HistoryExtra https://www.historyextra.com/people/walter-ralegh Fri, 24 Oct 2025 13:02:41 GMT en hourly 1 The Elizabethan court, with Professor Tracy Borman https://www.historyextra.com/membership/week-one-the-elizabethan-court-with-professor-tracy-borman/ Mon, 11 Mar 2024 13:53:13 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/week-one-the-elizabethan-court-with-professor-tracy-borman/ In the first lecture of the HistoryExtra Academy Elizabethans course, author, historian and broadcaster Tracy Borman takes us on a whistle-stop tour of Elizabeth I's court – from the glitz and glamour of her royal residences, to the courtiers desperate to impress the Virgin Queen View Green Video on the source website
Discover more content from week one of the HistoryExtra Academy Elizabethans course
7 things you (probably) didn't know about Tudor fashion – reading time 5 mins Where history happened: Tudor courtiers with Suzannah Lipscomb – reading time 13 mins Elizabeth I's personality: the unfathomable queen – reading time 9 mins In conversation: Tracy Borman on Queen Elizabeth I – watching time 16 mins Princely pleasures at Kenilworth: Robert Dudley's three-week marriage proposal to Elizabeth I – reading time 6 mins Elizabeth I's Accession Day Celebrations – reading time 7 mins Robert Dudley: Queen Elizabeth I's great love – reading time 12 mins
]]> Elizabethans quiz - week one https://www.historyextra.com/membership/elizabethans-quiz-week-one/ Mon, 11 Mar 2024 11:52:30 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/elizabethans-quiz-week-one/ How much did you learn about the Elizabethan court this week? Test your knowledge in our quiz View Riddle on the source website]]> Why was Sir Walter Raleigh executed? https://www.historyextra.com/period/elizabethan/why-sir-walter-raleigh-ralegh-executed/ Tue, 05 Mar 2024 09:20:35 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/elizabethan/why-sir-walter-raleigh-ralegh-executed/ Sir Walter Raleigh was a great favourite of Queen Elizabeth I. So how did he fall from grace and come to be executed in 1618? Walter Raleigh may have been a great adventurer and favourite of Elizabeth I – and supposedly happy to get his cloak muddy to save the queen some laundry – but he had been tempting fate for decades before his demise in 1618.
History remembers Raleigh as a polymath: a poet; a historian; a political theorist; a soldier; an explorer; and founder of the first English colony in the Americas who, it is thought, introduced tobacco to England, bringing it over from Virginia. While he was from a modest background, he made his way upwards through the court of Elizabeth I, ending up as captain of the queen’s guard.
His first fall from grace came when Elizabeth found out he had secretly married one of her ladies-in-waiting, Elizabeth ‘Bess’ Throckmorton, in 1591, earning him a stay at the Tower of London.
While Raleigh managed to rally from that, things went wrong again in 1603 when James VI of Scotland succeeded Elizabeth I and came to the English throne, as James VI and I.
Raleigh had “made no overtures to the presumptive heir, before Elizabeth died in 1603,” writes Mathew Lyons. “Which was doubly unfortunate, because one of James’s closest English confidantes was Lord Henry Howard, a former associate who had grown to deeply loathe Raleigh. Thus, when James came south in the late spring of 1603, he was already disposed to distrust Raleigh. Even if that weren’t the case, James simply had no need of him. Moreover, James had Scottish friends and supporters whom he needed to reward.”
In mid-1603, Raleigh was implicated in the Main Plot, which favoured the removal of James from the throne and the insertion of Arbella Stuart, James’s first cousin, in his place.
Hearing that Raleigh was involved in a plot to overthrow him, James swiftly had Raleigh imprisoned for treason. Ahead of Raleigh’s trial in November 1603, it seemed certain that he would be convicted and executed. And yet Raleigh put on such an audacious display at his trial that he transformed himself into a public hero.
- Read more about Walter Raleigh on trial
He was found guilty and sentenced to death, and then – largely due to concern over his public support – was not executed. Instead, Raleigh spent 13 years in the Tower, legally dead, but very much alive.
“James, his authority only recently established, baulked at proceeding further,” writes Mathew Lyons. “Raleigh’s execution was stayed, but the treason verdict was not rescinded. Raleigh would remain in the Tower, alive for now – but with the legal status of a dead man.”
Having escaped the axe, he somehow clawed himself back up again until he was permitted to lead an expedition in 1616 to find the mythical El Dorado in the New World, attempting to find gold in South America. (Raleigh had led an earlier, failed expedition in 1585). But Raleigh’s men attacked a Spanish fort, against James’s express royal orders. The Spanish wanted revenge; willing to oblige, in 1618 the king finally delivered on the death sentence handed out 15 years earlier.
During his final moments on the executioner’s block, Raleigh reportedly urged the executioner wielding the axe to “Strike, man, strike!”
]]> Walter Ralegh: “The rankest traitor in all England?” https://www.historyextra.com/membership/walter-ralegh-the-rankest-traitor-in-all-england/ Thu, 29 Oct 2020 15:00:30 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/walter-ralegh-the-rankest-traitor-in-all-england/ When Walter Ralegh (1554–1618), Queen Elizabeth I’s former favourite, was charged with conspiring against King James VI and I in July 1603, it seemed certain that he would be convicted and executed. And yet Ralegh put on such an audacious display at his trial that he transformed himself into a public hero. Four centuries after Ralegh’s eventual execution on 29 October 1618, Mathew Lyons explores the remarkable trial proceedings… It is a curious fact that when Sir Walter Ralegh was finally executed – on 29 October 1618 – he had been legally dead for 15 years. Even by 17th-century standards, that was unusual. But then, not many people face the death penalty twice in court – particularly when found guilty the first time, as Ralegh was in November 1603.
Ralegh has, in some senses, been refusing to die for the past 400 years. This century alone has produced three full biographies. But if you know nothing about Ralegh, the 1603 treason trial is a good place to start. Had Ralegh been executed in its immediate wake, it is doubtful his reputation would have long outlived him.
History remembers Ralegh as a polymath: a poet; a historian; a political theorist; a soldier; an explorer; and founder of the first English colony in the Americas who, it is thought, introduced tobacco to England, bringing it over from Virginia. But more than anything, the Ralegh of Elizabeth I’s reign was a ‘man on the make’. He came from a modest background – “a bare gentleman… poor in his beginnings,” one Jacobean commentator sniffed – but ended up as captain of the queen’s guard and holder of a hugely lucrative monopoly on wine licences, among other posts and perquisites.
But the 1603 treason trial changed everything. It made Ralegh into a hero, as iconic a victim of legal injustice as England has had: the US Supreme Court referred to his case extensively in a judgment as recently as 2004.
Which is all the more impressive when you consider that Ralegh was almost certainly guilty. But that was the extraordinary force of personality that he possessed. Sir William Cecil, Elizabeth’s closest adviser for some 40 years, once said that Ralegh could do more damage to a man in an hour’s conversation with Elizabeth than he, Cecil, could do good in a year.
But Ralegh made no overtures to the presumptive heir, James VI of Scotland, the future James I, before Elizabeth died in 1603. Which was doubly unfortunate, because one of James’s closest English confidantes was Lord Henry Howard, a former associate who had grown to deeply loathe Ralegh. Thus, when James came south in the late spring of 1603, he was already disposed to distrust Ralegh. Even if that weren’t the case, James simply had no need of him. Moreover, James had Scottish friends and supporters whom he needed to reward.
Ralegh’s fall, then, was swift and sharp. He lost both the captainship of the guard and his monopolies in May 1603. He was required to move out of Durham House, his home on the Strand for 20 years, at two weeks’ notice. This wasn’t merely a loss of income and status; it was a humiliation.
The situation was not unique to Ralegh, of course. Others who faced dramatically reduced circumstances included two brothers, George and Henry Brooke, the latter being 11th Baron Cobham and a longstanding friend of Ralegh’s.
So what had happened to bring about these humiliations?
The Bye plot and the Main plot
James’s succession to the English throne was smoothly orchestrated – largely by Sir Robert Cecil, who had assumed the role of principal secretary from his father. But these were tense, fast-moving times. Two plots against James were certainly discussed, and – perhaps – developed.
- Read more | James VI and I: the king who hunted witches
One, known as the Bye plot, aimed to kidnap James and force him to grant greater toleration to the nation’s Catholics, and it involved the aforementioned George Brooke. The existence of the other, known as the Main plot, was revealed by Brooke under questioning for the Bye in mid-July 1603. It essayed the removal of James from the throne and the insertion of Arbella Stuart, James’s first cousin, in his place. It was to be achieved through the loan of 600,000 crowns from Spain, which Brooke’s older brother Cobham was to negotiate through his friend, the Count Aremberg, who was an ambassador to England from the Spanish Netherlands.
When questioned, Brooke implicated Cobham and Ralegh in the Main plot. Both denied involvement, but found themselves in the Tower of London, Ralegh arriving there on 19 July. Ralegh then wrote to the Privy Council with some ‘newly-remembered’ suspicions about Cobham and Aremberg. It was a foolish, perhaps desperate thing to do, not least because it failed to take into account Cobham’s volatility: Cobham, Ralegh would say at the trial, had “passions of such violence that his best friends could never temper them”. The inquisitors saw their opportunity. They showed Ralegh’s letter to Cobham and, as they expected, he exploded. “Oh traitor! Oh villain!” he repeated over and over, before giving a statement denouncing Ralegh as the principal instigator and deviser of the plot.
That was on 20 July. A few days later, Cobham’s temper had passed and he retracted his accusations. But the damage was done. The statement was all the inquisitors needed by way of evidence. It was also all they got.
Ralegh despaired. On 27 July he attempted suicide, stabbing himself a little below the right breast with a knife. Then as now, historians have been inclined to write this off as a vast theatrical gesture, a heroic exercise in self-pity, but I am not so sure. Anyone familiar with suicidal ideation will recognise the emotional force of the note he wrote for his wife, Bess: “Oh death destroy my memory which is my tormentor: my thoughts and my life cannot dwell in one body.” And for whose benefit would such theatrics be?
Beyond the walls of the Tower, London was being ravaged by the plague. It was therefore decided that proceedings would be held instead in Winchester, specifically the Great Hall of the castle. Ralegh’s inner turmoil had done nothing to halt the legal process. And a genuine stage to act upon awaited him. But first, he had to get to Winchester, and that was easier said than done.
- Why did 17th-century plague doctors wear peculiar beaked masks?
Why? Because people hated Ralegh. Schadenfreude [pleasure derived by someone from another person's misfortune] is a common enough response to the hardships of the rich and famous, but this was something different. “It is almost incredible what bitter speeches and execrations he was exclaimed upon all the way he went through London and towns,” one eye witness said.
Sir William Waad, Ralegh’s keeper in the Tower of London and the man responsible for transporting him to Winchester, was clearly alarmed. It was ‘touch and go’, Waad said, whether Ralegh “should have been brought alive through such multitudes of unruly people as did exclaim against him”. In the end, the people held back their rage, consoling themselves by hurling mud and stones at the coach, together with – a nice touch, this – tobacco pipes.
Walter Ralegh's trial
Ralegh’s trial was set for 17 November 1603. It would last no longer than a day. As was customary in such procedures, the defendant had to argue his own case with no sight of the prosecution’s evidence before its presentation. Treason trials were not about justice, per se: they were about the authority of the state. Guilt and then the death sentence were all but foregone conclusions. What grounds were there for Ralegh to hope? His father-in-law, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, had been acquitted of treason half a century before, under Queen Mary I. The slimmest of hopes remained, then. But was it enough?
Ralegh’s trial was conducted in public before a panel of four justices and seven commissioners. Onlookers got their money’s worth: the trial was a sensation. “Sir Walter Ralegh served for a whole act, and played all the parts himself,” the courtier Dudley Carlton wrote to a friend. “He answered with that temper, wit, learning, courage, and judgement, that, save that it went with the hazard of his life, it was the happiest day that ever he spent.”
But what people noted first about Ralegh was his composure. While waiting for the trial to start, hesat on a stool, greeting friends with “very steadfast and cheerful countenance”, courtier Sir Thomas Overbury reported.
The impression made by the prosecutor, attorney general Sir Edward Coke, was less positive. Coke had a reputation for using an aggressive, abusive tone during proceedings: “His own disposition [was] to triumph upon poor delinquents, and men in misery,” Overbury said, and here he was no different. But Ralegh turned the abuse to his advantage: it spoke to the weakness of the crown’s case.
“All [Cobham] did was at thy instigation, thou viper. For I thou thee, thou traitor. I will prove thee the rankest traitor in all England,” Coke said to Ralegh.
“No, no, Mr Attorney,” Ralegh replied. “You may call me a traitor at your pleasure… but I take comfort in it. It is all that you can do, for I do not hear you charge me with any treason.”
An audacious defence
The more aggressive Coke was, the more he served to prove Ralegh’s point. And by making Coke and his handling of the prosecution part of his defence, Ralegh pulled him away from the legal substance of the case – which, whatever we may think of it today, was sufficient by contemporary standards.
But Ralegh’s primary goal was to undermine Cobham’s statement of 20 July. Amid the mudslinging, it was the only real evidence against him. Unfortunately, it was also the only evidence Coke required: Cobham had confessed to discussing the Main Plot with Ralegh, and Ralegh’s failure to report that information to the government made him complicit. Ralegh argued that one witness was insufficient for a prosecution in a treason trial, citing a law enacted under Edward VI: “No man shall be condemned of treason unless he be accused by two lawful accusers.”
No longer valid, said the judges.
Ralegh argued that because Cobham had never signed the 20 July statement, it was inadmissible as evidence.
Not so, said the judges.
Ralegh argued that he had – or ought to have – the absolute right to challenge his accuser in court. “Good my lords, let my accuser come face to face and be deposed. Were the case but for a small copyhold, you would have witnesses or good proof to lead the jury to a verdict; and I am here for my life!” (this, incidentally, is the point that the US Supreme Court were discussing in 2004). What, Ralegh implied, was the prosecution afraid of? “If my accuser were dead or abroad, it were something. But he liveth, and is in this very house!”
Not necessary, the judges said.
When these arguments were rejected, Ralegh cited biblical precedent on justice: “At the mouth of two witnesses, or three witnesses, shall he that is worthy of death be put to death; but at the mouth of one witness he shall not be put to death” (Deuteronomy, 17: 6).
It was an argument that played well among the onlookers: “His answers were interlaced with arguments out of divinity, humanity, civil law and common law; for his defence, especially, that he ought not to be condemned without two witnesses, and did insist both long and forcibly upon that point,” wrote London merchant Michael Hicks.
But the judges were unmoved. Ralegh’s arguments were, in a sense, those of what we would now call human rights. Half a century earlier, when Ralegh’s father-in-law, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, had been acquitted of treason, he had used the law itself to win his freedom. Having failed in his bid to do that, Ralegh went further. In essence, he put English law itself on trial. The audacity is startling.
And as the trial progressed, the mood in the room changed. People hissed and groaned at Coke when he rose to speak. “[Ralegh] carried himself so wisely and readily to all objections, as it wrought both admiration in the hearers for his good points, and pity towards his person,” Hicks wrote.
The trial’s climax came when Ralegh produced a new statement from Cobham exonerating him. Ralegh had been in secret communication with Cobham in the Tower over the summer: one written exchange had been delivered in a hollowed-out apple thrown in through an open window while the guard ate dinner.
It was a brilliant theatrical coup; Ralegh thought he had played his ace. This is why they won’t let Cobham take the stand. But Coke had another to trump it: yet another statement from Cobham, drawn up since they had arrived in Winchester, reaffirming Ralegh’s guilt (Cobham, it must be said, does not come out well from all this).
That, more than anything, surely did for Ralegh, as far as the jury was concerned. It wasn’t merely the accusation itself that mattered – its true force came from the fact that, in making the accusation against Ralegh, Cobham was also accusing himself. As Cecil wrote shortly after the trial: this was a kind of proof “than which… the law regardeth none greater”.
A verdict delivered
The jury took 15 minutes. The verdict came in: guilty, of course. And what then for Ralegh? The baroque theatrical torture of a traitor’s death.
But what the jury thought and what the public thought were two different things. “So well he shifted all advantages that were taken against him, that… in the opinion of all men he had been acquitted,” Dudley Carlton said. People wept, among them Cecil – often wrongly described as the architect of Ralegh’s downfall – and the Earl of Mar, one of James’s most loyal Scottish supporters.
News of Ralegh’s performance in Winchester travelled fast. Two allies of James rushed to brief him, Carlton tells us. “One affirmed that never any man spake so well in times past, nor would do in the world to come: and the other said that whereas when he saw [Ralegh] first, he was so led with the common hatred that he would have gone a hundred miles to have seen him hanged, he would, ere he parted, have gone a thousand to have saved his life.”
“In short,” Carlton said, “never was a man so hated and so popular, in so short a time.”
James, his authority only recently established, baulked at proceeding further. Ralegh’s execution was stayed, but the treason verdict was not rescinded. Ralegh would remain in the Tower, alive for now – but with the legal status of a dead man.
He was eventually executed in 1618. James had allowed him to leave the Tower in 1616 and lead an expedition to find gold in South America (Ralegh had led an earlier, failed expedition in 1585). Ralegh’s men attacked a Spanish fort, against James’s express command. The Spanish wanted revenge; James was happy to oblige.
But how? Being dead at law, it was impossible to bring new charges against him to trial. And besides, another public stage for Ralegh was too great a risk: what James called the “experiment at the arraignment in Winchester” could not safely be repeated. Instead, James convened a special – perhaps unique – panel of judges to decide if there were sufficient reason to re-instate Ralegh’s death sentence. Yes, they said. There were.
Ralegh died, then, to placate Spain, with whom James wanted to establish peace, on the basis of the 1603 verdict, which had condemned him for conspiring with Spain. Like being legally dead for 15 years while still alive and well, it was one of those ironies and paradoxes that seem to cluster round him.
The greatest of these is that the old queen’s former favourite made himself a kind of synecdoche for the rights of the English people against the arbitrary abuse of state power. After his death, his wife carried his head with her in a velvet bag wherever she went: even in death, Ralegh was a physical presence as much as a rhetorical and ideological one, each its own way a reproach against abuse of power. The shapers of the parliamentary cause later in the century – men such as Sir John Eliot; John Pym and Oliver Cromwell – thought deeply about Ralegh’s example.
In a sense, Ralegh’s agonised cry in his 1603 suicide note (“my thoughts and my life cannot dwell in one body”) proved prophetic: his trial; his sentence; his eventual death – a kind of political martyrdom, many thought – set his increasingly oppositional ideas free, and they metastasised into something far more powerful than anyone could have reckoned with that November day in Winchester.
Mathew Lyons is a writer and historian and the author of The Favourite, an exploration of the relationship between Walter Ralegh and Elizabeth I (Constable and Robinson, 2011)
This article was first published on HistoryExtra in October 2018
]]> The Spanish Armada: one of history’s biggest fibs? https://www.historyextra.com/membership/spanish-armada-history-fibs-myths-tilbury-elizabeth-i-philip-ii/ Wed, 01 Jul 2020 15:46:36 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/spanish-armada-history-fibs-myths-tilbury-elizabeth-i-philip-ii/ From Elizabeth I’s rousing speech at Tilbury to that famous game of bowls, much of what we think we know about the events of 1588 is the product of four centuries of spin, argues Lucy Worsley... In a world where thousands of opinions are competing for our attention, we like to think of history books speaking with one clear voice to tell us the definitive truth about the past. But it’s not like that at all.
One of the stopping-off points in the usual story of England’s journey towards becoming a global superpower with a world-class navy is the so-called defeat of the ‘invincible’ Spanish Armada in 1588. The quotation marks are used advisedly, for all is not as it seems.
The schoolgirl version of the story is that Philip II of Spain, deadly foe of Elizabeth I of England, sent his huge Armada of ships to invade England and return it to the Catholic faith, only to be defeated by the plucky little English navy, whose courageous captains included Sir Francis Drake.
Drake’s celebrated against-the-odds victory is often depicted as the moment that England took on Europe and won. For example, here’s Winston Churchill during the Battle of Britain: “We must regard the next week or so as a very important period in our history. It ranks with the days when the Spanish Armada was approaching the Channel, and Drake was finishing his game of bowls...”
Was Sir Francis Drake really playing bowls when the Armada approached?
Yet that game of bowls is problematic. You probably have the idea that it was while Drake was enjoying a game on the greens of Plymouth Hoe that the Spanish Armada was first sighted on the horizon. The usual story has Sir Francis turning to Lord Effingham, commander of the English
fleet, and saying that there was no need to hurry, there would be plenty of time to finish the game, and to thrash the Spaniards too. It’s deep in our national psyche as a moment of coolness in the face of fire; of the stiff upper lip.
Disappointingly, though, none of the early accounts of the Armada mention anyone playing bowls at all. It was a number of years after the event that one account finally describes sailors in Plymouth in July 1588 “dancing, bowling and making merry” on the shore as the Armada appeared. But it was an irresistibly juicy detail. In the 1730s, a biography of Sir Walter Ralegh tells us that Drake was determined to finish his game – and from then on it became ‘history’.
Another strand of the traditional story of the Armada concentrates on the psychodrama between two bitter and personal enemies: Philip II of Spain and Queen Elizabeth I, locked in an existential struggle between their differing religious beliefs.
In 1588, Philip was 61, a devout Catholic and king of the biggest empire in the world, reaching from South America to the Philippines. Elizabeth I was in her 50s, still unmarried, still childless, and ruling over a Protestant England in which Catholic plots were a constant threat.
But in 1554, some 34 years earlier, Philip had set sail from the northern Spanish port of Corunna in order to become part of the Tudor royal family. We often forget that before he was king of Spain, Philip II – the great villain in the Armada story – spent four years as king of England, due to his marriage to Mary, Elizabeth’s older half-sister.
