IN DISGRACE.
For one year after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, Raleigh resisted
with success, or overlooked with equanimity, the determined attacks
which Essex made upon his position at Court. He was busy with great
schemes in all quarters of the kingdom, engaged in Devonshire, in
Ireland, in Virginia, in the north-western seas, and to his virile
activity the jealousy of Essex must have seemed like the buzzing of a
persistent gnat. The insect could sting, however, and in the early part
of December 1588, Raleigh's attention was forcibly concentrated on his
rival by the fact that 'my Lord of Essex' had sent him a challenge. No
duel was fought, and the Council did its best to bury the incident 'in
silence, that it might not be known to her Majesty, lest it might injure
the Earl,' from which it will appear that Raleigh's hold upon her favour
was still assured.
A week later than this we get a glance for a moment at one or two of the
leash of privateering enterprises, all of them a little under the rose,
in which Sir Walter Raleigh was in these years engaged. An English ship,
the 'Angel Gabriel,' complained of being captured and sacked of her
wines by Raleigh's men on the high seas, and he retorts by insinuating
that she, 'as it is probable, has served the King of Spain in his
Armada,' and is therefore fair game. So, too, with the four butts of
sack of one Artson, and the sugar and mace said to be taken out of a
Hamburg vessel, their capture by Raleigh's factors is comfortably
excused on the ground that these acts were only reprisals against the
villainous Spaniard. It was well that these more or less commercial
undertakings should be successful, for it became more and more plain to
Raleigh that the most grandiose of all his enterprises, his determined
effort to colonise Virginia, could but be a drain upon his fortune.
After Captain White's final disastrous voyage, Raleigh suspended his
efforts in this direction for a while. He leased his patent in Virginia
to a company of merchants, on March 7, 1589, merely reserving to himself
a nominal privilege, namely the possession of one fifth of such gold and
silver ore as should be raised in the colony. This was the end of the
first act of Raleigh's American adventures. It may not be needless to
contradict here a statement repeated in most rapid sketches of his life.
It is not true that at any time Raleigh himself set foot in Virginia.
In the Portugal expedition of 1589 Raleigh does not seem to have taken
at all a prominent part. He was absent, however, with Drake's fleet from
April 18 to July 2, and he marched with the rest up to the walls of
Lisbon. This enterprise was an attempt on the part of Elizabeth to place
Antonio again on the throne of Portugal, from which he had been ousted
by Philip of Spain in 1580. The aim of the expedition was not reached,
but a great deal of booty fell into the hands of the English, and
Raleigh in particular received 4,000_l._ His contingent, however, had
been a little too zealous, and he received a rather sharp reprimand for
capturing two barks from Cherbourg belonging to the friendly power of
France. It must be understood that Raleigh at this time maintained at
his own expense a small personal fleet for commercial and privateering
ends, and that he lent or leased these vessels, with his own services,
to the government when additional naval contributions were required. In
the _Domestic Correspondence_ we meet with the names of the chief of
these vessels, 'The Revenge,' soon afterwards so famous, 'The Crane,'
and 'The Garland.' These ships were merchantmen or men-of-war at will,
and their exploits were winked at or frowned upon at Court as
circumstances dictated. Sometimes the hawk's eye of Elizabeth would
sound the holds of these pirates with incredible acumen, as on that
occasion when it is recorded that 'a waistcoat of carnation colour,
curiously embroidered,' which was being brought home to adorn the person
of the adventurer, was seized by order of the Queen to form a stomacher
for his royal mistress. It would be difficult to say which of the
illustrious pair was the more solicitous of fine raiment. At other times
the whole prize had to be disgorged; as in the case of that bark of
Olonne, laden with barley, which Raleigh had to restore to the Treasury
on July 21, 1589, after he had concluded a very lucrative sale of the
same.
In August 1589 Sir Francis Allen wrote to Anthony Bacon: 'My Lord of
Essex hath chased Mr. Raleigh from the Court, and hath confined him to
Ireland.' It is true that Raleigh himself, five months later, being
once more restored to favour, speaks of 'that nearness to her Majesty
which I still enjoy,' and directly contradicts the rumour of his
disgrace. This, however, is not in accordance with the statement made by
Spenser in his poem of _Colin Clout's come home again_, in which he says
that all Raleigh's speech at this time was
Of great unkindness and of usage hard
Of Cynthia, the Lady of the Sea,
Which from her presence faultless him debarred,
and this may probably be considered as final evidence. At all events,
this exile from Court, whether it was enforced or voluntary, brought
about perhaps the most pleasing and stimulating episode in the whole of
Raleigh's career, his association with the great poet whose lines have
just been quoted.
