Francis Drake: The Pirate Who Gave England the World | The Tudors' Darkest Hour EP 2

Tom Holland: Francis grows up absolutely stamped by his father's religious convictions which we have no reason to doubt. You know they're they're um they're very devoutly held and as an adult um Drake's Protestantism will be very fiery, very uncompromising, very passionately held. So to quote very much friend of the show John Sugdan. He said of Drake that that his profound faith was arguably his most salient characteristic and it provided the mainspring of his tempestuous career. And I think that's right. Drake has an incredible appetite for adventure, but that adventure is always in the cause of his understanding of the gospel. And so like a lot of the figures that we've been talking about in this series um William Ceell who becomes Lord Burley or Francis Walssingham um Drake grows up a very very committed anti-apist you know he is opposed to everything that smacks of the pope's rule right um and that may be even more important to him than than the sense he has of himself as a committed enemy of Spain. I mean, I think that the hostility to to Spain and to the Pope are lied in Drake, but probably it's hostility to the Pope that is the real kind of motivation for him.

Tom Holland: At stake on Drake's ship is a jockeying for position between Douty, the lawyer, the gentleman with intimate connections at court, the protetéé of Sir Christopher Hatton, who is the incredibly close court to Elizabeth herself, and Drake, who is an upwardly mobile son of Devon with a massive chip on his shoulder. ... Drake says to his men when he's kind of, you know, commissioning the jury, consider what a great voyage we are like to make. The like was never made out of England. We cannot afford to have dissension on board our ships. You know, we cannot tolerate even the threat of mutiny. ... So they finish their meal and then uh Douty is brought forward uh and his head is chopped off and Drake lifts the seed head and cries out, 'Lo, this is the end of traitors.' ... It serves to establish a very important precedent, namely that the authority of a captain on board his own ship outranks that of everyone else, even a gentleman. And you might say that it is because Drake asserted himself over Douty in this manner that in 1912 when the Titanic hit the iceberg, Charles Loller, the guy in charge of allocating people to the lifeboats on the sinking Titanic, was able to tell um Aster, the richest man on board the ship, 'No, you can't get in board.' And Aster accepted that instruction.

Tom Holland: Drake's achievements are stupifying. The voyage has lasted 1,046 days. It was the first by an English ship, the second in history to circumn the globe. He has survived appalling weather. Drake has returned with enormous amounts of treasure, more than the entire annual revenue of Queen Elizabeth. I mean, stupifying. And he's not only plundered the Spanish, he's outsmarted them and made them look foolish. ... on the 22nd of July, they make landfall in Sierra Leone, what will become Sierra Leone on the west coast of Africa. And that is 9,700 miles without picking up any supplies, any provisions. Drake's crew suffer no deaths from scurvy, no deaths from dehydration. It's an incredible feat. Absolutely incredible feat.