The Pirate Queen (33 page)
Authors: Susan Ronald
my Lord Deputy that now is presently upon his landing there discharged the frigates which the Scots having intelligence of and of their departure, upon the last voyage that the aforesaid hoy made for the revictualling of the castle, on their return assaulted, took and burnt her. My humble suit to your Honours is not to put this loss upon me…for had I not been assured by the Earl of Essex that he understood by certain [of] Her Majesty’s letters to himself, her pleasure was the frigates should not have been discharged as long as the place was retained, I would more sufficiently have provided for the safety of the passage.
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Before the end of the year, Sidney ordered the English garrison at Rathlin to be abandoned. The forty soldiers who had remained there had been reduced to eating their own horses for food due to the Scottish reprisals. And without Rathlin, there was no need for a
naval squadron. Essex and Drake returned to England, where they both received rewards from the court. By the summer of 1576, Essex had been sent back to Ireland as its earl marshal, but he died within weeks of dysentery, with dreams of yet more bloodshed thankfully unfulfilled.
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Drake had shared his own dream from the treetop high above Darien with the earl before his death, as well as his new friend, a gentleman named Thomas Doughty, who had served Essex well as a secretary. Doughty vowed to accompany Drake on his next great voyage, and to help him in any way he possibly could at court.
He was sent for unto Her Majesty by Secretary Walsingham, and she told him that she would gladly be revenged on the King of Spain for divers injuries and that Drake was the only man that might do this exploit…
—SIR FRANCIS DRAKE,
Sir Francis Drake Revived
T
he reappointment of Sir Henry Sidney as lord deputy in Ireland put that troubled province back into a safe pair of hands from the Privy Council’s perspective. There was no further need for an Irish navy, and hence no need for Drake to squander his maritime brilliance there.
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Where Drake’s timing had been decidedly poor on his return from the West Indies, his return from Ireland was blessed in every way. For years, Sir John Hawkins had had an eye on his father-in-law’s position as treasurer of the navy, and indeed Benjamin Gonson was grooming him for that post. In February 1577, Hawkins claimed the sums of £100 and £950 from lord treasurer Burghley: the first sum was for clearing “the coast of pirates” and the second, for his provision of ships and losses incurred in Essex’s Irish “plantation” scheme. He even listed the £150 costs for recovering his captured mariners from the King of Spain’s clutches in sending George Fitzwilliams to meet the king in 1571.
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In light of what followed, it is fairly clear that Burghley connived with Hawkins in making these demands.
Hawkins’s “reasonable suits,” so Burghley stated, included information garnered from Gonson’s naval accounts as well as discussions with Elizabeth’s two master shipwrights, Peter Pett and Matthew Baker. Not satisfied simply to have his losses covered, Hawkins went on to accuse the Winter brothers and the Navy Board of feathering their own nests and avoiding their blindingly obvious inability to deliver a better, sleeker, more efficient navy for less money. The
Winters’ annual costs were £6,000 ($2.09 million or £1.13 million today), and Hawkins claimed that a “far better” navy could be maintained for £4,000 yearly. To build seven ships had cost nearly £5,000 in the previous year, and Hawkins predicted that the current year would see a doubling of that sum. His claim, entitled “Abuses in the Admiralty Touching Her Majesty’s Navy Exhibited by Mr Hawkins” went on to allege that new ships were being built for £800 too much ($274,658 or £148,464 today) and wood provided for £400 per load too much ($137,329 or £74,232 today). These were serious charges indeed—particularly against a national hero like Sir William Winter—and could not go unaddressed.
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The accusation made, Hawkins could only wait out the results of the hornets’ nest he had stirred up against the Winter brothers. Though Hawkins had Burghley’s trust, the Lord Admiral Clinton, aging, but not without substantial influence, weighed in on the side of William and George Winter. Nonetheless, Hawkins was eventually appointed as the new “treasurer for marine causes,” to replace his father-in-law on November 18, 1577. “I shall pluck a thorn out of my foot,” an evidently relieved Gonson warned him, “and put it into yours.”
