Transcribed from “Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays” 1890
Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME {87}
‘TRUTH is stranger than fiction.’ A trite remark. We all say it again
and again: but how few of us believe it! How few of us, when we read the
history of heroical times and heroical men, take the story simply as it
stands! On the contrary, we try to explain it away; to prove it all not
to have been so very wonderful; to impute accident, circumstance, mean
and commonplace motives; to lower every story down to the level of our
own littleness, or what we (unjustly to ourselves and to the God who is
near us all) choose to consider our level; to rationalise away all the
wonders, till we make them at last impossible, and give up caring to
believe them; and prove to our own melancholy satisfaction that Alexander
conquered the world with a pin, in his sleep, by accident.
And yet in this mood, as in most, there is a sort of left-handed truth
involved. These heroes are not so far removed from us after all. They
were men of like passions with ourselves, with the same flesh about them,
the same spirit within them, the same world outside, the same devil
beneath, the same God above. They and their deeds were not so very
wonderful. Every child who is born into the world is just as wonderful,
and, for aught we know, might, _mutatis mutandis_, do just as wonderful
deeds. If accident and circumstance helped them, the same may help us:
have helped us, if we will look back down our years, far more than we
have made use of.
They were men, certainly, very much of our own level: but may we not put
that level somewhat too low? They were certainly not what we are; for if
they had been, they would have done no more than we: but is not a man’s
real level not what he is, but what he can be, and therefore ought to be?
No doubt they were compact of good and evil, just as we: but so was
David, no man more; though a more heroical personage (save One) appears
not in all human records but may not the secret of their success have
been that, on the whole (though they found it a sore battle), they
refused the evil and chose the good? It is true, again, that their great
deeds may be more or less explained, attributed to laws, rationalised:
but is explaining always explaining away? Is it to degrade a thing to
attribute it to a law? And do you do anything more by ‘rationalising’
men’s deeds than prove that they were rational men; men who saw certain
fixed laws, and obeyed them, and succeeded thereby, according to the
Baconian apophthegm, that nature is conquered by obeying her?
But what laws?
To that question, perhaps, the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the
Hebrews will give the best answer, where it says, that by faith were done
all the truly great deeds, and by faith lived all the truly great men who
have ever appeared on earth.
There are, of course, higher and lower degrees of this faith; its object
is one more or less worthy: but it is in all cases the belief in certain
unseen eternal facts, by keeping true to which a man must in the long run
succeed. Must; because he is more or less in harmony with heaven, and
earth, and the Maker thereof, and has therefore fighting on his side a
great portion of the universe; perhaps the whole; for as he who breaks
one commandment of the law is guilty of the whole, because he denies the
fount of all law, so he who with his whole soul keeps one commandment of
it is likely to be in harmony with the whole, because he testifies of the
fount of all law.
I shall devote a few pages to the story of an old hero, of a man of like
passions with ourselves; of one who had the most intense and awful sense
of the unseen laws, and succeeded mightily thereby; of one who had hard
struggles with a flesh and blood which made him at times forget those
laws, and failed mightily thereby; of one whom God so loved that He
caused each slightest sin, as with David, to bring its own punishment
with it, that while the flesh was delivered over to Satan, the man
himself might be saved in the Day of the Lord; of one, finally, of whom
nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand may say, ‘I have done
worse deeds than he: but I have never done as good ones.’
In a poor farm-house among the pleasant valleys of South Devon, among the
white apple-orchards and the rich water-meadows, and the red fallows and
red kine, in the year of grace 1552, a boy was born, as beautiful as day,
and christened Walter Raleigh. His father was a gentleman of ancient
blood: few older in the land: but, impoverished, he had settled down upon
the wreck of his estate, in that poor farm-house. No record of him now
remains; but he must have been a man worth knowing and worth loving, or
he would not have won the wife he did. She was a Champernoun, proudest
of Norman squires, and could probably boast of having in her veins the
blood of Courtneys, Emperors of Byzant. She had been the wife of the
famous knight Sir Otho Gilbert, and lady of Compton Castle, and had borne
him three brave sons, John, Humphrey, and Adrian; all three destined to
win knighthood also in due time, and the two latter already giving
promises, which they well fulfilled, of becoming most remarkable men of
their time. And yet the fair Champernoun, at her husband’s death, had
chosen to wed Mr. Raleigh, and share life with him in the little
farm-house at Hayes. She must have been a grand woman, if the law holds
true that great men always have great mothers; an especially grand woman,
indeed; for few can boast of having borne to two different husbands such
sons as she bore. No record, as far as we know, remains of her; nor of
her boy’s early years. One can imagine them, nevertheless.
