The Sultan and the Queen

by Jerry Brotton

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  As Harborne set sail, London’s merchants were also reassessing Moroccan trade in response to the sudden interest of a new and powerful investor: Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. The earl was one of Elizabeth’s most devoted servants and for many years a suitor for her hand in marriage. In 1562 he was appointed to her Privy Council and subsequently made lord steward of the royal household. In addition to his keen support of the arts and patronage of Robert Wilson and his acting company, Leicester was an enthusiastic advocate of trade and exploration, having invested in the Merchant Adventurers and the Muscovy Company and having acted as the principal promoter for Francis Drake’s global circumnavigation in 1577–1578. By 1581, with the Muscovy trade struggling and the Turkey Company about to receive its royal charter, Leicester turned his attentions to Morocco.

  The earl had good reason to be interested. Morocco’s commercial possibilities were obvious, although still relatively undeveloped in the aftermath of the Battle of Alcácer-Quibir. Equally tantalizing was the possibility of a political and military alliance between Elizabeth and al-Mansur. A year earlier, in June 1580, al-Mansur had exchanged letters with Elizabeth (many since lost), in which he flattered her as the greatest adherent of the “religion of Christ,” labeling her “the majesty in the lands of Christ, the sultana Isabel,” and promising a mutually beneficial coalition. “As you are doing the best to facilitate our affairs,” wrote al-Mansur, “so we will do the same for you here.”32 If Leicester could broker an Anglo-Moroccan alliance it would fulfill two of his most cherished ambitions: getting closer to Elizabeth and antagonizing the Spanish.

  In June 1581 Elizabeth issued a license to John Symcot, a “merchant trading into Barbary,” allowing him to sell six hundred tons of English timber “and to bring into this our realm so much saltpeter as he shall have in exchange in Barbary for the same wood.”33 Symcot was Leicester’s agent, and Leicester had persuaded Elizabeth to grant him this lucrative concession that promised to reopen the trade in saltpeter. The commission did not escape the attention of the Spanish ambassador Mendoza, who naturally informed Philip. “Some Englishmen have arrived in this country,” he informed Philip in October 1581, “having arranged with the king of Morocco to take him timber from here ready cut to build his galleys. The quantity is so large that, although Leicester is mixed up in the affair for the sake of profit, they have had to send to Holland for some of the wood, as it could not be furnished here.”34

  Unfortunately for Leicester, the whole venture was a disaster from beginning to end. Symcot was already in trouble with the lord mayor and sheriffs of London, who arrested him on suspicion of fraud. Leicester was furious and demanded his immediate release, insisting that Symcot was “bound to her majesty in the sum of two thousand pounds for the bringing over hither certain quantities of saltpeter and other commodities for the maintenance of her majesty’s munitions from the country of Barbary.”35 This appeal scarcely concealed the earl’s personal interest, but his closeness to the queen meant that it worked. In October 1582 Symcot was released and allowed to sail for Morocco.

  The English merchants pursuing respectable if unregulated trade in Morocco were unimpressed by Symcot’s arrival. They had quietly sought trade in sugar, cloth and timber with Ahmad al-Mansur ever since his accession in 1578. Symcot immediately started to use his royal license and Leicester’s influence as though they were a monopoly, playing on Elizabeth’s imprimatur to obtain an agreement from al-Mansur to grant him control of the trade in iron, lead and tin. He detained certain merchants’ cargoes destined for England and was even accused of opening their letters and sharing them with al-Mansur. An almighty row ensued. A group of English merchants wrote to Walsingham complaining of the “sinister and undirect dealings of John Symcot and his adherents,” to which Symcot responded by protesting against the “lewd practices and speeches” he claimed were being directed at him, insisting he was only doing the queen’s and Leicester’s work.36

  As the dispute escalated throughout the summer, the English merchants wrote again to Walsingham, demanding he redress their grievances. Their position was difficult: as legitimate but unregulated merchants, they were furious with the fly-by-night English traders flooding the Moroccan market with goods, driving prices and hence profits down, but they were also opposed to a creeping state monopoly that threatened their dissolution. With their future in jeopardy, the merchants justified their complaints by turning to religion. Having shown few qualms hitherto about trading with Muslims, they now told Walsingham that the “undirect and hard dealing” of unscrupulous English merchants in “forbidden commodities” into “the heathen country of Barbary” was causing “great clamors to be spread in other countries, that out of England there should be suffered to go munitions and other furniture to the aid of the infidels, which causeth our most true and pure religion to be brought into question.” Arming the infidel only strengthened Moroccan pirates and threatened “captivity to others who profess Christianity, but even also to her majesty’s subjects that tradeth [in] Spain.”37 According to this nervous claim, forbidden Moroccan trade was putting English Protestants in double jeopardy—captivity by armed Muslims and insolvency from antagonized Spanish Catholics.

  The complaint painted a halcyon picture of harmonious and profitable Anglo-Moroccan trade “until the first shippers of unlawful commodities spoiled the same.” This was an illusion, but a powerful one nonetheless: these interlopers were described as inveigling their way into the Moroccan ruler’s affections, obtaining from him a “grant to the Jews, renters of the sugar houses, to give unto them other men’s sugars long before paid for, by which hard dealing the Jews bankrupted [them], and thereby her majesty’s subjects lost very near £40,000, the circumstances whereof would be tedious to trouble your honor.”38

  A three-way trade among English merchants, Muslim rulers and Jewish intermediaries had been going on in Morocco for decades, with hardly a murmur of dissent, but once the private trade came under threat, the regulars opposed the monopolists by playing their trump card, religion, disclosing lurid tales of unscrupulous English merchants in league with villainous Muslims and greedy Jewish moneylenders. The problem, however, was not really caused by Muslims or Jews, but by Symcot, who was condemned in the merchants’ complaint for trading in “forbidden commodities, with such others that there doth associate them about some new and secret contract” that threatened to end commercial competition and by extension the unregulated trade. The complainants begged Walsingham to write to Symcot and to apply pressure on Leicester to stop both men’s high-handed interference.

  As a close associate of Leicester’s, Walsingham was unlikely to uphold a protest against the queen’s favorite. Besides, he was more interested in the news coming out of Constantinople, where William Harborne had arrived safely on March 29, 1583.

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  It was a wiser and more circumspect Harborne who returned to Constantinople that spring. He rented a house he called Rapamat (a corruption of “Ahmad”) from a man named Ahmad Pasha in the Findikli district along the Bosporus, a safe distance from the prying eyes of the other European ambassadors up the hill in Galata. This time he established a formal embassy consisting of his secretary, Edward Barton, as well as interpreters, servants, stables and a Janissary guard.39 He lost no time in paying due obeisance to the grand vizier, Kanijeli Siyavuş Pasha, and his old adversary, Admiral Qilich Ali Pasha. He also visited Hagia Sophia, which he acknowledged respectfully as “the chief see and church of primacy of this Turk.”40

  On April 24 Harborne was given a formal audience with Murad III at Topkapi Sarayi. He presented an array of gifts, described by the incensed Venetian ambassador as “a most beautiful watch set with jewels and pearls, ten pairs of shoes, two pretty lap dogs, twelve lengths of royal cloth, two lengths of white linen, and thirteen pieces of silver gilt.”41 Having this time ensured that he presented the right credentials as ambassador, Harborne was rewar
ded with the renewal of the Anglo-Ottoman treaty that had been canceled in 1581. This allowed him to begin appointing consuls across the Ottoman territories to represent English commercial interests. He boasted of his immediate success in renegotiating the customs duties charged on English goods. “In my oration to the Grand Signior upon my first arrival for her majesty I obtained of him for the company the release of almost half his custom,” he recalled, reducing the Ottomans’ customs duty rates from 5 percent to 2 percent, giving the Turkey Company a crucial advantage over its European rivals.42

