The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain 9789048542970

Citation preview

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Edited by Richard J. Blakemore and James Davey

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Ships off a Rocky Coast, 1621, by Adam Willaerts. Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, object number SK-A-1927. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 130 1 e-isbn 978 90 4854 297 0 doi 10.5117/9789463721301 nur 685 © The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2020 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

9

Note on Conventions and Terminology

11

Introduction

13

1. The Minion and Its Travels: Sailing to Guinea in the Sixteenth Century

37

2. Commanding the World Itself: Sir Walter Ralegh, La Popelinière, and the Huguenot Influence on Early English Sea Power

67

3. An Investigation of the Size and Geographical Distribution of the English, Welsh, and Channel Islands Merchant Fleet: A Case Study of 1571–72

81

Richard J. Blakemore and James Davey

Bernhard Klein

Alan James

Craig L. Lambert and Gary P. Baker

4. An Evaluation of Scottish Trade with Iberiaduring the AngloSpanish War, 1585-1604

105

5. Performing ‘Water’ Ralegh: The Cultural Politics of Sea Captains in Late Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama

125

6. ‘Wicked Actions Merit Fearful Judgments’: Capital Trials aboard the Early East India Company Voyages

153

7. ‘A water bawdy house’: Women and the Navy in the British Civil Wars

173

Claire McLoughlin

Claire Jowitt

Cheryl Fury

Elaine Murphy

8. ‘Thy sceptre to a trident change / And straight, unruly seas thou canst command’: Contemporary Representations of King Charles I and the Ship Money Fleets within the Cultural Imagination of Caroline England

193

9. ‘Proud Symbols of the Prospering Rural Seamen’: Scottish Church Ship Models and the Shipmaster’s Societies of North East Scotland in the Late 17th Century

229

10. Systematizing the Sea: Knowledge, Power and Maritime Sovereignty in Late Seventeenth-Century Science

257

Select Bibliography

283

About the Contributors

311

Index

317

Rebecca A. Bailey

Meredith Greiling

Philippa Hellawell

List of illustrations Figure. 1.1 The Minion, Anthony Roll (1546). British Library Additional MS 22047, after C.S. Knighton and D.M. Loades (eds), THE ANTHONY ROLL of Henry VIII’s Navy. Pepys Library 2991 and British Library Additional MS 22047 with related documents, Occasional Publications of the Navy Records Society, Vol. 2 (Aldershot: Ashgate, for the Navy Record Society, 2000), p. 55. Figure 8.1 John Payne, Sovereign of the Seas (1637), © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK. Figure 8.2 John Webb, Design for a triumphal arch, Temple Bar, (London, 1638), © RIBA Collections. Figure 8.3 Inigo Jones’s sketch for the relief carved spandrels for the proposed triumphal arch at Temple Bar, London (1636), © RIBA Collections. Figure 8.4 Detail of King Edgar on horseback from John Payne, Sovereign of the Seas (1637), © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK

40 197 199 200 201

Figure 8.5 Robert Ward, Animadversions of Warre (London, 1639), frontispiece and cameo detail. © The British Library Board.208 Figure 8.6 Peter Pett and the ‘Sovereign of the Seas’ (1637), © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. Detail of the ship’s stern and the figure of Victory. 217 Figure 8.7 Design for the Palace of Fame, from the courtly masque ‘Britannia Triumphans’, 1637 (pen & ink on paper), Jones, Inigo (1573-1652) / © The Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth / Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees / Bridgeman Images.221 Figure 8.8 Masquer with feathers and plume (pen & ink on paper), Jones, Inigo (1573-1652) / © The Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth / Reproduced by permission of 222 Chatsworth Settlement Trustees / Bridgeman Images. Figure 8.9 Francis Knight, A Relation of Seaven Yeares Slaverie Under the Turkes of Argeire (London, 1640), frontispiece and title page, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript 226 Library, Yale University. Figure 8.10 ‘Charles I King of Great Britain and England’, © Getty Images.227 Figure 9.1 The Schip model on display in Aberdeen Maritime Museum © Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collections.232 Figure 9.2 The Schip model in the offices of the Aberdeen Shipmaster Society © Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collections.234 Figure 9.3 The Schip model before being restored, c. 1981 © Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collections. 235 245 Figure 9.4 Burntisland Parish Church interior (authors own). Figure 9.5 Aberdeen Shipmaster Society mortification © Aber248 deen Art Gallery & Museums Collections. Figure 9.6 Sixteenth century Dutch pulpit at Bo’ness Old Kirk (author’s own). 253 Figure 10.1 Frontispiece of Francis Bacon’s Instauratio Magna (London: 1620). © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved 259 Figure 10.2 Robert Hooke’s Diagram of Hydrography, MS Rawlin270 son, A. 171, ff. 245-246, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

List of Tables Table 3.1 Regional Distribution of English and Welsh Merchant Fleet: Michaelmas–Michaelmas 1571–72. Table 3.2 Ports within Regions with the Most Ships. Table 3.3 Ports within Regions with the Greatest Tonnage.

95 96 97

Acknowledgements While editing this volume we have incurred a number of debts of gratitude. Firstly and most importantly, we would like to thank the eleven contributors to this volume for producing such a wide range of high-quality chapters. We are also grateful to the editors of the ‘Maritime Humanities, 1400-1800: Cultures of the Sea’ series, Claire Jowitt and John McAleer, for commissioning the book and making it the inaugural volume. At Amsterdam University Press, Erika Gaffney has been a committed and patient editor, and we also offer our thanks to the copy-editing and production teams that have worked alongside her: special mentions go to Judith Allan, Julie Benschop and Louise Visser. We would also like to thank the anonymous peer reviewer for their detailed comments that have improved the book immeasurably. At the National Maritime Museum, Robert J. Blyth, Lizelle de Jager and Nigel Rigby offered advice and assistance in the early stages of the project, as well as a forum for discussion and debate. Colleagues at our respective institutions – the University of Reading and the University of Exeter – have also provided support in a variety of forms. Lastly, as co-editors, we would like to thank each other. We have both changed jobs since the project was conceived and other commitments have frequently jostled for position, but working together on this book has been a consistent source of pleasure.



Note on Conventions and Terminology

This volume concerns the maritime world of early modern Britain. Many of the words in our title are contested and have their own complex histories, and there are a number of other phrases and conventions that warrant explanation and justification. Our job here is not to provide definitive conclusions to these debates, but to offer a few short sentences to explain our decisions. Perhaps most obvious is the notion of ‘Britain’ itself. As a political entity, ‘Britain’ did not exist until the Act of Union in 1707, but we use the term here for two reasons. Firstly, the idea of ‘Britain’ had existed for many centuries, and there were repeated efforts to utilise it throughout the early modern era. In 1603, for instance, James VI and I used the name ‘Great Britain’ in an active attempt to persuade his subjects to shift regional loyalties towards a new composite monarchy.1 Indeed, attempts to inculcate a sense of ‘Britishness’ before 1707 frequently utilised maritime symbols, such as Britannia. These points are discussed further in our introduction. Secondly, we wanted to take a ‘four nations’ approach to the subject. We suggest that the histories of England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, while distinctive and individual, were fundamentally intertwined, not least by maritime connections; indeed, many of the chapters that follow make just this point.2 During the early modern era, Ireland was never part of Britain in a strict political, legal, or geographical sense, and our volume gives more attention to what might be considered ‘mainland’ Britain, or the British Isles, in modern terms. However, Ireland was subject to the English and then British crown throughout this period, and was undoubtedly part of the British empire and of the maritime world we seek to understand here. In short, then, we use ‘Britain’ to describe a geographical and cultural space, rather than the political construct that would later form. The term ‘early modern’ has similarly confounded scholars. How one defines and delineates a historical period depends very much on one’s approach and geographical focus, and historical periodisation is by its very nature a generalisation or simplification of the past.3 Given that our focus 1 See David Armitage, ‘The Empire of Great Britain: England, Scotland and Ireland, c. 1540-1660’, in The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 24-60. 2 For further discussion see Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill, eds. The British Problem, c. 1534-1707: State formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996). 3 Laura Sangha, ‘On periodisation: or, what’s the best way to chop history into bits?’, The many-headed monster blog https://manyheadedmonster.wordpress.com/2016/04/21/

12 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

is on Britain and its wider engagement with the maritime world, this book uses ‘early modern’ to signify the period from the first European global voyages of exploration in the 1490s, through to the establishment of a global ‘British’ empire in the early 1700s. This has the added advantage of aligning with the reigns of the Tudor and Stuart dynasties (1485-1714). We hope the last key term, ‘maritime’, is rather more straightforward, focusing as it does on humankind’s relationship with the sea. Maritime history does have a reputation for overly-technical language (though this reputation is not entirely deserved), and we have gone to great lengths to steer clear of nautical terminology. However, there are a few areas where editorial decisions needed to be taken. Historians disagree on when one can begin to talk of a permanent ‘Royal Navy’ (as opposed to the more episodic mobilizations of the medieval period), but we use this term throughout to signify warships owned by the English and then British state; Scottish monarchs before 1603 also possessed naval ships, but the English navy provided the institutional nucleus for what became the Royal Navy. Indeed, the volume refers to a large number of ships, and ships’ names are italicised throughout. The reader will find no mention of ‘HMS’ (His/Her Majesty’s Ship), which was not in common use until the early nineteenth century. Lastly, we also use the word ‘it’, rather than ‘she’, to describe sea-going vessels. While the latter may be traditional, we feel it is outdated and problematic, and that the former is more appropriate for a twenty-first century audience.

on-periodisation-or-whats-the-best-way-to-chop-history-into-bits/ (last accessed 24 November 2019). Nor is this a new concern: see Dietrich Gerhard, ‘Periodization in European History’, American Historical Review, Vol. 61, No. 4 (July 1965), pp. 900-13.

Introduction Richard J. Blakemore and James Davey The idea of Britain as an island nation with an intrinsically maritime character and history is well-established. It is generally accepted that Britain has, and always has had, a close relationship with the sea, and that its people have always been predisposed towards travelling across the waves, drawing wealth and sustenance from them, and ruling over them. This idea also has a long heritage. One of the most famous expressions of it is in the words that William Shakespeare gave to John of Gaunt in Richard II, probably written in the 1590s: This royall Throne of Kings, this sceptred isle, … This Fortresse built by Nature for her selfe Against infection, and the hand of warre, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a Moate defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier Lands, This blessed plot, this earth, this Realme, this England 1

Like most popular ideas, however, this one begins to break down under a closer examination. Strictly speaking Britain is not an island, but an archipelago; and nor is it one nation but several, united relatively late in their existence. Shakespeare here writes exclusively of England because at that time there was no Britain in a political sense. Furthermore, it is highly unlikely that the real John of Gaunt would have placed such faith in the sea as a ‘Moate defensive’, setting England apart in splendid isolation from ‘less happier Lands’. He operated in an essentially European political world and pursued serious designs on the Castilian throne, while a French

1 William Shakespeare, Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, ed. by John Heminge and Henry Condell (London, 1623), ‘Histories’, p. 28: The Life and Death of King Richard the Second, act 2, scene 1, lines 40, 43-50.

14 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

invasion was a very real possibility throughout his rule of England during the infancy of his royal nephew.2 Indeed, Shakespeare depicted the sea as a threat just as much as an asset, due both to its own hazardous and stormy nature and to the access it granted to invaders in those periods when travel by sea was generally easier and quicker than travel by land. Some hint of this can be found, perhaps, in a later passage of the same speech: ‘England, bound in with the triumphant sea, / Whose rocky shore beates backe the envious siedge / Of watery Neptune’.3 Contradicting the tone of the earlier lines, the sea is no longer England’s defender but one of its assailants and (‘bound in’) even its jailor. This theme of violence and peril appears elsewhere in his canon, too. Twelfth Night begins with a shipwreck, in which the siblings Viola and Sebastien are separated – with comical consequences – while arguably Shakespeare’s most well-known maritime scene in The Tempest has the sorcerer Prospero conjure up a storm to isolate and divide his rivals, and carry out his long-nurtured plans for revenge. 4 In this latter case, Shakespeare’s fascination with the sea was most likely prompted by the shipwreck of the Sea Venture off the coast of Bermuda in 1609, an event which captured a significant amount of popular attention as the news arrived in England.5 It is thus no coincidence that Shakespeare chose to articulate the premise of a naturally maritime nation, as problematic as that premise is in terms of historical realism. Despite the dangers it posed, the maritime world became vitally important for Britain to a much greater extent than ever before from the sixteenth century onwards. The shipping and commerce of these islands, previously confined to northern Europe, now expanded to encompass transoceanic and eventually global networks. Alongside this, a ‘Royal Navy’ was founded, the first permanent naval force in the world, which secured ever-greater support from the state. Whether 2 Christopher John Phillpotts, ‘John of Gaunt and English Policy Towards France 1389-1395’, Journal of Medieval History, 16 (1990), pp. 363-86; Anthony Goodman, John of Gaunt: The Exercise of Princely Power in Fourteenth-Century Europe (London: Longman, 1992), Chapters 6-7, 9. 3 Shakespeare, Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, ‘Histories’, p. 28: Richard II, act 2, scene 1, lines 61-3. 4 On Shakespeare, early modern literature, and maritime themes, see Bernhard Klein, ed., Fictions of the Sea: Critical Perspectives on the Ocean in British Literature and Culture (London: Routledge, 2002); Steve Mentz, At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (London: Continuum, 2009); Dan Brayton, Shakespeare’s Ocean: An Ecocritical Exploration (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018). 5 Alden T. Vaughan, ‘William Strachey’s “True Reportory” and Shakespeare: A Closer Look at the Evidence’, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 3 (2008), pp. 245-73; Kenneth Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Routledge, 2005).

Introduc tion

15

through public or private investment, and whether positive or negative, the influence of the sea and seaborne activity on British politics, economics, society, and culture increased markedly. This growth of Britain’s maritime world aligned with a period of conscious nation-building. Shakespeare’s lifetime witnessed the first joining of Scotland and England under a single monarch in 1603, with Wales and Ireland also ruled by the English crown, followed later by more extensive political and legal unions in 1707 and 1801.6 Though the peoples of these islands inhabited neither a united kingdom nor a predominantly maritime one at the start of this period, by its end they were well on the way to living in both. The story of Britain becoming maritime is therefore deeply intertwined with the story of Britain becoming Britain. An important part of this transition came with the re-imagining of Britain as a maritime nation and, as the elegant phrases of Richard II and Shakespeare’s lasting impact demonstrates, this self-image entailed the reinterpretation of Britain’s entire past. An equally famous paean to Britain’s maritime potency, the ode ‘Rule, Britannia!’, was written in 1740 to commemorate the accession of George II. Though the original title and lyrics contain an exhortation towards maritime dominance, not a celebration of it, they nevertheless, like Shakespeare, assume that a natural and divine ‘charter’ existed between Britain and the sea, protecting the country from both ‘haughty tyrants’ and envious other ‘nations, not so blest as thee’. Just as significant, though often forgotten, is the poem’s original context: it was first performed as part of a masque which lauded the supposed seaborne successes of Alfred the Great during the ninth century.7 Britain becoming 6 Brian P. Levack, The Formation of the British State: England, Scotland and the Union, 1603-1707 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); John Robertson, ed., A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); John Morrill, ‘The British Problem c. 1534-1707’, in The British Problem, c. 1534-1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago, ed. by Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), pp. 1-38; Alexander Murdoch, British History 1660-1832: National Identity and Local Culture (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998); David L. Smith, A History of the Modern British Isles, 1603-1714: The Double Crown (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998); David Armitage, ‘The Empire of Great Britain: England, Scotland and Ireland, c. 1540-1660’, in David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 24-60; Jim Smyth, The Making of the United Kingdom, 1660-1800: State, Religion and Identity in Britain and Ireland (Harlow: Longman, 2001); Kevin Kenny, ed., Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Allan I. Macinnes, Union and Empire: The Making of the United Kingdom in 1707 (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2007); Jonathan Scott, When the Waves Ruled Britannia: Geography and Political Identities, 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 7 James Thomson and David Mallet, Alfred: A Masque. Represented before their Royal Highnesses the Prince and Princess of Wales, at Cliffden, on the First of August, 1740 (London, 1740), pp. 42-3; See also David Armitage, ‘Empire and Ideology in the Walpolean Era’, in Armitage, Ideological

16 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

maritime, therefore, also rather paradoxically resulted in the belief that it always had been. If these ideas presided over contemporary understandings of the maritime world, then historians have frequently shown themselves to be just as captivated. Indeed, that belief cast a long shadow over British maritime history, which initially embraced deterministic and nationalistic narratives seeking an explanation for Britain’s later naval and commercial dominance.8 These historians – whether consciously or not – embraced ideas of exceptionalism and a (usually anglocentric) national identity and destiny similar to that found in Richard II and ‘Rule, Britannia!’, often neglecting both the diversity and conflict that existed within Britain and the importance of relationships with other European nations and other peoples from around the globe. These assumptions obscured important questions about Britain and the sea. How much, and in what manner, did communities in these islands really engage with the maritime world in the early modern era? Was Britain’s transformation the result of a coherent maritime strategy, or a series of hesitant and halting steps? Most importantly, if we talk about a maritime nation in this period, just what ‘nation’ are we talking about? Over the last two decades or so, scholars have begun to unpick the layers of myth and jingoism that previously subsumed this subject, and to question the received wisdom that surrounds it; there is now a remarkable profusion of new research that seeks to challenge those accepted notions about Britain’s maritime past. These new approaches are part of a wider trend to rethink the history of the sea. Researchers from a variety of disciplines have begun to identify oceans, voyages, and navies as fertile grounds for analysis, and as a result there are a number of approaches that now have a stake in defining the discipline of maritime history.9 The traditional focus on strategy, Origins, pp. 170-98 (pp. 170-4); and, on another aspect of early modern maritime myth-building, N. A. M. Rodger, ‘Queen Elizabeth and the Myth of Sea-Power in English History’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 14 (2004), pp. 153-74. 8 Examples of this approach covering the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries include M. Oppenheim, A History of the Administration of the Royal Navy and of Merchant Shipping in Relation to the Navy, vol. I, MDIX-MDCLX (London: John Lane, 1896); Thomas W. Fulton, The Sovereignty of the Sea (London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1911); C. D. Penn, The Navy under the Early Stuarts and its Influence on English History (Leighton Buzzard: Faith Press, 1913); Julian S. Corbett, England in the Mediterranean: A Study of the Rise and Influence of British Power within the Straits, 1603-1713 (London: Longmans, Green & co, 1917); Arthur Bryant, Samuel Pepys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3 vols, 1934-8). 9 For theoretical discussions from different disciplinary backgrounds, see Jerry H. Bentley, ‘Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis’, Geographical Review, 89 (1999), pp. 215-25; Philip E. Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge: Cambridge

Introduc tion

17

operations, and technology is being supplemented with ground-breaking research. Recent scholarship has examined the relationship between the sea and constructions of identities (both national and gendered) as well as its impact on art, music, and popular culture.10 It has explored the social and cultural realities of life on board ship, the burgeoning communities that supported and depended upon seafaring, and the complex connections that existed between ship and shore.11 The history of ‘discovery’ has been replaced with one of ‘encounter’, focusing on moments of cultural exchange and the numerous incidents of violence and exploitation that came to define European imperialism.12 Perhaps most importantly, maritime history University Press, 2001); Klein, ed., Fictions of the Sea; Bernhard Klein and Gesa Mackenthun, eds., Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean (London: Routledge, 2004); Kären Wigen, ‘Oceans of History’, American Historical Review, 111 (2006), pp. 717-21; David Lambert, Luciana Martins, and Miles Ogborn, ‘Currents, Visions and Voyages: Historical Geographies of the Sea’, Journal of Historical Geography, 32 (2006), pp. 479-93; Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Kären Wigen, eds., Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges (Honolulu, Hawai’i: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007); David Cannadine, ed., Empire, the Sea and Global History: Britain’s Maritime World, c. 1763-c. 1840 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007); Glen O’Hara, ‘“The Sea is Swinging into View”: Modern British Maritime History in a Globalised World’, English Historical Review, 124 (2009), pp. 1109-34; John Mack, The Sea: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion Books, 2011). 10 Alain Cabantous, Les Citoyens du Large: Les Identités Maritimes en France (XVIIe-XIXe Siècle) (Paris: Éditions Aubier, 1995); Duncan Redford, ed., Maritime History and Identity: the Sea and Culture in the Modern World (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014); Charlotte Mathieson, ed., Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1650-Present (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Renaud Morieux, The Channel. England, France and the Construction of a Maritime Border in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). For works relating specifically to gender, see n. 24 below. 11 Works of maritime social history focusing on Britain are discussed below (see n. 22). For scholarship on seafaring communities more widely, see Paul C. van Royen, Jaap R. Bruijn, and Jan Lucassen, eds.,‘Those Emblems of Hell?’: European Sailors and the Maritime Labour Market, 1570-1870 (St John’s, Newfoundland: International Maritime Economic History Association, 1997); Jaap R. Bruijn, ‘Seafarers in Early Modern and Modern Times: Change and Continuity’, International Journal of Maritime History, 17 (2005), pp. 1-16; G. V. Scammell, Seafaring, Sailors and Trade, 1450-1750: Studies in British and European Maritime and Imperial History (Aldershot: Variorum, 2003), 1-22; Maria Fusaro, Bernard Allaire, Richard J. Blakemore, and Tijl Vanneste, eds., Law, Labour, and Empire: Comparative Perspectives on Seafarers, c. 1500-1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015). 12 This topic has received considerable attention, but for some general studies see Urs Bitterli, Cultures in Conflict: Encounters between European and Non-European Cultures, 1492-1800, translated by Ritchie Robinson (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989); Jerry H. Bentley, Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting & Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans & Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Peter C. Mancall, ‘Native Americans and Europeans in English America, 1500-1700’ in The Oxford History of the British Empire: Vol. I: Origins of Empire: British Overseas

18 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

has become firmly entwined with world and global history, most notably with the Atlantic and Indian Ocean ‘worlds’ that now have established historiographies of their own.13 In this book we seek to build upon this scholarship by exploring how Britain’s relationship with the sea changed across the early modern period; by investigating how the peoples of the British Isles came to be, and came to see themselves as, a maritime nation; and by considering what impact this had both on Britain and its connections to the wider world. We start with the opposite premise to Shakespeare and ‘Rule, Britannia!’. Britain’s transformation in these centuries was not a stately progress towards a preordained zenith, or the realisation of some innate national potential, but a messy, complicated, and disputed process, often driven by external influences. The essays published here do not pretend to offer a comprehensive discussion of this process, but instead represent new research into specific aspects of it, in order both to illuminate that bigger picture and to indicate the directions in which the maritime history of early modern Britain is now moving. In this introduction, we will briefly survey three core themes which unite the individual contributions of our authors, three ways in which Britain’s maritime world changed profoundly between the sixteenth and the Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, ed. by Nicholas Canny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 328-50; Melanie Perrault, Early English Encounters in Russia, West Africa and the Americas, 1530-1614 (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004); Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014); Jace Weaver, The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000-1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 13 The literature on these approaches is vast. For ‘state of the field’ pieces see Bernard Bailyn, ‘The Idea of Atlantic History’, Itinerario, 20 (1996), pp. 19-41; Daniel Finamore, ed., Maritime History As World History: New Perspectives on Maritime History and Nautical Archaeology (Gainsville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 2004); Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contour (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005); M. N. Pearson, The World of the Indian Ocean, 1500-1800 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2005); Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2006); Alison Games, ‘Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities’, American Historical Review, 111 (2006), pp. 741-57; Cannadine, ed., Empire, the Sea and Global History; Maria Fusaro and Amélia Polónia, eds., Maritime History as Global History (St John’s, Newfoundland: International Maritime Economic History Association, 2010); H. V. Bowen, Elizabeth Mancke, and John G. Reid, eds., Britain’s Oceanic Empire: Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds, c. 1550-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Richard J. Blakemore, ‘The Changing Fortunes of Atlantic History’, English Historical Review, 131 (2016), pp. 851-68; Christer Petley and John McAleer, The Royal Navy and the British Atlantic World, c. 1750-1820 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); David Armitage, Alison Bashford, and Sujit Sivasundaram, eds.,Oceanic Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Philippe Beaujard, The Worlds of the Indian Ocean: A Global History, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

19

Introduc tion

eighteenth centuries: the scope and scale of British seaborne activity; the efforts of the British government to control this activity; and the development of the idea of Britain as a maritime nation. *** Perhaps the most obvious change to Britain’s maritime world was its expansion, in terms of the quantity, frequency, and range of voyages which set out from Britain. Before the sixteenth century England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales traded primarily with nearby Europe, especially in wool and cloth to the markets of Flanders and northern France. Commodities from further afield reached these islands, but usually not in British ships.14 This situation transformed completely in the early modern period. Estimates of tonnage are quite imprecise, due to the available evidence, but there is no doubt that the number and size of British mercantile, fishing, and military vessels all increased during this period. Gary Baker and Craig Lambert provide a snapshot of the early stages of this growth in their chapter, providing a considerably higher level of precision than has previously been possible. As their chapter shows, it was not just the volume of shipping but the variety and the distance of destinations which changed. The proportion of British commercial shipping engaged in long-distance trade doubled, while British fishermen expanded into the North Atlantic and the North Sea.15 In the course of the sixteenth century, English expeditions set out for 14 Dorothy Burwash, English Merchant Shipping, 1460-1540 (Newton Abbott: David & Charles, 1969); Timothy O’Neill, Merchants and Mariners in Medieval Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1987); Donald Woodward, ‘Irish Sea Traders and Shipping from the Later Middle Ages to c.1660’, in The Irish Sea – Aspects of Maritime History, ed. by Michael McCaughan and John C. Appleby (Belfast: Queen’s University Belfast, Institute of Irish Studies, 1989), pp. 34-44; Vanessa Harding, ‘Cross-Channel Trade and Cultural Contacts: London and the Low Countries in the Late Fourteenth Century’, in England and the Low Countries in the Late Middle Ages, ed. by Caroline M. Barron and Nigel Saul (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995), pp. 153-68; David Ditchburn, Scotland and Europe: The Medieval Kingdom and its Contacts with Christendom, 1215-1545, Vol. I: Religion, Commerce and Culture, c.1215-1545 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2001); Gerald Harriss, Shaping the Nation: England 1360-1461 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 256-70; Martin Rorke, ‘English and Scottish Overseas Trade, 1300-1600’, Economic History Review, 59 (2006), pp. 265-88; Susan Rose, The Medieval Sea (London: Bloomsbury, 2007); Richard Gorski, ed., Roles of the Sea in Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2012); Joe Donnelly, ‘An Open Economy: The Berwick Shipping Trade, 1311-1373’, Scottish Historical Review, 96 (2017), pp. 1-31. 15 Ralph Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Newton Abbott: MacMillan, 1962), Chapters 1-4; Ralph Davis, English Overseas Trade 1500-1700 (London: MacMillan, 1973); Kenneth R. Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics: Seafaring and Naval Enterprise in the Reign of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991),

20 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Africa, the Americas, the Mediterranean, and Russia. The first voyages to the Indian Ocean followed at the turn of the seventeenth century with the foundation of the East India Company, a response to the Dutch Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company).16 There were later Scottish initiatives to trade in Africa and settle in the Americas, although these met with variable success: the consequences of the most infamous disaster, the Company of Scotland’s short-lived colony of Caledonia on the Gulf of Daríen, contributed towards the 1707 Act of Union.17 However, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh sailors, merchants, soldiers, and colonists were to be found in ‘English’ ships, colonies, and trading posts in both the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans.18 These commercial and military voyages were the Chapter 1; Jan Lucassen and Richard W. Unger, ‘Labour Productivity in Ocean Shipping, 1450-1875’, International Journal of Maritime History, 12 (2000), pp. 127-41; David J. Starkey, Chris Reid, and Neil Ashcroft, eds., England’s Sea Fisheries: The Commercial Sea Fisheries of England and Wales since 1300 (London: Chatham Publishing, 2000); Martin Rorke, ‘The Scottish Herring Trade’, Scottish Historical Review, 84 (2005), pp. 149-65; Jan Lucassen and Richard W. Unger, ‘Shipping, Productivity and Economic Growth’, in Shipping and Economic Growth 1350-1850, ed. by Richard W. Unger (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 3-44 (pp. 8-17). 16 K. N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint-Stock Company 1600-1640 (London: Frank Crass & co, 1965); Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder, and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480-1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Jaap R. Bruijn and Femme Gaastra, eds., Ships, Sailors and Spices. East India Companies and their Shipping in the 16th, 17th and 18th Century (Amsterdam: Het Nederlandsch Economisch-Historisch Archief, 1993); Philip Lawson, The East India Company: A History (London: Routledge, 1993); Femme S. Gaastra, ‘War, Competition, and Collaboration: Relations between the English and Dutch East India Companies in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in The Worlds of the East India Company, ed. by H. V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2002), 49-68; Perrault, Early English Encounters; Edmond Smith, ‘The Global Interests of London’s Commercial Community, 1599-1625: Investment in the East India Company’, Economic History Review, 71 (2018), pp. 1118-46. 17 Robin Law, ‘The First Scottish Guinea Company, 1634-9’, Scottish Historical Review, 76 (1997), pp. 185-202; Dennis R. Hidalgo, ‘“To Get Rich for Our Homeland”: The Company of Scotland and the Colonization of the Isthmus of Darien’, Colonial Latin American Historical Review, 10 (2001), pp. 311-50; Douglas Watt, The Price of Scotland: Darien, Union and the Wealth of the Nations (Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2006); Ignacio Gallup-Díaz, The Door of the Seas and Key to the Universe: Indian Politics and Imperial Rivalry in the Darién, 1640-1750 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), Chapters 4-5; Mark Horton, ‘“To Transmit to Posterity the Virtue, Lustre and Glory of their Ancestors”: Scottish Pioneers in Darien, Panama’, in Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic World: People, Products, and Practices on the Move, ed. by Caroline Williams (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 131-50; Douglas Hamilton, ‘Dreams of Empire: Scotland, Caledonia and the Emporium of the Indies’, in L’Écosse et ses Doubles: Ancien Monde, Nouveau Monde, ed. by Morag J. Munro-Landi (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010), pp. 69-88; Sophie Jorrand, ‘From “The Doors of the Seas” to a Watery Debacle: The Sea, Scottish Colonization, and the Darien Scheme, 1696-1700’, Études Écossaises, 19 (2017), pp. 1-14. 18 L. M. Cullen, ‘Merchant Communities Overseas, the Navigation Acts, and Irish and Scottish Responses’, in Comparative Aspects of Scottish and Irish Social History, 1600-1900, ed. by L. M.

Introduc tion

21

essential basis for the development of British colonial and trading activities around the world.19 The Company of Scotland was not the only failure, and many travellers did not return, but the presence of British ships and seafarers nevertheless became steadily more established in many areas of the world, and by the eighteenth century what had once been exploratory trips had become regular trade routes.20 Similarly, while the primary purpose of the substantially increased Royal Navy’s fleet may have been the defence of the British Isles and Ireland, naval squadrons had become a permanent presence in Mediterranean, American, and Indian waters by the end of our period.21 More voyages required more voyagers, and the seafaring population of the British Isles also grew rapidly in this period, as did the number of people participating in overseas trade.22 Some of these men (and a few women) Cullen and T. C. Smout (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1977), pp. 165-76; Gerald James Bryant, ‘Scots in India in the Eighteenth Century’, Scottish Historical Review, 64 (1985), pp. 22-41; Thomas M. Truxes, Irish-American Trade, 1660-1783 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Eric Richards, ‘Scotland and the Uses of the Atlantic Empire’, in Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. by Bailyn and Morgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), pp 67-114; Michael Fry, The Scottish Empire (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2001); T. M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire, 1600-1815 (London: Penguin, 2004); Kevin Kenny, ‘The Irish in the Empire’, in Ireland and the British Empire, ed. by Kenny, pp. 90-122; Andrew MacKillop, ‘Accessing Empire: Scotland, Europe, Britain, and the Asia Trade, 1695-c. 1750’, Itinerario, 29 (2005), pp. 7-30; Alexander Murdoch, Scotland and America (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009); David T. Gleeson, ed., The Irish in the Atlantic World (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2010); John M. MacKenzie and T. M. Devine, eds., Scotland and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 19 For overviews of British imperial expansion, see Andrews, Trade, Plunder, and Settlement; David Loades, England’s Maritime Empire: Seapower, Commerce, and Policy, 1490-1690 (London: Longman, 2000); Canny, ed., Origins of Empire; Bowen, Mancke, and Reid, eds., Britain’s Oceanic Empire. 20 Mortality rates in many of the early long-distance voyages were especially high: see P. E. H. Hair and J. D. Alsop, English Seamen and Traders in Guinea, 1553-1565: The New Evidence of Their Wills (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992); J. D. Alsop, ‘Tudor Merchant Seafarers in the Early Guinea Trade’, in The Social History of English Seamen, 1485-1649 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2012), ed. by Cheryl A. Fury, pp. 75-115; Cheryl Fury, ‘The First English East India Company Voyage, 1601-1603: The Human Dimension’, International Journal of Maritime History, 24 (2012), pp. 69-96; Cheryl A. Fury, ‘Health and Health Care at Sea’, in Social History of English Seamen, 1485-1649, ed. by Fury, pp. 193-227 (pp. 208-19). 21 The best overviews of naval activity in this period are N. A. M. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, 660-1649 (London: Penguin, 2004, originally published 1997); N. A. M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649-1815 (London: W. W. Norton & co, 2004). 22 G. V. Scammell, ‘Manning the English Merchant Service in the Sixteenth Century’, Mariner’s Mirror, 56 (1970), 131-54; Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Andrews, Ships, Money, and Politics, Chapter 3; Hair and Alsop, English

22 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

took to the sea for a short time, while others spent their working lives as sailors, but in either case the expansion in British shipping brought them face to face with new experiences, challenges, and opportunities which their predecessors had not encountered. Cheryl Fury and Claire Mcloughlin explore some of these in their contributions: respectively, the problems of discipline in East India Company ships, and the political and practical intricacies of Scottish trade with Spain during a period of Anglo-Spanish warfare. The ways in which seafarers, traders, and other travellers grappled with such challenges, and seized such opportunities, did much to shape Britain’s maritime world – though, as we have noted and as these chapters also show, not all were fortunate, few of these endeavours were entirely harmonious, and there were many who suffered among those who strove either to achieve or resist Britain’s imperial ambitions.23 This seafaring affected society in Britain on a wide scale. In her chapter, Elaine Murphy discusses how the British civil wars at sea impacted upon women, both the relatively small number who went to sea and the many more who stayed ashore but were engaged, in some form, in maritime activity. Murphy’s work reflects a growth in interest among maritime historians in both gender and the connection between seafaring and communities ashore, and seaborne activities certainly changed the lives of men and women across Britain and the world.24 Within Britain, several coastal or Seamen and Traders; Peter Earle, ‘English Sailors, 1570-1775’, in ‘Those Emblems of Hell?’, ed. by van Royen, Bruijn, and Lucassen, pp. 73-92; Gordon Jackson, ‘Scottish Sailors’, in ‘Those Emblems of Hell?’, ed. by van Royen, Bruijn, and Lucassen, pp. 119-57; Peter Earle, Sailors: English Merchant Seamen 1650-1775 (London: Methuen, 1998); Cheryl A. Fury, Tides in the Affairs of Men: The Social History of Elizabethan Seamen, 1580-1603 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2002); Scammell, Seafaring, Sailors and Trade; Isaac Land, War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor, 1750-1850 (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009); Fury, ed., Social History of English Seamen; Eleanor Hubbard, ‘Sailors and the Early Modern British Empire: Labor, Nation, and Identity at Sea’, History Compass, 14 (2016), pp. 348-58; Cheryl A. Fury, ed., The Social History of English Seamen, 1650-1815 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2017). 23 An emphasis on class conflict, suffering, and resistance has been particularly strong in Marcus Rediker’s work: see Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea; Marcus Rediker, ‘The Common Seaman in the Histories of Capitalism and the Working Class’, International Journal of Maritime History, 1 (1989), pp. 337-57; Marcus Rediker, ‘Towards a People’s History of the Sea’, in Maritime Empires: British Imperial Maritime Trade in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by David Killingray, Margarette Lincoln and Nigel Rigby (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2004), pp. 195-206; see also Niklas Frykman, Clare Anderson, Lex Heerma van Voss and Marcus Rediker, ‘Mutiny and Maritime Radicalism in the Age of Revolution: An Introduction’, International Review of Social History, 58 (2013), pp. 1-14. 24 Elliott J. Gorn, ‘Seafaring Engendered: A Comment on Gender and Seafaring’, International Journal of Maritime History, 4 (1992), pp. 219-25; Margaret Creighton and Lisa Norling, eds., Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700-1920 (Baltimore,

Introduc tion

23

riverine communities depended on their existence as ports, and developed distinct maritime districts. The largest and most famous was east London, a sprawl of wharfs, dockyards, warehouses, and seafarers’ homes. Stepney, the extensive parish stretching along the north bank of the Thames east of the Tower which encompassed much of this area, was as heavily populated as any town or city in Britain except for London itself, reflecting the importance of the maritime industry there.25 While London dominated British shipping, other major ports – Bristol, Cardiff, Dublin, Glasgow, Hull, Leith, Liverpool, Portsmouth, Swansea, and many more – had a considerable social and economic impact on their hinterlands and more widely as nodal points which linked the regions of Britain to each other and to the world. Indeed, regardless of where they stepped aboard ship, seafarers came from all across Britain, and they played a key role in disseminating the results of their labours at sea to their families and acquaintances ashore. These results were multifarious, and both direct and indirect. Sailors’ incomes, from wages and from trade, were important to their families and the port districts where these incomes were spent, as part of familial and communal ‘makeshift economies’.26 The cargoes that sailors brought Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 1996); Fury, Tides in the Affairs of Men, pp. 205-34; Jennine Hurl-Eamon, ‘Insights into Plebeian Marriage: Soldiers, Sailors, and their Wives in the Old Bailey Proceedings’, London Journal, 30 (2005), pp. 22-38; Martin Rorke, ‘Women Overseas Traders in Sixteenth-Century Scotland’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 25 (2005), pp. 81-96; Margarette Lincoln, Naval Wives and Mistresses, 1750-1815 (London: National Maritime Museum Publishing, 2007); Cheryl A. Fury, ‘Seamen’s Wives and Widows’, in Social History of English Seamen, 1485-1649, ed., by Fury, pp. 253-75; John C. Appleby, Women and English Piracy, 1540-1720: Partners and Victims of Crime (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2013); Margaret R. Hunt, ‘The Sailor’s Wife, War Finance, and Coverture in Late Seventeenth-Century London’, in Married Women and the Law: Coverture in England and the Common Law World, ed. by Timothy Stretton and Krista J. Kesselring (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), pp. 139-162; Derek Morris and Ken Cozens, ‘Mariners Ashore in the Eighteenth Century: The Role of Boarding-house Keepers and Victuallers’, Mariner’s Mirror, 103 (2017), pp. 431-49; see also Annette de Wit, Leven, Werken en Geloven in Zeevarende Gemeenschappen: Schiedam, Maassluis en Ter Heijde in de Zeventiende Eeuw (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2008), Chapters 6-7. 25 A. H. French, Marybel Moore, Jocelyn Oatley, M. J. Power, D. Summers, and S. C. Tongue, ‘The Population of Stepney in the Early Seventeenth Century’, Local Population Studies, 3 (1969), pp. 39-52; Michael J. Power, ‘The East London Working Community in the Seventeenth Century’, in Work in Towns 850-1850, ed. by Penelope J. Corf ield and Derek Keene (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990), pp. 103-20. 26 Fury, Tides in the Affairs of Men, 210-18; Pamela Sharpe, ‘Gender at Sea: Women and the East India Company in Seventeenth-Century London’, in Women, Work and Wages in England, 1600-1850, ed. by Neil Raven, Penelope Lane, and K. D. M. Snell (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2004), pp. 47-67; Jennine Hurl-Eamon, ‘The Fiction of Female Dependence and the Makeshift Economy of Soldiers, Sailors, and their Wives in Eighteenth-Century London’, Labor History, 49

24 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

to Britain, as Beverly Lemire has shown, impacted on all levels of society, as expensive commodities satisfied the desires of the elite while cheaper goods circulated among the seafarers’ own plebeian networks. Tobacco from North America brought not only a new and intoxicating substance for consumption, but also new social behaviours and cultural expectations, as well as a whole new industry of pipe-making. Textiles from India and elsewhere changed the clothes worn by workers and the wealthy alike.27 In her contribution here, Meredith Greiling discusses how other kinds of social practice were also transmitted by sea: the cultural and religious links between Scotland and northern Europe ran deep and remained profound throughout this period. The expansion of British seaborne activity, then, brought change to Britain, and to the many places where British seafarers travelled, sometimes to trade, sometimes to invade. This change should therefore not simply be seen, as it often has been, as a move outwards, an exporting of British endeavours. On the contrary, it was a fundamentally two-way phenomenon, and a dynamic one, as the initially disparate strands of seafaring became increasingly coordinated. This activity therefore brought not only social, economic, and material changes to Britain, but political change as well. *** Trade had been important to the monarchs of England and Scotland for centuries before the early modern period, due to both its impact on the economic wellbeing of their realm and the more direct implications for their own finances. Customs on imports and exports were a key part of royal income, and as trade expanded and as governance became a more expensive undertaking, so the importance of customs revenue increased. The rulers of early modern Britain therefore took a direct interest in the commerce of their subjects, and issued a range of regulations governing (2008), pp. 481-501; Fury, ‘Seamen’s Wives and Widows’, pp. 254-7, 260-6; Richard J. Blakemore, ‘Pieces of Eight, Pieces of Eight: Seamen’s Earnings and the Venture Economy of Early Modern Seafaring’, Economic History Review, 70 (2017), pp. 1153-84. 27 Beverly Lemire, ‘“Men of the World”: British Mariners, Consumer Practice, and Material Culture in an Era of Global Trade, c. 1660-1800’, Journal of British Studies, 54 (2015), pp. 288-319; Beverly Lemire, ‘A Question of Trousers: Seafarers, Masculinity and Empire in the Shaping of British Male Dress’, Cultural and Social History, 31 (2016), pp. 1-23; Beverly Lemire, Global Trade and the Transformation of Consumer Cultures. The Material World Remade, c. 1500-1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Introduc tion

25

what they could trade, with whom, and how much tax to pay on it.28 In other ways, too, the sea mattered to these monarchs, principally for its military significance. For medieval English kings, the ‘narrow seas’ linked their possessions in Europe with their realm in the British Isles, while for both Scottish and English monarchs the ability to move forces by sea, and to defend their own shores, were critically important, and this too intensified in the early modern period.29 From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, England and Scotland fought repeated wars with their European neighbours and – until 1603 – with each other, and most of these conflicts took place at sea, or involved travel by ship.30 In this same period occurred what some scholars have called a ‘military revolution’, an expansion of military force requiring more expenditure and more bureaucracy, thus driving the formation of more powerful states. Although naval developments were initially overlooked, several historians have since argued that the institutional, technical, and financial requirements of early modern navies were just as important to this phenomenon as was warfare ashore, if not more so.31 In a sense, then, early modern 28 Davis, English Shipping Industry, Chapter 14; Michael J. Braddick, The Nerves of State: Taxation and the Financing of the English State, 1558-1714 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), Chapter 3; James Scott Wheeler, The Making of a World Power: War and the Military Revolution in Seventeenth-Century England (Stroud: Sutton, 1999), pp. 94-8, 120-7; Rodger, Safeguard of the Sea, pp. 341-4; Patrick K. O’Brien, ‘Fiscal and Financial Preconditions for the Rise of British Naval Hegemony 1485-1815’, London School of Economics, Economic History Department Working Papers, 91/05 (2005), pp. 15-19. 29 Susan Rose, Medieval Naval Warfare, 1000-1500 (London: Routledge, 2002); Susan Rose, England’s Medieval Navy, 1066-1509: Ships, Men & Warfare (Barnsley: Seaforth, 2013). 30 For narrative accounts of naval conflict in the early modern period involving England and Scotland, see Rodger, Safeguard of the Sea; Rodger, Command of the Ocean; Steve Murdoch, The Terror of the Seas? Scottish Maritime Warfare 1513-1713 (Leiden: Brill, 2010). 31 Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Chapter 3; Jaap R. Bruijn, ‘States and their Navies from the Late Sixteenth to the End of the Eighteenth Centuries’, in War and Competition between States, ed. by Philippe Contamine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), pp. 69-98; Jan Glete, Warfare at Sea, 1500-1650: Maritime Conflicts and the Transformation of Europe (London: Routledge, 2000); Jeremy Black, Naval Power: A History of Warfare and the Sea from 1500 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009); Louis Sicking, ‘Naval Warfare in Europe, c. 1330-c. 1680’, in European Warfare, 1350-1750, ed. by Frank Tallet and D. J. B. Trim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 236-63; Gijs Rommelse, ‘Introduction: The Military Revolution at Sea’, Journal for Maritime Research, 13 (2011), pp. 117-8; John F. Guilmartin, ‘The Military Revolution in Warfare at Sea during the Early Modern Era: Technological Origins, Operational Outcomes and Strategic Consequences’, Journal for Maritime Research, 13 (2011), pp. 129-137; Gijs Rommelse, ‘An Early Modern Naval Revolution? The Relationship between “Economic Reason of State” and Maritime Warfare’, Journal for Maritime Research, 13 (2011), pp. 138-50; Jürgen G. Backhaus, ed., Navies and State Formation (Berlin: Lit, 2012); Richard Harding, Modern Naval History: Debates and

26 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Britain became a ‘fiscal-naval state’, as Patrick O’Brien and N. A. M. Rodger have argued.32 The navy was often the largest single item of government expenditure, entailing both rising taxation and the apparatus to collect and disburse those funds and to organise naval activity. A permanent naval administration was founded towards the end of Henry VIII’s reign, and the admiralty grew in size and influence to become a major department of state by the early eighteenth century.33 The impact of the navy and the maritime world on British politics has rarely received the attention it deserves outside of specialists in the field. In both England and Scotland, the state-orchestrated Protestant reformations relied upon naval forces to protect the realm from Catholic and other foes, not only in the famous Armada campaign of 1588 but throughout the sixteenth century.34 A few decades later, Charles I’s failed foreign policy during the 1620s, including humiliating naval defeats, contributed to the crisis of his reign.35 Parliament’s control of the navy during the civil wars that erupted from this crisis was key to their eventual victory over the king, and to the success of the subsequent Commonwealth governments in defending themselves from internal and external threats, and in subjugating Scotland and Ireland.36 The role played by the navy was pivotal at several moments in 1659-60, leading to Prospects (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); David Plouviez, ‘Marines Européennes, Développements Administratif, Économique et Financier’, in The Sea in History: The Early Modern World, ed. by Christian Buchet and Gérard le Bouëdec (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2017), pp. 773-84. 32 O’Brien, ‘Fiscal and Financial Preconditions’, p. 37; N. A. M. Rodger, ‘From the “Military Revolution” to the “Fiscal-Naval State”’, Journal for Maritime Research, 13 (2011), pp. 119-28; Patrick O’Brien, ‘State Formation and Economic Growth: The Case of Britain, 1688-1846’, in Navies and State Formation, ed. by Backhaus, pp. 217-72. See also Richard J. Blakemore and Pepijn Brandon, ‘The Dutch and English Fiscal-Naval States: A Comparative Overview’, in Anglo-Dutch Conflict in the Seventeenth Century, 1652-1689, ed. by David Ormrod and Gijs Rommelse (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2020), pp. 117-36. 33 For a general overview, see Rodger, Safeguard of the Sea; Rodger, Command of the Ocean. 34 David Loades, The Tudor Navy: An Administrative, Political and Military History (Aldershot: Scolar, 1992); David Loades, The Making of the Elizabethan Navy, 1540-1590: From the Solent to the Armada (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2009); Murdoch, Terror of the Seas?, Chapters 1-3; C. S. Knighton and David Loades, eds., Elizabethan Naval Administration (London: Navy Records Society, 2013). 35 Andrews, Ships, Money, and Politics; Nabil Matar, ‘The Barbary Corsairs, King Charles I and the Civil War’, The Seventeenth Century, 16 (2001), pp. 239-58; Nabil Matar, Britain and Barbary, 1589-1689 (Gainsville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 2005), Chapter 2; Richard J. Blakemore, ‘Thinking Outside the Gundeck: Maritime History, the Royal Navy and the Outbreak of British Civil War, 1625-42’, Historical Research, 87 (2014), pp. 251-74; Richard J. Blakemore and Elaine Murphy, The British Civil Wars at Sea, 1638-1653 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2018), Chapter 2. 36 Bernard Capp, Cromwell’s Navy: The Fleet and the English Revolution 1648-1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Blakemore and Murphy, British Civil Wars.

Introduc tion

27

the restoration of Charles II, and again in 1688- 89, when his brother James VII and II was overthrown in favour of James’s daughter Mary and her husband William III; it also played a key defensive role throughout the reigns of Charles, William and Mary, Mary’s sister Anne, and their Hanoverian successors.37 To a considerable degree, both through its routine activity and its revolutionary actions, the navy shaped the British state that emerged during this period. Moreover, while the state became more powerful within Britain, with the navy both requiring this power and reinforcing it, the expansion of Britain’s colonial and commercial interests created a wider imperial network in which the state was embedded. The growth of the British state and the first phases of the British empire were coeval and concomitant. Throughout this period, but especially in the earlier stages, both naval mobilisation in Britain and Europe and the imperial activity beyond it involved partnerships between the crown and its subjects. Naval administrators depended heavily on private finance, private suppliers, and privateers – and often the men running the navy were also investors in these enterprises. While this led to accusations of corruption, by contemporaries and historians, it was the only way any early modern state could effectively harness the available resources.38 In the same way, the crown was initially 37 On the navy’s role in these moments of political crisis, see Capp, Cromwell’s Navy, Chapter 10; Gill Blanchard, Lawson Lies Still in the Thames: The Extraordinary Life of Vice-Admiral Sir John Lawson (Stroud: Amberley, 2017), Chapters 4-5; J. D. Davies, Kings of the Sea: Charles II, James II & the Royal Navy (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2017), Chapter 11. On the navy’s activities during this period more generally, see N. A. M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (London: HarperCollins, 1986); J. D. Davies, Gentlemen and Tarpaulins: The Officers and Men of the Restoration Navy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); J. D. Davies, Pepys’s Navy: Ships, Men & Warfare, 1649-1689 (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2008); Sarah Kinkel, Disciplining the Empire: Politics, Governance, and the Rise of the British Navy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018). 38 Kenneth R. Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering: English Privateering during the Spanish War, 1585-1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964); David J. Starkey, British Privateering Enterprise in the Eighteenth Century (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1990); Capp, Cromwell’s Navy, pp. 230-42; Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics, pp. 189-202; Loades, Tudor Navy, pp. 5, 77, 130-5, 184-5; Douglas Hamilton, ‘Private Enterprise and Public Service: Naval Contracting in the Caribbean, 1720-50’, Journal for Maritime Research, 6 (2004), pp. 37-64; Davies, Pepys’s Navy, Chapters 20 and 40; Loades, Elizabethan Navy, pp. 52-3; Roger Knight and Martin Wilcox, Sustaining the Fleet, 1793-1815: War, the British Navy and the Contractor State (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2010); Murdoch, Terror of the Seas?, Chapters 2 and 4; David J. Starkey, ‘Voluntaries and Sea Robbers: A Review of the Academic Literature on Privateering, Corsairing, Buccaneering and Piracy’, Mariner’s Mirror, 97 (2011), pp. 127-47; H. V. Bowen, ‘The Contractor State, c. 16501815’, International Journal of Maritime History, 25 (2013), 239-74; Christian Buchet, The British Navy, Economy and Society in the Seven Years War, trans. by Anita Higgie and Michael Duffy, (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2013); David J. Starkey and Matthew McCarthy, ‘A Persistent

28 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

a co-investor in early voyages across the Atlantic or to the Indian Ocean, without any close control over them; in Elizabeth I’s case, at least, this was to preserve plausible deniability in the face of protests from Spain and Portugal, who claimed an exclusive sovereignty over those oceans.39 Bernhard Klein’s chapter in this volume examines one example of these hybrid endeavours, the sixteenth-century voyages to West Africa, while Fury’s, already mentioned, deals with another in discussing the East India Company. Monopolistic corporations like the East India Company, as well as the various colonial administrations, allowed the crown to delegate certain powers to groups of merchants, investors, and colonists: not only the authority to pursue trade or to colonise, and to exclude competitors, but also to establish and implement law, and to wage wars. These companies and colonies allied and fought with African, American, and Indian rulers; they employed thousands of workers and migrants from Britain, Europe, and elsewhere in the world; and they were instrumental in Britain’s expanding role in the transatlantic slave trade.40 Like the navy, they also had an impact on domestic politics.41 The state within Britain and the early British empire, Phenomenon: Private Prize-Taking in the British Atlantic World, c. 1540-1856’, in Persistent Piracy: Maritime Violence and State Formation in Global Historical Perspective, ed. by Stefan Amirell and Leos Müller (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), pp. 131-51; Blakemore and Murphy, British Civil Wars, Chapters 4-5; Blakemore and Brandon, ‘Dutch and English Fiscal-Naval States’. 39 Andrews, Trade, Plunder, and Settlement; John C. Appleby, ‘War, Politics, and Colonization, 1558-1625’, in Origins of Empire, ed. by Canny, pp. 55-78; Loades, Elizabethan Navy, pp. 112-13, 137-42, 148-54. 40 On trading companies, see K. G. Davies, The Royal African Company (London: Longmans, Green & co, 1957); Janice E. Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 10, 31-33, 35, 38-40, 59-68; Gaastra, ‘War, Competition, and Collaboration’; Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundation of the British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); William A. Pettigrew, Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672-1752 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Philip J. Stern, ‘“Bundles of Hyphens”?: Corporations As Legal Communities in the Early Modern British Empire’, in Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500-1850, ed. by Lauren Benton and Richard J. Ross (New York: New York University Press, 2013), pp. 21-47. On colonial authorities and imperial governance, see Canny, ed., Origins of Empire, especially Chapters 6-10, 13, and 16-17; Bowen, Mancke, and Reid, ed., Britain’s Oceanic Empire, especially Part 2. 41 Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); John R. Young, ‘The Scottish Parliament and the Politics of Empire: Parliament and the Darien Project, 1695-1707’, Parliaments, Estates & Representation, 27 (2007), pp. 175-90; Andrew MacKillop, ‘A Union for Empire? Scotland, the English East India Company and the British Union’, Scottish Historical Review, 87 (2008), pp. 116-34; George K. McGilvary, East India Patronage and the British State: The Scottish Elite and Politics in the Eighteenth Century (London: Tauris Academic, 2008); Douglas Watt, ‘The Company of Scotland and Scottish Politics, 1696-1701’, in Scotland in the Age

Introduc tion

29

therefore, are best conceptualised together as an essentially composite organisation, comprising many agendas and interests. Yet, over the early modern period, this organisation became increasingly coordinated. As Alan James argues in his chapter on the writings of Walter Ralegh, and as noted briefly above, this has often been retrospectively interpreted as the first stirrings of a later age of imperial power, and it is important for us to avoid such anachronism, to eschew the Whig narratives which originated in the nineteenth century and assumed parliamentary and naval supremacy were Britain’s birth-right. Early modern attempts to express a naval ideology, like Ralegh’s, were contingent on current political circumstances and also on the authors’ personal career, rather than expressing any maritime national ‘spirit’. Nevertheless, Britain’s rulers did seek to exert more control over their seafaring subjects and were increasingly successful in this design. Whereas Tudor and early Stuart monarchs had possessed some ambitions along these lines, only with the turmoil of the mid-seventeenth century did there emerge a government with both the will and the capability to pursue a more aggressive policy. The Navigation Act of 1651, reissued by Charles II in 1660 and again later, was a specific measure intended to challenge Dutch trading success, but it also encapsulated a vision of a joined-up maritime empire under the direction of the central government: initially an English one which sought to exclude everyone else, but becoming more British over time. 42 A similar vision is apparent in the measures taken later in the seventeenth century, and early in the eighteenth, to force Britain’s American colonies to accept new and more restrictive definitions of privateering, and to suppress piracy.43 In both cases of Two Revolutions, ed. by Sharon Adams and Julian Goodare (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2014), pp. 211-30. 42 Davis, English Shipping Industry, Chapter 14; J. E. Farnell, ‘The Navigation Act of 1651, the First Dutch War, and the London Merchant Community’, Economic History Review, 16 (1963), pp. 439-54; Michael J. Braddick, ‘The English Government, War, Trade, and Settlement, 1625-1688’, in Origins of Empire, ed. by Canny, 286-308 (pp. 294-6); Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640-1661 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 157-9, 171-6. 43 Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), Chapter 3; Lauren Benton, ‘Towards a New Legal History of Piracy: Maritime Legalities and the Myth of Universal Jurisdiction’, International Journal of Maritime History, 23 (2011), pp. 225-40; Douglas R. Burgess, The Politics of Piracy: Crime and Civil Disobedience in Colonial America (Lebanon, New Haven: University Press of New England, 2014); Margarette Lincoln, British Pirates and Society, 1680-1730 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014); Matthew Norton, ‘Classification and Coercion: The Destruction of Piracy in the English Maritime System’, American Journal of Sociology, 119 (2014), pp. 1537-75; Matthew Norton, ‘Temporality, Isolation, and Violence in the Early Modern English Maritime World’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 48

30 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

these measures provoked resistance, evasion, and conflict, but even with their limitations they represent some realisation of the British government’s ambitions. Those ambitions rested on a new perspective on Britain: the idea that it was a maritime nation. *** We argued at the beginning of this introduction that Britain did not begin the early modern period as a quintessentially maritime nation, or with a widespread perception that it was one. Only with the economic, social, and political developments outlined above did this ‘maritime-ness’ appear, and it brought with it not just a growing belief that Britain was inherently maritime, but that this was a preordained and natural state of affairs. This shift occurred on several interconnected levels. The political agenda and legitimacy of Britain’s rulers was underpinned by claims that they were sovereigns over the ‘British seas’, a maritime region of indeterminate but implicitly capacious extent. Initially these represented separate, and sometimes competing, English and Scottish claims, but with the Stuart dynasty these were fused, and infused with the more direct Scottish approach. 44 As Rebecca Bailey discusses in her chapter, Charles I took particular interest in enforcing this sovereignty, both in practical naval strength through the ‘Ship Money’ fleets, and in the popular representation of this activity in printed and material culture. In the same way as Shakespeare had, and ‘Rule Britannia!’ later would, Charles and his supporters appealed to history for precedents, such as King Edgar, supposedly master of a grand Saxon navy. Edgar appeared alongside many other historical examples in legal texts and poems which asserted the king’s claims, and more prominently as the figurehead of the king’s grandly decorated new flagship, the Sovereign of the Seas. The interregnum governments, after they had overthrown Charles I, upheld the same principles of sovereignty, and they were embraced again by Charles II after his restoration to the throne.45 In the later seventeenth century, as Philippa (2014), pp. 37-66; Mark Hanna, Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Rebecca A. Simon, ‘The Problem and Potential of Piracy: Legal Changes and Emerging Ideas of Colonial Autonomy in the Early Modern British Atlantic, 1670-1730’, Journal for Maritime Research, 18 (2016), pp. 123-37. 44 Fulton, Sovereignty of the Sea, Chapters 1-5; David Armitage, ‘The Empire of the Seas, 1576-1689’, in Armitage, Ideological Origins, pp.100-24 (pp. 105-8). 45 Important legal texts originally written in Charles I’s reign were printed during the 1650s: John Borough, The Soveraignty of the British Seas (London, 1651); John Selden, Of the Dominion, Or, Ownership of the Sea, trans. by Marchmont Nedham (London, 1652). There were also several

Introduc tion

31

Hellawell shows in her contribution to this volume, these ideas of sovereignty also featured in the burgeoning scientific discussions coalescing around the Royal Society. Understanding of the natural world was positioned as a vital resource for enhancing the king’s sovereignty over the sea. Beyond the person and power of the monarch, the idea of Britain as a maritime nation developed a distinct personality, though never far detached from the ruling dynasty. Where Shakespeare had referred to England alone, and pictured it as a ‘fortress’ and a ‘precious stone’, other contemporary writers adopted the Latin name ‘Britannia’, with increasingly maritime connotations. 46 John Dee’s General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation, published in 1577, portrays on its frontispiece two female figures beseeching Elizabeth for her naval protection. 47 For Dee, this concept remained closely associated with the queen: he was among the first to write of a ‘British empire’, by which he meant a universal Tudor monarchy across Britain and Ireland, and he also penned treatises supporting the queen’s claims to maritime sovereignty.48 In reality a British monarchy came not with the Tudors but their Scottish Stuart successors, and Britannia remained a recurring icon. Anthony Munday described how the pageants welcoming James VI and I to London in 1603 began first with ‘The Shippe called the Royall Exchange’, and then featured ‘a fayre and beautifull Nymph, Britania hirselfe’, standing upon ‘a Mount triangular, as the Island of Britayne it selfe is described to bee’. 49 Bailey, in her chapter, discusses the masque Britannia Triumphans in which Charles I himself played the leading role of ‘Britanocles’ when it was performed at court in 1638. The reign of his son, in later writers on the same subject, who again often emphasised historical precedents, such as Robert Codrington, His Majesties Propriety, and Dominion on the Brittish Seas Asserted (London, 1665), and John Evelyn, Navigation and Commerce, Their Original and Progress (London, 1674). See also Capp, Cromwell’s Navy, pp. 75-6, 83-5; Davies, Kings of the Sea, Chapter 8. 46 For example, William Camden, Britanniae siue Florentissimorum Regnorum Angliæ, Scotiæ, Hiberniæ et Insularum Adiacentum (London, 1586). On Camden’s work and its influence on later writers, see Robert J. Mayhew, ‘William Camden (1551-1623)’, in Geographers: Biobliographical Studies, Volume 27, ed. by Hayden Lorimer and Charles W. J. Withers (London: Continuum, 2008), pp. 28-42. 47 John Dee, General and Rare Memorials pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Nauigation (London, 1577). 48 William H. Sherman, ‘“This British Discovery and Recovery Enterprise”: Dee and England’s Maritime Empire’, in William H. Sherman, The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), pp. 148-200; Armitage, ‘Empire of the Seas, 1576-1689’, 105-8; Lesley B. Cormac, ‘Britannia Rules the Waves?: Images of Empire in Elizabethan England’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 4 (1998), pp. 10-20; Ken MacMillan, ‘John Dee’s “Brytanici Imperii Limites”’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 64 (2001), pp. 151-9. 49 Anthony Munday, The Triumphes of Re-Vnited Britania (London, 1605), sig. A4v-B1v.

32 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

1672, saw Britannia first appear on English coins, on the low denomination of farthing, therefore circulating to all levels of society. The same figure appeared on coinage throughout most subsequent reigns and, by the end of the eighteenth century, had acquired a trident (as well as songs about ruling the waves), thus intensifying the maritime association.50 Yet it was not just Britain, whether through its monarch or by itself, that was inherently maritime: it was increasingly believed that British people were natural seafarers too. This is particularly clear in the way that seafaring characters became commonplace in British culture. Claire Jowitt, in her chapter, explores the important role that the figure of the sea captain played in Elizabethan drama, just as she has previously examined how pirates were used both dramatically and politically in literature during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.51 Colloquial stereotypes and terms for sailors like ‘tarpaulin’ and ‘Jack Tar’ appeared for the first time in the later seventeenth century, and acquired considerable importance thereafter.52 Similarly, innumerable ballads about sailors and sea-travel circulated across the seventeenth century, celebrating the connections between seafarers, the navy, and the nation, a triumvirate which became ever more popular in the eighteenth century.53 The experience of naval or imperial service and 50 For on example of the 1672 farthing see British Museum object number 1926,0817.164; on the development of this imagery more generally, see Katharine Eustace, Britannia: Icon on the Coin (London: Royal Mint Museum, 2016). 51 For her previous work on pirates, see Claire Jowitt, ‘Piracy and Politics in Heywood and Rowley’s Fortune by Land and Sea (1607-9)’, Renaissance Studies, 16 (2002), pp. 217-33; Claire Jowitt, ‘Scaffold Performances: The Politics of Pirate Execution’, in Pirates? The Politics of Plunder, 1550-1650, ed. by Claire Jowitt (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), pp. 151-68; Claire Jowitt, ‘Rogue Traders: National Identity, Empire and Piracy, 1580-1640’, in Borders and Travellers in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Thomas Betteridge (Aldershot: Routledge, 2007), pp. 53-70; Claire Jowitt, The Culture of Piracy, 1580-1630: English Literature and Seaborne Crime (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). 52 Valerie Burton, ‘The Myth of Bachelor Jack: Masculinity, Patriarchy and Seafaring Labour’, in Jack Tar in History: Essays in the History of Maritime Life and Labour, ed. by Colin Howell and Richard Twomey (Fredericton, New Brunswick: Acadiensis Press, 1991), pp. 179-98, at pp. 179-80; Margarette Lincoln, Representing the Royal Navy: British Sea Power, 1750-1815 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 29-32; Land, War, Nationalism and the British Sailor; Joanne Begiato, ‘Tears and the Manly Sailor in England, c. 1760-1860’, Journal for Maritime Research, 17 (2015), pp. 117-133. 53 C. H. Firth, ed., Naval Songs and Ballads (London: Navy Record Society, 1908); Patricia Fumerton, ‘The Ballad’s Seaman: A Constant Parting’, in Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 131-52; James Davey, ‘Singing for the Nation: Balladry, Naval Recruitment and the Language of Patriotism in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Mariner’s Mirror, 103 (2017), pp. 43-66. Many ballads concerning sailors and the maritime world can be found in the English Broadside Ballad Archive at http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/; see the introductory essay by Laura Miller, ‘Sea: Transporting England’, http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/page/sea (accessed 1 May 2019). See also

Introduc tion

33

travel, by bringing together ever greater numbers of people from all over the British archipelago, also played an important role in developing a sense of ‘Britishness’ at multiple social levels, even while this did not subsume or obliterate local, regional, or distinct national identities.54 Just as British people increasingly travelled by sea, or encountered objects that had done so, they were ever more likely to perceive the sea, seafaring, the navy, and the empire as central parts of British national life. Even with this burgeoning nationalist culture, the idea of Britain, its rulers, and its people as inherently and distinctively maritime was profoundly shaped by international interaction. British discussions of seapower, as Alan James demonstrates in his chapter, were developed in response to European ideas: even claims to British maritime sovereignty were most often a riposte to Dutch, French, Portuguese, and Spanish writers – countries with whom Britain was both a trading partner and an imperial rival.55 The fact that British writers moderated such claims from 1689 onwards out of deference to their new Dutch king shows just how much ideas about Britain’s maritime world were influenced by both the domestic and the international context.56 Moreover, as Bailey discusses in her chapter, Charles I’s critics also adopted maritime topics and tropes, revealing the deep fissures that existed within the British political system. Despite the best efforts of the government to prevent it, many British subjects served other empires, even in wars against Britain, while foreign sailors worked on British ships, naval and commercial, so that the cultural trope of British ‘tars’ must be set beside the much more complex reality of Angela McShane, ‘Recruiting Citizens for Soldiers in Seventeenth-Century English Ballads’, Journal of Early Modern History, 15 (2011), pp. 105-37. 54 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (Yale University Press, 1992); Jonathan Scott, When the Waves Ruled Britannia: Geography and Political Identities 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 2011); John M. MacKenzie, ‘Empire and National Identities: The Case of Scotland’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 9 (1998), pp. 215-31; Andrew MacKillop, ‘Europeans, Britons, and Scots: Scottish Sojourning Networks and Identities in Asia, c. 1700-1815’, in A Global Clan: Scottish Migrant Networks and Identities Since the Eighteenth Century, ed. by Angela McCarthy (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2006), pp. 19-47; John M. MacKenzie, ‘Irish, Scottish, Welsh and English Worlds? A Four‐Nation Approach to the History of the British Empire’, History Compass, 6 (2008), pp. 1244-63; J. D. Davies, Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales (Stroud: The History Press, 2013), Chapters 2-3; Kirsten Sandrock, ‘The Legacy of Scotland’s Colonial Schemes: From the 1620s until Now’, Medievalia et Humanistica, 41 (2016), pp. 231-46; Sara Caputo, ‘Scotland, Scottishness, British Integration and the Royal Navy, 1793-1815’, Scottish Historical Review, 97 (2018), pp. 85-118. 55 For introductions to the international debate on maritime ‘sovereignty’, see Fulton, Sovereignty of the Sea; Richard J. Blakemore, ‘Law and the Sea’, in The Routledge Companion to Marine and Maritime Worlds, ed. Steve Mentz, Claire Jowitt and Craig. L. Lambert (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), pp. 388-425. 56 For example Philip Meadows, Observations Concerning the Dominion and Sovereignty of the Seas (London, 1689).

34 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

an international labour market.57 Several historians have emphasised that British identity was defined through interaction with certain imagined or encountered ‘others’, whether national, racial, or religious, and often from a position of vulnerability and fear rather than imperial dominance.58 Other scholars, meanwhile, have highlighted the coexistence of (and sometimes conflict between) multiple layers of localised, cultural, and ethnic identities that could cut across imperial boundaries.59 Britain’s rulers and peoples may 57 Douglas Catterall, Community without Borders: Scots Migrants and the Changing Face of Power in the Dutch Republic c. 1600-1700 (Leiden: Brill, 2002); Steve Murdoch, ‘The Good, the Bad and the Anonymous: A Preliminary Survey of Scots in the Dutch East Indies 1612-1707’, Northern Scotland, 22 (2002), 63-76; Andrew R. Little, ‘British Seamen in the United Provinces during the Seventeenth Century Anglo-Dutch Wars ‒ A Preliminary Survey’, in Trade, Diplomacy, and Exchange: Continuity and Change in the North Sea Area and the Baltic, c. 1350-1750, ed. by Hanno Brand (Hilversum: Verloren, 2005), pp. 75-92; Alexia Grosjean and Steve Murdoch, eds., Scottish Communities Abroad in the Early Modern Period (Leiden: Brill, 2005); Esther Mijers, ‘A Natural Partnership? Scotland and Zeeland in the Early Seventeenth Century’, in Shaping the Stuart World, 1603-1714: The Atlantic Connection, ed. by Allan I. Macinnes and Arthur H. Williamson (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 233-60; Jelle van Lottum, Jan Lucassen, and Lex Heerma van Voss, ‘Sailors, National and International Labour Markets and National Identity, 1600-1850’, in Shipping and Economic Growth, ed. by Unger, pp. 309-51; Esther Mijers, ‘Between Empires and Cultures: Scots in New Netherland and New York’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 33 (2013), pp. 165-95; Esther Mijers, ‘Scotland, the Dutch Republic and the Union: Commerce and Cosmopolitanism’, in Jacobitism, Enlightenment and Empire, 1680-1820, ed. by Allain I. Macinnes and Douglas J. Hamilton (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014), pp. 93-108; Sara Caputo, ‘Alien Seamen in the British Navy, British Law, and the British State, c. 1793-c. 1815’, Historical Journal, Early View, available at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X18000298 (accessed 1 May 2019). 58 Anthony Gerard Barthelemy, Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (London: Louisiana State University Press, 1987); W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Harvard University Press, 1997); Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558-1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth Century British Culture (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World 1600-1850 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002); Philip D. Morgan and Sean Hawkins, eds., Black Experience and the Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Matar, Britain and Barbary; Gerald MacLean and Nabil Matar, Britain and the Islamic World, 1558-1713 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Morieux, The Channel. 59 Claudia Schnurmann, ‘Atlantic Trade and Regional Identities: The Creation of Supranational Atlantic Systems in the 17th Century’, in Atlantic History: History of the Atlantic System, 1580-1830, ed. by Horst Pietschmann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), pp. 179-97; April Lee Hatfield, ‘Dutch and New Netherlands Merchants in the Seventeenth-Century English Chesapeake’, in The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel, ed. by Peter A. Coclanis (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), pp. 205-28; Eliga H. Gould, ‘Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery’, American Historical Review, 112 (2007),

35

Introduc tion

have begun to appear and to think of themselves as British and as naturally and uniquely maritime, but only through continuous and contentious dialogues with each other and with the rest of the world. *** It is an exciting time to be a scholar of maritime history. Not only is there a vibrant research culture which extends beyond the confines of any particular field or discipline, there is a growing recognition that this subject has the potential to escape the narrow parameters which have previously dogged it, and with which it is still often caricatured. The story of human society’s relationship with the sea has much to tell us about the global past, and the global present.60 This is true of the maritime world of early modern Britain, just as it is of other maritime histories. The changes we have summarised briefly in this introduction, and which are explored in more detail in the following pages, transformed Britain and its place in the world. They changed the connections between Britain and other places and regions, through trade and empire, with both productive and destructive results. They changed the political structure in Britain and its empire, shifting the balance of power towards certain institutions (the crown and parliament) while also increasing the importance of some interest groups (primarily overseas merchants). They changed the very idea of what Britain is, and of what it is to be British. They have also left us with a paradox. The well-established idea of maritime Britain with which we began, and which still persists today, emphasizes isolation, exceptionalism, and domination. The reality of Britain’s maritime world, as it emerged across the early modern period, reveals a picture of connection, exchange, and interdependence. We hope that our book will contribute further to unearthing – or, in a more suitable metaphor, dredging up – this historical reality. pp. 764-86; Colin Gordon Calloway, White People, Indians, and Highlanders: Tribal Peoples and Colonial Encounters in Scotland and America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Marsha L. Hamilton, ‘The Irish and the Formation of British Communities in Early Massachusetts’, in The Irish in the Atlantic World, ed. by David T. Gleeson (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2010), pp. 229-50. 60 For some ambitious and critical reflections on this point, see Maria Fusaro, ‘Maritime History as Global History: The Methodological Challenges and Future Research Agenda’, in Fusaro and Polónia, eds, Maritime History as Global History, pp. 267-82; Lincoln Paine, The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (London: Atlantic Books, 2013), pp. 3-10; Sujit Sivasundaram, Alison Bashford, and David Armitage, ‘Introduction: Writing World Oceanic Histories’, in Oceanic Histories, ed., by Armitage, Bashford, and Sivusandaram, pp. 1-28.

1. The Minion and Its Travels: Sailing to Guinea in the Sixteenth Century Bernhard Klein The Minion was a ship of the Royal Navy, originally built in 1522,1 and named after the type of small cannon made of cast-iron or bronze frequently in use on Tudor and Stuart ships. Known as one of Henry VIII’s favourites, referred to as ‘la Mignone’ by the French,2 ‘Mjinhona’ by the Portuguese,3 and ‘Miñona’ by the Spanish,4 the Minion was rebuilt twice in the 1530s and included in an illustrated inventory of Henry’s navy in 1546. Deployed initially in domestic and cross-Channel service, and involved in several skirmishes in Scottish, Irish, and European waters, it was later chosen as one of a small number of ships leased from the crown by London’s overseas merchants in the 1550s and 1560s, when it was first used in the trade with Spain and, probably, the Canaries and/or the Azores, and later undertook travel to Africa and the West Indies on at least five separate occasions. Its last known voyage took the ship from the Caribbean to Cornwall, where it landed in Mount’s Bay on 25 January 1569. Having already been the subject of complaints about its lack of deep-seaworthiness in 1561,5 it was condemned shortly after that final voyage, possibly in 1570,6 giving it a total lifespan of just under 50 years. 1 For the date, see the document in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII [hereafter L&P], III: part 2: 1521-23, ed. J.S. Brewer (London: Longmans et al., 1867), p. 1102, item 3591, dated 2 October 1522, containing the first known reference to the ship: ‘The King’s Minion and the four Spaniards are ready for the coast of Ireland’. 2 L&P, IX, 1535, ed. James Gairdner (London: Longman et al., 1886), p. 189, item 566 (footnote). 3 António Brásio (ed.), Monumenta missionária africana. África occidental (1469-1599), IV (Lisbon: Âgencia geral do ultramar, 1954), item 69, p. 246. 4 Calendar of State Papers, Spanish, 1558-1567 ed. Martin A.S. Hume (London: HMSO, 1892), p. 447, item 307 [hereafter CSP Spanish, 1558-1567]. 5 See the letter by John Lok to a syndicate of London overseas merchants, dated 11 December 1561, in Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, 3 vols (London: George Bishop et al., 1598-1600), II, part 2, pp. 53-4 [hereafter PN2]. This was the second, much expanded edition of Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations. 6 See Tom Glasgow Jr, ‘List of Ships in the Royal Navy from 1539 to 1588 – The Navy from Its Infancy to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada’, The Mariner’s Mirror 56, no. 3 (1970), pp. 299-307 (p. 301); J.J. Colledge and Ben Warlow, Ships of the Royal Navy. The Complete Record of All Fighting Ships of the Royal Navy from the 15th Century to the Present (London: Chatham Publishing, rev. ed. 2006), p. 227; C.S. Knighton and David M. Loades, The Navy of Edward VI and Mary I (Aldershot: Ashgate, for the Navy Records Society, 2011), pp. 497-8 [hereafter NEM].

38 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

The Minion was neither the largest, nor the most widely travelled, nor the most famous ship in Tudor England. Instead it shares the characteristics of a range of other, hardly very remarkable vessels, which together formed the material base for the ‘maritime world of early modern Britain’ that is the subject of this volume. It is precisely its relative ordinariness, however, that makes it a particularly fitting example for the purposes of this essay. Taking my cue from recent explorations of ‘global microhistory’ as a theoretical model that integrates a focus on the local within a macro context, a close study of the Minion opens up a window on the master narrative of Britain’s rise to a major sea power which allows local and individual stories to confirm or contest that explanatory framework.7 As we shall see, while the ship’s move from domestic to European to global spheres of action signals a trajectory broadly compatible with the standard account of contemporary English maritime aspirations, the specific details of the Minion’s travels reveal instead a series of unexpected historical alignments and social configurations. The story of the Minion has never been told in full. In what follows, I will look at the ship’s history – or perhaps its biography – from three different angles. The first section takes a broad diachronic view of the roughly halfcentury of the ship’s existence, summarizing what can be reliably established in material terms about its movements across European and global seas in that time. The second section focuses on the period after 1558, which is both its best documented and its most ambitious decade, when it voyaged far out of its comfort zone, becoming central to the West African trade pioneered by a syndicate of London-based merchants from 1553 onwards, and later participated in one of the earliest English slave trading voyages. The final section will move from the material and economic to the cultural and social spheres, by looking more closely at the Minion as a space of encounter and cross-cultural contact in which nobles, mariners, and traders, from different parts of the world, as well as Africans captured as slaves, cohabited in various constellations of power, hierarchy, and subjection.

7 The term ‘global microhistory’ was coined by Tonio Andrade in ‘A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys, and a Warlord: Toward a Global Microhistory’, Journal of World History, 21, 4 (2010), pp. 573-91 (p. 574). It has been taken up, amongst others, by Francesca Trivellato in ‘Is There a Future for Italian Microhistory in the Age of Global History?’, California Italian Studies 2, 1 (2011), https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0z94n9hq (6 May 2019); and by John-Paul A. Ghobrial in ‘The Secret Life of Elias of Babylon and the Uses of Global Microhistory’, Past & Present, 222 (2014), pp. 51-93.

THE MINION AND ITS TRAVELS: SAILING TO GUINEA IN THE SIX TEENTH CENTURY

39

A timeline for the Minion The chronology of the Minion can be largely pieced together from surviving evidence in the State Papers, in naval records, in Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, and in a variety of other sources. Described in its early decades as a modest ship of 150 or 180 tons,8 it patrolled the Irish Sea and the Channel in the 1520s, carried wine for the royal household from Bordeaux and La Rochelle, and transported building materials between various English ports. On at least one occasion, it was selected for diplomatic duty. On 1 October 1532, the Spanish ambassador Eustace Chapuys announced to Charles V that Henry will soon ‘cross the sea in the Minion’9 for his state visit to Calais in October and November, where he was to meet the French king, though a published account of the visit later in the same year placed Henry instead on the Swallow, a galleon of 240 tons.10 Whether the Minion carried the king or not, the Chapuys letter makes it very likely that the ship was part of the fleet that took the English delegation to France. The commemorative painting produced in honour of the king’s earlier, 1520 visit to Calais, The Embarkation of Henry VIII at Dover (c. 1540/41), shows a total of fifteen English warships, and the fleet in 1532 may well have contained a similar number of ships.11 Some degree of royal affection for the Minion certainly appears to have been in evidence, since a French source of 1535 refers to the ship as ‘the mistress of England’ [la maistresse d’Angleterre]12 – obviously a play on the French rendering of its name, ‘la Mignone’13 – which may possibly be taken as further evidence that the Minion was indeed in Calais three years earlier, when the unmarried Anne Boleyn, well known by then as Henry’s mistress, was a member of the king’s entourage. The same source reports that the ship was drawn into a Swedish naval battle in 1535 and ‘broken to pieces’ [mise en pièces]14 as a result, which may be one reason why the Minion was among those ships ‘new made’15 or rebuilt into a stronger and more heavily armed 8 See L&P, IV, part 1: 1524-26, ed. J.S. Brewer (London: Longman et al., 1870), p. 761, item 1714 (180 tons); and L&P, V, 1531-32, ed. James Gairdner (London: Longman et al., 1880), p. 591, item 1377 (150 tons). 9 Ibid., V, 1531-32, p. 591, item 1377. 10 See The maner of the tryumphe at Caleys and Bulleyn (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1532), sig.A.ij. 11 The painting forms part of the Royal Collection at Hampton Court Palace, inventory no. RCIN 405793. 12 L&P, IX, p. 189, item 566 + footnote. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 L&P, X: 1536, ed. James Gairdner (London: HMSO, 1887), p. 513, item 1231.

40 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Figure 1.1: The Minion, Anthony Roll (1546). British Library Additional MS 22047, after C.S. Knighton and D.M. Loades (eds), THE ANTHONY ROLL of Henry VIII’s Navy. Pepys Library 2991 and British Library Additional MS 22047 with related documents, Occasional Publications of the Navy Records Society, Vol. 2 (Aldershot: Ashgate, for the Navy Record Society, 2000), p. 55.

ship in 1536 by the Cromwell administration.16 It subsequently appears in the records as a ship of around 300 tons.17 Two years later, it apparently had to undergo reconstruction and/or repairs again, and in January 1539 was reported to be ‘standing in [the] docks’ at Deptford, ‘masts ready but not set up’.18 In the following decade, the Minion played a part in the French and Scottish wars. The year 1546 yields the most informative details of the ship’s construction. In that year, an image of the ship (the only one known to exist) was included in the set of three rolls of vellum presented to Henry VIII as a pictorial index of the Royal Navy by his clerk of the ordnance, Anthony Anthony (Fig. 1.1). These rolls – now shared between the British Library and the Pepys Library 16 According to Hakluyt, the Minion was part of an expedition to Newfoundland in March 1536 (see PN2, III, p. 129), but as E.G.R. Taylor has convincingly demonstrated on the basis of Admiralty records, he must have misheard name of the ship, which was actually the William. See E.G.R. Taylor, ‘Master Hore’s Voyage of 1536’, The Geographical Journal 77, 5 (1931), pp. 469-470 (p. 496). 17 See L&P, XX, part 2: 1545, ed. R.H. Brodie (London: HMSO, 1907), p. 11, item 27; C.S. Knighton and D.M. Loades (eds), THE ANTHONY ROLL of Henry VIII’s Navy. Pepys Library 2991 and British Library Additional MS 22047 with related documents, Occasional Publications of the Navy Records Society, Vol. 2 (Aldershot: Ashgate, for the Navy Record Society, 2000), p. 55. 18 L&P, XIV, part 1: 1539, ed. R.H. Brodie (London: HMSO, 1894), p. 51, item 143.

THE MINION AND ITS TRAVELS: SAILING TO GUINEA IN THE SIX TEENTH CENTURY

41

in Cambridge, and known collectively as the Anthony Roll after their creator – contain images of 58 ships and served, in all probability, not so much as a working inventory but as a presentational item intended to impress ambassadors and royal visitors with the firepower of the Royal Navy.19 The comparison between the only one of these 58 ships that has been partly preserved – the Mary Rose – and the image of it contained in the rolls certainly suggests that the principal aim of the visualization is not the accurate description of the ship but the exaggerated display of England’s military prowess.20 Since few, if any, of the ships in the Anthony Roll appear to have been drawn from life, information about the Minion contained in it has to be treated with caution, even though it remains the fullest extant source about the ship. Across the whole of the collection, the written sections, listing crew and ordnance in much detail alongside other equipment, are generally far more reliable than the visual depictions, which rarely match the textual detail.21 For the Minion, the tonnage is listed at 300, the total number of guns at 86, and the crew at 220 men: 100 soldiers, 100 mariners, 20 gunners.22 These are probably the figures for maximum capacity. In 1548, the number of guns had dropped to 63 in the royal inventory,23 and before rebuilding, the crew of the Minion comprised only 92 in April 1523 and 122 in September of the same year.24 During the four African voyages between 1558 and 1565, the number of men on board, including merchants, was probably around or below 100 on average;25 in October 1567, when leaving Plymouth for the Caribbean via Africa, one eyewitness reported a crew of ‘a hundred persons more or less’.26 The vessel is included in the first of the three rolls depicting four-masted ‘Shyppes’, and the rigging evident in the image is appropriate to the size of the vessel: eight sails (square for the two front masts, lateen for the back two) across all masts and the bowsprit. The passage in William Towerson’s log of 19 See C.S. Knighton, ‘The Manuscript and Its Compiler’, Knighton and Loades, THE ANTHONY ROLL, pp. 3-11 (p. 4). 20 See Stuart Vine, ‘The Evidence of the Mary Rose Excavation’, Knighton and Loades, THE ANTHONY ROLL, pp. 15-19. 21 See D.M. Loades, ‘The Ordnance’, Knighton and Loades, THE ANTHONY ROLL, pp. 12-14. 22 See Knighton and Loades, THE ANTHONY ROLL, p. 55. 23 See The Inventory of King Henry VIII, ed. David Starkey (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 1998), p. 149. 24 See L&P, III, part 2, p. 1242, item 2949 (92 men); p. 1396, item 3358 (122 men). 25 See J.D. Alsop, ‘Tudor Merchant Seafarers in the Early Guinea Trade’, Cheryl Fury (ed.), The Social History of English Seamen, 1485-1649 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2012), pp. 75-115 (p. 87). 26 Harry Kelsey, Sir John Hawkins: Queen Elizabeth’s Slave Trader (Princeton, NJ: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 320 n11.

42 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

1558, when the loss of ‘maine saile, foresaile, and spreetsaile’27 during the return journey from West Africa forced the Minion to drift for two days near Cape Finisterre, Galicia, seems consistent with the image, assuming that Towerson referred to the main bottom sails on the three front masts. The Minion often had a pinnace in tow, as shown on the image. On one occasion in April 1558, off the coast of West Africa, a companion ship, the Tiger, came so close to the Minion during a windless night that a pinnace was crushed between the two ships, ‘the Master of the Tyger [being] asleepe’.28 The hull shows five gunports along the side, at two different deck levels, and two at the stern, all depicted without lids, which is highly improbable. Higher up the stern, two further guns can be seen, emerging from the back of the ship without any ports at all, which the illustrator may have simply forgotten to add. The two gunports at the stern are placed so near (if not actually below) the waterline that it is highly unlikely they could have been in that position. The top two guns appear to be positioned in such proximity to the nearest guns on the same deck on either side of the sterncastle that they would have probably clashed inside the ship, or at least could not have been operated simultaneously in battle. The visual detail of the Minion’s firepower thus seems exaggerated in the Anthony Roll, and reports of the ship in action do not suggest a particularly high degree of operational capability. During a 1543 skirmish in the Channel, for example, a small French ship managed to bypass the Minion and another English naval ship, the Primrose, without much resistance, bragging later that ‘as two of the King’s best ships cannot better one of theirs of 180 [tons] burthen, they will go home through the Narrow Seas maugre their enemies.’29 In 1563, while engaged with two Portuguese vessels off the West African coast just east of Mina Castle, a barrel of gunpowder exploded in the steward room which injured most of the gunners and allowed the Portuguese to destroy the Minion’s foremast with ease.30 Finally, in the most detailed report of the Minion in battle (at San Juan de Ulúa in the Gulf of Mexico, September 1568), the ship’s survival was due not to its defensive strength but to the timely preparations and clever manoeuvring of its crew, who had made the ship sea-ready even before the Spanish attack got under way.31 27 PN2, II, part 2, p. 51. 28 Ibid., p. 47. 29 L&P, XVIII, part 1: 1543, ed. James Gairdner and R.H. Brodie (London: HMSO, 1901), p. 506, item 938. 30 See PN2, II, part 2, p. 55. 31 For different accounts of the battle, see PN2, III, pp. 472-3, 490, 524. See also the various depositions made as part of Hawkins’ claim against the Spanish government before the High Court of Admiralty in March 1569, espcially the account of Thomas Hampton, captain of the

THE MINION AND ITS TRAVELS: SAILING TO GUINEA IN THE SIX TEENTH CENTURY

43

In what might be a sign of its decreasing relevance for the navy under Edward, the Minion spent the decade after 1548 mainly on loan. In that year, the ship was handed to Thomas Seymour,32 the young king’s maternal uncle and brother of the lord protector, who was executed the following year, and then in 1550 to Sir William Herbert, later the first earl of Pembroke.33 From that year onwards, the Minion was in merchant service for six years,34 constituting one of the larger English trading vessels of the period,35 though not many details about this period have come to light. In 1550 and 1551, a Minion that could be the royal ship is twice recorded in the port of Bristol, each time entering with a range of commodities that suggest it was used in the trade with Spain, the Canaries and/or the Azores: on 18 December 1550, the ship carried wine, olive oil, raisins, orchil (red or violet dye), and sugar;36 on 26 June 1551, it arrived with a cargo of pepper, sugar, and a staggering 210 tons of woad (a blue dye originating from either Toulouse or the Azores), valued at £1,400.37 In 1565, the Minion was again carrying ‘woad from the Azores’.38 These details could indicate that the Minion was in this period already connected to the same London traders who later funded the voyages to Guinea, several of whom – such as Edward Castelin and Anthony Hickman – entertained business links with Iberian ports.39 By 1557, under Mary I, the Minion was back in the crown’s service, carrying William Howard, the Lord Admiral, in the Channel on 20 June.40 Minion during the Hawkins voyage (The National Archives, SP 12/53; Hampton deposition on f. 22r-33v). 32 See C.S. Knighton and David Loades (eds), Elizabethan Naval Administration (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, for the Naval Records Society, 2013), p. 8 [hereafter ENA]. 33 See John Roche Dasent, Acts of the Privy Council of England 1550-52, new series, III (London: HMSO, 1891), p. 43. 34 See NEM, p. 498. 35 For the size of individual vessels in England’s merchant navy in the Tudor period, see the essay by Craig L. Lambert and Gary P. Baker later in this volume. 36 See Susan Flavin and Evan T. Jones (eds), Bristol’s Trade with Ireland and the Continent, 1503-1601. The Evidence of the Exchequer Customs Accounts (Bristol: Four Courts Press, 2009), pp. 566-7, 581, 603, 608. Thanks to Craig Lambert for pointing me to this source. 37 Ibid., p. 603. 38 CSP Spanish, 1558-1567, p. 445, item 305. 39 Castelin and Hickman employed two factors in Gran Canary for the trade in sugar; these are probably the ‘two English Marchants’ (PN2, II, part 2, p. 45) mentioned by Towerson in the account of the 1558 voyage, when the Minion called in the Canaries on 12 February. On Castelin and Hickman, see T.S. Willan, The Muscovy Merchants of 1555 (Clifton, NJ: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1973), pp. 26-7; and J. McDermott (2008), ‘Castelin, Edward (fl. 1554-1578), merchant’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi-org.chain.kent.ac.uk/10.1093/ref:odnb/61534. 40 Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, Mary I, 1553-1558, ed. C.S. Knighton (London: Public Record Office, 1998), p. 282, item 621.

44 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Its possible use in the trade with the Canaries or the Azores would have made the Minion a logical choice for its main extra-European career, which started in the late 1550s, when the ship sailed four times to Guinea (West Africa) and once, via Guinea, across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, stopping in the Canaries for revictualling on every occasion (save one). These voyages were made possible by a cooperation between the crown under Elizabeth and a syndicate of London merchants, who hired the ship directly from the queen, separately for each new venture, in return for a share of the profits to be made from the voyages. The queen’s cut could be substantial: one of the agreements for a Guinea expedition (in 1564/5) specifies that ‘Her Majesty [is] to receive a third part clear of the gains of their voyage’41 for the loan of two ships, the Minion and the Primrose. The exact profits returned on the African voyages through the trade in gold, ivory, and pepper are not known, though they were significant enough to continue attracting promoters throughout the 1550s and 60s, despite a high mortality rate peaking at 60-70% for the first of these ventures, the 1553 voyage to Guinea and Benin under Thomas Windham. 42 The Minion’s four trading missions to Africa each lasted between six and nine months, and are confirmed for the years 1558, 1562, 1563, and 1564/5.43 On each occasion, the fleet’s intended departure date was October or November to enable trading during the cooler months at the start of the year, before a return journey during late spring. In the event, the first three voyages did not set out until January or February, with only the last one leaving in October. The return to England is confirmed for all four voyages between July and October, with the voyages arriving home late in the year suffering the most from the extreme weather conditions on the West African coast. 44 One of Hakluyt’s editorial comments on the late 41 Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reigns of Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth, 1547-1580. ed. Robert Lemon (London: Longman et al., 1856), XXXV, p. 247. 42 For a contemporary account of this voyage, see Richard Eden, The Decades of the newe worlde or west India (London: William Powell, 1555), 343r-348r; and the reprints in Richard Willes, The History of Trauayle in the West and East Indies (London: Richarde Iugge, 1577), 336v-341v; and in PN2, II, part 2, pp. 9-13. The mortality estimate is taken from P.E.H. Hair, ‘The Experience of the Sixteenth-Century English Voyages to Guinea’, The Mariner’s Mirror 83, 1 (1997), pp. 3-13 (p. 10). 43 See the table in Alsop, ‘Tudor Merchant Seafarers in the Early Guinea Trade’, p. 76. Alsop’s essay is an updated version of research findings first presented in P.E.H. Hair and J.D. Alsop, English Seamen and Traders in Guinea, 1553-1565: The New Evidence of Their Wills (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), which includes an earlier version of the same table on p. 49. 44 Detailed descriptions of the voyages, including departure and arrival dates, are contained in Hair and Alsop, English Seamen and Traders in Guinea, pp. 5-72.

THE MINION AND ITS TRAVELS: SAILING TO GUINEA IN THE SIX TEENTH CENTURY

45

return of the 1558 voyage, when mortality may have been as high as 50 per cent 45 and ‘not above thirty sound men’ were left on a fleet of three ships in August, emphasized ‘[t]he great inconvenience by late staying upon the coast of Guinie’.46 Nevertheless, given its repeated use on these long-distance voyages, the Minion appears to have proved a reliable vessel, despite the complaints of John Lok, a veteran of the Guinea trade, who wrote in a letter to the London promoters on 11 December 1561 that the Minion was ‘spent and rotten’, and impossible ‘for men to lie drie in’. 47 The successful voyages that followed appear to have proved him wrong. On its final voyage solely to Guinea, in 1564/5, the Minion made its first contact with the slave trading fleet of John Hawkins, the Plymouth merchant and original ‘sea dog’, a connection that intensified in the ship’s final years. The two fleets lay side by side in the port, then met again shortly after leaving Plymouth on 18 October 1564, ‘hail[ing] one the other after the custome of the sea’. They parted ways, and met again on 26 October in the port of El Ferrol in Galicia, seeking shelter from a storm. In the days between, the Minion’s companion ship Merlin had sunk from a gunpowder explosion, ‘through the negligence of one of the gunners’, losing three lives. Several months later in the Caribbean, on 29 April 1565, Hawkins heard from a French captain who had just been ‘beaten off [the Mina coast] by the Portugals gallies’ that ‘the like was hapned unto the Minion’, that many seamen had died through the lack of victuals, and that the captain and merchants on the Minion were prisoners of the Portuguese. 48 Whether these events happened is unclear, but if they did, their consequences must have been less dramatic than the report suggests, since on 5 July 1565, the Minion arrived back in London, via Southampton, according to letters by the Spanish ambassador. 49 In between its African missions, the Minion returned to royal service. In 1560, for example, the ship is confirmed in Scottish waters, helping to fight off the French after the Treaty of Berwick,50 and in September and October 1563, it served in the French wars immediately after its return from Guinea, presumably with all of the surviving seamen.51 The last recorded voyage of the Minion was both its longest and its most infamous. Loaned 45 Hair, ‘The Experience of the Sixteenth-Century English Voyages’, p. 10. 46 PN2, II, part 2, p. 51. 47 Ibid., p. 53. 48 Ibid., p. 56. 49 CSP Spanish, 1558-1567, p. 445, item 305; p. 447, item 307. 50 See Calendar of State Papers relating to Scotland and Mary, Queen of Scots, 1547-1603, 1: 1547-1563, ed. Joseph Bain (Edinburgh: HM General Register House, 1898), p. 365, item 737. 51 See Hair and Alsop, English Seamen and Traders in Guinea, p. 39.

46 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

in 1567 to John Hawkins, the ship was part of the fleet of six that set out from Plymouth on 2 October on Hawkins’ third (and England’s fourth) transatlantic slaving expedition.52 Four of these ships were Hawkins’ own, but two were on loan from the crown, the Minion and the 700-ton flagship, the Jesus of Lübeck, originally purchased by Henry VIII in the 1540s from the Baltic port of Lübeck, part of the Hanseatic League. During this voyage, the Minion became something of a floating hospital, as sick men were transferred onto the ship to keep the crew of the Jesus in health.53 The fleet stopped at Gomera in late October, at Cape Verde in November, and then in Sierra Leone between December and February, capturing nearly 500 Africans,54 before crossing the Atlantic and arriving at Domenica in March 1568. After trading and pillaging in the Caribbean for several months, Hawkins ran into a storm near Florida which badly damaged the Jesus. Seeking shelter at San Juan de Ulúa in the Gulf of Mexico, Hawkins unexpectedly encountered a Spanish fleet of 13 ships in September 1568 and was forced to share the small anchorage in the local port. Negotiations to avoid confrontation between the two fleets failed, and on 23 September 1568, according to one eyewitness, ‘three hundred Spaniards entred the Minion, whereat our General [Hawkins] with a loude and fierce voyce called vnto vs [the mariners on the Jesus], saying, God and Saint George, vpon those traiterous villaines, and rescue the Minion’.55 The patriotic appeal yielded results; the Minion withstood the initial onslaught and eventually managed to escape, though only by using the demasted Jesus of Lübeck as a shield against the Spanish attack. The ship emerged badly damaged from the fight. Two weeks later, while putting ashore one hundred of his men near Tampico, Mexico, Hawkins described it as ‘sore beaten with shotte from our enemyes’ and ‘in such perill that euery houre we looked for 52 Hawkins had undertaken two previous slaving voyages in 1562-3 and 1564-5; his associate (and relative) John Lovell commanded one such voyage in 1566-7. Much has been published on these voyages; see, for instance, James Alexander Williamson, Sir John Hawkins: The Time and the Man (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927); and his Hawkins of Plymouth (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1949). For the best recent biography of Hawkins, see Kelsey, Sir John Hawkins. 53 Testimony of William Collins, seaman on the Jesus. See Kelsey, Sir John Hawkins, 68-9. Collins was among the 100 seamen that Hawkins set ashore near Tampico, Mexico, in October 1568, and who were later captured, interrogated, and punished by the Mexican Inquisition. See the note in G.R.G. Conway, An Englishman and the Mexican Inquisition (Mexico City: privately printed, 1927), p. 156. 54 Hawkins’ estimate for the number of slaves captured was ‘betweene foure and fiue hundred’ (PN2, III, p. 522); Miles Philips thought it was ‘very neere the number of 500’ (ibid., p. 470); and Job Hortop put the number squarely at ‘500’ (ibid., p. 488). 55 PN2, III, p. 490.

THE MINION AND ITS TRAVELS: SAILING TO GUINEA IN THE SIX TEENTH CENTURY

47

shipwracke’.56 The ship had lost two anchors and three cables in the battle, which put ‘the companie of the Mynnyon […] very manye tymes in greate danger of ther lyves’57 during the return journey to England, according to Humphrey Fones, who came back alive. As one of only three surviving ships of the original fleet of six,58 the Minion eventually limped back into English waters in January 1569.59 The ship was dropped from the records in this or the following year.60 The career of the Minion spanned half a century and the reign of four Tudor monarchs. The ship was part of the growing navy under Henry VIII, which was foundational for the later emergence of English sea power; it was central to the economic collaboration between the crown and private investors under Elizabeth, which became key to the growth of the empire; and it was an early English player in the transatlantic slave trade, in which Britain was to assume a prominent role from the late 1630s onwards.61 It sailed both east to Africa and west to the Caribbean, replicating in its overseas travels the macro division of global space that increasingly governed the European perception of world geography, and which shaped, for example, the sequential arrangement of travel accounts in Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, as well as the collection of voyages published by the de Brys on the continent, which are divided into an eastern and a western series. Yet the Minion’s individual travels rarely reflect that geopolitical 56 Ibid., p. 525. 57 The National Archives, SP 12/53 f. 51v. 58 The other two were the 50-ton Judith, commanded by Francis Drake, which arrived back in Plymouth a day before Hawkins, and the 150-ton William and John, which left San Juan de Ulúa before the battle and returned to Ireland under Thomas Bolton (see Kelsey, Sir John Hawkins, 104). 59 For an account of the voyage published under Hawkins’ name (though possibly not written by him), see PN2, III, pp. 521-5. For a more recent historical assessment, see Kelsey, Sir John Hawkins, pp. 52-115. 60 I follow Glasgow and others in assuming that the Minion originally built in 1522 was condemned in 1570 or before, and that the ship referred to by Hakluyt as the Minion of London in several accounts dealing with events after 1580 is therefore a different ship. See Glasgow, ‘List of Ships’, p. 301; Colledge and Warlow, Ships of the Royal Navy, p. 227; NEM, pp. 497-8. 61 On the Tudor navy and sea power, see David Loades, The Tudor Navy: An Administrative, Political, and Military History (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1992), and his England’s Maritime Empire: Seapower, Commerce and Policy, 1490-1690 (Harlow: Longman, 2000); on the links between the crown, privateering, and empire, see Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480 -1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), and Nicholas Canny (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1: The Origins of Empire. British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); on Britain’s early involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, the scholarship is too numerous to be listed here, but a good introduction is provided by Kenneth Morgan, Slavery and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

48 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

framework, nor do the published accounts advertise the imperial mission to which they arguably made an early contribution. On its extra-European journeys, the ship sailed principally as a trading vessel, and its five forays into the Atlantic world were characterized not by a sense of English destiny but by local European rivalries, the relative ignorance about the non-European world, and the pressing need to catch up with the achievements of other seafaring nations, in particular Portugal and Spain.

The Minion in Guinea Apart from Hawkins’s third slaving expedition, the international dimension of which attracted substantial commentary across a range of contemporary sources,62 the Guinea voyages are the best known of all the travels undertaken by the Minion, mainly because accounts of several of them were included in Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, first in 1589, and then again, with some changes, in the substantially larger, three-volume edition of 1598-1600. The trade enabled by these voyages was an early English overseas commercial operation which is still a neglected area of the Tudor maritime experience, despite constituting, at the time, ‘the largest concentration of English tonnage in any extra-European commerce’.63 During the Minion’s lifetime, nine trading voyages solely to Guinea are known to have been funded by English merchants, between 1553 and 1565, in four of which the ship participated.64 Across the two editions of Hakluyt’s collection, seven items – ranging from short letters and meeting notes to long prose accounts – deal with these four voyages, and a further three accounts relate to the 62 Kelsey’s 2003 biography of Hawkins (Sir John Hawkins) makes more extensive use of Spanish sources than most other English-language accounts of Hawkins’ voyages. P.E.H. Hair, Hawkins in Guinea, 1567-68, University of Leipzig Papers on Africa, History and Culture, No. 5 (Leipzig: Institut für Afrikanistik, 2000), deals only with the Guinea sections of Hawkins’ third voyage but also uses some Spanish material. 63 Alsop, ‘Tudor Merchant Seafarers in the Early Guinea Trade’, p. 76. For the wider connections between West Africa and Europeans in the period, see David Northrup, ‘Africans, Early European Contacts, and the Emergent Diaspora’, Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 38-54. 64 See the table in Alsop, ibid. Hair’s earlier estimate of the number of English voyages to Guinea in the same time frame was ‘under a dozen’ (Hair, ‘The Experience of the Sixteenth-Century English Voyages to Guinea’, p. 3). Other English voyages, notably by Hawkins, also stopped at Guinea in this time span but went on to other destinations. They are not included in the count of nine.

THE MINION AND ITS TRAVELS: SAILING TO GUINEA IN THE SIX TEENTH CENTURY

49

Minion’s final voyage to the West Indies.65 Together, these ten accounts, supplemented by archival sources from England, Spain, and Portugal, give an insight into the material, economic, and political frameworks in which the ship operated on its Atlantic journeys. The trips solely to Guinea followed recognizable protocols in preparing for the voyage, setting out and arriving in Guinea, gathering local information to scope out the best places for trade, making contact with the locals, and maximizing profits ahead of the return leg to England.66 The Minion never sailed on its own but always in a convoy of two, three, or four ships, sometimes together with smaller, often unnamed pinnaces. On the first voyage, in 1558, the Minion is singled out as the ‘Admirall’67 of the fleet (ie, the flagship) in the long account of that journey penned by the commander, William Towerson, and included by Hakluyt in both editions of The Principal Navigations. Towerson was the son of a yeoman from Cumberland, apprenticed to a London skinner since 1551, who had also commanded the previous two English Guinea voyages in 1555/6 and 1557.68 Given that the Minion was a substantially larger vessel than the two ships Towerson had sailed in before,69 and indeed one of the largest of the English ships sailing to Africa at the time (together with the Primrose), its selection appears to reflect the growing ambition of the London merchants for the Guinea trade. Six years and four voyages later, business prospects were still seen as favourable enough for a contract to be signed on 11 July 1564 ‘betwixt the Queen, and Sir William Garrard and other Merchants, for hiring the Queen’s ship Mynyon, for Africa’.70 On this occasion, the vessel was newly rigged 65 These ten items are: PN2, II, part 2, pp. 44-52 (Towerson account of 1558 voyage); pp. 51-2 (letter by promoters to Lok 1561); pp. 52-3 (Lok letter to promoters 1561); pp. 54-5 (Rutter account of 1562 voyage); 55 (notes of promoters’ meeting 1564); p. 56 (extract from Hawkins voyage 1564); III, p. 469-87 (Miles Philips on third Hawkins voyage, 1567-9); pp. 487-95 (Job Hortop on third Hawkins voyage); pp. 521-5 (Hawkins account of third voyage). The tenth item, not included in PN2, is found only in the first edition of Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations: Richard Hakluyt, The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English nation (London: George Bishop et al., 1589), pp. 130-35 (Baker account of 1563 voyage) [hereafter PN1]. 66 For an overview of the typical voyage logistics and conditions, see Hair, ‘The Experience of the Sixteenth-Century English Voyages to Guinea’. 67 PN2, II, part 2, p. 44. 68 On Towerson, see J.D. Alsop, ‘The Career of William Towerson, Guinea Trader’, International Journal of Maritime History 4 (1992), pp. 45-82. 69 Towerson’s two previous ships were the Harte of 60 tons (1555-6), and the Tiger of 120 tons (1557). See ibid., p. 60. 70 A Catalogue of the Lansdowne Manuscripts in the British Museum: With Indexes of Persons, Places and Matters (London: House of Commons, 1816), p. 217, item 113.

50 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

‘upon the Queenes majesties charges’,71 with the help of master shipwright Peter Pett of Deptford, founder of a famous shipbuilding dynasty in England, whose son Phineas Pett went on to design the gigantic, 1500-ton warship Sovereign of the Seas for Charles I in 1637.72 The Admiralty agreed ‘to have the Minion ready’ by 15 August 1564, with the promoters responsible for all wages and charges after that date.73 Peter Pett’s help had been requested by the Minion on at least one earlier occasion, after a series of mishaps delayed its second voyage to Guinea by several months. In September 1561, the ship collided with the Primrose in the Thames, and was quickly repaired, only to collide again with the same ship in a storm in the Straits of Dover in November.74 The second collision required more expensive repairs and necessitated the help of Pett as well as that of another shipwright, Butolph Moungey of Kent.75 John Lok, commander of England’s second voyage to West Africa in 1554-55, was scathing of their efforts and subsequently withdrew from the voyage on 11 December, citing the Minion’s lack of seaworthiness and the dangers of the late departure date.76 The ship eventually sailed in January 1562 under a new commander, George Ireland. During its journeys to West Africa, the Minion passed Cape Palmas and Cape Three Points many times, stopped at coastal villages and rivers in modern-day Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, and various other locations, including River Sess, the Sassandra and San Pédro rivers, and settlements such as Takoradi, Shama, Moree, and Accra. Place-names are frequently mentioned in the accounts, but knowledge of local geography on the part of Minion’s mariners was understandably shaky; deictic references such as ‘[i]n this place, and three or foure leagues to the Westward of it, al along the shoare, there grow many Palme trees’,77 are typical. Mariners often also depended on information passed down by previous English voyagers; indeed, the transmission of travel intelligence was one reason for setting down accounts of these voyages in the first place. Towerson, for example, describing some strong currents off the coast of Sierra Leone in 1557, emphasized that these details are to be noted 71 PN2, II, part 2, p. 55. 72 On the Sovereign of the Seas, see the chapters by Alan James and Rebecca Bailey later in this volume. 73 Hair and Alsop, English Seamen and Traders in Guinea, p. 69n77. 74 Ibid., p. 31; ENA, 213n1 75 See The Navy Treasurer’s Quarter Book, 1562-3; quoted after ENA, p. 213. The repairs were carried out in Bristol where the Minion was taken and from where Lok wrote his letter to the promoters. 76 PN2, II, part 2, pp. 53-4. 77 Ibid., p. 28.

THE MINION AND ITS TRAVELS: SAILING TO GUINEA IN THE SIX TEENTH CENTURY

51

by ‘all they that saile this way […] or els they may be much deceived’,78 clearly assuming that his warning would reach later travellers. Sea charts, possibly rudimentary in content, helped the mariners on the Minion find their way, and the information gathered on their own journeys also in turn informed later travellers. On his first voyage to Guinea, in 1555, Towerson already had a ‘Carde’ available on board, which he refers to several times in his account,79 though he does not explain how detailed it was or where he obtained it. In the account he wrote on the Minion in 1558, he mentions no maps or charts, though they appear in other sources. The will of boatswain’s mate Thomas Shawe, for example, who also sailed on the Minion in 1558, mentions an astrolabe and a map in his possession;80 that of John Grebby on the Primrose, sailing alongside the Minion in 1562, lists ‘one Carde with compasses’.81 William Rutter, a factor who wrote an account of the 1563 voyage and who died in Guinea on either the Minion or the John Baptist in January 1565, also owned his own chart which he left to the master’s mate, Henry Seymor. Seymor, who died only a few months later in May, then passed on ‘the Card that was William Ruters’82 to yet another mariner. In their instructions for the 1562 voyage, the promoters asked their then commander, Lok, to improve on available charts by making ‘a plat’ of the coastline he was passing, ‘setting those places which you shall thinke materiall in your sayd plat, with their true elevations’.83 Whether Lok’s replacement, George Ireland, followed these instructions is not known, but no map or chart that would fit this description has so far been discovered. Navigational instruments were part of the official equipment, alongside timekeeping devices, flags, and spare items of rigging. On 20 December 1562, in preparation of the 1563 voyage, Thomas Spencer of London was paid for the delivery of a ‘great chest filled with provisions for the Minion and Primrose, viz. flags of St. George, great compasses and great running glasses, and shivers and cocks of brass, with divers other kinds of things for the furnishing of the same ships for Ethiopia’.84 One of those flags mentioned here later facilitated peaceful negotiations with a French ship near River Sess in April 1563. The French captain, who had initially taken flight at the sight of the Minion, later returned when ‘he had espied our flag, perceiuing 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

Ibid., p. 43. See ibid, pp. 25, 28, 29. See Hair and Alsop, English Seamen and Traders in Guinea, p. 272. Ibid., p. 283. Ibid., p. 332. PN2, II, part 2, p. 52. The Navy Treasurer’s Quarter Book, 1562-3; quoted after ENA, pp. 224-5.

52 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

vs to be Englishmen’.85 They then agreed terms, which did not please the French. The number of St George’s flags visible on of the Anthony Roll image of the Minion is clearly an exaggeration, but the one that was in use on the Minion during an incident in Gran Canaria in February 1558 was enough to enrage a Spanish admiral, who asked Towerson ‘to furle [his] flagge’.86 Towerson refused to comply. The Guinea run was known for a quick arrival and a long return. In 1558, the Minion took only five and a half weeks to reach Cape Mount (in modern-day Liberia), including a stopover in the Canaries; in 1563, the ship reached River Sess in about the same time, this time breaking the journey in Cape Verde. The return journeys to England, when ships needed to reach the west-flowing equatorial currents further south, were much longer: four and a half months in 1558 and two months in 1563.87 While the exact travelling times for the other voyages cannot be established, these do not appear to be unusual figures.88 Once in Guinea, the ships traded for several months (three and a half months in 1558; two in 1563) by calling at various points along the coast, and using their pinnaces and longboats to make contact with the shore. Strong coastal currents made this approach dangerous, and on the 1563/4 voyage (which did not include the Minion), one boat with nine merchants on board was separated from the main ship during a storm and never made contact again, though three of the merchants survived.89 While trading, the ships were often separated for parts of the time, either through adverse weather conditions, Portuguese attacks, or – when trading imperatives made it expedient – by design. Dangers increased for unaccompanied ships. In April 1563, for example, off Cape Palmas, the Minion ran into two Portuguese vessels bound for Mina Castle and only narrowly escaped, while its consort, the Primrose, had forged ahead further east. ‘God be praised the Minion had no hurt for that time’,90 Rutter noted, mindful of the gunpowder explosion (cited above) that was to be the outcome of the next Portuguese attack. The three main commodities that made Guinea attractive for English traders were gold, elephant’s teeth, and Malagueta pepper. On the Minion’s voyages, all three commodities were obtained from local African traders, not always on the best terms, and sometimes, by force, from French ships. 85 86 87 88 89 90

PN2, II, part 2, p. 54. Ibid., p. 45. For the dates of the 1558 voyage, see ibid., pp. 44-52; for the 1563 voyage, see ibid., pp. 54-5. See Hair, ‘The Experience of the Sixteenth-Century English Voyages’, p 7. See the account of Robert Baker’s second voyage, written in verse, in PN1, pp. 135-42. PN2, II, part 2, p. 54.

THE MINION AND ITS TRAVELS: SAILING TO GUINEA IN THE SIX TEENTH CENTURY

53

The account of the 1558 voyage mentions the acquisition of 31 elephant’s teeth, an unspecified amount of pepper, and 117 pounds of gold (roughly 43 kilos), 50 pounds of which came from a French ship taken as a prize on 5 April 1558 near Mina Castle. The 1563 voyage returned with hardly any gold but ‘Elephants teeth 166. weighing 1758 pounds’ and ‘Graines [­pepper] 22 buts full’.91 In 1565 the Minion left Guinea with perhaps as much as 150 pounds of gold (or 56 kilos), as well as sizeable amounts of ivory and pepper, according to the Spanish ambassador.92 In return, the English sold different types of cloth, products made of heavy metals (brass, iron, lead, etc), and possibly an assortment of trifles such as beads, bells, and pearls, summarized broadly as ‘marchandise’93 in the account of the 1563 voyage by Robert Baker. In 1558, cloth was in such high demand on the Guinea coast that on 3 May, the Minion ran out of the stock it had brought from England and started selling cloth seized from a French ship instead. On 31 March 1558, Towerson mentions the sale of ‘Manillios’,94 or metal bracelets, to the Africans of Takoradi (‘Hanta’). More trade of this nature must have taken place than is mentioned in the accounts. A list inserted by Hakluyt after Towerson’s account in the Principal Navigations, probably compiled by Towerson himself, which spells out in detail the ‘commodities and wares […] most desired in Guinie’,95 describes metal-based products in ten out of 21 entries. Interestingly, the two entries in the Bristol port book for 1550 and 1551, mentioned above, list the Minion’s cargo on exit as cloth, calf skin, and lead, which might suggest a link to the Guinea trade, perhaps via Iberian intermediaries, even before the start of the English voyages. Building materials were apparently carried by the Minion on the 1562 voyage, and again in 1564/5. On both occasions, these must have been intended for an English trading fort or factory to be erected on the Guinea coast. The attempt to establish a permanent foothold in West Africa speaks to the close link between trade and empire (even if the latter idea had not yet received much coherent treatment in English political thought) but also to the practical limitations the English faced in the period, who did not succeed 91 Ibid., p. 55. 92 CSP Spanish, 1558-1567, p. 447, item 307. The estimate of 150 pounds of gold is Hair’s, the source refers instead to ‘20,000 crowns in gold’. See A. Teixeira da Mota and P.E.H. Hair, East of Mina. Afro-European Relations on the Gold Coast in the 1550s and 1560s. An essay with supporting documents, Studies in African Sources 3 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1988), pp. 30-31. 93 PN1, p. 132. 94 PN2, II, part 2, p. 47. 95 Ibid., p. 52.

54 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

in following the Portuguese example of the existing forts at Mina and Axim until several decades into the seventeenth century. The possibility of an English fort or ‘castle’ was first raised in 1555 in a note sent by the English merchants to the crown in defence of their right to free trade with Guinea against the claims of the Portuguese ambassador.96 The ‘inhabitants of that country [ie, Guinea]’, the note reads, ‘offered us and our factors ground to build uppon, if they want to make any fortresses in their countrey’,97 which may be a reference to the same offer noted by Towerson on 13 January 1556, when he claimed that on the previous English voyage a local African ruler ‘came aboord the shippe … and offered them [the English factors in 1554/5] ground to build a Castle in’ (optimistically glossed by Hakluyt in the margin as the offer ‘to build a towne in Guine’).98 On 23 February 1557, Towerson again reports that the ‘king of Abaan’99 (possibly the ruler of Beraku, modern-day Ghana100) encouraged the English ‘to send men and provision into his countrey, to build a castle’,101 and in 1561 the London promoters followed up on this scheme by instructing Lok to find the best location for ‘a fort upon the coast of Mina in the king of Habaans country’.102 A letter from the Spanish ambassador dated 27 November 1561 conf irms that the fleet that sailed in 1562, which included the Minion, carried ‘cut-timber, artillery, munitions, arms, and victuals, for a year in greater quantity than is required for their own use’,103 and although the fort was not built on this voyage, nor on any of the previous ones, the plans seem to have persisted at least until 1564, when Portuguese spies reported that the Minion or one of the other two English ships bound for Guinea on the 1564/5 voyage carried ‘moveable planks’ of wood [taboas movediças] to be ‘unloaded on the Mina coast’ [tiraré na costa da Mjna],104 clearly with the intention to ‘build on land’ [para edefficar em terra].105 The references 96 On the English plans to build a fort in Guinea, see also Teixeira da Mota and Hair, East of Mina, pp. 21-6. 97 John William Blake, Europeans in West Africa, 1450-1560, 2 vols (London: Hakluyt Society, 1942), II, pp. 356-7. 98 PN2, II, part 2, p. 34. 99 Ibid., p. 42. 100 See J.D. Fage, ‘A Commentary on Duarte Pacheco Pereira’s Account of the Lower Guinea Coastlands in His Emeraldo de situ orbis, and on Some Other Early Accounts’, History in Africa 7 (1980), pp. 47-80 (pp. 61-3). 101 PN2, II, part 2, p. 42. 102 Ibid., p. 52. 103 CSP Spanish, 1558-1567, p. 219, item 144. 104 Brásio, Monumenta missionária africana, vol. 4, item 69, p. 246. 105 Ibid., item 70, p. 249.

THE MINION AND ITS TRAVELS: SAILING TO GUINEA IN THE SIX TEENTH CENTURY

55

suggest that the Minion was centrally involved in early, if abortive attempts to give the English traders a more permanent presence in the region, which was not finally achieved until the building of Fort Cormantine in Moree, Ghana, erected at the beginning of the English slave trading period between 1638 and 1645. While that phase in Anglo-African relations was still some decades in the future during the Minion’s four trading ventures to Guinea, its final voyage was already unequivocally engaged in the transatlantic slave trade. Leaving Plymouth in October 1567, Hawkins’ fleet had loaded the full range of trade goods supplied by the London syndicate under William Garrard, consisting of ‘brode clothe, carses [kersey], cottens, linnen clothe, silks, pintados [painted cotton cloth], margaritas [pearls], pewter, and haberdashe ware, and other marchandize to the value of aboute 16500 pounds sterling’, according to William Clarke, one of the four merchants on the voyage, sailing in the William and John.106 But in addition, the fleet left Plymouth with African slaves in the hold, brought to England from the Caribbean by John Lovell in the previous month, and took on many more in Sierra Leone, several of whom were still on board the Minion when the battered ship reached England for the last time in January 1569. The treatment of Africans as mere ‘cargo’ during the Hawkins voyage offers a depressing contrast to the Minion’s earlier visits to Guinea, when – as the following section will show – African traders had set foot on its planks and interacted with the English visitors on equal, often respectful terms.

The People of the Minion Few specifics are known about the Minion’s crewmen before the 1550s. Occasional references in the State Papers mention some officers by name and refer to casualties at sea, but rarely take account of ordinary seamen. The situation is different for the Guinea voyages. Through the pioneering work of Paul Hair and James Alsop, who have traced over 90 wills of seamen involved in the nine English Guinea voyages between 1553 and 1565,107 the names of about 350 individuals who sailed on the Minion and other ships involved in the trade have now been retrieved, not only of those who 106 The National Archives, SP 12/53 f. 14v, deposition of William Clarke. 107 See Hair and Alsop, English Seamen and Traders. This study, published in 1992, printed 89 wills of Guinea seamen. A further four wills, all by seamen on the Minion, have since been discovered. See Alsop, ‘Tudor Merchant Seafarers in the Early Guinea Trade’, p. 77n4.

56 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

died but also of surviving shipmates named in the wills.108 The local men who sailed to West Africa came from all over the British Isles, including Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, not just from the port cities of England. Some seamen may have come from Portugal,109 and we know from the accounts in Hakluyt that French mariners frequently joined the crew. Hawkins’ men in 1568 certainly included some French and Dutch sailors on the Minion.110 Seamen knew that the Guinea voyages were risky ventures. ‘I am appoynted to goo into the lande of Geney, being a longe and dangerouse Journey, having no certentie of my lif nor sure coming home’,111 noted George Warde (who did not return home) in his will on 12 October 1557. Many of the common seamen owned more useful, even valuable possessions than is often assumed, especially varied items of clothing. Some were clearly literate, some had proper beds, and many ate food that was neither rotten nor stale. The wage rates on the voyages were high by contemporary standards, and several mariners made additional profits from private trading, which was permitted on some of the ships, including the Minion.112 In their wills, often made on board within a day or a week of death, personal items and shares of their wages were passed on to shipmates, to family members, or to other figures in the seamen’s local parish, as well as to the poor. One mariner on the Minion, Anthony Ditton, even left 5 shillings of his wages to the University of Oxford in 1562, ‘to be giuen to some poore scoller that hath nede’.113 His fellow mariner John Mores also left 13 shillings 4 d to ‘the Colledge of Oxford’.114 Ships were hierarchical spaces, but in line with established maritime tradition, mariners on the Minion also participated in onboard decision-making and in the distribution of profits. For example, when Towerson stopped two vessels en route from Bordeaux to Gdańsk [‘Dantzig’] on 31 January 1558, suspecting them of carrying French goods that could be seized as a prize of war (which had been declared by Mary on 7 June 1557), it was ‘determined … that euery man should take out of the hulks so much as he could well bestow for necessaries’.115 On 5 April on the same voyage, the goods and valuables taken from a French ship at Accra [‘Egrand’] were also shared out among 108 See Hair and Alsop, English Seamen and Traders, p. 48. 109 See ibid., p. 243 (‘Francisco George’), et passim. 110 See Conway, An Englishman and the Mexican Inquisition, pp. 155-62. 111 Hair and Alsop, English Seamen and Traders, p. 281. 112 See ibid., pp. 105-57. 113 Ibid., p. 300. 114 Ibid., p. 309. 115 PN2, II, part 2, p. 44.

THE MINION AND ITS TRAVELS: SAILING TO GUINEA IN THE SIX TEENTH CENTURY

57

all crewmen, since all the extant wills from the voyage made after that date mention some variant of ‘[m]y share of the prize taken at Egraunde’.116 On 15 April, Towerson dropped his plans to ‘[move] our company for the voyage to Benin’ – that is, sail further east into a much hotter climate – after consulting with the rest of the ship, since ‘the most part of them all refused it’.117 Whether ‘company’ here refers to the entire crew or perhaps only to officers and possibly merchants, is not entirely certain, though the principle of sharing and seeking consent rather than imposing decisions from above is clearly established. Once on the Guinea coast, the English built up business relationships with African traders in a number of ways, largely by respecting time-honoured protocols of ‘commercial diplomacy’.118 As the accounts in Hakluyt make clear, English traders generally made an attempt to observe appropriate forms of conduct, and to respect local ritual and existing hierarchies, as far as they understood these. But things did not always go to plan. One relationship Towerson tried but failed to continue in 1558 was with Don John, a local Fetu ruler and business partner of some standing, ‘a graue man’,119 who f irst appears in the English sources in the account of the 1554/5 voyage,120 and whom Towerson had earlier met in January 1556 near Cape Three Points.121 When Towerson decided in May 1558, after some days of slow trading at Accra, to sail west in the Minion and see ‘what was to be done at the towne of Don Iohn’,122 no meeting with the local ‘captain’ could be arranged. Instead, the Africans refused to engage in any meaningful trade, which Towerson blamed (perhaps rightly, as we shall see) on Portuguese interference. He even went on land personally and approached local villages waving a white flag, but found none of the locals prepared to speak to him.123 In retaliation, his company attacked the locals, killing and hurting many, then ‘burned their towne, and brake all their boats’.124 Such a hostile act is not typical of the English behaviour in 116 Hair and Alsop, English Seamen and Traders, p. 249. For commentary, see ibid., p. 26. 117 PN2, II, part 2, p. 48. 118 P.E.H. Hair, ‘Attitudes to Africans in English Primary Sources on Guinea up to 1650’, History in Africa, 26 (1999), pp. 43-68 (p. 54). See also April Lee Hatfield, ‘A “very wary people in their bargaining” or “very good marchandise”: English Traders’ Views of Free and Enslaved Africans, 1550-1650’, Slavery & Abolition 25, 3 (2004), pp. 1-17. 119 PN2, II, part 2, p. 30. 120 See ibid., p. 29. 121 Ibid., p. 30. 122 Ibid., p. 48. 123 See ibid., p. 49. 124 Ibid.

58 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Guinea more broadly, but demonstrates that, for Towerson at least, respect for the locals was conditional on securing profit. Don John – or ‘Dom João’ in the Portuguese sources – may have been the Portuguese trade name given to successive Fetu rulers, since the Portuguese first refer to a local king of that name as being baptised in 1503.125 The ‘Don John’ that Towerson failed to meet in 1558 was described by Martin Frobisher in a 1562 deposition to the Privy Council as a capten, called Don Joan, dwelling in Futta [Fetu], within iij myles of the Castell of Myne [Mina Castle], [who] was required and promised great rewardes and stipendes by the King of Portingall’s agient to bicome under the obedience of the said king, and to ayde him agenst other that would trate [trade] into those parties; who not onely refused to graunt any parte therof, but also made aunswer that he accomnptid [accounted] hymself to be his fellowe. And therefore by no meanes he would be restrayned of his libertie.126

Frobisher had been sailing on the 1554/5 voyage to Guinea, commanded by John Lok, and was left behind as a hostage during trading near Mina Castle when the English ships were surprised by the Portuguese and forced into a hasty retreat, leaving no time for Frobisher to return on board. He subsequently spent several years in Portuguese captivity, first at Mina, later in Lisbon.127 His deposition notes the considerable degree of autonomy and independence some local African rulers claimed for themselves, and the anxieties about European competition felt by the Portuguese.128 That anxiety was confirmed by the Portuguese ambassador in a letter to Elizabeth on 7 June 1562, in which he complained that ‘[t]he profits of the fort at the Mina have in the years 1557 and 1558 been altogether decayed by reason of the English and French’.129 125 See Blake, Europeans in West Africa, 1450-1560, I, p. 96. 126 Ibid., II, p. 359. See also Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, of the Reign of Elizabeth, 1562, ed. Joseph Stevenson (London: Longman et al., 1867), p. 53, item 102, ‘Declaration of Martin Frobisher’. 127 On Frobisher, see James McDermott, ‘Frobisher, Sir Martin (1535?-1594)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/10191. 128 The case for African trading autonomy has been conf irmed by recent historians, for example by John Thornton in Africans and Africa in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400 to 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, sec. ed. 1998), pp. 13-71; or by David Northrup in Africa’s Discovery of Europe, 1450-1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, third ed. 2014), pp. 55-61. 129 Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, of the Reign of Elizabeth, 1562, p. 76, item 158.

THE MINION AND ITS TRAVELS: SAILING TO GUINEA IN THE SIX TEENTH CENTURY

59

When the English sought to make contact again with Don John on the 1563 voyage, they were told that he had died but that his replacement, Don Luis, had a son, Anthonio, who was ready ‘to traffike with us’, together with another business partner, Pacheco. Anthonio and Pacheco met with the English on 23 April, and the next day were still ‘aboord the Minion’. On 25 April, the Minion was attacked by two Portuguese gallies while still at sea, narrowly escaped, and then did not make contact again with the coast until they arrived at ‘Rio de Barbos’ (an Ivory Coast river) on 14 May. There the company stayed for a week, then sailed further west to River Sess, from where they set sail for England on 4 June, arriving in Dartmouth on 6 August 1563.130 The timeline is relevant because a Portuguese source dated 8 August 1564, that appears to refer to these events, states that certain Englishmen have sometimes said that the last time they came from Mina, I mean that they were on the Mina coast, two English speaking blacks [2 negros que fallão egres] came aboard the English carracks, that told them that the principal black of the land, who calls himself Don John, ordered them to tell them and promise that if the English came with a fleet by sea, that they would help by land, for what I know not, only that the said English trust this promise. And at this time they took with them two blacks, that were aboard when our galleys chased them away. And they could not take them to land again. And one of them died in Portsmouth, at the carracks’ arrival. And the other returns in the ones that are now sailing to Guinea.131

If this source refers to the events on the Minion in April/May 1563, as is likely, then Anthonio and Pacheco were taken to England even though they could have left the ship at either Rio de Barbos or River Sess, suggesting that their subsequent trip to England may not have been an entirely involuntary one. If the survivor of the pair then returned to Guinea on the 1564/5 voyage, he would have spent over a year in England, from August 1563 (return of the 1563 voyage) to mid-October 1564 (departure of the 1564/5 voyage). If it is also true that both Anthonio and Pacheco spoke English, then it is reasonable to assume that they spent time in England before. The accounts in Hakluyt mention several Guinea Africans travelling back and forth on English ships in the 1550s and 60s, including an individual called ‘Anthonie’, 130 PN2, II, part 2, p. 55. 131 Brásio, Monumenta missionária africana, vol. 4, item 69, p. 247. Thanks to Tiago Sousa Garcia for providing the translation from the Portuguese.

60 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

who was sorely missed by the inhabitants of Hanta in January 1557, and about whom Towerson made a promise to the locals that he ‘had bene at London in England, and should bee brought home the next voyage’.132 If Anthonie and Anthonio are the same person, then he visited England at least twice, once in the 1550s, once in 1563/4, possibly suggesting a two-way traffic between England and Guinea: not only English merchants travelling to Africa, but also African merchants travelling to England. It is tempting to speculate that Anthonie may have even settled in England and ended his life there, such as the individual who appears in a 1630 burial record of the parish register of St Augustine’s Church, Hackney: ‘Anthony a poore ould Negro aged 105’.133 But there is no means of knowing. Less speculative is the suggestion that Anthonio and Pacheco may have been referred to in a letter by a Portuguese agent dated 5 September 1562, which states that the English ships that arrived back in Portsmouth from Guinea with gold that year had returned two Africans from London to the Mina Coast on the outbound journey.134 This was the voyage which started with a collision in the Thames between the Minion and the Primrose, was later abandoned by Lok, and finally sailed in January 1562 with building materials on board. The apparently good relations that were developing between English merchants and the Africans of the Mina coast cannot have done anything but increase Portuguese anxieties. The agent notes that the two returning Africans were treated well in England, and that they had carried a letter to Elizabeth from their local king with an invitation to send further ships at any time. Assuming that the two Africans sailing back in January 1562 arrived on a previous English fleet returning from Guinea, they cannot have reached England any later than 20 October 1558 (or possibly earlier, since that voyage ‘had not aboue sixe Mariners and sixe Marchants in health’135 with the English shore in sight), meaning they must have lived in the country for three years or longer. 132 PN2, II, part 2, p. 38. 133 See the facsimile reproduction of the record in Miranda Kaufmann, Black Tudors. The Untold Story (London: Oneworld, 2017), p. 5. 134 Arquivo Nacional, Torre do Tombo, PT/TT/CC/1/106/11. The source reads: ‘dous negros que elles [h]avião trazido da Mina que amdavão em Lomdres’ [they have brought two blacks to Mina who were in London]. The document is briefly discussed by Teixeira da Mota and Hair (East of Mina, p. 48), and again by Hair and Alsop (English Seamen and Traders, p. 67n65), but is misread in both instances as stating that the two Africans were in London during one of King Philip’s visits to England. Actually, the letter refers to King Sebastian of Portugal, not King Philip of Spain, and only notes that its author, Ruy Mendes, was in London while in the service of his king when the two Africans were there (‘quamdo eu ali fuy em serviço d’el rey’). Many thanks to Maria João Oliveira e Silva for providing a transcription of this source. 135 PN2, II, part 2, p. 51.

THE MINION AND ITS TRAVELS: SAILING TO GUINEA IN THE SIX TEENTH CENTURY

61

The first reference to Africans being brought to England on trading vessels from Guinea occurs in the account of Lok’s first voyage in 1555, which notes that the English ‘brought with them certaine blacke slaues, whereof some were tall and strong men, and could wel agree with our meates and drinkes. The colde and moyst aire doth somewhat offend them.’136 It is very unlikely that these Africans were actually slaves. They were probably either traders, such as Anthonio and Pacheco, or locals kidnapped by the English to serve as cultural intermediaries on future voyages. In a later account Towerson explains to a local man in Don John’s town that these men ‘were in England well vsed, and were there kept till they could speake the language, and then they should be brought againe to be a helpe to Englishmen in this Countrey’.137 When the Minion first sailed to Guinea in 1558, Towerson states that on a visit to the shore on 4 April, he ‘tooke our Negro with vs’.138 This unnamed individual, ‘our Negro’, had clearly been travelling on the ship for some time, perhaps all the way from England, and was here acting in the role of a local guide. Then on 8 June, Towerson notes that ‘George and Binny came to vs, and brought with them about two pound of golde’.139 Both these local traders had travelled on English ships before. Binny was named by Towerson in January 1557 alongside Anthonie as one of the Africans who was then still in London. He must have made his way back either on this voyage (he may have been the individual referred to as ‘our negro’) or on another ship. George is frequently referred to as ‘George our negro’ in the account of Towerson’s second voyage in 1555/6 and must have been among the group of men who arrived back in Shama on 17 January 1557: ‘the people were very glad of our Negros, specially one of their brothers wives, and one of their aunts, which received them with much joy, and so did all the rest of the people, as if they had bene their naturall brethren’.140 It is unclear how many Africans were brought to England on these voyages.141 The mention of ‘certaine blacke slaues’ noted above is glossed by Hakluyt in the margins as ‘Fiue blacke Moores brought into England’.142 The figure of five is therefore an editorial insertion and may not be the number that Robert Gainsh had in mind, who sailed alongside Lok as master of 136 Ibid., pp. 22-3 (page 23 numbered ‘335’). 137 Ibid., p. 32. 138 Ibid., p. 47. 139 Ibid., p. 49. 140 Ibid., p. 38. 141 On these references, see also Kaufmann, Black Tudors, pp. 169-95. 142 PN2, II, part 2, p. 22.

62 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

the John Evangelist and is the likely author of the report in Hakluyt. In the account of the next voyage, written by Towerson, there is one reference to ‘fiue [Africans] taken away by Englishmen’ in the previous year, and then another two references, the first noting that ‘foure men were taken perforce the last yeere’, the second specifying that ‘last yeere M. Gainsh did take away the Captaines sonne and three others from this place with their golde’.143 These are all either references to the same group of people or to two different groups, making it possible that as many as nine Guinea Africans sailed to England in 1555. The practice of taking locals away – potentially against their will – to teach them English and train them as interpreters clearly continued on later expeditions, without always receiving explicit commentary. The capture, ‘perforce’, of a ‘Captaines sonne’ alongside three others did not help Towerson in 1556, since it set the Africans ‘bent against us’ and was ‘the cause that they became friends with the Portugales, whom before they hated’.144 The reference to the gold that was in their possession suggests that they were either wealthy, or local traders, or both. Their journey to England in 1555 was involuntary, but shipboard meetings between English and African traders cannot have been anything out of the ordinary, even if they are rarely documented. When Anthonio and Pacheco are recorded aboard the Minion in 1563, many others must have been there before and after, confirming that the deck of the ship had de facto become an international marketplace. Some modicum of social recognition clearly sprang from these interactions. On 3 February 1557, the master gunner Thomas Rippen, who probably died a year later on the Minion,145 was recognized on land by an African captain and asked about other members of the English crew that had visited the previous year.146 The English in turn showed some limited interest in African social organization, in their practical skills, and even their language, which Towerson made an effort to learn in 1555: ‘Here […] I learned some of their language’.147 One English seaman appreciated local craftsmanship so much that he thought it worth bequeathing ‘a cape that I had at Shamia [Shama]’148 to his captain. Guinea traders were not the only black Africans to have sailed on the Minion. In October 1567, several eyewitnesses saw African slaves being loaded onto Hawkins’ fleet, including the Minion, at the Plymouth docks. 143 Ibid., pp. 32, 34. 144 PN2, II, part 2, p. 34. 145 See Hair and Alsop, English Seamen and Traders, p. 25. 146 PN2, II, part 2, p. 42. 147 Ibid., p. 32. 148 Hair and Alsop, English Seamen and Traders, p. 250.

THE MINION AND ITS TRAVELS: SAILING TO GUINEA IN THE SIX TEENTH CENTURY

63

Estimates of the numbers vary between 40 and 60 slaves,149 and the most likely explanation for the presence of these Africans in Plymouth is that they were captured in Guinea earlier that year by John Lovell, who then failed to sell them in the Caribbean and brought them home with him when he returned to England in September 1567.150 Many more must have joined these Africans on the Minion between November 1567 and February 1568, when Hawkins captured further slaves in Cape Verde and Sierra Leone, the majority of whom were sold in Spanish colonies in the Americas. Some, however, stayed on board. On 1 January 1569, on the return voyage from Mexico, a Spanish fisherman came on board the Minion near Pontevedra, Galicia, and ‘saw some fifty people, black and white, sick and well’.151 Later that year, Thomas Hampton, captain of the Minion, testified before the High Court of Admiralty in London that during the battle in San Juan de Ulúa, 45 slaves kept in the English ships taken by the Spaniards were either captured or killed, but that ‘xii other Negros in the Mynnyon’152 went on the journey back to England. Hawkins and Fones confirmed the numbers at the same hearing, and Hawkins’ servant John Tommes added that of the ‘x or xii negros [..] in the foresaide Mynnyon […] she brought seuen from the saide port of la Vera Crux [= San Juan de Ulúa] into Englande and the rest died by the way homewarde’.153 What happened to the surviving seven Africans in England is not known. While still on board, they might have been simply treated as slaves, but the descriptions could also suggest that the master / slave hierarchy had perhaps ceased to apply on the Minion in 1569, when all hands would have been needed on deck to ensure everyone’s survival. The accounts of the Guinea voyages undertaken by the Minion rarely include reflections on the rationale and justification of these journeys. The assumption must be that the expectation of high profits and little else motivated contemporaries, and there is one account of a Minion voyage to Guinea which confirms this more clearly than any other source. The 1563 voyage, which left on 25 February and returned in August, is described in the account by William Rutter but also, in all likelihood, in the first of the two poems by Robert Baker, who sailed as a factor on either the Minion or the Primrose.154 Hakluyt included both poems in the first edition of the 149 See Kelsey, Sir John Hawkins, p. 320n11. 150 Ibid., p. 56. 151 Ibid., p. 96. 152 The National Archives, SP 12/53, f. 29v. 153 Ibid., f. 39v (Hawkins), 46r (Tommes), 52r (Fones). 154 The attribution is not certain. Hakluyt states in the headnote to the Rutter account that the ‘voyage is also written in verse by Robert Baker’ (PN2, II, part 2, p. 54), but he does not specify

64 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Principal Navigations but dropped them for the second, much expanded version. In the first of his poems, Baker states that he went to Guinea for no other reason than ‘to seeke for golde’, that he only narrowly escaped Guinea alive after a conflict with local Africans which ended in a bloody fight, and that once back in England he made a vow never to return, ‘Forswearing cleane the Ginnie land’.155 The narrative of Baker’s adventures is contrasted with the dealings of a small cast of Roman gods that include an acrimonious exchange between the blacksmith Vulcan, god of fire and champion of ‘blacke people’, ‘king of most / of all the Ginnie land’, and his enemy Mars, god of war and defender of ‘white men’. Vulcan rails in front of Jove that ‘[a] people lo is on my coast / […] They do my people strike / they do this day them kill’ – clearly having in mind the vessels from England – and he asks for permission to retaliate in kind by defending his people and a coast that, in his view, ‘sure was his’. Mars protests, explaining that the white people called on him for support because Vulcan’s ‘brutish blacke people’ had started the fight in the first place. Jove, overruling the objections from Mars, agrees with Vulcan in principle, but instructs him to let the visitors go unscathed on this occasion, promising him a free hand should they ever return. To clarify his decision, Jove adds that ‘these men [the English visitors] need not to seeke, / They haue so fruitfull a countrey / that there is none the like.’156 This is a rare contemporary acknowledgment of the greed that fuelled these early voyages, and an equally rare understanding that global justice may not be well served if a region blessed with abundant natural wealth takes away the scarce resources of another.157 *** The Guinea voyages offered occasions for the most sustained, certainly some of the earliest, contact between Englishmen and non-European peoples in the sixteenth century. This contact led to hostilities and eventually to slavery, but also to increased knowledge about each other, and in some which of the two Baker voyages he had in mind. The dates recorded by Baker and the details included in either of his poems also do not fully match the account by Rutter. For further commentary, see Hair and Alsop, English Seamen and Traders, pp. 35-41. 155 PN1, pp. 132, 135. On Baker, see my ‘“To pot straight way we goe”: Robert Baker in Guinea, 1563-4’, Daniel Carey and Claire Jowitt (eds), Richard Hakluyt and Collected Travel Writing in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, for The Hakluyt Society, 2012), pp. 243-55. 156 PN1, pp. 134-5. 157 I argue this case at more length in ‘“To pot straight way we goe”’.

THE MINION AND ITS TRAVELS: SAILING TO GUINEA IN THE SIX TEENTH CENTURY

65

cases to veiled expressions of respect. Whatever caricatures of bloodthirsty and sabre-rattling ‘blackamoors’ the English stage would later generate, these cannot have been rooted in the experience of the English seamen who sailed on the Minion and who had actually met and interacted with Guinea Africans at first hand.158 The range of influence widens if we consider the ship’s entire lifespan in the light of the many people that walked its planks: ‘George our negro’ and other Guinea traders, such as Anthonio and Pacheco, who spoke English; the English slave trader, John Hawkins, who used interpreters when dealing with the Spanish; probably a European king, Henry VIII; several African dignitaries; hundreds, perhaps thousands of officers, midshipmen, and common seamen from the British Isles and from across Europe; merchants and factors from London and other cities; many unnamed men, women, and children from Guinea taken as slaves against their will. So far, no records of any individual women on board have come to light, apart from, possibly, Anne Boleyn in 1532, who would have travelled with a large female entourage. But from shores around the globe, many more people set eyes on the Minion than stepped on its deck, and their lives too were affected by the goods, technologies, and the ideas it spread. Across five decades, the ship combined the functions of warship, merchantman, executive carrier, supply ship, and slaver; it made some people rich and others poorer, it brought humans into contact, but also tore them apart, enslaved them, killed them. If the focus on the material and social circumstances of a single ship, rather than the quantitative fortunes of fleets and navies, brings into view the seamless connections across time between trade, diplomacy, warfare, slavery, and wealth, it also foregrounds the inordinate human cost of early modern Britain’s maritime expansion.

158 For discussions of African characters in early modern English drama, see Eldred Jones, Othello’s Countrymen. Africans in English Renaissance Drama (London: Oxford University Press, 1965); Eliot Tokson, The Popular Image of the Black Man in English Drama, 1550-1688 (Boston: Hall, 1982); Anthony Gerard Barthelemy, Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representations of Blacks in English Renaissance Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987); Jack D’Amico, The Moor in English Renaissance Drama (Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1991); and Emily C. Bartels, Speaking of the Moor. From Alcazar to Othello (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

2.

Commanding the World Itself: Sir Walter Ralegh, La Popelinière, and the Huguenot Influence on Early English Sea Power Alan James Whosoever commands the sea, commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world, commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.1 ‒ Sir Walter Ralegh

To historians of naval power, these words stand out for their insight and almost prophetic wisdom. Indeed, the Tudor and early Stuart navies are often assessed on the extent to which such words were heeded and the foundations were laid for Britain’s later global pre-eminence supported by the three pillars of sea power, commerce, and empire. Yet it is difficult to escape the fact that, relative to its imperial rivals and in contrast to the volume and sophistication of much writing at the time on naval and imperial themes, Tudor England itself achieved limited success in overseas expansion and trade. Two alternative approaches, therefore, seem to present themselves to historians. England’s relative backwardness can be emphasised to put into sharper relief its future successes. Or, credit can be given for the necessary, if hesitant, f irst steps that were taken.2 1 Sir Walter Ralegh, ‘A Discourse of the invention of Ships, Anchors, Compasse, etc. The first Naturall warre, the severall, use, defects, and supplies of Shipping, the strength, and defects of the Sea forces of England, France, Spaine, and Venice, Together with the five manifeste causes of the suddaine appearing of the Hollanders’, in Judicious and Select Essayes and Observations, etc. (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1650), p. 19, as quoted in Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997; reprinted, 2002), p. 150. 2 Compare, as just two of any number of examples of the two approaches, Lenman’s uncompromising critique of early English colonial efforts, and of Ralegh himself, with Appleby’s assessment that, despite the clear limitations, ‘the foundation-stones for an English seaborne Empire were laid…’. Bruce Lenman, England’s Colonial Wars: 1550-1688. Conflicts, Empire and National Identity (Pearson: Harlow, 2001). John C. Appleby, ‘War, Politics, and Colonization, 1558-1628’, in Nicholas Canny, ed., The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 55-78.

68 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Either way, the contested memory of Walter Ralegh, which Claire Jowitt addresses in her chapter, figures prominently. He articulated the height of Elizabethan ambition and attempted, with mixed results, to give them teeth through his voyages, his efforts at colonisation, and his violent attacks against Spanish interests. Whether as an ambitious man-of-action or an illustration of the still unrealised potential of the nation, this violent, self-styled Renaissance man is usually considered within a long historical view of emerging imperial systems, state-sponsored naval power, and commercial enterprise. His vision, however, was not simply of an empire of overseas colonies and maritime trade of the sort that future generations would later imagine as Britain’s birthright. He was equally concerned with Spanish power and with what he saw as waning Habsburg imperial stature within Europe, and he made a far more immediate, pragmatic appeal for England to take advantage and to pursue naval strength as part of the traditional, competitive pursuit of dynastic security and monarchical reputation through war. Ralegh was only one writer among many in England and on the continent who called for investment in naval power and the pursuit of overseas expansion in the sixteenth century. Indeed, his ambitions can be traced directly to the dreams of the French Admiral, the Huguenot, Gaspard de Coligny, whose murder in 1572 sparked the St Bartholomew’s Day massacres in France. Coligny’s proposed solution to the internal, civil wars raging in France had been to unite the kingdom across the confessional divide in war against its natural enemy, Spain.3 What is less well-known, however, is that Ralegh, who once fought alongside the Huguenots in France, borrowed most directly from the Huguenot historian and writer, Henri Lancelot Voisin, sieur de La Popelinière, who had a similar political agenda. Of course, all such pleas for greater sea power and expansionist energy were addressed, of necessity, to monarchs and therefore appealed to their personal political sensitivities and to established standards of imperial and national success. Thus beneath Ralegh’s vaunting overseas ambition lay the manipulation of an emerging political observation that he shared with La Popelinière: by the early seventeenth century, naval power, regardless of whatever other benefits it might bring, was becoming an essential, almost defining, expression of royal authority and of the international stature of a monarch. If, by the 3 Henri Dubief, ‘Gaspard de Coligny et Walter Ralegh: un grand dessein et son échec’, Bulletin de la société de l’histoire du Protestantisme français, 128 (oct.-dec. 1982), pp. 493-504. Martine Acerra and Guy Martinière, eds, Coligny, les protestants et la mer (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris-Sorbonne, 1997).

69

Commanding the World Itself

time of his death by order of James I in 1618, the early Stuart state had not come to ‘command the riches of the world’ as Ralegh might have hoped, it had clearly taken on board the essential message that a strong navy was an important reflection of a legitimate and powerful monarchy, and in this respect England counted itself among the great states of Europe. *** In the early seventeenth century, northern European monarchies competed for political stature, or prestige, at sea. Over just a few years, the Danish, Swedish, French, and Anglo-Scottish monarchies each famously launched a magnificent warship, much larger than most, very heavily gunned and far more elaborately decorated than anything that had come before: respectively, the Tre Kroner, in 1604; the Vasa, in 1628; La Couronne in 1636; and, the Sovereign of the Seas in 1637. As practical instruments of war at sea, the results were decidedly uneven. The Vasa, as is well-known, sank on its maiden voyage. La Couronne did slightly better, accompanying the French fleet on a couple of operations, though to no great effect before being abandoned just a few years later. Even the Sovereign of the Seas was laid up in the early 1640s, although after a couple of re-builds it went on to have a relatively long career before succumbing to f ire in 1696. It may be tempting to dismiss these colossal projects as acts of vanity by short-sighted monarchs. Yet the ships can be credited more positively for their f ighting strength, even if just for their deterrent value. More than this, they were also statements of royal magnif icence and, as the extraordinarily detailed and ornate decoration that each one carried suggests, very eloquent ones at that. 4 Each of these monarchies clearly felt it was worth the not inconsiderable expense and effort required to make such a loud declaration of its grandeur and status at sea, reinforcing the lesson that navies are part of the history of monarchy as much as they are of developing states or emerging, modern systems of international trade and power. 4 On the Sovereign of the Seas, N.A.M. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, vol.I, 660-1649 (Harper Collins: London, 1997), pp. 387-9. Charles I wanted a ‘fleet as an instrument of deterrence and influence abroad, and … a symbol of his own majesty’, ibid, p. 393. On the Tre Kroner, and the issue of prestige, Martin Bellamy, Christian IV and His Navy: A Political and Administrative History of the Danish Navy, 1596-1648 (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 36-7, 140-1, 155. Benjamin W.D. Redding, ‘Divided by La Manche: Naval Enterprise and Maritime Revolution in Early Modern England and France, 1545-1642’ (PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2016), pp. 175-93.

70 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Of course, the Catholic, Iberian monarchies were the first to establish extensive maritime empires, and their wealth and global reach long remained unmatched and the target of jealous attack and imitation. Yet there is a very close association between the Reformation and the emergence of large-scale, organised naval power in sixteenth-century Europe. As N.A.M. Rodger has pointed out, one of the most dramatic features of the period was the growth of politicised, private, Calvinist violence at sea.5 Dutch, French, and English men-of-war operated within formal, and informal, international networks.6 Yet, in different ways, it was state power that grew most momentously along with navies in Denmark, Sweden, Scotland, the Dutch United Provinces, England, and even in Catholic France, where the seafaring activity of the rebellious Calvinist minority provided all the motivation needed to try to secure royal control of naval affairs. One obvious explanation for the timing of the growth of these European navies can be found in the allure of Iberian wealth and the various military struggles against Habsburg authority in Europe as well as in the naval competition that naturally arose amongst the new sea powers. This, and the commercial benefits of maritime trade, can account for the familiar forward-facing technological, military, and economic forces driving change that colour much naval history. Yet the effect of the Reformation on international politics was profound, and it did more than simply sharpen international rivalries. By creating a new brand of political outsider, it transformed sea power from a purely instrumental, practical means to specific political ends into an alternative way of demonstrating martial prowess, one which offered an additional potential opportunity to try to establish, consolidate, and to some extent even to define political legitimacy.7 This was, after all, a conservative international environment, a world of political outsiders and insiders competing for stature from which wealth and power were derived, and the very embodiment of success, by late medieval and early modern standards, was the Habsburg monarchy. Although the Habsburgs had obviously been more than willing to exploit their maritime 5 N.A.M. Rodger, ‘The New Atlantic: Naval Warfare in the Sixteenth Century’, in John B. Hattendorf and Richard W. Unger, eds, War at Sea in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003), pp. 243-4. 6 D.J.B. Trim, ‘Transnational Calvinist Co-operation and “Mastery of the Sea” in the Late Sixteenth Century’, in J.D. Davies, Alan James and Gijs Rommelse, eds, Ideologies of Western Naval Power, c.1500-1815 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020). 7 Alan James, ‘Chapter One: European Navies and Princely Power’, in Alan James, Carlos Alfaro Zaforteza and Malcolm Murfett, European Navies and the Conduct of War (London: Routledge, 2019).

Commanding the World Itself

71

potential and to endorse overseas conquest, their unrivalled imperial status and political leadership was never defined by their sea power, as such.8 Their stature was defined by generations of successful dynastic politics, ‘just wars’ of conquest, and by the inheritance of Rome. There was little the sea could offer by way of political status. Indeed, quite the contrary, at an individual level, the sea had always attracted those on the geographical, if not the very social, periphery of society, and so it was for the newly Protestant states within Europe. Sea power offered them an obvious means of military and economic competition, a means to defend themselves and to disrupt the enemy. More than that, for monarchies defying legal precedent and tradition and lacking papal endorsement, it offered something more: an alternative means to consolidate their martial reputation and legitimacy and to compete for political standing and repose. This was not just a world of fledgling bureaucratic or f iscal states, or of modern military powers innovating themselves into existence, as the sociologically-inspired historiography can occasionally imply.9 Sea power was employed to serve existing political aims often shaped by notions of success and failure that are quite alien to modern eyes, and its sudden rise in sixteenth-century Europe was in many ways the product of simultaneous competition with, and emulation of, Habsburg greatness. Thus, when the monarchies of northern Europe were building their magnificently adorned flagships in the early seventeenth century, it was not necessarily Spanish sea power, as such, that they had in their sights but Spain’s political primacy or imperial status. For Philip II, who did not inherit the formal imperial crown from his father but who headed the senior branch of the Habsburgs, ‘empire’ did not mean the American holdings of the Castilian monarchy, but was related directly to his personal authority and honour, that is to say to his dynastic inheritance and to his responsibility to protect it.10 It is well-known that Spain’s enemies accused it of abusing the theoretically universal authority inherited from Rome which it claimed to 8 For an extended discussion of national affinities to the sea, see Andrew Lambert, Seapower States: Culture, Identity and Strategy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). For other comparisons, see Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c.1500-c.1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); and, J.H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 9 For a critique, see Alan James, ‘Warfare and the Rise of the State’, in Matthew Hughes and William J. Philpott, eds, Palgrave Advances in Modern Military History (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), pp. 23-41. 10 Parker’s sensitive examination of Philip II’s thought displays hints of the modern temptation to assume the need for a modern grand strategy. Geoffrey Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

72 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

protect and of attempting to establish a universal monarchy. This justified military resistance, and in England, in particular, Spain’s Black Legend animated the imperial project for many years to come.11 Yet such howls of protest cannot completely disguise the desire to emulate Spanish greatness or the jealousy of the imperium which the Habsburgs claimed. Of course, Spain looms very large in most early modern naval and imperial history, but usually as a power in decline and rarely as an object of emulation.12 Yet the role Spain played in the expansion of European naval power into the seventeenth century is clear. These great flagships were part of a broader growth in the size of European navies, which since the 1610s was driven, at least in part, by the anticipation of the expiry in 1621 of the Twelve Years’ Truce between Spain and its rebellious Dutch provinces, when it was assumed that hostilities would resume and that Spain would have to try to strangle Dutch maritime trade that had been blossoming. To compete in this international environment, largely shaped by Spain’s struggle with the Dutch, a navy was necessary, and this would require a certain international technological competition. Yet the magnificence of these ships speaks of something else as well: an attempt to claim a certain stake in the majesty of the Habsburgs, to compete with them, and with each other, for political legitimacy. For Walter Ralegh, described by Anthony Pagden as the ‘most famous of the English would-be conquistadores’, sea power was openly held up as a way of copying Spain. Personally, it was a means to achieve aristocratic glory and wealth.13 There was undoubtedly a more pressing and desperate personal political interest as well. Indeed, A Discourse of the invention of Ships, anchors, etc., from which the quotation that opens this chapter was drawn, was written during Ralegh’s incarceration in the Tower and is said to have been dedicated to Henry, Prince of Wales (1594-1612), who shared a particular enthusiasm for the navy.14 The sentiments expressed fit with what we know about Ralegh’s overseas interests and the aggressive, anti-Spanish foreign policy that he advocated. Whether or not he actually believed that the state could plausibly entertain the prospect of wars of conquest on a Spanish scale, this was simply not a practical option. In addressing the prince, Ralegh was, in fact, appealing to more immediate, realisable political 11 Jonathan Hart, Comparing Empires: European Colonialism from Portuguese Expansion to the Spanish-American War (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003). 12 For a different perspective, Christopher Storrs, The Resilience of the Spanish Monarchy, 1665-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 13 Pagden, Lords, pp. 63-8, esp. 67. 14 Hill, Origins, p. 190.

Commanding the World Itself

73

ambitions and ingratiating himself with the man it was assumed would be the next king. Thus, his meaning and the source of his ideas bear further reflection, and indeed the context of the quotation reinforces the political purpose of the work and the centrality of this theme of Habsburg ‘empire’. Only one other time in the entire Discourse did Ralegh mention trade, with precious little more said about overseas expansion, ‘the world itself’. The aim, instead, was to attempt to trace the history of sea power through time, to provide a sort of briefer, naval version of his universal History of the World.15 The immediate purpose of this was to describe and to compare the current, relative strengths and weaknesses of other European powers of the day, to provide an international ranking of powers, and, in particular, to explain the very sudden appearance in the early seventeenth century of Dutch naval strength. He did not attempt to measure the trade or wealth of England’s neighbours, but rather the relative fighting strength and permanence of their navies, and very specifically navies which reflected upon the imperial majesty of a monarch or a state. This well-known quotation, though pithy and seeming to encapsulate in just a few words the logic of naval strength in modern history, suffers from being isolated from the rest of the text. It is not a complete thought, nor even a complete sentence. It is part of a larger idea that was based on war, not overseas trade or expansion: ‘war’ and the majesty of a monarch that can be won from it. Sea power was very specifically an instrument of war which served ‘empire’, in the traditional sense of the word, that is to say empire as the direct personal authority of a monarch (or, properly speaking, an emperor). It had a clear territorial, but continental, focus and was an extension of personal majesty. Navies, which Ralegh highly valued, were therefore a military means to the end of greater majesty. Indeed, according to Ralegh, this was a timeless principle, going back even before the flood and the ark, for there had ‘always’ been trade and war at sea, and all peoples had tried to improve their capacity to make war. In the current international league-tables that he drafted, England was doing well, ‘[f]or the Kings of England have for many years been at the charge to build and furnish a Navy of powerful Ships, for their owne defence, and for the Wars only’. English ships, since the unfortunate sinking of the Mary Rose, had become steadier, sturdier, and carried more ordnance. Only the kings of Denmark and Sweden received similar credit from Ralegh, for they, too, had good ships, at least they had over the last fifty years. The French, Spanish, Portuguese, and until recently the Dutch, 15 Ralegh, Sir Walter, The History of the World, 5 vols, C.A. Patrides, ed., (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1971).

74 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

on the other hand, ‘have had no proper Fleete belonging to their Princes or States’.16 Thus Ralegh argued that the navy maintained by each state was a reflection of its own grandeur: [T]he Spaniards and Portugalls have ships of great bulke, but fitter for the Merchant then for the Man of Warre, for burthen then for Battaile: But as Popelinire well observeth, the forces of Princes by Sea, are Marques de Grandeur d’Estate, Are markes of the greatness of an Estate: For whosoever commands the Sea, Commands the Trade: whosoever Commands the Trade of the world: Commands the Riches of the world and consequently the world it selfe: yet can I not deny, but that the Spaniards being afraid of their Indian fleets, have built some few very good ships, but he hath no ships in Garrison, as his Majestie [James I] hath, and to say the truth, no sure place to keepe them in; But in all Invasions he is driven to take up of all Nations, which comes into his Ports for Trade.17

Spain, in other words, for all its strength, did not have a proper navy, or adequate ports, and relied on pressing foreign ships and merchants in times of crisis, and this was a black mark on the king’s majesty. In contrast, the Venetians, ‘while they attended their fleets … [had been] great and powerfull Princes’. ‘The f irst honour they obtained’, Ralegh said, ‘was by making Warre … by sea’ against the Turk. Historically, the Genoese, too, had been ‘also exceeding powerfull by Sea’. Now, however, he lamented, they only maintained ‘a few Gallyes being altogether degenerate’. So, a people who had once been renowned warriors were now only ‘Merchants of mony, and the Spanish King’s bankers’, a degenerate and pitiful position.18 For Ralegh, naval power made possible the wars of conquest that had allowed Castile to eclipse the Holy Roman Empire which was ‘now sunck downe to the level of the soyle’.19 Yet it had not been the lack of sea power or overseas possessions as such that had diminished the Empire. It suffered against existing standards of greatness embodied by Castile based on war, continental territorial integrity, and authority. Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, Ralegh ranked France second to Spain for having consolidated its hold on Normandy, Brittany, Aquitaine, and other contiguous lands. With the personal union of the Scottish and English crowns, Stuart England, too, 16 Ralegh, Discourse, p. 19. 17 Ralegh, Discourse, p. 20. 18 Ralegh, Discourse, pp. 20-23. 19 Ralegh, Discourse, p. 24.

Commanding the World Itself

75

had territorial integrity and strength and so came third. Thus when Ralegh turned to his main subject, the rise of the Dutch, he was not impressed with their trade or global reach, nor even particularly with their ships or their skill at sea. He was impressed with how quickly the exploitation of the sea had built their state or domestic ‘empire’. England, Ralegh claimed, actually had little to fear from the Dutch. There was no immediate threat from any supposed superiority in the number or construction of their ships. England had built many ships and with their ‘broad sides … [were] able to continue a perpetuall volley of Demiculverins without intermission, And either sinck or slaughter the men, or utterly disorder any Fleet of crosse sailes, with which they encounter’.20 Equally, in a way which challenges common assumptions about the mercantilist preoccupations of seventeenth-century naval thought, nor were the Dutch a particular threat because of their overseas trade. There was nothing especially sinister about that, it seems. Indeed France, Spain, and Portugal all had greater overseas interests and more ships abroad than the Dutch, he said. What alarmed Ralegh was rather more precise, if not prosaic: the number of English guns in Dutch hands and their subsequent re-distribution to the other European powers. In the only other direct reference to trade, Ralegh claimed that the mismanagement of ordnance was behind England’s frustrated aspiration to have ‘commanded the Seas, and thereby the Trade of the world itselfe’. It was only by having allowed the Dutch to carry English guns that they had then been distributed across Europe and fallen into the hands of England’s enemies, making all too real such dangers as the Armada campaign of 1588. As for the sudden emergence of Dutch strength, this was due to the support of Elizabeth I, without the help of whose subjects their navigation would have ‘withered in the Bud’. To their credit, the Dutch encouraged their citizens to take part in fisheries and trade, and they composed their land armies of foreigners. Most directly, however, their strength was due to the House of Nassau, to the timely withdrawal of the Duke of Parma’s forces on two occasions, and above all to the recent Spanish embargo on Dutch trade which ‘constrained them and gave the courage to Trade by force into the East and West Indies, and in Africa…’.21 The Spanish had forced the Dutch overseas and were unlikely to recover from such an ill-judged policy, Ralegh claimed. The Discourse ends unremarkably with a defence of the imposition of duties on coal from Newcastle and, in a manner that 20 Ralegh, Discourse, pp. 29-30. 21 Ralegh, Discourse, pp. 36-7.

76 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

seems to anticipate the Navigation Acts, a call to end the transportation of English goods on foreign ships. The key practical issue, however, was the exportation of English guns, which was not just an immediate security concern but a broader reflection of the fact that war and maintaining the capacity to wage it was the principal occupation of monarchies and the source of their recognition, standing, and strength. That navies, therefore, were a potentially effective instrument of self-definition for political outsiders is reinforced by a reference to the direct source of Ralegh’s inspiration, openly acknowledged in the text, the Huguenot, La Popelinière. Often noted by historians for his apparently relatively objective accounts of French history and of the current religious civil wars, he wrote his most significant work on the theme of overseas expansion.22 Les Trois Mondes of 1582 divided the globe between the old world, the new world, and the still largely unknown one.23 Given Spanish entrenchment in the Americas, and no doubt influenced by the massacre of French Huguenots in Florida in the 1560s, the first significant French attempt at overseas colonisation, La Popelinière urged his countrymen to seek out, and to colonise, the great southern continent, Terra Australis. Like Ralegh, La Popelinière placed French ambitions within the context of a universal history of global expansion in which sea power was a mark of greatness. On the ancients, La Popelinière was convinced that the Persians, for example, had been great voyagers and deserved this reputation if for no other reason than the sheer extent of their empire and the ‘force and grandeur of the monarchy’. ‘The king of Persia, who made the whole world tremble with his power and who God had put on earth to dominate so many nations … proclaimed himself sovereign lord of the land and the sea’.24 La Popelinière’s admiration was not simply for naked power though. Whilst acknowledging that France wished to emulate the great Spanish and Portuguese discoveries of recent times, he was quick to point out that their accomplishments had been tarnished by unfettered 22 Paul-Alexis Mellet, Histoire de France de La Popelinière, 1581, livre vii (Geneva: Droz, 2018). 23 La Popelinière, Henri Lancelot Voisin, sieur de, Les Trois Mondes, Anne-Marie Beaulieu, ed., (Genève: Librairie Droz, 1997), p. 147. On La Popelinière himself, though it is silent on navies, see the critical edition of Henri Lancelot Voisin de La Popelinière, L’Histoire de France, t.1, v. 1517-1558, Véronique Larcade, Pascal Rambeaud, Thierry Rentet, Pierre-Jean Souriac, et Odette Turias, eds (Genève: Librairie Droz, 2011). 24 ‘Je me persuade bien plustost que les Perses ayent bien voyage de leur temps. Tant pource que l’empire confinoit à la grand mer & à l’Arabie, que pour la force & grandeur de ceste monarchie’. La Popelinière, Trois Mondes, pp. 140-141. ‘[Ce] grand roy de Perse, qui faisoit trembler le monde de sa puissance & que Dieu advouё maintenir sur la terre pour dominer sur tant de nations, n’eust il sceu donner plus avant, veu que demandant à tous les peuples qu’il se vouloit assubjectir, l’eau & la terre, il se disoit seigneur souverain de la terre & de la mer?’, ibid, p. 141.

Commanding the World Itself

77

violence. Conquest cannot be just or legitimate unless it is based upon just war. ‘Anyone who invades or claims possession otherwise is as entitled to be the lord of what he conquered as a brigand is to own the goods of a merchant whose throat he has slit’.25 Thus there were opportunities open to the French monarchy in the determined pursuit of overseas expansion, not just in the development of naval strength and wealth but also, by extension, in reputational ways for the legitimacy which proper conduct could afford. The words that Ralegh chose to quote directly, however, came from another, less well-known work that was produced two years later in 1584, L’Amiral de France. The French crown, fresh from a series of disastrous naval campaigns against Philip II at the Azores, embarked that year on a thorough, legal redefinition of naval government and of the office of admiral of France, extending its authority and jurisdiction before passing it to the king’s favourite, the Duke of Joyeuse.26 As David Armitage reminds us, the legal basis of French overseas expansion was personal, built around the king’s claim to ‘internal authority … over the clergy and the nobility’.27 Thus it was entirely consistent for La Popelinière to follow Les Trois Mondes with this detailed study of the new jurisdiction of this grand office of the realm, of the personal rights of the king’s admiral, and all of the other domestic, legal implications of the edict of 1584 which he dedicated to Joyeuse himself. L’Amiral de France included a history of sea power evoking the Assyrians, Indians, Greeks, Persians, and so on, although in this case it was King Minos who is said to have been credited with ‘the first sovereign empire on the sea’.28 In this way, La Popelinière flattered the French crown’s recent legislative efforts which he linked to his own particular vision of French overseas expansion. Although his stated purpose was to ‘encourage the officers and the youth of the kingdom to undertake some great voyages for the honour of the nation’, there was clearly also an element of self-interest, if not desperation, in trying to align Huguenot interests with those of the crown in this way.29 The alternative, of course, was for royal naval power 25 ‘Car qui-conque envahit ou possede autrement, est aussi injust seigneur de ce qu’il a conquis, qu’un brigand est de la bourse d’un marchand à qui il a coupé la gorge’. La Popelinière, Trois Mondes, pp. 254, 281. 26 Alan James, The Navy and Government in Early Modern France, 1572-1661 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004). 27 Armitage, Origins, p. 32. 28 ‘[L]e premier souverain Empire sur la mer’, Henri Lancelot Voisin, sieur de La Popelinière, L’Amiral de France. Et par occasion, de celuy des autres nations, tant vieiles que nouvelles (Paris: Thomas Perier, 1585), p. 3r. 29 La Popelinière, Amiral, chapter 16, p. 79r.

78 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

to be developed as a weapon to be used against the Huguenots, just as it had been in 1573 with the royal siege of La Rochelle by land and sea in the aftermath of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. For La Popelinière, too, therefore, there was a very pressing need to appeal to the political instincts and interests of his king. He had to graft his vision of France’s overseas future onto Henri III’s pursuit of his imperial majesty in order to create a legal environment in which his co-religionists could thrive, or indeed survive. Navigation, and its good government, he claimed, would help bring an end to the confessional divisions in France. Just as Ralegh would later do, La Popelinière emphasised that war was the very source of royal authority and, by extension, of the felicity of his kingdom. War brings discipline to a society, he claimed. It is the very ‘theatre of honour’, and sea power is an instrument of war.30 There is profit to be had, too, of course, but a running theme of the book is that navigation brings both ‘honour and profit’ equally to those who undertake it. For monarchs, who command as God’s lieutenants on land and on sea, riches can be drawn from it for their subjects, and they can thus be ‘a hundred times more loved and honoured by them and by their neighbours’.31 In a sentiment that was likely to attract the attention of Ralegh, La Popelinière declared that navigation serves the ‘embellishment and advantage of the kingdom, following the example of the ancient princes who always despoiled the vanquished to enrich their subjects with honourable booty’. Again, however, it is the honour of the booty that is the key to building the strength of the monarchy, for a prince who simply wishes to acquire money ‘mixes the mortar for the building of his grandeur with the blood of the human poor’.32 Whatever ambition Ralegh held for Spanish-style conquest of the New World, in this case he was drawing directly on La Popelinière and was therefore invoking something rather different. It was, in fact, an investment in the infrastructure and support of a strong navy designed to fight wars that he was looking for. Not surprisingly, both men admired the ancients, but the admiration was specifically for having built many galleys along with the ports, arsenals, and legal systems or legislation necessary to support them. These, Ralegh argued, have intrinsic political value, and for both men the most recent example to follow was Venice.33 In the passage that Ralegh 30 ‘[Le] Theatre d’honneur’, La Popelinière, Amiral, p. 89r. 31 ‘D’où ils ont d’ailleurs, raporté tant de richesses & et autres commoditz à leurs subjets; qu’ils en ont depuis esté cent fois plus aimez & honorez d’eux & de leurs voisins’, La Popelinière, L’Amiral, p. 80r. 32 La Popelinière, L’Amiral, pp. 84r and v. 33 For the influence of Venice more broadly, Lambert, Seapower States, passim.

79

Commanding the World Itself

quoted directly, La Popelinière claimed that to understand the potential of sea power to France they had to ‘look to the excellent arrangements and remarkable ordinance of the Arsenale at Venice, for the French lack such examples and other such marks of the grandeur of a state’, or ‘marques de grandeur d’Estat’.34 *** Ralegh’s long-term influence on the navy suggests that maritime Britain gained even more from the Huguenots than the skills and technical knowledge of the sea that Rodger identifies. The Huguenots necessarily employed sea power in their military struggle against the French crown. At the same time, they exploited its potential appeal to the king in order to elaborate a political case for their legal existence within the kingdom. In the Discourse of the invention of Ships, Ralegh made a similar appeal to his king, insisting that for a dynasty still trying to consolidate itself and to display its majesty and legitimacy, a strong navy would be indispensable. Young Prince Henry, for whom the famous ship-builder, Phineas Pett, created many model ships, was presumably receptive, though of course Ralegh’s writings and his memory had their greatest impact later on. The Discourse was only published in 1650, for the message he articulated was taken up with real relish and practical effect by the parliamentarians and specifically by Oliver Cromwell who looked back to Ralegh for inspiration in his great naval and political project of the mid-century. Yet the presence of Ralegh’s ghost had been felt for some time before that, in the reign of Henry’s brother, Charles I, who embraced his essential message. It was under him that Pett emerged as an important historical figure when his greatest creation, the awe-inspiring Sovereign of the Seas, was launched from Woolwich dockyard, as described in the chapter by Rebecca Bailey.35 In a very similar way, Cromwell, who was desperate to consolidate the new state that he came to oversee, launched the next largest English warship in 1655, the Naseby, also known as the Great Oliver, which had a representation of himself on the prow directly recalling that on the Sovereign of the Seas.36 Ralegh had not specifically advocated the 34 ‘Pour mieux comprendre cela, faudroit voir à l’oeil la belle disponsition & remarquable ordonnance de l’Arcenal Venitien. Car le François manque de tels exemples, comme de plusieurs autres marques de grandeur d’Estat’, La Popelinière, L’Amiral, pp. 5v and 6r. 35 And see, Hill, English Revolution, pp. 187, 194. 36 Bernard Capp, Cromwell’s Navy: The Fleet and the English Revolution, 1648-1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p 5. Armitage, Origins, p. 120.

80 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

construction of gargantuan, showpiece ships in the Discourse. Indeed, elsewhere he specifically advised against them in favour of smaller, sturdier, and more practical warships.37 Yet the connection between naval power and imperial majesty that he drew was a powerful message that proved to be irresistible to monarchs and republicans alike and who, indeed, each seemed to amplify it in turn.38 Although Ralegh’s lasting influence on the link that was forged between Britain and its navy is well-known, his own concern with the immediate practicalities of war is less so. Equally, the political message that he extrapolated from it and which would prove so influential in the future owed more to the continent and to the Huguenots than is usually acknowledged.

37 Sir Walter Ralegh, ‘Excellent Observations and Notes, concerning the Royall Navy and Sea-service’, (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1650). 38 See, for Restoration England, J.D. Davies, Kings of the Sea: Charles II, James II and the Royal Navy (Barnsley: Seaforth, 2017).

3.

An Investigation of the Size and Geographical Distributionof the English, Welsh, and Channel Islands Merchant Fleet: A Case Study of 1571–72 Craig L. Lambert and Gary P. Baker

The study of the sixteenth-century merchant fleet of England, Wales, and the Channel Islands is a neglected area of research in comparison to the volume of work undertaken into trade, the development of the Royal Navy, the age of exploration, privateering, great personalities, ship design, and naval warfare.1 The only major book-length study of English merchant shipping in this period – focusing upon the ships themselves rather than trade routes, commodities, and mercantile communities – is Dorothy Burwash’s English Merchant Shipping, 1460-1540, which is now over seventy years old, and The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the project from which this article derives: C. Lambert, ‘The Evolution of English Shipping Capacity and Shipboard Communities from the early Fifteenth Century to Drake’s Circumnavigation (1577)’, based at the University of Southampton (Arts and Humanities Research Council Project: AH/L004062/1). The project website, with an interactive database of English, Welsh, and Channel Island merchant ships can be found at: http://medievalandtudorships.org/. 1 Numerous studies on these topics could be cited. See, for example: Ralph Davis, English Overseas Trade, 1500-1700 (London: Macmillan, 1973); Michael Oppenheim, A History of the Administration of the Royal Navy and of Merchant Shipping in Relation to the Navy: from 1509-1640 (London: J. Lane, 1896); David Loades, The Tudor Navy: An Administrative, Political and Military History (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1992); Charles S. Knighton and David Loades, eds. Elizabethan Naval Administration (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013); Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480-1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); John C. Appleby, Under the Bloody Flag: Pirates of the Tudor Age (Stroud: History Press, 2009); Jonathan R. Adams, A Maritime Archaeology of Ships. Innovation and Social Change in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxbow, 2013); N.A.M. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, Volume 1: 660-1649 (London & New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997). On merchant seamen see: Cheryl Fury, ed. The Social History of English Seamen, 1485-1649 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2012); Maria Fusaro, Bernard Allaire, Richard J. Blakemore, and Tijl Vanneste, eds. Law, Labour and Empire: Comparative Perspectives on Seafarers, c.1500-1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Kenneth R. Andrews, ‘The Elizabethan Seaman’, The Mariner’s Mirror 68, 3 (1982), pp. 245-262; Craig L. Lambert, ‘Tudor Shipmasters and Maritime Communities, 1550-1600’, in The Routledge Companion to Marine and Maritime Worlds, ed. Steve Mentz, Claire Jowitt, and Craig. L. Lambert (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), pp. 323-348.

82 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

research into Welsh and Channel Islands shipping is similarly scant.2 This lack of research into the size and geographical distribution of the merchant fleet is unfortunate, because shipping was central to the economic lifeblood of the nation. Goods were imported and exported to and from Europe (and increasingly as the sixteenth century progressed from further afield), and whilst foreign shipping contributed to this overseas trade, by the sixteenth century at least it was indigenous shipping which bore the brunt of this mercantile activity in most ports.3 Merchant vessels were also essential to native trade, moving commodities coastwise and navigating the extensive Anglo-Welsh riverine networks to transport goods to and from hundreds of settlements both on the coast and much further inland. Fishing vessels, which were also employed as trading vessels on occasion, were also an essential part of the economy. 4 What is more, these vessels were of considerable political interest. The English Crown (which had suzerainty over Wales and the Channel Islands) had the prerogative right to tax overseas trade (imports and exports) on certain commodities carried in both native and foreign vessels, and the government thus had a vested financial interest in monitoring the activities of the merchant fleet. In short, an understanding of the merchant fleet of England, Wales, and the Channel Islands opens an important window into the country’s economy. The Crown was also interested in the size and tonnage of the fleet because it was able to requisition or hire merchantmen for naval duties: knowing how many ships existed, how large they were, and where they were located (their home ports) was vital information. The Crown’s interest in the merchant fleet led to the production of several 2 Dorothy Burwash, English Merchant Shipping, 1460-1540 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1947), throughout but especially Appendix II, pp. 177-200. On Wales, see Edward A. Lewis, The Welsh Port Books, (1550-1603), with an Analysis of the Customs Revenue Accounts of Wales for the same Period (London: Issued by the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1927); Spencer Dimmock, ‘Urban and Commercial Networks in the Later Middle Ages: Chepstow, Severnside and the Ports of Southern Wales’, Archaeologia Cambrensis, 152 (2003), pp. 53-68; Spencer Dimmock, ‘The Custom Book of Chepstow, 1535-6’, Studia Celtica, 38 (2004), pp. 131-50; Duncan Taylor, ‘The Maritime Trade of the Smaller Bristol Channel Ports in the Sixteenth Century’, (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Bristol, 2009), contains an excellent analysis of Welsh trade. On the Channel Islands see Wendy R. Childs, ‘Channel Islands Shipping as Recorded in the English Customs Accounts, 1300-1500’, in A People of the Sea: The Maritime History of the Channel Islands, ed. Aland G. Jamieson (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 44-58; John C. Appleby, ‘Neutrality, Trade and Privateering, 1500-1689’, in A People of the Sea, pp. 59-105. 3 Burwash, English Merchant Shipping, pp. 148-55. 4 Neville, J. Williams The Maritime Trade of the East Anglian Ports, 1550-1590 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 165.

An Investigation of the Size and Geogr aphical Distribution

83

surveys of merchant shipping, especially in the late sixteenth century, and it is one of the most extensive of these surveys, produced in 1572, which lies at the heart of this chapter. Why then, given the undoubted economic and naval importance of the merchant fleet to contemporaries, have scholars largely failed to undertake a quantitative analysis of its size (of both the number of vessels and tonnage) and distribution? This can largely be attributed to three inter-related factors. The first relates to the nature of the source materials, comprising of customs accounts (compiled annually in the leading ports in the kingdom), and records of ships requisitioned by the Crown in times of war (navy payrolls). The navy payrolls are most valuable in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries when English monarchs consistently requisitioned merchant ships to transport armies and supplies during the Hundred Years War. They provide details of the ship’s name, master’s name, home port, and sometimes the tonnage of requisitioned vessels (the latter detail not being provided in the customs accounts prior to 1565), and are useful for filling in gaps when the customs accounts do not survive. But the growing prevalence of the Royal Navy and the changing nature of English warfare in the sixteenth century made requisition of merchant vessels less frequent, and even in earlier centuries only a small portion of available merchant ships were ever requisitioned at any one time. Navy payrolls, therefore, can only ever play a subsidiary role in the reconstruction of the size and geographical distribution of the merchant fleet prior to the sixteenth century, and are of negligible value thereafter. The records with far more potential for attempting to reconstruct the merchant fleet are the customs accounts. England possesses the most comprehensive pre-modern records of seaborne mercantile activity in the world stretching back to the late thirteenth century (though with some inevitable gaps) which contain a wealth of information about English and foreign ships, merchants, and commodities being traded. Yet they are also a highly problematic resource for undertaking a survey of the merchant fleet.5 This is because, prior to 1565, barring a handful of records from the 1550s, they only contain details of overseas trade, with coastal voyages (which were not subject to taxation) omitted. Moreover, each port developed its own documentary culture in the recording of trade, and though all were generally detailed about the merchants and the commodities being moved, 5 Norman, S. B. Gras, The Early English Customs System; a Documentary Study of the Institutional and Economical History of the Customs from the Thirteenth to the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1918), pp. 3-152.

84 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

the information recorded about other facets of trade such as master and ship names was far from uniform. In other words, it is difficult for scholars using these records to calculate the size and distribution of the merchant fleet, or even quantify trade due to the omission of coastal voyages (though this has not prevented assertions being made).6 The introduction of the port books in 1565 makes the task of the fleet’s reconstruction somewhat easier.7 Initiated mainly as an attempt to reduce fraud, customs officials in each port were henceforth instructed to record details of all ships entering or leaving port: the ship’s name, master, tonnage, and voyage origin and destination, alongside the merchants using the vessels and the commodities being moved. The crucial aspect of the port books is that, for the f irst time, coastal trade was systematically recorded. Therefore, after 1565, it is theoretically possible for scholars to calculate the size and distribution of the merchant fleet.8 Yet this has not taken place because of the second and third reasons behind the lack of quantitative research into the fleet: the sheer volume of surviving records, and the technological limitations that have made undertaking such a study prohibitive. There is somewhere in the region of 20,000 surviving port books from 1565 until they were gradually phased out in the late eighteenth century. Even limiting this to the nearly forty years in which they cover Elizabeth’s reign provides c.2,500 documents, each containing multiple double-sided folios recording numerous voyages, especially those from large ports like London and Bristol which can run to hundreds of pages. Only in the last decade or so have rapid technological developments in computing (specifically database software) provided scholars with the realistic possibility of being able to collectively process and analyse the entirety of the records of English seaborne trade. But even with this technology, the Herculean scale of the task has dissuaded scholars from undertaking it. In addition, were one to undertake the task of a kingdom-wide survey, it would be 6 Maryanne Kowaleski, ‘The Shipmaster as Entrepreneur in Medieval England’, in Commercial Activity, Markets and Entrepreneurs in the Middle Ages, ed. Ben Dodds, and Christian D. Liddy (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2011), p. 168. 7 On the introduction of the port books see: Williams, Maritime Trade, pp. 16-18; Brian Dietz, The Port and Trade of Early Elizabethan London: Documents (London: Record Society, 1972), pp. x-xi. R. W. K. Hinton, ed. The Port Books of Boston 1601-1640 (Lincoln: Lincoln Record Society 1956), pp. xiii-xliii, provides the most comprehensive introduction to the port books. 8 Though one should always be aware that the volume of recorded trade was often less than the reality, due to either tardiness or corruption on the part of the customs officials in this and any pre-modern period. See Williams, Maritime Trade, chapter 1.

An Investigation of the Size and Geogr aphical Distribution

85

necessary to devise a methodology with which to identify individual ships; a challenging task given the volume, problems, and inconsistencies of the source materials. These problems have meant that nearly all the quantitative investigations of merchant shipping in sixteenth-century England have focussed on individual ports, regions, particular branches of overseas trade, or on ships as the instruments of trade.9 The way in which scholars have attempted to fit this regionally and port-focused research into a nationwide framework has been to utilise the aforementioned ship surveys. Neville Williams’s study of East Anglian trade published in the 1980s, for instance, took great strides forward in utilising ship surveys in conjunction with customs accounts, and analysed how a survey of East Anglian shipping in 1565 compared to a national survey undertaken in 1582.10 Other scholars have ignored the customs accounts entirely and used the ship surveys as the chief source of information on the merchant fleet. In his survey of Europe’s merchant fleets, Richard Unger, for example, drew solely on a series of Elizabethan ship surveys for his evidence.11 Surveys of English merchant shipping are, on the face it, an extremely useful tool for an analysis of the Tudor merchant fleet, providing details on the numbers of ships in a port, region, or the entire nation. They do, however, have two immediate drawbacks. First, many surveys only cover a specific region or focus on ships over a certain size, and it is not always immediately obvious why they were compiled and thus what criteria was being applied for the recording of ships. Second, not all surveys provide the information necessary for a comparison with the port books. A nationwide survey in 1577, for example, tells us there were 135 ships of 100 tons and upwards, and 656 ships from 40 to 100 tons; but not all ships 9 Peter Nash, ‘The Maritime Shipping Trade of Scarborough, 1550 to 1750’, Northern History, 49 (2012), pp. 202-22; Geoffrey Scammell, ‘English Merchant Shipping at the End of the Middle Ages: Some East Coast Evidence’, Economic History Review, 13 (1961), pp. 327-4; Wendy R. Childs, The Trade and Shipping of Hull, 1300-1500 (Hull: East Yorkshire Local History Society, 1990); Colin Platt, Medieval Southampton: The Port and Trading Communities, A.D. 1000-1600 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973); Susan Flavin and Evan T. Jones, eds. Bristol’s Trade with Ireland and the Continent: The Evidence of the Exchequer Customs Accounts (Bristol: Bristol Record Society, 2009); Richard W. Unger, The Ship in the Medieval Economy, 600-1600 (London: Croom Helm, 1980); J. M. Gibson, ‘The 1566 Survey of the Kent Coast’, Archaeologia Cantiana, 112 (1993), pp. 341-53; David Butcher, Medieval Lowestoft: The Origins and Growth of a Suffolk Coastal Community (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2016). 10 Williams, Maritime Trade, pp. 215-226. 11 Richard W. Unger, ‘The Tonnage of Europe’s Merchant Fleets, 1300-1500’, The American Neptune, 52 (1992), pp. 247-61.

86 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

are named, and some vessels are grouped under several ports making it difficult both to link ships to home ports and to compare such surveys with other records.12 What is required to attempt a reconstruction of the merchant fleet are a series of records that provide consistent information. The best sources for this purpose are port books and those ship surveys that provide the same information: a ship’s name, port of origin, tonnage, and the shipmaster’s name. By combining and correlating this information from port books and shipping surveys it is therefore possible to provide a snap-shot total of both tonnage and numbers of separate ships. The accounting year Michaelmas 1571 to Michaelmas 1572 offers the most potential to perform this task. Not only does the year have some of the best kingdom-wide coverage in terms of port books, it also saw the production of the most detailed nationwide ship survey of the entire Tudor period. The man appointed to the task, Thomas Colshill, held positions which gave him intimate knowledge of English mercantile activity and likely explains his selection for the undertaking: he had been supervisor of the petty customs in London in 1549, and in 1572 was appointed as surveyor the great customs in the city.13 Colshill went further than any surveyor of merchant shipping before him.14 Not only did he list all the head ports and their member ports in the kingdom, naming the ships in each and breaking down this information by tonnage, with a kingdom-wide summary at the end of the work, he also provided the name of the master associated with the vessel. Comparing Colshill’s survey with the information from the port books to determine the number of merchant ships in the kingdom in 1571–72 is evidently a challenging task, necessitating an analysis of thousands of ship voyages recorded in the port books. To do so requires the adoption of a methodological approach to identify individual ships, and one that minimises instances of conflation (mistakenly counting two or more vessels as one, thus under-estimating the number of ships) and double counting (counting the same vessel twice and thus over-estimating the number of ships). No methodological approach can ever, of course, be completely 12 The National Archives, Kew England [TNA] SP 12/111 fols. 66r-71r. Williams, Maritime Trade, p. 215 noted a similar problem with these documents. 13 He was also a well-connected man, sitting as an MP for Knaresborough in 1558 and Aylesbury in 1563. In 1557 his brother was described as a servant of the queen, and the family also seems to have an association with the earl of Arundel and Sir John Arundel of Cornwall. For a brief biography of Colshill see N. M. Fuidge, ‘COLSHILL, Thomas (c.1518-95), of London, Hackney, Mdx. and Chigwell, Essex’, in The History of Parliament Online: http://www.historyofparliamentonline. org/volume/1558-1603/member/colshill-thomas-1518-95 14 TNA SP 15/22.

An Investigation of the Size and Geogr aphical Distribution

87

accurate. Even the most nuanced approach cannot legislate for gaps in the historical record, spelling variants of ships’ names, masters’ names, and the tonnage given both between different accounts and even within the same record, and the possibility that some ships had their name changed over a given time period. To legislate for spelling variants the authors, when entering the information from the port books into a relational database, standardised particular pieces of information: the names of home ports, ships, and shipmasters, to allow the database to calculate the number of ships using any of the particular methodologies briefly described below. This process is itself open to problems, but without making an attempt one is forced to remain with port and regional studies where calculations can be more easily undertaken by hand. It should be noted that the shorter the period of analysis the more accurate the figures, as fewer records make problems of shipmasters moving between vessels, and ships serving out of more than one port, less likely, and a short period also minimises the possibility that a large number of vessels had their names changed. It is difficult to know how frequently ship name changes happened, but the shorter the time period investigated the less chance there is that this may have occurred.15 There is also the issue of smuggling: how much did it reduce the appearance of ships within the customs accounts? Smuggling by its very nature was clandestine and intended to avoid the attention of the authorities, yet whilst some vessels will undoubtedly not have appeared in the accounts this number is arguably quite small. Evan Jones has shown that rather than ships being built specifically to smuggle (meaning they never appeared in the customs accounts), the vast majority of cases of smuggling was merchants moving commodities upon which a high tax rate was due, and concealing them (in whole or in part) within cargoes for which negligible rates were paid, and which went through the customs house.16 In other words, whilst the trade records may well underestimate the value and volume of commodities 15 This database forms the basis of the one which underpins the AHRC project website, http:// medievalandtudorships.org/. The methodological approaches discussed here are only a brief overview of a complex set of criteria. For further more detailed discussion see: Craig L. Lambert, and Gary P. Baker, ‘The Merchant Fleet and Ship-Board Community of Kent, c.1565-c.1580’ Archaeologia Cantiana, 140 (2019), pp. 90-110. A book based on the project is also in preparation and this will contain details on methods and how to model the merchant fleet: Andrew Ayton, Gary P. Baker, and Craig L. Lambert, Ships and Seamen: England’s Merchant Fleet and Maritime Communities from the Late Middle Ages to the Age of Drake, 1300-1580 (forthcoming). 16 Evan T. Jones, Inside the Illicit Economy: Reconstructing the Smugglers’ Trade of Sixteenth Century Bristol (Ashgate: Farnham, 2012), pp. 3, 18, 113-37.

88 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

being moved, the actual number of ships recorded is likely to be fairly accurate (bearing in mind of course the problems of under-recording by officials).17 Indeed, even if a ship did evade the customs officials on occasion, it will more likely than not have appeared at least fleetingly in the records to avoid the suspicion. In short, any analysis of the size and geographical distribution of the merchant fleet can only offer approximations, but one must make the attempt if any meaningful, kingdom-wide analysis of the fleet is to be made.

Methodological Approaches for Reconstructing the Merchant Fleet There are essentially four methodologies that can be adopted to estimate the size of the merchant fleet. Within each methodology any ships with identical parameters (after the spellings have been standardised) are counted as the same ship; if there are variants they are counted as separate vessels. The first method uses the ‘three identifiers’ of the ship’s name, ship’s home port, and master’s name. The second – ‘tonnage method’ – discounts the master and uses the ship name, its tonnage, and home port. The third – ‘ship-name method’ – links the home port of a ship with a ship name and discounts the tonnage and master. Each of these three methods has its own strengths and weaknesses. On the plus side the ‘three-identifier method’ allows us to see the service patterns of individual shipmasters, but its viability is tested if large numbers of shipmasters commanded different ships within a given time frame. In terms of examining a short period this does not seem to have been the case. In the calendar year 1572 (i.e. 1 January–31 December), we see that there are c.2,257 individual masters who appear in the customs accounts, and of these c.2,106 (93%) are recorded as only commanding one vessel. Even in large ports the evidence suggests that, over short periods, masters generally stayed with the same ship. Of the sixty-two shipmasters recorded commanding ships of Poole in 1572 only six commanded more than one vessel.18 The ‘ship-name method’ avoids the problem of masters moving between ships, but has the problem of two or more ships with the same 17 On the potential for customs officials to under-record trade, intentionally or otherwise, see Williams, Maritime Trade, pp. 25-33. 18 TNA E 122/30/5; E 190/739/10; E 190/814/8; E 190/865/1; E 190/865/2; E 190/865/3; E 190/865/4; SP 15/22 f. 18v

An Investigation of the Size and Geogr aphical Distribution

89

name and home port being counted as only one vessel, especially for ships with common names like William or John. A 6 ton vessel called the Mary, for instance, was not the same ship as a 200 ton vessel with the same name from the same port, but the ship name method would count this as one ship. The ‘tonnage methodology’ whilst avoiding the potential conflation of two or more ships with the same name from the same port as being one vessel has the major drawback that ships’ tonnages were inconsistently recorded: in 1572 a Grimsby ship called the Robert, commanded by Thomas Spencer, appears nine times in the port books with its recorded tonnage ranging from 30 to 50 tons.19 These three methodological approaches, despite their flaws, are most useful when interrogating large datasets over an extended period of time, when an attempt to reconstruct the fleet ‘by hand’ is impossible. However, the investigation being undertaken in this chapter has an advantage over surveys of a longer period, because studying the fleet over a short period means a more nuanced approach can be applied to the data. In essence this is the fourth methodology, moulding together the best attributes of the other three approaches and examining each port individually to take account of conflation and double counting. To compensate for these methodological pitfalls for this chapter the authors created two databases. The first database included only those ships listed in the ship survey, the second included only those ships recorded in the port books from Michaelmas to Michaelmas 1571–72 (including those from the ports not recorded by Colshill which are discussed below). Account was taken of masters’ names, ship names, and the tonnages linked together, which appeared on multiple occasions in the port book database (because masters were performing more than one voyage in a certain vessel) and these duplicates were removed. Once this was achieved, the two databases were merged into one, which provided us the number of ships and their tonnage for England, Wales, and the Channel Islands from 29 September 1571 to 29 September 1572.

The 1572 Ship Survey Before moving on to examining the size and geographical distribution of the merchant fleet it is essential to understand the limitations of Colshill’s 1572 ship survey as a source for the size of the merchant fleet. The survey is now in a bound book of twenty-five double-sided folios, with a cover which 19 TNA E 190/306/7 fols.1r-3r.

90 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

reads: ‘Marchant Shipps in England Ao. 1572’. On the first paginated folio it records how Colshill used the Customers’ accounts to compile the item, and then continues by listing the head ports and their associated creeks in an east/west geographical order starting with Newcastle and ending with Chester. Under the heading for each port are listed all the ships in that port arranged by tonnage from the largest to the smallest, and under the name of each ship is recorded the master of that vessel. Recorded at the end of each head port section is a breakdown of the number of ships and vessels that fall within specified tonnage ranges, and at the end a cumulative total of these figures is provided: 1,383 ships. The survey, given what it purports to record, has attracted a good deal of scholarly attention, often to show the growth, in terms of tonnage and the number of vessels, between 1572 and another (admittedly less detailed) national survey in 1582.20 Its contents have also been misinterpreted. Michael Oppenheim thought it only included coasting ships and ignored vessels engaged in overseas trade and fishing.21 There is no evidence to support this conclusion. Colshill does not make this claim in the preamble, and it seems that when Oppenheim searched the 1572 survey he was expecting to find larger ships.22 What, therefore, does the ship survey record, and how true a reflection is it of the size and tonnage of the merchant fleet? On the face of it the survey appears to provide accurate information thanks to the detailed breakdown of ships by tonnage band, but this accuracy can be tested and be found wanting. This can f irstly be done by asking how it was that Colshill compiled the survey. Did he, for example, only look for Southampton ships in Southampton port books, or did he search every Customer’s account over 1571–72 to find Southampton ships mentioned in the records of other ports? The evidence on this issue is contradictory. On the one hand there is the case of Boston, Lincolnshire. For the accounting year Michaelmas 1571 to Michaelmas 1572 there are two surviving overseas port books associated with the port, though they only cover the period Michaelmas 1571 to Easter 1572.23 In those books two Boston ships appear: 20 Andrews, Trade Plunder and Settlement, pp. 22-5; Unger, ‘The Tonnage of Europe’s Merchant Fleets’; Williams, Maritime Trade, pp. 146, 247. 21 Michael Oppenheim, ‘Maritime History’, in The Victoria History of the County of Kent ed. William Page (London: St Catherine Press, 1908), p. 299 n.380. 22 The small size of English merchant ships had been noted by the French ambassador in 1539/40 when he reported that there were only seven or eight English merchant ships over 400 tons, Loades, Tudor Navy, p. 93. 23 TNA E 190/388/2; E 190/388/3: these are the Customer and Controller’s books respectively.

An Investigation of the Size and Geogr aphical Distribution

91

the Mary Anne of 50 tons (commanded by Reginald Bell) and the Swanne of 36 tons (commanded by Richard Jackson), and these are the only two ships recorded for that port in the ship survey. 24 Yet, if we look at the 1571–72 port books for the neighbouring port of King’s Lynn, we f ind a further four Boston ships.25 It would seem from this evidence that Colshill did indeed only look at the records of a particular port to f ind ships of that port, which means that he was potentially under-representing the size of the f leet. On the other hand there is the case of Aldeburgh in Suffolk: there are twenty-seven Aldeburgh vessels in the port books, but thirty-four in the ship survey, f ifteen of which appear in both records; cumulatively (when overlap between the two sets of records is accounted for) this totals forty-six ships. If Colshill had used the port books to compile his account, as he claimed to have done, he would have added a further twelve ships (and 160 tons) to Aldeburgh’s entry. These instances of under or over-representing the number of ships are not isolated to these two ports, and we are still none the wiser as to what method Colshill used to compile his survey. He also seems to have underestimated the number of large merchant ships (vessels of 100 tons and over) in the kingdom. A list of ships dated to 1574 tells us that in Plymouth, for example, there were six ships between 100 and 210 tons, yet Colshill’s 1572 survey shows only one ship (the Christopher of 100 tons) in that bracket.26 Similarly, the 1574 list records that thirteen ships of 100 tons and over sailed out of Harwich and Ipswich, whereas Colshill lists only eight ships of 100 tons and above.27 The difference between Colshill’s 1572 survey and another survey undertaken in 1577 is just as striking: the latter records 135 ships at 100 tons and above (17% of the ships in the survey), whereas Colshill’s 1572 survey shows that seventy-six ships (5% of the ships in the survey) were 100 tons or over.28 Obviously comparing the totals in Colshill’s survey with totals in lists two and five years later is problematic; it is possible that a good number of these 100 ton plus ships that do not appear in Colshill’s survey were built after 1572. We do know that in some regions of England ships seem to have gotten larger in the decade between 24 TNA SP 15/22 f.2v. 25 The James (28 tons); Margaret (24 tons); Matthew (20 tons) and Bull (12 tons): TNA E 190/427/2 fols.3r, 4v, 6v. 26 TNA SP 12/96 p.268; TNA SP 15/22 f.21v. 27 TNA SP 12/96 p.270; TNA SP 15/22 fols.7r, 8r. 28 1577 survey: TNA SP 12/11. Figures on ships and their tonnages in 1577 taken from Unger, ‘The Tonnage of Europe’s Merchant Fleets’, Table 1. The percentage for 1572 is 4.7% but it has been rounded up to 5%.

92 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

the 1572 survey and the one compiled in 1582.29 But such was the increase in the number of vessels of this size in the lists of 1574 and 1577 that we are able to question whether at least some of these were active in 1572, and Colshill did not record them. Instances can also be highlighted of Colshill recording ships that never appeared in the customs accounts. The Castell of Comfort (200 tons) recorded by Colshill as a Southampton ship is surely the same vessel owned by William Hawkins and Richard Grenville.30 This vessel had a chequered history but was essentially built for the purpose of taking prizes.31 Indeed, during the time the survey was compiled the Castle was probably in the Caribbean.32 Perhaps the inclusion of the Castle in the survey – a ship not built for trade – hints at Colshill’s true purpose for compiling the survey. We know that he was ordered to complete the task by William Cecil, Lord Burghley, against a background of heightened political tension of the late 1560s and early 1570s. The government had recently thwarted two attempts to oust the queen in favour of the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots; the Northern Rebellion (1569), and the Ridolfi Plot (1571). Both had attempted (whether the prospect was realistic or not) to co-ordinate the risings with the appearance of a Spanish invasion fleet. A survey conducted by the government of the ships of the Royal Navy in July 1570 showed how lamentable a state it was currently in: twenty ships and three galleys available for service, with another three unseaworthy.33 Colshill’s purpose then, seems at least in part to have been about recording merchant vessels that could potentially be requisitioned by the Crown in times of emergency.34 In other words some of the ships he recorded may not have been merchant vessels but instead, like the Castle, have been intended for privateering. 29 Williams, Maritime Trade, p. 217. 30 James A. Williamson, Hawkins of Plymouth: A New History of Sir John Hawkins and of the other Members of his Family in Tudor England (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1949), p. 195; Michael Lewis, The Hawkins Dynasty: Three Generations of a Tudor Family (London: Allen and Unwin 1969), p. 63. Hawkins and Grenville purchased shares in this ship in 1574, but in 1567 George Fenner had sailed her to the Azores and Cape Verde where he subsequently fought a naval battle, see Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement, p. 110. 31 Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering, p. 17. 32 Ibid. 33 TNA SP 12/71 f. 183. 34 On the background to the 1572 survey see: R. Pollitt, ‘Contingency Planning and the Defeat of the Spanish Armada’, The American Neptune, 41,1 (1984), pp. 25-32; Gary P. Baker and Craig L. Lambert, ‘England’s Reserve Navy’: https://www.navyrecords.org.uk/magazine_posts/ englands-reserve-navy-the-ship-survey-of-1572/.

An Investigation of the Size and Geogr aphical Distribution

93

Another problem with the survey is how shipmasters are recorded within it. In some cases Colshill has misread the port books, if indeed they were his source. In October and November 1571, for example, the port books record Edmund Avery of Dartmouth commanding the Elizabeth (15 tons) on two voyages to London; but Colshill lists the master as Edward Avery, and there are several similar clerical errors along the same lines in the survey.35 The appearance of Francis Drake as commander of the Pasco (40 tons) of Plymouth in Colshill’s survey is also puzzling.36 Drake was certainly connected with this vessel and may have purchased it from John Hawkins in or before 1571.37 In May 1572 Drake took this ship with him to the Caribbean, and this might explain why it was Drake who was named as the master on the 1572 survey as his command of the ship falls between Michaelmas 1571 and Michaelmas 1572.38 But nowhere in the surviving port books does Drake appear as a shipmaster, which suggests Colshill received the information about Drake’s command of this vessel from another source. There is also a major issue with the survey with regards to ‘missing’ ports; Colshill omitted sixty-four ports from his survey. Some of these were admittedly small (like Lepe in Hampshire and Eype in Dorset), but it surprising to see that ships from Grimsby and Whitby were not included in the survey, even though there were three Grimsby ships (total of 130 tons) and four Whitby ships (total of 73 tons) recorded in the port books.39 Grimsby’s omittance is even more perplexing when it is considered that, though not a head port, Grimsby (which came under the jurisdiction of Hull), was deemed large enough to be issued with port books of its own. Other ports and riverine settlements were also omitted from the survey like Tewkesbury (seventeen ships at a total of 215 tons in the port books), and Bewdley (eight ships totalling 97 tons). 40 The exclusion of Welsh ports from the survey was even more pronounced: whilst ships from Newport, Mumbles, and Chepstow were included, Aberthaw, Aberystwyth, Barry, Caerleon, Cardiff, Carmarthen, Dale, Milford Haven, St Davids, Tenby, Laugharne, 35 TNA E 190/928/4 fols.1r, 2r; SP 15/22 f.20r. 36 TNA SP 15/22 f.21v. 37 Harry Kelsey, Sir Francis Drake: The Queen’s Pirate (New Haven: Yale, 1998), p. 50. 38 Ibid., p. 51. 39 TNA E 190/306/1 fols.1r, 2v, 4r; E 190/306/3 f.2r; E 190/306/7 fols.1r-3r; E 190/427/4 f.3r. 40 Tewkesbury: TNA E 190/928/1 fols.2r-3r; E 190/928/2 f.2v; E 190/928/11 f.2r; E 190/928/12 fols.1r, 1v; E 190/1011/26, f.2r; E 190/1012/3 fols.1r, 1v, 2r, 3r; E 190/1012/6 f.1r; E 190/1128/13 fols.10r-18r; E 190/1129/1 fols.1v-14v. Bewdley: TNA E 190/1128/13 fols.12v, 13v, 15v; E 190/1129/1 fols.1r, 3r, 3v, 4v, 7r, 8r, 9r, 9v, 10r.

94 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Oystermouth, Tintern, and Swansea were not; all of which appear in the port books.41 Though some of these ships were small (10 tons or less), the size of vessels does not seem to have been a bar on inclusion within the survey; Colshill records ships of this size for a number of other ports. 42 In all, the missing sixty-four English and Welsh ports from the survey amount to 159 ships totalling of 2,271 tons. Of course, Colshill’s survey relied on each head port submitting its books to the Exchequer on time, and it is possible that some of the problems with the 1572 survey might be the result of some ports failing to deliver their accounts promptly. 43 This discussion of Colshill’s ship survey clearly highlights the need for a much more detailed investigation of all surviving Elizabethan ships surveys, how these compare with each other and with the customs accounts. For this present study it is enough to point out that the estimate presented in this chapter for the size of the merchant fleet should been seen as a minimum figure.

The Anglo-Welsh and Channel Islands Merchant Fleet: Michaelmas to Michaelmas 1571-72 Combining the port books and the 1572 ship survey, there were an estimated 1,923 separate native ships operating out of English, Welsh, and Channel Islands ports from 29 September 1571 to 29 September 1572, at a combined tonnage of 62,369. Interestingly, there is some discrepancy between the average ship tonnages in both sources. The average in the ship survey was 37 tons, and in the port books 21 tons, probably due to discrepancies in the recorded tonnage of the same ship in each of the two sources. Given that we are dealing with 1,923 ships, if hundreds of these were recorded with fluctuating tonnages that clearly had an impact on average sizes over the whole fleet. Therefore, the average size of ships as recorded by the whole dataset (thirty-two) is probably a good indicator as to what constituted an average sized merchantman over this period. It is also possible to narrow the analysis of the Elizabethan merchant fleet to take account of regional distribution. 41 TNA SP 15/22 fols.18r, 24v; E 190/928/1 f.2r; E 190/928/7 f.1v; E 190/928/11 fols.2r, 2v; E 190/1012/6 f.1r; E 190/1129/1 fols.1r, 4v, 5r, 5v, 6r, 9v, 10r, 11r, 12v, 19v, 21r, 21v, 22v, 23v, 24r. 42 TNA SP 15/22 fols.18r, 21v, 23r, 24v. 43 Williams, Maritime Trade, pp. 20-23, 34, reconstructs the accounting procedure and notes some problems with sending books out from London to the head ports. Therefore, some of the head ports might have returned their completed accounts late.

95

An Investigation of the Size and Geogr aphical Distribution

Table 3.1 Regional Distribution of English and Welsh Merchant Fleet: Michaelmas–Michaelmas 1571–7244 Region North-East East South-East South-West North-West Channel Islands Wales Unknown

Nos of Ports

No of Ships

Tonnage Total

Average Tonnage

8 54 60 85 8 3 15 1

119 576 578 511 47 31 59 2

5,402 19,651 23,238 11,261 1,140 468 1,139 70

45 34 40 22 24 15 19 35

The above table reveals that the ships of the north-east are, on average, larger than those of any other region. This was almost certainly a result of the Newcastle coal trade, as coal is a bulk product that needed to be freighted in large quantities and in large ships to the principal markets of Hull, King’s Lynn, Great Yarmouth, Ipswich, and London. 45 The south-east of England (including London) is unsurprisingly where we find the largest concentration of ships and tonnage, given that it was from the capital that many of the kingdom’s most prominent merchants, and largest ships trading as far afield as North Africa and Russia, were based. There were almost certainly far more ships in London than the records suggest. The only surviving port books for London from Mich. 1571 to Mich. 1572 are two coastal accounts (which are in a bad state of preservation) that only list shipments of wool and leather, and an overseas account recording imports by foreign merchants. 46 In other words, virtually all the ships of London which appear in 1571–72 are taken from the 1572 survey, and records of other ports, and the same is true elsewhere; there are no surviving port books for Newcastle, for example, before Mich. 1593, and its forty ships at a combined 2,003 tons in 1571–72 is 44 North-East = north bank of the Humber to Scottish border; East = south bank of Humber to Essex; South-East= London to Hampshire; South-West = Dorset to Gloucestershire, including those riverine ports of Worcestershire; North-West = Cheshire, Lancashire and Cumberland. Channel Islands ships were from Alderney (seven ships at 64 tons); Guernsey (eight ships at 115 tons), and Jersey (sixteen ships at 289 tons). 45 J. R. Blake, ‘The Medieval Coal Trade of North East England: Some Fifteenth Century Evidence’, Northern History, 11 (1967), 3-26; J. F. Wade, ‘The Overseas Trade of Newcastle upon Tyne in the Late Middle Ages’, Northern History, 30 (1994), pp. 31-48; J. F. Wade, The Customs Accounts of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1454-1500 (Durham: Surtees Society, 1995). For a later period, see Constance, M. Fraser, The Accounts of the Chamberlains of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1508-1511 (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1987). 46 TNA E 190/5/3; E 190/5/4; E 190/5/5.

96 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

likely an under-estimation. 47 Taking a wider perspective, we can see that the ports located from the south bank of the Humber to, and including, Hampshire accounted for 60% of the ships and 69% of the tonnage for the entire country. Jersey held over half (52%) of the Channel Islands ships, and accounted for 62% of the tonnage. Of course, the above-mentioned totals will inevitably be obscured by the shipping resources of large ports within each region. The north-east, for example, was dominated by Hull and Newcastle which accounted for 78% of the ships and 83% of the total tonnage of the region, and this despite the fact that Hull’s accounts are by no means complete and Newcastle’s do not survive. 48 Table 3.2  Ports within Regions with the Most Ships Region

Port

No. of Ships

Total Tonnage

% of ships % of Tonnage

North-East East South-East South-West North-West Channel Is. Wales

Hull49 G. Yarmouth London Dartmouth Liverpool Jersey / Newport

53 74 174 40 16 16 14

2,483 1,943 13,547 1,233 338 289 441

44.5 13 30 8 34 52 24

46 10 58 11 30 62 39

It must be remembered that the above table does not necessarily show which port had the largest ships in the region by tonnage. King’s Lynn, for example, had fewer ships than Great Yarmouth, but the average tonnage of Lynn’s ships was almost twice that of Yarmouth. Similarly, while there were more ships in Dartmouth at this time, the merchant fleet of Bristol had both larger ships and more overall tonnage (1,252 tons). We can also see the emergence of ports which had been seemingly insignificant in earlier centuries. In the late Middle Ages, Aldeburgh in Suffolk appears only infrequently in the national customs accounts, leading to the conclusion that it was a relatively minor port. Yet, over 1571–72 it had an estimated forty-six ships that were larger, on average, than those of Yarmouth (though Yarmouth’s records are incomplete). Aldeburgh’s relative obscurity in the national customs accounts prior to 1565 can be explained by looking at 47 Descriptive List of Exchequer, Queen’s Remembrancer, Port Books. Part 1. 1565 to 1700, (London: The Public Record Office, 1970), p. 52; TNA SP 15/22 f.1r; E 190/5.6 f.2v; E 190/306/1 fols.1v, 2r, 2v, 15v; E 190/589/5 f.2r; E 190/589/7 f.2r. 48 There is only a coastal account covering Michaelmas 1571 to Easter 1572: E 190/306/1. 49 Bearing in mind, of course, that there are no surviving port books for Newcastle.

An Investigation of the Size and Geogr aphical Distribution

97

the type of trade its ships undertook. Apart from one voyage to the Bay of Bourgneuf in June 1572, all other voyages by Aldeburgh ships were to English ports; we are thus dealing with the one of many ports in which coastal trade predominated, ports that existed in the earlier period which escaped notice of the overseas-centric customs accounts prior to 1565.50 As can be seen from Tables 3.1 and 3.2, the ports with the most ships tended to hold the greatest tonnage. In the case of Yarmouth and Ipswich, however, this was not the case. Yarmouth was a port with a large fishing fleet, with vessels which were also used for trading purposes, whereas in Ipswich there were fewer, but larger, ships used principally for overseas and coastal trading voyages. In other words, examining numbers of ships as opposed to tonnage, can provide an indicator as to the chief economic activity of a port. Table 3.3 shows the ports within their respective regions which possessed the greatest tonnage. Table 3.3  Ports within Regions with the Greatest Tonnage Region

Port

Tonnage

% of regional total

North-East East South-East South-West North-West Channel Islands Wales

Hull Ipswich51 London Bristol Chester Jersey Newport

2,483 1,943 13,547 1,252 338 289 441

46 10 58 11 30 62 39

The size of English ships at this time can also be examined. The largest single vessel recorded for 1571–72 was the 240 ton Salamon (Solomon) of London.52 After this there was a group of thirteen London vessels and the Castle of Comfort at Southampton, all registered at 200 tons.53 These ships, however, were exceptional. Just less than 1% of the ships in England at this time were 200 tons or over, 4% were 100-180 tons, and the majority (32%) were between 20 and 39 tons. At the other end of the scale were just fewer than 11% of ships at less than 10 tons, with the smallest being ships of 2 and 3 tons. 50 TNA E 190/5/5 f.16v; E 190/472/5 fols.1r-2r. 51 Ipswich has fewer vessels so in terms of average tonnage they are larger than Yarmouth ships, even though the total tonnage is the same. 52 TNA SP 15/22 f.16r. 53 TNA E 190/5/5 f.40r; TNA SP 15/22 fols.10r, 17v.

98 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

In terms of import and export voyages recorded in the port books, the cargoes ships carried were obviously a key determinant in which ships were used as well as how big they were; bigger ships tended to travel more further afield than smaller ones, presumably for security purposes and because a larger ship could carry larger cargoes and maximize profits. On 2 August 1572, for example, the 200 ton Jonas arrived into London from Gdańsk (present-day Poland) carrying bulk cargo such as 100 split oak planks, 41 lasts of pitch, 20 lasts of ashes, 3 short spruces, and 400 paving stones.54 Similarly at the end of the month on 30 August the 160 ton Harry arrived into London from Civitavecchia (a coastal town in Italy north-west of Rome). Though this ship’s cargo is not recorded it was probably freighting high value luxury goods which needed a large ship for defensive purposes and one that could carry a sizeable cargo.55 Much smaller vessels were also employed in overseas trade, but usually on routes where the distance was shorter. The 5 ton Rose of Jersey visited Southampton on 4 September 1572 and the 6 ton Edward of Poole sailed to Jersey on 10 March 1572.56 Small ships also participated in Anglo-French trade routes. On 23 May 1572 the 6 ton Mynion of Jersey left Southampton for St Malo, and on 24 July the 7 ton Harte of Harwich sailed into Ipswich from Dieppe.57 On occasion, however, a relatively small ship can be found trading much further afield, like the Angel of Topsham at 20 tons, which left Exeter on 14 August 1572 bound for Sanlúcar de Barrameda in southern Spain,58 and it is also worth noting that some vessels used on voyages of exploration were small. In 1576 Martin Frobisher sailed to Newfoundland in the Gabriel and Michael, both 25-30 tons, and in 1583 the Squirrel, a pinnace of probably 10 tons (in which Sir Humphrey Gilbert was lost with all hands in a storm off the Azores in 1583), had already crossed the Atlantic.59 Looking at the voyages more closely also provides a snap-shot of which trades English ships were employed in. Of the 2,263 recorded ship voyages undertaken by English, Welsh, and Channel Islands vessels from Michaelmas to Michaelmas 1571–72, nearly three-quarters (1,664) were coastal journeys.60 The focus of English overseas voyages was on the French ports 54 TNA E 190/5/5 f.40r. 55 TNA E 190/5/5 f.44v. 56 TNA E 190/814/8 f.33r; E 190/865/1 f.5r. 57 TNA E 190/814/8 fols.7v, 41r; E 190/589/6 f.16v. 58 TNA E 190/928/8 f.8r. 59 James McDermott, Martin Frobisher: Elizabethan Privateer (New Haven: Yale, 2001), p. 123; Andrews, Trade Plunder and Settlement, pp. 24, 192. 60 There are voyages for which the journey information is not known and this classifies Channel Islands ships visiting English ports as native (coastal) trade.

An Investigation of the Size and Geogr aphical Distribution

99

of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Rouen, Bordeaux, La Rochelle, St Malo, or Cherbourg, and the Low Countries ports such as Vlissingen and Amsterdam. Evidently geography played a significant role in which trade routes ships from most ports participated in. For example, for overseas voyages Bristol shippers traded primarily with Iberia, the ports of western France such as Bordeaux and La Rochelle, and those on the east coast of Ireland, while east coast shippers tended to sail to Antwerp and other Low Countries destinations.61 Channel Island shippers favoured the Southampton, Poole, and Brittany runs. Welsh shippers focused their attention on the coastal trade between the ports of Bristol, Wales, and north Devon; those in Chester were focused on the ports of the north-west and Ireland.62 In other words, ports and regions adopted their merchant fleet to the trades with which they were involved. In the north east, where Newcastle coal ships trundled down the east coast, ships tended to be larger to carry this bulky and heavy commodity. By contrast, ships of ports like Plymouth were smaller, better suited to nipping across the Channel and back to La Rochelle for wine.63 Inevitably there were always outliers: ships and masters which did not f it within established trading patterns of their port and/or wider region. For instance, for overseas voyages most Kent ships traded with the ports of north-east France and the Low Countries, but occasionally a Kentish vessel would make a trip further af ield. In July 1565, for example the 60 ton Barke of Sandwich arrived into London from the Barbary Coast with a cargo of dates weighing 200 pounds.64 Nevertheless, the salient point is that most ships operated within the established trade networks of their port and/ or wider region. Whilst ship biographies are beyond the scope of this chapter, we do know that at least some ships on the survey had long careers at sea. The 5 ton Jesus commanded by John Holford of Hythe (Hampshire) is in the ship survey, but we can trace this vessel’s career from 1565 to 1586, mainly plying coastal routes.65 It might have had a longer life, but the records we have for 61 For examples of Bristol’s overseas trade in the sixteenth century see: Flavin and Jones, Bristol’s Trade with Ireland and the Continent. 62 On 17 April 1572 Welsh ship (The Mighell commanded by Jenkin Davye) came into Exeter from Morlaix, TNA E 190/928/8 f.26v. 63 Gary P. Baker, ‘Domestic Maritime Trade in Late Tudor England c.1565-85: A Case Study of King’s Lynn and Plymouth’, in The Routledge Research Companion to Marine and Maritime Worlds 1400-1800, ed. Claire Jowitt, Craig Lambert, and Steve Mentz (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), pp. 95-124. 64 TNA E 190/3/2 f.20v. 65 TNA E 190/814/1 f.1r, 10r; E 190/816/7 f.5r.

100 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Holford’s career before 1565 only provide us with his name and his home port.66 Holford was also a fisherman and he provides an example of one those shipmasters who combined fishing with coastal trading, most likely using the same vessel for both purposes.67 Given the purpose for which she was built, the Castle of Comfort noted above had a relatively lengthy career. In 1566 she was used in George Fenner’s Guinea voyage, and we know she was still in service in 1575/76. Over her documented career she was owned by Henry Compton, William Hawkins, and Richard Grenville, and worked out of London, Southampton, and Plymouth. She cruised the seas off Morocco, the Azores, Guinea, the Caribbean, and Brittany.68 Other vessels named in the survey however did not have the longevity of the Jesus. The Ragged Staff, the largest ship in Bristol at the time of the survey, had a colourful career.69 Owned by Andrew Barker in the early 1570s, it was regularly employed in trade to French and Spanish ports.70 Yet, in 1576 it was scuttled by Barker when he used it for a raid of reprisal in the Spanish Caribbean.71 We can also look briefly at ship names.72 There was a conservative tendency in the naming of English ships, as saints and religious names predominated: Anne, Angel, Christ, Christopher, John, Margaret, Mary, and George are the most common. There is, however, a more eclectic approach to naming in the larger conurbations. In London, for example, there are more names that feature animals, both real and imagined, including the Greyhound, Golden Dove, Black Dragon, Springing Horse, Snake, and White Peacock. One plausible reason for saints’ names remaining prominent in smaller, regional, ports and coastal settlements is that the ‘reach’ of the Reformation was not as significant in such places, and ship owners chose 66 Service in 1552: LPS SC/5/4/49, f.8v; service in 1553: LPS SC/5/4/20, f.2r; service in 1555: LPS SC 5/4/52, f.8r; service in 1559: LPS SC 5/4/57, f.13v 67 For his career as an oyster fisher see Tudor Revels (http://www.tudorrevels.co.uk/). 68 Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement, p. 110 and idem, Elizabethan Privateering, p. 17; Lewis, The Hawkins Dynasty:, pp. 53-4. 69 TNA SP 15/22 f.23r. 70 TNA E 190/1129/2 f.2r; E 190/1129/3 fols.2r, 11v; E 190/1129/14, f.5r. 71 Prior to sailing to the Caribbean, Barker had two ships conf iscated by the Spanish and he took the Ragged Staff (along with a ship called the Bear, probably the 40 ton ship with that name recorded on the ship survey of 1572; TNA SP 15/22 f.23r) to the Caribbean in order to gain restitution for the money he lost when his other two ships were taken by the Spanish authorities. It ended badly for Barker because he was captured and executed, see Laughton, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online version: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/1387?docPos=1; accessed 24/11/2017. 72 A fuller survey of shipping and ship names will appear in Ayton, Baker, and Lambert, Ships and Seamen (forthcoming).

An Investigation of the Size and Geogr aphical Distribution

101

to keep to traditional names.73 Shippers may also have chosen ships with certain names to send to some ports on religious grounds to curry favour with overseas partners, although evidence for such practices is contradictory. For example, in September 1572 the Trinity of Kenton left Exeter for Seville, yet in the previous month the 16 ton Greyhound of Topsham had sailed to Vigo in Spain.74 On this evidence it would seem that English shippers trading with Catholic states did not think the name of the ship would impede their commerce. Another interesting name which appears in the ship survey is the Negro. In the whole database of c.53,000 ship-voyages (1400-1580),75 only three ships of that name appear: one of 40 tons in Plymouth commanded by Richard Graston, one of 60 tons in Melcombe Regis commanded by Oliver Gregory, and one in Dover of 15 tons commanded by Francis Pett.76 Interestingly, the Melcombe vessel did undertake a voyage out of Plymouth in 1569.77 This is a very unusual name, but it also appears in the The Fair Maid of the West by Thomas Heywood, a play partly set in south-western England, as the vessel commanded by the play’s protagonist, Bess Bridges.78 Given there is a link between Bess and the West-Country ports, including Plymouth, could it be that Heywood was familiar with this unusual name? Parts of the play were probably prepared during the latter part of Elizabeth’s reign, but when the ship survey was compiled Heywood would have been a child. Still, it is an interesting coincidence that Heywood chose such an unusual name for a ship and set part of his story in one of the only regions where that ship name had been in use. Some owners, by contrast, simply named their vessels after themselves. The Thomas Allen of London that entered its home port in June 1572 from Hamburg must be a ship owned by Thomas Allen, merchant of the Queen’s Baltic Stores and a Muscovy Company man, who was also one of the many backers for the Frobisher voyages in search of the north-west passage.79 Clearly, more research is needed into ship-naming practices as there are many social, religious, and potentially commercial reasons for naming a ship that go beyond the scope of this present piece. 73 See, for example, Eamon Duffy, The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). 74 TNA E 190/928/8 f.8v; E190/928/9 f.9r. 75 www.medievalandtudorships.org. 76 TNA E 190/739/21 f.2r; E 190/864/12 fols.1r-9r; E 190/1011/12 f.7v; TNA SP 15/22 f.21v; E 190/739/21 f.2r. 77 TNA E 190/739/21 f.2r; E 190/864/12 fols.1r-9r; E 190/1011/12 f.7v; TNA SP 15/22 f.21v 78 Thomas Heywood, The Fair Maid of the West or A Girl Worth Gold: Two Comedies by Thomas Heywood with an Introduction and Notes by John Payne Collier (London, 1850), p. 54 79 McDermott, Martin Frobisher, pp. 165, 285.

102 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Conclusion Whilst the most detailed ship survey produced in the sixteenth century in 1572 is problematic, if used carefully in conjunction with the English customs accounts it is possible for historians to partially reconstruct the size and geographical distribution of the Anglo-Welsh and Channel Islands merchant fleet. At the time of the survey’s composition England was on the cusp of embarking on a series of voyages that within three decades would see English ships sailing to North America with greater frequency, alongside voyages into the Pacific and Indian oceans. This article highlights that England’s merchant fleet was buoyant, ready to meet these new challenges, and much numerically larger than it has been credited with by previous scholarship, and even Colshill’s survey. In terms of the fleet’s distribution, the eastern, south-eastern, and south-western ports dominated. London had by far the largest concentration of tonnage and ships. Yet the east coast also had a considerable number of ships and tonnage employed in trade, particularly the trade in coal, and many other wares were transported to and from London, the other east-coast ports, and the Low Countries.80 The south-western ports, on the other hand, were looking further af ield, and while their economies were underpinned by the coasting trade and commerce with France and Iberia they had an eye on the wider Atlantic world.81 In the north-west, Liverpool, that was to emerge in later centuries as a major overseas port, was still at this juncture focused primarily upon Ireland and the coasting trade. Historians like to see trends in data and point to significant changes in the areas they investigate, but the merchant fleet from the late Middle Ages to 1572 displayed just as much continuity as change. In 1572 ports such as Hull, which in the late Middle Ages acted as a central hub of the north-eastern trades and contributed heavily to the wars of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, still possessed large numbers of ships.82 Great

80 Blake, ‘The Medieval Coal Trade’; Mavis Mate, Trade and Economic Developments, 1450-1550: The Experience of Kent, Surry, and Sussex (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2006). 81 Alison Grant, ‘Breaking the Mould: North Devon Maritime Enterprise, 1560-1640,’ in Tudor and Stuart Devon: The Common Estate and Government, Essays Presented to Joyce Youings, eds. by Todd Gray, Margery Rowe and Audrey Erskine (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1992), pp. 119-40. 82 Childs, The Trade and Shipping of Hull; Wendy R. Childs, ed., The Customs Accounts of Hull 1453-1490 (Leeds: The Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 1986).

An Investigation of the Size and Geogr aphical Distribution

103

Yarmouth also continued to maintain a large fleet in the late Tudor period.83 In the south-west, ports like Dartmouth that had bolstered the crown’s naval fleets in the Hundred Years War and played an important part in the Bordeaux wine trade, still continued to be an important centre of trade in the sixteenth century.84 In 1572 ships were probably smaller than they had been in the mid to late fifteenth century.85 But 1572 is also perhaps a watershed moment, as over the next fifteen to twenty years the evidence suggests that the proportion of merchant ships over 100 tons started to grow. There are reasons as to why this might have happened. The Anglo-Spanish wars of the mid-1580s and beyond encouraged privateering, which in turn led to the construction of bigger ships which could be used in privateering but which also offered more protection for vessels undertaking trade at a time of heightened tensions. Secondly, the 1580s was an important period for English maritime expansion. True, the Muscovy voyages of the 1550s had already borne fruit, but from the 1580s maritime expansion moved up a gear and included colonising ventures coupled with the creation of trading companies, intent on exploiting the riches of the East, all of which needed bigger ships. Yet, all this lay in the future and in 1572 the merchant fleet of England, Wales, and the Channel Islands was relatively robust. Bearing in mind we do not have full coverage for the port books in this period, it can be estimated that in 1571–72 there was a minimum of c.2,000 native ships sailing in and out English, Welsh, and Channel Islands harbours; far larger than Colshill’s 1572 ship survey indicates. The size and geographical distribution of the merchant fleet in the last quarter of the sixteenth century provided the ideal foundation for England’s later maritime expansion.

83 Anthony Saul, ‘Great Yarmouth in the Fourteenth Century’ (Unpublished D.Phil thesis: University of Oxford, 1975); Anthony Saul, ‘Great Yarmouth and the Hundred Years War in the Fourteenth Century’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 52 (1979), pp. 105-115. 84 Maryanne Kowaleski, ‘Warfare, Shipping and Crown Patronage: The Impact of the Hundred Years War on the Port Towns of Medieval England’, in Money, Markers and Trade in late Medieval Europe: Essays in Honour of H.A. Munro, eds. Lawrin Armstrong, Ivana Elbl and Martin Elbl (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 233-54; Craig L. Lambert, ‘Henry V and the Crossing to France: Reconstructing Naval Operations for the Agincourt Campaign, 1415’, Journal of Medieval History, 43 (2017), 24-39. See also Craig L. Lambert, ‘Naval Service and the Cinque Ports’, in Military Communities in Late Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Andrew Ayton, eds. Gary P. Baker, Craig L. Lambert and David Simpkin (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2018), pp. 211-36. 85 Ian Friel, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Big Ship, 1400-1520’, in The World of the Newport Medieval Ship: Trade, Politics and Shipping in the Mid-Fifteenth Century, ed. Evan T. Jones and Richard Stone (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2018), pp. 37-56.

4. An Evaluation of Scottish Trade with Iberiaduring the Anglo-Spanish War, 1585-1604 Claire McLoughlin

Scotland’s trade with Iberia in the later sixteenth century has been, until recently, a little researched subject.1 Previous scholarship on the relationship between this newly Calvinist Scottish kingdom and Spain as the centre of Counter Reformation intrigue usually focuses on conflict rather than commerce. Scotland, a country with a still volatile Catholic nobility, often in rebellion, was seen as a place which could provide a second front against England in the Anglo-Spanish war.2 Indeed the most detailed scholarly research, by David Worthington and Concepción Saenz-Cambra, has concentrated on the intentions and policies of the Spanish Habsburgs towards Scotland during this period.3 As Saenz-Cambra has pointed out, Scotland’s political and religious instability at the beginning of James’s adult reign, coupled with the rising influence of his Catholic cousin, Esme Stewart, the Earl of Lennox, made the kingdom increasingly attractive to Philip II.4 The Government of England, meanwhile, kept a wary eye on its northern neighbour, with the common perception that Scotland was politically insecure and in need of money enforcing the impression that the kingdom could be susceptible to Spanish influence.5 This view of Scotland as a geopolitical opportunity for Spain, however, is only one facet of Scotland’s position in the Anglo-Spanish war, with Scotland’s neutral status in the conflict affording opportunities for both Scottish and English commercial classes. 1 See Claire McLoughlin, ‘Scottish Commercial Contacts with the Iberian World, 1580-1730’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of St Andrews, 2014). 2 See Steve Murdoch, ‘James VI and the formation of a Scottish-British Military Identity’ in Fighting for Identity: Scottish Military Experience, c.1550-1900, ed. by Steve Murdoch and Andrew Mackillop (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 3-11. 3 David Worthington, Scots in Habsburg Service, 1618-1648 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 25-30; Concepción Saenz-Cambra, ‘Scotland and Philip II, 1580-1598: Politics, Religion, Diplomacy and Lobbying’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2003). 4 Saenz-Cambra, ‘Scotland and Philip II’, pp. 23- 64. 5 Susan Doran, ‘Loving and Affectionate Cousins? The Relationship between Elizabeth I and James VI of Scotland, 1586-1603’ in Tudor England and its Neighbours eds. by Susan Doran and Glen Richardson (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education UK, 2005), pp. 203-229.

106 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

This chapter investigates Scottish trade with Iberia during the conflict by bringing together numerous fleeting references in various secondary works and adding a significant amount of original research. Initially, this involves a brief discussion of examples of Scottish trade with Iberia, showing that this trade was more common than previously thought. A survey of the delicate political situation in which Scotland found herself during the Anglo-Spanish war follows, including the influence this had on trade, and the challenges that Scottish merchants faced due to the conflict. The last section will focus more particularly on the Scots who took advantage of the war by acting as intermediaries for their English counterparts, and the dangers that this could present to the merchants involved. As alluded to in the introduction, trade relations between Scotland and Iberia have, until recently, been a neglected area of early modern history, with references to Scots trading in Iberia appearing in secondary literature only as part of a wider study on a different topic, rather than as a standalone subject.6 Traditional scholarly perceptions of early modern Scottish commercial relations with Iberia are probably best summed up by the work of S.G.E Lythe and J. Butt, who refer to Iberia as ‘[a] great potential market, never much exploited by Scotsmen’.7 Despite this, evidence of Scottish trade with Iberia in the late sixteenth century does exist, with Scottish vessels a common sight around Iberian coasts. In October 1591, for example, it was reported by Robert Bowes, an English agent, that four ships from Scotland were ready to sail for Spain, with a ship of Aberdeen sailing for the same destination in 1597.8 A letter from George Nicolson to Sir Robert Cecil noted that two ships of Leith owned by Watty Morton and Solomon Barker had sailed to Spain in June 1600, both carrying cargoes of coal.9 Finally, the will and testament of John Whippo, a mariner from Leith, records that Whippo died in Lisbon in July 1601 while on a trading voyage.10 Indeed, Scottish ships 6 McLoughlin, ‘Scottish Commercial Contacts’, pp. 18-20. 7 S.G.E Lythe and J. Butt, An Economic History of Scotland, 1100-1939 (Glasgow: Blackie, 1975), p. 64. 8 Calendar of State Papers relating to Scotland and Mary Queen of Scots, 12 vols., online at: http:// tannerritchie.com [Hereafter: CSPS], X, pp. 575-577. Robert Bowes to Lord Burghley, 3 October 1591; Aberdeen Shore Work Accounts, 1596-1670, ed. by Louise B. Taylor, (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1972), 31. Simpson is also noted as the clerk of vessel that enters Aberdeen, possibly from Spain, in February 1598. This could be the same ship that left in December 1597, see p. 33. 9 CSPS, XIII II, 649-50. George Nicolson to Sir Robert Cecil, 12 June 1600. 10 National Records of Scotland [Hereafter: NRS], CC8/8/37. 6 January 1603. While the document was registered in 1603, Whippo died in July 1601. Many thanks to Sue Mowat for bringing this to my attention.

An Evaluation of Scottish Tr ade with Iberia

107

were such frequent visitors to Iberia during the Anglo-Spanish war that one creative English agent suggested that, rather than try and catch the Spanish fleet returning from South America while at sea, English vessels should merely disguise themselves as Scottish and wait in the mouth of the Guadalquivir.11 Moreover, these voyages were not isolated, but often reflected long-term trading relationships established by individual Scottish merchants, some of them resident in, or at least regularly travelling to, Spain. In August 1591, Juan Velazques, captain of a province in the Basque region, granted a trading licence to the Scot, William Home, allowing him to trade in that region.12 A letter from Philip II to Diego de Chaves Orellana two years later sheds light on more Scottish traders, who appear to have been based in the north of Spain, and were listed as carrying authentic licences to trade; and in January 1596 James VI wrote to Philip II in favour of Thomas Bogg, another Scottish merchant trading in Spain, and promised favourable treatment for Spanish merchants in Scotland.13 In February 1603, William Clepham stated to the English agents interviewing him that he had lived in Portugal for the previous eighteen months (having traded between Scotland and Spain for five years), with the same source additionally recording that an Englishman had arrived in Lisbon via a Scottish ship.14 While this evidence may appear fragmentary, it is worth noting that Scottish customs records are disappointingly scarce prior to the midseventeenth century (unlike in England as Lambert and Baker’s work in this collection demonstrates) and evidence of trade often survives only when normal trading practices were interrupted.15 We can be reasonably confident, then, that these examples represent more continuous and wide-ranging trading connections. The Anglo-Spanish war interrupted these normal trading practises and, as a result, sheds more light onto the extent of Scottish trade with Iberia. As the following section will show, the continuation of that trade during the conflict commanded interest from the English and Scottish states, as well as commercial communities. Given the 11 Pauline Croft, ‘Trading with the Enemy’, The Historical Journal, 32:2 (1989), p. 288. 12 NRS, JC66/8, 23 August 1591. Home later traded in France and was summoned before a local Calais court due to unpaid debts. See NRS, JC66/9. undated. 13 L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Library, Brigham Young University online at http:// lib.byu.edu/digital/phil2/about.php, Philip King of Spain: Correspondence, 5 February 1593; The Cecil Papers online at: http://cecilpapers.chadwyck.co.uk [hereafter: Cecil Papers], CP222/28. 1 January 1595/6. 14 Cecil Papers, CP91/159. The Earl of Bath to Sir Robert Cecil, 26 February 1602-3. 15 See chapter 3.

108 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

ongoing Catholic uprisings in Scotland, it is hardly surprising that Queen Elizabeth’s network of agents kept a close eye on the Scottish king, his kingdom, and their dealings with Philip II of Spain and his subjects. Indeed, there has been much scholarly work on English spy networks, very often in the context of the Stuart claim to the English throne.16 In this milieu it is not surprising that overt and covert English reports from Scotland were frequent, and as the Anglo-Spanish War went on, reference to Scottish relations including trade, with Iberia, were common. Such reports often included reported sightings of Spanish ships arriving in Scotland, and of Scottish ships leaving for Spain. For example, in a letter from Robert Bowes to Lord Burghley, advisor to Elizabeth, Bowes recorded an interview with Englishmen captured by Spanish ships and subsequently freed in Orkney. He wrote that he believed that a Spanish ship would continue to stay near the islands until joined by Scottish ships, upon which they would sail to Spain in convoy.17 Bowes added that two ships of ‘this town’ (probably Leith) were also preparing to sail to Spain, although he was unaware whether they would ‘have any fellowship with the Spaniards’, thus allowing for a purely commercial connection.18 Occasionally, Scottish vessels were used in Iberian voyages in the knowledge that they would visit, or were going near, the English coast. In 1594, for instance, a Scottish vessel of Dundee was employed to transport Englishmen home from Spain, after they were captured by Spanish privateers.19 While this intelligence regarding Scottish activities was of interest to Elizabeth’s councillors, the information that Scottish merchants and travellers could provide regarding the Spanish and their activities was far more important, particularly as English merchants and vessels were banned from Philip’s dominions. For example, in September 1601, Henry Hayworth, the mayor of Dartmouth, questioned Gilbert Gardin, master of a ship from Dundee. Gardin reported that he had seen 8,000 Spanish troops ready to 16 For more on the remarkable extent of Tudor spy networks during the reign of Elizabeth I see Robert Hutchinson, Elizabeth’s Spy Master (London: Phoenix, 2006); Stephen Alford, The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I (London: Penguin Books, 2013). From a Stuart perspective, see Cynthia Fry, ‘Diplomacy & Deception: King James VI of Scotland’s foreign relations with Europe (c. 1580-1603)’, (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of St Andrews, 2014). 17 CSPS, X, 390-392. Robert Bowes to Lord Burghley, 4 September 1590. 18 Ibid. Bowes was writing from Edinburgh, but the ships were likely to be from Leith, Edinburgh’s port town. Bowes also records that other ships were due to sail to Spain in the following days. 19 Cecil Papers, CP29/69. Henry Browne to the Queen, 1594.

An Evaluation of Scottish Tr ade with Iberia

109

embark on 35 ships, with more expected.20 In a rare piece of corroboration, just over a week later Sir Walter Ralegh wrote to Secretary Cecil that two merchants of Aberdeen had reported that 36 large ships, with 6,000 soldiers, had indeed left Lisbon destined for Ireland.21 This is almost certainly the force that landed in Ireland in October 1601 and later fought in the battle of Kinsale.22 It was not just information on Irish or Spanish individuals that the English collated; information about Scots abroad was also required by Elizabeth’s advisors and obtained by English agents based overseas. In October 1592, Richard Tomson wrote to Burghley informing him that he had been told, by Scots merchants who had been trading with Iberia, that many Scots who were ‘evil affected to theire Kinge and countrye, are gotten into Spaine and there enterayned bye the kinge’.23 England was not alone in seeking information: in August 1588, mariners from ‘little Leith’ gave details to Spanish authorities on the political affairs in Scotland, such as the marriage of the Earl of Huntly to the sister of the Duke of Lennox and the activities of William Semple.24 There are other examples of this practice, with John Lowrie, a Scot returning from Bordeaux, stating to one A. Douglas (presumably an English agent) that he had met a fellow countryman returning from Portugal, who had told him that Scottish, Irish, and Flemish masters were being prevented from leaving Lisbon in order to order to act as pilots for the transportation of the Spanish army.25 On occasion conflicting intelligence was provided: in March 1603, one Scotsman reported preparations in Lisbon for a great armada, but fifteen days later another Scot, Thomas Brown, reported that the fleet was actually bound for the East Indies.26 In addition to England’s existing intelligence-gathering resources, the quizzing of Scots added a welcome additional source of 20 Calendar of State Papers Domestic, 38 vols., online at: http://tannerritchie.com [Hereafter: CSPD], VI, 97. Henry Heyward, Mayor of Dartmouth to Sir Robert Cecil, 17 September 1601 21 Ibid, 105. Sir Walter Ralegh to Sir Robert Cecil, 26 September 1601. 22 The Battle of Kinsale: Study and documents from the Spanish Archives, ed. by Enrique García Hernán (Valencia: Albatros Ediciones, 2013), 22-24. 23 Lists and Analysis of State Papers Foreign Series: Elizabeth I, May 1592-June 1593, ed. by Richard Bruce Wernham (London: H.M. Stationary Off ice, 1964), 358. Richard Tomson to Burghley, 22 October 1592. 24 Calendar of Letters, Dispatches and State Papers Relating to the Negotiations between England and Spain, 17 vols., online at: http://tannerritchie.com [Hereafter: CSPSpanish], XVII, 406. 27 August 1588. 25 Cecil Papers, CP30/90. A. Douglas to Lord Burghley, 27 February 1595-6. It is possible that the author was Archibald Douglas who is discussed in more detail below. 26 Cecil Papers, CP99/83. Sir Nicholas Parker to Sir Robert Cecil, 2 April 1603.

110 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

information. The usefulness of Scottish merchants and Scottish neutrality during the war was not confined, however, to the supply of information. English merchants utilised their close geographical location to Scotland as a way to continue to trade. While the Anglo-Spanish conflict itself has been perceived as an ideological battle of religious differences, the reality for the English economy was very different. As Pauline Croft has stated, Anglo-Iberian trade was mutually beneficial, and the Anglo-Spanish war was an unmitigated disaster for merchants from both areas.27 Richard Wernham goes further, arguing that the difficulty English merchants had selling their cloth abroad had a knock-on effect for the whole country and damaged the English economy.28 Therefore English merchants continued to trade, using whatever methods they could to maintain commercial connections. It was not just English merchants who found the war damaging, Spanish merchants also complained. In 1591 the Venetian ambassador reported that merchants in Seville were demanding to be allowed to import goods ‘from any country whatsoever, especially from England, otherwise they declare that customs dues will be reduced to nothing’.29 For Englishmen who wished to trade without revealing their nationality, it was easiest to imitate their Irish and Scottish neighbours.30 This led to amusing, almost farcical, situations where English ships attempted to disguise themselves as Scottish, with varying results. In September 1587, the James of Leith sailed to San Lucar. All was not as it seemed, however, as the Scottish crew had been picked purely on the basis of their nationality and the vessel was actually the Dog of London.31 Due to such activities, Colonel William Semple was appointed by the Spanish government in 27 Pauline Croft, ‘English Commerce with Spain and The Armada War, 1558-1603’ in, England, Spain and the Gran Armada 1585-1604 eds. by Simon Adams, M.J Rodriguez-Salgado (London: John Donald, 1991), p. 242. 28 R.B Wernham, Before the Armada: The Emergence of the English Nation, 1485-1588 (New York: Norton, 1972), p. 388. 29 Calendar of State Papers relating to English Affairs Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice, VIII, ed. by Horatio F. Brown, available online at: http://tannerritchie.com, 528. Tomaso Contarini, Venetian Ambassador in Spain to the Doge and Senate, 2 March 1591. 30 Pauline Croft, ‘English Trade with Peninsular Spain, 1558-1625’ (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Oxford, 1969), 155. For Irish merchants see Óscar Recio Morales, ‘Identity and Loyalty: Irish Traders in Seventeenth Century Iberia’ in Irish and Scottish Mercantile Networks in Europe and Overseas in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries eds. by David Dickson, Jan Parmentier and Jane Ohlmeyer (Gent: Academia Press, 2007), pp. 197-210. 31 Croft, ‘Trading with the Enemy’, 288. Croft’s work details other examples such as the Samuel of London, which travelled to San Lucar under the name of the William of Kirkcaldy.

An Evaluation of Scottish Tr ade with Iberia

111

November 1597 to help weed out those Englishmen disguising themselves as Irish or Scottish.32 Semple, a long-term Catholic advocate and exile bent on overturning the Reformation in Scotland, proved successful in his task, and it was revealed that the vast majority of the ‘Scottish’ and ‘Irish’ ships at Huelva and Ayamonte were in fact English.33 Other Englishmen resident in Spain were arrested for attempting to conceal their origins, such as Walter Thomas, Ronald Bainsley, and John Barrett, all from Bristol but residing in Andalusia and pretending to be Scottish.34 Although there is evidence to suggest that Bristol’s trade was more buoyant that other areas of England during this period, it is fair to infer that if Bristol merchants were trying to remain in Spain under this guise then other Englishmen were doing so too.35 One Edward Firman, who actually was a Scotsman, was also arrested, allegedly for keeping property and business in Bristol.36 Even with Semple’s help, it was evidently difficult for the Spanish authorities to tell the difference between English and Scottish merchants, mainly due to the language similarities, as lamented by Pedro de Aldaya, a judge at the Royal Court of Seville, in 1598.37 In addition to disguising themselves, merchants also had to disguise their goods. The practice of forging the seal of the king of Scotland was as widespread as English traders pretending to be Scottish. In an attempt to lessen his sentence from the Inquisition, the English merchant Bartholomew Cole discussed the practice, stating (in regards to forged passports) ‘any stamps needed can without difficulty be made in England’.38 He further confessed that he himself had made a number of stamps to mark merchandise that he traded, and he knew that merchants also used French and Flemish stamps.39 In August of the following year John Clerk was arrested, possibly in England, for forging the seal of the king of Scotland: however, he was released, and was reported to be travelling to Spain. 40 If Clerk was indeed arrested in 32 Archivo General de Simancas [Hereafter: AGS], Estado Legajo 181. 26 November 1597. 33 Ibid, Aldaya to Philip II, 16 February 1598. 34 Albert J. Loomie, ‘Sir William Semple and Bristol’s Andalucian trade, 1597-1598’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 82 (1963), p. 184. 35 Richard Stone, ‘The Overseas Trade of Bristol before the Civil War’, International Journal of Maritime History, 23 (2011), 211-239. With thanks to the editors for bringing this to my attention. 36 Loomie, ‘Sir William Semple’, p. 184. 37 AGS, Estado Legajo 181. Aldaya to Philip II, 16 February 1598. 38 English Merchants and the Spanish Inquisition in the Canaries, eds. by L de Alberti and A.B Wallis Chapman (London: Royal Historical Society, 1912), p. 74. 39 Ibid. 40 ‘Cecil Papers: August 1593’ in Calendar of the Cecil Papers in Hatfield House: Volume 4, 15901594, ed R.A Roberts (London 1892), 344-367. British History Online, http://www.british-hisotroy.

112 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

England, the fact that he was released does suggest complicity by the English authorities who, regardless of their state of war, understood the harmful economic effect of the conflict. While mimicking their Scottish and Irish neighbours provided one, albeit dangerous, way for English merchants to continue to trade, the similarities between Scotland and England were not always to the advantage of their Scottish counterparts, and the war added new dangers for merchants from the neutral kingdom. During the Anglo-Spanish war Scottish merchants had two gauntlets to run; the first past English ships, whose crew might consider a Scottish vessel as ‘fair game’, particularly if it was on a trade voyage to their enemy; and the second past the Spanish authorities who, as outlined above, found it difficult to differentiate between English and Scottish merchants, and might be less than scrupulous when in need of supplies. 41 For example, an unsigned letter, written in early 1588 and most likely intended for English intelligence, indicated that Scottish ships were in danger of being seized for use in the Armada, stating ‘They embargo all kind of ships they can take, except Frenchmen; there was chase given to fourteen sail of English, Scottish, Flemish, and French ships […] whereof there are five taken’. 42 It is not clear whether any the Scots escaped or were captured. In March 1595, a report to Bowes from George Nicolson recorded that Scottish ships were said to be detained in Spain due to fears that they would carry intelligence to England. 43 This was not the only case of Scottish ships being impounded in the territories of the Spanish Habsburgs. As noted above, English ships masquerading as Scottish ones were not uncommon. This may be why, in Spring 1593, a Scottish ship was impounded in Laredo because it was not named as a genuine pass-holder, as listed by Philip II in his letter to Orellana. 44 While Philip praised Orellana for seizing the ship, the master was released following an investigation into the true intentions of the vessel. 45 ac.uk/cal-cecil-papers/vol4/pp344-367 Anthony Bacon to the Earl of Essex, 5 August 1593. Bacon discusses the man who arrested Clerk, ‘Alderman Martin’, and writes, ‘Touching my supposed sending for Ald. Martin, I beseech you assure her Majesty I neither sent nor looked for him’. While this record does not contain Bacon’s place of writing a letter from the following day (6 August – Anthony Bacon to Sir Robert Cecil) bases him in London. 41 For Anglo-Scottish disputes at sea in this period see Steve Murdoch, The Terror of the Seas? Scottish Maritime Warfare, 1513-1713 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 111-127. For the comprehensive work on Scottish and English admiralty jurisdictions and how these interacted see pp. 22-34. 42 Lincolnshire Archives, 8ANC3/58. March? 1588. 43 CSPS, XI, 546-8. George Nicolson to Robert Bowes, 9 March 1594-95. 44 L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Philip King of Spain: Correspondence, 1 May 1593. 45 Ibid, 22 May 1593.

An Evaluation of Scottish Tr ade with Iberia

113

There are also other examples, such as Alexander McMath, a merchant of Edinburgh, whose ship, The Angel, was seized in Bilbao in 1590 because Spanish and Portuguese witnesses testified that the goods on board were English. 46 McMath went to some length to get the goods restored, with petitions from the Scottish king and magistrates in Edinburgh, all stating to the authorities in Bilbao that the goods were Scottish, but without success.47 In 1592 McMath was called before the Inquisition in Madrid for a profession of faith, and claimed that he was baptised a Catholic but, following the death of his parents, had been persuaded into the Calvinist faith. 48 He went on to state that after trading with Spain for three years he saw the truth of the Catholic Church. This was possibly an attempt by McMath to gain some form of restitution for the loss of his ship, but if this was his intention, he was unsuccessful. In February 1607 the Scottish Privy Council wrote to King James regarding the matter, as McMath had still not received compensation, and it is unclear if he ever did.49 This was not the only instance during the AngloSpanish war when Scottish merchants requested King James’s assistance. In June 1591, in a letter to Philip II, James complained of ‘the wretched condition of very many of his subjects’.50 The Scottish king provided the example of John Mowbray, whose vessel was intercepted while on a trading voyage, with the crew imprisoned and Mowbray consigned to the galleys. While it is unclear whether this ship was going to Iberia, James stated in his letter that Scotland should be able to trade freely without such hindrance and hostility.51 In addition to the threat posed from the Spanish Habsburg’s Scottish vessels were also at risk from English warships. In September 1598, the Scottish king wrote to Queen Elizabeth complaining that a vessel from Kirkcaldy, the Grace of God, skippered by James Birrell, had been badly damaged by an English man-of-war, the Green Dragon of Bristol.52 The vessel had been returning from Cadiz, laden with wine and cinnamon, when it was attacked. James VI requested that the master of the vessel be permitted to seek redress for his ship and goods, with interest, from the inhabitants 46 Cecil Papers, CP120/61. The Scottish Privy Council to James VI, 5 February 1606/7; NRS, GD1/1126/1 February 1607. 47 Ibid. 48 Archivo Histórico National [Hereafter: AHN], Inquisición 108, Exp. 24.1592. 49 Cecil Papers, CP120/61. The Scottish Privy Council to James VI, 5 February 1607. 50 AGS, Estado Legajo. 839. James VI to Philip II, 4 June 1591. Many thanks to Dr. Cynthia Fry and to Dr. Peter Maxwell-Stuart. 51 Ibid. 52 State Papers Online: The Government of Britain, 1509-1714 online at: http://go.galegroup.com [Hereafter: SP Online], SP 52: LXIII, fo. 9r. James VI to Elizabeth, 16 September 1598; CSPS, XIII I, 313-4. Sir Robert Melville to Sir Robert Cecil, 10 October 1598.

114 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

of Bristol – possibly threatening a letter of reprisal.53 With characteristic shrewdness James pointed out: yet we may more particularly recommend this injury done to the joy and contentment of our common enemy, to the disturbance of that trade which might be profitable to us both and noisome to our said enemy.54

While not directly naming the Spanish Habsburgs (and thus protecting himself from accusations of partiality), James did implicitly refer to the Anglo-Spanish war and inferred that Scots were perhaps trading where Englishmen could not. In another example, the Hart of Leith, owned by Edinburgh merchants James Arnott and Thomas Marshall, was attacked off the northwest coast of Spain in January 1597 by two ships of Plymouth owned by Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who was captain of Plymouth castle.55 According to Archibald Douglas’s correspondence, King James wrote to Queen Elizabeth seeking redress. Douglas’s contact was an acquaintance of Gorges, and Douglas wrote that he had done his best to ensure that James’s complaint did not reach Elizabeth, in order to give Gorges the opportunity to satisfy the Edinburgh merchants.56 It must be remembered that Douglas was an English agent as well as a Scottish ambassador, and it is therefore possible that in this instance he was attempting to expand his own network.57 By giving Gorges the chance to resolve the matter without English royal involvement, Douglas could gain himself a new ally. In some instances, cases of Scottish-Iberian merchants caught up in the Anglo-Spanish conflict could drag on for years after the conflict had ended. In May 1609 the Scottish Privy Council retrospectively appealed to James VI & I on behalf of Thomas Henderson. Following a journey to Spain, 53 See Murdoch, The Terror of the Seas?, 79-110 on letters of reprisal. For the influence of Scottish maritime policy on Stuart-British thinking see ibid, 22-23. For the actual implementation of combined British naval operations see pp. 127-134. 54 SP Online, SP52: LXIII, fo. 9r. James VI to Elizabeth, 16 September 1598. 55 CSPS, XIII I, 389. Archibald Douglas to Dr Julias Caesar, 20 January 1598/9. Douglas was the Scottish ambassador to England as well as an English agent paid by Walsingham. He was also in correspondence with George Fausyde, who was on the island of Madeira (this could well be George Fassuet/Faused who was named in Bartholomew Cole’s testimony to the inquisition, see page 121); John Markham Thorpe, (ed.), Calendar of the State Papers Relating to Scotland, 1589-1603, II (London: Longman & Co, 1858), 623. George Fausyde to Archibald Douglas, 28 January 1593. 56 Ibid. 57 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online at: www.oxforddnb.com, Rob Macpherson, ‘Douglas, Archibald (c.1540-c.1602)’

An Evaluation of Scottish Tr ade with Iberia

115

Henderson’s vessel and goods were seized and he spent four years as a galley slave.58 Henderson had attempted to gain restitution from the Spanish authorities, but compensation was not forthcoming, and the Scottish Privy Council requested that James bring up Henderson’s case with the Spanish ambassador.59 The date on which Henderson’s ship was taken is not given, but he is likely to be the same Thomas Henderson who was noted as returning to Scotland from the Canary Islands in December 1601.60 Given the time it took for such cases to reach the Privy Council’s attention, and in conjunction with Henderson’s time in slavery, it is fair to assume he was arrested while the Anglo-Spanish war was ongoing. This case, along with McMath’s pleas to the Scottish authorities, the tale of Mowbray and his crew, the fate of the Grace of God of Kirkcaldy and others, provide interesting examples of problems that Scottish merchants faced during the conflict. As previously discussed, English agents obtained information from Scottish merchants to gather intelligence on Spain. English interest in Scottish merchants, however, was not confined to what traders might have seen; commercial activity also commanded English attention at a diplomatic level – especially when that involved Scottish trade with the Spanish Habsburgs. In June 1593, Anthony Rolston, an English agent, wrote from the Spanish town of ‘Fontarabye’ (possibly modern day Fuenterrabía) to Anthony Bacon that, in May, one William Orde had passed through the area on his way to Scotland and that he had obtained a trading licence from Philip II for Scottish merchants.61 When Robert Bowes, still residing in Scotland, became aware of Orde’s arrival he was alarmed enough to warn the local minister of Dysart and, as a result, Orde was arrested. On whose authority Bowes acted, or the arrest was carried out, is unclear, although presumably Bowes’s warning to the minister was serious enough to cause local alarm. Bowes claimed that Orde was in possession of a royal commission from James VI, which appointed him ‘conservator’ and gave ‘him power and authority, for the benefit of the Scottish merchants trading to Spain’.62 King James himself confirmed that this was indeed the case. It appeared that James had provided Orde with this commission in response to the activities of English merchants pretending to be Scottish, which had then brought genuine Scottish merchants under 58 Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, 38 volumes, online at: http://tannerritchie.com, VIII, 579-80. The Scottish Privy Council to James VI, 16 May 1609. 59 Ibid. 60 CSPS, XIII II, 913-8. George Nicolson to Sir Robert Cecil, 26 December 1601. 61 Cecil Papers, CP169/116. Anthony Rolston to Anthony Bacon, 29 June 1593. 62 CSPS XI, 107-9, Robert Bowes to Lord Burghley, 30 June 1593.

116 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

suspicion.63 Indeed, Philip II wrote a letter on 5 February 1593 in which he inferred James’s support for Orde.64 In Philip’s version, James had sent Orde to advise Philip as to how such fraud was carried out.65 The discovery of Orde’s activities by Bowes, however, must have put James in a difficult position. While he wished to protect his merchants and their trading relationships in Spain, he did not want to advertise this fact to Elizabeth’s agents. The Scottish king was aware that having dealings with England’s enemy would reflect badly upon his reputation in a kingdom that he one day hoped to rule. The use of the term ‘Conservator’ is unusual in this context, as the title was normally reserved for the administrator of the Scottish Staple in the Netherlands. As the staple’s highest representative, the Conservator had wide-ranging powers, and was the administrator of justice in matters concerning Scottish merchants. The Staple itself was, in effect, a Scottish outpost, where Scottish merchants were provided with safe anchorage, lodgings, and their own church; and the appointment of the Conservator was a power jealously guarded by the Scottish Convention of Royal Burghs.66 Therefore the description of Orde as a Conservator, and not merely consul or factor, provides an idea of the frequency of Scottish trade with Spain and is suggestive that the Scottish king sought to formalise the role. The appointment of Orde, however, may have been more than a practical action by James to protect his merchants trading to Iberia, but could also have been an attempt to control the Convention. In 1597 James advised the organisation to establish a Conservator in England, and recommended William Hunter for the position; later, in 1623, he tried to take direct control of the appointment of the Conservator in the Netherlands.67 Attempts were also made to establish a similar post in France as part of the 1606 Articles Concluded at Paris between James VI and Henry IV, although they were ultimately unsuccessful.68 Given 63 Ibid. 64 L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Philip King of Spain: Correspondence, 5 February 1593 65 Ibid. 66 V. Enthoven, ‘The last straw: Trade contacts along the North Sea Coast: the Scottish staple at Veere’ in The North Sea and Culture, 1550-1800, eds. by Juliette Roding and Lex Heerma van Voss (Larenseweg: Verloren, 1996), 209-221; Matthijs. P Rooseboom, The Scottish Staple in the Netherlands (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1910), 97-104; T. C Smout, Scottish Trade on the Eve of Union: 1660-1707 (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1963), 186; Claire McLoughlin, ‘The Control of Trade in Scotland during the Reigns of James VI and Charles I’ in Northern Studies 45 (2013), 56. 67 McLoughlin, ‘The Control of Trade’, 56-7. James was unsuccessful in both of these attempts, although a Conservator for England was later appointed by the Convention in 1612. 68 Steve Murdoch, Network North, Scottish Kin, Commercial and Covert Associations in Northern Europe, 1603-1746 (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 150-1. For more on Scottish commercial factors see Network North, pp. 128-169.

An Evaluation of Scottish Tr ade with Iberia

117

that post-1603 James made a concerted effort to ensure that his diplomatic representatives served all of his kingdoms, and himself directly appointed commercial representatives, it is likely that his appointment of Orde had a dual purpose: first to represent and protect Scottish merchants in Iberia, but also to gain control of who represented those merchants.69 Understanding that Scots were trading to the Iberian Peninsula in their own right, as evidenced above, helps us to understand the ability of the Scottish merchant fleet to facilitate trade during the war between England and Spain. As discussed, the attempts of English traders to disguise themselves and their goods as Scottish was obviously one-way to circumvent the trading embargo, but not without risk. There was a far easier way for English merchants to continue trading, and that was to pay their Scottish counterparts to undertake trade on their behalf. This approach could also be dangerous, this time for the Scottish merchants who chose to deal in banned English goods. One prominent Scot who took part in this practice was William Hunter, who in August 1586, was issued with a signed letter of commendation from James VI that allowed him to trade with Spain, ostensibly to purchase wine for use in James’s court.70 In January 1587 another Scot, Alexander Scott, stated to the local Spanish authorities that a vessel of which Hunter may have been master was actually English.71 However, it appeared that the master of the vessel had a stroke of luck (of sorts) when Francis Drake’s force arrived in Cadiz and this, combined with some careful bribery of the local Spanish officials, allowed him to claim that their ship had been ransacked by Drake’s forces and therefore they could not possibly be English.72 While Hunter had managed to escape prosecution on this occasion, suspicion over his activities remained. On 5 April of the same year, Bernardino de Mendoza reported to Philip that he had heard from a good quarter that a Scots merchant, who says he is the King of Scotland’s banker, is in Spain with twelve well fitted English boats freighted with merchandise from there [England].73 69 For the appointment of diplomatic representatives post 1603 see, Steve Murdoch, ‘Diplomacy in Transition: Stuart- British Diplomacy in Northern Europe 1603-1618’ in Ships, Guns and Bibles in the North Sea and Baltic States, c.1350-1700, eds. by A.I. Macinnes, T. Riis, and F.G. Pederson (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000), pp. 92-114. For Iberia specifically see, McLoughlin, ‘Scottish Commercial Contacts’, pp. 126-135. 70 AGS, Estado Legajo 839. August 1586. Many thanks to Matthijs Wibier for translating this document. 71 Croft, ‘English Trade with Peninsular Spain’, p. 157. 72 Ibid. 73 CSPSpanish, XVII, 62. Bernardino de Mendoza to the King, 5 April 1587. It is unclear if this is the same voyage mentioned by Croft or if this was a new journey.

118 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

In a further letter in May to Martine Se Idiaquez, Mendoza goes on to say that Scott could prove that the goods were English as ‘from their character it was impossible they could be Scotch’.74 Hunter was yet again condemned by the actions of Patrick Morris and Philip Shenston, who in October 1588 had, via an unnamed intermediary, sent forth intelligence to Spanish officials that Scottish ships would shortly be landing in Spain with a consignment of ‘English’ goods which were disguised using ‘the leaden seal of Edinburgh’.75 Mendoza instructed that, upon the vessels’ arrival in either Cadiz or San Lucar, Morris and Shenston were to be arrested along with all the officers. When questioned, Morris was ready to admit not only that the goods on board the vessel were English, but that he had carried letters, given to him by William Hunter, from English merchants in Spain to Queen Elizabeth and her advisors.76 Mendoza requested that Morris and Shenston be well treated and released once they had given their statements, ‘as the affair has been managed through them’. Additionally, Morris stated that he must be arrested along with his fellow officers so that when he returned to Scotland the owners of the merchandise would not suspect him.77 The event took place with Hunter apparently unaware of Morris’s deceit, but, as a result of Morris’s actions, Hunter was imprisoned from 9 November 1588 to 22 February 1589, indicated in a letter from John Ogilvy to Archibald Douglas and in Hunter’s own letter to Queen Elizabeth.78 For his part, Morris cheated everyone by returning to London overland and providing military information about the Spanish to Queen Elizabeth and her council.79 Hunter, it seems, believed that it was Morris leaving for England with military information that led to his own imprisonment, and not Morris’s (unknown) betrayal of him to the Spanish authorities. Being imprisoned did not prevent Hunter from continuing his correspondence with both Walsingham and Burghley, who he sent letters to in early

74 Ibid, 279-80. Bernardino de Mendoza to Martin Se Idiaquez, 8 May 1588. 75 Ibid, 186-7, Advice sent to Don Martin de Idiaquez, 1588. 76 Ibid, 470-1 Bernardino de Mendoza to Martin Se Idiaquez, 13 October 1588. 77 Ibid. 78 Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquis of Salisbury: The Cecil Papers 13 vols., online at: http://tannerritchie.com [Hereafter: Salisbury], XIII, 403-405. John Ogilvy, Laird of Poury to Lord Ambassador Archibald Douglas, February 1589; CSPS, XIII II, 1122-4. William Hunter to Queen Elizabeth, undated but possibly October 1601. 79 CSPS, XIII II, 1122-4. William Hunter to Queen Elizabeth, undated but possibly October 1601. Hunter claimed in this letter that he himself had sent Morris, who was in fact his servant, to London with orders to pass on the intelligence although it is clear from his letter that being arrested and imprisoned was not part of his plan.

