The Pirate Queen (40 page)

And, to add to the mystery, there were literally tons of swag that had not been registered either at Plymouth or at the Tower of London. Tremayne’s official report of what had been sent to the Tower from Plymouth’s Saltash Castle shows “forty-six parcels of treasure average over two hundred-weight each,” or almost five tons. This was, of course, after Drake had siphoned off the £24,000 for himself and his men. Another account in Burghley’s State Papers states that there were ten tons of silver bullion delivered.
⁶
What of the twenty-six tons of uncoined silver alone that Drake himself claimed to have taken?

Then there were the Royal Warrants for coins refined. In this manner, Sir Christopher Hatton received £2,300; Sir Francis Walsingham, £4,000; and the Earl of Leicester, £4,000 in newly minted coins. A further £29,635 was refined into “clean ingots” in their names.
⁷
The truth of the matter is that the backers were happy to admit to a windfall profit of 4,700 percent on their investment, but, officially, millions went unaccounted for.

Unofficially, it has been estimated that the queen’s share exceeded a full year’s expenditure for the entire realm. This is backed up by the fact that she gave over £100,000 to Francis, now Duke of Anjou, and again a suitor for Elizabeth’s hand, to help the Dutch in their struggle against Spain shortly after Drake’s return. By early 1581, Leicester had accompanied Anjou to the Low Countries with hundreds of courtiers as a sign of the queen’s goodwill, and also negotiated with Francisco Rodriguez (a former victim of Hawkins’s thefts) for the
pawning of some of the finest of the Portuguese crown’s diamonds.
⁸
Without Drake, Elizabeth simply would have been unable to support the Dutch or defend the realm in full measure as she would do over the coming years. Harvesting the sea was beginning to have its distinct attractions.

Still, the Queen of England could never admit in official circles that this was the case. She dissembled with Philip as she had done with Mendoza, feigning disbelief at his “
Memoria de los Cossarios Ingleses que han hecho robas en las Indias
” (“Memorandum concerning the robberies of the English Corsairs in the Indies”).
⁹
Her “engagement” to Anjou neutralized any French action against her, and effectively made Anjou her puppet in the Low Countries. Her sweet talking Antonio de Crato was to keep possible invasion of Portugal open as an option in the event of a full-fledged war with Spain. And the agreement hammered out by William Harborne in Turkey ushered in a new era of legitimate trade with Sultan Murad III and the beginning of the Levant Company through its special Charter of Privileges.

Coded messages to her enemies were the golden thread stringing all her disparate foreign policies together. While the queen’s enemies and her more conservative advisors like Burghley may have been dismayed at her behavior, she had read the mood of the nation perfectly: the country was puffing out its chest with pride at Drake’s exploits. England would no longer kowtow to Spain’s demands that she ignore the sea.

And so, on April 1, 1581, the queen decided to give her enemies the key to her cipher. The
Golden Hind
had made the voyage from Plymouth to Deptford to show her to the queen, as requested. Naturally, much of London rushed to the quayside to glimpse a view of the ship that had given them hope for the future. The throng was huge, with a hundred or so well wishers collapsing the plank across which the queen had walked to climb aboard the
Hind
moments earlier. They scrabbled in the mudflats below, uninjured, and entertaining other onlookers with their antics in trying to escape. The queen was entertaining, too, losing one of her garters, which was fetched back to her by Monsieur de Marchaumont, the French ambassador. It was purple and gold, and Elizabeth raised her skirts,
placing it upon her leg in front of the crowd, promising, like the coquette she was, that she would send it on to the ambassador as a keepsake when she had finished with it. After the royal banquet on deck, Drake was made to stoop before her. She mused aloud to the assembled audience if she should strike off his head with her gilded sword she held aloft. Naturally, there were defiant howls of “NO!” The queen smiled, lowering her eyes and nodding to her people, then passed the golden sword to de Marchaumont and asked him to kindly perform the ceremony of knighthood. The queen now had France, and Sir Francis Drake to protect her realm and harvest the seas.

As if to prove her right, Drake ordered a present of 1,200 crowns to be divided among the queen’s officers aboard the
Golden Hind
, and presented a large silver tray with a diamond frog to Elizabeth herself, to symbolize their understanding with France.
¹⁰

28. Elizabeth Strikes Back in the Levant

One must be a fox in order to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten off wolves.

—
NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI
,
The Prince,
1531
¹

U
ntil the early 1580s, foreign policy was underpinned by the three-legged stool of trade, plunder, and, in the case of Ireland, settlement. This period experienced a metaphorical tug-of-war between bona fide merchants seeking fresh outlets for legitimate trade, Elizabethan corsairs looking to get rich, and the new imperialists like Walter Raleigh, who had a vision to make colonization enrobe and dominate trade and plunder. Elizabeth, despite what her detractors may say, was not an imperialist. But like Drake with Doughty, she, too, had had enough poking and prodding by the pope and the King of Spain. Her difficulty remained in controlling the various factions at home to the benefit of England abroad.

Elizabeth’s deeply Protestant—even puritanical—party, led by Leicester and Walsingham, wanted her to protect the Dutch, at almost any cost. By agreeing to finance the Duke of Anjou’s elected rule in the Low Countries, her commitment was clear, and her risks were small.
²
Trade had been so erratic in the previous decade that the Low Countries had ceased to be the powerhouse it had been twenty years before, and had become instead a symbol of Spain’s might or religious freedom or persecution, depending on the point of view. But the queen was adamant, the Netherlands was not a colony or province of England, nor would it ever become one. To go down that weary road would mean all out war with Spain. Indeed, William of Orange paid dearly for welcoming Anjou as their leader in 1582 by an assassination attempt on his life funded by Philip of Spain. What did interest Elizabeth were the opportunities to renew trade
in places that had been a blank canvas until recent years, like the Levant. Walsingham, too, saw the merit of trade and recommended that

the first thing that is to be done to withstand their fines [customs duties] is to make choice of some apt man to be sent with her Majesty’s letters unto the Turk to procure an ample safe conduct, who is always to remain there at the charge of the merchants, as agent to impeach the indirect practises of the said Ambassadors, whose repair thither is to be handled with great secrecy, and his voyage to be performed rather by land than by sea.
³

William Harborne was just the man whom the leaders of the Levant Company, Osborne and Staper, identified for the job. He could promise precisely what the Turks wanted, and what the pope had forbidden as an export from Christendom—munitions. By allying herself with the Ottoman Empire, Philip’s main enemy, and contravening an edict from the pope, Elizabeth knew she could not only reap the rewards of the Levant trade but also annoy her two main enemies while adopting her favorite stance: feigning innocence. In May 1580, Harborne succeeded in procuring a complex charter of privileges from Sultan Murad III, which took the form of a unilateral treaty. It offered fabulous trading privileges merely for the friendship of the English queen. The reason for his munificence was, of course, a complete work of fiction. But it wasn’t all smooth sailing.

In April 1581, shortly after Drake had been knighted, an English ship called
Bark Roe
had been blissfully unaware of the importance of the new entente with the sultan and, after spending some time with Harborne at Chios, seized and plundered two merchantmen belonging to Greek subjects of Murad III. Harborne was arrested and locked up for piracy, and all English privileges were summarily withdrawn. Two months later, the queen was obliged to humbly apologize, and she offered to send a permanent ambassador to Constantinople to avoid such terrible misunderstandings of their amity.
⁴

Harborne was released and, after a brief sojourn in England, returned as the queen’s ambassador from 1583 to 1588. In that time,
he set up a network of consulates in Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon, and Libya. One of the Levant Company’s most forward thinking traders, John Newbery, set up trading posts stretching from Aleppo in Syria to India. English traders plied the Mediterranean freely bringing back Turkish carpets, Persian silk, sweet oils and wines, currants, and other delicacies from the Levant. They also traded in pepper, and other rare spices like cloves, nutmeg, ginger, and cinnamon, cutting out the middlemen between the Levant and England. England had more choice at cheaper prices in its luxury markets. The Levant Company at last fulfilled the trading aspirations that so many other trading companies, including the Muscovy Company, had simply failed to do. Undoubtedly Newbery, more than any other merchant so far, understood how the system in the Middle East worked. His journal took account of commodity prices, customs duties, cultural differences, transport costs, local caravan trading routes and much more.
⁵
And the more he succeeded, the angrier Philip II became. But the king was not the only one.

