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Lover

Some eleven years before the Cadiz portrait the artist Nicholas Hilliard had captured Captain Ralegh, in an exquisite miniature, as an impossibly handsome, dark-haired man, with flowers in his hair. His beard does indeed appear to turn up naturally. There is nothing of the sailor or the soldier, let alone the statesman, in his face. This beautiful man is merely a decorated, almost effeminised, object dressed in the clothes of the moment.

Ralegh miniature, c.1585, by Nicholas Hilliard

What a moment it was: huge detachable cartwheel ruffs and jewel-encrusted codpieces were the order of the day. The codpiece, a hollow but padded protuberance at the groin (‘cod’ was a contemporary word for the testicles), was crucial to a man’s image. It had come a long way from its functional origin as a flap of fabric between the two legs of the breeches, often the shirt-tails of a long linen shirt wrapped between the legs. Now, as padded, slashed, puffed, embroidered and bejewelled as other items of clothing of the period, the codpiece was ‘a self-conscious and exaggerated symbol of virility’, in the words of Anna Reynolds, a historian of dress. Sadly, no image of Captain Ralegh with codpiece survives.

Four years after Hilliard painted Ralegh with flowers in his hair, Sir Walter was still handsome (a contemporary described him as ‘framed in so just a proportion and so seemly an order, as there was nothing in him that a man might well wish to have been added or altered’) but in this portrait of 1588 (reproduced at the beginning of this book), he is not merely a disembodied pretty face. Admittedly, the artist shows neither Ralegh’s codpiece nor his legs – a shapely, stockinged leg was another crucial indicator of manliness – but the painting announces that this is a serious man, a man to be taken seriously.

Both portraits exude Ralegh’s personality; his confidence, his charisma. They proclaim, in different ways, his success at the court of Queen Elizabeth. Both also show him to be the Queen’s man, and the 1588 portrait sends subtle, and not so subtle, messages of loyalty through its use of symbolism. Amor et virtute (love and virtue), Ralegh’s motto (at least at that time), is inscribed in a corner of his portrait. It must therefore be true. His clothes are decorated in pearls, the Queen’s favourite jewel, whose ‘creamy colour and purity suited her preferred colour scheme of black and white’, and ‘symbolised virginity and the full moon’. The Queen herself was often similarly portrayed wearing large pear-shaped pearl earrings in one or both ears. Ralegh’s homage to his Queen is not only shown in the pearl decoration on his clothing but also in the immense earring hanging from his left ear. For women, pearls complemented their prized pale skin. For Ralegh, they were a sign of his oneness with the Queen, his commitment to her inviolable chastity. The wealth on display is also a reminder that his intimacy with Elizabeth had brought him unimaginable wealth and power by 1588.

Was it all a self-serving fiction, this intimacy and loyalty? Was Ralegh as significant, and as close, to the Queen as these portraits suggest? Some historians are deeply sceptical, placing Ralegh firmly on the margins of real power. Looked at politically, they argue Sir Walter did not influence policy at any stage but was merely the deliverer – often a disgruntled and frustrated deliverer – of the Queen’s political will. Looked at emotionally, both Ralegh and his Queen were merely performing the rituals of courtly love, with none of the true intimacy, perhaps even love, that Elizabeth expressed for men such as Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester or Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. But surely Elizabeth, that most canny of monarchs, would not have heaped so much wealth and status on Captain Ralegh, fresh from the Irish front line, unless there was something about the man that made him stand out from the other courtiers? Sir Walter and his Queen were lovers, but it is highly unlikely that their ‘love’ was ever physically expressed. It was an eroticised political relationship, not a political sexual relationship, and Elizabeth was on top.

The poetry exchanged between the two offers hints of the complex interplay between Walter and his Elizabeth. Ralegh’s verses (for he was a man of many talents, who quickly became known as one of Elizabeth’s ‘crew of courtly makers, noblemen and gentlemen’), passionately celebrate the Queen’s eternal power. She is the moon goddess Cynthia, and he is the sea, the ‘water’ (his nickname, from his Devonian pronunciation of his name). His every movement is governed by her power and the depth of his love mirrors the depth of the ocean. His is the voice of the fashionably lovesick character:

Fortune hath taken thee away, my love,

My life’s soul and my soul’s heaven above;

Fortune hath taken thee away, my princess;

My only light and my true fancy’s mistress

And so it continues; on and on, and on. Intriguingly, Elizabeth’s reassuring, but also deeply patronising, reply survives:

Ah, silly Pug, wert thou so sore afraid?

Mourn not, my Wat, nor be thou so dismayed.

The Queen ends her poem by commanding ‘silly’ (innocent but also foolish) Ralegh to get a grip:

Revive again and live without all dread,

The less afraid, the better thou shalt speed.

Sir Walter’s position as Elizabeth’s ‘silly pug’, the extent to which he would ‘speed’ under her command, depended not on these poetic exchanges, but on trust. It was essential to the mechanics of personal monarchy and particularly to the operation of the Privy Chamber.

The basic structure remained, regardless of which palace the Queen was resident in. Beyond the Privy Chamber, the Queen’s (almost) private space, lay a series of rooms: a gallery, a great hall, a great chamber, but always a Presence Chamber, with the royal throne and its canopy. For Queen Elizabeth’s subjects to reach anywhere near this throne, anywhere near the Royal Presence, sometimes took months of bribes, gifts and letters. Even then, the Queen might not emerge from her guarded and locked private chambers. But the wait would be worthwhile, since this was the only place that counted: all power rested in the will and person of the Queen. Access was everything.

