—And Ralegh had gained, perhaps through Gascoigne, some notice of both Leicester and Grey. Both of whom he later served.
—In 1577 Ralegh could list himself, as many with and without office did, as being “of the Court,” when he stood bail for two rowdy Devon men, his servants. He was living in the suburb of Islington. And there were already some stories of tavern brawls of his own. In one, which went the rounds, he tied the long ends of a fellow’s mustache into a knot, then stuffed it in his mouth.
—In the summer of 1578 Sir Humphrey Gilbert received a patent to settle with Englishmen any lands in the New World “not actually possessed of any Christian prince or people,” allowing him six years to find and to settle lands overseas. Sir Humphrey drew into this adventure his brothers, Adrian and Sir John, and to assist him his half brothers Carew and Walter Ralegh. Gascoigne had also invested before he died.
—One partner in the venture, Sir Humphrey’s chief support, Henry Knollys, was son of Sir Francis Knollys, the Queen’s Treasurer of the Household. But before they had well begun, Knollys deserted this for privateering in closer waters.
—At the end of November of ’78, just the worst time for a crossing, Sir Humphrey Gilbert set out with seven ships. One of them, old and leaky, was the Falcon, commanded by Walter Ralegh and mastered by Simon Fernandez, the Portuguese pilot. Storms and other troubles caused Gilbert’s venture to fail. His ships were scattered and returned to port. Ralegh, however, went on alone in the Falcon to try his luck at privateering. Did not return to England until May of ’79.
—I know nothing of his nautical affairs and care less, except as they illuminate his shadowy early life at the Court; but there is some urgency in the man who will take an old ship, his first command, alone for six months, risking everything on the venture. There must have been nothing tugging him back to Court. And he could not afford to have the adventure come to nothing. Perhaps on his voyage he gained something, enough to offset his losses, but it could not have been much. He was fortunate to bring back the Falcon afloat and to be alive.
—By early 1580 he was making his mark in another way—and the worst way to please the Queen. Was called before Council and committed to Fleet prison, for a week, for coming to swords with Sir Thomas Perrot. Not long after he was again in a brawl at the tennis court and was packed off to cool his humors at the Marshalsea.
—Nothing unusual, except that he was able to survive an unhappy reputation. There were many in the Court who foolishly looked for renown as ruffians. It is always easy to pick a quarrel or begin a brawl. And these rogues of Court, those who lived long enough, vanished forever. Both Queen and Council were adamant against permitting her Court to become a cockpit.
—Most curious is why Walter Ralegh fell to playing this game. In his writings he has ridiculed the courtier’s habit of dueling. And later he proved himself able to exercise restraint in the face of provocation. It may be he had given up all hope at Court by then. A younger crop of courtiers was already blooming. His chances had passed him by.
—By the summer of 1580 he was gone. Back to the craft of warfare. Off to Ireland as the captain of a company of foot soldiers.
—There his fortunes took a turn for the better, for when he came back to Court it was as one of Leicester’s men, and given a nod of approval by Walsingham as well. He returned in time for the Christmas Revels of ’81.
—No doubt in the world but William Cecil, Lord Burghley, had an eye upon him too. Which was Cecil’s duty and self-interest. But it was the eye of quiet suspicion. Like a good clerk, he was aware of Ralegh’s motley record and the signs of contradiction in him. Would be alert, but far too careful to interfere yet with a young man of tentative promise, especially before the man had gained anything. Wisdom and experience taught Burghley, who endured like a willow, by bending, through the times of Edward and Mary, to stand tall and transformed now, like an oak, that to sound premature alarms is a waste of time. Young men, even if they did happen to catch the Queen’s eye and please her, came and went, blossomed, then faded like May’s meadow flowers.
Burghley knew that if Ralegh did not capture the Queen’s interest, Leicester and Walsingham would drop him like a loose coin. There were always others. And he judged that neither Leicester nor Walsingham would advance any man they had any reason to fear themselves. Their separate interest in Ralegh was, therefore, reassuring.
