The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I

by John Cooper

  On his third and final attempt, John Davis was able to sail into Baffin Bay and as far as the pack ice at 73° latitude before his dangerously depleted supplies forced him back to Devon. To get so far and find his way safely home again was an astonishing feat of navigation and daring, the equivalent in modern times to making it back from the Moon. The Spanish Armada and Walsingham’s death put an end to Davis’s search for a western route to the Indies, although he remained convinced that one existed. His main bequest to future explorers was the ‘Davis backstaff’, a new kind of quadrant which enabled the elevation of the sun to be measured more precisely. He remembered his patron by naming Cape Walsingham at 66° 1ʹ 60 N; other than an anonymous Victorian office on the site of Seething Lane, the only place where he is still commemorated.30

  The prize which lured John Davis through Atlantic storms and ice, the sudden fogs and the constant fear of sailing uncharted waters in boats of less than sixty tons, was an exclusive English trade route to the wealth of the east. For others, the new world itself was the intended destination. One visitor to Mortlake who stood out from the rest was Sir George Peckham, a squire from an inland county with his own particular take on the opportunities to be grasped in the Americas. Peckham was a recusant Catholic, trusted to serve as Sheriff of Buckinghamshire but then imprisoned in 1580 for sheltering missionary priests. Unwilling to renounce either his allegiance or his faith, he resolved to establish a loyal Catholic colony in America. In company with Sir Thomas Gerard, a Lancashire Catholic who had subscribed to Frobisher’s mining expedition of 1577, Peckham cast around for a potential commander. They found their answer in Sir Humphrey Gilbert: a ruthless enemy of Catholic rebels in Ireland but also a proven man of action, commissioned by the queen to search out and settle any ‘remote, heathen and barbarous lands not actually possessed of any Christian prince or people’. Walsingham was all in favour of the plan, which gave Catholic loyalists an alternative to the conspiracy centres in Paris and Rome: emigration without political exile.

  Thomas Gerard’s sights had originally been set on Ulster rather than America. His offer to transport his tenants to be a buffer between the O’Neills and the clan MacDonald had been taken seriously by Lord Deputy Sidney, but Elizabeth was unwilling to fund him. A new-world colony, which ought to be able to pay for itself if half the tales were true, was a far more attractive proposition for the queen. In June 1582 Peckham became the lord of two million acres in what would one day become Rhode Island, pinpointed by Dee as the most auspicious place to settle. Gerard, who was granted one and a half million acres, and the other major proprietors (not all of them Catholic, since Philip Sidney was among them) made up a ruling council under Gilbert as governor. Just as in Ireland, a feudal hierarchy of settlers would stretch out below them, ranked according to the scale of their investment.

  Gilbert and Peckham imagined their American colony in intricate detail. Every farmer of sixty acres should have a long-bow, arrows and a target, while two thousand acres demanded the provision of a warhorse – ‘after such time as God shall send sufficient horses in these parts’, as Gilbert added with a rare dash of realism. Country parishes would be no more than three miles square, with a resident minister and three hundred acres of glebeland. Bishops and archbishops would be provided with vast seignories of their own. A central treasure-house would be established to fund schools and offer loans, while lands were reserved for soldiers maimed in the wars; a recognition that the English occupation would not go unopposed. Ordinary settlers were to be supplied with a hatchet, saw and spade, and enough grain and beans to get them started on the land. Almost as an afterthought, special privileges would be offered ‘to encourage women to go on the voyage’, though what these could have been is not recorded.

  While Gilbert set out to find a suitable site for the colony, Peckham turned to print to advertise the venture. His True Reporte of the Late Discoveries and Possession of the New-Found Landes was dedicated to Walsingham in 1583. Peckham added his own gloss to the alleged abundance of the new world: the stocks of fresh- and salt-water fish, the grapes as big as a man’s thumb, potato roots and the ‘grain called maize’. Gold, silver and precious stones could be cheaply bartered with the savages, who would benefit from the Christian gospel (no distinction being made between Catholic and reformed) and an education in ‘mechanical occupations, arts, and liberal sciences’. What cause for complaint, asked Peckham with apparent sincerity, could they possibly have? Much was also made of the Welsh-sounding names to be found in the Americas, proving that Elizabeth’s ancestor Prince Madog had settled in Florida in the twelfth century.

