been slandering Raleigh basely to James. Can we doubt that the same
poison had been poured into Elizabeth’s ears? She might distrust Cecil
too much to act upon what he said of Raleigh; and yet distrust Raleigh
too much to put the kingdom into his hands. However, she is gone now,
and a new king has arisen, who knoweth not Joseph.
James comes down to take possession. Insolence, luxury, and lawlessness
mark his first steps on his going amid the adulations of a fallen people;
he hangs a poor wretch without trial; wastes his time in hunting by the
way;—a bad and base man, whose only redeeming point—if in his case it be
one—is his fondness for little children. But that will not make a king.
The wiser elders take counsel together. Raleigh and good Judge Fortescue
are for requiring conditions from the newcomer; and constitutional
liberty makes its last stand among the men of Devon, the old county of
warriors, discoverers, and statesmen, of which Queen Bess had said that
the men of Devon were her right hand. But in vain; James has his way;
Cecil and Henry Howard are willing enough to give it him.
So down comes Rehoboam, taking counsel with the young men, and makes
answer to England, ‘My father chastised you with whips; but I will
chastise you with scorpions.’ He takes a base pleasure, shocking to the
French ambassador, in sneering at the memory of Queen Elizabeth; a
perverse delight in honouring every rascal whom she had punished. Tyrone
must come to England to be received into favour, maddening the soul of
honest Sir John Harrington. Essex is christened ‘my martyr,’ apparently
for having plotted treason against Elizabeth with Tyrone. Raleigh is
received with a pun—‘By my soul, I have heard rawly of thee, mon’; and
when the great nobles and gentlemen come to court with their retinues,
James tries to hide his dread of them in an insult; pooh-poohs their
splendour, and says, ‘he doubts not that he should have been able to win
England for himself, had they kept him out.’ Raleigh answers boldly,
‘Would God that had been put to the trial.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because then you
would have known your friends from your foes.’ ‘A reason,’ says old
Aubrey, ‘never forgotten or forgiven.’ Aubrey is no great authority; but
the speech smacks so of Raleigh’s offhand daring that one cannot but
believe it; as one does also the other story of his having advised the
lords to keep out James and erect a republic. Not that he could have
been silly enough to propose such a thing seriously at that moment; but
that he most likely, in his bold way, may have said, ‘Well, if we are to
have this man in without conditions, better a republic at once.’ Which,
if he did say, he said what the next forty years proved to be strictly
true. However, he will go on his own way as best he can. If James will
give him a loan, he and the rest of the old heroes will join, fit out a
fleet against Spain, and crush her, now that she is tottering and
impoverished, once and for ever. But James has no stomach for fighting;
cannot abide the sight of a drawn sword; would not provoke Spain for the
world—why, they might send Jesuits and assassinate him; and as for the
money, he wants that for very different purposes. So the answer which he
makes to Raleigh’s proposal of war against Spain is to send him to the
Tower, and sentence him to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, on a charge
of plotting with Spain.
Having read, I believe, nearly all that has been written on the subject
of this dark ‘Cobham plot,’ I find but one thing come brightly out of the
infinite confusion and mystery, which will never be cleared up till the
day of judgment, and that is Raleigh’s innocence. He, and all England,
and the very men who condemned him, knew that he was innocent. Every
biographer is forced to confess this, more or less, in spite of all
efforts to be what is called ‘impartial.’ So I shall waste no words upon
the matter, only observing that whereas Raleigh is said to have slandered
Cecil to James, in the same way that Cecil had slandered him, one passage
of this Cobham plot disproves utterly such a story, which, after all,
rests (as far as I know) only on hearsay, being ‘spoken of in a
manuscript written by one Buck, secretary to Chancellor Egerton.’ For in
writing to his own wife, in the expectation of immediate death, Raleigh
speaks of Cecil in a very different tone, as one in whom he trusted most,
and who has left him in the hour of need. I ask the reader to peruse
that letter, and say whether any man would write thus, with death and
judgment before his face, of one whom he knew that he had betrayed; or,
indeed, of one who he knew had betrayed him. I see no reason to doubt
that Raleigh kept good faith with Cecil, and that he was ignorant till
after his trial that Cecil was in the plot against him.
