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Walter Ralegh's History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance
By Nicholas Popper The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2012 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-21396-5
CHAPTER 1
Context: Ralegh and Historical Culture
RALEGH'S LIFE AND CAREER
Ralegh's participation in the culture of historical counsel illuminates the vast scope of this movement's influence. As the following chapter will show, the canons of historical culture were shaped in an array of intellectual and political contexts, resulting in an enterprise deemed prophetic and prudential, whose practices demanded the microscopic analysis of a broad range of sources. The Elizabethan elite absorbed its dictates into their political experience, and Ralegh's ascendancy took place in an environment that prized the collection and manipulation of historical texts. By invoking this multilayered conception of the past, Ralegh orchestrated the History both to meet the needs of a realmwide crisis and to address highly personal apprehensions concerning his own life.
Little in Ralegh's background portended a future role as a prophetic scholar proffering learned counsel. His early career suggests a desire to use military experience and education to establish qualification for provincial administration. Ralegh was born in 1554 to a fiercely Protestant gentry family of Devon. The West Country produced many of England's foremost sailors and soldiers, and many of Ralegh's maternal relatives had careers in these fields that embedded them within the local power structure. His father, similarly, had served as deputy vice admiral of Devon. Ralegh himself spent 1569–70 fighting for the Huguenot cause as a mercenary in France. In 1572, he matriculated at Oriel College, Oxford, where he was one of the older students among the growing number of gentry and aristocrats attending university. There is no record that he took a degree, and, in 1575, he was admitted to the Middle Temple. For the next few years he gadded about London, composing verse, brawling, serving short terms in prisons, and associating with poet-ruffians such as his maternal half brothers Adrian and Humphrey Gilbert. From 1580 to 1581, he served as a captain in Ireland under Lord Grey de Wilton as part of the effort to suppress the second Desmond rebellion. During this time, he presided over the brutal massacre of Continental Catholic reinforcements at Smerwick. It has been conjectured that he discovered significant letters among the possessions of the slaughtered that he used to gain entry to court in 1580.
By 1581, Ralegh had captured Elizabeth's favor. His rise was swift and spectacular, grounded in his mastery of the idiom of chaste love of his sovereign expressed through the courtier's tools of wit, verse composition, dancing, and disciplined self-presentation. The court buzzed with rumors about the queen's new favorite, and his ascent spurred malicious gossip and ridicule of the accent that betrayed his provincial origins. But Ralegh was more than a glittering ornament in Elizabeth's court. He quickly became a powerful administrator of the military and maritime affairs associated with the West Country and the region's most prominent representative at court. After Humphrey Gilbert's death in 1583, he was given the patent for exploration in the New World, an enterprise performed by Cornwall's and Devon's sailors. In 1584, he was elected a member of Parliament for Devon, and he represented various West Country constituencies during Elizabeth's reign. He was knighted in January 1585 and shortly thereafter became vice admiral of the West, lord warden of the Stanneries, and lord lieutenant of Cornwall. His highest appointment came in 1591, when he succeeded Christopher Hatton as captain of the guard. That same year, he published his Last Fight of the Revenge, an account of a recent naval defeat mythologizing the bravery of a foolhardy kinsman and fostering anti-Spanish sentiment. The favorite was also Elizabeth's chief agent for Devon and Cornwall affairs, and his military and maritime expertise wasdirected toward both shaping public opinion and implementing crown policy.
But, though Ralegh acquired highly coveted offices, he failed to reach the loftiest heights of Elizabethan government and was not appointed a privy counselor. The fall ensuing from his 1591 secret marriage to Elizabeth Throckmorton, a maid of honor, foreclosed this possibility. This marriage undermined Ralegh's purported singular love of his aging queen, who angrily banned the couple from court and ordered their imprisonment in the Tower of London. After their release, Ralegh and his wife relocated to his estate at Sherborne. In fact, his disgrace did not lead to his exile from politics; rather, he performed duties appropriate to a provincial governor and was returned for the 1593 parliament. But salacious rumors followed him, and, in 1593, the Court of High Commission was convened to investigate rumors of his atheism that, as we will see in the next chapter, spread from the pages of confessional pamphleteering to provincial gossip. The commission disbanded after satisfactorily establishing his orthodoxy, and he continued to pursue Elizabeth's favor. In 1595, he convinced her to let him lead an expedition seeking El Dorado in Guiana. After this enterprise failed, his enemies accused him of feigning the voyage while hiding in Devon. He responded in his exculpatory 1596 Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana, an eyewitness account urging English exploration of this uncolonized region. Gradually, these efforts persuaded the queen to again bestow her favor. After performing a significant role in the assault on Cadiz later that year, Ralegh regained a prominent place at court, and the next year he privateered in the Azores against the Spanish treasure fleet. He and his sovereign were reconciled in her last years.
