How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (41 page)

But trouble was brewing in Germany, where conflicts concerning the Protestant Reformation had broken out. It was Charles V, acting as Holy Roman Emperor, who had initially ordered Luther to appear at the Diet of Worms in 1521, promising him a safe conduct. When that episode left matters even worse than before, Charles outlawed Luther and his followers. Soon the Lutheran princes in Germany formed the Schmalkaldic League to defend the Reformation. Eventually Charles outlawed the league, and in 1547 he defeated Lutheran forces at the Battle of Mühlberg. But in 1552 the Protestant princes found a new ally in the Catholic monarch Henry II of France, and together they forced Charles’s armies to retreat to the Netherlands.

Three years later Charles, now in ill health, abdicated in favor of his son Philip. In addition to the immense Spanish Empire, Philip inherited a mountain of debts and an impending revolt in the Netherlands. Perhaps worst of all were the continuing threats to the treasure ships on which his precarious finances depended.

Pirates of the Caribbean

For all their fame, the actual pirates of the Caribbean played a minor, if colorful, role in looting Spain’s treasures. The pirates were groups of seamen, many of them deserters, who managed to secure a ship or two to attack and capture small merchant ships—usually only those sailing alone. Far more devastating were the
privateers
, who often sailed in fleets of large warships and who claimed legal standing under authority granted by the government of England, France, or Holland. This authority took the form of a letter of marque, which defined whose shipping could be attacked and specified how the spoils would be divided—a substantial share always going to the monarch who issued the letter. The incredible wealth being transported from the New World to Spain proved irresistible to both pirates and privateers, but usually only the latter could muster sufficient forces to confront the powerful Spanish treasure fleet.

The earliest known attack by privateers on Spanish treasure occurred in 1521, when Cortéz sent a precious cargo taken from the Aztecs back to Spain aboard three ships. Included were half a ton of gold, much silver, many boxes of pearls, and three live jaguars. But only part of it reached Spain. Two of the ships were intercepted by French privateers under the command of Jean Fleury. The French ambushed the Spanish ships just off the coast of Portugal and took the treasure to Paris, where they presented it to the king (receiving a generous slice for themselves).
⁶
Although legally these were French warships acting on orders from the king, they were privately owned. The Spanish denied the distinction between pirates and privateers, and they hanged Fleury as a pirate when they caught him in 1527.

But if the French were the first, from the Spanish perspective the English were the worst. Once Elizabeth was securely on the throne, English privateers posed the major threat to Spanish shipping, not only on the high seas but also in Caribbean waters. English privateers even launched ground attacks on Spanish ports and storehouses in the New World. In response, the Spanish took to calling Elizabeth the “Pirate Queen.” And so she was.
⁷
Nothing makes this clearer than the early career of Francis Drake.

Francis Drake was a hero from quite a young age, and time has not diminished his fame. At age thirteen he was apprenticed to the owner-captain of a small ship plying the coastal trade with France and the Netherlands. The elderly captain grew so impressed with Drake that upon his death he bequeathed the ship to the young man.

Drake made his first voyage to the New World at age twenty-two, in command of the
Judith
, a fifty-ton, three-masted ship, as part of a fleet assembled and commanded by John Hawkins, with Queen Elizabeth as one of the major investors. Hawkins was Drake’s second cousin and eventually became the chief designer and commander of England’s stunning victory over the Spanish Armada, with Drake as his second in command. Hawkins had gained his reputation as a privateer by capturing a number of Portuguese slave ships off the coast of Africa and then selling their human cargoes in the Caribbean slave markets. But his raids on the Spanish had rather mixed results—on Drake’s second voyage with Hawkins, in 1568, most of the English fleet was destroyed and only Drake and Hawkins managed to sail back to England. Following this ordeal, Drake decided to go it alone.

In 1569 Drake sailed to the Caribbean with two small ships. Nothing more is known of the venture, which he later called a “reconnaissance.”
⁸
In 1572 Drake led a tiny force of seventy men on two ships to intercept the annual Spanish treasure shipment while it was stored in the town of Nombre de Dios on the Isthmus of Panama. The attack was a success—the town was taken and the treasure was captured. Drake was badly wounded, however, and his men were so committed to their captain that they abandoned the treasure to carry him back to his ship.

But Drake was not ready to quit. He continued raiding Spanish ships, and in 1573 he found an ally in Guillaume Le Testu, a French pirate. Even together they lacked sufficient naval forces to attack the Spanish treasure fleet. Then Drake and Le Testu hit upon the idea of ambushing the mule train that brought the treasure overland from the Pacific to the Atlantic shore. On April 1, 1573, Drake, Le Testu, and thirty-five English and French sailors lay in wait for the treasure mule train. As dawn broke, it arrived—“190 mules tended by slaves and guarded by forty-five soldiers,” in the words of maritime historian Samuel Bawlf.
⁹
The trap was sprung, the soldiers and slaves fled, and the treasure was taken. In addition to substantial amounts of gold and gems, it included fifteen tons of silver. Drake’s men hid the silver they could not carry in the surrounding forest and then staggered off with their loads, heading for the beach. Le Testu had been wounded in the fight to seize the mule train and could not keep up. He insisted that the others go on, though two French sailors volunteered to accompany him. Soon the Spanish captured Le Testu and one of his sailors, torturing them to reveal Drake’s plan. Then Le Testu was beheaded and the sailor was drawn and quartered. So when Drake and his men reached the shore, they saw seven boatloads of Spanish soldiers patrolling. Drake’s own ships were nowhere to be found. They had been delayed by unfavorable winds, but the Spanish soon concluded that they had arrived too late to keep Drake from sailing and abandoned their vigil. The next day Drake’s ships arrived and everyone boarded and sailed away.

When Drake arrived in England with a huge treasure—valued at more than £40,000, or, as Bawlf noted, “roughly one-fifth of Queen Elizabeth’s annual revenues”
¹⁰
—it was an inauspicious moment. Elizabeth had just signed a new peace treaty with Spain in which she had agreed to keep her seamen from attacking Spanish shipping. With the queen’s connivance, Drake simply lay low for a time, carefully preserving the large royal share of his booty.

Strange to tell, however, Drake’s most fabulous capture of Spanish treasure took place during his circumnavigation of the globe. Late in 1578, unbeknownst to the Spanish, Drake had sailed his flagship the
Golden Hind
around the southern tip of South America and into the Pacific. Drake’s ship, originally named the
Pelican
, had been built to his specifications. She was a bit more than one hundred feet long and about twenty-one across. Her hull was double-planked, yet she drew only thirteen feet, which meant Drake could sail in shallow waters. Her main mast was about ninety feet tall and she could fly an extra amount of sail to increase her speed. The ship was heavily armed for her size, with seven gun ports on each side for extremely long-range cannons, with four more of these cannons on her main deck as well as many smaller guns.
¹¹
The queen had paid for construction of the
Golden Hind
and had also provided the new, smaller eleven-gun
Elizabeth
for Drake’s voyage.

Spanish ships in the Pacific sailed without fear of attack, since pirates and privateers were confined to the Atlantic. Consequently, Drake was able to take unsuspecting prizes. Among them was the
Nuestra Señora de la Concepción
, a cargo ship much larger than Drake’s
Golden Hind
, and better known as the
Cagafuego
(Spanish for “shitfire”). Drake was able to sail right up to the
Cagafuego
because her captain believed that his was a Spanish vessel. The treasure taken on that day was huge: twenty-six tons of silver, eighty pounds of gold, many jewels, and thirteen chests full of coins. To make room for it all, Drake discarded his ship’s ballast and replaced it with silver bars. Then he continued on his voyage up the Pacific coast, taking several other prizes along the way, before heading west to complete his circle of the earth. Finally, in 1580, Drake returned to England with enormous treasures. He stated that his backers received £47 for each £1 they had invested—Queen Elizabeth’s share probably amounted to £264,000, or considerably more than her year’s income from all other sources.
¹²
She would soon need every penny of it to prepare the fleet to face the Armada.

Spain’s Low-Country Wars

When Philip II succeeded his father, he gained a huge empire that sprawled from Asia to Austria, sustained by the largest standing army in Europe since the fall of Rome. This elite force enrolled more than two hundred
thousand men, recruited from all over Europe—large numbers of them from Ireland, Flanders, Italy, and Germany, with perhaps 20 percent of them from Spain.
¹³
They were superbly armed, well-trained, fierce in battle, and extremely expensive—so costly as to consume “ten times more revenue than all other functions of the [empire’s] government combined,” according to the historian William S. Maltby.
¹⁴
This was not a frivolous expense. Given the many challenges to Philip’s rule, he had either to bear these costs or surrender substantial portions of his patrimony.

Indeed, there was nothing frivolous about Philip. He was known as “Philip the Prudent,” and he devoted nearly every day of his long reign to sitting at his desk in the Escorial, the royal residence near Madrid, corresponding with officials throughout his vast realm, trying to control events and keep his empire solvent.

Aside from being diligent, Philip was said to have been a pleasant and gracious man. But as a Habsburg he had inherited a severely deformed lower jaw that interfered with both his eating and his speaking—the same deformity had afflicted his father. The “Habsburg Jaw” was the consequence of many generations of inbreeding: nearly all Habsburg males married first cousins, or their aunts, or their nieces.
¹⁵
In addition to these physical difficulties, Philip spent many of his years in mourning. He was married four times—three of his wives were immediate relatives, and each of these three died in childbirth. The fourth, Mary of England, died during the fourth year of their marriage (possibly of uterine cancer). In addition, most of his children died very young—between 1517 and 1700, half of all Habsburg children died before their first birthdays. As it happened, Philip’s foreign affairs were equally unfortunate.

Radical Dutch Protestants

Philip was an unflinchingly dedicated Roman Catholic. He always regretted that his father had granted Luther a safe conduct pass instead of having him seized and executed. But when he took the throne he was confronted with a substantial Protestant minority in the Netherlands that his father had tolerated. Initially he did nothing. Then he adopted what he took to be a sensible and humane plan. He would convert the Protestants by greatly improving and strengthening the Catholic Church.

At the time only four bishops served the entire Netherlands, leaving even many of the larger cities without one. The lack of bishops reflected a church that was without an effective presence in most places. So Philip
secured the pope’s permission to appoint sixteen new bishops. But there was little funding available to finance this huge new apparatus: a diocese was expected to be self-funding, but these new ones lacked the strong parish structures needed to bring in sufficient money. Worse yet, the prospect of a stronger, more active Catholic Church frightened Protestants, including the nobility, since it implied a more vigorous persecution of “heretics.” Philip’s move also infuriated Catholic nobles, who had traditional rights to appoint church officers.
¹⁶
These divisions were exacerbated in 1566 when Calvinist radicals struck.

The
Beeldenstorm
, or Iconoclastic Fury, involved roving bands of radical Calvinists who, opposing all religious images and decorations in churches, stormed into Catholic churches in the Netherlands and destroyed all artwork and finery. Many scholars have tried to explain this frenzy of image breaking as caused by the dislocation of many textile workers and a sudden rise in the price of food. If so, how is one to account for the fact that only churches were attacked? Why no attacks on government officials or town halls? Why no looting of shops and foodstores?
¹⁷

The
Beeldenstorm
reached Antwerp on August 21. As the iconoclasts proceeded they drew large, cheering crowds and no opposition. “All forty-two churches in the city were ransacked,” wrote the historian Jonathan Israel, “the images, paintings, and other objects hauled into the streets, smashed, and the plate pilfered, the work continuing at night under torches.”
¹⁸

But there was no cheering in the Escorial. Philip II decided that the time had come to impose serious governance on the Netherlands, in the form of Don Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, third Duke of Alba. At the head of ten thousand troops (and hundreds of attractive mounted “courtesans”),
¹⁹
Alba marched from Milan (then a Spanish province), through the Alpine passes, and into the Rhine valley, along what then was known as the Spanish Road. He arrived in Brussels on August 22, 1567, almost exactly a year after the
Beeldenstorm
had hit Antwerp.