The Pirate Queen

Queen Elizabeth I was originally dubbed ‘the pirate queen’ along with ‘that woman’ and ‘the heretic queen’ by successive popes during her reign, and Philip II of Spain. From the papal viewpoint, Elizabeth represented a dangerous return to the heresy of Protestantism and thereby a threat to the Vatican. For Philip II, the threat was not only religious but also secular: the Spanish inheritance of the ‘Low Countries’ – modern day Belgium and the Netherlands – had become staunchly Calvinist. Since the Netherlands represented Spain’s main northern trading centres, and a huge source of ready cash, any unrest there inspired by Elizabeth’s independence would jeopardize the smooth flow of funds to Spain.

Philip II

After Philip’s half-hearted proposal of marriage to Elizabeth in 1559, and Elizabeth’s successful resistance to the Franco-Scottish war alliance led by Mary Queen of Scots while she was briefly also Queen of France, Philip feared that Elizabeth’s Protestantism would make her a natural ally to his northern vassals, and worked tirelessly, to try to keep England dependant on its friendship with Spain. But Elizabeth was determined to be the first queen of England to reign in her own right; the first monarch to refer to her country as her ‘realm’ (as opposed to kingdom); and determined to keep the myriad factions at home and abroad from endangering her personal – and England’s – security. To ensure England’s independence from foreign domination, Elizabeth engaged the services of all her merchant and gentlemen adventurers from the merchant adventuring companies; to great financiers like Sir Thomas Gresham; Privy Councillors like Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and Sir Francis Walsingham; and maritime adventurers like Sir John Hawkins and Sir Francis Drake. Her maxim was ‘security’, and money meant security and power for defence of the realm. It was their duty to ensure – at times by any means – the future of the nation.

Portugal, then Spain, had pioneered maritime adventuring and colonial expansion, and it was up to Elizabeth’s adventurers to ensure England’s share of the economic rewards. The Pirate Queen is the story of how this was achieved, and Elizabeth’s role with her adventurers in England’s expansion. Where some like Sir Walter Raleigh believed in colonization, Elizabeth I herself was anything but an imperialist; and The Pirate Queen shows the evolution during her forty-four year reign about what security for the realm meant to her, to how she built the foundations for Empire weighed against increased hostility from the Spanish, and what they believed to be out-and-out piracy by the English.