Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (43 page)

As with Ralegh's poetic canon, the authenticity of some of his prose works from the Tower is doubtful. In particular, two of the best known, Maxims of State (1642) and The Cabinet Council (1658), were probably written by other hands. Both are compilations from books of advice by such writers as Guicciardini and Machiavelli. The most substantial of them, The Cabinet Council, was falsely ascribed to Ralegh by John Milton, but is in fact derived from a manuscript written by one 'TB'.
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Texts acquired prestige and perhaps selling-power by virtue of Ralegh's name and he himself occasionally confused matters by recycling works with different titles or dedicatees.
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With one important exception, the Instructions to his Son and to Posterity, Ralegh's tracts from the decade 1603 to 1612 deal with ship-building, naval affairs, sea-battles, royal marriages, diplomacy and foreign war. Except for the earliest of these, A Discourse touching a War with Spain and of Protecting the Netherlands, probably written in 1603, they were all either addressed to Prince Henry or written at the Prince's request. It does not follow from this that Sir Walter was a member of the Prince's inner circle, but it is more likely that he was himself seeking the patronage of the heir to the throne.
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A Discourse touching a War with Spain is, however, directly addressed to the new King, urging him in effect to pursue the policy of the 'war party' under Queen Elizabeth. Above all, Spain must be prevented from subduing the Netherlands. The King of Spain, Philip III, was poor now, but would never forget the humiliation he had suffered at the hands of the Dutch. The latter were strong at sea but weak on land, where they had to rely on allies or mercenaries. If King James did not provide help they would be forced to turn to the King of France, and such an alliance would be dangerous to England. However, while he was generally sympathetic to the Dutch cause, Sir Walter issued a word of caution. Dutch fleets were much more powerful than England's and lay across England's trade-route to the Baltic. Furthermore, the Dunkirk pirates, allied to the Dutch, had, according to Sir Walter, seriously damaged the merchants of the south-west counties.

Ralegh returned to the theme of relations with Spain in debates over proposed marriages for James's only surviving daughter, Elizabeth. Approaches had been made for a match with Elizabeth by the Elector Palatine and by the Duke of Savoy in 1611. The Prince of Wales was especially attached to his sister and was unhappy about the proposed Savoy marriage. Evidently he enlisted Ralegh's support to prevent it. While France and Spain had good reasons for alliances with Savoy, England had none, insisted Ralegh. Savoy was very unlikely to help England against Spain and the Princess was unlikely to gain either dignity or honour from the match. Furthermore, she and the house of Savoy were of different religions. Ralegh recommended a marriage with the Prince Palatine of the Rhine, who had succeeded to his title as a minor in 1610. This was the match eventually chosen, with disastrous results for Princess Elizabeth, who lived most of her married life in exile after she and her husband were driven from the Kingdom of Bohemia and from the Rhine Palatinate by Spanish troops.
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Ralegh's complementary discourse on the proposed marriage between Prince Henry and a daughter of the Duke of Savoy was written in the following year.
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The arguments, he writes, are all in the realm of public policy; and while there are some grounds for the match on the side of Savoy, there are none on the side of England. 'There is', he writes, 'a kind of noble and royal deceiving in marriages between kings and princes; yea, and it is of all others the fairest and most unsuspected trade of betraying.' He used the occasion of this proposed royal marriage to argue the case for a more aggressive policy towards Spain. Saying that he knew nothing against the Duke of Savoy, he insisted that 'it is the Spaniard that is to be feared; the Spaniard, who layeth his pretences and practices with a long hand'. Ralegh again argued in some detail that Savoy would never come to England's aid against either France or Spain, her only potential enemies. He launched into an attack on Spain, lamenting that Elizabeth had not listened to himself and his friends:
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[I]fthe late Queen would have believed her men of war, as she did her scribes, we had in our time beaten that great empire in pieces, and made their kings of figs and oranges, as in old times. But her Majesty did all by halves, and by petty invasions taught the Spaniard how to defend himself, and to see his own weakness; which, till our attempts taught him, was hardly known to himself. Four thousand men would have taken from him all the ports of the Indies; I mean all his ports, by which all his treasure doth or can pass.