Ralegh's position, however, remained fragile. Like all counselors in the 1590s, he struggled to decipher the queen's intentions while negotiating an environment marked by hostility between aspirants to her favor. By 1591, the old guard of Elizabethan counselors such as Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Francis Walsingham, and Christopher Hatton had died, and only William Cecil, Baron Burghley, remained from Elizabeth's remarkably stable group of long-term advisers. The new generation of counselors lacked the earlier group's capacity for collaborative action and compromise and, instead, operated with a ruthless fractiousness that had previously been reserved for those outside the regime. Burghley's son Robert Cecil and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, spent the 1590s maneuvering in pursuit of favor, seeking control of appointments, and plunging the precarious power structure into factional tumult. Though Essex had emerged as the queen's favorite during Ralegh's disgrace, the early 1590s saw him and Ralegh periodically in a tenuous alliance. But they fell out permanently in the wake of the Cadiz expedition, when each claimed primary credit for the successes of the assault and blamed the other for the treasure fleet's escape. Ralegh and Cecil allied after 1596, and Cecil's son William was educated at Sherborne. The two recoiled at Essex's ill-fated rebellion, and Ralegh was slandered as cheerfully laughing through Essex's execution in 1601.
The demise of their common enemy and a dispute in the 1601 parliament weakened the Ralegh-Cecil alliance, and it fully unraveled after Elizabeth's death in 1603. During the 1590s, Cecil had been preparing for the likely ascent of James VI of Scotland. He and Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, secured James's favor, and they held the sovereign's trust when he ascended the English throne. The cryptopapist Howard despised Ralegh for his anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic politics. He convinced James that Ralegh would not accept him as king, and Ralegh exacerbated matters by making only clumsy attempts to endear himself. Within a year of James's ascent, Ralegh was implicated in the nebulous Main Plot. The prosecutor, Edward Coke, accused Ralegh of conspiring with the Spanish to depose the new monarch and promote James's cousin Arabella Stuart. Scheduled for execution, Ralegh was spared at the last moment, legally dead, but alive in the Tower.
Though Ralegh allegedly tried to commit suicide early in his Tower stay, before long he again assumed activities that might benefit himself and the state. Indeed, confinement kept him near the center of Jacobean affairs in a way that exile to Devon would not have. Less than two weeks after his reprieve, he had already requested a trunk containing valuable papers. Early in his incarceration, he wrote discourses on potential matches for James and Anne of Denmark's children, developed a curative salve, and wrote position papers that captured the attention of Henry, Prince of Wales, whose militant anti-Spanish Calvinism stood in marked contrast to his father's ecumenical pacifism. Though the chronology of these works is uncertain, Ralegh's production of such advices appears to have increased after 1607 as Cecil's effort to reform crown finances incurred growing public and royal hostility. It was at this time that Ralegh began work on the History. Printing likely began in April 1611, when the History was entered in the Stationer's Register, quite possibly with Prince Henry's encouragement. Ralegh's best hope for release from the Tower seemingly perished with the prince's death in 1612, but he did not cease working on theHistory or producing counsel for Prince Charles.
Two years later, Ralegh perceived the regime's descent into crisis as an opportunity. In early 1614, death and scandal unsettled the Jacobean government in both its political and its polemical ranks. Howard, who after Cecil's 1612 death became James's foremost adviser, had further alienated large swaths of the political nation, and his credibility was destroyed by his implication in the Overbury affair and his mismanagement of the "Addled Parliament." When the disgraced Howard died that June, James's government found itself in the position of exceptional uncertainty. Unsuccessful efforts to manipulate Parliament had left the king impoverished and distrusted. Moreover, James's Anglican polemical apparatus was tottering no less than the political. Isaac Causabon, James's prized polemicist and conversant, had increasingly drawn public slights for his inability to speak English and association with the king's unpopular ecclesiastical settlement. He died that July while still at work on his effort to refute Cardinal Cesare Baronius's Annales Ecclesiastici. The king was, thus, in short order deprived of his foremost scholarly and political counselors.
In England, James had always relied heavily on one powerful counselor, but the Overbury affair and Howard's recent failures compromised his ability to fill the conspicuous opening at the top of the regime with someone from the pro-Spanish, peace faction. Perceiving the possibility of regaining James's favor, Ralegh produced two works highlighting his ability to proffer learned counsel. First, he brought the History to an abrupt close and then pressed William Stansby, on behalf of the bookseller Walter Burre, to publish the completed portion. The work was for sale in early November 1614. The decision to issue this work at this moment recognized that James was an active participant in a pan-European learned political culture and that he ascribed grave value to the moderating effect of erudite debates. Ralegh hoped that the History's displays of prudence and erudition would convince the king to install him at the center of a reconfigured regime, synthesizing the roles of Howard and Casaubon.
James was not swayed, recoiling instead at the intensity of Ralegh's criticism of kings. The court observer John Chamberlain noted Ralegh's severe disappointment when the History was recalled later that year by the crown for being "too sawcie in censuring Princes." Frustrated, Ralegh abandoned his historical project, but he continued to work to secure release from the Tower. He produced his "Dialogue between a Counsellor of State, and a Justice of the Peace," which suggested that he could ably manage an unruly parliament by honoring the institution's historical privileges while still implementing James's agenda. In the following two years, he wrote tracts on the history of navigation and the history of warfare that contained skeletal treatments of the centuries after the end point of the History. At last, in 1616, the impoverished James granted Ralegh temporary freedom to seek El Dorado's gold under the proviso that he not attack the Spanish. With Ralegh abroad, the confiscated copies of the History, as well as a reprinting, were sold for crown profit. But the voyage proved disastrous: Ralegh neither found gold nor prevented his crew from destroying a Spanish fort, and his son Wat was killed during the raid. Ralegh may have considered fleeing to the Continent to avoid his king's ire, but instead he chose to return to England, where he was seized, tried, and, in 1618, beheaded.
Ralegh was the last surviving Elizabethan favorite and the last major statesmen from the pre-Essex period at the Jacobean court, and in his scaffold speech he idealized the queen's reign by expressing deep sympathy and love for Essex. He quickly became a symbol of bygone Elizabethan glory for Englishmen dissatisfied with the Stuarts. Within a decade of his death, he had become a hero for anti-Stuart Puritans and Parliamentarians, revered as a symbol of halcyon days.
But, in his own time and his own estimation, Ralegh was no Puritan or monarchomach. He was a courtier, a crown servant, and an administrator whose practices were determined by his experience in the Elizabethan regime—and he remained committed to these activities even as a captive counselor under James.
RALEGH AND TEXT IN ELIZABETHAN POLITICAL CULTURE
The bulk of Ralegh's surviving prose writings date from his Jacobean incarceration. Verse composition had been the appropriate medium to express his courtly love to Elizabeth, but he did not use poetry to appeal to his male sovereign. Rather, when seeking to attract James's favor, he composed analyses of contemporary affairs considering policy alternatives and firmly advocating a particular course of action. These texts indicate the implementation of a political practice increasingly characteristic of European governments, one grounded in the recording, circulation, and preservation of counsel and policy.
Elizabethan privy counselors voraciously collected letters supplying intelligence on conditions in Britain and abroad, position papers analyzing actions available to Elizabeth and foreign princes, historical tracts offering precedents legitimizing political maneuvering, and polemics imploring specific policies. Their collections teemed with considerations of the most sensitive issues of Elizabeth's reign, such as her relationships with the monarchs of France and Spain, action in the Low Countries, the presence of recusants, the proper structure and practice of the Anglican Church, the strained relations with Scotland, and, above all, the question of the succession. The surfeit of surviving evidence of their collecting such works—as well as the surge in publications patronized by powerful statesmen—testifies to the rise of a textually based mode of political practice.
Ralegh did produce several written advices during Elizabeth's reign, including a 1592/93 tract on the succession, his 1596 account of the action at Cadiz, and two papers concerning war with Spain. Many of his letters from this period offer counsel on military matters for correspondents such as Walsingham and Cecil. He thus was one of the scores of men in Elizabeth's regime who lent their pens to evaluating policies that were then evaluated by the queen and the Privy Council. He also received manuscript position papers from those with less access than him, though in notably smaller numbers than the most powerful Elizabethan statesmen. This reflected his lesser power within the governing elite—a status epitomized by his frustrated pursuit of the position of privy counselor.
Ralegh's publication of the Last Fight of the Revenge and the Discovery of Guiana similarly indicates that his role in the administration differed from that of the privy counselors, who infrequently published under their own names. The Elizabethan elite carefully orchestrated the circulation of texts intended to intervene strategically in moments of tension. But, when men such as Burghley, Walsingham, or Leicester wished to shape public opinion, they generally encouraged clients to produce polemical tracts or historical admonitions. Lesser figures within the regime, such as Thomas Norton, were among those encouraged to author texts manipulating broader sentiment. These men operated with varying degrees of independence to issue print or manuscript publications that articulated crown policy to a broader public or framed the popular interpretation of recent events.
There were risks inherent in this system, however. Authors of such works hoped to pressure Elizabeth toward specific actions by mobilizing a public sphere to foment demonstrations of loyalty, but Norton, John Hales, and many others closely connected to prominent counselors were disgraced when their counsels were deemed overly aggressive. This danger prompted privy counselors to establish at least the pretense of distance from polemical publications, not wishing to hazard their participation in the formation of policy. There is no question that Ralegh aspired to achieve the place of privy counselor and was exasperated by Elizabeth's refusal. But his record of publication reveals that his position as closely resembled Norton's as it did Burghley's. Though he performed vital work for the regime through the duties associated with his crown offices, his occasional role as conduit to the public suggests his inhibited ability to shape policy within the regime.
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Excerpted from Walter Ralegh's History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance by Nicholas Popper. Copyright © 2012 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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