Richard Grenville

English military leader

• Born: June 6, 1542
• Birthplace: Buckland Abbey?, Devonshire, England
• Died: c. September 3, 1591
• Place of death: At sea, off Flores, the Azores

Grenville’s heroic death in battle against an overwhelming fleet was an inspiration to Elizabethan Englishmen in their war against a powerful Spanish empire.

Early Life

Sir Richard Grenville (GREHN-vil) was born into an old Cornish family of some distinction. The first record of Grenvilles in the west country can be dated to 1145. Grenville’s grandfather was a soldier and trusted official under Henry VIII and became one of the richest men in Cornwall. His father, Sir Roger Grenville, commanded the royal ship Mary Rose and was tragically drowned when it sank at Portsmouth in July, 1545. His mother, Thomasina Cole, then married Thomas Arundell of Leigh. On the death of his grandfather in 1550, Grenville inherited his substantial property.

Of Grenville’s early life and education little is known, but in 1559 he attended the Inner Temple, one of the Inns of Court, rather than going to one of the universities. Late in 1562, he was involved in a brawl in which he killed a man; he had to be pardoned by the queen. Despite the misadventure, it is possible that he was the same Grenville who was elected to Parliament in 1563 for a Cornish borough. By early 1565, after coming into control of his inheritance, he married Mary St. Leger. Their first son, Roger, died at the end of that year, but in 1567 they had a second son, Bernard, who survived to succeed his father.

Both as a result of his temperament and because of the military tradition in which he had been reared, it was inevitable that, after reaching adulthood, Grenville would join the military. In the summer of 1566, leaving his pregnant wife behind, he went off with some of his cousins to Hungary, where he served for a time in the army of Emperor Maximilian II fighting the Turks. By 1568, after a temporary peace had been negotiated, Grenville returned unscathed to England.

In 1569, still restless, Grenville took his family to Ireland, where, working with Warham St. Leger, the cousin of his father-in-law, he hoped to advance his fortunes. At the time, Ireland was regarded as frontier country, wild and savage as the distant New World and ripe for exploitation and colonization. Grenville found himself involved at once in suppressing a serious revolt by the native Irish. By 1570, disappointed in his hopes, Grenville returned to England.

In 1571, and again in 1572, Grenville was elected to Parliament for Cornwall. Up until that point, there was little remarkable about Grenville’s life and career. He had done nothing that might not have been expected from any other wealthy gentleman of the age with a restless temperament and a taste for adventure.

Life’s Work

Although in the 1570’s Grenville settled into the prescribed pattern for a leading member of the country gentry serving in Parliament and taking his place as an important figure in the local government of Cornwall as a justice of the peace and deputy lieutenant and, in 1577, sheriff of Cornwall his great energies found another outlet. The west country, thrusting out into the Atlantic like a long wedge, was the nursery of many of England’s boldest seamen, merchants in foreign trade and explorers. From the area came a stream of brave adventurous captains such as Sir John Hawkins and Sir Francis Drake, ready to take risky voyages for profit anywhere in a widening world. For men of greater wealth and social standing men such as Grenville and his cousins Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Ralegh there was a larger role to be played: organizing and securing funds for voyages whose exploration of uncharted waters would add to England’s territory as well as enrich its projectors. One great hope was that a passage could be discovered around the New World, a route to the wealth of Asia, one not dominated by a rival power. In the 1570’s, Gilbert was promoting a search for a northwest passage. Alternatively, Grenville was trying to drum up interest in a southwesterly route around South America. Going by the southwestern route, Englishmen would be trespassing on Spanish claims, but relations with that great empire were already deteriorating. Eventually, Grenville’s own plan for a Pacific expedition came to nothing, and it was Drake who first made the striking voyage of circumnavigation for England on the southerly route from 1577 to 1580, raiding the wealth of the virtually undefended Pacific coast of Spanish South America, coming home ballasted with silver.

After Gilbert died in 1583, Ralegh inherited his role as the leading projector of English schemes to explore, settle, and develop the New World. A colony established there offered the prospects both of cheap land and of a base for privateers to raid Spanish commerce. In this effort, Grenville became one of Ralegh’s principal supporters and led the first expedition sent out in 1585 to settle Virginia (the same expedition that established the ill-fated Roanoke settlement). It was his first naval command. Having left a party behind to establish a permanent English settlement in North America, Grenville and his small fleet returned home, capturing a rich Spanish merchant ship en route.

At that point, after a decade and a half of steadily worsening relations, England finally became involved in a full-scale war with Spain. Spain’s attempts to close its empire to trade with outsiders and to regard interlopers as pirates had long antagonized English commercial interests and led to an undeclared private war, although neither side was eager for an open conflict. The endless flow of gold and silver from a vast empire, however, transformed Spain into the most powerful state in the Western world. Spain had thus replaced France as the principal threat to English security. In Europe, Spain was committed to the suppression of Protestant heresy. In the nearby Netherlands , Spain had been trying since 1568 to put down a rebellion by Protestants. Many in England feared that if Spain succeeded there, England would be next. Queen Elizabeth, although she detested rebellion, agreed and provided aid to the Dutch.

Once war was declared, England had to be prepared to resist a mighty Spanish invasion fleet. Grenville, returning home from his second Virginia voyage, profitably raided the Spanish Azores on the way home. Then, as an experienced soldier, he was busy organizing the land and sea defenses of the west country, the first line of battle if the country were to be invaded by Spain. When the Armada finally came, it was decisively defeated, though the danger was far from over. Grenville’s part in the victory was modest. His own fleet of ships, being outfitted for the resupply of Virginia, had been commandeered to support Drake.

With the most pressing fear of invasion over, the war settled in to a stalemate. Long-standing English naval strategy was to recognize the unequal strength of the two sides. It was impossible for England to defeat preponderant Spanish power directly. Spain could be induced to make peace on favorable terms only if the war could be made too costly for them by cutting the supply of gold and silver from the Americas. The most effective way to carry on such a campaign would be to have a naval base on or close to Spain’s gold pipeline, either on the Iberian coast or in the Azores, the principal base from which the Spaniards convoyed the incoming treasure fleets to safety.

Furthering this strategy, in 1591, Lord Thomas Howard commanded a small fleet of some sixteen ships to the Azores. Grenville went out in command of the Revenge. At the end of August, the English fleet, after many months cruising off the Azores, was caught by surprise by a large Spanish squadron of fifty-three ships. Howard managed to extricate his ships from the action, but Grenville declined to run. The Revenge, alone, stood up to the overwhelming power of the Spanish fleet for some fifteen hours while the ship was pounded to pieces. At last, awash with the blood of her crew, and with Grenville himself mortally wounded, the Revenge was forced to strike her colors. The dying Grenville was taken aboard the Spanish flagship, where he died within a few days. Of his crew of 150, only 20 survived. Though the destruction of the Revenge was the result of Grenville’s foolhardy stubbornness, the episode was quickly taken up by the ballad singers and mythmakers. Grenville’s heroism in the face of impossible odds became a watchword for Englishmen, and even the Spaniards acknowledged the raw courage and devotion to honor in a gallant, if useless, death.

Significance

In the main lines of his career, Grenville was a typical important country gentleman, a member of Parliament and participant in local government. What distinguished him from his fellows and put him in the company of the other gentlemen of late Elizabethan England whose lives acquired legendary stature Ralegh, Drake, and Hawkins was that he was one of a small number of bold spirits who were prepared to risk life and fortune for the Virginia project. Though the first Virginia effort, in which he played so large a part, failed, the path had been blazed, and in the next generation, the enduring settlement of British North America began in Virginia. If Grenville’s role in the Virginia project entitles him to some special attention, his other claim to fame, and the major reason he is remembered after nearly four hundred years, is one bloody day’s fighting at sea. For late sixteenth century Englishmen, the defeat of the Revenge was like the Battle of Thermopylae, a moral tale about stout courage and fidelity to duty, the willingness to sacrifice all for the love of queen and country. In the exuberant patriotism of Elizabethan England, this was an episode to be cherished, and so it remained the subject of poems and admiring legend. In a more skeptical age, it might be more readily said of Grenville’s death that it was magnificent, but it was not war.

Bibliography

Andrews, Kenneth R. Elizabethan Privateering, 1583-1603. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1964. An authoritative work on privateering in England during the 1585-1603 war with Spain. Provides background on Grenville’s activities, with some specific references to him and to his west country associates. A useful bibliography.

Andrews, Kenneth R. Trade, Plunder, and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480-1630. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Provides a careful summary of British voyages of exploration and settlement.

Black, J. B. The Reign of Elizabeth, 1558-1603. 2d ed. Reprint. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. A volume in the standard Oxford History of England series, Black’s work is still the best general textbook covering the entire Elizabethan period.

Cheyney, Edward P. History of England from the Defeat of the Armada to the Death of Elizabeth. 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green, 1914-1926. Reprint. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1967. Despite its age, this work is still the best detailed history of the period 1588 to 1603 and is very helpful on the general context after the defeat of the Armada.

Loades, David. England’s Maritime Empire: Seapower, Commerce, and Policy, 1490-1690. New York: Longman, 2000. Study of the development of England into a colonial power. Places the settlement of Virginia within the larger context of England’s imperial project. Includes maps, bibliographic references, index.

Miller, Lee. Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony. New York: Penguin Books, 2002. Grenville’s role in the establishment of the colony is discussed as Miller attempts to determine the real causes of the colonists’ disappearance. Includes illustrations, maps, bibliographic references, and index.

Read, Conyers. Lord Burghley and Queen Elizabeth. London: Jonathan Cape, 1960. The second volume of a two-volume work. A detailed study of the queen’s principal adviser on domestic and foreign issues and therefore a close account of the policy background for Grenville’s public career after 1570.

Rowse, A. L. Sir Richard Grenville of the Revenge. Reprint. London: Jonathan Cape, 1977. Rowse provides much critical comment and analysis of the sources as well as a thorough background on the west country itself.

Wernham, R. B. The Making of Elizabethan Foreign Policy, 1558-1603. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. A brief overview, by a leading scholar, of the foreign policy background for Elizabeth’s reign. The best concise introduction, with helpful suggestions for additional reading.

Williams, Patrick. Armada. Charleston, S.C.: Tempus, 2000. Monograph on the English defeat of the Spanish Armada. Details the causes of the attempted invasion, the battle itself, and its aftermath. Includes illustrations, maps, bibliographic references, and index.

Williamson, J. A. The Age of Drake. 5th ed. London: A. & C. Black, 1965. A study by one of the principal researchers in the field of British maritime history during its great age; a classic in that field. Williamson’s other writings also are helpful as background. Includes maps, one foldout in color.