We have already seen that, eight years before this, Spenser and Raleigh
had met under Lord Grey in the expedition that found its crisis at
Smerwick. We have no evidence of the point of intimacy which they
reached in 1582, nor of their further acquaintance before 1589. It has
been thought that Raleigh's picturesque and vivid personality
immediately and directly influenced Spenser's imagination. Dean Church
has noticed that to read Hooker's account of 'Raleigh's adventures with
the Irish chieftains, his challenges and single combats, his escapes at
fords and woods, is like reading bits of the _Faery Queen_ in prose.'
The two men, in many respects the most remarkable Englishmen of
imagination then before the notice of their country, did not, however,
really come into mutual relation until the time we have now reached.
In 1586 Edmund Spenser had been rewarded for his arduous services as
Clerk of the Council of Munster by the gift of a manor and ruined castle
of the Desmonds, Kilcolman, near the Galtee hills. This little
peel-tower, with its tiny rooms, overlooked a county that is desolate
enough now, but which then was finely wooded, and watered by the river
Awbeg, to which the poet gave the softer name of Mulla. Here, in the
midst of terrors by night and day, at the edge of the dreadful Wood,
where 'outlaws fell affray the forest ranger,' Spenser had been settled
for three years, describing the adventures of knights and ladies in a
wild world of faery that was but too like Munster, when the Shepherd of
the Ocean came over to Ireland to be his neighbour. Raleigh settled
himself in his own house at Youghal, and found society in visiting his
cousin, Sir George Carew, at Lismore, and Spenser at Kilcolman. Of the
latter association we possess a most interesting record. In 1591,
reviewing the life of two years before, Spenser says:
One day I sat, (as was my trade),
Under the foot of Mole, that mountain hoar,
Keeping my sheep among the cooly shade
Of the green alders, by the Mulla's shore;
There a strange shepherd chanced to find me out;
Whether allured with my pipe's delight,
Whose pleasing sound yshrilled far about,
(the secret of the authorship of the _Shepherd's Calender_ having by
this time oozed out in the praises of Webbe in 1586 and of Puttenham in
1589,)
Or thither led by chance, I know not right,--
Whom, when I asked from what place he came
And how he hight, himself he did ycleepe
The _Shepherd of the Ocean_ by name,
And said he came far from the main-sea deep;
He, sitting me beside in that same shade,
Provoked me to play some pleasant fit,
(that is to say, to read the MS. of the _Faery Queen_, now approaching
completion,)
And, when he heard the music which I made,
He found himself full greatly pleased at it;
Yet aemuling my pipe, he took in hond
My pipe,--before that, aemuled of many,--
And played thereon (for well that skill he conned),
Himself as skilful in that art as any.
Among the other poems thus read by Raleigh to Spenser at Kilcolman was
the 'lamentable lay' to which reference had just been made--the piece in
praise of Elizabeth which bore the name of _Cynthia_. In Spenser's
pastoral, the speaker is persuaded by Thestylis (Lodovick Bryskett) to
explain what ditty that was that the Shepherd of the Ocean sang, and he
explains very distinctly, but in terms which are scarcely critical, that
Raleigh's poem was written in love and praise, but also in pathetic
complaint, of Elizabeth, that
great Shepherdess, that Cynthia hight,
His Liege, his Lady, and his life's Regent.
This is most valuable evidence of the existence in 1589 of a poem or
series of poems by Sir Walter Raleigh, set by Spenser on a level with
the best work of the age in verse. This poem was, until quite lately,
supposed to have vanished entirely and beyond all hope of recovery.
