Everyone knew, and everyone said, that the court, any court, was dangerous, from the poet courtier Thomas Wyatt, who warned of the ‘slipper top/Of court’s estates’ (and was charged with treason) to John Webster’s remarkable, fascinating character Vittoria, the ‘white devil’ created by the playwright in 1612, whose last words are:
O happy they that never saw the court,
Nor ever knew great man but by report.
Everyone knew, and some complained, that success meant scrambling over the bodies (metaphorically in most but not all cases) of your rivals, or as John Webster’s equally remarkable villain Bosola puts it in The Duchess of Malfi: ‘places in the court are but like beds in the hospital, where this man’s head lies at that man’s foot, and so lower, and lower’.
Everyone knew, but took great care not to say, that Kings and Princes were often only one step away from losing their crown. Take Ralegh’s own Queen. When Walter was born, in the early to mid-1550s, Protestant Princess Elizabeth, daughter of adulterous, executed Anne Boleyn, was still a prisoner of her older sister, the Catholic Mary Tudor. Few would have expected that, by the time Walter came of age, his Queen would have successfully consolidated her rule after the most precarious of starts. Her reign would be thirteen years old before a nobleman (Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk) was executed, for his part in a treasonous plot to oust Elizabeth. Thirteen years without a noble execution was a long time in Tudor politics, a measure of the Queen’s strong and stable leadership.
The threats to Elizabeth remained, not least Mary, Queen of Scots’s claim to the English throne. Mary had married her first husband Francis, the French dauphin, just before Elizabeth’s accession in 1559, and boldly declared herself Queen of England just months into her cousin Elizabeth’s reign. Mary continued to create problems, not least by producing a male heir in 1566. No matter that in the same year, Mary’s husband, the eight-month-old baby James’s father, was murdered, that Mary was abducted by Bothwell, who she then married and that when her son was just one year old, Mary was forced to abdicate, making her baby the King. Now there was King James VI of Scotland to consider, in addition to his provocative mother.
The traumatic and violent events of Mary Queen of Scots’s life offered a stark warning to the young Elizabeth, who presented herself as being, and indeed was, a much more cautious, canny operator when it came to sexual politics. She had her moments, however. In the early months of her reign, Elizabeth’s closest adviser was Robert Dudley, the man who had supported her through the years of imprisonment and uncertainty – her sweet Robin. Then, on 8 September 1560, Amy Robsart, Dudley’s wife, was found with her neck broken at the foot of the stairs in her house (her house, because she and Dudley had lived apart for at least a year, Robert with his Queen, Amy in faraway Cumnor, just outside Oxford). Questions were, understandably, asked. Did she fall or was she pushed? Dudley himself wanted to have her death investigated, although perhaps ‘more with an eye to the damage it might do to him than from grief at her loss’ according to a biographer. The most damning evidence comes from the Spanish ambassador, reporting on Dudley’s dangerous influence over the Queen (whom he persuaded to spend all her time hunting): he writes that the two were plotting the death of Dudley’s wife. The ambassador is writing after the event, however, and although there was smoke, no one could find, or maybe no one wanted to find, a fire. And Elizabeth did not marry the newly-single Dudley. She did, however, make him Earl of Leicester some four years later and he remained the most powerful man at court.
The Queen’s choice of husband was, predictably, the hottest topic in the early decades of her reign, but sanctioned or unsanctioned marriages amongst her courtiers ran it a close second. Among the elite, marriages were not personal but dynastic matters, with each alliance reconfiguring the political landscape in small or large ways. This was why they needed to be approved by the Queen. Elizabeth was full of praise for ‘honest or honorable’ marriages, ‘without scandal and infamy’. These were pleasing to her, so long as they were ‘orderly broken unto her’. And that was the issue: she wanted and needed to be in control and have full knowledge of these alliances to ensure her political security.
Eighteen years after the death of Amy Robsart, Leicester risked his position with a secret, unsanctioned marriage to Lettice Knollys, a cousin of the Queen. The Queen was certainly dismayed by the political disloyalty, perhaps dismayed by the emotional disloyalty, but probably unconcerned by the sexual disloyalty. Nevertheless, she forgave Leicester, as she would, again and again when her courtiers behaved badly, as long as there was no direct threat to her power, and as long as some form of public apology or punishment took place. Some, such as the historian Paul Hammer, see her as less forgiving of the women involved: Elizabeth ‘continued to nurse a grudge against her cousin Lettice…for marrying the man she could not’.
It was a slippery, dangerous, exciting, glamorous world and Ralegh wanted nothing more than to be at its heart. He had not been born to it. Ralegh’s father, Walter, was certainly of the gentry but not of the elite. His mother, Katherine, provided something of a link to the court, as her older sister was governess to the Princess and then Queen Elizabeth. As with soldiering, the Earl of Essex provides a stark contrast. Lettice Knollys was Essex’s mother: that helped. Robert Devereux succeeded to his title when he was not yet eleven years of age. He was immediately placed in wardship under William Cecil, Lord Burghley, master of the Court of Wards and the Queen’s most trusted minister from the earliest days of her reign and spent a brief period in Burghley’s household in 1577, before going up to Trinity College, Cambridge. That also helped. Ralegh may have attended Oriel College earlier in the 1570s, but no great household was going to take him in, bring him up and position him for success at court, although he did make some very good friends while at Oxford. Nor for Ralegh the grand tour; he had no family to bankroll a leisurely journey through the capital cities of Europe. No wonder that, in his mid-twenties, Captain Ralegh remained unrecognised, except for his propensity for fighting. Even that was hardly exceptional: the prisons were full of young men with too much energy, easy access to weapons and not enough money or opportunity, at least in their own minds.
All this had changed by 1583. Walter writes to his half-brother Humphrey Gilbert (although, as was usual at the time, Humphrey is addressed simply as his ‘loving brother’) on 15 March, from the court at ‘Richmond this Friday morning’, utterly revelling in his intimacy with the Queen. Ralegh is now a trusted intermediary; he sends his brother a jewel from Elizabeth herself, for Humphrey is off on another transatlantic voyage. It is ‘a token from Her Majesty, an anchor guided by a Lady as you see’. Three days later, Gilbert received the ‘very excellent Jewel – an anchor of gold set with 29 diamonds with the portraiture of a Queen…on the back side of the anchor is written Tuemur sub sacra ancora’. Just as important as this economically and politically valuable piece of jewellery, Walter passes on the Queen’s wishes for ‘good hap’ on the voyage, and ‘farther she commands that you leave your picture with me’. There were worse places to be than at Richmond Palace, passing on personal messages from your monarch. (One of those worse places would be the Atlantic during Gilbert’s return journey, where he would die.)
Ralegh was operating in a political culture based on access to the body of the absolute monarch, and he was making it work for him. In a centralised court, the transmission of power, favour and information was dependent on physical presence, partly so that one could pick up important information, but also because it was vital for courtiers to understand Elizabeth’s personal preferences. And Elizabeth liked Captain Ralegh. He was hard to dislike, at least in terms of his physical attractiveness. The ‘outward man’, in the words of a contemporary, had ‘a good presence, in a handsome and well-compacted person’. Around six feet tall (very tall for his time), he had thick dark hair and his beard even ‘turned up naturally’.
Then there’s the famous anecdote involving a cloak and a puddle:
Coming to the English court, Ralegh found the queen walking, till meeting with a plashy place, she seemed to scruple going thereon. Presently, Ralegh cast and spread his new plush cloak on the ground, whereon the queen trod gently, rewarding him afterwards with many suits, for his so free and seasonable tender of so fair a footcloth.
Ralegh’s more recent biographers, Nicholls and Williams, point out sternly that this story was penned by a man not born until 1608 and that, worse still, it doesn’t quite fit with the ways a Queen ‘went about her business’. Elizabeth did not just go walking amongst her people: ‘with the threat of assassination so potent in the 1580s, royal walkabouts in the uncontrolled press of a crowd were deemed too risky’. And yet there is a Ralegh-esque showmanship and chutzpah quality to the action, which suggests that something like it might well have happened.
Cloak or no cloak, the months passed and Ralegh became more and more powerful. April, and he writes to the Solicitor General Thomas Egerton about leases from All Souls College. In May, even more tellingly, he writes to Lord Secretary William Cecil, Lord Burghley (now in Greenwich) about his son-in-law. Lord Burghley was not only the Queen’s chief minister but also her most trusted counsellor. Elizabeth believed that he was both incorruptible and faithful and, crucially, a genuinely honest adviser who would put aside all personal considerations to give ‘that counsel that you think best’. Few in this century questioned the political validity of absolute, divinely-sanctioned monarchy but even fewer questioned the necessity of good counsel to the success of any monarchy. It was essential that the all-powerful monarch had the best advisers, people willing to tell truth to power. Burghley was one such adviser.
But even the wisest of counsellors can have errant relatives who are hard to handle. In Burghley’s case, it was his oldest daughter’s husband, the Earl of Oxford. The Earl had been in serious trouble in recent years, confessing, together with Lord Henry Howard, Charles Arundel and Francis Southwell, all closet Catholics, to participating in a conspiracy against Elizabeth, a conspiracy that had only been thwarted because the group had fallen out among themselves. Lord Burghley turned to Captain Ralegh to intercede on behalf of his son-in-law, now under house arrest. Walter Ralegh can reassure the highest statesman in the land that her Majesty ‘confessed that she meant it only thereby to give the earl warning’, and that all he himself wants is his lordship’s ‘health and quiet’. Ralegh had things under control by the first of June. After ‘some bitter words and speeches in the end all sins are forgiven’ and Oxford was allowed to return to court ‘at his pleasure. Master Ralley was a great mean herein’.
This was all the more remarkable given his lack of a political network. The true elite always had their retainers in place at court to feed back news and to create and counter rumours, even if they could not be present themselves. Ralegh had to do it all himself, and did so ruthlessly. It did not make him popular with those who were born to power. As Lord Burghley said, ‘seek not to be E[ssex] and shun to be R[alegh]’. Ralegh was never going to be ‘one of us’, but he was doing surprisingly well. No one felt safe. When the Earl of Leicester spent time away from court, his man became seriously worried because there were ‘some rumours given out here in court’ suggesting that Ralegh was ‘an ill instrument towards her [the Queen] against your lordship’.
On 13 November 1584, a courtier, Sir Edward Hoby, approached ‘Mr Ralegh to be a dealer in his domestic and private troubles, rather than Mr Secretary’. Mr Secretary is Lord Burghley: in this matter at least, for this week at least, Ralegh takes precedence over the Queen’s most senior minister. Four days later, he stars in the Accession Day tilt, one of the most lavish spectacles in the courtly calendar. Held every year on 17 November to celebrate the day on which Elizabeth had become Queen, the increasingly significant tilts were ‘annual exercises in arms begun and occasioned’ by the ‘great zeal and earnest desire to eternise the glory of her Majesty’s Court’. Held in the Whitehall Tiltyard, it was only one part of the extensive celebrations surrounding this extremely popular national holiday. Throughout England there were sermons and bell-ringings, bonfires and gun salutes. The poor were given bread, prisoners given alms, and the great houses of the land opened their doors to their community, who could feast, for once, at the expense of their landlords. Particularly virulent anti-papal and anti-Spanish propaganda accompanied the celebrations. No one was allowed to forget that Elizabeth was a Protestant Queen, denounced and excommunicated by the Pope of Rome, the prospective target of a Catholic holy war at any time. It was the kind of spectacle for which Ralegh was made, if not born.
But even performing in the Accession Day tilt did not mark his zenith. In 1585, his Queen knighted him. Sir Walter was appointed steward of the Duchy of Cornwall and Lord Warden of the Stannaries. The execution of Mary Queen of Scots, on 8 February 1587, enhanced his position still further, with Ralegh the beneficiary of the Babington traitors’ money and land. The same year he received forty-two thousand acres of prime Irish land.
There would be more. The Queen gave him Durham House on the Strand, a splendid palace with two large courtyards, built in the time of Henry III. Five hundred feet square, with a hall ‘stately and high, supported with lofty marble pillars’, the palace ‘standeth on the Thames very pleasantly’, wrote one traveller. You can still see the stones of the slipway if you visit the Royal Society of Arts in John Adam Street in London, although it is hard to imagine the surrounding extensive orchards and vegetable gardens, or the fresh water coming from a spring in nearby Covent Garden.
By 1586, Ralegh is even in a position to patronise, in both senses, the Earl of Leicester, although his patronage is offered in a postscript. He is writing to the Earl in response to Leicester’s request for a thousand ‘pioneers’, one hundred of whom should be miners, to be sent to the Low Countries from the West Country. Ralegh takes the opportunity to defend himself, since there has been a ‘very pestilent’ report of his ‘suspect doubleness’. He reassures Leicester that he is his true servant, and that he is no lover of Spain. So far, so obsequious and predictable, but the postscript has Ralegh reassuring the Earl in another way: ‘The Queen is in very good terms with you and, thank be to God, well pacified and you are again her sweet Robin’.
