A GENTLEMAN ADVENTURER.* Da. WILLIABisoN's elaborate biography of George Clifford,
third Earl of Cumberland, presents a typical gentleman adven- turer of the Elizabethan age. He was a wealthy young nobleman with great estates in the North. He had been educated at Trinity
* George. Third Earl of Cumberland (1658-1605): his Life and his Voyages. A Study from Original Document*. By Dr. G. a Williamson. Cambridge: the University Press. 125s. net.] under Whitgift and was skilled in all the e.rts of the courtier. He could make pretty speeches in the manner of Euphues, and he won such a reputation in the tilt-yard as to be named the Queen's personal champion, wearing her glove, set in jewels, in his helmet. Elizabeth's confidence in Cumberland was shown by her choice of him to suppress the rebellion of the ill-fated Essex in 1601. In other times such a man would have occupied himself with official duties and the administration of his pro- perty, or would have made the Army or the Navy his profession. But in Elizabeth's day it seemed natural for him to engage, whether in person or by proxy, in adventures at sea, ranging from ordinary privateering to a full-dress expedition against Porto Rico in which he had the amateur's full share of luck. An Elizabethan, of course, would not have understood the word "amateur." Every well-bred man was taught the use of arms, and every soldier of rank thought himself qualified to lead a force at sea as well as on land. He would leave the base mechanic art of navigation, as he conceived it, to the master-seaman whom he hired, but, when it came to fighting; he was prepared to direct a fleet. The evolution of a navy, wholly distinct from the merchant service and manned and officered solely by pro- fessional sailors, had only begun. Private enterprise, such as Cumberland's, supplied the bulk of the forces engaged in the long and successful struggle against Spain. Yet there were differences among these adventurers. Some, like Drake, made privateering and maritime exploration the main business of their lives. Others, like Ralegh, had to be content with planning and organizing voyages in which they rarely or never took part ; nothing is further from the truth than the popular belief that Ralegh was a great sailor and that he contributed in person to the defeat of the Armada or to the discovery of Viiginia. Cumber- land occupied a position midway between these. Like Ralegh, he arranged several expeditions which he was unable to accom- pany, especially his so-called "Fifth Voyage" of 1592, in which his squadron and Ralegh's Sleet captured the great carrack 'Madre de Dios,' the description of whose cargo is one of the most picturesque pages in Halcluyt. "The spices were pepper, cloves, maces, nutmegs, cinamon, greene ginger ; the drugs were benjamin, frankincense, galingale, mirabolans, zocotrine and camphire ; the silks, damasks, taffetas, sarcanets, altobassos that is counterfeit cloth of gold, unwrought China silke, sleeved silks, white twisted silke, curled cypresse," and so on in rich v....riety. tut, like Drake, Cumberland seems to have heard the call of the sea; for he actually commanded in six of his voyages and became almost as great a bugbear to the merchants of Lisbon and Seville as Drake himself.
The many letters which Dr. Williamson has drawn from the family archives at Appleby Castle and elsewhere, as well as those which he reprints from the Cecil correspondence and other sources, elucidate Hakluyt and Purchas in numerous details. They show, for instance, how anomalous—to a modern mind— were Elizabeth's methods of waging war on Philip the Second. Thus in 1592 Cumberland had received a patent authorizing him to make a voyage "to annoy the King of Spain and his subjects, and to burn, kill and slay as just and needful cause shall require." On former occasions he had borrowed a warship or two, but this time he did not, because the thrifty Queen forbade him "to lay any Spanish ship aboard with her ships lest both together might be destroyed by fire." He therefore hired a large and powerful vessel, the 'Tiger,' from St. Maio, for £300 a month, and made full use of his patent right to press ships and men into his service. Ralegh's fleet, which was at sea at the same time, was a composite venture. The Queen provided two men-of-war, one of which, the 'Foresight,' under that redoubtable mariner, Sir Robert Crosse, actually captured the 'Madre de Dios' off the Azores. Ralegh supplied the 'Roe- buck,' his brother sent another ship, and the City of London two more. The several parties invested varying amounts in the enterprise, which was, at one and the same time, an act of war and a commercial speculation. Elizabeth, whose business faculty has never been exaggerated, put only £1,800 into the pool, as compared with £6,000 from the City and £5,000 from Ralegh, but when the plunder was divided the Queen contrived to get nearly £100,000 for her share, while the City and Lord Cumberland had to be content with cent. per cent., and Ralegh declared that he had actually lost money on the transaction. The readiness of the shrewd merchants of London to invest in these privateering affairs is at first sight somewhat surprising, as Cumberland's voyages on the whole unquestionably cost him far more than they yielded in booty. But we must remember
that there were relatively few opportunities for investing capita/ in those days, except in the purchase of land, and, further, that the fitting out of the ships in the Thames and the disposal of their cargoes gave the enterprising traders chances of making money, apart from the actual dividends on their ventures. It is to be noted that Cumberland's intimate relations with the City merchants, his partners in many a privateering venture, caused him to take the lead in that far more important enter-
prise—the founding of the East India Company. The historic charter of December 30th, 1600, was granted to him and to 215 knights, aldermen and merchants. As a member of the court of the Company, Cumberland had already taken an active part in the preparations for the first voyage, and had sold the Company his ship, the 'Malice Scourge,' which, when she was built to his
order at Deptford in 1595, was accounted the finest vessel ever launched for a private English owner. The 'Malice Scourge,' re-christened the 'Red Dragon,' was the Admiral's ship in the Company's first expedition to the East Indies.
Cumberland's chief naval exploit was the taking of Porto Rico in 1598. He told his sister-in-law, Lady Warwick, in a most interesting letter which Dr. Williamson prints for the first time, that :
"For the West Indies what I have done this yeare maketh it apparent that their strongest places maie be carried with reason- able forces if they be resolutlie attempted. Porto Rico was thoughts invyncible and soe helde amongst them, they called it the Maiden Towne and feared noe force, yett loots not I by the enymie Thirtie men in gettinge it : there was in the towne seaven hundred men, fours hundred of them soldiers, that receaved pale of the Kinge : I did not laud full seaven hundred, which goinge without Guydes came full upon thoir strongest places, yett, as before I have showed you, we carried it, though all our souldiers (except Commanders) were men untrayned, and I assure myselfe had never seene land-service most of them."
He went on to say that with a thousand men he would undertake to capture Panama itself, and eventhe Havana, and thus to deal the Spaniard a fatal blow in his most vulnerable part. Cumber- land did not add that, though England might conceivably have taken these strong places in the West Indies, it was beyond her power at that time to hold them. He had, it is true, lost few men in the fighting at San Juan—Robinson says that sixty were killed—but he lost six hundred, or a third of his force, from dysentery within the six weeks from his first landing to his departure. We need not blame Elizabeth's councillors if they declined to adopt the sanguine young nobleman's ambitious schemes, the time for which had not come. Cumberland, how- ever, usually contented himself with cruising between the Tagus and the Azores—as Blake and Nelson and many less famous English seamen did after him. There he might hope either to intercept a Spanish eacTack homeward bound from the East or the West Indies, or to capture some of the neutral vessels trading with Spain. In 1591, for example, he fell in with the Dutch fleet taking home the annual cargo of spices from the great mart at Lisbon and seized it as good prize. But Monson, whom he ordered to escort the convoy to England, unluckily met a strong Spanish squadron, which overpowered him and recovered the spice ships. Cumberland, retreating before this new Armada, sent the pinnace, which, "like a flutter'd bird, came flying from far away," to warn Lord Thomas Howard, then cruising off the Azores, of the unexpected approach of the enemy. Everyone knows how Sir Richard Grenville, alone cf Howard's captains, refused to accept the warning and sacrificed his fine ship, the 'Revenge,' in an unnecessary fight with a whole Spanish fleet of less powerful vessels whose numbers at last prevailed. Cumberland's connexion with that famous episode is seldom noticed. According to Sir Richard Crosse, our privateers off the Spanish and Portuguese coasts would have done better if they had been properly provisioned. For the ill success of his own cruisers, wrote Crosse to Cecil, "I may justly condemn such victuallers as are offic,ed to furnish Her Majesty's ships, whose abuses are greater lets to sea service than any policy or act of the enemy." Cumberland tried to remedy this evil, but knavish contractors continued to be the curse of the
Navy until the age of Nelson. Dr. Williamson has taken great
pains to collect all the available materials for his biography. We could Wish that he had edited some of the new documents
with more care, particularly for the year 1592, and wrought them into a more coherent narrative. But the book as it stands, with its numerous quotations and its many illus- trations, is an instructive contribution to Elizabethan naval history.
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