Biography: Raleigh Trevelyan's biography of Sir Walter Raleigh is long and interesting, but uncritical and frequently inaccurate in its historical content, writes Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. But it remains an enjoyable read nonetheless.
Sir Walter Raleigh (c. 1554-1618) is almost as much a creature of legend as history. The soldier, capitalist, scientific investigator and political theorist is less known than the courtier, explorer and poet, who in turn has meant less to the popular imagination than the figure in the cartoon version of the Elizabethan Age, flinging his mantle in the mud for Queen Elizabeth or alarming his servant by breathing smoke. Then there are the stories related almost a century after their supposed occurrence by the dirty-minded and entertaining John Aubrey.
Raleigh Trevelyan's biography draws on all these sources; he even quotes at one point from 1066 and All That. The book is long and interesting, but uncritical and frequently inaccurate in its historical content. Its compensating virtue is in fact a function of its length, a willingness to give space to all of the varied aspects of Raleigh's career, the ins and outs of his financial and property dealings, the canards and rumours, the major adversaries, and especially the places to which he travelled.
It certainly was a full and dramatic career, with well-defined turning-points. Military exploits in Ireland, where he is remembered for the Smerwick massacre and the house in Youghal, voyages of Atlantic exploration, colonisation and piracy, pre-emptive raids on Spanish ports, ambushes of richly laden Spanish ships at sea, were sometimes highly successful and sometimes disastrous (especially for the unfortunate colonists left behind in Virginia in the first attempt to create an English presence there). All were manipulated to promote his image and career at the political centre, the Tudor court.
Taken up and heaped with benefits by Queen Elizabeth, cast out of favour on his marriage with Elizabeth Throckmorton, gradually re-established in the Queen's good books in her last years, he lost power and influence after her death. The new king, James I, did not like him. His trial and condemnation to death in 1603, on a partly-substantiated charge of taking bribes from the Spaniards against whom he had fought for 20 years, was followed by 13 years of imprisonment, during which he managed to live a life almost as full - siring a second son, conducting chemical experiments in a converted hen-house in the Tower of London, forming a friendship with the young Henry Prince of Wales, whose death in 1612 put paid to hopes that he might yet return to court, and writing the History of the World.
His release in 1616 was the prelude to a farcical conclusion. He set out, aged 62, to lead an expeditionary fleet to discover a mine which he thought he had almost found once before, in Guiana, for the benefit of King James. As James was negotiating a marriage for his surviving son, Charles, with the Spanish Infanta (a match which never came off) the enterprise was not supposed to include attacking any Spaniards.
But the few islands on the way to South America, the only places where the ships could collect water, were all in Spanish hands, and the inhabitants were inclined to resist the visitors; there were a few Spanish casualties even before they reached the Americas, where things got much worse. One of Raleigh's subordinates became separated from his flagship, landed and sacked a Spanish settlement, and his elder son, young Wat Raleigh, was killed. The goldmine was not found.
Raleigh returned to England, desperate, made a few futile attempts to escape to France, and surrendered to his fate. The sentence of 1603 was carried out, not without a solemn preliminary lecture to Raleigh on the perfect justice of the proceedings, and the usual theatrical (and, even now, moving) speeches on the scaffold, protestations, last words and beheading, all performed for a distinguished and appreciative audience.
Raleigh Trevelyan is a connection of Sir Walter, and this book has the marks of a lifetime's preparation. He has visited the Orinoco Delta, goldmines in Venezuela, and the Dingle Peninsula where he is a little testy about road-signs in Irish. He tells his story with all the traditional enthusiasm - perhaps empathising less with Raleigh himself than with those commentators from the Victorian age to the 1950s, whom he quotes from time to time, for whom Raleigh is the hero of Protestant, expansionist English patriotism.
His detail on peripheral matters is irritatingly likely to be wrong. The marriage between Sir Philip Sidney's brother Robert and the heiress Barbara Gamage is referred to as "brief", with a footnote "she died soon after". The marriage lasted from 1584 to 1621, not bad for those days, and produced numerous offspring. James Fitzthomas, the "Súgán (straw) Earl" of Desmond is referred to as a person named "Sugane". Pope Gregory XIII who reigned from 1572-1585 is also referred to as Gregory XII (who reigned from 1406-1417) - this is presumably a proofreading mistake, but, since both Popes get mentioned in the index, one wonders about the responsibilities of the editor (if such a person exists) and publisher. It took me five minutes on the Internet to establish that the correct facts are easily ascertainable, in these and other cases.
Readers of popular history don't like to feel that the author's facts are unreliable, but the book remains an enjoyable read nonetheless. The quotations in particular are full, and give a strong sense of the grandeur of the rhetorical prose, and the heartbreaking plainness of Raleigh's letters to his wife.
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is a poet and Dean of Faculty of Arts (Letters) at Trinity College Dublin where she teaches Renaissance literature
Sir Walter Raleigh. By Raleigh Trevelyan. Allen Lane Penguin Press, 622pp. £25