Saturday 25 April 2020

Radical Ralegh







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.’








Raleigh the Peacemaker (1586)

  A copy, in All Saints' Church East Budleigh, of one of the best known portraits of Sir Walter formerly attributed to Zuccaro but now...