The Pirate Queen (58 page)

In the meantime, the London merchants argued their case compellingly, producing vast lists and maps of cities and towns occupied by the Portuguese, and even greater lists and maps of places where “no Christian prince” had a fort or trade. Still, they didn’t fool the old queen. She knew full well that the Portuguese were far more than “merchants” in the East—the
Estado da India
controlled huge trading forts in Mozambique, Hormuz, Goa, and Malacca, and had fended off Arab and Venetian traders there for nearly a century.
⁴

Nonetheless, the merchants were right to stress the vast gaps in Portugal’s dominance between Indonesia and China. Where the Portuguese were strongest was, of course, from the western coast of India, encompassing Ceylon (Sri Lanka) to the Persian Gulf. But the Dutch, too, had consulted their maps and drawn the same conclusions. They knew that the eastern Portuguese trading empire was vulnerable. Their voyages to Bantam and Java were so successful that several new Dutch companies were formed to exploit the spice trade. There was widespread agreement among the queen’s merchants: if the English Levant Company merchants could not make the queen budge from her position, then England’s access to spices and the other rich trades was in jeopardy.

Elizabeth was tempted, but it was only when the talks with Spain were truly at an irrevocable impasse that she consented to allow their plan to go ahead. It was an ever-familiar pattern of “stop start” that dogged Elizabeth’s reign, at times caused by her natural caution for security of the realm, while at other times caused by lack of funds.
⁵
Still, the Londoners remained tenacious. By New Year’s Day 1600, the 101 names had grown to 218 merchants, incorporating as the “Company of London Merchants trading to the East Indies.” One of the leading merchants, Alderman Paul Bayning, headed the committee, and his close colleague, Thomas Smythe, became the new company’s governor. The only “titled” member they had was George Clifford, third Earl of Cumberland.

While most gentlemen adventurers had not as yet realized that their day had passed and that the future would need to be won by hard work and cunning rather than plunder, Cumberland and the London merchants were well aware of the changes in the world. Protestantism had spread; Spain had lost its terrier Philip II; and the Dutch with their States General had set themselves up as an alternative government to Spain’s, and they had taken control of their destiny. It was right that trade should change as a result, and the Londoners would remain single-minded in their eastern undertakings, agreeing universally not to muddle affairs of state with their trading objectives. Or so they thought.

The company charter of 1600 allowed the company a monopoly to the countries beyond the Cape of Good Hope and Strait of Magellan for a period of fifteen years, subject to the usual exclusion of places possessed by any Christian prince. Exceptionally, they were also allowed to export silver to a value of up to £30,000 annually ($7.22 million or £3.9 million today) to facilitate their trading activities. This was an incredible concession for a crown that scrimped to find cash at the best of times. The £30,000 represented an astounding sixth of the queen’s annual purse for the realm. Conversely, it demonstrated clearly to all participants in the new company that it had Elizabeth’s seal of approval.

But the Londoners would not allow the queen’s “seal” to keep them from running their company as they saw fit. They categorically refused one of Essex’s soldiers, Sir Edward Michelbourne, to
command the first venture, opting instead to continue backing James Lancaster as their commander. There remained a mistrust of gentleman adventurers’ ability to distinguish trade from plunder, whereas they knew that Lancaster would obey his orders and maintain trade as his primary concern.

Lancaster’s flagship, the 600-ton
Red Dragon
, had been recently purchased from the Earl of Cumberland (formerly called the
Malice Scourge
) at the inflated price of £3,700 ($889,092 or £480,590 today). The 240-ton
Susan
, which had belonged to Paul Bayning; the 260-ton
Ascension
, built for William Garraway (Cecil’s partner); the 300-ton
Hector
, and the 120-ton
Gift
comprised the rest of the fleet.
⁶
The
Red Dragon
would set the standard for all subsequent English East Indiamen—a real man-of-war bristling with firepower (thirty-eight guns in all), large yet sleek, weatherly, and, importantly, graced with a large cargo hold. She was as much a warship as a trader.

