Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (31 page)

While Ralegh was on his travels, relations between Elizabeth and the Earl of Essex reached a crisis. Paranoid, financially ruined and politically desperate, Essex brought two hundred diehard supporters into the streets of London on 8 February 1601, declaring his intention to rescue the Queen from those 'evil counsellors' who surrounded her. On that momentous morning, Ralegh was again in London. In a prelude to the main drama he met his rebel kinsman Sir Ferdinando Gorges on boats in the middle of the Thanes, counselling common sense, discretion and reliance on the Queen's clemency. But discretion and good sense were in short supply that day. Gorges refused, honouring his commitment to Essex and warning Ralegh of bloody times ahead. While they talked, Essex's stepfather and loyal ally, Sir Christopher Blount, spotted his chance, took up a gun and fired four times at Ralegh from Essex House, but the optimistic shots missed their target and Gorges, whose game that day was more complicated than at first appears, shoved the boats apart, telling Ralegh to go to his own work. Recognizing the futility of negotiation Ralegh did just that, hurrying to Court, and mobilizing the guard.

Essex's rebellion was soon over. The Earl had fatally exaggerated his support in the capital, and lacked the firepower to sweep aside resistance at Court. Backed by the Earls of Southampton, Bedford and Rutland, alongside other peers and well-born gentlemen, he rode into the city, calling out that England had been sold to the Infanta Isabella, and that Cecil, Ralegh and Cobham all sought his murder. Then, finding that no one was prepared to do more than listen, his nerve broke. With his shrinking retinue he fought and lost a skirmish at Ludgate, and fled back to Essex House by boat. After a day of 'hurrle burlye', of confusion and futility, Essex and Southampton came out of their last stronghold, 'upon their knees', giving up 'their swordes into the Lord Admirals hands'.
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For all the toing and froing casualties had been extraordinarily light, with just one man dead. Elizabeth faced the world, mocking this 'rebellion of a single day', but she knew that she had been lucky. Any rebellion in London, close to the Court and to the Queen, was both dangerous and disturbing. Essex's bad faith, and his unstated intention to reduce her to at best a puppet ruler, shocked her deeply. The degree of personal loyalty to Essex, so evident among too many members of well-connected families that February morning, had highlighted a dangerous strain of personal disloyalty towards the Queen. Nevertheless, Elizabeth survived, and the political nation rallied to condemn a defeated traitor. His erstwhile friends and enemies united to put the Earl on trial, give evidence against him, and find him guilty of treason. Northumberland, Essex's brother-in-law, was summoned back from congenial camp life in the Low Countries, but despite the despatch of a special messenger from the Privy Council on 10 February 'with letters from the Lordes and from...Sir Robat Cecill for his comynge hether', he tactfully contrived to miss the hastily convened trial.
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 When he did return, he was soon in contact with Ralegh, rewarding the latter's coachman on 28 February.
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The sharp contrasts so evident throughout Ralegh's political career are highlighted in his performances at two state trials, not three years apart. He gave evidence when Essex was arraigned with the Earl of Southampton in Westminster Hall on 19 February. Here, Ralegh was regarded as the successful rival, parading in fine livery as captain of the Queen's Bodyguard, a hostile witness against the stricken earl. Essex played upon this perceived prejudice, mocking Ralegh, insisting that he be sworn on the Bible, and then observing that, oath or no oath, Ralegh's word could not be trusted. 'What booteth it', he asked,'to swear the fox?'The evidence that Ralegh actually gave, limited though it was to factual matters of time and place, was ignored by onlookers intent upon spectacle. Publicly, Ralegh could only shrug off Essex's insult, but when he in turn stood trial for treason in 1603, and even at his death in 1618, there is reason to think that the Earl's scorn still rankled.

When Essex was brought to the executioner's block on Tower Green, six days after his trial, rumour again insisted that Ralegh gloated over his rival's fate. The gossip was in point of fact unfair. Obliged to attend the execution as Captain of the Guard, Ralegh withdrew to the armoury precisely to avoid such a charge. However, the privacy and mystery of an execution within the Tower, rather than on the open slope of Tower Hill, encouraged all sorts of tales. These rumours also ignore Essex's scaffold confession. He knew, he said, that both Ralegh and Cobham were loyal servants of the Queen. Such sentiments in 'last dying' speeches were in part common form, and Essex was set on dying a model, Christian death, but there were ways of saying these things even then, and no one has ever questioned Essex's sincerity at the final crisis. However, the pious death was witnessed only by a small group of privileged onlookers, while the trial had been a public event, and a talking point for thousands. The image that lingered in the minds of Londoners was that of Essex at the head of his men in Gracechurch Street, announcing with a 'gast' countenance and 'like a man forlorn' that England was sold to the Spaniard, telling the citizens that they should not be 'cosined so or conicatched so', and singling out Ralegh for particular opprobrium.
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 In his paranoia, Essex seems really to have believed that Ralegh had planned to murder him in his bed, or, aided by Cecil and Cobham, to snare him in treason, suborning priests and servants to 'entrap' him. He had said as much to followers, and an honest opinion, honestly expressed, has a power which runs apart from any truth.
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 Well into the autumn, 'false rumors and misreports' circulated in various parts of the country, linking Cecil, Ralegh and Cobham in vague and outrageous ways, hard to contradict.
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 There was, for the moment, no means of restoring a reputation hopelessly tarnished:

