Death of the Fox: a novel about Ralegh

by George Garrett

  —Her Court cost her, thus the nation, only one third what it had cost Queen Mary. She had an annual allowance of forty thousand pounds for the Court at the beginning of her reign. Half a century later, though prices had trebled and troubles had multiplied like hares, she refused to ask for more allowance for the Court.

  —She would summon Parliament for a subsidy she believed would be granted in the interest of all, but not in the matter of her own maintenance or the expenses of the Court.

  —She must have money of her own, that was clear enough. Though she insisted upon every economy, her demands were impossible to satisfy without a corresponding reduction of the size and the functions of the Court. Which she would not allow.

  —Consider she must maintain her royal palaces and other royal residences in good order. She built no new ones—surprising in such an age of building—but she must preserve what had been given to her. And clustered around each of these palaces was its own community, its life deriving from the presence of the palace. She must not stint, then, or permit the environs to wither away. Must hold residence in each and all—some were favorites, some housed bitter memories. With Council and Court, she had a household of almost two thousand, not counting servants and hangbys. Who must be fed at groaning tables, in ostentatious abundance.

  —Her menus were joyous. Even the most fastidious strangers, who never failed to mutter at our English cooking, admitted that the foods at Court were a marvel. Her table was laid to the sound of trumpets. Then, dish by dish, some lucky yeoman of the Guard tasting all for her safety’s sake. But she seldom ate in public. This ceremony was for her Court. She dined most simply in her chambers.

  —Servants of high and low degrees must be paid for their services.

  —Though she kept a sharp eye on accounts, she turned away from corruption of her servants, high and low, thus permitting, indeed encouraging, them to fatten meager earnings with gifts and bribes, according to degree and need. Judging them by work accomplished, not by means. And expecting some share of their wealth to come to her, directly or indirectly. Finally knowing that because all were guilty, all could be dispensed with, should that become expedient.

  —If great men sold middling offices, her concern was that the affairs of bought offices should be executed with loyal dispatch. If not, another buyer could always be found. There are always more seekers of office than offices. She transmuted ambitious men, turning their weakness to strength. There would always be factions. Nothing could change that. But by setting each of these men on his own, able to reward and punish, able to reap for himself, she could prevent even those of the same faction and persuasion from joining too closely together. Thus men like Burghley, Walsingham, Knollys, Sir Nicholas Bacon, Leicester, etc., though all might be strong Protestants and inclined to favor the Puritans above the bishops of her church, still they could seldom effect any unity of purpose; each being a man of strong character, each ambitious beyond ordinary hopes and appetites. So long as their ambitions were neither entirely frustrated nor satisfied, she could play them like chessmen.

  —She wrangled with merchants for bargains and kept expenses modest by means of her purveyors, hated like vermin by many, but less hated than higher taxes would have been.

  —Unable to gain a bargain for wines, she outraged native vintners by buying wines more cheaply abroad. The vintners soon came around. Unable to supply the Court with the rivers of beer it consumed, she permitted the show of a Royal Brewery being built at Whitehall. The brewers saw the light.

  —She invested in seafaring ventures, modestly so as to reduce her risk; but, for the sake of the Queen’s support, which ventures, without her support, might have been named piracy, she received a queen’s share of any profits.

  —Item: the Madre de Dios, taken by Ralegh’s men as a prize, yielded her eighty thousand pounds return on an investment of eighteen hundred pounds and the loan of two old ships.

  —Her custom of receiving and carefully cataloguing New Year’s gifts grew to be a practical kind of annual subsidy.

  —Her father had been famous for his entertainments. So was the Queen, but she preferred to be entertained. Ambitious men were willing to oblige her. And nothing will equal the splendor of those masques and revels, dances and performances of plays, tournaments and celebrations. For which she furnished the royal setting, the Court, and herself.

  —More often than any prince in memory, she would go forth to grace the entertainments of the Inns of Court or, carried upon a litter by her knights, to the wedding festivities of the daughter or son of some servant or friend. She was godmother to scores of the children of the gentry. In all these appearances she and the Court were seen by the populace. A very inexpensive thing to do and for good return.

  —She made her royal presence felt on all the native holidays and festivals, not only the feast days of the church, but also the old English May games, Midsummer Watch and so forth, adding her Accession Day, and later, on St. Elizabeth’s Day, a festival to honor the defeat of the Spanish Armada.

  —It is true that the masques of King James are more surprising in many ways. They are written by the finest of our poets, though they scarcely need the poetry of words, having the poetry of the designs, the scenes, and machinery of England’s new Merlin, Inigo Jones. He raises a curtain to such a glory of painted scenes, lit by hundreds of tiny glass lamps in the Italian fashion, as must be seen to be imagined. And there are cloud machines, wave machines, aerial devices, fountains and costumes for the masquers as never were seen in the last age. Some costumes, worn by both ladies and gentlemen, as the late Queen would never have permitted except in a painting or an arras. But the cost of the King’s marvels outweighs their grandeur. The Queen was much stronger for imagination, for richness of words to work the magic. Her banquet house at Whitehall was a tentative thing, propped up, repaired, useful for her reign and not much longer. Now the King must have the ingenious Mr. Jones to build him a new one of stone, costly as a royal palace.

  —And now the anti-masque is all the fashion since the King favors the drollery of satyrs and mermaids, bawds and furies, wild men, baboons, the magpie, crow and kite. Now a gentleman does better to portray an ass or a hog and a fine lady to be all feathers to her navel and all naked flesh above, if either would gain the applause of the King. The old virtues slowly vanish from the masque. And with them the spirit.

  —Queen Elizabeth built no palaces, no churches, no forts; though after the Armada with the money of a grateful—and frightened—Parliament, she shored up and repaired some old fortifications against a second coming of Spaniards. Even the spire of St. Paul’s was not restored.

  —But she disposed of old lands and houses freely to her favorites. For one price or another. By the fashion and example set early in her reign, these lands were put to work, and old places refurbished to fit new styles. And they were well scattered across the counties. Whether she ever visited them or not, they must be prepared for her visit. So, large or small, grand or modest, the houses of the favored must be built not only to appear palatial, but, if need be, to serve as palaces for her. Each with its orderly arrangement of presence chamber, privy chamber, coffer chamber, etc.

  —Again, in return for the income of the lands and the estates, a man must spend a fortune on keeping a great house. This leaving him, still, not entirely free of necessity. Not too satisfied or too comfortable.

  —This device, more valuable and cheaper than many showy palaces of her own, brought to the English land a bright and bold appearance of grandeur and prosperity; the great who owned them becoming like ambassadors to the counties. Required to spend freely, then out of necessity to develop and make use of lands and holdings or else become poor. And great houses became centers for charity, as the palaces were and castles had been. Except that these were not built for defense like the castles. Were, rather, indefensible. Which, besides advantage to herself, brought a sense, by appearance, of peace to the land. For who would build a grand palace with no walls�
��except windows—if he feared danger?

  —Never mind that the dangers were real enough and were most feared by the very men who brought the scenery of peace and prosperity to the land. Allow, though, that whether these men began to believe the illusions they lived in or not, they were thereafter in self-interest required to protect those illusions from crumbling.

  —All of which leads, as if by a winding stair, to the subject of her favorites.…

  —Though she could not shower gold upon many, she could reward a few grandly. These in turn—especially if young and ambitious—were compelled to spend also, to distribute wealth, to build up a following, to gain support. They must make a show of affluence commensurate with her favor. For most had nothing else except the favor of the Queen. This being true, they never doubted where their wealth and power came from. They must be both loyal and grateful out of necessity. See how she shared thereby her own condition with them. Likewise all who came to serve the favored man, to cling to his cloak, knew the origin of his fortune and the conditions of it. So a man favored by the Queen became the merchant of her favors. The Queen, not the favorite, was credited with largesse. Therefore—and all save foolish Essex knew this—their own allies, servants, and supporters were beholden first of all to her. Loyalty to the patron existed only so long as he remained in favor. A favorite’s disgrace could empty his house overnight.

