An interview with Bruce Lenman
This interview with Bruce Lenman (BL) was carried out by Yorkshire Television (YTV) for the Channel 4 programme Elizabeth's Pirates. Bruce Lenman is professor of modern history at the University of St Andrews.
Contents
• Privateering
• Francis Drake
• The circumnavigation
• Sir Walter Ralegh
• The Roanoke Island colony
• Ralegh and El Dorado
• Ralegh after Elizabeth's death
YTV: What was a privateer?
BL: A privateer was not a pirate. The problem is, of course, that the Spaniards call all other Europeans in American waters 'pirates'. But leaving that aside, a privateer is someone with a licence from his crown to collect damages that are due from another crown that is dragging its feet about making payment or indeed judging a case. Given the legendary slowness of Spanish bureaucracy, that was an easy situation to find.
Privateering is a business. Anyone who indulges in it who doesn't want to make money is a lunatic. Drake is out to make money – it's a business like any other. He is also, of course, trying to get personal satisfaction – it's a shame- and-honour society. He is also a Protestant and an Englishman and a loyal subject of the queen. All of these motives come together. Nobody has pure and simple motives for this kind of thing.
It necessarily involved a willingness to kill people, but then western Europe is run by a warrior élite whose business it is to kill people. It's not necessarily a very bloody business. Most sailors aren't paid enough to die defending somebody else's property. Most privateers' catches involved surprisingly little violence and often very little bloodshed.
YTV: Was the system of privateering corrupt?
BL: The lord high admiral, Lord Howard of Effingham, is spectacularly corrupt. That, I think, is true because issuing these licences more or less gave carte blanche to those who received them. They were often very bad at distinguishing the nationality of the ships they knocked off.
Nevertheless it's not corrupt in the sense that Drake's corrupt. I don't think you can accuse him of being corrupt, it's not applicable. He is ruthless, he is egotistical – he wouldn't have succeeded if he wasn't – but corrupt, no. The great danger a privateer faced was repudiation by his crown. Then he became a pirate and might have been hanged. So obviously you had to keep the crown on side. So Drake's contributions to the queen's treasure chest are simply common sense. He's got to pay the queen off to keep her on side.
I mean, it's so profitable that she thought it was well worth knighting him and saying what a good chap he'd been. If he hadn't brought back that amount of loot, she clearly wouldn't have done that. On top of which you have to remember she had dreadful fiscal problems and all contributions were gratefully received.
YTV: But the queen didn't want to be seen to be having open season on the Spanish, presumably?
BL: She is in a very difficult position. The last thing she wants is war. She had no martial ambitions, which makes her most unusual among 16th-century sovereigns. She simply wants to die holding the wreckage of the medieval empire in England and Ireland and the Channel Islands that she had inherited. Her sole territorial ambition was to get back a small town in northern France [Calais] that her sister had lost to the French. She had no other ambitions.
Privateering didn't involve declaring war. It's an act of legal redress that is acknowledged by contemporary international law. The fact that it is riddled with corruption merely means that it is like every other aspect of early modern government. All early modern government is riddled with corruption, partly because its officials are so miserably paid. What she is hoping is that it will put pressure on Spain.
YTV: How did a typical privateering attack happen?
BL: You spot a comparatively small local ship carrying hides or crops or wine or, if you're lucky, something more valuable. You chase it, you fire a shot across its bows, they surrender and you take what you want off it. You either take the ship and gave the crew a long boat or you let them go, depending on what was the more profitable thing to do. The crews of the attacked ships seldom fought – it wasn't worth it, they weren't paid enough.
Francis Drake
YTV: Was Drake ruthless?
BL: You don't succeed as a privateer unless you're ruthless. You don't succeed at anything much unless you're ruthless. Drake is an egotist and he does leave dead bodies behind him. On the other hand, he is not a psychopath. He doesn't kill for the sake of killing – in fact, he kills remarkably few people – so you are looking at a ruthless businessman. But aren't all successful businessmen ruthless?
YTV: What kind of ships did Drake use?
BL: You didn't build specialised ships for privateering because, by definition, it was an occasional activity. The thought of specialised warships is only just becoming normal in the late 16th century. Philip of Spain, when he was king of England, had insisted on building English battleships that, in fact, ended up fighting his Spanish armada.
Drake just takes appropriate ships, not specialised warships and certainly not specialised privateering warships. They are quite small. That is very important as it makes it relatively easy for them to enter certain, very difficult waters, certainly much easier than a bigger ship. They all have a small pinnace, either aboard or towed behind. Much of the activity is done in these even smaller boats, pinnaces or long boats.
YTV: Was part of Drake's motivation that he did not like the Spanish?
