Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (18 page)

What, though, does all this tell a biographer of Sir Walter Ralegh? Were his views so very different from those expressed by 'Harriot'? Of course, it is unsafe to take the beliefs endorsed by one Elizabethan and then attribute them to another, even if the two are close political and personal allies; the links of patronage and friendship are too complex for that. By the early 1590s, in any case, Harriot was looking to the Earl of Northumberland, rather than to Ralegh, as his principal patron, perhaps as a result of all this unwelcome notoriety, or perhaps because of Ralegh's fall from favour. Northumberland certainly harboured doubts over the nature of religion, and of God Himself, and greatly admired the scepticism of Pierre Charron. Profess ignorance, doubt, enquire, search and acknowledge what you do not know: Charron's injunctions in Of Wisdom are, as Clucas notes, underlined in Northumberland's own copy.
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 Harriot was working for the Earl by 1591, when an account book in the archive at Alnwick Castle shows him dining frequently with Northumberland's household in London.
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 We forget that Harriot, so long portrayed as the drab mathematician thinking great thoughts while gazing through his primitive telescopes, was congenial company at a small dinner party. Every now and then he appears in the historical record, fully at home in comfortable surroundings: when the Gunpowder Plotter Thomas Percy visited his kinsman Northumberland at Syon House during dinner on 4 November 1605, he found the Earl sitting at table with only his stepson-in-law, one other friend and Thomas Harriot for company. But if the focus of Harriot's scientific patronage was adjusted at this time, this was, at most, a shift of emphasis in a strong three-way friendship. Ralegh was still important to Harriot, perhaps ever more so as the years went by. Harriot risked a great deal in his futile efforts to help Ralegh during the crisis of 1603, and he was devastated by Ralegh's death in 1618. Maybe his biographer is right when he maintains that Harriot simply enjoyed a freer life in the service of the ninth Earl, away from the force of nervous energy that was Ralegh.
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Another incident frequently used to illustrate Ralegh's religious scepticism amounts to little more than prandial chaffing. In 1593, during a supper hosted by Sir George Trenchard at Wolfeton in Dorset, he and his brother Carew ruffled the temper of Ralph Ironside, Vicar of Winterborne Abbas, by inquiring into the nature of the soul and exposing what they saw as Ironside's flawed theological arguments. The reasonable soul, said the parson, ,is a spirituall and imortall substance breathed into man by God, whereby he lyves, and moves and understandeth, and soe is distinguished from other creatures'. 'But what', asked Ralegh, 'is that spirituall and imortall substance?"The soule', Ironside replied. And so the profitless discussion ran on, debating whether it was scholarly to argue in circles, until Ralegh, tiring of the sport, called for Grace to be said, 'for that quoth he is better than this disputacion'.
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 A tactful closure, perhaps, but one that left his own position at least ambiguous. Certainly it did not mollify Ironside, put out by what he saw as irreverent impertinence.

This spat may have helped prompt, and certainly added spice to an investigation into atheism in Dorset, undertaken by the Court of High Commission and convened at Cerne Abbas during the last week of March 1594. The hearing, which brought together as commissioners Sir Ralph Horsey - present at the dinner - Thomas Lord Howard of Bindon - no friend of Ralegh - the Sheriff of Dorset John Williams, and others, listened patiently to Ironside's sulky testimony, and to a succession of witnesses with nothing other than rumour to add.
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 It was feeble stuff: the minister at Gillingham, for example, had 'harde that one Herryott of Sir Walter Rawleigh his howse hath brought the godhedd in question, and the whole course of the scriptures, but of whome he so harde it he doth not remember'. After three days full of hearsay thrown against all sorts of people, from members of the local gentry to poor Harriot, the Commission dispersed, and took no further action.
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 They had clearly had enough. Nevertheless, as Rowse and many others have pointed out, mud of this texture tends to stick.
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 In Ralegh's case it has stuck ever since.

Ralegh was in no position to ignore the hint of scandal, and he duly proved his religious credentials by overseeing, with Horsey and Trenchard, a raid on Chideock, a residence of the Catholic Stourton family. There they arrested the Arundell family's priest, John Cornelius, alias Mooney. 'Hee is', said Ralegh, 'an Irishman and a notable stout villayne, and I thinke can say miche.'
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 Cornelius, transferred as a prisoner to Trenchard's house, was indeed quite happy to talk to Ralegh, albeit on topics of his own choosing. According to a Catholic source Ralegh passed an entire night conversing with the prisoner, and went away impressed by his sincerity, though irritated by a reference to atheism. If, indeed, the meeting ever took place, those long hours of talk did neither man any good. Cornelius was determined upon martyrdom, and nothing Ralegh or anyone else said could turn him from his purpose. Eventually, he was hanged, drawn and quartered at Dorchester, and Ralegh supervised the execution.
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 As with another imprisoned priest, Oliver Plasden, some years earlier, Ralegh had been prepared to spend time in argument and debate, in order to save a Catholic from the gallows. But Plasden died and Cornelius died, their consciences insisting that loyalty to the Queen should not compel them to set aside their obedience to the Pope.

