informs us that, on being confronted with Captains St. Leger and
Pennington, he confessed that he proposed the taking of the Mexico fleet
if the mine failed. To which I can only answer, that all depends on how
the thing was said, and that this is the last fact which we should find
in Sir Julius’s notes, which are, it is confessed, so confused, obscure,
and full of gaps, as to be often hardly intelligible. The same remark
applies to Wilson’s story, which I agree with Mr. Tytler in thinking
worthless. Wilson, it must be understood, is employed after Raleigh’s
return as a spy upon him, which office he executes, all confess (and
Wilson himself as much as any), as falsely, treacherously, and
hypocritically as did ever sinful man; and, _inter alia_, he has this,
‘This day he told me what discourse he and the Lord Chancellor had about
taking the Plate-fleet, which he confessed he would have taken had he
lighted on it.’ To which my Lord Chancellor said, ‘Why, you would have
been a pirate.’ ‘Oh,’ quoth he, ‘did you ever know of any that were
pirates for millions? They only that wish for small things are pirates.’
Now, setting aside the improbability that Raleigh should go out of his
way to impeach himself to the man whom he must have known was set there
to find matter for his death, all, we say, depends on how it was said.
If the Lord Chancellor ever said to Raleigh, ‘To take the Mexico fleet
would be piracy,’ it would have been just like Raleigh to give such an
answer. The speech is a perfectly true one: Raleigh knew the world, no
man better; and saw through its hollowness, and the cant and hypocrisy of
his generation; and he sardonically states an undeniable fact. He is not
expressing his own morality, but that of the world; just as he is doing
in that passage of his ‘Apology,’ about which I must complain of Mr.
Napier. ‘It was a maxim of his,’ says Mr. Napier, ‘that good success
admits of no examination.’ This is not fair. The sentence in the
original goes on, ‘so the contrary allows of no excuse, however
reasonable and just whatsoever.’ His argument all through the beginning
of the ‘Apology,’ supported by instance on instance from history, is—I
cannot get a just hearing, because I have failed in opening this mine.
So it is always. Glory covers the multitude of sins. But a man who has
failed is a fair mark for every slanderer, puppy, ignoramus, discontented
mutineer; as I am now. What else, in the name of common sense, could
have been his argument? Does Mr. Napier really think that Raleigh, even
if, in the face of all the noble and pious words which he had written, he
held so immoral a doctrine, would have been shameless and senseless
enough to assert his own rascality in an apology addressed to the most
‘religious’ of kings in the most canting of generations?
But still more astonished am I at the use which has been made of Captain
Parker’s letter. The letter is written by a man in a state of frantic
rage and disappointment. There never was any mine, he believes now.
Keymis’s ‘delays we found mere delusions; for he was false to all men and
hateful to himself, loathing to live since he could do no more villany.
I will speak no more of this hateful fellow to God and man.’ And it is
on the testimony of a man in this temper that we are asked to believe
that ‘the admiral and vice-admiral,’ Raleigh and St. Leger, are going to
the Western Islands ‘to look for homeward-bound men’: if, indeed, the
looking for homeward-bound men means really looking for the Spanish
fleet, and not merely for recruits for their crews. I never
recollect—and I have read pretty fully the sea-records of those days—such
a synonym used either for the Mexican or Indian fleet. But let this be
as it may, the letter proves too much. For, first, it proves that
whosoever is not going to turn ‘pirate,’ our calm and charitable friend
Captain Parker is; ‘for my part, by the permission of God, I will either
_make a voyage_ or bury myself in the sea.’ Now, what making a voyage
meant there is no doubt; and the sum total of the letter is, that a man
intending to turn rover himself accuses, under the influence of violent
passion, his comrades of doing the like. We may believe him about
himself: about others, we shall wait for testimony a little less
interested.
But the letter proves too much again. For Parker says that ‘Witney and
Woolaston are gone off a-head to look for homeward-bound men,’ thus
agreeing with Raleigh’s message to his wife, that ‘Witney, for whom I
sold all my plate at Plymouth, and to whom I gave more credit and
countenance than to all the captains of my fleet, ran from me at the
Grenadas, and Woolaston with him.’
