Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (48 page)

Ralegh wrote one more tract before he left the Tower in 1616: A Discourse of the Original and Fundamental Cause of War. In it he draws general conclusions from The History of the World and from later events in the Christian era. The range of his knowledge is impressive. 'The ordinary theme and argument of history is war...the exercise of violence under sovereign command against withstanders.' Its essential components are 'force, authority and resistance'.
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Ralegh distinguishes three different kinds of war: necessary; voluntary or arbitrary; and civil. Necessary wars occur when a country is 'overlaid by the multitude which live upon it' and is compelled by fear of famine to seize new lands. Foreign war may serve, as King Ferdinand of Aragon said, 'as a potion of rhubarb, to waste away choler from the body of the realm'. It will also involve great misery for the people. Western Europe has been happily free from such 'inundations' for the last six hundred years, but few kingdoms in Asia have escaped them.
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Voluntary or arbitrary war has many causes: fear of harm or invasion; desire for revenge; anger at injustice; religious conflict; and ambition. 'Of old times', he says, 'perhaps, before Helen of Greece was born, women have been the common argument of these tragedies.' Interestingly enough, the Indian chief Topiawari had made a very similar point when Ralegh visited him on his first Orinoco voyage. Papal claims to have the power to dispense subjects from their allegiance might have caused England 'as furious a war as ever' in Elizabeth's reign 'if Pope Plus's bull could have gored as well as he could bellow'.
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'Intestine or civil war' is the third kind. In discussing it Ralegh returns to the theme of the Dialogue, arguing the case for obedience to all legitimate authority. He calls Tacitus and Machiavelli in support. The former insists that 'we ought to submit to what is present, and should wish for good princes, but whatever they are, endure them'. Machiavelli calls this 'a golden sentence'.
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'No nation', says Ralegh, 'was ever bettered by a civil war'. In words that prefigure those of Thomas Hobbes later in the century, Ralegh argues that when men 'fly to arms' against one another, it becomes a state of war, in which they are returning to the state of nature where all covenants and agreements are void. In this state, 'natural conscience is not a sufficient curb to the violent passions of men out of the laws of society'. Each man becomes subject to whoever is more cunning or stronger than himself.
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However, 'wise governors will not bear hard upon the people', for if abuses of government grow to a height the 'true majority' may discharge the rulers, since the latter can show no patriarchal right. If those 'possessing the supreme power are incurably defective...the majority of the people...have a right to change the same, [and] I think naturally they must'. Yet if 'there is no such plain dangerous defect', even the majority has no right to remove the rulers, for then 'all governments would be at the will and pleasure of the people', which would be disastrous. But Ralegh gives no answer to the crucial question: who is to decide whether or not there is an incurable defect in the governors?
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In history, writes Ralegh, civil war often followed when the people were led into rebellion by great men intent on pursuing their own interests. He instances the French wars that had only recently finished with the Treaty of Vervins in 1598. They had been begun and continued by 'some few great men of ambitious and turbulent spirits, deluding the people with the cloak and mask only of religion, to gain their assistance'. The massacre of St Barthomew's Day in 1572 had, he insists, no more religion in it than the Sicilian Vespers. No greater plague, he repeats, can come upon a country than a civil war. He illustrates his point from the horrors perpetrated in Rome during the second century BC following the revival of the Agrarian Law by the Gracchi brothers: lands taken from Rome's enemies and previously divided among the nobles should under this law be shared among the people. Unparalleled hatred was unleashed between the Senate and the people. 'The common people were butchered after a most inhuman manner...the soldiers had liberty to kill all they met.'The fate of leaders and commanders was even worse and the dissensions continued until the fall of the Republic, which they had brought about.
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The common people of England have also been drawn to shed one another's blood 'for such a liberty as their leaders never intended they should have'. They have fought battles to redress grievances, which has always led to an increase of those same grievances. Learned scholars abroad believe that England is the commonwealth which is best governed, and men should not look for any other liberty than a good government.

In the aftermath of his execution, Ralegh became the favoured voice of the growing opposition to the King. James's son-in-law, Frederick, the Protestant Elector Palatine, was defeated at the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620 and expelled from his Rhine Palatinate by Spanish troops in 1623. James was put under pressure by English Protestants to secure his restoration. At first he attempted to do this by seeking help from the Habsburg's themselves and negotiating a marriage between Prince Charles and a Spanish princess. Negotiations failed during a fruitless attempt by Charles and the new royal favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, to woo the princess in Spain. Charles and Parliament then agreed on war with Spain shortly before the death of King James, and on Charles's accession Buckingham opened the war with a disastrous naval expedition to Cadiz. In the same year Parliament refused to grant the usual customs duties, normally granted for the life of the reigning monarch, for more than one year. A threat to impeach Buckingham led the King to dissolve Parliament before he could secure their agreement to a renewal of the customs. At this point, difficult enough, he entered war with France as well, thus involving the country in hostilities with both the major European powers. To provide for his military expenses he demanded a forced loan and imprisoned those who refused to pay.

The issue brought into play Ralegh's Dialogue, which had been circulating in manuscript for some years. Anna Beer has shown that, apart from the two copies in the State Papers, at least eleven others exist in various repositories. One of these was owned by Sir John Eliot, of Port Eliot, Cornwall, who marked certain passages in the text. Elected to Parliament in 1628, Eliot was imprisoned for his refusal to pay the forced loan, and from prison he wrote his Petition from file Gatehouse, justifying his action. There are echoes of Ralegh's Dialogue here, although he goes beyond Ralegh in various ways, principally in using statute to argue that men should not be compelled to pay taxes or give loans except with the consent of Parliament freely given. Like Ralegh, however, he claims that if men gave freely without compulsion more money would be raised for the King, he objects to imprisonment without trial on the ground that it is contrary to Magna Carta, and expresses the fear that if the King's wishes were granted now, 'future ages' might strike at property.
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There are signs in one of Eliot's draft speeches of Ralegh's influence: he uses the phrase 'squeezing of these sponges of the commonwealth into the king's coffers'; and when Eliot was under examination by the Council in 1626, he referred to having read 'the treatise which passes from hand to hand under the name of Sir Walter Raleigh by way of a Dialogue'.
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Ralegh's role was further established by publication of the Dialogue in 1628. Nominally published in Hamburg or alternatively Midelburg, in fact in London, it went into five editions within the first year, followed by another two in 1640. Its new title, The Prerogative of Parliaments, largely dropped pretence of impartiality between Counsellor and Justice.

Between 1620 and 1628 Ralegh's reputation as a patriot was becoming established. Gallant and honourable soldier, sworn enemy of Spain, he was presented as a Protestant hero in two remarkable, fictional tracts by Thomas Scott, who became preacher to the English regiment in Utrecht.
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In the earliest of these, Vox Populi or Newes from Spain, Scott imagines the Spanish Ambassador, Gondomar, arriving in Spain to give an account of his English embassy to an assembly of all the Councils of the Spanish kingdom. He is the archetype of the evil counsellor. He tells his audience that his aim throughout has been to make his master ruler of the world, advancing the Spanish state and Roman religion together. One of his finest achievements, he claims, was the bringing 'to an ignominious death, that old Pyrat [Ralegh]...one of the last now living, bred under that deceased English Virago [Elizabeth]'.

Scott returned to this theme with Sir Walter Rawleighs Ghost or England's Forewarner.
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The fictional Gondomar is about to address Philip IV's counsellors on the state of England and the possibilities for a Spanish invasion. The morning before he is due to attend upon the counsellors he goes to the garden of the Prado to walk by himself and to marshal his thoughts. Suddenly a most beautiful light begins to shine and he is struck with fear; the ghost of Sir Walter appears in shining armour and the ambassador falls upon his face in terror.'Why', he asks, 'have you come to disturb my rest?' He admits to having been the 'Nose of the Spanish State' and to have plotted Ralegh's downfall, claiming that this was 'the last worke or master-peece of all my wisedome and pollicie'. The apparition then gets angry and accuses Gondomar of having been 'a pack-horse to advance your master to universal monarchy'. The defeat of Spanish armies had not quenched their King's ambition, but had turned it to murder, asserts Ralegh, citing the Gunpowder Plot, Ravaillac's assassination of Henri IV and the expulsion of the Elector from the Palatinate as examples of Spain's villainy. Ralegh had now been appropriated to the parliamentary and Protestant causes, and for the next three decades continued to act as their spokesman from the other side of the grave.
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Down the years, many writers have dismissed Ralegh's second voyage to Guiana as the hopeless pursuit of a fantasy. Even without the benefit of hindsight, friends and foes alike doubted the viability of the enterprise, long before he set sail. For some, the prisoner had deluded himself with daydreams. Locked away in the Tower, he had been conquered by his own vivid imagination; the seductive narrative of the Discoverie had eventually beguiled its author as well. Joyce Lorimer argues persuasively that the quantities of gold and silver, and Ralegh's confidence in the details, grew after Robert Cecil's death in 1612. Without sober counsel to rein him in, Ralegh let his 'desperation to get out of the Tower and his firm "belief" in the riches of Guiana induce a fatal amnesia which led him to forget how his original reports on gold mines had been airbrushed and augmented for publication in 1596'.
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Though always cautious in committing precise details to paper - the Spaniards, he said, would exploit any leaks - Ralegh maintained, from about this time, that he had compelling evidence for the existence of a seam of gold in the sandy rock found close to the Spanish settlement at San Thome. And of course he insisted that everything to be found there belonged by right to the Queen. His expedition to Guiana in 1595, and the welcome that he had received from the native peoples, had given England her prior claim to colonize and exploit the region.

Others, less charitably, wondered what the old fox was up to now. Surely Ralegh realized that Spanish settlements on the Orinoco had multiplied since 1595, and that, for all his disclaimers, the voyage would mean bloodshed? Was that perhaps what he wanted, one means to foment dissent between England and Spain being as good as any other? Here was a way to frustrate the carefully nurtured plans of James I and the Spanish ambassador Gondomar, who had long endeavoured to persuade a sceptical Philip III that the new Prince of Wales, James's younger son Prince Charles, should marry his daughter, the Infanta Maria Anna. And might not the frustration of these political and dynastic ambitions be encouraged by France? There were grounds for these suspicions; when a plan is developed over many years the motives and mechanisms for keeping it alive are often extremely complex. However, it is perhaps more accurate to take the expedition at face value: this was Ralegh's final gamble. He had to believe that precious metals could be found in Guiana, and he clung to every piece of supportive evidence, gleaned over twenty years. As he wrote in 1618, in that forthright style of his that permitted no room for doubt, 'My one design was to go to a gold mine in Guiana, and tis not a feigned but a real thing that there is such a mine about three miles from S. Thomas...these things are as sure as that there is a God'.
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