Mary was desperate to secure England’s future as a Catholic country, and dreaded the thought that she might die childless and leave the Protestant Elizabeth to take the throne. But Philip felt differently. The alternative to Elizabeth, in the event of his and Mary’s marriage producing no children, was Mary, Queen of Scots. She was Catholic, which was a plus, but – due to her ancestry and powerful ties to the French court – she would have taken England firmly into the orbit of Philip’s French enemies, which was intolerable.
- Listen | Following calls for statues of Drake to be removed for his role in the slave trade, Claire Jowitt explores a dark chapter in Tudor history
So Philip rooted for his sister-in-law, persuading Mary to release Elizabeth from the house arrest under which she had been placed. When Mary lay dying, Philip realised that the only way he could persuade Elizabeth to support Catholics was to marry her, and get her to convert. And so he proposed. Elizabeth, as ever, refused to commit herself. A few months later, hearing that Philip had started new negotiations with a French princess, she said (and this is classic Elizabeth I) that he couldn’t have loved her all that much if he couldn’t wait a month or two for an answer.
Although the proposed match failed to materialise, Elizabeth and Philip remained friends. But over the next decade, as Elizabeth and her nation became decidedly Protestant, there were rumblings from Rome. In the late 1560s, Catholics in the north of England attempted an unsuccessful rebellion. To encourage them, in 1570 the pope excommunicated their queen.
Philip was now under pressure from Rome to topple Elizabeth. But with his vast empire to run, he had plenty of other priorities. Although films – notably Elizabeth: The Golden Age, directed by Shekhar Kapur – often show Philip as some sort of God-crazed psychopath, religion alone wasn’t a strong enough reason for Philip to invade England. Two other factors tipped his hand: firstly, Drake’s raids on Spanish ships, which Philip saw as piracy. Then there was Elizabeth’s support of Philip’s rebellious Protestant subjects in the Netherlands. This finally goaded Philip into planning his Armada.
- Listen | Jessie Childs tells the story of Tudor gentleman Thomas Tresham whose faith set him at odds with the Virgin Queen
Invincibility myth
The Spanish fleet that Philip assembled is usually depicted as an ‘invincible’ Goliath to England’s little David of a navy. In reality, it was anything but. It wasn’t even the biggest fleet ever to have attacked England: the Norman invasion fleet of 1066, and the French force that crossed the Channel in 1545 and sank the Mary Rose, both boasted more vessels.
The Spanish had around 130 ships – from war galleons to messenger vessels and provision boats. Although the English navy was smaller, a host of merchant and private boats were commandeered to create a force equal to that of the Spanish.
And, anyway, the invasion fleet had sailed into trouble long before it had an opportunity to engage its English foes. Soon after departing from Lisbon, they faced disease, rotting provisions and bad weather. They had to stop at Corunna for repairs. From there, the commander of the fleet wrote to Philip, confessing that he could see “hardly any of those on the Armada with any knowledge or ability to perform the duties entrusted to them... we are very weak”.
But Philip said the attack was to go ahead anyway. So off the Armada went, planning to sail up the English Channel towards its narrowest point. There it was to meet with an army of soldiers from the Netherlands led by the Duke of Parma, who were to be ferried across on barges to invade Kent.
First, though, the Spanish had to make it up the Channel, and here they began to experience more problems. The first major casualties they experienced were self-inflicted: a crash and explosion lost them two ships.
Dramatic effect
Once the Spanish were sailing up the Channel, the next narrative beat in most popular retellings of the story is Elizabeth I’s rousing speech to her men at Tilbury on the northern bank of the Thames. That famous piece of oratory – in which the queen tells the assembled troops that she may “have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but the heart and stomach of a king” – has been dramatised in countless films. Elizabeth is often depicted riding a horse, dressed in white velvet, or even in armour. “I myself will be your general,” she tells her men.
But this involves a tweaking to the timing of events for dramatic effect. Elizabeth had come up with the plan to address the troops while the Spanish were still in the Channel. Yet by the time she did so, the Armada were already staring defeat in the face. Eleven days earlier, English fireships had attacked the Spanish fleet while it was waiting off France for its rendezvous with Parma’s army. These burning vessels caused the Spanish to panic, with further crashes and losses. So when Elizabeth uttered her famous words at Tilbury, what was left of the Armada was on its way home, running up around Scotland and Ireland to get back to Spain. And there, in the north, the death knell was dealt to Spanish plans: not by Drake, Elizabeth I or brave English sailors – but by bad weather.
- Alternate history: what if the Spanish Armada had succeeded?
Interestingly, the content as well as the timing of Elizabeth’s speech has also ‘evolved’ over time. The sources don’t mention the famous “heart and stomach of a king” line until more than three decades after the event. It was first introduced by a Protestant chaplain who had been at Tilbury – and it sounds like just the sort of thing Elizabeth would have said. But historians cannot be sure that she really used those very words.
Does that matter? Tilbury has become a touchstone of history, not because of the facts, but because of the emotion it inspires. Shortly before the Second World War, when the actor Flora Robson, playing Elizabeth I, delivered the speech in the 1937 film Fire Over England, she was really talking about the feared Nazi invasion. Eight decades later, Elizabeth’s words were employed again – this time to sell feminism, football and beer as part of a Budweiser advertising campaign throwing its support behind the England Lionesses in the 2019 Women’s World Cup.
As these examples prove, the idea that Elizabeth, Drake and underdog pluck defeated a practically invincible Armada is now firmly established at the heart of England’s conception of itself. The Victorians found this idea particularly appealing. They were especially drawn to a story about a nation with a brilliant navy – something that’s reflected in the fact that the Armada formed part of Prince Albert’s planned decorative scheme for the House of Lords. But, for all the veneration of Drake and co, there was no straight line from 1588 to Britain’s imperial greatness in the 18th and 19th centuries. For one thing, the defeat of the Armada didn’t bring victory in the war with Spain; in fact, that conflict dragged on into the 17th century.
For another, the Spanish themselves never really saw the Armada as a significant setback. And that’s because, in 1589, the English suffered an embarrassing naval disaster of their own. That year, Drake led a so-called ‘Counter Armada’, with the aim of destroying the remainder of Philip’s fleet while it was under repair in Santander. It was a fiasco, in which 15,000 Englishmen died, and many of the 86 ships were lost.
Drake and his fleet were forced – just like Philip II’s own fleet a year earlier – to stop at Corunna for lack of provisions. And here, a local woman, Maria Pita, led fierce resistance against the English navy. Still celebrated as a heroine in Corunna, Pita is said to have killed an English soldier herself, thereby inspiring the town to victory. In another football connection, she has become a symbol of the local women’s team.
Someone should have told Margaret Thatcher about the ‘Counter Armada’. When Spain tried, unsuccessfully, to extradite the Chilean dictator General Pinochet from Britain for human rights abuses, the British prime minister sprang to the defence of the man who’d supported her during the Falklands War. She sent him a silver plate commemorating the English victory over the Spanish Armada, with a note decrying Spanish colonialism. Thatcher herself had often been photographed among her troops during the Falklands conflict, yet always appeared hyper-feminine in her personal style. She had learned a way of being a female war leader from Elizabeth I – to be womanly, yet to deny that gender mattered.
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The legend of the Spanish Armada created by the Elizabethans and retold by generations after them has a powerful legacy. In times of crisis – from the Second World War to the Falklands – it’s been used to convince us that this small island can take on superpowers; that we come from a long line of cool-headed and inspirational leaders; that, small as we are, we can still play a mighty role on the world stage.
The popular version of the story of the Armada – true or not – gives us confidence to believe in that fantasy. Who knows where this impressive mingling of facts, fantasy and fibs might take us next?
Lucy Worsley is chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces. The Spanish Armada was one of the topics she covered in her three-part series History’s Biggest Fibs on BBC Four in February 2020.
This article was first published in the February 2020 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]> Did Sir Walter Ralegh really lay down his cloak for Elizabeth I? https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/did-sir-walter-raleigh-ralegh-lay-down-cloak-queen-elizabeth-i/ Tue, 06 Aug 2019 13:00:03 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/did-sir-walter-raleigh-ralegh-lay-down-cloak-queen-elizabeth-i/ Dashing explorer and poet Walter Ralegh enjoyed the favour of Queen Elizabeth I soon after settling at court in 1581. But did he really lay down his cloak for Elizabeth I in an act of gallantry? A testament to his Sir Walter Ralegh's gallantry and style can be seen in the well-known incident when Ralegh rescued the royal feet of Elizabeth I from getting wet and muddy in ‘a plashy place’ by sacrificing his plush velvet cloak to cover the puddle.
Disappointingly, his cloak-laying is first recorded in Thomas Fuller’s History of the Worthies of England, published some 80 years after the supposed event.
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True or not, Ralegh enchanted the queen and was one of her firm favourites – that is, until he fell from grace by secretly marrying one of her maids of honour. There weren’t enough puddles and cloaks to appease Elizabeth – he was sent to the Tower of London.
Answered by one of our Q&A experts, historian and author Emily Brand
This article was taken from the May 2015 issue of BBC History Revealed magazine
]]> Walter Ralegh: enemy of the state https://www.historyextra.com/membership/walter-ralegh-raleigh-enemy-of-the-state/ Thu, 29 Nov 2018 17:32:47 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/walter-ralegh-raleigh-enemy-of-the-state/ Anna Beer, biographer of Walter Ralegh, explores the extraordinary life and incendiary legacy of the Tudor polymath Anna Beer, biographer of Walter Ralegh, explores the extraordinary life and incendiary legacy of the Tudor polymath. She reveals how he became a favourite of Elizabeth I, only to fall foul of her successor, James VI and I, with deadly consequences.
]]> Walter Ralegh: the traitor who inspired Cromwell https://www.historyextra.com/membership/walter-ralegh-the-traitor-who-inspired-cromwell/ Thu, 01 Nov 2018 07:00:49 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/walter-ralegh-the-traitor-who-inspired-cromwell/ Anna Beer charts how the incendiary writings of Walter Ralegh fuelled England's revolution This article was first published in the December 2018 edition of BBC History Magazine
It was Lord Mayor’s Day in the City of London, 29 October 1618. King James VI and I and his advisers were hoping that the “pageants and fine shows might draw away the people” from another event taking place upriver, in Westminster. Sir Walter Ralegh, condemned as a traitor in the earliest months of James’s reign, a long-term prisoner in the Tower of London, was to be executed that morning. That the king was remotely concerned about “the people” tells us something important about Ralegh. He had been legally dead for 15 years. He was the “best hated man” in England even before his arrest in 1603. He had no faction of his own and no great family standing behind him. In short, Ralegh’s death should have been wholly unremarkable.
That it was not was due to Ralegh himself. His final request had been that he might “be heard at the day of my death”, a request the crown made the mistake of granting. No formulaic scaffold speech for Sir Walter. He spoke for 45 minutes from the scaffold, delivering a powerful, politically charged justification of his beliefs. Impending death freed him from being a subject and allowed him to “speak freely” to the crowd: “I come not hither either to fear or flatter kings. I am now the subject of death, and the great God of heaven is my sovereign before whose tribunal I am shortly to appear.” It was radical stuff: “Now what have I to do with kings; I have nothing to do with them, neither do I fear them; I have only now to do with my God.” These were inflammatory words in a world in which the doctrine of the divine right of kings was used to justify tyranny.
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But these words were only surprising if we think of Ralegh as just another of Elizabeth’s favourites, a beautiful man with flowers in his hair – as Hilliard’s miniature (right) of 1585 portrays him – a second-string courtier in the eroticised powerplays of the 1580s and 1590s. Ralegh may never have been a Privy Councillor (he was only the fifth son of a Devon gentleman, after all), but throughout Elizabeth’s reign his was an important political voice.
Oil in the machine
Ralegh had come to his queen’s attention not simply through his service in her wars, but by his talent for political and military analysis. Even more useful to Elizabeth was Ralegh’s rhetorical ability. This was one of the key drivers of his success, the oil in the courtly machine, a clue to what Elizabeth found compelling in him. Ralegh could charm and persuade with authority and panache.
He was also drawn to dangerous topics like a moth to a flame. He wrote about the succession when the queen had forbidden it. He asked questions about God and was accused of atheism. He criticised the queen for being only and ever “a woman”.
Elizabeth, however, knew how to harness Ralegh’s scepticism to her own cause, and knew (at least most of the time) how to control him. Not so her successor, James. In November 1603, Ralegh was found guilty of treason, after being implicated in the Main Plot, an alleged conspiracy to remove James I. At his trial, he offered a dazzling defence of himself and an equally dazzling critique of the judicial process. No lawyer for Ralegh, his own wit was enough. He was condemned to death but, famously, the execution was stayed at the very last. Ralegh would, however, spend the rest of his life ‘legally dead’, and he was imprisoned in the Tower of London.
That long imprisonment would convert a man who occasionally turned to writing about matters political into one of the most significant (and most contested) political writers of the 17th century. For, in prison, Ralegh became preoccupied with the past and that preoccupation found its expression in writing. In prison, he built up a rich personal library of 500 books, vital tools for the writing of a universal history. In prison, he drew maps of lands he would never visit, studied battles on land and sea that had taken place millennia before, and brought to vivid life ancient civilisations that had crashed and burned. In prison, he questioned where, how and why events had unfolded as they had, always hinting at, but rarely spelling out (for that would be too dangerous) their relevance to contemporary life. In sum, in prison, he wrote his History of the World.
Dangerous words
Ralegh’s fellow prisoners in the Tower and their networks then helped him find a printer and publisher. These were men willing to take a risk on a book that would take three years to print and which only just squeaked past the censors, who insisted it must be published anonymously.
Despite the absence of Ralegh’s name on the frontispiece, The History of the World was a sustained act of personal display and vindication. Just as truth will emerge from death or dark oblivion, so Ralegh would speak from the Tower. Just as providence will eventually reward and punish individuals, so Ralegh and his persecutors would be judged. The final paragraphs of History were sheer political bravura – Ralegh wrote of the death of kings – and almost blasphemous in their diminishment of God and elevation of death. Only Ralegh was surprised that King James hated the book and feared its author. How could the king approve of a work that condemned individual monarchs with a ferocity rarely seen in the writing of the period? James was outraged by Ralegh’s “description of the kings that he hates, whomof he speaketh nothing but evil”. The work was called in, but it was too late. The genie was out of the bottle.
