Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (57 page)

Many heroes live on in the unconscious gesture, in the characteristic deed repeated for effect by those who come after, even if the repetition wanders far out of context. Men still spread their 'cloaks' for women they admire - in 2007 coats were flung down in the advertisements of a New York dating service and by an enthusiastic Labour MP, in the entourage of a candidate for the Party's deputy leadership.
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And in the cynical, analytical twenty-first century there are still some prepared to argue that Ralegh represents the typical Englishman, if only in his utter complexity; every age approaches self-assessment on its own terms.
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These many reworkings of Ralegh all touch on truth. Sir Walter may credibly be seen as a victim of royal high-handedness. He wrote one of the most influential books published in the seventeenth century. Lines from his best poems, once encountered, are never quite forgotten.
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In his heyday he won power and renown through his accomplishments as a courtier. Fascinated by the possibilities of distant new-found lands, he funded and took an interest in pioneering voyages which led, in due course, to some remarkable transformations in English politics and society. He was certainly sceptical of some aspects of church doctrine, and he associated closely with people who may well have been more sceptical still. Put briefly, he was a most astonishing and compelling man, touched by genius and by greatness, the focus of legend. All these things rightly intrigue us. The obvious flaws are every bit as fascinating. Many of those who encountered Ralegh at Oxford, in London, at the Elizabethan Court and on the high seas, either disliked him or distrusted him. Some considered him an upstart blessed only by good fortune, a liar, indiscreet, a theatrical charlatan, a man desperate to play some part in the high game of national politics, but betrayed by his own weaknesses. There is an abiding dark heart to his character, founded on melancholia certainly, but also on a cynicism cloaked in eloquence and theatre which reins in the adulation. There is, moreover, something terrifying in the memory of Ralegh pacing the scaffold, whipping up a crowd into religious fervour, moving, and all the while rejecting any real reconciliation with those who engineered his death.
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The report of a Spanish spy close to Ralegh in the early 1610s recalled how Robert Cecil had once remarked to the French Ambassador de la Boderie that, while Ralegh imprisoned was a loss to the nation, his release was unthinkable. Set loose in the world, 'he would immediately take revenge upon his enemies and would be unbearable'. The report simplifies Cecil's view, but it captures both Ralegh's potential as a safe scapegoat and his capacity for anger and vengeance.
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Greenblatt suggests that the fusion of life and art was Ralegh's great strength and also his abiding weakness; his vision could not take in more than a single consciousness, 'he lacked a sense of the other, and his life consequently is a record of misunderstanding and faulty judgments'.
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Greenblatt may well be right, but this is still just a little too neat for comfort. Surely Ralegh is aware of the 'other' when, for example, he commiserates with Cecil so sensitively upon the loss of his wife? The weakness really lay in who he was, in his background. In Tudor and Jacobean England, misunderstanding and faulty judgement in politics at the very highest level might be forgiven in a courtier-statesman of high birth; such people had the means necessary to work through setbacks. It was much harder for the 'expendable' self-made man, and Ralegh, for all his political myopia, understood this well enough. The essential frailty of a courtier with more modest family assets and resources runs as a dull thread throughout this glittering story, for Ralegh, never forgetting that vulnerability, developed a sarcasm in both his writings and his conversations to cover the weakness. He masks, but never quite conceals it, for sarcasm too easily topples into pessimism and self-pity.

As Naunton observed, Ralegh was fortune's 'tennis-ball'. Fortune - or Queen Elizabeth if one chose to read things that way - had 'tost him up of nothing, and to and fro to greatnesse, and from thence down to little more, then to that wherein she found him (a bare Gentleman)...well descended, and of good alliance, but poore in his beginnings'.
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Ralegh had goals in his life, and they were the conservative goals of a younger son: he sought to establish his descendants as propertied men and well-matched women, able to play a significant role in local and national affairs. Understanding that the fulfilment of these ambitions required money and land, he urged his son to avoid poverty, and to cultivate his betters: poverty is shameful, the poor are despised and they are denied the means to choose their own destiny. With his many gifts and opportunities these goals were achievable, and indeed Ralegh achieved them all, at one point enjoying the free choice of destiny that he craved, only to squander both wealth and opportunity. In so many respects, his life is therefore a story of failure. Yet the paradox is, that throughout Ralegh's lifetime and in all the centuries beyond, the failure redeems the man. Our admiration for a great Elizabethan, diminished by his lying, his self-regard, his pride and his clumsy vindictiveness, is augmented once again by an appreciation of human frailty.

Bess lived to an advanced old age, perhaps into her eighties, though no one has ever been able to trace a record of burial and her biographer has found no document that mentions her by name after 1631. An early tradition, however, insists that she survived to see the outbreak of the Civil Wars, the destruction and misery of the 1640s that obliterated a familiar world while at the same time promoting her dead husband into a combination of icon and sage, a republican hero. Something, it seems, had been held back in 1617 - the Guiana expedition did not swallow every last penny of the Ralegh fortunes. The widow Bess did well enough for herself, supporting her younger brother Nicholas and drawing interest from royal loans.
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According to Oldys she outlived Ralegh by twenty-nine years, which would date her death to 1647 or 1648.

