1603 Walter Raleigh probably never laid his cloak down over a muddy puddle so Queen Elizabeth I could walk over dry-shod. It probably wasn’t he who brought tobacco and the potato back from the New World to England. Even so, his actual life was crammed with near-legendary action. In turn soldier, explorer, member of parliament and (unsuccessful) settler of colonies, he was the queen’s favourite – contending with the Earls of Leicester and Essex – until he secretly married one of her ladies-in-waiting and got thrown in the Tower at her majesty’s displeasure. Incurring not wrath but cold revenge from Elizabeth’s successor, he went on trial for treason on this day, suspected of taking part in a plot against the life of James I, but the sentence was commuted.
Less often remembered, or even mentioned, is his writing: his narratives of exploration, his monumental A History of the World (1614) – above all, his verse. In the nearly 700 pages of his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, C.S. Lewis can spare just under two to Raleigh, whom he dismisses as ‘an amateur’ with ‘no style of his own’. He is usually classified as one of the ‘silver’ – or even ‘drab’ – poets. By this they mean that he eschewed the polysyllabic, Latinate diction of the high Renaissance (as in Daniel Drayton’s ‘the almes of thy superfluous prayse’) and also the strenuous ingenuity of Donne and the other metaphysicals.
Raleigh’s style (yes, he did have one) was anti-romantic, deploying an Anglo-Saxon vocabulary to challenge the more optimistic clichés of romantic love. He focused more on love lost than sought or enjoyed, more on the end of life than its prime, more on actual conditions in the countryside than on its pastoral idealisation. His response to Marlowe’s ‘The Shepherd’s Plea’ is typical. Here is Marlowe:
Come live with me, and be my love, …
And we will sit upon the rocks,
And see the shepherds feed their flocks.
And here is Raleigh’s ‘The Nymph’s Reply’:
If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every shepherd’s tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move …
But time drives flocks from field to fold,
When rivers rage and rocks grow cold.
If Raleigh had treated fantasies of New World riches as sceptically as he had literary conventions, he might have died in his bed. As it was, he made not one but two fruitless voyages to Venezuela in search of El Dorado, the golden city. On the second he laid waste to a Spanish settlement on the Orinoco. Buckling under Spanish pressure, James I reinstated the death sentence handed down in 1603.
The condemned man kept his sang froid to the end (see 29 October). The executioner’s axe was ‘a sharp Medicine’, he said, but ‘a Physician for all diseases and miseries’. As he lay ready for the blow, he cried out: ‘Strike, Man, strike!’ So Raleigh died as he lived: bravely, sardonically.