I do not care to enter into the tracasseries of this Cobham plot. Every
one knows them; no one can unravel them. The moral and spiritual
significance of the fact is more interesting than all questions as to
Cobham’s lies, Brooke’s lies, Aremberg’s lies, Coke’s lies, James’s
lies:—Let the dead bury their dead. It is the broad aspect of the thing
which is so wonderful; to see how
‘The eagle, towering in his pride of place,
Was by a mousing owl hawked at and killed.’
This is the man who six months ago, perhaps, thought that he and Cecil
were to rule England together, while all else were the puppets whose
wires they pulled. ‘The Lord hath taken him up and dashed him down;’ and
by such means, too, and on such a charge! Betraying his country to
Spain! Absurd—incredible—he would laugh it to scorn: but it is bitter
earnest. There is no escape. True or false, he sees that his enemies
will have his head. It is maddening: a horrible nightmare. He cannot
bear it; he cannot face—so he writes to that beloved wife—‘the scorn, the
taunts, the loss of honour, the cruel words of lawyers.’ He stabs
himself. Read that letter of his, written after the mad blow had been
struck; it is sublime from intensity of agony. The way in which the
chastisement was taken proves how utterly it was needed, ere that proud,
success-swollen, world-entangled heart could be brought right with God.
And it is brought right. The wound is not mortal. He comes slowly to a
better mind, and takes his doom like a man. That first farewell to his
wife was written out of hell. The second rather out of heaven. Read it,
too, and compare; and then see how the Lord has been working upon this
great soul: infinite sadness, infinite tenderness and patience, and trust
in God for himself and his poor wife: ‘God is my witness, it was for you
and yours that I desired life; but it is true that I disdain myself for
begging it. For know, dear wife, that your son is the son of a true man,
and one who, in his own respect, despiseth death and all his ugly and
misshapen forms . . . The everlasting, powerful, infinite, and omnipotent
God, who is goodness itself, the true life and light, keep thee and
thine, have mercy upon me, and teach me to forgive my persecutors and
accusers, and send us to meet in His glorious kingdom.’
Is it come to this then? Is he fit to die at last? Then he is fit to
live; and live he shall. The tyrants have not the heart to carry out
their own crime, and Raleigh shall be respited.
But not pardoned. No more return for him into that sinful world, where
he flaunted on the edge of the precipice, and dropped heedless over it.
God will hide him in the secret place of His presence, and keep him in
His tabernacle from the strife of tongues; and a new life shall begin for
him; a wiser, perhaps a happier, than he has known since he was a little
lad in the farmhouse in pleasant Devon far away. On the 15th of December
he enters the Tower. Little dreams he that for more than twelve years
those doleful walls would be his home. Lady Raleigh obtains leave to
share his prison with him, and, after having passed ten years without a
child, brings him a boy to comfort the weary heart. The child of sorrow
is christened Carew. Little think those around him what strange things
that child will see before his hairs be gray. She has her maid, and he
his three servants; some five or six friends are allowed ‘to repair to
him at convenient times.’ He has a chamber-door always open into the
lieutenant’s garden, where he ‘has converted a little hen-house into a
still-room, and spends his time all the day in distillation.’ The next
spring a grant is made of his goods and chattels, forfeited by attainder,
to trustees named by himself, for the benefit of his family. So far, so
well; or, at least, not as ill as it might be: but there are those who
cannot leave the caged lion in peace.
Sanderson, who had married his niece, instead of paying up the arrears
which he owes on the wine and other offices, brings in a claim of £2000.
But the rogue meets his match, and finds himself, at the end of a
lawsuit, in prison for debt. Greater rogues, however, will have better
fortune, and break through the law-cobwebs which have stopped a poor
little fly like Sanderson. For Carr, afterwards Lord Somerset, casts his
eyes on the Sherborne land. It has been included in the conveyance, and
should be safe; but there are others who, by instigation surely of the
devil himself, have had eyes to see a flaw in the deed. Sir John Popham
is appealed to. Who could doubt the result? He answers that there is no
doubt that the words were omitted by the inattention of the
engrosser—Carew Raleigh says that but one single word was wanting, which
word was found notwithstanding in the paper-book, _i.e._ the draft—but
that the word not being there, the deed is worthless, and the devil may
have his way. To Carr, who has nothing of his own, it seems reasonable
enough to help himself to what belongs to others, and James gives him the
land. Raleigh writes to him, gently, gracefully, loftily. Here is an
extract: ‘And for yourself, sir, seeing your fair day is now in the dawn,
and mine drawn to the evening, your own virtues and the king’s grace
assuring you of many favours and much honour, I beseech you not to begin
your first building upon the ruins of the innocent; and that their
sorrows, with mine, may not attend your first plantation.’ He speaks
strongly of the fairness, sympathy, and pity by which the Scots in
general had laid him under obligation: argues from it his own evident
innocence; and ends with a quiet warning to the young favourite not to
‘undergo the curse of them that enter into the fields of the fatherless.’
