How does Ralegh, a man whose year of birth we do not even know for sure, the fifth son of a Devonshire gentleman, ‘climb full high’ in the England of Elizabeth? He begins by going to the wars. In young Walter’s case, the year was 1569, and the battleground was France. Earlier in the decade, a massacre of French Protestants, Huguenots, had triggered the country’s wars of religion. The young Queen Elizabeth, only three years into her own Protestant reign, made a secret treaty with her co-religionists and, over the following years, a steady stream of Englishmen travelled across the Channel to offer their military support to the Huguenots. The teenaged Walter Ralegh was one, under the command of Count Lodewijk van Nassau, brother of William the Silent, the Netherlands’ Prince of Orange. The details are hazy: Walter rode ‘as a very young man’ with his cousin Henry Champernowne’s troop; another source claims his early years were full of ‘wars and martial services’. It is possible he was recruited by a Huguenot ship sent out from La Rochelle, or a ‘sea-beggar’ from Holland, with their ‘letters of marque’ (of extremely dubious authority) from William of Orange or Gaspard de Coligny, the French Huguenot leader. The boats descended on English ports to find young men just like Walter. Once in France, he found himself in the midst of a protracted, and sometimes vicious, civil war.
Ralegh’s future brother-in-law, Arthur Throckmorton, made a similar expedition, ten years later, but to the Low Countries. He was impelled by the same reason, to support the beleaguered Protestants, and his diary is a reminder of the quotidian nature of violence in wartime. He writes, with neither comment nor horror, that the English have captured the enemy’s ‘kine [cattle], mares and horses’ and that some spies ‘are taken and put to death in our camp’.
There is no diary for Walter. The only detail of his experience is provided by him, many years later. He writes he was at Moncontour near Poitiers in October 1569 (he would have been in his mid-teens) when Lodowick of Nassau’s competent retreat had ‘saved the one half of the Protestant army, then broken and disbanded; of which my self was an eye-witness, and was one of them that had cause to thank him for it’. A strategic retreat is valued much more than empty heroics. The foundation had been laid for Ralegh’s fascination with realpolitik and the art of war.
The Peace of St Germain of August 1570, which marked the end of the third phase of wars of religion in France, probably meant a return home for young Walter. England was facing its own religious crisis. On 25 February 1570, Pope Pius V had declared Elizabeth illegitimate, a mere usurper, a Prince due no obedience from her subjects. By doing so, he was explicitly giving sanction to Roman Catholics to assassinate her. They would even gain merit by doing so. If that was not enough to stiffen the sinews of a true Protestant Englishman, then the 1572 St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of French Huguenots in Paris raised the stakes still further.
But there is no indication the teenaged Walter went to the wars out of religious zeal. It was more that this was simply what young men did, particularly young men without titles or prospects and in search of both. For Arthur Throckmorton ten years later, a return from the wars meant one thing and one thing only: a chance to gain access to the Queen. Although he sent news to his mother Anne, and his sister Bess, that he was safely landed in Margate, his primary destination was Richmond Palace, where the Queen was based for the Christmas season that year. Arthur partied, celebrating Twelfth Night at the palace, and only in the new year did he return home. He had been seen.
It helped that Arthur was a Throckmorton, with family in high places. Ralegh was not only a fifth son but the product of a third marriage on the part of his father, Walter Ralegh, who had three other sons, and a second marriage on the part of his mother, Katherine Gilbert, née Champernoun, who had four other sons. Yes, he would be helped, and occasionally hindered, by a vast network of brothers and half-brothers and cousins in a world in which kinship ties could be the difference between success and failure; sometimes between life and death. But in the late 1560s and early 1570s, Walter was just one of hundreds of young men who went to the wars and then disappeared without trace. In 1577, long after he’d gone to be a soldier, he was living in Islington which, by any Elizabethan measure, is a long way from Richmond Palace.
