I wonder not the Moors so grac'd this nation,
If all the English equal their virtues.
Diplomatic relations between Christian and Islamic states in the sixteenth century were shaped by a network of official and covert policies covering the spectrum from open warfare and imperial engulfment to trade and alliance. Whether amities and conflicts arose from religious belief, familial relationships, dynastic instability, trade competition, or territorial acquisitiveness, all states trading across the Mediterranean region were forced to take into account the shifting balance of power between the hostile Ottoman and Hapsburg empires. Under pressure, amities across the Eastern Hemisphere were necessarily contingent, self-serving, and competitive, yet these included a longstanding cooperation between England and Morocco. The exchange of Moroccan saltpeter for English bullets and naval timber served military needs directly, while general trade and diplomatic contact also enhanced national security for both states. Morocco mitigated for England the threat posed by Spanish hostility and by a rebellious Ireland in league with papal and Spanish forces, while England mitigated for Morocco the threats posed by Spain's and Turkey's territorial ambitions.1 Unlike historians, many literary scholars have neglected the diplomatic history of early modern European-African interchanges, focusing instead on racial tension, which surfaced rather later than recent criticism has implied.2 But whatever racial tension was felt at this time was subsumed by England's interest in befriending powerful Moroccan kings, especially Ahmad al-Mansur, who reigned from 1578 to 1603.
English drama of the time underscores the mutuality of this alliance by its focus on the diplomatic interaction between Queen Elizabeth and Ahmad al-Mansur in the last decades of the l6th century. Two Elizabethan/ Jacobean dramas speaking to this alliance are The Famous Historye of Captaine Thomas Stukelely, printed in 1605 (an anonymous play whose multiple authorship probably includes Thomas Heywood), and The Fair Maid of the West Part I, ca. 1600 (by Thomas Heywood). Famous History is a fictionalized biography of the real-life adventurer Thomas Stukeley, whose quasi-comic peregrinations culminate in his death at Alcazar, Morocco in 1578. This battle involved Catholic forces allied with Muhammed al-Mutawakkil (a deposed king of Morocco) against the Muslim victors ‘Abd al-Malik and Ahmad. Fair Maid is a fictional biography of Bess Bridges, whose sea voyages mirror those of Stukeley but culminate in her diplomatic bonding with Ahmad al-Mansur (or, as he is named in this play, Mullisheg). These plays expose the complexity of the international negotiations that led to the Spanish-English peace of 1604, which, in turn, preceded the Jacobean acquisition and exploitation of New World territories. Appearing on the stage at the very end of Elizabeth's reign, they decode public assumptions about the diplomatic strategy which sustained England's embryonic national identity at the eve of imperial ascendancy.
By their alliance, the minor states of England and Morocco resisted Habsburg or Ottoman hegemony to forge instead their own empires. Morocco's empire was established by its consolidation under one ruler in 1578 and funded, in large part, by the invasion and exploitation of the Songhay (from 1590). England's imperial growth was founded on the pacification of Ireland after 1603 and Spain's suspension of aggression by the Treaty of London in 1604 which opened up the New World to English exploitation: both of these advantages stemmed, indirectly to be sure, from England's unusual alliance with Morocco. English and Dutch colonial ventures (long stymied by the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas between Spain and Portugal, which had divided the unexplored regions of the world between themselves) were encouraged by these peace agreements negotiated in 1604 and 1609.3 With Spain's compliance, England acquired an option for territorial expansion in the New World, authorized by James I's patent issued in 1606 and renewed in 1609. Without Morocco's cooperation, Elizabethan England might well have succumbed to Catholic militarism and containment: James I's diplomatic rapprochement with Spain and continuing trade relations with Morocco (less powerful but still a potent ally after al-Mansur's death) ensured the degree of national stability essential for England's founding of Jamestown in 1607.
Famous History and Fair Maid, among other plays touching on English-Spanish-Moroccan involvement, served as both entertainment and a supplementary form of news reporting years before the regular publication of news corantos (1622).4 With the aim of tracing the complexities of historical interaction encoded in dramatic works and, thus, their reflection of global geopolitical alignments, this essay first outlines diplomatic, military, and mercantile interactions among England, Morocco, and Spain from 1578 to 1614 and then examines the related plays written at the turn of the seventeenth century that illustrate England's dependence upon Moroccan friendship.5
The alliance of Elizabethan England and Morocco in trade and national defense signals an instance of collaboration between governments possessing a more or less equal share of world power in the divided camps of Christianity and Islam. Mutual resistance to the imperial powers of Spain and Turkey bound the states to a fourfold diplomatic game in which the similarity in aims and practices, if not religious faith, was decisive. Fear, alienation, and anti-Muslim or anti-black xenophobia may well have circulated in popular culture by way of negative images culled from the fantastic treatises of classical authors and their early modern imitators, but racism proper emerged from British experience of black slavery institutionalized in New World colonies only long after Elizabeth's death.6 The disdainful picture of Moroccans as racial others that modern commentators have construed as a perquisite of Elizabethan sensibility is an unlikely construction, in fact a bar to understanding African cosmopolitanism. Indeed, it helps to recall that racial identifications in these dramas are generally incidental (deriving from historical settings) rather than integral to the plays' central themes and concerns.
Whether Moors, Negroes, Arabs, or European renegades, Moroccans made no claim to social precedence by primogeniture or, indeed, by the accident of racial heritage. Phenotypic differences neither signified nor caused rigid social demarcation, and, generally, non-Muslim faith was tolerated except in cases of service to the sultan. Both Muhammed al-Mutawak-kil, killed at Alcazar, and Muly Ismael, who reigned from 1672 to 1727, were black-complexioned Moroccan kings, both, presumably, the sons of Negro concubines, and, therefore, in European reckoning, illegitimate.7 At the same time, English valuation of Moroccan kings in the Elizabethan era accrued, not from preconceptions about color, birth, or religious parity, but from cognizance of local power dynamics. Morocco was a world power and was acknowledged as such by ambassadors, travelers, and even stay-at-home playwrights.
The actual Battle of Alcazar in 1578 is the terminus a quo for these dramas, and its history the foundation of these plots. The historical record reveals that ‘Abd Allah al-Ghalib unlawfully established his son Muhammed al-Mutawakkil on the Moroccan throne from which he was rapidly displaced by his uncles, the rightful heirs, ‘Abd al-Malik and Ahmad. At the cost of his vassalage to Portugal, Muhammed al-Mutawakkil was successful in recruiting Don Sebastian to his aid and a crusading Catholic European army, supplemented by Muhammed al-Mutawakkil's supporters, attempted to take back Morocco at Alcazar. On the opposing side, ‘Abd al-Malik had relied on Ottoman military assistance to win the battle, but he died during the fighting and his brother Ahmad al-Mansur rejected Ottoman dominion to rule as emperor of a unified Morocco.
Modern critics' sensitivity to the legacy of racism has often obscured the fact that English playwrights depicted the victorious Moroccan kings as fully deserving the crown of Morocco. In both George Peele's Battel of Alcazar (ca. 1589) and the anonymous Famous History, which is clearly an adaptation of Peele's play, the “Black King” Muhammed al-Mutawakkil (or Muly Mahamet) is represented as the criminal usurper and his Catholic allies as wrong to offer their support. Philip II in Famous History wonders about Don Sebastian's insistence on providing Muly Mahamet with military aid against the rightful king, ‘Abd al-Malik (who was generally known in Spain as Muly Molocco): “The right is in Molucco: wherefore then / Would Prince Sebastian ayde the other part.” At an early stage of Anglo-Moroccan cooperation, Peele depicts Muly Mahamet in racially charged language as the murderer of his father and younger brothers, but some ten or fifteen years later, when diplomatic relations were firmer, the author of Famous History barely alludes to racial difference, erases the charge of murder, and simply denounces him for cowardice.8 Such a softening in characterization indicates a reduction in notions of Moroccan difference even with respect to a hostile figure. The anonymous playwright thus acknowledges England's strong bond of friendship with Ahmad al-Mansur. Some Moroccans were black-skinned and some deserved censure: indeed, the two characteristics were often linked. But this correlation is a function of the historical record rather than an instance of early modern racism.
The authority of the emperor Ahmad al-Mansur was never in dispute. His right to rule resulted in the first instance from his father's stipulation that his three sons inherit the crown sequentially, but secondarily from his survival at Alcazar where his brother ‘Abd al-Malik died.9 English-Moroccan diplomacy had been established some time before the Moroccans defeated Portugal in the Battle of Alcazar, the first agreement to trade Moroccan saltpeter (a component of gunpowder) for English bullets having been negotiated by Muhammed al-Mutawakkil before ‘Abd al-Malik seized the crown.10 After the accession of Ahmad, relations were strengthened by Elizabeth's grant of a twelve-year license to the Barbary Company (1585). Her favorite, the Earl of Leicester, who was already involved in many overseas trade ventures and in partnership with other members of the Barbary Company, thus acquired the monopoly to trade specifically in metals and saltpeter.11 In spite of the continuing presence of the Spanish, who occupied a number of significant garrisons in Morocco, the sultan strove to maintain his independence from Iberian as well as adjacent Ottoman influence. If Ahmad al-Mansur rejected Turkish control and cleverly played English demands against Spanish blandishments during this tumultuous period, by the time these plays reached the stage at the turn of the century the balance weighed in England's favor.12
English-Moroccan amity during Elizabeth's reign was instrumental in the continued political independence of both states, and plans for cooperative military ventures prove delightful examples of a common grandiose ambition to outdo Spain and Turkey. This cooperative spirit is evident in the state papers and personal correspondence of Elizabeth and al-Mansur.13 At the height of England's fear of an Irish/Papal /Spanish assault in 1578, Morocco dispatched a secret embassy to London. The merchant Jasper Thomson reported Ahmad al-Mansur's interest in England's assisting him to carry 20,000 soldiers and horses from Barbary to conquer Spain. Consul Henry Roberts was accompanied to England in 1589 by a Moroccan ambassador who offered to provide England with l00 ships and 150,000 ducats to facilitate the landing of Don Antonio in Portugal. In return, al-Mansur sought material and technological assistance for improving his galleys.14 The Moroccan king was pressed hard by England to support Don Antonio, the pretender to the Portuguese throne which had passed to Philip II of Spain, but he was saved from having to commit himself (and alienating Spain) by Antonio's timely death. In 1600, al-Mansur dispatched a new embassy to England. The reports of this visit are instructive in two ways: first, they reveal an English shock (even outrage) that these ambassadors surreptitiously used their privileged diplomatic rank to enhance Morocco's trading status; secondly, they illuminate the scope of Moroccan prestige.15 The Moroccans failed to be intimidated; instead, they intimidated the English.16 Not awed by Elizabeth's court and English culture, and aided by the queen's participation in secret discussions, the Moroccan ambassadors simply accepted the warrant of their own authority embedded in a firm Anglo-Moroccan alliance.17 With trade interests, colonial ambition, and prospective joint reprisals against Spain, England and Morocco found common cause that transcended racial and even religious difference.
Secret discussions and correspondence in 1600-1601 focused on Elizabeth's request for financial assistance to harry Spanish treasure ships in the West Indies and al-Mansur's proposal that England and Morocco combine forces in a joint colonization project.18 Al-Mansur writes that he will act within two years: “For our intent is not onely to enter upon the land to sack it and leave it, but to possesse it and that it remayne under our dominion for ever, and—by the help of God—to joyne it to our estate and yours.”19 His favored locale appears to be Eastern, where other Muslims and Moors will support her claims, rather than West Indian, where Elizabeth set her sights; but his proposal went nowhere. His eldest son instigated a revolt in Morocco at about this time, and al-Mansur died immediately after he reconsolidated his empire. Elizabethan and early Jacobean dramas inspired by late sixteenth-century history appear fully accepting of Ahmad al-Mansur's friendship, notwithstanding his outré or “eastern” habits. If Moroccan military assistance for England's New World anti-Spanish activity was not ultimately forthcoming and treaties to refrain from dealing in captive Englishmen were not always upheld, English prestige in Ahmad al-Mansur's Morocco was high and the English privileged Moroccan practices over those of neighboring Muslim states even beyond 1603 when both Elizabeth and Ahmad died.
