‘The said Thomas doth allege and say that by force of torment he was compelled to declare and say as the judge would he should say.... Divers merchants of England, prisoners with the said Thomas, have declared before divers of us that they were present when the said Thomas was so tormented.... Furthermore it shall please you to understand here, that of long time past and unto this day, all we that hereunder have firmed our names have lived and do live in great peril and fear of our persons and goods, and not only we but all others of our nation trading these parts of Andalusia, for fear of the extreme punishment and cruel intreating of the fathers of the Inquisition and their deputies, which be in all places where our trade doth lie.’[[203]]
Matters were not improved by the passing of the English Navigation Act of 1540, limiting the free trade privilege granted to foreigners in the previous year to those who shipped in English vessels. However, after a prolonged diplomatic struggle, in which either side fired off all its heavy guns, consisting of embargoes, restrictions, and revivals of obsolete statutes, Henry agreed to exempt both Spaniards and Flemings from the Act. A new alliance against France was shortly afterwards concluded between England and the Empire, and the Inquisition relaxed its activities against the heretic islanders. This early persecution in Spain was undoubtedly the germ of much that bore great fruit in the next generation. The sons of the men of 1540 were the sailors and merchant adventurers of Elizabeth’s reign; and their contemptuous hatred of the Spaniard did not arise exclusively from the events of their own day. The seafarers also became, on the whole, the most staunchly Protestant section of the community, which may be accounted for, on the principle of contrariety, by the torments inflicted on those who, while not themselves Protestants, denied the Pope’s supremacy. It cannot be pretended that any man in Henry’s reign experienced any religious fervour in asserting that his king was supreme head of the Church. Thomas Pery and his friends upheld the royal supremacy because they were loyal Englishmen who were commanded so to do; but their sufferings at the hands of the Papists engendered a hatred of the Catholic form of priestcraft, and inclined them to a corresponding sympathy with Protestantism.
The new alliance between Henry and the emperor was not of long duration. After making war in concert with the English in 1544, and failing to achieve any very decisive results, the emperor unexpectedly made peace with France at Crespi on September 18. England was left to carry on the struggle alone. In 1545 and 1546 the war was largely naval, the privateers of both countries ravaging the Channel and the Atlantic coasts of Europe, to the great annoyance of neutrals. Relations with Spain again became bad, particularly after the capture by an English privateer of an enormously rich Spanish ship from the West Indies, an act which, although justified by specious excuses, was nothing but rank piracy. As a result, orders were given in March 1545 for the arrest of all English merchants and ships in Spain. The arrest was of long duration, extending over more than eighteen months; in fact the affair was not satisfactorily cleared up before Henry’s death. The Inquisition again began to arrest Englishmen, who were refused a hearing in the civil courts on the ground that they were heretics. In June an Englishman was sentenced to be burnt at Seville, and a ship’s captain who was driven by stress of weather into San Sebastian was promptly seized by the Holy Office.[[204]]
When Henry VIII died the Council, under the control of the Protector Somerset, effected a settlement of the quarrel with Spain, and trade was resumed. The English at San Lucar obtained a restoration of their privileges after lodging a complaint in 1548 to the effect that the functions of their governor had been usurped by a Spaniard, who was collecting the dues rightfully belonging to their Company.[[205]] The troubles with France during the reigns of Edward VI and Mary rendered the Spanish voyage very unsafe. In 1552 the Council ordered that the ships should return from Spain in companies of not less than ten or twelve at a time.[[206]] Privateering, once set on foot by the French war of 1544–6, was not stamped out until the close of the century; and the privateers never hesitated to become pirates if the stakes were sufficiently large.
Under Mary and a restored Catholic régime in England there was naturally a period of better relations; and, surprising as it may seem, throughout the long period of veiled hostilities prior to the dispatch of the Armada, English merchantmen continued to resort to Spanish ports. John Hawkins, in 1568, actually put into Vigo to refit on his return from his disastrous third voyage, when his fleet was scattered by the Spaniards at St. Juan de Ulloa. In spite of the war to the death which was carried on in American waters, trade was maintained in Europe until 1585, when a treacherous attempt to seize English ships at Bilbao at length precipitated an official declaration of war.
Some light is thrown on the conditions of English residence in Spain and the Indies by a relation in Hakluyt of the adventures of one Robert Tomson, a merchant who went to Seville in the year 1553. He was possessed with a desire to wander and see the world, but first determined to make himself master of the Spanish tongue. For this purpose he resided for a year at the house of John Field, an Englishman, who had lived at Seville for close on twenty years, and who had a wife and family in that city. Seeing the ships arrive with rich cargoes from the Indies, Tomson determined to make his way thither, and persuaded Field to share in the enterprise. Field purchased a licence for himself, his family, and his friend to sail in the next fleet for New Spain. They made all preparations for departure, providing their own victuals and necessaries for the voyage. Before sailing, however, the fleet was stayed by the king’s command, and the two Englishmen, unwilling to wait, shipped themselves in February 1555 in a caravel going from San Lucar to the Canaries, where they knew the Indies fleet would touch for water.
At Grand Canary they found some Englishmen, factors of Anthony Hickman and Edward Castlyn, merchants of London, who gave them good entertainment. After they had waited nearly eight months the Indies fleet at last appeared. Tomson and Field went aboard a ship of Cadiz, belonging to an Englishman named John Sweeting, residing in that city, and commanded by another Englishman, Leonard Chilton, son-in-law of Sweeting. One of the other passengers in the same ship was also an English merchant. The fleet touched at San Domingo and then proceeded to San Juan de Ulloa, the principal port of Mexico. Before reaching that place, however, the ship in which the Englishmen had taken passage sprang a leak and foundered in a gale at sea, all her people being rescued by one of her consorts.
On April 16, 1556, Tomson and his friends landed in Mexico, much distressed by the loss of all their goods in the shipwreck. They were very generously treated by a Spaniard, an old friend of John Field’s, who lent them clothes, horses, and money for their journey to the city of Mexico. Disaster still dogged their footsteps. On the road Tomson fell sick with an ague, from which he did not recover for six months; while John Field and three of his family died of the same disease soon after reaching the capital. On his recovery Tomson fell in with a Scotsman, Thomas Blake, more than twenty years resident in the country, and by his assistance obtained employment with a rich Spaniard, who had been one of Cortes’s original conquistadores. After twelve months’ prosperity Tomson was foolish enough to give vent at a dinner-table to some Protestant opinions. An ill-wisher reported his words to the Bishop of Mexico. He was arrested and kept seven months in prison, and then, together with an Italian also charged with heresy, was forced to do open penance in the great church at Mexico. The Italian was sentenced to imprisonment for life, and Tomson for three years. They were sent down to the coast and put aboard a ship bound for Spain, but the Italian contrived to escape at one of the islands of the Azores by swimming ashore. He ultimately made his way to England and died in London. Tomson served his sentence in the Inquisition at Seville, and, on his release, was fortunate enough to marry the heiress of a rich Spaniard who had died on the homeward voyage from Mexico. He says: ‘The marriage was worth to me 2500 pounds in bars of gold and silver, besides jewels of great price. This I thought good to speak of, to shew the goodness of God to all that put their trust in him, that I ... should be provided at God’s hand in one moment, of more than in all my life before I could attain unto by mine own labour.’ And here, to the chink of the precious metal, his story ends.
What is particularly striking in this account is the number of Englishmen encountered by this one traveller in the Spanish seas and colonies. When the Indies were first discovered Castilians alone were permitted to resort to them. After the death of Isabella they were thrown open to all Spaniards; and it would appear that in later days Englishmen had little difficulty in making their way unobtrusively wherever they wished so long as they sailed under the Spanish flag, and were sound on religious matters. Other Englishmen, known to have been early voyagers to Spanish America, will be referred to in the next chapter.
Throughout the Middle Ages Englishmen had intermittently engaged in mercantile adventures to the Mediterranean, although it was not until the end of the fifteenth century that any regularly frequented trade was begun.[[207]] The stirrings of the Renaissance in England and the accompanying social changes developed a growth of the demand for luxuries such as only the East could supply. Prior to 1498, the year of Vasco da Gama’s epoch-making voyage to Calicut, the only avenue of approach to the marts of eastern merchandise lay through the Straits of Gibraltar. The discovery of the sea voyage to Asia was destined to revolutionize utterly the conditions of the trade, but the change was slow to accomplish itself, and for half a century to come the Mediterranean route was able to hold its place in competition with the long, dangerous navigation round half the circumference of the globe. Consequently it seemed well worth while to contemporary Englishmen in the days of the early Tudors, ignorant as they were of the vast significance of the discoveries of their time, to make strong efforts to capture a share of the traffic of the Levant.