The need for economies after the military overspend of the 1540s had inevitably led to some streamlining of the navy, but Elizabeth was still left with what for the time was an exceptionally well-managed and well-maintained battle fleet of about thirty sail. Most of these warships had been specially built or adapted by the 1580s to fight more as gun platforms than by the traditional methods of grappling and boarding. Smaller than the high-castled galleons of the Spanish and Portuguese, they were also faster, more manoeuvrable and carried heavier guns. They were the best fighting ships of any European navy, provided they stuck to what they had been designed for: defending home waters. On long ocean voyages, where durability and a capacious hold for storing supplies mattered more than speed and firepower, the advantage lay with their lumbering Iberian rivals.
Alongside, and overlapping with, the Elizabethan navy was a pack of pirate and ‘trading’ vessels that operated mainly out of the West Country ports. Royal experiments with ‘reprisals by general proclamation’ – in other words, privateering – in 1544, 1557 and 1563 had revitalised the centuries-old pirate trade in the Channel. At the same time, a few of the more intrepid English freebooters had begun to challenge Spanish and Portuguese claims to exclusive dominion over Africa and the Americas by raiding or trading with the scattered and often poorly defended Iberian colonies. One of the most successful of these interlopers was England’s first Atlantic slave-trader, the Devon sea captain Sir John Hawkins (1532–95), whose investors included Elizabeth herself.
By the 1550s there was a growing identification between Protestantism, piracy and deep-sea trading ventures. But it was the arrival of Huguenot privateers, driven to England during the 1560s by Catholic victories in France, that turned English seamen into warriors for the Protestant cause. As early as 1564, Cecil was privately expressing concern to his court colleagues at what he termed ‘this matter of resort of pyratts, or if you will so call them, our adventurers, that dayly robb the Spaniards and Flemings’.42 But the English government had never been very sensitive to such goings-on in the Channel, and – as Cecil’s words suggest – there were some at court who were inclined to regard pirates more as anti-Catholic ‘adventurers’. With tacit licence from the authorities, a joint English–Huguenot fleet, sailing under French letters of marque (an official licence to act as a privateer), was operating out of ports along the south coast by the late 1560s, preying upon ships of all nations, but especially those of Spain. Scottish and Dutch privateers, many of them Calvinists, also joined this unofficial war. For the English crews involved, piety and piracy ran in happy congruence: ‘we cold not do God better service than to spoyl the Spaniard both of lyfe and goodes’.43 Attacks on foreign merchant vessels in the crowded waters off southern England grew so frequent that the English themselves were forced to admit that ‘wee … are moste infamous for our outeragious, common, and daily piracies’.44
Not content with plundering Spanish shipping in European waters, Huguenot privateers had crossed the Atlantic in the 1550s and 1560s to attack Spanish settlements in the Caribbean. Inspired by the Huguenots’ example, and drawing on their maritime experience, the English followed in their wake – the indomitable Hawkins and his protégé Francis Drake (1540–96) at the helm. The luckier or bolder pirates like Drake won fame and fortune seizing Spanish treasure ships and raiding the Spanish Main. Their daring escapades caught the public’s imagination, and inspired more and more gentlemen and merchants to follow Drake’s example. But it was Huguenot navigators who had helped steer Drake and his like to their targets across the Atlantic, and it was Huguenot and other foreign mapmakers who taught the English to become expert cartographers themselves. Without this French connection it is doubtful whether English seapower would have spread beyond European waters as rapidly as it did.
But Protestantism and piracy would account only in part for the dramatic increase in English seafaring ventures during the second half of the sixteenth century. At least as important was the relative stagnation after 1550 of English cloth exports, which had made up the bulk of England’s trade with Europe since medieval times. Time-honoured trading patterns were then disrupted after the Spanish laid an embargo on English imports into Antwerp – the main entrepôt for English cloth – in 1563–5 in response to English acts of piracy in the Channel. Further obstacles to peaceful trade with the Low Countries were raised in the mid-1560s, as Philip II’s authoritarian and anti-Protestant policies – exacerbated by the impact of bad harvests and the activities of Calvinist provocateurs – plunged the Netherlands into rebellion. For the next eighty years or so the Spanish crown would pour troops and colonial treasure into the Low Countries in an effort to reconquer its Burgundian inheritance.
Commercial and political dislocation in the Low Countries encouraged a more venturous spirit among England’s merchants. Numerous trading companies were set up during the second half of the sixteenth century to open new trade routes to the Baltic, Africa and the Mediterranean. These ‘new’ merchants concentrated not on cloth exports but on luxury imports, which in the case of those who traded in the Mediterranean required the development of a new kind of heavily armed merchant vessel to ward off the attentions of Barbary corsairs and other pirates. The struggle for commercial supremacy in the Mediterranean during the later sixteenth century would provide much of the know-how and capital needed to extend England’s maritime trading network into the Indian Ocean in the early seventeenth century (see chapter 7).
England’s trade with Spain also boomed during Elizabeth’s reign, despite the growing tension between the two countries and the danger posed to English traders and seamen by the Inquisition. The example of William Bet, an English ship’s carpenter who was burned alive by the Inquisition simply for failing to take off his hat or kneel when a procession bearing the Host (the bread consecrated during the Mass) passed by, was not unique. Undeterred by the occasional victimisation of Protestant traders in Iberian ports, some English merchants defied their own government’s injunctions and sold heavy ordnance to the Spanish. Then, as now, England was a leading player in the arms industry, or at least in one vital sector of it: the manufacture of cannon. The relative ease and cheapness of acquiring heavy guns in England compared with the rest of Europe helps to explain the unusual willingness of English ships, however small, to give battle, and the English propensity to steal colonial goods from others rather than go to the trouble of establishing colonies of their own.
The prodigies of skill and courage performed by England’s seafarers during the first half of Elizabeth’s reign owed little to direct government action. Indeed, it was largely the queen’s failure to take a lead in advancing the Protestant cause in Europe or the New World that drew in Huguenots, pirates and merchants to fill the void. The Elizabethan government’s fitful involvement in resisting the might of the Spanish empire before the 1580s was entirely understandable. The fearsome Spanish tercios (massed infantry formations) were the Roman legions of their day, and Philip II a new Augustus. His annual income from New World silver and taxation at home was at least ten times that of Elizabeth. Moreover, England’s traditional commercial ties with the Low Countries, and its growing trade with Spain itself, meant there were sound economic reasons for staying on good terms with Philip and eschewing a militantly anti-Habsburg foreign policy. Philip too was generally anxious to avoid conflict. He gave serious consideration to regime change in England on several occasions between 1559 and the 1580s, but he usually had more pressing demands on his time and money than dealing with what he regarded as a divided and unstable country. Besides, all he or any other Catholic had to do was to wait for England’s spinster queen to die and for Mary Queen of Scots to succeed her.
Elizabeth’s desire to avoid war with Spain did not mean that she was willing to concede the claims of the Spanish and Portuguese to exclusive dominion in the New World. To make this point clear, as well as