The Battle of Alcazar was the ground of this cooperative alliance, but a negative result for England was Spain's absorption of Portugal after the deaths of King Sebastian (1578) and his successor Cardinal Henry (1580). When Philip II claimed the entire Iberian Peninsula, he had access to virtually all the riches of the New World: American silver and gold funded Spanish militarism in Africa, in Europe, and in the New World over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Philip II had withheld support from Sebastian's crusade in Morocco—perhaps with his future acquisition of Portugal fully in mind—and, following Portugal's defeat, was content to maintain the status quo with Ahmad al-Mansur. Morocco's compact with England seems an unlikely obstacle to Spanish ambitions, but Morocco continued to serve as a friendly buffer state between Catholics and Muslims that Elizabeth was able to put to good use. Not only did she press for materials of war, she had no compunction about negotiating Ottoman aid to force al-Mansur's hand in the matter of placing Don Antonio on the Portuguese throne. And Spain was reluctant to alienate Morocco. Morocco was not simply an exotic dramatic location or a marginal player in international relations; it was of paramount importance in shaping seventeenth-century global foreign policy. Al-Mansur's conquest of the Songhay in 1590 and his control of the legendary Timbuktu provided vast wealth in the form of gold, salt, and slaves, all of which funded his program of unification and generated international prestige.
During al-Mansur's reign, the coastline of a unified Morocco stretched from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, providing vital ports for shipping—both legitimate and pirate—en route to and from the Americas and the East. As Richard Hakluyt reminds us, Irish ports had initially been targeted to secure England-New World exploration and settlement, but Morocco's Atlantic ports proved equally valuable.20 By 1600, al-Mansur's wealth and status in the international world were legendary, his hospitality invaluable to a nation contemplating westward expansion. When Spain acquired vast properties by its usurpation of Portugal and its New World dominions, Elizabeth and her diplomats courted the Moroccan emperor as a counterweight to Iberian hegemony.
However, while al-Mansur was busy consolidating his power locally, Spanish aggression against England continued. Measures were afoot before the Battle of Alcazar for a combined Catholic force to attack England from Irish strongholds. Ahmad al-Mansur was exotic and powerful, but the Irish were far more worrisome. Not only were the Irish openly Catholic, seemingly savage, and frighteningly hostile, they were supported in their resistance to English rule by Philip II and the pope.
Through his connections to Ireland and Catholic Europe, Thomas Stukeley acted a prominent part in this international melee. He was an adventurer born of a well-respected Devonshire family, though by repute an illegitimate son of Henry VIII.21 His involvement in piracy, Irish military affairs, Spanish and papal plots against Protestantism, and, ultimately, his military participation at Alcazar render him, along with the rebels of Tyrone, an emblem of the Catholic threat. Piracy was rampant worldwide and not an unusual undertaking for the making of English fortunes and the creation of gentlemen.22 Piracy was also a subterfuge, sanctioned by governments to intimidate enemies and steal their assets without an overt declaration of war. Piracy is, thus, an apt vehicle for examining the pragmatism that governed global trade and the maintenance of military power. State-sponsored piracy was a covert act of war that facilitated personal and national economic and territorial advancement; Spanish bullion frequently fell into English pirates' hands (with a portion then finding its way into the queen's coffers) just as English goods and men fell into the hands of Ottoman, North African, and European pirates. Depending on the target, Stukeley's piracies could have enhanced or diminished England's global stature, but Stukeley opted to act against the queen's interests in Ireland.
In 1578, with its multiple references to the whereabouts and activities of Stukeley, the Acts of Privy Council reveals England's unease with his suspected treason on behalf of Catholic enemies.23 Stukeley was bribed or won over by papal title to numerous Irish estates and nominated the leader of Pope Gregory's expedition to establish a base in Ireland for the purpose of invading England. His death at Alcazar temporarily prevented the implementation of the plan. Stukeley's dramatic biography introduces him militarily in Shane O'Neill's second Ulster rebellion and the siege of Dundalk in 1566. His precise dealings with the Irish rebels and the English government during this time are not crystal clear.24 Richard Simpson provides a lengthy if somewhat speculative and anodyne account. An anonymous text entitled “A Thankful Remembrance,” which is pasted into William Stukeley's annotated copy of the play, provides a more or less contemporaneous version that corroborates the view of Stukeley's treasonous activities in Ireland presented in Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland. Although Stukeley became acquainted with Shane O'Neill when he appeared at Elizabeth's court to beg her pardon following his earlier rebellion, it is unlikely that Stukeley participated in O'Neill's 1566 revolt, wherein the Irish lord lost his head to a stake at the summit of Dublin Castle.25 Between 1568 and 1578, however, the historical record shows a tense awareness of Catholic sponsorship of Stukeley's prospective invasion of Ireland. Stukeley was reported to have arrived
out of Italie unto Cadis in Spaine, with certeine men, ships, and munitions assigned unto him by the pope. And being accompanied with certeine strangers attending upon him, he was come to the seas, to land upon some part of the realme of Ireland, in traitorous maner to invade the same, and to provoke the people to joine with him in rebellion.26
By 1578, the Lord Governor of Ireland, Sir Henry Sidney (the father of Sir Philip Sidney) was ready to leave his post, having restored “order and peace, being now delivered from inward and civill warre, and from the feare of Stukeleies invasion.”27
Two years after Stukeley's death at Alcazar, Italians landed at Smerwick to foment further rebellion in Ireland. They were quickly overcome, but continental Catholics did not abandon their invasion plans. Of course, the troubles in Ireland stemmed from England's military and cultural interference over the course of several centuries, but inter-and intraclan rivalries jeopardized sustained resistance to English domination, and the pope was evidently no more adroit at negotiating with clan leaders than were the English.28 Indeed, even the Spanish Armada (1588) was dispersed, and, following that invasion attempt and English reprisals, Philip III's last assault at Kinsale, in cooperation with Hugh O'Neill's Ulster forces, met with similar failure. Challenging English occupation, the rebellious lords led by the Earl of Tyrone, young Hugh O'Neill, had waged a nine-year war that devastated the countryside but resulted in no enduring victory for either side. After his continental allies were defeated in Kinsale in 1601, O'Neill surrendered at Mellifont in 1603. Philip III of Spain was then ready to make peace.
