The Pirate Queen (11 page)

And it was not difficult to find replacements for the Muscovy Company’s dead hero. Chancellor’s successors were two brothers, Stephen and William Borough, sons of the Devon navigator John Aborough. The Boroughs consolidated Chancellor’s northern sea route by turning it into a flourishing commercial highway and increasing important trade in rope, hemp, and Baltic oak to England. By the time the Muscovy Company’s Governor Cabot died in 1557, it was believed that the Muscovy trade could travel overland through Russia in a southerly direction to Persia.

Notwithstanding the Borough brothers’ achievements by sea, the land route southward through Russia to Persia was trail blazed by a merchant, member of the Mercers’ Company, and later royal
ambassador of Elizabeth’s: Anthony Jenkinson. Jenkinson began his career as an adolescent training in the Levant, and he traveled extensively throughout the Mediterranean, having received a “safe conduct” permitting him to trade freely in Turkish ports from Suleiman the Great in the early days of Mary of England’s rule. On his first journey to Russia, he said his trade with the Tartars was “small and beggarly…not worth the writing, neither is there any hope of trade in all those parts worth following.”
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Still, Jenkinson soldiered southward to Bokhara in tremendous danger from the successive marauding caravans who kidnapped him or molested the trading party. When they reached Bokhara some sixteen weeks later, the city was a huge disappointment, with “beggarly and poor” merchants with so few wares to sell that Jenkinson thought that their stocks hadn’t been renewed in two, if not three, years. The way to China, he discovered, would take another nine months overland in the most favorable circumstances; but the road was blocked by war, which happened with alarming regularity. Jenkinson continued on to the Caspian region and eventually sold enough goods to make a small profit. But it was his intelligence on the disruption to trade in the region between Russia, Persia, Turkey, and India by war that would prove the commodity of real value to Elizabeth.

In May 1561, Jenkinson was sent out again on his second Muscovy voyage, carrying letters recommending him to Czar Ivan, the Shah of Persia, and other Circassian princes. The purpose of his journey was to establish firm trade with Russia, and to make another trip to the Caspian region to open commercial trade with Persia. On his arrival in Moscow that summer, Jenkinson was shocked that he was denied access to the czar, and refused leave to travel south. After a six-month delay, under effective house arrest, and at a point of giving up all hope of achieving his goal, the former English ambassador “intervened.” At last, Jenkinson would be received at the Russian court.
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But what sort of “intervention” had the English ambassador made?

In the month prior to Jenkinson’s departure from England, the Senate of Hamburg wrote to Elizabeth that “certain princes of the Roman Empire” had informed them that “certain large quantities
of armour and cannon shipped from their town belong to private persons, and is intended for the use of the Grand Duke of the Russians or Muscovites against the Livonians in contravention to the Imperial decree which forbids any ammunitions of war to be sold for the use of the Muscovites. They therefore beg that she will send them an assurance that these arms are intended for her own service.”
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This complaint was followed two weeks later by a letter from the Senate of Cologne, that wrote on April 30, “Having heard that a very considerable amount of arms, offensive and defensive, were being shipped by her order (especially of the kind required for men-at-arms, such as hand-guns) they were unwilling to hinder the quiet transportation of the same for her service. It having just now come to their knowledge however that certain English traders convey these arms either into Muscovy direct, or to parts from which they may be carried thither, contrary to the interests of the empire.”
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Elizabeth naturally denied all knowledge of such goings on and wrote back to the Senate on May 6 that “on her royal word” no arms and munitions
had been
shipped in her name from Hamburg.
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Eight days later, on May 14, Anthony Jenkinson embarked for Russia. Two weeks after that, on May 31, the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand wrote to the Queen of England, telling her that he had heard these “rumors” and that the Muscovites are greatly encouraged in their belligerence against Poland and the Germanic states by the provision of “warlike matters.” He has therefore given strict orders that no one shall be allowed to transport arms or victuals into Muscovy, and begged the queen to ensure that none of her subjects would go to the country either.
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If Ferdinand had heard rumors that the Queen of England was providing Ivan the Terrible with his dark materiel of war, then most likely Ivan, too, would have expected armaments in the English merchants’ wares. There is no precise record of Jenkinson’s inventory that survives, but in view of the huge delay in Ivan’s receiving him, it seems unlikely that whatever war materiel may (or may not) have been provided at the outset was deemed inadequate by the tempestuous czar. The fact that only upon “the intervention” of the former English ambassador was Jenkinson allowed not only
to meet Ivan, but also to become the czar’s gem and silk merchant to Persia, indicates that some favors in the form of weaponry were most likely exchanged. Ivan made no secret about his “love” of the English in his struggle against Poland after this, and it is doubtful that this love would have been as steadfast as it became throughout the 1560s in commercial and political terms without an English trade in weaponry.

By June 1562, Jenkinson was finally given a safe conduct from court and allowed once more to journey down the Volga to the Caspian Sea, but aside from a sumptuous welcome and friendly relationship that developed with Abdullah Khan in Shirvan, the trading mission to Persia proved a disaster. He had once again landed himself in a war zone on the turn:

For the Turk’s Ambassador being arrived and the peace concluded, the Turkish merchants there at that time present, declared to the same Ambassador that my coming thither…would in great part destroy their trade, and that it should be good for him to persuade the Sophia not to favor me, as his highness meant to observe the league and friendship with the great Turk his master, which request of the Turkish merchants, the same Ambassador earnestly preferred, and being afterwards dismissed with great honor he departed out of the Realm with the Turk’s son’s head (the rebel Bajazet) as aforesaid, and other presents.
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Jenkinson was lucky to escape back to England without being made a “present” himself, and only returned at all through the good auspices of Abdullah Khan, who persuaded the shah that it would bring bad luck to kill a stranger “in that fashion.” While Jenkinson made five further voyages to the region, and his voyages were persistently marred by great misfortune, murder, and failure, the overwhelming desire to trade directly with Persia and Cathay would become an English mantra and obsession over the next twenty years. What Jenkinson’s adventures highlighted was that England’s strengths lie not in overland trade, but in somehow dominating the seas.

Trade had become the promoter of new ideas as well as the generator of economic growth, and helped England to emerge from
its mediocrity into the Renaissance. English merchants, mostly Londoners, learned quickly the refined art of the long-distance business gurus, the Italians, combined with the crucial strategy of controlling the Channel and Narrow Seas. Control of the Channel’s shipping lanes meant domination—both economic and political—of Spain’s trades with the Low Countries, and this in itself became a goal from the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign.

By the end of 1560, the English navy was already evolving into an efficient machine. The country’s seamen were putting out to sea to “harvest” from England’s enemies (and sometimes her friends) while the English Merchants Adventurers often benefited directly from their forays, though often claiming the reverse.

The country’s merchant fleet plying the Channel was not only well protected by the queen’s ships, as required, but also by a growing breed of fearless and daring seamen out to take prizes from hostile shipping in payment for shepherding the fleet. In the early 1560s many young English adventurers, dreaming most probably of voyages with the Muscovy Company to Cathay rather than mundane Channel crossings, grew up in the hope that some day, they would cross oceans and take “real” prizes. The exploits of English, French Huguenot, or Scottish pirates were whispered on everyone’s lips, and the source of persistent complaint to the Queen of England by her neighbors. Their daring raids in smaller, swifter ships were admired and feared by all. In England, these men were the new “Robin Hoods,” seeking to redress the previous years of bloody Catholic cruelty under Mary and dreaming of rich prizes to distribute among their friends. Such men hardly saw their own brand of retribution as Protestant corsairs in the same light. One such dreamer in the thick of the trade with the Low Countries and France—a red-haired junior master on a small bark making the run between the Low Countries and Dover—was the then unknown renegade Francis Drake.
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Like hundreds, if not thousands, of other young men, Drake’s life and career would be made by “harvesting the sea,” teetering perilously at times into piracy, while at other times turning his efforts expansively to the legitimate investments of other merchant princes of the day. His career, perhaps more than any other, came
to symbolize the synthesis of the English seaman from merchant shipping service to defense of the realm to the type of adventurer who would, in Sir Walter Raleigh’s words, “seek new worlds, for gold, for praise, for glory.”
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Frequently in years to come, it would be difficult to discern the legal endeavors of most of Elizabeth’s seamen, statesmen, and gentlemen from out-and-out buccaneering. These men—call them pirates, corsairs, rovers, privateers,
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mariners, sailors, merchants, adventurers, or gentlemen—would drive the rebirth of an isolated England and transform the island nation into a nascent empire. They would also undermine the fortunes of Catholic Europe, and most notably those of Spain and Portugal.

