The secrets of the past are all around us, hidden in our streets,
buried under our feet, and in this series I'll be uncovering
those secrets as I explore Britain's most historic towns.
I'll decipher physical clues...
Look at that. It's covered with lizard-like scales.
..and get to know some extraordinary
characters who are often overlooked.
He operated like a spy master.
They lied. They deceived. They cheated.
With the help of Ben Robinson's eye in the sky,
I'll discover which towns across the UK
reveal the most about each period in British history,
and find out how those stories still resonate today.
3,880.
More and more individuals are still dying from the plague.
Oh!
Oh, my goodness!
From the adventurous Elizabethans to the elegant Georgians,
from medieval knights through to the height of empire,
I'll tell the story of an era through the story of a single town.
Today, I'm in Britain's most Elizabethan town...
Secret courtyard.
It's rather like Jeff Bezos living above the Amazon warehouse. Yeah.
..a town that helped forge a brand-new, indomitable England,
and usher in its first golden age.
She's absolutely dripping in pearls and gems, isn't she?
Home to ruthless pirates
who stole millions as England entered the slave trade,
but were acclaimed as heroes.
There's this mixture of being patriotic,
and then also getting rich.
If you really want to understand the Elizabethans
in all their crafty, contradictory glory,
and the emergence of this new, world-encompassing myth of England,
then Plymouth is the place to come.
21st-century Plymouth is a city
that's home to a quarter of a million people,
and it's also a busy, thriving port
with regular ferries going across to France and Spain.
It has a thriving maritime community,
the sea is crucial to the economy here.
And Plymouth has always played a pivotal role
in this country's defences down the ages.
It's home to Devonport,
which is the largest naval base in western Europe,
and it's the reason why in the Second World War
the Luftwaffe flattened half of the city.
The naval presence that worried Hitler so much stretches back over 450 years.
Tucked away on the south coast of Devon, 16th-century Plymouth
may have been isolated from the rest of the country,
but its position at the gateway to the English Channel
made it utterly crucial to Britain's trade and defence,
a fact that wasn't lost on the Elizabethans.
The Elizabethan era began when the daughter of Henry VIII
and his ill-fated second wife, Anne Boleyn,
was crowned Queen of England and Ireland in 1558.
Elizabeth's 45-year reign saw England blossom from bankrupt backwater
to global player, laying down the foundations for an empire
that would soon exploit great swathes of the globe.
There are no records of Elizabeth, actually, ever setting foot
in Plymouth, but it's claimed that here on The Hoe
is where Francis Drake casually finished his game of bowls
before sailing off to destroy
the supposedly invincible Spanish Armada.
But like many of the best stories, it's not exactly true,
but what's certain is that Plymouth was playing a crucial role.
It was at the heart of the action during the Elizabethan age.
How was it that a small, relatively remote town
of just a few thousand people became such a key player?
To understand that, first I need to know what kind of kingdom -
or indeed queendom - Elizabeth inherited.
I'm meeting historian Dr Miranda Kaufmann to find out.
When Elizabeth came to the throne, what did she inherit?
A real quagmire of problems. The country's in debt.
It was a religiously divided country.
She had enemies abroad
and to make it even worse, she was a woman.
And a single woman. Yes.
So, you know, presumably with no... Well, no prospect of marriage or...
Oh, no, there were loads of prospects... ..were people expecting her to get married?
There was a huge pressure on her to get married immediately.
You know, people were looking to her to find a man
who could then be their king. Yeah.
Her sister, Mary, had been drawn into Spain's war against France,
which had been disastrous.
Just that January, England had lost Calais,
the last English foothold on the Continent.
She was going to make England Protestant again,
which was going to lead to it, to being really isolated
in Catholic Europe.
So, in its stubborn pursuit of sovereignty,
England found itself at loggerheads
with an all-powerful European neighbour.
Sound familiar?
Despite poor foreign relations, England was still trading
with Catholic Europe, still exporting to the continent.
Valuable commodities, like locally mined tin, were very much in demand.
And with an array of tidal rivers all ending at Plymouth,
the town soon became a key export hub.
As is so often the case, one or two businesses start to do really well,
and then a whole load of others take off in their wake,
and before you know it, Plymouth is a boom town.
I entered a prime part of Elizabethan Plymouth, an area today
referred to as the Barbican.
