The Culture of Piracy, 1580–1630

English Literature and Seaborne Crime

Claire Jowitt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351891851
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria medieval y moderna temprana

Listening to what she terms 'unruly pirate voices' in early modern English literature, in this study Claire Jowitt offers an original and compelling analysis of the cultural meanings of 'piracy'. By examining the often marginal figure of the pirate (and also the sometimes hard-to-distinguish privateer) Jowitt shows how flexibly these figures served to comment on English nationalism, international relations, and contemporary politics. She considers the ways in which piracy can, sometimes in surprising and resourceful ways, overlap and connect with, rather than simply challenge, some of the foundations underpinning Renaissance orthodoxies-absolutism, patriarchy, hierarchy of birth, and the superiority of Europeans and the Christian religion over other peoples and belief systems. Jowitt's discussion ranges over a variety of generic forms including public drama, broadsheets and ballads, prose romance, travel writing, and poetry from the fifty-year period stretching across the reigns of three English monarchs: Elizabeth Tudor, and James and Charles Stuart. Among the early modern writers whose works are analyzed are Heywood, Hakluyt, Shakespeare, Sidney, and Wroth; and among the multifaceted historical figures discussed are Francis Drake, John Ward, Henry Mainwaring, Purser and Clinton. What she calls the 'semantics of piracy' introduces a rich symbolic vein in which these figures, operating across different cultural registers and appealing to audiences in multiple ways, represent and reflect many changing discourses, political and artistic, in early modern England. The first book-length study to look at the cultural impact of Renaissance piracy, The Culture of Piracy, 1580-1630 underlines how the figure of the Renaissance pirate was not only sensational, but also culturally significant. Despite its transgressive nature, piracy also comes to be seen as one of the key mechanisms which served to connect peoples and regions during this period.

Chapter 1
Subversive Pirates? Representations of Purser and Clinton, 1583–1639

This chapter focuses on two notorious Elizabethan pirates, Purser and Clinton, who were hung at Wapping in 1583, and explores some of the complexities involved in fictionalizing pirate lives and behaviour. To take advantage of the popular interest in their case three broadsheet accounts of their exploits were published within weeks of the hangings, and then they seemed quickly forgotten as other more topical stories replaced them. However Purser and Clinton enjoyed an impressive textual afterlife. Over 20 years after their trial and executions, circa 1607, the playwrights Thomas Heywood and William Rowley included an ambiguously sympathetic representation of the pirates in their tragi-comedy Fortune by Land and Sea, and 30 years after that, in 1639, there appeared an anonymous two-part pamphlet about the case, A True Relation of the Lives and Deaths of the two most Famous English Pyrats, Purser, and Clinton.¹ This first chapter of The Culture of Piracy compares the representations of these two pirates published over this 50-year period across three different genres. The case of Purser and Clinton provides an opportunity to focus on the rhetorical capitol made from ‘piracy’ by a variety of writers through emphasising particular characteristics in their accounts of the pirates’ lives and deaths. There are both alterations and repeated features in the depictions discussed here, which engage with the key aspects of the ‘culture of piracy’ in the Renaissance: the way shifting political circumstances shaped attitudes to the criminality of piracy; English colonial expansion; and European competition for trade and empire. Each representation of Purser and Clinton was produced during the reign of a different monarch, with contrasting policies towards piracy and what constituted seaborne crime. As a result, a comparison between the depictions of their activities produced over the three reigns provides insight into how ‘piracy’ is culturally produced and disseminated.

Further, central issues to be explored in this chapter include the extent to which each of these representations is sympathetic to the pirates, and in what ways they seek to critique contemporary institutions of statecraft. In other words, I will suggest that apparently sanctioned representations of what should be seen as criminal piracy expose the inadequacies or failures of the state or monarch condemning the pirate. But exactly how subversive are such representations? Should they be seen to challenge some of the foundations upon which Renaissance orthodoxies were built – religious and political absolutism, the authority of men over women, aristocracy of birth, the superiority of Europeans and the Christian religion over other peoples and belief systems and the concomitant European justification, indeed duty, to evangelize and colonize? Or, alternatively, do depictions of anti-establishment pirates in these texts in fact merely confirm what they seek to challenge, as Stephen Greenblatt suggested more generally in his essay ‘Invisible Bullets’ in relation to Renaissance authority and its subversion?² In seeking to answer these questions I will be situating my analysis both against Greenblatt’s discussion, as well as in relation to recent work on the politics of discipline in early modern England, and debates concerning the emergence of English nationalism, colonialism and the drive for overseas trade and empire.

Purser and Clinton – real names Thomas Walton (alias Purser) and Clinton Atkinson (alias Clinton or Smith) – were not hung without reason in 1583. Evidence of the vigour of their piratical careers – jointly and severally, against English and other shipping – litters the Calendar of State Papers Domestic and Ireland – most sensationally in connection with an escape from Exeter gaol in 1580, as well as for numerous piracies in the years 1580–1583.³ Studland Bay in Dorset was a particular resort of pirates at this time, providing a sheltered aspect, plentiful hostelries, and corrupt local officials, and Purser and Clinton were clearly well-established members of this pirate community.⁴ In his confession of 1583 Clinton described the corruption of the local Admiralty officials, relating how ‘to have their goodwill and favour in the Islande’ he gave half his revenue of 60l. to the deputies Hawley, Ayres and Uvedale.⁵ As a result, pirates were even able to enjoy furloughs on shore; Clinton spent several days with his wife at an Erith hostelry.⁶ The piracies Clinton committed were particularly violent, even for the time. Indeed, he attracted the notice of James VI of Scotland who in a personal letter to Queen Elizabeth complained of the ‘cruel and strange usage’ of the Grace of God of Dundee, off Dungeness about July 1582, by ‘Captain Clintoun of London, Captain Hascock of Harwich, and Captain Edmerston of Poole, Englishmen’.⁷ Having seized the ship and lading, and ‘hurt and wounded a great part of the equippage’, Clinton set the crew naked on the shore and tortured them so severely to reveal the location of the money which he believed they had been ‘keeping for some better hap’ that some lost their thumbs and fingers and others their sight and hearing.⁸

The vigorous nature of piratical activity and the strength of the community of pirates in Studland resulted in an attempt by the Admiralty Judge Dr Lewes to deal with the situation in 1582 and 1583. In the Marshalsea prison he interviewed over 100 prisoners including suspected receivers and victuallers, and even took statements from the Admiralty officials from Corfe. Six months later an expedition to apprehend the Studland pirates was mounted, and Purser and Clinton were finally caught in June 1583 by William Barrowes (or Aboroughe), clerk of the navy, and brought in and interrogated with 38 others by the Admiralty deputy judges Dr Aubrey and Dr Caesar on 6–8 August 1583. ‘Clinton, Purser, Beavyn, and Baugh’, refusing to disclose the names of their receivers and abettors, were sent to the Tower, ‘there bye torture of the Racke to force them to disclose the same’.⁹ Only Clinton Atkinson has left signatures from after his torture, though whether this is evidence of the leniency of his treatment compared with the severity of the torture inflicted on the other three, or administrative co-incidence, is a moot point. Interestingly, records of the Privy Council show that four days prior to the pirates’ trial ten were recommended for execution ‘for example’.¹⁰

The Politics of Pirate Scaffolds

In Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault suggestively argued, using the dramatic metaphor ‘the spectacle of the scaffold’, that early modern French systems of punishment inscribed state power upon the body of the criminal:

[T]orture forms part of a ritual. It is an element in the liturgy of punishment and meets two demands. It must mark the victim … And, from the point of view of the law that imposes it, public torture and execution must be spectacular, it must be seen by all almost as its triumph.¹¹

According to this line of thinking, the public execution at Wapping of Purser and Clinton should be seen as the articulation of a power relation representing the ‘triumph’ of the state, and indeed the monarch, upon the pirates’ bodies. In a scaffold drama ‘the all-powerful sovereign … displays his strength’ as punishment is inflicted upon ‘the subject who has dared to violate the law’.¹² However, for Foucault, executions should not always be seen as a total victory for state or monarchic authority:

[p]reventing an execution that was regarded as unjust, snatching a condemned man from the hands of the executioner, obtaining his pardon by force, possibly pursuing and assaulting the executioners … all this formed part of the popular practices that invested, traversed and often overturned the ritual of the public execution.¹³

Such disturbances flouted contemporary institutions of power, offering a carnivalesque moment of inversion where the crowd might reject established authority and take the law into their own hands.

In the case of Purser and Clinton there was no such straightforward rejection of monarchic authority, no obviously anti-establishment incident when the crowd stampeded the scaffold in order to liberate the pirates and punish the executioners. Purser and Clinton were executed with seven other condemned pirates on the stretch of shoreline between high and low tide marks at Wapping on 30 August 1583 – the eighth, William Arnewood, a gentleman of some position, was reprieved (not rescued through the interference of the crowd).¹⁴ However, as both Foucault and J.A. Sharpe make clear, there can be other, less direct, signs of challenge to state authority in the ways that rites of execution are carried out and reported.¹⁵ The rites that inscribe sovereign authority might also generate and express resistance to that authority since, though executions might be intended to vindicate the justice and power of the state, they might also serve to glorify the criminal. In the pages that follow I explore whether, and in what ways, representations of early modern pirate executions should be seen as subversively charged.¹⁶ Unlike other criminals, who were gibbeted at Tyburn, pirates were always hung at Wapping. As the Elizabethan satirist and verse pamphleteer Samuel Rowlands wrote: ‘For though Pyrates exempted be / From fatall Tyburne’s withere’d tree, / They have an Harbour to arrive / Call’d Wapping’.¹⁷ The reason for giving pirates a gallows to themselves on the mudflats at Wapping was the fact that the strip of land between high- and low-water marks was under the jurisdiction of the Lord High Admiral not of the usual criminal courts.¹⁸ There was also a fairly elaborate set of customs surrounding pirates’ executions. Those convicted of piracy were brought from the Marshalsea in Southwark via London Bridge and the Tower of London to Execution Dock in a cart with a chaplain. The procession was led on horseback by the Admiralty Marshal or his deputy carrying a silver oar which represented the authority of the Admiralty over crimes committed at sea. In his Survey of London (1598), John Stow describes the Execution Dock at Wapping as ‘the usuall place of execution for hanging of Pirats & sea Rovers’, and observes how, after hanging, the bodies were chained to a stake ‘at the low water marke, there to remaine, till three tides had overflowed them’.¹⁹ Clearly there was a moralizing element in the after death treatment of a pirate corpse. Bodies were smeared with pitch (normally used as a preservative for ships) and hung on gibbets on the Isle of Dogs, Bugsby’s Reach, or Graves Point, and left to rot slowly in order to warn sailors on incoming and outgoing ships of the price of piracy.

According to the 1605 edition of Stow’s The Annales of England, Purser and Clinton’s execution was a flamboyant affair.²⁰ As Purser went to the gallows he ‘rent his venetian breeches of crimosin taffeta, and distributed the same to such his old acquaintance as stood about...