Under the Bloody Flag (19 page)

The proclamation demonstrated the determination of the regime to curb the piratical activities of men-of-war and other rovers. Its revival of commissioners for depredations, with extensive powers, also showed its concern to respond to overseas complaints about delays in the administration of justice. But the translation of these orders into effective action remained dependent on the cooperation and consent of local officials and communities. The lack of evidence for the proceedings of the commissioners, which may itself be revealing, makes it difficult to determine their effectiveness in implementing royal commands. In practice the attempt of the regime to control seaborne plunder rested on self-regulation among the promoters and companies of ships of war.

The inability of the regime to control or regulate the activities of men-of-war was reflected in the continued plunder of Spanish, Flemish and other shipping during the closing stages of the conflict with France. According to overseas complaints the disorder was accompanied by the use of torture against the masters of neutral vessels, to force them into false confessions. Captain Courteney tortured a Flemish master, John Petersen, with manacles until he confessed that he was a Frenchman. Although Courteney was condemned by the commissioners for depredations, and ordered by the council ‘to be punished with some corporall paine for examples sake’, he responded with a legal suit of his own against Petersen, for damages of £2,000, though it was halted in January 1565 at the intervention of the Spanish ambassador.
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The restoration of peace with France in April 1564 failed to stop the lawlessness at sea. In the aftermath of the war English rovers continued to plunder French vessels in the Channel. The vulnerability of French commerce to attack was underlined by a report in May of the spoil of several traders of France, to the value of more than 5,000 crowns, by an English rowing boat. During an uncertain and ambiguous period, that characterised the slow restoration of more peaceful conditions at sea, the council dealt with widespread complaints of illegal plunder. In August it instructed Sir William Godolphin, John Killigrew and others to restore goods plundered out of a Spanish ship in the south-west, or to compel the offenders to appear before the commissioners for depredations. The following month Sir Thomas Gargrave, vice president of the Council in the North, and other officials were ordered to assist two Frenchmen in the recovery of goods which had been taken and brought into Hull by Percival Wheteley, William Wentworth and their associates. About the same time it dealt with allegations against Sir John Perrot, Deputy Vice Admiral of Pembrokeshire, regarding the arrest of members of the company of Thomas Cobham in Tenby. Several days later the council took the unusual step of appointing searchers for spoils committed on the Spanish along the coasts of Wales, Devon and Cornwall. Sir Peter Carew and Sir John Chichester were subsequently paid £40 for their services in Devon and Cornwall over a period of thirty-four days.
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Ineluctably disorderly plunder became confused with piracy, particularly within the Channel. In August the Spanish ambassador reported that the region was still infested with thieves. The ‘worst feature of these particular matters’, he informed Philip II, ‘is that most of the people that are called pirates are simply rogues without means who spend what they steal and after they are condemned at a cost of much trouble and money have not the wherewithal to pay’.
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In these circumstances the victims of piracy preferred to recover their property, by arrangement with the pirates, rather than pursuing them through the High Court of Admiralty. Although the ambassador was undeniably impressed with the Queen’s determination to deal with piracy, the regime struggled to contain the problem during 1564 and 1565.

In an attempt to reassure Spain of its good intentions, in September 1564 the council provided a vessel to convoy a ship of Antwerp, which seems to have taken sanctuary in Plymouth harbour from pirates haunting the south-west, on the last leg of its homeward voyage from Spain. It also sent out two vessels to clear the coasts of Devon and Cornwall of rovers. In another gesture of its resolve to tackle the problem, Sir Peter Carew, one of the Vice Admirals in the south-west, was ordered to arrest Edmond Coke of Plymouth and other men from Falmouth and neighbouring havens, who were accused of victualling pirates. Later in the year Thomas Maynarde of Plymouth was commanded to appear before the commissioners for depredations, after he admitted receiving stolen booty from a pirate, Robert Thirkett. In November, after consulting with the judge of the High Court of Admiralty, the council authorized the mayor and corporation of Bristol to send out ships to apprehend pirates who were haunting the sea between the River Severn and the Scilly Isles. In the following month it issued instructions to the Vice Admirals in the south-west for the arrest and trial of pirates who had been active since the peace with France. The council complained that pirates had been arrested, but none were punished or executed. The Vice Admirals were instructed, therefore, to hold sessions for the speedy trial of suspected malefactors. Those found guilty were ‘to be executed upon sum cliffs nere to the sea side, to the example of others’.
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Officials in the south-west were also ordered to arrest a group of eight men, including John Heidon and John Hope, who were suspected of piracy, and to hold them in custody until they were able to clear themselves of the allegations.