A few remaining blocks of businesses and houses
tucked away down by the waterside.
Archaeologist Win Scutt knows every inch
of this old mercantile district.
It does feel like we're getting into the heart of old Plymouth here.
It is nice, you've got all this lovely granite and slate,
and the Plymouth limestone as well.
Despite many buildings dating to later centuries, a walk
down New Street can still transport you back 450 years.
It's these beautiful Elizabethan doorways.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Is that original? The carvings, that's original.
That's lovely. Lovely work.
There's a couple here with angels on them.
This one is an original Elizabethan, isn't it?
Yes, look at the angels on the top here. Oh! Aren't they beautiful?
Yeah, they're lovely.
So, there's lots of Elizabethan Plymouth surviving here
in New Street.
Built for prosperous French wine merchant Thomas Yogge,
Prysten House was one of the finest houses
in Elizabethan Plymouth.
This would have been the place to live in the 16th century.
Now part of a restaurant,
the house is open to the public,
but I'm lucky enough to be getting a private tour.
Mind your head.
Look at this. This is gorgeous.
Isn't it fantastic? Secret courtyard. Yes.
It's just shouting prestige. The merchant here wants
to show his affiliation with France, with Venice,
with all the great traders of Europe, I think,
because he's importing wine, you know.
I mean, it feels really Mediterranean.
But this is where all the barrels and all the...the warehouses...
Essentially, this is rather like Jeff Bezos living above the Amazon warehouse.
Yeah. He's living upstairs,
but all the work, he can keep a direct eye,
and come out of those doors,
and see his staff working or not working, you know,
so he can supervise the whole operation.
Surveying his empire, yeah. Exactly.
Other successful merchants had their premises
in the tight streets of the old town.
A lot of work's been done.
We've had specialist contractors, and they've come from all over the country.
This restoration really is a work in progress
and heritage officer Hannah Pooley's team are still uncovering
original Elizabethan features.
OK, are you ready? Yeah, yeah. Let's go in.
Come on in.
Welcome to 32 New Street. Oh, this is great.
Quite lucky with this house because it's the most authentic version
of an Elizabethan house left in Plymouth,
and that's why it's so special.
It's quayside position made this house a prime location
for sea captains and entrepreneurs.
They'd come here to the middle of Plymouth
when it was bustling and busy
to work and be near their businesses.
So, it's office space? Yeah, and sleeping. Yeah. Yeah.
So, some of them would have two rooms.
They might have an office at the front and a bedroom at the back.
Some people rented one room
so they would have done everything in that one room.
Among the many exotic goods being traded on Plymouth's quayside
was tobacco, which was obviously being sampled right here on site
as these were found under the floorboards.
They must be some of the earliest clay pipes in England.
Yeah, this is the most complete early pipe we found.
And this dates, again, 17th century,
maybe a bit earlier.
Yeah, I don't know an enormous amount about clay pipes,
but I do know that the styles vary a lot over time,
and that they're very dateable. They do.
And you can see the bowl here is much bigger... Yeah.
..and the bowl on the Elizabethan, or slightly later, is smaller,
and that's because tobacco costs so much more.
It's quite extraordinary, isn't it, to think about these foodstuffs
and things like tobacco that seem quite ordinary now...
Yeah. ..but this is the first time that people had seen them, had access to them in Europe.
Yeah, absolutely, and then for hundreds of years,
they smoked them in this house.
Yeah, you can imagine these rooms, can't you, all misty... Yes.
..with the pipe smoke and these kinds of deals
being struck about the next ships coming in.
But at the back it was Castle Street,
and Castle Street was renowned for pubs, and for sex work as well.
So, there were lots of women working back there,
and it's very possible that the men that were living in these rooms,
away from their families, were having a bit of fun of their own.
Easy access to all of that slightly salacious side of life in a port. Absolutely.
Later on, it would become known as Damnation Alley. Damnation Alley!
Yeah. So it tells you something about what life was like there.
I love that. Yeah.
So, you know, they've struck a good deal... Absolutely.
..off they go out the back. Yeah.
If sealing a deal Elizabethan style raises an eyebrow,
many of the intrepid men who sailed from Plymouth would employ
far more morally compromised methods,
and use them with Elizabeth's blessing.
They'd open up new worlds, create new trading opportunities,
and protect England from enemy forces,
but there weren't any epaulettes on the shoulders of these men.
