Elizabethan touch of gold

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33941, 6 September 1975, Page 10

Elizabethan touch of gold

Sir Walter Ralegh. By John Winton. Michael Joseph. 343 pp. Bibliography and index. N.Z. price $19.30. Contemporaries of Sir Walter Ralegh described him as one whom Fortune had picked out to make an example. In a time of dazzling individual brilliance, he shone forth in almost every area of human endeavour. Everything he touched seemed to glow. His failures, his periods of disgrace and imprisonment, did no more than provide a sharp contrast to the peaks of his achievements. Ralegh (the spelling is the one he preferred himself) was courtier, soldier, sailor, explorer, poet, parliamentarian, patron of the arts, falconer, gardener, botanist, chemist, historian, war reporter and antiquary. The catalogue is overwhelming; the detail of his career provides the material for this richly-illustrated new biography. Much about Ralegh remains obscure and Mr Winton is out to entertain, rather than break new ground in Elizabethan history. The date of Ralegh’s marriage, the fate of his first son—these remain uncertain. Curious contemporary poetic allusions to Ralegh, including the dark passages in. Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labour’s Lost” are discussed, but without final conclusions.

What Mr Winton does particularly well is to explore the detail of matters such as Ralegh’s attempts to found a

colony in North America and his interest in ship design and navigation, matters in which Ralegh’s influence literally changed history. His Virginia, hamed for his Queen, hardly flourished in his lifetime, but from the Americas Ralegh helped to introduce such essentials of European life as potatoes and tobacco. In England he enjoyed a monopoly of issuing wine-sellers’ licences, a most lucrative position, and as master of the tin mines in Cornwall and Devon he drew up regulations and standards which served well for generations. For all his flamboyance and energy, Ralegh remains a shadowy figure. His poems suggest an inner despair, elegantly’ cultivated, a contempt for worldly success even while he sought it. and an indifference to the turns of Fortune’s wheel. “And at my gate dispaire shall linger still. To let in Death when Love and Fortune will.” Elizabethans loved this bitter-sweet melancholy, personified by Jaques in “As You Like It.” Some of Ralegh’s most depressed poems were turned into popular songs, a final irony for a man who insisted on remaining aloof from the fickle world.

Ralegh summed up his own attitude in “The Life of Man”:

“Thus march we playing to our latest rest. Only we die in earnest. That’s no Jest."