Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (23 page)

Ralegh had every reason to cultivate wealthy friends. His own fortune had been eroded by efforts to repair the breach with Elizabeth, and by his outlay on Sherborne. When he drew up his will, early in July 1597, his estate appears relatively modest. Ralegh's own lands by now consisted only of the Munster territories - vast, but never profitable - and the lease on the manor of Sherborne together with some other neighbouring properties and woodland in the south-west of England. In this fascinating document the Queen is nowhere remembered. Indeed, as Agnes Latham has observed, 'all is concentrated on a little boy of four'.
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 The direct beneficiaries were members of Ralegh's family, his clients and servants. Adrian Gilbert was given a pension of £100 per annum, paid out of the Irish lands, the newly knighted Arthur Throckmorton was to have Ralegh's 'beste horse' and saddle, Sir George Carew the next best, and Alexander Brett Ralegh's 'longe blacke velvett cloake now in my wardrobe at Durham House'. Ralegh's executors were directed to sell his interest in the Roebuck, the great ship that he had commissioned. Out of the profits they were told to take care of Alice Goold's child. She was to receive 500 marks (£333) from the sale. From the same source, Thomas Harriot was given £200 and Lawrence Keymis (100. Under the will, Harriot also received an annual pension of £100 out of Ralegh's wine licences, as well as all the 'bookes and the furniture in his owne chamber and in [Ralegh's] bedchamber in Durham House, together with all such blacke suites of apparell as I have in the same house'. Black was Harriot's colour: dressed discreetly, he blended into the backcloth of history. John Meere of Castletown, about whom there will be more to tell, was left an annual rent of £20 from the Sherborne estate. This was something of an insurance policy, for Meere knew of many exploitable legal niceties relating to these properties.

Bess was provided for out of the wine monopoly, and out of the Sherborne estates during Wat's minority. Setting aside her pearls, which were of course her own, Ralegh divided household movables between his wife and his son. Those outside the immediate family circle were remembered with crumbs and keepsakes. Robert Cecil, 'my right honorable good frinde', was given a residuary interest in a set of porcelain. Both Ralegh and Bess shared the Secretary's fondness for quality chinaware. Like any leading courtier who had borrowed heavily, Ralegh provided for the settlement of debts, and for the redemption of pawned goods. He named his son as executor, appointing as overseers the four people he trusted most and would continue to depend on through the troubles and upheavals to come: Arthur Throckmorton; his cousin Sir George Carew (Carew's aunt, Katherine, had married Ralegh's maternal grandfather); Alexander Brett, of White Stanton, Somerset, married to Anne Gifford, a granddaughter of Sir George Throckmorton of Coughton; and the reliable Thomas Harriot.
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 The witnesses to this will also make an interesting group: Gilbert and Meere were on hand to look after his personal interests, while William Strode of Newnham and Christopher Harris of Radford, two of Drake's executors, were men of standing who knew how these things were done. Harris was indeed Ralegh's kinsman by marriage, and his deputy as Vice-Admiral of Devon.

It was prudent to consider fate and the future at this time. Following the triumph at Cadiz, Ralegh was sailing as Essex's second-in-command on a new expedition against Spain, now usually referred to as the Islands Voyage. The will was witnessed on 10 July, the day the fleet sailed, and was apparently a last-minute by-product of another mighty logistical operation. Again Ralegh worked hard to plan and provision the fleet; running up debts, and agreeing to settle those owed to Cecil out of his share from prizes captured on the expedition.
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 He was accounting for the colossal sum of £18,900, money intended to victual 6,000 men for a quarter of a year.
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 The fleet was duly assembled and provisioned, and it took to sea amid great excitement, but on this occasion there was to be no happy outcome. Foul weather, incompetence and divisions among the senior officers saw to that. From the outset, Ralegh was determined to show Essex in the best of lights, while trying to account for the particularly curious dynamic that drove the man. When telling Cecil about the initial storm that had driven the fleet back to Plymouth - and he wrote rather defensively, for neither he nor Essex had handled their squadrons with any particular credit - he adds a revealing gloss:

