and of other privateers or marauders.
English privateers, however, licensed by the Crown, still swarmed in the Channel, and though limited by their commissions to make war only on acknowledged enemies, were unwilling to be restricted to less lucrative game. Flemings and Spaniards, if laden with valuable cargoes, were still too frequently the objects of their plunder, under the pretext that as neutrals they had articles on board which the government of England held to be contraband of war.
Piratical cruises of the mayor of Dover.
Among these lawless rovers were to be found the mayor of Dover,[123] and other leading inhabitants, who, not satisfied with the capture, in a few months of the summer of 1563, of from six to seven hundred French prizes, appear to have plundered many neutral vessels, sixty-one of which were Spanish, for the most part laden with very valuable cargoes. Nor were the depredations of these pirates confined to the capture of neutrals. Their own countrymen were not safe from their rapacious talons, and it is recorded that rich harvests were often reaped by the plunder of the small English vessels employed in the valuable trade between Antwerp and London. Indeed, the vessels of no nation were safe; even the fishermen on the coast became occasionally the objects of their prey, and were stripped not merely of their cargoes of herrings, but of their ropes and anchors, and left to perish of hunger.
Prompt retaliation of the king of Spain, 1564.
Philip of Spain could now no longer endure the lawless outrages his people had suffered, so in January 1564 he issued a sudden order for the arrest of every English vessel in his harbours, with their crews and owners. Estimating that his people had suffered by them to the extent of one million and a half of ducats, he seized thirty of their vessels then in the ports of Spain, and imprisoned their crews as security for the repayment of this loss, at the same time excluding, by a general order, all English traders from the ports of the Low Countries.[124]
Reply of Elizabeth.
With the French war still upon her hands Elizabeth was obliged to endure the affront, limiting her remonstrance to a request that the innocent might not be made to suffer for the guilty, and, while admitting that, in the confusion of the times and the imperfectly understood views of international maritime law, wrong might have been done to his subjects, she, as an earnest of her good intentions, proposed a joint commission to inquire into his claims. At the same time she prohibited Flemish vessels from entering her ports, and instructed her ambassador to say to Philip that whatever injury might have been done to subjects of Spain, she had even greater grounds for complaint, and that until her ships and subjects were released, and redress afforded for the wrongs they had sustained, she prohibited all importations of Spanish merchandise.
Elizabeth attempts to suppress piracy, 29 Sept., 1564.
As it did not suit Philip any more than Elizabeth to go to war, he listened to the remonstrances of her ambassador; the English ships, and those of their crews who had survived the terrible sufferings of a Spanish prison, were released, and the commissioners commenced their inquiry at Bruges. But although all letters of marque expired on the declaration of peace with France, and the marauders had had to seek in many cases other fields for their depredations, Elizabeth, in this instance evidently meaning what she wrote, instructed Sir Peter Carew, then at Dartmouth, to fit out an expedition with speed and secresy, and clear the seas of any “pirates and rovers” which might still haunt the coasts of Devonshire and Cornwall, or who, with that taste for a lawless life which the nature of these commissions had engendered, lurked in the western rivers, or had their rendezvous among the numerous creeks on the shores of Ireland.