Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (4 page)

Sir Thomas Wyatt, Epigrams, no. xlix

If you want a quiet and contented life keep away from the royal Court, counselled Thomas Wyatt. Considering the corruption, immorality and danger he encountered there - he was twice imprisoned in the Tower under Henry VIII - his advice simply put a personal gloss on a widely acknowledged truth. Yet Wyatt continued to frequent the Court, and so did most ambitious men of his day. They could not keep away. Matters were not much different under Elizabeth I. Edmund Spenser might warn of the ways of the Court:

is no sort of life

For shepheard fit to lead in that same place,

Where each one seeks with malice and with strife,

To thrust downe other into foule disgrace,

Himselfe to raise: and he doth soonest rise

That best can handle his deceitfull wit,

In subtil shifts, and finest sleights devise.
1

But like Wyatt he knew that fortunes awaited those capable of subtlety and deceit. For Spenser and countless others the Court was the source of fame, honour and reputation. A successful career there brought titles, grants of office, lands and leases. For many, to retire from Court was to retire from life. In this book we consider the recipient of Spenser's poem, a courtier who took on these challenges, reached the slipper[y] top and fell disastrously; but who has nevertheless lived on in public memory across four centuries. We consider the intricacies of a life well lived, and also the still more complex structures of reputation and renown.

1554 witnessed novelty and upheaval. In Mary I, elder daughter of Henry VIII, England had its first truly sovereign Queen, governing the country from its capital city with the support of nearly the entire political nation. The year also witnessed religious realignment, and conspiracies among the disaffected. Rebels marched on London, prompting a display of great courage from Mary, the execution of another Queen, the unfortunate Jane Grey, and the imprisonment in the Tower of London of a young princess who, four years later, would succeed to the English throne in her turn. It also brought into this world one of that future Queen's most interesting, most talented and most charismatic subjects. Walter Ralegh was born at Hayes, near East Budleigh, Devon, the second son and third surviving child of Walter Ralegh and his wife Katherine (nee Champernowne). The Raleghs were an old-established county family, traced with a degree of confidence back to Sir Wymund Ralegh, a Devonshire landowner who died in 1258. Though they need to be treated with caution, some studies test the antiquity of the line still further, tracing a descent from Sir Hugh Rawley, or de Ralegh, who was sheriff of Devonshire from 1160 to 1167.
2
 The name is thought to be taken from the hamlet close to Barnstaple, in the north of the county Walter's grandfather, another Wymund, was the ward of Sir Richard Edgcumbe of Cotehele, and in due course he married Richard's daughter Elizabeth. Wymund's son and heir, Walter, was born in 1505 and was thus still a young child at his father's death in 1512. Some attempt seems to have been made to conceal the minority from the Court of Wards in faraway London, but the attempt failed, and the Court granted his wardship, along with four Devonshire manors held in trust for the young man by his uncle Sir Piers Edgcumbe and other trustees, to a favoured courtier, Sir Nicholas Vaux. The Ralegh estate was worth such attention, but only just. There were landholdings, probably all leased out, in Withycombe Raleigh and Colaton Raleigh.'
3
 There was not a great deal more.

Walter Ralegh senior moved to Hayes Barton from his father's home at Fardel, near Ivybridge, on the expiry of his wardship in 1526.
4
 He took up the remnant of a lease on the 'Barton of Powreshayes', renewing for eighty years, or for the lives of himself and his son John, in 1551.
5
 A late sixteenth-century farm stands today in this lonely spot, dipped in the gently rolling, green Devon countryside on the southern edge of Woodbury Common, but, as Joyce Youings points out, Walter junior was born in an earlier building, perhaps a 'long, low medieval house with shuttered, unglazed windows'
6
. 'That is the fact of the matter. Nevertheless, the antiquity of a Tudor house exercises the imagination: an old tradition in Hayes Barton, with as little justification as most legends of this sort, for long identified a particular bedroom as the birthplace. As might be expected the room faces south, towards the sea.'
7

