Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (41 page)

The consequences were serious indeed. With the estate first in question, and then lost, creditors pressed urgently for their money while sources of new credit dried up.
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 Again, however, the process was not as brutal as it appears. After protracted negotiations, and with some assistance from Cecil, the Raleghs secured generous compensation: a lump sum of £8,000 and an annuity of £400, payable to trustees for the lives of Bess and youngWat, then an undergraduate at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. The three trustees were all men who had stood by the Raleghs in bad times as well as good: his old friendThomas Harriot, the lawyer John Shelbury and Ralegh's loyal lieutenant and companion Lawrence Keymis.
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 Ready money was always prized at Court, and Bess was very soon able to lend a substantial sum to the Countess of Bedford in return for an annuity. As for Sherborne, it changed hands again and again in these years, always just out of reach of the ever hopeful Raleghs. Intending it for his eldest son, the King purchased the estate from Carr in February 1610, and Carr then repurchased it after Prince Henry's untimely death in November 1612.

Occasionally, alteration was forced upon the routine of prison life. The Tower of London was a royal palace, and as such it was required during the ceremonial entry of the new King and Queen to London during March 1604, an event held over from the coronation festivities of the previous summer on account of the plague. Prisoners were moved out as the monarch and court moved in. For a couple of weeks Ralegh, Cobham and Grey were transferred across the city to the Fleet Prison.
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 Other changes had a more lasting impact. The appointment of a new Lieutenant was always a sensitive time for prisoners, and when the fussy, diligent former diplomat William Waad was sworn in during August 1605 several key prisoners kept their distance, not quite liking or trusting what they saw. In Waad's own version of events, Cobham was sullen, his mood swings verging on insanity. Ralegh, characteristically, at first expressed his dislike of the new man, then tried to be civil.
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 The discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 sparked fresh disruptions. Shocked by the scale of this treason, the Government explored some tenuous links between Ralegh and the most prominent plotters, Guy Fawkes and Robert Catesby. The most fruitful line of enquiry led from the unfortunate Northumberland, now also imprisoned in the Tower. Evidence provided under interrogation very soon demonstrated that the Earl's distant cousin and trusted estate officer Thomas Percy, a man whom Northumberland had appointed a Gentleman Pensioner, a member of the King's own bodyguard, had been closely involved in the plot for the past eighteen months. Percy had leased the vault under the House of Lords, where Guy Fawkes, posing as his servant, had lurked with dark lantern, watch and a slow fuse on the night of 4 November, awaiting his moment to detonate nearly a ton of gunpowder.

There were other grounds for suspicion as well. Northumberland had dined with Percy at Syon House on 4 November, and King James, not unnaturally, suspected that the Earl might have been warned to stay away from Parliament on the following day. If Northumberland was indeed complicit in treason, his old friendship with Ralegh took on new significance. Ralegh, it transpired, had recently been in contact with Captain Edmund Whitelock, one-time supporter of Essex, and subsequently a client of the Percy family.
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 Whitelock had also been present at the Syon dinner party.
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 The plotters had spoken of recruiting Tower prisoners to their cause, of mobilizing all the discontented people of England, regardless of religion. Had these contacts facilitated such a mobilization?
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Moreover, Ralegh had on occasion spoken to the wife of the recently departed French ambassador, Beaumont, another good friend of Northumberland who was independently suspected of some involvement in the Gunpowder treason.

All of these circumstances were put to Ralegh, who quickly dismissed them. He had, so he insisted, no 'other affaire with Captain Whitlock then familier and ordinarie discource'. From time to time he had indeed tested the old friendship with Northumberland through indirect channels - he was looking for allies wherever they might be found - but he had always received 'a drie and frindless awnswere'. As for the Ambassador's wife, he had merely spoken politely to her in the presence of another lady. Aware of his growing reputation as a chemist, she had, he recalled, asked for 'a little balsemum of Guiana', and 'Whitlock being then in her cumpany I sent it by hym to her'.
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 What could possibly be sinister in that?

