A Family of Islands

by Alec Waugh

  Although he was already preparing his attack upon the English, he signed this letter as a viceroy. ‘When,’ Hawkins was later to report, ‘I questioned certain movements of his men, he replied that he, in the faith of a viceroy, would be our defence from all villainies.’

  The Spanish surprise attack was carefully worked out. Troops were to be embarked on to a merchantman; the fraternizing Spanish troops upon the island were to attack the Englishmen with hidden weapons. The English ships were to be captured and boarded; one of the hostages was to murder Hawkins.

  The English were taken unawares. They were outnumbered and outgunned. On shore they collapsed quickly, and the island and its guns were soon in Spanish hands, but on board they fought with skill and valour. Indeed, the Spanish second-in-command stated that had the English fought as well on land as they did at sea, the result might have been different. Hawkins encouraged his gunners with his customary gusto. He had his page bring him a measure of beer in a silver mug and drank their healths in it. As he set the mug down, a shot shattered it. ‘Fear nothing,’ he cried, ‘for God, who hath preserved me from this shot, will also deliver us from these traitors and villains.’ By now the Jesus was immobile, but Hawkins could not leave her until he had transferred to another and stouter ship, the Minion, the gold and pearls that were the profit of his trading. Only one other ship was fit to sail, the Judith, a fifty-ton ship under the command of Francis Drake. Hawkins fought till none of his Spanish adversaries was fit to follow him. At dusk he sailed out of range. In the morning he found that the Judith had ‘forsook him in his great misery’.

  When the Spaniards took over the Jesus, they found in its holds, in addition to fifty Negro slaves and a certain amount of merchandise, the ten hostages sent to Hawkins by the viceroy. Hawkins had left them there, in the hope that the viceroy would show a similar clemency to the English hostages. His hopes were ill-founded. In addition to the hostages, Don Martin held Robert Barrett, whom Hawkins had sent under a flag of truce with a message to the Spaniards, before the outbreak of hostilities. Barrett and the hostages were subjected to the same treatment that was accorded to the prisoners taken in the action. Most of them were examined by the Inquisition; Barrett was burned at the stake in Seville, some were so ill-used in prison that they died of hunger; others ended their lives as galley slaves. Only one of the hostages returned safe to England, in 1590.

  Hawkins continued eastward in the Minion with some two hundred men aboard. In the heat of the action he had had no time to transfer provisions from the Jesus; he had thought of his booty first. There was not nearly enough food aboard to feed the crew. They lived on stewed hides, on rats, cats and parrots. Some of the men asked to be set ashore, to try their fortune with the Indians and the Spaniards. Over a hundred were, some of them to be killed by the Indians, others to fall into the hands of the Spaniards and be subjected to the exactions of the Inquisition. The records of their interrogations remain, including that of the various punishments to which they were condemned at a Mexican auto-da-fé. A certain leniency was shown to those who had come to manhood after Elizabeth’s accession and had therefore not had the opportunity of instruction in the true faith during the reign of Mary Tudor, and it is known that Hawkins’ nephew Paul, who was captured at San Juan, was allowed to settle in New Spain and marry there. For the most part, the rest is silence.

  Hawkins’ bad luck continued. Winds were contrary. His men died of ill nutrition, and the survivors had scarcely enough strength to work the ship. Eventually, on the last day of December, he arrived at Vigo. It was risky for him to land, but unless he had supplies he would be unable to reach England; and he had the money with which to make his purchases. Relying on the good sense and good will of the average man, he decided to ‘put on an act’. Half dead of hunger though he was, he dressed himself in his finest clothes, breeches of crimson velvet, a jacket of scarlet leather trimmed with silver braid, a silken cloak and a gold chain. The Spaniards, with their love of pomp, of colour and of breeding, could not resist a handsome man endowed with the grand manner. To the fury of King Philip, his demands were granted.

  To his crew the sudden plenty was to prove disastrous, as in 1946, Europeans crossing to America after years of semi-starvation found that their withered stomachs could not contain an unrestricted diet. In addition to the men that had died on the voyage, over forty more died in Vigo Bay. Hawkins found a few recruits for his ship. But the Spanish ambassador in England reported that there were not more than fifteen survivors of the hundred who had sailed from Mexico.

  Life was accounted cheap in those days, and the gold and pearls that Hawkins brought back represented a profit for the syndicate that had financed the enterprise. But far more had happened on ‘that troublesome voyage’ than the loss or profit on the sale of six hundred slaves or the death of four hundred seamen; the fate of the West Indian Islands had been cast; the possibility of an Anglo-Spanish alliance had been destroyed. From now on, it was to be war to the death ‘beyond the lines’; the way lay open to the buccaneers; what Spain could not hold, France and England would possess; and as the glory of Spain receded, the Caribbean was to become increasingly the arena in which the rivalry of France and England was renewed from one reign to the next.

  3 Beyond the Lines

  Hidden from the world, I rule with a little piece of paper the destinies of the hemispheres.’ So wrote His Most Catholic Majesty, Philip II of Spain, in the last years of his life, at the close of the sixteenth century. He wrote it at his desk in the Escurial, the fantastic edifice with which he commemorated his victory over the French at Saint-Quentin on August 10, 1537, a day sacred to Saint Lawrence.

  Philip II has often been compared with Louis XIV of France, and the basic differences between them cannot be more easily appreciated than in a comparison between Versailles and the Escurial. Versailles is the playground of a pleasure-loving monarch, known as ‘the Sun King’, who strove to dazzle the world with his achievements. The Escurial is a convent, a church, a palace and a mausoleum. It was not built, as was Versailles, in a spirit of self-glorification, but to make manifest the glory of God.

  Set on the southwestern slopes of the Guadarramas so as to be visible from the greatest range of viewpoints, surrounded by rocky hills and thin, stunted vegetation, three and a half thousand feet above the sea, exposed to the cold winds of the sierras, it took twenty-one years to build. It was built in the form of the gridiron on which St Lawrence suffered. The cloisters and its courts were its bars, the towers at the corners of the monastery were its inverted legs, and the palace which extended its length was its handle. The ground plan indicates an area of four hundred thousand square feet. It has seven towers, fifteen gateways, more than twelve thousand doors and windows. The diameter-of the dome is sixty feet, its height at the centre over three hundred feet. The style is Doric, bold and simple, which provides a dramatic contrast with the bronze, marble and pictures of the High Altar, and with the Royal Mausoleum, a sumptuous octagonal chamber with twenty niches, filled with black marble urns for the ashes of kings and of their mothers. Here were to lie his own ashes beside his father’s, and those of all the successors to the throne for two hundred years, except Philip V and Ferdinand VI. It was constructed mainly of granite, which was hewn from a nearby quarry, and some of the stones were so huge that fifty yoke of oxen were needed to drag them up the hill. The resources of the New World and the old were ransacked for the rich materials that its adornment needed, jasper from Burgo de Osmer, damask and velvets from Granada, gold and silver from Peru. Its library, which contained the King’s own collection, was among thé most valuable in Europe. The Escurial is one of the great masterpieces of the Renaissance, and it was here, in a small cell-like room, that Philip laboured over his files.

  Nothing escaped the scrutiny of his relentless industry. He combined in his person the portfolios of half a dozen ministries, and not even his father had exerted wider powers. In 1580, when the strain on his relations with England was growing
keener, he annexed the throne of Portugal, which brought him not only the great port of Lisbon, but Brazil, the Guinea coast and trading posts in the Far East; an annexation which created difficulties for the Portuguese economy, closing Lisbon to the Netherlanders and opening the Far East to Holland and to Britain.

  Philip had the perpetual problem of France’s growing power; he had to keep France encircled, through his ownership of Milan and Naples. Italy was the corridor between Vienna and Madrid. His brother was the Emperor. Flanders was equally important; it covered France’s eastern flank. Without it, Spain would cease to be a European power. He could, if opposition became too great, dispense with the Dutch provinces, but he must hold Belgium. He was oppressed by the claims of power politics, but he saw those claims in terms not of self-aggrandizement but of his mission to extend and to defend the faith. He had to limit the rising power of France. He had to keep her weak, but he also had to keep her Catholic. He could only fulfil the various claims upon him through the wealth of the New World. A large portion of his time in that chill comfortless room was devoted to the dispatches from his governors and the reports from the Ministry in Seville.

  In England, in Holland and in parts of France, the name of Philip II is one of the most hated in modern history. By the Spaniards he is deeply loved. He was their first real king. His father had spoken Spanish badly and had spent less than a quarter of his life in Spain. Charles V’s affiliations were with Austria and Flanders. He spoke Flemish; he enjoyed the heavy drinking and eating and the coarse jesting of the Belgians. Philip was a Spaniard in heart and training. He was the kind of man the Spaniards most admire – dignified, austere, devout; passionate in his youth and avid of entertainment, but in middle age conscientious, industrious, a family man. He was a considerate husband; his wives adored him and his servants were devoted to him; he was scrupulous in honesty and his sense of duty. Moreover, he shared the ambitions of his fellow countrymen. They too were insistent on a Spain free of foreigners and unbelievers. They were intensely nationalistic. They had lived under the chains of Islam long enough. They distrusted the Moriscos, the converted Moors; they believed that they were not only secretly continuing to perform Moslem rites but were in correspondence with the Moors in Africa, aiding the Barbary pirates and ready to welcome an invasion. They were also distrustful of the Jews who had assisted the original invasion by acting as guides and spies, who as Orientals were closer in sympathy with the Moors than with the Spaniards. If the label ‘fifth columnist’ had existed then, it would have been attached to the Moriscos and the Jews. The Spanish people applauded and approved the Inquisition.

  One of Philip’s first public acts on his accession was to attend an auto-da-fé (an act of faith) at Valladolid. It was the type of ceremony dearest to the Spanish heart. It combined the pomp of a Roman triumph with the terrors of the Day of Judgment. The auto-da-fé was the apotheosis of the Inquisition. After months of imprisonment, torture, interrogation, the heretics were brought into the open to confess their guilt and suffer the penalties that were to be exacted of them. It was a day of celebration. At one end of the square, on a richly carpeted platform, were the seats of the Inquisitors, with the arms of the Holy Office set above them. Opposite a large scaffold was the royal gallery. At six on a May morning, every bell in the capital began to toll, and the procession started from the prison. The condemned were attended by two familiars of the Holy Office; those who were to be burned, by two friars in addition. Those who were to be reconciled wore sable; those who were not to be forgiven were draped in a loose yellow sack, with a conical pasteboard cap embroidered with figures of flames that were fed by devils. Many of the prisoners limped as a result of torture. One such – a man of noble birth – paused before Philip’s throne. ‘Is it thus,’ he asked, ‘that you allow your innocent subjects to be persecuted?’ The King replied, ‘If it were my own son, I would fetch the wood to burn him, were he such a wretch as thou art.’

  The cortège that followed these unlucky wretches glittered with Renaissance pageantry. There were the magistrates of the city, the judges of the court, the ecclesiastical orders, the nobles of the land on horseback. The members of the tribunal carried the standard of crimson damask, the arms of the Inquisition and the insignia of the founders. There was a long train of familiars. It was a brilliant spectacle on that bright May morning.

  A sermon was delivered. The Grand Inquisitor administered an oath. The populace on its knees swore to maintain the purity of the faith and to inform against unbelievers. Philip too took the oath; he rose from his throne; his sword flashed from its scabbard.

  The secretary of the tribunal read out the crimes and sentences. For the reconciled there was loss of property and civil rights; an imprisonment that might well be lifelong. The condemned, with cords round their necks, in their hands a cross or inverted torch, were handed over to the corregidor of the city to be dealt with ‘in all kindness and mercy’. The place of execution lay outside the city. Those who had admitted their guilt were, as an act of grace, garrotted before being burned. The Spaniard’s delight in ceremonial had been indulged, his relish of cruelty had been assuaged, and it was to this tribunal that the English and French sailors captured in the Caribbean were brought for judgment.

