ABSTRACT

PEELE, CAMPION, AND THE PORTUGAL EXPEDITION OF 1589

BY HUGH GAZZARD

The events of a few tumultuous weeks in the summer of 1588 still have a talismanic power in English, and British, narratives of national history, and of course they had a far stronger talismanic power for those who lived through them: ‘Triumph {0 English people) leap for ioy’ James Aske exhorted in that fateful year. Less memorialized, both now and at the time-with good reason-was England’s Counter-Armada of the following year, the expedition to Portugal under the command of Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Norris. But the expedi­ tion’s hopeful outset, and its far from trium phant return, were marked in two poems by George Peele, poems by turns heroic and ambivalent, and in a short Latin poem (published later) by Thomas Campion. In this article I shall closely examine these poems both in their character as public, occasional verse, and in the contexts of the events and the poets’ wider careers.