An Evaluation of Scottish Tr ade with Iberia

119

1589.80 In 1591 Hunter again wrote to Burghley, informing him that he had sent word to James VI of what took place, and that because of Alexander Scott’s actions he had been questioned ‘to his great danger’ – clearly he still had no idea it was actually Patrick Morris who betrayed him.81 James VI had ‘deemed the said Scott worthy of punishment’, and Hunter requested that Burghley write to the Lord Chancellor of Scotland to ensure that Hunter would be defended.82 That Hunter chose to write to James VI suggests that the Scottish king was aware, at the very least, of Hunter’s trading activities. Indeed, the fact that James ordered the informer, Scott, to be punished implies that James sanctioned Hunter’s role as a conduit for English goods, although whether this permission extended to his role as an English agent is unclear. Following his release, Hunter continued to trade for English merchants well into the 1590s, and gathered military information on behalf of Queen Elizabeth.83 Interestingly, the Scottish king also tried to secure permanent employment for Hunter on two occasions, recommending him to both the Scottish Convention of Royal Burghs for the post of Conservator for Scottish merchants trading to England (as previously discussed), and to Queen Elizabeth.84 Hunter was not the only Scotsman trading on behalf of his English counterparts. William Scott, from Kirkcaldy in Fife, conducted commerce from the Azores for London merchants, a clear example of a Scottish merchant trading to Spanish dominions on behalf of English counterparts.85 However, the earl of Cumberland captured two Portuguese ships at the Azorean island of St Michael in July 1589, and as a result Scott was arrested while loading his own vessel, the Christopher. He was subsequently imprisoned for two and a half years, and those who remained on board his ship sailed it back to London in his absence. Upon Scott’s release, merchants in London pursued 80 SP Online, SP94 III, fo. 123r. William Hunter to Francis Walsingham, 12 January 1589; The British Library, Cotton Manuscripts, Vespasian C VIII, fo. 207r-9r. William Hunter to Lord Burghley, 11 February 1589. 81 CSPS, X, 544. Memorial to Burghley from William Hunter, 20 July 1591. 82 Ibid. 83 Salisbury, IV, 587. 25 August 1594; Salisbury, V, 396. September 1595; CSPS, XIII II, 1122-4. William Hunter to Queen Elizabeth, undated but possibly October 1601. 84 Records of the Convention of Royal Burgh’s, 1295-1711, 4 vols, ed. by James Marwick (Edinburgh: W. Paterson, 1866-1880). II, pp. 48-49. 5 July 1599. Interestingly in this request James makes reference not only to the Conservator in the low countries as precedent for the post in England but also the Conservator in Spain; McLoughlin, ‘The Control of Trade’, p. 57; Salisbury XI, pp. 444-5. James VI to Elizabeth, 24 October 1601. 85 CSPS, XI, 36-7. James VI to Lord Burghley, 30 January 1592-3. Several Scottish ministers also attempted to assist Scott see, Thorpe, ed, Calendar of the State Papers Relating to Scotland, 1589-1603, II, p. 624. Scottish Ministers to the Privy Council of England. 12 February 1593.

120 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

him for sums owed and so hindered his attempts to begin trading again. In a letter to Lord Burghley, James requested that Elizabeth grant Scott protection so he could re-establish his trade.86 James also mentioned that Scott had been trading there for at least four years, which would date Scott’s entrance into this trade to the late 1580s. This is corroborated by information given by another merchant, Bartholomew Cole, to the Inquisition, when he stated that he had seen Scott on the island of St Michael in 1587, 1588, and 1589.87 Furthermore, Cole added that on his last visit Scott came with two ships of his own and another vessel, which he had bought in London with a mixed English and Scottish crew. Cole claimed that the cargo belonged to an Englishman in London. If Cole’s confession was accurate, the seizure of Scott’s vessel takes on a different light, and Scott’s operation seems even more substantial than indicated by the letter from James VI. Archibald Dawson provides another example of a trader who carried goods on behalf of English merchants in 1587 and 1588.88 According to Cole, reporting to the Inquisition, this merchandise was consigned to John Rankin on both the islands of St Michael and Terceira. It appears John Rankin was also a Scot, or had done a good job of convincing the authorities that he was. Regardless, his position came under suspicion due to Cole’s testimony, which stated that he was English and from Bristol.89 Rankin’s brother Nicholas, captain of a vessel owned by Archibald Dawson, was examined and questioned by Don Luis de la Cucua, governor of St Michael, in late spring 1591. He had sailed to Santa Cruz and then loaded his vessel with goods belonging to a local Canaries merchant, Pedro de Vchales, for a journey to St Michael. Despite the questioning there was no evidence as to Nicholas Rankin’s true nationality and so he was set free, although not before his ship and property were confiscated.90 In his witness statement regarding Cole’s case in July 1591, Alonso De Corral was asked if he was taking action against any other Englishmen (with the exception of Cole and the crew of the St James, Cole’s ship).91 Corral replied that he was also investigating Nicholas Rankin and William Home. It is likely this is the same William Home who, in August 1591, obtained a licence to trade from the captain of the province of Guipuzcoa.92 86 Ibid. 87 English Merchants, p. 73. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid, p. 75. 90 Ibid, p. 74 91 Ibid, pp. 53-4. 92 NAS, JC66/8. 23 August 1591. Home is not recorded as being imprisoned thus it is also possible that he left the island before the investigation could be concluded.

An Evaluation of Scottish Tr ade with Iberia

121

George Fausset can also be added to this trading group, again named in Cole’s information. Cole stated that Fausset had been to the island three times in the years 1589 and 1590, and brought commodities on behalf of an Englishman, Richard Doddridge, the mayor of Barnstaple and a prominent merchant.93 Finally, the vessel on which Cole himself was arrested looks to have been part of a similar scheme. Cole was a supercargo aboard the St James, skippered by Robert Brown. Alonso de Corral cast doubt as to the nationality of the crew, stating that some of the men on the vessel were English despite their protestations that they were Scottish. Robert Brown admitted to being the boatswain on the pinnace, but argued that he himself had been captured by the English on his way to Scotland, which was the only reason he was involved (amusingly Brown claimed that although he was Scottish, he could not remember where in Scotland he came from!).94 It is not clear what happened to Brown, but within a short space of time Cole saw the error of his ‘heretical’ ways, converted to Catholicism, and assisted the local authorities in their attempt to put an end to illegal trading.95 While Cole’s testimony must of course be questioned due to the circumstances in which it was obtained, his information appears to confirm other sources. In the case of trade to the Azores and the Canaries, in particular, it shows that the trade was far more common than has been previously accounted for, and that several Scottish skippers were regularly making the journey to the islands. Numerous reports from Spanish and English sources therefore show that Scottish vessels were regularly trading with Iberian ports, and that many were probably carrying English goods. These examples reveal Scottish opportunism, as well as a pragmatic solution to trading difficulties for the English. They highlight the difficulties that Scottish merchants faced, although in hindsight, due to his actions as a spy, Hunter must have been aware of the danger he was placing himself in. However, this could also provide an idea of the normality of these trading practices, and Hunter and Scott may only appear in historical records because their enterprises ran into difficulties. Hunter found himself under scrutiny when a fellow Scot informed the authorities of his activities; William Scott appears to have been the victim of a revenge attack by disgruntled officials in the Azores, although the extent of the trading subterfuge involving the Azores and Canaries islands was clearly far more substantial than historians have previously understood. Indeed, given that the trade embargo between 93 English Merchants, 73. 94 Ibid, pp. 54-55. 95 Ibid, pp. 80-1.

122 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

England and Iberia caused economic hardship for both kingdoms, it is probable that in many cases officials turned a blind eye to Scottish merchants bringing English goods to Iberia, rather than prosecuting the merchants involved. This hypothesis is supported by several specific cases. A report in February 1593 by E. Palmer, another English agent based at St Jean de Luz in France, reported that 24 Scottish ships had sailed to Bilbao and San Sebastian in the previous two months.96 Palmer went on to write: In all these parts of Spain the King had given order that all Scotsmen should be well used. If the truth were known, these goods, would be found to be Englishmen’s, taken in at Lynn market or thereabouts.97

Contemporary travellers also commented on the practice, with Fynes Moryson, a Cambridge university graduate on a grand tour of Europe, writing in 1598: And whill the English had warre with the Spaniards, the Scots as neutrals by carrying of English commodities into Spaine and by having their ships for more security leden by English merchants, grew somewhat richer and more experienced in Navigation, and had better and stronger shippes then in former time.98

Indeed, the practice gained such notoriety that even poetry was written about it: disgruntled merchants, unhappy at the Scottish Kirk’s constant railing against their trade with Spain, wrote in their turn about the hypocrisy of men who ‘lives like Lords by bribery of the poore’.99 This kind of trade also continued in reverse. In February 1598, Pedro de Aldaya wrote that a Scot by the name of George Al (who Aldaya believed operated a sophisticated operation with his brother William) had dispatched four ships from Huelva carrying wine and fruit to Bristol.100 In addition, Scotland was not necessarily the final destination for Iberian goods, even when carried on Scottish ships. Commodities that were commonly found on 96 Lists and Analysis, May 1592-June 1593, 361. E. Palmer to Lord Burghley, 11-21 December 1593. 97 Ibid, 361. This quote has been taken from Wernham’s analysis of the letter not the letter itself. 98 Early Travellers in Scotland, ed. by P. Hume Brown (Edinburgh: D Douglas, 1891), 87. Fynes Moryson, 1598. Many thanks to Professor Steve Murdoch. 99 The History of the Kirk of Scotland by Mr David Calderwood, ed. by Thomas Thomson, 7 vols. (Edinburgh: The Woodrow Society, 1844) V, p. 177. 100 AGS, Estado 181. Aldaya to Philip II, 7 January 1598; Aldaya to Philip II, 16 February 1598.

An Evaluation of Scottish Tr ade with Iberia

123

ships arriving from Iberia could be re-exported to Newcastle from Leith, such as a cargo of figs and raisins on board the Andrew of Anstruther, Alexander Thompson master, which arrived in Newcastle in November 1593.101 It would have been difficult for the Spanish authorities to uncover the true destination of many vessels and it is probable that many going to Scotland, the Dutch Republic, and other ports stopped in an English port along the way. By 1602 the Spanish authorities could no longer ignore these activities, and banned Scottish and Irish ‘traffic’ from Iberia, in recognition that a significant proportion of the ‘Scottish’ and ‘Irish’ commodities the ships carried were probably English.102 *** The cases cited above give a sense of the precarious, but highly profitable, position that Scotland and Scottish merchants were in with regard to the Iberian trade with Britain in the late sixteenth century. Due to the dynastic situation with England, James VI was anxious not to anger Queen Elizabeth, but he also did not want to sever relations with the powerful Habsburg empire. James also found himself in a potentially powerful position as the Spanish Habsburgs viewed Scotland, and its remaining Catholic population in particular, as a means to antagonise England and to possibly turn the war in their favour. For her part, Elizabeth needed Scotland to remain neutral, but still required the intelligence brought by Scottish merchants. James had the opportunity to exploit the situation to his own ends, but instead opted for a cautious approach, something for which his reign has become known for. The appointment of William Orde as a Conservator, for example, was intended to protect Scottish trading interests, but was not widely announced, as James did not wish to irritate Elizabeth. Scottish merchants also had to be careful because of the difficulty that Iberian officials had in distinguishing between the different kingdoms of mainland Britain. This occasionally led to strife when Scottish merchants were assumed to be English, or even just considered a suitable target for revenge, as in the case of William Scott. However, it was also a period of opportunity for Scottish merchants, who could take advantage of the trade embargo between England and Spain by 101 This example has been discovered via Matthew Greenhall’s thesis, ‘The Evolution of the British Economy: Anglo-Scottish Trade and Political Union, an Inter-Regional Perspective, 1580-1750’, (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Durham, 2011), however, the original sources were verified by the author. TNA, E190/185/6, Christmas 1593-Christmas 1594. 102 CSPD, VI, 259. John Chamberlain to Dudley Carleton, 4 November 1602.

124 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

acting as carriers between the two countries. Numerous merchants used the situation to benefit themselves and, in the majority of cases, there was little the Iberian authorities could do. On the Azorean islands the true state and complexity of the role of Scotsmen acting as conduits for English goods was only revealed when an Englishman confessed all to the Inquisition. Moreover, economic necessity superseded proclamations from Castile. Iberian merchants required the goods that Scots were bringing to them, and they also required a market for their own commodities. The Habsburg authorities had woefully inadequate resources to prevent merchants of other regions from dealing in English goods. As some of the case studies discussed here illuminate, Scottish merchants had a direct trade with Iberian ports – a trade that has been previously overlooked. Moreover, Scottish merchants took advantage of the opportunities offered to them during this period of conflict, and did so quickly, showing an understanding of the political situation and the ways they could utilise it to their advantage. It may have been a dangerous trade, but it was clearly one in which the lure of high profits outweighed the risks attached. This study not only enhances our knowledge of Scottish commercial activities in southern Europe, but it enriches our understanding of British-Spanish trade at the end of the 16th century more generally. It appears that the facilitation of English trade, and the opportunities this gave to Scottish merchants was of equal, if not more importance than the Counter-Reformation intrigues.

5.

Performing ‘Water’ Ralegh: The Cultural Politics of Sea Captains in Late Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama Claire Jowitt

‘I am Walter Ralegh, know ye not that?’ Walter Ralegh (c.1554-1618) was a pivotal cultural and political f igure. Adventurer, courtier, poet, traitor, he was one of the most charismatic and controversial figures of the English Renaissance. The antiquary Anthony à Wood summed up both the difficulties of categorising him and the range of his interests: ‘[a]uthors are perplex’d […] under what topic to place him, whether of statesman, seaman, souldier, chymist, or chronologer; for in all these he did excell’.1 ‘Favourite’ of Elizabeth I, in later life Ralegh’s fortunes reversed as, unpopular with James I, he was tried for treason, condemned, imprisoned, released, and then finally executed in October 1618 after his return from the disastrous second Guiana voyage. As his contemporary Sir Robert Naunton, Master of the Court of Wards, observed: ‘Sir Walter Rawleigh was one that it seemes fortune had picked out of purpose, of whom to make an example, and to use as her Tennis-Ball, thereby to shew what she could do’.2 He was also an individual whose life and treatment, and beliefs expressed in speech and writing, other writers used to support their own political viewpoints.3 Anna R. Beer sums up his extraordinary significance when she writes that, due to his own political marginalisation through long-term imprisonment and popular vilification, ‘Ralegh should not have mattered in the seventeenth century’, yet he was in fact the key individual the Stuart state was unable ‘to silence’. Indeed, ‘in the decades after his execution, Ralegh was re-formed by his readers into an authority

1 Anthony à Wood, Athenæ Oxienses. An Exact History of all the Writers and Bishops who have had their Education in the University of Oxford, 2 vols. (London: Printed for F.C. and J. Rivington, 1815), II, p. 239. 2 Sir Robert Naunton, Fragmenta Regalia, or Observations on the late Queen Elizabeth, her Times and Favourites (London: Charles Baldwyn, 1824), p. 103. 3 See Mark Nicholls and Penry Williams, Sir Walter Ralegh in Life and Legend (London: Continuum, 2011).

126 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

in opposition to Stuart government’.4 Processes of memorialization appear to have taken place even whilst Ralegh was still alive, perhaps because ‘the Last Elizabethan’ (Hugh R. Trevor Roper’s name for him) was considered already ‘civilly dead’ after his condemnation for treason in 1603, that is dead to law and society.5 Accounts about him both whilst alive and posthumously are often starkly different, running the gamut from hyperbolically hostile to hagiographic, so that multiple versions of ‘Walter Ralegh’ emerge and compete for dominance. For instance, he was often seen as the victim of royal authoritarianism, repression, and injustice. An anti-Stuart pamphlet, probably by Sir Anthony Weldon, praised Ralegh ‘whose least part was of more worth then the whole race of the best of the Scots Nation’, describing King James as ‘the Fountain of all our late Afflictions and miseries’, and Scotland as ‘rather a Dunghill then a Kingdome’.6 At the same time, Ralegh was himself the subject of frequent character attacks. Perceived as theatrical by his detractors, and out of favour with James and under suspicion of plotting against him, Ralegh’s apparently botched suicide attempt in 1603 elicited an unsympathetic response in ‘Sir Walter Rauleigh’s stabb’, which linked him to the traitor Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, and emphasized the attempt’s ‘godlesse’ dimensions. The unchristian nature of this act was also picked up by the king when he pointedly requested that Ralegh should be examined with a preacher present, to instruct him that ‘it is his sole he must wond not his boddy’.7 The appeal of theatricality and melodrama was something Ralegh was clearly acutely aware of, and played on, in his own writing. In his short poem ‘On the Life of Man’ (c.1612), for example, composed from prison, he uses the popular early modern conceit of measuring human life in terms of the span of the performance of a play. What is our life? The play of passion. Our mirth? The music of division: Our mothers’ wombs the tiring-houses be, 4 Anna R. Beer, Sir Walter Ralegh and his Readers in the Seventeenth Century (Houndsmills: Palgrave, 1997), p. 1. See also Anna Beer, Patriot or Traitor: the Life and Death of Sir Walter Ralegh (London: Oneworld, 2018). 5 Hugh R. Trevor-Roper, ‘The Last Elizabethan: Sir Walter Ralegh’, in Historical Essays (London: MacMillan, 1957), pp. 103‒07; the title ‘The Last of the Elizabethans’ was coined by Edward Thompson in 1935 and repeated by Alfred L. Rowse, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and Stephen Coote. See Rosalind Davies, ‘“The Great Day of Mart”: Returning to Texts at the Trial of Sir Walter Ralegh in 1603’, Renaissance Forum, 4 (1999), 12 pages; http://www.hull.ac.uk/renforum/v4no1/davies.htm. 6 Walter Scott, ed. A Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts on the Most Entertaining Subjects, 2nd edition, 13 vols. (London: T. Cadell et al, 1809-15) XIII, pp. 516, 509, 513. 7 Nicholls and Williams, Sir Walter Ralegh in Life and Legend, p. 198.

Performing ‘Water’ R alegh

127

Where we are dressed for life’s short comedy. The earth the stage; Heaven the spectator is, Who sits and views whosoe’er doth act amiss. The graves which hide us from the scorching sun Are like drawn curtains when the play is done.8

This chapter is the first critical study of the ways in which ‘Ralegh’ was performed (‘re-formed’ using Beer’s terminology) on page and stage, in a number of early modern plays that engage with maritime topoi. For early modern men and women from all levels of society, play going was a central and popular leisure and educational activity, with theatre capacity doubling between 1580 and 1610 from 5,000 to 10,000 spectators.9 The ‘seafever’ plays under discussion here intersect with this theatrical boom, straddling the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, as well as Ralegh’s rise, fall, death, and afterlife, and each one engages with the ‘meme’, or more properly ‘theatregram’ (since we are discussing drama), of the sea captain and his/her command of their ship.10 They include Thomas Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West Part 1 (c.1596-1603), William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (First Quarto 1603, Second Quarto 1604/05), Henry Chettle’s Tragedy of Hoffmann or a Revenge for a Father (c.1603/04), Thomas Middleton’s The Phoenix (c.1603/04), Middleton’s and John Webster’s Anything for a Quiet Life (c.1622), and Heywood’s and William Rowley’s Fortune By Land and Sea (c.1623). These plays ‘glance’ at Ralegh, and though accurately reconstructing audiences is difficult, and performance records for many plays in the period remain hard to fully assess, due to the incompleteness of surviving evidence, several of them, such as Hamlet, were early modern ‘blockbusters’, with repeated performances and revivals.11 Through these plays the character of the pirate sea captain ‒ in this period a particularly mobile figure politically and culturally, as well as geographically ‒ is shown as a vehicle capable of expressing covert 8 http://www.bartleby.com/257/18.html 9 See Claire Jowitt and David McInnis, ‘Introduction: Understanding the Early Modern Journeying Play’, in Travel and Drama in Early Modern England: the Journeying Play, ed. Claire Jowitt and David McInnis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 11. 10 In drama ‘theatregrams’ are the ‘interchange and transformation of units, figures, relationships, actions, topoi, and framing patterns’; see Louise George Clubb, Italian Drama in Shakespeare’s Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 6. See also Jacques Lezra, ‘Trade in Exile’, in Robert Henke and Eric Nicholson, eds., Transnational Mobilities in Early Modern Theater (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 199-216; Henke and Nicholson, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1-23. 11 The best and most up-to-date source of information on performance and theatre history is Martin Wiggins, British Drama 1533-1642: A Catalogue, 9 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011-)

128 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

political allusions, or ‘glancings’ and ‘applications’ as they were known by contemporaries.12 The ‘application’ most frequently cited by critics in accounts of early modern political theatre is Elizabeth I’s alleged remark ‘I am Richard II, know ye not that?’ to the antiquary William Lambarde in the wake of Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex’s failed rebellion of 8 February 1601.13 If the exchange did take place, the ‘glancing’ the queen referred to concerned how Richard II’s troubled history had recently been made use of for present political purposes. Essex was widely known by his contemporaries to have made remarks concerning the parallels between Richard’s and the queen’s positions in the late 1590s, and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men had performed Shakespeare’s 1597 play Richard II on 7 February, the day before the rebellion, at the special request of some of Essex’s faction.14 However, whether in fact Essex intended the play’s performance to incite an uprising, or if the staging was actually a part of his political rivals’ carefully orchestrated schemes to implicate publicly Essex in treason, is the subject of heated scholarly debate.15 Despite this indeterminacy, the significance of early modern plays as mirrors of contemporary politics is undisputed. This chapter focuses on the ways dramatists used sea captains to engage with key events and issues that ‘glance’ at Ralegh’s life, death, and beyond-the-grave influence. To differing degrees, and in contrasting ways, each of the plays under discussion offers a perspective on a man alternatively, sometimes simultaneously, seen as heroic or/and treasonous by his contemporaries, and whose actions and beliefs provoked intense and far-reaching debate about the leadership and political direction of the nation itself. This chapter focuses on just one encapsulation of ‘Ralegh’ from the heterogeneity of occupations and identities listed by à Wood: ‘the seaman’, or sea captain, and his beyond-the-law alter ego, the pirate, of early modern drama. This emphasis reflects both the cultural and ideological importance, even dominance, of these particular figures in proto-colonial 12 See Richard Dutton, Ben Jonson: To the First Folio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 133-55. 13 The connection between Shakespeare’s Richard II, Essex’s rebellion, and Elizabeth’s comments on the parallels between herself and the deposed king, are frequently discussed in political accounts of early modern drama. For an assessment of these readings, see James R. Siemon, ‘“Word Itself against the Word”: Close Reading after Voloshinov’, in Russ McDonald, ed., Shakespeare Reread: the Texts in New Contexts (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 226-58, especially p. 239. 14 On the identity of the individuals who arranged the play’s performance see Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age (London: Penguin, 2008), pp. 256-60. 15 See Bate, Soul of the Age, pp. 249-86.

Performing ‘Water’ R alegh

129

early modern England, and Ralegh’s particular place within English ‘seamen’ in the English imaginary since, as Alan James argues, in Chapter 2 ‘in many ways he [Ralegh] embodied English sea power’ for his contemporaries.16 Indeed, Ralegh’s personal identity was intimately connected to the sea, as evident by his nickname ‘Water’, referenced in his poem to Elizabeth I, ‘The Ocean’s Love to Cynthia’, where the goddess Cynthia, as the moon, controls the waters of the ocean tides. The queen used the name affectionately, but rivals used it with disdain (Essex suggests ‘It is too much to think, / so pure a mouth should puddle water drink’).17 In other words, within the history of the key figure of early modern English ‘seaman’, Ralegh was a dominant and, as this chapter argues, inspirational figure. As David Armitage argues, the links between maritime dominion and imperial, or colonial, success were only fully established in the eighteenth century when the ‘British Empire’ came to refer to a unified community of geographically remote members who were ‘Protestant, commercial, maritime, and free’.18 Nevertheless, from much earlier, England’s past, present, and future development, and maritime power, as well as the nation’s commanders, were seen as indelibly linked.19 England, famously described by William Shakespeare in Richard II as ‘this sceptered isle’ and ‘[t]his precious stone set in the silver sea’,20 was imagined as naturally disposed to an identity based on its maritime situation. As Sebastian Sobecki writes: ‘the literary history of the sea in English literature becomes a part of the vernacular discourse of Englishness’.21 Richard Hakluyt, a key architect of English overseas expansionism, also emphasized the absolute centrality of the sea to his vision from the get-go in his massive collection of accounts of travel and voyaging, The Principal Navigations (1589; 2nd revised edition 1598-1600): From the Mappe he [Richard Hakluyt the elder] brought me to the Bible, and turn[ed] to the 107 Psalme, directed mee to the 23 and 24 verses, 16 For a consideration of Ralegh’s attitudes to naval power, including the origins of those beliefs, and the ways his determination to develop English naval strength shaped his own writing, see Alan James, Chapter 2. 17 Beer, Patriot or Traitor, pp. 134, 137-38 18 David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 6. 19 See Sebastian Sobecki, The Sea and Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008). 20 William Shakespeare, King Richard II, ed. by Andrew Gurr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) II, i, 40, 46. 21 Sobecki, The Sea and Medieval English Literature, p. 4.

130 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

where I read, that they which go downe to the sea in ships, and occupy by the great waters, they see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deepe, &c.’.22

Appropriating the power and grandeur of the psalm, Hakluyt imagines that the project to develop a sea-borne English empire unites God and man, thus imbuing it with Christian authority and apparent legitimacy. In this recollection of his youthful appreciation of cartography, navigation, and the Bible, Hakluyt sees the outlines of his life’s work: the attempt to create a global English nation by traversing in ships ‘the great waters’ of the world. Indeed, for Englishmen more generally, according to the cultural historian Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power, the particular figure of the sea captain was a ‘remarkably stable’ national self-identity that endured for generations. ‘The Englishman sees himself as a captain on board a ship with a small group of people, the sea around and beneath him’ and provided a powerful collective vision and symbol of how Englishmen should behave and interact with others.23 As this chapter explores, the ways in which early modern drama insistently refracted ‘Ralegh’ directly and indirectly through the character of the sea captain supports Canetti’s analysis of the figure’s pivotal national role. Before, however, focusing on the significance of good leadership at sea, I want to focus briefly on the consequences of its absence, through the image of the ship a-drift. Of course, images of the ship of state, the ship of fools, and the ship of the church are well-established allegorical devices with histories that date back at least to classical times. For instance, in Horace’s Ode 1.14 ‘O navis’, translated into English as ‘To the Ship of State’, the ship has traditionally been seen as the Roman state at risk from heading into troubled waters.24 More specifically, the captain-less, rudderless boat was a particularly enduring topoi, used in various ways including setting adrift, voluntary exile or pilgrimage by sea, and transport by a self-propelled magical ship.25 Without question, the most famous Renaissance depiction of an out-of-control ship is the one that opens Shakespeare’s The Tempest 22 Richard Hakluyt, ‘Epistle Dedicatory to Sir Francis Walsingham’ in The Principall Navigations (London: George Bishop, Ralph Newberie, and Christopher Barker, 1589) sig. *2r. 23 Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (London: Phoenix, 2000), p. 171. 24 See Elizabeth Fowler, ‘The Ship Adrift’, in ‘The Tempest’ and Its Travels, ed. by Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (London: Reaktion, 2000), pp. 37-40; see also Robert W. Carrubba, ‘The Structure of Horace’s Ship of State: “Odes” 1, 14’, Latomus 62.3 (2003), 606-15. 25 Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 106-36.

Performing ‘Water’ R alegh

131

(1611), where the mariners vainly attempt to master a distressed, listing craft while the courtiers ‘assist the storm’ through their interference.26 In fact, as Elizabeth Fowler suggests, there are two ungovernable ships described in the play’s opening scenes.27 When, in I, ii, Miranda appears passionately concerned with the suffering of those shipwrecked, her father reminds her of their own encounter with an unmanageable vessel when they were cast adrift from Milan in a ‘rotten carcase of a butt, not rigged, / Nor tackle, sail, nor mast’.28 The double image of the ungovernable ship provides ‘a frame […] for thinking about governance’ says Fowler or, perhaps more precisely, I think, for considering the failures of command. On one level at least, the play is a dramatic meditation on the absence of political mastery over land and sea: it eliminates heroic prowess from the action, and thus ships’ occupants become victims rather than agents. The risk of tragic consequences resulting from either the lack or failure of leadership at sea further emphasizes the importance of the f igure of the sea captain in early modern drama. In the Tudor and Stuart periods, sea captains and other ship’s officers in English naval and privateering vessels were normally persons of consequence in the land community, attracting aristocrats or gentry through the opportunities they afforded for privateering and prof it. 29 However, a new breed of sea captain was beginning to emerge, later to be termed the ‘tarpaulin captain’ (i.e. a sea-bred superior off icer), but exemplif ied in this earlier period by Sir Francis Drake, born to yeoman stock but who through skill and determination, more than elite birth, rose up through the ranks.30 On his famous circumnavigation of 1577-80, Drake notoriously executed for treason his sometime friend, the well-connected nobleman Thomas Doughty, thereby exerting his authority over his social superiors, the ‘gentlemen officers’ 26 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. by Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) I, i, 15. 27 Fowler, ‘The Ship Adrift’, p. 38. 28 Shakespeare, The Tempest, I, ii, 5-6, 46-47. 29 Cheryl A. Fury, ‘The Work of G.V. Scammell’, in The Social History of English Seamen, 1485-1689, ed. by Cheryl A. Fury (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), p. 37. See also Fury, Tides in the Affairs of Men: The Social History of Elizabethan Seamen, 1580-1603 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), p. 21. 30 See Harry Kelsey, Sir Francis Drake: the Queen’s Pirate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). The meaning of ‘tar’ as a sailor is first recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1610 as the derogatory compound noun ‘tar-lubber’ (OED, ‘tar, n.1, compounds’); but it was associated with sailing and sailors (caulking to preserve ships from seawater) from much earlier (Middle English Compendium, c.1250 ‘ter for water-gong’. See https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/ middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED44869/track?counter=3&search_id=162390).

132 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

(i.e. elite military officers appointed to command). These events are part of a larger shift that over time turned on its head the established seafaring custom that masters should consult the elite off icers at sea. According to medieval maritime law, masters should discuss important decisions with their companies, and vestiges of this custom survived in English naval and privateering ships into the sixteenth century.31 Due to their social status, the elite off icers on a voyage, such as Doughty, expected to be part of Drake’s council as a matter of course, not to be treated as subordinates.32 Drake’s execution of Doughty epitomizes the idea that one captain is the sole master on a voyage regardless of social rank, and, through its telling and retelling in early modern culture, forms a turning point in understanding the role and authority of the sea captain in English colonial and imperial history.33

Ralegh on Stage Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West Part 1, published 1631, but probably composed between c.1596 and 1603, dates to the last years of the reign of Elizabeth I, and is centrally concerned with the struggle for command concerning the direction and leadership of amphibious expeditions. The play is highly specific about its setting: the action takes place during England’s war with Spain on the eve of ‘the Islands Voyage’ to the Azores of August to October 1597. The mission was important to Ralegh’s reputation and influence. As Alexandra Gadja writes: ‘[t]hrough the amphibious expeditions of 1596 and 1597, Ralegh rekindled a career ruined by his clandestine marriage to Bess Throckmorton in 1591’.34 In the Islands Voyage, antagonistic English naval commanders Essex as general, and Ralegh as rear admiral, 31 See Edda Frankot, ‘Medieval Maritime Law from Oléron to Wisby: Jurisdictions in the Law of the Sea’, in Communities in European History: Representations, Jurisdictions, Conflicts, ed. by Juan Pan-Montojo and Frederik Pedersen (Pisa: Pisa University Press, 2007), pp. 151-72. 32 ‘When medieval knights embarked, ships’ masters did their bidding, and that was another custom of which the vestiges still survived: Sir Hugh Willoughby, for example, was a gentleman and a knight but not a seaman, and the practical seamen were his subordinates’. See Sabrina L. Caine, http://academia.wikia.com/wiki/Journal_of_History_and_Classics:_Doubting_Thomas:_the_Dought(ie)_Affair_in_Fictive_History_and_Historical_Fiction 33 See Claire Jowitt, ‘The Hero and the Sea: Sea Captains and Their Discontents’, XVII‒XVIII Revue de la Société d’études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, L’Empire 74 (2017), http://journals.openedition.org/1718/888 34 Alexandra Gajda, The Earl of Essex and Late Elizabethan Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 144-145.

Performing ‘Water’ R alegh

133

led an Anglo-Dutch naval expedition against Spain and raided the island of Faial (Fayal) in the Azores.35 The two commanders were long-standing rivals, having competed for gloire in the Cadiz expedition of 1596, where a number of accounts played up Ralegh’s heroic role.36 Immediately before the Islands Voyage, relations between the men were uniquely, though briefly, cooperative, with them working together for mutual office: Essex gained promotion to master of the ordnance on 18 March and Ralegh attained reinstatement as captain of the guard in June. With the failure of the campaign on the Islands Voyage, cordiality degenerated into mutual recrimination: ‘Elizabeth’s reproach of Essex included a dressing down for his treatment of Ralegh, who with infuriating bravura, had pinned the blame for the voyage’s failure onto the earl’.37 The events of the play capture the vainglorious flavour of the Islands Voyage, since it achieved effectively nothing in advancing the English cause, either in the war or in gaining prizes. Once the expedition did manage to sail, storms dispersed the fleet and, when it eventually reunited, it spent the rest of the time cruising off the Azores in the hope of intercepting the Spanish silver convoy en route to Europe. Finally, in Essex’s absence, Ralegh attacked and captured Faial, the expedition’s only achievement. On his arrival Essex, extremely displeased with Ralegh’s success in taking the town without him (which he saw as presuming on his command), gave the order to sail for home.38 The struggle for command between these two sea captains was crucial to the voyage’s dismal outcome. Neither Essex nor Ralegh speak in the play (the departure of the ‘General’ and ‘Captains’ is shown in dumb show at the end of Act I), but their presence is pervasive, as the competition between them permeates all levels of characters involved in the expedition. Their conflict echoes in the antagonism between rival, lesser captains and adventurers. The fleet is shown at the beginning of Act I collecting in the West Country prior to departure with two rival groups, comprising professional sea captains and gentlemen adventurers, shown mingling and arguing as they await a fair wind. The whole of the play’s first act is concerned with conflict between two companies of recruits on the expedition. The gentleman-adventurer 35 For discussion see Jan Glete, Warfare at Sea 1500-1650: Maritime Conflicts and the Transformation of Europe (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 162-163. 36 See Paul E.J. Hammer. ‘Myth-making: Politics, Propaganda and the Capture of Cadiz in 1596’, The Historical Journal 40.3 (1997), pp. 621-642. 37 Gajda, The Earl of Essex, p. 163. 38 See N.A.M. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain 660-1649 (London and New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 286-288.

134 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Mr. Carroll with his two ‘Sea Captain’ friends (they are not individually named in the dramatis personae), and the elite Mr. Spencer and his follower the impecunious Capt. Goodlack, jostle for position vis-à-vis the favours of Bess Bridges, the tavern maid at The Castle. It is clear that poor discipline, ambition, and greed are rampant amongst the suitors/seamen. Plymouth streets ‘Glister with gold’, and are full of over-dressed gallants ‘tricked in scarf and feather’ looking for entertainment.39 The sexual conquest of Bess thus becomes an overdetermined signifier in the play. She is ‘adamant’, drawing all suitors to The Castle, just as the favours and power of Elizabeth I drew prominent, rival courtiers such as Essex and Ralegh to the queen’s castle. 40 Indeed, access to and desire for Bess is the cause of the quarrel in the tavern between her elite suitors Spencer and Carroll, resulting in the death of the latter. However, the play connects Spencer’s desire to participate in the Islands Voyage with his courtship of Bess in even more explicit terms. Goodlack criticizes Spencer’s twin desires with near identical words, representing both the voyage and Bess as beneath his class and condition. ‘Why, being a gentleman of fortune’s means […] will you adventure thus / A doubtful voyage’ he asks, and then chides ‘Come, I must tell you, you forget yourself, / One of your birth and breeding, thus to doat / Upon a tanner’s daughter’.41 In other words, Goodlack sees Spencer’s participation in a privateering raid and his desire for Bess as equally undermining of his elite status, and indeed explicitly (regarding the voyage) and implicitly (regarding Bess) indicates that his own (inferior) class status makes him a more appropriate participant in one and suitor to the other. This is an early indication that there is not only rivalry between the groups of men, i.e. between Spencer’s group and Carroll’s, but there is also competition and jockeying for position within groups themselves. In this scene, Goodlack is Spencer’s friend and confidant, but later in the play he attempts to woo Bess in earnest on his own behalf (not just to test her fidelity to Spencer, as per the latter’s instructions), and becomes genuinely covetous of Spencer’s fortune (rather than merely acting as the conduit to deliver it to Bess, according to instruction). ‘My purpose is to seek to marry her’ he says in Act III, as a way of securing Spencer’s legacy 39 Thomas Heywood, The Fair Maid of the West, Part I, ed. by J. Payne Collier in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood (London: The Shakespeare Society, 1845), I, i, p. 8. 40 Heywood, The Fair Maid of the West, Part I, I, i, p. 8. The connections between Bess and Elizabeth I have been explored most fully by Jean E. Howard, ‘An English Lass Amid the Moors: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and National Identity in Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West’, in Women, “Race”, and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 101-117. 41 Heywood, The Fair Maid of the West, Part I, I, i, p. 9.

Performing ‘Water’ R alegh

135

for himself. 42 Class rivalry shapes the dynamics between the two men, as ‘tarpaulin captain’ Goodlack turns against his friend and social superior Spencer, as Drake did against Doughty. In the play, there appears to be considerable confusion amongst characters, and argument between them, concerning the identity of the leader of the attack on Fayal. In Act II, the victorious sea captains talk about ‘the General’s command’ during the assault of Faial. 43 The name the General refers elsewhere in the play to Essex, but of course, Essex was not actually present during Ralegh’s initial attack at Fayal. Later, not naming the attack’s leader, Spanish characters describe ‘the spoil by th’ English done’ at Faial as the motivation to seize in reprisal the ship upon which Spencer is a passenger, making him captive.44 Also when Bess, who has fitted out a ship and set sail in search of Spencer (who, at this point, she believes to be dead), intercepts a Spanish fishing trip, she asks for news of the town and fort and is specifically informed by name of Ralegh’s initial victory: Since English Ralegh won and spoil’d it first, The town’s re-edified and fort new built, And four field pieces in the blockhouse lie To keep the harbour’s mouth. 45

Just as Essex and Ralegh, and their respective followers, disputed amongst themselves and produced competing accounts of heroic pre-eminence in the wake of these amphibious campaigns, the play also reflects their rivalry for gloire. The play replicates the inconsistency and argument over whether Essex or Ralegh should have most credit for the victory lower down the command chain. In particular, the disagreement between the two captains in Act II about who deserves recognition for bravery in the attack mimics the power struggle between their leaders. 2 Captain. When we assaulted Fayal, And I had by the general’s command The onset, and with danger of my person 42 Heywood, The Fair Maid of the West, Part I, III, p. 44. 43 Heywood, The Fair Maid of the West, Part I, II, p. 26. 44 Heywood, The Fair Maid of the West Part I, IV, p. 50. Essex arrived at Fayal the morning after Ralegh’s success and did participate in its burning if not its capture. 45 Heywood, The Fair Maid of the West Part I, IV, p. 57.

136 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Enforc’d the Spaniard to a swift retreat And beat them from their fort, thou when thou saw’st All fear and danger past, mad’st up with me To share that honor which was sole mine own And never ventur’d shot for’t or e’er came When bullet graz’d … 1 Captain. I’ll prove it with my sword That though thou had’st the foremost place in field And I the second, yet my company Was equal in the entry of the fort. My sword was that day drawn as soon as thine, And that poor honour which I won that day Was but my merit. 46

Indeed, when Spencer intervenes to stop their dispute, the captains challenge his right to do so: ‘You are no General; Or, if you be, pray show us your commission’. 47 The title of ‘General’ (short-form for ‘Captain-General’), was a gubernatorial role, and for the two captains it appears not attached to a named or known individual (i.e. Essex or Ralegh). 48 Instead, the role has paper-based authority with its status reliant on textual rather than actual evidence of martial experience and/or command. In other words, the captains seem unable to name the identity of their commanding officer and, it appears, they recognize any individual with appropriate documentation (a ‘commission’) as the superior officer. It is the paper commission, the sign of leadership, not the values and behaviour of leadership itself, which is the locus of authority in this scene, exposing the inadequacies of how superiority is established and maintained more generally within English structures of command. Given the captains have been quarrelling, signalling the failure of discipline, the fetishization of paper command further undermines confidence in the effectiveness of the campaign’s leadership. The lack of recognition of the identity of the mission’s ‘General’ is thus a metonym for national problems; captains obey pieces of paper rather than good leaders. These failures in command, leadership, and discipline, which reflect the larger rivalry between Essex and Ralegh for glory, swiftly appear to have tragic repercussions in the play. Just a few lines later, the quarrelling 46 Heywood, The Fair Maid of the West, Part I, II, p. 26. 47 Heywood, The Fair Maid of the West, Part I, II, p. 26. 48 On the semantics of the title ‘General’ in this period, and its changing meanings, see Jowitt, ‘The Hero and the Sea’ https://journals.openedition.org/1718/888.

Performing ‘Water’ R alegh

137

captains appear to wound Spencer fatally: ‘I am hurt to death’ he says. 49 The play treats the Islands Voyage with stinging cynicism. The captains and adventurers that serve on it are a lawless, feckless lot, more interested in plunder and duelling than disciplined campaigns. There is no lasting benef it to England’s war effort, or progress in securing victory for the nation: when Bess f inally arrives in Fayal, Ralegh’s success in taking the island has simply resulted in the construction of greater defensive fortifications, so that further English campaigns would be less likely to achieve successful outcomes. Incompetent or contested leadership has serious consequences. It is also clear that it is Bess who has gained plunder from the ‘rich Spaniard and the barbarous Turk’, yet spared ‘the French and Dutch’, unlike Essex or Ralegh, both of whom missed the Spanish treasure fleet on the Islands Voyage.50 Paradoxically, the male characters’ struggle to be in charge of the expedition leads to their complete failure in leadership, and into this lacuna, Heywood places a female, Bess, who is far more competent amphibiously than any of the men, hence praising the queen at the expense of her naval commanders.51 In other words, as a ‘glancing’ to Elizabeth I, Bess’s skills in command is demonstrated by her ability to manage campaigns effectively, via well-organised and selectively directed wealth accumulation through plunder. By contrast, her captains and other senior officers quarrel amongst themselves over gloire, achieving nothing positive (and indeed apparently killing the man she hopes to marry), thus praising Elizabeth I’s cool-headed rule as the best way to deliver English victory in war.

Ralegh and Regime Change When Elizabeth I died in March 1603 and her second cousin James VI of Scotland inherited the English throne, the new regime swiftly introduced a variety of different policies, most notably seeking to end the long war with Spain. As a result, the privateering encouraged under Elizabeth I (and so enthusiastically described in Fair Maid of the West) was outlawed, and forms of violence at sea that had been sanctioned by the previous regime were now 49 Heywood, The Fair Maid of the West, Part I, II, p. 27. 50 Heywood, The Fair Maid of the West, Part I, IV, p. 62. 51 For discussion see Claire Jowitt, The Culture of Piracy, 1580-1630: English Literature and Seaborne Crime (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), p. 119-23; Jowitt, ‘Elizabeth Among the Pirates: Gender and the Politics of Piracy in Thomas Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West, Part 1’, in The Foreign Relations of Elizabeth I, ed. Charles Beem (Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2011), pp. 125-144.

138 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

seen as piracy. Of course, prospects for sea captains sharply altered, with those that were at sea on privateering missions called in, and attempts made by the new government to scourge the seas of English pirates.52 Hardship amongst seamen was widespread, a fact that, paradoxically, may have caused an increase in piratical activity. Certainly, John Smith, recalling the situation some years later, described a link between penury and piracy. ‘[O]ur Royall King James, who from his infancy had reigned in peace with all Nations; had no imployment for those men of warre, so that those that were rich rested with that they had; those that were poore and had nothing but from hand to mouth, turned Pirats’.53 The next group of plays under discussion date from this transition. Shakespeare’s Hamlet was published in quarto in 1603, and in a second, different quarto edition shortly after in 1604/05; Chettle’s Hoffman was most probably written in 1603 or 1604, and performed by the Admiral’s Men in the last weeks of Elizabeth I’s reign or the beginning of James I’s;54 and Middleton’s The Phoenix, Middleton’s first single-authored play, most likely performed in front of the new king, James I, on 20 February 1604.55 None of these plays mentions Ralegh specifically by name, but the particular characteristics of the motif of piracy indicate that it is used to code attitudes and anxieties about regime change, and the resulting overhaul of established values and policies from Elizabeth’s reign, as well as views about the old Elizabethans ‒ such as Ralegh ‒ who still maintained them. Of course, Elizabeth I never publicly named her heir, and all through her reign discussion of the topic was 52 For an account of state attitudes to piracy, and the changes in policy between Tudor and Stuart regimes, see Peter Earle, The Pirate Wars (London: Methuen, 2004), pp. 17-67; David Delison Hebb, Piracy and the English Government, 1616-1642 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1994), pp. 7-20; John C. Appleby, ‘Jacobean Piracy: English Maritime Depredation in Transition, 1603-1625’, in Cheryl A. Fury, ed., The Social History of English Seamen, pp. 278-279. 53 John Smith, The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, ed. by Philip L. Barbour, 3 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986) II, p. 914. 54 Martin Wiggins dates the play to early 1603 in British Drama 1533-1642: A Catalogue, Volume V: 1603-1608 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 4-8. The play was published in 1631. Gary Taylor suggests a composition date of 1603 or early 1604 in ‘The Date and Auspices of the Additions to Sir Thomas More’, in Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More: Essays on the Play and its Shakespearian Interests, ed. by T.H. Howard-Hill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 100-130 (p. 118). 55 As its most recent editors Lawrence Danson and Ivo Kamps suggest, ‘in various senses [it is] a Jacobean play: it was written in the first year of James’ reign; it was performed at court in James’ presence; and […] it is imbued with the anxiety and optimism of that time of political transition’. See Thomas Middleton, The Phoenix, ed. by Lawrence Danson and Ivo Kamps, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, Gen. Eds. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007), p. 91.

Performing ‘Water’ R alegh

139

strongly discouraged, though authors wrote a number of tracts on the topic, and the issue was frequently alluded to allegorically in drama.56 However, prominent courtiers, most notably Essex (until his death) and Secretary of State Robert Cecil, corresponded and negotiated with James to ensure a peaceful transition.57 In other words, drama was a well-established vehicle to debate the implications and shape the consequences of regime change before it occurred. Indeed, because of the disparity between James VI of Scotland and Elizabeth I in policies regarding state-sponsored violence at sea, piracy was a particularly powerful and popular meme at this transitional moment in history, used by playwrights as a form of shorthand to signal critique, uncertainty, or anxiety over the consequences of impending or actual regime change.58 Both Hamlet and Hoffman date to the same historical moment and concern a son avenging a father’s murder, where the older men are both connected to piracy in the North and Baltic Seas, areas associated in particular with Scottish-Scandinavian maritime rivalry.59 Mary Floyd-Wilson describes the importance of Hamlet’s father Horwendile’s piracy in Shakespeare’s sources Belleforest and Saxo: ‘Horwendile is a heroic pirate, who gains renown and power with his sea adventures’ against rival monarchs.60 In Hamlet, Horatio’s reference to alliances between Old Fortinbras of Norway and the ‘valiant’ King Hamlet, resulting from the fearsome reputation of the latter (‘this side of our known world esteem’d him’),61 recall Horwendile’s fame and the ensuing rivalry between the pirate kings shown in Saxo and Belleforest. Horatio also wonders whether the Ghost may have ‘uphoarded in [his] life / Extorted treasure in the womb of earth’,62 also hinting at the scale of King Hamlet’s plunder, and implicitly his life as a pirate. As Floyd-Wilson argues, the nostalgia of Shakespeare’s Hamlet for his father and for Denmark’s past glory has its roots in the sources’ comparisons between the weak uncle Fengon (Claudio) and his heroic pirate father, who Fengon murdered due to 56 See Lisa Hopkins, Drama and the Succession to the Crown, 1561-1633 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 57 Ann McLaren, ‘The Quest for a King’, Journal of British Studies 41 (2002), 259-90; Pauline Croft, King James (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 58 On Scottish piracy, and King James’ efforts to control it, see Steve Murdoch, The Terror of the Seas? Scottish Maritime Warfare 1513-1713 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 111-152. 59 I am grateful to Derek Dunne for alerting me to the importance of piracy in Chettle’s play. 60 Mary Floyd-Wilson, ‘Hamlet, the Pirate’s Son’, Early Modern Literary Studies Special Issue 19 (2009), 12.1-11. http://purl.oclc.org/emls/si-19/floyhaml.html 61 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Thomson Learning, 2006), I, i, 87-88 62 Shakespeare, Hamlet, I, i, 139-140.

140 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

fratricidal jealousy of his brother’s amphibious successes.63 With the death of the pirate king, the Danes have lost their national reputation as worthy heroes of the seas, a message likely to appeal to those of Elizabeth’s courtiers, such as Ralegh, in favour of continuing the war against Spain. Furthermore, in the Second Quarto, though not the First Quarto, pirates play an important role in terms of plot development, capturing the prince (we are told in a letter in Act IV), and thus allowing him to escape the death Claudius has plotted for him in England and to return swiftly to Denmark. The sympathetic representation of pirates as ‘thieves of mercy’ in the later version thus indicates a strengthening rather than diminution of support for Elizabethan attitudes regarding the serviceableness of Smith’s ‘men of warre’.64 In Hoffman, Chettle also appears in favour of a nuanced ‘Elizabethan’ attitude to piracy. The play exposes state policies that force sea captains into piracy as a deliberate mechanism by which to exclude, criminalize, and execute an individual no longer in royal favour. According to Clois Hoffman his father Hans, as Vice-Admiral and Lord of Burtholme, served his royal masters in ‘thirty fights’ and ‘[f]illed all their treasures with foemen’s spoils’.65 He recounts that his father only turned pirate due to debts accrued from paying his men personally for work in service of the state, for which ‘he was named / A prescript outlaw’, and hence ‘Compelled to fly into the Belgic sound / And live a pirate’.66 This injustice is compounded by what appears to have been a one-sided, pre-judged trial, where Hoffman was denied legal representation: ‘wretches sentenced never find defence, / However guiltless be their innocence’.67 The play is set in Luneburg and Prussia, contains no references to England, Scotland, or particular individuals, and its composition is difficult to date with precision. We know that on 29 December 1602 Henslowe paid Chettle five shillings ‘in parte payment’ for Hoffman, but since an author earnt £6 for a full play, it is likely that the play was in early stages of composition, making 1603 or early 1604 its most likely dates (Chettle was dead by c.1606).68 If it is a late 1603 or 1604 play, its 63 ‘In Belleforest’s closet scene, Hamblet laments to his mother that she has married a man who murdered “the honor and glory of the Danes, who are now esteemed of no force nor valour at all” (211)’. See Mary Floyd-Wilson, ‘Hamlet, the Pirate’s Son’. 64 See Claire Jowitt, ‘Shakespeare’s Pirates: The Politics of Seaborne Crime’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch 148 (2012), 1-18. 65 Henry Chettle, The Tragedy of Hoffman, ed. by John Jowett (Nottingham: Nottingham Drama Texts, 1983), I, 148-149. 66 Chettle, The Tragedy of Hoffman, I, 150-151, 152-153. 67 Chettle, The Tragedy of Hoffman, I, 208-209. 68 Taylor, ‘The Date and Auspices’, p. 118.

Performing ‘Water’ R alegh

141

resonance with Ralegh’s personal situation is striking. If it is a 1603 play, then it functions as a more speculative exposé of what can happen to naval leaders who fail to adapt to royal policies, or who lose their monarch’s favour. A third contemporaneous play, The Phoenix, also uses the sea captain/ pirate theatregram. On one level, it contains a heavy-handed allegory in praise of new rulers, with political transition most strikingly revealed in its central plotline of a disguised ruler. Phoenix, son and heir of the dying king of Ferrara, who like Elizabeth I in 1603 has been on the throne for forty-five years, apparently exits the country to travel abroad with his friend Fidelio, at the behest of his father and his advisor Lord Proditor. In fact, Phoenix travels in his homeland, much like the Duke in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, which also dates from the same period, ‘look[ing] into the heart and bowels of the dukedom [for] abuses ready for reformation or punishment’.69 One of the most striking examples of ‘abuses’ is the wife-selling of Fidelio’s mother by her new husband, a sea captain. The Captain (he has no other name) complains that his new and virtuous wife sexually unmans him. Full of self-loathing and disgust with women, he seeks to dispose of her, intending to return to the sea and his life of piracy and freedom. On his first entrance he is shown being tempted by three ‘soldiering fellows’ to seek ‘noble purchase’, i.e. booty, in what sounds like a privateering adventure in pursuit of ‘Three ships, not a poop less’. Once alone in soliloquy, however, he describes himself as a ‘salt-thief’, in other words a pirate.70 His plans for his wife include acts of pandering, human trafficking, and murder. The Captain’s connection to the court is through his close relationship to the Duke of Ferrara’s trusted advisor Lord Proditor. Proditor (Latin for ‘traitor’) is the villain of the piece: he is the man to whom the Captain plans to sell his wife, and the chief architect of the plan to prevent Phoenix from inheriting the kingdom by having him murdered while travelling abroad. The Captain plotline satirizes Middleton’s stepfather, Thomas Harvey, an adventurer, grocer, and self-styled ‘Captain’, who Middleton disliked due to his attempts to gain the estate of his mother, Anne, which led to repeated bitter lawsuits.71 Harvey was still alive in 1603 or 1604, so The Phoenix may have been Middleton’s way of paying back his stepfather 69 William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, ed. by N.W. Bawcutt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), I, 102-104. 70 Middleton, The Phoenix, Scene 2, lines 1, 6, 56. 71 Mark Eccles, ‘Middleton’s Birth and Education’ RES 7 (1931), 431-441; P.G. Phialas, ‘Middleton’s Early Contact with the Law’ SP 52 (1955), 187-193; John B. Brooks, ‘Middleton’s Stepfather and the Captain of “The Phoenix”’, Notes and Queries n.s. 8 (1961), 382-384.

142 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

for his mother’s mistreatment (which included, allegedly, an attempt to poison her).72 However, the Captain’s depiction goes beyond providing a lens onto Middleton’s troubled family history. The Captain’s character and behaviour resonate with the period of transition between Tudor and Stuart regimes and foreign policies. Under James I, the slow negotiation of peace with Spain gathered pace toward its conclusion in the Treaty of London in August 1604. This process was out of kilter with Ralegh’s counsel since, on the king’s accession, he wrote A Discourse touching a War with Spain, which aggressively recommended the continuation of hostilities. Neither the tone nor the content of this ‘martial’ paper found favour with the king, leading to Ralegh’s imprisonment and trial on the 17th of November 1603 for his alleged involvement with Lord Cobham in plots to secure the succession for James’ cousin and Englishwoman Lady Arbella Stuart, just as Proditor attempts to shape the succession in Ferrara. At Ralegh’s trial, the court was informed that he would receive 8,000 crowns and a pension from Spain. Cobham was interrogated and signed a sworn confession (later recanted), which served as the chief evidence against Ralegh.73 Though Ralegh was condemned to the full punishment of a traitor’s castration, heart-removal, disembowelling, and quartering, the king commuted his sentence and he was imprisoned.74 Just as the Captain knows Proditor well in The Phoenix, Middleton’s stepfather knew Ralegh well. In the 1580s, Harvey was chief factor at Ralegh’s failed colony Roanoke, and had returned to London penniless with Drake in 1586. Thus, the failure of Roanoke was the root cause of Harvey’s pressing need to recapitalize himself through marriage to the rich widow Anne Middleton.75 In the play, Fidelio and Phoenix triumph over the Captain and he is sent to sea; Proditor’s treason is exposed and he is banished. The traitor Proditor, who tries to prevent the legitimate succession of a new king, can thus be seen to represent Ralegh to King James, with the roles of Proditor and the Captain reversed since Proditor is ‘the ‘chapman’ or purchaser of the Captain’s wife and piratical plunder, whereas Harvey was chief factor for Ralegh’s colony. The play thus functions as a compliment to the new king at the expense of his discarded, disgraced, 72 Gary Taylor, ‘Thomas Middleton: Lives and Afterlives’, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, p. 49. 73 See Davies, ‘“The Great Day of Mart”’. 74 Philip Ayres suggests that the trial of Caius Silius in Act III of Ben Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) ‘glanced’ at Ralegh’s Winchester trial. See B. Jonson, Sejanus his fall, ed. P.J. Ayres (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 16-22. 75 Phialas, ‘Middleton’s Early Contact’, 193.

Performing ‘Water’ R alegh

143

and now condemned courtier. Middleton’s ‘glancing’ at Ralegh was à la mode and likely to appeal to public sentiment, since Ralegh was seen by many as having had too much influence on the late queen (he was her ‘bludsucker’, according to Catholic gentlewoman Katherine Gawen) and was deeply unpopular as a result.76 In the Captain’s ignominy, the play likewise expresses cynicism about the qualities and values of the nation’s fighting men, who had profited from the war Ralegh had advocated continuing, and implicitly praises the king’s pacific policies. In broader terms, The Phoenix’s depiction of the Captain takes stock of England’s recent maritime policies, and its scepticism about the value of piracy and privateering (especially when compared to their portrayal in Hamlet and Hoffman) suggest that the play is concerned to debate, and indeed question, what sort of maritime nation Britain should become.

Afterlife ‘Ralegh’ as sea captain took on renewed vigour again in the early 1620s, when James’ policy to preserve peace became increasingly unpopular: with the navy seen as weak and overstretched, debates about the value of sea captaincy to the nation once more became central.77 Ralegh’s execution in 1618 was one of the most controversial political events of the seventeenth century, since his punishment was widely seen as unjust, especially as James enforced the commuted sentence without a new trial. His ‘exemplary punishment’ for the ‘hostile invasion of the Town of S. Thome’ against James I’s instruction was imposed under diplomatic pressure from Spain, and supporters of Ralegh saw his execution as part of the king’s policy to appease Spain.78 Published versions of his scaffold speech, and manuscript copies of his 1618 Apologie for his Voyage to Guiana (written between 28 and 31 July 1618) circulated widely to become part of his ‘political hagiography’.79 76 Quotation from Nicholls and Williams, Sir Walter Ralegh, p. 193. 77 For discussion of alterations in King James’ iconography over his reign, see James Doelman, James I and the Religious Culture of England (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 73-100. For an account of the naval problems of finance and organization facing King James in the first decades of his reign, see Elizabeth Milford, ‘The Navy at Peace: the Activities of the English Jacobean Navy, 1603‒1618’, The Mariner’s Mirror, 76.1 (1990), 23-36. 78 Beer, Patriot or Traitor, p. 253. 79 On the different manuscript and printed versions of Ralegh’s speech see Anna R. Beer, ‘Textual Politics: The Execution of Sir Walter Ralegh’, Modern Philology, 94.1 (1996), 19-38 (p. 35).

144 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

In all printed versions of the speech, Ralegh refuses to acknowledge his guilt, or glorify the king, both potentially seditious acts in themselves. James and his ministers debated the best method to manage the execution, publishing a declaration to justify the government’s actions.80 The crown was so concerned about Ralegh’s popularity that three works were published to discredit him, two by the man authorized to arrest Ralegh and bring him to justice, Sir Lewis Stukeley (The Humble Petition and Apology), and another by Sir Francis Bacon (A Declaration of the Demeanor and Cariage of Sir Walter Ralegh).81 All turn on the issue of Ralegh’s authority and command, since they contest charges of piracy, and the alleged crime takes on an ideological significance as it acts as shorthand for each side’s larger political standpoint. Ralegh refutes the charge squarely in his Apologie: ‘it was bruted, both before my departure out of England and by the most men beleived, that […] being once at liberty and in mine owne power, having made my way with some Forraigne Prince I would turne Pyratt and utterly forsake my Countrey’.82 Here ‘piracy’ stands not just for the type of raiding activities allowed by Elizabeth during the Anglo-Spanish war and outlawed by James, but more pointedly for an abdication of national identity by taking service with a ‘Forraigne Prince’, and Ralegh seeks to distance himself from it. The authorities’ eagerness to condemn him for it, meanwhile, stands out against the Jacobean state’s inconsistency in its prosecution of justice. The General Pardon issued in 1612 because seaborne crime was endemic, for instance, brought in some pirates, but many refused. Indeed, privateering/piracy was still popular with some prominent courtiers, such as Sir Francis Verney and Sir Robert Dudley, who did leave the country to serve in the navies of foreign princes, or Henry Mainwaring, who in 1616 was pardoned by James for leading a pirate fleet in the Maghreb and Ireland. None of these men were prosecuted, and Mainwaring became a personal favourite of the king.83 By contrast, though Ralegh claimed that he stood against some of his ship’s company who wished to ‘turne Pyrate’, Bacon’s

80 See Beer, Sir Walter Ralegh, pp. 97-104. 81 Lewis Stukeley, To the Kings most Excellent Maiestie. The Humble Petition and Information of Sir Lewis Stucley, Knight, Vice-admirall of Devon, (London: Bonham Norton and John Bill, 1618); Francis Bacon, A Declaration of the Demeanor and Cariage of Sir Walter Ralegh, Knight, (London: Bonham Norton and John Bill, 1618). See Beer, Sir Walter Ralegh, pp. 96-7; R.H. Bowers, ‘Ralegh’s Last Speech: The “Elms” Document’, RES, 2 (1951), 209-216. 82 Walter Ralegh, Sir Walter Ralegh his Apologie for his Voyage to Guiana, (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1650), p. 4. 83 Earle, The Pirate Wars, pp. 17-61.

Performing ‘Water’ R alegh

145

crown-sponsored account by contrast shows him repeatedly arguing for this, and other ‘Elizabethan’ patterns of behaviour: [W]hen the prosecution of this imaginarie Mine vanished […] Sir Walter Ralegh called a Councell of his Captaines […] where hee propounded to them, that his Intention and designe was; First, to make to the New-found lands, and there to revictuall and refresh his Ships; And thence to goe to the Westerne Islands, and there to lie in waite to meete with the Mexico Fleete, or to surprise some Carrackes; and so having gotten treasure, which might make him welcome into any forreine Countrey, to take some newe course for his future fortunes […] his cogitations imbracing East and West […] And although some old Pirates, either by his inciting, or out of feare of their owne case, were fierce and violent for the Sea, and against the returne, yet the far greater number were for the return […] which hee perceiving, for feare of further mutinie, professed in dissimulation, that hee himselfe was for the returne into England, and came and stood amongst them that had most voyces; But neverthelesse, after that he despaired to draw his companie to follow him further, hee made offer of his owne Ship (which was of great value) to his company, if they would set him aboard a French Barque: The like offer he made, when hee came upon the Coast of Ireland, to some of his chiefe Officers there.84

Ralegh’s conduct at his execution and his treatment by the state were popular topics for writers with, for instance, John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s Roman tragedy The False One (1620), where Pompey the Great’s companionin-arms Septimus (the ‘false one’ of the title), who betrayed his commander, being seen as an allegory for Stukeley’s accusations of Ralegh.85 However, the last two plays discussed in this chapter reflect specifically the contested accusation of piracy, and the ways in which its consequences played out. The character of a sea captain intimately connected to Ralegh appears in a second, much later play by Middleton, this time a co-written (with John Webster) comedy Anything for a Quiet Life (c.1622). The sea captain, a one-time pirate, here is, partially at least, a rehabilitated figure. Anything for a Quiet Life opens with an unemployed sea captain, Young Franklin, seeking a new post on a ship. He explains that, as a younger brother, he was compelled to go to sea to make his fortune and has recently returned from 84 Francis Bacon, A Declaration, pp. 20-22. 85 Baldwin Maxwell, Studies in Beaumont, Fletcher and Massinger (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Caroline Press, 1939), pp. 170-172.

146 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Ralegh’s disastrous 1617-18 Guiana voyage: ‘my fate / Throwing me upon the late ill-starred voyage / To Guiana, failing of our golden hopes’.86 This voyage casts a long shadow over Young Franklin’s career, since it renders him unemployable, because potential new employers see it as indicative of previous piratical activity. After the disastrous Guiana expedition, he explains to his friend that he had intended to join the Duke of Florence’s fleet against the Turk. By the 1620s, the title ‘Duke of Florence’ was out-dated, but it most likely refers to the Medici Grand Dukes of Tuscany. As such, it would place Young Franklin in the orbit of Dudley, another notorious English rebel and ‘outlaw’ and the illegitimate son of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who had left England in 1605 when the king ruled against him in his legitimacy court case. Much to James I’s annoyance, Dudley became naval advisor to Ferdinand II, supporting aggressive Italian colonial and foreign policies. Hence, despite his grumbles, Young Franklin’s willingness to serve in this post signal that his ambitions remain in keeping with those of the now dead Ralegh. Before embarking for the post with the Florentine fleet, Young Franklin is called to London by the corrupt aristocrat Lord Beaufort to discuss an opportunity on another venture, probably with the English East India Company: ‘Your lordship, minding to rig forth a ship / To trade for the East Indies sent for me’.87 Yet this voyage has not embarked, as Young Franklin complains: ‘I have stayed here two months / And find your intended voyage but a dream’.88 Increasingly financially desperate, he finds Beaufort’s support inadequate to meet his monetary needs, and misbelieves his new promise of recommending him to be ‘captain of a ship that’s bound for the Red Sea’. Young Franklin protests: ‘Men that have command, my lord, at sea, cannot live / Ashore without money’, especially as his tastes are for expensive ‘scarlet and gold lace’, similar to the privateering sea captains in Fair Maid of the West, Part I who were ‘tricked in scarf and feather’.89 Young Franklin’s voyage with Ralegh, it seems, has blighted his reputation.90 The East India merchants financing the Red Sea voyage do not want his services: ‘the merchants are possessed / You have been a pirate’.91 Yet, for 86 Thomas Middleton and John Webster, Anything for a Quiet Life, ed. by Leslie Thomson in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, Gen. Eds. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007), I, i, 166-168. 87 Ibid, 174-175, I, i, 175n. 88 Ibid, 181-182. 89 Ibid, 185-186. 90 Ibid, 196-198. 91 Ibid, 198-199.

Performing ‘Water’ R alegh

147

Young Franklin the allegation is a mark of ability and badge of honour: ‘Say I were one still?’ he challenges, and claims it makes him an abler captain: ‘If I were past the line once, why, methinks / I should do them better service’.92 With this boast of service ‘past the line’, meaning in the regions beyond the meridian established by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, which divided the New World and still-to-be discovered lands between Spain and Portugal, and which all other European colonial nations disputed, Young Franklin reveals himself to be all ‘pirate’, and proud of it.93 For Young Franklin, the scope of his travels and the fact that he has crossed the line mean that he believes, like Ralegh before him, that he can be a ‘better’ captain, but the merchants (and King James) do not agree. Young Franklin’s connection with Ralegh is treated with sympathy in Anything for a Quiet Life, since he is consistently revealed to be a resourceful and charismatic character who, prevented from undertaking the work to which he is temperamentally suited, due to the merchants’ opposition, finds himself having to live on his wits. Young Franklin is an attractive, intelligent, and amusing rogue, offering pleasurable sport to audiences and readers, as he gulls the slower-witted characters in London: how much better would it be for the nation, we seem invited to ask, if these resourceful abilities were put into operation in their proper sphere of overseas activity and encounter? By the early 1620s, the Palatinate crisis and criticism of James’ lack of decisive action in support of his daughter Elizabeth, wife to the dispossessed Elector Palatine, and an increasingly antagonistic ‘war party’, led by William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, and his brother Sir Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery, who argued against the king’s peaceful foreign policy, meant war against Spain was once more a distinct possibility. In this scenario, resourceful, able, and experienced sea captains would be essential. The last play under discussion is Thomas Heywood and William Rowley’s Fortune by Land and Sea. Martin Wiggins has recently suggested a later date for this play, suggesting 1619-26, with a best guess of 1623, instead of placing it in the first decade of the seventeenth century, specifically between 1607 and 1609, where most critics locate it.94 The play’s thematic similarity with other maritime drama produced late in James’s reign,95 92 Ibid, 200-201. 93 Jowitt, The Culture of Piracy, 1580-1630, p. 3. 94 On dating the play, see Martin Wiggins, British Drama 1533-1642: A Catalogue, Volume VII: 1617-1623 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 505-508.; see also Herman Doh, ‘Introduction’ in Thomas Heywood and William Rowley, Fortune by Land and Sea, ed. by Doh (New York: Garland, 1980), pp. 32-37. 95 Including Fletcher and Massinger’s The Double Marriage and The Sea Voyage.

148 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

and its depiction of f igures that glance at Ralegh, indebted to both his death and life, add further weight to arguments for a later date. The play is set in the early 1580s, when Young Forrest kills Rainsford (the murderer of his brother Frank) in a duel. He becomes a fugitive and, in an attempt to secure his pardon from Queen Elizabeth, captures the real-life pirates Purser and Clinton at sea, and takes them to justice. The play concludes with the pirates being marched offstage to be hanged (an event which actually took place in 1583), and Young Forrest’s marriage to a rich and virtuous widow. The play never mentions Ralegh directly. However, ‘glancings’ towards him operate multi-directionally. Rainsford ‘a quarrelsome Gentleman’, who is also well connected at court, is shown in Act One repeatedly demanding tobacco (‘Some canary sack, and tobacco’, ‘The pipe, sirrah!’, and ‘More tobacco, boy!’).96 Smoking was generally associated with raffish behaviour and disorderliness. Since according to popular opinion Ralegh introduced tobacco into England, smoking was prevalent amongst Ralegh’s circle, and James I was outspokenly anti-smoking, it was also metaphorically associated with both Ralegh and political dissidence.97 If, on one level, the braggart Rainsford, who seeks to intimidate with boasts of his ‘alliance and greatness’, invokes Ralegh, then Rainsford’s character and undignified death seem to support the state position on Ralegh.98 Indeed, the comedic stage directions for his death (‘Forrest loseth his weapon’ and ‘[Forrest] Guards himself, and puts by with his hat – slips – the other [Rainsford] running, falls over him and Forrest kills him’) seem designed to disrupt Ralegh’s scaffold speech being used to support an oppositional political hagiography based in part on his achievement of ‘a good death’.99 The play is multi-dimensional in its ‘applications’ towards Ralegh, however. Like Ralegh, and the pirates in the play, Young Forrest also faces execution (‘I dare not trust my native country with my forfeit life’) for his actions. The play’s narrative explicitly celebrates Young Forrest’s escape from a Ralegh-like fate under James by gesturing towards his treatment under Elizabeth, who rewarded him for his exploits (‘she styl’d me with the Order of Knighthood’) and suggested future appointments would be 96 Thomas Heywood and William Rowley, Fortune by Land and Sea, ed. by Barron Field in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood, Vol. 1 (London: The Shakespeare Society, 1845), I, ii, pp. 5-6. 97 See Penny McCarthy, ‘“It was not tobacco, stupefied my braine”: The Tobacco Controversy of 1602’, The Modern Language Review, 110 (2015), 631-648. 98 Heywood and William Rowley, Fo rtune by Land and Sea, II, ii, p. 27. 99 J.A. Sharpe, ‘“Last Dying Speeches”: Religion, Ideology and Public Execution in SeventeenthCentury England’, Past & Present 107 (1985), 144-167.

Performing ‘Water’ R alegh

149

forthcoming (‘with promise of employments of more weight’).100 The pirates’ execution is also not necessarily cause for celebration. Their execution speeches are powerful pieces of anti-state propaganda.101 The play seems contradictory concerning the deaths of such serviceable men. In plot terms, to reincorporate the heroic Young Forrest into legitimate society their execution is required, but their ‘gallant spirits’ who have ‘made Armadoes fly before our stream’ are lost to the nation.102 Ralegh’s dignified, even heroic, deportment at his execution and his best-selling speech strike similar notes. Apparently even Ralegh’s executioner was affected by the situation’s emotion: ‘the fellowe [the executioner] was much daunted (as it seemed to me) att his [Ralegh’s] resolution and courage, in so much that Sir Walter Ralegh clapped him on his back divers times; and cheered him up’.103 The pirates’ dignified speeches imply Young Forrest’s pardon should not be secured at the expense of their lives: both the pirates and Young Forrest are serviceable to the nation, especially in the eventuality of war against Spain. The similarities between Purser and Clinton with Young Forrest are compelling. Young Forrest, like the pirates, is a fugitive, and his ship is involved in indistinguishable activities. He acts as though he were in possession of letters of marque allowing attacks on other shipping, and tries to articulate a difference between his exploits and Purser and Clinton’s, but in the play’s on-board action that follows there is no difference in their amphibious manoeuvres as they mirror each other in preparation for battle.104 Indeed, like Young Forrest, the pirates also fly ‘the Cross of England and St. George’.105 Like Ralegh in Guiana in 1617-18, and the pirates, Young Forrest and his men have attacked the Spanish. One of his mariners describes how they have prospered since Forrest has become captain: When we first took you to our fellowship, We had a poor bark of some fifteen tun, And that was all our riches, but since then We have took many a rich prize from Spain.106 100 Heywood and William Rowley, Fortune by Land and Sea, V, iii, p. 73. 101 Barbara Fuchs describes their speeches as ‘elegiac’, see ‘Faithless Empires: Pirates, Renegadoes and the English Nation’, English Literary History, 67 (2000), 45-69 (p. 52). 102 Heywood and Rowley, Fortune by Land and Sea, V, ii, p. 71. 103 Anna Beer, Sir Walter Ralegh, p. 88. 104 See Janice E. Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 105 Heywood and Rowley, Fortune by Land and Sea, IV, ii, p. 57. 106 Heywood and Rowley, Fortune by Land and Sea, IV, ii, p. 55.

150 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

It is only once they are satiated with Spanish plunder that Young Forrest captures the English pirates. The inclusion of the characters Purser and Clinton means that the play’s action takes place before the Anglo-Spanish war, intensifying the resemblances between the actions of Young Forrest and the pirates. In fact, Young Forrest is at this point as much of an outlaw ‒ having killed a man ‒ as Purser and Clinton. If Young Forrest is attempting to secure his pardon through capture of the outlaw pirates, similarly so might they legitimately seek to compound for their crimes through his capture. The f igures of Young Forrest and the pirates are not oppositional to each other, and each seems indebted to Ralegh. In Young Forrest, we see the expression of Ralegh-like aggressive, expansionist policies at odds with James’ pacifist beliefs. His championing, through the twin rewards of knighthood and marriage to an honourable and rich wife, of amphibious aggression directly challenges Rex Pacificus. The punishment of the pirates for indistinguishable activities exposes inconsistencies in state justice (much like in the trial and execution of Ralegh, and the pardon of other individuals) and the short-sightedness of state policies when under threat of war. In their depiction of the figure of the sea captain, these plays are dealing with issues of authority, legitimacy, and governance, on land and at sea, and the types of characteristics that are required for leadership. What my argument reveals is that the figure of the sea captain, even as he allegorises or shadows a single figure, serves these issues in multi-directional ways. As England sought to establish itself as a player on the global stage, the figure of the pirate sea captain, and the characteristics he or she possessed, became increasingly central to both actual and textual activities. The ways in which drama performed ‘Sir Walter Ralegh’ are key parts of this story, as the characters that he inspired are emblematic of a national ambition for expansion and glory, and simultaneously reveal the darker depths of lawlessness, and the consequences of the kinds of restless, often uncontrollable energy they concurrently demonstrate. ‘Ralegh’ in The Fair Maid of the West, for instance, focalised the ways that disputes between sea captains threatened ambitions for English maritime campaigns. Later Jacobean plays considered, from various perspectives, how piracy might contribute to, or undermine, the development of a British maritime empire. As vehicles to communicate ideas to diverse individuals – as audience members, from monarch to groundling, when performed, and readers of different political and religious perspectives when in print – plays were the ubiquitous cultural form of the early modern period. As such, plays shaped national debates and consciousness.

Performing ‘Water’ R alegh

151

In all the ‘seafever’ plays discussed in this essay, which ‘glance’ at Ralegh in different ways, desires for a British maritime empire are powerfully expressed, but what form it should take, or how best to achieve it, and even what ‘maritime empire’ meant, are far less fixed. Persistently constructed as ‘Elizabethan’ in temperament and outlook, ‘Water’ Ralegh’s identity as a sea captain is used variously by later generations of playwrights. Shadows of ‘Ralegh’ might be revived to critique current policies by signalling nostalgia for a lost age of apparent maritime success; ‘Ralegh’ figures might be used to inspire and encourage effective maritime leadership; equally ‘Ralegh’ might be a symbol of corruption, unruliness, or dissidence, disciplined in the play-world to warn of where such behaviour leads. Each version is united, however, in posing, explicitly or implicitly, questions of what sort of maritime nation England, later Britain, could, or should, become, and what types of leader and leadership were needed to pilot it.

6. ‘Wicked Actions Merit Fearful Judgments’: Capital Trials aboard the Early East India Company Voyages Cheryl Fury

For the men on English East India Company vessels in the early seventeenth century, their multi-year voyages were rarely ‘smooth sailing’. Mortality on the first voyage (1601-3), for example, was about 60 per cent.1 Like most long-distance treks in the early modern period, the accounts of the English East India Company voyages are peppered with examples of shipboard disagreements -both physical and verbal, desertions, disease, and deaths. However, an examination of the ships’ logs from its f irst 4 major voyages (1601-11)2 also reveal extreme behaviours such as suicides, sexual deviance, mutinies, and a murder, all of which tested order aboard. These are indicators that for Tudor-Stuart seamen the 2-3 year round trip to the East Indies was one of the most challenging forms of maritime employment. Though the Company was a solicitous employer that was proactive when it came to the physical and spiritual health of its employees, experienced off icers, shipboard healthcare, regular worship, good wages, and a diet that often included anti-scorbutics were not suff icient to ensure shipboard harmony on Company ships.3 For most breaches of discipline, off icers chastened offenders with physical punishments, but there were occasions when order was so severely compromised that drastic measures were required. This chapter is not a legal study of these cases, but rather seeks to analyze what these offences and trials reveal about the human costs of the taxing multi-year voyages and the diff iculties 1 Cheryl Fury, ‘Good Wills Hunting: Tracking Down the Men of the First East India Company Voyage, 1601-3’; The International Journal of Maritime History, 27, 3 (2015), pp. 506-27. Mortality remained high. In 1615, one contemporary claimed that “men doe die extraordinarily in this Voyage…”. Robert Kayll, Trades Increase (Printed by William Stansby for John Barnes, 1615), pp. 11-12. 2 James Lancaster’s fleet (4 ships) sailed from 1601-3; the 2nd fleet (1604-06) consisted of 4 ships under Henry Middleton; William Keeling led 3 ships on the 3rd voyage (1607-10); the 4th fleet of 3 ships sailed under Alexander Sharpeigh (1608-1611). 3 Cheryl Fury, ‘Men Whose Vocation Calls us to Dangers Substantial: Healthcare in the Early English East India Company, 1601-1611’ in Claire Jowitt, Craig Lambert and Steve Mentz, eds., The Routledge Companion to Marine and Maritime Worlds 1400-1800 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020).

154 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

of maintaining shipboard order. In the voluminous publications about the East India Company, including a current renaissance of works on the Company, little attention has been paid to these topics during its foundational years. 4 This is all the more surprising given how revealing some of these accounts are. This study on shipboard order hopefully adds a needed dimension to this scholarship. *** Trying to maintain authority over those the Company deemed ‘the poore vngoverned Marriners’5 was a tricky business. Officers were instructed ‘to comaund as you may be both loved and feared, not using aucthoritie to worke your private respect or revenge but […] endevouringe to bringe the longe and tedious voyadge to a profitable end, with care of the saffetie, health and comforte of your people’.6 In order to do this, officers had to strike a balance between the Company’s profits and shipboard paternalism. If crews regarded their officers as fair-minded men of skill and reputation, they followed them more readily.7 Conversely, when the crew’s faith in their superiors waned, good order was often a casualty. To this end, the Company tried to be discerning about whom it hired for positions of authority.8 It turned down many applicants for employment, seeking men who could carry out the Company’s business but also ‘troubleshoot’ personnel problems afloat. When there were lapses in discipline, officers were to punish wrongdoers ‘according to the qualitie of their offences’.9 Standard maritime punishments included flogging, ducking, and restraining in the bilboes (irons), and although these physical reprimands were tailored to the shipboard environment, they utilized public shaming and painful corporal punishments similar to disciplinary measures on land. Ashore or afloat, punishments were designed to discipline, deter, and demonstrate authority.10 Offenders 4 Philip J. Stern, ‘History and Historiography of the English East India Company: Past, Present and Future’, History Compass, 7,4 (2009), pp. 1146-1180. 5 British Library (hereafter BL) IOR B/2/20v. 6 Henry Middleton’s Commission, The Voyage of Sir Henry Middleton to the Moluccas 1604-1606, ed. Sir William Foster (London: Hakluyt Society, 1943), p. 148. 7 For more detail, see Cheryl Fury, Tides in the Affairs of Men: The Social History of Elizabethan Seamen (Westport, Ct: Greenwood, 2002), pp. 50-4. 8 See the Company’s Court Minutes, BL IOR B/3, passim. 9 BL IOR B/2/19. 10 On punishments at sea, see Fury, Tides in the Affairs of Men, 65-74. For the goals of the justice system ashore, see Martin Ingram, ‘Shame and Pain: themes and variations in Tudor punishments’, in Penal Practice and Culture, 1500-1900, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2004), pp. 8, 37.

‘Wicked Ac tions Merit Fearful Judgments’

155

were disciplined in the hope that ‘they may reforme themselves.’11 Officers could also impose financial penalties such as demotion or withholding wages for flaunting the Company’s rules against private trading. The vast majority of offences on all early modern ships were punished by these corporal or monetary punishments, but in extreme cases offenders needed to be purged from shipboard society by marooning. This measure was rare in these early journeys, although an attempted suicide on the first voyage was supposed to be abandoned ashore.12 Even though self-murder was a rigorously punished felony in Tudor-Stuart England, surgeon Christopher Newchurch suffered only demotion after trying to poison himself in 1602; he was spared marooning by the intervention of the captain of the Susan, who ‘tooke him into his shippe, to live as an ordynary man.’13 Healthy shipboard relations between officers and subordinates were the bedrock of good order, and required both discipline and compassion. The Company mandated that its employees give officers ‘all due obedience & respect’ but, in practice, maintaining authority was a two-way street, and punishment was not the only method used. In return for their obedience, seamen expected to have a voice in the conduct of merchant voyages, and as a result, seafarers had a reputation as grumblers. One renowned Stuart sea captain referred to them as ‘surly natured patients’.14 If officers neglected their welfare, this opened the door to discontent, confrontation, work stoppage, or more menacing forms of protest. Such disruptions threatened the wellbeing of the ship’s company far more than individual misdemeanours, and could impair the ability to conduct commerce. The East India Company anticipated major breaches of discipline over the course of such long voyages. It selected James Lancaster to lead its first fleet – a veteran seafarer who had been to the East Indies previously 11 BL IOR B/2/36. 12 Anonymous, ‘A True and Large Discourse…’, in The Voyages of Sir James Lancaster, ed. Sir William Foster, (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1941), pp. 125-6. Marooning rarely appears in the records for the period. For examples, see R. F. Hitchcock, ‘Cavendish’s Last Voyage: John Jane’s Narrative of the Voyage of the Desire’, Mariner’s Mirror 89, 1, p. 9; R. F. Hitchcock, ‘Cavendish’s Last Voyage; The Charges Against Davis’, Mariner’s Mirror, 80, 3, pp. 263, 264; Sir William Foster, ed. Voyages of Thomas Best to the East Indies 1612-14 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1934), pp. 65, 174-5. 13 Anonymous, ‘A True and Large Discourse’, pp. 125-6. Suicide had serious economic, religious, legal, and social consequences in Tudor-Stuart England: see Michael Zell, ‘Suicide in Pre-Industrial England’, Social History, 11, 3 (October, 1986), p. 306; Michael MacDonald, and Terence R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 15-16. 14 Nathaniel Boteler, Boteler’s Dialogues, ed. W.G. Perrin. (London: Navy Record Society, 1929), p. 44.

156 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

and understood the taxing nature of the journey. While the Company had confidence in Lancaster’s abilities, it wanted to bolster his authority as much as possible. It sought and received a royal commission from Queen Elizabeth I which, as with those of his successors, gave him state-sanctioned powers to try men and execute those guilty of felonies, such as ‘wilfull murder w[hi] ch is hatefull in the sight of God, or mutenie w[hi]ch is an offence that maie tend to the ouerthrowe of the said voyage’.15 Generals and admirals had the power of life and death: according to Elizabethan and Stuart Captain Nathaniel Boteler, ‘this [responsibility] is not to be entrusted with every Commander, much less every master.’16 Such powers were a mark of the monarch’s favour and much prized.17 The fact the Company sought and obtained state-sanctioned powers from the onset indicates it was not naïve about the hardships of its commercial ventures in the East. Even though a General had this royally-granted authority to employ martial law, it was no assurance he could maintain good order afloat.18 The Company mandated shipboard religious practice to sooth tensions, encourage good behavior, and instill respect for the divinely-sanctioned hierarchy: ‘for that religious goverm[en]t doth best binde men to performe their duties’.19 Men far from home and under considerable stress might find comfort in familiar religious rituals. Although communal prayers and lay-led services were the norm on English ships, the Company exceeded this, hiring a preacher for each fleet. Shipboard services used the rites of the Church of England and the Book of Common Prayer – an important connection to home when men were on the other side of the globe. Religious arguments and appeals to English nationalism also undergird exhortations for men to behave abroad. When men were allowed ashore, officers gave them ‘seveare warning to behave themselves peaceablie & Civillie’, lest their disorders cost ‘the losse of your lyves & overthrown of oer voyadge […] besides an vtter discreeditt to oer Nation’.20 Those who violated Company rules did a disservice to themselves, the Company, God and England.21 Authority 15 BL IOR B/2/18v-19v. 16 Boteler, Boteler’s Dialogues, p. 18. 17 Kenneth R. Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics: Seafaring and Naval Enterprise in the Reign of Charles I (Cambridge University Press Archive, 1991), pp. 66-73. 18 See Derek Massarella, ‘“& thus ended the buisinisse”: A Buggery Trial on the East India Company Ship Mary in 1636’, Mariner’s Mirror, 103, 4 (2017), pp. 418-19. 19 BL IOR B/2/131. 20 BL IOR B/2/46. 21 BL IOR B/2/46, B/2/107v. For greater detail on shipboard religion, see V. Patarino, ‘The Religious Shipboard Culture of 16th and 17th-century English Sailors’, The Social History of English Seamen 1485-1649 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer Publishers, 2012), pp. 141-192.

‘Wicked Ac tions Merit Fearful Judgments’

157

was thus based on customary maritime practice, but bolstered by royal commissions and reinforced by religious sermons and patriotic sentiments. Thus equipped, Generals and the leading officers had to weather storms figuratively and literally until the ships returned home.22 The Company ships’ logs reveal that the first year of the voyage was usually the most troubled, and the most likely to see large-scale disorder. Due to the deficiency of Vitamin C in shipboard provisions, outbreaks of scurvy were common in the first few months after the fleets departed England, and periodically thereafter. Seafarers expected to go ashore when possible for fresh food and for the sick to regain their health, and after roughly four months at sea, the men wanted refreshing at, or near, the Cape of Good Hope. In the East India Company, as in the Dutch Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (‘Dutch East India Company’), the men viewed the practice of going ashore as a ‘right of refreshment’.23 Any attempt by the officers or the Company to delay or deny this right led to shipboard unrest: when, where, and for how long to go ashore was hotly contested, and the southern tip of Africa was a flashpoint. Although the Company recognized the men needed time ashore, it urged its officers to press on with the corporate objectives as expeditiously as possible. For their part, seamen knew their voices were powerful in combination.24 Crews often petitioned their officers for time ashore during heightened periods of morbidity and mortality, including on the second, third, and fourth voyages.25 During the second voyage, for example, many of Henry Middleton’s men were afflicted with scurvy. They had been at sea from the departure of the fleet from England in March 1604 until July: our sick men cryed out most lamentably; for at that present there were sicke of the scurvy at the least 80 men in our ship, not one able to helpe the other; who made a petition to the Generall [Middleton], most humbly entreating him, for Gods sake, to save their lives and put in for Saldania; 22 See Claire Jowitt, ‘The Hero and the Sea: Sea Captains and their Discontents’, Revue de la Société d’études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, 74 (2017). 23 See Jaap R. Bruijn and Els van Eyck van Heslinga, ‘Mutiny: rebellion on the ships of the Dutch East India Company’, The Great Circle, 4, 1 (1982), p. 3. 24 Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics, p. 74. 25 On average, English crews spent 21.7 days at the Cape of Good Hope refreshing on the outward journey to the East Indies during the period 1591-1619. Between 1619-1632 the time spent ashore drops dramatically to 7.5 days. M.D.D. Newitt, ‘The East India Company in the Western Indian Ocean in the Early Seventeenth Century’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 14, 2 (1986), p. 12.

158 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

otherwayes they were but dead men. The Generall, perusing there pitifull complaint and looking out his cabin dore, where did attend a swarme of lame and weake, diseased cripples.26

Moved by their distress, Middleton granted their petition and the fleet put into Table Bay, and this responsive leadership may well have prevented an escalation of shipboard strife.27 Having departed England in March, 1607, the crew of the third voyage simiarly wished to go ashore by December.28 The men of the flagship, Red Dragon, petitioned General William Keeling to allow them to go ashore, reminding him that ‘w[i]thout them hee could not p[er]forme his voyadge’.29 The petitioners clearly understood the value of their labour to the Company, and explicitly threatened to withdraw that labour. Like Middleton, Keeling was attentive to his men’s appeal. The Generals of the second and third fleets thus diffused tensions by responding to the men’s growing concerns for their health. Unlike Middleton and Keeling, John Lufkin, the shipmaster of the Good Hope on the fourth voyage, failed to realize when his men had reached a breaking point. After the three ships of this fleet were separated in a storm in September 1608, two of the vessels, the Ascension and the Good Hope, were reunited in May, 1609 in Aden.30 However, there was ‘noe greate cause to shute for joye’ at the subsequent arrival of the pinnace, Good Hope, ‘seeing they had murthered there maister.’ Inquiring who had killed Master John Lufkin, they answered ‘One and all of them’. Those in positions of authority regarded ‘one and all’ as a ‘mutinous sea cry’.31 In this case, the collective took responsibility for Thomas Clarke, who wielded the mallet and ‘strooke his [the Master’s] braines out’.32 The men’s main complaint was Lufkin’s unwillingness to allow them to go ashore for refreshment and fresh victuals. His crew claimed that Lufkin assured them repeatedly that they would go ashore, but broke his 26 The Voyage of Sir Henry Middleton, p. 9. 27 The Voyage of Sir Henry Middleton, p. 18. 28 Richmond Barbour, ed. The Third Voyage Journals: Writing and Performance in the London East India Company, 1607-10 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), p. 188. 29 The Third Voyage Journals, p. 18; BL IOR L/MAR/A/IV (July 1607). 30 BL Sloane MS. 858/30. 31 Boteler, Boteler’s Dialogues, p. 44. That ‘pernicious phrase’, ‘One and all’, was banned by the Admiralty Court in 1631. For more details, see Richard J. Blakemore, “The Legal World of English Sailors, c. 1575-1729”, in Maria Fusaro, Bernard Allaire, Richard Blakemore and Tijl Vanneste, eds. Law, Labour and Empire: Comparative Perspectives on Seafarers, c. 1500-1800 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 112; Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics, pp. 63-4. 32 William Foster, ed. Journal of John Jourdain 1608-1617 (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1905), pp. 78-79. BL Sloane Ms. 858/30v.

‘Wicked Ac tions Merit Fearful Judgments’

159

word, and the bonds between the master and his underlings were eroded by Lufkin’s failed promises. It is uncertain exactly when the men began to pester their master to go ashore, although they claimed he had driven them off ‘a longe time’ with repeated deceptions.33 Their protests, mutiny, murder of the master, and the ensuing jury trial took place between September, 1608 (when they were separated from the fleet), and May, 1609. The leading officers of the fourth fleet deliberated how best to restore good government and punish those responsible for the disastrous breakdown in order. Master Philip de Grove suggested they ‘wink at’ the murder and mutiny until they got home; De Grove was not respected by his crew, and may have realized his shaky hold on authority.34 On the other hand, merchantfactor John Jourdain counseled General Sharpeigh not to put off dealing with ‘such a fowle matter’, or he could risk shipboard upheaval himself. General Sharpeigh took Jourdain’s recommendation and used the powers granted him through his royal commission. The crew of the Good Hope were examined by the men of note in the fleet: the General, the preacher, the master, the purser, and Jourdain. A jury was impanelled and ‘vpon iust and due proofe, according to our English laws, they were convicted’. The two men who usurped command, Francis Dryver who became the master, and Thomas Clarke who served as master’s mate, were hanged aboard the Good Hope.35 Although Clarke struck the blow to kill Lufkin, Dryver was thought to be the driving force behind these actions.36 This tragic incident demonstrates that officers ignored petitions at their peril. Verbal or written complaints were often a prelude to work stoppage if officers did not make efforts to remedy problems. Mutineers usually sought redress of grievances, not to usurp command.37 Those in authority 33 BL Sloane Ms. 858/30v. 34 Merchant John Jourdain called de Grove a ‘crooked apostle’. Foster claimed he was ‘drunken and headstrong’. Journal of John Jourdain, pp. 138, xviii. He may also have sodomized the purser’s boy. Robert Coverte, A True and almost incredible report, (n.p., 1612), p. 68. 35 In Coverte’s account, two other men, Andrew Evans and Edward Hills, had been active in the conspiracy to bludgeon the master. He claims all four were “murderous and bad minded men”. Coverte, A True and almost incredible report, p. 21. Evans, a drummer, was given a reprieve because he was young. It did not hurt his prospects that he also had “some skill in surgerye”. BL Sloane Ms. 858/30v; Journal of John Jourdain, p. 80. As with Acton, youth was a mitigating factor. 36 Coverte, A True and almost incredible report, p. 21. 37 Mutiny was a nebulous term which could cover anything from insubordination to usurping command. For a few discussions of mutiny, see Fury, Tides in the Affairs, pp. 61-5; Cornelis J. Lammers, “Mutiny in Comparative Perspective’, International Review of Social History, 48, 3 (2003), pp. 473-482; Cornelis J. Lammers, “Strikes and Mutinies: a Comparative Study of Organizational Conflicts between Rulers and Ruled’, Administrative Science Quarterly (1969), pp. 558-572; Jane Hathaway, ed., Rebellion, Repression, Reinvention: Mutiny in Comparative Perspective (Westport,

160 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

viewed protests about provisions or refreshing as having some justification when they were life-and-death matters, but when protests became violent, perpetrators crossed the Rubicon.38 The murder of John Lufkin was therefore extremely unusual both because the shipmaster ignored the crescendo of complaints and because it culminated in his murder.39 The case of the Good Hope is an outlier because here protest resulted in the overthrowing of the shipboard hierarchy through murder and subsequent executions. Most mutinous behaviour did not lead to the noose. On the outward leg of the first voyage, Jonas Thoroughgood of the Red Dragon was found guilty of mutiny and contempt in June 1602, and sentenced to be hanged. The surviving records do not reveal the reason for his rebellion, nor the details of his trial. However, we are told that even though Thoroughgood was judged worthy of death, he was granted a reprieve because his crewmates made a ‘great entreaty’ on his behalf.40 Thoroughgood was the only one tried so he must have been the prime, or only, agitator. We know of very few cases of mutiny trials on English voyages during this time, but typically only the ringleaders were singled out for censure, as was the case with the Good Hope. On the Red Dragon, General Lancaster may have targeted Thoroughgood as the one who was stirring the pot of shipboard unrest, and whose conviction was meant to intimidate all actual and potential troublemakers in the fleet. There is no mention of mutiny thereafter, so if this trial was intended to demonstrate the General’s power from the monarch, it was duly noted by Thoroughgood and his crewmates (though Lancaster’s responsiveness to his crew, mentioned earlier, probably helped too). Thoroughgood’s reprieve is as significant as his trial. Ashore or afloat, crime was a community matter, and the fact that he had the support of at least some of the shipboard community strengthened his chances of receiving a pardon.41 The ‘entreaty’ from his crewmates indicates some may CT: Praeger,2001); Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics, pp. 62-83; Richard Blakemore, ‘Orality and Mutiny: The Seafarers of Early Modern London’, in Thomas V. Cohen and Lesley K. Twomey, eds. Spoken Word and Social Practice: Orality in Europe (1400-1700) (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 272-3; Bruijn and van Heslinga, ‘Mutiny’, pp. 1-9; G.V. Scammell, “Mutiny in British Ships, c. 1500-1750’, in Négoce, Ports et Océans XVIe-Xxe Siècles: Mélanges Offerts à Paul Butel (2003), pp. 337-354; Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 205-253. Mary C. Fuller, “Writing the long-distance voyage: Hakluyt’s circumnavigators.” Huntington Library Quarterly 70, no. 1 (2007), pp.48-59. 38 BL IOR B/2/1v; Fury, Tides in the Affairs of Men, pp. 54-55, 64-65, 158. 39 BL Sloane MS 858/30v, IOR B/2/45v, IOR B/2/1v. 40 “True & Large Discourse”, p. 132. 41 Paul Griffiths, ‘Punishing the English’, in Penal Practice and Culture, 1500-1900 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 16; Ingram, “Shame and pain”, p. 47.

‘Wicked Ac tions Merit Fearful Judgments’

161

have sympathized with his actions and/or they believed he was worthy of a second chance: this was not the case for the two leaders of the mutiny on the Good Hope. Alternatively, this call for mercy for Thoroughgood may have been staged to allow Lancaster to demonstrate the extent of his considerable authority while sparing the offender. Where Thoroughgood’s behaviour would probably have been punished with physical correction on most merchant ships, Lancaster’s commission gave him the power of life and death, so this may have been a ‘show trial’ with a didactic function. 42 Moreover, if Lancaster believed Thoroughgood’s execution would cause morale to drop further, clemency was a wise choice. He may have been wary of risking recriminations from the convicted man’s relations back in England, or harming the fledgling Company’s reputation. Whatever his reasons, they were sufficient to save Thoroughgood’s life, and he seems to have kept his head down for the rest of the voyage. Given the absence of further trouble, perhaps Thoroughgood’s trial did discipline and reform the offender and deter others. *** Mutinies such as the one on the Good Hope and the Red Dragon are an obvious barometer for shipboard unrest. Among the Company’s fleets, there were mutinies on a ship in the first and fourth fleets, or in half of the Company’s major voyages in the first decade. Although there was also unrest on the second and third voyages, those in authority responded positively to the men’s petitions, thereby diffusing tensions and preventing further escalation. The mutiny and murder on the fourth voyage seems to have been the direct result of the master ignoring his crew’s repeated petitions. Significantly, in all these cases, the troubles and trials occurred on the outward voyage. We can offer various explanations why the voyages home were more pacif ic. 43 Crews had been tapered by desertion and death. Survivors would receive years of wages and a portion of any privateering prizes taken when they made it home to England. Financially, this could be life-changing. Furthermore, a number of men had been promoted because of the deaths of their superiors: they gained additional income as well as valuable occupational experience. Thus, the men had powerful incentives to preserve the peace and follow orders until they reached an English port. 42 Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics, p. 66. 43 This was the pattern on Dutch East India Co. (VOC) ships as well. Bruijn and van Heslinga, ‘Mutiny’, p. 3.

162 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

These cases of large-scale disorder show that officers might be responsive to their crews, and stomached some offences, but used physical and financial punishments for others. At least some men may have been cowed by these displays of English justice. Without question, mutinous persons were seen as a serious threat to order and morale. This was also true of those deemed sexual deviants. During the third voyage, a gunner’s mate’s scandalous behavior caused repeated commotions: in May 1607, George King of the Hector was accused by two of his crewmates of ‘Commitinge fylthines’ with a dog while he was on watch. The captain questioned King’s accusers, two Scots, Alexander Phythy and Robert Kinningham, and sent a letter detailing the complaints against him to the General of the Fleet, William Keeling. Under English law, bestiality was a felony, not to mention a grave sin. 44 Twelve of the ‘cheifest of the Marryners’ from the Hector and the Red Dragon were selected to form a jury. On 22 May 1607, the indictment was read aboard the General’s ship, the Red Dragon, and the witnesses and jury were sworn in. During the trial King’s accusers were less certain about what they had seen: for conviction of bestiality under English law, penetration had to be proven. 45 The jury deliberated for two hours before ‘acquiting him of mereting Death ffor the same, ffynding him onely guilty of a wicked pretence.’ King’s ‘villainous intente’ was ‘not sufficiente to enduce the Consciences of the sayd Jurey to alott him death.’46 The jury left King’s punishment in the General’s hands. Keeling ordered that King should be whipped at the main mast: a typical public, corporal punishment conducted at the central locus of the shipboard community. King was moved from the Hector to the Red Dragon, presumably because he was an unsettling influence aboard the Hector, and living and working 44 Courtney Thomas, ‘“Not Having God Before his Eyes”: Bestiality in Early Modern England’ in Seventeenth Century, 26, 1 (Spring 2011), p. 151. There are very few British bestiality cases. Elaine Murphy unearthed the court martial of Abijah Dicher, marine of the HMS Defiance, in 1699. Dicher and his sexual partner, a turkey, were executed for sodomy. NA, ADM 1/5261, f. 197. B.R Burg notes that John Blake, a marine, was convicted of sodomy with a goat in 1758 but pardoned because of his mental condition. Bestiality was more common, or at least more prosecuted, in the Dutch East India Company. In the eighteenth century, there were a number of cases of Dutch men convicted of sodomizing shipboard pigs. B.R. Burg, Boys at Sea (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), n.6, p. 187; J. Oosterhoff, ‘Sodomy at Sea at the Cape of Good Hope during the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Homosexuality, 16 (1988), pp. 230-1. For more on seamen’s sexual habits, see Elaine Murphy’s chapter ‘A Water Bawdy House: Women and the Navy in the British Civil Wars’ in this volume. 45 Thomas, “Not Having God Before His Eyes”, p. 153. 46 The Third Voyage Journals, pp. 49, 160.

‘Wicked Ac tions Merit Fearful Judgments’

163

in a very limited shipboard space with his accusers would be problematic. Unlike Thoroughgood or Newchurch on the f irst voyage, though, the troubled and troublesome King did not behave himself after a brush with death. A few months later, in September 1607, King was suspected of theft when some shirts and other items went missing. Stealing from one’s crewmates was a serious matter, as it bred suspicion and damaged morale. King attempted to flee in the pinnace and he jumped overboard, ‘thincking to drowne himselfe’ when he saw he was pursued. After he had been brought back on shipboard, King ‘w[i]th a bould fface’ admitted he had been ‘3 tymes at the Gallowes ffoote to be hangd. But nothing greved his Conscyence […] but the Robbing of his owne poore mother of 5£.’ With his hands bound, the defiant King ‘(as all men judged) did wilfully cast him selfe […] into the sea, not having the ffeare of god before his eyes’. Although his crewmates did search ‘very dilligently’ for him, King was presumed drowned. 47 King’s conduct horrified his crewmates. He was a sexual deviant whose actions blurred the distinction between human and beast. His suicide was a felony and a sin – the antithesis of the ‘good death’ that was so important in seventeenth-century England, and expected of convicted criminals. Among communities ashore and afloat, there was a great desire to bring ‘the lost sheep back to the flock, even if they were shortly to be transformed into mutton’. 48 Most criminals of the time were surprisingly faithful in playing their role as the repentant sinner: King was unusual in that he took his own life in a very public display, and showed no contrition, except for stealing £5 from his mother. Instead, King exercised his last bit of agency and scripted his own unusual role in the theatre of punishment. The unrepentant King was not prepared for the next life spiritually, nor did the shipboard community ensure the offender’s capitulation to secular authority. As one of his crewmates claimed, in King’s case, such ‘wicked actiones […] merited […] fearfull judgementes’ in this life and the next. 49 The Company’s logs also reveal a sexual scandal involving three individuals on the Ascension in early 1609.50 William Acton, the purser’s boy, 47 The Third Voyage Journals, p. 89. 48 J.A. Sharpe, ‘“Last Dying Speeches”: Religion, Ideology and Public Execution in SeventeenthCentury England’, Past & Present, 107 (1985), p. 160; Claire Jowitt, ‘Scaffold Performances: The Politics of Pirate Execution’ in Claire Jowitt ed. Pirates? The Politics of Plunder, 1550-1650 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 151-168. 49 The Third Voyage Journals, pp. 5-6. 50 There are only a small number of buggery/sodomy cases in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From his examination of cases from 1627-1723, Burg determined that a very

164 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

confessed to his superior officers that he was guilty of the ‘vnnaturall sinne of buggerye’ with coxswain Nicholas White.51 The steward, Nicholas Cober, also had sexual contact with Acton twice in his cabin, but it was not ‘in the same nature as the other’.52 It is also possible that the master, Philip de Grove, took advantage of Acton sexually, but was not tried because of his position.53 A jury of eminent mariners found Acton, White, and Cober guilty of homosexual activities, but meted out very different punishments, even though the law made no distinction regarding sodomy between adults, or an adult and child.54 Acton was guilty by his own confession but the jury did not pronounce a sentence against him.55 Because of his youth, Acton was an excellent candidate for moral rehabilitation, and there is no evidence that he faced any punishment on the ship or in England.56 Cober and White were also found guilty, and Cober was whipped at the capstan before his crewmates.57 His life was spared because his crewmates ‘hope to his amendement’. Cober’s punishment was typical of those at sea and on land: punishing the flesh that had led him to sin against God’s decrees and transgress man’s laws. Only White was condemned to die. He was whipped and hanged at the yardarm in March 1609 for sodomizing Acton. Arthur Gilbert argues that sodomy was the ‘most feared’ crime afloat because it caused disorder and challenged masculinity, requiring a visible and harsh signif icant number of them involve an adult male and a boy. Burg argues that adult males raping boys upset the shipboard order and thus necessitated trials. B.R. Burg, Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean (New York: New York University Press, 1983), pp. 144-149. See also Burg, Boys at Sea; Massarella, ‘& thus ended the buisinisse’, p. 427. 51 BL Sloane Ms. 858/20-v. Buggery was considered a sin as well as a capital offence in England until 1861. Arthur Gilbert, ‘Buggery and the British Navy, 1700-1861’, Journal of Social History, 10 (1976), p. 72. 52 BL Sloane Ms. 858/20v. Most likely homoerotic behavior often fell short of penetration: Seth Stein LeJacq, ‘Buggery’s travels: Royal Navy sodomy on ship and shore in the long eighteenth century’, Journal for Maritime Research, 17, 2 (2015), p. 106. In such cases, men might be convicted of what later became known as indecent behavior or ‘uncleanliness’ to spare them the death penalty for buggery. 53 Steward Robert Coverte claims de Grove was an ‘arch villain, for this boy (Acton) confessed to myself that he was a detestable sodomite’. Coverte, A True and Almost incredible report, p. 68; See Cheryl Fury, ‘“To sett downe all the villanie”: Accounts of the Sodomy Trial on the Fourth East India Company Voyage (1609)’, Mariner’s Mirror, 102, 1 (2016), pp. 74-80. 54 Burg, Boys at Sea, p. xiii. 55 BL IOR L/MAR/A/VII/23. 56 Dutch youth in the VOC were treated leniently in such circumstances as well. Jan Oosterhoff, ‘Sodomy at Sea and at the Cape of Good Hope during the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Homosexuality, 16, 1-2 (1989), p. 237. 57 BL IOR L/MAR/A/VII/23v; BL Sloane MS. 858/43.

‘Wicked Ac tions Merit Fearful Judgments’

165

response.58 Because the wellbeing of the shipboard community had been mightily disturbed, public floggings and execution were necessary so that all the men aboard saw matters put to rights.59 His crewmates encouraged Nicholas White to confess his sins and die with a clear conscience for his soul’s health. White prepared himself to die ‘very dilligentlie all the daie and night’.60 He asked the preacher for his help, and an extra day’s liberty to remember his sins: ‘A good death was the keystone of a life well lived, but it could also […] cancel the debit sheet of a bad one.’61 White, undoubtedly, was trying to demonstrate that he too warranted mercy. The preacher delivered a sermon to call those aboard to a conversion of the heart, and to prepare the condemned man to leave this world. Prior to White’s hanging, there was ‘prayer and godlie exhortacions’, as well as a cup of wine shared for his farewell so that it might be a ‘Joyfull execution’, and ‘so wee committed him to god’. It was important that both the living and the condemned be at peace with the outcome for the sake of shipboard order and spiritual resolution. These shipboard rituals of reconciliation borrow from the religious rites of the time, and also incorporated drinking sociability, which was vital to the maritime community.62 This was a stark contrast to George King’s public suicide during the third voyage. Because there are so few details about the execution of the Good Hope’s mutineers, we cannot say if they mirrored White’s death, but White’s execution and the shipboard rituals surrounding it echo that of Thomas Doughty, a prominent mutineer on Drake’s voyage of circumnavigation.63 Although there were only a small number of executions on English ships in Tudor and early Stuart times with which to compare, it is likely that all executions were marked with some form of gallows ceremony, as they were 58 Gilbert, ‘Buggery and the British Navy’, pp. 86-88; N.A.M. Rodger, The Wooden World (Glasgow: Fontana Press, 1988), p. 227. 59 The penal order ‘valued publicity’. Paul Griff iths, ‘Bodies and Souls in Norwich’, Penal Practice and Culture, 1500-1900 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 91. 60 BL Sloane Ms. 858/21. 61 Ralph Houlbrooke, ed., Death, Ritual, and Bereavement (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 10. 62 BL Sloane 858/13, 21, 23v. On Best’s EIC voyage those reprieved of a death sentence in 1612 submitted to the General’s authority, gave thanks to all for their forgiveness, and promised to become new men. They drank beer to commemorate the occasion: Voyages of Best, p. 127; Fury, Tides in the Affairs, p. 57. 63 Before executing Doughty, Francis Drake assembled the men for confession and the Sacrament. Geoffrey Callender, ‘Drake and his Detractors’, Mariner’s Mirror, 7 (1921), p. 72. In 1592, Christopher Newport, future EIC officer, had the crew of the Golden Dragon of London drink to each other in a gesture of forgiveness for any wrongdoings but also as an act of solidarity before battle. NA, HCA 13/30/108v. See also BL IOR L/MAR/A/XVI/20v.

166 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

ashore.64 Ceremonies, religious sermons, and demonstrations of authority were ‘acts of symbolic reintegration’ for the community and therefore beneficial for seventeenth-century shipboard communities.65 *** The capital trials aboard the first four East India Company voyages reveal some of the most troubling incidents of Tudor-Stuart shipboard life. These disturbances can be categorized broadly into ‘protests about the conduct of the voyage’ and ‘sexual offences’, as we have seen. By the standards of Tudor and early Stuart maritime history, the number of felonies such as murder/self-murder, sexual crimes, and the general unrest on these voyages was high.66 To put things in perspective, there was only one naval mutiny during the Anglo-Spanish war (1585-1604), which was a non-violent protest over provisions, and these mutineers of the Golden Lion in 1587 were never punished.67 Explorer Henry Hudson was a rare victim of a mutiny over provisions in 1611 but, even then, his crew chose to cast him adrift rather than killing him with a mallet.68 Buggery trials in Elizabethan and Jacobean times were unusual: there was one known buggery trial afloat during the Elizabethan era.69 Shipboard executions were very infrequent, which makes the three on Company ships in 1609 for different offences seem all the more noteworthy.70 During the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, East India Company voyages rank with multi-year voyages such as the circumnavigations by Francis Drake (1577-1580) and Thomas Cavendish (1586-1588, 1591-1592) when it comes to their high incidence of shipboard 64 Paul English, ‘Punishing the English’, Penal Practice and Culture, 1500-1900, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 1-2. 65 Martin Ingram, ‘Shame and pain: themes and variations in Tudor punishments’, Penal Practice and Culture, p. 37. Bruijn and van Heslinga, ‘Mutiny’, p. 6. 66 Massarella, ‘& thus ended the buisinisse’, p. 427. Mutinies may have increased in frequency in the navy and merchant marine after 1625. Andrews, Ships, Money, and Politics, pp. 65-66. 67 Fury, Tides in the Affairs, pp. 62-3, 71-2. M. Oppenheim, A History of the Administration of the Royal Navy and of Merchant Shipping in Relation to the Navy, 1509-1660 (1896. Rpt. Hamden, Conn: Shoe String Press, 1961), pp. 389-90. 68 Hudson’s men who survived were not punished. Peter C. Mancall, Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson (New York: Basic Books, 2009), pp. 230-235. 69 Massarella, ‘& thus ended the buisinisse’, p. 427. Thomas Ogle, steward of the Bark Talbot, was found guilty of buggering two boys and was executed during Drake’s West Indian voyage (1585-6). Mary Frear Keeler, ed. Sir Francis Drake’s West Indian Voyage 1585-6 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1981), pp. 148, 243. 70 Thomas Doughty was executed for mutiny during Drake’s voyage of circumnavigation. Fury, Tides in the Affairs, p. 52.

‘Wicked Ac tions Merit Fearful Judgments’

167

unrest and transgressive behaviours.71 Whereas most mercantile, naval, and privateering voyages were measured in months, those that lasted years were evidently fraught with problems.72 Understandably, EIC officers were anxious to diffuse or contain the most disruptive behaviours and crimes lest they damage the fledgling Company’s reputation, as well as the moral and mental wellbeing of their subordinates. In their journals, high-ranking participants expressed their belief that sinful conduct on shipboard offended the Almighty and therefore impaired their prospects for a profitable journey – a sentiment echoed by the Company in London. Underpinning this was a concern about the physical and spiritual dangers represented by sojourning in far off lands, for years at a time, with ‘heathenish peoples’. Outlandish acts committed on EIC ships raised the prospect of Englishmen degenerating into beasts: men copulating with boys or animals, or killing their superiors, represented a descent into a frightening brutishness. These actions had to be counteracted with a good dose of English justice which would hopefully reestablish the links with the mother country and ‘civilization’.73 This is why officers keeping Company journals emphasized that shipboard trials were conducted in accordance with English laws, and that respected jurors had rendered the verdicts.74 Although the Company believed its errant employees should be punished so that they ‘may reforme themselves’, its generals had, and were willing to utilize, state-sanctioned violence in extreme cases.75 Yet Generals were understandably reluctant to employ the full weight of their authority unless necessary. Master Philip de Grove’s inclination to ‘wink at’ murder and 71 Hitchcock, ‘John Jane’s Narrative of the Voyage of the Desire’, pp. 4-16; Hitchcock, ‘The Charges Against Davis’, pp. 259-269; Callender, ‘Drake and his Detractors’, pp. 66-74, 98-105, 142-152; Gregory Robinson, ‘A Forgotten Life of Sir Francis Drake’, Mariner’s Mirror, 7 (1921), pp. 10-18; For an account of Edward Fenton’s challenging voyage to the East, see Richard Madox, An Elizabethan in 1582: the diary of Richard Madox, (London: Hakluyt Society, 1976). 72 Andrews, Ships, Men and Politics, p. 83. 73 Philip Stern argues that the English East India Company presented itself as ‘all that stood between its inhabitants and the anarchy of man in his natural state, particularly on the frontiers of empire’. Philip J. Stern, ‘Politics and Ideology in the Early East India Company-state: the case of St Helena, 1673-1709’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 35, 1 (2007), p. 14; Richard Guy wrote that contemporaries believed that ‘The absence of European social constraints also threatens the mental or spiritual state of the mariners: the Indies acts as a theatre for men to reveal their most bestial natures…’, see Richard Guy, ‘Calamitous Voyages: the Social Space of Shipwreck and Mutiny Narratives in the Dutch East India Company’, Itinerario, 39, 1 (2015), p. 121. 74 Doubtless the young Company also worried about recriminations in England. See W. Senior, ‘Drake and the Suit of John Doughty’, Mariner’s Mirror, 7 (1921), pp. 291-7. 75 BL IOR B/2/30.

168 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

mutiny on the fourth voyage until they got home is revealing. This hesitancy to deal with criminal matters ‘on site’ indicates that some of the leading officers were nervous about how much sway they had over the men, even with a royal commission. They did not want to risk destabilizing shipboard equilibrium with a trial and possible execution. Off icers were wary of pushing their men too far, given that the demands of the journey pressed many to their physical and psychological limits. Significantly, de Grove’s sentiments were echoed a few years later by Captain Nicholas Downton, when he reflected on the difficulties of leadership in his correspondence to the Company in 1613. He bemoaned that the men had ‘grown careless of observing any command’ and that ‘we dare not inflict any punishment lest the scurvy join with it in the overthrowing [of] their healths to the further scandal and discontent of the […] Company’. He claimed he regularly mediated ‘turbulent and factious oppositions one against another’, and for the ‘safety of the ship and goods I have been fain to temporize and wink at many (otherwise unfit to be suffered) abuses […] desiring God to bring a happy conclusion to this tedious and wearisome voyage’.76 Downton articulates the problems of keeping shipboard order and, the importance of letting lesser offences go unpunished in order to bring the voyage to a profitable end. Officers thus required not only seafaring and business acumen to pursue trade in the East but considerable ‘man management’ abilities as well. *** Governance afloat, then, was a complex exercise. Shipboard authority, even when bolstered by the powers of the state, had to be exercised in a measured fashion. It was not simply a matter of those in authority issuing judgements and punishments. They courted the endorsement of the shipboard community – men who were often far from home, under considerable stress, and risking their lives to complete the voyage. Commanders had to take the temperature of their crews: if some of the men disagreed with a verdict or punishment, it could destabilize the dynamics of shipboard society. One can appreciate why officers might wish to ‘wink at’ bad behaviour whenever possible, and why, when Generals were compelled to try offenders, they were generous with reprieves. Surgeon Newchurch was regarded as a ‘Dead Man Walking’ by his crewmates after his failed suicide attempt, but was allowed 76 Capt. Nicholas Downton, June 20, 1613. F. C. Danvers, ed. Letters received by the East India Co from its servants in the east: Vol. I 1602-1613 (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co, 1896), p. 268.

‘Wicked Ac tions Merit Fearful Judgments’

169

to remain part of the fleet. Even though he was convicted and sentenced to death, mutineer Thoroughgood was reprieved. King’s accusers wavered at his bestiality trial, which allowed him to escape a death sentence. His crewmates tried to save the suicidal King, a thief and sexual deviant, when he attempted to jump overboard twice. Although at least three people confessed they were guilty of homosexual acts during the fourth voyage, only one man was executed. The two ringleaders of the Good Hope were executed even though ‘one and all’ of their crewmates were culpable to varying degrees in the mutiny and murder. Although the official position of the state, the East India Company, and its officers was that ‘wicked actions merit fearful judgments’, in practice, fearful judgements were visited upon very few. Mercy was extended to those who attempted self-murder, committed sexual crimes, were complicit in mutiny, and conspired to murder. We can explain such clemency in part because Christian compassion was an integral part of English justice.77 Moreover, when it came to the intimate world of a seventeenth-century sailing vessel, forgiveness was a practical means of preserving the labour pool that was rapidly diminishing from illness; it also bolstered the notion that shipboard authority was paternalistic. By offering leniency to the redeemable, and by being attentive to the men’s petitions, generals appeared responsive to their men. This was an important ingredient to maintaining order and authority.78 Officers did not want to overstep their limits and expose how very fragile their authority was at sea. Even with a royal commission, commanders had little concrete power in the face of a hostile crew far from home, and a demonstration of mercy whenever possible to a contrite offender was good shipboard politics. As Master Lufkin discovered, authority was brittle when the leading officer had lost the trust of his men: ‘the security of the ship as a political space was also a matter of the careful management of status, respect, justice, and mercy’.79 There were limits, nevertheless. The actions of some men did warrant their removal from the shipboard community, by death or otherwise, but judging from these examples from the Company’s first decade, only the most hard-bitten reprobates got the noose. Whether the offenders escaped death or 77 Cynthia B. Herrup, ‘Law and morality in seventeenth-century England’, Past & Present, 106 (1985), pp. 102-123. 78 Authority ‘was not only imposed from above but also endorsed by those subjected to it’. Blakemore, ‘Orality and Mutiny’, p. 265. The importance of consent is clear in Bernhard Klein’s chapter, ‘The Minion and its travels: sailing to Guinea in the sixteenth century’. 79 Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 56.

170 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

were executed, the Company’s officers sought to present a neat morality tale with the disturbers of the shipboard peace confessing, seeking reconciliation with their crewmates, and submitting to temporal and spiritual authority. Most accused were willing to play their part. The notorious George King was exceptional for a number of unsavory reasons, including the fact he rejected the standard script in the theatre of justice.80 Because the meting out of severe punishments – and in such a public way – could be divisive, officers tried to shore up the fissures in the community: thus the need for rituals, religion, and reconciliation such as those around Nicholas White’s execution for sodomy on the fourth voyage. Justice in the East India Company was an interactive process rather than something simply imposed from above.81 When the situation warranted, men of different ranks brought accusations, were witnesses, passed judgment, carried out punishments, or lobbied for mercy. While some probably hesitated to make accusations that could bring about a crewmember’s death, they did so when the behavior was extreme enough, as in King’s bestiality trial. They also spoke up when they felt their crewmates were wrongly convicted and/ or worthy of a reprieve, as they did in the case of Cober and Thoroughgood’s exonerations. Even though a jury bore the responsibility of delivering a verdict, an offender’s ultimate fate was influenced by the willingness of the larger shipboard community to ‘buy in’ to the system of justice. It was important that men felt that verdicts served the communal interest, rather than simply being dictated from the apex of the fleet’s hierarchy. Therefore, popular participation in rendering justice, or at least the belief that it was broadly based, was very important to a healthy shipboard community. The fact that juries were used is significant, as they were not required in courts martial yet.82 Juries on Company ships in these foundational years were empaneled to decide a range of felonies, from sexual deviance to murder and mutiny.83 80 See also Jowitt, ‘Scaffold Performances’, pp. 151-168. 81 M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 58. For discussions of seamen and the justice system ashore, see Blakemore, ‘The Legal World of English Sailors’, pp. 100-120; George F. Steckley, ‘Litigious Mariners: Wage Cases in the Early Seventeenth Century Admiralty Court’, The Historical Journal, 42, 2 (Jun., 1999), pp. 315-345. 82 Massarella, ‘& thus ended the buisinisse’, pp. 418-19. 83 In the ensuing decade, juries also deliberated on various felonies. See BL Ms. ADD 31, 301/180v vol. II; BL IOR L/MAR/A/ XVI/51v; BL IOR B/2/ 132; Peter Floris, His Voyage to the East Indies in the Globe, 1611-1615: The Contemporary Translation of his Journal, W. H. Moreland, ed., (London: Hakluyt Society, 1934), p. 65; William Foster, ed. Letters received by the East India Company from its Servants in the East: vol. I 1602-1601 (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co, 1896), p. 198;

‘Wicked Ac tions Merit Fearful Judgments’

171

Without question, these multi-year voyages tested the participants’ mental and physical mettle. Seasoned officers struggled to preserve their workforce and shipboard order, especially during the first year of each voyage.84 Capital trials and displays of both authority and mercy may well have helped reinforce hierarchy afloat for the remainder of the voyage. This was especially important, given that shipboard order had weaker underpinnings than on land.85 If these were demonstrations of authority to deter further disturbances, the lack of trials on the homeward leg is significant. Whether this pattern of a factious first year capped off with a capital trial and liberal doses of clemency is visible in EIC voyages in the subsequent decades is a topic of ongoing research.86

William Foster, ed. The English Factories in India 1618-1621: A Calendar of Documents in the India Office, British Museum and Public Record Office (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), p. 288. 84 This was also the pattern on VOC ships. Bruijn and van Heslinga, ‘Mutiny’, p. 3. 85 Blakemore, ‘Orality and Mutiny’, p. 268. 86 For a discussion of the Company’s developing legal powers in Asia, see Edmond J. Smith, ‘Reporting and Interpreting Legal Violence in Asia: The East India Company’s Printed Accounts of Torture, 1603-24’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (2018), pp. 1-24; Philip J. Stern, The Company-state: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

7.

‘A water bawdy house’: Women and the Navy in the British Civil Wars* Elaine Murphy

In the summer of 1645, as the royalists besieged the town of Pembroke, James Philips, a gentleman from the area, boarded the Lion, a parliamentarian man-of-war anchored at Milford Haven. He wished to speak with Captain Richard Swanley, the admiral of the fleet stationed there, but when he entered the great cabin he did not find Swanley inside. A smirking servant insisted to Philips that Swanley was indeed in the cabin. The by now bemused Philips re-entered, and this time a closet door opened to reveal Captain Swanley with his hat off and his arms around a young woman who was standing between his legs. The captain claimed that she was simply delousing him, at which point the woman, named Belindia Steele, blushed. Rumours of Swanley’s dalliance with Belindia Steele spread among the parliamentarian maritime community, and sailors reportedly made up and sang songs about the relationship. The Lion developed an ill reputation for drinking, and for the conduct of the female passengers it carried: one witness suggested that the man-of-war had become a ‘water baudie house’.1 This story is much more complex, however, than simply being an amusing anecdote of the carryings-on of an older married officer (Swanley was aged around fifty) with a much younger woman.2 By examining questions of gender and the navy in the 1640s and 1650s, this chapter offers insights into the wider experiences of women with the Stuart navy and state. The large-scale availability of admiralty records from the period mean the Civil Wars and Interregnum offer historians a unique opportunity to undertake in-depth research into the complex interactions between women and the navy in one moment of Britain’s maritime expansion.

* I would like to thank Professor James Daybell, Dr Annaleigh Margey, Dr Richard J. Blakemore and Dr James Davey for comments on earlier drafts of this essay. Research for this essay was made possible thanks to a Caird Short Term Fellowship at the National Maritime Museum and an Edith and Richard French Fellowship at the Beinecke Library. 1 Elaine Murphy, ed., A calendar of material relating to Ireland from the High Court of Admiralty, 1641-1660 (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2011), nos. 170, 190. 2 Michael Baumber, ‘Swanley, Richard (1594/5-1650), naval officer’, ODNB.

174 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

In recent years, there has been extensive research into the ‘complex variety of women’s experiences’ during the Civil Wars.3 Historians such as Barbara Donagan, Jacqueline Eales, Ann Hughes, Alison Plowden, Diane Purkiss, Mark Stoyle, and Amanda Jane Whiting among others have shed light on the opportunities and hardships women faced and overcame during the upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s. 4 Despite this attention to the multifaceted experiences of women during the Civil Wars, there has been relatively little focus on women and the navy in this conflict.5 Before the 1640s, finding information about women on board men-of-war or doing business with the navy can be difficult; women connected to the wider maritime community appear in probate and legal records, but explicit links between them and the navy are not always obvious.6 There is, however, considerable scholarly research into the relationship between women and the navy in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Margarette Lincoln, Ellen Gill, Suzanne Stark, Margaret Hunt, and Richard Endsor all investigate different interactions between women and the navy in this period.7 This chapter will therefore expand this topic into the earlier period, because from the 3 Ann Hughes, Gender and the English Revolution (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), p. 32. 4 Hughes, Gender and the English Revolution; Alison Plowden, Women All on Fire: The Women of the English Civil War (Stroud: The History Press, 2004); Amanda Jane Whiting, Women and Petitioning in the Seventeenth-Century English Revolution: Deference, Difference, and Dissent (Turnhout: Brepols Publshers, 2015); Diane Purkiss, Literature, Gender and Politics During the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005); Barbara Donagan, War in England, 1642-1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Mark Stoyle, Soldiers and Strangers: An Ethnic History of the English Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Jacqueline Eales, Puritans and Roundheads: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 5 See for example Bernard Capp, Cromwell’s Navy, The Fleet and the English Revolution, 1648-1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001) pp. 249-68; Richard J. Blakemore and Elaine Murphy, The British Civil Wars at Sea, 1638-1653 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2018), Chapter 4. 6 For women and the wider early modern maritime world see John C. Appleby, Women and English Piracy, 1540-1720 Partners and Victims of Crime (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2013); Cheryl A. Fury, ‘Seamen’s Wives and Widows’, in Cheryl A. Fury (ed.), The Social History of English Seamen, 1485-1649 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2012), pp. 253-76; Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 67-8, 89, 133-4. 7 Margarette Lincoln, Naval Wives and Mistresses (London: National Maritime Museum, 2007); Margarette Lincoln, ‘The Impact of Warfare on Naval Wives and Women’ in Cheryl Fury (ed.), The Social History of English Seamen, 1650-1815 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2017), pp. 71-87; Ellen Gill, Naval Families, War and Duty in Britain, 1740-1820 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2016); Suzanne Stark, Female Tars: Women Aboard Ship in the Age of Sail (London: Pimlico 1998); Margaret Hunt, ‘The sailor’s wife, war finance, and coverture in late seventeenthcentury London’, in Timothy Stretton and Krista J. Kesselring (eds), Married Women and the Law: Coverture in England and the Common Law World (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University

‘A water bawdy house’: Women and the Nav y in the British Civil Wars

175

1640s on it becomes possible to explore in detail how women encountered and dealt with the navy. Parliamentarian naval expansion brought many different classes of women into contact with the navy and its bureaucracy, and surviving records make these women and their naval connections more visible to historians than ever before. These activities ranged from spending time on board men-of-war, to doing business with naval dockyards, to petitioning admiralty officials for wages and pensions owed to them. Studying these interactions provides us with a greater understanding of longer-term naval developments in areas such as contracting and logistics, and of women’s place in wider early modern British society. *** Probably the best-known woman to undertake multiple high-risk sea voyages during the 1640s was Queen Henrietta Maria. Some of her exploits, such as gun running for the royalist cause, were not typical of the experiences women faced at sea.8 Others, such as the hazards of weather and being attacked by enemy warships, were more familiar to many women who travelled by sea during the war years. In March 1642, en route to the Netherlands, one of her baggage ships sank in a storm, while the following February she managed to evade a pursuing fleet of parliamentarian ships and unload arms and ammunition at Bridlington near Newcastle. After she landed the parliamentarians opened fire on her, and the queen described how ‘before I could get out of bed, the balls were whistling on me in such style that you may easily believe I loved not such music’.9 One royalist pamphlet reported that she bore the difficulties and hardships with ‘with a Princely Patience and Courage’.10 Despite her public show of bravery, in private Henrietta Maria came to fear the prospect of putting to sea. In October 1642 she wrote to Charles that ‘I dread the sea so much, that the very thought of it frightens me, not on account of the fleet of the rebels, through that is a beast that I hate, but I fear it not’.11 It seems the experience of storms and the peril of Press, 2013), pp. 139-62; Richard Endsor, ‘The Women of Restoration Deptford’, Transactions of the Naval Dockyard Society, 8 (2012), pp. 77-86. 8 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Osborn fb94, folders 14-23. 9 Henrietta Maria, Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria: Including her Private Correspondence with Charles the First, ed. M. A. E. Green (London, 1857), p. 167. 10 Anon, A True Relation of the Queens Majesties Return out of Holland and, of Gods Merciful Preservation of her from those Great Dangers, wherein Her Royall Person was Engaged Both by Sea and Land (York, 1643), pp. 15-17. 11 Henrietta Maria, Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, p. 131.

176 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

shipwreck had made as much of an impression on Henrietta Maria as the parliamentarian navy had. Wartime necessity meant that many women, like the queen, travelled by sea regardless of the risks. The wives of government officials and soldiers regularly sailed on naval vessels with their husbands on overseas service, and the status of the passenger usually determined her treatment on board the ship.12 The navy prepared accommodation ‘as becomes a person of Quality’ for Lady Elizabeth, Countess of Cork, who wished to sail to Munster in 1648.13 The travelling conditions were undoubtedly less comfortable for the wives and children of three companies of soldiers whom Captain Cubitt, in the Portsmouth, brought back from the Isles of Scilly together with their husbands.14 During the 1654-5 expedition to the West Indies, General Venables brought his wife, Elizabeth, and the wives of his soldiers with him. Venables justified his decision to bring the women along to act as nurses for the injured soldiers by stating that it was a ‘necessity of having that Sex with an Army to attend upon and help the Sick and wounded’.15 Most of these women, too, were unlikely to have received special treatment aboard ship. Nevertheless, some aspects of travel by sea were universal. Seasickness, cramped quarters, bad smells, and dirt all made for discomforting journeys for novice sea travellers, and not just women.16 Sailing ships were ‘a physical and social space that had been engineered for men’, and for many women going into such an unwelcoming masculine world must have been unpleasant and disconcerting.17 A number of women, like Henrietta Maria, described the dangers they faced in their memoirs and other writings. After a stormy crossing to Ireland Frances Cooke, the wife of the regicide and chief justice John Cooke, wrote her meditations in which she offered a ‘humble thanksgiving to her Heavenly Father for granting her a new life, having concluded her selfe dead, and her grave made in the bottome of the sea, in that great storme’.18 Similarly, early in the war, the royalist Lady Ann 12 British Library (hereafter BL), Add MS 9305, fo. 36r. 13 Ibid., fo. 31r. 14 Calendar of State Papers, Domestic (hereafter CSPD), 1654, p. 518. 15 C. H. Firth (ed.), The Narrative of General Venables (London, 1900), p. 102. 16 For shipboard life and dangers faced by sailors on long voyages to Africa and the East Indies see Bernard Klein, Chapter 1; Cheryl Fury, Chapter 6. 17 For hardships endured by passengers on ships in the early modern period see Stephen R. Berry, A Path in the Mighty Waters: Shipboard Life and Atlantic Crossings to the New World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), pp. 34-67; 95; N. A. M Rodger, Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, 660-1649 (London, Penguin, 2004), pp. 316-8, 408. 18 Frances Cooke, Mris. Cooke’s Meditations, being an humble thanksgiving to her Heavenly Father (London, 1650), p. 2.

‘A water bawdy house’: Women and the Nav y in the British Civil Wars

177

Fanshawe described the dangers she endured aboard ship during a gale, and how she ‘had the discomfort of a very hazardous voyage’.19 Bad weather and unpleasant sea crossings were certainly not unique to the Civil Wars or the navy, but the large number of women who went to sea on warships and left records of their experiences during this period allows us an opportunity to understand how they viewed and regarded the maritime world. Some women, such as Henrietta Maria and Frances Cooke, clearly did not enjoy spending time on naval vessels; but there is a danger of seeing only negative experiences for women from these accounts. Spending time on men-of-war was not always perilous and unpleasant for women. Many, including Belindia Steele (if the complaints about her are to be believed), enjoyed visiting and being entertained on board parliamentarian ships. Others, such as Lady Fanshawe, overcame their initial dislike of travel by sea. On a later voyage she recounted how she was no longer willing to stay below when pirates threatened to attack the ship on which she travelled. The master of the merchantman she sailed on locked her in a cabin out of sight when they encountered a ‘Turkish pirate’, in a bid to persuade the Turkish captain that he was a man-of-war capable of fighting them off.20 Lady Fanshawe became so irked at this that she bribed a cabin boy to loan her a man’s hat and tarred coat so that she could stand on deck with her husband.21 From her memoirs, it is clear that Lady Fanshawe relished the opportunity to be part of the action and did not wish to wait meekly in her cabin. Not all women who visited men-of-war ran such risks. The high levels of naval activity throughout the war meant many women had the opportunity to pay short social or business visits to ships in harbour. Despite the turbulent nature of the conflict, some women followed their husbands, especially if they were officers, to different ports. In June 1645, Captain William Penn noted a visit by his admiral’s wife to the fleet, and that she brought a letter from Margaret, Penn’s wife.22 Except when undertaking a voyage, as described above, the duration of the stay of most officers’ spouses on naval vessels seems to have been reasonably short, and this trend for the wives and sweethearts of mariners to make short visits to warships continued in the later seventeenth century. A number of female relatives of the crew 19 Anne Fanshawe, Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe, Wife of Sir Richard Fanshawe, Bart., Ambassador from Charles the second to the courts of Portugal and Madrid (London, 1830), pp. 85-6. 20 Pirates who operated from Ottoman controlled North Africa. 21 Fanshawe, Memoirs, pp. 97-8. 22 Granville Penn, ed., Memorials of the Professional Life and Times of Sir William Penn… (London, 1883), I, p. 117.

178 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

of the Assistance, bound to Tripoli, sailed on the first leg of the journey to Dover in 1675.23 Other female visitors to men-of-war during the 1640s included enterprising women who rowed out to anchored warships to sell goods to the mariners. They sometimes ignored the political allegiance of the vessel in search of profit, such as the women from royalist-controlled Dublin who sold tobacco to seamen on board the Swan and Nicholas, two parliamentarian men-of-war blockading the harbour.24 Surviving accounts from the Civil Wars and later in the seventeenth century suggest that some of these female visitors were engaged in sexual (but not necessarily conjugal) relations with sailors.25 Henry Teonge, the chaplain of the Assistance on his first voyage in 1675, described how ‘You would have wondered to see, here a man and woman creepe into a Hammack; the womans Leggs to the hams hanging over the syds’.26 The nature of the relationship was not clear-cut in many cases. The boatswain of the Grantham complained about Captain Lightfoot’s relationship with the boatswain’s wife, asking whether she ‘came hither for his use or his captain’s’.27 In 1656 Captain Godfrey invited an old woman, with her husband and a young woman, on board the Marmaduke, who spent an evening ‘drinking and very merry’ with him in his cabin. The young woman reputedly spent the night in the captain’s cabin.28 Whether or not any of these female visitors worked as prostitutes can be difficult to ascertain from the available evidence.29 Religion, as Bernard Capp shows, played ‘a central and probably unparalleled part in naval life’ in the 1650s. Nevertheless, young English mariners continued to seek out casual sex and frequented brothels, as seafarers had always done. In Amsterdam seafaring men represented the largest percentage of men found with prostitutes.30 Parliamentarian officers and officials make no mention of prostitutes visiting their ships, but an incident described in the Moderate Publisher in 1653 suggests that women who sold sex did visit men-of-war. The newsbook reported how two royalist youths disguised as women tried to blow up the Sovereign. The mariners on the Sovereign welcomed these 23 National Maritime Museum (hereafter NMM), JOD/6, fos 3r-6v. 24 Trinity College Dublin (hereafter TCD), Ms 810, fos. 307-8v, 329-32. 25 For accusations of homosexual activity and bestiality on long East India Company voyages in the early seventeenth-century with no women on board the ship see Cheryl Fury, Chapter 6. 26 NMM, JOD/6, fo. 3r. 27 Quoted in Capp, Cromwell’s Navy, p. 255. 28 Bodleian Library, Rawl A295, pp. 15-16 29 For prostitutes visiting men-of-war in later periods see N. A. M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (London: Collins, 1986), pp. 76-7; Stark, Female Tars, pp. 13-18. 30 Capp, Cromwell’s Navy, pp. 249-54, 293; Lotte van de Poll, The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 152-63.

‘A water bawdy house’: Women and the Nav y in the British Civil Wars

179

‘sweet creatures, or seeming Females gallantly garnished and daintly drest up’ aboard the ship, and they began proffering kisses to the crew ‘as if it had been their trade or function’, before their plans were discovered.31 Not all the women who spent time on parliamentarian warships planned their sojourn on board such vessels, but came there by the fortunes of war, and many had little say how they found themselves on men-of-war or how the seamen they met treated them. The navy rescued civilians from isolated coastal garrisons that came under attack, especially in Ireland. Captains feared that the presence of weakened refugees crammed on board their ships might spread disease: Captain William Penn put the female evacuees from Bunratty Castle on shore to ‘pick, wash and refresh themselves’.32 The Steele family’s situation illustrates in some detail the complex position female refugees could find themselves in when dealing with the navy during the Civil Wars. Belindia Steele, her parents, and her sisters fled to Wales in 1643 after they lost their home in Queen’s County to the Irish rebels. Her father, Captain Richard Steele, fought for the king before changing sides and dying in the service of parliament. The families of renegades who defected to the opposing side often suffered losses because of their relative’s actions, and as the impoverished family of a turncoat, the Steele women needed the protection of parliamentarian officers like Swanley when the royalist forces advanced in Wales. The precise nature and propriety of Belindia Steele’s relationship with Richard Swanley is difficult to assess from surviving admiralty examinations, as some witnesses gave evidence that she acted in a proper manner but others stated that she was ‘malignant’ or ‘light’.33 Whether or not Belindia Steele was attracted to her rescuer, or had little choice but to acquiesce to the relationship with Swanley in order to protect her sisters and mother, remains impossible to ascertain with certainty. Nevertheless, her relationship with Swanley does highlight the complex experiences and potential vulnerabilities of women on naval ships during the 1640s and beyond.34 31 The moderate publisher of every daies sic intelligence from the Parliaments army, under the command of his Excellency the Lord General Cromwel, no. 136, 3-10 June 1653, p. 1088. The newsbook did not follow up on what happened afterwards in this case. 32 Peter H. Wilson, Europe’s Tragedy: A History of the Thirty Years War (London: Penguin, 2009), pp. 791-3; Penn, Memorials, I, p. 175. 33 TCD, MS 815, fos. 358r-359v; Murphy, High Court of Admiralty, nos. 170-180, 185, 190-5; Andrew Hopper, Turncoats and Renegadoes: Changing Sides During the English Civil Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 56-7, 100, 157-78. 34 For the vulnerability of women at sea in the 17th and 18th centuries see Appleby, Women and English Piracy, pp. 194-7; Berry, A Path in the Mighty Waters, pp. 161-4; Sarah Crabtree, ‘Navigating

180 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

If the position of women, such as Belindia Steele, who enjoyed parliamentarian protection could be precarious, then that of royalist or confederate women who encountered English men-of-war could be even more hazardous. Just as on land ethnicity, religion, and status played a key role in the treatment captives received.35 Captain Swanley freed Mrs Wheeler, a servant to the royalist Lady Ormond in Ireland, captured on board a ship going to Dublin in 1645 with goods for her mistress, because the marquis of Ormond intervened to plead for the release of the servant and his wife’s goods.36 Less well-connected women such as Eleanor Windell rarely fared so well. Windell lost the Hare, which belonged to her and her husband, as well as most of her goods when the Jocelyn intercepted the ship coming from a royalist port. Over six years later, with her husband now dead, the case of the Hare remained tied up in the admiralty court as Windell sought restitution for the seizure of the ship.37 Windell was lucky to lose only her property: other women were not so fortunate. In April 1644, a parliamentarian warship intercepted a vessel from Ireland transporting soldiers to fight for the king in England. Captain Swanley executed seventy Irishmen and two Irishwomen by tying them back to back and throwing them overboard. London newsbooks praised ‘the valiant and industrious Capt. Swanley’ for his actions, writing that ‘it was just to cast them into the Sea and wash them to death from the blood of the Protestants that was upon them’.38 The Civil Wars opens a window on some of the myriad of experiences of women on board naval vessels in the early modern period: while some women sought greater agency at sea, for others it could be perilous and indeed fatal. *** The conflict also highlights the ways in which seafarers and the wider British public perceived the presence of women on board naval vessels in the early modern period. Popular cultural tropes such as ballads and stories were fascinated by ‘she sailors’, women who concealed their sex Mobility: Gender, Class, and Space at Sea, 1760-1810’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 48 (2014), 89-106 (pp. 97-9). 35 Donagan, ‘Atrocity, War Crime, and Treason’, pp. 1137-1166; Micheál Ó. Siochrú, ‘Atrocity, Codes of Conduct and the Irish in the British Civil Wars 1641-1653’, Past & Present, 195 (2007), pp. 55-86; Stoyle, Soldiers and Strangers, pp. 66-9, 135-42. 36 Murphy, High Court of Admiralty, nos 170, 197. 37 Ibid., nos 163, 421-2, 428, 433, 493-4. 38 Elaine Murphy, ‘Atrocities at Sea and the Treatment of Prisoners of War by the Parliamentary Navy in Ireland, 1641-1649’, Historical Journal, 53 (2012), 21-37 (pp. 21-2).

‘A water bawdy house’: Women and the Nav y in the British Civil Wars

181

and dressed as men to join a man-of-war. The Maiden Sailor from 1693 described how a young woman ‘put on Seamans weed’ and was pressed into the Edgar.39 Donning male attire allowed some women the chance to move beyond the limits imposed on them by their sex to engage in military or naval service. For the 1640s and 1650s good evidence can be found for a number of women disguising themselves as men to serve in the various armies, and stories of ‘she soldiers’ can also be found in ballads such as The Famous Woman Drummer. 40 There is no solid evidence for any women disguising themselves to serve on warships in the 1640s and 1650s, but there are known instances from other contexts, such as the Dutch East India Company, and cross-dressing female mariners who remained undiscovered would have left no trace in the archival record. 41 The naval expansion of the period, with its demands for recruitment, and the unsettled political circumstances would certainly have created more opportunities for women to pursue this path. The Civil Wars can also shed light on how early modern British seamen perceived the presence of women on board their ships, as so many spent time on board naval vessels during the conflict. Some seventeenth-century seamen clearly appreciated the presence of women aboard ship. As well as noting goings-on in hammocks, Henry Teonge described the happiness of the crew as their wives and sweethearts sailed on the first leg of a voyage.42 Many sailors, however, often resented the presence of women in their shipboard world. Mariners traditionally regarded women on board ships as bad luck and blamed them for misfortunes that befell their voyage. 43 In 1669, for example, Edward Barlow attributed a fire that destroyed a royal ship to the gunner having his wife on board. He condemned women coming on board 39 Diane Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp 30-1; Lincoln, ‘Impact of Warfare’, pp. 71-2; Stark, Female Tars, pp. 85-6; Lincoln, Representing the Royal Navy, pp. 137-40; Fraser Easton, ‘Gender’s Two Bodies: Women Warriors, Female Husbands and Plebeian Life’, Past and Present, 180 (2003) 131-74 (pp. 142-3); Anon, The Maiden Sailor (1693), https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/22190/image 40 For a full discussion of women who disguised themselves as men during the Civil Wars see Mark Stoyle, ‘Give mee a Souldier’s Coat’: Female Cross‐Dressing during the English Civil War’, History, 103 (2018), pp. 5-26; Anon, The Famous Woman-Drummer (1655-8), http://ebba.english. ucsb.edu/ballad/30874/citation. 41 C. R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600-1800 (London: Hutchinson, 1965) p. 227. 42 NMM, JOD/6, fos 3r-6v. 43 Berry, A Path in the Mighty Waters, p. 99; Marcus Rediker, ‘Liberty Beneath the Jolly Roger: the lives of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, pirates’ in Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling (eds), Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700-1920 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 9-10.

182 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

men-of-war, stating that they brought ‘such … evils, doing more harm than good wheresoever they come’. 44 These negative attitudes towards women on board men-of-war predominated during the 1640s and 1650s, especially from parliamentarian naval officials. In 1649, Robert Coytmor, secretary to the admiralty, complained to Edward Popham, one of the parliamentary generals-at-sea, about neglect of the service brought about by officers spending too much time with their wives. Coytmor advised that ‘If you permit your captains to have their wives on board the State will suffer much damage, as it hath formerly to my knowledge’. 45 Some officers similarly blamed the presence of Elizabeth Venables for the failure of the campaign in the West Indies. Henry Whister attributed the suffering of the soldiers to the general and his wife stating that: But Gennerall Venabelles Being abord of our ship, and haueiug a good ship vnder him and his wife to lie by his side, did not fele the hardship of the Souldgers that did lie one the sand vntell the Raine did waish it from vnder them, and hauing littell or noe vitelles, and nothing to drink but water. 46

This stereotype of women who travelled on warships as a distraction or danger to the service continued through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1666, Sir John Mennes complained to Samuel Pepys about how his ships were ‘pestered with women’. 47 In the same year, Sir Thomas Allin warned that women brought plague into his squadron. 48 Admiralty instructions issued in 1731 limited the number female visitors to prevent the ships being ‘too much pestered’ with them. 49 Officials were thus willing to hold women responsible, often on the flimsiest of evidence, for naval disasters such as the explosion of warships – just as Barlow later did. During the Civil Wars Murrough O’Brien, Lord Inchiquin, the military commander in Munster, blamed a woman for the loss of the Duncannon frigate at the siege of Youghal in 1645. Inchiquin, who was not 44 Basil Lubbock (ed.), Barlow’s Journal of his Life at Sea in King’s Ships, East & West Indiamen & Other Merchantment from 1659 to 1703 (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1934), I, p. 171. 45 Historical Manuscripts Commission (hereafter HMC), Report of the Manuscripts of F.W. Leyborne- Popham, Esq., of Littlecote, Co. Wilts., ed. S. C. Lomas (London, 1899), p. 26. 46 Firth, Narrative of General Venables, p. 156 47 CSPD, 1665-6, p. 357. 48 NMM, DAR/3, p. 32. 49 Brian Lavery (ed.), Shipboard Life and Organisation, 1731-1815 (Aldershot: Navy Records Society, 1998), p. 46.

‘A water bawdy house’: Women and the Nav y in the British Civil Wars

183

present when the incident occurred, described how a shot from an Irish cannon entered the powder room where it hit and decapitated a woman holding a candle, which then fell into the gunpowder and caused the explosion. By contrast, William Penn, the naval commander who was present, attributed the loss of the frigate to the negligence of the commander, who brought his ship within range of an enemy artillery battery that scored a direct hit on the Duncannon’s powder room.50 In reality, accidental explosions due to the mishandling of gunpowder commonly occurred throughout the war.51 Nevertheless, scapegoating women for setbacks such as the sinking of the Duncannon clearly fits within a broader naval tradition for apportioning blame for disasters at sea on women. *** The Civil Wars offered extraordinary opportunities for women to profit from doing business with the parliamentarian navy. Wartime necessity meant that parliament needed to contract with both male and female suppliers for essential stores to keep its forces functioning on land and at sea. For example, Elizabeth Thacker, a London widow and pike maker, received a number of contracts for making and repairing pikes and halberds.52 New shipbuilding programmes and high levels of naval activity in the 1640s and 1650s created unprecedented demands for supplies to build men-of-war and keep ships at sea.53 Most of those who furnished the navy with the material it needed were men, but surviving admiralty records identify a small yet significant number of women contractors providing material to naval dockyards during and after the war years.54 The scale of goods delivered into naval stores suggests some of these women operated 50 Penn, Memorials, I, pp. 122-3; C. McNeill (ed.), The Tanner letters: original documents and notices of Irish affairs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Dublin: Irish Manuscript Commission, 1943), pp. 190-2. 51 Charles Carlton, Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars 1638-1651 (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 207-8; David Cressy, Saltpeter: The Mother of Gunpowder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 120, 126. 52 Peter Edwards, Dealing in Death: the Arms Trade and the British Civil Wars, 1638-52 (Stroud: Sutton, 2000), pp. 4, 13. 53 Murphy and Blakemore, British Civil Wars at Sea, Chapter 5; Rif Widfield, British Warships in the Age of Sail, 1603-1714: Design, Construction, Careers and Fate (Barnsley: Seaforth Publishing, 2004), pp. 26, 47-52, 88-99. 54 J. D. Davies, Pepys’s Navy: Ships, Men & Warfare, 1649-1689 (Barnsley: Seaforth Publishing, 2008), pp. 189-92; The National Archives (hereafter TNA), ADM 18/1-40. For women contractors in the Restoration see Endsor, ‘The Women of Restoration Deptford’, pp. 77-86.

184 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

large-scale manufacturing premises with considerable numbers of skilled and unskilled employees. Between 1646 and 1662, for example, Sibel James sent hundreds of thousands of treenails into Deptford dockyard.55 The manufacture and repair of items such as compasses by female contractors suggests these women either possessed themselves, or were able to hire employees with, considerable technical expertise. Elizabeth Hill repaired hundreds of compasses for the navy in 1643 and 1644, and Elizabeth Meader received eighteen shillings for mending compasses for the Recovery and Portsmouth frigates.56 During the war, women came to dominate some areas of naval supply. The shifting political landscape of the war, naval expansion, and general wear and tear at sea led to a massive demand for standards, flags, and bunting for the fleet. In February 1649, Elizabeth Venner took over her deceased husband’s business providing flags, jacks, and ensigns to the navy. She received payment for ‘five flags with harpes of the new forme’ costing £4 7s each in April of the same year.57 The number of admiralty payments received by these women indicates that for some of those engaged in this work it was a large-scale business venture. Elizabeth Venner received payments for eighteen bills in 1649, Ann Walford claimed for eight bills in 1650-1, and Mary Rowell collected £329 6s 4d for the standards she conveyed to Deptford in 1654.58 The large number of craftswomen who worked in textile-related industries helps to explain why so many became involved in the manufacture of flags for the navy.59 Women flag makers, who dominated the business in the 1640s and 1650s, ceased to receive contracts after the Restoration. Male suppliers such as John Young, John Mitchell, and Henry Whistler became the principal flag contractors in admiralty records.60 While it is difficult to say with certainty it is possible that the changing political landscape at the Restoration may therefore have cost female flag makers their contracts, as the state acquired new flags for the return of Charles II. Other female 55 TNA, ADM 18/1, p. 104; TNA, ADM 18/2, p. 163; TNA, ADM 18/5, pp.18, 21, 34, 124; TNA, ADM 18/7, pp. 37, 109, 200, 322; TNA ADM 18/11, pp. 11, 38, 87; TNA ADM 18/15, p. 18; TNA ADM 18/22, pp. 49, 120; TNA ADM 18/25, p. 173; TNA ADM 18/26, pp. 56, 188; TNA ADM 18/31, p. 41; TNA ADM 18/34, p. 3; TNA ADM 18/37, p. 59. 56 TNA, ADM 18/1, p. 114; TNA, ADM 18/2, p. 99; TNA, ADM 18/13, fo. 78v. 57 TNA, SP 25/62, p. 60; TNA ADM18/1, p. 212; TNA ADM 18/7, p. 2, 20; TNA, PROB/11/206/358. 58 TNA, ADM 18/7, pp. 2, 18, 19, 20, 35, 37, 218, 246, 255, 270, 272; TNA, ADM 18/11, pp. 15, 74, 82; TNA ADM18/26, p. 4. 59 Eleanor Hubbard, City Women: Money, Sex, and the Social Order in Early Modern London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 196-200; Majorie Kkenisto McIntosh, Working Women in English Society, 1300-1620 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 210-33. 60 TNA ADM 18/37, pp. 58, 66, 135, 228, 230, 243; SP 29/66 fo. 127r-9v.

‘A water bawdy house’: Women and the Nav y in the British Civil Wars

185

contractors, such as Sibel James, continued to work for the navy and the admiralty remained willing to do business with women in other areas of textile manufacture, such as the manufacture of sails.61 Nearly all of the female contractors named in admiralty records were widows. Every bill presented by Elizabeth Davis, who supplied thousands of ‘hammacoes’ [hammocks] at Deptford and Portsmouth between 1642 and 1644, described her as such. The wives of artisans often helped to run their husband’s business and possessed the knowledge necessary to continue doing so after his death. Guilds often permitted widows to carry on the trade with suitable journeymen, and some of these women clearly carried on with the business established by their husbands. Elizabeth’s husband, John Davis, fulfilled contacts for ‘hammacoes’ prior to his death. Mary Rowell likewise took over and expanded her husband George’s flag manufacturing for the navy following his death.62 In her study of the East India Company, Pamela Sharpe argues that the Company continued to do business with the widows of contractors as ‘a favour’ after the death of their husbands.63 This may be true to a certain extent in terms of admiralty officials extending contracts to widows during the war, but surviving records indicate that a sound ability to operate a business and fulfil contracts at the right price and quality, rather than gender or charity, was the key criterion for the navy in continuing to deal with widows. The scale of payments made to Prudence Mann, a widow, combined with the willingness of the Committee of the Navy to enter into new contracts with her to supply ‘bewpers’ [bunting] to the navy based on the sample patterns she previously provided, suggests that charity alone did not determine who received naval business.64 This willingness to do business with women that was established during the 1640s and 1650s continued into the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in several areas beside textiles. In 1690, Abigail Nicholls received permission to continue her husband’s business as ‘anchor smith’ at Woolwich as she employed a skilled foreman and offered to ‘perform the works as cheape 61 TNA ADM 18/47, p. 82. 62 Olwen Hufton, The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, 1500-1800 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), pp. 239-49; Hubbard, City Women, pp. 264-5; McIntosh, Working Women, pp. 234-5; TNA, ADM 18/1, pp. 5, 39, 80, 89; TNA, ADM 18/2, p. 89; TNA, ADM 18/7, pp. 49, 54, 63, 74, 104; TNA, ADM 18/15, pp. 99, 130; TNA, ADM 18/26, p. 4; TNA, ADM 18/34, pp. 72, 116. 63 Pamela Sharpe, ‘Gender at Sea: Women and the East India Company in Seventeenth-Century London, in Penelope Lane, Neil Raven and K.D.M. Snell (eds), Women, Work and Wages in England, 1600-1850 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004), pp. 58-62. 64 TNA, ADM 18/7, p. 330; TNA ADM 18/14, pp. 22, 132, 187; BL, Add MS 9306, fo. 126r.

186 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

and well as anybody else’.65 Once female contractors proved their abilities and value, especially during wartime, the navy was reluctant to cease doing business with them. Cost and reliability were clearly the key factors in doing business with parliamentarian navy and many women were able to skilfully play the market. The prominence of some female contractors in the navy’s financial records shows their central importance during the 1640s and 1650s. Hester Leverland, an ironmonger and widow, began supplying relatively modest amounts of ironwork such as nails to dockyards in 1643. Over the next twelve years, the scale of her contracts grew considerably, and by the 1650s, she undertook thousands of pounds worth of business with the navy each year. A 1646 order from the earl of Warwick indicates her importance. He overrode the objections of the Portsmouth dockyard commissioners to her establishing a nail shop there, stating that ‘she gave creditt when others would not to considerable summes of mony’.66 The admiralty’s continued reliance on the ironwork she provided can again be seen in a 1652 dispute over the supply of metal spikes. In adjudicating the case, the navy commissioners sided with Leverland over the shipwright at Chatham.67 The financial problems that beset the parliamentarian navy in the late 1640s meant that admiralty officials could not afford to alienate major contractors who extended credit, whether male or female.68 Hence, when a shortage of iron caused delays at Chatham, Captain Taylor turned to Mrs Loader, ‘the woman smith’, to persuade her friends to supply coal and iron on credit to ensure that work at the shipyard did not grind to a halt.69 Leverland and Loader’s interaction with admiralty officials suggests the value to the navy of good relations with businesswomen, and the degree of their influence within dockyard society. Equally, Hester Leverland’s willingness to extend credit when others refused raises the possibility that some women had little choice but to continue supplying the dockyards in order to receive payment for their earlier work. Not every women who did business with the navy was a contractor who supplied goods. The admiralty also employed small numbers of women to work in its shipyards. Mary Arner served as housekeeper at the pay house in Chatham in the 1640s and 1650s, while her husband William worked as a 65 NMM, ADM/A/1768/246. 66 BL, Add MS9306, fo. 96v; TNA ADM 18/7, pp. 1, 8, 15; TNA ADM 18/11, pp. 2, 3, 4. 67 NMM, LBK/86, 31 May 1652. 68 James S. Wheeler, ‘Navy Finance, 1649-1660’, Historical Journal, 39 (1996), pp. 457-66; James S. Wheeler, ‘Prelude to Power: The Crisis of 1649 and the Foundation of English Naval Power’, Mariner’s Mirror, 81 (1995), 148-55 (pp. 151-4). 69 CSPD, 1659-60, p. 531.

‘A water bawdy house’: Women and the Nav y in the British Civil Wars

187

glazier in the yard at the same time. Some women also rented property to the admiralty, such as Alice Paprell, a widow from Portsmouth who let a house there for the use of the principal officers of the navy for £16 per annum.70 Many more women probably laboured as employees or sub-contractors on various types of low-skilled work in or near the dockyards. In 1653, Elizabeth Honrerd and Winifried Borages received payment for three weeks’ work at three shillings per week each for picking weeds at the Navy Commissioners’ house at Deptford.71 One task that poor women near dockyards often engaged in was picking apart old ropes to make oakum to caulk ships. Storekeepers at dockyards generally aggregated payments for this type of work, making it difficult to get a sense of how many women participated in this labour. In 1659 Margaret Wells and ‘divers other’ unnamed ‘poor women’ received £9 16s ‘for their pains in picking out the state’s junck’.72 Finding records for the employment of women like this is difficult, but it does provide an insight into different types of work that were available to poor women, and the importance of the navy as an employer in early modern society. With husbands away on extended voyages, naval women who found themselves at home with little financial or emotional support turned to a variety of trades to make ends meet. Operating shops, alehouses, and lodgings that catered to seamen offered one way for women in port towns to supplement their income legitimately. In 1644 Joane Jackson, a widow of Maldon, ran a ‘common victualling house’ for seafaring men.73 Edward Coxere’s wife kept a shop while he was at sea in the 1650s.74 However, financial necessity, often brought about by delays in the payment of wages and pensions, forced many sailors’ wives and widows into a precarious existence. For these vulnerable women prostitution and crime offered a way to survive. In port cities such as London and Amsterdam some women kept brothels.75 Cheating sailors and their legitimate heirs also proved lucrative for others. The widow Ashwell lost her sailor husband’s wages after a woman from Southwark claimed that she was dead.76 John Palmer complained that a 70 TNA, ADM 18/1, p. 121; TNA, ADM 18/3 np; TNA, ADM 18/15, pp. 10, 11; TNA, ADM 18/22, p. 166. 71 TNA, ADM 18/15, p. 44. 72 TNA, ADM 18/34, pp. 3, 46. 73 Peter Earle, A City Full of People: Men and Women of London, 1650-1750 (London: Methuen, 1994), pp. 80-1, 185-6; Essex Record Office, QSBA 254. 74 Edward Coxere, Adventures by Sea of Edward Coxere, ed. EHW Meyerstein (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945), p. 80 75 Capp, Cromwell’s Navy, pp. 249-54; Hubbard, City Women, pp. 106-7; van de Poll, Burgher and the Whore, pp. 152-63; Hufton, Prospect Before Her, pp. 316-32. 76 CSPD, 1654, p. 190.

188 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

woman named Margaret Wilmer used forged certificates to receive money for a pension due to him for wounds he received at sea. Prostitution and ticket frauds like these continued to provide a way to make ends meet for sailor’s women into the eighteenth-century.77 Nursing traditionally offered more respectable employment for women, including seamen’s wives and widows, especially in times of war.78 Both the parliamentarians and royalists set up military hospitals during the 1640s. They lacked the capacity to treat all the injured, and most soldiers received care in a ‘putting out’ system whereby local people, mainly poor women, accommodated and tended to their wounds in their homes.79 The admiralty also made extensive use of this system by placing sick sailors with landladies in port towns. Chatham Chest records from the Civil Wars indicate that the navy allowed six shillings a week for the diet, lodging, and care of injured sailors to the women who performed this task. In May 1642, widow Roe of Chatham received £2 pounds for her attendance on two sick sailors, while Joice Long of Portsmouth was also paid £2 for her care of Edward Fisher, a seaman of the Providence, in July 1645.80 Despite the care they received, many wounded sailors did not recover, such as Andrew Forbish from the James. In March 1646 the Chest paid his nurse, widow Hagley of Rochester, £1 15s 10d to cover the cost of his burial and medicine during his stay with her.81 Royalist naval commanders did not pay as generously to the women who tended their sick: Prince Rupert allowed only three shillings per week to Mary Humble for her ministrations to the injured at Kinsale in 1649.82 The system evidently had its flaws. In 1653, Daniel Whistler complained about the mariners scattered round Portsmouth and that ‘the Thronging of weake men in to poore stifling houses [creates] The temptations to them of drinking ordinately in victualling houses’ at Portsmouth.83 The variable

77 CSPD, 1655, p. 95; Lincoln, Naval Waives, pp. 142-70. 78 John A. Lynn II, Women, Armies and Warfare in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 118-124; McIntosh, Working Women, pp. 79-84; Tim Reinke-Williams, Women, Work and Sociability in Early Modern London (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), pp. 95-6; Hubbard, City Women, p. 216. 79 Barbara Donagan, ‘The casualties of war: treatment of the dead and wounded in the English Civil War’ in Ian Gentles, John Morrill and Blair Worden (eds), Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 122-5; Carlton, Going to the Wars, pp. 225-9. 80 NMM, SOC/15; Wellcome Library, MS 7077, fo. 11v. 81 Wellcome Library, MS 7077, fo. 8r. 82 NMM, AND/27, pp. 7, 12, 19. 83 TNA, SP18/34/111.

‘A water bawdy house’: Women and the Nav y in the British Civil Wars

189

standard of care received by mariners in these houses ultimately led the admiralty to centralise care in hospitals in the 1700s.84 The Civil Wars thus opened up opportunities for profit and work for enterprising women. During the turmoil of the war years, other commonlyused records for women’s employments in the seventeenth-century, such as those of the Consistory Courts in London, provide less information or are not available.85 The survival of admiralty contracts and financial records from the 1640s and 1650s means the navy offers an invaluable way into the variety and complexity of women’s work experiences during the Civil War period. Questions such as the role of widows in the workforce, the importance of reputation for working women, and the types of employment that were available to women can be examined in detail from a naval perspective.86 There has been considerable historical focus in recent years on the development of Britain into a ‘fiscal-military’ or a ‘fiscal-naval’ state, but these studies neglect the role of women who did business with the state, and their significance in supplying Britain’s military and naval needs.87 The range of contracts and employment undertaken by women with the admiralty in the 1640s and 1650s clearly demonstrates their importance to the navy during the war. More importantly, the openings for women doing business with the navy did not end with the Restoration. Admiralty records show that large numbers of women continued to provide vital supplies and services to the navy throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. *** Naval sailors and their families endured great hardships even before the outbreak of the Civil Wars, but the conflict in the 1640s exacerbated some longstanding risks, such as those of capture or death at sea, and introduced new problems for women to overcome. The divisive nature of the Civil Wars made it diff icult for some naval families to keep in 84 Matthew Neufeld and Blaine Wickham, ‘The State, the People and the Care of Sick and Injured Sailors in Late Stuart England’, Social History of Medicine, 28, (2014), pp. 45-63 85 Peter Earle, ‘The Female Labour Market in London in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries’, Economic History Review, ns, 42 (1989), pp. 329-30; Gowing, Domestic Dangers, Chapter 2. 86 Reinke-Williams, Women, Work and Sociability, pp. 1-5; Earle, ‘Female Labour Market’, pp. 328-53; 87 N. A. M. Rodger, ‘From the ‘Military Revolution’ to the ‘Fiscal-Naval State’, Journal for Maritime Research, 13 (2011), pp. 119-28; Aaron Graham and Patrick Walsh (eds), The British fiscal-military states, 1660-c.1783 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016); John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1783 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).

190 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

touch. The royalists in Dublin arrested John Lambart, a parliamentarian mariner, in 1646 when he went ashore from the Nicholas, one of the ships blockading the city. According to Lambart ‘his occasion of his now coming on shore was to see his sister Debora Lambart … and his Aunt Judith Hooker’. 88 Women with relatives at sea understood the need for a proactive approach to dealing with the state and its off icials long before the 1640s, and issues such as wage arrears, payment of pensions, and redeeming captured sailors, meant that women with family members in naval service actively sought the redress of their issues. From the 1620s on the wives of mariners taken by North African and other pirates regularly petitioned parliament and the king for relief and help to secure the release of their menfolk. As Bernard Capp argues, ‘they assumed a right to be heard, and expected government to address their grievances’.89 During the Civil Wars, this willingness to speak up can be seen to an even greater extent as women from all sides petitioned parliament for arrears of pay or redress of grievances.90 For example, Katherine Drayton, the widow of Captain Thomas Beale of the Great Lewis, petitioned the committee of the admiralty for three years for her husband’s arrears of pay for his service.91 Just as in peacetime, naval wives and widows did not sit passively by. Instead, they were at the forefront of petitioning parliament and visiting Westminster to gain relief and seek the support of politicians for their cause.92 These petitions, letters, and protests by the female relatives of mariners demonstrate how women, often from lower levels of society, developed their agency in dealing with the navy during the war, and often met with 88 TCD MS 810, fo. 329r. 89 Whiting, Women and Petitioning, pp. 55-9; Chris R. Kyle, Theater of State: Parliament and Political Culture in Early Stuart England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), pp. 143-4; Nabil Matar, British Captives from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1563-1760 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 82-113; Parliamentary Archives, HL/PO/JO/10/130; Appleby, Women and English Piracy, p. 152; Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 310-1; Nabil Matar, ‘Wives, Captive Husbands and Turks: The First Women Petitioners in Caroline England’, Explorations in Renaissance Culture, 23 (1997), pp. 111-29; Sharpe, ‘Gender at Sea, pp. 59-62. 90 For the scale and variety of Civil War petitioning see Hannah Worthen, ‘Supplicants and Guardians: the petitions of Royalist widows during the Civil Wars and Interregnum, 16421660’, Women’s History Review, 26 (2017), pp. 528-40; Civil War Petitions Project, https://www. civilwarpetitions.ac.uk/ 91 Calendar of State Papers, Adventurers (hereafter CSPA), 1642-59, p. 369. 92 Whiting, Women and Petitioning, pp. 118-22; Marie McEntee, ‘The [Un]civill-sisterhood of Oranges and Lemons’: Female Petitioners and Demonstrators, 1642-1653’ in James Holstun (ed.), Pamphlet Wars: Prose in the English Revolution (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 92-111.

‘A water bawdy house’: Women and the Nav y in the British Civil Wars

191

success.93 The ‘mighty clamours’ of a group of sailor’s wives, for example, persuaded Captain Yates to release fifty men he had pressed at Newcastle.94 Indeed, petitions by women occasionally led to changes in official policies. A 1644 parliamentarian ordinance authorised the execution of Irish prisoners on land and at sea, and in the following years, as we have seen, officers like Richard Swanley executed a number of Irish captives. These actions in turn endangered the lives of English seafarers if the confederates captured them: in November 1646, Robert Vennard wrote to his wife about how the Irish placed him and other prisoners in a ‘woeful dungeon’ after Captain Gilson executed fifteen Irish seamen. Ursula Vennard and the wives of other detainees successfully petitioned parliament to put a halt to the summary execution of Irishmen, and to arrange for the redemption of English mariners from Ireland.95 Women were not always successful in their attempts to get the navy to help their families, and payments of wage arrears or the redemption of captives often took years, but naval women nevertheless formed a powerful lobbying force that parliament could not overlook during the 1640s. *** In April 1648, Mrs Woodgreen from Rochester repeatedly defied the Navy Commissioners in a dispute over timber. The commissioners complained that she slighted their warrants and abused their messenger.96 As Mrs Woodgreen shows, women in the 1640s and 1650s, including those connected with the navy, were not ‘merely passive victims’ of the war.97 The exceptional circumstances of the Civil Wars saw large numbers of women across all levels of society engage and interact with the parliamentarian navy in ways in which they had never done before, or on such a large scale. Nevertheless, historians have largely ignored the experiences of women and their contribution to the war effort at sea. This is part of a wider problem of the ‘neglect or sensationalisation’ of women’s involvement with the navy in the early modern period.98 This chapter has analysed the complex ways in which women encountered and dealt with the navy, its sailors, and its officials 93 Lincoln, Naval Wives, pp. 152-62. 94 Capp, When Gossips Meet, p. 311; CSPD 1652-3, p. 353 95 Parliamentary Archives, HL/PO/JO/10/1/120; CJ, v, 33; LJ, viii, 637; Murphy, ‘Atrocities at Sea’, pp. 21-2. 96 BL, Add MS 9305, fo. 46v. 97 Hughes, Gender and the English Revolution, p. 31. 98 Lincoln, ‘Impact of Warfare’, p. 71.

192 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

during the 1640s and 1650s. It highlights why the experiences, agency, and vulnerability of women such as Belindia Steele, Elizabeth Venner, and Mrs Woodgreen should not be overlooked when we seek to understand how the parliamentarian navy won the conflict at sea. Moving beyond the Civil War period, this essay opens up the importance of women to the wider naval developments in the seventeenth-century. The navy and its administration were shaped by the agency of women who interacted with it in a variety of roles, ranging from contractors to petitioners and passengers on board men-of-war. Women clearly played an important part in the development of maritime Britain, and studying women’s connections with the navy can provide valuable insights into questions of gender in early modern British society.

8. ‘Thy sceptre to a trident change / And straight, unruly seas thou canst command’: Contemporary Representations of King Charles I and the Ship Money Fleets within the Cultural Imagination of Caroline England Rebecca A. Bailey ‘Thy sceptre to a trident change / And straight, unruly seas thou canst command’ is a central image from one of the most opulent court masques of the 1630s, Britannia Triumphans.1 Performed at Whitehall on Sunday 7 January 1638, Charles I himself took the chief masquing role of Britanocles, the glory of ‘the Westerne World, [who] hath by his wisedome, valour and pietie, not onely vindicated his owne, but farre distant Seas, infested with Pyrats’ (Masque Argument). Devised by Inigo Jones, Surveyor of the King’s Works, and William Davenant, Poet Laureate, Britannia Triumphans appears to validate Charles I’s well-documented ambition to develop the navy into the most ‘potent’ force ‘for defence, offense, and diversion of any in the Christian world’.2 As John Taylor, the ‘Water Poet’, so memorably observed, the nation’s ships were ‘the impregnable Wooden walls of great Brittaine and Ireland … the winged flying and floating Castles, forts and fortifications for defence against forraigne invasion & domesticall rebellion’.3 During the 1630s, Charles I made every effort to bolster the navy’s ‘floating Castles’, culminating with the Sovereign of the Seas, launched the year before Britannia Triumphans was 1 William Davenant and Inigo Jones, Britannia Triumphans (1638) in Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court, ed. by S. Orgel and R. Strong, 2 vols (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), II, pp. 660-704, ll. 525-6. Subsequent references to this masque will be within the essay and refer to this volume; quotations in italics are as in the text. 2 B. W. Quintrell, ‘Charles I and His Navy in the 1630s’, The Seventeenth Century, 3.2 (1988), 159-79, (p. 167); see also N. A. M. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, 660-1649 (London: Penguin, 2004, first published 1997), Chapters 26-7. 3 John Taylor, A Valorous and Perillous Sea-Fight (London: 1640), p. 44. On Taylor’s life and work, see Bernard Capp, The World of John Taylor, the Water-Poet, 1578-1653 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).

194 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

staged. This flagship was lauded by Thomas Heywood in his True Description of His Majesties Royall and Most Stately Ship as an ‘incomparable structure’ which ‘hath made an inimitable president for all the Kinges and Potentates of the Christian World, or else where’. 4 Charles’s objective was to enhance England’s imperial standing and secure the coast from multiple threats of piracy, rapacious Dutch fishing fleets, and the ultimate fear of invasion, embodied by the living memory of the Spanish Armada.5 Accordingly, as this essay will argue, in the mid-to-late 1630s there was a noticeable focus on the ideal of Charles I as a maritime ruler. This contested ideal permeated through England’s wider print and scribal networks, as writers engaged with Charles I’s maritime ambitions on both domestic and international fronts, and buoyed the Caroline literary imagination. In particular, Charles I’s ship money fleets would become a central image in the furious debates eddying around the increasingly problematic concept of absolute rule. Heywood’s True Description, which Alan Young suggests was printed to accompany the proposed launch of the Sovereign of the Seas in September 1637, in many ways sets out the parameters of this debate.6 Heywood himself was so overcome, even by his first glimpse of the unfinished structure of the Sovereign of the Seas, that he immediately penned an ‘Epigrammaticall rapture’, raving: I should but loose myself and craize my braine, Striving to give this (glory of the Maine) A full description.7

To Heywood it was unimaginable that this ‘incomparable Vessel’ would not but ‘bee a great spur and incouragement to all [Charles’s] faithful and loving Subjects to bee liberall and willing Contributaries towards the Ship-money’.8

4 A. R. Young, His Majesty’s Royal Ship: A Critical Edition of Thomas Heywood’s ‘A True Description of his Majesties Royall Ship’ (New York: AMS Press, 2006), p. 17. 5 See Quintrell, ‘Charles I and his Navy’; Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 97-104, 545-52, 596-8, esp., p. 101; David D. Hebb, Piracy and the English Government, 1616-1642 (Aldershot: Routledge, 1994), Chapters 9-10; Nabil Matar, Britain and Barbary, 1589-1689 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2005), Chapter 2; Kenneth R. Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics: Seafaring and Naval Enterprise in the Reign of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp., Chapter 6; Richard J. Blakemore and Elaine Murphy, The British Civil Wars at Sea, 1638-1653 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2018), Chapter 1. 6 Young, True Description, p. xxi. 7 Ibid., p. 19. 8 Ibid., pp. 27-28.

‘Thy sceptre to a trident change / And str aight

195

Heywood’s hopes were short-lived. In fact, a key undercurrent within Heywood’s True Description is an attempt to win over those who refused to be properly impressed by King Charles’s maritime ambitions.9 As this essay will explore, such conflict was defined in the cultural imagination by the ship money trope, which itself spanned genres from the poetry of Edmund Waller, William Davenant, and Thomas Beedome to the plays of James Shirley, William Davenant, and William Strode.10 This trope reached its height with the court masque Britannia Triumphans, when Charles I employed the elite stage to blazon his imagined maritime triumphs to the wider world, reinforcing what Julie Sanders has identified as ‘the subtle play of intersection, interaction and influence between public and private (especially) courtly drama’.11 However, even within the masque form itself, the ship money fleets were a contested image. Fissures of unease can be located within Davenant’s masque libretto, which unsettle Inigo Jones’s stunning scenes of Stuart absolutism and maritime ascendancy. Davenant’s text repeatedly urged the need for mutual harmony within the body politic, an especially timely message as England lurched towards Civil War. Yet, by 1642, these maritime fissures had become veritable chasms – evident from seismic events such as Parliament commandeering the ship money fleets, which delivered a severe blow both to the image of the king and 9 This is evident from the postscript to the second edition of Heywood’s text which lightly glossed over the embarrassment of the Sovereign of the Seas’s abortive launch attributing it to ‘the breaking of so many Cables, and of a contrary Wind, which hindred the comming in of the Tide to its full height’. Ibid., p. 31. 10 Edmund Waller, ‘To the King on his Navy’ within The Poems of Edmund Waller, ed. by G. Thorn Drury, 2 vols (London: Routledge, 1901); William Davenant, Madagascar with Other Poems (London: 1638); Thomas Beedome, Poems Divine and Humane (London: 1641); James Shirley, The Young Admiral (London: 1637); William Davenant, Newes from Plymouth in The Dramatic Works of Sir William D’Avenant, 5 vols (Edinburgh and London: Paterson and Sotheran, 1873); William Strode, The Poetical Works of William Strode (1600-1645) Now First Collected From Manuscript and Printed Sources; To Which is Added The Floating Island, a Tragi-Comedy Now First Reprinted From the Original Edition, 1655, ed. by B. Dobell (London: privately printed, 1907). 11 Julie Sanders, ‘Caroline Salon Culture and Female Agency: The Countess of Carlisle, Henrietta Maria, and Public Theatre’, Theatre Journal, 52 (2000), 449-64 (p. 463). For excellent discussions of Britannia Triumphans see Martin Butler, The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 337-41; David Howarth, Art and Patronage in the Caroline Courts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 68-86; Barbara Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 102-6, 131-32, 238-41; Kevin Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 247-51; Lauren Shohet, Reading Masques: The English Masque (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 1-2, 31-33, 54-57. For responses in private theatre see Sara Trevisan, ‘Mildmay Fane’s Masque Raguaillo d’Oceano (1640): Royalism, Puritanism and Sea Voyages’, Renaissance Studies, 27, 1 (2013), 34-50.

