Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (44 page)

More revealing of Sir Walter's desires for his son and of his own past feelings come to light in an undated letter, probably written in about 1610 to young Wat, then aged around sixteen.
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Ralegh began by urging upon his son a vigorous and active life:

Awaken thyself to industrye and rowse upp thy spiritts for the world. Greate possessions would make thee lazie: I would have thee to be the sonne of thyne owne fortunes aswell as my sonne.

He urges Wat to follow the same objectives as he did himself: to honour God and to do good in the commonwealth, and he continues by reflecting on his own state of mind and on the vanity of the world. Thinking about death, he claims that he feels no more 'perturbation' than

I have donne in my best health to arise from table when I have well dyned and thence to retyre to a pleasant walke. I have had my parte in this world and nowe must give place to fresh gamesters. Farewell.

Ralegh reflects that 'All is vanity and wearynes', which we both love and complain about. Foolishly we struggle against the role decreed for us by God's ordinance and providence. Instead of being content to fulfil our roles as best we may, we strive for greater position. 'Oure heades swymme and our harts beate within us as if wee were att sea...Wee are toyled and hazarded with tempests and stormes that arise abroad.' Our fortunes depend not only on ourselves, but also on 'adventures that lye not in oure management'.

Publicke affaires are rockes, private conversations are whirlepooles and quickesandes. Itt is alike perilous to doe well and to doe ill...Nevertheles, my Bonne, take harte and courage to thee. Thy adventure lyes in this troublesome barque. Strive if thou canst to make good thy station in the upper decke. Those that live under hatches are ordained to be drudges and slaves.

He certainly spoke from experience. The struggle between divine providence and the freedom of man to choose was to be an underlying theme of Ralegh's most ambitious prose work, The History of the World.

A man of Ralegh's energy and ambition needed a large project in order to survive long years in captivity. He had always been an ardent reader and a more impressive project than The History of the World could scarcely be imagined. The resources were ready to hand. Ralegh's 515 volumes constituted a large private library, strong in history, geography and cosmology; and, as we have seen, it was complemented by the libraries of his two aristocratic neighbours in the Tower, the Earl of Northumberland and Lord Cobham.
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He also had friends, some of them scholars, to help and talk with him: Ben Jonson asserted that 'the best wits of England were employed for making of his historie', and others have implied that Ralegh was heavily reliant on other scholars.
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Given the size of his project - it was about one million words long - it could hardly have been otherwise. Ralegh knew French, Spanish, Italian and Latin, but he needed help with Hebrew and Greek; and friends like Sir Robert Cotton could help him with the loan of books from their own libraries.
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These were fertile times for writing history. The older genres of chronicles and antiquarian description were gradually being displaced by works modelled on such classical authors as Cicero and Tacitus. Instead of merely recording events or providing descriptions, writers like Francis Bacon and John Hayward sought to uncover motive and character. Emphasis upon morality and judgement became less prominent. Ralegh's work was, however, unusual in one important respect. While most history written in England during the first half of the seventeenth century was restricted to the British past, Ralegh extended his vision to the wider world. Only Johann Sleidan's Briefe Chronicle of the foure principall Empires was available to English readers, and that in a translation of 1563 by Stephan Wythers.

Some commentators have seen the patronage of Prince Henry as crucial to Ralegh's enterprise, both in its origins and in the disastrous effects of the Prince's death in 1612. 'It was for the service of that inestimable prince Henry', wrote Ralegh in his preface, 'that I undertook this work...It is now left to the world without a master.'
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But although Henry was greatly mourned at Court and in the country at large, it is unlikely that his patronage was all-important. If the Prince really did sympathize with his plight, Ralegh could reasonably have hoped for freedom from the Tower sooner rather than later; but the publication history of this and other prose works by Ralegh suggest that he may have sought other patrons as well, including Henry's younger brother Charles.
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As to the abandonment of the work after the publication of its first part, in his final page Ralegh announces that this will be succeeded by a second and third part, 'which I have also intended, and have hewn out'.
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One need not take this entirely seriously, but it suggests that the death of the Prince was not decisive in causing Ralegh to abandon the project. According to John Aubrey, sales were slow at first and his bookseller told him that he would be the loser by it. Ralegh flew into a passion and allegedly burned the second part. However, the story seems unlikely.
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At about the same time the possibility of reviving the Guiana expedition may have become brighter, persuading him to leave the History alone. Perhaps also the disapproval of the King discouraged Ralegh from continuing with his project. It is not of course unknown, then and now, for a historian to announce the preparation of a major work of history that never appears.