Meanwhile, Ralegh had more to say. As many regimes have found to their cost, if you put political prisoners in the same place, they start talking to each other. John Hoskins joined Ralegh in the Tower in 1614. The two men had known each other at the Inns of Court nearly 20 years earlier. The Inns were not merely places for the study and practice of law, but hotbeds of satire, and a breeding ground for a new kind of political actor: the parliamentarian. As an MP during the 1580s and 1590s, Ralegh himself had been extremely active, indeed vocal, by the standards of his time. But men such as Hoskins were taking things to a new level. This was why Hoskins found himself in the Tower in 1614, having spoken out against the king in the parliament of that year. The issue at stake was taxation without the consent of parliament. It was laced with a strong dose of anti-Scottish sentiment, but the principle at stake was parliament’s authority. Hoskins warned of a new Sicilian Vespers (a violent, and successful, rebellion against French rule in southern Italy, 1282), if parliament was dismissed.
Hoskins was asking for trouble, and he was arrested the day after parliament finished sitting. Asked “whether he well understood the consequence of that Sicilian Vesper”, he answered “that he had no more than a general information thereof, being but little conversant in those histories that lay out of the way of his profession”. It was a familiar defence and almost entirely unbelievable of a well-educated, politically active man. Hoskins remained in the Tower. And he talked with Ralegh, who then wrote a Dialogue Between a Counsellor of State and a Justice of Peace (to give the work its full title), his response to the proceedings of what came to be known as the ‘Addled Parliament’ of 1614.
Ralegh’s dangerous foray into the history and practice of parliamentary politics included a passionate defence of the need for a public sphere characterised by freedom of speech. More specifically, Ralegh mounted a full-scale assault on the “great ones” who were destroying the kingdom – and who could and should be delivered up to the new political force, the “people”, and their representatives, the Commons.
In one of Ralegh’s earlier dialogues, the topic was tacked on to the end of a work that was predominantly concerned with typical Raleghan themes such as foreign policy, the art of war and the Roman Catholic Spanish threat. Now things had changed. The Dialogue of 1614 focused exclusively on internal politics, national history and secular arguments. It was an astonishing work from a political prisoner of nearly 12 years' standing. The people were a force to be reckoned with, and James was a fool to underestimate them. Indeed, Ralegh raised the spectre of the mob if James lost “the general love of the people” by protecting his evil counsellors.
Blueprints for dissent
James ignored the work when it was presented to him, in manuscript, in 1615. But the Dialogue would do other work, both at its time of writing (it was widely circulated) and, crucially, over the following decades of dissent, civil war and revolution. In his lifetime, Ralegh’s political writings were, on one level at least, always self-serving: works that would draw his queen’s attention or were delivered at her bidding, and works that might, just, gain his release from prison. But to the next generation of political thinkers and actors, they would become much more.
Ralegh’s Dialogue was first printed in 1628, the year before James’s successor, Charles, turned to Personal Rule (an 11-year period when he ruled without recourse to parliament). Frustrated parliamentarians saw in Ralegh’s work not only advice (kings are safer when they work with parliament) but ideology, and gave the work a new title: The Prerogative of Parliaments in England. The subtitle even claimed Ralegh “proved” parliament’s rights. By the time the Dialogue was published for the second time (again as The Prerogative of Parliaments) in 1640, Ralegh’s oblique hints about the potential violence of the people, and his less oblique call for the removal of evil counsellors, were becoming lived reality as two such counsellors – William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury, and Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford – went to the block. What had been latent in Ralegh’s fictional dialogue was becoming reality.
Ralegh was reaching an ever-wider audience, while beliefs about the ‘people’ were far outstripping anything that he might have written or even hinted at. In these years, his History of the World, a Commonwealth bestseller, provided rich pickings to Levellers (who advocated extended suffrage) and parliamentarians alike. Vox Plebis, the Levellers' celebration of the voice and power of common people, even made Sir Walter speak for the ‘plebs’. His work was tweaked, but not by much. Ralegh’s now-cautious-seeming critiques of individual monarchs became a political principle: “We, the people” are “of as clear judgment in all things that concern the public as any, and as wise.”
“If God be for us”
But an even more famous and powerful advocate of Ralegh’s writings would emerge. His name was Oliver Cromwell and he recommended The History of the World as vital reading for his son, Richard (this is the only recorded instance of him recommending a secular book). Cromwell read Ralegh through the lens of his own religious fervour. In doing so, he transformed Ralegh’s pessimistic providentialism – which insists on the futility of all human actions, since death will surely come – into an optimism about the potential of human endeavour, if properly guided by providence. In a letter written on the same day that he recommended the History to his son, Cromwell wrote to his brother about his successes in Ireland: “If God be for us, who can be against us? Who can fight against the Lord and prosper? Who can resist his will?”
Throughout these years of dissent, civil war and revolution, Ralegh’s raw critiques of monarchy and his support for parliament would be weaponised and transformed into calls for radical political change. Future generations would harness Ralegh’s words in different ways, and to different agendas, but never so vitally as in the century of revolution that engulfed the British Isles.
Anna Beer is visiting fellow at Kellogg College, University of Oxford. Her new book, Patriot or Traitor: The Life and Death of Sir Walter Ralegh, was published by Oneworld in October.
]]> The Tudor guide to colonising the world https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-tudor-guide-to-colonising-the-world/ Tue, 11 Sep 2018 04:00:00 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-tudor-guide-to-colonising-the-world/ Cannibalism, plunder, starvation and murder - they all appear in an epic Tudor account of English voyages of discovery, compiled by a man who rarely left the country. Here, Claire Jowitt hails one of history's greatest travel books Sir Humphrey Gilbert was hailed a hero – not so much for the way he lived, but the way he died. In June 1583, the explorer, soldier and half-brother of Sir Walter Ralegh led a fleet of five ships from Plymouth to explore and colonise North America under the terms of a Letters Patent granted by Elizabeth I in 1578. Unfortunately, it was to be his last adventure, for on 9 September 1583 poor Gilbert drowned when his ship, the Squirrel, was lost on the return leg from Newfoundland.
According to the eyewitness report of Edward Hayes, captain of the Golden Hind, when Gilbert’s fleet encountered a violent storm near the Azores, he refused to abandon his small pinnace and transfer to the relative safety of Hayes’s ship. Gilbert was last seen on deck reading a book – probably either More’s Utopia or Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations. His final words, which Hayes claimed to hear, were: “We are as neare to heaven, by sea as by land.”
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Hayes’s account of Gilbert’s dramatic demise is a colourful one, and it certainly had a lasting impact back home in England – some 300 years after the event, late 19th and early 20th-century English writers were praising Gilbert for his Christian fortitude and imperial ambitions. Yet the account may have been lost to posterity had it not appeared in one of the most important travel books ever written –The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation… published in 1589 by a man called Richard Hakluyt.
Hakluyt’s name may mean little to most people now, but back in the heyday of the British empire, his tales of derring-do – of which Gilbert’s death was just one – were greatly admired as precursors of the Victorian expansionist spirit. In fact, so in thrall to Hakluyt’s works were the Victorians that they named a society after him – founded in 1846 by William Desborough Cooley – which has continued his work of editing travel accounts of trade, exploration and adventure ever since.
But perhaps no one summed up the 19th-century acclaim for Hakluyt better than the historian JA Froude, when he wrote in an 1852 article for the The Westminster Review that the The Principal Navigations was much admired as “the prose epic of the modern English nation”.
So who was this man, Richard Hakluyt, who collected and published hundreds of accounts of travels and exploration? Hakluyt the Younger, as he is known to distinguish him from his cousin, the lawyer Richard Hakluyt – who was also active in the world of trade and exploration – was born in Hertfordshire in 1552 or 1553, the son of another Richard, a member of the Skinners’ Company (one of the livery companies of the City of London), and his wife, Margery.
