by Neil Hanson
If Drake had grown rich from his voyages, the Crown had profited even more handsomely. Privateers carried out attacks on enemy shipping without any charge to the Treasury at all; only six of the 26 ships that attacked Cadiz in 1587 were supplied by the Queen, and 192 of the 226 ships that played some part in the Armada campaign were privately owned, 83 of them commandeered without compensation. The Crown also took a handsome share of the prizes those privateers secured. Within two years of the Admiralty Court being charged with assessing the value of such prizes, a judge of the court estimated that “Her Majesty has got and saved by these reprisals since they began above two hundred thousand pounds.” “Instead of controlling and taxing its subjects, the Crown entered with them into a race for private profit,” and the Queen lent her ships to Drake’s voyages and eagerly sought her substantial share of the proceeds. Her typical reaction to the return to port of one of her privateers was: “Her Majesty may be duly informed what profit may be looked for by that voyage.” She also often used her position to force through a grossly unequal division of the spoils. When the carrack the Madre de Dios was taken, laden with a fabulous cargo, Elizabeth offered each seaman £1 as his share of a prize valued at several hundred thousand pounds. Her greed received its due reward when the infuriated seamen stole vast quantities of pearls and precious stones, removing as much as three-quarters of the ship’s cargo. A single seaman sold 1,800 diamonds and 300 rubies to a dealer for £130. Even so the Queen still recouped a return of 3,000 per cent on her £3,000 investment. 10
Despite the riches she garnered, Elizabeth always denied any prior knowledge of or responsibility for the privateers. In any case, attempts to regulate privateering were “a striking example of late Elizabethan administration at its worst—feeble and corrupt”—and the Admiralty was “at once a department of state under the authority of the Crown and a private province or liberty of the Lord Admiral.” In theory, letters of marque were issued in exchange for undertakings that privateers would sail directly to enemy waters, attack only enemy ships and possessions, and return any prizes garnered to an English port where they could be inventoried and valued, with a tenth of the value being paid to the Lord Admiral, Lord Charles Howard. In practice, neutral ships were often attacked, part or all of the prize cargoes would often be sold abroad or on the black market, and “tenths” and customs duties were evaded. Such was the power and influence of those involved in privateering—Lord Charles Howard himself, Sir Walter Ralegh, Sir George Carey and Thomas Myddleton, one of the richest London merchants, and, of course, the Queen were just a few of those with a vested interest—that blind eyes were routinely turned to corrupt practices, and neutral merchants and ship-owners had very little hope of any restitution for stolen cargoes. Attempts to control such piracy were perfunctory at best, and Elizabeth further undermined them by her characteristic insistence that ships to patrol against pirates should be hired at local expense and their men paid only out of whatever prizes they could take. In effect those regulating piracy were being encouraged to take up piracy themselves, and not a single pirate was ever apprehended at sea.
After 1585, the open but undeclared war with Spain was marked by a period of “general reprisal” in which any Spanish ship was fair game for any English privateer, whether or not he had suffered alleged losses at Spanish hands, but even in less troubled times Lord Howard complained that Letters of Reprisal were “disorderly handled, bought and sold for money” and the names of ships and owners erased and replaced by others. His complaints would have carried more force had he not been so eager to profit from such activities himself. The real essence of his complaint was that in bypassing the Admiralty they were depriving him of his “tenths,” but he himself frequently sold commissions for cash without even bothering to notify the Admiralty Court. The Queen and her senior courtiers also took bribes—what else were the caskets of jewels that Sir Francis Drake was always careful to donate to her?—from privateers and merchant adventurers, originally established as the sole exporters of woollen cloth from England but now combining privateering with trade in a huge range of goods in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. One wrote to Burghley, “having full authority without account [my italics] to appear thankful, I have thought it my duty in regard to your most honourable favours to us . . . to promise and assure to pay or deliver to your use . . . the full sum of 1,000 pounds.” 11
English privateers not only accepted letters of marque from Elizabeth, they were equally happy to accept them from William of Orange, Henri of Navarre, Dom Antonio or indeed anyone else who would provide a legal pretext, no matter how flimsy, for attacks on Spanish ships and possessions. Without such authority they were mere pirates, but timing was often everything; what was piracy one day might be patriotism the next. When three Devonian captains, including Sir Walter Ralegh’s father, seized two Scottish ships in 1557, the Privy Council ordered the seizure of their own ships and goods as punishment, but when the Scots army crossed the border into England shortly afterwards, the ships and goods were restored and the men hailed as heroes.
