ROYAL FAVOUR (1581-1582).
[Sidenote: _Ralegh and Grey._]
This visit of Ralegh's to the Court was the turning-point in his career.
How it became that has been explained in different ways. According to
Naunton a variance between him and Grey drew both over to plead their
cause. Naunton goes on to say that Ralegh 'had much the better in
telling of his tale; and so much that the Queen and the lords took no
slight mark of the man and his parts; for from thence he came to be
known, and to have access to the Queen and the lords.' It is natural to
suppose that Ralegh's Irish campaigns were concerned with his sudden
rise at Court. Thenceforward he was a high authority on Irish policy.
His Irish experience continued to be the sheet-anchor of his ascendency
with the Queen. Naunton's tale, too, is supported by evidence from the
Hatfield and the Irish State papers of Ralegh's disposition to form and
push Irish plans of his own, and of Grey's keen jealousy of the habit.
Burleigh on January 1, 1582, in a letter to the Lord Deputy, mentioned
that Mr. Rawley had informed her Majesty how the charge of five or six
hundred soldiers for the garrison of Munster might be shifted from the
Queen to the province without umbrage to Ormond, its most powerful
land-owner. To this the Lord Deputy speedily replied, vehemently
criticising 'the plot delivered by Captain Rawley unto her Majesty.' He
condemned it as a plausible fancy, 'affecting credit with profit,' but
'framed upon impossibilities for others to execute.' To Walsingham he
complained bitterly of misrepresentations at Court in the same January,
and, in the following April, declared that he 'neither liked Captain
Rawley's carriage, nor his company.' On the other hand, Grey is not
known to have returned from Ireland till August, 1582; and the Council
Register contains no reference to a personal controversy between Ralegh
and him. But Ralegh may well have privately expounded to the Queen and
some Privy Councillors his views, which would then have been transmitted
to Grey to answer. Naunton's mistake in confronting the Deputy and the
self-confident Captain directly at the Council board does not seriously
affect the value otherwise of his statement. Still, the account of
Ralegh's admittance to the Queen's favour, with its particular
circumstances, rests, it must be remembered, on Naunton's own not
unimpeachable authority. Other authors who tell the same story, have
simply and unsuspiciously borrowed it from him. Students of Ralegh's
history have to accustom themselves to the use by successive biographers
of the same hypothetical facts with as much boldness as if they had been
the fruit of each writer's independent research.
[Sidenote: _Fuller's Tale._]
Another account attributes to Leicester Ralegh's sudden favour on his
return from Ireland. A few months before he was, we have seen,
soliciting the Earl for a change of employment. His introduction at
Court may have been the answer. Sir Henry Wotton, adopting the view,
cynically surmised that Leicester wished to 'bestow handsomely upon
another some part of the pains, and perhaps of the envy, to which long
indulgent fortune is obnoxious.' By others, whom Scott has partly
followed, the Earl of Sussex has been credited with the elevation of
Ralegh, as a counterpoise to Leicester. Neither the one noble nor the
other, it was supposed, could have patriotically desired to enrol in the
public service the most effective of recruits. Amongst all the subtle
solutions of the mystery of Ralegh's leap into prominence, Fuller's
well-worn story, which is now Scott's, commends itself for comparative
simplicity. Everybody has heard how her Majesty, meeting with a plashy
place, made some scruple to go on; when Ralegh, 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. Fuller, again, it is who vouches for the sequel of
the incident. Ralegh, he says, having thus attracted notice, wrote on a
window, which Elizabeth was to pass--
Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall.
Elizabeth capped it with
If thy heart fails thee, climb not at all.
[Sidenote: _Not Improbable._]
Some of Ralegh's later biographers have felt so intensely the
seriousness of their task, that they either omit or ridicule the legend.
The whole appeared first in the _Worthies_, published in 1662. No
documentary proof can be given of its veracity; and there is no
disproof. The opportunity might easily have occurred; and Ralegh was of
an eagerness and an adroitness not to have let it slip. Undoubtedly the
anecdote has the intrinsic merit beyond the rest of pointing to the
final and determining agent in his change of fortune. All the other
answers to the enigma may contain an ingredient of truth. Leicester
would recognize his capacity, and might have been ready to use him.
Sussex would perceive the danger of allowing so redoubtable a free lance
to pass to a rival service. Walsingham and Burleigh were manifestly
impressed with his extraordinary sagacity and strength of will. His
Irish services, which had called forth the admiration of Grey himself so
long as Ralegh fought under him, could not fail to be appreciated by the
Queen's wise councillors. He was backed by the vast family circles of
the Gilberts and Champernouns. In his later life he could speak of 'an
hundred gentlemen of my kindred.' He was no novice at the Court itself,
which he had studied for years before it recognized him as an inmate.
But Leicester and Sussex, like Grey, and even Burleigh and Walsingham,
though they might have employed him, and have bandied him among them,
would have concurred in keeping him in the background. To Elizabeth
herself may confidently be ascribed the personal decision that he was to
be acknowledged, and not merely used, but distinguished.
[Sidenote: _The Queen's Choice._]
To the Queen he owed his emergence from an obscurity, which posterity
wonders to find enveloping him till thirty. His was not a nature which
ripens late. As a boy at home, as an undergraduate at Oxford, as an
adventurer in France, as a seaman in the Atlantic, as a military leader
in Munster, as a commencing courtier, he might have been expected to
flash forth from the mass of his comrades. No apathy of contemporary
opinion is to blame for the long delay. Rather it was the hurry and the
glitter of contemporary life. A nation, like the English under
Elizabeth, facing the dawn of a new age, does not pause to mark degrees
of individual brightness. All eyes are dazzled with the radiance of the
era itself. The few rare and peculiar stars are not discriminated as
shining with a lustre of their own. The Queen would not be better able
than her subjects to measure the particular mode in which Ralegh
overtopped his neighbours. She discerned the special gifts which others
discerned, the 'good presence in a handsome and well compacted person;
the strong natural wit and a better judgment, with a bold and plausible
tongue, whereby he could set out his parts to the best advantage.' She
was diverted by his flights of fancy emphasized by the broad Devon
accent, which, to the day of his death, he never lost, or tried to lose.
She must have been conscious of depths of capacity, to which, whatever
the exigency, appeal was never made in vain. But the surpassing
attraction for her was the feeling that he and his grandeur were her
creature and creation.
[Sidenote: _Scandal._]
Personally she chose him, and she exacted that his service should be
personally rendered to her. He understood the conditions of his tenure
of influence, and generally fulfilled them faithfully. She knew, and he
knew, that he was selected for gifts which made him a valuable servant
of the State, as impersonated in its chief. Yet it is not strange that,
in an age of coarse feeling, and coarser language, his elevation should
have been attributed to mere feminine weakness. It is much more
surprising that the warning, 'No scandal about Queen Elizabeth,' should
have been disregarded by grave modern historians and biographers. Mr.
Edward Edwards, for instance, Ralegh's most thorough and painstaking
biographer since the learned but unmethodical Oldys, takes the report
for granted, and appears to think it honourable. The belief cannot bear
the least examination. Elizabeth was in the habit of requiring all her
courtiers to kneel to her as woman as well as Queen, to hail her at once
Gloriana and Belphoebe. The fashion was among her instruments of
government. By appealing to the devotion of her courtiers as lovers, she
hoped to kindle their zeal in serving their Queen. They who mock at her
claims to adoration as the Lady of the land are ungrateful to a policy
which preserved the tone of English society for a generation romantic,
poetical, and chivalrous. In pursuance of her usual system, and in
innocence of any vice but vanity, she was sure to invite the language of
passion from the owner of genius and looks like Ralegh's. She played
upon his Christian name, writing it as she and others pronounced it,
Water. She enjoyed the anger her kindness aroused in other admirers,
such as Hatton. He was willing to offer the homage for which she
thirsted. So were other courtiers by the dozen. Cautious methodical
George Carew wrote to her when she was seventy, and nearing the grave,
envying 'the blessing others enjoy in beholding your Royal person whose
beauty adorns the world.' Of sensual love between her and Ralegh there
is not a tittle of evidence which will be accepted by any who do not
start by presuming in her the morals of a courtesan. In support of the
calumny, passages of the _Faerie Queene_ have been cited, in which the
poet has been interpreted as literally and as illiberally as the
courtier. Fastidious Spenser would have shuddered to imagine the coarse
construction against his Queen to which his delicate allegories were to
be wrested. Had there been ground for the legend, we may feel tolerably
certain that Lady Ralegh would have known of it. She could not have
refrained from hinting at a motive for the wrath with which, it will
hereafter be seen, her mistress visited her transgression.
[Sidenote: _Ralegh's Versatility._]
Ralegh himself may not have been sufficiently careful to guard against a
fable flattering to his charms, if injurious to his independence. He
furthered malignant humours in his own time by his fondness for personal
adornment. His lavish vanity seems to have been taken as proof of his
and his Sovereign's amours. He must in any case, by no fault of his own,
but by the excessive bounty of nature in heaping courtly graces upon
him, have been exposed to the liability of misconstruction by later
ages. Measured by his force of character and his acts he has as little
as possible in common with a Leicester or a Hatton. Yet posterity,
misled by tradition, has never been sure whether his distinctive
vocation were not that of a fine gentleman. Contemporaries, partly from
misapprehension, partly from admiration, and partly from jealousy, tried
to fasten him to that. When the splendour of his exploits by sea and
land demonstrated him to be more than a courtier, they ranked him as
seaman or swordsman. His versatility lent itself to the error, and
operated to the disappointment of his real aim. His constant effort was
to be accepted and trusted as a serious statesman. He might have
attained his end more completely if his absorption in it had dimmed the
brightness of his marvellous intelligence, or deadened his delight in
its gymnastics. But he had to live his life according to his nature. The
multiplicity of his interests separates him from others of his mental
level. He loved power, both the contest for it and its exercise. He
coveted money for its uses, and equally for the inspiring experiences
involved in its acquisition. He liked to act the patron, and was content
in turn to play the client. He loved toil, and he could enjoy ease. He
revelled in the strifes of statesmanship and the physical perils of
battles and travel. He resembled his period, with its dangers and
glories, its possibilities of Spanish dungeons and Spanish plunder, its
uncertainties of theology and morality. He had a natural gift for
deriving pleasure from his actual circumstances, a dull and brutal civil
war, or a prison, though none could utter more dismal groans. By
predilection he basked in a Court, where simultaneously he could adore
its mistress and help to sway her sceptre.
[Sidenote: _His Aspect._]
[Sidenote: _Dates of Portraits._]
Hitherto his career had been run outside the verge of chronicles. Its
early stages left few direct records. They have to be pieced together by
retrospective allusions proceeding from himself or others, after he had
already risen. The difficulties of his biographers are not at an end
when he has mounted into the full blaze of publicity. His name
thenceforth was in a multitude of mouths; yet much in his character,
position, and motives always remains shadowy and uncertain. His
appearance at the time it was winning an entrance for him at Court can
only be conjectured. He was tall and well-proportioned, with thick curly
locks, beard, and mustache, full red lips, bluish-grey eyes, and the
high forehead and long bold face, remarked in a contemporary epigram.
Aubrey describes him by report similarly, with the addition that he was
sour eye-lidded. His characteristic features, and the 'general aspect of
ascendency,' were the same in youth and in later life. They are vividly
represented by several extant portraits, by Zucchero's, somewhat wanting
in repose and dignity, at Longleat; by another of Zucchero's, now in the
National Gallery of Ireland, the original of the print in Sir Henry
Ellis's collection of letters, representing Ralegh at forty-four, with a
map of Cadiz; by that at Knole, from which Vertue's print in Oldys's
Life probably was engraved; by that of 1588, formerly in Sir Carew
Ralegh's house at Downton, and now in the National Portrait Gallery; by
one belonging to Mr. J.D. Wingfield Digby; by one, dated 1618, in the
possession of Mr. T.L. Thurlow; and by the best, in Mr. George Scharf's
decisive judgment, the picture in possession of Sir John Farnaby
Lennard, at Wickham Court, Kent. The last, the original of Houbraken's
engraving, was painted in 1602 for the Carews of Beddington. Young
Walter, then eight years old, stands by Ralegh's side, a handsome boy,
richly dressed, with features, as they remained in later life, like his
father's, and the same air of command. A picture, described as by
Cornelius Janssen, sold at Christie's rooms in December, 1890,
represents a visage worn and sombre, the hair on the head thin. As the
artist's first commonly acknowledged portraits taken in England are
dated 1618, the work, if by Janssen, must have been executed after
Ralegh's second Guiana expedition, and might naturally exhibit these
traits. There are also several contemporary miniatures, one, in
particular, at Belvoir Castle. This is of especial interest, on account
of the age inscribed, sixty-five, and the year, 1618, which imply a
belief that he was born later than 1552. From the date, 1618, and the
representation of a battle, on the companion miniature of young Walter,
apparently by the same hand, it may be inferred that the portrait of the
father was, as that of the son must have been, painted after the second
voyage to Guiana. Probably, to judge from the combination of Lady
Ralegh's and her husband's initials on the back, it was executed for
her. In it, to a degree even beyond the portrait attributed to Janssen,
the hair of the head is pathetically white. Though elsewhere the marks
of age have not been so openly betrayed, all the extant portraits,
unless that in the National Portrait Gallery be an exception, were
executed after he had reached middle life. He may be beheld in most of
them as he appeared to his rivals and partisans, the veteran knight in
magnificent apparel, pearls, and silver armour, haughty and subtle,
tanned, hardened, and worn with voyages to the Spanish Main and fighting
at Cadiz, 'Ralegh the witch,' the 'scourge of Spain,' the 'soldier,
sailor, scholar, courtier, orator, historian, and philosopher.' We do
not see the daredevil trooper of Languedoc and Munster, the duellist,
the master of the roistering watch-beating Paunsfords. He is not visible
as pictured to the vivid fancy of the author of _Kenilworth_, the
youthful aspirant, graceful, eager, slender, dark, restless, and
supercilious, with a sonnet or an epigram ever ready on his lips to
delight friends and sting enemies.