After James I was crowned in 1603, the Portuguese crusade in Morocco and the turmoil in Ireland prompted a global realignment of power that favored the English. Spain, juggling far too many international conflicts, began to decline as a global leader. Its failure to win over the Irish and invade England and its subsequent eviction of all Moriscos from Spain (1609) were significant spurs to new geopolitical configurations. Revising Queen Elizabeth's international policies, James exiled English and Irish pirates, many of whom settled in Morocco and swelled the ranks of the fearsome Sally Rovers, who were, for the most part, Moriscos exiled from Spain and especially hostile to Spanish shipping.29 These new developments enhanced England's international status, depleted Spain's population, and swelled the ranks of Moroccan pirates.30 On Morocco's side, a bloody period of internecine warfare followed Ahmad al-Mansur's death, which spurred piratical activity and put a brake upon Morocco's further expansion. Indeed, following the deaths of Elizabeth and al-Mansur, Elizabeth's former ambassador, Henry Roberts, proposed to James I that England attempt to colonize Morocco.31 King James did not follow through with this suggestion, but rather continued to nurture Anglo-Moroccan cooperation.
Following James's peaceful succession, England was set fair to expand its dominions elsewhere. Of course, England's New World aspirations had taken shape some time before Spain's defeat in Ireland and the 1604 Treaty of London. It is probably coincidental that Humphrey Gilbert acquired a patent for the exploration and colonization of “Virginia” in 1578, the year of Portugal's defeat in the Battle of Alcazar, but his experience in colonizing Ireland was surely crucial.32 Sir Walter Ralegh, too, was experienced in Irish affairs, and it was he to whom the subsequent patent was issued in 1584. These men of the “West Country” were instigators of the 1584, 1585, and 1587 voyages to the eastern Atlantic coast and the founding of the colony at Roanoke. That colony was quickly expunged, but the idea of settlement in Indian lands, couched in terms of civil interaction and conversion, remained an attractive alternative to Irish colonization that had proved so arduous and expensive an undertaking. Potential English colonies began to be valued as early as 1585 not only as sites for spreading “civilization” and Christianity to North America but also as bases of operation against Iberian fishing and treasure fleets, and as prospective marketplaces for manufactures.33 England's successful parrying of Spanish assaults over the next decade and the treaty of 1604 renewed interest in these possibilities.
The settlement of Jamestown under the authority of James I began as yet another aristocratic colonial exploitation in line with the Iberian-American and Moroccan-Songhay models, but such venturing was stymied by the absence of treasure or discernible mineral resources.34 Regularly emblematized in England as a virgin saved from Spanish lust, Virginia provided an imaginary Eden and an actual locus for the English fantasy of imperial aggrandizement.35 Eventually, England's reliance on Moroccan products—especially sugar—was reduced by the establishment of New World plantations, and trade lessened in importance for both states. Initially, however, North American colonization was fostered by Moroccan-English resistance to Catholic, and especially Spanish, power in the circum-Atlantic arena and, perhaps most importantly, the material support of settlements was contingent upon England's continued access to secure Atlantic harbors in both Ireland and Morocco. Al-Mansur's immense value to England is recorded in John Smith's True Travels, Adventures and Observations: the writer—whether Smith or Henry Archer—observes that al-Mansur was “a most good and noble King, that governed well with peace and plentie…[in] everie way noble, kinde and friendly, verie rich and pompous in State and Majestie.”36 This backward look at Elizabeth's ally in a narrative by a prominent colonist in Jamestown suggests the extent of England's real debt to his friendship.
When we approach England and Morocco as allies in both spirit and fact, we see that any anxiety occasioned by the dissimilarity of race slips beneath the greater anxiety about Spanish and Catholic aggression.37 The ideological threads of England's self-fashioning as an independent Protestant state colluding politically and economically with Morocco, its primary analog not only in North Africa but, arguably, worldwide, are clearly marked in Famous History and Fair Maid, both of which celebrate this specific moment of relative stability and mutual empowerment. The two plays are linked by geography, time, and plot; their staging at the cusp of the new century and their concern with dynastic instability invoke a national awareness of the ramifications of global change. In this late Elizabethan era, playwrights looked outward in order to configure imaginative but not entirely fictitious histories of England's allies and enemies entering a new, but as yet unknowable world order.
Bess Bridges, heroine of Fair Maid, caps a serialization of Thomas Stukeley's treacherous history which had become the focus of popular ballads as well as several dramas (including Peele's Alcazar and lost plays entitled Stewtly or Stucley). The tensions evident in the dramatic constructions of Stukeley and Bridges graph the geopolitics by which England, in concert with Muslim Morocco, was able to buttress its independence. These two plays possess related structural and thematic elements, such as the anomalous chorus, but, more importantly, they validate Ahmad al-Mansur's authority. Instead of presenting Moors like Othello, Aaron, or Eleazar isolated within European culture, Famous History and Fair Maid show the African as king of his own people, forced to deal with the demands of intrusive Europeans desiring to fight with, trade with, or convert the Moors.
The plays represent international events that would remain topics of public interest well beyond the death of Queen Elizabeth. Acted in the 1590s but first published in 1605, Famous History fictionalizes Captain Thomas Stukeley's later career, its action set consecutively in England, Ireland, Spain, and Morocco at the time of the Battle of Alcazar. Stukeley's action in Shane O'Neill's rebellion in Ireland may well be apocryphal, but the susceptibility of Ireland to rebellion, especially in view of the assistance at hand from Rome and Spain, remained a concern of English Protestants until the Act of Union in 180l. Having quit Ireland to sail to Cadiz and present himself at Philip II's court, after some delay Stukeley is deployed as Philip's emissary to the pope. He returns to Spain with a contingent of Italian soldiers assigned to Ireland, but he chooses rather to assist King Sebastian and his Portuguese army in reinstalling the dispossessed king of Morocco, Muly Mahamet (Muhammed al-Mutawakkil). Their combined forces are defeated by the reigning monarch Abdelmeleck (‘Abd al-Malik) and his brother Muly Hamet (Ahmad). The historical record of the battle and its aftermath is quite specific as to the fates of the major players, but the dramatic plot centered on Stukeley proceeds from the military defeat at Alcazar to the murder of the Englishmen, Stukeley and Vernon, by vengeful Italian soldiers.