The Privy Chamber was the Queen’s chief refuge from the constant pressure of those who wanted that access. Only a handful of people saw the woman behind the royal performance and the portraits. Sir Walter Ralegh was one. As Captain of the Guard, he was in a uniquely privileged position.

Elizabeth did not merely trust Sir Walter; she knew how to exploit his particular and rare set of skills, in war and in peace, in England and far from English shores. The Queen well understood that her ‘silly pug’ was far from silly; that, above and beyond the exchange of verses of love, his talent with words could be useful to her and the English state. In the autumn of 1591, when the news began to come that English ships had suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the enemy, Spain, he would be especially valuable to his Queen.

The very ship that Ralegh was to have sailed in (if only the Queen had permitted him to leave her side) had been taken by the Spanish. It was, astonishingly, the only English vessel lost during the many years of war. Elizabeth turned to Sir Walter: could he transform this actual defeat into a moral victory? Of course he could. Ralegh’s tale, The Last Fight of the Revenge, tells the glorious story of a lone English captain’s brave stand against a vast Spanish fleet. Yes, the ship was lost. Yes, the captain (Richard Grenville, late of Virginia) was killed. But all the glory was England’s and her Queen’s. Sir Richard Grenville’s foolish, dangerous lone stand was transformed into an act of transcendent heroism. Ralegh’s Queen is ordained by God to bring Spanish Catholicism to its knees and lead England to further Protestant greatness. Elizabeth, ‘by the favour of God’ will continue to:

Resist, repel, and confound all whatsoever attempts against her sacred Person or kingdom In the mean time, let the Spaniard and traitor vaunt of their success: and we her true and obedient vassals guided by the shining light of her virtues, shall always love her, serve her, and obey her to the end of our lives.

Ralegh was very, very good at this kind of thing.

The only problem was that his words were empty. At precisely the time he was writing of love, service and obedience to his Queen, Ralegh was betraying her. He was risking every single political achievement and financial reward of the preceding decade – and there had been many. Perhaps even his freedom. Perhaps even his life. Whatever or whoever caused him to betray his Queen was powerful enough to make the risk worthwhile.

Bess Throckmorton and her family had known about the risks and rewards of Tudor life, riding the rollercoaster of religious and regime changes, for generations. Bess’s father, Nicholas, was of the Queen’s generation and in fact lived with Elizabeth when he was a very young man. Nicholas had turned his back on his family’s Catholicism (of his eighteen siblings, only one other converted to the new religion) and had therefore been eligible to join the household of Henry VIII’s sixth and last wife, the staunchly Protestant Katherine Parr. In Queen Katherine’s house, Nicholas was joined by two young girls, Lady Jane Grey and the Princess Elizabeth, daughter of Henry VIII’s ill-fated second wife, Anne Boleyn. The girls’ futures would be entangled with Nicholas’s for many years but he thrived in Parr’s household. He moved on to serve the boy King Edward VI, Henry VIII’s successor, as a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber and cemented his position at court through his marriage, in around 1549, to Anne Carew.

Anne, Bess’s mother, came from another prominent courtier family with their fair share of experience of the dangers of royal service. Anne’s mother was rumoured to be Henry VIII’s mistress. More verifiably, she was the first cousin of Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, two of Henry’s Queens. Anne’s father, another Nicholas, was one of Henry VIII’s closest friends from youth. He had even survived his King’s first marital cataclysm; when Katherine of Aragon was discarded in favour of Anne Boleyn, Nicholas Carew remained loyal to Katherine. The King was, however, a dangerous friend. Years later, and with a suddenness that surprised no one in the final years of his despotism, Henry turned on his friend, now deemed a traitor. Carew was executed in 1539.

Survivors to their fingertips, Nicholas Throckmorton and Anne Carew thrived under Henry’s son, Edward, who succeeded to the throne at only nine years old. The boy King’s health was not good, however, and it became clear that he would not reach adulthood. The newly-married Throckmortons had to move very carefully. The King’s choice of successor, or more importantly that of his chief adviser, the Earl of Northumberland, was Nicholas’s erstwhile housemate, the young Lady Jane Grey, daughter of Frances, Duchess of Suffolk. Lady Jane’s tenuous claim to the throne rested on the fact that she was the granddaughter of King Henry VIII’s sister, Mary. But her real value lay in her Protestantism and in the prospect of her marriage to Northumberland’s son, Guilford Dudley. King Edward himself encouraged this marriage, as part of his continuing attempts to set aside the claims of his older sisters, the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth. Northumberland feared the accession to the throne of the fiercely Catholic Princess Mary Tudor for good personal and political reasons, and Edward VI was ideologically opposed to any return to the religion of Rome. Between them, Edward and Northumberland overturned both Henry VIII’s will and the Succession Act of 1544.

The pace of events quickened as the young King’s health deteriorated. By June, Lady Jane Grey was suffering physically and mentally from the strain of the expectations laid on her. Edward VI died on 6 July 1553 but the public announcement of his death was delayed for two days. A further two days later, Lady Jane was brought by barge from Sion House, home of the Duke of Northumberland, to the Tower of London, pausing at Westminster and Durham House. At the Tower, she was proclaimed Queen. Only nine days later, and in the face of a hostile response to Queen Jane in London and elsewhere, Princess Mary Tudor was proclaimed Queen in London: ‘a conciliar conspiracy had put Queen Jane on the throne; a popular rising deprived her of it’ as the historian Susan Brigden puts it. It appeared that the issue of legitimacy (Mary was Henry VIII’s daughter, while Jane was merely his great-niece) counted with the people, that Northumberland was widely distrusted if not hated and, probably most significantly, that the reformed religion Jane represented had not taken as firm a root in the country as its Protestant leaders thought or hoped.