Each ship also had its merchants aboard. John Middleton, John Havard, and William Brund were the main factors aboard the
Hector
,
Susan
, and
Ascension
, respectively. Lancaster had a crew of two hundred, but the entire fleet had around five hundred men for 1,520 tons of shipping. Importantly, Lancaster’s chief pilot, the veteran of three arctic voyages, John Davis, had been to the East Indies before—sailing with the Dutch commander Cornelius Houtman van Hoorn, after whom Cape Horn is named.

A prerequisite of the voyage by Lancaster was that the ships be provisioned with enough lemon juice until they made landfall at the Cape in South Africa. He demanded that three spoonfuls of lemon juice be doled out to the men of all ranks daily to avoid the “plague of the sea”—scurvy. By the time they reached the Cape six months later, all men had remained “in rude health.”
⁷

The
Red Dragon
and her squadron were off the coast of Madagascar on Christmas Day 1601, only anchoring off Achin (Sumatra) the following June. Here was the major source of pepper, and a people hostile to Portugal. But pepper wasn’t the spice they sought: nutmeg and cloves fetched the highest prices in London, and that was what they intended to bring home. So they pressed on
to Bantam, where they were allowed to trade freely, and left several of their factors there, thereby founding the first English “factory” in the East.
⁸
But this did not bring the members of the company their Holy Grail, at least not yet.

After a fifteen-month outward bound journey, several months in the Far East, and a seven-month return stretch, Lancaster only reached England in September 1603, with his cargo that consisted, despite all his efforts, primarily of pepper.

The England he returned to was not the same place he had left, as Drake had found before in his time.

Plague ravaged the realm, and the queen was dead.

Many had believed that it was Essex’s tragic end that brought on the queen’s depression in 1602. But was Essex’s life worth more than that of Burghley, Walsingham, Hatton, Drake, Winter, Hawkins, Hunsdon, Knollys, or her most beloved Leicester? There were perhaps no more Drakes, but Drake, like so many Elizabethans, would be an anachronism in the seventeenth century. There was no more Philip II either. Protestantism had taken root and flourished at last, and Elizabeth knew that she had been instrumental in ensuring that its new shoots hadn’t withered.

In the third week of March 1603, the queen became progressively more reflective, standing for long hours simply staring out the window. She had been at her privy chamber window embrasure for two solid days, refusing food, running her index finger along her sore gums, staring. The sixty-nine-year-old Elizabeth, queen for over forty-four years, by the grace of God, turned, so it’s believed, to listen to the entreaties of her advisors to lie down and rest. Worn out from the burdens of office, illness, and age, and especially the loss of all those she had loved and who had died before her, the old queen made to turn and collapsed.

In the gray hours of Thursday, March 24, 1603, Tudor England expired with Elizabeth. On her deathbed, too weak to talk, she communicated with her privy councillors by signs. They read out the names of her possible successors, and when the King of Scots’s name was uttered, she slowly brought her hand to the crown of her head and nodded. James VI of Scotland, son of Mary Queen of Scots, would become James I of England. Having at last made her choice
of successor official, Elizabeth Tudor allowed herself to slip away quietly.
⁹

Given her symptoms, medical historians suggest that she died of septicemia caused by extensive tooth and gum decay, perhaps brought on by her great penchant for candied cherries, lovingly brought back from warmer seas by her adventurers to please their pirate queen.

Epilogue

France and England cannot be debarred from meddling with the aforesaid trade and navigation: their power is great, their seamen many, their seas large, their merchants with their captains and soldiers over greedy of money and booty and their subjects and servants never trusting….

—PHILIP II’S INSTRUCTIONS TO HIS SON, PHILIP III, IN 1596, BEFORE SLIPPING INTO A COMA AND DYING

T
hough forbidding any formal naming of her successor, or even any discussion of the matter, from the moment Elizabeth wrote to James VI of Scotland after the execution of his mother in 1587, King James had always been treated as her heir. It wasn’t a perfect or tidy solution, but for Elizabeth it was the only one. She had been right to believe that in choosing an heir, the seeds of destruction would be sown. Where Tudor statecraft had raised England from little more than a tribal community in her grandfather’s time, Elizabeth’s talent, perseverance, and skill had honed England into the beginnings of the nation state we recognize today. Though not officially united for another hundred years, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland found its roots in her time. Much of our treasured English language and literature flourished—despite or perhaps because of censorship—in Elizabeth’s England. In James Stuart, an intelligent but untrustworthy pair of hands, Elizabeth had inadvertently sown the seeds of the English Civil War and a century of upheaval.

