Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (34 page)

'In an houre, two mightie Nations were made one: wilde Ireland became tame on the sudden, and some English great ones that before seemed tame, on the sudden turned wilde.
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At Court, the Christmas of 1602 was a muted affair. Ralegh 'caried away' Cobham and Lord Compton to Sherborne, while several of the peers who, after Essex's revolt, were persona non grata about Elizabeth marked the season with the ever hospitable Sir John Harington.
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 The Queen's health remained sound enough, though she tired easily, and was quick to conceal infirmities as best she might. And then, rather suddenly, everyone seemed to notice a change. In February, particularly after the death of her old friend the Countess of Nottingham, Elizabeth's mind began to fail. She dropped into melancholy, refused to go to bed, went for hours without speaking. No one quite knew what was wrong, but it was soon evident to the watching Court that life was departing, little by little.

Drawing upon its experience as the pre-eminent executive body in early modern England, the Privy Council handled Elizabeth's sickness and death with tact and some skill. There was no sign of panic or improvisation: this, after all, was a moment long anticipated. It helped, of course, that the discontented elements in England - Essex's followers, most recusant Catholics and a majority of protestant nonconformists - all looked hopefully to James to improve their conditions. History, though, introduced a sense of uncertainty. Royal dynasties had seldom changed without bloodshed. Those same fears that had fuelled the secret correspondence with Edinburgh were encountered across English society. James - the only son of an only surviving daughter of an only surviving son - was dynastically beyond challenge; there was no viable alternative, and desperate rumours promoting the claims of his cousin Arbella Stuart and those of the Earl of Hertford's son, descended from Henry VIII's younger sister, only proved the point. But he remained a foreigner, and a Scot at that. Most English men and women, intent on preserving what they enjoyed, sought refuge in consensus, leaving a decision to others. Old Roger Manners, third son of the first Earl of Rutland, spoke for many when he wrote to his brother on 12 March: 'I wolnot goe about to make kyngs, nor seke to pull downe eny; only woll obay soch as be chosen and crowned.'
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Elizabeth's death, on the morning of 24 March 1603, ushered in a new world, strange and uncertain after a reign of more than forty-four years. Thomas Dekker grasped the magnitude of this alteration in Yeare. 'Upon Thurseday', he wrote, 'it was treason to cry God save king James king of England, and upon Friday hye treason not to cry so'.
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 For some, the slate appeared to be wiped clean. Northumberland insisted on bringing his nephew, the young Earl of Essex, to watch the proclamation of the new king at Cheapside, a gesture reflecting James's respect for the boy's father, and one that helped to draw the Devereux family back into political life.
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 At first there was a good deal of tension, 'many men in the city in arms, and more affrayed than hurt'.
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 When the nobility of the realm proclaimed James king in London, the crowd remained alarmingly quiet. One observer explained this silent joye' as a mark of respect for Elizabeth, never doubting that Londoners would delight in 'the accession of soe worthy a king', but silence can measure other emotions too.
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 No one was ready to celebrate until it was clear that there would be no rebellion or turmoil. Time, however, soon provided the necessary reassurance. Adam Winthrop, in rural East Anglia, recorded that James was proclaimed in Colchester and Sudbury on 27 March, amid general rejoicing.
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Celebration then became the natural state of things. Confident in the loyalty of every significant political player south of the Border, James set out on a leisurely, triumphal progress from Edinburgh to London. Travelling south, he was gawped at, pursued, pestered for favours and plied with formal petitions of all kinds. Ralegh rode up from the West Country to meet his new King at Burghley House, near Stamford, only to receive the driest of welcomes. Aubrey puts a terrible Jacobean pun into the King's mouth, 'O my soule, mon, I have heard rawly of thee'. The tales that Aubrey heard, which are not substantiated elsewhere, suggest that there was a particular reason for this distrust, something that went beyond the libels of Henry Howard. He maintained that during the debates in Whitehall of the so-called Great Council, the interim authority in England pending James's selection of a new Privy Council, Ralegh advocated a 'Commonwealth', rather than submission to the king of a 'needy, beggarly nation'.
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 If that is true, and the words are somehow in character with other remarks reported from those mysterious meetings and his peculiar ability to say the wrong thing at the wrong time, it is hardly surprising that Ralegh was now received without enthusiasm. Others suggested that Cecil had already sought Ralegh's removal from his captaincy of the Guard at one of these meetings of the Great Council, only to be opposed vigorously by Cobham, but these debates among the nobles and statesmen were never fully written down, and all the sources are problematic.
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 The choice of captain, in any case, lay with the new King.

Aubrey's other tale from this time has James, alarmed by the press of the crowd, asserting that he could have carried the country by force had the need arisen. Walking in his entourage, Ralegh then expressed his wish that the matter be put to the test. Why so, asked James. 'Because', replied Sir Walter, ,that then you would have known your friends from your foes.' Aubrey believed that this remark was 'never forgotten nor forgiven'.
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 Whether or not the story is true, Ralegh's reported assessment is crucial in understanding the events of that year. Did all this adulation capture the true feelings of men and women towards their new sovereign?

The favourite then performed one final service for his mistress: Ralegh was present in his official capacity at the Queen's funeral. He walked in that splendid procession through London, past a weeping, groaning crowd, at the head of one hundred and fifty men of the Guard, 'with the poynts of their holberds downewards'.
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 Thereafter, it rapidly became clear that he had no political future under the new monarch. He was stripped of his captaincy of the guard, replaced by the Scottish privy counsellor Sir Thomas Erskine. His lucrative monopolies were lost in the general suspension of these personal favours during May, and that same month he was given notice to quit Durham House, the Bishop, Tobie Matthew, having successfully petitioned James for the immediate return of his London home. Bishops having their own ways and means, Durham House had been secured by a 'most learned and worthie sermon' preached before the King at Berwick on 6 April, and another preached at Newcastle four days later. Matthew had access to James regularly, for a week, and he knew how to flatter and charm, exploiting that principal asset for all it was worth. Its worth was, in fact, Durham House.
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Ralegh submitted to these strokes, acknowledging that the new King had his own obligations, and his own priorities. Outwardly, he confined himself to a protest against the apparent vindictiveness of prominent legal officers, Thomas Egerton, John Popham and Edward Coke, criticizing the haste with which he was being driven from a residence occupied for more than fifteen years. Matthew was eager to secure the property, and at his prompting, Ralegh had been given until 24 June to deliver possession to the Bishop or his attorney. That was brisk indeed. 'I am of oppinion', he wrote, 'that if the Kings Majestye had recovered this howse or the like from the meanest gentelinan and sarvant hee had in Inglande that His Majestye would have geven six moneaths tyme for the avoydance.' The sense of injustice builds during his letter, and reaches a scorching climax. This process, he snarls, 'is bothe contrary to honor, to custonie and to civillety'.
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 Ralegh seethed with frustration at his own inability to charm James, and with anger that erstwhile friends had not spoken up for him. It does not seem to have occurred to him that those friends had reason to be wary; everyone was, after all, now under the scrutiny of an unfamiliar new monarch who could so easily make or destroy careers.

Even the superficial onlooker wasted no time in categorizing Ralegh with the men at Court who lacked any natural lodestone, the meddlers, the shifters, those who might seize on the moment, regardless ofprinciple. When the Marquis de Rosny, Henri IV's special envoy sent to congratulate James on his succession, set out to identify the four groups of courtiers jostling for preferment, he relegated Ralegh to the rag-bag fourth division, 'the others':

