Francis Drake (Part 2)

Dan Snow picks up his dramatic tale of the exploits of Francis Drake- this time the story of the Spanish Armada. From his astonishing raids on Spanish assets in the New World to his exploits as Queen Elizabeth I's 'war dog', Drake's adventures laid the groundwork for England's maritime ambitions. Dan recounts Drake's unyielding quest for glory, which forever changed the course of naval warfare, navigating the highs and lows of his storied career. This is Part 2 of 2. Written by Dan Snow and edited by Dougal Patmore Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 1:15Speaker 01

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• 1:25Dan Snow?

  In August 1579, King Philip of Spain was sitting at his desk. It was in a rather pokey little office in the largest Renaissance palace in Europe, the vast El Escorial, the monastery, the library, the palace, from which Philip liked to govern his vast empire. He was there, surrounded by his thousands of saintly relics, and he was wrestling with some particularly bad news. His empire in Peru, South America, totally free from outside threat since it had been brutally conquered earlier in the century, it was under attack.

• 2:10Dan Snow?

  That attack had come out of the western horizon. It had come like a thunderbolt, from the sea. At its head was a pirate, a corsair, a man known to the Spanish crown. He'd trashed the Spanish Caribbean empire the year before. A couple of years before that, he'd cut the artery of silver across the Isthmus of Panama. He was an Englishman, born a commoner. He was a heretic. He was a thug. His name was Francis Drake.

• 2:55Dan Snow?

  Philip's report stated: "It is a thing that terrifies one, the boldness of this low man." Over the next weeks and months, more news trickled in. This bold Englishman had raided Spanish possessions in South America, then the Pacific, in Asia, before making his way home.

• 3:18Dan Snow?

  The following year, after he'd arrived back in his home, back in England, Philip's ambassador there reported: "Drake was the man of the hour. Tales of his booty electrified the nation." To quote that report: "The adventurers who provided money and ships for the voyage are beside themselves for joy. The people here are talking of nothing else, but going out to plunder in a similar way. Every English boy now dreamt of following in the footsteps of Drake." He was mobbed wherever he went out in the streets, and it wasn't just the English. The King of France of all people had copies of Drake's portrait distributed to his courtiers. Francis Drake had really started a craze.

• 4:00Dan Snow?

  He had alerted England to its destiny, to take to the seas and steal everything it found there.

• 4:14Dan Snow?

  And the bad news for King Philip of Spain was that Drake's ambition seems only to have been stimulated by his adventurers, not sated. He was hardly back in England before he was lobbying the greatest in the land. "I'm very desirous," he said, "for action." And Francis Drake would get action, plenty of it, and so will you. This is the second part of My Tale of Drake, one of history's greatest sailors. In part one, we charted his course from utter provincial obscurity to globe-trotting hero of Protestant Europe. England's first real naval icon of the modern age. In this episode, we're going to follow Drake through even greater feats of leadership, as he took his men on one of the greatest raids in history, and led them through the

• 4:59Dan Snow?

  mighty clash against the fabled Spanish Armada. Another first in world history, as two fleets of artillery-carrying battleships clashed out at sea. Then, just as interestingly, we will see how the wheels of fate clicked. Lady Luck withdrew her favours, and Drake tasted defeat and disappointment. Thus proving that even, apparently the greatest among us, are human after all. You'll listen to Dan Snow's History Hit, as Drake famously wrote to Queen Elizabeth's spy chief, Walsingham, "There must be a beginning of any matter, but the continuing unto the end until it be thoroughly finished yields the true glory."

• 5:42Dan Snow?

  Well, well, let us steer a course for true glory now and get this story thoroughly finished. This is Drake, Part Two.

• 6:10Dan Snow?

  At the end of the 1570s, King Philip certainly had to swallow the bad news about this pesky Englishman. But the King of Spain could still take comfort from the fact that it looked like, generally, the tide was going his way. In 1780, the King of Portugal had died without leaving a Portuguese heir. Philip was the oldest son of the king's sister, and the Portuguese fairly reluctantly recognised him as their king. So in a flash, the two greatest empires in the world were suddenly added to each other. Philip's naval resources were now at least five times those of Queen Elizabeth of England. And his competition with England was getting ever more intense.

• 6:50Dan Snow?

  In 1579 and 1580, a papal expedition had landed in Ireland to fight the English. Philip protested it was nothing to do with him. There may have been some Spanish soldiers who'd signed up to fight, but it was a papal expedition, not a Spanish one. Elizabeth noted his excuses. It was another example of the Cold War between these two countries, England and Spain, teetering on the edge of going hot. Francis Drake arrived back from his circumnavigation of the world into this febrile environment. If I could be unfailable for one meeting in history, it might well be the interview between Elizabeth and Drake that took place after his circumnavigation. It lasted six hours.

• 7:36Dan Snow?

  He told her stories of his daring do. He told her about the new lands that he'd discovered, he'd claimed in her name, and she apparently was very well pleased. There were written accounts, there were drawings and charts, all of which ended up being lodged at the Tudor Court. But if you can believe it, none of them survive. They seem to have all been destroyed in the great Whitehall Palace fire of the 1690s. It's too painful to talk about. But anyway, Elizabeth was captivated. But there was a lobby within government and within trading circles who wanted all of the treasure Drake had stolen. They wanted all of that restored to Spain to buy peace, so that normal trade could continue.

• 8:19Dan Snow?

  Elizabeth, partly perhaps because of that long, exciting meeting, Elizabeth ends up siding with Drake. Drake was popular with the people of England. There was a mood afoot, there was a tide in the affairs of man. Elizabeth could sense it, and she wanted to be on the right side of it. Around a quarter of a million pounds of Drake's treasure was eventually lodged in the Tower of London. And it was said in the years that followed about that expedition that the investors made a profit of something like 4,000%. I mean, even if that's exaggerated. We will never know exactly how much Drake did in fact bring back and disperse to his investors. But just to give you a sense, the quarter of a million pounds lodged in the Tower of London, Elizabeth's annual revenue into the exchequer was a quarter of a million pounds.

• 9:03Dan Snow?

  In one ship, he'd just brought back Elizabeth's annual take. Well, that would make her even less popular with King Philip. She sent a large chunk of that money to the Dutch Protestants to pursue their war against Philip, their Spanish imperial overlord. Philip's intelligence reports from England showed that Drake was being very liberal with his share of the cash. He gave the Queen a crown. It was during a New Year's Day party. It was decorated with emeralds from Peru. He bribed courtesies with vast amounts of money. He bought access. Philip's ambassador in London said that the Queen shows extraordinary favour to Drake

• 9:46Dan Snow?

  and never fails to speak to him when she goes out in public. She ordered the Golden Hind, so Drake's ship, to be brought ashore and placed in her arsenal near Greenwich as a curiosity, where it remained for decades. Ebediously, he bought Golden Hind around Deptford, and on the 1st of April 1581, there was quite a to-do. Elizabeth came on board, there was a throng of people, there was a huge feast. She handed her sword to the French ambassador who was by her side and made him Knight Francis Drake. The son of simple farmers rose to his feet, now a knight of the realm, Sir Francis. In return, he gave her a large silver tray and a diamond frog.

• 10:30Dan Snow?

  Drake was thrilled with his social promotion. He actually spent quite a lot of time doing this. He designed a coat of arms, and there was a line representing the waves, and there was a ship, and there were stars representing the poles, and there was a knight's helmet, and a golden rope leading to the skies with the words 'auxilio divino', meaning 'with God's help'. And who could doubt this man was anything else other than a favourite of God? He'd sailed around the world, he'd survived storm, disease, shipwreck, he'd returned with an astonishing amount of money in his tiny ship. That could only be thanks to divine favour. He bought a big house, Buckland Abbey, where you can still go to day and visit, just inland from Plymouth, and the Queen gave him a mass of other properties across the country.

• 11:15Dan Snow?

  Although, as always with wily Elizabeth, there were some strings attached to those properties, but the gesture was a noble one. Drake thoroughly enjoyed his fame and plotted his next move. And in Spain, that got Philip nervous. He wrote to his ambassador, "Tell me what has become of Drake and what you hear of arming of ships. It is most important that I should know all this." Well, sir, Francis Drake was keen to give Philip plenty of news. "I am very desirous," he had told Elizabeth's favourite, the Earl of Leicester in October 1581, "to show that dutiful service I could possibly do in any action your lordship vouchs safe to use me."

• 11:57Dan Snow?

  Unfortunately for Drake, Elizabeth had decided to tighten that leash for the time being. Drake was desperate to capture the Azores. He was going to use a man who was a claimant to the Portuguese throne, a Portuguese guy called Dom Antonio. He was the previous king's illegitimate nephew. And he was doing that thing that deposed claimants always do, poor things, travelling from court to court, swallowing their pride, endlessly waiting for metes, being palmed off, then given a little piece of access, a sliver of hope, mainly as a warning to Spain in this endless game of diplomatic chess. But Drake saw Dom Antonio as a bridge to prizing Portugal out of Spain's grip. And after that, there's a way to get access to trade in Portugal's massive empire.

• 12:43Dan Snow?

  Now, on this occasion, it came to nothing, but Drake would have business with Don Antonio in the future. Instead, Sir Francis threw himself into official work. He became an MP. He sat on committees to improve harbors and how best to maintain the navy. This Drake, who'd been an outsider, disruptor, and innovator, was being brought into the heart of government. He still had no children. His poor wife died in early 1583, having hardly seen him in the years they'd been married. He grieved, and then two years later, he married another, very different partner, Elizabeth Sidnum, a wealthy heiress, in fact, one of the West Country's richest women. She was at least twenty years younger than Drake. And there is a world in which Drake would have aged and divided his time between London

• 13:28Dan Snow?

  and Devon, and he'd done important committee work, he'd have run his estates, he'd have slept on a comfortable feather bed, he'd have spawned a brood of children to found the dynasty, he'd have grown old. But it was not to be in this world. This was a world hurtling towards war, a war that Drake had helped to bring on, but given what we humans are, it's a war that probably would have happened anyway. And it was a conflict that would rip Drake away from the softness of life at home, into a world of canvas sails straining at their sheets, splintered wood, hard biscuit, and screams of crewmates bleeding out in the scuppers. Philip of Spain was feeling confident. France was divided.

• 14:13Dan Snow?

  It was on the verge of civil war, in fact, that would remove France, a player, from the European stage for some years to come. The Dutch were being brought back to obedience one hellish, grinding siege at a time. Antwerp was back in Spanish hands in 1585. Now, Philip thought, it was time to deal with the heretic Tudor queen and her nest of pirates for good.

• 14:38Dan Snow?

  That summer, King Philip ordered every English ship in his ports impounded, captured, their cargoes confiscated. Elizabeth immediately responded by attacking Philip's pain point. She sent English troops to keep the embers of revolt in the Netherlands glowing bright. Englishmen went to the Low Countries to fight the Empire. They came home with tales of Dutch courage. A clear gin they drank before battle to steady their nerves, and after it to forget the smell and sight of those close-quarters fights in muddy trenches. But Elizabeth did something else as well. She played her ace. Drake was summoned and unleashed.

• 15:23Dan Snow?

  For the first time Drake would sail with the Queen's commission. He would go south and make bloody mischief. Elizabeth had let slip the dogs of war. Drake was put at the head of a squadron of ships, some private, others part of Elizabeth's navy. The plan was to sever Philip's lifeline from the New World. The Hawkins boys were along for the ride of course, but those self-made west-country aristocrats of the ocean were joined by actual aristocrats of the blood. Leicester sent a ship captained by his brother-in-law. The Lord Admiral, Elizabeth's cousin Howard of Effingham, invested. The Tiger and other ship was commanded by a nephew of Elizabeth's legendary spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham.

• 16:07Dan Snow?

  There were twenty-five ships and several smaller boats. There were two thousand men. This was to be the largest long-range maritime expedition ever launched by the Kingdom of England. They set sail on the fourteenth of September, 1585, just in time to avoid the autumnal gales that scoured the Channel. He arrived in Vigo, in North Spain, on the Spanish mainland. He simply sailed in and he demanded the local governor allow him to fill his water casks and replenish his stores. His demands were quickly agreed to. So you have to imagine now, a port right in the heart of Spain, allowing the English to wander around at will, resupplying whilst drinking in local taverns. The king and his council quaked at the news.

• 16:52Dan Snow?

  They were very worried that Drake would do the unthinkable, that Drake would capture the entire annual treasure convoy that returned home to Spain from the New World every autumn. That year, by chance, was one of the richest fleets that ever sailed. It arrived in the Azores on the 7th of October. Drake left Vigo just four days later. The trap was set, but Drake's luck finally changed. By a mere 12 hours, at his reckoning, he missed the treasure fleet as it dashed into San Lucar, just north of Cadiz. Drake was just a few miles to the north. It would have been the single greatest coup in naval history,

• 17:36Dan Snow?

  and Drake was bitterly disappointed, but he pushed on. He pushed on to the Canary Islands, where a cannonball fired from Las Palmas passed between his legs on the deck of his ship and decided not to stop. Instead, he sailed for the Cape Verde Islands. He captured Santiago there and destroyed every single building, save the hospital, when its townsfolk refused to yield up a ransom. From there, he sailed across the Atlantic, the ship's crew is inevitably ridden by disease. His reduced force arrived in Hispaniola, and he decided to attack Santo Domingo, which is now the capital of the Dominican Republic. It was the oldest Spanish city in the New World. It had been the capital of the Spanish Empire in the New World for a while. However, it was unfortified, it had no serious naval force,

• 18:19Dan Snow?

  and it really only had a handful of regular soldiers. It was not forewarned, so Drake had luckily captured the Spanish ship, carrying the message to the city to be on its guard. On New Year's Day, 1586, Drake personally led the amphibious assault to land infantry. Then he went back to his fleet and sailed it round to threaten the harbour. That assault from two different directions, from land and sea, crushed the fighting spirit of the inhabitants, and they fled. The city was English, in return for five casualties. The flag of St George fluttered above one of the great Spanish colonial cities.

• 18:55Dan Snow?

  The English stripped it like locusts, chapels desecrated, treasury emptied. Drake demanded one million ducats for the return of the city. The Spanish refused. He started demolishing it, brick by brick. In the end, he settled for twenty-five thousand, which was a lot less than he hoped. One of the Spaniards who negotiated with Drake wrote down his impressions of the Englishman, and it's one of the best accounts we have, I love it. He wrote, Francis Drake knows no language but English. And I talked to him through interpreters. Drake is a man of medium stature, blonde, rather heavy than slender, merry, careful. He commands and governs imperiously. He is feared and obeyed by his men.

• 19:39Dan Snow?

  He punishes resolutely, sharp, restless, well spoken, inclined to liberality and to ambition, vainglorious, boastable, not very cruel. These are the qualities I noted in him during my negotiations with him. I love that. And it's particularly striking that he wrote that he wasn't very cruel, because it was actually while he was here in Santo Domingo that Drake carried out what was certainly one of his cruelest acts. He had sent one of his black comrades, a black sailor serving under him, on an embassy to the Spanish, and they'd killed that man in cold blood. In fact, he'd managed to stagger back to Drake and died at his commander's feet. And Drake was driven into a fury.

• 20:23Dan Snow?

  He did something remarkable, he dragged two Dominican friars out of captivity and he hanged them in cold blood, right there in the main square. And then he announced that he'd hang two more priests the following day, and every day after that, until the man responsible for his friend's murder was handed over to him. The Spanish ended up hanging the murderer themselves to spare him a shocking death at the hands of the English. So despite the account by the Spaniard, Drake certainly was capable of cruelty when his blood was up. With that reduced ransom and his holds, he sailed on. Spain had been utterly humiliated. Spain was the world's greatest empire, and here, one of its finest cities had just been sacked.

• 21:05Dan Snow?

  A third of the buildings had been destroyed, churches desecrated. What defences there had been, slighted. The Spanish could only think that it was divine punishment for their sins. Philip received messages saying the news could simply not be reported without tears. Nothing remains, he was told, but life itself. The news of Santo Domingo rippled across the Spanish-American world. Terror spread in its wake. Townspeople threw up defences and buried treasure right across Central America. But Drake was very deliberately heading straight for a particular city, Catarania, the heart of the Spanish Main. But there'd be no surprise this time. Defences had been strengthened.

• 21:49Dan Snow?

