The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam (17 page)

In Malta, things were going from bad to worse. Baker and his crew were put on trial by the Maltese Inquisition. It focused, as usual, on heresy—an apparently straightforward issue when confronted with English Protestants—and the settlement of commercial debts was quickly subsumed by darker fears of plots and conspiracies involving those suspected of harboring reformist religious beliefs. Baker’s arrest had coincided with a political crisis on Malta. Cefalotto had been appointed grand inquisitor by Pope Gregory XIII in late 1580 and immediately used his newfound power to accuse French members of the island’s Knights of St. John of Huguenot sympathies. The crisis was compounded by the decision of a group of Knights in July 1581 to oust the octogenarian grand master Jean de la Cassière, just as Baker was being arraigned. Cefalotto’s subsequent report to his superiors in Rome the following spring claimed to have uncovered not just an isolated case of piracy but a vast anti-Catholic conspiracy. “The plot of the capture of Malta was conceived,” he wrote, “by the English Queen, the Duke of Alençon and the Turks through their intermediary, Peter Baker, who was captain of the English ship
Roe
.” Cefalotto made lurid accusations that French Huguenots and English Protestants were in league with Muslim Turks to destroy what he called “the Catholic Commonwealth” and claimed he had uncovered letters proposing an Anglo-Ottoman invasion of Malta that would transform the political balance of power in the Mediterranean. He ordered that Baker and eight other Englishmen be dispatched to Rome, where they would stand trial for heresy.
³³

When the news reached London, Burghley advised Elizabeth to sacrifice Baker and apologize to Murad in a bid to salvage something of the imperiled Anglo-Ottoman trade. On June 26, 1581, she sent a letter to the sultan regretting “this unfortunate hap.” Scrupulously avoiding specific names or details, she apologized for the “most injurious and grievous wrong which of late came unto our understanding . . . done unto certain of your subjects by certain of our subjects, as yet not apprehended.” Choosing her words with care, Elizabeth regretted that Baker’s actions “doth infringe the credit of our faith, violate the force of our authority, and impeach the estimation of our word faithfully given unto your imperial dignity.” She implored Murad to “not withdraw your gracious favor from us . . . to hinder the traffic of our subjects.”
³⁴
Elizabeth must have been furious at having to grovel in this way to Harborne’s “heathen prince,” but unless she did so there seemed little chance that the Anglo-Turkish alliance would be renewed.

Even as Elizabeth wrote her letter, Harborne was battling to save his reputation, not to mention his liberty, in Constantinople. He accepted the humiliation of French diplomatic security to help contest the fines levied against him, and he used his dragoman, Mustafa Beg, to open communications with the current grand vizier, an unimpressed Koca Sinan Pasha. To his delight Mustafa reported that the Ottomans, perhaps in response to Elizabeth’s letter, were prepared to do a deal. They would restore the English privileges on condition that the queen formalize trade and diplomatic relations and appoint an official ambassador to the Porte. Harborne decided to cut his losses, and on July 17 he fled Constantinople. He had spent three arduous and expensive years building up the Anglo-Ottoman alliance from nothing. Now Walsingham’s “apt man” was returning to London hounded and impoverished.

5

Unholy Alliances

By the summer of 1581, events had conspired to frustrate Elizabeth’s attempts to establish formal alliances with Muslim rulers in Morocco and Turkey. The death of Abd al-Malik at the Battle of Alcácer-Quibir had robbed Elizabethan merchants of one of their staunchest allies, and it was unclear whether his successor, Ahmad al-Mansur, would prove as receptive to English trade. Peter Baker’s clumsy piracy seemed to have ended hopes of a commercial alliance with the Ottomans. At their trial before the Roman Inquisition, Baker and his crew were found guilty of heresy, for which most were consigned to the horror of the galleys, although it was reported that Baker had escaped before reaching Rome and was never heard of again, just another renegade who disappeared into the vastness of the Mediterranean. William Harborne, meanwhile, faced the likelihood, upon his return to London, of public disgrace and humiliation at his handling of the
Bark Roe
incident.

The unregulated nature of trade with Morocco had left the English merchants particularly vulnerable to sudden regime change, and Harborne’s lack of diplomatic accreditation had always limited his ability to negotiate with both the Ottomans and the resident Christian emissaries. The Ottoman demand that Elizabeth appoint an official resident ambassador to the Porte if relations were to continue was the catalyst for a radical change in policy. Walsingham and Burghley had long favored tacit support for regulated trading companies without committing the state to full responsibility for their actions, primarily because they lacked the resources, but such a policy wasn’t working in Russia, Persia, Morocco or—so it now seemed—Turkey.

Protests against unregulated commerce had been going on since the late 1560s, when the Muscovy Company had asked for a monopoly on trade in the northern region, asserting that “this Russian trade will be destroyed as the trade of Barbary is . . . through the greediness of the subjects of this realm carrying thither more of this country’s commodities than that country was able to consume, and by that means also causing the Barbary commodities to rise excessively.”
¹

In 1601, John Wheeler, the secretary of the Merchant Adventurers Company, published his
Treatise of Commerce
arguing in favor of joint-stock companies, and claiming that most of London’s merchants believed that “it is most profitable both for the prince and the country to use a governed company, and not to permit a promiscuous, straggling and dispersed trade.”
²
This may have been a self-interested view that lacked unanimity throughout the City, but it seemed to make sense when trading with particularly remote markets like those in Russia, Persia and the eastern Mediterranean. By the time Wheeler’s book came out, London’s mercantile community had proposed a series of initiatives to regulate trade in Muslim lands, from the joint-stock model pioneered by the Muscovy Company to regulated companies given exclusive trading rights by government charter in return for a percentage of customs duties on imports.

The shift in government policy precipitated by the
Bark Roe
crisis affected the Turkish trade especially: on September 11, 1581, the crown issued “The Letters Patents, or Privileges Granted by Her Majesty to Sir Edward Osborne, Master Richard Staper, and certain other Merchants of London for their trade into the dominions of the Great Turk.” Under its terms Osborne was appointed governor of the proposed joint-stock company in recognition both of his “great adventure and industry” and of the “great costs and charges” incurred in establishing the Turkish trade. His knowledge of the cloth trade as well as his familiarity with markets as diverse as Brazil, Portugal and the Baltics made him an obvious choice. He would lead a team of merchants tasked with nominating up to twelve others who would be allowed “during the term of seven years from the date of these patents, freely [to] trade, traffic and use feats [transactions] of merchandise into, and from the dominions of the said Grand Signior.”
³
The company was empowered to create its own internal regulations in return for agreeing to pay £500 of customs duties per annum into the Exchequer. It would call itself the Turkey Company. How its members could inveigle themselves back into the trust of the Ottoman Porte following the
Bark Roe
debacle and Harborne’s departure was unclear.

•   •   •

After three decades of trading with Muslim powers, Elizabethans were beginning to express increased interest—and some unease—at what was happening in Morocco and Turkey. One outlet for such interests was London’s theater. Ever since the first commercial playhouses had opened in 1576, the stage had quickly become a touchstone for popular hopes and fears concerning everything from witchcraft to adultery and cross-dressing. Throughout the 1580s and 1590s new theaters were being built across London, and, alongside other arenas for public spectacle such as executions, floggings and royal progresses, the Elizabethan public were learning to enjoy their leisure time in the rich and fascinating world of contemporary drama. The various theater companies running the playhouses boasted some of the country’s most powerful aristocrats as their patrons, and their plays were regularly performed at Elizabeth’s court. Yet public drama was also regarded with suspicion by London’s civic and religious authorities. Preachers condemned theaters as breeding idleness, lust and vanity, and worried that, as institutions driven by profit, and as places where hundreds of people met regularly, they offered a potentially subversive alternative to the church. Writing in 1579, Stephen Gosson, a former playwright and one of the theater’s earliest and sharpest critics, attacked what he saw as its alien and worthless commercial nature, arguing that “were not we so foolish to taste every drug, and buy every trifle, players would shut in their shops, and carry their trash to some other country.”
⁴
Gosson, who was also a failed actor, condemned theater as “the invention of the devil, the offerings of idolatry, the pomp of worldlings, the blossoms of vanity, the root of apostasy, the food of iniquity, riot and adultery.”
⁵

In response to such attacks, Elizabeth appointed a master of the revels in 1581 to censor any play performed in the city deemed offensive to the church or state. Wary of such opprobrium, the early theater impresarios built playhouses outside London’s ancient Roman walls, in the so-called liberties, areas free from the oversight of the city’s civic authorities and usually instead under relatively lax royal or aristocratic control. The Rose, the Hope and the Swan were all open-air playhouses erected on the south bank of the Thames—or Bankside—an area known for its dangerous yet also glamorous atmosphere. People crossed over to the south bank to visit a brothel or a bear pit—or to see a play. In the minds of many Londoners the three activities were interchangeable. When Philip Henslowe first bought the lease of the Rose tavern it was a brothel, whose activities continued to provide a profitable supplement to the theater that he erected in the building’s backyard.
⁶
He also built the Hope Theatre on the site of a bear garden, where up to a thousand spectators could come and pay a penny to see a play, then return the next day and spend the same amount to watch a bear tied to a stake, whipped and attacked by dogs.
⁷

The theater inhabited a precarious position in Elizabethan London: it was a vibrant new industry, a contributor to London’s financial prosperity, watched by thousands from all walks of life. Yet it was also subjected to relentless attack from the authorities. Its practitioners lived and worked in London’s poorest areas alongside volatile and marginalized communities of prostitutes, servants, artisans and “strangers”—people escaping religious persecution and slavery from the Low Countries, North Africa, the Ottoman Empire and even the New World. The theater was drawn to the stories reaching London from the Islamic world of enslavement, conversion, piracy and heroic adventure because they held a mirror up to its own practices and people.

In the summer of 1581, a play appeared that dramatized the issues of trade, money, religion and national differences generated by recent events in and around Turkey. Its author, Robert Wilson, was a talented young actor and playwright attached to a company financed by Elizabeth’s favorite, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester. The play was called
The Three Ladies of London
. In 1583 Wilson would subsequently transfer his allegiance to the theatrical company called Queen Elizabeth’s Men and forge his reputation producing plays for the Rose Theatre, which opened six years later. But in the early 1580s he was still learning his trade with Leicester’s Men and writing plays indebted to the medieval morality tradition and classical Roman city comedy whose sobriety might even have satisfied Stephen Gosson.

The Three Ladies of London
centers on the struggle between personifications of Love, Conscience and Lucre. It begins in London, with Lady Love and Lady Conscience complaining that Lady Lucre and her employees, the vice characters of Dissimulation, Fraud, Simony and Usury, have destroyed the traditional civic virtues and replaced them with the pursuit of money. The problem is identified as foreign goods coming into England purchased with money borrowed at excessive interest rates—a practice known as usury and condemned as immoral. Lady Love complains:

For Lucre men come from Italy, Barbary, Turkey,

From Jewry: nay, the pagan himself

Endangers his body to gape forth her pelf [money].

They forsake mother, prince, country, religion, kiff and kin,

Nay, men care not what they forsake, so Lady Lucre they win.
⁸

The overseas trade practiced in Muslim kingdoms like Morocco and Turkey by merchants such as Hogan and Harborne is identified as the source of the problem, responsible for eroding England’s time-honored social relations.

As the play progresses, Usury and Simony begin their work on behalf of Lady Lucre. Both vices are represented as nefarious Italian Catholics infiltrating virtuous Protestant England. Usury explains that he left his birthplace in Venice to come to London because “England was such a place for Lucre to bide.”
⁹
Simony admits that his “birth, nursery and bringing up hath hitherto been in Rome, that ancient religious city” where he had been selling ecclesiastical privileges (including papal indulgences) before English merchants smuggled him into London—where, he tells Lucre, “I heard in what great estimation you were.”
¹⁰
Wilson then introduces an effete, villainous Italian merchant called Mercadorus with a ludicrous accent. He tells Lady Lucre—addressed as “Madonna”—“me do for love of you tink no pain too mush.”
¹¹
Lucre orders him to “go among the Moors, Turkes, and pagans” to sell English grain, leather and beef. In return “for these good commodities” he must bring back exotic oriental “trifles to England” such as amber, jet, coral “and every such bauble,”
¹²
expensive objects with little intrinsic value. With comic relish Mercadorus acknowledges the widespread awareness of—and concern with—the English trade with Morocco and Turkey: