The Elizabethans

by Wilson, A. N.

  From 1582 onwards, therefore, the Elizabethans were on a different time-scale from Spain, Portugal, Italy and France. For us, who have adopted both the Gregorian method of regarding the solar calendar and the Scottish division of the calendar months, the Elizabethans were doubly out of sync. For instance, Sir Philip Sidney’s funeral happened on what we call 16 February 1587, which for those who were present was 1586. It makes dating any event in the later Elizabeth period a fiddly and confusing business and adds to our sense of their otherness. But one should not be distracted by this small thing from seeing their bigger thing, and above all their imaginative enlargement through the pioneering study of geography.

  The figure who stands out as the greatest English geographer of the age is also the man who in his monumental multi-volume book brought to life the Voyagers. Richard Hakluyt’s The Principall Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation did for explorers and navigators what John Foxe did for the Protestant martyrs. There is no better book in which to browse if what you want is armchair-travel, excitement, wonder and human oddity. But Hakluyt (c.1552–1616) – his name is pronounced Hackle-wit – was much more than just an anecdotalist. He was one of those Englishmen (note the title of his book: the achievements are those of the English Nation) who saw the almost limitless political possibilities of the new geography and who radically redefined the position of England in the world. ‘Give me a map,’ says Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, ‘then let me see how much is left for me to conquer all the world.’3

  Fear of Spain, and fear of the perils of ocean travel, were two very good reasons for English mariners not to venture upon the expansions that Hakluyt urged forward. As long ago as 1494, Henry VII had given letters patent to John Cabot of Bristol and his three sons ‘for the discovering of newe and unknown lands’. Hakluyt printed them in his Divers Voyages of 1582 as an incentive to try to follow the Cabots’ lead. Ninety years had passed, and fishing fleets had sailed out from Bristol almost every year into the Atlantic since then. They had gone, however, to catch cod, and not – as had the Spanish, the Portuguese and even the French – to establish colonies. Apart from the fact that this put England at a political and economic disadvantage, it worried Hakluyt that the Roman Catholic colonisers were spreading error as they collected gold, pearls and spices. It was time that Native Americans heard the words of Cranmer’s Prayer Book and the English Bible, for Hakluyt, like so many notable Elizabethans, was a clergyman – from 1583 to 1588 he was Preacher Hakluyt in Paris, chaplain to Sir Edward Stafford, the English Ambassador there, and in later life he was the rector of Wetheringsett, Suffolk.

  The Hakluyts were an old Herefordshire family and it is possible that Richard, as a boy, saw the Mappa Mundi in Hereford Cathedral Library, a magnificent late-medieval thirteenth-century depiction of the world, with Jerusalem at its centre. (The word mappa means cloth. The medievals had no word for map, and the modern concept of the map is a sixteenth-century phenomenon.) As late as 1520 English sailors possessed no sea-charts ‘except a very few drawn by foreigners’.4 It was a world in which the western hemisphere was unknown, and whose southern hemisphere must, for theological reasons, have been uninhabited. (Since Christ redeemed mankind, divine providence could only have planted human souls within the catchment area, so to say, of the Roman Empire.) God could scarcely have come to Earth and left it again without everyone on the face of the planet having the possibility of knowing about these saving events. This they could only do by living in the northern hemisphere. Whether or not Hakluyt went to Hereford during his boyhood, he grew up in London and was educated at Westminster School. It was in 1568, when he was sixteen, that he went to see his elder cousin, also called Richard Hakluyt, who was a lawyer of the Middle Temple. Lawyer Hakluyt kept a close eye on his often papist legal colleagues, reporting any suspicious goings-on to the government; he was also keenly interested in the new science, in maps and in that system of universal knowledge which they called cosmology: a study of geography, history, political systems, flora and fauna, and anthropology.

