Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age (23 page)

But at St John’s his good fortune ended. Several of his crew stole away and took to piracy; ‘some were sick of fluxes and many died: and, in brief, by one means or other our company was diminished, and many by the General licensed to return home.’ A gold-strike was claimed, but Gilbert, dreaming of the richer prize offered by uncounted acres on the American shore, took sail; Sir Humphrey now travelled in the tiny
Squirrel
, the better to explore the crannies of the coastline. At the Island of Sablon the flagship, the
Delight
, went aground and was lost while the remaining ships were helplessly driven on by a south-east gale. When the wind dropped, the navigators had lost their bearings. The skies look ominous, the cold increased; the men were in rags and without food; they pleaded to go back to England. Gilbert agreed ‘withal protesting himself greatly satisfied with that he had seen and knew already. Reiterating these words: Be content we have seen enough, and take no care of expense past; I will set you forth royally the next Spring, if God send us safe home’. On 31st August they altered course for England and saw immediately the ugly portent of a walrus who ‘to bid us farewell he sent forth a horrible voice, roaring or bellowing as doth a lion’. At the start of the return Gilbert was as variable as the weathercock, sometimes bold and swaggering, daring the devil himself to contest the passage home, and sometimes morose, beating the cabin-boy and lamenting the loss of certain unspecified possessions or papers. Hayes thought that these were the plans of secret mines. His men entreated Sir Humphrey to transfer from the
Squirrel
to the much larger
Golden Hind
, but he refused, saying he would not ‘forsake my little company going homeward with whom I have passed so many storms and perils’. They reached the Azores and set course for England when a great storm sprang up. On Monday, 9th September, the ships were dashed about; in the little frigate Gilbert, ‘sitting abaft with a book in his hand, cried unto us into the
Hind
(so oft as we did approach within hearing) “We are as near to heaven by sea as by land.” Reiterating the same speech, well beseeming a soldier resolute in Jesus Christ, as I can testify he was.’ At about midnight Hayes saw the lights of the
Squirrel
disappear and the ship and her crew swallowed up by the sea.

So much difficulty and so little achieved. The plans for colonization came to nothing. Even St John’s, Newfoundland, though claimed by Gilbert, had to wait another thirty years for the arrival
of the first permanent settlement. The cause for the failure was partly in Sir Humphrey himself. His expedition was built upon ambiguity. As with so many of his contemporaries, his ideals quarrelled with his practice; his heart desired a colony, but his hands were continually pulled towards riches. Moreover, despite his Devon birthplace, he was a poor seaman, perhaps from lack of experience and too many years ashore; even the Queen noted that he had ‘no good hap at sea’. If he had wanted wealth only, he might have sailed with a sound navigator and trusted his military training and his intrepid spirit to win him plunder, in the manner of Drake. But he chose to be the leader of a great sea enterprise which he guided and commanded poorly, though the aims of the venture were a mystery to most of his men. They taxed Gilbert, like the disappointed Edward Hayes of the
Golden Hind,
‘with temerity and presumption’ in that ‘he was too prodigal of his own patrimony and too careless of other men’s expenses on a ground imagined good’. He consumed the solid ground he stood on in pursuit of the ideal he could not reach.

If Sir Humphrey Gilbert had too much idealism, England had too little, and this also prevented the success of the early colonists. When Raleigh took up the work of his half-brother and sent two ships to explore the American coast, the land which they found and called Virginia contained gentle and friendly Indians. The expedition that Raleigh sent to possess it, in 1585, under Sir Richard Grenville and Ralph Lane, and manned by the usual criminals and riff-raff, pillaged, tortured and slaughtered to such effect that the Indians revolted and wiped out the colony. ‘It is the sinfullest thing in the world’, commented Bacon, ‘to forsake or destitute a plantation once in forwardness: for besides the dishonour, it is the guiltiness of blood of many commiserable persons.’ But the Queen and the Council looked on colonies as places which favourite courtiers could exploit for their profit, using for their purpose rogues and criminals unwanted in England. Again, Bacon pointed out the folly of this: plantations abroad were like plantations of wood; they needed careful tending and only gave their profit after many years. And criminals were not the men to do the tending. ‘It is a shameful and unblessed thing’, Bacon wrote in his essay on
Plantations
, ‘to take the scum of the people and wicked, condemned men, to be the people with whom you plant, for they will ever live like rogues and not fall to work, but be lazy and do mischief,
and spend victuals, and be quickly weary, to the discredit of the plantation.’
²

Sir Humphrey Gilbert takes his proper place among the imaginative men, the artists, of the age. His memorial is not his practical success, but rather the example of his thought and trials. ‘We and the French’, wrote Richard Hakluyt, ‘are most infamous for our outrageous, common, and daily piracies.’ Gilbert was the first influential voice in England to assert that colonization was a nobler work than piracy, and one more likely to advance England’s wealth and power. And he asserted this against the general opinion of the country: the robbers—Hawkins, Drake, Grenville and the like—were the popular heroes whose thefts were blessed by the Queen’s policy. But Gilbert, with the confidence of the visionary, saw before the Queen and her Council that England was strong enough to turn from destruction to building. ‘The time approacheth,’ wrote Hakluyt in the preface to the first edition of his
Principal Navigations,
written just before Gilbert’s last voyage, ‘and now is, that we of England may share and part stakes (if we will ourselves) both with the Spaniard and Portingale, in part of America and other reasons yet undiscovered.’ Hakluyt, the epic chronicler of England’s voyages, was the disciple of Gilbert’s thought, and so great a believer in colonization that he wanted to accompany Gilbert in 1583; but his duties as chaplain to the Earl of Stafford stopped him.

It is no surprise that the sea voyages so laboriously collected by Hakluyt and published in his
Principal Navigations
between 1582 and 1600 should have possessed the imagination of his fellow countrymen:

      Thy Voyages attend,

      Industrious Hakluyt;

Whose reading shall inflame

Men to seek fame,

wrote Michael Drayton, in his
Ode to the Virginian Voyage
. The new riches, so astoundingly and suddenly revealed, brought forth new riches from the mind. ‘Gold’, Columbus said, ‘is the most precious of all commodities; gold constitutes treasure, and he who possesses it has all he needs in this world, as also the means of
rescuing souls from purgatory, and restoring them to the enjoyment of paradise.’ The mystical properties of gold exercised their powerful influence on the English mind. Lust for wealth and power invaded the writing. ‘I’ll have them fly to India for gold’, says Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus of the spirits he controls:

Ransack the Ocean for orient pearl,

And search all corners of the new-found world

For pleasant fruits and princely delicates.

The mariners returned with the raw wealth of their experience from which the poets cut the jewels of their imagery. For writing itself showed a splendour not seen before, so that the very language seemed like George Chapman’s
Guiana
:

    whose rich feet are mines of gold,

Whose forehead knocks against the roof of stars,

Stands on her tiptoes at fair England looking.

(
De Guiana Carmen Epicum
)

The divinity of riches caused strange changes in men and art, a power that was recognized in the opening to Ben Jonson’s
Volpone:

Good morning to the day; and, next, my gold:

Open the shrine, that I may see my saint.

Hail the world’s soul, and mine.

Marlowe, Chapman, Jonson—three men whose ambitions and unruly, high-flown spirits matched those of the great plunderers Hawkins and Drake. The former raided the resources of language as boldly as the latter pirated the treasure ships of the Spaniards. But the voyages opened up another, quieter vein of the imagination inspired more by Gilbert’s geographical inquisitiveness than by the rapacity of the sea-dogs. The plays of the time, Sir Philip Sidney complained, were so bespattered with foreign places that the audience was hard put to know where they were: ‘you shall have Asia of the one side, and Affrick of the other, and so many other under-kingdoms, that the Player, when he cometh in, must ever begin with telling where he is; or else the tale will not be conceived.’ Gascoigne, in his preface to Gilbert’s
Discourse of a Discovery
, pictured the author in 1576, planning the north-west passage at his house in Limehouse with the maps and tables of Ortelius by his side. And when Marlowe took Tamburlaine on his vast
journeys of conquest, he did so with the same Ortelius in his hand:

Give me a map; then let me see how much

Is left for me to conquer all the world.

