Therefore piracy was quite as bad in the sixteenth century as it had been in the Middle Ages. The dwellers on either side of the English Channel were ever ready to pillage each other’s ships and property. About the first and second decade of the sixteenth century the Scots rose to some importance in the art of sea-robbery, and some were promptly taken and executed. In vain did Henry VIII. write to Francis I. saying that complaints had been made by English merchants that their ships had been pirated by Frenchmen pretending to be Scots, for which redress could not be obtained in France. In 1531 matters had become so bad, and piracy was so prevalent, that commissioners were appointed to make inquisitions concerning this illegal warfare round our coasts. Viscount Lisle, Vice-Admiral of England, and others were appointed to see to the problem. So cunning had these rovers become that it was no easy affair to capture them. But in this same year a notorious pirate named Kellwanton was taken in the Isle of Man; while another, De Melton by name, who was one of his accomplices, fled with the rest of the crew in the ship to Grimsby.
Sometimes the very ships which had been sent by the king against the pirates actually engaged in pillage themselves. There was at least one instance about this time of some royal ships being unable to resist the temptation to plunder the richly laden Flemish ships. But after complaint was made the royal reply came that the Flemings should be compensated and the plunderers punished. It was all very well to set a thief to catch a thief, but there were few English seamen of any experience who had not done some piracy at some time of their career, and when they at last formed the crews of preventive ships and got wearied of waiting for pirate craft to come along, it was too much to expect them to remain idle on the seas when a rich merchantman went sailing past.
Sometimes the pirates would waylay a whole merchant fleet, and if the latter were sailing light, would relieve the fleet of their victuals, their clothes, their anchors and cables and sails. But it was not merely to the North Sea nor to the English Channel that the English pirates confined themselves. In October 1533 they captured a Biscayan ship off the coast of Ireland. And during the reign of Henry VIII. there was an interesting incident connected with a ship named the Santa Maria Desaie. This craft belonged to one Peter Alves, a Portingale, who hired a mariner, William Phelipp, to pilot his ship from Tenby to Bastabill Haven. But whilst off the Welsh coast a piratical bark named the Furtuskewys, containing thirty-five desperate corsairs, attacked the Santa Maria and completely overpowered her. Alves they promptly got rid of by putting him ashore somewhere on the Welsh coast, and they then proceeded to sail the ship to Cork, where they sold her to the mayor and others, the value of the captured craft and goods being 1524 crowns. Alves did not take this assault with any resignation, but naturally used his best endeavours to have the matter set right. From the King’s Council he obtained a command to the Mayor of Cork for restitution, but such was the lawlessness of the time that this was of no avail. The mayor, whose name was Richard Gowllys, protested that the pirates told him they had captured the ship from the Scots and not from the Portingale, and he added that he would spend £100 rather than make restitution.
But stricter vigilance caused the arrest of some of these pirates. Six of them were sentenced to death in the Admiralty Court at Boulogne, eleven others were condemned to death in the Guildhall, London: and in 1537 a ship was lying at Winchelsea “in gage to Bell the mayor” for £35 for the piracies committed in her, for she had been captured after having robbed a Gascon merchantman of a cargo of wines.
The finest of the French sailors for many a century until even the present day have ever been the Bretons. And just as in the eighteenth century the most expert sailormen on our coasts were the greatest smugglers, so in Tudor times the pick of all seamen were sea-rovers. About the time of Lent, 1537, a couple of Breton pirate ships caused a great deal of anxiety to our west-country men. One of the two had robbed an English ship off the Cornish coast and pillaged his cargo of wine. From Easter-time till August these rovers hung about the Welsh coast, sometimes coming ashore for provisions and most probably also to sell their ill-gotten cargoes, but for the most part remaining at sea. It would seem from the historical records that originally there had been only one Breton ship that had sailed from St. Malo; but having the good fortune to capture a fishing craft belonging to Milford Haven, the crew had been split up into two. Presently the numbers of these French pirates increased till there was quite a fleet of them cruising about the Welsh coast. A merchant ship that had loaded a fine cargo at Bristol, bound across the Bay of Biscay, had been boarded before the voyage had been little more than begun. For week after week these men robbed every ship that came past them. But especially were they biding their time waiting for the English, Irish and Welsh ships who were wont about this period of the year to come to St. James’s Fair at Bristol.
