Empire of Blue Water Read Online Free

expedition, General Venables and William Penn, set out for the Americas, Spain was still a behemoth, the successor to Rome, and its control of the New World was largely uncontested. For its holdings there, the monarchy had enforced a policy of “no peace beyond the line,” meaning that all territories beyond Pope Alexander’s line of demarcation were not governed by European peace treaties. Spain and its enemies were to be considered in perpetual conflict in the Caribbean and the Spanish Main—the mainland of South and Central America. Although the Spanish kings declared this policy, the truth was that events in the West Indies would influence both relations between European nations and the treaties they negotiated.
    Cromwell and his commanders wanted fervently to loosen Spain’s grip on the riches of the Americas. Gage was their happy scout; his biography had become the blueprint for the invasion. But it also told a vicious tale all its own.
    Thomas Gage grew up in a time of lethal battles between Protestants and Catholics. His family had been part of the Catholic aristocracy since the time of the House of Tudor; imagine the Kennedys in an age of virulent suppression of the faith and you have their profile. Distantly related to Sir Francis Bacon and Shakespeare, Gage’s forefather Sir John Gage had been one of Henry VIII’s brilliant circle of young, ambitious men; his star dimmed only when he did not fully support Henry’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, the flame-haired daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. The resulting break with the pope, who denied the divorce, led Henry VIII to found the Church of England. The decision set Catholics and Protestants at one another’s throats for centuries and became the crucial moment for the Gage family: their fortunes would now rise and fall with the Catholic faith in England. The internecine religious wars of the following decades often had a Gage among their cast of characters: Sir John was called back into service when the Catholic Mary rose to power; his son Robert and his wife hid priests in their Surrey estate, at risk of death; Robert’s son was arrested for planning to assassinate the Protestant Elizabeth in the disastrous Babington plot, inspired by the pope’s excommunication of Elizabeth and his offer of absolution for anyone—“cook, brewer, baker, vintner, physician, grocer, surgeon or other”—who would kill her. The conspirator was executed in September 1586 for high treason, setting a standard for family devotion to the faith.
    This was the atmosphere in which Thomas Gage grew up: renegade priests from the Low Countries flung into secret hiding places at a knock on the door; forbidden masses celebrated in dripping basements; whispers, intense faith, deadly betrayals. His early life must have had something close to the feeling of the earliest Christians’, and it clearly demanded a high degree of both character and devotion. But Thomas rebelled against it, leaving the Jesuit faith to which his family had devoted itself and joining a hated rival: the Dominicans. He was seeking the truth about God and man, and he believed he’d found it. Afterward he received a letter from his father saying “that I should never think to be welcome to my brothers nor kindred in England nor to him, that I should not expect ever more to hear from him, nor dare to see him if ever I returned to England, but expect that he’d set upon me even the Jesuits whom I had deserted and opposed to chase me out of my country.” If one is to feel sympathy for Gage at any point in his increasingly sordid life, one might as well expend it the night he received his father’s letter, when he sat disowned and nearly friendless in a foreign country. Thomas lay awake that night, unable to sleep, and wept at his father’s words.
    By age twenty-five, Gage was studying at a Dominican monastery in Spain. Soon he’d fallen under the spell of a commissary of the pope recruiting young