Increase of the privateers, 1570.
Their desperate acts.
While such insults were of too frequent occurrence on shore, the agressions of the privateers had rather increased than diminished in the Channel. Elizabeth felt that, for the safety of the kingdom against invasion, she must chiefly depend on the force which could be maintained in the immediate neighbourhood of her own shores, and that it was quite as safe, and much more economical, to encourage the voluntary action of her subjects than to rely entirely upon a royal standing navy. Throughout the whole of the English coast, and especially in the Channel ports, the sea-going population regarded Papists generally as their natural enemies and their legitimate prey. Between forty and fifty vessels, corsairs or privateers, for the difference was not easily discernible, held the coast from Dover to Penzance. The English, French, or Flemish seamen, of whom their crews were promiscuously composed, were united by a common creed and a common pursuit. At one time they sailed under a commission from the Prince of Orange; at another under one from the Queen of Navarre. In every English harbour they had abundant stores ready for their use. Prizes were brought in almost every day to Dover, Southampton, or Plymouth and other western ports, where the cargoes were openly sold and the vessels refitted and armed. At times their acts were of the most desperate character: thus, three ships with valuable cargoes from Flanders, bound to a port in Spain, were captured outside the Goodwins, and, because they had stoutly resisted these privateers or pirates, the crews were ruthlessly flung into the sea, and left to perish before the eyes of their murderers.
1572.
When, somewhat later, the Spanish people heard that Hawkins was fitting out a squadron to cruise for the gold fleet, they were furious, and were roused to the highest pitch of anger. Philip, however, still lagged behind his subjects. A war with England would have been then a serious matter; he knew that in any such emergency France would send an army over the Rhine and revolutionise the Netherlands. He was therefore obliged to endure these continued insults and the piratical depredations upon the ships and merchandise of his subjects. It was the lesser of two evils. Encouraged by the richness of the spoils and the impunity with which the capture of Spanish property could be made, the English merchants and sailors were tempted to such an extent from their legitimate trade by the more exciting and far more lucrative occupation of bucaneering, that in the fourteenth year of Elizabeth’s reign the burden of all the vessels in the kingdom which were engaged in ordinary commerce scarcely exceeded fifty thousand tons.[138] The largest merchantman which then sailed from the port of London was only two hundred and forty tons register. Indeed, one hundred and fifty vessels of all kinds, most of them small coasters, comprised the whole fleet engaged in lawful commerce from the harbours of Cornwall and Devonshire; but so numerous were the pirates that no unarmed ship in the Channel worthy of their notice could escape from their clutches. Nor did they confine themselves to depredations at sea. Some of the crews of the more daring cruisers harassed the Spanish coast, sacking villages, plundering mansions, pilfering churches and convents, and had, moreover, the audacity to drink success to piracy out of the silver sacramental vessels which they had stolen. If not in all cases furnished with the Queen’s letter to “burn, plunder, and destroy,” they too frequently exercised that calling; and if ever England was justified in claiming the “Dominion of the Narrow Seas,” she had at no period of her history greater claims to it than when these freebooters, in vessels of every kind, poured forth from her ports, and scoured the English Channel like a flock of locusts—an eternal disgrace to the name they bore, and to the flag under which they had been launched for peaceful purposes upon the ocean.
FOOTNOTES:
[97] Froude’s ‘History of England,’ vol. iii. p. 248.
[98] Froude’s ‘History of England,’ vol. iii. p. 250, et seq.
[99] State Papers, vol. i. p. 828.
[100] Macpherson states that the name of the Great Harry was first given to the Lion, a Scotch ship belonging to Andrew Barton, which was taken by Lord Edward Howard in 1511 (vol. ii. p. 39).