him from the complaint which one has been often inclined to bring against
him,—Why, instead of sending others Westward Ho, did be not go himself?
Surely he could have reconciled the jarring instruments with which he was
working. He could have organised such a body of men as perhaps never
went out before or since on the same errand. He could have done all that
Cortez did, and more; and done it more justly and mercifully.
True. And here seems (as far as little folk dare judge great folk) to
have been Raleigh’s mistake. He is too wide for real success. He has
too many plans; he is fond of too many pursuits. The man who succeeds is
generally the narrow mall; the man of one idea, who works at nothing but
that; sees everything only through the light of that; sacrifices
everything to that: the fanatic, in short. By fanatics, whether
military, commercial, or religious, and not by ‘liberal-minded men’ at
all, has the world’s work been done in all ages. Amid the modern cants,
one of the most mistaken is the cant about the ‘mission of genius,’ the
‘mission of the poet.’ Poets, we hear in some quarters, are the anointed
kings of mankind—at least, so the little poets sing, each to his little
fiddle. There is no greater mistake. It is the practical, prosaical
fanatic who does the work; and the poet, if he tries to do it, is certain
to put down his spade every five minutes, to look at the prospect, and
pick flowers, and moralise on dead asses, till he ends a _Néron malgré
lui-même_, fiddling melodiously while Rome is burning. And perhaps this
is the secret of Raleigh’s failure. He is a fanatic, no doubt, a true
knight-errant: but he is too much of a poet withal. The sense of beauty
enthrals him at every step. Gloriana’s fairy court, with its chivalries
and its euphuisms, its masques and its tourneys, and he the most charming
personage in it, are too charming for him—as they would have been for us,
reader: and he cannot give them up and go about the one work. He
justifies his double-mindedness to himself, no doubt, as he does to the
world, by working wisely, indefatigably, and bravely: but still he has
put his trust in princes, and in the children of men. His sin, as far as
we can see, is not against man, but against God; one which we do not
nowadays call a sin, but a weakness. Be it so. God punished him for it,
swiftly and sharply; which I hold to be a sure sign that God also forgave
him for it.
So he stays at home, spends, sooner or later, £40,000 on Virginia, writes
charming court-poetry with Oxford, Buckhurst, and Paget, brings over
Spenser from Ireland and introduces Colin Clout to Gloriana, who loves—as
who would not have loved?—that most beautiful of faces and of souls;
helps poor puritan Udall out of his scrape as far as he can; begs for
Captain Spring, begs for many more, whose names are only known by being
connected with some good deed of his. ‘When, Sir Walter,’ asks Queen
Bess, ‘will you cease to be a beggar?’ ‘When your Majesty ceases to be a
benefactor.’ Perhaps it is in these days that he set up his ‘office of
address’—some sort of agency for discovering and relieving the wants of
worthy men. So all seems to go well. If he has lost in Virginia, he has
gained by Spanish prizes; his wine-patent is bringing him in a large
revenue, and the heavens smile on him. Thou sayest, ‘I am rich and
increased in goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou
art poor and miserable and blind and naked.’ Thou shalt learn it, then,
and pay dearly for thy lesson.
For, in the meanwhile, Raleigh falls into a very great sin, for which, as
usual with his elect, God inflicts swift and instant punishment; on
which, as usual, biographers talk much unwisdom. He seduces Miss
Throgmorton, one of the maids of honour. Elizabeth is very wroth; and
had she not good reason to be wroth? Is it either fair or reasonable to
talk of her ‘demanding a monopoly of love,’ and ‘being incensed at the
temerity of her favourite, in presuming to fall in love and marry without
her consent?’ Away with such cant. The plain facts are: that a man
nearly forty years old abuses his wonderful gifts of body and mind, to
ruin a girl nearly twenty years younger than himself. What wonder if a
virtuous woman—and Queen Elizabeth was virtuous—thought it a base deed,
and punished it accordingly? There is no more to be discovered in the
matter, save by the vulturine nose which smells carrion in every
rose-bed. Raleigh has a great attempt on the Plate-fleets in hand; he
hurries off from Chatham, and writes to young Cecil on the 10th of March,
‘I mean not to come away, as some say I will, for fear of a marriage, and
I know not what . . . For I protest before God, there is none on the face
of the earth that I would be fastened unto.’
This famous passage is one of those over which the virtuosity of modern
times, rejoicing in evil, has hung so fondly, as giving melancholy proof
of the ‘duplicity of Raleigh’s character’; as if a man who once in his
life had told an untruth was proved by that fact to be a rogue from birth
to death: while others have kindly given him the benefit of a doubt
whether the letter were not written after a private marriage, and
therefore Raleigh, being ‘joined unto’ some one already, had a right to
say that he did not wish to be joined to any one. But I do not concur in
this doubt. Four months after, Sir Edward Stafford writes to Anthony
Bacon, ‘If you have anything to do with Sir W. R., or any love to make to
Mistress Throgmorton, at the Tower to-morrow you may speak with them.’
This implies that no marriage had yet taken place. And surely, if there
had been private marriage, two people who were about to be sent to the
Tower for their folly would have made the marriage public at once, as the
only possible self-justification. But it is a pity, in my opinion, that
biographers, before pronouncing upon that supposed lie of Raleigh’s, had
not taken the trouble to find out what the words mean. In their virtuous
haste to prove him a liar, they have overlooked the fact that the words,
as they stand, are unintelligible, and the argument self-contradictory.
He wants to prove, we suppose, that he does not go to sea for fear of
being forced to marry Miss Throgmorton. It is, at least, an unexpected
method of so doing in a shrewd man like Raleigh, to say that he wishes to
marry no one at all. ‘Don’t think that I run away for fear of a
marriage, for I do not wish to marry any one on the face of the earth,’
is a speech which may prove Raleigh to have been a fool, and we must
understand it before we can say that it proves him a rogue. If we had
received such a letter from a friend, we should have said at once, ‘Why
the man, in his hurry and confusion, has omitted _the_ word; he must have
meant to write, not “There is none on the face of the earth that I would
be fastened to,” but “There is none on the face of the earth that I would
_rather_ be fastened to,”‘ which would at once make sense and suit fact.
For Raleigh not only married Miss Throgmorton forthwith, but made her the
best of husbands. My conjectural emendation may go for what it is worth:
but that the passage, as it stands in Murdin’s State Papers (the MSS. I
have not seen) is either misquoted, or mis-written by Raleigh himself, I
cannot doubt. He was not one to think nonsense, even if he scribbled it.
The Spanish raid turns out well. Raleigh overlooks Elizabeth’s letters
of recall till he finds out that the King of Spain has stopped the
Plate-fleet for fear of his coming; and then returns, sending on Sir John
Burrough to the Azores, where he takes the ‘Great Carack,’ the largest
prize (1600 tons) which had ever been brought into England. The details
of that gallant fight stand in the pages of Hakluyt. It raised Raleigh
once more to wealth, though not to favour. Shortly after he returns from
the sea, he finds himself, where he deserves to be, in the Tower, where
he does more than one thing which brought him no credit. How far we are
justified in calling his quarrel with Sir George Carew, his keeper, for
not letting him ‘disguise himself, and get into a pair of oars to ease
his mind but with a sight of the Queen, or his heart would break,’
hypocrisy, is a very different matter. Honest Arthur Gorges, a staunch
friend of Raleigh’s, tells the story laughingly and lovingly, as if he
thought Raleigh sincere, but somewhat mad: and yet honest Gorges has a
good right to say a bitter thing; for after having been ‘ready to break
with laughing at seeing them two brawl and scramble like madmen, and Sir
George’s new periwig torn off his crown,’ he sees ‘the iron walking’ and
daggers out, and playing the part of him who taketh a dog by the ears,
‘purchased such a rap on the knuckles, that I wished both their pates
broken, and so with much ado they staid their brawl to see my bloody
fingers,’ and then set to work to abuse the hapless peacemaker. After
which things Raleigh writes a letter to Cecil, which is still more
offensive in the eyes of virtuous biographers—how ‘his heart was never
broken till this day, when he hears the Queen goes so far off, whom he
followed with love and desire on so many journeys, and am now left behind
in a dark prison all alone.’ . . . ‘I that was wont to behold her riding
like Alexander, hunting like Diana, walking like Venus, the gentle wind
blowing her fair hair about her pure cheeks,’ and so forth, in a style in
which the vulturine nose must needs scent carrion, just because the roses
are more fragrant than they should be in a world where all ought to be
either vultures or carrion for their dinners. As for his despair, had he
not good reason to be in despair? By his own sin he has hurled himself
down the hill which he has so painfully climbed. He is in the
Tower—surely no pleasant or hopeful place for any man. Elizabeth is
exceedingly wroth with him; and what is worse, he deserves what he has
got. His whole fortune is ventured in an expedition over which he has no
control, which has been unsuccessful in its first object, and which may
be altogether unsuccessful in that which it has undertaken as a
_pis-aller_, and so leave him penniless. There want not, too, those who
will trample on the fallen. The deputy has been cruelly distraining on
his Irish tenants for a ‘supposed debt of his to the Queen of £400 for
rent,’ which was indeed but fifty marks, and which was paid, and has
carried off 500 milch kine from the poor settlers whom he has planted
there, and forcibly thrust him out of possession of a castle. Moreover,
the whole Irish estates are likely to come to ruin; for nothing prevails
but rascality among the English soldiers, impotence among the governors,
and rebellion among the natives. Three thousand Burkes are up in arms;
his ‘prophecy of this rebellion’ ten days ago was laughed at, and now has
come true; and altogether, Walter Raleigh and all belonging to him is in
as evil case as he ever was on earth. No wonder, poor fellow, if he
behowls himself lustily, and not always wisely, to Cecil, and every one
else who will listen to him.
As for his fine speeches about Elizabeth, why forget the standing-point
from which such speeches were made? Over and above his present ruin, it
was (and ought to have been) an utterly horrible and unbearable thing to
Raleigh, or any man, to have fallen into disgrace with Elizabeth by his
own fault. He feels (and perhaps rightly) that he is as it were
excommunicated from England, and the mission and the glory of England.
Instead of being, as he was till now, one of a body of brave men working
together in one great common cause, he has cut himself off from the
congregation by his own selfish lust, and there he is left alone with his
shame. We must try to realise to ourselves the way in which such men as
Raleigh looked not only at Elizabeth, but at all the world. There was,
in plain palpable fact, something about the Queen, her history, her
policy, the times, the glorious part which England, and she as the
incarnation of the then English spirit, were playing upon earth, which
raised imaginative and heroical souls into a permanent exaltation—a
‘fairyland,’ as they called it themselves, which seems to us fantastic,
and would be fantastic in us, because we are not at their work, or in
their days. There can be no doubt that a number of as noble men as ever
stood together on the earth did worship that woman, fight for her, toil
for her, risk all for her, with a pure chivalrous affection which has
furnished one of the most beautiful pages in all the book of history.
Blots there must needs have been, and inconsistencies, selfishnesses,
follies; for they too were men of like passions with ourselves; but let
us look at the fair vision as a whole, and thank God that such a thing
has for once existed even imperfectly on this sinful earth, instead of
playing the part of Ham and falling under his curse,—the penalty of
slavishness, cowardice, loss of noble daring, which surely falls on any
generation which is ‘banausos,’ to use Aristotle’s word; which rejoices
in its forefathers’ shame, and, unable to believe in the nobleness of
others, is unable to become noble itself.
As for the ‘Alexander and Diana’ affectations, they were the language of
the time: and certainly this generation has no reason to find fault with
them, or with a good deal more of the ‘affectations’ and ‘flattery’ of
Elizabethan times, while it listens complacently night after night ‘to
honourable members’ complimenting not Queen Elizabeth, but Sir Jabesh
Windbag, Fiddle, Faddle, Red-tape, and party with protestations of
deepest respect and fullest confidence in the very speeches in which they
bring accusations of every offence short of high treason—to be
understood, of course, in a ‘parliamentary sense,’ as Mr. Pickwick’s were
in a ‘Pickwickian’ one. If a generation of Knoxes and Mortons, Burleighs
and Raleighs, shall ever arise again, one wonders by what name they will
call the parliamentary morality and parliamentary courtesy of a
generation which has meted out such measure to their ancestors’ failings?
‘But Queen Elizabeth was an old woman then.’ I thank the objector even
for that ‘then’; for it is much nowadays to find any one who believes
that Queen Elizabeth was ever young, or who does not talk of her as if
she was born about seventy years of age covered with rouge and wrinkles.
