New World, Inc.

by John Butman

  But the grandeur of her title and the magnificence of her coronation belied the reality of Elizabeth’s pitiful inheritance and England’s perilous situation. The crown was still deeply in debt, the cloth trade continued to falter, the problems of unemployment and wealth disparity still plagued the realm, and people across the land were riven by religious division. Above all, Elizabeth’s position as queen was under threat almost as soon as she was anointed in Westminster Abbey: in England, she faced a contested succession; in France, she counted few supporters for her claim to the throne there; and in Ireland, she possessed limited sovereignty.

  Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, had never intended Elizabeth to be queen. In the 1530s, he had declared her, the daughter of Anne Boleyn, a bastard and debarred her succession to the throne. Although she was reinstated in the 1540s, the stain of illegitimacy remained with her. When her half-sister, Mary, acceded to the crown in 1553, Elizabeth had to tread carefully because conspiracy theorists sought to implicate her in every plot to overthrow the Catholic queen. She even suffered a brief incarceration in the Tower of London. But when Mary died unexpectedly at the age of forty-two, Elizabeth knew that it was her time—at last. She had survived. Evidently, her succession was meant to be. When she heard the news that she was to be queen, she was walking in the grounds of Hatfield House, her country mansion. She is supposed to have sunk to her knees by an old oak tree and whispered a prayer: “A domino factum est et mirabile in oculis nostris” (It is the Lord’s doing and it is marvelous in our eyes).2

  Complications quickly arose, however. Elizabeth was approached by Philip, Mary’s husband and king of Spain, with an offer of marriage. Philip had held the title of King of England jure uxoris—by right of marriage to Mary. With her death, he lost the title and his claim to succession, but he had no desire to lose his influence in England. The English Channel was a lifeline to Spain’s dominions in the Low Countries. With France controlling the coast on the south side, he needed to preserve his relationship with England to ensure safe passage for his ships. But Elizabeth dithered, time went by, circumstances changed, and the political union did not take place. As a result, Spain could no longer count on England for unfettered access to the Low Countries, and England could no longer count on Spain as an ally.

  While she was being courted by the Spanish, Elizabeth was confronted by the French and Scots. Another Mary—Elizabeth’s cousin Mary, Queen of Scots—believed she was the rightful successor to the English throne. Aged just sixteen, Mary was Henry VIII’s great-niece, and she had acceded to the Scottish throne on the death of her father, King James V of Scotland, when she was six days old. But with a French mother, she was raised in the French court, and in 1558, just prior to Elizabeth’s accession to the throne in England, she married Francis, heir to the French throne. The following year, when he became king as Francis II, she became queen of France.

  Mary was a zealous Catholic, and like most Catholics across Europe, she never accepted that Elizabeth’s mother had been lawfully married to Henry VIII. In a bid to assert her own claim to the English crown, she added the heraldic symbol of England—three golden, blue-tongued lions—to her coat-of-arms, along with those of Scotland and France.3 It was a brazen act of cultural appropriation.

  So, almost immediately upon her accession, Elizabeth found herself in a power struggle with the major powers of Europe. A map tells the story of her plight. Soon after her coronation, Elizabeth came into possession of an atlas that had been commissioned by Mary as a gift to Philip. In the beautifully illustrated book of maps, created by Diogo Homem, a gifted Portuguese cartographer, the countries of the world are marked with the flag of the crown that claimed possession of them. Philip’s coat of arms is stamped over the very heart of England as if the proud island nation were nothing more than an outlying province of the great empire of Spain.

  The atlas has survived to this day, but the coat of arms—with its turreted castle and rampant lion—has been scratched out. Historians have speculated that Elizabeth herself was responsible for this, as a petulant act of iconoclastic defiance.4 This is certainly possible. The young queen reviled Spain’s apparent assumption that it could rule the world. Her father, Henry VIII, had proclaimed England an empire in an Act of Parliament in 1533, the year Elizabeth was born. The monarch was rex imperator, king-emperor.

  But Elizabeth could not be an emperor without an empire over which to rule, and just a year before she became queen England had lost its last slice of sovereign territory beyond the British Isles—the port of Calais on the coast of France.

  FOR CENTURIES, CALAIS had been England’s commercial gateway to the European continent—the only trading center for its principal export: raw wool. But English monarchs had long laid claim to much more French territory, having once held sway over a sprawling continental empire that stretched from the Pyrenees on the France-Spain border to the ancient Roman wall that marked the England-Scotland border. In a series of conflicts now remembered as the Hundred Years’ War, England was forced to retreat from France and, by 1453, the country’s only foothold in France was Calais, its wool staple.

  Calais was more than just a coastal port and a staple for wool exports. It was also a strategic base, allowing England to safeguard the trade route between London and Antwerp. Its territory encompassed the surrounding area, covering 120 square miles comprising marsh and farmland and embracing several villages. This became known as the Pale—a word derived from the Latin phrase for “stake,” specifically a marker that delineates an area of land with a protected perimeter. There was a castle, but the center of Calais life was the market square and, in particular, the Staple Inn, an imposing building where the Staplers held sway. Here, merchants from Europe’s clothmaking capitals flocked to purchase English wool. And even as the raw wool trade faded in the 1550s, some English merchants continued to make a handsome living there. One of these was Sir Andrew Judde, who became Mayor of the Staple after helping to found the Mysterie.5

  The importance of Calais as one of England’s key links to the rich consumer markets of Europe was recognized across the continent. As Giovanni Michiel, a Venetian ambassador to England, put it, Calais was “the key and principal entrance to England’s dominions.” Without Calais, he said, the English would have “no outlet” from their country, “nor access to other countries, at least none so easy, so short and so secure.” Indeed, he suggested, evidently overlooking the enduring value of Antwerp, Calais was so essential that if the English were to lose control of it, “they would not only be shut out of the continent, but also from the commerce and intercourse of the world.”6

  Throughout Sir Andrew Judde’s mayoralty, reports circulated that the French were preparing to recapture Calais. These were dismissed as idle talk. Then, on the first of January 1558, the rumored invasion came. A French army attacked Calais. In a belated move, Queen Mary made a desperate attempt to defend the “chief jewel of the realm.”7 London merchants dispatched a relief force of five hundred men, while the Staplers, led by Judde, sent another hundred.8 But it was too little, too late. Within a week, the city had fallen to the French. Henry Machyn, a merchant and diarist, recorded that it was “the heaviest tidings to London and to England that ever was heard of.”9 For Andrew Judde, the news was devastating. Eight months later he was dead. Mary, too, was overcome by grief at the loss. Already suffering from stomach cancer, she succumbed some ten months later. “When I am opened,” she is supposed to have lamented, “you will find Calais lying in my heart.”10

  The loss of Calais, given its role as the staple for raw wool, was also a serious blow to England’s economy and the personal fortunes of some prominent merchants. One of Elizabeth’s first acts as queen was to dispatch emissaries to demand the return of Calais from France. But the best deal they could get was an agreement from the French to return the city after eight years—so long as Elizabeth did not start a war in the meantime. For the merchants, whose business was interrupted, this was deeply disappointing. They need
ed a new staple immediately and soon negotiated a move to Bruges, a Flemish town a few miles west along the coast from Antwerp. By 1561, the Staplers had secured a new charter and established a staple there.

  Elizabeth was not satisfied with this partial solution, and Cecil, who was now Elizabeth’s Principal Secretary, supported her contention that Calais must be won back. “Calais must be had,” he wrote, “for the honor of the realm, surety of the seas and trade of merchandise.”11 In September 1562, Sir Thomas Smith was brought back from the political wilderness and named England’s ambassador in Paris with the express task of negotiating a return of Calais through diplomacy. At about the same time, Elizabeth was presented with a highly risky proposal for regaining sovereign control of Calais by military means. A group of French Protestants—known as Huguenots—sought her support in a quest to overthrow France’s Catholic rulers by force and take possession of the country. They appealed to Elizabeth, as the standard-bearer of the Protestant cause in Europe. She agreed to support them, on one condition: England would have Calais.

  The enterprise was a huge gamble. The terms of the deal struck with the French clearly specified that Calais would be returned after eight years only if Elizabeth refrained from starting a war. So if she joined now with the Huguenots, her forces would have to win a decisive victory. If they lost, Calais would also be lost, and probably forever.12

  Elizabeth decided to take the chance, securing the financial support of two London merchants, Sir Thomas Gresham and Lionel Duckett.13 In October 1562, a six-thousand-strong English military force, led by Ambrose Dudley, son of John Dudley, was dispatched to Le Havre on France’s northern coast to join the fight alongside the Huguenots. But as the English prepared for battle, Elizabeth fell gravely ill with smallpox, perhaps from the strain of making such a difficult decision. With the patient nursing of Mary Sidney, Sir Henry’s wife and the Dudley brothers’ devoted sister, Elizabeth pulled through, although her skin was pockmarked for life.

  As she recovered, however, her hopes of recovering Calais faded. After seven months, the campaign to regain Calais fell apart. In April 1563, the Huguenots agreed to a truce with the French crown. Dudley had to abandon the effort, and Smith was obliged to sign Calais away. But that did not stop Elizabeth from using the title of Queen of England, Ireland, and France.*

  IF THE LOSS of Calais was not painful enough, Elizabeth soon faced an even greater challenge to her imperial status, a crisis that threatened to strip her of the royal title: Queen of Ireland. An Irish chieftain, Shane O’Neill, one of the most powerful and unpredictable Gaelic warlords, was leading a violent uprising against English rule, and threatening to collaborate with France and Spain to mount an invasion of England—just fifty miles across the Irish Sea.

  Elizabeth’s relationship with O’Neill and the Irish had been rocky from almost the start of her reign. In 1559, just as Elizabeth assumed her throne, O’Neill had come to power in Ulster, in the northeast of the island, where the O’Neills were one of the dominant clans. Three years older than Elizabeth, O’Neill rejected everything English. Nicknamed “The Proud,” he spoke in Gaelic and wrote in Latin, but reportedly refused “to writhe his mouth” around the “clattering English” tongue.14

  Nevertheless, at the outset of Elizabeth’s reign, he sought good relations. He petitioned Elizabeth, promising her that he would achieve peace in Ireland by bringing the “rude, uncivil, and disobedient people” of Ulster in check and forcing them to become “faithful, obedient, and true subjects” to the queen. He would also “subdue traitors” and “overcome rebels” and rid Ireland of the queen’s enemies.15

  O’Neill’s declarations of loyalty did not hold for long, and soon enough he was waging war with rival clans: terrorizing the countryside and burning villages in an effort to maintain his authority over Ulster. By June 1561, Elizabeth’s Lord Deputy, or viceroy, issued a proclamation, denouncing O’Neill as a “rebel and a traitor.”16

  In the face of this recalcitrant clan chief, Elizabeth had taken a dignified diplomatic approach, inviting O’Neill to visit her in London. She always preferred conciliation to confrontation. O’Neill agreed in principle, but demanded the queen loan him three thousand pounds to make the trip—money her advisers were sure she would never see again. This became the critical issue, with O’Neill letting it be known that “nothing hinders his own repair to her presence but the lack of money.” Eventually, Elizabeth released funds for O’Neill’s visit, and by November 1561 he was reported to be “ready to embark.”17

  By the first week of January 1562, O’Neill was in London, protected by a bodyguard largely composed of mercenaries known as gallowglasses—from the Gaelic, meaning “foreign warriors.” These fearsome fighters, whose heritage was Scottish, had settled in Ireland and won a reputation for devilish deeds on the battlefield. According to the celebrated chronicler William Camden, they marched through the streets of London “armed with hatchets, all bareheaded, their hair flowing in locks upon their shoulders.” They caused “as much staring and gaping as if they had come from China or America.”18

  On January 6, O’Neill signed a document of submission, after prostrating himself before the queen. Henceforward, he was to be considered “a good and natural subject.”19 But once he got back to Ireland, O’Neill reneged on the deal, claiming that he had been coerced to sign the document. “They kept me there until I had agreed to things so far against my honour and profit that I would never perform them while I live,” he said. “Ulster is mine and shall be mine.”20 For the next four years, O’Neill was in open rebellion, threatening the Pale—the isolated enclave of English settlers built around Dublin and modeled on Calais.

  IN 1565, SEEKING a different approach, Elizabeth appointed Sir Henry Sidney as her Lord Deputy in Ireland. Then in his mid-thirties, he had tried to avoid the assignment, regarding the place as a wasteland with an intractable problem—the division and antipathy of the two main communities: the Celtic Irish and the Old English.

  The Celtic Irish were Gaelic-speakers, with their own distinctive culture. They dominated the north and west, living as members of clans, including the O’Neills, the O’Donnells, and the O’Connors. Theirs was a pastoral, aristocratic society, and to the English the seminomadic Irish—they practiced “booleying,” taking cattle to upland pastures during the summer—seemed alien, even barbarian.

  The Old English, by contrast, were descendants of the Norman knights who had crossed the Irish Sea in the twelfth century at the behest of Pope Adrian IV, the first and only Englishman to be anointed Pope. Ireland was declared a “lordship,” and over the years the invader-settlers established towns under the command of powerful feudal magnates such as the earls of Kildare, Desmond, and Ormond. But they struggled to assert their authority on the land and constantly fought with the Celtic Irish. Many gradually adapted and adopted Irish ways. “Lord, how quickly doth that country alter men’s natures,” remarked Edmund Spenser, the English poet.21

  In his position as Lord Deputy, Sidney presided from Ireland’s largest city, Dublin, which lay at the center of the Pale. He soon came to the conclusion that nothing could be accomplished in Ireland while Shane O’Neill was alive. In a letter to Robert Dudley, his brother-in-law, Sidney described Ireland in the bleakest terms. The Pale was “spoiled daily” by attack, he wrote, and the place had fallen into “utter poverty.”22 Elizabeth had been reluctant to use force against O’Neill, not least because of the costs of waging war. But she changed her mind when Sidney warned her that if she did not take some kind of decisive action, she could well “lose Ireland as her sister lost Calais.”23 That Elizabeth could not afford to let happen.

  So, in the summer of 1566, a military force was dispatched to subdue O’Neill, a company that numbered a young headstrong captain named Humphrey Gilbert. He was well-known to Elizabeth. As a boy, Gilbert had been presented to Elizabeth by his great-aunt, Katherine Ashley, who had served Elizabeth as governess and who had become a kind of surrogate mother to the queen
.24 He had entered Elizabeth’s service when she was a twenty-one-year-old princess and he was a teenager. Elizabeth soon “took a particular liking” to Gilbert. Tall, handsome, and well-educated, having studied at Eton and Oxford, he was the very model of the virile young gentleman that the queen favored at court.25 He went on to prove his mettle in the abortive military effort to reclaim Calais, earning praise from his commander that there was “not a vallianter man that liveth.”26

  Gilbert returned to England from France in 1563 in search of fresh opportunities, bold projects that befitted his motto, Quod non? Why not? In the fall of 1565, he sought a commission from Elizabeth to lead a new quest to find the Northwest Passage to Cathay.27 He had no naval experience, however, and assumed that his proposal would be scorned, even ridiculed. To win over his skeptics, Gilbert wrote an elaborate treatise entitled “Discourse of a Discoverie for a New Passage to Cataia.” Addressed to his brother, it presented his rationale for the initiative.28 “You might justly have charged me with an unsettled head if I had at any time taken in hand to discover Utopia or any such country feigned by imagination,” he wrote. “But Cathay is none such: it is a country, well known to be described and set forth by all modern geographers.”29

  Gilbert completed his “Discourse” at the end of June 1566, but before it could be published he was summoned to serve in Ireland and obliged to postpone his plans to search for the Northwest Passage to Cathay. By November, however, after the English army had failed to bring down Shane O’Neill, Gilbert was back in England renewing his proposals for a voyage to Cathay. In December, he petitioned Elizabeth, asking to be granted a “captainship” of any new lands he might discover in his expedition of discovery.30 This she could not immediately do because his proposal might conflict with the rights of the Muscovy Company, which had recently been confirmed by Act of Parliament.31 For this reason, the proposals were sent to the two governors, William Garrard, one of the principal doers of the Mysterie, and his protégé, Rowland Heyward. But after swift reflection, they decided they did “mislike wholly” Gilbert’s proposal, which they deemed to be derogatory to the company’s privileges.32 Although their business activity was largely in Muscovy, the governors asserted that the company had “from the beginning of the first attempt” intended to pursue the “discovery of Cathay” and insisted that they “were determined to do so again, either by the north-east or by the north-west.”33