Mathew Lyons - The Favourite: Ambition, Politics and Love - Sir Walter Ralegh in Elizabeth Is Court

It was a cool spring morning and Elizabeth was at Greenwich Palace. She had been born here, like her father before her; it was her favourite place. The palace was built on the south side of the river just where the Thames loops down into Kent before returning to its eastward path to the sea; behind the turrets and gables of its brick river front lay courtyards and towers, gardens and park. When the court sat here, which was often, the great and lesser ships leaving Londons quaysides for the Americas and the other unknown limits of the world were known to salute their passing with the smoke and roar of their guns, drawing courtiers and councillors alike to the palace windows. River traffic to and from the city to the west was brisk.

This particular morning Elizabeth was enjoying the small and precious liberty of a walk in the palace park. The wide silver-grey river was rough and unsettled; curlews flecked the shore. Green fields could be seen to the south through a gate in the park wall, pastures rising quickly out of the valley, studded with poplars; to the east, the palace meadow gave way to green marshland. As she walked, Elizabeth perhaps talked with the small coterie of men and women gathered about her. She was no doubt lightly guarded, if at all, since she viewed such securities as an unnecessary evil or rather, as a malignant affront to her freedom, no matter their necessity. But she walked quickly, nonetheless.

And then she stopped, and the illusion of free movement, of liberty, faded. In front of her the path gave way to thick wetmud. She looked around at her courtiers, imperious and expectant. They did not move and the moment filled with uncertainty and silence. Then a tall young man stepped forward. She must have known him a little: through his family, his reputation at court, through talk of his exploits elsewhere. He was Ralegh, a West Countryman, a seaman and a soldier. She perhaps noted he was richly dressed, far beyond his status or his means. But then he swept off that sumptuous cape of his and, bowing low, laid it over the cold, wet mud at her feet. He had, surely, something graceful and witty to say to mark this small gift. She walked on over the cape, and looked at him again and wondered

This book is about that moment: Ralegh stepping forward from the obscurity of his youth, stepping out into historys glare, and Elizabeths wonder at him, his promise, his gifts. But while the story of the cloak itself is mostly a confection whatever truth it holds, it has little to say about Raleghs claims on his queen the true story of their coming together is quite different and altogether more compelling, fraught with dangers for both of them. The Favourite does what has not been done before and traces Raleghs rise to favour over several perilous years from which he was fortunate to emerge both alive and free. It examines anew the personal and political compulsions that drew them together, and then tracks the careful steps of their dance as Elizabeth negotiated, Ralegh at her side, the darkest years of her reign, overshadowed by the fear of conspiracy, assassination and war.

It is here that Raleghs cloak, casually thrown down to stop Elizabeth soiling her shoes in the dirt, becomes a problem. After all, if you know one thing about Ralegh and Elizabeth, it is this story, or a version of it. It has seeped out from its place in anecdotal Tudor history into the popular consciousness, becoming an iconic image that seems wholly to articulate the strange and elaborate rituals of deference and favour that existed between a queen and her courtier, a parable of ambition, subjugation and power.

In the process, the personalities of Ralegh and Elizabeth, no less than the physical and emotional drama and drive of their relationship, have blurred. We recognize the shape of their poses, and think no further. The very ubiquity of the story contrives to give their relationship a sense of inevitability, so that we do not stop to examine either it or them on their own terms: how their individual trajectories brought them together and what it was about their own experiences and understanding of the world that made each attractive to the other.

We do not even stop to ask what kind of attraction it was that they felt. We feel glibly assured that money, sex and power were present in some measure, but we do not consider how difficult it might have been to establish and sustain a meaningful relationship with such potent and conflicting motives ever-present, nor really what such a relationship might mean in the context of a queen regnant and a minor courtier in a late Tudor court. How could any private bond form in such a relentlessly public forum? What reality could the intense, passionate and playful rhetoric of love which both employed actually describe? Where was the human truth in the complex negotiations with power that court life inevitably imposed on them?

These questions are at the heart of The Favourite. If it is a book about Ralegh and his extraordinary rise to power, then it is also about Elizabeths struggle for personal liberty against the immense constraints of her position. Above all, in writing this book, I wanted to acknowledge, even celebrate, the ordinary contradictions of these two exceptional people, to rescue them from their own myths, restore to them some of the freedom for which they both so desperately and differently yearned.

To do this, I felt it was important to suspend the judgements of history, to follow them through the private crises and public struggles of their early lives to explore how they might have understood both themselves and each other at the point at which they met. I wanted to see their actions in the context of the moment, far from inevitable, and contingent on factors which may have otherwise been lost. The two portraits that emerged from this process are, perhaps, more flawed than we are used to, both damaged by their experiences, but more revealingly and credibly human.

For the same reason, I have chosen to focus exclusively on the early part of Raleghs career his rise to greatness. The Favourite is about what brought these two people together and what, at the very height of their relationship, they asked from and gave to each other. It is a book about the making of Sir Walter Ralegh, both the man who won Elizabeths favour and the myth of the favourite forever casting his cloak at her feet, exploring those aspects of their stories which have never really been adequately explained. In the years of Raleghs greatness these two people forged a myth that has survived for 400 years.

It may seem counter-intuitive that two such written-about figures from English history should remain with their relationship unexamined. Nevertheless, it is true. Ralegh customarily merits little more than a line or two in studies of Elizabeth, as if her choice of him reveals nothing about her beyond a mere attraction to men. In Raleghs biographies, by way of contrast, Elizabeth acts as a kind of deus ex machina, appearing periodically to dispense or withhold favour but essentially, humanly absent from the wild narrative of his life.

In fact, Ralegh himself still hides behind the myth he created for himself in the long third act of his life as a self-styled political prisoner under and ultimately martyr to the arbitrary government of James I. Every full biography of Ralegh is written in the shadow of that great and tragic figure, mesmerized by Raleghs mythopoeic gifts. The complexities of the man whom Elizabeth first favoured the young Ralegh, a tangled contradictory mass of insecurity and ambition, of intellect, awkwardness, vanity and doubt are lost.