Piratical activity remained concentrated in, but by no means confined to, the south-west. In December 1564 the mayor of Dover was commanded by the council to investigate complaints that a local ship had spoiled a French vessel of a lading of herring. Later in the month it ordered the arrest of three men in Southampton on suspicion of piracy. During January 1565 the Spanish ambassador complained of the robbery of a Flemish ship by Edward Cooke of Southampton. Evidently the plunder was secretly carried ashore by night, to Cooke’s house, when some of the robbers were captured, though their leader escaped.
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Despite vigorous and vigilant supervision by the council, the spoil of overseas shipping persisted in local waters, while plunder was dispersed across widely scattered coastal regions of England, Wales and Ireland. In April 1565 Carew informed the council of the arrest of one of Stukely’s ships at Cork, though a group of other pirates, including Heidon, escaped to the castle at Bearhaven, under the protection of O’Sullivan Beare. In trying to limit depredation at sea, the regime was compelled to rely on short-term expediency, which dealt with the consequences rather than the causes of such disorder, while it struggled to forestall complaints about partiality and slackness in the application of justice. In March 1565 the commissioners in Cornwall were commanded to execute three pirates, unless the assize judges advised otherwise. They were also instructed to send to London a jury of twelve men who had recently acquitted one suspect of piracy, together with the evidence presented during the trial. This concern was to ensure that the trial and punishment of pirates was accompanied by provision for the recovery and restoration of stolen goods, which relied on the cooperation of local officials. In April 1565 Sir Arthur Champernowne, Vice Admiral for Devon, was instructed to assist two Scotsmen in the recovery of their goods which had been spoiled at sea, while Sir Peter Carew was ordered to deliver a vessel, at Dartmouth, to John Petersen of Zeeland, in accordance with a process issued out of the High Court of Admiralty. In May officials in Dorchester were commanded to seize goods, on suspicion that they had been taken by pirates from Frenchmen.
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But the restoration of pirate booty repeatedly involved the council and the High Court of Admiralty in allegations against the proceedings of local officers, which pointed to wider and deeper weaknesses in the response to piracy.

Yet the regime achieved several striking successes in its campaign against piracy. By May 1565 two of the most notorious adventurers, Thomas Cobham and Thomas Stukely, were under arrest, leading one of Cecil’s agents in Bordeaux to claim that there was ‘no English pirate left upon the sea’, despite French complaints of continued raiding in the Channel.
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Cobham and Stukely were the leading figures among a group of adventurers whose ambitions for self-promotion and enrichment sustained a wave of speculative and opportunistic plunder along the coasts of Spain and Portugal during the 1560s. Neither Cobham nor Stukely explicitly identified themselves with the pirates who continued to infest the Channel and the coastal waters of the British Isles, although they drew on localized piracy for support and recruitment. But the search for honour, glory and wealth, which characterized the ambitions of such adventurers, the restless and rootless younger sons of landowners, was overshadowed by their mercenary motives at sea.

