by John Guy
• • •
Seriously alarmed by the commotion on Tower Hill, Elizabeth summoned her privy councillors to an emergency audience at Greenwich Palace. On 4 July, she dictated her terms of reference for what Burghley then turned into arguably the most savage proclamation of her reign, one that she demanded be ‘duly observed upon pain of her indignation’. Using the somewhat specious justification that ‘sundry sorts of base people’, notably ‘wandering idle persons of [the] condition of rogues and vagabonds’, had been spotted among the rioters disguised as war veterans, she ordered martial law to be imposed throughout London and its suburbs on an indefinite basis. A supreme military judge known as a Provost Marshal was to have unlimited discretion ‘to apprehend all such as shall not be readily reformed and corrected by the ordinary officers of justice’. In the most serious cases, suspects of no fixed abode whom the Provost Marshal’s officers had caught roaming the streets were to be hanged from the gallows ‘by order of martial law’, without the need for a trial or an appearance in court.49
A set of equally draconian, more specific orders drawn up under Burghley’s supervision assigned to the Provost Marshal a detachment of thirty cavalry, who were to be equipped with pistols, swords and daggers.50 Patrolling the streets night and day, they were to haul all suspicious characters to account, in the first instance before a special commission consisting of London and Middlesex magistrates sitting twice a week at the Old Bailey, near Newgate Prison.51
Burghley’s orders stressed the right of the Provost Marshal to sentence and hang summarily anyone found writing or disseminating a seditious libel or placard. And yet, despite his insertion of a last-minute clause into the document offering a handsome bounty to anyone providing information that would lead to such a drastic outcome, no one was caught.52
Hearing cases throughout the summer, the special commissioners ordered many offenders to be whipped or imprisoned. Others were ordered to leave London and return home to their birthplaces. Only gentlemen and their wives and Elizabeth’s servants – such as her purveyors, pursuivants, grooms, messengers and musicians – or others who could be vouched for by gentlemen were allowed to walk the streets after sunset. Everyone else was to be subject to the curfew.53
Although Mayor Spencer, fearing the mob, had strongly urged Elizabeth to proclaim martial law, these extreme measures sparked fears that she intended more generally to override the established courts of law. The result was a strongly worded protest from the judges of the Court of Queen’s Bench.54 Frustrated at what they took to be an affront to Magna Carta and due process of law, they sent a memo to the queen (unfortunately, only part of it survives) reasserting their right to summon before them any prisoners they chose to free from summary detention on writs of habeas corpus and to demand to know the cause of their arrest.55
A fortnight later, Sir Thomas Wilford, a Kentish man who had served with distinction in the Netherlands and in Normandy, was appointed Provost Marshal. Anxious not to provoke a second clash with the judges, Burghley did his best to rein in the queen’s desire for exemplary hangings, ensuring that Wilford’s commission was drafted so as to encourage him to proceed, wherever possible, ‘in ordinary manner’, using the city’s existing magistrates and constables rather than military men. According to the final version of Wilford’s commission, only ‘desperate offenders’ so incorrigible, so ‘notoriously culpable’ and careless of the law that they ‘care not for any ordinary punishment’ were to be hanged.56
In September, Wilford’s commission was quietly withdrawn and Mayor Spencer took back control of the city’s affairs, by which time civil order had largely been restored. At Spencer’s request, the commissioners appointed to sit at the Old Bailey continued to meet for at least another year, their remit whittled down to clearing the city’s highways and alehouses of the underclass so conveniently stereotyped by its social superiors as rogues, vagabonds and whores.57
Elizabeth did not herself revisit the topic of law and order directly. Instead, she watched approvingly as the Privy Council, acting on its own initiative, sharpened its enforcement weapons against unruly vagrants. During 1596 and 1597, Burghley and his fellow councillors, controversially, would order entire shiploads of beggars, vagrants, thieves, pimps and cutpurses from London and its criminal underworld to be forcibly rounded up and deported for military service in Ireland or the Netherlands. To organize these purges, they established a fresh team of Provost Marshals whose exclusive role was to seek out anyone caught loitering in the streets and escort them to the ports.58 Demobilized war veterans caught begging for lack of pay were to be arrested and sent straight back to the front line. For the first time, loitering became a serious crime, leading to an outcry in Parliament.59
