The Pirate Queen (7 page)

Yet the secret of Elizabeth’s success in dealing with this marauding brood of courtiers, merchants, and close relations vying for power, plunder, and riches remained her ability to fuse the colossal and diverging egos of her gentlemen and merchant adventurers while enforcing her personal will for the protection and security of England. Her security and England’s undoubtedly took precedence over their greed, their determination to discover “new worlds,” faster trade routes to the Indies, or imperialistic visions of settlement. And this “fusion” is a recurrent theme throughout all aspects of her reign. As queen, she masterminded the internal balance of court power, which was mimicked in her international politics by her interminable and often frustrating use of her dog-eared marriage card; the making and breaking of alliances; her prevarication; and her initial tacit, and later overt, acceptance of plunder and piracy as central to state policy.
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The queen’s crown—her very person—and the essence of her statecraft would depend on the concept of fusion, or compromise. As a Protestant ruler of a mixed Protestant and Catholic country, overpowered by Catholic giants like Spain and France, Elizabeth was all too conscious of the need to appear to be queen of “all the English.” The religious settlement culminating in the Act of Supremacy and Uniformity in April 1559, making Elizabeth supreme governor of the Church of England, was neither a Catholic nor Protestant solution. It pleased no one, but offended few. It
had been carefully crafted to provide a middle ground to keep the nation at peace. Catholics in her realm were allowed to “opt out” of Anglican Church services for a small recusancy fine to practice their preferred religion without fear of being burned at the stake, so long as they did not engage in treasonous acts against the queen or her government.
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Even the tightrope walk she endlessly engaged in—that of her feigning interest in marriage to make and break international peace accords—was nothing more than a quest for a balance of power.
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Above all other considerations, the golden thread that ran through Elizabeth’s domestic and foreign policy was security of the realm. The facts speak for themselves. Her grandfather, Henry VII, had seized power, finally ending generations of royal battles between the Yorks and Lancastrians in their seemingly interminable Wars of the Roses. One of her first memories when she was no more than three would have been her father’s reign having been seriously threatened by the popular uprising of the Pilgrimage of Grace. The other enduring fact was the execution of her mother and the invisible scars that had been left on her as a result. When Elizabeth had seen her cousin, Queen Catherine Howard—Henry VIII’s fifth wife—dragged through the castle by her hair screaming literally for her very life, it is no wonder that the nine-year-old Elizabeth whispered “I shall never marry” under her breath to Robert Dudley.
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These invisible scars continually marred her young and turbulent life until she could become queen. The forced estrangement from her young brother, Edward VI, by Dudley’s father, the Earl of Northumberland, began her long years of exile from court and mistrust of privy councillors. Her trauma culminated in the final years of suspicion and imprisonment at the hands of her sister, Mary, as Elizabeth herself best described when writing defiantly with a diamond on a window pane at Woodstock, “Much suspected by me, Nothing proved can be, said Elizabeth the prisoner.”
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It is little wonder that personal security and security of the realm became her mantras, and that all weapons at her disposal to achieve these goals would be used. Elizabeth’s overpowering desire to be personally secure and to ensure the safety of her people and realm was the driving force behind her sanctioning of plunder, promotion of
trade, switching allegiances, and eventually giving in to the imperial aims of her intellectuals and adventurers, and creating a nascent British Empire. Piracy and plunder became a vital tool to achieve her goals of security. And yet, for that to become a successful state policy, she would need to successfully “man manage” her merchant adventurers and gentlemen who would make it all possible.

