E
arly one October
morning in 1618, a
prisoner walked from
the Gatehouse gaol
in Westminster to
a scaffold in Old
Palace Yard. Sir
Wa lter R a leg h
had embarked
on his last journey. He faced his
death with courage, delivering
a speech of 45 minutes in which he
paced to and fro, using the platform
as a stage, stirring onlookers to a high
pitch of religious fervour. Ralegh
shared a joke with the executioner:
touching the axe he laughed that here was
a cure for every disease, a “sharp medicine”.
When the nervous headsman did not
proceed at their prearranged signal, Ralegh- his neck on the block – demanded an end:
“What do you fear?” he cried. “Strike, man!”
His head was severed at the second blow. The
last hero and favourite of the Elizabethan
age was dead. He was 64 years old.
How had it come to this? The path to the
scaffold was long, and must be followed
across several decades. In his prime, during
the 1580s, Sir Walter Ralegh appeared the
epitome of the self-made man. The fourth
son of a Devonshire gentleman, he had
exploited looks, hard work and good luck to
become one of the most influential men at
the court of Queen Elizabeth I.
Ralegh was handsome, with dark features
and, as the 17th-century biographer John
Aubrey described it, a beard that curled up
naturally. Elizabeth, some said, took him
for “a kind of oracle”. Recognising the
man’s energy and local knowledge, she
groomed him for high office in Devon and
Cornwall, counties where independent
views in religion and politics combined
with an exposed coastline, vulnerable to
attacks from the queen’s enemy, Spain.
Hilliard painted Ralegh in his prime, and
legends grew around this gorgeous,
larger-than-life figure. Half a century after
Ralegh’s death, Thomas Fuller recorded
how Sir Walter sacrificed his cloak so that
the queen might walk across a “plashy
place” at Greenwich. Though the tale is
probably mythical, it captures the oppor-
tunism of a courtier, fashioning a gesture
that still prompts the modern gallant to
follow suit. Stephen Pound, for example,
laid his coat across a puddle for Hazel
Blears during the Labour party’s deputy
leadership campaign in 2007.
By his mid-thirties, Ralegh was being
spoken of as a privy counsellor, one of the
queen’s closest political advisors. Lord
lieutenant of Cornwall, he served as
a member of parliament for Devon. He was
showered with rewards, and survived the
rise of Elizabeth’s newest favourite, the
handsome young Earl of Essex, to remain
at the heart of court.Arrogant and ambitious
But though many people admired Ralegh,
few liked him. He was arrogant and
ambitious, blind to his own weaknesses.
Able courtier he may have been, but Ralegh
was no politician. He lacked discretion and
subtlety, was too quick to say and write the
first thing that came into his head, and
seldom noticed that there were other valid
points of view.
Moreover, a proud self-made man lacks
friends when things go wrong – and things
did begin to go wrong, as the luck he had
once enjoyed deserted him. The queen was
infuriated by his clandestine marriage to
one of her personal attendants, BessThough many
people admired
Ralegh, few liked
him. He was
arrogant and
ambitious, blind to
his own weaknesses
Throckmorton, in 1591, but the clever
politician would have appeased Elizabeth’s
anger and retained her confidence.
Instead, Ralegh and Bess concealed
their marriage and the pregnancy that
had prompted it, and when their
secrets were discovered they
engaged in gestures of contrition
that, in their theatrical insincerity,
infuriated the queen. Husband and
wife were punished by imprison-
ment in the Tower of London.
Confinement was brief, but
Elizabeth’s resentment endured. The
middle-aged man never again enjoyed
her full trust. Now he had to work hard
to retain some powerful friends with
better connections and deeper pockets –
men such as the Earl of Northumberland
and Henry, Lord Cobham. Their surviving
papers shed light on Ralegh’s career.
His fortunes recovered somewhat during
the later 1590s. Ralegh explored Guiana (a
region of South America largely in what’s
now Venezuela) in 1595, fought gallantly at
the sacking of Cádiz in 1596, and was one of
few to emerge with credit from the so-called
Islands Voyage of 1597, an English expedi-
tion to capture the treasure fleet carrying
silver back to Spain from mines in America.
By Elizabeth’s death in 1603 he was again be-
ing considered as a privy counsellor, and the
queen allowed him to exercise his captaincy
of the guard, a position of trust that offered
access to the monarch. But his “damnable
pride”, as Aubrey describes it, ensured that
he remained unpopular with ordinary
people. The libels of the period mock him:
“Ralegh doth time bestride;
He sits twixt wind and tide,
Yet up hill he cannot ride,
For all his bloody pride.”
Higher up the social scale, one of the Earl
of Essex’s supporters, Sir Josceline Percy,
drew up a facetious will in 1601. In one
unsubtle bequest, his contempt is obvious:
“Item I do give my buttocks to Sir Walter
Ralegh and the pox go with them.”
Ralegh lacked political acumen and –
fatally, as it transpired – misread the new
monarch. James VI of Scotland, who
succeeded to the English throne as James I,
was determined to end the expensive war
with Spain, but Ralegh advocated the
continuation of hostilities and even wrote a
tract opposing any peace treaty. His enemies
at court – notably Henry Howard, the future
Earl of Northampton – poisoned the king’s
mind against him, while former friends such
the influential secretary of state Sir Robert
Cecil refused to offer their support.
When Ralegh first met the king at
Burghley House, James, through a terrible GETTY^ IMAGESHostages to fortune
Sir Walter Ralegh imprisons Spaniards
during his 1595 expedition to Guiana
in search of Eldorado, in this engraving
by Theodor de BryElizabethans and the world / Walter Ralegh