Most scandalously to modern eyes, the queen did not blink when, in 1596, a Lübeck merchant, Caspar van Senden, put forward an extraordinary scheme to capture and forcibly deport as many people of black African descent as he could find living in England, shipping them to Spain or Portugal to be sold as slaves or exchanged for English prisoners of war. No one knows precisely how many black Africans had been brought to England by this time, but from the 1540s onwards some London merchants had made fairly regular voyages to ‘Barbary’ (Atlantic Morocco), and in the 1560s Sir John Hawkins of Plymouth and his elder brother William had made their names infamous by trading for African slaves with backwoods Portuguese merchants.60 As a commercial venture, van Senden’s plan failed, but the fact that Elizabeth approved it and is on record as saying that she ‘doth think it a very good exchange’, will do nothing to enhance her reputation as ‘Good Queen Bess’ in the twenty-first century.61
12. The Quest for Gold
Finding his star waning at Court while those of his rivals waxed, Sir Walter Ralegh decided that the time had come to make or break his fortune. For some years, Elizabeth had promised that he would succeed Hatton as Captain of the Queen’s Guard, but Hatton had clung to the post like a clam. Only on Hatton’s death had Ralegh at last secured the office, which enabled him to attend the queen in the Privy Chamber, carrying an ebony baton tipped with gold.
Ralegh was a genuine patriot, and one of the most original minds of his generation. When Elizabeth had made it plain that she would not adopt his grand strategy for colonization and conquest in the Americas, he switched tack to privateering, transforming himself into the closest thing to a conquistador that England would produce. A quick thinker eager to operate on the largest possible canvas, he lobbied Elizabeth and Burghley to change their naval tactics: instead of trying to intercept and plunder Philip’s treasure ships in mid-Atlantic off the Azores, as the queen had ordered Drake and Norris at the time of their ill-fated expedition to Portugal, the convoys should be throttled at the dispatching end. That should either be done by raids on the Panama Isthmus, where much of Philip’s treasure from his Peruvian silver mines was sent for shipment to Spain, or by blockading the coast of Cuba or the Straits of Florida. And Ralegh knew his queen. If anything would win her support, it was the promise of riches. He threw stardust in her eyes, offering her the beguiling prospect of booty so vast it would make the war against Philip self-financing.1
Ralegh had first learned all there was to know about privateering as an adolescent, from his half-brother Sir Humphrey Gilbert and his mother’s kinsmen, the staunchly Protestant Champernownes of Modbury in Devon.2 After the outbreak of the Wars of Religion in France in 1562, the Champernownes were in the vanguard of Channel privateering, a practice developed largely by the English during the Hundred Years War and sanctioned by international law. Governments issued ‘letters of marque’ to merchants claiming to have suffered losses at the hands of foreign nationals. These letters authorized them to recoup their losses by ‘reprisal’, and their scope was soon enlarged to include not just enemy ships but neutral ships carrying enemy cargoes.3
Covertly aided by Walsingham between 1568 and 1572, the Champernownes had helped to organize a joint fleet with the
Huguenots of La Rochelle that sailed under letters of marque and reprisal issued by the Huguenot leaders. Armed with these documents, the West Country men cheerfully plundered ships from all nations, but chiefly from Spain, returning to Plymouth for supplies and to sell off the loot.4 Long before the outbreak of war with Spain in 1585, they had expanded their horizons, crossing the Atlantic and venturing as far as the West Indies in search of what Drake would euphemistically call ‘some little comfortable dew from heaven’.5 And when in 1581 the Portuguese Cortes had ousted Dom António and recognized Philip as the lawful king, the privateers gained a munificent new patron. From his lodgings in Stepney, the Portuguese pretender issued his own letters of reprisal, which empowered them to capture both Spanish and neutral ships and their cargoes. The legality of these Portuguese commissions might be highly dubious but, as international law was in its infancy, they could never be tested.6
