorley Boy’s forces in Ireland and the Scottish Isles. It might also give him a concrete success to present to the queen. The enterprise demanded men, of which he had no shortage, and ships.2
The idea of creating a naval force had evolved late in 1574. On 8 October Essex had addressed a document to the Privy Council entitled ‘My Opinion for the Government and Reformation of Ulster’. In it he made no reference to shipping, but remarked upon the problems of dealing with the Irish and Scots. To this the government responded with their own observations, of which the fifteenth read:
Item. What is to be thought requisite for the having of any shipping upon the sea, besides victuallers, to keep out ye Scots, for that no mention is thereof made in the plot [plan], and whether might not some of the galleys which the Scots use be thought meeter [more suitable] for those seas than the English pinnaces to stay [stop] the passages of ye Scots or take their galleys in their passages?3
In other words, what ships was Essex planning to use against the Scots? Essex had already thought about this matter, and Drake was his answer. The earl drew heavy, perhaps his greatest, support from West Country men, and counted among his adherents such noted Devonians as Sir Peter Carew and Sir Arthur Champernowne, the latter then Vice-Admiral of Devon. Through some such connection, no doubt, Essex enlisted the advice and services of Francis Drake, who knew all there was to know about operating in the sort of shallows favoured by the Scottish galleys. Drake later said that he was recommended to Essex by John Hawkins, by which it may be assumed that the two seamen had settled their former differences. Howbeit, initially it was less Drake himself than the two Spanish prizes he had brought back from the West Indies that interested Essex.
Early in 1575 he responded to the Privy Council’s ‘doubts’ about his plans for Ireland, and referred to Drake for the first time:
The shipping was not mentioned in the plot, but yet not unthought of, for I wrote unto my agents there to deal with my Lord Admiral, that ye shipping now here might be converted to buy certain frigates which one Drake brought out of [the] Indies, whereof one is in possession of Mr Hawkins [and] one of Sir Arthur Champernowne. The third [is] yet to be had, as I hearsay in Dartmouth.
They were bought at easy prices. If two of these might be sent they might be kept with less cost than one ship and do much more service than any other vessel. They will brook a sea well and carry 200 soldiers, as I am informed, and yet they draw so little water, as they may pass into every river, island or creek where the Scottish galley may flee, and are of better strength [and] stowage than the others, for the galleys are made more slight and thin than the wherries upon the Thames. No shipping therefore [is] so good for this purpose in my opinion as the frigates. I have slight ordnance to furnish them, but I lack oars and such necessaries. Good choice must be made of mariners for these boats, for ordinary sailors love not to pull at an oar.’4
From this it seems that Drake had sold his Spanish prizes to Hawkins and Champernowne, who now offered them to Essex as light-draught ships suitable for service against the Scots. A third vessel was reportedly at Dartmouth, but since Drake returned from the Caribbean with two vessels, she likely had nothing to do with him. Eventually, Essex was able to secure the services of Drake himself, along with five or six vessels, for an expedition against Rathlin Island.
Three of the ships were described by Essex as ‘frigates’, and he also employed two transports – a flyboat and a hoy – and possibly another pinnace. The flyboat, the Fortunate, was evidently already in Ireland, commanded by Captain John Potter, who had been in that service since 1573. Two more ships and a hoy came from London through the agency of the government, which paid Captain James Sydae £40 to take them to Dublin. Of these, the Reindeer was described variously as a frigate and a pinnace, and belonged to the queen. The Lymner may have been one of Drake’s old vessels, but she too seems to have crossed the Irish Sea with Sydae and was called either a pinnace or a frigate. Sydae’s final vessel was a 30-ton hoy called the Cork. The arrival of these forces in Dublin on 8 May, 1575 enabled Essex to consolidate his squadron. Potter was transferred to the command of the Lymner; Sydae controlled the Reindeer and the hoy; while the flyboat passed to Master George Allen. To these were added one or two vessels under the command of Francis Drake, whose Falcon, described as a bark or a frigate, carried the captain himself, a master, pilot, boatswain, steward, carpenter, gunner and eighteen mariners, a grand total of twenty-five men, one of whom was apparently Drake’s thirteen-year old cousin, John Drake. From the audit of Essex’s accounts we also learn that the Falcon was accompanied by a small pinnace.5
The foregoing contradicts the claim made by Edmund Howes some years after Drake’s death that the captain commanded, equipped and furnished with men and munitions three frigates for service under the Earl of Essex. Of the three ‘frigates’ assembled, only the Falcon and the Lymner may have once belonged to Drake, and there is no clear evidence that he commanded the full squadron. Drake, Sydae and Potter were paid at the same rate, 42 shillings a month, and in his dispatches Essex implies that each had an equal authority. Sydae, who had been serving in Ireland for two years, had the reputation of being a skilled seaman.6 But we must not demote Drake too severely, for he was clearly the most experienced and successful of the captains, and his ships had provided a nucleus for the squadron. He sank some of his resources into the expedition – a sailor later testified with exaggeration that he spent most of his money ‘on certain islands over there towards Ireland’ – and his services were retained longer than those of Sydae, Potter and Allen.7 All were rated for pay from 1 May, 1575, but whereas Drake was kept until the end of September, the others were discharged on the 19th of that month.
Essex’s original intention seems to have been to use his naval force to destroy the Scottish galleys plying between the Isles, Rathlin and the Glens of Antrim and the Route: ‘Touching the guarding of the victuals from the Scots of the Rathlins,’ he told Burghley, ‘if the frigates come, there shall not a Scottish boat remain in the Rathlins, or in the Glens, or come upon that coast.’8 But on reflection he decided that an attempt must be made upon Rathlin itself, which acted not only as a refuge and bastion for the Scots but also provided them with a base for freebooting along the coasts.
The squadron was assembled at Carrickfergus, which Drake would have found a squalid town, rife with typhus fever, but sporting a small harbour and a Norman castle. Drake might have compelled the Scots on Rathlin to surrender by a naval blockade alone, but Essex wanted a more dramatic and speedier result, and chose one of his ablest volunteers, John Norris, to take three hundred foot and eighty horse to the island to capture the castle there by storm. Norris was a captain of horse who had earned a reputation as a hard and ruthless soldier and whose talents had been honed in the bitter religious conflict in France, where he had served the Huguenots under Coligny. He was directed to take his troops to Carrickfergus and there to confer with the frigate captains about the suitability of wind and weather for a voyage to Rathlin. While Essex himself drew his army towards the Pale to suggest that he had no offensive afoot, Norris arrived in Carrickfergus, presented his letter of introduction from the earl to Drake, Sydae and Potter, and unfolded to them his plans. They agreed that the attack was feasible, and gathered all the small boats in the town to help transport Norris’s army to Rathlin.9
Leaving a garrison at Carrickfergus, the frigates escorted the armada of tiny vessels out of the port on 20 July. At sea their flotilla was soon dispersed by the winds, but it successfully regrouped at the landing place at Rathlin on the morning of the 22nd. The site of disembarkation is not precisely known, but Arkill Bay on the eastern coast of Rathlin has been suggested, and the obvious alternative would have been Church Bay tucked inside the angle of the L-shaped island. In either case the troops faced a northerly march towards the castle on the north-east of Rathlin. The boats discharged the soldiers so quickly that they caught many of the island’s inhabitants outside of the castle, and there was a brief skirmish as the English chased the Scots into their fortress. This part of the operation cost Norris his first casualty, one man killed.
The siege began in earnest after Drake and his fellow captains landed two heavy siege guns, and fire was directed upon the castle walls. It took three days to knock a practical breach in the defences, but when Norris’s men tried to storm the castle on the afternoon of 25 July they were driven back with losses of two men killed and eight wounded, although they had managed to fight their way across a bridge that passed over a ditch to the gate and even through the gate itself. The English consoled themselves in the belief that one of the principal Scottish leaders had been killed in this skirmish, and they resumed the bombardment, setting on fire some timber sections of the ramparts. Norris planned to make another assault the next morning, but just before daybreak on the 26th the Scots called for a parley.
The Scottish leader announced that he was willing to surrender the castle, provided that the inmates were allowed passage to Scotland. Drake would have accepted those terms, but Norris was in charge of the campaign, and he would have none of it. He knew, no less than the Scots, that the fall of the castle was inevitable anyway, sealed off as it was from food or reinforcements. Sooner or later the lives of the Scots would depend upon the clemency of the English, and there can have been few illusions about the disposition of Norris’s troops. Ever since the ‘Pardon of Maynooth’ in 1535, when English soldiers had butchered the garrison of Dengen after its surrender, the propensity for unbridled violence upon the helpless had seldom been far from either side on this bitter frontier. Norris told the Scottish leader that if Rathlin immediately surrendered his life and those of his family would be spared; as for the rest, their lives, in the language of the day, would be placed at the courtesy of the English soldiers. They would have to take their chance upon the mood of the captors. The decision before the commander of the Scots was an unenviable one, but it is doubtful if he hesitated, for his own family stood to be lost if the English were forced to storm the castle. He surrendered.
The result was a bloodbath. The ‘constable’ of the castle, his family, and a prisoner being held by the Scots (he was the son of Alexander Ogg McAllister, an Irish chief) were secured, but the English soldiery – with or without the encouragement of Norris is uncertain – murdered every other Scot they could find on the island, men, women, children, the aged, the feeble and the helpless, without distinction. It is said that they had been enraged by the stiff resistance the castle had made and by the losses they had sustained. However, after butchering two hundred of the prisoners on the surrender of the castle, they roamed about the island for several days, rooting out several hundred more from their refuges in caves and among the cliffs, and chopping them down on the spot. In addition the soldiers seized 300 cows, 3,000 sheep and 100 horses, and they confiscated a large quantity of corn, sufficient, it was said, to have kept two hundred men for a year.
Barbarous it certainly was, and yet it affords an interesting insight into the sixteenth-century mind, for not one word of censure has survived. On the contrary, Essex boasted of the exploit in each of three letters sent respectively to the queen, to the Privy Council and to Walsingham, and he solicited in the same breath a letter of thanks from Elizabeth to the officers and gentlemen who had captured Rathlin. And he got it. The queen congratulated the earl and promised to remember Norris for his services. To be fair, we know that Elizabeth had once cautioned Essex against unnecessary bloodshed in the conquest of Ulster, but there is nothing to suggest other than that the government approved of the massacre as an object lesson to rebels. Essex proudly informed Walsingham, the great minister, that Sorley Boy MacDonnell himself had watched the destruction of his people from the mainland and that he had been driven to distraction.
It must be assumed that Drake neither approved of nor participated in the massacre at Rathlin. He probably assisted the besiegers in landing men, stores and guns at the beginning of the operation, and thereafter cruised off shore to ensure that no help reached the island. The frigates were apparently busy, for they captured and burned eleven Scottish galleys. Time would show that Drake had the capacity for ruthlessness of a kind, but he was not an inhumane man, and he had already shown in his raids in the West Indies that he would attempt to deal with prisoners as generously as circumstances permitted. He had never killed unresisting Spaniards nor prisoners, and he had protected them from the cimarrones. And Norris’s murder of the Scots of Rathlin was not only not Drake’s way; it was not his war. If he found the humanity to protect the hated Spaniards, whom he held responsible for the débâcle at San Juan d’Ulua, we cannot suppose he was the man to condone the murder of Scottish or Irish people against whom he bore no grudges.
The fall of the island did not bring Drake’s services in Ireland to an immediate end, for Norris hoped to hold the castle for Essex, and, after repairing it with timber, bricks and lime brought from Carrickfergus, he installed a garrison of eighty soldiers and returned the rest to Carrickfergus for discharge. After handling these duties, the frigates found employment cruising about the island to keep its supply lines open and the predatory Scots at bay. Norris purchased a hoy and a small boat, perhaps the Cork and the Fortunate, for £60 and had them scuttle back and forth with provisions for the garrison under the screen provided by the frigates.
It was not until the end of September that the frigates were discharged. Essex had approved of the plan to hold Rathlin, and recommended that one hundred men be stationed on the island, forty of them to serve at sea. But someone spoke more loudly in Ireland than Essex now – the new Lord Deputy, Sir Henry Sidney, appointed in August 1575, and he thought differently. Sidney had a distant connection to Drake, for he was father-in-law to Drake’s godfather, the Earl of Bedford. Whether the link was important we cannot say, but it was Drake who brought Sidney to Ireland to take up his new post, as seems evident from Sir Henry’s accounts:
Freight and transportation: to Captain Drake, with his bark, the Frigacie [Falcon], which carried my lord to Ireland, 12 Sept., 1575, with 10s for the mariners, £25 10s Od. For a bark, the same time, with my lord’s stuff, £24 10s Od.10
Sidney was landed at the Skerries, north of Dublin, on the morning of 7 September, after a difficult passage. The calm weather which had blessed the embarkation had broken upon the point of sailing, and the seas were so stormy that some of the vessels containing part of the Lord Deputy’s train were separated and put into a creek two days’ journey away. Dublin was wracked by the plague when Sidney arrived, but whether Drake accompanied him into the town is not known.11
The Lord Deputy’s arrival marked the end of the Irish naval squadron. Essex had been instructed by the queen to maintain the garrison at Rathlin, ‘and if you shall see any necessary continuance for the entertaining of the frigates until you shall confer with our said servant and counsellor, Henry Sidney, we can be content to allow thereof.’12 In fact Sidney saw no necessity for either the frigates or the garrison on the island, and proved it by having all the captains except Drake discharged on 19 September. He cannot have been ignorant of the consequences, for without the screen the frigates had provided Rathlin’s supply lines were open to incursions from the vengeful Scots. If the Lord Deputy was deliberately undermining the soldiers on Rathlin to justify their removal, his measures were effective, and Norris documented the result. He complained that
my Lord Deputy that now is presently upon his landing there discharged the frigates, which the Scots having intelligence of and of their departure, upon the last voyage that the aforesaid hoy made for the revictualling of the castle, on their return assaulted, took and burnt her. My humble suit to your Honours is not to put this loss upon me … for had I not been assured by the Earl of Essex that he understood by certain [of] Her Majesty’s letters to himself, her pleasure was the frigates should not have been discharged as long as the place was retained, I would more sufficiently have provided for the safety of the passage.13
Without naval cover Rathlin Island was difficult to provision, and there was no well in the castle there, so that even the water had to be brought from the mainland. Gradually but surely the garrison became untenable, with the remaining forty soldiers in the castle being reduced to eating horses and colts for food. Before the end of the year Sidney caused it to be abandoned, and the work, as well as the need for the naval squadron, was extinguished.14 (There was to be at least one more occasion when England’s navy was to make use of that storm-lashed piece of rock jutting from the grey seas north of the Irish coast, for in October 1917 a battle cruiser, mortally wounded by the torpedo of a German U-boat, limped into Church Bay where it capsized and sunk to the bottom. Its name? Most appropriately, H.M.S. Drake.)
For Essex, no less than for Drake, the Irish interlude was over. He returned to England and received some rewards for what had scarcely been in all a successful project. Even the victory of Rathlin had failed to suppress the MacDonnells, who mounted a counter-attack against Carrickfergus. Essex was back in Ireland in the summer of 1576, with the office of Earl Marshal, but he soon fell ill with dysentery and died with his dreams unfulfilled. Drake had lost a patron, but his heart had never been in the wretched and profitless business in Ireland. Throughout his service on these rainy shores he was nursing a grander design, a vision that had inspired him since he had climbed that tree in Darien some years before. He spoke of it to Essex, and to his friends in Ireland, like James Sydae of the Reindeer, and a soldier called Thomas Doughty who had formerly served Essex as an aide. And now that his Irish work was done, he proposed to bring his project, breathtaking as it was in magnitude, to fruition. He would lead the English far from their own northerly seas, into the unknown, into the great South Sea itself.
1 Valuable accounts of the Elizabethans in Ireland are Bagwell, Ireland Under the Tudors, and Canny, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland.
2 A useful history of Rathlin is given in Clark, Rathlin-Disputed Island.
3 ‘Doubts to be Resolved by the Earl of Essex’, 1574, Additional MSS, British Library, London, Add. MS 48015: 319–20; Essex, ‘My Opinion for the Government and Reformation of Ulster’, 8 October, 1574, Ibid, Add. MS 48015: 314–18.
4 ‘The Answer of the Earl of Essex to the Doubts Conceived upon his Plot for the Reformation of Ulster’, 1575, Ibid, Add. MS 48015: 329.
5 Essex to Burghley, 8 May, 1575, State Papers (Ireland), Public Record Office, London, S.P. 63/51:19–20; wages and victualling accounts for 30 April to 16 October, 1575, Ibid, S.P. 63/53: 114–15: audit of Irish accounts, Ibid, S.P. 65/8; Dasent, ed., Acts of the Privy Council, 10 April, 1575, 8: 366.
6 Notes for the Consideration of the Lords of the Council, 14 May, 1575, State Papers (Ireland), S.P. 63/51: 59.
7 Deposition of John Butler, 1579, Nuttall, ed., New Light on Drake, 5–8.
8 Essex to Burghley, 8 May, 1575, State Papers (Ireland), S.P. 63/51: 19–20.
9 This account of the capture of Rathlin is drawn from Essex to Elizabeth, 31 July, 1575, Essex to the Privy Council, 31 July, 1575, and Essex to Walsingham, 31 July, 1575, Ibid, S.P. 63/52: 202–4, 206.
10 Hist. MSS Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of Lord de L’Isle and Dudley, 1: 427.
11 Sidney to the Privy Council, 28 September, 1575, Collins, ed., Letters and Memorials of State … written and Collected by Sir Henry Sydney, 1: 72–3.
12 Queen to Essex, 12 August, 1575, Brewer and Bullen, ed., Calendar of the Carew Manuscripts, 21.
13 John Norris to the Privy Council, 1575, State Papers (Ireland), S.P. 63/54: 126.
14 Sidney to the Privy Council, 15 November, 1575, Collins, 1: 75–6.