There is a famous story about Raleigh, written later in the seventeenth century, in which as a young man walking with Elizabeth he took a diamond ring from her and scratched on a window: “Fain would I climb, yet I fear to fall.” Elizabeth immediately scratched underneath: “If thy heart fails thee, climb not at all.” Among those possessions found on his body after his death was a diamond ring Elizabeth had given him.
Raleigh remains an extraordinarily romantic figure; given his striking good looks and his brilliant mind, it is sometimes hard to envisage the other side of Raleigh – the murderer with blood-soaked hands and scented hair, who his friend Lord Cobham believed was ready to sacrifice him on the altar of his ambition. But many of his contemporaries had no such difficulty and his fate, like that of Grey of Wilton, was often linked to the massacre of unarmed prisoners at Smerwick Fort in Ireland.
In December 1603 Sir John Harington recalled that it was Raleigh who had carried out the orders of Grey’s father to kill his Italian and Spanish prisoners, and after Raleigh’s death Bishop Goodman recorded that “a soldier who was then present [at Smerwick] and did see the execution done, told me that in his certain knowledge most of those soldiers who were employed therin came to a very unhappy end.”
The bones of the victims of the massacre at Smerwick Fort are still being unearthed.
Source:
Lisle, Leanda De. "The God of Truth and Time" After Elizabeth: The Rise of James of Scotland and the Struggle for the Throne of England. New York: Ballantine, 2005. 276-77. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
“Inventory of Such Things as Were Found on the Body of Sir WR etc,” in Edwards, Life, vol. 2, p. 496.
Goodman, The Court of James the First, vol. I, pp. 66-7.
Further Reading:
Elizabeth I of England / The Virgin Queen / Gloriana / Good Queen Bess
Henry Brooke, 11th Baron Cobham
Arthur Grey, 14th Baron Grey de Wilton
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