Just as he awakes to consciousness, the Smithfield fires are
extinguished. He can recollect, perhaps, hearing of the burning of the
Exeter martyrs: and he does not forget it; no one forgot or dared forget
it in those days. He is brought up in the simple and manly, yet
high-bred ways of English gentlemen in the times of ‘an old courtier of
the Queen’s.’ His two elder half-brothers also, living some thirty miles
away, in the quaint and gloomy towers of Compton Castle, amid the
apple-orchards of Torbay, are men as noble as ever formed a young lad’s
taste. Humphrey and Adrian Gilbert, who afterwards, both of them, rise
to knighthood, are—what are they not?—soldiers, scholars, Christians,
discoverers and ‘planters’ of foreign lands, geographers, alchemists,
miners, Platonical philosophers; many-sided, high-minded men, not without
fantastic enthusiasm; living heroic lives, and destined, one of them, to
die a heroic death. From them Raleigh’s fancy has been fired, and his
appetite for learning quickened, while he is yet a daring boy, fishing in
the gray trout-brooks, or going up with his father to the Dartmoor hills
to hunt the deer with hound and horn, amid the wooded gorges of Holne, or
over the dreary downs of Hartland Warren, and the cloud-capt thickets of
Cator’s Beam, and looking down from thence upon the far blue southern
sea, wondering when he shall sail thereon, to fight the Spaniard, and
discover, like Columbus, some fairy-land of gold and gems.
For before this boy’s mind, as before all intense English minds of that
day, rise, from the first, three fixed ideas, which yet are but one—the
Pope, the Spaniard, and America.
The two first are the sworn and internecine enemies (whether they pretend
a formal peace or not) of Law and Freedom, Bible and Queen, and all that
makes an Englishman’s life dear to him. Are they not the incarnations of
Antichrist? Their Moloch sacrifices flame through all lands. The earth
groans because of them, and refuses to cover the blood of her slain. And
America is the new world of boundless wonder and beauty, wealth and
fertility, to which these two evil powers arrogate an exclusive and
divine right; and God has delivered it into their hands; and they have
done evil therein with all their might, till the story of their greed and
cruelty rings through all earth and heaven. Is this the will of God?
Will he not avenge for these things, as surely as he is the Lord who
executeth justice and judgment in the earth?
These are the young boy’s thoughts. These were his thoughts for
sixty-six eventful years. In whatsoever else he wavered, he never
wavered in that creed. He learnt it in his boyhood, while he read ‘Fox’s
Martyrs’ beside his mother’s knee. He learnt it as a lad, when he saw
his neighbours Hawkins and Drake changed by Spanish tyranny and treachery
from peaceful merchantmen into fierce scourges of God. He learnt it
scholastically, from fathers and divines, as an Oxford scholar, in days
when Oxford was a Protestant indeed, in whom there was no guile. He
learnt it when he went over, at seventeen years old, with his gallant
kinsman Henry Champernoun, and his band of a hundred gentlemen
volunteers, to flesh his maiden sword in behalf of the persecuted French
Protestants. He learnt it as he listened to the shrieks of the San
Bartholomew; he learnt it as he watched the dragonnades, the tortures,
the massacres of the Netherlands, and fought manfully under Norris in
behalf of those victims of ‘the Pope and Spain.’ He preached it in far
stronger and wiser words than I can express it for him, in that noble
tract of 1591, on Sir Richard Grenville’s death at the Azores—a Tyrtæan
trumpet-blast such as has seldom rung in human ears; he discussed it like
a cool statesman in his pamphlet of 1596, on ‘A War with Spain.’ He
sacrificed for it the last hopes of his old age, the wreck of his
fortunes, his just recovered liberty; and he died with the old God’s
battle-cry upon his lips, when it awoke no response from the hearts of a
coward, profligate, and unbelieving generation. This is the background,
the keynote of the man’s whole life. If we lose the recollection of it,
and content ourselves by slurring it over in the last pages of his
biography with some half-sneer about his putting, like the rest of
Elizabeth’s old admirals, ‘the Spaniard, the Pope, and the Devil’ in the
same category, then we shall understand very little about Raleigh;
though, of course, we shall save ourselves the trouble of pronouncing as
to whether the Spaniard and the Pope were really in the same category as
the devil; or, indeed, which might be equally puzzling to a good many
historians of the last century and a half, whether there be any devil at
all.
The books which I have chosen to head this review are all of them more or
less good, with one exception, and that is Bishop Goodman’s Memoirs, on
which much stress has been lately laid, as throwing light on various
passages of Raleigh, Essex, Cecil, and James’s lives. Having read it
carefully, I must say plainly, that I think the book an altogether
foolish, pedantic, and untrustworthy book, without any power of insight
or gleam of reason; without even the care to be self-consistent; having
but one object, the whitewashing of James, and of every noble lord whom
the bishop has ever known: but in whitewashing each, the poor old flunkey
so bespatters all the rest of his pets, that when the work is done, the
whole party look, if possible, rather dirtier than before. And so I
leave Bishop Goodman.
Mr. Fraser Tytler’s book is well known; and it is on the whole a good
one; because he really loves and admires the man of whom he writes: but
he is sometimes careless as to authorities, and too often makes the wish
father to the thought. Moreover, he has the usual sentiment about Mary
Queen of Scots, and the usual scandal about Elizabeth, which is simply
anathema; and which prevents his really seeing the time in which Raleigh
lived, and the element in which he moved. This sort of talk is happily
dying out just now; but no one can approach the history of the
Elizabethan age (perhaps of any age) without finding that truth is all
but buried under mountains of dirt and chaff—an Augæan stable, which,
perhaps, will never be swept clean. Yet I have seen, with great delight,
several attempts toward removal of the said superstratum of dirt and
chaff from the Elizabethan histories, in several articles, all evidently
from the same pen (and that one, more perfectly master of English prose
than any man living), in the ‘Westminster Review’ and ‘Fraser’s
Magazine.’ {95}
Sir Robert Schomburgk’s edition of the Guiana Voyage contains an
excellent Life of Raleigh, perhaps the best yet written; of which I only
complain, when it gives in to the stock-charges against Raleigh, as it
were at second-hand, and just because they are stock-charges, and when,
too, the illustrious editor (unable to conceal his admiration of a
discoverer in many points so like himself) takes all through an
apologetic tone of ‘Please don’t laugh at me. I daresay it is very
foolish; but I can’t help loving the man.’