The Ralegh pedigree is complicated, but worth pursuing in an attempt to understand a child's place in his Tudor world. Walter Ralegh senior married three times. About his first wife, Joan Drake, little is known. The daughter of John Drake of Ash, she lies buried in the nave of East Budleigh church, the lettering on her gravestone curiously reversed. No one now seems to know why. According to Michael Stanford, the Drakes were minor gentry, with some family members prospering as merchants in Exeter and Exmouth. Perhaps Ralegh married rather below his own station. It seems likely that Joan, the mother of George (1527-97) and John (d. 1588), died in 1530, or soon after. She is now only a shadow on the page, but still less is known about Walter's second wife, identified vaguely as 'a daughter of Darrell of London', or rather more plausibly as Elizabeth de Ponte, the daughter of a Genoese merchant resident in England.'
8
 The only surviving daughter of this union, Mary, married Hugh Snedall of Exeter in 1563.
9
 Katherine Champernowne was, therefore, the third wife. The couple were cousins of a sort, for Walter's grandfather and namesake had also married a Katherine Champernowne some seventy years earlier. On this occasion there was no suggestion that the husband had chosen a wife beneath his own station. Katherine, indeed, was from a rather more elevated stratum of the Devon gentry, the widow of Otho (or Otes) Gilbert of Compton Castle near Newton Abbot, and the mother of three sons from her first marriage. Her marriage to Walter Ralegh also produced an older boy, Carew, and a daughter, Margaret or Margery, who grew up to marry first one Lawrence Radford, and subsequently George Hall, of Exeter. It is not known for certain whether Margaret was older or younger than Walter junior, such is the murk that obscures so many details in a minor gentleman's pedigree.

So far as anyone now can tell,Walter and Katherine were a well-matched pair. Walter Ralegh senior lived the life of a well-to-do country gentleman, carrying the obligations that normally fell to his class. In 1543 he was called upon to raise men for Henry VIII's campaign in France, itself an indication that he was a figure of stature in county society.
10
 In his own footnote to national history, Walter shares some blame for igniting the South-Western Rebellion, a dangerous revolt against the religious and economic policies of King Edward VI's uncle and Lord Protector the Duke of Somerset, which broke out during the summer of 1549. According to John Hooker, a young eyewitness to many of the bloody events that year, Ralegh travelled down the road to Exeter during Whit Week. Near Clyst St Mary he rode past an old woman, making her way to Mass, and telling her beads. Denouncing what he regarded as superstition, Ralegh insisted that 'there was a punyshemente by the law apoynted agaynste her and all suche as woulde not obeye and folowe the same and which woulde bee putt in execution vpon theime'.

Annoyed and somewhat alarmed, the old woman conferred with her fellow parishioners, many of them disturbed by the recent introduction of the new Edwardian Prayer Book. Clearly she had a way with words herself, for the villagers, enraged at her treatment, took to the street, set fire to a local mill, and came after Ralegh with murder in their hearts. Prudently, he fled the scene.
11
 Later in the rebellion Ralegh was imprisoned in the tower of St Sidwell's Church, apparently for his religious beliefs, during the month-long siege of Exeter. There is something of the son's opportunism in the father's subsequent actions. When the siege was raised, Ralegh and two fellow prisoners, finding themselves no longer guarded, appropriated many of the church ornaments, including a cope of fine cloth, worth twenty marks. The parish subsequently set about recovering its property, but Ralegh argued - perhaps with some justification - that he was owed a return for his treatment. He responded to demands for restoration of the cope by telling the court that 'yf it were not cut already for the sparmer of a bed they should have it'; here there is a taste of his son's bravado.
12
 In the end, however, Ralegh restored what he had taken, which is more than can be said for some other prisoners who also pilfered valuables from churches and civic buildings at that turbulent moment in Exeter's history.
13

In 1554 Ralegh assisted Sir Peter Carew, who had tried and failed to raise a rebellion in Devon against the Queen, to escape in one of his barks. Carew, however, was a charismatic, larger-than-life fellow, the sort of man who could persuade and cajole, and Stanford speculates that this perilous act might have arisen from friendship as much as through religious.
14
. Whatever the motivation, this was an isolated gesture of dissent in one who proved broadly loyal to the regime, and English monarchs seized upon loyalty wherever they found it. Ralegh was acting Vice-Admiral in Devon under Mary, and sat in that Queen's last parliament as a member for Wareham, Dorset. After the accession of Queen Elizabeth and the establishment of a more congenial protestant regime - if one mindful of his earlier trimming - he was churchwarden of East Budleigh in 1561.
15
 There are suggestions that Ralegh was accumulating wealth, benefitting from trade and investment. He was numbered among the many gentlemen who put money into privateering expeditions during the 1540s and 1550s, and Admiralty records reveal that he owned or co-owned several merchant ships and privateering vessels, even though the precise details are now lost in the gaps within the series of Exeter customs records.
16
 The tithes of fish at Sidmouth were leased to Ralegh and two of his sons from 1560 to 1578.
17
 In later life, he and his wife lived in Exeter, in a house 'adjoyning to the Palace-gate', a place that another false legend later associated with his youngest son's birthplace. He had paid £4 to become a freeman of Exeter in 1555, and obviously enjoyed long and close associations with the city.
18

