Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (9 page)

His career at Court reached its apogee in the late 1580s. Martin Frobisher told Lord Willoughby in July 1587 that 'Mr Rale standes emong[s]te othares undare the clothe of a state'.
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 In the same year, Ralegh was nominated to succeed Sir Christopher Hatton, newly promoted to the Lord Chancellorship, as Captain of the Guard. Even the most prejudiced of contemporaries had to admit that he was well suited to the office; here was a post full of ceremonial show, but with a keen practical purpose given all the threats to the Queen, real and perceived. Ralegh duly took up his duties after Hatton's death in 1591. The Captaincy of the Guard was a true mark of the Queen's trust, and the nomination sent a clear message to the world beyond Westminster. Observers would have been left in no doubt that those who showed disrespect to Ralegh insulted Elizabeth as well. Nevertheless, there was still an impermanence to his position. Monopolies, grants, and grace and favour apartments in town houses were important enough, but to command full credibility in exercising his new offices, and when lording it over the established gentry of Devon and Cornwall, Ralegh needed the most certain token of lasting authority in Elizabethan England. He required lands, an estate worthy of his new status. Elizabeth and her government had little enough land to give - directly. The early modern monarchy lived a hand-to-mouth existence, bestowing the offices and other benefits that periodically came its way to sustain loyalty, while playing on a shared interest in preserving social and political stability.
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 Of course, it did what it could. The Derbyshire properties of Anthony Babington, executed and attainted following another futile conspiracy in support of Mary, Queen of Scots, were conferred upon Ralegh in 1586. Extensive estates in Ireland also became available that year, though they represented a precarious speculation given the ongoing political confusion in Elizabeth's other kingdom. However, Ralegh could not afford to pick and choose. He received from the Queen a grant of three-and-a-half seignories in the plantation of Munster, part of the Desmond patrimony confiscated after the suppression of the Earl's revolt in the early 1580s.

The size of this vast Irish estate, 42,000 acres, balanced its problems and consequent obligations. Like other prominent colonists, Ralegh took on a commitment to settle the province with reliable Englishmen, united in a hierarchy running down through leading freeholders bound by contractual agreements to the 'undertaker'.
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 The English Council was working to a plan for settlement drawn up a decade earlier by a group of private adventurers, and now dusted down from the shelves of Burghley's study. Their goal was the establishment of key settlements on each seignory; six was thought to be the ideal number.
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 Of course, reality always complicated the clean lines drawn across a map. On many estates, borders were in time blurred and trimmed following successful legal claims on behalf of dispossessed landowners. Only Ralegh and the other principal adventurer, Hatton, did not suffer in this way, confident as they were in the Queen's favour.

One contemporary map of Munster, drawn up in 1587 and now in the National Maritime Museum, shows a swathe of territory along the Blackwater valley marked with Ralegh's name, emphasizing, if emphasis were required, the feudal imposition that was plantation.
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Ralegh was allotted four messuages - building plots with land attached - in the seaport of Youghal. Tradition has it that he was elected mayor of the town, and one might speculate, with many others, that the Warden's house of Our Lady's College is identical to Ralegh's residence 'Myrtle Grove'. Still standing today, the house is a charming, clearly very old structure, perhaps the oldest continually-occupied domestic dwelling in Ireland. Tadhg O'Keefe believes that it predates Ralegh by a century or more, and that it was originally built as a late medieval, open-hall, cleric's house, of the type found throughout southern England, but very rare in Ireland.
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 It is indeed immediately apparent that the interior walls of the house are later partitions. This Myrtle Grove has traditions all its own. Here is 'Spenser's Window', ancient and beautiful, from the pages of The Faerie Queene itself. In the grounds there is a walled garden where Ralegh is said to have planted potatoes and tobacco, and also four yews, rich in the tradition that he smoked his pipe in their shade.
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 Edmund Spenser's Kilcolman, the centre of his relatively small 3,000-acre estate, is not far distant - it lies midway between Limerick and Cork - and there, in the summer after the Armada, we imagine the two men reading one to another, perhaps from The Faerie Queene, moments recalled in Spenser's pastoral poem Colin Clouts Come Home Againe. 'To thee, that art the summer's nightingale/Thy Sovereign Goddess's most dear delight', wrote Spenser, mixing flattery with the obligations of this unequal friendship in, perhaps, unequal measure. The idyll died too soon. Ralegh returned to the precarious life at Court, while Spenser eventually fled Kilcolman in 1598, at the height of the Nine Years War.

