of five vessels. Ultimately, though, English galleys were rarely used for defense. Most galleys—and there were rarely more than three suitable for use at any one time—were thought by more practical minds to “serve in dede to lytle purpose.” The Galley Bonavolia, which had been acquired from the French in 1563, helped chart the Thames estuary and worked as a tug during its otherwise ignoble career.67
Considering the checkered history of English galleys, it is remarkable how frequently galley slavery appears in the sources. Legislation and proclamations allowing for individuals to be condemned to slavery was common during the 1540s. In 1544, the king issued a proclamation ordering alien French to leave England or they would be “sent to his grace’s galleys.” A year later, the ranks of galley slaves were augmented by other “such ruffians, vagabonds, masterless men, common players, and evil-disposed persons” who crossed the government’s path. In 1548, the city of London punished Edmund Grymeston for “writing an infamous libel full of reproach” by cutting off his ears at the pillory and sentencing him “to serve in the galleys as a slave during his life.” Elizabeth’s royal government went even further by making some effort to raise a force of galley slaves. In 1586, Francis Walsingham pressed the queen’s solicitor general to make plans to condemn the most vile criminals, “being repryved from execution” to the galleys, which would “both terrify ill disposed persons from offending, and make thos that shall hasard them selves to offend in some sorte proffitable to the common wealthe.”68
As evidence of the power and persistence of these ideas, two seventeenth-century English knights, Sir William Monson and the reformed pirate Sir Henry Mainwaring, were particularly forthright in their articulation of the advantages of galley slavery. In a discourse on pirates submitted to King James during the 1610s, Mainwaring suggested that in order to reduce the incidence of piracy in Ireland and England, it would be “no ill policy of this State, to make them Slaves, in the nature of Galley-Slaves.” “Other Christian Princes use this kind of punishment,” Mainwaring noted, “and so convert it to a public profit.” Moreover, he continued, “it is observable, that as many as make slaves of offenders, have not any Pirates of their Nation.” Monson concurred with Mainwaring, adding that pirates and other criminals “must be shaved both head and face, and marked in the cheek with a hot iron” so that others would “take them to be the King’s labourers, for so they should be termed, and not slaves.” Both Monson and Mainwaring recognized that the threat of slavery—the term even, in Monson’s case—would “terrify and deter them, more than the assurance of Death itself.” But echoing the insights found in More’s Utopia, they also asserted that slavery “will make men avoid sloth and pilfering and apply themselves to labour and pains.” And, in a best-case scenario, “it may be a means to save many of their Souls, by giving them a long time of Repentance.”69
Of course, galley slavery never amounted to much in Britain. In 1589, Sir John Hawkins issued a memorandum on the sea charges of the Galley Bonavolia, noting that the ship required 150 slaves to fill its 50 banks. Hawkins, however, did not even feel equipped to provide a budget for food expenditures for the slaves because “we are not yett in the experyence of yt.”70 On the few occasions when an English galley actually took to the sea, it was typically powered by free oarsmen. England’s self-styled reputation as a place void of slaves may also have limited the creation of a large force of galley slaves. When the English government returned the captured Galley Blanchard to the French in 1547, for example, Henry VIII refused to return its complement of 140 enslaved Neapolitans, Spaniards, and Gascons. For a short while, the men continued to row in chains while being encouraged by English cudgels, but Henry was advised that the galley would be “some chardge … contynewally iff his highness do kepe her styll with her sute of forsados as she ys nowe.” Viscount Lisle, England’s lord admiral, suggested instead that Henry should “gyve fredom and liberty to the sayde forsados at the leaste to as many as wold take yt wch I think wold be more worth to his [majesty] then the strength of [four] gallys if ever his [majesty] shold have any more to do with theym.” Besides endearing the former galley slaves to the English monarch, Lisle believed this measure would send a message to foreign powers who “wolbe ever in doubt to come nere unto any of the Kyngs [majesty’s] navy or ports for feare of Rendering theym selves unto his highnes.”71
From the perspective of a number English writers and policy makers, then, slavery was not something that should be rejected outright because it was inconsistent with the dignity of England. Human bondage, as most English authors preferred to label it, was a practical solution to a number of social ills that, if left unchecked, threatened to do even greater damage to the integrity of English freedoms and liberties than the institution of slavery ever could on its own. Although the most negative connotations associated with slavery galled—most particularly its abject nature—Englishmen like Ralph Robinson and Sir William Monson believed that the problem could be alleviated simply by labeling it as something else. If slavery had no place in early modern England, a system of human bondage founded on progressive, redemptive ideals was nonetheless a tantalizing notion.
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When Walsingham dispatched Hakluyt to Paris in 1583, neither man knew as much about long-distance, transatlantic navigation and colonialism as they would have liked. What they did know about and recognize when they saw it was slavery. To men like Walsingham and Hakluyt, slavery was useful to invoke because it emphasized the precarious grip England held on liberty and freedom, qualities they believed they enjoyed by virtue of their Protestant religion and English national identity. As well-educated Englishmen, they had read plenty about slavery as a result of the literary world they inhabited. Whether they studied Latin texts or contemporary works and whether they read secular histories or the Christian Bible, slavery was a subject that could not be avoided without seriously distorting the sacred and secular worlds they inhabited. That slavery had once been common but was no longer perhaps comforted some people and highlighted the triumph of English liberty in a world otherwise bound in chains, both real and metaphorical. But English men and women were also quick to recognize that the new era of domestic and international strife in which they lived threatened to undermine all that they held dear. To be English in the late sixteenth century was tantamount to being free while for others it was not, but that luxury was by no means guaranteed.
Servitude, villeinage, and penal slavery were not the same thing as the institutional system of slavery that would develop in the Atlantic world in later years, but these practices nonetheless encouraged Englishmen to think about slavery. A few individuals also chose to reconceptualize human bondage as a practical, even pragmatic, institution linked with England’s past, present, and future.72 Certainly, in raw numbers slavery itself was ultimately of small import, but its existence and theoretical application nonetheless reveals that, even outside the bounds of religious and intellectual circles, there were domestic reference points from which Englishmen could construct ideas about human bondage. Moreover, the existence of slavery points to a disjuncture between contemporary political rhetoric concerning the inclusive English nation and the social and cultural reality in which Englishness alone might not be enough to guarantee every individual the ideological benefits of his or her own nationhood. Freedom may have been a defining element of English national identity in the era of overseas settlement, but that did not mean that villeinage could not be justified in practice or that recalcitrant Englishmen could not be forced to labor in bondage. Penal slavery, in particular, and vagrancy legislation demonstrate the readiness of Tudor authorities to compel the lower orders to labor—not for labor’s sake but for that of society as a whole. Although Tudor elites might rhetorically eschew the arbitrary nature of slavery as perpetual and inheritable, nothing about slavery was deemed unreasonable if individuals brought it upon themselves, if the practice served a social purpose, or if it was directed toward stabilizing and preserving, paradoxically, the idea of freedom in England.
These domestic touchstones, however, did not exist in a vacuum. While English elites were ruminating on the practical application of domestic slavery or thinking about the relationship between Englishness and liberty, many of their fellow countrymen were coming to terms with the reality that the larger world in which they lived was rife
