The Pirate Queen (13 page)

Whether O’Neill intended anything other than reserving his political options is open to debate, but certainly de Quadra’s actions would have left O’Neill in no doubt whatever that Ireland had a friend in the King of Spain. Equally certain was that any attempt by Spain to stir up trouble in Ireland would have been very dimly viewed by any Tudor monarch, and in particular by the parsimonious queen, who was spending between £20,000 and £26,000 yearly ($8.33 million or £4.5 million today) to “keep the peace” in the rebellious province, in addition to whatever her governors and lord deputy had to shell out of their own pockets.
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Fortunately neither de Quadra nor Philip had realized that England was arming itself—just in case—through Gresham’s efforts in the Netherlands, Bohemia, Germany, and Hungary through legitimate trade and foreign finance. By April 1562, Gresham had acquired armaments for which he had paid the staggering sum of just under £140,000 ($50.78 million or £27.45 million today). The purchase of weaponry, gunpowder, and other war materiel had become the chief reason for the crown’s borrowings at London and Antwerp, and had begun to raise such suspicion in the Low Countries that Gresham had been obliged to bribe customs officers in order to ship the goods out of Antwerp for London.

But things were about to worsen for trade. France erupted into the first in a series of bloody religious civil wars that dogged the Valois dynasty until its end. At the outset the Huguenot factions maintained control broadly of the north and west of the country under the command of Admiral de Coligny as naval commander, and the Prince de Condé leading the land war. When Philip wrote to de Quadra in London in his secret code that the ambassador must advise Elizabeth of his intention to assist the French crown in its time of need, the alarm in the privy chamber was palpable. The argument raged that if Spain were indeed wooing Ireland, and assisting France, then there would be a real risk that England could be surrounded by the Spanish, invaded by her “postern gate,” and lose her independence. Spain simply had to be stopped. Yet it was only when Cecil received a communiqué from the English ambassador Throckmorton in France that matters were acted upon. Throckmorton’s April 17, 1562, letter stated:

Cecil must work with his friends at home, and especially abroad, so that the King of Spain may have his hand full in case he aid [sic] the Papists in France, for there lies danger. The Queen may make her profit of these troubles as the King of Spain intends to do…the Queen must not be idle. I know assuredly that the King of Spain practises to put his foot in Calais. Our friends the Protestants in France must be so handled and dandled that in case the Duke of Guise the Constable, the Marshal St Andre and that sect bring the King of Spain into France, and give them possession of some places and forts, then the Protestants for their defence or for desire of revenge or affliction to the Queen, may be moved to give her possession of Calais, Dieppe, or Newhaven; perhaps all three. This matter must not be moved to any of them or their ministers, for it will fall out more aptly of itself upon their demands of aid and especially when the Prince of Condé and the Protestants perceive the Papists bring strangers into France, and give the King of Spain interest in all things.
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By June, Admiral de Coligny and the Prince de Condé had proposed to give the port of Newhaven (Le Havre today) to Elizabeth to help defend France, and the vital shipping artery of the Channel. The Privy Council had had time to examine the repercussions and agree to garrison English troops at Newhaven and Dieppe, with Robert Dudley leading the “hawk” party for immediate support of the Huguenots. The queen and Cecil at last relented, more for tangible security to regain Calais as the longed-after home of the merchant Staplers than out of Protestant sympathy. For the Admiralty, Calais was also strategically important to England, since it was its toehold on the windward side of the Channel. If English shipping could again be harbored there, then the risk of being locked in port was eliminated.

Notwithstanding this, once at Newhaven, the Queen of England categorically refused to allow her soldiers out of the town, since that could be construed as a hostile act against an anointed king. She was keen that her motives should not be misunderstood, so she lost no time in asking her ambassador to Spain, Thomas Challoner, to meet with Philip to set out her concerns, and why she had been obliged to intervene in French affairs. Elizabeth was honing her particular
brand of statecraft: wage peace as if it were war. The country could literally ill afford for Philip to turn his heavy guns from his seemingly endless Mediterranean conflicts with the Ottoman Turk onto England.

But before Challoner could arrange the meeting, Elizabeth was struck down with smallpox, and for three weeks lay on what many believed to be her deathbed. She named Robert Dudley as protector of the realm in the event of her death, and the entire country prayed for her survival, remembering with dread the “protectorship” of Dudley’s father, Northumberland. The queen knew that Philip’s mind had been poisoned by de Quadra, and so one of the first things she did during her recovery was to have a lengthy letter penned to Philip. Her first point made is against the Spanish ambassador:

We have been in mind now of a long time to impart to you our concept and judgment hereof, wherein we have been occasioned to forbear only by the mutability of the proceedings of our neighbours in France and for that also we have some cause to doubt of the manner of the report of your ambassador, having found him in his negotiations divers times to have more respect towards the weal of others than of us and our country; we have thought not only to give special charge to our ambassador there resident with you to declare plainly and sincerely our disposition and meaning….
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Challoner’s interview took place at last on November 27, 1562, when the queen was already out of danger. His note of the audience to the Privy Council explained that the queen apologized that she had not written sooner, “not from any want of regard towards [the King of Spain], but because she had imagined that these disturbances in France would long since have ended. As she is compelled to move in the matter, Challoner thought it well to send to His Majesty a paper containing the motives which induced her to act as she has done. These reasons are, the hostility of the house of Guise, their efforts to secure the crown of England for the Queen of Scotland, the assumption of the royal arms of England, the refusal of Queen Mary to ratify the treaty, the Queen’s apprehension of a descent on her coasts from the seaports of Normandy, and the retention of Calais.”
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While the queen had been ill, Dudley had masterminded the deployment of some five thousand men and arms to Newhaven with Privy Council approval under the leadership of his brother, Ambrose, the Earl of Warwick, Robert’s elder surviving brother. When the Huguenots lost Rouen in October, they blamed Elizabeth, and her impossible order to remain within the city walls. The garrison had been put in an untenable position—defending an indefensible strategy through an exceptionally harsh winter with semihostile allies in the Huguenots, competent enemies in the French crown, and financial support from the Spanish. Further, with income from the Low Countries more and more precarious, and trade through the Muscovy Company still in its fledgling state, the prospects for peace and economic growth grew dim. It was time for the Queen of England to step up a gear and use the best weapon she had in her arsenal to avoid catastrophe—her adventurers. Some armed with the letter of reprisal, some not.

Elizabeth unleashed Stucley and gave the order for him to raise his army of “planters.” She also agreed, at long last, to grant the flamboyant West Countryman, John Hawkins, a passport to go on his first Guinea voyage to sell slaves to the Spanish plantations in the Americas.
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7. Raising the Stakes

Ships from the Indies have arrived…very heavily laden with divers merchandise and with one million and eight hundred thousand golden ducats, of which about one hundred eighty thousand belong to the King, and the rest to private individuals. They brought with them five ships, part French and part English, captured by them as corsairs; but the English ambassador declares that his countrymen were not corsairs, but merchants…

—PAULO TIEPOLO, VENETIAN AMBASSADOR IN SPAIN

W
ith more and more English merchants taken hostage under the draconian legislation of the Inquisition, Elizabeth’s resolve to keep her country independent hardened. Every means available to her would be used to that end, and piratical acts and double-dealing by the queen and the Admiralty in the Channel would become some of the sharpest weapons in her arsenal. But there were others, too.

When Elizabeth granted permission to John Hawkins of Plymouth to set sail in October 1562, she was in part responding to the international crisis, and in part to the outcry of her own people for vengeance upon the Inquisition and its perpetrators.
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In England, popular literature of the day was filled with passionate appeals against the Antichrist, Philip. Pamphleteers depicted the King of Spain as the devil incarnate, while Spanish ballads sung the praises of their king and his undeclared war on the
Luteranos
.
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In the Inquisition edict published in May 1560, it had been decreed that:

No son or grandson of any person burnt, or reconciled to the Church, can hold office in the King’s household, or at the Court.

If he holds a public office in any place he is to lose it.

He cannot be a merchant, apothecary or vendor of spices or drugs.

If any of the aforesaid persons has bought gold or silk, the sale of which had been prohibited them, they are to go to the inquisitors to report themselves within six days; otherwise on the expiration of that term, they will be prosecuted with all rigour, and whoever shall fail to accuse them is to be excommunicated.

No person of this kind can hold office, such as
maggiordomo,
accountant, carver, or any other charge in the household of any nobleman.
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With such public declarations of steely will from Spain, and public displays of fabulous Spanish wealth arriving in Seville twice yearly from its American colonies, it is little wonder that English envy and revenge were rapidly becoming the motivations behind the new crusade. Still, it is fair to say that both sides shared the blame of religious intolerance rife in that age, and they reaped the consequences that this would bring. Spain had wealth and an empire to protect. England had its Protestant state to uphold and believed it had every right to trade freely in Spanish territories. These reasons, coupled with religious intolerance, fear of foreigners, envy, greed, and revenge were all behind the escalation of hostilities and the rise of piracy.

Yet within England the reasons for raising the stakes fell broadly into three categories. For the queen and the Privy Council, the reasons were political. For the people, it was a matter of religion and pride. And for most merchants, at the outset, it was commercial. Later on, when piratical acts became a safer bet even for legitimate merchants, their reasons wavered into the political.
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But which of these reasons was John Hawkins’s motivation as he set sail to Portuguese West Africa on the first of his slaving voyages? The loathsome slave trade had been in existence ever since the conquistadores had decimated the Native American population through forced labor and disease some fifty years earlier. African “imports” were seen as a moral solution, relieving the Native Americans from their work burden, and the “imports” were deemed hardy and good workers for the plantations and the gold or
silver mines. A good indication of how the slave business to Spanish America had burgeoned was that, in 1551 alone, no fewer than seventeen thousand licenses were offered for sale.
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Hawkins, one of the most seasoned English traders in Spain and the Canaries, would have seen the slave trade firstly as an exceptionally good commercial opportunity for any ambitious merchant, and only secondly as a means to curry royal favor.

And what was Elizabeth’s motive for raising the stakes? It was obviously economic and political, but was that all? The queen adored symbolic gestures, and sending Hawkins on his first slaving voyage was tantamount to a battle cry that there would be “no peace beyond the lines of amity.” The English were simply declaring their right to free trade “beyond the line,” meaning in the New World, despite incessant Iberian claims that it was illegal.

Hawkins’s backers were enticed into the adventure by the treasurer of the navy, Benjamin Gonson, and the Royal Navy’s surveyor and national hero, William Winter. The financial powerhouses of the expedition included Londoners like William Garrard, Thomas Lodge, and Lionel Duckett, whose trade had been heavily disrupted by the troubles on the Continent. The undertaking would be purely commercial, thereby allowing the queen to claim loftily in her ambassadorial audiences that it contravened no treaty, and that to the best of her knowledge there was still freedom on the high seas.
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Although Hawkins was an excellent navigator, without the benefit of longitude calculations available, accurate maps, and familiarity with the African coast—and later the Caribbean—the voyage could have easily foundered. To ensure success, he needed a competent pilot familiar with the coasts, languages, and people they would encounter. Fortunately, Hawkins’s Spanish partner resident in the Canaries, Pedro de Ponte, had provided the wannabe slave trader with this most valuable asset for his long slaving voyage: a Spanish pilot from Cadiz, named Juan Martínez.