English privateers, however, licensed by the Crown, still swarmed in the Channel, and though limited by their commissions to make war only on acknowledged enemies, were unwilling to be restricted to less lucrative game. Flemings and Spaniards, if laden with valuable cargoes, were still too frequently the objects of their plunder, under the pretext that as neutrals they had articles on board which the government of England held to be contraband of war.

Among these lawless rovers were to be found the mayor of Dover,[123] and other leading inhabitants, who, not satisfied with the capture, in a few months of the summer of 1563, of from six to seven hundred French prizes, appear to have plundered many neutral vessels, sixty-one of which were Spanish, for the most part laden with very valuable cargoes. Nor were the depredations of these pirates confined to the capture of neutrals. Their own countrymen were not safe from their rapacious talons, and it is recorded that rich harvests were often reaped by the plunder of the small English vessels employed in the valuable trade between Antwerp and London. Indeed, the vessels of no nation were safe; even the fishermen on the coast became occasionally the objects of their prey, and were stripped not merely of their cargoes of herrings, but of their ropes and anchors, and left to perish of hunger.

Philip of Spain could now no longer endure the lawless outrages his people had suffered, so in January 1564 he issued a sudden order for the arrest of every English vessel in his harbours, with their crews and owners. Estimating that his people had suffered by them to the extent of one million and a half of ducats, he seized thirty of their vessels then in the ports of Spain, and imprisoned their crews as security for the repayment of this loss, at the same time excluding, by a general order, all English traders from the ports of the Low Countries.[124]

With the French war still upon her hands Elizabeth was obliged to endure the affront, limiting her remonstrance to a request that the innocent might not be made to suffer for the guilty, and, while admitting that, in the confusion of the times and the imperfectly understood views of international maritime law, wrong might have been done to his subjects, she, as an earnest of her good intentions, proposed a joint commission to inquire into his claims. At the same time she prohibited Flemish vessels from entering her ports, and instructed her ambassador to say to Philip that whatever injury might have been done to subjects of Spain, she had even greater grounds for complaint, and that until her ships and subjects were released, and redress afforded for the wrongs they had sustained, she prohibited all importations of Spanish merchandise.

As it did not suit Philip any more than Elizabeth to go to war, he listened to the remonstrances of her ambassador; the English ships, and those of their crews who had survived the terrible sufferings of a Spanish prison, were released, and the commissioners commenced their inquiry at Bruges. But although all letters of marque expired on the declaration of peace with France, and the marauders had had to seek in many cases other fields for their depredations, Elizabeth, in this instance evidently meaning what she wrote, instructed Sir Peter Carew, then at Dartmouth, to fit out an expedition with speed and secresy, and clear the seas of any “pirates and rovers” which might still haunt the coasts of Devonshire and Cornwall, or who, with that taste for a lawless life which the nature of these commissions had engendered, lurked in the western rivers, or had their rendezvous among the numerous creeks on the shores of Ireland.

Elizabeth’s efforts were, however, not crowned with success. The land-owners, who had too long been in league with the pirates, rendered every assistance to defeat Sir Peter Carew’s attempts for their suppression. At Berehaven, O’Sullivan Bere afforded them the protection of his castle, covering their vessels with its ordnance, and mustering a fleet of small craft and a sufficient number of men to bid defiance to the Queen’s authority,[125] thus giving fresh courage to the pirates. Fresh outrages were consequently committed on Spanish commerce, and fresh demands made by Philip that pirates who had been taken and convicted should in no case be pardoned, that the Queen’s officers in the western harbours should no longer allow these marauders to take in stores or to frequent her ports, that rewards should be offered for their capture and conviction, and that all persons on shore who aided these lawless expeditions should be severely punished.

In reply to these peremptory demands Elizabeth “resolved to show to the world that she intended to deal honestly in that matter.”[126] More ships of war were sent to sea to prosecute the search with greater vigour, yet, in the October following, a vessel from Flanders to Spain laden with tapestry, clocks, and various household articles, belonging to Philip himself, was intercepted and plundered. So audacious an act seems to have excited real alarm to Elizabeth and her Council. Orders were issued to make strict inquiry along the coast so as to discover the haunts of the pirates, with a view to their immediate trial and conviction; harbour commissioners were appointed to inquire and report upon all vessels entering or leaving places within their jurisdiction; rules were framed for the detection and detention of suspicious vessels, and any landed proprietors or other persons on the coasts who harboured or encouraged them were threatened with severe punishment. But the pirates whom the law had sent forth as privateers had become too strong for the law itself. Somehow or other, those of them who had been captured were soon free, and again at their lawless work; not one was hanged as he ought to have been, and the worst that befel them was a short-lived alarm.

Philip fortunately was not in a warlike humour, and Elizabeth’s excuses that she could do no more than she had done to suppress the piratical acts of her subjects were accepted by the court of Spain. Moreover, a new trade had arisen, affording employment thoroughly congenial to these marauders. The New World, not long discovered in the West, had been suffering so severely from a scarcity of labour, that a supply from other countries was urgently demanded by the colonists. The native Indian, unaccustomed to domestic life or to regular habits of industry, would not, or could not, be taught to familiarise himself with the ways of civilised man; as the forest supplied everything sufficient for his wants, the proud lord of the soil would not subject himself to the dominion of the invaders, while he refused to accept their servitude. Hence it was that as the Europeans advanced, the Indians retired, red men decaying as the white men increased; but the English pirates soon found them substitutes. On the shores of Western Africa, which they had frequented in quest of the Spanish merchant vessels from India, men of a quiet and peaceable nature were to be found basking in the sunshine in harmless idleness, and, too frequently, in a state little better than that of “the beasts that perish.”

Vast in number, and with little or no occupations, they offered a profitable source of commerce to such persons as were disposed to enter upon the traffic of human beings, and who would not hesitate to forcibly transport the superabundant population of Africa to meet the rapidly increasing demands for labour in the Western world.

In those days, when the transition from privateering to piracy was easy of accomplishment, the pirate soon became a practised and desperate slaver. There were then no laws to prevent this inhuman traffic. Indeed the nobler Spaniards, who first peopled the tropical portion of the vast American continent and the West India Islands, were of opinion that, in the innocent and docile children of Africa might be found, if kindly treated, servants who would labour without repugnance, and who, while replacing the native Indians, would materially improve their own then wretched condition. The Spanish settlers therefore encouraged the exchange, and, as emigrants from other nations flocked in great numbers to the newly discovered West, the demand for African labour soon became enormous.

When the freebooters of England found it either necessary or expedient to seek elsewhere other opportunities for their lawless and plundering propensities, no employment could have been more agreeable to their habits than that of a slave trade on the coast of Africa, and thus a commerce, which, if it had been conducted from the first by honest men, on a well-defined system of immigration, might have proved of immense benefit to every one connected with it, became, in the hands of worthless adventurers, one of the most depraved and demoralising recorded in history. Good, possibly, in its original intentions, this trade, from its earliest dawn, was made infamous by the desperate class of men engaged in it from its commencement, and it maintained its character for infamy, unredeemed by any civilising influences, even to our own time.

A privateer accustomed to plunder would naturally acknowledge no right of opinion on the part of those he captured: a slave was an article to be dealt with like any other article of commerce, and to be disposed of in any market where the highest price could be obtained. The consent of the negro himself to exchange a state of even starvation and misery for one of comparative comfort was an idea which did not enter the brains of those who first developed the trade; nor was it, indeed, ever entertained by their successors. Throughout the whole of three centuries during which it was carried on, no man on either side of the Atlantic seems to have attempted to introduce a legitimate system of immigration between the two great continents. What a blessing it would have been to mankind had some such system been adopted! What myriads of human lives would have been saved, while the rich lands of the Southern States of America and the equally luxuriant islands of the West, over many portions of which rank grass now grows, would have been beehives of industry and homes of peace, prosperity, and plenty. But, established in sin, the African slave trade thus continued, through its long term of existence, a sink of iniquity.

Though the Portuguese were, in after years, more largely engaged in this nefarious traffic than the people of any other nation, the fact must not be overlooked that John Hawkins, of Plymouth, so famous afterwards in the naval annals of England, was among its earliest promoters. In connection with one Thomas Hampton, he fitted out in October 1562, three vessels, the largest being only a hundred and twenty tons register, with which he sailed for Sierra Leone.[127] Having collected, “partly by the sword” and by other equally questionable means, three hundred negroes, he crossed the Atlantic to St. Domingo, where he disposed of them to considerable advantage, investing the proceeds in hides, half of which he took to England, despatching the remainder in Spanish vessels to Cadiz, under the care of his partner in the transaction. Philip the Second of Spain, however, confiscated the cargo on its arrival at Cadiz, while Hampton himself narrowly escaped the Inquisition; and a peremptory order was sent to the West Indies prohibiting English vessels from trading there. But Hawkins fitted out another expedition to proceed thither, in spite of every warning. Indeed the prospect of large profits was so tempting, that he even induced Lord Pembroke and other members of the English Council of State to take shares privately in this adventure. Moreover, if the letter of Philip’s ambassador can be relied upon,[128] Elizabeth herself had no objection to a share in any profits that might be realised, and placed one of the best ships of her navy at his disposal!

Under the patronage of the queen of England and of many of her councillors, Hawkins set sail from Plymouth on a second slave-hunting expedition, on the 18th of October, 1564. His fleet consisted of the Jesus of Lubeck,[129] of seven hundred tons, very fully armed, of his old vessel, the Solomon, which had been somewhat enlarged, and of two small sloops, of a light draught of water, suited to enter rivers and shallow waters.

“A rival expedition sailed at the same time and for the same purpose from the Thames, under David Cartel, to whom the Queen had also given a ship. Cartel had three vessels, the Minion, Elizabeth’s present; the John the Baptist, and the Merlin. The Merlin had bad luck; she had the powder on board for the nigger hunt, fire got into the magazine, and she was blown to pieces. Cartel, therefore, for a time attached himself with his two remaining ships to Hawkins, and the six vessels ran south together. Passing Teneriffe on the 29th of November, they touched first at the Cape Verde Islands, where the natives being very gentle and loving, and more civil than any other, it was proposed to take in a store of them. But the two commanders could not agree; Hawkins claimed the lion’s share of the spoil, and when they quarrelled, the Minion’s men, being jealous, gave the islanders to understand what was intended to be done with them, so that they avoided the snares laid for them.”[130]

Hawkins and Cartel then parted company, the former shaping his course for the coast beyond the Rio Grande, and filling up, as he proceeded, the hold of his ship with negroes, whom he had entrapped among the rivers and islands. Between purchases from the Portuguese, who were the first to establish factories and barracoons on these coasts, and the spoils made by his own desperate crews, Hawkins in a few weeks had collected on board of his ships no less than four hundred slaves, with whom he shaped his course for the West Indies, and came to an anchor close to the tower of Barbaratto. Finding that the interdict had arrived from the king of Spain forbidding the colonists, under pain of death, to admit any foreign vessels at any of the Spanish possessions, or have any dealings with them, Hawkins was entreated to leave. But he was not the man to be thwarted in his object whenever he felt that he had power to enforce it. Under the pretence that his ship was in distress and required refitting, he intimated that if he was refused the necessary supplies he should be obliged to send his men on shore to take them. The menace produced its effect by affording the governor a pretext for yielding and allowing the inhabitants to purchase the negroes, for whose services there was a rapidly increasing demand. In a few days half the cargo was disposed of, when Hawkins proceeded with the rest to the Rio de la Hacha, where he disposed of them to great advantage, in defiance of the king’s interdict, and the remonstrances of the governor.

With the proceeds of human beings, stolen from their homes, and sold under cover of his guns to the Spanish planters, Hawkins, having washed the pens in which he had cooped his unfortunate victims, sailed in high spirits for England. On his way home he made a cruise through the Carribean Sea, surveying, in the ostensible fulfilment of his mission, the islands, and mapping down the currents and the shoals. He then shaped his course round Cuba, steered through the Bahama Channel, and along the coast of Florida, to examine the capabilities of the country, as he explained, but more likely, from his marauding propensities, to see if he could pick up any of the treasure ships of Spain. He at length reached Padstow Harbour, and thence proceeded to London, where he rendered to his co-partners an account of his spoils, and for a time was the lion of the metropolis. Lord Pembroke and his colleagues in the Council realised a clear profit of sixty per cent. on their adventure, and it was generally supposed that Elizabeth was not uninterested in the spoils which the ship she had supplied had assisted in realising, unconscious, it may be hoped, that her favourite captain had done anything to offend her friend and ally the king of Spain.

