CHAP. X.

1441

Elizabeth Throckmorton.

CHAPTER X.

IN THE TOWER. THE GREAT CARACK. (1592.)

IMMEDIATELY on his return, if not before, he understood the reason of his recall. He had written to Cecil on March 10: 'I mean not to come away, as they say I will, for fear of a marriage, and I know not what. If any such thing were, I should have imparted it unto yourself before any man living; and therefore, I pray, believe it not, and I beseech you to suppress, what you can, any such malicious report. For, I protest, there is none on the face of the earth that I would be fastened unto.' As soon as he reached London in June, he was thrown into the Tower. He had seemed before to be enjoying the plenitude of royal favour. So lately as in January it had been shown by the grant of a fine estate in Dorset. No official record is discoverable of the cause of his imprisonment. Disobedience to the order to quit the fleet would have been a sufficient pretext. It was not mentioned. The imprisonment was a domestic punishment within her own fortress-palace, inflicted by the Queen as head of her household. The true reason was his courtship of Elizabeth, daughter to the Queen's devoted but turbulent servant and confidant, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton. He had died in 1571, at the age of fifty-seven, in Leicester's house. His eldest son, Nicholas, was adopted by a maternal uncle, the last Carew of Beddington, and became Sir Nicholas Carew. Elizabeth Throckmorton, who had as many cousins in high positions as Ralegh, was appointed a maid of honour.

Her portrait proves her to have been handsome. She was CHAP. X. tall, slender, blue-eyed and golden-haired. Her mental qualities will be in evidence during the rest of Ralegh's life. Never were written more charming letters than hers, in more unembarrassed phonetic spelling.

The Captain of the Guard and she attended on the Queen together. He made her an exception to his rule as to maids of honour, that, 'like witches, they can do hurt, but no good.' He found her only too amiable. Camden, in his Annals, published in 1615, explains Ralegh's crime and punishment: 'honorariâ Reginae virgine vitiatâ, quam postea in uxorem duxit.' Wood says the same in his Latinized English, merely translating Camden. A letter from Sir Edward Stafford to Sir Anthony Bacon, with the impossible date, July 30, couples Ralegh's and Miss Throckmorton's names in a burst of exultation, natural to Essex's friends: 'If you have anything to do with Sir Walter Ralegh, or any love to make to Mrs. Throckmorton, at the Tower to-morrow you may speak with them; if the countermand come not to-night, as some think will not be, and particularly he that hath charge to send them thither.' Stafford does not specify the offence. The sole independent testimony is the single sentence of Camden's. Scantiness of Testimony. Yet posterity has had no option but to accept the account. The error, if other courtiers had been the culprits, would have excited little surprise. Elizabeth's maids of honour were not more beyond suspicion than Swift asserts Anne's to have been. Essex's gallantries at Court, after as before his marriage, were notorious and many. Lord Southampton and his bride were the subjects of a similar tale a few years later. Palace gossip treated it as a very ordinary peccadillo. Cecil in February, 1601, tells Carew of the 'misfortune' of one of the maids, Mistress Fitton, with Lord Pembroke, as if it were a jest. Both the culprits, he remarks, 'will dwell in the Tower a while.' His phrases show none of the horror they breathed when he spoke of Ralegh, and the Queen was likely to read them. The English Court was pure in the time of

Hard to
believe.

CHAP. X. Elizabeth for its time. It degenerated greatly under her suc-
cessor. Harington contrasts manners then with the previous
'good order, discretion, and sobriety.' But no little licence
was permitted, and the tales of it commonly excite small sur-
prise. As told of Ralegh, and yet more of Elizabeth Throck-
morton, the story startles still. No evidence exists upon
which he can justly be pronounced a libertine. How she,
refined, faithful, heroic, should have been led astray, is hardly
intelligible. She must have now been several years over
twenty, probably twenty-eight or twenty-nine, and in her long
after-life she bore herself as entitled to all social respect. She
was allowed it by every one, except her Mistress, who never
restored her to favour. By the Cecils she was treated with
unfailing regard. In the whole of her struggle, by her hus-
band's side, and over his grave, for his and her son's rights,
not a whisper was heard of the blot on her fair fame. If
Camden had not spoken, and if Ralegh and she had not
stood mute, it would have been easy to believe that the
imagined liaison was simply a secret marriage resented as
such by the Queen, as, two years before, she had resented
Essex's secret marriage to Sidney's widow. That seems to
have been asserted by their friends, at the first explosion
of the scandal. A letter, written on the eve of Ralegh's
committal to the Tower, by one who manifestly did not hold
the benevolent opinion, says, after a spitefully prophetic com-
parison of Ralegh with his own

Hermit poor in pensive place obscure:

'It is affirmed that they are married; but the Queen is most fiercely incensed.'

That the royal anger had a better foundation than the mere jealousy of affection or of domination, it is to be feared, is the inevitable inference from the evidence, however concise and circumstantial. Had contradiction been possible, Camden would have been contradicted in 1615 by Ralegh and his wife. Cecil alluded to Ralegh's offence in

144 Harder to

1592 as 'brutish.' With all his zeal to indulge the Queen's CHAP. X.
indignation, he could not have used the term of a secret
marriage. The prevailing absence of Court talk on the occur- disbelieve.
rence is not traceable to any doubt of its true character.
Courtiers simply believed it dangerous to be outspoken on a
matter affecting the purity of the Virgin Queen's household
circle. Her prudery may indeed go some way towards ac-
counting for, if not excusing, the fault. It was dangerous for
one of her counsellors to be suspected of an attachment. So
late as March, 1602, Cecil was writing earnestly to Carew in
repudiation of a rumour that he was like to be enchanted
for love or marriage. Almost borrowing Ralegh's words to
himself of ten years earlier, he declares upon his soul he
knows none on earth that he was, or, if he might, would be,

married unto. In Elizabeth's view love-making, except to cust

herself, was so criminal that at Court it had to be done by stealth. Any show of affection was deemed an act of guilt. From a consciousness of guilt to the reality is not always a wide step. In Ralegh's references and language to his wife may be detected a tone in the tenderness as though he owed reparation as well as attachment. The redeeming feature of their passion is that they loved with true love also, and with a love which grew. His published opinions, as in his Instructions to his Son, on wives and marriage, like those of other writers of aphorisms in his age, ring harshly and coldly. But he did not act on frigid fragments of sententious suspiciousness. He was careful for his widow's worldly welfare. With death, as it seemed, imminent, he trusted with all, and in everything, his 'sweet Besse,' his 'faithful wife,' as scoffing Harington with enthusiasm called her. His constant desire was to have her by his side, but to spare her grieving.

When and where they were married is unknown. So careful were they to avoid publicity that Lady Ralegh's brother, Arthur Throckmorton, for some time questioned the fact, though his suspicions were dissipated, and he became an attached friend of the husband's. Probably the ceremony was performed

CHAP. X. after the imprisonment and not before. If the threat of detention in the Tower, mentioned by Stafford, were carried into effect against the lady, Ralegh at all events betrayed no consciousness that she was his neighbour. In his correspondence at the time he never speaks of her. His business was to obtain his release. He understood that allusions to the partner in his misdeed would not move the Queen to kindness. Like Leicester, and like Essex, he continued, though married, to use loverlike phrases of the Queen, whenever they were in the least likely to reach her ear. The Cecils were his allies against Essex. In July, 1592, under cover of an account for the Yeomen's coats for an approaching royal progress, he A Rhapsody. burst into a wonderful effusion to, not for, Robert Cecil: 'My heart was never broken till this day, that I hear the Queen goes away so far off 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 nigher at hand, that I might hear of her once in two or three days, 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; sometimes sitting in the shade like a Goddess; sometimes singing like an angel; sometimes 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 become of thy assurance? All wounds have scars, but that of fantasy; 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 divinity but by reason of compassion; for revenges are brutish and mortal. All those times past-the loves, the sighs, the sorrows, the desires-can they not weigh down one frail misfortune? Cannot one drop of gall be hidden in so great heaps of sweetness? I may then conclude, Spes et fortuna, valete. She is gone in whom I trusted, and