Elizabeth
Page 26
Everyone was on tenterhooks. No one could predict how the queen would react next. When Mary Shelton, another woman of the Bedchamber, had made a runaway marriage with the young widower John Scudamore in 1573 or early 1574, Elizabeth had exploded. So extreme was her fury, she had physically attacked Shelton, breaking the girl’s finger. As Eleanor Brydges, a maid of honour and an eyewitness, told the Earl of Rutland, ‘The Queen has used Mary Shelton very ill for her marriage. She hath dealt liberally, both with blows and evil words and hath not yet granted her consent. I think in my conscience never woman bought her husband more dear than she had done.’ The incident had to be hushed up, and everyone was made to pretend that a falling candlestick had caused the accident.22 After his own bruising experience following his marriage to Douglas Sheffield, Sir Edward Stafford had declared Elizabeth to be ‘angry with any love’.23
Stafford’s view was understandably jaundiced. From the queen’s perspective, what Bess had done was tantamount to perjury. When she was first admitted to the Bedchamber, she had sworn to serve her royal mistress ‘faithfully and honestly’, and by that Elizabeth understood the girl to have also promised to be chaste. If they conducted themselves in a manner she considered to be appropriate, Elizabeth could positively assist her Bedchamber servants or their offspring in their love suits. Contrary to all expectations, she would shortly intervene on behalf of Elizabeth Gorges, the daughter of one of her favourite attendants, Helena Snakenborg, Marchioness of Northampton, and her second husband, Sir Thomas Gorges, who had hit a brick wall in negotiations with their future in-laws.24
Unfortunately, by first sleeping with and then secretly marrying Ralegh after becoming pregnant, Bess had wounded the queen at her most vulnerable points. Not only had her kinswoman gone behind her back and allowed herself to be ‘vilely debauched’ by Ralegh, she had dared to marry a man from whom Elizabeth expected undying devotion.25 Ralegh, more so even than Leicester or Hatton before him, owed his career to the queen. She was filled with a sense of betrayal. To add insult to injury, barely two months before Bess’s baby was born, she had settled a generous ninety-nine-year lease of Sherborne Castle and its exquisite estates on Ralegh.
• • •
Just as in Leicester’s case, when he had secretly married Lettice Knollys, there was no instant royal tantrum, no hasty exchange of harsh words. Ominously, when Elizabeth managed to bridle her temper, it proved to be all the more lethal. The storm broke on Monday, 7 August, when she ordered Ralegh and Bess to be sent under guard to the Tower and placed in separate cells.26 Writing to Anthony Bacon, Burghley’s invalid nephew and a brilliant linguist who was shortly to become Essex’s chief spin doctor and intelligencer, Sir Edward Stafford gloated: ‘If you have anything to do with Sir Walter Ralegh, or any love to make to Mistress Throckmorton, at the Tower tomorrow you may speak with them, if the countermand come not tonight, as some think will not be, and particularly he that hath charge to send them thither.’27
The lovers’ fate was sealed by all absence of the slightest expression of contrition. Now that Ralegh was turning forty, a contemptuous self-reliance, combined with distaste for the humiliations he felt he had to endure in pandering to the vanity of an ageing, irascible spinster, was taking over his character. Demanding pen and paper in the Tower, he turned the iconography of the Elvetham water pageant completely on its head, daring to choreograph himself explicitly in verse as the wide, restless sea and Elizabeth as the unapproachable, tyrannical Cynthia, the chimerical, vindictive moon goddess who irrationally tortures men for their honest love.28
For her part, Bess seemed blissfully unaware that humble submission coupled with the most grovelling apology was the only possible route to pardon and reconciliation in the eyes of the queen. Despite her many months spent in relatively close proximity to Elizabeth since her admission to the Bedchamber eight years before, she stubbornly clung to the belief that she had done nothing wrong. Writing to sympathetic friends whom she hoped would show her letter to the queen, she protested, ‘I assure you truly, I never desired nor never would desire my liberty without the good liking nor advising of Sir Walter Ralegh: it is not this imprisonment, if I bought it with my life, that should make me think it long if it should do him harm to speak of my delivery.’ And she signed herself, ‘Ever assuredly in friendship, E.R.’29 The initials were meant to show that she believed she had a valid marriage but were deliberately provocative, for they mimicked the queen’s own cipher.
What would save Ralegh and Bess was, almost literally, the pungent scent of booty in Elizabeth’s nostrils. Just five weeks after she had sent them to the Tower, she heard that a Portuguese carrack captured by Ralegh’s fleet of privateers had been safely piloted into Dartmouth harbour with a prodigiously rich cargo. Already some of the loot had been siphoned off and sent to Exeter, hidden in sacks or under men’s cloaks.30 Bags of pearls and pots of aromatic musk used in perfume and as an aphrodisiac had even found their way to London. As Robert Cecil, who rode post-haste to Exeter on his way to Dartmouth, complained to Burghley, you could smell the looters a mile off. No fewer than two thousand dealers had flocked to Devon to snap up bargains. An eyewitness quipped that it was like Bartholomew Fair all over again.31
This time, luck seemed to be on Ralegh’s side. After the splitting of his fleet, Sir John Burgh’s squadron had sailed for the Azores, where they found the first of the great Portuguese carracks already within sight. When the vessel evaded him during a storm, Burgh positioned his ships so as to intercept a second carrack that was thought to be close behind. Shortly after midday on 3 August, he saw the Madre de Dios on the horizon, returning from Kochi, on the west coast of India. Rated at 1,600 tons and 165 feet long from prow to stern, her main mast towering 121 feet high, she was a floating castle. It took over six hundred men to handle her. With no fewer than seven decks, one above another, and two thirds of her tonnage represented by the weight of the exotic goods she was carrying, she would prove to be by far the richest prize captured by English privateers over the long course of the war.32
After a fierce and bloody gun battle lasting from noon until dusk, the vast ship was overwhelmed and its surviving crew forced to surrender. Ralegh’s men were the first to board, and an orgy of plunder ensued. Ransacking the upper decks by candlelight, they helped themselves to the more portable and valuable cargo: gold, silver, emeralds, diamonds, rubies, pearls and amber (commonly set in amulets and thought to attract lovers). Only narrowly did they avoid a catastrophic explosion, when, bearing their candles aloft, they burst into an armoury packed with gunpowder.33
Over the ten or so days that followed, many of the bulkier, heavier goods, as many as could be shifted at sea, were unloaded on to ten other ships so as to lighten the carrack. With Spanish warships still lurking off the coast of Brittany, near the Blavet estuary, it was essential that the privateers and their prize made as swift a homeward journey as possible. Many of the smaller ships made for Plymouth rather than Dartmouth, where much of the loot embezzled at sea, valued at £250,000, was sold off at ridiculously low prices. Only when Cecil, sent by the Privy Council to inventory the spoils, finally reached the quayside at Dartmouth was the sheer volume of the haul apparent. Among other wares, there were 537 tons of spices, 8,500 hundredweight of pepper, large chests of cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg, fifteen tons of ebony, two enormous crosses of gold and a large brooch studded with diamonds meant for King Philip which the looters had missed. Other items included carpets, tapestries, silks and fine fabrics, Chinese porcelain, hides, coconuts, frankincense, dyes such as cochineal and indigo, ivory and elephant’s teeth (ground to a fine powder and used in the treatment of leprosy).
