Hawkins took his squadron to Sierra Leone. Along the way he commandeered a French pirate ship, the Don de Dieu. The Portuguese claim that in the neighbourhood of the Cabo Rojo and the Rio Grande he captured or looted seven Portuguese ships. He had stolen various slaves from ships encountered along the way, and in Africa itself he rounded up some 500 more for transport to America. Probably some sixty or so were lost in the course of battles and skirmishes.
The 500 or so slaves were kept in the hold of the Jesus of Lübeck. It was not possible to bring them on deck for necessary bodily functions, so the smell and condition down there can readily be imagined. It seems (from the various accounts of the voyage) that Hawkins sold 325 of these slaves, which leaves well over 100 lost through sickness.
Above deck, the modern reader is especially struck by two features of life on this rotting, creaking sailing ship, with its cargo of suffering humanity.
One is the unforgettable image of Hawkins himself at table, being entertained by a group of five or six musicians, playing the fiddle. The leader of the group was William Low. When he was captured by the Inquisition and incarcerated in a monastery, the friars guessed the age of this freckly English boy to be seven or eight. In fact he was twenty years old when the Jesus set out.
Another feature of life that we should find striking, were we to spend twenty-four hours on that ‘troublesome voyage’, would be the religious observances. Morning and evening prayer, a truncated version of the services in the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer, were strictly observed. When I say strictly, I mean that Thomas Williams, Second Mate, went round the ship with a whip driving the crew to attend the reading of the Psalms appointed for each morning and evening of the month, and a recitation of the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. On Sunday mornings they would be assembled for an hour, hearing the Epistle and Gospel of the Day, followed by a reading by Hawkins himself of the Paraphrases of Erasmus. When, on the Minion, a man was unguarded enough to make the sign of the cross before taking the helm, he was roundly abused. William Saunders, mate of the Minion said, ‘There are on this voyage such evil papist Christians, that we cannot avoid having a pestilence visited on this Armada.’18
Whatever the cause, the third voyage of Hawkins from Africa to the Caribbean was indeed disastrous. By the time he left Sierra Leone he had ten ships. He managed to trade at seven ports in the Spanish Indies before a storm drove him to take refuge at San Juan de Ulúa, the port of landing for the inland journey to the city of Mexico. By now, the Jesus was in a terrible way.
The Jesus was brought in such case that she was not able to bear the sea longer, for in her stern on either side of the sternpost the planks did open and shut with every sea. The seas . . . without number and the leaks so big as the thickness of a man’s arm, the living fish did swim upon the ballast as in the sea. Our general, seeing this, did his utmost to stop her leaks, as divers times before he had . . . about her. And truly, without his great experience had been, we had been sunk in the sea in her within six days after we came out of England, and, escaping that, yet she had never been able to have been brought hither but by his industry, the which his trouble and care he had of her may be thought to be because she was the Queen’s Majesty’s ship and that she should not perish under his hand.’19
By the time the Jesus put in to San Juan de Ulúa, Hawkins had made unsuccessful applications to the Spanish authorities to be allowed to trade. In the Spanish pearl fishery of Borburata he had made the claim, already quoted, of personal acquaintanceship with Philip I (‘I know the [King of] Spaine your mr’). In the Venezuelan port of Rió de la Hacha the Spanish governor Castellanos was told by Hawkins that he was a ‘Catholic Christian’, but the English buccaneers, led by Lovell (like Drake, a relative of Hawkins), commander of the Minion, marauded and took hostages. Hawkins left behind seventy-five sick and dying slaves by way of compensation. It was in an attempt to reach Florida that the fleet was blown off-course and compelled to take shelter at the Mexican port of San Juan de Ulúa. Once in the harbour, they were attacked by the Spaniards. Drake, in the Judith, did the sensible thing – he got his ship out of harbour as soon as possible, and was able to sail back to England. ‘The Judith forsoke us in our greate miserie,’ said Hawkins. Five ships of Hawkins’s fleet were abandoned, four were captured and one was destroyed. Hawkins himself got away on the Minion, according to the Spanish Viceroy, Enríquez. Hawkins managed to escape with ‘the greater part of his possessions and loot’.20