  Women and children and valuables had been stowed safely in the interior. The defenders were armed and drilled. Having said that, too many of the defenders were enslaved or recently freed slaves. Would they charge onto British bayonets for their Spanish masters? Drake would find out. In mid-February, as at Santo Domingo, he'd landed his troops ashore, and then again, he and his fleet pushed around to threaten the harbour itself. In the last darkness before dawn, the English land force charged the barricades roaring Saint George, and there was a brief, snarling, bitter clash of men.

• 22:29Dan Snow?

  Iron-tipped pikes searching out the soft flesh that lay behind this wall of metal. It's the kind of battle between two bodies of men that's close until it isn't close. The side that wavers, the side that cracks, is utterly finished. And once the man next to you runs while you're outflanked, the English can get around beside you. And as the Spanish started throwing down their weapons, they exposed their neighbours to attack. The desperate attack of Englishmen who didn't want to die on this tropical beach, or worse still, be captured and have their guts pulled out in the town square. The Spanish fled. Those that stood were hacked down. Those who ran might have

• 23:10Dan Snow?

  lived. After a little more fighting, Cartagena, the rock of the Spanish main, was Drake's. Drake, always the optimist, asked for about half a million ducats in ransom, and the Spanish came back with a fraction of that. So again, Drake started demolish the city. At once 250 houses had been levelled, a settlement was agreed. 100,000 ducats. The haul from both cities, something like 50,000 English pounds. So good, but quite a long way short of some of the more optimistic projections for the cruise. Which is, by the way, a problem with this funding model. If you're trying to utterly humiliate Philip, job done. It's a success. If you're trying to turn a tidy profit, to keep those investors off your back, show strong Q2

• 23:55Dan Snow?

  revenues, well, that is trickier. And often, those two goals might be at odds, as we shall see in the rest of this podcast. As Drake held court in Cartagena, dysentery struck his men. More of his precious crewmen were lost. Drake did think about holding Cartagena permanently for the English crown, a base to harass the Spanish up and down the main on a year-round basis. But his men were not enthusiastic about that. Drake's plan involved him going to London to claim the glory while they wait in Cartagena, hungry, surrounded by furious Spaniards waiting to get their revenge, waiting to torture, humiliate them in the name of the Holy Church.

• 24:35Dan Snow?

  Less enticing. So Drake agreed to take everyone with him. He thought about a strike at Havana or Panama, but disease had pretty much ruined his force, and he decided he had to head home. He stopped at St Augustine in Florida. He destroyed the Forton settlement there, but left the indigenous village next door completely untouched, interestingly. He made his way back up the East Coast, North America. He picked up the colonists at Roanoke in Virginia, who were having a tough time, and he took them all home. He arrived back in England with sorry news for his backers. They didn't make any money on the expedition. But strategically, it was a hammer blow to Philip. If Drake could just pot around the Caribbean, occupying his possessions at will, his artery to Peru

• 25:19Dan Snow?

  could not be relied upon. Philip's credit briefly dried up. He was refused loans. His forces in Holland halted spending. Lord Burghley mused that Francis Drake is a fearful man to the King of Spain. At the very least, Philip was now forced to engage in a vast building project, a network of expensive defences for his American empire. He found himself locked into that old, "Spend a vast amount of money to protect the source of your vast amount of money" conundrum. He would not be the last leader to find himself in that position. Philip discussed it with his councillors. Elizabeth had gone too far. Drake, and unfortunately, imitators, people he'd inspired, were now an existential threat

• 26:01Dan Snow?

  to Spain, its empire, and God, of course, obviously. Philip would finally turn his full attention on the English. He would send his own fleet. He would topple the Queen, sired from that Protestant whore. He would restore England to the true faith, and he would hang Drake from a gallows. His secretary wrote, "The time for playing defence against the English was over." Philip's secretary wrote that Spain was forced to apply fire in their homeland. And Philip wouldn't just launch a fleet. He would send an armada.

• 26:40Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History. For more on Philip's Armada and Drake's response, keep listening.

• 26:49Dan Snow?

  This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery, a detail, but suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialised. Now I wonder what all baffled historians about us: mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 27:33Speaker 01

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• 28:15Speaker 01

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• 28:54Speaker 03

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• 29:05Speaker 03

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• 29:53Dan Snow?

  There was nothing secret about this D-Day. Ships were hired from around Europe. Supplies were stockpiled in broad daylight. The Pope promised a million crowns, but only when the Spanish army actually landed on English soil. And the Vatican was a leaky organisation. Everyone knew. Drake knew most of all, because in Plymouth, seamen talked on the quayside and in taverns about the money being offered to seafarers to join the great Spanish enterprise. Drake begged the Queen to be allowed to sail south and disrupt preparations, make a preemptive strike, and eventually Elizabeth agreed.

• 30:38Dan Snow?

  In the spring of 1587, Elizabeth decided to slacken off Drake's leash. He was to go to Iberia, disrupt, discourage, destroy. In the ever-complicated funding structures of Elizabethan military affairs, this was to be more on the strategic side than the commercial, although it was hoped that it might still pay for itself. The Queen contributed naval vessels. Elizabeth Bonaventure, Golden Lion, Dreadnought. Merchants provided other ships. Drake himself chipped in four ships, named after family members. In all, he had 24 vessels with 3,000 men on board, bigger even than the fleet he had taken to the Spanish Main.

• 31:21Dan Snow?

  Drake was wise enough to get out of Plymouth as quickly as he could before Elizabeth had one of her trademark changes of mind. Sure enough, that message arrived. New orders were received to not destroy Spanish towns, just capture ships offshore.

• 31:38Dan Snow?

  But Drake was already on the way. All right, folks, this next bit is like nothing else in British history, so get comfy. Drake heads to Spain. He's battered, obviously, by a biscayne gale. His fleet is strung out. He captures a few little ships, you know, he eases into it, he does a few warm-ups, snaps up a few little prizes, and then he arrives off Cadiz on the 19th of April. Does he wait for the fleet to regather? Does he wait for all the stragglers to come in? No, no, no, he doesn't. He just does the unthinkable. He sails straight into Spain's foremost naval base, straight in. He has a very quick council of war. His vice admiral says, let's pause.

• 32:18Dan Snow?

  He ignores him and uses the perfect breeze to sail straight into the harbour. No wrecking, nothing. Cadiz was absolutely rammed with ships, many of them stuffed with supplies for the Armada. Drake sailed straight past the harbour defences, obviously not flying his English national flag, of course, and he gets right in amongst the mass of merchant ships. All the witnesses say that he pulled it off because it was so obviously insane that no one in naval history had ever done anything like it. And once he was in, once he was among all those merchant ships, up went the English ensign, and the carnage began. Drake and his other ships boarded merchantmen. If they fought back, English cannons smashed them into submission. One rich Genoese ship was sent to the bottom in that way.

• 33:03Dan Snow?

  Aard galleys packed with Spanish troops rode out to fight, but the English ships spun round and unleashed broadsides on them before they could get to within insult distance. Ashore, the townsfolk absolutely lost it. They ran around like extras in a bad 80s World War II movie. They tried to stash their valuables in the castle, they dashed out of town. There was a crush, which cost dozens of people their lives. After an entire night spent torching looted ships, the following day Drake led men into smaller boats and they surged into the inner harbour. They found the 1,500-ton war galleon of Spain's greatest sailor, the Marquis de Santa Cruz.

• 33:47Dan Snow?

  They burned it to the waterline. Troops from nearby towns arrived to help, but all they could do was just stand on the quayside and watch the immolation in the harbour. One said it was like a volcano or something out of hell. It was a sad and dreadful sight, he wrote. Drake claimed to destroy thirty-nine ships. The Spanish later insisted it was only twenty-five. Either way, it was brutal. Drake proudly declared that he had singed the King of Spain's beard. I think I've run out of superlatives on this podcast.

• 34:25Dan Snow?

  I mean, you sail your reduced, storm-battered fleet into the principal naval base of the greatest empire to that point in world history and just set about them. You just wreck shop with absolute immunity. As Spanish troops watch, it's bonkers. I'm struggling to think of an equivalent in history. Even the Catholic Pope was in ecstasy about it. He wrote the following letter, absolutely brimming with fake news, you'll notice. "The king goes on trifling with this armada of his, but the queen acts in earnest. Were she only a Catholic, she would be our best beloved, for she is of great worth." Just look at Drake. Who is he?

