For centuries the memories of that soul-stirring victory over the Invincible abode only in the minds of Englishmen and between the covers of history-books, but in these latter days, these post-heroic days of criticism and commemoration, when all the great men are dead and all the great deeds done, and we have for some time been engaged upon raising monuments to the deeds and to the men who wrought them, or criticising and explaining the why and the how and the uses, or the uselessness it may be, of those men and the work of their hands,—in these latter days, I say, an Armada Memorial has been set up upon the historic Hoe. It is a tall pedestal, embellished with bronze plates and medallions, and bearing the inscription, “He blew with His winds and they were scattered,” and with the virago figure of a helmeted Britannia rushing in tempestuous petticoats, atop. Close at hand is the statue of Sir Francis Drake, that brilliant member of a brilliant group of Devonian Elizabethans; one who, like Raleigh, in his time played many parts, was foremost among those scourges of Spain we bred in those spacious days, pirate, filibuster, patriot, benefactor, and the first to circumnavigate the globe. Little wonder, then, that the name of Drake is honoured, even yet, in Plymouth. They honour his memory so jealously every year, at the Corporation visit to the weirs, not because of his martial exploits and the services he rendered the nation, but for the benefit he conferred upon Plymouth by bringing its water-supply from the inexhaustible springs of Dartmoor; and thus, in piously exclaiming, “May the descendants of him who brought us water never want for wine,” the Mayor sinks the repute of the Imperialist of the Elizabethan age in that of the local benefactor.
The improving hand of modern times has indeed improved away much of the outward and visible romance of the Hoe, which, from the rugged cliff-top common of Elizabeth’s time, whence the great captains, roused from their historic game of bowls, first glimpsed the dreaded Armada, has been flattened out into trim lawns, and provided with broad gravelled promenade paths, like the veriest urban park or recreation ground. All the forces that make for the commonplace and the obvious have been let loose upon the Hoe, and much of its highly picturesque character has been lost under the treatment of the surveyor and the landscape gardener. But this historic spot can never be quite spoiled, so long as it continues to look out upon Plymouth Sound, and nothing less than a cataclysm of Nature can alter that outlook.
THE CITADEL GATE.
Consider how exceptional the site. A hundred and fifty feet above the sea, it looks straight out to the Channel, three miles away, with the many square miles of glorious Plymouth Sound in between, enclosed to right and left by the wooded heights of Mount Edgcumbe and the terraced hills of Mount Batten and Bovisand. Drake’s Island, immediately in front of the Hoe, and looking so near, is a mile away, and at the distance of another two miles is the famous Breakwater. The Hoe thus stands at the head of one of the finest harbours in the world: finest alike from the seafaring and the picturesque points of view; but it has yet another function—or had, in those days before the giant ordnance of modern times was dreamt of—for it is situated prominently between the further inlets of the Catwater and the Hamoaze, where, unsuspected by the ill-informed enemies of other centuries, lay the wealth of Plymouth. Then it was that the Citadel, built upon the Hoe, was capable of challenging the foe, wishful of sending exploratory keels up the many creeks and estuaries that run in every direction inland, like the spreading fingers of a hand. The citadel is a fine, impressive piece of late seventeenth-century work, and although it was obsolete as a defence centuries ago, appeals very strongly to the layman in fortification, to whom battlements and castellated architecture appeal more forcibly than the earthworks of yonder forts semicircling the crescented hills, from Staddon Heights and Bovisand in Devon, to Tregantle and Screasdon in Cornwall.
Off the Hoe, in the most commanding position, disputing, if need were, the entrance to Mill Bay, the Catwater and the Hamoaze, is the great crag now known as Drake’s Island. It is a kind of islanded Gibraltar, a nest of forts and batteries of a calibre not generally known, but reputed immensely strong. Drake’s Island is not accessible to the public, and like all mysteries, is looked upon with awe. In the old days, when it was St. Nicholas Island, the place made an ideal prison, as regicides and recusants discovered in the reign of Charles the Second.
That was a worthy and a noble idea by which Smeaton’s old lighthouse-tower, superseded from its watch and ward over the Eddystone, was rebuilt on the Hoe in 1882. From the gallery of it you may glimpse its successor, diminished by the distance of fourteen miles to the semblance of a tiny stalk rising lonely amidst the waste of waters. It was no reflection upon the stability of the tower that it was found necessary to remove it, after it had safely weathered the storms of a hundred and twenty years in that exposed situation. It was the reef on which it stood that had decayed. The interior of this wave-washed tower, come ashore again after so many years, is open to inspection, and there, around the cornice of what was the store-room, you read the expression of the piety of those who built, in the text, “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it,” while above the lantern is the further inscription, “24th August, 1759, Laus Deo.”
Unhappily for the romantic associations of the Hoe, fifth-rate and utterly unhistoric streets and tramways conspire to render sordid the immediate neighbourhood, and the place-name has itself been, time beyond the memory of man, the sport of the H-less. It was H. J. Byron, the dramatist, who made a crushing retort to an actor, who, late for rehearsal, had excused himself by saying he had been for a “walk round the ’oe.” “Next time,” said Byron, “don’t wander so far. Take a stroll round the H.”