They were pirates.
I'm in Plymouth to learn how,
during the eventful reign of Elizabeth I,
this small town helped change the course of England's history,
from being an also-ran nation
to becoming a country whose empire would eventually span the globe.
I've already seen evidence of an economy based on exotic goods,
but there was also a thriving fishing industry here,
with sailors crossing the Atlantic
to catch cod off the coast of Newfoundland
to be traded back here and in foreign ports.
However, not all local sailors were above board.
Aerial archaeologist Ben Robinson has launched his drone
from the headland across the water
to get a better look at why Plymouth was the perfect place
to get up to no good.
That's beautiful.
I'm getting a brilliant sense here of why this is considered
to be one of the finest natural harbours in the world.
It's got a wide-open mouth to the sea,
relatively sheltered, but easy to access.
I can see all the headlands here, all the outcrops of rock.
There's little inlets, there's little bays,
there's little beaches,
there's reefs, there's rocky outcrops.
We've got fishermen, we've got cargo boats -
all manner of vessels.
So, the mariners in this place would have been mixing
all sorts of activities together.
Perhaps as fishing was a bit quiet, they'd have been doing other things.
Perhaps some of these things were a little bit non-legitimate,
a little bit nefarious.
And if you want places to hide,
places to slip under the noses of the authorities,
this harbour has got them.
In the 1560s, many of these rogue ships that had sailed from Plymouth
returned loaded with valuable treasures
stolen from Europe's richest, most powerful nation.
Spain had grown rich by plundering the Americas for its wealth
and was also Queen Elizabeth's archenemy.
I've met up with Dr Elaine Murphy
to learn more about the role pirating played
in the European power struggle.
Elaine, why was there so much enmity between Spain and England
at this point in time?
Well, there's a huge problem for the Spanish
with a lot of English pirates attacking Spanish merchant
and fishing fleets in the Channel and the North Sea.
But why are the Spanish in the Channel? I don't understand.
There's a lot of Spanish trade to the Spanish Netherlands -
the modern Netherlands and Belgium -
because the Spanish rule there,
but the Dutch are in revolt against them.
Right. So they're trying to gain their freedom.
Yeah.
You also have the problem that Dutch privateers, called Sea Beggars,
who are fighting against the Spanish,
are using English ports and are being permitted by Elizabeth
to sell their goods and get supplies here,
so this is really alienating King Philip II of Spain.
Aw, you can see it. He must have been incredibly frustrated.
You know, not only are the English attacking his ships,
but they're also supporting these Sea Beggars as well.
It's really frustrating for Philip.
Two men in particular were really annoying King Philip.
Both were from South Devon, they sailed from Plymouth,
and they were also cousins.
John Hawkins was a master seafarer
and, arguably, England's first-ever slave trader.
He stole slaves from Portuguese ships
and sold them into a life of appalling misery in the West Indies,
actions effectively sanctioned by Queen Elizabeth
who awarded Hawkins a coat of arms with a bound slave at the top.
Sailing with him and playing his part
in stealing from Spain and Portugal and the rise of the slave trade,
was Hawkins' cousin Francis Drake,
who also ended up working for his queen.
I'm visiting The Box,
Plymouth's almost-finished new museum and gallery,
to see something remarkable.
Oh, that's fantastic.
I know we're here to talk about pirates, Alice,
but don't be distracted by the mammoth in the room.
It's a bit difficult not to be distracted
by the mammoth in the room, though, isn't it?
It's absolutely amazing, it's really beautiful.
So, the galleries we've come through,
those will be open to the public when the museum does open,
but this is all behind the scenes.
Yes, this is here in the archival store in The Box,
so this bit won't be open to the public.
I'm here to see an incredible piece of evidence...
Be very careful with it.
..that directly connects Drake's actions
to the existential needs of his queen and country.
Beautiful, isn't it? It's lovely, look at that seal.
Absolutely beautiful Elizabethan... That's Elizabeth?
That's Elizabeth on the seal. So, it's a really beautiful seal.
Really, really well preserved. Yeah.
You can make out details of her face and her ruff.
That's lo... And it's on vellum.
"Elizabeth by the grace of god,
"Quene of England, France and Ireland.
"Defender of the faith...
"To my loving and faithfull subject,
"Sir Francis Drake knight greeting..." Drake, there.