Walter and his wife may have moved from Hayes to be near several members of Katherine's family; Brushfield notes that a number of Gilberts lived in Exeter. Alternatively, as Raleigh Trevelyan suggests, Hayes Barton may no longer have measured up to the aspirations of the family. The son and heir John and his wife might have been looking for something more prestigious.
19
 A third possibility is that this represents an economy measure: gentlemen living in towns were not expected to maintain so large a household staff, and old age might have been more comfortable in an urban setting.
20
 Once again, we must guess at motives. Walter Ralegh died in February 1581, at the end of the long years of Elizabethan peace, and he lies buried alongside Katherine in the church of St Mary Major, Exeter.
21

As for Katherine, her reformed beliefs are evident in a story that Foxe tells in his Actes and Monuments, the so-called Book of Martyrs. Recounting events leading to the execution of Agnes Prest in Exeter, Foxe states that Prest was visited during her imprisonment by 'a certayne worthy gentlewoman, the wife of one Walter Rauley, a woman of noble wit and of a good and godly opinion'. Visitor and visited found that they agreed on many articles of faith, the strengths of Prest's conviction making a great impression. 'As sone as she came home to her husband,' Mistress Ralegh declared that 'in her life she never heard a woman (of such simplicity to see to) talke so godly, so perfectly, so sincerely, and so earnestly; insomuch that if God were not with her, she could not speake such thinges; to the which I am not able to aunswere her (sayd she) who can read and she cannot.'
22
 Of course, Foxe set out to emphasize the virtues and fortitude of his 'martyrs', but the degree of independence, the honest candour of words spoken by wife to husband, and the conviction behind those words, all suggest the strength of Katherine's protestant beliefs, a robust character and a sound marriage. Katherine outlived Walter by some thirteen years. She made her will in April 1594, and probably died shortly thereafter.
23
 Her children by her marriage to Otho Gilbert included the noted mariner and soldier Humphrey Gilbert, whose adventurous career greatly influenced the young Ralegh. Another son, John Gilbert (d. 1596), administered his mother's estate. John's nephew, heir and namesake was knighted at the attack on Cadiz. This Sir John Gilbert later joined Ralegh in privateering ventures (which were the cause of occasional disputes between them) and stood by Sir Walter when he was a prisoner in the Tower. He died in 1608.

The younger Walter Ralegh derived no particular advantage from his descent. Though of respectable stock, he was the product of a third marriage and a second, the youngest of four sons to his father and five sons to his mother. Our knowledge of his early life suffers accordingly from the neglect that heralds and genealogists too often accord the humdrum younger child, the son who does not inherit his father's estate, and who has to make his own way in life. While 1554 is now widely accepted, even his date of birth is a matter of ongoing debate. No surviving parish register enlightens us.
24
 Ralegh's boyhood is a profound mystery, the surviving clues frustratingly random. Local traditions in east Devon assert that he was taught by the vicar of East Budleigh, and that he attended the new school at Ottery St Mary. Both seem plausible enough. Yet no one really knows how Ralegh came to acquire the formidable erudition displayed in later years. Brushfield, in so many words, suggests that he owed everything to his mother's genes and to her tuition; here was proof of the adage that able men have able mothers.
25
 He may have a point: Katherine's sons by Otho Gilbert do after all show something of the same brilliance. But bright children also have to work hard if they are to succeed in the world, and Ralegh could never be faulted for want of effort. He toiled intellectually as well as physically. Robert Naunton, a perceptive contemporary not particularly well disposed towards his subject, may give a lead when he recalled that Ralegh was 'an indefatigable Reader, whether by Sea or Land, and none of the least observers both of men, and the times'.
26
 The much quoted seventeenth-century biographer John Aubrey writes much later that Ralegh would always pack a 'Trunke of Bookes' when he sailed on a long voyage.'
27
 Ralegh was also concerned that others should have the benefit of reading, and in about 1603 donated £50 to the new Bodleian Library in Oxford for the purchase of books. The library had established a fund raising scheme under which donors gave money and the librarian chose books which were then embossed on the binding with the arms of the donor.
28
 It seems that he fell into the habit of assembling commonplace books, either his own or the work of others. Clue after clue suggests that he never stopped reading, but in early life it is hard to know what he read, and what impression those books made.
29