The
point about Sir Walter Ralegh: historian Anna Beer with Millais’ celebrated
1870 painting at Fairlynch Museum. Dr
Beer’s visit coincided with her talk about her book Patriot or Traitor: The Life and Death of Sir Walter
Ralegh at Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival on 19 September 2018
To mark 400 years since the execution of Sir Walter
Ralegh, on 31 October 2018 the House of Lords Works of Art Panel hosted a talk
by Dr Anna Beer. Its theme was
the hidden and surprising truth about East Devon’s best known local
hero - a swashbuckling soldier, sailor, courtier, poet and explorer who was
also a political prisoner turned radical parliamentarian.
It’s
quite a leap from the traditional ‘spuds and ciggies’ jokiness inspired by Sir
Walter’s colourful life to consider him as a pioneer of the parliamentary
democracy that we enjoy today. Yet for those radical thinkers who revolted
against antiquated concepts such as the Divine Right of Kings, Ralegh became
something of a hero in the centuries after his death.
The
title page of Ralegh’s History of the
World. A first edition of the work
was one of the rare items on display in Fairlynch’s Ralegh 400 exhibition
By
all accounts he was a conscientious MP for the Cornish borough of Mitchell. But it was during his time as one of the Tower of London’s longest-serving
prisoners that Ralegh’s political reputation was
established. Confined by order of King James, he nonetheless enjoyed access to his
extensive library. In 1614, his million-word History of the World was published. The book, with its criticism of
bad rulers, infuriated King James, who famously described it as ‘too saucy
towards princes’ and tried unsuccessfully to ban it.
Ralegh followed
his History with an equally
provocative piece of writing entitled A
Dialogue between a Counsellor of State and a Justice of the Peace,
described by Anna Beer as a foray into the history and practice of
parliamentary politics. It stands, she believes, as Ralegh’s most clear
articulation of his political beliefs: ‘a passionate defence of the need for a
public sphere characterised by freedom of speech’.
The American state of New
Hampshire's seal depicts the frigate USS Raleigh, surrounded by a laurel wreath. The Raleigh
was one of the first 13 warships sponsored by the Continental Congress for a
new American navy, built in 1776, at Portsmouth, NH. She was finally captured
by the British in 1778 and renamed as HMS Raleigh
Such writings,
including the History with its accounts
of the consequences of tyranny, deeply influenced republicans like Oliver
Cromwell and John Milton. Over a century later, Ralegh was respected for
similar reasons by the American revolutionaries. In 1776, during the War of
Independence, they even named
one of their warships after him. You can imagine the annoyance of the Royal
Navy.
A Beefeater admires the ‘Lost Garden’ at the Tower of London.
The garden was set up in 2018 to coincide with the 400th anniversary of
Ralegh’s death. The British Library has in its collection a manuscript
in his own hand containing chemical and medical recipes.
Image
credit: Historic Royal
Palaces
Along with his
writings while a prisoner in the Tower, Ralegh also enjoyed the freedom to
conduct scientific experiments in a laboratory converted from a disused hen
house. He developed his botanical skills in a herb garden adjacent to his
quarters. Such was his reputation as a physician, using medicinal plants that
he had discovered during his time in the New World, that Queen Anne herself
consulted him when her son Prince Henry fell ill.
These other,
less well known aspects of Ralegh’s life, combine to enhance our view of him as
a polymath, typical of the breed of 16th and 17th century
freethinkers otherwise known as Renaissance men and women.
For the 19th Earl of
Devon, writing in the 400th anniversary year of Ralegh’s death, East
Budleigh’s Great Elizabethan is ‘a hero to every Devonian with a wanderlust and
a sense of adventure – we should all make a pilgrimage to the Raleigh Wall in
Budleigh Salterton. A copy of the Boyhood of Raleigh hangs on my son’s bedroom
wall, a reminder of times when local Devon sailors pushed the bounds of the
known world and when our rugged coastline was the Cape Canaveral of its
day.'
Above: ‘Dreaming Beyond the Medieval’
Image credit: Ronnie Heeps http://www.ronnieheeps.net
Look
closely at the bottom right area of Ronnie Heeps’ painting 'Dreaming Beyond the Medieval'. You’ll see
that back in 2006 the artist had exactly that same thought when he was
commissioned by the government of Jersey to produce a series of works for Mont Orgueil Castle, the magnificent medieval
edifice situated above the picturesque town of Gorey.
‘Raleigh
was not afraid to undertake daring deeds and dream of glorious multifaceted
worlds, which lay just beyond the horizon of conventional thought,’ wrote the
artist. ‘He could comprehend a future world that was not a preordained
construct. A future world, which was in a constant state of flux and therefore
open to the influence of secular thinkers.’