The passage has often been quoted, but it is less often remembered that it was written for the heir to the throne and was widely circulated in manuscript. Asked whom the Prince should marry, Ralegh favoured a French match, but counselled delay for the time being. In the end the question answered itself, for the Prince of Wales died in November 1612, to the grief of the nation and especially to the enemies of Spain.
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Ralegh was determined that the Prince should be aware of the importance of the navy and of its current weakness. To that end he wrote three tracts, or parts of tracts, to instil in him an understanding of the subject. Henry's interest in the matter may have been first aroused when King James gave him an old warship, the Victory, in about 1607, ordering Phineas Pett, his principal shipwright, to rebuild her. The Prince wrote to Ralegh for advice, which he was of course delighted to give, producing a manuscript tract and a substantial letter. The tract, Observations concerning the Royal Navy, is wide-ranging in its approach.
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Ralegh urged on Prince Henry the need for naval reform. Some of his proposals are obvious: ships should be strongly built; should sail well in all weathers; and some at least should be harboured towards the west so that they can get out of port quickly on the approach of an enemy fleet. The essential reforms are two. First, the temptation to build huge ships with a great battery of cannon must be resisted. It is more important that they be manoeuvrable. Second, corruption must be rooted out. Only the sworn servants of the King should be appointed as captains. At present, he says, the navy is less well officered and manned than are merchant ships.

At the same time Ralegh wrote a long letter to the Prince, criticizing Pett's design for the new ship, which was to be known as the Priuuce Royal. Essentially, in Ralegh's view, Pett's proposed design was too long and too heavy: 600 tons could in effect carry as much ordnance as 1,200 because a smaller ship would be more manoeuvrable and could turn twice as fast as a larger. One hundred feet long and thirty-five broad would be a good proportion. Pett's vessel would be too high and therefore unsafe:'safety', wrote Ralegh,'is more to be respected then showes or niceness for ease'. The height might be possible for ordinary mariners, but 'menn of better sort, unused to such a life, cannot so well endure the rolling and tumbling from side to side'.
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He recalled the fate of the Mary Rose, which spectacularly sank in 1545 because the gun ports were too low in the water. Nevertheless, Sir Walter's cautions were ignored and the Prince Royal weighed in at 1,147 tons when completed. Within ten years it was declared unseaworthy; but that was due more to the unseasoned timber supplied by Pett than to his design.
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A Discourse of the Invention of Ships probably belongs to the same group of tracts as the Observations. After a brisk gallop through the story of ship design from the earliest times, including Noah's Ark, rafts and canoes, Ralegh reached the sixteenth century, describing in some detail improvements in the ships of his own day. He then turned, rather abruptly, to the weakness of the English navy under James I. Ralegh wrote that he could remember when one of the Queen's ships could have made forty Hollanders 'strike sail, and to come to anchor'.
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The Dutch freely 'acknowledged the English to be dontini niaris Britannici (lords of the English sea)'. Now things were different. Although the English did not have as many merchant ships of 500 tons as they had had in Elizabeth's day, 'yet are our merchants' ships now far more warlike and better appointed than they were, and the navy royal double as strong as then it was'. However, the Dutch too had grown in power. This could not be through having more ships and men. Rather it was the result of 'the detestable covetousness of such...persons as have gotten licenses, and given way to the transporting of the English ordnance'.
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The English have now 'forged hammers and delivered them out of our hands to break our own bones withal'. He had already proposed a ban on the export of ordnance in the Parliament of 1601 and he repeated it here.
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The most interesting of the naval tracts, Of the Art of Warre by Sea, was originally written, according to Ralegh himself,'for the Lord Henrie, Prince of Wales...but God hath spared me the labour of finishing it by his losse'.
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What survives is a small fragment of a much larger work, now lost. In a letter to Bess from the Tower on 4 October 1618, Ralegh asked her to search in his cedar chest for some 'paper books' and to send them to him. 'The title of one of them', he says,'is the Art of War by Sea'.
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Unless Sir Walter was being deliberately deceptive, this looks like the plan of a large work, containing at least fifteen chapters: for instance, 'Cap 11 That the Inglish, who might have mastred ye world by sea, have lost that advantage by the neglegence, ignorance, & covetousness of private persons. That the Inglish may in a short time recover this power.'At the end of a slightly longer passage he writes that

hee that commaunds the sea commaunds the trade, and hee that is lord of the Trade of the world is lord of the wealth of the worlde...and hee that bath the wealth bath the dominion. For Ambition is served by men, Men are bought, monies buyes them, money is gotten by trade.