Well-connected
Hakluyt the Younger was educated at Westminster School as a Queen’s Scholar and, in 1570, went on to Christ Church, Oxford. Ordained as a clergyman, between 1583 and 1588 he was chaplain and secretary to Sir Edward Stafford, English ambassador at the French court. He was then employed in a number of clerical roles, culminating with his appointment as prebendary (a type of canon) of Westminster from 1602 until his death in 1616. He was also well connected, serving as personal chaplain to Sir Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, who was principal secretary of state to both Elizabeth I and James VI and I.
Hakluyt’s interest in exploration dated back to his youth. In the preface to The Principal Navigations he recalls a visit to the chambers of his cousin Richard, where “I found lying open upon his board certain books of cosmography, with an universal Mappe”. His cousin “began to instruct my ignorance” by showing him recent geographical discoveries on the map, and describing the commodities and valuable trade resulting from them.
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The two Richard Hakluyts then discussed the relationship between the new geography and Christian belief, studying Psalm 107 from the Bible, “where I read, that they which go downe to the sea in ships, and occupy by the great waters, they see the works of the Lord, and his woonders in the deepe”. It “formed so deep an impression,” Hakluyt tells us that “I constantly resolved […] I would by God’s assistance prosecute that knowledge and kinde of literature.”
In this encounter the seeds were sown for Hakluyt’s life work, the circulation of practical information about global geography and trading opportunities, within the framework of the reformed Protestant religion.
Apart from a visit to Paris as part of Stafford’s household, Hakluyt never travelled himself – though in a letter of 1584 to Sir Francis Walsingham, then Queen Elizabeth’s principal secretary of state, he writes of his readiness to “goe myself in the action” under Gilbert’s patent for American exploration. Then, over 20 years later, in 1606, he was granted a licence to serve as chaplain for the Jamestown colony, but sent a substitute in his place.
So, instead of drawing on his own experiences, Hakluyt gathered the information that was to grace his works from a multitude of different eyewitnesses – not to mention a host of manuscripts and printed sources. It was then that he put his own individual mark on them, editing, translating and shaping them into a published text.
He would have been a familiar sight at the quays and the inns of London and Bristol’s docks, talking to travellers returning from long journeys. But he had other sources of information too, not least a network of correspondents from all over Europe. These included the geographer Emanuel van Meteren, the cartographer Gerard Mercator, the French royal cosmographer André Thevet, and the merchant and explorer Étienne Bellenger.
Hakluyt also gained access to the extensive London library of Lord Lumley, as well as becoming adept at locating antiquarian manuscripts and gaining permission to copy them. As van Meteren put it: “He [Hakluyt] is the most skilled man in research that I have ever known.”
Colonial expansion
Prior to publishing The Principal Navigations, Hakluyt contributed two other significant, though more modest, additions to the history of English overseas exploration. The first, Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America (1582), was a collection of travel accounts that aimed to promote the legitimacy of plans for English colonial expansion in North America.
The second, a 1584 manuscript entitled ‘A Particuler Discourse Concerninge the Greate Necessitie and Manifolde Commodyties That are Like to Growe to this Realme of England by the Westerne Discoveries Lately Attempted’ (widely known as ‘Discourse of Western Planting’), forcefully makes the case for developing English New World settlements, despite Spanish claims to the region based on papal bulls conferring ownership rights.
Hakluyt presented a copy of this manuscript to Elizabeth I in the autumn of 1584. No record survives of the queen’s reaction though, with Anglo-Spanish relations at a low point, it is perhaps unsurprising that she did not immediately follow Hakluyt’s recommendation that England directly confront Spain in the New World.
The Principal Navigations is a publication of fundamental importance to the emergence of England as a colonial power. Not only did it span every area of English activity and aspiration – from Muscovy to America, from Africa to the near east, and India to China and Japan – it also offered the most up-to-date information available, designed to stimulate ambitious plans for future trade and settlement.
By any standards, it is a massive book. The 1589 edition, which is one large volume of approximately 700,000 words, was divided into three sections. An expanded 1598–1600 edition, which comprised a total of more than 1.75m words, was divided into three too.
In the 1589 edition the text is split into English travels to the east and to the north, with the final section focusing on “all the corners of the vaste and new world of America”. Hakluyt also included an account of Francis Drake’s 1577–80 circumnavigation of the globe, and a report about Thomas Cavendish’s newly returned voyage of circumnavigation of 1586–88.
The first volume of the second edition includes 39 voyages to the north; the second volume contains 64 documents about travels to the south and south-east. The final, largest, volume included nearly 200 reports of travel and their supporting documents.
The large number of surviving copies of each edition, the range and scope of contemporary references to the text, and the frequent use of the information it contained suggest that The Principal Navigations circulated widely. Hakluyt’s most recent biographer, Peter Mancall, writes that “[c]opies of it became a fixture on board ships bound for distant parts,” suggesting that its utility as a practical guide for exploration was fully recognised.
Future trade
The Principal Navigations is also an important political and ideological statement, establishing an apparent tradition of ‘English’ activities that stretched as far back as Hakluyt could go in his recovery of antiquarian records.
Hakluyt began the third ‘American’ section of the first edition with the story of the ocean voyages of the Welsh prince Madoc to the New World. Madoc’s voyages placed the English, via their Welsh ancestors, in America more than three centuries before Columbus’s first footfall on the islands off the coast of the continent in 1492.
So, by dint of prior discovery, The Principal Navigations claimed the New World for the English, at a sweep negating Iberian claims for exclusive territorial rights in the region.
At the turn of the 16th century, England was not a global power. When Elizabeth I inherited the kingdom in 1558, it possessed no foreign territory. Even Calais, the last remaining continental outpost, had been humiliatingly lost during the reign of Elizabeth’s sister, Mary.
By the end of Elizabeth’s reign, in 1603, the nation was not significantly more successful. It had established, and lost, a colony on Roanoke Island in present-day North Carolina in the 1580s – this was later refounded at Jamestown in 1607 – and had made various efforts to exert control over Ireland through military campaigns and the establishment of plantations. However, what did change during the Elizabethan period, in no small part due to Hakluyt’s work, was that propagandist colonial discourses began to appear, justifying, defending and proving England’s Protestant right to empire.
After the publication of the second edition of The Principal Navigations, Hakluyt continued to be active in English overseas endeavours, translating Mare liberum, the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius’s argument about the freedom of the seas, into English. He also worked on an English-language translation of Gothard Arthus’s series of dialogues in Latin and Malay, a text that aimed to enable the English to challenge Portuguese and Dutch trading interests in the East Indies.
Hakluyt is also listed in April 1606 as one of the recipients of a patent granted by King James VI and I to North American lands in Virginia, a foundational document in the history of the Virginia Colony.
But perhaps his most important contribution to Jacobean exploration was through the advice and experience he could offer to new generations of explorers and merchants, and to his literary successors. He wrote reports about commodities, potential for trade, and local inhabitants – all relating to a variety of geographical regions. He also assessed the possibility of finding new navigable routes, particularly a North-West Passage, for the English East India Company and the Virginia Company.
He encouraged others to translate into English, and hence make important texts about particular regions accessible to a wide readership – all with the aim of stimulating trade. John Pory, for example, acknowledged Hakluyt’s influence in his decision to translate Leo Africanus’s history of Africa. Samuel Purchas, Hakluyt’s closest literary successor as the 17th-century editor of various compendious collections of travel and exploration, also hailed Hakluyt’s impact in the field of travel writing. He had been “as Admirall, holding out the light unto me in these Seas, & as diligent a guide by land”.
When Hakluyt died he was buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. No marker survives there to him, but even at the time of his death in 1616 his true monument was already apparent. That was placing the ‘English’ in the forefront and centre of international exploration and trade – both in deeds and in texts.
Hakluyt on... English cannibals
In 1536 Richard Hore embarked with two ships, the Trinity and the Minion, on a voyage to Newfoundland, possibly hoping to explore the Gulf of St Lawrence in the wake of recent French voyages to the region.
In the second edition of The Principal Navigations, Hakluyt described Hore as “a man of goodly stature and of great courage and given to the studie of Cosmographie” who had brought together a group of gentleman “desirous to see the strange things of the world”. However, the ships became separated near the Strait of Belle Isle. Hore’s ship, the Trinity, managed to return safely to England. The men on the other ship were not so fortunate; it became stranded on the coast of Labrador, resulting in starvation, murder and cannibalism. According to Hakluyt’s informant, Oliver Dawbeny, who was on the Minion, one of the group “killed his mate while he stooped to take up a roote for his relief, and cutting out pieces of his bodie whom he had murthered, broiled the same on the coles and greedily devoured them”.
Further cannibalism was prevented only by the arrival of a French ship, which the English seized and used to return to England, finally arriving, much emaciated, in late October 1536.
Hakluyt’s account was the first published version of the story. He describes how he rode 200 miles to interview William Butts, the last remaining survivor, because he particularly wanted to include his eyewitness account of the voyage.
Hakluyt on... the greatest ever English voyage
Francis Drake’s celebrated circumnavigation of the world (1577–80) possessed all the elements required to capture the English popular imagination. Travelling west to go east, and sailing for much of the time in Spanish-controlled waters, he pulled off the feat of navigating the Strait of Magellan, landing on the west coast of North America at ‘Nova Albion’, and heading back to England via the Moluccas (modern Indonesia), returning with a king’s ransom in (Spanish) treasure.
According to Hakluyt’s account, when Drake captured the Spanish ship Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, colloquially called Cacafuego or ‘Shitfire’, the ship contained “great riches, as jewels and precious stones, 13 chests full of royals of plate, foure score pound weight of gold, and sixe and twentie tunne of silver.”
Drake’s story was nearly left out of the first edition of The Principal Navigations due to its politically sensitive nature – it described unmerciful and highly profitable plundering.
At the last minute Francis Walsingham relented and allowed Hakluyt to include ‘The Famous Voyage of Sir Francis Drake into the South Sea, and There Henceabout the Whole Globe of the Earth, Begun in the Yeere of our Lord, 1577’. The piece was printed on six unpaginated leaves and inserted between pages 643 and 644.
Hakluyt on... the frozen north
In both editions of The Principal Navigations, Hakluyt included accounts of a 1553 voyage in search of the North-East Passage, on which Sir Hugh Willoughby and his men on the Bona Speranza and Bona Confidentia all died. However, his pilot, Richard Chancellor, and his men in the Edward Bonaventure survived and established direct, and highly lucrative, trade with Muscovy for the first time.
In the first edition, Hakluyt included an account of a young scholar, Clement Adams; in the second he added an account by Chancellor, as well as Willoughby’s log. The voyage was delayed by bad weather, and by mid-September the fleet had become separated. Willoughby’s journal recounts that, as the storms worsened, on 18 September he decided to winter in a bay near Varzina on the Kola Peninsula. Willoughby’s last entry was about unsuccessful searches made in three directions for help. It was not until the following spring that the two ships with the bodies of the crews, including Willoughby and his journal, were found by Russian fishermen.
Hakluyt’s framing of Willoughby’s death is an example of the power of understatement. After telling his readers about the notes written on the outside of the journal stating its purpose and the ship’s location, Hakluyt’s text ends on a telling, and chilling, note: “It appeareth by a Will found in the ship that Sir Hugh Willoughbie and most of the company were alive in January 1554.”
Willoughby and his men had clearly survived many weeks frozen in the ship before they died. Hakluyt’s matter-of-fact tone and the brevity of his comments force his readers to imagine the agonies of their final days.
Claire Jowitt is professor of English at Southampton University. With Daniel Carey, she is general editor of The Principal Navigations (1598–1600), to be published by Oxford University Press from 2016.
Tales Of Tudor Travel: The Explorer’s Handbook airs on BBC Four at 10pm on Tuesday 11 September.
This article was first published in the January 2013 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]> Top 10 Plantagenet podcasts – from the Black Death to Richard III https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/top-10-plantagenet-podcasts-from-the-black-death-to-richard-iii/ Mon, 18 Aug 2014 13:21:41 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/top-10-plantagenet-podcasts-from-the-black-death-to-richard-iii/ Edward III, the Wars of the Roses and the reputation of Henry V all feature in our list of top 10 Plantagenet podcasts The Black Death
John Hatcher visits a village devastated by the Black Death, in this podcast recorded in December 2013.
Also in this episode: James Evans describes the doomed search for the north-east passage in the 16th century.
Click here to listen.
The Wars of the Roses
In May this year, historian and author Sarah Gristwood paid a visit to Tewkesbury Abbey, which was a pivotal location in the 15th-century Wars of the Roses.
Also in this episode: ahead of the 70th anniversary of D-Day, military historian James Holland challenges some popular assumptions about the 1944 Normandy campaign, and recounts his experiences of meeting veterans.
Click here to listen.
Edward III
Mark Ormrod examines the reign of Edward III, in this podcast recorded in October 2011.
Also in this episode: Sam Willis takes us back to a major naval battle in the French Revolutionary Wars.
Click here to listen.
The plague
Mark Ormrod discusses the Black Death in this podcast recorded in February 2011.
Also in this episode: Mark Nicholls explores the life of Sir Walter Ralegh, and Simon Sebag Montefiore explains the challenges involved in writing a history of Jerusalem.
Click here to listen.
A fresh look at Edward III
In this August 2013 podcast Richard Barber describes the life and career of one of England's most successful medieval kings, based on new research for his book.
Click here to listen.
Henry V
Anne Curry explores Henry V's disreputable youth, in this podcast recorded in March 2013.
Also in this episode: Diarmaid Macculloch offers a robust defence of Wolf Hall star Thomas Cromwell.
Click here to listen.
The Wars of the Roses
In this September 2012 podcast, Sarah Gristwood reflects on the role of women in the Wars of the Roses.
Also in this episode: Tim Benbow describes the Second World War battle for Madagascar.
Click here to listen.
The cruelty of Henry V
Ian Mortimer explains why he thinks Henry V was a cruel king who doesn’t deserve his heroic reputation, in this October 2009 podcast.
Also in this episode: Amanda Vickery talks about her radio series that delves into the history of private lives in Britain.
Click here to listen.
Richard III
In this July 2014 podcast Chris Skidmore, who is writing a new biography of Richard III, talks to us about how his research is presenting a different picture of the controversial 15th-century king.
Also in this episode: we speak to Pamela Hartshorne about the challenges people faced in Tudor England when trying to keep their cities clean and hygienic.
Click here to listen.
A grisly end
David Hipshon speaks about the controversial king Richard III and his violent death at the battle of Bosworth, in this podcast recorded in March 2009.
Also in this episode: Hallie Rubenhold reveals a remarkable tale of adultery that caused a scandal in the 18th century.
Click here to listen.
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