Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (40 page)

Incarceration was comfortable enough. Following some structural changes, during which he was lodged temporarily in the Brick Tower, he was allowed his two rooms in the Bloody Tower, a 'stilhows', or laboratory, a private garden for his exercise and congenial company.
19
 And, like Cobham, Ralegh had his books. Five hundred and fifteen titles in at least five languages are listed in his commonplace of c.1607.
20
 He received an allowance of £208 per annum for food, fuel and light, a figure later increased by 50%. The growls and cries from the animal pens of the Tower Menagerie, a couple of hundred yards distant, would perhaps have been comforting enough, once they had grown familiar rather than exotic.
21
 When Sir Gawen Harvey, son of the Lieutenant of the Tower, catalogued the letters from Cecil to his father late in 1605, he revealed arrangements that permitted fairly liberal access to the Tower's more eminent prisoners. In 1604 and 1605, Cecil had sanctioned visits to Ralegh from John FitzJames, Lawrence Keymis, Dr Leonard Poe, Sir John Gilbert, 'Captain Wood and Spilman', Sir Carew Ralegh, 'my Lord of Pembroke's man', Nicholas Sanders, PeterVanlore, George Hull, Sir George Carey and John Shelbury. John Talbot, a secretary-cum-schoolmaster, also came and went, apparently as he pleased. Ralegh learned to trust and rely on Talbot, one that lived with mee eleven yeares in the Tower, an excellent generall skoller and a faithfull trew man as lived'.
22
 There is no indication that anyone was actually refused access. The list of those authorized to visit Cobham in the same period is as long, while Lord Grey's visitors, interestingly enough, include Ralegh's brother-in-law Sir Arthur Throckmorton.
23

At times, there is an impression of 'come one, come all'. Casual sightseers would occasionally chat with the prisoners, who do not seem to have felt at all restrained in their conversation. Frustrated by their somewhat insolent attitude, and possibly by the Council's reluctance to order a closer confinement, the Lieutenant considered the prisoners, as a group, 'impatient of any restraint'.
24
 Thomas Harriot (also serving in some more official capacity as his 'steward' at Sherborne), Walter Warner, and possibly Sir William Lower and that other dilettante astronomer Sir Allan Percy, the Earl of Northumberland's brother, all dropped in on academic pretexts, using Ralegh's growing library, and discussing new discoveries in the arts, sciences and in geography.
25
 From 1605, after his arrest on suspicion of complicity in the Gunpowder Plot, Northumberland himself was a fellow prisoner, quartered in the Martin Tower at the opposite corner of the fortress.

Others had travelled further. Two South Americans, brought back from the 1595 voyage and from subsequent expeditions, lived nearby and visited regularly. They were but two of the twenty or more native Americans brought to England over the years, on Ralegh's orders.
26
 Indians from Trinidad and Guiana now called on him; by Ralegh's own later account the future Cacique of Caliana was for two years his servant in the Tower.
27
 Meanwhile, George Percy, Northumberland's youngest brother, set out for Jamestown with the first band of settlers, and remained there for more than five years, maintained at the Earl's expense.
28
 Tower prisoners might have been locked away, but in the mind's eye they roamed widely through their correspondence with friends and agents.

Surviving lists for the libraries assembled by Ralegh and Northumberland indicate a division of the labour, Ralegh specializing in geography and history, while Northumberland collected books on military matters, mathematics, chemistry and architecture.
29
 Percy family tradition has it that a globe now at Petworth House, dating from 1592, was a gift from Ralegh to the Earl while both were prisoners in the Tower. Educational aids of this sort were commonly found in well-appointed libraries of the period, and Northumberland is known to have owned celestial and terrestrial globes while in captivity.
30
 If collaboration did indeed take place within the Tower, perhaps Cobham's books - principally by classical authors, it would seem, though the precise details are lost - should also be considered as contributing to the shared library.