  Sir William Pelham was one of several prominent figures to offer verses endorsing the True Reporte. To valiant minds, every land was a native soil. Other European powers had already woken up to the fact:

  Our foreign neighbours bordering hard at hand,

  Have found it true, to many a thousand’s gain;

  And are enriched by this abounding land,

  While pent at home, like sluggards we remain.

  But though they have, to satisfy their will:

  Enough is left, our coffers yet to fill.

  The English cause was wholly virtuous, and would receive the blessing of God:

  Then England thrust among them for a share,

  Since title just, and right is wholly thine.

  Richard Bingham addressed his own exhortation to young patriots in search of adventure:

  Then launch ye noble youths into the main,

  No lurking perils lie amid the way:

  Your travail shall return you treble gain,

  And make your names renowned another day.

  For valiant minds, through twenty seas will roam:

  And fish for luck, while sluggards lie at home.31

  Like Christopher Carleill, Peckham was at pains to emphasise ‘the easiness and shortness of the voyage’ to and from America. The truth was much harsher, and he knew it. By the time the True Reporte went into its second edition, Gilbert had already succumbed to the storms of the North Atlantic. Edward Hayes, the only captain to make it safely back to port, was able to tell Peckham what had happened. Gilbert’s fleet of four ships had made initially for Newfoundland, where he landed at St John’s harbour to read out the queen’s commission and dig a piece of turf, duly witnessed by a cluster of European sailors. By symbolically cultivating the land Gilbert had possessed it for Elizabeth, like a medieval noble entering on his estates. The royal arms were erected ‘engraven in lead, and inscribed upon a pillar of wood’ as permanent markers of English sovereignty. His next destination was Sable Island off Nova Scotia, en route towards the projected colony in Rhode Island, but the sinking of one ship and near mutiny of a second compelled the rest to turn for home. Gilbert lost his life in a storm off the Azores, brazening the weather with a book in his hand. Hayes caught his last words on the wind, ‘We are as near to heaven by sea as by land’, before he and his crew were overwhelmed. The Squirrel, which Gilbert had insisted on taking as his flagship, was just eight tons.32

  Peckham hoped to persuade Gilbert’s executors to carry on his legacy, or failing that to recruit another backer. But Adrian Gilbert and Walter Raleigh had enterprises of their own, and Philip Sidney’s dream had burst when the queen had forbidden him to sail. The scheme for loyal Catholic emigration swiftly foundered, taking its deviser with it. Within a year Peckham was in prison again, guilty of favouring the mass over holy communion. Far from becoming the proprietor of endless acres in America, he was forced to part with his family lands to pay his crushing recusancy fines. It was an obscure ending for a man who might have taken the heat out of the English Catholic question, to the acceptance of all sides. The best that can be said is that his celebration of the new world was widely circulated in Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations of the English Nation, and so helped to shape England’s future relationship with North America and the sea.

  If John Dee was the principal publicist of a British empire in the 1570
s, then the same could be said for Hakluyt during the decade that followed. A Church of England clergyman, Richard Hakluyt (called ‘the younger’ to distinguish him from his cousin, a lawyer who advised the crown on its claim to America) used the stability of an Oxford college fellowship, a prebend in Bristol Cathedral and a Suffolk country parish to write books about exploration which would be read for generations. Hakluyt was more editor than writer, freely making use of the work of others. The 1589 first edition of Principal Navigations was dedicated to Walsingham with a warmth which was more than formulaic:

  whereas I have always noted your wisdom to have had a special care of the honour of her majesty, the good reputation of our country, and the advancing of navigation, the very walls of this our Island, as the oracle is reported to have spoken of the sea forces of Athens: and whereas I acknowledge in all dutiful sort how honourably both by your letter and speech I have been animated in this and other my travels, I see my self bound to make presentment of this work to your self, as the fruits of your own encouragements, and the manifestation both of my unfeigned service to my prince and country, and of my particular duty to your honour.33