Yet there was always something more to Ralegh than merely being a courtly power player, although he was certainly that. He understood, or more accurately, could articulate, better than most the wheelings and dealings of patronage, exposing the lies of a ‘smooth knave’ (Walter himself is of course even smoother), but just as quickly getting back on good terms with him. He understood, and perhaps foolishly spelt out in his letters, how to manage the Queen. To his kinsman George Carew, he wrote ‘The Queen thinks that George Carew longs to see her, and therefore see her’. He understood, and perhaps dangerously spelt out in his letters, that money talks. He writes to Robert Cecil, Lord Burghley’s up and coming son, to say he has given the Queen a jewel worth £250 ‘to make [persuade] the bishop’. And typically, he always follows up: how did the Queen like the jewel? Ralegh was never going to sell himself short. As the same man who noted Ralegh’s handsomeness put it, he had ‘a bold and plausible tongue, whereby he could set out his parts to the best advantage’.
Then again, Ralegh is never straightforward, for his letters also show him to be a generous and concerned supporter of courtly aspirants, usually ready to help them up the greasy pole. As his power grew, he became the go-to man for countless people who were in exactly the same position as he had been a few years earlier. Moreover, despite the granting of the splendid Durham House, Ralegh made moves to buy a modest farmhouse in Devon. It was, however, not just any farmhouse, but ‘Hayes, a farm sometime in my father’s possession’ and crucially, the house in which he had been born. Ralegh offers to pay whatever it takes and assures the seller that he won’t be a bad neighbour, because of his ‘natural disposition’ towards the place. Sir Walter, drawn as much to the West Country as to the court, handled the politics of access with tact and, it seems, some generosity.
On the other hand, he hardly held back when it came to furnishing Durham House. His new-found wealth meant that his palace on the Strand was dressed in different ways in different seasons, and for different occasions. Wall paintings and wall hangings set off the rare and beautiful things acquired through his increasing connoisseurship. Quite how legitimately these items came to be in Durham House was questionable. One October, for example, Ralegh wrote to his nephew John Gilbert, who was down in the West Country, at Plymouth. Gilbert’s privateering ship, the Refusal, had recently taken a Brazilian vessel laden with porcelain and silks. Gilbert was suspected of having removed part of the cargo and allowing it to be ‘stolen’. Sir Walter was not backward in coming forward in his requests for some of the booty: his wife, Bess, wanted porcelain and he wanted ‘pied silks for curtains’. Indeed, Ralegh makes a half-joke about his request (Gilbert should get hold of these things ‘if you mean to bribe me’), acknowledging the reality of political and social life. This letter, written by Ralegh to a trusted family member, and lacking his often over-played rhetorical flourishes, offers a further glimpse of the man’s attractions. When confident and relaxed, he is direct, persuasive and utterly charming. His life at court meant, of course, that he was invariably on the defensive or anxious. A couple of weeks later he was still trying to get nice things from Gilbert, reminding him about the porcelain and adding a request for a certain fine saddle and some luxurious wall hangings. And, in a surprise move, he asks for some ‘silk stockings’ for himself.
Clothes always mattered to Sir Walter. They mattered to everyone, of course. During Elizabeth’s reign all portraits, particularly those of the Queen, show the sitters in their most uncomfortable, most formal clothes. As the historian of clothing Anna Reynolds writes, in ‘their rich fabrics, shimmering jewellery and complex hairstyles, monarchs and those surrounding them were moving displays of expensive finery from head to toe’. It was a time when men dressed to be noticed. As one stern commentator thundered: ‘What should I say of their doublets with pendant codpieces, or the breast full of jags and cuts, and sleeves of sundry colours?’ This all offered an opportunity for the fifth son of a Devonshire gentleman to punch considerably above his weight, at least in terms of his fashion statements. Clothing was all about status: if you could afford the most complex, highly-decorated silks, and had the time to get dressed in them, then you would wear them as ‘a legitimate and admirable proclamation of an individual’s worth’. Thus the importance of silk stockings. It was a life of strategic display, and Ralegh displayed himself well, to the disgust of those who despised his shameless proclamations of his own worth.
He was always concerned to look the part, even if it meant toning down the ‘bling’. When charged with hosting a French delegation he notes, with urgency, that the ‘French wear all black and no kind of bravery at all, so as I have only made me a black taffeta suit to be in and leave all my other suits’. There’s more: ‘I am even now going all night to London to provide me a plain taffeta suit and a plain black saddle’. It wasn’t always all about him (although it usually was). As Captain of the Guard he wanted his men to look good as well. One letter urgently requests that the ‘spangles of the coats of the guards’ should be on their way.
Not only in London or at the court did Ralegh reveal his ambitions and aesthetics. Although he failed to buy his humble birthplace, Hayes Barton, Sir Walter was rewarded with the estate of Sherborne by his Queen, yet another example of his successful courtiership. The twelfth-century Sherborne Castle was, at first glance, not perhaps the most enticing of country residences, being cold, crumbling, damp and neglected. Ralegh had, nevertheless, coveted the location for years: the courtier John Harington recounted that on passing by for the first time, riding from London to Plymouth, Ralegh was so excited that he fell off his horse. Even today, it is easy to understand what attracted him: the rich farmland, the superb hunting grounds and the ideal location for a man whose political and adventuring life regularly took him from London to the far west of England and back again. Ralegh saw that beneath the walls of the castle ran the river Yeo (which flooded at mid-winter) and that beyond the river, across some water meadows, lay a small hunting lodge, built in the time of Henry II.
In the years after 1592, Sir Walter and his lady, prompted by a couple of uncomfortable seasons in the old castle, created a new style of living, one to be admired and imitated by their contemporaries, in that old hunting lodge beyond the water meadows. It became the site of Sherborne Lodge, a beautifully designed country house, constructed to the latest French specifications. Sir Walter’s new home was one of the earliest (some would argue the earliest) English houses to use plaster on the exterior walls, while further lightness and elegance were created by the unusually large number of windows and the beautifully worked plaster ceilings, complete with Ralegh’s symbol of the Buck (a deer) in the Great Bed Room. The Buck is still to be seen today, in what is now Lady Bristol’s Bedroom, as is the ‘romantic’ ruin of the medieval castle, last occupied in Ralegh’s own century. The lodge was functional as well as refined: fresh water was pumped directly into the house from springs on a nearby hill, while the spacious kitchen and bakehouse, in the basement, had generous fireplaces. A fan-vaulted wine cellar and a barrel-roofed beer cellar ensured the household was well-provided for. Ralegh’s very design of the lodge embodied a rejection of the court and its values, for he abandoned the communal long gallery and the great hall, the defining features of a traditional courtier’s house. The servants’ quarters were also separated from the family’s rooms, further removing Sherborne from the spatially and socially enmeshed old ways.
Meanwhile at Durham House, Ralegh, in silk stockings, his table laid with the finest porcelain, patronising rather than seeking patronage, played host to some of London’s most interesting and cosmopolitan gatherings. There were foreigners, or ‘strangers’ as the Elizabethans called them; men such as Cayaworaco (son of a South American King). Although not a slave, Cayaworaco was not an equal; he may well have hovered somewhere between the two, gazed upon as a curiosity until he returned to become leader of his faraway homeland, Arromaia.
It was not just the presence of exotic strangers that made Durham House exceptional; it was the intellectual coterie that Ralegh gathered around him. Writers, scientists and thinkers were reliant on positions in the great households, where they would not only receive food and shelter but also access to books, something almost as important as financial reward. The quality of the men that Ralegh gathered around him was remarkable. Quality did not only mean rank but also ability. Ralegh cared little for lineage. Nothing is known, for example, about Thomas Harriot’s life before he matriculated at the University of Oxford, while another good friend and servant, in the broadest sense, was John Shelbury, the son of a London grocer. Shelbury, who studied at Oxford and Lincoln’s Inn, was elected MP for West Looe in Cornwall, most probably through Ralegh’s influence. Shelbury would be Ralegh’s trusted fixer of business and financial affairs for many, many years, and Harriot and Shelbury would liaise with the Privy Council in the dark days of 1603.
It is Thomas Harriot who stands out at Durham House. He was involved in the design and construction of ships and the hiring of sailors, and often acted as Ralegh’s accountant. But he was far, far more than this; he was one of the great scientists of his time. In Ralegh’s service, he achieved some of his most significant mathematical breakthroughs, prompted by his investigations into ‘the navigator’s art’, ‘the chief ornament of an island kingdom’ and an art that would reach its greatest heights if ‘the aid of the mathematical sciences were enlisted’.
Ralegh, for example, wanted Harriot to solve certain problems regarding the stacking of cannonballs. The scientist promptly provided a mathematical table to answer his patron’s initial question regarding the shape of the base of the stack. Further calculations followed, demonstrating how to compute the number of cannon balls in the pile. Harriot, in the words of an historian of science ‘was too much the mathematician to stop there’ and moved inexorably on to examine the implications of his calculations for the atomic theory of matter, in which he was a believer. Later, he would correspond with Johannes Kepler about atomic theory and mention the packing problem. Kepler offered an intuitive solution, which was finally proved in 1998 by Thomas Hales of the University of Michigan, with the help of reams of computer-generated data.
