Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age (21 page)

By 1563 Gilbert’s training was almost complete. Guided by such works as Castiglione’s
Il Cortegiano,
the most famous of the courtesy books which Sir Thomas Hoby translated into English in 1561, Gilbert had acquired the graces of peace and was proficient in music, dancing and the composition of lyric verse; it now remained
for him to put his courage, his fencing and horsemanship to the test of war. In his twenty-fourth year he left for France in search of honour and reputation.

He endured a small, cautious campaign, pretending to be in aid of the French Protestants, but really an English attempt to take the Channel port of Havre de Grace as compensation for the recent loss of Calais. He saw a few skirmishes and more dishonour. Having driven the trusting citizens from the town, the English settled in Havre de Grace and awaited the boredom of the siege. Soon the greater dread of the plague was upon them; the ominous buboes appeared at the groin and the armpit and soon the English soldiers, whose worst enemy until then had been heat and fatigue, screamed in painful contractions and died covered in pus from ruptured swellings. On 5th June Gilbert was wounded. In July the English capitulated and withdrew.

Though the chronicler John Stow wrote that Gilbert served in France ‘with great commendation’, no honour comes from a deceitful campaign and courage makes no headway against the plague. The reality of his military apprenticeship had been in grim contrast to the debonair assumptions of the courtier’s training. The brutal may show a disinterested lust for blood, but the courtier of gentle breeding, if he is to gain honour from the squalors of war, must endow the terrible business with noble purpose. Despite polishing, the little enterprise in France was without a gloss of nobility. Three years later an outbreak of rebellion in Ireland gave Gilbert the chance to acquire reputation, for this campaign was undertaken in a high national cause, to put down treason. Gilbert’s serious love for England promised the greatest severity for the Irish rebels; the aim of the war, as the commander-in-chief Sir Henry Sidney admitted, was to make the name of an Englishman ‘more terrible now to them than the sight of a hundred was before’, and this purpose, Sidney informed the Council in London, Gilbert achieved. Moreover, the Irish were miserable specimens and cruel rectitude is most easily practised against wretches: ‘they came creeping forth upon their hands’, Sidney wrote of his enemies in Munster, ‘for their legs could not bear them; they looked like anatomies of death; they spoke like ghosts crying out of their graves; they did eat the dead carrions, happy when they could find them; yea they did eat one another soon after.’

For more than three years Gilbert fought the Irish, first against
Shane O’Neill in Ulster and then against James FitzMaurice in Munster. He rose to the rank of colonel though he protested his ‘insufficientories to be such, both for want of years, experience, and all other virtues necessary for such an officer’. Several times he left Ireland, trying to escape from this savage assignment which he found expensive, distasteful, barren; but he was ordered back, for his distaste did not prevent him from being horrifically effective. At the end of 1569 Gilbert sent Cecil an account of his methods in Munster. If a town would not yield, he took it by force ‘how many lives so ever it cost, putting man, woman, and child of them to the sword’. The poet Thomas Churchyard, who left a description of this campaign in his
General Rehersal of Wars
(1579), wrote of piles of heads from the day’s slaughter put before Gilbert’s tent which did ‘bring greater terror to the people, when they saw the heads of their dead fathers, brothers, children, kinsfolk and friends, lie on the ground before their faces as they came to speak with the said Colonel’. Captain Ward, one of his officers, reported that the Irish accounted Gilbert ‘more like a devil than a man, and are so afraid of him that they did leave and give up twenty-six castles’. The commander-in-chief Sidney thought that Gilbert had made the highways safe and the towns free, and for all this, Sidney wrote, ‘I had nothing to present him with but the honour of a knighthood, which I gave him.’ Gilbert was allowed to leave Dublin for England in January 1570, and although he returned later in the year in an unsuccessful attempt to recover the expenses of his campaign, £3,315 in all, his days of notorious slaughter were over.

