The "Lost Colony" -- Other Theories

 

We know that historian David Beers Quinn believed that sometime in September the vast majority of John White’s 1587 settlers moved from Roanoke Island to a location near the southern shore of Chesapeake Bay, perhaps near the Chesapeake village of Skicoac, situated on the Elizabeth River. According to Quinn, the colonists lived in harmony with the Chesapeakes until late April of 1607, when three English ships transporting colonists entered the Bay. Warned by his priests that his vast Powhatan nation would be destroyed if these people were to establish themselves, Wahunsonacocks, fearful that the settlers would unite with John White’s transplanted colony, had White’s people and their host tribe, the Chesapeakes, massacred. (See my revised blog entry: “John White’s Lost Colony,” August 30, 2014). Maybe a dozen of White’s settlers, escaping, were adopted or enslaved by interior Carolina tribes.

More recently published historians – three that I will discuss -- disagree about where White’s people settled. One of them believes that Wahunsonacocks’s warriors did not kill them.

In "A Kingdom Strange: The Brief and Tragic History of the Lost Colony of Roanoke" James Horn postulates that the settlers established themselves on high ground between the mouths of the Chowan and Roanoke Rivers. He agrees with Quinn that the settlers probably opted to send a small group to Croatoan Island to await John White’s return with supplies and additional settlers to be able to direct him to the colony’s new location. “Possibly soon after White left [for England in 1587], several of the colonists’ leaders set out with Manteo and a couple of dozen men in the pinnace to make arrangements with the Chowanocs for establishing a temporary settlement … The Chowanocs had been allies of the English in the summer of 1586, and the settlers’ leaders hoped the Indians would see advantages in trading with the English or would view them as potential allies against hostile Iroquoian peoples to the south and west. The pinnace, probably capable of carrying forty passengers, would have had to have made at least two trips to the negotiated location, “a superb vantage point for keeping watch down the length of Albemarle Sound” (Horn 226).

“Once they had prepared the ground …, the settlers could begin the job of constructing their new living quarters using the timbers and materials brought from Roanoke Island. With the help of the Chowanocs, they could have had the settlement substantially completed by late December …“ (Horn 227).

Unlike Quinn, Horn believes that after it was apparent that White was not returning, some of the settlers migrated to other locations: closer to the Chowanoc capital; along Cashie Creek, a tributary of the Roanoke River; and near the falls of the Roanoke River. “The timing of the settlers’ movements is impossible to determine, but it is likely that most of them had joined Indian communities by the early to mid-1590s” (Horn 230). Horn believes that Wahunsonacocks, for the same reasons Quinn cited, ordered his warriors to “track down as many of White’s colonists as they could find and kill them” (Horn 232). Horn makes no mention of the Chesapeakes. Perhaps ten years after 1607 the Powhatan chief Opechancanough, a brother of Wahunsonacocks, ordered attacks against the Chowanocs and the Tuscaroras, killing many warriors and, presumably, a few more of White’s settlers. Horn’s theory that some of the colonists migrated from their settlement between the mouths of the Chowan and Roanoke Rivers before 1607 accounts for why a few white men and women were rumored to be living along Cashie Creek and near the falls of the Roanoke River during the early years of Jamestown’s existence.

In "The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand: Roanoke’s Forgotten Indians” Michael Leroy Oberg proceeds cautiously in attempting to account for the disappearance of John White’s people. He writes: “Their disappearance was meaningful. It was significant. That these colonists vanished demanded an explanation, and many have since been offered for the colonists’ fate” (Oberg 126). He examines eight theories.

He rejects Quinn’s supposition. “None of the English sources stated clearly that the colonists moved to the Chesapeake. … the Chesapeake Indians did not entirely disappear [after Wahunsonacocks’s 1607 attack]. … Governor John White had said that the colonists intended to move fifty miles into the interior after he left. If they moved west rather than north, and ascended Albemarle Sound rather than Chesapeake Bay, this relocation could have placed them in the territory of the Weapemeocs” (Oberg 137). Oberg discusses the possibility that the Weapeneoc chief Okisco might have sheltered the colonists but determines it unlikely. Although he had pledged loyalty to Queen Elizabeth and Walter Raleigh in 1586, Okisco was not supported by many members of his tribe, many of whom were hostile to the English. He had too many enemies to make plausible the idea that White’s settlers would choose him to provide them protection. “He was a leader with few followers, a deposed weroance who saw in the acceptance of English authority an opportunity, however desperate, to secure protection against the hostility of his own people” (Oberg 138).

Oberg concedes the merit of the theory that most of White’s settlers relocated at the mouth of the Chowan River. “The fifty miles that White estimated the colonists would move could have placed them along the fertile banks of the Chowan River, in the territory of Menatonon, a weroance who had never taken any hostile action against Raleigh’s colonists” (Oberg 142). The Choanoacs had their enemies, which included the Powhatans to the north and the Iroquoian Tuscaroras (identified by some historians as the Mandoag) to the west. “They occupied a critical point in the east-west flow of trade goods. Coastal peoples sent foodstuffs, beads, and European trade goods into the interior, which Choanoac middlemen exchanged with people farther to the west. Trade goods—beads, foodstuff, furs, and copper—moved along a line from the interior to the coast. The English needed protection from these coastal people. Certainly through Manteo they would have told Menatonon that provisions and trade goods were on the way, and that once their governor returned they could provide Menatonon with an ample quantity of presents. The colonists could strengthen the position of the Choanoacs in regional trade networks.” (Oberg 142-143). Over the years, the settlers would have been assimilated into the Choanoac tribe, becoming in the eyes of their host, full members of the community.

“We know that the Powhatan chiefdom and the Choanoacs had contended for control of the interior, particularly with regard to copper, a critical indication of status in Algonquian societies. At times they fought, and at times they traded. But once the English arrived at Jamestown Wahunsonacock [spelling differs from Horn’s] may have viewed the colonists settled in his territory and the white people at Chaonoac as levers Menatonon’s people could use to undermine his power. So in 1607 the Powhatans fell upon White’s colonists and their Choanoac hosts. Most of White’s colonists died, but a few survived …” (Oberg 142), finding shelter in different towns in the interior. “Yet it may not have happened like this at all,” Oberg concludes. What he seems reasonably certain of is that “Wahunsonacock attacked the colonists and their Algonquian hosts [whoever they might have been] … Some of them survived. … The descendants of these few colonists would have been socialized in native village communities in the Eastern Woodland. They became Algonquians and were no longer English men and women” (Oberg 146).

Lee Miller in her book "Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony" also agrees that most of John White’s settlers relocated in Choanoac territory. “It was an ideal region southwest of the Dismal Swamp along the Chowan River. Amazingly rich, well wooded, plentiful. … Survival was the issue. Relocation to the Chowan River, therefore, was the best decision that could have been made. … when John Smith questioned the Powhatan about the Lost Colonists, their advice was to search among the Chowanoc [a different spelling]. Indeed, they seemed so certain that this was where White’s company would be found that Michael Sicklemore” was sent by John Smith in late December 1608 to investigate. He found no colonists. “Instead, the picture the country presented was one of massive depopulation. The land was fertile, yet the people few, the country most overgrown with pines. Villages were gone, old fields reverted to stands of pines, one of the first trees to reestablish” (Miller 229-230).

What had happened? A massacre of the Chowanoc? Miller believes differently. “Disease. Contagion occurred everywhere in the Americas that Europeans made contact. [It decimated Algonquian villages along the shoreline of Pamlico Sound, Thomas Hariot noted, after he and his surveying crew and other Englishmen had made contact with them] … Disease had struck the Powhatan. … The illness may well have spread north from the Chowanoc country. [Roanoke Governor Ralph Lane and a company of soldiers had made aggressive contact with the Chowanoc in 1586] Menatonon traded with the Powhatan. … Suppose the explanation was as follows: the main body of White’s colonists separated and moved inland to the Chowan River. The Powhatan confirmed this, claiming that they had settled at Ohanoac … well within Chowanoc territory. And there it must have happened. A sudden and precipitious population decline would account very well for the situation Michael Sicklemore encountered. Few people, few villages, old fields overgrown with pines” (Miller 230).

