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Defeat

King James won the battle on the day, the crowd shouting ‘God save the King’ at his suitably regal, if belated, display of mercy. But would he win the war? Ralegh’s reputation had begun a remarkable turnaround in Winchester. His words and actions at the trial had established him as a powerful voice in direct contest with the authority of Stuart justice. As the new century unfolded, this oppositional voice, born of the occasion – he did not want to die – would be picked up, exploited and transformed, by reformists and radicals alike. At the time, more powerful still, scribes copied and recopied the transcripts of the proceedings, feeding the appetite of readers hungry to know of the events at Winchester. Ralegh was swiftly transformed from the ‘best hated man in England’ into a popular hero.

He was also good box office. The winter of 1603 saw William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson battling it out for theatre audiences on the south bank of the Thames and they knew a good story when they heard it. In Sejanus His Fall, Jonson reimagined Ralegh as Silius, a tormented, Hamlet-like figure, yet a noble man of action, facing the tyrannical pederast Emperor Tiberius. Unlike Shakespeare’s vacillating hero, who puts down his ‘bare bodkin’ from fear of ‘the undiscovered country’ of death, Silius escapes ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ and succeeds in killing himself in Act Three. Jonson’s play, following Roman rather than Christian doctrine, seems to applaud Silius’s death: ‘Look upon Silius, and so learn to die’.

The ‘clotted style, lack of irony, and grinding moral emphasis’ (in the words of one critic) of Sejanus means it is rarely revived, but it was performed at court in the winter of 1603 by the King’s Men, including William Shakespeare, who may have played Tiberius. Jonson referred to a ‘second pen’, although his co-writer was probably not Shakespeare, since the Bard was busy with his own response, Measure for Measure. Shakespeare’s company first performed this new play for the King in the banqueting hall at Whitehall on St Stephen’s Night, 26 December 1604, a year after the events that the play echoes. Shakespeare, meanwhile, is at his most topical in Measure for Measure, alluding to the plague (which was still widespread, leading to the closure of the theatres in spring 1604), to the making of a peace (brokered with Spain in August 1604) and to the Main and Bye Plots that had dominated the previous winter. As Mistress Overdone the brothel madam complains, ‘what with the war, what with the sweat, what with the gallows, and what with poverty, I am custom shrunk’. Shakespeare’s Duke of Vienna dispenses justice at the end of the play in a theatrical manner, echoing James’s tactics with Ralegh and his fellow conspirators the year before.

Opinion is divided on whether Silius represents Ralegh or the Duke represents King James, but Rome and Vienna are certainly London. Both playwrights show a city at breaking point and a society struggling with sleaze, corruption and disease. The dramatic solutions offered by Jonson and Shakespeare, whether honourable suicide or ostentatious displays of princely mercy, leave the underlying social and political problems raised by their plays unsolved. As with the execution of Essex just a few years earlier, it appeared the blood-letting had not cleansed the sickly body politic. That didn’t stop people being interested in the fallen Ralegh in his new home, the Bloody Tower in the Tower of London. The Tower was very much on the capital’s tourist circuit. Visitors marvelled at traitors past (‘look there, where Anne Boleyn was executed’, ‘those are the very cannons the Earl of Essex brought back from Cadiz’, ‘that’s the exact place where the brave Earl was beheaded’, ‘here’s the chapel he’s buried in’) and sought glimpses of celebrated traitors present.

Was it any consolation to the traitor himself that he had lived a life less ordinary in the years leading to his imprisonment? For, by any measure, then or now, Ralegh was exceptional in the scope of his abilities, the flagrancy of his flaws, the range of his achievements and the spectacular nature of his failures. It seems not. Ralegh could barely lift his pen. From his rooms in the Tower, he managed the most formulaic of gestures of gratitude. He wrote to Robert Cecil, acknowledging he had ‘failed both in friendship and in judgement’ and asking if he should write to the King. There is a subtext that Cecil has betrayed him but it is never made explicit. Cecil doesn’t reply until 20 December and then only indirectly, asking the Lieutenant of the Tower to tell Ralegh he wished him well and suggesting he should write to the King to thank him for being his sole deliverer. By then, Ralegh had already done so, in a tired reiteration of his loyalty. Psychologically, he was struggling. Being legally dead, all his powers had been transferred to others, including Lady Ralegh: ‘My tenants refuse to pay my wife her rent’. Bess, being Bess, was taking on more and more of her husband’s responsibilities, despite living in a world in which, as her correspondents reminded her, women were barred to ‘discourse of matters’ and ‘judge of questions’. She simply had to do it.

The Tower of London in 1597

In these darks days there are glimmers of Ralegh at his best, especially as a friend. Lawrence Keymis, who had been close to Ralegh for years, remained in the Tower until 31 December 1603, collateral damage from his patron’s fall. Keymis had lost his annuity and his vision of a plantation in the Indies and was so ‘examined’, so ‘pressed’, about his connection with Ralegh, that his ‘staff is now broken’. Ralegh for his part attempted to offer support (‘be good to Keymis for he is a perfect honest man who has suffered much for my sake’) and refused to accept Keymis would have given away anything, even under torture: he was a friend.

There were also faint splutterings of Sir Walter’s old pride. A year into his imprisonment, he seemed perplexed he was no longer receiving money from wine licences, the patent for which he had been granted by Elizabeth and which had not been transferred to anyone else. A few months earlier, in June 1604, he had refused to give up the seal of the Duchy of Cornwall to a messenger. Ralegh was stalling, just because he could, but he also had a point to make. He would send the seal to Cecil, and Cecil could deliver it to the King, because Ralegh had received it ‘from her Majesty’. More and more he looked back to the Elizabethan years, clinging to the idea that James might look past his misdemeanours, as Elizabeth had. He so wanted to ‘perish not here [in] misery only’. He begs: ‘Do not forget me, nor doubt me, for as God liveth I shall never forget your true honour and remorce of me’. Only James can lift him ‘out of the grave’. James, on his part, had no intention of doing anything to help a man he both despised and feared.

James Stuart’s negativity towards Ralegh was a product of the whispering campaign of the final years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. But the degree to which James disliked and distrusted Ralegh remains hard to explain, the more so since fear was something familiar to James Stuart, part of his make-up and, ironically, one of the sources of his success as a ruler. In 1584, the French agent at the Scottish court offered a detailed analysis (here summarised by the historian Pauline Croft) of the young King, then only eighteen. James was:

timid from being brought up in fear, but also intellectually able. He grasped and understood quickly. He judged carefully and with sensible discourse, he retained much and for a considerable time. He was learned in many languages, sciences and affairs of state, not only those of his own realm. In appearance, James was unimpressive, and as a result of lacking good instruction, very rude and uncivil in speaking, eating, manners, games and entertainment in the company of women. He hated music and dancing but was restless, never standing in one place and taking particular pleasure in moving around. His carriage was bad, with errative and vagabond steps. Grave in speech, he was ‘un vieux jeune homme’, old in a young man’s body, but on the other hand he was lazy, too devoted to his pleasures, especially hunting which he loved above all.

As Croft points out, ‘the curious combination of ability and complacency, idleness and shrewd government, warm emotions and lack of discretion’ remained typical of James throughout his life. What is striking about the description of James at eighteen is that he has many of Ralegh’s qualities – intellectual ability, wide-ranging knowledge, and a certain restlessness – without any of Ralegh’s flair and energy, without his charisma and, to be blunt, without his good looks. Could this explain some of James’s hatred towards him?

Autumn 1604 found Ralegh still in the Tower. On 20 September, he experienced some form of stroke or paralysis. A doctor visited and diagnosed ‘palsy’. The timing was terrible, because Lady Ralegh had a surprise for her husband. At thirty-nine, she was pregnant again. The couple’s third son would be born in February 1605, a baby of the Tower, christened Carew (a family name) in its parish church, St Peter ad Vincula. Carew had been conceived in the summer of 1604, when Ralegh still clung to his hopes of early release and Bess was still working tirelessly towards that end: ‘My wife told me that she spake with your lordship yesterday about my poor estate and hers’. Sir Walter and Bess both believed his lordship, Robert Cecil, would ensure the Sherborne trust was honoured, which was why Ralegh could write that he hoped he might not have to remain in the Tower but could be confined ‘within the hundred of Sherborne’. Or maybe not Sherborne. Casting around, he offers to live in Holland (‘where I shall perchance get some employment upon the Indies’) or, most astonishingly, offers to manage one of Cecil’s estates: he will ‘keep but a park of yours’. The desperation is obvious.

The prospective father struggled through the autumn and winter but the worst was still to come. Plague reached the Tower of London, even to the very next room to Ralegh who, ‘withered in body and mind’ is:

Daily in danger of death by the palsy, nightly of suffocation by wasted and obstructed lungs, and now the plague being come at the next door unto me, only the narrow passage of the way between, my poor child having lain this 14 days next to a woman with a running plague sore and but a paper wall between, and whose child is also this Thursday dead of the plague.

There is more. Ralegh’s ‘wife and child and others in whom I had comfort have abandoned me’. The pregnant Bess, and young Walter, aged eleven in November 1604, were able to flee the plague (if only to a house on Tower Hill, near All Hallows Barking). Ralegh had to stay.

His depression deepened. He wrote more and more about death as a release, while still making half-hearted attempts to provide for his family, his ‘wife and a child and a wife with child’, for whom he could do little or nothing.

