Project MUSE - Faithless Empires: Pirates, Renegadoes, and the English Nation (original) (raw)

ELH 67.1 (2000) 45-69

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Faithless Empires: Pirates, Renegadoes, and the English Nation

Barbara Fuchs

I thought the diuell was turnde Merchant, theres so many Pirates at Sea.

--Dekker, If This Be Not a Good Play, the Devil is In It

The English experience of piracy has usually been glorified as the proleptic wanderings of a future imperial power--piracy as the vanguard of the Empire. Under Elizabeth, England pursued a highly aggressive para-naval policy towards Spain; in the 1570s and 80s, piracy became England's belated answer to Spain's imperial expansion. Long before war became open in 1588, the Queen was giving her not-so-tacit approval to privateering expeditions that ostensibly sought new channels for English trade but in fact consisted mainly of attacks on Spanish colonies in the New World. 1 Glorified with the name of "privateers," Englishmen such as Francis Drake plundered Spanish colonies and enriched England's treasury. I would like to complicate this narrative of heroic exploits by analyzing how piracy proves a constant source of tension and embarrassment for the Jacobean state as it focuses on trade as a means to empire. As piracy grows uncontrollably, mimicking the English state in ruling the seas, it poses a challenge to the very powers who had authorized it.

Early on, pirates were recognized as a naval resource for England. John Dee, the magician and mathematician who advised Queen Elizabeth on the constitution of her navy, strongly recommended that the Crown rein in the pirates and profit from their ability. In his General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation (1577), Dee stressed the advantages of thus establishing a navy:

By this navy also, all pirates--our own countrymen, and they be no small number--would be called, or constrained to come home. And then (upon good assurance taken of the reformable and men of choice, for their good bearing from henceforth) all such to be bestowed here and there in the aforesaid Navy. For good account is to be made of their bodies, already hardened to the seas; and chiefly of their courage and skill for good service to be done at the sea. 2 [End Page 45]

Of course, the problem lies in the elision between "men of choice" and "choice men." Too much independent will might make the pirates less than ideal for state service, regardless of how much "good assurance" they gave of being reformed.

Given the strategic value of piracy, the state accorded it different valences at different points: if one attacked ships of a hostile nation for supposedly private purposes but with a mandate from one's government, one counted as a privateer, authorized and fully justified by the state and its pressing needs. Without such a mandate, one remained a pirate, even though the attacks carried out might be directed at the same ships, in the same manner, and with the same concrete results. While the privateer lent the currency of his private quarrel with foreigners to the state for the purpose of its larger aims, payment for this loan of legitimacy was forcibly exacted by those pirates who represented themselves as agents of the state even when they no longer embodied any such authority. When in Thomas Heywood's The Fair Maid of the West the apprentice Clem calls them "spirats," he addresses precisely the difficulty of reining in these unruly, often invisible, and apparently omnipresent figures. 3 And, as John Dee's recommendation so patently shows, the trajectory from privateer to pirate is somewhat of a state fantasy in the first place--the pirates are always already there, before the state uses them and also once it no longer has any use for them.

Pirates constitute a particularly interesting case of the relations between dominant and subordinate elements in early modern England, precisely because of their sometime incarnation as government agents. Their varying roles serve to chart the changes in England's attitude towards imperial expansion, from a rather desperate willingness to attack Spain in the Elizabethan years to a more restrained focus on...

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