The Pirate Queen (55 page)

And still, England’s merchants continued their onslaught. Talented captains like James Lancaster successfully raided Pernambuco in 1595, with Watts, Bayning, and other former merchants of England’s Spanish Company joining forces with him. The arms trade to Morocco flourished, as did the sale of metals for weaponry to the Ottoman sultans. Robert Cecil was a particularly active backer of Mediterranean plunder, and he became involved with Thomas Cordell’s and William Garraway’s plundering operations there, while also investing with the lord admiral’s own reprisal fleet.

The outports of England suffered if, like Bristol, they didn’t possess ship owners who had built vessels for the purposes of war, trade, and plunder. The ports of Plymouth, Weymouth, and Southampton fared better than most with their merchant and gentlemen adventurers, who frequently put their ships to sea under the queen’s banner either on the Continent or in Ireland. Yet while
the great merchants and the adventurers were not inflicting the long-hoped-for “knockout blow,” they were amassing gigantic personal fortunes. Watts, Bayning, Thomas Smythe, and Thomas Middleton all cast around for how best to turn those gigantic fortunes into monumental ones. To do that, they had to ensure a steady flow of merchandise of extreme worth and high quality, and a buoyant home market to sell it in. That would mean fishing in new grounds. These men had refined the skill of trade and plunder to a new art form and could engage in either or both at will. And so, without a strictly fixed idea as to which of their activities would prevail, they turned their eyes from the Atlantic eastward.

The East Indies had always been their Holy Grail, after all.

40. Essex, Ireland, and Tragedy

Eyes of youth have sharp sights, but commonly not so deep as those of older age…. I see as in a crystal the right figure of my folly…foreseen haps breeds no wonder; no more doth your short-returned post before his time.

—ELIZABETH I TO ROBERT DEVEREUX, JULY
1597

R
obert Devereux, Earl of Essex, like so many adventurers and courtiers of the younger Elizabethan generations, began his military career in the Low Countries at Leicester’s side. It was there that he inherited two of Sir Philip Sidney’s “best swords” and made his most steadfast friends in combat. With Sidney’s death, Essex became the queen’s favorite on his return home in 1587, and took Sidney’s place as well as darling of the court’s literati. The other “pretender” to both those titles, Walter Raleigh, would remain his bitter enemy for the duration of their lives. When Raleigh had himself painted with pearls under a crescent moon, Essex replied with Hilliard’s
Young Man among Roses
. Poetry, too, became a weapon of choice, as did—nearly—swords. With the loss of his own heir, Sir Philip Sidney, in the Low Countries, Leicester himself had encouraged their rivalry from the outset, seeing his stepson Essex as his natural successor for the queen’s heart over the upstart West Countryman Raleigh.
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And Leicester’s wishes, during his lifetime, were never ignored. Essex’s rise was meteoric. Within the year, he was a knight of the Garter, had been given the attainted Sir Francis Englefield’s lands, and the smashing London pad York House (which he’d rename Essex House). The young Earl’s servants boasted that even into the small hours of the morning “my lord is at cards or one game or another with her [the queen], that he comes not to his own lodging until the birds sing in the morning.”
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When Leicester died unexpectedly
on September 4, 1588, Essex took over his offices as lord steward and master of the horse. Elizabeth, deeply bereaved without her Leicester, saw him again daily in his stepson, Essex, and soon would not be parted from the young man. Though undoubtedly charismatic and brilliant, he had become the young Robert Dudley in Elizabeth’s eyes, lavishing gifts and appointments on him as she had done for Dudley in their youth. Even Leicester’s farm on sweet wines became Essex’s, and remained his until October 1600.

Yet, despite all the promise and all the love and gifts Elizabeth showered upon him, Essex’s worst enemy remained himself. His arrogance was colossal. He would do as he wished, and he would bring the “old” queen to heel. Possessing the pride of a man whose nature refused to be ruled would prove his epitaph.

