The Elizabethans (42 page)

By April 1584 Raleigh was able to send out an exploratory party, with two ships, captained by Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe. They came back from the coast of what is now North Carolina, and from the island of Roanoke, enraptured. English peas planted in the soil had grown fourteen inches in ten days. The Native Americans were ‘most gentle, loving and faithful, void of all guile and treason’. To prove it, Barlowe brought two of them with him to London: Manteo and Wanchese. Thomas Harriot set to work with them to see if he could write a grammar of the Algonquin language which they spoke. In order to transliterate their speech, Harriot devised a complicated thirty-six-digit alphabet. He was able to discover, from Manteo, that Roanoke Island was ruled by competing tribal chieftains. The most powerful of these, Wingina, had lately been wounded, which was why Barlowe had not met him on his reconnaissance. Most of Manteo’s talk appears to have been of the weapons and tactics of the other tribesmen, but Harriot was able to reconstruct from his conversations with the two Algonquin that Roanoke Island contained no suitable building materials. Hakluyt therefore urged upon the Queen that if they planned to construct a colonial settlement, they would need to transport ‘brickmakers, tilemakers, lymemakers, bricklayers, tillers, thackers (with reede, rushes, broome or strawe), sinkers of welles and finders of springs, quarrellers to digge, tile, rough masons, carpinters and lathmakers’. They would also need blacksmiths to ‘forge the irons of shovels’ and spade-makers that ‘may, out of the woods there, make spades like those of Devonshire’. Health would also be a major consideration. The whole enterprise could be destroyed by an epidemic of some as-yet-unknown disease, so it would be necessary to take doctors and what medical supplies then existed. (As always, when reading of medical preparations in history, the modern reader makes the mental note that they would have been more likely to survive without the quackery of the medical men.)

Raleigh flatteringly deemed that ‘Virginia’, in honour of the Virgin Queen, would be an appropriate name for the first English colony in the New World. He was rewarded with a knighthood for this pretty idea and she named him ‘Lord and Governor of Virginia’. Elizabeth could not spare him to make the voyage himself, so that expedition to colonise Roanoke Island was commanded by Raleigh’s cousin, the hot-tempered Sir Richard Grenville. (‘He was of so hard a complection,’ wrote one contemporary, ‘[that] he would carouse three or foure glasses of wine, and in a braverie take the glasses between his teeth and crash them in peeces and swallow them downe, so that oftentimes the blood ran out of his mouth.’)

The other commander, with more responsibility for the actual establishment of the colony, was Ralph Lane. In addition there was Thomas Cavendish, the second Englishman to circumnavigate the world, Thomas Harriot and John White, one of the best cartographers and illustrators of the age. When he came back to London, White was introduced by Hakluyt to Theodore DeBry, who made twenty-three engravings of White’s drawings, which one can now see in the British Museum. It is therefore possible for a wider readership to see what the Native American inhabitants of Roanoke looked like. There are pictures of the English arrival. We see the women and children. We see the men making boats, broiling fish, praying and dancing. We see their winter clothes, their hunting clothes, their religious regalia. We see a conjuror, a great lady and a great lord. Raleigh was not what a modern age calls a racist. After Manteo had been baptised, Raleigh appointed him – rather than one of the Europeans on the expedition – Lord of Roanoke, subject only to the
Weroanza
, or chieftain, Queen Elizabeth.
¹¹

The attempt to settle Roanoke was not a success. When Drake came up the coast in 1586, he found that the surviving English settlers wanted to leave
en masse
. As they departed, ‘the weather was so boisterous, and the pinnaces so often on ground, that the most of all we had, with all our Cardes, Bookes and writings, were by the Saylers cast over boord, the greater number of the Fleete being much aggrieved with their long and dangerous abode in that miserable road,’ as Lane put it in Hakluyt’s
Principall Voyages
.

But the historian A.L. Rowse was right – in his Trevelyan Lectures at Cambridge in 1958, entitled
The Elizabethans and America
– to stress the importance of the Roanoke expedition in the larger history. The colonists made many mistakes, but they learned from them. They came back to England with an enriched knowledge of the flora, fauna and weather conditions; and they learned of the Algonqin way of life. ‘We can see the influence of that first experience, as well as some lessons that should have been learned and were not, through all the subsequent attempts until at last permanent settlement was effected at Jamestown in 1607, and even beyond.’
¹²

Raleigh’s career was marked by triumph and disaster. In the reign of James I he was falsely accused of treason and condemned to death – a sentence that was commuted to long imprisonment in the Tower, where he wrote his patchy, but inspired
History of the World
. Upon his release he was allowed by the King to lead the voyage to Orinoco, which had obsessed him for half a lifetime. During the voyage he lost his son, and his fleet, but he broke the terms by which he had been released by attacking a Spanish town, and he perished on the block – beheaded at Whitehall on the insistence of the Spanish Ambassador in 1618.

