Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (33 page)

Cecil was still more alarmed when Ralegh tried to open his own correspondence with James VI in Scotland. Like Cecil, Northumberland and Howard, and like Essex before them all, he was doing his best to position himself against the change in dynasty that would eventually follow. Conducted through the Duke of Lennox, these discussions were brief, deeply obscure and to little was unwilling to risk another channel of furtive communication with London - but the fact that they took place at all is itself significant. There seems some reason to suppose that Ralegh acted on his own initiative, or with Lennox's active support, rejecting Cecil's advice to stay silent. While Cecil of all people could understand these motives, the statesman in him fretted over the lack of control in a particularly sensitive negotiation. Was this wise of Lennox? What would Ralegh say? Was he again acting with Cobham? In his own correspondence with King James, Cecil remains for the most part temperate and moderate, as befits an experienced counsellor, though he jabs with the stiletto at times, while in one remarkable passage the irritation and anxiety that he feels is expressed with quite shocking vehemence:

If I dyd not some tyme cast a stone into the mouth of these gaping crabbs, when they are in their prodigall humour of discourses, they would not stick to confess dayly how contrary it is to their nature to resolve to be under your soverainty; thogh they confess (Ralegh especially) that (rebus sic stantibus) naturall pollicy forceth them to keep on foot such a trade against the great day of mart. In all which light and soddain humours of his, thogh I do no way check him, becawse he shall not think I reject his freedome or his affection, but alwaies (sub sigillo corfessionis) use contestation with him, that I neyther had nor ever wold in individuo contemplate future idea, nor ever hoped for more then justice in time of change, yet, under pretext of extraordinary care of his well doing, I have seemed to disswade him from ingaging him self to farr, even for him self, much more therfore to forbere to assume for me, or my present intentions.
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The character assassination is curiously principled at times, and occasionally accurate. Cecil points out that Ralegh and Cobham lack the statesman's defining quality, discretion. They argue openly, they pass letters about, and they cannot keep secrets.
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 There are dangers here that we cannot easily appreciate today, growing out of the fears that men and women entertain when they can do little but wait and watch for change. The Queen was becoming ever more autocratic at the end of her reign, impatient of contradiction: Cecil told Carew that, if he himself was not prepared to stand up to Elizabeth on a particular point, no one else at Court would dare 'bestow six woords of argument to replye'.
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 Yet this irascible old woman had a soft spot for Cobham; where might that lead? Through his correspondence, Cecil is positioning both men in the party of instinctive opposition; here, he is saying, are courtiers who cannot naturally accept a Scottish king, and even though they may in time be obliged to do so, their acceptance will never be more than politic, and insincere. Putting political distance between himself and Ralegh, he throws in for good measure an artful glance at the old allegations of religious unorthodoxy: would Cecil really befriend a man 'whom most religious men do hold anathema'? In this way, he explains why he in 'no way checks' Ralegh, stressing that his 'extraordinary care' of Ralegh's well-being is only a pretext. If that was true in 1601 and 1602, for how long had it been true? Who was saying otherwise to James? As a friendship unravels, these are unanswered questions.

In the summer of 1601 Cecil told Carew that he had been so frustrated and irritated by 'the mutinys of those whom I do love and will (howsoever they do me)', that he had been 'left to seek new Freends'.
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 He duly found them. Over the next two years Ralegh's name was repeatedly blackened in the letters of Henry Howard, written through an intermediary to James VI in Edinburgh to assure him of Cecil's (and Howard's) loyalty. Howard had longstanding contacts with the Scottish Court, and in the present situation his support was useful. For the most part, Cecil simply confirms the authenticity on his ally's statements while leaving Howard to throw the vitriol. This he does industriously - Ralegh, Cobham and to a lesser extent Northumberland, are damned together as a 'diabolical triplicity', busily hatching 'cockatriceeggs' at Durham House!
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 Northumberland was a powerful man and a potentially dangerous opponent, so even Howard qualified his accusations. For his fellow Ralegh and Cobham, however, no adjective was spared. Howard disparaged them as damned, wicked: 'hell did never spew up such a couple...now set on the pin of making tragedies'. The Earl of Nottingham, he maintained, 'the other day wished from his soul, that he had but the same commission to carry the cannon to Durham-house, that he had this time twelve-month to carry it to Essex house'.
