The Pirate Queen (54 page)

Yet this “great” victory did not achieve Elizabeth’s aims. The Indies fleet was in harbor—some forty to fifty vessels fully laden and ripe for the plucking—but while the soldiers ravaged Cadiz, the Spanish captains were given all the time they needed to destroy the fleet themselves to prevent an English capture. To compound their error, no attempt was made to take Lisbon or any other Iberian port, and no thought was given to try to intercept the incoming treasure fleet. Essentially, the “famous victory” pointed up in red-letter terms that soldiers were not mariners, and that Lord Admiral Howard was no sailor. To make matters worse, their booty was embezzled by underlings at the cost of the adventure’s promoters. The queen, naturally, was left distinctly unamused, despite the fleet’s returning to England with two new Spanish warships, some 1,200 Spanish pieces of ordnance and £12,838 in gold, plate, sugar, hides, silks, and jewels ($3.09 million or £1.67 million today).
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She was all the more angry since her spies reported that the next Armada was now ready to sail from Lisbon. But no one seemed to know for certain if the plan was to reach England, or to land a force to fight and meddle in the continuing troubles in Ireland. Half of her advisors felt that Philip could not let the defeat of the “Invincible” lie, especially as it was compounded by the ignominy of Cadiz for a second time. Other voices were certain that the King of Spain meant
to attack her at her rebellious postern gate. Then, mercifully, word came through that the fleet had sailed from Lisbon, but had been shipwrecked by Atlantic storms off Finisterre that October. Again, the weather seemed to conspire in England’s favor, at least for a little while.

Essex, never one to miss a fresh rush of blood to the head, felt invincible himself after Cadiz. In a quickly cobbled together action, he embarked his forces to meet the remnants of the failed second armada—the “Invisible”—scattered along the coast at Ferrol and Corunna. But Essex was essentially a soldier and not a sailor—a common error in thinking among Elizabethan fighters—and he had paid little attention to the time of year for launching such an ill-conceived attack. Naturally, the weather had turned again, and Essex’s army was driven back to Plymouth by the autumn equinoctial storms, his ships battered and troops dreadfully seasick.

The year 1596 was another watershed in the prosecution of the war against Spain: there was Essex’s role as national hero, taking over Drake’s position, the end of France’s wars of religion by the conversion to Catholicism by Henry IV, and Philip’s second failed Armada attempt. Nonetheless, it was apparent that England could not deliver a knockout blow to Spain unless it had a base in the heart of the enemy’s territory. And England’s last chance of doing this ended when Essex was overruled by his own council of war at Cadiz.

Yet in many ways, it was probably the right decision to abandon Cadiz. The unruliness of the soldiers and seamen fighting seemingly endless years of war had produced an expectation of mountains of plunder as their just payment for serving their country. This expectation in turn had created an underclass of English seaman who, when viewed through the eyes of their superior officers, did not make a pretty picture in the light of day. “They rejoiced in things stark naughty, bragging in his [sic] sundry piracies.” The only thing that kept their officers safe from attack was a strict disciplinarian regime. Whipping at the capstan, keelhauling, or hanging were always options. Drake hanged a man for sodomy, and Cumberland a member of his crew for rape. Crews of less well-regimented vessels were not above murdering their own masters for victuals or casting
their captains adrift to die in despair—as happened later to the explorer Henry Hudson.
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From the sailors’ standpoint, however, they deserved better. “What is a piece of beef of half a pound among four men to dinner,” one seaman asked, “or half a dry stockfish for four days in the week, and nothing else to help withal: yea, we have help—a little beverage more than pump water. We were pressed by Her Majesty’s press to have her allowance [take her pay], and not to be thus dealt withal—you make no men of us, but beasts.”
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Still, the better ships allowed the men to swim and play music to help wile away the lonely hours in healthy undertakings rather than drinking and gambling. Music became part of the daily routine to help the men perform their chores, and their sea shanties had begun to be sung ashore in taverns.