  The day after his audience with Murad, Harborne appointed Harvie Millers as “our consul in Cairo, Alexandria, Egypt and other places adjacent, for the safe protection of body and goods of her majesty’s subjects.”43 Two months later Richard Forster was appointed to Aleppo, Damascus, Amman, Tripoli (in Lebanon) and Jerusalem. Other appointments followed on Chios and Patras, as well as in Algiers and Tunis, creating an impressive network of English residents across the Mediterranean in a vast arc from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Holy Land and into the Ionian Sea. Harborne reported that Murad had agreed to “the delivery of captives,” English galley slaves, “freed gratis at our request.”44

  Having thought he had seen the back of Harborne, the Venetian ambassador Gianfrancesco Morosini was infuriated by the Englishman’s sudden reappearance. He shared the French ambassador’s anger at the “breach” of their treaty with the sultan, “which provides that all ships, except those of Venice, must sail under the French flag.” He reported that Harborne “was escorted by no Christians, only by the Turks,” adding rather petulantly that “even the Turks in contempt call him a Lutheran, and show that they are far from pleased to see him.”45 However, he confessed that Harborne “has been well received by his majesty [Murad], who is flattered that such a powerful queen should have sent from four thousand miles away to tell him that she is all for him and desires his friendship. He considers also that she is a very fit instrument to damage the Christians, toward whom in her letters she shows an open ill-will.”46

  Against all expectations, Harborne had built a network of agents loyal to Walsingham dotted across the Mediterranean, able to facilitate smoother commercial relations (and hopefully avoid incidents like the Bark Roe debacle) as well as to provide vital military intelligence about Spanish and Ottoman activities. He was now far more experienced in countering the strategies adopted against him by the resident Catholic ambassadors, most especially the French and the Venetians, who, he reported, “have the uttermost opposed themselves against us, but their malice contraried, the Venetian denieth such his proceedings, and dissemblingly pretendeth friendship, having personally visited us,” while the French swore “to renew former amity.”47

  Staper and Osborne were no doubt relieved to hear of Harborne’s success, as they had recently funded another team of merchants to head east with even greater ambitions to reach Persia, the Mughal court of Akbar the Great, in India, and even China. In February 1583 a group led by Ralph Fitch and John Newberry left London on board the Tiger, bound for Syria, with letters from Elizabeth addressed to Akbar, or “Echebar king of Cambaya,” and the “King of China.” They arrived in Tripoli in April and traveled overland to Aleppo, then on to Basra and Hormuz, where they were arrested by the Portuguese authorities and shipped off to Goa. Having obtained their release thanks to the intercession of local Jesuits, they fled to Agra, where they claimed to have been given the first English audience with Akbar in the late summer of 1585, although what if anything passed between them remains unknown. From here the team split up, and Newberry disappeared. But the intrepid Fitch traveled on, visiting Bengal, Burma and Malacca before making his return to England in April 1591.48 The news of Fitch’s epic adventures remained in vogue for long enough for Shakespeare to allude to them in Macbeth (1606), where one of the witches plots against a sailor’s wife, saying, “Her husband’s to Aleppo gone, master o’ th’ Tiger.”49 Although the venture failed to yield any concrete commercial breakthrough, it was another sign of the growing confidence of London’s mercantile community.

  Harborne’s good fortune in Constantinople was in stark contrast to the undignified squabbling in Morocco following Symcot’s arrival. His success diverted the queen’s attention from Morocco, giving Walsingham a space to consider his response to the increasingly intemperate petitions of the regular merchants. Symcot died suddenly in the summer of 1583, as he was traveling back to England. This took some of the pressure off Walsingham to censure him, but the larger question of whether to introduce a commercial monopoly remained. Leicester lobbied ruthlessly for the creation of a regulated company capable of imposing a monopoly on the Moroccan trade—strictly on his own terms, of course. In April 1585, Elizabeth wrote to al-Mansur thanking him for the favor shown to Leicester over the Symcot affair, a tacit seal of approval for her favorite’s Moroccan policy. It was a preemptive decision motivated by the knowledge that London’s merchants were already drafting petitions arguing for and against a monopoly.

