The Pirate Queen (18 page)

For the next two weeks, Sparke’s chronicle becomes remarkably silent, noting only that they reached the French Huguenot enclave at Fort Caroline on the Florida coast safely. Whether this was a scheduled stop or not, Sparke does not venture to say, but it does seem odd that once loaded with riches for his investors and himself, Hawkins and his men would seek out the French, who were notable rovers. It may have been that part of his private discussions with the queen just before leaving home was to better understand the movement of shipping in the area, or that he had decided to scout about for himself. In any event, they were cordially greeted by the Huguenots, and he sold the smallest of his ships to René Laudonnière, the colony’s leader in the absence of Jean Ribault, along with shoes for his men, four cannons, and a good supply of powder and shot.

The road home was not arduous, with the fleet stopping off in Newfoundland for fresh water and fish. On September 20, 1565, after eleven months away, Hawkins brought his ships into Padstow harbor in Cornwall. In his note to Elizabeth, he stated that he had “always been a help to all Spaniards and Portuguese that have come in my way without any harm or prejudice by me offered to any of them.”
³⁶

Despite obvious exaggeration on both sides—in terms of actual harm Hawkins had done, his good or bad conduct, and the value of his trades—there is no doubt that John Hawkins had become a national hero. He had also finally attracted the serious attention of King Philip of Spain.

9. The Gloves Are Off

We have continued to receive complaints of the Flemish merchants and mariners of the English robbers, and we were moved to send many of these letters of complaint to the Queen of England, both before and after the death of Bishop Quadra, in the months of August, September, October, November and December last, begging her to remedy the evil…. Nothing has been done and no answer given to these letters, and as from day to day the complaints of people grow, we are now obliged to seek another remedy, since friendly remonstrance is of no avail.

—PHILIP II TO AMBASSADOR DE SILVA, FEBRUARY
1565

D
espite his protestations of innocence, Ambassador de Silva had no faith in Hawkins’s professed honorable mercantile intentions. In an encrypted message to Philip, de Silva claimed, “I do not believe that a ship would be safe, if they were strong enough to take it.”
¹
Importantly, de Silva added that he was certain that Hawkins had been prowling the Indies during his second voyage for a fortnight to attack the Spanish “plate fleet” known as the flota.

The Spanish ambassador had every right to dread this—as yet—unfulfilled menace. The English had surpassed the French as rovers in the Channel, and were aching to burst out of their financial straitjacket in Europe to trade with Cathay, the Indies, and the New World. The flota was, indeed, an exceptionally vital piece of machinery of state, and the threat to it became the Spanish government’s abiding terror throughout the next forty years. Since the beginning of the century the flota had operated as a government monopoly, managed by the Casa de Contractacion—or Commercial House—at Seville. When the fleet sailed up the Guadalquivir River from the coast, the ships anchored at the Toro del Oro, a magnificent round stone tower with huge wooden doors two stories high and
360-degree views of the town. There the ships would off-load their treasure chests onto the gently sloping cobbled quay. Ropes were slid through the three-inch-thick solid iron rings studded into the ironmongery of the oak doors, and the treasure was hauled up onto carriages then on about one hundred yards to the Casa de Contractacion.

Two fleets sailed yearly. The flota of New Spain sailed between Mexico and Spain. From 1564, the more important flota of Tierra Firma brought gold and silver from the Potosi mines of Peru via the Pacific (called the Southern Sea at the time) across the Isthmus of Panama to the Atlantic port of Nombre de Díos. Once loaded, the flota of Tierra Firma would head north along the Yucatán Channel then on to Havana. At Havana, always dependent until the last moment on orders received from the king, the flotas could—and frequently did—link up and make their Atlantic crossing together. It would not be an exaggeration to stress that the combined flotas carried the wealth of the Spanish Empire in their holds. Without these treasures, Philip’s Spain simply couldn’t continue to dominate the world stage, and what made the situation even more tense was the king’s utter awareness of this Achilles’ heel.
²

But the English assaults were nothing new for the Spanish. French corsairs had been attacking the treasure trains for decades in the West Indies, and it was only with the appointment of one of Spain’s greatest admirals, Pedro de Menéndez de Avilés, that French operations were mostly thwarted. Menéndez had provided three galleons as a permanent escort to the flotas at his own expense, and he was made captain general of the Indian trade in 1561—at his own “request.” As a result, hostilities seemed to have settled down at last between the French and Spanish when Hawkins burst upon the scene.