Well aware of the queen’s disfavor for “secret” marriages among her men and women at court, Essex nonetheless contracted to marry Philip Sidney’s widow, Frances Walsingham Sidney, sometime in 1590. While Elizabeth’s attachment to Essex meant that her fury soon subsided, his constant string of women—from her maid of honor Elizabeth Southwell to the Countess of Derby—stretched the queen’s patience more than once to breaking point. The queen frowned upon overt infidelity as it reflected poorly on her court. But the queen’s feelings mattered little at the end of the day to Essex. While his wife had given him an heir, she lacked the money that the queen’s most ostentatious courtier craved and demanded. And with Sir Francis Walsingham now dead, there was nothing to keep him in check. Essex found himself boasting “overly grandly” how he would handle matters, while plotting to make daring adventures in the hope of plunder and the position he believed he deserved.
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But Essex was a transparent boy compared to Robert Cecil, and he could never plumb the depths of Cecil’s Machiavellian thoughts and deeds. Essex’s own impatience and desperate wishes always seemed to interfere. So when he shined like a brilliant gemstone at Cadiz, and still did not get his way, he suffered a deep depression for the first part of 1587. The only thing that pulled him out of it was Elizabeth’s approval for him to take part in the Silver Blockade scheme devised by Hawkins. Instead of cruising off the Spanish coast, Essex and his men sailed for the Azores in the hope of catching the flota, despite
his criticism that this kind of expedition was “idle wanderings upon the sea” only a year before.
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Disgrace followed, when, on his return home, he discovered that the Spaniards had nearly succeeded in launching their fleet in an assault on Falmouth in Cornwall. And despite these setbacks, it never once dawned on Essex that he was a soldier of fortune and adventurer, not a naval commander.

Essex was sworn in as a privy councillor before the end of 1593, an honor that eluded Raleigh altogether. He threw himself into his work on the council in the vain hope that he could take over Burghley’s role as the queen’s chief advisor, since it was rumored that “their chief hour glass [Burghley] has little sand left in it.”
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As if to prove his unswerving loyalty, Essex wrongly accused, and had convicted, the queen’s physician, Roderigo Lopez, of plotting to assassinate the queen in 1594. Still, whenever the queen ridiculed him (as she derided all her councillors) for his flights of fancy or other pretensions, he would shut himself away in his rooms for days on end, like a spoiled child, until she made a gesture to show her favor. He lived in the mistaken hope that, on Burghley’s death, Elizabeth would choose his counsel over that of Robert Cecil.

By 1598, Essex had become known as a “man of great designs.” Elizabeth had become weary of his constant haranguing and demands for more gifts, more favors, more power. To boot, Essex had made powerful enemies—Burghley, Cecil, Nottingham, Cobham, and Raleigh—all of whom had been strengthened by their own successes. As if that were not enough to count against him, he insisted on trying to make peace between his mother and Elizabeth, whose “mislike” for her cousin Lettice (who had secretly married Leicester) had not lessened since Leicester’s death. Again and again, he taunted the queen, famously turning his back on her in her presence chamber, dumbfounding all onlookers. The incident in which he drew his sword on the queen had been smoothed over, but it was not entirely forgiven or forgotten.

He angered Elizabeth, yet moments later could make her laugh. No other subject had treated her in this way, but an explanation for the queen’s remarkable patience was that she saw in him the rambunctious Robert Dudley instead of the prideful Essex, and felt somehow that she couldn’t live without him at her side. When Essex became highly critical of all previous campaigns in Ireland—
including his dead father’s—his bluff was eventually called, and despite the queen’s hesitation at putting such a man at the head of her army there, she at last relented. The Privy Council agreed that he should prosecute the war against the rebellious Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and bring the Irish troubles to an end. His instructions clearly stated that he should head for Ulster after landing at Dublin, and defeat Tyrone.