  On July 15 the petitions were published. Those against a regulated company once again invoked religious differences, arguing that it would be ineffective because the “King of Barbary and all his subjects are barbarous infidels and without any knowledge of the true God; and his magistrates govern by tyranny; and therefore the danger will be great to execute any ordinance of this corporation within his kingdom, if it shall be understood to him or any of his magistrates.” Their case rested on a question of trust: How could a Christian trust a Muslim, and if the Muslim’s ruler refused to abide by the new corporation’s terms, how could it work? Finally, they invoked the classic laissez-faire economic philosophy: Why was regulation needed when there was already a long-standing “freedom of traffic” in the region where each merchant “standeth upon his own devise”?50

  Leicester’s pro-regulation merchants adopted a more optimistic common-law approach to regulating trade, believing the statutes they proposed would “keep reasonable men in order and bridle unreasonable men trading into Barbary, by incorporating them.” They pointed to the oversupply of English commodities “being sold there to much lost advantage,” in contrast to the demand for Moroccan goods “viz. sugar much advanced there,” that could be restrained by the creation of a regulated company (an organization with a government charter giving it exclusive rights to trade in a particular region). They also proposed that any English transgressions in Morocco could be “restrained by order and fear of punishment at home,” and that if anyone impeached his countrymen in Morocco “he must of a Christian become an infidel and abandon his country, which cannot be entered.” Finally, they argued that regulation was a direct response to “seeing the commodities of that country is in so few men’s hands as a few wily heads, with great stocks.”51 It took an even wilier head, like Leicester’s, to argue that a monopoly was required to oppose monopolization.

  The result was a foregone conclusion. On the same day, July 15, 1585, the “letters patent or privileges granted by her majesty to certain noble men and merchants for a trade to Barbary” were proclaimed, providing a charter for the foundation of what would become known as the Barbary Company. Most of them were copied almost verbatim from the privileges granted to the Turkey Company less than four years earlier. But there were two important differences. The first was that the new initiative was not a joint-stock but a regulated company (the former allowed members to trade on their individual capital and at their own risk, whereas the latter formalized and shared collective investments, profits and losses). The second was that Leicester was given unprecedented executive powers so far as a commercial company was concerned. Alongside Leicester and Robert Rich, 1st Earl of Warwick, forty London merchants trading in Morocco were named who, the patent claimed, “have sustained great and grievous losses.” The way to avoid such losses was to stipulate that “none others, shall and may, for, and during the space of twelve years, have and enjoy the whole freedom and liberty in the said traffic or trade,
unto or from the said country of Barbary,” aside from those named. Although there was no official governor, all ordnance was subject to “the consent of the said earl of Leicester,” making the privilege little more than Elizabeth’s gift to Leicester and his cronies to run the Moroccan trade as they liked.52 Leicester could now ship timber and munitions to Morocco with impunity, and in return Elizabeth was guaranteed a resident company agent, at no cost to the crown, capable of pursuing a diplomatic alliance with al-Mansur against the growing threat of Spain.

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  The wisdom of appointing a resident agent was exhibited by the continued effectiveness of another English agent operating in the Muslim world, more than two thousand miles from Morocco, the rejuvenated William Harborne. In January 1585 Harborne had intervened successfully in yet another maritime incident that threatened Anglo-Islamic relations, but this time one committed against the English. In May 1584 the Turkey Company’s ship Jesus had been seized, its cargo confiscated and its crew imprisoned in Tripoli (Libya). The local authorities believed that a factor had boarded the ship owing a local Turkish merchant 450 crowns, and promptly seized the ship, hanging its master and one of its crew. The vessel’s fate might have remained unknown had it not been for the Jesus’s resourceful boatswain, Thomas Sanders, who managed somehow to smuggle a letter out of captivity in Tripoli to his father in Tavistock in Devon. Sanders provided one of the earliest English accounts of life as a galley slave. He described his “miserable bondage and slavery” in vivid detail, with lurid stories of how he was sold into the Turkish galleys, where “we were chained three and three to an oar and we rowed naked above the girdle,” raiding Greek vessels trading African slaves. He wrote that some of his compatriots had been compelled to “turn Turk,” graphically describing their forced circumcision.53