The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (39 page)

At this point Shah Abbas paid Sherley an unexpected visit on his sickbed. If Sherley is to be believed, an extraordinary conversation ensued. The shah began by saying “he had no great inclination” to demean himself by allying with a divided group of Christian powers, “God having given him so ample, so rich and so warlike a dominion” as Persia. Sherley responded by arguing that Abbas would have to confront the Turks sooner rather than later, as their political demands and military campaigns against Persia “were likely rather to increase than diminish.” He conceded that the Christians were divided, but contended that many, including the Spanish and the papacy, were already fighting the Ottomans, and would “embrace the amity, honor the name of your majesty, and unite themselves in any terms of princely alliance.” He also suggested that the shah could strike at Ottoman hegemony in another way: “In giving liberty of Christian religion, so much abhorred of their part, and security of trade, goods and person to Christians,” Abbas would circumvent Constantinople’s control over commercial and pilgrimage routes in the region, and he would gain access to European “founders of ordnance, makers of all sorts of arms, and munitions.”
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Sherley’s proposals were optimistic to say the least, but, remarkably, Abbas responded to them. He agreed “to write to as many of the Christian princes as are greatest among them” to “apply themselves to our purpose” and allow “their merchants to repair to our dominions.” Abbas made it clear that it was Sherley’s responsibility to implement the initiative. “And because you have been the mover and persuader of this business, you also shall be the actor of it, assuring myself that my honor cannot be more securely reposed in any man’s hands, than your own.” Sherley was ecstatic: he now claimed the right to represent the shah’s interests in Europe and to act like a Persian
mirza
with the authority to mingle with kings and emperors. Having left England in 1598 in the service of the Earl of Essex, intent on disrupting Spanish and papal policy in Italy, Sherley was now proposing to broker a grand anti-Ottoman alliance between Persia and Europe’s Catholic rulers. Considering that official Elizabethan policy remained broadly pro-Ottoman, this was an extraordinary turn of events. As Sherley took on the mantle of the shah’s ambassador to Europe, he must have known he was turning his back on any possible rehabilitation with the queen or her counselors. Perhaps he believed he could single-handedly change the queen’s foreign policy. Perhaps his arrogance and hubris was such that he no longer cared.

As before, it is difficult to assess the veracity of Sherley’s claims as little or no evidence has been found from the Persian side. The shah may have already decided to dispatch an embassy to Europe following the Turkish ambassador’s provocative demands. Mainwaring recalled that Abbas immediately “sent away the Turk’s ambassador . . . commanding him to tell his master the Turk [Mehmed III] that he would never rest until he were in the field with him.”
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Whatever actually passed between Sir Anthony and the shah at the Englishman’s bedside, in April 1599 Abbas began a lavish round of feasting in preparation for the departure of Sherley’s embassy. The shah prepared formal “Letters of Credence from the Great Sophy to the Christian Princes,” stating that Sherley had come “of his own free will, out of Europe, into these parts,” and that “when this gentleman comes unto your Christian princes, you shall credit him in whatsoever you demand or he shall say, as mine own person.” Sherley was also given commercial privileges by Abbas “for all Christians to Trade and Traffic into Persia.” These stated that Persia was “open to all Christian people and to their religion,” and included a “patent for all Christian merchants, to repair and traffic in and through our dominions, without disturbances or molestations.”
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These were remarkable concessions that, if set beside Elizabeth’s alliances with the Ottoman and Sa’adian rulers, gave England unprecedented commercial and diplomatic relations with the Islamic world, stretching over 4,300 miles from Marrakesh via Constantinople to Isfahan.

Sherley, now drunk on his own grandeur, began planning his embassy. He agreed blithely with Abbas that his brother Sir Robert should stay behind in Persia, ostensibly to aid the shah in his military preparations, but obviously as a hostage to ensure that Sir Anthony would return. Perhaps as further insurance Abbas appointed a member of his trusted tribal cavalry, Husain Ali Beg Bayat, to join the embassy as an ambassador with Sherley, alongside four Persian secretaries, including Ali Beg’s nephew Uruch Beg. The most surprising member of the party was a Portuguese Augustinian friar named Nicolò de Mello, who had arrived in Isfahan claiming to be not only the Spanish procurator to the Indies (an agent responsible for liaising between the Curia in Rome and its missionaries in the Indies), but the long-lost brother of the dead Portuguese king Sebastian I. De Mello intrigued Sherley, who introduced him to the shah, but the friar promptly denounced the Englishman and his mission. Moving quickly to defuse the situation and “stop this priest’s mouth,” Sherley explained to him that he “was sorry that he had not understood my purpose which was the general service of all Christendom, and that he might make himself great, by bearing a part in such a holy service.”
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While acknowledging that it was a risky plan to travel with a hostile Augustinian friar as well as a Persian cavalry officer, Sherley invited de Mello to join his party.

By May 1599, after spending five months in Persia, Sherley and his embassy were ready to leave. It was an ill-assorted crew of at least twenty-four, excluding servants, boasting two ambassadors (Sherley and Ali Beg), Augustinian and Franciscan friars, a retinue of Persians and the long-suffering Mainwaring, Parry and Pinçon, along with thirty-two crates of gifts for the Christian princes. Their political mission made returning via Ottoman territory impossible, so with Abbas eager to foster closer commercial relations with the new Russian tsar Boris Godunov, the embassy headed north toward the Caspian, and from there up the Volga toward Moscow. Divested of his semiregal status at the Persian court, Sir Anthony started behaving badly almost immediately, although on this occasion it seemed with some justification. Almost as soon as they departed, Parry learned that de Mello had “confessed he was but an ordinary Augustine friar, and in a gamesome vein he further confessed how he would bring men’s wives, after he had shriven them, to his bent.” He said he liked nothing more than to be “with a whore at night.” When the Franciscans revealed further details of de Mello’s duplicity, Sherley kept him under armed guard for the rest of the journey. He was also soon quarreling violently with Ali Beg and the Persians over various unspecified “misdemeanors.” When they reached the Caspian Sea, bad weather threatened to capsize the entire ill-tempered mission. As the storm hit, “one heard a dreadful medley of voices and prayers,” recalled Pinçon. “We of the [Protestant] religion prayed in one way; there were some Portuguese monks who threw figures of the
Agnus Dei
into the sea to appease it, and muttered certain words, repeating ‘Virgin Mary,’ ‘St. John’ and the
In Manus
[Evening Prayer]. The Mahommedans invoked ‘Ali, Ali Mahomet,’ but instead of all these I feared that the Devil would come to carry this rabble to Hell.”
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They survived to reach Moscow in November, but the mood in the party remained tense.

If the plan was to incorporate the new tsar as the first member of a grand Euro-Persian alliance, it was a miserable failure. Godunov, a shrewd and capable politician, had succeeded to the tsardom following the collapse of the Rurik dynasty, and was suspicious of any diplomatic initiatives that might threaten his questionable accession to power. Upon his arrival Sherley was promptly arrested for ten days by a “crew of aqua-vitae-bellied fellows, clad in coats of cloth of gold.” When he and Ali Beg were granted an audience with the tsar, an ambiguity relating to the ambassadors’ status arose, causing the first of many diplomatic incidents. By appointing two ambassadors, neither with precedence over the other, Abbas had invited obvious confusion, which resurfaced when the tsar requested to see the Persians before Sherley, who “utterly refused to go in that order . . . especially he being a Christian and they pagans.”
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Sherley’s notorious sensitivity in matters of protocol alienated him from both the tsar and the Persian ambassador; Godunov “vexed and molested” him, while Ali Beg goaded de Mello into accusing Sherley of being a lowborn spy, with no desire to further anyone’s interests other than his own. Boris’s officials seized Abbas’s letters of introduction, whose studied vagueness seemed to confirm the Russians’ suspicions; once again Sherley was placed under arrest.

Not for the first time, the Englishman’s reckless behavior managed to save him. When summoned by Boris to answer de Mello’s charges, “being by that graceless and ungrateful friar further provoked, he, not able, though instantly he should have died for it, to suppress his heat, gave the fat friar such a sound box on the face, his double cause of choler redoubling his might, desire of revenge withal augmenting the same, that down falls the friar, as if he had been struck down with a thunderbolt.”
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Remarkably, instead of arresting him for such violent behavior, the Russians were impressed by Sherley’s “courage and high resolution,” and promptly dropped the charges against him. In response he mentioned that de Mello had been secretly celebrating the Roman Catholic mass during his stay in Moscow. Catholicism was detested and outlawed by the Russian Orthodox tsar, who immediately banished de Mello to the Solovetsky Monastery on the White Sea (which in the 1920s became one of the earliest labor camps in the infamous Soviet gulag).

