John Raleigh of Forde

Today I'm in East Budleigh,. But I'm not with Sir Walter Raleigh, who looks rather splendid in this photo. Today's post is all about his less well-known half brother.

Statue of Sir Walter Raleigh, East Budleigh, Devon

Did you realise that the famous Sir Walter Raleigh had four half-brothers, one named Raleigh and three named Gilbert? In this page from my notebook, I’m focussing on one of them; John Raleigh of Forde. He grew up in the village of East Budleigh in Devon, near the River Otter, which meets the sea at Budleigh Salterton.

The Mouth of the River Otter near Budleigh Salterton.

Today the river mouth has silted up. Nearby there’s a nature reserve renowned for its wildlife, particularly birds and re-established native beavers. However, in the early sixteenth century, the River Otter was navigable as far as Otterton, about 2 miles inland. John Leland, writing in the 1540s, suggests that the shingle bar had not yet built up sufficiently to prevent the passage of fishing boats to Otterton at high tide. ¹However, the harbour had likely become unusable for larger vessels by the 1550s. Nearer the river mouth, Budleigh Haven was a bustling port with ships laden with woollen goods, grain, and stone jostling for position at the quayside.

When John Raleigh was a boy, East Budleigh, now a tranquil village, was a bustling town. Weavers and dyers produced woollen cloth and the sound of hammers rang from the shipbuilding yards.

East Budleigh today

John’s mother was Walter senior’s first wife, Joan Drake. At the time of their marriage in the 1520s, Walter had recently come of age, bringing the wardship of Lord Vaux to an end. It seems he did not relish continuing a life at court and returned to Devon. Joan’s family ran a flourishing shipping business in Exmouth. Walter joined the family business, later adding ships of his own to the fleet. They carried cargoes of wool and woollen cloth across the English Channel, returning with salt and wine, no doubt suitably armed against the threat of Barbary pirates. Eventually Walter had his own shipping enterprise.

John was a toddler when Joan died in 1530. An extraordinary ledger stone, usually hidden beneath a blue carpet in All Saints Church, East Budleigh, marks the place of Joan’s burial. It is not clear whether the reversed lettering was merely an error by the stonemason, or had some hidden meaning.

Ledger stone in All Saints Church, East Budleigh, where Walter Raleigh senior served as church warden in the 1560s.

Joan’s death left Walter with two young sons to bring up, and he soon remarried. We know little about his second wife, Isabel Darrel, probably the daughter of a London merchant. Life in rural Devon must have seemed dull after city life. Isabel died after only a few years of marriage, leaving Walter with another mouth to feed — a daughter, Mary.

Walter’s third wife, Katherine, daughter of Sir Philip Champernowne of Modbury, and mother of Sir Walter Raleigh, is the subject of my novel ‘A Woman of Noble Wit.’ She was the widow of Otho Gilbert of Compton and Greenway — hence the three Gilbert half-brother’s; Sir John, Sir Humphrey and Adrian. Katherine swapped a grand Tudor mansion on the banks of the River Dart at Greenway for a much smaller house, known today as Hayes Barton, in East Budleigh. She and Walter soon had children of their own; Margaret, followed by Carew and Sir Walter. By this time John and George were in their twenties.

All of Walter’s sons grew up around ships. Sir Walter’s sea faring exploits are familiar. But it’s perhaps less well recognised that John and George also became accomplished sea captains. They joined their father’s business shipping goods back and forth across the English Channel. By then the estuary was already silting up and Water Senior was likely running his ships out of nearby Exmouth or Topsham. But did the Raleighs ever cross the line between acting as privateers and becoming pirates?

I addressed that question in one of the short snippets from Devon’s past I recorded last autumn for BBC Radio Devon’s ‘Secret Devon’. If you’re in the UK, you can listen on BBC Sounds.

Sir Walter's half-brother

John and George Raleigh were both mentioned as available for England’s defence at the time of the Spanish Armada. Sadly, John died just before the Spanish ships appeared off the coast of Cornwall in 1588, but George supplied a ship.²

If you’d like to find out more about John Raleigh and his connections to my home town of Newton Abbot There is an updated blog post on my website.

John Raleigh of Forde

(All photos in this post are my own.)

1. Leland, J., The itinerary of John Leland in or about the years 1535-1543. parts I to [XI] ed smith, L.T 1838. Part III, p. 241.

2. Roberts. J., Devon and the Spanish Armada, 1988, p.27.