Three years later, however, we can tell his prospects were improving. Not because he was on the receiving end of three charges of brawling but because one of them was ‘besides the tennis court in Westminster’, a popular location for the settling of scores with other young men. No more Islington: it was around this time that Walter Ralegh was appointed Extraordinary Esquire of the Body to the Queen, personally attendant upon his monarch.
Ireland effected the transformation. In the summer of 1579, with Elizabeth’s court preoccupied by the possibility of a marriage between the Queen and the Duke of Anjou, and with both parties apparently considering the marriage as a serious proposition for serious political reasons, not least the increasing power of Spain, rebellion broke out in Ireland. This was hardly a new phenomenon. Ever since the Anglo-Norman invasion of the island in the twelfth century there had been conflict, whether simmering or outright, between the native Irish and the feudal lords who pledged their loyalty to the King of England. The 1560s had been a decade of on-off warfare in Ireland, although well into the seventies there were those who still hoped that the English could reduce the island to ‘civility’ by peaceful means: ‘Can the sword teach them to speak English, to use English apparel, to restrain them?’
In 1579, the threat level rose. Under the banner of the Pope, the Irish leader James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald gathered an expeditionary force from Catholic Europe. His goal was nothing less than the removal of the Protestant ‘she-tyrant’, Elizabeth. The she-tyrant asked one of Walter Ralegh’s half-brothers, Humphrey Gilbert, to patrol the south coast of Ireland. It was not his finest hour. Gilbert failed to pay his sailors, who promptly disappeared with two of the ships. Gilbert himself lost £2,000. Another rebellion followed in August, this time led by the Earl of Desmond. But then the military tide turned. Fewer than a thousand English troops engaged twelve hundred Irish, at Monasternenagh near Limerick, and won. Desmond was proclaimed a traitor, and the suppression of the rebellion became ‘an exercise in reducing the Earl’s strongholds one by one, ravaging his lands and forcing the submission of his suspected allies, while a naval task force prevented any foreign reinforcements arriving from abroad’, in the words of the historian Paul Hammer, in his book on Elizabeth’s wars. The Queen chose Arthur, 14th Lord Grey of Wilton (the recently appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland) to complete this ‘exercise’ in the summer of 1580, and he duly brought more than two thousand new men. Amongst them was one Captain Ralegh, with his hundred men, levied in London in July. As the summer faded, the younger brother of the Earl of Desmond was hung, drawn and quartered for his part in the rebellion. It was reported Captain Ralegh’s men played a part in cutting up the body into small pieces, an act praised by a contemporary historian, who noted, happily, that ‘thus the pestilent hydra hath lost another of his heads’. Lord Grey set the tone for the campaign, being a man fuelled by a hatred of Catholicism and a desire to crush the Irish, ironically through the use of the same methods as the notorious Duke of Alba, the Spanish scourge of the Low Countries.
Despite these successes, Irish submission proved hard to achieve. An unexpected uprising in Leinster was swiftly followed by the arrival of six hundred new Spanish and Italian troops in the south west of Ireland at Smerwick (now Ard na Caithne) in September. They took the opportunity to land when Elizabeth’s ships were forced to sail for supply and maintenance. A forceful response was needed and by mid-October 1580 the Queen had committed 6,500 Englishmen to Ireland, with another thirteen hundred on their way. Their strategic goal was the reclaiming of the small earth fort at Smerwick, which was duly surrounded from the sea by royal warships, which could join in the land bombardment. Smerwick surrendered to Lord Grey within days despite his offering no terms to those inside the fort. At the surrender, the Spanish officers were spared, but all the other defenders were killed, the majority by troops under the command of Captain Ralegh.
There have been attempts to justify the massacre at Smerwick. Those killed were mercenaries; the Spanish commander, more fool he, surrendered knowing no assurances had been given; those surrendering could expect nothing better; by the standards of sixteenth-century warfare, it really wasn’t too bad. Even if one puts aside the horror, however, Smerwick proved about as successful as other English wartime massacres. Over the next two years some fifteen hundred ‘chief men and gentlemen’ were executed in an attempt to enforce English rule, a number that does not include the uncounted ‘meaner sort’. But still the Irish forces grew.
