BOOKS
Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life and Legend
by Mark Nicholls and Penry Williams
(Continuum, February 2011)
The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh:
A Historical Edition by Michael Rudick
(ed) (MRTS, 1999)DISCOVER MOREDr Mark Nicholls teaches history at St John’s
College, Cambridge. His books include A History
of the Modern British Isles, 1529–1603: The Two
Kingdoms (Blackwell, 1999)enough to pay off their critics. Though many
volunteers and investors were infected with
gold fever, more sober voices questioned the
viability of the enterprise. “God speed him,”
Chamberlain wrote at Ralegh’s departure for
Guiana in 1617, “and send him a better
voyage than I can hope for.”
Those prayers went unanswered. Ralegh
contracted fever during an arduous Atlantic
crossing and was too sick to accompany his
forces up the Orinoco river to the site of the
supposed mine. The expedition, led instead
by his lieutenant Lawrence Keymis, found
no silver – but did ransack the Spanish
settlement at San Thomé, during which
attack Ralegh’s eldest son, Wat, was killed.
When the troops straggled back to the
river’s mouth, Ralegh’s anger drove
Keymis to suicide, while the disheartened
volunteers refused to search further.
Ralegh returned home a virtual prisoner
of a mutinous crew. “My brains are
broken,” he wrote to Bess, and for once
he did not exaggerate.Diplomatic incident
This left James with the problem of what
to do with his failed treasure-seeker. A
diplomatic incident loomed: Philip III of
Spain, furious at the attack on San Thomé,
called for Ralegh’s execution. Yet many
in England were by now uneasy about
Catholic ambitions in Europe, and wanted
to give no comfort to Spain.Ralegh’s fate turned on James’s hostility.
He had been a thorn in the king’s side for too
long, and the more James’s investigators
peered into Ralegh’s recent plans and
negotiations, the more it seemed that he had
operated as an agent of France, poisoning
the Anglo-Spanish peace. There was enough
truth in this picture to turn James away
from clemency. Despite the principled
objections of lawyers and judges, uneasy at
the thought of executing a man on a
sentence passed 15 years earlier, the king got
his way. Ralegh went to the scaffold.
In 1618, as in 1603, there is evidence to
suggest that Ralegh was, technically, guilty
as charged. The irony is that on both
occasions inept management of proceedings
generated sympathy for the prisoner that
endured after death. James could not escapethe personal. In executing an elderly man,
with so little respect for the mechanisms of
justice, he confirmed suspicions expressed
in Ralegh’s own writings that kings were
perverted by the power they wielded.
Alive, Ralegh could, as the late historian
AL Rowse once suggested, be a bore about
himself. Dead, and silent, the story of his
life gathered colour: legends of tobacco,
potatoes, cloaks and amorous adventures
clustered around him. A dissident of the
1610s was shaped to later political needs.
Several witnesses to Ralegh’s execution –
John Pym, John Eliot and John Hampden- were among the parliamentary opponents
of Charles I two decades later. In the words
of the historian GM Trevelyan, Ralegh’s
ghost “pursued the House of Stuart to the
scaffold”. It has harried the memory of
James I ever since.
Ralegh awaiting execution in Old Palace
Yard, Whitehall, October 1618. He
delivered a speech of 45 minutes
before placing his neck on the blockIn the words of
the historian
GM Trevelyan,
Ralegh’s ghost
“pursued the
House of Stuart
to the scaffold”
MARYEVANS^Elizabethans and the world / Walter Ralegh