The Pirate Queen (41 page)

But Ireland was where he would make his name. His uncle, Sir Arthur Champernowne, embroiled him further in that unfortunate country with his personal vision for Irish “plantings” in Ulster and Munster between 1566 and 1572. Gilbert even became involved with Sir Thomas Smith, Elizabeth’s secretary of state, in his privately financed plantation schemes in Ulster from 1571 to 1575, and led English “volunteers” as their hardened military commander in the Low Countries in 1572. Knighted for services to the crown in Ireland in 1570, Sir Humphrey Gilbert was of that breed of highly volatile younger sons of gentle birth in Elizabethan England who saw gold in colonization, rather than in piracy.
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The queen, for her part, needed Gilbert and men like him to extend her authority in Ireland. Allowing her gentlemen to pillage and spoil the land of its rich natural timber resources and prolific fishing grounds was the only pay she could afford to give. Still Gilbert, much like his much younger half brother, Walter Raleigh, seemed expert
at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The eldest Gilbert was Sir John, followed by Sir Humphrey, then Adrian. Walter Raleigh and his elder brother Carew were their half brothers by their mother’s marriage to Walter Raleigh senior. Never before had five sons from one gentlewoman dominated foreign expansion. But such was the lot for Katherine Champernowne’s sons. They had each been introduced in their turn at court by their aunt, Cat Ashley, Elizabeth’s faithful governess. For each, their early days held tremendous promise, but they were ultimately destroyed by their own arrogance, poor judgment of their courtly rivals, scant knowledge of the lands they wanted to explore, and, in Walter’s case, an inability to assess the situation dispassionately and roll with the tides of change.

Gilbert’s early successes as a brutal military captain in Ireland fed his vision of transplanting Englishmen to foreign shores. Unlike Drake, Gilbert delighted in inflicting massive casualties in as vile a manner as possible. Deliberately killing as many women and children along with their men, his particular specialty was to lay waste to the land, cut off his victims’ heads, and use them as markers forming a gruesome path to his tent. He brought “great terror to the people when they saw the heads of their dead fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, children, kinsfolk and friends lie on the ground before their faces.” Gilbert himself boasted to Sir Henry Sidney that “after my first summoning of any castle or fort, if they would not presently yield it, I would not afterwards take it of their gift [accept their surrender], but won it perforce, how many lives soever it cost, putting man, woman and child of them to the sword.”
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For some reason, Humphrey Gilbert thought that his fearsome conduct in Ireland qualified him to go in search of the Northwest Passage, as if this perilous sea voyage of discovery was a natural extension to his previous credentials. When the Muscovy Company refused to allow Gilbert to “interlope,” he continued to build on his knowledge base for North America, reading everything he could find on the subject and consulting with the Hakluyts and Dee. By concentrating his energies on the colonization of America, he believed that he would be in the forefront of what would become, at some point, a necessity to England’s survival. On the plus side of his highly volatile character, Gilbert’s enthusiasm for North American colonies was infectious and spread to young Walter (sixteen years his
junior). It would be their spectacular failures that would pave the way for the seventeenth-century successes.
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With the assistance of both the Richard Hakluyts and John Dee, a huge body of correspondence and firsthand accounts of life in the Americas was building up, and Humphrey Gilbert had access to most of it. He conjectured that the failure of the Company of Kathai, and Drake’s secret departure on his voyage of circumnavigation, meant the time was right to press the queen for a royal patent for Norumbega—that swathe of North America between the Hudson River and Cape Breton in Newfoundland.

Since Gilbert was so well connected, and had Leicester’s support to search for the Northwest Passage and settle America, Elizabeth granted a royal patent on June 11, 1578, “to discover and inhabit some strange place not actually possessed of any Christian prince or people.”
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It is tantalizing to hope that the queen did not want such a violent adventurer to wreak havoc on any people, but this was hardly her worry. Her limitation on the patent to a term of six years in which to settle Englishmen in these lands in order to retain the title from the crown was, however, a stroke of genius. Elizabeth could appear to comply with his scheme, while not venturing a penny herself, and if the venture came to nothing, then she would have lost nothing.

