Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (55 page)

This obsession with the dead Ralegh was an instant phenomenon. As Yelverton said, a star had fallen; reasons had to be sought, and lessons learnt. Ralegh was news. Immediately after the events in Old Palace Yard, Edward Harwood told Dudley Carleton that London 'at this tyme is onely full of the famous and worthy ende'.
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Throughout late November 1618, as the great comet or nova in the zodiacal constellation Ophiuchus shone in the night sky, Chamberlain pondered on the significance of events, sending Carleton copies of letters, verses and ballads, passing on the evolving legend of Ralegh's last night, and telling how the condemned man had joked to keep up Bess's spirits, before saying his farewells after midnight and snatching a few brief hours of sleep.
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In doing so, Chamberlain fell into his accustomed role of the gently selective critic. For the most part this flow of Raleghana was proving 'poore stuffe...not worth the overlooking'. Yet his letters acknowledged that the works were being looked over all the while: print had responded to high demand.'We are so full still of Sir Walter Raleigh', he wrote,'that almost every day brings foorth somwhat in this kind.' It was only to be expected that some of these scribblers and balladeers took a routine approach, putting words of repentance into Ralegh's mouth, but the fact that other efforts were called in by the censor shows that a less conventional message was gaining a large audience. Everyone knew that an official account of these events was at press, but Chamberlain added that any proofs put forward in this official declaration of Ralegh's treasons 'had neede be very pregnant and demonstrative, or els they will hardly prevaile'. He was right. Pitted against a powerful image of Ralegh on the scaffold, the Crown's sober response was never likely to win over hearts and minds.
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Another of Carleton's correspondents, John Pory, took it for granted that his friend would already have read much on the topic. Still he could not resist contributing to the process of exchange: 'being a matter of so muche marke and renowne, it is fitt, that all tounges and pennes both good and bad should be employed about it'. There was no juicier topic for the newsmongers that side of Christmas, and the juice was sharper for the authorities' evident unease. Pory reported the common opinion that Ralegh's 'death will doe more harme to the faction that sought it, then ever his life could have done'.
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Public regard for a worthy Englishman grew steadily. On New Year's Day 1619 John Holles told his son in London to 'gather up as many of Sir W. Rawlies verses, and letters as yow can, ex unguibus leonem'.
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It is significant that the executioner's traditional words - 'behold the head of a traitor' - are recorded in only one version of Ralegh's final speech and death. The legitimacy and morality of royal justice were left unconfirmed, to withstand if they could the scrutiny of succeeding generations.
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Anna Beer suggests that Bess, working from her house 'hard by Austin Friars', was behind this torrent of writings, that the publication at this point of the letter Ralegh had written to her when facing death in 1603 depended on her connivance. It is a persuasive argument, even though Ralegh's speech on the Westminster scaffold was itself powerful enough to fuel interest and promote a new English martyr.
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Not that the message, following so close on the fiasco in Guiana, was entirely positive. A year after his ignominious return, the failure of Ralegh's expedition still tainted his reputation, particularly among the many who had ventured their savings in the voyage. One such was the author 'I. H. gent', perhaps John Heath of New College Oxford, whose capable epigrams in his 1619 collection The House of Correction refer more than once to the calamity of a failed speculative investment:

Thus I lost all; wherefore it is a signe,

The[y] found no Mine of gold, yet gold of mine.

I. H.'s work also responds to continuing debate over the causes of Ralegh's failure, summarizing all that had gone wrong in just ten lines. Most interestingly, he has a high regard for Keymis, which could only reflect poorly on the captain who had so readily blamed and abandoned a loyal associate.

Sundry oppinions abroad are spred,

Why the Gwyanians no better sped;

Some say, they were prevented out of Spayne,

Others, because some did returne agayne:

Some say, 'twas sicknesse: others, their abode

So long ere they put from the English Rode.

Some say, their General's absence: but the most

Say, Captaine Kemish death, when he was lost,

All was overthrowne, he onely was to doe it,

And that Sir Walter came but Rawly to it.
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So many people noted the ambiguities of Ralegh's last voyage. Some even tried to portray his Guiana expedition as a religious venture, crowned by martyrdom.
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For most, though, 1618 told a simpler tale. Ralegh had failed in Guiana, just as he had failed on many other occasions in a busy life. Even so, his end had made up for all the shortcomings. Public opinion, while nodding to the normative ballad literature, concluded that a great wrong had been done, and that the King, somehow, had to make amends.
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For all its careful structure, its mockery of the dead man as a manipulative, insincere actor, the official account of the process against Ralegh, the King's 'Declaration of the demeanour and carriage of Sir Walter Ralegh', was read widely as an admission of error and miscalculation, falling back as it did on a rather demeaning catalogue of private conversations between Ralegh and those who had set themselves up as his friends, while condensing the current criticism of recent proceedings into a few over-simplified sentences. By reverting to the legal argument that Ralegh had died in accordance with English Law, the 'Declaration' served only to question the fundamental justice of any law that could put a man to death in these particular circumstances. This approach actually invited comparisons, encouraging readers to choose between two versions of the truth. All too many English men and women, after reading Ralegh's 'Apologie' and an account of his execution, decided to believe him and not the King.
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James struggled to come to terms with these developments. Pory has the King relieved that the most vitriolic criticism is being directed against Stucley. 'I have done amiss. Raleigh's blood be upon thy head.'
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He must have hoped that the fuss, like the nova in the night sky, would gradually fade away. But Ralegh's subversive influence proved particularly robust. In May 1620, Thomas, Earl of Kellie, wrote to John, Earl of Mar from his house on the Strand, telling him that Lord North's brother, who had sailed with Ralegh, had ignored an express command from the King and had set out on a voyage of his own, 'whitche trubills his Majestie verrye mutche, and the more becawss he hes cawsed the Spanishe embassadoure to wret to Spaine that he shuld not goe'. These independent spirits were particularly bothersome. James thought 'his reputatione tuiched ather that he intendit not to staye him, or then that he had not the meanes to staye him'.
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In his lifetime, Ralegh was always to some degree a'bore about himself', but when he was no longer on hand to point out the obvious, the better traits in his character, and his nobler and more generous actions, became ever more apparent.
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His silence permitted others to manipulate the remembered facts, and encouraged the creation of new truths. Written words now spoke for him, and Ralegh's talents as a writer ensured a particularly positive legacy. Readers began to shape Raleghs all their own: authority, as we are constantly reminded, does not always come from the author. During the late 1610s and early 1620s many in England were deeply alarmed by the growing threat from the Catholic Habsburgs in both Germany and Spain. The humiliation suffered by James's daughter Elizabeth when her husband was driven from his lands in Bohemia and the Palatinate by Catholic armies scandalized Protestant opinion at home, and demonstrated to some the bankruptcy of James's pacific policies. Against this backcloth, Ralegh embarked on his first posthumous career, as a Protestant, popular hero, a victim of the same shabby royal appeasement towards Catholic powers, an opposition figure motivated by principle rather than by personal advancement.

It was, perhaps, an obvious construct. Ralegh could all too easily be considered a martyr to appeasement, viewed as he was by so many as 'Spaines Arch-Foe'.
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Arch-foes are always worthy of respect. John Pory has the Earl of Northumberland reflecting on events from his Tower cell, soon after Ralegh's death. The Spanish, Northumberland suggested, would have been better advised to give £100,000 in bribes rather than have Ralegh killed, were the Spanish marriage for Prince Charles to proceed, whereas if the match failed, the English should have stumped up the L100,000 rather than kill someone of this calibre.
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While overly neat, and from a friendly source, the Earl's reflection captures the dead man's growing reputation.

Northumberland's view was ardently promoted by Bess, whose own memorial miniatures of her dead husband and dead son show both as military heroes, the likeness of Wat curiously, and perhaps deliberately similar to the beautiful 1588 Hilliard miniature of Ralegh at the zenith of his career. Bess's Ralegh remained, nevertheless, a multi-faceted individual: she diligently pointed out through marginal notes the close and fruitful association with Edmund Spenser in her son Carew's copy of Spenser's 1617 collected works.
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Ralegh's status as a protestant martyr drew some unexpected admirers. Godfrey Goodman, no radical republican, would one day kiss Ralegh's skull reverently.
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The roll call of those impressed by the exciting combination of magisterial history and oppositional politics included William Drummond, James Harrington, and in later years Marvell, Bunyan, William Penn, the Earl of Shaftesbury, and the puritan poet Anne Bradstreet in Massachusetts.
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Several of those present at the execution seem to have settled there and then on the Ralegh that they would remember.
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John Eliot discerned a Roman hero, and remained uncertain only 'whether death were more acceptable to him, or he more welcome unto death'.
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To Eliot and several other future opponents of Charles I's personal rule he was 'our Ralegh'.
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Eliot's annotations to his copy of the Dialogue, preserved in his manuscript copy of the work, show him grasping the weighted arguments, highlighting the points of current relevance, and using Ralegh's text as a basis for his own Petition from the Gatehouse.
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Oliver Cromwell did not attend the execution, but one senses occasionally in his later speeches, and in the development during the 1650s of his Western Design for an English empire in the Caribbean, that he was certainly present in spirit.

Others were quick to take up a popular theme. We have seen how, in Sir Walter Rawleighs Ghost, the radical exile Thomas Scott presented a man fit and able to save the country from popery, born not for himself or his family, but for England.
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Even the thickest walls at Whitehall and the Escorial cannot shut out a ghost. A very protestant spectre, Ralegh returned to confound Habsburg machinations, the honest advocate of godly war.
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Once resurrected, the dead do not rest easily. Ralegh's ghost, as G. M. Trevelyan observed, 'pursued the House of Stuart to the scaffold'.
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The desirability of confronting Spain and the Empire on the battlefield and at sea was one of those fault-lines in the future royalist-parliamentarian divide, a symbol of the ageing, nostalgic support for Parliament eventually so prominent in the early stages of the Civil Wars. Michael Rudick points out that Scott's conjuration is symptomatic of the seventeenth-century tendency to draw from and invent the words of 'Elizabethan worthies' when commenting 'on immediate concerns'.
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A worthy past was, however unrealistically, characterized by good government. The 1628 rebranding of Ralegh's Dialogue as The Prerogative of Parliaments was, we have noted, instantly popular. As Anna Beer writes, 'Ralegh's "private" advice to James was thus appropriated to an increasingly urgent and public debate about the nature of government, and it is in this context that the work became politically active'.
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People continued to read the Prerogative; Ralegh's Instructions to his son were bowdlerized and transformed into a far more religious work in the popular editions of the 1630s, and during the next two decades, while the British Isles were torn apart and then reshaped by war and novel forms of government, radicals plundered Ralegh's History for illustrative examples of the workings of Providence. Full of ambiguity - sometimes deliberately introduced by the author, and sometimes not - The History of the World carried near canonical status, and every leading writer and politician, on both sides, was therefore obliged to 'negotiate' with Ralegh's texts as well as with posthumous portrayals of Ralegh the man.
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In 1650, Cromwell, admiring economy with words (in others) and ever more aware of passing time, recommended one particular book to his son Richard: 'Recreate yourself with Sir Walter Raughleye's History: it's a body of history; and will add much more to your understanding than fragments of Story.'
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Perhaps he found that he could relate to Elizabeth's favourite, and James's opponent. Like Ralegh, Cromwell had risen by chance from obscurity, his political prominence was the product of middle life; and both men revered the God of Battles. Milton read the History, as he read other works by Ralegh, and there are allusions to both Guiana and to Ralegh's exploration of Genesis in Paradise Lost.
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In the 1650s several of Ralegh's texts were published or republished, and some works by others were attributed to him, notably Maxims of State and Cabinet Council, the latter published by an admiring Milton.

For a time, he becomes defined by his status as a best-selling author. In the first significant biography, appended anonymously to a 1652 edition of the History, the author suggests that King James's dislike of Ralegh was in part the result of envy - he resented a greater literary talent. Evaluation of that talent was, however, peculiarly open to shifting fashion. When the 'protestant hero' came to be reassessed as a writer, more and more people set the heroism to one side, and began to pick holes in Ralegh's scholarship. Criticism extended from his works to his life and conduct. The 1650s saw vigorous debate over Ralegh's credibility as a 'good' person; even in the heyday of the English republic the foremost opponent of Stuart monarchy did not have things all his own way. Carew Ralegh and William Sanderson, son of the disgruntled principal investor in the first Guiana voyage, took up their pens and refought the courtroom battles of Winchester and London in predictably partisan, inconclusive fashion.
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