  Philip, seated in the Escurial, reading the reports of his governors, his ambassadors and spies, had no illusions as to the extent and depth of the hatred that was mounting against him across the Channel. But he was in many ways a patient man. He had so many obligations, so many responsibilities, that he could endure minor irritations. He was, moreover, very much in debt. Declared insolvent as early as 1557, he had, through a bankruptcy in 1572, ruined an Augsburg banker with a debt of four million florins. He could only obtain loans at usurious rates of interest, and always working against him behind the scenes were the Jews whom his ancestors had expelled. He had to proceed slowly. English historians tend to present his reign in terms of his conflict with Elizabeth. But actually, to him, his conflict with the crescent was more important, and it could be argued that in the light of Christendom’s longer story, the victory of Lepanto was more significant than the defeat of the Armada.

  Philip was a patient man. During his brief period as consort of the English crown, he had urged moderation upon Mary Tudor. He had instructed his confessor to preach against the burning of Hooper, his view being that action against the crown should be treated as treachery, not as heresy. ‘In England,’ so Sir Charles Petrie explains in his biography of Philip, ‘there was every reason to avoid making religious martyrs and there was not the slightest need to do so, for the same end could be achieved by different means. A large number of the Protestants burned by Mary could easily have been punished by death in the ordinary way for murder, breach of the peace, high treason or some other criminal offence, for most of them were engaged in subversive activities which could have been construed as treasonable by any sixteenth-century government.’

  Time, he believed, was on his side. He had the main strategy of the New World planned. Hispaniola, Cuba, Puerto Rico, which had seemed so important on their discovery, had become now unimportant except as bastions for his silver fleet, but as that they were of supreme importance. No interference, no interlopers could be allowed. The Pope’s bestowal of the Caribbean was a sacred trust. His temper rose when he learned of each new flaunting of his authority. As the months went by, his wrath became concentrated upon one figure, El Draqui, the Plymouth pirate, Francis Drake.

  When Hawkins set sail on his ‘troublesome voyage’, his cousin Francis Drake was in his middle twenties. Drake’s conduct, in command of the Judith at San Juan de Ulúa, when he withdrew his ship from the action and left Hawkins to face the consequences of Spanish treason, has caused his biographers some concern. Hawkins described himself as ‘forsaken in our great misery’, but Hawkins was given to self-pity, as his final letter to his sovereign shows, and there is no indication that the Hawkins family felt any resentment toward Drake. In after years Hawkins was ready to
serve with Drake and under him. They were both Plymouth men; the same town continued to hold them both, and Drake’s expedition six years later against Nombre de Dios, a private enterprise launched from Plymouth, could have hardly been undertaken without family approval. Hawkins’ accusation was a permanent entry on Drake’s record, and was later brought up against him by Frobisher, but at this distance of time, and with scanty records at our disposal, it may be assumed that it was generally believed he had acted as a good sailor should in bringing his ship home safe. Certainly that episode is the one unfavourable entry in his record.

  In character Drake was very different from his cousin. He had not Hawkins’ happy-go-lucky nature. His upbringing had been hard. At Gillingham Reach on the Medway, the Tudor navy’s home port, his father had been a Bible reader to the ships. It was a bare existence. From his father he acquired a hatred of Popery and a faith in a personal God little less intense than Philip’s. As Philip did, he accepted his reverses as the will of God. As a boy of ten he had seen, after the failure of Wyatt’s rebellion against Mary Tudor, corpses swinging from gibbets along the Medway. That rebellion had been a protest against Mary’s Spanish marriage. From the very start he had thought of the Spaniards in terms of cruelty. He never went to school. Such learning as he had came to him from his father. He learned to read and write. He never expressed himself easily on paper, but he acquired a knack for oratory that stood in greater stead one who had to command men face-to-face. He could preach a vigorous sermon and in his later years he was an effective Parliamentarian. But his real education came from the hulk that was his home. As a boy, the sound of washing water was in his ears, and his cot rose and fell with the tides. It was said of the Spaniards who manned Philip’s galleons that they were not sailors, but soldiers afloat. Drake was a seaman first.