Detail from the Burghley Map of Falmouth Haven.

      A glow of patriotism radiates from the manuscript. The castles appear jaunty and solid. Over the lower blockhouse of Pendennis rises a St George flag so large that it looks set to topple the little tower. From the castle itself flutters a Royal Standard of impossible size – peer closely and you can see the gilded symbols flashing like tiny jewels: six rampant passant lions, one rampant, and the curves of the Irish harp.

      By contrast, the ancient town of Penryn, with its outdated, pre-Reformation dominance, is shunted to the bottom of the map. The cross-river chain is shown, and below it the remains of Glasney College. Years earlier, before the Norman Conquest, Penryn had been one of Cornwall’s largest population centres, second only to the county town, Launceston. Here it is almost ignored, pressed to the margins, where four centuries of thumb-grasps and page-turnings have flaked the paint so that the town now looks to be in the midst of a snowstorm.

      Where Falmouth will emerge during the coming century there is just shale and shingle in the very slight recess of Smithwick Creek, and on the cliff above, open ground. Only one building is drawn, a low shed marked lym-kiln. The great port has its lowly origins here: on an empty beach, in the swampy ground above, and in the cob-walls of a small lime-kiln.

      Dominating the picture, dwarfing the ancient town of Penryn, is Arwenack Manor, the most opulent and expensive house in Cornwall. Placed between Pendennis Castle above and Penryn below, the house appears in style to be the child of both. With its battlements and towers, it has taken on the martial character of Pendennis. But in the courtyards, the mullioned windows and the long facade, the vast manor carries an ironic resemblance to Glasney College whose destruction allowed the Killigrews to create it. Aglow with Protestant triumphalism, surrounded by its neatly fenced demesne land, it fills the map with its worldly fortitude.

      Such is the precedence given to Arwenack that the whole image suggests a piece of propaganda for the Killigrew family. It is usually assumed that Burghley himself commissioned the map, yet although he bound other manuscript maps into Saxton’s Atlas, Falmouth is the only large-scale depiction of a harbour. Whether he asked for it or whether it was presented to him unsolicited is not clear.

      The Killigrew family and Lord Burghley were certainly known to each other. Burghley would have been aware of old John, Pendennis’s first governor, his sudden rise, his imprisonment, his pirate son Peter and all the nefarious sea-tales of the family. But he also knew more directly, from court, two of the sons who were rather better behaved. William Killigrew was an MP, who in his career represented Cornish constituencies in a total of seven Parliaments (no Cornish family of the time provided more MPs than the Killigrews). William was also Groom to Elizabeth I’s Bed Chamber. His brother Henry Killigrew was even closer to the Queen’s inner circle, by turns Teller of the Exchequer and Surveyor of the Armoury, and her chosen envoy on a number of vital missions to Scotland, France and the Netherlands. But the closest link was that Henry Killigrew and Lord Burghley were married to sisters, the famous daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke (a third was married to Sir Nicholas Bacon).

      An upbringing in the rowdy atmosphere of Arwenack, with its visiting ships, its Huguenot rovers and Dutch sea-beggars, had prepared Henry Killigrew for an adventurous political career. He spent Mary’s reign in exile and perfected his French and Italian. He was not a tall man and acquired a permanent limp from a wound picked up in the siege of Rouen in 1562. When he was released, and Rouen relieved, it seemed Elizabeth and England were in the ascendant. Henry Killigrew wrote to his wife’s brother-in-law, Lord Burghley (then William Cecil): ‘God prosper you as He has begun, and inspire her Majesty to build up the temple of Jerusalem.’

      Burghley has annotated each of his county maps with a list of its ‘justices’. There is a sense of him trying to order the kingdom, to catalogue it for better governance – or any governance. In Mortlake, the mystic John Dee was building a mythical Jerusalem for his queen, while Burghley, the great administrator, was assembling the more solid building-blocks for a civil state.

      But Lord Burghley and the Killigrews of Arwenack were also at odds. In their respective attitudes to the sea, each represents a distinct thread of English interests which, when wound together, stretched taut through the coming centuries. One was legitimate, using the sea for the collective good; the other was illegal, exploiting it for private gain. One produced the Royal Navy, the other spun off into piracy. Each developed seamanship and a certain arrogance at sea, contributing in its own way to the victories of Drake, Cochrane and Nelson.

      Burghley was among those who understood that the country’s future – indeed its survival – lay in naval strength. He took personal control of the political aspects of the Royal Navy, and spent the 1560s and 1570s building up capacity, commissioning surveys of shipping and mobilising. He had a great love of geography and his copy of Saxton’s Atlas also includes a map of the coast of Norway, Sweden and northern Russia. He was famous for his meticulous knowledge of the places of Europe. Yet he himself left British shores only once in his life, for a brief visit to the Low Countries.

      The rise in piracy, represented by the Cornish Killigews, angered him; fish were the rightful yield of the seas, not plunder. Those who lived by the coast should spread nets to feed the people, not sail off on prize-grabbing adventures. But since the Reformation, and the relaxation of fast days, demand for fish had shrunk: to eat meat on a Friday, to roll your jaws over bloody slabs of beef, became an affirmation of Protestant faith, and it left fishermen with a shrinking market. They stowed their nets and joined privateers. To try to induce them back, Burghley – still William Cecil at the time – introduced a government bill to make twice-weekly fish-eating compulsory. His measure was jeered in the House for its Popish implications, and dubbed ‘Cecil’s Fast’.

      The Killigrews on the other hand saw the sea as a source of personal gain. Arwenack became a hub for the illicit side of seaborne enterprise, for privateering, a practice which took off during the last decades of Tudor rule. Elizabethan ‘privateering’ was, strictly, distinct from the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century practice which spawned the term, but it offered the same dubious licence to attack foreign ships as redress for lost cargoes. In the sixteenth century, this licence was provided through a ‘letter of marque’. If a merchant or captain was robbed of his goods by a foreign power, he was given a chit which allowed him to snatch compensation in kind from any ships of that power. Often the letters themselves were exchanged for money, and often not held at all. In practice, privateering was little more than semi-sanctioned piracy.

      To Burghley, it made a mockery of the rule of law, and jeopardised relations with other nations, particularly Spain. But with hindsight, the spirit of privateering characterises the Elizabethan age – the ship as the vessel of the wildest hopes, the heady myth-making, the heroic sea voyages, the failure of the Spanish Armadas. Privateering also had one great practical benefit: it proved the nation’s greatest school for maritime skills.

      The countless and nameless figures who manned the privateers learned the advantages of the modern rig with its auxiliary sails. They learned to use the mesh of halyards and lifts and sheets. They learned how to charge the guns with volatile serpentine powder, and how to damp the recoil. And they learned something far more important, that despite the risks and discomforts, a successful foray into the Channel, or the taking of a Spanish prize, could bring greater reward than a lifetime of toil. The sea and quick wealth become part of a powerful association for coastal communities, brought together in the arts of seamanship.

      Life on board a privateer was brutal and anarchic, lacking either the hierarchical order of Spanish ships or the fierce discipline of the later Royal Navy. Privateers were mutual enterprises, operated on the same basis as fishing boats, with the crew receiving no wages but reaping a third of the takings. They would coerce the captain if they disagreed with him – ‘shite on thy commissions!’ – or simply mutiny. There were open fights. The ships were often shockingly overmanned and under-victualled. Scurvy and the flux laid whole companies low; there were instances of starvation. But when a prize was sighted, all disputes were forgotten. The men took to their stations, gaining the weather-gage, firing on the prize not to sink it but to disable it. With small arms – fowlers and murderers, muskets and calivers – the ship was boarded. If booty was not revealed