The Levelling Sea: The Story of a Cornish Haven in the Age of Sail. Philip Marsden
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market. The Killigrews had, in their own wayward manner, upheld principles – like Shakespeare’s ‘sanctimonious pirate’ in Measure for Measure who takes a wooden board to sea with the Ten Commandments written on it, or rather nine, as he has scrubbed out Thou shalt not steal.
John Killigrew remained in prison while officials picked at the bones of his Arwenack estates. He grew more and more concerned for the upkeep of his wife and children. In 1600 Queen Elizabeth ‘most graciously pyttieng the extremities whereunto the said John Killigrew hathe of late fallen’ allowed him home for three months.
So he went back once more to Arwenack. In forty years, through its high-ceilinged rooms and banqueting hall, had passed countless adventurers and riches. But the estate now lacked the land to support itself. On the headland to seaward of Arwenack, and visible from the curtilage, Pendennis Castle was, for the first time, not governed by a Killigrew. As it had once been the agent of their rise, so its neglect had marked their downfall. The new governor, Sir Nicholas Parker, was immune to the temptations of the sea. He was a soldier, veteran of campaigns in the Low Countries. As soon as John Killigrew was removed, he hastened to restore the castle. Falmouth was regarded as one of the country’s most vulnerable corners. ‘There are two places in these western parts,’ Sir Francis Godolphin wrote to Burghley, ‘where, if not fortified, the enemy may prevail; the harbours of Falmouth and Scilly.’ Elizabeth addressed Sir Nicholas Parker directly, suggesting in a letter that he was having to start from scratch: ‘We committed to you the charge of our fortifications intended to be built upon the haven of Falmouth.’
Parker took to his duties with zeal. He employed 400 men to dig ditches, curtaining the castle with earthworks and look-out posts. He applied for new guns to add to the one that remained in the castle. In examining the castle grounds, he spotted a more effective land boundary and annexed fifty acres of Arwenack land. Short of timber, he felled 1,700 of Killigrew’s trees.
John Killigrew complained, but he could do little. Parker was a proven hero. Richard Carew considered that Pendennis’s ‘greatest strength consisteth in Sir Nicholas Parker, the governor’. Tacitly Carew admonished the Killigrews’ years of local bullying, in contrast to Parker ‘who demeaning himself no less kindly and frankly towards his neighbours … than he did resolutely and valiantly against the enemy when he followed the wars’. His presence and leadership were exemplary. At Pendennis he had two companies of 100 men, as well as being colonel-general of all forces in Cornwall. He commanded, gushed Carew, ‘not only their bodies by his authority, but also their hearts by his love’.
John Killigrew died in prison in 1605. His heir – the fourth John Killigrew – inherited the house and little else. He had married a lively woman named Jane Fermor whose inheritance managed to give a little respite from his father’s debts. But according to all accounts, she caused him much misery. At Pendennis Castle, succession had a new heredity. When Sir Nicholas Parker died, his son became governor and added a further humiliation to the fallen Killigrews. It was this man, according to the Killigrew chronicle, who ‘first debauched’ Jane Killigrew.
With the death of Elizabeth I and the arrival of James I in England, travelling overland from Scotland in his great cavalcade, came a radical shift in official policy to the sea. Gone was support for those who pursued sail-driven adventure. The state would no longer tolerate mavericks like the West Country sea-barons for whom the Channel was a free-for-all, who made a grab for whatever ships passed within their reach. King James appeased the Spanish with an instant treaty, locked up Sir Walter Raleigh, banned the practice of privateering, and presided over a Navy that, though generously funded, rotted like some diseased shrub from the top down. The number of admirals, who rarely went near the water, soon exceeded that of serviceable ships, while crews went unpaid.
James had little understanding of the sea, finding that his attempts to bring order to it had exactly the opposite effect. Released from naval service, unable to sail on privateers, tens of thousands of seamen were now idle. Nothing ashore could match the returns of their life at sea, so they went back. The first years of James’s rule witnessed a rise in English piracy never seen before or since. By 1608 an estimated 500 English pirate ships were at large, ten times as many as in the time of Elizabeth. Brutalised by war, emboldened by their nautical skills, the bandit mariners – the finest pirates in Europe – infested the seas, spreading the spirit of lawlessness from the English Channel, out across the North Atlantic and down into the Mediterranean.
The seamen of the West Country were well represented in this great flowering of robber enterprise. In Plymouth, the mayor complained of the ‘great number of sailors, mariners and masterless men, that heretofore have been at sea in men of war [and their] intolerable outrages’. In 1605 the Jonas was seized off the Isle of Wight with £10,000 of lawns and cambrics. Over the coming months, the Jonas was sailed westward, stopping off to flog its cargo, a travelling bazaar of looted cloth. At Helford, numerous bales were taken ashore, carried to Penryn and sold openly in the market.
In Devon and Cornwall the pirates had nothing to fear from the authorities. Richard Hawkins, son of Sir John, and Hannibal Vyvyan – respectively vice-admirals of Devon and South Cornwall – themselves benefited from piracy. They sold pardons to the leaders and took generous bribes for allowing plundered goods to be sold. Tolerance of piracy spread beyond the West Country, along the coast and right up the hierarchy of the Navy, to the Lord High Admiral, the Earl of Nottingham.
If piracy and privateering were the principal blemishes in the emergence of England as a maritime power, naval corruption came a close second. In the final years of Elizabeth’s reign some ingenious scams appeared in the service. Finding no check, they multiplied. James’s regime of official profligacy encouraged naval leaders like Sir Robert Mansell (treasurer of the Navy) and Sir John Trevor (surveyor of the Navy) to help themselves to Crown supplies, and their example was imitated down through the ranks. Everything, from cordage and spars, canvas and crews, to ships themselves, was written in the books at vastly inflated quantities. As the actual fleet shrank, so the Navy’s ledgers recorded a phantom version of itself, growing larger with each passing month. When at last the Earl of Northampton forced a public inquiry – at which the full extent of corruption was revealed – the King did little more than wag a beringed finger at Mansell and Trevor. Likewise, when Hannibal Vyvyan was summoned from Cornwall, he too was let off. Holding pirates like Captain Jennings to ransom in the Helford river, allowing the release of Robert Duncomb at Falmouth, merited a summons, but no penalty.
Strangely, among all the complaints of wrongdoing in the early years of James’s reign, in the State Papers and Acts of the Privy Council and Star Chamber, even the extensive account of reformed pirate Sir Henry Mainwaring, the name of Killigrew is nowhere to be seen. The fourth John Killigrew, it turned out, was a stickler for the law. The picture of his own father dying bankrupt and alone in prison convinced this John that it was worth following the path of legality. He spent a great deal of time in litigation – riding up and down to London, attending courts first for his divorce from Jane, then lobbying for a scheme that he hoped would re-establish his family’s position.
On the northern boundary of what little land remained to Arwenack – just half a mile along the coast from the manor – lay Smithwick Creek. There above the low cliff, where a stream cut back into the soil and splashed to the shingle, stood the lime-kiln. A small inn had been built there, too, to provide for visiting crews – the single seed from which the port was about to grow.
According to the Killigrew family chronicle, the idea had been Walter Raleigh’s. Returning from the Caribbean in 1595, he put into Falmouth. His ships carried none of the journey’s hoped-for treasure, but he did bring tales of glittering cities on the Orinoco and the promise of future expeditions to discover them. In Falmouth, he sent his men to the single inn at Smithwick while he himself dined just along the shore with the Killigrews.
Raleigh was a mariner at heart and he had an instinctive attraction to Falmouth’s natural merits, its sheltering headlands and network of deep-water creeks, its position far out towards the Western Approaches. Now he spoke of Arwenack’s potential as a staging-post in the coming age. Old John Killigrew was in no position to pursue it – an outlaw, laden with a lifetime of debt and felony. But his son picked up on it. The chronicler, who wrote with scorn about his forebears, spoke