Certainly these books were collected for a purpose. Scholarship was encouraged, by the King and by members of his Court; like Boethius, the prisoner was urged to find comfort in study. Cobham struggled with classical translation and in the early days of his confinement Lord Grey sent his mother a translation of Cyprian's work on patience, pointing out in the accompanying letter that, like the Saints, he was now obliged to suffer in his faith.
31
 The remark was somehow typical of this temperamental, pious, wayward young man. Northumberland worked on literary conceits, and on a still very readable advice to his son, while Ralegh, as we shall see, trumped them all with his massive History and other significant works.

Access granted so liberally to friends and servants was not usually denied to members of the prisoner's close family. For much of the time, Ralegh's wife and child were allowed to come, stay and go without significant restriction, and indeed a third son, Carew, was baptized in the Tower Church of St Peter ad Vincula on 15 February 1605. The name represented a nod towards both sides of the family; by chance, the baptismal name of Ralegh's older brother was also the maiden name of Bess's mother. Another namesake, the erudite Cornish antiquary Richard Carew of Antony, stood as a godfather.
32
 Anna Beer reflects on the couple's childlessness across eleven years, and speculates that Ralegh might not have been the father, that Bess might indeed have had an affair with a peripheral courtier, Edmund Lascelles. This notion, however, depends on theories of Ralegh's medical impotence caused by (hypothetical) syphilis supposedly contracted in Guiana, on one snippet of gossip, and on an equally problematic subsequent identification.
33
 Ralegh, though depressed by the financial implications of another child, seems to have accepted Carew without demur, and, if it is allowed that the couple had indeed experienced problems, conception in 1604 may simply reflect the fertility peak of a woman in her late thirties. Captivity in fact seemed to draw Ralegh and Bess closer together, just as it smoothed away the disputes and frustrations between the Earl and Countess of Northumberland. Like the Countess, Lady Ralegh showed enduring strength in adversity. She did not hesitate to denounce Henry Howard directly for his underhand hostility. She sat for a striking portrait, now in the National Gallery of Ireland, marshalled her kinswomen to support her continuing appeals for fair financial treatment and took a house on Tower Hill, convenient in its proximity to her husband's gaol.

Bess's continued presence in or about the Tower came to be assumed, to the extent that, when the terms of Ralegh's imprisonment were tightened in 1611 by order of the Council, the prisoner begged Sir Walter Cope, Chamberlain of the Exchequer, to 'move my Lord Treasorer in my behalf, that by his grace my wife might agayne be made a prisoner with me, as she bath bine for six yeeres last past'. The Lord Treasurer was none other than Robert Cecil, by now Earl of Salisbury. Formally, if perhaps a touch ironically, Ralegh rested confident in Cecil's underlying affection and good nature:'the blessings of God cannot make him cruell that was never so'. His desire that Bess should be with him in that 'unsavery place' was, Ralegh argued, but a minor detail.
34
 Bess did not necessarily regard the matter in the same way She had proved particularly reluctant to comply with the new measures, and the Council had been obliged to direct the Lieutenant of the Tower, rather prissily, that 'Lady Raleighe must understand his Majisties express will and commandment that she resort to her house on Tower Hill, or elsewhere, with her women and souns to remayne there, and not to lodg hereafter within the Tower.
35
 The King's wishes remained all important, and for James the matter was still personal. When in September 1606 Bess had come to Court and knelt before him, James had simply sidestepped the obstacle, walking by without a word.
36

For all the family bravado, confinement vexed and burdened Ralegh. He experienced periods of deep depression, even allowing for the doleful common form that pads out his business letters to Cecil and other Counsellors. 'For inyne owne tyme,' he tells Cecil in the winter of 1604-5, 'good my lord consider that it cannot be calde a life but only misery drawn out and spoone into a long thride'.
37
 From the earliest days of his imprisonment, Ralegh suffered from some form of 'palsy' or paralysis, and from a chronic shortage of breath.
38
As he told Cecil in 1605,'1 am every second or third night in danger ether of suddayne death, or of the loss of my lymes and sense, being sumetyme two howres without feeling or motion of my hand and whole arm'.
39
 Dr Leonard Poe, a practitioner with a fashionable clientele, attended him in September 1604, and in March 1606 Peter Turner, another greatly respected physician, found that Ralegh was complaining of a numbness in his left side, 'and his tong taken in sum parte, in so mych that he speketh wekely'.
40
 Turner recommended a move to warmer quarters, only to find the Council much less sympathetic. In the winter of 1610-11 Bess reported that her husband had 'been lately punished with an extreame cold'.
41
 With Ralegh, there is always a suspicion of exaggeration, or a neurotic pessimism, and he understandably hoped that a long list of symptoms would eventually elicit some measure of pity, even though nobody ever seemed to listen. 'I complayn not of it', he wrote to Cecil, musing on his health.'I know it vayne for ther is none that hath compassion therof.'
42

While his life had been spared, Ralegh still had to face the other unpalatable consequences of a conviction for treason. Legally, he was a dead man; his lands and goods lay at the King's disposal. Monarchs did not always respond vindictively in these situations, particularly if there were dependent relatives to consider, and James was at first minded to be generous. Ralegh's goods and chattels were granted to his servants John Shelbury and Robert Smith on 14 February 1604 for the use of his wife and child, specifically in order to settle his many debts.
43
 Ralegh's wine licencees were ordered by the Privy Council to pay their arrears to the trustees one week later, and the right to grant wine licences was given to Ralegh's old ally the Earl of Nottingham and his son only in December 1604. Shelbury and Smith dutifully discharged their obligations. In the circumstances it was difficult to protect every interest; predators had been eyeing Ralegh's property ever since his arrest. On 16 October 1603 Cecil had written to the Scots courtier Sir James Elphinstone, warning him that others also hoped for profit from Ralegh's downfall, and adding, frankly, that there was in any case little to secure.
44
Ralegh's principal estate was, after all, entailed to his son, and so did not fall into the Crown's hands following the sentence passed at Winchester. This, of course, was the prisoner's chief consolation. On 3 August 1604 the Sherborne estate was granted by letters patent to family trustees, who held it on behalf of Lady Ralegh and young Walter for the duration of Ralegh's life.
45

Unfortunately, the consolation was short lived. Within months it became apparent that the conveyance of the Sherborne estate to Wat, dated 20 January and sealed on 12 April 1603, contained a flaw. The clerk who had copied it from a draft had omitted ten crucial words. Legally, this omission left Ralegh in freehold possession of the estate at the time of his treason and trial, and Sherborne was thus, after all, forfeit to the King.
46
 James havered, wondering whether to honour the spirit rather than the letter of the deed, and to confirm Ralegh's family in possession, but the pressure of Court obligations eroded altruism, and by the end of 1609 the land had passed to James's favourite, the handsome Scot Robert Carr. Ralegh wrote to Carr, urging a man whose 'faire day is but now in the dawne' against erecting his 'first buildings upon the ruines of the innocent'. If Sherborne were lost, he noted, 'there remaynes nothing with me but the name of life, dispoiled of all ells but the title and sorrow thereof'.
47
 Would any compassionate man seek a family's ruin in this way?

But Carr was the rising star; the Ralegh of twenty years earlier. Sherborne was soon his. This was the nature of patronage and reward at the Jacobean Court. A favourite's path to fortune invariably meant that others missed out, while others still sometimes lost property or possessions. As a libel later written against Carr put it, the pretty Scot had looted everything he possessed from competitors and rivals:

John Chamberlain, who always relished the turn of fortune's wheel, commented that for all Bess's desperate efforts to retain the property it was 'past recall'. Now Ralegh might readily 'say with job naked came I into the world and naked shall I go out'. Chamberlain captured a sentiment obviously common among Londoners at the time: the oversight, he wrote, 'is said to be so grosse, that men do meerly ascribe yt to Gods owne hand that blinded him and his counsaile'.
49
 Gross it was, but such things are there to be spotted in legal documents if one goes looking for them. Others had more sympathy for the prisoner, less patience with the contrivances of lawyers. Is John Webster condemning Ralegh's treatment when in The White Devil he likens whores to 'those brittle evidences of law/Which forfeit all a wretched man's estate/ For leaving out one syllable'?