Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (17 page)

Thanks, perhaps, to the influence in the county of another Carew kinsman, Richard, who was married to one of the Arundell family of Trerice, effectively the patrons of the borough, Ralegh was elected a burgess of Mitchell, Cornwall, in the 1593 Parliament. He had been knight of the shire for Devon in the 1580s, and this borough seat was distinctly less exalted. Nevertheless, it was at least a step on the path back to favour, and one or two clues suggest that he might still have been able to exercise his own patronage to secure the Saltash seat for the well-travelled diplomat Jerome Horsey.
52
 In the next two Parliaments Ralegh was returned for county seats: Dorset in 1597 and Cornwall in 1601. He was unique in Elizabeth's reign in representing three English counties, a keen Parliament man, actively concerned with borough patronage and with the business of the House, seldom if ever omitted from an important committee; he was, after all, a lord lieutenant, albeit of an impoverished and remote county. From time to time the Commons offered him a stage. In 1593, for example, he took on the role of prophet, warning fellow members in a sweeping survey of the dangers posed by Spain, demanding pre-emptive action and, consequently, a grant of subsidies sufficient to sustain the necessary military operations. These opinions were hardly unorthodox, though his insistence that those who could pay more should be taxed proportionately went against the realities of direct taxation in Elizabethan England. Ralegh argued that the 'three pound men', those who only just fell into the group liable to contribute towards the subsidy, should be excused payment, and the money lost from these subjects taken instead from 'those of ten pounds and uppward'.
53
 Subjected to unprecedented pressure from the Lords to act generously, MPs duly granted the Queen a triple subsidy, but, once again, no effort was made to revise the increasingly fossilized calculations for this standard form of direct taxation. Too many vested interests were involved, and the Queen would not even contemplate a destabilization of the political nation in a time of war. In parliament after parliament, the return on each 'entire subsidy' dwindled.

At Westminster, the pragmatic side to Ralegh's character emerged from time to time, bringing colleagues down to earth, pricking some wilder conceits. In the 1593 Parliament he spoke to counter demands for the banishment of obdurate 'Brownists', an early manifestation of English Congregationalist separatism who took their name from the priest and radical preacher Robert Browne. The measure was, he suggested, flawed both in principle and in practice. Brownists were misguided, of that he professed to have no doubt, but as in the case of John Udall it seemed to him wrong that so heavy a punishment should be imposed in a matter of belief and conscience. With such laws, there was always the danger that innocent people might suffer along with the guilty; punish the fact, he urged, and not the supposed intention. And how, he asked, could so sweeping a measure be implemented? Assuming that '2,000 or 3,000 Brownestes meete at the sea[side], at whose charge shall they be transported, or whether will you send them? I am sory for it, I am afrayd there be 10,000 or 12,000 of them in England: when they be gone who shall mayntaine their wife and children?'
54
 Again, though, he may have miscalculated. The bill that Ralegh and others opposed so determinedly was a government measure, dear to the hearts of Elizabeth and her Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift. While Queen and Archbishop reluctantly bowed to pressure and restructured the bill, these changes did not save two leading Brownists, Henry Barrow and John Greenwood, who were executed early one April morning in 1593, while the Parliament still sat.

Ralegh did rather better when playing the nationalist card, denouncing any measure of relief for Dutch merchants selling goods in England.'Whereas it is pretended, that for Strangers it is against Charity, against Honour, against profit to expel them; in my opinion it is no matter of Charity to relieve them. 'The nature of this Dutchman is to fly to no man but for his profitt, and to none they will obey longe.'
55
 These same people, he thundered, had shored up the imperial ambitions of Spain, and they should not receive any English silver. This was hardly an unpopular view; indeed it was typical of the xenophobia induced by unending war.

