[In the following essay, Winton relates the circumstances surrounding Raleigh's marriage and fall from royal favor and reflects on how these events formed his work.]

What exactly happened in that summer of 1592 when Sir Walter Ralegh was disgraced and dismissed the Court will probably never now be known. In January he was still high in favour. The Queen was, in fact, then arranging to transfer to him the lease of a property he coveted, Sherborne Castle in Dorset. He returned to England from his sea voyage on or about 16th May. On the 23rd Lord Burghley and the Lord Admiral were writing to tell him that the Queen approved his change of plan. In June he was still living at Durham House, carrying out his normal business affairs, as though nothing were amiss. But by the end of July or, at the very latest, August, he was in the Tower of London, his career as a Court favourite at an end. Elizabeth Throckmorton, the lady who was almost certainly the cause of his downfall, was also imprisoned in the Tower at the same time.

With so much in his favour, his swarthy good looks, his wit, his passionate poems, his extravagant clothes, his wealth and his flamboyant life-style, and his reputation as a swordsman and soldier and adventurer, Ralegh must have had a glamour which made him attractive to women. But he does not seem to have been at all a ladies’ man. He was a courtier for more than ten years, the last five of them as Captain of the Guard, and he had the means of meeting every girl who came to Court. Yet there was never any gossip linking his name with any woman. In his ‘Instructions to His Son’, written many years later, he is decidedly cool towards the female sex. He advises his son not to be taken in by a pretty face and to take care that ‘thou be beloved of thy wife, rather than thyself besotted on her’. He advises leaving most of an estate to the children, and only to the widow enough to live on, and only then for the period of her widowhood. ‘Let her not enjoy her second love in the same bed wherein she loved thee, nor fly to future pleasures with those feathers which death hath pulled from thy wings.’ These were the prudent, elder thoughts of a man who protested such profligate love for the Queen when he was young.

Ralegh seems not to have been much interested in women. In his Apophthegms, Francis Bacon repeats a catty little story that ‘Sir Walter Ralegh was wont to say of the ladies of Queen Elizabeth's privy-chamber and bed-chamber: That they were like witches; they could do hurt, but they could do no good.’ However, at least one of Her Majesty's ladies appealed to him, and she was not the one anybody would have expected. Elizabeth Throckmorton was not the girl likely to capture Sir Walter Ralegh. She was no heiress, and no great beauty. She was twenty-seven, well on the shelf by Elizabethan standards. Her portrait shows a fair-haired, blue-eyed, nice girl, with a pleasant face and figure. ‘Homely’ is the word that springs to mind. Yet it seems that, for love of her, Ralegh willingly jeopardized his Court career. The two stuck by each other in the years to come. Their marriage was a resounding success.

Elizabeth's father was Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, of Coughton in Warwickshire, who had been a favourite of Edward VI, but who had become involved in Wyatt's Rebellion under Mary. He had defended himself and actually got himself acquitted of a charge of treason. Later, he was Queen Elizabeth's ambassador to the Court of France. Sir Nicholas's was a typical Throckmorton career. They were a large family, with relatives all over the country, and they had their ups and downs. Elizabeth was the only girl of seven children. She was particularly close to her second brother Arthur, who became a friend of Sir Walter's. Sir Nicholas died in 1571 when his daughter was six years old (she was baptized at Beddington, Surrey, on 16th April 1565, and she would almost certainly have been only a few days old when she was baptized). She was left £500 in her father's will for the period of her minority. In February 1572 her mother lent the money to the Earl of Huntingdon. It was never returned. Many years later, Ralegh’'s relatives were still trying to get it back.

Arthur Throckmorton kept a diary, in which he recorded that his sister was ‘sworn of the Privy Chamber’ on 8th November 1584. This was a very good chance for Elizabeth. For a fatherless, dowry-less young girl, a position at Court was about her only way of making a good marriage. On 1st January 1589 Elizabeth Throckmorton's name appears on a list of those who gave the Queen a New Year present. She gave ‘two ruffs of lawn cut-work made’ and received in return ‘in gilt plate 15 oz. 3 qrs.’. She probably met Ralegh in his earliest years at Court, but of their courtship nothing is known, except two of his poems, which are believed to have been written in honour of ‘Serena’, which was supposed to have been Lady Ralegh’'s allegorical title. One of them is entitled ‘To his Love when hee had obtained Her.’ It is possibly the nearest Ralegh ever came to an explicitly sexual poem:

