The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (10 page)

But where shall we begin his laudes to tell,

In Europe, Asia, Affrick? For these all he saw, in all

Employed for England’s common good: nor my rejoicing small,

That from Elizabeth to reign, and I to live begun,

Hath happened that commerce and fame he to his natives won.
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Such high praise might have endured, but even as these verses were being written, England’s Persian trade was already a thing of the rapidly receding past, and with it Jenkinson’s fame. Elizabeth and her merchants were looking closer to home for profitable alliances beyond Catholic Europe. The moment had come to turn their attention south. It was time to do business with the Moors from Barbary.

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The Battle for Barbary

In the second edition of his
Principal Navigations,
Richard Hakluyt claimed that England’s “first voyage for traffic into the kingdom of Morocco in Barbary” took place as early as 1551.
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“Barbary” entered the English language from the amalgamation of Greek and Latin for “land of barbarians” and the Arabic word “Berber.” The Elizabethans’ vague geography understood Barbary as either the Moroccan kingdom or more usually the entire North African coast as far south as Guinea. What English merchants based in Spain knew was that shipping merchandise directly by sea down the Atlantic coastline, from one port (like Bristol) to another (usually Agadir) in relatively clement conditions at a distance of around eighteen hundred miles, was relatively easy.

From the late fifteenth century the Berber Wattasid dynasty ruled most of northern Morocco, but it was unable to oppose Portuguese incursions into its coastal regions. In the early sixteenth century a new dynasty emerged to the south. The Sa’adians, of Arab descent, claimed Marrakesh as their capital, defeating the Portuguese at Agadir in 1537 and finally overthrowing the Wattasids in 1554.

In 1551, as Wattasid control began to collapse, a group of English merchants financed Thomas Wyndham to sail to Morocco’s southern ports, trading English linen, wool and “diverse other things well accepted by the Moors” in exchange for almonds, dates and the Moroccan sugar that would play such havoc with Elizabeth’s teeth.
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Most of Wyndham’s backers regarded Barbary as a natural extension of their established business in Spain, though many also wanted to explore more distant eastern markets (four supporters of Wyndham’s voyage soon became charter members of the Muscovy Company).

Not everyone was impressed by England’s arrival. “The Portuguese were much offended with this our new trade into Barbary,” admitted one English trader in 1552. The Portuguese still held Tangier, Mazagan near Casablanca, and El Mina in modern-day Ghana. Their claims to a trading monopoly on the three thousand miles of coastline in between seemed unrealistic, but this did not stop them from protesting at the English encroachment. The Spanish were also alarmed, their diplomats reporting that the first ships were loaded not just with linen and wool but also “pikes and armor,” and that a subsequent expedition was “laden with all sorts of munitions of war.”
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The Protestant Edward VI and his regents were predictably uninterested in allaying Portuguese and Spanish anxieties that English weapons were arming their Moroccan adversaries, but with the marriage of Mary and Philip in 1554, the English crown agreed to Portuguese demands for a cessation of trade.

Elizabeth had few such qualms about trading with Morocco, and in 1559 her first Parliament drew up a series of economic reforms bracing the country for imminent international isolation by restricting imports, but encouraging overseas exports and a stronger navy based on “new navigations” into regions including “those to Guinea, to Barbary, to Muscovy.” Within a decade England was importing 250 tons of Moroccan sugar each year, valued at £18,000, with imports overall worth over £28,000, nearly 25 percent more than the entire revenue for trade with Portugal.
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In 1562, as Portuguese warships and English merchant fleets began clashing off the African coast, the Portuguese ambassador protested to Elizabeth that her merchants were once again selling arms enabling the Moroccans to wage war on Portugal. Elizabeth replied airily in a memorandum drafted by William Cecil, Lord Burghley, her secretary of state, that “the more Christian people that shall resort to the Gentiles and Saracens, the more shall the faith increase,” and that she “cannot allow that more regard should be had to the enriching of any particular person by monopolies and private navigations than to the public utility of the whole body of Christendom.”
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It was a wonderfully disingenuous answer, especially as it came precisely at the moment when Moroccan forces were besieging the Portuguese in Mazagan. Apart from Elizabeth’s studiedly obtuse comment, the English hardly ever mentioned religion directly when pressed on their commercial incursion into Morocco. It was a sign of the trade’s profitability—and Elizabeth’s growing confidence—that when pressed by the Portuguese to ban it in 1571, she refused on the grounds that Morocco was not a Portuguese possession, and was therefore free to trade with whomever it wished.

