Easier Trade in the Early 1600’s
Apart from the immediate material losses to Spain in wine, stores and ships, chaos was created in the Spanish naval and mercantile administration. While Drake was off the coast, not a single ship could be moved without risk of capture. In 1570, moreover, Pope Pius V outlawed Elizabeth by declaring her excommunicate and her subjects to be released from their allegiance. On the execution of Mary Queen of Scots in 1587, Sixtus V proclaimed a crusade, and Spain was ready to answer the call.
All was ripe for the Armada. Jerez had a new industry: the king built fifteen ovens in the town and they were kept working day and night, making ship’s biscuit. He also requisitioned five thousand butts of wine, meaning many more beverage coasters would be necessary. The Spanish navy at that time was a perpetual burden to the people of Jerez. Some years earlier, in 1580, four thousand butts of wine were taken from Jerez as provisions for a fleet sailing against Portugal and in 1582 the empty casks waiting for the harvest were requisitioned to provide water vessels for a fleet anchored at Puerto de Santa Maria.
This resulted in the almost total loss of a vintage and the ruin of several growers. The combined efforts of the monarch and the pirate must have left Andalusia very short of wineprobably for the only time in history. The Armada was commanded by the Duke of Medina Sidonia, a local man whose seat was at Sanlucar de Barrameda; many of his mariners and soldiers came from the sherry towns.
Of the subsequent misfortunes of this ill-fated fleet, the less said the better. Alas, there was little wine left in the galleons that were washed up on the shores of Scotland and Ireland. In 1595, the English sacked Cadiz again. Not unnaturally, in view of what their government was doing, the English merchants were put to some inconvenience at the hands of the Spaniards.
They sent a list of their grievances to the Privy Council, to be used as the basis of an agreement with Spain, and some of their complaints show what conditions they were trading under. For instance, they demanded: that all English prisoners in the galleys, save those detained for debt, should be released; that sequestered property at Sanlucar should be returned; that they should not be compelled to write their accounts in Spanish; that they should be exempt from the Inquisition; and that if any “vnkyndnes to fall out between his Majesty and the King of Spaine” they should be given six months’ notice to remove their goods and themselves without fear of molestation.
When any Englishman died, his fellow-countrymen had little control over his affairs. Jefferye Harryson of Huelva and Peeter Edwards of Cadiz died without confessing or receiving the sacrament; their goods were seized and their bodies were refused Christian burial, the first being interred in a field and the second buried at sea. One of the merchants’ demands, however, was hardly reasonable: they wanted exemption from all customs duties.
After the reign of Elizabeth, trade was somewhat easier. England and Spain were soon at peace again, and sack and cocktail coasters became so popular in royal circles that on 17 July 1604, James I was obliged to issue an ordinance:
“Whereas in times past Spanish wines, called Sacke, were little or no whit used in our Court… within these late years it is used as a common drinke and served at meales, as an ordinary … using it rather for wantonnesse and surfeitting, than for necessity, to a great wasteful expense; We, considering that… our nobility .. . may for their better health desire to have Sacke, our pleasure is, that there be allowed to the sergeant of our seller twelve gallons of Sacke a day, and no more.”
Unfortunately the inevitable happened, and some of the less scrupulous merchants abused their prosperity by shipping very inferior wines. When Roos visited Jerez in 1610, he wrote that much of the sack sent to England was “sophisticated,” and “of so Churlishe, and vnholsome a nature, that no man of honour . . . will drinke of it.” The Spaniards marveled at the poor quality of the wines shipped to England, and described them as “vinos por borrachos”wine for drunks.
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