Ralegh’s letters from this time do not dwell on these aspects of war, in part because he has to write about everyday matters (such as paying his men) and in part because he wants to write about high-level policy. His correspondent is Francis Walsingham, the Queen’s Principal Secretary and master of ‘intelligence’. With each letter Walter shows increasing confidence, sometimes writing again within a couple of days, certain Walsingham will listen. He supplies up-to-date news from the front line (‘Davy Barrey has broken and burnt all his castles and entered publicly into the action of rebellion’) but also begins to offer political advice. Elizabeth, having spent a further £100,000 on the war, has made a mistake by appointing an Irish ‘president’ of Munster, the Earl of Ormond. He’d been in post for two years, but ‘there are a thousand traitors more than there were the first day’. (Ironically, the placatory Earl of Ormond had been appointed in a conciliatory move because all-out war was proving both expensive and futile.) Ralegh recommends his own half-brother, Humphrey Gilbert, for the post, despite or because of his reputation for savagery and violence, reminding Walsingham that Gilbert suppressed a rebellion in two months with only a third of the men, and is the most ‘feared’ among the Irish nation. ‘The end shall prove this to be true’. In another sign of his growing confidence, and in a move which would become characteristic of the mature man, Ralegh offers to serve the Queen privately, with ‘a dozen or ten horse’. He knows he’s pushing the envelope, and asks Walsingham to ‘take my bold writing in good part’. Walsingham did nothing, at least not in 1581. But the fact this letter was written on the day his father was buried in faraway Exeter shows Captain Ralegh’s priorities. Family was important: political preferment, through soldiering, was more important.
Ralegh’s experiences in Ireland were a world away from those of the man who would become his most significant political rival in later years. Robert Devereux, the young Earl of Essex, gained his first taste of war when he joined his stepfather, Robert Dudley Earl of Leicester’s, expedition to the Low Countries in 1585. This was the first official English army for a generation to be sent abroad; the military follow-up to Queen Elizabeth’s proclamation on 14 August of that year that she was, at last, taking the Netherlands under her protection. This proclamation of 1585 precipitated war with Spain and would dominate Ralegh’s life and inform his politics for years to come.
The Queen appointed the Earl of Essex as colonel general of the cavalry (no captain, let alone foot soldier, he) and he was present at the battle at Zutphen in September 1586, where the great English hero Sir Philip Sidney was killed. The dying Sidney bequeathed the young Earl his best sword (some say he bequeathed his two best swords) and the Earl of Leicester made his stepson a knight. No matter the expedition’s military aims remained unachieved and fighting was sporadic. Essex saw himself as a ‘second Sidney’, a martial hero, and took every opportunity to live the military dream. In 1589 he would join Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Norris’s expedition to Portugal, without the Queen’s permission. Two years later, this time with Elizabeth’s blessing, he led English troops in Normandy, although he could not resist conferring twenty-four knighthoods during the campaign, twenty-four more than he was authorised to do. Both ventures were military failures, but Essex, if only by right of birth, remained England’s ‘senior aristocratic soldier’, in the words of one biographer.
Back in 1581, mere Captain Ralegh, approaching his thirties, was becoming frustrated with the attritional reality of the guerrilla warfare he was being forced to wage against the Irish. He’d come to accept he had to supply his men with victuals from his own pocket and then plead for repayment (with some success, receiving £43, 14 shillings and 8 pence from the English authorities in Dublin for the wages of himself and his company for thirty-two days). But now, writing to Lord Grey from Cork, he complains he and his company have made ‘two journeys’, ‘one in horrible weather and the other utterly bootless being done without draught [plan] or espiall [information from spying], and beside enforced to walk such unreasonable march’. The only result has been the laming of their own soldiers. There’s bitterness (about a property he believed he should have had), and there’s need: he wants another hundred soldiers to counter the enemy’s ‘galligass’ (tall, strong men who carried battleaxes) and ‘kerne’ (lightly-armed foot-soldiers). This particular letter would be used by Grey as ammunition when he challenged the Queen’s conciliatory policy. The zealous Protestant Grey was outraged that ‘God’s cause is made a second or nothing at all’.
Captain Ralegh, in contrast, is far more pragmatic, and far more self-serving, as demonstrated in a letter from this time recounting ‘a hard escape’ he’d achieved when set upon by fourteen horsemen and ‘three score footmen’. He was hugely outnumbered, having only three horsemen and a couple of Irish footmen.
I coveted to recover a little old castle and in that retire [retreat] I lost three men and three horses. The manner of mine own behaviour I leave to the report of others but the escape was strong to all men. The castle was a long mile off from the place where he first set on us.
Immediately, Ralegh moves into a request for more support from London and Dublin, a request authorised by his own heroism but also by his on-the-ground experience. He’s straight-talking and hard-headed:
There is great need of a supply in Munster for the bands are all much decayed…Beside the men are such poor and miserable creatures as their captains dare not lead them to serve. If your honours beheld them when they arrive here you would think them far unfit to fight for Her Majesty’s crown.
Later, the story of the escape would get even better, and in interesting ways, in the hands of a sympathetic (to Ralegh), patriotic and imperialist historian, John Hooker. He lowers the number of horsemen attacking but adds Ralegh crossing the ford alone and going back to rescue his servant, Henry Moile, whose horse had foundered. It is one of the earliest stories to be attached to Ralegh’s name, and shows him as a selfless leader, looking out for the ordinary man. Hooker is, of course, out to flatter his patron, but that so many of his contemporaries remember similar moments of generosity and even egalitarianism suggests Ralegh did indeed have these qualities.
Hooker’s text, written later and with an eye to the New World and its ‘savages’, contains an element missing from Ralegh’s own writings:
For what can be more pleasant to God, than to gain and reduce in all Christianlike manner, a lost people to the knowledge of the gospel, and a true Christian religion, than which cannot be a more pleasant and a sweet sacrifice, and a more acceptable service before God?
For Hooker, as for Lord Grey, the priority in Ireland was the imposition of religion. That was the fundamental reason to establish English government. There were of course other compelling reasons, social, political and economic. The control of Ireland would enlarge ‘the bounds of the English kingdom’, and transfer ‘the superfluous multitude of fruitless and idle people (here at home daily increasing) to travel, conquer, and manure another land’, all of which would ‘yield infinite commodities’. With or without the religiosity, it was a powerful, if profoundly flawed, vision; one that would run like a seam through the English imperial project over the coming centuries.
How to achieve the enlargement of the ‘bounds of the English kingdom’ when the Irish were still in Ireland was another question. Ralegh’s half-brother, Humphrey Gilbert, colonel of Munster between 1569 and 1571, thought he knew, ordering the decapitation of entire villages in order to have the path to his tent decorated with ‘a lane of heads’ prior to inviting the submission of local chiefs and leaders. As Thomas Churchyard, propagandist for Gilbert’s approach, expressed it, the sight of ‘the heads of their dead fathers, brothers, children, kinsfolk and friends’ brought ‘great terror to the people’ and made them seek peace under the new regime. Nearly thirty years later (and still no peace in Ireland), Edmund Spenser, the poet, to whom Ralegh would give his patronage in the late 1580s and early 1590s, proposed an approach possibly even more horrific than Gilbert’s, even by the standards of English colonial policy at the time. Justifying his stance, spelt out in his A View of the Present State of Ireland (probably written in 1596, but unpublished in his lifetime), by insisting that the Irish are degenerate barbarians, Spenser advocates the use of martial law. This is controversial enough, but Spenser goes on to insist that famine is the best and quickest way to pacify the Irish. His words remain shocking more than four hundred years later. (Some would argue that Spenser intended the reader to question the extreme ‘solution’ offered by one of the participants in what is, after all, a fictional dialogue but, for me, this is a view born of modern discomfort with the work’s viciousness.)
