Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (32 page)

He was also spending considerable sums on both his new house and its extensive gardens. A plan of the Lodge by Simon Basyll shows what was afoot - and indeed the central part of the present house at Sherborne is Ralegh's home, ceilings, windows and all.
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Local prestige made all things possible: roads were diverted and chapels enclosed to suit Ralegh's plans.
44
 Adrian Gilbert claimed in an unsuccessful Chancery suit some years later that he had spent (700 at Sherborne 'about Sir Walter Ralegh's business, in making and planting of his walks and gardens, and about other his affairs, by the space of seven years, or thereabouts'. Gilbert had forborne to press for these and other sums that Ralegh owed him 'in respect of brotherly affection', as he put it, not that Ralegh had ever really responded to his gestures of fraternal regard.
45
 With some allowance for the exaggeration common to such documents, Gilbert's claims ring true.

Local prominence did not, however, come without local difficulties. By the turn of the century Ralegh's principal enemy in Dorset was his former bailiff at Sherborne,John Meere, a man remembered with some generosity in the 1597 will. Even by contemporary standards, Meere seems to have been a scoundrel. When Ralegh first came on the scene this former employee of the Bishop of Salisbury was imprisoned in London, convicted of clipping coin. In Ralegh's obviously partial account, he had taken a nian 'eaten with lyce out of prison because it was tolde me that he had all the auncient records of Sherborne'.
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 New to the politics and social niceties of Dorset, Ralegh had good reason to value local knowledge. He had installed the liberated Meere in a house close to the Castle, and if episcopal complaints about rent arrears and other matters are to be taken at face value Meere, for a time, proved a very effective agent in his disputes with the Bishop.
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 For various reasons, however, trust had been broken: Meere's enterprise knew no limits. Ralegh wrote that he had found his man '(comminge on him on the sudden) counterfeitinge my hand above a hundred times upon an oyled paper'.
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There is indeed independent evidence that Meere could forge Ralegh's handwriting.
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 Dismissal very naturally followed, but the bailiff was not inclined to go quietly. He pursued a vexatious case in Star Chamber, harrying Ralegh's tenants through other law courts at the same time. Significantly, Meere still had friends at Court. Thomas Howard, Lord Bindon, disliked Ralegh, perhaps on account of allegations that he believed Ralegh had made against him, and now he interceded in the courts and with Cecil on Meere's behalf.
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 The Howards were influential, and Cecil, not for the first or the last time, was confronted by conflicting obligations.

For the moment, though, old friendships held firm. In August 1601 Ralegh was confidently counting on the Secretary to frustrate the machinations of 'thos roggs the Meers', and Cecil was proving a stout ally, imprisoning Meere in the Gatehouse throughout the summer for words spoken against Sir Walter, helping to extract a retraction of accusations made against Ralegh and sending for Meere's son Christopher to answer a separate set of charges.
51
 However, the retraction was obviously tactical. The matter progressed to the Western Assizes in 1602, and with Bindon's steady support Meere remained a thorn in Ralegh's side for years to come, an irritating constant in so many of his surviving letters.
52

All the buying and selling of land in Dorset had one important consequence. With Sherborne secure Ralegh saw little point in holding on to his vast Munster estate, devastated during the Nine Years' War. By 1600 most of Ralegh's seignories in Ireland were untenanted and unprofitable; and Lismore Castle was in ruins. Richard Boyle, Clerk of the Council in Munster, later first Earl of Cork, had been accumulating lands by exploiting various legal devices, and had won the favour and protection of Sir George Carew, Ralegh's cousin and Lord President of the Council in Munster. Carew wrote to Ralegh urging him to sell and Boyle carried the letters. With help from Cecil a deal was arranged. Boyle used his fiancée's marriage portion of £1,000 to help him buy the Ralegh seignories for £1,500 in a deal concluded during December 1602. They became a major part of Boyle's estate and fortune, while the sale helped Ralegh at a difficult time.
53

