III
Drake was beyond doubt the greatest man who ever set foot in the Revenge, but it was not for him, or any like him, to sail her to the fulfilment of her unparalleled destiny. The imagination of two great peoples has made of him an almost supernatural hero, a gigantic figure of romance; but in spite of his inexhaustible courage,
his dazzling fortune, and the touch of extravagance which he caught from the spirit of his time, he was neither a Don Quixote nor a Prince Fortunate of mere adventures. For him there was nothing that could not be dared, but it must be dared with method and for an end in view; for him wisdom could never be “wisdom in the scorn of consequence.” Setting aside their natural bravery and the fashion of the day, there was little in common between this heroic prototype of the modern Englishman, and Sir Richard Grenville, the inheritor of a temperament which has long been practically extinct among us, and was even then the characteristic of a dwindling
class. The men of courage without discipline, of enthusiasm without reason, of will without science—a type of arrested development surviving from the days beyond the Renaissance—fell with the Stuart Kings and were finally buried with the rebels of the ’45. It is easy to say that they were of no use, these turbulent, insensate, self-willed children of aristocracy; at the least they added colour and vivacity to life, and these are something; now and again they had their great moments, when folly touched the height of tragedy, and left a true inspiration for those who are not too sober or too senile to receive it.
Men have always liked to think of definite characteristics as the hereditary possession of certain families—often, no doubt, without much justification, but surely not altogether so in the
case of the Grenvilles. Reading their records without any preconceived belief, we cannot but hear one note ringing out again & again through at least three centuries and a half. We hear Sir Richard’s grandson, Sir Bevil—it goes without saying that he was a Cavalier—swearing “to fetch those traitors out of their nest at Launceston, or fire them in it.” We see him, “after solemn prayers,” charging furiously “both down the one hill and up the other” at Bradock Down; or again dying on the brow of Lansdowne Hill, after he had stormed it in the face of cannon, “small shot from the breastworks” and “two full charges from the enemy’s horse.”
His brother, another Sir Richard, was a Cavalier, too, and a Grenville to the backbone; hated by his men for his iron discipline—“no doubt,”
says Clarendon, “the man had behaved himself with great pride and tyranny over them”—he was even more intolerable to his superiors; he flatly refused to act under Hopton, and drove the Prince of Wales to imprison him in despair. A more attractive, but still characteristic, member of the family was Bevil’s son, Denis, Archdeacon of Durham, whom we find, after James II had already fled the kingdom, preaching in the midst of his enemies “a seasonable loyall Sermon”; collecting a war fund from the prebendaries for his fallen sovereign; bolting to Scotland on horseback; captured, but escaping to France; coming back incognito and escaping again. Ardent Jacobite and equally ardent Protestant, he defied the Court at St Germain to convert him to Romanism, and when they would
not allow him to read the English Service, consoled himself by publishing at Rouen a manifesto with the exquisite title of “The Resigned and Resolved Christian and Faithful and Undaunted Royalist in two plain farewell Sermons and a loyal farewell Visitation Speech.”
It must be admitted that even so late as the eighteenth century—the Venerable Denis lived till 1703—these gentlemen were the opposite of tame; even when they were “Resigned” they were at the same time “Resolved” and “Undaunted.” This is even more true of their fourteenth-century ancestor, Sir Theobald, the first Grenville of whom I have found anything essential to relate. He, at the age of twenty-two, thought fit to rebel against the paternal despotism of John Grandison, Bishop of Exeter, who had
instituted a nominee of Sir John Raleigh’s to the Grenville family living of Kilkhampton, in defiance, it would appear, of the lawful patron’s rights. Sir Theobald made war at once in the best Grenville manner. At dawn on Sunday, March 24, 1347, he invaded the Manor of Bishop’s Tawton with 500 followers “armed with divers kinds of weapons, offensive and defensive, after the fashion of men going to mortal war.” They stormed the Manor-house, the Sanctuary and the Manse; killed some of the defenders, took plunder to the value of two hundred marks (the Bishop’s estimate) and otherwise “multipliciter perturbarunt pacem et tranquillitatem Domini nostri Regis.” The Bishop’s peace and tranquillity being also disturbed, he at once excommunicated the entire army. Sir Theobald
then brought and won an action against Raleigh in the King’s Bench; the Bishop’s man appealed to Rome, with the inevitable result; the King’s Bench judgement was annulled, with costs against Sir Theobald. Cheered by this, the Bishop sent the Abbot of Hartland and the Prior of Launceston to Kilkhampton one fine July day to put things to rights. The Grenville army, with faces masked and painted, bows bent and arrows notched, met the Church Militant in a narrow lane and routed it shamefully; the pursuit lasted for a mile, and Sir Theobald then fortified and held Kilkhampton Church for several days. After eighteen months more of contumacy, peace was made; from the terms we may judge how hard the Grenville had pressed his tremendous adversary. He knelt, it is true, and confessed his guilt—there
there was no denying that—but the Bishop, in return for this preservation of his dignity, had to revoke his own institution and admit a new rector upon Sir Theobald’s presentation; Raleigh got nothing but the barren pleasure of reading aloud the Act of Submission. The significant points of the story are to me, first, that this boy of twenty-two gained his end in the teeth of all Rome; second, that to gain it he cared not what he did or suffered; and last, that it was never worth the money or the crimes it cost him.
