AT COURT.
Raleigh had not completed his thirtieth year when he became a recognised
courtier. We have seen that he had passed, four years before, within the
precincts of the Court, but we do not know whether the Queen had noticed
him or not. In the summer of 1581 he had written thus to Leicester from
Lismore:--
I may not forget continually to put your Honour in mind of my
affection unto your Lordship, having to the world both professed
and protested the same. Your Honour, having no use of such poor
followers, hath utterly forgotten me. Notwithstanding, if your
Lordship shall please to think me yours, as I am, I will be
found as ready, and dare do as much in your service, as any man
you may command; and do neither so much despair of myself but
that I may be some way able to perform so much.
To Leicester, then, we may be sure, he went,--to find him, and the whole
Court with him, in the throes of the Queen's latest and final
matrimonial embroilment. Raleigh had a few weeks in which to admire the
empty and hideous suitor whom France had sent over to claim Elizabeth's
hand, and during this critical time it is possible that he enjoyed his
personal introduction to the Queen. Walter Raleigh in the prime of his
strength and beauty formed a curious contrast to poor Alencon, and the
difference was one which Elizabeth would not fail to recognise. On
February 1, 1582, he was paid the sum of 200_l._ for his Irish services,
and a week later he set out under Leicester, in company with Sir Philip
Sidney, among the throng that conducted the French prince to the
Netherlands.
When Elizabeth's 'poor frog,' as she called Alencon, had been duly led
through the gorgeous pageant prepared in his honour at Antwerp, on
February 17, the English lords and their train, glad to be free of their
burden, passed to Flushing, and hastened home with as little ceremony as
might be. Raleigh alone remained behind, to carry some special message
of compliment from the Queen to the Prince of Orange. It is Raleigh
himself, in his _Invention of Shipping_, who gives us this interesting
information, and he goes on to say that when the Prince of Orange
'delivered me his letters to her Majesty, he prayed me to say to the
Queen from him, _Sub umbra alarum tuarum protegimur_: for certainly,
said he, they had withered in the bud, and sunk in the beginning of
their navigation, had not her Majesty assisted them.' It would have been
natural to entrust to Leicester such confidential utterances as these
were a reply to. But Elizabeth was passing through a paroxysm of rage
with Leicester at the moment. She ventured to call him 'traitor' and to
accuse him of conspiring with the Prince of Orange. Notwithstanding
this, his influence was still paramount with her, and it was
characteristic of her shrewd petulance to confide in Leicester's
_protege_, although not in Leicester himself. Towards the end of March,
Raleigh settled at the English Court.
On April 1, 1582, Elizabeth issued from Greenwich a strange and
self-contradictory warrant with regard to service in Ireland, and the
band of infantry hitherto commanded in that country by a certain Captain
Annesley, now deceased. The words must be quoted verbatim:--
For that our pleasure is to have our servant Walter Rawley [this
was the way in which the name was pronounced during Raleigh's
lifetime] trained some time longer in that our realm [Ireland]
for his better experience in martial affairs, and for the
especial care which We have to do him good, in respect of his
kindred that have served Us, some of them (as you know) near
about Our person [probably Mrs. Catherine Ashley, who was
Raleigh's aunt]; these are to require you that the leading of
the said band may be committed to the said Rawley; and for that
he is, for some considerations, by Us excused to stay here. Our
pleasure is that the said band be, in the meantime, till he
repair into that Our realm, delivered to some such as he shall
depute to be his lieutenant there.
He is to be captain in Ireland, but not just yet, not till a too tender
Queen can spare him. We find that he was paid his 'reckoning' for six
months after the issue of this warrant, but there is no evidence that he
was spared at any time during 1582 to relieve his Irish deputy. He was
now, in fact, installed as first favourite in the still susceptible
heart of the Virgin Star of the North.
This, then, is a favourable opportunity for pausing to consider what
manner of man it was who had so suddenly passed into the intimate favour
of the Queen. Naunton has described Raleigh with the precision of one
who is superior to the weakness of depreciating the exterior qualities
of his enemy: 'having a good presence, in a handsome and well-compacted
person; a strong natural wit, and a better judgment; with a bold and
plausible tongue, whereby he could set out his parts to the best
advantage.' His face had neither the ethereal beauty of Sidney's nor the
intellectual delicacy of Spenser's; it was cast in a rougher mould than
theirs. The forehead, it is acknowledged, was too high for the
proportion of the features, and for this reason, perhaps, is usually
hidden in the portraits by a hat. We must think of Raleigh at this time
as a tall, somewhat bony man, about six feet high, with dark hair and a
high colour, a facial expression of great brightness and alertness,
personable from the virile force of his figure, and illustrating these
attractions by a splendid taste in dress. His clothes were at all times
noticeably gorgeous; and to the end of his life he was commonly
bedizened with precious stones to his very shoes. When he was arrested
in 1603 he was carrying 4,000_l._ in jewels on his bosom, and when he
was finally captured on August 10, 1618, his pockets were found full of
the diamonds and jacinths which he had hastily removed from various
parts of his person. His letters display his solicitous love of jewels,
velvets, and embroidered damasks. Mr. Jeaffreson has lately found among
the Middlesex MSS. that as early as April 26, 1584, a gentleman named
Hugh Pew stole at Westminster and carried off Walter Raleigh's pearl
hat-band and another jewelled article of attire, valued together in
money of that time at 113_l._ The owner, with characteristic
promptitude, shut the thief up in Newgate, and made him disgorge. To
complete our picture of the vigorous and brilliant soldier-poet, we must
add that he spoke to the end of his life with that strong Devonshire
accent which was never displeasing to the ears of Elizabeth.
The Muse of History is surely now-a-days too disdainful of all
information that does not reach her signed and countersigned. In
biography, at least, it must be a mistake to accept none but documentary
evidence, since tradition, if it does not give us truth of fact, gives
us what is often at least as valuable, truth of impression. The later
biographers of Raleigh have scorned even to repeat those anecdotes that
are the best known to the public of all which cluster around his
personality. It is true that they rest on no earlier testimony than that
of Fuller, who, writing in the lifetime of men who knew Raleigh, gives
the following account of his introduction to Elizabeth: 'Her Majesty,
meeting with a plashy place, made some scruple to go on; when Raleigh
(dressed in the gay and genteel habit of those times) presently cast off
and spread his new plush cloak on the ground, whereon the queen trod
gently over, rewarding him afterwards with many suits for his so free
and seasonable tender of so fair a footcloth.' The only point about this
story which is incredible is that this act was Raleigh's introduction to
the Queen. Regarded as a fantastic incident of their later attachment,
the anecdote is in the highest degree characteristic of the readiness of
the one and the romantic sentiment of the other.
Not less entertaining is Fuller's other story, that at the full tide of
Raleigh's fortunes with the Queen, he wrote on a pane of glass with his
diamond ring:--
Fain would I climb, but that I fear to fall,
whereupon Elizabeth replied,
If thy heart fail thee, then climb not at all.
Of these tales we can only assert that they reflect the popular and
doubtless faithful impression of Raleigh's mother-wit and audacious
alacrity.