With the voyages before him, what other material did a poet need for his imagination? ‘But read the report of the worthy Western discoveries, by the said Sir Humfry Gilbert’, Gabriel Harvey advised a fellow writer. Who in the past, Edmund Spenser inquired in the
Faerie Queene:

      in venturous vessel measured

    The Amazons huge river now found true?

Or fruitfullest Virginia who did ever view?

And did not the noble work of exploration increase the fame and power of England? Again, Humphrey Gilbert was the inspiration of the poet; he was the first, said Thomas Churchyard, who:

      all for countreys cause, and to enrich the same,

Now do they hazard all they have.

Gilbert’s bold motto had been
Quid Non
—Why Not?—and the possibilities opened up by his thoughts on colonization intrigued the mind. Even Chapman, for whom exploration was the pursuit of infinite riches, admired the idealism that put riches to the country’s service. In
De Guiana
he commended the ‘patrician spirits’—the true nationalists—

That live not for yourselves, but to possess

Your honour’d country of a general store.

Others, equally possessed by Gilbert’s idealism, had a more generous vision of England’s work in the new lands. Samuel Daniel, in his
Musophilus
published two years before the death of Elizabeth, saw England as the gentle civiliser:

And who, in time, knows whither we may vent

The Treasures of our tongue? To what strange shores

This gain of our best glory shall be sent

To enrich unknowing nations with our stores?

What worlds in the yet unformed Occident

May come refin’d with the accents that are ours?

In his will, Gilbert had also dimly perceived a golden age where
the virtue and knowledge of Europe, released from the historical problems of the homeland, could establish the ideal commonwealth in foreign parts. Others, also seeking a golden age, saw colonization not so much as an extension of European power and influence, but rather as a corrective to the fiery temper and greedy itch of Europe; gentle natives with simple and uncorrupted ways would teach Europe how to live.

And when Amadas and Barlow brought the first news from Virginia in 1585, it seemed that this idyllic place might tempt the English colonists to live a life of quiet and natural justice. No doubt Shakespeare had both Gilbert and the Virginian venture in mind when he borrowed the words of Montaigne to describe the ideal state in the
Tempest:

All things in common nature should produce

Without sweat or endeavour: treason, felony,

Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine,

Would I not have; but nature should bring forth

Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance,

To feed my innocent people.

But Shakespeare, so much wiser than Gilbert and so much aware of human frailty, knew that the dream of simple justice could not withstand the energy, greed and ambition of his contemporaries. ‘You are gentlemen of brave mettle’, says Gonzalo in the
Tempest
, explaining why the ideal would never work: ‘you would lift the moon out of her sphere, if she would continue in it five weeks without changing.’ It is a fitting epitaph to the impossible hopes of Sir Humphrey Gilbert.

1
   It was not unusual to go to university at a very young age. John Fisher took the grammar degree at Cambridge when he was fourteen, and Wolsey, the famous ‘boy bachelor’, received his B.A. from Oxford at fifteen.

2
   Bacon became a shareholder in the Company that planted the first successful English colony at Cupid’s Bay, Newfoundland, in 1610.

8

Richard Hooker

E
NGLISH
R
ELIGION
in the sixteenth century was a puzzle to the Christian world. Cardinal Allen, an Englishman banned from his homeland by his Catholicism, wrote at the end of the Tudor age that his country’s inconstancy was its shame: ‘We have had to our Prince a man who abolished the Pope’s authority by his laws, and yet in other points kept the faith of his fathers; we have had a child who by the like laws abolished together with the Papacy the whole ancient religion; we have had a woman who restored both again and sharply punished Protestants; and lastly her Majesty that now is who by the like laws hath long since abolished both again, and now severely punished Catholics as the other did Protestants; and all these strange differences within the compass of thirty years.’