Stuart Walton on the vast fortunes accrued by Sir Walter Ralegh from an alcohol monopoly.
He stood an imposing six feet tall in a society where such a height was relatively rare, his physical loftiness bearing with it an appositely haughty demeanour. His sartorial style occasioned a certain stunned disbelief, but then that was the intention. If cutting a dash was a common practice among the notability of Elizabethan court culture, Walter Ralegh aimed to dash his rivals out of sight.
Notoriously arrogant in his bearing, he went about resplendent in silks, velvet, and furs. His shoes, tied with white ribbons, were studded with jewels.1
White ribbons amid London’s muck. Ralegh’s lavishness was calculated to bring him to the notice of Queen Elizabeth herself, but for that, a level of service to the Crown was required. Ralegh captained a troop of the Queen’s forces in rebellious Ireland, where the quelling, often savage even by the sanguinary standards of the day, was such that the monarch found ample reason to reward him.
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Dazzling enrichment
His ascent to renown, and riches that were more than merely sartorial, began not long after his return. In 1581, the Queen began raining benefits and favours on her courtier, including vast tracts of expropriated Irish land. In May 1583, he was awarded what was termed the “Farm of Wines,” essentially a licensing monopoly that allowed Ralegh the dispensation of permissions to tavern-keepers to sell wine, active throughout the length and breadth of the kingdom. Although Ralegh would go on to sub-contract the monopoly, bringing in even greater sums to his own dazzling enrichment, the initial arrangement was already worth around £700 per annum (equivalent to about £150,000 in today’s values).
The licences typically indicated the prices at which gallons of wine should be sold, in accordance with what had been paid for the bulk quantity—the tun, butt or pipe. In an early licence granted to one William Chesbrough and his son, of Horncastle in Lincolnshire, specific mention is made of “French wynes Gascoigne Guyan [Médoc] Rochell and such lyke,” as well as “Sacke, Malmseyes and all other sweet wynes.”2 The maximum retail prices of all of these are stipulated, with the salient exception of ‘Muskadell,’ the delectable sweet Greek island wine used as the base for spiced possets, on which no restrictions were placed. The taverner was free to charge whatever he could get for that.
Not everything about the arrangement proceeded smoothly. In Cambridge, Ralegh’s agent for collecting the licence monies, the vintner John Keymer, was aggressively obstructed while going about his business in July 1584 by scholars of the University. Townsfolk joined in the affray, which quickly became a full-blown riot, during which Keymer’s wife Joan was roughly jostled and had blood-curdling death threats shouted into her face.
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Ralegh wrote outraged letters to the University vice-chancellor, but appears not always to have been favoured with replies. Keymer was subsequently, and quite unjustly, thrown into jail for unlicensed trading, and although Ralegh referred the matter to the Lord Chancellor, Lord Burghley, who in turn kicked it sideways to two of his Law Lords, the highest court in the land decreed that the royal charter to sell wine bestowed upon the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge trumped any other administrative proceeding.
Falling star
This would hardly be the worst humiliation to be visited on Ralegh, whose star plummeted with startling rapidity after the accession of James I in 1603. He would be imprisoned in the Tower of London on charges of treason, eventually pardoned, but then beheaded for exactly the kind of military recklessness (on the Orinoco river, in search of El Dorado) for which he had once been so handsomely rewarded on the Dingle peninsula. He was stripped of the wine monopoly in 1604, when it was awarded to the Earl of Nottingham.
The cautionary moral of a life not wholly lacking in tragic grandeur, that pride so often propels a fall, could be sounded of many a court career in the Tudor dynasty. What is also of historical interest, though, is the fate that would befall the award of the wine monopoly, of which Ralegh was only the second holder. His predecessor, Sir Edward Horsey, had made £500 per annum out of it. By the time of his fall, Ralegh had inflated that to £1,299. It was financial corruption made liquid.
James I would make an attempt to put an end to the system, as “altogether contrary to the Laws of this Realm,” a nobility of intent that dissolved like cinnamon in Muskadell when it came to enacting the abolition. There would be three further successors to Ralegh, the last of whom was milking well over £3,000 per annum from the system. More than oratorical statements of principle, it would take a real revolution, in the form of Cromwell’s Commonwealth, for all such monopolies, without exception, to be terminated.
Among his many other talents, Sir Walter, as he became two years after the granting of the wine monopoly, was an accomplished poet and prose stylist. Practical wisdom after the fashion of Montaigne was a particular predilection. “Take especial Care that thou delight not in Wine,” one of his admonitions warned, “for there never was any Man that came to Honour or Preferment that loved it … [e]xcept thou desire to hasten thine End, take this for a general Rule, that thou never add any artificial Heat to thy Body by Wine or Spice.”3
Notes:
1 Stephen Greenblatt (2025), Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, Christopher Marlowe (London: The Bodley Head), p196.
2 Chancery Files, 1610. National Archives, Kew.
3 Sir Walter Ralegh (1751), The Works of Sir Walter Ralegh Kt. Political, Commercial, and Philosophical Vol II (London: R. Dodsley), p354, 355.
