‘I am Walter Ralegh, know ye not that?’

Walter Ralegh (c.1554-1618) was a pivotal cultural and political figure. Adventurer, courtier, poet, traitor, he was one of the most charismatic and controversial figures of the English Renaissance. The antiquary Anthony á Wood summed up both the difficulties of categorising him and the range of his interests: ‘[a]uthors are perplex’d […] under what topic to place him, whether of statesman, seaman, souldier, chymist, or chronologer; for in all these he did excell’. ‘Favourite’ of Elizabeth I, in later life Ralegh's fortunes reversed as, unpopular with James I, he was tried for treason, condemned, imprisoned, released, and then finally executed in October 1618 after his return from the disastrous second Guiana voyage. As his contemporary Sir Robert Naunton, Master of the Court of Wards, observed: ‘Sir Walter Rawleigh was one that it seemes fortune had picked out of purpose, of whom to make an example, and to use as her Tennis-Ball, thereby to shew what she could do’. He was also an individual whose life and treatment, and beliefs expressed in speech and writing, other writers used to support their own political viewpoints. Anna R. Beer sums up his extraordinary significance when she writes that, due to his own political marginalisation through long-term imprisonment and popular vilification, ‘Ralegh should not have mattered in the seventeenth century’, yet he was in fact the key individual the Stuart state was unable ‘to silence’. Indeed, ‘in the decades after his execution, Ralegh was re-formed by his readers into an authority in opposition to Stuart government’. Processes of memorialization appear to have taken place even whilst Ralegh was still alive, perhaps because ‘the Last Elizabethan’ (Hugh R. Trevor Roper's name for him) was considered already ‘civilly dead’ after his condemnation for treason in 1603, that is dead to law and society.

Accounts about him both whilst alive and posthumously are often starkly different, running the gamut from hyperbolically hostile to hagiographic, so that multiple versions of ‘Walter Ralegh’ emerge and compete for dominance. For instance, he was often seen as the victim of royal authoritarianism, repression, and injustice.

Introduction

Mental health policy has made great strides in the last 20 to 25 years in attempting to shift the delivery of mental health services from the large outdated asylum system. The attempts at consolidating the closure of the asylums, while ensuring the build-up of alternative locally based community care services, have not been without their problems. Criticisms have been levelled at the fragmented and piecemeal build-up of alternative forms of community care throughout the 1980s and 1990s, where gaps in services have been highlighted and where concerns have centred around public safety in relation to homicides in the community and the increased prevalence of mental health problems among the homeless and in the prison population. The wider policy initiatives leading to the mixed economy of healthcare, the creation of the health/social care divide and the emphasis on greater involvement of communities and the voluntary sector in delivering services for vulnerable people have been a mixed blessing.

In the coastal town of Hastings in the southeast of England, a Befriending Scheme for people with mental health problems was established in 1989. The scheme was set up on a shoestring and survived for 15 years during a turbulent period of major national policy changes by attracting core funding from a succession of commissioning agencies beginning with health services, social services, the local health trust and latterly the local primary care group. It was a well-respected local service making a difference to the lives of vulnerable individuals with mental health problems and received the local civic pride award for its work in 1997. However, the service was voluntarily decommissioned in January 2006 as it had failed to attract adequate funding for service delivery and development (core funding had for a number of years been diminishing) and there were concerns regarding its ability to maintain the quality standards for which it was renowned. This chapter takes a critical look at the functions of the Befriending Scheme against a background of severe socioeconomic deprivation and explores what we have learned about its potential role in challenging stigma and combating social exclusion within communities.

Hastings: the socioeconomic context

The southeast of England is perceived as an affluent area on a broad range of socioeconomic indicators.