Yes. Yeah. And what's she saying in it?
She is ordering him "the performance of such matters
"which have been committed to your charge".
So, she's not actually giving them a specific commission to do something,
she's put him in charge of a fleet to attack the Spanish at Cadiz.
But she's not mentioning Cadiz. She's not mentioning the Spanish.
It's all very obscure here. Yes.
This document's all about how he's in charge of the fleet
and how everybody must obey him.
And there's kind of a bleak reference to "the matters"
that she's committed to his charge. "Such matters", yeah.
That gives her a bit of a get-out, doesn't it?
A bit of a get-out, and it gives Drake a lot of leeway
to do whatever he sees as right. Yeah.
The queen gives Drake some ships to sail with him on this voyage,
but most of the ships are privately owned,
so they're private men of war.
So, they're going to attack the King of Spain,
but these men are also going to hope to get rich from this.
They're going to hope to capture Spanish prizes.
So it's both a pre-emptive strike and a privateering voyage.
Having sailed from Plymouth in 1587,
Drake's small fleet attacked the Spanish fleet in port at Cadiz,
in Southern Spain.
It was an audacious operation
that successfully delayed Spanish preparations to invade England.
And, as usual, Drake made sure he returned home
with his ships full of treasure.
So, he's acting privately, but very much under the aegis of Elizabeth.
Yes, the queen is caught up in everything
and will take a share of all the profits these men make.
Yeah. I mean, in some ways, it reminds me of, I don't know,
stories of espionage today where, you know,
spies are doing things obviously with...with the blessing
and with the encouragement of the countries they're acting for.
But then, er, then the countries can completely deny
any connection with it.
I think that's important - the deniability.
But also you don't want to say where you're going in this,
because what if this fell into Spanish hands?
Or what if a Spanish spy found it?
So there's this mixture of serving the Crown, being patriotic,
and then also getting rich,
which is that lovely combination of privateering
that Drake has really learned over a long time
from people like his mentor, Sir John Hawkins.
Drake continued to plunder and harass
the galleons of Spain and Portugal, whose empire Spain now controlled.
Infuriated, Europe's most powerful nation was ready for war
with England.
The scene was set for Plymouth's two most notorious sailors
to turn from state-sponsored pirates to saviours of their nation.
I'm in Plymouth,
a city whose streets were said to have been paved with gold
during Elizabeth's golden era.
And that gold came from Spain,
stolen by Plymouth's famous and globally feared pirates.
I think their activities changed the whole mood of England in the 1570s -
it began to swagger,
it puffed out its chest,
and strode around the ring of European politics,
and unashamedly set out to antagonise the Catholic world.
England began to believe that it was a contender.
Arguably, the man who was doing the most to create this new confidence
was Francis Drake, Plymouth's superstar sailor.
Sometimes, it seems this town is one great homage to Drake.
There's a shopping centre
which actually draws parallels with the man himself.
In 2006, it was crowned worst new building in Britain,
but another panel decided it was "shopping location of the year".
Drake provoked the same sort of reaction.
A flawed hero today,
Elizabethans simply couldn't ignore his success.
Drake wrote accounts of his adventures,
and it's fair to say that he presented
an extremely generous portrait of himself.
He wanted to describe himself as a heroic maritime genius.
But he was hated by Spain and the rest of Catholic Europe.
He stole their slaves and their gold.
He was also hated by the English court,
who thought that he was a jumped-up Plymouth peasant.
But Drake knew that his queen and country were broke,
and that if he could change that,
he would be accepted into her inner circle.
What he needed was the ultimate haul of Spanish treasure.
In 1577, Drake set out from Plymouth
for the gold-rich Pacific Coast of South America,
girded by the treacherous Magellan Straits.
Once through, Drake had free rein over the undefended ships
and ports of the entire west coast of the Americas.
In his ship, the Golden Hind, Drake looped up the coast,
loading up with unheard of amounts of Spanish treasure,
even claiming what is now California for his queen.
He set off for home via the Pacific and the southern tip of Africa.
Drake's epic three-year voyage made him a national hero,
but alongside the gold in his cargo,
once again, there were slaves.
Miranda Kaufmann has been studying these voyages.
So, was it all as heroic
as perhaps we're sometimes led to believe?
Of course not.