Menéndez’s reaction was predictable. He was determined to make both the French and English understand his intentions for the region once and for all. Less than a month after Hawkins and his men had left Fort Caroline in Florida, Menéndez landed soldiers just south of the French colony and massacred nearly all its inhabitants. Jean Ribault had just returned with some raw recruits and supplies, and they, too, were slaughtered. Menéndez, as a lesson to
Luteranos
everywhere, proudly left a plaque under the lifeless
bodies of his victims, declaring that the colonists had been hanged as heretics by order of the King of Spain.
³
For Menéndez, there could be no compromise. Any foreign colony would be “most damaging to these kingdoms, because on that coast of Florida, near the Bahama Channel…they could establish and fortify themselves so as to be able to maintain galleys and other swift war vessels to capture the flotas and other private ships coming from the Indies….”
⁴

Meanwhile, back in Spain, the fact that Hawkins had traded successfully with semiofficial status from the Queen of England had made his intrusion into West Indian waters a very serious matter indeed. Philip’s sense of self-preservation, coupled with the unshakable belief that all seagoing
Luteranos
—whether French, Dutch, or English—were hateful scoundrels and pirates, created a sense of imminent danger at the Spanish court that was far greater than the threat the English were capable of delivering.

Yet despite all the attention drawn by the English exploits in the West Indies, it was still the veiled hostilities in the Channel that worried Philip the most. Hawkins was an extension of English Channel piracy in the king’s eyes, and all the more dangerous since his return to England when the queen bestowed a knighthood on her new hero. The obvious favor that Elizabeth extended to all her adventurers—and particularly Hawkins—was a clear indication to the Spanish king of the queen’s hostile intentions. This, coupled with the unfortunate appointment of Dr. John Man as the English ambassador to Spain in 1566, made discussion of “English affairs” at court a very heated matter.

This was the Spanish viewpoint. For Elizabeth and her privy councillors, the situation was entirely different. England had had its lifeblood of commerce snatched away by Spain, and Emden was proving a very poor replacement for Antwerp. Trade between the Flemish and English was still mutually banned when Hawkins pulled into Padstow harbor in September 1565, and the queen was becoming fretful again for her personal security as well as the security of the realm. Both had been jeopardized by a number of events. Economically, poor trade on the Continent, and the failure of the Muscovy Company (in particular Anthony Jenkinson and others) to prove the stunning successes they had promised long ago,
had already led to economic hardship for many. Politically, Elizabeth was weighed down with other grave concerns besides Philip of Spain. The rebellion of Shane O’Neill against colonization in Northern Ireland (Ulster) and the sudden and provocative marriage in the autumn of 1565 of Mary Queen of Scots to the young, handsome, and frequently drunk Lord Henry Darnley had disastrous implications. The Ulster Rebellion proved very costly in human life and hard cash. The Darnley marriage strengthened Mary’s claim to the English throne. Mary’s actions were also a personal rebuff to the English queen: Elizabeth’s choice of husband for the Scottish queen, Leicester, had been spurned as the “keeper of the royal stud.” As if this weren’t bad enough, Elizabeth’s Catholic population reminded her obliquely that failing Mary as queen, Philip II also had a very strong claim in his own right as an heir to the English throne. The only other viable heir, Catherine Grey, was by now locked away in the Tower for marrying without royal consent.

This was the England to which John Hawkins had returned. Security of the realm clung precariously, yet steadfastly, at the top of the Queen of England’s agenda, and that security was now seriously compromised by a growing trade war with Spain as well as the constant political machinations of Mary Queen of Scots, who still refused to sign the Treaty of Edinburgh of 1560. Elizabeth’s merchant and gentlemen adventurers—whether they were viewed as pirates or not by her friends or foes—represented a private army willing to defend her realm with their wealth and lives, economically, politically, socially, and militarily. And so, she had resolved to nurture them, while appearing to distance herself from their more questionable actions performed in her name.

In most ways, the West Indies was a sideshow. With trade on the Continent in a near shambles, the Holy Grail of riches for Elizabeth’s adventurers remained a northeasterly passage to China, or Cathay. No other country had as yet staked a claim to the northeast passage to Cathay, so England was free to maneuver. It was a route that the Portuguese and Spaniards had never frequented. All that remained was to find it. And if the queen’s adventurers could find the
northeast
passage—or any other shortcut—to Cathay, the economic wealth of the nation would be preserved.

