His attacks on Spanish cities and ships transformed his private war into a struggle for surivival between Protestant England and Catholic Spain, in which he became Elizabeth I's most prominent admiral and marked the emergence of England as major maritime nation.

The first was the expansion of the Tudor state, which demanded more talent than high birth could supply.

From this we learn that in 1548 Edmund was indicted for two offences of robbery – stealing a horse and beating Roger Langisforde and rifling his purse on the highway, petty and sordid sixteenth-century crimes. He was described as being ‘late of Tavistock’ before the end of the year, which suggests that although he was pardoned he had already bolted.

Throughout his life, Drake’s profound faith was arguably his most salient characteristic, and it provided the mainspring of his tempestuous career. There would be other motivations – patriotism, profit and personal grievances against the Spaniards – but none was greater than his Protestantism. Those who have portrayed him purely as an avaricious freebooter have underestimated both the religious climate of the day and Drake’s own intense piety. It was his confidence in God’s protection and the belief that God worked through him that gave him the courage to brave the greatest dangers.

The earliest evidence, from the 1560s, shows that Drake’s religious convictions were not only deep but extreme and uncompromising. In time he would find himself a spiritual home among the Elizabethan Puritans, for to Drake the Roman Church was not merely corrupted by the excrescences of the centuries and in need of reform; it was a false church, administered, as he said, by Antichrist, and fit only to be eschewed and condemned.

In 1545 rich silver deposits were located at Potosi in what is now Bolivia and three years later more at Zacatecas in Mexico. By the 1560s, when Drake first saw the Caribbean, the mines were producing upon a large and regular scale, and a transatlantic trade between Seville and the New World had emerged.

In the resultant confession he admitted that it was Francis Drake who had converted him to Protestantism on the voyage of 1566–7.

But Hawkins was sure enough of his ground to allow his ships to slip out of Plymouth on 9 November, 1566, under a different captain, John Lovell. There were three vessels, the Paul of 200 tons under Master James Hampton, the Solomon of 100 tons under Master James Raunse, and the 40-ton Pasco under Master Robert Bolton.

It can hardly be doubted that as he struggled over the wintry Atlantic swells Drake was coming to an important decision. The day of the contraband trade was over, smouldering in the ruins of that Mexican roadstead. It was time for another way, Drake’s way. For the rest of his life Francis Drake pictured himself an avenger, bent upon rewarding the treachery of Don Martin Enriquez. It must have seemed a futile, an almost presumptuous decision at the time, but it put a fire into the obscure little sea captain, defeated and dishonoured. On the pitching Judith, brooding upon his misfortunes, Francis Drake declared war upon the King of Spain.

Privateers were authorized by governments to raid enemy shipping during war-time, and they were the common recourse of nations whose formal navies were weak.

Whatever England’s official relationships with Spain might be, a popular anti-Spanish xenophobia was in the making that would acclaim Drake as its hero.

By the time Drake’s men reached their destination they were sodden, much of their gunpowder was useless, and even the strings to their crossbows were too wet to be efficient. The men would have to shelter and restore their weapons to order, and for more than half an hour Drake waited impatiently beneath a penthouse while the storm subsided, knowing that every moment that passed gave his enemies time to regroup.

An instrumental figure in the transformation, and in the formulation of Drake’s new strategy, was a remarkable Negro called Diego, who had defected from his Spanish masters to the English during the raid on Nombre de Dios. He attached himself to Drake as a manservant, and between the two developed a close friendship that benefited both. … It was from Diego that Drake learned more of the cimarrones, of their knowledge of the treasure route between Panama and Nombre de Dios, and of their hatred of the Spaniards, from whose cruelties they had fled. Diego assured Drake that the cimarrones would help him, and the captain led his small squadron into the Gulf of Uraba, where he could perfect his new plan, reprovision his vessels and allow the alarm that had frustrated his attack upon Cartagena to subside.

Drake had turned to the cimarrones as tools to his ends, but from the relationship he learned a respect for Negroes and coloured peoples generally that was in advance of most of the empire builders of his time. Working shoulder to shoulder with these black men, following them along jungle trails only they knew, confronting hazards together, and listening to their stories of the treatment they had received from the Spaniards, Drake thought that he understood their plight.

With his usual decision he declared that he would open the body of one of the victims to investigate the origins of the sickness, and since the very proposition filled the men with horror, he chose his brother as the subject of the autopsy. Unfortunately, the operation was futile, and left Drake no wiser.

Drake saw a vision of the future here, the basis of another adventure. Just as he had led the corsairs to the isthmus highway, so he now grasped the possibility of unlocking the door to the Pacific, where none but the Spaniards and the occasional Portuguese had gone from Europe before, and which was still largely a mystery even to them.