And now, reader, how does this of Witney, and Woolaston, and Parker’s
intentions to ‘pirate’ separately, if it be true, agree with King James’s
story of Raleigh’s calling a council of war and proposing an attack on
the Plate-fleet? One or the other must needs be a lie; probably both.
Witney’s ship was of only 160 tons; Woolaston’s probably smaller. Five
such ships would be required, as any reader of Hakluyt must know, to take
a single Carack; and it would be no use running the risk of hanging for
any less prize. The Spanish main was warned and armed, and the Western
Isles also. Is it possible that these two men would have been insane
enough in such circumstances to go without Raleigh, if they could have
gone with him? And is it possible that he, if he had any set purpose of
attacking the Plate-fleet, would not have kept them, in order to attempt
that with him which neither they nor he could do without each other.
Moreover, no ‘piratical’ act ever took place; if any had, we should have
heard enough about it; and why is Parker to be believed against Raleigh
alone, when there is little doubt that he slandered all the rest of the
captains? Lastly, it was to this very Parker, with Mr. Tresham and
another gentleman, that Raleigh appealed by name on the scaffold, as
witnesses that it was his crew who tried to keep him from going home, and
not he them.
My own belief is, and it is surely simple and rational enough, that
Raleigh’s ‘brains,’ as he said, ‘were broken’; that he had no distinct
plan: but that, loth to leave the New World without a second attempt on
Guiana, he went up to Newfoundland to re-victual, ‘and with good hope,’
as he wrote to Winwood himself, ‘of keeping the sea till August with some
four reasonable good ships,’ probably, as Oldys remarks, to try a trading
voyage; but found his gentlemen too dispirited and incredulous, his men
too mutinous to do anything; and seeing his ships go home one by one, at
last followed them himself, because he had promised Arundel and Pembroke
so to do; having, after all, as he declared on the scaffold, extreme
difficulty in persuading his men to land at all in England. The other
lies about him, as of his having intended to desert his soldiers in
Guiana, his having taken no tools to work the mine, and so forth, one
only notices to say that the ‘Declaration’ takes care to make the most of
them, without deigning, after its fashion, to adduce any proof but
anonymous hearsays. If it be true that Bacon drew up that famous
document, it reflects no credit either on his honesty or his ‘inductive
science.’
So Raleigh returns, anchors in Plymouth. He finds that Captain North has
brought home the news of his mishaps, and that there is a proclamation
against him, which, by the bye, lies, for it talks of limitations and
cautions given to Raleigh which do not appear in his commission; and,
moreover, that a warrant is out for his apprehension. He sends his men
on shore, and starts for London to surrender himself, in company with
faithful Captain King, who alone clings to him to the last, and from whom
we have details of the next few days. Near Ashburton he is met by Sir
Lewis Stukely, his near kinsman, Vice-Admiral of Devon, who has orders to
arrest him. Raleigh tells him that he has saved him the trouble; and the
two return to Plymouth, where Stukely, strangely enough, leaves him at
liberty and rides about the country. We should be slow in imputing
baseness: but one cannot help suspecting from Stukely’s subsequent
conduct that he had from the first private orders to give Raleigh a
chance of trying to escape, in order to have a handle against him, such
as his own deeds had not yet given.
The ruse, if it existed then, as it did afterwards, succeeds. Raleigh
hears bad news. Gondomar has—or has not—told his story to the king by
crying, ‘_Piratas_! _piratas_! _piratas_!’ and then rushing out without
explanation. James is in terror lest what had happened should break off
the darling Spanish match.
Raleigh foresees ruin, perhaps death. Life is sweet, and Guiana is yet
where it was. He may win a basketful of the ore still, and prove himself
no liar. He will escape to France. Faithful King finds him a Rochelle
ship; he takes boat to her, goes half way, and returns. Honour is
sweeter than life, and James may yet be just. The next day he bribes the
master to wait for him one more day, starts for the ship once more, and
again returns to Plymouth—so King will make oath—of his own free will.