Something that really shocked me
that I don't think many people know about
is they capture this African woman called Maria
on one of the Spanish ships,
and then they abandon her, heavily pregnant,
on an island somewhere in Indonesia,
with two other African men
that have also joined the ship on the voyage.
Do we know what happened to her?
Does...does history record? No, no.
But I mean, well...
I mean, whether she even survived the childbirth
in those circumstances is, you know, anyone's bet. Yeah.
And no-one knows who the father was either.
So, by that time, then,
by the time they'd abandoned Maria on the island,
they're continuing to head west,
and eventually they get all the way back to Britain.
How much money had he made?
Well, we know that Elizabeth herself pocketed more
than her usual annual revenue of £250,000.
She got more than that. Her whole revenue? Yes.
From...from the thing.
He takes his cut, you know,
and along the way he's knighted, he's made Mayor of Plymouth,
he becomes an MP, he gets his own coat of arms.
You know, he's made it. And he buys this place.
Buckland Abbey is a monument to Drake's success.
The boy from a small house in Devon had become
not only the first Englishman
to command a complete circumnavigation of the globe,
he was now a firm favourite of his queen,
and Lord of the Manor.
What a beautiful place.
For Drake, there was a delicious irony
in moving into this particular property.
Oh, this is fantastic.
By using intermediaries, he'd tricked his posh local rival,
Sir Richard Grenville, into selling it to him.
So, is that Elizabethan - that ceiling and the friezes?
Yeah, so this would have been what Grenville put in.
The date above the fireplace is 1576.
So, Drake didn't need to do much decoration, then, when he arrived.
He could walk straight in and start partying. Yeah.
To honour his achievements,
Drake was granted his own coat of arms,
a clear symbol of acceptance in the Elizabethan era.
Oh, that's a splendid coat of arms.
And then, at the bottom, it says "Sic Parvis Magna".
My Latin is a bit rusty. So - "From small, big".
MIRANDA CHUCKLES
"From humble beginnings to greatness."
That sounds better. That's more poetic, isn't it?
Yeah, a little bit. SHE CHUCKLES
Alongside a knighthood, Elizabeth gave Drake this astonishing brooch,
here being worn by Mrs Drake in this ostentatious portrait.
So, this is Drake's wife.
Yes, and who he marries in 1585.
And she is dressed so sumptuously.
I mean, she's dripping in pearls.
And I must say there's more than a passing resemblance here,
surely, to Elizabeth.
Well, it was the fashion, wasn't it?
Elizabeth was dressed in high fashion.
This lady, also Elizabeth, dressed in high fashion.
With the ruff and the pearls and the...
You know, this was the look to go for.
Drake, now bursting with confidence,
turned his mind from global adventures
to improving his own back yard.
With its great inlets of brackish, tidal waters,
Plymouth badly needed a consistent supply of fresh water.
Now, as mayor, Drake used his guile
to lobby Parliament for funds to create one.
Some of the resulting structures still exist today,
and Ben Robinson has taken a trip up onto Dartmoor to take a look.
There we go.
Starting to get a bit of height now,
and things are suddenly becoming a lot clearer.
I can see what I'm looking for starting to emerge.
It's a curving earthwork,
a channel, a leat.
This is Drake's Leat - an artificial watercourse.
And the idea of this was to bring fresh water
down from Dartmoor where there's an abundance of the stuff.
And what it intended to do was to help scour out the harbour
with this flow of fresh water,
but also to be used for firefighting and to provision the navy.
Very, very important.
Can we just get a little bit lower, Max?
Yeah, that's good. Great.
So, we're zooming in now. Crikey, we're flying along it.
It's a narrow channel. It's only about six foot wide.
It's...it's fairly shallow, two foot deep.
But that's all that was needed to carry this water down.
This is a Victorian reservoir, but it would have been a mill pond
for one of Drake's mills.
There was a flour mill right here.
Because, you see,
the water from the leat never reached the sailors,
and instead Drake took full advantage
of this new water course and built mills along it.
It might be the first example of a big public infrastructure project
that only ended up benefiting a very small number of people.
Something that mayors in Britain and around the world have been
working hard to perfect ever since.
Drake brazenly embezzled funds for his own gain,
and naturally got away with it,
a fact that might have been hard to swallow
for the less well-off in Elizabethan England.
Back then, people without any financial security,
especially women, were subject to a harsh system of justice
administered by the church court.
I've headed to St Andrew's Church,
which was used as an informal courtroom.
I'm meeting historian Dr Todd Gray,
who's been studying a revealing archive of the trials held here.
These documents from the church court are fantastic,
because they are the words which are meant to have been spoken
in anger or in malice - the slander cases.
So, this one here, a group of women overhear
one woman being told by a man, Moses Goodyear,
to "go back to the stairs and to the stable",
implying that this woman has been having illicit sex
in a number of places... Mm, yeah.
..including on the stairs and in the stable.
So, it's basically about somebody being called a whore.
Basically, yes.
In this one, it's "whore".
It could be bobtail, punk, queen, harlot, strumpet.
There are about 30 words one can call a woman with immoral ways.
Yeah. We judge women by their virtue,
men by their honesty.
OK. It doesn't sound particularly fair.
So, have you got some specific examples
of some choice slander here?
"Ninnyhammer".
What's that?
Ninnyhammer's a bit of a blockhead,
a stubborn man... Yeah.
..a stupid man.
Whereas a ninnycock is...
Sounds rude. Yeah.
..it's...
..a man whose wife has left him sexually redundant.
Oh.
Whereas in this case,
we have two women who are arrested for being poor.
Just for being poor?
They are found in a ditch sleeping.
They are thought to be beggars.
They can't be begging,
and they are pushed back to where they come from.
But before that, and as we see in here,
they are to be going "to the next market day
"to be whipped about the town as whores and vagabonds".
Oh, my goodness.
And they were, they had their hands tied to the back of a cart,
they had their tops taken off
and then whipped until they were bloody
going through the streets.
And you would have had somebody with a tin pot and a spoon
making noise before,
and it was this great sort of procession,
humiliation, shame, but physical punishment on top.
Yeah, yeah. And of course, it's a spectacle.
Nothing like enjoying a good spectacle.
A system of justice that administers such harsh punishment
to a simple homeless woman,
yet turns a blind eye
to Drake's wholesale plunder begs the question -
how did he get away with it?
He's got a moral imperative.
You know, he's doing it for the right reasons.
He says he's doing it for God.
He's not doing it for money, then? No.
He happens... His...
He just happens to be making money. His justification always is
he's doing it as a good Protestant against the Catholics...
Yeah. ..against the Pope.
So he's got moral right on his side.
It seems morality could be quite flexible for the Elizabethans.
But the double standards of men like Drake would drive
an even deeper wedge between Protestants and Catholics.
So many of the power struggles during the Elizabethan era seem,
on the surface of it,
to be about two versions of Christianity
pitted against each other.
Queen Elizabeth I is Protestant.
Mary Queen of Scots, beheaded in 1587, is Catholic.
And then there's this epic battle
between Protestant and Catholic forces at sea.
But really that's all about trade, money and power.
After years of suffering not only the indignity
but real financial losses
as the trade and military routes of the Catholic Spanish Empire
are disrupted by Protestant English pirates,
King Philip of Spain finally cracks.
Retribution was coming.
I'm in Plymouth to discover why it was the Elizabethan era's
most infamous and important town.
In the 1560s and '70s,
as the home port of Queen Elizabeth's Sea Dogs,
it was teeming with craft and cunning
that had been driving Prince Philip of Spain mad with frustration.
The English were constantly stealing goods from the Spanish,
and the island of Britain stood in the way -
blocking Spanish trade routes to northern Europe.
By the late 1500s, Queen Elizabeth and all her advisors knew
that Spain would eventually declare war on England,
but they just didn't know when that was going to happen.
They also knew that Spain had the most powerful navy in the world
whilst all they had was a ragbag collection of old ships
and borrowed merchant vessels.
But, here in Plymouth,
what they DID have were the most knowledgeable
and experienced sailors in the world,
and this is where John Hawkins comes back into our story.
Incredibly, Hawkins had risen from slave-trading pirate
to become the unrivalled supremo of Elizabeth's navy,
tasked with whipping it into shape
for the inevitable confrontation with Spain.
A typical Tudor warship, such as the Mary Rose,
was top-heavy, slow and cumbersome to manoeuvre -
qualities that helped her capsize in Portsmouth harbour in 1545.
Spanish galleons followed many of the same design principles.
Hawkins favoured the ideas of innovative shipwright Matthew Baker,
whose designs prioritised speed, mobility and stability.