Until now, no one seems to have been aware that we hold in our hands a
fragment of Raleigh's _magnum opus_ of 1589 quite considerable enough to
give us an idea of the extent and character of the rest.[4]
In 1870 Archdeacon Hannah printed what he described as a 'continuation
of the lost poem, _Cynthia_,' from fragments in Sir Walter's own hand
among the Hatfield MSS. Dr. Hannah, however, misled by the character of
the handwriting, by some vague allusions, in one of the fragments, to a
prison captivity, and most of all, probably, by a difficulty in dates
which we can now for the first time explain, attributed these pieces to
1603-1618, that is to say to Raleigh's imprisonment in the Tower. The
second fragment, beginning 'My body in the walls captived,' belongs, no
doubt, to the later date. It is in a totally distinct metre from the
rest and has nothing to do with _Cynthia_. The first fragment bears the
stamp of much earlier date, but this also can be no part of Raleigh's
epic. The long passage then following, on the contrary, is, I think,
beyond question, a canto, almost complete, of the lost epic of 1589. It
is written in the four-line heroic stanza adopted ten years later by Sir
John Davies for his _Nosce teipsum_, and most familiar to us all in
Gray's _Churchyard Elegy_. Moreover, it is headed 'the Twenty-first and
Last Book of _The Ocean to Cynthia_.' Another note, in Raleigh's
handwriting, styles the poem _The Ocean's Love to Cynthia_, and this was
probably the full name of it. Spenser's name for Raleigh, the Shepherd,
or pastoral hero, of the Ocean, is therefore for the first time
explained. This twenty-first book suffers from the fact that stanzas,
but apparently not very many, have dropped out, in four places. With
these losses, the canto still contains 130 stanzas, or 526 lines.
Supposing the average length of the twenty preceding books to have been
the same, _The Ocean's Love to Cynthia_ must have contained at least ten
thousand lines. Spenser, therefore, was not exaggerating, or using the
language of flattery towards a few elegies or a group of sonnets, when
he spoke of _Cynthia_ as a poem of great importance. As a matter of
fact, no poem of the like ambition had been written in England for a
century past, and if it had been published, it would perhaps have taken
a place only second to its immediate contemporary, _The Faery Queen_.
At this very time, and in the midst of his poetical holiday, Raleigh was
actively engaged in defending the rights of the merchants of Waterford
and Wexford to carry on their trade in pipe-staves for casks. Raleigh
himself encouraged and took part in this exportation, having two ships
regularly engaged between Waterford and the Canaries. Traces of his
peaceful work in Munster still remain. Sir John Pope Hennessy says:
The richly perfumed yellow wallflowers that he brought to
Ireland from the Azores, and the Affane cherry, are still found
where he first planted them by the Blackwater. Some cedars he
brought to Cork are to this day growing, according to the local
historian, Mr. J. G. MacCarthy, at a place called Tivoli. The
four venerable yew-trees, whose branches have grown and
intermingled into a sort of summer-house thatch, are pointed out
as having sheltered Raleigh when he first smoked tobacco in his
Youghal garden. In that garden he also planted tobacco.... A few
steps further on, where the town-wall of the thirteenth century
bounds the garden of the Warden's house, is the famous spot
where the first Irish potato was planted by him. In that garden
he gave the tubers to the ancestor of the present Lord
Southwell, by whom they were spread throughout the province of
Munster.
These were boons to mankind which the zeal of Raleigh's agents had
brought back from across the western seas, gifts of more account in the
end than could be contained in all the palaces of Manoa, and all the
emerald mines of Trinidad, if only this great man could have followed
his better instinct and believed it.
Raleigh's habitual difficulty in serving under other men showed itself
this autumn in his dispute with the Irish Deputy, Sir William
Fitzwilliam, and led, perhaps, to his return early in the winter. We do
not know what circumstances led to his being taken back into Elizabeth's
favour again, but it was probably in November that he returned to
England, and took Spenser with him. Of this interesting passage in his
life we find again an account in _Colin Clout's come home again_.
Spencer says:
When thus our pipes we both had wearied well,
... and each an end of singing made,
He [Raleigh] gan to cast great liking to my lore,
And great disliking to my luckless lot;
and advised him to come to Court and be presented to 'Cynthia,'
Whose grace was great and bounty most rewardful.
He then devotes no less than ninety-five lines to a description of the
voyage, which was a very rough one, and at last he is brought by Raleigh
into the Queen's presence:
The shepherd of the ocean ...
Unto that goddess' grace me first enhanced,
And to my oaten pipe inclined her ear,
That she thenceforth therein gan take delight,
And it desired at timely hours to hear,
finally commanding the publication of it. On December 1, 1589, the
_Faery Queen_ was registered, and a pension of 50_l._ secured for the
poet. The supplementary letter and sonnets to Raleigh express Spenser's
generous recognition of the services his friend had performed for him,
and appeal to Raleigh, as 'the Summer's Nightingale, thy sovereign
goddess's most dear delight,' not to delay in publishing his own great
poem, the _Cynthia_. The first of the eulogistic pieces prefixed by
friends to the _Faery Queen_ was that noble and justly celebrated sonnet
signed W. R. which alone would justify Raleigh in taking a place among
the English poets.
Raleigh's position was once more secure in the sunlight. He could hold
Sir William Fitzwilliam informed, on December 29, that 'I take myself
far his better by the honourable office I hold, as well as by that
nearness to her Majesty which still I enjoy, and never more.' The next
two years were a sort of breathing space in Raleigh's career; he had
reached the table-land of his fortunes, and neither rose nor fell in
favour. The violent crisis of the Spanish Armada had marked the close of
an epoch at Court. In September 1588 Leicester died, in April 1590
Walsingham, in September 1591 Sir Christopher Hatton, three men in
whose presence, however apt Raleigh might be to vaunt his influence, he
could never have felt absolutely master. New men were coming on, but for
the moment the most violent and aggressive of his rivals, Essex, was
disposed to wave a flag of truce. Both Raleigh and Essex saw one thing
more clearly than the Queen herself, namely, that the loyalty of the
Puritans, whom Elizabeth disliked, was the great safeguard of the nation
against Catholic encroachment, and they united their forces in trying to
protect the interests of men like John Udall against the Queen's
turbulent prejudices. In March 1591 we find it absolutely recorded that
the Earl of Essex and Raleigh have joined 'as instruments from the
Puritans to the Queen upon any particular occasion of relieving them.'
With Essex, some sort of genuine Protestant fervour seems to have acted;
Raleigh, according to all evidence, was a man without religious
interests, but far before his age in tolerance for the opinions of
others, and he was swayed, no doubt, in this as in other cases, by his
dislike of persecution on the one hand, and his implacable enmity to
Spain on the other.
In May 1591, Raleigh was hurriedly sent down the Channel in a pinnace to
warn Lord Thomas Howard that Spanish ships had been seen near the Scilly
Islands. There was a project for sending a fleet of twenty ships to
Spain, and Raleigh was to be second in command, but the scheme was
altered. In November 1591 he first came before the public as an author
with a tract in which he celebrated the prowess of one of his best
friends and truest servants, Sir Richard Grenville, in a contest with
the Spaniard which is one of the most famous in English history.
Raleigh's little volume is entitled: _A Report of the Truth of the Fight
about the Iles of the Acores this last Sommer betwixt the 'Reuenge' and
an Armada of the King of Spaine_. The fight had taken place on the
preceding 10th of September; the odds against the 'Revenge' were so
excessive that Grenville was freely blamed for needless foolhardiness,
in facing 15,000 Spaniards with only 100 men. Raleigh wrote his _Report_
to justify the memory of his friend, and doubtless hastened its
publication that it might be received as evidence before Sir R.
Beville's commission, which was to meet a month later to inquire into
the circumstances of Grenville's death. Posterity has taken Raleigh's
view, and all Englishmen, from Lord Bacon to Lord Tennyson, have united
in praising this fight as one 'memorable even beyond credit, and to the
height of some heroical fable.'
The _Report_ of 1591 was anonymous, and it was Hakluyt first who, in
reprinting it in 1599, was permitted to state that it was 'penned by the
honourable Sir Walter Ralegh, knight.' Long entirely neglected, it has
of late become the best known of all its author's productions. It is
written in a sane and manly style, and marks the highest level reached
by English narrative prose as it existed before the waters were troubled
by the fashion of Euphues. Not issued with Raleigh's name, it was yet no
doubt at once recognised as his work, and it cannot have been without
influence in determining the policy of the country with Spain. The
author's enmity to the Spaniard is inveterate, and he is careful in an
eloquent introduction to prove that he is not actuated by resentment on
account of this one act of cruel cowardice, but by a divine anger,
justified by the events of years, 'against the ambitious and bloody
pretences of the Spaniard, who, seeking to devour all nations, shall be
themselves devoured.' The tract closes with a passionate appeal to the
loyalty of the English Catholics, who are warned by the sufferings of
Portugal that 'the obedience even of the Turk is easy and a liberty, in
respect of the slavery and tyranny of Spain,' and who will never be so
safe as when they are trusting in the clemency of her Majesty. All this
is in the highest degree characteristic of Raleigh, whose central idea
in life was not prejudice against the Catholic religion, for he was
singularly broad in this respect, but, in his own words, 'hatred of the
tyrannous prosperity of Spain.' This ran like a red strand through his
whole career from Smerwick to the block, and this was at once the
measure of his greatness and the secret of his fall.