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Hawkins’s appointment is a demonstrable change of direction, and an important one in English naval history. Because of, rather than despite, his merchant pirating of the 1560s, a redesign program would be undertaken in his tenure that produced precisely what he had sought: sleeker, swifter, more heavily armed, more efficient ships that would run circles around the Spanish and Portuguese.
Drake’s return from Ireland also coincided with the outburst of “gold fever” at court, introduced by Michael Lok and Martin Frobisher. The air was filled with expectation that the gold that had so long filled Philip of Spain’s coffers might justly come to England, too, through Frobisher’s mining exploits. The only cloud on Drake’s horizon was the strong possibility that English merchants—if they knew what he had in mind—could veto his own plans for the future.
Some merchants had already turned to illicit trade and plunder, while others clung precariously to the “old ways” of the merchant companies and government-granted monopolies. But it was the
“newer” aggressive English traders who, little by little, had been gnawing away at the fringes of Spain’s empire. Yet miraculously, while English depredations against Spanish shipping had been steadily on the rise, so trade with Iberia had risen, too. English trade with the Barbary Coast (largely in the control of the Portuguese or Moors) amounted to some £17,775 ($6.11 million or £3.3 million today) by 1576. England’s trade with Portugal in the same year was £8,758 5s. 4d. ($3.01 million or £1.63 million today). While trade had been higher in previous years, there were still some 4,361 English officially resident in Portugal (there were only 7 Portuguese in England in the same period). The treaty of 1572 had also finally come into effect opening trade to the Barbary Coast. All this “progress” led the merchants to hope widely that the English would no longer be viewed as interlopers.
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It was a slender thread to cling to.
Elizabeth, meanwhile, was never one to pass up a great opportunity to slyly knife Philip in the back. English shipping had once again begun trading in the Mediterranean after the defeat of the Turks at Lepanto, but the war of Cyprus (1570–73) had crippled trade with Venice anew. With Antwerp’s trade in chaos since 1569 and the arrival of Alba, the 1570s became a decade of plunder, piracy, and underhanded dealing. A veritable tidal wave of piracy swept the Italian and Iberian peninsulas, with English rovers leading the pack along with the French, Barbary, and Turkish mariners. By the latter part of the decade, the deadly combination of Leicester and Walsingham granted a monopoly to Acerbo Velutelli, a Luccan merchant, to freight imports of currants from the eastern Mediterranean to England aboard English ships. Among the ship owners were Sir John Hawkins, Oliver and Nicholas Stile, Simon Lawrence, and Thomas Cordell.
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Still, the most important of the Levant traders would be Sir Edward Osborne. According to Hakluyt,
Sir Edward Osborne and M. Richard Staper seriously considering what benefit might grow to the common wealth by renewing of the foresaid discontinued trade, to the enlarging of Her Majesty’s customs [duties], the furthering of navigation, the venting of diverse general commodities of this Realm, and the enriching of the City of London, determined to use some effectual means of re-establishing and augmenting thereof. Wherefore about the year 1575, the foresaid R.W. [Right Worshipful] merchants at their charges and expenses sent John Wight and Joseph Clements by way of Poland to Constantinople, where the said Joseph remained 18 months to procure a safe conduct from the grand signory for Mr William Harborne, then factor for Sir Edward Osborne…. The said Mr Harborne the first of July 1578 departed from London by the sea to Hamburg, and thence…traveled to Leopolis in Poland…he arrived at Constantinople the 28th of October.
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Elizabeth was desperate to foster good relations with the Porte (the Sultan’s government in Constantinople), as a counterbalance to Spain’s open animosity and France’s invariable spoiling tactics. Harborne’s embassy to Constantinople was not merely a new commercial venture to Spain’s old enemy; it was a matter of considerable interest to the state, with state sanction. Walsingham’s memorandum to the queen from 1578, entitled “A Consideration of the Trade unto Turkey,” sets out how to use this new and important market “to great profit” through direct access to the Levant. He also urged the queen to look at the political advantages to an Anglo-Ottoman entente, thus beginning the long and lucrative chapter in England’s history of trade with the Middle East.
