In time of crisis, so the legend goes, Sir Francis Drake will come to our aid again, as once he did against the Spanish Armada.
Drake’s Drum is a snare drum painted with the arms of Sir Francis Drake, which went with him on his historic voyage around the world in 1577-80. It is said that before his death, he instructed his heirs to keep it safe at Buckland Abbey, his family home in Devon, and promised that if ever England were under threat the people should beat the drum, and he would return. The drum survives to this day.
In 1573, Sir Francis Drake had two ambitions: to revenge himself on the Spanish, and to see with his own eyes the Pacific Ocean.
In 1567, Francis Drake had been humiliated on an English expedition against Spanish possessions around the Caribbean. Five years later he returned, seeking revenge. With the help of the Cimarrons — Africans escaped from Spanish slavers, and nursing their own grievances — he planned to snatch gold bound for the Spanish Treasury at Nombre de Dios. But first, his chaplain tells us, he had a stop to make.
At the height of the Inquisition, King Philip II of Spain sent a glorious fleet against England to bring the nation back to his Church.
When Mary I of England died in 1558, her devoutly Catholic widower Philip II of Spain felt he should have inherited her crown. Instead it went to Mary’s Protestant half-sister Elizabeth, who gave asylum to Dutch Protestants suffering under Philip’s Spanish Inquisition, harassed his Atlantic trade, and in 1587 executed her most plausible Catholic rival, Mary Queen of Scots. A year later, Philip took drastic action.
Elizabethan adventurer Sir Francis Drake combined sailing round the world with really annoying the King of Spain.
Elizabethan adventurer Sir Francis Drake was only the second man in history to circumnavigate the globe, a feat he achieved in 1580 aboard the famous ‘Golden Hinde’. His attention was not, however, concentrated exclusively on making historic discoveries.