For some were sunk, and some were shattered, and some would fight no more;
God of battles! was ever a battle like this in the world before?
Though wounded early in the day, Grenville was able to fight his ship from the upper deck till an hour before midnight, when he was again wounded, this time in the body, with a musket ball. The sailors carried him below, and as his wounds were being dressed, a shot crashed through the Revenge, stretched the doctor lifeless, and inflicted an injury to Sir Richard’s head from which, in two or three days, he died.
And still the battle raged; and still ship after ship drew out of action, utterly defeated by the splendid gunnery and desperate courage of Grenville’s men. Gradually the fire slackened; before daylight it ceased altogether, for the Spaniards abandoned their attempts to sink the Revenge or carry her by board. Yet fifteen out of their twenty men-of-war had been hotly engaged with her: two of them she had sunk outright; a third was so damaged that her crew ran her on shore to save their lives; a fourth was in a sinking condition. Dawn found the enemy’s immense fleet encircling the one English ship like wolves round a dying lion, and wary of approaching him in his last agony. When the sun rose, the survivors of the crew began to realise their desperate plight. Sir Richard commanded the master-gunner to split and sink the ship, that thereby nothing might remain of glory or victory to the Spaniards, and endeavoured to persuade the crew “to yield themselves to God and to the mercy of none else, but as they had, like valiant resolute men, repulsed so many enemies, they should not now shorten the honour of their nation by prolonging their own lives by a few hours or a few days.”
The chief gunner and a few others consented; but the rest having dared quite enough for mortal men, refused to blow up the ship, and surrendered to the enemy. Grenville was carried in a dying condition to the ship of the Spanish Admiral, and as he lay upon his couch on the deck, the captains of the fleet crowded round to see the expiring hero, who, feeling his end approaching, showed not any sign of faintness, but spake these words in Spanish, and said: “Here die I, Richard Grenville, with a joyful and quiet mind, for that I have ended my life as a true soldier ought to do, that hath fought for his country, Queen, religion and honour. Wherefore my soul most joyfully departeth out of this body, and shall always leave behind it an everlasting fame of a valiant and true soldier that hath done his duty as he was bound to do.”
Such was the fight at Flores in that August of 1591—“a fight memorable even beyond credit and to the height of some heroic fable.” It has been called “England’s naval Thermopylæ.” It was from the first as hopeless a battle as that of the Spartans under the brave Leonidas, and its moral effects at the time were hardly less than that of Thermopylæ. Froude tells us it struck a deeper terror, though it was but the action of a single ship, into the hearts of the Spanish people—it dealt a more deadly blow upon their fame and moral strength than even the destruction of the Armada itself, and in the direct results which arose from it it was scarcely less disastrous to them. Men may blame Sir Richard Grenville for his obstinacy, and what they deem his false notion of honour in scorning to turn his back upon the foe when the odds were so overwhelmingly against him, but at least it must be conceded that his courage and that of his crew have immortalised his name.
Sir Bevill Grenville.
(From an Oil Painting.)
Passing over Sir Richard’s son, John, who followed Drake and was drowned in the ocean, “which became his bedde of honour,” and also another son, Sir Bernard, we come to the latter’s famous son, Sir Bevill—a man no whit inferior in loyalty and courage to his illustrious grandsire, and whom men called the English Bayard. When Charles I., in 1639, raised an army against the Scots, Bevill Grenville joined the Royal Standard at the head of a troop of horse at York. “I cannot contain myself within my doors,” he wrote, “when the King of England’s standard waves in the field upon so just an occasion, the cause being such as must make all those that die in it little inferior to martyrs. And for my own part, I desire to acquire an honest name or an honourable grave. I never loved my life or ease so much as to shun such an occasion, which if I should, I were unworthy of the profession I have held, or to succeed those ancestors of mine who have so many of them in several ages sacrificed their lives for their country.”