The colonists, however, were mostly immune. What became of them? Noting that the Algonquian Secotan (Pamlico Sound villages mostly, including Roanoke), Chowanoc, and Weaponeoc had been allied defensively in 1584 against aggressive non-Algonquian tribes situated in the interior, Miller believes that contagion destroyed the prevailing balance of power in the region. The contagion that spread throughout the tribes of the alliance never reached the fearful enemies to the west, collectively referred to as the Mandoags. “… the question we must ask is this: Did the Chowanoc, the nation closest to the Mandoag frontier, come under attack?” Miller’s conclusion: “Reduced by disease, the Chowanoc had been attacked on the frontier. By a life-long enemy. By the Mandoag. If this indeed happened, the Chowanoc would have lost. White’s colonists would have suffered the same fate’ (Miller 233, 234).

Miller believes the Mandoag attack occurred soon after the colonists’ relocation, not some twenty years later. Events “must have moved rapidly after the colonists’ relocation, after the sudden shift in the balance of power.” It was the custom of Carolina and Virginia natives to spare women and children in battle. They would also spare men who surrendered in battle and men who were leaders or whose labor was valued. “… we might suppose that a rather large number of English men, women, and children were whisked away into the interior, possibly around thirty-five …’ (Miller 236). Evidence of their existence were crosses and letters newly carved in the barks of trees, left for Jamestown residents Nathaniel Powell and Anas Todkill, dispatched into Mandoag territory by John Smith, to discover.

Meanwhile, Jamestown was in desperate straits. “Jamestown has no food. Supply ships come, but they also bring more colonists. Too many planters are unwilling to fend for themselves, despite their own looming mortality. They reach crisis level, then sink even lower. The winter of 1609 is Jamestown’s starving time. … May 23, 1609. Sir Thomas Gates is dispatched to Jamestown with authority to impose martial law, if need be, to reestablish order.” He is instructed by the Virginia Company, the colony’s London group of investors, to wage war on the Powhatan. He is told: “You are to seize into your custody half their corn and harvest and their weroances and all other their known successors at once. Their children are to be taken and reeducated so that their people will easily obey you. Priests are to be imprisoned so that they no longer poison and infect them their minds with religion. … The Virginia Council are adept manipulators. Brainwash the children, remove the religious leaders. Control a people. … War is declared” (Miller 219, 220).

Reports of atrocities reached England. “Jamestown soldiers prodded [Paspahegh Chief] Wowinchopunk’s children into boats, rowed them into the bay, and disposed of them by throwing them overboard and shooting out their brains in the water. Governor De la Warr had their mother arrested as a prisoner of war, then ordered her stabbed. Reports multiply. A Nansemond village was incinerated, temples looted, the royal corpses dragged out onto the sand and robbed of their pearl and copper adornments. … England erupts in massive protest. Critics condemn the theft of Powhatan land, charging that Jamestown is no better than Spain, glossing robbery under cunning and coloured falsehoods” (Miller 220).

The Virginia Company insisted that it had the legal right to take away Powhatan land, citing the precedence of the colony of Roanoke. Protesters were adamant. “It is clear that the only way to get the country behind the war is to turn the Powhatan into villains” (Miller 220). William Strachey, secretary of the Jamestown colony, did so, declaring that Wahunsonacock had murdered White’s settlers. What then of John Smith’s statement written years later, that Wahunsonacock had told him in December 2008 that he had ordered the settlers murdered? “The truth is that Smith never said that Wahunsonacock murdered the colonists. Samuel Purchas [a London compiler of travel narratives, a cleric who believed that the Powhatan were devil-worshippers] said so. “Powhatan confessed that he had been at the murder of that colony, Purchas wrote, and showed to Captain Smith a musket barrel and a brass mortar and certain pieces of iron which had been theirs. Hardly proof – the items could have come in trade from anywhere. … The explanation that the Powhatan murdered the Lost Colonists is too neat and tidy. Were it believed, then Jamestown could justify wiping out the Powhatan. The implications are profound: from the moment war is declared, no further searches are made. Stachey’s story and thirty years of ensuing hostility destroy any information we might have recovered” (Miller 224). The story holds for four centuries, Miller contends. Historians David Beers Quinn, James Horn, and Michael Leroy Oberg have perpetuated it.

Who were the Mandoag? Lee Miller asks. They were not a distinct tribe. The word is a term that means “stealthy” and “treacherous,” that means “enemy,” that means “snakes.” The Mandoag “region is large, the nations many” (Miller 241). They were not the Iroquoian Tuscarora, as some historians maintain. The nation that Miller identifies as the prime culprit is the Siouan-speaking Eno, who controlled access to the copper-producing region in the Carolina Piedmont. Very fierce and powerful, the Eno were mercenaries hired by the small but very wealthy Occaneechi nation to assist in protecting Occaneechi Island, a vital trading center and distribution terminus for products moving up an established trading path from the south. The Eno monitored entry onto the trading path and northern access to distant copper mines approximately 250 miles into the interior. Miller believes that the Eno took the English survivors to the Occaneechi trade mart, where they were separated and disseminated throughout the Piedmont among the Occaneechi trading partners and among Eno towns.

“Deep in the woods, far in the interior of a country called Mandoag, where the tall trees close in the darkness, melted copper runs in rivulets. … Cut off from any communication, dispersed one from the other, four men, two boys, and a young girl work the copper. Men have come looking for them. Englishmen, stumbling through the interior, from faraway Jamestown. Steam rising up from the fires of the melting copper reflects a sudden spark of hope in eyes dulled from drudgery – if only they can speak to the search party, if only they can cry out. ‘We are here! We are here!’ But the Mandoag won’t allow it. Through stinging tears, a man carves a cross on a tree, and another. And another. A forest etched with crosses.

“Power and politics are in Jamestown. No one understands the message. The search for White’s colonists is called off and a story fabricated. All hope is gone” (Miller 262).

Finally, an article, “Map’s Hidden Marks Illuminate and Deepen Mystery of Lost Colony,” printed May 3, 2012, in the New York Times deserves our attention. Here are pertinent excerpts.

The British Museum’s re-examination of a 16th-century coastal map using 21st-century imaging techniques has revealed hidden markings that show an inland fort where the colonists could have resettled after abandoning the coast.

…

The analysis suggests that the symbol marking the fort was deliberately hidden, perhaps to shield it from espionage in the spy-riddled English court.

…

The discovery came from a watercolor map in the British Museum’s permanent collection that was drawn by the colony’s governor, John White.

…

In the past there had been hints as to where the settlers might have gone — White himself made an oblique reference to a destination 50 miles inland — but no solid evidence had surfaced.

Even White’s map, which was included in a 2007 British Museum exhibition, appeared to hold no clues. But two small patches layered atop the map intrigued Brent Lane, a member of the board of the First Colony Foundation who was helping research the site of an American Indian village.

Mapmakers in the era often used the patches, overlaying new paper atop old to correct mistakes and repair damage. Mr. Lane speculated that one of the patches could mask an Indian village.

The British Museum agreed to investigate, and it used infrared light, X-ray spectroscopy and other imaging techniques to look beneath the patches. The larger patch, which was the focus of Mr. Lane’s curiosity, indeed appeared to show a correction to coastal topography.

What lay under the second one stunned Mr. Lane. The patch hid a four-pointed star outlined in blue and filled in red, according to the British Museum’s report. The patch also covered a smaller, enigmatic marking, possibly a second settlement.

To historians, the star where two rivers emptied into Albemarle Sound probably represented a fort or the intended location of one, and its discovery greatly increases the likelihood that the colonists retreated to the spot.

Quoted by The Virginia Gazette, historian James Horn commented: “I couldn’t have scripted it better. I was stunned when I heard the news. That’s exactly where I wrote they had gone.” Archeological excavation could probably prove whether an English settlement had ever existed at that location. Because a privately owned 18-hole golf course presently covers the land, this has not been done.