There was good reason for Elizabeth to resist such political pressure. The Moroccan trade was becoming very profitable, and it involved over thirty of London’s most powerful merchants, some acting alone, others in partnerships. In nearly every case, regardless of the commodities involved, the trade was conducted almost exclusively through Jewish intermediaries upon whom the new Sa’adian dynasty came to rely for everything from ransoming Christian captives to running the country’s lucrative sugar farms. One of the most powerful of all the Jewish sugar barons in Morocco was Isaac Cabeça. Isaac and his brother Abraham came from a Sephardic family who had fled forced conversion in Spain for Morocco, where they reverted to Judaism and flourished under their Muslim patrons, first as translators and interpreters, then as merchants and bankers. By the late 1560s Isaac was selling sugar and buying cloth from a consortium of six English merchants led by Sir William Garrard. One of London’s most influential cloth merchants, Garrard had been trading in Morocco since 1552, as well as supporting slaving voyages to west Africa and Richard Chancellor’s ill-fated Russian voyage, which led to his appointment as one of the Muscovy Company’s founding consuls.
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In 1568 Cabeça was pronounced bankrupt and was imprisoned by Sultan Abdullah al-Ghalib for unpaid rents of 50,000 ounces of silver owed on three royal sugar farms. Garrard’s consortium was appalled: Cabeça owed them more than £1,000 for cloth bought on credit, a standard practice whereby payment—often with interest—was settled in either bills of exchange or sugar. As he had neither, the English merchants’ factors struck a bargain with the insolvent Cabeça that “if he would promise unto them to discharge the old debt” of £1,000 and supplied the consortium with £16,000 of sugar, they would intercede on his behalf with the sultan.
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They employed “a certain Moor being chief there about” called Tangarffe to petition Abdullah al-Ghalib to release Cabeça. But first Tangarffe insisted that the English factors had to “promise to become bound to him” for whatever costs he incurred in settling Cabeça’s debts. Two of the English factors agreed, and Cabeça was released, but in the convoluted chains of debts and credits binding Christians, Jews and Muslims together, it became so difficult to establish who owed what that the English merchants began suing one another first in the High Court of Admiralty and then in Chancery in a series of tortuous and inconclusive cases that dragged on throughout the 1570s. It is symptomatic of these exchanges that in the depositions undertaken in his absence Cabeça was only ever referred to as “a famous and jolly merchant,” whose religion was largely irrelevant to the financial machinations that threatened to engulf him.
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While English merchants traded with Muslims and Jews in Morocco, events thousands of miles away in London and Rome were about to transform England’s position within Europe, and with it the country’s relations with the Islamic world. In the early hours of May 24, 1570, John Felton, a well-known Catholic sympathizer living in Bermondsey, just south of the Thames, crossed London Bridge and nailed a printed document to the door of the Bishop of London’s palace near St. Paul’s Cathedral. It was a copy of a papal bull issued in Rome on February 25 by Pope Pius V, entitled
Regnans in Excelsis
(“Reigning on High”), declaring the excommunication of Elizabeth I.
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The bull (so called after its lead seal, or
bulla
), named after its opening words, condemned “Elizabeth, the pretended Queen of England” for “having seized on the kingdom and monstrously usurped the place of Supreme Head of the Church in all England,” reducing “the said kingdom into a miserable and ruinous condition, which was so lately reclaimed to the Catholic faith” under Mary and Philip. It cataloged a litany of perceived sins, based on Elizabeth’s legislation of the late 1550s, including the abolition of “Catholic rites and ceremonies,” the introduction of prayer books “to be read through the whole realm containing manifest heresy,” and other “impious rites and institutions, by herself entertained and observed according to the prescript of Calvin.” It concluded: “We do out of the fullness of our Apostolic power declare the aforesaid Elizabeth as being a heretic and a favourer of heretics, and her adherents in the matters aforesaid, to have incurred the sentence of excommunication, and to be cut off from the unity of the Body of Christ. And moreover We do declare her to be deprived of her pretended title to the kingdom aforesaid.” The bull issued one last particularly divisive edict: “We do command and charge all and every noblemen, subjects, people, and others aforesaid that they presume not to obey her or her orders, mandates, and laws.”
¹⁰