—Suppose he did attract the attention of the Queen? He would gain a rung or two upon that slippery Jacob’s ladder at Court. Chances were he would be left there to hang on for as long as he was able.
—All misjudged him, Walsingham, Leicester, and Burghley. More important, they misjudged the Queen.
—Within a few weeks after his return, Ralegh had been noticed by the Queen. She singled him out of a crowd for a moment of recognition during one of her Sunday processions.
—A public notice of his existence and a few words …
—A sign that she found him pleasing and that he might be watched. No great shakes of a lamb’s tail. Many men labored long at schemes and good works, spending themselves poor in service to gain nothing more than that. An honor, to be sure, and more than he could have expected. And, in justice, had he never received another sign of favor from the Queen, it would have been sufficient. Not to his ambitions, of course, but in the scale of things at Court.
—All misjudged Walter Ralegh. They misjudged the Queen also. Not perceiving that she had now ruled for nearly twenty years. And what that meant.
—Her early favorites were older. Beginning of stiffness in the joints of nimble Sir Christopher Hatton. Who had danced into favor when dancing was her best cordial. All were older; though she would not, could not hold up a mirror glass for them to see it. She, too, would be caught in that cold reflection.
—As Queen she could justify her impulse to find a new favorite. Besides which she was a woman, and she could not soothe her mixed feelings, of content and discontent, of thanksgiving and vague dread, like any milkmaid who can buy a new bonnet at the fair. Yet she could find a new favorite if she wished to.
—Here was a full-grown man, a proud soldier, being put forward by her counselors. Worth looking at.
—In a short time, by spring of 1582, there was no doubt that Walter Ralegh had stepped into the charmed, inmost circle close to the Queen. The next bestowal was a nickname. Walter Ralegh became Water, and sometimes Wit or Oracle.
—Old favorites itched with anxiety. Which flattered her.
—And now the world was suddenly all promises for Ralegh, of everything or nothing. His deep-grained satirical sense let him bear uncertainty. He could make light of it, and she would understand that and take it for a compliment.
—About that time, on a spring day, the Queen and a party were walking in the gallery of the palace.
—He stopped walking and went to a window, where he busied himself by writing on a pane with a diamond. He wrote: “Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall.”
—Turned to find the Queen standing behind him. He knelt, then, and she took the diamond from him. She wrote the second line in answer: “If thy heart fail thee, climb not at all.”
—Without a word she turned and rejoined her group, leaving him kneeling, smiling to himself.
—The Queen kept the diamond.
—For the next ten years he was showered with rewards and favor. And even after the disgrace of his marriage and his time in the wilderness, there were more.
—In a marvelous short time Walter Ralegh was a man of wealth. Among the rewards she bestowed upon him were two estates from All Souls College; the monopoly patent to license the selling of wines and to exact fines in this capacity; other monopolies, including, aptly, one upon the traffic in playing cards; a license to export woolen broadcloth; Durham House on the river; the whole estate of Sherbourne in Dorset; forty-two thousand acres of land in Ireland along the River Black water, in Cork and Waterford—and at that time by statute law no man was allowed to hold seigniory ov
er more than twelve thousand acres there—including nine castles, properties in and around the town of Youghal, and Lismore Castle; a license to export any and all commodities from Munster whether or not there were legal restrictions; and when Anthony Babington died for his plot against the Queen and forfeited his estate, Babington’s lands and property in Nottingham, Lincoln, and Derby went to Ralegh. Ralegh also received a patent to explore and to make colonies in any part of the New World not already in the possession of a Christian kingdom and the rights to control all access to any settlement he should found there.
—He was knighted by the Queen, who was frugal with this honor.
—Among offices and titles Ralegh held were these: Captain of the Guard, Lord Warden of the Stanneries, Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall, Vice-Admiral of Devon and Cornwall, Ranger of Gillingham Forest, Captain of Portland Castle, and Governor of the Island of Jersey.
