Pirate Nation. David Childs
Elizabeth came to the throne, religious rivalry begat a righteous covetousness that would lead English pirates to feel they lacked neither morals nor honour in inviting Spanish and Portuguese merchants to discharge these cargoes at sea into English hulls, rather than waiting to purchase the goods from warehouses in Lisbon or Seville.
The problem for the pirates was that if they were caught by foreign nationals they could be imprisoned or executed, and if they avoided that, they could still have their loot confiscated. This was a European-wide practice: in July 1588 the Dutch captured a well-armed Scottish pirate ship and executed the crew of ninety-four.8 The problem for the Privy Council was to create a loophole in the law which would provide, literally, some sort of life insurance for its privileged pirates, while avoiding the reparation and restoration of valuable illegal seizures which the nation would rather retain. The solution lay with the issuing of letters of reprisal (each one of which earned the Lord Admiral a fee), not for specific incidents but by way of a general free-for-all.
This innovation was experimented with during the undeclared war with France of 1560–64 when the earl of Warwick, besieged in Le Havre, and the Huguenot champion, the prince of Condé, issued letters of reprisal without any reference to any loss claimed. Shortly afterwards, Elizabeth herself issued a supportive proclamation licensing attacks on ‘enemy’ merchant ships. This was, in Rodger’s phrase, ‘a flimsy legal cover’ which strengthened the ‘established connections between Protestanism and piracy.’9
The French war was just a rehearsal for the longer, more serious Spanish war to come. So, in 1585 when hostilities could neither be avoided nor ignored, although the requirement to prove loss for non-Iberian incidents was continued (Appendix 1A), any rover could purchase a letter of reprisal to seize as much in the way of Spanish goods as he could lay his hands on (Appendix 1B), as long as he also purchased a bond guaranteeing his good behaviour (Appendix 1C).
Letters of reprisal issued by allied would-be heads of state, such as Dom Antonio of Portugal or the Prince of Orange, were also considered to be valid. This safeguard increased the number of seamen willing to take a risk on plunder, while it was not long before the limits imposed by bonds were being ignored without consequence.
The potential advantage for the queen was obvious and in June 1585, just two months after the Spanish had impounded a number of English vessels, their cargo and crews, leading to a clamour for letters of reprisal, Sir George Carey wrote: ‘her Majesty shall not need to espy the faults of those that venture their own to do her service.’10 Very soon the queen would turn this blind-eyed tacit approval into eyes wide-open active participation, as she sought to maximise her own take from the plunder.
In the twenty years between the French war and the Spanish one, Elizabeth had learned much, including the fact that the imposition of legal due process when examining any doubtfully legitimate prize could lose her a share of many a valuable cargo. So with her famed pragmatism, Elizabeth turned herself into a pirate queen, protesting her innocence or impotence to foreign ambassadors, while accepting her share from her wayward, and always disownable, pirates. Every relevant facet of her state was involved in the plundering, including the Privy Council, of which the Lord Admiral was a member; the High Court of Admiralty, to which the Lord Admiral appointed the judges; the vice admirals of the coastal counties, who were often related to the Lord Admiral, as were many of the naval commanders who seized the goods. At a local level, sheriffs and magistrates soon learned the peculiarities of administering justice to pecuniary advantage, while merchants found out how to make gains by obtaining ‘letters of reprisal’ which enabled them to thieve at sea with legal authority. And as this great organic growth took hold, so it attracted its symbiotic partners; corruption and theft twined around every aspect of naval life, achieving such a stranglehold over truth that the results of inquiries against corruption, even when they managed to expose the filching that they had found, were ignored. Many of those holding high office had either their own private pirate fleets and lairs, or invested heavily in the piratical activities of others; at the turn of the century, even the queen’s new secretary, Robert Cecil, lacking his old father William’s sensitivity, partnered the Lord Admiral in such endeavours, although not for great reward. Thus England, whose sophisticated legal system developed over centuries to pronounce on every aspect of national life, far from being immune, or incompetent to manage piracy, chose to apply its adequate laws in an arbitrary way for personal gain, not public good.
Such state sponsorship, amounting to a private/public piratical partnership, was, whatever it lacked in legitimacy, logical. England’s mariners were, until Hawkins’s voyages to Africa and the West Indies showed the way, mostly coast-hugging sailors, engaged in either the wool trade to the Low Countries or the wine trade to Gascony. Her fishermen had reached the Newfoundland Banks, had even stepped ashore on that island’s beaches, but they could not claim to be blue-water venturers. Whereas Columbus’s voyages of the 1490s to the Americas and da Gama’s passage to the East Indies were soon followed up with trading and exploiting enterprises, in England Cabot’s landing in Newfoundland in 1497 had led to almost a century of explorative inactivity by the English, save for the banging of their heads against the impenetrable walls of ice which blocked their way east or west to Cathay.
Even had they so wanted, international law in the form of the papally inspired and approved Treaty of Tordisillas of 1494 precluded nations other than Spain and Portugal from venturing to trade or settle in unknown lands to the east or west of a line drawn 370 leagues beyond the Cape Verde Islands. Any venture into these closed waters, albeit with legitimate trade in mind, was viewed as trespass. Thus the Portuguese ambassador complained to Elizabeth that John Hawkins’s 1567 voyage to Guinea and Sierra Leone had involved trespass and piracy, the latter to the value of 70,000 ducats. He also told her that:
If she would prohibit her subjects from all trade on the coasts of Guinea under pain of death and confiscation of goods. His subjects can never endure that foreigners should reap the advantage of that commerce which his ancestors acquired by a great expense of blood and treasure. The King is pricked to the heart that she refused immediate recompense to his subjects for piracies committed by the English, and again demands that she will do so. The King promises justice to two of her subjects. The King forbears to answer the other points contained in her reply, as they have nothing to do with the subject in question.11
With such a drastic response for foraying thus far, if English merchants wanted to trade for the wealth of the west or the spices of the east without risking their lives, they were expected so to do at considerable disadvantage in the markets of Seville or Lisbon. It was thus not surprising that some saw more advantage in investing in powder and shot discharged from reusable canisters, than in wool and cloth which those in warmer climes did not wish to wear. High-seas piracy thus became stay-at-home England’s answer to the well-rewarded global expansion of the Iberian states. Realistically, it was the only way that the nation could keep pace with their economic rise, and it offered Elizabeth a swifter and surer return on investment than did any equivalent support for the creation of her own new world commonwealth. Indeed, Frobisher’s failure to return from his voyages to the northwest without either discovering a sea-route to Cathay or gold-enriched ores, and the disappearance of Ralegh’s ill-supported settlers on Roanoke, must have contrasted forcefully in the queen’s mind with the wealth which Drake, ‘the master thief of the unknown world’, laid before her in 1580 following his successful piratical circumnavigation.
The blanket issue of letters of reprisal did not make the queen rich. After the costs of a voyage had been deducted, the Lord Admiral received 10 per cent of the value of the prize, and the Crown just 5 per cent in customs dues, with the residue being split three ways between the victuallers, the owners and the crew. As the rewards for pillage became greater (Andrews estimates that between 1585 and 1603 the value of prize goods ranged from about £100,000 to £200,000 a year12), so the queen’s desire to be included in the distribution grew. This she achieved by issuing her own letters of commission to her favourite pirates, meaning that she could also dispatch her own ships to strengthen their forces. Ironically, the first and most famous of these commissions, the one which Drake referred to in his prosecution of Thomas Doughty during his circumnavigation, may not even have existed. If it did it would have been written on the same lines as those she gave to her most persistent pirate, George Clifford, earl