The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (15 page)

“It is my last mirth in this world. Do not grudge it to me. When I come to the sad parting you shall see me grave enough.”

 

M
ost Americans think of Sir Walter Raleigh as the founder of the doomed colony of Roanoke, or perhaps as the courtier who lay down his cape for Queen Elizabeth to tread upon, or possibly as the founder of a chain of seafood restaurants, and so might be surprised to find him here, in the section on Ireland—but Raleigh was an Irish landowner and, the story has it, the man who brought the fabled spud to the Irish masses. He was also by any measure a remarkable man in a time of remarkable men. He was born into a prominent Protestant family of modest means but with numerous connections at court and with relatives involved in soldiering and merchant adventuring. Like a true Elizabethan, Raleigh was both gentleman and brawler, poet and sailor, soldier and queen's favorite.

He grew up in Devon amongst fishermen and farmers, where tales of the sea lit his imagination. In his early teens he could have joined his half-brother Humphrey Gilbert who was fighting for civilization and profit in Ireland, but he chose instead, at the age of fourteen, to join the wars in France, fighting with a detachment of English on the side of the Huguenots.
France was a sophisticated place and if he was to learn the art of war, better to learn it there than among the kerns of Ireland. What exactly Raleigh did in France, or even how long he was there, is uncertain, though he did return to England a veteran—and by eighteen was off to Oxford and after a few years there moved to London, where he successfully avoided studying law, though registered at the Middle Temple, an Inn of Court that he treated (as many young gentlemen did) as a club.

In his middle twenties, after an aborted voyage to the New World, Raleigh went a-soldiering to Ireland. Humphrey Gilbert had set the tone for fighting in Ireland by lining the pathway to his tent with the severed heads of his enemies. Ireland was that sort of place. Raleigh recognized the especial cruelties of war in Ireland (his cousin was ambushed and murdered in August 1580, shortly after Raleigh landed in Cork), but he also believed that an industrious Englishman could make something out of the Irish bog if he had strength and stamina enough to reduce the bogtrotters.

It was a matter of national security, as well as personal advancement. Ireland was in rebellion (or parts of it were), and aiding the rebels was a small contingent of Spanish and Italian soldiers sent with a papal blessing. Not knowing how to fight in Ireland—the Irish were guerrillas—and not knowing the language, the Italians and the Spanish proved a hapless enemy, built themselves a fort, awaited an English siege, surrendered without much ado, and then were cut down to a man (a few women were hanged, as were some Catholic priests, though they were tortured first). Captain Raleigh was among the officers charged with executing this duty—which was by our lights inexcusable, but customary at the time, though it did spark outrage in Catholic Europe.
²

Raleigh the swashbuckler was better displayed in another incident of the Irish war. He was crossing a river, pursued by Irish bushwhackers who outnumbered him at least ten or perhaps twenty to one. Raleigh calmly sat his horse in the river, aiding a fallen comrade. Armed only with a pistol and
staff, he stared down his Irish pursuers who rode away shouting insults and abuse. Raleigh wrote: “The manner of my own behaviour I leave to the report of others, but the escape was strange to all men.”
³

Raleigh was a clever officer, and not shy about offering advice to his commander or to the queen (through her secretary of state, and spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham) on how the situation in Ireland could be improved. He left Ireland in December 1851, having gained, with the grudging permission of the Lord Deputy of Ireland (the Puritan Lord Grey), a burnt-down castle (Barry Court). He went to London, to the queen's court, and with the panache for which he was famous—and which made him many enemies—he “had gotten the Queen's ear in a trice, and she began to be taken with his elocution, and loved to hear his reasons to her demands. And the truth is, she took him for a kind of oracle, which nettled them all.”
⁴

Being a queen's favorite brought with it money (through monopoly licenses), prestige (including an appointment as a member of Parliament from Devon), and special privileges (such as leasing digs at Durham House, a palace confiscated by the Crown from the bishop of Durham). It also gave Raleigh what he really wanted, a royal patent to go discovering in the New World. In 1584, he set out on a scouting expedition that landed in what is now North Carolina and returned to England with two natives to show off, along with glowing reports about the prospects for planting a colony there. In January 1585, Raleigh was knighted, and a coat of arms was awarded to “Walter Raleigh, Knight, Lord and Governor of Virginia.”

The establishment of the Virginia colony (most likely named by Raleigh after his patroness, the Virgin Queen) was Raleigh's grand passion. But to his enormous disappointment, the queen would not let him join his next outfitted expedition. So it left without him in 1585, and instead of exploring
the New World he was employed as the Lord-Lieutenant of Cornwall and Admiral of the West. He was also, in the English fashion of the time, an investor in piracy, which, as one of his biographers notes, would have made him a wealthy man independent of royal favor;
⁵
if he had not been a court favorite, Raleigh would almost certainly have been a pirate himself. He was, after all, a handsomer, smoother, lither, more intellectual version of Sir Francis Drake; the sort who would equip his expedition to Virginia with a scientist to make the establishment of his colony a true act of discovery.

The colony began well, with the local Indians gracious because they assumed the Englishmen were gods, or at least higher beings of some sort.
⁶
The Englishmen, however, were fatally dependent on the generosity of the Indians, whose economy was based on sufficiency rather than surplus and trade. The English had come expecting to find treasure. They were ill-prepared to become farmers in a land that required hard work. The friendly Indians became less so; other, hostile tribes begrudged the arrival of the English interlopers; and inevitably there was fighting, which was bad for the Indians because if the English were poor farmers, they were far better soldiers. The disappointed colonists returned home to England.

Raleigh, however, was determined to make a go of it and recruit a sturdier group of settlers. He wanted to attract families, people who would stick it out and not give up in the absence of easy riches. He also took to smoking tobacco from an Indian pipe, demonstrating one of the comforts, and products, of a Virginia colonial life. The new settlement would be at Roanoke, the settlers of good birth, and two of the settlers were pregnant, one with a child who would be named Virginia Dare, the
first child of English blood to be born in the Americas. But Roanoke proved no permanent settlement, except in legend.

In the meantime, Raleigh continued to advance at court, becoming Captain of the Guard. He was one of the queen's most intimate friends—which of course made him many enemies. But to the queen he was an exciting conversationalist, a flattering and clever poet (his poems for the most part hold up rather well), and a dynamic man of action (which now included dabbling in espionage against Spain). She was pleased to make use of these capacities. She was also pleased to give him forty-two thousand acres in Munster, Ireland, to found an English colony there. The lands had been confiscated from the Earl of Desmond after his failed rebellion, and the goal was to establish a colony that would bring with it all the benefits of English civilization and guard the island from foreign invasion. As for the native Irish, they were regarded as the American settlers later regarded Indians—the farther away one was from them, the more sympathetic one might be to their plight; the closer one was, the more one took the view that pushing these poor, unproductive, and occasionally savage people out of the way was a simple act of advancing civilization. Though much of the time he managed his Irish estates from afar, Raleigh proved singularly adept at populating his colony with the families, farmers, skilled workers, and tradesmen, not to mention potatoes, the land needed to be profitable and self-sustaining. In Ireland, he struck up a friendship with Edmund Spenser, another expatriate and a fellow poet.

Raleigh's main home remained Durham House, and there he gathered men with active, educated, restless minds, pushing the boundaries of current knowledge, and worrying some with their philosophical speculations—because, having jettisoned Christian orthodoxy of more than a millennium, it was not so large a step to dispense with the new Protestant orthodoxy for free-thinking speculation. Liberals call this process “the
Enlightenment”; enemies of Raleigh called it atheism; and while it is clear that Raleigh travelled some distance in the direction of free-thinking, it is equally clear that he retained his Anglicanism. Anglicanism was a religion of patriotism, and patriot he surely was. Especially as his sovereign robbed one of her bishops (in the Tudor style) to give him a country estate at Sherborne.

And Raleigh did his duty. He supervised the execution of Jesuits (though he was no Jesuit-hunter), and his great privateer warship, the
Ark Raleigh
(given to the queen and rechristened the
Ark Royal
in 1587) led the English fleet against Spain's armada in 1588. Raleigh himself was obliged to organize the defenses of the West Country for an invasion that never took place.

What did take place was a marriage, in secret (most likely in 1592), between Raleigh and Bess Throckmorton, a maid of honor to the queen—a sacrament that, when discovered, had them struck off the roles of palace favorites and even landed Raleigh confinement in the Tower of London and Bess into a sort of house arrest. It was only after Elizabeth gouged the spoils from one of Raleigh's privateering ventures (and left him to take a loss on his investment), that she freed him (and later Bess). Though he had profited from royal favor, he chafed at its constraints. Marriage gave him some independence; so, ironically, did his fall into the queen's displeasure. Raleigh had often proposed overseas adventures that Elizabeth allowed—while keeping him in England. Now, with his mind fastened on the prospect of finding El Dorado, she was disposed to let him go.