The Pirate Queen (53 page)

But Raleigh’s inquisitiveness and hopes to launch an all-out investigation of the region were interrupted with the sudden discovery by Elizabeth that he had secretly married her lady-in-waiting, Bess Throckmorton. Their son, Wat, was living proof of their relationship, yet Raleigh lied and bluffed about his involvement with the queen’s lady. When Raleigh was finally compelled to confess, Elizabeth thundered at him in rage and unceremoniously packed him off to the Tower to cool his silken heels for a while. The queen had to approve all court marriages by law, and Raleigh should have known better. After all, he followed Leicester’s own public debacle in secretly marrying Lettice Knollys, Walter Devereux’s widow, by a number of years, as well as Robert Devereux’s (second Earl of Essex) own crime two years earlier.

Elizabeth’s efforts in the early 1590s were also absorbed by Philip’s change of tactic. Henry of Navarre had inherited the French throne, and as the Protestant king of predominantly Catholic France, this made his efforts in the Spanish Netherlands even more futile. That is, until the Spanish took Calais. Now Henry, financed as well by Elizabeth, was fighting a rear-guard action, trying to keep the Spanish from fanning out from the Pas de Calais and beyond. For her part, Elizabeth did what she could by sending Essex and his volunteers to relieve Rouen at the French king’s side, but her frayed purse strings were near breaking point. It is intriguing to speculate if her lack of capital might have been the main reason why she had allowed the adventurers out to sea in the vast numbers that she did at
the time. A percentage of their takings—even after pilferage by the crews and hangers-on at port—was better than absolutely nothing. She had become bitter that things had come to such an impasse, for if there was one thing above all else that Elizabeth loathed, it was being backed into a corner.
¹⁹

It seems odd that Drake was the only great adventurer who was not at sea, and may well have held a warmer place in her heart as a result. He, at least, was making an attempt to capture the ill-gotten gains of her pirates and adventurers. Even more interesting is that Elizabeth used his wondrous reputation to full advantage, often claiming within earshot of the Venetian ambassador that Drake was due to sail with fifty ships. Here we can still see the young queen teasing and taunting her enemies, and telling lies as if they were truths.
²⁰

No longer fettered by Elizabeth as her indispensable favorite, Raleigh along with Cumberland came up with a scheme to capture the Isthmus of Panama in reprisal for the loss of the
Revenge
. The plan appealed to the queen’s devious side, and it was a way for Raleigh to show his allegiance. Without too much cajoling Elizabeth ventured two ships and £3,000 in cash ($720,890 or £389,670 today). Raleigh contributed the
Roebuck
and money he said was his own, but many think it had really been borrowed from his friends. In the event, they never made it past the Azores. There Captain Crosse (who was a Drake veteran mariner) in one of Cumberland’s ships took the Portuguese carrack
Madre de Díos
after a hard fight. It was the largest ship afloat at the time, with seven decks and a cargo in gold, spices, and precious gemstones worth a staggering £150,000 ($36.08 million or £19.5 million today).
²¹
At least that was the official figure.

But by the time the treasure was brought back to England, much had been pilfered along the way. Stories of disorderliness among the English sailors filled the official and popular press. Drake himself heard how the swarm of English pirates (for he could describe them as nothing else) ran wild with excitement, rummaging through the passengers’ cabins, breaking open chests with their weapons, and running off with much of what belonged by law to the adventurers’ ship owners and the Admiralty. He spent much of his time taking depositions of how Cumberland’s mariners were literally at one
another’s throats, staving off sailors from the other adventuring ships and keeping them from partaking in their ecstatic orgy of booty.

