Sir Francis Drake

And you that live at home and cannot brook the flood,

Give praise to them that pass the waves to do their country good.

BASKERVILLE BROUGHT THE fleet home, brushing aside a Spanish pursuit force near Cuba as he did so. In England the news of Drake’s death was received sorrowfully, nowhere more than among his own people in the west. Inspired by the Rouse family, the poet Charles FitzGeffrey devoted a full-length epic to Drake, extolling him as the embodiment of the quintessential Protestant hero. The English seamen had their own way of commemorating their most celebrated leader. They followed the wake he had carved, attacking Spanish towns, cities and ships. Puerto Rico fell, and Puerto de Caballos in Honduras, Campeachy in Mexico, St Vincent in the West Indies, and yet again Puerto Bello. After capturing the last in 1601, Captain William Parker, himself a Plymouth man, drew up his ships ‘somewhat to the eastward of the castle of Saint Philip, under the rock where Sir Francis Drake, his coffin, was thrown overboard’, in a fitting salute to the man who had shown them the way.¹

The Spaniards, of course, saw it differently. Some, who had either known him or served against him, were not without respect for a fellow warrior, a man who had fought his war vigorously, but seldom with the outright barbarity of so many of the contestants. Thus the soldier Juan de Castellanos had already honoured him in his ambitious verse about the voyage of 1585–6. And so now did Don Alonso de Sotomayor, Drake’s last opponent, reflect somewhat ruefully upon the passing of ‘one of the most famous men of his profession that have existed in the world, very courteous and honourable with those who surrendered, of great humanity and gentleness, virtues which must be praised even in an enemy.’² But in Spain many merchants, who had suffered by Drake’s raids, were less magnanimous. This was, after all, the man who had ravaged more than a score of Spanish towns and cities, overthrown Philip’s fleets and taken over five hundred ships. They illuminated Seville in exultation at his end. And the most devoted of Catholics spoke as if the Devil himself had been slain. When Lope de Vega, whose reverence for the Church eventually led him to holy orders, wrote his famous La Dragontea in 1596 and 1597, celebrating Drake’s death, he had not a good word to say for his subject. He was charged with cowardice, brutality and incompetence – no falsehood was too monstrous if it served to denigrate his memory.

Sir Francis, however, might not have been displeased, for the jubilation of enemies of his faith was testimony to what he had done. There was one epitaph in particular that might have amused him. When word of Drake’s death was brought to an exhausted, sick and failing old man hidden in his huge and lonely monastery at the Sierra de Guaderrama, the tired face flickered with a delight his servants had rarely seen. ‘It is good news,’ said Philip II, ‘and now I will get well.’ Thus did the ruler of the greatest empire the world had yet seen acknowledge for the final time that a sailor from a diminutive but insolent island had reached out and humbled him.

Neither Philip nor Elizabeth lived to end their war. The king revitalized his navy, and sent out two more armadas, but they were dispersed by storms before reaching England. More successfully, but no less indecisively, the English retaliated, and even sacked Cadiz in 1596. Still, when the conflict was wound up by the Treaty of London in 1604, there had been few such victories, and it was the profits of privateering, in terms of both plunder and experience, that constituted the principal English legacies of the later years of the war.

As Drake had anticipated there was an unseemly squabble over his will. He had appointed his brother Thomas as his executor, with the power to collect monies and discharge debts and to account to the investors in the last voyage, but although the will was proven in London as early as May 1596 its repercussions sounded for years. First there was Elizabeth, Lady Drake, furious that the codicil had deprived her of Yarcombe and Sampford Spiney, and asserting her right also to the profits from the mill rents, willed her by her husband. Supported by the previous executors, Strode, Harris and Rouse, she went to court to annul Drake’s codicil. Thomas successfully defended his appointment as the sole executor of his brother, but in 1598 a county escheator upheld Elizabeth’s claim to Sampford Spinney and Yarcombe on account of her marriage settlement.