That which most greeveth mee and which I protest before the majesty of God I do constantly beleve, is that ether my Lord Generall hyme sealf will wrestell with the seas to his perrill or, constrayned to cum bake, be found utterly hartbroken, although it be not in the poure of man to fight agaynst ellements.
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Two days later, with Essex now known to be safe, he begged Cecil 'to worke from Her Majestye sume cumfort to my Lord Generall who I know is dismayd by thes mischances yeven to death'.
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 For all his manifest idiosyncrasies, Essex was a valiant, even at times a heroic figure, who took every setback to heart. At the beginning of August the two commanders rushed up to Court to put forward an alternative plan, or rather a refinement to the existing plan, aimed at an always tempting target, the annual Spanish silver fleet returning in convoy from the Americas.
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 The prospect of winning vast treasure, and denying that treasure to the impoverished Spanish Crown, united them in cupidity - Essex, as Cecil noted, was dealing with Sir Walter 'very nobly' - but the Council, understandably worried that the revised scheme might leave England undefended by sea, were less enthusiastic. Nevertheless, this rejected plan had some merit. In contrast to the earlier dispositions made in 1597, it committed limited resources against one target, avoiding any combined operations on the coast of Spain; there were fewer tactical ambiguities. When the fleet sailed again, the vagueness of its mission meant that only luck and good generalship would offer any prospect of success.

Both luck and skill, however, were wanting. Ralegh found it hard to remain on message, as the Earl's impossible expectations undermined any pretence of friendship and trust. After the fleet set out from Plymouth a second time, quite late in the season in mid-August, the weather out on the ocean was not much better, and storms plagued progress to the rendezvous off Flores. When many of the ships came together on 15 September, Ralegh's capture of the town of Horta, on Fayal in the Azores, was the sole achievement of any note, and it showed him in his best light, setting aside the weariness that went with his inability to sleep long at sea, scouting out the land from a 'torne shipp' which had lost its main mast and leading his men with exemplary bravery and confidence.
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 He later made light of the achievement, maintaining in The History of the World that it was always 'more difficult to defend a coast, than to invade it'. Memories of that triumph led him to assert in the same work a 'forward' doctrine of naval defence. England was, he insisted, best advised ,to entertain those that shall assail us, with their own Bief in their bellies, and before they eat of our Kentish Capons'. The monarch should 'imploy his good ships on the Sea, and not trust to any intrenchment upon the shore'.
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 But taking weather, tide and the fragility of intelligence into account, combined operations are seldom straightforward, and even today few strategists would instinctively concur with Ralegh's assessments.
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His success at Fayal had unforeseen consequences. After a series of bitter exchanges and misunderstandings Essex, who arrived belatedly off the island, maintained that the rear-admiral had flouted his direct orders. Sir Walter had no authority to order the attack without the consent of his superior officer. In his suspicious fury, he demanded that Ralegh should be court-martialled. Many in his entourage were ready to egg him on, Sir Christopher Blount prominent among them. Essex's father-in-law, Blount had missed out on a share of the glory, and the loss of these precious opportunities rankled.
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 Still Ralegh dutifully showed respect, passing on to Cecil flattering reports of Essex's high reputation in Europe.
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 Battered yet again by the Atlantic, the fleet struggled home in the autumn, ship by ship, carrying rumours and counter-rumours that sent Bess into a frenzy of anxiety for her husband. There was no news of Ralegh, she wrote in a hasty letter to Cecil, and some of the stories that she had heard left her fearing the worst.
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 It was mid-October before she knew for certain that Ralegh was safe.
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 The embarrassed commanders learnt on their return that a Spanish fleet had sailed against England earlier in the month. This too had been frustrated by the evil summer weather, but Queen Elizabeth immediately pointed out that her country had been exposed to invasion, with no naval shield. Worse still, the risk had been taken for no discernible return.

It was time to put on a show of duty. Essex scampered around raising troops against the residual threat of invasion, while Ralegh worked to improve land defences in Cornwall, and determinedly accentuated positives. He drew up what amounted to a balance sheet for the year's campaigning, reckoning that England and Ireland had been 'defended, the enemy dishonored and made a great looser and the warr made uppon our enemis charge'.
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 Even among friends, this sunny spin failed to convince.

