The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (47 page)

The assassination of William of Orange in July 1584 dismayed not only the Dutch. The consciousness of the Queen’s mortality, the sense of the frailty of the thread on which her subjects’ safety hung, were rarely spoken of publicly, but never forgotten. During the Anjou crisis, Leicester’s nephew, Sir Philip Sidney, dared to write in his
Old Arcadia
, under cover of pastoral convention, of the Queen’s death and its consequences. Surely Elizabeth would never marry now, never bear a child: she was the last of her line. In France, after the death of Anjou in June 1584, mourned only by Elizabeth and by his mother, war over the succession threatened, because the heir to the throne was now the Protestant Henry of Navarre. In England in the autumn of 1584 thousands of the political nation, of the Protestant nation, foreseeing disaster, swore to a Bond of Association. Binding themselves as ‘one firm and loyal society’, they vowed to defend the Queen and, should she be killed, to put to death the person for whose sake she had been murdered; Mary Stewart. This was vigilante justice, the politics of fear and vengeance, and showed the dark side of the passions aroused by religious division. Elizabeth and England were now left alone to face Spain at the zenith of its power.

NEW WORLD VENTURES AND
THE COMING OF WAR WITH SPAIN IN THE
I580
S

In the spring of 1578, a time of despair for forward Protestants, when the Queen broke her promise to the Dutch and abandoned the cause, Philip Sidney told his friends that he was ‘meditating some Indian project’: a voyage to America. Wearied of ‘in servile court remaining’, of the flattery and whispers behind the arras, of waiting for royal favour that never came, and haunted by the dishonour of a long peace, Sidney longed to join the discoverers and colonizers who dreamt of finding in the New World the freedom and fortune that the Old denied them. The voyages were both cause and consequence of worsening relations between England and Spain, whose King aspired, wrote Sidney’s friend Fulke Greville, to write ‘
Yo el Rey
[I, the King]’ across a map of the whole western world.

England’s claim to territory in the New World was old before it was exploited. Henry VII had sponsored John Cabot’s voyage and discovery of Newfoundland in 1497, but Spain and Portugal had stolen a march. When Philip II annexed the Portuguese throne and its empire in 1580–83 he became master in the eastern hemisphere as well as the west. His monopolistic and Catholic imperial vision seemed boundless. Spain’s immense aggrandizement had come to depend upon her oppression and exploitation of New World territories, and upon the misery of their inhabitants, which became legendary. In the 1570s the English began to envisage an empire of their own, to rival that of Spain. Some had a vision of a British empire as rich in virtue as in commerce; pacific and Protestant. John Dee, the Queen’s celestial mathematician, sought to persuade her to make good her claim to a British empire overseas, inherited from King Arthur and from Prince Madog, the Welsh prince who had allegedly
discovered America. Elizabeth, of course, rebutted the papal donation of the New World to Catholic Spain and Portugal. Was not ‘the use of the sea and air… common to all?’ she asked. She promised to plant English colonies in lands still uninhabited by Europeans.

The world was all before them, much of it still unknown. Cosmographers, geographers, philosophers and ‘painful travellers’, observing the movements of the oceans, postulated the existence of a North-West Passage between Asia and America, which they called the Strait of Anian. This would be the way to China and Cathay, to the wealth of the East. More intriguing still was the vast undiscovered southern continent included on their maps by Mercator and Ortelius –
Terra Australis Incognita
– which was believed to contain Marco Polo’s kingdom of Locach and fabulous riches. Now travellers must venture in order to prove the theories of the cosmographers. ‘Any man of our country, that will give the attempt, may with small danger pass to Cathay,’ past the island of America, wrote Sir Humphrey Gilbert optimistically in 1576.

Storms and perils, shipwrecks, freezing cold and burning heat, and mountainous seas tested the voyagers. Psalm 107 told of men who went down to the sea in ships to discover the wonders of the deep, and the sailors did find wonders: sea unicorns and monsters, mountains of ‘unmerciful ice’, siren voices and ghostly fires. Novel diseases afflicted them, among them the calenture, the fever which lured overboard the sailors who, in their delirium, believed blue seas to be green fields. On dry land there were more wonders: man-eating alligators and anthropophagi (man-eating men). Sailing into unknown waters, running short of food and water, the travellers never knew whether it would be even more terrifying to sail on than to turn back. Parties left behind as colonists might never be seen again; their disappearance, like that of those left on Roanoke Island in 1587, mysterious and ominous. Shipwrecked mariners, like John Drake on the coast of Brazil, might be enslaved by Indians, or worse. To chart all the miseries of his ‘sorrowful voyage’ to San Juan de Ulúa in Mexico of 1567, wrote John Hawkins, would need a chronicler as patient as the recorder of the ‘lives and deaths of the martyrs’. Safe at home, Elizabethans avidly read the travellers’ tales. The stories were embellished to promote investment in the voyages, yet the bravery and reckless optimism of the adventurers reach down the centuries.

