Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (42 page)

Neglect and oblivion might be fought off in various ways. From his cell, Ralegh continued to sponsor exploration in the Americas, augmenting his memories of Guiana, and digging out an ever richer goldmine in his mind. The lure of gold and silver was powerful. Quite early on, Ralegh's prospects for release appeared to turn on the feasibility of another voyage, retracing the preliminary expedition of 1595. He was staking everything, more and more obsessively, on the vision of golden mountains, of treasure deep within a far-off continent. Every adventure across the Atlantic, English, Spanish and French, was turned to serve that purpose. As Joyce Lorimer points out, the (unfounded) enthusiasm created by Christopher Newport's mineral samples brought home from Jamestown, coupled with a temporary deterioration in Anglo-Spanish relations, 'prompted Ralegh to see the Guiana mines, which had been of little interest to him in 1595, as his ticket to freedom from the Tower'.
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 In the summer of 1607 he approached the Secretary, and suggested that if Cecil and Queen Anne would each take a third stake in the venture, which he calculated would cost £5,000, then he and his friends would finance the rest. Ralegh had worked out answers to the obvious objections: he himself would travel under another's command, as a private gentleman, so as to guarantee his return to England. It would doubtless reassure James to know that he had a well-placed Scot, John Ramsay, Viscount Haddington, in mind for this command. 'Wee will break no peace, invade none of the Spanish towns. Wee will only trade with the Indiens and see none of that nation except they assayle us.'
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Remembering the process of creative rewriting that had sharpened Ralegh's rather vague accounts of mines in Guiana eleven years before, Cecil declined the bait, though he could never quite discount the possibility of wealthy conquests in the New World, and allowed or even encouraged the prisoner to bring back fresh proposals four years later.
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 Others were much more ready to listen, caught up as they were by gold-fever. 'Sir Walter Raleigh', wrote John Chamberlain late in 1609, 'bath a ship come from Guiana richly laden they say with gold ore, and Sir Thomas Rowe with a ship and pinnesse is going that way to seeke his fortune:
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Later that year Ralegh is found cultivating Henry Prince of Wales, then fifteen years old, advising him on shipbuilding in a long, technical letter recommending a compact design with appropriate gun lines.
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 There are indications, clearer when viewed in retrospect, that Ralegh saw in the young man a personal and a national future blessing. Scrutiny of the surviving evidence prevents us from reading too much into this unequal friendship. As Anna Beer has pointed out, Henry received and responded to many applications for patronage. 'A search for favour has been consistently inflated by scholars into a special relationship.'
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 However, it is also possible to dismiss too easily the many clues that point to a potentially significant patron-client alliance. Both Cecil and Henry Howard were wary of Ralegh's influence with the young princes'.
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 All that charisma, coming together, might prove problematic. Besides, the truth is not always as important as a widely shared public perception. Tradition has it that Henry stood aghast at his father's treatment of Ralegh: no one else, he suggested, 'would keep such a bird in a cage'.
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 One Spanish agent in London, writing soon after the Prince's death, reported it as fact that Henry had secured a pledge from his father to set Ralegh free.
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Whatever the true nature of their relationship, Prince Henry's death from typhoid in 1612 - despite the application in extremis of a 'quintessence' supplied by Ralegh, 'which he sayes they shold have applied sooner' - was clearly a blow to the prisoner's hopes of liberty.
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 Regime change, or even the ever closer prospect of such change, would surely have improved Ralegh's lot; it was understandable that he dwelt thereafter on a lost future. With no prospect of better times to come, he stopped work on his The History of the World. Ralegh drew the great book to a close with the rise of Rome. 'It hath pleased God', he wrote, 'to take that glorious Prince out of the world, to whom [the words in his History] were directed; whose unspeakable and never enough lamented losse, hath taught mee to say with Job,Versa est in Luctum Cithara mea, et Organum meum in vocem flentium.'
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 No one can set aside so public a valediction.

As for the medicine which failed to save Henry's life, Ralegh's 'cordial' became famous, its properties passing into legend.
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 Soon after Sir Walter's death, the scholarly Bathsua Makin nurtured her lifelong interest in healing through the acquisition from Bess of 'all Sir W [alter] Ralegh's receipts'. She is said by Samuel Hartlib to have been 'very well acquainted' with Ralegh's son Carew, but her interest is symptomatic of the respect that Ralegh's work seems to have commanded.
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 Even in the eighteenth century the Hanoverian royal family were prepared to try his most ambitious recipe as a treatment of last resort. According to the diary of the Earl of Egmont, when George II's consort Queen Caroline fell ill with complications following a rupture in November 1737, she was given Ralegh's cordial to ease the pain, for it proved to be 'the only thing stayed with her'. Some improvement was noted that same night, but this was not sustained, and the unfortunate Queen died ten days later.
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The concoction of cordials is in character. An undated letter from Sir Charles Cavendish to the Countess of Shrewsbury, and the dedication in the 1596 edition of Paracelsus's 114 Experiments and Cures prepared by John Hester point to a longstanding interest in medicine.
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 A collection of chemical and medical recipes in Ralegh's hand survives in the British Library, and he is credited, often spuriously, with creating many a pill or salve.
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 That reputation, of course, did nothing to dispel the doubts surrounding Ralegh's character. Nostrums and poisons, the curative and the fatal arts, lay close together in the public imagination. Earlier in 1612, reporting the death of Sir Philip Sidney's daughter Elizabeth, the dowager Countess of Rutland, John Chamberlain remarked that Ralegh had been 'slaundered to have geven her certain pilles that dispatcht her', and when Ralegh himself fell sick in February 1615 some, the cynical Chamberlain among them, quickly put the illness down to his chemical experiments.
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One or two contemporaries suggested that Ralegh's interest in experimental science ran deeper still. He is said to have built a furnace for smelting metal, to have worked on the purification of salt water and to have studied methods for preserving meat on ocean voyages. Taking enthusiasm and expertise for granted, Francis Bacon wondered whether Ralegh, and Northumberland, might be actively encouraged to carry forward experimental work in their Tower cells. The prisoner's strategy here is perfectly clear. Ralegh was staying, by one means or another, in the public eye. He was never an easy man to overlook: as early as September 1603 Londoners were reminded that the Rappahannock Indians who staged a display of canoeing on the Thames had been brought back by an expedition sailing under his sponsorship to search for the lost colonists.
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 Writing popular history, concocting cure-alls, commenting on political developments, walking in the grounds of the Tower and saluting passers-by, he made sure that, despite the passage of years, no one could quite forget the King's most notorious prisoner.

Like many before and after him, from Boethius and Thomas More to John Bunyan and Charles I, Sir Walter Ralegh found that imprisonment provided the time to write without distractions.
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During the first decade of his long incarceration he converted himself into something like a one-man think-tank, issuing a flow of tracts on the affairs of the day and on broad issues of statecraft. Their number and their range are striking. All those written between 1603 and 1613 circulated initially in manuscript and were printed only later, in every case after Ralegh's death. 'Publication' by the circulation of manuscripts was still common practice in the early seventeenth century and had certain advantages. In particular, manuscript texts were more difficult to censor and could be freely passed round groups of friends.
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Ralegh had published two works in print before his imprisonment: A Report of the Truth of the Fight about the Iles of the Acores and The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana.
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The Report described the final fight and heroic death of Ralegh's cousin, Sir Richard Grenville, who had sailed to the Azores in 1591 with an English fleet under Lord Thomas Howard in the hope of capturing the Spanish treasure fleet on its return from the Indies. Unhappily a much bigger Spanish fleet of fifty-three vessels caught them there. Whether Ralegh was moved to write in order to defend the honour of his kinsman or to counter Spanish boasts of victory is uncertain: either or both are possible. Certainly he wanted to celebrate the heroism of Grenville without denigrating the more powerful, and living, Howard.

The writing is vigorous and direct, the narrative compelling. Ralegh opens with a blast against the claims of the Spaniards, who

according to their usuall maner, fill the world with their vaine glorious vaunts, making great apparance of victories: when on the contrary, themselves are most commonly & shamefully beaten and dishonoured.

By contrast, he claims, the English celebrated true honour without boasting. Ralegh turns then to the story of the encounter. Howard, with six of the Queen's ships and six supply vessels, together with the Barke Ralegh and some pinnaces, was anchored off Flores, the most westerly island of the Azores, when he was warned that the Spanish fleet was sailing towards him from Ferrol. About half the men in each ship were sick and many of the rest were ashore. Howard decided to weigh anchor and abandon his station, but the Revenge delayed as it picked up the men ashore. While Howard and the rest of the fleet got clear, Grenville refused 'to turne from the enimie, affirming that he would rather chose to dye, then to dishonor himselfe, his countrie, and her Maiesties shippe'. Ralegh admits that 'the other course had beene the better', but insists that Grenville refused to take flight 'oute of the greatnesse of his minde'. The Revenge was soon surrounded by huge Spanish galleons, each with a company of soldiers. The fight began at three o'clock in the afternoon and lasted well into the night. By daybreak, after fifteen hours of fighting, the English had run out of ammunition and the Revenge was unable to move. Grenville, seriously wounded, ordered his Master Gunner to split and sink the ship rather than let her fall into the hands of the enemy. The Master Gunner would have obeyed, but the Captain and the ship's Master begged Grenville to try for a 'composition' with the enemy, arguing that those sailors who were not wounded could still do the Queen good service if they were allowed to live. The majority of the ship's company sided with life rather than death and the Master was taken to the Spanish General, Don Alphonso Bazan, who offered terms: the prisoners would be spared and would be taken to England, where the 'better sorte' would pay a reasonable ransom. These terms were agreed by the company in the Revenge, it being, wrote Ralegh, 'no hard matter to diswade men from death to life'. Grenville was then taken aboard Don Alphonso's ship, where he died of his wounds.

The conduct of the English commanders raised controversy in London. Some criticized Howard for not coming to the rescue of the Revenge. To this Ralegh replied that 'the verie hugeness of the Spanish fleet...would have crusht them between them into shivers'. The dishonour and loss to the Queen would have been greater than any harm that might have come to the enemy. Even so, Howard himself would have been willing to sail 'between the squadrons' had the other captains and masters of the fleet not refused to become a prey to the enemy when there was no hope or possibility of victory. It would have 'il sorted the discretion and trust of a Generall to commit himself and his charge to an assured destruction without hope or any likelihood of prevailing'. Sir William Monson, a naval captain who later fought at Cadiz in 1596, accused Grenville of 'wilfull rashness' in failing to follow his Admiral 'as all discipline of war did teach him'. To that Ralegh replied that Grenville had acted from the desire for glory out of the greatness of his heart. In doing so Ralegh was trying, not quite convincingly, to defend the rational conduct of Howard while praising Grenville's valour. But he was able triumphantly to claim victory for the English force thanks to the violent storm that arose shortly after the fight, scattering the Spanish ships and sinking many of them, including the captured Revenge. Thus, insisted Ralegh, God was protecting the Queen against the malicious purposes of her enemies. By contrast, Spanish accounts of the fight claimed that the storm arose from the soul of Grenville in Hell, which 'raised up all the devils for the revenge of his death'.