Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (14 page)

In 1592 Ralegh invested in one of the largest and most successful expeditions of the reign. Sixteen ships were involved, two of them belonging to the Queen. Ralegh fitted out the Roebuck, his brother Carew the Galliantt Rawliglie, and John Watts the Alcedo and the Margaret and Jolin. There were ten others. Ralegh was in charge of the preparations and was nominated as overall commander, with Sir John Burgh his second-in-command. The fleet sailed with Sir Walter in command on 6 May, but the following day Martin Frobisher caught up with them carrying an order from the Queen that Ralegh must return home. Reluctantly he complied, and was back in England ten days later. Ralegh's lines in his great 'The Ocean to Cynthia' may refer to this recall:

Without Ralegh, the expedition sailed on with Frobisher in command. Three Spanish ships were captured: the Santa Clara of Biscay and two East Indiamen, the Santa Cruz and the Madre de Dios, the most valuable prize of the whole reign. The profit of this huge cargo turned out to be slender for the investors, particularly for Sir Walter.
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 In 1593 Ralegh sent his own ship, the Roebuck, in a squadron under Sir John Burgh to capture or destroy the Spanish settlement on the island of La Margarita, off the northern coast of South America. The attempt was beaten back. In 1594 Jacob Whiddon was sent to reconnoitre Trinidad. By then Ralegh's attention was turning to Guiana.
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Although Ralegh's colonies on Roanoke failed, there were some visible legacies as well as some lessons learned. Ralegh has been credited with bringing potatoes and tobacco across the Atlantic. Potatoes, which were originally grown in Peru, had arrived in Seville at least as early as 1570. From there they had spread to other parts of Europe, very probably to England, before the time of the Roanoke voyages. Gerard, in his Herball of 1597, introduced some confusion into the story of the potato by claiming that he had 'received roots hereof from Virginia'. In fact these were plants known to the Indians of that region as openauk, which are not potatoes. However, although Ralegh almost certainly did not bring potatoes into England, he may possibly have introduced them into Ireland. The evidence for this is very late and for that reason not very reliable. Sir Richard Southwell of Kinsale claimed in the Proceedings of the Royal Society for 1693 that his grandfather had brought into Ireland potatoes that he had been given by Ralegh, and an article of 1699 by one John Houghton reaffirmed the claim, but without any further evidence being given. There is a well-known story that Ralegh's gardener in Youghal had picked the berries of a potato plant and cooked them with unhappy results. The same story is also told about Sir Francis Drake and is just one of the many myths that accumulated about the two men.
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It is no more likely that Ralegh brought tobacco into England before anyone else. Tobacco had been imported into Europe from America by Andre Thevet in the middle of the sixteenth century and is known to have been growing in England as early as 1571. However, when John Aubrey claimed that Ralegh was 'the first that brought tobacco into England and into fashion', he was wrong on the first point but probably right on the second. At first tobacco was used for medicinal rather than social purposes. In The Faerie Queene (1590) Spenser has the female warrior Belphoebe, who stood for Elizabeth, searching the woods for 'divine tobacco' to heal her page Timias, who is generally thought to have represented Ralegh. So a connection between Ralegh and tobacco was made early on, and he probably was one of the men responsible for popularizing the smoking of tobacco at the royal Court. Not surprisingly, various stories circulated about Ralegh and tobacco. One has a servant seeing him smoking and pouring a bucket of water over him, an anecdote also told of the actor Tarleton. Another relates the tale of a wager between the Queen and Sir Walter about the weight of the smoke given out by a pound of tobacco. Ralegh argued that this could be found by weighing first the tobacco and then the resulting ash. The difference would represent the weight of the smoke. A third story, which he strongly denied, has him smoking at the execution of the Earl of Essex, but he did 'take tobacco' on the morning of his own death.
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As a colony of settlement with commercial backing, the proposed settlement of 1587 was founded on more realistic lines than its predecessor. Yet there were fatal weaknesses. The colony was small, geographical knowledge was weak, the choice of sites was poor and the transatlantic lifeline was hazardous and unreliable. Roanoke's financial resources were slender and in consequence it depended heavily upon the profits of privateering, which distracted attention from the colonists themselves. Piracy was an essential source of finance but a dangerous rival for attention.
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 For a colony to survive it must quickly become self-supporting and be no longer dependent on the native inhabitants for food. That seems to have been apparent to Harriot and White, but not to other settlers: they had to work the land and in the early days of the Jamestown colony that notion was unwelcome. Encroachments on Indian food-supplies caused friction and the colonists were often brought near to starvation. By launching the colonial ideal Ralegh pointed the way to a British empire; and he brought together an enterprising and imaginative group of men to carry out his plans. He has been honoured (and later vilified) for that, but the project that ultimately succeeded was very different from the one he had first envisaged. Lessons could be and to some extent were drawn from the Roanoke experience, but they had often to be learned again in Jamestown.
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By the late 1580s, the generations were changing; Elizabeth was outliving her contemporaries. Leicester and his brother the Earl of Warwick, Walter Mildmay, Walsingham and Hatton all died between 1588 and 1591. In the tight little circle of trusted advisors at Court, the loss of so many counsellors inevitably had a destabilizing effect, on the governance of England, and, at first sight, on the Queen herself. Some thereafter choose to see Elizabeth as an increasingly marginalized figure, her grip on political events slowly loosening, her control over her Privy Council gradually weakening. John Guy invites us to interpret the 1590s as a 'second reign of Queen Elizabeth', a monarchy of shadows, beset by advancing mortality, by endless war, by incompetent leadership, by an increasing authoritarianism and by bitter, unchecked, factional rivalry, all the glory long departed.
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 The Queen struggles to cope with the generation gap. Her treatment of favourites and counsellors as intemperate boys verges on the eccentric. Some, such as the intelligent younger son of Lord Burghley, Robert Cecil, appointed a Counsellor at the age of twenty-eight in 1591 and Secretary in 1596, bide their time against the succession of a new monarch. From the older generation, only Burghley survives, and after 1591, though increasingly debilitated by illness, he dominates the Council. Unique in the history of western European monarchies, Burghley's long pre-eminence grows stronger still in this last decade, for the Queen's trust never falters.
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These are complex times, however, and the concept of a 'second reign', while interesting and helpful, does not of itself show England as it really was. As Natalie Mears points out, the differences can be exaggerated; governance and political culture continue to operate along familiar lines.
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 The sudden mortality around the Council table in the 1580s obscures the continuity in royal service elsewhere. At Court, and also out in the Elizabethan countryside, new names replace the old, brought forward by Elizabeth's favour and in some cases trading on that same extended cousinship that advanced Leicester and Essex. The Earl of Worcester is one such: capable, a fine horseman, wealthy and modest. John Fortescue, Thomas Egerton,William Brooke Lord Cobham and many other experienced, capable Crown servants from the 'second reign' demonstrate that Elizabeth could still favour good men as well as bad.

