The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (44 page)

Dee was in the habit of writing in the books which he owned, building up over the years to a kind of diary by marginalia. Public and personal events mingled with his observations of the tides, the stars and the weather. The first recorded meeting between Dee and Walsingham took place in November 1577, no doubt connected with the north-west passage and the publication of the
General and Rare Memorials
. Dee was also called on to explain the appearance of a comet shaped like a Turkish sword, and the macabre discovery of a doll of Queen Elizabeth in Lincoln’s Inn fields with a pin driven through its breast. A year later he was briefed by Leicester and Walsingham before a trip to Germany on some sort of government service. In September 1579 Dee noted that he had had a dream about Walsingham. No details are recorded, although he had another dream the same night in which he saw himself naked with his skin patterned like velvet. In 1582 both men were involved in preparing a report for Burghley on the desirability of converting to the Gregorian calendar by jumping ten days, which would have put England in sync with papal Europe. Dee suspected that the Catholics had got their maths wrong and put forward an amended plan of his own, but the Archbishop of Canterbury rejected the whole notion unless a consensus could be reached among the Protestant churches. (The decision was postponed in Britain until 1752, by which time eleven extra days would be necessary.)

The web of connections between principal secretary and propagandist of empire continued to grow. On 23 January 1583 Walsingham paid a visit to Mortlake, an easy journey from Barn Elms or the court at Richmond, where he found Sir Humphrey’s brother Adrian Gilbert, ‘and so talk was begun of North-West Straights discovery’. The following day Dee and Gilbert met 
Walsingham in secret at Robert Beale’s house in Barnes, where ‘we made Mr Secretary privy of the N. W. passage, and all charts and rutters were agreed upon in general’, a rutter being a mariner’s guide to sea routes and tides. In February it was Lady Walsingham who ‘came suddenly into my house very freely’, followed by her husband and the poet Edward Dyer, who shared Dee’s enthusiasm both for westward expansion and for alchemy. In March 1590, only weeks before the death of her husband, Ursula Walsingham would stand as godmother to Dee’s daughter Madinia.
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The fourth man around Beale’s table on 24 January 1583 was John Davis, who had travelled up from Devon to seek official backing for his own attempt to find a way through the Arctic ice to China. Davis and his friend Adrian Gilbert had been involved in a dispute with Dee some years earlier, but were now sufficiently reconciled to make a joint appeal for funding from the merchant communities in London and Exeter. Dee then set off for Poland, at which point his house and library were ransacked, possibly by protesters against his magical practices, although associates and ex-pupils were certainly involved. Davis was among those helping themselves to books and instruments.

Walsingham took the lead in Dee’s absence, drafting proposals for a north-west passage company with staple towns at London, Dartmouth and Plymouth. Gilbert entrusted the ensuing expeditions of 1585–7 to John Davis, and so it was that the Davis Strait between Baffin Island and Greenland acquired its European name. The discovery of a great cod bank in the strait created the opportunity to draw Lord Burghley into the enterprise. Burghley was less closely aligned with new world projects than Walsingham, consistent with his altogether more conciliatory foreign policy. But he was an avid collector of maps, including the 1570 world atlas by Abraham Ortelius, which he annotated with details of Martin Frobisher’s voyage of 1576. 
He was also keen to see a strong English fishing fleet, on grounds that subjects who were well fed were less likely to rob and to riot. When Davis returned to England with a sample of Canadian cod preserved in a barrel, Walsingham advised him to show a chunk of it to Burghley. He may have allowed himself a private smile at the thought of the lord treasurer being ceremonially presented with a slab of salted fish. But the tactic worked: Burghley became a sponsor of English expeditions to the St Lawrence to fish for cod and whale, and kill walrus for their ivory and oil – an alternative to Spanish olive oil for the soap-makers of Bristol.

On his third and final attempt, John Davis was able to sail into Baffin Bay and as far as the pack ice at 73° latitude before his dangerously depleted supplies forced him back to Devon. To get so far and find his way safely home again was an astonishing feat of navigation and daring, the equivalent in modern times to making it back from the Moon. The Spanish Armada and Walsingham’s death put an end to Davis’s search for a western route to the Indies, although he remained convinced that one existed. His main bequest to future explorers was the ‘Davis backstaff’, a new kind of quadrant which enabled the elevation of the sun to be measured more precisely. He remembered his patron by naming Cape Walsingham at 66° 1ʹ 60 N; other than an anonymous Victorian office on the site of Seething Lane, the only place where he is still commemorated.
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The prize which lured John Davis through Atlantic storms and ice, the sudden fogs and the constant fear of sailing uncharted waters in boats of less than sixty tons, was an exclusive English trade route to the wealth of the east. For others, the new world itself was the intended destination. One visitor to Mortlake who stood out from the rest was Sir George Peckham, a squire from an inland county with his own particular take on the opportunities to be grasped in the Americas. Peckham was a recusant Catholic, 
trusted to serve as Sheriff of Buckinghamshire but then imprisoned in 1580 for sheltering missionary priests. Unwilling to renounce either his allegiance or his faith, he resolved to establish a loyal Catholic colony in America. In company with Sir Thomas Gerard, a Lancashire Catholic who had subscribed to Frobisher’s mining expedition of 1577, Peckham cast around for a potential commander. They found their answer in Sir Humphrey Gilbert: a ruthless enemy of Catholic rebels in Ireland but also a proven man of action, commissioned by the queen to search out and settle any ‘remote, heathen and barbarous lands not actually possessed of any Christian prince or people’. Walsingham was all in favour of the plan, which gave Catholic loyalists an alternative to the conspiracy centres in Paris and Rome: emigration without political exile.

Thomas Gerard’s sights had originally been set on Ulster rather than America. His offer to transport his tenants to be a buffer between the O’Neills and the clan MacDonald had been taken seriously by Lord Deputy Sidney, but Elizabeth was unwilling to fund him. A new-world colony, which ought to be able to pay for itself if half the tales were true, was a far more attractive proposition for the queen. In June 1582 Peckham became the lord of two million acres in what would one day become Rhode Island, pinpointed by Dee as the most auspicious place to settle. Gerard, who was granted one and a half million acres, and the other major proprietors (not all of them Catholic, since Philip Sidney was among them) made up a ruling council under Gilbert as governor. Just as in Ireland, a feudal hierarchy of settlers would stretch out below them, ranked according to the scale of their investment.

Gilbert and Peckham imagined their American colony in intricate detail. Every farmer of sixty acres should have a long-bow, arrows and a target, while two thousand acres demanded the provision of a warhorse – ‘after such time as God shall send 
sufficient horses in these parts’, as Gilbert added with a rare dash of realism. Country parishes would be no more than three miles square, with a resident minister and three hundred acres of glebeland. Bishops and archbishops would be provided with vast seignories of their own. A central treasure-house would be established to fund schools and offer loans, while lands were reserved for soldiers maimed in the wars; a recognition that the English occupation would not go unopposed. Ordinary settlers were to be supplied with a hatchet, saw and spade, and enough grain and beans to get them started on the land. Almost as an afterthought, special privileges would be offered ‘to encourage women to go on the voyage’, though what these could have been is not recorded.

While Gilbert set out to find a suitable site for the colony, Peckham turned to print to advertise the venture. His
True Reporte of the Late Discoveries and Possession of the New-Found Landes
was dedicated to Walsingham in 1583. Peckham added his own gloss to the alleged abundance of the new world: the stocks of fresh- and salt-water fish, the grapes as big as a man’s thumb, potato roots and the ‘grain called maize’. Gold, silver and precious stones could be cheaply bartered with the savages, who would benefit from the Christian gospel (no distinction being made between Catholic and reformed) and an education in ‘mechanical occupations, arts, and liberal sciences’. What cause for complaint, asked Peckham with apparent sincerity, could they possibly have? Much was also made of the Welsh-sounding names to be found in the Americas, proving that Elizabeth’s ancestor Prince Madog had settled in Florida in the twelfth century.

Sir William Pelham was one of several prominent figures to offer verses endorsing the
True Reporte
. To valiant minds, every land was a native soil. Other European powers had already woken up to the fact:

 Our foreign neighbours bordering hard at hand,

Have found it true, to many a thousand’s gain;

And are enriched by this abounding land,

While pent at home, like sluggards we remain.

But though they have, to satisfy their will:

Enough is left, our coffers yet to fill. 

The English cause was wholly virtuous, and would receive the blessing of God:

 Then
England
thrust among them for a share,

Since title just, and right is wholly thine.

Richard Bingham addressed his own exhortation to young patriots in search of adventure:

Then launch ye noble youths into the main,

No lurking perils lie amid the way:

Your travail shall return you treble gain,

And make your names renowned another day.

For valiant minds, through twenty seas will roam:

And fish for luck, while sluggards lie at home.
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Like Christopher Carleill, Peckham was at pains to emphasise ‘the easiness and shortness of the voyage’ to and from America. The truth was much harsher, and he knew it. By the time the
True Reporte
went into its second edition, Gilbert had already succumbed to the storms of the North Atlantic. Edward Hayes, the only captain to make it safely back to port, was able to tell Peckham what had happened. Gilbert’s fleet of four ships had made initially for Newfoundland, where he landed at St John’s harbour to read out the queen’s commission and dig a piece of turf, duly witnessed by a cluster of European sailors. By symbolically cultivating the land Gilbert had possessed it for Elizabeth, like a medieval noble entering on his estates. The
royal arms were erected ‘engraven in lead, and inscribed upon a pillar of wood’ as permanent markers of English sovereignty. His next destination was Sable Island off Nova Scotia, en route towards the projected colony in Rhode Island, but the sinking of one ship and near mutiny of a second compelled the rest to turn for home. Gilbert lost his life in a storm off the Azores, brazening the weather with a book in his hand. Hayes caught his last words on the wind, ‘We are as near to heaven by sea as by land’, before he and his crew were overwhelmed. The
Squirrel
, which Gilbert had insisted on taking as his flagship, was just eight tons.
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Peckham hoped to persuade Gilbert’s executors to carry on his legacy, or failing that to recruit another backer. But Adrian Gilbert and Walter Raleigh had enterprises of their own, and Philip Sidney’s dream had burst when the queen had forbidden him to sail. The scheme for loyal Catholic emigration swiftly foundered, taking its deviser with it. Within a year Peckham was in prison again, guilty of favouring the mass over holy communion. Far from becoming the proprietor of endless acres in America, he was forced to part with his family lands to pay his crushing recusancy fines. It was an obscure ending for a man who might have taken the heat out of the English Catholic question, to the acceptance of all sides. The best that can be said is that his celebration of the new world was widely circulated in Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations of the English Nation
, and so helped to shape England’s future relationship with North America and the sea.

If John Dee was the principal publicist of a British empire in the 1570s, then the same could be said for Hakluyt during the decade that followed. A Church of England clergyman, Richard Hakluyt (called ‘the younger’ to distinguish him from his cousin, a lawyer who advised the crown on its claim to America) used the stability of an Oxford college fellowship, a prebend in Bristol Cathedral and a Suffolk country parish to write books about
exploration which would be read for generations. Hakluyt was more editor than writer, freely making use of the work of others. The 1589 first edition of
Principal Navigations
was dedicated to Walsingham with a warmth which was more than formulaic:

whereas I have always noted your wisdom to have had a special care of the honour of her majesty, the good reputation of our country, and the advancing of navigation, the very walls of this our Island, as the oracle is reported to have spoken of the sea forces of Athens: and whereas I acknowledge in all dutiful sort how honourably both by your letter and speech I have been animated in this and other my travels, I see my self bound to make presentment of this work to your self, as the fruits of your own encouragements, and the manifestation both of my unfeigned service to my prince and country, and of my particular duty to your honour.
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