the Queen in the height of his favour first gave him
a foothold as a lessee. We have seen how, to develop his term into the
fee, he created and transplanted Bishops. His assiduity was rewarded in
1598 by Bishop Cotton's accommodating acceptance of a surrender of the
lease, and grant of the fee to the Crown, subject to the old rent of
L260. From the Crown the fee was conveyed to him. The transfer comprised
the lordship of the Hundred of Yetminster, with the manor of Sherborne,
five other manors in Dorset and Somerset, and the Castle, lodge, and
parks of Sherborne and Castleton. Ralegh added to the estate by buying
out leases with his own money, and by the purchase of several adjacent
properties. Then he set himself seriously to the perfecting of the
whole. He did not stint his expenditure. Sir John Harington says that
with less money than he bestowed in building, drawing the river into his
garden, and buying out leases, he might, without offence to Church or
State, have compassed a much better purchase. He had begun by trying to
improve the existing castle. In 1594 he altered his plan, and designed a
new house at some distance. Only the centre of the present Sherborne
Castle, a four-storied edifice with hexagonal towers at the ends, was
erected by him. Aubrey described it as a delicate lodge of brick, not
big, but very convenient for the bigness, a place to retire to from the
Court in summer time, for contemplation. Digby, when he became its
owner, added four wings with a tower to each. Pope visited Lord Bristol
there, and has sketched the place in one of his graceful letters to Miss
Blount. He dwells particularly on the lofty woods clothing the
amphitheatre of hills, the irregular lovely gardens, the masses of
honeysuckle, the ruins of the old fortress, the sequestered
bowling-green, and the grove Ralegh planted, with the stone seat from
which he overlooked the town and minster, and dreamt and smoked. The
spirit of Ralegh still dominates Sherborne, after all the efforts of the
first Lord Bristol to lay it by swelling the lodge into a sumptuous
castle, and of the sixth by turning Capability Brown loose into his
pleasure grounds.

[Sidenote: _Strife with Meere._]

He loved Sherborne, and his wife was perhaps still more attached to it.
In October, 1601, he wrote: 'My wife says that every day this place
amends, and London to her grows worse and worse.' He had his worries
there, as was his self-imposed fate wherever he was.