The Pirate Queen (23 page)

12. The Queen and Alba’s Pay Ships

Her Majesty commands all and every, her justices and officials within her towns, cities, ports, and other places under her government, to take steps to detain and arrest with all their goods, chattels, and ships, all subjects born in the dominions of the King of Spain, in order that they may be held as security and pledges for the damages and loss received, without just or apparent cause, by the subjects of Her Majesty, and for other reasons which may appear….

—ELIZABETH R, ROYAL PROCLAMATION OF JANUARY
1569

B
efore San Juan de Ulúa, while Hawkins was languishing in the Caribbean waters around Borburata, his world back home had changed dramatically. In May 1568, Mary, Queen of Scots, and her fellow fugitives from Scottish justice stole across the border into England at Solway Firth, fleeing the wrath of their lords of the covenant. With the murder of Shane O’Neill in Ireland a year earlier in June 1567, after nearly two years of a marauding war against the English—and nearly a decade of Shane’s deeply humiliating treatment of Elizabeth’s government there—the importation of Scottish mercenaries to Ireland had ceased temporarily with Shane’s death. In fact, it seemed to many that the Catholic Scottish threat to both England and Ireland—for the time being—was at a standstill.
¹
Elizabeth entered her tenth year as England’s queen with secure borders at both her “postern” gates, even if the situation with the Low Countries and Spain looked set to explode.

William of Orange and his brother, Louis of Nassau, were both in exile from the States at the head of ineffective mercenary armies, while their maritime supporters—the Sea Beggars—were plundering Spanish shipping at sea. France’s Huguenot insurgents held La Rochelle as their base, with the dual result of keeping
Henry III busy in a semiperpetual state of civil war and preventing the French king from becoming interested in foreign affairs. The Huguenots also helped promote English trade inadvertently when, under the pretence of violence against the English wine fleet at Bordeaux, Sir William Winter accompanied the fleet for security—and also ran secret weaponry and victuals ashore to keep supplying France’s rebels.
²

Even Elizabeth’s captain of state, William Cecil, saw the benefit of exploiting these improved conditions for England abroad. As long as they lasted, England—and her queen—could breathe easier, and perhaps reflect on the new order, in relative security. While Mary’s sudden exile in England was a very tricky matter to handle for myriad reasons, Cecil’s calm statecraft in conjunction with Elizabeth’s keen desire to see Scotland’s rightful monarch restored to the throne saw this as an opportunity to mediate between the Scottish queen and her Protestant lords. So long as Mary—who still had the best claim as heir to the English throne—remained a pawn in Elizabeth’s power to play as she willed, the English queen and her councillors held an unexpected trump card against the Catholic League that threatened from Spain and, especially, Rome.

Pope Pius V—as his predecessors Paul IV and Pius IV—had been itching to excommunicate the Queen of England from the fold. To date, it was only Philip’s intervention that had stopped the popes from acting in haste. As odd as it may seem, it quite suited Philip in a Machiavellian way to have Mary trussed up in a castle in England. The very last thing that he truly wanted was for her to seize the English throne, which he felt he had almost as good a claim to.
³
Philip knew that there was little doubt that the Scottish queen remained a pawn of her powerful French Guise uncles, and would keep him from recovering his “lost” kingdom, England.

While Elizabeth had become more than a mild irritant, the Spanish king still held out hope that she would marry his cousin, the Austrian Archduke Charles, or another Catholic prince, and at least become subject to her husband’s will. That Elizabeth had successfully navigated these waters without finding herself ensnared in a marriage to any prince—Catholic or otherwise—was becoming a serious worry to the Spanish king, and indeed to Elizabeth’s parliaments and Privy Council.

Philip’s consternation was compounded by the fact that Spanish intelligence had been found woefully lacking. The Spanish ambassador de Silva had claimed that he had the situation under control, that he “understood” Hawkins, and that he had the power to stop the next planned West Indian incursion. De Silva also claimed that he, as spymaster, was “controlling” the renegade Thomas Stucley, who was again throwing his weight around in Ireland by the middle of 1568, unsettling the fragile peace. When the Butlers and the Desmonds renewed their territorial disputes in an open war, Stucley bamboozled de Silva into believing that he could deliver Ireland with just a few thousand men and horse into Spain’s eager hands.

All the Spanish ambassador’s assertions that he had the situations “under control” couldn’t have been further from the truth. So when it was discovered that Hawkins and his fleet had undertaken yet another slaving voyage, Philip glowered with rage at Guzmán de Silva’s gullibility and Hawkins’s cunning deceits. Something had to be done to improve Spain’s intelligence. Since the ambassador had been pleading poverty and wished to return home, the easy solution was at hand. While Hawkins was heading toward the Florida Channel, Philip decided to remove de Silva to a “safer” haven, appointing him ambassador to the signory in Venice.

De Silva’s replacement, Guerau de Spes, proved another kettle of fish altogether. Described by his contemporaries as a “fire-eating Catalan soldier,” he lacked the finer points of diplomacy so necessary in a good ambassador. Interestingly, Elizabeth’s own ambassador to Spain was hardly any better. Dr. John Man had been booted out of Madrid around the same time for calling the pope “a canting little monk” at a dinner party.
⁴

But it was the daily bad news from the Channel and the States that continued to preoccupy Philip most. The previous year he had loosed the finest commander of any army in Europe on the Flemings—Don Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alba. Alba had been appointed as general governor of the Low Countries in retaliation to the Flemings’ rebellion, called the Iconoclastic Fury. Back in the spring of 1566, the Netherlanders had rioted and destroyed more than four hundred churches and desecrated countless smaller shrines. More than two hundred thousand men had taken up arms against Spain, and when news reached Philip, he shook his head wearily,
reportedly saying, “in truth, I cannot understand how such a great evil could have arisen and spread in such a short time.”
⁵
Even when he abolished the Inquisition, the riots continued, and so he rescinded his previous order. Naturally, the Flemings were having none of it.

Alba left Spain in April 1567 and gathered a force of ten thousand crack
tercio
Spanish troops as he marched toward the Low Countries. They crossed the Alps in June and entered Brussels without a fight on August 22, 1567. Today, it is difficult to imagine that this “bloodless” military action was a turning point in northern European history. For the next eighty years, Spain would try to keep trade and communications open to the Spanish Netherlands; whereas the Netherlanders and Spain’s enemies would try by any means possible to keep Spain out. The result of the conflict (known as the “Eighty Years’ War”) would be the United Provinces of the Netherlands and the birth of the Dutch Empire.

In the spring, the Venetian ambassador in Spain wrote to the signory that the Queen of England had written

to complain of the proclamation published at Antwerp, whereby all English merchants were compelled either to live according to [the] Catholic religion or to abandon commercial pursuits and the country…but the King would neither receive the Ambassador nor the letters, and indeed has given the ambassador to understand that if he wishes to remain here, he also must live like a good Christian…. I do not know whether his Majesty has lately had any cause for taking this action against the Queen, or whether the result proceeds from his excellent nature…the King has told him [the Nuncio] with great distinctness that he may assure the Pope that all the subjects of his Majesty’s states must either believe what his Majesty believes, or be utterly destroyed and ruined…
⁶

By the autumn of 1568, Alba’s troops had swollen to over fifty thousand mercenaries. They had been gathered from Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and Spain, and represented a formidable fighting force. It was against these professionals, led by the ruthless Alba, that Elizabeth’s merchant and gentlemen adventurers would pitch their lives, fortunes, and wits.
⁷

The immediate effect of Alba’s arrival was the implementation
of the worst excesses of Philip’s religious schemes, including a quasi-Inquisition, known by the Spanish as the Council of Troubles. The Flemings called it the “Council of Blood.” He pledged to Philip that he would “create a New World” in the troublesome provinces, and there is little doubt that he did, though not in the sense that he had intended.
⁸
For the Queen of England, and especially Cecil, Alba’s arrival shattered the rosier picture from the beginning of the year. A highly disciplined Spanish army was now within a hundred miles of London across a short stretch of the Narrow Seas. De Spes, informed by exiled English Catholics and tutored against the English queen by the Count of Feria, looked increasingly like a fifth column rather than an open avenue for diplomatic discourse. Even William of Orange’s resistance was crumbling before Alba’s onslaught.

Then, in late November, God became Protestant again. The Channel weather had been appalling, delaying William Winter and the wine fleet at London. On the southern coast, Huguenot rovers had chased four small Spanish ships into port at Falmouth, Plymouth, and Southampton. The customs officers were advised that the ships carried treasure for the Duke of Alba—it was the gold to pay his troops. According to de Spes:

Up to the present two cutters and one other vessel have arrived safely in Antwerp, and for the rest of them, Benedict Spinola asked me to intercede. At the same time that I received news of them I requested audience of the Queen, which was granted on the 29
^th
, and the Queen consented to give me a passport for the money to be brought overland, or to lend one of her own ships to convoy the vessels in safety, of which I gave notice to the duke of Alba, from whom I have received no answer…. I warned the captains of the vessels not to move, and had letters from the Queen sent to the officials of the ports, ordering them to defend the ships, which was highly necessary as, although in the cases where the ships could get shelter near to the towns, they have done so, the pirates have attacked them, and some of our men have been killed defending their vessels, with a greater loss still on the part of the corsairs…. Many people have advised the Queen to seize the money, and the vice admiral has written to this effect from Plymouth. I am in hourly expectation of the Duke’s order….
⁹

The Council naturally agreed to the safe conduct overland to Dover, while the queen herself offered a naval squadron to escort the Spanish ships by sea. De Spes dared not decide without Alba, and still awaited word. It is significant that this letter to the king was sent through their usual channels, in Spanish, and certainly not in code. Of course, it was intercepted. Cecil naturally wanted to speak to Benedict Spinola, the great Italian merchant banker residing in London, but he had to tread carefully. Yet little did Cecil know, Spinola had news for Cecil, too.

The merchant had heard through his reliable correspondents in Spain that some great evil had befallen the Hawkins expedition in the West Indies, and that they had all been massacred. Since Spinola had been an investor in the second Hawkins voyage as well as the last one,
and
he was the source of the treasure aboard Alba’s pay ships, he had spread the alarm quickly to Sir William Winter, who was guarding Spinola’s wine fleet bound for La Rochelle. The last thing Spinola wanted was further losses. When the terrible news reached Winter, he immediately put into Plymouth to protect the treasure ships until some sense could be made of the combined disasters. While he was there, he felt compelled to tell John Hawkins’s elder brother, William, the bad news. The date was December 3, the day after the queen had signed the safe conduct for the treasure.

The elder Hawkins lost no time in writing off to Cecil, conveying the dreadful intelligence. He pleaded that Spinola be questioned about the truth of the matter. While de Spes wrangled with the governor of the Isle of Wight (Edward Horsey, a notable rover in his own right) to get the Spanish treasure away from him under the safe conduct dated December 2, Hawkins and Sir Arthur Champernowne, vice admiral of Devon, were battening down the hatches in the West Country. If John Hawkins and his men had been slaughtered, the King of Spain’s treasure would make some small recompense under a “letter of patent.”

Meanwhile, in London, Spinola and Cecil met at last. Both had reasons for a friendly and frank discussion. The Italian merchant banker told Elizabeth’s leading councillor that the treasure had been a loan to the Spanish king, and even told him the terms at 10 percent payable in Antwerp. The queen was consulted forthwith, and it was agreed with Spinola that a loan to the Queen of England was just as
advantageous for the Italian, and far less risky, in the circumstances, than a loan to Philip of Spain. Once their transaction was agreed, and sealed, the treasure was brought from its various points on the south coast to the Tower, and locked up securely. When counted, it amounted to a staggering £85,000 ($30.34 million or £16.4 million today).