Martin Frobisher was “a most valorous man, and one that is to be reckoned among the famousest men of the age for counsel and glory gotten at sea,” but he was also one of the most lawless of all privateers. Practically illiterate, he was sent to sea as a boy in 1553, left as a hostage to a chief in Guinea and then captured by the Portuguese, and did not return to England until 1559. He became a successful privateer and explorer, and made three voyages in search of the North-West Passage, but after the failure of the third in 1578 he fell out of favour at Court— Elizabeth was never slow to punish those who failed to produce a profit for the Crown—and made no further official voyages until he became Drake’s Vice-Admiral on a privateering voyage in 1585–86. In the intervening years he had lived by piracy, and even Elizabeth’s allies, the Dutch, were moved to complain about his depredations of their ships in the Channel. He was far from unique—“home waters [were] alive with felons, traitors, malefactors, depredations, robbers, trespassers and even debtors”—and the Hanseatic merchants, Denmark and Poland also made formal complaints to Elizabeth about the lawless actions of her privateers, without noticeable effect. 12
As legitimate avenues of commerce were closed by hostilities with Spain—by the summer of 1588 “trade came to a virtual standstill”— more and more merchants turned to privateering, sometimes in combination with their normal trade, sometimes in place of it. They also possessed the warehousing, transport and contacts to dispose of their prize goods at the optimum price, a facility denied to common seamen, who were forced to accept a fraction of the true value of the goods they sold. In the late 1580s and early 1590s a minimum of one hundred privateering voyages a year were being undertaken by English ships, and the true figure may well have been much higher—documentation of a trade that operated at the margins of legality was always scant. Even those who had lost no goods or ships to the Spaniards had no difficulty in obtaining letters of marque on payment of a suitable fee to the Lord Admiral, and one man claimed that there were “never less than 200 sail of voluntaries” off the coasts of Spain and her overseas possessions. Even an official list, which, given the number of ships sailing under forged, stolen or unofficial letters of marque, must have considerably understated the true figure, showed 236 privateers at sea in a period of just three years, and many of them must have made multiple voyages in that time.
Many ports also flourished on the trade, fitting out the privateering ships and establishing markets where goods of any sort, in any quantity, could be traded without questions about ownership or provenance. Torbay and the Isle of Wight were well-known havens of privateers, and several Irish ports, Milford Haven in Wales and Mead Holes on the Isle of Wight also housed flourishing black markets, where “such as make sale there are suspected to have some evil by the goods they there sell.” Much of the trade was not in treasure and precious metals but in basic materials and foodstuffs: hardwoods, hides, sugar, salt, iron, corn, Spanish an
d Gascon wines, salt-fish, nuts and olives. Prize goods may have accounted for as much as 15 per cent of the value of England’s total imports at the time, and “nothing is thought to have enriched the English most, nor done so much to allow many individuals to amass the wealth they are known to possess as the wars with the Spaniards.”13
The press gang was never needed for privateers; the reputation of a commander such as Drake and the prospect of plunder and prize money were enough to fill a ship with crew. Privateers were always heavily overmanned at their departure. They carried three men for every five tons burthen, triple the rate of a merchant ship, ensuring both a large boarding force and sufficient men to form prize crews to sail captured ships home. They also invariably sailed with a large complement of officers to guard against mutinies. Overmanning allowed for the inevitable wastage of men through casualties and disease, but by causing a more rapid depletion of water and provisions and even worse overcrowding and hygiene than the already appalling norm, it also ensured that scurvy, “the bloody flux” (dysentery) and ship’s fever (typhus) would strike the crew earlier and with even more virulence.
