The Elizabethans (60 page)

Twelve years entire I wasted in this war,
¹⁸

Twelve years of my most happy younger days;

But I in them, and they now wasted are,

Of all which past the sorrow only stays.

At nearly forty, a sixteenth century man was entering, if not old age, then a period when the best of life is over. C.S. Lewis wrote that the quatrains ‘vibrate with sombre passion’, as well they might, as Raleigh reflected on his dangerous and emotionally upsetting relationship with the Queen. As it happened, he only had to spend five weeks in the Tower. His wife was imprisoned for rather longer, but although they were released, it was ‘never glad confident morning again’. Raleigh’s hey-day as a courtier was over. He now looked abroad for glory.

26

My America

RALEIGH AND HIS
wife were sent to a prison where – had the Queen’s whim so decreed – they might easily have been incarcerated for years, or until death. As things turned out, Raleigh did, under the next monarch, spend years of his life in the Tower, and was beheaded there in 1618. Prince Henry, James I’s son, who loved Raleigh and admired his genius, said that ‘no king but his father would keep such a bird in a cage’ and blamed Robert Cecil (by then the Earl of Salisbury) for his sad fate.
¹
Bess, as a maid of honour, had incurred the Queen’s wrath for marrying without royal consent. But one gets an uncanny sense that the offence for which Walter and Bess Raleigh were sent down by Elizabeth in 1591 was that of consummating heterosexual love, procreating and marrying. In order to atone for these sins, Raleigh would have to commit ‘virtuous’ deeds – that is, sail out into the high seas, commit acts of piracy and mass murder on Spanish vessels and then sail to the New World to lay claim to land inhabited by other people. Such is the moral universe that the Elizabethans at court inhabited. No wonder, in order to compose his great moral epic
The Faerie Queene
, Spenser felt he had to return to the rural seclusion in Ireland, where human wrongdoing was daily manifest, but morality was perhaps a little less inverted.

While Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower, his old friend Sir Richard Grenville was sent in his place, alongside Lord Thomas Howard, to capture the Spanish treasure-ships at sea. Grenville’s ship was the
Revenge
. Three of the other vessels were captained by men who would be Raleigh’s comrades on the later voyage to Guiana: Whiddon, Cross and Thynne. They loitered off the Azores, some sixteen English ships. By the end of August 1591, however, sailing off the coast of Portugal, the Earl of Cumberland got wind of what the Spanish intended – namely to send an Armada of fifty-three ships against the English state-sponsored pirates. Cumberland was able to reach the Azores just, but only just, before the arrival of the Spanish fleet. He found the English in a bad way – fever and sickness had weakened the men of six ships, and Lord Thomas Howard decided that it would be suicidal to engage with an enemy so hugely superior in strength and numbers. So he weighed anchor and took off to England. The Spanish had surrounded Grenville before he could pick up his men or rejoin the English fleet. Grenville disobeyed Howard’s orders to rejoin the fleet. He was not an experienced sailor, and the loss of the
Revenge
and the men on it was his fault. Yet Raleigh saw the death of the stubborn Cornishman Grenville as heroic. Rather than surrender to the Spaniards, Grenville was prepared to die, with all his crew, and if necessary to destroy the ships that remained to them rather than allow them to fall into enemy hands. There is something undeniably impressive about this: in his defiance, his doughty Protestantism, his contempt for the enemy and his willing embrace of death, Sir Richard Grenville was an archetypical Elizabethan hero; and so the loss of the
Revenge
passed into historical legend, being seen as on the scale of the defence of the 300 at Thermopylae. Tennyson’s version of the story, based on his reading of Froude, for a hundred years became part of the poetic repertoire of any English child:

‘We die – does it matter when?

Sink me the ship, Master Gunner – sink her, split her in twain!

Fall into the hands of God, not into the hands of Spain!’