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It was as if all these excellent signs for his project were conspiring to raise Drake’s expectations. But there was more. The single most important development in English thinking of the period, attributable to Dr. John Dee, was about to be published. In August 1576, Dr. Dee wrote his first draft of the incredibly insightful paper “A Petty Navy Royal,” which would change English thought on the island nation’s relationship to the sea forever. It might have also been aptly entitled “In Defense of the Realm,” and it was made available to the public as part of his
General & Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation
, in 1577.
Dee logically laid out a thirteen-point plan for the development of a standing navy for England’s defense. He urged for a navy of seventy-five or more tall ships, well provisioned with supplies to patrol England’s coasts, not only to fend off any threat of invasion
from her neighbors, but also from Spain and the pope, who had already shown their true colors through the Ridolfi plot and the bull of excommunication. Dee is the first to refer to the “British Empire” and to England’s shores as part of a greater Britain. He covers all skills required in such a defensive force from mustering the men to what tasks they would need to be trained to perform ranging from piloting skills in harbor and recognizing landmarks to the greater “art of navigation” and every shade of expertise in between. It is obviously written with an eye to presentation to Elizabeth, since his point 5 lays claim to the intractable problems of vagrancy and crime when he writes, “How many hundreds of lusty and handsome men would be, this way, well occupied, and have needful maintenance, which now are either idle, or want sustenance, or both; in too many places of this renowned Monarchy?”
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Not pirate nor prince nor potentate would dare attack a realm so strong, Dee continues, adding that pirates of “good character” would desire to be employed in such an instrument of national pride. Foreign fishermen guilty of invading England’s shores for decades could be rebuffed by a standing navy, thereby ensuring enough fish stocks for the common good. But Dee, as an experienced intelligencer, added that humble fishermen may not be fishermen after all:
And this sort of people they be, which otherwise by colour [under cover] and pretence of coming about their feat of fishing do subtly and secretly use soundings and searchings of our channels, deeps, shoals, banks, or bars along the sea coasts, and in our haven mouths also, and up in our creeks, sometimes in our bays, and sometimes in our roads, etc.; taking good marks, for avoiding of the dangers, and also trying good landings. And so, making perfect charts of all our coasts round about England and Ireland, are become almost [more] perfect in them, than the most part of our masters, leadsmen or pilots are. To the double danger of mischief in times of war; and also to no little hazard of the State Royal, if maliciously bent, they should purpose to land any puissant army, in time to come.
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Dee concludes his thesis with the correct assertion that “this Petty Navy Royal is thought to be the only Master Key wherewith to open all locks that keep out or hinder this incomparable British Empire
from enjoying…such a yearly revenue of Treasure…with so great ease to…yield the like to either king or other potentate…”
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The timing of Dee’s publication was no accident. Frobisher had already left on his second voyage, and adventurers of all sorts were beating a path to his door. Several years earlier, he had presented the queen with his view of the state of the realm that clearly demonstrated that something had to be done to alleviate the perpetual state of near-war abroad so that the people could enjoy their long-earned peace at home. Protestants everywhere—especially in Flanders and the Dutch provinces—were under siege by either the pope, Philip II, or Charles IX of France.
Crucial to this exposé was the simple fact that Elizabeth trusted Dee implicitly. Like Leicester, he was affectionately called her “eyes.” While she paid him little by way of money, he was always welcomed at court. His near neighbor, Sir Francis Walsingham, was also a great admirer of his, as was Leicester himself. It would be these three men who would form the core support for Drake and his fellow adventurers, both at court, and in the realm generally. Burghley, on the other hand, had made his views known with regard to partaking in plunder, preferring the integrity of investments through the guise of a joint stock company like the Muscovy Company instead. Though he turned his nose up at booty as a means to become personally wealthy, Burghley welcomed it nonetheless into Elizabeth’s purse for the realm.
