He set out twice to find El Dorado
He was executed to appease Spain
* * *
He grew up in Devon amongst fishermen and farmers, where tales of the sea lit his imagination. In his early teens he could have joined his half-brother Humphrey Gilbert who was fighting for civilization and profit in Ireland, but he chose instead, at the age of fourteen, to join the wars in France, fighting with a detachment of English on the side of the Huguenots. France was a sophisticated place and if he was to learn the art of war, better to learn it there than among the kerns of Ireland. What exactly Raleigh did in France, or even how long he was there, is uncertain, though he did return to England a veteran—and by eighteen was off to Oxford and after a few years there moved to London, where he successfully avoided studying law, though registered at the Middle Temple, an Inn of Court that he treated (as many young gentlemen did) as a club.
In his middle twenties, after an aborted voyage to the New World, Raleigh went a-soldiering to Ireland. Humphrey Gilbert had set the tone for fighting in Ireland by lining the pathway to his tent with the severed heads of his enemies. Ireland was that sort of place. Raleigh recognized the especial cruelties of war in Ireland (his cousin was ambushed and murdered in August 1580, shortly after Raleigh landed in Cork), but he also believed that an industrious Englishman could make something out of the Irish bog if he had strength and stamina enough to reduce the bogtrotters.
It was a matter of national security, as well as personal advancement. Ireland was in rebellion (or parts of it were), and aiding the rebels was a small contingent of Spanish and Italian soldiers sent with a papal blessing. Not knowing how to fight in Ireland—the Irish were guerrillas—and not knowing the language, the Italians and the Spanish proved a hapless enemy, built themselves a fort, awaited an English siege, surrendered without much ado, and then were cut down to a man (a few women were hanged, as were some Catholic priests, though they were tortured first). Captain Raleigh was among the officers charged with executing this duty—which was by our lights inexcusable, but customary at the time, though it did spark outrage in Catholic Europe.2
Raleigh the swashbuckler was better displayed in another incident of the Irish war. He was crossing a river, pursued by Irish bushwhackers who outnumbered him at least ten or perhaps twenty to one. Raleigh calmly sat his horse in the river, aiding a fallen comrade. Armed only with a pistol and staff, he stared down his Irish pursuers who rode away shouting insults and abuse. Raleigh wrote: “The manner of my own behaviour I leave to the report of others, but the escape was strange to all men.”3
Raleigh was a clever officer, and not shy about offering advice to his commander or to the queen (through her secretary of state, and spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham) on how the situation in Ireland could be improved. He left Ireland in December 1851, having gained, with the grudging permission of the Lord Deputy of Ireland (the Puritan Lord Grey), a burnt-down castle (Barry Court). He went to London, to the queen’s court, and with the panache for which he was famous—and which made him many enemies—he “had gotten the Queen’s ear in a trice, and she began to be taken with his elocution, and loved to hear his reasons to her demands. And the truth is, she took him for a kind of oracle, which nettled them all.”4
Being a queen’s favorite brought with it money (through monopoly licenses), prestige (including an appointment as a member of Parliament from Devon), and special privileges (such as leasing digs at Durham House, a palace confiscated by the Crown from the bishop of Durham). It also gave Raleigh what he really wanted, a royal patent to go discovering in the New World. In 1584, he set out on a scouting expedition that landed in what is now North Carolina and returned to England with two natives to show off, along with glowing reports about the prospects for planting a colony there. In January 1585, Raleigh was knighted, and a coat of arms was awarded to “Walter Raleigh, Knight, Lord and Governor of Virginia.”
Virginia’s Founder
The establishment of the Virginia colony (most likely named by Raleigh after his patroness, the Virgin Queen) was Raleigh’s grand passion. But to his enormous disappointment, the queen would not let him join his next outfitted expedition. So it left without him in 1585, and instead of exploring the New World he was employed as the Lord-Lieutenant of Cornwall and Admiral of the West. He was also, in the English fashion of the time, an investor in piracy, which, as one of his biographers notes, would have made him a wealthy man independent of royal favor;5 if he had not been a court favorite, Raleigh would almost certainly have been a pirate himself. He was, after all, a handsomer, smoother, lither, more intellectual version of Sir Francis Drake; the sort who would equip his expedition to Virginia with a scientist to make the establishment of his colony a true act of discovery.
The colony began well, with the local Indians gracious because they assumed the Englishmen were gods, or at least higher beings of some sort.6 The Englishmen, however, were fatally dependent on the generosity of the Indians, whose economy was based on sufficiency rather than surplus and trade. The English had come expecting to find treasure. They were ill-prepared to become farmers in a land that required hard work. The friendly Indians became less so; other, hostile tribes begrudged the arrival of the English interlopers; and inevitably there was fighting, which was bad for the Indians because if the English were poor farmers, they were far better soldiers. The disappointed colonists returned home to England.
The Sixteenth-Century Anti-Smoking Movement
It is said that when one of Raleigh’s manser-vants first saw him smoking, he doused him with water thinking his master had caught fire.
Raleigh, however, was determined to make a go of it and recruit a sturdier group of settlers. He wanted to attract families, people who would stick it out and not give up in the absence of easy riches. He also took to smoking tobacco from an Indian pipe, demonstrating one of the comforts, and products, of a Virginia colonial life. The new settlement would be at Roanoke, the settlers of good birth, and two of the settlers were pregnant, one with a child who would be named Virginia Dare, the first child of English blood to be born in the Americas. But Roanoke proved no permanent settlement, except in legend.
In the meantime, Raleigh continued to advance at court, becoming Captain of the Guard. He was one of the queen’s most intimate friends—which of course made him many enemies. But to the queen he was an exciting conversationalist, a flattering and clever poet (his poems for the most part hold up rather well), and a dynamic man of action (which now included dabbling in espionage against Spain). She was pleased to make use of these capacities. She was also pleased to give him forty-two thousand acres in Munster, Ireland, to found an English colony there. The lands had been confiscated from the Earl of Desmond after his failed rebellion, and the goal was to establish a colony that would bring with it all the benefits of English civilization and guard the island from foreign invasion. As for the native Irish, they were regarded as the American settlers later regarded Indians—the farther away one was from them, the more sympathetic one might be to their plight; the closer one was, the more one took the view that pushing these poor, unproductive, and occasionally savage people out of the way was a simple act of advancing civilization. Though much of the time he managed his Irish estates from afar, Raleigh proved singularly adept at populating his colony with the families, farmers, skilled workers, and tradesmen, not to mention potatoes, the land needed to be profitable and self-sustaining. In Ireland, he struck up a friendship with Edmund Spenser, another expatriate and a fellow poet.
Raleigh’s main home remained Durham House, and there he gathered men with active, educated, restless minds, pushing the boundaries of current knowledge, and worrying some with their philosophical speculations—because, having jettisoned Christian orthodoxy of more than a millennium, it was not so large a step to dispense with the new Protestant orthodoxy for free-thinking speculation. Liberals call this process “the Enlightenment”; enemies of Raleigh called it atheism; and while it is clear that
Raleigh travelled some distance in the direction of free-thinking, it is equally clear that he retained his Anglicanism. Anglicanism was a religion of patriotism, and patriot he surely was. Especially as his sovereign robbed one of her bishops (in the Tudor style) to give him a country estate at Sherborne.
And Raleigh did his duty. He supervised the execution of Jesuits (though he was no Jesuit-hunter), and his great privateer warship, the Ark Raleigh (given to the queen and rechristened the Ark Royal in 1587) led the English fleet against Spain’s armada in 1588. Raleigh himself was obliged to organize the defenses of the West Country for an invasion that never took place.
