The Real Raleigh
Jun. 22nd, 2008 02:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvesselFeb 2008
Lady in Waiting - Rosemary Sutcliffe - Heywood Books, 1989
* * * *
Quick, name all the things you can remember about Sir Walter Raleigh (without clicking the link). If your knowledge of history is as patchy as mine your list will probably be something along the lines of: favourite of Queen Elizabeth, explorer who went to America, introduced tobacco and potatoes to England, curried favour by laying his cloak over a puddle. Which only goes to show the power of myth over reality, for none of them is strictly true. Yes, he was a favourite of the Queen, but also earned her ire by marrying her lady-in-waiting Bess Throckmorton which led to his imprisonment and exile for five years. When he was in favour, the Queen refused to let him go on any expeditions, and those that he did succeed in arranging, like the colony on Roanoke Island and the quest for El Dorado, were failures (he also never set foot on the American mainland). He probably made smoking popular at court, but both the potato and tobacco were already known in England through trade with the Spanish. And the cloak story is probably a myth, invented by Thomas Fuller and popularised by Sir Walter Scott in his novel Kenilworth (this is disputed and a cloak does feature in Raleigh's coat of arms, though in my view it could just as easily signify his love of travel). Rosemary Sutcliffe, one of our best historical novelists, was clearly aware of the myths, which is why none of them appear in this book.
Instead, she focuses on the relationship between Raleigh and Bess. This is portrayed as a genuine love-match in which Raleigh's deep feelings for his wife conflict with his life-long obsession with exploration. "Lady in Waiting" is an appropriate title because Bess spends much of the time waiting for her husband to come home from expedition, exile or imprisonment. This does result in the book's one noticeable flaw - a tendency to Mills and Boon-style romanticism in the many reunion scenes between Raleigh and his wife - but also causes Bess to take a passionate interest in her husband's activities, enabling Sutcliffe to introduce the complexities of Elizabethan court politics in a believable fashion.
Although Bess and Raleigh are the most fully realised characters, the others are well-drawn and believable, from the subtle Robert Cecil to the stately but human Elizabeth and the slimeball James I. The dialogue is clever - not modern English, but not faux-Elizabethan either. The (clearly genuine) quotations from Raleigh's letters and poems that are sprinkled through the text don't feel out of place.
Evidently the book was originally marketed as a romance, and there is a hilariously condescending Daily Telegraph review (from - I sincerely hope - the original publication in the 1950s) on the back cover: "A sensitive, delightful novel that no woman could fail to enjoy". Well, no actually. It's far better than that. This is a novel for everyone with an interest in history who wants to know what the real Raleigh may have been like.
Lady in Waiting - Rosemary Sutcliffe - Heywood Books, 1989
* * * *
Quick, name all the things you can remember about Sir Walter Raleigh (without clicking the link). If your knowledge of history is as patchy as mine your list will probably be something along the lines of: favourite of Queen Elizabeth, explorer who went to America, introduced tobacco and potatoes to England, curried favour by laying his cloak over a puddle. Which only goes to show the power of myth over reality, for none of them is strictly true. Yes, he was a favourite of the Queen, but also earned her ire by marrying her lady-in-waiting Bess Throckmorton which led to his imprisonment and exile for five years. When he was in favour, the Queen refused to let him go on any expeditions, and those that he did succeed in arranging, like the colony on Roanoke Island and the quest for El Dorado, were failures (he also never set foot on the American mainland). He probably made smoking popular at court, but both the potato and tobacco were already known in England through trade with the Spanish. And the cloak story is probably a myth, invented by Thomas Fuller and popularised by Sir Walter Scott in his novel Kenilworth (this is disputed and a cloak does feature in Raleigh's coat of arms, though in my view it could just as easily signify his love of travel). Rosemary Sutcliffe, one of our best historical novelists, was clearly aware of the myths, which is why none of them appear in this book.
Instead, she focuses on the relationship between Raleigh and Bess. This is portrayed as a genuine love-match in which Raleigh's deep feelings for his wife conflict with his life-long obsession with exploration. "Lady in Waiting" is an appropriate title because Bess spends much of the time waiting for her husband to come home from expedition, exile or imprisonment. This does result in the book's one noticeable flaw - a tendency to Mills and Boon-style romanticism in the many reunion scenes between Raleigh and his wife - but also causes Bess to take a passionate interest in her husband's activities, enabling Sutcliffe to introduce the complexities of Elizabethan court politics in a believable fashion.
Although Bess and Raleigh are the most fully realised characters, the others are well-drawn and believable, from the subtle Robert Cecil to the stately but human Elizabeth and the slimeball James I. The dialogue is clever - not modern English, but not faux-Elizabethan either. The (clearly genuine) quotations from Raleigh's letters and poems that are sprinkled through the text don't feel out of place.
Evidently the book was originally marketed as a romance, and there is a hilariously condescending Daily Telegraph review (from - I sincerely hope - the original publication in the 1950s) on the back cover: "A sensitive, delightful novel that no woman could fail to enjoy". Well, no actually. It's far better than that. This is a novel for everyone with an interest in history who wants to know what the real Raleigh may have been like.