The Pirate Queen (12 page)

Naturally, the situation alarmed the Netherlanders as well as all their trading partners—Protestant and Catholic alike. Unrest in the Low Countries could only spell disaster for the merchant classes. The announcement also created havoc in England, since it was an undisguised fact that two of the most senior Netherlander officials—William of Orange and Count Egmont—knew nothing about the redrawing of the Netherlands map.
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To compound the gravity of the situation, English merchants in
Spain had been arrested by Inquisition inspectors under royal edict, and the inquisitors destroyed English “Lutheran books” (the Bible) and merchandise. An English pinnace, the
Fleur de Lys
, had been seized in the Canaries in March 1562, and the inquisitors charged her crew with the dastardly crime of “Lutheranism.” Even established English factors were imprisoned under the laws of the Inquisition and charged with heresy.
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Naturally alarmed, English merchants trading with Spain complained to the queen and the Privy Council, demanding royal intervention and a stop to the seizures. As they were unprotected by a “company,” like the Merchants Adventurers, and were without a common organization, English traders in Spain were particularly vulnerable. They had no specific representation with city fathers, or the Spanish court. Not only were they being charged with heresy, but unfair levies were raised against them, and the Spanish courts were patently biased. At the end of the day, the use of English shipping was curtailed for “quarrels of matters of religion without cause.”
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Still, the English were not the only ones singled out for harsh treatment. When the Netherlanders experienced the same abuse, there was an abrupt souring in relations between England and Spain. This new phase in Anglo-Iberian trade was heralded by unprovoked attacks on Spanish shipping on the high seas in response to the “strange and pitiful” treatment of English merchants in Spain.
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Trade with “Lutheran” heretics seemed to be no longer respected as a legitimate activity in Spanish waters, so the English had nothing to lose and would no longer act respectably. This naturally provoked outrage from Spain, and the English ambassador met several times with the Duke of Alba to outline what Elizabeth was doing against English piracy in Galicia and Andalusia.

The year when these “provocations” occurred was 1562, and some believed at the time that the escalation of “hostilities” between England and Spain may not have been an accident, irrespective of the King of Spain’s troubles in the Low Countries. The Queen of England, some ventured, may have chosen her precise moment to flex her newfound muscles.

Two years earlier, the Ottoman fleet ambushed the Spanish fleet at Djerba off the coast of North Africa, capturing six thousand
veteran troops and thirty galleys. Elizabeth chose to believe, rightly, that Philip’s withdrawal of the
tercios
from the Low Countries meant that these crack troops were destined for the Mediterranean to replace the captured soldiers, and would be preoccupied in the Mediterranean fighting Islam for some time to come. Her advisors and spies in France had also warned her at the beginning of 1562 that the country was hurtling toward the first of its religious civil wars. The Huguenot commanders, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny and the Prince de Condé were already making overtures to England to help them in their struggle. If she were to take any action against Spain while France was in turmoil, she needn’t fear a French reprisal. Trouble in the Low Countries; trouble in France; the confiscation of English merchants, goods, and shipping in Spain; and the restraint of European trade were all important considerations in her decisions. Elizabeth abhorred war. It was a diabolical waste of money and men. If revenge could be had by lightning raids on Spanish shipping, where she could always disown any involvement or tacit approval, then she could keep her dogs of war focused on the enemy at sea, rather than grumbling and troublemaking at home.

There is no doubt that the Queen of England appreciated better than most that Philip’s war against the Ottoman Empire had not gone particularly well since Djerba, and in 1562 was at its high tide of danger. Exasperatingly for the King of Spain and the English, Moslem corsairs cruised off the Spanish coast taking any ship they could as their victims—including English vessels at the height of the seizures of English ships by the Spanish themselves! A merchant in Seville reported home, “owing to the Turks and Moors, no ship can come in nor go out.”
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The English ambassador now complained about Spanish and Ottoman depredations, only to be confronted with evidence that English vessels were intruding in Portuguese waters off the Guinea coast of Africa.

