She was about fifty-three, and she was asking for a place to bury her husband. Earlier that year he had written to tell her that their son was dead. Now she was writing to her brother, asking for room in the church where she meant to lie herself.
On 29 October 1618, Sir Walter Raleigh was executed in Old Palace Yard, Westminster. James I had revived the death sentence passed on him fifteen years before. For Bess, born Elizabeth Throckmorton, the disaster had begun far from England, on the expedition that had taken her husband and their son Walter, known as Wat, to South America. The father had come home. The son had not.
Their family had begun with a marriage the Queen had not authorised. Bess was a daughter of the diplomat Sir Nicholas Throckmorton and Anne Carew, and had become one of Elizabeth I's attendants. Raleigh was a royal favourite. Both held positions that depended upon the Queen's favour, and both married as though that favour might survive their keeping the wedding to themselves.
When Elizabeth discovered the marriage in 1592, she sent them to the Tower of London. Bess lost her place at court. A woman could attend the Queen in her private rooms and still discover that her own private arrangements were royal business.
There was a household beyond the scandal. At Sherborne in Dorset, Bess became mistress of a home. Wat was baptised nearby in 1593, and the boy grew up bearing his father's name while his parents worked their way through the consequences of having chosen one another. The marriage outlasted the Queen's anger. It would have to outlast a king's suspicion as well.
In 1603, the year James succeeded Elizabeth, Raleigh was convicted of treason and sentenced to death. Expecting to die, he wrote Bess a farewell. There were debts and property to deal with, instructions about burial, advice that she should marry again, and a child to remember for his father's sake. Affection shared the letter with the business of keeping a family provided for. Even a farewell had accounts attached.
That time, the farewell did not become final.
Raleigh was spared, but remained a prisoner in the Tower until 1616. Bess and Wat were allowed to join him during his confinement. His accommodation in the Bloody Tower included furnished rooms and the attendance of servants, privileges which made family life possible without making him free. For Bess, the arrangements extended beyond the fortress. She rented a house on Tower Hill, and there, probably, in 1605, she gave birth to another son, Carew.
The child whose future Raleigh had commended to her in 1603 acquired a younger brother. Years that had seemed about to end in widowhood contained another birth, another boy to bring up, and the ordinary work of a household conducted around the extraordinary fact of its father's imprisonment.
Release came in 1616. A pardon did not.
Raleigh obtained permission for another expedition to Guiana in search of gold, and sailed in 1617. Wat went with him. The venture promised wealth to the Crown, but England was at peace with Spain, and an English expedition could not attack Spanish settlements without consequences. In January 1618, at San Tomé on the Orinoco, Raleigh's men did attack a Spanish settlement. Wat was killed in the fighting. The expedition found no gold.
On 22 March 1618, Raleigh wrote to Bess about their son. His brains were broken, he told her, and it was a torment to him to write. He wrote anyway. "Comfort your heart, dearest Bess, I shall sorrow for us both."
He could write that across the sea. He could not bring Wat home.
Raleigh returned to England in June. Spain pressed for punishment, and James's government investigated his conduct. The legal means finally used to kill him was the sentence of 1603. The years Bess had spent living alongside his imprisonment had not removed it; nor had the royal commission that sent him overseas. On 28 October he was brought before the judges, and execution was ordered on the old sentence. That night Bess visited him in the Gatehouse prison at Westminster. She had been granted his body. The next morning, he was put to death.
Bess still had Carew, about thirteen, to provide for. She also had a burial to arrange. In the hours around the execution, she wrote to her brother Sir Nicholas Carew at Beddington in Surrey, asking to bury Raleigh in his church, where she wished to be buried herself. Two or three of her men would bring the body that night. She asked him to answer at once.
"The Lords have given me his dead body, though they denied me his life."
Raleigh's body was buried instead in the chancel of St Margaret's, Westminster. Bess had asked for a place for them both, after a marriage spent accommodating the decisions of queens, kings and prison authorities. She had supplied the destination, the men and the urgency. At the end of the letter about where to bury her husband, she added a line for herself: "God hold me in my wits."