Meanwhile, the courtier and captain of the guard had other roles to play; life was busy. Sometimes he enjoyed the spectacle of London for its own sake. In April 1601 Northumberland took him in his coach to watch a football match at 'Tuttles', presumably Tothill Fields in Westminster. A wild Lenten scrimmage was entertaining to the aristocrat, viewed from a safe distance.
54
 At other times, he was himself the showman. The Queen liked to employ Ralegh as a congenial tour guide for ambassadors, keeping him happy by hinting at, but never granting, some more demanding diplomatic role in the near future. Repeating courtesies extended to envoys from the future Charles IX of Sweden in 1598,Virginio Orsini, Duke of Bracciano, and to Ludovic Verreyken, Ambassador from the Archdukes in Flanders, Ralegh met the French King Henri IV's envoy the Marquis de Rosny in the summer of 1601, full of good humour and affability. In September that same year he escorted the Duc de Biron, King Henri's personal emissary, 'to Westminster to see the monuments', taking him on another day to the Bear Garden in Southwark. Reporting on Biron's visit to Cecil, Ralegh criticized the neglect of a guest, and of a great man; the Earl of Cumberland, who had orders from the Council to meet and escort Biron, had not fulfilled his obligations. Because of that neglect, Ralegh had been faced with all sorts of difficulties when working out how to convey the envoy into Hampshire, to catch the Queen on her summer progress.
55

Some of the criticism, by implication, fell on the Council - and maybe on the Secretary - since they were ultimately responsible for ensuring Biron's comfort and dignity. Here is a significant straw in the wind; the critical tone to his letters is becoming gradually more obvious. Though they agreed on the essentials, Ralegh turned on Cecil in the Parliament of 1601, criticizing the latter's call for further financial sacrifice in support of the war effort. 'I knowe', said Cecil,'that neyther potte nor panne, nor dishe, nor spone, should be spared when daunger is at our elbowes.' Ralegh was not quite happy with this. 'I like not', he said, 'that the Spanyardes our enemyes should knowe of our sellinge our pottes and pannes to paye subsedies...it argues povertye in the State'. Cecil responded briskly: the Spaniard, he said, should be left in no doubt that loyal Englishmen would sell every pot, every pan, everything, if that was what it took to keep the enemy out.
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While at some points in a busy parliamentary session Ralegh and Cecil worked together, it appears from other similarly sharp remarks to Francis Bacon that Ralegh was disinclined to support policies uncritically. He was particularly unhappy with the ramshackle and inefficient subsidy assessments.
57
 To tax the relatively poor while the rich benefitted from a massive undervaluation of estates stuck in his conscience, and in this he was far from alone. In Committee, many MPs sought to fine-tune the 1601 subsidy, this way and that, and Ralegh's views, though opposed to those put forward by Cecil, echo the speeches of Sir Robert Wroth and others.
58
 It may of course be that we read too much into Ralegh's contributions; he said a lot, and what he said was not always consistent. One of the most experienced members of the Lower House, he spoke his mind with greater freedom than ever before, denouncing the export of ordnance, mocking efforts to compel attendance at church, looking out for the interests of his West Country tinners and opposing attempts (doomed in any case) to regulate farming, preferring to 'sett [the land] at libertye, and leave every man ffree'.
59
 For Andrew McRae, Ralegh was here attempting to sweep away restraints on individual liberty, he 'struck the keynote of English capitalism, which would reverberate through the centuries to come'.
60
 It is, however, an open question whether Ralegh truly glimpsed the vision, or simply chafed against restraint, and in his grumbling he must surely have irritated a Secretary trying to see through measures that would help the Crown and its finances at a critical point in the war. He did not have many other natural allies in the House. Ralegh is said to have blushed during the acrimonious debates over monopolies, defending the practice on his record in administering the tin mines, and challenging his opponents to press for a total abolition of monopolies, rather than pursuing a piecemeal approach. The 'greate silence' that followed this theatrical gesture signified embarrassment, or, more likely, open disagreement.
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The wise statesman does not usually speak too freely in a public arena. Rowse suggests that Ralegh lacked the politician's essential dose of humbug, but absence of humbug is one thing, a lack of persuasive skills, discretion and common sense quite another.
62
 To distance oneself in those uncertain times from the principal minister at Court, even intermittently, amounted to recklessness, and the consequences were severe indeed. So much was thrown away. Cecil had entrusted his ten-year-old son William to Ralegh's care at Sherborne over the spring and summer of 1600, perhaps another gesture of the high regard he had for Bess, and perhaps an attempt to press some brisk Ralegh-style scholarship into an unreceptive young 
63
 This experiment worked, to an extent, Ralegh writing to Cecil in familiar, affectionate terms, politely referring to that obvious gesture of trust: 'Wee ar all, littell and great, in good health'.
64
 Many attempts have been made to explain the breakdown of a longstanding friendship. Some have chosen to blame Henry Howard - younger brother of the last Duke of Norfolk, Catholic, highly educated, an intriguer with long-established contacts in the Edinburgh Court - for turning Cecil against Ralegh, but Cecil was too canny to be led into unwelcome policies by such a man.

The simplest explanation is the most plausible. Ralegh had coveted the office of Vice-Chamberlain, but in February 1601 that appointment went to a senior Elizabethan bureaucrat, Sir John Stanhope. Stanhope had long been a front-runner for the post, but failure is not always easy to accept.
65
 And then, on 29 June 1601, Elizabeth named three new privy counsellors to fill the ranks of a much depleted band. The men chosen were the Earls of Shrewsbury and Worcester, both wealthy and well connected, if more than a little suspect in religion, together with Shrewsbury's enemy Stanhope, promoted in respect of his new office, his dependence on Cecil, and his favour with the Queen. In the cautious aftermath of the Essex rebellion, Ralegh, Cobham, and Northumberland were all overlooked. John Weakley noted in a letter to Francis Clifford, afterwards Earl of Cumberland, that there was ,some little feud between [Cecil] and Sir Walter R[alegh]', linking the illfeeling directly to the choice of counsellors.' Some thinketh', he concluded, that 'Sir Walt[er] Ra[legh] is not well pleased'.
66

The Queen selected her Council, and the Queen stood above reproach, but Ralegh, thwarted again in his search for the position of trust that had eluded him so long, was free to blame those about her for his disappointment. At first he allowed himself to be fobbed off with hope deferred: 'Yow here of our new councelors', he wrote on 14 July to Sir John Gilbert. 'I am left out till the parlement they tell me, butt I take no thought for it.
67
 In fact, he thought about it a great deal. Though tokens of the old familiarity with Cecil are never omitted from their correspondence, it is now possible to see something else at work there too: the mutual suspicion that a friendship has been poisoned. When Ralegh writes from Sherborne in August 1601, he concludes a friendly but somewhat businesslike letter with a note that may have an intentional resonance beyond the rather forced humour: 'I pray beleve', writes Ralegh,'that when all harts ar open and all desires tried that I am your poorest and your faythfullest frind to do yow service: Bess, he adds in a postscript, 'returns yow her best wishes notwithstanding all quarrels'.
68
 Cecil, as Ralegh well knew, valued fidelity. As Henry Howard wrote to James VI of Scotland during the following year, 'nothing makes him confident, but experience of secret trust, and security of intelligence'.
69
 But since Elizabeth Cecil's death following a miscarriage, in 1597, the relationship was no longer held together by the mutual trust of two wives, no longer rock solid. Ralegh's valedictory emphasis was a human gesture, but it was unwise, at such a time, to maintain a grievance to the point at which powerful friends were lost.

Of course, Cecil was also quite capable of dissembling; he was nearly always able to conceal the ways in which his thoughts were turning. Cecil was worried too - Essex's all too public assertion that the Secretary was hostile to the King of Scots was potentially catastrophic. He was now obliged to discount suggestions that his opposition to Essex had been driven by personal ambition rather than by the good of the State, and his friendship with a man branded by popular opinion as the Earl's enemy made that very difficult. Writing to Sir George Carew, one of his few trusted allies, Cecil first made it clear that he was not prepared to give uncritical support to Ralegh's ambitions, insisting that Sir Walter would achieve a seat at the Council table only by giving up his Captaincy of the Guard in Carew's favour.
70
 The continent might have been intended as a courtesy, or more likely as reassurance to an ally buried in Ireland that his interests were not forgotten. Cecil may at that stage have been resigned to Ralegh's advancement, should the Queen press for it. Very interestingly, however, he also seemed to spot some personal threat in the close friendship between Ralegh and Cobham, and if, at that stage, he could go only so far when writing of these anxieties to someone as close to Ralegh as Carew, he is unusually candid in respect of the excitable, flashy Cobham: 'For the better man, the second wholly sweys him, and to which passions he is subject who is subject to his Lady, I leave to your judgment and Experience'.
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