Now Serena bee not coy;
Since wee freely may enjoy
Sweete imbraces: such delights,
As will shorten tedious nightes.
Thinke that beauty will not stay
With you allwaies; but away;
And that tyrannizing face
That now holdes such perfect grace,
Will both chaing’d and ruined bee;
So fraile is all thinges aswee see,
So subject unto conquering Time.
Then gather Flowers in theire prime,
Let them not fall and perish so;
Nature her bountyes did bestow
On us that wee might use them: And
Tis coldnesse not to understand
What shee and Youth and Forme perswade
With Oppertunety, that's made
As we could wish itt. Lett's then meete
Often with amorous lippes, and greet
Each other till our wantonne Kisses
In number passe and dayes Ulisses
Consum’d in travaile, and the starrs
That looke upon our peaceful warrs
With envious lustere. If this store
Will not suffice, wee’le number o’re
The same againe, untill wee finde,
No number left to call to minde
          And shew our plenty. They are poore
          That can count all they have and more.

It is a poem which in content and feeling looks back to Catullus and forward to the Metaphysical poets of the next century.

A delightfully coarse anecdote in Aubrey gives almost the only glimpse anywhere of Ralegh in any sexual activity. ‘He loved a wench well: and one time getting up one of the mayds of honour against a tree in a wood (’twas his first lady) who seemed at first boarding to be something fearful of her Honour, and modest, she cryed Sweet Sir Walter, what do you me ask? Will you undoe me? Nay, sweet Sir Walter! Sweet Sir Walter! Sir Walter! At last, as the danger and the pleasure at the same time grew higher, she cried in the extacey Swisser Swatter! Swisser Swatter! She proved with child and I doubt not but this hero tooke care of them both, as also that the product was more then an ordinary mortall.’

In his anecdotal way, Aubrey was quite right. Sir Walter did get Elizabeth Throckmorton with child, although it is not clear whether in or out of wedlock. The lawsuit over her inheritance gives one clue about their date of marriage. One of the depositions states that ‘on 20th day of February in the thirtieth year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, or thereabouts, the aforesaid Elizabeth Throckmorton accepted as her man Walter Ralegh, knight.’ This gives the wedding the incredible date of 20th February 1588, and means, if true, that Bess Throckmorton and Walter Ralegh, in the hot-house gossip atmosphere of the Court, concealed for four years their marriage, a pregnancy and confinement.

The year may be wrong, although the day and month may be correct. The documents quoted are dated some thirty years after the events they describe. A member of the Throckmorton or Ralegh families might remember the day and the month clearly but be mistaken about the exact year, after such a passage of time. The date of the marriage might be 20th February 1591. It does not seem part of Bess Throckmorton's character to permit intercourse before marriage, and by June of that year she was pregnant. On 19th November Arthur wrote of his sister's marriage in his diary and on the 30th, as a proper elder brother should, he had ‘an interview’ with Ralegh. It was by then perhaps too late to ask Sir Walter whether his intentions towards Bess were honourable.

The episode of Serena and the Blatant Beast in Book VI of The Faerie Queene has been taken to refer to Elizabeth Throckmorton and her ‘Squire’, Walter Ralegh. Serena and her squire have been badly hurt by that beast of scandal and ask a ‘Hermite’ for advice on what they should do.

The best (sayd he) that I can you advize,
          Is to avoide the occasion of the ill:
          For when the cause, whence evill doth arize,
          Removed is, th’effect surceaseth still.
          Abstaine from pleasure, and restraine your will,
          Subdue desire, and bridle loose delight,
          Use scanted diet, and forbeare your fill,
          Shun secresie, and talke in open sight:
So shall you soone repaire your present evill plight.

The advice was sound but by the year 1592 the murmurs of scandal were growing. On 24th February Arthur Throckmorton wrote urgently to Ralegh at Chatham, where he was gathering ships and men for his Panama expedition, and four days later Bess came to stay at her brother's house at Mile End, on the outskirts of London. It seems scarcely credible that a lady of the Privy Chamber, a woman well-known to the Queen and intimate with her, could travel about London in an advanced state of pregnancy without any inkling of her situation reaching the Queen's ears, but this seems to have been the case. The murmurs of scandal were growing louder, for in that letter to Cecil from Chatham on 10th March, Ralegh wrote that much-studied denial of his wife:

I mean not to cume away, as they say I will, for feare of a marriage, and I know not what. If any such thing weare, I would have imparted it unto yoursealf before any man livinge; and, therefore, I pray believe it not, and I beseech you to suppress, what you can any such mallicious report. For I protest before God, ther is none, on the face of the yearth, that I would be fastned unto.