Works cited:

Emery, Theo. “Map’s Hidden Marks Illuminate and Deepen Mystery of Lost Colony.” New York Times 3 May 2012: A18. The New York Times. Web. 4 May 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/us/...;

Horn, James. Kingdom Strange: The Brief and Tragic History of the Lost Colony of Roanoke. New York: Basic Books, 2010. Print.

Miller, Lee. Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2001. Print.

Oberg, Michael Leroy. The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand: Roanoke’s Forgotten Indians. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Print. 

I have had to repost this blog entry.  The August 1 entry disappeared while I attempted to make a correction in its content.  The revised entry is below.

John White's "Lost Colony"

 



William Sanderson’s Moonlight and John Watts’s Hopewell arrived three leagues off Hatorask Island August 15, 1590. Watts’s five ships had wasted considerable time in the Caribbean harassing local shipping while they had waited for the great Santo Domingo treasure fleet’s appearance. Occasionally, one or two galleons of a great fleet lagged. These were the prize ships that privateers like the Hopewell’s Captain Cocke and other ship captains craved. As they had waited, July had passed into August. John White’s anxiety had reached its apex. Assuming that the Hopewell did sail to Roanoke, it would need to leave the Outer Banks no later than the end of August to avoid a winter crossing of the Atlantic.

It was August 18, the third birthday of White’s Roanoke-born granddaughter Virginia Dare, when White, Captain Cocke, and a contingent of sailors set foot on Roanoke Island. Climbing a sandy bank, they sighted on a tree branch the Roman letters CRO, signifying, White interpreted, the word “Croatoan,” the name of Manteo’s village of birth, some 50 miles distant on the southern part of Hatarask Island. White explained to the mystified sailors that prior to his 1587 leaving-taking, the settlers “had considered relocating.” Fear of further reprisal by local Algonquians for wrongs done to them and of sudden discovery by Spanish ships were weighing on them. “… they were prepared to remove from Roanoke 50 miles into the main.” And if he were unable to find them upon his return, “they devised a plan, a secret token agreed upon” that they would “write or carve on the trees or posts of the doors the name of the place where they should be seated. … I willed them, that if they should happen to be distressed in any of those places, that they should carve over the letters or names, a cross” (Miller 13).

Entering the village compound, they saw not a door, house, shed, board, or even a nail where the 1587 structures had existed. Standing before them instead, in the center of the compound, was “a high wooden palisade, artificially constructed of trees with curtains and flankers very fort-like. … On one of the chief trees or posts at the right side of the entrance to the palisade, where the bark is scraped away … was engraven CROATOAN … without any cross or sign of distress” (Miller 14). We can imagine White’s exhilaration, his anticipation of seeing his daughter and granddaughter and, God be willing, all of his friends and associates a day’s travel by ship thereafter.

Out at sea a great storm was building. With some difficulty the sailors rowed their scallops back to the Hopewell and Moonlight, anchored off Port Ferdinando. “Night passes fitfully, the ships plunging in the mounting swells. The next morning, despite the weather, Captain Cocke agrees to set a course for the island of Croatoan … The anchor spins away, taking a second down with it. Untethered, the ship drives fast into the shore. Toward the shoals. … By accident, sheer luck, they fall into a channel or deep water and avoid being dashed to pieces on the bar. … Only one anchor remains of an original four, and the weather grew to be fouler and fouler; our victuals scarce and our cask and fresh water lost” (Miller 16).

The idea of wintering in the Caribbean was considered. Decisions were made. The Moonlight would return directly to England, its crew declaring it to be “weak and leaky.” The Hopewell would remain in the West Indies! Hope yet! White could join his settlers in the spring! But then, “August 28 it happens. The wind shifts. … The storm blasts up off the Carolina coast from out of nowhere. … A wild storm, full of malice and greed. Howling winds buffet the ship, coiling the sails around the masts. … Wrenching the Hopewell away from its destination [Trinidad]. … The Hopewell is forced east in a direct line with the Azores. Away from the eye of the storm” (Miller 17-18).

“At Flores in the Azores the Moonlight is spotted riding with four English men-of-war. A surprise. The leaky hull only an excuse to rejoin the fray, dodging inactive duty at Roanoke. … And all the while, the enemy sea and her ally the wind continue to play havoc with his [Cocke’s] plans, preventing a landing for provisions … The Hopewell finally surrenders and sets a course for England.” The ship reaches Plymouth October 14. “The voyage is over. White’s last chance to contact the planters had come and gone” (Miller 18).

Sir Walter Raleigh could no longer help him. The continuous attacks directed at Raleigh by the young Earl of Essex and his friends had reduced considerably the Queen’s regard for him. And then, Raleigh utterly destroyed that which was left. In the summer of 1591 he seduced secretly Elizabeth (Beth) Throckmorton, one of Elizabeth’s maids of honor. In July they conceived a child. In the autumn they were secretly married. Beth left the Court in February 1592, gave birth to a son in March, and returned to Court in April. Rumors circulated. In July, “Queen Elizabeth, in a rage, hurls the lovers in the Tower. Raleigh’s disgraces leave him fair game for his enemies” (Miller 203). The radical English Jesuit Robert Parsons led Raleigh’s debasers. He had already, in February, charged Raleigh with atheism. A rash of vicious publications followed. Raleigh “is accused of the loss of life of voyagers and mariners, and of damaging England while enriching himself through militarism and ambition.” He is “an epicurean. A free-thinker. Separatist sympathizer. A loose cannon” (Miller 203).

Raleigh was released from the Tower in August (Beth in December) but was barred from the Court. “Nor did her {Elizabeth’s] displeasure abate, for he was obliged to live quietly … for the next five years at Sherborne Castle” (Weir 413) in Devon and on his estates in Ireland.

In February 1593 Richard Hakluyt received a letter from John White, who was residing on one of Raleigh’s Irish estates. Nearly two and a half years had passed since his tragic return from Roanoke. The letter detailed the events of his 1590 experience. “He commits his colonists to the merciful help of the Almighty. … White was never heard from again” (Miller 204).

Nor would John White’s settlers make contact with any European, as far as historians know. Working with only scraps of information, historians do speculate where John White’s “lost colony” may have relocated and what may have happened to them. Here is one historian’s theory.

David Beers Quinn, the author of Set Fair for Roanoke, believed that a small segment of the settlers went to Croatoan to await John White’s expected return, while the vast majority, perhaps 88 individuals, sailed to the south shore of Chesapeake Bay, the intended location of White’s voyage to Roanoke in 1587. Governor Ralph Lane had sent a detachment of soldiers to that area to live among the Chesapeake natives during the 1585-1586 winter. The success of that expedition was a major reason why Sir Walter Raleigh chose not to resurrect the Roanoke Island colony. Quinn stated: “it was not until Jamestown had been established for a year and a half that clear evidence emerged that the main body of the colonists had indeed joined the Chesapeake Indians as early as 1587 and had lived and perished with them” (345). Quinn estimated that the pinnace in their possession probably made three trips to the Bay and the 15 miles up the Elizabeth River to Skicoac, their chosen location.

“The moving of the colonists northward in September 1587 would make sense, as they would wish to be established before winter. … There would need to have been messengers sent, probably overland, to warn them [the Chesapeake Indians at Skicoac] of the approach of the colony, and one or two men must have spoken enough of their language to be able to communicate effectively with them, with, perhaps, the guidance of one of Manteo’s Indians. … The first winter and the first growing season would be crucial. It may be that a permanent village site was carved out in 1588 at some distance from the main Chesapeake town to allow the settlers to develop their own community life. … The settlers would have been buoyed up with hope that sometime in 1588 White [told of their location by colonists at Croatoan] would appear with wives and children and single men and women to add to their strength and increase the size of the colony” (347, 349). Because White never appeared, intermarriage and assimilation with the natives had to have taken place over the succeeding years.