Lady Jane Grey thus became yet another casualty of the power struggles of the mid-sixteenth century. One of the many tragic ironies of her situation was that her own father rallied support for Queen Mary and renounced the regal claims of his daughter. When it became clear that she would not be sister to a Queen, Jane’s sister Catherine, who had been hastily married to Henry Herbert, was as hastily cast off by her new husband’s family. The convenient, and possibly valid, excuse was that the marriage had not been consummated. Jane Grey’s father and mother, the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk, were pardoned by the merciful new Queen Mary, but Jane’s fate remained uncertain. Only a few months later, in the first winter of Mary’s reign, her father was involved in a rebellion against the Queen’s authority. His change of allegiance assured not only his execution but also that of his daughter; Lady Jane was beheaded on 12 February 1554.

Bess Throckmorton’s parents, in particular her mother Anne, had backed the wrong Queen. Anne had been dangerously close to the Grey faction, even standing as proxy for Queen Jane as a godmother on the very day, 19 July 1553, that Queen Mary was proclaimed in London. The accession of Mary, and the subsequent execution of Lady Jane, was politically disastrous for both Anne and her husband Nicholas. Only a week after the execution of Lady Jane, Nicholas was imprisoned in the Tower for his part in the Duke of Suffolk’s recent conspiracy. Anne, heavily pregnant with their first child, was preparing for her confinement. Two months later, in April, her husband’s case came to trial at the Guildhall. The charge was treason.

For Anne Throckmorton, daughter of the executed ‘traitor’ Nicholas Carew, this was disturbingly familiar territory. Astonishingly, husband Nicholas was acquitted by the jury. Queen Mary was so distraught at the decision, one without precedent in a treason trial, that she allegedly took to her bed for three days. Once acquitted, Sir Nicholas moved to ensure that Anne – who in the meantime had given birth to a boy, christened William – would be provided for in case of further threats to his life.

Having survived the early months of Queen Mary’s reign, Anne and Nicholas maintained a tactfully low profile until the accession of the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I allowed for their political resurgence. Their only daughter, Bess, was born in 1565, by which time the new Queen’s rule was secure, or as secure as any monarch’s of that time.

There would be one further twist in the tale linking the Throckmorton and Grey families. When Bess’s father Nicholas died in 1571, Anne remarried just six months later. Her new husband was Adrian Stokes, first the secretary, then husband, then widower of Frances Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk. That made him, significantly, the stepfather of the one surviving Grey sister. Anne and Adrian’s country estate was Beaumanor, the Duchess’s former residence, and it was at Beaumanor that Bess lived for much of her childhood, in rooms that were still named for their Grey mistresses.

Such a tempestuous, deadly family history might have made a lesser woman than Anne Throckmorton aspire to a quiet life for her only daughter Bess. Instead, Anne was determined to place her daughter at court and, in 1584 (also a high point for Walter Ralegh), she achieved her goal. On 8 November Queen Elizabeth invested Bess, aged nineteen, as a Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber.

Bess, like Sir Walter, now had access to the intimate space around the monarch. Elizabeth’s women controlled admittance to her person and had intimate knowledge of the monarch’s disposition, both invaluable political commodities in a personal monarchy. As a Gentlewoman of the Chamber, Bess could and did act as broker, of both influence and information, for the gentlemen who sought the Queen’s favour. Even the Queen’s most powerful male ministers knew that they had to speak, and listen, to the Queen’s women. They aimed, before actually seeing the Queen, to learn ‘her Majesty’s disposition by some in the Privy Chamber with whom you must keep credit, for that will stand you much in stead’.

Just as women such as Bess Throckmorton shielded Elizabeth from the demands of her nation, her Captain of the Guard, Sir Walter Ralegh, protected the royal body from the very real threat of assassination. Both had to be loyal to the Queen, and the Queen alone. For six or seven years it is possible they were just that. But, in the summer of 1591, Bess became pregnant by Walter. In the autumn, the couple married in such secrecy that we still do not know the date. Ralegh’s lines on his ideal woman celebrate both her mind and her body in delightfully explicit terms:

A violet breath and lips of jelly

Her hair not black nor over-bright

And of the softest down her belly

As for her inside he’d have it

Only of wantonness and wit.

But it was never just about sex. In an era in which the personal was the political, Bess’s pregnancy and the couple’s secret marriage were a challenge to the power, authority and future of the Queen herself. And it was never just about Bess and Walter, for, in that overheated summer of 1591, Ralegh achieved a telling rapprochement with his rival Essex. Perhaps Essex saw an opportunity to neutralise his competitor by bringing him into his circle, somewhere Ralegh (with more money than he knew what to do with, but also with a lurking and unfulfilled aspiration to be accepted into the aristocratic elite of the nation) may have been only too happy to be. It is certain is that the Earl of Essex did nothing to expose either the affair or the marriage, and there is evidence that he encouraged both. In return, Ralegh made his rival look good in The Last Fight of the Revenge, transforming Essex’s inept and unwanted participation in the military action two years earlier in Portugal into a masterpiece of wartime strategy.

As her belly swelled, both Sir Walter and Bess pretended that nothing was happening. She maintained her position as a Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber, while Sir Walter was busy with boats, finances and the brave new world. By November, and the Accession Day celebrations, all seemed to be going well. Elizabeth suspected nothing. Arthur Throckmorton, Bess’s brother, reported in his diary that ‘the queen spoke to me and made me to kiss her hand’. A couple of days later, Arthur recorded in his diary, in discreet French, that it was ‘le jour que je saye le maryage de ma soeur’; the day he found out about the marriage of his sister. Arthur promptly ‘spoke’ with Sir Walter in December but still there was no leak. It all stayed in the family.

