Richard Grenville

Sir Richard Grenville (with various transcriptions, among which Greynvile , Greeneville , Greenfield , etc; to pronounce with the Frenchwoman, the name being of Anglo-Norman origin), born the June 6th 1542 with the castle of Clifton House – died of the continuations of its wounds to the combat the September 10th 1591) was an officer, exploring navigator and English of the Ère élisabéthaine. He died as hero with the Combat of the Azores. He is the grandfather of Richard Grenville, 1st baronet, one of the main characters of the First English revolution.

Biography

Youth

Grenville passed its youth to Buckland Abbey in the county of Devon. He was cousin of Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake, and attended the retirement with Clifton of Theodore Paléologue, last descending from the Byzantine emperors. At the seventeen years age, it left to study the right to Inner Temple. In 1562, it was compromised in a brawl on Strand, during which it passed Robert Bannister by the sword and left it for death, a crime for which it obtained his forgiveness.

The man of war

At the sides of the armies of the emperor Maximilien, Grenville fights the Turks in Hungary in 1566. In 1569, one finds it in Ireland as assistant of Sir Warham Light St for the division of the grounds between the colonists in the baronie of Kerricurrihy, that the count de Desmond had mortgaged with Light St. About this time, following the example Peter Carew which had requisitioned grounds in the south of the county of Leinster, Grenville seized grounds with Tracton, the west of the port of Cork, in order to colonize them. St Light establishes its districts in the surroundings, while Humphrey Gilbert went on Idrone along Blackwater. All these ground requisitions in the south of Ireland caused the anger of noble of Ireland, and led to the Révoltes of Desmond, carried out by James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald.

Named Sheriff of Cork, Grenville had to face when Fitzmaurice, supported by the count de Clancar, James Fitzedmund Fitzgerald (the Sénéchal of Imokilly), Edmund Fitzgibbon (“White Knight”) and others, encircled Tracton, removed strong English with the halberd and massacred all the garrison, except for three English soldiers who were hung the following day. Fitzmaurice held up the threat of a Spanish unloading, which he announced like imminent; having seized the goods of the middle-class men of Cork, it was extremely made recover artillery of the fortifications of Youghal.

Grenville had just embarked for England, when in June 1569 (whereas the Spanish Galion S of the fleet of Americas had just been seized), the count Fitzmaurice besieged Waterford and required that all the English, including the woman of Grenville and Lady Light St are given to him as an hostage, and that all the prisoners are released; but the Irish middle-class men refused obtempérer. One then became by the wire of the sword the English farmers. While Cork was famished, the town of Youghal prepared with an imminent attack. Whereas the revolt extended, Grenville remained in England.

Grenville made common cause with the count d' Arundel and the duke of Norfolk, against the opinion of the first secretary of the queen, Sir William Cecil in 1569 but, " inflexible Protestant " , it went until stopping the priest Cuthbert Mayne in the proper residence of Francis Tregian elder the in 1577, priest who died in martyrdom. During this period, it made small fishing port of Bideford (northern Devon) an important center of trade.

Explorations in the New-World

Grenville wished to carry out the circumnavigation of the sphere at the end of the years 1570, but the Queen Elizabeth preferred to him Sir Francis Drake for this mission: Grenville planned to rejoin the Pacific Ocean by the Magellan Strait, rather than by Labrador (solution known as “Passage of the North-West”), a program which was finally concluded by Sir Francis Drake at the time of sound tour of 1577. In 1585, Grenville ordered the flotilla of seven vessels which took along the first English colony of North America in the Île of Roanoke, in the archipelago of the Outer Banks on the coasts of the North Carolina. Its brutal behavior was severely blamed by Ralph Lane, the governor of the colony, which criticized “ the intolerable pride and the insatiable ambition ” of Grenville. Indeed, though the natives algonquien S were initially hospital, the English colonists treated them with roughness and contempt: because one of them had concealed a silver cut, Grenville put at bag and set fire to a whole village, killing all its inhabitants.

In 1586, Grenville returned to Roanoke to discover that the surviving colonists (with the number of which the scientist Thomas Harriot and the engraver John White) had taken again the sea with the ships of Francis Drake. During the voyage of the return, it plundered several boroughs of the archipelago of the the Azores. It is about this time that an anecdote was published reporting its behavior during a dinner with Spanish governors:

It drank back-to-back three or four wine glasses, then by challenge bit glasses with full teeth until breaking them, chewing the glares and to swallow them of them, so that blood ran on its lips without it testifying the least pain.

The queen refused in Grenville to take part in the sides of Drake to the attack of Cadiz in 1587, and rather charged it with organizing the defense of the coasts of Devon and the Cornouailles in preparation for the invasion of England by the Invincible Armada the following year. It was charged, with Sir Walter Raleigh, to supervise water off the coasts of Ireland, and after the Spanish invasion was pushed back, it turned over in the county of Munster to organize its grounds within the framework of the Colonies of Ireland. After the repression of the second Revolt of Desmond in 1583, indeed, it had acquired there grounds (a few 24.000 acres, is 9700 ha) with Kinalmeaky, and there attracted many colonists, but its repeated efforts remained vain and it returned to England in 1590.

Last commands

Grenville was named Vice-amiral fleet under the orders of Thomas Howard, in load of the command of a squadron stationed with the the Azores to make to control on the Spanish convoys ghost of the America S. Its flagship was the HMS Revenge , a Galion considered as a chief of work of naval construction.

With broad of the island of Flora the English fleet was surprised by a strong squadron, sent by Philippe II. Howard beat a retreat, but Grenville faced the fifty-three enemy vessels in spite of a reduced crew of 95 men, in consequence of an epidemic on the island. Twelve hours during, its crew held in respect the Spaniards, damaging fifteen enemy galleons seriously; tiny room at the last end, Grenville was on the point of making jump its ship, but its crew went and itself died a few days later of the continuations of its wounds. The Revenge , and with him sixteen other Spanish ships, were damaged in the floods during a cyclone shortly after.

Posthumous homages

the last combat of Grenville on board the Revenge is commemorated by a poem of Alfred Tennyson (" The Revenge") like by a song of Al Stewart (" Lord Grenville").
One of the five houses of Churcher' S College, a public school English, bears the name of Grenville, just as one of the eight houses of Dulwich College, and also one of the four of Queen Elizabeth' S High School
the last combat of Grenville on board the Revenge is evoked in a poem of Robert E. Howard ( Solomon Kane' S Homecoming ) drawn from the collection Fanciful Tales (1936).
Grenville is the hero of a song of Al Stewart in its album Year off the Cat (1976)

Random links: