Duty first - of Philip II, his Tudor Matter and life in general

by Anna Belfrage

Philip II

Philip II of Spain tends to be remembered for two – well, three – things from an English perspective:

• He married Mary Tudor – a match not exactly made in heaven between a love-sick woman and a man who married out of political obligations 
• He wooed his former sister-in-law Elizabeth Tudor, supposedly hoping to marry her when Mary died 
• He sent the Spanish Armada to conquer England.

One could think, based on this, that Philip had a special affinity for England, that his heart and soul longed to be an Englishman. I’m sorry to break this to you, but from Philip’s perspective, England was pretty insignificant – this was a man with more titles than would fit on the fly leaf of a Bible, ruler of a huge empire. No, Philip’s interest in England emanated from his irritation with this pesky Protestant kingdom and its determined support to those equally pesky Protestants in the Spanish Dominions.

Philip II comes down to us through the years as something of a bore. Too stiff, too dour, too fond of black…Rarely does anyone mention his impressive library in El Escorial, where the books were turned the wrong way so that instead of spines, the visitors saw only gold-edged pages. Rarely does anyone mention that Philip had read a substantial part of all those books – conversant in multiple languages, raised to rule, and from a family that set a high value on schooling their princes, Philip had received an excellent and thorough education. And rarely does anyone mention his other wives, his problems with his children, his affectionate letters to his daughters, his carefully chosen gifts to both his children and his wives – or his gruesome death.

So today, I thought we’d spend some time with Philip – or Felipe el Prudente, as those of us who speak Castilian prefer to call him.

Charles I&V

Being born the son of an extremely capable man is not always a blessing. In this case, Philip II had giant footprints to fill, but he doesn’t seem to have been unduly daunted. Philip was born the eldest son of Charles I & V, that powerful Holy Roman Emperor who was ever a champion of his aunt, Catherine of Aragon (see? Another, if indirect, English connection) who ruled an empire so vast he decided it was too big for any mortal man to manage well – which was why, upon Charles’ death, Philip did not become the next Holy Roman Emperor. Being King of Spain and its growing empire was enough of a challenge.

Charles married Philip’s mother to make his Spanish grandees happy. He himself was in no hurry to wed, but by all accounts he was happy with his Portuguese wife, and his son and heir was raised in a harmonious household. Once again, to appease those Spanish grandees, Philip was raised in Spain, speaking Castilian as his first language.

Philip was a serious man – and somewhat shy. Already as a boy, his distinguishing characteristic was his sense of duty. Duty to his father, duty to his mother, duty to his tutors – and as he grew, this would morph into duty to his country, to his family and wives.

Rarely did Philip do something for himself. Never did he caper about while warbling “don’t worry, be happy.” In Philip’s strictly regimented life, happy was not something a serious man aspired to, and as to worry, well Philip always worried. About being good enough. About the lack of sons. About the situation in England. About the Spanish Netherlands. About God. About the state of his linens – Philip had an abhorrence of anything dirty and was meticulous about his hygiene. Major plus, if you ask me…

Charles was quite taken with this reflective son of his, and once Philip was over his childhood years, father and son bonded as Charles tried to teach Philip everything he knew about ruling an empire consisting of various people, various languages, various cultures. There was one fundamental difference between Charles and Philip: Charles had been raised in the polyglot court of his aunt Margaret of Austria, had as a matter of course been exposed to various creeds, various cultures. Philip, on the other hand, had been raised in the tender care of devoted Catholics in a country that viewed all cultures but their own with a sizeable pinch of suspicion. Let’s just say that Philip’s upbringing left him somewhat less…flexible.

He was however, ever the obedient and dutiful son. So when Charles arranged Philip’s first marriage with Princess Maria Manuela of Portugal, Philip of course agreed. As an aside, being a prince – just as much as being a princess – meant little say in who you married. Royal marriage was for building alliances and consolidating power, not for something as ephemeral as love.

Purportedly Maria Manuela

Anyway: Maria Manuela and Philip were of an age – both of them were sixteen – and liked each other well enough. They were also very closely related: Maria’s mother was Philip’s paternal aunt, and Philip’s mother was Maria’s paternal aunt, plus Philip’s maternal grandmother was his father’s maternal aunt. Well: let’s just say it was complicated. Very complicated – and it didn’t help that the somewhat unstable bloodline of Juana of Castile  appeared all over the place. So when little Maria Manuela gave birth to a son in 1545, the baby had a DNA cocktail that did not exactly predestine him to greatness. Even worse, Maria died in childbirth, and Philip was left with a feeble if male heir but no wife.

Years passed. In England, that heretic of a king, the man who’d broken with the Holy Church, finally died – and it was Philip’s conviction Henry VIII was destined for hell. As we all know, Henry’s son was not long for this world, and in 1553, Mary Tudor became Queen of England.

Holy Roman Emperor Charles made happy sounds, as did the Pope. At last an opportunity to bring England back into the fold of the true faith! At the time, Mary was in her late thirties. She was more than aware that time was running out, and she desperately wanted an heir of impeccable Catholic lineage. Charles slid a look at his son – at the time 27 or so – slid a look at Mary, and suggested they wed, despite being cousins. Well: it was suggested to Mary – Philip was ordered to comply with daddy’s wishes.

Mary, wearing Philip's gift to her,
the famous pearl La peregrina

Mary was over the moon. Handsome Philip had everything she desired in a bridegroom. Whether the groom was as thrilled is debatable – his aide wrote that “the marriage was concluded for no fleshly consideration” – but as always Philip set his shoulders and proceeded to do his duty. In this case, his duty was to check the growing power of France and preserve control over the Low Countries. A fiercely Protestant England had offered succour to the Protestants in the Spanish Netherlands, but now, with Mary and Philip firmly in charge, such safe harbours no longer existed. Philip could therefore hope to quell the difficult Dutch before they all embraced the Reformation. That did not go so well for him, putting it mildly, but that is a story for another day.

Mary very much wanted to become pregnant. Here, yet again, Philip did his duty, but despite hope, prayers and effort there was no child – there was just a phantom pregnancy. Philip seems to have doubted all along that Mary was pregnant, and after the sad matter had come to an end, he left his bride for the restless Low Countries. Mary was inconsolable. What Philip felt is unknown, but he was courteous enough to bid his wife a tender farewell.

Philip and Mary

We are now in 1555, and this is when Philip supposedly was starting to regard Elizabeth Tudor as a potential replacement for his sister. Hmm. At the time, Mary was not yet forty, and while barren there was nothing to suggest she was about to die anytime soon. Not that Philip did not enjoy Elizabeth’s company – he liked intelligent and erudite women – and Elizabeth came with the added plus of being younger than Philip rather than eleven years older. But there were issues regarding Elizabeth’s faith, and Philip would never consider marrying a Protestant – his soul shrieked in pain at the thought.

Still, I imagine there was some attraction, and Elizabeth was smart enough to establish a cordial relationship with her brother-in-law, very soon to become one of the more powerful European monarchs.  In 1556, Charles abdicated in favour of his son and brother. Philip became king of Spain and all its dominions, his uncle became the next Holy Roman Emperor, based in the historical homeland of the Hapsburgs, namely Austria.

Mary’s reign was plagued by famine, by her cleansing of the heretics among her subjects, by dwindling trade as her Spanish husband forbade her from doing anything detrimental to Spain. Of course her subjects grumbled, and there were plots aplenty – even, in some cases, headed by her Catholic subjects. France and Spain were at loggerheads, and with Mary being married to Philip, France considered England an enemy too – rightly so, as per Philip, who wanted England’s help in defeating these upstart Frenchies who had the temerity to question just who was the most important Catholic monarch in the world. That’s why Philip popped by on a visit in 1557 – to convince Mary to support war with France. Mary hoped this conjugal visit would lead to other things, and lo and behold, some months later Mary declared herself pregnant. Yet again, a phantom pregnancy…

Poor Mary – no child, no loving husband, just a cool political union as expressed by Philip’s rather laconic comment upon hearing about Mary’s death in 1558. “I feel reasonable regret,” he said.

Elizabeth of Valois

Philip had other matters to concern himself, first and foremost the situation in France. And then there was the matter of his son, Don Carlos, all of thirteen and showing worrying signs of mental instability. Don Carlos had been proposed as a groom for Elizabeth of Valois, this as an attempt to heal the rift between France and Spain. At the Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis, Philip went one step further and offered to marry Elizabeth himself, despite an age difference of almost twenty years.

By all accounts, this was a very happy marriage. Philip was a devoted husband, entranced by his pretty and vivacious wife. She stood by his side during that most difficult time in his life, when his son went from bad to worse until at last Philip had no option but to incarcerate Don Carlos, by now mad as a hatter. Philip’s little wife might have been young, but she was wise, and in her company he found comfort and hope – plus she gave him children. Daughters, to be sure, but healthy living children. A son would surely follow. Unfortunately, that did not happen. Elizabeth died in childbirth – yet another girl, stillborn, and Philip was devastated.

By now we’re in 1568, and while relationships with France remained coolly cordial, Philip now had another mess on his hands: the Low Countries had risen in insurrection, protesting the heavy yoke of Spanish taxes and demanding the right to embrace the Protestant faith. England, of course, hastened to the aid of their religious brethren. Philip was pissed off, putting it mildly. Here he’d been advocating a lenient approach towards the upstart English and their Protestant queen, urging the Pope to cool down, not do anything hasty, and this is how the English dogs repaid him?

On top of the utter political mess in the Spanish Netherlands, plus the rather urgent matter of halting Ottoman expansion into Europe, Philip had the pressing matter of begetting an heir, which was why he married his niece, Anna of Austria, in 1570.

Little Diego

Anna was yet another young bride, more than twenty years his junior, but just like Elizabeth she was affectionate and kind, and Philip was as happy with her as he’d been with his French princess. Anna gave Philip sons – beautiful boys, and Philip had his heir, the Infante Fernando, who died at age six in dysentery. A grief-struck father consoled himself with the fact that there was the Infante Diego to take the dead son’s place. Except that four years later he also died, this time of small-pox. Fortunately, there was one son left, little Philip. Not that Philip was the son his father would have hoped for, being small and sickly, but at least he was alive.

Anna of Austria

Anna died in 1580, leaving Philip a widower for the fourth time. He was never to re-marry. Instead, he invested his efforts in his children and his empire, a lot of his energy directed at pacifying the Dutch now that the Ottomans had been adequately crushed at Lepanto in 1571.

In England, Elizabeth encouraged support to the Dutch, quietly applauded English pirates when they attacked the treasure-laden Spanish galleons, and in general caused Philip much irritation. But so far, Elizabeth had no children, and the obvious heir to the English crown was therefore Mary, Queen of Scots, at present Elizabeth’s prisoner. A light in the tunnel for Catholics everywhere, was Mary – a light brutally extinguished when Elizabeth was prevailed upon to sign the execution order for her cousin in 1587.

The situation in the Spanish Netherlands went from bad to worse, and with Mary dead, there was no hope the English would come to their senses all by themselves and turn from their heretic faith. No, it fell upon Philip to take responsibility for their souls – and, while he was at it, effectively squash all support for the Dutch reformers – which was why he decided to send the Armada, an effort to invade England and once and for all reinstall the Catholic faith. We all know how that ended, don’t we?

Philip in his younger years

Today, we tend to measure Philip by his few failures rather than his numerous successes. Partly because he was who he was, partly because of his turn-coat secretary Antonio Pérez, generations of Europeans have been fed an image of Philip as a cold-hearted fanatic who delighted in seeing heretics twist in torment. Philip has become a victim to the Black Legend, whereby Spain – and Philip – are depicted as infested by evil. Philip has been accused of killing his own son, of strangling prisoners with his own hands. He had been defamed and ridiculed – even in his own lifetime – and rarely has anyone risen to defend him, least of all Philip himself, who chose to never respond to the more ludicrous of Pérez’ accusations.

I would argue Philip was much more than this: in his private letters, we see a man who concerned himself greatly with the well-being of those he loved. In how he managed his empire, we see a man who eschewed absolute power, attempting instead to ensure there were future controls in place. Genuinely devout, he quelled some of the more fanatic aspects of the Counter-Reformation, he encouraged learning and education and brought Spain firmly out of the Middle Ages. Yes, he was the enemy of Protestants' champions such as William the Silent. But he was equally the hero of his Catholic subjects, the determined defender of Europe against the Ottomans, and a man who always tried to do his duty. Always.

Philip's favourite daughter, Catalina

In 1598, an old and weakened Philip fell ill. By now, he was a lonely old man – of his eleven children only three remained alive, and his favourite daughter had recently died, the single occasion in which Philip gave in to open despair, cursing fate for taking his loved ones from him. For 55 days, the king lay dying, covered in pustules and weeping sores. Incapable of rising from his bed, he lay in his stinking waste, any attempt at keeping him clean futile. A humiliating death for a man who abhorred being dirty. He died clutching the same crucifix his father had held when he died. At the moment of his death he was lucid, and it is said he saw Death coming and smiled in welcome, free at last from this life of duty and sorrows – so many sorrows.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Anna Belfrage is the successful author of eight published books, all of them part of The Graham Saga. Set in 17th century Scotland, Virginia and Maryland, this is the story of Matthew Graham and his wife, Alex Lind - two people who should never have met, not when she was born three centuries after him.

Anna's books have won several awards - recently, one of her books won the HNS Indie Book of the Year Award -  and are available on Amazon, or wherever else good books are sold.

Presently, Anna is working on a new series set in 14th century England - the first installment will be published in November 2015. Plus, after the above, she's thinking Philip II has potential as a character...

For more information about Anna and her books, please visit her website. If not on her website, Anna can mostly be found on her blog.

Sir Francis Drake, the Hellburners of Holland, and the Sea of Horses

What defeated the Spanish Armada? Well, the English navy, of course, and Lord Howard, Francis Drake, John Hawkins. They sailed out of Plymouth in their gallant little ships and harried the Spanish galleons all along the Channel from the Lizard to Calais until the Spaniards had had enough. It was a great naval victory.

Well, yes, up to a point. The English ships – many of which were as big or even bigger than the Spanish – did all of that. It was a continuous naval battle lasting – with intervals – over a week. There was lots of cannon fire – particularly from the English, who probably fired about three times as many cannon balls as the Spanish. It was a major naval battle – 150 ships in the Spanish fleet, about the same in the English.

But – here’s a strange thing. Despite all those guns, and all those cannon balls, not a single ship was sunk by enemy fire on either side. Not one. Because naval gunnery simply wasn’t good enough.  And anyway, wooden ships were notoriously difficult to sink. Even in the battle of Trafalgar, when naval cannons were much more powerful, most ships were dismasted and battered into hulks, rather than being actually sunk.

So in 1588, the Armada made it all the way along the English Channel to Calais, battered, but unbeaten. The English ships were a nuisance, but the mighty Spanish fleet was still as much of a threat as it had been a week earlier. More so, in fact, because it was very close to achieving its first objective.

It’s important to understand that the Armada itself wasn’t an invasion fleet. Even though it had lots of soldiers and horses on board (more about those later) the Armada’s job was to act as an escort for another Spanish army, led by the duke of Parma, which was in Holland. Parma’s men (and horses) were supposed to cross the Channel on flat-bottomed barges, while the galleons of the Spanish Armada protected them from the English navy. The same plan that Napoleon and Hitler tried to use later.

So why did it fail?   Well, that’s where the secret weapon comes in - the terrible Hellburners of Holland. These were really scarey – the nuclear weapons of the sixteenth century. They had first appeared in 1585, at the siege of Antwerp. The Spanish army had blocked access to the city with an 800 metre long bridge made of ships tied together across the river. The Dutch needed to break this blockade, or they would starve. So on the night of 4th-5th April 1585 they sent a fleet of 32 fireships floating downstream towards the bridge. The Spanish soldiers laughed. They didn’t think it would work.

But two of these fireships, the Fortuyn and the Hoop, were different. An Italian engineer, Federigo Giambelli, had made them into bombs. Inside each ship he had built an oblong chamber with a brick floor, walls five feet thick, and a roof made of lead with tombstones piled on top. He filled each chamber with 7000 pounds of high quality gunpowder. Then he fitted a delayed action clockwork fuse, and covered the chamber with a wooden deck so the ship looked normal.

The first ship, Fortuyn, ran aground before it reached the bridge, but the Hoop crunched straight into it. Then it exploded. All that gunpowder confined in a chamber produced a COLOSSAL explosion. According to the historian John Lothrop

            ‘The Hoop disappeared, together with the men (Spanish soldiers) who had boarded her, and the blockhouse, against which she had struck, with all its garrison, while a large portion of the bridge, with all the troops stationed on it, had vanished into air. It was the work of a single instant. The Scheldt yawned to its lowest depth, and then cast its waters across the dykes … and far across the land. The earth shook as with the throb of a volcano … Houses were toppled down miles away and not a living thing … could keep its feet. The air was filled with a rain of ploughshares, grave-stones, and marble balls, intermixed with the heads, limbs and bodies of what had been human beings. Slabs of granite, vomited by the flaming ship, were found afterwards at league’s distance, buried deep in the earth. A thousand soldiers were destroyed in a second of time; many of them were torn to shreds, beyond even the semblance of humanity.’

What has this got to do with the Armada? Well, three years later, when the Spanish Armada was anchored off Calais, waiting for the Duke of Parma’s army, the English admiral, Lord Howard, sent a fleet of 8 fireships floating towards them. This was a fairly desperate measure, after a week of inconclusive bombardment. Probably he hoped to set some Spanish ships on fire. But if he did, he was about to be disappointed.

Disappointed, because not a single Spanish ship was set on fire. The English fireships drifted harmlessly through the Spanish fleet, and burnt themselves out on the shore. All of them. So Howard had just wasted 8 of his own ships.

But he probably didn’t care – in fact he must have been delighted with the result. Because what the fireships did cause was chaos, and total, utter panic. The Spanish captains cut their cables, sailed into each other, crashed their ships on the shore, or fled out to sea. The next day there was a major battle off Gravelines, which scattered them further. Despite all the Spanish admiral’s appeals, the Armada never assembled as a disciplined force again. They gave up the idea of waiting for the Duke of Parma’s invasion force, and fled into the North Sea, losing touch with each other, and each surviving ship began its long desperate journey north, around Scotland and Ireland to their Spanish home. Lord Howard had finally won the victory which had eluded him for so long.

But what caused it? Why did the Spanish captains – all experienced seamen – panic like that? Why not just dodge the fireships and laugh at the English for wasting their own ships? Well, the answer lies in the Hellburners. Everyone had heard the horror story of the Siege of Antwerp, and the Italian engineer, Giambelli, was known to be working for Queen Elizabeth. So when the Spanish sailors saw those fireships bearing down on them, they thought they were looking at weapons of mass destruction. They were about to be vaporized.

It was a mistake, because none of the fireships were hellburners. The English navy had almost run out of gunpowder; they couldn’t have made one even if they’d wanted. But the Spanish didn’t know that. So they panicked and fled.

And the sea of horses? That’s a really sad story. Many of the Spanish ships didn’t just have men on board, they had horses too, for their officers to ride when they landed in England. But on the long journey home, they didn’t need the horses. Everyone on board was starving, and short of water. So …

A week or two after this battle, the skipper of a Hansa merchant vessel reported a strange, terrible sight. He’d sailed through an empty sea, he said, but everywhere he looked, it was alive with horses and mules, swimming desperately for their lives.

Tim Vicary writes historical novels and legal thrillers. You can read about them on his website and blog.

All images from Wikimedia commons

Sir Francis Drake and the Barrel Staves

by Tim Vicary

As part of the research for Nobody’s Slave, in which the young Francis Drake is a minor character, I read The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, by Garrett Mattingley. One of the many fascinating details in this classic book is the tale of how Sir Francis, instead of pursuing treasure as he normally did, changed the course of history by lighting a bonfire on a beach.

What bonfire was this, you ask? Was it one of the famous beacons on the cliffs of southern England, which were lit when the Armada appeared, passing the message from the Lizard in Cornwall to Whitehall in London that the long awaited menace, the dreaded Catholic invasion fleet, had at last arrived? No, it was none of these.

It was another bonfire, lit almost a year before, on a June evening on a beach in Spain. While English sailors lounged around, roasting meat, drinking beer, laughing and talking happily.

In 1587 Drake left Plymouth, in command of a large fleet, to carry the war into Spanish waters. The Armada was known to be gathering in Spanish ports, and his mission was to cripple it by sinking, burning or destroying as many ships as he could, before they ever left harbor.  He was moderately successful at this. He raided Cadiz, where he sank or burnt about 30 Spanish ships.  Then he sailed on to Portugal, where he captured the castle of Sagres where Henry the Navigator had once made his maps and planned the early voyages of discovery. Here at Sagres the men were sent ashore and the ships were ‘cleaned, fumigated and rummaged’ to make them more healthy.

But the key moment was when he captured a small fleet of transports loaded mostly with wood ‘about 16 or 17 hundred ton in weight.’ To a pirate like Drake, whose eyes glinted with Spanish gold, this may have seemed something of a disappointment at first. But he was smart enough, all the same, to know how important this cargo was, and exactly what to do with it.

The ships were loaded with barrel staves - the planks which coopers used to make barrels. We still have wooden barrels today, of course; they are used to contain wine, spirits and sometimes beer. The best ones are made of oak, and the wood used to make them – the oaken barrel staves – are carefully seasoned until most of the sap has gone out of them, and they are dry enough to hold their shape and make a barrel that is perfectly waterproof. Then the barrels are filled with port wine, whisky or brandy, to which the seasoned oak imparts a particular flavor which is prized by connoisseurs.

People in the sixteenth century knew all about this, of course; but they didn’t just keep wine and spirits in oak barrels.  They also used them for water, flour, dried biscuit, salt fish, salt meat – in fact every kind of food, drink and supplies which they wanted to preserve and transport. This was particularly important to sailors. Food kept in a barrel was as vital to them as tinned or frozen food is to us. Without it, sixteenth century sailors had to rely on catching fish, or butchering live animals which they took with them on board.

So all these barrel staves which Sir Francis Drake had captured were vital supplies for the Spanish Armada. They couldn’t easily be replaced. It takes many months, even in the warmth of Spain, for oak to season properly, and this cargo was nearly a year’s supply, from the whole of southern Spain and Portugal.  And you can’t make good barrels out of unseasoned oak. If you try, the green wood is likely to crack or split, so that the contents leak out, or the air gets in and starts fungus, mould and decay.

There’s one other important difference between wood that has been left to season for a year, and fresh cut wood that still has the sap in it. As anyone who has a fire or a wood-burning stove will know, the seasoned wood burns much better. That’s what Sir Francis Drake did; he burnt the lot. ‘All of which I commanded to be consumed into smoke and ashes by fire.’ So we can imagine, perhaps, the satisfied smile on the faces of the English sailors, as they warmed themselves around the blaze of this enormous bonfire. Probably they had a barbecue, like anyone with a bonfire on a beach. They roasted meat, laughed and sang. While the poor Spanish merchants and sailors watched, full of anger and despair.

The Armada still sailed, of course. But much later than King Philip had intended. And even then, many of the barrels on its ships were made of green, half-seasoned wood. Barrels which split and cracked and leaked, so that when the tired, hungry sailors opened them, the contents were damp, moldy or rotten. But the sailors had nothing else, so they had eat it, or go without. And if you eat moldy food, you get sick.  

So as the Armada sailed through the storms of the Bay of Biscay, up the channel to their failed rendezvous with Parma, and then away around the north of Scotland and wild Atlantic Irish coast towards home, the poor starving Spanish sailors, increasingly sick and hungry, had yet another reason to curse the one Englishman whom they loathed above all others – Sir Francis Drake. El Draque.

And all because he lit a bonfire on a summer’s beach, a year before!

Tim's book featuring Francis Drake, Nobody's Slave, is available on Amazon UK, Amazon US , and Smashwords.  Other books on Tim's website

All images from Wikimedia Commons.

Sir Francis Drake and the African Slaves, by Tim Vicary

As a boy, growing up in Devon, I was taught that Francis Drake and John Hawkins were great Elizabethan heroes.  Drake was the first Englishman to sail around the world, to return with untold riches and be knighted by Queen Elizabeth on the deck of his ship, the Golden Hind; Hawkins was the founder of the Royal Navy, the man who designed and built the fast, weatherly galleons which sailed rings around the Spanish Armada.

These men were pioneers, adventurers, founders of the British Empire. Everything they did seemed admirable. They had saved the nation once; if England were ever in danger of invasion again all we had to do was to sound Drake’s Drum (which was hidden somewhere in Plymouth) and like King Arthur, he would rise from the dead and sail back to our rescue. As schoolboys, we basked in the reflected glory of these men. The symbol for the county of Devon was an Elizabethan galleon – Drake’s ship - sailing proudly across a blue sea.

It’s different today. Look up Devon County Council on the web and what do you find? No ship – just a logo of two green leaves. Terrific. (So Devon has trees and the rest of England does not?) But it’s a sign of the times. The environment is fashionable, the British Empire is no longer something to be proud of. 

Do today’s school children learn much about Francis Drake and John Hawkins? I wonder. If they do, I’m sure they are taught a different version of British history differently to the one I learned; and to an extent, that’s quite right. For Sir Francis Drake was not just a hero; he was also a pirate and a thief. He was licensed by the Queen to steal, burn and destroy Spanish ships and colonies in the New World. He was as feared and hated by the Spanish just as much as the Vikings once were by English monks, or Somali pirates are by sailors today.  

So what about his cousin, Sir John Hawkins, the founder of the British Navy, the man who built Queen Elizabeth’s galleons to defend us against the Spanish Armada? Surely he was no pirate; he was a respectable merchant, a shipowner,  a businessman, a senior civil servant.

Well, yes. He was all of those things. But he was a slave trader too. That’s where much of his wealth came from.

Oh dear. If there’s one thing that’s really really bad about the British Empire, that has be it: the slave trade. African prisoners torn from their homes, chained and packed like sardines into the stinking holds of wooden ships for month-long voyages across the heaving Atlantic. Then poked and prodded, naked and trembling, in a marketplace where they stood waiting to be sold.

Everyone knows this. I’m sure if there’s one thing that British school children DO learn about in their history lessons it’s the slave trade. And quite right too. It was horrible. It was also one of the greatest forced migrations in history. It’s because of the slave trade that British and American classrooms today don’t just contain white children who can identify with men like Drake and Hawkins, but also black children whose African ancestors were enslaved by men just like them.

You might think John Hawkins was ashamed of being a slave trader, but he wasn’t. Not at all. After all he hadn’t started it; the Portuguese were selling slaves long before him; they regarded the whole of the west African seaboard as exclusively their own, granted to them by the Pope. They sold slaves across the Atlantic to Spanish colonists in New Spain, the part of the New World the Pope had granted exclusively to them. Hawkins was just trying to get some of this commerce for himself, in the spirit of free trade. He made three slave-trading voyages, and he was so successful that he commissioned a coat of arms, proudly featuring – of all things – a black man bound with a rope.

Not very politically correct. Not the sort of public relations we can celebrate in our schools today, where racism is rightly regarded with anathema. And it wasn’t just John Hawkins who was involved with this; his young cousin Francis Drake sailed with him too, on the third and most troublesome of his three slaving voyages.

Clearly, these men were no angels. They were slave-traders, pirates, thieves – how can we possibly regard them as heroes? Surely we should just condemn them outright; and say there was nothing good about their lives at all?

 Well, perhaps. But perhaps not. These men, like most historical figures, were more complex than they first appear.

John Hawkins was both a slave trader AND the Treasurer of Queen Elizabeth’s Navy. He was the man who commissioned and built the ships which defeated the Spanish Armada. And by doing that, he saved many English men from becoming slaves themselves, bound for years to an oar in a Spanish galley, or being burned alive by the Inquisition at an Auto-da-Fe.

Francis Drake was both a pirate AND a great explorer, consummate navigator, circumnavigator of the world. He, like Hawkins, saved England from invasion by Spain.

But the life of Francis Drake also shows us something else. Astonishingly, it seems that it was possible to be both a slave trader AND the friend of escaped African slaves!

Here is the evidence. In 1567 the young Francis Drake sailed to Sierra Leone in a fleet commanded by his cousin, John Hawkins. Here they bought, stole and captured some 500 African slaves which they transported to the Spanish Main and sold to Spanish colonists. But although the colonists were happy to buy the slaves, they were less happy about the vendor; their King, Philip of Spain, had made it very clear that English and French merchants should be kept out of his New World Empire, and treated as pirates.

So when Hawkins’s fleet was caught in a hurricane, and forced to seek shelter in the Spanish port of San Juan de Ulloa, he knew he was in trouble. While he was there, repairing his ships, the new Viceroy arrived from Spain with a fleet of 13 ships. At first, Hawkins negotiated an uneasy truce with the Viceroy: hostages were exchanged, and the Spanish fleet entered the harbor, mooring a short distance from the English. But the Spanish Viceroy had no intention of doing deals with a pirate. The truce was broken, and after a fierce battle most the English ships were sunk or captured. Hawkins escaped in one ship, Drake in another. Hawkins’s ship, the Minion, was so overcrowded with sailors from his other ships that he was forced to maroon several hundred men on land, where they were taken prisoner by the Spanish. When the Minion eventually reached England, only 15 men were still alive on board.