Mr. Napier’s little book is a reprint of two ‘Edinburgh Review’ articles
on Bacon and Raleigh. The first, a learned statement of facts in answer
to some unwisdom of a ‘Quarterly’ reviewer (possibly an Oxford
Aristotelian; for ‘we think we do know that sweet Roman hand’). It is
clear, accurate, convincing, complete. There is no more to be said about
the matter, save that facts are stubborn things.
The article on Raleigh is very valuable; first, because Mr. Napier has
had access to many documents unknown to former biographers; and next,
because he clears Raleigh completely from the old imputation of deceit
about the Guiana mine, as well as of other minor charges. With his
general opinion of Raleigh’s last and fatal Guiana voyage, I have the
misfortune to differ from him _toto coelo_, on the strength of the very
documents which he quotes. But Mr. Napier is always careful, always
temperate, and always just, except where he, as I think, does not enter
into the feelings of the man whom he is analysing. Let readers buy the
book (it will tell them a hundred things they do not know) and be judge
between Mr. Napier and me.
In the meanwhile, one cannot help watching with a smile how good old
Time’s scrubbing-brush, which clears away paint and whitewash from church
pillars, does the same by such characters as Raleigh’s. After each fresh
examination, some fresh count in the hundred-headed indictment breaks
down. The truth is, that as people begin to believe more in nobleness,
and to gird up their loins to the doing of noble deeds, they discover
more nobleness in others. Raleigh’s character was in its lowest nadir in
the days of Voltaire and Hume. What shame to him? For so were more
sacred characters than his. Shall the disciple be above his master?
especially when that disciple was but too inconsistent, and gave occasion
to the uncircumcised to blaspheme? But Cayley, after a few years,
refutes triumphantly Hume’s silly slanders. He is a stupid writer: but
he has sense enough, being patient, honest, and loving, to do that.
Mr. Fraser Tytler shovels away a little more of the dirt-heap; Mr. Napier
clears him (for which we owe him many thanks), by simple statement of
facts, from the charge of having deserted and neglected his Virginia
colonists; Humboldt and Schomburgk clear him from the charge of having
lied about Guiana; and so on; each successive writer giving in generally
on merest hearsay to the general complaint against him, either from fear
of running counter to big names, or from mere laziness, and yet absolving
him from that particular charge of which his own knowledge enables him to
judge. In the trust that I may be able to clear him from a few more
charges, I write these pages, premising that I do not profess to have
access to any new and recondite documents. I merely take the broad facts
of the story from documents open to all; and comment on them as every man
should wish his own life to be commented on.
But I do so on a method which I cannot give up; and that is the Bible
method. I say boldly that historians have hitherto failed in
understanding not only Raleigh and Elizabeth, but nine-tenths of the
persons and facts in his day, because they will not judge them by the
canons which the Bible lays down—by which I mean not only the New
Testament but the Old, which, as English Churchmen say, and Scotch
Presbyterians have ere now testified with sacred blood, is ‘not contrary
to the New.’
Mr. Napier has a passage about Raleigh for which I am sorry, coming as it
does from a countryman of John Knox. ‘Society, it would seem, was yet in
a state in which such a man could seriously plead, that the madness he
feigned was justified’ (his last word is unfair, for Raleigh only hopes
that it is no sin) ‘by the example of David, King of Israel.’ What a
shocking state of society when men actually believed their Bibles, not
too little, but too much. For my part, I think that if poor dear Raleigh
had considered the example of David a little more closely, he need never
have feigned madness at all; and that his error lay quite in an opposite
direction from looking on the Bible heroes, David especially, as too sure
models. At all events, let us try Raleigh by the very scriptural
standard which he himself lays down, not merely in this case unwisely,
but in his ‘History of the World’ more wisely than any historian whom I
have ever read; and say, ‘Judged as the Bible taught our Puritan
forefathers to judge every man, the character is intelligible enough;
tragic, but noble and triumphant: judged as men have been judged in
history for the last hundred years, by hardly any canon save those of the
private judgment, which philosophic cant, maudlin sentimentality, or fear
of public opinion, may happen to have forged, the man is a phenomenon,
only less confused, abnormal, suspicious than his biographers’ notions
about him.’ Again I say, I have not solved the problem: but it will be
enough if I make some think it both soluble and worth solving. Let us
look round, then, and see into what sort of a country, into what sort of
a world, the young adventurer is going forth, at seventeen years of age,
to seek his fortune.
Born in 1552, his young life has sprung up and grown with the young life
of England. The earliest fact, perhaps, which he can recollect is the
flash of joy on every face which proclaims that Mary Tudor is dead, and
Elizabeth reigns at last. As he grows, the young man sees all the hope
and adoration of the English people centre in that wondrous maid, and his
own centre in her likewise. He had been base had he been otherwise. She
comes to the throne with such a prestige as never sovereign came since
the days when Isaiah sang his pæan over young Hezekiah’s accession.