Elizabeth was still young and attractive, and the death of her father the same year left her extremely rich. To Buckland Abbey, Sampford Spinney and Yarcombe she could now add Combe Sydenham, the manors of Sutton Bingham and Bossington, and other properties. With such assets she could have commanded a range of suitors, and it is surprising that she ended her widowhood about 1597 by marrying someone as unprepossessing as Sir William Courtenay. Nevertheless, it did not last. Elizabeth died suddenly in 1598, of what is not recorded, leaving no heirs by either of her marriages, and her first husband’s properties reverted to the Drake family.³

With Elizabeth gone, Thomas Drake’s opponents were Jonas Bodenham and the Drakes of Esher, and he had a wretched time with them, battling through one cause after another. A deep-rooted animosity between Bodenham and Thomas now cast off all restraint. Bodenham boasted that he would not leave Thomas ‘worth the gloves on his hands ere he had done with him’, and told a servant of the Duke of Lenox ‘that he could and would (unless Mr Drake did otherwise satisfy him) discover against him such matters as his whole estate could hardly answer.’ No doubt Bodenham was a vindictive spendthrift, as Thomas alleged, but perhaps the fault did not lie entirely with him, for the brother of Sir Francis Drake was far from an innocent operator. The proceedings of the Court of Requests contain a complaint by Lucas Bourne and John Welch and their wives in which they charge Thomas Drake with trying to cheat them of an inheritance, some property in the ward of St Andrew in Plymouth. He had, they said, ‘by sinister means gotten into his hands or possession the deeds, charters and evidences concerning the said premises’, and was seeking to dispossess them.⁴

For years Jonas Bodenham and Thomas Drake did battle in the courts, with the latter unsuccessfully attempting to recover papers from Jonas that would help square Drake’s accounts. After Elizabeth’s death Bodenham secured Sampford Spiney, as Sir Francis had wished, but Thomas recovered it for the Drake line by purchase in 1601. He also got Yarcombe, when the Drakes of Esher failed to provide the price within the time stipulated in the admiral’s will, and the leases of the corn mills. Not the wisest man in Christendom, someone once called Thomas, but assuredly not the simplest either, for although bitter litigation continued until his death in 1606 he preserved most of Sir Francis Drake’s property for the family. The legal proceedings were vicious throughout, with Richard Drake of Esher even stooping to charge Sir Francis with having embezzled money from the 1585 voyage and the capture of the Rosario. Although some historians have avidly repeated these charges, the circumstances in which they were produced and the paucity of the evidence adduced in their favour entitles us to regard them with great suspicion. The 1585 voyage was thoroughly audited at the time, when the events were fresh, and the problems about the transfer of the plunder from the Rosario have been described. In neither case did contemporaries charge Drake with embezzlement, nor were those accusations convincingly raised by his detractors in later years.

Four centuries have now passed since the waters of the Caribbean closed over the body of Sir Francis Drake, but he has not been forgotten. The story of the Devonshire man driven by faith, patriotism, personal ambition and profit to challenge a huge empire embodied so much of the quality of legend that it was bound to be remembered. It still continues to exercise the imagination. Indeed, so powerful has been its appeal that English folklore, no less than the contemporary Spanish superstition, endowed Sir Francis with supernatural powers, but, whereas his enemies saw him as the reincarnation of the Devil, his admirers told of the miraculous super-hero, who could hurl a cannonball across the earth, whittle chips of wood into water and transform them into ships, and return from the dead to ride across Dartmoor with spectral hounds or defend his country whenever it was endangered. As John Knox Laughton remarked towards the end of the last century: ‘From among all moderns Drake’s name stands out as the one that has been associated with almost as many legends as that of Arthur or Charlemagne.’⁵