What did take place was a marriage, in secret (most likely in 1592), between Raleigh and Bess Throckmorton, a maid of honor to the queen—a sacrament that, when discovered, had them struck off the roles of palace favorites and even landed Raleigh confinement in the Tower of London and Bess into a sort of house arrest. It was only after Elizabeth gouged the spoils from one of Raleigh’s privateering ventures (and left him to take a loss on his investment), that she freed him (and later Bess). Though he had profited from royal favor, he chafed at its constraints. Marriage gave him some independence; so, ironically, did his fall into the queen’s displeasure. Raleigh had often proposed overseas adventures that Elizabeth allowed—while keeping him in England. Now, with his mind fastened on the prospect of finding El Dorado, she was disposed to let him go.
In Search of El Dorado
The rumored city of gold was said to be in the jungles of Guiana, and Raleigh was committed to finding it, and carving an English colony off the Spanish Main. Raleigh set sail in 1595. On his way to El Dorado, he liberated Trinidad’s Indians from the hated Spanish (English imperialists have always had a taste for putting themselves at the heads of native armies to overthrow presumed oppressors; in this case, the capture of St. Joseph, Trinidad, also helped secure Raleigh’s rear flank before he embarked for Guiana). The Indians celebrated their annexation to the great white queen and remembered Raleigh as a hero for generations after. They also confirmed for Raleigh the existence of El Dorado, and agreed to help him find it. Raleigh and a hundred Englishmen then rowed into the mysterious, humid, mosquito-heavy jungle, the swamp of the Orinoco delta. If one wants to understand the making of the British Empire one can see it here: why should a financially well-established forty-year-old man plunge into trackless jungle in search of gold and patriotic glory? The answer: that is what Englishmen did.
They could also be taken in by the locals. As they plowed the creeper-laden swamps to the mountain country where they presumed El Dorado to be, they were told stories of Amazons and a tribe of people who had their eyes in their shoulders and their mouths in their chests—stories that were met with merry, debunking guffaws when Raleigh dutifully reported them on his return to England. But the Indians apparently believed these stories themselves, for some volunteered to go with Raleigh to fight and take El Dorado. That fight did not happen, of course, but Raleigh did not leave Guiana without making preparations for another expedition. He even left behind a teenage member of his crew, whose task was to learn the Indian language. That, Raleigh thought, would be a great help when next he returned to Guiana—which, in the event, would be twenty years later.
In the meantime, he tried his own hand at singeing the beard of the king of Spain. The Spaniards appeared to be preparing another armada; Raleigh wanted to cut them off with a mighty preemptive strike of cutlass-wielding Englishmen, and his advice was taken. A great fleet was prepared to attack the Spanish port of Cadiz. The Englishmen and their Dutch allies struck in June 1596, with Raleigh one of the fleet commanders. He was brave and intrepid and one of the most inspiring commanders in battle (his first sea action), but he was also badly wounded in the thigh (which gave him a permanent limp). He largely missed out on the month’s worth of sacking that followed Cadiz’s capture. Where others made a profit, Raleigh, in his own words, gained “naught but poverty and pain.”7
After a botched attack on the Azores (botched by the Earl of Essex—a longtime rival, later executed for treason; Raleigh was once again gallant in action) he increasingly busied himself, of necessity, with business and parliamentary affairs. Business in Ireland was bad. The ever rebellious natives had despoiled his estates, and he eventually conceded there was little profit to be made in that soggy, contumacious island. In Parliament he proved himself a commonsensical and generous representative of the people’s interests. But when his great patroness Elizabeth died Raleigh found himself in disfavor with the new king, James VI of Scotland, now James I of England. Raleigh was accused of involvement in a Catholic plot to overthrow the new monarch—a charge ludicrous on its face but potentially deadly in its consequences. Though he defended himself with wonderful rhetorical art, he was found guilty. His death sentence was suspended by the king who kept him imprisoned in the Tower of London for thirteen years.
Raleigh the Scholar’s Martial Judgment
“If therefore it be demanded whether the Macedonian or the Roman were the best warrior, I will answer, the English. . . . If any man ask, how then it came to pass that the English won so many battles.... I may, with best commendation of modesty, refer him to the French historian; who... useth these words: ‘The English[man] comes with a conquering bravery, as he that was accustomed to gain everywhere, without any stay.’”
Quoted in Norman Lloyd Williams, Sir Walter Raleigh (Cassell Biographies, 1988), p. 227
These were not wasted years. Though life expectancies were shorter, men dreamed big in those days, and Raleigh still dreamt of gold mines in Guiana. His thoughts turned to religion too, and he became something of a moral philosopher, his philosophy deeply grounded in the Bible and a waxing Christian faith. He devoted himself to calculations mathematical and to conducting scientific experiments—chemical and medical mostly—and to writing a massive (and unfinished) history of the world, focused on the history recounted in the Bible, as well as the history of ancient Greece and Rome, and the history of England. The king’s wife liked him and was wont to intercede for him, as did the king’s son, to whom he became a sort of informal tutor and adviser.
Raleigh Feeling the Blade of His Executioner’s Axe
“This is a sharp medicine but it is a physician for all diseases.”
Quoted in Raleigh Trevelyan, Sir Walter Raleigh (Henry Holt, 2002), p. 552
For thirteen years, Raleigh was considered legally dead (though he was animated enough to father another son with his wife Bess). When he was finally resurrected, in 1616, it was to sail again for Guiana. But El Dorado would be his undoing. The sixty-two-year-old adventurer came down desperately sick, and his scapegrace but brave son Wat died leading his men into battle—a battle against Spaniards that it would have been politic to avoid, for the king of Spain demanded Raleigh’s head for the outrage. As Raleigh was an already condemned man, it was an easy diplomatic solution for King James to put Raleigh on trial again, have him condemned, and this time send him to the chopping block. Raleigh showed an impressive, Christian calm before the executioner—so much so that the axeman seemed paralyzed and unable to do his duty. Raleigh called out to him: “Strike, man, strike!” and the blade crashed down once, and then again to finish the job.
It was poor payment for a patriot, and a man of talent. But England has always been careless of these; sending out privately educated gentlemen to tame savage tribes, in which duty, Kipling noted in his poem The Arithmetic of the Frontier, “Two thousand pounds of education” could drop “to a ten-rupee jezail” bullet. The British Empire always trusted that more gallant, ingenious men would come springing up—and they did, and they were put to good use.
Chapter Nine
ARTHUR WELLESLEY, THE 1ST DUKE OF WELLINGTON (1769–1852)
“My ugly boy Arthur is food for powder and nothing more.”
—the assessment of Arthur Wellesley’s loving mother1
Arthur Wellesley, the man who would become the “Iron Duke,” the 1st Duke of Wellington
, was born in Dublin to a family that had come to England with William the Conqueror, and to Ireland with its subsequent Norman conquest. It was a noble family. His father was an earl and a member of the Irish House of Lords, his mother the daughter of a viscount. The Anglo-Irish aristocracy of which he was a part was bred to lead—especially to lead men into battle.
Arthur was sent to Eton, where he remained a rather lonely figure, an outsider in all except bloodlines. His mother then took him to Brussels to learn French. The one, and possibly only, talent he showed at this time was a facility with the violin, something he had inherited from his (now late) father. His eldest brother was in the Irish House of Lords and had a seat in Parliament at Westminster. His second brother was a former naval man elected to the Irish parliament. His younger brother appeared to have brains and piety sufficient for the church, and his youngest brother was aiming for an army career. Only Arthur seemed to be without prospects or ambition. This would change.
* * *
Did you know?
Wellington, an accomplished musician, burnt his violin to concentrate on being a soldier
The “Iron Duke,” renowned for his self-control, wept over battlefield losses
It was Wellington, the arch-Conservative, who carried Catholic Emancipation
* * *
He spent a year at the French Royal Academy of Equitation at Angers, a finishing school for gentlemen and potential officers. When he returned home at the end of 1786, even his mother was impressed at his transformation—the awkward boy was now handsome, sometimes mischievous, sometimes reserved, and still to grow into his full dignity, but to his admirers at least he was a charming young man. The following year, before he turned eighteen, he was commissioned an infantry ensign. Soon promoted to lieutenant and stationed in Ireland, he became a member of the Irish House of Commons at the age of only nineteen.
The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire Page 10