Young, learned, witty, beautiful (as with such a father and mother she
could not help being), with an expression of countenance remarkable (I
speak of those early days) rather for its tenderness and intellectual
depth than its strength, she comes forward as the champion of the
Reformed Faith, the interpretress of the will and conscience of the
people of England—herself persecuted all but to the death, and purified
by affliction, like gold tried in the fire. She gathers round her, one
by one, young men of promise, and trains them herself to their work. And
they fulfil it, and serve her, and grow gray-headed in her service,
working as faithfully, as righteously, as patriotically, as men ever
worked on earth. They are her ‘favourites’; because they are men who
deserve favour; men who count not their own lives dear to themselves for
the sake of the queen and of that commonweal which their hearts and
reasons tell them is one with her. They are still men, though; and some
of them have their grudgings and envyings against each other: she keeps
the balance even between them, on the whole, skilfully, gently, justly,
in spite of weaknesses and prejudices, without which she had been more
than human. Some have their conceited hopes of marrying her, becoming
her masters. She rebukes and pardons. ‘Out of the dust I took you, sir!
go and do your duty, humbly and rationally, henceforth, or into the dust
I trample you again!’ And they reconsider themselves, and obey. But
many, or most of them, are new men, country gentlemen, and younger sons.
She will follow her father’s plan, of keeping down the overgrown feudal
princes, who, though brought low by the wars of the Roses, are still
strong enough to throw everything into confusion by resisting at once the
Crown and Commons. Proud nobles reply by rebellion, come down southwards
with ignorant Popish henchmen at their backs; will restore Popery, marry
the Queen of Scots, make the middle class and the majority submit to the
feudal lords and the minority. Elizabeth, with her ‘aristocracy of
genius,’ is too strong for them: the people’s heart is with her, and not
with dukes. Each mine only blows up its diggers; and there are many dry
eyes at their ruin. Her people ask her to marry. She answers gently,
proudly, eloquently: ‘She is married—the people of England is her
husband. She has vowed it.’ And yet there is a tone of sadness in that
great speech. Her woman’s heart yearns after love, after children; after
a strong bosom on which to repose that weary head. More than once she is
ready to give way. But she knows that it must not be. She has her
reward. ‘Whosoever gives up husband or child for my sake and the
gospel’s, shall receive them back a hundredfold in this present life,’ as
Elizabeth does. Her reward is an adoration from high and low, which is
to us now inexplicable, impossible, overstrained, which was not so then.
For the whole nation is in a mood of exaltation; England is fairyland;
the times are the last days—strange, terrible, and glorious. At home are
Jesuits plotting; dark, crooked-pathed, going up and down in all manner
of disguises, doing the devil’s work if men ever did it; trying to sow
discord between man and man, class and class; putting out books full of
filthy calumnies, declaring the queen illegitimate, excommunicate, a
usurper; English law null, and all state appointments void, by virtue of
a certain ‘Bull’; and calling on the subjects to rebellion and
assassination, even on the bedchamber—woman to do to her ‘as Judith did
to Holofernes.’ She answers by calm contempt. Now and then Burleigh and
Walsingham catch some of the rogues, and they meet their deserts; but she
for the most part lets them have their way. God is on her side, and she
will not fear what man can do to her.
Abroad, the sky is dark and wild, and yet full of fantastic splendour.
Spain stands strong and awful, a rising world-tyranny, with its
dark-souled Cortezes and Pizarros, Alvas, Don Johns, and Parmas, men
whose path is like the lava stream; who go forth slaying and to slay, in
the name of their gods, like those old Assyrian conquerors on the walls
of Nineveh, with tutelary genii flying above their heads, mingled with
the eagles who trail the entrails of the slain. By conquest,
intermarriage, or intrigue, she has made all the southern nations her
vassals or her tools; close to our own shores, the Netherlands are
struggling vainly for their liberties; abroad, the Western Islands, and
the whole trade of Africa and India, will in a few years be hers. And
already the Pope, whose ‘most Catholic’ and faithful servant she is, has
repaid her services in the cause of darkness by the gift of the whole New
World—a gift which she has claimed by cruelties and massacres unexampled
since the days of Timour and Zinghis Khan. There she spreads and
spreads, as Drake found her picture in the Government House at St.
Domingo, the horse leaping through the globe, and underneath, _Non
sufficit orbis_. Who shall withstand her, armed as she is with the
three-edged sword of Antichrist—superstition, strength, and gold?
English merchantmen, longing for some share in the riches of the New
World, go out to trade in Guinea, in the Azores, in New Spain: and are
answered by shot and steel. ‘Both policy and religion,’ as Fray Simon
says, fifty years afterwards, ‘forbid Christians to trade with heretics!’
