The Pirate Queen (8 page)

Before March 1559,
The Book of Sea Causes
, the first such register of naval assets and liabilities of its kind, had been compiled by the officers of the queen’s navy, giving the names of all the ships, their tonnage, and number of men. It assessed the state of readiness of the queen’s navy from the detail of her ships; their state of repair, type and quantity of artillery, the victuals in store, and what would be required at what cost to bring Her Majesty’s navy into a fit fighting fleet. The bad-tempered and extremely gifted mariner William Winter, master of the queen’s ordnance for the seas and probable main author of
The Book
, also reported on the state of all the ordnance and munitions both aboard ship as well as in the queen’s storehouses.
⁹

To make matters worse, Scotland’s pirates began to make serious inroads into English imports, ravaging the English coastlines from Berwick to Norwich in the East and Carlisle to Liverpool in the West. Even the Spanish king was losing patience with the situation. Elizabeth herself reported to her ambassador in Scotland that the “King of Spain having…of late written to us that not only the subjects of the King of Portugal, but also his own of Spain and his Low Countries, are spoiled by pirates, some English, but most Scots, haunting our south and north seas…has earnestly renewed the complaint by his ambassador, adding that if the seas were not better preserved under our leagues, he must arm a force himself.”
¹⁰
Irish pirates also made any passage through Irish waters treacherous, and English smugglers and pirates frequently joined in their escapades.

Then word arrived at court that a significant number of French troops were already garrisoned in Scotland. Invasion from France, where Mary Stuart and her husband, Francis, lived, was feared at any time. Letters poured into the Privy Council begging the queen to fortify the towns of Portsmouth, Southampton, and the towns of the Cinque Ports. The country remained ill prepared for all-out war against France and Scotland, mostly due to lack of funds and trained men to defend the realm. The situation was dire. But not for the first time, nor the last, the dogged English will—whether Catholic or Protestant—to remain independent of a foreign power prevented a civil war, and Englishmen and -women from all walks of life pulled together to defend the country. Scotland’s domination by France was a ready example of what could happen in England, and no one wanted a rampaging, invading army to overrun the country and plunder what little they had.

Whether it was luck, or Cecil “making” England’s luck on behalf of his queen and country, by April 1559, Scotland’s Lords of the Congregation were already engaged in battle against the dowager Queen Mary of Guise’s French troops. To the west, Ireland stood steadfastly Catholic and a potential magnet for France, Spain, or even the papacy as a toehold in the British Isles to attack the queen’s Protestant England. Elizabeth was undoubtedly wise to see the necessity of preparing England as best she could for war, but without cash, no standing army, a debased coinage that she was in the process of rectifying, and a fleet that was in dire need of urgent repair the prospects of success were bleak.

There is no doubt that the picture was truly grim. Yet despite all the counsel received—both wise and bold—and all the letters issued hastily to better understand the financial state of the realm, it was only the backing of Elizabeth’s merchants that gave the queen the breathing room she needed to understand her options and to act upon what she had learned. Sir Thomas Gresham, a member of the Mercers’ Company of London and the queen’s agent in Antwerp, was the most important of these at the end of 1558 and throughout the early 1560s. Antwerp, which had been on a steady rise in the first half of the sixteenth century, was the hub for all luxury goods for northern Europe. By the spring of 1559, it was easily the northern commercial capital. It was also Gresham’s base of operations. Antwerp’s other
main attraction was that it was the economic powerhouse for Philip II’s Spanish Netherlands, and a source of inestimable intelligence on the Habsburg economy and intentions in the New World. And with the loss of Calais, the Staplers had temporarily retreated to Antwerp while seeking new cities to conduct their business for the spinning of their wool into cloth on a more permanent basis.
¹¹

And so, it was on Thomas Gresham that the queen relied for help. Elizabeth’s sister had borrowed £160,000—£100,000 in Antwerp and £60,000 in London—in the final year of her reign ($59.81 million or £32.33 million today).
¹²
When Elizabeth had come to the throne in November 1558, £69,069 ($25.83 million or £13.96 million today) were still owed to Flanders merchants.
¹³
Over the next year, Elizabeth would borrow a further £30,000 ($11.14 million or £6.02 million today) from her powerful traders with Antwerp, the Merchants Adventurers, through Gresham’s auspices to pay soldiers’ wages, buy arms, and refit ships. It was Gresham alone who took charge of the queen’s finances with Antwerp, which was still the northern powerhouse of trade and finance. It was also Gresham who advised the queen on how best to consolidate her debt and rebuild confidence in the pound sterling by removing base coins from circulation.