Privateering would become an official weapon of Elizabethan warfare in 1585 after Philip placed an embargo on English and Dutch shipping in Iberian ports and attempted to seize the Primrose at Bilbao. The Privy Council instructed Lord Admiral Howard to issue letters of reprisal to all English merchants who suffered depredations from Spanish actions. Proof of losses would soon become little more than a legal fiction as ventures were undertaken by all who fancied the chance of making their fortune. Increasingly, private ‘men-of-war’, mostly converted merchantmen financed and equipped by speculators and investors, took to sea with a view to snatching prizes whenever the opportunity arose, offering little more than a token nod in the direction of the queen. Between 1589 and 1591 alone, privateers captured some three hundred merchantmen, seizing plunder worth in excess of £400,000.7
• • •
By 1591, when Ralegh turned his attention in earnest to privateering, more than two hundred such voyages had already taken place. Now he aimed to mastermind the most daring venture so far: an expedition to Panama, whose target was nothing less than Philip’s treasure convoy. Mortgaging his estates and pooling the resulting cash with that of a few friends and business associates, he set about recruiting stakeholders, notably the queen, a syndicate of London merchants and the Earl of Cumberland. If even three or four of Philip’s ships could be captured with their cargoes, the gains would be immense.8
At first, Elizabeth gave Ralegh permission to assume command of the expedition, but then she changed her mind. With her beloved Leicester gone and Essex away on the Rouen campaign, she wanted a handsome man beside her to attend and entertain her. She never really loved Ralegh, but he kept her amused. When she told him he might accompany the expedition as far as Cape Finisterre but then must return, he had no alternative but to find a replacement for the rest of the venture. For that he turned to Sir Martin Frobisher, the first Englishman to enter the Hudson Strait and an intrepid explorer with strong connections to the Muscovy Company, who had already made three attempts to locate the fabled north-west passage linking the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. He was to take command of the queen’s ships once they were at sea, while Sir John Burgh, who had fought under Lord Willoughby in the Netherlands and for Henry IV at the Battle of Ivry, would take over Ralegh’s flagship, the Roebuck, and its pinnaces.9
In February 1592, Ralegh was ready to set sail, but he was prevented by fierce westerly gales that lasted for months. Only on 6 May was he at last able to put to sea. By then, he feared for the success of the expedition. With supplies fast diminishing and the season already too far advanced to reach the Caribbean, he worried about how he could repay the creditors who had financed the enterprise.10 Worse was to come: he had barely left Falmouth harbour and reached the open sea when Frobisher came alongside his ship on a small boat and informed him that he must return to Court immediately. A scandal was about to break, and Ralegh was at its centre.11
Ever the inveterate maverick, Ralegh disobeyed. Only after he had seen the last of his ships out past Cape Finisterre would he return to face Elizabeth’s fury. Intercepting some merchant vessels sailing between Sanlúcar de Barrameda in southern Spain and Antwerp, on one of which was an escaped English prisoner of war, he discovered that Philip had ordered the treasure convoy not to sail that year, on account of the gales. On the other hand, the prisoner also brought the news that no fewer than five great carracks (huge, multi-deck merchant ships of more than a thousand tons) were expected to arrive from the Portuguese East Indies between the end of July and the middle of August, sailing round the Cape of Good Hope and up the West African coast.12
Armed with this fresh intelligence, Ralegh split his fleet into two. Frobisher was ordered to cruise up and down in Spanish waters and prevent Philip’s warships from leaving port, while Burgh was instructed to sail towards the Azores to intercept as many of the carracks as he could. Only then did Ralegh return home, in a borrowed ship, reaching Plymouth in the third week of May. It was time to face the queen.13
• • •
Events would take a more sinister turn than Ralegh had imagined. His offence was to have secretly married Bess Throckmorton, one of Elizabeth’s Privy Chamber intimates. The daughter of Sir Nicholas Throckmorton and thus a kinswoman of the queen, Bess had begun sleeping with Ralegh around Christmas 1590. All the signs point to it being a love match. Dancing attendance on the queen was one thing, but now, at thirty-seven, Ralegh hoped for a son and heir, just as Leicester had before him when he married Lettice Knollys. Ten years younger than her husband, Bess was one of the Court beauties, a mature woman with a will and mind of her own. This was no flighty teenager bewitched by her swaggering beau, even if Ralegh had recently taken to wearing a double-pearl earring in his left ear, to bring out what one biographer has called his ‘dark Celtic virility’.14 When Bess had become pregnant by the end of the summer, the couple were quietly married.
