Elizabethan England's Renaissance man

BIOGRAPHY: HIRAM MORGANreviews Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life and LegendBy Mark Nicholls and Penry Williams, Continuum Press, 378pp. £25

MENTION OF Sir Walter Raleigh always brings to mind Seamus Heaney's marvellously subversive Ocean's Love to Ireland, about the conquering Devonian ravishing a young Irish girl against a tree accompanied by her breathless pants of "Sweesir, Swatter! Sweesir, Swatter!". The source of this is an incident in Aubrey's Brief Liveswhere Sir Walter undoes not Ireland but his own career by impregnating the queen's handmaiden.

Raleigh (1554-1618) wrote poetry, fought the Irish, massacred papists, built houses, launched colonial ventures, went privateering, burned Cadiz, published history and conducted chemical experiments. Sir Walter proved an accomplished all-rounder at everything except painting. But such Renaissance men were not natural products of the period, and this impoverished younger son from the English West Country certainly wasn’t.

In this book two of Britain’s finest academic historians have produced a comprehensive and nuanced biography of the iconic Elizabethan.Raleigh was made by his access to power as a courtier of Queen Elizabeth I. It wasn’t throwing his cloak over a puddle for her that effected the critical introduction (the cloak incident never happened, and is dispensed with here, along with the stories about potatoes and tobacco). Instead, it was carrying dispatches from the lord deputy, Grey, in Ireland that brought him to the queen’s attention.

Thereafter this good-looking macho man, with his witty repartee and classical schooling, had everything going for him. In quick succession the new favourite received a house on the Thames, lucrative licences in the wine and cloth trades, an estate in his native county, a host of local offices, the largest grant by far of the confiscated Desmond lands divvied up in the Munster plantation, the rights to colonise North America, and, symbolic of his closeness to her, captaincy of the queen’s guard. The favourite’s need to stay near the court explains why he employed agents to develop his Irish lands and used relatives and associates in the abortive attempt to establish a colony in Virginia.

In 1592 Raleigh’s secret marriage to Bess Throckmorton landed both the couple and their short-lived firstborn in the Tower of London. Even his best poetry could not assuage the queen.

With many of her favours to him withdrawn, Raleigh was heavily in debt at the time of his release. His career was henceforth, in contemporary parlance, a tennis ball of fortune. He literally had to get back on the boat, making his first voyage to Guyana in search of El Dorado in 1595. Courageous leadership at Cadiz the following year buoyed up his career, but by now he had a younger rival in the earl of Essex, who, as the new royal favourite, claimed the glory of victory there. In 1598 revolt in Munster sent his Irish investments up in smoke and another opportunist, Richard Boyle, was the beneficiary of the fire sale.

Raleigh, who had not regained the queen’s full confidence, was never going to please the monarch who followed her, James I. The new king had him sent back to the Tower for plotting against the succession. Raleigh’s unpopularity had enabled James to move against him. There were accusations of atheism, allegations of a disreputable part in the downfall of the crowd-pleasing Essex, and, most of all, claims about his ruthless exploitation of royal monopolies during the hard-hit war years. But public opinion, a new factor in history, was now to come to his rescue. The treason charges against Raleigh were based on the retracted confession of a single witness, and at a state trial, botched by the crown prosecution, he deftly played the role of the Englishman denied his traditional rights at law. He was found guilty, but the king could not execute him.

The next 13 years in the Tower weren't lost though. Raleigh built a new reputation as a God-fearing parliamentarian, circulating criticisms of the increasingly absolutist nature of government and publishing a History of the World(1614), which took its cue from the Bible and emphasised God's providence. Meanwhile, he gained extra brownie points by sending out cordials and distillations to sick and dying aristos and royals.

He was eventually released to make one last desperate attempt to find El Dorado. His voyage, which attracted many investors owing to his earlier overblown best-seller, The Discoverie of Guiana, proved a disaster. His eldest son was killed attacking a Spanish fort, no fabled gold mine was discovered, and his crew mutinied. Raleigh returned a broken man and the king, under diplomatic pressure from Spain, was forced to proceed with his execution.

By the time he went to the scaffold Raleigh had regained his composure. Unlike condemned traitors in the past, he showed no repentance, dying proud and defiant. Public opinion had transformed an upstart courtier and Renaissance freethinker into a popular martyr in a patriotic, Protestant struggle against papist-inspired tyranny.

HIRAM MORGANteaches history at University College Cork. He is currently writing the biography of Hugh O'Neill, earl of Tyrone