The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (48 page)

Gilbert gained almost unlimited powers over unlimited territory and peoples yet undiscovered by Europeans. Held by homage to the Queen, these lands would be governed by him; his the right to grant tenures and make laws. Still in England, Gilbert sold a vast paper empire of twenty million acres which he had never seen. It was not until June 1583 that Gilbert sailed for Newfoundland and for ‘Norumbega’, the future New England. At St John’s, he claimed Newfoundland for the Queen, cutting a turf as an archaic symbol of possession, and establishing law and
religion according to English practice. What kind of colony he would have created in Norumbega cannot be known, for he never arrived. Like his half-brother Ralegh, like Sidney and Dee, Gilbert practised the ‘starry science’ of alchemy and, finding ore, his saturnine imagination became ‘wholly fixed on the Newfoundland’. He left, promising to return, but disasters followed his little fleet. The
Delight
went down with all hands, and with the charts and ore still containing their secrets. Refusing to abandon his ‘little company’ with whom he had ‘passed so many storms and perils’, Gilbert was lost at sea. Last seen upon the foundering
Squirrel
, calmly reading, he called out: ‘We are as near to heaven by sea as by land.’ Perhaps he was drawing comfort from Cicero’s Stoicism, but perhaps the book was More’s
Utopia
, for this was Hythloday’s aphorism, and
Utopia
had lessons for colonists.

The Americas offered to those who ventured the prospect of a ‘golden world’, like that of the first Creation before the Fall, when an uncorrupted earth brought forth its fruits without human labour, and when mankind lived ‘void of all guile and treason’. Such was the country which Sir Walter Ralegh’s agents claimed to discover in 1584 in Wingandacoa, which they renamed Virginia, after their Queen who was virgin too. In this earthly paradise the land smelt ‘sweetly… as if we had been in the midst of some delicate garden’. Yet these English conquistadors sailed also in search of gold of another kind. The New World promised endless wealth, there for the taking; not beyond the dreams of avarice for men of fevered imaginations and unbounded optimism. Here, so they told prospective investors, was soil so fertile that a day’s labour in planting would provide food for a year. All the commodities of southern Europe and of the East – oils, flax, frankincense, fruit, sugar – awaited the planters. There were drugs too, including tobacco, which Thomas Harriot – as fatally for himself as for millions thereafter – thought a health-giving herb. This cornucopia had the not inestimable advantage of being possessed by ‘savages’ who did not know how to exploit what they had. When Ralegh went in person to the New World in 1595 he found in Guiana a land which ‘hath yet her maidenhead’. Yet to discover might be to despoil, and suspicion and venality entered this new Eden with the discoverers.

English claims to lands in the New World rested upon their being uninhabited by any Christian prince (not that this would stop them preying upon Christian neighbours from their new lands), but there were ‘natural inhabitants’ and local princes whose relationship to the
colonists needed urgently to be addressed. Thomas Harriot represented the Indians of Virginia as natural theologians, virtuous pagans who, like More’s Utopians, believed in many gods but ‘one only chief and great god’ and in the immortality of the soul, and were already moving towards ‘civility and the embracing of true religion’. The aims of the colonists were threefold: to advance true religion among pagan peoples (advertised as the first purpose, when it was usually not), to trade and cultivate, and to conquer. Without conquest there could be neither colonization nor conversion. The first promoters urged that the colonists proceed against the Indians with ‘all humanity and courtesy and much forbearing of revenge’, for only through amity could trade and settlement prosper. Among the Indians, the settlers planned to live as gentlemen (even if they were not): never to work with their hands, but to live upon Indian labour. But soon came the recognition that they might need to act with ‘extremity’ in order to conquer, fortify and colonize; that the Indians might not want to cede what was theirs.