[Sidenote: _Spelling of Name._]
[Sidenote: _Seventy-four Forms._]
The spelling of his name for the first thirty-two years of his life was
as vague and unsettled as his acts. There was no standard of orthography
for surnames till the latter part of the seventeenth century. Neither
the owners, nor others, were slaves to uniformity. Posterity has used
its own liberty of selection, often very arbitrarily. Robert Cecil, for
instance, signed his name Cecyll, and nobody follows him, not even his
descendants. For Ralegh's name his contemporaries never had a fixed rule
to the end of him. Transcribers with the signature clear before them
would not copy it; they could not keep to one form of their own. His
correspondents and friends followed the idea of the moment. Lord
Burleigh wrote Rawly. Robert Cecil wrote to him as Rawley, Raleigh, and
Ralegh. A secretary of Cecil wrote Raweley and Rawlegh. King James, for
whom in Scotland he had been Raulie, wrote once at any rate, and Carew
Ralegh commonly, Raleigh. Carew's son Philip spelt his name both Raleigh
and Ralegh. Lady Ralegh signed one letter Raleigh, but all others which
have been preserved, Ralegh. The only known signature of young Walter is
Ralegh. The Privy Council wrote the name Raleghe, Rawleighe, and
Rawleigh. George Villiers spelt it Raughleigh, and Cobham, Rawlye. In
Irish State Papers he is Rawleie. Lord Henry Howard wrote Rawlegh and
Rawlie. The Lord Admiral called him Rawlighe. For some he was Raileigh,
Raughlie, and Rauleigh. In a warrant he was Raleighe, and in the
register of Stepney Church, Raylie. Naunton wrote Rawleigh and Raghley,
and Milton, in a manuscript commonplace book, Raugleigh. Sir Edward
Peyton in his book spelt the name Rawliegh. Stukely in his Apology spelt
it Raligh. The name to his verses printed in Gascoigne's volume is
Rawely, and in a manuscript poem it is Wrawly. In another manuscript
poem it is Raghlie. Puttenham printed it Rawleygh. In the wonderful mass
of manuscripts at Lambeth, collected by Sir George Carew, who kept every
paper sent him, though his correspondents might beg him to burn their
letters, the name, beside forms already given, appears spelt as Ralighe,
Raule, Rawlee, Rauley, Rawleye, Raulyghe, Rawlyghe, and Ralleigh. In a
letter from Sir Thomas Norreys in the equally wonderful, but less
admirable, pile of Lismore papers, he is Raulighe. In the books of the
Stationers' Company he is Rawleighe, and Rauleighe in the copy in the
Harleian MSS. of the discourse of 1602 on a War with Spain. In
Drummond's Conversations with Ben Jonson he is Raughlie. References
occur to him in Mr. Andrew Clark's _Oxford Register_, as Rallegh,
Rawlei, Rauly, Raughley, Raughly, Raughleigh, Raylye, and Rolye.
Foreigners referred to him as Ralle, Ralle, Raleghus, Raleich, Raleik,
Raulaeus, Rale, Real, Reali, Ralego, and Rhalegh. In addition, I have
found in lists compiled by Dr. Brushfield the name spelt Raley, Raleye,
Raleagh, Raleygh, Raleyghe, Ralli, Raughleye, Rauleghe, Raulghe,
Raweleigh, Raylygh, Reigley, Rhaleigh, Rhaley, Rhaly, and Wrawley.
Ralegh himself had not kept the same spelling throughout his life. Down
to 1583 his more usual signature had been the phonetic Rauley. But in
1578 he signed as Rawleyghe a deed which his father signed as Ralegh,
and his brother Carew as Rawlygh. A letter of March 17, 1583, is the
first he is known to have signed as Ralegh; and in the following April
and May he reverted to the signature Rauley. From June 9, 1584, he used
till his death no other signature than Ralegh. It appears in his books
when the name is mentioned. It is used in a pedigree drawn up for him in
1601. Of the hundred and sixty-nine letters collected by Mr. Edward
Edwards, a hundred and thirty-five are thus signed. Six signed Rauley,
one Raleghe, and one Rauleigh, belong to an earlier date. The rest are
either unsigned or initialled. The reason of his adoption of the
spelling Ralegh from 1584, unless that it was his dead father's, is
unknown. Of the fact there is no doubt. The spelling Raleigh, which
posterity has preferred, happens to be one he is not known to have ever
employed.