by John Guy
• • •
Back in London, Walsingham had uncovered what he declared to be a fresh and profoundly menacing plot to assassinate Elizabeth. This involved the supporters of Mary Queen of Scots and, on the fringes, Bernardino de Mendoza, now the Spanish ambassador in Paris, where he had made his home a safe-house for some of the most dangerous men in Europe. Walsingham claimed to have secured firm proof that those behind this latest plot were acting with Mary’s explicit knowledge and consent.* Fearful that Elizabeth would not act decisively against her royal cousin without added pressure from Leicester, despite the existence of this proof, both Burghley and Walsingham urged his recall on the flimsy pretext that he was needed to attend an imminent session of Parliament.
On 24 November 1586, Leicester finally returned to England. He was replaced in his command by Peregrine Bertie, Lord Willoughby, one of his ablest subordinates, who had led the cavalry charge at the Battle of Zutphen, unhorsing the enemy general and taking him prisoner. With his soldiers by now close to mutiny and his creditors in England and Holland alike demanding repayment and refusing to reschedule his loans, Leicester was happy to come home. He hoped to use the opportunity to lobby Elizabeth for greater support for the Dutch rebels in the future, for neither he nor they were satisfied with what they had achieved so far. They complained that he had wasted their money, imposed new levies on them and hired foreign troops without their consent. For his part, he had found them prickly, to say the least, and the overall effect of Elizabeth’s insistence that he fight a defensive war had been to concede the strategic initiative to Parma.69
On arrival at Court, Leicester was questioned intently for several days by the queen and Burghley about his use of Crown funds. ‘I thought myself very hardly handled’, he protested to Burghley, since it was ‘no way possible for me to give Her Majesty such a particular reckoning of the expenses as she looked for, and yet it might have pleased you . . . to have rather sought to make Her Majesty understand how impossible . . . it was to my place to answer or give account of particular auditors’ books.’70
Leicester did not see how Elizabeth could reasonably expect him to account for the specific disbursements of his subordinates, when he had given them only general instructions. He felt the investigation smacked of a witch-hunt. But Burghley understood how vehemently Elizabeth believed that vast amounts of her treasure had been wasted in the Netherlands, and he was determined to keep his own job, even if that meant piling the pressure on a colleague.
Under different circumstances, this clash between the two titans on the Privy Council might have had explosive consequences, but the latest assassination plot meant that they would have to set aside all other concerns. Leicester was forced to swallow his pride and accept that the queen would never reimburse him the money he had spent from his own pocket in the Netherlands, a crushing humiliation for a man who had once imagined himself to be a serious contender for her hand. As the Court prepared to move from Richmond to Greenwich in readiness for the Christmas festivities, Burghley, Leicester and Walsingham found themselves confronting their biggest challenge since the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign. For better or worse, they would have to close ranks.
3. Brave New World
Just as the great debate over the crisis in the Netherlands was about to begin in the Privy Council in October 1584, a dashing thirty-year-old Sir Walter Ralegh had stepped on to the scene. Six feet tall and speaking with a thick West Country accent, he was a Devonshire man and a commoner. Blessed with an ivory complexion and shiny, curly black hair, he was the epitome of masculinity: arrogant, ambitious, a swashbuckling swordsman, mesmerizingly handsome, nattily dressed, learned, even something of a poet. Larger than life, one of the first men in England to keep an African manservant, he had already begun to challenge Leicester as Elizabeth’s favourite.1 King Philip, curious to know exactly who he was, was asking questions about him. Warned in a dispatch from London that Elizabeth ‘continues to make much of the new favourite very openly’, he scribbled in the margin, ‘I do not know who this is.’ That would not be the case for long.2
