Utrecht in 1474. Bound by this pact, Henry VII, with all the resources of his diplomacy, was unable to shake the League's position in his realm. In other directions, however, he had advanced English trade. He had made favourable treaties with Spain and the Netherlands, had protected his subjects from Venetian jealousy in the Mediterranean, and had passed Navigation Acts (1485 and 1488) to restrict the import of wine from Gascony to English shipping. Under Henry VIII the North Sea trades made no great advance. English merchants in the Baltic and Germany remained subordinate to the Hansa which also competed keenly with them in the Netherlands. The western trades show a much more interesting record. There may not have been much growth in their volume, but the English share certainly increased. The misfortunes of Venice caused the great Flanders gålleys, formerly the vehicles of the spice trade, to become irregular in their sailings and to cease them altogether after 1532. Private Venetian ships still came to England, and a Venetian community long remained in London, but a great deal of the trade with Italy and the Levant fell into the hands of English merchants. The Levant voyage commonly took twelve months and demanded the use of a large and well-armed ship. The King occasionally ventured a warship in the trade. It supplied moreover an incentive to build merchantmen of a more advanced type than was common on the short North Sea routes. Business training also benefited, for the records show that the risk of a Levant voyage was usually shared by a considerable number of merchants, Englishmen being often associated with Italians.1 Here is to be seen one of the origins, not only of the regular joint-stock company for foreign trade, but also of those very flexible syndicates which carried on the Elizabethan warfare against Spain and accomplished much pioneering work in the colonial Empire of the seventeenth century. The need for experience in such matters is apparent when it is remembered that they involved complex questions of law between the parties. The High Court of Admiralty, reorganised by Henry VIII, adapted its procedure to the new needs of the time, and from 1536 onwards preserved in its records an immense body of learning and precedent. The westward traders strengthened their connection with the French ports, and undoubtedly obtained there a stock of information about Africa, Brazil and the West Indies, where French intruders were busy throughout the reign of Francis I. In spite of the wars with France, there is little evidence of rancour between the French and English seamen; on the contrary, they seem to have joined in hatred of the Flemings and Germans and afterwards of the Portuguese and Spaniards, so that when the Reformation supervened, the seeds were already laid of that 1 Exchequer (Customs), E. 122, 143/11, 1539, July 19-a great ship from Southampton for Levant, laded by more than twenty merchants, English and foreign; E. 122, 143/13, 1542, Dec. 21-a similar undertaking. THE BRAZIL TRADE 33 alliance between English Protestants and French Huguenots, which made the Channel and the Bay of Biscay a freebooters' paradise and severed the best line of communication between the Habsburg dominions. The English share of trade with the Peninsula grew in volume as the result of changing conditions. Bristol, Plymouth and Southampton tapped the traffic from Portugal to Antwerp, and Southampton gradually regained some of the business lost by the decline of Venice. The seaports of Andalusia were no longer a terminus only, but began to serve as half-way points on the Levant route. In 1530 Henry VIII issued a charter conferring the organisation of a regulated company upon the merchants in Spain; and so valuable was the traffic that it survived all the troubles of the Reformation until the beginning of war in 1585. In the later years of Henry VIII there is clear evidence of English ships frequenting the Spanish Canaries and the Portuguese Azores, bringing wines and sugar from the former and woad from the latter.1 Portugal, however, prohibited access to Madeira and the African coast. As the sixteenth century advanced, the difficulties besetting the English merchants in Spain became serious enough to destroy any but a well-rooted trade. Privateering and piracy grew rampant; the Spanish secular laws were oppressive -English residents, for example, were not allowed to keep their private accounts in their own language;2 and the cruelties of the Inquisition, as Admiralty records show, were not such fables of Protestant polemic as has sometimes been alleged. The most striking oceanic advance of the reign was the opening of a regular trade with Guinea and Brazil in spite of Portuguese objections. The details of the story are lost, but from the scanty evidence which remains it appears that William Hawkins of Plymouth was the pioneer. He made three voyages in person to Brazil in 1530-2, touching the Guinea coast on the outward passage. In subsequent years he sent out ships on the same errand, one of which in 1540 brought home a valuable lading of ivory and Brazil wood, which may be taken as typical of the results of the trade.3 At the same date the Southampton men were active, and one of them built a fort near Bahia in 1542. In 1540 a London ship went to northern Brazil (which may possibly mean Guiana) and thence to the Caribbean, where her crew committed piracies on the Spaniards.4 Hawkins and the Southampton men were all merchants doing business with Spain and Portugal, and it is from those countries that they may have 1 H.C.A. Examinations, nos. 3 and 4, passim, 1538-42; H.C.A. 7/1, Exemplifications, nos. 206-8, 1538. 