Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (15 page)

An interesting dynamic operated here. Essex was the younger man, apparently with time on his side. But he was also taking all the risks. It was he who dashed off to seek glory in the so-called Counter Armada of 1589, a disastrous attempt to liberate Portugal from Spanish rule. Ralegh, by contrast, remained in England, even though he had apparently received permission to join the expedition. Two years later, it was Essex who led a force to Normandy, in support of the new protestant King Henri IV of France, and it was Essex, again, who took the blame when that campaign disintegrated, broken by disease and unrealistic goals. Elizabeth was enraged when the Earl rather cannily knighted twenty-four well-born gentlemen outside Rouen, confirming some personal alliances that would hold good for years. The risks in any search for martial glory usually overwhelmed any gains; the prudent courtier did not willingly stray too far from the Queen.

Essex's ultimate failure to make an ally out of Ralegh, who at heart shared the same political and strategic philosophies, is conventionally explained by reference to the Earl's intransigence and paranoia, but Ralegh could be equally intransigent and, sometimes, just as irrational. He was, moreover, responsible for his own calamities. Actions often portrayed as simply incontinent are more accurately attributed to self-protection and 'family insurance'. For anyone who played the role of the Queen's 'lover' at Elizabeth's Court, marriage to another woman bludgeoned through the romantic façade. At the beginning of the 1590s, Ralegh began a liaison with Elizabeth - Bess - Throckmorton, one of the Queen's ladies of the Privy Chamber. Bess, then in her mid-twenties, had been a part of the Queen's inner circle since November 1584. She was the daughter of Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, the Tudor diplomat and courtier, a man of strong protestant convictions. The Throckmortons were a prolific family - Nicholas, a fourth son like Ralegh, was one of nineteen children - of old blood, and well connected, but they were also a house divided. Though Nicholas had turned his back emphatically on the old religion, a majority of the Throckmortons were openly and proudly Catholic. Some of the family were pursued for recusancy under Elizabeth, and in due course caught up in the Gunpowder Plot under James I.
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Young Bess therefore had cousins and kinsfolk who were political liabilities. Even her father, an inveterate schemer, had been tried and acquitted on a charge of treason under Mary, only to be imprisoned once again by Elizabeth on suspicion of favouring a marriage between Mary Queen of Scots and the Duke of Norfolk. Bess's mother, Anne, was the daughter of Nicholas Carew, executed in 1539 for alleged conspiracy against Henry VIII, while her stepfather, Adrian Stokes, had been the second husband of Frances Brandon, a granddaughter of Henry VII, and the mother of Lady Jane Grey. Worst of all, her cousin Francis Throckmorton had given his name to perhaps the most serious Catholic conspiracy against Elizabeth, and had paid for his plotting with his life in the summer of 1584.

Without doubt the affair was founded on a strong mutual attraction, but as in most Elizabethan matches there was a good deal of calculation and politics as well. Here was no maid, weeping her way to marriage with a hesitant lover, grimly determined to 'do the right thing'. Here were no teenagers, distracted by first love. It was altogether more pragmatic than that. Ralegh was forging an alliance with one of England's most prominent gentry families - like them or loathe them, the Throckmortons were certainly significant - while for Bess, the prestige of the royal favourite offset any doubts about marrying a youngest son. On both sides it seemed a canny union: advantageous, yet within acceptable social bounds. Anna Beer suggests that Bess may have played for a still higher stake: through a marriage to Ralegh her family might aspire, 'if not to the throne itself, then to a part in a coalition of powerful courtiers on the death of the aging and childless Queen Elizabeth'.
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 He probably appeared a good bet for the present as well as for the less than certain future.

The difficulty lay at Court. A liaison of this kind would displease the Queen. The consequences were of course taken into consideration, but both Ralegh and his lover were determined people. All accounts agree that Bess was formidable. Her brother Arthur, who was very fond of his sister, would later refer to her as 'Morgan le fay' in a diary entry of 1609.
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 She was clearly a match for Ralegh in every sense, and any reading of the surviving evidence must conclude that the marriage proved strong. Over the years, however, it had much to endure. Although Beer justifiably highlights the energy of husband and wife - for her they are the 'power couple' of the late Elizabethan Court - their energy has about it at almost every stage the taint of desperation, of a frantic response to shared loss. The political implications of their union proved, on a personal level, far more significant than either anticipated, and so the public story of Walter and Bess's marriage develops into a cheerless struggle to repair the irreparable.