• 35:10Dan Snow?

  What forces has he? And yet he burned twenty-five of the king's ships at Gibraltar and as many again at Lisbon. He's robbed the flotilla and sacked San Domingo. His reputation is so great that his countrymen flock to him to share his booty. We are sorry to say it, but we have a poor opinion of this Spanish armada and fear some disaster. Drake was a little bit more measured than the Pope about his own success. He'd seen the scale of Spanish preparations. He wrote home to the spymaster Walsingham, "I dare not almost write unto your honour, of the great forces we hear the King of Spain hath out in the straits.

• 35:52Dan Snow?

  Prepare in England strongly and most by sea. Stop him now and stop him ever." And even now, Drake wasn't done. He sailed to Sagres, right on the tip of Cape St Vincent, which is that very sharp headland, that sort of sharp corner of south-west Portugal. It's a bit of a choke point, really. All north-south traffic has to round that cape. Drake landed, battered the fort there into submission. In fact, he piled up firewood outside the gates and set fire to the wood and then the gates before launching an assault through that flame. They desecrated and looted any Catholic church they found, obviously. A Spaniard wrote:

• 36:30Dan Snow?

  "There was customary drunken revelry, diabolical extravagances and obscenities." In the bays nearby that headland, where vessels would pause for a fair wind to get them round Cape St Vincent, in those bays, he destroyed forty-seven vessels, many of them carrying vital barrel staves. Now, that doesn't sound super glamorous, but it's absolutely essential. Seasoned barrel staves are required to make good snug watertight barrels, which in turn keep your victuals fresh and deter rot. The Armada would sail with woefully inadequate barrels, as a result of Drake's action here. Drake then spent two days in front of Lisbon, where the warships

• 37:13Dan Snow?

  of the Armada were assembling, and he taunted them to come out and fight. Spain's greatest Admiral, Santa Cruz, he knew his fleet was not yet ready to take on the English, and he sat utterly humiliated in harbour. The Venetian ambassador wrote: "The English are masters of the sea." The Spanish were worried that he might just stay there, indefinitely, like a cancer in south-west Iberia. But suddenly, Drake was off. He'd had the sniff of some rich American prizes crossing the Atlantic, and he dashed off to the Azores to intercept. Storms whittled down his fleet still further, but his run of form continued. A fat carack, a big trading ship, the San Felipe, fell right into his lap. He sailed up close, he

• 37:55Dan Snow?

  ran up his colours, and he demanded surrender. She fired a broadside, to be fair. The English crept so close to her hull that her cannonballs went overhead. Three little English ships pressed on her from all sides, like wild dogs tearing at a doomed buffalo. Soon, she surrendered.

• 38:13Dan Snow?

  When Drake climbed aboard, he discovered that she was actually from the east rather than the west. The riches of Asia lay in her hold. And she was the richest ship taken by the English since Drake had taken that treasure ship in the Pacific, you'll remember from part one. There was cinnamon, there was nutmeg, there was pepper. Drake would end up with a cool £20,000. Elizabeth netted a tidy £50,000. It was time for Drake to head home. The Armada had been disrupted, his investors would get a handsome return. As ever, statecraft and profit in uneasy partnership, but it worked on this occasion, everyone was happy. In fact, Drake's backers had their thirst for the treasures of the east ignited, and

• 38:56Dan Snow?

  they were the men who would come together to organise the East India Company within a decade, to go out to the east and fill ships with the treasures like those that Drake had snatched in the Azores. The Armada was even more disrupted than Drake knew. The Spanish Admiral Santa Cruz was so spooked by the idea of Drake haunting the Azores that he did sail that fleet out of Lisbon, he sailed them out into the Atlantic to go and look for Drake and protect any homebound Spanish ships. In the 16th century, when ships put into the Atlantic for a cruise, they come back battered, they come back in need of repairs. Their crews come back scurvy-ridden, diseased, coughing up blood. And that Spanish cruise, looking for Drake, who'd long gone, made it impossible to turn

• 39:41Dan Snow?

  those ships and those men around in time to head to England before the autumn storms. So the Armada would not sail in 1587. Drake had bought Elizabeth another year to prepare, and she would need it. But he'd also ensured that she would need that year to prepare, because Drake had humiliated Philip in the most profound way. The Armada would be sent, and it would sail not only on a mission of regime change, but a crusade to erase terrible national shame. This would truly be an all-or-nothing clash. Philip driving his admirals to come back utterly victorious, to defeat the man responsible for that humiliation, Sir Francis Drake.

• 40:25Dan Snow?

  As for Drake, he would be there, on the English coast, waiting for that Armada to come.

• 40:33Dan Snow?

  The following year, 1588, a fleet had been painstakingly reassembled in Iberia. Such a fleet, the likes of which had never really been seen before. Spain and Portugal, two maritime superpowers now both ruled by King Philip. Under his sway, the greatest empire the world had ever seen, stretching across five continents. As the saying of the time went, "He was a man who ruled half the world." And in the spring of 1588, he was bending every sinew he spent every waking hour obsessing about, focusing the entire imperial effort on the subjugation of a woman who ruled half

• 41:18Dan Snow?

  an island. Elizabeth I, Elizabeth Tudor, Queen of England. Seventy-three fighting ships from strange hybrid ordnance sailing vessels called Galleasses, which it would hoped would fuse the Mediterranean-Atlantic fighting traditions together and dominate both. There was also the thousand-ton, 180-foot-long San Martin with 48 heavy guns on two enclosed decks. That's well over double the size of Drake's flagship of 1587, with far more firepower. Alongside those seventy-three fighting ships, there were fifty transport vessels. Thirty thousand men would sail. It was a floating city, and in all boasted something like two and a half thousand cannon.

• 42:03Dan Snow?

  Alongside all that wood and iron, Philip had God on his side. He had papal sanction and encouragement. The Pope had declared this was indeed a crusade. "Every conceivable pretext for a just and holy war is to be found in this campaign," the men of the Armada were told. They were also assured this was defensive, not offensive. It was to protect Spanish land, tranquility, peace, and repose.

• 42:32Dan Snow?

  It sailed under a holy banner, the word stitched on it, "Arise, O Lord, and vindicate Thy cause." The entire enterprise was shot through by faith. In fact, a little less faith and a little more logic wouldn't have gone astray. Essentially, the plan was, the faith-heavy plan, was the Armada was going to sail up the English Channel. It was going to arrive in the Calais area, where the Spanish possessions in the Netherlands, what is now roughly Belgium, met France. And then it was going to embark the Spanish army in the Netherlands, and it was going to sail across the Channel to Kent.

• 43:15Dan Snow?

  That army was going to swat aside the English and march on London. Now, you will have heard me say this before on this platform. But plans made by landlubbers in gigantic Baroque monasteries in central Spain, with absolutely no understanding of the wind, the tide, the current, anchor cables and harbors, are often exercises in fantasy. Philip's plan of "Go to that bit of coast, put an army on your ships, sail somewhere else", now that's the kind of plan that gives amphibious folk an anxiety attack. It makes me feel sick just reporting it. It was a wholly and spectacularly unrealistic plan, which extraordinarily is exactly what the new commander of the Armada,

• 43:59Dan Snow?

  the Duke of Medina-Sedonia, told Philip to his credit. Medina-Sedonia had been shoved in to replace the legendary Spanish Admiral Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz had died in early 1588, in part, it's said, because of the intolerable shame that had been inflicted on his fleet by Sir Francis Drake. His replacement was no Santa Cruz. Medina-Sedonia had begged not to be given the honour. He said he didn't know anything about ships, he got seasick, and he was a poor leader. Well, at least he's a realistic one, which actually puts him well ahead of the most leaders. There you go. But Philip wanted him there because he was extremely posh. He was from the very pinnacle of Spanish society. Think about Sir Francis Drake, and

• 44:44Dan Snow?

  then think about his polar opposite, that was Medina Sidonia. He was an aristocrat who knew nothing about the sea. However, he did know something about military plans because he told Philip that his idea of linking up with the army would never work. Philip said, "You leave that to God." Now, admittedly, Elizabeth also put one of her greatest subjects in charge of her navy, Charles Howard, Lord Effingham. He was her cousin. And in England, for the last three or four generations, when there is a threat, when there is the tramp of feet, the whiff of gunpowder, topsols on the horizon, men on the march, you call for the Howards. His grandfather had been terribly wounded in the melee at Barnet fighting