Built in 1763,
this covered slipway in Plymouth's Devonport Naval Base
is the oldest remaining in the world.
It's currently used by Will Sterling,
whose team use centuries-old construction methods
and who understands the influence of Hawkins on warship design.
You're the latest
in a long line of shipwrights that's worked here, then.
Maybe so, yeah.
What do you think was the main difference in ship design
as we move into the Elizabethan era?
Hawkins was the figurehead of a move to make the boats deeper,
and made them more stable, they could carry more guns,
get your ballast lower down.
But also, and more importantly,
it meant that they could go closer to the wind.
So Hawkins is designing boats, or at least commissioning boats,
that were designed with a hull that rode lower in the water.
Is that a differently shaped hull? Maybe so.
And it might be easiest to explain that
by looking at these two boats here.
Both those boats are the same length.
Boat on the left - quite a shallow boat...
Yeah. ..60 tonnes.
And on the right, you've got quite a deep boat - 160 tonnes.
In terms of the displacement? The displacement, yeah.
So, just because she's that much deeper,
she's almost three times the weight,
yet the same size on top of the water.
All that extra room made space
for new longer-range, rapid-fire cannon,
which English armourers had been at the forefront of developing.
Manoeuvrability plus fire power meant the small English fleet
was suddenly a much more formidable fighting machine.
But there were the basics to attend to as well.
The shipyards of Plymouth had to make sure
these wooden ships were as watertight as possible.
So, you're just finishing off this ship, then? Yeah, yeah.
Will is showing me a technique
employed by Elizabethan shipbuilders.
Oakum is a tarred felt that seals the gaps between the planks.
You're sort of bunching it up into the seam,
and this is just getting it into the seams.
It seems amazing that that's going to be watertight enough.
Yeah. No, really watertight and really strong.
Will makes it look really easy.
Definitely something I can have a go at, surely?
All you've got to do is get it in the seam,
and then you can tap it in a bit more afterwards.
The wages were based on how many feet you caulked in a day.
Oh, my goodness. Do you think you've done enough?
I'm not going to make enough for dinner, I don't think.
Luckily, John Hawkins had far more skilled shipwrights
to help build his ships for the new Queen's Navy.
And because he was treasurer of the Navy,
crucially, he controlled the purse strings.
Hawkins had the access to the funds.
So, we can all have great ideas, but making those ideas happen,
you need to have access to money.
Yeah. So it's not private enterprise and innovation,
this is state-sponsored R&D. Yeah.
They're pitted against those European powers. What they...
Yeah, that's it.
No, that's it. They're pitted against them,
and they're trying to make sure that they're the best,
and they want to have that edge.
Hawkins got Elizabeth's new navy ready just in time,
because in July 1588,
the greatest fleet of warships the world had ever seen
hove into view just off the coast of Plymouth.
Ah, we've been here before.
This is the bit where Francis Drake,
who by now was Vice Admiral of the English fleet,
nonchalantly finishes off his game of bowls on Plymouth Hoe.
That takes us into the realms of mythology,
we need to wrestle ourselves back to reality
and look at what was actually happening
out there in Plymouth Harbour over this couple of weeks.
Ben Robinson is out on the headland
with his state-of-the-art crow's nest
to give us the bigger picture of that first great Battle of Britain.
If you could just pan round just to the left a little bit,
that would be great.
So, I can now get the view.
This is where the English fleet had to navigate -
through these waters,
out through the sound, into the open sea.
And the tide was against them. The winds were against them.
There was a strong south-westerly blowing, much like today,
and they literally had to haul themselves out of the harbour.
They mustered off Rame Head, at the mouth of the sound.
And they knew the Armada was waiting for them.
And we've got a view here,
a near contemporary view of what was going on.
And here we are here.
Here are the English ships off to meet the Armada,
which is in this vast crescent formation -
great defensive formation.
The ships with the big guns can protect all the lightly armed ships,
the cargo ships, the troop carriers in the centre there.
The plan of the Armada is to rendezvous
on the coast of the Netherlands, pick up a massive invasion force.
And the target is London - striking at the capital itself.
If that happens, it's all over - game over - the kingdom's lost.
The Armada moors up at Calais here,
and during the night, Drake sends fire ships.
These are ships set on fire, full of incendiary gunpowder,
to disrupt the moored Armada.
And it works. They're in a complete panic.
