Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (22 page)

In the spring and early summer of 1596 those opportunities presented challenges fit for an ambitious man: to ensure that leading Counsellors worked harmoniously together, to raise troops and to prepare the fleet under the direction of his friend Charles, Lord Howard of Effingham, the Lord Admiral, all the while allaying the doubts of financiers, suppliers, suspicious courtiers and a Queen reluctant to spend money on combined operations after the debacle of England's disastrous expedition against Portugal in 1589. The new world had served its purpose. As Rear Admiral of the expeditionary fleet Ralegh had fresh priorities, and one senses the relief with which he pursued them. Life was particularly frantic.
1
 Using his brother-in-law Arthur Throckmorton's house at Mile End as his base, he travelled up river and down, persuading men to embark with the fleet. Ralegh's enthusiasm was still clearly infectious. Among many others he cajoled Throckmorton himself into joining the expedition.
2

Cecil was the first to allow that, when circumstances demanded, Ralegh could 'toil terribly'. Letter after letter from Sir Walter arrived on Cecil's desk - six within the space of three days, early in May - a barrage of news, attempting to exercise patronage, complaining about the situation in Ireland and detailing the work at hand. Scribbling furiously, Ralegh denounced those who 'refuse to serve Her Majestye', implicitly suggesting that those who did in fact serve her, in small things and in great, merited any favours that the Queen might care to bestow.
3
 On the verge of being appointed Principal Secretary, an office which gave its holder particular privileges of access to the monarch, Cecil also knew how to toil, and between these very different men there is at all times a mutual respect accorded to those with energy and drive. He seems to have offered practical help in those busy days, providing timely assurance for a bad debt of £500 when Ralegh, one of the original guarantors, found himself liable for repayment at a particularly inopportune moment.
4
He also helped Ralegh uphold his rights as Lord Warden of the Stannaries in Devon, and wrote reassuringly to Bess, who responded by promising Cecil that she would refer to him in all her 'cumbars' [troubles], as her 'surest staff' during Ralegh's absence.
5
 it is interesting that Cecil took such pains to assist and encourage the disgraced couple. Even though he was obviously well disposed to Ralegh, it is hard to suppose that the public actions of a very new Secretary would have been distasteful to the Queen.

Preparations for the expedition show all the usual tribulations, especially those resulting from the vagaries of wind and tide, decisive factors before the days of steam. Storms, or even a breeze blowing in the wrong direction, frustrated the movement of troops down the Channel, and slow progress gave the snipers at Court more ammunition: Ralegh was dragging his feet, they suggested, while the Queen fretted, as she always fretted, about leadership, about aims and about the feasibility of the entire project. Pressed men ran away, or simply refused to serve.
6
 Essex, in a 'hellish torment' of uncertainty, wrote an edgy letter to Ralegh, full of outward understanding for his 'pains and travail in bringing all things to that forwardness they are,, and half concealed fears that the delays might be caused by more than just an adverse wind: 'I will not entreat you to make haste, though our stay here is very costly, for besides all other expense, every soldier in the army has his weekly lendings out of my purse.
7
 Ralegh was in fact doing all that he could, and at times he too was caught up in the stresses of the moment. When the expedition's high command assembled, later in May, Ralegh - egged on by Arthur Throckmorton - quarrelled with the Lieutenant-General of the embarked army, Sir Francis Vere, over the limits of their respective commands and their competing claims to seniority. These arguments were never entirely resolved, though Essex made a stab at a compromise, logically offering precedence by land to the one, and by sea to the other. Throckmorton's provocative role was censured, but then pragmatically overlooked; he was allowed to sail with the fleet.

This brouhaha was quite in character; Ralegh was always sensitive to slights, while no one ever found it difficult to quarrel withVere. Besides, drink had obviously fuelled the row.
8
 For once, though, the expedition prospered despite the shortcomings of its senior officers. The large Anglo-Dutch fleet of more than one hundred ships eventually sailed from Plymouth early in June, and the ensuing operation culminated in one of the triumphs of Elizabethan arms.
9
 On 20 June the fleet arrived off Cadiz, taking the Spanish authorities there completely by surprise. While Spain knew that an attack was imminent, it had assumed that the targets would be those of 1589: Lisbon, and perhaps the Azores. Ralegh, in the Queen's new ship the Warspite, sailed south in the rearguard, patrolling the coast to surprise enemy shipping, but when entering the harbour on the twenty-first he led the fleet. The previous afternoon he had persuaded Lord Howard to attack the town, much to Essex's delight, and he now took the opportunity to vindicate his argument. Nevertheless, he did so warily; for all his gallantry, Ralegh was initially more cautious in his command than some of his fellow captains that day.
10

