When the gloves were off for Raleigh

 

Image courtesy of Dents Museum

This pair of beautifully decorated gloves associated with Sir Walter Raleigh is among the highlights of Fairlynch’s exhibition to mark the 400^th anniversary of the Elizabethan explorer’s death.

Described as ‘off-white doeskin, embroidered with gold and silver metal threads, tiny “spangles” and edged with silver gilt fringing’, the gloves have been dated as made in about 1600.  They are on loan from Dents Collection, based at the centuries-old Warminster-based firm of glovemakers.

Highly decorative gloves were a demonstrable sign of status and wealth, often given as gifts as a reward for service or supplication for expected favours. These gloves were not for wearing – hence their survival in such good condition.

‘There were few tokens of bonding and friendship that were as important in early modern culture,’ writes Felicity Heal in her 2014 book The Power of Gifts: Gift Exchange in Early Modern England. ‘The hand gesture as a mark of amity made these relatively simple gifts rich in symbolic power.’

Image of Bess, Lady Raleigh, as featured at Fairlynch Museum  

It was around 1600 that Raleigh’s wife Bess had made gloves for Sir Robert Cecil, Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary of State. 

One of the most powerful and the most calculating politicians of the time, he was a man whom both she and Walter regarded as their friend. In a letter to Cecil at this time Raleigh wrote that Bess ‘says that she must envy any fingers whosoever that shall wear her gloves but your own.’

Sir Robert Cecil, created 1^st Earl of Salisbury by King James I    Image credit: National Portrait Gallery

What neither Bess nor Walter realised was that their supposed friend was actively engaged in their destruction. The Tudor dynasty was nearing its end, to be succeeded by the House of Stuart. 

Aware that the most likely successor to the increasingly frail Queen would be the King James VI of Scotland, Cecil was making plans for a transfer of power in which Raleigh would be sacrificed.  

It was important, he saw, that the character of the old Queen’s favourite be blackened in the eyes of the Scottish king so that Cecil would be seen as a supporter of the new regime.

King James I of England and VI of Scotland, c.1606, after John De Critz the Elder (c.1551-1642) National Portrait Gallery

Raleigh’s reputation as a smoker was bad enough to inspire the Scot’s disgust at such a habit. Sir Walter’s enjoyment of tobacco was well known at court. More serious for him was his reputation as an atheist, and it was this that Cecil used to encourage James’ mistrust of Raleigh. 

Since the beginning of May 1602 the Secretary of State had been engaged in a treasonable correspondence with James’ ministers in Scotland, using a secret code of numbers. The Queen was 24, James was 30, Raleigh was 2. Cecil himself was 10. 

It was in a letter of this time that Cecil wrote to King James about his supposed friend that he was a person ‘whom most religious men do hold anathema’. The underhand accusation was, as described by Sir Walter’s biographer Raleigh Trevelyan, a ‘stunningly disloyal’ act.   

St Mary’s Church, Cerne Abbas

Image credit: Chris Downer

It was true that Sir Walter, a relatively freethinking man for his age, had been accused of atheism. A commission had been set up in 1594 at Cerne Abbas, close to his home at Sherborne Castle, to deal with accusations that Raleigh and his circle of intellectuals, known to some as ‘The School of Night’, had denied the reality of heaven and hell.  He was acquitted, but the accusation of atheism was again raised at his trial for treason in 1603. 

It is likely that this contributed to the guilty verdict reached by the court, a verdict which would prove fatal after the failed 1617 expedition to Guiana.

Rosemary Harden supervises the installation of the gloves in the Raleigh 400 display, with Fairlynch Museum Trustee Martyn Brown. Rosemary, curator of the Fashion Museum in Bath, worked with Dents Collection on the Museum's loan request for the gloves  

These gloves are fabulous. You can imagine Bess Raleigh’s hands at work as she gives the finishing touches to a similar pair destined for the hands of her husband’s supposed friend Robert Cecil. 

Maybe this is at a time when Bess and Walter are caring for Cecil’s young son Will at Sherborne Castle.  The boy’s mother, Elizabeth Cecil had died in childbirth, aged only 34. Walter has poured his deepest and most poignant reflections into a letter to Robert Cecil dated 24 January 1597, written to console the distraught widower. 

But you can also reflect on the thoughts that cross Bess’ mind as she wonders how far she and Walter can trust him. Perhaps you can imagine the gloves discarded; those clever hands and fingers will be at work within just a few years on a treasonable correspondence with a foreign king. It will ultimately take Walter to the scaffold.   

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