The patriotic Victorians, Tennyson and Froude, would have been unable to write about the loss of the
Revenge
in the way that they did, had it not been for Raleigh who first immortalised the legend in ‘A report of the truth of the fight about the Isles of Azores, this last summer betwixt the Revenge, one of Her Majesties Shippes, and an Armada of the King of Spaine’. It is one of Raleigh’s finest pieces of prose, violently partisan, crudely anti-Spanish, but essential reading if you want to capture the heroic Elizabethan mindset and their attitude to the Spanish Empire, which then dominated the world. It is one of the great pieces of battle-reportage in the English language:

All the Powder of the Revenge to the last barrel was now spent, all her pikes broken, fortie of her best men slaine, and the most part of the rest hurt. In the beginning of the fight she had but one hundredth free from sicknes, and fourscore and ten sicke, laid in hold upon the Ballast. A small troop to man such a ship, and a weak Garrison to resist so mighty an Army. By those hundred all was sustained, the voleis, bourdings, and entrings of fifteen ships of warre, besides those which beat her at large. On the contrarie, the Spanish were always supplied with souldiers brought from everie squadron: all manner of Armes and pouder at wil.

Raleigh was insistent that the majority of the English fleet did not sail away for reasons of cowardice; but he was also anxious to absolve his old friend Grenville from any imputation of incompetence. There were men still stuck on the island and he could not leave them to the merciless fates of captives of Spain, which were by now notoriously commonplace throughout the world.

Raleigh was contemptuous of the religious arguments put forward by the King of Spain, and by ‘their runnagate Jesuites’, which place high on any Spanish agenda the wish to convert the world to Catholicism. ‘Neither have they at any time as they protest invaded the kingdoms of the Indies and Peru and els where, but onely led thereunto, rather to reduce the people to Christianitie, then for either golde or empire.’ Conquest and world domination were their aim and business, and Raleigh wanted no one – least of all English Catholics such as so many of his Throckmorton in-laws – to be deceived by any of the propaganda. The King of Spain ‘useth his pretence of religion, for no other purpose, but to bewitch us from the obedience of our naturall Prince’.

Raleigh therefore felt perfectly within his rights, as an Englishman, to exact revenge for the
Revenge
. And since this venture stood to make its backers, including the Queen, a great deal of money, Raleigh was temporarily released from the Tower. The Queen adventured two ships, and £3,000. Raleigh gave his ship, the
Roebuck
, and a lot of borrowed money. The idea had been that Raleigh would accompany the fleet to the coast of Spain, and then return to England while they sailed on to Panama. As soon as he was at sea, however, Raleigh ignored all the orders from Frobisher to go home. He persuaded Frobisher to stay and watch the Spanish coast while he took his squadron to the Azores, where they commandeered two giant Spanish carracks from the East Indies. The
Santa Cruz
, having been plundered, they drove ashore and burned. The
Madre de Dios
– 1,600 tons, a huge ship – was boarded and taken. The sailors on board who took her back to England could not believe their luck and spent the whole voyage pilfering loot. Raleigh managed to get some small return on his investment, though he claimed he lost on the deal. (He and his partners put in £34,000, took £36,000 out, but had a lot of incidental expense.) The Queen took the bulk of the loot – valued at £82,666. 13s. 4d.

No wonder their friend and fellow ‘Scholar of Night’, George Chapman – famed as the translator whose version of Homer made Keats feel:

like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken

– should have seen the potentialities of Guiana as almost limitless. In that decade when the economy was in such a parlous state – rising food prices, failed crops, a fall in the real value of money, and inflation – Guiana became a mythic source of betterment, which could return England to its wealth, and Elizabeth to the bright glory of her early years:

Riches and conquest and renown I sing

Riches with honour, conquest without blood,

Enough to seat the monarchy of earth,

Like to Jove’s eagle on Eliza’s hand.

Guiana, whose rich feet are mines of gold,

Whose forehead knocks against the roof of stars,

Stands on her tiptoe at fair England looking,

Kissing her hand, bowing her mighty breast,

And every sign of all submission making,

To be her sister and her daughter both

Of our most sacred Maid . . .
²

Although he had made the sacred Maid, the Queen, so spectacular a sum of money from the
Madre de Dios
raid, Raleigh was still in disgrace. He and his wife were released from the Tower, but retreated to Sherborne Castle, where they missed the court, and London, keenly. Raleigh planned another expedition. By 1595 the rather grandiose schemes had shrunk. The fleet of seven vessels became four, with his friends Lawrence Keymis, Jacob Whiddon and Douglas Master in charge of them. Keymis was an interesting man – a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, from 1583 to 1591, a good mathematician and geographer, a member of the group of friends who constituted (in so far as it existed) the ‘School of Night’, and a fast friend of Raleigh’s. It would have been easy to desert Raleigh when he fell from the royal favour, but Keymis stayed loyal and, while Raleigh was in the Tower, acted as his agent and tried to keep his ever-interesting financial affairs in order. Raleigh attracted real devotion, and one still feels his attraction – of all the great Elizabethans, he is the most attractive.