Ralegh knew that it was possible to get away, if not with murder, then with the occasional sexual imbroglio. Unsurprisingly, frustration with the rule (and rules) of the Virgin Queen frequently led to eruptions of distinctly unchaste behaviour. The year 1591 was a particularly fruitful one for scandal, ranging from the banishment of Mr Dudley for kissing Mistress Cavendish, to Sir Francis Darcy being sent to the Tower ‘about Mistress Lee who was brought abed in the court’.

Ralegh also knew that it was possible to father a child without the tedious necessity of marrying the child’s mother. His will of 1597 left five hundred marks to his ‘reputed daughter begotten on the body of Alice Goold now in Ireland’. This is around £333: the same will left £200 to Thomas Harriot, who also received ‘all my books and the furniture in his own chamber and in my bedchamber at Durham House, together with all such black suits of apparel as I have in the same house’. It is possible that Alice Goold was the daughter of James Gold of Cork, Attorney General of Munster, who in the late 1580s was commissioned by Queen Elizabeth to survey the lands confiscated from the Earl of Desmond (and other rebels) for distribution amongst the English undertakers. But we don’t know Alice and Walter’s daughter’s name, when she was born, or even if she was in fact Ralegh’s child. What happens in Ireland, stays in Ireland.

Sir Walter Ralegh did not marry Alice Goold. He did marry Bess Throckmorton. An image of Bess from this time survives, although only as a black and white print of the lost original painting. She wears the conventional fashions of the 1590s: puffed sleeves ballooning, lace ruff immaculately starched, jewels ostentatiously displayed. There are a few details in the picture that might confuse the viewer. Bess wears the open ruff traditionally associated with an unmarried woman, but a large ring sits on the thumb of her left hand. Is this possibly a wedding ring? At that time, it was a matter of personal choice on which finger one wore the wedding ring. Is there even a hint of her pregnancy? Her stomach is certainly more rounded than in other women’s portraits of the time. These details may or may not be significant; what is certain is that the woman portrayed, with her wide, flat cheekbones, long nose and slightly protruding bottom lip, may not be a conventional beauty but she nevertheless exudes a strange power.

The social and political reality was that Bess, the stepsister (admittedly via many steps) of Lady Jane Grey the nine-days’ Queen, was of a higher rank than Ralegh, with familial ties to the monarchy, and a father, Nicholas Throckmorton, who was for many years Queen Elizabeth’s trusted fixer in the tricky business regarding Mary Queen of Scots.

Most accounts of their relationship have Walter as virile and culpable and Bess as his sexual victim and political nemesis. One of the earliest biographies has him roguishly ‘devirginating a Maid of Honour’, which is deemed ‘the worst Action of his whole Life’. Nevertheless, Ralegh does the honourable thing, by marrying ‘the Object of his Love, the deflowered Lady’. The evidence suggests that Bess Throckmorton was far from a passive and innocent victim of Sir Walter’s allegedly skilful seduction. This is not to diminish the man’s attractions. His immense wealth and handsome face might have been enough for many women. He was charming, experienced, urbane and intelligent. His dark, Celtic good looks made him suspiciously similar in appearance and outlook to Bess’s father. And he could write. But in the end, he was the fifth son of a Devon squire. Bess was a Throckmorton. Understand that, and Ralegh’s ambitious plan starts to become clearer.

During the winter of 1591 he gave nothing away. His letters were studiously businesslike (if at times written so quickly as to be illegible, and hastily addressed to the wrong brother), concerned only with the organisation of his next great naval expedition against the Spanish in Central America. He was, gloriously, at last to be a full Admiral, in command of thirteen ships that would attack the Spanish silver fleet and, while there, sack Panama. Ralegh, being Ralegh, is preoccupied, quite rightly, with supplies for his men: fifty tons of cider in good casks; ten thousand dry Newfoundland fish to be sent to Plymouth. The serious planning for the Panama voyage began in early 1592; the ships were supposed to leave in February. Typically, there were delays. On 3 March Ralegh wrote again to his brother (getting the name right this time). He had wanted the sailors to be ready by 16 March but ‘now, through many urgent occasions’ he is ‘constrained to defer’ and asks John Gilbert to make sure the sailors are levied ‘from places least infected’ by plague, and to be ready on the twentieth.

Bess remained at court, still concealing, goodness knows how, her pregnancy. On 11 February, her ever-loyal brother Arthur paid twenty-eight shillings for a nurse ‘for fourteen weeks from Monday next’. Bess came to his house in Mile End at the end of the month. She was cutting it fine, but if she could keep her non-attendance at court to under a fortnight, she would not need to obtain a licence to authorise her absence. Arthur wrote that his sister had come ‘to lie here’. Both meanings are in play: Bess would both prepare for the birth of her child and continue to deceive the world, from Arthur’s house.

Hiding in Mile End, Bess was physically not far from Sir Walter, who was often in Chatham Docks supervising preparations for the Panama expedition. To see each other was, however, simply too dangerous. Ralegh had invested an immense amount of money and time in setting up this voyage and its success relied on his charismatic leadership. An attack on Panama would serve his purposes well, enabling him to be as far away as possible if and when the news of his marriage and child broke on the Queen.

Despite his military, naval and political experience, Ralegh’s temperament in this very different kind of crisis had not been truly tested. But it would be, by the ever-rising Robert Cecil. As the birth approached, Sir Walter explicitly denied any relationship with Bess in a series of lies to Cecil, who had been pushing Ralegh for some answers in the light of reports and rumours. Sir Walter claimed that there had been no marriage, that there would be no marriage and that he was attached to no one other than the Queen:

I mean not to come away, as they say I will, for fear of a marriage and I know not what. If any such thing were I would have imparted it unto your self before any man living. And therefore I pray believe it not, and I beseech you to suppress what you can any such malicious report. For I protest before God, there is none on the face of the earth that I would be fastened unto.

What Sir Walter did not know, but probably should have guessed, was that Robert Cecil had belatedly found out about the secret marriage, most probably during the week at the end of February when Bess left the court. Therefore, when Ralegh wrote this letter on 10 March, Cecil knew that he was being lied to. Sir Walter thus destroyed any precarious bond of trust between these two profoundly dissimilar men. The letter, born of expediency, was political folly of the highest order: the request for Cecil to suppress the ‘malicious reports’ was naïve; and to swear ‘before God’ that he is telling the truth was downright blasphemous.

Bess went into labour on the morning of 29 March: that afternoon she ‘was delivered of a boy between 2 and 3’. Sir Walter, still waiting for the wind at Chatham, heard of the birth of his son from Arthur Throckmorton’s footman Dick, who rode down with the news that same afternoon. Sir Walter stayed away (what else could he do?) but he sent his half-brother, Adrian Gilbert to Bess, with fifty pounds of spending money. This generous sum, Gilbert later recalled, was spent ‘at Mile End Green, and about London, when the Lady Ralegh was first delivered with child; and when most of Sir Walter’s friends forsook him’.

Ralegh could not afford to let the news of the birth of his first son break his stride. Two days after the baby’s birth, he was at Portland in the west of England, immersed in further expedition business, ‘ready to take the first wind’, picking up runaway mariners (‘for we shall be undone if we miss them’) and getting the all-important fish supplies on board.

On 10 April 1592 the boy child was christened, with the unusual name of Damerei. His godfathers were his uncle, Arthur Throckmorton and, surprisingly, given his history with the baby’s father, the Earl of Essex. These were telling choices. Essex was supporting the marriage of his chief political rival to a woman from a solidly and aggressively Protestant family, just as he had allied himself in marriage to the widow of the Protestant soldier-hero Sir Philip Sidney, the daughter of the spymaster and foreign policy hawk Walsingham. The new political order envisioned, longed for, by Essex revolved around these marriages and their offspring. The marriage of Sir Walter Ralegh and Bess Throckmorton symbolised a vision for England: the honourable soldier and the Protestant gentlewoman would bring forth brave sons to fight for God’s own nation. It was irrelevant that Essex had spent long periods of time apart from his own wife and had had numerous sexual relationships, including one with a maid of honour, Elizabeth Southwell, that resulted in the birth of an illegitimate son, Walter Devereux, at the end of 1591. This was not about sex; it was about establishing a political cabal.

Did Essex balk at the choice of the baby’s name? The Raleghs’ aspirations are nowhere more apparent than in the ambitious pretensions implicit in ‘Damerei’, so called because Ralegh had ‘proved’, with the aid of a genealogist, that he was descended from the Plantagenets. Yes: he had royal blood. In 1587, Ralegh, then in the ascendant at court, commissioned a history of Ireland from a well-known scholar, John Hooker. Hooker used his dedication to make public new evidence about Ralegh’s royal ancestry. You had to go back to the Plantagenets to find it, and you had to accept that one Sir John de Ralegh had married the daughter of de Amerie or Damerei of Clare, a relation of Edward I, but if you accepted these facts it all made perfect historical sense.

Essex was not too alarmed by the royal name and nominated Ralegh to be a Knight of the Garter. This was the most exclusive social group in the realm: its numbers were limited to twenty-five and since the appointment was for life, new investitures depended on mortality. Only ‘the best, most excellent, and renowned persons in all virtues and honour’ could receive the honour, symbolised by ‘a garter garnished with gold and precious stones, to wear daily on the left leg only; also a kirtle [tunic], gown, cloak, chaperon [head covering], collar and other solemn and magnificent apparel, both of stuff and fashion exquisite and heroical to wear at high feasts’. Ralegh would have looked very fine. Unfortunately, Essex was the only peer of the realm to nominate Sir Walter, who never did receive the Garter.

Ralegh had more pressing concerns at the end of April, as he waited for the tide to take the fleet out of Falmouth. He clearly wanted to be out of the way if and when trouble came. He began speaking about the expedition as a matter of life and death: ‘if we live we hope to repay all again, if not we shall reckon in the kingdom of Heaven’. Bess, astonishingly, returned to court on 27 April, just four weeks after Damerei’s birth. Her brother Arthur still paying the bills, the baby was sent with his nurse to Enfield, out of sight, but probably not out of mind. At the very moment when Bess audaciously re-established herself as a Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber, the weather and sea conditions were at last propitious for Ralegh and he made his escape from Falmouth. The couple were back where they wanted to be.

Only a day after setting sail, however, Sir Martin Frobisher caught up with Sir Walter and demanded that he return to court, on the orders of the Queen. Ralegh, perhaps foolishly, ignored these orders, insisting that he needed to stay with the fleet until it was fully at sea. He was quick to understand that this was not just another example of Elizabeth’s desire to have her dear pug near her. Rather, it was the first real threat to his special relationship with the Queen. The stalling over, on 16 May he was back in Plymouth and a few days later back in London.

Still the expected storm did not come from the Queen. Could Elizabeth really have been worried about Sir Walter’s safety at sea? Relieved, Sir Walter and Bess, clearly both increasingly confident, took steps to regularise their relationship. For Ralegh, this meant asserting his financial and legal rights as a husband. He sent his man, Browne, to Arthur Throckmorton’s house to draw up an ex post facto marriage settlement. For Bess, or rather Lady Ralegh, if only the world could know, this meant bringing her baby and his wet nurse back to the City of London from their exile in Enfield. She, Damerei and the nurse all went, on 21 May, to the house of her long-suffering brother in Mile End. Once again, Arthur paid the nurse.

The confidence implicit in these actions was ill-founded. A mere three days later, a representative of the Lord Chamberlain came to the house at Mile End. The writing was on the wall because the Lord Chamberlain was one of the three principal officers of the Royal Household, with particular responsibility for the monarch’s private and semi-private chambers, including the royal bedchamber. The messenger carried a warrant for the arrest and interrogation of Arthur and Anna Throckmorton. They were questioned to establish the extent of their involvement in the deception surrounding the two-month-old baby lodged in their house. This may have been when Bess realised just how much her brother and sister-in-law were risking; the point when she realised that it was time for her husband to stand up and be counted, the point when she had had enough of the lies. Whatever the case, there is a certain defiance in her next move. On 28 May 1592, baby Damerei was at last formally taken by his mother to his father’s house. For a brief twenty-four hours, the Raleghs were a conventional family in their home, Durham House.

After the deceptive lull, the storm finally broke. First, the Queen’s men came to question Sir Walter, who was placed under house arrest. For two days he was interrogated, allowed just one private visit from Arthur. The two men (if they had any sense) would have attempted to co-ordinate their stories. The Queen then moved against her Gentlewoman. Unlike Sir Walter, Bess was not allowed to stay in her own house but was taken by Sir Thomas Heneage, the Vice-Chamberlain, to a ‘courtyard’ somewhere in London. Heneage was one of Elizabeth’s most trusted spymasters, heir to the feared Walsingham; no doubt his team of secret agents had been collecting information for days, weeks or months. In happier times, Sir Walter and Sir Thomas had exchanged poems about the nature of love. Now Bess was in effect his prisoner and her husband was fighting for his political life.

Arthur quickly left London. Summoned for a second round of questioning, he replied that he was needed at his country estate at Paulerspury in Northamptonshire. He was nevertheless hauled back and made two formal statements on 10 and 12 June 1592. Suspiciously (and frustratingly for the historian), neither of these documents survives, but whatever Arthur said appeared to clear his name. He was allowed to return to the relative safety of the country and its pursuits; a few weeks later he was hunting with his best friend.

On one level hope flickered. Perhaps even at this stage the crisis could be managed, or at least suppressed, and the Queen, the most important player, might live and let live if only for the sake of minimising the scandal. Indeed, Elizabeth appeared to be mellowing towards Sir Walter, confirming on 27 June 1592 the transfer to him of the estate of Sherborne. Granted Sherborne by his Queen, he was still not a free man.

Deprived of the lifeblood of personal contact with his monarch, Ralegh was struggling: ‘the torment of my mind cannot be greater’ he wrote in desperation. He was also angry. With typically bitter irony, he complained to Charles, Lord Howard, that Her Majesty thought it was, as he put it, ‘profitable to punish’ his ‘great treasons’, suggesting that on the one hand that it would not be profitable to punish him and that it would have been profitable to have been allowed to attack the Spanish treasure fleet, and on the other that his solitary ‘unfortunate accident’ was being grossly inflated into ‘great treason’.

He continues, because he cannot stop himself:

But I see there is a determination to disgrace me and ruin me, and therefore I beseech your lordship not to offend her Majesty any further by suing for me. I am now resolved of the matter. I only desire that I may be stayed not one hour from all the extremity that either law or precedent can avow, and if that be little would God it were withal concluded, that I might feed the lions as I go by to save labour.

Ralegh’s attempts at irony fall very flat, as does his half-hearted joke about being thrown to the lions of the Tower of London (the monarch’s personal zoo, as well as prison). His secret marriage, his secret baby, were, if not ‘great treasons’, then certainly a political and personal betrayal of his Queen. As for ‘profit’, Elizabeth would gain far more money from of Ralegh’s downfall than she ever had from his success.

What is absent from his letters is any explicit acknowledgement of what he has done. This was not only true of Ralegh. There may have been a whispering campaign, but no one appeared willing to spell out exactly what had happened. There is a mysterious silence in the official records about why Ralegh, his wife, her brother and her sister-in-law were interrogated. It was even unclear whether it was indeed one ‘unfortunate accident’ or the ‘several occasions’ mentioned in one fascinated courtier’s letter. The Earl of Essex’s poetry vividly captures the atmosphere at court. He is no great writer but he knows at first hand that ‘heavens, what hell! The bands of love are broken, Nor must a thought of such a thing be spoken’.

If the precise nature of the charges remains hidden, so do the Queen’s motivations. The strangely stop-start progress of events suggests that the conventional interpretation, that the Queen, for whom ‘vanity was the one constant force’, was fired with sexual jealousy and banished Sir Walter from court ‘when he seduced her maid’ is inadequate. As the historian Susan Doran points out in her study of the Queen’s courtships, there is no need to explain Elizabeth’s behaviour in terms of deep-seated psychological damage and neurosis, let alone to suggest that she was motivated by vanity and jealousy; the Queen’s anger at the secret weddings of her ladies and courtiers usually had a political cause. In general terms she wanted her privy chamber to be apolitical and consequently required her ladies to be free from loyalties to a husband and his kin. By marrying, her ladies risked their political neutrality; furthermore, when they married (often by necessity) secretly, they demonstrated to their mistress their untrustworthiness and divided loyalties. Marriages conducted without the Queen’s ‘privity’ (her permission and knowledge) made her ‘grievously offended’. Moreover, Queen Elizabeth’s responses to the disloyalty of her female courtiers varied: Mary Shelton had her ears boxed, while Bridget Manners’ husband was sent to prison.