196 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

the royalist cause.12 Such sharp reversals of fortune expose the central importance of the idea of maritime Britain in defining and understanding the Caroline nation. *** King Charles’s maritime passion had begun as a young boy, fostered by his elder brother Prince Henry’s keen interest in the navy and exploration. In 1610 the celebrated shipbuilder and naval administrator, Phineas Pett, had been commissioned to build for Prince Henry the greatest English warship ever constructed, the Prince Royal.13 Two years later, on Henry’s untimely death, Antonio Foscarini, the Venetian Ambassador in London, noted how Prince Henry ‘had begun to put the navy in order and raised the number of sailors’.14 When King Charles acceded to the throne in 1625, he continued this royal patronage of the Pett family, rewarding Pett with a gold chain for bringing Queen Henrietta Maria safely to England on the Prince Royal, and embarking upon an intensive programme of ship building which cost over a million pounds.15 For, as Alan James argues in Chapter 2, ‘the connection between naval power and imperial majesty’ was ‘irresistable’.16 From 1626 to 1637 several new vessels were launched: Mercury and Spy (1626), Henrietta and Maria (1626-7), Charles (1632-3), and Greyhound and Roebuck (1636).17 As Kevin Sharp has documented, Charles took a personal interest in his naval investment, inspecting the ships as they were built and launching the vessels with great aplomb.18 The king’s valiant attempt to create a potent navy was vaunted to the wider world through his remarkable warship, the Sovereign of the Seas.19 This completely overreached not only his brother’s flagship, the Prince Royal, 12 Richard J. Blakemore, ‘Thinking Outside the Gundeck: Maritime History, the Royal Navy and the Outbreak of British Civil War, 1625-42’, Historical Research, 87, 236 (May 2014), 251-74; Blakemore and Murphy, British Civil Wars, Chapter 2. 13 Catherine McLeod, The Lost Prince: The Life and Death of Henry Stuart (London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 2012), p. 145. 14 CSP Venetian, 1610-13, 23 November 1612, item 692. 15 Quintrell, ‘Charles I and his Navy’, p. 167; Phineas Pett, The Autobiography of Phineas Pett, ed. by W. G. Perrin (London: Navy Records Society, 1917). 16 Alan James, Chapter 2. 17 James H. Sephton, Sovereign of the Seas: The Seventeenth-Century Warship (Stroud: Amberley, 2011), Appendix 2, p. 191; see also Rodger, Safeguard of the Sea, Chapter 26. 18 Sharp, Personal Rule, 98-9. 19 The ship’s career has been traced in detail in Sephton, Sovereign of the Seas; see also Rodger, Safeguard of the Sea, 382-3, 386-94.

‘Thy sceptre to a trident change / And str aight

197

Figure 8.1: John Payne, Sovereign of the Seas (1637), © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK.

but all other European vessels. Launched in 1637, the Sovereign of the Seas was praised by the Venetian ambassador, Anzolo Correr, as ‘the largest and finest construction ever seen in England’.20 It was popularly known as ‘the EIGHT / Wonder’ and later nicknamed the ‘Golden Devil’ by the Dutch.21 Created from over 2,500 great oaks and lavishly ornamented with carvings and gilding costing nearly £7,000 (the equivalent of building a new forty-gun warship), the Sovereign of the Seas proudly proclaimed on the emblems of over one hundred cannon that Charles I had ‘grasped firmly’ the ‘sceptre of the seas’.22 Again, thanks to Heywood’s True Description, we know that the ideal of the ship of state was engraved on the ship’s hull, which palpably underscored the Stuart belief in absolute rule: ‘He who Seas, Windes, and Navies doth protect / Great Charles, thy great Ship in her course direct’.23 By 1640 the prelate and poet, Henry King, openly marvelled at such significant naval investment: what a Royall Navie … to bestride and mount the tops of those foaming Billowes? What Mountaines of Oake upon those Watery Mountaines? What Wooden Castles to keep the Ocean in awe? Like strong Walls and 20 CSP Ven, 1636-9, 9 October 1637, item 311. 21 Thomas Cary, inscribed on John Payne’s engraving of the Sovereign of the Seas, within Young, True Description, Appendix, p. 76. 22 Sephton, Sovereign, 15, 85, 105. The exact Latin inscription on each canon read ‘Carolus Edgari sceptrum stabilivit aquarium’ which I have translated as ‘King Charles has grasped firmly King Edgar’s sceptre of the seas’. 23 Young, True Description, p. 27. For a fascinating discussion of ‘images of the ship of state, the ship of fools, and the ship of the church’, together with ‘the ship a-drift’ see Clare Jowitt, Chapter 5.

198 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Bulwarks to repell those Adversaries, who have long made this Kingdome the aime of their Ambition and Revenge.24

In parallel with this enlarged navy, during the 1630s the image of Charles I as a type of Caroline Neptune became a significant element of the king’s royal iconography. This was underpinned and legitimised by the naval success of former English monarchs, in particular King Edgar and Elizabeth I.25 Indeed, John Dee, astronomer, astrologist and advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, had remarked how images of ‘the Peaceable king Edgar’ with his ‘Invincible Sea Strength’ had ‘streamed down’ into his own ‘Imagination’ as an example for Elizabeth I herself to follow ‘for the Godly Prosperity of this British Impire’.26 As Vaughan Hart has pointed out, the representation of Britain as a seafaring nation was central to the designs of both Inigo Jones and John Webb for a proposed triumphal arch at Temple Bar in London. This arch was envisioned as a symbolic celebration of Charles’s absolute authority on sea as well as land.27 In Figure 8.2, a prominent statue of Neptune dominates the left column of Webb’s 1638 design whilst, in Figure 8.3, maritime emblems of shipping feature on the relief panels of Jones’s 1636 drawing. Such triumphant maritime iconography was echoed in the elaborate carvings of the Sovereign of the Seas. Thomas Heywood, who had designed the ship’s emblems, provided a (lengthy) key to their meaning in his True Description. Thus, Heywood eagerly pointed out to his Caroline reader how Neptune ‘with his Sea-horse, Dolphin and Trident’ appeared in a prominent position on ‘the Hances of the waste’, whilst ‘upon the Beak-head sitteth royall King Edgar on horse-backe, trampling upon seven Kings’.28 King Edgar was deemed a rather unusual choice of figurehead for such a mighty vessel. Indeed, Heywood notes how some of the ‘figures and Mottoes’ which richly adorned the Sovereign of the Seas had been ‘too liberally taxed’ by those who ‘doubted of their propriety’.29 Yet, as Heywood explained to 24 Henry King, A Sermon Preached at St. Pauls March 27 1640. Being the Anniversary of his Majesties Happy Inauguration to His Crowne (London: 1640), pp. 52-3. 25 On Elizabeth I, see N. A. M. Rodger, ‘Queen Elizabeth and the Myth of Sea-Power in English History’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 14 (2004), 153-74. 26 John Dee, General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation (London: 1557), pp. 55, 58. Richard Hakluyt cites Dee in The Principle Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation (London: 1599-1600), pp. 6-9. I am grateful to the reviewer of this volume for this reference. 27 Vaughan Hart, Inigo Jones: The Architect of Kings (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 78-81. I am grateful to Professor Barbara Ravelhoefer for this reference. 28 Young, A True Description, pp. 25, 20. 29 Ibid., p. 20.

‘Thy sceptre to a trident change / And str aight

199

Figure 8.2: John Webb, Design for a triumphal arch, Temple Bar, London (1638), © RIBA Collections.

those readers ‘desirous to understand’ their ‘imagined obscurity’, the ideal of King Edgar, in fact, brilliantly showcased the symbolic qualities which Charles I believed defined his rule.30 James Howell noted how Charles’s ‘great Ship’ was ‘nam’d the Edgar; [because he] was one of the most famous

30 Ibid.

200 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Figure 8.3: Inigo Jones’s sketch for the relief carved spandrels for the proposed triumphal arch at Temple Bar, London (1636), © RIBA Collections.

Saxon kings this Island had, and the most potent at sea’.31 In 1637, an English translation of William Camden’s Britain was published which specifically praised King Edgar ‘the Peaceable’ for his refusal to seek out vain-glorious conflict.32 According to Camden, King Edgar was a ‘second Salomon that was, laws-father, Prince of peace, / In that he wanted [i.e. lacked] warres, the more his glorie had increase’.33 Such an apogee, of course, neatly chimed with the Stuart regime’s on-going identification with King Solomon, epitomised by Rubens’s apotheosis of King James I on the central ceiling panel of the Whitehall Banqueting House.34 King Edgar’s renown as a maritime ruler was also rehearsed in several contemporary tracts. These ranged from legal texts by Sir John Borough and John Selden which defined Charles’s maritime ambitions, to Thomas Heywood’s more lurid tale of the exploits of two Elizabethan pirates.35 Hence, the apocryphal tale of King Edgar’s prowess on the River 31 James Howell, Epistolae-Ho Elianae (London: 1650), 1, p. 222. 32 William Camden, Britain, or A Chorographicall Description of the Most Flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the Ilands Adjoyning, Out of the Depth of Antiquitie Beautified With Mappes of the Severall Shires of England (London: 1637), p. 230. Accessed via EEBO http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.882003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:image:16125:125 33 Ibid. 34 Roy C. Strong, Britannia Triumphans: Inigo Jones, Rubens and Whitehall Palace (London: Thames and Hudson Press, 1980). 35 Gerard Malynes, Consuetudo, vel Lex Mercatoria, Or the Ancient Law-Merchant (London: 1622), Chapter 35; John Borough, The Soveraignty of the British Seas (London: 1651), pp. 20-2; John Selden, Mare Clausum (London: 1635), Book 2, Chapter 12; Thomas Heywood, A True Relation, of the Lives and Deaths of Two Most Famous English Pyrats, Purser, and Clinton who Lived in the Reigne of Queene Elizabeth (London: 1639), Chapter 4, unpaginated.

‘Thy sceptre to a trident change / And str aight

201

Figure 8.4: Detail of King Edgar on horseback, from John Payne, Sovereign of the Seas (1637), © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK

Dee in Chester whereby he ensured his maritime sovereignty would become a commonplace. Intriguingly, just as King Charles recognised the visual importance of a fine vessel to flaunt his maritime authority, so, too, King Edgar was depicted by Heywood: sitting in a new barge for that purpose, hee himselfe tooke the charge of the helme, … and was the steares-man; and was rowed by eight Contributary Kings which hée commanded … unto ye Church of St. Thomas, and from thence backe againe to his owne Pallace; to shew that he was sole Soveraigne of so many provinces.36

The diplomat and poet, Sir Richard Fanshawe, nimbly wove this increasingly popular Edgar ideal into his celebratory poem ‘On His Majesties Great Shippe’.37 Fanshawe perceived Edgar’s ‘Empire ore the Sea’ (l. 46) to provide the ‘image of a perfect Government’ (l. 50): Where, sitting at the helme the Monarch steeres, The Oares are labour’d by the active Peeres And all the People distributed are In other offices of Peece and Warre (ll. 51-54). 36 Thomas Heywood, True Relation, Chapter 4, unpaginated. 37 Richard Fanshawe, ‘On His Majesties Great Ship’ within Young, A True Description, Appendix, pp. 77-9.

202 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Thomas Heywood pushed these links between Charles and Edgar further, even suggesting Edgar’s methods of combatting piracy as a paradigm for contemporary policing of the Caroline seas: ‘amongst other of his politicke actions, [he] used in the Summer season to scower Seas with certaine ships of warre, to free the foure Seas of pirats, and robbers, … by meanes whereof he kept his Land in great peace & quietnes, free from the danger of all forreigne enemies’.38 In particular, Heywood praised Edgar for surprising by ‘Sea a Prince of the Romans, whose name was Maxentius, who had done many out-rages upon the Ocean, and was the greatest Arch-pirate that those times afforded’.39 The success of Charles’s promulgation of this Edgar trope can, rather ironically, be seen in the repeated attempts by the king’s critics to splinter such an ideal. Richard Bernard, Puritan divine and prolific writer, employed the example of King Edgar to reproach Charles for his lax approach to the holiness of the Sabbath. This was a particularly contentious matter between Laudian and Puritan religio-political factions. 40 Charles I was frequently criticised for watching plays on the Sabbath; indeed, the king would actually perform Britannia Triumphans on a Sunday. Yet, as Bernard slyly reminded his reader, in contrast to King Charles’s popish capers, King Edgar had specifically ordered: ‘that the Sunday should bee kept holy from Saturday at noon, till Munday morning […] so zealous were those Princes in those times’.41 Even more damning, the Puritan polemicist William Prynne, with typical relish, attempted to demolish King Edgar’s appeal by denouncing him as ‘an incontinent liver’, who excelled only in ‘deflouring Maids and Virgins’. 42 For in King Edgar, a Saxon monarch celebrated for his maritime 38 Heywood, True Relation, see Footnote 36 above. 39 Young, True Description, p. 21. 40 See Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Peter White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Kenneth Fincham, ed., The Early Stuart Church, 1603-1642 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 1993); Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought: 1600-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, eds., Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2006); Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547-c.1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 41 Richard Bernard, A Threefold Treatise of the Sabbath (London: 1641), p. 151. Accessed via EEBO http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_ id=xri:eebo:image:102301:82 42 William Prynne, The Antipathie of the English Lordly Prelacie (London: 1641), p. 227. Accessed via EEBO http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_

‘Thy sceptre to a trident change / And str aight

203

acumen, Charles I had identified a dexterous paradigm from amongst his kingly ancestors: one that could champion Charles’s own plans for naval expansion, underscore the visual importance of an exceptional vessel and, when augmented through the figure of Britanocles, suggest the presence of an even loftier Britain on the international stage. *** The extent of Charles’s maritime ambitions becomes further apparent from an examination of both the scribal and print networks of Caroline England.43 The king’s encouragement of the circulation of documents which supported England’s claims of maritime supremacy is well known.44 In 1633 the Keeper of the Records at the Tower of London, Sir John Borough, completed his manuscript discussion of ‘The Soveraignty of the British Seas’, commissioned by Charles himself. 45 A year later, the Attorney General and the Judge of the Admiralty published a ‘Reglement for the Narrow Seas’ which insisted on England’s sovereignty throughout the North and Irish Seas and the Channel. 46 In 1635, John Selden’s Mare Clausum, which Heywood deemed to be an ‘exquisite and absolute worke’, was finally published. 47 Selden’s text had been written in 1618 as part of a British response to the Dutch humanist and philosopher Hugo Grotius’s Mare Liberum of 1609. As Philippa Hellawell observes in Chapter 10, ‘politico-legal debate concerning the sovereignty of the seas’ would be ‘developed by various writers throughout the seventeenth century’. 48 David Armitage reminds us how Grotius’s explosive insistence that ‘the element of the sea is common to all’ was ‘taken by English and Scots id=xri:eebo:image:58789:211 43 See Noah Millstone, Manuscript Circulation and the Invention of Politics in Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Jason Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 44 See Thomas Wemyss Fulton, The Sovereignty of the Sea (London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1911), Chapters 6-9; Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics; Chapter 2; Quintrell, ‘Charles I and his Navy’; Sharpe, Personal Rule, 102-3; David Armitage, ‘The Empire of the Seas, 1576-1689’, in The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, ed. by David Armitage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 100-24; Blakemore, ‘Thinking Outside the Gundeck’, pp. 262-4. 45 A copy from 1643 survives in National Maritime Museum CAD/D/18, and on Charles’s involvement see National Maritime Museum REC/3, fo. 268v; Borough’s manuscript was published in 1651, see Footnote 35 above. 46 Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics, 136. 47 Selden, Mare Clausum; Young, True Description, p. 25. 48 See Philippa Hellawell, Chapter 10, p. 6.

204 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

as an assault on their fishing rights in the North Sea’. 49 William Welwod, a Scottish juror, had been the first writer in Britain to denounce Grotius’s tract as a ‘ridiculous pretence’ which tended to the ‘prejudice of my most worthy prince and his subjects’, and was ‘suspected as a drift against our undoubted right and propensity of fishing on this side the sea’.50 It was no accident that Welwod’s Abridgment of All Sea-Lawes, first printed in 1613, was republished in 1636 for Caroline readers. The readership of these legal texts was perhaps more restricted than Heywood’s pamphlets, especially those published in Latin or circulated in manuscript. Nevertheless, these treatises sought to reinforce, for both domestic and international audiences, Charles I’s conviction that (as he put it after dissolving parliament in 1640) ‘to live like their King, [he must be] able to defend himself and them, to be usefull to his friends and considerable to his enemies, to maintain the Soveraigntie of the Seas, and so make the Kingdom flourish in trade and commerce’.51 This was not empty rhetoric. Bolstering the navy was supposed to ensure the safety of subjects at home and enhance Charles I’s standing amongst international naval powers.52 However, the knotty problem of funding the fleets through the controversial ship money levy would become one of the greatest concerns of the political moment, and open up wider debates surrounding the increasingly unwieldy Stuart ideal of absolute rule.53 Judge Finch wryly observed during John Hampden’s notorious ship money case 49 Hugo Grotius, The Free Sea, trans. by Richard Hakluyt, ed. by David Armitage (Indiana: Liberty Fund, 2004), pp. 25, xi. See also Helen Thornton, ‘Hugo Grotius and the Freedom of the Seas’, International Journal of Maritime History, 16 (2004), 17-38; Helen Thornton, ‘John Selden’s Response to Hugo Grotius: The Argument for Closed Seas’, International Journal of Maritime History, 18 (2006), 105-128. 50 Welwod’s critique was published as Chapter 27 of his Abridgement of All Sea-Lawes (London: 1613, reprinted 1636); this critique is included within Armitage’s modernised text, pp. 65-74, quoting here pp. 65-6. Welwod also published an expanded discussion in Latin as De Dominio Maris (London: 1615). See also J. D. Alsop, ‘William Welwood, Anne of Denmark and the Sovereignty of the Sea’, Scottish Historical Review, 59 (1980), 171-4; Martine Julia van Ittersum, ‘Mare Liberum versus the Propriety of the Seas? The Debate between Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) and William Welwood (1552-1624) and its Impact on Anglo-Scotto-Dutch Fishery Disputes in the Second Decade of the Seventeenth Century’, Edinburgh Law Review, 10 (2006), 239-276; J. D. Ford, ‘William Welwod’s Treatises on Maritime Law’, Journal of Legal History, 34 (2013), 172-210. 51 Charles I, His Majesties Declaration to All His Loving Subjects, of the Causes which Moved Him to Dissolve the Last Parliament (London: 1640), pp. 13-14. 52 See the works cited in Footnote 5 above. 53 Roger Lockyer, The Early Stuarts: A Political History of England, 1603-1642 (London: Longman, 1989), pp. 231-3, 265-7; Sharpe, Personal Rule, 545-95; Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, first published 2002), pp. 67-71.

‘Thy sceptre to a trident change / And str aight

205

of 1637 that ‘we may argue til Doomsday and not sattisffie the multitude’.54 As early as 1635, an anonymous libel nailed to Cheapside Cross attacked ship money as a ‘crewell hard Tribute’ which reduced the king’s subjects to ‘Tributarie slaves’.55 Yet, as Justice Crawley succinctly argued in defence of the king’s position, ‘if the Sea must defend the land, why should not the land bee contributories?’56 The idea of direct taxes specifically to fund the navy was not new, and the f irst Caroline ship money levy of 1634 followed older models, with King Charles requiring contributions from inhabitants of coastal towns to finance his naval reforms and ensure the defence of England’s coastlines.57 It became more controversial in 1635, when the ship money levy was extended throughout the whole country. As the monarch alone had the right to deem when the nation was in danger, Charles I believed he did not need to debate the matter in Parliament.58 This effectively transformed a coastal emergency levy into a deeply unpopular yearly tax. Anzolo Correr, the Venetian ambassador, correctly observed to the Doge and Senate that such a tax was ‘repugnant to the uses and forms observed by the people up to the present time’.59 Many in England were suspicious that there were ulterior motives: as Sir Thomas Wentworth cannily advised Charles in 1637, such a levy had the potential to ensure the ‘“Independent” standing of the monarchy “in wealth, strength and Glory farr above any their projenitors”’.60 Henrik Langelüddecke’s examination of the surviving correspondence between those Sheriffs ordered to collect the levy and the Privy Council reveals that opposition to ship money was ‘widespread and employed a variety of forms of passive and active resistance’.61 Grave reports of violence against ship money collectors abounded, and some of the reported objections to the tax 54 Judge Finch, Hampden on Ship Money manuscript, National Maritime Museum, CLU/3, p. 1. 55 Cited by Millstone, Manuscript Circulation, 251. 56 ‘The Argument of Justice Crawley’, Reason 6, Hampden on Ship Money, National Maritime Museum, CLU/3, p. 11. 57 See Robin J. W. Swales, ‘The Ship Money Levy of 1628’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 50 (1977), 164-76; Andrew Thrush, ‘Naval Finance and the Origins of the Development of Ship Money’, in War and Government in Britain, 1598-1650, ed. by Mark Charles Fissel (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), pp. 133-62. 58 Clive Holmes, Julian Goodare, Richard Cust, and Mark Kishlansky, ‘Debate: Charles I: A Case of Mistaken Identity’, Past and Present, 205 (2009), 175-237, (pp. 184-5). 59 Anzolo Correr to the Doge and Senate, 5 Jan 1635: CSP Ven, 1636-9, p. 315. 60 Cited by Millstone, Manuscript Circulation, 251. Millstone’s fine analysis of the circulation of ship money manuscripts can be found in Chapter 7 of this volume. 61 Henrik Langelüddecke, ‘“I Find All Men & My Officers All Soe Unwilling”: The Collection of Ship Money, 1635-1640’, Journal of British Studies, 46, 3 (July 2007), 509-542 (p. 516).

206 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

veered towards the treasonable. In July 1635, Edward Boys of Bonnington, Kent, was censured for declaring ‘yf wee have such taxes layd uppon us we must rebell’ whilst, in April 1638, Thomas Mace from Gloucestershire commented: ‘If it be so, that the King must have all, I would the king were dead’.62 In an attempt to confront such vociferous debates, in February 1637, King Charles sought the opinion of twelve judges regarding the legality of the Crown exercising its prerogative powers to raise monies to defend the realm. The judges supported the king. To ensure widespread circulation of this decision, copies of the judgement were held at central courts and read out at assizes in an attempt to shape public discourse.63 However, with the bold appearance in August 1637 of the manuscript libel ‘A Remonstrance Against Ship Money’, Charles I decided to press on in November 1637 with the full-blown trial of a leading ship money offender, John Hampden.64 The case reverberated around the central question, as Mr Justice Hutton would argue, whether ‘the people of this Realme are Subjects and not slaves; Free-men, and not villeins; and therefore not to be taxed De alto & basso, and at will, but according to the Laws of this Kingdome’.65 Charles I would win the case. But, as Archbishop Laud observed, the huge publicity fomented by such a case was damaging as ‘it puts thoughts into wise and moderate men’s head, which were better out’.66 Millstone has argued how the ship money case is a fine example of scribal publicity. The scribal texts of the arguments made by both Hampden’s legal team, and the judges Hutton and Croke, circulated far beyond the usual reach of manuscript circles to become ‘some of the most reproduced texts of the decade’ and ‘stand amongst the most powerful critiques of Caroline governance’.67 Ultimately produced in print form as pamphlet literature (or what John Nalson would later term ‘the Paper Bullets of the Press’), these arguments about the legality of ship money, as Jason Peacey observes, 62 Langelüddecke, ‘Collection of Ship Money’, p. 517. Matters were no easier for those officials overseeing the collection of ship money. Sir Simonds D’Ewes was pricked Sheriff for Suffolk in 1639 to 1640, and had sole responsibility for ensuring the shire’s levy was returned to the Crown despite his own opposition to the tax. See S. P. Salt, ‘Sir Simonds D’Ewes and the Levying of the Ship Money, 1635-1640’, The Historical Journal, 37, 2 (June 1994), 253-287. 63 Millstone, Manuscript Circulation, 257. 64 See Sharpe, Personal Rule, 587-8, 716-30; Richard Cust, Charles I: A Political Life (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007, first published 2005), pp. 193-4. 65 The Arguments of Sir Richard Hutton (London: 1641), p. 58. 66 Cited by Millstone, Manuscript Circulation, 270. 67 Ibid., 264.

‘Thy sceptre to a trident change / And str aight

207

would reach ‘every corner of the land’ and ‘were consumed across the social spectrum’.68 Less remarked upon, but an undoubted by-product of Charles I’s expansion of the navy, funded by this national levy, was the appearance in the mid-1630s of a whole tranche of technical guides aimed at fostering a more widespread understanding of this burgeoning maritime enterprise. In 1636, Captain John Smith’s An Accidence for the Sea was reprinted. Originally published in 1626 in recognition of the need to train English sailors in the art of naval excellence, the full title marketed itself as ‘very necessary’ reading ‘for all young Sea-men, or those that are desirous to goe to Sea’. Accordingly, it covered everything from the ‘Building, Rigging, and Sayling a Man of Warre’ and how ‘to manage a Navy and Fight at Sea’ to an explanation of ‘the Charge and Duty of every Officer’.69 This fascination with warships, which chimed with King Charles’s naval ambitions, was mirrored in Robert Ward’s Animadversions of Warre (1639). As the frontispiece demonstrates in Figure 8.5, with its cameo depiction of a fleet in full sail, Ward offered specif ic advice on battles at sea as well as on land.70 Even Thomas Powell’s curiously named The Art of Thriving (1635), which was effectively a career guide, pinpointed two maritime professions, that of the ‘Navigator’ and the ‘Sea soldier’, as being especially tempting for a young man keen to ‘drive the world before him, and so mount up to wealth’.71 According to Powell, ‘Questionlesse the better way of thriving is to be a Sea Soldier, In this Kingdome of England, being an Island, for that he is more usefull to his Country’. In comparison to a ‘Land Soldier’, Powell opined that a ‘Sea Soldier’ would require ‘more learning’, would be ‘certaine of victuals, and wages’, and would have the ‘chance to have a snap at a booty or a prize which may in an instant make him a fortune for ever’. Appealing to a potential young sea soldier’s attraction to danger, Powell clinched his argument with the declaration that ‘more valour is required’ of the sea soldier ‘because the extremity of the place requires it’.72 68 John Nalson, An Impartiall Collection of the Great Affairs of State (1682), 2, p. 809; Peacey, Print and Public Politics, 27. 69 John Smith, Accidence for the Sea (London: 1636), full title; first published as John Smith, An Accidence or the Path-Way to Experience (London: 1626). 70 Robert Ward, Animadversions of Warre (London: 1639), frontispiece. 71 Thomas Powell The Art of Thriving. Or the Plaine Path-Way to Preferment (London: 1635), sig. A4. Accessed via EEBO http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_ id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:image:15397 72 Ibid., pp. 51-52.

208 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Figure 8.5: Robert Ward, Animadversions of Warre (London: 1639), frontispiece and cameo detail. © The British Library Board

‘Thy sceptre to a trident change / And str aight

209

In the same year, Welwod’s reprinted Abridgement of all Sea-Lawes had the timely aim of explaining the role of ‘every sort of sea-faring persons in every order’ ranging from ‘Commanders, Iudges, Skippers’ and ‘Mariners’ to ‘Merchants, Passengers, Fishers, Ferryers’ and ‘Watermen’.73 Notably, Welwod devoted a specific chapter to ‘War-fare shippes, and of the Captaines and Companies, thereof’, where he examined in particular ‘the graces & vertues required in them, with their duties, power and preferment’.74 Joad Raymond reminds us how pamphlets were often ‘recycled’ as part of a process of ‘pointed allusion’ and thereby assumed ‘authority in new circumstances’.75 This reprint of Welwod’s text brought to the Caroline debate on maritime sovereignty, the gravitas of a renowned professor of maths and civil law who, in 1590, had written the first printed treatise on the laws of the sea in Britain.76 Moreover, as Welwod’s Abridgement of All Sea-Lawes had the distinction of being the only response to Mare Liberum that Grotius dignified with a published reply, this 1636 reprint adroitly reminded international readers of British fishing and maritime rights while articulating to domestic readers the necessity of an effective navy to ensure the nation’s sovereignty of the seas.77 This maritime expansion even had a spiritual impact. The Reverend Henry Valentine, rector of Deptford and therefore in daily contact with London’s shipping and seafarers, spotted a niche in the early modern sermon market and decided to publish a series of sermons for England’s mariners, because ‘discourses of this nature are few, yet great need have Sea-men of them’.78 Alongside his sermons, Valentine, a staunch supporter of Charles I’s ecclesiastical and maritime policies, included specially written prayers for sailors before, during and after their voyages, for:

73 Welwod, Abridgement of all Sea-Laws, 1636 edn, p. 18. 74 Ibid., pp. 237, 239. 75 Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering, 165. 76 William Welwod, The Sea-Law of Scotland (Edinburgh: 1590). 77 See Van Ittersum, ‘Mare Liberum versus the Propriety of the Seas’. 78 Henry Valentine, Four Seamen’s Sermons (London: 1635), Epistle Dedicatory. The sermons Valentine published in this book were delivered at annual meetings of the Trinity House of Deptford, a guild of ship-owners and shipmasters of the Thames: see G. G. Harris, The Trinity House of Deptford, 1514-1660 (London: Athlone Press, 1969). Valentine contributed an ‘Elegie upon the incomparable Dr Donne’ to the 1635 edition of John Donne’s works, Poems by J. D. with Elegies on the Authors Death (London: 1635). Valentine’s keen support of Charles I is shown in his sermon God Save the King (London: 1639), preached on the anniversary of Charles I’s inauguration, 27 March 1639, which criticised ‘a generation of vipers … who instead of rejoicing in their king rail at him’, p. 15.

210 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

shipping is the very nerves and sinewes, the strength and security of a nation, and our ships are (and so they may well be) called the walls of our Kingdome. And next to the protection of Almighty God, the wisdom of a gracious King, and the unanimity of the people, they are the lockes of Sampson wherein our strength consisteth.79

Thus, Charles I’s ambition to ‘add ye Trident’s claime’ to ‘his Sceptre’ was rehearsed across scribal and print networks, reflected in the (re)publication of seafaring technical guides, contested by the angry debates regarding the funding of the ship money fleets which reverberated across the nation, and was brought sharply into focus by that gilded flagship, the Sovereign of the Seas.80 Venerated by poet and prelate, Henry King, as a ‘floating / trophy built to Fame’, King’s fervent hope was that sight of the Sovereign ‒ this ‘Great wonder of the time’ ‒ would unite ‘In one aspect two warring / Opposites’ and thus: Enforce the bold disputers to Obey: That they, whose pens are Sharper than their swords, May yield in fact, what they Denied in words.81

*** Charles I’s expansion of the navy, embodied by the ship money fleets, not only anchored this widespread fascination with all things maritime but was itself to become a powerful image in the quest within the Caroline literary imagination to understand the place of the sea in English and British culture. Edmund Waller’s poem to ‘The King on his Navy’, for instance, which Warren Chernaik dates to the mid-1630s, championed the king’s vision through a wonderfully vivid image of the fleets in full sail: Where’er thy navy spreads her canvas wings, Homage to thee, and peace to all she brings … Should nature’s self invade the world again, 79 Ibid., p. 9. 80 Thomas Cary, ‘Triton’s Auspicious Sound’ l. 16 within Young, A True Description, p. 76. 81 Henry King, ‘A Salutation of his Majesty’s Ship the Sovereign’, accessed via http://www. poetryexplorer.net/poem.php?id=10078006, ll. 1-2, 13, 15-16, 55-60.

‘Thy sceptre to a trident change / And str aight

211

And o’er the centre spread the liquid main, Thy power were safe, and her destructive hand Would but enlarge the bounds of thy command [.]82

William Davenant reinforced this triumphant depiction of the royal navy in his epic romance, ‘Madagascar’ (written in 1637, published in 1638).83 In this curious dream vision, Prince Rupert, King Charles’s nephew, not only effortlessly conquers the island of Madagascar with the aid of the English fleets but subdues the very elements: [I] saw The empire of the Winds, new kept in awe By things so large and weighty as did presse Waves to Bubbles … The Sea, for shelter hastned to the shore; Sought harbour for it selfe, not what it bore: So well these Ships could rule. (ll. 27-33)

Perhaps, however, the potency of the ship money fleets is best suggested from their appearance in the work of lesser known poets. Thomas Beedome’s witty reflection ‘The Royall Navy’ employed the fleets as a metaphor for man’s relationship with God: What’s heaven? A haven: what ships anchor there? Hope, faith, and love, with one small pinnace, feare. What are those? Men of warre, how fraught? With armes: What burthen? Weighty, suiting their alarum? Whose ships? The Kings: what colours? The red crosse: What ensigns? Bloody from their Princes losse.84 82 Edmund Waller, ‘To the King on His Navy’ (1636) within Warren Chernaik, The Poetry of Limitation (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1968), pp. 145-6, ll. 1-2, 19-22. 83 William Davenant, Madagascar With Other Poems (London: 1638), p. 2. Anticipating his text for Britannia Triumphans, Davenant specifically likens Charles I to Neptune: ‘The Sea is duly held, the proper spheare/ Wherein that Trident swayes, yet, in his hand / It turns strait to a sceptre when on land [.]’ (‘Madagascar’, ll. 42-4). On this poem and other seventeenth-century writings on Madagascar, see also Margarette Lincoln, British Pirates and Society, 1680-1730 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), Chapter 6; Edmond Smith, ‘“Canaanising Madagascar”: Africa in English Imperial Imagination, 1635-1650’, Itinerario, 39 (2015), 277-98. 84 Thomas Beedome, ‘The Royall Navy’, ll. 5-10 within Poems, Divine and Human (London: 1641). Accessed via EEBO http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.882003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_ id=xri:eebo:image:62385:44

212 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Published within Poems, Divine and Human (1641), Beedome’s adroit intertwining of conventional religious imagery with contemporary references to the fleets is further complicated by the increasingly volatile political situation in Caroline England. Accordingly, in contrast to the victorious images of Heywood, Waller, and Davenant, Beedome wryly reflects on the vainglorious nature of the fleets, and vows instead to ‘strike saile’ and ‘strive to prove / Thy [God’s] captive, in my hope, faith, feare and love’.85 This hollow note encapsulated within Beedome’s poetry resonated more strongly with the treatment of the fleets on the early modern stage. The fundamental question of what a subject owed to ‘God, to the king, and to the law’ had long fascinated early modern playwrights.86 Capitalising on the huge public interest generated by the ship money levy, the fleets quickly became a distinctive device across commercial, elite, and even university theatrical platforms. In September 1636, the fleets featured in William Strode’s Floating Island, performed before the king and queen at Christ Church College, Oxford. Amongst the audience was Fr George Leyburn. In many ways this Catholic priest, who was risking his life just stepping on English soil, is an unlikely theatre critic. Yet Leyburn deftly pinpoints the text’s political allegory: ‘Represented [was] a king whos name was Prudentius (you may imagine our most prudent prince) […] by the passions you may understand the puritans, and all such as are opposite to the courses which our king doth run in his government’.87 Leyburn commented specifically on the authority of the fleets and their integral role in maintaining order in the kingdom: for the ‘passions’ of ‘Tumult […] Debate and Discontent’ were only successfully contained when Prudentius (King Charles) ordered his navy to protect the island (Great Britain).88 If we turn to the Globe Theatre in 1635, in contrast to Strode’s royalist panegyrics, William Davenant’s News From Plymouth comically portrays the navy as ineffectual: ‘wind-bound’ in Portsmouth rather than boldly patrolling the high seas.89 In 1637, this more subversive treatment of the ship money fleets deepened with Thomas Coates’s serendipitous publication of James Shirley’s The Young Admiral. Published some four years after its first performance, The 85 Ibid., ll. 19-20. 86 Salt, ‘Sir Simonds D’Ewes’, p. 282. 87 George Leyburn to Farrington (E. Bennett), 3 September 1636, Archives At Westminster Cathedral, Series A 28, p. 523. 88 Strode, Floating Island, p. 234. 89 For a discussion of this play see Claire Jowitt, ‘“To sleep, perchance to Dream”: The Politics of Travel in the 1630s’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 44 (2014), 249-64 (pp. 254-5). This treatment of the navy is also in opposition to Davenant’s own poetic triumphant maritime vision of Madagascar (1638).

‘Thy sceptre to a trident change / And str aight

213

Young Admiral’s focus on the plight of Vittori, a loyal Admiral of Naples, beleaguered by the tyrannical actions of his prince, neatly chimed with complaints against the ship money levy.90 William Prynne in his Humble Remonstrance to His Majesty Against The Tax of Ship-Money forensically identified the dangers of such a tyrant king: if your Majesty by your absolute authority, might impose such Taxes […] on your subjects, […] then all their Goods, Lands, and Liberties, will be at your Majesties absolute disposition, and then we are not free-borne Subjects but villaines and rascals, and where then are our just Ancient Rights and Liberties.91

In The Young Admiral, Vittori finds himself effectively shipwrecked on the horns of a similar dilemma. Repeatedly circling around this vexed question of unjust kingship, Vittori uses the image of a ship tossed in a storm to make sense of his predicament: … I am in a tempest And know not how to steer; destruction dwells On both sides (3.1.354-6)

This terse image brilliantly captures how the sea itself was an especially acute metaphor for such agonising deliberations. For, as the Reverend Henry Valentine reminded his audience in Deptford church and his readers: the Sea it is an embleme of the world […] Here as in the Sea we have our calmes of peace, and our stormes of persecution; our faire-weather of prosperity, and health; and our foule-weather of adversity and sicknesse. Here some are swallowed up in the gulfe of despaire, some are split upon the rocks of presumption, & the best men are a little leakie.92 90 James Shirley, The Young Admiral (London: 1637). For a discussion of this play see my essay ‘“A Conflict More Fierce than Many Thousand Battles”: Staging the Politics of Treason and Allegiance in James Shirley’s Maritime Plays, The Young Admiral and The Court Secret’, in James Shirley and Early Modern Theatre: New Critical Perspectives, ed. by Barbara Ravelhofer (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 72-85. 91 William Prynne, An Humble Remonstrance to His Majesty Against The Tax of Ship-Money Imposed, Laying Open the Illegalitie, Abuse, and Inconvenience … (London: 1641), p. 15. Accessed via EEBO http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_ id=xri:eebo:image:157722:9 92 Valentine, Sermons, p. 17.

214 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

*** It was in an attempt to plug such ‘leaks’ that Charles I performed the lead role in one of the most sumptuous court masques of the 1630s, Britannia Triumphans. Even the title of this masque deliberately invoked Britain’s past naval triumphs through its resonance with James Aske’s poem, Elizabetha Triumphans, which celebrated Elizabeth I’s victory against the Spanish Armada.93 But Britannia Triumphans also harks back to the triumphant tone of Heywood’s True Description of the Sovereign of the Seas, where Heywood strove ‘to give the World a true and authentick expression […] concerning his sacred Majesty[’s …] absolute dominion over the foure Seas’.94 As is now recognised, the Stuart court masque was far more than opulent festivity. Martin Butler has observed how although a masque’s ‘primary purpose was to legitimate the king, they never inertly proclaimed kingly values’. Rather, as we shall discover in Britannia Triumphans, ‘they offered an arena in which symbolic solutions could be advanced for the problems, disagreements, and controversies of contemporary political life’.95 The importance which Charles placed on this masquing event is evident from reports by the Savoy agent in London of the king’s rigorous practice schedule: ‘For two weeks the king has been preparing to dance his masque next Sunday’.96 Britannia Triumphans literally bristled with references to the John Hampden ship money case, now awaiting judgement over the Christmas period. As the ship money writs made clear, one of the key aims of the levy was to ensure a robust defence of the kingdom with particular regard to the threat of piracy: ‘We are given to understand that certain thieves, pirates, and robbers of the sea, [… are] wickedly taking by force and spoiling the ships and goods and merchandises, not only of our subjects, but also of subjects to our friends in the sea which hath been accustomed anciently to be defended by the English nation’.97 The parallels are glaring between Charles I and his masquing role of Britanocles, a glorious ruler who had cleansed the seas from Pirates. Underpinning this image is the contemporary celebration of Charles I as a modern-day King Edgar, who, as we have seen, was also famed for scouring the seas of pirates. Such a performance was all the more spectacular because 93 James Aske, Elizabetha Triumphans (London: 1588); see also Rodger, ‘Queen Elizabeth and the Myth of Sea-Power’. 94 Young, True Description, p. 24. 95 Butler, Stuart Court Masque, 5. 96 John Orrell, ‘The London Court Stage in the Savoy Correspondence, 1613-1675’, Theatre Research, 4/2 (1979), 79-94 (p. 92). 97 Rushworth, Historical Collections, 2, p. 257.

‘Thy sceptre to a trident change / And str aight

215

of a daring expedition in 1637 by British sailors to an infamous nest of pirates, at Salé on the Moroccan coast.98 North African corsairs from Salé, as well as Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis, were the scourge of English shipping.99 In the same year that the expedition took place James Frizell noted how ‘in the last four years, sixty four ships had been taken with 1,524 captives “sould for slaves”’.100 Fear of those seemingly irrepressible Salé pirates was so damaging to the king that, in October 1636, the Reverend Charles Fitzgeffrey had openly attacked King Charles from the pulpit for failing to defend or, at the very least, ransom his captive subjects, demanding ‘How much hath beene lavishly expended in Pompes, in Playes, in Sibariticall-feasts, in Cameleon sutes, and Proteus-fashions …? How many soules might have beene ransommed from that Hell on Earth, Barbarie, with halfe these expences?’101 Although a semi-private expedition, formed of a squadron entirely separate from the ship money fleets, the 1637 voyage liberated 302 men and women and damaged Salé’s shipping, albeit temporarily.102 Charles I was swift to capitalise on this success. When the squadron returned victorious to England, Charles welcomed the commander of the expedition, Captain Rainsborough, as a national hero. As George Glover recounted there was an unprecedented, ‘eye-dazzling’ parade through London of the freed English captives, together with the visiting Moroccan ambassador, Alkaid Jaurar Ben Abdella.103 Attended by ‘Thousands and ten Thousands of Spectators’, this spectacle was aimed to encourage, as Sir Thomas Wentworth shrewdly remarked to Archbishop Laud, the ‘ready and cheerful payment of Shipping Monies’.104 Ben Abdella was taken to view the Sovereign of the Seas as part of 98 Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics, Chapter 7; Hebb, Piracy and the English Government, Chapter 11; Rodger, Safeguard of the Sea, 384-6. 99 Hebb, Piracy and the English Government, Chapters 9-10; Matar, Britain and Barbary, Chapter 2; Nabil Matar, British Captives from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1563-1760 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 82-97. 100 Cited by Matar, Britain and Barbary, 58. It is not clear if all of these captives were English: see Matar, British Captives, 93. 101 Charles Fitzgeffrey, Compassion Towards Captives Chiefly Towards Our Brethren and Countrymen Who Are In Miserable Bondage In Barbarie. Urged and Pressed in Three Sermons on Heb. 13.3. Preached in Plymouth, in October 1636 (London: 1637). 102 Andrews, Ships, Money and Politics, 179-83; Matar, British Captives, 93-4. I am grateful to my editors for discussion of the distinction between Charles I’s ship money fleets and this semi-private expedition. 103 George Glover, The Arrivall and Intertainments of the Embassador, Alkaid Jaurar Ben Abdella with His Associate Mr Robert Blake (London: 1637), p. 9. 104 Glover, Arrivall and Internainments; The Earl of Strafford’s Letters and Dispatches, ed. by W. Knowler, 2 vols. (London: 1739), II, p. 138.

216 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

his official visit, and the performance of Britannia Triumphans at Whitehall was very much the climax of these victorious festivities. King Charles I offered an undoubted insouciance in answering his critics through the absolute embodiment of what Reverend Charles Fitzgeffrey had damned as mere ‘Pompes’: the masque form at its most majestic. With a near three-year hiatus since Queen Henrietta Maria’s performance in the last masque, William Davenant’s and Inigo Jones’s The Temple of Love, the anticipation surrounding Britannia Triumphans was palpable.105 In order to protect the magnificent Rubens’s ceiling of the Banqueting Hall, Charles had even instructed that a specially created, purpose-built masquing space should be erected.106 Davenant’s published text, which accompanied the masque, specifically directs the reader’s focus towards this enormous sense of occasion, zooming in on the presence of Queen Henrietta Maria ‘seated under the state’ and noting how ‘the room [was] filled with spectators of quality’ (ll. 32-3). With remarkable precision, Davenant isolates the first image to engage the viewer’s attention: the proscenium arch which framed the action of the masque and was an unashamed celebration of England’s mastery of the seas. Those individuals who had struggled to decipher Heywood’s naval iconography carved on the Sovereign of the Seas would have found no such impediments here. The reader can effortlessly visualise Davenant’s depiction of the two figures sitting astride columns on either side of the stage: a woman, ‘in watchet drapery, heightened with silver’ holding the rudder of a ship in her hand to signify ‘Naval Victory’ and a man, bearing a sceptre, representing ‘Right Government’ (ll. 39-48). Interestingly, as Figure 8.6 demonstrates, Inigo Jones’s iconography echoed Heywood’s naval pageantry as the figure of ‘Victory’ dominated the carvings on the Sovereign’s stern.107 Returning to Britannia Triumphans, at the bottom of each proscenium arch column prone figures of ‘captives lay bound’ (l. 38), which was an obvious reference to Charles’s brazen assimilation of Rainsborough’s recent success in Salé. Across the top of the proscenium stretched ‘a large frieze with a sea triumph of naked children riding on sea-horses and fishes, and young tritons with writhen trumpets, and other maritime fancies’ (ll. 50-52). As Davenant’s masque argument explains, the theme of the masque was the transformation of those ‘maliciously insensible’ subjects who stubbornly refused to pay homage to Britanocles’s magnificence. With Charles I performing the role of Britanocles, there are obvious analogies to the king’s own difficulties with 105 William Davenant, The Temple of Love (London: 1635). 106 Orgel & Strong, Theatre of the Stuart Court, p. 16. 107 Sephton, Sovereign, 94.

‘Thy sceptre to a trident change / And str aight

217

Figure 8.6: Peter Pett and the ‘Sovereign of the Seas’ (1637), © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. Detail of the ship’s stern and the figure of Victory

those of his subjects angered by the ship money tax. Indeed, the very phrase ‘maliciously insensible’ chimes with the language of royalist tracts. The 1636 memorandum ‘Consideracons touchinge the shipp-moneyes’ specifically condemned ‘some malevolent spirits, that Labor to poison and censure the most hon[ora]ble accons, blasting this, [ship money tax] for an imposicon an Innovacon, against the liberty of the subject, and as a barr to parliament’.108 By 1640, similar phrasing was still being used to target Charles’s ship money opponents, with the king dismissing them as malcontents for ‘vent[ing] their own malice and disaffection to the State’.109 In contrast to the ongoing discontent among King Charles’s subjects, however, in the masque world of Britannia Triumphans Britanocles ultimately quashed such dissent. This vision is empowered by the visual splendour of Jones’s stunning scenery, shot through with references to Rainsborough’s recent success at Salé, and further enhanced by the actual presence in the audience of the Moroccan ambassador. As Ravelhofer has pointed out, Charles I took 108 Cited by Millstone in Manuscript Circulation, 254. 109 Charles I, His Majesties Declaration, p. 3.

218 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

a personal interest in the ambassador’s position within the masquing room, chiding the Master of Ceremonies, Sir John Finet, the following day for placing him ‘so obscurely’.110 Thus, Britannia Triumphans allowed Charles I an international platform to present himself to both his subjects and foreign powers as a maritime ruler par excellence, whose assumed nautical conquests (as prophesied by Heywood in True Description) vindicated the levying of the unpopular ship money tax. Yet, the very presence of doubting subjects in Britannia Triumphans served as a stark reminder that despite the masque’s ‘noise and shows’ (l. 330), neither the ship money fleets, nor the king himself, were unassailable. Inigo Jones’s spectacle was commanding, but fissures in Davenant’s text (as critics from Martin Butler to Barbara Ravelhofer have argued) create an intriguing dissonance within the masque form.111 This is all the more surprising as William Davenant was very much at the heart of the establishment: he signed himself as Queen Henrietta Maria’s ‘servant’ and was awarded the position of Poet Laureate, on the death of Ben Jonson in 1637, for publications such as Madagascar .112 Indeed, traditionally, Davenant has been perceived by critics as the theatrical yardstick by which to measure the sycophantic decadence of Caroline drama. Yet, Davenant gently mocked the navy in News From Plymouth. Likewise, his plays Love and Honour (1635) and The Fair Favourite (1638), staged at both the Blackfriars Theatre and Whitehall, deftly critiqued the court fashion of platonic love and boldly counselled against the dangers of an overly powerful consort.113 Perhaps it should be of little surprise that even within the delicate confines of Britannia Triumphans, a masque performed by the king at Whitehall to celebrate and promote royal policy, Davenant’s libretto weaves around Jones’s absolute vision to create a richer, and ultimately, more challenging masque: deftly acknowledging the real divisions generated by the ship money levy, and gesturing towards a solution in the necessity of mutual harmony within the body politic. This is highlighted even in Davenant’s introduction to the 110 In actual fact, Ben Abdella was sent to the wrong box. He should have been seated ‘in a compartiment capable of a dozen persons at the left hand behind his majestyes seate’ which suggests a sizeable presence and a central view of the spectacle. Ceremonies of Charles I: The Notebooks of John Finet, 1628-41, ed. by Albert J. Loomie (New York: Fordham University Press, 1988), p. 242; Ravelhofer, Early Stuart Masque, 239. 111 See Footnote 11 for details of excellent scholarly discussions of Britannia Triumphans. 112 As with this masque where Davenant presents himself on the title page as ‘her Majesties Servant’. 113 For a discussion of these Davenant plays see my Staging the Old Faith: Queen Henrietta Maria and the Theatre of Caroline England, 1625-1642 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018; first published 2009), pp. 158-66, 189-95.

‘Thy sceptre to a trident change / And str aight

219

masque, where he informs the reader how Britannia Triumphans had been devised to allow the king to ‘recreate’ his ‘spirits wasted in grave affaires of state’ (l. 4). On one level this is merely traditional panegyric: Twelfth Night entertainments were often presented in such terms. Yet, undoubtedly, the John Hampden ship money trial had been a bruising encounter. Questions had been raised over Charles I’s increasingly absolute style of government which, whatever the verdict of that trial, would not be easily silenced.114 As was clear even from the celebratory tones of Heywood’s guide to the Sovereign of the Seas, distrust marked both sides of the ship money debates. Noticeably, in Britannia Triumphans the language of falsehood, seeming, and artifice seeps into Davenant’s text to repeatedly unsettle the masterful vision of Jones’s spectacle. This textual wariness is most apparent in the chief anti-masque figure of Imposture. From the opening exchange between Imposture and Britanocles’s champion, Action, the language between these f igures of rule and misrule circles around the checks and balances surrounding the ideal of the body politic. Action condemns Imposture for wilfully misleading his followers: of being a ‘Fine, false artificer’ (l. 79). Imposture parries by accusing Action of behaving with ‘disdain’ (l. 84), being ‘strangely arrogant’ (l.90), and of scorning men. Unusually for the masquing form, Imposture remains on stage when the anti-masque figures of rebellion are traditionally banished. Moreover, Imposture refuses to be cowed even when Bellerophon, the embodiment of Heroic Virtue, is parachuted in on ‘a winged’ Pegasus. Far from being daunted by this heavenly messenger, Imposture boldly counters: T’were easy to subdue if choleric scorn Might make up confutation without help Of arguments. (ll. 292-4)

Read against John Hampden’s ship money case, where critics of Charles I persistently accused the king of arrogance, of acting beyond his lawful remits and teetering towards the tyrannical, this feisty debate has a distinctive bite. The threat of Imposture’s challenge is exacerbated through a surprising 114 Historians remain sharply divided over the nature of Charles’s style of government and the response to it. For important contributions on this topic see Sharpe, Personal Rule; David Cressy, ‘Conflict, Consensus, and the Willingness to Wink: The Erosion of Community in Charles I’s England’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 61 (1998), 131-49; Cust, Charles I; Mark Kishlansky, ‘Charles I: A Case of Mistaken Identity’, Past & Present, 189 (2005), 41-80; Holmes, Goodare, Cust, and Kishlansky, ‘Debate: Charles I’.

220 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

manipulation of the masque form. Unusually, Imposture continues his debates after the entries of the anti-masques have been dismissed, which disrupts and distances the heroic impact of Bellerophon’s presence. Through this irrepressible f igure of Imposture, Davenant gives the ‘maliciously insensible’ a voice that is especially powerful as it refuses to be easily muted. Such an unexpected mutation of traditional masque conventions allows Davenant to subtly emphasise the Pied-Piper-like power of Imposture, with his ‘taking tunes, to which the numerous world / Do dance’ (ll. 310-11). Even more unexpectedly, such subversion creeps into the arguments of Britanocles’s own supporters. Bellerophon contemptuously dismisses Imposture’s visual display: Alas, how weak and easy would you make Our intellectual strength, when you have hope It may be overcome with noise and shows (ll. 328-30)

Yet, such a critique sits uneasily with the masque form itself, and with Britanocles’s role in particular. One could argue that this is precisely the strategy behind Charles I’s own assumption of the role of Britanocles, epitomised by his stunning entrance, when he appears in a blaze of light and glory, through the central arch of the Palace of Fame (Figure 8.7). The full grandeur of Inigo Jones’s scenery bolsters Britanocles’s spectacular arrival. Heralded by the ‘richly adorned’ (l. 490) Palace of Fame rising up from beneath the stage, complete with living statues representing ‘Arms’ (l. 501) and ‘Science’ (l. 505), Britanocles, ‘the treasure of our sight’ (l. 515) is urged to ‘break forth’ (l. 515). Immediately, Britanocles is associated with images of light and moral vision. The Chorus of Poets invokes Britanocles as the lodestar of ‘Heroic Virtue’ (l. 518), asking in a powerful crescendo: What to thy power is hard or strange? Since not alone confined unto the land, Thy sceptre to a trident change, And straight unruly seas thou canst command! (ll. 523-6)

To the eager spectator, the anticipation and fulfilment of such a vibrant royal entrance must have been remarkable. Davenant meticulously notes how first, the fourteen noble masquers appeared, and then, ‘at that instant’ (l. 532), the gate of the Palace of Fame opened, and Britanocles stepped out onto the masquing stage, positioning himself directly underneath the figure of Fame and holding the gaze of his chief spectator, Queen Henrietta

‘Thy sceptre to a trident change / And str aight

221

Figure 8.7: Design for the Palace of Fame, from the courtly masque ‘Britannia Triumphans’, 1637 (pen & ink on paper), Jones, Inigo (1573-1652) / © The Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth / Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees / Bridgeman Images.

Maria. Emphasising the sensory nature of the masque form, Davenant offers a detailed description of the masquers’ rich costumes. The striking colour mix of carnation and white fabric skilfully suggests the colours of England’s St. George’s flag, whilst the masquers’ caps, with their ‘several falls of white feathers’ (ll. 542-3), effortlessly create an image of the furling froth of the sea. The audience and reader are allowed a moment to absorb this dazzling tableau, as Fame (now hovering in the clouds) and the Chorus together pay

222 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Figure 8.8: Masquer with feathers and plume (pen & ink on paper), Jones, Inigo (1573-1652) / © The Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth / Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees / Bridgeman Images.

‘Thy sceptre to a trident change / And str aight

223

tribute to ‘Britanocles the great and good’ (l. 549). Yet, even within this brilliant spectacle, Davenant introduces a moment of jarring tension. As Fame informs us, ‘the wonder’ (l. 554) of Britanocles’s virtue has the disconcerting effect of paralysing his masquers, to the extent that ‘they would to statues grow’ (l. 553). The Chorus of Poets has to literally order the masquers to dance: Move then in such a noble order here As if you each his governed planet were And he moved first, to move you in each sphere. (ll. 558-60)

As Kevin Sharpe has pointed out, Davenant’s language of the planets directly echoed the recorded opinion of John Banks, king’s attorney in the John Hampden ship money trial. Banks had championed the royal prerogative by reminding the judicial court that as the king is ‘the first mover among these orbs of ours, and he is the circle of their circumference […] He is the soul of this body whose proper act is to command’.115 In the masquing hall of Britannia Triumphans this vivid image was consummately performed and, indeed, heightened by this initial moment of paralysis, which highlighted the importance of all parts of the body politic moving as one.116 Yet if, as Imposture has argued and as the masque’s ‘jealous sceptics’ (l. 100) have suspected, ‘all but pretend / Th’ resemblance of that power’ (ll. 105-6), this moment of frozen hiatus is also a reminder of how easily the spectacle of government can be ruptured. Fame’s rather effusive rhetorical question to Britanocles, ‘What to thy power is hard or strange?’ (l. 523), is transformed into a more troubling reflection. The answer to Fame’s demand would appear to lie in Britannia Triumphans’s final vision. It is only when the masque shutters return us to Jones’s opening scene of ‘Britain’ (l. 565) complete with ‘English houses of the old and newer forms […] and afar off prospect of the city of London and the river Thames’ (ll. 59-61), that the masquers finally move as one and ‘dance their entry’ (l. 566). Such a spectacle is all the more potent, as intermingled with those masquers who staunchly supported the king, such as William Cavendish, 3rd Earl of Devonshire, and James Stewart, 4th Duke of Lennox, were powerful families who were increasingly critical of the monarch. Indeed, at least three masquers’ noble fathers would later side with parliament.117 Amongst the 115 Cited by Sharpe, Personal Rule, 722, Footnote 584. 116 See also Ravelhofer, Early Stuart Masque, 102-6. 117 The 4th Earl of Pembroke and the 4th Earl of Bedford were the respective fathers of masquers, Lord Philip Herbert, William Russell, who succeeded his father as 5th Earl of Bedford in May 1641, and Mr Francis Russell.

224 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

other masquers, Lord Wharton would become a stalwart parliamentarian whilst the wavering Lord Paget, after initially opposing King Charles, returned to the royalist fold in 1641. Barbara Ravelhofer has argued how just the physical act of dancing collectively can generate formidable fellow-feeling, creating an ‘enabling apotropaic practice’.118 In Britannia Triumphans, such an esprit de corps is suggested visibly by the arrival of the sea-nymph, Galatea, a personification of the Goddess of Calm Seas.119 Galatea’s song emphasises the need for concord and harmony by advocating a reciprocal balance within the body politic which seamlessly mirrors the concord of the dance: How ev’n and equally they’ll meet When you shall lead them by such harmony As can direct their eares and feet. (ll. 618-620)

The emphasis on the word ‘harmony’, encircled by the end rhyme of ‘meet’ and ‘feet’, softens the more authoritarian undertones implied by ‘lead’ and direct’. Crucially, it is only with the concord of the king and the body politic restored that the masque achieves the reassuring, visual splendour of Jones’s concluding scene of safe harbour: ‘in the end a great fleet was discovered, which passing by with a side wind tacked about, and with a prosperous gale entered into the haven’ (ll. 623-5). Unusually for the masque form, as Davenant specif ically remarked upon, this maritime scene of success and serenity ‘continued to entertain the sight whilst the dancing lasted’ (l. 625), acting as the backdrop for the celebratory revels. In typical irreverent style, Davenant concluded the masque libretto with a valediction to the royal couple, eliding any distinction between Charles and Britanocles by wishing the ‘royal lover’ (l. 633), Charles I, ‘youthful blessings’ (l. 634) to be ‘bettered every night’ (l. 638). Vaughan Hart reminds us how ‘the king’s body was consistently celebrated in Stuart art and propaganda as the exemplar of earthly harmony. As such it became the ideal microcosm and pattern of perfect proportion’.120 Thus, George Puttenham in The Arte of Poesie likened Elizabeth I to a column: a ‘Gemetricall’ figure ‘most beawtifull’, signifying ‘support, rest, state and 118 Ravelhofer, Early Stuart Masque, 107. 119 Galatea, daughter of Nereus and Doris, was one of the fifty Nereides of Greek mythology: ‘galênê’ and ‘theia’ gives the translation ‘Goddess of Calm Seas’. See http://www.theoi.com/ Pontios/NereisGalateia.html 120 Vaughan Hart, ‘Inigo Jones, “Vitruvius Britannicus”’, Architectural History, Vol 53 (2010), 1-39, (p. 9).

‘Thy sceptre to a trident change / And str aight

225

magnificence’.121 In Britannia Triumphans, King Charles I, stepping out as Britanocles from the central arch of the Temple of Fame, can be seen as the living embodiment of that triumphal maritime arch which was designed in the late 1630s but never constructed. Beneath the dazzle of the king’s performance of Britanocles, Davenant tempers Jones’s absolute vision to suggest the possibility of a harmonious yoking of the body politic. *** The playwright and poet William Habington rather prophetically warned his readers in 1637 that ‘Kings may / Find proud ambition humbled at the sea / Which bounds dominion’.122 Charles I was to experience the truth of such a prophecy. Barely eighteen months after the ‘noise and shows’ of Britannia Triumphans, Galatea, the Goddess of Calm Seas, appeared to have forsaken England. On 21 October 1639, the navy suffered international humiliation in the infamous Battle of the Downs when the Spanish Fleet was ruthlessly attacked by the Dutch navy in neutral English waters, despite the presence of English naval ships, whose intervention proved futile.123 By 1640, Charles’s bold claim of cleansing the seas from pirates (together with his self-identification with King Edgar, the arch-pirate hunter) had been severely undermined. David Hebb has noted how reports of prestigious merchant vessels such as the Rebecca of London being captured in the Mediterranean caused much consternation to London’s mercantile community.124 Such anxiety was exacerbated by the publication of Captain Francis Knight’s eyewitness account of his Seaven Yeares Slaverie Under the Turkes of Argeire, Suffered by an English Captive Merchant, complete with a lurid image of a turbaned Turk mercilessly lashing a benighted English mariner.125 In March 1641, disturbing news reached London that some five thousand English seamen were now held captive in Algiers and Tunis.126 This perhaps explains the devastating critique delivered in Parliament by the poet, and former champion of the ship money fleets, Edmund Waller: 121 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London: 1589), p. 80. 122 William Habington’s commendatory poem to William Davenant’s Madagascar within A. M. Gibbs, The Shorter Poems, and Songs From the Plays and Masques (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 9. 123 See Blakemore and Murphy, British Civil Wars, 1-4. 124 Hebb, Piracy and the English Government, 267. 125 Francis Knight, A Relation of Seaven Yeares Slaverie Under the Turkes of Argeire, Suffered by an English Captive Merchant (London: 1640). 126 Matar, Britain and Barbary, 65.

226 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Figure 8.9: Francis Knight, A Relation of Seaven Yeares Slaverie Under the Turkes of Argeire (London: 1640), frontispiece and title page, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

the daily complaints of the decay of our Navy tell us how ill ship-money has maintain’d the Soveraignty of the Sea; and by the many petitions which we receive from the wives of those miserable Captives at Algier … it does too evidently appeare that to make us Slaves at home, is not the way to keep us from being made Slaves abroad.127

Projecting forwards to the summer of 1641, Richard Brathwaite’s satirical pamphlet, Mercurius Britannicus, contained a short, if ferocious, play depicting the impeachment of those judges who had presided over John Hampden’s trial and supported the king.128 The transformation of the royal fleet was complete when, in July 1642, parliament commandeered the vessels, apparently with the enthusiastic support of the sailors aboard.129 Indeed, by 1650, the anonymous pamphlet The Common-wealth’s Great Ship flagrantly celebrated the Sovereign of 127 Mr. Waller, Of Ship Money, Judges, and Intermission of Parliament, November 1640. See John Rushworth, ‘Historical Collections: Speeches in the Long Parliament’, in Historical Collections of Private Passages of State: Volume 3, 1639-40 (London: 1721). 128 For a full discussion of this satire see Martin Butler, ‘A Case Study in Caroline Political Theatre: Brathwaite’s Mercurius Britannicus’, The Historical Journal, 27, 4 (1984), 947-53. 129 Blakemore, ‘Thinking outside the gundeck’, pp. 254-7; Blakemore and Murphy, British Civil Wars, 46-53.

‘Thy sceptre to a trident change / And str aight

227

Figure 8.10: ‘Charles I King of Great Britain and England’, © Getty Images.

the Seas as the Commonwealth’s flagship, revising Heywood’s 1637 guide to the vessel by excising any reference to Charles I.130 As Figure 8.10’s contemporary image depicting the storms of Charles I’s reign exposes, maritime Britain offers a unique insight into the cultural imagination of the Caroline nation. As this chapter has demonstrated, playwrights and poets from Heywood to Davenant artfully engaged with these maritime tropes that moved so successfully between playing spaces; deftly linking ships, literature, national, and international identity together and, through the ship money trope in particular, symbolising the failings, possibilities, and ultimately even the legitimacy of Charles I’s personal rule. For, as Henry Valentine warned mariners in 1635, an admonition perhaps also aimed at Charles I himself: Let a ship bee built as strong as art can possibly make her, let her bee laden with gold, silver, and the most precious commodities, let her cary never so many guns, let her beare the name of some dreadfull and hideous monster, yet the winde playes with as a toy, and the waves tosse it as a tennis ball.131

130 Anon, The Common-wealths Great Ship Commonly Called the Soveraigne of the Seas, Built in the Year, 1637 With a True and Exact Dimension of her Bulk and Burden (London: 1653). See also, James, Chapter 2, p. 13. 131 Valentine, Sermons, p. 48.

9. ‘Proud Symbols of the Prospering Rural Seamen’: Scottish Church Ship Models and the Shipmaster’s Societies of North East Scotland in the Late 17th Century* Meredith Greiling

In the collections of Aberdeen Maritime Museum in northeast Scotland is a seventeenth-century ship model at one time classified as a ‘votive ship’. This model came from the city’s St Nicholas Kirk, where it was hung in 1689 in front of the seamen’s loft, the seating gallery built for the Shipmaster Society of Aberdeen. Votive ship models were presented as offerings to be hung up in churches or shrines in fulfilment of a sacred vow made to God in return for safe deliverance from peril at sea. As the philosopher Hans Blumenberg writes, ‘there is a frivolous, if not blasphemous, moment inherent in all seafaring […] a transgression of natural boundaries that was likely to result in punishment’.1 Several seafaring cultures have adopted suitable measures to assuage the correct deity and so avoid such punishment, and the power of magical and intercessory objects is clearly evident in the surviving material culture from the earliest British practices of the Christian faith, from pilgrim badges and miniature ship models recorded at medieval shrines,2 to graffiti of ships carved onto church pillars.3 As Thomas notes, ‘Magical aids were invoked when problems were too great to be solved by human skill. The * Sections of this chapter have been reproduced previously in Meredith Greiling, ‘The Schip model in Aberdeen; profane sculpture in a sacred space’, Sculpture Journal, Vol. 24, No. 2 (2015): pp. 33-50. 1 Hans Blumenberg, translated by Steven Rendall, Shipwreck with Spectator ‒ Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence (Boston, MA: MIT, 1997), p. 10 2 Ship models were recorded by William Wyrcestre at St Anne’s shrine near Bristol: see James B. M. Dallaway and William Canynges, Antiquities of Bristow in the Middle Centuries; including the topography by William Wyrcestre, and the life of William Canynges (Mirror Office, 1834. 3 See Matthew Champion, Medieval Graffiti: The Lost Voices of England’s Churches (London, Ebury Press, 2015); A. B. Emden, ‘Graffiti of Mediaeval Ships from the church of St Margaret’s-atCliffe, Kent’, The Mariner’s Mirror, Vol. 8, No. 6 (1922), pp.167-173; Christer Westerdahl, ‘Medieval Carved Ship Images Found in Nordic Churches: the poor man’s votive ships?’, The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, Vol. 42, No. 2 (2013), pp. 337-347.

230 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

dangers of seafaring made sailors notoriously superstitious and generated a large number of ritual precautions designed to secure favourable weather and the safety of the ship.’4 For medieval Christians all elements of the votive act were crucial: it was imperative that the vow be completed to fulfil the pact made between the sailor and God.5 As Morgan states, ‘Promises are solemnly made… Publicly displayed imagery makes vows more meaningful and the hope for deliverance more promising’.6 In the pre-Reformation Scottish church the public display of the vow’s fulfilment was a crucial element of this sacred contract. This chapter argues that this may have continued informally in the early modern period too. The original vow was an individual act for personal intercession, but its completion was made in a public space, and moreover in a sacred public space. As such, these little ships would also serve as a reminder to congregations of their dependence on the sea and God’s grace for their livelihoods, and by extension dependence on the shipmasters. This votive interpretation has been accepted, and used as a common description for all ship models found in British churches, regardless of date, as Morton Nance describes: ‘the growth of the ship-modeler’s art had its first beginnings in rites, half magical, half religious, by which man sought to control his fate’.7 The motif of the ship in Christian imagery and symbolism, rituals, and rites, also tapped into wider religious tropes based around maritime themes. Yet the ship model had multiple meanings in the church context. More recently there has been a great deal of research published on the social history of churches, folk-beliefs, and superstitions both before and after the Scottish Reformation that began in 1560, which helps us to build an understanding of how these models operated outside the formal rituals and functions of the church.8 Later interpretations of the significance of 4 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 777. 5 David Morgan, The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005); Michael Wayne Cole and Rebecca Zorach, The Idol in the Age of Art: Objects, Devotions and the Early Modern World (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009). 6 Morgan, ‘The Sacred Gaze’, p.59 7 Robert Morton Nance, Sailing-ship Models: A Selection from European and American collections (London: Halton & Truscott Smith, 1924), p. 14 8 Thomas, Decline of Magic; Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400-c.1580 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992); Richard Marks, Image and Devotion in Late Medieval England (Stroud: Sutton, 2004); Cole and Zorach, Idol in the Age of Art; Søren Kaspersen and Ulla Haastrup, Images of Cult and Devotion:

‘Proud Symbols of the Prospering Rur al Seamen’

231

church ship models define them more often as signifiers of the importance of the local maritime guilds, arguing that ‘since the end of the sixteenth century, ship models have also been displayed in the churches of coastal villages, where they functioned as proud symbols of the prospering rural seamen’.9 Between these def initions, between the intercessions of the medieval church on the one hand and the prosaic corporate emblems of later merchant trade guilds on the other, these church ship models signify the exchange of ideas, art, and culture around and across the North Sea just as much as the circulation of people, money, and goods. This chapter looks in detail at the Aberdeen Schip model, a block-built model of a Dutch man-of-war which was hung in front of the seamen’s loft in St Nicholas Kirk, a church in the heart of Aberdeen’s new town, just a few hundred metres up the hill from the city’s harbour. This model illustrates that shipmaster societies in Scotland traded in more than just wool, hides, and salmon, and that the cultural exchanges they engaged in with their counterparts in continental Europe, and in particular with the Staple ports of the United Provinces, have resulted in these characteristic models that have been preserved and copied over the centuries since. In Aberdeen’s St Nicholas Kirk the choice of a miniature Dutch naval vessel to hang in front of the Society’s seats is intriguing and enigmatic. The model is now known as the Schip, in reference to its Dutch origins, but its original name, if it ever had one, is not recorded. It is over a metre long and nearly a metre and a half in height, fully rigged but without sails and with no indication of crew or other f igures on board.10 A rampant golden lion is carved at the figurehead, and faces can be seen carved on to the ends of the catheads. The transom is topped with three outsized lanterns. Gun ports are displayed open, with disproportionately large guns sticking out ready for action. The whole ship was repainted in bright red, white, and gold paint following a thorough restoration in 1982. The hull is of a solid construction, carved from a single block of wood with built-up topsides. The Schip’s guns and lanterns appear cartoonishly large, and the masts seem to have been stretched, but this design would have been a deliberate calculation by the model-maker. This type of model was intended to be Function and Reception of Christian Images in Medieval and Post-medieval Europe (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004); David George Mullan, Protestant Piety in Early-Modern Scotland: Letters, Lives and Covenants, 1650-1712 (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 2008). 9 Wolfgang Steusloff, ‘Kirchen-Schiffsmodelle im Wandel’, Deutsches Schiffahrtsarchiv, Vol. 23 (2000), pp. 489-502. 10 length over all 1160mm x height 1310mm x breadth 580mm.

232 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Figure 9.1: The Schip model on display in Aberdeen Maritime Museum © Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collections

displayed suspended from a dark church ceiling by chains or on a rod, so that they would appear to float in space, sailing ethereally through the heavens. The oversized and out-of-scale features appear more distinct when seen at a distance from below and in poor lighting, while the extreme perspective of viewing the model from below would have had a foreshortening effect on the tall masts. This is in stark contrast with how the model is encountered in Aberdeen Maritime Museum today, in a brightly lit room displayed inside a glass case alongside church silverware, where it can be viewed from every angle. The Aberdeen shipmasters who commissioned this model to hang in front of their loft in St Nicholas Kirk would have had a closer view from

‘Proud Symbols of the Prospering Rur al Seamen’

233

their seats, but certainly none of the congregation below would have been able to make out much more detail than the overall impression of a fine fighting vessel appearing to sail through the church. The model restorer’s report from 1981 describes the model’s condition prior to restoration, and makes comments on the original features and areas of repair and replacement, as well as an estimate as to the age of the model: ‘The hull would appear to represent a 5th rate ship of 1670, borne out by the very exaggerated rake to the stem, mast positions and overall profile’.11 His assessment of the model’s features are not entirely accurate, however. For example, he describes the figurehead as ‘typical of the crowned lion type introduced by Charles II for all men of war, other than 1st rates,’12 which raises some ambiguity about whether the model in fact represents a Dutch or British vessel. The lion figurehead carving on the Aberdeen Schip very clearly has no crown, and is far more typical of Dutch warships of that period. The contemporary sketches of Dutch warships made by Willem van de Velde the Younger show that most Dutch naval vessels carried a rampant lion figurehead, with hind legs stretched behind and under it, front paws raised and mouth open, the lion being a symbol of the United Provinces, and none of these ships were shown with a crowned lion.13 By contrast, both van de Velde’s studies of British ships and contemporary Navy Board models clearly illustrate a variety of f igurehead motifs on British vessels, including more crowned than uncrowned lions.14 This strengthens the case for a Dutch origin – or at least a Dutch identification – of the Schip model. 11 Condition report from Donald Smith, Marine Modelmaker, 5th July 1981 ‒ reproduced with permission from Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums. 12 Ibid. 13 Examples showing the crown-less rampant lion f igurehead can be seen on models and sketches of the great Dutch warships Hollandia. See G.C.E Crone, ‘The Model of the Hollandia of 1664-1683’, The Mariner’s Mirror, Vol. 4, No. 4 (1914), pp. 106-109 and in a number of van de Velde’s sketches in the collections of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London; Gouden Leeuw, 1666 (PAI7263); Liefde, 1664 (PAG6185); Wulpenburg Amsterdam, around 1659 (PAG6180); and in a ‘Portrait of a Dutch two-decker’, 1665 (PAG6195). 14 A Navy Board model of a fourth-rate Royal Navy warship of 1660, and therefore contemporary with the van de Velde drawings, shows a crowned lion figurehead (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, Caird Collection SLR0366) as does the model of the third-rate 70 guns ship Bedford of 1698 (SLR0384) in the same collection. van de Velde’s drawings of British naval vessels illustrate a variety of figurehead motifs: St Andrews, around 1670 and Triumph, around 1675 (PAG6224 and PAG9361) both show variations on horses and seahorses for example. However, the Royal Navy warship Mordaunt 40-50 guns of 1681 (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, Caird Collection SLR0004) has a similar figurehead to the Dutch lions.

234 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Figure 9.2: The Schip model in the offices of the Aberdeen Shipmaster Society © Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collections

Whilst direct comparisons are difficult, as there is no suggestion that the model is intended to represent a specific vessel, a number of other features common to Dutch naval vessels can be discerned on the Aberdeen model which lend further weight to the interpretation of it as a Dutch rather than British vessel. The restorer’s report assessed the carved decorations on the transom and tafferel: ‘If the three stern lanterns are original, then so too is the transom decoration. It seems probable that this has been rebuilt over the years and the large “hind” motive added.’15 If we disregard the ‘hind’ decoration from the tafferel as being a later addition, we can nevertheless examine the other more integral, and more likely original, features of the transom carvings. In particular, the exaggerated dolphins on the top rail above the transom are an important clue as to the origins of the model, or at least its intended interpretation. The twisting tails of the two dolphins surround a shield which appears to bear the city arms of Amsterdam, three saltires stacked vertically on a black pale, albeit faint and very heavily over-painted. This motif was very common on Dutch warships and East 15 Condition report from Donald Smith, Marine Modelmaker, 5th July 1981 ‒ reproduced with permission from Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums

‘Proud Symbols of the Prospering Rur al Seamen’

235

Figure 9.3: The Schip model before being restored, c.1981 – stern view © Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collections

Indiamen.16 The lack of carved wreaths decorating the gunports also suggests a Dutch ship; British vessels typically surrounded at least the top row of gunports with a decorative wreath or other carvings, whereas this was not seen on Dutch vessels of the same period. The standing and running rigging is an amalgam of later additions and alterations to the original masts.17 This could be an example of a 16 See the van de Velde sketches for the 56-guns Dutch naval ship Wakende Boei, around 1666, which clearly shows an identical top rail transom carving (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, PAG6208 and PAH3845) 17 Ibid

236 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Scottish model-maker copying the style of a Dutch ship, or a Dutch-made model with later alterations to the rigging. It is not possible to say with any certainty whether the model was made in the United Provinces and brought to Aberdeen, or whether it was made locally in the style of a Dutch ship, but the evidence that it is intended to represent a link to the Dutch Republic is clear from the features described. Other elements of rigging are identified by the restorer as later additions and are an indication of extensive and continuous repairs and alterations to the model over a long period of time.18 The report on the model’s condition and accompanying photographs in 1981 indicate that whilst a great number of changes had been made over the centuries to the rigging (always the most vulnerable part of a ship model), and to some areas of decoration, such as the addition of the ‘hind’ to the transom and evidence of considerable repainting, much of the original model survives. We can conclude that it was intended to represent a Dutch ship, though it is unclear whether it was made in the United Provinces or Scotland. Beyond the model itself, the earliest source concerning it is Clark’s history of Aberdeen, the Society’s own minute books for this period having disappeared since that history was written. Clark attributes the donation of the model to a member of the Shipmaster Society of Aberdeen named Alexander Mackie in 1689, and quotes a memorandum in the books that he ‘had gifted ane ship to the [seaman’s] Loft and did Hinge the same at his charge [sic].’19 We can therefore begin to explore the potential meanings of this ship model for Mackie and the other shipmasters of Aberdeen, beginning with the religious connotations of such an object. *** In order to better understand how this ship model would have been perceived in a seventeenth-century Scottish church, a century after the Reformation in Scotland, it is helpful to consider what the image of the ship represented in wider Christian culture both before and during the Reformation. The importance of the sea to communities across the classical, medieval, and early modern Christian world meant that the idea of the ship at sea, with its fate entirely dependent on the mercy of God, was an easily comprehensible metaphor for the lives of man. It is an image used time and again in the Bible: 18 Ibid 19 Alexander Clark, A Short History of the Shipmaster Society or The Seamen’s Box of Aberdeen (Aberdeen: William Smith & Sons, 1911), p. 26.

‘Proud Symbols of the Prospering Rur al Seamen’

237

Noah surviving the flood, Jesus calming the sea of Galilee, and in Psalm 107, for those who ‘went down to the sea in ships, doing business on the mighty waters’ and ‘saw the deeds of the Lord, his wondrous works in the deep’.20 One early church founder, Hippolytus of Rome, used a maritime metaphor to describe the church itself, writing that ‘the world is a sea in which the church, like a ship, is beaten by the waves but not submerged’.21 The very real perils for those undertaking sea voyages gave these metaphors particular power. Sea travel has been inherently dangerous throughout history, but was especially so during the medieval and early modern periods, when developments in sailing technology facilitated ever further voyages, and encounters with plague, warfare, and piracy were also frequent.22 Biblical passages relating to seafaring, and stories of saints performing miracles at sea, were reproduced and echoed in medieval church paintings and objects of ritual significance and offerings. For instance, in the passage describing the shipwreck of St Paul, the saint’s exhortation to be of good cheer and fearless is an example of a literal angelic intercession in the face of an impending shipwreck in the Mediterranean Sea. Paul’s powerful first-person account is very direct and conjures a picture of a situation that would be terrifyingly familiar to sailors anywhere. Paul is told by an angel that although the ship will be lost, none of the crew or passengers will drown. His calm encouragement of his fellow sailors is a demonstration of his faith, and when the ship is finally sunk, and all the crew manage to swim to a Maltese island, Malta became the first Roman territory to convert to Christianity. Maltese churches were subsequently filled with votive paintings and sculptures celebrating accounts of divine intercessions for sailors, and similar sentiments appear elsewhere.23 For the Venerable Bede, writing in the ninth century, ‘the storm is also an ever-present dimension of life for Christians. While on the waters of this life, our boat is always in danger from temptation’.24 Ships were therefore important as physical agents carrying the message of Christianity around Europe, but also as a powerful metaphor in the teachings of the early church. 20 Psalm 107, New Revised Standard Version: containing the Old and New Testaments with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical books (Anglicized London: SPCK, 2008) 21 Robert William Henry Miller, ‘Sea, Ship and Seamen in Early Christian Literature’, The Mariner’s Mirror, Vol. 96, No. 4 (2010), p. 421. 22 See the chapters in this volume by Klein, Fury and Lambert and Baker. 23 A.H.J. Prins, In peril on the Sea: marine votive paintings in the Maltese Islands (Valletta: Said International, 1989). 24 St Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea, III, Part 1 (Albany: Preserving Christian Publications, Inc., 1995), p. 173

238 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

The image of the ship, and the use of votive ship models, evidently persisted into the early modern period. Similar maritime metaphors survived into sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sermons, particularly featuring the church as a ship, or the human soul as a ship or precious cargo, voyaging through the threatening seas of the world towards the promised haven of salvation.25 British sailors’ familiarity with the story of St Paul is also apparent from contemporary sources.26 However, the Reformation changed the broader religious context in which these ideas existed. The rejection of idolatry, the worship of false idols of which ex-voto practices were accused, led to the destruction of many shrines and sculptures, ‘in favour of purifying worship by purging it of all accretions considered to be false or detracting from the honour which God alone deserved’.27 Much greater emphasis was placed on words than on decoration, as ‘Calvinist culture teaches one to reject graven images… The primacy of the word in Reformed thought derives not simply from the existence of sacred texts ‒ as the iconoclasm so vividly demonstrated, there are no sacred images ‒ but also from the belief in the intellectual superiority of the words as a means of communication’.28 This meant that Protestant churches across Northern Europe, and their affiliated guilds and organisations, such as the burgeoning maritime benevolent societies discussed below, tended towards painted tablets of Biblical verses to decorate their walls after the Reformation, rather than any potentially idolatrous imagery. Many of the churches and guilds also started their own schools so as to teach reading and thereby make the sacred word more widely accessible. Decorations in churches did not disappear, however. Martin Luther’s own feelings on the subject were divided, notably in Wider die hymelischen Propheten of 1524, in which he wrote that ‘the image is neutral, no more responsible for superstitious abuse than a weapon is responsible for murder… 25 See, for example, Richard Madox, A Learned and A Godly Sermon, to be Read by All Men, but Especially for Marryners, Captaynes and Passengers, which Trauell the Seas (London, 1581); John Flavel, Navigation Spiritualiz’d: or, A New Compass for Seamen (London, 1698); John Flavel, Navigation Spiritualiz’d: or, A New Compass for Seamen (London, 1698). 26 Edward Barlow, a seventeenth-century seafarer who wrote a journal during his career, mentioned St Paul’s shipwreck while visiting Malta. See Basil Lubbock, ed. Barlow’s journal: of his life at sea in King’s ships, East and West Indiamen and other merchantmen from 1659 to 1703, 2 vols. (London, Hurst & Blackett, 1934), pp. 156-8. 27 James Kirk, ‘Iconoclasm and Reform’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society, Vol. 24, No. 3 (1992), p. 366. 28 Jan De Vries and David Freedberg, Art in History, History in Art: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Culture (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1991), p. 2.

‘Proud Symbols of the Prospering Rur al Seamen’

239

The answer to the problem is not iconoclasm but to purge the images of their abuses’.29 Whilst Baxandall argues that Protestant artists chose to ‘replace devotional figures by narrative representations of the holy stories, and to relocate the images from within to outside the church, and not least into the home’,30 the use of secular depictions was also deemed acceptable. Brusati describes the ‘reconfiguration of sacred and public space… The control of these highly charged spaces was a matter of considerable political interest and tension in the early years’.31 This tension can be seen in other forms of sculptural art in churches. Gardner’s work on fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury English church pew end carvings, for instance, shows that ‘the Reformation does not seem to have put an end to it, though church building was not encouraged, and only secular subjects could be used’.32 Against this background of religious change, the extent to which one might be able to interpret the Aberdeen Schip model as a votive offering, given in thanks in return for deliverance from peril at sea, is diff icult to assess. As a post-Reformation model such offerings were no longer part of practiced worship; yet throughout Scotland many Catholic forms of worship persisted in some areas long after the off icial conversion to Protestantism.33 The Reformation in Scotland was not one single event, but a gradual and hard-won transition from parish to parish. There was not one single idea of what was and was not permissible in the new church, but rather a continual challenge and reinterpretation that varied across the country.34 Certainly there is evidence to suggest that sacred vows continued to have very real power in post-Reformation Scotland. Todd, in her exploration of the culture of Protestantism in early modern Scotland, mentions the Elgin merchant William Guthrie, who gave the kirk six glass windows ‘which he avowed to do in his danger in peril on the seas’.35 This suggests that such practices were still tolerated in post-Reformation Scottish churches. 29 Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 72 30 Ibid 31 Celeste Brusati, ‘Reforming Idols and Viewing History in Pieter Saenredam’s Perspectives’, in Cole and Zorach, eds. Idol and the Age of Art, p. 32 32 Arthur Gardner, Minor English Wood Sculpture, 1400-1550. An essay on carved figures and animals on bench-ends in English parish churches (London: Alec Tiranti, 1958), p. 11 33 Mairi Cowan, Death, Life, and Religious Change in Scottish Towns, c.1350-1560 (Manchester University Press, 2012), p. 9 34 William McMillan, ‘Worship of the Scottish Reformed Church, 1550-1638’, Unpublished Ph.D Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1925. 35 Todd, Culture of Protestantism, p.353

240 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

A similar balance between old and new is evident in the first Gaelic book of common order published in post-Reformation Scotland, a translation of an order of service, printed by Robert Lekprevik in Edinburgh in 1567, translated from the Latin and English into Gaelic by ‘Mr John Carswell minister of the church of God in the bounds of Argyle whose other name is Bishop of the Isles’.36 In it, Bishop Carswell included one form of service for the blessing of a ship when going to sea, which contained a call and response prayer of intercession led by the steersman with the ship’s crew, even though call and response elements of prayers had been widely done away with and were discouraged by the father of the Scottish Reformed church, John Knox.37 The sailor’s call and response is recorded as follows: Let one of the crew say thus: The Steersman “Bless our ship’.” The rest respond “May God the Father bless her.” The Steersman “Bless our ship.” Response “May Jesus Christ bless her.” The Steersman “Bless our ship.” Response “May the Holy Spirit bless her.” The Steersman “What do ye fear and seeing that God the Father is with you?” Response “We fear nothing.” The Steersman “What do ye fear and seeing that God the Son is with you?” Response “We fear nothing.” The Steersman “What do you fear and seeing that God the Holy Ghost is with you?” Response “We fear nothing.”38

At a time when the keeping of festival saints’ days, pilgrimages, and even singing of carols and the celebration of Christmas were all banned, sailors were nevertheless permitted prayers and special services that came very close to the format of intercessions outlawed in the new church.39 This underlines the importance of seafarers to the prosperity of the community, and the general awareness of the perilous conditions in which they worked. It also reinforces the idea that some older beliefs (perhaps including those regarding votive ship models) continued to have traction. Indeed, the sacred and supernatural purposes of church ship models as objects of divine intercession may be a legitimate explanation for the 36 McMillan, ‘Scottish Reformed Church’, p.93 37 Jane E. A Dawson, John Knox (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015), p.100 38 Ibid. pp.94-95 39 For comparison, see the discussion of religious culture aboard English ships in Vincent V. Patarino, ‘The Religious Shipboard Culture of Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century English Sailors’, in The Social History of English Seamen, 1485-1649, ed. by Cheryl A. Fury (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2012), pp. 141-92.

‘Proud Symbols of the Prospering Rur al Seamen’

241

earliest Scottish model, a Danish warship model now in the collections of the National Museum of Scotland, which dates from 1590, a century earlier than the Aberdeen model. This model is associated with James VI and his safe return to Scotland with his new wife, Anne of Denmark. The model has the insignia of Anne’s brother, Christian IV, carved on the transom.40 It was given to Trinity Church, where the king worshipped in Leith, and to which David Lindsay, the minister who had performed the marriage, belonged. Lindsay also went on to conduct the Queen’s coronation when they finally arrived at Holyrood Palace. The model may have been intended as a wedding present from Christian to his sister and new brother-in-law, but it may also, in the long-established practice of making a vow while faced with the prospect of peril at sea, represent a vow fulfilled by the placing of the ship model ex-voto in a church. The King’s voyage in October 1589 to meet his betrothed, and their return voyage to Scotland, were beset by storms; the party was forced to abandon their initial attempt to reach Scotland and seek refuge in Norway, where the royal couple were married. Great celebrations were held when the king f inally arrived back in Leith in May 1590 with his new bride, not least because a sinister interpretation was soon placed on the voyage. As Todd commented, ‘early modern Scotland was a realm of competing religious cultures, including not only the Protestant/Catholic rivals, but even more dangerous, the surviving pre-Christian culture of fairies, sorcery and charming’. 41 A supposed plot to kill the king by witchcraft was uncovered, and 70 people from North Berwick, a coastal village not far from Edinburgh, were accused of taking part. The coven of witches claimed, under torture, that they had killed a cat and thrown it into the sea to summon the storms, and that the Devil had told them that ‘the king is the greatest enemie hee hath in the world’. 42 James VI gained a reputation as a witch hunter following the North Berwick witch trials. He studied the subject, publishing his findings in a discourse, Daemonologie, in 1597, and introduced additional legislation to punish those found guilty of witchcraft. It is therefore reasonable to interpret the action of placing the model in the church after a dangerous and supernaturally imperilled voyage as a royal thanks-offering, whether to the minister who performed 40 George Dalgleish, ‘Sorcery, Suspicion and Shakespeare’, Explorer (Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland, 2013), pp. 20-21. 41 Todd, Culture of Protestantism, p. 355 42 James Carmichael, Newes from Scotland Declaring the Damnable Life of Doctor Fian a notable sorcerer, who was burned at Edinburgh in January last (London, England, William Wright, attributed 1591, University of Glasgow Special Collections).