BL: Drake is strongly Protestant, we know that. He comes from a ministerial background. On the other hand, he's a Spanish speaker. He does not have psychopathological attitudes towards Spaniards. He is trying to gain compensation. He is also like all the rest of them, trying to hit the jackpot, which he does, knocking off things like the Cacafuegos, which was a staggeringly wealthy prize, totally different from 99.99% of the prizes stolen by normal privateers. At that time, of course, he is building himself up as a man of reputation and honour and entering the gentry class, and that is probably his deepest ambition.
The circumnavigation
YTV: When Drake set off on the circumnavigation, why did he do it in such secrecy?
BL: Because it was highly controversial. The queen was a natural appeaser; she did not want to fight Spain. And, besides, she knows that it will be horribly expensive and she was as mean as they come, with good reason. So the English government is deeply divided. Cecil, her principle minister, is hostile to the whole thing from start to finish, so the only way Drake was going to get away was by keeping things as secret as possible and then making a dash for it.
YTV: How did Drake navigate?
BL: The maps from that period that are so highly regarded now – which are described as the 'maps of the explorers' and would cost you a fortune – were actually pretty useless for going from point A to point B. They were much too inaccurate. They are really mental constructs, not navigational tools.
Then they had the problem that they didn't know where they were because no one could tell where they were in terms of longitude until the end of the 18th century with the chronometer. It was impossible to tell longitude with any degree of accuracy.
So Drake was facing a very difficult task. There are patterns, mostly determined by the winds. In the north Atlantic, the winds go clockwise so it is not difficult to get over to the Americas. You go down past Spain, so to speak, call in at the Canaries or Madeira to get wine, food and water and then the winds carry you over, more or less whether you want to go or not. You have to avoid bad seasons like the hurricane season from August onwards in the Caribbean, but by and large, that gets you across to America.
The best way, once you got close to anything that was difficult, was to find a local boat, kidnap the pilot, tell him you'd kill him if he didn't take you to where you wanted to go. That was the normal privateering and later buccaneering method of coping with difficult waters. It's very efficient – works almost every time.
Launching into the Pacific with the enormous distances involved was even more courageous. Drake was facing a staggering voyage from which he might not come back, and yet he decided to do it. So it is an astonishing set of decisions he takes. He faces not only huge distances across open sea but also the enormous difficulties of navigating through what is now Indonesia where, in fact, he runs ashore.
YTV: Why didn't he come back through the Strait of Magellan? Did he set off from England thinking, 'I'm going to go round the world'?
BL: Certainly not. But I think, first of all, redoing a very difficult passage was not attractive. The prevailing winds had been against him rounding the Horn. Going back the same way was an appalling prospect even to a modern seaman, and he knew, from his knowledge of Portuguese and Spanish voyaging, that the alternative option was open to him of actually circumnavigating. It's a great act of boldness that he decided to do it, but it also had the advantage that the Spaniards would not be waiting for him – it was the one thing they probably would not expect. He also had a sporting chance of picking up a valuable spice cargo to help pay for the voyage, which he did.
YTV: How successful was the voyage?
BL: Drake himself was clear that the success of the voyage would depend on the approval of the crown. He is the first English circumnavigator. He brings back cargoes that are seen as profitable, and it's a great act of bravura and dash of a kind that was much admired by contemporary culture. From his point of view, from the point of view of English identity and self-confidence, it was a great success.
YTV: And he got away with it.
BL: Why should he not? If it is successful, you will get away with it. If it was not, if it had failed, that would have been a different story.
Sir Walter Ralegh
YTV: How did Ralegh achieve success?
BL: Ralegh owes everything to the court. The key to his life is that he makes it in the Elizabethan court. He makes it up to a certain point because he comes in with some connections. But the rest of his success is vitally dependent on his personal assets, which are mainly a vibrant personality and stunning good looks, and those attract the attention of the queen and that, up to a point, is everything.
The Elizabethan regime is a personal monarchy. The queen is ultimately the government. We should not find that difficult. She controls patronage. She is very much like a British prime minister, in that, if you want anything from the government, you have to get it from Tony Blair. If you want anything in the Elizabethan regime, you have to get it from Elizabeth. We live under a personal monarchy to some extent, only it's done by the prime minister.
In Elizabethan England, the nominal monarch is also the real controller of the government, and therefore the royal will and access to royal favour are what it's all about. So the politics of access are crucial, and Ralegh manages to get access. Ralegh's entire career is that of a courtier. Without the court, he is nothing, and in the court, his entire career is defined by what the queen is willing to let him do and what the queen is not willing to let him do. And he boasts to other people that he has access to the sovereign, but of course, he doesn't have an unconditional ability to manipulate it.