Ralegh probably began to write the History in or around 1611; at any rate, it was entered in the Stationers' Register on 11 April that year by Walter Burre, bookseller. Three-and-a-half years later, in November or December 1614, the great work appeared, in a single volume of almost a million words with an elaborate frontispiece but with no name on the title-page. On 22 December the Archbishop of Canterbury was ordered by the King to call in the work and suppress it. In the following January John Chamberlain reported to Dudley Carleton that Ralegh's book 'is called in by the King's commaundment, for divers exceptions, but specially for beeing too sawcie in censuring princes...he takes yt much to hart, for he thought he had won his spurres and pleased the King.'
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A few months later the Stationers' Company was ordered by the King to hand over the confiscated volumes to one John Ramsay to be 'disposed of at our pleasure'.
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Probably Ramsay then sold them, which would account for the survival of several copies. Two more editions followed in 1617 after Ralegh had been released from the Tower. Each of these now had a title-page bearing a portrait of the author. It is not clear why the original edition had neither title-page nor author's name. The first edition did, however, include an elaborate, symbolic frontispiece with the word Providentia at the top, surmounting a globe, flanked by the figures of Fania Bona and Fama Mala. Below are the figures of Testis Telnpon+nl, Magistra Vitae, Lux Veritatis, and so on.

The text opens with a lengthy preface, discussing the nature of historical writing and those principles of public conduct that could be derived from it. Essentially, The History of the World is philosophical history, in which Ralegh seeks to uncover fundamental truths about the role and purpose of God and the lessons that could be drawn from the past. He reveals, too, his own beliefs and values. The first two of the five books of the History are largely concerned with events described in the Old Testament, from the creation of the world until the Babylonian Captivity. However, while these events occupy the foreground, there are background accounts of other regions, in particular of the Egyptian, Assyrian and Babylonian empires. The last three books deal with the Persian Empire and its defeat at the hands of Greece, the exploits of Xenophon, the conquests of Alexander, and the rise of Rome until the second Punic War and the absorption of Macedon around 146 BC. In these later books Old Testament history occupies little space, and major differences in approach are opened up between the two halves of the History.

Defending the claims of history in his preface, Ralegh wrote that in one respect 'it triumphs over all human knowledge, that it hath given us life in our understanding...yea it hath triumphed over time, which, besides it, nothing but eternity hath triumphed over: for it hath carried our knowledge over the vast and devouring space of so many thousands of years'. Through the study of history we can perceive the world as it was when it was young. 'It is not the least debt which we owe unto history, that it hath made us acquainted with our dead ancestors.' In a word, he concluded, 'we may gather out of history a policy no less wise than eternal; by the comparison and application of other men's fore-passed miseries, with our own like errors and ill deserts'.
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'It is', he wrote later, 'the end and scope of all history, to teach by examples of times past, such wisdom as may guide our desires and actions.'
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Kings and princes have committed many cruelties to make themselves masters of the world; yet the empires of the past have left 'no fruit, flower, grass, nor leaf, springing upon the face of the earth...No; their very roots and ruins do hardly remain.' Ralegh gives various explanations for the decline and fall of empires, saying that he will resolve the question by looking at some examples of the rule 'that ill doing hath always been attended with ill success'. To make the point he turned in the preface of the book to the history of the Norman kings and their successors. Henry I, when he had 'by force, craft, and cruelty...dispossess'd, over-reach'd, and lastly made blind and destroyed his elder brother Robert duke of Normandy, to make his own sons lords of this land: God cast them all, male and female, nephews and nieces (Maud excepted) into the bottom of the sea'. Similarly, God avenged subsequent cruelties upon the descendants of the kings, as Richard II suffered from the cruelties of his grandfather, Edward III, as well as his own; and his supplanter, Henry IV, 'saw (if souls immortal see and discern any things after the bodies death) his grand-child Henry the Sixth, and his son the prince, suddenly, and without mercy, murdered; the possession of the crown (for which he had caused so much blood to be poured out) transferred from his race'.
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So the story of wickedness and retribution continued. 'Now', he went on, 'for king Henry the eighth: if all the pictures and patterns of a merciless prince were lost in the world, they might all again be painted to the life, out of the story of this king.'
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In the end God took away all of Henry's descendants without issue: Edward, Mary and Elizabeth all died childless, leaving the succession to James, who received the crown from the hand of God. None of the foul spots discernible in other monarchs were visible in James. Above all, through him God gave England the blessing of the union of England and Scotland. 'Put all our petty grievances together, and heap them up to their height, they will appear but as a molehill, compared with the mountain of this concord.
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Perhaps surprisingly, Ralegh omitted almost all mention of the reign of Elizabeth. No doubt it would have been tactless to include her name when he wished to reserve all his praise for her successor. Some of that praise was indeed so fulsome that there must, given Ralegh's continued imprisonment by James, be at least a touch of irony there.

Kings and princes have been the same the world over in their wickedness, claimed Ralegh, and God has been consistent in punishing them through their offspring. While we all profess the love of God and knowledge of his commandments, our souls contain nothing but hypocrisy: 'we are all (in effect) become comedians in religion; and while we act in gesture and voice, divine virtues, in all the course of our lives we renounce our persons, and the parts we play.
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Ralegh was fond of theatrical metaphors: indeed, as Stephen Greenblatt has argued, it is possible to regard his whole life as a performance.
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'God, who is the author of all our tragedies, bath written out for us, and appointed us all the parts we are to play: and bath not, in their distribution, been partial to the most mighty princes of the world.' Luck shifts in an unforeseeable way: 'the change of fortune on the great Theatre is but as the change of garments on the less'. The same theme is echoed in his late poem 'What is our life?': mothers' wombs are seen as the 'tiring houses', Earth as the stage and Heaven as the spectator.
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