an infamous betrayal
The life of Sir Lewis Stukeley (sometimes spelt Stukely, or Stucley) will be stigmatized
forever by one dishonourable deed: the betrayal of his distant cousin and Devon worthy Sir
Walter Raleigh on his return from Guiana in 1618, a shameless act that lead directly to
Raleigh's incarceration in the Tower and subsequent execution. Whence Sir Lewis has been
branded 'the Judas of Devonshire'.
The oldest son of John Stukeley of Affeton by Frances St Leger, Sir Lewis was one of many
who were granted a knighthood by James I on his way to London in 1603. As with others so
honoured, this award was purely on account of his breeding, rather than for his
achievements. He first came to public notice in 1617 when, as the recently installed
Vice-Admiral of Devonshire, he was appointed temporary guardian of the infant child Thomas
Rolfe, son of John Rolfe and his Indian Princess wife Pocahontas, after her sudden death
just as preparations were being made for the three of them to return from England to
Virginia.
Raleigh returns without gold
It was in June 21st, 1618 that Sir Walter Raleigh returned from his ill-fated expedition to
the Orinoco without the gold the heavily indebted King James I had been hoping for. News of
Raleigh's travails in Guiana had preceded his return, and in attacking the Spanish
settlement of San Thomé Raleigh had breached his rules of engagement. The scheming
Spanish Ambassador Gondomar had beseeched James to constrain Raleigh from attacking Spanish
interests in the colony as a precondition of his expedition, and was demanding that Raleigh
now be taken to Spain for public execution in Madrid.
James mulled over Gondomar's request but rejected it as too risky, fearing that the
slippery Raleigh might escape his Spanish captors; Raleigh was to be hanged in England
instead, a gesture that would prove to the Spaniards how decisively he acted against those
committing hostile actions against them. The guilty verdict from his 1603 trial for treason
could be reaffirmed as James had declined to offer Raleigh a full pardon on his release
from the Tower in 1616 before his expedition to Guiana. All that remained was to get
Raleigh to London and arrest him. Sir Lewis Stukeley was commissioned with completing this
task.
Stukeley intercepts Raleigh on route to London
Raleigh had been met by his wife Bess at Plymouth, and very soon they embarked on the journey to London where Raleigh was to surrender himself to face the wrath of the king.
Stukeley meanwhile was relishing his assignment as he had a long-standing grudge against
Raleigh believing him to have perpetrated an extreme injustice against his father
when he was a volunteer with Sir Richard Grenville's expedition to colonise Virginia in
1584. Though he hardly needed such an inducement, the king had promised Stukeley the
substantial sum of £500 if could elicit some damning admissions from Raleigh in
addition to conveying him into custody in London.
Some 20 miles from Plymouth at Ashburton, Raleigh and his companions, which included the
ever loyal Captain King, were met by Stukeley coming from the opposite direction. Stukeley
feigned a hearty welcome on meeting his kinsman, and the group were conducted back to
Plymouth to Radford, the home of their friends Sir Christopher Harris and his wife, where
they remained in convivial company for a few days. Surprisingly Stukeley left his charge
unguarded while attending to other business, awaiting further instructions from King James.
It may be that this was done as a stratagem to encourage Raleigh to take flight, thereby
strengthening the case against him. Undoubtedly such a ploy was orchestrated by Stukeley
later in the denouement of this sorry tale.
Raleigh's foregoes chance to flee
On seeing a French vessel in Plymouth Sound, Raleigh decided to seize the moment and bade
Captain King to arrange with the French skipper for the pair of them to be given safe
passage across the Channel. At nightfall Raleigh and the good captain crept out of Radford
to the quay below the house and rowed towards the French craft. Suddenly Raleigh was beset
by doubts; it would be a dishonourable act to flee his country, and he unwisely assumed he
could count on the generosity of the king to offer him a pardon. They returned to Radford
and next day Raleigh sent money to the French ship's master, begging him to wait one more
night when they would make their escape. Night came, but once again he decided against
taking flight. The next day Stukeley received orders to take his prisoner to London, ending
the opportunity for an immediate escape. On July 25th the party set off from Plymouth. With
Stukeley was a French quack Mannourie whose role was to spy on Raleigh.
stalled at Salisbury
At Salisbury Raleigh complained of sickness, and begged to be allowed to remain there for a
while. This was a subterfuge to give him time to put pen to paper and write a full and
truthful account of his recent expedition to Guiana that was later to be published as
An Apology for the Journey to Guiana. Mannourie connived and assisted with this
delaying tactic, but later said it was done at Raleigh's insistence. Price's Worthies
of Devon gives us this vivid passage describing Mannourie's intervention:
He was now forced to make use of all the arts imaginable to appease his majesty, and defer
his anger; to which intent Mannourie, a French quack at Salisbury, gave him several vomits,
and an artificial compound, which made him look ghastly and dreadful; full of pimples and
blisters, and put the cheat upon the very physicians themselves, who could not tell what to
make of his urine, being adulterated with a drug in the glass, that turned it, even in
their very hands, into an earthy humour of a blackish colour, and of a very offensive
savour.
escape plan B is hatched
Meanwhile Raleigh directed his wife Bess and Captain King to make haste to London to
arrange for a vessel to be moored off Tilbury to await Sir Walter's arrival. King engaged
Cotterell, an old servant of Raleigh's, to find the boat; he sent King to an old boatswain
of his who vowed to ready a suitable ketch for Raleigh at Tilbury.
The plan began to unravel when the boatswain revealed these arrangements to a third party.
Immediately Sir William St. John, a captain of one of the king's ships, rode to meet
Stukeley and his prisoner whom he encountered at Bagshot to the south-west of London.
Stukeley then confided in Sir William a series of charges against Raleigh that he was to
put before King James. The next day Stukeley had yet another matter to lay before the king:
Le Chesneée, the interpreter of the French Embassy, visited Sir Walter at Brentford
and brought with him a message from Le Clerc, agent for the King of France, offering him a
passage on board a French vessel, together with letters of introduction which would secure
him an honourable reception in Paris.
Raleigh thanked him for this, but declined saying he had already made arrangements for an
escape. Stukeley had overheard Le Clerc's proposal, or had persuaded Raleigh to reveal it
after vowing as a kinsman to assist in his escape. A plot involving the French was a
serious matter at the time, and the king would use it as one more charge to bring against
Raleigh. He counselled Stukeley to continue to collude in the escape effort, but to arrest
him at the last moment.
On arrival in London, Raleigh was taken to his house in Broad Street where he was revisited
by Le Clerc who repeated his offer. It was declined for a second time.
Raleigh is betrayed
On August 9th, Raleigh boarded a skiff accompanied by Captain King and Stukeley who was all
smiles. They were to be rowed under darkness to their escape vessel moored at Tilbury. They
had not gone far when King noticed a large boat following close behind. They continued
rowing as night fell with the larger vessel pursuing them. On arrival at Woolwich, as
prearranged Stukeley commanded the oarsmen to pull into the dock and the other boat joined
them. A line of police officers and two Justices of the Peace filed off and Stukeley
himself ordered the arrest:
Sir Walter Raleigh, I arrest you in the King's name. Gentlemen, your prisoner. Guard him
well, for he is a desperate man who has just tried to escape.
Raleigh was returned to the Tower, where he remained until the day of his execution. The
king had appointed a six-man commission to investigate whether Raleigh had struck a secret
deal for his escape with the French, and to assess both the charges arising out of the
Guiana fiasco and the incriminating reports of his behaviour since his return to England.
Raleigh was given a perfunctory hearing before this commission which decided that the only
legal grounds for executing him was to reaffirm the death sentence passed in 1603.
The execution took place at Whitehall on October 29th, 1618. Raleigh made a stirring 45
minute speech in which he rejected all the charges against him. He refuted several
allegations made by Stukeley concerning his conduct on the journey from Plymouth to London,
but graciously extended Stukeley his forgiveness. Raleigh maintained his dignity and
composure to the very end.
Stukeley is shunned
Stukeley remained at court for a while, still in favour with King James. But no-one else would condescend to speak to him; instead he was met with contempt and gestures of disgust. He resorted to writing a pamphlet, to be signed under oath, in justification of his actions and contradicting Raleigh's denials on the scaffold.
Some days later Stukeley in his role as Vice-Admiral of Devon had occasion to visit the old Armada hero Lord Charles Howard[note 1] at his home but was robustly rebuffed:
The old lion explodes in an unexpected roar. 'Darest thou come into my presence, thou base
fellow, who art reputed the common scorn and contempt of all men? Were it not in mine own
house I would cudgel thee with my staff for presuming to speak to me!' Stukeley, his tail
between his legs, goes off and complains to James. 'What should I do with him? Hang him? On
my soul, if I hung all that spoke ill of thee, all the trees in the island were too few.'
Such is the gratitude of kings, thinks Stukeley; and retires to write foolish pamphlets in
self-justification, which, unfortunately for his memory, still remain to make bad worse.
[From Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time by Charles Kingsley]
self-imposed exile
A few days later Stukeley and his accomplice Mannourie were caught clipping the very blood money paid by the king to betray Sir Walter. Mannourie was arrested and under cross-examination admitted that he perjured his evidence against Raleigh. Stukely tried to no avail to blame his servant and his son for tampering with the King's coinage. But James owed Stukely too great a debt to see him suffer, and allowed him to buy a pardon. Now a broken man, Stukeley returned to his family seat at Affeton in Devon where he was treated with even greater scorn. Beset with paranoia, he fled to the remote isle of Lundy in the Bristol Channel.
I leave you with Charles Kingsley's account of Stukeley's ignominious return to the West
Country, with its eloquent depiction of Lundy where he passed his final days in wretched
solitude.
Within twelve months he, the rich and proud Vice-Admiral of Devon, with a shield of sixteen
quarterings and the blood-royal in his veins, was detected debasing the King's
coin within the precincts of the royal palace, together with his old accomplice Mannourie,
who, being taken, confessed that his charges against Raleigh were false. Stukeley fled, a
ruined man, back to his native county and his noble old seat of Affeton.
A terrible plebiscitum[note
2] had been passed in the West country against the betrayer of its last Worthy.
The gentlemen closed their doors against him; the poor refused him - so goes the legend -
fire and water. Driven by the Furies, he fled from Affeton, and wandered westward down the
vale of Taw, away to Appledore, and there took boat, and out into the boundless Atlantic,
over the bar, now crowded with shipping, for which Raleigh's genius had discovered a new
trade and a new world.
Sixteen miles to the westward, like a blue cloud on the horizon, rises the ultima Thule of Devon, the little isle of
Lundy. There one outlying peak of granite, carrying up a shelf of slate upon its southern
flank, has defied the waves, and formed an island some three miles long, desolate,
flat-headed, fretted by every frost and storm, walled all round with four hundred feet of
granite cliff, sacred only, then at least, to puffins and pirates. Over the single
landing-place frowns from the cliff the keep of an old ruin, 'Marisco Castle,' as they call
it still, where some bold rover, Sir John de Marisco, in the times of the old Edwards,
worked his works of darkness: a grey, weird, uncanny pile of moorstone, through which all the winds of heaven howl day and night.
In a chamber of that ruin died Sir Lewis Stukeley, Lord of Affeton, cursing God and man.
notes
Lord Charles Howard, 1st Earl of Nottingham, was also known as Lord Howard of Effingham. He
was Lord Admiral of England in command of the English fleet that defeated the Spanish
Armada in 1588, with Sir Francis Drake as his second in command. He was on good terms with
both Elizabeth I and James I, and died aged 88. [return]
In Roman times a plebiscitum was a law enacted by the common people. Here I assume
terrible plebiscitum is used as a figure of speech, as there was no forum for such
local democracy in the West Country at the time. [return]
sources
There are any number of biographies of Raleigh to choose from. I have mainly referred to
these works of a popular nature:
Worthies of Devon by John Prince, Exeter, 1701.
Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time, with other papers by Charles Kingsley, Boston:
Ticknor and Fields, 1859.
The Historical Nights Entertainment (Second Series) by Rafael Sabatini, Houghton
Mifflin, 1919.
VII. SIR JUDAS - The Betrayal of Sir Walter Raleigh
Sir Walter Raleigh by Nina Brown Baker, Harcourt, Brace & World, New York,
1950.
For additional material on Sir Lewis Stukeley I have relied on:
Devonshire Characters and Strange Events V1 by Sabine Baring-Gould, Plymouth,
1908.