Despite the hardships and the low life expectancy, the lure of pillage and prize money continued to ensure that privateers were never short-handed. Some affected not to understand the reasons. “It is strange what misery such men will choose to endure in small ships of reprisal, though they be hopeless of gain, rather than serve Her Majesty, where their pay is certain, their diet plentiful and their labour not so great . . . The ships these men covet to go in are neither of service nor strength to the State or annoyance to the enemy. Their owners are men of as base condition as themselves . . . Thus have more seamen been consumed than in all other actions or enterprises against Spain. And no man dares reprove it, because the Lord Admiral is interested in all such prizes as these unprofitable ships take.”
Others found the attractions of privateers over the Queen’s service less hard to fathom. A prime cause for disaffection with the Queen’s ships was “the wages being so small,” which, as John Hawkins pointed out, caused “men to run away, to bribe and make means to be cleared from the service, and insufficient, unable and unskilful persons supply the place.” Even worse were “the procrastinations which they have met with in point of pay at the end of the service.” The crewmen of the English Grand Fleet would have ample evidence of that when the threat from the Armada had passed. On a privateer or merchant ship they could profit from “secret trading” on their own account and enjoy “the loose liberty and undisciplined life,” but the greatest attraction was “the promising hopes that they flatter themselves with when they go upon their thirds” (the one-third value of captured prizes allocated as the crew’s share) and the prospect of pillage: “there is nothing that more bewitches them” and “once entered into that trade, they are hardly reclaimed.” The right of pillage extended to anything that was not part of the captured ship’s fixtures, fittings and cargo, including the personal property of the crew and officers, and anything above decks or lying loose. In theory the items of pillage were brought to the mainmast and distributed according to the customary shares of the officers and crew; in practice such items were considered fair game for anyone who could seize them, and disputes often led to brawls and even deaths among the victorious privateers. The captain and officers of one ship “were all that day until evening on board their prize pacifying of brawls.”14
Many gentlemen adventurers in search of excitement, glory and quick profit also sailed with the privateers or, like George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, became privateers themselves. His ship, the Red Dragon, was as fast and as heavily armed as the Queen’s galleons. In previous centuries such men had amassed fortunes through plunder and ransom in war. William of Windsor was only one “active and valorous knight, rich in great wealth which he had acquired by his martial prowess,” and many castles were “partly built by spoils gotten in France.” By the late sixteenth century, the private armies of retainers had been brought more under the control of an increasingly powerful monarch, and war—at least on land—was no longer the means to wealth and fortune. Influence at court, whether as minister or Crown favourite, was now the key to riches, but at sea fortunes were still to be made by men whose stock in trade was the cannon, the musket and the sword. Few held on to the fortunes they made, for almost all the privateers were also spendthrifts; wealth easily acquired was just as easily squandered. Despite the riches he had garnered on his earlier voyages, Drake still thirsted for more. Lord Howard was one of the noblest lords in the realm but one of the poorest; John Hawkins dressed in the height of fashion and maintained a style of living that consumed much of even his substantial income, and the Earl of Cumberland lost one fortune in reckless extravagance and “expensive sports,” and another in funding ten privateering expeditions to regain his lost wealth. By 1600 he reckoned to have spent £100,000 on fitting out ships for privateering and he died penniless.
Privateering remained a risky business, for all except the Queen, who would hire out her royal galleons to privateers in return for a substantial share of the anticipated rewards. The merchant adventurers were required to arrange and pay for a complete refit of each Queen’s ship before they sailed, and meet all the costs of equipping, crewing and supplying them, in addition to the hire charge that was payable even if the voyage returned no profit whatsoever. They nominated their own commander, but the Queen had the right to appoint the second-in-command, and the merchant adventurers would pay his wages. By operating at one remove, the Queen was able to claim a lack of foreknowledge of any acts of piracy committed during these voyages, while still collecting a handsome dividend from them. She was thus able to conclude the Treaty of Conciliation with the Duke of Alba in 1573 while pocketing her share of Drake’s raid on the Spanish Main in the same year, and right up to the eve of the launching of the Armada she continued to benefit from privateering while still protesting her innocence to Philip of Spain.