The temptation must have been terrible and the sin none. What kept him
from yielding but innocence and honour? He will clear himself; and if
not, abide the worst. Stukely and James found out these facts, and made
good use of them afterwards. For now comes ‘a severe letter from my
Lords’ to bring Raleigh up as speedily as his health will permit; and
with it comes one Mannourie, a French quack, of whom honest King takes
little note at the time, but who will make himself remembered.
And now begins a series of scenes most pitiable; Raleigh’s brains are
indeed broken. He is old, worn-out with the effects of his fever, lamed,
ruined, broken-hearted, and, for the first time in his life, weak and
silly. He takes into his head the paltriest notion that he can gain time
to pacify the King by feigning himself sick. He puts implicit faith in
the rogue Mannourie, whom he has never seen before. He sends forward
Lady Raleigh to London—perhaps ashamed—as who would not have been?—to
play the fool in that sweet presence; and with her good Captain King, who
is to engage one Cotterell, an old servant of Raleigh’s, to find a ship
wherein to escape, if the worst comes to the worst. Cotterell sends King
to an old boatswain of his, who owns a ketch. She is to lie off Tilbury;
and so King waits Raleigh’s arrival. What passed in the next four or
five days will never be truly known, for our only account comes from two
self-convicted villains, Stukely and Mannourie. On these details I shall
not enter. First, because one cannot trust a word of them; secondly,
because no one will wish to hear them who feels, as I do, how pitiable
and painful is the sight of a great heart and mind utterly broken.
Neither shall I spend time on Stukely’s villanous treatment of Raleigh,
for which he had a commission from James in writing; his pretending to
help him to escape, his going down the Thames in a boat with him, his
trying in vain to make honest King as great a rogue as himself. Like
most rascalities, Stukely’s conduct, even as he himself states it, is
very obscure. All that we can see is, that Cotterell told Stukely
everything: that Stukely bade Cotterell carry on the deceit; that Stukely
had orders from headquarters to incite Raleigh to say or do something
which might form a fresh ground of accusal; that, being a clumsy rogue,
he failed, and fell back on abetting Raleigh’s escape, as a last
resource. Be it as it may, he throws off the mask as soon as Raleigh has
done enough to prove an intent to escape; arrests him, and conducts him
to the Tower.
There two shameful months are spent in trying to find out some excuse for
Raleigh’s murder. Wilson is set over him as a spy; his letters to his
wife are intercepted. Every art is used to extort a confession of a
great plot with France, and every art fails utterly—simply, it seems to
me, because there was no plot. Raleigh writes an apology, letters of
entreaty, self-justification, what not; all, in my opinion, just and true
enough; but like his speech on the scaffold, weak, confused—the product
of a ‘broken brain.’ However, his head must come off; and as a last
resource, it must be taken off upon the sentence of fifteen years ago,
and he who was condemned for plotting with Spain must die for plotting
against her. It is a pitiable business: but as Osborne says, in a
passage (p.108 of his Memoirs of James) for which one freely forgives him
all his sins and lies, and they are many—‘As the foolish idolaters were
wont to sacrifice the choicest of their children to the devil, so our
king gave up his incomparable jewel to the will of this monster of
ambition (the Spaniard), under the pretence of a superannuated
transgression, contrary to the opinion of the more honest sort of
gownsmen, who maintained that his Majesty’s pardon lay inclusively in the
commission he gave him on his setting out to sea; it being incongruous
that he, who remained under the notion of one dead in the law, should as
a general dispose of the lives of others, not being himself master of his
own.’
But no matter. He must die. The Queen intercedes for him, as do all
honest men: but in vain. He has twenty-four hours’ notice to prepare for
death; eats a good breakfast; takes a cup of sack and a pipe; makes a
rambling speech, in which one notes only the intense belief that he is an
honest man, and the intense desire to make others believe so, in the very
smallest matters; and then dies smilingly, as one weary of life. One
makes no comment. Raleigh’s life really ended on that day that poor
Keymis returned from San Thomé.’
And then?