‘Lutheran devils, and enemies of God,’ are the answer they get in words:
in deeds, whenever they have a superior force they may be allowed to
land, and to water their ships, even to trade, under exorbitant
restrictions: but generally this is merely a trap for them. Forces are
hurried up; and the English are attacked treacherously, in spite of
solemn compacts; for ‘No faith need be kept with heretics.’ And woe to
them if any be taken prisoners, even wrecked. The galleys, and the rack,
and the stake are their certain doom; for the Inquisition claims the
bodies and souls of heretics all over the world, and thinks it sin to
lose its own. A few years of such wrong raise questions in the sturdy
English heart. What right have these Spaniards to the New World? The
Pope’s gift? Why, he gave it by the same authority by which he claims
the whole world. The formula used when an Indian village is sacked is,
that God gave the whole world to St. Peter, and that he has given it to
his successors, and they the Indies to the King of Spain. To acknowledge
that lie would be to acknowledge the very power by which the Pope claims
a right to depose Queen Elizabeth, and give her dominions to whomsoever
he will. A fico for bulls!
By possession, then? That may hold for Mexico, Peru, New Grenada,
Paraguay, which have been colonised; though they were gained by means
which make every one concerned in conquering them worthy of the gallows;
and the right is only that of the thief to the purse, whose owner he has
murdered. But as for the rest—Why the Spaniard has not colonised, even
explored, one-fifth of the New World, not even one-fifth of the coast.
Is the existence of a few petty factories, often hundreds of miles apart,
at a few river-mouths to give them a claim to the whole intermediate
coast, much less to the vast unknown tracts inside? We will try that.
If they appeal to the sword, so be it. The men are treacherous robbers;
we will indemnify ourselves for our losses, and God defend the right.
So argued the English; and so sprung up that strange war of reprisals, in
which, for eighteen years, it was held that there was no peace between
England and Spain beyond the line, _i.e._, beyond the parallel of
longitude where the Pope’s gift of the western world was said to begin;
and, as the quarrel thickened and neared, extended to the Azores,
Canaries, and coasts of Africa, where English and Spaniards flew at each
other as soon as seen, mutually and by common consent, as natural
enemies, each invoking God in the battle with Antichrist.
Into such a world as this goes forth young Raleigh, his heart full of
chivalrous worship for England’s tutelary genius, his brain aflame with
the true miracles of the new-found Hesperides, full of vague hopes, vast
imaginations, and consciousness of enormous power. And yet he is no
wayward dreamer, unfit for this work-day world. With a vein of song
‘most lofty, insolent, and passionate,’ indeed unable to see aught
without a poetic glow over the whole, he is eminently practical,
contented to begin at the beginning that he may end at the end; one who
could ‘toil terribly,’ ‘who always laboured at the matter in hand as if
he were born only for that.’ Accordingly, he sets to work faithfully and
stoutly, to learn his trade of soldiering, and learns it in silence and
obscurity. He shares (it seems) in the retreat at Moncontour, and is by
at the death of Condé, and toils on for five years, marching and
skirmishing, smoking the enemy out of mountain-caves in Languedoc, and
all the wild work of war. During the San Bartholomew massacre we hear
nothing of him; perhaps he took refuge with Sidney and others in
Walsingham’s house. No records of these years remain, save a few
scattered reminiscences in his works, which mark the shrewd, observant
eye of the future statesman.
When he returned we know not. We trace him, in 1576, by some verses
prefixed to Gascoigne’s satire, the ‘Steele Glass,’ solid, stately,
epigrammatic, ‘by Walter Rawley of the Middle Temple.’ The style is his;
spelling of names matters nought in days in which a man would spell his
own name three different ways in one document.
Gascoigne, like Raleigh, knew Lord Grey of Wilton, and most men about
town too; and had been a soldier abroad, like Raleigh, probably with him.
It seems to have been the fashion for young idlers to lodge among the
Templars; indeed, toward the end of the century, they had to be cleared
out, as crowding the wigs and gowns too much; and perhaps proving noisy
neighbours, as Raleigh may have done. To this period may be referred,
probably, his Justice done on Mr. Charles Chester (Ben Jonson’s Carlo
Buffone), ‘a perpetual talker, and made a noise like a drum in a room; so
one time, at a tavern, Raleigh beats him and seals up his mouth, his
upper and nether beard, with hard wax.’ For there is a great laugh in
Raleigh’s heart, a genial contempt of asses; and one that will make him
enemies hereafter: perhaps shorten his days.
One hears of him next, but only by report, in the Netherlands under
Norris, where the nucleus of the English line (especially of its
musquetry) was training. For Don John of Austria intends not only to
crush the liberties and creeds of the Flemings, but afterwards to marry
the Queen of Scots, and conquer England: and Elizabeth, unwillingly and
slowly, for she cannot stomach rebels, has sent men and money to the
States to stop Don John in time; which the valiant English and Scotch do
on Lammas day, 1578, and that in a fashion till then unseen in war. For
coming up late and panting, and ‘being more sensible of a little heat of
the sun than of any cold fear of death,’ they throw off their armour and
clothes, and, in their shirts (not over-clean, one fears), give Don
John’s rashness such a rebuff, that two months more see that wild meteor,
with lost hopes and tarnished fame, lie down and vanish below the stormy
horizon. In these days, probably, it is that he knew Colonel Bingham, a
soldier of fortune, of a ‘fancy high and wild, too desultory and
over-voluble,’ who had, among his hundred and one schemes, one for the
plantation of America as poor Sir Thomas Stukely (whom Raleigh must have
known well), uncle of the traitor Lewis, had for the peopling of Florida.