2 Cal. St. Pap. Foreign, 1561-2, no. 412. 3 E. 122, 116/11, 13. Eng. Hist. Rev. XXIV, 96, Marsden, R. G., "The Voyage of the Barbara of London". Further details not given by Marsden occur in a Spanish report of 17 August 1540, printed in J. F. Pacheco's Coleccion de documentos ineditos...de las posesiones españolas, Madrid, 1864-84, 1, 572. CHBE I 3 obtained their charts and pilots for the ocean voyages. But a more probable source is to be found in Normandy. The seamen of Rouen, Havre, Honfleur and Dieppe had visited the tropics from the beginning of the century and had made a regular trade thither since 1520.1 Rouen, in particular, harboured a number of Spanish and Portuguese renegades, some of whom had become naturalised Frenchmen and were doubtless ready to sell their countries' secrets. The English Brazil trade died out during the French war of 1544-6. Portugal was at length taking the colonisation of the country in hand, and was sending out warships to stop intruders. In addition, the war made freebooting in home waters more profitable than distant trading, and the Admiralty records show that many a cargo of sugar, ivory and dyestuffs was brought into English ports by adventurers who went no farther than Finisterre in search of it. The French, on the other hand, made no break in their tropical expeditions. Francis I and Henry II connived at them, and at a later date Admiral Coligny became a frequent investor. His position as head of the Huguenot party was thus utilised to transform the earlier interloping under royal patronage into a Protestant crusade which carried fire and sword into the colonial waters of the Peninsular Powers. Henry VIII's services in strengthening the Royal Navy, establishing the Navy Board and fortifying several ports were vitally necessary. Already in 1538-9 Englishmen were being roughly used in Spain for refusing to deny their King's claim to the title of Supreme Head of the Church. In 1540 a new English Navigation Act introduced the principle of discriminating duties between users and non-users of English shipping; but so loud were Flemish and Spanish complaints that Henry was obliged to give way and exempt the Emperor's subjects from its operation. Then, in 1542-4, there was a reconciliation with Charles V, and in the latter year he and Henry jointly declared war on Francis. They made one campaign in unison, and Henry captured Boulogne, but in the autumn Charles suddenly concluded a separate peace at Crespy, leaving England alone to cope with France and Scotland. Scotland was already powerless for offence, thanks to a joint naval and military expedition in 1544, which had taken Edinburgh, burned Leith, and cleared the Forth of shipping; but France had a strong professional army and a navy capable of contesting the Channel. The danger year was 1545, when the French fleet came over and blockaded the English in Portsmouth. There was a half-hearted fight off the mouth of the harbour, and afterwards the French withdrew, defeated more by their own maladministration than by the English guns. Henry's Navy won no victory; yet its existence 1 Bréard, C. and P., Documents relatifs à la marine normande (Rouen, 1889), pp. 201-2. For this very important period of French expansion see, in general, Charles de la Roncière, Hist. de la marine française, III. 2 Letters and Papers, XIV, pt 1, nos. 466, 487; xv, nos. 38, 281. THE WESTERN ADVENTURERS 35 had saved the country from invasion, for that was the purpose with which the French had set out. The Emperor's Peace of Crespy was a serious blow to the old alliance of England with Spain and the Low Countries. There were circumstances which tended to justify him, but by all good Englishmen his act was regarded as one of the blackest treachery. Accordingly his subjects became fair game for adventurers who professed to be privateering against France, but who resisted few temptations to rob beyond the scope of their commissions. By 1545 the privateers had already cleared the seas of French merchantmen, and now they began to take Spaniards and Flemings and even Portuguese on the charge of carrying French goods. Some did not trouble to make the excuse. One of them took a treasure ship from the West Indies with a cargo worth 30,000 ducats,1 patently not of French ownership, and many others did similar feats. The