The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - PREVIEW： Epochs #233

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome back to Epochs. If you remember last time I'd finally finished,

00:00:24.880 finally finished the story all about Magellan. Now I thought I'd do a one-off palette cleanser

00:00:29.920 before I change entirely to a completely different epoch in history, but I thought where I'd spoken

00:00:35.920 quite a lot about the Spanish and the Portuguese sailors and explorers and adventurers, I thought

00:00:42.400 well it's only really right that I speak about an English one. So today I'm going to try and make

00:00:47.180 it a one-off episode, so it will be a bit of an overview, a one-off episode all about Sir Walter

00:00:53.540 Riley. So you know just to give the English perspective on these things a little bit.

00:00:59.540 So okay let's talk about that, I couldn't just leave you with letting people think that the

00:01:03.620 Spanish and Portuguese were the only ones that did daring adventures on the high seas in the late

00:01:07.700 middle ages in the 16th century. There was many, there was Frenchmen and Englishmen and Dutchmen

00:01:14.900 that did all that sort of thing, but obviously being an Englishman I want to keep up the end

00:01:19.540 and talk a bit about Sir Walter Riley. So one of the first things to say is it's a bit later than

00:01:25.460 Magellan. Okay so Magellan's, if you remember, the Magellan Voyage was in the 1520s and the events of

00:01:31.860 Sir Walter Riley's life was much later in the 16th century, like in the 1570s, 80s, 90s and even into

00:01:38.660 the very beginning of the 17th century, the 1600s. So it's a bit later. So before I actually dive in and

00:01:45.940 talk all about just the life and career of Riley himself, I need to give you just a little bit of

00:01:52.020 an overview of what's happened since the age of Magellan. And as I say I'm going to try and pack

00:01:56.980 all this into one episode, so today it will be you know something of an overview rather than a sort of

00:02:02.980 super deep dive as the Magellan thing had done. I can't do that every time, in fact it probably wouldn't

00:02:07.620 be advisable. So for this one a lot had happened in the next sort of 50 years after Magellan. Portugal

00:02:15.060 and Spain had both gone on, as well as the little bit of the Dutch and a little bit of the French and

00:02:20.340 a little bit of the English, but mainly the Portuguese and the Spanish or Castilians had gone on to sort of

00:02:27.540 consolidate their hold on all sorts of places around the world, but particularly the Spanish. So by the time

00:02:36.820 of Drake, that's Sir Francis Drake, which is his life overlaps Sir Walter Riley, but it's a little

00:02:42.100 bit older, a little bit older. By the time of Drake and Sir Walter Riley, Spain had really become,

00:02:49.620 and some argue about exactly to what extent this is true, but had really become the most powerful

00:02:53.780 country in the world. You know, there's some caveats to that. Some would say France still

00:02:58.660 was the strongest land power in Europe. But in terms of commerce, in terms of sort of global reach,

00:03:04.900 in a few different ways, in terms of navy, is kind of the Spanish, sort of the United States of the

00:03:13.220 mid and late 16th century. They're the most powerful country in the world, and certainly

00:03:18.020 on the rise as well, it seems like. It looks like they're only going to get more powerful, if anything.

00:03:23.700 So that Magellan thing, well, first of all, Christopher Columbus and the Magellan thing,

00:03:28.260 really does set Spain up to sort of start eclipsing Portugal and everyone else. They're getting lots

00:03:35.940 and lots of treasure, largely silver, more silver than gold, but also gold, but all sorts of treasure

00:03:41.860 and other commodities from the New World, from the Americas, both sort of what is modern day Florida

00:03:50.100 and in the Caribbean, which today is the Caribbean, Mesoamerica, you know, the central bit of America,

00:03:57.620 all of, you know, places like Mexico and Honduras and that sort of thing, and South America, places,

00:04:04.260 Brazil, what is modern day Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, all that sort of thing.

00:04:07.620 So, and they've had basically a monopoly on it. If you remember, I talked about that treaty that the

00:04:14.660 Pope had struck. This is even before Magellan, between the Spanish and the Portuguese, dividing

00:04:20.180 the world up between them. And so the Spanish had just made great gains on all of that. They were

00:04:26.900 becoming, or had already become, extremely rich and powerful. Incidentally, slight side note for any

00:04:34.980 Fedora tippers out there. The internal economy of Spain wasn't that good. And a lot of this gold

00:04:41.540 and silver actually ended up as tribute, finding its way to Rome and the Popes. But still, at a

00:04:47.300 certain point in time, particularly in the 16th and 17th century, so much silver and gold was flowing

00:04:54.900 back to Spain from the New World, various places in the New World, that Spain could afford, among other

00:05:00.740 things, a big navy. And so, you know, keep consolidating their position, again, all around

00:05:06.580 the world. That's one of the things, isn't it? It's a classic thing. Money breeds money. The more

00:05:10.420 money you've got, the more you can spend on accruing new money, more money. It's often the way it is,

00:05:17.140 you know. It's terrible when it's the other way around, isn't it? You haven't got any money,

00:05:21.300 and you're broke, but you needed a bit of money to get off the ground, and you haven't got any,

00:05:26.100 so you're stuck. Well, the other way is true. Just keep investing your fortunes in new,

00:05:32.660 new ventures to make more. It's not fair, is it? But that's the way the world goes around. Okay,

00:05:38.020 anyway. So Spain, everyone was jealous of Spain, right? Everyone else, well, not everyone,

00:05:42.820 but, you know, in Europe, in Western Europe, you know. Everyone else sees Spain and thinks,

00:05:48.180 that's not fair. We want a slice of that action, right? It's not fair. It's as simple as that.

00:05:53.220 It's not fair. And, I mean, England is one of those. We're not Britain yet. It is still England.

00:05:59.780 England sees this. France, the low countries. Holland, basically. Various, various countries.

00:06:08.260 Some of the Italian republics, they all see this, and they're like, we want a bit of that action.

00:06:14.420 But according to the Pope, anyway, you're not allowed to. According to Rome and the Pope,

00:06:20.100 the Atlantic, and certainly all the New World, or the West Coast, or the East Coast of the New World,

00:06:26.820 is all Spanish. So countries like France or England are not allowed, as far as the Pope is concerned,

00:06:33.700 to just go across and start taking land, and making colonies, and exploring, and all that sort of

00:06:40.340 thing. Well, there's some countries, Protestant countries, that don't give a fig what the Pope

00:06:46.980 says in Rome. Don't give a fig about what the King of Castile, or Spain, wants, or says. We're just going

00:06:54.260 to do it. So, cut back to England. We had Henry VIII, right, through the 16th century. The middle part,

00:07:02.820 and some of the latter parts of the 16th century, and anyone who knows anything about Henry VIII,

00:07:07.620 and I will get to him in crazy detail at some point in epochs. He famously broke with Rome,

00:07:13.860 and although during his lifetime, his exact relationship with Rome, and with Protestantism,

00:07:20.260 and his interest in Lutherism, and all that sort of thing, was actually quite ambiguous. It wasn't

00:07:28.260 completely clear. It wasn't like Henry VIII, on one particular day, decided he's not going to be

00:07:34.580 Catholic anymore. He's just a Protestant, a quote-unquote Protestant now, and that's it going

00:07:40.180 forward. It wasn't like that. Henry VIII kept the whole thing deliberately muddy and unclear. He'd

00:07:46.020 certainly sort of broken with Rome to a degree, but he sort of vacillated over the years, over

00:07:51.220 years of this. He sort of vacillated back and forth, saying he's some sort of repentant Catholic,

00:07:57.460 and he really is a Catholic in all but name. And then other days, you know, weeks later or months

00:08:03.140 later, he will say super hardline Protestant things and rail against the Pope and Rome. He kept doing

00:08:08.980 that for years. Okay, so it wasn't clear. Okay, so then after him, his son Edward, who didn't reign for all

00:08:14.900 that long and was quite young and died young, he was super hardline Protestant, just absolutely

00:08:21.060 straight up and down hardline Protestant, because the people that had surrounded him, the people that

00:08:25.060 had raised him, and then the people that surrounded him once he was king, they were all hardline

00:08:30.020 Protestants, and particularly the Archbishop of Canterbury and things. And it was in their interest

00:08:35.380 to make sure that England became fully, you know, fully Protestant and stayed that way. So at that point,

00:08:42.740 England's now Protestant. And then when Edward dies of natural causes, his older sister, Mary,

00:08:48.900 takes over, bloody Mary, and she's married to the King of Spain, and she's hardcore Catholic.