6. The Politics of Piracy, Trade, and Religion

This is a nation of overwhelming audacity, courageous, impetuous, unmerciful in war, warm on first acquaintance, sneering at death, but boastful about it, cunning, and completely given to dissimulation, whether in word or deed; above all they possess prudence, along with great eloquence and hospitality.

—EMANUEL VAN METEREN, ABOUT THE ENGLISH

B
efore the end of the third year of Elizabeth’s reign she had firmly established England as a new force to be reckoned with in the Channel, boosting the country’s status and stability, and laying the firm foundations for independence. She had stood up to the troublesome Guise faction in France and Scotland. The whirligig of changing French Valois kings—Henry II, his sons, Francis II, Charles IX—and even their formidable mother, Catherine de’ Medici, recognized Elizabeth’s achievements and potential danger to France. Philip II admired her and lamented her heresy, and Pope Pius IV wanted her dethroned and even proposed to the Spanish king that he would crown him King of England himself.
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While the English queen had allied herself with other Protestants in Sweden, Scotland, France, and the Netherlands, she had been careful to maintain a policy of “balance” and “diplomacy” with France, Portugal, the Holy Roman Empire, and Spain. As Philip’s ambassador to England so bitterly remarked in April 1562, “…now that she has the support of the heretics here and in France, and knows the trouble our affairs are in, in the Netherlands, I am certain that this Queen has thought and studied nothing else since the King sailed for Spain, but how to oust him from the Netherlands, and she believes the best way to effect this is to embroil them over there on religious questions, as I wrote months ago.”
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Elizabeth did, indeed, keep an intent eye on events in the Low Countries. She knew that England’s wealth, security, and ability to borrow and generate foreign exchange depended to a large extent on free trade in the Netherlands. But there were storm clouds on the horizon. Philip’s insatiable need for cash to fight his Mediterranean war against the Ottoman Turk had led to the States-General reluctantly agreeing to grant a 3.6 million ducat loan ($326.43 million or £176.45 million today) to their Spanish overlord, but refused to allow disbursements until Spain recalled her crack
tercios
troops home. While Philip may have been apoplectic with rage, he was desperate for the money from the Netherlands to supplement his fortune in gold and silver sent to Seville twice yearly from the Americas. And so he agreed to their terms.
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As can be expected from a monarch on whose empire the sun never set, his response to the States-General’s economic blackmail was predictably ugly. Philip worked with the pope in secret on a plan to redraw the religious map of the Low Countries, fill the pulpits of the country with his own men of the cloth, and introduce the Inquisition there. Without warning, toward the end of 1561, the pope published the plan, naming the new bishops—all of whom had been personally selected by Philip. Their new primate and cardinal was none other than Philip’s trusty minister, Cardinal Antoine Perronet de Granvelle, who later tried to persuade the Netherlander elite that he was one of them. After the first uprisings, he wrote to Philip that “people here universally display discontent with any and all Spaniards in these provinces. It would seem that this derives from the suspicion that one might wish to subject them to Spain and reduce them to the same state as the Italian provinces under the Spanish crown.”
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