Privateering and Piracy.
Privateering was encouraged by a proclamation of 8th July 1557, permitting any one to fit out vessels against the royal enemies, and allowing possession to be retained of all ships and goods captured ‘withoute making accompte in any courte or place of this realme,’ and without payment of any dues to the Lord Admiral or any other officer. This entire abrogation of control increased the tendency to illegal acts even among the more honest adventurers; while Carews, Killigrews, Tremaines, and the ubiquitous Strangways, and Thomson, industriously working for themselves, the government had always with them. Thomson was off Scilly in 1556, with three ships, and was taken. When tried only he and four others were condemned and the Council loudly complained of the partiality of the jury, a partiality which better explains the prevalence of piracy during these years than the accepted explanation of the inefficiency of the Navy. The two Killigrews, Thomas and Peter, were, if not the worst, the most successful offenders and in 1556 were sufficiently enriched by their plunder to think of retiring to ‘some island’ for the winter. They were frequently chased into French ports, but to keep them there was beyond the power of the men-of-war, and the French authorities treated them with a neutrality more than benevolent.
When we find a privateer belonging to the Lord Privy Seal attacking neutral vessels, and man-of-war officers boarding and robbing a Flemish merchantman at Tilbury, it seems wonderful, in view of the excesses such incidents suggest among the majority with no sense of legal responsibility, that commerce could have been carried on at all.
ELIZABETH
1558-1603
The Naval Policy of Elizabeth.
Her subjects were occupied, during the greater portion of Elizabeth’s reign, in teaching their Queen the use of a navy, instruction that she was the first English sovereign to put into practice on strategic principles. Yet study of the forty-five years of glorious naval history on which her renown is mainly based, leaves the impression that more might and should have been done with the Navy. That she preferred diplomacy to force would have been a merit had the choice been founded on an ethical detestation of the cruelty of war, instead of an ingenuous belief in her own skill and the obtuseness of her antagonists. Under conditions more favourable to ascendancy at sea than have ever existed for England, before or since, the successes of the Navy itself, as distinguished from the expansion of the commercial marine, were, although relatively great, limited by the hesitation with which the naval arm was employed, the way in which the service was pecuniarily starved, and the settled doctrine underlying her maritime essays that an expedition should be of a character to return a profit on the outlay. And perhaps the severest comment on her government lies in the fact that she was more liberal in her treatment of the Navy, than of any other department of the State. In February 1559 she possessed twenty-two effective ships of 100 tons and upwards, in March 1603, twenty-nine; practically, therefore, she did little more than replace those worn out by efflux of time, for only two were lost in warfare. If Henry VIII created a navy under the stimulus of a possible necessity it requires little imagination to conceive his course when the time had come, as it never came for him, to put forth every effort in using it for the preservation of England.
When Elizabeth succeeded to the throne, the possession of a fleet and an organised administration, the French royal navy, only a few years before an apparently serious competitor, had ceased to exist; the rivalry of Holland had not yet begun, and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that a Spanish royal navy had never existed, in the sense of an ocean going service organised on a basis enabling it to act vigorously and effectively in any direction.[499] The opportunity had come therefore to a power with maritime ambition, the only one possessing an efficient fleet and naval control, and incited by religious differences and commercial emulation. The altered situation brought to the front a band of men who, in the preceding century, would have been military adventurers in France, but who now, half traders, half pirates, handled their ships with the same strategic and tactical skill their ancestors exercised on land, and who, if they had been allowed a free hand, would have brought Spain down in ruin instead of merely reducing her to a condition of baffled impotence. They were not allowed a free hand. When acting for themselves they had the knowledge that if it suited the royal policy of the moment repudiation of their deeds might mean, if not loss of life, at least loss of property and reputation. When in command of royal fleets they were kept in touch with the government, hampered by voluminous and contradictory instructions, and, above all, their efforts and successes rendered nugatory by the parsimony which kept the depots always on the brink of exhaustion.
In naval, as in other matters, Elizabeth tried to make her subjects do the work of the crown and therefore she frequently confined her action to taking a share with several ships in a privateering expedition, prepared by private individuals for their own profit. Such expeditions swell the list of ships employed at sea, and privateering as a source of injury to an enemy has its value, but such enterprises when forming the whole effort of the State for a particular year show an insufficient acquaintance with the character of the operations required. Privateers were equipped not with large objects but to secure profits for owners and crews. It sometimes happened that this purpose was at issue with the wider views of the admiral in command, and the voyage became ineffective where a similar number of men-of-war subject to discipline might have done important service. The enormous increase in the merchant marine which, it will be shown, characterised the reign, was in one way disadvantageous since it induced the government to rely more on a guerre de course than on the sustained and systematised action of the Royal Navy. Even when a great fleet was sent out the light in which Elizabeth regarded it is instructively shown in a letter to Nottingham, after the Cadiz voyage of 1596, when he had asked for money to pay the men’s wages: