Articles and Book Reviews by Fergus M. Bordewich
Walter Ralegh: Architect of Empire
Sir Walter Ralegh was a swashbuckling pirate, poet, colonizer and courtier who founded a doomed settlement.
[Book review] Walter Ralegh: Architect of Empire by Alan Gallay
Review By Fergus Bordewich in The Wall Street Journal, November 2019.
IF AMERICANS KNOW of Sir Walter Ralegh at all today, it is most likely as the founder of the ill-fated "Lost Colony" of Roanoke, which he established on the North Carolina coast, and which disappeared without a trace a few years later. Some, perhaps, might also associate him with his quixotic quest for the ever-elusive golden city of "El Dorado" in the South American jungle. But such wispy associations fail to do justice to the colonial visionary, swashbuckling pirate, poet, mystic, courtier, and alleged traitor whom Alan Gallay has vividly conjured in this richly researched and engagingly written new biography. (Rather than the familiar "Raleigh", Mr. Gallay, a professor of American history based at Texas Christian University, prefers the spelling that Sir Walter used in later life.)
Intellectually gifted, gallant and sophisticated as he was, Ralegh had been born a commoner into a family of long-faded prestige. He owed most of his remarkable success to the favor of Queen Elizabeth, with whom he maintained a long and intimate though probably not sexual relationship. She granted him a cornucopia of titles, royal sinecures, estates, and commercial monopolies, as well as the sole patent to plant settlers in America, where he bestowed the name "Virginia" on the mid-Atlantic coast in honor of his royal patron -- the "Virgin Queen". (He also introduced both tobacco and the potato to Europe.) In addition, working on the crown's behalf, he led numerous privateering expeditions against the Spanish and played a key role in the development of England's rise as a naval power. Most significantly, in Mr. Gallay's judgment, he played a preeminent role in the English colonization of Ireland where, writes Mr. Gallay, Ralegh "set in motion the building of an English empire."
We today tend to see that empire through the distorting lens of the late 19th century, when great swathes of the world were ruled from London and British armies marched largely unhindered around the globe. In the 1580s, all that lay far in the future. Even Scotland was then largely autonomous and although England had nominally ruled Ireland for some four hundred years, the royal writ remained shaky across much of that often rebellious island.
Ralegh, Mr. Gallay says, saw colonization in both Ireland and the Americas not just as a commercial but also, surprisingly, a spiritual enterprise that would create "a better world for both the colonizer and the colonized." Altruism was hardly his main motive, however. Ralegh stood to become very rich by extending the crown's control in Ireland - Elizabeth assigned him ultimately some 150,000 acres mainly in County Kerry, where he in turn distributed tracts to his personal retainers.
According to Mr. Gallay, the "Munster Plantation", as this project was called, comprised one of the greatest governmental enterprises undertaken by Elizabethan England. Vast tracts of land confiscated from actual and alleged rebels against the crown were to be brought under English law, developed commercially, and peopled with English Protestant settlers who would demonstrate "civilized" values to the "wild" Irish. In the process, it was assumed that the English would grow wealthy, and the tamed Irish would grow more English. Over time, the Anglicization of Ireland would serve as a template for the later colonization of North America where, writes Mr. Gallay, "the English colonies and then the United States attempted to implement the same policies that were tried in Ireland."
Mr. Gallay considers Ralegh's assimilationist approach to colonization enlightened for its time, in contrast to the Spanish practice of violent conquest and the enslavement of the native peoples in its colonies. In Ireland, Ralegh maintained friendly relations with the local Catholics, and in the Americas he urged fair treatment for the native peoples. The Indians are "as free by nature as any Christian," Ralegh wrote in connection with his proposed colonization of Guiana, during his hunt for "El Dorado". He declared that "no Christians may lawfully invade with hostility any heathenish people to kill, spoile, & conquer them," and stipulated that any Englishman who attempted to rape a native woman be punished by death.
Writes Mr. Gallay, Ralegh "had no interest in changing America's Native peoples." His unusual tolerance for religious and cultural diversity lay in his devotion to the philosophy of Hermeticism, to which Mr. Gallay devotes considerable attention. Hermeticism, which enjoyed a vogue among intellectuals of the time, emphasized the second coming of Christ and common ties among all Christians. However, it also held that all matter was infused by the divine and honored the sacredness in all "holy things," including those of non-Christian peoples, Native Americans among them. According to Mr. Gallay, "Hermeticists believed that in America they had the opportunity to discover secrets of the universe-of God's Creation-that could lead humanity to greater physical and spiritual well-being." To such beliefs, Ralegh added a transcendental hope that Queen Elizabeth might, as Mr. Gallay puts it, become "empress of a universal empire that would save both Old and New Worlds from the papal anti-Christ and prepare the way for Christ's return and the impending end of the world, or, at the very least, bring on the return of Constantine's Golden Age."
English colonization was rather less utopian in practice. In the Americas, friendship with the natives lasted as long as it served English interests. And in Ireland, colonial rule was often harsh. Ralegh's settlers and their heirs pressured the Irish to stop roaming with their livestock and move into towns; Irish tenants were pushed off their land as fields were enclosed with fencing; Irish names were altered and use of the Irish language discouraged. Ultimately the colonial enterprise was a one-way street. While Mr. Gallay strives commendably to see the colonial experiment in America from the Indian point of view, he tells us frustratingly little about how the Irish felt about their coerced assimilation. This puzzling lacuna is all the more glaring in a book that reaches so ambitiously and otherwise successfully beyond simple biography in its effort to plumb the character of an age and the diversity of the peoples who inhabited it.
Compared to Ireland, Roanoke was basically a side-show. In 1585, Ralegh established his small settlement near Cape Hatteras, an inauspicious location that probably doomed the colony from the start. In early reports, the colony was described as an Eden blessed with fine soil and welcoming aborigines. The native tribes were at first indeed friendly, and a second contingent of settlers was sent out, but relations with the Indians soon deteriorated. Supplies ran short. Relief ships failed to arrive. Conflict arose, probably over food, and violence erupted. When at last a ship arrived from England in 1590, the colony was gone, leaving one of the most enduring mysteries in American history. Mr. Gallay speculates, as other historians have, that the survivors may have managed to relocate north to somewhere near Chesapeake Bay, where they eventually died off, were killed, or intermarried with native Americans.
By the time the successful Jamestown colony was established in Virginia in 1607, in Virginia, Ralegh would be a prisoner in the Tower of London. After Elizabeth's death in 1603, his official patronage mostly evaporated. His relations with the new king, James I, were rocky from the start. On the basis of what was almost certainly false evidence, enemies at court accused Ralegh of participating in a bizarre plot to kidnap the ultra-Protestant monarch and compel him to allow religious tolerance throughout the kingdom. "Ralegh's personality, his larger-than-life persona, and his Hermeticism and lack of orthodoxy all combined to make him the perfect candidate for sacrifice," writes Mr. Gallay.
Charged with treason, Ralegh's life hung in the balance. Although restricted to the Tower, his prestige ensured that he would enjoy generous amenities, including a chemical laboratory in which to carry out experiments, a substantial library, and uninterrupted visits from friends; while jailed, he also wrote much excellent poetry as well as a history of the world that enjoyed great popularity for generations. Somehow he managed to convince the king that if he was allowed to mount another voyage to the Americas he could find El Dorado on the upper reaches of the Orinoco River in present-day Guiana, and make James the wealthiest man on earth. Even more remarkably, the king agreed. But of course there was no city of gold. The expedition was a fiasco and returned empty-handed. If Ralegh had been a less honorable man, he could easily have disappeared with one of his ships. But instead he returned to England and to imprisonment, knowing that it would probably mean his death.
On October 29 1618, Ralegh went to the block, fifteen years after he was first charged with treason. He was sixty-six years old. His luck had finally run out, though his panache had not. On the scaffold he coolly asked, and was allowed, to test the executioner's axe to determine if it had a good edge. Smiling, he told the sheriff overseeing his execution, "This is a sharp Medicine, but it is a Physitian for all Diseases." The moment eloquently testifies to the ineffable grace in crisis of the man who Mr. Gallay justly terms "England's most famous knight," a colossus who bestrode his age with both humanity and courage. His improbable life has found a superb laureate in Mr. Gallay.