A Brief History of the Tudor Age

by Ridley, Jasper

  Winter finally entered the Forth with eleven of his fourteen ships on 23 January, twenty-seven days after leaving Gillingham; but the French had run into even greater difficulties than he had done. Sailing from Le Havre and Calais, they came within sight of Scotland, but were then driven back by the gales and had to return to France. The French garrison at Leith, deprived of reinforcements, was forced to surrender after a four-month siege to the troops that Elizabeth had sent by land from Berwick. By the Treaty of Edinburgh of 6 July 1560, the French agreed to withdraw from Scotland, which became a Protestant state and passed from the French into the English orbit of influence.

  The great uncertainty about the duration of a sea-voyage made it difficult to calculate the amount of food which should be taken in the ship. The general rule adopted in the English navy was that if the carcass of one bullock was taken for every member of the crew for a four-month voyage, this was ordinarily enough to cover emergencies; but as the meat had to be salted, and it was impossible to preserve fruit or fresh vegetables for a long journey, the men fell ill from scurvy and other diseases, which were responsible for many of the deaths which occurred among the crews.

  The ships which made these hazardous voyages in the sixteenth century seem very small to us, in the twentieth century, when there are battleships and aircraft carriers of more than 50,000 tons. When Henry VII became King, he decided to build the most powerful navy in Europe. He already had four excellent warships which had been built for Edward IV and Richard III, but in 1490 he built two ships which were larger than any which had previously been known, and which made a great impression on his contemporaries at home and abroad. The Regent was 1,000 tons, and carried 225 small guns, the serpentines, which were not capable of sinking an enemy ship, but could shatter her rigging and rake her decks. The Sovereign was only a little smaller than the Regent, and both were substantially bigger than the French ships, the Grande Louise and the Cordelière, of 790 and 700 tons, which had hitherto been the largest ships in Europe. The Regent and the Sovereign, like the two French ships, had three masts, instead of the one or two masts which had been usual until the end of the fifteenth century.

  The Regent was sunk in the attack on Brest in 1512 at the outbreak of Henry VIII’s first war against France; but Henry replaced her with an even larger ship which was launched in his presence at Erith in 1514. It was officially named the Henry Grâce à Dieu, but was usually referred to as the Great Harry. It was 1,500 tons, with four masts, with topgallant sails on three of them, and carried 184 guns of varying calibres. A year later, Henry attended the launching of another warship at Woolwich, accompanied by Catherine of Aragon and his sister Mary, the French Queen, who had just married the Duke of Suffolk. Mary named the ship the Virgin Mary, but soon everyone was calling her the Mary Rose. She was smaller than the Great Harry, being 400 tons, but had 120 oars and could carry 1,000 soldiers; and her 207 guns were so powerful that the Venetian ambassador believed that no town in the world could withstand their fire-power. The ambassador described how Henry greatly enjoyed himself at the launching. He was dressed in a doublet of gold brocade, and in scarlet hose, and repeatedly blew on a captain’s whistle a yard long which was hanging from a thick gold chain around his neck.

  During his last war against France, Henry VIII bought three more warships, the Jesus of Lubeck, the Murrian, and the Struse of Dawske (Danzig), of 700, 500 and 450 tons. When the French were preparing to invade England with 40,000 men in the summer of 1545, Henry had a fleet of eighty ships at Portsmouth which were ready to meet the enemy. On 19 July he dined in the Mary Rose. Suddenly the French appeared off Portsmouth, and the Mary Rose went into action against them. The French had already retreated, and the Mary Rose was on the point of returning to harbour, when she capsized and sank with the loss of all but thirty of her crew of five hundred. Henry was eager to raise the ship, so that he could use her guns again, and employed some Italian experts to do the work; but after three unsuccessful attempts, the project was abandoned, and the Mary Rose was not raised until 1982. The Great Harry survived for a few more years, but was accidentally burned in 1553.

  Elizabeth I, who was more economical and less ostentatious than her father, never built a ship as large as the Great Harry. Her largest ship was the Triumph of 1,100 tons, which was built in 1561, when the Jesus of Lubeck was still in service. Twenty-six years later, Sir Walter Raleigh built a ship of 800 tons, which he intended to name the Ark Raleigh; but while she was still on the stocks he sold her in 1587 to Elizabeth I for £5,000, and the name was changed to the Ark Royal. She was Lord Howard of Effingham’s flagship in the battle against the Armada.

  But the sailors who travelled to unknown lands at the farthest ends of the earth sailed in much smaller ships. At the beginning of the Tudor Age, no one in Europe had been to the American continent or further south along the coast of Africa than the mouth of the Congo river. Then in 1488 the Portuguese captain, Bartolomé Diaz, sailed round the Cape of Good Hope. In February 1489 the Genoese seaman, Christopher Columbus, wrote to Henry VII and asked him to finance an expedition to find a western route across the Atlantic to Asia. But Henry refused, and it was from Spain that Columbus sailed in 1492 on the voyage that took him to Cuba and to discover the New World of the American continent. In 1497 the Portuguese Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope to India.

  The Venetian sailor, Giovanni Caboto, had for many years been trading with England, and had bought a house in Bristol, where he anglicized his name to John Cabot. In his youth he had been to Mecca and had seen the wares which Arab merchants had brought there from China and Eastern Asia; and he believed that it would be possible to sail west from England across the Atlantic and reach China that way. It would thus be possible to open up a profitable trade route between Western Europe and China, for goods could be carried more cheaply by sea than by the long land journey through Asia Minor and the Ottoman Empire; and he had been told by a Portuguese sailor that the coast of China was only a few hundred miles west of Iceland. He took some time to persuade Henry VII to authorize his expedition, but Henry eventually agreed, and granted letters patent to Cabot and his son Sebastian and his two other sons, after Cabot had promised to give him twenty per cent of all the profits that he made from his voyage.

  Cabot sailed from Bristol on 2 May 1497 with a crew of eighteen sailors. At 5 a.m. on 24 June he sighted an island off the coast of Newfoundland and named it St John’s Island because it was the Feast of St John the Baptist. He claimed the territory on behalf of Henry VII, and returned to Bristol convinced that he had reached China. He set off on another voyage next year with the intention of getting to Japan, and sailed north from Newfoundland, entering Baffin Bay and sailing along the coast of Greenland as far north as 67½°. He died soon after his return to England, but his son Sebastian Cabot carried on, undertaking many voyages on behalf of the English, Spanish and Venetian governments, including a voyage to Brazil and the River Plate for Charles V in 1526. The English did not engage in any further discoveries in America during the reign of Henry VIII, but English fishermen went every year to Newfoundland to catch fish.

  In 1521 a Portuguese expedition under Magellan sailed round the world, by South America through the Straits of Magellan, across the Pacific to the Philippines, and back to Lisbon by the Cape of Good Hope. This voyage fascinated explorers all over Europe, and stimulated speculation about the existence of a North-west Passage and a North-east Passage. The philosophical theory of ‘harmony’ made the men of the sixteenth century believe that if there was a South-west Passage from Europe to Asia by the Straits of Magellan and Cape Horn, and a South-east Passage by the Cape of Good Hope, there must also be a North-west Passage to the west of Greenland and a North-east Passage to the north of Norway.

  In 1576 a Yorkshire seaman, Martin Frobisher, persuaded the Earl of Warwick to finance his expedition to find the North-west Passage. He was encouraged by Elizabeth I, for it was believed that in the north-west regions there was a hitherto unk
nown substance, which they called ‘black earth’, which could be turned into gold by alchemists. He sailed from Blackwall in the Thames with a crew of thirty-five men in three ships, the largest of which was 25 tons. He reached the coast of Labrador, but did not get as far north as the Cabots had done seventy-eight years before; and the black earth which he brought back with him turned out to be merely iron-pyrites. He made two more expeditions in 1577 and 1578, but was equally unsuccessful. John Davis from Devon tried to find the North-west Passage in 1585, and again in the next two years. At his third attempt, in 1587, he reached 73°N in Baffin Bay, where he was stopped by ice; but he believed that he had found the North-west Passage to China. Both Frobisher and Davis served against the Armada. Frobisher died in 1594 from wounds received in fighting the Spaniards in Brittany. Davis was killed by Japanese pirates near Sumatra in 1605.

  The attempt to find a North-east Passage led to more profitable results. In the reign of Edward VI, old Sebastian Cabot, who was nearly eighty, planned an expedition with the support of merchants of the City of London, though Cabot was too old to go on the voyage himself. Three ships under the command of Sir Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor sailed from London, where their expedition had aroused great interest, in May 1553; but adverse winds prevented them from getting any further than Harwich. After a month the wind changed, and they sailed to the north of Norway, but off the Lofoten Islands they were separated by gales. One ship, under Willoughby, was wrecked on the coast of Lapland, where Willoughby and his men died, probably of cold, in January 1554. Chancellor and the other two ships entered the White Sea, and reached the harbour, near the monasteries of St Michael and St Nicholas, where the town of Archangel was built thirty years later. Chancellor travelled to Moscow, where he was received by the young Tsar, Ivan the Terrible, and friendly diplomatic relations were established between England and Russia. After returning safely to England, Chancellor made another voyage to St Nicholas and Moscow; but on the return journey, he was shipwrecked and drowned off the coast of Aberdeenshire in 1556.

  His voyages and contacts in Moscow interested some English merchants, and a Muscovy Company was formed to develop trade with Russia. The Company sent to Russia an enterprising traveller, Anthony Jenkinson, who before he was twenty had been to North Africa, Aleppo, and many other places in the Eastern Mediterranean. In 1558 he sailed to St Nicholas and was granted permission by the Tsar to open an English House, as a trading centre, in the town of Kholmogory on the River Dvina, about sixty miles from St Nicholas. From his base at Kholmogory he travelled up the Dvina to Vologda, which was a much longer distance than the overland route but easier and safer. From Vologda he proceeded overland to Moscow, where he established excellent relations with Ivan the Terrible. On one occasion he dined in private with the Tsar, sitting opposite him at a table which was only a little lower than Ivan’s.

  The Muscovy Company was interested in the possibility of developing trade, not only with Russia but also with Persia, hoping, with the Tsar’s goodwill, to bring goods from Persia through Russia. After Jenkinson returned to England, the Company interested Elizabeth I in the idea, and Jenkinson set off again for Russia, carrying letters from Elizabeth to Ivan the Terrible and to ‘the Sophy’, as the English called the Shah of Persia. Under the Russian calendar the years were dated, not from the birth of Christ, but from the beginning of the world; and Elizabeth’s letters to Ivan and the Shah were ‘dated in our famous city of London the 25 day of the month of April in the year of the creation of the world 5523 and of our Lord Jesus Christ 1561 and of our reign the third’. Both the letters were written in Latin.

  Jenkinson sailed from Gravesend with the letters on 14 May 1561. He reached St Nicholas on 14 July, Vologda on 8 August, and Moscow on 20 August. He stayed there for some months while Ivan and the Persian ambassador in Moscow made arrangements for his journey to Persia, and left Moscow with the Persian ambassador on 27 April 1562, travelling by water down the Volga to Astrakhan, where they arrived on 10 June. But Jenkinson then ran into difficulties. He went to Bokhara and established friendly relations with Abdullah Khan, the King of Khiva; but because of wars in the region he was unable to get to Persia, and had to return to Moscow. He made another attempt to reach Persia, and was eventually received in audience by the Shah at Kazvin in 1564; but the Shah and his ministers were unfriendly, and Jenkinson thought he had been lucky to leave Persia alive.

  But thanks to Jenkinson’s excellent relations with Ivan, the trading prospects for English merchants in Russia appeared to be very hopeful, and in 1568 Elizabeth decided to send one of her ablest and most experienced diplomats, Thomas Randolph, to Moscow. Randolph had spent several years as her ambassador in Edinburgh at the court of Mary Queen of Scots, and had played a very important part in the intrigues and revolutions which had overthrown Mary and established her son, the infant James VI, as King in her place. His selection for the mission to Russia shows the importance which Elizabeth attached to it.

  Randolph sailed from Harwich on 22 June 1568, and reached St Nicholas on 23 July, where he noted, like a good Protestant, that ‘the apparel of the monks is superstitious, as ours have been’, and that ‘their Church is fair, but full of painted images, tapers and candles’. Randolph followed the usual route which Jenkinson had taken, to Kholmogory, then by water up the Dvina to Vologda, and overland from there to Moscow. His seven-hundred-mile journey up the Dvina took five weeks, for his barge had to be pulled by hand for most of the way. He found excellent inns between Vologda and Moscow, and was impressed when he crossed the Volga at Yaroslavl to see that it was a mile wide.