Summer 1605. The world is even darker for Ralegh, despite Bess being safely delivered of Carew. A new, more authoritarian governor takes charge of the Tower and Lady Ralegh is instructed to ‘resort to her house on Tower Hill or elsewhere with her women and her sons’. She cannot visit her husband and is forbidden to drive into the Tower in her coach, as she has been wont to do. Ralegh writes that he is:

Every second or third night in danger either of sudden death, or of the loss of my limbs and sense, being sometime two hours without feeling or motion of my hand and whole arm. I complain not of it: I know it vain for there is none that hath compassion thereof.

‘I complain not’? Hardly. Lady Ralegh’s ‘crying and bewailing’ is all he receives: ‘she hath already brought her eldest son in one hand and her sucking child in another, crying out of her and their destruction, charging me with unnatural negligence and that, having provided for my own life, I am without sense and compassion of theirs’. All Ralegh wants is compassion; all he gets is his wife’s bitterness. He curses the time ‘that ever I was born into the world and had a being’. Ralegh may not have been quite as low as this letter suggests; one must take into account his rhetorical talents and his sense of audience. He was writing to Robert Cecil, who he hoped might help in supporting Bess and his two sons, even if not Ralegh himself.

But he was certainly in no condition to withstand the next crisis: the Gunpowder Plot. Catholic rebels, led by Guy Fawkes and backed, allegedly, by Spain, sought to blow up the King and his parliament. Lady Ralegh was suspected of involvement on two counts. The first, plain and simple, was her family origins: she was a Throckmorton. Although her Protestant father, Nicholas, was an exception to the Catholic Throckmorton observance, Bess had had treacherous cousins who had paid the price of it, and now she had cousins who were at the heart of the plot. It was to Coughton, the Throckmorton family’s main estate, that Robert Catesby’s servant, Bates, rode to tell of the conspiracy’s failure. Even though the Throckmorton name did not feature markedly in the cast of conspirators, a quick glance at the matrilineal family tree reveals a network of Throckmorton women at the conspiracy’s heart. Robert Catesby’s mother was Anne Throckmorton. Francis Tresham’s mother was Muriel Throckmorton. The historian Pauline Croft identifies an interlinked group of four crypto-Catholic families who provided the foundations for the attempted assault on James and his parliament. The group comprised Catholic women with conforming husbands and fathers, bonded by intermarriage, creating ‘striking networks of closely related wives, sisters and mothers’.

This was precisely the kind of network from which Bess was excluded, because of her father’s rejection of his family’s faith. Her brother Arthur was quick to distance himself from his ‘unkind kindred’; unkind in its older meaning of unnatural, as well as its more modern sense of cruel. Lady Ralegh’s impeccably Protestant and loyal background should have protected her from any suspicion. It didn’t. The reason was, of course, her marriage to Ralegh, convicted for his treacherous conspiracy with Spain just two years before.

Bess was specifically charged with having gone down to Sherborne to prepare for the imminent Spanish invasion that would follow swiftly on the act of terrorism against the King and parliament. She had even been seen cleaning the armour there, by a spy who had been placed in her household by Robert Cecil.

Yet again, Ralegh underestimated, or misunderstood, the King’s chief minister. (A small minority of historians has suggested the Gunpowder Plot was actually devised and engineered by Robert Cecil and his network of spies to further discredit the English Catholics, a similar conspiracy theory to the one of 1603. It’s a familiar cry when atrocities are committed or discovered, and one that’s hard to prove or disprove.) While Ralegh was busy writing to Cecil in the hope he would make some effort to help Lady Ralegh, Cecil had insinuated his spy Edward Cotterell into her household under the name of Captain Sampson. Lady Ralegh paid him five shillings a week while he reported back to his real master, Cecil. Sampson had much to report. He noted that at the Tower Sir Walter ‘did speak at a window in the wall of the garden’ with ‘any person that he desired to speak withal’. The command quickly went out to block up the window and by that means prevent the prisoner’s communication with the outside world. At Sherborne, Sampson reported that all the talk had been ‘that Sir Walter Ralegh should be set at liberty at the parliament’. Lady Ralegh’s activities at Sherborne were deeply suspicious:

[She was] twice there that summer, and about September she did cause all the armour to be scoured as he thinketh because it was rusty. And then she caused also two walks to be made in the garden the furnishing whereof was a great charge unto her, and the house to be dressed up, where before all things lay in disorder.

What could this mean? Was Bess gleefully preparing for a Spanish invasion or was she merely being a good housekeeper? Cotterell/Sampson was not sure, but hoped to find out more when he travelled back to London with Lady Ralegh later in the year. By this stage, however, she was deeply suspicious of him and when he arrived, with two of her real friends and kinsmen, he was left, literally, out in the cold, during which time ‘he walked upon the Tower Hill’. Cotterell/Sampson paced the streets until ‘the Lady Ralegh returned him answer that she would have nothing to do with him, and presently on her coming forth, the Lady Ralegh went to the Tower’.

Lady Ralegh’s caution meant Cecil had no hard evidence against her but he kept probing, insisting on a further examination of people in Sherborne. All he could come up with was rumour: a witness reported he had met some unnamed person at the local fair and that this unnamed person had said that on 6 November Ralegh would be in danger of his life but would ‘escape, and come to greater matters’. Flimsy though it was, it was enough to get Ralegh into trouble; he was questioned on 9 November. He acknowledged he had been visited by Captain Whitlock, formerly an associate of the Earl of Essex but now in the household of the Earl of Northumberland and, more immediately relevant, one of the conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot.

Ralegh insisted there was nothing in the visit. He had merely ‘familiar and ordinary discourse’ with Whitlock, who only came to visit the prisoner because he, Whitlock, was bored. Ralegh had hoped Whitlock could describe the Earl of Northumberland’s attitude towards him but had only received a ‘dry and friendless answer’. There had been no correspondence with the Earl.

Henry Percy, Ninth Earl of Northumberland, born in April 1564, the same month and year as William Shakespeare, had successfully kept out of trouble during his youth at Elizabeth’s court. He put some religious distance between himself and his father and uncle, both committed Catholics and was made a Knight of the Garter in 1593. He successfully walked the tightrope of courtly politics; marrying the Earl of Essex’s sister in 1594 while at the same time becoming close to the Earl’s rival, Sir Walter Ralegh. As Ralegh’s fortunes waned in the later 1590s, Northumberland became the patron of Thomas Harriot, who flourished in the Earl’s household and took full advantage of his remarkable library. The Harriot connection fanned the flames of suspicion surrounding Percy’s intellectual interests, which had gained him the nickname of the ‘wizard earl’. He was, they said, a man ‘who troubled not much himself’ about religion.

The accession of King James did not interrupt Henry Percy’s quiet but the Gunpowder Plot did. Thomas Percy, a second cousin once removed and, more pertinently, the constable of Northumberland’s Alnwick Castle, was one of the ringleaders. And Thomas had dined with his noble kinsman on 4 November. Henry Percy insisted their discussions had touched only on estate business but he would hardly say anything else. It was both good and bad news for the Earl when his treacherous cousin was killed soon after in open rebellion; Thomas Percy could neither accuse nor clear him. As the Earl put it, ‘noen but he can shew me clere as the day, or darke as the night’.

Whitlock was an equally dangerous link that tied Ralegh and Northumberland to the Plot. But, as with Thomas Percy, there was nothing to see. Pressed once more, Sir Walter insisted that his only other contact with the man was over some trivial business with the French ambassador’s wife. She had requested ‘a little balsam of Guiana’ and Ralegh had sent it to her via Whitlock.

Despite Cecil and his colleagues’ best efforts, it seemed the Raleghs were telling the truth: he was not involved and she was a good housewife. There was no fire. There wasn’t even any smoke. Their loyal friend Thomas Harriot was, however, caught up in the crossfire, more by virtue of his position in the Earl of Northumberland’s household than any specific link to the Raleghs. King James moved against Earl and scientist, imprisoning both in the Tower. Harriot was interrogated on the charge he had cast King James’s horoscope in an attempt to use his magical powers to influence the King’s future. He was lucky and did not remain long imprisoned in the Tower’s Gatehouse. His patron the Earl, more of a threat, was held without any prospect of release.

So it was also with the legally dead Ralegh. Worse still, the Plot justified the imposition of a stricter prison regime. Cecil’s spy had noted that ‘Owen a waterman brought him diverse times beer and ale in bottles’. It would not do. Not content with stopping up a window to the outside world, the Crown stopped another small pleasure for the prisoner.

In the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, Ralegh was under constant watch, denied access to his garden and his family, and ill in mind and body. A doctor’s report said:

All his left side is extremely cold, out of sense and motion or numb. His fingers on the same side beginning to be contracted. And his tongue taken in some part, in so much that he speaks weakly and it is to be feared he may utterly lose the use of it.

The doctor recommended, in March 1606, that Ralegh be moved to warmer quarters, to a ‘little room which he hath built in the garden adjoining to his still house [laboratory]’. The modern editor of Sir Walter’s letters sternly warns readers to remember that ‘Ralegh was an accomplished actor’ and may have exaggerated his paralysis to make his daily life more comfortable in those early spring days of 1606. But perhaps it was not exaggeration: in his early fifties, Ralegh was, it seems, broken in mind and body. The rest might indeed be silence.