Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (56 page)

That debate was multifaceted. In his lifetime Sir Walter had understood, through experience, the dangers of misinterpretation. He tried in ways matched by few authors of his time to control the interpretation of his texts, but such control was never really possible, especially when later generations fastened onto specific aspects in a complex character. Plainly, his name carried a powerful attraction for writers and publishers, either to sell works which were not actually his or to validate a message. As with the living man, however, it is not always easy to identify the message. No one can quite decide, for instance, whether Milton published Cabinet Council because he was offering it as an ironic criticism of Cromwell or because it gave sound advice on how best to endure tyranny. Or was he well aware that it served both turns? Ambiguity is everywhere. Ralegh seems to have been supplied with varying and very different identities by writers during the Commonwealth and Protectorate: for some he was the loyal if dashing representative of corrupt monarchies, for others he represented the scourge of kings, for others still he advocated aggressive commercialism. His work and his words retained currency as well; they were put to use by dangerously radical thinkers. From time to time Ralegh is quoted in Leveller tracts, something that he would certainly not have welcomed!
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In the long aftermath of the Popish Plot, epitaphs to the late Earl of Shaftesbury, a politician fired by a determination to preserve what he saw as the true Protestant succession, cast him as 'Rawleigh Redevivus'.
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The intention was to flatter both Shaftesbury and Ralegh.

Moving into the eighteenth century, as the Civil War generation died out, the heat of controversy died as well. Readers read Ralegh's works and reflected on his life more objectively. That did not necessarily result in any loss of regard. John Locke stood with Cromwell on the value of Ralegh's History, considering it an excellent source for gentlemen intent on improving their education. The vigour of the writing and the all-encompassing, nionuniental chronological scope still persuaded the educated reader to reach, occasionally, for the folio volume on the bottom shelf. But scholarship was moving on, and Ralegh's limitations as a student of the ancient world were increasingly apparent. While they took the trouble to read Ralegh's work, and while they acknowledged the scale of his achievement, Samuel Johnson and David Hume were less impressed than Milton.
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At the same time, the complex lessons of his life were being simplified still further; remaining ambiguities were being deliberately lost. Some now discounted the scholarship altogether. Ralegh was squeezed, arguably diminished, into a composite image of the sturdy English soldier-scholar, the mould tentatively fashioned for him by Robert Naunton in Fragmenta Regalia long before - the archetypal 'handsome and well compacted person'.
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A stock military hero, his bust rests between those of William III and Drake in the Temple of British Worthies at Stowe School, rather than in the neighbouring group of literary figures.
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John Campbell included him in his Lives of the British Admirals in 1742.

Again, simplification hardly dented the prevailing sympathy. A very popular 1719 Tragedy of Sir Walter Raleigh, by George Sewell, portrayed him not for the first or last time both as a victim of perfidious Spanish intrigues and as an honest, virtuous family man. Family values played well on the eighteenth-century stage, in Britain and in the American colonies. The diary of the Earl of Egmont shows just how some well-placed figures in the Hanoverian Court regarded the actions and character of a former king:

MrVertu, the graver, a curious and knowing man in his profession, told me an anecdote concerning Sir Walter Raleigh's unhappy fate that is worth setting down. He said the publisher of Sir Ralph Winwood's letters in three vol. folio assured him that among Sir Ralph's papers he found a letter directed to him at his country seat from the Duke of Buckingham, requiring him to deliver to Count Gundamor...the enclosed packet, and withal to let him know that on such a day Sir Walter Raleigh was to set out for America. That packet was undoubtedly the plan and scheme of the design which historians say King James obliged Sir Walter to give him before he went his voyage...and the same which Sir Walter complains in one of his letters (since printed) to have found in the Spanish Governor's town when he plundered it.

Even if this were only a copy, Egmont wrote, it still served to warn the Spanish. He could not contain his disgust. 'The barbarous murder of him at his return by straining the law shows there was a determined resolution to dispatch him one way or other.'
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The enemy of such a monarch would hardly fail to win respect. No wonder that Rysbrack's popular eighteenth-century bust shows Ralegh serene, his hat at a jaunty angle.