Crushing Tyrone would be Essex’s greatest challenge. Ireland had been in “revolt” in one form or another for most of Elizabeth’s long reign, with Tyrone’s own uncle, Shane O’Neill, being massacred at the hands of the English. The Earl of Ormond had been the queen’s staunchest ally though, for a long while, he was wrongly viewed as treacherous to England by the machinations of the Earl of Desmond, and the misinformation that Hugh O’Neill himself had sown among English nobles. Sir Henry Sidney claimed that he had “bred” the young O’Neill (at the time the third Baron of Dungannon) “from a little boy, then very poor of goods, and full feebly friended” between 1556 and 1559. In 1567, Sir Henry brought the young Dungannon to court along with other sons from other Irish noble houses to fully educate them in the English ways. He had gone from having no chance of inheriting the title of the “O’Neill” as the third defenseless son of the man deprived of his inheritance by Shane O’Neill, to the all-powerful Earl of Tyrone, who used his knowledge of England and its customs against itself to his own ends.
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The situation in Ireland was desperate. When the English hadn’t been trying to dominate the Irish chieftains, the chieftains themselves warred endlessly with one another. Cattle raids, scorched-earth policies, rape, murder, and tribal allegiances dominated the country. The only constant was the Catholic religion, which after Henry VIII’s break with Rome meant that Catholic interests viewed it as a launch pad into England. The more Protestant England fought to retain its “Irish plantations” (confiscated, of course, from dissident Irish chieftains) and its Irish sovereignty, the more the Irish revolted.
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When Tyrone returned to Ulster in 1585, it was with the single purpose to make himself master of his own lands yet again, then to free Ireland from England’s yoke. He was a consummate general and, unusually for the times, had oodles of patience. For the next ten
years, he honed his Ulster guerrilla raids into a well-run rebellion, until at last in 1595 open warfare was declared. These tactics had been the undoing of Sir John “Black Jack” Norris, returned from the Low Countries and Cadiz to give the Irish yet another drubbing. The current lord deputy, Sir William Russell, too, had been confounded by Tyrone. When Russell was replaced by Lord Burgh in 1597, Elizabeth hoped that at last she had found the military and administrative combination to bring Ireland to heel. Within eight months, both Norris and Burgh were dead.

Nothing and no one seemed capable of stopping Tyrone. He leveled one English plantation after another, and the queen feared that even the Pale surrounding Dublin might be in jeopardy. Other parts of the country were beginning to adopt Tyrone’s tactics, and no matter what forces or commanders the queen threw at them, the Irish were victorious. Tyrone’s famous victory against Sir Henry Bagenal at Yellow Ford gave heart to all Ireland, and created a number of other uprisings around the Pale in Leinster and in Munster in the Southwest. Walter Raleigh’s own vast forty-two-thousand-acre plantation was washed away in a sea of blood. As if this wasn’t bad enough, what Elizabeth truly feared with considerable dread was that Tyrone was expecting assistance at any moment from Spain or the pope, not only to take her troubled province from her realm, but also to invade England itself.
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It was into this tricky situation that the new lord lieutenant, the hotheaded Essex, arrived in April 1599. Instead of following the queen’s directions to head at once for Ulster, Essex attacked Munster, in the Southwest, claiming that he needed to make the South safe first against possible Spanish support. With each passing week, the queen wrote more and more vitriolic letters to her new lord lieutenant. Ireland was bankrupting her. Why wasn’t he meeting Tyrone’s forces in Ulster? Finally, she snapped, and on July 19, 1599, wrote to Essex:

We have perceived by your letters to our Council brought by Henry Carey, that you are arrived at Dublin after your journey into Munster, where though it seemeth by the words of your letter that you had spent divers days in taking an account of all that have passed since you left that place, yet have you in this dispatch given us small light either when or in what order you intend particularly to proceed to the northern action. Wherein if you compare the time that is run on and the excessive charges that is spent with the effects of anything wrought by this voyage (howsoever we may remain satisfied with your own particular cares and travails of body and mind), yet you must needs think that we that have the eyes of foreign princes upon our actions and have the hearts of people to comfort and cherish—who groan under the burden of continual levies and impositions which are occasioned by these late actions—can little please ourself hitherto with anything that hath been effected.
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Against the queen’s specific command, instead of engaging Tyrone’s troops in the North, he proceeded to make peace with Tyrone, who had after all been Essex’s good friend at court. The English had been decimated by disease and fruitless war in Munster thanks to Essex. When the two old friends met, talking midstream so that they wouldn’t be overheard, their horses belly-deep in the fast-flowing current, the history of Ireland would be changed forever. At the end of their half-hour talk, Essex came away feeling that he had made an honorable peace. He believed that his Irish friend had agreed to lay down his arms. Tyrone, meanwhile, reported back to Spain that he had nearly persuaded Essex to turn against Elizabeth!
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It is one of the more mysterious chapters in the history of the two countries since what happened next doesn’t clearly follow, and proved a tragedy to both sides.