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.”