Why was no one willing to talk about the issue in this case? More specifically, why was the Queen particularly aggrieved? In the short term, probably because Sir Walter could not keep quiet. Although it was clear that Her Majesty was not receiving his complaints well, Ralegh was unable to resist making one more attempt. His sense of urgency was compounded by the knowledge that the Queen was making final preparations for her summer progress, when anyone who was anyone would leave London.

Time was running out. A letter recounts how, catching sight of the royal barges assembling on the Thames at Blackfriars, Ralegh physically struggled with his keeper, his kinsman George Carew, saying ‘that he would disguise himself and get into a pair of oars to ease his mind but with a sight of the queen, or else, he protested, his heart would break’. Tellingly, the correspondent (Ralegh’s friend and cousin, so on paper a sympathiser) noted: ‘all lameness was forgotten’. Even his friends saw through Ralegh’s histrionics. He needed to calm down. He didn’t.

He wrote to Robert Cecil, hoping that he would pass his words on to the Queen. Ralegh’s letter is an extraordinary outpouring of intense emotion, ostensibly directed at a no doubt bemused, and possibly amused, Cecil but clearly directed to Elizabeth. Sir Walter certainly piles on the praise:

I that was wont to behold her riding like Alexander, hunting like Diana, walking like Venus – the gentle wind blowing her fair hair about her pure cheeks like a nymph, sometimes sitting in that shade like a nymph [at this point, he crosses out ‘nymph’ and inserts ‘goddess’, having realised he has used ‘nymph’ already], sometimes singing like an angel, sometimes playing like Orpheus.

Sir Walter hints at the cause of the goddess Elizabeth’s wrath but always euphemistically and always stressing the singularity of it all: ‘once amiss…one frail misfortune…one drop of gall’. This is at best disingenuous, if it could be construed to mean the sexual act that created Damerei. Judged more harshly, it was a blatantly self-serving lie. Ralegh, as victim, presents himself as trapped in London (as he indeed was, under house arrest), with his beloved Queen going ‘away so far off’ while he remains incarcerated in ‘a dark prison’. Significantly, when he revised the letter, he added the words ‘all alone’, thus not merely drawing attention to his prospective loneliness but also emphasising that Elizabeth had succeeded in separating him from his wife. By the end of a letter that becomes hysterical, Ralegh has completely lost sight of Cecil as audience and his words are addressed solely to his Queen. The letter completely failed in its purpose (the Queen left Greenwich on 25 July and was at the Nonsuch Palace by the 27th) and probably served only to exacerbate the situation. Ralegh was right to describe himself as ‘a fish cast on dry land, gasping for breath, with lame legs and lamer lungs [first time spelt ‘lunges’, second time ‘loonges’]’.

Things became serious. House arrest, until now seen as punishment enough for both Sir Walter and Bess, was insufficient. The Tower was spoken of. The ‘dark prison’ of Ralegh’s fantasy was to become, it was said, a harsh reality. Gossip went around London like wildfire. On Sunday night, Sir Edward Stafford wrote, with gleeful cattiness, to Anthony Bacon: ‘If you have any thing to do with Sir Walter Ralegh, or any love to make to Mistress Throckmorton, at the Tower tomorrow you may speak with them, if the countermand come not tonight, as some think it will not be, and particularly he that hath charge to send them thither’. These revealing comments suggest first that the marriage between Ralegh and Bess was not common knowledge (Bess was still ‘Mistress Throckmorton’, although this could be irony) but clearly the existence of her baby was, made evident in the snide aside about her willingness to make love.

Second, they suggest a power struggle behind the scenes. The order to send Ralegh and his lady to the Tower had been drawn up but someone else was attempting to have that order countermanded. ‘He that hath charge to send them thither’ believed that the countermand would not be achieved. Who this is remains unclear but it is most likely Robert Cecil, who may well have been secretly delighted with the turn of events. No countermand came.

The Queen may have believed that the relationship was simply a matter of rampant hormones and could be ignored once a proper show of outrage had been manifest. But when she found out that there had been a marriage, that the baby was legitimate, that the boy’s parents claimed he was descended from the Plantagenets, that the Earl of Essex was his godfather and that his mother had a family history of treachery and pretension to the Crown, she acted. Just over a year after Damerei had been conceived, four months into their son’s life, Walter and Bess finally paid the price for their ambitions. Queen Elizabeth, at the Nonsuch Palace, signed the warrant for the arrest and imprisonment of her wayward gentlewoman and captain. On 7 August 1592, as the summer heat worked on the city’s dirt, the pair were imprisoned in the Tower of London.

Ralegh the wordsmith turned to poetry, clearly not having learned from the failure of his earlier passionate letter to Robert Cecil. More than five hundred lines of (admittedly superb, if by turns self-pitying and aggressive) verse later, he must have felt he had captured the intensity of his feelings for his Queen. Having written out his poetic offering in his best italic hand, he sent it to Cecil in the hope that he would pass it on to Elizabeth. Cecil, unsurprisingly did not, although whether in an attempt to further marginalise his rival or tactfully, to protect Ralegh from the potentially problematic impact of his own words – Sir Walter is at his most bitter – remains unclear. In the mid-nineteenth century, a scholar working through papers held in Hatfield House, the Cecil family seat, stumbled upon these remarkable poems. For all their apocalyptic sense of urgency in 1592, the manuscript had lain unseen for some 250 years.