The greatest loss was the loss of life. Drake got home with about a dozen men on the Judith. Another ship in the fleet, the William and John, which had not accompanied them to Mexico, probably had another fifteen or twenty. And a dozen or so were on board the Minion with Hawkins when, on 24 January 1569, it landed in the chill of a Cornish morning at Mount’s Bay. What a sight for them as they opened their frosty windows in St Michael’s Mount, or in the fishing villages of Newlyn and Mousehole! In Vigo, on the Portuguese coast, a few days earlier, Hawkins and his men had come ashore. A Portuguese merchant described the appearance of this thirty-six-year-old Englishman who had been so battered and humiliated by near-shipwreck, by storms at sea, by battle and by Spanish guns. Was he bedraggled, careworn, spectral? Hawkins was, according to his Portuguese observer, ‘dressed in a coat trimmed with marten skins, with cuffs of black silk. He had a scarlet cloak, edged in silver and a doublet of the same material. His cape was silk, and he wore a great gold chain around his neck.’21
The fates of the men who fell into the hands of the Spaniards, left behind in Mexico, were often gruesome. Some were sent to Spain. Others remained in Mexican prisons, comparatively well treated until the arrival in Mexico in 1571 of the Holy Inquisition, of which the two merciless officers were Moya de Contreras and Fernandez de Bonilla.
Eleven of the English prisoners were younger than sixteen at the time of the battle of San Juan. The Inquisitors treated the juveniles, who had been small children when Elizabeth came to the throne and had therefore had no chance of instruction in the Catholic faith, with some mercy. Miles Philips, for example, eighteen in 1572, was sentenced to three years in a Jesuit house in Mexico. But the older men were considered mature enough to be Catholics who had lapsed into heresy. They were kept for a long time in prison by the Inquisition, and in February 1574 the following sentences were pronounced: William Collins, of Oxford, age forty, seaman, ten years in the galleys; John Burton, of Bar Abbey, twenty-two, seaman, 200 lashes and six years in the galleys; John Williams, twenty-eight, of Cornwall, 200 lashes and eight years in the galleys; George Dee, thirty, seaman, 300 lashes and eight years in the galleys. The following year John Martin of Cork, otherwise known as Cornelius the Irishman, was burned at the stake.
When John Hawkins set out on his first transatlantic voyage, with its shocking cargo, Philip II of Spain, the Queen of England’s brother-in-law, was inclined to see England as a potential ally against the machinations of the French. By the time of the third voyage of Hawkins, Anglo-Spanish relations were badly damaged. Neither Drake nor Hawkins can be said to have behaved well on this voyage, but they had displayed great skills as seamen, and extraordinary resourcefulness. These qualities could not alone break the power of the two mighty maritime empires, the Portuguese and the Spanish. But thanks to the Elizabethan privateers, the world was no longer simply divided, as it had been by a Borgia pope, between the Iberian superpowers. The barbarous cruelty of the Spanish Inquisition to the English sailors left behind by Hawkins in Mexico was not forgotten. Within twenty years the sea-dogs would take their revenge on the Spanish Armada. An anti-Catholic mindset remained ingrained in English national consciousness until the advent of multiculturalism in the late twentieth century. Even then it was not obliterated. Rather, instinctive hatred of religious bigotry controlled from abroad remained, with the objects of obloquy being now not Catholics so much as Muslims.
The Jesus of Lübeck had fallen into the hands of Spain. The image of it at sea, however, with its slaves in the ho
ld, its velvet-clad captain at table above, and its ageless boy-musicians, remains in our mind as emblematic of its times – something we should be unlikely to encounter in any era before or after the new times ushered in by the reign of Elizabeth. Perhaps it is as good an image as any to hold in our minds as we try to focus on that most extraordinary age.
3
Ceremonial – Twixt earnest and twixt game
ELIZABETH’S REIGN BEGAN with ceremony. Even by the ritualistic standards of sixteenth-century Europe, England stood out for its love of formal ceremonies. The Venetian Ambassador to the court of Henry VIII had been astonished to see Princess Elizabeth kneel three times before her father in the course of one interview.1 All foreign observers noted the ceremony with which the English royalty and nobility surrounded their existence. As an old lady, Elizabeth was watched passing to chapel at Greenwich, on a Sunday in 1598. ‘As she went along in all this state and magnificence she spoke very graciously to foreign ministers, in English, French and Italian. Whosoever speaks to her, kneels; now and then she raises someone with her hand. Wherever she turned her face, as she was going along, every one fell on their knees.’2
In November 1558 it was only to be expected, then, that pageantry of the greatest possible extravagance should advertise to the people of England that an era of marvels was about to begin. National morale was low. England had just been defeated in a humiliating war against the French. Its last hold on French soil – the port of Calais – had been lost. The last Queen of England, Elizabeth’s half-sister Mary, had been married to Philip II, King of Spain, and England had therefore been caught up with the Franco-Spanish rivalry that was the chief political fact of contemporary Europe. And this had not been to England’s advantage. Philip, who had never been close to his wife, had not been in England for months when Mary died. There was every reason to fear that the French would press home their victory over Calais and make a bid for the English throne itself. Why not make the Dauphiness of France, Mary Stuart, Queen of England? Mary was the great-granddaughter of Henry VII, and although the will of Henry VIII, anticipating the threat of the French, forbade any foreigner from inheriting the English throne, she did at least have the claim of legitimacy; whereas Elizabeth, in many eyes, did not. Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn, had given birth to her when Henry’s queen, Catherine of Aragon, was yet living. Anne Boleyn’s eruption into Henry VIII’s heart had provoked what, for many English men and women of 1558, was the ultimate tragic disaster – the severance of the English Church from Rome, the splintering of Catholicism, the Dissolution of the monasteries, the end of the old religion. Elizabeth had been declared a bastard by the Pope, but even in English law the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine was highly questionable. Moreover, after the disgrace and beheading of Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth’s mother, and his remarriage to Jane Seymour and the birth of Edward VI, Henry VIII had himself declared Elizabeth to be a bastard. Even though, by his will, he had declared that the succession should pass, as it did, first to Edward, then to Mary, and next (if they both died childless) to Elizabeth, the declaration of her illegitimacy had never been revoked in law. There was much debate among the lawyers and political classes about the wisdom of raising this matter in Parliament. Apart from the considerable danger of enraging the new monarch (and she was Henry VIII’s daughter, quite capable of flying into rages and dispatching her subjects to the block), there was also the propaganda danger of rehearsing her technical illegitimacy. Nicholas Bacon, the Lord Keeper, decreed that the ‘Crowne, once worne, taketh away all defects whatsoever’.3
Yet if the Protestantism that had been brought in by Anne Boleyn’s adultery scandalised the Catholic majority, the attempt at a Counter-Reformation by Henry’s daughter Mary Tudor, during her short reign (1553–8) had antagonised many of her subjects. Against the advice of her husband, she had introduced the hated heresy-hunts of the Inquisition, and more than 300 people had been roasted alive for their thought-crimes. There must have been very many conservative-minded English men and women in 1553 who had their doubts about the Reformation; who regarded Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England, as a fine man who had been wrongly executed by King Henry; who deplored the wreckage of the monasteries, and even more, detested the bullying persecution of such saintly figures as the monks of the London Charterhouse; who yet disliked the fanaticism of continental Calvinists and missed the outward trappings of old Catholic England – May poles, Mystery Plays, Corpus Christi processions – and who felt revulsion at the human bonfires of Smithfield. Mary Tudor, in her zeal for the Catholic faith of the Counter-Reformation, made many a convert to the fledgling Church of England.
Yet, as the young Queen Elizabeth knew, and her close advisers perhaps knew even better, she was a ruler of questionable legitimacy, becoming the queen of a realm divided against itself. The ceremonies that were put in hand from the very hour of her accession were therefore designed to reinforce in the populace a sense of reassurance, a sense of national unity, a sense of her sacred place in the life of a revivified nation.
The news came to her at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, some twenty miles from the capital. It was 17 November 1558. Elizabeth Tudor was twenty-five years old: she had been born at Greenwich on 7 September 1533. Her appearance is more familiar, perhaps, than any other character in English history, and one of the reasons for this is that her ritualised portraits were painted so often, and their messages were so carefully plotted. The coronation portrait, for example, of which a copy survives in London’s National Portrait Gallery, shows her holding orb and sceptre, and crowned in state. Her robe is emblazoned with Tudor roses. This is a picture that is almost all regalia. It is stating her claim to continue the dynasty begun by her ‘good grandfather’, as she called him (not everyone would have applied that epithet to the brilliantly devious Welshman Henry Tudor), Henry VII. But the regalia are not all that we remember from the portrait. We remember the long, red-gold hair, fine and loose over her ermine-clad shoulders. We remember the very distinctive long, white hands (the genes shared with Mary, Queen of Scots produced the same attractive feature, which often seems to accompany high intelligence); and there is the face. She was very recognisably Henry VIII’s daughter, with the same aquiline nose, the same shape of brow; but the shape of the face, long and oval, was much more like her mother, Anne Boleyn. Whereas Anne had been dark and sallow, however, Elizabeth had all the Tudor Welsh lightness of skin. One observer – Robert Johnston in Historia Rerum Britannicarum – noted that her skin was more than white, it was of a glowing paleness. Her eyes were golden, too, and large-pupilled from short-sight – exacerbated from much reading. She read and spoke fluently in Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian and English and had a little Welsh.
This was a formidably clever, and slightly frightening, young person who had never fully opened her heart to anyone – not to her terrifying monster of a father; not to Catherine Parr, who had been such a wise stepmother, and certainly not to Parr’s reprehensible husband Thomas Seymour, whose scandalous cuddlings and attempts to make love to the young princess had caused public outrage. Nor had Elizabeth ever opened her heart to her brother, her sister or her tutors. From the moment of her accession she would rely, with a mixture of profound intelligence, flirtatious recklessness and Welsh canniness, on a succession of differing, nearly always male, advisers. But there was never one person who could claim to be her sole educator, her one love or her only counsellor. The deftly captured coronation portrait by Guillim Stretes, though it survives only in a copy, reveals a face that is alive with intelligence. England – like most other countries – has flourished when governed by intelligent people. Queen Victoria’s prime ministers, from Peel to Salisbury, were some of the cleverest men in the country. The only other period of comparable expansion and prosperity in English history is the reign of Elizabeth, when the head of state, and her surrounding court, were first-class brains.
By the time the Council had reached Hatfield, Elizabeth was waiting for them �
�� the ‘news’ having evidently been broken to her by an earlier outrider. She was walking in the park, and stood beneath a leafless oak when they told her that she was the Queen of England. She knelt down in the grass and said, ‘A domino factum est et mirabile in oculis nostris’, a quotation from the 118th Psalm – ‘It is the Lord’s doing and it is marvellous in our eyes.’ When she stood, the councillors could see that she was ‘indifferent tall, slender and straight.’
As well as being one of the most intellectually accomplished rulers who had ever occupied the throne of England, Elizabeth was also gifted with a peculiar political intelligence and the ability to empathise with, and understand, and manipulate, crowds. Her poor sister Mary, with her rather gruff mannish voice, her poor skin, her tiny eyes and her shyness, totally lacked these qualities. She had never engaged with the People at all. From the moment of her appearing in the London streets, Elizabeth knew how to work the crowd. The economy of England had been left, by Mary Tudor’s incompetence and by the failures in the French wars, in a terrible condition. There were debts of more than £266,0004. Elizabeth – one of her least amiable characteristics – was extremely parsimonious and ‘retentive’, unwilling to spend, even when national emergency depended upon it. But in this matter of selling herself to the people, she was prepared to part with more than £20,000 for the ceremonies alone. Yet it is not fair to think of her solely as a skinflint in economic terms. Early in the reign, 1560–1, she would issue a new coinage, which restored the value of the currency.5 Walsingham considered this her finest achievement.
The Elizabethans Page 4
