The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (45 page)

An island with walls. Hakluyt’s memorable image resurfaces a year or so later in Shakespeare’s
Richard II
during John of Gaunt’s ‘sceptred isle’ speech, perhaps indebted to
Principal Navigations
: ‘this precious stone set in a silver sea, which serves it in the office of a wall, or as a moat defensive to a house’ (II, I, 46–8). Hakluyt may also have been thinking about the very real sea-walls which Walsingham had ordered to fortify the harbour at Dover.

The phenomenal success of
Principal Navigations
is recalled in the many first editions which survive to this day – at Middle Temple and Cashel Cathedral, Harvard University and New York Public Library, three copies each in the Folger and the Huntington, ten distributed between the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, and more besides. The preface tells the story of what amounted to Hakluyt’s second conversion, to the cause of overseas discovery. Visiting his cousin at his legal chambers in London, the younger Hakluyt was shown the ‘division of the earth’ according to ancient knowledge and the findings of modern explorers. Transfixed by the map in front of him, his
thoughts turned to the 107th Psalm: ‘they which go down to the sea in ships, and occupy by the great waters, they see the works of the Lord, and His wonders in the deep’. A new sense of vocation quickened within Hakluyt, reflecting both his passionate Christian faith and his desire to see the English break out of their ‘sluggish security’. To remain inert while England’s enemies spread their net across the world was to expose crown and nation to danger. As if to alert his readers to all that might be lost, Hakluyt completed
Principal Navigations
on 17 November: Queen Elizabeth’s accession day.

The dedication to Walsingham reflected a relationship which dated back to Hakluyt’s days as a don at Christ Church. His earliest known work, a pamphlet recommending the seizure of the Strait of Magellan, was either commissioned by Walsingham or written to gain his attention. From 1580 onwards Hakluyt was collecting material and interviewing mariners in preparation for the plantation of North America.
Divers Voyages touching the Discoverie of America
appeared in 1582, fuelling the atmosphere of excitement in which Peckham and Humphrey Gilbert were able to stake their claims in New England. Walsingham praised Hakluyt for his efforts to publicise ‘the discovery of the Western parts yet unknown’, and encouraged him to continue both for his own private good – a hint of the preferment to come – as well as the ‘public benefit of this realm’. In spring 1583 he was in Bristol, attempting to sell Christopher Carleill’s projected voyage to the mayor and aldermen. The following September Walsingham sent him to France, the only foreign country which Hakluyt would see with his own eyes, as chaplain to the English ambassador Sir Edward Stafford. There was little love lost between Walsingham and Stafford, which makes it all the more interesting that Hakluyt was soon acting as the principal secretary’s eyes and ears within the Paris embassy.

Using his chaplaincy as cover, Hakluyt was able to gather a 
mass of information on French and Spanish interests in North America. A letter of January 1584 reveals the range of his activities in Paris. He promised Walsingham reports from Dieppe and St Malo. He visited a warehouse of Canadian pelts purchased by the royal furrier, and reported on gossip that the French were planning to send a mission of ‘many friars and other religious persons’ to the new world, although Hakluyt suspected that this might be misinformation: ‘I think they not be in haste to do it’. He met the pretender to the Portuguese throne, Don Antonio, ‘and five or six of his best captains and pilots’, and had hopes of meeting a man from Savoy who had travelled to Japan. He rode to Rouen to investigate French plans to build a trading post in Maine or Nova Scotia, and he made contact with Walsingham’s agents in the Basque country close to the Spanish border. Somehow Hakluyt got access to the royal library in the Abbey of St Martin, where he made notes on the voyages of Jacques Cartier to the Gulf of St Lawrence in 1534–6. He also monitored the activities of the English exile community in Paris, briefing the government on the Catholic response to Lord Burghley’s propaganda tract
The Execution of Justice
. Given Stafford’s double dealing, it is quite possible that Hakluyt kept a watch on him too. When Walsingham was sick, he dealt with Carleill instead. All told, he was a valuable asset.