• 45:27Dan Snow?

  for Edward IV. He'd been wounded again fighting for King Richard at Bosworth, but the Tudors knew a valuable sword arm when they saw it, and he was unleashed against rebels in the North, this time fighting under Henry VII's banner. He smashed a Scottish army at Fodden for Henry VIII. The next Howard had taken an arrow in the face for his sovereign, and now it was Charles Howard, Lord Effingham's, turn. This Lord Howard wasn't a sailor in Drake's League, but he had been to sea. He was much more of a sailor than Medina Sidonia, and he was keen. He was a team play, threw himself into it. And above all, he seemed reasonably happy for his celebrity deputy to take the lead, because vice admiral of

• 46:09Dan Snow?

  the English fleet was one Sir Francis Drake. The English fleet would be led by the aristocrat and the upstart. Now, a lot could go wrong, but they seemed to make a fine team. They complemented each other. Drake spent the whole of the spring of 1588 being begged to be unleashed on the coast of Spain, obviously, he's only got one gear. And a mixture of Elizabeth's caution, also lack of supplies for the fleet and bad weather postponed his departure. And by the end of June, he got the chance and he erupted into the Bay of Biscay. The trouble was, in fact, the Armada had already sailed with great fanfare, but they were immediately scattered by a massive storm, so divine favour showing itself up there

• 46:53Dan Snow?

  in curious ways, well disguised perhaps. They reassembled in Carana. Medina Stonia begged Philip one last time, "Please reconsider", he said, "Get on with it", and they set off again on the 12th of July. By that stage, Drake and Howard had been forced back into Plymouth by storms as well, so the fleet instead just waited and resupplied. The English ships took on fresh supplies and waited. On the 19th of July, an English ship was sailing just south of Lizard, just off the southern coast of Cornwall. It was either a scout or a pirate looking for prey, it's slightly unclear, but either way it found a lot more than it could handle.

• 47:34Dan Snow?

  Suddenly, it saw on the southern horizon a forest of masts, and on them, sails showing the Red Cross of Crusade. The skipper ran before the breeze for Plymouth and broke the news. The Armada had come. The story goes that Francis Drake was playing bowls famously with his officers on Plymouth Ho. I have stood on that spot today. I've watched white-clad figures play bowls, still, on that bowling green, imagining Drake and his friends. But sadly, we have absolutely no evidence that he was playing bowls that day, it's a completely unfounded story, but it's a good one.

• 48:17Dan Snow?

  It's a building block of our English mythical self-image.

• 48:23Dan Snow?

  We tell each other this story to remind ourselves that we are unflappable, sport-loving, oozing with confidence and always ready with a one-liner. The story goes that when he received the message playing bowls, he paused and said, "Well, we've got plenty of time to finish the game and beat the Spanish too." Whether he said that or not, there was the ring of truth to it because you can't get a fleet out of Plymouth against the win and the tide. You've got to wait for the ebb tide. So in fact, had he been playing bowls, he could have finished the game of bowls. They could load the funnel casks of fresh water and some fresh food on board, and then they could get the men out of the taverns with a knotted rope end.

• 49:07Dan Snow?

  Sure enough, as the tide began to ebb, the tide began to go out. The English fleet got to sea, and there, as they left Plymouth Sound, they first set eyes on the Spanish Armada. One observer wrote, "The ocean did seem to groan under its weight."

• 49:30Dan Snow?

  Stick around and find out how the Spanish Armada fared against Francis Drake after this.

• 49:40Speaker 01

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• 50:31Speaker 03

  What started the Civil War? What ended the conflict in Vietnam? Who was Paul Revere? And did the Vikings ever reach America?

• 50:42Speaker 03

  I'm Don Wildman and on American History Hit, my expert guests and I are journeying across the nation and through the years to uncover the stories that have made America. We'll visit the battlefields and debate floors where the nation was formed, meet the characters who have altered it with their touch, and count the votes that have changed the direction of our laws and leadership. Find American History Hit twice a week, every week, wherever you get your podcasts. American History Hit, a podcast from History Hit.

• 51:30Dan Snow?

  I'm going to call a quick time out here and just emphasize how absolutely astonishing this was as a moment in world history. Two massive fleets at sea facing each other. This was a paradigm shifting moment. Of course, there have been naval battles before. You have all heard of Salamis, where the king of kings, the king of Persia, had watched as his awed ships were bottled up by the Greeks and his navy smashed adriftward. There was Yaman, where over a thousand Chinese ships clashed. The fate of the Song Dynasty at stake. I could go on, obviously, but fear not, I won't. Those are different podcasts. This, though, this was really different. And I'll ask you to remember this.

• 52:11Dan Snow?

  This was two fleets armed with cannon about to fight a multi-day battle. Not a battle in which ships crashed into each other and then crews beat and stabbed each other to death. Nor was this a battle where the ships were going to shore every night and dragged up the beach, then pushed out to sea and fight again the next day. No, no, this was expeditionary fleet warfare in the gunpowder age. The English had never done anything like this before. They'd never fought a battle like this. The Spanish, neither. The Portuguese had fought an alliance of enemies in the Indian Ocean at Diu in 1509. But for all its importance, they only had about 15 or so ships present, and it was fought in a very different way. What was about to happen was new.

• 52:53Dan Snow?

  Drake, for example, he'd pounced, he'd ambushed, he'd tricked, he'd raided. But neither he nor any other Englishman had ever commanded this many ships at sea against a well-armed enemy. These battles coming up are ground zero for British naval fleet actions. It's a straight line from here to the Battle of Jutland in 1916. History was at a hinge point. The pages of the manuals were blank and Drake was about to pick up his pen. In the build up to this campaign, Drake and the other English naval advisers, administrators had been responsible for building a fleet of ships for Her Majesty. That were not as bulky as the Spanish galleons, were not as superficially impressive.

• 53:38Dan Snow?

  But they were faster, they were better at sailing and they were built around a very simple concept, they were built around the cannon. The towering Spanish ships were built to do several jobs, to overindigenous peoples as they pushed their empire ever further, to dissuade pirates and privateers from attacking their treasure fleets. They were also designed to fight, but in a different manner, in an older manner. Yes, they had cannon on board and they would shoot off their cannon, but then they wouldn't really bother about reloading them, they would then come alongside, they'd crash the ship into that of their enemy and then the crews on board would shoot arrows and bullets from imposing towering structures on the fore and aft of the ship.

• 54:22Dan Snow?

  They would board the enemy, they'd fight it out with cold steel. These ships were designed to take part in, well, battles very similar to those fought on land, a kind of floating land battle in which the crews would fight it out on the decks of interlocked ships. Armoured clad men hurling themselves at their opponents across spars and gangplanks, the slightest slip and they'd be dragged down into the grey green sea by their heavy metal breastplate. The English though, they were groping towards a very different way of fighting at sea, a way that involved using cannon, big guns, to blast their opponents from a distance rather than swap sword thrusts on a crowded deck. And that's how Drake and Howard went into battle over the next few days.

• 55:07Dan Snow?

  They both led a series of attacks on the slow-moving Spanish armada. They would sail in, they would blast their cannon on their broadside, they would tack out to sea, reload and sail in again and repeat, like wolves scavenging around a herd of buffalo. They never got too close to get grappled, they just came in just close enough to inflict damage, to wound, to infuriate and confuse.

• 55:31Dan Snow?