00:08:54.900 So she takes the country back to full-blown, at least on paper, full-blown Catholicism. Okay,

00:09:00.980 then she doesn't rule for all that long. She then dies of natural causes. And then her little sister

00:09:07.060 takes over Elizabeth, good Queen Bess. And we get the Elizabethan age. Elizabeth became queen when she

00:09:14.580 was quite young. What was she? 17? 16, 17 or 18? She was young. She was a girl, really, and she became

00:09:21.940 queen. And she didn't die until she was like 70, 69 or 70. So she's queen for, you know, 50 years plus.

00:09:30.980 So we've got a whole age there. The Elizabethan age. Lots of historians like to think of it as,

00:09:35.860 or say it is, a golden age that we sort of, in some senses, come out of the darkness of the medieval

00:09:42.500 period and come into sort of what might be, you might think of as the English Renaissance or something,

00:09:48.740 or the early modern period or something like that. It is very, very easy, even though this isn't good

00:09:54.740 history, really. I mean, serious, serious good academic history. It isn't good to say this,

00:10:00.180 but it does feel like a golden age, but there's no such thing really as a golden age.

00:10:05.300 It's just a term people say. For a lot of people, a lot of people, it would have been just as bloody

00:10:12.580 and short and nasty as ages before and after it. But nonetheless, you look back on the Elizabethan

00:10:18.900 age, Shakespeare and all sorts of things, and it seems like a golden age. Okay. So this is the time

00:10:24.020 in which Sir Walter Riley lived and Drake. And Elizabeth is a Protestant. Okay. And then,

00:10:30.100 so after Elizabeth, we'd never go back to Catholicism with one, perhaps you might argue,

00:10:35.620 one tiny blip, James II, but that's a different story. Basically, the low resolution overview is

00:10:42.180 that once Elizabeth becomes queen after Mary, bloody Mary, England becomes Protestant and is Protestant

00:10:49.460 forever more until this day. Okay. So you can see that from the age of Henry VIII through to

00:10:56.420 Elizabeth, England has kind of vacillated, well, definitely has vacillated between being Catholic

00:11:01.460 and Protestant. And all through this time and after, there are big wars of religion in Europe,

00:11:07.380 Protestants and Catholics all over Europe, well, having wars, butchering each other, all sorts of

00:11:13.220 frightfulness. And we manage, the English, manage to stay out of that largely. Good Queen Bess, old Lizzie,

00:11:20.100 thing Lizzie, manages to keep us out of this. Her position on it all is that you can't really

00:11:27.540 be a Catholic priest. Like if we catch you being a Catholic priest, you're in trouble. You might well

00:11:33.140 get, you certainly get arrested and you may well be executed. So you can't be preaching Catholicism. But

00:11:40.580 if you're, if you're a Catholic inside your own heart and mind, that's okay. Like she's not going

00:11:47.460 to send out witch finder generals to interrogate people to find out if they're secretly Catholic

00:11:53.540 and then burn you at the stake. It's not that. Okay. So again, historians argue over exactly to what

00:11:59.060 degree there was a police state in the Elizabethan age about Catholicism. But if there was sort of,

00:12:05.620 you know, Spanish, i.e. Catholic, spies and agent provocateurs in England, that would be a problem.

00:12:11.300 They would be arrested and executed and all that sort of thing. And sometimes they'd even turn,

00:12:16.500 the authorities would even turn a blind eye. If he was extremely rich and powerful, like a duke or

00:12:20.580 something, and you had your own castle, you had a basically a chapel, which a lot of them did,

00:12:27.300 most of them did. And you wanted to completely privately still have what is to all intents and

00:12:32.660 purposes of Catholic mass. And you just kept it quiet. You kept it on the down low and you didn't,

00:12:37.140 you didn't sort of make a big song and dance out of it. You just did it privately and you kept it

00:12:41.940 inside your own heart and mind. That would be okay, usually. Okay. So in other words, compared to the

00:12:47.300 continent, what was going on, on the continent, that's quite relaxed. Elizabeth would say things like,

00:12:52.420 um, you know, it's not the place of the, of the prince, i.e. her, or a king. It's not the place of a prince

00:13:00.340 to sort of legislate what's in someone's heart, heart or mind. Anyway, despite all of that, what was

00:13:06.020 saying all of that, and some historians would argue with what I just said there, say, no, no, it's much more

00:13:10.260 repressive than that. Anyway, anyway. Okay. Haven't got time to go into all that in massive detail. Maybe another time.

00:13:14.740 Um, formally, legally, Britain is the Anglican Church, the Church of England, uh, Protestantism.

00:13:21.140 That is the formal religion. Okay. So now on the sort of the grand, um, scene, as I said, Spain is the

00:13:29.380 main superpower. Perhaps you might say the only hyper power at this point. And England is a mixture of

00:13:36.100 jealous and scared, right? For quite a while, there's been this sort of, uh, this three-way power struggle

00:13:42.660 between England, France, and Spain, certainly in terms of power, the power dynamic in Europe.

00:13:49.700 This is not necessarily on the high seas and in the new world or anything. But so there's this three-way,

00:13:55.380 for a few generations, a three-way thing between England, France, and Spain. And you sort of,

00:14:01.060 each of those three parties sort of trying to balance their power against each other and kind of

00:14:07.140 constantly making alliances and breaking alliances and realizing when one of them becomes

00:14:12.500 too overly powerful, you'll sort of gang up against them and, and so on and so on and so on endlessly.

00:14:18.820 Well, at this particular stage, it's sort of Spain has got the upper hand. So France is obviously wary

00:14:24.500 and England is wary. And, um, I mean, England, some, some historians like to say, especially in recent

00:14:31.540 years, it's a revisionist, it's a modish thing for court historians, sort of boomer historians who hate

00:14:37.940 themselves and hate England, say that England was just a backwater, just a nothing sort of country

00:14:43.300 in, you know, the age of Elizabeth and Henry VIII and things. And, you know, it wasn't until the age of

00:14:49.940 true empire that Britain became a big player. And before that, we were backward. France and Spain were

00:14:56.180 the big players and England was sort of nothing. Well, that's just not true. I mean, if you go back to,

00:15:01.220 you can go back to sort of the age of Henry II or something, we can go back a long way. England's

00:15:06.340 always been one of the big players or among the big players in Europe, certainly Northwest Europe

00:15:11.700 for, for a long, long time. So at this point in the 16th century, you know, we're up there. Spain

00:15:16.100 is definitely the top dog. I'm not saying they're not. Spain's definitely, definitely sort of got the

00:15:20.580 upper hand at this point, but England's sort of in the running. They're not, you know, it's not a tiny

00:15:25.780 little, basically a tiny little country like Denmark, say. Not that Denmark's that tiny, but,

00:15:30.820 you know, England has got pretensions to be, and could potentially be, one of the big players.

00:15:37.380 And so they see, you know, everyone sees, it's obvious, it's no secret, that the thing that is

00:15:43.060 sort of feeding Spain is the new world. You know, Columbus has sailed the ocean blue in 1492.

00:15:51.780 I'd say 1492. So already by the age of Elizabeth, Elizabeth comes to the throne in 1558. Already by

00:15:58.900 that point, it's been, well, 60, knocking 70 years since Columbus. So everyone knows of the new world,

00:16:06.900 right? They know that there's all these islands in the Caribbean, and then they know that there's these

00:16:12.980 two massive continent-sized land masses, one to the north and one to the south of that, and that they're,

00:16:19.940 they represent and, well, they are, you know, a source of endless riches and resource and power

00:16:27.060 and influence. Giant, giant land masses. So the idea that Spain has just got a complete monopoly on

00:16:34.340 all of that, that's just, that's not going to fly. Now, a lot of countries in Europe, when the Pope says,

00:16:40.820 no, it's a no, right? If there's a papal bull or a papal decree or a treaty that's been ratified by

00:16:47.780 Rome and the Pope that says, you're just not allowed to go to the new world, that's Spain's

00:16:52.980 exclusively. A lot of countries will say, oh, okay, fair enough. You know, we don't want to get

00:16:57.380 excommunicated. We're not going to, you know, it is what it is. The Pope has said so. The King of Spain

00:17:02.980 has said so. We can't stand up to either of those. So, okay. But other countries, if you're a Protestant

00:17:09.460 country, particularly, will say, no, F that. F all of that. We're going to do what we want. Who's

00:17:15.940 going to stop us? What, the King of Spain? Yeah, try it then. Try it. Who's going to stop us? The Pope?