  —Moreover, she could be credited far beyond any accounting of her generosity. For there were few who were favored in Court who did not wish to seem more so. Affairs of a man who seemed to be in favor could prosper. The man whose affairs prospered because he was presumed to be in favor would, by this token, owe his additional prosperity to the Queen. For it was inspired by her. Through these she gained credit for generosity far exceeding the truth. An occasional great giving, for all the world to marvel at, to see and envy, and this coupled with a boon here and a bone there, together with some bits and pieces of possibility, these gestures made a little money go a long way in her Court.

  —She, herself, was never loath to accept gifts or service from almost anyone of the Court or outside it, always reserving the right to examine each suit upon its merits. If they chose to see her as corruptible, conceiving her according to themselves, they could attribute injustice, when they failed to achieve their ends, to the unreasonable whims of a woman. For which she could hardly be blamed. When they succeeded, perhaps because the cause was just or their aims reasonable, they could attribute success to their own cleverness.

  —So much to be done with so little. England was ringed with enemies, hard pressed, almost powerless when she came to the throne. She could not build military power. She might have increased her safety somewhat, but at the risk of ruining the kingdom. And, doing so, she would have lost the favor of the people, who cannot conceive of enemies until they appear in armor at the gates. Instead of armies she created a show of peace and plenty, illusory but confident; permitting thereby, within England at least and for a time, peace and prosperity to bloom like flowers in a glass house. Her people had been saddened and dazed by the inexplicable turns of Fortune. In that final season of the Tudors, which ought to have been a leafless winter, she made an artificial springtime out of thin air.

  —From those who served her the Queen demanded the outward and visible signs of love and loyalty. She insisted upon ceremony and flattery, as a sign of sane and reasonable behavior. Her favorites must be ardent in professions of love and loyalty; not because she was gulled, but because it was proper and becoming. It is said that a scholar may be gulled three times. The Queen, like a soldier, could be gulled only once.

  —From the first of her reign the Queen had her favorites, cast in no single mold, having not much in common with each other except that each was a remarkable man. Placed in one chamber, each given simultaneous youth, health, and vigor, restored to the condition which first captured her attention, they would appear to contradict one another. Ciphers in an old account book, balanced once and discarded, they cancel each other out, becoming, in sum and balance, nothing at all.

  —It seems possible that she imagined them and that they existed only there, in the Queen’s imagination.

  —Thus any one of them could be chosen as a type for all.

  —Why not Ralegh? He shows the qualities of contradiction she favored. And he came to favor neither at the beginning nor the end of the reign. He could never be so close to her as Leicester, never so pure and abstract in distance as Leicester’s stepson—Essex.

  —He was not as the braggart captain would have him. Nor as he seems now—an old man, sick and tired, in disgrace and danger, a gray shadow of himself. We must take him as he was, in that lost time, when he was in and out of the Court, from his beginnings; seeking by imagination to see what she saw, what pleased her, what allowed her to turn to him with favor.

  —I cannot, with the confidence of that captain, spitting out his small wisdom as if it were the core and seeds of the Original apple, speak of anything except the world I know and what was known of Ralegh there. I do not allow myself the simplicity of imagining that this or that thing, which may or may not have happened, irrevocably marked his soul like an executioner’s branding iron. I know this, though. That for all its easy shining, the Court is as fierce a field to test the mettle of a man, to give him his share of wounds and blessings, as any other.

  —True, Ralegh came, like others beyond counting, to seek a place at Court. True, he managed in due time to catch her eye. And when she looked at him, she could read in him qualities she favored. He was valiant, intelligent, diverting, proud, flawed, and enigmatic. He was still young enough, singularly handsome, correct in fashion and manners. And, perhaps, she could appreciate a lonely reticence which was in harmony with her own.