The end will, I assure me, be very short, and much sooner than can be in so great a trouble, as it seemeth, hoped for. Although there should none of them fall by the sword nor be slain by the soldier, yet thus being kept from manurance and their cattle from running abroad, by this hard restraint they would quickly consume themselves and devour one another. The proof whereof I saw sufficiently exampled in these late wars of Munster, for, notwithstanding that the same was a most rich and plentiful country, full of corn and cattle, that you would have thought they should have been able to stand long, yet ere one year and a half they were brought to such wretchedness as that any stony heart would have rued the same. Out of every corner of the woods and glens they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them. They looked like anatomies of death; they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves; they did eat the dead carrions, happy where they could find them; yea, and one another soon after, insomuch as the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of their graves. And if they found a plot of watercresses or shamrocks, there they flocked as to a feast for the time, yet not able long to continue there withal; that in short space there were none almost left, and a most populous and plentiful country suddenly left void of man and beast. Yet sure, in all that war there perished not many by the sword, but all by the extremity of famine which they themselves had wrought.
Ralegh never wrote anything as appalling as this, and he rarely offered religious justifications for violence, but that does not mean he somehow stands apart from men such as Hooker, Grey and Spenser, not to mention his half-brother, Humphrey Gilbert. As he would say, again and again, the end justified the means.
At the same time he never lost sight, because he never could, of the reality of military life. In Ireland, in the late 1570s and early 1580s, that reality was sick, hungry English soldiers and a daily diet of often futile violence. Later, he would write that he was running low on men ‘because the new come men die so fast’. Others, understandably, attempted to escape. They were caught and hanged. Either way, the numbers went down. From the first, Captain Ralegh learned that, as much as anything else, war is about paying your soldiers. Day by day, he made his priority the feeding and payment (of eight pence a day) of his ‘footband of one hundred men’, writing back to base in pedantic detail about dates, times and costs.
Ralegh presents himself in his letters as the experienced military man but the truth was that he hated life in Ireland. He knew where he wanted to be: at court. On 26 August 1581, he wrote from Lismore to the Queen’s favourite, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, making an abject offer of his service. He explains that he is in Ireland, serving Lord Grey, something he only does because he knows Grey ‘to be one of yours’. It is only loyalty to Leicester that keeps him there. Without that, ‘I would disdain it as much as to keep sheep’. Ireland is not a commonwealth, it’s a ‘common woe’.
A few months later, he escaped the ‘common woe’; he was sent back to England with dispatches. It was a golden opportunity for the man whose ability to write powerfully in defence of himself and in support of policies, whose ability not just to create a good story but to embellish it, was never in doubt. Without getting his Irish commission, Captain Ralegh would not have come to Elizabeth’s attention but without writing about it, he would not have stuck.
Ralegh knew how to get things done. He could justify the unjustifiable, while in the same breath standing up for the underdog. He knew how to cover his back and the backs of those more powerful than he. And he knew, or at least he said he knew, for whom he was doing everything he did. In one letter he can be outraged that five hundred ‘milk kine’ [cows] have been taken ‘from the poor people. Some had but two, and some three, to relieve their poor wives and children, and in a strange country newly set down to build and plant’ and, having expressed his outrage, in the same letter offer himself as the answer to the problem he has identified. The poor people will be protected. At three days’ notice, Ralegh will ‘raise her a better band, and arm it better tenfold, and better men, whensoever she shall need it’.
She is Elizabeth. And at the heart of what would become a most remarkable political intimacy was Ralegh’s ability to make his Queen believe that he could deliver, or more cynically, that if he did not, he would be able to make it look as if he (and his monarch) had delivered.
That was all ahead of him. Returned to England in December of 1581, he caught the attention of the Queen herself, now in her late forties. She insisted that he remain. Apparently, he needed further training. Captain Ralegh, a soldier and sailor for thirteen years, needed no further training, but his Queen needed him near her, and Ralegh, ever the opportunist, needed no further encouragement. He’d made it to court.