00:17:20.420 Yeah, well, no, don't care. I don't care. We don't, we don't care what the Pope says. You're like a false,

00:17:25.860 you're a false thing. We don't recognise Popes. Well, and so that is England of the 1560s and 70s

00:17:34.820 and 80s and 90s. We're in exactly that position. We don't care what the Pope said. So that's just

00:17:39.940 off the table. That treaty that the Spanish and the Portuguese signed, don't care about that.

00:17:44.420 They're our enemies. So why would we care about that? And then being worried or scared about the

00:17:50.180 king of Spain and his ships, his navy, his armada, well, well, we'll have to brave that.

00:17:56.820 We'll have to run that risk because there's too much at stake. There's just too much at stake.

00:18:02.180 There's two things. One, if we just allow Spain to endlessly, you know, take money and wealth and

00:18:08.500 resources from the new world back to Spain, they'll, they'll completely dominate. They really will become

00:18:13.780 a completely unassailable hyperpower. The fear is forever that they'll just, they'll just utterly,

00:18:20.340 utterly dominate. So one, if we can disrupt that in any way, and then secondly, if we can actually

00:18:25.300 take things for ourselves. So there's a double whammy, a double, a double thing going on there.

00:18:31.300 Simply just disrupt Spain and, and start taking stuff for ourselves. So that's what Elizabeth decides

00:18:38.340 to do. I mean, things like that had already started even before Elizabeth became queen.

00:18:42.740 Now, Elizabeth herself wasn't massively warlike in any way. She was, um, again, historians will argue

00:18:50.020 about this a bit, but she was actually quite vacillating. She was, okay, it's, it's funny at

00:18:56.020 different times in her life and at different, when you catch her in a different mood, sometimes she's

00:19:01.060 quite bellicose and aggressive, but often she's not. I mean, there's that classic thing when the armada

00:19:06.420 itself comes up, which we'll get to in a moment. Um, you know, she's supposed to have said,

00:19:10.180 or at least Shakespeare says that she says, you know, she has the stomach and heart of a, of a king

00:19:15.460 of England. And, uh, she's, she's an extremely strong whammy and, uh, you don't mess with her.

00:19:22.660 Okay. Okay. So at some points that, and at other times she's like, she's very timid in terms of policy

00:19:28.020 and going to war. Very, very timid. Everyone around her and her Privy Council and things are saying,

00:19:32.260 look, we've got to go to war here or there. We've got to respond in a military fashion

00:19:37.140 here or there. And she'll be like, no, no, no, let's not do that. No, no, no, that's too dangerous.

00:19:41.540 Uh, um, I don't know. Uh, I'll make up my mind tomorrow. And then tomorrow comes, I don't know.

00:19:46.420 I'll make up my mind next week. Uh, uh, so anyway, all that said, I suppose the takeaway is Elizabeth

00:19:51.940 the first, um, she was, it would depend what mood you would catch her. She's very much like her father

00:19:58.340 in that sense. Um, and she would sometimes maddeningly change her mind and she'd tell

00:20:04.980 everyone what the policy was going to be, what she wanted, what, what the crown was going to do.

00:20:09.700 And then, and then like quite soon after change her mind and reverse everything and it would screw

00:20:14.820 everything up. Um, yeah, so she'd vacillate a bit. So, but anyway, she does decide that we are going,

00:20:22.500 England, we are going to screw with Spain and we are going to try and take bits of the new world

00:20:28.420 for ourselves or at least explore them. But she does it in a fairly trepid way, right? She's not like,

00:20:34.900 okay, let's put together a giant shipbuilding program. Let's try and rival Spain in terms of

00:20:44.180 shipbuilding and in terms of, uh, fighting them on, on the oceans and in the Caribbean and on the west,

00:20:52.580 uh, the east coasts of North and South America. It wasn't quite like that, but she did say where

00:20:57.540 there's lots of people coming to her, lots of brave adventurers and sea captains coming to her and the

00:21:04.660 people around her saying, look, just give me that chance. Give me a Royal charter. Give me sort of legal,

00:21:10.100 formal leave to go and fight the Spanish on the Spanish main, the Spanish coastlines of the,

00:21:16.020 of the new world in the Caribbean and stuff. You know, give me the, give me a shot coach.