How to bring the Indians into subjection and to ‘civility’? The dilemma and the argument were familiar from much nearer home; from Ireland, where the ‘wild Irish’ were increasingly treated as ‘savage’ and ‘pagan’, rather than as an ancient Christian civilization, and where some English governors urged that reform and civility must be imposed by force. Of course, the Irish were not pagan, but Catholic; they were subjects of the English Queen, who was also Queen of Ireland, and subject to her laws; and some of the most rebellious and intransigent of her Irish subjects were now not Gaelic but Anglo-Irish; not easily seen as Indians. Yet in Sierra Leone Edward Fenton, who had served with the 1st Earl of Essex in Ulster, found similarities between African native peoples and the Irish, saying, ‘This is thoroughly Irish, for thus the Irish are wont to do.’ Sir Henry Sidney had compared certain Gaelic clans to cannibals. The debate about Indian and Irish ‘civility’ was familiar to the colonists and projectors because so many of them – Drake, Gilbert, Grenville, Frobisher, Ralegh, Lane, Harriot, Philip Sidney – were of the Protestant New English who had visited or served in Ireland. Philip Sidney, who was partner in a secret and fantastic scheme to sequester parts of Munster and planned to be baron of Kerry, had purchased three million acres of ‘Norumbega’ from Gilbert, which neither of them ever saw. Those who had been promoters of schemes to colonize Ireland turned to much wider lands and wilder peoples.

A strange mixture of the quest for virtue in action and a ruthless
acquisitiveness marked the lives of the Elizabethan adventurers. The New World offered many freedoms. To those, like Ralegh, Harriot and Gilbert, whose speculation was theological and scientific as well as financial, America was ‘a fruitful womb of innovation’. The most enthusiastic projectors for Gilbert’s colony were members of the recusant Catholic gentry, seeking escape from the ruinous penalties which awaited them in England for practising their religion. Walsingham encouraged their migration. For the landless and insecure in England, not least for younger sons, there was the prospect of wealth. The lands in the colonies were free from the debt and entail which trammelled landowners in the Old World. In the New World the colonists could live with little recourse to the governor and less to England. On this frontier, without restraint or supervision, with no laws of war, they could test themselves. Ralegh and his friends planned to prey upon the Spanish empire from their colony. America was a ‘place of hazard’ where furious spirits miscast for the long peace in England might win fame and honour. But that long peace was about to end.

In September 1585 Sidney at last attempted his escape to the New World. He rode to Plymouth to join Drake’s voyage to the West Indies, without royal permission: a ‘desperate course’, judged his father-in-law, Walsingham. On the very eve of sailing, he was ordered back by the Queen’s peremptory command. Drake could not countenance a divided command, nor could Elizabeth allow Sidney’s disobedience. But with her ‘thunder’ came her ‘grace’. Sidney was appointed Governor of Flushing in the Netherlands, and offered the chance for action in the Protestant cause for which he had yearned. For on 4 September, the day before Drake sailed, Elizabeth’s help at last came to save the Dutch in their extremity, in the form of 4,000 troops. Her commission to the predatory Drake to sail along the Spanish Main and her protection of the Low Countries precipitated what she had so long avoided: war with Spain.

At the end of 1584 Elizabeth’s councillors had confronted an alarming paradox: the only way to secure lasting peace for England might be by waging war. Since the previous summer England had stood alone in Europe. Burghley starkly expressed the danger of that unchosen isolation: ‘No help but her own, and that but half a help’, since the loyalty of so many Catholics was still suspected to lie with the Scottish Queen
and with Rome. Despite her old horror of French encirclement, Elizabeth had sought an offensive and defensive alliance with Henry III to challenge the ‘overgreatness’ of the King of Spain, and proposed their joint government of the Low Countries. That planned alliance had failed and the Duke of Anjou’s dismal rule as elected sovereign of the Netherlands (1581–3) had ended with his abdication. In July 1581 the Act of Abjuration deposed Philip II, and a Dutch republic was created. By the spring of 1583 the state of the rebel provinces was desperate, and Orange’s strategy of religious peace, whereby local authorities should tolerate freedom of worship, lay in ruins. Anjou had left the Netherlands that June, unlamented, and Orange abandoned Brabant in the south for Holland which would become, as he had predicted, his tomb. In July 1584 an assassin earned a Spanish bounty by cutting down the
pater patriae
.

The demoralized, mesmerized towns of Flanders and Brabant capitulated, one by one, before the serpentine diplomacy and strategic genius of the Prince of Parma, Governor-General of the Netherlands. Parma, who seemed to retain in his head a plan of all the waterways and terrain of the Low Countries, forced the towns’ surrender by distant blockade, by treachery from within, and by the silver bullets of bribes, as often as by military assault. By the end of 1584 only Brussels, Mechelen and Antwerp still resisted: the revolt in the south seemed doomed. Fearful of falling into Spanish hands, the Dutch prepared to throw themselves into French. ‘He who would escape Charybdis falls into Scylla,’ remarked Sir Edward Stafford, English ambassador to Paris. At the end of 1584 the rebel states offered sovereignty to Henry III, who refused it. France was entering a new and dangerous phase of her own civil war. The death of the Duke of Anjou left the Protestant Bourbon leader, Henry of Navarre, heir to the French throne. The militant Catholic League, first formed in 1576, was now revived under Guise leadership; it was sworn to resist the succession of a heretic, by ‘
main forte
’ if necessary, and to defend Holy Church. From the late summer of 1584 the Guise lords rallied their noble clienteles in the provinces of the north and east of France and at the end of the year Philip II promised aid to the Leaguer army. If the League won, the French Channel shore, where the League was strongest, would lie open to Spain. Would France become Spain’s client? The English watched events over the Channel with mounting alarm.

Once again, England’s help was the last hope of the rebel Dutch.
Would Elizabeth at last allow the cause to die? Her councillors, in conference at the end of 1584, debated two momentous questions: should England protect the United Provinces; if not, how should she defend herself against Philip II’s ‘malice and forces’, which would surely turn against her once he had subdued Holland and Zeeland? There could be no ‘quiet neighbourhood’ with a victorious, vengeful Spain. Better to wage war abroad, and with allies, than to encounter the power of Spain at home, undermined by enemies within: this was the argument of Sir Walter Mildmay and the interventionists. Against this strategy were presented the arguments which had always persuaded Elizabeth before: to aid the rebels was against ‘honour and conscience’; they were a ‘popular state without a head’, against nature; and the cost of the war would be as great as it was incalculable, and her subjects might resist paying for it. The interventionist argument at last prevailed. As Burghley concluded, it was safer to enter the war now to prevent Philip from attaining the ‘full height of his designs and conquests’, which would be irresistible and leave Elizabeth and England helpless before his ‘insatiable malice, which is most terrible to be thought of but most miserable to suffer’. Recognizing this as a time of great danger, Elizabeth’s Protestant nobility and gentry bound themselves in the Bond of Association.

In August 1585, in the Treaty of Nonsuch, Elizabeth and the Dutch made formal their mutually reluctant recognition that they were the only allies for each other. To offer protection to the Dutch was to invite retribution, and the Queen who had tried to risk nothing now risked everything. ‘She took the diadem from her head and adventured it upon the doubtful chance of war,’ said the King of Sweden. All her provocation (despite her prevarication) – the seizure of Alva’s pay-ships, the ‘volunteers’ sent in 1572, the secret loans, the knighting of Drake after his circumnavigation and seizure of Spanish treasure – led at last to her grudging adoption of the cause. Philip II’s past hostile actions were alleged in formal justification of Elizabeth’s protection of the Netherlands. Yet even as English help came, it came too late; too late to save Antwerp which, blockaded and starved, finally surrendered to Parma three days before the treaty was signed. The great metropolis, once the heart of the revolt, became a Spanish bastion. Could Antwerp have been relieved? Many thought so, and did not easily forgive Elizabeth. Although she sent help, the Queen’s objectives had never changed and were not those of the Dutch. Fearing French encirclement, her hope was still merely to restore ancient liberties of the Netherlands under Spanish
sovereignty, even though the Dutch had finally and formally forsworn it in the Act of Abjuration of 1581. Elizabeth always drew back from their last demand, for her to rule. It was one thing to accept the sovereignty of New Albion; quite another to become queen of the rebel Dutch. Some around her had other ideas.