For England’s Catholics, the bull created a terrible dilemma, compelling them to choose between religion and country. For Felton, it proved fatal in the most gruesome manner. Within days of posting the bull he was arrested and imprisoned in Newgate, where he declared that Elizabeth “ought not to be the queen of England.” Such treasonous statements landed him in the Tower of London, where he was put on the rack and became the first Englishman to be tortured by the state for his Catholic beliefs. He was found guilty of treason and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered at the scene of his crime, in St. Paul’s churchyard. On August 8 he addressed a hostile crowd and a hangman named Bull (a joke not lost on many Protestant observers), insisting that he had done nothing wrong other than promote a solemn papal edict. Refusing the ministrations of attendant Protestant clergy, Felton was hanged, cut down before losing consciousness, and then disemboweled; as the hangman pulled out his still beating heart he is said to have cried out “once or twice, ‘Jesus,’” before he finally expired.
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There are several reasons it took the pope more than a decade to excommunicate Elizabeth. For starters her brother-in-law and former suitor King Philip II of Spain believed he knew England better than most, and he vetoed repeated attempts at excommunication, anxious to avoid pushing Elizabeth into the arms of the Calvinists in the Low Countries who were already causing him difficulties. So long as Elizabeth avoided persecuting English Catholics, Spain was reluctant to intervene. However, after the introduction of the Oath of Supremacy in 1559, which required public officials to swear allegiance to the queen as supreme governor of the Church of England, the country’s religious reformers began to formulate a series of political and theological attacks on Catholicism. Defending the oath in 1566, Robert Horne, Bishop of Winchester, wrote that “the Pope is a more perilous enemy unto Christ, than the Turk: and Popery more idolatrous, than Turkery.”
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As the religious rhetoric escalated and Europe started to divide along sectarian lines, Elizabeth found it increasingly difficult to remain neutral. In 1562 she began providing military support to the French Protestant Huguenots, and, though this venture failed, by 1566 she was also funding Calvinist rebels fighting Spanish rule in the Low Countries. Both policies soon ran into trouble. By the late 1560s the Catholic Guise faction in France appeared to be gaining the upper hand over the Huguenots. The Spanish finally lost patience with English privateers raiding Spain’s American fleet and with Elizabeth’s support for the Dutch Calvinist rebels, and in 1568 they impounded English goods in the economically vital port of Antwerp. That same year, Elizabeth’s first cousin Mary Stuart, “Queen of Scots,” fled the civil wars engulfing Scotland and sought refuge in England, where she became the focus of English Catholic hopes as a potential successor to Elizabeth. Within a year she was the catalyst for the Northern Rebellion, an uprising led by the powerful Catholic earls of Westmorland and Northumberland, who vowed to depose Elizabeth and enthrone Mary. Although the uprising was crushed, it finally galvanized Pius V to move against Elizabeth.

The pope’s decision backfired almost immediately. He had neglected to consult an infuriated Philip, the only ruler with sufficient military might to enforce the bull’s demand for Elizabeth’s deposition. In England, the bull divided Catholics while strengthening patriotic support for Elizabeth and pushed her toward more aggressive Protestant policies at home and abroad. English suspicions of an international Catholic conspiracy seemed to be confirmed when the House of Guise carried out the infamous St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre on August 24, 1572, slaughtering more than three thousand Huguenots on the streets of Paris and thousands more in the rest of France. The news sent shock waves through Europe: Elizabeth’s court went into mourning and condemned the “cruel murderers of such innocents.” Rome openly rejoiced, and the usually phlegmatic Philip II announced that the massacre “was one of the greatest joys of my life.”
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