In an age of mutability death loses some of its terrors. ‘One day one sees a man as a great lord,’ a French traveller to England noted in 1558, ‘the next he is in the hands of an executioner.’ A man who has some contempt for his own eclipse will send others that way the more easily: Gilbert’s efficiency in Ireland, not his ferocity, was unusual. John Keats, in a famous passage on Shakespeare, remarked on the playwright’s ‘negative capability’, the power to look on death, despair and uncertainty with detachment. The power which Shakespeare showed in art, many of his contemporary men of action showed in life. ‘For conversation of particular greatness and dignity,’ wrote Raleigh, Humphrey Gilbert’s half-brother, ‘there is nothing more noble and glorious than to have felt the force of every fortune.’ Terrestrial events were merely
accidents that proved the character. To be great was to think greatly, the mind following its abstract star; then the ruthless pursuit of high endeavours, causing perhaps the death of many others and even one’s own demise, could be looked on with equanimity. Hawkins the slave-trader, Drake the circumnavigator, Gilbert, and later Raleigh, the scourges of Ireland, men practised in ruthlessness, were all proud and ambitious, and were all in the grip of large ideal notions.

Gilbert fought in Ireland for the cause of England’s greatness—to put down treason, to secure English rights and property, and if possible to establish English rule throughout the land. Despite the barbarity of his methods he quickly saw that rapine and destruction were no way to make Ireland an obedient and peaceful province of England. It is to his credit, and supports his own contention that he had no military ambition and no desire to command, that he looked for peaceful ways to subdue Ireland. The policy of ‘plantation’ was first attempted in Ireland in 1556, in the reign of Queen Mary, when English soldiers were given the land of rebellious chiefs in the counties of Leix and Offaly. Soon after he went to Ireland, Gilbert pressed for an English plantation in Ulster. Elizabeth was sympathetic, seeing that the scheme would cost her nothing, and wrote to Sidney that Englishmen ‘were to be allured to plant in Ulster’. The plan failed, but in 1568 Gilbert, being then in Munster, again petitioned for grants of land: ‘Sith it seemeth good to the Queen’s Majesty to use means to reduce the Realm of Ireland to civility and obedience.’ Although this plan went little further than the former one, Gilbert was convinced of the advantages of colonization. In 1572 he wrote a
Discourse on Ireland
setting out the benefits for England; he mentioned the increase in trade, the value of Irish minerals and fishing, the good harbours in Ireland for English shipping, but chiefly he thought of the security and glory of England, to keep ‘the Irish empire from the conquest of the Spaniards, Frenchmen and other nations’.

A courtly education and his desire to serve the Queen had turned Sir Humphrey Gilbert into a soldier. For ten years, from the age of twenty-four, he followed this profession in France, in Ireland and in the Netherlands. But his mind—the wistful mind that aspired to a great and singular enterprise for the glory of queen and country—became aware that his destiny would not be realized on
the numerous and bloody battlefields of Europe. From the restrictions of the European land, where each field and path had a profound history, he turned his thoughts to the sea whose unfenced immensities allowed the imagination a corresponding freedom. Son of a sailor, born by the sea, friend and colleague of Devon seamen, and living in an age of great discoveries, he could not have forgotten the sea. In the intervals between campaigns he thought of ships and voyages. In 1566, on his return from France, he was eager to try the north-west passage to China and was only stopped by the opposition of Sir John Gilbert, his elder brother; ‘thereupon he wrote this treatise unto his said brother, both to excuse and clear himself from the note of rashness and also to set down such authorities, reasons and experiences, as had chiefly encouraged him unto the same.’ This treatise was
A Discourse of a Discovery for a New Passage to Cataia,
written in 1566, but not published until 1576 when the poet George Gascoigne brought it to the press and contributed a preface.

This short pamphlet, written with persuasive charm, drew proofs for a north-west passage from the usual erroneous sources of antiquity—from the myths of Plato, from the history of Pliny, from the geography of Strabo, and from others even less reliable—and added to this much puzzling information of tides and currents, of travels and migrations. It set out also the advantages of the passage, the benefits to England’s trade, and the possibility of finding new, rich lands beyond the reach of Spain and Portugal. None of this was new. The geographical misinformation and the naïve surmises were common to the age; the wish to outflank Spain and Portugal on the way to the riches of the East had caused the Merchant Adventurers to send Willoughby and Chancellor on their voyages to the North-East in 1553 and 1556. The only novelty in the treatise appeared in this surprising hint: ‘Also we might inhabit some part of those countries, and settle there such needy people of our country, which now trouble the commonwealth, and through want here at home are inforced to commit outrageous offences, whereby they are dayly consumed with the gallows.’ In these poor criminals may be seen the forerunners of all England’s imperial millions. And Gilbert, hell-bent on distinction, made it clear that he was the man to undertake such an enterprise; ‘he is not worthy to live at all,’ he wrote in the closing passage of his treatise, ‘that for fear, or danger of death, shunneth his
countries service, and his own honour: seeing death is inevitable, and the fame of virtue immortal. Wherefor in this behalf,
Mutare vel timere sperno
.’ Something must come of such a desperate resolution.

