Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (51 page)

The failure of his expedition left Ralegh stunned. 'My braines are broken', he wrote to Bess on 22 March 1618, 'and tis a torment to mee to write...as Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Hawkins died heart-broken when they failed of their enterprize, I could willinglie doe the like."Comfort your heart (deare Bess): I shall sorrow for us both', he added. 'I shall sorrowe the lesse because I have not long to sorrowe, because not long to live.' His letter is signally if perhaps logically unbalanced: a short essay of despair, a long, bitter postscript pouring out accusation after accusation, against Keymis, against his men, against betrayal by those at Court - he meant the King but could not say so - who had insisted on passing his plans to the Spanish. Self-obsession and the neuroses of an unsuccessful military commander far from Court mix with grief, but the grief is painfully genuine. 'There was never poore man soe exposed to the slaughter as I was.' Documents found at San Thome, he said, proved that well enough.
1

Here is some instinctive self-justification. The desperate letter to Bess was despatched along with a still more graphic account for Ralegh's steadfast supporter Sir Ralph Winwood. Winwood's letter was indeed the first of the two to be written. But Winwood had died in London late in October 1617, bled too soon in a fever, some said, and as in 1603 few about the King were prepared to offer unqualified support to a vulnerable man. News of the attack on San Thome reached London in May, and gave Gondomar the perfect excuse to press his uncompromising agenda. 'Piratas! Piratas!' he bellowed at the readily-persuaded monarch. A royal proclamation of 9 June responded angrily to reports that the peace between England and Spain had been compromised on the Orinoco.
2
Ralegh's ship was impounded by order of the Lord Admiral soon after he came ashore, and at the end of July, in accordance with directions from the Privy Council, Ralegh himself was conveyed to London by his cousin Sir Lewis Stucley,Vice-Admiral of Devon and Sir Richard Grenville's nephew.

Bess travelled with him. So did the loyal Captain Samuel King, and so too did Guillaume Manoury, Stucley's French doctor, now given the thankless task of overseeing Ralegh's health. While still at Plymouth, under persuasion from Bess and King, Ralegh made an abortive attempt to escape by ship to France, but then, while trying and failing to locate a French vessel in Plymouth roads, wrapped in the mist of a summer night, he changed his mind, resolving to see matters through at home. It can only be assumed that he panicked over the consequences for his wife and son, or maybe he calculated that James's show of anger was essentially a diplomatic device. Perhaps, making the kind of political judgement that works for some, he hoped that the Spanish alliance would soon come to grief. Stucley had taken his time in travelling down from London to the West Country, and had lingered in Plymouth, possibly out of charity for a shattered man, or possibly because he understood that both the King and Privy Council would have tacitly welcomed a successful flight from justice.
3
At all events, he was now censured for his casual attitude. On receiving a particularly humiliating injunction from the Council to delay no longer, he subsequently took their warning to heart.
4

The ride up to London was therefore pressed as quickly as possible, via Sherborne and a meeting with Sir John Digby, the new owner of Ralegh's house. The party then travelled on to nearby Poyntington Manor, home of an old friend, Sir Edward Parham, the only suspect to have been acquitted on a charge of high treason in the trials that followed the Bye Plot.
5
At Salisbury, feigning sickness with Manoury's connivance, so as to gain a few days in which to think and write, Ralegh composed an 'Apologie for the ill successe of his enterprise to Guiana', building on the reasons for failure laid out in his letter from St Kitts. In particular, he excused his own shortcomings by highlighting the frustrations encountered by other, larger military expeditions, expounding all the while on the inadequacies of his men, 'the very skume of the world, Drunkards, Blasphemers, and such like'.
6
Subordinate officers had been little better. The 'Apologie' is very careful to answer every point of criticism made by the malcontents among his fleet captains.
7
Yet he maintained that he could have coped with every one of these challenges, had it not been for a further, fatal handicap: the nature of his commission had made it all but impossible to impose his authority on this 'rabble'. Every man in his fleet had known that he had not been pardoned.