This incident made it crystal clear, as the Spanish Viceroy intended, that there was no possibility of English merchants trading with the Spanish colonists. Over the next few years Hawkins tried to negotiate with Spain for the return of his imprisoned sailors, even pretending, at times, that he was a Catholic. But Francis Drake took a more direct method. Since it was no longer possible to trade with the Spanish colonists, he decided to raid them instead. He set out to steal the gold and silver from the mines of South America which made the Spanish king so rich.

Francis Drake was very successful at this. In fact, he became one of the most successful pirates in all history. Historians estimate that each shareholder in his voyage of circumnavigation round the world made a profit of £47 for each £1 they invested. Queen Elizabeth got more money from that one pirate ship, than all other Exchequer receipts for a year.

But Francis Drake couldn’t have done all this on his own. Many of his most successful raids were due to some very important allies – the Cimarrons. These Cimarrons were escaped African slaves; people exactly like those whom he and John Hawkins had captured in Sierra Leone. Some of them may have actually travelled in Hawkins’s ships. But a lot of the Africans who were sold as slaves to the colonists had escaped. So many of them escaped, in fact, that they became a major threat to the Spanish colonists – just as big a threat as the English and French pirates. But unlike the pirates, the Cimarrons didn’t want gold and silver; they didn’t have much use for it.  They wanted freedom, and revenge, and the ability to defeat their Spanish masters.

All the accounts suggest that Francis Drake got on really well with these people. In a famous raid in Panama Drake presented the Cimarron leader, Pedro, with a gold encrusted scimitar which had previously belonged to Henry II, king of France. A true pirate’s sword! His Cimarron allies also took him to a hilltop in Panama, and showed him a famous tree. They climbed this tree with Francis Drake and his friend, John Oxenham, and showed them a marvelous sight: the Atlantic Ocean to the east, and the Pacific to the west. It was this vision which inspired Drake’s later voyage round Cape Horn.

Some of these Africans liked Drake so much that they even chose to sail with him. As the wounded Drake was getting back into his pinnace after a raid on Nombre de Dios in 1573, a black man called out to him from the shore: ‘Are you Francis Drake? Then I am coming with you!’ This man, an escaped African slave called Diego, became one of Drake’s longest-serving seamen, and stayed with him until he died on the Golden Hind’s round-the-world voyage six years later. And in 1586, at the siege of Santo Domingo, Drake sent a different black servant to receive a Spanish officer who carried a flag of truce. When the Spaniard, apparently insulted by this, callously ran the black man through with his sword, Drake was so incensed that he insisted that the Spanish hanged their own officer before any further negotiations took place.

So perhaps, even though he was once a slave-trader, we can exonerate Drake from the modern slur of racism. Slavery, after all, was common in the sixteenth century, and not necessarily linked to race. Thousands of slaves were chained to the oars of the galleys on both sides, Spanish and Turkish, at the battle of Lepanto; that was how Mediterranean sea-battles were fought. Moorish sailors from North Africa raided the coasts of Cornwall and southern Ireland for slaves to sell in the markets of Constantinople. For sailors and people who lived near the coast, slavery was an unfortunate hazard of life. It could happen at any time, out of the blue, and transform a person’s life forever.

For someone writing a historical novel about Drake and Hawkins today, what does all this mean? Surely the story can’t, or shouldn’t, be only about the heroic English sailors, as books were when I was young. John Hawkins’s third slave-trading voyage transformed the lives of hundreds of unlucky Africans – more Africans, probably, than there were English sailors on his ships. So in a novel about these events, surely the Africans should have a prominent place too. What was life like for them, as well as for the English sailors who captured them?

In my book, Nobody’s Slave, I try to imagine what this may have been like. Nobody’s Slave is the story of two teenage boys, one African, one English, whose lives collide on John Hawkins’s third slave-trading voyage. I have tried to write an adventure story which, I hope, can be read by anyone, white or black, as part of our shared and troublesome history. It’s a work of fiction, but all the main events really happened; they are based on original sources, and as true and accurate as I can make them.

Sources:  Much of the original source material can be found in The Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, by Richard Hakluyt. Hawkins’ own account of his voyage (written and approved by John Sparke, who sailed with him) is in Volume 7; two other very colorful accounts, by Miles Philips and Job Hortob, both of whom sailed with Hawkins and were captured by the Spanish, are in Volume 6.

Links: Amazon US

Amazon UK

Tim’s website