242 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

the marriage, the sailors who brought them home, or to a provident God for sparing them (or perhaps to all three). Although no similarly clear evidence survives behind Mackie’s donation of the Schip model, it may well have originated within the same tradition, reflecting the tensions between cultural continuities and dramatic change that characterised Scotland’s Reformation. *** Besides its impacts on doctrine and church decoration, the Reformation had other social consequences as well, especially for civic and professional communities. Religious reforms deprived local guilds of their traditional opportunities to demonstrate their status in their communities through their annual saint’s day parades. Todd described the significance of holy days and processions as an expression of local power in the Protestant churches in early modern Scotland, for: the long-standing association of crafts guilds with their patron saints, in Scotland as elsewhere, made their post-Reformation lot particularly difficult and helps to explain why they appear so often before the sessions of Aberdeen and other towns for “superstitious” celebrations of saints’ and other holy days. For their members to cease observance of their own saint’s day entailed loss of public identity… and undermined its corporate status in the town’. 43

This loss was in some ways compensated for, however, by the church authorities providing each guild with its own seating area, and so the shipmasters of many coastal towns and cities were granted their own loft, or seating gallery, within the church. The mariners of towns such as Burntisland, Leith, Bo’ness, and Ayr were allowed to process into the kirk collectively and sit together in their ‘own clearly labelled gallery before the captive audience of their perforce Sabbatarian neighbours, [by which they] declared both their corporate identity and their piety as clearly as ever they had in earlier processions or festival pageantry’. 44 Such a loft appeared at St Nicholas Kirk, Aberdeen, in front of which the shipmasters hung the Schip model. In April 1670 the church elders were making decisions about remodelling the layout of the church into the new east and west chapels. Six Aberdeen 43 Todd, Culture of Protestantism, p.187 44 Ibid, p. 325

‘Proud Symbols of the Prospering Rur al Seamen’

243

skippers petitioned the council for the construction of a loft for seamen, protesting that similar lofts were to be found in other Royal burghs: but the sea-men of this burgh were altogether destitute of such accommodation, seeing there was commodious places betwixt the pillars on the south side of the New Church where with their permission they should make up a loft in decent manner for the afore said effect, which should not in the least be any ways prejudicial to the lights of the kirk, but rather tend to the decorement thereof…which should encourage them to carry and behave themselves as became. 45

The skippers’ request was granted. Even before the sailor’s loft was constructed, however, concerns over social status and professional groupings were already evident in St Nicholas Kirk. Richard Franck, an Englishman travelling through Aberdeen in 1656, described ‘every merchant in his peculiar pew, where every society of mechanicks [sic] have their particular seat, distinguished by escutcheons, suitable to their profession’. 46 Indeed, this was common across Scotland. An examination of any Scottish Kirk Session Minute Book, a form of church administration introduced during the Reformation, demonstrates that up until the mid-nineteenth century seating in the church was a constant topic for argument and negotiation, and comes second only to ante-nuptial fornication for the amount of time and pages spent in deliberations by the Kirk Sessions. 47 Church members, whether wealthy families, guilds, or shipmasters societies, ‘were intent on defining their corporate identities and privileged status in that context by using material objects that were religious in their association with hearing the word preached, but that also obviously contained layers of social meaning in their construction, design and placement’. 48 This could mean armorial badges on pew ends or, in the case of the seafaring associations, a ship model. The Schip model is evidently connected to the collective civic declarations made within the sacred space of the church, which were clearly important in the seventeenth century. The model would have been a way to command 45 J. Stuart, ed. Scottish Burgh Records Society, Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen, 1625-1642 (Edinburgh: Printed for the Scottish Burgh Records Society, 1872), p 276. 46 Franck, Richard, Northern Memoirs, calculated for the meridian of Scotland; to which is added, the contemplative and practical angles (Edinburgh: A. Constable and Co. 1821), p. 205 47 Andrew Edgar, Old Church life in Scotland: Lectures on Kirk-session and presbytery records (Paisley & London: Alexander Gardner, 1885), pp. 17-26 48 Todd, Culture of Protestantism, p. 325

244 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

the newly reconfigured interior of the reconstructed church, which may also give a hint as to why Master Mackie chose a model ship, rather than a painting, stained glass window, candlesticks, silver beakers or some other acceptable device, for his gift and as an emblem of the Society. A miniature representation of the world in three-dimensions has an immediacy and impact that captures the imagination of the viewer, and Mackie (and perhaps the Society) evidently wanted to make an impact. Todd describes how members of guilds ‘were intent on defining their corporate identities and privileged status in that context by using material objects that were religious in their association with hearing the word preached, but that also obviously contained layers of social meaning in their construction, design and placement’.49 As Lynch has put it when writing about Aberdeen, ‘by the 1650s, decorative art was used, not for the glory of God, but for the badges of rank which adorned the pews of the elite and reinforced social distinctions amongst them.’50 Alexander Clark confirms this understanding, stating that by permitting a new loft to be built exclusively for the use of ‘the various grades of mariners belonging to the Society’ this illustrated how ‘the Society of Shipmasters was regarded by the magistrates as a corporate body of importance in the municipal life of the burgh’. He notes that the seamen’s loft was erected above the Grammar School loft at the west end of the church, and that it contained accommodation for the various grades of mariners belonging to the Society. This was carefully arranged, with front seats being appropriated to the masters, the second seats to the mates and the back seats to the ordinary seamen. The front of the loft was hung with a green cloth, but on the death of a shipmaster a black cloth was substituted. Crucially, ‘on the front of the loft there was also painted the picture of a ship’.51 The overall effect must have looked similar to the sailor’s loft still extant in Burntisland Church. This church was built in 1592, the first post-Reformation church to be built in Scotland, and even though their model is a 1960s replica, the impression to visitors, with the painted panels of ships and shipmasters decorating the front of the lofts, is nevertheless striking. There could have been no doubt in the minds of those seated about the church as to who belonged to that loft or the nature of their profession. 49 Todd, Culture of Protestantism, p. 325 50 Michael DesBrisay Gordon Lynch with Murray G. H. Pittock, ‘The Faith of the People’ in E. Patricia Dennison, David Ditchburn, and Michael Lynch, Aberdeen before 1800: a new history (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2002), p. 300 51 Victoria Elizabeth Clark, The Port of Aberdeen. A history of its trade and shipping from the 12th century (Aberdeen: D. Wyllie & Son, 1921), p. 26

‘Proud Symbols of the Prospering Rur al Seamen’

245

Figure 9.4: Burntisland Parish Church interior (author’s own)

Reflecting on this interaction between religious and social dimensions in early modern Scottish churches, Spicer describes these buildings as a ‘reformed Temple’, and notes that: the decoration, appearance and structure of these temples reflected the status of the Reformed community; displays of civic imagery and personal heraldry linked the buildings with the political elites. Such iconography and architectural display were not incongruous to those who were assured in their faith, and who like James VI could tell the difference between idolatry and decoration.52

This duality is evident in the king’s receipt of the Danish shop model, and its donation to Leith Trinity Church. Both the Leith model and the Aberdeen Schip model may therefore have carried some of the pre-Reformation associations with which the image of the ship, and the maritime world in general, was laden, but they were also embedded in the new social practices brought about by the Reformation in Scotland. The Schip model and the seamen’s loft also underline the guild’s role in the town, as Clark suggested. When James VI returned to Leith from his impromptu stay in Norway, part of the convoy was a ship provided by 52 Andrew Spicer, Calvinist Churches in Early Modern Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 232.

246 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Aberdeen, the Nicolas.53 It may have been for this reason that he granted a royal charter to the Shipmaster Society of Aberdeen on 19th February 1600.54 This was seventeen years before the Seven Incorporated Trades of Aberdeen (hammermen, bakers, wrights and coopers, tailors, weavers, shoemakers and fleshers) received their royal charter. Initially, it was a mutual benef it society to provide welfare for elderly and inf irm sailors and their families. All sailors belonging to the port of Aberdeen, regardless of their rank, were required to pay into what was known colloquially as ‘the sailor’s box’. This sailor’s ‘prime gilt’ payment was compulsory and in essence a form of welfare insurance. Although other benevolent societies in Scotland and the United Provinces began appearing not long after that date, the Shipmaster Society of Aberdeen may be considered as one of the oldest, and perhaps the oldest, post-Reformation mariner’s benevolent society in Europe. Unlike Trinity House in Hull, founded 1369, and the Fraternity of Shipmasters and Mariners of Leith, founded in 1380, later to become the Corporation of the Trinity House of Leith, the Shipmaster Society of Aberdeen was not linked to a religious order in its founding. Davids describes a general move away from the religious fraternities to systems of self-governing societies occurring across Protestant northern Europe, as ‘Skippers guilds (or Schiffer-Gesellschaften) proliferated in Hanse towns in north-west Germany as a substitute for religious brotherhoods, which had been denounced by the Lutheran Reformation. Wherever Lutheranism prevailed, fraternities of seamen eventually made way for guilds’.55 Even if the Shipmaster Society was innovatively secular, the importance and influence of the Trinity House of Leith can be discerned from the founding articles of the Society’s royal charter of 1600, which takes the Leith practice as precedence: ‘all schippis and crearis of onie uther toune within this Our realme, loss or laiddinis in the said port of Aberdene sall pay thair pryme-gilt to the said box, as the saidis maisteris and marineris of Aberdeine payis in the town of Leith’.56 In other words, the Society had the power to levy a 53 Aberdeen City Council, ‘Reenactment reveals devastating impact of the plague on Aberdeen’. from http://www.aberdeencity.gov.uk/CouncilNews/ci_cns/pr_plaguereenactment_040712.asp. (2012), p. 67 54 Clark, Port of Aberdeen, p.3 55 Karel Davids, ‘Seamen’s Organizations and Social Protest in Europe, c. 1300-1825’, International Review of Social History, Vol. 39, No. 2 (1994), pp. 145-169, p. 152 56 ‘All ships and clears of any other town within this our realm, unloading or loading in the said port of Aberdeen shall pay their prime gilt to the said box, as the said masters and mariners of Aberdeen pays in the town of Leith’. Clark, Short History, p. 71.

‘Proud Symbols of the Prospering Rur al Seamen’

247

tax on all ships loading and unloading in the harbour, and the Aberdeen shipmasters set their fees by the charges they themselves paid when trading in Leith, their primary home trading port. The monies collected were kept in a specially-made box with two locks, meaning that it could only be opened by two senior members of the Society. Clark describes it as ‘a corporation fully representative of the seafaring interests of the burgh, embracing within its membership not only the shipmasters, but all the seamen, ship-carpenters and riggers, and its history during that period was practically synonymous with the history of the shipping trade of the port’.57 In addition to the subscriptions of ordinary sailors vast sums of money were gifted by wealthy shipmasters and their ‘relicts’ (widows), as can be seen from this highly decorated mortification board, also in the collections of Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums. Like the Schip model and seamen’s loft, these mortif ication boards reflect how Aberdeen’s wealthy elite, in common with much of the affluent merchant classes across Europe in the late sixteenth century, had experienced a shift in how wealth was demonstrated in the context of the church. In this post-Reformation Scottish society where payments to the church or the purchase of indulgences were no longer a sure path to immortal redemption, there was now a new Protestant requirement to demonstrate one’s worthiness through philanthropy and public acts of benevolence. The earliest of three mortification boards painted for the Society is decorated with nautical symbols; an illustration of a ship underway at sea flying the flag of the Union as well as saltires, an anchor, gilded seashells, and the city’s crest. On it is written, ‘A Catalogue of Mortifyer’s names, and their Destinations to the Poor of the Sea-men’s Box of Aberdeen’ under which is listed the names, occupations and place of residence for each donor, plus the amount and the date. This board records the names of those who contributed money to the fund between 1703 and 1801, including some extremely generous amounts considering the equivalent buying power in today’s money. For example the £100 gifted in 1703 would be worth approximately £15,000 today and the £6,000 gifted in 1801 is equal to over £400,000 today.58 These boards demonstrate that even two centuries after the founding of the Society it could still command large personal donations from its wealthy benefactors, sums worthy of richly decorative public display. The mortification boards also give an insight into the types of people donating to the Shipmaster Society. The first entry is from Robert Gordon, 57 Clark, Short History, p. 2 58 Based on calculations from https://www.measuringworth.com 1703 converted to retail price in 2017.

248 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Figure 9.5: Aberdeen Shipmaster Society of mortification © Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collections

a factor (a Scots term for a manager or business agent) in Bordeaux. Among the many other shipmasters, merchants, and widows, is William Stordy of Carlisle, who was the Comptroller for His Majesties Customs at the Port of Aberdeen. Clearly the great and good of Aberdeen wanted to contribute, and be seen to be contributing, even when they left to work abroad, or had moved to Aberdeen from elsewhere. The Society had grown beyond its origins as a mutual aid society, an organisation that was purely of, and for, its own

‘Proud Symbols of the Prospering Rur al Seamen’

249

shipmasters and sailors; it acquired a broader role in demonstrating the status of its supporters. These same supporters, who before the Reformation might have commissioned works of art and sculpture for the church and would have seen those works destroyed in the iconoclasm of the Protestant churches, now looked to benevolent societies to make endowments. The mortification board describes an outward-looking benevolent society supported by wealthy Aberdonians near and far, an impression augmented by the choice of a Dutch frigate to hang in front of their seating loft in the kirk. These donations were all the more significant because Aberdeen endured all the ravages of the seventeenth century; wars with the Dutch and French, plague, and civil war all had a devastating impact on the city. The city suffered severely during the dark times of the British Civil Wars, when Scottish congregations fought and died to support the tenets of their Reformation. Aberdeen fared particularly badly during the wars; the Battle of Justice Mills in September 1644 marked a low point of slaughter and disarray in the city.59 The turmoil of civil unrest was compounded by the arrival of a plague epidemic in 1647 that gripped the city for a year and took a serious toll on the city’s population and trade. In a sermon by Edinburgh minister Archibald Skeldie, published in 1645 while plague ravaged the capital, Skeldie claimed that the wrath of God against Scotland is being manifested ‘by the devouring sword that hath killed many of our brethren in the North, and by the plague of pestilence in the south’.60 In this case the ‘devouring sword’ was the Earl of Montrose, who brought an army representing the King, while the ‘plague of pestilence’ arrived in Aberdeen soon afterwards. The town had been visited by the bubonic plague many times before the final epidemic of 1647, but this year-long attack was the most devastating. Approximately one person in five died of the disease, just three years after Montrose had brought civil war to the city’s streets, and society effectively collapsed. ‘There were no markets, no courts or church services’…Camps for the sick and the dying were erected on the Links and at Woolmanhill. Anyone sent to these camps was being handed a death sentence. The council enacted strict laws to deal with the situation with mass graves opened on the Links where hundreds of people were buried’.61 The shipping trade of Scotland was heavily disrupted during this period, and this had an inevitable impact on the Shipmaster Society’s finances for decades afterwards, which were also interrupted by new crises. In the Society’s 59 Gordon DesBrisay in Dennison et al, Aberdeen before 1800, p. 245 60 John Ritchie, ‘A Seventeenth-Century Sermon Anent the Pestilence’, Medical History, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1958), pp. 144-146, citation at p. 144 61 Aberdeen City Council, ‘Reenactment reveals devastating impact of the plague on Aberdeen’.

250 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

minutes for 1689 it was recorded that their pensioners had to be content with 3/4 parts of their allowances ‘till it please God to bless us with peace and trade again’.62 Even with such limitations, the Society’s role in supporting Aberdeen’s maritime community must have been especially important during these hard times, and perhaps increased the impact (and visibility) of the Society’s wealthy donors. Besides its personal meanings for Mackie – including its religious connotations and potential votive purpose – and its association with the Society’s civic identity, displaying a model of the type of vessel seen in the trading countries of Europe, particularly representing the naval and economic powerhouse of the United Provinces, might also be understood as a thanks-offering for having survived such difficult decades. It could even have been a statement of hope that the new Protestant king and queen might finally put an end to the threat of Catholic rule, and return Aberdeen to a more prosperous time of trade across the North Sea. *** Aberdeen celebrated the coronation of King William and Queen Mary in April 1689 by assembling the town and councillors to a service in St Nicholas Kirk, signalled by gun salutes and bonfires.63 The Anglo-Dutch marriage and later the coronation of William and Mary strengthened the Protestant grip on the English, Irish, and Scottish thrones, driving out the Catholic King James and establishing an Anglo-Dutch alliance against the Catholic powers of France and Spain. Aberdeen was still recovering from its earlier hardships, but the shipmasters of Aberdeen, as a civic and charitable body representing links with the city’s most important trading countries, might nevertheless seize the opportunity to boast proudly of their connections to the United Provinces. The display of a Dutch warship in the midst of these solemn celebrations would be fitting, representing a new and hopefully beneficial union with a wealthy European partner. The timing of Mackie’s donation of the Schip model in that very year certainly supports this interpretation, and though the model was probably not intended to represent a specific existing ship, and was not built to scale, it would have been exact enough as a miniature representation of the class of ships to satisfy the sailor’s professional eye. The implications of the choice of a Dutch warship are underlined by the fact that it is clearly not the type of vessel 62 Clark, Short History, p. 18 63 Aberdeen City Council, ‘Reenactment reveals devastating impact of the plague on Aberdeen’, p.139

‘Proud Symbols of the Prospering Rur al Seamen’

251

that Aberdeen shipmasters would have owned, or that would have regularly visited Aberdeen harbour. Instead, it is an example of the latest maritime technology, and an acknowledgement of the superiority of the Dutch navy. A Dutch man-of-war would have been easily recognised, even by non-sailors, as an emblem of international power, wealth, and dominance.64 This choice also reflects the strong relationship between Scotland and the Dutch United Provinces at that time. Aberdeen had long-established trade routes with Europe and in particular with the United Provinces, which had formal connections going back at least as far as 1444. Indeed, the archaeological collections at Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums contain multiple examples of stoneware jars and pots from northern Europe dating to the 14th and 15th centuries.65 Given the importance of the church to the social fabric of life at that time Aberdeen merchants, and shipmasters in particular, would have been very familiar with European church traditions, especially as they would probably have spent some time travelling to, and sojourning in, northern European ports. During the seventeenth century Aberdeen’s primary links were with the Dutch province of Zeeland and the Staple port at Veere, known as Campvere, which was Aberdeen’s most important overseas trading partner, judging by the amounts of pike-gilt collected from ships in the town harbour in 1685-1700 and recorded in the Society’s account books.66 Scottish merchants had the right to export their goods duty-free into Zeeland under the Staple port system. The agreement, signed in 1407, was initially with the town of Bruges, and then with Middelburg, but the Scottish signed an agreement with Veere in 1541. Writing in 1776 in An Account of the Scotch Trade in the Netherlands, and of the Staple Port in Campvere, James Yair, the minister of the Scottish church in Veere, describes how Scottish merchants in 1541, following a period of unrest between the Low Countries and British ports about herring fishing, negotiated the Staple agreement.67 The Staple agreement was not only a customs-free port for the Scottish merchants, but provided all manner of protections from arrest, and privileges of buying and selling, in exchange for their use of Veere exclusively for 64 J. R. Bruijn, The Dutch Navy of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (St. John’s, Newfoundland: International Maritime Economic History Association, 2011), p. 73 65 A. J. Cameron, A. Stones, D. H. Evans, A. Johnston and D. Spiers, Aberdeen: an in-depth view of the city’s past: excavations at seven major sites within the medieval burgh (Edinburgh, Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 2001), p.124 66 Clark, Short History, p. 21 67 James Yair, An Account of the Scotch Trade in the Netherlands and of the Staple Port in Campvere (London, 1776).

252 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

unloading their goods to the wider continental market. In addition to the rights of trading and protection the Scottish merchants were also provided with home comforts in the town. Yair quotes an extract from the articles of the 1541 Staple Contract: ‘We grant to the said nation, a house within our town of Campvere, the most commodious and convenient that can be found, for those of the said nation, without paying any hire, with freedom of excise upon wine, or beer, for those of the said nation; and likewise they shall not pay excise for victuals imported for their provision, entertainment and consumpt [sic]’.68 By 1668, ‘a church, a churchyard, an inn, a recreation ground, and a prison were allotted to the Scottish community, the repair and upkeep of which were undertaken by the magistrates of Veere’.69 Scotland’s economic survival depended on the Scottish Staple ports of Veere and elsewhere, particularly in times of war when other markets, such as France or Spain, were inaccessible or very challenging.70 Veere was the last of the Staple ports to be established and one which flourished more or less until the French invasion of the United Provinces at the end of the seventeenth century. The Scottish church at Veere thrived even beyond that, so much so that in 1738 the magistrate in Aberdeen proposed an Aberdonian candidate be chosen to fill the vacancy in the Scots church at Campvere.71 This record of the traffic between Scotland, and Aberdeen in particular, and the trading ports of the Dutch Republic and Flanders is relevant to an understanding of the Shipmaster Society of Aberdeen and why they chose a Dutch vessel as the symbol to hang in front of their loft in the public space of the city’s main church. It can be seen that the trade with Flanders was important not only to the civic leaders in Veere, but also to the merchants in Aberdeen, who continued to be loyal to Veere a long time after other cities were selling their goods in the markets of Protestant Rotterdam and elsewhere.72 When the Scottish Staple market was moved for a short period to Dordrecht in 1673, one account notes that ‘the people of this town [Veere] 68 John Davidson and Alexander Gray, The Scottish Staple at Veere: a study in the economic history of Scotland (London: Longmans, Green & Company, 1909), p. 417 69 Matthijs Pieter Rooseboom, The Scottish Staple in the Netherlands. An account of the trade relations between Scotland and the Low Countries from 1292 til 1676, with a calendar of illustrative documents (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1910), p. 233 70 Davidson and Gray, Scottish Staple, p. 417; Rooseboom, Scottish Staple, p. 221 71 Clark, Port of Aberdeen, p. 69 72 A. Grosjean and S. Murdoch, Scottish Communities Abroad in the Early Modern Period (Leiden, Brill, 2005), p. 178; Douglas Catterall, Community without Borders: Scot migrants and the changing face of power in the Dutch Republic, c. 1600- 1700 (Boston: Brill, 2002), pp. 194-230

‘Proud Symbols of the Prospering Rur al Seamen’

253

Figure 9.6: Sixteenth century Dutch pulpit at Bo’ness Old Kirk (author’s own)

were doing all they could to get the Staple back, and in this they were loyally supported by their old allies the merchants of Aberdeen’.73 Aberdeen was not the only port city with this type of trade agreement across the North Sea with many of the eastern Scottish ports, such as Culross and Leith, establishing similar arrangements, with both economic and cultural exchanges as a result. Evidence of these connections can still be seen in traces of the fabric of churches along the Scottish coast, for example at Bo’ness Old Kirk, at the western end of the Firth of Forth, which continues to use a pulpit imported from the United Provinces in the sixteenth century. Just as they did in Scotland, church interiors across northern Europe became contested spaces after the iconoclasm of the Reformation, with power struggles over what was and was not permissible. Again, sailors and shipmasters demonstrated their unique position of importance by the physical representation of their trade in a dominant public space – and often through the use of ship models.74 The earliest surviving church ship models in northern Europe, such as those at Haarlem, in Holland, make statements to the viewer about the city and its status which resemble those made by the Aberdeen Schip model. At Haarlem’s Great or St Bavo Church, the former Catholic cathedral in the 73 Rooseboom, Scottish Staple, p. 221 74 Steusloff, ‘Kirchen-Schiffsmodelle im Wandel’; Brusati, ‘Reforming Idols’; De Vries & Freedberg, Art in History.

254 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

central market square of this major trading city, three ship models were hung from the mid-sixteenth century onwards, newly representing a daring naval escape by Haarlem ships that had occurred in the thirteenth century. The oldest model was hung by a shipmaster in September 1550, and the other two date from between 1600 and 1630. Their position, hanging between pillars close to a shrine of St Olav, the shipmaster’s shrine, within a famously austere, white interior, emphasises their importance. That the models survived after the shrine was destroyed in the purge of the Cathedral’s decorations in 1578, known as the Haarlem Noon, is significant. Iconoclasm focussed on ‘those objects that had too much power or presence, primarily sculptures and reliquaries, and figural images of God, Christ and the saints that were in easily accessible locations and appeared to be alive, misleading worshipers into idolatry’.75 These ships, by contrast, depicted an important moment in the city’s history as well as a facet of Haarlem character, ingenuity and determination in the face of danger, and therefore they were not associated with idolatry, but rather with a unifying scene from Haarlem’s past.76 As in Scotland, the reconf iguration of church interiors in northern Europe occurred in ‘artistic centres such as Haarlem and Utrecht where the pressure to cleanse churches of idols met with a strong countervailing interest’. Moreover, ‘such competing exigencies assured that the removal of images…remained a matter of ongoing negotiation well into the seventeenth century. As principal sites of these negotiations the public churches offered perhaps the most palpable material evidence of the local histories of the Reformation’.77 The curious correspondences between the Aberdeen Schip model and its northern European counterparts, as well as the preference for a Dutch ship in a Scottish church, suggests a close cultural connection between religious practices and the civic identities of shipmasters in both locations. Scottish and European ship models should be regarded as signifiers of power and piety, status, commerce, and cultural exchanges. They are inextricably linked to an abiding belief in the supernatural, including witchcraft, and suggest the power of objects to influence the natural world and the seas in particular was still very much a consideration. Most significantly, though, the placing of the Schip model offers a telling example of how Scottish religious culture was inextricably linked to European practices, and that this connection could be shaped – and indeed defined – by the sea. 75 Mia M. Mochizuki, The Netherlandish Image after Iconoclasm, Material Religion in the Dutch Golden Age, 1566-1672 (London: Ashgate, 2008), p. 113 76 Ibid, p.205 77 Brusati, ‘Reforming Idols’, p. 32

‘Proud Symbols of the Prospering Rur al Seamen’

255

*** This chapter has shown that by studying an individual ship model, and considering the wider social and cultural contexts that gave it meaning, we can glean insights not just into the maritime world of early modern Britain, but also think about wider processes of transnational connectedness. For a maritime city in Scotland, the importance of sailors to the financial wellbeing of port towns and their wider international connections, combined with the perils inherent in their work was well established. This is underlined and acknowledged by the place sailors had in the churches of those towns, and in their own distinctive religious culture and forms of prayer both ashore and at. It is also because of the unique dangers involved in seafaring that the Shipmaster Societies began to appear around the coastal towns of Scotland at the end of the sixteenth century as a form of welfare system for sailors and their families. By the time of the Glorious Revolution at the end of the seventeenth century, when the Dutch Schip was hung up in front of the Shipmaster Society of Aberdeen’s loft at St Nicholas Kirk, Scottish seafarers represented a real link to the dominant global power and the new British monarch. However, it also reveals that Scottish ports were looking to the United Provinces for their cultural and business trade, as well as how to represent themselves in the new style of church. As with the church at Haarlem, by hanging ship models in their churches Scottish shipmasters were asserting their place in the ranks of the nobility, with a ship in place of a coat of arms, and at the centre of civic and religious activity. More than this, though, they were placing themselves at the centre of an interconnected and inter-reliant maritime world.

10. Systematizing the Sea: Knowledge, Power and Maritime Sovereignty in Late Seventeenth-Century Science Philippa Hellawell

For early modern historians, the frontispiece of Francis Bacon’s Instauratio Magna (Fig. 10.1) has become a symbol for the joint ventures of knowledge and travel in this period. Depicting a large galleon ship sailing beyond the Pillars of Hercules, it represented human advance beyond the boundaries of the known world, buttressed by the phrase from the Book of Daniel: Multi pertransibunt & augebitur scientia (‘Many will travel and knowledge will be increased’).1 This same rhetoric was carried forth into the Royal Society of London, where Bacon’s works were said to have acted as a ‘prophetic scheme’. Indeed, John Evelyn sketched a design for the Society’s new motto and coat of arms that was strikingly similar to Bacon’s frontispiece: a ship sailing on the water with the inscription ‘Et Augebitur Scientia’.2 As well as gesturing towards the Society’s Baconian lineage, Evelyn’s ship further cemented the links between the maritime world and the increase of knowledge. Yet the connections between knowledge and travel went beyond the will to know and discover, by implying the will to conquer too. As Robert Iliffe has shown, the early fellows of the Royal Society envisioned an experimental philosophy that was ‘peculiarly English’, seeking to create a philosophical empire centred in London where ‘there will scarce be a Ship come up the Thames, that does not make some return of Experiments as well as Merchandize’. Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667), an apologist account of the Society’s early years, cast England’s empire as ‘the greatest that ever commanded the ocean’, rendering it ‘not only mistress of the ocean, but the most proper seat for the advancement of knowledge.’3 Empire denoted 1 Francis Bacon, Instauratio Magna (London: 1620), frontispiece. 2 British Library, London, Add MS 78344, f. 114. For debates on the influence of Bacon on the Royal Society, see Margery Purver, The Royal Society: Concept and Creation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967); K. Theodore Hoppen, ‘The Nature of the Early Royal Society: Part I’, The British Journal for the History of Science 9, no. 1 (1976), pp. 1-24; and William Lynch, Solomon’s Child: Method in the Early Royal Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 3 Robert Iliffe, ‘Foreign Bodies: Travel, Empire, and Early Royal Society of London. Part II. The Land of Experimental Knowledge’, Canadian Journal of History 34 (1999), p. 28; Thomas Sprat,

258 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

supreme command over a domain, but this could be territorial or conceptual, over land as well as knowledge. Science and empire were, in this regard, wedded together, with the Royal Society’s second charter explicitly stating their intention ‘to extend not only the boundaries of Empire, but also the very arts and sciences.’4 The connections between science and empire were rooted in shared notions of power, for both were projects with an aspiration to human dominion. As Sarah Irving has argued, the recovery of man’s prelapsarian empire over nature and the expansion of English territorial empire were regarded, in the minds of some experimental philosophers, as part of the same enterprise.5 Robert Boyle, for instance, described the overarching project of experimental philosophy as ‘the empire of man over inferior creatures’, often citing the verse of Genesis where God enjoins Adam ‘to fill the earth and master it.’6 The fact that England’s empire was a maritime empire then has consequences for the place of the sea in early modern scientific inquiry because it acted as an important site for the convergence of knowledge and power, science and politics. ‘Science’ is a highly contested term prior to the nineteenth century, but it is employed here as a capacious category that encompasses a miscellany of disciplines, concerned, in their own way, with understanding a range of natural and artificial phenomena.7 Within the Royal Society, which was by no means the only locus of scientific activity in Restoration London, we see maritime concerns emerge in diverse forms: in Robert Boyle’s chymical work on the ‘saltness of the seas’, the mathematician John Wallis’ theory of the tides, William Petty’s experimental system of ship design, Robert Hooke’s marine timekeeper, and Edmond Halley’s diving bell (to name just a few examples). The variety of work also shows that ‘science’ was as much about the production of things as it was about understanding natural processes. This was ‘the study of nature with a view to works’, for as Bacon wrote in Novum Organum (1620), The History of the Royal Society (London: 1667), p. 86-87. Also see Richard Drayton, ‘Knowledge and Empire’, in The Oxford History of the British Empire vol. 2, ed. P. J Marshall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 231-252. 4 Royal Society (RS), London, DC/1/2, Second Charter of the Royal Society, 22 April 1663. 5 Sarah Irving, Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), pp. 1-22. 6 Sarah Irving, Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire, p. xii, 1. 7 On discussions on early modern science, see Katherine Park and Lorraine Daston, ‘Introduction: The age of the new’, in The Cambridge History of Science: Volume 3 Early Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 1-17, and Peter Dear, ‘What is the history of science the history of? Early modern roots of the ideology of modern science’, Isis 96, 3 (2005), pp. 390-406.

Systematizing the Sea

Figure 10.1: Frontispiece of Francis Bacon’s Instauratio Magna (London: 1620). © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved

259

260 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

‘where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced.’ Sophie Weeks has argued that Bacon’s whole programme for the reform of natural knowledge was rooted in a ‘science of magic’ whereby total command of the principles and motions of nature made possible the enlargement of human power and the manipulation of nature’s forces.8 Nature had to be understood in order to be controlled. Although the exact phrase is not found in Bacon’s work, this is the essence of the notion that ‘knowledge is power’, or more accurately that ‘human knowledge and power meet in one.’ Knowing was the means to controlling, to establish ‘the empire of man over things’.9 By focusing on the systematization of maritime information, this chapter broadens our understanding of the relationship between knowledge and use and, by extension, knowledge and power. Older histories of science often reduced considerations of use to technical innovations, usually in the fields of husbandry or engineering, ignoring the more general aspirations to utility and improvement that cannot be measured by technological achievement alone. Emphasis on the application of knowledge, or ‘how far science entered into technology’, has upheld a series of inflexible and anachronistic oppositional categories (pure and applied science, theory and practice, and science and technology) and recent work in the history of early modern science has pointed to the redundancy of these categories for they obscure the hybrid nature of knowledge production where aspirations of knowledge and use intersected. Indeed, what may traditionally be regarded as theoretical or observational forms of knowledge, such as doctrines of the tides or the mapping of the heavens, were as much geared towards the practical end of navigation as the compass or the ship was. We should therefore look beyond instruments and machines to appreciate how contemporaries understood ‘useful knowledge’.10 As such, this chapter focuses on the collection and organisation of maritime information as a window to understand the 8 Sophie Weeks, ‘The Role of Mechanics in Bacon’s Great Instauration’, in Philosophies of Technology: Francis Bacon and his Contemporaries, ed. Claus Zittel, Gisel Engel et al (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 133-195. 9 Francis Bacon, ‘Novum Organum, in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, Douglas Denon Heath, 14 vols. (London: 1862-1901) VIII, p. 67, 162. 10 For traditional perspectives on science/technology and the application of knowledge, see A. Rupert Hall, ‘Engineering and the Scientific Revolution’, Technology and Culture, 2, 4 (1961), pp. 333-341; and Richard Westfall, ‘Science and Technology during the Scientific Revolution’, in Renaissance and Revolution: Humanists, Scholars, Craftsmen and Natural Philosophers in Early Modern Europe, ed. J.V Field and Frank A. G. L James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 63-72. On the redundancy of oppositional categories, see The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the late Renaissance to early Industrialisation ed. Lissa Robert, Simon Schaffer and Peter Dear (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen,

Systematizing the Sea

261

knowledge/power dynamic, observing the ways experimental philosophers sought to collect, collate, and classify various forms of information with a view of drawing it into a working system of maritime practice.11 Systematization is an important concept here, for it was an exercise of power itself. Much like the cabinets of curiosity which were said to represent a microcosm of the world, systems, in their own way, sought to contain the world, imposing order on a seemingly chaotic nature and submitting it to some form of methodical arrangement. Systematization as a practice is often characterised as an Enlightenment impulse (the ‘formal means to Enlightenment’s end’), but it has an even longer history and Clifford Siskin has recently identified a whole ‘genre of system’ that aimed to mediate knowledge and imitate nature.12 The ‘tree of knowledge’ metaphor, present in philosophical works from Bacon to Denis Diderot, conveyed the sense that all knowledge grew into some organic whole, into a comprehensive system, despite the diversity of its branches.13 Systems, and their attendant taxonomies, were a way to make sense of the natural world, to organize it into a web of relationships and rules, to give a sense of order, but also a sense of control. The systematic impulse of early modern science is often recognised in terms of classifying natural knowledge, but there was also a push to order and codify practical knowledge into working systems or models. It was commonly believed that practical knowledge, which was embodied in the worker and transmitted through imitation, could be abstracted and codified into a new system of knowledge so that ‘it might be more effectively mastered, perfected and controlled.’14 This was one of the chief means by which the experimental philosopher believed they could assist the world of trade, bringing certainty and precision to seemingly ad-hoc craft processes. Such a mind-set was evident in the early years of the Royal 2007), and for an overview of the concept of ‘useful knowledge’, see Maxine Berg, ‘The Genesis of Useful Knowledge’, History of Science 45, no. 2 (2007), pp. 123-33. 11 Information may be distinguished from knowledge as something raw and specif ic, and knowledge as information that has been digested or even systematized (though such a distinction is only a relative one, as Peter Burke cautions: A Social history of knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot [Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013], p. 11). Also see Simon Schaffer, ‘Newton on the Beach: The Information Order of Principia Mathematica’ History of Science, 49 (2009), p. 246. 12 Clifford Siskin, ‘Mediated Enlightenment: The System of the World’, in Clifford Siskin and William Warner, This is Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 164-72; Clifford Siskin, System: The Shaping of Modern Knowledge (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2016). 13 Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and other Episodes in French Cultural History, (London: Penguin, 1985), pp. 185-207. 14 Eric H. Ash, Power, Knowledge and Expertise in Elizabethan England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), p. 16.

262 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Society, where the ‘History of Trades’ project sought to improve technical practice by collecting information on various craft processes from brewing to metal-working.15 In this chapter, we shall explore the ways the sea and seafaring practices were systematized by three experimental philosophers associated with the early Royal Society: Robert Southwell, Robert Hooke, and William Petty. Seamen had their own systems of knowledge, but the focus on the experimental philosopher allows us to identify some of the significant ways science and politics interconnected in the maritime world. The association of the Royal Society with questions of maritime significance was cemented early in their history, with Sprat declaring that the fellows had ‘principally consulted the advancement of navigation’ and ‘employed much time in examining the fabric of ships.’16 On one level, the sea and seafaring practices were just a part of the universal task to contemplate and examine all natural and artificial processes, yet, on another level, they acted as a form of propaganda to legitimise the novelty of experimental philosophy in comparison to other systems of thought and the more traditional and insular modes of natural philosophy taught in the universities. The maritime world provided an opportunity to contribute to the public good, to speak to the wants of Restoration society, and play into the naval, and learned, self-image of the English crown from whom they sought support.17 Here, the gathering, mapping and systematization of knowledge was thought to translate into greater power and, by examining these systems, we acquire a sense of how the collection and organization of knowledge was regarded as the means to secure England’s maritime future. In fact, both Southwell and Petty’s systems were actually geared towards the establishment of an English mare clausum, where the English could claim jurisdiction over a large swathe of European waters. Arguments for mare clausum ‒ a closed sea ‒ formed part of an ongoing politico-legal debate concerning the sovereignty of the seas, stimulated by Hugo Grotius’ call for a free and open sea in his Mare Liberum (1609) and developed by various writers throughout the

15 On the ‘history of trades’, see, Walter E. Houghton, ‘The history of trades: Its relation to seventeenth-century thought,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 2, no. 1 (1941): 33-60 and Kathleen H. Ochs, ‘The Royal Society of London’s History of Trades Programme: An Early Episode in Applied Science’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society 39, no. 2 (1985), pp. 129-58. 16 Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society, p. 150. 17 On the naval interests of the late Stuart kings, see J.D Davies, Kings of the Sea: Charles II, James II, and the Royal Navy (Barnsley: Seaforth Publishing, 2017).

Systematizing the Sea

263

seventeenth century.18 Southwell and Petty, and even Hooke, thus became part of a wide-ranging discourse on maritime advancement, connecting knowledge to power and science to sovereignty. In detailing the composition of these systems, the chapter works to integrate the history of science into narratives of the emerging maritime nation, illustrating how new systems of knowledge were shaped by the maritime and entwined with projections for greater oceanic power.

Southwell’s ‘Discourse on Water’: rules of nature and maritime sovereignty On the 8 April 1675, Robert Southwell, a government official and diplomat, read aloud his discourse on water to his peers at the Royal Society. ‘Those of our society, who have long been versed in philosophical disquisitions, can, out of some few circumstances of a single experiment, make such an hours discourse,’ he declared, ‘but I, who have no such dexterity, am forced to take for my subject a whole element, a quarter of the universe and above half the surface of the habitable world.’19 This was a paper on water in its broadest sense; it began with a definition of the elemental qualities of water, to classifying different topographical bodies of water, and outlining a series of miscellanies relating to floods, shorelines, and the tides. As a system of knowledge, it lacked some overall coherence; it was mostly a compendium of principles and definitions of marine environments and related phenomena, and the connections between different bodies of knowledge were not closely drawn out, nor mobilized towards a larger goal. The exception, however, was the middle portion of Southwell’s twenty-page discourse, which considered ‘the waters of the worlds, as divided into sea and rivers, and the sea divided into coasts, shores, bays, roads, ports, havens 18 On maritime sovereignty, see John Selden, Of the dominion, or ownership of the sea (London: 1652) (a translation of the original Latin, which was published in 1635); Thomas Weymyss Fulton, The Sovereignty of the Sea (London: Blackwood, 1911); David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), chapter 4; Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); J.D Davies, Kings of the Sea, chapter 8. For a consideration of maritime spaces, also see Richard Blakemore, ‘The Ship, the River and the Ocean Sea: Concepts of Space in the Seventeenth-Century London Maritime Community’ in Maritime History and Identity: The Sea and Culture in the Modern World, ed. Duncan Redford (London: I.B Tauris, 2013), pp. 98-119. 19 Robert Southwell, ‘Discourse on Water’, in Thomas Birch, History of the Royal Society, 4 vols, (London: 1757), III, p. 197. Also in RS, London, RBO/4/59.

264 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

and creeks.’20 The focus here was on navigable waters, ‘those useful in human affairs’, and the classification of these environments was established as the necessary foundation to facilitate rule over them. By defining the boundaries of British and European maritime space, Southwell moved to lay out a natural argument for an English mare clausum that would entitle the crown to sovereignty over the seas. The Anglo-Dutch wars had imparted new energy to debates surrounding the historical and legal claims for mare clausum. Commercial jealousy, the protection of fisheries, and the politics of striking the flag were at the route of conflict and were bound up with English designs for economic dominance and what was regarded as their ‘undoubted sovereignty and dominion in the seas.’ Southwell was writing the year after the end of the third Anglo-Dutch war and was no doubt shaped by the fresh attention paid to questions of sovereignty in the maritime world and renewed efforts to reiterate the crown’s historical claims to the seas by persons such as William Prynne and Sir Philip Meadows.21 Defining the limits of navigable waters had become an important part of treaty negotiations between the English and the Dutch and in the concept of mare clausum Southwell found both the grounds for establishing natural boundaries and settling the question of sovereignty. Furthermore, Southwell began his discourse with what he saw as the experimental philosopher’s role in political, international and maritime affairs. ‘Supposing the sea did belong of right unto A, and the rivers unto B,’ he wrote, ‘it seems necessary for the peace of mankind, that philosophers should assist the world, and particularly help A and B with such definitions, as are necessary for such their peace’.22 Southwell’s system was, at least initially, concerned with the identification and imposition of natural boundaries. He established a series of definitions that he argued could assist in political disputes; however, as we shall see, this was less about the maintenance of peace than the acquisition of sovereignty. The first area of ambiguity was between seas and fresh-water rivers. There were no ‘rules in nature’ for doing this and the potential methods Southwell outlined to distinguish between bodies of water – the saltiness of waters, the limits of ebbing and flowing, and their narrowness and depth – were all ruled problematic. Furthermore, Southwell argued that there were no 20 Robert Southwell, ‘Discourse on Water’, p. 200. 21 For more on the Anglo-Dutch wars, see Thomas Weymyss Fulton, The Sovereignty of the Sea, chapters 12 and 13, and James Rees Jones The Anglo-Dutch wars of the seventeenth century (London: Routledge, 2013). 22 Robert Southwell, ‘Discourse on Water’, p. 200.

Systematizing the Sea

265

sufficient ‘statutes and agreements of people for determining the same, nor hath the navigating nation of England set such marks’ and so, as a consequence, this could not effectively prevent ‘wars and blood between several nations.’23 Distinguishing between seas and the ocean was similarly problematic. There had been some agreement amongst parties regarding lines of determination between different seas, which were understood to belong to different nations, but oceans ‘indifferently belong[ed] to all nations and states.’ This meant that it would be difficult to settle questions of sovereignty and Southwell cited potential controversies regarding the capture of prize ships, framing the problem in economic as well as political terms. It was here where nature, law and politics aligned, for by determining ‘lines of fixed determination’, the experimental philosopher was to assist in the division of international waters. Again, precise measurement of the landscape – the soundings of waters or the determining of longitude – were proposed as methods for defining these lines.24 In Southwell’s paper, the description and division of different bodies of water, and the difficulty of distinguishing between them, were fashioned as problems for ascertaining sovereignty. His discourse, or at least a substantial part of it, reduced navigable waters to issues of ownership; to Southwell, ‘the principal use of the sea and rivers [was] for easier carriage of commodities’ and so his natural history of the oceans was deeply entwined with matters of global politics and trade.25 This was not simply a matter of drawing the boundaries between different types of water, but also defining in natural terms the points where land meets shore and shore meets coast. The shore showed itself as both land and sea, a belt of land between high and low water marks, whereas the coast was even more ambiguous, referring to the part of the sea ‘which by some natural right belongs to the paralleled and adjacent country washed by it.’26 Certainty was particularly desirable here and Southwell explained that he remained unsure how he might distinguish the shore and coast of France ‘upon which an Englishman may not fish without breach of peace.’ He canvassed the state papers where he met with a document from the 1630s that declared the crown’s intention to have maps of these limits ‘affixed in the most public places of his [majesty’s] chiefest sea towns and harbours’.27 Failing to locate these maps, Southwell offered 23 Robert Southwell, ‘Discourse on Water’, pp. 200-201. 24 Robert Southwell, ‘Discourse on Water’, pp. 200-201. 25 Robert Southwell, ‘Discourse on Water’, p. 207. 26 Robert Southwell, ‘Discourse on Water’, p. 202. 27 Robert Southwell, ‘Discourse on Water’, p. 203. It is unlikely that the 1630s maps were produced. For more on this, see Richard Blakemore, ‘Thinking outside the gundeck: maritime

266 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

his own solution for distinguishing between bodies of navigable waters: a mare clausum based on a ‘natural’ justification for English sovereignty. Building on ideas f irst set down by Selden, Southwell proposed the following: That an enclosure may be made of those four seas, which are commonly deemed part and parcel of the English Empire, by sensible and practicable marks, for an inconsiderable charge, viz. for within one hundredth part of the yearly charge, which the sea forces of England have commonly cost, and that so, as no vessel may go in and out of the same without notice.

The enclosure was to extend from the Isle of Scilly, around Ireland and north Scotland to Norway, Denmark, passing Holland, Zeeland and Flanders, to reach Calais and then back to Scilly, incorporating the seas within. However, the princes and states of Europe were not to share sovereignty over this enclosure, but transfer their power to one of their number. How this power would be brokered or policed was not made clear, but Southwell argued that the English Empire was ‘the best qualified even in nature, to receive and administer this power.’28 As Alan James’ contribution to this volume sets out, sea power was intimately connected to the international stature of the monarch and so claims to maritime sovereignty – here in the form of an enclosure – could work to reinforce English martial prowess and the majesty of the crown on the world stage.29 The essential basis of Selden’s original argument was that the English had ‘ancient rights by custom, conquest, and concessions’ to sovereignty over the seas. Selden, and the maps proposed in the 1630s, therefore sought to establish mare clausum upon legal and historical principles. Southwell extended this case by forwarding a series of ‘natural arguments’, where geographical factors were paired with commercial and military considerations. Firstly, England and Ireland’s geographical situation was set in the middle of a line of trade from north-west Russia, around Ireland, to North Africa through the Mediterranean to Constantinople. Its position meant that much trade traffic passed through or by their waters. Southwell calculated that ¾ of history, the royal navy and the outbreak of British civil war, 1625-42’, Historical Research, 87, 236 (2014), pp. 251-274. 28 Robert Southwell, ‘Discourse on Water’, p. 204. 29 We also see this with the famous warship, Sovereign of the Seas, which is discussed in Alan James’ and Rebecca Bailey’s chapters. The ship made a powerful claim to sovereignty, not just in name and size, but through the triumphant maritime iconography incorporated into the ship’s carvings.

Systematizing the Sea

267

all ships of European nations trading to the East Indies and America must pass between Scilly and Brittany and Scotland and Norway, passages that he suggested should be enclosed. Yet these passages were not significant because of the volume of traffic, but rather because of the value and use of the cargo they carried. Greenland and Muscovy trades were managed through these passages, as was the ‘great magazine of naval provisions’ such as timber, iron, hemp and pitch. The ‘great fisheries of the old world’ also existed within the said enclosure ‘and within the same is the greatest market and consumption of all the French bulky commodities of wine, brandy, salt, pepper and their fruits.’ A claim to the waters extended to a claim to the trade they transported; in fact, the very value of these waters was illuminated by their commercial potential. Ireland also stood in the ‘face of the new American world’ which ‘every day, more and more beget[s] a vast trade,’ especially in comparison to France, Spain, and Portugal who had only ‘half so many ports and conveniences for the new world’s trade.’30 The English, to Southwell, were the natural guardians of the seas, for not only did their geographical situation bring access to trade routes, but it also necessitated strength in shipping and sea soldiers to defend them from foreign invasion. Southwell proudly declared that England’s sea force was nearly treble the size of any enemy they had faced, and suggested that it would be in the interest of other states to transfer their power to England to prevent bellum omnium contra omnes (the war of all against all). It was the English crown’s ancient claim to maritime dominion, and the ‘natural’ arguments that underpinned them, that Southwell felt justified the resignation of authority unto England.31 According to Southwell’s calculations, the King of England had more shipping and trade than any two European princes, excepting the Dutch Republic, and four times as many subjects ‘who, when they find it in their interest to look after the dominion of the seas, may also bear the same proportion to the Hollanders, even in naval strength also.’ The English were a maritime people in the making. Nature, on the other hand, was an impediment to states like France who could not hope to achieve the power of the English and Dutch at sea, while Sweden and Demark could forward no claim to dominion ‘unless they could be always as one, which the likeness of their interest will seldom suffer them to be.’ The design of Southwell’s enclosure meant that England could claim a greater proportion of the shoreline than the kings of France, Spain, Denmark, and the states of Holland possessed collectively. 30 Robert Southwell, ‘Discourse on Water’, pp. 204-5. 31 Robert Southwell, ‘Discourse on Water’, pp. 205-6.

268 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Such proposals for an English mare clausum were not new, but Southwell’s arguments become especially signif icant when we consider the wider context in which they were made. On a political level, military engagements and treaty negotiations with the Dutch made the question of maritime boundaries especially relevant, illustrating the pervasive political influence on Southwell’s discourse and indeed his wider natural philosophy. This was a discourse on water – the ‘whole element, a quarter of the universe’ – though it quickly morphed into a discussion on navigable waters and the difficulties of distinguishing between them. Southwell was concerned with the definition, classification, and boundaries of the coastal and oceanic landscape, presenting attempts at systematization as a way the experimental philosopher could assist in the resolution of much larger political and legal disputes through mapping these boundaries. Yet the difficulties of finding appropriate markers in nature – methods that he surveyed in his paper ‒ were manipulated to make a case for the creation of an enclosure of northern European waters. The enclosure was to be ruled by the English crown, firstly, on the basis of a series of ‘rules of nature’ that mixed geography with commercial and military potential and, secondly, in the interest of other states in order to prevent war and aid trade. In the natural world, Southwell found both problems and solutions for delineating maritime boundaries, an aspect that historians who have written on the sovereignty of the seas have largely overlooked. His initial attempts to submit navigable waters to clear taxonomical arrangement instead yielded the arguments for establishing an English mare clausum based on natural definitions.

Hooke’s diagram of hydrography: networking men, nature, and artefacts Whereas issues of systematization were used to legitimise arguments for maritime dominion in Southwell’s discourse, Robert Hooke – one of the chief experimenters of the early Royal Society – saw systematization as the means to generate that power more organically. From the late sixteenthcentury onwards, the art and science of navigation and shipbuilding were examined and developed in a range of treatises and manuals that sought to abstract and codify existing maritime knowledge. As mathematicians entered the territory of the seaman and shipwright, they worked to root practice in general mathematical principles, moving away from the local

Systematizing the Sea

269

experience of individuals to a systematized body of universal knowledge.32 Hooke stood within this wider tradition of systematization, though his distinctive approach was to draw together a myriad of different forms of knowledge that tied together the natural and the artificial, the observational and the theorised, and the trades of navigation and shipbuilding into one coherent system. Hooke’s analysis was communicated via a tree-diagram of ‘hydrography’ (Fig. 10.2) organised according to rules of Ramist logic, which placed emphasis on classification over syllogism as the key organizing principle.33 This was a popular renaissance form of systematization that compressed knowledge into schemata and organized it into a series of connected branches, reflecting ‘a tendency to map, outline and spatialize segments of knowledge.’34 It is possible that Hooke also drew particular inspiration from John Dee’s diagram, or ‘groundplat’, of the ‘sciences and artes mathematical’ that appeared in his preface to Euclid’s Elements. The diagram listed various disciplines derived from the mathematical sciences, including many subjects ‒ astronomy, hydrography and navigation – with practical application in the maritime world.35 Focusing on hydrography, Hooke took his diagram further, drawing connections between very different forms of knowledge, from the structure of ships and the strength of different materials to the manual skill of seamen and the force of oceanic winds. By placing navigation within a wider culture of seafaring, Hooke’s system strongly suggests that the history of navigation need not be exclusively concerned with its bare technical elements, which Willem Morzer-Bruyns identifies as the reason why the subject has struggled to integrate itself within the wider discipline of maritime history.36 What is particularly intriguing about Hooke’s system is how it so aptly lends itself to 32 Eric H. Ash, Power, Knowledge and Expertise in Elizabethan England, chapters 3 and 4. For a detailed account of the art and science of early modern navigation, see David Waters, The art of navigation in England in Elizabethan and early Stuart times (London: Hollis and Carter, 1958). 33 Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Rawlinson, A. 171, ff. 245-246, Diagram of Hydrography. The diagram was presented to the Royal Society on 24 March 1686: ‘Mr Hooke, at the desire of the council, brought in an analysis of the whole matter of hydrography, of which he had given a fair copy to the president and promised to give another to the society’ (Birch, History of the Royal Society IV, p. 468). 34 Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and other Episodes in French Cultural History, pp. 193-94. 35 John Dee, ‘The Mathematicall Praeface to Elements of Geometrie of Euclid’, in Euclid, The Elements of Geometrie (London: 1570). 36 Willem F.J. Mörzer Bruyns, ‘Research in the history of navigation: its role in maritime history’, International Journal of Maritime History 21, 2 (2009), pp. 261-286. Also see Waters, The art of navigation.

270 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Figure 10.2: Robert Hooke’s Diagram of Hydrography, MS Rawlinson, A. 171, ff. 245v-246r, The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

Actor-Network Theory, which considers action a product of the networked relations between men, nature and artefacts. The history of navigation is not new territory for this form of analysis, for in the 1980s the sociologist John Law interpreted fifteenth-century Portuguese expansion as the result of the ‘heterogeneous engineering’ of human and non-human actors into a network that incorporated the natural, the social, the political, and the technological.37 Of particular importance in Law’s analysis were documents (maps, charts, piloting manuals), devices (astrolabes and quadrants), and ‘drilled people’ (expert navigators), which together facilitated Portuguese maritime expansion. Hooke’s diagram is interesting, not as a demonstrative case of ‘heterogeneous engineering’ (so named because it is a ‘network of juxtaposed components’), but as a historical programme for it, where the process of navigation was conceived as the combined result of different types of knowledge and action.38 37 John Law, ‘On the Methods of Long Distance Control: Vessels, Navigation, and the Portuguese Route to India’, in Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? ed. John Law (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Books, 1986), pp. 234-263; John Law, ‘Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering: The Case of Portuguese Expansion’, in The Social Construction of Technological Systems ed. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas Parke Hughes and Trevor J. Pinch (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 111-134. 38 John Law, ‘Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering: The Case of Portuguese Expansion’, p. 113.

Systematizing the Sea

271

In the typical Ramist style, Hooke began with a general definition – in this case of hydrography – that was then sub-divided into its ‘integral parts.’ He def ined hydrography as ‘the history and description of the nature and use of waters’, where the term ‘history’ was understood as a true account of the facts.39 Like Southwell’s discourse, it began as an examination of water in its broadest sense, but quickly mutated into a consideration of the seas and the means to acquire power over them. This, however, pertained to the practice of navigation, rather than the legal boundaries of navigable waters. Hooke’s primary definition was divided into two key parts: I. The natural and philosophical history of all its essential qualities and proprietys… [and]all the physical powers and operations of all kinds of natural water II. The artificial or mechanical history, which contains the description of all its uses and applications to mechanical purposes. 40

The f irst part occupied only a very small part of the diagram, being subdivided into two qualities of water: simple (rain, dew, spring) and compound (saline or sulphurous). It was presumably under the compound ‘saline’ that Hooke placed the seas. However, this was the limit of Hooke’s systematic analysis of natural waters for the remainder of the diagram was dedicated to the artif icial and the mechanical; in other words, the uses of water in relation to ships and navigation. Hooke’s hydrography, the description of the nature and uses of water, became squarely focused on the sea and seafaring. Just as Southwell saw the principal use of waters as the ‘carriage of commodities’, Hooke too placed emphasis on the ‘uses and applications to mechanical purposes’ over water’s ‘essential qualities.’41 Yet this was not the simple division of theory and practice for, as we shall see, navigation still relied on knowledge of water’s qualities but in combination with other forms of knowledge that encompassed the natural, the material, the observational, the practical, the mechanical, the mathematical and even the speculative. Seventeenth-century dictionaries were almost unanimous in their def inition of ‘hydrography’ as the ‘description of waters’, though Hooke took this further by considering how these waters

39 Bodl. Lib, MS Rawlinson, A. 171, f. 245. 40 Bodl. Lib, MS Rawlinson, A. 171, f. 245. 41 Bodl. Lib, MS Rawlinson, A. 171, f. 245.

272 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

interacted with other materials and forces in the networked process of navigation. 42 Part II of Hooke’s general definition consequently considered water in two important regards: how it moves (‘the business of hydrolicks’) and how it acts as a vehicle. Hooke had little to say about ‘hydrolicks’, but moved to deconstruct the ways water ‘serves to convey other bodies from place to place.’ Here, water assisted, even obliged, human action; it served the transportation of people and things in ships across the globe. Transportation by water was the result of materials and nature working together, and Hooke proceeded to map the particulars necessary to facilitate the action of conveyance. One needed to be conversant in very different types of knowledge: the ‘qualities of water for the purpose of supporting and moving bodies’ (also referred to as ‘hydrostaticks’ which included knowledge of the ‘tides, currents, waves, cortices &c’) and ‘the qualifications of the things to be supported and conveyed by it from one place to another which may be called shipwrighting or shipcraft.’ What was initially an analysis of the nature and use of waters, from this point onwards, switched to the programmatic mapping of the construction, management, and direction of water vessels. As with any matter that was subject to inquiry within the circles of experimental philosophy, water vessels were first to be understood through the composition of histories, i.e. the collection of empirical particulars. Hooke divided these histories into the component parts of ship construction and the navigation of the vessel. 43 Beginning with the body of the vessel, Hooke mapped the elements necessary for arriving at its perfect form, which was to begin with a very literal history of ‘the forme, figure, shape, proportion, strength & c. of the vessels and all the parts of them as adapted to several ends.’ This would involve an investigation into the composition and structure of ships in what were seemingly the greatest of human civilizations: ‘what was the Phoenician; what the Greek ships; what the Roman ships’; and, of course, ‘what the British ships.’ Here Hooke placed England within the ranks of other historic maritime empires, though he did so under the label ‘British’ perhaps to emphasize the country’s own ancient lineage.44 Hooke’s threefold history also involved considering the form of ships in the present, which meant observing the present figure and strength of ships in England and 42 For def initions of hydrography as the description or delineation of waters, see Edward Phillips, A new world of English words (London: 1658); Thomas Blount, Glossographia (London: 1661); Elisha Coles, An English Dictionary (London: 1677). 43 Bodl. Lib, MS Rawlinson, A. 171, f. 245. 44 Only in terms of the past does Hooke refer to ‘Britain’; when referring to the present, Hooke speaks of England.

Systematizing the Sea

273

rival neighbouring countries (Holland, Spain, Portugal, France, Denmark), in Asia (China and Japan) and ‘the rest of the world (African, West Indian)’. The third history was – almost paradoxically to modern eyes ‒ that of the future, though Hooke admitted that ‘this is rather conjecture or invention than properly history.’ At the core of the good practice of shipwrightry, as Hooke saw it, was the collection of information, an intelligence initiative that drew on historical study, contemporary observation, and projections on the future of the craft. Much of this information was already in circulation, but Hooke like many of his contemporaries believed this needed to be accumulated and arranged into a cohesive system in order to be effective. These histories of practice were just one way of understanding the perfect form of the vessel, and Hooke also proposed compiling histories of the ‘materials fit for the compleating this forme.’ This part of the history was essentially an assessment of the materials to be used in construction: ‘their kinds and their specific qualifications of each as to the[ir] goodness or badness.’ Hooke divided these into the following categories: mineral (iron, steel, copper, brass, tin, lead, &c); vegetable (oak, elm, ash, fir, hemp, flax, pitch, tar, resins); and animals (hides, tallow etc.), showing how natural materials could be employed for navigational use. One needed to be knowledgeable of the respective properties of these materials, their ‘fitness and nonfitness for several uses’ and their qualifications according to strength, tenacity, toughness, lightness, hardness, and durability. 45 For Hooke, good ships were built on good knowledge: knowledge of materials and their properties, and knowledge of historical and contemporary forms, figures and shapes. Knowledge was also at the core of the other essential part of ‘shipwrighting’, which Hooke described as ‘the soul or life of the vessel.’ This is a very interesting category that integrated the natural, the human and the artefactual, for they were all ‘powers that actuate, enliven, or… give motion and regimen to the vessel’, such as men and the winds. Other than a history of the winds (‘the motions and powers of the air as applicable to the moving of vessels on water’), the mapping of the animating powers of the ship related mainly to men and ‘their several employments and dutys in a vessel’, for under this head ‘[was] combined the whole art of navigation.’ The art of navigation was divided into practical and speculative, the former consisting of ‘the diligent and active use and application of all organs and utensils of the vessel’. These organs were separated into the ‘mechanical’ – the sails, oars, ridders, anchors, masts, ropes (essentially 45 Bodl. Lib, MS Rawlinson, A. 171, f. 246.

274 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

‘the business of seamen’) – and the ‘non-mathematical’, which covered all manner of charts, books, compasses, quadrants, clocks, log lines, and telescopes. Hooke differentiated between the two forms on the basis that the mechanical related to the literal movement of the vessel, whereas the non-mathematical referred to the guiding, ‘only to the directing part of the movement of the vessel’.46 Both, however, were animated by human action. Hooke’s diagram delivered a programme of navigation that connected men, books, instruments, materials, and natural elements; a system, a model of maritime practice, which plotted how to build, man, and guide a vessel. Even given the limited text on Hooke’s diagram, we learn a lot about how he envisaged the relationship between knowledge and power in the maritime context: even the action of sailing depended on knowledge of various animate and inanimate objects and the ways in which they worked together. Hooke’s scheme was partly expanded in a later manuscript on ‘The Art of Water Carriage’, where he reduced the art to mastery over ‘several sorts of knowledge.’47 Like the diagram, this scheme began with knowledge of the nature of water, proceeded to discuss engines for carriage across water, and then moved to consider the means of steering and holding course. Of water, it was necessary to know its gravity and resistance to moving bodies; of the engine (or ship), the shape, materials, workmanship and strength were fundamental components; and on the movement of the vessel, the motions and strength of water and air were listed as necessary pieces of information. What is particularly interesting about this version of Hooke’s system is the important role of the seaman’s knowledge: of the distances and courses between places ‘that have collected from the experience of skillful masters, pilots, seamen &c., whom have communicated or published the same in print.’48 In the diagram, it was non-mathematical aids such as books, maps and charts that Hooke rendered essential to practical navigation, yet the production of such aids, and the knowledge they communicated, were now recognised in the figure of the seaman and located in his experience. As with shipwrightry, much navigational knowledge was present, existing, and in circulation, but it needed to be brought together, digested, and codified to make for more efficient practice in the larger fashion of the ‘history of trades’. In Hooke’s scheme, power at sea was built on diverse bodies of knowledge, from the properties of natural materials to the force of tides and winds that were harnessed to create a new blueprint for maritime power. 46 Bodl. Lib, MS Rawlinson, A. 171, ff. 245-6. 47 RS, Cl.P/20, f. 64, Robert Hooke, ‘The Art of Water Carriage.’ 48 RS, Cl.P/20, f. 64.

Systematizing the Sea

275

Whereas Southwell approached this in terms of territory, geography and law, Hooke saw power in the form of people, materials, and natural forces.

Petty’s ‘Treatise of Naval Philosophy’: the information order of maritime power Like Hooke’s diagram of hydrography, the ship – how it was designed, built, and powered – was central to William Petty’s ‘Treatise of Naval Philosophy’. In the early 1660s (with a brief reprise in the 1680s) Petty, a founding member of the Royal Society, dedicated himself to the invention and production of a twin-hulled ship commonly referred to as the ‘double-bottom’. However, this design was part of a much larger philosophy of shipping documented across numerous manuscripts, which Petty distilled into his fifteen-page naval treatise. By 1663, Petty had written six treatises on shipping, equally subdivided into three different categories, which were also reflected in the ‘Naval Philosophy’: these were physica, mechanica and politica (the physical, the mechanical, and the political).49 Petty’s philosophy synthesized – though not consciously – the key emphases of Hooke and Southwell’s systems; it brought together an analysis on the mechanical parts of shipping and seafaring with a programme for English maritime sovereignty. In many ways, Petty is symbolic of the nexus of shared interests that connected scientific and maritime spheres. His work derived from his broad intellectual occupations with experimental and mechanical philosophies, but also from his personal interest in the sea (it being the ‘chief of his childish recreations’) and his professional duties as Judge of the Court of Admiralty in Dublin from 1674.50 Petty’s treatise was testament to the overlap between science and politics, a system that married a physico-mathematical approach to shipping with a concern for naval policy and economy. Petty’s was the most technical of the systems that we have surveyed, as three quarters of the treatise was dedicated to a ‘physico-mathematical discourse of ships and sailing.’ His treatise was part of a much larger drive for the systematization of practice across the shipbuilding industry and it would appear that it was specifically penned in response to the Dutch 49 Petty to Moray, 19 April 1663, in The Double Bottom, or Twin-Hulled Ship, of Sir William Petty, ed. Marquis of Landsdowne (Oxford: Roxburghe Club, 1931), pp. 66-67. 50 Epistle Dedicatory to Charles II in The Double Bottom, or Twin-Hulled Ship, of Sir William Petty, p. 6; British Library (BL), London, Add. MS 72895, f. 34, ‘Of Shipping (being the 3d Section of Hydrostatics which is the 5th part of the Doctrine of Motion)’. Also printed in the above, pp. 6-13.

276 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

statesman Nicolaas Witsen’s Aeloude en Hedendaegse Scheeps-bouw en Bestier (‘Ancient and Modern Shipbuilding and Management’) (1671), which he argued ‘did not contain a tenth part of what is in my Scheme.’51 Unlike the systems of his contemporaries, Petty’s was developed within a largely experimental and mechanical framework.52 It started with a list of sixteen experiments, diverse trials that began with a consideration of the qualities of materials: ‘the absolute and comparative strength of wood, metals, and ropes in their several dimensions, figures and quantities’ and ‘experiments upon pitch, tarr, rosin, oyl, brimstone, tallow, occum-leather &c. relating to the sheathing, caulking, and preserving of vessels.’ Alongside materials was an emphasis on the motion and power of vessels and a series of experiments derived to measure the forces exerted upon swimming bodies and ‘the particular power of oars, wheels, poles, draughts of men and horses.’ As with Hooke’s system, these elements were interpreted in terms of biological and non-biological phenomena – men and horses, oars and wheels – and the analysis of power and motion relied on an examination of the chief forces of nature: wind and water. In his table of experiments, Petty recommended experiments on ‘the motions, strengths, and matter’ of the two elements and particularly of the different types of water ‘upon the surface thereof in rivers, tide-ways, currents…as also in the ocean.’ Appended to this was the measurement of the depth of water and ‘discovering the nature of ground’ at the bottom of the sea to ascertain ‘the hold-fast of anchors’. Knowledge of nature, especially its forces, was tantamount to understanding, and enhancing, the figure and performance of the ship.53 The subsequent section of ‘Naval Philosophy’ dealt with the anatomy of the vessel, ‘the definition and division of a ship in its several parts.’ Here, 51 Osler Library, Montreal, B.O 7612, v.1, f. 49. 52 For other relevant contemporary publications on shipbuilding, see Anthony Deane, Doctrine of Naval Architecture (London: 1670) and F. Dassie, Architecture Navale (Paris, 1677). 53 William Petty, ‘A Treatise of Naval Philosophy’ in Thomas Hales, An Account of Several New Inventions and Improvements (London: 1691), pp. 117-119. Also see manuscript copy in RS Cl.P/7i/13. The exact date of the treatise is not clear as it was published posthumously in Hales’ treatise. Anthony à Wood suggests that the manuscript of the naval philosophy was the same paper that Petty presented to the Royal Society in 1662, ‘Thoughts on the Philosophy of shipping’, but a letter to Robert Wood suggests that the naval philosophy was written in response to a recent Dutch publication on shipping in 1671. It could be that the naval philosophy was expanded from the 1662 paper as Aubrey’s Brief Lives records that Robert Wood had a copy of the paper (John Aubrey, Brief Lives ed. Richard Barber [Woodbridge, The Boydell Bridge, 1982], p. 246). Samuel Pepys’ Naval Minutes (ed. J.R Tanner [London: Naval Record Society, 192], p. 149) also shows that he had a copy of the manuscript in 1682, and that he was urging Petty to finish it.

Systematizing the Sea

277

we see the ship subject to systematization itself, being reduced to ‘several sections, lines, centers, and proportions of resistance.’54 The ship was defined, in technical terms, as ‘all from the keel to the vane, and from the extremity of boulspirit to the landthorn’, and roughly arranged into three principal parts, ‘the hull, sails, and her burthen.’ Again, definition and classification were central to the act of systematization and, after further dividing the hull into the cavity or hold, Petty listed several important ‘lines’ within the cavity that were to be drawn parallel to the keel. This included lines where the ship ‘sinks loaden as a Merchant Man’ and where the gun deck was to be placed. His ‘physico-mathematical discourse’ was not simply a theoretical or mathematical exercise; it was orientated towards use, devised to be integrated into common maritime practice, whether naval or mercantile. This emphasis on use was also reflected in Petty’s initial list of experiments that proposed the collection of observations on the methods of loading ships with different commodities – timber, salt, corn, cotton, and liquor in cask – and a series of experiments on gunpowder, the different sorts of metals for guns, and their effects on shooting.55 There was, however, one key speculative exercise, a thought experiment, that was devised to arrive at a model for the ‘practical part of ship-carpentry.’ Petty proposed envisioning a piece of timber of an indefinite length and considering the process by which to carve out the hull of a ship. A series of lengths, lines, parts, proportions, angles were considered to get the best shape and through this exercise Petty sought to reduce ship-carpentry to the ‘art of following the model aforesaid’. Petty paired this exercise with a list of desiderata that could also account for the movement of the ship: equations between the size of sails and the velocity of the wind, doctrines on steering and rudders, and compendiums of information on the placement of masts and riggings for different sorts of vessels. Petty sought to make the whole practice of shipbuilding and seafaring into a science with the aim of reducing phenomena to some general law or rule. This did not qualify as a science – in contemporary terms – because of its technical qualities, but because it comprised a body of systematic knowledge, where disparate information was distilled into a system of laws and/or principles.56 The 54 This was not the f irst such example; for instance, see John Smith, An accidence or the pathway to experience necessary for young sea-men (London: 1626), which was based on Henry Mainwaring’s ‘sea-dictionary’ (The life and works of Sir Henry Mainwaring, 2 vols [London: Navy Records Society, 1920-1). 55 William Petty, ‘A Treatise of Naval Philosophy’, pp. 119-122. 56 For instance, see the definition of ‘science’ as ‘knowledge founded upon or gain’d by certain, clear and self-evident principles’ in Edward Philipps, A New World Of Words, ed. John Kersey

278 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

following chapters, designed to put the principles derived from Petty’s model into practice, similarly focused on the collection and interpretation of information, rather than the elaboration of any methods of construction. Operating within the same intellectual tradition as Hooke, Petty sought to create ‘histories’ – collections of facts and observations – on how ships had been built in the past. The spectrum of past practices extended from antiquity to ‘the advance of the shipping trade for the last twenty years, by the Portugals, Genoveses, English, Netherlands, and the inhabitants of the Baltic.’57 This was the information order of the maritime nation where ships and seafaring were built on the consolidation of various forms of information and different types of knowledge. However, the amassing of information was not limited to the physico-mathematical part of Petty’s treatise, but was the essential basis for his subsequent sections on naval policy and oeconomy. The section on naval policy is where we can observe significant parallels with Southwell’s discourse, for the rationale for the collection of various sorts of naval and maritime information was predicated on the notion that ‘the king of England, being not only by right and custom sovereign of the narrow seas, [had] the best means and most concernment to be more considerable at sea, than any other prince or state.’ Although we do not see the expression mare clausum in the ‘Naval Philosophy’, references to English maritime sovereignty find further expression in a number of Petty’s other manuscripts, which were written throughout the 1660s and 1670s. As Lauren Benton highlighted in her work on law and geography in European empires, there was a distinction to be made between jurisdiction over sea space and ownership of the sea; Grotius, for instance, treated sovereignty and ownership as separate legal categories. However, David Armitage has shown that Petty’s theory of mare clausum reconciled the two concepts in a Hobbesian interpretation of ‘the commensurability of dominium and imperium’.58 In Petty’s conception of mare clausum, the English King would act as a Leviathan-like sovereign, a Dominis Maris (Lord of the sea), who would offer protection to the northern European maritime states in return for their subservience at sea. Petty reasoned that if the King was sovereign of these waters, he could extend that power over all seas, rendering ‘whoever that sovereign makes admiral…admiral (London: 1706), n.p. 57 William Petty, ‘A Treatise of Naval Philosophy’, pp. 122-129. 58 Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty, p. 121; David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, pp. 122-123.

Systematizing the Sea

279

of the universe’ and the Court of the Admiralty ‘the court of the whole world.’ Of course, this had implications for Petty’s own political office, the Judge of the Court of Admiralty of Ireland, who would therefore exercise ‘a proportionable extent of jurisdiction.’59 Petty’s mare clausum was, in many ways, similar to Southwell’s Englishcontrolled enclosure where he paired – though not explicitly – the power to govern with the power of ownership. In fact, some of the parallels between Petty and Southwell’s proposals are more than merely coincidental. Petty and Southwell were cousins and maintained a significant correspondence throughout their lifetime. The same concern in Southwell’s discourse over the necessity of marks to demarcate the boundaries of waters was also present in Petty’s papers. Petty ruled that ‘seas and navigable waters be sufficiently limited by sensible marks in order to [assert] a real dominion in and over them’ and was dissatisfied with earlier debates that expressed little concern for oceanic boundaries: neither Selden or Grotius have spoken intelligibly, much less completely of this matter for although we have heard much of mare clausum or of an enclosed sea, yet I do not know anything, completely written of the seas clausibility, or of the means whereby to distinguish one sea from another, nor the seas from other waters.60

Like Southwell’s proposal for an enclosure of northern European waters, Petty’s mare clausum was to enclose the sea between three lines of demarcation: between Ireland and Scotland, between Scotland and Norway, and between France and Ireland. Significantly, this included England’s maritime rival, the Netherlands, who had become ‘the late envy of the world’ through their oceanic exploits. However, Petty insisted that the appointment of an English Dominus Maris was also in the interest of all the maritime states of northern Europe, using the exact same words as Southwell: it would prevent ‘bellum omnium contra omnes’, allowing ‘peace & profit [to] ensue.’61 It is therefore difficult not to interpret Petty’s proposal in light of escalating tensions and hostilities between the English and Dutch throughout the 1660s and 1670s, as well as growing rivalry with France, for both the enclosure 59 BL, Lansdowne MS 1228/9, f. 66, ‘A memoir relating to the sovereignty of the four seas’; BL, Lansdowne MS 1228/8, f. 48, ‘The Judge of the Admiralty his speech at Ringsend’. 60 BL, Lansdowne MS. 1228/7, ff. 38-39, ‘Sir William Petty’s speech at his first sitting as Judge of the Admiralty’. 61 BL, Lansdowne MS. 1228/7, f. 42; BL, Lansdowne MS 1228/9, f. 65.

280 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

and the institution of Dominus Maris lent themselves as practical solutions to questions of sovereignty and ownership of the seas. Claims to maritime sovereignty, however, went beyond historical arguments and emphasised England’s potential to acquire power given their necessity and advantage. Petty suggested that it was in ‘[the king of England’s] interest to know and discover’ various sets of data on the maritime world, again seeing maritime power as dependent on the accumulation of maritime information. Amongst these particulars, Petty recommended the crown discover: the total tonnage of shipping , now and throughout history; the number of seamen, particularly experienced seamen, ‘knowing where they are at all times, whether at home, or at sea’; lists of ships and seamen in each port in his majesty’s dominions; the wider array of harbours and ports ‘in the whole commercial world’ and what ships they can receive; wages and the rate of victuals in each state; and intelligence on all privateers and pirates. The function of this information was to allow the king to appropriately proportion his navy. According to Petty’s recommendations, the navy was not to consist of more tuns of shipping than there were seamen, nor did it need to be much larger than the tonnage of shipping in any two of its neighbouring states. The ‘intelligence’ gathered was also ‘to determine the number and sorts of ships which are always to be in readiness.’62 This was to be a mathematically-proportioned navy. In Petty’s programme for a new naval policy, maritime sovereignty could be quantified. Headings for the collection of naval information were proceeded by a series of miscellaneous items that related to the advantages and necessary conditions for maritime supremacy: the benefit of the shipping and fishing trades, and self-sufficiency in regards to shipping materials (especially the decline of timber stocks); the possibilities of making England the centre of a great empire ‘and that good tobacco and sugars would grow in England’; and the whole prospect of discovery offered by the oceans, ‘of new countries, new passages, new mines of gold, of silver, and of the longitude itself.’ These items were accompanied by a brief consideration of seamen, mainly how to assist those who were ill, infirm or under employed, and how ‘in what time land soldiers and other seamen may be made auxiliary seamen.’ So integral was the maritime realm to the English state that Petty initiated plans to transform the country into a nation of seamen. However, the final and shortest part of the treatise focused on how Petty’s recommendations could be implemented with ‘least charge’’ and, in line with mercantilist thinking, with ‘the least expense of foreign commodities.’ 62 William Petty, ‘A Treatise of Naval Philosophy’, pp. 129-130.

281

Systematizing the Sea

These were vague, to be based on estimates on the charge of the navy per ton per annum, annual charges of fitting, victualling and manning a war ship, and calculating the optimal rate of ship construction on the basis of the average ‘reign’ of a ship. Petty indicated that the present management of the navy and ‘the three great branches of that expense’ (wages, victuals, and stores) would be further addressed in a subsequent section, but this was not forthcoming. In the tradition of systematization, he proposed ‘subdividing each of [these branches] into several other branches as the nature of the thing and custom requires.’ For Petty, as with the others, the ocean, the ship, and the navy could be reduced into units of knowledge and information, quantified and classified, mapped and organized into a system to generate greater power at sea.63 *** As with other areas of public life – commerce, literature, art – science was a part and a product of early modern British politics and society; a society cultivating a distinct maritime culture and identity. Just as we see the traces of maritime ambition in the ‘seafever’ plays that are the subject of Claire Jowitt’s chapter, and within the wider cultural imagination of Caroline England that Rebecca Bailey examines, science also mirrored issues in contemporary maritime politics. From Southwell’s vision for an English mare clausum, to Hooke’s map of successful navigational practice, and Petty’s philosophy of shipping, the composition of these systems varied in significant ways, but all three wedded knowledge and power together in a way that promised sovereignty as a result of systematization. The act of collecting and classifying information was considered the route to maritime ascendency, achieved through the organization of that information into coherent systems that could be implemented on the seas, in the dockyard and across the naval administration. These systems were both intellectual exercises and political strategies, and the fact that we see little evidence they were implemented is inconsequential when compared to the larger statements they make about the shared concerns that bound scientific, maritime, and political spheres. These systems also bore the hallmark of their political circumstance: of a self-identifying maritime nation, of commercial rivalry with the Dutch, mounting tension with the French, military conflicts at sea, and longstanding legal debates concerning English claims to maritime sovereignty. 63 William Petty, ‘A Treatise of Naval Philosophy’, pp. 130-132.

282 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

They embody the knowledge/power dynamic in the maritime world, evidencing the ways politics spoke to science, and how science spoke to politics by offering solutions to these problems. Traditionally, the history of science and maritime history have met in the more technical examination of navigational instruments and techniques, but the works surveyed here allow us to look beyond measures of technological advancement to the entangled trajectories of knowledge and use and the wider culture of maritime improvement in which science, and associated intellectual practises such as systematization, observation, and experimentation, played an integral part in envisaging and engineering the nation’s maritime future. From this perspective, the separate strands of maritime history – of which the history of science is an important part – should not be compartmentalized. Much as Southwell, Hooke and Petty unified the disparate elements of seafaring, histories of politics and science, geography and sovereignty, shipbuilding and navigation, naval governance and warfare can and ought to be brought together in a comprehensive examination of Britain’s evolving maritime power.



Select Bibliography

Adams, Jonathan R., A Maritime Archaeology of Ships. Innovation and Social Change in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxbow, 2013) Adams, Sharon and Goodare, Julian, Scotland in the Age of Two Revolutions (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2014). Alford, Stephen, The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I (London: Penguin Books, 2013) Alsop, J. D., ‘William Welwood, Anne of Denmark and the Sovereignty of the Sea’, Scottish Historical Review, 59 (1980), pp. 171-4 Andrade, Tonio, ‘A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys, and a Warlord: Toward a Global Microhistory’, Journal of World History 21, No. 4 (2010), pp. 573-91 Amirell, Stefan and Müller, Leos, eds., Persistent Piracy: Maritime Violence and State Formation in Global Historical Perspective (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), Andrews, Kenneth R., Elizabethan Privateering: English Privateering during the Spanish War, 1585-1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964) Andrews, Kenneth R., ‘The Elizabethan Seaman’, in Mariner’s Mirror, 68 (1982), pp. 245-262 Andrews, Kenneth R., Trade, Plunder, and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480-1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) Andrews, Kenneth R., Ships, Money and Politics: Seafaring and Naval Enterprise in the Reign of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) Appleby, John C., Under the Bloody Flag: Pirates of the Tudor Age (Stroud: History Press, 2009) Appleby, John C., Women and English Piracy, 1540-1720: Partners and Victims of Crime (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2013) Armitage, David, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) Armitage, David, Bashford, Alison and Sivasundaram, Sujit, eds., Oceanic Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) Armstrong, Lawrin, Elbl, Ivana and Elbl, Martin, Money, Markers and Trade in Late Medieval Europe: Essays in Honour of H.A. Munro (Leiden: Brill, 2007) Ash, Eric H., Power, Knowledge and Expertise in Elizabethan England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004) Ayton, Andrew, Baker, Gary P. and Lambert, Craig L., Ships and Seamen: England’s Merchant Fleet and Maritime Communities from the Late Middle Ages to the Age of Drake, 1300-1580 (Oxford: Oxbow, forthcoming, 2020)

284 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Backhaus, Jürgen G., ed., Navies and State Formation (Berlin: Lit, 2012) Baker, Gary P., Lambert, Craig L. and Simpkin, David, Military Communities in Late Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Andrew Ayton (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2018) Bailey, Rebecca A., Staging the Old Faith: Queen Henrietta Maria and the Theatre of Caroline England, 1625-1642 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018) Bailyn, Bernard, ‘The Idea of Atlantic History’, Itinerario, 20 (1996), pp. 19-41 Bailyn, Bernard, Atlantic History: Concept and Contour (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005) Bailyn, Bernard and Morgan, Philip D., Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991) Barbour, Richmond, ed. The Third Voyage Journals: Writing and Performance in the London East India Company, 1607-10 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009) Barthelemy, Anthony Gerard, Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (London: Louisiana State University Press, 1987) Bate, Jonathan, Soul of the Age (London: Penguin, 2008) Beaujard, Philippe, The Worlds of the Indian Ocean: A Global History, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) Beem, Charles, The Foreign Relations of Elizabeth I (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011) Beer, Anna R., ‘Textual Politics: The Execution of Sir Walter Ralegh’, Modern Philology, 94 (1996), pp. 19-38 Beer, Anna R., Sir Walter Ralegh and his Readers in the Seventeenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 1997) Beer, Anna R., Patriot or Traitor: The Life and Death of Sir Walter Ralegh (London: Oneworld, 2018) Begiato, Joanne, ‘Tears and the Manly Sailor in England, c. 1760-1860’, Journal for Maritime Research, 17 (2015), pp. 117-33 Bellamy, Martin, Christian IV and His Navy: A Political and Administrative History of the Danish Navy, 1596-1648 (Leiden: Brill, 2006) Bentley, Jerry H., Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-modern Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) Bentley, Jerry H., ‘Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis’, Geographical Review, 89 (1999), pp. 215-25 Bentley, Jerry H., Bridenthal, Renate and Wigen, Kären, eds., Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges (Honolulu, Hawai’i: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007) Benton, Lauren, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)

Selec t Bibliogr aphy

285

Benton, Lauren, ‘Towards a New Legal History of Piracy: Maritime Legalities and the Myth of Universal Jurisdiction’, International Journal of Maritime History, 23 (2011), pp. 225-40 Benton, Lauren and Ross, Richard J., Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500-1850 (New York: New York University Press, 2013) Berry, Stephen R., A Path in the Mighty Waters: Shipboard Life and Atlantic Crossings to the New World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015) Betteridge, Thomas, ed., Borders and Travellers in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Routledge, 2007) Bijker, Wiebe E., Hughes, Thomas Parke and Pinch, Trevor J., eds., The Social Construction of Technological Systems (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987) Bitterli, Urs, Cultures in Conflict: Encounters between European and Non-European Cultures, 1492-1800, trans. by Ritchie Robinson (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989) Black, Jeremy, Naval Power: A History of Warfare and the Sea from 1500 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009) Blake, J. R., ‘The Medieval Coal Trade of North East England: Some Fifteenth Century Evidence’, Northern History, 11 (1967), pp. 3-26 Blakemore, Richard J., ‘Thinking Outside the Gundeck: Maritime History, the Royal Navy and the Outbreak of British Civil War, 1625–42’, Historical Research, 87 (2014), pp. 251-74 Blakemore, Richard J., ‘The Changing Fortunes of Atlantic History’, English Historical Review, 131 (2016), pp. 851-68 Blakemore, Richard J., ‘Pieces of Eight, Pieces of Eight: Seamen’s Earnings and the Venture Economy of Early Modern Seafaring’, Economic History Review, 70 (2017), pp. 1153-84. Blakemore, Richard J. and Murphy, Elaine, The British Civil Wars at Sea, 1638-1653 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2018) Blumenberg, Hans, Shipwreck with Spectator ‒ Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, trans. by Steven Rendall (Boston, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1997) Bolster, W. Jeffrey, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997) Bose, Sugata, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2006) Bowen, H. V., Lincoln, Margarette and Rigby, Nigel, eds., The Worlds of the East India Company (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2002) Bowen, H. V., Mancke, Elizabeth and Reid, John G., eds., Britain’s Oceanic Empire: Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds, c. 1550-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) Bowen, H. V., ‘The Contractor State, c. 1650-1815’, International Journal of Maritime History, 25 (2013), pp. 239-74

286 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Boxer, C. R., The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600-1800 (London: Hutchinson, 1965) Bradshaw, Brendan and Morrill, John, eds., The British Problem, c. 1534-1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996) Brand, Hanno, ed., Trade, Diplomacy, and Exchange: Continuity and Change in the North Sea Area and the Baltic, c. 1350-1750 (Hilversum: Verloren, 2005) Brayton, Dan, Shakespeare’s Ocean: An Ecocritical Exploration (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018). Braddick, Michael J., The Nerves of State: Taxation and the Financing of the English State, 1558-1714 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996) Brenner, Robert, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) Brewer, John, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1783 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1990) Bruijn, Jaap R., ‘Seafarers in Early Modern and Modern Times: Change and Continuity’, International Journal of Maritime History, 17 (2005), pp. 1-16 Bruijn, Jaap R., The Dutch Navy of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (St. John’s, Newfoundland: International Maritime Economic History Association, 2011) Bruijn, Jaap R. and Gaastra, Femme, eds., Ships, Sailors and Spices. East India Companies and their Shipping in the 16th, 17th and 18th Century (Amsterdam: Het Nederlandsch Economisch-Historisch Archief, 1993) Bruijn, Jaap R. and Heslinga, Els van Eyck van, ‘Mutiny: Rebellion on the Ships of the Dutch East India Company’, The Great Circle, 4 (1982), pp. 1-9 Bruyns, Willem F. J. Mörzer, ‘Research in the History of Navigation: Its Role in Maritime History’, International Journal of Maritime History, 21 (2009), pp. 261-286 Buchet, Christian, The British Navy, Economy and Society in the Seven Years War, trans. by Anita Higgie and Michael Duffy (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2013) Buchet, Christian and le Bouëdec, Gérard, eds., The Sea in History: The Early Modern World (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2017) Burg, B. R., Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers in the SeventeenthCentury Caribbean (New York: New York University Press, 1983) Burg, B. R., Boys at Sea (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007) Burgess, Douglas R., The Politics of Piracy: Crime and Civil Disobedience in Colonial America (Lebanon, New Haven: University Press of New England, 2014) Burke, Peter, A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013) Burwash, Dorothy, English Merchant Shipping, 1460-1540 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1947) Butcher, David, Medieval Lowestoft: The Origins and Growth of a Suffolk Coastal Community (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2016)

Selec t Bibliogr aphy

287

Butler, Martin, ‘A Case Study in Caroline Political Theatre: Brathwaite’s Mercurius Britannicus’, The Historical Journal, 27, 4 (1984), pp. 947-53 Butler, Martin, The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) Cabantous, Alain, Les Citoyens du Large: Les Identités Maritimes en France (XVIIeXIXe Siècle) (Paris: Éditions Aubier, 1995) Callender, Geoffrey, ‘Drake and his Detractors’, Mariner’s Mirror, 7 (1921), pp. 66-74, 98-105, 142-52 Calloway, Colin Gordon, White People, Indians, and Highlanders: Tribal Peoples and Colonial Encounters in Scotland and America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) Cameron, A. J., Stones, A., Evans, D. H., Johnston, A. and Spiers, D., Aberdeen: An In-Depth View of the City’s Past: Excavations at Seven Major Sites within the Medieval Burgh (Edinburgh, Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 2001) Cannadine, David, ed., Empire, the Sea and Global History: Britain’s Maritime World, c. 1763-c. 1840 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007) Canetti, Elias, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (London: Phoenix, 2000) Canny, Nicholas, ed. The Oxford History of the British Empire: Vol. I: Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 328-50 Capp, Bernard, Cromwell’s Navy: The Fleet and the English Revolution 1648-1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) Capp, Bernard, The World of John Taylor, the Water-Poet, 1578-1653 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) Capp, Bernard, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) Caputo, Sara, ‘Scotland, Scottishness, British Integration and the Royal Navy, 1793-1815’, Scottish Historical Review, 97 (2018), pp. 85-118 Caputo, Sara, ‘Alien Seamen in the British Navy, British Law, and the British State, c. 1793-c. 1815’, Historical Journal, Early View, available at https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0018246X18000298 (accessed 1 May 2019) Carlton, Charles, Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars 1638-1651 (London: Routledge, 1994) Carrubba, Robert W., ‘The Structure of Horace’s Ship of State: “Odes” 1, 14’, Latomus, 62 (2003), pp. 606-15 Catterall, Douglas, Community without Borders: Scots Migrants and the Changing Face of Power in the Dutch Republic c. 1600-1700 (Leiden: Brill, 2002) Champion, Matthew, Medieval Graffiti: The Lost Voices of England’s Churches (London, Ebury Press, 2015) Chaudhuri, K. N., The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint-Stock Company 1600-1640 (London: Frank Crass & co, 1965)

288 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Childs, Wendy R., The Trade and Shipping of Hull, 1300-1500 (Hull: East Yorkshire Local History Society, 1990) Clark, Alexander, A Short History of the Shipmaster Society or The Seamen’s Box of Aberdeen (Aberdeen: William Smith & Sons, 1911) Clark, Victoria Elizabeth, The Port of Aberdeen. A History of its Trade and Shipping from the 12th Century (Aberdeen: D. Wyllie & Son, 1921) Clubb, Louise George, Italian Drama in Shakespeare’s Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) Coclanis, Peter A., The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005) Cohen, Thomas V. and Twomey, Lesley K., eds. Spoken Word and Social Practice: Orality in Europe (1400-1700) (Leiden: Brill, 2015) Cole, Michael Wayne and Zorach, Rebecca, eds., The Idol in the Age of Art: Objects, Devotions and the Early Modern World (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009) Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) Colley, Linda, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World 1600-1850 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002) Colville, Quintin and Davey, James, A New Naval History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019) Contamine, Philippe, ed., War and Competition between States (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000) Cooper, Helen, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) Cormac, Lesley B., ‘Britannia Rules the Waves?: Images of Empire in Elizabethan England’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 4 (1998), pp. 10-20 Cowan, Mairi, Death, Life, and Religious Change in Scottish Towns, c.1350-1560 (Manchester University Press, 2012) Crabtree, Sarah, ‘Navigating Mobility: Gender, Class, and Space at Sea, 1760-1810’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 48 (2014), pp. 89-106 Creighton, Margaret and Norling, Lisa, eds., Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700-1920 (Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 1996) Cressy, David, ‘Conflict, Consensus, and the Willingness to Wink: The Erosion of Community in Charles I’s England’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 61 (1998), pp. 131-49 Cressy, David, Saltpeter: The Mother of Gunpowder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)

Selec t Bibliogr aphy

289

Croft, Pauline, ‘English Trade with Peninsular Spain, 1558-1625’ (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Oxford, 1969) Croft, Pauline, ‘Trading with the Enemy, 1585-1604’, The Historical Journal, 32 (1989) Croft, Pauline, King James (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) Crone, G. C. E., ‘The Model of the Hollandia of 1664-1683’, Mariner’s Mirror, 4 (1914), pp. 106-9 Cullen, L.M. and Smout, T. C., eds., Comparative Aspects of Scottish and Irish Social History, 1600-1900 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1977) Cust, Richard, Charles I: A Political Life (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007) Darnton, Robert, The Great Cat Massacre and other Episodes in French Cultural History, (London: Penguin, 1985) Davey, James, ‘Singing for the Nation: Balladry, Naval Recruitment and the Language of Patriotism in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Mariner’s Mirror, 103 (2017), pp. 43-66. Davey, James, ed., Tudor and Stuart Seafarers: The Emergence of a Maritime Nation, 1485-1707 (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). Davids, Karel, ‘Seamen’s Organizations and Social Protest in Europe, c. 1300-1825’, International Review of Social History, 39 (1994), pp. 145-69 Davidson, John and Gray, Alexander, The Scottish Staple at Veere: A Study in the Economic History of Scotland (London: Longmans, Green & Company, 1909) Davies, J. D., Gentlemen and Tarpaulins: The Officers and Men of the Restoration Navy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) Davies, J. D., Pepys’s Navy: Ships, Men & Warfare, 1649-1689 (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2008) Davies, J. D., Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales (Stroud: The History Press, 2013) Davies, J. D., Kings of the Sea: Charles II, James II & the Royal Navy (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2017) Davies, J.D., James, Alan and Rommelse, Gijs eds, Ideologies of Western Naval Power, c.1500-1815 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019) Davies, K. G., The Royal African Company (London: Longmans, Green & co, 1957) Davies, Rosalind, ‘“The Great Day of Mart”: Returning to Texts at the Trial of Sir Walter Ralegh in 1603’, Renaissance Forum, 4 (1999), 12 pages Davis, Ralph, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Newton Abbott: MacMillan, 1962) Davis, Ralph, English Overseas Trade 1500-1700 (London: MacMillan, 1973) Dear, Peter, ‘What is the History of Science the History of? Early Modern Roots of the Ideology of Modern Science’, Isis, 96 (2005), pp. 390-406 Dennison, E. Patricia, Ditchburn, David and Lynch, Michael Aberdeen before 1800: A New History (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2002)

290 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Devereaux, Simon and Griffiths, Paul, Penal Practice and Culture, 1500-1900 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2004) Devine, T. M., Scotland’s Empire, 1600-1815 (London: Penguin, 2004) Dimmock, Spencer, ‘Urban and Commercial Networks in the Later Middle Ages: Chepstow, Severnside and the Ports of Southern Wales’, Archaeologia Cambrensis, 152 (2003), pp. 53-68 Dodds, Ben and Liddy, Christian, eds., Commercial Activity, Markets and Entrepreneurs in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2011) Doelman, James, James I and the Religious Culture of England (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000) Donagan, Barbara, War in England, 1642-1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) Doran, Susan and Richardson, Glen, Tudor England and its Neighbours (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education UK, 2005) Duffy, Eamon, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400-c.1580 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992) Dugaw, Diane, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014) Eales, Jacqueline, Puritans and Roundheads: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) Easton, Fraser, ‘Gender’s Two Bodies: Women Warriors, Female Husbands and Plebian Life’, Past and Present, 180 (2003), pp. 131-74 Earle, Peter, ‘The Female Labour Market in London in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries’, Economic History Review, 42 (1989), pp. 329-30 Earle, Peter, A City Full of People: Men and Women of London, 1650-1750 (London: Methuen, 1994) Earle, Peter, Sailors: English Merchant Seamen 1650-1775 (London: Methuen, 1998) Earle, Peter, The Pirate Wars (London: Methuen, 2004) Edgar, Andrew, Old Church Life in Scotland: Lectures on Kirk-Session and Presbytery Records (Paisley & London: Alexander Gardner, 1885) Edwards, Peter, Dealing in Death: The Arms Trade and the British Civil Wars, 1638-52 (Stroud: Sutton, 2000) Elliott, J. H., Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006) Emden, A. B., ‘Graffiti of Mediaeval Ships from the church of St Margaret’s-at-Cliffe, Kent’, Mariner’s Mirror, 8 (1922), pp. 167-173 Endsor, Richard, ‘The Women of Restoration Deptford’, Transactions of the Naval Dockyard Society, 8 (2012), pp. 77-86

Selec t Bibliogr aphy

291

Farnell, J. E., ‘The Navigation Act of 1651, the First Dutch War, and the London Merchant Community’, Economic History Review, 16 (1963), pp. 439-54 Field, J. V. and James, Frank A. G. L., eds., Renaissance and Revolution: Humanists, Scholars, Craftsmen and Natural Philosophers in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) Finamore, Daniel, ed., Maritime History As World History: New Perspectives on Maritime History and Nautical Archaeology (Gainsville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 2004) Fincham, Kenneth, ed., The Early Stuart Church, 1603-1642 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 1993) Fincham, Kenneth and Lake, Peter, eds., Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2006) Fincham, Kenneth, and Tyacke, Nicholas, Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547-c.1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) Fissel, Mark Charles, ed., War and Government in Britain, 1598-1650 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991) Flavin, Susan, and Jones, Evan T., eds., Bristol’s Trade with Ireland and the Continent, 1503-1601. The Evidence of the Exchequer Customs Accounts (Bristol: Four Courts Press, 2009) Floyd-Wilson, Mary, ‘Hamlet, the Pirate’s Son’, Early Modern Literary Studies, Special Issue 19 (2009), 12.1-11. http://purl.oclc.org/emls/si-19/floyhaml.html Ford, J. D., ‘William Welwod’s Treatises on Maritime Law’, Journal of Legal History, 34 (2013), pp. 172-210 Foucault, M., Discipline and Punish (New York, Vintage Books, 1995) Fry, Michael, The Scottish Empire (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2001) Frykman, Niklas, Anderson, Clare, van Voss, Lex Heerma and Rediker, Marcus, ‘Mutiny and Maritime Radicalism in the Age of Revolution: An Introduction’, International Review of Social History, 58 (2013), pp. 1-14. Fuchs, Barbara, ‘Faithless Empires: Pirates, Renegadoes and the English Nation’, English Literary History, 67 (2000), pp. 45-69 Fuller, Mary C., “Writing the Long-Distance Voyage: Hakluyt’s Circumnavigators”, Huntington Library Quarterly, 70 (2007), pp. 48-59 Fulton, Thomas Wemyss, The Sovereignty of the Sea (London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1911) Fumerton, Patricia, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) Fury, Cheryl A., Tides in the Affairs of Men: The Social History of Elizabethan Seamen, 1580-1603 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002)

292 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Fury, Cheryl, A., ed., Social History of English Seamen, 1485-1649 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2012) Fury, Cheryl, A. ‘The First English East India Company Voyage, 1601-1603: The Human Dimension’, International Journal of Maritime History, 24 (2012), pp. 69-96 Fury, Cheryl A., ‘Good Wills Hunting: Tracking Down the Men of the First East India Company Voyage, 1601-3”, International Journal of Maritime History, 27 (2015), pp. 506-27 Fury, Cheryl A., ‘“To Sett Downe all the Villanie”: Accounts of the Sodomy Trial on the Fourth East India Company Voyage (1609)’, Mariner’s Mirror, 102 (2016), pp. 74-80 Fury, Cheryl A., ed., The Social History of English Seamen, 1650-1815 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2017). Fusaro, Maria and Polónia, Amélia, eds., Maritime History as Global History (St John’s, Newfoundland: International Maritime Economic History Association, 2010) Fusaro, Maria, Allaire, Bernard, Blakemore, Richard J. and Vanneste, Tijl, eds., Law, Labour, and Empire: Comparative Perspectives on Seafarers, c. 1500-1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015). Gajda, Alexandra, The Earl of Essex and Late Elizabethan Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) Gallup-Díaz, Ignacio, The Door of the Seas and Key to the Universe: Indian Politics and Imperial Rivalry in the Darién, 1640-1750 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) Games, Alison, ‘Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities’, American Historical Review, 111 (2006), pp. 741-57 Gentles, Ian, Morrill, John and Worden, Blair, eds., Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) Ghobrial, John-Paul A., ‘The Secret Life of Elias of Babylon and the Uses of Global Microhistory’, Past & Present, 222 (2014), pp. 51-93 Gilbert, Arthur, ‘Buggery and the British Navy, 1700-1861’, Journal of Social History, 10 (1976), pp. 72-98 Gill, Ellen, Naval Families, War and Duty in Britain, 1740-1820 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2016) Gleeson, David T., ed., The Irish in the Atlantic World (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010) Glete, Jan, Warfare at Sea, 1500-1650: Maritime Conflicts and the Transformation of Europe (London: Routledge, 2000) Goodman, Anthony, John of Gaunt: The Exercise of Princely Power in FourteenthCentury Europe (London: Longman, 1992).

Selec t Bibliogr aphy

293

Gorn, Elliott J., ‘Seafaring Engendered: A Comment on Gender and Seafaring’, International Journal of Maritime History, 4 (1992), pp. 219-25 Gorski, Richard, ed., Roles of the Sea in Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2012) Gould, Eliga H. ‘Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery’, American Historical Review, 112 (2007), pp. 764-86 Gowing, Laura, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) Graham, Aaron, and Walsh, Patrick, eds., The British Fiscal-Military States, 1660-c.1783 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016) Gras, Norman, S. B., The Early English Customs System; a Documentary Study of the Institutional and Economical History of the Customs from the Thirteenth to the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1918) Gray, Todd, Rowe, Margery and Erskine, Audrey, Tudor and Stuart Devon: The Common Estate and Government, Essays Presented to Joyce Youings (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1992) Greiling, Meredith, ‘The Schip Model in Aberdeen; Profane Sculpture in a Sacred Space’, Sculpture Journal, 24 (2015), pp. 33-50 Grosjean, Alexia, and Murdoch, Steve, eds., Scottish Communities Abroad in the Early Modern Period (Leiden: Brill, 2005) Guilmartin, John F., ‘The Military Revolution in Warfare at Sea during the Early Modern Era: Technological Origins, Operational Outcomes and Strategic Consequences’, Journal for Maritime Research, 13 (2011), pp. 129-37 Guy, Richard, ‘Calamitous Voyages: The Social Space of Shipwreck and Mutiny Narratives in the Dutch East India Company’, Itinerario, 39 (2015), pp. 117-40 Hair, P. E. H., ‘The Experience of the Sixteenth-Century English Voyages to Guinea’, Mariner’s Mirror, 83 (1997), pp. 3-13 Hair, P. E. H., ‘Attitudes to Africans in English Primary Sources on Guinea up to 1650’, History in Africa, 26 (1999), pp. 43-68 Hair, P. E. H. and Alsop, J.D., English Seamen and Traders in Guinea, 1553-1565: The New Evidence of Their Wills (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992) Hall, A. Rupert, ‘Engineering and the Scientific Revolution’, Technology and Culture, 2 (1961), pp. 333-41 Hammer, Paul E. J., ‘Myth-Making: Politics, Propaganda and the Capture of Cadiz in 1596’, Historical Journal, 40 (1997), pp. 621-42 Hamilton, Douglas, ‘Private Enterprise and Public Service: Naval Contracting in the Caribbean, 1720-50’, Journal for Maritime Research, 6 (2004), pp. 37-64 Hanna, Mark, Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015)

294 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Harding, Richard, Modern Naval History: Debates and Prospects (London: Bloomsbury, 2016) Harris, G. G., The Trinity House of Deptford, 1514-1660 (London: Athlone Press, 1969) Hart, Jonathan, Comparing Empires: European Colonialism from Portuguese Expansion to the Spanish-American War (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003) Hart, Vaughan, ‘Inigo Jones, “Vitruvius Britannicus”’, Architectural History, 53 (2010), pp. 1-39 Hart, Vaughan, Inigo Jones: The Architect of Kings (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011) Hathaway, Jane, ed., Rebellion, Repression, Reinvention: Mutiny in Comparative Perspective (Westport: Praeger, 2001) Hattendorf, John B. and Unger, Richard W. eds., War at Sea in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2003) Hebb, David Delison, Piracy and the English Government, 1616-1642 (Aldershot: Scolar Press) Hendricks, Margo, and Parker, Patricia, Women, “Race”, and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. (London: Routledge, 1994) Henke, Robert and Nicholson, Eric, eds., Transnational Mobilities in Early Modern Theater (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014) Herrup, Cynthia B., ‘Law and Morality in Seventeenth-Century England’, Past & Present, 106 (1985), pp. 102-23 Hidalgo, Dennis R., ‘“To Get Rich for Our Homeland”: The Company of Scotland and the Colonization of the Isthmus of Darien’, Colonial Latin American Historical Review, 10 (2001), pp. 311-50 Holmes, Clive, Goodare, Julian, Cust, Richard and Kishlansky, Mark, ‘Debate: Charles I: A Case of Mistaken Identity’, Past and Present, 205 (2009), pp. 175-237 Holstun, James, ed., Pamphlet Wars: Prose in the English Revolution (London, Routledge, 1992) Hopkins, Lisa, Drama and the Succession to the Crown, 1561-1633 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011) Hoppen, K. Theodore, ‘The Nature of the Early Royal Society: Part I’, British Journal for the History of Science, 9 (1976), pp. 1-24 Hopper, Andrew, Turncoats and Renegadoes: Changing Sides During the English Civil Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) Houlbrooke, Ralph, ed., Death, Ritual, and Bereavement (London: Routledge, 1989) Houghton, Walter E., ‘The History of Trades: Its Relation to Seventeenth-Century Thought,’ Journal of the History of Ideas, 2 (1941), pp. 33-60 Howard-Hill, T. H., Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More: Essays on the Play and its Shakespearian Interests (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) Howarth, David, Art and Patronage in the Caroline Courts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)

Selec t Bibliogr aphy

295

Howell, Colin and Twomey, Richard, eds., Jack Tar in History: Essays in the History of Maritime Life and Labour (Fredericton, New Brunswick: Acadiensis Press, 1991) Hubbard, Eleanor, City Women: Money, Sex, and the Social Order in Early Modern London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) Hubbard, Eleanor, ‘Sailors and the Early Modern British Empire: Labor, Nation, and Identity at Sea’, History Compass, 14 (2016), pp. 348-58 Hufton, Olwen, The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, 1500-1800 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996) Hughes, Ann, Gender and the English Revolution (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012) Hughes, Matthew and Philpott, William J., eds, Palgrave Advances in Modern Military History (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006) Hulme, Peter and Sherman, William H., eds., ‘The Tempest’ and Its Travels (London: Reaktion, 2000) Hurl-Eamon, Jennine, ‘Insights into Plebeian Marriage: Soldiers, Sailors, and their Wives in the Old Bailey Proceedings’, London Journal, 30 (2005), pp. 22-38 Hutchinson, Robert, Elizabeth’s Spy Master (London: Phoenix, 2006) Iliffe, Robert, ‘Foreign Bodies: Travel, Empire, and Early Royal Society of London. Part II. The Land of Experimental Knowledge’ Canadian Journal of History, 34 (1999), pp. 23-50 Irving, Sarah, Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008) Ittersum, Martine Julia van, ‘Mare Liberum versus the Propriety of the Seas? The Debate between Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) and William Welwood (1552-1624) and its Impact on Anglo-Scotto-Dutch Fishery Disputes in the Second Decade of the Seventeenth Century’, Edinburgh Law Review, 10 (2006), pp. 239-76 James, Alan, The Navy and Government in Early Modern France, 1572-1661 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2004) James, Alan, Zaforteza, Carlos Alfaro and Murfett, Malcolm, European Navies and the Conduct of War (London: Routledge, 2018). Jamieson, Aland G., ed., A People of the Sea: The Maritime History of the Channel Islands, (London: Methuen, 1986) Jones, James Rees, The Anglo-Dutch Wars of the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 2013) Jorrand, Sophie, ‘From “The Doors of the Seas” to a Watery Debacle: The Sea, Scottish Colonization, and the Darien Scheme, 1696-1700’, Études Écossaises, 19 (2017), pp. 1-14 Jowitt, Claire, ‘Piracy and Politics in Heywood and Rowley’s Fortune by Land and Sea (1607-9)’, Renaissance Studies, 16 (2002), pp. 217-33 Jowitt, Claire, ed., Pirates? The Politics of Plunder, 1550-1650 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007)

296 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Jowitt, Claire, The Culture of Piracy, 1580-1630: English Literature and Seaborne Crime (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010) Jowitt, Claire, ‘Shakespeare’s Pirates: The Politics of Seaborne Crime’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 148 (2012), pp. 1-18 Jowitt, Claire, ‘“To Sleep, Perchance to Dream”: The Politics of Travel in the 1630s’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 44 (2014), pp. 249-64 Jowitt, Claire, ‘The Hero and the Sea: Sea Captains and Their Discontents’, XVII-XVIII Revue de la Société d’Études Anglo-Américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe Siècles, 74 (2017), http://journals.openedition.org/1718/888 Jowitt, Claire, Lambert, Craig, and Mentz, Steve, eds., The Routledge Companion to Marine and Maritime Worlds 1400-1800 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020). Jowitt, Claire and McInnis, David, eds., Travel and Drama in Early Modern England: The Journeying Play (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) Kaspersen, Søren, and Haastrup, Ulla, Images of Cult and Devotion: Function and Reception of Christian Images in Medieval and Post-Medieval Europe (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004) Kaufmann, Miranda, Black Tudors. The Untold Story (London: Oneworld, 2017) Kelsey, Harry, Sir Francis Drake: The Queen’s Pirate (New Haven: Yale, 1998) Kenny, Kevin, ed., Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) Killingray, David, Lincoln, Margarette and Rigby, Nigel, eds., Maritime Empires: British Imperial Maritime Trade in the Nineteenth Century (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2004) Kinkel, Sarah, Disciplining the Empire: Politics, Governance, and the Rise of the British Navy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018) Kirk, James, ‘Iconoclasm and Reform’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 24 (1992), pp. 366-83 Klein, Bernhard, ed., Fictions of the Sea: Critical Perspectives on the Ocean in British Literature and Culture (London: Routledge, 2002) Klein, Bernhard and Mackenthun, Gesa, eds., Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean (London: Routledge, 2004) Knight, Roger and Wilcox, Martin, Sustaining the Fleet, 1793-1815: War, the British Navy and the Contractor State (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2010) Knighton, C. S. and Loades, David, eds., Elizabethan Naval Administration (London: Navy Records Society, 2013) Kyle, Chris R., Theater of State: Parliament and Political Culture in Early Stuart England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012) Lambert, Andrew, Seapower States: Culture, Identity and Strategy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018)

Selec t Bibliogr aphy

297

Lambert, Craig L., ‘Henry V and the Crossing to France: Reconstructing Naval Operations for the Agincourt Campaign, 1415’, Journal of Medieval History, 43 (2017), pp. 24-39. Lambert, Craig L. and Baker, Gary P., ‘England’s Reserve Navy: The Ship Survey of 1572’ in The Navy Records Society. Published online January 2018: https://www.navyrecords.org.uk/magazine_posts/englands-reserve-navy-the-ship-survey-of-1572/. Lambert, David, Martins, Luciana and Ogborn, Miles, ‘Currents, Visions and Voyages: Historical Geographies of the Sea’, Journal of Historical Geography, 32 (2006), pp. 479-93 Lammers, Cornelis J., ‘Mutiny in Comparative Perspective’, International Review of Social History, 48 (2003), pp. 473-82 Lammers, Cornelis J., ‘Strikes and Mutinies: A Comparative Study of Organizational Conflicts between Rulers and Ruled’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 14 (1969), pp. 558-72 Land, Isaac, War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor, 1750-1850 (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009) Langelüddecke, Henrik, ‘“I Find All Men & My Officers All Soe Unwilling”: The Collection of Ship Money, 1635-1640’, Journal of British Studies, 46 (2007), pp. 509-42 Lavery, Brian, ed., Shipboard Life and Organisation, 1731-1815 (Aldershot: Navy Records Society, 1998) Law, John, ed., Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Books, 1986) Law, Robin, ‘The First Scottish Guinea Company, 1634-9’, Scottish Historical Review, 76 (1997), pp. 185-202 Lawson, Philip, The East India Company: A History (London: Routledge, 1993) LeJacq, Seth Stein, ‘Buggery’s travels: Royal Navy sodomy on ship and shore in the long eighteenth century’, Journal for Maritime Research, 17 (2015), pp. 103-16 Lemire, Beverly, ‘“Men of the World”: British Mariners, Consumer Practice, and Material Culture in an Era of Global Trade, c. 1660-1800’, Journal of British Studies, 54 (2015), pp. 288-319 Lemire, Beverly, ‘A Question of Trousers: Seafarers, Masculinity and Empire in the Shaping of British Male Dress’, Cultural and Social History, 31 (2016), pp. 1-23 Lemire, Beverly, Global Trade and the Transformation of Consumer Cultures. The Material World Remade, c. 1500-1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) Lenman, Bruce, England’s Colonial Wars: 1550-1688. Conflicts, Empire and National Identity (Pearson: Harlow, 2001). Levack, Brian P., The Formation of the British State: England, Scotland and the Union, 1603-1707 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987)

298 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Lewis, Michael, The Hawkins Dynasty: Three Generations of a Tudor Family (London: Allen and Unwin 1969) Lincoln, Margarette, Representing the Royal Navy: British Sea Power, 1750-1815 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002) Lincoln, Margarette, Naval Wives and Mistresses, 1750-1815 (London: National Maritime Museum Publishing, 2007) Lincoln, Margarette, British Pirates and Society, 1680-1730 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014) Loades, David, The Tudor Navy: An Administrative, Political and Military History (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1992) Loades, David, England’s Maritime Empire: Seapower, Commerce, and Policy, 14901690 (London: Longman, 2000) Loades, David, The Making of the Elizabethan Navy, 1540-1590: From the Solent to the Armada (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2009) Lockyer, Roger, The Early Stuarts: A Political History of England, 1603-1642 (London: Longman, 1989) Lucassen, Jan and Unger, Richard W., ‘Labour Productivity in Ocean Shipping, 1450-1875’, International Journal of Maritime History, 12 (2000), pp. 127-41 Lynch, William, Solomon’s Child: Method in the Early Royal Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) Lynn II, John A., Women, Armies and Warfare in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) Lythe, S. G. E and Butt, J., An Economic History of Scotland, 1100-1939 (Glasgow: Blackie, 1975) MacDonald, Michael and Murphy, Terence R., Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) Macinnes, A. I., Riis, T. and Pederson, F. G., eds., Ships, Guns and Bibles in the North Sea and Baltic States, c.1350-1700 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000) Macinnes, Allan I., Union and Empire: The Making of the United Kingdom in 1707 (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2007) Macinnes, Allan I. and Hamilton, Douglas J., eds., Jacobitism, Enlightenment and Empire, 1680-1820 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014) Macinnes, Allan I. and Williamson, Arthur H., eds., Shaping the Stuart World, 1603-1714: The Atlantic Connection (Leiden: Brill, 2006) MacKenzie, John M., ‘Empire and National Identities: The Case of Scotland’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 9 (1998), pp. 215-31 MacKenzie, John M., ‘Irish, Scottish, Welsh and English Worlds? A Four‐Nation Approach to the History of the British Empire’, History Compass, 6 (2008), pp. 1244-63 MacKenzie, John M. and Devine, T. M., eds., Scotland and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Selec t Bibliogr aphy

299

MacKillop, Andrew, ‘Accessing Empire: Scotland, Europe, Britain, and the Asia Trade, 1695–c. 1750’, Itinerario, 29 (2005), pp. 7-30 MacKillop, Andrew, ‘A Union for Empire? Scotland, the English East India Company and the British Union’, Scottish Historical Review, 87 (2008), pp. 116-34 MacLean, Gerald and Matar, Nabil, Britain and the Islamic World, 1558-1713 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) Mack, John, The Sea: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion Books, 2011). MacMillan, Ken, ‘John Dee’s “Brytanici Imperii Limites”’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 64 (2001), pp. 151-9 Mancall, Peter C., Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson (New York: Basic Books, 2009) Marks, Richard, Image and Devotion in Late Medieval England (Stroud: Sutton, 2004) Marshall, P. J., ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire: Vol. II: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) Marzagalli, Silvia and Bonin, Hubert, eds., Négoce, Ports et Océans XVIe-XXe Siècles: Mélanges Offerts à Paul Butel (Pessac: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux 2003) Massarella, Derek, ‘“& Thus Ended the Buisinisse”: A Buggery Trial on the East India Company Ship Mary in 1636’, Mariner’s Mirror, 103 (2017), pp. 417-30 Matar, Nabil, ‘Wives, Captive Husbands and Turks: The First Women Petitioners in Caroline England’, Explorations in Renaissance Culture, 23 (1997), pp. 111-29 Matar, Nabil, Islam in Britain, 1558-1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) Matar, Nabil, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) Matar, Nabil, ‘The Barbary Corsairs, King Charles I and the Civil War’, The Seventeenth Century, 16 (2001), pp. 239-58 Matar, Nabil, Britain and Barbary, 1589-1689 (Gainsville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 2005) Matar, Nabil, British Captives from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1563-1760 (Leiden: Brill, 2014) Mate, Mavis, Trade and Economic Developments, 1450-1550: The Experience of Kent, Surry, and Sussex (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2006). Mathieson, Charlotte, ed., Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1650-Present (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) Maxwell, Baldwin, Studies in Beaumont, Fletcher and Massinger (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 1939) McCarthy, Angela, ed., A Global Clan: Scottish Migrant Networks and Identities Since the Eighteenth Century (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2006). McCarthy, Penny, ‘“It was not Tobacco, Stupefied my Braine”: The Tobacco Controversy of 1602’, Modern Language Review, 110 (2015), 631-648. McDermott, James, Martin Frobisher: Elizabethan Privateer (New Haven: Yale, 2001)

300 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

McDonald, Russ, ed., Shakespeare Reread: The Texts in New Contexts (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) McGilvary, George K., East India Patronage and the British State: The Scottish Elite and Politics in the Eighteenth Century (London: Tauris Academic, 2008) McIntosh, Majorie Kkenisto, Working Women in English Society, 1300-1620 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) McLaren, Ann, ‘The Quest for a King’, Journal of British Studies, 41 (2002), pp. 259-90 McLeod, Catherine, The Lost Prince: The Life and Death of Henry Stuart (London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 2012) McLoughlin, Claire, ‘The Control of Trade in Scotland during the Reigns of James VI and Charles I’, Northern Studies, 45 (2013), pp. 46-67 McLoughlin, Claire, ‘Scottish Commercial Contacts with the Iberian World, 15801730’ (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of St Andrews, 2014) McMillan, William, ‘Worship of the Scottish Reformed Church, 1550-1638’ (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1925) McShane, Angela, ‘Recruiting Citizens for Soldiers in Seventeenth-Century English Ballads’, Journal of Early Modern History, 15 (2011), pp. 105-37 Mentz, Steve, At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (London: Continuum, 2009) Mijers, Esther, ‘Between Empires and Cultures: Scots in New Netherland and New York’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 33 (2013), pp. 165-95 Milford, Elizabeth, ‘The Navy at Peace: The Activities of the English Jacobean Navy, 1603-1618’, Mariner’s Mirror, 76 (1990), pp. 23-36 Miller, David Philip, ‘“The Usefulness of Natural Philosophy”: The Royal Society and the Culture of Practical Utility in the Later Eighteenth Century’, British Journal for the History of Science, 32 (1999), pp. 185-201 Miller, Robert William Henry, ‘Sea, Ship and Seamen in Early Christian Literature’, Mariner’s Mirror, 96 (2010), pp. 418-29 Millstone, Noah, Manuscript Circulation and the Invention of Politics in Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) Milton, Anthony, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought: 1600-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) Mochizuki, Mia M., The Netherlandish Image after Iconoclasm, Material Religion in the Dutch Golden Age, 1566-1672 (London: Ashgate, 2008) Morgan, David, The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) Morgan, Philip D. and Hawkins, Sean, eds., Black Experience and the Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) Morieux, Renaud, The Channel. England, France and the Construction of a Maritime Border in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Selec t Bibliogr aphy

301

Morris, Derek and Cozens, Ken, ‘Mariners Ashore in the Eighteenth Century: The Role of Boarding-house Keepers and Victuallers’, Mariner’s Mirror, 103 (2017), pp. 431-49 Muir, Kenneth, The Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Routledge, 2005). Mullan, David George, Protestant Piety in Early-Modern Scotland: Letters, Lives and Covenants, 1650-1712 (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 2008). Munro-Landi, Morag J., ed., L’Écosse et ses Doubles: Ancien Monde, Nouveau Monde (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010) Murdoch, Alexander, British History 1660-1832: National Identity and Local Culture (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998) Murdoch, Alexander, Scotland and America (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009) Murdoch, Steve, ‘The Good, the Bad and the Anonymous: A Preliminary Survey of Scots in the Dutch East Indies 1612-1707’, Northern Scotland, 22 (2002), 63-76 Murdoch, Steve, Network North: Scottish Kin, Commercial and Covert Associations in Northern Europe, 1603-1746 (Leiden: Brill, 2006) Murdoch, Steve, The Terror of the Seas? Scottish Maritime Warfare 1513-1713 (Leiden: Brill, 2010) Murdoch, Steve and Mackillop, Andrew, eds., Fighting for Identity: Scottish Military Experience, c. 1550-1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2002) Murphy, Elaine, ‘Atrocities at Sea and the Treatment of Prisoners of War by the Parliamentary Navy in Ireland, 1641– 1649’, Historical Journal, 53 (2012), pp. 21-37 Nance, Robert Morton, Sailing-Ship Models: A Selection from European and American Collections (London: Halton & Truscott Smith, 1924) Nash, Peter, ‘The Maritime Shipping Trade of Scarborough, 1550 to 1750’, Northern History, 49 (2012), pp. 202-22 Neufeld, Matthew, and Wickham, Blaine, ‘The State, the People and the Care of Sick and Injured Sailors in Late Stuart England’, Social History of Medicine, 28, (2014), pp. 45–63 Newitt, M. D. D., ‘The East India Company in the Western Indian Ocean in the Early Seventeenth Century’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 14 (1986), pp. 5-33 Nicholls, Mark, and Williams, Penry, Sir Walter Ralegh in Life and Legend (London: Continuum, 2011). Norton, Matthew, ‘Classification and Coercion: The Destruction of Piracy in the English Maritime System’, American Journal of Sociology, 119 (2014), pp. 1537-75 Norton, Matthew, ‘Temporality, Isolation, and Violence in the Early Modern English Maritime World’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 48 (2014), pp. 37-66 O’Brien, Patrick K., ‘Fiscal and Financial Preconditions for the Rise of British Naval Hegemony 1485-1815’, London School of Economics, Economic History Department Working Papers, 91/05 (2005), pp. 15-19

302 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Ochs, Kathleen H., ‘The Royal Society of London’s History of Trades Programme: An Early Episode in Applied Science’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 39 (1985), pp. 129-58 O’Hara, Glen, ‘“The Sea is Swinging into View’: Modern British Maritime History in a Globalised World’, English Historical Review, 124 (2009), pp. 1109-34 Ogborn, Miles, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) O’Neill, Timothy, Merchants and Mariners in Medieval Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1987) Oosterhoff, J., ‘Sodomy at Sea at the Cape of Good Hope during the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Homosexuality, 16, (1989), pp. 229-35 Oppenheim, Michael, A History of the Administration of the Royal Navy and of Merchant Shipping in Relation to the Navy: from 1509-1640 (London: J. Lane, 1896) Oppenheim, Michael, ‘Maritime History’, in The Victoria History of the County of Kent, ed. W. Page (London: Archibald Constable, 1926), pp. 243-369 Ormrod, David, and Gijs Rommelse, Anglo-Dutch Conflict in the Seventeenth Century, 1652-1689, ed. by David Ormrod and Gijs Rommelse (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2020) Orrell, John, ‘The London Court Stage in the Savoy Correspondence, 1613-1675’, Theatre Research, 4 (1979), pp. 79-94 Ó Siochrú, Micheál, ‘Atrocity, Codes of Conduct and the Irish in the British Civil Wars 1641-1653’, Past & Present, 195 (2007), pp. 55-86 Pagden, Anthony, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c.1500-c.1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) Pan-Montojo, Juan and Pedersen, Frederik, Communities in European History: Representations, Jurisdictions, Conflicts (Pisa: Pisa University Press, 2007) Park, Katherine and Daston, Lorraine, eds., The Cambridge History of Science: Volume 3, Early Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) Parker, Geoffrey, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) Parker, Geoffrey, The Grand Strategy of Philip II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) Paine, Lincoln, The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (London: Atlantic Books, 2013) Peacey, Jason, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) Pearson, M. N., The World of the Indian Ocean, 1500-1800 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2005) Perrault, Melanie, Early English Encounters in Russia, West Africa and the Americas, 1530-1614 (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004) Petley, Christer and McAleer, John, eds., The Royal Navy and the British Atlantic World, c. 1750-1820 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)

Selec t Bibliogr aphy

303

Pettigrew, William A., Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672-1752 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013) Pestana, Carla Gardina, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640-1661 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2004) Phillpotts, Christopher John, ‘John of Gaunt and English Policy Towards France 1389-1395’, Journal of Medieval History, 16 (1990), pp. 363-86 Pietschmann, Horst, ed., Atlantic History: History of the Atlantic System, 1580-1830 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002) Platt, Colin, Medieval Southampton: The Port and Trading Communities A.D. 1000-1600 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973) Plowden, Alison, Women All on Fire; The Women of the English Civil War (Stroud: The History Press, 2004) Poll, Lotte van de, The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) Pollitt, R. L., ‘Contingency Planning and the Defeat of the Spanish Armada’, American Neptune, 44 (1984), pp. 25-32 Prins, A. H. J., In Peril on the Sea: Marine Votive Paintings in the Maltese Islands (Valletta: Said International, 1989). Purkiss, Diane, Literature, Gender and Politics During the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005) Purver, Margery, The Royal Society: Concept and Creation (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1967) Quintrell, B. W., ‘Charles I and His Navy in the 1630s’, The Seventeenth Century, 3 (1988), pp. 159-79 Ravelhofer, Barbara, The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) Ravelhofer, Barbara, ed., James Shirley and Early Modern Theatre: New Critical Perspectives, (London and New York: Routledge, 2017) Raymond, Joad, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) Raven, Neil, Lane, Penelope and Snell, K. D. M., eds., Women, Work and Wages in England, 1600-1850 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2004) Redding, Benjamin W. D., ‘Divided by La Manche: Naval Enterprise and Maritime Revolution in Early Modern England and France, 1545-1642’ (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Warwick, 2016) Redford, Duncan, ed., Maritime History and Identity: The Sea and Culture in the Modern World (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014) Rediker, Marcus, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)

304 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Rediker, Marcus, ‘The Common Seaman in the Histories of Capitalism and the Working Class’, International Journal of Maritime History, 1 (1989), pp. 337-57 Reinke-Williams, Tim, Women, Work and Sociability in Early Modern London (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014) Robert, Lissa, Schaffer, Simon and Dear, Peter, eds., The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the late Renaissance to early Industrialisation (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 2007). Robertson, John, ed., A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) Robinson, Gregory, ‘A Forgotten Life of Sir Francis Drake’, Mariner’s Mirror, 7 (1921), pp. 10-18 Rodger, N. A. M., The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (London: HarperCollins, 1986) Rodger, N. A. M., The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, Volume 1: 660-1649 (London: Penguin, 2004) Rodger, N. A. M., The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, Volume 2: 1649-1815 (London: W. W. Norton & co, 2004). Rodger, N. A. M., ‘Queen Elizabeth and the Myth of Sea-Power in English History’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 14 (2004), pp. 153-74 Rodger, N. A. M., ‘From the “Military Revolution” to the “Fiscal-Naval State”’, Journal for Maritime Research, 13 (2011), pp. 119-28 Roding, Juliette and Voss, Lex Heerma van, eds., The North Sea and Culture, 1550-1800 (Larenseweg: Verloren, 1996 Rommelse, Gijs, ‘Introduction: The Military Revolution at Sea’, Journal for Maritime Research, 13 (2011), pp. 117-8 Rommelse, Gijs, ‘An Early Modern Naval Revolution? the Relationship between “Economic Reason of State” and Maritime Warfare’, Journal for Maritime Research, 13 (2011), pp. 138-50 Rooseboom, Matthijs. P., The Scottish Staple in the Netherlands (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1910) Rorke, Martin, ‘The Scottish Herring Trade’, Scottish Historical Review, 84 (2005), pp. 149-65 Rorke, Martin, ‘Women Overseas Traders in Sixteenth-Century Scotland’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 25 (2005), pp. 81-96 Rose, Susan, Medieval Naval Warfare, 1000-1500 (London: Routledge, 2002) Rose, Susan, The Medieval Sea (London: Bloomsbury, 2007) Rose, Susan, England’s Medieval Navy, 1066-1509: Ships, Men & Warfare (Barnsley: Seaforth, 2013). Royen, Paul C. van, Bruijn, Jaap R. and Lucassen, Jan, eds.,“Those Emblems of Hell?”: European Sailors and the Maritime Labour Market, 1570-1870 (St John’s, Newfoundland: International Maritime Economic History Association, 1997)

Selec t Bibliogr aphy

305

Saenz-Cambra, Concepción, ‘Scotland and Philip II, 1580-1598: Politics, Religion, Diplomacy and Lobbying’ (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2003). Salt, P., ‘Sir Simonds D’Ewes and the Levying of the Ship Money, 1635-1640’, Historical Journal, 37 (June 1994), pp. 253-287. Sanders, Julie, ‘Caroline Salon Culture and Female Agency: The Countess of Carlisle, Henrietta Maria, and Public Theatre’, Theatre Journal, 52 (2000), pp. 449-64 Sandrock, Kirsten, ‘The Legacy of Scotland’s Colonial Schemes: From the 1620s until Now’, Medievalia et Humanistica, 41 (2016), pp. 231-46 Saul, Anthony, ‘Great Yarmouth in the Fourteenth Century’ (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Oxford, 1975) Saul, Anthony, ‘Great Yarmouth and the Hundred Years War in the Fourteenth Century’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 52 (1979), pp. 105-15 Scammell, Geoffrey V., ‘English Merchant Shipping at the End of the Middle Ages: Some East Coast Evidence’, Economic History Review, 13 (1961), pp. 327-41 Scammell, Geoffrey V., ‘Manning the English Merchant Service in the Sixteenth Century’, in Mariner’s Mirror. 56 (1970), pp. 131-54 Scammell, Geoffrey. V., Seafaring, Sailors and Trade, 1450-1750: Studies in British and European Maritime and Imperial History (Aldershot: Variorum, 2003) Schaffer, Simon, ‘Newton on the Beach: The Information Order of Principia Mathematica’, History of Science, 49 (2009), pp. 243-76 Schwartz, Stuart B., ed., Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting & Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans & Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) Scott, Jonathan, When the Waves Ruled Britannia: Geography and Political Identities, 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) Senior, W., ‘Drake and the Suit of John Doughty’, Mariner’s Mirror, 7 (1921), pp. 291-7 Sephton, James H., Sovereign of the Seas: The Seventeenth-Century Warship (Stroud: Amberley, 2011) Sharpe, J. A., ‘“Last Dying Speeches”: Religion, Ideology and Public Execution in Seventeenth-Century England’, Past & Present, 107 (1985), pp. 144-67 Sharpe, Kevin, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) Sharpe, Kevin, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) Sherman, William H., The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995) Shohet, Lauren, Reading Masques: The English Masque (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) Simon, Rebecca A., ‘The Problem and Potential of Piracy: Legal Changes and Emerging Ideas of Colonial Autonomy in the Early Modern British Atlantic, 1670-1730’, Journal for Maritime Research, 18 (2016), pp. 123-37

306 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Siskin, Clifford, System: The Shaping of Modern Knowledge (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2016). Siskin, Clifford and Warner, William, This is Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010) Smith, David L., A History of the Modern British Isles, 1603-1714: The Double Crown (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) Smith, Edmond, ‘“Canaanising Madagascar”: Africa in English Imperial Imagination, 1635-1650’, Itinerario, 39 (2015), pp. 277-98 Smith, Edmond J., ‘Reporting and Interpreting Legal Violence in Asia: The East India Company’s Printed Accounts of Torture, 1603–24’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 46 (2018), pp. 603-26 Smith, Edmond J., ‘The Global Interests of London’s Commercial Community, 1599-1625: Investment in the East India Company’, Economic History Review, 71 (2018), pp. 1118-46 Smout, T. C., Scottish Trade on the Eve of Union: 1660-1707 (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1963) Smyth, Jim, The Making of the United Kingdom, 1660-1800: State, Religion and Identity in Britain and Ireland (Harlow: Longman, 2001) Sobecki, Sebastian, The Sea and Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008) Spicer, Andrew, Calvinist Churches in Early Modern Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007) Stark, Suzanne, Female Tars: Women Aboard Ship in the Age of Sail (London: Pimlico 1998) Starkey, David J., British Privateering Enterprise in the Eighteenth Century (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1990) Starkey, David J., ‘Voluntaries and Sea Robbers: A Review of the Academic Literature on Privateering, Corsairing, Buccaneering and Piracy’, Mariner’s Mirror, 97 (2011), pp. 127-47 Starkey, David J., Reid, Chris and Ashcroft, Neil, eds., England’s Sea Fisheries: The Commercial Sea Fisheries of England and Wales since 1300 (London: Chatham Publishing, 2000) Steckley, George F., ‘Litigious Mariners: Wage Cases in the Early Seventeenth Century Admiralty Court’, Historical Journal, 42 (1999), pp. 315-45 Steinberg, Philip E., The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) Stern, Philip J., ‘Politics and Ideology in the Early East India Company-State: the Case of St Helena, 1673-1709’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 35 (2007), pp. 1-23 Stern, Philip J., ‘History and Historiography of the English East India Company: Past, Present and Future’, History Compass, 7 (2009), pp. 1146-80 Stern, Philip J., The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundation of the British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)

Selec t Bibliogr aphy

307

Steusloff, Wolfgang, ‘Kirchen-Schiffsmodelle im Wandel’, Deutsches Schiffahrtsarchiv, 23 (2000), pp. 489-502 Stone, Richard, ‘The Overseas Trade of Bristol before the Civil War’, International Journal of Maritime History, 23 (2011), pp. 211-39 Storrs, Christopher, The Resilience of the Spanish Monarchy, 1665-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) Stoyle, Mark, Soldiers and Strangers: An Ethnic History of the English Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002) Stoyle, Mark, ‘Give Mee a Souldier’s Coat’: Female Cross‐Dressing during the English Civil War’, History, 103 (2018), pp. 5-26 Stretton, Timothy and Kesselring, Krista J., Married Women and the Law: Coverture in England and the Common Law World (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013) Strong, Roy C., Britannia Triumphans: Inigo Jones, Rubens and Whitehall Palace (London: Thames and Hudson Press, 1980) Swales, Robin J. W., ‘The Ship Money Levy of 1628’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 50 (1977), pp. 164-76 Tallet, Frank and Trim, D. J. B., eds., European Warfare, 1350-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) Taylor, Duncan, ‘The Maritime Trade of the Smaller Bristol Channel Ports in the Sixteenth Century’, (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Bristol, 2009) Thomas, Courtney, ‘“Not Having God Before his Eyes”: Bestiality in Early Modern England’, The Seventeenth Century, 26 (2011), pp. 149-73 Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971) Thomson, Janice E., Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994) Thornton, Helen, ‘Hugo Grotius and the Freedom of the Seas’, International Journal of Maritime History, 16 (2004), pp. 17-38 Thornton, Helen, ‘John Selden’s Response to Hugo Grotius: The Argument for Closed Seas’, International Journal of Maritime History, 18 (2006), pp. 105-128. Thornton, John, Africans and Africa in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400 to 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, sec. ed. 1998) Todd, Margo, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002) Trevisan, Sara, ‘Mildmay Fane’s Masque Raguaillo d’Oceano (1640): Royalism, Puritanism and Sea Voyages’, Renaissance Studies, 27 (2013), pp. 34-50 Trevor-Roper, Hugh R., Historical Essays (London: MacMillan, 1957)

308 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Trivellato, Francesca, ‘Is There a Future for Italian Microhistory in the Age of Global History?’, California Italian Studies, 2 (2011), https://escholarship.org/ uc/item/0z94n9hq (accessed 6 May 2019) Truxes, Thomas M., Irish-American Trade, 1660-1783 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) Tyacke, Nicholas, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) Unger, Richard W., The Ship in the Medieval Economy, 600-1600 (London: Croom Helm, 1980) Unger, Richard W., ‘The Tonnage of Europe’s Merchant Fleets, 1300-1500’, American Neptune, 52 (1992), pp. 247-61 Unger, Richard W., ed. Shipping and Economic Growth 1350-1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2011) Vaughan, Alden T., ‘William Strachey’s “True Reportory” and Shakespeare: A Closer Look at the Evidence’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 59 (2008), pp. 245-73 Vries, Jan de, and Freedberg, David, Art in History, History in Art: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Culture (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1991) Wade, J. F., ‘The Overseas Trade of Newcastle Upon Tyne in the Late Middle Ages’, Northern History, 30 (1994), pp. 32-48 Waters, David W., The Art of Navigation in England in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Times (London: Hollis and Carter, 1958) Watt, Douglas, The Price of Scotland: Darien, Union and the Wealth of the Nations (Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2006) Weaver, Jace, The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000-1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). Wernham, R. B., Before the Armada: The Emergence of the English Nation, 1485-1588 (New York: Norton, 1972) Westerdahl, Christer, ‘Medieval Carved Ship Images Found in Nordic Churches: The Poor Man’s Votive Ships?’, International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, 42 (2013), pp. 337-47 Wheeler, James S., ‘Prelude to Power: The Crisis of 1649 and the Foundation of English Naval Power’, Mariner’s Mirror, 81 (1995), pp. 148-55 Wheeler, James S., ‘Navy Finance, 1649-1660’, Historical Journal, 39 (1996), pp. 457-66 Wheeler, James S., The Making of a World Power: War and the Military Revolution in Seventeenth-century England (Stroud: Sutton, 1999) Wheeler, Roxann, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth Century British Culture (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000)

Selec t Bibliogr aphy

309

White, Peter, Predestination, Policy and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) Whiting, Amanda Jane, Women and Petitioning in the Seventeenth-Century English Revolution: Deference, Difference, and Dissent (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2015) Widfield, Rif, British Warships in the Age of Sail, 1603-1714: Design, Construction, Careers and Fate (Barnsley: Seaforth Publishing, 2004) Wigen, Kären, ‘Oceans of History’, American Historical Review, 111 (2006), pp. 717-21 Wiggins, Martin, British Drama 1533-1642: A Catalogue, 9 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011-) Williams, Caroline, ed., Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic World: People, Products, and Practices on the Move (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009) Williams, Neville J., The Maritime Trade of the East Anglian Ports, 1550-1590 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) Wilson, Peter H., Europe’s Tragedy: A History of the Thirty Years War (London: Penguin, 2009) Wit, Annette de, Leven, Werken en Geloven in Zeevarende Gemeenschappen: Schiedam, Maassluis en Ter Heijde in de Zeventiende Eeuw (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2008) Woolrych, Austin, Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) Worthen, Hannah, ‘Supplicants and Guardians: the petitions of Royalist widows during the Civil Wars and Interregnum, 1642-1660’, Women’s History Review, 26 (2017), pp. 528-40 Young, John R., ‘The Scottish Parliament and the Politics of Empire: Parliament and the Darien Project, 1695-1707’, Parliaments, Estates & Representation, 27 (2007), pp. 175-90 Zell, Michael, ‘Suicide in Pre-Industrial England’, Social History, 11 (1986), pp. 303-17 Zittel, Claus, Engel, Gisel, et al, eds., Philosophies of Technology: Francis Bacon and his Contemporaries (Leiden: Brill, 2008)



About the Contributors

Gary Baker is currently working as a Senior Research Associate at the University of East Anglia on the AHRC project ‘Warhorse: The Archaeology of a Military Revolution’? His research specialisms are maritime and military history from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries; topics on which he has published several articles and a jointly-edited festschrift: Military Communities in Late Medieval England. Essays in Honour of Andrew Ayton (Boydell, 2018). From 2017-19 he worked as an R.A. to Professor Claire Jowitt, assisting in the preparation of a new fourteen-volume critical edition of Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations (1598-1600) for Oxford University Press. Prior to this, from 2014-16, he worked with Dr Craig Lambert at the University of Southampton on the AHRC project: ‘The Evolution of English Shipping Capacity and Shipboard Communities from the Early Fifteenth Century to Drake’s Circumnavigation (1577)’; http://medievalandtudorships.org. The article in this volume derives from research undertaken on that project. Rebecca A. Bailey is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Liverpool John Moores University. She is the author of Staging the Old Faith: Queen Henrietta Maria and the Theatre of Caroline England 1625 to 1642 (Manchester University Press, second edition 2018), and is currently preparing a modern spelling edition of James Shirley’s ‘The Young Admiral’ for the Oxford Complete Works of James Shirley. Richard Blakemore is a Lecturer in the History of the Atlantic World at the University of Reading; before coming to Reading he studied at the universities of Aberystwyth and Cambridge, and held research posts at the universities of Exeter and Oxford. He has published articles dealing with navigational culture, Atlantic piracy, British trade to West Africa, and seafarers’ income and economic agency. With Elaine Murphy, he is the author of The British Civil Wars at Sea, 1638-1653 (Boydell & Brewer, 2018), and he is currently finishing a monograph entitled Empires below Deck: Two Seafarers and their Worlds in the Seventeenth Century. James Davey is Lecturer in Naval and Maritime history at the University of Exeter. His specialism is the history of Britain and its maritime world, focusing particularly on the Royal Navy in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. His research looks beyond the traditional remit of maritime history to analyse the political, economic, social and cultural

312 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

forces which created the navy, and which were in turn were shaped by its activities. His recent publications include: In Nelson’s Wake: The Navy and the Napoleonic Wars (Yale University Press, 2015); Tudor and Stuart Seafarers: The Emergence of a Maritime Nation (Bloomsbury, 2018) and A New Naval History (Manchester University Press, 2019) edited with Quintin Colville. His current research project explores the Royal Navy in the ‘Age of Revolution’. Prior to working at Exeter, he was a curator at the National Maritime Museum, where he worked on two major galleries: ‘Tudor and Stuart Seafarers’ (2018) and ‘Nelson, Navy, Nation’ (2013). Cheryl Fury is a Professor of History at the University of New Brunswick Saint John. She teaches courses in European history and in particular Tudor-Stuart England, early modern women, queenship, the Holocaust, and Fascism. She holds a BA (Honours History & English) and an MA from the University of New Brunswick. She received her PhD from McMaster University and held the Alexander O. Vietor Memorial Fellowship in Maritime History from the John Carter Brown Library. Cheryl’ s first book, Tides in the Affairs of Men: The Social History of Elizabethan Seamen 1580-1603 was very well received, and she was the major contributor and editor to The Social History of English Seamen 1485-1649 (2012) and The Social History of English Seamen 1650-1815 (2017). She has published several articles and reviews inThe Mariner’s Mirror, The International Journal of Maritime History, The Northern Mariner, Proceedings of the Atlantic Theological Conference, The Canadian Journal of History, Canadian Historical Reviews, H-Albion, Journal of Maritime Research and Sixteenth Century Journal. Her most recent work focuses on the men who sailed on the English East India Company voyages. Meredith Greiling is Senior Curator of Transport at National Museums Scotland. A former curator of Historic Photographs and Ship Plans at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, and Curator of Maritime History at Aberdeen Maritime Museum, Meredith was also responsible for curating the new Windermere Jetty Museum of Boats, Steam and Stories in the English Lake District. Meredith has completed doctoral research on the history of ship models in Scottish churches at the University of Hull as part of a Maritime Sculpture scholarship. Philippa Hellawell is a historian of early modern science, technology and medicine, who examines their manifestations in the British maritime world. After receiving her PhD from King’s College London, she was awarded the Caird Senior Research Fellowship at the National Maritime Museum

About the Contributors

313

before returning to King’s as Early Career Development Fellow in Early Modern Medicine in 2018. Philippa has also worked as Teaching Fellow in the History of Science and Medicine at the University of York and has undertaken research fellowships at The Huntington Library in California and the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University. Alan James is a Senior Lecturer in the War Studies Department at King’s College London. He is currently the director of the MA in the ‘History of Warfare’, and among his other roles he is a trustee of the ‘British Commission for Maritime History’ and the reviews editor of the Journal of Strategic Studies. His research interests include imperialism, early modern naval warfare, confessional conflict and state-building and the history of pre-revolutionary France, and he has published widely in these areas. His book The Navy and Government in Early Modern France, 1572-1661 (Boydell, 2004) won the 2005 the ‘Best Young Academic Author of the Year’ award for his book on the French Navy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and he is also the author of The Origins of French Absolutism, 1598-1661. More recently, he co-edited a collaborative study of European navies and warfare and on a critical survey of French sea power from the 1540s to 1815 entitled Ideologies of Western Naval Power, c. 1500-1815 (Routledge, 2019). Claire Jowitt is Associate Dean for Research in Arts and Humanities at the University of East Anglia, where she is also Professor of Renaissance Studies. She is author of Voyage Drama and Gender Politics, 1589‒1642 (Manchester University Press, 2003) and The Culture of Piracy: English Literature and Seaborne Crime 1580‒1630 (Ashgate, 2010; reprinted Routledge, 2016). Edited volumes include Pirates? The Politics of Plunder, 1550‒1650 (Palgrave, 2006); with Daniel Carey, Richard Hakluyt and Travel Writing in Early Modern Europe (Ashgate and Hakluyt Society, 2012; reprinted Routledge 2016); with David McInnis Travel and Drama in Early Modern England: The Journeying Play (Cambridge University Press, 2018); and, most recently, with Craig Lambert and Steve Mentz, Routledge Companion to Marine and Maritime Worlds, 1400‒1800 (Routledge, 2020). She is General Editor, with Carey, of the forthcoming Oxford University Press edition of Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations (1598‒1600) http://www.hakluyt.org/. She is currently co-editing The New Handbook to Hakluyt with Carey, and is writing a monograph on the figure of the early modern sea captain. She is a member of the Hakluyt Society Council, and co-edits, with John McAleer, Maritime Humanities, 1400-1800: Cultures of the Sea for Amsterdam University Press.

314 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Bernhard Klein is Professor of English at the University of Kent. His main research interests include early modern literature and culture, space and cartography, Irish writing, maritime culture and history, and he has published extensively in all of these areas. His current research focuses on the interactions between England and West Africa in the early modern period. He has run two EU-funded collaborative projects with colleagues across Europe: TEEME – Text and Event in Early Modern Europe (2011-2020) and MOVES – Migration and Modernity (2019-2023). Craig Lambert is Associate Professor of Maritime History at the University of Southampton. He has written extensively on medieval and Tudor maritime history, with a special focus on naval operations, merchant shipping, and maritime communities. His first book (Shipping the Medieval Military: English Maritime Logistics in the Fourteenth Century (Woodbridge, 2011) examined an often ignored aspect of the Hundred Years war. With Dr Andrew Ayton he has recently published an article (‘Navies and Maritime Warfare,’ in The Hundred Years War Revisited, ed. A. Curry (London, 2019) which takes a fresh approach to the role naval operations played in the Hundred Years War. With Professor Claire Jowitt and Professor Steve Mentz he has just brought to completion a 25 chapter edition for Routledge which focuses on many aspects of maritime history and culture (The Routledge Companion to Marine and Maritime Worlds, 1400-1800). In 2014, he was awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Grant to investigate the evolution of English shipping capacity, c.1400-c.1577, which produced a free to access database containing over 53,000 ship-voyages: www.medievalandtudorships.org. With Dr Gary Baker has published an article on Kent’s merchant fleet and shipmasters (‘The Merchant Fleet and Ship-Board Community of Kent, c.1565–c.1580’, Archaeologia Cantiana 140 (2019)). He is currently finalising a monograph based on the AHRC shipping project. Originally from East Lothian, now living in London, Claire McLoughlin graduated from the University of St Andrews in 2014 for a thesis ‘Scottish Commercial Contacts with the Iberian World, 1581-1730’ and now works as a civil servant. Elaine Murphy is Associate Professor of Maritime History at the University of Plymouth. She teaches modules on piracy and privateering, and naval history there. Her recent publications include The British Civil Wars at Sea, 1638-1653 (2018) with Richard J. Blakemore, Ireland and the War at Sea, 1641-1653 (2012) and A Calendar of Material relating to Ireland from the High

About the Contributors

315

Court of Admiralty, 1641-1660 (2012). She is a co-editor on a new edition of the Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (forthcoming with Oxford University Press). Her current research focuses on the experiences and interactions of women with the Stuart navy in the seventeenth-century.

Index Abaans, king of 54 Abdella, Alkaid Jaurar Ben 215, 218 Aberdeen 106, 109, 229, 231–2, 236, 242–4, 246–53, 255 Aberdeen, Society of Shipmasters of 229, 231–2, 234, 236, 242–4, 246–52, 255 Aberdeen Schip Model 231–5, 239, 241–3, 245, 247, 250, 253–5 Aberthaw 93 Aberystwyth 93 Accra 50, 56–7 Acton, William 159, 163–4 Aden 158 Admiralty, Court of (Ireland) 275, 279 Admiralty, High Court of (England) 42, 63, 158, 180, 203 Admiralty, The 26, 50, 173, 175, 179, 182–90 Admiral’s Men, The 138 Africa, African 20, 28, 37–8, 41–2, 44–7, 49–50, 52–3, 55–6, 59–65, 75, 95, 157, 190, 215, 266, 273 Al, George 122 Al, William 122 Aldaya, Pedro de 111, 122 Aldeburgh 91, 96–7 Alderney 95 Alfred the Great 15 Algiers 215, 225–6 Allen, Thomas 101 America, Americans 24, 28, 63, 76, 102, 107, 267 Amsterdam 99, 178, 187, 234 Andalusia 111 Andrew of Anstruther 123 Angel 100, 113 Angel of Topsham 98 Anne 100 Anne, Queen 27 Anne of Denmark 229, 241 Anthonie/Anthonio 59–62, 65 Anthony 60 Anthony, Anthony 40 Anthony Roll, The 40–2, 52 Antwerp 99 Aquitaine 74 Argyle 240 Arner, Mary 186 Arner, William 186 Arnott, James 114 Arundel, earl of 86 Arundel, John 86 Ashwell, widow 187 Asia, East Indies 44, 75, 109, 153, 155, 157, 176, 267, 273

Aske, James 214 Assyria 77 Atlantic Ocean 18–20, 28, 44, 46, 48–9, 98, 102 Aubrey, John 276 Axim 54 Ayamonte 111 Aylesbury 86 Ayr 242 Azores, The 37, 43–4, 77, 92, 98, 100, 119, 121, 124, 132–3 Bacon, Anthony 115 Bacon, Francis 144–5, 257–61 Bainsley, Ronald 111 Baker, Robert 49, 53, 63–4 Baltic Sea 46, 101, 139, 278 Barbary Coast 99, 215 Barbos, Rio de 59 Barke of Sandwich 99 Barker, Andrew 100 Barker, Solomon 106 Bark Talbot 166 Barlow, Edward 181–2, 238 Barnstaple 121 Barrett, John 111 Barry 93 Basque region 107 Bath, earl of 107 Beale, Thomas 190 Bear 100 Beaufort, Lord 146 Bede, The Venerable 237 Bedford 233 Bedford, earl of 223, 233 Beedome, Thomas 195, 211–2 Bell, Reginald 91 Belleforest 139–40 Bellerophon 219–20 Benin 44, 57 Beraku 54 Bermuda 14 Bernard, Richard 202 Berwick 45, 241 Best, Thomas 155, 165 Bewdley 93 Bilbao 113, 122 Binny 61 Birrell, James 113 Black Dragon 100, 113, 158, 160–2 Blackfriars Theatre 218 Blake, John 162 Bogg, Thomas 107 Boleyn, Anne 39, 65 Bolton, Thomas 47

318 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Bonnington 206 Borages, Winifred 187 Bordeaux 39, 56, 99, 103, 109, 248 Borough, John 30, 200, 203 Boston 90–1 Boteler, Nathaniel 155–6, 158 Bourgneuf, Bay of 97 Bowes, Robert 106, 108, 112, 115–6 Boyle, Robert 258 Boys, Edward 206 Bo’ness 242, 253 Brathwaite, Richard 226 Bridges, Bess 101, 134–5, 137 Bridlington 175 Bristol 23, 43, 50, 53, 84, 96–7, 99–100, 111, 113–4, 120, 122, 229 Britain, British 11–6, 18–9, 22–35, 38, 47, 56, 65, 67–8, 79–80, 105, 123–4, 129, 143, 150–1, 173, 175, 180–1, 189, 192, 196, 198, 200, 203–4, 209–10, 212, 214, 223, 227, 229–30, 233–5, 238, 249, 251, 255, 264, 281–2 Britannia 11, 15–6, 18, 30–2, 195, 202, 214, 216–9, 221, 223–5 Britanocles 31, 193, 203, 214, 216–7, 219–20, 223–5 Brittany 74, 99–100, 267 Brown, Robert 121 Brown, Thomas 109 Browne, Henry 108 Bruges 251 Brys, Theodore de 47 Bull 91 Bunratty Castle 179 Burntisland 242, 244–5 Cadiz 113, 117–8, 133 Caerleon 93 Caesar, Dr Julius 114 Calais 39, 107, 266 Caledonia, colony of 20 Cambridge 41, 122 Camden, William 31, 200 Canaries/Canary Islands, The 37, 43–4, 52, 115, 120–1 Cape Finisterre 42 Cape Mount 52 Cape of Good Hope 157, 162, 164 Cape Palmas 50, 52 Cape Three Points 50, 57 Cape Verde 46, 52, 63, 92 Cardiff 23, 93 Caribbean, West Indies 37, 41, 44–7, 49, 55, 63, 75, 92–3, 100, 176, 182, 273 Carlisle 248 Carmarthen 93 Carroll, Mr 134 Carswell, John 240 Castelin, Edward 43 Castell/Castle of Comfort 92, 97, 100

Castile, Castilian 13, 71, 74, 124 Cavendish, Thomas 155, 166 Cavendish, William, earl of Devonshire 223 Cecil, Robert 106, 109, 139 Cecil, William, Lord Burghley 92, 118–20 Channel and Channel Islands, The 39, 42–3, 81–2, 89, 94–9, 102–3, 203 Chapuys, Eustace 39 Charles I 26, 30–1, 33, 50, 69, 79, 175, 179–80, 190, 193–207, 209–20, 223–7 Charles II 27, 29–31, 184, 233, 265, 267, 278, 280 Charles V 39 Chatham 186, 188 Cheapside 205 Chepstow 93 Cherbourg 99 Cheshire 95 Chester 90, 97, 99, 201 Chettle, Henry 127, 138–40 China 273 Christ 100 Christian IV 241 Christopher 91, 100, 119 Church of England 156 Church/Kirk of Scotland 116, 122, 230, 236, 242–3, 247, 251 Civitavecchia 98 Clark, Alexander 236, 244–5, 247 Clarke, Thomas 158–9 Clarke, William 55 Claudio/Claudius 139–40 Clepham, William 107 Clerk, John 111–2 Clinton (Clinton Atkinson) 148–50 Coates, Thomas 212 Cober, Nicholas 164, 170 Cobham, Lord 142 Codrington, Robert 31 Cole, Bartholomew 111, 114, 120–1 Coligny, Gaspard de 68 Collins, William 46 Colshill, Thomas 86, 89–94, 102–3 Commonwealth, The 26, 226–7 Company of Scotland 21 Compton, Henry 100 Conservator, office of 115–6, 119, 123 Consistory Courts 189 Constantinople 266 Cooke, Frances 176–7 Cooke, John 176 Cormantine 55 Cornwall 37, 86 Correr, Anzolo 197, 205 Couronne, La 69 Court Martial 162, 170 Court of Wards 125 Coxere, Edward 187 Coytmor, Robert 182

319

Index

Crawley, Justice 205 Croke, Judge 206 Cromwell, Oliver 79 Cromwell, Thomas 40 Cubitt, Captain 176 Cucua, Don Luis de la 120 Culross 253 Cumberland 49, 95 Cumberland, earl of 119 Cynthia 108, 113, 129 D’Ewes, Simonds 206 Dale 93 Darien, Gulf of 20 Dartmouth 59, 93, 96, 103, 108 Davenant, William 193, 195, 211–2, 216, 218–21, 223–5, 227 Davis, Elizabeth 185 Dawson, Archibald 120 Dee, John 31, 198, 269 Dee, River 201 Denmark, Danish 69–70, 73, 139–40, 241, 245, 266–7, 273 Deptford 40, 50, 184–5, 187, 209, 213 Deptford, Trinity House of 209 Devereux, Robert, earl of Essex 126, 128–9, 132–7, 139 Devon 99 Dicher, Abijah 162 Diderot, Denis 261 Dieppe 98 Ditton, Anthony 56 Doddridge, Richard 121 Domenica 46 Dordrecht 252 Dorset 93, 95 Doughty, Thomas 131–2, 135, 165–6 Douglas, A. 109 Douglas, Archibald 114, 118 Dover 39, 50, 101, 178 Downton, Nicholas 168 Drake, Francis 47, 93, 117, 131–2, 135, 142, 165–6 Drayton, Katherine 190 Dry, Francis 159 Dryver, Francis 159 Dublin 23, 178, 180, 190, 275 Dudley, Robert, earl of Leicester 144, 146 Duncannon frigate 182–3 Dundee 108–9 Dutch Republic, United Provinces, the Netherlands, Dutch 20, 29, 33, 56, 67, 70, 72–3, 75, 116, 123, 133, 137, 157, 161–2, 164, 167, 175, 181, 194, 197, 203, 225, 231, 233–6, 246, 249–55, 264, 267–8, 275–6, 278–9, 281 Dysart 115 East Anglia 85 East India Company (English) 20, 22, 28, 146, 153–8, 161, 163, 165–71, 178, 185

Edgar 181 Edgar, King 30, 197–202, 214, 225 Edinburgh 108, 113–4, 118, 240–1, 249 Edward of Poole 98 Edward VI 43 Elector Palatine 147 Elgin 239 Elizabeth 93 Elizabeth, countess of Cork 176 Elizabeth I 28, 31, 44, 47, 49–50, 58, 60, 75, 84, 86, 92, 101, 108–9, 112–4, 116, 118–20, 123, 125, 127–9, 132–4, 137–41, 144, 148, 156, 198, 214, 224 England, English 11–5, 19, 24–6, 30–1, 38–9, 41–2, 44, 46–50, 52–65, 67–70, 72–6, 79, 81–3, 85, 89–91, 94–5, 97–8, 100–3, 106–25, 129–33, 135–8, 140, 142–6, 148–51, 153, 155–61, 163–5, 167, 178, 180, 191, 194–8, 203, 205, 207, 209–12, 214–6, 221, 223, 225, 239–40, 243, 250, 257–8, 262, 264–8, 272, 275, 278–81 Essex 95 Ethiopia 51 Euclid 269 Europe, European 13–4, 16–7, 19, 24–5, 27–8, 32–3, 37–8, 47–8, 65, 68–76, 82, 85, 122, 124, 133, 147, 197, 231, 237–8, 246–7, 250–4, 262, 264, 266–8, 278–9 Evans, Andrew 159, 251 Evelyn, John 31, 257 Exeter 98–9, 101 Eype 93 Faial/Fayal 133, 135 Fame 223 Fanshawe, Lady 177 Fanshawe, Richard 201 Fausset, George 114, 121 Fengon 139 Fenner, George 92, 100 Fenton, Edward 167 Ferdinand II 146 Ferrara, king and duke of 141–2 Ferrol, El 45 Fetu 57–8 Fidelio 141–2 Fife 119 Finch, Judge 204–5 Finet, John 218 Fisher, Edward 188 Fitzgeffrey, Charles 215–6 Flanders, Flemish 19, 109, 111–2, 252, 266 Fletcher, John 145, 147 Florence, duke of 146 Florida 46, 76 Forbish, Andrew 188 Forrest, Young 148–50 Fortinbras, Old 139 Foscarini, Antonio 196

320 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

France, French 13, 19, 33, 37, 39–40, 42, 45, 51–3, 56, 58, 67–8, 70, 73–9, 90, 98–100, 102, 111–2, 116, 122, 137, 145, 249–50, 252, 265, 267, 273, 279, 281 Francis I 39 Franck, Richard 243 Frank 148 Franklin, Young 145–7 Frizell, James 215 Frobisher, Martin 58, 98, 101 Fuenterrabía 115 Gabriel and Michael 98 Gaelic 240 Gainsh, Robert 61–2 Galatea 224–5 Galicia 42, 45, 63 Galilee, Sea of 237 Gardin, Gilbert 108–9 Garrard, William 49, 55 Gaunt, John of 13 Gawen, Katherine 143 Gdansk/Danzig 56, 98 Genoa, Genoese 74, 278 George 61, 65 George II 15 Germany 246 Ghana 50, 55 Gilbert, Humphrey 98 Gilson, Captain 191 Glasgow 23 Gloucestershire 95, 206 Glover, George 215 Godfrey, Captain 178 Golden Dove 100 Golden Dragon 165 Golden Lion 166 Gomera 46 Good Hope 158–61, 165, 169 Goodlack, Captain 134–5 Gordon, Robert 247 Gorges, Ferdinando 114 Grace of God 113, 115 Grantham 178 Graston, Richa rd 101 Great Lewis 190 Grebby, John 51 Greece, Greek 77, 224, 272 Green Dragon 113 Greenland 267 Gregory, Oliver 101 Grenville, Richard 92, 100 Greyhound 100, 196 Greyhound of Topsham 101 Grimsby 89, 93 Grotius, Hugo 203–4, 209, 262, 278–9 Grove, Philip de 159, 164, 167–8 Guadalquivir, River 107 Guiana 125, 143, 146, 149

Guinea, Guinean 43–5, 48–65, 100 Guipuzcoa 120 Guthrie, William 239 Haarlem 253–5 Habington, William 225 Habsburg dynasty (see also Philip II) 68, 70–3, 112–5, 123–4 Hackney 60 Hagley, Widow 188 Hakluyt, Richard 39–40, 44, 47–9, 53–4, 56–7, 59, 61–3, 129–30, 198 Hales, Thomas 276 Halley, Edmond 258 Hamblet 140 Hamburg 101 Hamlet 127, 138–9, 143 Hampden, John 204, 206, 214, 219, 223, 226 Hampshire 93, 95–6, 99 Hampton, Thomas 42–3, 63 Hanoverian dynasty (see also George II) 27 Hanseatic League 46, 246 Hanta 53 Hare 180 Harry 98 Harte of Harwich 98 Hart of Leith 114 Harvey, Thomas 141–2 Harwich 91, 98 Hawkins, John 34, 42–3, 45–9, 55–6, 62–3, 65, 92–3 Hawkins, William 92, 100 Hayworth, Henry 108 Hector 162 Henderson, Thomas 114–5 Henrietta Maria 175–7, 196, 212, 216, 218, 220 Henri III 78–9 Henry, Prince of Wales 72, 79, 196 Henry IV 116 Henry VIII 26, 37, 39–40, 46–7, 65 Henslowe, Philip 140 Herbert, Philip, earl of Montgomery 147, 223 Herbert, William, earl of Pembroke 43, 147 Heyward, Henry 109 Heywood, Thomas 101, 127, 132, 137, 147, 194–5, 197–8, 200–4, 212, 214, 216, 218–9, 227 Hickman, Anthony 43 Hippolytus of Rome 237 Hobbes, Thomas 278 Hoffman, Clois 127, 138–40, 143 Hoffman, Hans, Lord of Burtholme 140 Holford, John 99–100 Holland 175, 253, 266–7, 273 Hollandia 233 Holy Roman Empire 74 Holyrood Palace 241 Hooke, Robert 258, 262–3, 268–76, 278, 281–2 Hooker, Judith 190 Hor, Job 46, 49

321

Index

Horace 130 Horatio 139 Horwendile 139 Howard, William 43 Hudson, Henry 166 Huelva 111, 122 Hull, Trinity House of 246 Humber, River 95–6 Hunter, William 116–9, 121 Huntly, earl of 109 Hutton, Judge 206 Hythe 99 Iberia, Iberian 43, 53, 70, 99, 102, 105–9, 113–4, 116–7, 121–4 Idiaquez, Martine Se 118 India, Indian 24, 77 Indian Ocean 18, 20–1, 28, 102 Ipswich 91, 95, 97–8 Ireland, George 50–1 Ireland, Irish 11, 15, 19–21, 26, 31, 37, 47, 56, 99, 102, 109–12, 123, 144–5, 176, 179–80, 183, 191, 193, 250, 266–7, 279 Irish Confederacy 180, 191 Irish Sea 39, 203 Italy, Italian 98, 146 James 91, 188 James of Leith 110 James VI and I 11 27, 31, 69, 74, 105, 107, 109, 111, 113–7, 119–21, 123, 125–7, 137–9, 142–4, 146–8, 150, 200, 241, 245, 249 James VII and II 27, 250 James, Sibel 184–5 Jerse 95–8 Jesus 99–100 Jesus of Lübeck 46 Jocelyn 180 John 89, 100 John, Don/Dom João 57–9, 61 John/João III 58 John Evangelist 62 Jonas 98 Jones, Inigo 193, 195, 198, 200, 216–20, 223–5 Jonson, Ben 218 Jourdain, John 159 Jove 64 Joyeuse, duke of 77 Keeling, William 153, 158, 162 Kent 50, 85, 99, 206 Kenton 101 King, George 162–3, 169–70 King, Henry 197, 210 King’s Lynn 91, 95–6, 122 Kinningham, Robert 162 Kinsale 109, 188 Kirkcaldy 110, 113, 115, 119 Knaresborough 86

Lambarde, William 128 Lambart, Debora 190 Lambart, John 190 Lancashire 95 Lancaster, James 153, 155–6, 160–1 Laredo 112 Laud, William 206, 215 Laugharne 93 Leith 23, 106, 108–10, 114, 123, 241–2, 245–7, 253 Leith, The Fraternity of Shipmasters and Mariners of (later Trinity House of) 246–7 Lekprevik, Robert 240 Lepe 93 Leverland, Hester 186 Leyburn, George 212 Liberia 50, 52 Lincolnshire 90 Lindsay, David 241 Lion 173 Lisbon 58, 106–7, 109 Liverpool 23, 96, 102 Lok, John 37, 45, 49–51, 54, 58, 60–1 London 23, 31, 37–8, 43–5, 49, 51, 54–5, 60–1, 63, 65, 84, 86, 93–102, 110, 112, 118–20, 142, 146–7, 158, 167, 180, 183, 187, 189, 196, 198–200, 203, 209, 214–5, 223, 225, 257–8 Lord Chamberlain’s Men, The 128 Lord Chancellor of Scotland 119 Low Countries, The 99, 102, 119, 251 Lübeck 46 Lufkin, John 158–60, 169 Luis, Don 59, 120 Luneburg 140 Luther, Martin 238 Mace, Thomas 206 Mackie, Alexander 236, 242, 244, 250 Madagascar 211–2, 218 Madeira 114 Madrid 113 Maghreb, The 144 Mainwaring, Henry 144, 277 Maldon 187 Malta, Maltese 237–8 Mann, Prudence 185 Marmaduke 178 Mary 89, 100 Mary, Queen of Scots 92 Mary I 43, 56 Mary II 27, 250 Mary Rose 41, 73 Massinger, Philip 145, 147 Matthew 91 Maxentius 202 McMath, Alexander 113, 115 Meader, Elizabeth 184 Meadows, Philip 33, 264 Mediterranean Sea 20–1, 225, 237, 266

322  Melcombe Regis 101 Mendoza, Bernardino 117–8 Mennes, John 182 Mercury 196 Merlin 45 Mexico, Gulf of 42, 46 Mexico, Mexican 46, 63, 145 Middleton, Anne 141–2 Middleton, Thomas 127, 138, 141–3, 145 Milan 131 Milford Haven 93, 173 Mina 42, 45, 52–4, 58–60 Minion 37–57, 59–63, 65 Minos, King 77 Miranda 131 Mitchell, John 184 Montrose, earl of 249 Mordaunt 233 Moree 50, 55 Morlaix 99 Morocco, Moroccan 100, 215, 217 Morris, Patrick 118–9 Morton, Watty 106 Moryson, Fynes 122 Moungey, Butolph 50 Mount’s Bay 37 Mowbray, Joh 113, 115 Munster 176, 182 Muscovy Company 101 Mynion of Jersey 98 Nalson, John 206 Naples 213 Naseby 79 Nassau, House of (see also William III) 75 Naunton, Robert 125 Neptune 14, 198, 211 Nereus 224 Newcastle 75, 90, 95–6, 99, 123, 175, 191 Newchurch, Christopher 155, 163, 168 Newfoundland 40, 98 Newport 93, 96–7 Newport, Christopher 93 Nicholas 190 Nicholls, Abigail 185 Nicolas 246 Nicolson, George 106, 112 Normandy 74 North Sea 139, 203–4, 231, 250, 253 Norway 139, 241, 245, 266–7, 279 O’Brien, Murrough, Lord Inchiquin 182 Ogilvy, John 118 Ogle, Thomas 166 Orde, William 115–7, 123 Orellana, Diego de Chaves 107, 112 Orkney 108 Ormond, Lady 180

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Ormond, marquis of 180 Oxford 56, 212 Oystermouth 94 Pacheco 54, 59–62, 65 Pacific Ocean 102 Paget, Lord 224 Palatinate, The 147 Palmer, E. 122 Palmer, John 187 Paprell, Alice 187 Paris 116 Parliament (England) 35, 179, 183, 190–1, 195, 204–5, 217, 223, 225–6 Parma, duke of 75 Pembroke 173 Penn, William 177, 179, 183 Pepys, Samuel 182 Persia, Persians 76–7 Pett, Francis 101 Pett, Peter 50 Pett, Phineas 50, 79, 196 Petty, William 258, 262–3, 275–82 Philip II 60, 71, 77, 105, 107–8, 112–3, 115–7 Philips, James 173 Philips, Miles 46, 49 Phoenicians 272 Phythy, Alexander 162 Plymouth 41, 45–7, 55, 62–3, 91, 93, 99–101, 114, 134, 212, 218 Poland 98 Pompey the Great 145 Pontevedra 63 Poole 88, 98–9 Popham, Edward 182 Portsmouth 23, 59–60, 176, 184–8, 212 Portugal, Portuguese 28, 33, 37, 42, 45, 48–9, 52, 54, 56–60, 62, 73–6, 107, 109, 113, 119, 147, 177, 267, 270, 273, 278 Powell, Thomas 207 Primrose 42, 44, 49–52, 60, 63 Prince Royal 196 Proditor, Lord 141–2 Prospero 14 Providence 188 Prudentius 212 Prussia 140 Prynne, William 202, 213, 264 Purser (Thomas Walton) 148–50 Puttenham, George 224 Queen’s County 179 Rainsborough, William 215–7 Rainsford 148 Ralegh, Walter 29, 67–9, 72–80, 109, 125–30, 132–8, 140–51 Rankin, John 120 Rebecca of London 225

323

Index

Red Dragon 158, 160–2 Roanoke 142 Rochelle, La 39, 78, 99 Rochester 188, 191 Roebuck 196 Rolston, Anthony 115 Rome, Roman 64, 71, 98, 130, 145, 237, 272 Rose of Jersey 98 Rotterdam 252 Rouen 99 Rowell, Mary 184–5 Rowley, William 127, 147 Royal Burghs, Convention of 116, 119, 243 Royal Navy 12, 14, 21, 26–9, 32–3, 37, 40–3, 47, 72–3, 79–83, 92, 103, 131–3, 137, 143, 173–7, 179, 183–93, 196–8, 204–5, 207, 209–12, 216, 218, 225–6, 233, 267, 275, 278, 280–2 Royal Society 31, 257–8, 262–3, 268–9, 275–6 Rubens, Peter Paul 200, 216 Rupert, Prince 188, 211 Russell, William, earl of Bedford 223 Russia, Muscovy 20, 95, 103, 266–7 St David’s 93 St James 120–1 St Jean de Luz 99, 122 St Malo 98–9 St Michael, Island of 119–20 St Paul 237–8 Saldania 157 Salé 215–7 Salomon (Solomon) of London 97 Sandwich 99 San Juan de Ulúa 42, 46–7, 63 San Lúcar/Sanlúcar de Barrameda 98, 110, 118 San Pédro, River 50 San Sebastian 122 Santa Cruz 120 S. Thome/São Tomé 143 Sassandra, River 50 Savoy 214 Saxo 139 Saxons 30, 200, 202 Scandinavia 139 Scilly, Isles of 176, 266–7 Scotland, Scottish 11–2, 15, 19–22, 24–6, 30–1, 37, 40, 45, 56, 69–70, 74, 92, 95, 105–24, 126, 137, 139–40, 162, 203–4, 229–31, 236, 239–55, 266–7, 279 Scott, Alexander 117–9 Scott, William 119–21, 123 Sebastian/Sebastião, King 60 Sebastien 14 Selden, John 30, 200, 203, 266, 279 Semple, William 109, 111 Septimus 145 Seville 101, 110–1 Seymor, Henry 51 Seymour, Thomas 43

Shakespeare, William 13–5, 18, 30–1, 127–30, 138–9, 141 Shama 50, 61–2 Sharpeigh, Alexander 153, 159 Shawe, Thomas 51 Shenston, Philip 118 Shirley, James 195, 212–3 Sierra Leone 46, 50, 55, 63 Silius, Caius 142 Simpson, clerk 106 Skeldie, Archibald 249 Smith, John 138, 207, 277 Snake 100 Solomon, King 200 Southampton 45, 90, 92, 97–100 Southwark 187 Southwell, Robert 262–8, 271, 275, 278–9, 281–2 Sovereign of the Seas 30, 50, 69, 79, 178, 193–8, 201, 210, 214–7, 219, 226, 266, 278 Spain, Spanish 5, 22, 28, 33, 37, 39, 42–3, 45–6, 48–9, 52–4, 60, 63, 65, 67–8, 71–6, 78, 92, 98, 100–1, 103, 105–19, 121–3, 132–3, 135–7, 140, 142–4, 147, 149–50, 166, 194, 214, 225, 250, 252, 267, 273 Spencer, Mr 134–7 Spencer, Thomas 51, 89 Sprat, Thomas 257, 262 Springing Horse 100 Spy 196 Squirrel 98 Steele, Belindia 173, 177, 179–80, 192 Steele, Richard 179 Stepney 23 Stewart, Esme, earl of Lennox 105 Stewart, James, duke of Lennox 109, 223 Stordy, William 248 Strode, William 195, 212 Stuart, Lady Arbella 142 Stuart dynasty (see also Charles I, Charles II, James VI and VI, James VII and II, Mary II) 12, 29–31, 37, 67, 69, 74, 108, 114, 125–6, 131, 138, 142, 153, 155–6, 165–6, 173, 195, 197, 200, 204, 214, 224, 262 Stukeley, Lewis 144–5 Swallow 39 Swan and Nicholas 178 Swanley, Richard 173, 179–80, 191 Swanne 91 Swansea 23, 94 Sweden, Swedish 39, 69–70, 73, 267 Table Bay 158 Takoradi 50, 53 Tampico 46 Taylor, Captain 186 Taylor, John 193 Tenby 93 Teonge, Henry 178, 181

324 

The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain

Terceira 120 Terra Australis 76 Tewkesbury 93 Thacker, Elizabeth 183 Thames, River 23, 50, 60, 209, 223, 257 Thomas, Walter 111 Thompson, Alexander 123 Thoroughgood, Jonas 160–1, 163, 169–70 Throckmorton, Bess 132 Tiger 42, 49 Tintern 94 Tommes, John 63 Tomson, Richard 109 Topsham 98, 101 Tordesillas 147 Toulouse 43 Tower of London 23, 72, 203 Towerson, William 41–3, 49–54, 56–8, 60–2 Trinity of Kenton 101 Tripoli 178, 215 Triumph 233 Tudor dynasty (see also Edward VI, Elizabeth I, Mary I, Henry VIII) 12, 29, 31, 37–8, 47–8, 67, 85–6, 103, 131, 138, 142, 153, 155, 165–6 Tunis 215, 225 Turks, Turkey, Turkish 74, 137, 146, 177, 225–6 Tuscany, grand duke of 146 Utrecht 254 Valentine, Henry 209, 213, 227 Vasa 69 Vchales, Pedro de 120 Veere 116, 251–2 Velazques, Juan 107 Velde, Willem van de 233, 235 Venables, Elizabeth 176, 182 Venables, Robert 176, 182 Venice, Venetian 67, 74, 78–9, 110, 196–7, 205 Vennard, Robert 191 Vennard, Ursula 191 Venner, Elizabeth 184, 192 Vereenigde Oostindishe Compagnie (VOC, Dutch East India Company) 20, 157, 161–2, 171, 181 Verney, Francis 144 Vigo 101 Viola 14 Vittori 213 Vlissingen 99

Voisin, Henri Lancelot, sieur de La ­Popelinière 68, 74, 76–9 Vulcan 64 Wakende Boei 235 Wales, Welsh 8, 11, 15, 19, 56, 72, 81–2, 89, 93–9, 102–3, 179 Walford, Ann 184 Waller, Edmund 195, 210, 212, 225 Wallis, John 258 Walsingham, Francis 114, 118 Warwick, earl of 186 Webb, John 198 Webster, John 127, 145 Weldon, Anthony 126 Wells, Margaret 187 Welwod, William 204, 209 Wentworth, Thomas 205, 215 West Country 133 Westminster 190 Wharton, Lord 224 Wheeler, Mrs 180 Whippo, John 106 Whister, Henry 182 Whistler, Daniel 188 Whistler, Henry 184 Whitby 93 White, Nicholas 164–5, 170 Whitehall 193, 200, 216, 218 White Peacock 100 William 89 William III 27, 33 Willoughby, Hugh 132 Wilmer, Margaret 188 Winchester 142 Windell, Eleanor 180 Windham, Thomas 44 Witsen, Nicolaas 276 Wood, Anthony à 125, 128, 276 Woodgreen, Mrs 191–2 Woolmanhill 249 Woolwich 79, 185 Worcestershire 95 Yair, James 251–2 Yarmouth 95–7, 103 Yates, Captain 191 Youghal 182 Young, John 184 Zeeland 251, 266