If he did not go back to fight in Ireland, his experience of Irish
affairs was made use of by the Government. He showed a considerable
pliancy in giving his counsel. In May 1581 he had denounced Ormond and
even Grey for not being severe enough, but in June 1582 he had veered
round to Burghley's opinion that it was time to moderate English tyranny
in Ireland. A paper written partly by Burghley and partly by Raleigh,
but entitled _The Opinion of Mr. Rawley_, still exists among the Irish
Correspondence, and is dated October 25, 1582. This document is in the
highest degree conciliatory towards the Irish chieftains, whom it
recommends the Queen to win over peacefully to her side, this policy
'offering a very plausible show of thrift and commodity.' It is
interesting to find Raleigh so supple, and so familiar already with the
Queen's foibles. It was probably earlier in the year, and about this
same Irish business, that Raleigh spoke to Elizabeth, on the occasion
which Naunton describes. 'Raleigh,' he says, 'had gotten the Queen's ear
at a trice; and she began to be taken with his elocution, and loved to
hear his reasons to her demands; and the truth is, she took him for a
kind of _oracle_, which nettled them all.' Lord Grey, who was no
diplomatist, had the want of caution to show that he was annoyed at
advice being asked from a young man who was so lately his inferior. In
answer to a special recommendation of Raleigh from the Queen, Lord Grey
ventured to reply: 'For my own part I must be plain--I neither like his
carriage nor his company, and therefore other than by direction and
commandment, and what his right requires, he is not to expect from my
hands.' Lord Grey did not understand the man he was dealing with. The
result was that in August 1582 he was abruptly deposed from his dignity
as Lord Deputy in Ireland. But we see that Raleigh could be exceedingly
antipathetic to any man who crossed his path. That it was wilful
arrogance, and not inability to please, is proved by the fact that he
seems to have contrived to reconcile not Leicester only but even Hatton,
Elizabeth's dear 'Pecora Campi,' to his intrusion at Court.
As far as we can perceive, Raleigh's success as a courtier was unclouded
from 1582 to 1586, and these years are the most peaceful and uneventful
in the record of his career. He took a confidential place by the Queen's
side, but so unobtrusively that in these earliest years, at least, his
presence leaves no perceptible mark on the political history of the
country. Great in so many fields, eminent as a soldier, as a navigator,
as a poet, as a courtier, there was a limit even to Raleigh's
versatility, and he was not a statesman. It was political ambition which
was the vulnerable spot in this Achilles, and until he meddled with
statecraft, his position was practically unassailed. It must not be
overlooked, in this connection, that in spite of Raleigh's influence
with the Queen, he never was admitted as a Privy Councillor, his advice
being asked in private, by Elizabeth or by her ministers, and not across
the table, where his arrogant manner might have introduced discussions
fruitless to the State. In 1598, when he was at the zenith of his power,
he actually succeeded, as we shall see, in being proposed for Privy
Council, but the Queen did not permit him to be sworn. Nothing would be
more remarkable than Elizabeth's infatuation for her favourites, if we
were not still more surprised at her skill in gauging their capacities,
and her firmness in defining their ambitions.
Already, in 1583, Walter Raleigh began to be the recipient of the
Queen's gifts. On April 10 of that year he came into possession of two
estates, Stolney and Newland, which had passed to the Queen from All
Souls College, Oxford. A few days later, May 4, he became enriched by
obtaining letters patent for the 'Farm of Wines,' thenceforward to be
one of the main sources of his wealth. According to this grant, which
extended to all places within the kingdom, each vintner was obliged to
pay twenty shillings a year to Raleigh as a license duty on the sale of
wines. This was, in fact, a great relief to the wine trade, for until
this time the mayors of corporations had levied this duty at their own
judgment, and some of them had made a licensing charge not less than six
times as heavy as the new duty. The grant, moreover, gave Raleigh a part
of all fines accruing to the Crown under the provisions of the wines
statute of Edward VI. From his 'Farm of Wines' Raleigh seems at one
time to have obtained something like 2,000_l._ a year. The emoluments
dwindled at last, just before Raleigh was forced to resign his patent to
James I., to 1,000_l._ a year; but even this was an income equivalent to
6,000_l._ of our money. The grant was to expire in 1619, and would
therefore, if he had died a natural death, have outlived Raleigh
himself. We must not forget that the cost of collecting moneys, and the
salaries to deputy licensers, consumed a large part of these receipts.
While Raleigh was shaking down a fortune from the green ivy-bushes that
hung at the vintners' doors, the western continent, at which he had
already cast wistful glances, remained the treasure-house of Spain. His
unfortunate but indomitable half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, recalled
it to his memory. The name of Gilbert deserves to be better remembered
than it is; and America, at least, will one day be constrained to honour
the memory of the man who was the first to dream of colonising her
shores. Until his time, the ambition of Englishmen in the west had been
confined to an angry claim to contest the wealth and beauty of the New
World with the Spaniard. The fabulous mines of Cusco, the plate-ships of
Lima and Guayaquil, the pearl-fisheries of Panama, these had been
hitherto the loadstar of English enterprise. The hope was that such
feats as those of Drake would bring about a time when, as George Wither
put it,
the spacious West,
Being still more with English blood possessed,
The proud Iberians shall not rule those seas,
To check our ships from sailing where they please.