In one of his longest surviving letters, written from his 'house in Calze' that same evening to (in all probability) Arthur Gorges, Ralegh provided a vivid narrative of the action. At first, everything had gone rather well. The Warspite had sailed past the outer defences without firing a shot, making straight for the inner harbour. Then, after dropping anchor, came the real fight, a vicious struggle on sea and land, not only with the demoralized yet gallant enemy, but also with fellow commanders anxious not to be left behind in the race for glory and plunder. Ralegh was ostentatiously determined to 'revendge the death of The Revendge, or to second it with mine owne'. Here, he realized, was the perfect opportunity to earn a reputation while promoting his own colourful published version of Sir Richard Grenville's doomed action against a Spanish fleet off the Azores in 1591.
11
 The risks that men ran in this 'Hell' were all too obvious. Ralegh was wounded in the fighting, receiving 'a greevous blow in my legg, larded with mane splinters which I daylie pull out'.
12
 But glory now easily suppressed pain. A more elaborate account of the assault, probably written to Cecil, was eventually published in 1700 by Ralegh's grandson as A Relation of the Action at Cadiz. Here is one of the finest set-piece battle scenes in English literature. Writing of his own attack on the enemy galleons, Ralegh tells how the Spanish ship the Philip ran aground,

tumbling into the sea heaps of soldiers, so thick as if coals had been poured out of a sack in many ports at once, some drowned and some sticking in the mud. The Philip and the St Thomas burnt themselves: the St Matthew and the St Andrew were recovered by our boats ere they could get out to fire them. The spectacle was very lamentable on their side; for many drowned themselves; many, half burnt, leaped into the water; very many hanging by the ropes' ends by the ships' sides, under the water even to the lips; many swimming with grievous wounds, strucken under water, and put out of their pain.
13

With the English occupying the town, Essex made a name for himself by controlling his troops, and ensuring that churches were respected. There was no plundering of prisoners, and no killing in cold blood. When the fighting died down he outdid his generosity at the siege of Rouen, knighting sixty-three followers, Throckmorton included, but, amid all these shows of honour, a greater opportunity was missed. The tactical triumph concealed a measure of strategic incompetence. Cadiz was sacked, but the wealth carried on board the merchant fleet then in harbour was lost when the Spanish ships were scuttled. Even so, the expedition proved lucrative. The declared plunder offers only a partial picture, for a great deal of loot was either overlooked or concealed, but Ralegh alone carried off goods - including carpets, plate, gold and wine - valued at more than £1,700.
14
 Several English captains and private adventurers brought books home as well, books which today sit on the shelves of more than one ancient library. A 1588 catalogue of the Andalucian nobility in the British Library, for example, bears an inscription by Throckmorton, recording that the volume was carried from Cadiz on 27 June.
15

Like any other Elizabethan courtier, far from the Queen, Ralegh feared that his part in the operation might be misconstrued at home. He demonstrated all the neuroses of a man long excluded from Court. 'What others shall deliver of me', he told Gorges, 'I know not. The best wil be that ther was 16000 eye witnesses, but they may be cunning in their prayses.'
16
 Certainly there was a good deal of 'cunning' in all that filtered back to England, so many recriminations, boasts and exaggerations. Yet he need not have worried. The more influential among those eyewitnesses wrote and spoke warmly of his valour and judgement, of how he had won great renown, and even love, throughout the army.
17
 As news struggled home ahead of the fleet, rumours ran round London that Ralegh had drowned, and the public display of relief when these stories were shown to be false also demonstrated a measure of popular redemption.
18
 Weighing events in Cadiz, Elizabeth at last inclined towards forgiveness. Ralegh was allowed to return to Court the following year, and, from June 1597 he once again exercised his captaincy of the guard, filling vacancies (a necessity with the passage of time but also a statement that he had taken up the reins of office once more) and basking in the Queen's goodwill, 'with the Earl of Essex's liking and furtherance'.
19
 That gloss is interesting, and might be an oversimplification. Essex had sidestepped the actual reconciliation; it was Cecil who brought his friend to the Queen on 1 June, and who stood by when she allowed Ralegh to accompany her on an evening ride.
20
 Ralegh had earned his return, and he had, moreover, secured some established and increasingly powerful allies. He was even spoken of as a possible privy counsellor, and in that context - significantly - his friend Henry Brooke's name began to be mentioned too, a reflection of Elizabeth's growing regard for the handsome, engaging son and heir of that loyal Crown servant, William Brooke, Lord Cobham.
21

It may be that Essex sought to control Ralegh's recovery of favour at Court, and it may be that such controls were part of a scenario engineered by or for Elizabeth. Essex's very public intercession might have given her an equally public opportunity to show magnanimity, and indeed to follow a course that still did not come freely from her own heart. The acceptable role now allocated to him echoes both Ralegh's original entree to court, and also the military dimension to English foreign policy that had become so important to Essex. When, in November 1596, the Queen told Essex that she 'would have a meeting of such persons as were experienced in martial courses, that by them some advice might be given her, as was in the year '88', she first omitted Ralegh's name, only for Essex to add it to the list, along with that of Sir George.
22
 Though the dangers of inference are considerable, there are also one or two clues to suggest that Essex and Ralegh worked together as patrons, for example in relation to the bid by William Tooker for the Wardenship of Winchester.
23

If this was in some sense an Indian summer of favour, the sun was still warm. Essex had helped him to recover ground, but Ralegh appreciated the contributions made by others. He readily acknowledged all that Cecil had done to restore his fortunes, flattering the Secretary, and commiserating with him gracefully on the loss of his wife, Cobham's sister, in January 1597.'Ther is no man sorry for death it sealf butt only for the tyme of death...Yow shall', he wrote, 'butt greve for that which now is as then it was when not yours, only bettered by the difference in this, that shee hath past the weresume jurney of this darke worlde and hath possession of her inheritance...Sorrows draw not the dead to life butt the livinge to death.'
24
 'Impossible it is to equal words and sorrows', he would write much later in his The History of the World, dwelling on the untimely death of Henry Prince of Wales, but impossible or not, Ralegh was usually willing to try. When confronted with the melancholy of bereavement, the enduring power of sorrow and its potential to fasten onto human lives, he was seldom lost for words. Bess, for her part, stepped in with the pragmatic woman's contribution, offering to help bring up Cecil's son William.
25
 A combined strategy, surely?

In rehabilitating Sir Walter Ralegh, Elizabeth and the ageing Burghley might have had a deeper purpose: besides rewarding service overseas, they may reasonably have hoped to smooth over tensions much closer to home. Congenial to both, as events surrounding the Cadiz expedition had shown, Ralegh could plausibly serve as a bridge between the Cecils and Essex. On his return to the heart of Court, Ralegh at once settled into his role as an ever-optimistic go-between, passing on news from Cecil to Essex and telling Cecil in turn, by way of an intimate if presciently ambiguous touch in July 1597, that Essex had been 'wonderfull merry att the consait [conceit] of Richard the 2'.
26
 Is this a reference to Shakespeare's new play, or is it perhaps a more straightforward meditation on the fate of an unlucky Plantagenet king, hardly a source of gay reflection?

He could be good at this sort of thing and, for a time, conciliation appeared to work. Cecil 'lent part of his house in Chelsea' to Ralegh, and the various parties saw a good deal of one another that summer, both publicly and in private.
27
 Brooke, meanwhile, was prospering too, though his rise inevitably brought him into conflict with Essex; there was room only for so many favourites. On the death of Lord Cobham, in 1597, Essex hoped to secure the post of Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports for his protege Robert Sidney. The Queen, though, was having none of this, emphasizing the status of the office and selecting instead the dead Lord Warden's son. Essex, typically, chose to take a stand on an unwinnable point, dismissing his rival in public, and drawing a similarly intemperate response.
28
Again the matter was patched over, but Essex here may have been feeling some of the pangs that had driven Ralegh to Ireland eight years earlier. Or perhaps he simply did not enjoy being thwarted. Either way, with Ralegh rather sensibly manoeuvring still further into Cobham's good books, the resulting tensions were hard to avoid.