  Then what's so exciting about this campaign, these battles, is over the next week, you watch as Drake is innovating. He's writing the rules on how big gun battleships fight at sea. He leads his column of ships right up to the Spanish fleet, he brings his guns to bear, he fires his broadsides, and he gets his gun crews reloading as fast as they can. He starts the job here, that Nelson will finish at the Battle of Trafalgar. Enough on the overview, let's get back to the specific timeline here. They fight a big battle off Plymouth that first day. At the end of it, a lot of cannonballs have been shot, a lot of powder's been used, a lot of noise has been made, but the Spanish fleet are intact, they're hardly bruised, they're continuing their stately progression

• 56:14Dan Snow?

  up the English Channel towards their rendezvous with their troops in the Low Countries. But Drake, surprise, surprise, got lucky at this moment. Two Spanish ships collided, the Spanish were really packed in tight in this great mass of ships, so the idea was that they could help protect each other. So it's a great herd of ships moving at the pace of the slowest ship up the channel. And two of those ships collided, not unsurprisingly, given the battle, the noise, the confusion. One of them was the Rosario, which was abandoned after attempts to take her in tow. In that big stretch of ocean, in the depths of a dark night, guess who stumbled right across her? Drake, that's who. He sailed up, he

• 56:55Dan Snow?

  told them who he was, and they surrendered with embarrassing haste. Aboard the Spanish ship, well, another little stroke of luck for Drake, one-third of the entire money supply of the Spanish Armada. That put Drake in a good mood. He whined and dined the Spanish captain in his cabin. The Spaniard said that he was happy, that if his fate decreed that he should be captured, it would be Drake who captured him. There have been many suggestions over the years that all the money on board didn't find its way in its entirety into the Queen's treasury. Some of it, so the gossip went, got lost in handling. Over the next few days Drake and Howard attacked the Armada again and again.

• 57:35Dan Snow?

  Alongside them, other maritime legends: Martin Frobisher, the Hawkins Boys, Drake's brothers from another mother from Devon. They fought at Portland Bill, they fought at the Isle of Wight, and although they didn't inflict body blows on the Spanish, they demonstrated a very worrying superiority in sailing and gunnery over the Spanish ships. No one ever seen or heard naval gunnery of this intensity. On the 28th of July, the Armada arrived at Calais. It was now only a few dozen miles from the Spanish army in the Netherlands. On paper, Philip's grand plan was going pretty well. It was reaching its climax. But as it happened, the Spanish army had been

• 58:17Dan Snow?

  caught by surprise by the Armada's arrival. They'd given the storms and various things, they didn't actually know when the Spanish Armada was going to arrive, and so it would not be ready for days to even attempt to make it out to the Armada's ships. It would have to organise itself and its supplies, it would have to get into its barges, down rivers and canals, to the sea, and try and make it out to the Armada. The problem is, the Spanish Armada didn't have days. It didn't have days at all, because it was anchored in an unprotected anchorage. So it was not in a snug little harbour, they didn't go into Calais, inside the sea walls and tie up and all go to the pub and warm up. No, they just anchored off the coast at Calais, and there is no particular protection offered

• 58:58Dan Snow?

  by any headlands there, for example. And so the Spanish Armada was not sure it could just sit there off the coast, waiting for the army to get its act together. There was also an even bigger problem that Philip had never wanted to properly address, and that is, between the Armada and the canals bringing the Spanish army to the open sea, in the shallow waters along the coast, was a fleet of little Dutch rebel Protestant boats. They roamed those shallows, and they were on their knees every day praying for that Spanish army to come out in their slow-moving barges into the English Channel, because they would have pounced on them and nobbled them. They would have fallen upon those canal

• 59:39Dan Snow?

  barges rammed with Spanish troops like a fox at a chicken coop door. But anyway, it wouldn't even come to that, because the Spanish had a bigger problem, even than the anchorage, than the wind, than the army's slowness or the Dutchman. The Spanish Armada was facing the English fleet and Drake. Late that evening, only hours after the Spanish had arrived in their anchorage off Calais, once it was dark, Spanish lookouts spotted the flare of flames out to sea among the English fleet, and they knew exactly what they were. They knew with terrible certainty that one of their greatest fears was about to be realised: fire.

• 1:00:23Dan Snow?

  If you're in a wooden ship, surrounded by tar and pitch and gunpowder and hemp, and you can't swim, you are terrified of fire. And as soon as they saw those flames, they knew that the English had unleashed a swarm of fire ships. So we don't know who first suggested it. We do know Drake was a big advocate, and he offered one of his own older ships a sacrificial victim. And so throughout the day on the 28th, they'd been loading these ships, well, with anything that would blow up or burn, really, gunpowder of course, but offcuts of wood, old sails, bits of rope, anything hanging around that would burn, which in the 16th century is nearly everything.

• 1:01:05Dan Snow?

  And when the tide and the wind were right that night, small crews of brave souls set those ships sailing towards the Spanish fleet, which was lying at anchor, and lit the fuses. Within seconds, flames were curling up the rig, engulfing the hulls. At the very last minute, these crewmen leapt into small boats and made their escape, and the fiery ships continued towards the Spanish of their own accord. Now, the Armada had known that a fire ship attack was very likely in Medina Estonia. Done quite well, they issued instructions. In fact, they were ready for this attack. And despite all that, nearly every ship in the Spanish fleet absolutely lost it. They panicked.

• 1:01:47Dan Snow?

  They took to their anchor cables with swords and axes, rather than take the time to pull them up, and that left vital anchors on the seabed. They crashed into each other in the dark in their haste to escape. They scattered. The defensive cohesion of the Spanish Armada, which had been one of its major strengths, was now scattered to the winds. When the sun rose the following day, the Spanish Armada was spread out in little clusters of ones and twos, right along the stretch of coast.

• 1:02:22Dan Snow?

  The English couldn't believe their luck. They shook out their sails and they charged.

• 1:02:29Dan Snow?

  Now, everyone likes to call Drake a freebooting pirate, but it's very important to remember here, it was actually Lord Howard, the Lord High Admiral, the Queen's cousin. He's the guy who saw dollar bills, as it were. And he led a great chunk of his squadron to attack a big Spanish ship that had been beached. Yes, it was a big, powerful-looking ship, but it was out of the action. It was sitting on its side on the beach. It was a target to be snapped up after the battle, once the fighting strength of the Armada had been crushed. Instead, for much of the morning, Howard and his mates were focused on this ship. It's called the San Lorenzo. They tried to board her, they chased the Spanish crew ashore, but then the French governor of Calais sallied out and opened fire on them and claimed the prize for himself. It was, all in all, a complete waste of time and resources for the English.

• 1:03:13Dan Snow?

  Anyway, that was Howard. And that meant that it was Drake who led the main effort of the English at this battle of Gravoline. This time Drake built on everything he'd learned over the previous week. He went in close, he went into 50 metres range. He wanted his broadsides to have real impact. The sort of long-range dueling hadn't quite delivered. So now he wanted his men as close as he dared, but without allowing anyone on the Spanish ship to grapple them, hug them close, bring them alongside, and then send Spanish soldiers swarming across to board them. So that was Drake's battle plan. And the Spanish suffered terribly as a result. The San Felipe and the San Mateo were peppered with holes.

• 1:03:55Dan Snow?

  Their scuppers running with blood, their sails shredded, loose shrouds and haliers just dangling down. The Maria Juan rang with the screams of the wounded. Witnesses were shocked by the intensity of fire. This was truly a new era of war at sea. Most of the cannon on the Spanish flagship were blasted off their carriages. Cannonballs smashed through Drake's cabin. The Maria Juan sank with most of her crew. Spaniards tried to fire and reload their cannon, they tried to attend to the wounded, they tried to keep their rig up and their bilges from overflowing. Now, this is a dynamic environment, so all day the wind is pushing them gently along the Dutch coast, what's now

• 1:04:35Dan Snow?

  the Belgian coast, away from Calais, past the town of Graveline and the town of Dunkirk, away from the possible rendezvous with the Spanish army. And as it happens, towards the terrible sandbanks of Zeeland. Medina Sidonia messaged one of his subordinates, simply saying, "What shall we do? We are lost." Morale not that high on the flagship. The reply was, "I'm going to fight and die like a man. Send more shot." Two of the damaged Spanish ships did go round on those banks, and as the tide went out, the Dutch came out, murdering many of the crew and looting the hulls. The rest of the fleet was saved from that fate by a

• 1:05:18Dan Snow?

  last-minute switch in the wind. It went round to the southeast, which pushed the Spanish offshore away from the banks. The Spanish Armada, Medina Sidonia wrote, "had been saved by a miracle." Now, remember this, listeners, because the Spanish Armada was saved, you heard me say it, you heard this leader of the Spanish Armada say it, "saved by the wind." So let's have none of this nonsense about it being the weather, not the English, who defeated the Armada. They'd been saved from annihilation on the sandbanks of Zealand, or sinking at the hands of the English fleet, but they had been defeated, categorically defeated. The plan, Philip's Great Plan, the one that relied on a little bit too much faith, that was now unworkable,

• 1:06:00Dan Snow?