Throughout the later 1580s, Ralegh retained the confidence of the Queen, and so had the measure of her new favourite, Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex. Born in 1565, Essex was eleven years Ralegh's Junior. He was something of an enigma to contemporaries, and he remains misunderstood today. The popular view that Essex was a 'great resenter', who never understood or forgave dissimulation, has been qualified by Paul Hammer in his definitive study of the Earl's political career.
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 Naunton again came as close with the brief pen portrait as anyone ever has, picturing a young Essex full of 'a kinde of urbanity, or innate curtesie, which both wonne the Queen, and too much took upon the people.
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 He nurtured enmities, but these were often born of disillusion, and a sense of injury that sometimes takes hold of the honourable man.

The old favourite and the new never quite knew what to make of each other. There were periods of apparently quite genuine and spontaneous camaraderie, and periods of hostile disengagement, prompted by now forgotten quarrels. In 1587 the two men were 'made Frendes'.
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 In December 1588, Essex challenged Ralegh to a duel. During the summer of 1589, Essex's followers insisted that their lord had 'chassed Mr Rauly from the coart and [had] confined him in to Irland'.
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 There Ralegh wrote his commendatory sonnets to The Faerie Queene, so full of self-pity and the despair provoked by displacement. He seems to have been in low spirits that year, as he reached the mid-point of his 'three score and ten'. One of these poems, 'Me thought I saw the grave, where Laura lay', foreshadows the later Ralegh canon in its open acknowledgement of mortality and impermanence, for man, for England, for the history of the world.
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 Life at Court was becoming less straightforward, even though the scuttle and bustle of political manoeuvring is in large measure hidden from the historian dependent upon written records. It may have been at this time that Spenser wrote of Ralegh's disenchantment in 'Colin Clouts Come Home Againe'; but there is no very specific evidence of the Queen's antagonism before the disaster of 1592:

Contemporaries frequently portrayed the relationship as a see-saw, the balance, rather simplistically, tilting from Ralegh to Essex, then back once more. Sir Charles Cavendish, present at a dinner given by Lord Burghley for Arbella Stuart, cousin of James VI and, potentially, his rival for the English throne, suggested gleefully that, thanks to Essex's rise, Ralegh was 'in wonderful declination'. It was, thought Cavendish, very unlikely that he would ever rise again, even though he was 'courteously used' by Burghley, and even though he was behaving in a startlingly modest way, quite out of step with his former pride.
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 In a letter keeping his correspondent up to date with Christmastide developments in London, the Earl of Derby told the Earl of Shrewsbury late in 1589 that Ralegh, who had been away from Court, had returned to the capital but was not straying far from Durham House. In his absence, Essex had been held in high favour. Or so it seemed - Derby and Shrewsbury were not always the most astute observers.
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 All this, though, is to miss the complexity of a close association between men who were frequently of one mind. There were times when Ralegh and Essex worked harmoniously together. Both, for example, showed some sympathy for the more extreme protestant separatists and 'hotter' puritans, taking the side of John Udall, the religious controversialist, who was sentenced to death under the statute of 1571 for writing 'a wicked, scandalous libel' called the Demonstration of Disciplitie. They may have had their different reasons for this joint effort - Ralegh for his part seems to have disliked extreme punishments in cases of conscience - but the cooperation was witnessed by Thomas Phelippes, a shady character drawn from the underworld of Elizabethan espionage, who sensed that Essex was somehow compelling Ralegh to help him represent the views of puritans to the Queen. Before Elizabeth could make up her mind to pardon him, the unfortunate Udall died in gaol.
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