Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (16 page)

Disgrace, and the loss of influence at Court, allowed old rivals to recover ground. The Archbishop of Cashel, Meiler Magrath, had been obliged to grant Ralegh most of the temporalities of the see of Lismore and Waterford, which he had enjoyed in commendam, alongside the revenues from his own see, for some years. Now, during the summer of 1592, he was able to claw back a good deal, aided and abetted, for once, by his enemy the Lord Deputy, Sir William Fitzwilliam.
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 Maximizing the returns on a number of impoverished Irish benefices, Magrath was a pluralist on the grand scale, with an eye for the moment: he was himself quite popular at Elizabeth's Court, and Ralegh's downfall coupled with the death of the Bishop of Lismore,Thomas Weatherhead, gave him his opportunity.

Ralegh, however, showed that he could exploit the moment too. The fleet he had so recently sent off into the Atlantic succeeded in capturing a Portuguese carrack, the 1,600-ton Madre de Dios, one of the greatest single prizes taken by Elizabethan seamen. This was not the silver fleet, but it promised to provide an ample return on a commercial venture. The carrack was brought to Dartmouth in triumph, and tales reached London of how a vast treasure on board was being plundered by those at the scene. In this administrative chaos lay Ralegh's opportunity; no one knew the south-west and its inhabitants better than he did. On 15 September, at the request of Sir John Hawkins - who openly regarded Ralegh 'the especyall man' for the task - and through the mediation of Burghley, he was sent to Dartmouth, still technically a prisoner, as he never tired of telling those he met on the way.
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 He had, to some extent, bought his freedom, promising the Queen £80,000 from the prize if he were released, and nothing but a profitless hull if he were not.

Fore score thowsande pounde is more then ever any man presented Her Majestye as yet. If God have sent it for my ransome I hope Her Majestye of her abundant goodness will accept it. If I speake with the least a greater sume wilbe more thancks worthye.
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At least he had the good sense to remain silent about Bess and his marriage when discussing matters altogether more congenial to Elizabeth. At Dartmouth, under Robert Cecil's observant eye, he set to work, enjoying the welcome given him by mariners.
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 The pilferers had in fact already done a competent job; from a cargo originally worth perhaps half a million pounds, only £140,000 worth of goods survived to enrich the Queen and the other investors. Elizabeth, who had taken a 10 percent stake in the venture, took Ralegh at his word and insisted on payment of the promised £80,000 for the royal coffers, leaving him with nothing more than a notional profit of £2,000 on the £34,000 adventured by him and his associates.
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 Perhaps, in the circumstances, that was beside the point, for after his efforts on the south coast Elizabeth began to forgive. On 22 December Bess was released from the Tower.

The new Lady Ralegh had shown particular resolution, some might call it enduring stubbornness, while under arrest. Writing from her prison to the clearly sympathetic Sir Moyle Finch and his wife Elizabeth Heneage, daughter of the Vice Chamberlain, she refers to a continuing sickness, thanking Lady Finch for her 'medsen'. Bess's resolutely phonetic spelling characterizes every surviving letter. While 'dayly put in hope' of liberation, she does not want it should the consequences prove difficult for her husband: 'I never desiared nor never wolde desiar my lebbarti with out the good likeking ne advising of Sur W hit tis not this in prisonment if I bought hit with my life that shuld make me thinke hit long if hit shuld doo him harme to speke of my delivery: but Sur R S[ecill?] was somwhat deseved in his Jugment in that and hit may be hee findeth his eror.' She seems to have fretted over Cecil's attempts at mediation! There were no such doubts about her husband.'Wee ar trew with in ourselfes I can asur you'.
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 The Raleghs against the world; defiance mixed with desperation.