Enormous as Drake’s booty had been, it was only a minor loss in the totality of Spain’s transatlantic trade, equal to only a twentieth of the annual value of the exports from Spain to the West Indies.

Edmund Howes, who may have obtained his information from the man himself, wrote that Drake voluntarily provided three frigates for the Earl of Essex’s forces in Ireland, and that he served Essex with distinction by sea and land in the capture of ‘divers’ strong fortresses. This is an exaggeration, because familiarity with Essex’s forays in Ireland reveals few encounters with stone houses, let alone enemy fortresses, and little in the way of naval action. There is one exception: the capture of Rathlin Island, and the records of Essex’s expedition confirm that Drake was indeed engaged for that service and discharged soon after it was completed.

Time would show that Drake had the capacity for ruthlessness of a kind, but he was not an inhumane man, and he had already shown in his raids in the West Indies that he would attempt to deal with prisoners as generously as circumstances permitted. He had never killed unresisting Spaniards nor prisoners, and he had protected them from the cimarrones.

If this interpretation is correct, Drake was in effect a privateer, a licensed private man-of-war, an instrument of government policy, rather than a pirate, but with the difference that war had not been declared between England and Spain and Drake carried no commission; if he was captured he had nothing that would incriminate the queen.

On deep-sea voyages, in which ships were remote from the common instruments of justice, mutiny was the most feared and extreme of offences. … In circumstances like these mutinous spirits soon infected others, and the history of the sea is full of the murders and strifes that ensued, and of the weak and irresolute captains like Dampier, Kidd and Bligh who succumbed to them.

Drake also formally claimed these southern islands for his country and called them the Elizabeth Islands. They were the first overseas possessions claimed for England during the current reign, preceding Drake’s own attachment of Nova Albion (California) in 1579 and Gilbert’s formal possession of Newfoundland in 1583.

When he could free himself from the three hours a day he spent in worship, the attention he had to give to the handling of the ship and other matters, and the time he spent listening patiently to the council whose advice he seldom heeded, he found refuge in his cabin, studying charts and sailing directions, and – another unusual cultured touch – painting with cousin John. As a record of the voyage, he noted not only geography and navigation, but carefully painted the wildlife he had seen, birds, trees and seals.

Given that lives were at risk in any armed contest, Drake’s raid on the Pacific coast of South America was remarkably bloodless. None of his prisoners was killed, although those who acted disingenuously, who attempted to withhold information or valuables, were sometimes dealt with severely indeed. Today, this brutality stimulates revulsion, but Drake lived in a world very different from our own, and he cannot fairly be judged by the ethics of the late twentieth century. We must locate his behaviour within the context of sixteenth-century conflict.

The English view was that discovery alone did not constitute ownership of territory; only effective occupancy or control by a Christian prince could do that.

Francisco Vitoria of the University of Salamanca contended in 1532 that Spain’s claims to the New World were valid only inasmuch as they applied to uninhabited country; inhabited land belonged not unnaturally to its inhabitants.

The Golden Hind sailed on 26 March, forging across the Indian Ocean. She came within sight of the African coast on 21 May and cruised around the Cape of Good Hope in June, searching anxiously for a further source of fresh water. If it had not been for the rain collected in casks set upon the deck the company would have been in difficulties, and when a landfall was made at Sierra Leone the supply was down to less than half a pint to every three persons. Surprisingly, the narratives are silent upon this extraordinary phase of Drake’s voyage, a run of 9,700 miles from Java to Sierra Leone without a base or a reliable map, but experienced seamen marked it as among his finest achievements

Thus at a stroke the two great imperial powers were fused into one. Portugal’s domination of the African coast, the Indian Ocean, the East Indies and Brazil was now added to Spain’s hold upon parts of Europe and the Americas to form the largest empire the world had yet seen.

About £264,000 worth was eventually deposited in the Tower, according to a memorandum of Burghley.

Instead, she handed it to Marchaumont and bade him perform the ceremony of knighthood, cunningly involving France in a brazen act of defiance of Spain.

Those jibes about the upstart, the social climber, were having some effect, and Sir Francis’s initial reaction was to deny his humble origins, and insist that his family had, after all, been distinguished.

The capture of Santo Domingo and Cartagena proclaimed to the world how weakly Philip’s American empire was defended, how vulnerable were its principal cities and the treasure flow that depended upon them. The king’s credit, upon which his military campaigns were founded, temporarily collapsed, and he was rumoured to be almost bankrupt. The bank of Seville broke, and that at Venice tottered.

Whether or not Elizabeth had genuinely hoped that she could release Drake without starting a war, for Philip the raid was the last straw. Encouraged by his leading counsellors, Juan de Idiaquez and Cristóbal de Moura, he recognized that even though Parma had captured Antwerp, even though Leicester’s English army had achieved little to halt the Spanish tide in the Netherlands, Spain’s communications with both the Low Countries and the Americas depended upon defeating England. It had to be done, for God and Empire. From the different proposals submitted to him by Santa Cruz and Parma came the king’s great crusade against England.

Despite the legacy of her extravagant forbears she had paid her debts, revalued the debased coinage and created a reserve fund, but with a gross income of less than half a million pounds a year her government was already in trouble again.

With chagrin Elizabeth saw her chested reserve fall by four-fifths between 1584 and 1588 to a mere £55,000, less than it would take for the full mobilization of her fleet.

Taxation caused unrest, and it increased Elizabeth’s dependence upon Parliament, which alone had the right to grant it.

On 15 March, 1587 Drake’s new commission was signed, and it was entirely to his satisfaction.

As an indication of the relative contributions, as determined to apportion prize money, it was reckoned that the queen provided 2,100 tons and 1,020 men; the merchants 2,100 tons and 894 men; Drake 600 tons and 619 men; and Howard 175 tons and 415 men.4

By Fenner’s count forty-seven caravels and barks laden with hoops, pipe-boards, planks and oars were burned. These were the materials that Santa Cruz needed to make casks to store provisions for the fleet, and when the Armada eventually sailed the following year the rot that prematurely afflicted its supplies was in no small way due to the Spaniards’ having to use unseasoned wood for casks after Drake’s raid destroyed so much of their supply of seasoned timber.

The Crown provided less than half of the funds that created Drake’s expeditions. All Elizabethan naval commanders were more or less dependent upon private finance, and had to ensure a financial return if they wanted similar backing in the future.

Disease, probably typhus fever, had been troubling the English ships, particularly those of Howard’s division, for some time, but after the fleet’s return the losses reached alarming proportions, welcomed only by the enemy and, almost incredibly, some members of the government who saw it merely as a saving on wages. The men had not been paid and could not, therefore, be fully discharged, and they began dying daily on the ships and in the ports, their miseries multiplied by deficiencies in clothing and what seems to have been a form of food poisoning occasioned by the consumption of contaminated victuals.

In all some sixty of the 130 ships that had sailed for Spain had been lost, and, no less troubling to a monarch who genuinely felt for many of his servants (unlike Elizabeth, Philip insisted that his veterans be paid), the toll in dead, prisoners or dying probably rose to 15,000 or more.

Norris himself advanced no such charge, for, whatever Sir Francis’s bluff optimism may have led him to say by way of encouragement to the officers, he acted fully in accordance with the plans he had worked out with Norris and the senior commanders at Peniche, plans which enjoined him to risk the fleet in the Tagus only after he had assessed the prospects at Cascais. … Elizabeth had made it completely clear that an attack upon Lisbon would be dependent upon a considerable show of support for Antonio, and it was upon that above all else that her commanders relied.

After quitting Corunna he had opted for a voyage to Lisbon rather than Santander and San Sebastian, perhaps in response to the commercial interests of the expedition, but more probably in hopes of opening a front in Portugal – a strategy that rested more upon Dom Antonio’s glib tongue and Drake’s ardour to damage Spain than upon a cool assessment of the situation.

Where once he had been bold, nimble and surprising, he was now hesitant, ponderous and predictable. He refused to believe it, and said the Indies had changed. But it was not that. It was he who had changed. The conclusion is inescapable: Sir Francis Drake had lost his spell.

Although admirals strove to meet the new challenges of order, discipline, organization and supply, the sea-keeping qualities of the fleets were severely limited by the lack of effective remedies for disease, and their offensive capacity was blunted by inexperience in battle.

While the Tudor navy certainly improved in these respects, its relative inadequacy was illustrated by Elizabeth’s constant recourse to privateering, which remained the typical form of naval warfare throughout the period.

Under Drake’s leadership, naval operations certainly expanded and diversified, but as Kenneth Andrews has so cogently argued, they frequently failed to meet their aspirations, and Elizabeth’s navy remained immature.

By exposing these flaws – such as the isthmus of Panama, the route into the Pacific, and the general vulnerability of the Caribbean – he held the initiative in his war against the Spaniards for years.

The age of Drake was one of endeavour rather than success. The Elizabethans failed to find the North-east Passage, or the North-west Passage; they failed to colonize America; they did not establish a sustainable trade with the Americas, and it was not until the seventeenth century that they finally opened a firm trade with the East.

European seafarers, consequently, learned to live in a difficult dangerous world in which the distinctions between merchant and corsair, trade and plunder, and peace and war were blurred.

Repeated fire was not primarily achieved within each ship, but by a succession of ships, each discharging her guns before temporarily withdrawing.