It was formerly supposed that Raleigh came into possession of Sherborne,
his favourite country residence, in 1594, that is to say after the
Throckmorton incident. It is, however, in the highest degree improbable
that such an estate would be given to him after his fatal offence, and
in fact it is now certain that the lease was extended to him much
earlier, probably in October 1591. There is a pleasant legend that
Raleigh and one of his half-brothers were riding up to town from
Plymouth, when Raleigh's horse stumbled and threw him within the
precincts of a beautiful Dorsetshire estate, then in possession of the
Dean and Chapter of Salisbury, and that Raleigh, choosing to consider
that he had thus taken seisin of the soil, asked the Queen for
Sherborne Castle when he arrived at Court. It may have been on this
occasion that Elizabeth asked him when he would cease to be a beggar,
and received the reply, 'When your Majesty ceases to be a benefactor!'
His first lease included a payment of 260_l._ a year to the Bishop of
Salisbury, who asserted a claim to the property. In January 1592, after
the payment of a quarter's rent, Raleigh was confirmed in possession,
and began to improve and enjoy the property. It consisted of the manor
of Sherborne, with a large park, a castle which had to be repaired, and
several farms and hamlets, together with a street in the borough of
Sherborne itself. It is a curious fact that Raleigh had to present the
Queen with a jewel worth 250_l._ to induce her 'to make the Bishop,'
that is to say, to appoint to the see of Salisbury, now vacant, a man
who would consent to the alienation of such rich Church lands as the
manors of Sherborne and Yetminster. John Meeres, afterwards so
determined and exasperating an enemy of Raleigh's, was now[5] appointed
his bailiff, and Adrian Gilbert a sort of general overseer of the works.
Raleigh had been but two months settled in possession of Sherborne, with
his ninety-nine years' lease clearly made out, when he passed suddenly
out of the sunlight into the deepest shadow of approaching disfavour.
The year opened with promise of greater activity and higher public
honours than Raleigh had yet displayed and enjoyed. An expedition was to
be sent to capture the rich fleet of plate-ships, known as the Indian
Carracks, and then to push on to storm the pearl treasuries of Panama.
For the first time, Elizabeth had shown herself willing to trust her
favourite in person on the perilous western seas. Raleigh was to command
the fleet of fifteen ships, and under him was to serve the morose hero
of Cathay, the dreadful Sir Martin Frobisher. Raleigh was not only to be
admiral of the expedition, but its chief adventurer also, and in order
to bear this expense he had collected his available fortune from various
quarters, stripping himself of all immediate resources. To help him, the
Queen had bought The Ark Raleigh, his largest ship, for 5,000_l._; and
in February 1592 he was ready to sail. When the moment for parting came,
however, the Queen found it impossible to spare him, and Sir John
Burrough was appointed admiral.
It is exceedingly difficult to move with confidence in this obscure part
of our narrative. On March 10, 1592, we find Raleigh at Chatham, busy
about the wages of the sailors, and trying to persuade them to serve
under Frobisher, whose reputation for severity made him very unpopular.
He writes on that day to Sir Robert Cecil, and uses these ambiguous
expressions with regard to a rumour of which we now hear for the first
time:
I mean not to come away, as they say I will, for fear of a
marriage, and I know not what. If any such thing were, I would
have imparted it to yourself, before any man living; and
therefore, I pray, believe it not, and I beseech you to
suppress, what you can, any such malicious report. For I protest
before God, there is none, on the face of the earth, that I
would be fastened unto.
Raleigh was now in a desperate embarrassment. There was that concealed
in his private life which could only be condoned by absence; he had seen
before him an unexpected chance of escape from England, and now the
Queen's tedious fondness had closed it again. The desperate fault which
he had committed was that he had loved too well and not at all wisely a
beautiful orphan, Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, a
maid of honour to the Queen. It is supposed that she was two or three
and twenty at the time. Whether he seduced her, and married her after
his imprisonment in the Tower, or whether in the early months of 1592
there was a private marriage, has been doubted. The biographers of
Raleigh have preferred to believe the latter, but it is to be feared
that his fair fame in this matter cannot be maintained unsullied. Among
Sir Walter Raleigh's children one daughter appears to have been
illegitimate, 'my poor daughter, to whom I have given nothing, for his
sake who will be cruel to himself to preserve thee,' as he says to Lady
Raleigh in 1603, and it may be that it was the birth of this child which
brought down the vengeance of Queen Elizabeth upon their heads.
His clandestine relations with Elizabeth Throckmorton were not in
themselves without excuse. To be the favourite of Elizabeth, who had now
herself attained the sixtieth summer of her immortal charms, was
tantamount to a condemnation to celibacy. The vanity of Belphoebe
would admit no rival among high or low, and the least divergence from
the devotion justly due to her own imperial loveliness was a mortal sin.
What is less easy to forgive in Raleigh than that at the age of forty
he should have rebelled at last against this tyranny, is that he seems,
in the crisis of his embarrassment, to have abandoned the woman to whom
he could write long afterwards, 'I chose you and I loved you in my
happiest times.' After this brief dereliction, however, he returned to
his duty, and for the rest of his life was eminently faithful to the
wife whom he had taken under such painful circumstances.
There is a lacuna in the evidence as to what actually happened early in
1592; the late Mr. J. P. Collier filled up this gap with a convenient
letter, which has found its way into the histories of Raleigh, but the
original of which has never been seen by other eyes than the
transcriber's. What is certain is that Raleigh contrived to conceal the
state of things from the Queen, and to steal away to sea on the pretext
that he was merely accompanying Sir Martin Frobisher to the mouth of the
Channel. He says himself that on May 13, 1592, he was 'about forty
leagues off the Cape Finisterre.' It was reported that the Queen sent a
ship after him to insist on his return, but such a messenger would have
had little chance of finding him when once he had reached the latitude
of Portugal, and it is more reasonable to suppose that after straying
away as far as he dared, he came back again of his own accord. On June 8
he was still living unmolested in Durham House, and dealing, as a person
in authority, with certain questions of international navigation. Three
weeks later the Queen seems to have discovered, what everyone about her
knew already, the nature of Raleigh's relations with Elizabeth
Throckmorton. On July 28 Sir Edward Stafford wrote to Anthony Bacon:
'If you have anything to do with Sir Walter Raleigh, or any love to make
to Mrs. Throckmorton, at the Tower to-morrow you may speak with them.'
It was four years before Raleigh was admitted again to the presence of
his enraged Belphoebe.
Needless prominence has been given to this imprisonment of Raleigh's,
which lasted something less than two months. He was exceedingly restive
under constraint, however, and filled the air with the picturesque
clamour of his distress. His first idea was to soften the Queen's heart
by outrageous protestations of anxious devotion to her person. The
following passage from a letter to Sir Robert Cecil is remarkable in
many ways, curious as an example of affected passion in a soldier of
forty for a maiden of sixty, curious as a piece of carefully modulated
Euphuistic prose in the fashion of the hour, most curious as the
language of a man from whom the one woman that he really loved was
divided by the damp wall of a prison:
My heart was never broken till this day, that I hear the Queen
goes away so far off, whom I have followed so many years with so
great love and desire, in so many journeys, and am now left
behind her, in a dark prison all alone. While she was yet nigher
at hand, that I might hear of her once in two or three days, my
sorrows were the less; but even now my heart is cast into the
depth of all misery. 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, like a nymph;
sometime sitting in the shade like a goddess; sometime singing
like an angel; sometime playing like Orpheus. Behold the sorrow
of this world! Once amiss, hath bereaved me of all. O Glory,
that only shineth in misfortune, what is become of thy
assurance? All wounds have scars, but that of fantasy; all
affections their relenting, but that of womankind. Who is the
judge of friendship, but adversity? or when is grace witnessed,
but in offences? There were no divinity, but by reason of
compassion for revenges are brutish and mortal. All those times
past, the loves, the sights, the sorrows, the desires, can they
not weigh down one frail misfortune? Cannot one drop of salt be
hidden in so great heaps of sweetness? I may then conclude,
_Spes et fortuna, valete_! She is gone in whom I trusted, and of
me hath not one thought of mercy, nor any respect of that that
was. Do with me now, therefore, what you list. I am more weary
of life than they are desirous I should perish.
He kept up this comedy of passion with wonderful energy. One day, when
the royal barge, passing down to Gravesend, crossed below his window, he
raved and stormed, swearing that his enemies had brought the Queen
thither 'to break his gall in sunder with Tantalus' torment.' Another
time he protested that he must disguise himself as a boatman, and just
catch a sight of the Queen, or else his heart would break. He drew his
dagger on his keeper, Sir George Carew, and broke the knuckles of Sir
Arthur Gorges, because he said they were restraining him from the sight
of his Mistress. He proposed to Lord Howard of Effingham at the close of
a business letter, that he should be thrown to feed the lions, 'to save
labour,' as the Queen was still so cruel. Sir Arthur Gorges was in
despair; he thought that Raleigh was going mad. 'He will shortly grow,'
he said, 'to be Orlando Furioso, if the bright Angelica persevere
against him a little longer.'
It was all a farce, of course, but underneath the fantastic affectation
there was a very real sentiment, that of the intolerable tedium of
captivity. Raleigh had been living a life of exaggerated activity, never
a month at rest, now at sea, now in Devonshire, now at Court, hurrying
hither and thither, his horse and he one veritable centaur. Among the
Euphuistic 'tears of fancy' which he sent from the Tower, there occurs
this little sentence, breathing the most complete sincerity: 'I live to
trouble you at this time, being become like a fish cast on dry land,
gasping for breath, with lame legs and lamer lungs.' There was no man
then in England whom it was more cruel to shut up in a cage. This
reference to his lungs is the first announcement of the failure of his
health. Raleigh's constitution was tough, but he had a variety of
ailments, and a tendency to rheumatism and to consumption was among
them. In later years we shall find that the damp cells of the Tower
filled his joints with pain, and reduced him with a weakening cough. But
long before his main imprisonment his joints and his lungs were
troublesome to him.
Meanwhile the great privateering expedition in which Raleigh had
launched his fortune was proceeding to its destination in the Azores. No
such enterprise had been as yet undertaken by English adventurers. It
was a strictly private effort, but the Queen in her personal capacity
had contributed two ships and 1,800_l._, and the citizens of London
6,000_l._, but Raleigh retained by far the largest share. Raleigh had
been a week in the Tower, when Admiral Sir John Burrough, who had
divided the fleet and had left Frobisher on the coast of Spain, joined
to his contingent two London ships, the 'Golden Dragon' and the
'Prudence,' and lay in wait under Flores for the great line of
approaching carracks. The largest of these, the 'Madre de Dios,' was the
most famous plate-ship of the day, carrying what in those days seemed
almost incredible, no less than 1,800 tons. Her cargo, brought through
Indian seas from the coast of Malabar, was valued when she started at
500,000_l._ She was lined with glowing woven carpets, sarcenet quilts,
and lengths of white silk and cyprus; she carried in chests of
sandalwood and ebony such store of rubies and pearls, such porcelain and
ivory and rock crystal, such great pots of musk and planks of cinnamon,
as had never been seen on all the stalls of London. Her hold smelt like
a garden of spices for all the benjamin and cloves, the nutmegs and the
civet, the ambergris and frankincense. There was a fight before
Raleigh's ship the 'Roebuck' could seize this enormous prize, yet
somewhat a passive one on the part of the lumbering carrack, such a
fight as may ensue between a great rabbit and the little stoat that
sucks its life out. When she was entered, it was found that pilferings
had gone on already at every port at which she had called; and the
English sailors had done their share before Burrough could arrive on
board; the jewels and the lighter spices were badly tampered with, but
in the general rejoicing over so vast a prize this was not much
regarded. Through seas so tempestuous that it seemed at one time likely
that she would sink in the Atlantic, the 'Madre de Dios' was at last
safely brought into Dartmouth, on September 8.
The arrival of the 'Madre de Dios' on the Queen's birthday had something
like the importance of a national event. No prize of such value had ever
been captured before. When all deduction had been made for treasure
lost or pilfered or squandered, there yet remained a total value of
141,000_l._ in the money of that day. The fact that all this wealth was
lying in Dartmouth harbour was more than the tradesmen of London could
bear. Before the Queen's commissioners could assemble, half the usurers
and shopkeepers in the City had hurried down into Devonshire to try and
gather up a few of the golden crumbs. Raleigh, meanwhile, was ready to
burst his heart with fretting in the Tower, until it suddenly appeared
that this very concourse and rabble at Dartmouth would render his
release imperative. No one but he could cope with Devonshire in its
excitement, and Lord Burghley determined on sending him to Dartmouth.
Robert Cecil, writing from Exeter to his father on September 19,
reported that for seven miles everybody he met on the London road smelt
of amber or of musk, and that you could not open a bag without finding
seed-pearls in it. 'My Lord!' he says, 'there never was such spoil.'
Raleigh's presence was absolutely necessary, for Cecil could do nothing
with the desperate and obstinate merchants and sailors.
On September 21, Raleigh arrived at Dartmouth with his keeper, Blount.
Cecil was amazed to find the disgraced favourite so popular in
Devonshire. 'I assure you,' he says, 'his poor servants to the number of
one hundred and forty, goodly men, and all the mariners, came to him
with such shouts and joy as I never saw a man more troubled to quiet
them in my life. But his heart is broken, for he is extremely pensive
longer than he is busied, in which he can toil terribly, but if you did
hear him rage at the spoils, finding all the short wares utterly
devoured, you would laugh as I do, which I cannot choose. The meeting
between him and Sir John Gilbert was with tears on Sir John's part; and
he belike finding it known he had a keeper, wherever he is saluted with
congratulation for liberty, he doth answer, "No, I am still the Queen of
England's poor captive." I wished him to conceal it, because here it
doth diminish his credit, which I do vow to you before God is greater
among the mariners than I thought for. I do grace him as much as I may,
for I find him marvellously greedy to do anything to recover the conceit
of his brutish offence.'
Raleigh broke into rage at finding so many of his treasures lost, and he
gave out that if he met with any London jewellers or goldsmiths in
Devonshire, were it on the wildest heath in all the county, he would
strip them as naked as when they were born. He raved against the
commissioners and the captains, against Cecil and against Cross. As was
his wont, he showed no tact or consideration towards those who were
engaged with or just above him; but about the end of September business
cooled his wrath, and he settled down to a division of the prize. On
September 27, the Commissioners of Inquiry sent in to Burghley and
Howard a report of their proceedings with respect to the 'Madre de
Dios'; this report is signed by Cecil, Raleigh, Sir Francis Drake, and
three other persons. They had carried on their search for stolen
treasure so rigorously that even the Admiral's chests were examined
against his will. They confess their disappointment at finding in them
nothing more tempting than some taffetas embroidered with Chinese gold,
and a bunch of seed-pearl.
Sir Walter Raleigh now married or acknowledged Elizabeth Throckmorton,
and in February 1593 Sir Robert Cecil procured some sort of surly
recognition of the marriage from the Queen. For this Lady Raleigh thanks
him in a strange flowery letter[6] of the 8th of that month, in which
she excuses her husband for his denial of her--'if faith were broken
with me, I was yet far away'--and shows an affectionate solicitude for
his future. It seems that Raleigh's first idea on finding himself free
was to depart on an expedition to America, and this Lady Raleigh
strongly objects to. In her alembicated style she says to Cecil, 'I hope
for my sake you will rather draw for Walter towards the east than help
him forward toward the sunset, if any respect to me or love to him be
not forgotten. But every month hath his flower and every season his
contentment, and you great councillors are so full of new councils, as
you are steady in nothing, but we poor souls that have bought sorrow at
a high price, desire, and can be pleased with, the same misfortune we
hold, fearing alterations will but multiply misery, of which we have
already felt sufficient.' The poor woman had her way for the present,
and for two full years her husband contented himself with a quiet and
obscure life among the woods of Sherborne.
For the next year we get scanty traces of Raleigh's movements from his
own letters. In May 1593 his health, shaken by his imprisonment, gave
him some uneasiness, and he went to Bath to drink the waters, but
without advantage. In August of that year we find him busy in
Gillingham Forest, and he gives Sir Robert Cecil a roan gelding in
exchange for a rare Indian falcon. In the autumn he is engaged on the
south coast in arranging quarrels between English and French fishermen.
In April 1594 he captures a live Jesuit, 'a notable stout villain,' with
all 'his copes and bulls,' in Lady Stourton's house, which was a very
warren of dangerous recusants. But he soon gets tired of these small
activities. The sea at Weymouth and at Plymouth put out its arms to him
and wooed him. To hunt 'notable Jesuit knaves' and to sit on the granite
judgment-seat of the Stannaries were well, but life offered more than
this to Raleigh. In June 1594 he tells Cecil that he will serve the
Queen as a poor private mariner or soldier if he may only be allowed to
be stirring abroad, and the following month there is a still more urgent
appeal for permission to go with the Lord Admiral to Brittany. He has a
quarrel meanwhile with the Dean and Chapter of Sarum, who have let his
Sherborne farms over his head to one Fitzjames, and 'who could not deal
with me worse withal if I were a Turk.' But a month later release has
come. The plague has broken up his home, his wife and son are sent in
opposite directions, and he himself has leave to be free at last; with
God's favour and the Queen's he will sail into 'the sunset' that Lady
Raleigh had feared so much, and will conquer for England the fabulous
golden cities of Guiana.