Undoubtedly, not all of what he did was aboveboard. Customs agents were bribed to allow bullion to be exported from the Low Countries, and not all shipments of armaments were openly declared. Gresham rightly feared that, if the Netherlands regent for Philip II, Margaret of Parma, understood that he was arming England for the conflict ahead, a full embargo on exports to England would be put into force. What Gresham also recognized, as a seasoned Channel traveler, was that the queen’s navy needed urgent refitting if the country had any hope of staving off the powers of France, Spain, and the papacy. Stealth and rapid deployment of money and materiel were essential.

It was Gresham’s echo of other advice already received from Cecil and his fellow privy councillors that helped spring the queen into early action. The first step toward rebuilding her navy was for the princely sum of £14,000 a year ($4.98 million or £2.69 million today) to be advanced half yearly to Sir Benjamin Gonson, treasurer of the
Admiralty, “to be by him defrayed in such sort as shall be prescribed by him the said lord treasurer with the advice of the lord admiral.”

The lord treasurer was to

cause such of her Majesty’s ships as may be made serviceable with caulking and new trimming to be sufficiently renewed and repaired; item to cause such of her Highness’s said ships as a must of necessity be made of new to be gone in hand withal and new made with convenient speed; item he to see also her Highness’s said ships furnished with sails anchors cables and other tackle and apparel sufficiently; item he to cause a mass of victual to be always in readiness to serve for 1,000 men for a month to be set to the sea upon any sudden; item he to cause the said ships from time to time to be repaired and renewed as occasion shall require; item when the said ships that are to be renewed shall be new made and sufficiently repaired and the whole navy furnished of sails, anchors, cables and other tackle then is the said lord treasurer content to continue this service in form aforesaid for the sum of £10,000 yearly to be advanced as is aforesaid; item the said Benjamin Gonson and Edward Baeshe, surveyor of the victuals of the ships, shall make their several accounts of the defrayment of the said money and of their whole doings herein once in the year at the least and as often besides as shall be thought fit by my lords of the council.
¹⁴

The Book of Sea Causes
detailed the naval preparedness of the realm. Elizabeth’s thirty-four ships consisted of eleven great ships (200 tons and upward), ten barks and pinnaces, and one brigantine, which were “meet to be kept,” or in satisfactory condition, while the remaining twelve, among which were two galleys, were to be discarded as “of no continuance and not worth repair.”
¹⁵
Of all the ships surveyed, twenty-four were between 200 and 800 tons, four barks were between 60 and 80 tons, and there were two pinnaces of 40 tons.

But
The Book of Sea Causes
did not stop at its assessment of the Royal Navy. It noted with considerable interest that there were some forty-five “merchant ships which may be put in fashion for war” and another twenty vessels that could serve as victuallers. The
commissioners estimated that the enlarged fleet of merchant ships and royal ships could be mobilized within two months, providing there was “ready money for the doing thereof.” The recommendation at the end of
The Book
was that “the Queen’s Majesty’s Navy” (this was the first time the term was employed) should be laid up in the Medway and Gillingham Water below Rochester Bridge in Kent, and that Portsmouth on the south coast should be used as an advanced base of operations in the summer months only.

The Book
’s main author, William Winter, was a colorful rapscallion who would eventually be knighted for his service to queen and country later in Elizabeth’s reign. He had been one of the plotters in the Wyatt’s Rebellion against Elizabeth’s sister, Queen Mary, the leaders of which had wanted to put the Protestant Elizabeth on the throne. While Winter had been sent to the Tower for his efforts, even Queen Mary of England had to recognize his usefulness at sea when England declared war on Valois France with Spain. She was forced to release him for the good of the realm, and, as expected, Winter proved his mettle. He was undoubtedly the best and most able sea officer of his generation, and would soon prove his worth for Elizabeth, too.