There was no point in leaving anything out. Ralegh also advanced some familiar arguments, insisting again that Guiana was English territory, and that his actions in the face of Spanish aggression there had been entirely justified. Indeed he threw responsibility on King James: if Guiana did not belong to the English Crown, he argued, why had the King permitted him to set sail in the first place? A recent massacre of English traders was brought forward to support his contention that the peace with Spain, carefully nurtured over fourteen years, was nothing but a sham. Ralegh did not hesitate to put this particularly bluntly. 'To breake peace where their is noe peace', he wrote, 'is impossible.'
8
Shrewdly - perhaps too shrewdly for the purpose - Ralegh returned to the injustice that he felt he had suffered in 1603. Since the Spanish King so clearly wished to frustrate Ralegh's voyage, he had only to reveal to James the details of the supposed intrigue for which Ralegh had long since been sentenced to death.
9

The 'Apologie' is a strong polemic, and a robust self-justification, brimming over from time to time into abuse of erstwhile friends. Occasionally it echoes Ralegh's defence at Winchester, mocking the absurdities in some of the accusations laid against him and dwelling on the impossibility of a fair hearing: 'As good successe admitts of noe examination of errors soe the contrarie allowes of noe excuse howe reasonable or just soever.'
10
Yet it also inadvertently demonstrates some longstanding reservations about the existence of workable gold reserves in Guiana. If he had begun, across more than twenty years, to believe his own propaganda, deep in his heart he seemed to know that it had been propaganda, and that his recent voyage had been a gamble that had failed. It was one thing to find traces of gold washed up on a river flat, another to profit from a goldmine. 'What madnes', he asked, 'would have made me undertake this journey, but the assurance of the Myene; thereby to have done his majesty service, to have bettered my Countrie by the trade, and to have restored my wife and Children to the estate they had lost.
11
What indeed? The commitment of honour, the giving of his word had meant that his liberty was linked to the discovery of treasure. One other point is made repeatedly. Carefully piecing his argument together, Ralegh consulted his manuscript journal of the early part of the voyage.
12
While he dwelt on that record of events, and turned all the circumstances over in his mind, he came to the conclusion that he had been plagued with the worst kind of luck. How could any commander contend against the ill fortune that had followed him from the old world to the new, and back again? 'An unfortunate man I am.'
13
Ralegh writes with his usual vigour and clarity, reaching out to a wide, popular audience, and to posterity. He was, it seems, already looking beyond the immediate source of any mercy. Many of the issues that he raised were unlikely to reassure the King, and all too likely to annoy him.

The only other interpretation again points to political naiveté. A principal weakness of the 'Apologie' and other late appeals to James is that they were constructed on a simple premise: that once the King understood Ralegh's predicament, he would recognize honesty and reward him as a faithful counsellor. They assumed, in other words, a reparable bond between the two men. Ralegh, who misread so many of his contemporaries, once again misread the King; he overlooked the fact that James had given his word to Gondomar, and to Gondomar's master, that there would be no 'injury to the vassals or the territories' of Philip III.
14
Arriving at Salisbury on his summer progress,James had already heard many slanted accounts of the voyage from, among others, Roger North, one of those who deserted Ralegh at Nevis. Persuaded that Ralegh had all along planned an escape to France, aware that Englishmen in Spain were now vulnerable to reprisals from an incensed Spanish crown and infuriated by any suggestion that royal ambivalence had ruined the expedition, the King rejected the 'Apologie' and ordered Ralegh on to London. The final leg of a miserable journey was duly completed, early in August. Lodgings in the Tower were under preparation, by order of the Council, but as a concession to his recent illness Ralegh was first permitted to recuperate at Bess's house in Broad Street.
15
Even there, he was once again a prisoner of the state; a thorough inventory of every item found in his immediate possession was taken on 10 August.
16

James's abrupt dismissal brought home to Ralegh the danger of his situation. The 'Apologie' very soon began to circulate in manuscript, finding a receptive audience.
17
Ralegh was in need of friends, and had no reason to be choosy. Suddenly, a haven in France seemed both attractive, and also a long way away. At Brentford, while on his journey up to London, Ralegh had turned down an offer of help conveyed from the French resident agent, Le Clerc, assuring him that all would be well. But after considering his options these friendly words, and the solution that they offered, prompted him into action. Through Captain King, Ralegh attempted to hire a ship that would carry him down the Thames and across the Channel. The ship's captain revealed these plans to the authorities. Stucley was informed of the scheme, and, belatedly, learnt from the contrite doctor himself of Manoury's connivance in Ralegh's recent medical deceptions. He began to play games of his own, pretending friendship with the prisoner, and a willingness to assist in his escape. Still posing as a sympathetic confidant, Stucley accompanied Ralegh and King in a small vessel, sailing downstream from London. King had arranged a rendezvous with the ship off Gravesend, but just past Woolwich, Ralegh, seeking anonymity in a cloak and broad brimmed hat with a green ribbon, put ashore and was arrested. As John Chamberlain put it, Ralegh had been

bewrayed, or in a sort betrayed by Sir Lewes Stukeley (who had the charge of him) and brought backe by certain boatel that waited for him about Wolwich. Sir Lewes did nourish him in the humor with promise to assist and accompanie him, but yt was a fowle pas de clerc for an old cousener to be so cousened and overtaken.
18

The cozener cozened, yet again! Ralegh's former servant Edward Cottrell, and King's boatswain Hart, also put service to King James and the state above loyalty to Ralegh that day, but it was Stucley, with his pretence of friendship, with his Judas-like embraces at the denouement, with his avid acceptance of the contents of Ralegh's private bag when the prisoner was committed to the Tower, who was subsequently reviled for his 'betrayal'. Though Ralegh contented himself at the time with telling Stucley that 'these actions will not turn out to your credit', he attacked him vigorously thereafter, at every opportunity. Stucley's subsequent career suggested to contemporaries that God's hand was afterwards turned against him. The poor man endured an appropriately biblical fate: he was arrested and sentenced to death for clipping coin in 1619 and, after receiving a contemptuous, dismissive pardon from James, died lonely and insane on Lundy Island in 1620. Or so the story goes.
19

Stucley's own 'Appollogie', written soon after the escapade on the Thames, his insistence that he had simply done his duty to the Crown, and his impassioned Petition to the King, perhaps written for him by the Devonshire rector Leonell Sharpe, did nothing to change public opinion. As Chamberlain wrote, he was 'generally decried'.
20
This was all rather harsh. The rebuke that Stucley had received after Ralegh's first abortive escape attempt now left him little scope to help the prisoner, even if he had wanted to do so. Had Ralegh escaped, Stucley would have been blamed, and his career would have been destroyed. He was damned whatever he did. When Stucley writes of Ralegh in his Petition that 'an Angel of darknesse, did put on him the shape of an Angel of light at his departure [Ralegh's execution], to perform two Parts most cunningly; First, to poison the hearts of discontented people; Secondly, to blemish me in my good name, a poore instrument of the just desires of the State, with false imputations', the assessment rings true.
21
Without presuming to guess the impact of Divine judgement, it appears that a mixture of bad luck, improvidence and debt destroyed Stucley's career.
22

Events now began to gather momentum. On 14 August privy counsellors began to look closely at the case, taking evidence from Stucley and others.
23
Sensing this new threat, Ralegh appealed for support from George Villiers, by now Marquess of Buckingham. In a brief, impassioned defence of his intentions, he assured the favourite that he had only one ambition left, to return to Guiana, in a French ship if need be. There he would find the elusive mine, and so prove to the King that his 'late enterprise' had been 'grownded uppon a trewth'. The inventory of his immediate possessions, taken on arrival at the Tower, included a map of Guiana, a map of the Orinoco and three sea charts showing the West Indies. These were still among his most treasured possessions. Surely, he argued, James would draw a distinction between 'offences proceeding from a life havinge naturall impulsion without all ill intent, and those of an ill hart'.
24
Queen Anne, desperately sick with the dropsy that eventually killed her, also wrote to Buckingham, begging him to help save Ralegh's life. She also appealed to her husband for mercy.
25
But none of this did much good. The King hardly listened to his wife any more, while Buckingham believed that England's long-term interests were best served by an alliance with Spain. In comparison, Ralegh's life mattered little.