It is possible, though now hard to prove, that the death of Bess's son moved the Queen to set her free. Little Damerei Ralegh vanishes from the record. Ralegh seems to have deliberately distanced himself from his wife at this point; perhaps both he and Bess had realized that it would not do to flaunt their marriage while events were taking a more favourable turn. Arthur Throckmorton made the immediate arrangements after Bess's release, and she travelled down into the country while Ralegh remained close to the Court.
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However, husband and wife were not separated for long. Bess soon returned to London, and on 1 November 1593 the couple's second child,Walter - known throughout his life as Wat - was baptized at Lillington, Dorset, a few miles south-west of the foundations of a fine new house Ralegh was beginning to build, close by the old castle at Sherborne. In January 1592, the Queen had taken a lease of ninety-nine years on all the Bishop of Salisbury's estates in or near Sherborne, and she had immediately sublet them to Ralegh for the remainder of her term. Here was a property long coveted by Ralegh - or so we are told - and indeed its position is still lovely, standing in glorious parkland on the outskirts of Sherborne. A story told by Sir John Harington has Ralegh thrown from his horse while waxing lyrical about the advantages of the estate, ploughing the soil of Sherborne with his face - an involuntary act of 'seisin', an entry upon his land, which chimed with the procedures of the Common Law and which was considered at the time to be a good omen.
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 The new 'Lodge' built substantially of Portland limestone, together with its gardens, owed much to the architect Simon Basyl and to Ralegh's talented, capricious half-brother Adrian Gilbert.
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 Aubrey, as usual, captures the charm and purpose of the place. Sherborne was 'a delicate lodge...not big, but very convenient for the bignes, a place to retire from the Court in summer time and to contemplate etc....In short and indeed tis a most sweet and pleasant place and site as any in the West, perhaps none like it:
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 No wonder, then, that Ralegh had 'cast such an eye upon it as Ahab did upon Naboth's vinyard'.
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Years later, when Adrian Gilbert was attempting to add up the money that he had spent on Ralegh's behalf, never to be repaid, he included £50 in respect of time 'spent at Mile End Green, and about London, when the Lady Ralegh was first delivered with child; and when most of Sir Walter's friends forsook him, being requested by the said Sir Walter Ralegh to visit.
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 Gilbert was putting a price on family kindnesses, and was by that point bitter enough to charge over the odds. But he did not exaggerate the sense of isolation. It was the loss of those political alliances, so long taken for granted, that brought home to Ralegh the magnitude of his miscalculation, and again his actions under pressure did not prove wise. In a letter to the Queen, probably written in February 1593, he describes himself, pointedly if with quite breathtaking effrontery, as 'all alone in the worlde', while criticizing the failure of friends to extricate him from his self-inflicted troubles. Elizabeth too came in for reproach. Would she never forgive him? Was he to suffer forever? Worse still - and this twist is as bizarre as it is ill-judged - the letter encloses a memorandum on the succession, 'but onn houres worke', an immediate response to Peter Wentworth's abortive attempt to speak on the subject in Parliament. Wentworth's scheming led him straight to the Tower, and although his memorandum was essentially anodyne, arguing correctly that the matter was for God and princes alone, Ralegh was perhaps fortunate to escape the same fate. It may be that the paper did not reach the Queen. If it did, she would have been none too pleased to see so many alternative rulers paraded, even though Ralegh's object was to find fault with the claims of each one in their turn. And, for future note, one of the candidates thus disparaged was King James VI of Scotland. To discuss the succession was to tread on sensitive ground. So far as an ageing, childless queen was concerned, the matter went beyond the remit of subjects, and beyond legislation. In his principled pursuit of freedom of speech in Parliament Wentworth knew what he was doing, and he recognized the likely consequences. By contrast, the political naivety of Ralegh's impulsive gesture is striking.
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That same letter also mentions another political paper by Ralegh, part of the same campaign, 'contayninge the dangers which might groe by the Spanish faction in Skotlande'. It is the only such reference to this document. No copy exists.
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 Nevertheless, we know from his speeches in Parliament that Ralegh was concerned by Spanish attempts to 'corrupt' the Scots nobility. King James, for his part, feared that a rapprochement between England and Spain might frustrate his hopes of one day securing the English crown.
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There were some well-placed friends that did not in fact desert the Raleghs. Successive Earls of Shrewsbury, and their spouses, seem to have remained on good terms. In the tense days before James I's succession the friendships between Ralegh, Bess, and Bess of Hardwick, the formidable four-times married widow of Gilbert, the sixth Earl, was widely recognized, but Ralegh was already writing to the Countess, apologizing for neglecting their friendship, as early as 1593. In so doing he could not omit a self-pitying aside, lamenting the 'ill desteny', even the 'strenght of counterworkinge' that dogged him. Again, it was dawning upon him that he might struggle to recover the Queen's favour.
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The Earl and Countess of Shrewsbury spent a good deal of time away from Court, but others with more regular access to the Queen were also reluctant to abandon the disgraced favourite. After their mutually advantageous supervision of the Portuguese carrack, Lord Howard of Effingham and the Cecils seem to have done what they could for the Raleghs, actively intervening when Sir William Fitzwilliam, acting on orders from the Council, put a stop to the trade in Irish pipe staves out of Munster to the Canary Islands. This wartime gesture threatened the precarious economy of the Munster plantation.
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 In trying to resolve the dispute, the Council weighed timeless arguments that strove to justify commerce with the enemy: members were reminded that the Canaries were a friendly part of Spain, and that England derived benefit from the trade. Spain benefited too, of course, but she was already securing plenty of staves from Norway, and would only obtain more from Scandinavia if Irish sources were cut off. Above all, the trade was particularly beneficial to the local plantation economy, and if planted men were to give up on Ireland and come home to England, the security of the province would be jeopardized.
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 After deliberation, the Council took a pragmatic approach to the immediate problem and the trade continued. However, Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam was no friend, and with or without the help of Council orders he continued to make life difficult for Ralegh's settlers.

