Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (7 page)

In public life, the roots of advancement are frequently elusive. Attempts to chart or measure the establishment of an Elizabethan favourite all too often end in frustration in a fruitless quest to identify a series of personal decisions taken by an inscrutable monarch. It is, however, evident that a favourite's progress can assume a momentum of its own, once the fact of favour becomes apparent to others at Court. It is also clear that favour often follows a process of very careful political calculation. That was certainly the case with Ralegh. Access led to familiarity, familiarity led to an objective assessment of ability, and this assessment weighed the man's capacity to undertake particular political or ceremonial tasks. Returning to Court in December 1581, carrying despatches from Grey, Ralegh was again the bearer of news, again a source of information for Queen, Council and the wider Court alike.
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 News gave him his entrée, and now he was clearly speaking to and impressing influential people, closeted with the powerful figures around Elizabeth.

How did he impress? Here the prevailing murk and the want of reliable contemporary analysis is such that Ralegh's biographers turn out of necessity to the elegant simplifications of later generations. As so many romantic novelists and popular historians insist, a measure of physical attraction may well have helped his cause.'
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 John Aubrey reminds us that the Queen loved to have 'proper men' about her at Court, and Ralegh was as proper as they came.'
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 He was tall - at six feet rather taller than most of his contemporaries - dark-haired in youth, with somewhat pale and refined features: a high forehead and a long face. His beard 'turnd up naturally', always an advantage.
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 Robert Naunton's pen-picture is particularly convincing:

[Ralegh] had in the outward man, a good presence, in a handsome and well compacted person, a strong naturall wit, and a better judgement, with a bold, and plausible tongue, whereby he could set out his parts to the best advantage, and to these he had the adjuncts of some generall learning, which by diligence he enforced to a great augmentation, and perfection.
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His physical presence is indeed well documented, and it stands out in the lovely miniatures that survive from the mid- and late 1580s. But so too are Ralegh's diligence, his aptitude for repartee and his passion to read and to learn. For all that we can tell, it was this magical brew that caught Elizabeth's attention, and made her turn to Ralegh, time and again, for a comment, an aside or a thoughtful critique. Naunton, a contemporary trying like so many others to account for the fact that 'he had gotten the Queen's ear at a trice', suggested that Elizabeth took 'no slight mark of the man, and his parts', that she held Ralegh 'for a kinde of oracle, which nettled them all'.
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 Every legend that surrounds his rise to favour places him in attendance on the Queen, close enough to talk to her, to play the faithful servant. He had already achieved the goal of any would-be courtier: an intimacy that had nothing to do with frolics in the bedchamber, and everything to do with personal confidence and public display.

What legends they are! The well-worn tale of how Ralegh once spread his cloak over a 'plashy place', traditionally at Greenwich, so allowing the Queen to walk across, rests only on gossip recorded by Thomas Fuller, who was born at least twenty years after the event he describes. As Steven May points out, the story does not accord with the ways in which a Queen went about her business. With the threat of assassination so potent in the 1580s, royal walkabouts in the uncontrolled press of a crowd were deemed too risky.
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Nevertheless, here is history as it should have been, an imaginative illustration of a known truth. In the tale, the Queen rewards Ralegh with 'many suits' in recompense for the one that he has cast down; adventure brings reward.
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 Fuller is also responsible for another familiar story, in which Ralegh and his Queen compose couplets on a window pane. 'Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall', he is said to have begun, only for Elizabeth to respond with her usual, brisk challenge to a courtier's masculinity: 'If thy heart fails thee, climb not at all'.
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 Later versions of the story have the lines inscribed with the point of a diamond. That is quite a lot of scratching, and composition must have taxed the patience of both parties, but the story predates Fuller's popular book, and seems to tap into a tradition that Ralegh, in the earliest days of his favour, might have been rather cautious, and even diffident.
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'At a trice' overstates the case. Ralegh had of course figured on the periphery of the Court for several years; he was no youngster when he caught Elizabeth's eye. When his opportunity came, that experience in the shadows may have proved an advantage. Even though the Queen's great favourite Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, was out of favour, following his marriage to the widowed Countess of Essex and the birth of his short-lived son and heir Lord Denbigh in 1580, competition was still very strong, and the fixed hierarchies within a Tudor Court always operated as a steadying factor. Sir Christopher Hatton, who had himself made a career and a fortune in the Queen's service, was clearly envious, though how far his petulant displays of pique at Ralegh's advancement represented the formalized discontent of an older favourite, rather than true jealousy, it is now very hard to tell. Neither Hatton nor the Earl of Oxford could have missed the significance of the selection when Ralegh, acting as Lord Burghley's intermediary, sought the Queen's forgiveness for Oxford's latest indiscretion. Burghley's choice would have wounded the aristocratic Oxford - would any nobleman have relished being beholden to an upstart like Ralegh? - and perhaps it was meant to wound.
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Recognition of this kind, from the pre-eminent Elizabethan statesman, demonstrated Ralegh's new importance. During May 1583 Maurice Browne, agent in London for the Thynne family, noted Ralegh's prominence, and his consequent high spending. He was already a model of how to get on at Court. Since Thynne was involved in disputes with Ralegh's brother Carew, Browne fretted about the powerful figures ranged against his friend and suggested that Thynne should play the Ralegh and strive to enhance his own image when coming to Court. Perhaps he might think about buying some smart new clothes!
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 Sir Edward Hoby, marooned in Berwick, far from Court, was clearly alarmed by talk that Ralegh was actively taking Sir Humphrey Gilbert's side in an ongoing dispute.
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 Thomas Morgan, then in the pay of Mary Queen of Scots, also recognized a rising star when he saw one: Ralegh was, he wrote,'the Quene's dere miniont, who daylye groweth in creditt'. This might, he suggested, work to Mary's advantage, for it seemed possible that Ralegh's secretary, William Langharne, would prove a good, loyal, malleable Catholic.
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 Unfortunately for Morgan, and for Mary, Langharne's attachment to Catholicism proved ambivalent. Right from the start, it seems, religious ambiguity settled over Ralegh and his immediate circle.

