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.

John Sugden, Sir Francis Drake, loc. 56