On Cecil’s instructions, the houses of local people and inns where the wealthier dealers lodged were raided in a concerted effort to salvage as much of the embezzled cargo as possible. His men found jewellery, notably pearls, diamonds and an armlet of gold, and a fork and spoon of crystal with rubies. Overall, the value of the
recovered cargo was assessed at £141,120 (£141 million today), still an astonishing sum.34
Ralegh’s sailors, meanwhile, were running riot all over the West Country, spending their money on drink and women. Informed that no one but he would be able to discipline them, Elizabeth reluctantly signed the order for his conditional release. Barely six weeks after he had arrived at Tower Wharf and been led across a narrow drawbridge used for important prisoners, Ralegh walked out of the Tower through the main gateway.35 He was escorted on his journey down to Dartmouth by a ‘keeper’ – one ‘Mr Blount’, possibly Sir Christopher Blount, his sworn enemy and Essex’s stepfather. He claimed self-pityingly that he was still the queen’s poor captive but, to all intents and purposes, he was now a free man.36
• • •
Naturally, there was more to Ralegh’s release than first meets the eye. He alone, the mastermind of the whole extraordinary venture, could adequately explain to Robert Cecil and his officials the costs the various investors had incurred in equipping the privateers and the share of the booty that was rightfully theirs. On the face of it, this was a simple enough task, but Ralegh knew it would not turn out that way, guessing from the outset that Elizabeth would steal a march on her fellow speculators by claiming the lion’s share of the loot.37
He was absolutely right. Enraged at the scale of embezzlement, the queen at first contemplated seizing the whole of what remained of the fortune, and Ralegh could hardly stop her. To muzzle him, she was quite capable of threatening to frame him for theft, along with Sir John Burgh, whom she had already accused of carrying off large quantities of precious stones, amber and musk. She would be undeterred by the inconvenient fact that Ralegh had been in the Tower, and not at sea, when the worst of the thefts had taken place. His men, after all, had played a leading part in ransacking the upper decks of the carrack. It was surely therefore his fault that roughly two thirds of the booty (in value, if not in volume) had been so carelessly frittered away.38
Her greed exposed her character at its most rapacious. Remembering her searing reaction to the sending of the death warrant for Mary Queen of Scots and wary of falling foul of her in that way ever again, Burghley warned Sir John Fortescue, his deputy in the Exchequer responsible for cash flow, to advise her that, since the country was at war, she had a right by royal prerogative to allocate shares of the booty at her sole discretion. Her decision was final and ‘must be the Law in the cause’. There could be no appeal.39
But Fortescue was decidedly uncomfortable. Describing it as a ‘tickle matter’, he cautioned Burghley that it would ‘utterly overthrow all service if due regard were not had of my Lord of Cumberland and Sir Walter Ralegh, with the rest of the adventurers, who would never be induced to further adventure if they were not princely considered of’.40
The upshot was a compromise, but one weighted heavily in the queen’s favour. Although, as Ralegh reminded Burghley, Elizabeth had risked only ‘the tenth part’ of the costs of the expedition, she now proceeded to dictate the distribution of the profits irrespective of how much individual investors had staked.41 Whereas she had put at risk just two ships and £1,800, she awarded herself more than £70,000, or 50 per cent of the gains. Cumberland, who had risked £19,000, got his original investment back, plus a profit of £18,000, almost doubling his money.42 The syndicate of city merchants, who had staked £6,000, received a similar rate of return. However, Ralegh, who had contributed £34,000, was handed back only his stake and a modest profit of £2,000, way out of proportion to the formula applied elsewhere. Elizabeth arrived at this figure by drastically discounting the costs of fitting out the ships he had provided, and she took no account of the £11,000 he had been forced to pay in interest charges on his borrowed money, as she did with others. At a stroke of her pen, she turned Ralegh’s meagre ‘profit’ into a hefty loss.43
Still smarting from his marriage, she then banished him from Court, suspending him indefinitely from his office as Captain of the Guard. Bess was released from the Tower on 22 December, and the two retired to Sherborne to lick their wounds in time for Christmas.44 Ralegh had bought their freedom by sacrificing between £16,000 and £32,000 of the profits Cecil calculated were due to him.45 Anticipating this outcome some weeks before the final settlements of accounts, he joked with his customary braggadocio that this was ‘more than ever any man presented Her Majesty with as yet’.46
• • •
If Ralegh was down, he was far from out. Debarred from Court and forced to seek a seat in Parliament as a humble burgess for the village of Mitchell in Cornwall rather than as the senior knight of the shire for Devon, he knew that his only viable route back to royal favour was to return to sea. He consoled himself after the death of his firstborn with the fact that Bess had become pregnant again: the elder of their two surviving sons would be baptized Walter, or ‘Wat’ for short, in Lillington parish church, a few miles south of Sherborne, on All Saints’ Day in 1593.47
For some years, Ralegh had been preoccupied by stories circulating among Spanish conquistadors of a legendary empire known as El Dorado, ruled by a descendant of the royal line of the Incas. El Dorado was thought to be home to the mines from where the wealth of the Inca and Aztec civilizations had been sourced; it was said that there men powdered themselves with gold dust after bathing in turpentine. And with Thomas Harriot still the chief impresario of his team of technical advisers, Ralegh set him to work to draw up a new plan of exploration and discovery. A variant of the original grand strategy of 1585 that had so signally failed to impress the queen, it placed a much greater emphasis on prospecting for gold.48
According to legend, the lost empire lay in Guiana, on land that today is part of Venezuela and Colombia, between the mouths of the Orinoco and Amazon rivers. Hidden away deep in the tropical jungle somewhere near the source of the Orinoco was a city of gold called Manoa, whose ruler dined off gold and silver plate, had chests and trunks full of bullion and precious stones and who relaxed in a pleasure garden packed with life-sized sculptures of fishes, animals, birds, flowers, herbs and trees, all made of gold. An explorer, Don Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, captured by one of Ralegh’s privateers, had told him of this magical place and informed him that Don António de Berrío, the governor of the Spanish colony of Trinidad, had made no fewer than three expeditions into the jungle in search of gold.49
Stuck at home with Bess at Sherborne, Ralegh’s imagination fed his gambler’s streak and persuaded him to sail to Trinidad and begin a search for El Dorado. Success would not only bring him the wealth and fame that he believed were rightly his, it would restore him to his place of honour. Bess did her best to dissuade him, even writing to Robert Cecil: ‘Now sir, for the rest, I hope you will rather draw Sir Walter towards the East than help him forward toward the sunset, if any respect to men or love to him be not forgotten.’50
But Cecil and Lord Admiral Howard were both keen to take their cut should Ralegh be as good as his word. They bought shares in his expedition, while Ralegh amassed his own stake by selling land and borrowing £60,000. He pulled off this seemingly impossible feat at a time when his own credit was in disarray by borrowing on the security of a kinsman, the successful London financier William Sanderson.51 Vastly overconfident, Ralegh unscrupulously milked his gullible relative, offering spurious promises of repayment. Ultimately the man was ruined.52
On Thursday, 6 February 1595, Ralegh sailed from Plymouth, heading for the Canary Isles with some two hundred mariners and a hundred and fifty soldiers aboard five ships. Among the soldiers was his nephew John, Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s son. Six weeks later, they all reached Trinidad, where Ralegh launched a night-time commando raid on the sleepy Spanish garrison and captured none other than Berrío himself. By wining and dining, charming and beguiling his exalted prisoner, Ralegh coaxed from him invaluable intelligence that he believed would enable him to succeed where others had failed.53
Navigating a route through the shallow, sandy chan
nels of the delta in cockleshell rowing boats, Ralegh led a hundred of his fittest men up the crocodile-infested Orinoco, battling a blazing sun, torrential showers and adverse currents. In a journey fraught with peril, braving unrelenting attacks from snakes and insects and with their supplies of food and clean water fast diminishing, his party travelled some 250 miles inland, convincing themselves that they were about to become as rich as Croesus. Although Ralegh did find what he believed to be gold-bearing rock on a cliff face not far from the River Caroní, a tributary of the Orinoco, he lacked the tools needed to break it. It was only on his return that he discovered that many of the stones he and his men were able to gather would prove to be disappointingly valueless.54
• • •
Elizabeth did not think about Ralegh much while he was away, but he thought of her constantly. On arrival in Trinidad, he had shown the local chiefs her portrait while he sang her praises. And in an extraordinary encounter on the south bank of the Orinoco, some three miles to the east of its junction with the Caroní, he pitched a tent and conversed through an interpreter with the Orenoqueponi King Topiawari, declaring (disingenuously) that a Virgin Queen, no less, had sent him to protect the indigenous people from the atrocities of the cruel Spaniards.55
Despite all his bravery and derring-do, Ralegh returned empty-handed to Plymouth in September to be greeted with delight by Bess alone.56 From Sherborne, an estate he had been so solicitous to acquire but which he now described as ‘this desolate place’, he urged Robert Cecil to sponsor a follow-up expedition in which both men could recoup their losses.57 He sent Cecil a lengthy report that he had written either on his return voyage or shortly after landing at Plymouth. A thrilling action-adventure story surpassing anything written in a later age by Rudyard Kipling or Henry Rider Haggard, it was a heady mixture of fact and fiction. Published early the next year in a carefully edited version overseen by Cecil under the title The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana, it was, to all practical effects, the prospectus for a sale of shares in a second venture.58