While Gilbert’s own substantial family of brothers and uncles involved their fortunes in the undertaking, Gilbert himself understood the benefit of royal patronage, and tried to enthuse others at court, including Elizabeth, with the prospect of discovering gold. But he found that Lok and Frobisher had tied up the wafer-thin royal investment market with their final voyage, and his pleas fell on deaf ears. Only young Henry Knollys, son of Sir Francis Knollys, treasurer of the queen’s household and cousin to the queen, became a major participant. While Sir Humphrey was gathering together his fleet for the Norumbega expedition, he talked of rescuing Oxenham from Panama; capturing all the shipping of France, Spain, and Portugal; fishing at the Newfoundland fisheries; and eventually seizing the whole of the West Indies for England. He wrote off memorandum after memorandum trying to enlist the same level of support Drake had done so successfully, but to no avail.

While the word “madness” springs to mind for this as well as other Gilbert projects, in his defense, these rantings fit more into the realm
of trying to make dreams come true. Most of the queen’s western adventurers were facing the complete unknown, with Spanish America their sole compass for “how things worked.” And if Spain could fashion an empire from nothing and become wealthier than any other European nation could imagine, then so could England…if only the queen would back
their
voyages of exploration to North America.

But before the expedition sailed from Plymouth, Gilbert and Henry Knollys fell out, and Knollys set off with three of the ten ships in the expedition to capture “rich prizes” through opportunistic piracy. Gilbert, meanwhile, with his brothers and half brothers set off in the seven remaining ships for North America. Before they were past Ireland, the fleet was dispersed by heavy squalls and storms. Gilbert alone made landfall there. That was the closest he would get to America.

His half brothers, Carew and Walter Raleigh, however, each in command of his own ship, fared only slightly better. Walter’s navigator was the exiled Portuguese pilot, Simon Fernandez, who would play an important role in Raleigh’s own dreams of settlement. After the storms, Fernandez argued that it would be best to head south instead of north by northwest to the Canaries, taking the more familiar route favored by Hawkins and Drake.
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They made it as far as the Cape Verde Islands, where they had a “confrontation” with some Spanish and Portuguese ships and escaped back home, with the
Falcon
, a leased ship from John Hawkins, now badly in need of repairs. Understandably, any plunder taken in the fracas was shared out with the ship owner.

In one sense, their timing was fortunate. The court and Privy Council had no time to immediately address issues of gentlemen adventurers engaging in piracy. The proposed French marriage with Alençon was “on again” in 1580–81, consuming all of the court’s energies, and forcing all of the queen’s gentlemen to take sides. Burghley, a proponent of the match, was in disfavor, and Walsingham with Leicester, on the rise. Whose patronage a gentleman followed would determine which side of the argument he would be on. Walter Raleigh was the exception. Originally under the patronage of the vituperative Earl of Oxford, Raleigh “jumped ship” and made his search for a new patron. He wrote to the Earl
of Leicester, declaring that “I will be found as ready and dare do as much in your service as any man you may command.”
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Of course, Raleigh hadn’t recognized that Leicester’s heir, Sir Philip Sidney, was being groomed as the earl’s younger replacement for the queen’s affections, and if for any reason Sidney failed, Leicester’s stepson, Robert, Earl of Essex, would most assuredly do well. Despite Raleigh’s brief encounter with the sea, remembered by many as a dubious chapter in his young career, by 1581, he had already shown great promise as a soldier in Munster. And Leicester wanted to keep him there, out of court, and out of harm’s way.

In the meantime, the tenacious Spanish ambassador, Bernardino de Mendoza, was unrelenting in trying to get recompense for the piracy in which Knollys, and later Raleigh, had been engaged during the failed first Gilbert voyage. But the queen was not minded to hear the pleadings of Philip’s servant in England until such time as he came forward with a reasonable explanation or apology for the king’s financing the papal mercenary troops in Ireland. He had invaded her sovereign soil and committed a clear act of war, she argued. Mendoza’s position had been so severely compromised that no one dared to speak to him. When he walked along the street, children hooted and stoned him. In his audience with the queen in October 1581 at Richmond, he lashed out at Elizabeth that whatever she might think of Spain, she had brought these tribulations upon herself; that she was extending herself far too much to the Portuguese pretender, Dom Antonio de Crato; and that if she didn’t change tack, “cannons would bring her to reason.”
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Elizabeth was livid. She told Mendoza that he need “not think to threaten or frighten her, for if he did, she would put him in a place where he could not say a word.” He was within an ace of being expelled, and he knew it. He had gone too far, and he tried to appease the English queen with flattery, telling her that she was “a lady so beautiful that even lions would crouch before her.”
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Elizabeth answered that she would ignore the Spanish ambassador’s pleas for restitution from her gentlemen adventurers, including Drake, until the King of Spain could answer for his invasion of Ireland.
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Yet despite the heated exchange, when Gilbert requested another passport to go to his “lands” in America, the queen forbade him to sail, claiming that he was “noted of not good hap by sea” as his recent
voyage clearly showed. Disgruntled, Humphrey Gilbert sold part of his “concession” of lands north of the fiftieth parallel in Norumbega to Dr. John Dee.
¹⁰
After all, he had “by his former preparation [been] enfeebled of ability and credit to perform his designments…whereby his estate was impaired.” He had been left no alternative but to dispose of “certain assignments out of his commission to sundry persons of mean ability desiring the privilege of his grant, to plant and fortify in the North parts of America about the river of Canada.”
¹¹

Gilbert assigned rights to a Southampton merchant, Edward Cotton, to exploit whaling in the Gulf of St. Lawrence; but his venture soon ended in failure, too. Then in 1581, Gilbert took advantage of a change in the political atmosphere with the first Throckmorton assassination attempt on Elizabeth’s life and subsequent clamping down on Catholics and recusancy fines. He agreed on a deal to grant rights of settlement to some 8.5 million acres to Catholics led by Sir George Peckham and Sir Thomas Gerrard to offset some of his losses.
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When the Spanish ambassador got wind of the Catholic “transportation” scheme, which would effectively export all opposition to Protestant policies in England, he set in motion a campaign to discredit both Gilbert and the Peckham/Gerrard undertaking. It would be disastrous for Spain’s designs on England if Gilbert and his Catholic subtenants overcame the odds stacked against them.
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Gilbert predictably ignored the Spanish threat and formed his own Southampton-based company called “The Merchant Adventurers with Sir Humphrey Gilbert,” which would be imbued with the exclusive rights of trade with Gilbert’s North American colony. The new company included all of Katherine Champernowne’s five sons, thirty-nine Southampton merchants, and, notably, Francis Walsingham, who ventured £50.
¹⁴

Prior to this, in preparation for Gilbert’s own second expedition, Simon Fernandez was sent to the New England coast in an 8-ton frigate, the
Squirrel
, on a reconnaissance mission. On his return, Hakluyt, Gilbert, Dee, and Peckham all met at Dee’s Mortlake home to discuss Fernandez’s findings. But myths, not hard facts about terrain, the native Americans, and threats to settlement generally abounded. In their desperation, an Englishman named David Ingram, who had been put ashore in the Gulf of Mexico by John Hawkins back in 1568, was also interrogated by Gilbert and his
partners. Ingram had miraculously walked across North America to Newfoundland, where he was eventually picked up and returned to England. Still Ingram’s tale was so fabulous to the adventurers that they were unable to decipher his facts from fantasy.
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Predictably, money began to dwindle, as always in these costly expeditions, and many of Peckham’s backers pulled out when it became apparent that the queen would still demand the vast recusancy fines from her Catholic subjects even if they emigrated to America. Still, the lack of enthusiasm for the project can be largely attributable to Francis Throckmorton, who had initially been arrested in 1581 for plotting against the queen. In early 1583, he was unexpectedly taken into custody again.
¹⁶
Walsingham, who may have invested in the Catholic venture to North America to get to know his “enemies” better, had had Throckmorton seized as one of “the chief agents of the Queen of Scots,” and who was also in the pay of the King of Spain. Seditious pamphlets published abroad were found in his possession, and he was put under excruciating torture for six months before he finally confessed all.