However, in the meanwhile, the men of the west were becoming much more alert, and were ready for any chance that might occur. And a Bristol man named Bowen, after fourteen Breton pirates had come ashore near Tenby to obtain victuals, acted with such smartness that he was able to have the whole lot captured and put into prison. And John Wynter, another Bristolian, knowing that the pirates were hovering about for those ships bound for the fair, promptly manned a ship, embarked fifty soldiers, as well as the able seamen, and cruised about ready to swoop down on the first pirate ship which showed up on the horizon. The full details of these men and what they did would make interesting reading if they were obtainable; but we know that of the above-mentioned fourteen, one, John du Laerquerac, was captain of the Breton craft. On being arrested he stoutly denied that he had ever “spoiled” English ships. That was most certainly a bare-faced lie, and presently Peter Dromyowe, one of his own mariners, confessed that he himself had robbed one Englishman; whereupon Laerquerac made a confession that, as a matter of fact, he had taken ships’ ropes, sailors’ wearing apparel, five pieces of wine, a quantity of fish, a gold crown in money and eleven silver halfpence or pence, as well as four daggers and a “couverture”!
It was because the English merchants complained that they lost so much of their imports and exports by depredations from the ships of war belonging to Biscay, Spain, the Low Countries, Normandy, Brittany and elsewhere, that Henry VIII. had been prevailed upon to send Sir John Dudley, his Vice-Admiral, to sea with a small fleet of good ships. Dudley’s orders were to cruise between the Downs on the east and St. Michael’s Mount on the west—in other words, the whole length of the English Channel—according as the wind should serve. In addition, he was to stand off and on between Ushant and Scilly and so guard the entrance to the Channel. Furthermore, he was to look in at the Isle of Lundy in the Bristol Channel—for both Lundy and the Scillies were famous pirate haunts—and after having so done he was to return and keep the narrow seas. Dudley was especially admonished to be on the look out to succour any English merchant ships, and should he meet with any foreign merchant craft which, under the pretence of trading, were actually robbing the King’s subjects, he was to have these foreigners treated as absolute pirates and punished accordingly.
For the state of piracy had become so bad that the King “can no longer suffer it.” So also Sir Thomas Dudley, as well as Sir John, was busily employed in the same preventive work. On the 10th of August of that same year, 1537, he wrote to Cromwell that he had at Harwich arrested a couple of Frenchmen who two years previously had robbed a poor English skipper’s craft off the coast of Normandy, and this Englishman had in vain sued in France for a remedy, since the pirates could never be captured. But there were so many of these corsairs being now taken that it was a grave problem as to how they should be dealt with. “If they were all committed to ward,” wrote Sir Thomas, “as your letters direct, they would fill the gaol.” Then he adds: “They would fain go and leave the ship behind them, which only contains ordnance, and no goods or victuals to find themselves with. If they go to gaol, they are like to perish of hunger, for Englishmen will do no charity to them. They are as proud naves as I have talked with.”
Eleven days later came the report from Sir John Dudley of his experiences in the Channel. He stated that while on his way home he encountered a couple of Breton ships in the vicinity of St. Helen’s, Isle of Wight, where he believed they were lying in wait for two Cornish ships “that were within Porchemouthe haven, laden with tin to the value of £3000.” Portsmouth is, of course, just opposite St. Helen’s, and on more than one occasion in naval history was the latter found a convenient anchorage by hostile ships waiting for English craft to issue forth from the mainland. But when these Breton pirates espied Dudley’s ships coming along under sail, they “made in with Porchemouthe,” where Dudley’s men promptly boarded them and placed them under arrest, with the intention of bringing them presently to the Thames. Dudley had no doubt whatever that these were pirates, but at a later date the French ambassador endeavoured to show that there was no foundation for such a suspicion. These two French crafts, he sought to persuade, were genuine merchantmen who had discharged their cargo at “St. Wallerie’s” (that is to say, St. Valery-sur-Somme), but had been driven to the Isle of Wight by bad weather, adding, doubtless as a subtle hint, that they had actually rescued an Englishman chased by a Spaniard. It is possible that the Frenchmen were telling the truth, though unless the wind had come southerly and so made it impossible for these bluff-bowed craft to beat into their port, it is difficult to believe that they could not have run into one of their own havens. At any rate, it was a yarn which Dudley’s sailors found not easy to accept.
This was no isolated instance of the capture of Breton craft. In the year 1532 a Breton ship named the Mychell, whose owner was one Hayman Gillard, her master being Nicholas Barbe of St. Malo, was encountered by a crew of English seamen who entertained no doubts whatsoever as to her being anything else than a pirate. Their suspicions were made doubly sure when they found her company to consist of nine Bretons and five Scots. They arrested her at sea, and when examined she was found well laden with wool, cloth and salt hides. Some French pirate ships even went so far as to wear the English flag of St. George, with the red cross on a white ground. This not unnaturally infuriated English seamen, especially when it was discovered that the Bretons had also carried Englishmen as their pilots and chief mariners, and were training them to become experts in piracy.