00:21:20.260 Just let me on the field coach. I can do it. And she would pretty much a lot of the time say, no,

00:21:25.460 no, no, no, no, no, no. It's far too dangerous. We don't want to antagonize Spain. You know,

00:21:29.700 that's no good. We can't do that. But then sometimes, sometimes she would say,

00:21:34.900 yes. All right, then go on. So again, it depended what mood you caught her in. Uh, I mean, well,

00:21:41.220 you say that she did rule for so long, you know, 50 plus years, but over those years,

00:21:46.740 the relationship with Spain went through peaks and troughs. Sometimes it did seem in the national

00:21:51.860 interest just to keep the peace and let everything simmer down. And, um, if the, if the, if the Spanish

00:21:58.740 you're going to be kind and peaceful, um, then we'll reciprocate. And, and that's, that's the best

00:22:05.300 thing to do. That's in our interest to do. Then at other times, you know, it might be only one year

00:22:09.780 later. It's like, no, they're painting us into a corner and we've got no option, but to be aggressive

00:22:16.020 back or Spain's a particularly low ebb in one way or another. And, uh, you know, it's just a window of

00:22:22.100 opportunity for us, the English, if we strike here or there at just this moment, it's sort of a freebie,

00:22:28.660 you know, things like that. 50 years is a long time. So, okay. At various points, Elizabeth sort

00:22:33.780 of allows this stuff to happen. So a great example of it is Sir Francis Drake and other men like John

00:22:40.260 Hawkins. Um, eventually at a certain point, Elizabeth's like, okay, I'll formally, you know,

00:22:46.260 give the sign of approval from the crown and you guys can go to West Africa and all in the

00:22:52.900 Atlantic and all in the Caribbean and, and, and the East coast of the Americans. You can go there

00:22:58.500 and basically screw with the Spanish. You know, these are, these are privateers. Some people from

00:23:03.940 the Spanish point of view, these are simply pirates with, with a royal sanction. They're nothing more

00:23:09.220 than sort of marauders and pirates. Uh, you know, and to the English, they're, they're just heroes,

00:23:14.340 right? They're, they're just fighting the enemy. That's what they're doing. They're doing sort of

00:23:18.100 the right thing. They're, they've, they've got a royal sanction, you know, the crown, the state

00:23:23.460 has green lit it. So they're just doing their duty. They're doing their job. It's, you know,

00:23:28.900 right? It's like, uh, I don't know, uh, a U at the U S Navy or U S submarine, uh, patrolling the

00:23:35.060 waters around Russia in the cold war or something, right? From the Russian point of view, you're, you're,

00:23:40.660 you're the enemy, you're the baddie, you're doing something wrong. But from the

00:23:44.020 U S point of view, you're, you're doing exactly the right thing. You're doing your duties.

00:23:48.500 So anyway, people like Drake and Hawkins is like that. Some people call them pirates,

00:23:54.100 effectively. Others call them, you know, heroes. Anyway, if you're interested on my channel,

00:23:59.460 History Bro, I've got an eight or nine part series all about the life of Drake, quite a few hours,

00:24:05.460 I don't know, like four or five plus hours talking about the life and career of Sir Francis Drake.

00:24:10.500 He's sort of the original. Drake is the original. Uh, he's so good. And like,

00:24:14.980 he does screw with the Spanish loads, like, uh, takes whole treasure ships, Spanish treasure ships

00:24:21.780 filled with silver and gold and commerce of all different types coming from Panama,

00:24:27.300 coming from the new world, sailing across the Atlantic back to Spain. And he takes them like,

00:24:31.780 he does it like three different times, like giant treasure, a treasure that's worth more than the whole

00:24:36.500 years. GDP. Not that they had GDP exactly back then, but you know, um, you get, you get the idea,

00:24:42.660 giant, giant, um, treasures that he stole and just, just screwed with the Spanish on a, on a pretty big

00:24:49.540 scale for one man. Anyway. Okay. So Drake is a little bit before Sir Walter Riley. Our story today

00:24:55.060 is about Sir Walter Riley. I haven't forgotten. Um, and there were other men who weren't the only ones,

