The Elizabethans (5 page)

She was a typical mid-sixteenth-century warship, and her inadequacies taught Hawkins a great deal about ships – knowledge he would put to good use in middle age when, as Treasurer of the Navy, he streamlined the ships that would defeat the Armada. The
Jesus
was broad in the beam, to provide balance for the great height of the poop and the forecastle. These two vast wooden forts, constructed at either end of the ship, were separate. Boarders could only enter the ship in the waist, which made them immediately vulnerable to crossfire between poop and forecastle. On the broadside were a few great guns. Above them, guns of medium size, and higher up yet were small firearms, mounted on a swivel and designed to fire hailshot and dice at point-blank range. There were four masts: the fore and main each carried a course and a topsail, the mizzen and bonaventure mizzen each had a single lateen sail. We can see what it looked like from a sketch in the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and our modern eyes would at first take in a construction of great beauty, its pinnaces and banners fluttering from the masts, its port-holes and gun-holes making a picturesque fretwork in old German wood.

The reality of life on the
Jesus
was hellish. She began to spring leaks during the first Atlantic gale that she encountered in October 1567. Of the six ships and 400 men accompanying Hawkins on that expedition, some seventy men were destined to return. From the squadron of six ships, only the
Minion
(300 tons) and the
Judith
(50 tons) made it home.

Hawkins took his squadron to Sierra Leone. Along the way he commandeered a French pirate ship, the
Don de Dieu
. The Portuguese claim that in the neighbourhood of the Cabo Rojo and the Rio Grande he captured or looted seven Portuguese ships. He had stolen various slaves from ships encountered along the way, and in Africa itself he rounded up some 500 more for transport to America. Probably some sixty or so were lost in the course of battles and skirmishes.

The 500 or so slaves were kept in the hold of the
Jesus of Lübeck
. It was not possible to bring them on deck for necessary bodily functions, so the smell and condition down there can readily be imagined. It seems (from the various accounts of the voyage) that Hawkins sold 325 of these slaves, which leaves well over 100 lost through sickness.

Above deck, the modern reader is especially struck by two features of life on this rotting, creaking sailing ship, with its cargo of suffering humanity.

One is the unforgettable image of Hawkins himself at table, being entertained by a group of five or six musicians, playing the fiddle. The leader of the group was William Low. When he was captured by the Inquisition and incarcerated in a monastery, the friars guessed the age of this freckly English boy to be seven or eight. In fact he was twenty years old when the
Jesus
set out.

Another feature of life that we should find striking, were we to spend twenty-four hours on that ‘troublesome voyage’, would be the religious observances. Morning and evening prayer, a truncated version of the services in the Church of England’s
Book of Common Prayer
, were strictly observed. When I say strictly, I mean that Thomas Williams, Second Mate, went round the ship with a whip driving the crew to attend the reading of the Psalms appointed for each morning and evening of the month, and a recitation of the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. On Sunday mornings they would be assembled for an hour, hearing the Epistle and Gospel of the Day, followed by a reading by Hawkins himself of the
Paraphrases
of Erasmus. When, on the
Minion
, a man was unguarded enough to make the sign of the cross before taking the helm, he was roundly abused. William Saunders, mate of the
Minion
said, ‘There are on this voyage such evil papist Christians, that we cannot avoid having a pestilence visited on this Armada.’
¹⁸

Whatever the cause, the third voyage of Hawkins from Africa to the Caribbean was indeed disastrous. By the time he left Sierra Leone he had ten ships. He managed to trade at seven ports in the Spanish Indies before a storm drove him to take refuge at San Juan de Ulúa, the port of landing for the inland journey to the city of Mexico. By now, the
Jesus
was in a terrible way.

The
Jesus
was brought in such case that she was not able to bear the sea longer, for in her stern on either side of the sternpost the planks did open and shut with every sea. The seas . . . without number and the leaks so big as the thickness of a man’s arm, the living fish did swim upon the ballast as in the sea. Our general, seeing this, did his utmost to stop her leaks, as divers times before he had . . . about her. And truly, without his great experience had been, we had been sunk in the sea in her within six days after we came out of England, and, escaping that, yet she had never been able to have been brought hither but by his industry, the which his trouble and care he had of her may be thought to be because she was the Queen’s Majesty’s ship and that she should not perish under his hand.’
¹⁹

By the time the
Jesus
put in to San Juan de Ulúa, Hawkins had made unsuccessful applications to the Spanish authorities to be allowed to trade. In the Spanish pearl fishery of Borburata he had made the claim, already quoted, of personal acquaintanceship with Philip I (‘I know the [King of] Spaine your mr’). In the Venezuelan port of Rió de la Hacha the Spanish governor Castellanos was told by Hawkins that he was a ‘Catholic Christian’, but the English buccaneers, led by Lovell (like Drake, a relative of Hawkins), commander of the
Minion
, marauded and took hostages. Hawkins left behind seventy-five sick and dying slaves by way of compensation. It was in an attempt to reach Florida that the fleet was blown off-course and compelled to take shelter at the Mexican port of San Juan de Ulúa. Once in the harbour, they were attacked by the Spaniards. Drake, in the
Judith
, did the sensible thing – he got his ship out of harbour as soon as possible, and was able to sail back to England. ‘The
Judith
forsoke us in our greate miserie,’ said Hawkins. Five ships of Hawkins’s fleet were abandoned, four were captured and one was destroyed. Hawkins himself got away on the
Minion
, according to the Spanish Viceroy, Enríquez. Hawkins managed to escape with ‘the greater part of his possessions and loot’.
²⁰

The greatest loss was the loss of life. Drake got home with about a dozen men on the
Judith
. Another ship in the fleet, the
William and John
, which had not accompanied them to Mexico, probably had another fifteen or twenty. And a dozen or so were on board the
Minion
with Hawkins when, on 24 January 1569, it landed in the chill of a Cornish morning at Mount’s Bay. What a sight for them as they opened their frosty windows in St Michael’s Mount, or in the fishing villages of Newlyn and Mousehole! In Vigo, on the Portuguese coast, a few days earlier, Hawkins and his men had come ashore. A Portuguese merchant described the appearance of this thirty-six-year-old Englishman who had been so battered and humiliated by near-shipwreck, by storms at sea, by battle and by Spanish guns. Was he bedraggled, careworn, spectral? Hawkins was, according to his Portuguese observer, ‘dressed in a coat trimmed with marten skins, with cuffs of black silk. He had a scarlet cloak, edged in silver and a doublet of the same material. His cape was silk, and he wore a great gold chain around his neck.’
²¹

The fates of the men who fell into the hands of the Spaniards, left behind in Mexico, were often gruesome. Some were sent to Spain. Others remained in Mexican prisons, comparatively well treated until the arrival in Mexico in 1571 of the Holy Inquisition, of which the two merciless officers were Moya de Contreras and Fernandez de Bonilla.

Eleven of the English prisoners were younger than sixteen at the time of the battle of San Juan. The Inquisitors treated the juveniles, who had been small children when Elizabeth came to the throne and had therefore had no chance of instruction in the Catholic faith, with some mercy. Miles Philips, for example, eighteen in 1572, was sentenced to three years in a Jesuit house in Mexico. But the older men were considered mature enough to be Catholics who had lapsed into heresy. They were kept for a long time in prison by the Inquisition, and in February 1574 the following sentences were pronounced: William Collins, of Oxford, age forty, seaman, ten years in the galleys; John Burton, of Bar Abbey, twenty-two, seaman, 200 lashes and six years in the galleys; John Williams, twenty-eight, of Cornwall, 200 lashes and eight years in the galleys; George Dee, thirty, seaman, 300 lashes and eight years in the galleys. The following year John Martin of Cork, otherwise known as Cornelius the Irishman, was burned at the stake.

