the wealth of the west or the spices of the east without risking their lives, they were expected so to do at considerable disadvantage in the markets of Seville or Lisbon. It was thus not surprising that some saw more advantage in investing in powder and shot discharged from reusable canisters, than in wool and cloth which those in warmer climes did not wish to wear. High-seas piracy thus became stay-at-home England’s answer to the well-rewarded global expansion of the Iberian states. Realistically, it was the only way that the nation could keep pace with their economic rise, and it offered Elizabeth a swifter and surer return on investment than did any equivalent support for the creation of her own new world commonwealth. Indeed, Frobisher’s failure to return from his voyages to the northwest without either discovering a sea-route to Cathay or gold-enriched ores, and the disappearance of Ralegh’s ill-supported settlers on Roanoke, must have contrasted forcefully in the queen’s mind with the wealth which Drake, ‘the master thief of the unknown world’, laid before her in 1580 following his successful piratical circumnavigation.
The blanket issue of letters of reprisal did not make the queen rich. After the costs of a voyage had been deducted, the Lord Admiral received 10 per cent of the value of the prize, and the Crown just 5 per cent in customs dues, with the residue being split three ways between the victuallers, the owners and the crew. As the rewards for pillage became greater (Andrews estimates that between 1585 and 1603 the value of prize goods ranged from about £100,000 to £200,000 a year12), so the queen’s desire to be included in the distribution grew. This she achieved by issuing her own letters of commission to her favourite pirates, meaning that she could also dispatch her own ships to strengthen their forces. Ironically, the first and most famous of these commissions, the one which Drake referred to in his prosecution of Thomas Doughty during his circumnavigation, may not even have existed. If it did it would have been written on the same lines as those she gave to her most persistent pirate, George Clifford, earl of Cumberland, in 1595 (Appendix 2). Elizabeth also recorded in advance the return that she expected from her contribution which was ‘£10,000 for every carrack bound from Portugal for the Indies, or £20,000 on any from the Indies to Portugal.’13
Experience had already taught Cumberland that the queen could demand more than was ever suggested by pre-sailing agreements. In the taking of the richest prize of all, Madre de Dios in 1592, his reward had been minimal. Under the rules that were accepted as standard, Elizabeth would have been entitled in this instance to a share of £20,000 of that ship’s £141,000 invoiced worth, with the earl receiving at the least £66,000, and Walter Ralegh, the London merchants and Hawkins sharing the remainder. Instead, the queen was constrained from keeping it all only by the argument that to do so would discourage further similar sorties. In the end she kept £80,000, and with ill grace handed over £36,000 to Cumberland and £24,000 to Ralegh, with the merchants sharing the remainder.14 Ralegh had invested over £34,000 in the voyage, Cumberland some £19,000, while Her Majesty had provided two ships and £1,800. This was not untypical of Elizabeth who, faced with the opportunity of being leanly right or richly wrong, never hesitated to select the road to wealth.
By sponsoring her pirates Elizabeth took a step beyond that which her great rival was prepared to take. Richard Hawkins, himself captured by the Spanish while on a piratical voyage, noted that if a Spanish ship operating as a pirate:
. . . should fall athwart his King’s armado or galleys, I make no doubt but they would hang the captain and his company for pirates . . . for by a special law it is enacted that no man in the kingdom of Spain may arm any ship and go in warfare, without the King’s special licence and commission, upon pain to be reputed a pirate, and to be so chastised . . . In England the case is different: for the war once proclaimed, every man may arm that will . . . which maketh for our greater exemption from being comprehended within the number of pirates.15
For Elizabeth’s laxer rules on piracy to be effective, she needed men in the right quantity and with the right qualifications to serve her both offensively and defensively. In July 1545 Reneger had brought four of his pirate fleet and a French prize to the Solent to join Lord Admiral Lisle’s force to repulse the French invasion. In 1588 not one but a dozen pirates formed up with Howard’s fleet to face the Spanish Armada. Elizabeth, needing more Renegers, had found a cohort prepared to make the transference from nautical outlaw to naval officer and from knave to knight, a progression that made idols of the ‘sea dogs’ such as Drake, Hawkins, Grenville, Frobisher, Cumberland and Ralegh.16
These men formed a new piratocracy whose voyages, covertly or overtly blessed by the state, were to associate them with great wealth, although not all of them were successful in its retention. Most significantly, they were well received at court and it is this symbiotic relationship between government and the cream of the corsairs that showed the state up for what, from 1580, it was – a pariah nation over whose maritime affairs this piratocracy had risen to take command and reap rewards.
Thus there arose two very separate levels of piracy: close inshore this was the equivalent of breaking and entry; on the ocean it was grand larceny and it is this latter offence to which the state gave its blessing. The gulf between the two forms of the same crime can be illustrated by the fact that many who committed the grander crime, such as Richard Grenville, were content to sit as local magistrates in judgement of those who were accused of the lesser.17 Under Elizabeth’s watchful eye the state dealt with petty pirates as the law demanded while Mafia-like godfather figures, such as Lord Admiral Howard, not only ensured that organised crime and corruption was left unhindered, but that the major perpetrators, such as Drake or Frobisher, became acceptable members of society.
There is an argument that the rovers who sailed in search of prizes could not be considered pirates, as they voyaged with letters of reprisal or a queen’s commission. Yet both in the excuse and the execution this is palpably not so. First, although such authority exonerated those with a genuine grievance, many endeavoured to capture far more than the losses they claimed when applying for a letter of reprisal. Drake, for example, justified his seizures of a great treasure in the Pacific by saying that he sought only compensation for the (much exaggerated) loss suffered by his cousin, John Hawkins, when his fleet was battered by the Spanish at San Juan de Ulua in 1568, although he did not cease his activities once he reached that mark. Many produced no evidence of loss to justify their receipt of a letter of reprisal; in fact, after 1585 the Admiralty no longer made this a prerequisite. Indeed, with each prize having a potential value in excess of the court’s annual income, there was no possibility of an adventurer claiming a loss equivalent to his capture. The very value of these captures made false the virtue of legitimate reprisal claims, thus making their seizure different only from piracy in the perpetrators’ possession of a scrap of paper and/or the approval of the Crown.
Secondly, neither the Crown nor the Admiralty took stern action to ensure their pirates took goods only from enemy nationals. Whatever their stated position, they encouraged a free-for-all in which the greater crime became not the illegal seizure of ships and their cargoes, but the failure to surrender them on return to England.
Thirdly, the Elizabethans were swift to condemn the piracy of others, whatever legal justification those rovers claimed. The Barbary states of Tripoli, Tunis and Algiers, along with neighbouring Morocco, all had state-sponsored corsairs’ fleets whose captains and crews were considered to be pirates, and were treated as such if captured. Elizabeth’s support for her own rovers may have been less open and less evident, but dissembling and cloaking does not absolve her from supporting activities which if committed by any other nation were considered wrongful.
Fourthly, the whole of Europe considered England to be a pirate state. Could they all be mistaken? With a typical xenophobic myopia, Elizabeth’s beautiful but brainless favourite, the earl of Essex, saw things only from his nation’s point of view. In commenting on the unsatisfactory terms of the treaty of Vervins, by which France had independently agreed peace terms with Spain, the impetuous earl, failing to see the true cause of English isolation, remarked:
The French King hath broken the league and abandoned us
