Raleigh was not a secret adept of Giordano Bruno’s Hermetic creed, or a secret unbeliever. As his brush with Parson Ironside showed, he was a thoughtful, humorous, but basically serious person. Absolutely typical of intellectuals of his age, he – in common with Montaigne, or with Philip Sidney – was impossible to pin down to a position. The characteristic of the age was uncertainty, which was perhaps what made the institutions of Church and state so merciless to minds that, inevitably, strayed outside the orthodoxies. But Europe was fighting wars about matters that, as Raleigh’s playful Socratic dialogue in Winterbourne demonstrated to the foolish and vindictive clergyman, could not possibly be proved true or false. In the Preface to his History of the World, he wrote:
Certainly there is nothing more to bee admired, and more to bee lamented, than the privat contention, the passionate dispute, the personall hatred, and the perpetuall warre, massacres, and murders, for Religion among Christians: the discourse whereof hath so occupied the World, as it hath well neare driven the practise thereof out of the world.
The appalling disparity between the bitterness of the quarrels and the message of Love that lay at the heart of the Christian message could not but induce an aghast cynicism: ‘Wee are all (in effect) become Comoedians in religion: and while we act in gesture and voice, divine vertues, in all the course of our lives wee renounce our Persons, and the parts wee play.’15
If there was a School of Night, as opposed to a group of friends who felt free, when together, to air their thoughts without reference to thought-police, then Raleigh was the centre of it. The most fascinating and attractive character, he understandably drew to himself poets and philosophers, explorers and adventurers. He was much the most interesting of all Queen Elizabeth’s favourites, and from 1582 to 1592 she showered him with honours: Lord Warden of the Stanneries, Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall, Vice Admiral of the Western Counties and, as Captain of the Queen’s Bodyguard, a courtier who was all but unable to leave her side.
Sir John Harington, the Queen’s godson and the translator of Ariosto, tells the story that when Raleigh was riding between Plymouth and the court, he fell in love with Sherborne Castle, the country seat of the Bishops of Sherborne. ‘This Castle being right in the way, he cast such an eye upon it as Ahab did upon Naboth’s vineyard, and once above the rest being talking of it, of the commodiousness of the place, and how easily it might be got from the bishopric, suddenly over and over came his horse, that his very face, which was then thought a very good face, ploughed up the earth where he fell.’
It was perhaps an unhappy omen of Raleigh’s accident-prone career. At the time, the Queen was only too happy to force the Bishops of Sherborne to allow the Crown a ninety-nine-year lease upon the castle and estate, and to give the castle to Raleigh as his grace-and-favour residence. The favour did not last long. In the early days, when the Queen was still smarting from the marriage of her greatest love, Leicester, to Lettice Knollys, Raleigh’s flattering attentions were a consolation. It is pointless to ask whether his protestations of love for Elizabeth were ‘genuine’. Court life was an elaborate dance. The abject gestures and hyperbolic words of the successful courtier would be insanely sycophantic if translated into a modern context – if, for example, we were to imagine a modern male office worker addressing such words to his female boss as Raleigh wrote to Elizabeth:
O princely form, my fancy’s adamant,
Divine conceit, my pain’s acceptance,
Oh all in one, oh heaven on earth transparent,
The seat of joy’s and love’s abundance!
But the poem ‘The Ocean to Scinthia’ (that is, Raleigh to Elizabeth) subverts and extends many of the courtly conventions. Behind the ritualistic façade of the courtier’s devotion to his jewel-encrusted monarch-doll there was a tempestuous, very often serious and unhappy friendship between two extremely strong characters. Raleigh, exceptionally tall and very good-looking, undoubtedly attracted the Queen sexually. He was also a match for her intellectually, which few people were. She must have relished the side of him that was cynical, enquiring and angry, and which surfaces from time to time in some of the very few poems agreed by scholars to be of his composition:
Tell potentates, they live
Acting by others’ action,
Not loved unless they give,
Not strong but by affection.
If potentates reply,
Give potentates the lie.
Raleigh’s cleverness, his ability to read and converse in three modern European languages, his grace, his panache and his physical courage would all have been appealing to the Queen. But it was not to be expected that such a person would be sexless, and Ocean’s (Walter’s, or Wa’ter’s) love for the Chaste Moon-Goddess could not be the whole of Raleigh’s life. Elizabeth might try to hide this obvious fact from herself, but it could not be hidden from Raleigh.
Evidently there were always tensions in their relationship, and even before the 2nd Earl of Essex invaded her heart, she could be petulant and dismissive of Raleigh in his role of favourite. For a while, the two men were uneasy friends and rivals for the position of chief favourite at court. In 1588, after some petty squabble, Essex challenged Raleigh to a duel. Raleigh went to Ireland, and it was on this visit that he befriended Spenser, and read Spenser’s work-in-progress, probably the first three books of The Faerie Queene. As well as being one of the poem’s first great champions, Raleigh also became some of the characters within Spenser’s fantasy: not only within The Faerie Queene, but in the charming Colin Clouts Come Home Againe. It tells the story of how Raleigh – the Shepherd of the Sea – came to Ireland, and persuaded Spenser to cross the sea to visit Cynthia (Elizabeth) and the beautiful ladies of her court. They left Kilcolman, Spenser’s Irish seat, in the autumn of 1589; eighteen months later the Queen rewarded Spenser with an annual pension of £50 to complete his epic. The poem is dated ‘the 27th of December 1591, from my house of Kilcolman’. So, for this London-born poet, Ireland had become home, even though England is represented as a land of peace and civilisation beside the tormented island:
For there all happie peace and plenteous store
Conspire in one to make contented blisse:
No wayling there nor wretchednesse is heard,
No bloodie issues nor no leprosies,
No grisly famine, nor no raging sweard,
No nightly bodrags [raids], nor no hue and cries . . .16
It is a glorious poem. The description of the sea-voyage to England is especially fine. The list of court beauties is in part poetry, in part the Elizabethan equivalent of a ‘social diary’ in a modern illustrated magazine, and in part an application for patronage. His praise of ‘Amaryllis’ – Alice Spencer, the recent widow of Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange – will catch the eye of literary historians, for this is the lady who would live well into the seventeenth century and would be the patroness – by then as the Countess of Derby – to whom Milton dedicated Comus. Her splendid tomb in Harefield, Middlesex, shows her golden hair streaming over her shoulders.
It is noticeable that Spenser singles out love, and the worship of the love-god Cupid, as the particular occupational hazard of the poet – ‘For him the greatest of the gods we deem.’ But the contrast between the rancorous, feud-ridden court and the idyllic rural delights of Kilcolman is the real theme of this extremely deft and backhanded piece of pastoral. Whereas the Shepherd of the Ocean has promised the simpleton-bard a journey to a place where there are no ‘Troubles’ of the classic Irish kind – midnight raids, fights, killings – he actually leads him into a court where the rivalries and feuds provide evidence of human depravity that is every bit as strong. In the dedication to Raleigh, Spenser alludes to the ‘malice of evill mouthes, which are always wide open to carpe at and misconstrue my simple meaning. I pray continually for your happinesse’. The poem was not published until 1595, but this dedication is dated 1591, when Raleigh’s happiness – and indeed his very life – was threatened by a situation that S
penser, in his apparently simple pastoral poem of two bumpkin shepherds, had so laid bare.
During the period of Spenser’s visit back to England, and his excited taste of court life with its beautiful women – ‘Beautie is the bayt, which with delight / Doth man allure’17 – Raleigh fell in love with one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting: Elizabeth Throckmorton. By the time Raleigh had taken possession of Sherborne Castle, and Spenser had gone back to Ireland, Bess Throckmorton was pregnant. The lovers were to grow into a devoted married couple, but they both knew the Queen and realised they were in deadly peril. Raleigh was thirty-six or thirty-seven. Bess was twenty-five when her baby was born. The child was hastily christened: the godparents were his uncle, Arthur Throckmorton, Anna Throckmorton and, of all people, the Earl of Essex. He was then hastily sent to a wet-nurse in Enfield. Raleigh was supposed to be planning a naval expedition against the Spanish, and Bess tried to return to court as if the marriage and the baby had never happened. There was no real hope of keeping their marriage a secret – not in such a court as that. For this reason, presumably, Raleigh attempted ‘damage limitation’: getting Essex as the godfather of the child, and a building-up of his own reputation as an indispensable sea-hero. But there was no denying what had happened. He, the favourite, or ex-favourite, had committed that unpardonable sin. Raleigh and Bess were sent to the Tower of London.
