Pirates of the Caribbean

That credit had to go to bad guy and arch-enemy, King Philip II of Spain, whose territories in the New World brought him enormous wealth and a navy capable of claiming many major sea routes as its own.

Why then would Philip spend the money to assemble the largest – and most expensive – naval force ever seen against his island foe?

The answer lies in the religion and politics that ruled those times, fought out on the seas upon which the fighting men of England and Spain were more used to encountering each other.

First, then, the religion and politics. The young Philip of Spain was in fact first married to his fellow Catholic, Queen Mary of England. Marriage had not made Philip king (the English parliament expressly forbade his ruling), but played the role of reluctant “consort” to the Queen. His sole purpose in the match was to try to father a Catholic heir to the English throne and so keep the country within the Roman Catholic sphere.

Indeed, when the childless Mary died in 1558 and was succeeded by her very Protestant sister, Elizabeth, Philip remained so determined to influence the future religious direction of the country that he proposed marriage to Elizabeth too.

But at the game of religion and politics, Elizabeth proved to be a match for Philip. In the art of maritime politics and strategy, she certainly maintained an edge. Elizabeth acknowledged Philip’s proposal, but kept him waiting – and then waiting some more. She maintained open communications and protested the friendship between the countries. All the while, however, she encouraged and endorsed a completely different relationship at sea.

England, in contrast to the growing Spanish Empire, had no colonies during Elizabethan times. But England did have a strong contingent of seafarer explorers – such as Francis Drake (with his ship The Pelican, later renamed The Golden Hind), Walter Raleigh (The Ark Royal), Richard Hawkins (The Galliot Duck), Martin Frobisher (The Gabriel and The Triumph), Humphrey Guilbert (The Raleigh, The Swallow, and The Squirrel), and Richard Grenville (The Revenge). Whenever any of these famous sea-captains encountered Spanish treasure ships en route from the rich empire of the New World to their home ports in Spain, the English mariners rarely resisted the temptation to plunder the treasure. The Spanish treasure fleets represented very rich pickings and the English had witnessed the spoils to be earned from their Dutch counterparts.

Indeed, it was the Dutch who first established the idea of “legitimate” pirates when Prince William of the Netherlands funded Protestant Privateers to attack Spanish ships. In a Protestant alliance against Catholic Spain, Queen Elizabeth of England allowed the Dutch “privateers” – or pirates depending on your point of view! – a safe harbour in English ports.

The English seamen such as Francis Drake witnessed the ‘spoils of piracy’ obtained from the hated Spanish and began to join their Dutch comrades as Elizabethan ‘Privateers’. Elizabethan Privateers were lawful pirates who were authorised by their government and sovereign to attack the treasure ships of enemy nations. The English government issued ‘letters of marque’ to them, thus effectively licensing them to plunder enemy ships. Letters of marque and reprisal, commissioned by the government, distinguished their ships from unauthorised pirate ships. The Elizabethan “privateers” thus became auxiliaries to, or substitutes for, a regular navy. The ‘letters of marque’ prevented privateers from being charged with piracy, which was an offence ordinarily punishable by death.

In fairly rapid time, the activities of the English privateers on the Spanish Main (the coasts of Spanish possessions in the New World) and in the Atlantic became a severe drain on the Spanish treasury. The English trans-Atlantic slave trade – started by John Hawkins in 1562 – gained royal support, even though the Spanish government complained that Hawkins’ trade with their colonies in the West Indies was a smuggling racket.

In September 1568, a slaving expedition led by Hawkins and Francis Drake was surprised by the Spanish, and several ships were sunk, at San Juan de Ulúa, near Veracruz, Mexico. This engagement soured Anglo-Spanish relations still further, and in the following year the English detained several treasure ships sent by the Spanish to supply their army in the Netherlands. Drake and Hawkins, amongst others, intensified their privateering as a way to break the Spanish monopoly on Atlantic trade.

Although war between the two countries was never formally declared, Anglo-Spanish hostilities continued intermittently between 1585 and 1604. They continued to be fuelled by the religious intolerance between Philip and Elizabeth – whom the Spanish convinced themselves to be an illegitimate heir to the English throne. According to Catholic doctrine, Elizabeth’s father Henry VIII had had no right to divorce his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, to marry Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn. Therefore Elizabeth was born out of proper wedlock, and thus had no right to the throne.

Philip’s resolve to return England to the true faith of Catholicism was so determined that he planned an invasion and, so the construction of the Spanish Armada began as early as 1584. He sought and secured the Pope’s blessing for the scheme, which even included Philip’s right to name the next monarch of England, for whom he had in mind his own daughter, Isabella.

The fate of the Spanish Armada, when it eventually arrived near English shores in 1588 is well known – effectively repulsed by the privateers (or pirates, depending on your persuasion) of Drake and his ilk. Less well remembered by the English side, of course, is that an “English Armada” which sailed into Spanish waters in 1589 was just as soundly defeated before the battles of La Coruña and Lisbon. The Anglo-Spanish war which had never been formally declared was nevertheless formally concluded in the Treaty of London of 1604.