Stukely, an extreme example of the type, fashioned a wayward career of divided allegiances and activities, ranging from England and Ireland to Spain and the Mediterranean, which included intermittent piratical venturing from the later 1550s to the mid-1560s. A younger son of Sir Hugh Stukely of Affeton Castle in Devon, though reputedly an illegitimate child of Henry VIII, he acquired extensive experience as a military adventurer before flirting with the attractions of maritime depredation. During the closing months of Mary’s reign he was engaged in privateering against the French, which spilled over into the disorderly plunder of Spanish shipping. In June 1563 he was involved in a scheme for a joint Anglo-French expedition with Jean Ribault. Though the expedition was apparently intended for Florida, Stukely’s aim was essentially predatory. When the venture failed to proceed as planned, he turned to raiding the coasts of France and Spain from bases in south-west England and Ireland. Stukely’s activities provoked angry complaints from the Spanish monarchy. In January 1564 Philip II ordered his ambassador in London to seek redress for his attack on a Portuguese vessel in Bayonne, during which three of the crew were killed. According to Portuguese reports, Stukely sailed with a ship and a smaller vessel, described as a smack, ‘under the guise of a merchantman for greater security’, preying upon small trading and fishing vessels. During the latter part of 1563 he seized a Portuguese fishing vessel, valued at 1,500 ducats, which had sought shelter in the port of Munguia. On leaving, he captured a Biscayan ship, laden with iron and money, worth 3,800 ducats. He also seized another vessel off Pontevedra, with a cargo of wine, before returning to Ireland.
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Although the piratical raids of Stukely and others were especially targeted on local coastal trades, they exposed the vulnerability of the seaborne commercial and communications network that held together the Spanish Empire. Occasionally, moreover, they embarrassed the Spanish with the capture of richer prizes. In February 1564 a Spanish representative in London complained of the seizure of a ship, returning from Flanders with a cargo worth 80,000 ducats and forty convicts, by Cobham, in consort with two vessels from Newcastle. The Spanish claimed that Cobham and his associates ‘attacked the ship with artillery as if they were mortal enemies, and killed a brother of the owner’.
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The arrest of Stukely and Cobham thus gave the regime an opportunity to respond to diplomatic complaints and grievances from the recently appointed Spanish ambassador in London, Guzman de Silva. Since his appointment in 1564, de Silva had urged the Queen to take stronger action against pirates and rovers. The Queen’s earlier promise that Cobham ‘should receive an exemplary punishment if he was [taken] in England’, may have aroused Spanish expectations, as expressed in the cautious optimism that crept into de Silva’s reports.
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In August 1564, while informing Philip of the measures taken for the satisfaction of his subjects, he noted that ‘the remedy will not be a complete one for all, yet it appears they are doing their best’. Partly in response to de Silva’s pleas, the regime tried to regulate more rigorously the activities of men-of-war, while equipping a fleet of royal ships to be sent against pirates. According to the ambassador, Elizabeth was very annoyed at the damage inflicted on peaceful traders, though she continued to claim that many of the pirates were ‘Scotsmen who spoke English to avoid being known’.
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But the failure of the trials of Cobham and Stukely was another illustration of the regime’s inability to combat piracy and maritime disorder. At the same time it appeared to confirm the suspicions of the Spanish that adventurers such as Cobham enjoyed the support of the Queen’s courtiers and councillors. In July 1565 de Silva compiled a confusing report that Cobham, a ‘bad man and a great heretic’, was acquitted by a jury of twelve men; however, the judge of the High Court of Admiralty, ‘seeing that they were biased or perhaps bribed, did not submit the whole case to them, but only certain counts, and when they had absolved the prisoner he was taken back to prison again’. The council intervened, charging the jury with bringing in a false verdict. Each juror was condemned with a fine of £20 or imprisonment for six months, and ‘put in the pillory with papers stuck on them like a cuirass’.
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The ambassador was reassured by the Queen’s concern to ensure that Cobham was punished. Following a second trial, he reported that Cobham was found guilty and sentenced:

to be taken back to the Tower, stripped entirely naked, his head shaved, and the soles of his feet beaten, and then, with his arms and legs stretched, his back resting on a sharp stone, a piece of artillery is to be placed on his stomach too heavy for him to bear but not heavy enough to kill him outright. In this torment he is to be fed on three grains weight of barley and the filthiest water in the prison until he die.
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Yet the ambassador was soon informed that Cobham’s relatives and kin were seeking a pardon for him. Although they did not include Lord Cobham, who reportedly considered ‘his brother’s crime a disgraceful one’, the petitioners included the Earl of Sussex, who privately urged de Silva to intercede with the Queen, ‘to suspend the execution of the sentence … to prevent … disgrace to their house and kin’. Regardless of the appeal, the ambassador was increasingly doubtful that the sentence would be carried out. Indeed, Cobham seems to have successfully claimed benefit of clergy. In September de Silva was informed by the judge of the High Court of Admiralty that the Queen had been advised after the trial that ‘being an ecclesiastic, [he] could not be done to death, by the laws of the realm, and they had sentenced him as they had to deter others from committing like crimes’.
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