The Pirate Queen (27 page)

And so it came to pass that Stucley, since the time of Ridolfi, had become Philip’s “loyal” client. In a joint proposal to the King of Spain and the pope, Stucley had urged, “That there be given him four well equipped ships and a foist and two barks and therewith 3,000 foot and five hundred horse, where he will undertake to raise without for the present any payment on that account; and with that force he will go to Plymouth and burn and take the fleet of Hawkins and thence he will go to Ireland and make himself master of Waterford and Cork.”
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Though Stucley had personally betrayed Elizabeth, it was the greater Catholic League against her, her troublesome “province” Ireland, and ultimately the defeat of the Turks that truly worried the English queen and Burghley in international politics. These were particularly harsh years for queen and country. Years of upheaval in trade in the Low Countries, the Northern Catholic Rising in England, failed plantations in Ireland coupled with the James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald and Edmund Butler tribal war there, the loss of “favored nation status” in Ivan the Terrible’s Russia for the previous three years, no successful northerly route as yet to Cathay for the growth of the luxury trade to the Orient, Barbary pirates and Spanish wars in the Mediterranean, the papal excommunication and absolution of English subjects from obeying Elizabeth, and the ultimate failure of Hawkins’s slaving expeditions all combined to make the early 1570s a time of particular penury and dissatisfaction.

Still, there were, seemingly, some bright rays on the horizon. Peace, though an illusion, had reigned in the more heavily populated, predominantly Protestant south for fifteen years. A compromise had been etched in stone between Protestants and Catholics, and the country was poised to enter a new era of prosperity, if only the rest of the world would let it happen. Some adventurers had dedicated much of their efforts to improving matters at home, despite nursing a penchant for raiding foreign shipping in the Narrow Seas and
beyond. Sir Lionel Duckett, master of the Mercers’ Company in 1572 and lord mayor of London in that year, was determined to maintain “good order” in the capital by curbing excessive debauchery, drinking, and feasting, despite being labeled a killjoy. He also instituted the system for the issue of writs of habeas corpus to be restricted to cases against those who disturbed the peace. Where Duckett indirectly condoned “lawlessness” at sea through his private investments, he was particularly proud—with good reason—of his efforts at curbing criminality and venal behavior at home.
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Sir Thomas Gresham, who would remain the queen’s royal factor at Antwerp until May 1573, had found his role increasingly difficult to maintain since the seizure of the Duke of Alba’s pay ships. Gresham witnessed the delicate series of negotiations for the return of the money (long ago spent) between the Genoese bankers, the queen and Burghley, and the king’s representative, Tomasso Fieschi, but was powerless to contribute positively to talks that were by and large handled at Privy Council level.
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To complicate matters further, Gresham’s great friends were Balthazar and Gaspar Schetz, with whom he often stayed. Life must have been decidedly uncomfortable for the queen’s factor since Gaspar was also the King of Spain’s royal factor.
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All of these complications paled into insignificance, though, when, as a result of Philip’s naval war against the Turks and his requirement to enhance protection of his colonies, the King of Spain declared bankruptcy in Antwerp yet again in 1572.

And Gresham was unstoppable. He had already turned his attention to a different and positive project. Plans were under way for the pinnacle of his personal achievement. His vision for England’s future would become a monument that all merchants and traders could appreciate and enjoy. With Sir Lionel Duckett’s able assistance, Gresham began building the physical representation to England’s economic future—the Royal Exchange in the City. Modeled on the Antwerp bourse, it was to be Gresham’s legacy to the nation, built in large part with his own money.
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Yet trade with Antwerp, the greatest pillar of foreign exchange, had long been reduced to a low water mark by international circumstances. Customs and excise duties on imports were at an all
time low at the time of building, making the Royal Exchange seem to some like Gresham’s great folly. Merchant adventurers had been reduced to becoming “adventurers” harvesting the seas in order to make a living. Naturally, any merchandise brought into port without the proper paperwork—including a “letter of reprisal”—would have been confiscated. And so smuggling became rife everywhere. The result was that most of the crown’s receipts now came from the sale of crown lands rather than foreign exchange or excise duty.

Something needed to be done. Sir Thomas Smith, Elizabeth’s principal secretary in 1572, had agreed with the Merchants Adventurers stance that, ultimately, only continued trade with the Netherlands could guarantee Anglo-Spanish amity.
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Perhaps it was for his outspoken, if correct but unpopular, views that Smith was sent to Paris on the embassy with Sir Philip Sidney in 1572 for Henry of Navarre’s marriage to the King of France’s sister, rather than to the Low Countries to continue the negotiations for the “return” of the money taken from Alba’s pay ships in November 1568.

Burghley urged his queen that something had to be done about the international situation if England were to grow and occupy a position of importance in the world. Elizabeth agreed. She knew full well what she would have to do to placate the King of Spain and Alba, and so long as it cost her very little in real financial and face-saving terms, it would seem to show a great willingness on her part to patch things up with the kings of Spain and Portugal. After consultations with Burghley and other Privy Councillors, the queen resolved, firstly, to cease the Guinea and all slave trade;
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and, secondly, to make a concerted effort to stop Channel piracy. The first of these was handled readily enough through proclamation, though neither Iberian king believed that Elizabeth was sincere. Nor did they believe, rightly, that the Privy Council and the Admiralty could stop privateers from interloping in Spanish and Portuguese colonies.

As to Channel piracy, the ready solution was for the queen to expel Orange’s Sea Beggars from their safe haven at Dover. But was this newfound cooperation with Spain all it seemed to be? Or was it, as with so many things with Elizabeth, a masterstroke or “answer answerless” to an intractable problem, another of her gossamer webs
that when held up to the lightest of breezes turned round upon itself and became nothing more than broken silken threads?

Captain La Marck, Orange’s most robust mariner, had made Dover and the creeks and bays along the south coast his home with his fellow Sea Beggars for several years. English seamen swelled his ranks in the certain expectation that they would share in La Marck’s plunder. But La Marck, his men, and even the English who served under or alongside him were expendable in the game of cat and mouse that the Queen of England played with Philip of Spain. They were a cheap and easily disavowed means of making unofficial war. But meanwhile, she persisted—until the spring of 1572—in renewing safe conduct after safe conduct for La Marck and his men. As the Queen of England, it was the only course open to her to show her defiance of Spain. As the patron of these pirates, Elizabeth would never allow their expulsion to mean their extinction.
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Alba’s view remained skeptical. The Sea Beggars were rebels and pirates, baptized by Elizabeth as Orange’s soldiers, but pirates nonetheless.
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Interestingly, little has been made of the fact that Philip had engaged willingly in the same practice of harboring rebels—but in his case, rebels from English justice. After the collapse of the Northern Rising, the Earl of Westmoreland, Lord Dacre, and others had escaped to the Netherlands and lived comfortably under the protection of the Spanish government
and
on Spanish pensions.
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These very men would become the backbone for Philip’s “Enterprise of England” in 1588. Their activities could not, would not, be tolerated by the queen or her Privy Council without a fight.

And so, in what appeared to the uninitiated to be an act of munificence—the expulsion of Orange’s Sea Beggars from England’s shores—Elizabeth had, in fact, struck a lethal blow against the King of Spain; she was pulling back the olive branch from his outstretched hand. What followed was vintage Elizabeth.

The expulsion orders handed down from the commissioners of the Cinque Ports on the grounds of “plundering ships belonging to the merchants of the Steelyard and others, and seizing their ships and the goods they had taken or uttered ‘to the slander of the realm and impeachment of the haunt and traffic of merchandise’” was only one of the long list of complaints against the Dutch rebels.
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On March 25, they were ordered to quit Dover and, indeed, England.
When La Marck was still seen hovering off the south coast, Sir John Hawkins was sent with his fleet to ensure La Marck’s retreat. A month later, La Marck’s fleet landed at the Isle of Wight to sell their captured prizes for victuals. Three days later, they successfully captured one of two deepwater ports in the Netherlands, Brill.

At last, Orange had his toehold on home ground. Brill had been seized by La Marck, but Flushing, the other deepwater port, was beyond his reach. In July 1572, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Elizabeth’s hardened gentleman adventurer fresh from his wars in Ireland, and Gilbert’s uncle, the vice admiral of Devon, Sir Arthur Champernowne, led some eleven hundred “pressed” volunteers to capture Flushing and Sluys. Above all, it was Gilbert’s duty to ensure that the French would not be able to occupy these ports. There is no doubt that he had the tacit support of the queen and the Privy Council for an undertaking like this: when he failed to take Flushing by November, he returned to England in a feigned “disgrace.”
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Then, in a most transparent effort to prove her good credentials in combating piracy in 1572, Elizabeth refused to grant Sir Richard Grenville a license to voyage into the Pacific since it would “annoy the King of Spain.”

Yet even the cunning deceits of the Queen of England were to be outdone in 1572 by another queen—the dowager Queen of France, Catherine de’ Medici. In that year Catherine was in the middle of negotiating a marriage between her son, Francis, the Duc d’Alençon, and Elizabeth. She was also responding to the clear and present danger closer to home that the Huguenot leader, Admiral de Coligny, represented. Coligny had, in her eyes and those of the Guises, supplanted Catherine’s influence with the weak King Charles, her son. In the summer of 1572, the eyes of the great nations of Europe were on Paris for the wedding of Henry, King of Navarre, to Marguerite de Valois, Catherine’s daughter, and sister to King Charles. It was a match that had been championed by Coligny. After years of civil war, Coligny—in an act of conciliation—had become a close advisor of the king, and had been instrumental in the negotiations.

Queen Catherine whispered in her son’s ear that as the king of Navarre was a Protestant, she feared the capital could become
a killing field if the population were allowed to go about armed. Naturally, Charles concurred, and he issued a royal proclamation forbidding arms and the molestation of any foreigner or Navarre follower. Protestants throughout Europe, and especially in France, took this for a great act of kindness and reconciliation, and they flocked to Paris for the ceremony.

The stark facts were precisely the contrary. The Guises, uncles to Mary, Queen of Scots, along with Queen Catherine, believed that Coligny represented too great an influence on the weak-minded king. Coligny simply had to go. And what better time to assassinate Coligny than when Paris was
en fête
and filled to overflowing with Protestants?

On the morning of Friday, August 22, 1572, after a week of festivities celebrating the elaborate wedding of Henry to Marguerite, Admiral de Coligny wended his way back to his lodgings in the rue de Béthisy. He was returning home from watching the king play Guise at tennis at the Louvre. A would-be assassin fired three shots from a third-floor window as Coligny turned into his street. The first blew off most of Coligny’s right-hand index finger. The next lodged in his left arm, and the third missed altogether. The king was notified, and his personal physician was sent to tend to the admiral. Coligny’s wounds were not considered grievous, and the Huguenots who had gathered to stand vigil in the street below the admiral’s lodgings rejoiced “to see the king so careful as well for the curing of the admiral, as also for searching out of the party that hurt him.”
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Bearing this out, the king and his brothers were so solicitous that they and their mother visited the convalescing admiral.

Yet Henry of Navarre and the Prince de Condé smelled danger in the air. They tried to calm their Huguenot supporters by confirming that Coligny would recover completely. But when the man hired to assassinate the admiral was caught, one Maurevert, it was also discovered that the man who had held the horse for Maurevert’s quick getaway was a veteran servant of the Duc de Guise. Maurevert’s weapon, a harquebuse, had been “borrowed” from the Duc d’Alençon’s armory. And the Duc d’Alençon was the English queen’s intended bridegroom.

There was only one option left open to the scheming Valoises
and Guises to keep the truth from coming out: exterminate the Huguenots. At four in the morning, the Duc de Guise and his Swiss mercenaries forced their way into the admiral’s lodgings. Coligny was already on his knees in prayer. While he knelt, the mercenaries stabbed him repeatedly then tossed his bloodied body out the window. Meanwhile, throughout the capital, Huguenot houses were attacked. Men, women, and children were slaughtered, their bodies thrown into the streets or the River Seine. Huguenots to whom King Charles had granted asylum at the Louvre were murdered, their two hundred or so corpses piled high in the splendid palace courtyard. According to the Spanish ambassador to France, Zuñiga, fanatics had entered the English embassy where Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s ambassador, resided, and where other English notables like Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Thomas Smith hid along with the ambassador from the mob. Only after the danger had passed had the Duc de Nevers stationed the royal guard outside Ambassador Walsingham’s home. In the first blood orgy on St. Bartholomew’s Day, conservatively over two thousand Huguenots were slain.