His honor partly restored, Sherley wintered in Moscow and prepared to leave in the spring of 1600. He now wrote to his supporters back in London, justifying his actions and positioning himself for a return to England. In February he sent a letter to the counselor of his patron the Earl of Essex, Anthony Bacon, elder brother of the queen’s counselor Francis. In his letter Sherley boasted of his achievements in Persia. “I have opened the Indies for our merchants,” he fantasized, with the result that “they shall have more power than the Portuguese, through Persia they may bring as secure as between London and St. Albans.” Spinning ever more fanciful and grandiose schemes, Sherley professed to be in correspondence with “the King of Tabur [Lahore],” the “mightiest king of the Indies,” the Mughal emperor Akbar the Great. He claimed Akbar “hath desired of me some man which knows the wars to discipline his men,” and that he was ready to send a Captain Thomas Powell, at that time in Persia with his brother Robert, to assist him in attacking the Portuguese. Sherley’s extravagant plans did not end there. He had an even crazier scheme to conquer the Indies that involved the illegitimate children of the unfortunate Portuguese pretender Don António (who had died in poverty in Paris in 1595). He suggested that “if any of Don António’s sons will come into his [Akbar’s] country he shall be assisted with money and men, for the recovering of the rest of the Indies.” Unsurprisingly, Bacon did not rise to this lurid fantasy of an alliance between Portuguese renegades and Mughal Indians dislodging the Habsburg-controlled Portuguese in the Indian Ocean.

In any case, back in London Anthony Bacon was facing far more pressing matters. The previous year his master Essex had been appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland with the task of defeating the country’s Catholic chieftains, who were led by Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone. The subsequent military campaign was a complete disaster. Essex agreed to a humiliating peace with O’Neill against the queen’s explicit orders and then fled Ireland for London in September 1599. His reckless actions left him in deep disgrace with Elizabeth, who placed him under house arrest in London over the winter of 1599–1600. As Sherley spun ever more improbable tales of grand political strategy, one of the few men capable of ensuring his honorable return to England was losing the capacity to do so.

In June 1600 Sherley and his party abandoned Moscow and retraced Anthony Jenkinson’s steps toward Arkhangelsk on the White Sea. There he wrote to Essex, clearly having been informed of the earl’s arrest and political isolation, telling him, “I am plunged in grief to hear of your Lordship’s misfortunes, but my devotion to you is as great as ever.”
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This did not prevent him from meeting Muscovy Company merchants and writing to Essex’s rival Robert Cecil, much to the dismay of the Essex faction. Sherley knew he was in disgrace for leaving England without royal permission and, even worse, brokering a Persian alliance that now threatened to upset Elizabeth’s cordial relations with the Ottomans (the queen was currently preoccupied with the elaborate exchange of gifts with Safiye Sultan). With his habitually florid and unintentionally comical style he tried to be contrite: “Yet do I upon the knees of my heart acknowledge the greatness of my fault in departing from her majesty without the blessedness of her gracious favor,” he began. But then he bragged, “I have laid open the treasures of other countries for her subjects,” adding, “I have only used the favor and love of the king of Persia for her glory.” He then apologized for further delaying his return home. “Neither is it my will,” he maintained unconvincingly, “that I am first gone to the Emperor of Germany,” the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. Still, he could not resist offering the queen a little advice, pointing out that Tsar Boris had a daughter and if Elizabeth could find a suitable “gentleman of spirit whom she will vouchsafe to call cousin” then an Anglo-Russian marriage would be “to the infinite benefit of her merchants.”
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Robert Cecil was unimpressed. He wrote to Ambassador Henry Lello in Constantinople, another victim of Sherley’s duplicity, complaining of Sir Anthony’s arrogance in having “taken upon him to be an ambassador to the princes of Europe, to unite themselves in a league with the Persian, for which purpose he came through Muscovy.” Cecil reported that the queen’s fury over Sherley’s reckless scheme had been intensified as he had had “the audacity to write to the queen for leave to come to her. . . . Hereupon her majesty increased her former displeasure toward him . . . as by no means she will suffer him to come into the kingdom.”
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