Free The Pirate Queen by Susan Ronald Page B

tighten up on slack and wasteful accounting, with weekly reporting to the lord admiral or vice admiral instituted. The navy’s treasurer had to report monthly as well, giving written accounts quarterly; and the master of naval ordnance was obliged to make a quarterly report from his department. But the real power to spend money on ships, ordnance, and seamen remained in the lord treasurer’s hands; and the lord treasurer, the Earl of Winchester, remained at the queen’s side in the Privy Council.
    The modern naval administration was beginning to take shape. Sir Benjamin Gonson was Winchester’s counterpart in the Royal Navy, which disbursed the funds on Gonson’s behalf. Gonson, himself a wealthy merchant, had another claim to fame. Within the next few years he would become the father-in-law of the queen’s most colorful corsair of the 1560s, John Hawkins.

5. The Merchants Adventurers, Antwerp, and Muscovy
Our merchants perceived the commodities and wares of England to be in small request with the countries and people about us…and the price thereof abated…and all foreign merchandises in great account, and their prices wonderfully raised; certain grave citizens of London…began to think with themselves how this mischief might be remedied: for seeing that the wealth of the Spaniards and Portuguese…they there upon resolved upon a new and strange navigation.
—RICHARD HAKLUYT, PRINCIPALL NAVIGATIONS, 1589
    L ong before and after the wily patriarch of the Hawkins family, William, had ceded his Spanish trades with Iberia to his two sons, first Bruges then Antwerp was the center of world trade in the densely populated north of Europe. Since the last great Dukes of Burgundy had moved their court to Bruges in the mid-fourteenth century and aligned themselves to the English crown, the special relationship between the House of Burgundy and England prevailed against the common enemy, France. When Marie of Burgundy married into the Habsburg line around 130 years later, the affinity between England and Burgundy was automatically transferred to the House of Habsburg. 1
    The great and powerful London Company of Merchants Adventurers had profited from the relationship with the House of Burgundy, then Habsburg, since the late Middle Ages. Its wealth and power resided not only in maintaining the status quo with their cloth exports across the Narrow Seas to Antwerp, but also in keeping ahead of the increasingly cutthroat competition. In the year before Elizabeth ascended the throne, the foreign merchants of thenorth German Hanse towns decided at the Diet of Lübeck to start a commercial war against England, since the Merchants Adventurers were insisting with the crown that Hanse privileges (particularly the waiving of import duties) should be renewed only if the Hanse merchants imported goods solely from their own lands. The value of Hanse imports had already exceeded £200,000 ($73.39 million or £39.67 million today), and so in response, the Hanse merchants gambled that their merchandise from across Europe would mean more to the Elizabethans than the vociferous complaints of her merchant princes. 2
    It was a game played throughout Christendom. The Merchants Adventurers themselves enjoyed special privileges at Antwerp and held similar rights there to the German Hanse merchants based out of the Steelyard in London. So when the English vessels returned to England—importing gems, spices, and other luxuries from the Indies, wines from Italy, or silks—it took little convincing to point out to the queen that it was in her best interests to ensure that they did so on English ships at higher customs duties. 3 But applying diplomatic pressure on the crown wasn’t the only way the Merchants Adventurers gained the upper hand against its competition. One of the formidable Hanse towns, Hamburg, had suffered badly from the series of religious edicts made by the pope and Philip of Spain’s father, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, against its