The Levelling Sea: The Story of a Cornish Haven in the Age of Sail. Philip Marsden

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      The Killigrew family.

      A year later, the Crown turned to deal with a perennial problem. To help purge the Channel of its growing number of bandits, a Commission for Piracy was established. In London, its receiver of fines was Sir John’s own brother, Henry Killigrew. Among the offenders was another brother, the notorious pirate Peter, forced to part with £25 to make amends for his felonies. In Cornwall, Sir John Killigrew himself – no stranger to the business of piracy – was appointed the Commission’s head.

      On paper, Sir John Killigrew was now one of the most powerful men in the West Country, but his name is not among the far-sighted figures of the Elizabethan age. Sir John was a consummate, dyed-in-the-wool rogue. To his father’s bullying, he added profligacy and a taste for southern wines. He established a family trait that would push him further and further from the track of the law – extravagance. Among those he owed money to was the convict Anthony Bourne, holed up in his own Pendennis Castle. When Bourne escaped, Cornwall’s vice-admiral accused Killigrew of complicity. Sir John challenged him to fight; the two men clashed swords at Truro but without resolution. Arbitration found in the vice-admiral’s favour, but Killigrew still refused to pay the £100 fine.

      The limitations of Tudor sources, and the reluctance of lawless privateers to commit their adventures to paper, have left little but glimpses of the second John Killigrew and his affairs. (One contemporary described him ‘as proud as Ammon, as covetous as Ahab and as cruel as Nero’.) But from the proceedings of the Privy Council come details of a particular incident.

      It was the winter of 1582. A Spanish ship, the Marie, some 140 tons burden, had been struggling down the Channel. Days of gales had left her rigging badly damaged. Rather than tack south into the weather, towards her home port of San Sebastian, the Marie did what any stricken ship would have done: sought shelter in Falmouth. She bore away to the north, loosening sheets for St Anthony’s Head, past Pendennis Castle and Black Rock, and into the flat waters of the Penryn river. There her master commissioned repairs.

      On shore, the people of Penryn watched the Marie. They watched the pinnaces come and go and in the evening they watched her crew at the inn of Ambrose Cox. The days passed. The gales fell away and the swells flattened; the waters of the Carrick Roads became glassy. Now the Marie could not leave for want of wind and so she sat there still, her masts restepped, her new sails bent, while her anchor chain dropped vertically into the flat winter water.

      At Arwenack, Sir John Killigrew, too, had been watching the Marie. Together with his wife and a number of his men, he put together a plan. Having set it in motion, Sir John – Cornwall’s Crown Commissioner for Piracy – saddled his horse and rode far away from any taint of involvement. At nine in the evening, a couple of Killigrew’s men appeared at Cox’s inn and told the Spaniards: there is illness on the Marie, you must board at once. Bess Moore agreed to tell anyone who might ask that two more of Killigrew’s servants, Kendall and Hawkins, were with her that evening and tarried until midnight while one had his shirt dried.

      In fact they and the others hurried out to Arwenack, launched Killigrew’s pinnace, and rowed across the moonlit water to the Marie. Among the Marie’s crew were two Flemings who had secretly agreed to hide the ship’s weapons. The boarding party had little difficulty in tying up the Spaniards. Inspection of the holds, though, proved a disappointment – all they found was holland cloth and some nice leather chairs. They would have to rely on the ship itself for a return; they set sail for Ireland and, as the Privy Council was later told, ‘most of the men cast overboarde’.

      When a London merchant, with a venture of his own aboard the Marie, called for an investigation, the Commissioner for Piracy in Cornwall strangely failed to muster any evidence. But in this case the Privy Council made one or two of their own inquiries and managed to breach the local cordon of alliance and alibi. Soon Killigrew himself was being sought as a suspect. He fled Arwenack. He travelled to London ‘where he secretlie lurked in some place’. When he was discovered, he was held at Greenwich, bound before the Earl of Bedford for sureties of £1,000.

      The case against Sir John Killigrew for the ransacking of the Marie was still outstanding when he died a year or so later, in 1584. In seventeen years as master of Arwenack, Sir John had managed to outdo his father in extravagance, the wanton exploitation of official appointments, and impunity. Now with Europe slipping into war, the Channel becoming ever more dangerous, the next John Killigrew sailed back to Cornwall, leaving behind the court of Elizabeth where he had been living under the wing of his uncle Henry. He promised not merely to ‘make large satisfaction for his father’s faults’, but to correct the wrongs of all his other freebooting uncles. He pledged to honour Her Majesty by doing everything in his power to protect, during these dark days, the strategic part of her realm that was his charge. He took over Arwenack Manor and the governorship of Pendennis Castle, and in due course, was elevated to the position of vice-admiral of Cornwall.

      But the third John Killigrew, according to a later charge-sheet, ‘kept not within the compass of any law, as his father now and then, from fear of punishment, did’. To try to stem his growing debts, he sold off land, parts of Penryn and farms in the hundreds of Penwith and Kerrier. He managed, though, to cling to his house at Arwenack and also the wooded-off creeks of the Helford river where the plunder-mart provided income. Looted ships slipped with ease in and out of the river, swelling his shoreside cellars with cloth and metal and wines. He had his supporters in the surrounding area, those with little regard for the English state, who decorated their houses and their person with the pickings of pirated cargoes. The clamour of creditors and writs did not stop Killigrew filling the banqueting hall at Arwenack with a host of high-living merchants and privateers. He lived a life of risk and sudden reward, of brazen ship-ventures, and in the interludes between them recreated their spirit at his own gaming table. Of all the Killigrews, the third John Killigrew of Arwenack was by far the most dissolute.

      The Privy Council became used to petitions for his debts. They summoned him frequently from Cornwall, but he never appeared. In 1588 they received a complaint from a Danish merchant: Killigrew had ransacked his ship. The Council was furious, not least to learn that he was still at large: ‘for as much as divers messingers have been sent for the said Killegrew … he goeth up and down the countrey accompanied with divers and lewde and disordered persons for his gard, armed with unlawfull weapons’.

      All available force should be used, they urged, to apprehend him, even if he was in the keep of Pendennis Castle. Only the following year, still uncaptured, was СКАЧАТЬ