  —His beginning was by rote. For it has been said by some wag that a man must come to Court like Job and then abide there like Ulysses. Which, in part, is Ralegh’s story.

  —He came first to Court in the seventies. Another young man, a soldier back from a foreign war. One who had passed through the polishing of Lyon’s Inn of Chancery and the Middle Temple.

  —At Middle Temple he was among friends and kin, even if he lacked means beyond what little of a much divided estate might be his and whatever he might have scrounged and looted while playing soldier in sunny Languedoc.

  —And, as well, within his little world of Devon, means or no, he came from an honorable family, whose honor went back to times before the Conquest. Whose distinction, however, was a matter of cloudy memory. The truth for him being that he was the youngest son of Walter Ralegh of Fardel, youngest son by the third wife. His mother was of some distinction. She was Elizabeth Champernoun, daughter of Sir Philip Champernoun and the widow of a man of note in those parts, Otho Gilbert. By whom she had borne three sons, Ralegh’s half brothers, Adrian, John, and Humphrey Gilbert. There is also an older brother with the Ralegh name—Carew.

  He was last in a family of honorable name and slight means. His best inheritance, his hope, lay in blood and kinship. For by blood and marriages he was kin to good Westcountry names—Carew, Granville, Tremayne, Courtenay, Saintleger, Russell, Drake, of course the Champernouns and Gilbert, and others.

  —There was small chance in the Court for such a man. Except for having some good kin in Devon, he was on his own to stand or to fall. He had his looks, his wits, his courage, and such shows of appearance as he could beg, borrow, or steal to give him a beginning. Further, he wore the yoke of pride. Pride which could mean nothing to most young men on the edges of the Court, his satirical, cynical, urgently ambitious peers. Others at the center, including the Queen herself, might have knowledge or recollection of his name and kin. And, true enough, the Gilberts were a little above the common pit and press of groundlings. But they could not be expected to raise him up much. At Court a man must look to his own advancement first.

  —Walter Ralegh, of Hayes Barton in the parish of East Budleigh, Devonshire, had no advantage over an army of youn
g men coming to the Court.

  —Not much is known or remembered of those first fruitless years, and no wonder. For no one takes notice of a new man until after he has come to some good or grief. He must have done the usual things. For certain he wrote verses, and in 1576 some hard satirical lines of his were published to recommend George Gascoigne’s The Steele Glass. Which is enough to speculate upon.

  —There was a friendship on several grounds. Gascoigne, a few years younger than Ralegh, was a soldier too. Had come earlier to Court from Gray’s Inn. And here’s an irony: George Gascoigne’s first patron at Gray’s Inn was that distinguished bencher, Sir Christopher Yelverton.

  —Ralegh would know something of Gascoigne’s soldiering, for Gascoigne had served under Sir Humphrey Gilbert in the Netherlands in ’72. Served twice there before he was captured by the Spaniards and sent back to England. Gascoigne had proved himself a man of courage, and would prove it again at the Spanish Fury of Antwerp, when he drew his sword and saved English lives from the mutinous Spaniards who invaded English House.

  —But later in ’76 Gascoigne was on the edge of the Court, publishing poems, seeking to make a name. And, give or take a button or a breath, he must have been ahead of Ralegh in the footrace toward the slippery ladder of preferment. At least he had been given more occasion for advancement. In the summer of ’75 Gascoigne was Leicester’s man and was put to work in the creation of the festivities presented for the Queen to honor her visit to Kenilworth. He wrote parts of the spectacles and, as a player, appeared before Her Majesty, first in the part of A Savage Man and, at her farewells, as Sylvanus. And he managed to find some favor from Lord Grey. With favor from Leicester and Grey, having been noticed by the Queen, Gascoigne should have cleared idle harbor and have begun to sail with fair winds. Burghley and Walsingham took note of him. He did service for them as an agent on the Continent.