ond baron Howard of Effingham, Hawkins served as a
rear admiral during the battle.
For his service against the Spanish Armada,
Hawkins was knighted. Two years later, he was dis-
patched to the coast of Portugal to attack and seize a
Spanish fleet laden with gold and treasure from the
New World. However, he missed the ships altogether,
and they sailed home safely. Hawkins wrote a lengthy
letter to Queen Elizabeth, quoting Scripture: “Paul
doth plant, Apollo doth water, but God giveth the
increase,” to which Elizabeth is allegedly to have ex-
claimed, “God’s death! This fool went out a soldier, and
has come home a divine.”
In 1595, Hawkins went with his cousin, Sir Francis
Drake, on a voyage to the West Indies to hunt for the
Spanish treasure fleet, but their mission ended in failure.
Hawkins became sick, and he died suddenly on 12 No-
vember 1595 off the coast of what is now Puerto Rico.
He was buried at sea.
In his 1958 work Vantage at Sea, historian Thomas
Woodrooffe writes:
John Hawkins, treasurer of the Navy, was more
than any other man responsible for the defeat of
the [Spanish] Armada. He was that rare combi-
nation in any age, a seaman who was also a good
businessman. He himself had made three long
voyages, and he knew what was needed to keep a
fighting fleet at sea, for months if need be, some-
thing his colleagues had never contemplated. He
encouraged the building of ships intended not
for hand-to-hand fighting but for free maneuver
and the rapid discharge of their guns. He was
determined not only to have ships of the high-
est quality but the best men to sail and fight in
them, and being a businessman, he knew very
well that if he wanted quality, he would have to
pay for it. In spite of calculated obstruction and
virulent accusations of fraud by other members
of the Navy Board, Hawkins went serenely on
with his self-imposed task of transforming an old
and out-of-date fleet into one that was modern
and oceangoing. He seemed impervious to criti-
cism, and it was this bland indifference to those
who considered themselves his elders and betters
that finally proved too much for old Sir William
Winter and made him explode about Hawkinsin a letter to [Lord] Burghley: “He careth not to
whom he speaketh, nor what he sayeth, blushe
he will not.”References: Williamson, James Alexander, Sir John
Hawkins: The Time and the Man (Oxford, U.K.: The
Clarendon Press, 1927); Kelsey, Harry, Sir John Hawkins:
Queen Elizabeth’s Slave Trader (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 2003); Walling, Robert Alfred John, A
Sea-dog of Devon: A Life of Sir John Hawkins (London:
Cassell and Company, 1907); Mattingly, Garrett, The
Armada (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959); Bruce, An-
thony, and William Cogar, “Hawkins, Sir John,” in An
Encyclopedia of Naval History (New York: Checkmark
Books, 1999), 171–72; Woodrooffe, Thomas, Vantage at
Sea: England’s Emergence as an Oceanic Power (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1958).Henry V (1387–1422) English king
Many of the events in Henry’s early life depicted in Wil-
liam Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth are apocryphal. A de-
scendant of William i (the Conqueror), he was born at
Monmouth in September 1387, the eldest son of Henry
IV (1367–1413) and his wife Mary de Bohun. At his
birth, he was styled as Henry Earl of Monmouth, and
when his father ascended to the English throne in 1399,
he became Prince of Wales. He was raised by his pa-
ternal uncle, Henry, duke of Beaufort (ca. 1377–1447),
Henry VI’s half brother. Historian David Hilliam, in his
study of the men and women who have ruled England,
writes: “According to Shakespeare, young Prince Hal, as
Henry was called while still in his teens, enjoyed a wild
lifestyle with an old reprobate of a companion, Sir John
Falstaff, and a motley collection of other rogues and
thieves. The Boar’s Head tavern... saw him as a regular
tippler.” However, when his father died on 20 March
1413, Henry, at 26, gave up his wild ways and took the
throne as Henry V.
Henry’s reign lasted only nine years, but in that
time he became a notable soldier monarch like his ances-
tor edWard iii. Almost at once he went to war against
France to claim territory through his descent from Wil-
liam the Conqueror. He named his uncle and benefactor
Henry, duke of Beaufort, as lord chancellor to act on
his behalf while he was away. By 1415, he had raised
enough men to invade France.henRy v