Ultimate friendship with Spain, on the basis of immunity for unaggressive Protestantism, mutual toleration, and unfettered trade, was broadly the ideal for which Burghley worked; to achieve it, he was ready to bring to bear any amount of pressure which would not actually precipitate war. But it was part of the policy always to make sure that there was, at any rate, technical justification for everything done by the English Government. This technical correctness is particularly characteristic of the man. While Elizabeth herself and nearly every man in her court, were all shareholders, or in some degree interested, in the privateering expeditions of Drake and other captains, Burghley held himself rigidly aloof from them, and never made a penny of personal profit in that way. He had no moral qualms about seizing the Genoese treasure in 1568--that was merely an arrangement by which the bankers lent to England money which they had intended to lend to Spain; if it inconvenienced Spain, Spain should not have seized the English ships in her harbours. But when Drake came home after sailing round the world, with vast quantities of captured treasure in the _Golden Hind_, Burghley stigmatised the whole proceedings as piratical, declined any share of the spoil, and would have had it restored to Spain.
In this connection, the Lord Treasurer’s[E] aversion to these raiding expeditions was so strong that when Drake’s great voyage was in contemplation the utmost pains were taken to keep the matter out of his knowledge. But there were very few things that Burghley did not succeed in being aware of; and one of the gentleman-adventurers who sailed in that expedition, Thomas Doughty, was in personal communication with him before it started. This man was executed by Drake at Port St. Julian, in Patagonia--one of the grounds on which he was held guilty of treason towards the “General,” Drake, being that he had admittedly revealed as much as he knew to Burghley. The fact that inquiry into that execution was carefully shirked, while the recorded evidence is somewhat contradictory and inconclusive, has led to the formation of various surmises to the disfavour of Drake, of Burghley, of Doughty, or of the witnesses, according to the point of view of the critic. The most natural interpretation would seem to be that in the first place Drake and the sailors in general suspected gentleman-adventurers at large of being an objectionably insubordinate and troublesome element; and the General may very possibly have been injudicially ready to condemn one of them on insufficient evidence--evidence which satisfied him but did not amount to legal proof--and fancied that collusion with the antagonistic Lord Treasurer implied certainly ill-will and probably treachery to the commander. Applying those current rules of evidence which repeatedly sufficed to condemn men for treason at home, the case for executing Doughty was quite strong enough to act on, though exceedingly awkward to make public. It would show, of course, that the sailor was very suspicious of the designs of the statesman from whom the Queen wanted to have the thing concealed; it also suggests that Elizabeth liked to do behind the minister’s back, if she could manage it, the things which she knew he would disapprove. But it does not involve anything outrageous on Drake’s part, or any real discredit to the Lord Treasurer.