History shows this to have been a bloodless campaign, but the above extract proves Grenville’s hereditary spirit, and the King, in token of his approval, knighted him at Berwick-on-Tweed before the army broke up; and when, three years later, the storm at last burst over England, which had been so long threatening, Charles I. had no more loyal supporter than Sir Bevill Grenville. Clarendon says he was “the most generally loved man in Cornwall.” He was the soul of the Royalist cause there, and his influence was so great that he readily raised a body of volunteers fifteen hundred strong. At Bradock Down, near Liskeard, where the first important encounter with the Parliamentarian troops took place, Sir Bevill led the van. Describing the fight to his wife, he writes: “After solemn prayers at the head of every division, I led my part away, who followed me with so great a courage, both down the one hill and up the other, that it struck a terror into them,” with the result that twelve hundred prisoners were captured, and all the guns. The next engagement took place at Stratton (distant only a few miles from Grenville’s own home in the adjoining parish of Kilkampton) on May 16th, 1643, where he was again conspicuous for his personal courage. The Earl of Stamford, who commanded the Parliamentarian troops, which numbered close on 6,000, all perfectly equipped and victualled, had encamped in a very strong position on the top of a hill, now called Stamford Hill, near the village of Stratton. It is an isolated grassy hill on a ridge which runs nearly due north and south. The sides on the east and south are the steepest, whilst the western slope has an ancient earthwork near the summit, which Stamford had defended with guns that ought to have rendered it impregnable. The Royalist troops, less than half their number, short of ammunition, and so destitute of provisions that the best officers had but a biscuit a day, lay at Launceston. They nevertheless marched the twenty miles to Stratton “with a resolution to fight with the enemy upon every disadvantage of place or number.” In the evening they halted, footsore and hungry, a mile from the base of the high hill on which the Parliamentarian troops lay in overwhelming strength, and determined to attack them at daybreak. Weary as they were, the men stood to their arms all night, for the enemy were too near to make rest possible, and with the first light, Sir Bevill, to whom every inch of the ground was, of course, perfectly familiar, and to whom, consequently, was committed the ordering of the fight, divided the troops into four storming parties. The little army was too small to merit, when divided into such parts, any other designation. In the morning the fight commenced, and continued till the afternoon was well advanced, but no impression could be made by the gallant Cornishmen, who were repulsed again and again. At last powder began to fail, and it became a question between retreat, which implied certain disaster, or victory. A final and heroic effort was made; muskets were laid aside, and, trusting to pike and sword alone, the lithe Cornishmen pressed onwards and upwards. Grenville led the party on the western slope, and Sir John Berkeley that on the northern, while Hopton and the other commanders scaled the south and east sides. Their silent march seems to have struck their opponents with a sense of power, and the defence grew feebler. Grenville first reached the crest, and seized the entrenchment, and captured the thirteen brass field-pieces and one mortar by which it was defended; and when Berkeley prevailed on the north side, the Parliamentarian horse fled from the hill headlong down the steep descent, and made off. This had its moral effect on the defenders of the other two sides of the camp, and their resistance perceptibly slackened. Soon the other two storming parties, who had had the steepest climb, pressed upward, and the enemy, despite the efforts of their officers to rally them, made off to the adjoining heights. The victorious commanders embraced one another on the hard-won hilltop, thanking God for a success for which at one time they had hardly ventured to hope. It was no time to prolong their rejoicings, as the enemy, demoralised though they were, appear to have rallied somewhat, and to have shown a disposition to renew the combat; but Grenville quickly turned their own captured cannon on them, and a few rounds sufficed to dislodge them. Panic ensued, and a general stampede, in which arms and accoutrements were flung aside, concluded the fight of Stratton. By this decisive victory, not only was Cornwall cleared of the enemy and secured for the King, but the whole of Devon, excepting a few of the principal towns, fell into the hands of the Royalists. The King was not unmindful of the gallant Sir Bevill’s share in the fight, but wrote him a gracious letter promising further proofs of his bounty and favour.