The Elizabethans (34 page)

As they set out, it is perhaps worth reminding ourselves of how little equipment Drake had at his disposal to assist his prodigious navigational skill. He possessed, obviously, a compass. It was probably in the twelfth century that Europeans discovered that a lodestone – that is, a mineral composed of an iron oxide – aligns itself in a north–south direction, as will a piece of iron that has been magnetised by contact with a lodestone. By the sixteenth century compasses were quite sophisticated. At London’s National Maritime Museum is exhibited Drake’s Dial, a brass instrument made by Humphrey Cole in 1569 (it was once believed to belong to Drake, but now they are not so sure). It consists of a compass along with lunar and solar dials, which enable the user to calculate the time. Engraved on the casing are the latitudes of many of the important ports in the world.

The other instrument Drake had at his disposal would have been a cross-staff. This was used to calculate a ship’s latitude (north–south position) at night by observing the angle between the horizon and the North (or Pole) Star, and by taking a reading off the scale. This could then be coupled with a compass reading. (It was not until the eighteenth century that an English clock-maker named John Harrison devised an instrument for calculating longitude, or the east–west position.)

So, with the stars to guide them, and instruments that most modern navigators would deem inadequate for an afternoon’s recreational sailing, Drake and his mariners set off from the coast of California to cross the Pacific Ocean.

His first stop would seem to have been one of the Palau Islands, where his attempts to trade with the natives led to a fracas. Twenty islanders were killed, when Drake realised that they wanted to steal his merchandise. It was brutal treatment, but no one has ever pretended Drake was other than brutal. Next, he made for the Spice Islands, which came into sight in early November. His negotiations with the Sultan of Ternate, lasting less than a week, enabled Drake to build up a prodigious cargo: six tons of cloves. Drake began negotiations with the Sultan for the establishment of a trading post in the Spice Islands; certainly the East India Company regarded the verbal agreement between Drake and the Sultan as one to be taken seriously, and Drake’s week in Ternate was seen by imperialist historians from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries as ‘an example once again of Drake being wished into the role of a founding father of the British Empire’.
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Equally, post-imperialist historians have dwelt on Drake’s moral shortcomings and shown remarkably little admiration for this man’s achievement: namely, the circumnavigation of the globe in a small wooden sailing ship with a drunken, semi-mutinous crew and next to no navigational instruments.

Examples of Drake’s cruelty are again rehearsed as he is called to the bar of modern liberal-minded history for having been the hero of old-fashioned history of a different tradition. When they reached Crab Island, they marooned a black woman who was heavily pregnant, with two black male slaves. No doubt William Camden, the semi-official national historian, was right to say that Drake behaved ‘most inhumanly’ in this matter. How the woman became pregnant – she was ‘gotten with child between the captain and his men pirates’ – does not indeed reflect well upon Drake, if you choose to judge a sixteenth-century privateer who was at sea for nearly three years by the enlightened standards of a land-bound modern historian. And Drake’s treatment of his chaplain, which is seen as quasi-comic by Victorian and early twentieth-century writers, is (perhaps understandably) offensive to modern sensibilities. The
Golden Hind
, the first English ship in the Pacific Ocean, was also the first in the Indian Ocean. When, during gales of 9 January 1580 she struck a submerged rock, it looked for a while as if all was lost.
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It was necessary to ditch precious cargo – three tons of the cloves, two cannon, some precious metal, and beans. Fletcher, the hapless chaplain, preached a sermon to the terrified men suggesting that they were being punished for the judicial murder of Thomas Doughty.

Drake was not a captain to take such talk on his ship. Morale was low, nerves were taut and he was determined to get back to England with his treasure ship. He simply could not afford at this stage of his voyage to allow the Reverend Francis Fletcher to upset the men even more than they were already disturbed. He needed to make an example of him. The chaplain was clapped in irons and nailed fast to one of the hatches, while Drake, his judge, sat opposite him, cross-legged on a sea-chair. The clergyman had claimed to speak for God. Drake would match this by establishing that he, and not the priest, had the ultimate authority on his ship. No one questioned Drake’s physical or legal authority over his men. He now, in a sort of maritime parody of Henry VIII claiming to himself supreme governorship of the English Church, asserted his spiritual authority too. There was no trial, and no preamble. He merely bellowed at the chaplain, making sure that every man aboard heard the words: ‘Francis Fletcher, I do here excommunicate thee out of the church of God and from all benefits and graces thereof and I denounce thee to the devil and all his angels.’
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The cleric – or ex-cleric, if you believe in Drake’s power to defrock the clergy – was obliged to remain below deck and, upon pain of death, to wear upon his arm a label that read, ‘Francis Fletcher the falsest knave that liveth’.