George Lyttelton, the politician and writer, also took up Ralegh as a stock character, making him express unconventional opinions and give advice on the present times. Lyttelton's unpublished 'Observations on the life and reign of Queen Elizabeth', written in 1733, picked up on Bolingbroke's recent Remarks on the History of England in an engagement with the politics of Elizabeth's reign. The essay turned on a fanciful conversation between Ralegh, Henry Wotton and Sir Francis Bacon, and, as any reader of Lyttelton might guess, it contained a number of less than subtle allusions to politics in the Age of Walpole.
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Simplified versions of Sir Walter Ralegh were easy to admire. The young Edward Gibbon, casting about for a subject in the early 1760s, settled at first on Ralegh, 'my Hero', and only abandoned the project when he realized that Tudor and Stuart biography was already a crowded field, that the antiquary and herald William Oldys had published a comprehensive if uninspired history of his man, and that the choice, if pursued, might well lead to neglect and oblivion! Happily for history, Gibbon, after one or two other false starts, opted for an altogether 'safer' topic.
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By this point, Ralegh's legacy has a transatlantic dimension. American revolutionaries, aware of Ralegh's part in the prehistory of the Thirteen Colonies, also appreciated his value as a symbol of 'opposition'. His The History of the World seems to have been widely read, or at least widely available in the libraries of colonial gentlemen.
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At the start of the Revolutionary War, in the summer of 1775, the Pennsylvania Packet newspaper conjured in an elegy to Dr Joseph Warren, a prominent casualty at the Battle of Bunker Hill, a parade of ghosts, past patriots all, with Ralegh at their head.
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Following a series of toasts to 'prosperity, freedom independency to the thirteen united states of America', the Raleigh, a frigate built in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, saw distinguished service in the War of Independence, before falling into British hands. The name may have been chosen by Joseph Hewes, 'father' of the US Navy, and in the best naval tradition it was passed on, successive Raleighs sailing in the service of the United States over the next two centuries.
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A newly independent nation looked for heroes, national and local. The capital of North Carolina took the name of the state's most famous founding father, and carefully preserved the association, as the lists of place and street names associated with Sir Walter bear witness.
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State tradition maintains that the city's name was suggested by Commissioner James Martin, who served in the 1792 North Carolina General Assembly as representative from Stokes County.
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The Americanization of Ralegh, his memory and his memorialization, ran far beyond North Carolina. His name was given to cities, towns and counties in seven states, to trains, shops, businesses, road races and all sorts of natural features, apart from the more predictable hotels and inns, and brands of tobacco. To the Sir Walter Ski Club, and the Velvet Cloak Motel!
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Walter Raleigh Day' was marked in public schools across North Carolina in 1954. In a gesture worthy of the man himself a pragmatic State government, working through a Sir Walter Raleigh Commission chaired by the Governor, used this occasion to cajole children into contributing their pennies and dimes towards the cost of a statue to Sir Walter in the capital.
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America has also remembered Ralegh as a pioneer of westward expansion, particularly when the enlargement of a nation took on a new dynamic during the nineteenth century. The poet Joel Barlow in his epic 'Columbiad' puts Ralegh back in armour, facing the setting sun, 'his eye, bent forward, ardent and piercing nature and evolving time; /Beside him stood a globe, whose figure traced/A future empire in each present waste.' A century later, in his perceptive biography of Ralegh written for children, John Buchan put forward a similar argument, suggesting that 'the British Empire of to-day, and the Republic of the United States, are alike built on his dreams'.
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Like Gibbon before him, Buchan was a young man seduced by the drama and colour of a life well lived. Unlike Gibbon, but very much like his subject, Buchan was also a politician who believed in the virtues as well as the practical benefits of Empire. Buchan died in harness, as Governor General of Canada, one winter's night in Montreal in 1940. Ralegh would have welcomed such a death.

The nineteenth century consolidated Ralegh's next transformation from soldier patriot to sailor hero, the pioneer of empires in the east and in the west. In America, journals given over to education and instruction in the spirit of self-improvement carried uncritical biographies of Ralegh, focusing on Roanoke as a forerunner of enduring colonies inVirginia and New England.
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In Britain, popular histories and scholarly works suppressed Aubrey's reference to the maid and the tree trunk, turning him into a knight errant, entranced by the far horizon. In Millais"The Boyhood of Raleigh' the child absorbs the mariner's tales, while numerous school textbooks and William Theed in his romantic sculpture reminded Victorians of how a gallant adventurer stepped forward in doublet and ruff to throw his cloak before an appreciative Queen.
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And in extremis, of course, Ralegh had played the man, fought and (in his own way) triumphed against immense odds. There was a touch of Lancelot certainly, of Arthur quite possibly, in all this romancing. And there is a touch of the outlaw hero Robin Hood too, notably in the 'greenwood' Ralegh of Edward German and Basil Hood's 1902 comic opera Merrie England.