Elizabeth is not taken in by Ralegh. She is attracted by him; he is an important favourite. She recognises that he had great abilities and a good mind, and she is a very clever woman, but she does not trust him. She thinks he is unstable, and her judgement is good and she shows that. He never achieves the sort of career at court he would have wanted.
The court is both a public circus attendant on the sovereign with a good deal of patronage within it, and a machine to govern the country. To govern the country, you must get into the Privy Council. Privy councillors are courtiers who are politically important. The Privy Council is the executive government of the country. Ralegh is never allowed into the Privy Council. He is captain of the Guard, he controls access and security, but Elizabeth never lets him into the Privy Council.
YTV: Why?
BL: I think it is clear that Elizabeth didn't trust him. She doubted his judgement, in which she showed great good sense. She is still at her peak when he is making his career. Latterly, I think she lost her grip and let someone like Essex into the Privy Council, which was perhaps a piece of bad judgement on her part. But in her heyday, Ralegh could only sell himself so far.
The Roanoke Island colony
YTV: Tell me about Roanoke.
BL: Roanoke is an extraordinary settlement because, in one sense, it was wonderfully well done. As a naval base against the Spaniards, it had the virtue that the Spaniards could never find it. The other side of the coin was that it was so well hidden because it was a very inappropriate site for a naval base. It is hidden behind the Outer Banks of the Carolinas, and on the whole, it has rather a bad harbour, poorly situated for navigation.
So it is a strange performance, Roanoke. We think that, towards the end, the plan was to move it to the Chesapeake Bay, but they never got round to it. The Chesapeake, of course, would have been a far better base but much easier for the Spaniard to locate because they knew it very well.
YTV: Why did it fail?
BL: Roanoke fails because the queen is totally uninterested in the Americas in terms of putting tuppence into any serious colonising plans there. This is very sensible on her part – they are usually ruinously expensive. Therefore Roanoke is being sustained by the pocket of not one of the wealthiest men in England, and he simply doesn't have the resources. The early days of these colonies – not excluding the Virginia colony, which eventually succeeded – are invariably horribly difficult and horribly expensive. Ralegh simply didn't have the money to keep it going.
Ralegh and El Dorado
YTV: Why did Ralegh go to Guiana?
BL: Virtually all Europeans and many Spaniards were obsessed with the fantastic rewards gained by Cortés and Pizarro when they did their spectacular rip-offs in Mexico and Peru. The ambition of every courtier, solider and swordsman was to repeat that performance.
To do that, you had to persuade yourself that there was another hugely rich Amerindian empire waiting to be raped. It wasn't good enough to chase the ancestors of the Apaches in the desert because there was no profit in that. You needed another empire; therefore, you persuaded yourself that it had to exist. The Spaniards persuaded themselves it had to exist, and Ralegh got the idea from the Spaniards.
It was a very common contemporary delusion. They wanted to believe it could be done again. It could not, but that was not acceptable to the contemporary mind.
Raleigh is no more a delusionist than vast numbers of contemporary Europeans. They all had imaginations fevered by expectations of sudden wealth to be gained in the Americas. He is a perfectly rational person, but like many rational people, when he needed to believe in something that would advance his career if it were true, he was very good at talking himself into believing that it was so.
Ralegh after Elizabeth's death
YTV: What happened to Ralegh when Elizabeth died?
BL: Raleigh's world really does end with the queen's death because her successor was so radically different. Ralegh had failed to build himself into the politics of the Jacobean court before James reached England – the key to success was to have been in touch with James before he succeeded to the throne. James had been connected with Essex, who was a rival and not much liked by Ralegh. James was deeply involved with Burleigh and the Cecil faction, who had very little time for Ralegh.
At this point, Ralegh had really not much chance of winning over a mature Scottish king who had no complexes about Spain, who doesn't want to continue the war, who is actually a conscientious near-pacifist and who is initially very suspicious of this late Elizabethan hawk and adherent to factions that he didn't have a lot of sympathy for.
YTV: James didn't like Ralegh personally, did he?
BL: Ralegh had been very much a handsome male favourite of a female ruler. Now James likes handsome male favourites since James is bisexual, and although he was on good terms with his queen, Anne of Denmark, it is not a sexual relationship after a given point. There had been a succession of handsome male favourites, but Ralegh's sexual wavelength is just wrong for James. Ralegh is utterly heterosexual and not one of the pretty boys that James is going to pick up. James is an amiable, vain, intelligent pedant, a devout Christian and a near-pacifist whose pacifism was reinforced by profound personal cowardice.