Lupold von Wedel, a star-struck Pomeranian nobleman whom Elizabeth invited as a Christmas guest to Greenwich Palace in 1584, noted that it was Ralegh with whom she chiefly conversed, even when Leicester was around. Wearing a wig of snaky golden curls to disguise the bald crown of her head, and a gown of black velvet sumptuously embroidered with silver and pearls in ostentatious mourning for William of Orange, Elizabeth had seemed enthralled by him as he knelt beside her chair during the dancing after dinner. Von Wedel gasped when she poked her finger in Ralegh’s face, teasing him by remarking on a speck of dirt and offering to wipe it away. ‘It was said’, continued von Wedel, that ‘she loved this gentleman now in preference to all others; and that may be well believed.’3
Leicester had encountered a rival before, but he had fended him off. Sir Christopher Hatton had first begun to attract Elizabeth’s attention in the 1560s, and in 1572 she made him a gentleman of her Privy Chamber, showering him with gifts. Almost as tall and attractive as Ralegh and also in his early thirties when he first caught the queen’s eye, Hatton was the consummate courtier. An unctuous flatterer who sported a feather in his hat as his personal trademark, he declared himself to be Elizabeth’s ‘everlasting bondman’, seemingly without a hint of hypocrisy. ‘No death, no, not hell, no fear of death shall ever win of me my consent so far to wrong myself again as to be absent from you one day,’ he had effusively protested in 1573. ‘Passion overcometh me. I can write no more. Love me; for I love you.’4
Hatton avoided entanglements with other women and, unlike Leicester, he never married. As a sign of her affection, Elizabeth nicknamed him ‘Lids’ or ‘Lyddes’ (‘Eyelids’). Sometimes he called himself her ‘Slave’ or her ‘Sheep’, as when he wrote to her from his sickbed, again, probably, in 1573, quipping, ‘Your Mutton is black; scarcely will you know your own, so much hath this disease dashed me.’
Once made a privy councillor in 1577, however, Hatton shifted his focus from seduction towards building his reputation as a statesman. He learned to work with Leicester on such issues as the Anjou marriage and the plight of the Dutch, and the two men ended up as genuine friends. When Leicester incurred Elizabeth’s wrath by accepting the position of Governor-General of the Netherlands, he turned to Hatton for help more often than to Burghley. And Hatton reciprocated, making strenuous efforts on his behalf and colluding with Walsingham to doctor a report Leicester had written for the queen, blotting out passages they knew would infuriate her and altering others before reading the document out to her.5
Ralegh, by contrast, was never likely to assimilate fully to the prevailing Court establishment. An incorrigible maverick, a man of ‘light and sudden humours’, he would be denounced by the Jesuits as an atheist* for allegedly denying the immortality of the soul.6 He chose as his motto Amore et Virtute (‘By love and virtue’) and some claimed he distinguished himself more in the first realm than in the second. Rumours of his sexual conquests were legendary: he had fathered an illegitimate daughter in Ireland and was said to have pleasured one of Elizabeth’s lovesick maids against a tree-trunk. He was fond of grand gestures, but the oft-repeated account of how he first became a courtier after spreading his new plush cloak over a ‘plashy place’ for the queen to walk over is almost certainly apocryphal.
Ralegh’s glittering career owed less in its earliest stages to his cloak than to two of his Devonshire connections. He was a nephew of the formidable Katherine (or Kat) Ashley,* whom in 1559 Elizabeth had chosen as her first chief gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber. Kat and Elizabeth went back further even than that. Kat, the daughter of Sir Philip Champernowne of Modbury in Devon, had entered Elizabeth’s service as a teenager when the future queen was no more than five.7 She would rise to become her governess and in or about 1545 she married John Ashley, Elizabeth’s second cousin,* whom the queen would make a gentleman of the Privy Chamber and the Master of
the Jewel House. Around the time Thomas Seymour made his early-morning advances to Elizabeth while she was living with Katherine Parr, he had joked about Kat with his servant and illegitimate half-brother, John Seymour, asking him to enquire ‘whether her great buttocks were grown any less or no’.8 Although Kat died of an unknown illness before Ralegh was twelve, he had merely to mention her name to catch Elizabeth’s attention when he first appeared on the fringes of the Court in 1577.