  that had failed. They were being pushed ever further from their army. They couldn't sail back against the wind. It's not easy at the best of times in those big Spanish ships, and now they've been battered. Their sails and rig have been smashed, they're shorthanded, their will to go on has been broken, and the English fleet is in the way. The English fleet is still shadowing them, blocking their way back, even if they could have tried to sail south. The only option now was to return home over the top of Scotland and Ireland. Off they went. Drake trailed them as far north as the Firth of Forth, so round about Edinburgh, but as they disappeared ever further north into the waters of the Highlands, you broke

• 1:06:41Dan Snow?

  off the chase. There was certainly nothing to be gained from taking a fleet around Cape Wrath, even in summer. As the Spanish were about to find out. That Spanish fleet was smashed by gales on those terrible coastlines. Ships were sunk, entire crews were drowned, treasures consigned to the deep. Some Spanish stragglers made it ashore to be massacred by the English garrison in Ireland. Truly, they'd escaped the frying pan, only to be hurled into the fire. The remnant of the Spanish Armada limped home to Spain, utterly, utterly defeated. Drake, Howard, and the English had just saved Elizabeth, and perhaps they'd saved

• 1:07:26Dan Snow?

  the entire nascent English trading and imperial project. It was a pretty important battle. Sir Francis Drake seems to have attracted the jealousy of some of his comrades by being hailed as the architect of victory, and to be honest, I'm not sure that that's unfair. He had led the way. Spain's defeated mariners and soldiers came home in 1588, apparently protesting that Sir Francis Drake was a devil and no man. Even that other Drake fanboy, the Pope, exclaimed, "He's a great captain. With what courage he had battled the Armada, do you think he showed any fear?" Philip could never be convinced to admire Drake, I don't think. He read the reports, telling him that sixty of his hundred and thirty ships did not return

• 1:08:11Dan Snow?

  home, and he wrote, "I have read it all, although I would rather not have done, because it hurts so much." He went on to say that he wished for death, so great was the humiliation. Sir Francis Drake had broken Philip. He finally had his revenge. Sir Drake has proved himself as an explorer, as a raider, a plunderer, a nuisance, as an entrepreneur. He's one of Tudor England's richest self-made men. He's played his part in the administration of the country and the navy, and now he's just led that navy in the first fleet action of the modern era. It's difficult to comprehend. And, friends, he wasn't done.

• 1:08:55Dan Snow?

  And next, well, he invaded Philip's kingdom. Following the Armada, Drake convinced the Queen to strike at Spain while it was still weak. Drake's plan was that he would sail south and finish off the battered Armada at its moorings, and Elizabeth agreed to it. He would command what some have called the "English Armada", and as we'll see, Drake would come to regret the comparison. There were two major problems with this Armada from the outset. One, Elizabeth said, "Sure, do it, but I got no money." So again, it's going to be this mismatch of private businessmen and royal ships. There's always a tension there. And stemming from that tension was the decision by some of those businessmen, including Drake,

• 1:09:40Dan Snow?

  to take along Dom Antonio, our old friend, the old hapless Portuguese pretender. They thought they'd take him along and they'd restore him to the throne of Portugal and win enormous rewards from a grateful monarch. As you'll have immediately spotted, this mission has two rather distinct aims, and they prove not to be compatible. Drake would command the fleet, of course, and old comrade of his, Sir John Norris, would command the land forces. Now, this was not going to be hit and run. This was a massive amphibious expedition. And again, they keep breaking records, this was the largest amphibious assault ever sent out of English waters, British waters. The idea was to force Spain to its knees and just bring the war to an end.

• 1:10:24Dan Snow?

  One hundred and eighty ships, thirteen thousand soldiers, four thousand sailors.

• 1:10:31Dan Snow?

  Except the problems mounted. Elizabeth got cold feet, as so often, and stopped them taking the artillery train that only the monarch has access to. That's the big, heavy guns, capable of besieging, grinding down the fortifications of strong Spanish citadels. You can't just pick those up from Ait's warehouse. There was only one siege train in the country, and that was carefully guarded by the monarch. She decided not to send it. She also didn't send enough supplies, so the fleet set off with provisions for only a couple of weeks. And as ever logistics would determine the course of events, the amount of food, much more so than any grandiose plans dreamed up in London. And I regret to inform you that things did not go well from the start. Storms scattered through Biscay. Some ships turned up in Bordeaux, in Dorset.

• 1:11:16Dan Snow?

  Repairs were made by captains who seemed to take that opportunity to have second thoughts. Maybe we shouldn't rejoin this expedition. Drake's strength dwindled right from the off. And if I'm honest, we start to see a change in Drake here. Drake lacked his customary dash and decision. He was sluggish. When it began, they started at Coraner, the port on the northwest tip of Spain. Drake landed Norris's men, who ran rampage through the town, looting, drinking, destroying everything. It was total chaos. They did eventually get a grip, and they replenished their ships from Spanish store warehouses. But then they got unlucky again. The wind blew really hard inshore, so from the sea to the shore, and bottled them up

• 1:11:58Dan Snow?

  for two weeks in Coraner, in which time they ate through much of their new supplies. So Norris spent those two weeks trying to blast his way into the defended upper town of Coraner, but without the Queen's heavy guns, he was woefully underpowered. They did open a little breach in the wall, they knocked down a little stretch of wall, and they launched an assault, but during that assault, some more of the wall collapsed and buried the English attacking troops. They did have a bit more success with a Spanish force of about 8,000 men, which was hoping to relieve Coraner, so marching towards Coraner from elsewhere in the country. Norris led his men out of the city and routed them. So that's another humiliating defeat for Philip on home soil. Finally, though, the wind changed, and Drake could sail.

• 1:12:38Dan Snow?

  But a far more effective enemy than Spanish ships and infantry came to the aid of King Philip, the old scourge of every long-range expedition in this period. Disease ripped through Drake's fleet. They had to beat south, they had to tack south against the wind down the coast of Spain and Portugal, and as they did so, men sickened. Bodies racked with pain were laid out on the gun deck, the all-op decks. No one, of course, had any idea why they were suffering or what could be done. The dead were thrown overboard in droves. Drake's command was dwindling away. And that's when he made the momentous decision not to keep attacking King Philip's

• 1:13:18Dan Snow?

  ports in search of warships to destroy, so not to carry out Elizabeth's specific instructions. Instead, he would attempt to seize the great prize that was Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. He'd arrive as a liberator, he'd install Dom Antonio on the throne, and he'd tear an entire kingdom, in fact, an entire empire, from Philip's grasp. You can see why he thought it was worth giving it a go. Drake landed the soldiers on a beach forty miles north of the city. A great surf was running and it meant that some of the men were lost, they were drowned as the open boats were capsized in the breakers along the beach. Dom Antonio managed to land in one piece, however, and the English would now see whether his proud boasts were real.

• 1:14:03Dan Snow?

  Would his people rally to him? As that force marched towards Lisbon, the Portuguese people looked reasonably apathetic. Most were not going to risk throwing their lot in with this ragtag army with no supplies or siege train marching on Lisbon. Drake took his fleet down the coast and sailed into the estuary, the Tagus there, but he didn't act with his accustomed verve. He was slow, he was cautious. Norris, for his part, marching overland, was not inundated by waves of volunteers. The streets were dangerously quiet. The Portuguese people were hedging their bets. So there was a Spanish garrison and they were shut up behind powerful defence in Lisbon, big walled defence in Lisbon.

• 1:14:48Dan Snow?

  Norris couldn't dislodge them, and humiliatingly, he was forced to retreat. Disease chewed through his ranks. The whole excursion cost him one-third of his men. Drake and Norris had disobeyed Elizabeth, and they had failed in the task they'd set for themselves. It was not ideal. They made the decision to take their shrunken force to the Azores. Again, it was scattered by gale and individual captains took the opportunity to go home. They arrived separately at the Azores. One of their ships, Dreadnought, had only three healthy crew out of its original three hundred. It was a disaster, and it was Drake's first major defeat in charge. He does deserve a good chunk of the blame.

• 1:15:33Dan Snow?