Courtly gestures and political lovemaking should never obscure the political realities on which favour was grounded. Everything was built on labour and a measure of diligence, and Ralegh, like any successful courtier, was always capable of hard work. Setting aside private reservations, he could also, when necessary, project an utter confidence in his own ability. Sometimes, that self-belief was interpreted as egotism and an excess of hubris. With Ralegh's appointment as Lord Warden of the Stannaries and High Steward of the Duchy of Cornwall in the summer of 1585, Sir Anthony Bagot wrote a bitter letter to Burghley, denouncing the choice, and lamenting Ralegh's 'intolerable' pride, 'as the world knows'. A show of pride would never make such a courtier popular. 'No man is more hated than him', Bagot insisted, and 'none cursed more daily by the poor.'
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 Without doubt Ralegh was 'damnably proud', just as Aubrey says. Here is a charge encountered over and over again, through the next two decades.

A favourite of the Queen does of course have reason to be proud - the fault, if such it is, can perhaps be excused. And if he was cursed by some, he was also admired by others, especially by a number of ladies at Court. Apocryphal as it is, Aubrey's raw tale of how Ralegh pleasured a scarcely reluctant maid of honour, pinning her against the trunk of a convenient tree, gives a flavour of the man's power, and, perhaps, his weakness. The girl's token resistance is soon overcome. 'Oh Sir Walter, will you undo me?' swiftly gives way to 'Nay, sweet Sir Walter', and finally to a rhythmic, breathless, 'Swisser Swatter', as his attentions proceed.
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 Ralegh's posthumous reputation as a womanizer, however, is scarcely supported by the evidence. Aubrey goes out of the way to add that this was 'his first Lady', and while he seldom fails to make women swoon in the movies, no one in his lifetime depicts Ralegh as a serial seducer.'
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 Cool appraisal rather than hot ardour characterizes several tales told about him.
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 The poem 'Lady, farewell, whom I in silence serve', according to one manuscript heading, is said to have been surreptitiously 'put into my La[dy] Laitons Pocket' by Ralegh, a gesture which seems to chime with a tradition that Ralegh was actually somewhat hesitant in his pursuit of the women about the Queen.

But as to Love unknowne I have decreed,

So spare to speake doth often spare to speed.
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His name is also linked, tenuously, to another lady of the bedchamber, Anne Vavasour, but Anne was pursued, sometimes fruitlessly, by many gentlemen at Court.
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 Otherwise, Ralegh the ladies' man is fashioned by later writers bent on adding superfluous colour to the historical record, and by the occasional verse attribution of seventeenth-century compilers. Even in this after-age, however, many writers and collectors emphasize diffidence as well as predatory lust.
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Of course, such affairs as there were had to be kept decently hidden, given the source of Ralegh's good fortune. The Queen always came first. Corresponding with his half-brother in March 1583, Ralegh sent Humphrey Gilbert, then about to set off on his ambitious final voyage to America, 'a token from Her Majesty, an ancor guyded by a Lady...farther she cummandeth that yow leve your picture with mee'.
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 Here again is a proof of success, a demonstration, this time in writing, of a treasured intimacy. There were many other demonstrations, in many other forms. On 27 December 1584 the Pomeranian traveller Leopold von Wedel, detailing a visit to the English court, catches just a measure of this theatre. Chatting with, or rather to, her courtiers, the Queen pointed 'with her finger at [Ralegh's] face, that there was a smut on it, and was going to wipe it off with her handkerchief; but before she could he wiped it off himself'. Like every other bystander, von Wedel got the message. Here, he reflected, was a man who two years before could scarcely afford to keep a servant. Now, through the sole favour of the Queen, 'he can keep five hundred'.
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 Dependency, and the rewards that it might bring, were obvious to any educated observer. The complexities run deeper, however; is an element of symbiosis present too? As A. L. Rowse points out there was something about Ralegh's personality, 'daunting...fascinating but contingently antipathetic', that fashioned a very specific and rather idiosyncratic relationship between subject and monarch. There was more of an age gap than with earlier favourites, Leicester and Hatton, and there was no settled pet nickname for Ralegh, a reliable token of regal trust.
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 Elizabeth had marked the man down for advancement because it had pleased her to do so, and because she had seen certain political advantages in the arrangement. How far the personal then drew these decisions further is anybody's guess. Events would prove that she could do without him.

Tangible benefits soon began to accrue. The rewards that fall to a favourite evade precise measurement. We do not always pick up on the little gifts and benefits, except sometimes in stories focusing on the envy of others. The Welsh soldier and author Sir Roger Williams, whose family background was not so very different, ground his teeth at a rival's success. When Ralegh was presented with a gold chain in 1589, Williams asserted that he himself had done just as much for the state as this parasitic favourite. But men like Williams were never slow in advertising their own merits. The next year he told Lord Burghley, very bluntly: 'I am one that deserves better reward.'
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