The temptation to link the Middle East to the East was huge, particularly since Newbery had been so successful in setting up his trading posts as far as India. In Newbery’s 1583 voyage to the East, he not only carried the queen’s letters of introduction to Akbar the Great and “the king of China,” but sailing with him in the
Tiger
were the merchants Ralph Fitch (who would later become famous for his involvement in the East India Company), Ralph Allen, John Eldred, William Shales, and William Skinner, along with a jeweler, William Leeds, and a painter named James Story. The queen herself had “lent” 10,000 pounds in weight in silver to Osborne, Staper, and their partners for the journey—silver certainly looted from Spain’s empire by Drake. While all the merchants except Fitch and Newbery were to be left at Baghdad and Basra to set up their trading posts, Newbery, Fitch, the jeweler, and the painter went on to India. But why?

India was, until the mid-eighteenth century, the only place where diamonds of any quality could be found. It was also where rubies, emeralds, and pearls abounded along with gold. John Dee had been consulted by Newbery before leaving London, and it was evident that the intention of their reconnaissance into India was to acquire
“great quantities of diamonds, pearls and rubies, etc. to which end they brought with them a great sum of money and gold, and that very secretly.”
⁶

In August, within ten days of setting up their trading post in Hormuz, Newbery and Fitch were arrested and shipped to prison in Goa. According to Newbery, “there were two causes which moved the captain of Hormuz to imprison us and afterwards to send us hither. The first was because Michael Stropene had accused us of many matters, which were most false. And the second was for that Mr Drake at his being at Moluccas, caused two pieces of his ordinance to be shot at a galleon of the king of Portugal….”
⁷

While it was all well and good for the Portuguese—who had been governing Hormuz and Goa for nearly eighty years—to allege offense at Drake’s actions, Newbery was probably aware of the queen’s fascination with Dom Antonio de Crato (and even more aware of her fixation on acquiring his crown jewels), and her surreptitious support for him. Undeterred, he disavowed any dealings with either Drake or Antonio de Crato, and he blamed his imprisonment on the Venetian Stropene, who, Newbery claimed, “did presently invent all the subtle means they could to hinder them [the English]: and to that end they went unto the Captain of Hormuz…telling him that there were certain English men come into Hormuz, that were sent only to spy the country; and said further, that they were heretics.”
⁸
What hadn’t occurred to either Newbery or Fitch was that the middlemen whom they were cutting out of the Levant trade with England were the Venetians.

Fortunately for the hapless English merchants, two Jesuit priests and a Dutch trader intervened on their behalf, and they were released after three desperate weeks in the Goan prison. The lesson was salutary but unfortunately wasn’t automatically transferable between adventurers. Like children, Elizabeth’s adventurers rarely learned from the mistakes of their brothers. It would be at least another fifty years before English traders realized that if they didn’t know the local system and understand the politics, legal trade would be virtually impossible.

29. Katherine Champernowne’s Sons Take Up the American Dream

Brother, I have sent you a token from Her Majesty, an anchor guided by a Lady as you see, and farther Her Highness willed me to send you word that she wished as great good hap and safety to your ship as if herself were there in person….

—WALTER RALEIGH TO SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT, MARCH
18, 1582

C
loser to home, the gentlemen adventurers fared better, at least in terms of the political upheavals of Elizabeth’s reign. Humphrey Gilbert had been a soldier of fortune since 1562, first at Newhaven in France, then, from 1566 in Ireland, involving himself in myriad plantation schemes. Between his stint at Newhaven and his time in Ireland, he had proposed to the queen that he set out and search for the Northwest Passage.