Ralegh’s other invaluable link to the Court was through his elder half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert. A flamboyant, violent, inflammatory character and a brazen risk-taker, Gilbert was proud of his motto Mutare vel Timere Sperno (‘I scorn to change or to fear’). Along with his kinsmen and circle of friends, many of them second sons or prodigals born out of wedlock, he stood for the values of raw monarchical power and personal glory as won by valour. Such men boasted that they looked forward to ‘troubling Burghley’s fine head’ and to stopping Elizabeth’s ‘frisking and dancing’ by showing her how foolish it was ‘to displace a soldier’ in favour of a fawning bureaucrat ‘with a pen and ink-horn at his girdle’.9
In 1580, Gilbert had secured for Ralegh a captain’s commission in the army being sent to suppress a bloody revolt in Ireland. Ralegh was present at the siege of Smerwick in County Kerry, where a force of papal and Spanish adventurers had joined the rebel garrison. After a three-day bombardment, the garrison surrendered. The survivors were disarmed and, under Ralegh’s supervision, all but thirty were massacred. A few weeks later, Ralegh boasted of his half-brother’s macabre reputation in Ireland, writing to Walsingham that he had ‘never heard nor read of any man more feared than he is among the Irish nation’.10 This referred to Gilbert’s role as a colonel during an earlier revolt in 1569, when he had not been shy to put the values he preached into practice, capturing twenty-five castles, imposing martial law wherever he went, slaughtering all who resisted him and humiliating those who surrendered by insisting that they first approached him in his tent by crawling on all fours along a corridor marked by the decapitated heads of their relatives.11
Within a year of the massacre at Smerwick, Ralegh had made his first major breakthrough with the queen. As his senior commanding officer’s confidential courier, he was responsible for giving her private briefings on Irish affairs. During these audiences, he was never afraid to undermine his superiors by criticizing their failings. Elizabeth, for her part, relished what, in those years, was a decidedly rare opportunity to contest the advice offered by her military experts, since, for once, it gave her the ammunition she needed to force Burghley and Walsingham to approach matters of policy on her terms rather than theirs.12
Hatton would soon grumble that Ralegh was rising too fast and too high in the queen’s esteem. He was especially vexed that she had nicknamed him ‘Water’. Impetuously, Hatton sent Elizabeth three ‘tokens’ early one morning as she was on her way to hunt a doe. One was a diminutive bucket, which elicited the reply that he need not fear ‘drowning’. She sent him back a gift of a dove: the bird, she said, which ‘together with the rainbow brought the good tidings and the covenant that there should be no more destruction by water’.13
Despite his courtly talents, Ralegh retained many of Gilbert’s muscular and insolent attitudes. Over the years, he would several times be disciplined by the Privy Council for brawling or duelling, at one point twice in a month.14
• • •
It was clear by 1584 that Ralegh’s career would be shaped most fully by Gilbert’s ardent belief in the promises offered up by the New World. For all the efforts of earlier brave English merchants and seamen in searching for new lands and the trade and prosperity they might bring, the Crown had been reluctant to invest in exploration and colonization. The chief obstacle was the five decrees issued by Pope Alexander VI in 1493 by which he conceded to Spain the right to occupy a region vaguely defined as ‘such islands and lands . . . as you have discovered or are about to discover’. As modified by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, the effect of the pope’s decrees was to grant Spain and Portugal a duopoly over exploration and colonization of the non-European world.
Bristol seamen had made at least two voyages of Atlantic exploration, in 1480 and 1481, and Henry VII granted privileges to the famous Genoese navigators John and Sebastian Cabot in 1496 to sail across the Atlantic in search of a fabled north-west passage through the Arctic ice to the Pacific Ocean and the East Indies.15 (This passage was believed to lie between Labrador and Greenland at a latitude of between 66 and 67 degrees north.) They failed to find it, but in 1497 Henry gave John Cabot a payment of £10 (equivalent to one year’s wages) on his return as a reward ‘to him that found the New Isle’, referring to present-day Newfoundland, followed by a pension of £20 a year.16
When Henry VIII broke with the pope, English adventurers found fresh opportunities to challenge the Iberian duopoly of the New World, but Henry himself did little to promote colonization, despite his passion for all things naval. The French were well ahead of the English on that score, because they had more fully absorbed the discoveries made by Spanish and Portuguese cartographers.
A step forward was taken in Edward VI’s reign. In 1553, prompted by a sudden dip in English trade, a syndicate of wealthy London merchants backed by the Privy Council made a concerted effort to discover a north-eastern passage to Asia through the Arctic Ocean and on into the Bering Sea. Three ships sailed from Tilbury in Essex. The expedition carried with it a letter signed by Edward, addressed to ‘all Kings, Princes, Rulers, Judges and Governors of the earth, and all other having any excellent dignity on the same, in all places under the universal heaven’.17 Two of these ships foundered when their crews became disorientated by the intense cold off the coast of northern Lapland. A year later, some Russian fishermen discovered the men frozen to death, some still seated in the act of writing their wills, pens in hand and paper before them.18 The third ship, captained by Richard Chancellor, made it safely into the White Sea but got no further than the Russian port of St Nicholas. The expedition’s one resounding success was that Chancellor finally reached Moscow, where he was able to negotiate an agreement with the tsar, Ivan the Terrible, for the syndicate’s members to trade with his subjects. The result was the formation in London of the Muscovy Company, to which Mary Tudor granted a royal charter in 1555.19
In 1578, Gilbert aimed to follow in the Cabots’ footsteps by discovering a navigable route from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. But, more immediately, he secured a monopoly grant from Elizabeth, valid for six years, to ‘discover, find, search out and view such remote, heathen and barbarous lands, countries and territories not actually possessed of any Christian prince’. His intention was to annex large tracts of Newfoundland for the queen, over which he and his heirs would enjoy freehold rights in perpetuity. When he revealed his plans to his half-brother, Ralegh instantly joined the venture.
The purpose and intended destination of their expedition were kept a closely guarded secret, but the plan involved a raid on Spanish assets in the Caribbean to raise capital, followed by the establishment of a North American settlement. Unfortunately, bad weather and a serious quarrel with his second-in-command forced Gilbert to turn back just beyond the west coast of Ireland. Ralegh was scarcely more successful. He braved the winter Atlantic storms as far as the Cape Verde islands, but at that point his supplies ran low and he, too, returned.20
Determined to succeed where he had so far failed, Gilbert organized a second expedition in 1583. This began more auspiciously. Landing at St John’s in Newfoundland, Gilbert took possession of the harbour, displacing the Breton cod fishermen who plied their trade there and laying claim in the queen’s name to the surrounding territory within a distance of six hundred miles.21 He nailed a heraldic banner of the royal arms, cast in lead, to a wooden post, establishing the first English possession in the New World since John Cabot’s voyage of 1497. Next, he began to search for mineral ore, excavating samples
with the help of a German metallurgist he had recruited.22 For many years he had mingled with alchemists, lured by the promise of riches. Like his more famous friend the astrologer and magus Dr John Dee, Gilbert believed that if he could only find the right minerals he could turn base metals into copper or perhaps even gold.23
It was not long, however, before a sickness struck down Gilbert’s men. When Gilbert finally set out with the rump of his crew to reconnoitre and ‘make plats [maps]’ of the North American Atlantic coastline, an overloaded ship carrying his mineral samples and the bulk of the expedition’s rations ran aground and sank in a gale. His men begged him to turn back before they all perished – and perish many of them did. Gilbert’s own vessel was overwhelmed by mountainous waves in a hurricane off the Azores, and he was last seen standing on deck with a Bible in his hand, shouting, ‘We are as near to heaven by sea as by land.’ Only a single ship made it back to Falmouth.24
Ralegh had not joined this second expedition. He had invested in it, however, and encouraged Elizabeth to view it favourably. As soon as he learned of his half-brother’s death, he petitioned the queen to grant him exclusive rights of exploration and settlement similar to those Gilbert had enjoyed. He was confident that she would not refuse him.25 Already, the new favourite seemed to think of himself as untouchable, arrogantly addressing correspondents as if he were the queen’s preferred mouthpiece and talking down to Burghley.26
In March 1584, Elizabeth assented to Ralegh’s petition and granted him everything she had previously allowed to Gilbert. (The documents survive and show that Ralegh’s and Gilbert’s grants were identical.)27 She had already allowed Ralegh to move into the prestigious higher floors of Durham House on the Strand, a large, rambling property overlooking the Thames.28 These were state apartments once reserved for the use of visiting foreign diplomats; closer to Whitehall, they were, if anything, even more imposing than Leicester House. And to help Ralegh fund his new lifestyle, the queen had granted him rights to some valuable leases and given him a lucrative monopoly grant for wine and the licensing of vintners. From now on, everyone selling wine or keeping a tavern would first have to purchase a licence from him or be prepared to pay him a fine. This munificent gift, worth around £1,100 a year and reminiscent in its scale of an earlier grant Elizabeth had given to Leicester of the lease of the farm of the customs* on sweet (Mediterranean) wines, would underwrite Ralegh’s credit for years to come.