Spenser was one of many Irish acquaintances, for in this distant corner of Elizabeth's domain a major landowner with direct connections to the Queen was a man worth knowing. In another of those informative, throwaway lines in The History of the World, Ralegh glosses his reflections on the extreme ages of Biblical patriarchs with an allusion to an ancient Tudor noblewoman.'I myself', he wrote, 'knew the old Countess of Desmond of Inchiquin in Munster, who lived in the year 1589 and many years since, who was married in Edward the Fourth's time, and held her jointure from all Earls of Desmond since then.'
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This National Maritime Museum map also emphasizes Ralegh's central importance to the Irish enterprise. Here is another political payback for Elizabeth's investment of time and money in her 'Ralegh Project'. His great estate was far larger than any other single grant in the plantation, almost three times as big as the next in size, that given to Sir William Herbert. Since each undertaker' was technically limited to 12,000 acres, the grant attracted hostile comment, notably from the Lord Deputy, Sir John Perrot. Ralegh in turn accused Sir John of 'raising impertinent objections', and turned the power of a favourite upon his opponent. Perrot was warned by Burghley, candidly and perhaps quite accurately, that Ralegh was 'able to do you more harm in one hour than we are all able to do you good in a year'.
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The Queen, of course, could set aside all rules, and it has been suggested that she permitted Ralegh to take over the holdings of two other undertakers - Sir John Clifton and Sir John Stawell - whose enthusiasm for the enterprise had cooled.

Nevertheless, this importance was transient. Ralegh was in no position to stay in Ireland. The south-west of England required his attentions, and of course he had a position to defend at Court. He resided in Youghal for some of 1588 and 1589, and may perhaps have visited again in June 1590, but thereafter he left the management of his estate to his agents. Indeed, Ralegh's interest in the land waned when he acquired property at Sherborne in Dorset during 1592. Sherborne, though smaller, was a far more valuable English patrimony, land fitted for the house that he planned to build and hand down to his descendants. Essentially conventional in his personal ambitions, Ralegh sought nothing else. Most of the workload involved in developing his seignories in Ireland fell, it seems, on Andrew Colthurst, an officer paid by the government.
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 We know the names of fourteen freeholders, merchants among them, nominated by Ralegh in and before 1589.
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 In August that year he gave Robert Mawle and another man authority to lease and sell lands in his name, and as D. B. Quinn observes there is nothing in the surviving record to indicate that he ever revoked this authority. Mawle, rewarded with a lease of the Barony of 'Inchiquin Ralegh' as Sir Walter, perhaps remembering the double-barrelled Devonshire parishes of his youth, chose to call it, seems to have been his principal agent.

Even so, Ralegh still worked harder than most to develop his Irish land, especially in the early years. In 1590 he licensed and backed an initiative by Henry Pyne, another tenant, to manufacture pipe staves, the pieces of wood bound together by the hoops around a barrel or cask, drawing on the timber reserves of the region. The worked timber was to be exported to the Canaries and to Madeira, where staves of a quality fit to cask wine were in short supply. Hatton and Ralegh both looked at developing wood cultivation and iron smelting on their new estates; they were receptive to any idea that might pay, or at least sustain settlers. Land was enclosed, set about with quickset hedgerows, and a loyal English population was imported. Ralegh peopled his lands with tenants, directly at first. One hundred and twenty-eight of them had arrived in Ireland by 1589, including the foremost English mathematician and astronomer of his generation, Thomas Harriot, who settled at Molana Abbey. In 1594, when operating at second hand, he leased out the seignories to various Englishmen for £200 per annum.
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 Details of these arrangements surviving in the records show a serious attempt at colonization, with a new population apparently well equipped to make a success of their venture. We know, for example, that in 1589 Ralegh's settlers owned 1,430 cattle, 1,160 sheep, 28 ploughs, ten teams of horses and 310 small Irish horses and other animals.
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 The effort made economic sense to the landowner, and also enhanced his prestige, suggesting that further territorial acquisitions might sensibly follow. Leases preserved among the Lismore manuscripts in the National Library of Ireland, made on his behalf between 1589 and 1602 but concentrated in the first three of these years, show Ralegh, in Quinn's words, 'concerned principally to consolidate his holdings northward from Youghal along the River Blackmore [sic - Blackwater] to Lismore...and along the River Bride'. Once again these leases were very much directed at English speculators, in the knowledge that they would seek to sub-let. This arrangement lost a margin of the potential profit, but still allowed Ralegh a guaranteed income, and removed a good deal of the immediate risk. Quite cautiously phrased, the leases were limited for the most part to terms of forty years.
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 In late sixteenth-century Ireland, no one really dared to look further ahead.

While in Ireland, Ralegh also fathered a child.
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 Of the mother, Alice Goold, little is known, beyond the fact that she appears to have been a daughter of Justice James Goold. Indeed, the very existence of this child rested on a single letter of disputed authenticity until the rediscovery of Ralegh's will in the 1960s revealed a bequest to his 'reputed daughter' of 500 marks. We do not know the girl's name, but we do have some reason to believe that Ralegh later betrothed her to Daniel Dumaresq, his page when Governor of Jersey. Daniel, the son of John Dumaresq, Seigneur of Samares manor, and John's first cousin Esther, was one of two wards from Island families granted to Ralegh at this time. While the young man seems to have been slightly weak in the head, his family had influence, and he was duly sworn a in September 1607, in succession to his father. The match seems to have had little support from Dumaresq senior - or that at least is the impression an anxious father wished to convey after Ralegh's disgrace in 1603. According to one contemporary manuscript inscription in a Jersey book, 'The Seigneur of Samares made Sir Walter Ralegh's daughter no jointure and disowned the marriage at her death.' The Reverend Elie Brevint, a seventeenth-century Sark chronicler, tells us that this elusive young woman died of plague in 'London or Kingston', presumably between 1603 and 1606, and most probably during the great outbreak of 1603 which carried away one-fifth of the city's population.
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 Brevint, incidentally, tells us more, recalling in an Aubrey-like diversion three sayings of Sir Walter before his appointment as Governor of Jersey. One relates to the inheritance of widowers whose wives die in childbirth. Another is typical Ralegh, straightforward, gnomic and thoughtful: 'Oars are made of wood'. The third is a touch prophetic, and may draw on personal experience recalled from events in 1592: 'It is most galling to a prisoner if his wife is not permitted to see him.'
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The portrait of Ralegh now in the National Portrait Gallery collection, dated 1588 and attributed to the H monogrammist, shows a man in the prime of life, and at the height of success. If we carry in our mind's eye an impression of the typical Elizabethan favourite, it cannot stray very far from this likeness. Ralegh, garlanded by the motto 'Amor et Virtute', strikes a predictable pose, recognizing the source of his authority and prominence. His monarch's devoted servant, he wears Elizabeth's colours, white and black. Two pearls, an Elizabethan emblem, are worn in an earring. In his cloak are moonbeams, stitched in tiny pearls, while a silver crescent surmounts the motto, none-too-subtle allusions to Queen Elizabeth allegorized as Cynthia, chaste Roman goddess of the moon.

Like every courtier, Ralegh needed his secure sources of ready cash and investment capital. In his nephew by marriage,William Sanderson, he found a reliable partner. A highly experienced London merchant (married to Ralegh's niece Margaret Snedall, the 'nephew' was at least four years older than Sir Walter) who had inherited money from his father, Sanderson had a good track record in financing Atlantic voyagers. He had backed John Davis's pursuit of the North-West Passage in the 1580s, and he sponsored the glorious Celestial and Terrestrial globes published by Emery Molyneux in 1592.
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 Sanderson advanced Ralegh thousands of pounds, managed some aspects of the favourite's business affairs, and ploughed money into his Virginia adventures. An anonymous, and favourable, contemporary memoir of the merchant describes their relationship in more detail:

[Sanderson] did mannage his affaires all the tyme of his prosperity; And did (at severall tymes) stand bound for the said Sir Walter Raleigh for more than a hundred Thowsand pounds starling; And also for meere debt more than sixteene Thousand pounds at one tyme taken up in London most part thereof at Usury upon his own bond, such was his Credite and Reputation in those dayes,As there can be made good proofe thereof. 
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