Favourite The

  Mathew Lyons

  For my father, John, and to the memory of my mother, Molly, with gratitude and love

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Chapter I: A Decayed Estate

  Chapter II: Leagues of Smoke

  Chapter III: In a Country Strange

  Chapter IV: The Deceits of Fortune

  Chapter V: The World’s Eye

  Chapter VI: The Virgin Queen

  Chapter VII: The Wind of Faction

  Chapter VIII: The Fort of Fame

  Chapter IX: Excess of Duty

  Chapter X: The Right-flourishing Man

  Chapter XI: The Sacred Anchor

  Chapter XII: A Durable Fire

  Chapter XIII: Hollow Servants

  Chapter XIV: Amore et Virtute

  Chapter XV: The Less Afraid

  End notes

  Bibliography

  Copyright

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Two people above all have helped make this book what it is. Leo Hollis at Constable & Robinson has been everything a writer could wish for in an editor: patient and supportive, incisive and insightful, encouraging, rigorous and enthusiastic. My agent, Sarah Such, has nurtured this project to completion from the first tentative and unshaped conversations, always wise in her judgement and acute in her analysis and infallible in her advice.

  On a personal level, first among all things to praise and give thanks for are my wife Helen – who has carried too much of the burden of this book’s writing and to whose love and faith I owe more than she can know – and our children Isaac and Evie, who illuminate and warm all things in our lives with their boundless love, quizzical intelligence and quiet sarcasm.

  I would also like to say a public thank-you to Alice Burden, Mike Dee, Julia Posen, Sue Sands, and Karl and Jane Woolley, for their great kindness, generosity and support for our family during 2010. I am grateful too to Sarah Elvins and Jane Housham, Catriona Jardine, and Richard Siddle for helping sustain my career during the writing of this book, and to David Barraclough and Jenny Boyce, Kes Fielding and Jane Hodgson, and George Osborne and Lois Rogers for their hospitality and friendship.

  The staff at the British Library, as always, have been unfailingly and unflappably helpful; I am immensely grateful to them. I would also like to thank Nicola Jeanes and Emily Burns at Constable & Robinson, together with my copy-editor Sophie Hutton-Squire, for their work on my behalf.

  Note: Although I rather like the vigour, invention and variety of 16th-century spelling, I felt that on balance clarity was a greater virtue and I have therefore modernized spelling where required. There is no better illustration of the need for such standardization than the fact that William Stebbing, Ralegh’s best Victorian biographer, logged 74 variant spellings of his surname. Although I have retained one or two other spellings in source material as a nod to such profusion, elsewhere I have standardized on that preferred by Ralegh himself.

  But when I found my self to you was true

  I lov’d my self, because my self lov’d you.

  Sir Walter Ralegh

  Minions are not so happy as vulgar judgements think them, being frequently commanded to uncomely, and sometimes unnatural employments.

  Sir Walter Ralegh

  INTRODUCTION

  It was a cool spring morning and Elizabeth was at Greenwich Palace. She had been born here, like her father before her; it was her favourite place. The palace was built on the south side of the river just where the Thames loops down into Kent before returning to its eastward path to the sea; behind the turrets and gables of its brick river front lay courtyards and towers, gardens and park. When the court sat here, which was often, the great and lesser ships leaving London’s quaysides for the Americas and the other unknown limits of the world were known to salute their passing with the smoke and roar of their guns, drawing courtiers and councillors alike to the palace windows. River traffic to and from the city to the west was brisk.

  This particular morning Elizabeth was enjoying the small and precious liberty of a walk in the palace park. The wide silver-grey river was rough and unsettled; curlews flecked the shore. Green fields could be seen to the south through a gate in the park wall, pastures rising quickly out of the valley, studded with poplars; to the east, the palace meadow gave way to green marshland. As she walked, Elizabeth perhaps talked with the small coterie of men and women gathered about her. She was no doubt lightly guarded, if at all, since she viewed such securities as an unnecessary evil – or rather, as a malignant affront to her freedom, no matter their necessity. But she walked quickly, nonetheless.

  And then she stopped, and the illusion of free movement, of liberty, faded. In front of her the path gave way to thick wetmud. She looked around at her courtiers, imperious and expectant. They did not move and the moment filled with uncertainty and silence. Then a tall young man stepped forward. She must have known him a little: through his family, his reputation at court, through talk of his exploits elsewhere. He was Ralegh, a West Countryman, a seaman and a soldier. She perhaps noted he was richly dressed, far beyond his status or his means. But then he swept off that sumptuous cape of his and, bowing low, laid it over the cold, wet mud at her feet. He had, surely, something graceful and witty to say to mark this small gift. She walked on over the cape, and looked at him again and wondered …

  This book is about that moment: Ralegh stepping forward from the obscurity of his youth, stepping out into history’s glare, and Elizabeth’s wonder at him, his promise, his gifts. But while the story of the cloak itself is mostly a confection – whatever truth it holds, it has little to say about Ralegh’s claims on his queen – the true story of their coming together is quite different and altogether more compelling, fraught with dangers for both of them. The Favourite does what has not been done before and traces Ralegh’s rise to favour over several perilous years from which he was fortunate to emerge both alive and free. It examines anew the personal and political compulsions that drew them together, and then tracks the careful steps of their dance as Elizabeth negotiated, Ralegh at her side, the darkest years of her reign, overshadowed by the fear of conspiracy, assassination and war.

  It is here that Ralegh’s cloak, casually thrown down to stop Elizabeth soiling her shoes in the dirt, becomes a problem. After all, if you know one thing about Ralegh and Elizabeth, it is this story, or a version of it. It has seeped out from its place in anecdotal Tudor history into the popular consciousness, becoming an iconic image that seems wholly to articulate the strange and elaborate rituals of deference and favour that existed between a queen and her courtier, a parable of ambition, subjugation and power.

  In the process, the personalities of Ralegh and Elizabeth, no less than the physical and emotional drama and drive of their relationship, have blurred. We recognize the shape of their poses, and think no further. The very ubiquity of the story contrives to give their relationship a sense of inevitability, so that we do not stop to examine either it or them on their own terms: how their individual trajectories brought them together and what it was about their own experiences and understanding of the world that made each attractive to the other.

  We do not even stop to ask what kind of attraction it was that they felt. We feel glibly assured that money, sex and power were present in some measure, but we do not consider how difficult it might have been to establish and sustain a meaningful relationship with such potent and conflicting motives ever-present, nor really what such a relationship might mean in the context of a queen regnant and a minor courtier in a late Tudor court. How could any private bond form in such a relentlessly public forum? What reality could the intense, passionate and playful rhetoric of love
– which both employed – actually describe? Where was the human truth in the complex negotiations with power that court life inevitably imposed on them?

  These questions are at the heart of The Favourite. If it is a book about Ralegh and his extraordinary rise to power, then it is also about Elizabeth’s struggle for personal liberty against the immense constraints of her position. Above all, in writing this book, I wanted to acknowledge, even celebrate, the ordinary contradictions of these two exceptional people, to rescue them from their own myths, restore to them some of the freedom for which they both so desperately and differently yearned.

  To do this, I felt it was important to suspend the judgements of history, to follow them through the private crises and public struggles of their early lives to explore how they might have understood both themselves and each other at the point at which they met. I wanted to see their actions in the context of the moment, far from inevitable, and contingent on factors which may have otherwise been lost. The two portraits that emerged from this process are, perhaps, more flawed than we are used to, both damaged by their experiences, but more revealingly and credibly human.

  For the same reason, I have chosen to focus exclusively on the early part of Ralegh’s career – his rise to greatness. The Favourite is about what brought these two people together and what, at the very height of their relationship, they asked from and gave to each other. It is a book about the making of Sir Walter Ralegh, both the man who won Elizabeth’s favour and the myth of the favourite forever casting his cloak at her feet, exploring those aspects of their stories which have never really been adequately explained. In the years of Ralegh’s greatness these two people forged a myth that has survived for 400 years.

  It may seem counter-intuitive that two such written-about figures from English history should remain with their relationship unexamined. Nevertheless, it is true. Ralegh customarily merits little more than a line or two in studies of Elizabeth, as if her choice of him reveals nothing about her beyond a mere attraction to men. In Ralegh’s biographies, by way of contrast, Elizabeth acts as a kind of deus ex machina, appearing periodically to dispense or withhold favour but essentially, humanly absent from the wild narrative of his life.

  In fact, Ralegh himself still hides behind the myth he created for himself in the long third act of his life as a self-styled political prisoner under – and ultimately martyr to – the arbitrary government of James I. Every full biography of Ralegh is written in the shadow of that great and tragic figure, mesmerized by Ralegh’s mythopoeic gifts. The complexities of the man whom Elizabeth first favoured – the young Ralegh, a tangled contradictory mass of insecurity and ambition, of intellect, awkwardness, vanity and doubt – are lost.

  One consequence of this is that an essential truth about Ralegh and his rise to power has never adequately been addressed: almost all of those who came across him at court loathed and distrusted him. Elizabeth was the shining exception – and yet her contemporary reputation as a brilliant judge of men and their uses rightly survives to this day.

  Ralegh was, a contemporary later reflected, a man ‘who had offended many and was maligned of most’. His greatness is apparent to us because we know what came after. It was not apparent at all to many of those who knew him. Many of his peers were jealous, both of his success and, no doubt, his gifts: jealous and not a little frightened. Even William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s longest-serving, most loyal and most trusted adviser, guardedly warned a friend that Ralegh’s closeness to the queen meant he could do more damage to someone in an hour than he, Burghley, could do good in a year. But there has to be more to it than that.

  The Ralegh of the 1580s – the man who seemed to seduce Elizabeth – was deliberately abrasive, manipulative and deceitful. It was, in a way, part of his charm – his outspokenness, his unwillingness to be cowed – and it was certainly integral to his identity. Moreover, Ralegh had a genius for self-advertising, although the idea, which the story of the cloak seems to perpetuate, that it was expressed through humility or deference, is to miss the man entirely. A more accommodating and deferent Ralegh would neither have risen so high nor left such a mark on the history of his own and later times. To understand him we need to suspend judgement, to note the unique and troubling circumstances of late sixteenth-century England and how they impacted on a young man with no meaningful prospects in life like Ralegh.

  Yet if Ralegh the courtier was very much a self-conscious creation it is worthwhile pausing to consider what magnitude of will and intellect it might have taken to create and sustain that persona in the crucible of Elizabeth’s court. Or, to put it another way, how great the emotional toll must have been: for all the bluster, there is a fragility to Ralegh that is easy to overlook, a desperate diffidence and insecurity. He wanted to be at the apex of the nation’s power, but he also wanted to escape from it: that tension between his ambition and his self-doubt is one of the many things that is fascinating about him, but it also casts a different shadow on his relationship with Elizabeth, how he wanted and needed her – however one likes to quantify such needs – and how he wanted to be elsewhere too. This, the push and pull of their relationship – the almost narcotic pattern of indulgence and withdrawal – breaks the traditional frame through which we see them; ultimately Ralegh needed from Elizabeth something other than the wealth and status with which she famously favoured him. But what?

  Equally, we may think of Ralegh as the archetypal courtier, using flattery and extravagant gestures to win pecuniary and other favours from his queen, but were those really the qualities for which she rewarded him? There were many such aspects of court life in which he, unlike many of his peers, played no part. There is no evidence, for instance, that Ralegh was ever involved in a key part of the later Elizabethan court calendar, the ritual displays of tilting – especially the Accession Day tilts – when those who aspired to preferment could present an idealized version of themselves to the court. This is perhaps particularly surprising given his reputation for ostentation: they were above all opportunities to dazzle, to draw attention to one’s magnificence. More surprising still is the absence of any New Year gifts from Ralegh to his queen, unlike almost every other leading figure at court. This was another key ritual, another significant means of giving thanks and attracting favour. Elizabeth, everyone knew, was exceptionally fond of receiving expensive presents, particularly in the form of jewellery.

  The truth, as always, is more intriguing. These lacunae point to a profound sense of aloneness that always hung over Ralegh, which may sometimes have been hauteur but which also spoke to a more complex sense of reticence and privacy than is generally acknowledged, an aloofness expressing both an extraordinary self-confidence and a deep-seated insecurity – a weakness wrapped up in a strength. He liked to do things differently, and he liked to do different things. When he sought Elizabeth’s favour, it would be on his own terms – and that was not easy.

  As for Elizabeth, while she certainly enjoyed such exhibitions of loyalty and affection, she did not need to reward courtiers as she rewarded Ralegh to earn them. If there is a temptation to assume that Elizabeth rewarded Ralegh with favour for being merely handsome and witty, then it must be resisted; neither of them merits such condescension. After her death, Ralegh was heard to complain bitterly about just such popular misconceptions, how he had to work hard for every favour he received and do many things – uncomely and sometimes unnatural employments, he called them – which he found morally questionable.1 Far from being kind and generous to him, he said, she was in fact unjust and tyrannous.2

  What, then, did she ask of him – and did he give it freely?

  In fact, Elizabeth’s attitude to Ralegh – and indeed other favourites – is more complex than the caricature might usually allow. One reason for that is the power of her mythology. ‘Elizabeth I’ and ‘the Virgin Queen’ seem to us to be synonyms, interchangeable and irrevocably linked. But the truth is that the Virgin Queen – imperious, unyielding, inviolate – is s
omething Elizabeth became over time through a mixture of state propaganda, projection and, some would have said, a good deal of wishful thinking. The phrase itself was not actually addressed to her until the summer of 1578, and the myth itself only began to put down its deep roots once the prospect of marriage was finally off the horizon in the early to mid-1580s. For the greater part of her reign, to those who knew her, and to the many of her subjects whose conversations and dreams she inhabited, she was a more sensual and provocative figure, possessed of an ambivalently powerful sexuality, at once seductive and disruptive.

  If Elizabeth’s court still seems to us after 400 years to be a place of unusually heightened drama then one reason for it must be Elizabeth’s refusal to marry. Elizabeth was fond of commenting on the bond between her and her subjects; she had no need for a husband, she said, because she was wedded to her people. It would be truer to say that she was wedded first of all to herself, since the strength of will it required to resist the pressure to marry suggests more a ruthlessly single-minded solipsism – albeit blessed with an acute political sense – than anything more altruistic. If the Elizabeth of the 1560s and 70s thought the safety of the realm was best ensured by her continued independence, she was alone in that view – and it was an opinion she never dared express openly.

  After all, Elizabeth’s preference for singularity meant that political power – perhaps particularly the soft power of grace and favour – was uniquely concentrated in her hands. There were to be no rival power bases to speak of at Elizabeth’s court, no other royal household but her own, no factions that looked to anyone but her for their reward. The only other person with a significant claim on anyone’s loyalty to the crown was Elizabeth’s cousin, Mary Stuart, and she spent the last seventeen years of her life in Elizabeth’s control, imprisoned in a sequence of more-or-less remote households about England.