As Paul Hammer has noted, Essex had himself turned the Islands Voyage into a high-stakes military gamble, and its failure consequently amounted to a political catastrophe for the gambler. Their fresh, and quite unnecessary, quarrel over the action at Fayal weakened the carefully nurtured amity between Essex and Ralegh, so evident in Ralegh's encomium of Essex's conduct at Cadiz in 1596.
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 It weakened Essex too. Responsibility for a futile campaign lay with the expedition commander and the taste of sour grapes was strong. When he took offence at the Queen's promotion of the Lord Admiral to the earldom of Nottingham in October 1597, and at Nottingham's patent of creation which credited him with victory at Cadiz, the Queen again turned to Ralegh as an obvious peacemaker, another indication that she trusted him, and that this was considered to be one of his natural roles at the Court. Essex, however, continued to see slights and fashion enemies. In the short term his intransigence was rewarded with the office of Earl Marshal, an ancient distinction commanding precedence and dignity. In the long term, it destroyed him, along with many of his remaining friends.
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The world was changing. Obligatory unity of purpose in the face of invasion and conquest by Spain had gradually given place to the backbiting endemic at a Court caught up in an expensive, inconclusive conflict. English statesmen were trying to cope with war in several theatres, while confronted with harvest failures, inadequate taxation, local discontent and an uncertain political future. The Queen's grasp remained sure enough, but any monarch would have struggled to preserve unity through these difficult times. After the Islands Voyage, the backbiting seemed to grow worse. At last, the Cecils began to appreciate that they simply could not work with an increasingly erratic and uncompromising Essex, and that fact was slowly brought home to others who had hoped until then that tensions around the Queen amounted to nothing more than the familiar Elizabethan stresses between counsellors who shared aims, and who differed only over methods. It was not like that any more. Essex's energy, his cunning and his gifts as a soldier-statesmen, were being overwhelmed by his querulous fears, his absolute conviction that he was the one honest man left at Court. As Hammer observes, Essex 'took politics too seriously because he framed his actions according to principle'.
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Like other still more prominent figures at the Court, notably the Earls of Northumberland and Worcester, Ralegh now had to make a choice, and without any discernible hesitation he aligned himself with the political mainstream. He and Cobham both gave farewell dinners for Cecil, and rode with him to Dover as the Secretary set out on his important embassy to France during February 1598. Cecil was not used to being absent from Court, and he may well have drawn comfort from the gesture. Here is positioning in the literal, and obvious, sense. It is significant, too, that Cobham is entrusted with Cecil's formal letter of thanks to Elizabeth for the gift of a jewel.
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Even then, the rather desperate working relationship with Essex endured. Essex stood in as Secretary of State during Cecil's absence, and did so effectively; no one ever faulted the work ethic of this puzzling, tragic man.

Cecil returned home disillusioned with French promises, and gravely concerned at French plans to conclude a separate peace with Spain, plans that resulted in the Treaty of Vervins that May. He was shocked at the ravaged state of the country, left in no doubt that nothing would deter Henri IV from making peace with Spain, and won over by the King's observation that the Dutch could not expect to secure their frontiers through the exhaustion of their allies.
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 The Council wavered over the desirability of continuing the war, with the aged Burghley famously reprimanding Essex for his reluctance to contemplate peace by opening his prayer book and pointing to Psalm 55: 'Bloody and deceitful men shall not live out half their days'. Or so we are told with the advantage of hindsight. The gesture made no impression on Essex. Increasingly persuaded - correctly - that Cecil was taking a tougher stance with the Dutch, and that the Secretary would if necessary contemplate a separate peace with Spain, he wrote and circulated an 'Apologie' for his own more belligerent position, arguing that no trust was to be placed in Spanish promises.
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 Such debates were the stuff of meetings at the Council table. Early that summer, however, Essex made a disastrous misjudgement. Frustrated in an attempt to nominate a new Lord Deputy of Ireland during a meeting of the Council, he turned his back on the Queen, who boxed his ears, and told him to go and be hanged. At this point Essex snapped. He reached for his sword, and, when restrained by his colleagues, swore that he could not put up with such treatment, that he would not have endured it even at the hands of the Queen's father. The instinctive threat of violence appalled everyone present, including the Earl himself. This was dangerous madness, an action that could all too easily be construed as treason. Essex fled to his house in Wanstead, angry and scared. 'Cannot princes err?' he asked the Lord Keeper, Thomas Egerton. 'Cannot subjects receive wrong?' The Queen tried, but found it difficult to ignore him.