Two days after the queen’s Accession Day in November, Bess’s brother Arthur heard of his sister’s predicament and offered to help. Slipping away from Court on the pretext of sickness, she went to his house in Mile End, east of London, where she was safely delivered of a son. Arthur recorded the date in a remarkable diary found in 1950 by a carpenter in an outhouse: it was Wednesday, 29 March 1592, ‘between two and three o’clock in the afternoon’, just over a month before the baby’s father set sail from Falmouth. Towards the end of April, Bess left her child with a wet nurse at Enfield in Middlesex, twelve miles north of London, and resumed her duties in the Bedchamber as though nothing had happened. But it was not long before her secret seeped out.15
If Ralegh ever supposed he could brazen it out with the queen, he was sadly mistaken. The revelation came when her ears were already tingling. A fortnight before Bess’s clandestine wedding, London had been buzzing with reports of scandals involving the queen’s maids of honour. First to break was the news that an illegitimate son had been born to Elizabeth Southwell. Essex’s paternity would be kept safely hidden for several more years, although the curious fact that the infant was whisked away by Lettice Knollys to be brought up quietly in Staffordshire inevitably invited rumours.16
The queen then caught Leicester’s illegitimate son by Douglas Sheffield, the young Robert Dudley, kissing Margaret Cavendish in the Presence Chamber. Barely a week later, another of her maids, Katherine Legh, was found to have given birth to a daughter in a corner of the Maids’ Chamber. Thoroughly disgusted at such behaviour, Elizabeth dismissed Mrs Jones, the ‘mother of the maids’, sending her and Legh’s seducer, Sir Francis Darcy, one of Essex’s acolytes, to the Tower.17
Ralegh fatally compounded his own offence by lying. As his relationship with Bess had come under scrutiny even before he sailed for Cape Finisterre, Robert Cecil, whose antennae were twitching, had put feelers out in a letter meant to elicit a candid exchange of confidences. But when Ralegh replied, confirming that he still meant to accompany his ships, despite having ceded overall command of the expedition to Frobisher, he prevaricated, telling Cecil, ‘I mean not to come away, as they say I will, for fe
ar of a marriage and I know not what.’
If any such thing were, I would have imparted it unto yourself before any man living. And therefore, I pray, believe it not, and I beseech you to suppress what you can [in] any such malicious report. For I protest before God, there is none on the face of the earth that I would be fastened unto.18
It was never wise to lie to a Cecil. On 28 May, Bess’s baby was brought by his nurse to Durham House, where his father dandled him on his knee for the first and possibly the only time: the child would die before a year was out. Three days later, Elizabeth had Ralegh committed to Robert Cecil’s custody under house arrest. A day or so later, he was back at Durham House, in the charge of Cecil’s close ally Sir George Carew. From there, Ralegh wrote melodramatic letters to anyone who would listen and staged a suitably theatrical scene for Carew in which he swore passionately that his heart would break unless he could catch a glimpse of his goddess the queen.19
On 3 June, Elizabeth sent Bess to live with Sir Thomas Heneage and his wife, Anne, at their house in London, near Aldgate. Heneage, Leicester’s scourge in the Netherlands and now a privy councillor, could be trusted to clip the new Lady Ralegh’s wings. As to how the queen intended to deal with the two impetuous lovers in the longer term, she kept her own counsel.20
• • •
Essex alone was willing to petition Elizabeth for Ralegh. Much of their former rivalry melted away in these months, as Essex stood as godfather to Ralegh’s son and nominated Ralegh for election to the Order of the Garter, a conspicuously futile gesture but one that made his point.21 Never really able to understand what went on inside Elizabeth’s head, Essex simply could not see why Ralegh’s secret life should jeopardize his career simply because she insisted on behaving as a surrogate parent to women who were old enough to make their own decisions.