What emerged as the Royal Navy then was a group of men who were not born to the gentleman class, serving alongside gentlemen and noblemen of the realm. For those lucky enough to survive, and wanting to better themselves socially and financially, the navy was their respectable “leg up” into the higher echelons of society. For those who thought only of plunder and swag—irrespective of their social standing—their place was frequently found lashed at the mizzen mast or clapped in irons before being killed or escaping into out-and-out piracy. Above all, there was evidently truth on both sides of the argument.

The harsh reality was that there were no more Drakes after 1596. Instead, private interests investing in joint stock companies continued to dominate not only Elizabethan foreign trade but also Elizabethan adventuring. Though still alive, the ailing William Cecil, Lord Burghley, had by now ceded most of his duties to his intelligent younger son, Robert. Unlike his father, the ambitious Robert Cecil was a strong proponent of adventuring; and he, like the queen, was as guilty as the seagoing adventurers in hoping that treasure would come his way. As a younger son, Cecil, like all adventurers, was looking to build up his personal fortune, and he succeeded admirably.
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Elizabeth was trying to keep the country afloat, praying (as it turns out in vain) to avoid the further sale of crown lands. Both Elizabeth and Cecil invested heavily in the Earl of Cumberland’s adventures of 1589 and 1593, but it was their support
of the lord admiral and the Admiralty that brought them their most lucrative source of income.
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The Admiralty, under Charles Howard, had turned plunder into quite a business. Not only did it receive 10 percent on all registered prizes—and it is estimated that only 10 percent of prizes were registered—but the High Court of the Admiralty sold reprisal letters to adventurers, took bonds from them, sold plundered goods in order to make “cash restitutions,” and levied and collected customs. Its officers, from the admiral to its high court judge, Sir Julius Caesar, to the individuals in charge of every department or activity, were all involved in adventuring. In this way, the queen’s navy had become a navy of private interests that encouraged Elizabeth to invest in plundering expeditions whenever her navy was not engaged in defense of the realm.
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And whenever a matter of particular interest to “Mr. Secretary Cecil” came before the High Court of the Admiralty, Lord Howard was quick to dash a note off to Sir Julius Caesar reminding him of Cecil’s personal interest. It was an exceedingly well-oiled machine, with Sir Julius Caesar taking a “twentieth” of the lord admiral’s “tenth.”
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Still, these men who made the Admiralty work should not be judged too harshly. By the standards of the time, they worked efficiently and honestly, taking what was expected by way of recompense since salaries were often not paid at all, or paid late. When compared to Spain’s naval administration, England’s Admiralty was a paragon of virtue.

In truth, by the late 1590s, it had become so difficult to discern the machinations of the Admiralty that it was left to Cecil to oversee its activities on behalf of the Privy Council. The “pirates” were dealt with harshly by the High Court of the Admiralty, and usually forced to give restitution for a portion of what had been stolen. In 1600 alone, there were eighty-nine cases of men arrested as pirates. It mattered little if they were the lowly Captain Diggory Piper (of the famed galliard) or a peer of the realm. Only Sir George Carey, governor of the Isle of Wight, and heir to Lord Hunsdon and future patron of William Shakespeare, seemed to escape unscathed. But then again, he was the lord admiral’s brother-in-law. What mattered were the
circumstances of the seizure, and whether the so-called “pirates” could bribe their way out of trouble.
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Sir Julius Caesar, too, had a position of unprecedented power. It was he who sat at the High Court of the Admiralty and issued the letters of reprisal, often accepting fiction as fact. It was said that Drake’s adventures had “inflamed the whole country with a desire to adventure unto the seas, in the hope of the like good success,” and it was Caesar’s duty to ensure that they could. Reprisal ships usually accompanied “royal” missions, though others chose to sail independently if the queen’s expeditions seemed too tame for their needs. The 1590s were therefore the decade where John Hagthorpe’s statement that there were “never less than two hundred sail of voluntaries and others on Spanish Coasts” has generally been accepted. Even if it were an exaggeration, there were probably never any less than a hundred English ships of reprisal sailing on the seas at any one time in the whole decade. And most of these ships went “unregistered” for a fee, thanks to Sir Julius and the Admiralty officers. Others were logged in at low values for their cargoes.
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Taking the Admiralty, merchants, and the adventurers as “the queen’s adventurers,” it is easy to see why the queen’s share of the purse in pure percentage terms continued to dwindle. But it wasn’t the unfair distribution of the spoils that strained the economy. It was Ireland, as well as the war with Spain, that was ruining her. Each year, more and more crown lands needed to be sold to keep “Battleship England” afloat, and the old queen was reduced to finding as many creative ways as possible, assisted by her “elf” (also called her “pygmy”) Cecil, to plug the leaks. Raleigh, somewhat unkindly but nonetheless truthfully, accused the queen of not recognizing the power of her “private navy.”