The Chesapeakes had successfully resisted the growing power of the Powhatan and their ambitious chief Wahunsonacocks. Quinn wrote: “For several decades before 1600 he had been building up his authority in the Virginia Tidewater, subjecting by diplomacy or war, or both, tribe after tribe along the James and York rivers and on the Virginia Eastern Shore. Not all the tribes on the south bank of the James or the southern shore of Chesapeake Bay were prepared to acknowledge his authority … Among the tribes that evidently did not pay him tribute were the Chesapeakes. Moreover (if our assumptions are correct), they were harboring and making marriage alliances with a group of white refugees who had appeared many years before but had, apparently, not played any part in the politics or warfare of the area and so had not been molested. But the entry of a Spanish ship in 1588 into the Chesapeake Bay [see my blog entry: “1588-1590: Drake’s Failure, Raleigh’s Decline, White’s Dilemma” -- July 1, 2014] must have given Powhatan some grounds for alarm” (360). (Quinn uses the name of the large Algonquian nation -- Powhatan -- as the name of its chief) In 1603 an English ship commanded by Samuel Mace, making landfall, seized several natives presumably of Powhatan’s confederation. The natives were taken to London to be interrogated (as Manteo and Wanchese had been questioned in 1584) to obtain useful knowledge of the Chesapeake territory and its inhabitants. Powhatan’s priests prophesized that white men would come again to deprive Powhatan of his kingdom. After three ship commanded by Captain Christopher Newport entered Chesapeake Bay in April 2007, Powhatan took action. According to John Smith, Jamestown resident and explorer, and William Strachey, secretary of the Jamestown colony in 1609, Powhatan slaughtered the Chesapeakes and their assimilated white allies. Smith claimed years later that Powhatan himself had confessed this to him December 2008 at the two men’s last meeting. Strachey wrote of instructions given by King James I that Powhatan’s priests be executed and Powhatan’s confederacy be broken apart both as punishment for the slaughter and to establish dominion over Powhatan. This was never done, due to the weakness of the settlement. Jamestown officials, and Smith, did hear rumors of white survivors living in various locations in the North Carolina interior. Two half-hearted attempts to reach them were unsuccessful.

Quinn wrote that “no concerted attempt was made to recover them.” A military operation would probably have been too risky given the weakened state of the Jamestown settlement. Quinn believed that emissaries could have been sent to bribe chieftains. This also was not done. By 1611 “it may have seemed mere sentimentality to expend any great effort to recover a handful of individuals. Under the Spartan regime of Sir Thomas Dale, from 1611 to 1616, this seems plausible. But we are left entirely in the dark. The survivors were deserted completely, so far as we know, for twelve or thirteen years … All this time we hear nothing of attempts to search the Outer Banks for colonists who had remained with Manteo. They are never even mentioned and pass into oblivion for the rest of the seventeenth century. We are forced to accept as a fact that they became Indians themselves, and their children and grandchildren wholly so, as the century went on” (375-376).

Next month I will present the theories of Michael Leroy Oberg, Lee Miller, and James Horn.

Works Cited:

Miller, Lee. Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2001. Print.

Quinn, David Beers. Set Fair for Roanoke. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1985. Print.

Weir, Alison. Elizabeth the Queen. London: Vintage Books, 1998. Print. 

 

1588-1590 -- Drake's Failure, Raleigh's Decline, White's Dilemma

 



In late May 1588, while John White was recuperating in England from wounds suffered aboard the Brave and his countrymen were anticipating the arrival of King Philip’s great armada, a Spanish bark carrying 30 soldiers left St. Augustine, Florida, and headed north.  Its commander’s assignment was to search the Atlantic coastline for an English settlement rumored to have been founded one, two, or three years earlier.  Making Chesapeake Bay landfalls in June, traveling up the Potomac and Susquehanna Rivers, the ship’s party found no evidence of an English presence.  Battling a fierce wind early during their return voyage, the crew dismasted the bark and rowed it toward the shoreline of a long sandbar island.  Finding a shallow inlet (probably Port Ferdinando), they entered an expansive, shallow sound.  Looking northward, they saw a great bay (the entrance to Albemarle Sound), the wooded part of Roanoke Island, and a deeper inlet into the sound a league north of the island.   On the east side of the northern portion of the island they discovered a slipway (a shipyard) “for small vessels and on land a number of wells made with English casks …, and other debris indicating that a considerable number of people had been here” (Quinn 308).  Finding no Englishmen present, concluding that the settlement had been abandoned, the party sailed for Florida.  Had John White and the Brave actually gone to Roanoke, the Brave and the Spanish bark might possibly have found each other and fought.

 

After the Spanish Armada’s defeat in September, White sought Walter Raleigh’s assistance.  Historian Lee Miller believes that Raleigh told the Queen that sabotage was the motive of Simon Fernandez’s refusal to carry John White and his colonists to the southern shore of Chesapeake Bay in 1587.  Raleigh had to have known that his accusation would implicate Elizabeth’s very powerful secretary to state, Francis Walsingham.  (See blog entry, “1587-1588: Philip II Defeated, John White Thwarted,” fourth paragraph, June 1, 2014) 

 

Most likely, Raleigh made his allegation after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, when the Queen was no longer fixated on the nation’s survival.  Notwithstanding, doing so afterward was a dangerous action.  “With the victory celebration booming, Raleigh’s complaints could only come as an unwelcomed distraction – ungrateful at best – amid the patriotic fervor.  John White’s enemies will roundly condemn him [White] as a liar.  The whelp Essex and his faction are ever ready to denounce Raleigh for his recriminations, calling him an acerbic troublemaker whose combative nature disrupts the peace of the Court.  He takes too much credit for the defeat of the Armada.  He is too independent” (Miller 198).  More importantly, what might Walsingham do?  And how might the Queen react?  Did Raleigh consider thoroughly these predictable risks?  Given his history of combating criticism with disdain, he probably didn’t. 

 

Unlike other historians, who refuse to speculate what he may have said, Lee Miller believes that Raleigh implicated Walsingham.  “Raleigh’s single defender is Leicester.  Yet soon after the Armada’s defeat, Leicester is dead from a fever, which many suspect was caused by poison.  Whatever the source of Raleigh’s troubles, there is no denying that he passed into a period of disfavor that has no other ready explanation.  He speaks of errors made … Was accusing Walsingham his error” (Miller 198)?

 

White and Raleigh must have had long conversations “about the possibilities for doing something as soon as the war fervor had died down and the prohibition on sailing had been removed” (Quinn 310-311).  Raleigh probably “introduced White to his business manager in London, William Sanderson, and to the richest promoters of the day, the two Thomas Smiths (or Smythes), who were father and son” (Quinn 311).  Clearly out of favor with the Queen, Raleigh had to disassociate himself from White’s enterprise so as not to damage him.

 

Elizabeth’s long-time friend and advisor and one-time suitor, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, had died September 4.  Grief-stricken, she had refused to see anybody for days.  It was at this time that Leicester’s step-son, Robert Devereux, the youthful, petulant Earl of Essex, capitalized on Elizabeth’s attraction to him.  Having moved into Leicester’s old quarters at Court, he was constantly near her.  He flattered her, and, simultaneously, demanded indulgences.  Thirty-four years her junior, he played the admiration game.  “’I do confess that, as a man, I have been more subject to your natural beauty, than as a subject to the power of a king,’ he told her” (Weir 402).  Resentful whenever she refused any of his demands, he would threaten to leave Court and live in the country, confident that she would yield.  “He thought to manipulate her, but constantly underestimated her formidable intellect and strength of will.  However, such was her affection for him that she would invariably forgive him for minor transgressions: this, again, led him to believe that he could do as he pleased with impunity” (Weir 401).    All the while that he sought to manipulate her, he derided Raleigh.

 

In November Essex fought a duel with Sir Charles Blount, a handsome young courtier whom Elizabeth had given a golden chess queen, a token he wore tied to his arm with a crimson ribbon.  In December, Essex, quarreling, challenged Raleigh to a duel.  Raleigh declined.  The Privy Council forbade it take place.  Hearing of it, Elizabeth was very disturbed.  Essex remarked to the French ambassador, “’She takes pleasure in beholding such quarrels among her servants,’ especially when they concerned herself” (Weir 402).

 

Raleigh returned to Elizabeth’s good graces in early 1589, perhaps because she needed his participation in a major assault upon Spanish and Portuguese ports and the Azores to be led by Sir Francis Drake that spring.  Working independently, Raleigh’s business partner William Sanderson had put together a holding company of investors -- finalized March 7 -- to fund a relief expedition to Roanoke.  The investors were to be granted “the right to trade freely with the City of Ralegh and with any part of America in which Ralegh had any claim” (Quinn 312).  Nothing resulted from the agreement.  Any colonial endeavor required the protection of armed vessels, ships owned by large London syndicates engaged exclusively in privateering.  Who of the owners would give up potential riches to have his captains shepherd a supply ship and additional settlers to a far-distant, godforsaken land?  Even if one such owner were to be found, his ships were not immediately available.   They were to be used by Drake in his forthcoming assault.

 

The crippled remnants of the 1588 Armada were being repaired in the northern Spanish port of Santander and the Portuguese port of Lisbon.  Spain had taken possession of Portugal in 1581.  Don Antonio, the pretender to the Portuguese throne, had fled to England.  Living in London, he became one of Francis Drake’s friends.  Antonio told Drake that the Portuguese people were only waiting for his return to rise up and expel the Spaniards.  Wanting to destroy Philip’s preparations for a future invasion attempt, Elizabeth sanctioned Drake’s ambitious expedition.  Drake’s intention was to smash Philip’s navy, land Antonio and a military force in Portugal, pillage, incite a successful uprising, establish a permanent English base in the Azores, and seize Spanish treasure ships.

 

Drake’s fleet, consisting ultimately of 150 ships, carrying 20,000 men, set sail April 18.  Living well beyond his means and in debt for more than 23,000 pounds, Essex had been desperate to be a participant.  Ships would be seized.  Booty would be collected.  He would be enriched.  And he would earn renown as a valiant soldier.  Why, he demanded, was Raleigh to be a participant and he not?  The Queen was adamant.  Disguising himself, Essex galloped to Plymouth and boarded a ship that was to join Drake at sea.  Elizabeth ordered two ships to retrieve him.  Bad weather prevented the ships from reaching him.

 

The same bad weather impeded Drake.  “The ships were soon scattered by a series of violent gales, and some thirty turned back.  When the fleet regrouped on the north coast of Spain, the wind prevented it from reaching Santander” (Bawlf 235).  Drake sailed then to La Caruna.  Here, Drake had minor success, destroying 13 merchant ships in the harbor while General John Norreys (Norris) captured the lower town, killing 500 Spaniards.  Attempts to capture the fortified upper town failed.  The raid caught Spain off-guard.  The days Drake spent at La Caruna, however, gave Spanish forces time to strengthen their coastal defenses.  Lacking artillery, Norreys was unable to capture Lisbon.  Essex and Raleigh fought the enemy here with distinction. Neither Norreys, Drake, Raleigh, nor Essex witnessed any Portuguese uprising. 

 

By then, Drake’s campaign had suffered a heavy toll.  Disease had spread throughout his fleet.  Over 10,000 men would die from or be incapacitated by it.  The plan to attempt a landing on one of the islands of the Azores was abandoned.  Drake had only 2,000 men fit for combat.  Norreys sailed for England with the sick and wounded.  Drake set out with 20 ships to hunt Spanish treasure ships.  Struck by a heavy storm, his flag ship springing a leak, he turned about and returned to Plymouth.  Drake had lost about 40 ships, the investors of the expedition were to take heavy losses, and the Queen was poorer by 49,000 pounds.  To punish Essex, Elizabeth awarded Raleigh at Court a gold chain.  Essex, acting the role of returning hero, received nothing.  Even though she later excused his disobedient behavior as “but a sally of youth,” Essex wrote a resentful letter to James VI of Scotland, Elizabeth’s heir apparent.

 

The failure of William Sanderson’s holding company to attempt to obtain ships and Elizabeth’s turbulent relationship with Essex continued.  Again, Raleigh fell out of favor.  On August 15, Sir Francis Allen wrote to Anthony Bacon, in France, that Essex had chased Raleigh from the Court and had “confined him to Ireland.”  Raleigh had taken residence there to organize his estates; Elizabeth had threatened to reclaim 42,000 acres of his holdings.  At a low point emotionally, he composed a melancholy poem that included these lines: “As in a country strange without companion/I only wail the wrong of death’s delays.”  (He made no mention in the poem of his having fathered an illegitimate daughter)  At the end of 1589 Raleigh was again in Elizabeth’s good graces.  It helped that Francis Walsingham had become ill and would die April 6, 1590.  It helped him even more that Essex had secretly married Walsingham’s widowed daughter Frances and that Elizabeth was greatly upset. 

 

Raleigh returned to England in early 1590.  John White had been busy attempting to arrange passage to Roanoke.  “The year 1590 was the year of the privateers.  The Lisbon expedition had provided more loss than gain to the nearly 150 armed merchantmen that had participated in it” (Quinn 315).  The privateering firms were eager to recoup their losses.  They “were busy preparing all the ships they could for purely plundering expeditions and did not care to be burdened with supplies for a colony that would have to be searched for on the North American coast when the time might be spent more profitably in a privateering cruise alone” (Quinn 315).  Needing to fulfill his commitments at Court, Raleigh did not have the time nor the financial means to outfit an expedition to Roanoke himself; but he was able to prevail again upon his friend and business associate William Sanderson. 

 

Raleigh told Sanderson to find a ship.  He purchased an 80 ton vessel, which he named the Moonlight.  The ship hadn’t the capacity to carry all of the provisions needed to transfer and establish White’s colony.  Additionally, she needed protection.  Raleigh was able to pressure John Watts “who, with his partners, formed one of London’s most powerful privateering syndicates,” into agreeing to provide additional cargo capacity and provide protection (Quinn 316).  The flagship of Watts’s little squadron of privateers was the Hopewell, captained by the experienced Abraham Cocke.  Rumors that Spain was yet preparing to invade persuaded Elizabeth to put a hold on the sailing of some of the privateers.  This had allowed Raleigh to force Watts “to agree to convoy both White and the supply ship Moonlight to North America if his ships were released without further delay” (Quinn 317).  Sanderson forced Watts to post a bond for 5,000 pounds to carry out his obligations to the settlers.

 

At the end of February White and a group of settlers arrived in Plymouth where the ships were about to sail.  Abraham Cocke refused to accept the settlers and their equipment.  Only White would be allowed to come aboard!  White had no time to complain to Raleigh or Sanderson, both of whom were in London.  Lee Miller wrote: “What an incredible choice!  White must know that if he leaves England without supplies, his arrival on Roanoke will be as good as nothing.  Three years wasted; he will return in exactly the same condition as when he left.  For this, he has spent agonizing years braving famine and storms, ridicule and pirate attack.  He has been shot and wounded.  If he boards Watts’s ship now without supplies, he will only share the colonists’ fate.  …  Was Walsingham behind it?  The decision might well have been made before his death.  Essex” (Miller 202)? 

 

White acquiesced.   

 

The Hopewell, the Little John, and the pinnace John Evangeliist left Plymouth Harbor March 20.  The Moonlight, delayed in sailing, would rendezvous with them in the Caribbean.

 

Sources cited:

 

Bawlf, Samuel.  Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake.  Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.  2004.  Print.

 

Miller, Lee. Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony.  New York: Arcade Publishing, 2001.  Print.

 

Quinn, David Beers.  Set Fair for Roanoke.  Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1985.  Print.

 

Weir, Alison.  Elizabeth the Queen.  London: Vintage Books, 1998.  Print.