As we said, Truth is stranger than fiction. No dramatist dare invent a
‘poetic justice’ more perfect than fell upon the traitor. It is not
always so, no doubt. God reserves many a greater sinner for that most
awful of all punishments—impunity. But there are crises in a nation’s
life in which God makes terrible examples, to put before the most stupid
and sensual the choice of Hercules, the upward road of life, the downward
one which leads to the pit. Since the time of Pharaoh and the Red Sea
host, history is full of such palpable, unmistakable revelations of the
Divine Nemesis; and in England, too, at that moment, the crisis was
there; and the judgment of God was revealed accordingly. Sir Lewis
Stukely remained, it seems, at court; high in favour with James: but he
found, nevertheless, that people looked darkly on him. Like many
self-convicted rogues, he must needs thrust his head into his own shame;
and one day he goes to good old Lord Charles Howard’s house; for being
Vice-Admiral of Devon, he has affairs with the old Armada hero.
The old lion explodes in an unexpected roar. ‘Darest thou come into my
presence, thou base fellow, who art reputed the common scorn and contempt
of all men? Were it not in mine own house I would cudgel thee with my
staff for presuming to speak to me!’ Stukely, his tail between his legs,
goes off and complains to James. ‘What should I do with him? Hang him?
On my sawle, mon, if I hung all that spoke ill of thee, all the trees in
the island were too few.’ Such is the gratitude of kings, thinks
Stukely; and retires to write foolish pamphlets in self-justification,
which, unfortunately for his memory, still remain to make bad worse.
Within twelve months he, the rich and proud Vice-Admiral of Devon, with a
shield of sixteen quarterings and the blood-royal in his veins, was
detected debasing the King’s coin within the precincts of the royal
palace, together with his old accomplice Mannourie, who, being taken,
confessed that his charges against Raleigh were false. He fled, a ruined
man, back to his native county and his noble old seat of Affton; but Até
is on the heels of such—
‘Slowly she tracks him and sure, as a lyme-hound, sudden she grips
him,
Crushing him, blind in his pride, for a sign and a terror to
mortals.’
A terrible plebiscitum had been passed in the West country against the
betrayer of its last Worthy. The gentlemen closed their doors against
him; the poor refused him—so goes the legend—fire and water. Driven by
the Furies, he fled from Affton, and wandered westward down the vale of
Taw, away to Appledore, and there took boat, and out into the boundless
Atlantic, over the bar, now crowded with shipping, for which Raleigh’s
genius had discovered a new trade and a new world.
Sixteen miles to the westward, like a blue cloud on the horizon, rises
the ultima Thule of Devon, the little isle of Lundy. There one outlying
peak of granite, carrying up a shelf of slate upon its southern flank,
has defied the waves, and formed an island some three miles long,
desolate, flat-headed, fretted by every frost and storm, walled all round
with four hundred feet of granite cliff, sacred only, then at least, to
puffins and pirates. Over the single landing-place frowns from the cliff
the keep of an old ruin, ‘Moresco Castle,’ as they call it still, where
some bold rover, Sir John de Moresco, in the times of the old Edwards,
worked his works of darkness: a gray, weird, uncanny pile of moorstone,
through which all the winds of heaven howl day and night.
In a chamber of that ruin died Sir Lewis Stukely, Lord of Affton, cursing
God and man.
These things are true. Said I not well that reality is stranger than
romance?
But no Nemesis followed James.
The answer will depend much upon what readers consider to be a Nemesis.
If to have found England one of the greatest countries in Europe, and to
have left it one of the most inconsiderable and despicable; if to be
fooled by flatterers to the top of his bent, until he fancied himself all
but a god, while he was not even a man, and could neither speak the
truth, keep himself sober, nor look on a drawn sword without shrinking;
if, lastly, to have left behind him a son who, in spite of many
chivalrous instincts unknown to his father, had been so indoctrinated in
that father’s vices as to find it impossible to speak the truth even when
it served his purpose; if all these things be no Nemesis, then none fell
on James Stuart.
But of that son, at least, the innocent blood was required. He, too, had
his share in the sin. In Carew Raleigh’s simple and manful petition to
the Commons of England for the restoration of his inheritance we find a
significant fact stated without one word of comment, bitter or otherwise.