Sebastian's success at Alcazar would have permitted the blossoming of Catholic power in North Africa. It was, if nothing else, expedient for England to support the reigning monarch ‘Abd al-Malik when Sebastian took up Muhammed al-Mutawakkil's cause in his zeal for a crusade, especially since “the Black King” promised Morocco's future vassalage to Portugal. England thereafter took Portugal's part against Spain—in order, as William Monson argues, to profit from trade with Portugal's American colonies.38 Nonetheless, the author of Famous History asserts the right of the Moorish kings Abdelmeleck and his brother Muly Hamet to reclaim the crown from their usurping nephew Muly Mahamet. The scene concluding the battle presents a civilized Muly Hamet, who listens to a recitation of the list of enemies killed and then enjoins his soldiers to
See that the Body of Sebastian,
Have Christian and kingly buriall,
After the country maner for in life,
A Braver sperit nere lived upon the [f]ame,
And let the christian bodies be interd,
For muly-mahamet: let his skin be flead,
From of the flesh; from foote unto the head,
And stuft within: and so be borne about,
Through all the partes of our Dominions,
To terefie the like that shall pursue,
To lift their swords against their soverayn.39
An anointed king, Sebastian is accorded the privileges of his rank; only with respect to Muly Mahamet's usurpation does Muly Mahamet slip into the rhetoric of debasement. Even so, the prospective offstage mutilation of Muly Mahamet constitutes a subdued version of European torture, far less horrific (since Muhammed al-Mutawakkil is already drowned) than the sentence passed on Sir Walter Ralegh (but never fully exacted) when he was found guilty of treason in 1603.40 The usurper's or traitor's bloody fate was designed to frighten subjects rather than generate a sympathetic response: there was no sympathy extended to Muhammed al-Mutawakkil.
Even the ballad “The Life and Death of the Famous Thomas Stukeley” roundly condemns the forces allied against the legitimate Moroccan kings:
Heaven was so displeased
And would not be appeased,
But took us off Gods heavy wrath did show
That he was angry at this War,
He sent a fearful Blazing Star
Whereby ye Kings might their misfortunes know.41
Stukeley's challenge to legitimate Moroccan authority was incorporated into stage lore in George Peele's Battel of Alcazar. Peele sets Stukeley up as a self-righteous Catholic crusader: “No doubt the quarrell opened by the mouth / Of this young prince unpartially to us, / May animate and hearten all the hoast, / To fight against the devill for Lord Mahamet.”42 To a Protestant English sensibility, militant Catholicism was anathema. Peele was certainly aware that Stukeley posed a grave danger to Queen Elizabeth. In fact, the historical Stukeley had been imprisoned from time to time facing charges ranging from piracy to treason. Whether he genuinely subscribed to Catholicism or not, his acceptance of Philip's patronage at a time his queen feared a Spanish invasion leaves us in little doubt of his status in English political discourse. In Holinshed's Chronicles, he is depicted thus:
And out of Ireland ran awaie one Thomas Stukeleie, a defamed person almost thorough all Christendome, and a faithlesse beast rather than a man, fleeing first out of England for notable Pirasies, and out of Ireland for trecheries not pardonable.43
The popular record constituted by drama and ballads tends to obscure the official response to his treason and preserves his reputation as a warrior hero. Peele represents him ironically as one who did “glitter all in golde, / Mounted upon his Jennet white as snowe, / Shining as Phoebus in King Phillips Court,” an image creating a fine stage show but a poor excuse, surely, for an Englishman. Ballads might occasionally have rendered a strict account of topical events, but more usually commented on them—their contents “chiefly emotional rather than literal.”44 Attributed to Richard Johnson (1573-1659), the ballad reflects on Stukeley's activities from a temporal and emotional distance and fails to indict him directly as a traitor or a recusant. The quintessential “English” bravery allowed to the popular representations of Stukeley, however, by no means justified his consorting with Sebastian, nor did his martial prowess in any way diminish Ahmad al-Mansur's legitimacy.45
Indeed, like Peele's Alcazar, Famous History shows Stukeley meeting death—not as a military hero in battle—but at the hands of papal soldiers disgruntled by his choice to deflect them from Ireland in order to join Sebastian's forces in Africa. In his last speech, Stukeley blames treason for his downfall:
England farewell: what fortune never yet,
Did crosse Tom Stukley in, to show her frowne
By treason suffers him to be overthrowne.46
An English audience would surely have construed “treason” as his own involvement in Catholic invasion plans of Ireland rather than the actions of mutinous Italian soldiers. The ballad version of his death credits him with more repentance but provides little detail about his transgressions. Elided from popular discourse is any definitive articulation of his treasonous activities in Ireland, and Stukeley's most serious shortcomings remain elusive. But his reputation as a freewheeling adventurer and military hero is clearly tempered by hubris and moral ambivalence. The play reveals that he despises the Irish, yet he accepts the pope's commission to assist them in rebellion against the queen; he is generous to his soldiers and valiant in war, yet he glorifies Muly Mahamet and his illegitimate claim. On the other hand, perhaps he shows himself a “true” Englishman in keeping his word to the governor's wife in Cadiz while he breaks his oath to the pope.
Despite the cultural record's ambivalence about the precise nature of his crimes, I suggest that the dramatic Stukeley functioned as an exemplary (if somewhat shadowy) villain brought to his just end. Heywood's Bridges functions as his iconic foil. Tom Stukeley's collusion with continental Catholics and his wrong-headed support of Muly Mahamet is rectified in Bess Bridge's resolute constancy and her embrace of Mullisheg.
Heywood's Fair Maid excises moral ambiguity in its reconstruction of English adventuring and heroism. Bridges's voyages and good works are embedded in the same matrix of international affairs that provides the setting for Famous History, the plays teaching inverse lessons about expectations for the behavior of England's representatives in foreign lands.
The iconic opposition of Bridges and Stukeley in these plays celebrates England's friendship with Morocco. Stukeley actually fought in Morocco, but Bridges comprehends multiple influences historically grounded in the period between Henry VIII's French wars (in which Stukeley participated) and the end of Elizabeth's reign, but particularly in the period of Anglo-Moroccan cooperation from 1578 onward. These influences include Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene as well as ballads and the chapbook histories of less elevated women than Britomart and Queen Elizabeth: specifically, Mary Ambree, Long Meg of Westminster (both of whom Bridges mentions), and Grace O'Malley (Grania ny Maille), the notorious Irish pirate.47 A woman of low birth, Bess Bridges nevertheless upholds the chivalric idealism of the virginal Britomart, her attachment to the portrait of Spencer (whose name is an obvious homonym of Edmund Spenser) an emblem of Britomart's magical image of Artegall and symbol of Bridges's commendable chastity. All of her female precursors—both fictional and historical—are cross-dressing women warriors like Britomart. Moreover, Bridges's occupation is indebted both to Long Meg and to the tavern culture that fashioned Tom Stukeley. As in Long Meg's popular history, Bridges derives her strength from her exemplary constancy, honesty, and intelligence rather than the mere physical prowess and outrageous bravado of Stukeley. Owner of the Windmill tavern rather than a barmaid, Bridges falls in love with a soldier in line with Meg's template. His name is Spencer. When he kills a fellow Englishman in defense of his lover's honor, he flees abroad to join Sir Walter Ralegh's forces sacking Fayal and leaves Bridges his tavern in Foy (Cornwall), his possessions, and his portrait.48 While in Fayal, he is wounded in a duel, and, anticipating death, he calls upon Goodlack to execute his will in England. Goodlack quits Fayal believing his friend to be mortally wounded, but he is saved by the skill of his physician while another man named Spencer happens to die. From this point on, the plots of the two plays run parallel.
Bridges uses her inheritance from Spencer to purchase a ship called the Negro—a “prize” brought to England by pirate or privateer—and sets out with her friends with the secret intention of reclaiming Spencer's body from territory retaken by the Spanish. Bridges's voyage through Spanish territory on her black ship illuminates English concerns in this geopolitical web. The Negro, her ship, transcends any simple binary opposition between black and white or the anticipation of England's engagement in African slave trading. In its first mission the ship emblematizes her neoplatonic commitment to Spencer, in its second mission it emblematizes the moderation of English pirates, and in its third mission it emblematizes the fruitfulness of English diplomacy. While we cannot entirely discount the equation of blackness and African subordination, in this figure black resonates more compellingly at other levels. First, it represents mourning, as befits the heroine's mood;49 second, it represents religion, for Protestant ships were traditionally black; and thirdly, it represents piracy, for pirates often used black vessels in order to slip unnoticed past warships in the night.50 Finally, it represents topical events. The impetus behind Heywood's choice of name may come from actual ships similarly named,51 but, rather more likely, from those edicts issued by Elizabeth I in 1596 to deport slaves from England. One edict calls for the repatriation of ten “blackamores” whom Sir Thomas Baskerville brought from the New World to England; the other calls for the voluntary exchange of 89 black slaves resident in England (a question of their masters' compliance rather than their own) for 89 English subjects held as slaves in Spain and Portugal.52 Universally cited by modern scholars as evidence of early English racism, these edicts reflect, instead, a domestic concern with the dire corn shortages at that time and a diplomatic negotiation for the redemption of English captives. Shortfalls in the harvest necessitated an aggressive policy of alms distribution to the unemployed and poor, the Acts of Privy Council in 1596 repeatedly enjoining well-provisioned subjects to curtail their own appetites in order to feed the hungry. The government justified the deportation of “those kinde of people,” not on the grounds of black inferiority, but because their employment as slaves usurped the jobs of needy English men and women. Bridges's vessel, already a “prize” taken from enemy shipping and, therefore, not valued as English, represents those unfortunate Negroes to be deployed in the redemption of captive Englishmen. Alerting the audience to the despicable Spanish policy of enslaving freeborn Englishmen, she is prepared to risk the Negro and all aboard to retrieve Spencer's corpse from the Spaniards.
En route for Fayal and dressed as a sea captain, she captures Spanish fishermen who reveal that Spencer's corpse was disinterred from consecrated ground, reburied (aptly enough) in an infertile corn field, then exhumed again and burned. Her enduring commitment to love even after Spencer's death is a neoplatonic convention of the age, but her mission is rendered futile by Spanish desecrations. Thus, she fires on the Fayal church, which is once again in Spanish hands, her battery a symbol of Protestant England's religious and moral outrage against Spain's illicit treatment of fellow Christians. She goes on to rescue the English merchant vessel upon which the still living Spencer and his physician had taken passage. Circumstances are such that she fails to recognize her lover (she thinks him a ghost) or he her (she is dressed in male clothing) and he goes on his way to Mamorah. They meet again in the court of Mullisheg, the sultan. Not tempted by unearned wealth offered by the smitten Moroccan, Bridges completes her metamorphosis from tavern-keeper to warrior-pirate to diplomat.
Spencer (whose role reflects that of Vernon in Famous History) is also at court; his mission is to plead for the English merchant accused of cheating Mullisheg (or Ahmad al-Mansur/Muly Xeque) of his customs duties. When Bridges spots him, she offers Mullisheg all her wealth (“leave naught that's mine unrifled”) to relieve him. Mullisheg graciously resists taking advantage of her self-sacrifice, conferring upon Spencer the dubious honor of chief eunuch. Her corrupt and foolish servant, Clem, steps in to accept the promotion, and Spencer, freed from the threat of castration, asks Mullisheg for Bridges's hand in marriage—a double transference of agency to which she willingly accedes, although, like Britomart's, her history is far from concluded.
Heywood made Anglo-Moroccan interactions something of his stock in trade. His play If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody (1606) deals with English-Moroccan trade specifically; Fair Maid Part I speaks to late Elizabethan diplomatic cooperation; and Fair Maid Part II reflects England's declining dependence on Morocco. Domestic legal policy, diplomacy, and trade opportunities were then, as now, contingent components in international transactions. In Part I, Bridges acts as an ambassador who is called upon to mitigate Mullisheg's severity in dealing with foreign merchants and missionaries caught flouting his laws. All countries engaged in international trade imposed restrictions on imports, required payment of customs duties, and monitored the behaviors and rights of foreign sailors, England no less than any other state.53 These rules were spelled out quite clearly in international treaties. There is no question that the European merchants represented in the play have transgressed Moroccan laws articulated by public edict. The French merchant has attempted to “deal in commodities forbid”; the Italian merchant has failed to monitor the “outrage” of his crew who have been sentenced to the Moroccan galleys; and the English merchant carrying Bridges's beloved Spencer has failed to pay customs duties.54 The “quiddit” in Moroccan law that permits Mullisheg to confiscate both goods and ships when European merchants evade import or customs regulations, as in the case of Spencer's ship master, is more clearly a European trick than a Moroccan one. The historical record reveals the English as particularly prone to this draconian punishment of interlopers and smugglers. For example, England confiscated ships and goods from interlopers in the Barbary and Turkey trades.55 Trade charters note the division of spoils from such infractions at the ratio of 50 percent to the queen and 50 percent to the company or patentees. Another telling example of England's greed for ships is to be found in the Dolphin incident when, in 1586, the English illegally captured the Spanish Dolphin and its cargo, returning the spoils only after the Spanish petitioned Ahmad al-Mansur for intervention in the return of their property.56 In Fair Maid Part I, Ambassador Bridges convinces Mullisheg to forgive all transgressions, his sole reward a chaste kiss. Not a titillating kiss between a flirt and a king, this gesture simply mirrors those kisses she has previously bestowed upon her admirers in evidence of her exemplary chastity, her worth as Queen Elizabeth's representative. The sultan's heroic spirit, generosity, honor, and overall good humor are lauded by the English and the satisfied merchants, and his confirmation of Bridges as a “girl worth gold” points toward her perfection as well as to his own elevation over Philip II, who dressed Stukeley in tawdry “glitter.” Untarnished by treason, inconstancy or greed, Bridges symbolizes the very best of English virtue. Concomitantly, the victor at Alcazar, while not so constant (he craves an intercultural harem) and not nearly so self-negating, represents the best of Moroccan virtue: he is a king actually worth gold and a man, a Moor, on almost equal terms with good Queen Bess. If the theatrical Bess Bridges is seen to “bosom” with a Moor following her voyage from England aboard the Negro, the image is not one of simple cross-racial titillation: rather, her embrace of Mullisheg reflects the queen's long-term history of diplomatic “bosoming” with her Moroccan ally. From this iconic voyage, part piratical and part diplomatic, Bridges is set to bring home freed English captives, Spanish booty, Moroccan gold, and international goodwill.
Bridges's history was not narrowly confined to Morocco. Like Stukeley's, her adventures take place in a global context. England's major threat was not Muslim difference but England's risk for absorption by European Catholics, and, especially, by Spain which had striven to invade England indirectly through Ireland and directly by sea. Morocco facilitated England's avoidance of imperial engulfment by trading materials of war and providing safe Mediterranean and Atlantic ports for commercial and military shipping; England performed a reciprocal service in providing Morocco with vital weapons and naval timber with which to withstand ongoing Ottoman and Iberian military pressure. In the plays that were written and performed at this precise juncture the final scenes set in Africa form only part of the international nexus: like Stukeley, Bridges proceeds from English to Spanish and then to Moroccan territory.
The representation of English-Spanish interaction in both plays would have incensed contemporaneous audiences. Playgoers surely realized that Stukeley mistakes the tyranny of his Spanish host for generosity when Philip, remarking on his overweening pride and reckless gullibility, boasts “If England have but fifty thousand such, / the power of Spain their coast shall touch.” Stukeley is characterized as a dual liability to English security while Bridges is deliberately figured as both a commercial and a political asset. The desperate situations in which Fair Maid's Spencer and his merchant companion find themselves, first in Spanish waters and then in Morocco, shadow the mistreatment of Thomas Stukeley and his rival Vernon when they arrive in Spain. Captain Stukeley is not himself a merchant; however, the governor of Cadiz accuses him of fraud in evading customs duties, seizes his ships and horses, and commits him to prison. In contradistinction to the historical record that attests to his piracies and tends to justify the governor's suspicion, Stukeley is not, on this occasion, engaged in common piracy—only treason. His detention highlights Spanish greed, breach of hospitality, and, perhaps, stupidity. Vernon, too, merely a traveler, acts as spokesperson for an English sea captain and merchant whose ship and goods have been seized by the Spanish. To Philip II, Vernon accuses the Spanish of “unchristian” behavior in enticing him and the captain ashore in order to declare the ship a wreck and, thus, subject to seizure.57 Philip restores the ship and goods—but, of course, the merchant in this case is completely innocent of any malfeasance and is entitled by “natural law” to his possessions.58 Treaties from this era tend to specify exactly the conditions of punishment for trade infractions, which suggests that infractions were frequent and often subject to dire retribution. The 1604 Spanish-English peace agreement stipulates precisely the limitations to official retaliation.59 It goes without saying that treaties, even in times of peace, were frequently ignored. Muslims in North Africa were not untutored in diplomacy or warfare with European powers; they were self-interested and experienced traders accustomed to the cheats and impositions of their Christian counterparts and fully capable of reciprocal double-dealing. However, in these two plays, the Spanish and their collaborators epitomize the international malefactor.
Bess Bridges's diplomatic resolution at Mullisheg's court is comic and celebratory; in contrast, the episodes describing English encounters with the Spanish navy underscore English disgust with Spanish treachery. Undoubtedly buoyed by the rout of the Spanish Armada but chagrined by Ralegh's failure to retain the Azores or permanently impair Cadiz, Heywood embodies Spanish immorality in the figure of the Spanish captain. Having captured the merchant vessel on which Spencer and his physician travel to Morocco, the captain refuses to accept any ransom and enslaves the Englishmen, presumably for galley or New World labor. Although he grudgingly acknowledges English pluck, he nonetheless threatens Spencer with torture rather than welcoming him as a chivalric peer. Bridges defeats the captain in battle, and, measuring English behavior by his own and expecting to be enslaved, he submits. Yet she simply confiscates his goods and releases his captives. At this juncture, the Spaniard contritely modifies his tone to one of awed respect: “I know not whom you mean, but be't your queen, / Famous Elizabeth, I shall report / She and her subjects both are merciful.”60 Both Bridges and the queen illuminate by inversion the excesses occasioned by Spanish vice.
Apart from Queen Elizabeth, merchants, officials, and sovereigns depicted in these plays are intransigent, not only in terms of personal honor but also in commercial transactions even when treaties regulated such behavior. In this era of circum-Atlantic piracy and mutual coastal raiding, bullion and goods were not the only valuable commodities, and West African slaves were not the only human commodity. The Spanish enslaved Christians and Muslims; North African corsairs alone or in cooperation with their governments enslaved or ransomed Christians and Africans; and English naval officers and pirates often sold their captives to other European nations. But official English policy was different: neither Christians nor Muslims seized from foreign shipping were subject to enslavement—even if they were sometimes exchanged for Englishmen, imprisoned, or even hanged. The difference may seem minor to us now, but it underscores an official rejection of institutionalized slavery within England proper. Queen Elizabeth's willingness to deport slaves already in residence, her efforts to redeem European captives, her failure to authorize an official slave trade, and, perhaps, above all, Henry Roberts's proposition to colonize the slave-rich empire of Morocco immediately after her death all point to her intolerance for this trade in human beings, no matter their race or religion. This is not to suggest that Elizabeth, any more than other Englishmen and women, was an exemplar of tolerance. Extreme violence in colonizing Ireland and converting the Irish to Protestantism served her interests by protecting England's western flank from Catholic invasion, and potential force against the natives was envisioned by the West Country men intent on settling North America. In contrast to the Iberians, whose imperial imperative enjoined them to baptize heathens both in the New World and in Africa, Elizabeth and her subjects had no colonial ambition in Morocco. The English therefore felt little compulsion to attempt to sway the infidel from his faith or his slave-trading, so long as these did not impinge on English affairs. England's imperial hopes did not, at that time, include the usurpation of African territories; African slaves were traded primarily by the Portuguese and the Dutch, and other African commodities were available through regular diplomatic channels. In matters of both national security and trade, therefore, Englishmen and Moroccans shared similar objectives that were mutually promoted by frequent diplomatic interaction and an absence of territorial conflict.
Staged in the early years of the century but not published until 163l, Fair Maid reiterates Famous History's view of Stukeley's role in international events. The later play counterposes Stukeley's treasonous, intemperate, and choleric character to Bridges's patriotism, equanimity, and valor. Bess functions as Stukeley's positive foil—her gender, youth, beauty, piety, constancy, and cross-dressed valor rehearsing those qualities possessed by chapbook heroines and replicating the virulently nationalist agenda of Edmund Spenser's Britomart who defeated the warlike and effeminizing Irish rebel Radigund in Book V of The Faerie Queene. Putting aside for now other telling details of the Stukeley-Bridges correspondence, a vital one is that Stukeley hails from the West Country and Bridges, of course, is similarly a West Country native. When we read the play in its geopolitical context, her western heritage points us toward the West Country explorers and to Grace O'Malley, pirate and, ultimately, patriot from the west of Ireland. Although the “west” identifies a discrete region in England, in Bridges's designation “Fair Maid of the West” the term serves to balance Elizabeth's “West” with Ahmad's “East” and gestures toward England's ambition for colonial expansion west, across Ireland and thence to the shores of the New World. Indeed, “West Country men” such as Drake, Grenville, Hawkins, Ralegh, and Gilbert were all implicated in Irish pacification before they turned their hands to Atlantic piracy or sponsorship of New World colonization.61 (It is well to bear in mind that Stukeley was also involved in a scheme to exploit Florida.) “West” is a linguistic cornerstone bearing the full weight of English-Moroccan diplomacy in the actualization of England's pacification of Ireland and its prospective colonization of North America.
New World settlement overcame the Elizabethan antipathy to institutional slavery in part by colonists' imitation of Spanish and Portuguese conquest but primarily, after the Restoration, by Charles II's chartering of the English slave trade. Jamestown was established just a few years after Elizabeth's death on the foundation of English-Moroccan amity that had been fostered during a prolonged period of Spanish aggression. But the geopolitical world was undergoing radical shifts driven by new monarchies, revised government policies, and mass migrations: English men and women traveled to the New World and killed or displaced Native Americans, Spanish Moriscos were deported to North Africa; Europeans carried ever more African slaves to the Caribbean. During the entire course of the seventeenth century, plays with African and Muslim themes continued to depict or analogize the turbulence characterizing the Mediterranean/ Atlantic region from the time of the Spanish reconquista.62 Just as the characterization of Spaniards in contemporaneous drama reflected and perhaps shaped English imperial history, so too the characterization of Moroccans reflected and shaped assumptions about England's relations with Morocco and with Africa in general. With its powerful king, long-term history of civil interaction, comprehensible laws, and enduring spirit of cooperation, Morocco inspired historically grounded characters for the English stage only slightly inferior to the self-congratulatory English. Indeed, in 1604 John Smith ranks Ahmad al-Mansur's Morocco high on an English workingman's scale of satisfaction:
so much [al-Mansur] delighted in the reformation of workmanship, hee allowed each of them ten shillings a day standing fee, linnen, woollen, silkes, and what they would for diet and apparell; and custome-free to transport, or import what they would.63
Had the colonial government of Jamestown offered so much, the English immigrants and Native Americans might have found reasons for cooperation.
The stage at the turn of the century served a utilitarian role in disseminating news about current events, and the plays central to this study, touching as they do on local and international affairs, supplemented the historical record and narratives of travelers. They constitute a brief dramatic historiography that reveals popular attitudes and opinions that helped chart the rise of England's empire, ideologically opposed to Spaniards and Catholicism yet tolerant of Moroccan Moors and their religious difference. In short, they establish the ideological and diplomatic context within which Jamestown became feasible. In the New World, in North Africa, or in Europe, the Spanish with their well-publicized array of vices and accessible, comprehensive history served as the preeminent foils for English practices and what the English preferred to consider their own domestic and colonial sobriety and moderation. To the English, infidels—whether Muslim, Moor, or Native American—were always envisioned, at least prospectively, as allied players in the geopolitical opposition to Spain and its Catholic network. Yet after Charles II acquired the Moroccan port of Tangier in 1662 and chartered the Atlantic slave trade, the theatrical representation of both Spaniards and Moroccans became ever more unhistorical and romanticized. It remains to be seen whether this change resulted from a proliferation of news periodicals, a dramatic trend premised on the availability of continental romances, or a new—but by no means improved—paradigm of England's global self-fashioning following upon its expropriation of vast tracts of North America and the institutionalization of chattel slavery.