We know very little about the early years of Ralegh's marriage. Bess lived at Sherborne, running house and estate, while her husband tried to recover lost ground in London. In letters to allies at Court he usually avoided any mention of his wife, a necessary discretion, given the delicacy of the subject. His resolve slipped, however, in moments of stress. Writing to Cecil from Durham House, late in September 1594, Ralegh dealt briefly with a few preparations for his forthcoming Guiana voyage, and then told the Secretary in a postscript about an outbreak of plague in Sherborne. 'My Bess', he writes, 'is on way sent, hir Bonne another way, and I am in great troble ther with.' Ralegh's helplessness and anxiety are all too clear. So too is his love for'niy Bess'.
56
 Whenever the public, formal mask slips, expressions of deep affection, on both sides, are never hard to find. With Ralegh absent on his Guiana voyage Bess wrote to Cecil, pursuing with dogged determination an inheritance of (500 lost long since to the 'care' of the Earl of Huntingdon, and lamenting the days apart from 'him that I am', an unambiguous expression of love and dependence.
57

According to every test imposed by the Elizabethan authorities, Ralegh was a conforming member of the established church. From time to time, however, he would express a measure of rational scepticism, a potentially dangerous trait in a public figure. That danger was aggravated by the company he kept and by his evident taste for discussion and debate. Ralegh's patronage of the mathematician and astronomer Thomas Harriot, and his contacts with Giordano Bruno, Christopher Marlowe, John Dee and Harriot's other patron Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, tarred him by association with far more radical notions. Indeed, they helped to bolster a charge of atheism, vividly put forward in a work by the influential English Catholic exile, Robert Parsons. Parsons' pseudonymous Elizabethae...saevissiuium in Catliolicos sui regni edictum...cum responsione, published in Augsburg in 1592, provided contemporary readers with a lurid account of goings on at the 'heretical' English Court, and gave later authors a rich collection of tales and legends, material that begged for imaginative elaboration and further speculation. According to a rather condensed English summary of Parsons' work, also published on the Continent in that same year, Ralegh presided over a 'schoole of atheisme'. There, following a hardly demanding syllabus, 'both Moyses, and our Savior, the olde, and new Testamente [were] jested at, and the schollers taughte, amonge other thinges, to spell God backwarde'.
58
 Fanciful in the extreme, of course, yet both John Dee and Thomas Harriot felt that they might have been singled out as 'the Conjurer who is M[aster] thereof', the schoolmaster in this academy of unbelief. There is some slight evidence that they met to discuss the implications.
59

Parsons' attacks, even his charges of atheism, were by no means confined to Ralegh, who was really only a secondary target. Burghley - a 'worm', a ,serpent'- was always a much more substantial foe, more worthy of Parsons' vitriol, and the dead Hatton, Walsingham and Leicester were also savaged. The book was, of course, just another contribution to an interminable and strongly-worded propaganda war between Protestant and Catholic. Parsons was responding to attacks against the Jesuits launched by Elizabeth's government, in turn a response to the activities of Jesuit missionary priests in England after 1580. The October 1591 proclamation against the Society of Jesus had used particularly venomous language, insisting that Jesuits were engaged in treason concealed under a cloak of religion. Nevertheless, reputations tarnished in this way are sometimes difficult to polish afresh, especially when, years after the event, polemical tittle-tattle still provides a convenient foundation for other widely-disseminated ideas. One mountain from a molehill theory, for example, links Ralegh's hypothetical 'school of atheism' to the 'school of night' mentioned by the King of Navarre in Love's Labour's Lost. This curious notion can be traced back to the early twentieth century, when Arthur Acheson suggested a connection between Shakespeare's 'little academe' and George Chapman's poem 'The Shadow of Night'. From that charming if unsubstantiated conceit, academic speculation during the 1930s fashioned another fanciful Elizabethan academy, with Ralegh and Northumberland as funders and sponsors, and Harriot as the intellectual genius.
60
 John Dee, as ever, lurked somewhere in the background.

To believe in such an academy, however, is to credit allusion and guesswork over substance and probability. Love's Labour's Lost, generally supposed to have been written in the mid-1590s, is certainly laced with topical references, but Shakespeare's mockery of a po-faced group of noblemen who take their celibate scholarship altogether too seriously has broader targets - some of them still highly elusive - while Navarre's remark is too fleeting, and slight, for these suggestions to carry weight. Far too much is made of particular interpretations supported, essentially, by the later gossip of Anthony Wood and John Aubrey. Nevertheless, despite a careful deconstruction by Ernest Strathmann, the 'School of Night' still influences some more recent literary speculation, Frances Yates's evaluation of occult elements in the supposed curriculum coming more and more to the fore.
61