When John Hawkins set out on his first transatlantic voyage, with its shocking cargo, Philip II of Spain, the Queen of England’s brother-in-law, was inclined to see England as a potential ally against the machinations of the French. By the time of the third voyage of Hawkins, Anglo-Spanish relations were badly damaged. Neither Drake nor Hawkins can be said to have behaved well on this voyage, but they had displayed great skills as seamen, and extraordinary resourcefulness. These qualities could not alone break the power of the two mighty maritime empires, the Portuguese and the Spanish. But thanks to the Elizabethan privateers, the world was no longer simply divided, as it had been by a Borgia pope, between the Iberian superpowers. The barbarous cruelty of the Spanish Inquisition to the English sailors left behind by Hawkins in Mexico was not forgotten. Within twenty years the sea-dogs would take their revenge on the Spanish Armada. An anti-Catholic mindset remained ingrained in English national consciousness until the advent of multiculturalism in the late twentieth century. Even then it was not obliterated. Rather, instinctive hatred of religious bigotry controlled from abroad remained, with the objects of obloquy being now not Catholics so much as Muslims.

The
Jesus of Lübeck
had fallen into the hands of Spain. The image of it at sea, however, with its slaves in the hold, its velvet-clad captain at table above, and its ageless boy-musicians, remains in our mind as emblematic of its times – something we should be unlikely to encounter in any era before or after the new times ushered in by the reign of Elizabeth. Perhaps it is as good an image as any to hold in our minds as we try to focus on that most extraordinary age.

3

Ceremonial – Twixt earnest and twixt game

ELIZABETH’S REIGN BEGAN
with ceremony. Even by the ritualistic standards of sixteenth-century Europe, England stood out for its love of formal ceremonies. The Venetian Ambassador to the court of Henry VIII had been astonished to see Princess Elizabeth kneel three times before her father in the course of one interview.
¹
All foreign observers noted the ceremony with which the English royalty and nobility surrounded their existence. As an old lady, Elizabeth was watched passing to chapel at Greenwich, on a Sunday in 1598. ‘As she went along in all this state and magnificence she spoke very graciously to foreign ministers, in English, French and Italian. Whosoever speaks to her, kneels; now and then she raises someone with her hand. Wherever she turned her face, as she was going along, every one fell on their knees.’
²

In November 1558 it was only to be expected, then, that pageantry of the greatest possible extravagance should advertise to the people of England that an era of marvels was about to begin. National morale was low. England had just been defeated in a humiliating war against the French. Its last hold on French soil – the port of Calais – had been lost. The last Queen of England, Elizabeth’s half-sister Mary, had been married to Philip II, King of Spain, and England had therefore been caught up with the Franco-Spanish rivalry that was the chief political fact of contemporary Europe. And this had not been to England’s advantage. Philip, who had never been close to his wife, had not been in England for months when Mary died. There was every reason to fear that the French would press home their victory over Calais and make a bid for the English throne itself. Why not make the Dauphiness of France, Mary Stuart, Queen of England? Mary was the great-granddaughter of Henry VII, and although the will of Henry VIII, anticipating the threat of the French, forbade any foreigner from inheriting the English throne, she did at least have the claim of legitimacy; whereas Elizabeth, in many eyes, did not. Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn, had given birth to her when Henry’s queen, Catherine of Aragon, was yet living. Anne Boleyn’s eruption into Henry VIII’s heart had provoked what, for many English men and women of 1558, was the ultimate tragic disaster – the severance of the English Church from Rome, the splintering of Catholicism, the Dissolution of the monasteries, the end of the old religion. Elizabeth had been declared a bastard by the Pope, but even in English law the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine was highly questionable. Moreover, after the disgrace and beheading of Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth’s mother, and his remarriage to Jane Seymour and the birth of Edward VI, Henry VIII had himself declared Elizabeth to be a bastard. Even though, by his will, he had declared that the succession should pass, as it did, first to Edward, then to Mary, and next (if they both died childless) to Elizabeth, the declaration of her illegitimacy had never been revoked in law. There was much debate among the lawyers and political classes about the wisdom of raising this matter in Parliament. Apart from the considerable danger of enraging the new monarch (and she was Henry VIII’s daughter, quite capable of flying into rages and dispatching her subjects to the block), there was also the propaganda danger of rehearsing her technical illegitimacy. Nicholas Bacon, the Lord Keeper, decreed that the ‘Crowne, once worne, taketh away all defects whatsoever’.
³