—He was possessed of the wealth and power of many of the nobility and with the possibility of using it to accumulate even more. He could, if he wished, like a dog with a bone, settle for the present satisfaction and defend it. Which satisfaction was, in truth, more than even a child’s falcon-free imagination could comprehend.
—Pain and poverty and thwarted ambition, which are the lot of most creatures, whether they live at Court or a barn, can break the virtues like brittle bones. But it is also true that good fortune can jar and shake a man’s soul. For, most remarkable of all, he was free. Changed or not, he was, upon the whim of another, freed of all he had imagined himself to be.
—Consider that for the favorite, even as the head-whirling intoxication of favor released him from many bondages, it forged new fetters. For what had been given to him could, in like fashion, with the same absence of warning or justice, be—The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord—withdrawn.
—Now he was studied by the court. Observed like any fish in a garden pool. Every word and action noted, glossed for hidden meaning. Raised above others, he must pay a dear price; lonely when most public; rich, yet belonging to others: all others who, clinging to the figure of justice, as sailors, they say, will hang on for life to a gloating chest or broken spar, examine him for any signs of virtue which might justify his fortune. Likewise, more close and intent, solemn as a jeweler searching a stone for flaws, yet calm, too, like poised cats studying the antics of a wounded bird they watched and waited for signs of weakness which might betray him.
Walter Ralegh proved no miserly guardian of new fortunes. He was willing to risk it all upon adventures. He spent of his wealth as if, like the deepest well, it could never run dry.
—This was a secular act of faith in which the Queen was well pleased. It pleased others at Court for other reasons. By his blithe disregard he was most vulnerable, able to fall in an instant and to fall as far as he had been raised.
—Yet, as if sharing a secret with the Queen, as if in league and conspiracy with her, he knew these things, and they did not trouble him. Vulnerability never taught him to be humble. Rather it increased his indifference, up to the edge of impudence.
—He seldom pressed suit for himself, but he took pleasure in seeking favor for others, high and low; especial pleasure, no doubt, in making suit for his onetime master and better—the Earl of Leicester.
—Once in the presence of a crowd he knelt before the Queen and asked some favor for a friend.
“When, Sir Walter, will you cease to be a beggar?” the Queen demanded.
“When Your Gracious Majesty ceases to be a benefactor,” he said.
—She laughed and granted the suit.
—On another occasion, that sassy little Mr. Richard Tarlton, the celebrated comedian, was performing. And, noticing Ralegh beside the Queen whispering into the Queen’s ear and the Queen nodding, he clapped his hands as loud as an arquebus and leveled an accusing finger at Ralegh.
“See!” he cried out. “See how the knave commands the Queen!”
—Ralegh laughed out loud. And the Queen corrected Tarlton with a gentle frown.
—And all the while Ralegh was spending his wealth upon ventures and the voyages he could not make, being required to remain at Court. He became an equal and generous patron to the new learning and to our antiquarians. He gave comfort to scholars and artisans and limners. A gentleman of means is known by these things. The books which are dedicated to him are the witnesses of affluence. Printed books acknowledge Ralegh’s patronage and interest in history, geography and cartography, medicine, antiquities, and the natural philosophies such as chemistry. He was a patron of music and even John Case’s Praise of Music calls him a lover of good music and a skilled musician. His portraits, from a proper early miniature by Nicholas Hilliard to the final one, made before his last Guiana voyage, show he was much interested in and knowing of fashions in painting. He hired the artist John White to join with Thomas Harriot in depicting, by words and pictures, the new world of Virginia. He spent a lavish sum to support the English publication of the drawings of James Morgues.
—Two great natural philosophers, Harriot and Dr. John Dee, were more friends than servants, and assisted him in his studies of chemistry, astronomy, mathematics, geography, shipbuilding and navigation.
—A poet himself, he was recognized as one of the finest of the gentlemen poets, whose work was seldom published but widely known in manuscripts. As early as 1589 his repute was sufficient for him to be singled out by George Puttenham in The Arte of English Poesie: “For dittie and amorous Ode I finde Sir Walter Rawleyghs vayne most loftie, insolent and passionate.”