To get anywhere near the truth in these matters, we have to disentangle evidence from speculation. Ralegh's obscure links with Marlowe have been taken to provide evidence of atheism in both men, though it is hard to be certain that the two ever met. Verse exchanges may demonstrate familiarity with the works of corresponding authors, but literary familiarity of this kind does not of course confirm parallel processes of face-to-face conversation and debate. A suspected atheist, Richard Cholmley, once passed on a specific and, on the face of it, rather compelling story to a government informant. Marlowe, he said, had many persuasive arguments to uphold notions of atheism, and had indeed read an 'atheist lecture', whatever that might have been, to Ralegh and others.
62
 But this evidence is of limited value. The little that we know of Cholmley suggests a credulous individual, confident that atheism was rife in London, and receptive to the easy blasphemies of the alehouse. Ideas advanced by Samuel Tannenbaum eighty years ago that Ralegh ordered Marlowe's murder to silence a potential witness to his atheism are still more imaginative, even in the context of all the murky speculation still surrounding that bloody quarrel at Deptford in 1593.
63
 Certainly, they credit Ralegh with powers far beyond his reach.

Thomas Harriot was undoubtedly both Ralegh's friend and client, but was he an atheist? That is itself a challenging question to answer. Parsons' 'Conjurer' jibe certainly hit home, for Harriot was obliged to counter similar accusations throughout the rest of his life. Did Thomas Nashe, for example, draw on them when writing in Pierce Penilesse his supplication to the divell of 'mathematicians abroad, that will prove men before Adam'. People, wrote Nashe, who were 'harbored in high places', would willingly 'maintaine it to the death, that there are no divells'.
64
 A year later, in Christs teares overJerusaleni, the same author apparently mocked Harriot's ethnographic work on the peoples of North America, insisting that, according to English atheists, 'the late discovered Indians, are able to shew antiquities, thousands [of years] before Adana'. One of Nashe's many targets in this dismal and provocative work was the type of person who 'establisheth reason as his God', who delighted in picking over'every circumstance of [God's] providence', questioning 'why he did not thys thing, and that thing, and the other thing, according to theyr humors'.
65
 Several courtiers and their followers showed this spirit of enquiry during the 1590s, albeit in private, but given Nashe's own connections it seems quite possible that he had Harriot in mind. If Harriot was indeed targeted here, so too was his patron. Accusations against courtiers and their followers were nothing new, but they were only effective, and dangerous, when the courtier was vulnerable. In the early 1590s, Ralegh was an easy target.
66

Nashe exaggerates a great deal in Christs teares, for exaggeration is a characteristic of his work, but does he exaggerate Harriot's scepticism? The scholar's extensive surviving papers contain no hint of unorthodox religious speculation. Rather, they dwell on the prosaic, detaining the reader with abstruse mathematical challenges and practical problems in need of solution, from plumbing on the Syon estate, and auditing arrangements for the financing of Ralegh's first Guiana voyage, to a calculation of the optimum height of a ship's mast. Nashe was however justified in emphasizing Harriot's reliance upon personal observation, on, to quote Stephen Clucas, 'the significance of what he sees'.
67
 Such a man might indeed have entertained doubts over the Creation, and the omnipotence of God. In a particularly important recent essay, Clucas draws on an intriguing anonymous manuscript in the British Library, dating from 1594, to propose that Harriot did indeed move away from conventional religious tenets, and towards a reliance on reason over the ambiguities of theological argument. Clucas points out that the assignment of these views to Harriot is still a matter for debate. The owner of the manuscript added a cautious 'ut credo' to the attribution, but Harriot's name is obviously not one that can be rejected out of hand.
68

The argument advanced in this manuscript is familiar enough. 'Harriot' contends through syllogism that God cannot be both the first cause of all things, and at the same time omnipotent and intelligent. He is sceptical of arguments which create hierarchies of angels, and even doubts that humans can know anything at all about such beings, if they indeed exist: 'we have no experience of the power of spirits or spiritual phenomena'.
69
 He uses evidential the lack of it - to cast doubt on the existence of miracles. They simply do not seem to occur, unambiguously, in the modern world. The leading questions come thick and fast: What law made God the emperor over men and the angels? To what end does God punish men? Why does God demand veneration from men and the angels? Still more fundamentally, why did God make men and the world as they are, shoddy, vain and transient? In one deeply interesting shift of gear the au. To be or not to be?
70
 Aubrey long afterwards picked up a story that, in Harriot's view, 'ex nihilo nihil fit', and the tale seems to square with what we know of the man.
71