All the Queen's Men (17 page)

Be it known unto all men by those present June 17 1579 by the grace of God in the name of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth of England and her successors for ever, I take possession of this kingdom whose king and people freely resign their right and title in the whole land unto her majestys keeping now named by me and to be known unto all men as Nova Albion. Francis Drake.
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Drake and the
Golden Hind
continued eastwards across the Pacific and disaster loomed when his ship hit a submerged rock off the island of Celebes in Indonesia and became firmly stuck. They were aground for almost twenty hours, ‘but our generall as hee had alwayes hitherto showed himself courageous, and of a good confidence in the mercie and protection of God . . . and we did our best indevour to save ourselves which it pleased God so to blesse, that in the ende we cleared ourselves most happily of the danger'.
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This was more by luck than good judgement, for having unavailingly lightened the ship in an attempt to float clear, the
Golden Hind
was finally blown off the rock by a sudden storm. Once more, Drake's legendary good fortune had come to his aid when all seemed lost and he was able to voyage on across the Indian Ocean and around the Cape of Good Hope: ‘This cape is a most stately thing. The fairest cape we saw in the whole circumference of the earth and we passed by it the 18 of June.'
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From there, they journeyed via Sierra Leone to arrive back in England in the autumn of 1580, the entire voyage having taken two years, nine months and thirteen days. Of the five ships that had left Plymouth nearly three years earlier, only the
Golden Hind
returned at that time, and only half the original crew of Drake's ship remained with him at the end of the voyage.

As Drake turned into Plymouth Sound, past Rame Head, he hailed a fishing boat to enquire if the Queen was still alive. England would not be a safe place for him without her protection from irate Spaniards now demanding his head. He anchored offshore and Drake's first wife, Mary Newman, whom he had married in 1569, was brought out in a rowing boat by John Blytheman, the Mayor of Plymouth, to be reunited with her husband, whom she had not seen for three long years. Shortly, he was summoned to London to meet Elizabeth. ‘He passes much time with the Queen, by whom he is highly favoured and told how great is the service he has rewarded her',
³⁴
the angry Spanish ambassador, Don Bernardino de Mendoza, reported to an equally irate King Philip of Spain. At the New Year celebrations at Richmond, the Queen flaunted a glittering new crown of emeralds which Drake had presented to her to further taunt the seething ambassador. There followed a series of stormy meetings between Elizabeth and Mendoza during which the Spaniard threatened her with war. Elizabeth was totally unmoved and in April dined with Drake on board the
Golden Hind
which by that time was lying at Deptford; afterwards he was knighted on deck before a large and enthusiastic crowd. This was Drake's finest hour.

Sir Francis Drake's voyage around the world remains one of the greatest journeys ever undertaken. In the Prince's Chamber at the House of Lords, there is a bronze which contains the inscription, ‘Sir Francis Drake, Knight, has circumnavigated the globe from east to west and has discovered in the south part of the world many unknown places.' It was a venture which reaped handsome rewards for the Queen and the other investors and at the same time made Drake a legend. Yet again, Elizabeth's keen judgement of human nature and her choice of a man to carry out an important mission was more than justified by subsequent events. None of the original contenders for command of the expedition ever accomplished anything remotely comparable to Drake's dazzling achievement. Frobisher's three voyages to find the Northwest Passage led to nothing of significance. Ralegh's search for the elusive El Dorado proved equally disappointing, while Grenville's hot-blooded and impulsive nature resulted in a heroic yet futile death. The Queen's assessment of Drake's unique qualities of a seamanship coupled with his ruthless and opportunistic nature enabled her to achieve the aim she most desired: profit and prestige on a massive scale. Meanwhile, Spain had been humiliated before the entire world, its maritime supremacy brought into question in brutal fashion. The English Queen basked in Drake's glory as she counted her new-found wealth. Drake had also become extremely rich and, in 1580, he bought Buckland Abbey in South Devon from the impoverished Sir Richard Grenville. This former Cistercian Abbey had been converted into a splendid private residence subsequent to the dissolution of the monasteries and was located quite close to where Drake had been born, in far more humble circumstances, some thirty-five years prior to his acquisition of the property. The local boy had indeed made good.

Nothing quite like Drake's three-year journey around the world was to occur again for a very considerable time. Another English navigator, Thomas Cavendish, who had been involved in establishing Ralegh's colony in Virginia, circumnavigated the globe between 1586 and 1588, but without such acclaim or material reward. He attempted a similar voyage five years later but perished in the storm-tossed waters of the South Atlantic. John Davis, yet another West Country explorer, penetrated further into the Arctic wastelands than Frobisher, reaching Baffin Bay off north-east Canada, yet still failed to find the elusive Northwest Passage. Davis discovered the Falklands and also gave his name to the strait lying between Canada and Greenland. The most northerly group of Canadian islands are today known as Queen Elizabeth's Islands.

These great maritime journeys into the unknown were truly remarkable feats of navigation, achieved despite very limited technology, in an alien and often hostile environment. Today any amateur sailor aided by satellite navigation can pinpoint their position down to the last yard – in the sixteenth century, there was no reliable method for calculating longitude, while latitude could only be determined using a primitive form of sextant in good visibility. Unlike a modern yacht, a sixteenth-century sailing vessel was square-rigged and could only sail upwind with difficulty. These vessels were small, fragile and unwieldy, oars providing the only alternative form of power to the wind. Although Drake is said to have travelled in considerable style, even reported to have taken a group of musicians with him, the conditions for the crews would be spartan to say the least. These seamen were poorly fed and badly paid, disease was rife, death ever present in a variety of violent forms. Despite all these difficulties and disadvantages, the European explorers progressively broadened the horizons of the known world and established the great colonial empires that were to last for many centuries.

The majority of Elizabethan explorers were in awe of their monarch, even worldly courtiers like Walter Ralegh or grizzled veterans such as Sir Humphrey Gilbert. The Queen was also exceedingly skilled at contriving gestures calculated to ensure their continued admiration and gratitude, as instanced in a letter from Ralegh to Gilbert written in 1583:

Brother, I have sent you a token from Her Majesty, an anchor guided by a lady as you see; and further, Her Highness willed me to send you word that she wished you as great good-hap and safety to your ship as if she herself were there in person; desiring you to have care for yourself as of that which she tendereth; and therefore for her sake you must provide for it accordingly. Further, she commandeth me that you leave your picture with me. . . . So I commit you to the will and protection of God, Who sends us such life or death as He shall please or hath appointed. – Your true Brother, W. Raleigh.
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The Queen's message would doubtless have launched Gilbert out across the ocean thinking kindly of his sovereign, exactly as Elizabeth had intended.

Exploration in the second half of the sixteenth century was considerably assisted by progressively greater number of detailed maps becoming available. Two men from the Netherlands, Gerardus Mercator and Abraham Ortelius, were the most influential cartographers of the time. Mercator lived between 1512 and 1594, his most useful contribution to navigation was the atlas which bears his name, which enabled a mariner to plot a course as a straight line, making the same angle on all the meridians. It remains in use to this day. Ortelius's greatest masterpiece was his magnificent
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum
, an atlas containing seventy uniform maps, published in 1567, two years after Mercator's definitive work. However, these world maps produced by Ortelius and Mercator relied on a degree of inspired theoretical guesswork which required updating by the reports of travellers who had actually visited the regions shown on their maps. Mercator acknowledged this in a letter to a colleague after receiving an intrepid Englishman's account of a trip to the Arctic Circle; Mercator amended his maps accordingly, in particular correcting the location of the city of Moscow, which was some distance away from where he had originally placed it.

Lord Burghley was one of Elizabeth's Privy Councillors quick to appreciate the importance of good, reliable maps and was constantly acquiring or commissioning new ones from any source that he could find; many fine examples of these can now be seen at the British Library in London. Cartographers were very highly regarded and could command considerable sums for their services, which were such a vital contribution to the success of any great voyage of discovery.

By the end of Elizabeth's reign, England had become a major maritime nation, largely thanks to the exertions of numerous fearless explorers. The seeds of the British Empire were sown and the foundations of future prosperity of a highly successful trading nation established during the time she was sovereign. Towards the end of her life, the Queen was instrumental in founding the East India Company when she granted a charter to a group of London merchants and City traders in 1600.

‘There must be a beginning of any great matter, but the continuing unto the end until it be thoroughly finished yields the true glory',
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declared Drake to Sir Francis Walsingham. The Queen's explorers valiantly tried to make Drake's words come true and often succeeded.

A
s soon as Elizabeth had inherited the English throne, both Privy Council and Parliament began urging their new young Queen to marry, not out of any romantic desire to see her happily settled in marital bliss, but to satisfy the more prosaic requirement of a healthy male heir to secure the succession and maintain the Tudor line. Succession had been a major preoccupation in England ever since the Wars of the Roses when a combination of mainly weak rulers, coupled with heirs who were either disputed, murdered or killed in battle, resulted in a protracted conflict within the nation which nobody wished to see ever again.

The Queen, therefore, soon found herself under considerable pressure to seek a suitable husband. The Privy Council agitated, Parliament petitioned, preachers lectured from the pulpit. Certainly there was no shortage of suitors: Elizabeth was young and desirable, far more attractive than her half-sister Mary had been when she became queen, and the possibility of becoming her consort was a glittering prize either for a member of the English aristocracy or for foreign royalty, even as far away as Russia, from where the Tsar of All the Russias, Ivan the Terrible, ardently sought her favours. Closer to home, there was King Eric XIV of Sweden, as well as King Philip II of Spain, recently widowed from Elizabeth's half-sister, and Archduke Charles of Austria. Even the Pope is reputed to have murmured, ‘our children would have ruled the whole world'.
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Among the English nobility the ageing 12th Earl of Arundel, together with the good-looking yet conceited Sir William Pickering, were early contenders who soon fell by the wayside. Sir William Cecil, the Queen's newly appointed Principal Secretary, assured her that God would find her a husband and in due course the obligatory son.

Elizabeth was in no hurry to oblige. After the isolation she had endured at Hatfield, the new young Queen was revelling in all the attention. It was a hugely enjoyable experience which she wished to continue for as long as possible. She loved the spirit of the chase – it was fun to keep men guessing as to her intentions. She was also aware that actually agreeing to marry might lead to some considerable problems at home or abroad, opening up the unwelcome prospect of entering a political minefield as well as the nuptial chamber. Far too many of the foreign suitors were Catholic, and Elizabeth had vivid memories of how Mary's popularity had quickly waned following the announcement of her intention to marry Prince Philip of Spain. Now Philip had become King and Roman Catholicism had grown even more unpopular in England – Elizabeth had no desire to cause an uprising early in her reign in the manner that Mary had done.

The Queen also found the prospect of marrying the ex-husband of her dead half-sister somewhat bizarre. It had disturbing echoes of her father marrying Catherine of Aragon, his elder brother's widow. Catherine had also been Spanish and the marriage had begun to falter when there was no sign of a male heir. Yet when Elizabeth came to the English throne, Spain was still a major ally and England was at war with France. Therefore, Philip's opportunistic proposal had to be turned down gracefully, with as much tact as could be mustered, in order not to cause offence and generate a Franco-Spanish alliance against England. Much to his secret relief, Philip learnt that Elizabeth would not marry him as she considered herself to be a heretic in his eyes. Shortly afterwards the Spanish King married the French King Henry II's daughter instead. If Elizabeth was surprised at the speed that her supposedly ardent suitor had been able to find an alternative bride, then it was a painless introduction into the international marriage game, wherein politics mixed with pleasure with smoothly practised assurance.

The royal marriage game was like a giant version of chess whereby the map of Europe became an enormous board for knights, kings, queens, the occasional bishop, princes and dukes to be moved around cleverly and endlessly. Like chess, the marriage game was an activity which required vision, patience and consummate skill. Anticipation of moves contemplated by other participants was another key factor – these could be devious, cunning and breathtakingly unorthodox. On one occasion, Elizabeth even proposed Lord Robert Dudley as a suitable husband for Mary, Queen of Scots, thereby enhancing her reputation for a mischievous sense of humour. Other Grand Masters of the game included Catherine de Medici, widow of the French King Henry II. Catherine had produced six children by a husband who still had plenty of time for a mistress, the beauteous Diane de Poitiers. Considerably older than Henry and permanently in mourning for her dead husband, Diane always dressed in black and white. Henry was so entranced by her that he also wore the same colour clothes, giving the amorous couple the appearance of a pair of chess pieces.