The Pirate Queen (2 page)
Authors: Susan Ronald
I would also like to thank all those who had a hand in making the visual side of the book so very special. To the National Portrait Gallery; the National Maritime Museum Picture Library; the Bodleian Library; the Pepysian Library, Magdalene College,
Cambridge; the British Library; the Walker Gallery and Liverpool Museums; Museum of Plymouth; Museum of London; the Royal College of Arms; the Wallace Collection; and particularly His Grace, the Duke of Bedford, I would like to extend my special thank-you.
My personal thanks to my researcher, Andrew Balerdi, for freeing me up to complete this book by beginning research on the next one for me. To my sons—Matt, Zandy, and Andrew—thanks for putting up with me. To my mother, my heartfelt thanks for your support. To my editor, the extraordinary Hugh Van Dusen at HarperCollins, and the entire HarperCollins team (Marie Estrada, Robert Crawford, and all those behind the scenes), thank you, thank you, thank you. To my agent, Alexander Hoyt: Who would have thought…?
And to my husband, Doug, without whom nothing could ever be possible, this is for you.
F
or those readers looking for a bodice ripper about Elizabeth’s loves, I fear I would disappoint you in
The Pirate Queen
. But if, on the other hand, you always wanted to know
more
about Elizabeth as a person and a monarch, then please read on. Since I was a young child I have been fascinated by Elizabeth Tudor beyond her putative love affairs, and especially how this phenomenal woman had been able to rule with an iron fist in an age of pure male domination. She was the first female ruler of England to rule in her own right. However one speculates about her real reasons, she was determined to remain her own mistress and thereby guarantee England its independence from foreign domination. I especially wanted to know how she was able to achieve this so successfully.
The Pirate Queen
, in part, provided me, and hopefully will provide you, with many of the answers. She had the quick intellect of her mother, her father’s boldness, and both of their bad tempers. She was hugely vain and courageous; highly educated and gifted; monumentally abused in her youth and shunned by family, church, and society. She at times played her advisors and courtiers consciously off against one another, and more often than not she listened to the sage counsels of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, above all others. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, remained the love of her life, and, as such, it is immaterial if that love was consummated. In the queen’s mind, she was a virgin, married to the country, and intent on keeping England independent of foreign princes, come what may. Elizabeth was all these things, and many more.
In her time, the English Renaissance took root and flourished, spawning the great talents of Sidney, Gascoigne, Spenser, Kyd, Marlowe—and killing three of the five in “service of the realm” prematurely. Great poets like Raleigh, the embodiment of courtly love and adventuring, as well as Dyer, a gentleman adventurer, too, help us glimpse behind the curtain of time into Elizabeth’s court. Chettle, Nashe, Lodge, and, of course, the remarkable Shakespeare, all found their voice in Elizabeth’s England. But why was this so? The reasons are far too varied to do justice to here, other than to say that the writers themselves reflected the times: ordinary people went to the
theater to learn about history or England’s friends and foes. It was a time of tremendous change, and the queen herself wanted to engage her people (on her side naturally) in the process. That engagement process was a double-edge sword—making and breaking the lives of her most gifted early writers. It also transformed English from a language spoken by very few on the fringes of Europe into the ever-changing, ever-growing world lingua franca that it is today.
In the cauldron brewing between Protestant and Catholic, courtier and adventurer, Spain and the Papacy, Ireland and Scotland, the Dutch and their Spanish overlords, Elizabeth remained constant, imperious, and imperial. She dominated all she surveyed through cunning, wit, loyalty, charm, bad temper, an aura of extreme wealth, and parsimony. It was her parsimony that aggravated her courtiers and councillors to distraction, making her seem weak and indecisive. She was famous for giving her “answer answerless” and wearing her opponents down with her rhetorical arguments. Yet in the end, she became the embodiment of the English psyche and kept the country independent from the Catholic threats posed by Spain and the Papacy. She survived more than twenty assassination attempts, and, with her, England survived, too.
She was above all an incredibly astute businesswoman as head of state. She feared marriage for myriad reasons, and knew instinctively that by naming an heir she would sow the seeds of her own destruction. For forty-four years she successfully evaded this fundamental issue at the heart of her reign. Nonetheless, she was no empire builder. In the simplest terms, if she had been, then she would have wanted a family to keep the Tudor Dynasty alive. But her aversion to empire wouldn’t prevent her gentlemen adventurers from embracing the concept.
All English foreign interests were, at the outset of Elizabeth’s reign, either financial or defensive. Antwerp was the main export and money market since the fall of Calais to the French a year before she came to power. With the growth of Protestantism in the Low Countries, Antwerp’s stranglehold on northern trade came under threat, and England needed to look elsewhere for foreign trade, or perish. The mid-1550s saw the first English forays into a faraway commercial entente with Russia through the formation of the
Muscovy Company, in the hope that it would lead to a northerly route to Cathay [China] and direct trade with the Far East. When this failed to materialize, other routes—not already claimed by the Portuguese or Spanish empires—were sought. When both great world empires resisted English “interloping,” viewed by the English as attempts at commercial trade, the age of English maritime expansion, or merchant and gentlemen adventuring on a large scale, was born. It is the relationship between Elizabeth and this disparate breed of men and how they worked together for what was believed to be the common “weal”—the enrichment of England and themselves—that is the primary focus of
The Pirate Queen
.
Still, to better understand that focus, it is also vital to understand how weak England was when the twenty-five-year-old Elizabeth became queen. Defense of the realm—and the queen—was the greatest worry on everyone’s mind. Throughout her personal writing, the single-minded attention she gives to “security” is quite heartbreaking. And the central theme of security remains the golden thread woven through the intricate fabric of her reign—security for herself before she came to power, supplanted by security for the realm thereafter. In her mind, to create a secure realm, she needed two things: peace and money. When peace was gained at home through deft footwork by the queen and her advisors within the first year of Elizabeth’s reign, the disappointed French (under the mother of Mary Queen of Scots), who had tried to invade England, found themselves ousted instead from Scotland. It was through Elizabeth’s gentlemen adventurers that the attempt was foiled, and through her merchant adventurers that money was raised to protect the realm and pay for England’s soldiers. In those days, plunder was how soldiers and mariners believed they were paid for the risks they took, and it remained common military policy until World War II, to turn a blind eye to the practice.
It was precisely these two groups of adventurers who would eventually deliver the security for the realm that both the queen and the country craved. They would, inadvertently, mind you, transform England into the nascent modern economy and empire that would dominate the world by the end of the eighteenth century. Had Philip II of Spain allowed the English to trade freely in his American
dominions and beyond, it is entirely possible that the British Empire would have been quite different.
I have a passion for original sources and, before beginning any research in earnest, go through original manuscripts to get a better feel for the individuals I will be writing about. In Elizabeth’s case, I was blessed with a wealth of material. Gentlemen adventurers like Sir Francis Walsingham; Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester; Sir Walter Raleigh; and Sir Francis Drake provided me with a rich vein to tap into. Merchant adventurers like Sir Thomas Gresham; William Cecil, Lord Burghley; and his second son, Sir Robert Cecil, wrote nearly every day during their tenures in office. Only some of those original manuscripts are detailed in the selected bibliography along with other primary and secondary sources.
Before beginning to read on, there are a number of points that I feel need clarification at the outset. The first relates to dates. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian calendar that we use today. In October 1582, all Catholic countries moved their dates forward by ten days, which is sometimes termed New Style by authors, with the Julian calendar dates termed Old Style. By 1587, most of Europe used the Gregorian calendar. England, however, refused and did not adopt this calendar until 1751. This meant that when it was March 11 in England, and the first day of spring, the date in France was March 21. In addition, New Year’s Day was on March 25 in England. The reasons for England’s stubbornness on this matter will become apparent in the course of the book. Since my references are for the most part English, I have converted any New Style dates to Old Style for ease of understanding. Also, I have made New Year’s Day January 1, instead of March 25, for the same reason.
Place names were also different from time to time, and after the first usage of those names, I have put the modern equivalent in square brackets [ ]. Thereafter, I use the original name, which has been introduced previously. In quotations, I have also provided modern meanings for obscure words, where I felt the reader would have difficulty, in brackets [ ] next to the offending word. These definitions have, by and large, been provided by the Oxford English
Dictionary entry for that word. Spellings have also been modernized into American English, except where they appear in direct quotations from the period. I have, where appropriate, inserted modern British English spellings in these quotations.
Rates of exchange between currencies are derived from a number of sources ranging from the
Calendar of State Papers
, to merchants’ certifications, to the Bank of England. Thanks to the Bank of England I have been able to provide you with a good estimate of what, say, £1,000 in 1599 for example would be worth today. (It’s £129,890 by the way.) I must stress, however, that these modern conversion rates are approximate only, and are primarily based on the Retail Price Indices available at the time, again through the Bank of England. Since conversion rates in modern times fluctuate more rapidly than in Elizabeth’s era, it’s important to remember that a glut or shortage of commodities (gold in particular) in a commercial market would have a greater effect on currencies than, say, what a loaf of bread (a local product) might cost.
When I began writing, the U.S. dollar was struggling to keep below $2 to the pound sterling. By the time I finished the book, the dollar rate had improved to $1.75 to the pound (though still fluctuating). The prognosis from the Bank of England, UBS, CFSB, and Barclays for the coming year is that the dollar-to-sterling exchange rate has been $1.65 to the pound, but the dollar rally would be short lived. To hedge my bets, I’ve used $1.85 to the pound in my conversions, mainly because I believe that this is the dollar’s natural level for the next year. Again, the conversion rates to today’s currencies are not exact, and are merely intended to be a representative modern equivalent in dollars and sterling in an effort to aid the reader’s understanding.
In an attempt to add clarity for the non-British reader, I have also tried to treat elevations to various aristocratic titles uniformly. Once an individual receives a title, I wrote out his full name, for example, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and thereafter referred to him as Leicester. This is the way it is normally handled in the United Kingdom. Similarly, since there was a plethora of “Marys” during Elizabeth’s reign, I have usually tried to adopt their titles as soon as possible so that they could be more readily differentiated.
There are two terms that are used repeatedly throughout the book: Merchants Adventurers/merchant adventurers. On the former, whenever the words Merchants Adventurers appear, it is intended to signify the Company of Merchants Adventurers or their members. Whenever the term is not capitalized, it means investors or merchants who are traders. Whichever one it is intended to be will be clear in the sentence.
“Pirate” is a word at the heart of the book. The word “privateer” was not coined until the eighteenth century, and I had a terrible objection to using a word that had not as yet been invented, and then to describe someone with that word used for the first time two hundred years into the future. In the 1560s and 1570s, the words “pirate,” “corsair,” and “rover” are used interchangeably for the queen’s illegal traders. An “interloper” was specifically someone who traded illegally in a foreign country either against English interests or foreign ones. (These tended not to be pirates at all.) When a “pirate” raided shipping with the queen’s (or another ruler’s) approval, they are described as holding “letters of reprisal” or “letters of marque.”
As Elizabeth’s “pirates” (for that’s what many of them were, essentially) evolved into her “adventurers” the word “pirate” is filtered out. An adventurer in Elizabeth’s time was anyone who was prepared to take a risk—from the financial entrepreneurs we would recognize today, to an illegal trader (“interloper”), to a merchant trying his luck, or an out-and-out pirate.
Above all, I hope I have lifted the veil on Elizabeth as a leader: her methods of dominating her men; why her famed use of a woman’s prerogative to “change her mind” was in most instances a tactical political weapon, astutely wielded to wrong foot the opposition; and why State-sponsored piracy and plunder was the only way England could survive.