Still, that wasn’t the end of the affair. London jewelers clamored aboard diligences and rushed to Plymouth where the sailors disembarked. Every cutpurse and thief gathered around the pier in the hope of something to steal while the treasure was unloaded. “We cannot look upon anything here,” the harassed receiver of customs, Thomas Middleton, opined, “except we should keep a guard to drive away the disordered pilfering bystanders that attend but a time to carry away somewhat when any chest is opened.” It took Drake and several other commissioners several weeks to gain control of the situation—restoring order, taking witness statements, examining mariners, taking inventory, and finally, thankfully, sending £141,000 worth of the cargo to London.
²²
Drake had yet again more than proved his weight in gold.

The taking of the
Madre de Dios
had a devastating effect on Philip’s reputation. The gossipy Venetian ambassador in Spain wrote in cipher to the doges that “the King must be relieved from the weight of so many debts…he has debts of about thirteen millions [ducats] in gold…in the air as they say.” And it was true that “the West India fleet has never at any time of its history been so harried by the English and exposed to such danger of capture as at this present moment.”
²³

But in truth, enough gold and silver made its way to Philip’s coffers, and his rebuilding program continued unabated. There would be another Armada.

Part Four

Dawn of Empire

I myself will venture my royal blood; I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of your virtue in the field. I know that already for your forwardness you have deserved rewards and crowns, and I assure you in the word of a prince you shall not fail of them….

—ELIZABETH I, ARMADA SPEECH AT TILBURY, AUGUST
9, 1588

39. The Alchemy That Turned Plunder into Trade

Ambition is like choler, which is an humour that maketh men active, earnest, full of alacrity, and stirring if not stopped…. So ambitious men, if they find the way open for their rising, and still get forward, they are rather busy than dangerous…

—SIR FRANCIS BACON,
Essays
,
Of Ambition

B
y the mid-1590s, Spain’s naval rebirth was not only rumored, but also evident from the turning tide of her adventurers at sea. While Philip’s health continued to deteriorate, his anger against England remained hearty. Drake had been a landlubber for six years, and he longed to feel the boards beneath his feet, the stiff sea breezes in his face, and the thrill of the attack again. The ghost of Thomas Doughty had finally been laid to rest, though his younger brother, John, still rotted in prison for his attempt on Drake’s life.
¹
Now in his mid-fifties, with the help of his cousin, Sir John Hawkins (in his sixties himself), the two veteran sea dogs persuaded the queen to allow them a nostalgic revival of their “troublesome” 1568 adventure, but this time the purpose was to capture Panama. If Hawkins’s blockade couldn’t stop the silver shipments, surely their landing at Panama would. The queen allowed them to go, wanting to believe in them more than
truly
believing. Perhaps this was why she wanted them to adopt the tactics that had been so successful in their youths—the surprise smash-and-grab raids that had so inspired her younger, ambitious adventurers. And so, after much preparation, they set sail with the old queen’s blessing.

The result was catastrophic. When the two former pirates heard that a great silver carrack had been crippled in Puerto Rico, they naturally attacked. It had been over ten years since Drake had last
seen the West Indies, and in that time, Spain’s fortifications against the return of
El Draco
proved more than effective. Hawkins was killed by a direct hit in November 1595. Two months later, in January 1596, Drake had his stool shot out from under him while eating dinner. But his luck would not hold this time. Within weeks, he was dead of the bloody flux, probably brought on by an infection of his wounds.
²
Starved of the threat of
El Draco
—whether real or imagined—all looked lost to the despondent queen.

But just as this devastating news reached court, worse was yet to come. Henry IV of France had decided that “Paris was worth a mass” and converted to Catholicism, ending decades of civil war. The effect on Elizabeth was profound since Henry had been her hope for a Protestant, and thereby benign, France. In reply to this, she urgently sent Gilbert Talbot, seventh Earl of Shrewsbury, to obtain Henry’s oath to observe the conditions of their league against Spain and to invest him in the Order of the Garter. “And by this means you will shade if not cover my error,” she wrote to Henry, “if such I may call it, who was the first to present to you my faith, assuring you that if all pacts were as inviolate as this one will be on my side, everyone would be astonished to see such constant friendship in this century.”
³
Her words still ring true today. Catholic France and Catholic Spain would assuredly form a league against England, the queen feared. Time was of the essence if Philip, France, the pope, and any other takers of her crown were to be stopped.

Elizabeth knew that her only alternative was to continue to prosecute her war against Spain, and so she agreed to send out an expedition from Plymouth bound for the Spanish coast and bent on capturing and destroying as many ships as it could at Cadiz, then Lisbon.
⁴
Leading the voyage was the lord admiral himself with the queen’s charismatic favorite, the handsome, hotheaded Robert, Earl of Essex. Raleigh, freshly returned from his Guiana voyage (which had not been successful in finding the mythical El Dorado, nor had it been of any real significance as a voyage of discovery), had been asked to join the fleet as its rear admiral. Funding for the expedition came directly from the queen, with Howard and Essex as her joint shareholders. A stunning fleet of around 150 sail with 18 of the
queen’s ships among them, along with 18 Dutchmen and 12 outsized Londoners all bristling with the latest firepower. A landing force of ten thousand soldiers of England’s “choisest men” was mustered and taken aboard. They would be led by Essex, Vere, Blount, Gerrard, and Cumberland.
⁵

As with Drake nine years earlier, Cadiz was miraculously caught sleeping. Two of the king’s galleons were destroyed and two others captured. When the town surrendered to the swashbuckling Essex for an agreed ransom of 125,000 ducats ($7.59 million or £4.1 million today) the best terms they could get from the English was to allow all but the top 150 citizens of the town leave, along with all the women, before the sack began. In addition, the Spaniards had to leave all their worldly possessions behind.
⁶
As soon as the women left town the queen’s soldiers sacked it, in an ecstatic, raging free-for-all lasting two weeks. So far as they were concerned, their voyage was made.

Incredibly, while the sack of the town was taking place, the lord high admiral and his men did not have their eyes on the richly laden India fleet in port. To prevent them from stealing it and using the proceeds against Spain, Don Luis Alfonso Flores, the admiral of the flota, ordered the ships to be destroyed. The estimated value of the ships’ cargoes alone amounted to around 4 million ducats ($240.32 million or £129.9 million today) according to Medina Sidonia, but the Spanish merchants would later claim 12 million ducats in losses.
⁷
As to personal effects of the townspeople and churches, no accurate estimate of either the value, or the inventory of what was taken or destroyed, survives. Loot was, after all, how all nations paid their soldiers for the risks they took.

What had originally been intended as an act of war with strict instructions by the queen was again sidetracked by private interest and plunder. The lord admiral had persuaded the queen that a mission entirely funded by her as a royal expeditionary force, and not as a joint stock company, would stop the increasing lawlessness of her mariners and achieve her war aims. Indeed, his instructions ordered, “by burning of ships of war in his [the King of Spain’s] havens before they should come forth to the seas, and therewith also destroying his magazines of victuals and his munitions for the arming of his navy, to provide that neither the rebels in Ireland
should be aided and strengthened, nor yet the king be able, of long time, to have any great navy in readiness to offend us.”
⁸

Still, it was Essex’s shining hour—a brilliant, magnificent knight at the head of an army defeating the queen’s greatest foe. He was like a fire-breathing dragon in the face of the enemy, demanding the council of war to hold on to the port of Cadiz to stop trade from the Mediterranean and both the East and West Indies, “whereby we shall cut his [Philip’s] sinews and make war upon him with his own money.”
⁹
More is the pity that he was overruled by “wiser” heads since by occupying the port—even for a short period of time—all shipments by sea could have been halted, turning the thorn in Philip’s side into a massive bellyache. This was Essex’s first and best moment as a soldier. Even his great rivalry with the disgraced Walter Raleigh (who famously cried
Entramos!
while attacking the town) showed Essex to be an inspirational leader of men at Cadiz, while Raleigh was shown to be a great talker at them.