Robert Cecil in particular remained happy to take Ralegh's advice on areas in which he could reasonably claim some expertise, and the giving of advice kept a disgraced man in the public eye. Ralegh was determined to make the most of this opportunity, to show that he could still be of use to his sovereign. Ostensibly sending news from the south-west - or the news that there was no news - his letters turned to other, more statesmanlike concerns. The emerging alliance in Ireland between Hugh O'Donnell, Lord of Tyrconnell, and Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, was one subject where his dire forewarnings had proved substantially accurate, and he was not slow to point this out, likening himself to 'the Trojen Southsayer [who] cast his spear agaynst the wodden horse but [was] not beleved'. The situation, he felt, was not beyond salvation, provided that England focused her efforts and gave Ireland its due measure of attention. Taking a wider geopolitical view of the troubles, Ralegh highlighted the pressures of war in Brittany, a distraction from the threat posed across the Irish Sea -'wee ar so busyed and dandled in thes French warrs, which ar endless, as wee forgett the defens next the hart' and the connections between the powerful Earl of Argyll and Ulster politics, 'for by hyme this fier must be only mayntayned in Ulstell'. Of course, that obligation to take Ireland seriously was itself deeply frustrating to any true Englishman. Ireland was, he well knew, a blight and burden on the English crown, for the sums spent on 'so beggarly a nation' a much better kingdom might have been purchased. Political chaos in Ireland brought many personal difficulties for an Irish landowner. Ralegh did what he could for the tenants on his Irish estates, but settlers began to abandon their holdings as the lack of security emboldened the dispossessed Irish and their supporters to take whatever they could, by whatever means, while substantial investments in nascent industrial and agricultural schemes now brought no significant return. Ralegh laces his 'I told you so' letter with the usual dose of self pity: 'I am tumbled down the hill by every practize...I am the worse for the Bath and not the better.'
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 Even spa waters could hardly be expected to dispel the gloom that afflicted him in these years.

Correspondence with the Cecils at this time concentrates on business, with some spice of pleasure: the occasional reference to falconry and horsebreeding, and the more than formal good wishes to friends and relations.
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 The importance lies in what is not said, for the letters implicitly confirm his continued value to the regime, and therefore his status in the Elizabethan world. By this time, there is just a hint of sunnier days ahead. In May 1594 Ralegh was confident enough to remind the Lord Keeper, Sir John Puckering, that Star Chamber should not encroach on the 'auncient custome and prerogative' of the Stannaries.
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 People still turned to him for help, confident that he could use his links at Court to assist them. These petitioners were a typically mixed bunch: admiralty officials in search of wardships, negligent privateers, cuckolded sea captains, experienced army officers battered by the wars and Irishmen anxious to escape the consequences of former offences, now given hope by the downfall of others. Here is the Elizabethan patronage system at work: lavish compliments, an attempt at objectivity in the request, delicate allusions to the all too necessary bribery and, as in a letter to William Cecil's patronage secretary and Robert Cecil's close friend Michael Hickes, a pious exhortation that nothing should be done that might conflict with a man's conscience.
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 Yet the catalogue of petitioners also suggests the limits on Ralegh's political recovery during the 1590s. In the days of his greatness the list of supplicants would have been longer, and more varied, and there would have been less need to put pen to paper. Slowly, Ralegh came to realize that his comparatively modest antecedents made him dispensable. Leicester, Oxford and Essex enjoyed an independent status that helped them to recover from misfortunes at Court, but Ralegh was entirely dependent on the favour of a Queen who now felt that she could no longer trust him. On the verge of middle age, his moment had gone. In the search for patronage there are hints that Ralegh is being by-passed, in ways that would never have occurred before 1592. George Carew pressed this nomination as a helpful gesture during Ralegh's absence in Guiana, but it is still strange to see him writing directly to Cecil in the mid-1590s, recommending a man as muster piaster in Cornwall, albeit with a gloss that the favoured one is a kinsman of Ralegh's, and that Sir Walter will surely 'not dislike him'.
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