A number of interconnected but distinct traditions of Drake developed. One, embedded in children’s literature, exploited the entertainment value of sensational derring-do; another, deeper and more sophisticated, emphasized Drake’s role in the formation of England’s naval and maritime tradition; and a third used Sir Francis to inspire endeavour and achievement, particularly in times of adversity. The first thread matured only in the last years of the nineteenth century, after a popular press had risen upon the expansion of public literacy. Beginning with G. A. Henty’s Under Drake’s Flag in 1882 the tales hit the bookstores, one after another, patriotic books for boys, fact and fiction, weak on analysis and uninterested in motives, but strong on action. Their titles tell it all: With Hawkins and Drake, At Sea with Drake, Drake on the Spanish Main, For Drake and Merry England, Sea Dogs All, The Fighting Lads of Devon, The Boy’s Drake, and many more. This trend continued until the 1960s, in such books as Douglas Bell’s Drake Was My Captain (1953) and Peter Dawlish’s Young Drake of Devon (1954) and He Went with Drake (1955). There were relatively few mature treatments of Drake in fiction, and books aimed at adults (among them Julian Corbett’s For God and Gold, F. Van Wyck Mason’s The Golden Admiral and Margueritte Wilbur’s Immortal Pirate) seldom precluded a juvenile audience.

It was this tradition that was transferred to film during the twentieth century, although Sir Francis’s motion picture début was in a slushy silent called Drake’s Love Story in 1913. Featuring Hay Plumb as Drake and Chrissie White as Elizabeth Sydenham, it was inspired by Louis Napoleon Parker’s Drake, A Pageant Play (1912), in which corny expressions (‘Child’s Play’, ‘Odzookers!’) mingled with action scenes and romantic dialogue between the hero and his betrothed (‘in the burning tropics, in the whirlwind and the gale, the one thought in my brain was Bess!’). This book made Elizabeth Sir Francis’s life-long romance, and deleted poor Mary Newman from the story completely. After the uncertain tilt at romance, the Drake films reverted to unpolluted action in Drake of England (1935); The Sea Hawk (1940), which fused a proposed film biography of Drake with Sabatini’s novel of the same title and was consequently true to neither; and Seven Seas to Calais (1962), an Italian-American production. Television followed suit with twenty-six half-hours of Sir Francis Drake, made by the British ABC and ATV companies in 1961 and 1962. In this series Drake (played surprisingly convincingly by Terence Morgan) untangled the problems not only of Queen Elizabeth (Jean Kent), but also of a cast of sixteenth-century celebrities that ranged from Dr Dee and Thomas Stukeley to Miguel de Cervantes. Westward Television’s Drake’s Quest (1977), in celebration of the quadri-centennial of the circumnavigation, stuck more closely to history and was the screen’s only attempt to offer a deeper insight into the man and his times.

If there was a pedagogical element in the derring-do tradition, it was the inculcation of patriotism. Thus, Richard Lovett’s Drake and the Dons (1888) was proclaimed ‘the best boys’ book that has appeared for many a day, and we trust that parents and teachers will encourage the children who look to them for guidance to read it, and thus become acquainted with the secrets of England’s present greatness.’⁶ This comment was typical of its time, for it was then that the more academic interpretation of Drake’s career matured, a tradition that sometimes exalted the seaman as the founder of England’s naval and maritime ascendancy.

This second view echoed Britain’s position at the close of the nineteenth century as the leading (if fading) mercantile power and the supreme naval and imperial nation. The empire, just completed by acquisitions in Africa, was at its height, and the map of the world was plastered in pink. The Royal Navy had ruled the waves for as long as anyone could remember, and theorists such as A. T. Mahan saw ‘sea power’ as an essential instrument of national greatness. Warmed by the stirring glow of empire, British historians such as Julian Corbett, John Knox Laughton and Michael Oppenheim turned towards the period that they believed had laid the foundation of their country’s naval strength and towards the men who had set England upon the path to maritime supremacy and the tremendous prosperity, security and international influence that were predicated upon it.

For Julian Corbett, Drake’s best biographer, Sir Francis was more than a man of action par excellence, a hero meet for tales of high adventure. If Henry VIII had created the modern navy, it was Drake who had transformed it into a major vehicle of policy. His large-scale expeditions against Spain and the West Indies and his battles in the Channel had made it a force in Europe, helped preserve the Reformation and rescued England from invasion. During his operations, according to Corbett, Drake displayed a strategical and tactical genius and developed ideas that would become hallmarks of naval power, including the importance of the offensive and sailing ship tactics using broadsides and a line-ahead formation. Corbett’s Drake and the Tudor Navy, published in 1898, was a powerful presentation of the creator of England’s naval tradition and the forerunner of Nelson.

The eagerness with which Britain embraced this re-evaluation was particularly evident in the tercio-centennial celebrations of the Armada’s defeat, in 1888. Based on Plymouth, they inspired special numbers of such periodicals as The Illustrated London News, The Western Antiquary and The Graphic, and extensive pageantry, including re-enactments and banquets. An exhibition, organized by W. H. K. Wright, eventually moved from the West Country to the Theatre Royal in London’s Drury Lane. Poems by Douglas Sladen, Edward Capern, John Tate and others; new dramas; paintings such as F. Baden-Powell’s The Last Shot at the Spanish Armada, and various Drake relics (including a silk purse, a walking stick, a tankard, a silver spoon, a dagger, two swords, astrolabes, curtains, plate and a snuffbox) were paraded to honour the occasion. At no time since his death had the nation felt more indebted to the little Devonian. In 1883 the ships of the British North American and West Indian squadrons planned an attempt to recover Drake’s leaden coffin from the depths of the sea, an enterprise revived with no greater success in the 1970s. And it was about then that two great statues were raised in Devon. They were not quite the first sculptures of the admiral. Herr Andreas Friederich had sculpted a 14-foot statue out of fine-grained red sandstone and given it to Offenburg in Germany, where it was erected in 1854. Drake’s left hand contained a bundle of potato stalks, while his right held a map of America, and the statue credited him with introducing the potato to Europe when he returned to England in 1586. It was another German, Joseph Edgar Boehm, who created the large bronze statue that was unveiled in 1883 and awarded to Tavistock, where it still stands. But a replica, made the following year, is now more famous, prominently established on Plymouth Hoe and gazing out to sea.

There is truth, of course, in this image of Drake, but Corbett exaggerated his case. Under Drake’s leadership, naval operations certainly expanded and diversified, but as Kenneth Andrews has so cogently argued, they frequently failed to meet their aspirations, and Elizabeth’s navy remained immature. It depended much upon private enterprise, and had to respond to the profit motive as well as to national policy. Although admirals strove to meet the new challenges of order, discipline, organization and supply, the sea-keeping qualities of the fleets were severely limited by the lack of effective remedies for disease, and their offensive capacity was blunted by inexperience in battle. While the Tudor navy certainly improved in these respects, its relative inadequacy was illustrated by Elizabeth’s constant recourse to privateering, which remained the typical form of naval warfare throughout the period.

Not only that, but an objective biographer must set Drake’s weaknesses as an admiral against his obvious strengths. In his early years he displayed extraordinary qualities – courage and audacity; energy, determination and speed; aggression and brilliant seamanship; and the ability to detect the strategical weaknesses of his enemies and to profit by them. By exposing these flaws – such as the isthmus of Panama, the route into the Pacific, and the general vulnerability of the Caribbean – he held the initiative in his war against the Spaniards for years. They ran after him, plugging the gaps in their defences that he had so sensationally advertised. But Drake’s deficiencies must also be noted. Even if those final miserable campaigns depicted a man of declining powers, a man whose grasp of the bases of his earlier successes had been loosened, he had throughout his career diluted his genius with some inadequacies. His victualling left much to be desired, and his leadership was not above criticism. Affable, cheerful and loyal, willing to labour beside all men, great or humble, yes. But he was also full of promises he could not always fulfil, and his self-assertion and instant decision-making left some subordinates feeling both uninformed and undervalued. Able to inspire immense affection in many close associates, he nevertheless experienced difficulties in most of the fleets he commanded. Drake and his navy had made a good beginning, but they were still far removed from the ‘band of brothers’ that won the battles of the Nile and Trafalgar.

Corbett’s view of Drake was, in any case, excessively narrow, for his contribution was to Elizabethan maritime history generally, rather than to that of the navy only. He was the most daring of corsairs before he became an admiral, and it was in this wider context that his significance fully emerges. The age of Drake was one of endeavour rather than success. The Elizabethans failed to find the North-east Passage, or the North-west Passage; they failed to colonize America; they did not establish a sustainable trade with the Americas, and it was not until the seventeenth century that they finally opened a firm trade with the East. Amid such disappointments Drake’s earlier voyages were striking, and provided the one hero who could inspire others. They aroused the greed and enterprise of the country, and unleashed a tide of imitators bent upon honour and profit. By demonstrating that Englishmen could sail anywhere and fight anyone – even Philip of Spain – Drake injected his countrymen with the national self-confidence and pride that not only fuelled maritime endeavour but also enabled England to meet the crisis of 1588. Drake neither created the English oceanic movement, nor represented its full diversity, any more than Shakespeare embodied every aspect of the flowering of literature or Queen Elizabeth could be credited with all the achievements of the body politic. But he, like them, was the symbol that lingered in the imagination. More than anyone else, Drake broadcast to the world England’s coming of age as a great seafaring nation.

The tradition of Drake as a founder of British greatness, so beloved by the Victorians basking in world empire, seemed less important to the subjects of the second Queen Elizabeth in the 1960s and after. While Sir Francis remained one of the legendary figures of history, common knowledge of his career dipped, and, curiously, professional historians began to regard the maritime heritage that had diffused the language, culture and influence of an island race across the globe as unimportant, or at least unfashionable. There were many reasons for the trend. Intellectually, the concept of empire now engendered more shame than pride, and as Britain’s role in the world visibly shrank after 1945 her historians became increasingly insular in their thinking. There are few scholars of naval and maritime history in British universities, and the themes are greatly undervalued in general histories. Drake, like the other great men in the seafaring tradition, suffered scholarly neglect. It is interesting to note that the study of Cook’s voyages owes most to Antipodean historians, that the only recent professional scholar to write a book about Nelson is a Dane, and that – always admitting Kenneth Andrews, Helen Wallis and a few other very honoured exceptions – knowledge of Drake has relied heavily upon American scholarship. In schools, too, the decline of history as a subject of study contributed to a growing ignorance about Sir Francis. In the 1960s the stream of substantial juvenile biographies and novels that had once facilitated instruction began to dry up.⁷

The retreat of the Victorian tradition was also marked by reassessments of the sailor and his significance. At its best this revisionism was exemplified by Andrews’s fine study of Drake’s Voyages (1967), an impressive and judicious antidote to Corbett’s adulation that placed the subject within the greater context of Elizabethan expansion. At its worst it degenerated into the cynical denigration of Drake’s character and achievements to be found in some recent writing, which depicts Sir Francis as nothing more than an avaricious corsair, whose quest for plunder subordinated any sense of duty. This view has condemned Drake for abandoning the blockade of Portugal in 1587, uncritically revived the ill-supported charge that the admiral deliberately jeopardized Howard’s fleet in 1588 to snap up the wealthy Rosario, and emphasized the commercial over the strategic differences of opinion in the expedition of 1589. Overall, such an interpretation shows little insight into Drake’s motivation, particularly his sharp Puritanism, and seriously underestimates the extent of his thinking and activity. Worse still, it does violence to the facts. But however partial and prejudiced, the view suggests the extent to which the late Victorian image of Drake has been abandoned by generations more conscious of the tawdriness of empire.

Yet, as the Spaniards had learned, Drake was never an easy man to keep down, and there may already be signs of a revival, if the enthusiasm of various quadri-centennial celebrations on both sides of the Atlantic are an indication. And irrespective of the fortunes of the first two traditions we have described – Drake the hero of adventure stories and Drake the pioneer of British maritime superiority – there was another one that always acknowledged the myth’s capacity for resurrection. For Drake lives on as a continuing inspiration, a symbol about which the British nation rallies when endangered, and which it recalls in moments of high endeavour.

Arguably, this was the first function of Drake’s memory. In 1626, when he finally ushered into print Philip Nichols’s account of the voyage of 1572, Drake’s nephew entitled the book Sir Francis Drake Revived and called ‘upon this dull or effeminate age to follow his noble steps for gold and silver.’ The theme recurred throughout seventeenth-century literature. A collection of Drake narratives published in 1653 also employed the title Sir Francis Drake Revived, as did the first book-length biography, Nathaniel Crouch’s The English Hero, or Sir Francis Drake Revived (1692). Crouch trusted that Drake’s career ‘may be a pattern to stir up all heroic and active spirits in these days to benefit their prince and country.’ In the following century Dr Samuel Johnson, who knew so little of Drake that he could inform his readers that ‘no series of success could ever betray [him] to vanity’, nevertheless offered another biography that considered the sailor ‘a sufficient proof that no obscurity of birth or meanness of fortune is unsurmountable to bravery and diligence.’ Thus did Sir Francis become the model of the self-made man. And the process continues today, as ships of enthusiastic adventurers retrace his voyages and measure their own manhood against his. When the lone yachtsman, Francis Chichester, completed his epic circumnavigation of the world in 1967, Elizabeth II used Drake’s sword to perform the ceremony of knighthood.⁸

Within living memory the most notable examples of this use of the myth occurred during the two world wars, when Drake’s spirit was invoked to prop up morale in a Britain battered by conflicts worse than Sir Francis could ever have imagined. One image conjured up in those times, by, among others, Sir Winston Churchill, was the famous story of the game of bowls. Drake’s alleged remark, ‘There is plenty of time to win the game and beat the Spaniards too’, was exactly the note of confidence the country needed in the face of an enemy. But it is doubtful if even Churchill raised Drake’s ghost as effectively as did Sir Henry Newbolt in his famous poem, ‘Drake’s Drum’.

The drum in question, preserved at Buckland Abbey, is a side- or snare drum, 21 inches high, with a shell or barrel of walnut. It certainly belongs to Drake’s period, and is said to have accompanied him on his voyage around the world. Drake’s drum had long been the subject of strange stories. Robert Hunt, writing before 1865, tells us that ‘old Betty Donithorne, formerly the housekeeper of Buckland Abbey,’ had assured him that if Drake heard the drum beating ‘he rises and has a revel.’⁹

Newbolt knew something of these old superstitions and turned them to patriotic account. His verses, written in December 1895, when threatening noises from the German Kaiser were sending the Royal Navy to sea, declared that the drum could indeed summon Drake from the dead, not for a revel, but in defence of England, whenever the country was in danger. According to Newbolt the dying admiral called:

Published in the St James’s Gazette in January 1896, the poem was an immediate success, and gained further currency at the beginning of the new century when Sir Charles Stanford set it to music. In passage the tale was embellished, so that the drum itself was said to beat a ghostly tattoo to call Sir Francis from his watery grave at moments of national crisis. The men of the Brixham trawlers thought they heard it the day the Battle of Jutland was fought. And on 21 November, 1918, it was heard throbbing loudly aboard the Royal Oak as the Kaiser’s ships surrendered to the British grand fleet at Scapa Flow. The captain of the ship reportedly instituted a search for the phantom drummer, but nothing that could explain the phenomenon was found and the spectral roll continued at intervals until orders were given for the German colours to be hauled down.

The legend re-emerged during the Second World War. In August 1940, in the midst of the Battle of Britain, the BBC went on air with a programme entitled Drake’s Drum. This was broadcast on the Overseas Transmission in the series This Land of Ours and, the following month, was printed in London Calling. That same September, as the Luftwaffe lost its fight for mastery of the daytime skies, two army officers swore they heard the drum again, beating on a Hampshire seashore.

It was Colonel E. T. Clifford who, in 1916, summed up the importance of the drum story:

In the great war that is now being waged be assured that we shall triumphantly emerge, largely because of our navy, which has generously adopted Drake’s principles of naval war, and also because the spirit of Drake is still with us, and still animates the people of this Empire. That is the true significance of Drake’s Drum. Confidence, resolution, bravery and patriotism were Drake’s characteristics. Let us follow so great an example.¹⁰

During the Second World War an anxious public was also being exhorted to fortitude by words that Drake had written more than three and a half centuries before. He had been addressing Walsingham as his ship, the Elizabeth Bonaventure, rode off Sagres on 17 May, 1587: ‘There must be a beginning of any great matter, but the continuing unto the end until it be thoroughly finished yields the true glory.’ Those words were recalled by the Vicar of Harrow in an article for the London Times of 20 November, 1939, and something in them struck the mood of an embattled people. Soon Drake’s words had been converted into a prayer by Eric Milner-White and G. W. Briggs, a prayer that has become one of the most popular in the language:

O Lord God, when thou givest to thy servants to endeavour any great matter, grant us also to know that it is not the beginning, but the continuing of the same unto the end, until it be thoroughly finished, which yieldeth the true glory.

Wartime Britain took the words to heart, and they were repeated time and again during the darkest years of the conflict, on London placards and in Christmas cards, on radio broadcasts (one by General Montgomery) and in church services. They were featured during the National Day of Prayer on 23 March, 1941, and when the war was over the prayer survived as a statement of resolution, and was a favourite of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who most recently quoted it during a difficult financial crisis in October 1989.¹¹

Determination, courage, verve, patriotism – above all faith. Drake would have approved of the qualities he had come to represent. No less would he have been pleased to learn that in death, as in life, he watched over his people.

² Jameson, ‘Some New Spanish Documents Dealing with Drake’, 29. For Lope de Vega’s treatment of Drake see the same author’s ‘Lope de Vega’s La Dragontea’, and Ray, Drake dans la Poésie Espagnole.

³ In addition to the account in Eliott-Drake, Family and Heirs of Sir Francis Drake, see Dasent, ed., Acts of the Privy Council, 26: 21–2, 49–50, 137–8.

⁴ Drake Papers, Devon County Record Office, Exeter, 346M/F552, ff. 9, 28; deposition of Francis Crane, 13 May, 1605, Public Record Office, London, E.133/47/3; procs. of Court of Requests, Ibid, Req. 2/87/14. The litigation between Bodenham and Thomas Drake can most conveniently be studied in the notes and transcripts of Lady E. F. Eliott-Drake, Drake Papers, 346M/F534, F551–68, F590, F710–11, E688, and in her Family and Heirs, 1: 137–48, 174–92.

⁷ The last flurry of full-length titles included Will Holwood, The True Book About Sir Francis Drake (1958); Edith Hurd, Golden Hind (1960); Jean L. Latham, Drake, The Man They Called a Pirate (1961); Ronald Syme, Drake, Sailor of Unknown Seas (1961); Frank Knight, The Young Drake (1962); Louise Andrews Kent, Music for Drake (1964); and M. J. Foltz, Awani (1964). Then, suddenly, titles thinned out. In all more than one hundred original books, fact and fiction, have dealt at full length with Drake’s career.

⁸ Crouch, English Hero, foreword; Johnson, Lives of Sir Francis Drake …, 271–2. An earlier biography, Samuel Clark’s seventy-two page pamphlet, Life and Death of … Sir Francis Drake (1671), was in the same vein.

¹⁰ The material on the drum is based principally on Ditmas, The Legend of Drake’s Drum.

¹¹ For this subject see Bonner-Smith, ‘Drake’s Prayer’. An example of Thatcher’s use of the prayer is described in the Daily Telegraph for 28 October, 1989.