Even Frobisher had not entertained the notion of leaving Spain alone,
and of planting in the northern hemisphere colonies of English race. It
was Sir Humphrey Gilbert who first thought of a settlement in North
America, and the honour of priority is due to him, although he failed.
His royal charter was dated June 1578, and covered a space of six years
with its privilege. We have already seen that various enterprises
undertaken by Gilbert in consequence of it had failed in one way or
another. After the disaster of 1579 he desisted, and lent three of his
remaining vessels to the Government, to serve on the coast of Ireland.
As late as July 1582 the rent due to him on these vessels was unpaid,
and he wrote a dignified appeal to Walsingham for the money in arrears.
He was only forty-three, but his troubles had made an old man of him,
and he pleads his white hairs, blanched in long service of her Majesty,
as a reason why the means of continuing to serve her should not be
withheld from him. Raleigh had warmly recommended his brother before he
was himself in power, and he now used all his influence in his favour.
It is plain that Gilbert's application was promptly attended to, for we
find him presently in a position to pursue the colonising enterprises
which lay so near to his heart. The Queen, however, could not be induced
to encourage him; she shrewdly remarked that Gilbert 'had no good luck
at sea,' which was pathetically true. However, Gilbert's six years'
charter was about to expire, and his hopes were all bound up in making
one more effort. He pleaded, and Raleigh supported him, until Elizabeth
finally gave way, merely refusing to allow Raleigh himself to take part
in any such 'dangerous sea-fights' as the crossing of the Atlantic might
entail.
On June 11, 1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert sailed from Plymouth with a
little fleet of five vessels, bound for North America. According to all
authorities, Raleigh had expended a considerable sum in the outfit;
according to one writer, Hayes (in Hakluyt), he was owner of the entire
expedition. He spent, we know, 2,000_l._ in building and fitting out one
vessel, which he named after himself, the 'Ark Raleigh.'
Sir Humphrey Gilbert was not born under a fortunate star. Two days after
starting, a contagious fever broke out on board the 'Ark Raleigh,' and
in a tumult of panic, without explaining her desertion to the admiral,
she hastened back in great distress to Plymouth. The rest of the fleet
crossed the Atlantic successfully, and Newfoundland was taken in the
Queen's name. One ship out of the remaining four had meanwhile been sent
back to England with a sick crew. Late in September 1583 a second sailed
into Plymouth with the news that the other two had sunk in an Atlantic
storm on the 8th or 9th of that month. The last thing known of the
gallant admiral before his ship went down was that 'sitting abaft with a
book in his hand,' he had called out 'Be of good heart, my friends! We
are as near to heaven by sea as by land.'
At the death of Gilbert, his schemes as a colonising navigator passed,
as by inheritance, to Raleigh. That he had no intention of letting them
drop is shown by the fact that he was careful not to allow Gilbert's
original charter to expire. In June 1584 other hands might have seized
his brother's relinquished enterprise, and therefore it was, on March
25, that Raleigh moved the Queen to renew the charter in his own name.
In company with a younger half-brother, Adrian Gilbert, and with the
experienced though unlucky navigator John Davis as a third partner,
Raleigh was now incorporated as representing 'The College of the
Fellowship for the Discovery of the North West Passage.' In this he was
following the precedent of Gilbert, who had made use of the Queen's
favourite dream of a northern route to China to cover his less
attractive schemes of colonisation. Raleigh, however, took care to
secure himself a charter which gave him the fullest possible power to
'inhabit or retain, build or fortify, at the discretion of the said W.
Raleigh,' in any remote lands that he might find hitherto unoccupied by
any Christian power. Armed with this extensive grant, Raleigh began to
make his preparations.