In the tense aftermath of treason, however, no one was prepared to accept straightforward answers. Along with two surviving plotters, Fawkes and Thomas Winter, Northumberland faced further questioning on his connections with Ralegh, while Sir Walter was himself interviewed by the Council. Trying to offset the inevitable damage done by notoriety and rumour, Ralegh soon afterwards walked along the wall in his garden, so that the public could see him happy, and resolute. Waad regarded this as an attempt to suggest that the Lords had called Ralegh before them to clear him rather than to investigate his recent actions, even to give him permission for Wat to travel on the Continent, or to allow his doctors greater flexibility in their visits. A suspicious man, as Lieutenants of the Tower had to be, he duly tightened the restraints on his charge.
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 Bess for her part came under suspicion for some autumnal 'spring cleaning'. She had recently ordered the polishing of armour at Sherborne, an action which Ralegh, with absolute lack of gallantry, discounted as merely the folly of one whose imperfections he really ought to conceal!
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There was, of course, no good reason to interpret domestic economy as a preparation for treasonous military action. Some of this thin evidence, however, demonstrated the depth of loyalty to Ralegh in the south-west of England, while the trenchant comments on English justice overheard by John Wodenothe in the crowd that watched the Earl of Northumberland's trial in Star Chamber on 27 June 1606, proved that this personal sympathy extended to the heart of London as well.
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 As James and his ministers recognized through their determination to sift every shred of testimony, their prisoner and his ordeal at Winchester were far from forgotten. Nerves settled, and the Gunpowder investigations eventually subsided without incriminating Ralegh. Northumberland was less fortunate. He was convicted of several 'contempts', and was sentenced to imprisonment at the King's pleasure. Although no substantial charge was ever brought against him, the Earl remained a prisoner in the Tower until an amnesty on the King's fifty-fifth birthday, in 1621.
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Imprisonment under sentence of death for high treason did not necessarily hinder the pursuit of a Jacobean gentleman's favourite pastime - litigation. In February 1611 Ralegh, through his agents John Shelbury and Robert Smith, launched a suit against his erstwhile financier, William Sanderson.
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 This process has from the start an appearance of futility, profitable only for lawyers. Shelbury and Smith accused Sanderson of fraudulent accounting when handling sums raised for Ralegh's Guiana expedition, a charge that was almost impossible to prove. The long and complex series of events at the heart of the case already lay in the distant past, while the business methods of an experienced merchant financier were of course ingenious and obscure. Taking the case to court may have been one move in a bid to force a favourable final settlement from Sanderson, but the attempt, if such it was, backfired, and proceedings dragged on for at least two years, Sanderson growing convinced that a key document had been tampered with by Ralegh's men. Crushed by debts of his own, Sanderson was in no position to settle out of court, or indeed to back down. Necessity and common purpose brought together the most unlikely allies in an early modern courtroom. Those who supported Ralegh through their testimony included John Meere, here giving short shrift to Sanderson's principal argument for forgery.
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1611 was a particularly difficult year. That summer, Ralegh faced lengthy questioning by members of the Privy Council, among them his old nemesis Henry Howard, now Earl of Northampton. These new suspicions seem to have grown out of charges recently laid against the Earl of Northumberland by his former servant, Timothy Elks. Northumberland, so Elks insisted, had known rather more about the Gunpowder Plot than had hitherto been revealed, and - dragging in a name from the past - he had confided in the by now deceased Whitelock. These were dangerous days for Northumberland; the King had always suspected that he might have been directly involved in the treason, and it now seemed that those suspicions had been well.
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  This Whitelock connection explains, in part, the renewed attention paid to Ralegh, but there was another, equally significant reason. Once again demonstrating his ability to choose the wrong moment, Ralegh had recently begun to write discourses criticizing the marriages with the house of Savoy proposed for Prince Henry and his sister by the Council in the spring of 1611. The initial manuscript had been widely circulated, and his strong opposition to this Catholic double wedding had made quite an impact.
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 Those who favoured the alliance, including the King, Cecil and Henry Howard, were less than pleased. Hostility runs through these summer investigations, in contrast to relatively gentlemanly proceedings during the far more significant events of 1603 and 1605. Following the examination of Northumberland, Howard told Robert Carr that the counsellors had had 'a bout with Sir Walter Ralegh', and that they had found him 'as bold, proud and passionate as ever. The lawless liberty of the Tower, so long cockered and fostered with hopes exorbitant, [had] bred suitable desires and affections. And yet', Howard concluded, 'your lordship may assure His Majesty that by this publication he hath won little ground.'
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These developments baffled ordinary Londoners. John More toldWilliam Trumbull that, in the common opinion of the street, Ralegh had been placed under close arrest for his 'unseasonable and untrue brags that the Lord Cobham doth now repent him of his accusation'.
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 The old 'injustice' of the Winchester courtroom was still a topic of conversation in educated circles, a matter which required no elaboration. As usual, Ralegh faced up to hostility rather well. It was the tedium of endless captivity that really tested his morale. Now he fought back energetically, deploring the injustices of circumstance that left him, 'after eyght yeers imprissonment...as straygtly lockt up as I was the first day'. Corresponding with Queen Anne, he declared that, given a choice, he would prefer to 'dye, once for all, and therby to give end to the miseries of this life, than to strive against the ordinance of God, who is a trew judge of my innocencie towards the King'.
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 By then, he knew his friends. The Queen had all along shown sympathy to the Tower prisoners. Some suggest that this was one of the few means she had of hurting an inconsiderate and neglectful husband, but it is possible that expectations were being carefully managed; James derived no benefit from denying his prominent prisoners all hope of mercy. Anne pleaded for Ralegh's release, and rather ostentatiously dined at Syon House in June 1607. But in the short term these gestures were to no avail.
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The frustrations of imprisonment weighed particularly heavily when the teenagerWat, on leaving Oxford, set out on a tour of the Continent in 1612, accompanied by the poet and playwright Ben Jonson. Jonson's own memories provide us with vignettes of a lively, rather disturbing progress through northern Europe. Parisians were alienated by eccentric references to the crucifixion -War took an inebriated jonson round the streets, spread-eagled on a cart - while Ralegh's money was squandered without thought. The unlikely travelling companions returned to England just over a year later, thoughWat promptly headed back to the Continent to fight a duel. While Bess, according to Jonson, took the reports of wild behaviour in her stride, seeing the father in the son and recalling Ralegh's energy and outspokenness as a young man, Sir Walter, the wisdom of age now upon him, was infuriated by Wat's crude gestures. Anna Beer justifiably suggests that these differing reactions highlight the close relationship that had developed between mother and son, but there is, if we can trust Jonson's tale, also a reliable and rather obvious clue here to the nature of relations between Ralegh and Wat.
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 It may be that the father knew his boy rather too well, and that he was alarmed by this knowledge.