Many an adventure had taken place before then. His imprisonment in the Tower by James I was not his first visit. In 1592 the beloved courtier of Elizabeth committed the great sin of falling in love with Elizabeth Throckmorton, one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting. Just before he died, twenty-six years later, Raleigh said to Bess his wife, ‘I chose you, and I loved you in my happiest times.’

19

The Scottish Queen

THAT SUMMER, OF
1586, while Philip Sidney was yet alive and trying to control his angry, sick, unpaid troops garrisoned in Flushing; and while the dome of St Peter’s in Rome was at last completed, and the new Pope Sixtus V was offering Sidney’s godfather, King Philip II, two million gold ducats to invade England; and while London audiences were being thrilled by Thomas Kyd’s
Spanish Tragedy
; and while the thirty-four-year-old Walter Raleigh was returning to England with the first cargo of tobacco, and Sir Thomas Harriot was bringing Europe’s first potatoes across the Atlantic; while Camden published his
Britannia
and the religious martyr Margaret Clitherow was being crushed to death in York; while El Greco was dying at Badajoz – the park at Chartley Manor, in the county of Stafford, was as peaceful in appearance as any corner of rural England when the trees are in full leaf and the deer have finished breeding.

Chartley is a beautiful place in the understated mode of Staffordshire. The manor house, which burned down in 1847, must have been of some splendour. It was there in 1575, after the extravagances of Leicester’s entertainments at Kenilworth, that the Queen and her court had moved on to enjoy the hospitality of the beautiful Lettice, Countess of Essex. Elizabeth had not, during that visit, realised perhaps, that Lettice and Leicester were lovers. And it was at Chartley that Philip Sidney had first glimpsed Essex’s thirteen-year-old sister Penelope Devereux, the Stella of his sonnet-sequence. Much had happened since then. Lettice and Leicester had married. Chartley had been inherited by her son, the young Earl of Essex.

In the high summer of 1586, however, Chartley saw no house-parties, no sonneteers, no pageants, no young lovers. It had become in effect a prison for the Scottish queen. Her custodian was no longer the sympathetic Earl of Shrewsbury, but a former English Ambassador to Paris, Sir Amyas Paulet. He was in all senses a Puritan. (In the chapel at Chartley he held Protestant Bible services rather than use the authorised liturgy of the Church.
¹
) He made no secret of his contempt for Mary Stuart, whose custody he undertook at the hated Tutbury in January 1585. Under instruction from Walsingham, he was a much stricter guardian than Shrewsbury had been. None of the Queen’s entourage were allowed to leave Tutbury Castle without military escort. He refused to allow her to hang the royal cloth of state over her chair. He wore his hat in her presence and refused to treat her as a royal personage. Her outdoor exercise was severely curtailed and she became ill. Paulet tried to burn a packet sent to Mary from London full of ‘abominable trash’ – rosaries and pictures marked in silk with the words
Agnus Dei
. He objected to her giving alms to the poor of Tutbury on Maundy Thursday.

The move to Chartley was inspired by considerations of security. The house was moated. Once immured there, Queen Mary was even more restricted than she had been at Tutbury, but at least the house was not malodorous and the prospects were beautiful. And as that high summer ripened, the uncongenial Sir Amyas Paulet allowed her exercise. Someone had sent her a greyhound from Scotland, and it was added to the lapdog entourage of that dog-loving lady. Perhaps it was with a thought of giving this creature some exercise that Sir Amyas permitted the Scottish queen to ride out with him through the park at Chartley on 11 August. They were going to join a buck-hunt at the nearby estate of Tixall on the banks of the Trent. The tall queen was arrayed in a new suit of riding clothes and her mood, which had been fretful most of the summer, was light. She rode faster than Paulet, but paused on her horse to allow him to catch her up. At this point they saw horsemen galloping towards them.