Spain and Portugal had long argued against any shipping other than their own being allowed “beyond the line”—that is to say, along the coast of Africa, in the Indies, the Caribbean, the Spanish Main, the Philippines, or Brazil—or for that matter anywhere else where they landed outside of Europe.
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Now that Portugal had the child king, Sebastian, on its throne, Philip took his duties as the elder statesman protecting their colonies most seriously.
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But intrusion by “interlopers” was nothing new to either Spain or Portugal. As early as the 1530s, the Guinea coast had been worried by French and English rovers in search of Ashanti gold and slaves to man the ever-expanding Spanish and Lusitanian empires. The English pirate Thomas Wyndham sailed to the Guinea coast of Africa in 1553—with substantial backing from the City of London—and three ships: the
Primrose
, the
Lion,
and the
Moon.
When their Portuguese pilot fell out with Wyndham, and headed upriver with some gentlemen traders, the crew spat in his face and drew their swords upon his return. The pilot and gentlemen had been blithely trading in human cargo while the crew withered in the “smothering heat with close and cloudy air and storming weather of such putrifying quality that it rotted the coats off their backs.”
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Yellow fever had decimated the crew, and only the
Primrose
returned, with an emaciated crew of a mere forty men. Three-quarters of the men had died, but the ship had over 400 pounds of twenty-two-carat gold in her hold, 36 butts of melegueta peppers, 250 tusks, and the head of one elephant “of huge bigness.”
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Even the queen herself had ventured four royal ships in a failed Guinea voyage in June 1561 as part of a London syndicate.

More worrying to Philip was that he had had reports of English rovers making transatlantic voyages, and demanded that Ambassador Alvarez de Quadra lodge a serious rebuke with the queen. One of the most infamous of these corsairs was a scoundrel called Thomas Stucley, who had been charged with piracy as early as May 1558 for robbing some Spanish ships. Whether Stucley was acquitted due to lack of evidence or the rumor that he was Henry VIII’s “base born son” is open to some doubt. Whether Stucley himself started the scurrilous rumor is not beyond the realm of possibility either. Shortly after this incident, Stucley absconded with his own father’s property—that is to say, that of Hugh Stucley—and, when those funds ran out, defrauded his four brothers and impoverished his long-suffering wife.

Miraculously, with his past shenanigans, in 1560, Stucley was employed as a tax collector in the county of Berkshire, probably stealing all the money he could get, since a year later he had purchased a captaincy at Berwick. Perhaps more remarkably, Elizabeth more than tolerated the reprobate, and probably attempted to use him as a spy in her “wild” Irish province.

There is no doubt that Stucley was at the heart of a daring plan in 1562 to cross the Atlantic. He had proposed a venture to the Queen of England whereby he, and the French rover Jean Ribault, the Dieppe sailor and “western planter” turned pirate who had previously been in English service, would colonize Florida. Elizabeth was tantalized by the prospect and agreed to supply at least one ship and artillery.
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All that remained was to recruit the sailors and “planters,” or colonists.

There was little that Philip could do, other than protest via his ambassador while he was preoccupied with his war in the Mediterranean and unrest in the Low Countries. Legitimate trade became a precarious way to earn a living in these times, and English piracy flourished with the tacit approval of the state. There was a huge increase in letters of reprisal against injustices perpetrated against English merchants and seamen issued by the Admiralty at the time with the queen’s knowledge.