Raleigh returns. Ten years has he been learning his soldier’s trade in
silence. He will take a lesson in seamanship next. The court may come
in time: for by now the poor squire’s younger son must have
discovered—perhaps even too fully—that he is not as other men are; that
he can speak, and watch, and dare, and endure, as none around him can do.
However, there are ‘good adventures toward,’ as the ‘Morte d’Arthur’
would say; and he will off with his half-brother Humphrey Gilbert to
carry out his patent for planting _Meta Incognita_—‘The Unknown Goal,’ as
Queen Elizabeth has named it—which will prove to be too truly and fatally
unknown. In a latitude south of England, and with an Italian summer, who
can guess that the winter will outfreeze Russia itself? The
merchant-seaman, like the statesman, had yet many a thing to learn.
Instead of smiling at our forefathers’ ignorance, let us honour the men
who bought knowledge for us their children at the price of lives nobler
than our own.
So Raleigh goes on his voyage with Humphrey Gilbert, to carry out the
patent for discovering and planting in _Meta Incognita_; but the voyage
prospers not. A ‘smart brush with the Spaniards’ sends them home again,
with the loss of Morgan, their best captain, and ‘a tall ship’; and _Meta
Incognita_ is forgotten for a while; but not the Spaniards. Who are
these who forbid all English, by virtue of the Pope’s bull, to cross the
Atlantic? That must be settled hereafter; and Raleigh, ever busy, is off
to Ireland to command a company in that ‘common weal, or rather common
woe’, as he calls it in a letter to Leicester. Two years and more pass
here; and all the records of him which remain are of a man valiant,
daring, and yet prudent beyond his fellows. He hates his work, and is
not on too good terms with stern and sour, but brave and faithful Lord
Grey; but Lord Grey is Leicester’s friend, and Raleigh works patiently
under him, like a sensible man, just because he is Leicester’s friend.
Some modern gentleman of note—I forget who, and do not care to
recollect—says that Raleigh’s ‘prudence never bore any proportion to his
genius.’ The next biographer we open accuses him of being too
calculating, cunning, timeserving; and so forth. Perhaps both are true.
The man’s was a character very likely to fall alternately into either
sin—doubtless did so a hundred times. Perhaps both are false. The man’s
character was, on occasion, certain to rise above both faults. We have
evidence that he did so his whole life long.
He is tired of Ireland at last: nothing goes right there:—When has it?
Nothing is to be done there. That which is crooked cannot be made
straight, and that which is wanting cannot be numbered. He comes to
London and to court. But how? By spreading his cloak over a muddy place
for Queen Elizabeth to step on? It is very likely to be a true story;
but biographers have slurred over a few facts in their hurry to carry out
their theory of ‘favourites,’ and to prove that Elizabeth took up Raleigh
on the same grounds that a boarding-school miss might have done. Not
that I deny the cloak story to be a very pretty story; perhaps it
justifies, taken alone, Elizabeth’s fondness for him. There may have
been self-interest in it; we are bound, as ‘men of the world,’ to impute
the dirtiest motive that we can find; but how many self-interested men do
we know who would have had quickness and daring to do such a thing? Men
who are thinking about themselves are not generally either so
quick-witted, or so inclined to throw away a good cloak, when by much
scraping and saving they have got one. I never met a cunning, selfish,
ambitious man who would have done such a thing. The reader may; but even
if he has, we must ask him, for Queen Elizabeth’s sake, to consider that
this young Quixote is the close relation of three of the finest public
men then living, Champernoun, Gilbert, and Carew. That he is a friend of
Sidney, a pet of Leicester; that he has left behind him at Oxford, and
brought with him from Ireland, the reputation of being a _rara avis_, a
new star in the firmament; that he had been a soldier in her Majesty’s
service (and in one in which she has a peculiar private interest) for
twelve years; that he has held her commission as one of the triumvirate
for governing Munster, and has been the commander of the garrison at
Cork; and that it is possible that she may have heard something of him
before he threw his cloak under her feet, especially as there has been
some controversy (which we have in vain tried to fathom) between him and
Lord Grey about that terrible Smerwick slaughter; of the results of which
we know little, but that Raleigh, being called in question about it in
London, made such good play with his tongue, that his reputation as an
orator and a man of talent was fixed once and for ever.
Within the twelve months he is sent on some secret diplomatic mission
about the Anjou marriage; he is in fact now installed in his place as ‘a
favourite.’ And why not? If a man is found to be wise and witty, ready
and useful, able to do whatsoever he is put to, why is a sovereign, who
has eyes to see the man’s worth and courage to use it, to be accused of I
know not what, because the said man happens to be good-looking?
Now comes the turning-point of Raleigh’s life. What does he intend to
be? Soldier, statesman, scholar, or sea-adventurer? He takes the most
natural, yet not the wisest course. He will try and be all four at once.
He has intellect for it; by worldly wisdom he may have money for it also.
Even now he has contrived (no one can tell whence) to build a good bark
of two hundred tons, and send her out with Humphrey Gilbert on his second
and fatal voyage. Luckily for Raleigh she deserts and comes home, while
not yet out of the Channel, or she surely had gone the way of the rest of
Gilbert’s squadron. Raleigh, of course, loses money by the failure, as
well as the hopes which he had grounded on his brother’s Transatlantic
viceroyalty. And a bitter pang it must have been to him to find himself
bereft of that pure and heroic counsellor just at his entering into life.