Harriot’s mathematical and scientific achievements are truly impressive, from breakthroughs in optics and chemistry to solving the problem of ‘reconciling the sun and pole star observations for determining latitude’ and other navigational achievements. But for Sir Walter Ralegh, Harriot offered a chance to learn. He not only paid his in-house scientist to do the maths (and the physics and the accounts) but also to instruct him, so that by Harriot’s aid Ralegh ‘might acquire those noble sciences’ in his ‘leisure hours’. Others saw the lessons going on at Durham House as sinister rather than noble, in part because any discussion of cosmology, an essential element in navigation, was dangerous in Ralegh’s time. About ten years before Ralegh’s birth, in 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus had published his scientific theory of heliocentrism, removing the Earth from the centre of the universe. Others followed in his path, including Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei. Bruno was burned to death and Galileo imprisoned for their scientific enquiry. Harriot and Ralegh were asking dangerous questions of the universe. Whether Harriot was a servant, friend or (dangerous) teacher, or all three, he was certainly loyal to Sir Walter, not always an easy task with a man who attracted controversy and danger like moths to a flame.
The high water mark for the attacks on Durham House came in 1593. Ralegh’s enemies labelled the house a ‘school of atheism’ where the ‘scholars’ are ‘taught, among other things, to spell God backwards’ by a ‘conjurer that is master thereof’. The master conjuror was probably Thomas Harriot, or possibly John Dee, but both feared he was the one meant. These claims were all part of the witch-hunt (or more precisely, atheist hunt) of 1593, whose most celebrated, if possibly tangential, victim was Christopher Marlowe. The Privy Council was investigating the playwright’s activities, calling Marlowe before them in mid-May and ordering him to report daily until ‘licensed to the contrary’. A couple of weeks later, the informer Richard Baines accused Marlowe of atheism, in ‘A note containing the opinion of one Christopher Marley [sic] concerning his damnable judgment of religion and scorn of God’s word’: ‘that the first beginning of Religion was only to keep men in awe’, ‘that Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest’ and ‘that the sacrament…would have been much better being administered in a tobacco pipe’. And Baines explicitly linked Marlowe to Ralegh and to Harriot.
A couple of days later, Marlowe was dead, stabbed in a house in Deptford Strand in an argument over the bill, ‘the sum of pence, that is, le recknynge’. The links, if any, between Marlowe’s supposed atheism and the circumstances of his death on 30 May 1593 remain a matter of intense debate. Conspiracy theorists have suggested that Ralegh had him killed to stop his mouth, but there is no evidence. Then again, there wouldn’t be.
A year later, Marlowe’s death came back to haunt Ralegh, in the form of an inquiry by the Court of High Commission into his religious beliefs. The evidence brought before the court came from the summer of 1593. The court heard that, shortly after the mysterious death of Christopher Marlowe, Sir Walter and his lady went out to dine with friends and family near Sherborne. Over the meal, they discussed religion. Sir Walter kept pushing the argument further and further, challenging every definition (‘neither could I learn hitherto what God is…’) and appealing to what he called ‘our mathematics’ for certainty, rather than to the Bible. There was no stopping him and there were those present who remembered the conversation and months later used it to attempt to destroy him.
The Court of High Commission’s task was to establish whether Ralegh had indeed ‘called the godhead into question and the whole course of Scriptures’. Throughout March 1594 those who had been present at the dinner party the previous summer were questioned intensively. Harriot was dragged into the enquiry. It was pointed out that he had been cited before the Privy Council for denying the resurrection of the body of Christ. It was a close-run thing, but Sir Walter convinced the court that he was no atheist, and that hearsay was no evidence. It was an argument that wasn’t going to work again in 1603. In 1594 Ralegh lived to fight another day, but the enquiry resulted in his spending the next few months travelling restlessly around the West Country, attending to the political and military business conferred on him, more and more the provincial outcast. His curiosity remained undiminished but was now tempered by an acute awareness of the perils of enquiry, and a new (if short-lived) caution.
That caution may have been fuelled by the fact that he now had even more to lose, for Sir Walter had become a father the previous year. It was at Sherborne, in a suitably darkened room (light and air were thought to harm the new-born baby), attended by the women of her household and a professional midwife, that his wife Bess gave birth to a baby boy in the autumn of 1593. In precisely this year, a doctor, John Jones, when questioned as to who should be present at a birth, replied that there should ideally be a few ‘godly, expert and learned women’, rather than ‘a rude multitude given either to folly, banqueting or bravery, as in the towns of the West Country is too much used’. Whether there was ‘banqueting and bravery’ in Dorset is unknown, but mother and baby survived, and on 1 November 1593, little Walter (to be known as Wat) was christened in the small country church of Lillington, close to Sherborne. The records for the following few months are scanty, which may indicate that they were relatively peaceful. Bess would have had her churching, a ceremony of thanksgiving for the safe delivery of the mother, which took place about four weeks after a baby’s birth. Women were churched even if their baby were stillborn or had died in the first weeks of infancy, and the ritual could be a crucial part of coming to terms with the loss. The ceremony signalled the woman’s status as a mother, her community’s recognition of her experience and her own thanksgiving for survival. Soon after came the Christmas festivities, the twelve days of holidays filled with feasting and entertainments.
Sir Walter’s son thrived at Sherborne and would become the centre of his father’s dreams of a dynasty. His competitors had other ideas, however. In the years when Ralegh consolidated his wealth and power, the Earl of Essex rapidly emerged as a force to be reckoned with. Essex was younger than Ralegh, as handsome as Ralegh (at least to contemporaries), and crucially, was backed by his stepfather, the Earl of Leicester. In the summer of 1587, the Queen made Essex her master of the horse (a position Leicester had given up allow his stepson to take it). After Leicester’s unexpected death in September 1588, the rivalry between Sir Walter and the Earl became ever more intense. It was said the Queen had to intervene to prevent a duel between the two men, travelling all the way from Greenwich to Richmond to do so.
The tensions between Ralegh and Essex had been simmering since the mid-1580s, when the latter had begun to rival, and then usurp, the former as the Queen’s most intimate favourite. As the gossips noted, the Queen was often ‘abroad, nobody near her but the Earl of Essex and, at night, my Lord is at cards, or one game or another with her, that he cometh not to his own lodging till birds sing in the morning’. The relationship between Queen and courtier was stormy; Essex’s pride and impetuosity both attracting and infuriating Elizabeth. He understood, only too well, the workings of the court and, in particular, how vital it was to have access to the body of the monarch. He fantasised, dangerously, that he could always freely declare his mind in the presence of the Queen, that she would always forgive him and then move swiftly to destroy his enemies. It was when Elizabeth denied the Earl access that problems arose, because Essex foolishly demanded to see his Queen, bursting in upon her, invading her personal and political space. This was in 1589, and Elizabeth forgave her Essex. This time.
Nor was 1589 a good year for Ralegh. In the summer, he was in Ireland, busy telling anyone who would listen that he had not been pushed out by a triumphant Essex (‘For my retreat from the Court it was upon good cause, to take order for my prize’, referring to his privateering success) and insisting that he still maintained his crucial ‘nearness to her Majesty’. The court gossips told a different story: he had been ‘chased’ away by Essex. Ralegh had never been popular, and now there was some downright pleasure in his apparent disfavour.
Chased into Ireland or Cornwall; put on trial for atheism; the lies and the cabals: whatever the rewards of the courtier’s life for Ralegh, he was always acutely aware of the dark side. He was, of course, well able to live up to the ideal of the courtier: humanist discussion, courtesy and chivalry, the occasional poem; all in a day’s work. He writes about, while also demonstrating, the skills of the perfect courtier in his elegy for Sir Philip Sidney, a poem that ends by saying, with fitting modesty:
That day their Hannibal died, our Scipio fell:
Scipio, Cicero, and Petrarch of our time,
Whose virtues, wounded by my worthless rhyme,
Let angels speak, and heaven thy praises tell.
These qualities (which Ralegh must have known, or hoped, he had, although modesty forbad him to declare them, and his lineage suggested he should not have them) needed to be delivered with panache, or more precisely, sprezzatura. No effort should be seen. In Elizabeth’s court, as one scholar has pointed out:
To perform with skill that which is difficult requires grace, but to perform successively, uninterruptedly, and without apparent contradiction roles that are in continual tension if not in conflict requires dexterity, aplomb, self-mastery, and wit; in a word – Castiglione’s word – sprezzatura. Such a performance, in an arena of fierce competition for material advancement and status reward, could not be rendered indefinitely without cost.
Elizabeth herself was always performing, and there are sometimes glimpses of that cost. Late in her reign, the French ambassador described his meeting with the Queen, revealing a woman of both anxiety and confidence, frailty and power, whose life was one of great freedom but at the same time frighteningly constricted, lived always in the public gaze. He writes:
She looked at me kindly, and began to excuse herself that she had not sooner given me audience, saying that the day before she had been very ill with a gathering on the right side of her face, which I should never have thought seeing her eyes and face: but she did not remember ever to have been so ill before. She excused herself because I found her attired in her nightgown, and began to rebuke those of her Council who were present, saying, ‘What will these gentlemen say’ – speaking of those who accompanied me – ‘to see me so attired? I am much disturbed that they should see me in this state.’
The entire interview involved a dance of etiquette, played out before the nightgowned Elizabeth: the taking off and putting on of headwear, the standing or sitting of Queen and ambassador, all conducted in front of the assembled gentlemen. Admittedly, the Queen’s was a rather special nightgown: its lining was ‘adorned with little pendants of rubies and pearls, very many, but quite small’, while the exterior was of ‘silver cloth, white and crimson, or silver “gauze”, as they call it’. Her ‘dress had slashed sleeves lined with red taffeta, and was girt about with other little sleeves that hung down to the ground’, with which Elizabeth constantly played. ‘She would complain that the fire was hurting her eyes, though there was a great screen before it and she six or seven feet away; yet did she give orders to have it extinguished, making them bring water to pour upon it.’ The Queen’s nervous tension is palpable: it was the price she paid for sustaining her public image.
For Ralegh, the cost was a kind of disgust at the fictions of the court, and perhaps at himself for perpetuating them. It seeps into his writing from this period, in particular into his poetry, most notably his magnificent tirade, The Lie. Although it remains uncertain exactly when Sir Walter wrote the poem, its message is clear. His soul (merely the body’s guest) is instructed to go on a ‘thankless errand’ since ‘I needs must die’. The soul, soon to be parted from the body, must ‘give the world the lie’. The truths told by the soul are hardly comfortable ones for the court, the church, for potentates and leaders; the ‘best’, as the poet writes with bitter irony:
Say to the court it glows
And shines like rotten wood;
Say to the church it shows
What’s good, and doth no good:
If court and church reply,
Then give them both the lie.
Tell potentates they live
Acting by others’ action,
Not loved unless they give,
Not strong but by a faction.
If potentates reply,
Give potentates the lie.
Tell men of high condition
That manage the estate,
Their purpose is ambition,
Their practice only hate:
And if they make reply,
Then give them all the lie.
And that’s just the start.
The court might shine like ‘rotten wood’ but, during the second half of the 1580s, it provided Ralegh with unimagined wealth, in the first instance through his monopoly on wine licences. He had money to burn and he burned it. Indeed, he was sometimes forced to burn it: Accession Day tilts didn’t come cheap. Nor did two pearls the size of quail’s eggs, to be worn in one ear only. There were many ways to spend one’s fortune, some more necessary than others.
And yet it was still not enough for Walter Ralegh. He was much more than a mere courtier, at least in his own mind. Ralegh’s thoughts turned to Ireland. His service there – however violent, grim and frustrating – had provided him with a route to the Queen’s attention, a sufficient prize for most men. Now he wanted to go back, his goal the establishment of his own successful colony (‘plantation’), a fitting reward for Captain Ralegh’s years of military service.
The timing was right. At the very moment of his new-found political intimacy with the Queen the Irish rebellion had been, in theory, defeated. In January 1584 Sir John Perrott, the newly-appointed governor, was commissioned by Lord Burghley, still grateful to Captain Ralegh for helping with his errant son-in-law, ‘to repeople’ the ‘dispeopled’ province of Munster so that ‘the lands escheated should be inhabited with obedient people’. English appropriation of Irish lands for settlement had been going on for centuries, but in Ralegh’s lifetime, and then most notably in the 1580s, the pace and purpose of the colonial project changed, with mass confiscations of land and large-scale importation of English settlers. The commissioners surveying Munster in 1584 welcomed the interest of those English ‘undertakers’; well-placed, wealthy, loyal subjects of Elizabeth who ‘undertook’ to populate the new lands. So began the plantation of Munster, and Ralegh was at the front of the queue. This would be his true legacy.
But in the same year Queen Elizabeth conferred an even greater prize, an even more visionary opportunity, upon her favourite; one which made the prospect of an estate in the south of Ireland pale into insignificance. Elizabeth granted Ralegh the patent to discover unknown lands, to take possession of them in the Queen’s name, and to hold them for six years. This was the first, and most vital, step towards establishing a colony in ‘Virginia’, named for Ralegh’s Virgin Queen, a brave new (English) world across the ocean. It was a vision that would absorb much of Ralegh’s money and energy – and channel his powerful ambition – over the following years.