AND ANOTHER THING
Are these the real reasons why Sir Walter Ralegh is to be removed from his pedestal?
PAUL JOHNSON
It is characteristic of New Labour, which hates our history and its glories, and any- thing which redounds to the credit of Eng- land, that they are removing the statue of Sir Walter Ralegh, one of our greatest heroes, to make way for a gruesome prosopoglyph demanded by the feminist lobby. At present Ralegh stands in front of what was White- hall Palace, where he lorded it, and within sight of his famous turret-study overlooking the Thames, the prospect from which, wrote his memorialist John Aubrey, 'is as pleasant perhaps as any in the world'. He is to be hus- tled into the obscurity of Greenwich on the bogus grounds that it was there that he sacri- ficed his cloak to save Queen Elizabeth from getting her feet wet. As the story is apoc- ryphal and late (it first occurs in Fuller's Worthies), we can take this excuse for what it is — typical New Labour humbug.
Ralegh was everything New Labour hates or secretly envies. He was of old family but self-made, an entrepreneur, risk-taker and hugely successful. He was an out-and-out elitist. As he said to his son, 'Strive, if thou canst, to make good thy station on the upper deck; those that live under hatches are ordained to be drudges and slaves. Poverty is a shame amongst men, an imprisonment of the mind, a vexation of every worthy spirit.' He was proud of being English — 'damnably proud', said Aubrey — and of his home, Devon: he 'spoke broad Devonshire till his dying day'. He was one of our first imperial- ists, a friend of Dr John Dee, who coined the term 'the British Empire'. He financed and founded our first colony, Virginia. He was a fighter and warrior, swordsman and soldier, from the age of 16. He was a genuine intel- lectual, who thought hard and deep, and for himself. His scientific knowledge was extraordinary for his age, and was one rea- son he endeared himself to the queen, a fel- low intellectual. But there was no Two Cul- tures about Ralegh. He wrote excellent verse, including a memorable octave on the eve of his execution, and his History of the World, written in the Tower of London, is a stunner — its deadly concluding lines, aimed at James I, apply equally well to members of the present regime.
Ralegh was politically incorrect, even by the standards of his day. He laughed at the hypocrisies of the Commons and the dra- gooning of MPs by the government — he told the House brazenly that he often `plucked at a man's sleeve' to prevent him voting in a division, which he took to be common practice and 'of no great impor- tance'. (Cries of 'Oh! Oh!') He introduced tobacco to England and said it was good for you. In his day it sold for its weight in silver. Its export became the first staple of the American colonies — without it, they could not have survived and the USA would never have come into existence. The unpu- rified kind smoked in Ralegh's time was certainly less harmful than the highly con- centrated tobacco used now, and may have done good. Ralegh, like the queen, was a medical empiric, who invented his own medicines and mixed his cures himself. He thought tobacco was a cordial. Aubrey says `he took a pipe of tobacco a little before he went to the scaffold to settle his spirits' the origin of the 'last cigarette' custom.
Ralegh hated Irish rebels and murderers, and hanged them without compunction, unlike Mandelson and Co. who lick their boots. He had not much time for the Scotch either, another reason why the present gov- ernment, which is fundamentally a Scotch one, is so anxious to disparage and degrade him. In a secret meeting in Whitehall just after the queen's death, Ralegh told fellow opinion-formers that "twas the wisest way to keep the government in their own hands, and set up a commonwealth, and not be sub- ject to a needy, beggarly nation'. James I got to hear of it and, when he reached London, looked nastily at Sir Walter and said, 'On my soul, mon, I have heard rawly of thee.'
James I's Scotchness was not the only reason why he imprisoned Ralegh in the Tower and eventually at the request of the Spanish — a Continental power which had recently been our mortal enemy — insisted on the judicial murder of a hero who had been one of our outstanding naval com- manders in the war against Spain. James was a sodomite who found it hard to keep his hands off beautiful young men. Ralegh, as Captain of the Queen's Guard, had recruited some of the tallest and hand- somest men in the kingdom, and the queen had deeply appreciated his success in build- ing up such a corps of giant Adonises. But Ralegh looked after his men, made sure they were imbued with manly spirit and were not tempted by rich sex-perverts. He himself was a lover of beautiful women, a forceful coureur de dames. 'He loved a wench well,' wrote Aubrey, and tells a tale of how he 'boarded' one of the maids of honour against a tree, and she cried:
`Sweet Sir Walter, what do you ask me? Will you undo me? Nay, sweet Sir Walter! Sweet Sir Walter! Sir Walter!' At last, as the danger and the pleasure of it at the same time grew higher, she cried in ecstasy, ‘Swisser Swatter Swisser Swatter.'
Ralegh's beloved son, killed in the expedi- tion to Venezuela, was of a similar propensi- ty. He and his father were invited to dinner `to some great person', and Ralegh warned the son beforehand, 'Thou art such a quar- relsome, affronting fellow that I am ashamed to have such a bear in my company.' The son promised to behave, and for a time did so. Then he suddenly told the company:
This morning, not having the fear of God before my eyes, but by the instigation of the devil, I went to a whore, I was very eager of her, kissed and embraced her, and went to enjoy her, but she thrust me from her, and vowed I should not, 'for your father lay with me but an hour ago.' Sir Walt, being so strangely surprised and put out of his counte- nance at so great a table, gives his son a damned blow on the face. His son, as rude as he was, would not strike his father, but strikes the gentleman next to him and says, 'Box about — 'twill come to my father anon.'
Ralegh's robust and normal sexuality was no doubt a further reason why the Scotch king recoiled from him and eventually destroyed him. Ralegh did not fit into the new and creepy court, where it was useful to pander to the king's tastes and suck up to his catamites. For similar reasons, he does not fit into the orientation of the pre- sent lot, where homosexuality is grotesque- ly over-represented in the Cabinet and (increasingly) in all the centres of power in our country. The government is now to invoke the Parliament Act to enable prose- lytising buggers to get their hands on teenage children two years earlier, an extraordinary abuse of the Statute. Ah well, there will be a day of reckoning in due course, though I don't know whether it will come in this life or the next. Both, perhaps.
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