Legend has it that the history of Sir Walter Ralegh can be told in four objects: cloak and puddle, potato and tobacco. Anna Beer’s new biography makes no bones about setting the record straight. The tale of Ralegh’s sartorial sacrifice to save Elizabeth I’s royal foot from a “plashy place” didn’t appear in print until half a century after his death, while potatoes and tobacco had reached Europe years before he set sail for the New World.
But, as Beer points out, myths have meaning – in this case marking Ralegh’s extraordinary double career as courtier and colonist, as well as his prodigious flair for self-promotion. “Patriot or traitor”, her title asks, although the book’s back cover rejects the blunt binary in favour of “Writer – Explorer – Patriot – Traitor”, a daisy chain that comes closer to tracing the unpredictable contours of a mercurial life.
Ralegh was born in 1554, the fifth son of a Devonshire landowner. (All his life he spoke with a Devon accent, and his pronunciation of his name – Water – left a trail of poetic puns, both friendly and hostile, bobbing in his wake.) Lacking an inheritance, aspiring younger sons had to make their way in the world by brain or brawn. Ralegh was still in his teens when he began to demonstrate that he was blessed with an abundance of both.
Before he was 30, he had fought in the French wars of religion, studied at Oxford and the Inns of Court, captained a ship in a voyage of Atlantic exploration led by his half-brother Humphrey Gilbert, landed a commission in the English army in Ireland, and caught the eye not only of William Cecil, Elizabeth’s chief minister, but of the queen herself. Tall, dark, flamboyant and handsome, Ralegh found himself climbing the ladder of preferment at court with vertiginous ease. Both body and mind, however, remained restless.
In Ralegh, it turned out, remarkable talent was matched by insatiable ego. Nothing was ever enough, in terms of wealth, influence, intellect or action. The failure of the expeditions he sent in 1585 and 1587 to the new English colony of Virginia, named after his queen, only compounded his conviction, a decade later, that he would find the fabled gold of El Dorado when he sailed to the coast of South America in 1595. This was speculation born of desperation. In the early 1590s he blotted his copybook in spectacular fashion: not only had his interest in science and rational scepticism led to accusations of atheism, but the revelation of his secret marriage to the formidable Bess Throckmorton, one of the queen’s maids of honour, precipitated Elizabeth’s incandescent rage and a brief stay in the Tower for the couple.
Through it all – triumph, disgrace, retrenchment, partial recovery – Ralegh wrote: letters full of furious energy; poems of love and loss, by turns elegant, erotic, bitter and cynical; breathtakingly vivid accounts of the strange lands and brutal battles in which he had journeyed and fought; pages on pages of words with which he sought to bend the world to his own apparently irresistible will. (As he noted in his report on “The Discovery of the Large, Rich and Beautiful Empire of Guiana”, “I hope it shall appear there is a way found to answer every man’s longing.”)
And he continued to write when everything went irretrievably wrong. The one man obdurately resistant to Ralegh’s rhetorical genius, his sense of entitlement, his theatrical self-aggrandisement, was the one who mattered: James VI of Scotland and I of England, Elizabeth’s successor. Months after the queen’s death, Ralegh was implicated in a plot to overthrow the new king and found guilty of treason. An 11th-hour stay of execution stopped short of a pardon, and he spent the next 13 years in the Tower, a (legally) dead man writing an 800-page history of the world. In 1616 his powers of persuasion bloomed one last time, and Ralegh, at 62, was freed to return to Guiana in search, once again, of El Dorado. The disastrous failure of the voyage sealed his fate. On 29 October 1618 – after a virtuoso speech from the scaffold that transformed his reputation in the course of its 45 minutes – he lost his head on the block.
Four hundred years on, Beer’s biography channels the chaotic energy of the man himself, summoning up his life in animated, colloquial prose, shifting constantly between past and present tense. (“It was, of course, ‘fake newes’”, we’re told of a pamphlet recounting Ralegh’s last expedition.) As a work of history Patriot or Traitor is frustrating – the text peppered with unattributed quotations, and evidence impossible to trace through a vanishingly brief list of “works consulted”, while the wider political world in which he lived can seem shadowy, even shaky, in points of detail, with historiographical argument about his exploits kept disconcertingly at arm’s length.
But what brings the book to brilliant life is Ralegh’s voice. In conversation with his writing, Beer’s prose soars. Even a judge at his last trial was moved to remark that Ralegh “hath been as a star at which the world hath gazed”. We’re gazing still. Here he stands, in the spotlight, centre-stage, at the heart of his own story. It’s hard not to think Sir Walter would have approved.
• Helen Castor’s Elizabeth I is published by Penguin.
Patriot or Traitor: The Life and Death of Sir Walter Ralegh is published by Oneworld. To order a copy for £16.33 (RRP £18.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