Ralegh was by no means the only target of Thomas Rogers' popular rhyme, but the portrait of an archetypal covetous upstart courtier inspired imitation, and several further contributions to the 'process of social shaming' that underpinned libelling.
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 Careers spent in profitable sycophancy offered easy targets. Pierre Lefranc identifies more than a dozen spirited attacks on Ralegh dating from the five years that lie between Essex's disgraceful behaviour at the Privy Council Table and Sir Walter's trial at Winchester. All dwell on personal vice, on a capacity for cunning intrigue and on atheism.
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 If we can trust the common twentieth-century association of Ralegh with 'Paulus' - and it must be admitted that the identification is not entirely compelling - John Harington's epigrams attack him time after time as avaricious, proud, insensitive, heretical and untrustworthy.
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 Some of the libels openly accuse Ralegh of betraying Essex: Rogers, for example, portrays a man too clever for his own good, now rejected on account of that treachery:

Courtiers who had tried and failed to accommodate Essex's neuroses shrugged their shoulders in despair or frustration. In April 1601, Northumberland was told by Dudley Carleton of widespread sympathy across the Low Countries for the late Earl and his family. In his reply Northumberland acknowledged the difficulty of arguing against prevailing 'truth'. As for'oppinions of my Lord of Essex marterdom,' he wrote, 'they will know it better one day, or if they will not then must wee of this state give them leave to thinke as they list.'
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Others, though, were rather more active in promoting their views. At home and abroad, hostility towards Ralegh was nurtured by Essex's loyal companions, who had gone out in rebellion with him in February 1601 and who now shared his disgrace. Sir Josceline Percy, Northumberland's younger brother, had been knighted by Essex in Ireland during 1599, and he was not the man to desert a patron, even in extremis. In later years Ben Jonson,William Drummond and others chuckled at his raw, sardonic jests. With his brother Charles, Percy was imprisoned in the Fleet gaol during the spring of 1601, awaiting trial for treason. There he drew up a facetious will, bestowing parts of his body on those he felt might best appreciate the generosity. A couple of these mock-solemn 'bequests' are sufficient to demonstrate the anger that lay behind the humour:

Item, I give my members to my Lord Cobham, for he hathe a faire Ladie, and doth her no good with his, and mine being well used will do her some pleasure.

Item I doe give my buttocks to Sir Walter Ralegh and the pox goe with them.
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Some of Percy's scorn was justified. Although innocent of any open triumphalism, Ralegh certainly sought advantage from Essex's fall. He profited from the disgrace of the Earl's follower, the volatile Sir Edmund Baynham, who had been sentenced to death for treason in February, only to be pardoned that August. Ralegh set about his profiteering in an open, typically unencumbered fashion, asking the Attorney General Sir Edward Coke for a letter in support of his ambitions. Coke, busy, bombastic and irrepressible, was a valuable ally when cutting a straight path through the convolutions of the law In the end, Baynham's forfeited lands were sold off by two amenable lawyers, one of them his own brother-in-law, the other Ralegh's steward. The terms of the sale allowed Baynham to retain effective possession, in the form of long leases. Ralegh gained some return, but the details are not now known. Proceedings of this sort were by no means uncommon following convictions for treason; less than three years later Ralegh himself would look for a similar act of royal generosity.
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Recovery at Court brought other rewards. Ralegh also succeeded in obtaining from the Queen a freehold title to his Sherborne estate. The properties granted by the Bishop of Salisbury to the Queen, and then by the Queen to Ralegh, in 1592 were now surrendered by the Bishop to the Queen, in consideration of an annual rent of £260, plus another £60 for lands in Burton and Holnest that had been transferred in 1594 to Ralegh's friend and neighbour, John FitzJames. The Queen subsequently granted the freehold to Ralegh and FitzJames by letters patent dated 11 September 1599.
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 A superficially soothing royal letter of thanks to the Bishop, Dean and Chapter of Salisbury emphasized - as did many another similar letter down the years - that this in no way set a precedent, but rather that Ralegh's services and the insecurity of his current title had proved compelling reasons for the exchange. The letter also carried a powerful sting in the tail: the Bishop, it maintained, had squeezed Ralegh too sharply. More generous terms might yet convince the Queen that he had not neglected her wishes in the matter. This was how Elizabeth dealt with the princes of her Church!
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Secure in the enjoyment of his Dorset estates, Ralegh embarked on a deliberate programme of expansion by purchase, building on earlier, piecemeal acquisitions. He was planning for the far future, consolidating a grand estate for his descendants. Already, in 1596, he had taken a lease of Haselbery, in reversion, from the Earl of Derby.
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 Shortly before Easter 1600 he paid £100 to Richard and Margaret Jones for nearly a hundred acres of wood, pasture and meadow in Lillingborne and other surrounding Dorset villages.
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 On 13 December 1601 he bought, for an undisclosed but clearly significant suns, the manor of Sherborne Barton from Thomas Freke of Iwerne Courtney and Richard Swayne of the Middle Temple.
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 His largest purchase followed in January 1602, when he agreed to pay £1,300 to Richard Arnolde of Alton for the moieties of around three hundred acres and two local manors - Prymsley and Pynford - properties formerly belonging to Sir John Horsey, the brother of Arnolde's wife Mary.
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 The legal fallout from these developments ran on into the next reign. An indenture preserved at Alnwick Castle records a mutual disclaimer of any remaining life interests enjoyed by Ralegh and FitzJames in one other's property, as conveyed in September 1599. Dated 26 May 1603, this counterpart, presumably once belonging to FitzJames, may well bear the last surviving signature of Ralegh as a free man, before his long incarceration in the Tower.
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