But with the same elasticity which sent him to the grave, he is busy
within six months in a fresh expedition. If _Meta Incognita_ be not
worth planting, there must be, so Raleigh thinks, a vast extent of coast
between it and Florida, which is more genial in climate, perhaps more
rich in produce; and he sends Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlow to look for
the same, and not in vain.
On these Virginian discoveries I shall say but little. Those who wish to
enjoy them should read them in all their naive freshness in the
originals; and they will subscribe to S. T. Coleridge’s dictum, that no
one nowadays can write travels as well as the old worthies who figure in
Hakluyt and Purchas.
But to return to the question—What does this man intend to be? A
discoverer and colonist; a vindicator of some part at least of America
from Spanish claims? Perhaps not altogether: else he would have gone
himself to Virginia, at least the second voyage, instead of sending
others. But here, it seems, is the fatal, and yet pardonable mistake,
which haunts the man throughout. He tries to be too many men at once.
Fatal: because, though he leaves his trace on more things than one man is
wont to do, he, strictly speaking, conquers nothing, brings nothing to a
consummation. Virginia, Guiana, the ‘History of the World,’ his own
career as a statesman—as dictator (for he might have been dictator had he
chosen)—all are left unfinished. And yet most pardonable; for if a man
feels that he can do many different things, how hard to teach himself
that he must not do them all! How hard to say to himself, ‘I must cut
off the right hand, and pluck out the right eye. I must be less than
myself, in order really to be anything. I must concentrate my powers on
one subject, and that perhaps by no means the most seemingly noble or
useful, still less the most pleasant, and forego so many branches of
activity in which I might be so distinguished, so useful.’ This is a
hard lesson. Raleigh took just sixty-six years learning it; and had to
carry the result of his experience to the other side of the dark river,
for there was no time left to use it on this side. Some readers may have
learnt the lesson already. If so, happy and blessed are they. But let
them not therefore exalt themselves above Walter Raleigh; for that lesson
is, of course, soonest learnt by the man who can excel in few things,
later by him who can excel in many, and latest of all by him who, like
Raleigh, can excel in all.
Few details remain concerning the earlier court days of Raleigh. He
rises rapidly, as we have seen. He has an estate given him in Ireland,
near his friend Spenser, where he tries to do well and wisely,
colonising, tilling, and planting it: but like his Virginia expeditions,
principally at second hand. For he has swallowed (there is no denying
it) the painted bait. He will discover, he will colonise, he will do all
manner of beautiful things, at second hand: but he himself will be a
courtier. It is very tempting. Who would not, at the age of thirty,
have wished to have been one of that chosen band of geniuses and heroes
whom Elizabeth had gathered round her? Who would not, at the age of
thirty, have given his pound of flesh to be captain of her guard, and to
go with her whithersoever she went? It is not merely the intense
gratification to carnal vanity—which if any man denies or scoffs at,
always mark him down as especially guilty—which is to be considered; but
the real, actual honour, in the mind of one who looked on Elizabeth as
the most precious and glorious being which the earth had seen for
centuries. To be appreciated by her; to be loved by her; to serve her;
to guard her; what could man desire more on earth?
Beside, he becomes a member of Parliament now; Lord Warden of the
Stannaries; business which of course keeps him in England, business which
he performs, as he does all things, wisely and well. Such a generation
as this ought really to respect Raleigh a little more, if it be only for
his excellence in their own especial sphere—that of business. Raleigh is
a thorough man of business. He can ‘toil terribly,’ and what is more,
toil to the purpose. In all the everyday affairs of life, he remains
without a blot; a diligent, methodical, prudent man, who, though he plays
for great stakes, ventures and loses his whole fortune again and again,
yet never seems to omit the ‘doing the duty which lies nearest him’;
never gets into mean money scrapes; never neglects tenants or duty; never
gives way for one instant to ‘the eccentricities of genius.’
If he had done so, be sure that we should have heard of it. For no man
can become what he has become without making many an enemy; and he has
his enemies already. On which statement naturally occurs the
question—why? An important question too; because several of his later
biographers seem to have running in their minds some such train of
thought as this—Raleigh must have been a bad fellow, or he would not have
had so many enemies; and because he was a bad fellow, there is an _à
priori_ reason that charges against him are true. Whether this be
arguing in a circle or not, it is worth searching out the beginning of
this enmity, and the reputed causes of it. In after years it will be
because he is ‘damnable proud,’ because he hated Essex, and so forth: of
which in their places. But what is the earliest count against him?
Naunton, who hated Raleigh, and was moreover a rogue, has no reason to
give, but that ‘the Queen took him for a kind of oracle, which much
nettled them all; yea, those he relied on began to take this his sudden
favour for an alarm; to be sensible of their own supplantation, and to
project his; which shortly made him to sing, “Fortune my foe.”’
Now, be this true or not, and we do not put much faith in it, it gives no
reason for the early dislike of Raleigh, save the somewhat unsatisfactory
one which Cain would have given for his dislike of Abel. Moreover, there
exists a letter of Essex’s, written as thoroughly in the Cain spirit as
any we ever read; and we wonder that, after reading that letter, men can
find courage to repeat the old sentimentalism about the ‘noble and
unfortunate’ Earl. His hatred of Raleigh—which, as we shall see
hereafter, Raleigh not only bears patiently, but requites with good deeds
as long as he can—springs, by his own confession, simply from envy and
disappointed vanity. The spoilt boy insults Queen Elizabeth about her
liking for the ‘knave Raleigh.’ She, ‘taking hold of one word disdain,’
tells Essex that ‘there was no such cause why I should thus disdain him.’
On which, says Essex, ‘as near as I could I did describe unto her what he
had been, and what he was; and then I did let her see, whether I had come
to disdain his competition of love, or whether I could have comfort to
give myself over to the service of a mistress that was in awe of such a
man. I spake for grief and choler as much against him as I could: and I
think he standing at the door might very well hear the worst that I spoke
of him. In the end, I saw she was resolved to defend him, and to cross
me.’ Whereupon follows a ‘scene,’ the naughty boy raging and stamping,
till he insults the Queen, and calls Raleigh ‘a wretch’; whereon poor
Elizabeth, who loved the coxcomb for his father’s sake, ‘turned her away
to my Lady Warwick,’ and Essex goes grumbling forth.
Raleigh’s next few years are brilliant and busy ones; and gladly, did
space permit, would I give details of those brilliant adventures which
make this part of his life that of a true knight-errant. But they are
mere episodes in the history; and we must pass them quickly by, only
saying that they corroborate in all things our original notion of the
man—just, humane, wise, greatly daring and enduring greatly; and filled
with the one fixed idea, which has grown with his growth and strengthened
with his strength, the destruction of the Spanish power, and colonisation
of America by English. His brother Humphrey makes a second attempt to
colonise Newfoundland, and perishes as heroically as he had lived.
Raleigh, undaunted by his own loss in the adventure and his brother’s
failure, sends out a fleet of his own to discover to the southward, and
finds Virginia. One might spend pages on this beautiful episode; on the
simple descriptions of the fair new land which the sea-kings bring home;
on the profound (for those times at least) knowledge which prompted
Raleigh to make the attempt in that particular direction which had as yet
escaped the notice of the Spaniards; on the quiet patience with which,
undaunted by the ill-success of the first colonists, he sends out fleet
after fleet, to keep the hold which he had once gained; till, unable any
longer to support the huge expense, he makes over his patent for
discovery to a company of merchants, who fare for many years as ill as
Raleigh himself did: but one thing one has a right to say, that to this
one man, under the providence of Almighty God, do the whole of the United
States of America owe their existence. The work was double. The colony,
however small, had to be kept in possession at all hazards; and he did
it. But that was not enough. Spain must be prevented from extending her
operations northward from Florida; she must be crippled along the whole
east coast of America. And Raleigh did that too. We find him for years
to come a part-adventurer in almost every attack on the Spaniards: we
find him preaching war against them on these very grounds, and setting
others to preach it also. Good old Hariot (Raleigh’s mathematical tutor,
whom he sent to Virginia) re-echoes his pupil’s trumpet-blast. Hooker,
in his epistle dedicatory of his Irish History, strikes the same note,
and a right noble one it is. ‘These Spaniards are trying to build up a
world-tyranny by rapine and cruelty. You, sir, call on us to deliver the
earth from them, by doing justly and loving mercy; and we will obey you!’
is the answer which Raleigh receives, as far as I can find, from every
nobler-natured Englishman.
It was an immense conception: a glorious one: it stood out so clear:
there was no mistake about its being the absolutely right, wise,
patriotic thing; and so feasible, too, if Raleigh could but find ‘_six
cents hommes qui savaient mourir_.’ But that was just what he could not
find. He could draw round him, and did, by the spiritual magnetism of
his genius, many a noble soul; but he could not organise them, as he
seems to have tried to do, into a coherent body. The English spirit of
independent action, never stronger than in that age, and most wisely
encouraged, for other reasons, by good Queen Bess, was too strong for
him. His pupils will ‘fight on their own hook’ like so many Yankee
rangers: quarrel with each other: grumble at him. For the truth is, he
demands of them too high a standard of thought and purpose. He is often
a whole heaven above them in the hugeness of his imagination, the
nobleness of his motive; and Don Quixote can often find no better squire
than Sancho Panza. Even glorious Sir Richard Grenvile makes a mistake:
burns an Indian village because they steal a silver cup; throws back the
colonisation of Virginia ten years with his over-strict notions of
discipline and retributive justice; and Raleigh requites him for his
offence by embalming him, his valour and his death, not in immortal
verse, but in immortal prose. The ‘True Relation of the Fight at the
Azores’ gives the keynote of Raleigh’s heart. If readers will not take
that as the text on which his whole life is a commentary they may know a
great deal about him, but him they will never know.
The game becomes fiercer and fiercer. Blow and counterblow between the
Spanish king, for the whole West-Indian commerce was a government job,
and the merchant nobles of England. At last the Great Armada comes, and
the Great Armada goes again. _Venit_, _vidit_, _fugit_, as the medals
said of it. And to Walter Raleigh’s counsel, by the testimony of all
contemporaries, the mighty victory is to be principally attributed.
Where all men did heroically, it were invidious to bestow on him alone a
crown, _ob patriam servatam_. But henceforth, Elizabeth knows well that
she has not been mistaken in her choice; and Raleigh is better loved than
ever, heaped with fresh wealth and honours. And who deserves them
better?