Their arrival perhaps explained the gaiety of Queen Mary’s demeanour. Throughout her long life of imprisonment Mary had known of plots to place her on the throne of England, to assassinate Elizabeth and bring the English Church once more into communion with the Bishop of Rome. In the previous months she had been privy to the latest such hare-brained scheme in which Anthony Babington, a rich young gentleman from Dethick in Derbyshire (he had been the Earl of Shrewsbury’s page when Queen Mary first arrived in Sheffield), offered to kill Queen Elizabeth and, with six other associates, murder Cecil, Walsingham, Hunsdon and Sir Francis Knollys. With Leicester and a substantial representation of Protestants now in the Low Countries, it was deemed by the conspirators a propitious moment to bring about the longed-for Catholic counter-revolution. And hence Queen Mary’s smiles as she waited for Sir Amyas Paulet to catch her up on their ride. The strangers who galloped towards them had not, however, ridden hard from London to tell Mary that she had been proclaimed Queen of England by popular acclamation. Sir Amyas knew their business. The leader of the troop was Sir Thomas Gorges. In his splendid bright-green serge, luminously embroidered,
²
Sir Thomas could have been playing a symbol of summer in a pageant. But he was one of Queen Elizabeth’s trusted courtiers. (Trusted, that is, except when he went through that dangerous, familiar courtier’s obstacle-course, marriage without the Queen’s knowledge or consent. His bride, also a courtier, was the immensely wealthy and beautiful young Marchioness of Northampton, a Swedish noblewoman born Helena Henriksson. Sir Thomas Gorges – one of the richest men in Wiltshire and buried in Salisbury Cathedral when full of years – was briefly English ambassador to the Swedish court.
³
) As soon as Queen Mary saw Gorges, she must have known that here was no romantic Catholic recusant come to pay homage. Gorges, now aged fifty was an incarnation of the court and the Protestant establishment. In a loud voice he said, ‘Madame, the Queen my mistress finds it very strange that you, contrary to the pact and engagement made between you, should have conspired against her and her State, a thing which she could not have believed had she not seen proofs of it with her own eyes and known it for certain.’

Mary turned aside and, flustered, began to protest her innocence, but Sir Thomas was explaining that her servants were now to be taken away from her and she would be conducted at once to Tixall.

The Babington Plot was a real one, but what none of the conspirators realised was that Walsingham had known about it from the beginning, and that the consummate spy-master had decided to use it as a way of finally entrapping the Scottish queen. Letters had come in and out of Chartley concealed in beer barrels. They now had written proof that Mary was colluding with the would-be murderers of the Queen of England.

The conspirators were publically executed in the manner that gave the greatest delight to the crowds. As Camden recorded, ‘They were all cut down, their privities were cut off, bowelled alive and seeing and quartered.’ No wonder Anthony Babington groaned, ‘
Parce mihi, domine Jesu
(Spare me, Lord Jesus)’
⁴
as these barbarities were perpetrated.

The fate of the Scottish queen, who lay at the heart of the conspirators’ aspirations, was in some senses more delicate. As far as Walsingham, Cecil and Parliament were concerned, the matter was simple: she must die. But she was the deposed sovereign of a foreign state, not an English subject. Her execution would have far-reaching international consequences. It could be seen as justifying the foreign invasion that the Pope had already urged; as providing an incentive for the Armada that Philip II was already trying to assemble. And there was the deep complexity of Queen Elizabeth’s attitude.

‘Amyas,’ she wrote:

my most faithful and careful servant, God reward thee treblefold in three double for thy most troublesome charge so well discharged. If you knew, my Amyas, how kindly, besides dutifully, my grateful heart accepteth and praiseth your spotless actions, your wise orders and safe regards, performed in so dangerous and crafty a charge, it would ease your travails and rejoice your heart. In which I charge you to carry this most just thought, that I cannot balance in any weight of my judgement the values that I prize you at, and suppose no treasure to countervail such a faith; and shall condemn myself in that fault, which yet I never committed, if I reward not such deserts. Yea, let me lack what I most need. If I acknowledge not such a merit with a reward
Non omnibus est datum
. Let your wicked murderess know, how with hearty sorrow her vile deserts compelleth these orders; and bid her from me ask God forgiveness for her treacherous dealing towards the saviour of her life many a year, to the intolerable peril of her own; and yet not contented with so many forgivenesses, must fall again so horribly, for passing a woman’s thought, much less a prince’s; and instead of excusing, whereof not one can serve, it being so plainly confessed by the authors of my guiltless death, let repentance take place; and let not the fiend possess her, so as her better part be lost, which I pray, with hands lifted up to Him that may both save and spill.