Anglo-Spanish hatred of Elizabethan days was no new thing. It began in the dungeons of the Inquisition and on the waters of the Bay and the Channel before Henry VIII was dead; and it confirmed the Protestantism of the western adventurers and urged them to make common cause with the more experienced Huguenot freebooters from the ports of France. So important was the western element in the subsequent generation that it is relevant to consider individually some of the men who were its pioneers. In London the Gonson family were prominent. William Gonson under Henry VIII traded with Spain and also despatched many ships to the Levant. Great nobles like the Dukes of Suffolk and Norfolk participated in the trade, in association with the Gonsons and other merchants. Benjamin Gonson, the son of William, succeeded to a similar career. His western ventures included the financing of voyages to Guinea under Mary and Elizabeth and of John Hawkins's expeditions to the West Indies. He was Treasurer of the Navy and Cecil's right-hand man in its administration; and John Hawkins married his daughter and succeeded to his office. Sir William Lock and his son Michael were also Levant traders, and Michael Lock was in after days the chief promoter of the Company of Kathai and of Frobisher's search for the North-West Passage. The Castlyn family were originally prominent in the Spanish and Portuguese trade under Henry VIII, William Castlyn as a merchant, and his brother James as a sea captain. From the Peninsula they extended their operations to the Canaries and the Azores, to which group James Castlyn made one of the first recorded English voyages. Edward Castlyn, of the next generation, in partnership with Anthony Hickman, maintained resident factors in the Canary Islands in the reign of Mary, and both of them were prominent investors in the pioneer voyages to Barbary and Guinea. Of the other London adventurers in oceanic undertakings, Sir George Barnes and Sir 1 Letters and Papers, xx, pt 1, no. 459, and several subsequent references. Andrew Judd were Spanish traders, as also were Sir William Gerrard and Sir Lionel Ducket. In general it may be said of this London group of which the above list is not exhaustive-that they made their fortunes in the old regulated trades across the North Sea and then ventured their surplus in the more risky speculations on the ocean; the majority of them are known to have belonged to the Merchant Adventurers as well as to the Spanish Company. Southampton numbered among her townsmen some men of the same stamp. Henry Huttoft was a Levant trader with extensive Italian connections under Henry VIII. He served the State as collector of customs and as a contractor for naval construction at Portsmouth, where he built the second Great Harry and other ships in 1536 and the following years. He acted also as agent to Thomas Cromwell, who was himself an investor and shipowner in the Spanish and Levant traffic. Robert Reneger, Thomas Borey and John Pudsey were Southampton merchants who engaged in the early Brazil trade. Reneger in the last French war was a noted privateer and the captor of the first West Indian treasure ship to fall into English hands. The Brazil ventures of William Hawkins of Plymouth have already been considered. He helped Cromwell in the Dissolution, engaged largely in privateering, and afterwards acted as a contractor for victualling the Navy and fortifying Plymouth Sound. He represented Plymouth in three Parliaments and twice served as mayor, an office which was important as an outpost of the central authority. His sons William and John continued the same tradition, engaging in pioneering ventures and bearing a part in national and local administration.1 At Bristol the Thornes filled a similar position. Their main business was trade with Spain and the Mediterranean, and by it they were inspired to promote oceanic expansion. Robert Thorne the elder and his son of the same name have already been mentioned for their share in American discovery. The younger Robert and his brother Nicholas traded with the Canaries and even maintained a factor in 1526 in the West Indies, although their trade thither is fairly certain to have been carried in Spanish bottoms. The significance of all these men, and of many others, in the national development was considerable. By voyages to the Peninsula, the Levant and the Atlantic islands they acquired ideas and knowledge of highly organised business methods, of shipbuilding and navigation, and of the new world-conditions which were to dominate the future. They accumulated capital in the old trades and were fearless in using it in the new. They were necessarily individualists, breaking with the old tradition of incorporation, and as active in challenging vested interests afloat as on shore. Some of them mingled trade with privateering, which was legitimate warfare, and with indiscriminate roving against neutrals, which was not; thus they grew accustomed 1 See Williamson, J. A., Sir John Hawkins, passim. |