There seems little doubt that this letter was a flat lie, made up by Ralegh in a moment of desperation when he was afraid that scandal might cause his voyage to Panama to be cancelled.

Arthur wrote the sensational entry for 29th March 1592 in his diary ‘My sister was delyvered of a boye betwene 2 and 3 in the afternowne. I wrytte to syr Walter Rayley, and sent Dycke the footmane to whom I gave hym 10s.’ On 10th April he had another entry, just as sensational. ‘Damerei Raelly was baptysed by Robert Earlle of Essexes (sic) and Arth. Throkemorton and Anna Throkemorton’ [Arthur's wife].

Of all the mysteries in Ralegh’'s mysterious private life at this time, the part of Essex is the most baffling. Again, it seems scarcely credible that Ralegh should ask his chief rival and enemy at Court to stand godfather to his child—and just as incredible that Essex should agree. It is hardly possible that Essex would refrain from telling the Queen. Here was Sir Walter Ralegh, Knight, Captain of Her Majesty's Guard, Lord Warden of the Stannarys etc., with a secret marriage, or if he were not married, with a bastard child sired on one of Her Majesty's ladies of the Privy Chamber. Apart from any future advantage to be gained by Essex at Court from this situation, it made the most riveting personal gossip. There was a further point: if Essex actively took a part and then remained silent, he connived at deceiving the Queen.

It is more than probable that Essex did tell the Queen. She was now an old lady, and she brooded over her injury for a time, playing cat and mouse with the Raleghs, while she decided when and how to strike. Meanwhile, the Raleghs went on as though nothing had happened, thus adding insult to injury. On 27th April Damerei was put out to nurse with Throckmorton relatives at Enfield, while Bess calmly returned to Court. It seems amazing that she was able to give any convincing excuse for her absence. Bess Throckmorton had sworn to be faithful to the Queen. By returning to Court and saying nothing, she was now deliberately and directly deceiving the Queen. It was probably for this that she was never forgiven and never readmitted to Court.

On 6th May Ralegh sailed, ‘set himself under sail at Falmouth towards the Indies’ as Arthur wrote in the diary. His intrigue with Bess Throckmorton must by now have been an open secret in London. There seems to have been a slight but noticeable withdrawal of polite society from Ralegh’'s company, as though people did not want to be associated too closely with a man who was so soon to be disgraced. Many years later, Adrian Gilbert claimed in a Chancery Case what he had spent ‘at Mile End and about London when the Lady Ralegh was first delivered of a child, and when most of Sir Walter's friends forsook him, being requested by the said Walter Ralegh to visit her’. This ostracism, if it ever amounted to so much, was short-lived. In later years Bess Throckmorton was always treated by everybody (except the reigning sovereign) with the greatest respect and consideration, as Sir Walter's wife.

Ralegh was back in England again on 16th May. On that day Arthur noted ‘Browne came from Sir Walter hither.’ Three days later, he ‘paid the nurse 14 weeks wages come Monday next, 28s. (‘Fourteen weeks’ dates the engagement of the nurse at some time in the middle of February, just before Bess came to stay at Arthur's house.) The same day, 19th May, ‘Browne and Sir George Carew came to have me seal the writings between Sir W. Ralegh and Eliz.’ This was obviously the marriage settlement.

In May nurse and child were still being ferried about London with little attempt at concealment. On 21st May they were at Mile End. A week later they were at Durham House. By this time, the Queen must have known. On 31st May Ralegh was committed to the custody of Sir Robert Cecil. This was in no way imprisonment, but was more of a caution. It was oddly insensitive, and very foolish, of Ralegh that at no time does he appear to have gone to see the Queen, to explain himself, or to try to excuse himself. Perhaps he thought no explanations were necessary, or that they would avail him nothing. Neither he nor Bess Throckmorton ever seems to have taken the Queen's feelings into account.

But still the blow did not fall. On 2nd June Ralegh was at Durham House, where Arthur Throckmorton visited him that day. The next day Bess Throckmorton was committed to the custody of the Vice-Chamberlain, Sir Thomas Heneage. Even now, Ralegh made no attempt to placate the Queen. His pride had made him stupid, or he may have believed, typically, that putting a bold face on it would carry him through. On the 8th he was writing to the Lord High Admiral from Durham House, defending the actions of his ships, including the Roebuck, against the accusations of certain merchants of Middleburgh. Ralegh’'s ships (from his Panama expedition) had engaged a fleet of thirteen Flemish ships off Cape Finisterre on 13th May. Those that hove to and behaved respectfully he dismissed ‘and suffered not the valew of a farthinge to betaken from any of them’. But the others had acted suspiciously and made it plain to Ralegh that their money ‘belonged to thos of Anwerpe who dayly fraight shipps of Zelande for the trade of Spayne, to abuse Her Majestye’. It is not the letter of a shamefaced man, aware that he is about to be dismissed. On the contrary, it is Ralegh at his most confident, absolutely assured of his own rights and rightness, scornful of those who run away.

