Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (8 page)

More substantial, financial favours are easier to detect. In April 1583 Ralegh secured leases reverting to the Crown from All Souls, Oxford, selling them on without delay to guarantee the profit. That May, he received a patent for the sale of wine and the licensing of vintners, worth at a minimum £600 per annum, even allowing for his agent's fees. This grant, renewed and refined over the next twenty years, established his fortune.
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 The practical value of this 'farm' lay in the power Ralegh now enjoyed to charge vintners £l a year to sell wines; import permits were also, theoretically, at his disposal. Many copies of licences issued in Ralegh's name are preserved in the National Archives.
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 A licence to export undyed woollen broadcloth, granted fora year in 1584 and confirmed in 1585,1587 and 1589, was if anything still more lucrative. Even Burghley, who understood the worth of these things, at one point considered the resulting income excessive. In all these ways, a cash-strapped Crown, lacking any disposable land and coin, rewarded those it chose to advance.

A great man at the Court needed a house measured to his status. In 1583, the Queen granted Ralegh a handsome London dwelling, Durham House on the Strand, one in a line of 'palaces' facing the Thames. The acquisition of this imposing property, in a particularly desirable riverside location close to the Court, underlined his new-found prominence. In fact, he shared the house with Sir Edward Darcy, but it was a big place, and Ralegh occupied the more prestigious higher floors. Visitors to Durham House wrote of its magnificence, recalling the splendour of its fabric and fittings. Of mid-thirteenth-century origin, the house had been added to and rebuilt by Thomas Hatfield, Bishop of Durham, one hundred years later. It had passed into royal hands in 1536, although Henry VIII's first two Queens had already used it as temporary lodgings, further evidence of the prestige secured by its size and setting. In 1553 the house had seen the ill-fated marriage between Lady Jane Grey and Guildford Dudley, son of the Duke of Northumberland and brother of Elizabeth I's future favourite, the Earl of Leicester. More recently, Elizabeth had used it to accommodate foreign ambassadors, and perhaps as temporary lodgings for noblemen on visits to the Court, though successive Bishops of Durham never quite gave up hope of recovering their predecessors' property. These lingering expectations became significant in a decisive later phase of Ralegh's career.
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Common sense dictated the layout: the main buildings ran to the south, with the outhouses and service quarters to the north, the two blocks separated by generous courtyards. York House stood to the west, while a pleasant garden and orchard on the eastern side of the property offered an elegant buffer against Ivy Lane and its popular river stairs.
29
 From the mid-1580s a close friend, the Earl of Northumberland, occupied a house in Ivy Lane when in the capital, and indeed much of London court society lived within an easy walk of Ralegh's property. All this was highly satisfactory, but one feature proved particularly attractive. Durham House was blessed with a lantern tower or turret that had a 'prospect which is [as] pleasant perhaps as any in the world'. Through the turret windows, Ralegh looked out on the bend of the Thames, eastwards to the City, with its cluster of church spires, the great block tower of St Paul's, the fortress palace of the Tower of London and the solitary medieval bridge of many arches, and south to the Palace of Westminster, home of the law courts and also of Parliament during its occasional sessions. Aubrey credited the potency of a fine view: it enlarged ,an ingeniose man's thoughts' he suggested, and certainly views were very important to Ralegh.
30
 He put the chamber to use as his study, and it is said that he later adapted an attic room at Sherborne for the same purpose.

Durham House offered a stage well suited to the magnificence of a leading courtier, and Ralegh never once stinted on splendour when the means were to hand. His clothing was the subject of much comment, admiration and imitation. It was also the target for opportunistic theft: a 'gentleman', Hugh Pewe, pleaded guilty in 1584 to a charge that he had stolen 'a jewel worth eighty pounds, a hatt bande of pearls worth thirty pounds, and five yards of white silk called damaske worth three pounds', all Ralegh's property ,at Westminster'. Theft on this scale was a felony, grand larceny, theoretically punishable by death, but Pewe, like many another Elizabethan criminal, pleaded benefit of clergy, reading or reciting the 'neck verse', and so escaped the gallows. The sheer scale of the finery, casually left lying around, is more telling than the fact that some fellow was tempted to make off with it.
31
 Here was another statement of favour, wealth and power.

Ralegh knew too how to play for rewards, even though their accumulation bred hostility among competitors at Court and unpopularity among the ordinary citizens of London, who resented the rise of another acquisitive favourite. Sir John Harington relates how Ralegh, eager for the manor of Banwell, part of the Wells diocesan estate, told Elizabeth that the bishop, Thomas Godwin, had married for a second time. The Queen's own views were quite clear: she did not think that bishops should marry at all. A second marriage demonstrated personal weakness, perhaps even insolence towards the sovereign. By alienating Elizabeth from her incontinent prelate, of course, Ralegh improved his own prospects of securing an advantageous lease. Harington's story may be apocryphal but it shows rather well how a capable courtier set about his work, and it shows too that tales portraying Ralegh as a 'slick operator' were perfectly credible to contemporaries.
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The rewards of the 1580s amounted to largesse on a remarkable scale, but what political rationale underpinned such generosity towards a landless younger son? The answer becomes apparent when Ralegh's personal abilities, his regional connections, and the present needs of government are considered side by side. Though now at the heart of Court, Ralegh remained the Devon man. John Aubrey's slightly ambiguous assertion, based on conversations with the Cornish judge and politician Sir Thomas Malet, that Sir Walter spoke 'broad Devonshire to his dying day', surely points to an accent that stood out, even among the rounded vowels encountered at the Elizabethan Court.
33
 In July 1584, the new favourite tried to purchase his birthplace, 'Hayes, a farme sumtyme in my fathers possession', offering to give the owner Richard Duke 'what so ever in your conscience yow shall deeme it worthe'.
34
 Ralegh still owned very little freehold property at that time, and the manoeuvre reads like a step towards establishing an estate in his own 'country'. While Duke chose not to sell, many of the honours bestowed upon Ralegh by the Queen had a deliberate, regional slant. Confident in his administrative abilities, impressed by his willingness to work hard, Elizabeth was building her favourite up into a regional viceroy. Ralegh was granted the Rangership of Gillingham Forest, Dorset, in July 1584. Knighted on 6 January 1585, he became Lord Warden of the Stannaries, the semi-autonomous tin-mining jurisdictions, in June.
35
 After the death of Francis Russell, second Earl of Bedford, in July 1585, he was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall in September, and Vice-Admiral of the West in November that same year. The well-known Hilliard miniature was painted at around this time. It shows a gorgeous man, in gorgeous clothes. A man, perhaps, who has at last found his place in life.

The lieutenancy has a particular significance, for the honour was almost exclusively confined to the peerage in late Elizabethan England after its reintroduction, as a temporary military expedient, during the 1580s.
36
 Here was the crucial appointment in Ralegh's early career. Throughout the early 1580s, as Ralegh rose to favour, England was moving steadily towards war with Spain. Spain's commitment to re-conquer the rebellious United Provinces placed perhaps the finest army in Europe - under the command of one of Europe's most experienced generals, Alexander Farnese, from 1586 the Duke of Parma -just the other side of the Channel, while the assassination of the Dutch leader William the Silent in 1584 reminded the whole protestant nation that Elizabeth's regime and the established religion depended on the life of a childless Queen. Many people in England, including many at Court, acknowledged the power of primogeniture, tacitly set aside the 1544 Succession Act and regarded Elizabeth's cousin, the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, as next in line to the throne. A prisoner in England since 1568, Mary offered a ready alternative for discontented Catholics plotting Elizabeth's death. These were anxious times. Ralegh's new regional honours gave a trusted soldier, a proven workhorse, and a man unambiguously dependent upon the Queen for favour, military and political authority in an exposed, vulnerable and independently-minded part of England, far from London.

No one at Westminster could afford to take the south-west for granted. Little more than thirty years earlier, Devon and Cornwall had been convulsed by a particularly bloody rebellion against the rule of the Lord Protector, the Duke of Somerset. Fifty years before that, an army of Cornishmen had marched on London, discontented at the taxation imposed by Henry VII's nervous and vulnerable government. What was true in the 1490s remained true in the 1580s. Were the Elizabethan government to neglect the region, a canny enemy might take advantage of its many natural harbours, and, perhaps, of the lingering attachment to Catholicism still found there.