By the time Winter was released into action, Elizabeth had already promoted him from surveyor of the navy to master of naval ordnance. There is every indication that he was most likely the decisive voice in the shaping of the new naval program. During the next few years, he oversaw the building of the 1,200-ton
Triumph
and the 1,000-ton
White Bear
. He also arranged for the 800-ton
Victory
to be purchased from its merchant owners. Yet despite these early advances, the poor state of the royal fleet meant that the total number of great ships in operation by 1565 had fallen to seventeen.
¹⁶
Winter found this unacceptable, and was undoubtedly one of the first commanders to believe that England’s ships were the best “walls” to protect the realm.

Fortunately, Winter’s formidable naval talents extended beyond seamanship and surveying. When war with the Queen of Scots and her French Guise relations to expunge the popular Protestant movement became a certainty, Winter was dispatched by Elizabeth in December 1559, the worst possible time of year to engage in a naval battle in the North Sea. His instructions via the Duke of Norfolk, in
charge of the land expedition, were clear: “He [Winter] shall aid the Queen’s said friends and annoy their enemies, specially the French, without giving any desperate adventure; and this he must seem to do of his own head as if he had no commission of the Queen or of the Duke of Norfolk. And that the Queen’s friends may be the sooner comforted the Duke thinks it not amiss that either the said Winter himself or some of the captains, do forthwith show themselves in the Firth, leaving the rest behind to receive the said five hundred or 600 harquebusiers to follow.”
¹⁷

The high winds and swirling icy tides of the North Sea in December did not deter the queen’s indomitable sea dog. Not only did he and his fleet of thirty-four ships surprise the French by preventing reinforcements from landing; but the French were driven back all the way to the Spanish Netherlands for shelter. Exhausted and glad to be alive, the French clambered upon the shore, only to be subjected to pillage from pirates of an unknown nationality. Within a few weeks, in January 1560, it was a confident Winter who boldly sailed into the Firth of Forth at Leith, cutting off the French army at Fife. The French troops almost immediately abandoned their weapons, and Winter captured two French galleys as prizes for himself, his men, and the glory of England. When the dispatches reached the queen at court, Elizabeth could hardly believe Winter’s phenomenal achievement. An order to attack by land as well was issued, and the courier rode day and night to Berwick to deliver the message. If Winter could do it, then surely the Duke of Norfolk could follow suit and beat the French roundly, she reasoned. Winter’s successes had been hailed by the Scottish Lords of the Congregation, and asked only for England’s army to help them reclaim their country from Mary Queen of Scots’s mother, Mary of Guise.

Meanwhile, in Antwerp, Gresham wrote to Cecil at precisely the same moment that January, declaring, “Here there is very large talk of the Queen’s estate, and the weakness of England, which comes in very ill time for the accomplishment of the rest of her affairs.”
¹⁸
The very real concern for Gresham and his factor, Richard Clough, who were responsible for getting replacement armaments and ammunition to the English fleet and armies, was that credit would not be granted to the queen for a substantial shipment of war materiel worth between £14,000 and £15,000 ($5.38 million and £2.91 million
today) and release of Her Majesty’s ships from harbor in Antwerp. Yet by the close of business on the very day Gresham wrote his worried letter, the Antwerp authorities and foreign merchant princes agreed to allow the loaded English vessels to depart. Gresham and Clough had already shipped enough copper alone for the queen’s ordnance makers to manufacture up to forty cannons.
¹⁹

The success in Gresham’s negotiations, as well as the superiority against the French at sea, was due in large part to Winter’s ability to keep the French at bay and the Spanish under threat of reprisal if they interfered. By his control of the Narrow Seas, England threatened to cut off communication with Antwerp and French interaction with Scotland. It was the first time in what would become the queen’s long reign that her ships would provide her with security from invasion, while ensuring that commerce was allowed to continue, albeit at a greatly reduced level. Gresham, while responsible for procuring the weapons of war, also wanted the peace restored as soon as possible, since for every pirate or adventurer able to capture a valuable prize, there were a thousand Englishmen trying to resume England’s main export—the cloth trade to Antwerp.
²⁰