4. The Quest for Cash

Wherein it may appear that we mean to do to no person wrong but to provide and foresee how apparent dangers to our estate may be diverted, and that we might not remain in this kind of unsurety to have our Calais restored to us…

QUEEN ELIZABETH TO PHILIP II OF SPAIN, SEPTEMBER
30, 1562

B
y April 1559, the first immediate crises of the queen’s reign had been successfully addressed: the Act of Supremacy and Uniformity provided a religious solution, and the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis had been agreed. While Elizabeth had ostensibly held out for the return of Calais, with the treaty providing for the French to give Calais back to England in eight years’ time, or forfeit 500,000 crowns ($186.9 million or £101 million today), there was little doubt in the queen’s or Cecil’s minds that Calais was irretrievably lost.
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Both the queen and Cecil also understood that the chances of England ever receiving the forfeit sum entailed in the treaty were slim.

Yet the loss of Calais cut deeper than a loss to Elizabeth’s Tudor pride, as many believe. It had been the home for over a century to the Staplers, who shipped wool from England to Calais for spinning and trading on the spun wool. As with all wars, men, merchandise, money, homes, markets, and confidence were lost with Calais, too. Furthermore, the security of the realm had been placed in jeopardy, since without Calais, England no longer controlled the Straits of Dover, then known as the Narrow Seas, from both sides of the landmass. This helps to put into perspective, to some extent, Elizabeth’s fixation with regaining Calais, and the disasters that were to follow as a result of her policy to win her staple town back.

The treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis merely allowed for the cessation of hostilities, with a great deal of face saving on both sides. It fell far
short of the ultimate goal of any treaty since it did not eliminate the threat of future wars. The new French king, Francis II, was also by now King of Scotland, and his bride, Mary Queen of Scots, openly defied Elizabeth’s personal right to rule by actively claiming the English throne in her own right as a granddaughter of Henry VII.

When Francis’s father, Henry II, died from his injuries in a jousting accident in July 1559, things turned from bad to worse for Elizabeth. Even Henry had allowed his son and Mary to sport the insignia of England on their coat of arms, in an overt attempt to goad Elizabeth into premature action against their more powerful kingdom of France. And now that Mary Queen of Scots was also Queen of France, her powerful uncles, the Guises, began actively plotting to put Mary on the throne of England.

At the time, England was by and large rightly regarded as a military and economic backwater by both the French and the Spanish, and there were ample reasons for this perception. What neither crown had yet had the chance to recognize was that Elizabeth Tudor would become the first English monarch adept at playing off one European giant against another in a long game, thereby upsetting the balance of European power and allowing England to step forward onto the world stage. To the north, in France’s unofficial vassal realm of Scotland, Elizabeth Tudor warily watched, fearful that it would be only a matter of time before the hostilities between the staunchly Protestant Scottish Lords of the Congregation and the queen dowager, Mary of Guise, would embroil both France and England in their Scottish war. And war was unpredictable and bad for trade.

Any war—aside from the supreme waste of human and economic resources—could not fail to demonstrate, in Elizabeth’s eyes, that England was intrinsically weak militarily and economically. The country was simply ill-prepared to face a stronger enemy like France from the Continent, much less a France coupled with Scotland, and potentially Ireland as well. Catholic Ireland had always been viewed as a back door for all Catholic sympathizers, be they French, Spanish, or emissaries from the pope. With a probable war at sea and along the border of Scotland, the thought of having to watch the English flank at Ireland, in addition to the Channel and the North Sea, became a matter for considerable worry. The obvious fact that
armies—or for that matter, navies—needed money that the crown did not have seemed to Elizabeth to be an insurmountable problem. Worse still, the young English queen was unproven as a leader. For her councillors, the specter of war was a regrettable diversion so early in the young queen’s reign that could well cost the country its freedom.

Yet despite the expensive diversion of war, it was one that they would have to face up to if England were to remain a Protestant nation. To achieve their goals, Elizabeth and her councillors simply had to tackle the economic health of the realm, while simultaneously keeping England out of a conflict that it could ill afford.