It is hard to know whether Ralegh's intervention on these occasions demonstrates his own moderation, or whether it is part of a concerted effort on the part of the administration to prevent the creation of martyrs. The latter is more likely, but it is worth remembering that, six years later, Edward Gorges begged from Cecil the release of a Catholic prisoner from a London gaol. The man - never named, but almost certainly Henry Carew the younger, of Hainworthy, Dorset - was described as Ralegh's kinsman, and Ralegh, according to the optimistic petitioner, was confident of converting the prisoner if he could but get the man out of the clutches of his fellow Catholics.
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Gorges omitted to mention that Ralegh had asked the same favour months before, in the same terms. He had already done all that could be done for this family, but without effect.
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The evidence, then, takes us only so far. Ralegh's religious beliefs are hard to categorize, but his character as we understand it suggests a mixture of the deist, the naturally sceptical, and (less certainly) the fundamentally devout. The sentiments expressed in his writings, particularly in his The History of the World, confound easy charges of unorthodoxy, but the casual ribbing of Ironside argues against any unthinking acceptance of religious dogma. As Aubrey said, Ralegh's boldness led him to 'venture at discourse which was unpleasant to the Church-men', but when he returned to London following his first voyage to Guiana people remarked that Sir Walter now attended sermons daily because he had 'seen the wonders of the Lord in the deepe'.
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 Discounting the wittiness of this remark, Ralegh was just the man to be impressed by direct personal experience. On a long sea voyage, he had time to ponder profound questions, and there are signs that, as he thought about them, his views in these matters changed over the years. One thing, though, did not change. He could never abide cant. 'We are all', he wrote, 'in effect become comedians in religion; and while we act, in gesture and voice, divine virtues, in all the course of our lives we renounce our persons and the parts we play. For charity, justice and truth have but their being in terms, like the philosophers' material prima.'
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Here is the authentic voice of Ralegh. An understanding of some deeper truths was beyond the wit of man: beyond the churchmen, beyond kings in their state, and even beyond Sir Walter Ralegh. The last word, however, should go to a one-time friend, Sir John Harington. In 1603, when no one wanted to speak out for a fallen Elizabethan favourite, Harington was brave and honest enough to tell the Bishop of Bath and Wells what he truly felt about Ralegh's religious convictions: 'As he hathe ofte discoursede to me wyth moch lernynge, wysdom, and freedome, I knowe he dothe somewhat dyffer in opynyon from some others; but I thynke also his hearte is welle fixed in everye honeste thynge...In relygion, he hathe showne (in pryvate talke) great depthe and goode readynge...In good trothe, I pitie his state.'
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Almost as soon as Ferdinand Pizarro had overthrown the great empire of the Incas in 1532, Spanish conquistadores began to explore east of the Andes for new lands to conquer and precious metals to mine. Traders in the pearl fisheries off the northern coast of South America - known as Tierra Firme - were told of rich tribes dwelling to the south, between the Amazon and the Orinoco. Gradually this grew into the myth of a city of gold, called Manoa, sited on Lake Parima, and ruled by an emperor, El Dorado, a descendant of the royal line of the Incas. The Empire of Guiana
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 over which he ruled was said to be comparable in riches to the Empire of Peru, as a sign of which the King/Emperor was bodily anointed every year with gold dust. A succession of Spaniards explored the regions of what are now Colombia and Venezuela. Some came from the east: Diego de Ordas ascended the Orinoco as early as 1531, and one of his followers, Juan Martines de Albujar, told how he had been taken by Indians to the city of Manoa where he had seen astounding riches. The story was totally fabricated. Others approached from the west: Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada reached the capital of the Muisca people, Bogotá, in 1536; Francisco de Orellana reached the Amazon in 1542; Lope de Aguirre and Pedro de Ursua descended it in 1559 in a terrifying voyage during which Ursua was murdered. After Ursua's death, Aguirre went up the River Negro and then descended the Orinoco to its mouth near Trinidad.
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The pre-eminent Spanish figure in the exploration of the Guiana region was Antonio de Berrío. A veteran of the Spanish wars, he was lucky enough to marry the niece of Jiménez de Quesada, then Governor of New Granada, who declared Berrío his heir. The latter made three heroic journeys into the area east of Bogotá, the third of these being the most impressive. He left Tunja in March 1590 with 112 Spaniards, 700 horses, 1,000 head of cattle, 20 cannons and 20 rafts.
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 Some of his force travelled by land, some by river. After eighteen months struggling down the Orinoco and through the delta he finally reached Trinidad in the autumn of 1591. He sent his camp master, Domingo de Vera, to establish a small fortified base, San Jose de Oruna, on Trinidad, and then to explore the Caroni River, which was thought to rise near the fabled city of Manoa. In April 1593, according to Spanish letters captured at sea, de Vera formally 'took possession' of the land ruled by the Indian chief, Morequito, at the junction of the Caroni and the Orinoco.
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 When de Vera returned with specimens of gold work and exciting stories of the mythical city, he was despatched to Spain by Berrío to collect potential settlers for a new colony on the Orinoco, a role in which he was much too successful. He recruited between 1,500 and 3,000 persons, of whom he was authorized to take 1,000 back to America. Lack of food and Indian attacks put paid to most of them.

Berrío was not the only conquistador interested in the riches of Guiana. Francisco de Vides, Governor of New Andalucia, and Juan Sarmiento de Villandrando, Governor of Margarita, were both threatening his position and that of English interlopers. Such was the situation in Guiana when Sir Walter Ralegh planned his own voyage.
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 Much of the Orinoco basin had been explored, Spanish settlers had been granted property in Trinidad, and the Indians had got to know some of the ways of the Europeans.

Ralegh wrote in his account of the Discoverie of Guiana that he had first learned of this land of gold 'by relation'. His source may well have been the explorer and historian of the Incas, Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, who had been captured by one of Ralegh's privateers in 1586 and had had friendly conversations with Sir Walter during his captivity. Soon after Gamboa departed for Spain in November 1586, some ships left England to reconnoitre the mouth of the Orinoco as part of a plan to plant the area with Portuguese settlers in support of Don Antonio, the pretender to the throne of Portugal. The Lord Admiral, Charles Howard, was one of the principal backers of the plan and it is possible that Ralegh became interested at the same time. The scheme came to nothing, except that a survey party was sent out with four young English boys, two of whom were left on Trinidad with an Indian chief to learn the language and the other two on an island near the mouth of the Orinoco.
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