The Muscovy Company had been founded well over a decade
earlier, and trade with Russia had grown in that time in hemp, cordage, flax, train oil, furs, hides, tallow, and wax. Russian ropes, manufactured by the Muscovy Company’s rope makers in Kholmogory and Vologda, supplied most of the crown’s naval needs. All these imports were widely used in the burgeoning English merchant navy and were essential in contributing to development of English sea power. The Russians, for their part, were great admirers of English broadcloth, but they were governed by an increasingly unstable Ivan the Terrible. The czar had granted the English privileged trading status, paying no customs duties or tolls, and the English effectively held commercial control over the White Sea for nearly two decades.
⁵
But for some reason, Ivan had taken a “mislike” of late to Anthony Jenkinson, probably since Jenkinson was trailblazing a path via the Caspian Sea region to Persia, in the hope of opening up a silk trade with the shah.

The czar’s “mislike” translated into a high-level personal drama back in England for Sir William Cecil and his protégé, Sir Francis Walsingham. Both were heavy investors in the Russia trade and took an active interest in ensuring that the Muscovy Company prospered. Like many inspired investors since their time, they hadn’t viewed Russia as a high-risk investment. Russia was rather an insurance policy for Baltic oak and all the necessities of naval power for the greater good of the English nation. Russia was the first outpost of extra-European trade that had flourished, yet its investors were not reaping real profits.

While Hawkins was establishing his slave trading in the West Indies during his second voyage, Anthony Jenkinson was fighting a rear-guard action with his own Muscovy Company against charges of fraud and misappropriation of funds. To make matters worse for Jenkinson when he had hoped to court royal favor to “scout those seas and to procure to apprehend such pirates as have lately frequented the same,” he had angered Elizabeth instead by taking the queen’s own ship, the
Aid
, to fulfill this so-called worthwhile task. The hapless adventurer was ordered “in her Highness’s name, to repair with the said ship into the river Thames as soon as wind and weather will serve, upon whose arrival Her Majesty will send such smaller vessels thither in his stead as shall be fitter for that service than the
Aid
is.”
⁶

The
Aid
was, in fact, needed urgently in Ireland, for Sir Henry Sidney, an Elizabethan gentleman adventurer and Ireland’s new lord deputy. Sidney had married the Earl of Leicester’s sister, Mary, and had been backed by Leicester as a replacement for the Earl of Sussex for the post for some time. Since joining the Privy Council, Leicester had taken a strong, personal interest in Ireland, as he knew that taming the “wild Irish” was the queen’s greatest concern for security of the realm and that she remained in constant fear of attack through that “postern gate.” Though Sidney had been appointed in the summer, it was October before he was allowed to embark for Dublin to take up his new position as lord deputy.

The intractable problem between England and Ireland had its roots in a papal decree under Henry II, some three hundred years earlier. English plantations that were colonized to replace the power of the church had first begun under Henry VIII when he had dissolved the monasteries. By Elizabeth’s reign they had fallen into decay. These plantations were constantly invaded by the Irish clansmen, or septs; and in the North, Shane O’Neill had followed a long-standing Irish tradition and imported Scottish mercenaries, known as “Redshanks,” to help him make territorial gains against other Irish septs. To make matters worse, many English colonists, or “planters” as they were called, had gone native, adopting Irish traditions and customs, the most unacceptable of which was “coyne and livery.” “Coyne,” from the Gaelic
coinmeadh
, meaning the right of the great lord to demand hospitality of whatever nature for his person, had been coupled with the English “livery,” by which the lord could demand whatever he needed for his horse. These two demands embodied the worst of both the Irish and English systems and harkened back to the nastiest features of the medieval
droits de seigneur
. It was a uniquely Irish invention, grounded in extortion and intimidation that ran like a sixteenth-century protection racket. The abolition of this pernicious practice became the abiding prime objective of Elizabeth in Ireland.
⁷
After all, her father, Henry VIII, had made Ireland his own kingdom after his break with Rome, and while the Irish saw matters differently, Elizabeth was determined to colonize the country and tame its wild people. Ireland was in thought and deed the first English colony, and it would become the Queen of England’s most spied-on flank—for she feared invasion by
this “postern gate” even more than invasion from France, Scotland, or Spain directly.