Ralegh's elder brother Carew also survived him. Carew was, if anything, more enthusiastic when teasing Ralph Ironside at Wolfeton, but this isolated episode of vicar-baiting did no lasting damage to a respectable county career. He represented Wiltshire in the Parliaments of 1584 and 1586, Ludgershall in 1589, Fowey in 1601 and Downton in 1603-4 and 1621. He also served as Lieutenant of the Isle of Wight and Captain of the Castle at Portland. The diplomat Sir Thomas Wilkes assigned his property at Downton to Carew in the early 1590s.
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Gentleman of the horse, in his youth, to the wealthy John Thynne of Longleat - one of those 'servants' to the aristocracy and high gentry who were men of stature in their own right - Carew followed another Tudor tradition by marrying Thynne's widow, some time after 1580. The lady in question was Dorothy (d. 1616), daughter of Sir William Wroughton of Broad Hinton. Husband and wife settled at Downton House, near Salisbury. Carew was knighted by Queen Elizabeth at Basing House on 14 September 1601, and he was, like his brother, a friend of the Earl of Northumberland. In 1603 Carew lent the Earl a skilled riding master who taught Northumberland's groom how to make a horse 'amble'.
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Though there was little of the soldier in him, he assisted with the logistics of the proposed 1594 expedition to Brest, serving with Sir George Trenchard in arranging victuals for foot soldiers at Weymouth.
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The records are just sufficient to suggest a taste for finer things. According to John Aubrey, Carew had 'a delicate cleare voice, and played singularly well on the olpharion (which was the instrument in fashion in those dayes), to which he did sing'.
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The sweet, small voice of the Raleghs again.

After his brother's conviction for treason there are hints that Carew shared in the family's disgrace. In October 1606 the Privy Council ordered him to 'shewe more respect' to the Ralegh family's old adversary,Viscount Bindon, the Lord Lieutenant of Dorset. For good measure, they taxed him with 'some unfitting wordes used against the said Viscount'. But despite the Council's intervention it is easy to read too much into these things. Neighbourly disputes, and the vituperation that went with them, were hardly uncommon, out in the Jacobean shires.
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Carew's second son, Walter (1586-1646), became Dean of Wells. A Chaplain in Ordinary to Charles I, and a member of the Great Tew circle, he married Maria, daughter of Sir Ralph Gibbs of Honington. Walter lived a sedate, scholarly life, up to a point, but the Ralegh spirit was there at the finish. Confined to his own deanery at the end of the First CivilWar, he died following a scuffle with his gaoler.
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Sir Walter Ralegh's only surviving son, Carew Ralegh, matriculated from Wadham College, Oxford, on 23 March 1621, and his name remained on the books of the College until 1623. Anthony Wood asserts that Carew was something of a poet when at Oxford, but the evidence for this is otherwise very thin. A single poem under his name is printed in Henry Lawes' Ayres and Dialogues, of 1653. Poet or not, he does seem to have been a quieter, more patient man than his boisterous elder brother. Family friends stood by him after his father's death. The Earl of Pembroke rather optimistically presented Carew at Court when he left Oxford, but James - who knighted the sons of more than one Gunpowder Plotter and who did not invariably pursue vendettas into a second generation - is said to have found him the reincarnation of his father. For the time being that resemblance put paid to any Court career, and Carew promptly set off for a year on the Continent. Despite widespread sympathy, he escaped from the legal consequences of his father's treason and was restored in blood only in 1628, James (perhaps again dwelling on the family likeness) having refused assent to an earlier private bill of restoration which had passed both Houses in 1624. Bess, moreover, now had to scrape together £4,000 as a loan to help finance an expedition to La Rochelle, though it again says something for the hidden resources of well-connected women in the early seventeenth century that she managed this somehow.
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Charles I also insisted that Carew should renounce all remaining claims to the Dorset estates. So Sherborne remained with the descendants of Sir John Digby, Earl of Bristol, the former ambassador to Spain, and, for the moment, Carew looked elsewhere. In 1629 he bought from the Earl of Southampton an estate at East Horsley, Surrey, marrying Philippa, the widow of Sir Anthony Ashley and a cousin of the paramount royal favourite, the Duke of Buckingham. A man of some grace and accomplishment, he danced in Ben Jonson's masque, Love's Triumph, in 1630, and five years later became a gentleman of the privy chamber. The Raleghs were back at Court.

Rehabilitation was not entirely straightforward. Carew could not rival his older brother when it came to the absurd indiscretion, but he had his moments. In 1639, his temper getting the better of him, he spent a week in the Fleet prison after quarrelling with and striking Sir William St Ravee at court, in a row over the size of a stag's antlers, a robust and ambiguous subject for disagreement between gentlemen. He inherited his uncle Sir Nicholas Throckmorton's property atWest Horsley in 1643 - no doubt an expectation of this legacy had prompted his earlier purchase in the neighbouring parish - and over the next few years spent considerable sums on his new house.