Great Failure

SIR WALTER RALEGH--Edward Thompson--Yale University Press ($4).

"All the powder of the Revenge to the last barrel was now spent, all her pikes broken, forty of her best men slain, and the most part of the rest hurt."

Thus begins one of the most famed passages in English prose. Its author though posterity does not seem to think he knew how to spell his own name was one of the most brilliant figures of his brilliant day. Sir Walter Raleigh, whom his latest biographer calls "the last of the Elizabethans," spelled his name three different ways (Rawleyghe, Rauley, Ralegh) but never signed himself Raleigh. Biographer Thompson lists 68 different spellings used by his contemporaries. The Spaniards, to whom Raleigh was Public Enemy No. 1, called him various guttural equivalents, such as "Guatteral." However they spelled Raleigh's name, Englishmen of his Jay and ever after knew it stood for greatness. Author Thompson's Sir Walter Ralegh is a beautiful biographical job, in which scholarship and humanity have for once gone hand in hand.

Ralegh was the greatest failure of the Elizabethan age, and outside his native Devon the most hated man in England. His rocket-like career came down like a dead stick, but there was a star-burst before the end. Ralegh was a gentleman but not a noble, and both the Tudor and the older nobility frowned on him as an upstart. After a fitful attendance at Oxford some fighting in the Low Countries and in Ireland (where he made historians shudder by his part in the massacre at Smerwick), Ralegh went to Elizabeth's court and began his rapid rise. Biographer Thompson does not comment on the legend that attributes Elizabeth's first favors to the tale of the cloak and the mud-puddle. However it happened, he was soon generally considered the Queen's lover. According to Thompson, there was nothing in that, but he was certainly one of Elizabeth's favorites. He soon had enough capital to go, like Drake, into piracy on a large scale. Unlike Drake, however, who tried merely to spoil the Spaniards, Ralegh had colonizing ambitions. His most famed colony, on which he never set foot, was Virginia. Thence he imported and did his best to popularize smoking tobacco. (Biographer Thompson sets down as apocryphal the story of Ralegh's alarmed servant, who seeing smoke coming from his" master's mouth! dashed a bucket of water over him.) He spent -L-40,000 trying to get Virginia started, finally handed it over to a London company.

Elizabeth's favor was more than a little hampering to Ralegh. While he had it. she refused to let him endanger his precious skin. While less valued sailors were chivying Spain's great Armada to its doom. Ralegh was kept chafing in London. When Sir Richard Grenville sailed on his fatal raid against the Azores, Ralegh was recalled at the last minute. But Ralegh lost Elizabeth's favor for good when she discovered his secret marriage. She sent the tactless pair to the Tower, then banished them to the country in disgrace. Although he paid a gigantic fine Ralegh was not allowed at court for five years. From that time on, his schemes went wrong. His expeditions to Guiana brought back little but tall tales. His part in the raid on Cadiz was creditable but he got less than his share of prize money.

When Elizabeth died and James I, who hated tobacco and feared Spain, succeeded her, Ralegh was left in a dangerous spot. Spain wanted his head, and James was more than willing to comply. On a cooked-up charge of treason, Ralegh was tried and condemned to death. On the eve of execution he wrote his famed farewell to his wife: "First. I send you all the thanks my heart can conceive, or my pen express, for your many troubles and cares taken for me. which--though they have not .taken effect as you wished--yet my debt is to you never the less. But pay it I never shall in this world. . . . Beg my dead body, which living was denied you; and either lay it at Sherborne, if the land continue, or in Exeter church, by my father and mother. I can write no more. Time and Death call me away." But the King reprieved him, shut him up in the Tower, kept him a prisoner there for 13 years.

Finally, on payment of another fine, and because Ralegh convinced the King that there was gold in the hills of Guiana, he was freed and allowed to fit out his last, most disastrous expedition. Ralegh was 64 when he took this final fling at fate. Everything went wrong. Though he leaned over backward to keep from embroiling himself with the Spaniards, his men were attacked by them, his son killed. In revenge, while Ralegh lay sick aboard his ship, his men stormed and sacked a Spanish town. Yet they found no gold mine.

Ralegh went back to England to take his medicine which James was ready to give. The Spanish ambassador was howling for Ralegh's blood, insisted on James's handing the culprit over that he might be publicly hanged in Spain. James would have done that, too, if public opinion had let him. Instead he put Ralegh through the farce of another trial, and when Ralegh's brilliant self-defense made the prosecution look silly, had him condemned on the old charge of treason--from which he had been reprieved but never technically pardoned.

Night before the execution Ralegh met an old friend, asked him if he expected to be on hand next day and said it might be hard to get a seat: "I do not know what you may do for a place. For my own part. I am sure of one. You must make what shift you can." On the scaffold he bore himself so cheerfully that the parson in attendance was somewhat disgruntled. When the ax fell, the crowd groaned, and someone said: "We have not another such head to be cut off!"

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