  When he reached Moscow at the end of September, he was annoyed and disturbed to find that he was confined in a house as a virtual prisoner for five months. During this time he and his retinue were lavishly supplied with food and drink, but they were not admitted to the Tsar’s presence or allowed to see or communicate with either Ivan’s ministers or with the English merchants in Moscow. When the Tsar at last agreed to see him in February 1569, he was very friendly. Randolph was very satisfied when he left for England at the end of April. Travelling again by Vologda, he embarked at St Nicholas at the end of July, and reached London in September.

  But relations between England and Russia were sensitive. Ivan was very offended by Elizabeth’s refusal of his offer of marriage to her lady-in-waiting, Lady Mary Hastings; the English diplomats resented the attitude of the Russians, who seemed to regard all foreign sovereigns, including Elizabeth, as being the Tsar’s inferiors; and the representatives of the Hansa merchants in Russia tried to influence the Russian officials against their English commercial competitors. At one time Ivan turned against Jenkinson, who feared for his safety in Moscow; but he persuaded Ivan that the whole trouble had been caused by the tactlessness of the Russian ambassador in England and of some ignorant Englishmen in Moscow; and thanks entirely to Jenkinson’s ability, good relations were re-established. Ivan came to trust the English in Moscow so much that he appointed their physician, Dr Mark Ridley, who was a cousin of the bishop and martyr, Nicholas Ridley, to be his own personal physician.

  The English merchants of the Muscovy Company, with their English Houses in Moscow and Kholmogory, succeeded in establishing trade between Astrakhan and London along the Russian rivers and by sea from St Nicholas, though there were many cases of friction between the Russians and the English diplomats in Moscow during the following years. Relations worsened after Ivan the Terrible’s death, but improved again when Boris Gudunov became Tsar. As for Jenkinson, he returned to England, and lived quietly in Northamptonshire till he died, aged over eighty, in 1611.

  The English people were very interested in the travels and adventures of their seamen and traders. Richard Hakluyt, an Oxford scholar, collected the reports which the travellers had written and in 1589 published them in his book The Principall Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation Made by Sea or Overland to the Remote and Farthest Distant Quarters of the Earth at any time
within the compasse of these 1600 Yeeres. He included the accounts of the travellers in Muscovy; but the readers’ chief interest was in the adventures of their seamen who had challenged the power of the Spaniards on the ‘Spanish Main’, the Western Atlantic and the Caribbean.

  In 1562 the Plymouth sailor, John Hawkins, sailed to Guinea on the coast of West Africa to participate in the slave trade in competition with Spanish, Portuguese and French traders. The traders kidnapped young blacks in Guinea, but acquired most of their victims by buying from the native chiefs the prisoners whom the chiefs had captured in wars with other native tribes. They carried the prisoners across the Atlantic and sold them as slaves in the Spanish colonies in the West Indies, for the Spanish settlers there had discovered that blacks from Africa were physically stronger, and could work harder and longer, than the native inhabitants who had lived in the West Indies before the Spaniards arrived.

  Hawkins and his kinsman, Francis Drake, and other seamen from Devon made several expeditions to Guinea to take slaves to the West Indies, although the Spanish slave-traders claimed to have a monopoly of the trade. The English slave-traders were no more inhibited by moral scruples from engaging in the trade than were their Spanish, Portuguese and French competitors. Slavery was a well-known feature in sixteenth-century Europe. Apart from the few cases of slavery in England, any Christian soldier or sailor who fell into the hands of the Turks or the Moors was likely to be kept as a slave if he was not killed by his captors; and the Spaniards enslaved the Moslem prisoners whom they captured in their wars in the Mediterranean and North Africa. They could justify their action in taking blacks from Africa to the West Indies as slaves on the grounds that the blacks were thus introduced to the doctrines of Christianity, which alone could save their immortal souls, apart from the fact that many of them would probably have been killed by their native captors if the European traders had not persuaded the captors to sell them as slaves. Hawkins was so far from having a guilty conscience about engaging in the slave trade that when he was granted a coat-of-arms, he chose as his crest the figure of a black man bound in chains.