It is needful here to pass rapidly over the chronicle of the expeditions
to America, since they form no part of the personal history of Raleigh.
On April 27 he sent out his first fleet under Amidas and Barlow. They
sailed blindly for the western continent, but were guided at last by 'a
delicate sweet smell' far out in ocean to the coast of Florida. They
then sailed north, and finally landed on the islands of Wokoken and
Roanoke, which, with the adjoining mainland, they annexed in the name of
her Majesty. In September this first expedition returned, bringing
Raleigh, as a token of the wealth of the new lands, 'a string of pearls
as large as great peas.' In honour of 'the eternal Maiden Queen,' the
new country received the name of Virginia, and Raleigh ordered his own
arms to be cut anew, with this legend, _Propria insignia Walteri
Ralegh, militis, Domini et Gubernatoris Virginiae_. No attempt had been
made on this occasion to colonise. It was early in the following year
that Raleigh sent out his second Virginian expedition, under the brave
Sir Richard Grenville, to settle in the country. The experiment was not
completely successful at first, but from August 17, 1585, which is the
birthday of the American people, to June 18, 1586, one hundred and eight
persons under the command of Ralph Lane, and in the service of Raleigh,
made Roanoke their habitation. It is true that the colonists lost
courage and abandoned Virginia at the latter date, but an essay at least
had been made to justify the sanguine hopes of Raleigh.
These expeditions to North America were very costly, and by their very
nature unremunerative for the present. Raleigh, however, was by this
time quite wealthy enough to support the expense, and on the second
occasion accident befriended him. Sir Richard Grenville, in the 'Tiger,'
fell in with a Spanish plate-ship on his return-voyage, and towed into
Plymouth Harbour a prize which was estimated at the value of 50,000_l._
But Raleigh was, indeed, at this time a veritable Danae. As though
enough gold had not yet been showered upon him, the Queen presented to
him, on March 25, 1584, a grant of license to export woollen
broad-cloths, a privilege the excessive profits of which soon attracted
the critical notice of Burghley. Raleigh's grant, however, was long left
unassailed, and was renewed year by year at least until May 1589. It
would seem that his income from the trade in undyed broad-cloth was of
a two-fold nature, a fixed duty on exportation in general, and a charge
on 'over-lengths,' that is to say, on pieces which exceeded the maximum
length of twenty-four yards. When Burghley assailed this whole system of
taxation in 1591, he stated that Raleigh had, in the first year only of
his grant, received 3,950_l._ from a privilege for which he paid to the
State a rent of only 700_l._ If this was correct, and no one could be in
a better position than Burghley to check the figures, Raleigh's income
from broad-cloth alone was something like 18,000_l._ of Victorian money.
Such were the sources of an opulence which we must do Raleigh the credit
to say was expended not on debauchery or display, but in the most
enlightened efforts to extend the field of English commercial enterprise
beyond the Atlantic. We need not suppose him to have been unselfish
beyond the fashion of his age. In his action there was, no doubt, an
element of personal ambition; he dreamed of raising a State in the West
before which his great enemy, Spain, should sink into the shade, and he
fancied himself the gorgeous viceroy of such a kingdom. His imagination,
which had led him on so bravely, gulled him sometimes when it came to
details. His sailors had seen the light of sunset on the cliffs of
Roanoke, and Raleigh took the yellow gleam for gold. He set his faith
too lightly on the fabulous ores of Chaunis Temotam. But he was not the
slave of these fancies, as were the more vulgar adventurers of his age.
More than the promise of pearls and silver, it was the homely products
of the new country that attracted him, and his captains were bidden to
bring news to him of the fish and fruit of Virginia, its salts and dyes
and textile grasses. Nor was it a goldsmith that he sent out to the new
colony as his scientific agent, but a young mathematician of promise,
the practical and observant Thomas Hariot.