As they reached Trinidad, Raleigh temporarily parted company from them to do a brief reconnaissance in the Orinoco delta in (modern-day) Venezuela. For it was on the banks of the Orinoco that he hoped to find gold. When he met the native caciques:

I made them understand that I was a servant of a Queen, who was the great cacique of the north and a virgin . . . that she was an enemy to the Castellani [that is, the Spanish] in respect of their tyranny and oppression, and that she delivered all such nations about her, as were by them oppressed, and having freed all the coast of the northern world from their servitude had sent me to free them also, and withal to defend the country of Guiana from their invasion and conquest. I showed them her majesty’s picture which they so admired and honoured, as it had been easy to have brought them idolatrous thereof . . . so as in that part of the world, her majesty is very famous and admirable, whom they now call Ezrabeta Cassipuna Aquerewana, which is as much as Elizabeth, the great princess or greatest commander.
³

Raleigh was anxious that his sailors should not behave like the Spanish Conquistadors: there were to be no rapes, no violence, no plunder of the villages. He wanted the caciques to be on his side and to lead him to his obsession – the gold. Fatally, he did manage to find a few fragments of gold in the river, and this fed the mania that possessed him for the next twenty-three years: the belief that somewhere in the Orinoco he was going to find riches beyond avarice’s wildest hope. It was the failure of that last expedition to Orinoco in 1618 that cost him his life. He lost his son on that final expedition, and when he came home it was to face trumped-up charges of treason and fraud.

The night before he died, he sat up in his cell in the Tower of London and wrote that mordant verse:

Even such is Time, which takes in trust

Our youth, our joys, and all we have,

And pays us with but age and dust;

Who in the dark and silent grave,

When we have wandered all our ways,

Shuts up the story of our days.

Did he pause there, as he wrote. And was that the whole of his faith, this enquiring, sceptical man who in the 1590s had been accused of being an atheist? No. It was not mere convention that made him add the next two lines. Raleigh did not give a fig for conventions. Like so many of the most interesting men and women of the age, he was very close to scepticism. His mind questioned everything. It was one of the things that he had in common, not only with raffish young intellectuals such as Marlowe, but with the Queen. But, like the Queen, he held fast to the faith:

And from which earth, and grave, and dust,

The Lord shall raise me up, I trust.
⁴

Likewise, we find the sceptic Thomas Hariot reading aloud from the Scriptures to the Native Americans in Virginia in 1616.

And although the dreams of gold in Guiana turned out to be a dangerous fantasy, Raleigh’s involvement with the fledgling colony of Virginia was not useless.

In his essay on ‘Plantations’, the malicious Francis Bacon wrote, ‘it is the sinfullest thing in the world to forsake or destitute a plantation once in forwardness, for besides the dishonour, it is the guiltiness of blood of many commiserable persons’. It was clearly a dig against Raleigh, who had claimed that the voyage of 1595 had been to protect the new colony of Virginia, but he had become distracted by the prospect of finding gold in Guiana. Yet it was unfair to blame Raleigh for the financial setbacks of the early settlers in Virginia. He lived on borrowed money and, until he found his crock of Guianan gold, he could not subsidise Virginia. He did abandon the Roanoke settlers, but no one else helped them either in the 1580s or 1590s. ‘I long since presumed to offer your Majesty my service in Virginia,’ he wrote to James I, ‘with a short repetition of the commodity, honour and safety which the King’s Majesty might reap by that plantation, if it were followed to effect. I do still humbly beseech your Majesty, that I may rather die in serving the King and my Country than to perish here’ (he was writing from the Tower).