The blow inflicted by the French of the loss of the staple at Calais had already impacted England’s fledgling modern economy, though the Staplers had removed their business to Antwerp temporarily in the Spanish Low Countries while searching for another city to use as their main staple town. Meanwhile, Scottish and French pirates were marauding the Channel and the Narrow Seas, and the most powerful group of merchants, the Merchants Adventurers, whose international market was located in Antwerp, were deeply concerned that they would be cut off from their Continental source of wealth. They could, by law, only sell their merchandise abroad, and were only licensed to do so at Antwerp. The English queen knew that her merchants were her best chance at securing loans for the crown, and that a war stood to impoverish her best potential source of ready funds.

It was a dilemma she would need to speedily address. But Elizabeth wasn’t given to snap decisions. No matter how she tried to evade the issue, at the end of the day, the nation needed to be able to defend itself, and before any loan could be obtained for arms, the queen needed to understand what she could offer up as security and how she could borrow from English or foreign merchants. To do that, Elizabeth needed to know what she owned; what she was owed; what was missing that could be tracked down and restored; and what could be sold for cash or favors. In the first important months of her reign, the Privy Council wrote letters to “the tellers of the exchequer to send hither a perfect book of the names of all such as are behind within the Queen’s Majesty’s House of the payment of the last Subsidy granted to the late Queen.”
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An inventory was taken of
the late Queen Mary’s jewels, and note made of those items that were missing or had been sold during her lifetime. A committee of the Privy Council was appointed to examine the grants of crown lands made in the last reign.
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Under the heading “Debts to the Crown,” a letter was sent from the Privy Council “to the lord treasurer to cause speedy certificate to be made to the Queen’s Majesty of all manner of debts due in the exchequer to the extent [that] the same being known, [so that] order may be given by such as her Highness hath appointed in Commission to see the same answered with all expedition.” In December a letter went out to the Court of Wards [Court of Awards] to a Mr. Damsell requesting him to “certify all manner of debts due in the Court.”
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No individual, dead or alive, was exempt from the quest for cash. Queen Mary’s archbishop, Cardinal Pole, who died the same day as his mistress, was a particular target for Elizabeth’s men. Within twelve days of taking power, the Privy Council had issued orders to Sir Nicholas Throckmorton “to suffer certain parcels of the late Cardinal’s plate which are thought meet by the officers of the Jewel House for the service of the Queen to be brought hither by some of his own folks to the end that, the same being viewed, he may receive the value thereof or of so much of it as shall be thought meet for her Highness’ use, and the rest to be safely returned back again unto him, and that they may be bold in her Majesty’s name to assure him.”
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Then the queen and her ministers instructed the sheriffs to put pressure upon such of the “Collectors of the Subsidy” in each county “as were behindhand in their payments. Letters to the sheriffs of the counties of Buckinghamshire, Yorkshire, Gloucestershire, Nottinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Staffordshire, and Warwickshire and [to] the mayors of the towns of Northampton, Derby, King’s Lynn and Southampton, [were expedited] to apprehend the collectors of the fifteenth and [the] tenth[taxes]in the said shires and towns behind of [sic] their collections, and to bind them in good bands in treble the sums to make payment of all that is by them due into the exchequer within fifteen days next after the bands taken, &c., according to the minute in the Council Chest.”
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Before the end of December, the Privy Council reminded Sir Anthony St. Leger, the Irish treasurer, in the name of the queen—and
not for the first time—that the crown must insist on the repayment of the large sums for which he had failed to account during his tenure of office in the treasury in Ireland.
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Lord Paget received notice that his licence to deal in wine might be reconsidered, and that the Queen reserved the right in the meantime to reasonably demand a share of his profits. Paget was also required to send in an exact statement of the debts due to the late Queen Mary.
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This was tantamount to an official rebuke, and would have made both St. Leger and Paget unhappy in the extreme. From Berwick in the north to Land’s End at the tip of Cornwall, Elizabeth and her privy councillors scoured the country for cash and a true picture of her assets and liabilities. No member of the church or aristocracy, no merchant or yeoman was spared. And most important in this audit of the crown’s assets was the queen’s navy.