Walter Ralegh was one of the pivotal players in Elizabethan England's initial forays into empire building in Ireland and North America. In this book Alan Gallay has succeeded in generating a study of Ralegh that is very readable, lively and accessible. One of the great strengths of his book is that he shows how English colonisation in Ireland fitted into the wider patterns of English imperialist ambitions in Elizabeth's reign. Ralegh himself personifies the connectedness of English colonialism in Ireland and in North America in that he played key roles in the Munster plantation and also in the Virginia plantation, and in doing so he was not alone. Gallay situates Ralegh firmly among a closely-related milieu of ambitious west country adventurers who sought to make their fortunes beyond England's shores.
One of the most important of those men for Ralegh was his elder half-brother, Humphrey Gilbert. In 1566 Gilbert submitted a proposal to Elizabeth I asking her to allow him to find a north-west passage to Asia, which won the support of William Cecil, the queen's chief minister, but was ultimately rejected because of the competing claims of the Muscovy Company. Therefore, Gilbert looked to Ireland for opportunities to gain riches but his dubious claims to land in south-eastern Ireland helped to precipitate a rebellion, which he then proceeded to crush on behalf of the queen by employing levels of savagery that were unprecedented in Ireland.
When Gilbert's adventures in Ireland brought him no fortune, he looked again to the Americas to enrich himself. He again offered to find a north-west passage to Asia, and also to pirate Spanish treasure from the Americas and to colonise the north-east coast of North America on behalf of the queen. However, his ill-organised attempt at establishing a colony in North America in 1578, along with his half-brothers, Carew and Walter Ralegh, ended in dismal failure. Walter subsequently became one of Elizabeth's captains during the Desmond rebellion and played his part in pacifying southern Ireland through a murderous famine. When the rebellion came to an end Walter joined Gilbert in yet another failed attempt to establish a colony in North America.
After Gilbert died, Ralegh secured the queen's approval to establish a colony of his own in North America, and in July 1584 a small English settlement was duly established on Roanoke Island. The planned colony on the mainland never matched Ralegh's great expectations and six years later Roanoke was completely abandoned by its English colonists in mysterious circumstances. Meanwhile, Ralegh enjoyed greater success in another colonial venture — the plantation of Munster. He used his position as one of Elizabeth Tudor's favourites to secure grants from her of three-and-a-half choice seignories: an area of about 150,000 acres when account is taken of non-arable land (p. 270).
Gallay offers a sympathetic account of Ralegh's efforts as a coloniser. He highlights the economic benefits generated for Youghal and its hinterland, and his success in attracting English immigrant farmers and manufacturers to Munster. However, having gotten one of the queen's ladies-in-waiting pregnant, Ralegh married her in November 1591 without the queen's permission, and ended up imprisoned in the Tower of London in consequence. Though he was released in time his fortunes never fully recovered. The plantation of Virginia had failed, his involvement in Munster was curtailed and he was barred from Elizabeth's court. He began to fantasise about finding incredible riches in South America. In 1595 Ralegh launched his quest for El Dorado in the ‘empire of Guiana’, an imaginary place which he supposed was located somewhere near the Orinoco River. The quest ended, inevitably, in failure.
Ralegh's shifting focus on Ireland and the Americas as potential sources of fortune and fame, and also service to his queen, alerts the reader to the fact that he and his kind sought their personal aggrandisement in what they saw as inter-changeable theatres. Gallay transforms our understanding of the true nature of the English colonial enterprise in Ireland by setting it in its transatlantic context. English colonists justified their schemes on many bases, but one recurring claim is that they were motivated by a desire to bring benefits to the ‘savages’ whose lands they intended to colonise. In America, as in Ireland, they claimed that they wished to propagate true religion to the ‘natives’, which was an empty formula in both cases. They also trumpeted the economic gains that would accrue to both the indigenous peoples, as well as to the colonists. However, the bottom line was that should the ‘natives’ resist the English they could then be exterminated, just as the god of the Old Testament sanctioned the dispossession, enslavement or genocide of the enemies of the Israelites. English provocations cynically provoked resistance — which was then used to justify genocidal campaigns against great numbers of people ahead of English settlement on both sides of the Atlantic. All too often historians have mimicked the English and blamed the victims for their misfortunes.
The great weakness in Gallay's book is that he tries to represent Ralegh as an exception to the rule; as a coloniser who sincerely conceived of ‘colonization as an act of co-creation, of English and Natives working together’, one who ‘understood indigenous peoples as humans blessed by God’ (p. 364). However, his evidence of Ralegh working in co-operation with native people concords with a wider pattern wherein other English colonisers ‘promoted friendship as a means of coexistence … (while) they waited until they had a modicum of security before turning to enslaving, swindling, attacking and taking Natives’ land’ (p. 364). This book is not the definitive study of Ralegh, but it makes a nonsense of any attempt to understand him or his kind from a strictly insular perspective.