I will undertake to say that as to the beauty of this woman there is a
greater mass of testimony, and from the very best judges too, than there
is of the beauty of any personage in history; and yet it has become the
fashion now to deny even that. The plain facts seem that she was very
graceful, active, accomplished in all outward manners, of a perfect
figure, and of that style of intellectual beauty, depending on
expression, which attracted (and we trust always will attract) Britons
far more than that merely sensuous loveliness in which no doubt Mary
Stuart far surpassed her. And there seems little doubt that, like many
Englishwomen, she retained her beauty to a very late period in life, not
to mention that she was, in 1592, just at that age of rejuvenescence
which makes many a woman more lovely at sixty than she has been since she
was thirty-five. No doubt, too, she used every artificial means to
preserve her famous complexion; and quite right she was. This beauty of
hers had been a talent, as all beauty is, committed to her by God; it had
been an important element in her great success; men had accepted it as
what beauty of form and expression generally is, an outward and visible
sign of the inward and spiritual grace; and while the inward was
unchanged, what wonder if she tried to preserve the outward? If she was
the same, why should she not try to look the same? And what blame to
those who worshipped her, if, knowing that she was the same, they too
should fancy that she looked the same, the Elizabeth of their youth, and
should talk as if the fair flesh, as well as the fair spirit, was
immortal? Does not every loving husband do so when he forgets the gray
hair and the sunken cheek, and all the wastes of time, and sees the
partner of many joys and sorrows not as she has become, but as she was,
ay, and is to him, and will be to him, he trusts, through all eternity?
There is no feeling in these Elizabethan worshippers which we have not
seen, potential and crude, again and again in the best and noblest of
young men whom we have met, till it was crushed in them by the luxury,
effeminacy, and unbelief in chivalry, which are the sure accompaniment of
a long peace, which war may burn up with beneficent fire.
But we must hasten on now; for Raleigh is out of prison in September, and
by the next spring in parliament speaking wisely and well, especially on
his fixed idea, war with Spain, which he is rewarded for forthwith in
Father Parson’s ‘Andreæ Philopatris Responsio’ by a charge of founding a
school of Atheism for the corruption of young gentlemen; a charge which
Lord Chief-Justice Popham, Protestant as he is, will find it useful one
day to recollect.
Elizabeth, however, now that Raleigh has married the fair Throgmorton and
done wisely in other matters, restores him to favour. If he has sinned,
he has suffered: but he is as useful as ever, now that his senses have
returned to him; and he is making good speeches in parliament, instead of
bad ones to weak maidens; so we find him once more in favour, and
possessor of Sherborne Manor, where he builds and beautifies, with
‘groves and gardens of much variety and great delight.’ And God, too,
seems to have forgiven him; perhaps has forgiven; for there the fair
Throgmorton brings him a noble boy. _Ut sis vitalis metuo puer_!
Raleigh will quote David’s example one day, not wisely or well. Does
David’s example ever cross him now, and those sad words,—‘The Lord hath
put away thy sin, . . . nevertheless the child that is born unto thee
shall die?’
Let that be as it may, all is sunshine once more. Sherborne Manor, a
rich share in the great carack, a beautiful wife, a child; what more does
this man want to make him happy? Why should he not settle down upon his
lees, like ninety-nine out of the hundred, or at least try a peaceful and
easy path toward more ‘praise and pudding?’ The world answers, or his
biographers answer for him, that he needs to reinstate himself in his
mistress’s affection; which is true or not, according as we take it. If
they mean thereby, as most seem to mean, that it was a mere selfish and
ambitious scheme by which to wriggle into court favour once more—why, let
them mean it: I shall only observe that the method which Raleigh took was
a rather more dangerous and self-sacrificing one than courtiers are wont
to take. But if it be meant that Walter Raleigh spoke somewhat thus with
himself,—‘I have done a base and dirty deed, and have been punished for
it. I have hurt the good name of a sweet woman who loves me, and whom I
find to be a treasure; and God, instead of punishing me by taking her
from me, has rendered me good for evil by giving her to me. I have
justly offended a mistress whom I worship, and who, after having shown
her just indignation, has returned me good for evil by giving me these
fair lands of Sherborne, and only forbid me her presence till the scandal
has passed away. She sees and rewards my good in spite of my evil; and
I, too, know that I am better than I have seemed; that I am fit for
nobler deeds than seducing maids of honour. How can I prove that? How
can I redeem my lost name for patriotism and public daring? How can I
win glory for my wife, seek that men shall forget her past shame in the
thought, “She is Walter Raleigh’s wife?” How can I show my mistress that
I loved her all along, that I acknowledge her bounty, her mingled justice
and mercy? How can I render to God for all the benefits which He has
done unto me? How can I do a deed the like of which was never done in
England?’
If all this had passed through Walter Raleigh’s mind, what could we say
of it, but that it was the natural and rational feeling of an honourable
and right-hearted man, burning to rise to the level which he knew ought
to be his, because he knew that he had fallen below it? And what right
better way of testifying these feelings than to do what, as we shall see,
Raleigh did? What right have we to impute to him lower motives than
these, while we confess that these righteous and noble motives would have
been natural and rational;—indeed, just what we flatter ourselves that we
should have felt in his place? Of course, in his grand scheme, the
thought came in, ‘And I shall win to myself honour, and glory, and
wealth,’—of course. And pray, sir, does it not come in in your grand
schemes; and yours; and yours? If you made a fortune to-morrow by some
wisely and benevolently managed factory, would you forbid all speech of
the said wisdom and benevolence, because you had intended that wisdom and
benevolence should pay you a good percentage? Away with cant, and let
him that is without sin among you cast the first stone.
So Raleigh hits upon a noble project; a desperate one, true: but he will
do it or die. He will leave pleasant Sherborne, and the bosom of the
beautiful bride, and the first-born son, and all which to most makes life
worth having, and which Raleigh enjoys more intensely than most men; for
he is a poet, and a man of strong nervous passions withal. But,—
‘I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honour more.’
And he will go forth to endure heat, hunger, fever, danger of death in
battle, danger of the Inquisition, rack, and stake, in search of El
Dorado. What so strange in that? I have known half a dozen men who, in
his case, and conscious of his powers, would have done the same from the
same noble motive.
He begins prudently; and sends a Devonshire man, Captain Whiddon—probably
one of The Whiddons of beautiful Chagford—to spy out the Orinoco. He
finds that the Spaniards are there already; that Berreo, who has
attempted El Dorado from the westward, starting from New Granada and
going down the rivers, is trying to settle on the Orinoco mouth; that he
is hanging the poor natives, encouraging the Caribs to hunt them and sell
them for slaves, imprisoning the caciques to extort their gold,
torturing, ravishing, kidnapping, and conducting himself as was usual
among Spaniards of those days.
Raleigh’s spirit is stirred within him. If ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ fiction
as it is, once excited us, how must a far worse reality have excited
Raleigh, as he remembered that these Spaniards are as yet triumphant in
iniquity, and as he remembered, too, that these same men are the sworn
foes of England, her liberty, her Bible, and her Queen? What a deed, to
be beforehand with them for once! To dispossess them of one corner of
that western world, where they have left no trace but blood and flame!
He will go himself: he will find El Dorado and its golden Emperor; and
instead of conquering, plundering, and murdering him, as Cortez did
Montezuma, and Pizarro Atahuallpa, he will show him English strength;
espouse his quarrel against the Spaniards; make him glad to become Queen
Elizabeth’s vassal tributary, perhaps leave him a bodyguard of English
veterans, perhaps colonise his country, and so at once avenge and protect
the oppressed Indians, and fill the Queen’s treasury with the riches of a
land equal, if not superior, to Peru and Mexico.
Such is his dream; vague perhaps: but far less vague than those with
which Cortez and Pizarro started, and succeeded. After a careful survey
of the whole matter, I must give it as my deliberate opinion, that
Raleigh was more reasonable in his attempt, and had more fair evidence of
its feasibility, than either Cortez or Pizarro had for theirs. It is a
bold assertion. If any reader doubts its truth, he cannot do better than
to read the whole of the documents connected with the two successful, and
the one unsuccessful, attempts at finding a golden kingdom. Let them
read first Prescott’s ‘Conquests of Mexico and Peru,’ and then
Schomburgk’s edition of Raleigh’s ‘Guiana.’ They will at least confess,
when they have finished, that truth is stranger than fiction.