TWENTY-NINE
THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE COMPANY
On other subjects king and prince thought as one. James responded to accounts of the most recent voyage to discover the Northwest Passage with a compliment to his son’s vigour and passions. ‘To the ears of the Prince, who is keen for glory, come suggestions of conquests far greater than any made by the Kings of Spain,’ the Venetian ambassador said, deftly checking off Henry’s interests in one sentence – glory, conquest, wealth, empire, defiance of a religious and colonial enemy.
Between 1607 and 1611, English navigator Henry Hudson had undertaken four exploratory voyages, naming a cape in the Hudson Straits ‘Prince Henry’s Foreland’ on his final voyage, from which he had failed to return. The Northwest Company projectors had high hopes the mythic passage lay within one more voyage, one ‘extraordinary means to grace and honour’, a final push through the ice. At the end of July 1611 the king issued a grant of incorporation to the ‘Company of Discoverers of the Northwest Passage’. He announced the ‘action itself will be more fortunate, and the undertakers thereof the more encouraged, if it shall be countenanced by our most dear and well beloved son, Henry, Prince of Wales’, now to be titled ‘Supreme Protector of the said Discovery and Company’. The motto James gave the company, Juvat ire per altum – ‘He Delights to go upon the Deep’ – celebrated his son’s spirit with typical generosity, affection, some wit, and irony: Henry had actually gone nowhere.
The list of investors was a roll call of Henry’s followers. The prince instructed Phineas Pett to help Hudson’s replacement, Admiral Thomas Button, choose ships for the voyage. Button liked the Resolution and the Discovery. By April 1612 they were ready to set sail, Button carrying ‘Certain Orders and Instructions set down by the most noble Prince, Henry’.
‘Let there be a religious care running throughout your ships,’ Henry instructed Button, and quick punishment of ‘profane speeches’. There should be ‘no swearing or blaspheming of his Holy name, no drunkenness or lewd behaviour’. Henry and Button needed to avoid the expedition collapsing into mutiny as, by most accounts, Henry Hudson’s final trip had. The mutineers abandoned Hudson to his fate, setting him adrift in a small boat, and no one saw the explorer again. As usual, Henry ordered a full navigational-geographical record be kept. He expected them to be gone for up to two years.
At the same time, Henry asked his father, repeatedly, to appoint him Lord High Admiral. The prince sent ‘a spy’, to observe ‘privily … how the royal navy was ordered’. He felt passionately he must set out ‘with diligence and authority … to regulate many abuses which the present Admiral who is decrepit, can hardly do’. The prince was stubborn enough not to give up till he got his way. The king met him halfway, permitting Henry to make a general review of the navy with a view to its complete refit and modernisation. Henry’s men had to ‘report what defects there were’. But the prince used the opportunity to pry ‘into the King’s actions’ regarding the navy, showing ‘dislike’ of his father’s neglectfulness. Not content with examining the royal naval dockyards, there was ‘no doubt, but he had others’, spying for him, ‘in the Signet Office’ as well. Given an inch, Henry took a mile.
James reacted by announcing that Prince Charles would become Lord High Admiral on Nottingham’s retirement. Henry was furious. Charles was only eleven. The king knew the depth of Henry’s commitment to the navy. James wavered under his torrent of objections, and soon Henry had his father’s agreement to allow him ‘to execute [the position] during his brother’s minority, with a Commission of the greater Lords, and … of Inferiors’. That gave Henry years to launch the navy on its programme of upgrades and expansion.
In the Privy Council, Henry pressed his fellow councillors to sanction the construction of eight new galleons and produced detailed lists of cost-cutting measures. They stonewalled. Undeterred, Henry took his usual course of action, of gathering expert opinion from within his circle and circulating it. That meant experienced sailors such as Ralegh and Sir Arthur Gorges, who were both asked to contribute reports. Ralegh wrote pieces on ship design and on the royal navy, and emphasised the bond of trade, domination of the seas, and global power: ‘For whosoever commands the sea commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.’
Ralegh concluded that Dutch naval strength was already damaging British commercial activity (though they were Britain’s closest allies). Henry’s expedition to discover the Northwest Passage was part of his challenge to the Dutch for trade to Asia and the Far East. He also insisted that Spain must, once and for all, be prevented from enforcing its exclusive domination of American colonisation and trade. Henry vowed that the moment his father broke ‘with Spain … [he himself] would, in person, become the executor of that noble attempt’.
All the prince could do for now was get experience on the water. He commissioned Pett to build him a pinnace to support the Prince Royal, with instructions that his cabin should be roomy, for Henry desired ‘to solace himself sometimes into the Narrow Seas’.
Pretty soon, Henry was sure Charles would never be Lord High Admiral. ‘The Prince has managed so cleverly with the king that he has got his [father’s] word for the post for himself,’ reported the Venetian ambassador. In Elizabeth’s reign ‘the post of Admiral was worth one hundred and fifty thousand crowns’, Henry had ascertained. ‘In time of war, it is undoubtedly the greatest post in this kingdom.’ It would become great again, when he had finished with it. The results would surely produce for his father and himself all the money they could spend, as it had for Spain – and possibly allow him the freedom to marry who he wished. Economic prosperity, national security, and royal prestige met in Henry’s plans for the navy.
A knock-on effect of these projects was that commitment to Virginia steadied initially under Henry’s patronage. Henry’s poet, Michael Drayton, urged ‘you brave heroic minds’ to ‘go and subdue’ the Spanish, and save Virginia for God and King. Only womanish ‘hinds’ stayed at home ‘with shame’. One Spaniard irritably informed his king that ‘those who are interested in this colony [Virginia] show … they wish to push this enterprise very earnestly, and the Prince of Wales lends them very warmly his support and assistance towards it’. James and Henry were ‘new Constantines … propagating’ Christianity among the Virginians, ‘who yet live in darkness’, said William Crashaw, Preacher for the Inner Temple. There was also the promise of a dividend of twenty pence in the pound, while souls were harvested, a great return on your outlay.
In reality, the project of colonising North America had failed repeatedly since Ralegh first sailed thirty years earlier. Sir Thomas Gates had been trying to pull the fledgling colony back together since that starving winter, but after months of effort, felt it was beyond him. No attempt was ever made to think ahead, about what was needed on the ground once the colonisers had taken possession of the Native Americans’ lands, and ‘liberated’ them from the ‘darkness’ of their way of life. The settlers needed detailed, well-informed plans about how to cultivate the land efficiently; how to construct strong, fortified settlements; how to establish and maintain friendly relations with the natives you were dispossessing; and ideally, how to acquire prior understanding of how their society and economy functioned, on their terms. A good start would be if colonists learned to speak the Algonquin language. John White and Thomas Harriot’s researches could have helped here: Harriot could be reached through Henry.
Instead, the Virginia Company stood on the brink of another collapse. The English were preparing to abandon America again, when Admiral Lord De La Warr, accompanied by Henry’s former weapons tutor, Sir Thomas Dale, landed at Jamestown on 29 May 1611. Henry had written to Maurice of Nassau to secure Dale’s release for this voyage. Thomas Dale took one look and concluded that only the temporary imposition of martial law could hope to stop the rot and consolidate their foothold in the New World. Gates was appointed lieutenant-governor under De La Warr. Dale was to be high marshal. A brutal man, Dale drew up a series of severe martial laws, imposed them, and set about rebuilding the colony. Unwittingly, he created the first legal system for America. Once Dale and Gates regulated the colony so it could begin to function, Dale set off up the James River. About seventy miles upstream, he found prettier, drier, sweeter ground than the malarial pit of Jamestown.
By early 1612, Dale reported to Henry that the new township which he had named Henrico (sometimes Henricus or Henricopolis) was ‘much better and of more worth than all the work ever since the colony began’. He had laid the town’s foundations already, he said: three streets of timber buildings and a church, and sent his master a little present of an American ‘hawk and a tassall’. The Virginia Company drew up plans for a private university in the town: the first in America, they called it Henrico College. The company minutes recorded the carving out of ‘ten thousand acres of land for the University to be planted at Henrico and one thousand acres for the College for the conversion of the Infidels’.*
Along with Cape Henry at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, and Fort Henry on the Hampton River, bit by bit Henry’s representatives filled in the map for their prince. Henry’s ‘royal heart was ever strongly affected to that action’. Virginia’s first historian judged Dale and Gates, brutal as they were, essential to the founding of British America. Without them, the colony, said Robert Johnson, would have collapsed once more from the combined effects of famine, absence of the rule of law, the ravages of disease and attack from indigenous tribes. Yet, Johnson’s recommended actions to ensure the future well-being of the colony explained why James came to dislike the Virginia Company. ‘Let them,’ the colonists, ‘live as free Englishmen under the government of just and equal laws, and not as slaves after the will and lust of any superior … discourage them not in growing religious nor in gathering riches,’ he said.
‘Any superior’ could so easily evolve to include that most superior of ‘free Englishmen’ – the sovereign. Many English settlers hoped they came to create a brave new world of opportunity. In 1612, most survivors found themselves to be almost indentured labourers, living under martial law, for the benefit of vested City interests and the shareholders of the Virginia Company, Prince Henry prominent among them.
In all this, Henry was a man of his time, embracing his era’s fascination with voyages of discovery, imaginary and actual. Henry dreamed of travelling through ‘unpathed waters, undreamed shores’, to bring back never-before-seen wonders. The desire for odysseys, to make the world bigger and fresher, was such an ancient impulse, and the desire surged hard in Henry now. But he could not go where he wished. He was not a Thomas Coryate, nor an Edward Cecil, nor Ralegh, Dale or Gorges.
Henry had badly wanted to lead English troops to Jülich-Cleves, yet had not even been allowed to cross the English Channel in his own ships. He desired direct experience of Christendom, where preachers said the apocalyptic struggle for Europe’s salvation was brewing – a battle in which, from six months old, his role had been prophesied. When Coryate and Henry’s boyhood friends came back, their tales let him travel freely – in his mind. When King Henri IV was alive, Henry fantasised about visiting him dressed in disguise. Now he enabled some of his followers to go to America, to do what he yearned to do: establish a godly brave new world, freed from the rituals and constraints that held even an absolute monarch-in-waiting in his place. When he was king though …
Henry planned to sail his ships, including the Prince Royal, out across the high seas, rather than up and down the Thames estuary. It was a question of time. He was seventeen. He had all the time in the world. To be trapped in the southern half of England for ever, within the boundaries marked by hunting tracks and royal progresses, was unimaginable.
He would travel for friendship’s sake, to visit princely cousins in Europe – as his uncle Christian IV had visited the Stuarts, and his father had sailed on impulse to Denmark to fetch home his mother. He would travel for diplomatic reasons, visiting the capitals of his allies. He would travel as a pilgrim, the holy knight of his ‘barriers’ tourney, to ally with the rest of Protestant Christendom and complete the Reformation. He would travel for wealth, to prosper the common weal, and secure his borders. He would travel to war to daunt enemies. He would travel to escape the gilded cage of court. The siren song of the still-to-be-discovered was irresistible to him.
The danger was that he would become like Icarus. His image shone so bright at home and abroad. Would he throw a correspondingly dark shadow? Yearning to soar above the grey compromises necessary to everyday life, he was a glory-hunting young man. He risked developing the affliction of visionaries and heroes, who can become inhuman in the pursuit of their vision.
Henry asked Robert Sidney, Viscount Lisle and governor of Flushing, to find him a company of soldiers in Holland. ‘I had purposed the Company to your young knight,’ Lisle told his wife. Their son was a friend of Henry’s, and one of those the prince had chosen to make a Knight of the Bath in June the previous year. Lisle’s son also longed to command a company of soldiers under Maurice. Of course he did. He was one of Henry’s people. Lisle told his wife he could only let their son have it, ‘if I can get free of the Prince [Henry], to whom you know of old I did make a promise of the next Company [to fall vacant in the Flushing garrison]’. It is impossible to think Henry would let such a chance slip through his fingers.
* Today, Henrico is a suburb of Richmond, Virginia.