She showed her gratitude to Drake for his success in these enterprises by knighting him aboard his own ship at Deptford in 1581, and he gave her another series of lavish presents in return, including “a salt of gold, like a globe,” with the oceans picked out in green enamel. So many spectators watched the pageant that a bridge collapsed under their weight. “The Queen’s Majesty came aboard his weather-beaten barque; where being as highly graced as his heart could wish with knightly honour . . . his name and fame became admirable in all places”—except in the corridors of the Royal Court in Spain, where by 1582 Philip was offering a reward of 20,000 ducats to anyone who brought him Drake’s head or proof that he had been permanently prevented from carrying out any more of his “terrible handiwork.” 15
Utterly fearless, shrewd and intuitive, Drake wreaked havoc among Spanish shipping and raided the coast of the New World and Spain itself with equal impunity, and his vaulting ambition even embraced the aim of taking Panama and Havana or the Azores as permanent bases from which to raid Spanish possessions and intercept the flota. The Venetian ambassador to Spain believed it to be entirely possible, for Drake was “Master of the Sea, and finds no hindrance to the development of his designs,” and even Burghley, no admirer of provocations to Philip, was forced to admit that “Sir Francis Drake is a fearful man to the King of Spain.” Mendoza had warned Elizabeth not to “offend a king who had so strong an arm and so long a sword,” but after knighting Drake, Elizabeth had made it clear that his activities would continue: “The use of the sea and air is common to all and neither Nature nor custom permit any possession thereof,” though having made her ringing public proclamation, Elizabeth kept Drake at Court for some time to avoid further antagonizing Spain.
Philip regarded Drake and his ilk as nothing but common pirates, and any captured English privateers were treated accordingly. The captains, ships’ officers and pilots were beheaded in front of their crews, who were then sent as slaves to the galleys. Drake saw himself not as a pirate but as the King’s rival and chief opponent, a
view reflected in many European capitals, where such was his fame that “many princes of Italy, Germany and elsewhere, enemies as well as friends, desired his picture,” and when his portrait was displayed in a shop in Ferrara crowds gathered to view “the great English corsair.” He also provided the Protestant population of northern Europe with almost the only successes they could celebrate against the seemingly irresistible tide of victories by the forces of the Counter-Reformation. 16
All spoke of Drake as if he embodied the English navy and such was his success that Spaniards came to regard him as in league with the devil, possessed of supernatural powers, and keeping in his cabin “a familiar spirit with whom he talks,” or “a magic crystal in which he could discern the most secret movements of his enemies” far away across the sea. Strangely, the latter belief may have had some foundation in fact. Robert Recorde in 1551 and Leonard Digges in 1571 had both described using a lens and a mirror to “make distant objects larger,” and Thomas Harriot, a scientist sent by Sir Walter Ralegh to the fledgling colony of Roanoke in Virginia in 1585, took with him what he described as “a perspective glass.” In the same year William Bourne claimed to have discovered a way of using two lenses to view distant objects, though he did not produce a working device in support of his claim.
The telescope was patented by a Dutch inventor in 1608, but the earlier experiments of Recorde, Digges, Bourne and Harriot at least raise the intriguing possibility that the “perspective glass” might have been the first telescope. The ability to see enemies at long range, well before they were visible to the naked eye, would have conferred a huge military advantage, and such scientific knowledge—if it had existed at that time—would have been the most closely guarded of state secrets. As well as supporting Roanoke, Ralegh was also a backer of Drake’s privateering expeditions, and in his restless and relentless search for means to improve the performance of his ships, Drake would certainly have grasped the significance of the telescope, had it been shown to him.17