And so they went on their way rejoicing. On 8 February they reached Baratina, where they could take in much-needed food supplies. The next port of call was Java. They took on board plantains, coconuts, sugarcane, chicken, cassava and beef. Drake paid an astounding £4,000 for this revictualling. By 26 March the
Golden Hind
was sailing west-south-west for the Cape of Good Hope, and by July they had sailed up the west coast of Africa as far as the Guinea coast.

Drake had a clear run home, but three political or legal hazards threatened his ultimate triumph. They were all summed up by the famous question that he asked, of a fisherman bobbing about in those Devonian waters, on 26 September, when he finally dropped anchor in Plymouth harbour:
Does the Queen still live?

If, in his absence, England had been conquered by France or Spain, or reverted to Roman Catholicism under Mary Stuart, Drake’s position would have been uncertain indeed. Already, dispatches from the Viceroy of Peru and the President of the Court of Panama and the Viceroy of New Spain had reached Europe. Philip II knew of Drake’s piratical antics in Panama and South America, and the Spanish Ambassador in London, Mendoza, had demanded restitution. So the first hazard was that Elizabeth might be dead. The second was the possibility that, dreading a war with Spain, Elizabeth might disown Drake and his adventure. A third danger was that John Doughty, brother of the unfortunate Thomas, would demand full legal retribution for what was an illegal killing.

Luck, as so often, was on Drake’s side. Queen Elizabeth was a mercurial and far from dependable patroness, but there was in her nature something of the pirate queen. She took a gamble. Although Spain was still England’s chief trading partner – with many merchants and ships and perhaps as many as 2,500 sailors around the Iberian peninsula – and although Philip II sent 800 mercenaries to fight in Ireland, Elizabeth gambled that he would not declare outright war because of Drake’s adventure. As for the grievances of John Doughty, who attempted to get Drake prosecuted for murder in the Earl Marshal’s court, he looked as if he would be successful. Once again, Drake was lucky. Drake contested Doughty’s claim at the Queen’s Bench, submitting that the Earl Marshal could not exercise jurisdiction in the case. The Lord Chief Justice ruled against him. Conveniently the Queen delayed appointing a Lord High Constable when the position became vacant. He would have been the judge responsible for the offences committed outside the realm. John Doughty meanwhile, driven half-mad by the delay, conspired with a Spanish spy to have Drake murdered. He was arrested – his drunken conversation having been overheard – and died in prison.

Queen Elizabeth loved a rogue, and she loved treasure. On New Year’s Day 1581 she appeared at court wearing a crown of emeralds and a diamond cross that Drake had presented to her. The Spanish Ambassador, who knew that she was dripping with loot from the Spanish Main, priced the cross at 50,000 ducats.
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The precise details of how much of the stolen treasure was presented to Elizabeth, and how much remained at Drake’s disposal, were left deliberately vague. Those who had invested in his voyage of circumnavigation were rewarded handsomely. In 1638 Lewis Roberts claimed to have seen a paper written in Drake’s hand certifying that all his backers had received a dividend of £57 for every £1 invested. Since the expedition had cost £5,000 to furbish, the yield (if Roberts’s figures were right) would have been £285,000, more than the Queen’s entire annual revenue. Mendoza thought Drake had plundered £450,000, while other Spanish sources placed it at 950,000 pesos or £332,000. Whatever the exact figures, the gains were prodigious, the equivalent not of the personal fortunes of individuals, but of entire nations.
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Drake bought Buckland Abbey, a former Cistercian monastery near Plymouth, which had been converted into a private estate when Henry VIII suppressed the religious houses. By April 1581 – when the people of the Netherlands had decided to depose their Spanish ruler, Philip II, and nominate François Hercule, Duc d’Alençon, as their ‘prince and lord’ – Elizabeth was prepared to revive the ridiculous idea of her marriage, and as a further act of defiance to Spain she conferred a knighthood on Francis Drake.

At her request, the
Golden Hind
was taken to Deptford. She accepted Drake’s invitation to dine on board. £10,000 of looted Spanish silver was spent on the feast. The ship had been repainted and revarnished. A huge crowd gathered. A gilded sword was produced, and the Queen joked as she took it in her hands that she was going to use it to cut off Drake’s head. She was sparing with honours. This knighthood, and the arms and privileges that went with it, were of the utmost significance. The message given to Spain, and to the world, was that Elizabeth herself endorsed Drake’s (and by extension the other privateers’) adventures on the high seas. England was a pirate kingdom, prepared to enrich herself at the expense of the rest of the world. If, by stealing silver and gold and jewels, mined by slaves for Catholic colonists of abominable cruelty, these buccaneers implied a gesture of defiance to the Pope and the Inquisition, so much the better. And if there was the implication, in the declaration of trade agreements with far-away potentates in the Indian Ocean, that England was now a world trader, a colonial power in the making, then better still – better and better.

When the Italian poet Ariosto, in his chivalric epic
Orlando Furioso
, included a prophecy of the Emperor Charles V, he called to mind Charles’s famous heraldic device, the two columns and the words
Plus oultre
. The columns were the Pillars of Hercules. The motto, ‘more – even further’ was presumably at the back of A.C. Benson’s mind when he wrote ‘Land of Hope and Glory’: ‘Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set’. When Sir John Harington (Queen Elizabeth’s godson) translated Ariosto, he rendered the prophecy in these words:

Yet I foresee, ere many ages passe,

New mariners and masters new shall rise,

That shall find out that erst so hidden war,

And shall discover where the passage lies

And all the men that went before surpasse

To find new lands, new starres, new seas, new skies,

And passe about the earth as doth the sunne,

To search what with Antipodes is done.

A marginal note by Harington speaks of Drake’s circumnavigation of the world. Harington transfers to Drake those maritime exploits which the prophetess in Ariosto had seen as the portent of a coming universal Empire.
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Drake’s exploit was thereby seen to be something much more than a stupendous exploit by an individual. It made a significant contribution to the National Myth.

15

A Frog He Would A-wooing Go

BY THE LATE
1570s the Cold War that existed in Europe – between France and the Habsburgs, between England and the Habsburgs, between Catholics and Protestants – began to look as if it would turn into a real war. And the theatre of that war was to be found in the Low Countries: modern-day Belgium and Holland. All Queen Elizabeth’s instincts were for peace, and for saving money: both were reasons, from her point of view, not to be involved with the troubles in the Low Countries.

Fighting had continued there intermittently throughout the 1570s, with terrible loss of life. William of Orange, the Protestant champion, a convinced Calvinist, had successfully led the Northern Provinces in rebellion against the Spaniards. But victories were followed by reversals (12,000 lives had been lost in the siege of Haarlem in the winter of 1572–3). The Pacification of Ghent in 1578 looked like a victory for Dutch independence. In conceding that the Spanish king was
de jure
their absentee sovereign, the states united under William of Orange, and it was agreed that there should be religious toleration. Everyone knew, however, that the peace was fragile, and the resentments of the Catholic Belgians in the south against the (largely) Protestant Dutch in the north was only one factor in a volatile situation that could at any minute plunge not merely the Low Countries, but Europe as a whole, into war.

Among those foreign powers willing, and even eager, to become involved, were John Casimir, the brother of the Elector Palatine, who led an army of German mercenaries to protect the Protestants into Mons at the beginning of 1578, and the Duc d’Anjou – formerly the Duc d’Alençon, who, though a Catholic, was anxious to exercise power in some sphere, and was happy if this could be combined with causing agitation to the Spanish. (The great nineteenth-century American historian of the Dutch Republic, Motley, said of the duke that he was ‘ferocious without courage, ambitious without talent, and bigoted without opinions’.
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