Patriot or Traitor

The Life and Death of Sir Walter Ralegh

Anna Beer

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786074355
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

A BBC History Magazine Book of the Year A writer, soldier, politician, courtier, spy and explorer, Sir Walter Ralegh lived more lives than most in his own time, in any time. The fifth son of a Devonshire gentleman, he rose to become Queen Elizabeth's favourite, only to be charged with treason by her successor.Less than a year after the death of his Queen, Ralegh was in the Tower, watching as the scene was set for his own execution. Patriot or Traitor is the dramatic story of his rise and fall.

‌Part One

‌1

Soldier

How does Ralegh, a man whose year of birth we do not even know for sure, the fifth son of a Devonshire gentleman, ‘climb full high’ in the England of Elizabeth? He begins by going to the wars. In young Walter’s case, the year was 1569, and the battleground was France. Earlier in the decade, a massacre of French Protestants, Huguenots, had triggered the country’s wars of religion. The young Queen Elizabeth, only three years into her own Protestant reign, made a secret treaty with her co-religionists and, over the following years, a steady stream of Englishmen travelled across the Channel to offer their military support to the Huguenots. The teenaged Walter Ralegh was one, under the command of Count Lodewijk van Nassau, brother of William the Silent, the Netherlands’ Prince of Orange. The details are hazy: Walter rode ‘as a very young man’ with his cousin Henry Champernowne’s troop; another source claims his early years were full of ‘wars and martial services’. It is possible he was recruited by a Huguenot ship sent out from La Rochelle, or a ‘sea-beggar’ from Holland, with their ‘letters of marque’ (of extremely dubious authority) from William of Orange or Gaspard de Coligny, the French Huguenot leader. The boats descended on English ports to find young men just like Walter. Once in France, he found himself in the midst of a protracted, and sometimes vicious, civil war.

Ralegh’s future brother-in-law, Arthur Throckmorton, made a similar expedition, ten years later, but to the Low Countries. He was impelled by the same reason, to support the beleaguered Protestants, and his diary is a reminder of the quotidian nature of violence in wartime. He writes, with neither comment nor horror, that the English have captured the enemy’s ‘kine [cattle], mares and horses’ and that some spies ‘are taken and put to death in our camp’.

There is no diary for Walter. The only detail of his experience is provided by him, many years later. He writes he was at Moncontour near Poitiers in October 1569 (he would have been in his mid-teens) when Lodowick of Nassau’s competent retreat had ‘saved the one half of the Protestant army, then broken and disbanded; of which my self was an eye-witness, and was one of them that had cause to thank him for it’. A strategic retreat is valued much more than empty heroics. The foundation had been laid for Ralegh’s fascination with realpolitik and the art of war.

The Peace of St Germain of August 1570, which marked the end of the third phase of wars of religion in France, probably meant a return home for young Walter. England was facing its own religious crisis. On 25 February 1570, Pope Pius V had declared Elizabeth illegitimate, a mere usurper, a Prince due no obedience from her subjects. By doing so, he was explicitly giving sanction to Roman Catholics to assassinate her. They would even gain merit by doing so. If that was not enough to stiffen the sinews of a true Protestant Englishman, then the 1572 St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of French Huguenots in Paris raised the stakes still further.

But there is no indication the teenaged Walter went to the wars out of religious zeal. It was more that this was simply what young men did, particularly young men without titles or prospects and in search of both. For Arthur Throckmorton ten years later, a return from the wars meant one thing and one thing only: a chance to gain access to the Queen. Although he sent news to his mother Anne, and his sister Bess, that he was safely landed in Margate, his primary destination was Richmond Palace, where the Queen was based for the Christmas season that year. Arthur partied, celebrating Twelfth Night at the palace, and only in the new year did he return home. He had been seen.

It helped that Arthur was a Throckmorton, with family in high places. Ralegh was not only a fifth son but the product of a third marriage on the part of his father, Walter Ralegh, who had three other sons, and a second marriage on the part of his mother, Katherine Gilbert, née Champernoun, who had four other sons. Yes, he would be helped, and occasionally hindered, by a vast network of brothers and half-brothers and cousins in a world in which kinship ties could be the difference between success and failure; sometimes between life and death. But in the late 1560s and early 1570s, Walter was just one of hundreds of young men who went to the wars and then disappeared without trace. In 1577, long after he’d gone to be a soldier, he was living in Islington which, by any Elizabethan measure, is a long way from Richmond Palace.

Three years later, however, we can tell his prospects were improving. Not because he was on the receiving end of three charges of brawling but because one of them was ‘besides the tennis court in Westminster’, a popular location for the settling of scores with other young men. No more Islington: it was around this time that Walter Ralegh was appointed Extraordinary Esquire of the Body to the Queen, personally attendant upon his monarch.

Ireland effected the transformation. In the summer of 1579, with Elizabeth’s court preoccupied by the possibility of a marriage between the Queen and the Duke of Anjou, and with both parties apparently considering the marriage as a serious proposition for serious political reasons, not least the increasing power of Spain, rebellion broke out in Ireland. This was hardly a new phenomenon. Ever since the Anglo-Norman invasion of the island in the twelfth century there had been conflict, whether simmering or outright, between the native Irish and the feudal lords who pledged their loyalty to the King of England. The 1560s had been a decade of on-off warfare in Ireland, although well into the seventies there were those who still hoped that the English could reduce the island to ‘civility’ by peaceful means: ‘Can the sword teach them to speak English, to use English apparel, to restrain them?’

In 1579, the threat level rose. Under the banner of the Pope, the Irish leader James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald gathered an expeditionary force from Catholic Europe. His goal was nothing less than the removal of the Protestant ‘she-tyrant’, Elizabeth. The she-tyrant asked one of Walter Ralegh’s half-brothers, Humphrey Gilbert, to patrol the south coast of Ireland. It was not his finest hour. Gilbert failed to pay his sailors, who promptly disappeared with two of the ships. Gilbert himself lost £2,000. Another rebellion followed in August, this time led by the Earl of Desmond. But then the military tide turned. Fewer than a thousand English troops engaged twelve hundred Irish, at Monasternenagh near Limerick, and won. Desmond was proclaimed a traitor, and the suppression of the rebellion became ‘an exercise in reducing the Earl’s strongholds one by one, ravaging his lands and forcing the submission of his suspected allies, while a naval task force prevented any foreign reinforcements arriving from abroad’, in the words of the historian Paul Hammer, in his book on Elizabeth’s wars. The Queen chose Arthur, 14th Lord Grey of Wilton (the recently appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland) to complete this ‘exercise’ in the summer of 1580, and he duly brought more than two thousand new men. Amongst them was one Captain Ralegh, with his hundred men, levied in London in July. As the summer faded, the younger brother of the Earl of Desmond was hung, drawn and quartered for his part in the rebellion. It was reported Captain Ralegh’s men played a part in cutting up the body into small pieces, an act praised by a contemporary historian, who noted, happily, that ‘thus the pestilent hydra hath lost another of his heads’. Lord Grey set the tone for the campaign, being a man fuelled by a hatred of Catholicism and a desire to crush the Irish, ironically through the use of the same methods as the notorious Duke of Alba, the Spanish scourge of the Low Countries.

Despite these successes, Irish submission proved hard to achieve. An unexpected uprising in Leinster was swiftly followed by the arrival of six hundred new Spanish and Italian troops in the south west of Ireland at Smerwick (now Ard na Caithne) in September. They took the opportunity to land when Elizabeth’s ships were forced to sail for supply and maintenance. A forceful response was needed and by mid-October 1580 the Queen had committed 6,500 Englishmen to Ireland, with another thirteen hundred on their way. Their strategic goal was the reclaiming of the small earth fort at Smerwick, which was duly surrounded from the sea by royal warships, which could join in the land bombardment. Smerwick surrendered to Lord Grey within days despite his offering no terms to those inside the fort. At the surrender, the Spanish officers were spared, but all the other defenders were killed, the majority by troops under the command of Captain Ralegh.

There have been attempts to justify the massacre at Smerwick. Those killed were mercenaries; the Spanish commander, more fool he, surrendered knowing no assurances had been given; those surrendering could expect nothing better; by the standards of sixteenth-century warfare, it really wasn’t too bad. Even if one puts aside the horror, however, Smerwick proved about as successful as other English wartime massacres. Over the next two years some fifteen hundred ‘chief men and gentlemen’ were executed in an attempt to enforce English rule, a number that does not include the uncounted ‘meaner sort’. But still the Irish forces grew.

Ralegh’s letters from this time do not dwell on these aspects of war, in part because he has to write about everyday matters (such as paying his men) and in part because he wants to write about high-level policy. His correspondent is Francis Walsingham, the Queen’s Principal Secretary and master of ‘intelligence’. With each letter Walter shows increasing confidence, sometimes writing again within a couple of days, certain Walsingham will listen. He supplies up-to-date news from the front line (‘Davy Barrey has broken and burnt all his castles and entered publicly into the action of rebellion’) but also begins to offer political advice. Elizabeth, having spent a further £100,000 on the war, has made a mistake by appointing an Irish ‘president’ of Munster, the Earl of Ormond. He’d been in post for two years, but ‘there are a thousand traitors more than there were the first day’. (Ironically, the placatory Earl of Ormond had been appointed in a conciliatory move because all-out war was proving both expensive and futile.) Ralegh recommends his own half-brother, Humphrey Gilbert, for the post, despite or because of his reputation for savagery and violence, reminding Walsingham that Gilbert suppressed a rebellion in two months with only a third of the men, and is the most ‘feared’ among the Irish nation. ‘The end shall prove this to be true’. In another sign of his growing confidence, and in a move which would become characteristic of the mature man, Ralegh offers to serve the Queen privately, with ‘a dozen or ten horse’. He knows he’s pushing the envelope, and asks Walsingham to ‘take my bold writing in good part’. Walsingham did nothing, at least not in 1581. But the fact this letter was written on the day his father was buried in faraway Exeter shows Captain Ralegh’s priorities. Family was important: political preferment, through soldiering, was more important.

Ralegh’s experiences in Ireland were a world away from those of the man who would become his most significant political rival in later years. Robert Devereux, the young Earl of Essex, gained his first taste of war when he joined his stepfather, Robert Dudley Earl of Leicester’s, expedition to the Low Countries in 1585. This was the first official English army for a generation to be sent abroad; the military follow-up to Queen Elizabeth’s proclamation on 14 August of that year that she was, at last, taking the Netherlands under her protection. This proclamation of 1585 precipitated war with Spain and would dominate Ralegh’s life and inform his politics for years to come.

The Queen appointed the Earl of Essex as colonel general of the cavalry (no captain, let alone foot soldier, he) and he was present at the battle at Zutphen in September 1586, where the great English hero Sir Philip Sidney was killed. The dying Sidney bequeathed the young Earl his best sword (some say he bequeathed his two best swords) and the Earl of Leicester made his stepson a knight. No matter the expedition’s military aims remained unachieved and fighting was sporadic. Essex saw himself as a ‘second Sidney’, a martial hero, and took every opportunity to live the military dream. In 1589 he would join Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Norris’s expedition to Portugal, without the Queen’s permission. Two years later, this time with Elizabeth’s blessing, he led English troops in Normandy, although he could not resist conferring twenty-four knighthoods during the campaign, twenty-four more than he was authorised to do. Both ventures were military failures, but Essex, if only by right of birth, remained England’s ‘senior aristocratic soldier’, in the words of one biographer.

Back in 1581, mere Captain Ralegh, approaching his thirties, was becoming frustrated with the attritional reality of the guerrilla warfare he was being forced to wage ag...

Table of contents

• Note on spelling, orthography and pronunciation
• The scaffold: Winchester
• Part One
• 1 • Soldier
• 2 • Courtier
• 3 • Coloniser
• 4 • Sailor
• 5 • Lover
• 6 • Explorer
• 7 • Writer
• 8 • Rival
• 9 • The last days of Elizabeth
• 10 • The path to the scaffold
• The scaffold: Winchester
• Part Two
• 11 • Defeat
• 12 • Revival
• 13 • Gold
• 14 • Ralegh released
• 15 • Dead man sailing
• 16 • The last days of Ralegh
• 17 • The last hours of Ralegh
• Epilogue
• Sir Walter Ralegh in his own words
• Image section
• Works consulted
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology