At the time of Ralegh's birth the family had lost its pristine CHAP. I. splendour. But there has been a tendency to exaggeration of the extent of the decadence, by way of foil to the merit which retrieved the ruin. John Hooker, a contemporary Devonshire antiquary, uncle to the author of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, described the family as 'consopited,' and as having 'become buried in oblivion, as though it had never been.' Yet Walter Ralegh of Fardell was still a land-owner of importance. His third marriage indicates that he had not fallen out of the society of his class. Not even personally can he and his wife Katherine be set down as altogether obscure. Holinshed names one of them, and Foxe names both. Walter Their Chaseems to have had much of his great son's restlessness and independence of character, if without the genius and the gift of mounting. After his first wife's death he energetically adopted reformed doctrines. In 1549 during the rising in the West his religious zeal endangered his life. The story is thus told in Holinshed's Chronicles. 'It happened that a certain gentleman named Walter Ralegh, as he was upon a side holy day riding from his house to Exeter, overtook an old woman going to the parish church of Saint Mary Clift, who had a pair of beads in her hands, and asked her what she did with those beads. And entering into further speech with her concerning religion which was reformed, and as then by order of law to be put in execution, he did persuade with her that she should, as a good Christian woman and an obedient subject, yield thereunto; saying further that there was a punishment by law appointed against her, and all such as would not obey and follow the same, and which would be put in execution upon them. This woman nothing liking, nor well digesting this matter, went forth to the parish church, where all the parishioners were then at the service; and being impatient, and in an agony with the speeches before passed between her and the gentleman, beginneth to upbraid in the open church very hard and unseemly speeches concerning religion, saying that she was threatened by the gentleman, that, except she racter. CHAP. I. Would leave her beads, and give over holy bread and holy water, the gentlemen would burn them out of their houses and spoil them, with many other speeches very false and untrue, and whereof no talk at all had passed between the gentleman and her. Notwithstanding, she had not so soon spoken but that she was believed, and in all haste like a sort of wasps they fling out of the church, and get them to the town which is not far from thence, and there began to intrench and fortify the town, sending abroad into the country round about the news aforesaid, and of their doings in hand, flocking, and procuring as many as they could to come and to join with them. But before they came into the town they overtook the gentleman Master Ralegh aforesaid, and were in such a choler, and so fell in rages with him, that, if he had not shifted himself into the chapel there, and had been rescued by certain mariners of Exmouth which came with him, he had been in great danger of his life, and like to have been murdered. And albeit he escaped for this time, yet it was not long before he fell into their hands, and by them was imprisoned and kept in prison in the tower and church of Saint Sidwell, without the east gate of the city of Exeter, during the whole time of the commotion, being many times threatened to be executed to death.' He was not released till the battle of Clyst, called by Holinshed, Clift, Heath, won on August 4, 1549, by Lords Grey and Bedford near the scene of his misadventure, followed by a second victory on the next day, forced the Catholic insurgents to raise the siege of Exeter, which they had been blockading since July 2. In Peril of Death. He was no fair weather theologian. His Protestantism out-lived King Edward. He sympathized with the demonstration in 1553 against the Spanish marriage. On the failure of the Devonshire movement his cousin, Sir Peter Carew, the ringleader at Exeter, is stated in official depositions to have effected his escape abroad through Walter Ralegh, whom he 'persuaded to convey him in his bark' to France from Weymouth. The wording implies active and conscious intervention. The strange thing is that he should not have CHAP. I. been punished for complicity. Later in the reign of Mary his wife exposed herself to similar peril, and similarly escaped. Foxe in his Acts and Monuments relates that Agnes Prest, before she was brought to the stake in 1557 at Southernhay, had been comforted in Exeter gaol by the visits of 'the wife of Walter Ralegh, a woman of noble wit, and of good and goodly opinion.' Burial. Unless that Walter was churchwarden of East Budleigh in 1561, and that a conveyance by him of the Sidmouth Manor fish tithes proves him to have been alive in April, 1578, nothing more is known of him. It has not been ascertained Death and when he and Katherine died, though they are believed to have been dead in 1584. The interest in the East Budleigh farm had by that time run out; and it is surmised they had removed into Exeter, if they had not previously possessed a residence there, perhaps by the Palace Gate. On the authority of a request by their son in 1603 to be buried, if not at Sherborne, beside them in Exeter Church,' it has been concluded that they were interred in the Cathedral. A monument erected to Katherine's son by her first marriage, Sir John Gilbert, was long accepted as theirs. In fact no trace of their burial in any Exeter church has been found. The present inclination of local archeologists seems to be to assume that they were not buried at Exeter at all. It is hard to assent in the face of Ralegh's words. At all events, nothing else of any kind is remembered of the pair; or could reasonably be expected to have been remembered. History has told much more of them than of most country gentlemen and their wives. CHAP. II. Ralegh's CHAPTER II. IN SEARCH OF A CAREER (1552-1581). 6 WALTER, the second son by the third marriage of Walter Ralegh of Fardell and Hayes, was born in the reign of Edward VI, it has been supposed, in 1552. The exact date is not beyond doubt; for the registration of baptisms at East Budleigh was not begun till two or three years later. If the inscription on the National Portrait Gallery picture, 1588, aetatis suae 34,' and that on Zucchero's in the Dublin Gallery, 'aet. 44, 1598,' be correct, his birth must have been not in 1552, but about 1554. A similar, or nearly similar, inference may be drawn from the statement, on a miniature of him at Belvoir Castle, of his age as sixty-five in 1618. One local writer, R. Izacke, has claimed the honour of his birthplace for a house in Exeter, adjoining the Palace-gate. Probably the rumour points, as I have intimated, to its occupation at some time or other by his parents. Another author asserts that he was born at Fardell. His own testimony, 'being born in that house,' is decisive in favour of his father's Budleigh home, a lonely, one-storied, thatched, late Tudor farm-house, not a manor-house, of moderate size, with gabled wings, and a projecting central porch. Tradition has marked out the particular room in which he was born, as on the upper floor at the west end, facing southwards. The house, which is a mile west of East Budleigh church, and six from Exmouth, with the exception of some change at the end of the east wing, probably retains its original character. It was restored in 1627 by 'R. D.' For a century past it has been denominated Hayes Barton, or simply Hayes. Previously it had been called, after successive landlords, Poerhayes or Power's Hayes, CHAP. II. and Dukes-hayes. The hollow in which it lies, among low hills, is on the verge of a tract of moorland; and Hayes Wood rises close at hand. Through the oak wood to Budleigh Salterton Bay is two miles and a half. In this quiet spot Ralegh spent his boyhood, in circumstances not very unlike those of more eminent county families with which his was connected. During the earlier half of the sixteenth century the majority of the gentry were continually growing poorer, and a minority were growing richer. The Raleghs, it is plain, had not met with the good fortune of the Russells, and others of their rural peers. They were declining, if hardly in the degree represented subsequently. But an ampler share of prosperity could not have made much difference in young Walter's prospects or training. Three brothers were all before him in the succession to the patrimony. His birthright could not have comprised more than the cadet's prescriptive portion of necessity and brains. It is unfair to the natural curiosity of posterity that his extraordinary endowments in the second respect are not traceable in anecdotes of his childhood. Naturally a local legend reports him to have loved the society of adventurous mariners. Sir John Millais in his 'Boyhood of Ralegh,' which was painted at Budleigh Salterton, has embodied it. In a narrative printed a century after his death a general assertion of his fondness for books of voyages occurs. Otherwise his boyish tastes and habits are wholly unknown. The name of his school has not been preserved. The first accepted fact after his birth is his entrance, as a commoner, into Oriel College, At Oxford. of which, says Anthony à Wood, his cousin, C. Champernoun, was a member. According to a statement by Thomas Fuller, of which there is no corroboration either in the books of Christ Church, or elsewhere, he belonged also to Christ Church, before or after his admission into Oriel. For any details of his academical course, as for the dates of its commencement and close, posterity is indebted to Wood, who remarks that |