The agents in Walsingham’s service generally worked for money, laced with Protestantism to a greater or lesser degree. Hakluyt’s motivation was subtly different. He welcomed the benefits which his patron could put his way, but he placed an even higher value on the chance to promote ‘our western planting and discovery’. Sending news that he had approached the Genoese banker Horatio Palavicini ‘to become an adventurer in those western voyages’, Hakluyt appealed for lectures in mathematics and navigation in Oxford and London; if Walsingham agreed to fund them, it would be ‘the best hundred 
pounds that was bestowed this five hundred years’. There was even the chance that Hakluyt would be released from his chaplaincy to sail westwards in person. Judging by the tone of his letters, this is what he truly yearned to do. He told Walsingham that he was ready to ‘go myself into the action’, ‘in the service of God and my country to employ all my simple observations, readings and conference’. But as an Oxford academic with no experience of the sea, Hakluyt was more useful in Paris. By the time he was finally free to leave in 1588, it was too late: the Elizabethan experiment in empire was effectively over.
³⁴

Hakluyt’s influence needs to be measured in words more than deeds. A busy editor and translator, he also made his own unique contribution to the cause of English overseas expansion. Hakluyt spent the summer of 1584 in London putting together his
Discourse of Western Planting
, twenty-one chapters which were part sermon and part practical guide to the settlement of America. The manuscript original which Hakluyt presented to the queen on 5 October is lost, but a contemporary copy survives in New York Public Library; this may be the one which Hakluyt paid a scrivener to prepare for Walsingham to keep. Hakluyt probably worked on the
Discourse
at Walsingham’s house in Seething Lane, making use of the books and maps in his study. The title-page states that it was written at the ‘request and direction’ of Walter Raleigh, who had recently despatched two ships to assert the rights in America which he had been granted following the death of Humphrey Gilbert. Walsingham would come to resent Raleigh’s easy manner with the queen, a tense situation made worse when Elizabeth granted her favourite the lands once belonging to Anthony Babington, but for the present the two worked together to get Hakluyt a hearing at court.

The
Discourse of Western Planting
is easily overlooked, its outline obscured by the far more famous
Principal Navigations
. The text wasn’t printed until 1877, although the assumption that an idea
is more important simply because it is published would have seemed strange to the Elizabethan mind. John Dee was highly selective about what he allowed to go into print; manuscript was the proper forum for advice and debate. By presenting his argument as the work of his own hand, Hakluyt played to the sensitivities of a queen who loathed the public discussion of state secrets. Long sections of the
Discourse
are quoted from Sir George Peckham, and the
Destruycion de las Indias
by Bartholomé de las Casas, and John Ribault’s
Whole and True Discovery of Terra Florida
. Again, the modern equation between originality and impact can be misleading. Hakluyt skilfully selected his evidence, researching his subject and presenting his conclusion with all the care of an Oxford disputation. The ample examples, the repetition and the scrupulous citing of authorities were familiar techniques of academic rhetoric.

When Hakluyt does elect to speak in person, his voice comes through with conviction and a powerful sense of urgency. Explorers from many nations had found America to be ‘a place wonderful fertile and of strong situation’, its people naturally gentle and the climate so benevolent that two harvests could be gathered in a single year. The commodities on offer in this aromatic Eden run on for page after page, a shopping list for the senses: oranges and almonds, cloves and pepper, huge woods and mighty fish, silkworms and sassafras. The wealth of South America had elevated the monarchies of Spain and Portugal, rulers over parched and unyielding landscapes at home, to a scale of power and grandeur which they could scarcely have imagined. But there was ample space to settle north of Florida, ‘if by our slackness we suffer not the French or others to prevent us’. The best part of America was still there for the taking, more suited to the industrious and godly nature of the English people than the torrid southern territories which had been conquered by Spain. Aware of the importance of dynastic continuity to the 
queen, Hakluyt threw in a prayer encouraging her to finish the work of her forebears:

God which doth all things in his due time, and hath in his hand the hearts of all princes, stir up the mind of her majesty at length to assist her most willing and forward subjects to the performance of this most godly and profitable action which was begun at the charges of King Henry the 7th her grandfather, followed by King Henry the eighth her father, and left as it seemeth to be accomplished by her.

Not for nothing did he sign himself to Walsingham as ‘Richard Hakluyt, Preacher’.
³⁵

The key to all this wealth was what Hakluyt called ‘traffic’, the lawful exchange in the rich resources of the earth which was pleasing in the sight of God. Western planting would supply raw materials and skilled employment for a kingdom in which both were growing scarce. Hakluyt was happy to speak of colonies, but wanted it understood that the English would be far superior to the Spanish. His account of the violations inflicted on the subjects of New Spain brims over with anger and disgust. More than ‘fifteen millions of souls’, he calculated, had perished under Spanish tyranny. His choice of word for them, ‘souls’, is revealing. The native population was childlike rather than brutish in Hakluyt’s estimation, willing to obey and eager to learn. The Catholic powers talked of converting them, but had brought only slavery and death. That was why the people of America ‘cry out unto us their next neighbours to come and help them, and bring unto them the glad tidings of the gospel’. A reader familiar with the works of Thomas More would have been reminded of the citizens of
Utopia
, keen to soak up the Christian message.

Hakluyt edged further, treading carefully for fear of offending the queen. If England armed the natives of Florida ‘as the Spaniards arm our Irish rebels’, she would gain a powerful ally 
against a regime which aspired to dominate the globe. Combine this with a fortified plantation in Cape Breton, and the whole proud edifice of the Spanish empire might topple. Like the crow in Aesop’s fable, his gorgeous feathers taken by the peacock and the magpie and the jay, Philip II would become ‘a laughing stock for all the world’.
³⁶

Walsingham’s timing in bringing Hakluyt back from Paris was impeccable. He arrived in England in late July 1584, just days after the assassination of William of Orange had thrown Protestant Europe into an uproar. Raleigh’s two barques returned from their exploration of the Outer Banks in September, full of the welcome they had received at Roanoke and bringing two Indians who had decided to see the court of Elizabeth for themselves. A fortnight after Hakluyt’s audience with the queen, Walsingham and Burghley led the privy council in signing the bond of association. In November Parliament was summoned, endorsing the bond and demanding harsher measures against Catholic priests and Jesuits. Walsingham, Drake and Sir Philip Sidney were all named to the Commons committee which met to confirm Raleigh’s entitlements in the new world, a rare example of Walsingham taking an active interest in parliamentary procedure. Hakluyt’s
Discourse
addressed any lingering concerns about the legality of colonisation, rebutting the pope’s jurisdiction in America with a mixture of theology and legal reasoning laced with lively anti-Catholicism.

The queen yielded, wooed by Raleigh’s poetry on the one side and Hakluyt’s promises on the other. Raleigh was knighted on Twelfth Night 1585 and empowered to requisition 2,400 lb of gunpowder from the magazine in the Tower of London. His personal seal now styled him as ‘Lord and Governor of Virginia’, but Elizabeth could not bear to part with his company. So it was his Cornish cousin Sir Richard Grenville who led Raleigh’s five ships out of Plymouth Sound in April, bound for ‘her majesty’s
new kingdom of Virginia’. Two members of Walsingham’s household, Master Atkinson and Master Russell, sailed with them to report on the establishment of the colony. Grenville later wrote to Walsingham regarding his share of the spoils from a Spanish cargo of sugar and ginger which the admiral seized after depositing the colonists, confirming that he had a personal stake in the first English colony in America. Walsingham also arranged for a Danish subject named Martin Laurentson to join the expedition to learn ‘the art of naval warfare’, acting on a personal request to Queen Elizabeth from her Protestant ally and former suitor Frederick II.
³⁷

Virginia had a more forgiving climate than either Nova Scotia or Newfoundland, but Roanoke Island was far from ideal as a place to settle. The Outer Banks form a crescent around the coast of modern North Carolina, two hundred miles from Cape Lookout in the south to Cape Henry and the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay. Roanoke lies four miles offshore, sheltered by the barrier islands from the worst of the Atlantic but windswept and unstable. The island has changed shape since the sixteenth century, losing the northern edge where an Indian village and an English-built jetty once stood. Much of the south and east is marshy. The forests of red and white cedar, pines and sweet gum which so impressed the first settlers have largely disappeared today. Gone too are the Secotan, the Indian nation who welcomed the newcomers with feasts of corn and smoked fish, traded their maize for knives and glass beads and baby dolls, and allowed John White to draw them. The Roanoke region, it turned out, was thickly inhabited; welcome news for those who believed that the colony’s future lay in trade, but an unavoidable source of conflict if the English settled down to farming, logging and mining.
³⁸