  He shouldn't have gambled everything on trying to stick a pretender on the throne of Portugal. And if he was going to do that, he should have acted with greater resolution in Lisbon. He should have just landed his men in the town and try and take the place by storm. But it's also true that weather and supplies had been against him. They went back to England, taking poor Dom Antonio with him. I feel a bit sorry for him. He went back to his poor life in a west country village. But he did at least write this to a friend. This, I can assure you, that four thousand Englishmen are equal to eight thousand Spaniards. And whenever I can embark with them again, I shall gladly do so, especially if Sir John Norris and Sir Francis Drake be amongst them, for by my faith, they are gallant gentlemen. For the next six years, Drake was nearly always ashore.

• 1:16:18Dan Snow?

  He was busy, had a range of military and political jobs. He spoke in Parliament about naval matters. He pushed for more spending. He chaired committees on naval affairs. Set up a welfare scheme for sailors, which was much needed, a pension for veterans. He must, though, have felt the call to the sea. He must have hankered after the simplicity of a rising and falling deck beneath his feet. That souwesterly wind on your right cheek is your clear raimed head that we all know and love. The well-drilled crew will follow you to the ends of the earth. It must have all appeared to be a simpler life than that of court intrigue and legal disputes about prizes. And that's perhaps what took Drake back to sea one last time in his mid-fifties in 1594.

• 1:17:06Dan Snow?

  He was in command of a large expedition, but again, it was a flawed one. Twenty-seven ships, two and a half thousand men. Drake was going back to the Caribbean, but he was going in partnership with an old colleague, his old friend and occasional rival, Sir John Hawkins. For some very odd reason, Elizabeth insisted they shared the command of the expedition, equal shares, two of them in charge. And it was a disastrous idea. Hawkins was in his sixties, he'd become slow and cautious. It took them a long time to get the ships, the men, the provisions together, by which time the Spanish knew the expedition was coming, and they knew it was headed to the Caribbean. They left in August. Hawkins and Drake were arguing about supplies, bickering.

• 1:17:51Dan Snow?

  They stopped in the Canaries, but their Drake was sluggish. The townsfolk in Las Palmas had time to build defences and man them while Drake was conducting a slow recce. This was not the Drake of old. His men were beaten back when they tried to land. He just wasn't the same Drake, he was cautious. By October, they're in Guadalupe, and their only chance of success lay in speed. Speed was of the essence if they wanted to surprise and capture valuable cargoes in Puerto Rico. But Hawkins was ill, and he wanted to repair his ships, and Drake didn't overrule him, he settled down to wait. And they didn't arrive in Puerto Rico till the 12th of November, by which stage the Spanish colony had been forewarned.

• 1:18:29Dan Snow?

  There, off Puerto Rico, old Sir John Hawkins died, second only to Drake in his fame and his influence on English maritime history. The town of San Juan on Puerto Rico had received warning about a week before the English arrived, and they'd gone into overdrive. Defences were built, cannon laid, shots piled beside the barrels. Drake couldn't rely on surprise, so he was going to just batter his way in, use kinetic force, aggression. But no, even here, he prevaricated, he seemed unwilling to commit. As a bit of a starter, he launched an attack on some ships in the harbour, but he was met by ferocious Spanish resistance, savage cannon fire from the shore. And so Drake abandoned the assault on San Juan.

• 1:19:14Dan Snow?

  He told his men there'd be easier targets elsewhere. This was a different Drake, and the Spanish could sense it. Tales of his repulse from the Canaries and Puerto Rico spread. The Spanish felt that rarest of emotions in their chests. They felt hope. Maybe even confidence. And while the opposite was happening aboard Drake's fleet, Drake's crews began to whisper, they began to question his leadership. He moved slowly up the Spanish main. All the settlements knew of his coming. The Spanish had evacuated towns, they'd stripped them of all wealth and possessions. He burned a couple of empty towns. But actually, all he did there was just waste his time when he should have fallen like a thunderbolt on Panama.

• 1:19:56Dan Snow?

  He eventually arrived, but there, which had been his main target all along, the Spanish had time to evacuate their settlements as well. He sent a party across his old stomping grounds, across the Isthmus, to the Pacific side, but they were stopped by atrocious weather. They were also stopped by a fort built just days earlier on the high ground in the centre of the Isthmus. And the Spanish held up their advance. This party trickled back defeated to the Caribbean coast. Drake was now staring disaster in the face. He seems to have fallen into depression. A colleague said that since Plymouth, there had never once been joy or laughter on Drake's face. Drake insists the Caribbean had changed. It used to be a paradise, now it was a desert.

• 1:20:40Dan Snow?

  There were no ships worth capturing, the Spanish were getting their act together. But perhaps it was Drake that changed. By January, the admiral was confined to his cabin. He was ill. He was dying. On the 27th, he was declining fast. He had dysentery. In the early hours of the 28th of January, he rose from his bed and roared for his armour, so it might be buckled on and he could greet death as a soldier. His servants forced him back into bed. And that's where he died, at 4am. His men took him to the nearby town of Portobello,

• 1:21:21Dan Snow?

  which they torched as a fitting funeral pyre for their leader. Then they took him out to sea in the deeper water off Baho San Medina Island and gave his body to the ocean, encased in a lead coffin, as the guns of his ships blast a salute.

• 1:21:41Dan Snow?

  After taking a dozen Spanish cities, five hundred of King Philip's ships, after defeating his armada and capturing his treasure, Drake's career had come to an end. The English wept, but they also followed the trail he had blazed. The Spanish main would burn over the years of war that remained. The Spanish, they celebrated his death. When news was brought to a sickly King Philip, his eyes brightened. Now he croaked, "I will get well." "It was good news," he declared. And that's all the eulogy Francis Drake needs. A eulogy for a low-born sailor from a little island on the edge of the world.

• 1:22:23Dan Snow?

  The most powerful man on earth rejoiced at his passing.

• 1:22:29Dan Snow?

  Until a generation or two ago, Drake was one of the most famous and celebrated Englishmen in history. He dominated the historical fiction read by generations of young men, young men that were being ready to follow him to sea and carry the flag of their monarch to the furthest reaches of the planet. He was the subject of endless early movies in British cinema history. When Francis Chichester completed his epic solo sail around the world in 1967, Elizabeth II knighted him with Drake's sword. Margaret Thatcher quoted Drake during a rough period in her premiership. And that makes sense because as Britain surveyed its mighty empire, investigated its cause, its birth, how it had come to be, what were the roots of this gigantic domain?

• 1:23:14Dan Snow?

  And the gaze of those searchers settled on Drake. He had conducted the first circumnavigation. He had claimed the first territory outside Europe for Queen Elizabeth. He was the victor of the first great sea battle of the modern age. He was the man who'd identified and captured and brought home the wealth of the new world. Now, much of this is agiography and myth-making, but there is a, I think there's a kernel of truth here. Before Drake, there was no buccaneering tradition. There was no national obsession with the riches of the Spanish main. There was no celebrated ocean-going sailors. There were no practical dreams of English empire beyond the oceans.

• 1:23:54Dan Snow?

  And after Drake, well, all that became the English Identity. He's almost Arthurian. He became the sort of archetypal English hero. He was emulated, he was copied by thousands of others. His spirit was summoned, it was cited in parliaments and pamphlets, it was used regularly to lobby for an expansive, aggressive, buccaneering Protestant national strategy, generation after generation. There was the myth of Drake's drum, unknown now but familiar immediately to every Briton a hundred years ago. A drum which was said to have been taken on Drake's voyages, which sits now in his old house at Buckland Abbey.

• 1:24:38Dan Snow?

  Let someone beat on that drum and Drake will return to beat the Spaniards or their successors out of the Channel. Men claimed to hear that drumbeat at the Battle of Jutland in 1916. There were reports of ghostly drumbeats when the German fleet surrendered to the Allies at the end of the First World War. During the Battle of Britain, two army officers claimed to hear Drake's drumbeat while they were stationed on the Hampshire coast. Today, that's all very different, thankfully, or perhaps naively. Children are not raised to fear a foreign fleet in the Western Approaches, so there's no talk of Drake's drum, nor is there much talk of the man who helped stir a confidence

• 1:25:23Dan Snow?

  on this island, that its people too could join the mighty Iberian empires in exploring the world and exploiting its gold and its spice and its gems, conquering its lands. And so, the story of Drake will endure. Thanks for listening, folks. More History Podcasts coming down the slipway at you thick and fast. Don't forget to hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and they'll drop smoothly into your feed like Drake coming alongside an enemy prize. Thanks for listening.

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• 1:27:45Dan Snow?

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