Les autres comme la Comte de Northumbelland, de Sutenton, de Comberland, les Milords Cobham, Ralek, Griffin [Markham] et autres seront tousiours de toutes les factions qui voudront remuer mesnage on dedans on dehors leur Royaume, voire aucuns d'eux contre leur proper Roy et leur patrie.
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Rosny's remarks as they appear in his published memoirs are tainted by later elaboration, and by the wisdom of hindsight, but allowing for the simplicity of his message, and for the briskness with which he categorizes every courtier then in London, the assessment is fair enough. The envoy was a shrewd man, and a canny politician. And he had met Ralegh before. While he was in England for little more than a fortnight, he had benefited from long conversations with the resident ambassador, Northumberland's good friend Christophe de Harlay, Comte de Beaumont. The names among 'les autres' are interesting. They divide into the politically significant, men like the Earls of Northumberland, Southampton and Cumberland, whom James could not afford to antagonize so early in the reign, and the potentially vulnerable, the likes of Cobham and Ralegh. Over the next two months or so, the significance of that distinction became clear. In Ralegh's case one has also to consider his deep unpopularity - an outspoken Catholic gentlewoman, Katharine Gawen, wasted no time on James's accession in denouncing the late Queen and the two courtiers who had controlled her. Bizarrely identifying Ralegh and the Lord Chief Justice Sir John Popham in this role, Gawen delighted in asserting that the pair of 'bludsuckers' were now 'putt downe'. Lower on the social scale the so-called'poore mens peticion to the Kinge', one of many attempts to seize the moment in 1603, singles Ralegh out as a man who deserves neither favour nor advancement.
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 He was, in short, becoming a liability to his friends.

When occasional opportunities arose to impress James, Ralegh, perhaps trying too hard, muffed them. Discussing foreign affairs with the King during a royal visit to Beddington Park, home of Sir Nicholas Carew, he advocated a vigorous prosecution of the war with Spain.
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 He was it seems already thinking about, if not already drafting, his surviving tract on the subject. The tone of this work is quite uncompromising. Do not follow France's lead, he says. Keep the Dutch as allies and strike hard against the Spanish empire - it is far more fragile than appearances might suggest.
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 In 1603, however, views of this kind were misplaced. This was not what a monarch determined to make peace with England's long-standing enemy wanted to hear, and after eighteen years of war most people in England simply sought an end to conflict. If Spain had been weakened by the struggle, England had suffered as well.

These setbacks were bad enough, but worse was to follow. On 15 July, while at Court, Ralegh was detained for questioning in connection with a tangled and rather fatuous plot then coming to light, hatched by two Catholic priests, William Watson andWilliam Clark, the financially desperate Nottinghamshire knight Sir Griffin Markham and - a potentially dangerous link - Cobham's younger brother George Brooke. On the edge of this circle, tantalized yet repelled by the prevailing Catholicism, stood the puritan peer, Lord Grey de Wilton, an imprudent, hot-tempered and devout young man who had quarrelled openly with Essex, with Southampton and with just about everyone else at Court. Planned literally to its own extinction - these conspirators talked a good campaign without showing any sign of carrying it through - the socalled Bye Plot aimed to kidnap the King and to hold him hostage against promises of wholesale changes in government and an openly acknowledged toleration of Catholicism in England.
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Suspicions against Ralegh had clearly been building over the past few days. Northumberland was, at that time, in disgrace for spitting in the face of an old enemy, Sir Francis Vere, when in the King's presence, and he had been placed under house arrest with the Archbishop of Canterbury at Croydon, to give him time to reflect on his indiscretion. With talk of treason in the air the Earl was naturally worried that this coincidental, transient punishment might be misinterpreted. He therefore wrote to James on 14 July, asking forgiveness and seeking to clear his name. His covering letter to Cecil reveals all too clearly the direction of current investigations.

Perhaps I should have knowen more of these matters if Rawleighe had not conceaved as he told me that I could keepe nothing from you. I am now glad of those thoughts in him and your freindship and mine never stoode me in better steede if he have done any thing that is not justifiable.
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