—But if he was known and respected for his verses among the poets of Court, from Sidney to Harrington, he was surprising for the divers poets he patronized, men as various and variously gifted as Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, George Chapman, Francis Beaumont, and John Fletcher. More than patron, he mingled with poets and scribblers, taking as much pleasure in an evening at the Mermaid as a night at Court. By circumstance he can never have been close to Mr. William Shakespeare, who was servant to both Essex and Southampton, but he must have known him at the Mermaid and elsewhere, for Ralegh haunted the playhouses. Was closest of all to Edmund Spenser, whose holdings at Kilcolman were near to Ralegh’s Irish estates. Spenser wrote of Ralegh in “Colin Clout’s Come Home Again” and allegorically in The Faerie Queene. For which great work Ralegh produced a dedicatory poem. It was Ralegh who first introduced Spenser at Court and managed to secure a pension for him.
—Curious, whenever Ralegh found himself unable to patronize these men, he found other patrons for them including some among his enemies.
—It was not difficult for enemies to turn this patronage and friendship with learned men, poets, artisans and such, against him. Like the others, he sometimes made use of poets to serve his turn, to promote enterprises or to satirize rivals. These things could be answered, thrust and counterthrust. But his friendships with these men, especially the nature of their discussions and disputations, his experiments with new instruments and theories in natural philosphy, were to prove more dangerous. Easy for the envious to conceive that their privacy was secrecy. Easy enough to trouble the superstitious and the unlearned with rumors of their doings.
—So long as he was in the Queen’s favor, he was secure. Yet his indifference to Court opinion and popular gossip made him a fine standing target for satire.
—Though he never set new styles of dress or affected foppish fashions, his clothing was priceless. Every courtier wore his fortune on his back, like a gaudy snail, and so did Ralegh. When he had no fortune, this was common enough to be ignored; but when he was rich, his show of pearls and jewels was taken to be proud and arrogant. He seemed to be biting his thumb at them all.
—Once he appeared in a splendid and original costume of black and white only, sprinkled with countless pearls. It was so like, as if cut from the same magic bolt of cloth, a gown the Queen was wearing, that they appeared like twins together. When he first astonished her w
ith this costume, she laughed and embraced him. Any woman who had dared such a thing would have been boxed about the ears in a trice. And most men, even among their favorites, would have been sent off to enjoy a long season of English country life. His impudence differs from that gesture of Essex at the tiltyard. Essex’s jest was for the crowd; Ralegh’s, though public, was more like a secret shared with the Queen. He courted no favor but hers.
—There was always some self-satire in his mirth. Once, another time of the tiltyard, when rumor was he had suffered some misfortune or disgrace, Ralegh came riding out of the gate of Durham House and down the Strand toward Whitehall, not, like Essex, making a show of the number of his retainers, but himself clad entirely in armor made of silver.
—From these occasions and many others I conclude the Queen was willing to permit him to play the conny-catcher to the world of connies, to gull his rivals, to equivocate, to take on almost any role or pose he fancied. What she demanded in return was an absolute, unflagging loyalty and trust.
—If so, then he was bound, sooner or later, to betray himself and fail her.
—Later in 1591 he secretly married Elizabeth Throckmorton, one of the Queen’s maids of honor. In March of ’92, while Ralegh was elsewhere, freed from the confines of Court by the war with Spain, preparing an expedition to strike the Spanish Indies flota and the Isthmus of Panama, his firstborn son, Damerei, was christened, the Earl of Essex serving as godfather. Within a month Bess Throckmorton returned to Court and resumed her duties. By May Ralegh had been recalled and committed to the keeping of Robert Cecil. Otherwise no action was taken against him.
—It was not until August that the Queen acted, ordering Ralegh and his wife committed to the Tower. The rumor of the marriage had been bruited about Court for some time, and Ralegh had denied it to his friends, succeeding only in arousing more speculation. The Queen must have known the truth for a long time.
Death of the Fox Page 29