Some of them slip their anchors and head out to sea.
Some of them stay where they are.
The English are out-gunned, but they've got speed on their side,
they've got manoeuvrability on their side.
They can position themselves, get in, attack, and get out again.
The Spanish are panicked by this.
The English have broken up the fleet,
they chase them up the east coast of England.
The Spanish have to carry on round Scotland,
and they're lashed by ferocious Atlantic storms.
They're dispersed, they're wrecked.
They've lost. The English have won.
It was an astonishing outcome, the Spanish were so sure
that they were just going to romp to victory,
that their admiral, Medina Sidonia, has identified Mount Edgcumbe House,
just over there on the hill in Cornwall,
as his future home.
He never got it.
Plymouth's two knights of the sea wouldn't enjoy their status
as national heroes for long.
Unable to resist the rich rewards of long voyages,
both Hawkins and Drake returned to the Caribbean,
where they both died at sea.
But their deeds had already inspired hundreds of others
to follow in their wake.
There is another famous son of Devon who we haven't heard much about yet,
but he was often here in Plymouth,
and quite closely linked with Queen Elizabeth,
if we're to believe the stories.
He is, of course, Walter Raleigh.
I've caught up with Todd Gray again
to find out how this iconic English name
fits into Plymouth's Elizabethan saga.
Todd, you can't really come to Plymouth and talk about history
without mentioning Raleigh.
Well, Raleigh's the flip side to Drake -
he's handsome, he's charming, he's an intellectual, he's a writer.
Born 50 miles away,
but his colonisation attempts start off from here.
He's a very rich figure that we know an awful lot about,
and he has this idea of colonisation rather than smash and grab.
So he's not a privateer like Drake, then?
He does do some of that, but that's not his main thrust,
I think, what his legacy is.
His legacy is establishing a new England in the Americas.
He wants to colonise the whole of the coast,
and he owns 3,000 miles of coastland.
It doesn't quite work... Mm.
..and it takes a little while for it to succeed.
Disease and starvation meant Raleigh's colonies all failed.
And in 1603, a tired Queen Elizabeth died without an heir.
However, the colonising zeal
that was pioneered by the Elizabethans
would take root in a big way,
thanks to a certain ship named Mayflower
that sailed from right here in Plymouth in 1620.
The only way they can colonise New England
is by exporting Puritans.
Yeah. Religious fundamentalists will bear it, they'll stick it out -
the cold, the miserable conditions, the poverty -
just so that they have a place to pray in their way.
So, we get rid of them, they start up New England,
and then it turns into a land bonanza.
Yeah. So more and more people go out there for the land,
and they change the colony.
It's quite deeply uncomfortable history, isn't it,
the idea of going over to another country,
another continent, and just seizing it for yourself?
There were people there already.
Yeah. I find it quite strange.
I mean, I have ancestors who were on the Mayflower.
Do you? So, we weren't...
You don't? I do. You traced it back?
I do. I have Stephen Hopkins.
And they weren't religious fundamentalists,
they were land-grabbers. Yeah.
So, instead of bigots, they were thieves.
So, I'm slightly better with that.
But, look, you're here now, there are the Mayflower steps,
your ancestors stepped off these steps, onto those ships,
and off they went. Yeah. And you're back here.
Apart from it wasn't those steps, because they're Victorian.
No, they're Victorian. But never mind.
They're like the steps they would have used when they came down.
Yeah. How does that feel?
Well, I think a little uncomfortable. Yeah.
You know, it's not something to be happy about.
It's something that happened in the past. Yeah.
I think it's a... Yeah. It's a good time to look and...
..look back to the Elizabethan era,
Britain's relationship with the world,
think about where we are now. Yeah.
The Puritans called their American colony Plymouth,
and just over 150 years later,
their descendants were living in a new independent country.
But by then, Britain's growing empire was about to enter
its most omnipotent global phase.
An empire built on momentum gained in the expansionist,
sometimes violent, often extraordinary Elizabethan era.
Plymouth was at the heart of it all,
its bustling dockside streets
bursting with the ideas of entrepreneurs,
its intrepid mariners pushing at the envelope of exploration,
bringing back a bounty that would save a queen from bankruptcy.
And those two men,
those second cousins who went from being pirates
to heroes of the nation.
This, for me, is why Plymouth is Britain's most Elizabethan town.
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