The letter of reprisal was a long-established and useful tool of monarchs throughout Europe. Since medieval times, the letter of reprisal, or
letter de mark
, allowed a merchant, traveler, or ship owner who had been robbed on foreign territory in peacetime by the subjects of a foreign prince to recoup his losses. The letter of reprisal was granted only after the offended party had been unable to obtain justice in the courts of the foreign country, and was, in Elizabethan England, granted by the High Court of the Admiralty in cases of reprisals at sea, and in times of “peace.” Peace frequently meant little more than undeclared war, which was for all intents and purposes the situation the English found themselves in now.
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The letter of reprisal in the hands of England’s merchant navy became a devastatingly blunt instrument. The Channel shipping lanes became positively choked with would-be aggrieved Englishmen boarding, ransacking, maiming, and often destroying any foreign vessel and her crew that they could lay their hands on. It mattered little if the ships were French, Italian, Netherlanders, or indeed Spanish. Since the most numerous—and richest—ships in the Channel were those belonging to Spain and the Netherlands (a neutral), they became the ripest targets for the holders of the letters of reprisal to attack. The English used whatever means they could
to obtain their prizes, and we should not doubt their brutality in the exercise of their “duties.”
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England’s seamen were, by and large, a ferocious lot, most of whom had been press-ganged into service. They were rough, undisciplined, and poorly paid. The only thing that sustained many of them and kept them in tow was the promise of prize money or booty—not patriotism or an unswerving loyalty to the authority of the crown, or even their captain—to protect England’s shores. Getting wealthy through piracy was their raison d’être, not the icing on the cake. Throughout the 1560s, once pressed into service, these men did not need to be escorted to their ports of embarkation; they went willingly under the command of the recruiting officer and reported for duty wherever they were sent. Their wages were less than fishermen could expect, while the chances of their dying at sea from disease were excellent. Most voyages saw at least half its crew die from disease or starvation. If contact were made with the enemy, then more would die in battle or from infection from their wounds in the weeks that followed. It is little wonder that keeping them in order required excellent leadership skills. As most captains well understood, these men had come for pillage, or, as Drake called it, “some little comfortable dew from heaven.”
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Atrocities carried out by the English were rife. One Spanish crew had even been trussed in their ship’s sails and tossed overboard to drown, while their ship—now an English prize—was brought back to an English harbor.
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In the words of Captain Luke Ward, a pirate who later became an adventurer of exploration, the English sailor was “great in words and sufficiently crafty, bold as well as hard-working, irascible, inexorable, grasping.”
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The most outstanding of these were the fiercely Protestant West Countrymen like the Hawkinses, the Killigrews, the Champernownes, and the Hawkinses young, and as yet unknown, cousin, Francis Drake, who was trawling the Channel in the early 1560s in a bark that skirted in and out of the waters in the Netherlands, sometimes in legitimate trade, sometimes not. These men represented a new force in English foreign policy, and one that was as unpredictable as it was impossible to resist, or control.

Most significantly, they gave the common folk cause to be proud, and to hope. These “local heroes” were often the difference
between survival and starvation. Harvests were frequently poor, and the winter of 1562-63 was bitterly cold. With Elizabethan local government in the hands of this unpaid gentry or nobility, the local heroes’ resourcefulness in the quest for prizes often meant employment and food on the table. Men like the elder Sir Walter Raleigh, vice admiral of Devon; and Sir Edward Horsey, captain of the Isle of Wight, were among the more notorious local robber barons who made a fine art of taking prizes and making English markets for their stolen booty. It is little wonder with such sea dogs unleashed in the Channel that the Spaniards and the Netherlanders put their losses at over 2 million ducats ($11.6 billion or £6.27 billion today) by the end of 1563.

In an attempt to cool the rising temperature between Spain and England, Elizabeth had placed herself in the position of honest broker between Spain and the Low Countries, urging Philip to reinstate the “ancient rights”—meaning to stop the Inquisition and allow freedom of religious practice in the Netherlands. She was also heavily involved with the Huguenot cause in France. Naturally, the Spanish king didn’t trust her, as she was abrogating “ancient rights” at the same time in Ireland by enforcing English over Celtic law and had instituted recusancy fines against Catholics in England.
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He resisted all her entreaties to help in his troubled province, and indeed sent Ambassador de Quadra his orders just to drive his own message into Elizabeth’s heart. De Quadra inveigled the brutal Ulster Irish malcontent, Shane O’Neill, to come to his embassy in London to hear a Catholic mass. O’Neill, who had come to England to submit to Elizabeth on the understanding that he would be granted rights as the O’Neill chieftain, couldn’t resist the temptation. De Quadra wrote to the regent’s advisor and Philip’s minister, Cardinal de Granvelle, in the Low Countries that, “Shane O’Neill and ten or twelve of his principal followers have received the holy sacrament in my house with the utmost secrecy as he refused to receive the Queen’s communion. He has assured me that he is and will be perfectly steadfast on the question of religion. As to the rest, if His Majesty should intend to mend matters here radically as he writes me from Spain, I think this man will be a most important instrument.”
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