At Prince Henry’s death the Sherborne lands had been given again to Carr,
Lord Somerset. To him, too, ‘the whirligig of time brought round its
revenges,’ and he lost them when arraigned and condemned for poisoning
Sir Thomas Overbury. Then Sir John Digby, afterwards Earl of Bristol,
begged Sherborne of the King, and had it. Pembroke (Shakspeare’s
Pembroke) brought young Carew to court, hoping to move the tyrant’s
heart. James saw him and shuddered; perhaps conscience stricken, perhaps
of mere cowardice. ‘He looked like the ghost of his father,’ as he well
might, to that guilty soul. Good Pembroke advised his young kinsman to
travel, which he did till James’s death in the next year. Then coming
over—this is his own story—he asked of Parliament to be restored in
blood, that he might inherit aught that might fall to him in England.
His petition was read twice in the Lords. Whereon ‘King Charles sent Sir
James Fullarton, then of the bed-chamber, to Mr. Raleigh to command him
to come to him; and being brought in, the King, after using him with
great civility, notwithstanding told him plainly that when he was prince
he had promised the Earl of Bristol to secure his title to Sherborne
against the heirs of Sir Walter Raleigh; whereon the earl had given him,
then prince, ten thousand pounds; that now he was bound to make good his
promise, being king; that, therefore, unless he would quit his right and
title to Sherborne, he neither could nor would pass his bill of
restoration.’
Young Raleigh, like a good Englishman, ‘urged,’ he says, ‘the justness of
his cause; that he desired only the liberty of the subject, and to be
left to the law, which was never denied any freeman.’ The King remained
obstinate. His noble brother’s love for the mighty dead weighed nothing
with him, much less justice. Poor young Raleigh was forced to submit.
The act for his restoration was passed, reserving Sherborne for Lord
Bristol, and Charles patched up the affair by allowing to Lady Raleigh
and her son after her a life pension of four hundred a year.
Young Carew tells his story simply, and without a note of bitterness;
though he professes his intent to range himself and his two sons for the
future ‘under the banner of the Commons of England,’ he may be a royalist
for any word beside. Even where he mentions the awful curse of his
mother, he only alludes to its fulfilment by—‘that which hath happened
since to that royal family is too sad and disastrous for me to repeat,
and yet too visible not to be discerned.’ We can have no doubt that he
tells the exact truth. Indeed the whole story fits Charles’s character
to the smallest details. The want of any real sense of justice, combined
with the false notion of honour; the implacable obstinacy; the contempt
for that law by which alone he held his crown; the combination of
unkingliness in commanding a private interview and shamelessness in
confessing his own meanness—all these are true notes of the man whose
deliberate suicide stands written, a warning to all bad rulers till the
end of time. But he must have been a rogue early in life, and a needy
rogue too. That ten thousand pounds of Lord Bristol’s money should make
many a sentimentalist reconsider—if, indeed, sentimentalists can be made
to reconsider, or even to consider, anything—their notion of him as the
incarnation of pious chivalry.
At least the ten thousand pounds cost Charles dear.
The widow’s curse followed him home. Naseby fight and the Whitehall
scaffold were surely God’s judgment of such deeds, whatever man’s may be.
FOOTNOTES
{87} _North British Review_, No. XLV.—1. ‘Life of Sir Walter Raleigh.’
By P. Fraser Tytler, F.R.S. London, 1853.—2. ‘Raleigh’s Discovery of
Guiana.’ Edited by Sir Robert Schomburgk (Hakluyt Society), 1848.—3.
‘Lord Bacon and Sir Walter Raleigh.’ By M. Napier. Cambridge, 1853.—4.
‘Raleigh’s Works, with Lives by Oldys and Birch.’ Oxford, 1829—5.
‘Bishop Goodman’s History of his own Times.’ London, 1839.
{95} I especially entreat readers’ attention to two articles in
vindication of the morals of Queen Elizabeth, in ‘Fraser’s Magazine’ of
1854; to one in the ‘Westminster’ of 1854, on Mary Stuart; and one in the
same of 1852, on England’s Forgotten Worthies, by a pen now happily well
known in English literature, Mr. Anthony Froude’s.
{138} Since this was written, a similar Amazonian bodyguard has been
discovered, I hear, in Pegu.
{155} It is to be found in a MS. of 1596.