Robert Cecil went on to become the great Jacobean statesman, elevated in James’s reign to the title of Marquis of Salisbury. Sir Francis Bacon’s betrayal of his good friend Essex was soon forgotten. By 1621 he had risen to become Lord Verulam Viscount St. Albans. King James treasured him, giving him a knighthood in 1603, then ultimately promoting his rise to Privy Councillor, lord keeper and,
finally, lord chancellor in 1618. Bacon was, of course, also the accomplished Jacobean writer and philosopher. Both the Cecils and Bacons, along with many other great Elizabethan aristocratic families like the Stanleys, Herberts, and Sidneys, remain influential in Britain today.

Elizabeth died knowing that the Earl of Tyrone, who had cost her so dearly in lives of her adventurers and hard cash, had been captured, though fortunately she did not live to see his fate. King James I ultimately pardoned and restored him to power in 1607, but Tyrone fled to Rome, where he lived out his life peacefully until its end in 1616.

Walter Raleigh, though, did not fare as well. No sooner had James reached London than he was advised by none other than Robert Cecil that Raleigh was championing a scheme to put James’s cousin Arabella Stuart on the throne of England. Raleigh once again found himself incarcerated in the Tower and was found guilty of high treason. Though initially slated for execution, at the pleading of James’s wife, Anne of Denmark, and eldest son, Prince Henry, Raleigh’s sentence was commuted. It was in these dreary days that Raleigh wrote his
History of the World
and some of his best poetry, including “The Lie.” Desperate to restore his fortune and favor at court, Raleigh was given one last chance by the king to find El Dorado. The voyage naturally failed, with Raleigh also losing his eldest son Wat in the escapade. The sixty-three-year-old adventurer returned to England a broken man, and readied himself for the scaffold that awaited him, famously pronouncing as the axe touched his neck, “Tis a sharp remedy, but a sure one for all ills.”

James naturally had revoked any claim that Raleigh had to the “country of Virginia.” In 1607 the colony of Jamestown was founded. In 1609 the Virginia Company was granted its new charter by the king, with funding by many of the London merchants and their heirs who had also been involved in the East India Company. Its governor, John Rolfe—the husband of the Native American princess Pocahontas—began the exploitation of tobacco for sale back in London in 1612. But the Virginia Company’s government was too rigid, and despite a revamping of its operations in 1616, company control of the enlarged Virginia colony was never adequate to ensure its survival. Though Raleigh lived long enough to hear of its expansion before his death,
he never saw Virginia again. Also, the Virginia Company was never profitable like the East India Company, thus dooming it to failure. After an attack by the natives in 1622 that wiped out Jamestown, the Virginia Company was dissolved in favor of a royal government.

A few years earlier, the self-imposed exiles, the Brownists of Elizabethan England, had returned from Leiden in the Netherlands after a lifetime abroad. Better known today as the Pilgrim Fathers, these Puritan Separatists chartered the 180-ton merchant ship
Mayflower
used in the wine trade from a London adventurer, settling in December 1620 in Massachusetts Bay. While only thirty-seven of the colonists were “Leiden Separatists,” there were an additional sixty-five passengers plus crew who hopefully had the varied skills required for success in northern Virginia. The closely knit religious community founded on the Puritan work ethic prospered where nearly all other religiously motivated attempts at colonization had failed.

The Catholic “transportation policy” originally envisaged for northern Virginia (Norumbega) headed farther south, where the “great city” of Baltimore was founded as a Catholic enclave promoting Catholic ideals under Lord Baltimore in Charles I’s reign. The state of Maryland was named after Charles I’s queen, Henrietta Maria, the youngest child of Henry IV of France and a staunch Catholic.