It was probably while he was in the Tower that Raleigh wrote his poem, the ‘Book of the Ocean to Cynthia’. He let it be known that this was to be an extended work of twelve books, like The Faerie Queene. How seriously are we to take this? The first ten books are supposedly ‘lost’, but it is just as possible that he never wrote them. Given his friendship with Spenser, his sardonic nature, his anger with the Queen, is it not likely that he built up the idea of the long poem to Cynthia as a sort of bitter joke? There is certainly a great bitterness in the poem as he looks back on his twelve years as the companion-courtier of that impossible character ‘Cynthia’:
Twelve years entire I wasted in this war,18
Twelve years of my most happy younger days;
But I in them, and they now wasted are,
Of all which past the sorrow only stays.
At nearly forty, a sixteenth century man was entering, if not old age, then a period when the best of life is over. C.S. Lewis wrote that the quatrains ‘vibrate with sombre passion’, as well they might, as Raleigh reflected on his dangerous and emotionally upsetting relationship with the Queen. As it happened, he only had to spend five weeks in the Tower. His wife was imprisoned for rather longer, but although they were released, it was ‘never glad confident morning again’. Raleigh’s hey-day as a courtier was over. He now looked abroad for glory.
26
My America
RALEIGH AND HIS wife were sent to a prison where – had the Queen’s whim so decreed – they might easily have been incarcerated for years, or until death. As things turned out, Raleigh did, under the next monarch, spend years of his life in the Tower, and was beheaded there in 1618. Prince Henry, James I’s son, who loved Raleigh and admired his genius, said that ‘no king but his father would keep such a bird in a cage’ and blamed Robert Cecil (by then the Earl of Salisbury) for his sad fate. 1 Bess, as a maid of honour, had incurred the Queen’s wrath for marrying without royal consent. But one gets an uncanny sense that the offence for which Walter and Bess Raleigh were sent down by Elizabeth in 1591 was that of consummating heterosexual love, procreating and marrying. In order to atone for these sins, Raleigh would have to commit ‘virtuous’ deeds – that is, sail out into the high seas, commit acts of piracy and mass murder on Spanish vessels and then sail to the New World to lay claim to land inhabited by other people. Such is the moral universe that the Elizabethans at court inhabited. No wonder, in order to compose his great moral epic The Faerie Queene, Spenser felt he had to return to the rural seclusion in Ireland, where human wrongdoing was daily manifest, but morality was perhaps a little less inverted.
While Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower, his old friend Sir Richard Grenville was sent in his place, alongside Lord Thomas Howard, to capture the Spanish treasure-ships at sea. Grenville’s ship was the Revenge. Three of the other vessels were captained by men who would be Raleigh’s comrades on the later voyage to Guiana: Whiddon, Cross and Thynne. They loitered off the Azores, some sixteen English ships. By the end of August 1591, however, sailing off the coast of Portugal, the Earl of Cumberland got wind of what the Spanish intended – namely to send an Armada of fifty-three ships against the English state-sponsored pirates. Cumberland was able to reach the Azores just, but only just, before the arrival of the Spanish fleet. He found the English in a bad way – fever and sickness had weakened the men of six ships, and Lord Thomas Howard decided that it would be suicidal to engage with an enemy so hugely superior in strength and numbers. So he weighed anchor and took off to England. The Spanish had surrounded Grenville before he could pick up his men or rejoin the English fleet. Grenville disobeyed Howard’s orders to rejoin the fleet. He was not an experienced sailor, and the loss of the Revenge and the men on it was his fault. Yet Raleigh saw the death of the stubborn Cornishman Grenville as heroic. Rather than surrender to the Spaniards, Grenville was prepared to die, with all his crew, and if necessary to destroy the ships that remained to them rather than allow them to fall into enemy hands. There is something undeniably impressive about this: in his defiance, his doughty Protestantism, his contempt for the enemy and his willing embrace of death, Sir Richard Grenville was an archetypical Elizabethan hero; and so the loss of the Revenge passed into historical legend, being seen as on the scale of the defence of the 300 at Thermopylae. Tennyson’s version of the story, based on his reading of Froude, for a hundred years became part of the poetic repertoire of any English child:
‘We die – does it matter when?