In vain. Lady Raleigh, with her children, entreats James on her knees:
in vain again. ‘I mun ha’ the land,’ is the answer; ‘I mun ha’ it for
Carr.’ And he has it; patching up the matter after a while by a gift of
£8000 to her and her elder son, in requital for an estate of £5000 a
year.
So there sits Raleigh, growing poorer day by day, and clinging more and
more to that fair wife, and her noble boy, and the babe whose laughter
makes music within that dreary cage. And all day long, as we have seen,
he sits over his still, compounding and discovering, and sometimes
showing himself on the wall to the people, who gather to gaze at him,
till Wade forbids it, fearing popular feeling. In fact, the world
outside has a sort of mysterious awe of him, as if he were a chained
magician, who, if he were let loose, might do with them all what he
would. Certain great nobles are of the same mind. Woe to them if that
silver tongue should once again be unlocked!
The Queen, with a woman’s faith in greatness, sends to him for
‘cordials.’ Here is one of them, famous in Charles the Second’s days as
‘Sir Walter’s Cordial’:—
B. Zedoary and Saffron, each ½ lb.
Distilled water 3 pints.
Macerate, etc., and reduce to 1½ pint.
Compound powder of crabs’ claws 16 oz.
Cinnamon and Nutmegs 2 oz.
Cloves 1 oz.
Cardamom seeds ½ oz.
Double refined sugar 2 lb.
Make a confection.
Which, so the world believes, will cure all ills which flesh is heir to.
It does not seem that Raleigh so boasted himself; but the people, after
the fashion of the time, seem to have called all his medicines
‘cordials,’ and probably took for granted that it was by this particular
one that the enchanter cured Queen Anne of a desperate sickness, ‘whereof
the physicians were at the farthest end of their studies’ (no great way
to go in those days) ‘to find the cause, and at a nonplus for the cure.’
Raleigh—this is Sir Anthony Welden’s account, which may go for what it is
worth—asks for his reward, only justice. Will the Queen ask that certain
lords may be sent to examine Cobham, ‘whether he had at any time accused
Sir Walter of any treason under his hand?’ Six are sent. Cobham
answers, ‘Never; nor could I: that villain Wade often solicited me, and
not so prevailing, got me by a trick to write my name on a piece of white
paper. So that if a charge come under my hand it was forged by that
villain Wade, by writing something above my hand, without my consent or
knowledge.’ They return. An equivocation was ready. ‘Sir, my Lord
Cobham has made good all that ever he wrote or said’; having, by his own
account, written nothing but his name. This is Sir Anthony Welden’s
story. One hopes, for the six lords’ sake, it may not be true; but there
is no reason, in the morality of James’s court, why it should not have
been.
So Raleigh must remain where he is, and work on. And he does work. As
his captivity becomes more and more hopeless, so comes out more and more
the stateliness, self-help, and energy of the man. Till now he has
played with his pen: now he will use it in earnest; and use it as few
prisoners have done. Many a good book has been written in a dungeon—‘Don
Quixote,’ the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’: beautiful each in its way, and
destined to immortality: Raleigh begins the ‘History of the World,’ the
most God-fearing and God-seeing history which I know of among English
writings; though blotted by flattery of James in the preface: wrong: but
pardonable in a man trying in the Tower to get out of that doleful
prison. But all his writings are thirty years too late; they express the
creed of a buried generation, of the men who defied Spain in the name of
a God of righteousness,—not of men who cringe before her in the name of a
God of power and cunning. The captive eagle has written with a quill
from his own wing—a quill which has been wont ere now to soar to heaven.
Every line smacks of the memories of Nombre and of Zutphen, of Tilbury
Fort and of Calais Roads; and many a gray-headed veteran, as he read
them, must have turned away his face to hide the noble tears, as Ulysses
from Demodocus when he sang the song of Troy. So there sits Raleigh,
like the prophet of old, in his lonely tower above the Thames, watching
the darkness gather upon the land year by year, ‘like the morning spread
over the mountains,’ the darkness which comes before the dawn of the Day
of The Lord; which he shall never see on earth, though it be very near at
hand; and asks of each newcomer, ‘Watchman, what of the night?’