Some personal details of Raleigh's private life during these two years
may now be touched upon. He was in close attendance upon the Queen at
Greenwich and at Windsor, when he was not in his own house in the still
rural village of Islington. In the summer of 1584, probably in
consequence of the new wealth his broad-cloth patent had secured him, he
enlarged his borders in several ways. He leased of the Queen, Durham
House, close to the river, covering the site of the present Adelphi
Terrace. This was the vast fourteenth-century palace of the Bishops of
Durham, which had come into possession of the Crown late in the reign of
Henry VIII. Elizabeth herself had occupied it during the lifetime of her
brother, and she had recovered it again after the death of Mary.
Retaining certain rooms, she now relinquished it to her favourite, and
in this stately mansion as his town house Raleigh lived from 1584 to
1603. In spite of his uncertain tenure, he spent very large sums in
repairing 'this rotten house,' as Lady Raleigh afterwards called it.
Some time between December 14, 1584, and February 24, 1585, Raleigh was
knighted. On the latter date we find him first styled Sir Walter, in an
order from Burghley to report on the force of the Devonshire Stannaries.
His activities were now concentrated from several points upon the West
of England, and he became once more identified with the only race that
ever really loved him, the men of his native Devonshire. In July he
succeeded the Earl of Bedford as Lord Warden of the Stannaries; in
September he was appointed Lieutenant of the County of Cornwall; in
November, Vice-Admiral of the two counties. He, appointed Lord Beauchamp
his deputy in Cornwall, and his own eldest half-brother, Sir John
Gilbert of Greenway, his deputy in Devonshire. In the same year, 1585,
he entered Parliament as one of the two county members for Devonshire.
As Warden of the Stannaries he introduced reforms which greatly
mitigated the hardships of the miners.
It is pleasanter to think of Raleigh administering rough justice from
the granite judgment-seat on some windy tor of Dartmoor, than to picture
him squabbling for rooms at Court with 'Pecora Campi,' or ogling a
captious royal beauty of some fifty summers, Raleigh's work in the West
has made little noise in history; but it was as wholesome and capable as
the most famous of his exploits.
In March, 1586, Leicester found himself in disgrace with Elizabeth, and
so openly attributed it to Raleigh that the Queen ordered Walsingham to
deny that the latter had ceased to plead for his former patron. Raleigh
himself sent Leicester a band of Devonshire miners to serve in the
Netherlands, and comforted him at the same time by adding, 'The Queen is
in very good terms with you, and, thanks be to God, well pacified. You
are again her "Sweet Robin."' It seems that the strange accusation had
been made against Raleigh that he desired to favour Spain. This was
calculated to vex him to the quick, and we find him protesting (March
29, 1586): 'I have consumed the best part of my fortune, hating the
tyrannous prosperity of that State, and it were now strange and
monstrous that I should become an enemy to my country and conscience.'
Two months later he was threatened with the loss of his post as
Vice-Admiral if he did not withdraw a fleet he had fitted out to harass
the Spaniards in the Newfoundland waters. About the same time he
strengthened his connection with the Leicester faction by marrying his
cousin, Barbara Gamage, to Sir Philip Sidney's younger brother Robert.
This lady became the grandmother of Waller's Sacharissa. The collapse of
the Virginian colony was an annoyance in the summer of this year, but it
was tempered to Raleigh by the success of another of his enterprises,
his fleet in the Azores. One of the prizes brought home by this purely
piratical expedition was a Spanish colonial governor of much fame and
dignity, Don Pedro Sarmiento. Raleigh demanded a ransom for this
personage, and while it was being collected he entertained his prisoner
sumptuously in Durham House.
On October 7, 1586, Raleigh's old friend Sir Philip Sidney closed his
chivalrous career on the battle-field at Zutphen. Raleigh's solemn elegy
on him is one of the finest of the many poems which that sad event
called forth. It blends the passion of personal regret with the dignity
of public grief, as all great elegiacal poems should. One stanza might
be inscribed on a monument to Sidney:
England doth hold thy limbs, that bred the same;
Flanders thy valour, where it last was tried;
The camp thy sorrow, where thy body died;
Thy friends thy want; the world thy virtues' fame.
This elegy appeared with the rest in _Astrophel_ in 1595; but it had
already been printed, in 1593, in the _Phoenix Nest_, and as early as
1591 Sir John Harington quotes it as Raleigh's.
It was not till the following spring that Raleigh took possession of
certain vast estates in Ireland. The Queen had named him among the
'gentlemen-undertakers,' between whom the escheated lands of the Earl of
Desmond were to be divided. He received about forty-two thousand acres
in the counties of Cork, Waterford, and Tipperary, and he set about
repeopling this desolate region with his usual vigour of action. He
brought settlers over from the West of England, but these men were not
supported or even encouraged at Dublin Castle. 'The doting Deputy,' as
Raleigh calls him, treated his Devonshire farmers with less
consideration than the Irish kerns, and although it is certain that of
all the 'undertakers' Raleigh was the one who, after his lights, tried
to do the best for his land, his experience as an Irish colonist was on
the whole dispiriting. By far the richest part of his property was the
'haven royal' of Youghal, with the thickly-wooded lands on either side
of the river Blackwater. He is scarcely to be forgiven for what appears
to have been the wanton destruction of the Geraldine Friary of Youghal,
built in 1268, which his men pulled down and burned while he was mayor
of the town in 1587. Raleigh's Irish residences at this time were his
manor-house in Youghal, which still remains, and Lismore Castle, which
he rented, from 1587 onwards, of the official Archbishop of Cashel,
Meiler Magrath.
We have now reached the zenith of Raleigh's personal success. His fame
was to proceed far beyond anything that he had yet gained or deserved,
but his mere worldly success was to reach no further, and even from this
moment sensibly to decline. Elizabeth had showered wealth and influence
upon him, although she had refrained, at her most doting moments, from
lifting him up to the lowest step in the ladder of aristocratic
preferment. But although her favour towards Raleigh had this singular
limit, and although she kept him rigidly outside the pale of politics,
in other respects her affection had been lavish in the extreme. Without
ceasing to hold Hatton and Leicester captive, she had now for five years
given Raleigh the chief place in her heart. But, in May 1587, we
suddenly find him in danger of being dethroned in favour of a boy of
twenty, and it is the new Earl of Essex, with his petulant beauty, who
'is, at cards, or one game or another, with her, till the birds sing in
the morning.' The remarkable scene in which Essex dared to demand the
sacrifice of Raleigh as the price of his own devotion is best described
by the new favourite in his own words. Raleigh had now been made Captain
of the Guard, and we have to imagine him standing at the door in his
uniform of orange-tawny, while the pert and pouting boy is half
declaiming, half whispering, in the ear of the Queen, whose beating
heart forgets to remind her that she might be the mother of one of her
lovers and the grandmother of the other. Essex writes:
I told her that what she did was only to please that knave
Raleigh, for whose sake I saw she would both grieve me and my
love, and disgrace me in the eye of the world. From thence she
came to speak of Raleigh; and it seemed she could not well
endure anything to be spoken against him; and taking hold of my
word 'disdain,' she said there was 'no such cause why I should
disdain him.' This speech did trouble me so much that, as near
as I could, I did describe unto her what he had been, and what
he was.... I then did let her know, whether I had cause to
disdain his competition of love, or whether I could have comfort
to give myself over to the service of a mistress which was in
awe of such a man. I spake, with 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 himself. In that
end, I saw she was resolved to defend him, and to cross me.
It was probably about this time, and owing to the instigation of Essex,
that Tarleton, the comedian, laid himself open to banishment from Court
for calling out, while Raleigh was playing cards with Elizabeth, 'See
how the Knave commands the Queen!' Elizabeth supported her old
favourite, but there is no doubt that these attacks made their
impression on her irritable temperament. Meanwhile Raleigh, engaged in a
dozen different enterprises, and eager to post hither and thither over
land and sea, was probably not ill disposed to see his royal mistress
diverted from a too-absorbing attention to himself.