The Stannaries needed particularly careful handling. Enjoying centuriesold privileges, including separate taxation and a parliament of their own authorized to determine matters of immediate concern to the tin industry, they represented a seam of sometimes cantankerous independency on the margins of England. While the industry's heyday was long past, there were still profits to be made in this seasonal occupation, justifying the hard labour and rough living conditions high on Dartmoor.
37
 To his death the Earl of Bedford, as a prominent landowner in the south-west of England and as the lord lieutenant in Dorset, Devon and Cornwall, had worked to maintain royal authority and, indeed, his own prestige in the region, but Bedford died on the same day as his only surviving son, his grandson and heir was still a minor, and a fresh approach was clearly called for in this dangerous hour. Ralegh could not of course boast a title or lands, but the family name carried weight in the region, he had gifts of his own and would at least be able to shoulder some part of the Earl's former burden. Elizabeth and her advisors hoped with some justification that they had identified the right man for a particularly challenging job.

Ralegh's new authority was not limited to Cornwall; logically, it extended into the county of his birth. Across the Tamar, he served as a knight of the shire for Devon in the Parliaments of 1584 and 1586. Here was a source of patronage, and enrichment for oneself and one's friends. Here were dignity and status too. Informally, the county MPs ranked above those elected from cities and towns in the social hierarchy. During the autumn of 1584, Parliament met in the midst of a political crisis after the assassination of William the Silent. Following the discovery of the so-called Throckmorton Conspiracy against Elizabeth, members had to deal with the knee-jerk reaction of protestant England, the Bond of Association, by which county gentry publicly undertook to pursue to the death those responsible, were the Queen to be attacked and killed.
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 This was a sensitive issue: the Queen did not like independent action, however well meaning, and she liked still less any talk of her death. But ordinary political life went on too. Absorbing the protocols of legislative process, Ralegh struggled to see through a private bill confirming his patent for founding a colony - unnecessary perhaps, but the authority of Parliament would have helped to make assurance doubly sure.
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It is as though a cloak of artifice has been snatched away, revealing the point of all these favours and rewards. They built up a youngest son into a courtier-statesman with the presence and authority to impress some difficult constituents. As friends and acquaintances looked for help from the rising man, Ralegh's requests for favours began to display a West Country bias. A few examples from many serve to illustrate the point. In October 1586 he wrote as a newly established patron of exploration to the Earl of Leicester, seeking the Earl's favour for his fellow Devonian Sir Francis Drake, who was then 'in good hope to return for the Indies if it may be brought to pass'. Drake had recently returned from the West Indies, bringing home most of Ralegh's colonists from Virginia.
40
 Early in the 1590s, Ralegh sought the clerkship of the peace in Exeter for his servant Hancock, as a favour from Sir John Gilbert. Family politics were in play here too, and Gilbert gracefully acceded to the request. He could not, he wrote later, deny 'so honourable and dear a brother'.
41
 On another occasion in the mid-1580s Ralegh wrote to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Walter Mildmay, seeking favour for George Evelegh, a son of the former subsidy collector in East Devon, now saddled with his father's debts.
42
 Evelegh had also been a contemporary of Ralegh at the Inns of Court, and some of these favours were nuanced by Court as well as Country considerations. Early in 1586 Ralegh wrote to Sir William More, a property owner in Blackfriars, asking for his understanding in the unfortunate case of Rocco Bonetti, a highly fashionable Italian fencing master who owed money on buildings that he had put up on More's land and who now needed the security of an extension to his lease in order to pay off significant debts.
43
 Bonetti is credited with introducing the flexible style of fighting with rapier and dagger to England, and along with many other courtiers Ralegh had patronized his fencing school.
44

Ralegh, like any other man of means, was not entirely free from the charlatan with a hard-luck story.
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 It was difficult sometimes to spot the rascal in the crowd. Petitions of every kind, telling every miserable tale under the sun, arrived on the desks of Burghley, Leicester and other prominent figures at Court. These petitions prompted a positive response in a surprising number of cases, for even the meanest suitor might presume to name the friend of a friend, or a family connection through a distant cousin. The Elizabethan world - and it was at times a very small world - turned on favours done, favours acknowledged and, in appropriate cases, on favours returned.