But there is one bright point at least in the darkness; one on whom
Raleigh’s eyes, and those of all England, are fixed in boundless hope;
one who, by the sympathy which attracts all noble natures to each other,
clings to the hero utterly; Henry, the Crown Prince. ‘No king but my
father would keep such a bird in a cage.’ The noble lad tries to open
the door for the captive eagle; but in vain. At least he will make what
use he can of his wisdom. He asks him for advice about the new ship he
is building, and has a simple practical letter in return, and over and
above probably the two valuable pamphlets, ‘Of the Invention of Ships,’
and ‘Observations on the Navy and Sea Service’; which the Prince will
never see. In 1611 he asks Raleigh’s advice about the foolish double
marriage with the Prince and Princess of Savoy, and receives for answer
two plain-spoken discourses as full of historical learning as of
practical sound sense.
These are benefits which must be repaid. The father will repay them
hereafter in his own way. In the meanwhile the son does so in his way,
by soliciting the Sherborne estate as for himself, intending to restore
it to Raleigh. He succeeds. Carr is bought off for £25,000, where Lady
Raleigh has been bought off with £8000; but neither Raleigh nor his widow
will ever be the better for that bargain, and Carr will get Sherborne
back again, and probably, in the King’s silly dotage, keep the £25,000
also.
In November 1612 Prince Henry falls sick.
When he is at the last gasp, the poor Queen sends to Raleigh for some of
the same cordial which had cured her. Medicine is sent, with a tender
letter, as it well might be; for Raleigh knew how much hung, not only for
himself, but for England, on the cracking threads of that fair young
life. It is questioned at first whether it shall be administered. ‘The
cordial,’ Raleigh says, ‘will cure him or any other of a fever, except in
case of poison.’
The cordial is administered; but it comes too late. The prince dies, and
with him the hopes of all good men.
* * *
At last, after twelve years of prison, Raleigh is free. He is sixty-six
years old now, gray-headed and worn down by confinement, study, and want
of exercise: but he will not remember that.
‘Still in his ashes live their wonted fire.’
Now for Guiana, at last! which he has never forgotten; to which he has
been sending, with his slender means, ship after ship to keep the Indians
in hope.
He is freed in March. At once he is busy in his project. In August he
has obtained the King’s commission, by the help of Sir Ralph Winwood,
Secretary of State, who seems to have believed in Raleigh. At least
Raleigh believed in him. In March next year he has sailed, and with him
thirteen ships, and more than a hundred knights and gentlemen, and among
them, strange to say, Sir Warham St. Leger. This is certainly not the
quondam Marshal of Munster under whom Raleigh served at Smerwick
six-and-thirty years ago. He would be nearly eighty years old; and as
Lord Doneraile’s pedigree gives three Sir Warhams, we cannot identify the
man. But it is a strong argument in Raleigh’s favour that a St. Leger,
of a Devon family which had served with him in Ireland, and intimately
connected with him his whole life, should keep his faith in Raleigh after
all his reverses. Nevertheless, the mere fact of an unpardoned criminal,
said to be _non ens_ in law, being able in a few months to gather round
him such a party, is proof patent of what slender grounds there are for
calling Raleigh ‘suspected’ and ‘unpopular.’
But he does not sail without a struggle or two. James is too proud to
allow his heir to match with any but a mighty king, is infatuated about
the Spanish marriage; and Gondomar is with him, playing with his hopes
and with his fears also.
The people are furious, and have to be silenced again and again: there is
even fear of rioting. The charming and smooth-tongued Gondomar can hate,
and can revenge, too. Five ’prentices who have insulted him for striking
a little child, are imprisoned and fined several hundred pounds each.
And as for hating Raleigh, Gondomar had been no Spaniard (to let alone
the private reasons which some have supposed) had he not hated Spain’s
ancient scourge and unswerving enemy. He comes to James, complaining
that Raleigh is about to break the peace with Spain. Nothing is to be
refused him which can further the one darling fancy of James; and Raleigh
has to give in writing the number of his ships, men, and ordnance, and,
moreover, the name of the country and the very river whither he is going.
This paper was given, Carew Raleigh asserts positively, under James’s
solemn promise not to reveal it; and Raleigh himself seems to have
believed that it was to be kept private; for he writes afterwards to
Secretary Winwood in a tone of astonishment and indignation, that the
information contained in his paper had been sent on to the King of Spain
before he sailed from the Thames. Winwood could have told him as much
already; for Buckingham had written to Winwood, on March 28, to ask him
why he had not been to the Spanish Ambassador ‘to acquaint him with the
order taken by his Majesty about Sir W. R.’s voyage.’ But however
unwilling the Secretary (as one of the furtherers of the voyage) may have
been to meddle in the matter, Gondomar had had news enough from another
source; perhaps from James’s own mouth. For the first letter to the West
Indies about Raleigh was dated from Madrid, March 19; and most remarkable
it is that in James’s ‘Declaration,’ or rather apology for his own
conduct, no mention whatsoever is made of his having given information to
Gondomar.
Gondomar offered, says James, to let Raleigh go with one or two ships
only. He might work a mine, and the King of Spain would give him a safe
convoy home with all his gold. How kind. And how likely would Raleigh
and his fellow-adventurers have been to accept such an offer; how likely,
too, to find men who would sail with them on such an errand, to be
‘flayed alive,’ as many who travelled to the Indies of late years had
been, or to have their throats cut, tied back to back, after trading
unarmed and peaceably for a month, as thirty-six of Raleigh’s men had
been but two or three years before in that very Orinoco. So James is
forced to let the large fleet go; and to let it go well armed also; for
the plain reason, that otherwise it dare not go at all; and in the
meanwhile letters are sent from Spain, in which the Spaniards call the
fleet ‘English enemies,’ and ships and troops are moved up as fast as
possible from the Spanish main.
But, say some, James was justified in telling Gondomar, and the Spaniards
in defending themselves. On the latter point there is no doubt.
‘They may get who have the will,
And they may keep who can.’
But it does seem hard on Raleigh, after having laboured in this Guiana
business for years, and after having spent his money in vain attempts to
deliver these Guianians from their oppressors. It is hard, and he feels
it so. He sees that he is not trusted; that, as James himself confesses,
his pardon is refused simply to keep a hold on him; that, if he fails, he
is ruined.
As he well asks afterwards, ‘If the King did not think that Guiana was
his, why let me go thither at all? He knows that it was his by the law
of nations, for he made Mr. Harcourt a grant of part of it. If it be, as
Gondomar says, the King of Spain’s, then I had no more right to work a
mine in it than to burn a town.’ An argument which seems to me
unanswerable. But, says James, and others with him, he was forbid to
meddle with any country occupate or possessed by Spaniards. Southey,
too, blames him severely for not having told James that the country was
already settled by Spaniards. I can excuse Southey, but not James, for
overlooking the broad fact that all England knew it, as I have shown,
since 1594; that if they did not, Gondomar would have taken care to tell
them; and that he could not go to Guiana without meddling with Spaniards.
His former voyages and publications made no secret of it. On the
contrary, one chief argument for the plan had been all through the
delivery of the Indians from these very Spaniards, who, though they could
not conquer them, ill-used them in every way: and in his agreement with
the Lords about the Guiana voyage in 1611, he makes especial mention of
the very place which will soon fill such a part in our story, ‘San Thomé,
where the Spaniards inhabit,’ and tells the Lords whom to ask as to the
number of men who will be wanted ‘to secure Keymish’s passage to the
mine’ against these very Spaniards. What can be more clear, save to
those who will not see?
The plain fact is that Raleigh went, with his eyes open, to take
possession of a country to which he believed that he and King James had a
right, and that James and his favourites, when they, as he pleads, might
have stopped him by a word, let him go, knowing as well as the Spaniards
what he intended; for what purpose, but to have an excuse for the tragedy
which ended all, it is difficult to conceive. ‘It is evident,’ wisely
says Sir Robert Schomburgk, ‘that they winked at consequences which they
must have foreseen.’
And here Mr. Napier, on the authority of Count Desmarets, brings a grave
charge against Raleigh. Raleigh in his ‘Apology’ protests that he only
saw Desmarets once on board of his vessel. Desmarets says in his
despatches that he was on board of her several times—whether he saw
Raleigh more than once does not appear—and that Raleigh complained to him
of having been unjustly imprisoned, stripped of his estate, and so forth;
and that he was on that account resolved to abandon his country, and, if
the expedition succeeded, offer himself and the fruit of his labour to
the King of France.