On May 8, 1587, Raleigh sent forth from Plymouth his fourth Virginian
expedition, under Captain John White. It was found that the second
colony, the handful of men left behind by Sir Richard Grenville, had
perished. With 150 men, White landed at Hatorask, and proposed to found
a town of Raleigh in the new country. Every species of disaster attended
this third colony, and in the midst of the excitement caused the
following year by the Spanish Armada, a fifth expedition, fitted out
under Sir Richard Grenville, was stopped by the Government at Bideford.
Raleigh was not easily daunted, however, and in the midst of the
preparations for the great struggle he contrived to send out two
pinnaces from Bideford, on April 22, 1588, for the succour of his
unfortunate Virginians; but these little vessels were ignominiously
stripped off Madeira by privateers from La Rochelle, and sent helpless
back to England. Raleigh had now spent more than forty thousand pounds
upon the barren colony of Virginia, and, finding that no one at Court
supported his hopes in that direction, he began to withdraw a little
from a contest in which he was so heavily handicapped. In the next
chapter we shall touch upon the modification of his American policy. He
had failed hitherto, and yet, in failing, he had already secured for his
own name the highest place in the early history of Colonial America.
We now reach that famous incident in English history over which every
biographer of Raleigh is tempted to linger, the ruin of Philip's
Felicissima Armada. Within the limits of the present life of Sir Walter
it is impossible to tell over again a story which is among the most
thrilling in the chronicles of the world, but in which Raleigh's part
was not a foremost one. We possess no letter of 1588 in which he refers
to the fight.
On March 31, he had been one of the nine commissioners who met to
consider the best means of resisting invasion. In the same body of men
sat two of Raleigh's captains, Grenville and Ralph Lane, as well as his
old opponent, Lord Grey. Three months before this, Raleigh had reported
to the Queen on the state of the counties under his charge, and his
counsel on the subject had been taken. That he was profoundly excited at
the crisis in English affairs is proved by the many allusions he makes
to the Armada in the _History of the World_. It is on the whole
surprising that he was not called to take a more prominent part in the
event.[3]
It is believed that he was in Ireland when the storm actually broke,
that he hastened into the West of England, to raise levies of Cornish
and Devonian miners, and that he then proceeded to Portland, of which,
among his many offices, he was now governor, in order that he might
revise and complete the defences of that fortress. Either by land or
sea, according to conflicting accounts, he then hurried back to
Plymouth, and joined the main body of the fleet on July 23. There is a
very early tradition that his advice was asked by the Admiral, Howard of
Effingham, on the question whether it would be wise to try to board the
Spanish galleons. The Admiral thought not, but was almost over-persuaded
by younger men, eager for distinction, when Raleigh came to his aid
with counsel that tallied with the Admiral's judgment. In the _History
of the World_ Raleigh remarks:
To clap ships together without any consideration belongs rather
to a madman than to a man of war. By such an ignorant bravery
was Peter Strozzi lost at the Azores, when he fought against the
Marquis of Santa Cruz. In like sort had Lord Charles Howard,
Admiral of England, been lost in the year 1588, if he had not
been better advised than a great many malignant fools were that
found fault with his demeanour. The Spaniards had an army aboard
them, and he had none. They had more ships than he had, and of
higher building and charging; so that, had he entangled himself
with those great and powerful vessels, he had greatly endangered
this kingdom of England.
Raleigh's impression of the whole comedy of the Armada is summed up in
an admirable sentence in his _Report of the Fight in the Azores_, to
which the reader must here merely be referred. His ship was one of those
which pursued the lumbering Spanish galleons furthest in their wild
flight towards the Danish waters. He was back in England, however, in
time to receive orders on August 28 to prepare a fleet for Ireland.
Whether that fleet ever started or no is doubtful, and the latest
incident of Raleigh's connection with the Armada is that on September 5,
1588, he and Sir Francis Drake received an equal number of wealthy
Spanish prisoners, whose ransoms were to be the reward of Drake's and of
Raleigh's achievements. More important to the latter was the fact that
his skill in naval tactics, and his genius for rapid action, had very
favourably impressed the Lord Admiral, who henceforward publicly treated
him as a recognised authority in these matters.