It is vain, I think, to deny that in such a family group as this, Sir Richard Grenville of the Revenge would be in every sense at home. His record is plain. In 1585, when Raleigh’s first colony for Virginia set out from Plymouth in seven ships, it was Sir Richard who took command of it,
though he knew little of seamanship, and still less, apparently, of government. Letters from Lane, the head of the colony, to Secretary Walsingham, and dispatches from the treasurer to Raleigh himself, set forth Grenville’s “intolerable pride” and his “insatiable ambition.” His behaviour to his subordinates was such that they desire to be freed from any place where he is to carry any authority in chief. But what an irresistible fighter he is! On the homeward voyage he falls in with “a Spanish ship of 300 tunne, richly loaden”; having no boats, he boards her with an improvised one, “made with boards of chests, which fell a sunder, and sunke at the shippes side as soone as ever he and his men were out of it.” He reached
home at the end of October, and was off again in the following April, when the Justices of Cornwall report to the Council, Sir Richard having evidently neglected to do so, that, “being about to depart to sea, he has left his charge of 300 men to George Greynvil.” On this voyage he sacked the Azores, took “divers Spanyardes” and performed “many other exploytes,” but he reached Virginia too late to be of any service to the colony, which had already left for England. Then came the business of the Armada, in which he had at least three ships of his own engaged, though he got little chance of distinguishing himself in his station off the coast of Devon and Cornwall. His next voyage was that in the Revenge: and here again, in the one memorable action of his life, we cannot but see the working of the peculiar character which is visible in all the rest.
“This Sir Richard Greenfield was a great and a rich Gentleman in England,” says a contemporary, the Dutchman Linschoten, “and had great yearly revenewes of his owne inheritance: but he was a man very unquiet in his minde, and greatly affected to warre: in so much as of his owne private motion he offered his service to the Queene: he had performed many valiant acts, and was greatly feared in these Islands [i.e., the Azores], and knowne of every man, but of nature very severe, so that his owne people hated him for his fiercenes and spake verie hardly of him: for when they first entered into the Fleete or Armado, they had their great sayle in a readinesse, and might possiblie enough have sayled
away: for it [i.e., the Revenge] was one of the best ships for sayle in England, and the Master perceiving that the other shippes had left them, and followed not after, commanded the great sayle to be cut, that they might make away: but Sir Richard Greenfield threatened both him, and all the rest that were in the ship, that if any man laid hand upon it, he would cause him to be hanged, and so by that occasion they were compelled to fight, and in the end were taken.”
Sir William Monson, another contemporary, has left behind him a similar account, first printed in 1682. “Upon view of the Spaniards, which were 55 sail, the Lord Thomas warily, and like a discreet General, weighed Anchor, and made
signs to the rest of his Fleet to do the like, with a purpose to get the wind of them: but Sir Richard Grenvile, being a stubborn man, ... would by no means be persuaded by his Master, or Company, to cut his main Sail, to follow the Admiral: nay, so headstrong and rash he was, that he offered violence to those that counselled him thereto.”
Sir Walter Raleigh, Grenville’s kinsman, friend and apologist, tells substantially the same story, but he endeavours to throw a different complexion upon it, by representing Sir Richard as being in the first instance trapped in the fulfilment of a duty. He declares that the Revenge “was the last waied, to recover the men that were upon the Island, which otherwise had been
lost.” Unfortunately, this contention is negatived by the numbers of the men captured in her; and, indeed, he goes on to say that Grenville afterwards “utterly refused to turn from the enemy” and boasted that he would “enforce those of Sivill to give him way.” Sir Richard Hawkins is more whole-hearted. “At the Ile of Flores, Sir Richard Greenfield got eternall honour and reputation of great valour, and of an experimented Soldier, chusing rather to sacrifice his life, and to passe all danger whatsoever, than to fayle in his Obligation, by gathering together those which had remained ashore in that place, though with the hazard of his ship and companie: and rather we ought to imbrace an honourable death than to live with infamie and dishonour, by fayling in dutie.”
No man would have been quicker to lay down such a principle than Grenville, but it is clear that on this occasion he did not observe it, and to maintain that he did so would be to mistake the nature of the man. He was no quiet resolute victim of duty: his stubbornness was not that of faithful endurance. If the evidence we have quoted goes for anything he was then, as ever, proud, rash, headstrong and tyrannical, and he remained true to himself even in his famous dying speech, which has been garbled by every translator for 300 years. “Here die I, Richard Greenfield, with a joyfull and quiet mind, for that I have ended my life as a true soldier ought to do, that hath fought for his country, Queene, religion, and honor, whereby my soule most joyfull departeth out of this bodie, and shall alwaies leave behind it an everlasting fame of a valiant and true soldier, that hath done his dutie, as he was bound to do.” So it has always run; it was not until 1897 that Mr David Hannay first translated and replaced the fierce concluding sentence: “But the others of my company have done as traitors and dogs, for which they shall be reproached all their lives and leave a shameful name for ever.” That, to my ear, is the authentic voice of the Grenville.