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 Erudition hard won as a reader in Rhetoric at Cambridge was deployed with gusto. Northumberland, in his pride and ambition, is merely ridiculous, indiscreet and slightly giddy, Cobham lacks brains, but Ralegh is the real threat. Here is an atheist, indiscreet, incompetent, hostile to the very idea of James's succession. Worse still, Ralegh, mere man that he is, is governed by a formidable wife. This combination of 'Lucifer' and 'Proserpina' spells great danger to the King's ambitions.
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All this is as crucial to understanding Ralegh's subsequent troubles as it is murky and unedifying. Despite their bile, these letters are revealing. James may have ignored some of Howard's more colourful assertions, while delighting in the allusion and rhetoric; as an exchange between scholar and scholar, he correctly described Lord Henry's style at one point as 'ample Asiatic and endless'.
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 Some of Howard's views, notably his misogynistic dislike of Bess, were peculiarly his own. But the barrage of insinuation, particularly when this purported to convey Cecil's sentiments, could not fail to leave its impression. Given his significance at court, Cecil's dissociation from Ralegh, his insistence that he could never support a man of 'light and soddain humours' fundamentally opposed to a Stuart succession, was deeply damaging, and it is again difficult to escape the conclusion that Ralegh's wilful part in this critical breach amounted to an entirely avoidable miscalculation.
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So a once friendly correspondence with Cecil becomes essentially a matter of duty. Through the autumn of 1601 Ralegh passes on intelligence of the Spanish fleet sailing to assist the Earl of Tyrone in Ireland. He sticks to facts, and to common form, except when the Meere case prompts him to add a postscript from Bess.
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 It is as if he cannot always quite bring himself to beg favours. In the letters of 1602 he frets that he is being overlooked, abandoned, sent on fools' errands far from Court. There are strange and troubling echoes - albeit nothing more than echoes - of Essex here. One of the disadvantages of Jersey, he discovers, is that it lies a long way from the source of power and favour. Writing from the island on 20 July Ralegh asks Cecil to recall him from that 'desolation'. 'I arived here the 3th so I have walked here this 17 dayes in the wilderness.'
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 Notwithstanding these gripes, he only returned to England on or very shortly before 12 August, having established that his island command stood secure against any surprise Spanish raid.
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But if friendship is dying, dependence thrives. All the while Ralegh still relies on Cecil for help of every kind. In May he enters into a bond to the Secretary for the repayment of £4,000.
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 In August Ralegh seeks Cecil's assistance, and through him additional help from the Lord Admiral, in protecting the value of cargoes of sassafras and cedar brought back by two recent Virginia voyages, one of them by a pinnace sent out in yet another futile bid to locate the Roanoke colonists. Rather ambitiously, he bases his case on the 1584 patent, but this useful timber is worth the gamble. The cedar would, Ralegh suggests, be just the thing to 'seele cabinneats and make bords and many other delicate things'. However, he offsets the failure of the request, even as it is made: 'It is your destiney to be trobled with your frinds, and so must all men bee, butt what yow thinck unfitt to be dun for mee shall never be a quarrell ether internall or externall.' One wonders whether either man really believed that any more.
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It is, however, interesting that third parties, even those close to both, do not seem to sense that anything is amiss. Ralegh and Cecil still act together in matters of mutual profit, for example in a clever and face-saving process during 1602 by which Cecil, as Master of the Court of Wards, secured a profitable wardship for himself.
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 They also cooperated to compose legal disputes, in one case as a panel of last resort.
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 Adrian Gilbert, pottering away in true Gilbertian style designing a secure water supply for Cecil's country house, Theobalds, ties the two men together, as patrons, but also as intimates. 'Sir Walter was very earnest with me to come presently after him to go to Jersey with him: which your Honour must excuse, for I cannot be yet absent well from hence.' He gives Cecil the timeless reassurance of the project manager: 'Fear nothing for Gilbert us est hic, a phrase I write to Sir Walter.'
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Ralegh, moreover, was still not without true friends. Northumberland, who he anticipated meeting in the West Country on his return from Jersey, advised King James, in his own correspondence carried north by the future Gunpowder Plotter Thomas Percy, that, although Ralegh was undeniably 'insolent, [and] extreamly heated', he had always explicitly acknowledged James's right to the throne at Elizabeth's death. Besides - and here is a particularly acute observation through all that follows - Ralegh is essentially powerless, unable to do the King 'muche good nor hearme'. While Sir Walter had his faults, the Earl felt compelled to add that there were 'excellent good parts of natur' in his old friend.
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 However, Northumberland was himself subjected to Howard's insinuations, and a fretful, impotent King was obliged to place most trust and confidence in his strongest allies. Nothing in Northumberland's measured assurances seems to have altered James's already low opinion of Ralegh.

Towards the end of 1602, English statesmen expressed the usual seasonal concern over reported movements of Spanish shipping around the coast of north-western France and along the Channel. The Governor of Jersey was obliged to monitor this information particularly carefully. In September, Ralegh wrote to Cecil from Bath, in very formal and abrupt terms; 'payne', he said, prevented anything more detailed. His letter conveyed intelligence about a fleet that had touched land at the Blavet estuary in Brittany, apparently carrying silver to pay the troops in Flanders. While an ambush might be feasible, the letter also suggests without quite saying so that the time to strike has already passed.
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 Cecil still collaborated with Ralegh and Cobham in privateering voyages, some of them draped with subterfuge. In January 1603 he writes a typically opaque letter to Sir Walter, full of caveats and caution. A ship confiscated by the Admiralty Court is now again to be ventured. Tempted by the potential return, Cecil declares that he will bear half the costs, at least, with Ralegh and Cobham staking the balance. But he does not want his role publicized: 'For though I thanke God I have noe other meaninge then becometh an honest man in any of my actions yet that which weare an other mans Pater noster, would be accompted in me a charme.'
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Erosion of the firm political alliance with Robert Cecil, right at the end of Elizabeth's reign, invites us to take stock. For all his hard work, Ralegh never quite recovered the ground lost following his marriage. By 1603 he was once again active at the heart of Court, and a breakthrough to high office still seemed possible. He was entrusted with distinguished short-term appointments and sensitive commands. He had allies still closer to the Queen. But his dependence on Cecil, now alienated by the strains of the secret correspondence, and on Cobham demonstrated that his heyday was long past. The passage of years brought no more credit with maturity; sage advice had been part of the package that had first attracted Elizabeth, more than twenty years earlier. Ralegh had never been a giddy young favourite, on whom time might eventually confer wisdom. By the end of the Queen's life he was young only in comparison to her. Ralegh struggled even to pass on crumbs of patronage to his clients: 'It greves mee', he wrote to Cecil in June 1602, begging for favour on behalf of 'the poore taverners of Inglande', 'to finde with what difficulty and torment to my sealf I obtayne the smalest favor.'
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Of course these troubles were relative. When his nephew Sir John Gilbert, in the middle of a dispute over the proceeds from a privateering venture, presumed during the spring of 1602 to remind Ralegh that he had never once lost Gilbert's support, even when his fortunes were very low, Ralegh responded vigorously, pointing out to the young man that some had further to fall than others: 'I pray forgett nott your sealf nor do not so mich mistake my fortunes but that when they were at worst they were better then the best of your owne, and were abell enough to steed my frinds and despise the rest.'
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 For all his bravado, however, it was clear by 1603 that Ralegh could in no sense afford to 'despise the rest'. Dynastic change was coming, and change demanded outward cooperation and consensus, while prompting gambles which worked out well for some and less well for others. As Ralegh himself realized, it was a time for being seen to advocate particular courses, particularly convincingly. Warning Cobham against building up any hopes of securing the office of Lord Chamberlain in 1602, Ralegh noted that 'the good of thes changes wilbe that while men ar of necessety to draw lotts they shall hereby see their chanses and dispose them sealvs accordingly'.
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