Still, even the outspoken Raleigh hadn’t recognized that the real power had almost imperceptibly shifted from the gentlemen adventurers back into the hands of the queen’s merchant adventurers. These men, like John Watts of London and alderman Paul Bayning with his
Golden Phoenix
, worked at times for the queen, and at other times, strictly for their own commercial interests. Any joint stock companies that they engaged in had clear objectives, and these were cast in stone. Heavily armed for defensive and offensive action, the
Londoners in particular who specialized in building and owning ships that could double up for “warfare” were awesome weapons. There was no longer any room on their ships for the amateur adventurer, or the queen’s objectives when they were engaged in trade. These were businessmen in the modern sense. Friends were friends, but business was business.

There were still smaller vessels hankering for plunder, too. These were usually owner captains, much as young Drake had been aboard his bark plying the Channel ports. Often they grouped together, sharing expenses and creating small squadrons, especially when they ventured farther afield like the West Indies. Those who had done well sometimes lent money to the great adventures of Drake, Raleigh, Essex, and Cumberland, but, by and large, they knew their place among the second rung of merchant adventurers, combining trade and plunder when they could.

And yet the “trade” of plunder consumed many more fortunes and lives than it made. “The numbers of sailors and seamen,” Admiral Monson complained, “are increased treble by it [plunder] to what they are in the navigations of peaceable voyages.”
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True pirates became the more respectable “adventurers” thanks in no small part to the lining of Sir Julius Caesar’s pockets. Often a peaceful voyage would deteriorate into an exercise in piracy as a result. Naturally, this made foreigners reluctant to trade with the English, never quite knowing their real intentions. And, in turn, it created a trade depression that compounded the intractable problem of unemployment and poverty to a level unknown since the Wars of the Roses a century earlier. The 1590s became known as a decade of high inflation, failed harvests, renewed bouts of plague in London in particular, and the decade where the aging queen (now in her sixties) seemed to be losing her tight grip on her divergent factions at court. It is no wonder that the reputation Englishmen gained abroad was as a rambunctious lot of pirates.

But Elizabeth hadn’t by any stretch of the imagination “lost the plot.” She, and of course Robert Cecil, encouraged pamphleteers singing the praises of her seafaring men. Adventuring writers like Henry Roberts became more popular than Shakespeare. Nationalism and patriotism were attributed to the acts of daring-do by the queen’s
adventurers, and the average Englishman swelled with pride that their tiny country had seen off the greatest empire in the world—not once or twice, but three times, with the third armada attempt meeting the same fate as the second.

Spain’s economy had suffered, too. Not so much from the direct plundering of ships but more from the secondary and tertiary effects of the English (and by now to a lesser extent the French) and Dutch depredations. Ships lost added enormously to the cost of maintaining the flow of treasure. Increased fortifications in the West Indies and elsewhere consumed real time, money, and men. Lives of Spain’s finest soldiers and mariners were lost, with their number severely depleted after the failed “Invincible” campaign of 1588. Scurvy (the plague of the sea), ships sunk at sea, poor wages, and poorer campaigns of attack meant that Spain’s men were dying in droves. Its population began to slump. Defense of the Atlantic had to be added to the price tag of trying to reconquer the Netherlands in its unrelenting rebellion. Famine and plague at home also took their toll, in part caused by private fortunes being wasted on protection of their West Indian plantations and mines. Others began to feel that the Atlantic trade was too risky and sought other ways of making a living.