Bess was pregnant by the late summer of 1591, and at some point shortly before 19 November, she and Ralegh married in secret.
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 Pierre Lefranc's argument that the couple were already husband and wife as early as 1588 surely misreads the common-form of a Chancery case relating to the nonpayment of Bess's dowry, where a very approximate, and inconsequential, date is given for the marriage, in effect because a blank must be filled.
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 The marriage could not of course remain a secret for ever. Ralegh, it seems, planned to be a long way from England when the news became public, far beyond the immediate wrath of the Queen. As we have seen, a major military expedition to Panama was planned for 1592. The target was the annual Spanish shipment of silver home from South America; the potential gain was immense. England's political nation scrapped for a stake in the enterprise. The Queen, the City of London and the Earl of Cumberland made significant investments, while Ralegh insisted on a leading role, committed a particularly large sum of money to the voyage, and planned to accompany the fleet for at least a part of its journey before handing over command to Martin Frobisher. Busying himself in preparations - it was his way of closing out other realities - he made every effort to discount spreading rumours of his marriage, assuring Robert Cecil as late as March 1592 that 'if any such thing weare I would have imparted it unto your sealf before any man livinge'.
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 Ralegh more than once resorted to blatant falsehood when he perceived his career to be at stake, but such deceptions could backfire, especially if, as seems probable, Cecil knew the truth.

Bess, who had somehow managed to conceal her advanced pregnancy from everyone at the Court, was delivered of a son on 29 March 1592, 'betwene 2 and 3 in the afternowne', at her brother Arthur's town house in Mile End. This precision we owe to Throckmorton's diary.
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 Remarkably, Essex stood godfather when the child was christened Damerei on 10 April. Having recently experienced the Queen's anger following his own marriage to Frances Sidney,Walsingham's daughter and Sir Philip's widow, the Earl was clearly a sympathetic confidant. Suggestions that the invitation was extended in order to compromise Essex as a co-conspirator seem wide of the mark. While he could easily have betrayed Ralegh's secret for personal gain, such a betrayal ran completely against the young man's character.

Why Damerei? The strange name, Beer suggests, announced the new family's ambitions, a statement that blue blood ran through Ralegh veins. In 1587 Ralegh had subsidized a history of Ireland from John Hooker, and Hooker, in a necessarily flattering prefatory investigation into his patron's ancestry, noted a marriage 250 years earlier between Sir John de Ralegh, 'who then dwelled in the house of Furdell in Devon, an ancient house of your ancestors, and of their ancient inheritance', and the daughter of 'De Amerie of Clare', a connection of the Plantagenet royal house.
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 Perhaps late-Elizabethan fashion also influenced the choice. In 1602 the Earl of Northumberland, who had no need to emphasize antiquity in his pedigree, reached back to the medieval past to select the name Algernon for his newborn child.