In the rush for possessions, wealth and power released by the sea voyages of Portugal and Spain, England had been left behind. While the Portuguese sailors, guided and encouraged by the royal family, moved steadily down the coast of Africa, discovering Madeira in 1419, the Azores in 1448 and rounding the Cape of Good Hope in 1486, England was still convulsed in the last brutalities of the Wars of the Roses. And when that struggle was over none of the early Tudors had the vision of King John of Portugal or of his more famous son, Prince Henry the Navigator. England established no naval college, as Portugal had done; there was no equivalent of the Spanish Casa de Contratacion in Seville, where the lecturer in navigation instructed and examined all captains bound for the Indies. England had no writers on geography and the theory of navigation. Pedro de Medina’s important
Arte de Navegar
(1545), the text-book for world voyagers, was not translated into English until 1581. England’s rulers were insular, cautious, poor; her sailors, the Spanish Ambassador at the court of Henry VII wrote, ‘are generally savages’. The line drawn by Pope Alexander VI in May 1493, dividing the new discoveries between Spain and Portugal, recognized the pre-eminence of these nations in the work of exploration.

It was impossible that Spain and Portugal should enjoy their new worlds in peace. The vast riches brought back inflamed the greed of less fortunate nations, and strange tales moved the imagination of all Europe. The pity of it was, the poet of
A New Interlude
complained in 1517, that England had no foreign possessions:

        what an honourable thing

Both to the realm and the king,

To have had his dominion extending

There into so far a ground.

In 1513, Robert Thorne, a Bristol man who went to live in Seville, had exhorted Henry VIII to encourage exploration. In 1527, at the invitation of the English ambassador, Thorne wrote a long account of Spanish and Portuguese successes, and then set out a
way in which England could redress the balance. His advice was to go north, so shortening the passage to the Spice Islands and, on the way, opening ‘the navigation of all Tartary, which should be no less profitable to our commodities of cloth, than these spiceries to the Emperor and King of Portingale’. And to the objection that the northern seas were blocked with ice, and the lands too cold to live in, Thorne replied with the confidence of one resident in warm, beguiling Seville that ‘there is no land uninhabitable, nor sea innavigable’.

The North slowly became England’s particular territory. John Cabot had prepared the way, sailing from Bristol in 1497 to discover Cape Breton. Within a few years the English fishermen were out in force, making the arduous journey to the Newfoundland fishing banks. Henry VIII encouraged shipbuilding and protected English fisheries so that Hakluyt could justly claim that the Newfoundland trade ‘was common and frequented in the reign of Edward VI’. And Hakluyt’s judgment had the support of the Spaniards. The geography book
El Yslario General
, written in 1536 by Alonzo de Santa Cruz, an experienced navigator from the Casa de Contratacion, affirmed that Labrador was ‘frequented by the English, who go there to take fish, which the natives catch in great numbers’.

But the fishing trade with its traditional modest rewards was of no interest to the new English adventurers. Envious of the riches of Spain and Portugal, they wished to use the routes of the North only as a means to the East, to the wealth of Cathay and the Spice Islands. ‘The preciousness of these things,’ wrote Robert Thorne, ‘is measured after the distance that is between us and the things that we have appetite unto’. Serious attempts to lessen this hateful distance were taken by the Merchant Adventurers in mid-century. In 1553 three ships under Willoughby and Chancellor were sent to find Asia by the North-East, and further journeys in that direction were made in 1556 and 1558 by Stephen Burrough and Anthony Jenkinson. Despite the oppression of fog, cold and ice which killed so many, these expeditions established trade with Russia; but the larger aim to win through to the East seemed impossible by this route, and so men’s hopes turned once again to the North-West.