But it was not all Camelot. Remarkably after so many years, his History was still being read for pleasure, and instruction. Early in the nineteenth century it was one of the first books bought by the Congregational Minister, historian and founder of the British Quarterly Review, Robert Vaughan, and one can perhaps detect Ralegh's style in some of Vaughan's many works. Equally captivated by his literary abilities, John Hannah produced the first serious edition of Ralegh's poems.
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A later, more cynical, age finds his patronage of science and his religious scepticism to taste. Growing rather bored with Ralegh the politician and sea dog, it highlights instead his unconventional intelligence. The wit that fascinated and repelled the first Elizabethans has again come to the fore. With Francis Bacon, Ralegh is regarded as the archetypal sixteenth-century renaissance man; as Fuller put it he was 'dexterous...in all his undertakings, in Court, in Camp, by Sea, by Land, with Sword, with Pen'.
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The Welsh author David Lloyd suggested in the later seventeenth century that Ralegh was 'a man that seemed born for any thing he undertook'.
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An early biographer,John Shirley, made the same point by deploying a rather different list, just as carefully attuned to the seventeenth-century mind. Ralegh had been 'statesman, seaman, souldier, chymist, or chronologer; for in all these he did excel. He could make every thing he read or heard his own, and his own he could easily improve to the greatest advantage.' It was hard, said Shirley, to pigeon-hole him.
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In what should be a liberating process the new more complicated Sir Walter Ralegh has, however, been sidelined. The pride shared by Britons and many North Americans eighty years ago has largely vanished.
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There are several reasons for this. Renaissance figures do not necessarily make good role models in a modern world characterized by specialization. There is perhaps something about the name, something fussy, something 'Walterish', that instinctively repels too many in modern society, just as it attracted people in centuries past - the soft victim of the Dennis the Menace cartoon strips has a lot to answer for. And there is always the poison of Ralegh's association with cigarettes and with Ireland. The Beatles' lyric -'Although I'm so tired I'll have another cigarette/And curse Sir Walter Raleigh/He was such a stupid get' - and Seamus Heaney's transformation of the Elizabethan seducer into a ravisher of a whole nation in his vigorous poem 'Ocean's Love to Ireland', are straws carried in the breeze of disparagement.
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Compared with the forest cavalier of Merrie England, and indeed the powerful bass role in Donizetti's Roberto Devereux, Benjamin Britten's version of Ralegh in Gloriana is altogether more ambivalent. Heroes of Empire have for some become an embarrassment, and of course the absurd necessities of life in a Tudor court give ample scope to the clever modern comedian.
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The resulting marginalization has at times been quite literal. Ejected from its plinth in Whitehall, the charming little statue of Ralegh was consigned, after much parliamentary ado, to Greenwich, while another, tobacco-sponsored statue by Vivien Mallock marks the man's Devonshire roots in East Budleigh.
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It is not without significance that the great Hollywood epics have to all intents and purposes passed Ralegh by. In The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), Vincent Price played him as a foppish villain against Errol Flynn's doomed (and for once unsatisfactory) Earl of Essex and Bette Davis's melancholy Elizabeth.
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In 1955, Richard Todd, resplendent in a prosthetic nose, attempted and failed to spark another 'Davis as Elizabeth' vehicle, The Virgin Queen. No one quite knew what to do with the plot, though under Henry Koster's capable direction and with the help of gorgeous costumes and a spirited performance by Joan Collins as Bess Throckmorton, the film still has its moments. Ralegh, in the shapely form of Clive Owen, fared no better in that post-modern disappointment Elizabeth: the Golden Age (2007). Owen essentially takes on Todd's role, with as little conviction. Price, Todd and Owen present unimaginative wraiths; their characters convey no excitement to the fiction, and have precious little historical substance. But there is, of course, only so much that a latter-day Sir Walter can do. The supporting cast in any big-screen treatment of Elizabethan England is always doomed to merge with the background. On screen, there is room for only one hero(ine).
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