Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (30 page)

Ralegh finishes with a comparison between Anne and Elizabeth, unsurprisingly favouring James's Queen:

As a petition it is more tactfully couched than 'The Ocean to Cynthia'. Ralegh is still an angry man, but his language is less violent than in the Cynthia poem; one might even say that there is more humility in it, if that word could ever be applied to Ralegh. However, the same word could be applied to his final poem, written shortly before he was executed.
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 It evoked an immediate response. Lord Treasurer Cranfield, for example, copied the lines on the back of a list of customs returns and on a letter.
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All his life, Ralegh thrived or suffered in unequal friendships - with Spenser, with Harriot, with Cecil and Northumberland. For a few years, at the end of Elizabeth's reign, his links to Lord Cobham are of particular significance. Cobham was courted assiduously, as a political ally and also as a friend. As early as 1594, long before Cobham succeeded to his title, the Bishop of Salisbury wrote a long and unhappy letter to him, apparently trying to steer him away from an unsuitable connection and explaining why Ralegh does not deserve any courtesy. No doubt something can be arranged, but a man who wilfully refuses to pay his rents and his dues to the Bishop should really receive no further leases, particularly on the land that he covets.
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 After 1597, Ralegh saw in the young man's developing relationship with the Queen the trust and affection that he himself had lost. By then, he did not scruple to grab back favour through the good offices of a friend. The eclipse of Cobham's fortunes in 1603, and the dismissive verdict of history, have together clouded our understanding of realities in the Court of an ageing Queen. Even in belittling him, Cobham's enemies wrote of his hold on Elizabeth's affections. When, in 1597, he succeeded his father as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, in the face of stiff competition from Essex, Cobham's triumph was interpreted as a manifestation of the esteem in which the father had been held. That was the Elizabethan way, but the appointment had as much to do with Elizabeth's desire to advance a favourite, and, perhaps, the Council's willingness to give the young man his chance.
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Over the next six years Cobham was, like Ralegh, considered as a potential privy counsellor, and rumour linked him with the office of Lord Chamberlain in succession to the ailing Lord Hunsdon.
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 He shared the court official's burden - particularly acute for a Lord Warden - of interrogating suspect Catholics arrested while en route to and from continental seminaries, and it seems that he carried out these duties with diligence and vigour. Here was no courtier going through the motions.
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 Cobham did not miss a single day of the 1601 Parliament, and he maintained his own intelligence contacts at the very highest levels. In 1603 Ralegh, when on trial for his life, insisted in open court that Cobham had, with the full consent of Queen and Council, sustained for the past seven years a dialogue with Charles de Ligne, Count of Arenberg, one of the most experienced statesmen at the Brussels court. No one present contradicted the statement, and the prisoner had no particular reason to exaggerate or lie.
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No scrupulous assessment of the evidence can conclude that Cobham was a political lightweight. He faced difficulties in these years, but they are the troubles that confront every ambitious courtier. Typically, he ran short of funds; Sir John Hele was among those who advanced him money, but Hele did so confident that Cobham was in a position to further his suit for the Mastership of the Rolls.
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Loans of this kind were seen as good investments, whether or not the money was repaid on time. Cobham was also faced with the traditional and taxing problem of reconciling county rivalries - in his case the perennial strife among the prominent gentry of Kent - with his commitments at Court.
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 Unfortunately, much of what we know about his character comes from the pens and mouths of those same county rivals, especially the Sidneys of Penshurst, whose papers shed such welcome light on the last years of Elizabeth's reign. It is not the safest evidence on which to base an accurate portrait.

There was more to this friendship between Ralegh and Cobham than the shared pursuit of royal favour. Witty and capable, Cobham proved congenial company. The occasional spat is dutifully recorded by the Court postmaster and Sidney client Rowland Whyte in his letters to Sir Robert Sidney. In November 1599 Whyte reported happily that a 'deep unkindness' had sprung up between the two men.
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But these clouds soon passed. Ralegh regretted Cobham's failure to join him at Bath in a distinctly sycophantic letter of 29 April 1600: 'we can butt longe for yow and wyshe yow as owre lives whersoever'.
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 Anna Beer sees as significant the fact that Ralegh uses the plural pronoun, the first time that he refers to Bess and himself in this way in any surviving letter. She suggests that this underlines a 'new awareness of his dependence on Bess'.
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 It may also demonstrate the prevailing dynamic in this relationship; Bess harboured a soft spot for Cobham. Certainly it is also possible to detect in the absence of formality a relaxed friendship, to read a different kind of Elizabethan letter which does not address matters of business, and which for once has little or no ulterior motive.

At that moment Cobham was himself preoccupied by dynastic priorities. His marriage to Frances Howard startled the Court, and was explained away by Cobham's need for cash and Howard's need for a well-placed courtier husband. Elizabeth seems to have had no particular objection, for her this was a comfortable union between two old and distinguished families, but Howard was a sharp and unprincipled woman and she made enemies. Bess, for one, never could endure her company.
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 Nevertheless, the friendship between Ralegh and Cobham was strong enough to weather these domestic hostilities. In June 1600 Ralegh went off into the country, 'bag and baggage, wife and children', as Ralph Adderley put it ungallantly in a letter to the Sheriff of Staffordshire.
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A month later the Earl of Nottingham, stuck at Court and unable to track down a servant of Ralegh's to carry a letter, sent it instead to Cobham, confident that the two men would soon meet in order to travel overseas.
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. Later in July Ralegh, Cobham, Northumberland and other courtiers visited the Low Countries, crossing the sea from Sandwich. Northumberland revelled in the experience, studying fortification and generally getting in the way of professional officers, but for Ralegh and Cobham this was a short visit. Ralegh had seen it all before, while Cobham never showed any interest in the military life. Besides, there were instructions from the Queen - possibly aimed at Cobham in particular - to return without delay.
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 Both were soon back in England, while gossip struggled over the apparent pointlessness of the visit. 'I hear', wrote Sir Henry Neville to the future Secretary of State Ralph Winwood, 'their journey was not altogether idle, nor upon Curiosity only, but that they carried some Message which did no harm.'
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That autumn Ralegh travelled to Jersey, surveying his 'littell common wealth', and also to Cornwall on Stannary business. From Sherborne he wrote another letter to his 'best lorde', trading again on Cobham's particular intimacy with Elizabeth. Ralegh had apparently presented her with a gift, perhaps out of gratitude for the Governorship, and now he wanted to know 'how the Queen accepted the Jewell'.
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 The nuances in such matters were important, and Cobham, always close to the Court, was well placed to provide an answer. Other letters surviving from those months convey to Cecil and Lord Buckhurst a first impression of Jersey and its defences, and dwell on careful negotiations to settle the price of tin. While in Jersey he took a moment to bury the hatchet with an old enemy, the erudite Edward, Lord Zouche, then deputy governor of nearby Guernsey. An exchange of carefully worded letters had the desired effect.
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 In Devon, Ralegh tried very hard to satisfy all interests, those of the tinners, the mine-owners, the Queen, and of course his own.
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 Life was busy for Bess as well. While Ralegh immersed himself in the affairs of government on his new island, taking his oath of office on 20 December, a fire beginning in the stables caused considerable damage to Durham House. Bess, responding to Cecil's polite enquiry, assured the Secretary that nothing precious had been lost, while regretting that there was now no chance of entertaining him as a guest that winter. As neighbours do, she blamed the incident on a servant of her cousin and fellow lodger in the vast residence, Sir Edward Darcy.
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 Fire was not the only problem confronting the owner of this literally palatial property; like its wealthy neighbours it was a target for thieves. Two suspects were indicted in April 1602 for breaking 'burglariously' into the house, and stealing fine linen to the value of £17.
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 Cecil's consideration for Bess is illuminating; it is rare to see him so conscientious and affectionate. There is something very personal at work here: he would of course remember that Bess had been close to Elizabeth, Cecil's late wife, in their early days together at Court.
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