 

1587-1588: Philip II Defeated, John White Thwarted

 

King Philip II of Spain had reason to believe at the beginning of 1587 that his armada of war ships being constructed in the port of Cadiz and the port of Lisbon would be prepared to sail in June or July.  They would travel to the Netherlands, upload on barges approximately 16,000 of the Duke of Parma’s soldiers, cross the English Channel, break through if not destroy opposing warships, and put ashore Parma’s troops, which would quickly vanquish all opposition, march to London, and depose the Queen.  Elizabeth, her advisors, and every citizen of the realm knew his intentions.  Desperate measures were required to defeat him. 

 

Elizabeth began by providing Frances Drake four Royal Naval ships.  A group of London merchants, looking to profit from the seizure of Spanish ships, armed an assortment of pinnaces and outfitted twenty merchantmen to accompany Drake.  Drake’s motley fleet left Plymouth Harbor April 12.  Seven days later, vacillating, Elizabeth sent Drake a message by ship instructing him not to initiate hostilities.  Driven back to port by strong headwinds, the ship did not reach him.  Drake’s attacks upon the shipping in Cadiz and Lisbon and assaults by raiding parties upon several forts along the Portuguese coast inflicted great damage.  Over one hundred Spanish ships of various tonnage were destroyed or captured, including 37 ships burned in Cadiz Harbor.  On June 8 Drake captured the Portuguese carrack Sao Filipe, laden with silk, spices, and gold valued at 108,000 pounds.  Drake’s fleet returned to England July 6.  Great celebrations ensued.  In Madrid, Philip ordered the construction of a new armada.

 

While Drake was yet at sea, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, demonstrated again his incompetence as commander of English soldiers in the Netherlands.  Returned to the United Provinces June 25 with 3,000 new troops and a fleet of warships, he alienated his Dutch allies with his imperious conduct and failed to check Parma’s advancement in the Protestant-occupied territory.  Extremely displeased, Elizabeth recalled him November 10.

 

John White, artist-turned-governor, and 117 recruited settlers had left England May 8, nearly a month after Drake’s departure, intent upon establishing a colony on or near the southern shores of Chesapeake Bay.  Walter Raleigh had instructed White to stop by Roanoke Island to pick up the 15 sailors that Richard Grenville had left there in late June 1586 after finding Governor Ralph Lane’s colony abandoned.  Upon their arrival, White’s pilot, Simon Fernandez, ordered White and his settlers to disembark, claiming it was too late in the season to sail to the Chesapeake.  White believed that Fernandez intended to use his ships to privateer.  Historian Lee Miller believes that Fernandez was carrying out the orders of Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s chief secretary, Walsingham wanting the colonial venture to fail and, thereby, destroy Raleigh’s competing influence over the Queen.

 

Placed in great peril -- the previous Roanoke settlement’s governor Ralph Lane had alienated the local Algonquian tribe and murdered its leader -- White’s principal subordinates recognized that Raleigh had to be notified immediately of their whereabouts.  They could not have ships sent by Raleigh intended for their benefit sail directly to the Chesapeake.  Fernandez could not be trusted to deliver their message.  It was agreed that White himself had to return to England on one of the expedition’s ships.  He did so, arriving in Ireland October 16 after a harrowing crossing. 

 

White found his countrymen extremely anxious.  Philip II’s invasion plans had been foiled, but only temporarily.  Substantial preparations to confront Philip’s forthcoming invasion remained to be accomplished.  Raleigh promised to send a ship with needed supplies to Roanoke as soon as he was able.  The following spring he would have his cousin Richard Grenville and a fleet of ships set sail out of Bideford, despite the Privy Council’s general stay on shipping from English ports.  White’s colony would have to survive the winter at Roanoke before it could be relocated.

 

As Philip’s new armada was being built, Elizabeth was taking measures to defend her country.  Harbors and land defenses were being strengthened.  Eleven warships were being built and old warships refurbished.  Arms and stores were being requisitioned.  And, germane especially to John White’s situation, Walter Raleigh’s favored standing with the Queen declined.

 

Raleigh had been appointed Captain of the Queen’s guard in April 1587, succeeding Christopher Hatton, who had been appointed Lord Chancellor.  It was an honorary position with no salary but with great prestige.  He was expected to spend much time with her, among other duties serving her meals and delivering messages and performing errands.  She had needed his presence to rally her from the deep depression she had suffered following Mary Stuart’s execution. 

 

A handsome new face, however, had appeared at Court -- nineteen-year-old Robert Devereux, the Second Earl of Essex.  Tall, dark-eyed, with auburn hair, elegant, intelligent, he was Leicester’s step-son.  Essex had taken an immediate dislike of Raleigh, now well into his thirties.  He was jealous of Raleigh’s literary accomplishments and envious of his overseas enterprises.  Essex was of aristocrat, an ancestor of Edward III.  Lord Burghley and his son Robert Cecil, two of Elizabeth’s key advisors, had encouraged a relationship between the young man and the Queen, believing he could best rejuvenate her from her depression.  Playing cards frequently with him, she found him to be an exhilarating companion.  Having a quick temper, Essex was given to passionate outbursts and tantrums.  As time would demonstrate, he harbored great resentments.  Elizabeth had allowed him a freedom of speech she had not Christopher Hatton or Raleigh.  Raleigh’s enemies had watched gleefully as Essex had begun to supplant Raleigh as her favorite.  In June 1587 she had made Essex her Master of the Horse, succeeding his step-father, the Earl of Leicester.  After she had recalled Leicester in November, upon Leicester’s insistence, Elizabeth sent Essex and Leicester’s nephew, Sir Philip Sidney, to the Netherlands to replace him.

 

Raleigh’s assistance in helping Elizabeth prepare for Philip’s invasion would prove to be considerable.  He had sold his ship, the Ark Raleigh, to the Queen for a modest 500 pounds.  (It would be renamed the Ark Royal and be the flag ship of the Lord High Admiral, Charles Lord Howard)  In November, while Essex and Sidney were being transported to the Netherlands and John White was pressing him yet for relief ships, Raleigh was appointed to Elizabeth’s Council of War.  His specific duty was to levy troops and improve defenses in Southwest England.  He would set up a system of beacons from Cornwall to the south coast to alert the early appearance of Philip’s fleet.  6,000 trained men would be held ready to march to Plymouth and another 8,000 to Falmouth if either port were attacked.

 

Winter passed.  In March 1588, Grenville was poised with a fleet of ships at Bideford to sail to the Caribbean and, afterward, to Roanoke Island.  Just before he was to lift anchor, the Privy Council ordered him to travel to Plymouth where he was to relinquish his ships to his long-time adversary, Francis Drake.  Not one of the ships would be used months later against Philip’s Armada.  Historian Lee Miller conjectures that Walsingham was responsible for this decision.  “Yet ships did leave.  … Specifically, the ships that are not allowed to sail are Raleigh’s” (Miller 194).  White implored Raleigh for assistance.  Raleigh was able to procure two small ships – the Row and the Brave -- unsuitable for naval engagement.  “April 22, 1588.  The boats leave the Devon coast.  White rides in the Brave, captained by Arthur Facy.  Fifteen colonists sail with him …  If the weather is favorable, White can expect a two-month crossing, placing them on Roanoke at the end of June” (Miller 195).  Instead, Facy and the Row engaged immediately in privateering.  They encountered on May 6 a French vessel twice each of the English vessels’ sizes.  The French ship’s crew attempted to board the Brave.  White was wounded twice in the head -- by a sword and then by a pike -- and shot in the side of the buttock.  The Brave surrendered and was looted.  Released, the Brave and the badly battered Row limped back to England.

 

Raleigh was too busy to do anything more than commiserate.  “There is no time now to think of any Roanoke rescue.  …  The kingdom’s troops are far too few; therefore Raleigh urges a radical plan of attack: hit the Spaniards by sea before they can land.  The English navy is redesigned, the ships lowered to gain nimbleness and speed” (Miller 196).  April 1588: “… Elizabeth ordered the refurbishment of twelve more ships and her government instituted a programme of intensive training for her fighting forces.  Drake was in favour of sailing to Spain to sabotage Philip’s fleet, but she would not allow it, being concerned that her own ships would be either damaged or lost when she most needed them.  Any confrontation at sea, she said, must take place within sight of the shores of England, in order to remind her sailors what they were fighting for” (Weir 388-389).  Hoping yet that she could avert war, she dispatched Dr. Valentine Dale to meet with the Duke of Parma to negotiate a peace settlement.  They met May 30, “the very day on which the Spanish Armada of 130 ships, manned by 30,000 men … set sail from Lisbon, bound for England” (Weir 389).