The key to English success, he insists, is 'our forcible trade into the Levant [which] was the cause of our building or [our?] warlike shipps'. One longs for more, for we seem to have here the sketch of a theory of sea warfare.
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A Dialogue between a Jesuit and a Recusant, dated 1611-12, stands somewhat apart from Ralegh's other work. No manuscript copy exists and its first publication was in Laurence Echard's Abridgment of Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World.
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It is a strange, discursive work, containing echoes from some of Ralegh's other tracts, a long excursus on the kings of Poland, the commercial strength of the Dutch and the misdeeds of the popes. We cannot be wholly certain that the work is Ralegh's, but it deserves attention.
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'The attack on the Jesuits is fairly conventional, designed to separate loyal English Catholics from the treasonous designs of the Order and to encourage the King and Prince Henry in an aggressive policy towards Spain. However, the concluding pages of the tract are surprising. Commenting on the poverty of King James, Ralegh criticizes the English Parliament for its denial of his right to levy impositions (taxes on imports) on his subjects. 'Should we tie the king so precisely to the law as he may not lay an imposition upon things superfluous? Would the commonwealth be worse off without currants?'
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The author attributes the trouble to luxury and laxness of morals. In earlier days nobles and gentlemen would live in their counties and provide hospitality, but now 'my lady must live in London. Oh, the abominable pride and vanity of this age!' As so often, women were to blame! The corruption of the time and the temptations of London were familiar themes for the moralists of the Jacobean age, but it is surprising to find them in a tract about the villainy of Jesuits and popes. It is also strange to find Ralegh, if he is indeed the author, attacking the parliamentary critics of James's taxes.
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The most readable of the Tower Tracts was Ralegh's Instructions to his Son and to Posterity, probably written in about 1609 and first printed in 1632, with several subsequent editions over the years.
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This 'advice' was a popular genre at the time, gently lampooned in Polonius's famous speech to Laertes in Hamlet. Lord Burghley, Francis Osborne, Sir William Monson and Ralegh's companion in the Tower, the ninth Earl of Northumberland, all tried their hand at it. Indeed Burghley produced two sets of advice and Northumberland three. Burghley's instructions to his eldest son, Thomas, emphasize the importance of morning and evening prayers and of knowing the scriptures: Thomas should read the Psalter twelve times a year, the New Testament four times and the Old Testament once. Burghley is more relaxed and practical in giving advice to his other son, Robert, who possibly had less need of constant Bible-reading.
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Sir Walter's advice is also largely secular. Only the final section of ten mentions God: you should let God be the author of all your actions. The rest of the work is a Machiavellian prescription for getting on in the world, with little concern for education or morality. In choosing friends you should choose your betters or at least your equals rather than your inferiors, 'shunning always such as are poor and needy'; but equally you should not tie yourself to a great man who may attempt unlawful things. In choosing a wife, 'the only danger therein is beauty, by which many men have been betrayed'. Remember that while affections do not last, 'yet the bond of marriage endureth to the end of thy life; and therefore better to be borne withal in a mistress than in a wife'. If your affection changes for a mistress, you are free to choose again. Yet you should not marry a plain woman for she may produce uncomely children, 'and comeliness in children is riches'. Just as you should be careful in breeding horses and other beasts, so you should 'value the shape and comeliness' of your children. You should not be 'sour or stern' to your wife; but leave her no more than you have to after your death.
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The remaining sections are conventional, lacking Ralegh's usual sense of style. Do not listen to flatterers; keep out of private quarrels; do not talk too much; do not tell lies; and keep your anger under control. Above everything, you must look after your estate: know the value of your possessions, do not spend anything before you have got it (a touch of Polonius here), and never act as a surety for anyone.