Bess attempted to get the support of her noblewomen friends and risked a gentle criticism of Robert Cecil. Perhaps he has been ‘deceived in his judgement’ and ‘it may be he findeth his error’. She is ‘daily put in hope of’ delivery from the Tower of London (a hope that would be dashed again and again), but she is also aware that she may do ‘harm’ to Sir Walter ‘to speak of my delivery’. Her studied cheerfulness and practicality almost conceal the perilous situation that she finds herself in but there are clear indications that she is both ill and frightened. The ‘plague is greatly seized’ and coming closer and closer to the Tower. Bess’s opening lines refer to the end, to her sick estate and to her illness, which continues ‘even so still’. There are moments of studied optimism, but she acknowledges that her future, even if she is released, is uncertain. ‘Who knoweth what will become of me when I am out?’ she asks. And yet, despite her obvious fears and sickness, Bess celebrates her marriage, never showing anything other than complete loyalty and devotion. She writes to her friend that ‘I assure you truly, I never desired, nor never would desire my liberty without the good liking nor advising of Sir W R’ and she goes on defiantly, ‘we are true within ourselves, I can assure you’. Proud to the last, she signs the letter ER, a public proclamation of her married status and, disconcertingly, the Queen’s cipher.

Safely out of reach, in her palace at Nonsuch, of the encroaching plague in London, the other ER received news of the capture of the richest prize ever taken by English ships, the Spanish treasure galleon Madre de Dios. English ships? They were also Ralegh’s ships. Elizabeth had denied her errant courtier the opportunity to sail with his fleet to Panama but on paper he remained the expedition’s leader and it had succeeded beyond anyone’s dreams. The Madre de Dios contained half a million pounds’ worth of treasure and all the spices and gold, ebony and ivory, that could be dreamed of by an ambitious adventurer. But the distribution of the booty was being grossly mishandled and by the time the looters had finished their business, the cargo was worth less than 150,000 pounds. Robert Cecil was horrified by the chaos: ‘Fouler ways, desperate ways, no more obstinate people did I ever meet with’. Sir John Hawkins, on the spot in Dartmouth and desperate for support, knew who was needed: ‘Sir Walter Ralegh is the especial man’.

Soldier Ralegh and sailor Ralegh saw his opportunity. As soon as the Madre de Dios came into Dartmouth, he began offering the Queen and her council a financial deal in return for his release from the Tower of London. On 11 September 1592 he wrote to Lord Burghley, promising hard cash: ‘Four score thousand pound is more than ever any man presented Her Majesty as yet. If God have sent it for my ransom I hope Her Majesty of her abundant goodness will accept it’. Ralegh’s offer of hard cash is framed by some very familiar rhetoric. Writing from his ‘unsavoury dungeon’, he has a ‘faithful mind and a true desire to serve her’ (which neatly glosses over the actions of his unfaithful body), and once again his letter ends with an implied plea direct to the Queen herself.

Whether it was promise of eighty thousand pounds or the declarations of a ‘faithful mind’ and ‘true desire’, the strategy appeared to work. A few days later, in mid-September, the Queen signed the order for Ralegh’s conditional release. The following day he was out. In hours he was riding westwards, dashing off a letter of thanks to Lord Burghley from London, and yet another from Hartley Row, on the road west between Basingstoke and Bagshot. Burghley’s son, Robert Cecil, capturing the essence of the man, noted that Ralegh’s ‘heart is broken, as he is extremely pensive, unless he is busied, in which he can toil terribly’.

It could have been worse. Ralegh was forbidden to appear in court and could not exercise his duties as Captain of the Guard, but he had been permitted to keep the Sherborne estate and his offices in the West Country. Ralegh was back in business, asking, from Hartley Row, for a commission to make enquiry into which goldsmiths and jewellers have gone down to Devon, intending to intercept them on their way back as, he promises, ‘many things will be discovered’.

His wife had no such possibility of escape. Some who had supported and encouraged Lady Ralegh a few months earlier, not least the Earl of Essex, were quick to fade into the background in her time of trouble. All she had was a husband who would not even acknowledge her (there is continued and complete silence about Bess in Sir Walter’s letters for fully the next three years). Did he believe she had ruined his political career?

Unable to offer eighty thousand pounds to the Queen and unwilling to deny her relationship with Ralegh, Bess remained alone in the Tower. As September continued, the heat in London did not abate. It was the end of one of the hottest summers in living memory and London was a city of drought; the Thames itself dried up. Conditions in the Tower deteriorated as the weeks went by but worse was to come in October, as the plague took a stranglehold on the city. Those who had returned to attend to business or the start of the new law term quickly packed up and left; even the legal sessions moved to Hertford, well north of London. The theatres closed; playwrights either fell silent or found other ways to earn their keep: this was the summer William Shakespeare turned to poetry. The Queen eventually returned from her summer progress but kept clear of the City of London and Westminster, preferring to stop at Hampton Court on 10 October. The heat and the plague acted on the weak; on those who could not leave. It was most probably in October that baby Damerei died, at only six months old. There is silence in the official records about this small tragedy and about the fate of the infant’s mother. Was it a coincidence that Bess and her baby were left in prison in a plague-ridden London? ER, the Queen, may well have hoped that ER, her treacherous gentlewoman, would follow the baby Damerei, carrier of such an ambitious name, into the anonymity of a public plague pit.

At last, in deepest midwinter, Bess was allowed to leave the Tower. She went straight to the Sherborne estate. Her fallen husband, unlikely to be given any form of military, naval or political command any time soon, and estranged from both his Elizabeths, remained at Durham House. He had escaped being ‘deciphered’ as a traitor but it appeared that his fall from grace would be as rapid and complete as his rise to power.