Thus encouraged, the slave trade flourished. Nor was it surprising that the vast profits which Hawkins had secured should have induced others to fit out slaving expeditions. The merchants of London felt no hesitation in supplying the requisite funds.[131] They did not inquire very minutely into the mode in which their employés conducted their business. Ostensibly their capital was required to fit out vessels to carry on the trade of immigration from the coast of Africa, where labour was too abundant, to the shores of the newly discovered country, which had no bounds to its vast and rich territory, and where labour was in still greater demand. If these roving Englishmen ruined the colonies Spain had established and menaced the safety of her merchant fleets, that was a matter of no concern to England; and if they pillaged a few of them when a favourable opportunity occurred, the capitalists who supplied the means received a bonus on their investment beyond the ordinary dividend, and did not of course trouble themselves to inquire how it had been obtained.

As might have been anticipated, slave fleets were fitted out at most of the leading ports; they had orders, it is true, not to approach the West Indies, or break the laws or injure in any way the subjects of the king of Spain; but when they returned richly laden, no formal inquiries were made whether these riches had been obtained from the freightage of some Spanish vessel which the silent ocean had engulfed, or from the proceeds of the slaves the freebooters had landed at some rendezvous on the shores of the West India Islands or on the American colonies, in concert with the planters, whose profits were measured by the number of Africans whom they could obtain to cultivate the soil on which they had settled. “Your mariners,” remonstrated the Spanish ambassador with Elizabeth, “rob my master’s ships on the sea, and trade where they are forbidden to go; they plunder our people in the streets of your towns; they attack our vessels in your very harbours, and take our prisoners from them; your preachers insult my master from their pulpits, and when we apply for justice we are answered with threats.”[132]

These freebooting expeditions continuing for some years practically unchecked, Elizabeth at last felt uneasy for her relations with Spain. Her attempts to suppress them, which were always languid, had been laughed at and evaded. Though the Channel was less infested with privateers than it had been at the commencement of her reign, or during that of her immediate predecessors, they had extended and increased their ravages on the ocean and in distant lands. With the Huguenots of Rochelle, under Condé’s flag and with Condé’s commission, they had made a prey of the property of Papists; and, like the crusaders of former ages, had, on the plea of propagating and extending the Protestant faith, plundered Papists wherever they could be found. But when Hawkins (now Sir John Hawkins) prepared to fit out a third expedition, this time on a much more extensive scale, the Spanish ambassador gave notice to Elizabeth that unless it was prohibited serious consequences would follow. Of course Sir John was reprimanded by the Council, and enjoined to respect the laws which closed the ports of the Spanish colonies against unlicensed traders. The reprimand, however, was but an empty display of friendship to the king of Spain, made merely to satisfy for the moment the demands of his ambassador. The slave trade had proved much too profitable to be thus relinquished. It had become a large source of profit to Elizabeth and many of her most influential counsellors, and consequently Hawkins had no difficulty in persuading her Majesty that he himself would not only be ruined if prevented from sailing with the expedition he had equipped, but that the crews whom he had engaged would be driven to misery and ready, therefore, to commit acts of folly which might seriously injure her merchants and endanger the well-being of her kingdom. “The voyage,” he promised, “would give no offence to the least of her Highness’s allies and friends.... It was only to lade negroes in Guinea, and sell them to the West Indies, in truck for gold, pearls, and emeralds, whereof he doubted not but to bring home great abundance, to the contention of her Highness, and the benefit of the whole realm.”[133]

His arguments, or it might be the greatness of the temptation, overcame his sovereign’s scruples, and in October 1567, Hawkins sailed from Plymouth with five well-appointed vessels, including the Queen’s ship, the Jesus, which carried his flag, and among his crew was Francis Drake, his kinsman, who afterwards became famous or infamous, as our readers may interpret his career, in the maritime history of England.

The voyage was prosperous beyond Sir John’s most sanguine expectations. At Sierra Leone he formed an alliance with an African tribe, then at war with their neighbours; sacked a densely peopled town, was rewarded with as many prisoners as his ships could carry; and, in the spring of the following year, found himself among the Spanish settlements conducting a business fully answering his most glittering hopes. Where the ports were open he found an easy market for his slaves, and when the governors resisted his attempts to open negotiations, he carried his purpose by force of arms, for in either case the planters were eager to deal with him. Ere the summer was over he had amassed a very large sum of money[134] in bars of gold and silver, and other commodities, materially enhanced by even more desperate and depraved measures than that of slave dealing, as stray vessels, with valuable property on board, too frequently became objects of his plunder.

Having suffered severely during a gale of wind, which he encountered in the Gulf of Mexico, and finding also that the bottoms of his ships, foul with sea-weed and barnacles, required cleaning, he put into St. Jean d’Ulloa to refit; but the day after he entered a Spanish fleet made its appearance at the mouth of the harbour, consisting of thirteen men of war, the smallest of them larger than the Jesus; and though Hawkins, if he had been on the open sea, might have managed to make his escape from this very formidable force, it was sheer madness to seek an engagement. “If he could,” remarks Froude,[135] “have made up his mind to dispute the entrance of a Spanish admiral into one of his own harbours, he believed that he could have saved himself, for the channel was narrow and the enemy’s numbers would give him no advantage. But neither his own nor Elizabeth’s ingenuity could have invented a pretext for an act of such desperate insolence; at best he would be blockaded, and, sooner or later, would have to run. The Spaniards passed in and anchored close on board the Englishmen. For three days there was an interchange of ambiguous courtesies. On the fourth, Philip’s admiral had satisfied himself of Hawkins’ identity.” He had been commissioned specially to look for him, “and by the laws of nations he was unquestionably justified in treating the English commander as a pirate.”

The formality of summoning him to surrender was dispensed with. The name of Hawkins had become so terrible, that the Spanish admiral dare not give him any warning of his intentions. But, taking possession of the mole during the night, and mounting batteries upon it, and guns on every point of land where they could be brought to bear, the Spaniards opened fire upon the Jesus and her comrades. Though taken by surprise, and while many of their boats’ crews were in the town, “the English fought so desperately, that two of the largest of the Spanish ships were sunk, and another set on fire.” The men on shore forced their way on board to their companions, and, notwithstanding the tremendous odds, the result of the action still seemed uncertain, when the Spaniards sent down two fire ships, and then Hawkins saw that all was over, and that vessels and treasures were lost. “The only hope now,” continues Froude in his graphic description of the encounter, “was to save the men. The survivers of them now crowded on board two small tenders, one of fifty tons, the other rather larger, and leaving the Jesus and the other ships, the gold and silver bars, the negroes, and their other spoils to burn or sink, they crawled out under the fire of the mole, and gained the open sea. There their position scarcely seemed less desperate. They were short of food and water. Their vessels had suffered heavily under the fire; they were choked up with men, and there was not a harbour on the western side of the Atlantic into which they could venture to run; in this emergency a hundred seamen volunteered to take their chance on shore, some leagues distant down the coast, and after wandering miserably in the woods for a few days, they were taken and carried as prisoners to Mexico. Hawkins and Drake and the rest made sail for the English Channel, which, in due time, in torn and wretched plight, they contrived to reach.”

Immediately on their arrival at Plymouth, Drake rode in all haste to London with a schedule of the property of which he represented they had been plundered by the Spaniards, and prayed that he and Sir John, and his brother William Hawkins, might be allowed to make reprisals under the commission which they held from the Prince of Condé. Relating what had taken place in a way least prejudicial to themselves, Elizabeth, smarting under the great loss she had sustained through the failure of the expedition, listened eagerly to what they had to say, and was prepared to meet their wishes after hearing from the Bishop of Salisbury, whom she had consulted, that “God would be pleased to see the Spaniards plundered”—a theory which too generally then prevailed among all ranks of Protestants.

It was, however, no easy matter to accomplish. It would have been too monstrous an outrage to have openly seized any of the rich Spanish vessels which then lay in her ports, or to have fitted out a fleet for Hawkins, granting him liberty to plunder as many of them as he could catch in the Channel. Some other means must be devised as there was not sufficient pretext for wanton violence. It required grave consideration, for it would expose the Queen’s government to reproach if any of the subjects of her “good ally” king Philip suffered wrong in English waters. While hesitating what to do, some English privateers, sailing under the flag of the Prince of Orange, and holding his letter of marque, brought into Plymouth Spanish and Portuguese prizes, with treasure on board said to be worth 200,000 ducats. The Spanish ambassador lodged a complaint with Elizabeth, and expressed his alarm for the safety of the large amount of treasure which was on board these vessels. Here an excellent opportunity presented itself for obtaining the recompense to which she considered herself entitled. With many expressions of regret for the insecurity of the seas, she offered either to convey the treasure by land to London and to transport it thence, or to permit the Duke of Alva, then in the Netherlands endeavouring to suppress the rebellion, to take it in his own ships to its destination. The ambassador, not without misgivings, accepted the latter alternative; nor, indeed, were his fears groundless. Elizabeth landed the treasure under the plea that “the audacity of the pirates” had rendered it necessary that she should keep it on shore under her own charge, as it would have been unsafe at sea even under convoy of her own fleets.

The Spanish ambassador was amazed. He could not suppress his astonishment; but, when he urged that the money was required immediately for the payment of his master’s troops, Elizabeth simply pleaded the insecurity of transport, remarking that she would keep it in perfect safety, though afterwards admitting that, as she was in want of money, her vigorous government had retained it “as a loan.” No sooner had the ambassador ascertained that this “loan” was to be appropriated, one half in doubling the English fleet, and the other in enabling the Prince of Orange to raise a second army against Alva, than he drew up a statement of the circumstances in Spanish and English for circulation in the city of London, and despatched his secretary in a swift boat to urge Alva to immediate reprisals. As the English trade with Flanders, though less than what it had been, was still a considerable source of the wealth of the London merchants, the Spanish ambassador hoped that they would join him in his protest and force the Queen to reimburse the treasure she had so unceremoniously retained for her own purposes. The Duke of Alva acted on the instant by arresting every English resident in the Low Countries, seizing such English ships as were in its ports, sequestering their cargoes, and imprisoning their crews; while couriers rode post haste across France to Spain, so that Philip might extend the embargo to every port within his dominions before the English had time to depart.

Elizabeth had hoped that her frivolous excuse for seizing the treasure would be accepted: at least she had no idea that such prompt reprisals would have been made; but, though the shock was great, she had taken a step from which, after the reprisals by Spain, she felt she could not at the time retreat. Forthwith a retaliating edict of the most stringent character appeared, ordering the immediate imprisonment of every Spaniard and Netherlander found in England, and the arrest of every vessel in her ports or in the Channel owned by any of Philip’s subjects. That very night the mayor and aldermen of the city of London went round to the houses of all the Spanish merchants, sealed up their warehouses, and carried them off from their beds to the Fleet prison. Even without Philip’s treasure the value of the Spanish and Flemish goods thus detained far exceeded the confiscation of Alva.[136] But the suppression of trade which these acts created caused great discontent in London, and there were many persons in England, especially among the old aristocracy, who felt that Elizabeth’s conduct had been far from creditable, and was a gross affront to her professed friend and ally, the king of Spain.

The injury to English trade proved, however, less complete than the Spanish minister had anticipated. An eventual open rupture with Spain had long been foreseen and prepared for. But changes in the course of commerce were made with greater ease than he had calculated upon. Fresh openings of ports in the Baltic afforded new facilities for intercourse; and Hamburg readily took the place of Antwerp as the mart through which English goods could be carried into Germany. The merchants of London had also found new and more distant fields for their enterprise. They had pushed their way to Moscow, penetrated to Persia, and had opened out, by way of the Straits of Gibraltar, direct commercial intercourse with Constantinople and Alexandria, the ancient centres of the commerce of the world, and even with the Catholic state of Venice. Rochelle supplied the best wines and fruits of France; while its privateers intercepted the vessels sailing from the Catholic harbours, and their cargoes lay ready for export in the Huguenot storehouses. English spirit and energy having converted the loss feared by an exclusion from the Spanish and Flemish trades into gain, Elizabeth and her ministers became even more imperative in their demands. Alva, who had come to England to arrange, if possible, terms of conciliation and renewed intercourse, was informed that, if relations between Spain and England were to be re-established, the king himself must send a direct commission for that purpose; and, as a proof of Elizabeth’s determination to maintain the position she had taken in this affair, the ships which escorted Alva back to Dunkirk actually cut out from Calais roads a dozen rich Spanish merchantmen, and sent them to the Thames.

Whenever a ship could be found with a Catholic owner she was plundered by the English rovers. In harbour, in the Channel, or on the open sea, they became alike objects of their eager prey. While some of these freebooters were content to lie in wait for such vessels as contained Flemish prisoners whom they would set at liberty, others resolutely entered Spanish ports to rescue the English vessels, crews, and cargoes which had been detained in them. But their patriotism, like their religious enthusiasm, was ever blended with a love of plunder, for they invariably helped themselves to any valuables they came across in their cruises by land or by sea. To the yet deeper distress of Philip, the houses of the largest Spanish merchants in London were not merely searched and ransacked by Elizabeth’s police, but the plundered furniture of his chapel, the crucifixes and the images of the saints were borne in mock procession through the streets, and burnt in Cheapside amid the jeers of the populace, who cried as they saw them blazing, “These are the gods of Spain—to the flames with them and their worshippers.”[137]

While such insults were of too frequent occurrence on shore, the agressions of the privateers had rather increased than diminished in the Channel. Elizabeth felt that, for the safety of the kingdom against invasion, she must chiefly depend on the force which could be maintained in the immediate neighbourhood of her own shores, and that it was quite as safe, and much more economical, to encourage the voluntary action of her subjects than to rely entirely upon a royal standing navy. Throughout the whole of the English coast, and especially in the Channel ports, the sea-going population regarded Papists generally as their natural enemies and their legitimate prey. Between forty and fifty vessels, corsairs or privateers, for the difference was not easily discernible, held the coast from Dover to Penzance. The English, French, or Flemish seamen, of whom their crews were promiscuously composed, were united by a common creed and a common pursuit. At one time they sailed under a commission from the Prince of Orange; at another under one from the Queen of Navarre. In every English harbour they had abundant stores ready for their use. Prizes were brought in almost every day to Dover, Southampton, or Plymouth and other western ports, where the cargoes were openly sold and the vessels refitted and armed. At times their acts were of the most desperate character: thus, three ships with valuable cargoes from Flanders, bound to a port in Spain, were captured outside the Goodwins, and, because they had stoutly resisted these privateers or pirates, the crews were ruthlessly flung into the sea, and left to perish before the eyes of their murderers.

When, somewhat later, the Spanish people heard that Hawkins was fitting out a squadron to cruise for the gold fleet, they were furious, and were roused to the highest pitch of anger. Philip, however, still lagged behind his subjects. A war with England would have been then a serious matter; he knew that in any such emergency France would send an army over the Rhine and revolutionise the Netherlands. He was therefore obliged to endure these continued insults and the piratical depredations upon the ships and merchandise of his subjects. It was the lesser of two evils. Encouraged by the richness of the spoils and the impunity with which the capture of Spanish property could be made, the English merchants and sailors were tempted to such an extent from their legitimate trade by the more exciting and far more lucrative occupation of bucaneering, that in the fourteenth year of Elizabeth’s reign the burden of all the vessels in the kingdom which were engaged in ordinary commerce scarcely exceeded fifty thousand tons.[138] The largest merchantman which then sailed from the port of London was only two hundred and forty tons register. Indeed, one hundred and fifty vessels of all kinds, most of them small coasters, comprised the whole fleet engaged in lawful commerce from the harbours of Cornwall and Devonshire; but so numerous were the pirates that no unarmed ship in the Channel worthy of their notice could escape from their clutches. Nor did they confine themselves to depredations at sea. Some of the crews of the more daring cruisers harassed the Spanish coast, sacking villages, plundering mansions, pilfering churches and convents, and had, moreover, the audacity to drink success to piracy out of the silver sacramental vessels which they had stolen. If not in all cases furnished with the Queen’s letter to “burn, plunder, and destroy,” they too frequently exercised that calling; and if ever England was justified in claiming the “Dominion of the Narrow Seas,” she had at no period of her history greater claims to it than when these freebooters, in vessels of every kind, poured forth from her ports, and scoured the English Channel like a flock of locusts—an eternal disgrace to the name they bore, and to the flag under which they had been launched for peaceful purposes upon the ocean.