from supporting the leading practitioners of this illegal trade.
Each level of growth had a geographical locus. Thus a local rogue turned rover might land and dispose of his piratical gains under cover of darkness near the harbour which was his home. At county level, a crooked but influential member of the gentry, such as the local vice admiral, could make it known that he was prepared to turn a blind eye to such activities at a price, or even sponsor a few ships and seamen of his own. At this stage of growth the Crown, when so minded, attempted to cauterise the activity, although there were always those in authority, such as the Lord Admiral, who controlled both the navy and the Admiralty Court, who could covertly condone that which they were charged to condemn.2 The result was that the pruning hooks of legality were handled with such discretion that those dispatched by both sea and land to root out piracy wielded their secateurs in a lackadaisical manner – only snipping with full force on those least able to offer rich rewards in their defence. No effort was ever made to constrain those who returned with the most golden fruits from further afield, regardless from whose orchard they had been snatched.
By the mid sixteenth century England had earned her epithet of a nation of pirates, but in the quarter century that closed with Elizabeth’s death in 1603, the country turned from being a nation of pirates into a pirate nation; a state whose own ruler was identified as a pirate queen who (along with most her advisers, favourites and legal practioners) was a beneficiary of piracy.
In this environment, piracy – meaning robbery at sea – came to refer to several different ways in which merchandise could be removed from ships by force. At the Jolly Roger, skull-and-crossbones end, it included the swashbuckling exploits of many an opportunist, as well as the activities of half-starved men struggling to survive by robbing little of value from their fellow seagoers.3 Hundreds of lowly pirates plied this trade in comparative obscurity, unless they were captured, tried and, lacking influential friends, hanged at the Execution Dock at Wapping between the high and low water marks, a muddy strand that came within the jurisdiction of the Lord High Admiral. Their activities indicated a lack of law enforcement, but not the financial and moral vacuum at the very top which was essential for the careers of a few of the most successful pirates to flourish.
For such men to thrive they needed both the challenge of cargoes worth capturing and security from prosecution. One of the problems with the persecution of piracy arose because many of these crimes took place beyond the jurisdiction of the nations whose citizens were involved, ie on the high seas. Pirates were in this respect natural outlaws, roving as satellites beyond the gravitational pull of the Admiralty and its officials, whose response to pirates returning to land depended much more on the political and financial fallout from their activities rather than the legality of their actions – making many of them outlaws, but not outcasts.
To manage this lawlessness one league out from land, states recognised a system of compensation whereby a merchant could reclaim the value of plundered goods from the nation of the pirate. This was achieved through the issue, by a state or convenient pretender, of letters of reprisal (or ‘marque’ in French), often valid for just six months, which granted to the wronged party the right to board vessels linked to the perpetrator by port of origin, nation or even religion, and seize goods up to the assessed value of that which had been taken. When well-ordered the system worked: in 1546 the owners of Kathryn of Bristol fell in with a Breton ship whose owner owed them £100. Coming alongside, they persuaded the master to be escorted to St David’s where ‘without compulsion, the Breton delivered him 11 tun of wine, priced £22, and 9 ton of salt, price £6, as parcel of that £100.’4 The cargo claimed by Kathryn of Bristol represented the typical, everyday, boring bulk freight that was so frequently seized piratically in the first half of the sixteenth century. The fact that many considered it worthwhile risking their necks to seize a barrel of salted herring and some wax candles says more about the social deprivation that existed in many a coastal town and village than it does about a natural streak of thievery running through the veins of English seamen. Besides which, the latter quarter of the sixteenth century was a period of dearth, when food taken at sea became a form of famine relief. Yet far offshore, a new type of cargo was now being carried across the oceans creating new opportunities and fresh temptations.
This sea-change into something rich, if not strange, had made itself apparent the year before the successful conclusion of Kathryn’s claim. On 1 March 1545, Robert Reneger, acting with the invalid authority of a letter of reprisal issued two years earlier, seized the carrack San Salvador, near Seville, whence she was returning from a voyage to New Spain laden with gold and other goods to the value of £4,300 (£560,000 today). However exaggerated Reneger’s original claim for compensation had been, there is no chance that it could have amounted to more than a single digit percentage of what he saw stowed in the hold of San Salvador. He brought it home where, whatever his desire, it was so valuable that he had to involve the Crown in its disposal. The treasure was taken to the Tower, but not so Reneger who, to the intense annoyance of the imperial ambassador, ‘instead of being punished like a pirate, was treated like a hero’.5
It was to be many years before the successors to Reneger would emerge to serve a new sovereign, but the circumstances that would lead to Elizabeth sponsoring such lawlessness existed throughout the long Tudor century, from 1485 to 1603. This was an age of avarice in which the Crown led by example. The dynasty was always short of money and found the raising of revenue through parliament both unsatisfactory and embarrassing. Funds were needed both to establish the Crown’s legitimacy and engender awe at home, and its recognition by foreigners of its position as a major European power. Henry VII succeeded in doing just this through taxing the peerage and wealthy (and not so wealthy) merchants, extracting money from them to pay for wars which he then had his enemies pay to prevent.
Not so his son Henry VIII who, desperate to be acclaimed a renaissance warrior prince, spent his father’s fortune several times over in wasteful and unsuccessful wars against the French, and only replenished his coffers by assuming the role of rogue landlord to the country’s vast monastic estates, turfing out the sitting tenants, minus their possessions, and selling the freehold to his cronies. Even this rapacious behaviour did not restore the nation’s fortunes and, after two short reigns and two even shorter but costly wars, Elizabeth came to the throne in 1559, not only with debts of £200,000, but to find that the coffers were bare. The expulsion of the French from Scotland and the financing of an expedition to Rouen cost her a further £650,000. She also loaned money to both France and the Netherlands for them to repulse the Spanish. By 1596 the former owed her £445,125 and the latter almost £800,000, so she had a very small war-chest available to fund her own fight against Spain, as well as sustain an army bogged down in Ireland.
The money that the queen had available to maintain her court, her armed forces, her government and her lifestyle came from income generated by the Crown lands, customs and a variety of additional sources. This was referred to as her ‘ordinary revenue’ and amounted in the early years of her reign to about £120,000 a year, rising to £300,000 after 1593. To meet the occasional, the unforeseen, or emergencies such as wars or additional defence, the queen relied upon her ‘extraordinary expenditure’, to raise which she was entitled to call on parliament for support by way of taxation that on average through her reign amounted to just £80,000 a year. This meant that by 1588, the year of the nation’s greatest peril, Elizabeth had a little over £250,000 annual income with which to fight her foes and fund those European Protestants whose rebellions she chose to underwrite.6
Today she could have managed her finances by raising taxes on the wealthy or reducing welfare benefits to the poor, but neither of these options was available to her. The rich avoided taxation, while the poor drew no state benefit: indeed, Elizabeth, by nature parsimonious, found it difficult enough to pay her employees, such as her soldiers and sailors, what they were due, although their officers seldom went short. Borrowing was one option open to her and for this she relied upon the Flemish money market where much funding could be obtained if the (normally high) interest rate could be agreed. As collateral, the goods of London merchants made a juicy bond,