00:25:00.660 but you know, Drake and Hawkins probably among the most famous and Drake particularly becomes extremely

00:25:07.620 famous for, for doing this, right? Sir Francis Drake is an example of, um, it, it working this policy

00:25:15.060 of sending out a small number of ships, very small number really in the scheme of things, uh, just to do

00:25:21.380 privateering against the Spanish. It's sort of extraordinarily successful for what it is. And so

00:25:28.260 lots of people, and he becomes famous, right? He's sort of a very, very poor nobody and Elizabeth

00:25:35.220 makes him a knight and he gets a cut of his, of the treasures that he steals. So he becomes extremely

00:25:42.260 rich. You know, people look at Drake after he becomes a success. Um, and he also circumnavigated

00:25:48.580 the globe. He was the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe. You know, in fact, you could argue

00:25:55.140 that he's the first, well, it is true that he's the first captain to circumnavigate the globe,

00:26:01.140 right? He did like Magellan didn't, Magellan himself personally, Elcano did, but Magellan didn't

00:26:07.620 circumnavigate the globe, right? He dies in the Philippines, whereas Drake, you know, Elcano was

00:26:12.580 the first to do it, but Drake goes all the way around the world and comes back and survives. Um,

00:26:17.460 as well as all the stuff he's done to screw the Spanish, he becomes extremely rich and powerful in,

00:26:22.900 in his own lifetime. Now, other men, other adventurous men see this and of course they

00:26:29.540 want to do it, right? Every good Englishman in the Elizabethan age would love the opportunity to,

00:26:37.140 you know, fight the Spanish. Again, it's sort of your duty to fight the Spanish and have an

00:26:42.580 animosity with the Catholics, because the Catholics are butchering Protestants in Europe all the time.

00:26:47.780 Well, both sides are butchering each other, but if you're an Elizabethan age adventurer, you want to

00:26:55.540 fight the Catholics, fight the Spanish, you know, knock the Spanish off their perch of being the most

00:27:01.620 powerful country in the world, basically, in the known world. And if anything, try and get a slice of that

00:27:09.300 sweet, sweet colonial action in the new world. It's just one, one giant opportunity just waiting to be

00:27:16.900 taken. You know, we know they knew that there were some indigenous native peoples in the new world,

00:27:24.740 North and South America and the Caribbean, but right, they're no match for firearms and steel armor or iron

00:27:32.340 armor and modern, that is 16th century, modern warfare and tactics and weaponry. So that's not

00:27:41.380 too much of a problem, if you go over in force, that is. So it's just there to be taken, right?

00:27:46.580 There could be, there could be, there is endless commodities, and there could even be sort of gold

00:27:51.940 mines and lots and lots of gold. We'll get on to the question of gold in a moment, a little bit later.

00:27:57.300 But so it's sort of, it's almost like a no-brainer. Everyone wants an opportunity to exploit the new

00:28:06.020 world and, in the process, screw over Spain and make England great again. Okay, enter the stage,

00:28:14.980 Sir Walter Raleigh. So he's a young man, he came from Devon, came from Devon, south-west,

00:28:20.980 west country, not far, not all that far from where I'm sitting right now. And along with a lot of

00:28:26.580 these people, like Drake and Hawking, come from the west country and the south coast. It sort of

00:28:32.900 makes sense. And he was born into an aristocratic family, an important aristocratic family, but they,

00:28:39.540 and they had some money, but they were far from fantastically rich. They certainly weren't poor,

00:28:46.420 but they weren't sort of swimming in money. But they were pretty well connected. They were very

00:28:52.020 well connected. For example, Raleigh's mother or some senior people, older people in his family,

00:29:00.420 the generation older than him, were closely connected to Elizabeth herself. One of Raleigh's relatives had

00:29:07.860 been her wet nurse or one of her ladies-in-waiting helped educate her and raise her. So his family

00:29:18.020 were, you know, a bit more than middle class, not that there really was a middle class in the 16th

00:29:22.260 century, but they were aristocratic, but minor aristocrats without a fantastic amount of money,

00:29:28.420 but, you know, well connected. We hope you enjoyed that video. And if you did,

00:29:32.420 please head over to lotusseaters.com for the full unabridged video.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - October 19, 2025

PREVIEW： Epochs #233 ｜ Sir Walter Raleigh

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