The desperate character of the privateers.
Such applications were granted with little discrimination, a conduct easily accounted for by the fact that when England found herself actually at war with the then second power in the world, the whole of her naval force in commission consisted of only seven coast-guard vessels, the largest not exceeding one hundred and twenty tons, and eight brigs and schooners, which had been purchased from the merchant service, and fitted with guns. Besides these she had in harbour and fit for service only twenty-three vessels of war, one of them measuring eight hundred tons, and nearly new; the others, which had seen service, consisting of one vessel of seven hundred tons, together with some of from six hundred to two hundred tons, the remaining portion of the fleet being sloops, or similar small craft. These were all that were left of the royal fleet which Henry VIII. had created. Poverty-stricken through the impolitic measures adopted by Edward VI. and his improvident council, and by the contentions during the reign of Philip and Mary, England, for the time finding herself unable to create or maintain a fleet of her own which could cope with the navy of France, much less with that of Spain, had, therefore, in a great measure to depend on the privateers whom she licensed. Knowing the weakness of the government whom they professed to serve, and the importance attached to their services, the owners of these vessels felt no hesitation in far exceeding the limits of their licence, whenever they could with impunity increase their own wealth. The rich merchantmen of Spain and Flanders, although there had been no formal declaration of war, became the objects of their prey, and were much more eagerly sought after than the poor coasters of Brittany. Under the pretence of retaliation for sufferings inflicted on English subjects by the Spanish Inquisition, and often without any professions at all, English merchants and English gentlemen, whose estates lay contiguous to the sea coast, or on the creeks and navigable rivers, fitted out vessels as traders, under vague and questionable commissions, and sent them forth, heavily armed, to plunder on the high seas whatever ships, including not unfrequently those of their own countrymen, they might consider worthy of their prey.
A.D. 1561.
Indeed, men belonging to the best families in England then became lawless rovers, especially as one of them, Sir Thomas Seymour, had formed the idea of establishing a private sovereignty among the Scilly Islands, where, as on the coast of Ireland, there were numerous narrow channels affording safe and convenient rendezvous for any desperate cruiser, who levied war on his own account whenever he thought the government neglected its duty, or whenever, by a fortunate chance, richly laden vessels happened to cross his path. The annals of the period[118] frequently mention traders which had sailed from Antwerp to Cadiz, never having reached their destination; no danger of the sea had impeded their progress, but, when hugging the land, they had met a mysterious stranger, who had ordered them to heave-to, and deliver their cargo: boats from the nearest shore in league with the cruiser, were frequently in attendance, and, during the course of the night, carts and waggons were ready at some sheltered nook on the beach to relieve the boats of their loads, and to convey bales of goods or tubs of spirits to the convenient cellars of the country squires.[119] Sometimes the unsuspecting trader was pounced upon during the course of the night by a lugger full of armed men, which had lain in wait for her, hidden, during the day, among the rocks or in one of the inlets on the coast.
Conduct of the Spaniards.
A.D. 1563.
No doubt the Spaniards had, in many instances, provoked acts of piracy by rousing a spirit of revenge for the cruel sufferings Englishmen had sustained at the hands of the Inquisition. Thus Dorothy Seely, when petitioning the Lords of Elizabeth’s Council for recovery of the losses and sufferings of her husband, who, with others of the Queen’s subjects, had been thrown into a Spanish prison, prays that she and “the friends of such of Her Majesty’s subjects as be there imprisoned, afflicted and tormented against all reason, may be allowed to fit out certain ships for the sea at their own proper charges, and to capture such Inquisitors, or other such Papistical subjects of the King of Spain, as they can take by sea or land, and to retain them in prison in England with such torment and diet as Her Majesty’s subjects had suffered in Spain.... Or that it may please Her Majesty to grant unto the Archbishop of Canterbury and the bishops the like commission in all points for foreign Papists, as the Inquisition has in Spain for the Protestants, that thereby they may be forced not to trouble her subjects repairing to Spain, or that there may be hereupon an interchange or delivery of prisoners.”[120]
Daring exploits and cruelty of Lord Thomas Cobham,
Not the least daring of the English aristocratic freebooters were the sons of Lord Cobham of Cowling Castle. Having distinguished themselves during their youth in Wyatt’s rebellion, they had grown up after the type of their boyhood, lawless Protestants, half knight-errants of the Reformation, and half pirates roving the seas, with a combined spirit of revenge and love of plunder. Thomas Cobham, the most intrepid and daring of the sons, was one of many whom Elizabeth was, for some time, powerless to suppress, even had she been so disposed. Indeed, he was continually at war on his own account with the enemies of the truth wherever he could combine the service of the cause of Protestantism with pecuniary gain. Although in his case there may have been more of the crusader than of the marauder, he had become so desperate a rover, that Elizabeth was at last forced to proclaim him an outlaw, but she was evidently not anxious about his capture. Alike cruel and daring, Cobham had resolved not to be outdone in this respect by the Inquisitors of Spain. Froude says of him[121] that, whilst cruising in the Channel, he caught sight of a Spanish ship, which had been freighted in Flanders for Bilbao, with a cargo valued at eighty thousand ducats, and forty prisoners who were going to Spain to serve in the galleys, and that he chased her into the Bay of Biscay, where he fired into her, killed the captain’s brother and a number of his men, and, boarding her when all resistance had ceased, sewed up the captain himself and the survivors of the crew in their own sails, and flung them overboard. Having scuttled the ship, Cobham made off with the booty to his pirate’s den in the south of Ireland.
Though English hearts had often been broken with the news of brothers, sons, or husbands wasting to skeletons in the dungeons of Cadiz, or burning to ashes in the Plaza at Valladolid, the eighteen drowned bodies, with the mainsail for their winding sheet, which were washed upon the Spanish shores, tended only to increase the horrors and to magnify the punishments to which English prisoners in Spain had long been subjected.[122]