  When young Hakluyt called on his lawyer cousin he found ‘lying open upon his boord [table] certain books of Cosmographie, with an universall Mappe’. The boy was gripped as his cousin showed him maps of the New World. He would have seen a world not unlike the Hereford Mappa Mundi in one sense: Jerusalem was still at its centre, but now there was this difference – there was America. If he was looking at Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia, he would have seen Americas that had an eastern seaboard, but no Pacific coast. Sea monsters would have gambolled in the Atlantic. Lawyer Hakluyt waved his hand over his collection of maps and told of ‘all the knowen Seas, Gulfs, Bayes, Straights, Capes, Rivers, Empires, Kingdomes, Dukedomes and Territories of each part’. He spoke of the riches to be had in these parts, if only merchants would visit them. And then he opened the Bible and pointed to Psalm 107: ‘He directed mee to the 23 and 24 verses, where I read, that they which go downe to the sea in ships and occupy by the great waters, they see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deepe.’

  For the boy Hakluyt, it was an epiphany. He resolved, ‘If ever I were preferred to the University, where better time, and more convenient place might be ministred for these studies, I would by God’s assistance prosecute that knowledge and kinde of literature, the doores whereof (after a sort) were so happily opened before me.’5

  Hakluyt went up to Christ Church in 1570, where he would have overlapped with Philip Sidney.6 William Camden, destined to become a fine antiquary and headmaster of Westminster, was a poor scholar of the college. Richard Carew – who would one day collaborate with Camden on The Survey of Cornwall – was up at the same time. Walter Raleigh was at Oriel, Richard Hooker was at Corpus, all at the same time.7 Unlike Sidney, who went out into the great world, Hakluyt was an archetypal don, destined (apart from his embassy work in Paris, and later withdrawal to married life and a country living) to spend much of his life in the university. To the Greek and Latin that he learned at school he added a mastery of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French, and he read everything relevant to his obsession, all travel books, works of cosmology, works of geographical discovery.8

  Hakluyt was one of those influential intellectuals in Elizabethan England who saw that possession of power at sea truly was open to those with the skill and the panache to seize it. When Columbus had crossed the Atlantic, the Borgia pope Alexander VI had simply drawn a line down the map of the known world and decreed that it should be divided between Spain and Portugal. Although the Cabots had sailed the Atlantic too, for half a century, the English had been supine in their acceptance of the fact that the ocean, and the lands beyond the Atlantic, were the possession of the superpowers. But unlike the military domination of great land-masses, which requires huge armies, to command the sea needed few ships and much skill.

  At the funeral of Charles V in Brussels in 1558 – which must have been one of the most stupendous funerals of all time – there were between 2,500 and 3,000 candles burning around the hearse; all the religious orders were represented; there were fifteen abbots, four bishops and an uncountable procession of European princes and aristocrats. But almost the most impressive item in the entire funeral pageant was a great ship, twenty-four feet in length, twenty tons in weight, encrusted with gilt. There were men inside this gilded ship, who simulated its movement on the high seas. And, noted the awestruck English observer, who wrote back to London to describe it:

  there stood in the sea before the ship two strange monsters, who had either a collar or a bridle about their necks, whereunto was made fast a cord of silk being fast unto the ship and unto them, and so it seemed as if they pulled the ship forwards. Upon the ship from the water to the shrouds were painted all the voyages and victories that the Emperor had done by water. The sea wherein the ship went was stuck full of banners of the Turks and Moors fallen down and lying in the water . . .9

  Hakluyt’s multi-volume account of English travellers and voyagers, and his celebra
tion of English maritime skills, are the literary equivalent of that great ship in the Emperor’s funeral. They are an advertisement to the world that England had awakened; that while it had cut itself off from membership of a Europewide Church and declared an independent island-identity, it had also reached out to the great world, to explore and to conquer.

  By the 1570s the Elizabethan urge to cross the Atlantic and to establish commercial footholds – in defiance of Spain – had grown stronger than ever. Sir Martin Frobisher made three voyages (in 1576, 1577 and 1578) in quest of the North-West Passage, journeys deflected by the prodigious discovery of gold, and ‘everyone’ – from the Queen to Sidney and his sister Mary, to Dr Dee – investing money in the venture. The late 1570s had also seen the rise of the fervently ambitious Walter Raleigh.

  Unusually tall – six foot or more – handsome, clever and with a broad Devon accent, Raleigh (1552–1618) came from an old West Country family that had come down in the world. The Raleighs who fought at Agincourt, or supplied a thirteenth-century Bishop of Winchester, had now become decayed gentry. Walter Raleigh went up to Oriel College, Oxford, then served abroad in the Huguenot armies of France. In 1578 he was back in England, taking a close interest in the ventures of his half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who was fitting out a small fleet to explore America. Gilbert obtained from the Queen the first English colony in North America. There were several voyages, all more or less abortive, with Gilbert aiming to establish a base in Newfoundland.

  While these journeys into the American unknown were in progress, Raleigh was making his way into the no-less-dangerous terrain of court politics, and of Ireland. Having fallen in with Leicester and become one of his protégés, Raleigh then fell foul of Burghley’s horrible son-in-law, the Earl of Oxford, who somehow persuaded Raleigh to carry a challenge to Philip Sidney. Sir Philip accepted it and was prepared to fight the duel, but Oxford withdrew, and then attempted to embroil Raleigh in a murder plot against Sidney. When Raleigh would have none of it, he found he had made a bitter enemy of Oxford. Perhaps to escape all this unpleasantness, Raleigh went as captain over 100 soldiers to Ireland in 1580, and took part in the bloody engagement at Smerwick, where some Spanish and Italian adventurers were walled up in the Fort del Oro. Some 600 of them were slaughtered by Raleigh and his men. When the Queen heard of it, her only criticism was that Raleigh had spared the officers. Edmund Spenser was also present at Smerwick, and it was probably then that the two poets became friends.

  Much of 1580–1 was spent by Raleigh in Ireland: at Cork, and then at Lismore, where he accepted a temporary commission for the governorship of Munster. He was very nearly killed when making his way from Lismore to Cork with a troop of 800 men who were set upon by the Irish, who stabbed the horses of the Englishmen with their knives.10

  It was in December 1581 that Raleigh came back to London and it was then that he appeared at court in Greenwich and first attracted the notice of the Queen. The story told by Thomas Fuller in his Worthies was printed years after Raleigh died, and its authenticity has been doubted. Nevertheless, it is easy to see why it passed into legend: ‘[He] found the Queen walking still, meeting with a plashy place, she seemed to scruple going therein. Presently Raleigh cast and spread his new plush cloak on the ground; whereon the queen trod gently, rewarding him afterwards with many suits, for his so free and seasonable tender of so fair a foot cloth.’

  Whether or not Raleigh put his cloak in a puddle, he certainly attracted the devoted attention of Elizabeth. It was now some years since Leicester had committed the cardinal sin of matrimony, as well as becoming paunchy, white-haired and middle-aged. Hotspur had turned into Falstaff. She needed someone to love extravagantly, capriciously and to the point of enraging the rest of the court. Raleigh, an outrageous flirt, a man of colossal intelligence and enterprise and very deep reserves of humour, was the worthy object of her new-found love. ‘Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall,’ he scratched – prophetically – on a windowpane with his diamond ring. She reportedly added, ‘If thy heart fail thee, climb not at all.’ But if the story is true, she did not mean it. She wanted him to climb.

  His half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, died, and six months later Raleigh was granted Gilbert’s patent – the right to colonise America, authorising him to occupy ‘countries and territories not actually possessed of any Christian prince’.

  The Queen had given him a crumbling palace in which to live, none other than Durham House, the London residence of the Bishops of Durham, overlooking the Thames. This now became his centre of operations to plan the colonisation of America. He enlisted one of his most accomplished Oxford contemporaries, Thomas Harriot, a scientist and mathematician, who was determined that Raleigh’s expedition should have what Gilbert’s had so lamentably lacked: adequate navigation. Harriot conducted classes in navigation with Raleigh’s captains, pilots and masters. Meanwhile, Raleigh got in touch with the younger Richard Hakluyt, who was now ‘Preacher Hakluyt’, the English chaplain at the embassy in Paris. Hakluyt was engaged to present to the Queen what amounted to a manifesto for a full-scale colonial planting in America: the Discourse of Western Planting. Hakluyt presented a number of cogent reasons why America should be invented.

  First, it was to prevent the possible calamity of Native Americans being converted to Roman Catholicism. A modern sensibility might smile (or, depending upon temperament, be offended) at this belief, but if one considers the Enlightenment and the American Revolution of 1776 to be the natural prerequisite, it is not so absurd.

  Hakluyt’s most powerful arguments were economic. Trade with Spain and trade with Russia were sources of Elizabethan wealth. But trade with America could become much, much more lucrative. In Paris he had seen the vast quantities of furs coming from Newfoundland. The resources of America – minerals, spices, and other commodities – were limitless. The passage across the Atlantic was easy, involving no cut across other countries. English colonisation could, he maintained, be humane, by contrast with the Spanish and Portuguese subjugations of the West Indies and South America. In 1580 Philip II was the ruler of all the European settlements so far established in the New World. It was time for a change, and Hakluyt, the geographer of brilliance – geography taking in demography, anthropology and what we should call sociology – saw that Spain’s population was falling; England’s was rising, and England’s time had come. He knew (as did everyone) that getting money out of Queen Elizabeth was like getting blood from a stone, except in the case of a favourite. As a man who had dreamed since adolescence of colonial expansionism, Hakluyt could see that Raleigh, who had captured the Queen’s heart, was the ideal man to open her purse-strings.

  By April 1584 Raleigh was able to send out an exploratory party, with two ships, captained by Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe. They came back from the coast of what is now North Carolina, and from the island of Roanoke, enraptured. English peas planted in the soil had grown fourteen inches in ten days. The Native Americans were ‘most gentle, loving and faithful, void of all guile and treason’. To prove it, Barlowe brought two of them with him to London: Manteo and Wanchese. Thomas Harriot set to work with them to see if he could write a grammar of the Algonquin language which they spoke. In order to transliterate their speech, Harriot devised a complicated thirty-six-digit alphabet. He was able to discover, from Manteo, that Roanoke Island was ruled by competing tribal chieftains. The most powerful of these, Wingina, had lately been wounded, which was why Barlowe had not met him on his reconnaissance. Most of Manteo’s talk appears to have been of the weapons and tactics of the other tribesmen, but Harriot was able to reconstruct from his conversations with the two Algonquin that Roanoke Island contained no suitable building materials. Hakluyt therefore urged upon the Queen that if they planned to construct a colonial settlement, they would need to transport ‘brickmakers, tilemakers, lymemakers, bricklayers, tillers, thackers (with reede, rushes, broome or strawe), sinkers of welles and finders of springs, quarrellers to digge, tile, rough masons, c
arpinters and lathmakers’. They would also need blacksmiths to ‘forge the irons of shovels’ and spade-makers that ‘may, out of the woods there, make spades like those of Devonshire’. Health would also be a major consideration. The whole enterprise could be destroyed by an epidemic of some as-yet-unknown disease, so it would be necessary to take doctors and what medical supplies then existed. (As always, when reading of medical preparations in history, the modern reader makes the mental note that they would have been more likely to survive without the quackery of the medical men.)

  Raleigh flatteringly deemed that ‘Virginia’, in honour of the Virgin Queen, would be an appropriate name for the first English colony in the New World. He was rewarded with a knighthood for this pretty idea and she named him ‘Lord and Governor of Virginia’. Elizabeth could not spare him to make the voyage himself, so that expedition to colonise Roanoke Island was commanded by Raleigh’s cousin, the hot-tempered Sir Richard Grenville. (‘He was of so hard a complection,’ wrote one contemporary, ‘[that] he would carouse three or foure glasses of wine, and in a braverie take the glasses between his teeth and crash them in peeces and swallow them downe, so that oftentimes the blood ran out of his mouth.’)

  The other commander, with more responsibility for the actual establishment of the colony, was Ralph Lane. In addition there was Thomas Cavendish, the second Englishman to circumnavigate the world, Thomas Harriot and John White, one of the best cartographers and illustrators of the age. When he came back to London, White was introduced by Hakluyt to Theodore DeBry, who made twenty-three engravings of White’s drawings, which one can now see in the British Museum. It is therefore possible for a wider readership to see what the Native American inhabitants of Roanoke looked like. There are pictures of the English arrival. We see the women and children. We see the men making boats, broiling fish, praying and dancing. We see their winter clothes, their hunting clothes, their religious regalia. We see a conjuror, a great lady and a great lord. Raleigh was not what a modern age calls a racist. After Manteo had been baptised, Raleigh appointed him – rather than one of the Europeans on the expedition – Lord of Roanoke, subject only to the Weroanza, or chieftain, Queen Elizabeth.11