  An island with walls. Hakluyt’s memorable image resurfaces a year or so later in Shakespeare’s Richard II during John of Gaunt’s ‘sceptred isle’ speech, perhaps indebted to Principal Navigations: ‘this precious stone set in a silver sea, which serves it in the office of a wall, or as a moat defensive to a house’ (II, I, 46–8). Hakluyt may also have been thinking about the very real sea-walls which Walsingham had ordered to fortify the harbour at Dover.

  The phenomenal success of Principal Navigations is recalled in the many first editions which survive to this day – at Middle Temple and Cashel Cathedral, Harvard University and New York Public Library, three copies each in the Folger and the Huntington, ten distributed between the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, and more besides. The preface tells the story of what amounted to Hakluyt’s second conversion, to the cause of overseas discovery. Visiting his cousin at his legal chambers in London, the younger Hakluyt was shown the ‘division of the earth’ according to ancient knowledge and the findings of modern explorers. Transfixed by the map in front of him, his thoughts turned to the 107th Psalm: ‘they which go down to the sea in ships, and occupy by the great waters, they see the works of the Lord, and His wonders in the deep’. A new sense of vocation quickened within Hakluyt, reflecting both his passionate Christian faith and his desire to see the English break out of their ‘sluggish security’. To remain inert while England’s enemies spread their net across the world was to expose crown and nation to danger. As if to alert his readers to all that might be lost, Hakluyt completed Principal Navigations on 17 November: Queen Elizabeth’s accession day.

  The dedication to Walsingham reflected a relationship which dated back to Hakluyt’s days as a don at Christ Church. His earliest known work, a pamphlet recommending the seizure of the Strait of Magellan, was either commissioned by Walsingham or written to gain his attention. From 1580 onwards Hakluyt was collecting material and interviewing mariners in preparation for the plantation of North America. Divers Voyages touching the Discoverie of America appeared in 1582, fuelling the atmosphere of excitement in which Peckham and Humphrey Gilbert were able to stake their claims in New England. Walsingham praised Hakluyt for his efforts to publicise ‘the discovery of the Western parts yet unknown’, and encouraged him to continue both for his own private good – a hint of the preferment to come – as well as the ‘public benefit of this realm’. In spring 1583 he was in Bristol, attempting to sell Christopher Carleill’s projected voyage to the mayor and aldermen. The following September Walsingham sent him to France, the only foreign country which Hakluyt would see with his own eyes, as chaplain to the English ambassador Sir Edward Stafford. There was little love lost between Walsingham and Stafford, which makes it all the more interesting that Hakluyt was soon acting as the principal secretary’s eyes and ears within the Paris embassy.

  Using his chaplaincy as cover, Hakluyt was able to gather a mass of information on French and Spanish interests in North America. A letter of January 1584 reveals the range of his activities in Paris. He promised Walsingham reports from Dieppe and St Malo. He visited a warehouse of Canadian pelts purchased by the royal furrier, and reported on gossip that the French were planning to send a mission of ‘many friars and other religious persons’ to the new world, although Hakluyt suspected that this might be misinformation: ‘I think they not be in haste to do it’. He met the pretender to the Portuguese throne, Don Antonio, ‘and five or six of his best captains and pilots’, and had hopes of meeting a man from Savoy who had travelled to Japan. He rode to Rouen to investigate French plans to build a trading post in Maine or Nova Scotia, and he made contact with Walsingham’s agents in the Basque country close to the Spanish border. Somehow Hakluyt got access to the royal library in the Abbey of St Martin, where he made notes on the voyages of Jacques Cartier to the Gulf of St Lawrence in 1534–6. He also monitored the activities of the English exile community in Paris, briefing the government on the Catholic response to Lord Burghley’s propaganda tract The Execution of Justice. Given Stafford’s double dealing, it is quite possible that Hakluyt kept a watch on him too. When Walsingham was sick, he dealt with Carleill instead. All told, he was a valuable asset.