He was confined to Durham House, in the care of his cousin Sir George Carew, and now, at last, he seems to have had an inkling of what awaited him. Another relative, Arthur Gorges, went to call on him and later in a letter of 26th July described to Cecil what had happened. Ralegh had been standing at the window of his turret study, gazing and sighing at the bustle of boats and barges he could see down-river at Blackfriars Steps, when ‘suddenly he brake out into a great distemper, and sware that his enemies had of purpose brought her Majesty thither, to break his gall sunder with Tantalus’ torment’.

It was a preposterous suggestion, but Ralegh began to work himself up into a rage and ‘as a man transported with passion, he sware to Sir George Carew that he would disguise himself and get into a pair of oars to ease his mind with but a sight of the Queen; or else he protested his heart would break’.

Sir George, of course, refused to let him do any such thing, whereupon they ‘fell out to choleric outrageous words, with striving and struggling at the doors’. Sir George had his new periwig torn off his head.

Gorges had not taken this unseemly scuffling seriously, but now he saw that Ralegh’'s self-induced rage had become genuine. ‘At last they had gotten out their daggers which when I saw I played the stickler between them, and so purchased such a rap on the knuckles that I wished both their pates broken. And so with much ado they stayed their brawl to see my bloodied fingers.’ Gorges, also a poet, writes vividly of the scene and his Mercutiolike intervention. ‘At the first, I was ready to break with laughing to see the two scramble and brawl like madmen, until I saw the iron walking, and then I did my best to appease the fury.’

‘Good sir,’ Arthur Gorges concluded, ‘let nobody know thereof, for I fear Sir W. Ralegh will shortly grow to be Orlando Furioso if the bright Angelica persevere against him a little longer.’ But Gorges perhaps spoiled his effect with an ingenuous little postscript: ‘I could wish her Majesty knew.’

The Queen would have taken the point of the reference to Orlando Furioso, lately translated at her request by Sir John Harington, had Cecil ever shown the letter to her, which is debatable. But in any case it was now far too late for fine literary touches. It was common knowledge that Sir Walter Ralegh was bound for the Tower of London. On 30th July Sir Edward Stafford wrote to Anthony Bacon, another of the Essex faction, ‘If you have anything to do with Sir Walter Ralegh, or any love to make to Mrs Throckmorton, at the Tower tomorrow you may speak with them; if the countermand comes not tonight, as some think will not be, and particularly he that hath charge to send them thither.’ On 7th August 1592, Arthur Throckmorton recorded in his diary, ‘Ma soeur s’en alla a la Tour, et Sir W. Raelly.’

The dates of Ralegh's imprisonment given by Stafford and Throckmorton are difficult to reconcile with other evidence. It is very probable that Ralegh was sent to the Tower much earlier than the end of July. In his letters to Cecil, marked ‘from the Tower, July’, he refers to events such as the Burke uprising in Ireland, which began on 2nd July. He is also concerned that Sir William Fitzwilliam, having heard of his downfall, is scheming against him. It would have taken some days for news of his disgrace to travel to Ireland, and for Ralegh to receive news back of Fitzwilliam's reactions. But perhaps the precise date on which his incarceration began is not so important. Of much more importance is the fact that Ralegh knew, Essex knew, everyone knew, that an era at Court had ended.

Ralegh's offence is nowhere defined. There were no formal charges, no hearings, and no evidence. His was a domestic Court misdemeanour, punished domestically. Nobody disputed the Queen's right to imprison her favourite without trial, and keep him in the Tower for as long as she liked; he was confined, literally, at the Queen's pleasure. A contemporary reference to Ralegh’'s offence is in Camden's Annales for the year 1595: ‘Walter Ralegh, Captain of the Queen's Guards, for defiling the honour of a lady of the Queen (whom he afterwards led in marriage) dismissed from favour and kept in prison for many months, is now set free but banished from the Court.’ In September of that year, writing to Heneage about Ralegh, Cecil said that he found ‘him marvellously greedy to do anything to recover the conceit of his brutish offence’. This seems strong language. Ralegh had behaved no more brutishly than other courtiers. He himself in his letters writes of ‘his disgraces’ but in a letter to the Lord Admiral, probably written in August, he permits himself one sarcastic flash: ‘it is more profitable to punishe my great treasons, then that I should ether strengthen the fleet, or do many other things that lye in the diches.’

It has been suggested that Ralegh's crime was somehow darker and deeper, perhaps even a treason against the State. That part of Camden's Annales referring to it was not published until 1627, long after Ralegh’'s execution; but Lady Ralegh survived him by many years and died, a very old lady, in 1647. She could have refuted Camden's account if she had thought it incorrect. The most likely solution is the simplest. Ralegh secretly married one of the Queen's ladies and afterwards tried to conceal it. For that, the Queen regularly imprisoned her favourites and banished their wives from Court.

Ralegh was confined in the Brick Tower, under the charge of Sir George Carew. His quarters were on the inland side of the fortress and had no view of the river and its passing traffic, but his imprisonment was not particularly rigorous. His friends could still visit him, more or less as they pleased. He had his own servants who lodged in rooms above his own. He carried on his business affairs, by deputy, messenger, and letter.

His letters to Cecil in July give some idea of Ralegh's state of mind and business preoccupations in the Tower. In Ireland Fitzwilliam had taken advantage of his adversary's disgrace and was putting pressure on Ralegh's tenants. He claimed that Ralegh had not paid his Undertaker's rent of four hundred pounds, and he seized five hundred ‘milch kine’ from the poor tenants in lieu. Ralegh protested—and quite truthfully—that the debt, of only fifty marks, had been paid, and that he was the only English Undertaker who had so far paid anything at all in rent. He warned that harassing the English settlers in Ireland would only weaken the Queen's position there and encourage Irish rebels. In another letter he asks for news and says that he forecast the Burke rebellion, but the Queen ‘made a scorn’ at his ‘conceat’. ‘But yow shall find it,’ he goes on, prophetically, ‘but a shoure of a farther tempest.’ In this letter Ralegh shows that he is feeling sorry for himself. ‘So I leve to trouble yow at this time, being become like a fish cast on dry land, gasping for breath, with lame leggs and lamer loongs.’ This was the first reference to his ailments. The Thames damp was getting into his bones and his lungs. In the future, he suffered greatly from the ague.

Although he was banned from the Queen's physical presence, Ralegh was still officially Captain of the Guard and carried on his duties through deputies. It was under cover of these duties that he tried to appeal to the Queen's emotions and her memories of times past. The letter was, again, to Cecil, from the Tower, in July 1592:

I pray be a mean to Her Majesty for the signing of the bills for the Gards' coats, which are to be made now for the Prograsse, and which the Cleark of the Cheeck hath importunde me to write for.

My heart was never broken till this day, that I hear the Queen goes away so far of-whom I have followed so many years with so great love and desire, in so many journeys, and am now left behind her, in a dark prison all alone. While she was yet nire at hand, that I might hear of her once in two or three dayes, my sorrows were the less: but even now my heart is cast into the depth of all misery. I that was wont to behold her riding like Alexander, hunting like Diana, walking like Venus, the gentle wind blowing her fair hair about her pure cheeks, like a nymph; sometime siting in the shade like a Goddess; sometime singing like an angell; sometime playing like Orpheus. Behold the sorrow of this world! Once amiss, hath bereaved me of all. O Glory, that only shineth in misfortune, what is becum of thy assistance? All wounds have skares, but that of fantasie; all affections their relenting, but that of womankind. Who is the judge of friendship, but adversity? or when is grace witnessed, but in offences? There were no divinety, but by reason of compassion; for revenges are brutish and mortall. All those times past—the loves, the sythes, the sorrows, the desires, can they not way down one frail misfortune? Cannot one dropp of gall be hidden in so great heaps of sweetness? I may then conclude, Spes et fortuna valete [Farewell, hopes and fortune]. She is gone, in whom I trusted, and of me hath not one thought of mercy, nor any respect of that that was. Do with me now, therefore, what you list. I am more weary of life then they are desirous I should perish; which if it had been for her, as it is by her, I had been too happily born.

Ralegh signs himself ‘Your's, not worthy any name or title’.

But even this appeal, eloquent almost to the point of being over-written, did not touch the Queen. Evidently, she did not agree that Ralegh's fault was just ‘one frail misfortune’ nor only one drop of gall hidden in heaps of sweetness. Or perhaps Cecil never showed the letter to the Queen, as Ralegh hoped he would.

In prison Ralegh's proud and volatile spirit soared up one day, sank down the next. He was cheerful and then gloomy, optimistic and then downcast, by turns. At times he was defiant, scorning everybody and defying them to do their worst. One of his finest poems is a superbly sustained piece of invective against the City, the Court and the world. It was no wonder he was the ‘best hated man’. The poem gains in effect from its rhetorical repetitions until it pours over the reader, like some of Ralegh’'s prose, in a great irresistible wave. Called ‘The Lie’, the poem shows Ralegh de contemptu mundi, Ralegh contra mundum:

Goe soule the bodies guest
          upon a thankelesse arrant,
Feare not to touch the best
          the truth shall be thy warrant:
Goe since I needs must die,
          and give the world the lie.
Say to the Court it glowes,
          and shines like rotten wood,
Say to the Church it showes
          whats good, and doth no good.
If Church and Court reply,
          then give them both the lie.
Tell Potentates they live
          acting by others action,
Not loved unlesse they give,
          not strong but by affection.
If potentates reply,
          give Potentates the lie.
Tell men of high condition,
          that mannage the estate,
Their purpose is ambition,
          their practise onely hate:
And if they once reply,
          then give them all the lie.
Tell them that brave it most,
          they beg for more by spending,
Who in their greatest cost
          seek nothing but commending.
And if they make replie,
          then give them all the lie.
Tell zeale it wants devotion
          tell love it is but lust
Tell time it meets but motion,
          tell flesh it is but dust.
And wish them not replie
          for thou must give the lie.
Tell faith its fled the Citie,
          tell how the country erreth,
Tell manhood shakes off pittie,
          tell vertue least preferreth
And if they doe reply,
          spare not to give the lie.
So when thou hast as I
          commanded thee, done blabbing,
Although to give the lie,
          deserves no less than stabbing,
Stab at thee he that will,
          no stab thy soule can kill.

There were not many left unscathed by that, and the poem understandably aroused a good deal of contemporary resentment. Some were even provoked to composing replies to ‘The Lie’. One of these began:

Go Eccho of the minde,
A careles troth protest;
Make answere that rude Rawly
No stomack can digest.

Ralegh might be kept in the Tower, but his ships were still sailing the seas, and his agents passing from country to country. He wrote to the Lord High Admiral about the affairs of the Navy, and mentioned ‘a man of mine cumminge from the coast of Britayne’; there was also a captain of Ralegh's, John Floyer, and the controversy over the ship of Bayonne which he had taken as a prize. But as the days in the Tower lengthened into weeks, Ralegh slowly began to realize that his former place at Court was irretrievably lost. Pacing his room like one of the Tower lions the visitors came to see, he knew that, incredibly, life at Court and in the country was going on without him. Sometimes he despaired and said that he might as well be fed to the lions, and save everybody further trouble. At other times he was resigned, and told the Lord Admiral not to intercede for him with the Queen any more. It was doing more harm than good.

Physically, apart from the Thames dampness, Ralegh's captivity was not uncomfortable. His privation was in the mind. As he said, ‘the torment of the mind cannot be greater.’ Frustration is a powerful source of energy, and he expressed the melancholy which was always ready to overtake him in one of the most sombre poems ever written from inside a prison cell:

My boddy in the walls captived
Feels not the wounds of spightfull envy,
Butt my thralde mind, of liberty deprived,
Fast fettered in her antient memory,
Douth nought beholde butt sorrowes diinge face:
Such prison earst was so delightfull
As it desirde no other dwellinge place,
Butt tymes effects, and destinies dispightfull
Have changed both my keeper and my fare,
Loves fire, and bewties light I then had store,
Butt now close keipt, as captives wounted are,
That food, that heat, that light I finde no more,
          Dyspaire bolts up my dores, and I alone
          Speake to dead walls, butt thos heare not my mone.

Lady Ralegh was also in the Tower at this time, but it is not known whether she was allowed to visit her husband. One of her letters from the Tower to Heneage's son-in-law, Sir Moyle Finch, significantly signed E. R., not E. T., shows that she had been sick but was in good heart, still hoping for release. Lady Ralegh composed her words phonetically, just as they occurred to her, and the letter is a good example of her spectacularly idiosyncratic spelling:

Your kinness and me ladis conteneweth to the end and ever: wich must and douth bind me to aknookleg hit forever: for my sicke esstat I wryt to you the manner ther of befor: I contenew even so stell: yet have I such help as I may, but I will now tri your ladis medsen; I thanke you for your advis to wryt to Mr. vis-chambarlin: I will parform hit to moro in such sort as hee may shoo hit the q[ueen]: I can most willingly wryt to him wher I asur my selfe of helpe: sinc I have wrytten to me L Chambarlin wher I much hope for non: but so must I be reuled. I am dayly put in hope of my deliverey: but I protest I will not hope tell your fathar hether: I asur you treuly I never desiared nor never wolde desiar my lebbarti with out the good likeking ne advising of Sur W R: hit tis not this in prisonment if I bought hit with my life that shuld make me thinke hit long if hit shuld doo him harme to speke of my delivery: but Sur R. S(ecill?) was somwhat deseved in his Jugment in that and hit may be hee findeth his eror: I pray you tell your ladi I reserved heer kind lettar from Cubbam (Cobham): when wee mit wee will talke of hit: the towar standeth just in the way to Kent from Copthall: and who knooeth what will be com of me when I am out: the plage is gretly sesid and ever hath bin cliar heer a bout: and wee ar trew with in ourselfes I can asur you. Towar, ever assuredly yours in frinshep. E. R.

The letter shows some of Bess Throckmorton's qualities: her remembrances of her friends, her optimism, her submission to her husband's desires, and her wish not to do anything which might embarrass or discommode him. But Bess was never readmitted to the Queen's favour. Her offence, if anything, had been greater than Ralegh's. She had wiped the Queen's eye. She had stolen what the Queen had believed to be incontestably and permanently her own property. It was the sheer insolent unexpectedness of Bess Throckmorton's coup which took the breath away. She had never been outstanding amongst the Queen's ladies. That such a plain-favoured little duckling should capture such a swan, the Queen's own black swan, passed all understanding—and all forgiveness.

In the Tower in 1592 Ralegh may quite possibly have worked on his long poem, the Ocean to Cynthia. This is very unlikely to be the poem to Cynthia mentioned by Spenser three years earlier, but could well be a later instalment of it. This poem does not praise Cynthia, as Spenser's lines imply, but rather mourns her loss. It is a poem about the sensations of social and mental deprivation, as though the poet were grieving for the loss not only of the Queen but also of the life of the Court and the whole culture of which she was the centre.

The poem is unfinished, allusive and mysterious, often dealing in the connotations of words rather than their lexical meanings. A thread of expectancy runs throughout, arousing in the reader a feeling of tense anticipation, while he waits for the poet to broach his main theme, after due and respectful preliminaries. But the work never reaches so firm a resolution. The poem ends, and the reader is waiting for what he has already been told. The preparation was the consummation.

The poem begins with the death of love, and paints a picture of spiritual desolation, represented by dead fires, broken monuments, sapless trees and silent nightingales:

Sufficeth it to yow my joyes interred,
In simpell wordes that I my woes cumplayne,
Yow that then died when first my fancy erred,
Joyes under dust that never live agayne.
If to the livinge weare my muse adressed,
Or did my minde her own spirrit still inhold,
Weare not my livinge passion so repressed,
As to the dead, the dead did thes unfold.
Sume sweeter wordes, sume more becumming vers,
Should wittness my myshapp in hygher kynd,
But my loves wounds, my fancy in the hearse,
The Idea but restinge, of a wasted minde,
The blossumes fallen, the sapp gon from the tree,
The broken monuments of my great desires,
From thes so lost what may th’affections bee,
What heat in Cynders of extinguisht fires?
Lost in the mudd of thos hygh flowinge streames
Which through more fayrer feilds ther courses bend,
Slayne with sealf thoughts, amasde in fearfull dreams,
Woes without date, discumforts without end,
From frutfall trees I gather withred leves
And glean the broken eares with misers hands,
Who sumetyme did injoy the waighty sheves
I seeke faire floures amidd the brinish sand.
All in the shade yeven in the faire soon dayes
Under thos healthless trees I sytt alone,
Wher joyfull byrdds singe neather lovely layes
Nor Phillomen recounts her direfull mone.

Autobiographical references should not be pursued too closely, but eight lines (61-8) seem to describe the events leading up to Ralegh's imprisonment in the Tower:

To seeke new worlds, for golde, for prayse, for glory,
To try desire, to try love severed farr,
When I was gonn shee sent her memory
More stronge then weare ten thowsand shipps of warr,
To call mee back, to leve great honors thought,
To leve my frinds, my fortune, my attempte,
To leve the purpose I so longe had sought
And holde both cares, and cumforts in contempt.

One existing manuscript of the poem is in Ralegh's handwriting. It looks like a fair copy but is a working version, with corrections and additions. In places Ralegh has crossed out a word and written in another. He has left spaces in the text, and marked passages in the margin, as though he intended to revise them. One magnificent passage (69-103) has a space between lines 72 and 73, and a possible revision mark in the margin beside the incomplete three-line stanza of 101-3. The poet begins with a succession of paradoxes, ‘heat in ice’, and compares his remaining love with a body still warm after death, buds in winter and a mill-wheel still turning after the stream is diverted. So deprived, the poet turns to thoughts of strange lands and to the idea of writing a history of the world:

Such heat in Ize, such fier in frost remaynde,
Such trust in doubt, such cumfort in dispaire,
Mich like the gentell Lamm, though lately waynde,
Playes with the dug though finds no cumfort ther.
But as a boddy violently slayne
Retayneath warmth although the spirrit be gonn,
And by a poure in nature moves agayne
Till it be layd below the fatall stone;
Or as the yearth yeven in cold winter dayes
Left for a tyme by her life gevinge soonn,
Douth by the poure remayninge of his rayes
Produce sume green, though not as it hath dunn;
Or as a wheele forst by the fallinge streame,
Although the course be turnde sume other way
Douth for a tyme go rovnde vppon the beame
Till wantinge strength to move, it stands att stay;
So my forsaken hart, my withered mind,
Widdow of all the ioyes it once possest,
My hopes cleane out of sight, with forced wind
To kyngdomes strange, to lands farr off addrest.
Alone, forsaken, frindless onn the shore
With many wounds, with deaths cold pangs inebrased,
Writes in the dust as onn that could no more
Whom love, and tyme, and fortune had defaced,
Of things so great, so longe, so manefolde
With meanes so weake, the sowle yeven then departing
The weale, the wo, the passages of olde
And worlds of thoughts discribde by onn last sythinge:
As if when after Phebus is dessended
And leues a light mich like the past dayes dawninge,
And every toyle and labor wholy ended
Each living creature draweth to his restinge
Wee should beginn by such a partinge light
To write the story of all ages past
And end the same before th’ aprochinge night.

Sometimes the bearing on his own life seems to be unmistakeable, as in the famous passage on the ‘twelve years war’, with its echoes of his ‘Farewell to the Court’ (120-7). The ‘twelve years’ can be computed from 1580 when Ralegh went to Ireland, up until the possible date of composition in 1592. But there are a number of possible solutions:

Twelve years intire I wasted in this warr,
Twelve yeares of my most happy younger dayes,
Butt I in them, and they now wasted ar,
Of all which past the sorrow only stayes.
So wrate I once, and my mishapp fortolde,
My minde still feelinge sorrowfull success
Yeven as before a storme the marbell colde
Douth by moyste teares tempestious tymes express.

Ralegh describes the Queen's terrible change from doting lover to vengeful sovereign in one exquisite coupling of animal and prison images, ending with what could be a reference to his ‘error’ with Miss Throckmorton which he somewhat ungenerously suggests was not due to love at all (327-39):

A Queen shee was to mee, no more Belphebe,
A Lion then, no more a milke white Dove;
A prisoner in her brest I could not bee,
Shee did untye the gentell chaynes of love.
Love was no more the love of hydinge
All trespase, and mischance, for her own glorye.
It had bynn such, it was still for th’ellect,
But I must bee th’exampell in loves storye,
This was of all forpast the sadd effect …
But thow my weery sowle and hevy thought
Made by her love a burden to my beinge,
Dust know my error never was forthought
Or ever could proceed from sence of Lovinge.

The poem moves to its majestic elegiac ending, with sudden flashes of light, as at 493-6:

Shee is gonn, Shee is lost! Shee is found, shee is ever faire!
Sorrow drawes weakly, wher love drawes not too.
Woes cries, sound nothinge, butt only in loves eare.
Do then by Diinge, what life cannot doo …

The last page of the manuscript begins with line 514, ‘My steapps are backwarde, gasinge on my loss’, and goes on to the end of the poem at line 522 ‘Her love hath end; my woe must ever last.’ Under this is written ‘The end of the bookes, of the Oceans love to Scinthia, and the beginninge of the 12 (22?) Boock, entreatinge of Sorrow’. There are twenty-one lines of this poem, which go down to the bottom of the page.

Over the page, only three words are written, ‘For tender stalkes’—and nothing more. It is as though Ralegh were interrupted at his writing and never went back to this manuscript. It is pleasant to speculate that the interruption was a messenger from the Queen. Ralegh was urgently required on the Queen's business. The great Portuguese carrack Madre de Dios was at Dartmouth and was being pillaged by everyone who could get to the scene. Ralegh was the only man who could make sure that the Queen got her share of the booty. Where poetry and pleading had failed, money had succeeded. Ralegh was released from the Tower.