Some of the older man's concern was justified. Wat was quick-tempered, actually a very violent youth, a lusty fighter, never put out of countenance or baffled, as Aubrey elegantly gives it. Even by the standards of Jacobean England, his sense of humour was heavy, and crude. At Oxford, during Coursing, or the highly competitive process of disputing theses in the Schools of the University which often led to tensions and fights among the Colleges, he 'putt a turd in the box, and besmeared it about his antagonist's face'.
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 Amid preparations for the Guiana expedition of 1617, father and son were invited to a grand dinner, and Ralegh, sensing trouble, prudently extracted a promise to behave. When Wat forgot himself and made an inappropriate remark at table, Sir Walter gave him 'a damned blow over the face'. Wat did not presume to hit back. Instead, he turned in his chair, struck 'over the face the Gentleman that sate next to him, and sayed "Box about: 'twill come to my Father anon"'. The witticism, such as it was, lived on: Aubrey reflected that 'Box about' had become a 'common-used Proverb'.
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 A good deal of this is predictable. Ralegh's anger, at the dinner table and on hearing of Wit's escapades overseas, amounted to a recognition that he was himself now so far away, in space and time, from the delights of an active life that confronted his son.

The reflection preyed on his mind. He fretted that he might be forgotten, and become irrelevant in a world that had moved on. When the spectacular scandal surrounding the mysterious death of Sir Thomas Overbury broke in 1615, Ralegh's name was at no point brought into play.
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 New prisoners arrived in the Tower, and departed, but for Ralegh, as for Grey, Cobham and Northumberland, there seemed no way out of gaol, no way back to freedom, and a life lived close to the centre of affairs. If anything, the prospects of release appeared to recede as the years passed, and, significantly perhaps, after the deaths of Robert Cecil in 1612 and Henry Howard-'his majestie's erwigg/With a Papistical bald crowne, and a Protestant perewigg', as one hostile epitaph had it - in 1614.
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