Sink me the ship, Master Gunner – sink her, split her in twain!
Fall into the hands of God, not into the hands of Spain!’
The patriotic Victorians, Tennyson and Froude, would have been unable to write about the loss of the Revenge in the way that they did, had it not been for Raleigh who first immortalised the legend in ‘A report of the truth of the fight about the Isles of Azores, this last summer betwixt the Revenge, one of Her Majesties Shippes, and an Armada of the King of Spaine’. It is one of Raleigh’s finest pieces of prose, violently partisan, crudely anti-Spanish, but essential reading if you want to capture the heroic Elizabethan mindset and their attitude to the Spanish Empire, which then dominated the world. It is one of the great pieces of battle-reportage in the English language:
All the Powder of the Revenge to the last barrel was now spent, all her pikes broken, fortie of her best men slaine, and the most part of the rest hurt. In the beginning of the fight she had but one hundredth free from sicknes, and fourscore and ten sicke, laid in hold upon the Ballast. A small troop to man such a ship, and a weak Garrison to resist so mighty an Army. By those hundred all was sustained, the voleis, bourdings, and entrings of fifteen ships of warre, besides those which beat her at large. On the contrarie, the Spanish were always supplied with souldiers brought from everie squadron: all manner of Armes and pouder at wil.
Raleigh was insistent that the majority of the English fleet did not sail away for reasons of cowardice; but he was also anxious to absolve his old friend Grenville from any imputation of incompetence. There were men still stuck on the island and he could not leave them to the merciless fates of captives of Spain, which were by now notoriously commonplace throughout the world.
Raleigh was contemptuous of the religious arguments put forward by the King of Spain, and by ‘their runnagate Jesuites’, which place high on any Spanish agenda the wish to convert the world to Catholicism. ‘Neither have they at any time as they protest invaded the kingdoms of the Indies and Peru and els where, but onely led thereunto, rather to reduce the people to Christianitie, then for either golde or empire.’ Conquest and world domination were their
aim and business, and Raleigh wanted no one – least of all English Catholics such as so many of his Throckmorton in-laws – to be deceived by any of the propaganda. The King of Spain ‘useth his pretence of religion, for no other purpose, but to bewitch us from the obedience of our naturall Prince’.
Raleigh therefore felt perfectly within his rights, as an Englishman, to exact revenge for the Revenge. And since this venture stood to make its backers, including the Queen, a great deal of money, Raleigh was temporarily released from the Tower. The Queen adventured two ships, and £3,000. Raleigh gave his ship, the Roebuck, and a lot of borrowed money. The idea had been that Raleigh would accompany the fleet to the coast of Spain, and then return to England while they sailed on to Panama. As soon as he was at sea, however, Raleigh ignored all the orders from Frobisher to go home. He persuaded Frobisher to stay and watch the Spanish coast while he took his squadron to the Azores, where they commandeered two giant Spanish carracks from the East Indies. The Santa Cruz, having been plundered, they drove ashore and burned. The Madre de Dios – 1,600 tons, a huge ship – was boarded and taken. The sailors on board who took her back to England could not believe their luck and spent the whole voyage pilfering loot. Raleigh managed to get some small return on his investment, though he claimed he lost on the deal. (He and his partners put in £34,000, took £36,000 out, but had a lot of incidental expense.) The Queen took the bulk of the loot – valued at £82,666. 13s. 4d.
The Elizabethans Page 45