With Damerei packed off to a nurse in Enfield, Bess returned to Court late in April, taking up her duties as a Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber, while Ralegh sailed on 6 May on the first leg of the Panama expedition.
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 He was back in Plymouth by mid-May, by which time his secret had come out. There was no instant response, no immediate royal tantrum; rather ominously, the Queen controlled her anger. On 28 May Damerei Ralegh was brought by his nurse to Durham House, where his father saw him for perhaps the only time. Three days later Ralegh was committed to the charge of Sir Robert Cecil, though the oversight seems to have been loose and gentlemanly; by 2 June he was back at Durham House, albeit under orders to stay there. The following day Bess was placed in the custody of the Vice-Chamberlain, Sir Thomas Heneage.
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Perhaps this light touch gave the wrong impression. Convinced that a charade of courtly contrition would suffice, Ralegh lamented his wretchedness, nominally to Cecil, but in fact directly to the Queen. He was unwise to do so. Overdone flattery did not square with his attempts to suggest that the offence was entirely trivial, that it amounted to 'one drope of gall', and nothing more. 'Do with mee now therfore what yow list', he concludes. 'I am more wery of life then they are desirus I should perishe, which if it had bynn for her, as it is by her, I had bynn to happelye borne'.
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 Arthur Gorges recalled in a letter to Cecil an occasion on which Ralegh, watching from the high windows of Durham House, noticed the Queen's barges on the river below. Wrestling theatrically with his keeper, George Carew, Ralegh had shouted that he 'wolde disguyse hymselfe and gett into a pare of oares to ease his mynde butt with a syght of the Quene, or els, he protest, his harte wolde breake'. The whole performance ended in 'outragius wordes' and the 'Jaylor had hys newe perwygg torne of hys crowne'. Gorges, a literary fellow, surmised that Ralegh would 'shortely growe Orlando furioso; If the bryght Angelyca persever against a little longer'.
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 Maddened, that is, with unrequited love! That was Ralegh's point, as Gorges knew, but the ultimate spectator of this little drama, the 'bryght Angelyca', was irritated rather than pacified by gestures from the frantic lover, smacking as they did of the stage, of thespian artifice and a lack of remorse.
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It was a curious but somehow characteristic miscalculation, one which helped set this indiscretion apart from other occasions on which Elizabeth had been infuriated by the clandestine marriages of her favourites. These irked her, both on the personal level - as disloyal acts - but also in the way that they disregarded so easily her assumed control over the bloodlines in her own extended cousinship. Marriage control by the materfamilias counted for a great deal at the Elizabethan Court. Leicester, after his marriage to Lettice Knollys in 1578, and Essex, following his marriage to Frances Sidney in 1590, had both flirted with the Tower. Both had enraged the Queen, but both had been forgiven. No doubt Ralegh was gambling on a similarly happy outcome, but there were less auspicious precedents to consider as well. On the birth of their child the Earl of Oxford and his lover Anne Vavasour had both been imprisoned in 1581, and though this wilful aristocratic couple had compounded their offence in adultery - Oxford was married to Burghley's daughter - their fate would prove the truer guide. With Bess brazening it out at Court, and Ralegh shuffling through every thin gesture that came into his head, Elizabeth was simply not prepared to forgive and forget. Indeed, when at last she made up her mind to act, the response was venomous. Husband and wife were both sent to the Tower of London on 7 August 1592, Arthur Throckmorton recording the event in French, a language that he resorted to in his diary only at moments of personal or family crisis.
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This imprisonment must be understood in its context. The clandestine marriage had clearly amounted to an act of lèse-majesté, what the age defined rather broadly as 'contempt'. Bess's status as a lady in waiting had been besmirched. Under the protection of the Queen, she had married without her mistress's consent, and had conspired with her new husband to conceal the fact. It needs to be borne in mind, though, that neither Ralegh nor his wife stood in any danger of their lives, despite some assertions to the contrary. No capital crime had been committed. This was not treason by any reasonable legal yardstick. It did not even rank as a particularly serious contempt. Some more threatening acts of lèse-majesté might be pursued through an ore tenus prosecution in Star Chamber; the Earl of Northumberland was prosecuted in this fashion in 1606, after the Gunpowder Plot. However, the summary justice in prosecutions of this kind always assumed an admission of guilt, and a public prosecution would have reflected very badly on the deceived Queen.
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 A spell in the Tower might shock, and serve to express extreme displeasure, but it could not undo a marriage. Elizabeth was left to demonstrate the extent of her disgust, and to indicate unambiguously that there would be no easy path back to trust and favour.

Neither prisoner felt particularly guilty. Ralegh chafed at the disgrace, sought solace in poetry, and begged for release with as much humility as he could muster, but it is clear from the sentiments expressed in his finest poem 'The Ocean's Love to Cynthia' (or 'The Ocean to Cynthia'), which probably dates from this period, that he was also furious at the way in which he and his wife had been treated. Sometimes, his pride blinded good sense. In 'The Ocean to Cynthia', Ralegh is the wide, restless sea and Elizabeth the unapproachable moon goddess. She is also a tyrannical, inconstant woman, who tortures him as a traitor for his honest love. This is splendid stuff, but Ralegh, wallowing in melancholy, misses his mark. If, as we might suppose, Cecil never showed the poem to Elizabeth - it seems to have remained among his papers - he was only doing its author a service. The Queen, in these matters, acted more consistently than Ralegh ever cared to notice.
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