Drake: For God, Queen, and Plunder

When I found out that Brassey's Military Profiles series was doing an assessment of Francis Drake, I was pleased that this complex and almost legendary figure was going to be summed up in a handy snapshot reference work. At 89 pages of text, this endeavor was quite a challenge. Dudley Wade has managed to include all the controversies and episodes while providing a surprisingly full and fair an appraisal in such a concise book. My introduction to Drake was a reading of Julian Corbett's one volume 1912 biography (rather than his more scholarly but ponderous 1899 two volume treatment incorporating the dawn of the British Navy). While a handy summary of Drake's career, in just over 200 pages, it was written for a British audience and assumed some background knowledge of the personalities, parties and political-religious quarrels both within England and among its European (principally Spanish) antagonists. Plus Corbett's Edwardian British chauvinism and dated idiom is a bit off-putting. I've since read works on the English "sea dogs" and renaissance era piracy and seafaring, and was looking for a good, brief overview of Drake employing modern (i.e. late 20th century) research. Chapter 1, Prelude (pp. 3-13). This is a valuable chapter setting the exploits of Drake in total context. This includes the development of seafaring/navigation, maritime trade and conquest, the vagaries and rivalries of the search for routes to the sources of spices (and later, more fortuitously precious metals and gems) in the East, and the rise of Protestant-Catholic (not always so neatly demarcated) antagonism, later focused on the struggle between Protestant England and Caotholic Spain and their allies, pawns, dupes and double-agents. All this is set into English court and religious history - often identical-and the various political intrigues surrounding Elizabeth I. Chapter 2, Young Man Drake (pp. 15-28). Born of the lesser gentry (economically akin to the present day lower middle class) Drake's father, a tailor by trade, became a preacher in the new Church of England and thus a target for a Catholic backlash against Edward VI's promulgation of a common prayer book. Fleeing local persecution the family wound up living in a ship's hulk converted to a home near Plymouth where young Drake was exposed to seafarers of the port as his father received a very modest stipend to preach the new gospel to them. Here Dudley speculates on the exposure of the boy to the nuts and bolts, or knots and splices, of practical seamanship, while his father imbued him with guiding principles of his Protestant faith and a concomitant hatred of Catholicism - though not of Catholics as individuals. The brief return of the pro-Catholic "Bloody Mary" to the throne marked another stage in the young Drake's career, wherein for his son's safety, his father agreed that his eldest son should leave home at the age of 13. Dudley notes two theories about his schooling in seamanship at this point.

Drake: For God, Queen, And Plunder by military historian Wade G. Dudley (Visiting Assistant Professor, East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina) is a fascinating, informed and informative, military and historical biography of Sir Francis Drake, the famous high seas plunderer of fifteenth century England, who was fueled by hatred of Catholic Spain and his devotion to his Protestant queen Elizabeth I. Highly recommended reading, Drake is a very carefully researched and engagingly told account with an especial focus upon Drake's nautical and military tactics.