Between 1576 and 1578 Martin Frobisher led three expeditions to find the North-West Passage. Sailing through freezing fog, past floating

mountains and islands of ice, he claimed what is now called Baffin Island, a place so remote that the only name the Queen could find for it was
Meta Incognita
, the unknown boundary. The discovery of an Eskimo with apparently Tartar features seemed to prove the existence of the passage but, misled by delusory inlets and blocked by ice, these travellers could never find it. They found instead rocks which sparkled in the sun. A gold rush followed, sponsored by wild speculation at home, but that rock proved as heartbreaking and elusive as the North-West Passage itself: it was fool’s gold.

In 1582 Richard Hakluyt, the great propagandist of plantation, dedicated a tract to Philip Sidney urging the colonization of ‘those blessed countries from the point of Florida northward’, still ‘unplanted by Christians’. Blaming ‘a preposterous desire of seeking gain rather than God’s glory’ for England’s failure to found an empire, he promised that profits would follow ‘if we first seek the kingdom of God’. The predatory English privateers who plied their barbarous slave trade between West Africa and the Spanish Indies in the 1560s and 1570s seemed indistinguishable from pirates. Yet religious zeal mingled with cupidity in many of the raiders in the New World. Francis Drake, most brilliant and daring of all English seafarers, who sailed around the world between 1577 and 1580, plundering Spanish treasure as he went, carried Foxe’s
Acts and Monuments
with him (with the woodcuts coloured in), and was mortally affronted to find himself described by Philip II as a
corsario
, pirate. For him, every attack upon Spanish possessions was an assault upon Rome; every discovery, for the glory of the Queen and God. But the glory was also his own. On the coast of what may have been California in 1579 he accepted sovereignty for Elizabeth of a territory he called New Albion, and was himself crowned by the Indians, who honoured him ‘by the name of Hioh’. The original purpose of Drake’s voyage was shrouded in secrecy, but seeking the Pacific approach to the Strait of Anian, he discovered no
Terra Australis Incognita
where he had believed it would be.

Out of sight of land, captains might choose to be traders, pirates or explorers, or each in turn. Who could bind them once at sea? In the tiny world of a ship, captains held monarchical, even tyrannical, powers, if they could prevent their crew from mutiny. So Edward Fenton, sent in 1582 with the Queen’s commission on the first trading expedition to the Far East, soon abandoned his mercantile purpose as he listened to a pirate crew who longed for Spanish prizes. ‘We could not do God better
service than to spoil the Spaniard,’ insisted the ship’s surgeon on the
Galleon Leicester
. Fenton planned to emulate, even to surpass, Drake, and to set up a colony in Brazil, or on the island of St Helena, with himself as king. Divided counsels and Fenton’s indecision undermined the voyage. Should they, against royal command, sail west through the Magellan Strait, which was guarded by a Spanish fleet, to plunder in Peru, or sail eastwards by the Cape of Good Hope to the Moluccas? As mutiny threatened, the fleet’s chaplains preached in vain upon Christian charity: that no man could serve two masters. Even on this troubled voyage the watchword was religious: the challenge in the dark was ‘If God be with us’; the response, ‘Who shall be against us?’

Inspired by Drake’s triumph, most Elizabethan promoters and travellers looked westwards. Abandoning the frozen wastes of
Meta Incognita
, they turned their aspirations to the balmier shores of eastern North America; not only to explore but to live and lord it there. In 1578 Elizabeth granted to Sir Humphrey Gilbert for six years the right to discover and plant ‘such remote, heathen and barbarous lands’ as were still in no other ‘Christian prince’s’ possession. She forbade any aggression against a prince at peace with England. Gilbert’s New World schemes had hitherto been directed towards assaults upon Spanish fishing fleets around Newfoundland and piracy in the Caribbean and West Indies; his colonial ventures aimed at dispossession of the Irish in Munster. Now he dreamed not only of the North-West Passage, but of an empire in the West, with himself as overlord. Gilbert’s mentor was the magus John Dee, whose arcane vision of a British empire he shared. But Gilbert shared too the ruthless European dream of Indians exchanging a king’s ransom for glass beads, and proposed to set poor children to work to make such ‘trifles’. Mr Ashley, a playing-card maker who had manufactured beads ‘and other devices’ for Gilbert’s venture in 1582, was hoping for the day when a letter posted in London on May Day would reach China before the following midsummer.