 

‘The progress of the Spanish fleet had been impeded by storms … As the chain of beacons flared, Elizabeth heard the news on the night of 22 July …  A prayer of intercession, composed by the Queen, was read in churches” (Weir 389-390).

 

Philip’s Armada moved along the south coast headed for the Netherlands to upload Parma’s army.  Waiting at Plymouth was the English fleet, 150 ships strong, its admiral Lord Howard of Effingham, assisted by the far more experienced Sir Francis Drake …

 

Effingham put out to sea after nightfall on the 19^th.  He skirmished briefly with the ships of the Armada off Eddystone, near Plymouth, on Sunday, July 21.  Two days later near Portland, Dorset, he damaged severely several galleons.  Two more were wrecked off the Isle of Wight July 25.  “The English fleet continued to shadow the Armada as it sailed east, neatly avoiding any further engagements by sailing out of range whenever the galleons prepared for battle” (Weir 390).

 

The Armada anchored off Calais, where Parma and 16,000 troops waited.  The English ships followed.  At midnight on July 28 five “hell-burners” (fire ships), packed with wood and pitch, were sent amongst the galleons.  The subsequent inferno, aided by high winds, caused great panic.  The galleons scattered.  Because of the high winds, the Spanish admiral was unable to regroup them into the Armada’s protective crescent formation.

 

“On 29 July, off Graylines … the two fleets engaged in what was to be the final battle.  … The Spaniards lost eleven ships and 2000 men, and the English just fifty men.  The action was only abandoned when both sides ran out of ammunition” (Weir 391).

 

On July 30 the wind changed.  The Armada was forced northwards, off course, its galleons scattering.  Effingham ordered his ships to chase them, but there was no need.  “… the wind – the ‘Protestant’ wind, as people were now calling it … -- and terrible storms were bringing about more destruction than they could realistically have hoped to achieve themselves” (Weir 391).

 

Eventually, Effingham ended the chase.  King Philip’s remaining ships, many of them broken, made their way dangerously around the coasts of Scotland, Ireland and Cornwall.  Philip had suffered the worst naval defeat in his country’s history.  He had lost two thirds of his men, “many dying stranded on remote beaches of wounds and sickness, or slaughtered in Ireland by the Lord Deputy’s men” (Weir 392).  He had lost 44 ships. Many more were too damaged to be considered seaworthy.  The English had lost only a hundred men and none of their ships.  Yet Elizabeth was cautious.  ‘This tyrannical, proud and brainsick attempt’ would be, she observed in a letter to James VI [of Scotland], ‘the beginning, though not the end, of the ruin of that king [Philip]’.  The Spanish fleet might have been crippled, but there remained a very real threat from Parma and his army, who were poised to cross the Channel, and awaited only a favourable wind” (Weir 392).

 

Sources Cited:

 

Miller, Lee. Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony.  New York: Arcade Publishing, 2001.  Print.

 

Weir, Alison.  Elizabeth the Queen.  London: Vintage Books, 1998.  Print.



 

Mary Stuart Beheaded

 

It is important to know how dire Queen Elizabeth’s circumstances were at home and abroad while Walter Raleigh pursued his intention to establish an English colony in North America.  We saw in last month’s blog that in 1584 he had sent Captains Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe to America to locate land suitable to establish a base for privateers to attack Spanish treasure ships.  The location had to be rich in natural resources and its native inhabitants needed to be cooperative.  Amadas and Barlowe returned to England in mid-September satisfied that they had found such a place.

 

They found Queen Elizabeth, England’s leaders, and the nation’s citizenry all greatly apprehensive about the safety of the country.  During the two captains’ absence, France’s Duke of Anjou (presumed by many to be Queen Elizabeth’s future husband) had died and William of Orange, leader of the Protestant provinces of the Netherlands, had been assassinated.  Philip II of Spain seemed poised to invade England.  Additionally, Mary Stuart’s existence continued to be a threat to Elizabeth’s life.

 

At the end of December 1584 Dr. William Parry was arrested for his aborted attempt to assassinate the Queen.  Parry, working as a spy for Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s most senior advisor, had been assigned by Burghley to infiltrate papist circles.  To reward him for his services, Elizabeth had awarded Parry a pension.  He confronted her one day in her garden at Richmond palace while she was taking the air.  Overcome by “the majesty of her presence, in which he saw the image of her father,” Parry could not “suffer his hand to execute that which he had resolved” (Weir 354).  The Pope and Mary Stuart’s agent in Paris believed that Parry was acting on behalf of the deposed Queen of Scotland.  Mary was moved to the forbidding fortress of Tutbury in January 1585 to be placed under the strict supervision of Sir Amyas Paulet, a staunch Puritan.  In February 1585 Elizabeth authorized Parry’s hanging.

 

In 1585 Parliament passed a law that ordered all seminary priests to leave England within 40 days or suffer the penalty of high treason.  A bond of association was signed by thousands of Protestant gentlemen who swore to take up arms and destroy Mary if she became involved in a plot against the Queen.  Mary was showed the Bond.  She denied any knowledge of a conspiracy, signed the Bond herself, but wrote King Philip two days later to urge him to press ahead with his planned invasion.

 

Richard Grenville, seven ships, and 600 men left Plymouth Harbor April 9 to establish a military colony on North Carolina’s Outer Banks.  Ralph Lane, a veteran of the Irish wars, was to be its governor.  In May King Philip ordered all English ships in his ports seized.  Trade with Spain and Portugal, vital to the English economy, ended.  Queen Elizabeth “authorized the issue of letters of marquee, turning piracy into privateering, and English ships were dispatched to seize as many Spanish vessels and their cargoes as they could” (Quinn 85).  Grenville returned to England October 18, having captured the Santa Maria de San Vicente, the value of its cargo exceeding the expense to investors of Grenville’s entire voyage.

 

In August 1585 Elizabeth extended to the Dutch, her sole ally, her protection, promising an army of 6,000 men and 1,000 horse.  On September 17, she appointed Robert Dudley, the Duke of Leiscester, the army’s commander.  Obeying her orders, Raleigh sent an armed squadron to Newfoundland, where it captured seventeen Spanish fishing vessels.  The same month Elizabeth promoted Sir Francis Drake an admiral, “provided him with a fleet of twenty-two ships and 2000 men, and dispatched him on a voyage to capture several of Spain’s greatest naval bases in the Caribbean.”  Drake sacked Santo Domingo, Havana, and Cartagena.  “Her objectives … were to keep Philip fully occupied elsewhere, and at the same time demonstrate to him the might of England’s naval power” (Weir 357).  In October she sent Philip a twenty-page declaration justifying her actions.

 

On December 8, Leicester and his stepson, Robert Devereau, the second Earl of Essex, left England for the Netherlands.  (Essex would soon supplant Raleigh as Elizabeth’s Court favorite)  Leicester “took with him a household of 170 persons, many of noble birth, as well as his wife, who insisted upon being attended by a bevy of ladies and taking a vast quantity of luggage, including furniture, clothing, and carriages” (Weir 358).  The Dutch, disappointed that Elizabeth had declined to be their sovereign, treated Leicester as a visiting prince.  Leicester accepted from them, without Elizabeth’s approval, the title of Supreme Governor of the Netherlands.  Furious but upon her Privy Council’s advice, Elizabeth decided not to recall him.  Leicester would prove to be an incompetent general, his gift of command being his ability to antagonize both his allies and his own men, many of whom subsequently deserted.

 

On Christmas Eve Mary Stuart was moved to a moated house at Chartley.  She had complained to Elizabeth about her previous residence, at Tutbury.  This provided Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s principal Secretary of State, to set a trap once and for all to eliminate Mary.

 

Walsingham turned a trainee priest, Gilbert Griffith, sent to England by Mary’s friends in Paris, to work for him.  Walsingham instructed Griffith to pass on to Mary the many letters from abroad that were waiting for Mary at the French embassy.  Any reply that she gave Griffith he would deliver to Walsingham, who would have it deciphered, copied, and resealed and afterward sent to its destination.  Griffith informed Mary that he had organized a secret route whereby letters might be smuggled in and out of Chartley.  Letters would be smuggled in and out inside a large beer barrel provided by the local brewer in Buxton.  Gifford persuaded the brewer to convey Mary’s letters in a waterproof wooden box small enough to be slipped through the bung-hole of a barrel.

 

In March 1586 Philip wrote Pope Sixtus V to ask that he bless Philip’s planned invasion of England.  He received the Pope’s blessing.  “The planned invasion now assumed the nature of a crusade against the Infidel, a holy war that was to be fought on a grand scale” (Weir 363).

 

On May 20 Mary Stuart wrote to the Spanish ambassador to England Bernardino de Mendoza to inform him that she would cede her right to the succession of the English crown to Philip. The Spanish king told the Pope that he had no interest in receiving it but would transfer any claim to his daughter, the Infanta Isbella Clara Eugenia.

 

In late May, Gilbert Griffith gave Walsingham two other letters that Mary Stuart had smuggled out to him.  One of them assured Mendoza that she supported Philip’s planned invasion.  The second letter was sent to Charles Paget, an English nobleman, a staunch Roman Catholic, and a correspondent of Mary’s living in France.  The letter asked Paget to remind Philip of the need for urgency in invading England.  In a return letter Paget told Mary that a priest, John Ballard, had arrived in England from France to orchestrate a Catholic rebellion against Elizabeth.

 

Meanwhile, Walter Raleigh’s colony at Roanoke Island under Ralph Lane’s governorship was failing.  A drought, hostile relations with the local natives, the failure of supply ships to arrive from England, a dearth of food supply: all contributed to Lane’s desperation.  He was rescued from starvation unexpectedly by Francis Drake, sailing north from the Caribbean on the whim of adding to Lane’s fort armament that he had taken from the Spaniards.  A ferocious storm convinced Lane to load his entire colony onto Drake’s ships.  The fleet left June 19.  It reached England July 27.

 

While Lane and Drake were considering Lane’s options at Roanoke, John Ballard, watched closely by Walsingham’s agents, was seen visiting Anthony Babington, a rich twenty-five year old Catholic gentleman of Dethick.  Ballard and Babington were overheard discussing Philip’s projected invasion and Elizabeth’s murder.  The deed was to take place either in her Presence Chamber, while she walked in the park, or while she rode in her coach.  Babington would do the deed himself with the assistance of six of his friends, themselves idealistic young Catholics of gentle birth.  On June 25 Mary wrote to Babington, who replied July 6.  He outlined to her his conspiracy: his “six noble gentlemen” would dispatch the Queen; he would rescue Mary from Chartley; and with the help of the invading Spanish forces, she would become Queen.

 

On July 17 Walsingham was given Mary’s return letter to Babington.  Written by her two secretaries from her notes, which she subsequently burned, the letter indicated that Mary endorsed Babington’s plan and Elizabeth’s murder.  Walsingham had his forger had a postscript that asked for the names of Babington’s six gentlemen.

 

Much to Walter Raleigh’s surprise, Drake and the entire Roanoke colony arrived in Plymouth July 27.  He had sent Grenville and a relief squadron off to Roanoke in April, the squadron arriving off the Outer Banks approximately two weeks after Drake and Lane’s departure.

 

While London was celebrating Drake’s boastful return – “In half a year … he has destroyed what Philip cannot rebuild in twenty, even with all his millions in gold” (Miller 160) – Walsingham pounced.  John Ballard was arrested August 4 and put in the Tower of London.  August 9 -- Mary Stuart’s jailor, Sir Aymas Paulet, confiscated Mary’s letters, jewelry, and money while she was hunting before arresting her on the moors.  August 14 – Babington was located and taken to the Tower.  Fearing torture and believing that being cooperative would earn him a pardon, four days later he confessed.  September 20 -- Babington, Ballard, and five other conspirators were executed.  They were hanged briefly, had their privates cut off and bowels taken out while alive and seeing, and then beheaded and quartered.

 

On October 11 a special court of 36 commissioners assembled to hear evidence against Mary Stuart, who refused to acknowledge its jurisdiction.  During her trial, Mary denied all knowledge of the Babington Plot, declared that her crucial letter to Babington was a forgery, insisted that she had never sanctioned the murder of Elizabeth, and that all she had ever done was seek help to gain her freedom wherever she could find it.  Parliament assembled October 29 to ratify the special court’s guilty verdict.  It petitioned Elizabeth November 12 to authorize Mary’s execution.

 

Elizabeth could not act.  “If she signed the death warrant, she would be setting a precedent for condemning an anointed queen to death, and would also be spilling the blood of her kinswoman.  To do this would court the opprobrium of the whole world, and might provoke the Catholic powers to vengeful retribution.  Yet if she showed mercy, Mary would remain the focus of Catholic plotting for the rest of her life to the great peril of Elizabeth and the kingdom.  Elizabeth knew where her duty lay, but she did not want to be responsible for Mary’s death.  For weeks she existed under the most profound stress which affected her judgment and brought her close to a breakdown” (Weir 375).

 

On February 1, 1587, Sir William Davison presented Elizabeth the death warrant to sign.  She did so, but, according to what she insisted days later, she then commanded Davison not to disclose the fact.  As Davison was about to leave the room, Elizabeth suggested that he might ask Mary’s jailor, Sir Amyas Paulet, to quietly do away with Mary.  Elizabeth could claim that Mary had died of natural causes.  Although horrified, Davison agreed to write to Paulet, who answered back that he could not in good conscience.

 

Acting apparently against her wishes, Davison took the death warrant to the acting Lord Chancellor, who attached to the warrant the Great Seal of England.  When Elizabeth discovered that this had happened, she made Davison swear on his life not to let the warrant out of his hands until she had expressly authorized him to do so.

 

In an emergency meeting, Elizabeth’s ten councilors agreed to take the responsibility for Mary’s execution.  Lord Burghley drafted an order to have the sentence carried out.  Mary Stuart was decapitated February 8.

 

Elizabeth “erupted, not only in a torrent of weeping, but also in rage against those who had acted on her behalf and driven her to this.  Her councilors and courtiers …  quaked in fear at the terrible accusations that were hurled at them” (Weir 380).  Walsingham fled to his country home and feigned illness.  Leicester and Burghley were banished from the royal presence.  Davison was arrested Feb. 14, tried in the Star Chamber, sentenced to a heavy fine, and imprisoned in the Tower.

 

By May, Elizabeth had begun to forgive.  Burghley was allowed back to Court.  Leicester was forgiven.  Sir Christopher Hatton was sworn in as Lord Chancillor, and Walter Raleigh replaced him as Captain of the Guard.  Paulet was appointed Chancillor of the Order of the Garter.  Davison would remain in the Tower until after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.

 

King Philip of Spain was poised to strike.  He had ordered General Parma to subjugate as much of the Dutch Provinces as was possible to create a springboard for the invasion.  Acting on Elizabeth’s orders, Francis Drake and 24 ships left Plymouth Harbor April 16, 1587, to attempt to cripple Philip’s armada of ships. When John White, authorized by Walter Raleigh to found a colony somewhere on the south shore of Chesapeake Bay, left Plymouth May 8 with 117 men, women, and children, nobody in England knew what Drake had accomplished, and nobody but the perpetrator and his agent knew that White’s venture would be sabotaged. 

 

Sources cited:

 

Miller, Lee. Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony.  New York: Arcade Publishing, 2001.  Print.

 

Quinn, David Beers.  Set Fair for Roanoke.  Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1985.  Print.

 

Weir, Alison.  Elizabeth the Queen.  London: Vintage Books, 1998.  Print.