  The agents in Walsingham’s service generally worked for money, laced with Protestantism to a greater or lesser degree. Hakluyt’s motivation was subtly different. He welcomed the benefits which his patron could put his way, but he placed an even higher value on the chance to promote ‘our western planting and discovery’. Sending news that he had approached the Genoese banker Horatio Palavicini ‘to become an adventurer in those western voyages’, Hakluyt appealed for lectures in mathematics and navigation in Oxford and London; if Walsingham agreed to fund them, it would be ‘the best hundred pounds that was bestowed this five hundred years’. There was even the chance that Hakluyt would be released from his chaplaincy to sail westwards in person. Judging by the tone of his letters, this is what he truly yearned to do. He told Walsingham that he was ready to ‘go myself into the action’, ‘in the service of God and my country to employ all my simple observations, readings and conference’. But as an Oxford academic with no experience of the sea, Hakluyt was more useful in Paris. By the time he was finally free to leave in 1588, it was too late: the Elizabethan experiment in empire was effectively over.34

  Hakluyt’s influence needs to be measured in words more than deeds. A busy editor and translator, he also made his own unique contribution to the cause of English overseas expansion. Hakluyt spent the summer of 1584 in London putting together his Discourse of Western Planting, twenty-one chapters which were part sermon and part practical guide to the settlement of America. The manuscript original which Hakluyt presented to the queen on 5 October is lost, but a contemporary copy survives in New York Public Library; this may be the one which Hakluyt paid a scrivener to prepare for Walsingham to keep. Hakluyt probably worked on the Discourse at Walsingham’s house in Seething Lane, making use of the books and maps in his study. The title-page states that it was written at the ‘request and direction’ of Walter Raleigh, who had recently despatched two ships to assert the rights in America which he had been granted following the death of Humphrey Gilbert. Walsingham would come to resent Raleigh’s easy manner with the queen, a tense situation made worse when Elizabeth granted her favourite the lands once belonging to Anthony Babington, but for the present the two worked together to get Hakluyt a hearing at court.

  The Discourse of Western Planting is easily overlooked, its outline obscured by the far more famous Principal Navigations. The text wasn’t printed until 1877, although the assumption that an idea is more important simply because it is published would have seemed strange to the Elizabethan mind. John Dee was highly selective about what he allowed to go into print; manuscript was the proper forum for advice and debate. By presenting his argument as the work of his own hand, Hakluyt
played to the sensitivities of a queen who loathed the public discussion of state secrets. Long sections of the Discourse are quoted from Sir George Peckham, and the Destruycion de las Indias by Bartholomé de las Casas, and John Ribault’s Whole and True Discovery of Terra Florida. Again, the modern equation between originality and impact can be misleading. Hakluyt skilfully selected his evidence, researching his subject and presenting his conclusion with all the care of an Oxford disputation. The ample examples, the repetition and the scrupulous citing of authorities were familiar techniques of academic rhetoric.

  When Hakluyt does elect to speak in person, his voice comes through with conviction and a powerful sense of urgency. Explorers from many nations had found America to be ‘a place wonderful fertile and of strong situation’, its people naturally gentle and the climate so benevolent that two harvests could be gathered in a single year. The commodities on offer in this aromatic Eden run on for page after page, a shopping list for the senses: oranges and almonds, cloves and pepper, huge woods and mighty fish, silkworms and sassafras. The wealth of South America had elevated the monarchies of Spain and Portugal, rulers over parched and unyielding landscapes at home, to a scale of power and grandeur which they could scarcely have imagined. But there was ample space to settle north of Florida, ‘if by our slackness we suffer not the French or others to prevent us’. The best part of America was still there for the taking, more suited to the industrious and godly nature of the English people than the torrid southern territories which had been conquered by Spain. Aware of the importance of dynastic continuity to the queen, Hakluyt threw in a prayer encouraging her to finish the work of her forebears: