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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time, by Charles
+Kingsley
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions 
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at 
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+
+
+
+Title: Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time
+
+
+Author: Charles Kingsley
+
+
+
+Release Date: December 26, 2014  [eBook #3143]
+[This file was first posted on January 2, 2001]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME***
+
+
+Transcribed from “Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays” 1890
+Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+
+
+
+
+                   SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME {87}
+
+
+‘TRUTH is stranger than fiction.’  A trite remark.  We all say it again
+and again: but how few of us believe it!  How few of us, when we read the
+history of heroical times and heroical men, take the story simply as it
+stands!  On the contrary, we try to explain it away; to prove it all not
+to have been so very wonderful; to impute accident, circumstance, mean
+and commonplace motives; to lower every story down to the level of our
+own littleness, or what we (unjustly to ourselves and to the God who is
+near us all) choose to consider our level; to rationalise away all the
+wonders, till we make them at last impossible, and give up caring to
+believe them; and prove to our own melancholy satisfaction that Alexander
+conquered the world with a pin, in his sleep, by accident.
+
+And yet in this mood, as in most, there is a sort of left-handed truth
+involved.  These heroes are not so far removed from us after all.  They
+were men of like passions with ourselves, with the same flesh about them,
+the same spirit within them, the same world outside, the same devil
+beneath, the same God above.  They and their deeds were not so very
+wonderful.  Every child who is born into the world is just as wonderful,
+and, for aught we know, might, _mutatis mutandis_, do just as wonderful
+deeds.  If accident and circumstance helped them, the same may help us:
+have helped us, if we will look back down our years, far more than we
+have made use of.
+
+They were men, certainly, very much of our own level: but may we not put
+that level somewhat too low?  They were certainly not what we are; for if
+they had been, they would have done no more than we: but is not a man’s
+real level not what he is, but what he can be, and therefore ought to be?
+No doubt they were compact of good and evil, just as we: but so was
+David, no man more; though a more heroical personage (save One) appears
+not in all human records but may not the secret of their success have
+been that, on the whole (though they found it a sore battle), they
+refused the evil and chose the good?  It is true, again, that their great
+deeds may be more or less explained, attributed to laws, rationalised:
+but is explaining always explaining away?  Is it to degrade a thing to
+attribute it to a law?  And do you do anything more by ‘rationalising’
+men’s deeds than prove that they were rational men; men who saw certain
+fixed laws, and obeyed them, and succeeded thereby, according to the
+Baconian apophthegm, that nature is conquered by obeying her?
+
+But what laws?
+
+To that question, perhaps, the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the
+Hebrews will give the best answer, where it says, that by faith were done
+all the truly great deeds, and by faith lived all the truly great men who
+have ever appeared on earth.
+
+There are, of course, higher and lower degrees of this faith; its object
+is one more or less worthy: but it is in all cases the belief in certain
+unseen eternal facts, by keeping true to which a man must in the long run
+succeed.  Must; because he is more or less in harmony with heaven, and
+earth, and the Maker thereof, and has therefore fighting on his side a
+great portion of the universe; perhaps the whole; for as he who breaks
+one commandment of the law is guilty of the whole, because he denies the
+fount of all law, so he who with his whole soul keeps one commandment of
+it is likely to be in harmony with the whole, because he testifies of the
+fount of all law.
+
+I shall devote a few pages to the story of an old hero, of a man of like
+passions with ourselves; of one who had the most intense and awful sense
+of the unseen laws, and succeeded mightily thereby; of one who had hard
+struggles with a flesh and blood which made him at times forget those
+laws, and failed mightily thereby; of one whom God so loved that He
+caused each slightest sin, as with David, to bring its own punishment
+with it, that while the flesh was delivered over to Satan, the man
+himself might be saved in the Day of the Lord; of one, finally, of whom
+nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand may say, ‘I have done
+worse deeds than he: but I have never done as good ones.’
+
+In a poor farm-house among the pleasant valleys of South Devon, among the
+white apple-orchards and the rich water-meadows, and the red fallows and
+red kine, in the year of grace 1552, a boy was born, as beautiful as day,
+and christened Walter Raleigh.  His father was a gentleman of ancient
+blood: few older in the land: but, impoverished, he had settled down upon
+the wreck of his estate, in that poor farm-house.  No record of him now
+remains; but he must have been a man worth knowing and worth loving, or
+he would not have won the wife he did.  She was a Champernoun, proudest
+of Norman squires, and could probably boast of having in her veins the
+blood of Courtneys, Emperors of Byzant.  She had been the wife of the
+famous knight Sir Otho Gilbert, and lady of Compton Castle, and had borne
+him three brave sons, John, Humphrey, and Adrian; all three destined to
+win knighthood also in due time, and the two latter already giving
+promises, which they well fulfilled, of becoming most remarkable men of
+their time.  And yet the fair Champernoun, at her husband’s death, had
+chosen to wed Mr. Raleigh, and share life with him in the little
+farm-house at Hayes.  She must have been a grand woman, if the law holds
+true that great men always have great mothers; an especially grand woman,
+indeed; for few can boast of having borne to two different husbands such
+sons as she bore.  No record, as far as we know, remains of her; nor of
+her boy’s early years.  One can imagine them, nevertheless.
+
+Just as he awakes to consciousness, the Smithfield fires are
+extinguished.  He can recollect, perhaps, hearing of the burning of the
+Exeter martyrs: and he does not forget it; no one forgot or dared forget
+it in those days.  He is brought up in the simple and manly, yet
+high-bred ways of English gentlemen in the times of ‘an old courtier of
+the Queen’s.’  His two elder half-brothers also, living some thirty miles
+away, in the quaint and gloomy towers of Compton Castle, amid the
+apple-orchards of Torbay, are men as noble as ever formed a young lad’s
+taste.  Humphrey and Adrian Gilbert, who afterwards, both of them, rise
+to knighthood, are—what are they not?—soldiers, scholars, Christians,
+discoverers and ‘planters’ of foreign lands, geographers, alchemists,
+miners, Platonical philosophers; many-sided, high-minded men, not without
+fantastic enthusiasm; living heroic lives, and destined, one of them, to
+die a heroic death.  From them Raleigh’s fancy has been fired, and his
+appetite for learning quickened, while he is yet a daring boy, fishing in
+the gray trout-brooks, or going up with his father to the Dartmoor hills
+to hunt the deer with hound and horn, amid the wooded gorges of Holne, or
+over the dreary downs of Hartland Warren, and the cloud-capt thickets of
+Cator’s Beam, and looking down from thence upon the far blue southern
+sea, wondering when he shall sail thereon, to fight the Spaniard, and
+discover, like Columbus, some fairy-land of gold and gems.
+
+For before this boy’s mind, as before all intense English minds of that
+day, rise, from the first, three fixed ideas, which yet are but one—the
+Pope, the Spaniard, and America.
+
+The two first are the sworn and internecine enemies (whether they pretend
+a formal peace or not) of Law and Freedom, Bible and Queen, and all that
+makes an Englishman’s life dear to him.  Are they not the incarnations of
+Antichrist?  Their Moloch sacrifices flame through all lands.  The earth
+groans because of them, and refuses to cover the blood of her slain.  And
+America is the new world of boundless wonder and beauty, wealth and
+fertility, to which these two evil powers arrogate an exclusive and
+divine right; and God has delivered it into their hands; and they have
+done evil therein with all their might, till the story of their greed and
+cruelty rings through all earth and heaven.  Is this the will of God?
+Will he not avenge for these things, as surely as he is the Lord who
+executeth justice and judgment in the earth?
+
+These are the young boy’s thoughts.  These were his thoughts for
+sixty-six eventful years.  In whatsoever else he wavered, he never
+wavered in that creed.  He learnt it in his boyhood, while he read ‘Fox’s
+Martyrs’ beside his mother’s knee.  He learnt it as a lad, when he saw
+his neighbours Hawkins and Drake changed by Spanish tyranny and treachery
+from peaceful merchantmen into fierce scourges of God.  He learnt it
+scholastically, from fathers and divines, as an Oxford scholar, in days
+when Oxford was a Protestant indeed, in whom there was no guile.  He
+learnt it when he went over, at seventeen years old, with his gallant
+kinsman Henry Champernoun, and his band of a hundred gentlemen
+volunteers, to flesh his maiden sword in behalf of the persecuted French
+Protestants.  He learnt it as he listened to the shrieks of the San
+Bartholomew; he learnt it as he watched the dragonnades, the tortures,
+the massacres of the Netherlands, and fought manfully under Norris in
+behalf of those victims of ‘the Pope and Spain.’  He preached it in far
+stronger and wiser words than I can express it for him, in that noble
+tract of 1591, on Sir Richard Grenville’s death at the Azores—a Tyrtæan
+trumpet-blast such as has seldom rung in human ears; he discussed it like
+a cool statesman in his pamphlet of 1596, on ‘A War with Spain.’  He
+sacrificed for it the last hopes of his old age, the wreck of his
+fortunes, his just recovered liberty; and he died with the old God’s
+battle-cry upon his lips, when it awoke no response from the hearts of a
+coward, profligate, and unbelieving generation.  This is the background,
+the keynote of the man’s whole life.  If we lose the recollection of it,
+and content ourselves by slurring it over in the last pages of his
+biography with some half-sneer about his putting, like the rest of
+Elizabeth’s old admirals, ‘the Spaniard, the Pope, and the Devil’ in the
+same category, then we shall understand very little about Raleigh;
+though, of course, we shall save ourselves the trouble of pronouncing as
+to whether the Spaniard and the Pope were really in the same category as
+the devil; or, indeed, which might be equally puzzling to a good many
+historians of the last century and a half, whether there be any devil at
+all.
+
+The books which I have chosen to head this review are all of them more or
+less good, with one exception, and that is Bishop Goodman’s Memoirs, on
+which much stress has been lately laid, as throwing light on various
+passages of Raleigh, Essex, Cecil, and James’s lives.  Having read it
+carefully, I must say plainly, that I think the book an altogether
+foolish, pedantic, and untrustworthy book, without any power of insight
+or gleam of reason; without even the care to be self-consistent; having
+but one object, the whitewashing of James, and of every noble lord whom
+the bishop has ever known: but in whitewashing each, the poor old flunkey
+so bespatters all the rest of his pets, that when the work is done, the
+whole party look, if possible, rather dirtier than before.  And so I
+leave Bishop Goodman.
+
+Mr. Fraser Tytler’s book is well known; and it is on the whole a good
+one; because he really loves and admires the man of whom he writes: but
+he is sometimes careless as to authorities, and too often makes the wish
+father to the thought.  Moreover, he has the usual sentiment about Mary
+Queen of Scots, and the usual scandal about Elizabeth, which is simply
+anathema; and which prevents his really seeing the time in which Raleigh
+lived, and the element in which he moved.  This sort of talk is happily
+dying out just now; but no one can approach the history of the
+Elizabethan age (perhaps of any age) without finding that truth is all
+but buried under mountains of dirt and chaff—an Augæan stable, which,
+perhaps, will never be swept clean.  Yet I have seen, with great delight,
+several attempts toward removal of the said superstratum of dirt and
+chaff from the Elizabethan histories, in several articles, all evidently
+from the same pen (and that one, more perfectly master of English prose
+than any man living), in the ‘Westminster Review’ and ‘Fraser’s
+Magazine.’ {95}
+
+Sir Robert Schomburgk’s edition of the Guiana Voyage contains an
+excellent Life of Raleigh, perhaps the best yet written; of which I only
+complain, when it gives in to the stock-charges against Raleigh, as it
+were at second-hand, and just because they are stock-charges, and when,
+too, the illustrious editor (unable to conceal his admiration of a
+discoverer in many points so like himself) takes all through an
+apologetic tone of ‘Please don’t laugh at me.  I daresay it is very
+foolish; but I can’t help loving the man.’
+
+Mr. Napier’s little book is a reprint of two ‘Edinburgh Review’ articles
+on Bacon and Raleigh.  The first, a learned statement of facts in answer
+to some unwisdom of a ‘Quarterly’ reviewer (possibly an Oxford
+Aristotelian; for ‘we think we do know that sweet Roman hand’).  It is
+clear, accurate, convincing, complete.  There is no more to be said about
+the matter, save that facts are stubborn things.
+
+The article on Raleigh is very valuable; first, because Mr. Napier has
+had access to many documents unknown to former biographers; and next,
+because he clears Raleigh completely from the old imputation of deceit
+about the Guiana mine, as well as of other minor charges.  With his
+general opinion of Raleigh’s last and fatal Guiana voyage, I have the
+misfortune to differ from him _toto coelo_, on the strength of the very
+documents which he quotes.  But Mr. Napier is always careful, always
+temperate, and always just, except where he, as I think, does not enter
+into the feelings of the man whom he is analysing.  Let readers buy the
+book (it will tell them a hundred things they do not know) and be judge
+between Mr. Napier and me.
+
+In the meanwhile, one cannot help watching with a smile how good old
+Time’s scrubbing-brush, which clears away paint and whitewash from church
+pillars, does the same by such characters as Raleigh’s.  After each fresh
+examination, some fresh count in the hundred-headed indictment breaks
+down.  The truth is, that as people begin to believe more in nobleness,
+and to gird up their loins to the doing of noble deeds, they discover
+more nobleness in others.  Raleigh’s character was in its lowest nadir in
+the days of Voltaire and Hume.  What shame to him?  For so were more
+sacred characters than his.  Shall the disciple be above his master?
+especially when that disciple was but too inconsistent, and gave occasion
+to the uncircumcised to blaspheme?  But Cayley, after a few years,
+refutes triumphantly Hume’s silly slanders.  He is a stupid writer: but
+he has sense enough, being patient, honest, and loving, to do that.
+
+Mr. Fraser Tytler shovels away a little more of the dirt-heap; Mr. Napier
+clears him (for which we owe him many thanks), by simple statement of
+facts, from the charge of having deserted and neglected his Virginia
+colonists; Humboldt and Schomburgk clear him from the charge of having
+lied about Guiana; and so on; each successive writer giving in generally
+on merest hearsay to the general complaint against him, either from fear
+of running counter to big names, or from mere laziness, and yet absolving
+him from that particular charge of which his own knowledge enables him to
+judge.  In the trust that I may be able to clear him from a few more
+charges, I write these pages, premising that I do not profess to have
+access to any new and recondite documents.  I merely take the broad facts
+of the story from documents open to all; and comment on them as every man
+should wish his own life to be commented on.
+
+But I do so on a method which I cannot give up; and that is the Bible
+method.  I say boldly that historians have hitherto failed in
+understanding not only Raleigh and Elizabeth, but nine-tenths of the
+persons and facts in his day, because they will not judge them by the
+canons which the Bible lays down—by which I mean not only the New
+Testament but the Old, which, as English Churchmen say, and Scotch
+Presbyterians have ere now testified with sacred blood, is ‘not contrary
+to the New.’
+
+Mr. Napier has a passage about Raleigh for which I am sorry, coming as it
+does from a countryman of John Knox.  ‘Society, it would seem, was yet in
+a state in which such a man could seriously plead, that the madness he
+feigned was justified’ (his last word is unfair, for Raleigh only hopes
+that it is no sin) ‘by the example of David, King of Israel.’  What a
+shocking state of society when men actually believed their Bibles, not
+too little, but too much.  For my part, I think that if poor dear Raleigh
+had considered the example of David a little more closely, he need never
+have feigned madness at all; and that his error lay quite in an opposite
+direction from looking on the Bible heroes, David especially, as too sure
+models.  At all events, let us try Raleigh by the very scriptural
+standard which he himself lays down, not merely in this case unwisely,
+but in his ‘History of the World’ more wisely than any historian whom I
+have ever read; and say, ‘Judged as the Bible taught our Puritan
+forefathers to judge every man, the character is intelligible enough;
+tragic, but noble and triumphant: judged as men have been judged in
+history for the last hundred years, by hardly any canon save those of the
+private judgment, which philosophic cant, maudlin sentimentality, or fear
+of public opinion, may happen to have forged, the man is a phenomenon,
+only less confused, abnormal, suspicious than his biographers’ notions
+about him.’  Again I say, I have not solved the problem: but it will be
+enough if I make some think it both soluble and worth solving.  Let us
+look round, then, and see into what sort of a country, into what sort of
+a world, the young adventurer is going forth, at seventeen years of age,
+to seek his fortune.
+
+Born in 1552, his young life has sprung up and grown with the young life
+of England.  The earliest fact, perhaps, which he can recollect is the
+flash of joy on every face which proclaims that Mary Tudor is dead, and
+Elizabeth reigns at last.  As he grows, the young man sees all the hope
+and adoration of the English people centre in that wondrous maid, and his
+own centre in her likewise.  He had been base had he been otherwise.  She
+comes to the throne with such a prestige as never sovereign came since
+the days when Isaiah sang his pæan over young Hezekiah’s accession.
+Young, learned, witty, beautiful (as with such a father and mother she
+could not help being), with an expression of countenance remarkable (I
+speak of those early days) rather for its tenderness and intellectual
+depth than its strength, she comes forward as the champion of the
+Reformed Faith, the interpretress of the will and conscience of the
+people of England—herself persecuted all but to the death, and purified
+by affliction, like gold tried in the fire.  She gathers round her, one
+by one, young men of promise, and trains them herself to their work.  And
+they fulfil it, and serve her, and grow gray-headed in her service,
+working as faithfully, as righteously, as patriotically, as men ever
+worked on earth.  They are her ‘favourites’; because they are men who
+deserve favour; men who count not their own lives dear to themselves for
+the sake of the queen and of that commonweal which their hearts and
+reasons tell them is one with her.  They are still men, though; and some
+of them have their grudgings and envyings against each other: she keeps
+the balance even between them, on the whole, skilfully, gently, justly,
+in spite of weaknesses and prejudices, without which she had been more
+than human.  Some have their conceited hopes of marrying her, becoming
+her masters.  She rebukes and pardons.  ‘Out of the dust I took you, sir!
+go and do your duty, humbly and rationally, henceforth, or into the dust
+I trample you again!’  And they reconsider themselves, and obey.  But
+many, or most of them, are new men, country gentlemen, and younger sons.
+She will follow her father’s plan, of keeping down the overgrown feudal
+princes, who, though brought low by the wars of the Roses, are still
+strong enough to throw everything into confusion by resisting at once the
+Crown and Commons.  Proud nobles reply by rebellion, come down southwards
+with ignorant Popish henchmen at their backs; will restore Popery, marry
+the Queen of Scots, make the middle class and the majority submit to the
+feudal lords and the minority.  Elizabeth, with her ‘aristocracy of
+genius,’ is too strong for them: the people’s heart is with her, and not
+with dukes.  Each mine only blows up its diggers; and there are many dry
+eyes at their ruin.  Her people ask her to marry.  She answers gently,
+proudly, eloquently: ‘She is married—the people of England is her
+husband.  She has vowed it.’  And yet there is a tone of sadness in that
+great speech.  Her woman’s heart yearns after love, after children; after
+a strong bosom on which to repose that weary head.  More than once she is
+ready to give way.  But she knows that it must not be.  She has her
+reward.  ‘Whosoever gives up husband or child for my sake and the
+gospel’s, shall receive them back a hundredfold in this present life,’ as
+Elizabeth does.  Her reward is an adoration from high and low, which is
+to us now inexplicable, impossible, overstrained, which was not so then.
+
+For the whole nation is in a mood of exaltation; England is fairyland;
+the times are the last days—strange, terrible, and glorious.  At home are
+Jesuits plotting; dark, crooked-pathed, going up and down in all manner
+of disguises, doing the devil’s work if men ever did it; trying to sow
+discord between man and man, class and class; putting out books full of
+filthy calumnies, declaring the queen illegitimate, excommunicate, a
+usurper; English law null, and all state appointments void, by virtue of
+a certain ‘Bull’; and calling on the subjects to rebellion and
+assassination, even on the bedchamber—woman to do to her ‘as Judith did
+to Holofernes.’  She answers by calm contempt.  Now and then Burleigh and
+Walsingham catch some of the rogues, and they meet their deserts; but she
+for the most part lets them have their way.  God is on her side, and she
+will not fear what man can do to her.
+
+Abroad, the sky is dark and wild, and yet full of fantastic splendour.
+Spain stands strong and awful, a rising world-tyranny, with its
+dark-souled Cortezes and Pizarros, Alvas, Don Johns, and Parmas, men
+whose path is like the lava stream; who go forth slaying and to slay, in
+the name of their gods, like those old Assyrian conquerors on the walls
+of Nineveh, with tutelary genii flying above their heads, mingled with
+the eagles who trail the entrails of the slain.  By conquest,
+intermarriage, or intrigue, she has made all the southern nations her
+vassals or her tools; close to our own shores, the Netherlands are
+struggling vainly for their liberties; abroad, the Western Islands, and
+the whole trade of Africa and India, will in a few years be hers.  And
+already the Pope, whose ‘most Catholic’ and faithful servant she is, has
+repaid her services in the cause of darkness by the gift of the whole New
+World—a gift which she has claimed by cruelties and massacres unexampled
+since the days of Timour and Zinghis Khan.  There she spreads and
+spreads, as Drake found her picture in the Government House at St.
+Domingo, the horse leaping through the globe, and underneath, _Non
+sufficit orbis_.  Who shall withstand her, armed as she is with the
+three-edged sword of Antichrist—superstition, strength, and gold?
+
+English merchantmen, longing for some share in the riches of the New
+World, go out to trade in Guinea, in the Azores, in New Spain: and are
+answered by shot and steel.  ‘Both policy and religion,’ as Fray Simon
+says, fifty years afterwards, ‘forbid Christians to trade with heretics!’
+‘Lutheran devils, and enemies of God,’ are the answer they get in words:
+in deeds, whenever they have a superior force they may be allowed to
+land, and to water their ships, even to trade, under exorbitant
+restrictions: but generally this is merely a trap for them.  Forces are
+hurried up; and the English are attacked treacherously, in spite of
+solemn compacts; for ‘No faith need be kept with heretics.’  And woe to
+them if any be taken prisoners, even wrecked.  The galleys, and the rack,
+and the stake are their certain doom; for the Inquisition claims the
+bodies and souls of heretics all over the world, and thinks it sin to
+lose its own.  A few years of such wrong raise questions in the sturdy
+English heart.  What right have these Spaniards to the New World?  The
+Pope’s gift?  Why, he gave it by the same authority by which he claims
+the whole world.  The formula used when an Indian village is sacked is,
+that God gave the whole world to St. Peter, and that he has given it to
+his successors, and they the Indies to the King of Spain.  To acknowledge
+that lie would be to acknowledge the very power by which the Pope claims
+a right to depose Queen Elizabeth, and give her dominions to whomsoever
+he will.  A fico for bulls!
+
+By possession, then?  That may hold for Mexico, Peru, New Grenada,
+Paraguay, which have been colonised; though they were gained by means
+which make every one concerned in conquering them worthy of the gallows;
+and the right is only that of the thief to the purse, whose owner he has
+murdered.  But as for the rest—Why the Spaniard has not colonised, even
+explored, one-fifth of the New World, not even one-fifth of the coast.
+Is the existence of a few petty factories, often hundreds of miles apart,
+at a few river-mouths to give them a claim to the whole intermediate
+coast, much less to the vast unknown tracts inside?  We will try that.
+If they appeal to the sword, so be it.  The men are treacherous robbers;
+we will indemnify ourselves for our losses, and God defend the right.
+
+So argued the English; and so sprung up that strange war of reprisals, in
+which, for eighteen years, it was held that there was no peace between
+England and Spain beyond the line, _i.e._, beyond the parallel of
+longitude where the Pope’s gift of the western world was said to begin;
+and, as the quarrel thickened and neared, extended to the Azores,
+Canaries, and coasts of Africa, where English and Spaniards flew at each
+other as soon as seen, mutually and by common consent, as natural
+enemies, each invoking God in the battle with Antichrist.
+
+Into such a world as this goes forth young Raleigh, his heart full of
+chivalrous worship for England’s tutelary genius, his brain aflame with
+the true miracles of the new-found Hesperides, full of vague hopes, vast
+imaginations, and consciousness of enormous power.  And yet he is no
+wayward dreamer, unfit for this work-day world.  With a vein of song
+‘most lofty, insolent, and passionate,’ indeed unable to see aught
+without a poetic glow over the whole, he is eminently practical,
+contented to begin at the beginning that he may end at the end; one who
+could ‘toil terribly,’ ‘who always laboured at the matter in hand as if
+he were born only for that.’  Accordingly, he sets to work faithfully and
+stoutly, to learn his trade of soldiering, and learns it in silence and
+obscurity.  He shares (it seems) in the retreat at Moncontour, and is by
+at the death of Condé, and toils on for five years, marching and
+skirmishing, smoking the enemy out of mountain-caves in Languedoc, and
+all the wild work of war.  During the San Bartholomew massacre we hear
+nothing of him; perhaps he took refuge with Sidney and others in
+Walsingham’s house.  No records of these years remain, save a few
+scattered reminiscences in his works, which mark the shrewd, observant
+eye of the future statesman.
+
+When he returned we know not.  We trace him, in 1576, by some verses
+prefixed to Gascoigne’s satire, the ‘Steele Glass,’ solid, stately,
+epigrammatic, ‘by Walter Rawley of the Middle Temple.’  The style is his;
+spelling of names matters nought in days in which a man would spell his
+own name three different ways in one document.
+
+Gascoigne, like Raleigh, knew Lord Grey of Wilton, and most men about
+town too; and had been a soldier abroad, like Raleigh, probably with him.
+It seems to have been the fashion for young idlers to lodge among the
+Templars; indeed, toward the end of the century, they had to be cleared
+out, as crowding the wigs and gowns too much; and perhaps proving noisy
+neighbours, as Raleigh may have done.  To this period may be referred,
+probably, his Justice done on Mr. Charles Chester (Ben Jonson’s Carlo
+Buffone), ‘a perpetual talker, and made a noise like a drum in a room; so
+one time, at a tavern, Raleigh beats him and seals up his mouth, his
+upper and nether beard, with hard wax.’  For there is a great laugh in
+Raleigh’s heart, a genial contempt of asses; and one that will make him
+enemies hereafter: perhaps shorten his days.
+
+One hears of him next, but only by report, in the Netherlands under
+Norris, where the nucleus of the English line (especially of its
+musquetry) was training.  For Don John of Austria intends not only to
+crush the liberties and creeds of the Flemings, but afterwards to marry
+the Queen of Scots, and conquer England: and Elizabeth, unwillingly and
+slowly, for she cannot stomach rebels, has sent men and money to the
+States to stop Don John in time; which the valiant English and Scotch do
+on Lammas day, 1578, and that in a fashion till then unseen in war.  For
+coming up late and panting, and ‘being more sensible of a little heat of
+the sun than of any cold fear of death,’ they throw off their armour and
+clothes, and, in their shirts (not over-clean, one fears), give Don
+John’s rashness such a rebuff, that two months more see that wild meteor,
+with lost hopes and tarnished fame, lie down and vanish below the stormy
+horizon.  In these days, probably, it is that he knew Colonel Bingham, a
+soldier of fortune, of a ‘fancy high and wild, too desultory and
+over-voluble,’ who had, among his hundred and one schemes, one for the
+plantation of America as poor Sir Thomas Stukely (whom Raleigh must have
+known well), uncle of the traitor Lewis, had for the peopling of Florida.
+
+Raleigh returns.  Ten years has he been learning his soldier’s trade in
+silence.  He will take a lesson in seamanship next.  The court may come
+in time: for by now the poor squire’s younger son must have
+discovered—perhaps even too fully—that he is not as other men are; that
+he can speak, and watch, and dare, and endure, as none around him can do.
+However, there are ‘good adventures toward,’ as the ‘Morte d’Arthur’
+would say; and he will off with his half-brother Humphrey Gilbert to
+carry out his patent for planting _Meta Incognita_—‘The Unknown Goal,’ as
+Queen Elizabeth has named it—which will prove to be too truly and fatally
+unknown.  In a latitude south of England, and with an Italian summer, who
+can guess that the winter will outfreeze Russia itself?  The
+merchant-seaman, like the statesman, had yet many a thing to learn.
+Instead of smiling at our forefathers’ ignorance, let us honour the men
+who bought knowledge for us their children at the price of lives nobler
+than our own.
+
+So Raleigh goes on his voyage with Humphrey Gilbert, to carry out the
+patent for discovering and planting in _Meta Incognita_; but the voyage
+prospers not.  A ‘smart brush with the Spaniards’ sends them home again,
+with the loss of Morgan, their best captain, and ‘a tall ship’; and _Meta
+Incognita_ is forgotten for a while; but not the Spaniards.  Who are
+these who forbid all English, by virtue of the Pope’s bull, to cross the
+Atlantic?  That must be settled hereafter; and Raleigh, ever busy, is off
+to Ireland to command a company in that ‘common weal, or rather common
+woe’, as he calls it in a letter to Leicester.  Two years and more pass
+here; and all the records of him which remain are of a man valiant,
+daring, and yet prudent beyond his fellows.  He hates his work, and is
+not on too good terms with stern and sour, but brave and faithful Lord
+Grey; but Lord Grey is Leicester’s friend, and Raleigh works patiently
+under him, like a sensible man, just because he is Leicester’s friend.
+Some modern gentleman of note—I forget who, and do not care to
+recollect—says that Raleigh’s ‘prudence never bore any proportion to his
+genius.’  The next biographer we open accuses him of being too
+calculating, cunning, timeserving; and so forth.  Perhaps both are true.
+The man’s was a character very likely to fall alternately into either
+sin—doubtless did so a hundred times.  Perhaps both are false.  The man’s
+character was, on occasion, certain to rise above both faults.  We have
+evidence that he did so his whole life long.
+
+He is tired of Ireland at last: nothing goes right there:—When has it?
+Nothing is to be done there.  That which is crooked cannot be made
+straight, and that which is wanting cannot be numbered.  He comes to
+London and to court.  But how?  By spreading his cloak over a muddy place
+for Queen Elizabeth to step on?  It is very likely to be a true story;
+but biographers have slurred over a few facts in their hurry to carry out
+their theory of ‘favourites,’ and to prove that Elizabeth took up Raleigh
+on the same grounds that a boarding-school miss might have done.  Not
+that I deny the cloak story to be a very pretty story; perhaps it
+justifies, taken alone, Elizabeth’s fondness for him.  There may have
+been self-interest in it; we are bound, as ‘men of the world,’ to impute
+the dirtiest motive that we can find; but how many self-interested men do
+we know who would have had quickness and daring to do such a thing?  Men
+who are thinking about themselves are not generally either so
+quick-witted, or so inclined to throw away a good cloak, when by much
+scraping and saving they have got one.  I never met a cunning, selfish,
+ambitious man who would have done such a thing.  The reader may; but even
+if he has, we must ask him, for Queen Elizabeth’s sake, to consider that
+this young Quixote is the close relation of three of the finest public
+men then living, Champernoun, Gilbert, and Carew.  That he is a friend of
+Sidney, a pet of Leicester; that he has left behind him at Oxford, and
+brought with him from Ireland, the reputation of being a _rara avis_, a
+new star in the firmament; that he had been a soldier in her Majesty’s
+service (and in one in which she has a peculiar private interest) for
+twelve years; that he has held her commission as one of the triumvirate
+for governing Munster, and has been the commander of the garrison at
+Cork; and that it is possible that she may have heard something of him
+before he threw his cloak under her feet, especially as there has been
+some controversy (which we have in vain tried to fathom) between him and
+Lord Grey about that terrible Smerwick slaughter; of the results of which
+we know little, but that Raleigh, being called in question about it in
+London, made such good play with his tongue, that his reputation as an
+orator and a man of talent was fixed once and for ever.
+
+Within the twelve months he is sent on some secret diplomatic mission
+about the Anjou marriage; he is in fact now installed in his place as ‘a
+favourite.’  And why not?  If a man is found to be wise and witty, ready
+and useful, able to do whatsoever he is put to, why is a sovereign, who
+has eyes to see the man’s worth and courage to use it, to be accused of I
+know not what, because the said man happens to be good-looking?
+
+Now comes the turning-point of Raleigh’s life.  What does he intend to
+be?  Soldier, statesman, scholar, or sea-adventurer?  He takes the most
+natural, yet not the wisest course.  He will try and be all four at once.
+He has intellect for it; by worldly wisdom he may have money for it also.
+Even now he has contrived (no one can tell whence) to build a good bark
+of two hundred tons, and send her out with Humphrey Gilbert on his second
+and fatal voyage.  Luckily for Raleigh she deserts and comes home, while
+not yet out of the Channel, or she surely had gone the way of the rest of
+Gilbert’s squadron.  Raleigh, of course, loses money by the failure, as
+well as the hopes which he had grounded on his brother’s Transatlantic
+viceroyalty.  And a bitter pang it must have been to him to find himself
+bereft of that pure and heroic counsellor just at his entering into life.
+But with the same elasticity which sent him to the grave, he is busy
+within six months in a fresh expedition.  If _Meta Incognita_ be not
+worth planting, there must be, so Raleigh thinks, a vast extent of coast
+between it and Florida, which is more genial in climate, perhaps more
+rich in produce; and he sends Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlow to look for
+the same, and not in vain.
+
+On these Virginian discoveries I shall say but little.  Those who wish to
+enjoy them should read them in all their naive freshness in the
+originals; and they will subscribe to S. T. Coleridge’s dictum, that no
+one nowadays can write travels as well as the old worthies who figure in
+Hakluyt and Purchas.
+
+But to return to the question—What does this man intend to be?  A
+discoverer and colonist; a vindicator of some part at least of America
+from Spanish claims?  Perhaps not altogether: else he would have gone
+himself to Virginia, at least the second voyage, instead of sending
+others.  But here, it seems, is the fatal, and yet pardonable mistake,
+which haunts the man throughout.  He tries to be too many men at once.
+Fatal: because, though he leaves his trace on more things than one man is
+wont to do, he, strictly speaking, conquers nothing, brings nothing to a
+consummation.  Virginia, Guiana, the ‘History of the World,’ his own
+career as a statesman—as dictator (for he might have been dictator had he
+chosen)—all are left unfinished.  And yet most pardonable; for if a man
+feels that he can do many different things, how hard to teach himself
+that he must not do them all!  How hard to say to himself, ‘I must cut
+off the right hand, and pluck out the right eye.  I must be less than
+myself, in order really to be anything.  I must concentrate my powers on
+one subject, and that perhaps by no means the most seemingly noble or
+useful, still less the most pleasant, and forego so many branches of
+activity in which I might be so distinguished, so useful.’  This is a
+hard lesson.  Raleigh took just sixty-six years learning it; and had to
+carry the result of his experience to the other side of the dark river,
+for there was no time left to use it on this side.  Some readers may have
+learnt the lesson already.  If so, happy and blessed are they.  But let
+them not therefore exalt themselves above Walter Raleigh; for that lesson
+is, of course, soonest learnt by the man who can excel in few things,
+later by him who can excel in many, and latest of all by him who, like
+Raleigh, can excel in all.
+
+Few details remain concerning the earlier court days of Raleigh.  He
+rises rapidly, as we have seen.  He has an estate given him in Ireland,
+near his friend Spenser, where he tries to do well and wisely,
+colonising, tilling, and planting it: but like his Virginia expeditions,
+principally at second hand.  For he has swallowed (there is no denying
+it) the painted bait.  He will discover, he will colonise, he will do all
+manner of beautiful things, at second hand: but he himself will be a
+courtier.  It is very tempting.  Who would not, at the age of thirty,
+have wished to have been one of that chosen band of geniuses and heroes
+whom Elizabeth had gathered round her?  Who would not, at the age of
+thirty, have given his pound of flesh to be captain of her guard, and to
+go with her whithersoever she went?  It is not merely the intense
+gratification to carnal vanity—which if any man denies or scoffs at,
+always mark him down as especially guilty—which is to be considered; but
+the real, actual honour, in the mind of one who looked on Elizabeth as
+the most precious and glorious being which the earth had seen for
+centuries.  To be appreciated by her; to be loved by her; to serve her;
+to guard her; what could man desire more on earth?
+
+Beside, he becomes a member of Parliament now; Lord Warden of the
+Stannaries; business which of course keeps him in England, business which
+he performs, as he does all things, wisely and well.  Such a generation
+as this ought really to respect Raleigh a little more, if it be only for
+his excellence in their own especial sphere—that of business.  Raleigh is
+a thorough man of business.  He can ‘toil terribly,’ and what is more,
+toil to the purpose.  In all the everyday affairs of life, he remains
+without a blot; a diligent, methodical, prudent man, who, though he plays
+for great stakes, ventures and loses his whole fortune again and again,
+yet never seems to omit the ‘doing the duty which lies nearest him’;
+never gets into mean money scrapes; never neglects tenants or duty; never
+gives way for one instant to ‘the eccentricities of genius.’
+
+If he had done so, be sure that we should have heard of it.  For no man
+can become what he has become without making many an enemy; and he has
+his enemies already.  On which statement naturally occurs the
+question—why?  An important question too; because several of his later
+biographers seem to have running in their minds some such train of
+thought as this—Raleigh must have been a bad fellow, or he would not have
+had so many enemies; and because he was a bad fellow, there is an _à
+priori_ reason that charges against him are true.  Whether this be
+arguing in a circle or not, it is worth searching out the beginning of
+this enmity, and the reputed causes of it.  In after years it will be
+because he is ‘damnable proud,’ because he hated Essex, and so forth: of
+which in their places.  But what is the earliest count against him?
+Naunton, who hated Raleigh, and was moreover a rogue, has no reason to
+give, but that ‘the Queen took him for a kind of oracle, which much
+nettled them all; yea, those he relied on began to take this his sudden
+favour for an alarm; to be sensible of their own supplantation, and to
+project his; which shortly made him to sing, “Fortune my foe.”’
+
+Now, be this true or not, and we do not put much faith in it, it gives no
+reason for the early dislike of Raleigh, save the somewhat unsatisfactory
+one which Cain would have given for his dislike of Abel.  Moreover, there
+exists a letter of Essex’s, written as thoroughly in the Cain spirit as
+any we ever read; and we wonder that, after reading that letter, men can
+find courage to repeat the old sentimentalism about the ‘noble and
+unfortunate’ Earl.  His hatred of Raleigh—which, as we shall see
+hereafter, Raleigh not only bears patiently, but requites with good deeds
+as long as he can—springs, by his own confession, simply from envy and
+disappointed vanity.  The spoilt boy insults Queen Elizabeth about her
+liking for the ‘knave Raleigh.’  She, ‘taking hold of one word disdain,’
+tells Essex that ‘there was no such cause why I should thus disdain him.’
+On which, says Essex, ‘as near as I could I did describe unto her what he
+had been, and what he was; and then I did let her see, whether I had come
+to disdain his competition of love, or whether I could have comfort to
+give myself over to the service of a mistress that was in awe of such a
+man.  I spake for 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 him.  In the end, I saw she was resolved to defend him, and to cross
+me.’  Whereupon follows a ‘scene,’ the naughty boy raging and stamping,
+till he insults the Queen, and calls Raleigh ‘a wretch’; whereon poor
+Elizabeth, who loved the coxcomb for his father’s sake, ‘turned her away
+to my Lady Warwick,’ and Essex goes grumbling forth.
+
+Raleigh’s next few years are brilliant and busy ones; and gladly, did
+space permit, would I give details of those brilliant adventures which
+make this part of his life that of a true knight-errant.  But they are
+mere episodes in the history; and we must pass them quickly by, only
+saying that they corroborate in all things our original notion of the
+man—just, humane, wise, greatly daring and enduring greatly; and filled
+with the one fixed idea, which has grown with his growth and strengthened
+with his strength, the destruction of the Spanish power, and colonisation
+of America by English.  His brother Humphrey makes a second attempt to
+colonise Newfoundland, and perishes as heroically as he had lived.
+Raleigh, undaunted by his own loss in the adventure and his brother’s
+failure, sends out a fleet of his own to discover to the southward, and
+finds Virginia.  One might spend pages on this beautiful episode; on the
+simple descriptions of the fair new land which the sea-kings bring home;
+on the profound (for those times at least) knowledge which prompted
+Raleigh to make the attempt in that particular direction which had as yet
+escaped the notice of the Spaniards; on the quiet patience with which,
+undaunted by the ill-success of the first colonists, he sends out fleet
+after fleet, to keep the hold which he had once gained; till, unable any
+longer to support the huge expense, he makes over his patent for
+discovery to a company of merchants, who fare for many years as ill as
+Raleigh himself did: but one thing one has a right to say, that to this
+one man, under the providence of Almighty God, do the whole of the United
+States of America owe their existence.  The work was double.  The colony,
+however small, had to be kept in possession at all hazards; and he did
+it.  But that was not enough.  Spain must be prevented from extending her
+operations northward from Florida; she must be crippled along the whole
+east coast of America.  And Raleigh did that too.  We find him for years
+to come a part-adventurer in almost every attack on the Spaniards: we
+find him preaching war against them on these very grounds, and setting
+others to preach it also.  Good old Hariot (Raleigh’s mathematical tutor,
+whom he sent to Virginia) re-echoes his pupil’s trumpet-blast.  Hooker,
+in his epistle dedicatory of his Irish History, strikes the same note,
+and a right noble one it is.  ‘These Spaniards are trying to build up a
+world-tyranny by rapine and cruelty.  You, sir, call on us to deliver the
+earth from them, by doing justly and loving mercy; and we will obey you!’
+is the answer which Raleigh receives, as far as I can find, from every
+nobler-natured Englishman.
+
+It was an immense conception: a glorious one: it stood out so clear:
+there was no mistake about its being the absolutely right, wise,
+patriotic thing; and so feasible, too, if Raleigh could but find ‘_six
+cents hommes qui savaient mourir_.’  But that was just what he could not
+find.  He could draw round him, and did, by the spiritual magnetism of
+his genius, many a noble soul; but he could not organise them, as he
+seems to have tried to do, into a coherent body.  The English spirit of
+independent action, never stronger than in that age, and most wisely
+encouraged, for other reasons, by good Queen Bess, was too strong for
+him.  His pupils will ‘fight on their own hook’ like so many Yankee
+rangers: quarrel with each other: grumble at him.  For the truth is, he
+demands of them too high a standard of thought and purpose.  He is often
+a whole heaven above them in the hugeness of his imagination, the
+nobleness of his motive; and Don Quixote can often find no better squire
+than Sancho Panza.  Even glorious Sir Richard Grenvile makes a mistake:
+burns an Indian village because they steal a silver cup; throws back the
+colonisation of Virginia ten years with his over-strict notions of
+discipline and retributive justice; and Raleigh requites him for his
+offence by embalming him, his valour and his death, not in immortal
+verse, but in immortal prose.  The ‘True Relation of the Fight at the
+Azores’ gives the keynote of Raleigh’s heart.  If readers will not take
+that as the text on which his whole life is a commentary they may know a
+great deal about him, but him they will never know.
+
+The game becomes fiercer and fiercer.  Blow and counterblow between the
+Spanish king, for the whole West-Indian commerce was a government job,
+and the merchant nobles of England.  At last the Great Armada comes, and
+the Great Armada goes again.  _Venit_, _vidit_, _fugit_, as the medals
+said of it.  And to Walter Raleigh’s counsel, by the testimony of all
+contemporaries, the mighty victory is to be principally attributed.
+Where all men did heroically, it were invidious to bestow on him alone a
+crown, _ob patriam servatam_.  But henceforth, Elizabeth knows well that
+she has not been mistaken in her choice; and Raleigh is better loved than
+ever, heaped with fresh wealth and honours.  And who deserves them
+better?
+
+The immense value of his services in the defence of England should excuse
+him from the complaint which one has been often inclined to bring against
+him,—Why, instead of sending others Westward Ho, did be not go himself?
+Surely he could have reconciled the jarring instruments with which he was
+working.  He could have organised such a body of men as perhaps never
+went out before or since on the same errand.  He could have done all that
+Cortez did, and more; and done it more justly and mercifully.
+
+True.  And here seems (as far as little folk dare judge great folk) to
+have been Raleigh’s mistake.  He is too wide for real success.  He has
+too many plans; he is fond of too many pursuits.  The man who succeeds is
+generally the narrow mall; the man of one idea, who works at nothing but
+that; sees everything only through the light of that; sacrifices
+everything to that: the fanatic, in short.  By fanatics, whether
+military, commercial, or religious, and not by ‘liberal-minded men’ at
+all, has the world’s work been done in all ages.  Amid the modern cants,
+one of the most mistaken is the cant about the ‘mission of genius,’ the
+‘mission of the poet.’  Poets, we hear in some quarters, are the anointed
+kings of mankind—at least, so the little poets sing, each to his little
+fiddle.  There is no greater mistake.  It is the practical, prosaical
+fanatic who does the work; and the poet, if he tries to do it, is certain
+to put down his spade every five minutes, to look at the prospect, and
+pick flowers, and moralise on dead asses, till he ends a _Néron malgré
+lui-même_, fiddling melodiously while Rome is burning.  And perhaps this
+is the secret of Raleigh’s failure.  He is a fanatic, no doubt, a true
+knight-errant: but he is too much of a poet withal.  The sense of beauty
+enthrals him at every step.  Gloriana’s fairy court, with its chivalries
+and its euphuisms, its masques and its tourneys, and he the most charming
+personage in it, are too charming for him—as they would have been for us,
+reader: and he cannot give them up and go about the one work.  He
+justifies his double-mindedness to himself, no doubt, as he does to the
+world, by working wisely, indefatigably, and bravely: but still he has
+put his trust in princes, and in the children of men.  His sin, as far as
+we can see, is not against man, but against God; one which we do not
+nowadays call a sin, but a weakness.  Be it so.  God punished him for it,
+swiftly and sharply; which I hold to be a sure sign that God also forgave
+him for it.
+
+So he stays at home, spends, sooner or later, £40,000 on Virginia, writes
+charming court-poetry with Oxford, Buckhurst, and Paget, brings over
+Spenser from Ireland and introduces Colin Clout to Gloriana, who loves—as
+who would not have loved?—that most beautiful of faces and of souls;
+helps poor puritan Udall out of his scrape as far as he can; begs for
+Captain Spring, begs for many more, whose names are only known by being
+connected with some good deed of his.  ‘When, Sir Walter,’ asks Queen
+Bess, ‘will you cease to be a beggar?’  ‘When your Majesty ceases to be a
+benefactor.’  Perhaps it is in these days that he set up his ‘office of
+address’—some sort of agency for discovering and relieving the wants of
+worthy men.  So all seems to go well.  If he has lost in Virginia, he has
+gained by Spanish prizes; his wine-patent is bringing him in a large
+revenue, and the heavens smile on him.  Thou sayest, ‘I am rich and
+increased in goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou
+art poor and miserable and blind and naked.’  Thou shalt learn it, then,
+and pay dearly for thy lesson.
+
+For, in the meanwhile, Raleigh falls into a very great sin, for which, as
+usual with his elect, God inflicts swift and instant punishment; on
+which, as usual, biographers talk much unwisdom.  He seduces Miss
+Throgmorton, one of the maids of honour.  Elizabeth is very wroth; and
+had she not good reason to be wroth?  Is it either fair or reasonable to
+talk of her ‘demanding a monopoly of love,’ and ‘being incensed at the
+temerity of her favourite, in presuming to fall in love and marry without
+her consent?’  Away with such cant.  The plain facts are: that a man
+nearly forty years old abuses his wonderful gifts of body and mind, to
+ruin a girl nearly twenty years younger than himself.  What wonder if a
+virtuous woman—and Queen Elizabeth was virtuous—thought it a base deed,
+and punished it accordingly?  There is no more to be discovered in the
+matter, save by the vulturine nose which smells carrion in every
+rose-bed.  Raleigh has a great attempt on the Plate-fleets in hand; he
+hurries off from Chatham, and writes to young Cecil on the 10th of March,
+‘I mean not to come away, as some say I will, for fear of a marriage, and
+I know not what . . . For I protest before God, there is none on the face
+of the earth that I would be fastened unto.’
+
+This famous passage is one of those over which the virtuosity of modern
+times, rejoicing in evil, has hung so fondly, as giving melancholy proof
+of the ‘duplicity of Raleigh’s character’; as if a man who once in his
+life had told an untruth was proved by that fact to be a rogue from birth
+to death: while others have kindly given him the benefit of a doubt
+whether the letter were not written after a private marriage, and
+therefore Raleigh, being ‘joined unto’ some one already, had a right to
+say that he did not wish to be joined to any one.  But I do not concur in
+this doubt.  Four months after, Sir Edward Stafford writes to Anthony
+Bacon, ‘If you have anything to do with Sir W. R., or any love to make to
+Mistress Throgmorton, at the Tower to-morrow you may speak with them.’
+This implies that no marriage had yet taken place.  And surely, if there
+had been private marriage, two people who were about to be sent to the
+Tower for their folly would have made the marriage public at once, as the
+only possible self-justification.  But it is a pity, in my opinion, that
+biographers, before pronouncing upon that supposed lie of Raleigh’s, had
+not taken the trouble to find out what the words mean.  In their virtuous
+haste to prove him a liar, they have overlooked the fact that the words,
+as they stand, are unintelligible, and the argument self-contradictory.
+He wants to prove, we suppose, that he does not go to sea for fear of
+being forced to marry Miss Throgmorton.  It is, at least, an unexpected
+method of so doing in a shrewd man like Raleigh, to say that he wishes to
+marry no one at all.  ‘Don’t think that I run away for fear of a
+marriage, for I do not wish to marry any one on the face of the earth,’
+is a speech which may prove Raleigh to have been a fool, and we must
+understand it before we can say that it proves him a rogue.  If we had
+received such a letter from a friend, we should have said at once, ‘Why
+the man, in his hurry and confusion, has omitted _the_ word; he must have
+meant to write, not “There is none on the face of the earth that I would
+be fastened to,” but “There is none on the face of the earth that I would
+_rather_ be fastened to,”‘ which would at once make sense and suit fact.
+For Raleigh not only married Miss Throgmorton forthwith, but made her the
+best of husbands.  My conjectural emendation may go for what it is worth:
+but that the passage, as it stands in Murdin’s State Papers (the MSS. I
+have not seen) is either misquoted, or mis-written by Raleigh himself, I
+cannot doubt.  He was not one to think nonsense, even if he scribbled it.
+
+The Spanish raid turns out well.  Raleigh overlooks Elizabeth’s letters
+of recall till he finds out that the King of Spain has stopped the
+Plate-fleet for fear of his coming; and then returns, sending on Sir John
+Burrough to the Azores, where he takes the ‘Great Carack,’ the largest
+prize (1600 tons) which had ever been brought into England.  The details
+of that gallant fight stand in the pages of Hakluyt.  It raised Raleigh
+once more to wealth, though not to favour.  Shortly after he returns from
+the sea, he finds himself, where he deserves to be, in the Tower, where
+he does more than one thing which brought him no credit.  How far we are
+justified in calling his quarrel with Sir George Carew, his keeper, for
+not letting him ‘disguise himself, and get into a pair of oars to ease
+his mind but with a sight of the Queen, or his heart would break,’
+hypocrisy, is a very different matter.  Honest Arthur Gorges, a staunch
+friend of Raleigh’s, tells the story laughingly and lovingly, as if he
+thought Raleigh sincere, but somewhat mad: and yet honest Gorges has a
+good right to say a bitter thing; for after having been ‘ready to break
+with laughing at seeing them two brawl and scramble like madmen, and Sir
+George’s new periwig torn off his crown,’ he sees ‘the iron walking’ and
+daggers out, and playing the part of him who taketh a dog by the ears,
+‘purchased such a rap on the knuckles, that I wished both their pates
+broken, and so with much ado they staid their brawl to see my bloody
+fingers,’ and then set to work to abuse the hapless peacemaker.  After
+which things Raleigh writes a letter to Cecil, which is still more
+offensive in the eyes of virtuous biographers—how ‘his heart was never
+broken till this day, when he hears the Queen goes so far off, whom he
+followed with love and desire on so many journeys, and am now left behind
+in a dark prison all alone.’ . . . ‘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,’ and so forth, in a style in
+which the vulturine nose must needs scent carrion, just because the roses
+are more fragrant than they should be in a world where all ought to be
+either vultures or carrion for their dinners.  As for his despair, had he
+not good reason to be in despair?  By his own sin he has hurled himself
+down the hill which he has so painfully climbed.  He is in the
+Tower—surely no pleasant or hopeful place for any man.  Elizabeth is
+exceedingly wroth with him; and what is worse, he deserves what he has
+got.  His whole fortune is ventured in an expedition over which he has no
+control, which has been unsuccessful in its first object, and which may
+be altogether unsuccessful in that which it has undertaken as a
+_pis-aller_, and so leave him penniless.  There want not, too, those who
+will trample on the fallen.  The deputy has been cruelly distraining on
+his Irish tenants for a ‘supposed debt of his to the Queen of £400 for
+rent,’ which was indeed but fifty marks, and which was paid, and has
+carried off 500 milch kine from the poor settlers whom he has planted
+there, and forcibly thrust him out of possession of a castle.  Moreover,
+the whole Irish estates are likely to come to ruin; for nothing prevails
+but rascality among the English soldiers, impotence among the governors,
+and rebellion among the natives.  Three thousand Burkes are up in arms;
+his ‘prophecy of this rebellion’ ten days ago was laughed at, and now has
+come true; and altogether, Walter Raleigh and all belonging to him is in
+as evil case as he ever was on earth.  No wonder, poor fellow, if he
+behowls himself lustily, and not always wisely, to Cecil, and every one
+else who will listen to him.
+
+As for his fine speeches about Elizabeth, why forget the standing-point
+from which such speeches were made?  Over and above his present ruin, it
+was (and ought to have been) an utterly horrible and unbearable thing to
+Raleigh, or any man, to have fallen into disgrace with Elizabeth by his
+own fault.  He feels (and perhaps rightly) that he is as it were
+excommunicated from England, and the mission and the glory of England.
+Instead of being, as he was till now, one of a body of brave men working
+together in one great common cause, he has cut himself off from the
+congregation by his own selfish lust, and there he is left alone with his
+shame.  We must try to realise to ourselves the way in which such men as
+Raleigh looked not only at Elizabeth, but at all the world.  There was,
+in plain palpable fact, something about the Queen, her history, her
+policy, the times, the glorious part which England, and she as the
+incarnation of the then English spirit, were playing upon earth, which
+raised imaginative and heroical souls into a permanent exaltation—a
+‘fairyland,’ as they called it themselves, which seems to us fantastic,
+and would be fantastic in us, because we are not at their work, or in
+their days.  There can be no doubt that a number of as noble men as ever
+stood together on the earth did worship that woman, fight for her, toil
+for her, risk all for her, with a pure chivalrous affection which has
+furnished one of the most beautiful pages in all the book of history.
+Blots there must needs have been, and inconsistencies, selfishnesses,
+follies; for they too were men of like passions with ourselves; but let
+us look at the fair vision as a whole, and thank God that such a thing
+has for once existed even imperfectly on this sinful earth, instead of
+playing the part of Ham and falling under his curse,—the penalty of
+slavishness, cowardice, loss of noble daring, which surely falls on any
+generation which is ‘banausos,’ to use Aristotle’s word; which rejoices
+in its forefathers’ shame, and, unable to believe in the nobleness of
+others, is unable to become noble itself.
+
+As for the ‘Alexander and Diana’ affectations, they were the language of
+the time: and certainly this generation has no reason to find fault with
+them, or with a good deal more of the ‘affectations’ and ‘flattery’ of
+Elizabethan times, while it listens complacently night after night ‘to
+honourable members’ complimenting not Queen Elizabeth, but Sir Jabesh
+Windbag, Fiddle, Faddle, Red-tape, and party with protestations of
+deepest respect and fullest confidence in the very speeches in which they
+bring accusations of every offence short of high treason—to be
+understood, of course, in a ‘parliamentary sense,’ as Mr. Pickwick’s were
+in a ‘Pickwickian’ one.  If a generation of Knoxes and Mortons, Burleighs
+and Raleighs, shall ever arise again, one wonders by what name they will
+call the parliamentary morality and parliamentary courtesy of a
+generation which has meted out such measure to their ancestors’ failings?
+
+‘But Queen Elizabeth was an old woman then.’  I thank the objector even
+for that ‘then’; for it is much nowadays to find any one who believes
+that Queen Elizabeth was ever young, or who does not talk of her as if
+she was born about seventy years of age covered with rouge and wrinkles.
+I will undertake to say that as to the beauty of this woman there is a
+greater mass of testimony, and from the very best judges too, than there
+is of the beauty of any personage in history; and yet it has become the
+fashion now to deny even that.  The plain facts seem that she was very
+graceful, active, accomplished in all outward manners, of a perfect
+figure, and of that style of intellectual beauty, depending on
+expression, which attracted (and we trust always will attract) Britons
+far more than that merely sensuous loveliness in which no doubt Mary
+Stuart far surpassed her.  And there seems little doubt that, like many
+Englishwomen, she retained her beauty to a very late period in life, not
+to mention that she was, in 1592, just at that age of rejuvenescence
+which makes many a woman more lovely at sixty than she has been since she
+was thirty-five.  No doubt, too, she used every artificial means to
+preserve her famous complexion; and quite right she was.  This beauty of
+hers had been a talent, as all beauty is, committed to her by God; it had
+been an important element in her great success; men had accepted it as
+what beauty of form and expression generally is, an outward and visible
+sign of the inward and spiritual grace; and while the inward was
+unchanged, what wonder if she tried to preserve the outward?  If she was
+the same, why should she not try to look the same?  And what blame to
+those who worshipped her, if, knowing that she was the same, they too
+should fancy that she looked the same, the Elizabeth of their youth, and
+should talk as if the fair flesh, as well as the fair spirit, was
+immortal?  Does not every loving husband do so when he forgets the gray
+hair and the sunken cheek, and all the wastes of time, and sees the
+partner of many joys and sorrows not as she has become, but as she was,
+ay, and is to him, and will be to him, he trusts, through all eternity?
+There is no feeling in these Elizabethan worshippers which we have not
+seen, potential and crude, again and again in the best and noblest of
+young men whom we have met, till it was crushed in them by the luxury,
+effeminacy, and unbelief in chivalry, which are the sure accompaniment of
+a long peace, which war may burn up with beneficent fire.
+
+But we must hasten on now; for Raleigh is out of prison in September, and
+by the next spring in parliament speaking wisely and well, especially on
+his fixed idea, war with Spain, which he is rewarded for forthwith in
+Father Parson’s ‘Andreæ Philopatris Responsio’ by a charge of founding a
+school of Atheism for the corruption of young gentlemen; a charge which
+Lord Chief-Justice Popham, Protestant as he is, will find it useful one
+day to recollect.
+
+Elizabeth, however, now that Raleigh has married the fair Throgmorton and
+done wisely in other matters, restores him to favour.  If he has sinned,
+he has suffered: but he is as useful as ever, now that his senses have
+returned to him; and he is making good speeches in parliament, instead of
+bad ones to weak maidens; so we find him once more in favour, and
+possessor of Sherborne Manor, where he builds and beautifies, with
+‘groves and gardens of much variety and great delight.’  And God, too,
+seems to have forgiven him; perhaps has forgiven; for there the fair
+Throgmorton brings him a noble boy.  _Ut sis vitalis metuo puer_!
+
+Raleigh will quote David’s example one day, not wisely or well.  Does
+David’s example ever cross him now, and those sad words,—‘The Lord hath
+put away thy sin, . . . nevertheless the child that is born unto thee
+shall die?’
+
+Let that be as it may, all is sunshine once more.  Sherborne Manor, a
+rich share in the great carack, a beautiful wife, a child; what more does
+this man want to make him happy?  Why should he not settle down upon his
+lees, like ninety-nine out of the hundred, or at least try a peaceful and
+easy path toward more ‘praise and pudding?’  The world answers, or his
+biographers answer for him, that he needs to reinstate himself in his
+mistress’s affection; which is true or not, according as we take it.  If
+they mean thereby, as most seem to mean, that it was a mere selfish and
+ambitious scheme by which to wriggle into court favour once more—why, let
+them mean it: I shall only observe that the method which Raleigh took was
+a rather more dangerous and self-sacrificing one than courtiers are wont
+to take.  But if it be meant that Walter Raleigh spoke somewhat thus with
+himself,—‘I have done a base and dirty deed, and have been punished for
+it.  I have hurt the good name of a sweet woman who loves me, and whom I
+find to be a treasure; and God, instead of punishing me by taking her
+from me, has rendered me good for evil by giving her to me.  I have
+justly offended a mistress whom I worship, and who, after having shown
+her just indignation, has returned me good for evil by giving me these
+fair lands of Sherborne, and only forbid me her presence till the scandal
+has passed away.  She sees and rewards my good in spite of my evil; and
+I, too, know that I am better than I have seemed; that I am fit for
+nobler deeds than seducing maids of honour.  How can I prove that?  How
+can I redeem my lost name for patriotism and public daring?  How can I
+win glory for my wife, seek that men shall forget her past shame in the
+thought, “She is Walter Raleigh’s wife?”  How can I show my mistress that
+I loved her all along, that I acknowledge her bounty, her mingled justice
+and mercy?  How can I render to God for all the benefits which He has
+done unto me?  How can I do a deed the like of which was never done in
+England?’
+
+If all this had passed through Walter Raleigh’s mind, what could we say
+of it, but that it was the natural and rational feeling of an honourable
+and right-hearted man, burning to rise to the level which he knew ought
+to be his, because he knew that he had fallen below it?  And what right
+better way of testifying these feelings than to do what, as we shall see,
+Raleigh did?  What right have we to impute to him lower motives than
+these, while we confess that these righteous and noble motives would have
+been natural and rational;—indeed, just what we flatter ourselves that we
+should have felt in his place?  Of course, in his grand scheme, the
+thought came in, ‘And I shall win to myself honour, and glory, and
+wealth,’—of course.  And pray, sir, does it not come in in your grand
+schemes; and yours; and yours?  If you made a fortune to-morrow by some
+wisely and benevolently managed factory, would you forbid all speech of
+the said wisdom and benevolence, because you had intended that wisdom and
+benevolence should pay you a good percentage?  Away with cant, and let
+him that is without sin among you cast the first stone.
+
+So Raleigh hits upon a noble project; a desperate one, true: but he will
+do it or die.  He will leave pleasant Sherborne, and the bosom of the
+beautiful bride, and the first-born son, and all which to most makes life
+worth having, and which Raleigh enjoys more intensely than most men; for
+he is a poet, and a man of strong nervous passions withal.  But,—
+
+    ‘I could not love thee, dear, so much,
+    Loved I not honour more.’
+
+And he will go forth to endure heat, hunger, fever, danger of death in
+battle, danger of the Inquisition, rack, and stake, in search of El
+Dorado.  What so strange in that?  I have known half a dozen men who, in
+his case, and conscious of his powers, would have done the same from the
+same noble motive.
+
+He begins prudently; and sends a Devonshire man, Captain Whiddon—probably
+one of The Whiddons of beautiful Chagford—to spy out the Orinoco.  He
+finds that the Spaniards are there already; that Berreo, who has
+attempted El Dorado from the westward, starting from New Granada and
+going down the rivers, is trying to settle on the Orinoco mouth; that he
+is hanging the poor natives, encouraging the Caribs to hunt them and sell
+them for slaves, imprisoning the caciques to extort their gold,
+torturing, ravishing, kidnapping, and conducting himself as was usual
+among Spaniards of those days.
+
+Raleigh’s spirit is stirred within him.  If ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ fiction
+as it is, once excited us, how must a far worse reality have excited
+Raleigh, as he remembered that these Spaniards are as yet triumphant in
+iniquity, and as he remembered, too, that these same men are the sworn
+foes of England, her liberty, her Bible, and her Queen?  What a deed, to
+be beforehand with them for once!  To dispossess them of one corner of
+that western world, where they have left no trace but blood and flame!
+He will go himself: he will find El Dorado and its golden Emperor; and
+instead of conquering, plundering, and murdering him, as Cortez did
+Montezuma, and Pizarro Atahuallpa, he will show him English strength;
+espouse his quarrel against the Spaniards; make him glad to become Queen
+Elizabeth’s vassal tributary, perhaps leave him a bodyguard of English
+veterans, perhaps colonise his country, and so at once avenge and protect
+the oppressed Indians, and fill the Queen’s treasury with the riches of a
+land equal, if not superior, to Peru and Mexico.
+
+Such is his dream; vague perhaps: but far less vague than those with
+which Cortez and Pizarro started, and succeeded.  After a careful survey
+of the whole matter, I must give it as my deliberate opinion, that
+Raleigh was more reasonable in his attempt, and had more fair evidence of
+its feasibility, than either Cortez or Pizarro had for theirs.  It is a
+bold assertion.  If any reader doubts its truth, he cannot do better than
+to read the whole of the documents connected with the two successful, and
+the one unsuccessful, attempts at finding a golden kingdom.  Let them
+read first Prescott’s ‘Conquests of Mexico and Peru,’ and then
+Schomburgk’s edition of Raleigh’s ‘Guiana.’  They will at least confess,
+when they have finished, that truth is stranger than fiction.
+
+Of Raleigh’s credulity in believing in El Dorado, much has been said.  I
+am sorry to find even so wise a man as Sir Robert Schomburgk, after
+bearing good testimony to Raleigh’s wonderful accuracy about all matters
+which he had an opportunity of observing, using this term of credulity.
+I must dare to differ on that point even with Sir Robert, and ask by what
+right the word is used?  First, Raleigh says nothing about El Dorado (as
+every one is forced to confess) but what Spaniard on Spaniard had been
+saying for fifty years.  Therefore the blame of credulity ought to rest
+with the Spaniards, from Philip von Huten, Orellano, and George of
+Spires, upward to Berreo.  But it rests really with no one.  For nothing,
+if we will examine the documents, is told of the riches of El Dorado
+which had not been found to be true, and seen by the eyes of men still
+living, in Peru and Mexico.  Not one-fifth of America had been explored,
+and already two El Dorados had been found and conquered.  What more
+rational than to suppose that there was a third, a fourth, a fifth, in
+the remaining four-fifths?  The reports of El Dorado among the savages
+were just of the same kind as those by which Cortez and Pizarro hunted
+out Mexico and Peru, saving that they were far more widely spread, and
+confirmed by a succession of adventurers.  I entreat readers to examine
+this matter in Raleigh, Schomburgk, Humboldt, and Condamine, and judge
+for themselves.  As for Hume’s accusations, I pass them by as equally
+silly and shameless, only saying, for the benefit of readers, that they
+have been refuted completely by every one who has written since Hume’s
+days; and to those who are inclined to laugh at Raleigh for believing in
+Amazons and ‘men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders’ I can only
+answer thus—
+
+About the Amazons, Raleigh told what he was told; what the Spaniards who
+went before him, and Condamine who came after him, were told.  Humboldt
+thinks the story possibly founded on fact; and I must say that, after
+reviewing all that has been said thereon, it does seem to me the simplest
+solution of the matter just to believe it true; to believe that there
+was, about his time, or a little before, somewhere about the Upper
+Orinoco, a warlike community of women.  Humboldt shows how likely such
+would be to spring up where women flee from their male tyrants into the
+forests.  As for the fable which connected them with the Lake Manoa and
+the city of El Dorado, we can only answer, ‘If not true there and then,
+it is true elsewhere now’; for the Amazonian guards of the King of
+Dahomey at this moment, as all know, surpass in strangeness and in
+ferocity all that has been reported of the Orinocquan viragos, and thus
+prove once more that truth is stranger than fiction. {138}
+
+Beside—and here I stand stubborn, regardless of gibes and sneers—it is
+not yet proven that there was not, in the sixteenth century, some rich
+and civilised kingdom like Peru or Mexico in the interior of South
+America.  Sir Robert Schomburgk has disproved the existence of Lake
+Parima; but it will take a long time, and more explorers than one, to
+prove that there are no ruins of ancient cities, such as Stephens
+stumbled on in Yucatan, still buried in the depths of the forest.  Fifty
+years of ruin would suffice to wrap them in a leafy veil which would hide
+them from every one who did not literally run against them.  Tribes would
+die out, or change place, as the Atures and other great nations have done
+in those parts, and every traditional record of them perish gradually;
+for it is only gradually and lately that it has perished: while if it be
+asked, What has become of the people themselves? the answer is, that when
+any race (like most of the American races in the sixteenth century) is in
+a dying state, it hardly needs war to thin it down, and reduce the
+remnant to savagery.  Greater nations than El Dorado was even supposed to
+be have vanished ere now, and left not a trace behind: and so may they.
+But enough of this.  I leave the quarrel to that honest and patient
+warder of tourneys, Old Time, who will surely do right at last, and go on
+to the dogheaded worthies, without necks, and long hair hanging down
+behind, who, as a cacique told Raleigh, that ‘they had of late years
+slain many hundreds of his father’s people,’ and in whom even Humboldt
+was not always allowed, he says, to disbelieve (so much for Hume’s scoff
+at Raleigh as a liar), one old cacique boasting to him that he had seen
+them with his own eyes.  Humboldt’s explanation is, that the Caribs,
+being the cleverest and strongest Indians, are also the most imaginative;
+and therefore, being fallen children of Adam, the greatest liars; and
+that they invented both El Dorado and the dog-heads out of pure
+wickedness.  Be it so.  But all lies crystallise round some nucleus of
+truth; and it really seems to me nothing very wonderful if the story
+should be on the whole true, and these worthies were in the habit of
+dressing themselves up, like foolish savages as they were, in the skins
+of the Aguara dog, with what not of stuffing, and tails, and so forth, in
+order to astonish the weak minds of the Caribs, just as the Red Indians
+dress up in their feasts as bears, wolves, and deer, with foxtails, false
+bustles of bison skin, and so forth.  There are plenty of traces of such
+foolish attempts at playing ‘bogy’ in the history of savages, even of our
+own Teutonic forefathers; and this I suspect to be the simple explanation
+of the whole mare’s nest.  As for Raleigh being a fool for believing it;
+the reasons he gives for believing it are very rational; the reasons Hume
+gives for calling him a fool rest merely on the story’s being strange: on
+which grounds one might disbelieve most matters in heaven and earth, from
+one’s own existence to what one sees in every drop of water under the
+microscope, yea, to the growth of every seed.  The only sound proof that
+dog-headed men are impossible is to be found in comparative anatomy, a
+science of which Hume knew no more than Raleigh, and which for one marvel
+it has destroyed has revealed a hundred.  I do not doubt that if Raleigh
+had seen and described a kangaroo, especially its all but miraculous
+process of gestation, Hume would have called that a lie also; but I will
+waste no more time in proving that no man is so credulous as the
+unbeliever—the man who has such mighty and world-embracing faith in
+himself that he makes his own little brain the measure of the universe.
+Let the dead bury their dead.
+
+Raleigh sails for Guiana.  The details of his voyage should be read at
+length.  Everywhere they show the eye of a poet as well as of a man of
+science.  He sees enough to excite his hopes more wildly than ever; he
+goes hundreds of miles up the Orinoco in an open boat, suffering every
+misery, but keeping up the hearts of his men, who cry out, ‘Let us go on,
+we care not how far.’  He makes friendship with the caciques, and enters
+into alliance with them on behalf of Queen Elizabeth against the
+Spaniards.  Unable to pass the falls of the Caroli, and the rainy season
+drawing on, he returns, beloved and honoured by all the Indians, boasting
+that, during the whole time he was there, no woman was the worse for any
+man of his crew.  Altogether, we know few episodes of history so noble,
+righteous, and merciful as this Guiana voyage.  But he has not forgotten
+the Spaniards.  At Trinidad he payed his ships with the asphalt of the
+famous Pitch-lake, and stood—and with what awe such a man must have
+stood—beneath the noble forest of Moriche fan-palms on its brink.  He
+then attacked, not, by his own confession, without something too like
+treachery, the new town of San José, takes Berreo prisoner, and delivers
+from captivity five caciques, whom Berreo kept bound in one chain,
+‘basting their bodies with burning bacon’—an old trick of the
+Conquistadores—to make them discover their gold.  He tells them that he
+was ‘the servant of a Queen who was the greatest cacique of the north,
+and a virgin; who had more caciqui under her than there were trees on
+that island; that she was an enemy of the Castellani (Spaniards) in
+behalf of their tyranny and oppression, and that she delivered all such
+nations about her as were by them oppressed, and having freed all the
+coast of the northern world from their servitude, had sent me to free
+them also, and withal to defend the country of Guiana from their invasion
+and conquest.’  After which perfectly true and rational speech, he
+subjoins (as we think equally honestly and rationally), ‘I showed them
+her Majesty’s picture, which they so admired and honoured, as it had been
+easy to have brought them idolaters thereof.’
+
+This is one of the stock charges against Raleigh, at which all
+biographers (except quiet, sensible Oldys, who, dull as he is, is far
+more fair and rational than most of his successors) break into virtuous
+shrieks of ‘flattery,’ ‘meanness,’ ‘adulation,’ ‘courtiership,’ and so
+forth.  One biographer is of opinion that the Indians would have admired
+far more the picture of a ‘red monkey.’  Sir Robert Schomburgk,
+unfortunately for the red monkey theory, though he quite agrees that
+Raleigh’s flattery was very shocking, says that from what he knows—and no
+man knows more—of Indian taste, they would have far preferred to the
+portrait which Raleigh showed them—not a red monkey, but—such a picture
+as that at Hampton Court, in which Elizabeth is represented in a
+fantastic court dress.  Raleigh, it seems, must be made out a rogue at
+all risks, though by the most opposite charges.  The monkey theory is
+answered, however, by Sir Robert; and Sir Robert is answered, I think, by
+the plain fact that, of course, Raleigh’s portrait was exactly such a one
+as Sir Robert says they would have admired; a picture probably in a
+tawdry frame, representing Queen Bess, just as queens were always painted
+then, bedizened with ‘browches, pearls, and owches,’ satin and ruff, and
+probably with crown on head and sceptre in hand, made up, as likely as
+not, expressly for the purpose for which it was used.  In the name of all
+simplicity and honesty, I ask, why is Raleigh to be accused of saying
+that the Indians admired Queen Elizabeth’s beauty when he never even
+hints at it?  And why do all commentators deliberately forget the
+preceding paragraph—Raleigh’s proclamation to the Indians, and the
+circumstances under which it was spoken?  The Indians are being murdered,
+ravished, sold for slaves, basted with burning fat; and grand white men
+come like avenging angels, and in one day sweep their tyrants out of the
+land, restore them to liberty and life, and say to them, ‘A great Queen
+far across the seas has sent us to do this.  Thousands of miles away she
+has heard of your misery and taken pity on you; and if you will be
+faithful to her she will love you, and deal justly with you, and protect
+you against these Spaniards who are devouring you as they have devoured
+all the Indians round you; and for a token of it—a sign that we tell you
+truth, and that there is really such a great Queen, who is the Indian’s
+friend—here is the picture of her.’  What wonder if the poor idolatrous
+creatures had fallen down and worshipped the picture—just as millions do
+that of the Virgin Mary without a thousandth part as sound and practical
+reason—as that of a divine, all-knowing, all-merciful deliverer?  As for
+its being the picture of a beautiful woman or not, they would never think
+of that.  The fair complexion and golden hair would be a sign to them
+that she belonged to the mighty white people, even if there were no
+bedizenment of jewels and crowns over and above; and that would be enough
+for them.  When will biographers learn to do common justice to their
+fellow-men by exerting now and then some small amount of dramatic
+imagination, just sufficient to put themselves for a moment in the place
+of those of whom they write?
+
+So ends his voyage, in which, he says, ‘from myself I have deserved no
+thanks, for I am returned a beggar and withered.’  The only thing which,
+as far as I can find, he brought home was some of the delicious scaly
+peaches of the Moriche palm—the _Arbol de Vida_, or tree of life, which
+gives sustenance and all else needful to whole tribes of Indians.  ‘But I
+might have bettered my poor estate if I had not only respected her
+Majesty’s future honour and riches.  It became not the former fortune in
+which I once lived to go journeys of piccory’ (pillage); ‘and it had
+sorted ill with the offices of honour which, by her Majesty’s grace, I
+hold this day in England, to run from cape to cape and place to place for
+the pillage of ordinary prizes.’
+
+So speaks one whom it has been the fashion to consider as little better
+than a pirate, and that, too, in days when the noblest blood in England
+thought no shame (as indeed it was no shame) to enrich themselves with
+Spanish gold.  But so it is throughout this man’s life.  If there be a
+nobler word than usual to be spoken, or a more wise word either, if there
+be a more chivalrous deed to be done, or a more prudent deed either, that
+word and that deed are pretty sure to be Walter Raleigh’s.
+
+But the blatant beast has been busy at home; and, in spite of Chapman’s
+heroical verses, he meets with little but cold looks.  Never mind.  If
+the world will not help to do the deed, he will do it by himself; and no
+time must be lost, for the Spaniards on their part will lose none.  So,
+after six months, the faithful Keymis sails again, again helped by the
+Lord High Admiral and Sir Robert Cecil.  It is a hard race for one
+private man against the whole power and wealth of Spain; and the Spaniard
+has been beforehand with them, and re-occupied the country.  They have
+fortified themselves at the mouth of the Caroli, so it is impossible to
+get to the gold mines; they are enslaving the wretched Indians, carrying
+off their women, intending to transplant some tribes and to expel others,
+and arming cannibal tribes against the inhabitants.  All is misery and
+rapine; the scattered remnant comes asking piteously why Raleigh does not
+come over to deliver them?  Have the Spaniards slain him, too?  Keymis
+comforts them as he best can; hears of more gold mines; and gets back
+safe, a little to his own astonishment; for eight-and-twenty ships of war
+have been sent to Trinidad to guard the entrance to El Dorado, not
+surely, as Keymis well says, ‘to keep us only from tobacco.’  A colony of
+500 persons is expected from Spain.  The Spaniard is well aware of the
+richness of the prize, says Keymis, who all through shows himself a
+worthy pupil of his master.  A careful, observant man he seems to have
+been, trained by that great example to overlook no fact, even the
+smallest.  He brings home lists of rivers, towns, caciques, poison-herbs,
+words, what not; he has fresh news of gold, spleen-stones, kidney-stones,
+and some fresh specimens; but be that as it may, he, ‘without going as
+far as his eyes can warrant, can promise Brazil-wood, honey, cotton,
+balsamum, and drugs, to defray charges.’  He would fain copy Raleigh’s
+style, too, and ‘whence his lamp had oil, borrow light also,’ ‘seasoning
+his unsavoury speech’ with some of the ‘leaven of Raleigh’s discourse.’
+Which, indeed, he does even to little pedantries and attempts at
+classicality; and after professing that himself and the remnant of his
+few years he hath bequeathed wholly to Raleana, and his thoughts live
+only in that action, he rises into something like grandeur when he begins
+to speak of that ever-fertile subject, the Spanish cruelties to the
+Indians; ‘Doth not the cry of the poor succourless ascend unto the
+heavens?  Hath God forgotten to be gracious to the work of his own hands.
+Or shall not his judgments in a day of visitation by the ministry of his
+chosen servant come upon these bloodthirsty butchers, like rain into a
+fleece of wool?’  Poor Keymis!  To us he is by no means the least
+beautiful figure in this romance; a faithful, diligent, loving man,
+unable, as the event proved, to do great deeds by himself, but inspired
+with a great idea by contact with a mightier spirit, to whom he clings
+through evil report, and poverty, and prison, careless of self to the
+last, and ends tragically, ‘faithful unto death’ in the most awful sense.
+
+But here remark two things: first, that Cecil believes in Raleigh’s
+Guiana scheme; next, that the occupation of Orinoco by the Spaniards,
+which Raleigh is accused of having concealed from James in 1617, has been
+ever since 1595 matter of the most public notoriety.
+
+Raleigh has not been idle in the meanwhile.  It has been found necessary
+after all to take the counsel which he gave in vain in 1588, to burn the
+Spanish fleet in harbour; and the heroes are gone down to Cadiz fight,
+and in one day of thunder storm the Sevastopol of Spain.  Here, as usual,
+we find Raleigh, though in an inferior command, leading the whole by
+virtue of superior wisdom.  When the good Lord Admiral will needs be
+cautious, and land the soldiers first, it is Raleigh who persuades him to
+force his way into the harbour, to the joy of all captains.  When
+hotheaded Essex, casting his hat into the sea for joy, shouts
+‘_Intramos_,’ and will in at once, Raleigh’s time for caution comes, and
+he persuades them to wait till the next morning, and arrange the order of
+attack.  That, too, Raleigh has to do, and moreover to lead it; and lead
+it he does.  Under the forts are seventeen galleys; the channel is
+‘scoured’ with cannon: but on holds Raleigh’s ‘Warspite,’ far ahead of
+the rest, through the thickest of the fire, answering forts and galleys
+‘with a blur of the trumpet to each piece, disdaining to shoot at those
+esteemed dreadful monsters.’  For there is a nobler enemy ahead.  Right
+in front lie the galleons; and among them the ‘Philip’ and the ‘Andrew,’
+two of those who boarded the ‘Revenge.’  This day there shall be a
+reckoning for the blood of his old friend; he is ‘resolved to be revenged
+for the “Revenge,”’ Sir Richard Grenvile’s fatal ship, or second her with
+his own life’; and well he keeps his vow.  Three hours pass of desperate
+valour, during which, so narrow is the passage, only seven English ships,
+thrusting past each other, all but quarrelling in their noble rivalry,
+engage the whole Spanish fleet of fifty-seven sail, and destroy it
+utterly.  The ‘Philip’ and ‘Thomas’ burn themselves despairing.  The
+English boats save the ‘Andrew’ and ‘Matthew.’  One passes over the
+hideous record.  ‘If any man,’ says Raleigh, ‘had a desire to see hell
+itself, it was there most lively figured.’  Keymis’s prayer is answered
+in part, even while he writes it; and the cry of the Indians has not
+ascended in vain before the throne of God!
+
+The soldiers are landed; the city stormed and sacked, not without mercies
+and courtesies, though, to women and unarmed folk, which win the hearts
+of the vanquished, and live till this day in well-known ballads.  The
+Flemings begin a ‘merciless slaughter.’  Raleigh and the Lord Admiral
+beat them off.  Raleigh is carried on shore with a splinter wound in the
+leg, which lames him for life: but returns on board in an hour in agony;
+for there is no admiral left to order the fleet, and all are run headlong
+to the sack.  In vain he attempts to get together sailors the following
+morning, and attack the Indian fleet in Porto Real Roads; within
+twenty-four hours it is burnt by the Spaniards themselves; and all
+Raleigh wins is no booty, a lame leg, and the honour of having been the
+real author of a victory even more glorious than that of 1588.
+
+So he returns; having written to Cecil the highest praises of Essex, whom
+he treats with all courtesy and fairness; which those who will may call
+cunning: we have as good a right to say that he was returning good for
+evil.  There were noble qualities in Essex.  All the world gave him
+credit for them, and far more than he deserved; why should not Raleigh
+have been just to him; even have conceived, like the rest of the world,
+high hopes of him, till he himself destroyed these hopes?  For now storms
+are rising fast.  On their return Cecil is in power.  He has been made
+Secretary of State instead of Bodley, Essex’s pet, and the spoilt child
+begins to sulk.  On which matter, I am sorry to say, historians talk much
+unwisdom, about Essex’s being too ‘open and generous, etc., for a
+courtier,’ and ‘presuming on his mistress’s passion for him’; and
+representing Elizabeth as desiring to be thought beautiful, and
+‘affecting at sixty the sighs, loves, tears, and tastes of a girl of
+sixteen,’ and so forth.  It is really time to get rid of some of this
+fulsome talk, culled from such triflers as Osborne, if not from the
+darker and fouler sources of Parsons and the Jesuit slanderers, which I
+meet with a flat denial.  There is simply no proof.  She in love with
+Essex or Cecil?  Yes, as a mother with a son.  Were they not the children
+of her dearest and most faithful servants, men who had lived heroic lives
+for her sake?  What wonder if she fancied that she saw the fathers in the
+sons?  They had been trained under her eye.  What wonder if she fancied
+that they could work as their fathers worked before them?  And what shame
+if her childless heart yearned over them with unspeakable affection, and
+longed in her old age to lay her hands upon the shoulders of those two
+young men, and say to England, ‘Behold the children which God, and not
+the flesh, has given me!’  Most strange it is, too, that women, who ought
+at least to know a woman’s heart, have been especially forward in
+publishing these scandals, and sullying their pages by retailing
+pruriences against such a one as Queen Elizabeth.
+
+But to return.  Raleigh attaches himself to Cecil; and he has good
+reason.  Cecil is the cleverest man in England, saving himself.  He has
+trusted and helped him, too, in two Guiana voyages; so the connection is
+one of gratitude as well as prudence.  We know not whether he helped him
+in the third Guiana voyage in the same year, under Captain Berry, a north
+Devon man, from Grenvile’s country; who found a ‘mighty folk,’ who were
+‘something pleasant, having drunk much that day,’ and carried bows with
+golden handles: but failed in finding the Lake Parima, and so came home.
+
+Raleigh’s first use of his friendship with Cecil is to reconcile him, to
+the astonishment of the world, with Essex, alleging how much good may
+grow by it; for now ‘the Queen’s continual unquietness will grow to
+contentment.’  That, too, those who will may call policy.  We have as
+good a right to call it the act of a wise and faithful subject, and to
+say, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children
+of God.’  He has his reward for it in full restoration to the Queen’s
+favour; he deserves it.  He proves himself once more worthy of power, and
+it is given to him.  Then there is to be a second great expedition: but
+this time its aim is the Azores.  Philip, only maddened by the loss at
+Cadiz, is preparing a third armament for the invasion of England and
+Ireland, and it is said to lie at the islands to protect the Indian
+fleet.  Raleigh has the victualling of the land-forces, and, like
+everything else he takes in hand, ‘it is very well done.’  Lord Howard
+declines the chief command, and it is given to Essex.  Raleigh is to be
+rear-admiral.
+
+By the time they reach the Azores, Essex has got up a foolish quarrel
+against Raleigh for disrespect in having stayed behind to bring up some
+stragglers.  But when no Armada is to be found at the Azores, Essex has
+after all to ask Raleigh what he shall do next.  Conquer the Azores, says
+Raleigh, and the thing is agreed on.  Raleigh and Essex are to attack
+Fayal.  Essex sails away before Raleigh has watered.  Raleigh follows as
+fast as he can, and at Fayal finds no Essex.  He must water there, then
+and at once.  His own veterans want him to attack forthwith, for the
+Spaniards are fortifying fast: but he will wait for Essex.  Still no
+Essex comes.  Raleigh attempts to water, is defied, finds himself ‘in for
+it,’ and takes the island out of hand in the most masterly fashion, to
+the infuriation of Essex.  Good Lord Howard patches up the matter, and
+the hot-headed coxcomb is once more pacified.  They go on to Graciosa,
+where Essex’s weakness of will again comes out, and he does not take the
+island.  Three rich Caracks, however, are picked up.  ‘Though we shall be
+little the better for them,’ says Raleigh privately to Sir Arthur Gorges,
+his faithful captain, ‘yet I am heartily glad for our General’s sake;
+because they will in great measure give content to her Majesty, so that
+there may be no repining against this poor Lord for the expense of the
+voyage.’
+
+Raleigh begins to see that Essex is only to be pitied; that the voyage is
+not over likely to end well: but he takes it, in spite of ill-usage, as a
+kind-hearted man should.  Again Essex makes a fool of himself.  They are
+to steer one way in order to intercept the Plate-fleet.  Essex having
+agreed to the course pointed out, alters his course on a fancy; then
+alters it a second time, though the hapless Monson, with the whole
+Plate-fleet in sight, is hanging out lights, firing guns, and shrieking
+vainly for the General, who is gone on a new course, in which he might
+have caught the fleet after all, in spite of his two mistakes, but that
+he chooses to go a roundabout way instead of a short one; and away goes
+the whole fleet, save one Carack, which runs itself on shore and burns,
+and the game is played out and lost.
+
+All want Essex to go home, as the season is getting late: but the wilful
+and weak man will linger still, and while he is hovering to the south,
+Philip’s armament has sailed from the Groyne, on the undefended shores of
+England, and only God’s hand saves us from the effects of Essex’s folly.
+A third time the Armadas of Spain are overwhelmed by the avenging
+tempests, and Essex returns to disgrace, having proved himself at once
+intemperate and incapable.  Even in coming home there is confusion, and
+Essex is all but lost on the Bishop and Clerks, by Scilly, in spite of
+the warnings of Raleigh’s sailing-master, ‘Old Broadbent,’ who is so
+exasperated at the general stupidity that he wants Raleigh to leave Essex
+and his squadron to get out of their own scrape as they can.
+
+Essex goes off to sulk at Wanstead; but Vere excuses him, and in a few
+days he comes back, and will needs fight good Lord Howard for being made
+Earl of Nottingham for his services against the Armada and at Cadiz.
+Baulked of this, he begins laying the blame of the failure at the Azores
+on Raleigh.  Let the spoilt naughty boy take care; even that ‘admirable
+temper’ for which Raleigh is famed may be worn out at last.
+
+These years are Raleigh’s noon—stormy enough at best, yet brilliant.
+There is a pomp about him, outward and inward, which is terrible to
+others, dangerous to himself.  One has gorgeous glimpses of that grand
+Durham House of his, with its carvings and its antique marbles, armorial
+escutcheons, ‘beds with green silk hangings and legs like dolphins,
+overlaid with gold’: and the man himself, tall, beautiful, and graceful,
+perfect alike in body and in mind, walking to and fro, his beautiful wife
+upon his arm, his noble boy beside his knee, in his ‘white satin doublet,
+embroidered with pearls, and a great chain of pearls about his neck,’
+lording it among the lords with an ‘awfulness and ascendency above other
+mortals,’ for which men say that ‘his næve is, that he is damnable
+proud’; and no wonder.  The reduced squire’s younger son has gone forth
+to conquer the world; and he fancies, poor fool, that he has conquered
+it, just as it really has conquered him; and he will stand now on his
+blood and his pedigree (no bad one either), and all the more stiffly
+because puppies like Lord Oxford, who instead of making their fortunes
+have squandered them, call him ‘jack and upstart,’ and make impertinent
+faces while the Queen is playing the virginals, about ‘how when jacks go
+up, heads go down.’  Proud?  No wonder if the man be proud!  ‘Is not this
+great Babylon, which I have built?’  And yet all the while he has the
+most affecting consciousness that all this is not God’s will, but the
+will of the flesh; that the house of fame is not the house of God; that
+its floor is not the rock of ages, but the sea of glass mingled with
+fire, which may crack beneath him any moment, and let the nether flame
+burst up.  He knows that he is living in a splendid lie; that he is not
+what God meant him to be.  He longs to flee away and be at peace.  It is
+to this period, not to his death-hour, that ‘The Lie’ belongs; {155}
+saddest of poems, with its melodious contempt and life-weariness.  All is
+a lie—court, church, statesmen, courtiers, wit and science, town and
+country, all are shams; the days are evil; the canker is at the root of
+all things; the old heroes are dying one by one; the Elizabethan age is
+rotting down, as all human things do, and nothing is left but to bewail
+with Spenser ‘The Ruins of Time’; the glory and virtue which have
+been—the greater glory and virtue which might be even now, if men would
+but arise and repent, and work righteousness, as their fathers did before
+them.  But no.  Even to such a world as this he will cling, and flaunt it
+about as captain of the guard in the Queen’s progresses and masques and
+pageants, with sword-belt studded with diamonds and rubies, or at
+tournaments, in armour of solid silver, and a gallant train with
+orange-tawny feathers, provoking Essex to bring in a far larger train in
+the same colours, and swallow up Raleigh’s pomp in his own, so achieving
+that famous ‘feather triumph’ by which he gains little but bad blood and
+a good jest.  For Essex is no better tilter than he is general; and
+having ‘run very ill’ in his orange-tawny, comes next day in green, and
+runs still worse, and yet is seen to be the same cavalier; whereon a
+spectator shrewdly observes that he changed his colours ‘that it may be
+reported that there was one in green who ran worse than he in
+orange-tawny.’  But enough of these toys, while God’s handwriting is upon
+the wall above all heads.
+
+Raleigh knows that the handwriting is there.  The spirit which drove him
+forth to Virginia and Guiana is fallen asleep: but he longs for Sherborne
+and quiet country life, and escapes thither during Essex’s imprisonment,
+taking Cecil’s son with him, and writes as only he can write about the
+shepherd’s peaceful joys, contrasted with ‘courts’ and ‘masques’ and
+‘proud towers’—
+
+       ‘Here are no false entrapping baits
+       Too hasty for too hasty fates,
+          Unless it be
+          The fond credulity
+    Of silly fish, that worlding who still look
+    Upon the bait, but never on the hook;
+          Nor envy, unless among
+       The birds, for prize of their sweet song.
+
+       ‘Go! let the diving negro seek
+       For pearls hid in some forlorn creek,
+          We all pearls scorn,
+          Save what the dewy morn
+    Congeals upon some little spire of grass,
+    Which careless shepherds beat down as they pass
+          And gold ne’er here appears
+       Save what the yellow Ceres bears.’
+
+Tragic enough are the after scenes of Raleigh’s life: but most tragic of
+all are these scenes of vain-glory, in which he sees the better part, and
+yet chooses the worse, and pours out his self-discontent in song which
+proves the fount of delicacy and beauty which lies pure and bright
+beneath the gaudy artificial crust.  What might not this man have been!
+And he knows that too.  The stately rooms of Durham House pall on him,
+and he delights to hide up in his little study among his books and his
+chemical experiments, and smoke his silver pipe, and look out on the
+clear Thames and the green Surrey hills, and dream about Guiana and the
+Tropics; or to sit in the society of antiquaries with Selden and Cotton,
+Camden and Stow; or in his own Mermaid Club, with Ben Jonson, Fletcher,
+Beaumont, and at last with Shakspeare’s self to hear and utter
+
+       ‘Words that have been
+    So nimble, and so full of subtle flame,
+    As if that every one from whom they came
+    Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest.’
+
+Anything to forget the handwriting on the wall, which will not be
+forgotten.  But he will do all the good which he can meanwhile,
+nevertheless.  He will serve God and Mammon.  So complete a man will
+surely be able to do both.  Unfortunately the thing is impossible, as he
+discovers too late: but he certainly goes as near success in the attempt
+as ever man did.  Everywhere we find him doing justly and loving mercy.
+Wherever this man steps he leaves his footprint ineffaceably in deeds of
+benevolence.  For one year only, it seems, he is governor of Jersey; yet
+to this day, it is said, the islanders honour his name, only second to
+that of Duke Rollo, as their great benefactor, the founder of their
+Newfoundland trade.  In the west country he is ‘as a king,’ ‘with ears
+and mouth always open to hear and deliver their grievances, feet and
+hands ready to go and work their redress.’  The tin-merchants have become
+usurers ‘of fifty in the hundred.’  Raleigh works till he has put down
+their ‘abominable and cut-throat dealing.’  There is a burdensome
+west-country tax on curing fish; Raleigh works till it is revoked.  In
+Parliament he is busy with liberal measures, always before his
+generation.  He puts down a foolish act for compulsory sowing of hemp in
+a speech on the freedom of labour worthy of the nineteenth century.  He
+argues against raising the subsidy from the three-pound men—‘Call you
+this, Mr. Francis Bacon, _par jugum_, when a poor man pays as much as a
+rich?’  He is equally rational and spirited against the exportation of
+ordnance to the enemy; and when the question of abolishing monopolies is
+mooted he has his wise word.  He too is a monopolist of tin, as Lord
+Warden of the Stannaries.  But he has so wrought as to bring good out of
+evil; for ‘before the granting of his patent, let the price of tin be
+never so high, the poor workman never had but two shillings a week’; yet
+now, so has he extended and organised the tin-works, ‘that any man who
+will can find work, be tin at what price soever, and have four shillings
+a week truly paid . . . Yet if all others may be repealed, I will give my
+consent as freely to the cancelling of this as any member of this house.’
+Most of the monopolies were repealed: but we do not find that Raleigh’s
+was among them.  Why should it be if its issue was more tin, full work,
+and double wages?  In all things this man approves himself faithful in
+his generation.  His sins are not against man, but against God; such as
+the world thinks no sins, and hates them, not from morality, but from
+envy.
+
+In the meanwhile, the evil which, so Spenser had prophesied, only waited
+Raleigh’s death breaks out in his absence, and Ireland is all aflame with
+Tyrone’s rebellion.  Raleigh is sent for.  He will not accept the post of
+Lord Deputy and go to put it down.  Perhaps he does not expect fair play
+as long as Essex is at home.  Perhaps he knows too much of the ‘common
+weal, or rather common woe,’ and thinks that what is crooked cannot be
+made straight.  Perhaps he is afraid to lose by absence his ground at
+court.  Would that he had gone, for Ireland’s sake and his own.  However,
+it must not be.  Ormond is recalled, and Knollys shall be sent: but Essex
+will have none but Sir George Carew; whom, Naunton says, he hates, and
+wishes to oust from court.  He and Elizabeth argue it out.  He turns his
+back on her, and she gives him—or does not give him, for one has found so
+many of these racy anecdotes vanish on inspection into simple wind, that
+one believes none of them—a box on the ear; which if she did, she did the
+most wise, just, and practical thing which she could do with such a
+puppy.  He claps his hand—or does not—to his sword, ‘He would not have
+taken it from Henry VIII.,’ and is turned out forthwith.  In vain
+Egerton, the Lord Keeper, tries to bring him to reason.  He storms
+insanely.  Every one on earth is wrong but he: every one is conspiring
+against him; he talks of ‘Solomon’s fool’ too.  Had he read the Proverbs
+a little more closely, he might have left the said fool alone, as being a
+too painfully exact likeness of himself.  It ends by his being worsted,
+and Raleigh rising higher than ever.  I cannot see why Raleigh should be
+represented as henceforth becoming Essex’s ‘avowed enemy,’ save on the
+ground that all good men are and ought to be the enemies of bad men, when
+they see them about to do harm, and to ruin the country.  Essex is one of
+the many persons upon whom this age has lavished a quantity of
+sentimentality, which suits oddly enough with its professions of
+impartiality.  But there is an impartiality which ends in utter
+injustice; which by saying carelessly to every quarrel, ‘Both are right,
+and both are wrong,’ leaves only the impression that all men are wrong,
+and ends by being unjust to every one.  So has Elizabeth and Essex’s
+quarrel been treated.  There was some evil in Essex; therefore Elizabeth
+was a fool for liking him.  There was some good in Essex; therefore
+Elizabeth was cruel in punishing him.  This is the sort of slipshod
+dilemma by which Elizabeth is proved to be wrong, even while Essex is
+confessed to be wrong too; while the patent facts of the case are, that
+Elizabeth bore with him as long as she could, and a great deal longer
+than any one else could.  Why Raleigh should be accused of helping to
+send Essex into Ireland, I do not know.  Camden confesses (at the same
+time that he gives a hint of the kind) that Essex would let no one go but
+himself.  And if this was his humour, one can hardly wonder at Cecil and
+Raleigh, as well as Elizabeth, bidding the man begone and try his hand at
+government, and be filled with the fruit of his own devices.  He goes;
+does nothing; or rather worse than nothing; for in addition to the
+notorious ill-management of the whole matter, we may fairly say that he
+killed Elizabeth.  She never held up her head again after Tyrone’s
+rebellion.  Elizabeth still clings to him, changing her mind about him
+every hour, and at last writes him such a letter as he deserves.  He has
+had power, money, men, such as no one ever had before.  Why has he done
+nothing but bring England to shame?  He comes home frantically—the story
+of his bursting into the dressing-room rests on no good authority—with a
+party of friends at his heels, leaving Ireland to take care of itself.
+Whatever entertainment he met with from the fond old woman, he met with
+the coldness which he deserved from Raleigh and Cecil.  Who can wonder?
+What had he done to deserve aught else?  But he all but conquers; and
+Raleigh takes to his bed in consequence, sick of the whole matter; as one
+would have been inclined to do oneself.  He is examined and arraigned;
+writes a maudlin letter to Elizabeth.  Elizabeth has been called a fool
+for listening to such pathetical ‘love letters’: and then hardhearted for
+not listening to them.  Poor Lady! do what she would, she found it hard
+enough to please all parties while alive; must she be condemned over and
+above _in æternum_ to be wrong whatsoever she did?  Why is she not to
+have the benefit of the plain straightforward interpretation which would
+be allowed to any other human being; namely, that she approved of such
+fine talk as long as it was proved to be sincere by fine deeds: but that
+when these were wanting, the fine talk became hollow, fulsome, a fresh
+cause of anger and disgust?  Yet still she weeps over Essex when he falls
+sick, as any mother would; and would visit him if she could with honour.
+But a ‘malignant influence counteracts every disposition to relent.’  No
+doubt, a man’s own folly, passion, and insolence has generally a very
+malignant influence on his fortunes; and he may consider himself a very
+happy man if all that befalls to him thereby is what befell Essex,
+namely, deprivation of his offices and imprisonment in his own house.  He
+is forgiven after all; but the spoilt child refuses his bread and butter
+without sugar.  What is the pardon to him without a renewal of his
+licence of sweet wines?  Because he is not to have that, the Queen’s
+‘conditions are as crooked as her carcase.’  Flesh and blood can stand no
+more, and ought to stand no more.  After all that Elizabeth has been to
+him, that speech is the speech of a brutal and ungrateful nature.  And
+such he shows himself to be in the hour of trial.  What if the patent for
+sweet wines is refused him?  Such gifts were meant as the reward of
+merit; and what merit has he to show?  He never thinks of that.  Blind
+with fury, he begins to intrigue with James, and slanders to him, under
+colour of helping his succession, all whom he fancies opposed to him.
+What is worse, he intrigues with Tyrone about bringing over an army of
+Irish Papists to help him against the Queen, and this at the very time
+that his sole claim to popularity rests on his being the leader of the
+Puritans.  A man must have been very far gone, either in baseness or in
+hatred, who represents Raleigh to James as dangerous to the commonweal on
+account of his great power in the west of England and Jersey, ‘places fit
+for the Spaniard to land in.’  Cobham, as Warden of the Cinque Ports, is
+included in his slander; and both he and Raleigh will hear of it again.
+
+Some make much of a letter, supposed to be written about this time by
+Raleigh to Cecil, bidding Cecil keep down Essex, even crush him, now that
+he is once down.  I do not happen to think the letter to be Raleigh’s.
+His initials are subscribed to it; but not his name and the style is not
+like his.  But as for seeing ‘unforgiveness and revenge in it,’ whose
+soever it may be, I hold and say there is not a word which can bear such
+a construction.  It is a dark letter: but about a dark matter and a dark
+man.  It is a worldly and expediential letter, appealing to low motives
+in Cecil, though for a right end; such a letter, in short, as statesmen
+are wont to write nowadays.  If Raleigh wrote it, God punished him for
+doing so speedily enough.  He does not usually punish statesmen nowadays
+for such letters; perhaps because He does not love them as well as
+Raleigh.  But as for the letter itself.  Essex is called a ‘tyrant,’
+because he had shown himself one.  The Queen is to ‘hold Bothwell,’
+because ‘while she hath him, he will even be the canker of her estate and
+safety,’ and the writer has ‘seen the last of her good days and of ours
+after his liberty.’  On which accounts, Cecil is not to be deterred from
+doing what is right and necessary ‘by any fear of after-revenges’ and
+‘conjectures from causes remote,’ as many a stronger instance—given—will
+prove, but ‘look to the present,’ and so ‘do wisely.’  There is no real
+cause for Cecil’s fear.  If the man who has now lost a power which he
+ought never to have had be now kept down, then neither he nor his son
+will ever be able to harm the man who has kept him at his just level.
+What ‘revenge, selfishness, and craft’ there can be in all this it is
+difficult to see; as difficult as to see why Essex is to be talked of as
+‘unfortunate,’ and the blame of his frightful end thrown on every one but
+himself: the fact being that Essex’s end was brought on by his having
+chosen one Sunday morning for breaking out into open rebellion, for the
+purpose of seizing the city of London and the Queen’s person, and
+compelling her to make him lord and master of the British Isles; in which
+attempt he and his fought with the civil and military authorities, till
+artillery had to be brought up and many lives were lost.  Such little
+escapades may be pardonable enough in ‘noble and unfortunate’ earls: but
+readers will perhaps agree that if they chose to try a similar
+experiment, they could not complain if they found themselves shortly
+after in company with Mr. Mitchell at Spike Island or Mr. Oxford in
+Bedlam.  However, those were days in which such Sabbath amusements on the
+part of one of the most important and powerful personages of the realm
+could not be passed over so lightly, especially when accompanied by
+severe loss of life; and as there existed in England certain statutes
+concerning rebellion and high treason, which must needs have been framed
+for some purpose or other, the authorities of England may be excused for
+fancying that they bore some reference to such acts as that which the
+noble and unfortunate earl had just committed, as wantonly, selfishly,
+and needlessly, it seems to me, as ever did man on earth.
+
+I may seem to jest too much upon so solemn a matter as the life of a
+human being: but if I am not to touch the popular talk about Essex in
+this tone, I can only touch it in a far sterner one; and if ridicule is
+forbidden, express disgust instead.
+
+I have entered into this matter of Essex somewhat at length, because on
+it is founded one of the mean slanders from which Raleigh never
+completely recovered.  The very mob who, after Raleigh’s death, made him
+a Protestant martyr—as, indeed, he was—looked upon Essex in the same
+light, hated Raleigh as the cause of his death, and accused him of
+glutting his eyes with Essex’s misery, puffing tobacco out of a window,
+and what not—all mere inventions, so Raleigh declared upon the scaffold.
+He was there in his office as captain of the guard, and could do no less
+than be there.  Essex, it is said, asked for Raleigh just before he died:
+but Raleigh had withdrawn, the mob having murmured.  What had Essex to
+say to him?  Was it, asks Oldys, shrewdly enough, to ask him pardon for
+the wicked slanders which he had been pouring into James’s credulous and
+cowardly ears?  We will hope so; and leave poor Essex to God and the
+mercy of God, asserting once more that no man ever brought ruin and death
+more thoroughly on himself by his own act, needing no imaginary help
+downwards from Raleigh, Cecil, or other human being.
+
+And now begins the fourth act of this strange tragedy.  Queen Elizabeth
+dies; and dies of grief.  It has been the fashion to attribute to her, I
+know not why, remorse for Essex’s death; and the foolish and false tale
+about Lady Nottingham and the ring has been accepted as history.  The
+fact seems to be that she never really held up her head after Burleigh’s
+death.  She could not speak of him without tears; forbade his name to be
+mentioned in the Council.  No wonder; never had mistress a better
+servant.  For nearly half a century have these two noble souls loved each
+other, trusted each other, worked with each other; and God’s blessing has
+been on their deeds; and now the faithful God-fearing man is gone to his
+reward; and she is growing old, and knows that the ancient fire is dying
+out in her; and who will be to her what he was?  Buckhurst is a good man,
+and one of her old pupils; and she makes him Lord Treasurer in Burleigh’s
+place: but beyond that all is dark.  ‘I am a miserable forlorn woman;
+there is none about me that I can trust.’  She sees through Cecil;
+through Henry Howard.  Essex has proved himself worthless, and pays the
+penalty of his sins.  Men are growing worse than their fathers.  Spanish
+gold is bringing in luxury and sin.  The last ten years of her reign are
+years of decadence, profligacy, falsehood; and she cannot but see it.
+Tyrone’s rebellion is the last drop which fills the cup.  After fifty
+years of war, after a drain of money all but fabulous expended on keeping
+Ireland quiet, the volcano bursts forth again just as it seemed
+extinguished, more fiercely than ever, and the whole work has to be done
+over again, when there is neither time nor a man to do it.  And ahead,
+what hope is there for England?  Who will be her successor?  She knows in
+her heart that it will be James: but she cannot bring herself to name
+him.  To bequeath the fruit of all her labours to a tyrant, a liar, and a
+coward: for she knows the man but too well.  It is too hideous to be
+faced.  This is the end then?  ‘Oh that I were a milke maide, with a
+paile upon mine arm!’  But it cannot be.  It never could have been; and
+she must endure to the end.
+
+‘Therefore I hated life; yea, I hated all my labour which I had taken
+under the sun; because I should leave it to the man that shall be after
+me.  And who knows whether he shall be a wise man or a fool? yet shall he
+have rule over all my labour wherein I have showed myself wise, in
+wisdom, and knowledge, and equity . . . Vanity of vanities, and vexation
+of spirit!’  And so, with a whole book of Ecclesiastes written on that
+mighty heart, the old lioness coils herself up in her lair, refuses food,
+and dies.  I know few passages in the world’s history more tragic than
+that death.
+
+Why did she not trust Raleigh?  First, because Raleigh, as we have seen,
+was not the sort of man whom she needed.  He was not the steadfast
+single-eyed statesman; but the many-sided genius.  Besides, he was the
+ringleader of the war-party.  And she, like Burleigh before his death,
+was tired of the war; saw that it was demoralising England; was anxious
+for peace.  Raleigh would not see that.  It was to him a divine mission
+which must be fulfilled at all risks.  As long as the Spaniards were
+opposing the Indians, conquering America, there must be no peace.  Both
+were right from their own point of view.  God ordered the matter from a
+third point of view.
+
+Besides, we know that Essex, and after him Cecil and Henry Howard, had
+been slandering Raleigh basely to James.  Can we doubt that the same
+poison had been poured into Elizabeth’s ears?  She might distrust Cecil
+too much to act upon what he said of Raleigh; and yet distrust Raleigh
+too much to put the kingdom into his hands.  However, she is gone now,
+and a new king has arisen, who knoweth not Joseph.
+
+James comes down to take possession.  Insolence, luxury, and lawlessness
+mark his first steps on his going amid the adulations of a fallen people;
+he hangs a poor wretch without trial; wastes his time in hunting by the
+way;—a bad and base man, whose only redeeming point—if in his case it be
+one—is his fondness for little children.  But that will not make a king.
+The wiser elders take counsel together.  Raleigh and good Judge Fortescue
+are for requiring conditions from the newcomer; and constitutional
+liberty makes its last stand among the men of Devon, the old county of
+warriors, discoverers, and statesmen, of which Queen Bess had said that
+the men of Devon were her right hand.  But in vain; James has his way;
+Cecil and Henry Howard are willing enough to give it him.
+
+So down comes Rehoboam, taking counsel with the young men, and makes
+answer to England, ‘My father chastised you with whips; but I will
+chastise you with scorpions.’  He takes a base pleasure, shocking to the
+French ambassador, in sneering at the memory of Queen Elizabeth; a
+perverse delight in honouring every rascal whom she had punished.  Tyrone
+must come to England to be received into favour, maddening the soul of
+honest Sir John Harrington.  Essex is christened ‘my martyr,’ apparently
+for having plotted treason against Elizabeth with Tyrone.  Raleigh is
+received with a pun—‘By my soul, I have heard rawly of thee, mon’; and
+when the great nobles and gentlemen come to court with their retinues,
+James tries to hide his dread of them in an insult; pooh-poohs their
+splendour, and says, ‘he doubts not that he should have been able to win
+England for himself, had they kept him out.’  Raleigh answers boldly,
+‘Would God that had been put to the trial.’  ‘Why?’  ‘Because then you
+would have known your friends from your foes.’  ‘A reason,’ says old
+Aubrey, ‘never forgotten or forgiven.’  Aubrey is no great authority; but
+the speech smacks so of Raleigh’s offhand daring that one cannot but
+believe it; as one does also the other story of his having advised the
+lords to keep out James and erect a republic.  Not that he could have
+been silly enough to propose such a thing seriously at that moment; but
+that he most likely, in his bold way, may have said, ‘Well, if we are to
+have this man in without conditions, better a republic at once.’  Which,
+if he did say, he said what the next forty years proved to be strictly
+true.  However, he will go on his own way as best he can.  If James will
+give him a loan, he and the rest of the old heroes will join, fit out a
+fleet against Spain, and crush her, now that she is tottering and
+impoverished, once and for ever.  But James has no stomach for fighting;
+cannot abide the sight of a drawn sword; would not provoke Spain for the
+world—why, they might send Jesuits and assassinate him; and as for the
+money, he wants that for very different purposes.  So the answer which he
+makes to Raleigh’s proposal of war against Spain is to send him to the
+Tower, and sentence him to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, on a charge
+of plotting with Spain.
+
+Having read, I believe, nearly all that has been written on the subject
+of this dark ‘Cobham plot,’ I find but one thing come brightly out of the
+infinite confusion and mystery, which will never be cleared up till the
+day of judgment, and that is Raleigh’s innocence.  He, and all England,
+and the very men who condemned him, knew that he was innocent.  Every
+biographer is forced to confess this, more or less, in spite of all
+efforts to be what is called ‘impartial.’  So I shall waste no words upon
+the matter, only observing that whereas Raleigh is said to have slandered
+Cecil to James, in the same way that Cecil had slandered him, one passage
+of this Cobham plot disproves utterly such a story, which, after all,
+rests (as far as I know) only on hearsay, being ‘spoken of in a
+manuscript written by one Buck, secretary to Chancellor Egerton.’  For in
+writing to his own wife, in the expectation of immediate death, Raleigh
+speaks of Cecil in a very different tone, as one in whom he trusted most,
+and who has left him in the hour of need.  I ask the reader to peruse
+that letter, and say whether any man would write thus, with death and
+judgment before his face, of one whom he knew that he had betrayed; or,
+indeed, of one who he knew had betrayed him.  I see no reason to doubt
+that Raleigh kept good faith with Cecil, and that he was ignorant till
+after his trial that Cecil was in the plot against him.
+
+I do not care to enter into the tracasseries of this Cobham plot.  Every
+one knows them; no one can unravel them.  The moral and spiritual
+significance of the fact is more interesting than all questions as to
+Cobham’s lies, Brooke’s lies, Aremberg’s lies, Coke’s lies, James’s
+lies:—Let the dead bury their dead.  It is the broad aspect of the thing
+which is so wonderful; to see how
+
+    ‘The eagle, towering in his pride of place,
+    Was by a mousing owl hawked at and killed.’
+
+This is the man who six months ago, perhaps, thought that he and Cecil
+were to rule England together, while all else were the puppets whose
+wires they pulled.  ‘The Lord hath taken him up and dashed him down;’ and
+by such means, too, and on such a charge!  Betraying his country to
+Spain!  Absurd—incredible—he would laugh it to scorn: but it is bitter
+earnest.  There is no escape.  True or false, he sees that his enemies
+will have his head.  It is maddening: a horrible nightmare.  He cannot
+bear it; he cannot face—so he writes to that beloved wife—‘the scorn, the
+taunts, the loss of honour, the cruel words of lawyers.’  He stabs
+himself.  Read that letter of his, written after the mad blow had been
+struck; it is sublime from intensity of agony.  The way in which the
+chastisement was taken proves how utterly it was needed, ere that proud,
+success-swollen, world-entangled heart could be brought right with God.
+
+And it is brought right.  The wound is not mortal.  He comes slowly to a
+better mind, and takes his doom like a man.  That first farewell to his
+wife was written out of hell.  The second rather out of heaven.  Read it,
+too, and compare; and then see how the Lord has been working upon this
+great soul: infinite sadness, infinite tenderness and patience, and trust
+in God for himself and his poor wife: ‘God is my witness, it was for you
+and yours that I desired life; but it is true that I disdain myself for
+begging it.  For know, dear wife, that your son is the son of a true man,
+and one who, in his own respect, despiseth death and all his ugly and
+misshapen forms . . . The everlasting, powerful, infinite, and omnipotent
+God, who is goodness itself, the true life and light, keep thee and
+thine, have mercy upon me, and teach me to forgive my persecutors and
+accusers, and send us to meet in His glorious kingdom.’
+
+Is it come to this then?  Is he fit to die at last?  Then he is fit to
+live; and live he shall.  The tyrants have not the heart to carry out
+their own crime, and Raleigh shall be respited.
+
+But not pardoned.  No more return for him into that sinful world, where
+he flaunted on the edge of the precipice, and dropped heedless over it.
+God will hide him in the secret place of His presence, and keep him in
+His tabernacle from the strife of tongues; and a new life shall begin for
+him; a wiser, perhaps a happier, than he has known since he was a little
+lad in the farmhouse in pleasant Devon far away.  On the 15th of December
+he enters the Tower.  Little dreams he that for more than twelve years
+those doleful walls would be his home.  Lady Raleigh obtains leave to
+share his prison with him, and, after having passed ten years without a
+child, brings him a boy to comfort the weary heart.  The child of sorrow
+is christened Carew.  Little think those around him what strange things
+that child will see before his hairs be gray.  She has her maid, and he
+his three servants; some five or six friends are allowed ‘to repair to
+him at convenient times.’  He has a chamber-door always open into the
+lieutenant’s garden, where he ‘has converted a little hen-house into a
+still-room, and spends his time all the day in distillation.’  The next
+spring a grant is made of his goods and chattels, forfeited by attainder,
+to trustees named by himself, for the benefit of his family.  So far, so
+well; or, at least, not as ill as it might be: but there are those who
+cannot leave the caged lion in peace.
+
+Sanderson, who had married his niece, instead of paying up the arrears
+which he owes on the wine and other offices, brings in a claim of £2000.
+But the rogue meets his match, and finds himself, at the end of a
+lawsuit, in prison for debt.  Greater rogues, however, will have better
+fortune, and break through the law-cobwebs which have stopped a poor
+little fly like Sanderson.  For Carr, afterwards Lord Somerset, casts his
+eyes on the Sherborne land.  It has been included in the conveyance, and
+should be safe; but there are others who, by instigation surely of the
+devil himself, have had eyes to see a flaw in the deed.  Sir John Popham
+is appealed to.  Who could doubt the result?  He answers that there is no
+doubt that the words were omitted by the inattention of the
+engrosser—Carew Raleigh says that but one single word was wanting, which
+word was found notwithstanding in the paper-book, _i.e._ the draft—but
+that the word not being there, the deed is worthless, and the devil may
+have his way.  To Carr, who has nothing of his own, it seems reasonable
+enough to help himself to what belongs to others, and James gives him the
+land.  Raleigh writes to him, gently, gracefully, loftily.  Here is an
+extract: ‘And for yourself, sir, seeing your fair day is now in the dawn,
+and mine drawn to the evening, your own virtues and the king’s grace
+assuring you of many favours and much honour, I beseech you not to begin
+your first building upon the ruins of the innocent; and that their
+sorrows, with mine, may not attend your first plantation.’  He speaks
+strongly of the fairness, sympathy, and pity by which the Scots in
+general had laid him under obligation: argues from it his own evident
+innocence; and ends with a quiet warning to the young favourite not to
+‘undergo the curse of them that enter into the fields of the fatherless.’
+In vain.  Lady Raleigh, with her children, entreats James on her knees:
+in vain again.  ‘I mun ha’ the land,’ is the answer; ‘I mun ha’ it for
+Carr.’  And he has it; patching up the matter after a while by a gift of
+£8000 to her and her elder son, in requital for an estate of £5000 a
+year.
+
+So there sits Raleigh, growing poorer day by day, and clinging more and
+more to that fair wife, and her noble boy, and the babe whose laughter
+makes music within that dreary cage.  And all day long, as we have seen,
+he sits over his still, compounding and discovering, and sometimes
+showing himself on the wall to the people, who gather to gaze at him,
+till Wade forbids it, fearing popular feeling.  In fact, the world
+outside has a sort of mysterious awe of him, as if he were a chained
+magician, who, if he were let loose, might do with them all what he
+would.  Certain great nobles are of the same mind.  Woe to them if that
+silver tongue should once again be unlocked!
+
+The Queen, with a woman’s faith in greatness, sends to him for
+‘cordials.’  Here is one of them, famous in Charles the Second’s days as
+‘Sir Walter’s Cordial’:—
+
+B. Zedoary and Saffron, each        ½ lb.
+Distilled water                     3 pints.
+Macerate, etc., and reduce to       1½ pint.
+Compound powder of crabs’ claws     16 oz.
+Cinnamon and Nutmegs                2 oz.
+Cloves                              1 oz.
+Cardamom seeds                      ½ oz.
+Double refined sugar                2 lb.
+               Make a confection.
+
+Which, so the world believes, will cure all ills which flesh is heir to.
+It does not seem that Raleigh so boasted himself; but the people, after
+the fashion of the time, seem to have called all his medicines
+‘cordials,’ and probably took for granted that it was by this particular
+one that the enchanter cured Queen Anne of a desperate sickness, ‘whereof
+the physicians were at the farthest end of their studies’ (no great way
+to go in those days) ‘to find the cause, and at a nonplus for the cure.’
+
+Raleigh—this is Sir Anthony Welden’s account, which may go for what it is
+worth—asks for his reward, only justice.  Will the Queen ask that certain
+lords may be sent to examine Cobham, ‘whether he had at any time accused
+Sir Walter of any treason under his hand?’  Six are sent.  Cobham
+answers, ‘Never; nor could I: that villain Wade often solicited me, and
+not so prevailing, got me by a trick to write my name on a piece of white
+paper.  So that if a charge come under my hand it was forged by that
+villain Wade, by writing something above my hand, without my consent or
+knowledge.’  They return.  An equivocation was ready.  ‘Sir, my Lord
+Cobham has made good all that ever he wrote or said’; having, by his own
+account, written nothing but his name.  This is Sir Anthony Welden’s
+story.  One hopes, for the six lords’ sake, it may not be true; but there
+is no reason, in the morality of James’s court, why it should not have
+been.
+
+So Raleigh must remain where he is, and work on.  And he does work.  As
+his captivity becomes more and more hopeless, so comes out more and more
+the stateliness, self-help, and energy of the man.  Till now he has
+played with his pen: now he will use it in earnest; and use it as few
+prisoners have done.  Many a good book has been written in a dungeon—‘Don
+Quixote,’ the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’: beautiful each in its way, and
+destined to immortality: Raleigh begins the ‘History of the World,’ the
+most God-fearing and God-seeing history which I know of among English
+writings; though blotted by flattery of James in the preface: wrong: but
+pardonable in a man trying in the Tower to get out of that doleful
+prison.  But all his writings are thirty years too late; they express the
+creed of a buried generation, of the men who defied Spain in the name of
+a God of righteousness,—not of men who cringe before her in the name of a
+God of power and cunning.  The captive eagle has written with a quill
+from his own wing—a quill which has been wont ere now to soar to heaven.
+Every line smacks of the memories of Nombre and of Zutphen, of Tilbury
+Fort and of Calais Roads; and many a gray-headed veteran, as he read
+them, must have turned away his face to hide the noble tears, as Ulysses
+from Demodocus when he sang the song of Troy.  So there sits Raleigh,
+like the prophet of old, in his lonely tower above the Thames, watching
+the darkness gather upon the land year by year, ‘like the morning spread
+over the mountains,’ the darkness which comes before the dawn of the Day
+of The Lord; which he shall never see on earth, though it be very near at
+hand; and asks of each newcomer, ‘Watchman, what of the night?’
+
+But there is one bright point at least in the darkness; one on whom
+Raleigh’s eyes, and those of all England, are fixed in boundless hope;
+one who, by the sympathy which attracts all noble natures to each other,
+clings to the hero utterly; Henry, the Crown Prince.  ‘No king but my
+father would keep such a bird in a cage.’  The noble lad tries to open
+the door for the captive eagle; but in vain.  At least he will make what
+use he can of his wisdom.  He asks him for advice about the new ship he
+is building, and has a simple practical letter in return, and over and
+above probably the two valuable pamphlets, ‘Of the Invention of Ships,’
+and ‘Observations on the Navy and Sea Service’; which the Prince will
+never see.  In 1611 he asks Raleigh’s advice about the foolish double
+marriage with the Prince and Princess of Savoy, and receives for answer
+two plain-spoken discourses as full of historical learning as of
+practical sound sense.
+
+These are benefits which must be repaid.  The father will repay them
+hereafter in his own way.  In the meanwhile the son does so in his way,
+by soliciting the Sherborne estate as for himself, intending to restore
+it to Raleigh.  He succeeds.  Carr is bought off for £25,000, where Lady
+Raleigh has been bought off with £8000; but neither Raleigh nor his widow
+will ever be the better for that bargain, and Carr will get Sherborne
+back again, and probably, in the King’s silly dotage, keep the £25,000
+also.
+
+In November 1612 Prince Henry falls sick.
+
+When he is at the last gasp, the poor Queen sends to Raleigh for some of
+the same cordial which had cured her.  Medicine is sent, with a tender
+letter, as it well might be; for Raleigh knew how much hung, not only for
+himself, but for England, on the cracking threads of that fair young
+life.  It is questioned at first whether it shall be administered.  ‘The
+cordial,’ Raleigh says, ‘will cure him or any other of a fever, except in
+case of poison.’
+
+The cordial is administered; but it comes too late.  The prince dies, and
+with him the hopes of all good men.
+
+* * *
+
+At last, after twelve years of prison, Raleigh is free.  He is sixty-six
+years old now, gray-headed and worn down by confinement, study, and want
+of exercise: but he will not remember that.
+
+    ‘Still in his ashes live their wonted fire.’
+
+Now for Guiana, at last! which he has never forgotten; to which he has
+been sending, with his slender means, ship after ship to keep the Indians
+in hope.
+
+He is freed in March.  At once he is busy in his project.  In August he
+has obtained the King’s commission, by the help of Sir Ralph Winwood,
+Secretary of State, who seems to have believed in Raleigh.  At least
+Raleigh believed in him.  In March next year he has sailed, and with him
+thirteen ships, and more than a hundred knights and gentlemen, and among
+them, strange to say, Sir Warham St. Leger.  This is certainly not the
+quondam Marshal of Munster under whom Raleigh served at Smerwick
+six-and-thirty years ago.  He would be nearly eighty years old; and as
+Lord Doneraile’s pedigree gives three Sir Warhams, we cannot identify the
+man.  But it is a strong argument in Raleigh’s favour that a St. Leger,
+of a Devon family which had served with him in Ireland, and intimately
+connected with him his whole life, should keep his faith in Raleigh after
+all his reverses.  Nevertheless, the mere fact of an unpardoned criminal,
+said to be _non ens_ in law, being able in a few months to gather round
+him such a party, is proof patent of what slender grounds there are for
+calling Raleigh ‘suspected’ and ‘unpopular.’
+
+But he does not sail without a struggle or two.  James is too proud to
+allow his heir to match with any but a mighty king, is infatuated about
+the Spanish marriage; and Gondomar is with him, playing with his hopes
+and with his fears also.
+
+The people are furious, and have to be silenced again and again: there is
+even fear of rioting.  The charming and smooth-tongued Gondomar can hate,
+and can revenge, too.  Five ’prentices who have insulted him for striking
+a little child, are imprisoned and fined several hundred pounds each.
+And as for hating Raleigh, Gondomar had been no Spaniard (to let alone
+the private reasons which some have supposed) had he not hated Spain’s
+ancient scourge and unswerving enemy.  He comes to James, complaining
+that Raleigh is about to break the peace with Spain.  Nothing is to be
+refused him which can further the one darling fancy of James; and Raleigh
+has to give in writing the number of his ships, men, and ordnance, and,
+moreover, the name of the country and the very river whither he is going.
+This paper was given, Carew Raleigh asserts positively, under James’s
+solemn promise not to reveal it; and Raleigh himself seems to have
+believed that it was to be kept private; for he writes afterwards to
+Secretary Winwood in a tone of astonishment and indignation, that the
+information contained in his paper had been sent on to the King of Spain
+before he sailed from the Thames.  Winwood could have told him as much
+already; for Buckingham had written to Winwood, on March 28, to ask him
+why he had not been to the Spanish Ambassador ‘to acquaint him with the
+order taken by his Majesty about Sir W. R.’s voyage.’  But however
+unwilling the Secretary (as one of the furtherers of the voyage) may have
+been to meddle in the matter, Gondomar had had news enough from another
+source; perhaps from James’s own mouth.  For the first letter to the West
+Indies about Raleigh was dated from Madrid, March 19; and most remarkable
+it is that in James’s ‘Declaration,’ or rather apology for his own
+conduct, no mention whatsoever is made of his having given information to
+Gondomar.
+
+Gondomar offered, says James, to let Raleigh go with one or two ships
+only.  He might work a mine, and the King of Spain would give him a safe
+convoy home with all his gold.  How kind.  And how likely would Raleigh
+and his fellow-adventurers have been to accept such an offer; how likely,
+too, to find men who would sail with them on such an errand, to be
+‘flayed alive,’ as many who travelled to the Indies of late years had
+been, or to have their throats cut, tied back to back, after trading
+unarmed and peaceably for a month, as thirty-six of Raleigh’s men had
+been but two or three years before in that very Orinoco.  So James is
+forced to let the large fleet go; and to let it go well armed also; for
+the plain reason, that otherwise it dare not go at all; and in the
+meanwhile letters are sent from Spain, in which the Spaniards call the
+fleet ‘English enemies,’ and ships and troops are moved up as fast as
+possible from the Spanish main.
+
+But, say some, James was justified in telling Gondomar, and the Spaniards
+in defending themselves.  On the latter point there is no doubt.
+
+    ‘They may get who have the will,
+    And they may keep who can.’
+
+But it does seem hard on Raleigh, after having laboured in this Guiana
+business for years, and after having spent his money in vain attempts to
+deliver these Guianians from their oppressors.  It is hard, and he feels
+it so.  He sees that he is not trusted; that, as James himself confesses,
+his pardon is refused simply to keep a hold on him; that, if he fails, he
+is ruined.
+
+As he well asks afterwards, ‘If the King did not think that Guiana was
+his, why let me go thither at all?  He knows that it was his by the law
+of nations, for he made Mr. Harcourt a grant of part of it.  If it be, as
+Gondomar says, the King of Spain’s, then I had no more right to work a
+mine in it than to burn a town.’  An argument which seems to me
+unanswerable.  But, says James, and others with him, he was forbid to
+meddle with any country occupate or possessed by Spaniards.  Southey,
+too, blames him severely for not having told James that the country was
+already settled by Spaniards.  I can excuse Southey, but not James, for
+overlooking the broad fact that all England knew it, as I have shown,
+since 1594; that if they did not, Gondomar would have taken care to tell
+them; and that he could not go to Guiana without meddling with Spaniards.
+His former voyages and publications made no secret of it.  On the
+contrary, one chief argument for the plan had been all through the
+delivery of the Indians from these very Spaniards, who, though they could
+not conquer them, ill-used them in every way: and in his agreement with
+the Lords about the Guiana voyage in 1611, he makes especial mention of
+the very place which will soon fill such a part in our story, ‘San Thomé,
+where the Spaniards inhabit,’ and tells the Lords whom to ask as to the
+number of men who will be wanted ‘to secure Keymish’s passage to the
+mine’ against these very Spaniards.  What can be more clear, save to
+those who will not see?
+
+The plain fact is that Raleigh went, with his eyes open, to take
+possession of a country to which he believed that he and King James had a
+right, and that James and his favourites, when they, as he pleads, might
+have stopped him by a word, let him go, knowing as well as the Spaniards
+what he intended; for what purpose, but to have an excuse for the tragedy
+which ended all, it is difficult to conceive.  ‘It is evident,’ wisely
+says Sir Robert Schomburgk, ‘that they winked at consequences which they
+must have foreseen.’
+
+And here Mr. Napier, on the authority of Count Desmarets, brings a grave
+charge against Raleigh.  Raleigh in his ‘Apology’ protests that he only
+saw Desmarets once on board of his vessel.  Desmarets says in his
+despatches that he was on board of her several times—whether he saw
+Raleigh more than once does not appear—and that Raleigh complained to him
+of having been unjustly imprisoned, stripped of his estate, and so forth;
+and that he was on that account resolved to abandon his country, and, if
+the expedition succeeded, offer himself and the fruit of his labour to
+the King of France.
+
+If this be true, Raleigh was very wrong.  But Sir Robert Schomburgk
+points out that this passage, which Mr. Napier says occurs in the last
+despatch, was written a month after Raleigh had sailed; and that the
+previous despatch, written only four days after Raleigh sailed, says
+nothing about the matter.  So that it could not have been a very
+important or fixed resolution on Raleigh’s part, if it was only to be
+recollected a month after.  I do not say—as Sir Robert Schomburgk is very
+much inclined to do—that it was altogether a bubble of French fancy.  It
+is possible that Raleigh, in his just rage at finding that James was
+betraying him and sending him out with a halter round his neck, to all
+but certain ruin, did say wild words—That it was better for him to serve
+the Frenchman than such a master—that perhaps he might go over to the
+Frenchman after all—or some folly of the kind, in that same rash tone
+which, as we have seen, has got him into trouble so often already: and so
+I leave the matter, saying, Beware of making any man an offender for a
+word, much less one who is being hunted to death in his old age, and
+knows it.
+
+However this may be, the fleet sails; but with no bright auguries.  The
+mass of the sailors are ‘a scum of men’; they are mutinous and
+troublesome; and what is worse, have got among them (as, perhaps, they
+were intended to have) the notion that Raleigh’s being still _non ens_ in
+law absolves them from obeying him when they do not choose, and permits
+them to say of him behind his back what they list.  They have long delays
+at Plymouth.  Sir Warham’s ship cannot get out of the Thames.
+Pennington, at the Isle of Wight, ‘cannot redeem his bread from the
+bakers,’ and has to ride back to London to get money from Lady Raleigh.
+The poor lady has it not, and gives a note of hand to Mr. Wood of
+Portsmouth.  Alas for her!  She has sunk her £8000, and, beside that,
+sold her Wickham estate for £2500; and all is on board the fleet.  ‘A
+hundred pieces’ are all the ready money the hapless pair had left on
+earth, and they have parted them together.  Raleigh has fifty-five and
+she forty-five till God send it back—if, indeed, He ever send it.  The
+star is sinking low in the west.  Trouble on trouble.  Sir John Fane has
+neither men nor money; Captain Witney has not provisions enough, and
+Raleigh has to sell his plate in Plymouth to help him.  Courage! one last
+struggle to redeem his good name.
+
+Then storms off Sicily—a pinnace is sunk; faithful Captain King drives
+back into Bristol; the rest have to lie by a while in some Irish port for
+a fair wind.  Then Bailey deserts with the ‘Southampton’ at the Canaries;
+then ‘unnatural weather,’ so that a fourteen days’ voyage takes forty
+days.  Then ‘the distemper’ breaks out under the line.  The simple diary
+of that sad voyage still remains, full of curious and valuable nautical
+hints; but recording the loss of friend on friend; four or five officers,
+and, ‘to our great grief, our principal refiner, Mr. Fowler.’  ‘Crab, my
+old servant.’  Next a lamentable twenty-four hours, in which they lose
+Pigott, the lieutenant-general, ‘mine honest frinde, Mr. John Talbot, one
+that had lived with me a leven yeeres in the Tower, an excellent general
+skoller, and a faithful and true man as ever lived,’ with two ‘very fair
+conditioned gentleman,’ and ‘mine own cook Francis.’  Then more officers
+and men, and my ‘cusen Payton.’  Then the water is near spent, and they
+are forced to come to half allowance, till they save and drink greedily
+whole canfuls of the bitter rain water.  At last Raleigh’s own turn
+comes; running on deck in a squall, he gets wet through, and has twenty
+days of burning fever; ‘never man suffered a more furious heat,’ during
+which he eats nothing but now and then a stewed prune.
+
+At last they make the land at the mouth of the Urapoho, far south of
+their intended goal.  They ask for Leonard the Indian, ‘who lived with me
+in England three or four years, the same man that took Mr. Harcourt’s
+brother and fifty men when they were in extreme distress, and had no
+means to live there but by the help of this Indian, whom they made
+believe that they were my men’; but the faithful Indian is gone up the
+country, and they stand away for Cayenne, ‘where the cacique (Harry) was
+also my servant, and had lived with me in the Tower two years.’
+
+Courage once more, brave old heart!  Here at least thou art among
+friends, who know thee for what thou art, and look out longingly for thee
+as their deliverer.  Courage; for thou art in fairyland once more; the
+land of boundless hope and possibility.  Though England and England’s
+heart be changed, yet God’s earth endures, and the harvest is still here,
+waiting to be reaped by those who dare.  Twenty stormy years may have
+changed thee, but they have not changed the fairyland of thy prison
+dreams.  Still the mighty Ceiba trees with their wealth of parasites and
+creepers tower above the palm-fringed islets; still the dark mangrove
+thickets guard the mouths of unknown streams, whose granite sands are
+rich with gold.  Friendly Indians come, and Harry with them, bringing
+maize, peccari pork, and armadillos, plantains and pine-apples, and all
+eat and gather strength; and Raleigh writes home to his wife, ‘to say
+that I may yet be King of the Indians here were a vanity.  But my name
+hath lived among them’—as well it might.  For many a year those simple
+hearts shall look for him in vain, and more than two centuries and a half
+afterwards, dim traditions of the great white chief who bade them stand
+out to the last against the Spaniards, and he would come and dwell among
+them, shall linger among the Carib tribes; even, say some, the tattered
+relics of an English flag, which he left among them that they might
+distinguish his countrymen.
+
+Happy for him had he stayed there indeed, and been their king.  How easy
+for him to have grown old in peace at Cayenne.  But no; he must on for
+honour’s sake, and bring home if it were but a basketful of that ore to
+show the king, that he may save his credit.  He has promised Arundel that
+he will return.  And return he will.  So onward he goes to the ‘Triangle
+Islands.’  There he sends off five small vessels for the Orinoco, with
+four hundred men.  The faithful Keymis has to command and guide the
+expedition.  Sir Warham is lying ill of the fever, all but dead; so
+George Raleigh is sent in his place as sergeant-major, and with him five
+land companies, one of which is commanded by young Walter, Raleigh’s son;
+another by a Captain Parker, of whom we shall have a word to say
+presently.
+
+Keymis’s orders are explicit.  He is to go up; find the mine, and open
+it; and if the Spaniards attack him, repel force by force: but he is to
+avoid, if possible, an encounter with them: not for fear of breaking the
+peace, but because he has ‘a scum of men, a few gentlemen excepted, and I
+would not for all the world receive a blow from the Spaniards to the
+dishonour of our nation.’  There we have no concealment of hostile
+instructions, any more than in Raleigh’s admirable instructions to his
+fleet, which, after laying down excellent laws for morality, religion,
+and discipline, go on with clause after clause as to what is to be done
+if they meet ‘the enemy.’  What enemy?  Why, all Spanish ships which sail
+the seas; and who, if they happen to be sufficiently numerous, will
+assuredly attack, sink, burn, and destroy Raleigh’s whole squadron, for
+daring to sail for that continent which Spain claims as its own.
+
+Raleigh runs up the coast to Trinidad once more, in through the Serpent’s
+Mouth, and round Punto Gallo to the lake of pitch, where all recruit
+themselves with fish and armadillos, ‘pheasant’ (Penelope), ‘palmitos’
+(Moriche palm fruit?), and guavas, and await the return of the expedition
+from the last day of December to the middle of February.  They see
+something of the Spaniards meanwhile.  Sir John Ferns is sent up to Port
+of Spain to try if they will trade for tobacco.  The Spaniards parley; in
+the midst of the parley pour a volley of musketry into them at forty
+paces, yet hurt never a man; and send them off calling them thieves and
+traitors.  Fray Simon’s Spanish account of the matter is that Raleigh
+intended to disembark his men, that they might march inland on San
+Joseph.  He may be excused for the guess; seeing that Raleigh had done
+the very same thing some seventeen years before.  If Raleigh was
+treacherous then, his treason punished itself now.  However, I must
+believe that Raleigh is not likely to have told a lie for his own private
+amusement in his own private diary.
+
+On the 29th the Spaniards attack three men and a boy who are ashore
+boiling the fossil pitch; kill one man, and carry off the boy.  Raleigh,
+instead of going up to Port of Spain and demanding satisfaction, as he
+would have been justified in doing after this second attack, remains
+quietly where he is, expecting daily to be attacked by Spanish armadas,
+and resolved to ‘burn by their sides.’  Happily, or unhappily, he escapes
+them.  Probably he thinks they waited for him at Margarita, expecting him
+to range the Spanish main.
+
+At last the weary days of sickness and anxiety succeeded to days of
+terror.  On the 1st of February a strange report comes by an Indian.  An
+inland savage has brought confused and contradictory news down the river
+that San Thomé is sacked, the governor and two Spanish captains slain
+(names given) and two English captains, nameless.  After this entry
+follow a few confused ones, set down as happening in January, concerning
+attempts to extract the truth from the Indians, and the negligence of the
+mariners, who are diligent in nothing but pillaging and stealing.  And so
+ends abruptly this sad document.
+
+The truth comes at last—but when, does not appear—in a letter from
+Keymis, dated January 8.  San Thomé has been stormed, sacked, and burnt.
+Four refiners’ houses were found in it; the best in the town; so that the
+Spaniards have been mining there; but no coin or bullion except a little
+plate.  One English captain is killed, and that captain is Walter
+Raleigh, his firstborn.  He died leading them on, when some, ‘more
+careful of valour and safety, began to recoil shamefully.’  His last
+words were, ‘Lord have mercy upon me and prosper our enterprise.’  A
+Spanish captain, Erinetta, struck him down with the butt of a musket
+after he had received a bullet.  John Plessington, his sergeant, avenged
+him by running Erinetta through with his halbert.
+
+Keymis has not yet been to the mine; he could not, ‘by reason of the
+murmurings, discords, and vexations’; but he will go at once, make trial
+of the mine, and come down to Trinidad by the Macareo mouth.  He sends a
+parcel of scattered papers, a roll of tobacco, a tortoise, some oranges
+and lemons.  ‘Praying God to give you health and strength of body, and a
+mind armed against all extremities, I rest ever to be commanded, your
+lordship’s, Keymish.’
+
+‘Oh Absalom, my son, my son, would God I had died for thee!’  But weeping
+is in vain.  The noble lad sleeps there under the palm-trees, beside the
+mighty tropic stream, while the fair Basset, ‘his bride in the sight of
+God,’ recks not of him as she wanders in the woods of Umberleigh, wife to
+the son of Raleigh’s deadliest foe.  Raleigh, Raleigh, surely God’s
+blessing is not on this voyage of thine.  Surely He hath set thy misdeeds
+before Him, and thy secret sins in the light of His countenance.
+
+Another blank of misery: but his honour is still safe.  Keymis will
+return with that gold ore, that pledge of his good faith for which he has
+ventured all.  Surely God will let that come after all, now that he has
+paid as its price his first-born’s blood?
+
+At last Keymis returns with thinned numbers.  All are weary,
+spirit-broken, discontented, mutinous.  Where is the gold ore?
+
+There is none.  Keymis has never been to the mine after all.  His
+companions curse him as a traitor who has helped Raleigh to deceive them
+into ruin; the mine is imaginary—a lie.  The crews are ready to break
+into open mutiny; after a while they will do so.
+
+Yes, God is setting this man’s secret sins in the light of His
+countenance.  If he has been ambitious, his ambition has punished itself
+now.  If he has cared more for his own honour than for his wife and
+children, that sin too has punished itself.  If he has (which I affirm
+not) tampered with truth for the sake of what seemed to him noble and
+just ends, that too has punished itself; for his men do not trust him.
+If he has (which I affirm not) done any wrong in that matter of Cobham,
+that too has punished itself: for his men, counting him as _non ens_ in
+law, will not respect or obey him.  If he has spoken, after his old
+fashion, rash and exaggerated words, and goes on speaking them, even
+though it be through the pressure of despair, that too shall punish
+itself; and for every idle word that he shall say, God will bring him
+into judgment.  And why, but because he is noble?  Why, but because he is
+nearer to God by a whole heaven than others whom God lets fatten on their
+own sins, having no understanding, because they are in honour, and having
+children at their hearts’ desire, and leaving the rest of their substance
+to their babes?  Not so does God deal with His elect when they will try
+to worship at once self and Him; He requires truth in the inward parts,
+and will purge them till they are true, and single-eyed, and full of
+light.
+
+Keymis returns with the wreck of his party.  The scene between him and
+Raleigh may be guessed.  Keymis has excuse on excuse.  He could not get
+obeyed after young Raleigh’s death: he expected to find that Sir Walter
+was either dead of his sickness or of grief for his son, and had no wish
+‘to enrich a company of rascals who made no account of him.’  He dare not
+go up to the mine because (and here Raleigh thinks his excuse fair) the
+fugitive Spaniards lay in the craggy woods through which he would have to
+pass, and that he had not men enough even to hold the town securely.  If
+he reached the mine and left a company there, he had no provisions for
+them; and he dared not send backward and forward to the town while the
+Spaniards were in the woods.  The warnings sent by Gondomar had undone
+all, and James’s treachery had done its work.  So Keymis, ‘thinking it a
+greater error, so he said, to discover the mine to the Spaniards than to
+excuse himself to the Company, said that he could not find it.’  From all
+which one thing at least is evident, that Keymis believed in the
+existence of the mine.
+
+Raleigh ‘rejects these fancies’; tells him before divers gentlemen that
+‘a blind man might find it by the marks which Keymis himself had set down
+under his hand’: that ‘his case of losing so many men in the woods’ was a
+mere pretence: after Walter was slain, he knew that Keymis had no care of
+any man’s surviving.  ‘You have undone me, wounded my credit with the
+King past recovery.  As you have followed your own advice, and not mine,
+you must satisfy his Majesty.  It shall be glad if you can do it: but I
+cannot.’  There is no use dwelling on such vain regrets and reproaches.
+Raleigh perhaps is bitter, unjust.  As he himself writes twice, to his
+wife and Sir Ralph Winwood, his ‘brains are broken.’  He writes to them
+both, and re-opens the letters to add long postscripts, at his wits’ end.
+Keymis goes off; spends a few miserable days; and then enters Raleigh’s
+cabin.  He has written his apology to Lord Arundel, and begs Raleigh to
+allow of it.  ‘No.  You have undone me by your obstinacy.  I will not
+favour or colour your former folly.’  ‘Is that your resolution, sir?’
+‘It is.’  ‘I know not then, sir, what course to take.’  And so he goes
+out, and into his own cabin overhead.  A minute after a pistol-shot is
+heard.  Raleigh sends up a boy to know the reason.  Keymis answers from
+within that he has fired it off because it had been long charged; and all
+is quiet.
+
+Half an hour after the boy goes into the cabin.  Keymis is lying on his
+bed, the pistol by him.  The boy moves him.  The pistol-shot has broken a
+rib, and gone no further; but as the corpse is turned over, a long knife
+is buried in that desperate heart.  Another of the old heroes is gone to
+his wild account.
+
+Gradually drops of explanation ooze out.  The ‘Sergeant-major, Raleigh’s
+nephew, and others, confess that Keymis told them that he could have
+brought them in two hours to the mine: but as the young heir was slain,
+and his father was unpardoned and not like to live, he had no reason to
+open the mine, either for the Spaniard or the King.’  Those latter words
+are significant.  What cared the old Elizabethan seaman for the weal of
+such a king?  And, indeed, what good to such a king would all the mines
+in Guiana be?  They answered that the King, nevertheless, had ‘granted
+Raleigh his heart’s desire under the great seal.’  He replied that ‘the
+grant to Raleigh was to a man _non ens_ in law, and therefore of no
+force.’  Here, too, James’s policy has worked well.  How could men dare
+or persevere under such a cloud?
+
+How, indeed, could they have found heart to sail at all?  The only answer
+is that they knew Raleigh well enough to have utter faith in him, and
+that Keymis himself knew of the mine.
+
+Puppies at home in England gave out that he had killed himself from
+remorse at having deceived so many gentlemen with an imaginary phantom.
+Every one, of course, according to his measure of charity, has power and
+liberty to assume any motive which he will.  Mine is simply the one which
+shows upon the face of the documents; that the old follower, devoted
+alike to the dead son and to the doomed father, feeling that he had, he
+scarce knew how, failed in the hour of need, frittered away the last
+chance of a mighty enterprise which had been his fixed idea for years,
+and ruined the man whom he adored, avenged upon himself the fault of
+having disobeyed orders, given peremptorily, and to be peremptorily
+executed.
+
+Here, perhaps, my tale should end; for all beyond is but the waking of
+the corpse.  The last death-struggle of the Elizabethan heroism is over,
+and all its remains vanish slowly in an undignified, sickening way.  All
+epics end so.  After the war of Troy, Achilles must die by coward Paris’s
+arrow, in some mysterious, confused, pitiful fashion; and stately Hecuba
+must rail herself into a very dog, and bark for ever shamefully around
+lonely Cynossema.  Young David ends as a dotard—Solomon as worse.
+Glorious Alexander must die, half of fever, half of drunkenness, as the
+fool dieth.  Charles the Fifth, having thrown all away but his follies,
+ends in a convent, a superstitious imbecile; Napoleon squabbles to the
+last with Sir Hudson Lowe about champagne.  It must be so; and the glory
+must be God’s alone.  For in great men, and great times, there is nothing
+good or vital but what is of God, and not of man’s self; and when He
+taketh away that divine breath they die, and return again to their dust.
+But the earth does not lose; for when He sendeth forth His Spirit they
+live, and renew the face of the earth.  A new generation arises, with
+clearer sight, with fuller experience, sometimes with nobler aims; and
+
+    ‘The old order changeth, giveth place to the new,
+    And God fulfils himself in many ways.
+
+The Elizabethan epic did not end a day too soon.  There was no more life
+left in it; and God had something better in store for England.  Raleigh’s
+ideal was a noble one: but God’s was nobler far.  Raleigh would have made
+her a gold kingdom, like Spain, and destroyed her very vitals by that
+gold, as Spain was destroyed.  And all the while the great and good God
+was looking steadfastly upon that little struggling Virginian village,
+Raleigh’s first-born, forgotten in his new mighty dreams, and saying,
+‘Here will I dwell, for I have a delight therein.’  There, and not in
+Guiana; upon the simple tillers of the soil, not among wild reckless
+gold-hunters, would His blessing rest.  The very coming darkness would
+bring brighter light.  The evil age itself would be the parent of new
+good, and drive across the seas steadfast Pilgrim Fathers and generous
+Royalist Cavaliers, to be the parents of a mightier nation than has ever
+yet possessed the earth.  Verily, God’s ways are wonderful, and His
+counsels in the great deep.
+
+So ends the Elizabethan epic.  Must we follow the corpse to the grave?
+It is necessary.
+
+And now, ‘you gentlemen of England, who sit at home at ease,’ what would
+you have done in like case?—Your last die thrown; your last stake lost;
+your honour, as you fancy, stained for ever; your eldest son dead in
+battle—What would you have done?  What Walter Raleigh did was this.  He
+kept his promise.  He had promised Lord Arundel to return to England; and
+return he did.
+
+But it is said his real intention, as he himself confessed, was to turn
+pirate and take the Mexico fleet.
+
+That wild thoughts of such a deed may have crossed his mind, may have
+been a terrible temptation to him, may even have broken out in hasty
+words, one does not deny.  He himself says that he spoke of such a thing
+‘to keep his men together.’  All depends on how the words were spoken.
+The form of the sentence, the tone of voice, is everything.  Who could
+blame him, if seeing some of the captains whom he had most trusted
+deserting him, his men heaping him with every slander, and, as he
+solemnly swore on the scaffold, calling witnesses thereto by name,
+forcing him to take an oath that he would not return to England before
+they would have him, and locking him into his own cabin—who could blame
+him, I ask, for saying in that daring off-hand way of his, which has so
+often before got him into trouble, ‘Come, my lads, do not despair.  If
+the worst comes to the worst, there is the Plate-fleet to fall back
+upon’?  When I remember, too, that the taking of the said Plate-fleet was
+in Raleigh’s eyes an altogether just thing; and that he knew perfectly
+that if he succeeded therein he would be backed by the public opinion of
+all England, and probably buy his pardon of James, who, if he loved Spain
+well, loved money better; my surprise rather is, that he did not go and
+do it.  As for any meeting of captains in his cabin and serious proposal
+of such a plan, I believe it to be simply one of the innumerable lies
+which James inserted in his ‘Declaration,’ gathered from the tales of men
+who, fearing (and reasonably) lest their heads should follow Raleigh’s,
+tried to curry favour by slandering him.  This ‘Declaration’ has been so
+often exposed that I may safely pass it by; and pass by almost as safely
+the argument which some have drawn from a chance expression of his in his
+pathetic letter to Lady Raleigh, in which he ‘hopes that God would send
+him somewhat before his return.’  To prove an intention of piracy in the
+despairing words of a ruined man writing to comfort a ruined wife for the
+loss of her first-born is surely to deal out hard measure.  Heaven have
+mercy upon us, if all the hasty words which woe has wrung from our hearts
+are to be so judged either by man or God!
+
+Sir Julius Cæsar, again, one of the commission appointed to examine him,
+informs us that, on being confronted with Captains St. Leger and
+Pennington, he confessed that he proposed the taking of the Mexico fleet
+if the mine failed.  To which I can only answer, that all depends on how
+the thing was said, and that this is the last fact which we should find
+in Sir Julius’s notes, which are, it is confessed, so confused, obscure,
+and full of gaps, as to be often hardly intelligible.  The same remark
+applies to Wilson’s story, which I agree with Mr. Tytler in thinking
+worthless.  Wilson, it must be understood, is employed after Raleigh’s
+return as a spy upon him, which office he executes, all confess (and
+Wilson himself as much as any), as falsely, treacherously, and
+hypocritically as did ever sinful man; and, _inter alia_, he has this,
+‘This day he told me what discourse he and the Lord Chancellor had about
+taking the Plate-fleet, which he confessed he would have taken had he
+lighted on it.’  To which my Lord Chancellor said, ‘Why, you would have
+been a pirate.’  ‘Oh,’ quoth he, ‘did you ever know of any that were
+pirates for millions?  They only that wish for small things are pirates.’
+Now, setting aside the improbability that Raleigh should go out of his
+way to impeach himself to the man whom he must have known was set there
+to find matter for his death, all, we say, depends on how it was said.
+If the Lord Chancellor ever said to Raleigh, ‘To take the Mexico fleet
+would be piracy,’ it would have been just like Raleigh to give such an
+answer.  The speech is a perfectly true one: Raleigh knew the world, no
+man better; and saw through its hollowness, and the cant and hypocrisy of
+his generation; and he sardonically states an undeniable fact.  He is not
+expressing his own morality, but that of the world; just as he is doing
+in that passage of his ‘Apology,’ about which I must complain of Mr.
+Napier.  ‘It was a maxim of his,’ says Mr. Napier, ‘that good success
+admits of no examination.’  This is not fair.  The sentence in the
+original goes on, ‘so the contrary allows of no excuse, however
+reasonable and just whatsoever.’  His argument all through the beginning
+of the ‘Apology,’ supported by instance on instance from history, is—I
+cannot get a just hearing, because I have failed in opening this mine.
+So it is always.  Glory covers the multitude of sins.  But a man who has
+failed is a fair mark for every slanderer, puppy, ignoramus, discontented
+mutineer; as I am now.  What else, in the name of common sense, could
+have been his argument?  Does Mr. Napier really think that Raleigh, even
+if, in the face of all the noble and pious words which he had written, he
+held so immoral a doctrine, would have been shameless and senseless
+enough to assert his own rascality in an apology addressed to the most
+‘religious’ of kings in the most canting of generations?
+
+But still more astonished am I at the use which has been made of Captain
+Parker’s letter.  The letter is written by a man in a state of frantic
+rage and disappointment.  There never was any mine, he believes now.
+Keymis’s ‘delays we found mere delusions; for he was false to all men and
+hateful to himself, loathing to live since he could do no more villany.
+I will speak no more of this hateful fellow to God and man.’  And it is
+on the testimony of a man in this temper that we are asked to believe
+that ‘the admiral and vice-admiral,’ Raleigh and St. Leger, are going to
+the Western Islands ‘to look for homeward-bound men’: if, indeed, the
+looking for homeward-bound men means really looking for the Spanish
+fleet, and not merely for recruits for their crews.  I never
+recollect—and I have read pretty fully the sea-records of those days—such
+a synonym used either for the Mexican or Indian fleet.  But let this be
+as it may, the letter proves too much.  For, first, it proves that
+whosoever is not going to turn ‘pirate,’ our calm and charitable friend
+Captain Parker is; ‘for my part, by the permission of God, I will either
+_make a voyage_ or bury myself in the sea.’  Now, what making a voyage
+meant there is no doubt; and the sum total of the letter is, that a man
+intending to turn rover himself accuses, under the influence of violent
+passion, his comrades of doing the like.  We may believe him about
+himself: about others, we shall wait for testimony a little less
+interested.
+
+But the letter proves too much again.  For Parker says that ‘Witney and
+Woolaston are gone off a-head to look for homeward-bound men,’ thus
+agreeing with Raleigh’s message to his wife, that ‘Witney, for whom I
+sold all my plate at Plymouth, and to whom I gave more credit and
+countenance than to all the captains of my fleet, ran from me at the
+Grenadas, and Woolaston with him.’
+
+And now, reader, how does this of Witney, and Woolaston, and Parker’s
+intentions to ‘pirate’ separately, if it be true, agree with King James’s
+story of Raleigh’s calling a council of war and proposing an attack on
+the Plate-fleet?  One or the other must needs be a lie; probably both.
+Witney’s ship was of only 160 tons; Woolaston’s probably smaller.  Five
+such ships would be required, as any reader of Hakluyt must know, to take
+a single Carack; and it would be no use running the risk of hanging for
+any less prize.  The Spanish main was warned and armed, and the Western
+Isles also.  Is it possible that these two men would have been insane
+enough in such circumstances to go without Raleigh, if they could have
+gone with him?  And is it possible that he, if he had any set purpose of
+attacking the Plate-fleet, would not have kept them, in order to attempt
+that with him which neither they nor he could do without each other.
+Moreover, no ‘piratical’ act ever took place; if any had, we should have
+heard enough about it; and why is Parker to be believed against Raleigh
+alone, when there is little doubt that he slandered all the rest of the
+captains?  Lastly, it was to this very Parker, with Mr. Tresham and
+another gentleman, that Raleigh appealed by name on the scaffold, as
+witnesses that it was his crew who tried to keep him from going home, and
+not he them.
+
+My own belief is, and it is surely simple and rational enough, that
+Raleigh’s ‘brains,’ as he said, ‘were broken’; that he had no distinct
+plan: but that, loth to leave the New World without a second attempt on
+Guiana, he went up to Newfoundland to re-victual, ‘and with good hope,’
+as he wrote to Winwood himself, ‘of keeping the sea till August with some
+four reasonable good ships,’ probably, as Oldys remarks, to try a trading
+voyage; but found his gentlemen too dispirited and incredulous, his men
+too mutinous to do anything; and seeing his ships go home one by one, at
+last followed them himself, because he had promised Arundel and Pembroke
+so to do; having, after all, as he declared on the scaffold, extreme
+difficulty in persuading his men to land at all in England.  The other
+lies about him, as of his having intended to desert his soldiers in
+Guiana, his having taken no tools to work the mine, and so forth, one
+only notices to say that the ‘Declaration’ takes care to make the most of
+them, without deigning, after its fashion, to adduce any proof but
+anonymous hearsays.  If it be true that Bacon drew up that famous
+document, it reflects no credit either on his honesty or his ‘inductive
+science.’
+
+So Raleigh returns, anchors in Plymouth.  He finds that Captain North has
+brought home the news of his mishaps, and that there is a proclamation
+against him, which, by the bye, lies, for it talks of limitations and
+cautions given to Raleigh which do not appear in his commission; and,
+moreover, that a warrant is out for his apprehension.  He sends his men
+on shore, and starts for London to surrender himself, in company with
+faithful Captain King, who alone clings to him to the last, and from whom
+we have details of the next few days.  Near Ashburton he is met by Sir
+Lewis Stukely, his near kinsman, Vice-Admiral of Devon, who has orders to
+arrest him.  Raleigh tells him that he has saved him the trouble; and the
+two return to Plymouth, where Stukely, strangely enough, leaves him at
+liberty and rides about the country.  We should be slow in imputing
+baseness: but one cannot help suspecting from Stukely’s subsequent
+conduct that he had from the first private orders to give Raleigh a
+chance of trying to escape, in order to have a handle against him, such
+as his own deeds had not yet given.
+
+The ruse, if it existed then, as it did afterwards, succeeds.  Raleigh
+hears bad news.  Gondomar has—or has not—told his story to the king by
+crying, ‘_Piratas_! _piratas_! _piratas_!’ and then rushing out without
+explanation.  James is in terror lest what had happened should break off
+the darling Spanish match.
+
+Raleigh foresees ruin, perhaps death.  Life is sweet, and Guiana is yet
+where it was.  He may win a basketful of the ore still, and prove himself
+no liar.  He will escape to France.  Faithful King finds him a Rochelle
+ship; he takes boat to her, goes half way, and returns.  Honour is
+sweeter than life, and James may yet be just.  The next day he bribes the
+master to wait for him one more day, starts for the ship once more, and
+again returns to Plymouth—so King will make oath—of his own free will.
+The temptation must have been terrible and the sin none.  What kept him
+from yielding but innocence and honour?  He will clear himself; and if
+not, abide the worst.  Stukely and James found out these facts, and made
+good use of them afterwards.  For now comes ‘a severe letter from my
+Lords’ to bring Raleigh up as speedily as his health will permit; and
+with it comes one Mannourie, a French quack, of whom honest King takes
+little note at the time, but who will make himself remembered.
+
+And now begins a series of scenes most pitiable; Raleigh’s brains are
+indeed broken.  He is old, worn-out with the effects of his fever, lamed,
+ruined, broken-hearted, and, for the first time in his life, weak and
+silly.  He takes into his head the paltriest notion that he can gain time
+to pacify the King by feigning himself sick.  He puts implicit faith in
+the rogue Mannourie, whom he has never seen before.  He sends forward
+Lady Raleigh to London—perhaps ashamed—as who would not have been?—to
+play the fool in that sweet presence; and with her good Captain King, who
+is to engage one Cotterell, an old servant of Raleigh’s, to find a ship
+wherein to escape, if the worst comes to the worst.  Cotterell sends King
+to an old boatswain of his, who owns a ketch.  She is to lie off Tilbury;
+and so King waits Raleigh’s arrival.  What passed in the next four or
+five days will never be truly known, for our only account comes from two
+self-convicted villains, Stukely and Mannourie.  On these details I shall
+not enter.  First, because one cannot trust a word of them; secondly,
+because no one will wish to hear them who feels, as I do, how pitiable
+and painful is the sight of a great heart and mind utterly broken.
+Neither shall I spend time on Stukely’s villanous treatment of Raleigh,
+for which he had a commission from James in writing; his pretending to
+help him to escape, his going down the Thames in a boat with him, his
+trying in vain to make honest King as great a rogue as himself.  Like
+most rascalities, Stukely’s conduct, even as he himself states it, is
+very obscure.  All that we can see is, that Cotterell told Stukely
+everything: that Stukely bade Cotterell carry on the deceit; that Stukely
+had orders from headquarters to incite Raleigh to say or do something
+which might form a fresh ground of accusal; that, being a clumsy rogue,
+he failed, and fell back on abetting Raleigh’s escape, as a last
+resource.  Be it as it may, he throws off the mask as soon as Raleigh has
+done enough to prove an intent to escape; arrests him, and conducts him
+to the Tower.
+
+There two shameful months are spent in trying to find out some excuse for
+Raleigh’s murder.  Wilson is set over him as a spy; his letters to his
+wife are intercepted.  Every art is used to extort a confession of a
+great plot with France, and every art fails utterly—simply, it seems to
+me, because there was no plot.  Raleigh writes an apology, letters of
+entreaty, self-justification, what not; all, in my opinion, just and true
+enough; but like his speech on the scaffold, weak, confused—the product
+of a ‘broken brain.’  However, his head must come off; and as a last
+resource, it must be taken off upon the sentence of fifteen years ago,
+and he who was condemned for plotting with Spain must die for plotting
+against her.  It is a pitiable business: but as Osborne says, in a
+passage (p.108 of his Memoirs of James) for which one freely forgives him
+all his sins and lies, and they are many—‘As the foolish idolaters were
+wont to sacrifice the choicest of their children to the devil, so our
+king gave up his incomparable jewel to the will of this monster of
+ambition (the Spaniard), under the pretence of a superannuated
+transgression, contrary to the opinion of the more honest sort of
+gownsmen, who maintained that his Majesty’s pardon lay inclusively in the
+commission he gave him on his setting out to sea; it being incongruous
+that he, who remained under the notion of one dead in the law, should as
+a general dispose of the lives of others, not being himself master of his
+own.’
+
+But no matter.  He must die.  The Queen intercedes for him, as do all
+honest men: but in vain.  He has twenty-four hours’ notice to prepare for
+death; eats a good breakfast; takes a cup of sack and a pipe; makes a
+rambling speech, in which one notes only the intense belief that he is an
+honest man, and the intense desire to make others believe so, in the very
+smallest matters; and then dies smilingly, as one weary of life.  One
+makes no comment.  Raleigh’s life really ended on that day that poor
+Keymis returned from San Thomé.’
+
+And then?
+
+As we said, Truth is stranger than fiction.  No dramatist dare invent a
+‘poetic justice’ more perfect than fell upon the traitor.  It is not
+always so, no doubt.  God reserves many a greater sinner for that most
+awful of all punishments—impunity.  But there are crises in a nation’s
+life in which God makes terrible examples, to put before the most stupid
+and sensual the choice of Hercules, the upward road of life, the downward
+one which leads to the pit.  Since the time of Pharaoh and the Red Sea
+host, history is full of such palpable, unmistakable revelations of the
+Divine Nemesis; and in England, too, at that moment, the crisis was
+there; and the judgment of God was revealed accordingly.  Sir Lewis
+Stukely remained, it seems, at court; high in favour with James: but he
+found, nevertheless, that people looked darkly on him.  Like many
+self-convicted rogues, he must needs thrust his head into his own shame;
+and one day he goes to good old Lord Charles Howard’s house; for being
+Vice-Admiral of Devon, he has affairs with the old Armada hero.
+
+The old lion explodes in an unexpected roar.  ‘Darest thou come into my
+presence, thou base fellow, who art reputed the common scorn and contempt
+of all men?  Were it not in mine own house I would cudgel thee with my
+staff for presuming to speak to me!’  Stukely, his tail between his legs,
+goes off and complains to James.  ‘What should I do with him?  Hang him?
+On my sawle, mon, if I hung all that spoke ill of thee, all the trees in
+the island were too few.’  Such is the gratitude of kings, thinks
+Stukely; and retires to write foolish pamphlets in self-justification,
+which, unfortunately for his memory, still remain to make bad worse.
+
+Within twelve months he, the rich and proud Vice-Admiral of Devon, with a
+shield of sixteen quarterings and the blood-royal in his veins, was
+detected debasing the King’s coin within the precincts of the royal
+palace, together with his old accomplice Mannourie, who, being taken,
+confessed that his charges against Raleigh were false.  He fled, a ruined
+man, back to his native county and his noble old seat of Affton; but Até
+is on the heels of such—
+
+    ‘Slowly she tracks him and sure, as a lyme-hound, sudden she grips
+    him,
+    Crushing him, blind in his pride, for a sign and a terror to
+    mortals.’
+
+A terrible plebiscitum had been passed in the West country against the
+betrayer of its last Worthy.  The gentlemen closed their doors against
+him; the poor refused him—so goes the legend—fire and water.  Driven by
+the Furies, he fled from Affton, and wandered westward down the vale of
+Taw, away to Appledore, and there took boat, and out into the boundless
+Atlantic, over the bar, now crowded with shipping, for which Raleigh’s
+genius had discovered a new trade and a new world.
+
+Sixteen miles to the westward, like a blue cloud on the horizon, rises
+the ultima Thule of Devon, the little isle of Lundy.  There one outlying
+peak of granite, carrying up a shelf of slate upon its southern flank,
+has defied the waves, and formed an island some three miles long,
+desolate, flat-headed, fretted by every frost and storm, walled all round
+with four hundred feet of granite cliff, sacred only, then at least, to
+puffins and pirates.  Over the single landing-place frowns from the cliff
+the keep of an old ruin, ‘Moresco Castle,’ as they call it still, where
+some bold rover, Sir John de Moresco, in the times of the old Edwards,
+worked his works of darkness: a gray, weird, uncanny pile of moorstone,
+through which all the winds of heaven howl day and night.
+
+In a chamber of that ruin died Sir Lewis Stukely, Lord of Affton, cursing
+God and man.
+
+These things are true.  Said I not well that reality is stranger than
+romance?
+
+But no Nemesis followed James.
+
+The answer will depend much upon what readers consider to be a Nemesis.
+If to have found England one of the greatest countries in Europe, and to
+have left it one of the most inconsiderable and despicable; if to be
+fooled by flatterers to the top of his bent, until he fancied himself all
+but a god, while he was not even a man, and could neither speak the
+truth, keep himself sober, nor look on a drawn sword without shrinking;
+if, lastly, to have left behind him a son who, in spite of many
+chivalrous instincts unknown to his father, had been so indoctrinated in
+that father’s vices as to find it impossible to speak the truth even when
+it served his purpose; if all these things be no Nemesis, then none fell
+on James Stuart.
+
+But of that son, at least, the innocent blood was required.  He, too, had
+his share in the sin.  In Carew Raleigh’s simple and manful petition to
+the Commons of England for the restoration of his inheritance we find a
+significant fact stated without one word of comment, bitter or otherwise.
+At Prince Henry’s death the Sherborne lands had been given again to Carr,
+Lord Somerset.  To him, too, ‘the whirligig of time brought round its
+revenges,’ and he lost them when arraigned and condemned for poisoning
+Sir Thomas Overbury.  Then Sir John Digby, afterwards Earl of Bristol,
+begged Sherborne of the King, and had it.  Pembroke (Shakspeare’s
+Pembroke) brought young Carew to court, hoping to move the tyrant’s
+heart.  James saw him and shuddered; perhaps conscience stricken, perhaps
+of mere cowardice.  ‘He looked like the ghost of his father,’ as he well
+might, to that guilty soul.  Good Pembroke advised his young kinsman to
+travel, which he did till James’s death in the next year.  Then coming
+over—this is his own story—he asked of Parliament to be restored in
+blood, that he might inherit aught that might fall to him in England.
+His petition was read twice in the Lords.  Whereon ‘King Charles sent Sir
+James Fullarton, then of the bed-chamber, to Mr. Raleigh to command him
+to come to him; and being brought in, the King, after using him with
+great civility, notwithstanding told him plainly that when he was prince
+he had promised the Earl of Bristol to secure his title to Sherborne
+against the heirs of Sir Walter Raleigh; whereon the earl had given him,
+then prince, ten thousand pounds; that now he was bound to make good his
+promise, being king; that, therefore, unless he would quit his right and
+title to Sherborne, he neither could nor would pass his bill of
+restoration.’
+
+Young Raleigh, like a good Englishman, ‘urged,’ he says, ‘the justness of
+his cause; that he desired only the liberty of the subject, and to be
+left to the law, which was never denied any freeman.’  The King remained
+obstinate.  His noble brother’s love for the mighty dead weighed nothing
+with him, much less justice.  Poor young Raleigh was forced to submit.
+The act for his restoration was passed, reserving Sherborne for Lord
+Bristol, and Charles patched up the affair by allowing to Lady Raleigh
+and her son after her a life pension of four hundred a year.
+
+Young Carew tells his story simply, and without a note of bitterness;
+though he professes his intent to range himself and his two sons for the
+future ‘under the banner of the Commons of England,’ he may be a royalist
+for any word beside.  Even where he mentions the awful curse of his
+mother, he only alludes to its fulfilment by—‘that which hath happened
+since to that royal family is too sad and disastrous for me to repeat,
+and yet too visible not to be discerned.’  We can have no doubt that he
+tells the exact truth.  Indeed the whole story fits Charles’s character
+to the smallest details.  The want of any real sense of justice, combined
+with the false notion of honour; the implacable obstinacy; the contempt
+for that law by which alone he held his crown; the combination of
+unkingliness in commanding a private interview and shamelessness in
+confessing his own meanness—all these are true notes of the man whose
+deliberate suicide stands written, a warning to all bad rulers till the
+end of time.  But he must have been a rogue early in life, and a needy
+rogue too.  That ten thousand pounds of Lord Bristol’s money should make
+many a sentimentalist reconsider—if, indeed, sentimentalists can be made
+to reconsider, or even to consider, anything—their notion of him as the
+incarnation of pious chivalry.
+
+At least the ten thousand pounds cost Charles dear.
+
+The widow’s curse followed him home.  Naseby fight and the Whitehall
+scaffold were surely God’s judgment of such deeds, whatever man’s may be.
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES
+
+
+{87}  _North British Review_, No. XLV.—1.  ‘Life of Sir Walter Raleigh.’
+By P. Fraser Tytler, F.R.S.  London, 1853.—2.  ‘Raleigh’s Discovery of
+Guiana.’  Edited by Sir Robert Schomburgk (Hakluyt Society), 1848.—3.
+‘Lord Bacon and Sir Walter Raleigh.’  By M. Napier.  Cambridge, 1853.—4.
+‘Raleigh’s Works, with Lives by Oldys and Birch.’  Oxford, 1829—5.
+‘Bishop Goodman’s History of his own Times.’  London, 1839.
+
+{95}  I especially entreat readers’ attention to two articles in
+vindication of the morals of Queen Elizabeth, in ‘Fraser’s Magazine’ of
+1854; to one in the ‘Westminster’ of 1854, on Mary Stuart; and one in the
+same of 1852, on England’s Forgotten Worthies, by a pen now happily well
+known in English literature, Mr. Anthony Froude’s.
+
+{138}  Since this was written, a similar Amazonian bodyguard has been
+discovered, I hear, in Pegu.
+
+{155}  It is to be found in a MS. of 1596.
+
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME***
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+
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time, by Charles
+Kingsley
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions 
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at 
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+
+
+
+Title: Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time
+
+
+Author: Charles Kingsley
+
+
+
+Release Date: December 26, 2014  [eBook #3143]
+[This file was first posted on January 2, 2001]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME***
+</pre>
+<p>Transcribed from &ldquo;Plays and Puritans and Other
+Historical Essays&rdquo; 1890 Macmillan and Co. edition by David
+Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org</p>
+<h1>SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME <a name="citation87"></a><a
+href="#footnote87" class="citation">[87]</a></h1>
+<p>&lsquo;<span class="smcap">Truth</span> is stranger than
+fiction.&rsquo;&nbsp; A trite remark.&nbsp; We all say it again
+and again: but how few of us believe it!&nbsp; How few of us,
+when we read the history of heroical times and heroical men, take
+the story simply as it stands!&nbsp; On the contrary, we try to
+explain it away; to prove it all not to have been so very
+wonderful; to impute accident, circumstance, mean and commonplace
+motives; to lower every story down to the level of our own
+littleness, or what we (unjustly to ourselves and to the God who
+is near us all) choose to consider our level; to rationalise away
+all the wonders, till we make them at last impossible, and give
+up caring to believe them; and prove to our own melancholy
+satisfaction that Alexander conquered the world with a pin, in
+his sleep, by accident.</p>
+<p>And yet in this mood, as in most, there is a sort of
+left-handed truth involved.&nbsp; These heroes are not so far
+removed from us after all.&nbsp; They were men of like passions
+with ourselves, with the same flesh about them, the same spirit
+within them, the same world outside, the same devil beneath, the
+same God above.&nbsp; They and their deeds were not so very
+wonderful.&nbsp; Every child who is born into the world is just
+as wonderful, and, for aught we know, might, <i>mutatis
+mutandis</i>, do just as wonderful deeds.&nbsp; If accident and
+circumstance helped them, the same may help us: have helped us,
+if we will look back down our years, far more than we have made
+use of.</p>
+<p>They were men, certainly, very much of our own level: but may
+we not put that level somewhat too low?&nbsp; They were certainly
+not what we are; for if they had been, they would have done no
+more than we: but is not a man&rsquo;s real level not what he is,
+but what he can be, and therefore ought to be?&nbsp; No doubt
+they were compact of good and evil, just as we: but so was David,
+no man more; though a more heroical personage (save One) appears
+not in all human records but may not the secret of their success
+have been that, on the whole (though they found it a sore
+battle), they refused the evil and chose the good?&nbsp; It is
+true, again, that their great deeds may be more or less
+explained, attributed to laws, rationalised: but is explaining
+always explaining away?&nbsp; Is it to degrade a thing to
+attribute it to a law?&nbsp; And do you do anything more by
+&lsquo;rationalising&rsquo; men&rsquo;s deeds than prove that
+they were rational men; men who saw certain fixed laws, and
+obeyed them, and succeeded thereby, according to the Baconian
+apophthegm, that nature is conquered by obeying her?</p>
+<p>But what laws?</p>
+<p>To that question, perhaps, the eleventh chapter of the Epistle
+to the Hebrews will give the best answer, where it says, that by
+faith were done all the truly great deeds, and by faith lived all
+the truly great men who have ever appeared on earth.</p>
+<p>There are, of course, higher and lower degrees of this faith;
+its object is one more or less worthy: but it is in all cases the
+belief in certain unseen eternal facts, by keeping true to which
+a man must in the long run succeed.&nbsp; Must; because he is
+more or less in harmony with heaven, and earth, and the Maker
+thereof, and has therefore fighting on his side a great portion
+of the universe; perhaps the whole; for as he who breaks one
+commandment of the law is guilty of the whole, because he denies
+the fount of all law, so he who with his whole soul keeps one
+commandment of it is likely to be in harmony with the whole,
+because he testifies of the fount of all law.</p>
+<p>I shall devote a few pages to the story of an old hero, of a
+man of like passions with ourselves; of one who had the most
+intense and awful sense of the unseen laws, and succeeded
+mightily thereby; of one who had hard struggles with a flesh and
+blood which made him at times forget those laws, and failed
+mightily thereby; of one whom God so loved that He caused each
+slightest sin, as with David, to bring its own punishment with
+it, that while the flesh was delivered over to Satan, the man
+himself might be saved in the Day of the Lord; of one, finally,
+of whom nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand may
+say, &lsquo;I have done worse deeds than he: but I have never
+done as good ones.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>In a poor farm-house among the pleasant valleys of South
+Devon, among the white apple-orchards and the rich water-meadows,
+and the red fallows and red kine, in the year of grace 1552, a
+boy was born, as beautiful as day, and christened Walter
+Raleigh.&nbsp; His father was a gentleman of ancient blood: few
+older in the land: but, impoverished, he had settled down upon
+the wreck of his estate, in that poor farm-house.&nbsp; No record
+of him now remains; but he must have been a man worth knowing and
+worth loving, or he would not have won the wife he did.&nbsp; She
+was a Champernoun, proudest of Norman squires, and could probably
+boast of having in her veins the blood of Courtneys, Emperors of
+Byzant.&nbsp; She had been the wife of the famous knight Sir Otho
+Gilbert, and lady of Compton Castle, and had borne him three
+brave sons, John, Humphrey, and Adrian; all three destined to win
+knighthood also in due time, and the two latter already giving
+promises, which they well fulfilled, of becoming most remarkable
+men of their time.&nbsp; And yet the fair Champernoun, at her
+husband&rsquo;s death, had chosen to wed Mr. Raleigh, and share
+life with him in the little farm-house at Hayes.&nbsp; She must
+have been a grand woman, if the law holds true that great men
+always have great mothers; an especially grand woman, indeed; for
+few can boast of having borne to two different husbands such sons
+as she bore.&nbsp; No record, as far as we know, remains of her;
+nor of her boy&rsquo;s early years.&nbsp; One can imagine them,
+nevertheless.</p>
+<p>Just as he awakes to consciousness, the Smithfield fires are
+extinguished.&nbsp; He can recollect, perhaps, hearing of the
+burning of the Exeter martyrs: and he does not forget it; no one
+forgot or dared forget it in those days.&nbsp; He is brought up
+in the simple and manly, yet high-bred ways of English gentlemen
+in the times of &lsquo;an old courtier of the
+Queen&rsquo;s.&rsquo;&nbsp; His two elder half-brothers also,
+living some thirty miles away, in the quaint and gloomy towers of
+Compton Castle, amid the apple-orchards of Torbay, are men as
+noble as ever formed a young lad&rsquo;s taste.&nbsp; Humphrey
+and Adrian Gilbert, who afterwards, both of them, rise to
+knighthood, are&mdash;what are they not?&mdash;soldiers,
+scholars, Christians, discoverers and &lsquo;planters&rsquo; of
+foreign lands, geographers, alchemists, miners, Platonical
+philosophers; many-sided, high-minded men, not without fantastic
+enthusiasm; living heroic lives, and destined, one of them, to
+die a heroic death.&nbsp; From them Raleigh&rsquo;s fancy has
+been fired, and his appetite for learning quickened, while he is
+yet a daring boy, fishing in the gray trout-brooks, or going up
+with his father to the Dartmoor hills to hunt the deer with hound
+and horn, amid the wooded gorges of Holne, or over the dreary
+downs of Hartland Warren, and the cloud-capt thickets of
+Cator&rsquo;s Beam, and looking down from thence upon the far
+blue southern sea, wondering when he shall sail thereon, to fight
+the Spaniard, and discover, like Columbus, some fairy-land of
+gold and gems.</p>
+<p>For before this boy&rsquo;s mind, as before all intense
+English minds of that day, rise, from the first, three fixed
+ideas, which yet are but one&mdash;the Pope, the Spaniard, and
+America.</p>
+<p>The two first are the sworn and internecine enemies (whether
+they pretend a formal peace or not) of Law and Freedom, Bible and
+Queen, and all that makes an Englishman&rsquo;s life dear to
+him.&nbsp; Are they not the incarnations of Antichrist?&nbsp;
+Their Moloch sacrifices flame through all lands.&nbsp; The earth
+groans because of them, and refuses to cover the blood of her
+slain.&nbsp; And America is the new world of boundless wonder and
+beauty, wealth and fertility, to which these two evil powers
+arrogate an exclusive and divine right; and God has delivered it
+into their hands; and they have done evil therein with all their
+might, till the story of their greed and cruelty rings through
+all earth and heaven.&nbsp; Is this the will of God?&nbsp; Will
+he not avenge for these things, as surely as he is the Lord who
+executeth justice and judgment in the earth?</p>
+<p>These are the young boy&rsquo;s thoughts.&nbsp; These were his
+thoughts for sixty-six eventful years.&nbsp; In whatsoever else
+he wavered, he never wavered in that creed.&nbsp; He learnt it in
+his boyhood, while he read &lsquo;Fox&rsquo;s Martyrs&rsquo;
+beside his mother&rsquo;s knee.&nbsp; He learnt it as a lad, when
+he saw his neighbours Hawkins and Drake changed by Spanish
+tyranny and treachery from peaceful merchantmen into fierce
+scourges of God.&nbsp; He learnt it scholastically, from fathers
+and divines, as an Oxford scholar, in days when Oxford was a
+Protestant indeed, in whom there was no guile.&nbsp; He learnt it
+when he went over, at seventeen years old, with his gallant
+kinsman Henry Champernoun, and his band of a hundred gentlemen
+volunteers, to flesh his maiden sword in behalf of the persecuted
+French Protestants.&nbsp; He learnt it as he listened to the
+shrieks of the San Bartholomew; he learnt it as he watched the
+dragonnades, the tortures, the massacres of the Netherlands, and
+fought manfully under Norris in behalf of those victims of
+&lsquo;the Pope and Spain.&rsquo;&nbsp; He preached it in far
+stronger and wiser words than I can express it for him, in that
+noble tract of 1591, on Sir Richard Grenville&rsquo;s death at
+the Azores&mdash;a Tyrt&aelig;an trumpet-blast such as has seldom
+rung in human ears; he discussed it like a cool statesman in his
+pamphlet of 1596, on &lsquo;A War with Spain.&rsquo;&nbsp; He
+sacrificed for it the last hopes of his old age, the wreck of his
+fortunes, his just recovered liberty; and he died with the old
+God&rsquo;s battle-cry upon his lips, when it awoke no response
+from the hearts of a coward, profligate, and unbelieving
+generation.&nbsp; This is the background, the keynote of the
+man&rsquo;s whole life.&nbsp; If we lose the recollection of it,
+and content ourselves by slurring it over in the last pages of
+his biography with some half-sneer about his putting, like the
+rest of Elizabeth&rsquo;s old admirals, &lsquo;the Spaniard, the
+Pope, and the Devil&rsquo; in the same category, then we shall
+understand very little about Raleigh; though, of course, we shall
+save ourselves the trouble of pronouncing as to whether the
+Spaniard and the Pope were really in the same category as the
+devil; or, indeed, which might be equally puzzling to a good many
+historians of the last century and a half, whether there be any
+devil at all.</p>
+<p>The books which I have chosen to head this review are all of
+them more or less good, with one exception, and that is Bishop
+Goodman&rsquo;s Memoirs, on which much stress has been lately
+laid, as throwing light on various passages of Raleigh, Essex,
+Cecil, and James&rsquo;s lives.&nbsp; Having read it carefully, I
+must say plainly, that I think the book an altogether foolish,
+pedantic, and untrustworthy book, without any power of insight or
+gleam of reason; without even the care to be self-consistent;
+having but one object, the whitewashing of James, and of every
+noble lord whom the bishop has ever known: but in whitewashing
+each, the poor old flunkey so bespatters all the rest of his
+pets, that when the work is done, the whole party look, if
+possible, rather dirtier than before.&nbsp; And so I leave Bishop
+Goodman.</p>
+<p>Mr. Fraser Tytler&rsquo;s book is well known; and it is on the
+whole a good one; because he really loves and admires the man of
+whom he writes: but he is sometimes careless as to authorities,
+and too often makes the wish father to the thought.&nbsp;
+Moreover, he has the usual sentiment about Mary Queen of Scots,
+and the usual scandal about Elizabeth, which is simply anathema;
+and which prevents his really seeing the time in which Raleigh
+lived, and the element in which he moved.&nbsp; This sort of talk
+is happily dying out just now; but no one can approach the
+history of the Elizabethan age (perhaps of any age) without
+finding that truth is all but buried under mountains of dirt and
+chaff&mdash;an Aug&aelig;an stable, which, perhaps, will never be
+swept clean.&nbsp; Yet I have seen, with great delight, several
+attempts toward removal of the said superstratum of dirt and
+chaff from the Elizabethan histories, in several articles, all
+evidently from the same pen (and that one, more perfectly master
+of English prose than any man living), in the &lsquo;Westminster
+Review&rsquo; and &lsquo;Fraser&rsquo;s Magazine.&rsquo; <a
+name="citation95"></a><a href="#footnote95"
+class="citation">[95]</a></p>
+<p>Sir Robert Schomburgk&rsquo;s edition of the Guiana Voyage
+contains an excellent Life of Raleigh, perhaps the best yet
+written; of which I only complain, when it gives in to the
+stock-charges against Raleigh, as it were at second-hand, and
+just because they are stock-charges, and when, too, the
+illustrious editor (unable to conceal his admiration of a
+discoverer in many points so like himself) takes all through an
+apologetic tone of &lsquo;Please don&rsquo;t laugh at me.&nbsp; I
+daresay it is very foolish; but I can&rsquo;t help loving the
+man.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Mr. Napier&rsquo;s little book is a reprint of two
+&lsquo;Edinburgh Review&rsquo; articles on Bacon and
+Raleigh.&nbsp; The first, a learned statement of facts in answer
+to some unwisdom of a &lsquo;Quarterly&rsquo; reviewer (possibly
+an Oxford Aristotelian; for &lsquo;we think we do know that sweet
+Roman hand&rsquo;).&nbsp; It is clear, accurate, convincing,
+complete.&nbsp; There is no more to be said about the matter,
+save that facts are stubborn things.</p>
+<p>The article on Raleigh is very valuable; first, because Mr.
+Napier has had access to many documents unknown to former
+biographers; and next, because he clears Raleigh completely from
+the old imputation of deceit about the Guiana mine, as well as of
+other minor charges.&nbsp; With his general opinion of
+Raleigh&rsquo;s last and fatal Guiana voyage, I have the
+misfortune to differ from him <i>toto coelo</i>, on the strength
+of the very documents which he quotes.&nbsp; But Mr. Napier is
+always careful, always temperate, and always just, except where
+he, as I think, does not enter into the feelings of the man whom
+he is analysing.&nbsp; Let readers buy the book (it will tell
+them a hundred things they do not know) and be judge between Mr.
+Napier and me.</p>
+<p>In the meanwhile, one cannot help watching with a smile how
+good old Time&rsquo;s scrubbing-brush, which clears away paint
+and whitewash from church pillars, does the same by such
+characters as Raleigh&rsquo;s.&nbsp; After each fresh
+examination, some fresh count in the hundred-headed indictment
+breaks down.&nbsp; The truth is, that as people begin to believe
+more in nobleness, and to gird up their loins to the doing of
+noble deeds, they discover more nobleness in others.&nbsp;
+Raleigh&rsquo;s character was in its lowest nadir in the days of
+Voltaire and Hume.&nbsp; What shame to him?&nbsp; For so were
+more sacred characters than his.&nbsp; Shall the disciple be
+above his master? especially when that disciple was but too
+inconsistent, and gave occasion to the uncircumcised to
+blaspheme?&nbsp; But Cayley, after a few years, refutes
+triumphantly Hume&rsquo;s silly slanders.&nbsp; He is a stupid
+writer: but he has sense enough, being patient, honest, and
+loving, to do that.</p>
+<p>Mr. Fraser Tytler shovels away a little more of the dirt-heap;
+Mr. Napier clears him (for which we owe him many thanks), by
+simple statement of facts, from the charge of having deserted and
+neglected his Virginia colonists; Humboldt and Schomburgk clear
+him from the charge of having lied about Guiana; and so on; each
+successive writer giving in generally on merest hearsay to the
+general complaint against him, either from fear of running
+counter to big names, or from mere laziness, and yet absolving
+him from that particular charge of which his own knowledge
+enables him to judge.&nbsp; In the trust that I may be able to
+clear him from a few more charges, I write these pages, premising
+that I do not profess to have access to any new and recondite
+documents.&nbsp; I merely take the broad facts of the story from
+documents open to all; and comment on them as every man should
+wish his own life to be commented on.</p>
+<p>But I do so on a method which I cannot give up; and that is
+the Bible method.&nbsp; I say boldly that historians have
+hitherto failed in understanding not only Raleigh and Elizabeth,
+but nine-tenths of the persons and facts in his day, because they
+will not judge them by the canons which the Bible lays
+down&mdash;by which I mean not only the New Testament but the
+Old, which, as English Churchmen say, and Scotch Presbyterians
+have ere now testified with sacred blood, is &lsquo;not contrary
+to the New.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Mr. Napier has a passage about Raleigh for which I am sorry,
+coming as it does from a countryman of John Knox.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Society, it would seem, was yet in a state in which such a
+man could seriously plead, that the madness he feigned was
+justified&rsquo; (his last word is unfair, for Raleigh only hopes
+that it is no sin) &lsquo;by the example of David, King of
+Israel.&rsquo;&nbsp; What a shocking state of society when men
+actually believed their Bibles, not too little, but too
+much.&nbsp; For my part, I think that if poor dear Raleigh had
+considered the example of David a little more closely, he need
+never have feigned madness at all; and that his error lay quite
+in an opposite direction from looking on the Bible heroes, David
+especially, as too sure models.&nbsp; At all events, let us try
+Raleigh by the very scriptural standard which he himself lays
+down, not merely in this case unwisely, but in his &lsquo;History
+of the World&rsquo; more wisely than any historian whom I have
+ever read; and say, &lsquo;Judged as the Bible taught our Puritan
+forefathers to judge every man, the character is intelligible
+enough; tragic, but noble and triumphant: judged as men have been
+judged in history for the last hundred years, by hardly any canon
+save those of the private judgment, which philosophic cant,
+maudlin sentimentality, or fear of public opinion, may happen to
+have forged, the man is a phenomenon, only less confused,
+abnormal, suspicious than his biographers&rsquo; notions about
+him.&rsquo;&nbsp; Again I say, I have not solved the problem: but
+it will be enough if I make some think it both soluble and worth
+solving.&nbsp; Let us look round, then, and see into what sort of
+a country, into what sort of a world, the young adventurer is
+going forth, at seventeen years of age, to seek his fortune.</p>
+<p>Born in 1552, his young life has sprung up and grown with the
+young life of England.&nbsp; The earliest fact, perhaps, which he
+can recollect is the flash of joy on every face which proclaims
+that Mary Tudor is dead, and Elizabeth reigns at last.&nbsp; As
+he grows, the young man sees all the hope and adoration of the
+English people centre in that wondrous maid, and his own centre
+in her likewise.&nbsp; He had been base had he been
+otherwise.&nbsp; She comes to the throne with such a prestige as
+never sovereign came since the days when Isaiah sang his
+p&aelig;an over young Hezekiah&rsquo;s accession.&nbsp; Young,
+learned, witty, beautiful (as with such a father and mother she
+could not help being), with an expression of countenance
+remarkable (I speak of those early days) rather for its
+tenderness and intellectual depth than its strength, she comes
+forward as the champion of the Reformed Faith, the interpretress
+of the will and conscience of the people of England&mdash;herself
+persecuted all but to the death, and purified by affliction, like
+gold tried in the fire.&nbsp; She gathers round her, one by one,
+young men of promise, and trains them herself to their
+work.&nbsp; And they fulfil it, and serve her, and grow
+gray-headed in her service, working as faithfully, as
+righteously, as patriotically, as men ever worked on earth.&nbsp;
+They are her &lsquo;favourites&rsquo;; because they are men who
+deserve favour; men who count not their own lives dear to
+themselves for the sake of the queen and of that commonweal which
+their hearts and reasons tell them is one with her.&nbsp; They
+are still men, though; and some of them have their grudgings and
+envyings against each other: she keeps the balance even between
+them, on the whole, skilfully, gently, justly, in spite of
+weaknesses and prejudices, without which she had been more than
+human.&nbsp; Some have their conceited hopes of marrying her,
+becoming her masters.&nbsp; She rebukes and pardons.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Out of the dust I took you, sir! go and do your duty,
+humbly and rationally, henceforth, or into the dust I trample you
+again!&rsquo;&nbsp; And they reconsider themselves, and
+obey.&nbsp; But many, or most of them, are new men, country
+gentlemen, and younger sons.&nbsp; She will follow her
+father&rsquo;s plan, of keeping down the overgrown feudal
+princes, who, though brought low by the wars of the Roses, are
+still strong enough to throw everything into confusion by
+resisting at once the Crown and Commons.&nbsp; Proud nobles reply
+by rebellion, come down southwards with ignorant Popish henchmen
+at their backs; will restore Popery, marry the Queen of Scots,
+make the middle class and the majority submit to the feudal lords
+and the minority.&nbsp; Elizabeth, with her &lsquo;aristocracy of
+genius,&rsquo; is too strong for them: the people&rsquo;s heart
+is with her, and not with dukes.&nbsp; Each mine only blows up
+its diggers; and there are many dry eyes at their ruin.&nbsp; Her
+people ask her to marry.&nbsp; She answers gently, proudly,
+eloquently: &lsquo;She is married&mdash;the people of England is
+her husband.&nbsp; She has vowed it.&rsquo;&nbsp; And yet there
+is a tone of sadness in that great speech.&nbsp; Her
+woman&rsquo;s heart yearns after love, after children; after a
+strong bosom on which to repose that weary head.&nbsp; More than
+once she is ready to give way.&nbsp; But she knows that it must
+not be.&nbsp; She has her reward.&nbsp; &lsquo;Whosoever gives up
+husband or child for my sake and the gospel&rsquo;s, shall
+receive them back a hundredfold in this present life,&rsquo; as
+Elizabeth does.&nbsp; Her reward is an adoration from high and
+low, which is to us now inexplicable, impossible, overstrained,
+which was not so then.</p>
+<p>For the whole nation is in a mood of exaltation; England is
+fairyland; the times are the last days&mdash;strange, terrible,
+and glorious.&nbsp; At home are Jesuits plotting; dark,
+crooked-pathed, going up and down in all manner of disguises,
+doing the devil&rsquo;s work if men ever did it; trying to sow
+discord between man and man, class and class; putting out books
+full of filthy calumnies, declaring the queen illegitimate,
+excommunicate, a usurper; English law null, and all state
+appointments void, by virtue of a certain &lsquo;Bull&rsquo;; and
+calling on the subjects to rebellion and assassination, even on
+the bedchamber&mdash;woman to do to her &lsquo;as Judith did to
+Holofernes.&rsquo;&nbsp; She answers by calm contempt.&nbsp; Now
+and then Burleigh and Walsingham catch some of the rogues, and
+they meet their deserts; but she for the most part lets them have
+their way.&nbsp; God is on her side, and she will not fear what
+man can do to her.</p>
+<p>Abroad, the sky is dark and wild, and yet full of fantastic
+splendour.&nbsp; Spain stands strong and awful, a rising
+world-tyranny, with its dark-souled Cortezes and Pizarros, Alvas,
+Don Johns, and Parmas, men whose path is like the lava stream;
+who go forth slaying and to slay, in the name of their gods, like
+those old Assyrian conquerors on the walls of Nineveh, with
+tutelary genii flying above their heads, mingled with the eagles
+who trail the entrails of the slain.&nbsp; By conquest,
+intermarriage, or intrigue, she has made all the southern nations
+her vassals or her tools; close to our own shores, the
+Netherlands are struggling vainly for their liberties; abroad,
+the Western Islands, and the whole trade of Africa and India,
+will in a few years be hers.&nbsp; And already the Pope, whose
+&lsquo;most Catholic&rsquo; and faithful servant she is, has
+repaid her services in the cause of darkness by the gift of the
+whole New World&mdash;a gift which she has claimed by cruelties
+and massacres unexampled since the days of Timour and Zinghis
+Khan.&nbsp; There she spreads and spreads, as Drake found her
+picture in the Government House at St. Domingo, the horse leaping
+through the globe, and underneath, <i>Non sufficit
+orbis</i>.&nbsp; Who shall withstand her, armed as she is with
+the three-edged sword of Antichrist&mdash;superstition, strength,
+and gold?</p>
+<p>English merchantmen, longing for some share in the riches of
+the New World, go out to trade in Guinea, in the Azores, in New
+Spain: and are answered by shot and steel.&nbsp; &lsquo;Both
+policy and religion,&rsquo; as Fray Simon says, fifty years
+afterwards, &lsquo;forbid Christians to trade with
+heretics!&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;Lutheran devils, and enemies of
+God,&rsquo; are the answer they get in words: in deeds, whenever
+they have a superior force they may be allowed to land, and to
+water their ships, even to trade, under exorbitant restrictions:
+but generally this is merely a trap for them.&nbsp; Forces are
+hurried up; and the English are attacked treacherously, in spite
+of solemn compacts; for &lsquo;No faith need be kept with
+heretics.&rsquo;&nbsp; And woe to them if any be taken prisoners,
+even wrecked.&nbsp; The galleys, and the rack, and the stake are
+their certain doom; for the Inquisition claims the bodies and
+souls of heretics all over the world, and thinks it sin to lose
+its own.&nbsp; A few years of such wrong raise questions in the
+sturdy English heart.&nbsp; What right have these Spaniards to
+the New World?&nbsp; The Pope&rsquo;s gift?&nbsp; Why, he gave it
+by the same authority by which he claims the whole world.&nbsp;
+The formula used when an Indian village is sacked is, that God
+gave the whole world to St. Peter, and that he has given it to
+his successors, and they the Indies to the King of Spain.&nbsp;
+To acknowledge that lie would be to acknowledge the very power by
+which the Pope claims a right to depose Queen Elizabeth, and give
+her dominions to whomsoever he will.&nbsp; A fico for bulls!</p>
+<p>By possession, then?&nbsp; That may hold for Mexico, Peru, New
+Grenada, Paraguay, which have been colonised; though they were
+gained by means which make every one concerned in conquering them
+worthy of the gallows; and the right is only that of the thief to
+the purse, whose owner he has murdered.&nbsp; But as for the
+rest&mdash;Why the Spaniard has not colonised, even explored,
+one-fifth of the New World, not even one-fifth of the
+coast.&nbsp; Is the existence of a few petty factories, often
+hundreds of miles apart, at a few river-mouths to give them a
+claim to the whole intermediate coast, much less to the vast
+unknown tracts inside?&nbsp; We will try that.&nbsp; If they
+appeal to the sword, so be it.&nbsp; The men are treacherous
+robbers; we will indemnify ourselves for our losses, and God
+defend the right.</p>
+<p>So argued the English; and so sprung up that strange war of
+reprisals, in which, for eighteen years, it was held that there
+was no peace between England and Spain beyond the line,
+<i>i.e.</i>, beyond the parallel of longitude where the
+Pope&rsquo;s gift of the western world was said to begin; and, as
+the quarrel thickened and neared, extended to the Azores,
+Canaries, and coasts of Africa, where English and Spaniards flew
+at each other as soon as seen, mutually and by common consent, as
+natural enemies, each invoking God in the battle with
+Antichrist.</p>
+<p>Into such a world as this goes forth young Raleigh, his heart
+full of chivalrous worship for England&rsquo;s tutelary genius,
+his brain aflame with the true miracles of the new-found
+Hesperides, full of vague hopes, vast imaginations, and
+consciousness of enormous power.&nbsp; And yet he is no wayward
+dreamer, unfit for this work-day world.&nbsp; With a vein of song
+&lsquo;most lofty, insolent, and passionate,&rsquo; indeed unable
+to see aught without a poetic glow over the whole, he is
+eminently practical, contented to begin at the beginning that he
+may end at the end; one who could &lsquo;toil terribly,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;who always laboured at the matter in hand as if he were
+born only for that.&rsquo;&nbsp; Accordingly, he sets to work
+faithfully and stoutly, to learn his trade of soldiering, and
+learns it in silence and obscurity.&nbsp; He shares (it seems) in
+the retreat at Moncontour, and is by at the death of
+Cond&eacute;, and toils on for five years, marching and
+skirmishing, smoking the enemy out of mountain-caves in
+Languedoc, and all the wild work of war.&nbsp; During the San
+Bartholomew massacre we hear nothing of him; perhaps he took
+refuge with Sidney and others in Walsingham&rsquo;s house.&nbsp;
+No records of these years remain, save a few scattered
+reminiscences in his works, which mark the shrewd, observant eye
+of the future statesman.</p>
+<p>When he returned we know not.&nbsp; We trace him, in 1576, by
+some verses prefixed to Gascoigne&rsquo;s satire, the
+&lsquo;Steele Glass,&rsquo; solid, stately, epigrammatic,
+&lsquo;by Walter Rawley of the Middle Temple.&rsquo;&nbsp; The
+style is his; spelling of names matters nought in days in which a
+man would spell his own name three different ways in one
+document.</p>
+<p>Gascoigne, like Raleigh, knew Lord Grey of Wilton, and most
+men about town too; and had been a soldier abroad, like Raleigh,
+probably with him.&nbsp; It seems to have been the fashion for
+young idlers to lodge among the Templars; indeed, toward the end
+of the century, they had to be cleared out, as crowding the wigs
+and gowns too much; and perhaps proving noisy neighbours, as
+Raleigh may have done.&nbsp; To this period may be referred,
+probably, his Justice done on Mr. Charles Chester (Ben
+Jonson&rsquo;s Carlo Buffone), &lsquo;a perpetual talker, and
+made a noise like a drum in a room; so one time, at a tavern,
+Raleigh beats him and seals up his mouth, his upper and nether
+beard, with hard wax.&rsquo;&nbsp; For there is a great laugh in
+Raleigh&rsquo;s heart, a genial contempt of asses; and one that
+will make him enemies hereafter: perhaps shorten his days.</p>
+<p>One hears of him next, but only by report, in the Netherlands
+under Norris, where the nucleus of the English line (especially
+of its musquetry) was training.&nbsp; For Don John of Austria
+intends not only to crush the liberties and creeds of the
+Flemings, but afterwards to marry the Queen of Scots, and conquer
+England: and Elizabeth, unwillingly and slowly, for she cannot
+stomach rebels, has sent men and money to the States to stop Don
+John in time; which the valiant English and Scotch do on Lammas
+day, 1578, and that in a fashion till then unseen in war.&nbsp;
+For coming up late and panting, and &lsquo;being more sensible of
+a little heat of the sun than of any cold fear of death,&rsquo;
+they throw off their armour and clothes, and, in their shirts
+(not over-clean, one fears), give Don John&rsquo;s rashness such
+a rebuff, that two months more see that wild meteor, with lost
+hopes and tarnished fame, lie down and vanish below the stormy
+horizon.&nbsp; In these days, probably, it is that he knew
+Colonel Bingham, a soldier of fortune, of a &lsquo;fancy high and
+wild, too desultory and over-voluble,&rsquo; who had, among his
+hundred and one schemes, one for the plantation of America as
+poor Sir Thomas Stukely (whom Raleigh must have known well),
+uncle of the traitor Lewis, had for the peopling of Florida.</p>
+<p>Raleigh returns.&nbsp; Ten years has he been learning his
+soldier&rsquo;s trade in silence.&nbsp; He will take a lesson in
+seamanship next.&nbsp; The court may come in time: for by now the
+poor squire&rsquo;s younger son must have
+discovered&mdash;perhaps even too fully&mdash;that he is not as
+other men are; that he can speak, and watch, and dare, and
+endure, as none around him can do.&nbsp; However, there are
+&lsquo;good adventures toward,&rsquo; as the &lsquo;Morte
+d&rsquo;Arthur&rsquo; would say; and he will off with his
+half-brother Humphrey Gilbert to carry out his patent for
+planting <i>Meta Incognita</i>&mdash;&lsquo;The Unknown
+Goal,&rsquo; as Queen Elizabeth has named it&mdash;which will
+prove to be too truly and fatally unknown.&nbsp; In a latitude
+south of England, and with an Italian summer, who can guess that
+the winter will outfreeze Russia itself?&nbsp; The
+merchant-seaman, like the statesman, had yet many a thing to
+learn.&nbsp; Instead of smiling at our forefathers&rsquo;
+ignorance, let us honour the men who bought knowledge for us
+their children at the price of lives nobler than our own.</p>
+<p>So Raleigh goes on his voyage with Humphrey Gilbert, to carry
+out the patent for discovering and planting in <i>Meta
+Incognita</i>; but the voyage prospers not.&nbsp; A &lsquo;smart
+brush with the Spaniards&rsquo; sends them home again, with the
+loss of Morgan, their best captain, and &lsquo;a tall
+ship&rsquo;; and <i>Meta Incognita</i> is forgotten for a while;
+but not the Spaniards.&nbsp; Who are these who forbid all
+English, by virtue of the Pope&rsquo;s bull, to cross the
+Atlantic?&nbsp; That must be settled hereafter; and Raleigh, ever
+busy, is off to Ireland to command a company in that
+&lsquo;common weal, or rather common woe&rsquo;, as he calls it
+in a letter to Leicester.&nbsp; Two years and more pass here; and
+all the records of him which remain are of a man valiant, daring,
+and yet prudent beyond his fellows.&nbsp; He hates his work, and
+is not on too good terms with stern and sour, but brave and
+faithful Lord Grey; but Lord Grey is Leicester&rsquo;s friend,
+and Raleigh works patiently under him, like a sensible man, just
+because he is Leicester&rsquo;s friend.&nbsp; Some modern
+gentleman of note&mdash;I forget who, and do not care to
+recollect&mdash;says that Raleigh&rsquo;s &lsquo;prudence never
+bore any proportion to his genius.&rsquo;&nbsp; The next
+biographer we open accuses him of being too calculating, cunning,
+timeserving; and so forth.&nbsp; Perhaps both are true.&nbsp; The
+man&rsquo;s was a character very likely to fall alternately into
+either sin&mdash;doubtless did so a hundred times.&nbsp; Perhaps
+both are false.&nbsp; The man&rsquo;s character was, on occasion,
+certain to rise above both faults.&nbsp; We have evidence that he
+did so his whole life long.</p>
+<p>He is tired of Ireland at last: nothing goes right
+there:&mdash;When has it?&nbsp; Nothing is to be done
+there.&nbsp; That which is crooked cannot be made straight, and
+that which is wanting cannot be numbered.&nbsp; He comes to
+London and to court.&nbsp; But how?&nbsp; By spreading his cloak
+over a muddy place for Queen Elizabeth to step on?&nbsp; It is
+very likely to be a true story; but biographers have slurred over
+a few facts in their hurry to carry out their theory of
+&lsquo;favourites,&rsquo; and to prove that Elizabeth took up
+Raleigh on the same grounds that a boarding-school miss might
+have done.&nbsp; Not that I deny the cloak story to be a very
+pretty story; perhaps it justifies, taken alone,
+Elizabeth&rsquo;s fondness for him.&nbsp; There may have been
+self-interest in it; we are bound, as &lsquo;men of the
+world,&rsquo; to impute the dirtiest motive that we can find; but
+how many self-interested men do we know who would have had
+quickness and daring to do such a thing?&nbsp; Men who are
+thinking about themselves are not generally either so
+quick-witted, or so inclined to throw away a good cloak, when by
+much scraping and saving they have got one.&nbsp; I never met a
+cunning, selfish, ambitious man who would have done such a
+thing.&nbsp; The reader may; but even if he has, we must ask him,
+for Queen Elizabeth&rsquo;s sake, to consider that this young
+Quixote is the close relation of three of the finest public men
+then living, Champernoun, Gilbert, and Carew.&nbsp; That he is a
+friend of Sidney, a pet of Leicester; that he has left behind him
+at Oxford, and brought with him from Ireland, the reputation of
+being a <i>rara avis</i>, a new star in the firmament; that he
+had been a soldier in her Majesty&rsquo;s service (and in one in
+which she has a peculiar private interest) for twelve years; that
+he has held her commission as one of the triumvirate for
+governing Munster, and has been the commander of the garrison at
+Cork; and that it is possible that she may have heard something
+of him before he threw his cloak under her feet, especially as
+there has been some controversy (which we have in vain tried to
+fathom) between him and Lord Grey about that terrible Smerwick
+slaughter; of the results of which we know little, but that
+Raleigh, being called in question about it in London, made such
+good play with his tongue, that his reputation as an orator and a
+man of talent was fixed once and for ever.</p>
+<p>Within the twelve months he is sent on some secret diplomatic
+mission about the Anjou marriage; he is in fact now installed in
+his place as &lsquo;a favourite.&rsquo;&nbsp; And why not?&nbsp;
+If a man is found to be wise and witty, ready and useful, able to
+do whatsoever he is put to, why is a sovereign, who has eyes to
+see the man&rsquo;s worth and courage to use it, to be accused of
+I know not what, because the said man happens to be
+good-looking?</p>
+<p>Now comes the turning-point of Raleigh&rsquo;s life.&nbsp;
+What does he intend to be?&nbsp; Soldier, statesman, scholar, or
+sea-adventurer?&nbsp; He takes the most natural, yet not the
+wisest course.&nbsp; He will try and be all four at once.&nbsp;
+He has intellect for it; by worldly wisdom he may have money for
+it also.&nbsp; Even now he has contrived (no one can tell whence)
+to build a good bark of two hundred tons, and send her out with
+Humphrey Gilbert on his second and fatal voyage.&nbsp; Luckily
+for Raleigh she deserts and comes home, while not yet out of the
+Channel, or she surely had gone the way of the rest of
+Gilbert&rsquo;s squadron.&nbsp; Raleigh, of course, loses money
+by the failure, as well as the hopes which he had grounded on his
+brother&rsquo;s Transatlantic viceroyalty.&nbsp; And a bitter
+pang it must have been to him to find himself bereft of that pure
+and heroic counsellor just at his entering into life.&nbsp; But
+with the same elasticity which sent him to the grave, he is busy
+within six months in a fresh expedition.&nbsp; If <i>Meta
+Incognita</i> be not worth planting, there must be, so Raleigh
+thinks, a vast extent of coast between it and Florida, which is
+more genial in climate, perhaps more rich in produce; and he
+sends Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlow to look for the same, and
+not in vain.</p>
+<p>On these Virginian discoveries I shall say but little.&nbsp;
+Those who wish to enjoy them should read them in all their naive
+freshness in the originals; and they will subscribe to S. T.
+Coleridge&rsquo;s dictum, that no one nowadays can write travels
+as well as the old worthies who figure in Hakluyt and
+Purchas.</p>
+<p>But to return to the question&mdash;What does this man intend
+to be?&nbsp; A discoverer and colonist; a vindicator of some part
+at least of America from Spanish claims?&nbsp; Perhaps not
+altogether: else he would have gone himself to Virginia, at least
+the second voyage, instead of sending others.&nbsp; But here, it
+seems, is the fatal, and yet pardonable mistake, which haunts the
+man throughout.&nbsp; He tries to be too many men at once.&nbsp;
+Fatal: because, though he leaves his trace on more things than
+one man is wont to do, he, strictly speaking, conquers nothing,
+brings nothing to a consummation.&nbsp; Virginia, Guiana, the
+&lsquo;History of the World,&rsquo; his own career as a
+statesman&mdash;as dictator (for he might have been dictator had
+he chosen)&mdash;all are left unfinished.&nbsp; And yet most
+pardonable; for if a man feels that he can do many different
+things, how hard to teach himself that he must not do them
+all!&nbsp; How hard to say to himself, &lsquo;I must cut off the
+right hand, and pluck out the right eye.&nbsp; I must be less
+than myself, in order really to be anything.&nbsp; I must
+concentrate my powers on one subject, and that perhaps by no
+means the most seemingly noble or useful, still less the most
+pleasant, and forego so many branches of activity in which I
+might be so distinguished, so useful.&rsquo;&nbsp; This is a hard
+lesson.&nbsp; Raleigh took just sixty-six years learning it; and
+had to carry the result of his experience to the other side of
+the dark river, for there was no time left to use it on this
+side.&nbsp; Some readers may have learnt the lesson
+already.&nbsp; If so, happy and blessed are they.&nbsp; But let
+them not therefore exalt themselves above Walter Raleigh; for
+that lesson is, of course, soonest learnt by the man who can
+excel in few things, later by him who can excel in many, and
+latest of all by him who, like Raleigh, can excel in all.</p>
+<p>Few details remain concerning the earlier court days of
+Raleigh.&nbsp; He rises rapidly, as we have seen.&nbsp; He has an
+estate given him in Ireland, near his friend Spenser, where he
+tries to do well and wisely, colonising, tilling, and planting
+it: but like his Virginia expeditions, principally at second
+hand.&nbsp; For he has swallowed (there is no denying it) the
+painted bait.&nbsp; He will discover, he will colonise, he will
+do all manner of beautiful things, at second hand: but he himself
+will be a courtier.&nbsp; It is very tempting.&nbsp; Who would
+not, at the age of thirty, have wished to have been one of that
+chosen band of geniuses and heroes whom Elizabeth had gathered
+round her?&nbsp; Who would not, at the age of thirty, have given
+his pound of flesh to be captain of her guard, and to go with her
+whithersoever she went?&nbsp; It is not merely the intense
+gratification to carnal vanity&mdash;which if any man denies or
+scoffs at, always mark him down as especially guilty&mdash;which
+is to be considered; but the real, actual honour, in the mind of
+one who looked on Elizabeth as the most precious and glorious
+being which the earth had seen for centuries.&nbsp; To be
+appreciated by her; to be loved by her; to serve her; to guard
+her; what could man desire more on earth?</p>
+<p>Beside, he becomes a member of Parliament now; Lord Warden of
+the Stannaries; business which of course keeps him in England,
+business which he performs, as he does all things, wisely and
+well.&nbsp; Such a generation as this ought really to respect
+Raleigh a little more, if it be only for his excellence in their
+own especial sphere&mdash;that of business.&nbsp; Raleigh is a
+thorough man of business.&nbsp; He can &lsquo;toil
+terribly,&rsquo; and what is more, toil to the purpose.&nbsp; In
+all the everyday affairs of life, he remains without a blot; a
+diligent, methodical, prudent man, who, though he plays for great
+stakes, ventures and loses his whole fortune again and again, yet
+never seems to omit the &lsquo;doing the duty which lies nearest
+him&rsquo;; never gets into mean money scrapes; never neglects
+tenants or duty; never gives way for one instant to &lsquo;the
+eccentricities of genius.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>If he had done so, be sure that we should have heard of
+it.&nbsp; For no man can become what he has become without making
+many an enemy; and he has his enemies already.&nbsp; On which
+statement naturally occurs the question&mdash;why?&nbsp; An
+important question too; because several of his later biographers
+seem to have running in their minds some such train of thought as
+this&mdash;Raleigh must have been a bad fellow, or he would not
+have had so many enemies; and because he was a bad fellow, there
+is an <i>&agrave; priori</i> reason that charges against him are
+true.&nbsp; Whether this be arguing in a circle or not, it is
+worth searching out the beginning of this enmity, and the reputed
+causes of it.&nbsp; In after years it will be because he is
+&lsquo;damnable proud,&rsquo; because he hated Essex, and so
+forth: of which in their places.&nbsp; But what is the earliest
+count against him?&nbsp; Naunton, who hated Raleigh, and was
+moreover a rogue, has no reason to give, but that &lsquo;the
+Queen took him for a kind of oracle, which much nettled them all;
+yea, those he relied on began to take this his sudden favour for
+an alarm; to be sensible of their own supplantation, and to
+project his; which shortly made him to sing, &ldquo;Fortune my
+foe.&rdquo;&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Now, be this true or not, and we do not put much faith in it,
+it gives no reason for the early dislike of Raleigh, save the
+somewhat unsatisfactory one which Cain would have given for his
+dislike of Abel.&nbsp; Moreover, there exists a letter of
+Essex&rsquo;s, written as thoroughly in the Cain spirit as any we
+ever read; and we wonder that, after reading that letter, men can
+find courage to repeat the old sentimentalism about the
+&lsquo;noble and unfortunate&rsquo; Earl.&nbsp; His hatred of
+Raleigh&mdash;which, as we shall see hereafter, Raleigh not only
+bears patiently, but requites with good deeds as long as he
+can&mdash;springs, by his own confession, simply from envy and
+disappointed vanity.&nbsp; The spoilt boy insults Queen Elizabeth
+about her liking for the &lsquo;knave Raleigh.&rsquo;&nbsp; She,
+&lsquo;taking hold of one word disdain,&rsquo; tells Essex that
+&lsquo;there was no such cause why I should thus disdain
+him.&rsquo;&nbsp; On which, says Essex, &lsquo;as near as I could
+I did describe unto her what he had been, and what he was; and
+then I did let her see, whether I had come to disdain his
+competition of love, or whether I could have comfort to give
+myself over to the service of a mistress that was in awe of such
+a man.&nbsp; I spake for 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 him.&nbsp; In the end, I saw she was
+resolved to defend him, and to cross me.&rsquo;&nbsp; Whereupon
+follows a &lsquo;scene,&rsquo; the naughty boy raging and
+stamping, till he insults the Queen, and calls Raleigh &lsquo;a
+wretch&rsquo;; whereon poor Elizabeth, who loved the coxcomb for
+his father&rsquo;s sake, &lsquo;turned her away to my Lady
+Warwick,&rsquo; and Essex goes grumbling forth.</p>
+<p>Raleigh&rsquo;s next few years are brilliant and busy ones;
+and gladly, did space permit, would I give details of those
+brilliant adventures which make this part of his life that of a
+true knight-errant.&nbsp; But they are mere episodes in the
+history; and we must pass them quickly by, only saying that they
+corroborate in all things our original notion of the
+man&mdash;just, humane, wise, greatly daring and enduring
+greatly; and filled with the one fixed idea, which has grown with
+his growth and strengthened with his strength, the destruction of
+the Spanish power, and colonisation of America by English.&nbsp;
+His brother Humphrey makes a second attempt to colonise
+Newfoundland, and perishes as heroically as he had lived.&nbsp;
+Raleigh, undaunted by his own loss in the adventure and his
+brother&rsquo;s failure, sends out a fleet of his own to discover
+to the southward, and finds Virginia.&nbsp; One might spend pages
+on this beautiful episode; on the simple descriptions of the fair
+new land which the sea-kings bring home; on the profound (for
+those times at least) knowledge which prompted Raleigh to make
+the attempt in that particular direction which had as yet escaped
+the notice of the Spaniards; on the quiet patience with which,
+undaunted by the ill-success of the first colonists, he sends out
+fleet after fleet, to keep the hold which he had once gained;
+till, unable any longer to support the huge expense, he makes
+over his patent for discovery to a company of merchants, who fare
+for many years as ill as Raleigh himself did: but one thing one
+has a right to say, that to this one man, under the providence of
+Almighty God, do the whole of the United States of America owe
+their existence.&nbsp; The work was double.&nbsp; The colony,
+however small, had to be kept in possession at all hazards; and
+he did it.&nbsp; But that was not enough.&nbsp; Spain must be
+prevented from extending her operations northward from Florida;
+she must be crippled along the whole east coast of America.&nbsp;
+And Raleigh did that too.&nbsp; We find him for years to come a
+part-adventurer in almost every attack on the Spaniards: we find
+him preaching war against them on these very grounds, and setting
+others to preach it also.&nbsp; Good old Hariot (Raleigh&rsquo;s
+mathematical tutor, whom he sent to Virginia) re-echoes his
+pupil&rsquo;s trumpet-blast.&nbsp; Hooker, in his epistle
+dedicatory of his Irish History, strikes the same note, and a
+right noble one it is.&nbsp; &lsquo;These Spaniards are trying to
+build up a world-tyranny by rapine and cruelty.&nbsp; You, sir,
+call on us to deliver the earth from them, by doing justly and
+loving mercy; and we will obey you!&rsquo; is the answer which
+Raleigh receives, as far as I can find, from every nobler-natured
+Englishman.</p>
+<p>It was an immense conception: a glorious one: it stood out so
+clear: there was no mistake about its being the absolutely right,
+wise, patriotic thing; and so feasible, too, if Raleigh could but
+find &lsquo;<i>six cents hommes qui savaient
+mourir</i>.&rsquo;&nbsp; But that was just what he could not
+find.&nbsp; He could draw round him, and did, by the spiritual
+magnetism of his genius, many a noble soul; but he could not
+organise them, as he seems to have tried to do, into a coherent
+body.&nbsp; The English spirit of independent action, never
+stronger than in that age, and most wisely encouraged, for other
+reasons, by good Queen Bess, was too strong for him.&nbsp; His
+pupils will &lsquo;fight on their own hook&rsquo; like so many
+Yankee rangers: quarrel with each other: grumble at him.&nbsp;
+For the truth is, he demands of them too high a standard of
+thought and purpose.&nbsp; He is often a whole heaven above them
+in the hugeness of his imagination, the nobleness of his motive;
+and Don Quixote can often find no better squire than Sancho
+Panza.&nbsp; Even glorious Sir Richard Grenvile makes a mistake:
+burns an Indian village because they steal a silver cup; throws
+back the colonisation of Virginia ten years with his over-strict
+notions of discipline and retributive justice; and Raleigh
+requites him for his offence by embalming him, his valour and his
+death, not in immortal verse, but in immortal prose.&nbsp; The
+&lsquo;True Relation of the Fight at the Azores&rsquo; gives the
+keynote of Raleigh&rsquo;s heart.&nbsp; If readers will not take
+that as the text on which his whole life is a commentary they may
+know a great deal about him, but him they will never know.</p>
+<p>The game becomes fiercer and fiercer.&nbsp; Blow and
+counterblow between the Spanish king, for the whole West-Indian
+commerce was a government job, and the merchant nobles of
+England.&nbsp; At last the Great Armada comes, and the Great
+Armada goes again.&nbsp; <i>Venit</i>, <i>vidit</i>,
+<i>fugit</i>, as the medals said of it.&nbsp; And to Walter
+Raleigh&rsquo;s counsel, by the testimony of all contemporaries,
+the mighty victory is to be principally attributed.&nbsp; Where
+all men did heroically, it were invidious to bestow on him alone
+a crown, <i>ob patriam servatam</i>.&nbsp; But henceforth,
+Elizabeth knows well that she has not been mistaken in her
+choice; and Raleigh is better loved than ever, heaped with fresh
+wealth and honours.&nbsp; And who deserves them better?</p>
+<p>The immense value of his services in the defence of England
+should excuse him from the complaint which one has been often
+inclined to bring against him,&mdash;Why, instead of sending
+others Westward Ho, did be not go himself?&nbsp; Surely he could
+have reconciled the jarring instruments with which he was
+working.&nbsp; He could have organised such a body of men as
+perhaps never went out before or since on the same errand.&nbsp;
+He could have done all that Cortez did, and more; and done it
+more justly and mercifully.</p>
+<p>True.&nbsp; And here seems (as far as little folk dare judge
+great folk) to have been Raleigh&rsquo;s mistake.&nbsp; He is too
+wide for real success.&nbsp; He has too many plans; he is fond of
+too many pursuits.&nbsp; The man who succeeds is generally the
+narrow mall; the man of one idea, who works at nothing but that;
+sees everything only through the light of that; sacrifices
+everything to that: the fanatic, in short.&nbsp; By fanatics,
+whether military, commercial, or religious, and not by
+&lsquo;liberal-minded men&rsquo; at all, has the world&rsquo;s
+work been done in all ages.&nbsp; Amid the modern cants, one of
+the most mistaken is the cant about the &lsquo;mission of
+genius,&rsquo; the &lsquo;mission of the poet.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Poets, we hear in some quarters, are the anointed kings of
+mankind&mdash;at least, so the little poets sing, each to his
+little fiddle.&nbsp; There is no greater mistake.&nbsp; It is the
+practical, prosaical fanatic who does the work; and the poet, if
+he tries to do it, is certain to put down his spade every five
+minutes, to look at the prospect, and pick flowers, and moralise
+on dead asses, till he ends a <i>N&eacute;ron malgr&eacute;
+lui-m&ecirc;me</i>, fiddling melodiously while Rome is
+burning.&nbsp; And perhaps this is the secret of Raleigh&rsquo;s
+failure.&nbsp; He is a fanatic, no doubt, a true knight-errant:
+but he is too much of a poet withal.&nbsp; The sense of beauty
+enthrals him at every step.&nbsp; Gloriana&rsquo;s fairy court,
+with its chivalries and its euphuisms, its masques and its
+tourneys, and he the most charming personage in it, are too
+charming for him&mdash;as they would have been for us, reader:
+and he cannot give them up and go about the one work.&nbsp; He
+justifies his double-mindedness to himself, no doubt, as he does
+to the world, by working wisely, indefatigably, and bravely: but
+still he has put his trust in princes, and in the children of
+men.&nbsp; His sin, as far as we can see, is not against man, but
+against God; one which we do not nowadays call a sin, but a
+weakness.&nbsp; Be it so.&nbsp; God punished him for it, swiftly
+and sharply; which I hold to be a sure sign that God also forgave
+him for it.</p>
+<p>So he stays at home, spends, sooner or later, &pound;40,000 on
+Virginia, writes charming court-poetry with Oxford, Buckhurst,
+and Paget, brings over Spenser from Ireland and introduces Colin
+Clout to Gloriana, who loves&mdash;as who would not have
+loved?&mdash;that most beautiful of faces and of souls; helps
+poor puritan Udall out of his scrape as far as he can; begs for
+Captain Spring, begs for many more, whose names are only known by
+being connected with some good deed of his.&nbsp; &lsquo;When,
+Sir Walter,&rsquo; asks Queen Bess, &lsquo;will you cease to be a
+beggar?&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;When your Majesty ceases to be a
+benefactor.&rsquo;&nbsp; Perhaps it is in these days that he set
+up his &lsquo;office of address&rsquo;&mdash;some sort of agency
+for discovering and relieving the wants of worthy men.&nbsp; So
+all seems to go well.&nbsp; If he has lost in Virginia, he has
+gained by Spanish prizes; his wine-patent is bringing him in a
+large revenue, and the heavens smile on him.&nbsp; Thou sayest,
+&lsquo;I am rich and increased in goods, and have need of
+nothing; and knowest not that thou art poor and miserable and
+blind and naked.&rsquo;&nbsp; Thou shalt learn it, then, and pay
+dearly for thy lesson.</p>
+<p>For, in the meanwhile, Raleigh falls into a very great sin,
+for which, as usual with his elect, God inflicts swift and
+instant punishment; on which, as usual, biographers talk much
+unwisdom.&nbsp; He seduces Miss Throgmorton, one of the maids of
+honour.&nbsp; Elizabeth is very wroth; and had she not good
+reason to be wroth?&nbsp; Is it either fair or reasonable to talk
+of her &lsquo;demanding a monopoly of love,&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;being incensed at the temerity of her favourite, in
+presuming to fall in love and marry without her
+consent?&rsquo;&nbsp; Away with such cant.&nbsp; The plain facts
+are: that a man nearly forty years old abuses his wonderful gifts
+of body and mind, to ruin a girl nearly twenty years younger than
+himself.&nbsp; What wonder if a virtuous woman&mdash;and Queen
+Elizabeth was virtuous&mdash;thought it a base deed, and punished
+it accordingly?&nbsp; There is no more to be discovered in the
+matter, save by the vulturine nose which smells carrion in every
+rose-bed.&nbsp; Raleigh has a great attempt on the Plate-fleets
+in hand; he hurries off from Chatham, and writes to young Cecil
+on the 10th of March, &lsquo;I mean not to come away, as some say
+I will, for fear of a marriage, and I know not what . . . For I
+protest before God, there is none on the face of the earth that I
+would be fastened unto.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>This famous passage is one of those over which the virtuosity
+of modern times, rejoicing in evil, has hung so fondly, as giving
+melancholy proof of the &lsquo;duplicity of Raleigh&rsquo;s
+character&rsquo;; as if a man who once in his life had told an
+untruth was proved by that fact to be a rogue from birth to
+death: while others have kindly given him the benefit of a doubt
+whether the letter were not written after a private marriage, and
+therefore Raleigh, being &lsquo;joined unto&rsquo; some one
+already, had a right to say that he did not wish to be joined to
+any one.&nbsp; But I do not concur in this doubt.&nbsp; Four
+months after, Sir Edward Stafford writes to Anthony Bacon,
+&lsquo;If you have anything to do with Sir W. R., or any love to
+make to Mistress Throgmorton, at the Tower to-morrow you may
+speak with them.&rsquo;&nbsp; This implies that no marriage had
+yet taken place.&nbsp; And surely, if there had been private
+marriage, two people who were about to be sent to the Tower for
+their folly would have made the marriage public at once, as the
+only possible self-justification.&nbsp; But it is a pity, in my
+opinion, that biographers, before pronouncing upon that supposed
+lie of Raleigh&rsquo;s, had not taken the trouble to find out
+what the words mean.&nbsp; In their virtuous haste to prove him a
+liar, they have overlooked the fact that the words, as they
+stand, are unintelligible, and the argument
+self-contradictory.&nbsp; He wants to prove, we suppose, that he
+does not go to sea for fear of being forced to marry Miss
+Throgmorton.&nbsp; It is, at least, an unexpected method of so
+doing in a shrewd man like Raleigh, to say that he wishes to
+marry no one at all.&nbsp; &lsquo;Don&rsquo;t think that I run
+away for fear of a marriage, for I do not wish to marry any one
+on the face of the earth,&rsquo; is a speech which may prove
+Raleigh to have been a fool, and we must understand it before we
+can say that it proves him a rogue.&nbsp; If we had received such
+a letter from a friend, we should have said at once, &lsquo;Why
+the man, in his hurry and confusion, has omitted <i>the</i> word;
+he must have meant to write, not &ldquo;There is none on the face
+of the earth that I would be fastened to,&rdquo; but &ldquo;There
+is none on the face of the earth that I would <i>rather</i> be
+fastened to,&rdquo;&lsquo; which would at once make sense and
+suit fact.&nbsp; For Raleigh not only married Miss Throgmorton
+forthwith, but made her the best of husbands.&nbsp; My
+conjectural emendation may go for what it is worth: but that the
+passage, as it stands in Murdin&rsquo;s State Papers (the MSS. I
+have not seen) is either misquoted, or mis-written by Raleigh
+himself, I cannot doubt.&nbsp; He was not one to think nonsense,
+even if he scribbled it.</p>
+<p>The Spanish raid turns out well.&nbsp; Raleigh overlooks
+Elizabeth&rsquo;s letters of recall till he finds out that the
+King of Spain has stopped the Plate-fleet for fear of his coming;
+and then returns, sending on Sir John Burrough to the Azores,
+where he takes the &lsquo;Great Carack,&rsquo; the largest prize
+(1600 tons) which had ever been brought into England.&nbsp; The
+details of that gallant fight stand in the pages of
+Hakluyt.&nbsp; It raised Raleigh once more to wealth, though not
+to favour.&nbsp; Shortly after he returns from the sea, he finds
+himself, where he deserves to be, in the Tower, where he does
+more than one thing which brought him no credit.&nbsp; How far we
+are justified in calling his quarrel with Sir George Carew, his
+keeper, for not letting him &lsquo;disguise himself, and get into
+a pair of oars to ease his mind but with a sight of the Queen, or
+his heart would break,&rsquo; hypocrisy, is a very different
+matter.&nbsp; Honest Arthur Gorges, a staunch friend of
+Raleigh&rsquo;s, tells the story laughingly and lovingly, as if
+he thought Raleigh sincere, but somewhat mad: and yet honest
+Gorges has a good right to say a bitter thing; for after having
+been &lsquo;ready to break with laughing at seeing them two brawl
+and scramble like madmen, and Sir George&rsquo;s new periwig torn
+off his crown,&rsquo; he sees &lsquo;the iron walking&rsquo; and
+daggers out, and playing the part of him who taketh a dog by the
+ears, &lsquo;purchased such a rap on the knuckles, that I wished
+both their pates broken, and so with much ado they staid their
+brawl to see my bloody fingers,&rsquo; and then set to work to
+abuse the hapless peacemaker.&nbsp; After which things Raleigh
+writes a letter to Cecil, which is still more offensive in the
+eyes of virtuous biographers&mdash;how &lsquo;his heart was never
+broken till this day, when he hears the Queen goes so far off,
+whom he followed with love and desire on so many journeys, and am
+now left behind in a dark prison all alone.&rsquo; . . . &lsquo;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,&rsquo; and so forth, in a style in which
+the vulturine nose must needs scent carrion, just because the
+roses are more fragrant than they should be in a world where all
+ought to be either vultures or carrion for their dinners.&nbsp;
+As for his despair, had he not good reason to be in
+despair?&nbsp; By his own sin he has hurled himself down the hill
+which he has so painfully climbed.&nbsp; He is in the
+Tower&mdash;surely no pleasant or hopeful place for any
+man.&nbsp; Elizabeth is exceedingly wroth with him; and what is
+worse, he deserves what he has got.&nbsp; His whole fortune is
+ventured in an expedition over which he has no control, which has
+been unsuccessful in its first object, and which may be
+altogether unsuccessful in that which it has undertaken as a
+<i>pis-aller</i>, and so leave him penniless.&nbsp; There want
+not, too, those who will trample on the fallen.&nbsp; The deputy
+has been cruelly distraining on his Irish tenants for a
+&lsquo;supposed debt of his to the Queen of &pound;400 for
+rent,&rsquo; which was indeed but fifty marks, and which was
+paid, and has carried off 500 milch kine from the poor settlers
+whom he has planted there, and forcibly thrust him out of
+possession of a castle.&nbsp; Moreover, the whole Irish estates
+are likely to come to ruin; for nothing prevails but rascality
+among the English soldiers, impotence among the governors, and
+rebellion among the natives.&nbsp; Three thousand Burkes are up
+in arms; his &lsquo;prophecy of this rebellion&rsquo; ten days
+ago was laughed at, and now has come true; and altogether, Walter
+Raleigh and all belonging to him is in as evil case as he ever
+was on earth.&nbsp; No wonder, poor fellow, if he behowls himself
+lustily, and not always wisely, to Cecil, and every one else who
+will listen to him.</p>
+<p>As for his fine speeches about Elizabeth, why forget the
+standing-point from which such speeches were made?&nbsp; Over and
+above his present ruin, it was (and ought to have been) an
+utterly horrible and unbearable thing to Raleigh, or any man, to
+have fallen into disgrace with Elizabeth by his own fault.&nbsp;
+He feels (and perhaps rightly) that he is as it were
+excommunicated from England, and the mission and the glory of
+England.&nbsp; Instead of being, as he was till now, one of a
+body of brave men working together in one great common cause, he
+has cut himself off from the congregation by his own selfish
+lust, and there he is left alone with his shame.&nbsp; We must
+try to realise to ourselves the way in which such men as Raleigh
+looked not only at Elizabeth, but at all the world.&nbsp; There
+was, in plain palpable fact, something about the Queen, her
+history, her policy, the times, the glorious part which England,
+and she as the incarnation of the then English spirit, were
+playing upon earth, which raised imaginative and heroical souls
+into a permanent exaltation&mdash;a &lsquo;fairyland,&rsquo; as
+they called it themselves, which seems to us fantastic, and would
+be fantastic in us, because we are not at their work, or in their
+days.&nbsp; There can be no doubt that a number of as noble men
+as ever stood together on the earth did worship that woman, fight
+for her, toil for her, risk all for her, with a pure chivalrous
+affection which has furnished one of the most beautiful pages in
+all the book of history.&nbsp; Blots there must needs have been,
+and inconsistencies, selfishnesses, follies; for they too were
+men of like passions with ourselves; but let us look at the fair
+vision as a whole, and thank God that such a thing has for once
+existed even imperfectly on this sinful earth, instead of playing
+the part of Ham and falling under his curse,&mdash;the penalty of
+slavishness, cowardice, loss of noble daring, which surely falls
+on any generation which is &lsquo;banausos,&rsquo; to use
+Aristotle&rsquo;s word; which rejoices in its forefathers&rsquo;
+shame, and, unable to believe in the nobleness of others, is
+unable to become noble itself.</p>
+<p>As for the &lsquo;Alexander and Diana&rsquo; affectations,
+they were the language of the time: and certainly this generation
+has no reason to find fault with them, or with a good deal more
+of the &lsquo;affectations&rsquo; and &lsquo;flattery&rsquo; of
+Elizabethan times, while it listens complacently night after
+night &lsquo;to honourable members&rsquo; complimenting not Queen
+Elizabeth, but Sir Jabesh Windbag, Fiddle, Faddle, Red-tape, and
+party with protestations of deepest respect and fullest
+confidence in the very speeches in which they bring accusations
+of every offence short of high treason&mdash;to be understood, of
+course, in a &lsquo;parliamentary sense,&rsquo; as Mr.
+Pickwick&rsquo;s were in a &lsquo;Pickwickian&rsquo; one.&nbsp;
+If a generation of Knoxes and Mortons, Burleighs and Raleighs,
+shall ever arise again, one wonders by what name they will call
+the parliamentary morality and parliamentary courtesy of a
+generation which has meted out such measure to their
+ancestors&rsquo; failings?</p>
+<p>&lsquo;But Queen Elizabeth was an old woman then.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+I thank the objector even for that &lsquo;then&rsquo;; for it is
+much nowadays to find any one who believes that Queen Elizabeth
+was ever young, or who does not talk of her as if she was born
+about seventy years of age covered with rouge and wrinkles.&nbsp;
+I will undertake to say that as to the beauty of this woman there
+is a greater mass of testimony, and from the very best judges
+too, than there is of the beauty of any personage in history; and
+yet it has become the fashion now to deny even that.&nbsp; The
+plain facts seem that she was very graceful, active, accomplished
+in all outward manners, of a perfect figure, and of that style of
+intellectual beauty, depending on expression, which attracted
+(and we trust always will attract) Britons far more than that
+merely sensuous loveliness in which no doubt Mary Stuart far
+surpassed her.&nbsp; And there seems little doubt that, like many
+Englishwomen, she retained her beauty to a very late period in
+life, not to mention that she was, in 1592, just at that age of
+rejuvenescence which makes many a woman more lovely at sixty than
+she has been since she was thirty-five.&nbsp; No doubt, too, she
+used every artificial means to preserve her famous complexion;
+and quite right she was.&nbsp; This beauty of hers had been a
+talent, as all beauty is, committed to her by God; it had been an
+important element in her great success; men had accepted it as
+what beauty of form and expression generally is, an outward and
+visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace; and while the
+inward was unchanged, what wonder if she tried to preserve the
+outward?&nbsp; If she was the same, why should she not try to
+look the same?&nbsp; And what blame to those who worshipped her,
+if, knowing that she was the same, they too should fancy that she
+looked the same, the Elizabeth of their youth, and should talk as
+if the fair flesh, as well as the fair spirit, was
+immortal?&nbsp; Does not every loving husband do so when he
+forgets the gray hair and the sunken cheek, and all the wastes of
+time, and sees the partner of many joys and sorrows not as she
+has become, but as she was, ay, and is to him, and will be to
+him, he trusts, through all eternity?&nbsp; There is no feeling
+in these Elizabethan worshippers which we have not seen,
+potential and crude, again and again in the best and noblest of
+young men whom we have met, till it was crushed in them by the
+luxury, effeminacy, and unbelief in chivalry, which are the sure
+accompaniment of a long peace, which war may burn up with
+beneficent fire.</p>
+<p>But we must hasten on now; for Raleigh is out of prison in
+September, and by the next spring in parliament speaking wisely
+and well, especially on his fixed idea, war with Spain, which he
+is rewarded for forthwith in Father Parson&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Andre&aelig; Philopatris Responsio&rsquo; by a charge of
+founding a school of Atheism for the corruption of young
+gentlemen; a charge which Lord Chief-Justice Popham, Protestant
+as he is, will find it useful one day to recollect.</p>
+<p>Elizabeth, however, now that Raleigh has married the fair
+Throgmorton and done wisely in other matters, restores him to
+favour.&nbsp; If he has sinned, he has suffered: but he is as
+useful as ever, now that his senses have returned to him; and he
+is making good speeches in parliament, instead of bad ones to
+weak maidens; so we find him once more in favour, and possessor
+of Sherborne Manor, where he builds and beautifies, with
+&lsquo;groves and gardens of much variety and great
+delight.&rsquo;&nbsp; And God, too, seems to have forgiven him;
+perhaps has forgiven; for there the fair Throgmorton brings him a
+noble boy.&nbsp; <i>Ut sis vitalis metuo puer</i>!</p>
+<p>Raleigh will quote David&rsquo;s example one day, not wisely
+or well.&nbsp; Does David&rsquo;s example ever cross him now, and
+those sad words,&mdash;&lsquo;The Lord hath put away thy sin, . .
+. nevertheless the child that is born unto thee shall
+die?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Let that be as it may, all is sunshine once more.&nbsp;
+Sherborne Manor, a rich share in the great carack, a beautiful
+wife, a child; what more does this man want to make him
+happy?&nbsp; Why should he not settle down upon his lees, like
+ninety-nine out of the hundred, or at least try a peaceful and
+easy path toward more &lsquo;praise and pudding?&rsquo;&nbsp; The
+world answers, or his biographers answer for him, that he needs
+to reinstate himself in his mistress&rsquo;s affection; which is
+true or not, according as we take it.&nbsp; If they mean thereby,
+as most seem to mean, that it was a mere selfish and ambitious
+scheme by which to wriggle into court favour once more&mdash;why,
+let them mean it: I shall only observe that the method which
+Raleigh took was a rather more dangerous and self-sacrificing one
+than courtiers are wont to take.&nbsp; But if it be meant that
+Walter Raleigh spoke somewhat thus with himself,&mdash;&lsquo;I
+have done a base and dirty deed, and have been punished for
+it.&nbsp; I have hurt the good name of a sweet woman who loves
+me, and whom I find to be a treasure; and God, instead of
+punishing me by taking her from me, has rendered me good for evil
+by giving her to me.&nbsp; I have justly offended a mistress whom
+I worship, and who, after having shown her just indignation, has
+returned me good for evil by giving me these fair lands of
+Sherborne, and only forbid me her presence till the scandal has
+passed away.&nbsp; She sees and rewards my good in spite of my
+evil; and I, too, know that I am better than I have seemed; that
+I am fit for nobler deeds than seducing maids of honour.&nbsp;
+How can I prove that?&nbsp; How can I redeem my lost name for
+patriotism and public daring?&nbsp; How can I win glory for my
+wife, seek that men shall forget her past shame in the thought,
+&ldquo;She is Walter Raleigh&rsquo;s wife?&rdquo;&nbsp; How can I
+show my mistress that I loved her all along, that I acknowledge
+her bounty, her mingled justice and mercy?&nbsp; How can I render
+to God for all the benefits which He has done unto me?&nbsp; How
+can I do a deed the like of which was never done in
+England?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>If all this had passed through Walter Raleigh&rsquo;s mind,
+what could we say of it, but that it was the natural and rational
+feeling of an honourable and right-hearted man, burning to rise
+to the level which he knew ought to be his, because he knew that
+he had fallen below it?&nbsp; And what right better way of
+testifying these feelings than to do what, as we shall see,
+Raleigh did?&nbsp; What right have we to impute to him lower
+motives than these, while we confess that these righteous and
+noble motives would have been natural and rational;&mdash;indeed,
+just what we flatter ourselves that we should have felt in his
+place?&nbsp; Of course, in his grand scheme, the thought came in,
+&lsquo;And I shall win to myself honour, and glory, and
+wealth,&rsquo;&mdash;of course.&nbsp; And pray, sir, does it not
+come in in your grand schemes; and yours; and yours?&nbsp; If you
+made a fortune to-morrow by some wisely and benevolently managed
+factory, would you forbid all speech of the said wisdom and
+benevolence, because you had intended that wisdom and benevolence
+should pay you a good percentage?&nbsp; Away with cant, and let
+him that is without sin among you cast the first stone.</p>
+<p>So Raleigh hits upon a noble project; a desperate one, true:
+but he will do it or die.&nbsp; He will leave pleasant Sherborne,
+and the bosom of the beautiful bride, and the first-born son, and
+all which to most makes life worth having, and which Raleigh
+enjoys more intensely than most men; for he is a poet, and a man
+of strong nervous passions withal.&nbsp; But,&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;I could not love thee, dear, so much,<br />
+Loved I not honour more.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>And he will go forth to endure heat, hunger, fever, danger of
+death in battle, danger of the Inquisition, rack, and stake, in
+search of El Dorado.&nbsp; What so strange in that?&nbsp; I have
+known half a dozen men who, in his case, and conscious of his
+powers, would have done the same from the same noble motive.</p>
+<p>He begins prudently; and sends a Devonshire man, Captain
+Whiddon&mdash;probably one of The Whiddons of beautiful
+Chagford&mdash;to spy out the Orinoco.&nbsp; He finds that the
+Spaniards are there already; that Berreo, who has attempted El
+Dorado from the westward, starting from New Granada and going
+down the rivers, is trying to settle on the Orinoco mouth; that
+he is hanging the poor natives, encouraging the Caribs to hunt
+them and sell them for slaves, imprisoning the caciques to extort
+their gold, torturing, ravishing, kidnapping, and conducting
+himself as was usual among Spaniards of those days.</p>
+<p>Raleigh&rsquo;s spirit is stirred within him.&nbsp; If
+&lsquo;Uncle Tom&rsquo;s Cabin,&rsquo; fiction as it is, once
+excited us, how must a far worse reality have excited Raleigh, as
+he remembered that these Spaniards are as yet triumphant in
+iniquity, and as he remembered, too, that these same men are the
+sworn foes of England, her liberty, her Bible, and her
+Queen?&nbsp; What a deed, to be beforehand with them for
+once!&nbsp; To dispossess them of one corner of that western
+world, where they have left no trace but blood and flame!&nbsp;
+He will go himself: he will find El Dorado and its golden
+Emperor; and instead of conquering, plundering, and murdering
+him, as Cortez did Montezuma, and Pizarro Atahuallpa, he will
+show him English strength; espouse his quarrel against the
+Spaniards; make him glad to become Queen Elizabeth&rsquo;s vassal
+tributary, perhaps leave him a bodyguard of English veterans,
+perhaps colonise his country, and so at once avenge and protect
+the oppressed Indians, and fill the Queen&rsquo;s treasury with
+the riches of a land equal, if not superior, to Peru and
+Mexico.</p>
+<p>Such is his dream; vague perhaps: but far less vague than
+those with which Cortez and Pizarro started, and succeeded.&nbsp;
+After a careful survey of the whole matter, I must give it as my
+deliberate opinion, that Raleigh was more reasonable in his
+attempt, and had more fair evidence of its feasibility, than
+either Cortez or Pizarro had for theirs.&nbsp; It is a bold
+assertion.&nbsp; If any reader doubts its truth, he cannot do
+better than to read the whole of the documents connected with the
+two successful, and the one unsuccessful, attempts at finding a
+golden kingdom.&nbsp; Let them read first Prescott&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Conquests of Mexico and Peru,&rsquo; and then
+Schomburgk&rsquo;s edition of Raleigh&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Guiana.&rsquo;&nbsp; They will at least confess, when they
+have finished, that truth is stranger than fiction.</p>
+<p>Of Raleigh&rsquo;s credulity in believing in El Dorado, much
+has been said.&nbsp; I am sorry to find even so wise a man as Sir
+Robert Schomburgk, after bearing good testimony to
+Raleigh&rsquo;s wonderful accuracy about all matters which he had
+an opportunity of observing, using this term of credulity.&nbsp;
+I must dare to differ on that point even with Sir Robert, and ask
+by what right the word is used?&nbsp; First, Raleigh says nothing
+about El Dorado (as every one is forced to confess) but what
+Spaniard on Spaniard had been saying for fifty years.&nbsp;
+Therefore the blame of credulity ought to rest with the
+Spaniards, from Philip von Huten, Orellano, and George of Spires,
+upward to Berreo.&nbsp; But it rests really with no one.&nbsp;
+For nothing, if we will examine the documents, is told of the
+riches of El Dorado which had not been found to be true, and seen
+by the eyes of men still living, in Peru and Mexico.&nbsp; Not
+one-fifth of America had been explored, and already two El
+Dorados had been found and conquered.&nbsp; What more rational
+than to suppose that there was a third, a fourth, a fifth, in the
+remaining four-fifths?&nbsp; The reports of El Dorado among the
+savages were just of the same kind as those by which Cortez and
+Pizarro hunted out Mexico and Peru, saving that they were far
+more widely spread, and confirmed by a succession of
+adventurers.&nbsp; I entreat readers to examine this matter in
+Raleigh, Schomburgk, Humboldt, and Condamine, and judge for
+themselves.&nbsp; As for Hume&rsquo;s accusations, I pass them by
+as equally silly and shameless, only saying, for the benefit of
+readers, that they have been refuted completely by every one who
+has written since Hume&rsquo;s days; and to those who are
+inclined to laugh at Raleigh for believing in Amazons and
+&lsquo;men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders&rsquo; I
+can only answer thus&mdash;</p>
+<p>About the Amazons, Raleigh told what he was told; what the
+Spaniards who went before him, and Condamine who came after him,
+were told.&nbsp; Humboldt thinks the story possibly founded on
+fact; and I must say that, after reviewing all that has been said
+thereon, it does seem to me the simplest solution of the matter
+just to believe it true; to believe that there was, about his
+time, or a little before, somewhere about the Upper Orinoco, a
+warlike community of women.&nbsp; Humboldt shows how likely such
+would be to spring up where women flee from their male tyrants
+into the forests.&nbsp; As for the fable which connected them
+with the Lake Manoa and the city of El Dorado, we can only
+answer, &lsquo;If not true there and then, it is true elsewhere
+now&rsquo;; for the Amazonian guards of the King of Dahomey at
+this moment, as all know, surpass in strangeness and in ferocity
+all that has been reported of the Orinocquan viragos, and thus
+prove once more that truth is stranger than fiction. <a
+name="citation138"></a><a href="#footnote138"
+class="citation">[138]</a></p>
+<p>Beside&mdash;and here I stand stubborn, regardless of gibes
+and sneers&mdash;it is not yet proven that there was not, in the
+sixteenth century, some rich and civilised kingdom like Peru or
+Mexico in the interior of South America.&nbsp; Sir Robert
+Schomburgk has disproved the existence of Lake Parima; but it
+will take a long time, and more explorers than one, to prove that
+there are no ruins of ancient cities, such as Stephens stumbled
+on in Yucatan, still buried in the depths of the forest.&nbsp;
+Fifty years of ruin would suffice to wrap them in a leafy veil
+which would hide them from every one who did not literally run
+against them.&nbsp; Tribes would die out, or change place, as the
+Atures and other great nations have done in those parts, and
+every traditional record of them perish gradually; for it is only
+gradually and lately that it has perished: while if it be asked,
+What has become of the people themselves? the answer is, that
+when any race (like most of the American races in the sixteenth
+century) is in a dying state, it hardly needs war to thin it
+down, and reduce the remnant to savagery.&nbsp; Greater nations
+than El Dorado was even supposed to be have vanished ere now, and
+left not a trace behind: and so may they.&nbsp; But enough of
+this.&nbsp; I leave the quarrel to that honest and patient warder
+of tourneys, Old Time, who will surely do right at last, and go
+on to the dogheaded worthies, without necks, and long hair
+hanging down behind, who, as a cacique told Raleigh, that
+&lsquo;they had of late years slain many hundreds of his
+father&rsquo;s people,&rsquo; and in whom even Humboldt was not
+always allowed, he says, to disbelieve (so much for Hume&rsquo;s
+scoff at Raleigh as a liar), one old cacique boasting to him that
+he had seen them with his own eyes.&nbsp; Humboldt&rsquo;s
+explanation is, that the Caribs, being the cleverest and
+strongest Indians, are also the most imaginative; and therefore,
+being fallen children of Adam, the greatest liars; and that they
+invented both El Dorado and the dog-heads out of pure
+wickedness.&nbsp; Be it so.&nbsp; But all lies crystallise round
+some nucleus of truth; and it really seems to me nothing very
+wonderful if the story should be on the whole true, and these
+worthies were in the habit of dressing themselves up, like
+foolish savages as they were, in the skins of the Aguara dog,
+with what not of stuffing, and tails, and so forth, in order to
+astonish the weak minds of the Caribs, just as the Red Indians
+dress up in their feasts as bears, wolves, and deer, with
+foxtails, false bustles of bison skin, and so forth.&nbsp; There
+are plenty of traces of such foolish attempts at playing
+&lsquo;bogy&rsquo; in the history of savages, even of our own
+Teutonic forefathers; and this I suspect to be the simple
+explanation of the whole mare&rsquo;s nest.&nbsp; As for Raleigh
+being a fool for believing it; the reasons he gives for believing
+it are very rational; the reasons Hume gives for calling him a
+fool rest merely on the story&rsquo;s being strange: on which
+grounds one might disbelieve most matters in heaven and earth,
+from one&rsquo;s own existence to what one sees in every drop of
+water under the microscope, yea, to the growth of every
+seed.&nbsp; The only sound proof that dog-headed men are
+impossible is to be found in comparative anatomy, a science of
+which Hume knew no more than Raleigh, and which for one marvel it
+has destroyed has revealed a hundred.&nbsp; I do not doubt that
+if Raleigh had seen and described a kangaroo, especially its all
+but miraculous process of gestation, Hume would have called that
+a lie also; but I will waste no more time in proving that no man
+is so credulous as the unbeliever&mdash;the man who has such
+mighty and world-embracing faith in himself that he makes his own
+little brain the measure of the universe.&nbsp; Let the dead bury
+their dead.</p>
+<p>Raleigh sails for Guiana.&nbsp; The details of his voyage
+should be read at length.&nbsp; Everywhere they show the eye of a
+poet as well as of a man of science.&nbsp; He sees enough to
+excite his hopes more wildly than ever; he goes hundreds of miles
+up the Orinoco in an open boat, suffering every misery, but
+keeping up the hearts of his men, who cry out, &lsquo;Let us go
+on, we care not how far.&rsquo;&nbsp; He makes friendship with
+the caciques, and enters into alliance with them on behalf of
+Queen Elizabeth against the Spaniards.&nbsp; Unable to pass the
+falls of the Caroli, and the rainy season drawing on, he returns,
+beloved and honoured by all the Indians, boasting that, during
+the whole time he was there, no woman was the worse for any man
+of his crew.&nbsp; Altogether, we know few episodes of history so
+noble, righteous, and merciful as this Guiana voyage.&nbsp; But
+he has not forgotten the Spaniards.&nbsp; At Trinidad he payed
+his ships with the asphalt of the famous Pitch-lake, and
+stood&mdash;and with what awe such a man must have
+stood&mdash;beneath the noble forest of Moriche fan-palms on its
+brink.&nbsp; He then attacked, not, by his own confession,
+without something too like treachery, the new town of San
+Jos&eacute;, takes Berreo prisoner, and delivers from captivity
+five caciques, whom Berreo kept bound in one chain,
+&lsquo;basting their bodies with burning bacon&rsquo;&mdash;an
+old trick of the Conquistadores&mdash;to make them discover their
+gold.&nbsp; He tells them that he was &lsquo;the servant of a
+Queen who was the greatest cacique of the north, and a virgin;
+who had more caciqui under her than there were trees on that
+island; that she was an enemy of the Castellani (Spaniards) in
+behalf of their tyranny and oppression, and that she delivered
+all such nations about her as were by them oppressed, and having
+freed all the coast of the northern world from their servitude,
+had sent me to free them also, and withal to defend the country
+of Guiana from their invasion and conquest.&rsquo;&nbsp; After
+which perfectly true and rational speech, he subjoins (as we
+think equally honestly and rationally), &lsquo;I showed them her
+Majesty&rsquo;s picture, which they so admired and honoured, as
+it had been easy to have brought them idolaters
+thereof.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>This is one of the stock charges against Raleigh, at which all
+biographers (except quiet, sensible Oldys, who, dull as he is, is
+far more fair and rational than most of his successors) break
+into virtuous shrieks of &lsquo;flattery,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;meanness,&rsquo; &lsquo;adulation,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;courtiership,&rsquo; and so forth.&nbsp; One biographer is
+of opinion that the Indians would have admired far more the
+picture of a &lsquo;red monkey.&rsquo;&nbsp; Sir Robert
+Schomburgk, unfortunately for the red monkey theory, though he
+quite agrees that Raleigh&rsquo;s flattery was very shocking,
+says that from what he knows&mdash;and no man knows more&mdash;of
+Indian taste, they would have far preferred to the portrait which
+Raleigh showed them&mdash;not a red monkey, but&mdash;such a
+picture as that at Hampton Court, in which Elizabeth is
+represented in a fantastic court dress.&nbsp; Raleigh, it seems,
+must be made out a rogue at all risks, though by the most
+opposite charges.&nbsp; The monkey theory is answered, however,
+by Sir Robert; and Sir Robert is answered, I think, by the plain
+fact that, of course, Raleigh&rsquo;s portrait was exactly such a
+one as Sir Robert says they would have admired; a picture
+probably in a tawdry frame, representing Queen Bess, just as
+queens were always painted then, bedizened with &lsquo;browches,
+pearls, and owches,&rsquo; satin and ruff, and probably with
+crown on head and sceptre in hand, made up, as likely as not,
+expressly for the purpose for which it was used.&nbsp; In the
+name of all simplicity and honesty, I ask, why is Raleigh to be
+accused of saying that the Indians admired Queen
+Elizabeth&rsquo;s beauty when he never even hints at it?&nbsp;
+And why do all commentators deliberately forget the preceding
+paragraph&mdash;Raleigh&rsquo;s proclamation to the Indians, and
+the circumstances under which it was spoken?&nbsp; The Indians
+are being murdered, ravished, sold for slaves, basted with
+burning fat; and grand white men come like avenging angels, and
+in one day sweep their tyrants out of the land, restore them to
+liberty and life, and say to them, &lsquo;A great Queen far
+across the seas has sent us to do this.&nbsp; Thousands of miles
+away she has heard of your misery and taken pity on you; and if
+you will be faithful to her she will love you, and deal justly
+with you, and protect you against these Spaniards who are
+devouring you as they have devoured all the Indians round you;
+and for a token of it&mdash;a sign that we tell you truth, and
+that there is really such a great Queen, who is the
+Indian&rsquo;s friend&mdash;here is the picture of
+her.&rsquo;&nbsp; What wonder if the poor idolatrous creatures
+had fallen down and worshipped the picture&mdash;just as millions
+do that of the Virgin Mary without a thousandth part as sound and
+practical reason&mdash;as that of a divine, all-knowing,
+all-merciful deliverer?&nbsp; As for its being the picture of a
+beautiful woman or not, they would never think of that.&nbsp; The
+fair complexion and golden hair would be a sign to them that she
+belonged to the mighty white people, even if there were no
+bedizenment of jewels and crowns over and above; and that would
+be enough for them.&nbsp; When will biographers learn to do
+common justice to their fellow-men by exerting now and then some
+small amount of dramatic imagination, just sufficient to put
+themselves for a moment in the place of those of whom they
+write?</p>
+<p>So ends his voyage, in which, he says, &lsquo;from myself I
+have deserved no thanks, for I am returned a beggar and
+withered.&rsquo;&nbsp; The only thing which, as far as I can
+find, he brought home was some of the delicious scaly peaches of
+the Moriche palm&mdash;the <i>Arbol de Vida</i>, or tree of life,
+which gives sustenance and all else needful to whole tribes of
+Indians.&nbsp; &lsquo;But I might have bettered my poor estate if
+I had not only respected her Majesty&rsquo;s future honour and
+riches.&nbsp; It became not the former fortune in which I once
+lived to go journeys of piccory&rsquo; (pillage); &lsquo;and it
+had sorted ill with the offices of honour which, by her
+Majesty&rsquo;s grace, I hold this day in England, to run from
+cape to cape and place to place for the pillage of ordinary
+prizes.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>So speaks one whom it has been the fashion to consider as
+little better than a pirate, and that, too, in days when the
+noblest blood in England thought no shame (as indeed it was no
+shame) to enrich themselves with Spanish gold.&nbsp; But so it is
+throughout this man&rsquo;s life.&nbsp; If there be a nobler word
+than usual to be spoken, or a more wise word either, if there be
+a more chivalrous deed to be done, or a more prudent deed either,
+that word and that deed are pretty sure to be Walter
+Raleigh&rsquo;s.</p>
+<p>But the blatant beast has been busy at home; and, in spite of
+Chapman&rsquo;s heroical verses, he meets with little but cold
+looks.&nbsp; Never mind.&nbsp; If the world will not help to do
+the deed, he will do it by himself; and no time must be lost, for
+the Spaniards on their part will lose none.&nbsp; So, after six
+months, the faithful Keymis sails again, again helped by the Lord
+High Admiral and Sir Robert Cecil.&nbsp; It is a hard race for
+one private man against the whole power and wealth of Spain; and
+the Spaniard has been beforehand with them, and re-occupied the
+country.&nbsp; They have fortified themselves at the mouth of the
+Caroli, so it is impossible to get to the gold mines; they are
+enslaving the wretched Indians, carrying off their women,
+intending to transplant some tribes and to expel others, and
+arming cannibal tribes against the inhabitants.&nbsp; All is
+misery and rapine; the scattered remnant comes asking piteously
+why Raleigh does not come over to deliver them?&nbsp; Have the
+Spaniards slain him, too?&nbsp; Keymis comforts them as he best
+can; hears of more gold mines; and gets back safe, a little to
+his own astonishment; for eight-and-twenty ships of war have been
+sent to Trinidad to guard the entrance to El Dorado, not surely,
+as Keymis well says, &lsquo;to keep us only from
+tobacco.&rsquo;&nbsp; A colony of 500 persons is expected from
+Spain.&nbsp; The Spaniard is well aware of the richness of the
+prize, says Keymis, who all through shows himself a worthy pupil
+of his master.&nbsp; A careful, observant man he seems to have
+been, trained by that great example to overlook no fact, even the
+smallest.&nbsp; He brings home lists of rivers, towns, caciques,
+poison-herbs, words, what not; he has fresh news of gold,
+spleen-stones, kidney-stones, and some fresh specimens; but be
+that as it may, he, &lsquo;without going as far as his eyes can
+warrant, can promise Brazil-wood, honey, cotton, balsamum, and
+drugs, to defray charges.&rsquo;&nbsp; He would fain copy
+Raleigh&rsquo;s style, too, and &lsquo;whence his lamp had oil,
+borrow light also,&rsquo; &lsquo;seasoning his unsavoury
+speech&rsquo; with some of the &lsquo;leaven of Raleigh&rsquo;s
+discourse.&rsquo;&nbsp; Which, indeed, he does even to little
+pedantries and attempts at classicality; and after professing
+that himself and the remnant of his few years he hath bequeathed
+wholly to Raleana, and his thoughts live only in that action, he
+rises into something like grandeur when he begins to speak of
+that ever-fertile subject, the Spanish cruelties to the Indians;
+&lsquo;Doth not the cry of the poor succourless ascend unto the
+heavens?&nbsp; Hath God forgotten to be gracious to the work of
+his own hands.&nbsp; Or shall not his judgments in a day of
+visitation by the ministry of his chosen servant come upon these
+bloodthirsty butchers, like rain into a fleece of
+wool?&rsquo;&nbsp; Poor Keymis!&nbsp; To us he is by no means the
+least beautiful figure in this romance; a faithful, diligent,
+loving man, unable, as the event proved, to do great deeds by
+himself, but inspired with a great idea by contact with a
+mightier spirit, to whom he clings through evil report, and
+poverty, and prison, careless of self to the last, and ends
+tragically, &lsquo;faithful unto death&rsquo; in the most awful
+sense.</p>
+<p>But here remark two things: first, that Cecil believes in
+Raleigh&rsquo;s Guiana scheme; next, that the occupation of
+Orinoco by the Spaniards, which Raleigh is accused of having
+concealed from James in 1617, has been ever since 1595 matter of
+the most public notoriety.</p>
+<p>Raleigh has not been idle in the meanwhile.&nbsp; It has been
+found necessary after all to take the counsel which he gave in
+vain in 1588, to burn the Spanish fleet in harbour; and the
+heroes are gone down to Cadiz fight, and in one day of thunder
+storm the Sevastopol of Spain.&nbsp; Here, as usual, we find
+Raleigh, though in an inferior command, leading the whole by
+virtue of superior wisdom.&nbsp; When the good Lord Admiral will
+needs be cautious, and land the soldiers first, it is Raleigh who
+persuades him to force his way into the harbour, to the joy of
+all captains.&nbsp; When hotheaded Essex, casting his hat into
+the sea for joy, shouts &lsquo;<i>Intramos</i>,&rsquo; and will
+in at once, Raleigh&rsquo;s time for caution comes, and he
+persuades them to wait till the next morning, and arrange the
+order of attack.&nbsp; That, too, Raleigh has to do, and moreover
+to lead it; and lead it he does.&nbsp; Under the forts are
+seventeen galleys; the channel is &lsquo;scoured&rsquo; with
+cannon: but on holds Raleigh&rsquo;s &lsquo;Warspite,&rsquo; far
+ahead of the rest, through the thickest of the fire, answering
+forts and galleys &lsquo;with a blur of the trumpet to each
+piece, disdaining to shoot at those esteemed dreadful
+monsters.&rsquo;&nbsp; For there is a nobler enemy ahead.&nbsp;
+Right in front lie the galleons; and among them the
+&lsquo;Philip&rsquo; and the &lsquo;Andrew,&rsquo; two of those
+who boarded the &lsquo;Revenge.&rsquo;&nbsp; This day there shall
+be a reckoning for the blood of his old friend; he is
+&lsquo;resolved to be revenged for the
+&ldquo;Revenge,&rdquo;&rsquo; Sir Richard Grenvile&rsquo;s fatal
+ship, or second her with his own life&rsquo;; and well he keeps
+his vow.&nbsp; Three hours pass of desperate valour, during
+which, so narrow is the passage, only seven English ships,
+thrusting past each other, all but quarrelling in their noble
+rivalry, engage the whole Spanish fleet of fifty-seven sail, and
+destroy it utterly.&nbsp; The &lsquo;Philip&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;Thomas&rsquo; burn themselves despairing.&nbsp; The
+English boats save the &lsquo;Andrew&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;Matthew.&rsquo;&nbsp; One passes over the hideous
+record.&nbsp; &lsquo;If any man,&rsquo; says Raleigh, &lsquo;had
+a desire to see hell itself, it was there most lively
+figured.&rsquo;&nbsp; Keymis&rsquo;s prayer is answered in part,
+even while he writes it; and the cry of the Indians has not
+ascended in vain before the throne of God!</p>
+<p>The soldiers are landed; the city stormed and sacked, not
+without mercies and courtesies, though, to women and unarmed
+folk, which win the hearts of the vanquished, and live till this
+day in well-known ballads.&nbsp; The Flemings begin a
+&lsquo;merciless slaughter.&rsquo;&nbsp; Raleigh and the Lord
+Admiral beat them off.&nbsp; Raleigh is carried on shore with a
+splinter wound in the leg, which lames him for life: but returns
+on board in an hour in agony; for there is no admiral left to
+order the fleet, and all are run headlong to the sack.&nbsp; In
+vain he attempts to get together sailors the following morning,
+and attack the Indian fleet in Porto Real Roads; within
+twenty-four hours it is burnt by the Spaniards themselves; and
+all Raleigh wins is no booty, a lame leg, and the honour of
+having been the real author of a victory even more glorious than
+that of 1588.</p>
+<p>So he returns; having written to Cecil the highest praises of
+Essex, whom he treats with all courtesy and fairness; which those
+who will may call cunning: we have as good a right to say that he
+was returning good for evil.&nbsp; There were noble qualities in
+Essex.&nbsp; All the world gave him credit for them, and far more
+than he deserved; why should not Raleigh have been just to him;
+even have conceived, like the rest of the world, high hopes of
+him, till he himself destroyed these hopes?&nbsp; For now storms
+are rising fast.&nbsp; On their return Cecil is in power.&nbsp;
+He has been made Secretary of State instead of Bodley,
+Essex&rsquo;s pet, and the spoilt child begins to sulk.&nbsp; On
+which matter, I am sorry to say, historians talk much unwisdom,
+about Essex&rsquo;s being too &lsquo;open and generous, etc., for
+a courtier,&rsquo; and &lsquo;presuming on his mistress&rsquo;s
+passion for him&rsquo;; and representing Elizabeth as desiring to
+be thought beautiful, and &lsquo;affecting at sixty the sighs,
+loves, tears, and tastes of a girl of sixteen,&rsquo; and so
+forth.&nbsp; It is really time to get rid of some of this fulsome
+talk, culled from such triflers as Osborne, if not from the
+darker and fouler sources of Parsons and the Jesuit slanderers,
+which I meet with a flat denial.&nbsp; There is simply no
+proof.&nbsp; She in love with Essex or Cecil?&nbsp; Yes, as a
+mother with a son.&nbsp; Were they not the children of her
+dearest and most faithful servants, men who had lived heroic
+lives for her sake?&nbsp; What wonder if she fancied that she saw
+the fathers in the sons?&nbsp; They had been trained under her
+eye.&nbsp; What wonder if she fancied that they could work as
+their fathers worked before them?&nbsp; And what shame if her
+childless heart yearned over them with unspeakable affection, and
+longed in her old age to lay her hands upon the shoulders of
+those two young men, and say to England, &lsquo;Behold the
+children which God, and not the flesh, has given me!&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Most strange it is, too, that women, who ought at least to know a
+woman&rsquo;s heart, have been especially forward in publishing
+these scandals, and sullying their pages by retailing pruriences
+against such a one as Queen Elizabeth.</p>
+<p>But to return.&nbsp; Raleigh attaches himself to Cecil; and he
+has good reason.&nbsp; Cecil is the cleverest man in England,
+saving himself.&nbsp; He has trusted and helped him, too, in two
+Guiana voyages; so the connection is one of gratitude as well as
+prudence.&nbsp; We know not whether he helped him in the third
+Guiana voyage in the same year, under Captain Berry, a north
+Devon man, from Grenvile&rsquo;s country; who found a
+&lsquo;mighty folk,&rsquo; who were &lsquo;something pleasant,
+having drunk much that day,&rsquo; and carried bows with golden
+handles: but failed in finding the Lake Parima, and so came
+home.</p>
+<p>Raleigh&rsquo;s first use of his friendship with Cecil is to
+reconcile him, to the astonishment of the world, with Essex,
+alleging how much good may grow by it; for now &lsquo;the
+Queen&rsquo;s continual unquietness will grow to
+contentment.&rsquo;&nbsp; That, too, those who will may call
+policy.&nbsp; We have as good a right to call it the act of a
+wise and faithful subject, and to say, &lsquo;Blessed are the
+peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of
+God.&rsquo;&nbsp; He has his reward for it in full restoration to
+the Queen&rsquo;s favour; he deserves it.&nbsp; He proves himself
+once more worthy of power, and it is given to him.&nbsp; Then
+there is to be a second great expedition: but this time its aim
+is the Azores.&nbsp; Philip, only maddened by the loss at Cadiz,
+is preparing a third armament for the invasion of England and
+Ireland, and it is said to lie at the islands to protect the
+Indian fleet.&nbsp; Raleigh has the victualling of the
+land-forces, and, like everything else he takes in hand,
+&lsquo;it is very well done.&rsquo;&nbsp; Lord Howard declines
+the chief command, and it is given to Essex.&nbsp; Raleigh is to
+be rear-admiral.</p>
+<p>By the time they reach the Azores, Essex has got up a foolish
+quarrel against Raleigh for disrespect in having stayed behind to
+bring up some stragglers.&nbsp; But when no Armada is to be found
+at the Azores, Essex has after all to ask Raleigh what he shall
+do next.&nbsp; Conquer the Azores, says Raleigh, and the thing is
+agreed on.&nbsp; Raleigh and Essex are to attack Fayal.&nbsp;
+Essex sails away before Raleigh has watered.&nbsp; Raleigh
+follows as fast as he can, and at Fayal finds no Essex.&nbsp; He
+must water there, then and at once.&nbsp; His own veterans want
+him to attack forthwith, for the Spaniards are fortifying fast:
+but he will wait for Essex.&nbsp; Still no Essex comes.&nbsp;
+Raleigh attempts to water, is defied, finds himself &lsquo;in for
+it,&rsquo; and takes the island out of hand in the most masterly
+fashion, to the infuriation of Essex.&nbsp; Good Lord Howard
+patches up the matter, and the hot-headed coxcomb is once more
+pacified.&nbsp; They go on to Graciosa, where Essex&rsquo;s
+weakness of will again comes out, and he does not take the
+island.&nbsp; Three rich Caracks, however, are picked up.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Though we shall be little the better for them,&rsquo; says
+Raleigh privately to Sir Arthur Gorges, his faithful captain,
+&lsquo;yet I am heartily glad for our General&rsquo;s sake;
+because they will in great measure give content to her Majesty,
+so that there may be no repining against this poor Lord for the
+expense of the voyage.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Raleigh begins to see that Essex is only to be pitied; that
+the voyage is not over likely to end well: but he takes it, in
+spite of ill-usage, as a kind-hearted man should.&nbsp; Again
+Essex makes a fool of himself.&nbsp; They are to steer one way in
+order to intercept the Plate-fleet.&nbsp; Essex having agreed to
+the course pointed out, alters his course on a fancy; then alters
+it a second time, though the hapless Monson, with the whole
+Plate-fleet in sight, is hanging out lights, firing guns, and
+shrieking vainly for the General, who is gone on a new course, in
+which he might have caught the fleet after all, in spite of his
+two mistakes, but that he chooses to go a roundabout way instead
+of a short one; and away goes the whole fleet, save one Carack,
+which runs itself on shore and burns, and the game is played out
+and lost.</p>
+<p>All want Essex to go home, as the season is getting late: but
+the wilful and weak man will linger still, and while he is
+hovering to the south, Philip&rsquo;s armament has sailed from
+the Groyne, on the undefended shores of England, and only
+God&rsquo;s hand saves us from the effects of Essex&rsquo;s
+folly.&nbsp; A third time the Armadas of Spain are overwhelmed by
+the avenging tempests, and Essex returns to disgrace, having
+proved himself at once intemperate and incapable.&nbsp; Even in
+coming home there is confusion, and Essex is all but lost on the
+Bishop and Clerks, by Scilly, in spite of the warnings of
+Raleigh&rsquo;s sailing-master, &lsquo;Old Broadbent,&rsquo; who
+is so exasperated at the general stupidity that he wants Raleigh
+to leave Essex and his squadron to get out of their own scrape as
+they can.</p>
+<p>Essex goes off to sulk at Wanstead; but Vere excuses him, and
+in a few days he comes back, and will needs fight good Lord
+Howard for being made Earl of Nottingham for his services against
+the Armada and at Cadiz.&nbsp; Baulked of this, he begins laying
+the blame of the failure at the Azores on Raleigh.&nbsp; Let the
+spoilt naughty boy take care; even that &lsquo;admirable
+temper&rsquo; for which Raleigh is famed may be worn out at
+last.</p>
+<p>These years are Raleigh&rsquo;s noon&mdash;stormy enough at
+best, yet brilliant.&nbsp; There is a pomp about him, outward and
+inward, which is terrible to others, dangerous to himself.&nbsp;
+One has gorgeous glimpses of that grand Durham House of his, with
+its carvings and its antique marbles, armorial escutcheons,
+&lsquo;beds with green silk hangings and legs like dolphins,
+overlaid with gold&rsquo;: and the man himself, tall, beautiful,
+and graceful, perfect alike in body and in mind, walking to and
+fro, his beautiful wife upon his arm, his noble boy beside his
+knee, in his &lsquo;white satin doublet, embroidered with pearls,
+and a great chain of pearls about his neck,&rsquo; lording it
+among the lords with an &lsquo;awfulness and ascendency above
+other mortals,&rsquo; for which men say that &lsquo;his
+n&aelig;ve is, that he is damnable proud&rsquo;; and no
+wonder.&nbsp; The reduced squire&rsquo;s younger son has gone
+forth to conquer the world; and he fancies, poor fool, that he
+has conquered it, just as it really has conquered him; and he
+will stand now on his blood and his pedigree (no bad one either),
+and all the more stiffly because puppies like Lord Oxford, who
+instead of making their fortunes have squandered them, call him
+&lsquo;jack and upstart,&rsquo; and make impertinent faces while
+the Queen is playing the virginals, about &lsquo;how when jacks
+go up, heads go down.&rsquo;&nbsp; Proud?&nbsp; No wonder if the
+man be proud!&nbsp; &lsquo;Is not this great Babylon, which I
+have built?&rsquo;&nbsp; And yet all the while he has the most
+affecting consciousness that all this is not God&rsquo;s will,
+but the will of the flesh; that the house of fame is not the
+house of God; that its floor is not the rock of ages, but the sea
+of glass mingled with fire, which may crack beneath him any
+moment, and let the nether flame burst up.&nbsp; He knows that he
+is living in a splendid lie; that he is not what God meant him to
+be.&nbsp; He longs to flee away and be at peace.&nbsp; It is to
+this period, not to his death-hour, that &lsquo;The Lie&rsquo;
+belongs; <a name="citation155"></a><a href="#footnote155"
+class="citation">[155]</a> saddest of poems, with its melodious
+contempt and life-weariness.&nbsp; All is a lie&mdash;court,
+church, statesmen, courtiers, wit and science, town and country,
+all are shams; the days are evil; the canker is at the root of
+all things; the old heroes are dying one by one; the Elizabethan
+age is rotting down, as all human things do, and nothing is left
+but to bewail with Spenser &lsquo;The Ruins of Time&rsquo;; the
+glory and virtue which have been&mdash;the greater glory and
+virtue which might be even now, if men would but arise and
+repent, and work righteousness, as their fathers did before
+them.&nbsp; But no.&nbsp; Even to such a world as this he will
+cling, and flaunt it about as captain of the guard in the
+Queen&rsquo;s progresses and masques and pageants, with
+sword-belt studded with diamonds and rubies, or at tournaments,
+in armour of solid silver, and a gallant train with orange-tawny
+feathers, provoking Essex to bring in a far larger train in the
+same colours, and swallow up Raleigh&rsquo;s pomp in his own, so
+achieving that famous &lsquo;feather triumph&rsquo; by which he
+gains little but bad blood and a good jest.&nbsp; For Essex is no
+better tilter than he is general; and having &lsquo;run very
+ill&rsquo; in his orange-tawny, comes next day in green, and runs
+still worse, and yet is seen to be the same cavalier; whereon a
+spectator shrewdly observes that he changed his colours
+&lsquo;that it may be reported that there was one in green who
+ran worse than he in orange-tawny.&rsquo;&nbsp; But enough of
+these toys, while God&rsquo;s handwriting is upon the wall above
+all heads.</p>
+<p>Raleigh knows that the handwriting is there.&nbsp; The spirit
+which drove him forth to Virginia and Guiana is fallen asleep:
+but he longs for Sherborne and quiet country life, and escapes
+thither during Essex&rsquo;s imprisonment, taking Cecil&rsquo;s
+son with him, and writes as only he can write about the
+shepherd&rsquo;s peaceful joys, contrasted with
+&lsquo;courts&rsquo; and &lsquo;masques&rsquo; and &lsquo;proud
+towers&rsquo;&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&lsquo;Here are no false
+entrapping baits<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Too hasty for too hasty fates,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Unless it be<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The fond credulity<br />
+Of silly fish, that worlding who still look<br />
+Upon the bait, but never on the hook;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Nor envy, unless among<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The birds, for prize of their sweet song.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&lsquo;Go! let the diving negro seek<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; For pearls hid in some forlorn creek,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; We all pearls scorn,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Save what the dewy morn<br />
+Congeals upon some little spire of grass,<br />
+Which careless shepherds beat down as they pass<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; And gold ne&rsquo;er here
+appears<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Save what the yellow Ceres bears.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Tragic enough are the after scenes of Raleigh&rsquo;s life:
+but most tragic of all are these scenes of vain-glory, in which
+he sees the better part, and yet chooses the worse, and pours out
+his self-discontent in song which proves the fount of delicacy
+and beauty which lies pure and bright beneath the gaudy
+artificial crust.&nbsp; What might not this man have been!&nbsp;
+And he knows that too.&nbsp; The stately rooms of Durham House
+pall on him, and he delights to hide up in his little study among
+his books and his chemical experiments, and smoke his silver
+pipe, and look out on the clear Thames and the green Surrey
+hills, and dream about Guiana and the Tropics; or to sit in the
+society of antiquaries with Selden and Cotton, Camden and Stow;
+or in his own Mermaid Club, with Ben Jonson, Fletcher, Beaumont,
+and at last with Shakspeare&rsquo;s self to hear and utter</p>
+<blockquote><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&lsquo;Words that have been<br
+/>
+So nimble, and so full of subtle flame,<br />
+As if that every one from whom they came<br />
+Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Anything to forget the handwriting on the wall, which will not
+be forgotten.&nbsp; But he will do all the good which he can
+meanwhile, nevertheless.&nbsp; He will serve God and
+Mammon.&nbsp; So complete a man will surely be able to do
+both.&nbsp; Unfortunately the thing is impossible, as he
+discovers too late: but he certainly goes as near success in the
+attempt as ever man did.&nbsp; Everywhere we find him doing
+justly and loving mercy.&nbsp; Wherever this man steps he leaves
+his footprint ineffaceably in deeds of benevolence.&nbsp; For one
+year only, it seems, he is governor of Jersey; yet to this day,
+it is said, the islanders honour his name, only second to that of
+Duke Rollo, as their great benefactor, the founder of their
+Newfoundland trade.&nbsp; In the west country he is &lsquo;as a
+king,&rsquo; &lsquo;with ears and mouth always open to hear and
+deliver their grievances, feet and hands ready to go and work
+their redress.&rsquo;&nbsp; The tin-merchants have become usurers
+&lsquo;of fifty in the hundred.&rsquo;&nbsp; Raleigh works till
+he has put down their &lsquo;abominable and cut-throat
+dealing.&rsquo;&nbsp; There is a burdensome west-country tax on
+curing fish; Raleigh works till it is revoked.&nbsp; In
+Parliament he is busy with liberal measures, always before his
+generation.&nbsp; He puts down a foolish act for compulsory
+sowing of hemp in a speech on the freedom of labour worthy of the
+nineteenth century.&nbsp; He argues against raising the subsidy
+from the three-pound men&mdash;&lsquo;Call you this, Mr. Francis
+Bacon, <i>par jugum</i>, when a poor man pays as much as a
+rich?&rsquo;&nbsp; He is equally rational and spirited against
+the exportation of ordnance to the enemy; and when the question
+of abolishing monopolies is mooted he has his wise word.&nbsp; He
+too is a monopolist of tin, as Lord Warden of the
+Stannaries.&nbsp; But he has so wrought as to bring good out of
+evil; for &lsquo;before the granting of his patent, let the price
+of tin be never so high, the poor workman never had but two
+shillings a week&rsquo;; yet now, so has he extended and
+organised the tin-works, &lsquo;that any man who will can find
+work, be tin at what price soever, and have four shillings a week
+truly paid . . . Yet if all others may be repealed, I will give
+my consent as freely to the cancelling of this as any member of
+this house.&rsquo;&nbsp; Most of the monopolies were repealed:
+but we do not find that Raleigh&rsquo;s was among them.&nbsp; Why
+should it be if its issue was more tin, full work, and double
+wages?&nbsp; In all things this man approves himself faithful in
+his generation.&nbsp; His sins are not against man, but against
+God; such as the world thinks no sins, and hates them, not from
+morality, but from envy.</p>
+<p>In the meanwhile, the evil which, so Spenser had prophesied,
+only waited Raleigh&rsquo;s death breaks out in his absence, and
+Ireland is all aflame with Tyrone&rsquo;s rebellion.&nbsp;
+Raleigh is sent for.&nbsp; He will not accept the post of Lord
+Deputy and go to put it down.&nbsp; Perhaps he does not expect
+fair play as long as Essex is at home.&nbsp; Perhaps he knows too
+much of the &lsquo;common weal, or rather common woe,&rsquo; and
+thinks that what is crooked cannot be made straight.&nbsp;
+Perhaps he is afraid to lose by absence his ground at
+court.&nbsp; Would that he had gone, for Ireland&rsquo;s sake and
+his own.&nbsp; However, it must not be.&nbsp; Ormond is recalled,
+and Knollys shall be sent: but Essex will have none but Sir
+George Carew; whom, Naunton says, he hates, and wishes to oust
+from court.&nbsp; He and Elizabeth argue it out.&nbsp; He turns
+his back on her, and she gives him&mdash;or does not give him,
+for one has found so many of these racy anecdotes vanish on
+inspection into simple wind, that one believes none of
+them&mdash;a box on the ear; which if she did, she did the most
+wise, just, and practical thing which she could do with such a
+puppy.&nbsp; He claps his hand&mdash;or does not&mdash;to his
+sword, &lsquo;He would not have taken it from Henry VIII.,&rsquo;
+and is turned out forthwith.&nbsp; In vain Egerton, the Lord
+Keeper, tries to bring him to reason.&nbsp; He storms
+insanely.&nbsp; Every one on earth is wrong but he: every one is
+conspiring against him; he talks of &lsquo;Solomon&rsquo;s
+fool&rsquo; too.&nbsp; Had he read the Proverbs a little more
+closely, he might have left the said fool alone, as being a too
+painfully exact likeness of himself.&nbsp; It ends by his being
+worsted, and Raleigh rising higher than ever.&nbsp; I cannot see
+why Raleigh should be represented as henceforth becoming
+Essex&rsquo;s &lsquo;avowed enemy,&rsquo; save on the ground that
+all good men are and ought to be the enemies of bad men, when
+they see them about to do harm, and to ruin the country.&nbsp;
+Essex is one of the many persons upon whom this age has lavished
+a quantity of sentimentality, which suits oddly enough with its
+professions of impartiality.&nbsp; But there is an impartiality
+which ends in utter injustice; which by saying carelessly to
+every quarrel, &lsquo;Both are right, and both are wrong,&rsquo;
+leaves only the impression that all men are wrong, and ends by
+being unjust to every one.&nbsp; So has Elizabeth and
+Essex&rsquo;s quarrel been treated.&nbsp; There was some evil in
+Essex; therefore Elizabeth was a fool for liking him.&nbsp; There
+was some good in Essex; therefore Elizabeth was cruel in
+punishing him.&nbsp; This is the sort of slipshod dilemma by
+which Elizabeth is proved to be wrong, even while Essex is
+confessed to be wrong too; while the patent facts of the case
+are, that Elizabeth bore with him as long as she could, and a
+great deal longer than any one else could.&nbsp; Why Raleigh
+should be accused of helping to send Essex into Ireland, I do not
+know.&nbsp; Camden confesses (at the same time that he gives a
+hint of the kind) that Essex would let no one go but
+himself.&nbsp; And if this was his humour, one can hardly wonder
+at Cecil and Raleigh, as well as Elizabeth, bidding the man
+begone and try his hand at government, and be filled with the
+fruit of his own devices.&nbsp; He goes; does nothing; or rather
+worse than nothing; for in addition to the notorious
+ill-management of the whole matter, we may fairly say that he
+killed Elizabeth.&nbsp; She never held up her head again after
+Tyrone&rsquo;s rebellion.&nbsp; Elizabeth still clings to him,
+changing her mind about him every hour, and at last writes him
+such a letter as he deserves.&nbsp; He has had power, money, men,
+such as no one ever had before.&nbsp; Why has he done nothing but
+bring England to shame?&nbsp; He comes home frantically&mdash;the
+story of his bursting into the dressing-room rests on no good
+authority&mdash;with a party of friends at his heels, leaving
+Ireland to take care of itself.&nbsp; Whatever entertainment he
+met with from the fond old woman, he met with the coldness which
+he deserved from Raleigh and Cecil.&nbsp; Who can wonder?&nbsp;
+What had he done to deserve aught else?&nbsp; But he all but
+conquers; and Raleigh takes to his bed in consequence, sick of
+the whole matter; as one would have been inclined to do
+oneself.&nbsp; He is examined and arraigned; writes a maudlin
+letter to Elizabeth.&nbsp; Elizabeth has been called a fool for
+listening to such pathetical &lsquo;love letters&rsquo;: and then
+hardhearted for not listening to them.&nbsp; Poor Lady! do what
+she would, she found it hard enough to please all parties while
+alive; must she be condemned over and above <i>in
+&aelig;ternum</i> to be wrong whatsoever she did?&nbsp; Why is
+she not to have the benefit of the plain straightforward
+interpretation which would be allowed to any other human being;
+namely, that she approved of such fine talk as long as it was
+proved to be sincere by fine deeds: but that when these were
+wanting, the fine talk became hollow, fulsome, a fresh cause of
+anger and disgust?&nbsp; Yet still she weeps over Essex when he
+falls sick, as any mother would; and would visit him if she could
+with honour.&nbsp; But a &lsquo;malignant influence counteracts
+every disposition to relent.&rsquo;&nbsp; No doubt, a man&rsquo;s
+own folly, passion, and insolence has generally a very malignant
+influence on his fortunes; and he may consider himself a very
+happy man if all that befalls to him thereby is what befell
+Essex, namely, deprivation of his offices and imprisonment in his
+own house.&nbsp; He is forgiven after all; but the spoilt child
+refuses his bread and butter without sugar.&nbsp; What is the
+pardon to him without a renewal of his licence of sweet
+wines?&nbsp; Because he is not to have that, the Queen&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;conditions are as crooked as her carcase.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Flesh and blood can stand no more, and ought to stand no
+more.&nbsp; After all that Elizabeth has been to him, that speech
+is the speech of a brutal and ungrateful nature.&nbsp; And such
+he shows himself to be in the hour of trial.&nbsp; What if the
+patent for sweet wines is refused him?&nbsp; Such gifts were
+meant as the reward of merit; and what merit has he to
+show?&nbsp; He never thinks of that.&nbsp; Blind with fury, he
+begins to intrigue with James, and slanders to him, under colour
+of helping his succession, all whom he fancies opposed to
+him.&nbsp; What is worse, he intrigues with Tyrone about bringing
+over an army of Irish Papists to help him against the Queen, and
+this at the very time that his sole claim to popularity rests on
+his being the leader of the Puritans.&nbsp; A man must have been
+very far gone, either in baseness or in hatred, who represents
+Raleigh to James as dangerous to the commonweal on account of his
+great power in the west of England and Jersey, &lsquo;places fit
+for the Spaniard to land in.&rsquo;&nbsp; Cobham, as Warden of
+the Cinque Ports, is included in his slander; and both he and
+Raleigh will hear of it again.</p>
+<p>Some make much of a letter, supposed to be written about this
+time by Raleigh to Cecil, bidding Cecil keep down Essex, even
+crush him, now that he is once down.&nbsp; I do not happen to
+think the letter to be Raleigh&rsquo;s.&nbsp; His initials are
+subscribed to it; but not his name and the style is not like
+his.&nbsp; But as for seeing &lsquo;unforgiveness and revenge in
+it,&rsquo; whose soever it may be, I hold and say there is not a
+word which can bear such a construction.&nbsp; It is a dark
+letter: but about a dark matter and a dark man.&nbsp; It is a
+worldly and expediential letter, appealing to low motives in
+Cecil, though for a right end; such a letter, in short, as
+statesmen are wont to write nowadays.&nbsp; If Raleigh wrote it,
+God punished him for doing so speedily enough.&nbsp; He does not
+usually punish statesmen nowadays for such letters; perhaps
+because He does not love them as well as Raleigh.&nbsp; But as
+for the letter itself.&nbsp; Essex is called a
+&lsquo;tyrant,&rsquo; because he had shown himself one.&nbsp; The
+Queen is to &lsquo;hold Bothwell,&rsquo; because &lsquo;while she
+hath him, he will even be the canker of her estate and
+safety,&rsquo; and the writer has &lsquo;seen the last of her
+good days and of ours after his liberty.&rsquo;&nbsp; On which
+accounts, Cecil is not to be deterred from doing what is right
+and necessary &lsquo;by any fear of after-revenges&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;conjectures from causes remote,&rsquo; as many a stronger
+instance&mdash;given&mdash;will prove, but &lsquo;look to the
+present,&rsquo; and so &lsquo;do wisely.&rsquo;&nbsp; There is no
+real cause for Cecil&rsquo;s fear.&nbsp; If the man who has now
+lost a power which he ought never to have had be now kept down,
+then neither he nor his son will ever be able to harm the man who
+has kept him at his just level.&nbsp; What &lsquo;revenge,
+selfishness, and craft&rsquo; there can be in all this it is
+difficult to see; as difficult as to see why Essex is to be
+talked of as &lsquo;unfortunate,&rsquo; and the blame of his
+frightful end thrown on every one but himself: the fact being
+that Essex&rsquo;s end was brought on by his having chosen one
+Sunday morning for breaking out into open rebellion, for the
+purpose of seizing the city of London and the Queen&rsquo;s
+person, and compelling her to make him lord and master of the
+British Isles; in which attempt he and his fought with the civil
+and military authorities, till artillery had to be brought up and
+many lives were lost.&nbsp; Such little escapades may be
+pardonable enough in &lsquo;noble and unfortunate&rsquo; earls:
+but readers will perhaps agree that if they chose to try a
+similar experiment, they could not complain if they found
+themselves shortly after in company with Mr. Mitchell at Spike
+Island or Mr. Oxford in Bedlam.&nbsp; However, those were days in
+which such Sabbath amusements on the part of one of the most
+important and powerful personages of the realm could not be
+passed over so lightly, especially when accompanied by severe
+loss of life; and as there existed in England certain statutes
+concerning rebellion and high treason, which must needs have been
+framed for some purpose or other, the authorities of England may
+be excused for fancying that they bore some reference to such
+acts as that which the noble and unfortunate earl had just
+committed, as wantonly, selfishly, and needlessly, it seems to
+me, as ever did man on earth.</p>
+<p>I may seem to jest too much upon so solemn a matter as the
+life of a human being: but if I am not to touch the popular talk
+about Essex in this tone, I can only touch it in a far sterner
+one; and if ridicule is forbidden, express disgust instead.</p>
+<p>I have entered into this matter of Essex somewhat at length,
+because on it is founded one of the mean slanders from which
+Raleigh never completely recovered.&nbsp; The very mob who, after
+Raleigh&rsquo;s death, made him a Protestant martyr&mdash;as,
+indeed, he was&mdash;looked upon Essex in the same light, hated
+Raleigh as the cause of his death, and accused him of glutting
+his eyes with Essex&rsquo;s misery, puffing tobacco out of a
+window, and what not&mdash;all mere inventions, so Raleigh
+declared upon the scaffold.&nbsp; He was there in his office as
+captain of the guard, and could do no less than be there.&nbsp;
+Essex, it is said, asked for Raleigh just before he died: but
+Raleigh had withdrawn, the mob having murmured.&nbsp; What had
+Essex to say to him?&nbsp; Was it, asks Oldys, shrewdly enough,
+to ask him pardon for the wicked slanders which he had been
+pouring into James&rsquo;s credulous and cowardly ears?&nbsp; We
+will hope so; and leave poor Essex to God and the mercy of God,
+asserting once more that no man ever brought ruin and death more
+thoroughly on himself by his own act, needing no imaginary help
+downwards from Raleigh, Cecil, or other human being.</p>
+<p>And now begins the fourth act of this strange tragedy.&nbsp;
+Queen Elizabeth dies; and dies of grief.&nbsp; It has been the
+fashion to attribute to her, I know not why, remorse for
+Essex&rsquo;s death; and the foolish and false tale about Lady
+Nottingham and the ring has been accepted as history.&nbsp; The
+fact seems to be that she never really held up her head after
+Burleigh&rsquo;s death.&nbsp; She could not speak of him without
+tears; forbade his name to be mentioned in the Council.&nbsp; No
+wonder; never had mistress a better servant.&nbsp; For nearly
+half a century have these two noble souls loved each other,
+trusted each other, worked with each other; and God&rsquo;s
+blessing has been on their deeds; and now the faithful
+God-fearing man is gone to his reward; and she is growing old,
+and knows that the ancient fire is dying out in her; and who will
+be to her what he was?&nbsp; Buckhurst is a good man, and one of
+her old pupils; and she makes him Lord Treasurer in
+Burleigh&rsquo;s place: but beyond that all is dark.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;I am a miserable forlorn woman; there is none about me
+that I can trust.&rsquo;&nbsp; She sees through Cecil; through
+Henry Howard.&nbsp; Essex has proved himself worthless, and pays
+the penalty of his sins.&nbsp; Men are growing worse than their
+fathers.&nbsp; Spanish gold is bringing in luxury and sin.&nbsp;
+The last ten years of her reign are years of decadence,
+profligacy, falsehood; and she cannot but see it.&nbsp;
+Tyrone&rsquo;s rebellion is the last drop which fills the
+cup.&nbsp; After fifty years of war, after a drain of money all
+but fabulous expended on keeping Ireland quiet, the volcano
+bursts forth again just as it seemed extinguished, more fiercely
+than ever, and the whole work has to be done over again, when
+there is neither time nor a man to do it.&nbsp; And ahead, what
+hope is there for England?&nbsp; Who will be her successor?&nbsp;
+She knows in her heart that it will be James: but she cannot
+bring herself to name him.&nbsp; To bequeath the fruit of all her
+labours to a tyrant, a liar, and a coward: for she knows the man
+but too well.&nbsp; It is too hideous to be faced.&nbsp; This is
+the end then?&nbsp; &lsquo;Oh that I were a milke maide, with a
+paile upon mine arm!&rsquo;&nbsp; But it cannot be.&nbsp; It
+never could have been; and she must endure to the end.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Therefore I hated life; yea, I hated all my labour
+which I had taken under the sun; because I should leave it to the
+man that shall be after me.&nbsp; And who knows whether he shall
+be a wise man or a fool? yet shall he have rule over all my
+labour wherein I have showed myself wise, in wisdom, and
+knowledge, and equity . . . Vanity of vanities, and vexation of
+spirit!&rsquo;&nbsp; And so, with a whole book of Ecclesiastes
+written on that mighty heart, the old lioness coils herself up in
+her lair, refuses food, and dies.&nbsp; I know few passages in
+the world&rsquo;s history more tragic than that death.</p>
+<p>Why did she not trust Raleigh?&nbsp; First, because Raleigh,
+as we have seen, was not the sort of man whom she needed.&nbsp;
+He was not the steadfast single-eyed statesman; but the
+many-sided genius.&nbsp; Besides, he was the ringleader of the
+war-party.&nbsp; And she, like Burleigh before his death, was
+tired of the war; saw that it was demoralising England; was
+anxious for peace.&nbsp; Raleigh would not see that.&nbsp; It was
+to him a divine mission which must be fulfilled at all
+risks.&nbsp; As long as the Spaniards were opposing the Indians,
+conquering America, there must be no peace.&nbsp; Both were right
+from their own point of view.&nbsp; God ordered the matter from a
+third point of view.</p>
+<p>Besides, we know that Essex, and after him Cecil and Henry
+Howard, had been slandering Raleigh basely to James.&nbsp; Can we
+doubt that the same poison had been poured into Elizabeth&rsquo;s
+ears?&nbsp; She might distrust Cecil too much to act upon what he
+said of Raleigh; and yet distrust Raleigh too much to put the
+kingdom into his hands.&nbsp; However, she is gone now, and a new
+king has arisen, who knoweth not Joseph.</p>
+<p>James comes down to take possession.&nbsp; Insolence, luxury,
+and lawlessness mark his first steps on his going amid the
+adulations of a fallen people; he hangs a poor wretch without
+trial; wastes his time in hunting by the way;&mdash;a bad and
+base man, whose only redeeming point&mdash;if in his case it be
+one&mdash;is his fondness for little children.&nbsp; But that
+will not make a king.&nbsp; The wiser elders take counsel
+together.&nbsp; Raleigh and good Judge Fortescue are for
+requiring conditions from the newcomer; and constitutional
+liberty makes its last stand among the men of Devon, the old
+county of warriors, discoverers, and statesmen, of which Queen
+Bess had said that the men of Devon were her right hand.&nbsp;
+But in vain; James has his way; Cecil and Henry Howard are
+willing enough to give it him.</p>
+<p>So down comes Rehoboam, taking counsel with the young men, and
+makes answer to England, &lsquo;My father chastised you with
+whips; but I will chastise you with scorpions.&rsquo;&nbsp; He
+takes a base pleasure, shocking to the French ambassador, in
+sneering at the memory of Queen Elizabeth; a perverse delight in
+honouring every rascal whom she had punished.&nbsp; Tyrone must
+come to England to be received into favour, maddening the soul of
+honest Sir John Harrington.&nbsp; Essex is christened &lsquo;my
+martyr,&rsquo; apparently for having plotted treason against
+Elizabeth with Tyrone.&nbsp; Raleigh is received with a
+pun&mdash;&lsquo;By my soul, I have heard rawly of thee,
+mon&rsquo;; and when the great nobles and gentlemen come to court
+with their retinues, James tries to hide his dread of them in an
+insult; pooh-poohs their splendour, and says, &lsquo;he doubts
+not that he should have been able to win England for himself, had
+they kept him out.&rsquo;&nbsp; Raleigh answers boldly,
+&lsquo;Would God that had been put to the trial.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Why?&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;Because then you would have known
+your friends from your foes.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;A reason,&rsquo;
+says old Aubrey, &lsquo;never forgotten or forgiven.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Aubrey is no great authority; but the speech smacks so of
+Raleigh&rsquo;s offhand daring that one cannot but believe it; as
+one does also the other story of his having advised the lords to
+keep out James and erect a republic.&nbsp; Not that he could have
+been silly enough to propose such a thing seriously at that
+moment; but that he most likely, in his bold way, may have said,
+&lsquo;Well, if we are to have this man in without conditions,
+better a republic at once.&rsquo;&nbsp; Which, if he did say, he
+said what the next forty years proved to be strictly true.&nbsp;
+However, he will go on his own way as best he can.&nbsp; If James
+will give him a loan, he and the rest of the old heroes will
+join, fit out a fleet against Spain, and crush her, now that she
+is tottering and impoverished, once and for ever.&nbsp; But James
+has no stomach for fighting; cannot abide the sight of a drawn
+sword; would not provoke Spain for the world&mdash;why, they
+might send Jesuits and assassinate him; and as for the money, he
+wants that for very different purposes.&nbsp; So the answer which
+he makes to Raleigh&rsquo;s proposal of war against Spain is to
+send him to the Tower, and sentence him to be hanged, drawn, and
+quartered, on a charge of plotting with Spain.</p>
+<p>Having read, I believe, nearly all that has been written on
+the subject of this dark &lsquo;Cobham plot,&rsquo; I find but
+one thing come brightly out of the infinite confusion and
+mystery, which will never be cleared up till the day of judgment,
+and that is Raleigh&rsquo;s innocence.&nbsp; He, and all England,
+and the very men who condemned him, knew that he was
+innocent.&nbsp; Every biographer is forced to confess this, more
+or less, in spite of all efforts to be what is called
+&lsquo;impartial.&rsquo;&nbsp; So I shall waste no words upon the
+matter, only observing that whereas Raleigh is said to have
+slandered Cecil to James, in the same way that Cecil had
+slandered him, one passage of this Cobham plot disproves utterly
+such a story, which, after all, rests (as far as I know) only on
+hearsay, being &lsquo;spoken of in a manuscript written by one
+Buck, secretary to Chancellor Egerton.&rsquo;&nbsp; For in
+writing to his own wife, in the expectation of immediate death,
+Raleigh speaks of Cecil in a very different tone, as one in whom
+he trusted most, and who has left him in the hour of need.&nbsp;
+I ask the reader to peruse that letter, and say whether any man
+would write thus, with death and judgment before his face, of one
+whom he knew that he had betrayed; or, indeed, of one who he knew
+had betrayed him.&nbsp; I see no reason to doubt that Raleigh
+kept good faith with Cecil, and that he was ignorant till after
+his trial that Cecil was in the plot against him.</p>
+<p>I do not care to enter into the tracasseries of this Cobham
+plot.&nbsp; Every one knows them; no one can unravel them.&nbsp;
+The moral and spiritual significance of the fact is more
+interesting than all questions as to Cobham&rsquo;s lies,
+Brooke&rsquo;s lies, Aremberg&rsquo;s lies, Coke&rsquo;s lies,
+James&rsquo;s lies:&mdash;Let the dead bury their dead.&nbsp; It
+is the broad aspect of the thing which is so wonderful; to see
+how</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;The eagle, towering in his pride of
+place,<br />
+Was by a mousing owl hawked at and killed.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>This is the man who six months ago, perhaps, thought that he
+and Cecil were to rule England together, while all else were the
+puppets whose wires they pulled.&nbsp; &lsquo;The Lord hath taken
+him up and dashed him down;&rsquo; and by such means, too, and on
+such a charge!&nbsp; Betraying his country to Spain!&nbsp;
+Absurd&mdash;incredible&mdash;he would laugh it to scorn: but it
+is bitter earnest.&nbsp; There is no escape.&nbsp; True or false,
+he sees that his enemies will have his head.&nbsp; It is
+maddening: a horrible nightmare.&nbsp; He cannot bear it; he
+cannot face&mdash;so he writes to that beloved
+wife&mdash;&lsquo;the scorn, the taunts, the loss of honour, the
+cruel words of lawyers.&rsquo;&nbsp; He stabs himself.&nbsp; Read
+that letter of his, written after the mad blow had been struck;
+it is sublime from intensity of agony.&nbsp; The way in which the
+chastisement was taken proves how utterly it was needed, ere that
+proud, success-swollen, world-entangled heart could be brought
+right with God.</p>
+<p>And it is brought right.&nbsp; The wound is not mortal.&nbsp;
+He comes slowly to a better mind, and takes his doom like a
+man.&nbsp; That first farewell to his wife was written out of
+hell.&nbsp; The second rather out of heaven.&nbsp; Read it, too,
+and compare; and then see how the Lord has been working upon this
+great soul: infinite sadness, infinite tenderness and patience,
+and trust in God for himself and his poor wife: &lsquo;God is my
+witness, it was for you and yours that I desired life; but it is
+true that I disdain myself for begging it.&nbsp; For know, dear
+wife, that your son is the son of a true man, and one who, in his
+own respect, despiseth death and all his ugly and misshapen forms
+. . . The everlasting, powerful, infinite, and omnipotent God,
+who is goodness itself, the true life and light, keep thee and
+thine, have mercy upon me, and teach me to forgive my persecutors
+and accusers, and send us to meet in His glorious
+kingdom.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Is it come to this then?&nbsp; Is he fit to die at last?&nbsp;
+Then he is fit to live; and live he shall.&nbsp; The tyrants have
+not the heart to carry out their own crime, and Raleigh shall be
+respited.</p>
+<p>But not pardoned.&nbsp; No more return for him into that
+sinful world, where he flaunted on the edge of the precipice, and
+dropped heedless over it.&nbsp; God will hide him in the secret
+place of His presence, and keep him in His tabernacle from the
+strife of tongues; and a new life shall begin for him; a wiser,
+perhaps a happier, than he has known since he was a little lad in
+the farmhouse in pleasant Devon far away.&nbsp; On the 15th of
+December he enters the Tower.&nbsp; Little dreams he that for
+more than twelve years those doleful walls would be his
+home.&nbsp; Lady Raleigh obtains leave to share his prison with
+him, and, after having passed ten years without a child, brings
+him a boy to comfort the weary heart.&nbsp; The child of sorrow
+is christened Carew.&nbsp; Little think those around him what
+strange things that child will see before his hairs be
+gray.&nbsp; She has her maid, and he his three servants; some
+five or six friends are allowed &lsquo;to repair to him at
+convenient times.&rsquo;&nbsp; He has a chamber-door always open
+into the lieutenant&rsquo;s garden, where he &lsquo;has converted
+a little hen-house into a still-room, and spends his time all the
+day in distillation.&rsquo;&nbsp; The next spring a grant is made
+of his goods and chattels, forfeited by attainder, to trustees
+named by himself, for the benefit of his family.&nbsp; So far, so
+well; or, at least, not as ill as it might be: but there are
+those who cannot leave the caged lion in peace.</p>
+<p>Sanderson, who had married his niece, instead of paying up the
+arrears which he owes on the wine and other offices, brings in a
+claim of &pound;2000.&nbsp; But the rogue meets his match, and
+finds himself, at the end of a lawsuit, in prison for debt.&nbsp;
+Greater rogues, however, will have better fortune, and break
+through the law-cobwebs which have stopped a poor little fly like
+Sanderson.&nbsp; For Carr, afterwards Lord Somerset, casts his
+eyes on the Sherborne land.&nbsp; It has been included in the
+conveyance, and should be safe; but there are others who, by
+instigation surely of the devil himself, have had eyes to see a
+flaw in the deed.&nbsp; Sir John Popham is appealed to.&nbsp; Who
+could doubt the result?&nbsp; He answers that there is no doubt
+that the words were omitted by the inattention of the
+engrosser&mdash;Carew Raleigh says that but one single word was
+wanting, which word was found notwithstanding in the paper-book,
+<i>i.e.</i> the draft&mdash;but that the word not being there,
+the deed is worthless, and the devil may have his way.&nbsp; To
+Carr, who has nothing of his own, it seems reasonable enough to
+help himself to what belongs to others, and James gives him the
+land.&nbsp; Raleigh writes to him, gently, gracefully,
+loftily.&nbsp; Here is an extract: &lsquo;And for yourself, sir,
+seeing your fair day is now in the dawn, and mine drawn to the
+evening, your own virtues and the king&rsquo;s grace assuring you
+of many favours and much honour, I beseech you not to begin your
+first building upon the ruins of the innocent; and that their
+sorrows, with mine, may not attend your first
+plantation.&rsquo;&nbsp; He speaks strongly of the fairness,
+sympathy, and pity by which the Scots in general had laid him
+under obligation: argues from it his own evident innocence; and
+ends with a quiet warning to the young favourite not to
+&lsquo;undergo the curse of them that enter into the fields of
+the fatherless.&rsquo;&nbsp; In vain.&nbsp; Lady Raleigh, with
+her children, entreats James on her knees: in vain again.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;I mun ha&rsquo; the land,&rsquo; is the answer; &lsquo;I
+mun ha&rsquo; it for Carr.&rsquo;&nbsp; And he has it; patching
+up the matter after a while by a gift of &pound;8000 to her and
+her elder son, in requital for an estate of &pound;5000 a
+year.</p>
+<p>So there sits Raleigh, growing poorer day by day, and clinging
+more and more to that fair wife, and her noble boy, and the babe
+whose laughter makes music within that dreary cage.&nbsp; And all
+day long, as we have seen, he sits over his still, compounding
+and discovering, and sometimes showing himself on the wall to the
+people, who gather to gaze at him, till Wade forbids it, fearing
+popular feeling.&nbsp; In fact, the world outside has a sort of
+mysterious awe of him, as if he were a chained magician, who, if
+he were let loose, might do with them all what he would.&nbsp;
+Certain great nobles are of the same mind.&nbsp; Woe to them if
+that silver tongue should once again be unlocked!</p>
+<p>The Queen, with a woman&rsquo;s faith in greatness, sends to
+him for &lsquo;cordials.&rsquo;&nbsp; Here is one of them, famous
+in Charles the Second&rsquo;s days as &lsquo;Sir Walter&rsquo;s
+Cordial&rsquo;:&mdash;</p>
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td><p>B. Zedoary and Saffron, each</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&frac12; lb.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Distilled water</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>3 pints.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Macerate, etc., and reduce to</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>1&frac12; pint.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Compound powder of crabs&rsquo; claws</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>16 oz.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Cinnamon and Nutmegs</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>2 oz.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Cloves</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>1 oz.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Cardamom seeds</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&frac12; oz.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Double refined sugar</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>2 lb.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center">Make a
+confection.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<p>Which, so the world believes, will cure all ills which flesh
+is heir to.&nbsp; It does not seem that Raleigh so boasted
+himself; but the people, after the fashion of the time, seem to
+have called all his medicines &lsquo;cordials,&rsquo; and
+probably took for granted that it was by this particular one that
+the enchanter cured Queen Anne of a desperate sickness,
+&lsquo;whereof the physicians were at the farthest end of their
+studies&rsquo; (no great way to go in those days) &lsquo;to find
+the cause, and at a nonplus for the cure.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Raleigh&mdash;this is Sir Anthony Welden&rsquo;s account,
+which may go for what it is worth&mdash;asks for his reward, only
+justice.&nbsp; Will the Queen ask that certain lords may be sent
+to examine Cobham, &lsquo;whether he had at any time accused Sir
+Walter of any treason under his hand?&rsquo;&nbsp; Six are
+sent.&nbsp; Cobham answers, &lsquo;Never; nor could I: that
+villain Wade often solicited me, and not so prevailing, got me by
+a trick to write my name on a piece of white paper.&nbsp; So that
+if a charge come under my hand it was forged by that villain
+Wade, by writing something above my hand, without my consent or
+knowledge.&rsquo;&nbsp; They return.&nbsp; An equivocation was
+ready.&nbsp; &lsquo;Sir, my Lord Cobham has made good all that
+ever he wrote or said&rsquo;; having, by his own account, written
+nothing but his name.&nbsp; This is Sir Anthony Welden&rsquo;s
+story.&nbsp; One hopes, for the six lords&rsquo; sake, it may not
+be true; but there is no reason, in the morality of James&rsquo;s
+court, why it should not have been.</p>
+<p>So Raleigh must remain where he is, and work on.&nbsp; And he
+does work.&nbsp; As his captivity becomes more and more hopeless,
+so comes out more and more the stateliness, self-help, and energy
+of the man.&nbsp; Till now he has played with his pen: now he
+will use it in earnest; and use it as few prisoners have
+done.&nbsp; Many a good book has been written in a
+dungeon&mdash;&lsquo;Don Quixote,&rsquo; the
+&lsquo;Pilgrim&rsquo;s Progress&rsquo;: beautiful each in its
+way, and destined to immortality: Raleigh begins the
+&lsquo;History of the World,&rsquo; the most God-fearing and
+God-seeing history which I know of among English writings; though
+blotted by flattery of James in the preface: wrong: but
+pardonable in a man trying in the Tower to get out of that
+doleful prison.&nbsp; But all his writings are thirty years too
+late; they express the creed of a buried generation, of the men
+who defied Spain in the name of a God of righteousness,&mdash;not
+of men who cringe before her in the name of a God of power and
+cunning.&nbsp; The captive eagle has written with a quill from
+his own wing&mdash;a quill which has been wont ere now to soar to
+heaven.&nbsp; Every line smacks of the memories of Nombre and of
+Zutphen, of Tilbury Fort and of Calais Roads; and many a
+gray-headed veteran, as he read them, must have turned away his
+face to hide the noble tears, as Ulysses from Demodocus when he
+sang the song of Troy.&nbsp; So there sits Raleigh, like the
+prophet of old, in his lonely tower above the Thames, watching
+the darkness gather upon the land year by year, &lsquo;like the
+morning spread over the mountains,&rsquo; the darkness which
+comes before the dawn of the Day of The Lord; which he shall
+never see on earth, though it be very near at hand; and asks of
+each newcomer, &lsquo;Watchman, what of the night?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>But there is one bright point at least in the darkness; one on
+whom Raleigh&rsquo;s eyes, and those of all England, are fixed in
+boundless hope; one who, by the sympathy which attracts all noble
+natures to each other, clings to the hero utterly; Henry, the
+Crown Prince.&nbsp; &lsquo;No king but my father would keep such
+a bird in a cage.&rsquo;&nbsp; The noble lad tries to open the
+door for the captive eagle; but in vain.&nbsp; At least he will
+make what use he can of his wisdom.&nbsp; He asks him for advice
+about the new ship he is building, and has a simple practical
+letter in return, and over and above probably the two valuable
+pamphlets, &lsquo;Of the Invention of Ships,&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;Observations on the Navy and Sea Service&rsquo;; which the
+Prince will never see.&nbsp; In 1611 he asks Raleigh&rsquo;s
+advice about the foolish double marriage with the Prince and
+Princess of Savoy, and receives for answer two plain-spoken
+discourses as full of historical learning as of practical sound
+sense.</p>
+<p>These are benefits which must be repaid.&nbsp; The father will
+repay them hereafter in his own way.&nbsp; In the meanwhile the
+son does so in his way, by soliciting the Sherborne estate as for
+himself, intending to restore it to Raleigh.&nbsp; He
+succeeds.&nbsp; Carr is bought off for &pound;25,000, where Lady
+Raleigh has been bought off with &pound;8000; but neither Raleigh
+nor his widow will ever be the better for that bargain, and Carr
+will get Sherborne back again, and probably, in the King&rsquo;s
+silly dotage, keep the &pound;25,000 also.</p>
+<p>In November 1612 Prince Henry falls sick.</p>
+<p>When he is at the last gasp, the poor Queen sends to Raleigh
+for some of the same cordial which had cured her.&nbsp; Medicine
+is sent, with a tender letter, as it well might be; for Raleigh
+knew how much hung, not only for himself, but for England, on the
+cracking threads of that fair young life.&nbsp; It is questioned
+at first whether it shall be administered.&nbsp; &lsquo;The
+cordial,&rsquo; Raleigh says, &lsquo;will cure him or any other
+of a fever, except in case of poison.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>The cordial is administered; but it comes too late.&nbsp; The
+prince dies, and with him the hopes of all good men.</p>
+<p>* * *</p>
+<p>At last, after twelve years of prison, Raleigh is free.&nbsp;
+He is sixty-six years old now, gray-headed and worn down by
+confinement, study, and want of exercise: but he will not
+remember that.</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;Still in his ashes live their wonted
+fire.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Now for Guiana, at last! which he has never forgotten; to
+which he has been sending, with his slender means, ship after
+ship to keep the Indians in hope.</p>
+<p>He is freed in March.&nbsp; At once he is busy in his
+project.&nbsp; In August he has obtained the King&rsquo;s
+commission, by the help of Sir Ralph Winwood, Secretary of State,
+who seems to have believed in Raleigh.&nbsp; At least Raleigh
+believed in him.&nbsp; In March next year he has sailed, and with
+him thirteen ships, and more than a hundred knights and
+gentlemen, and among them, strange to say, Sir Warham St.
+Leger.&nbsp; This is certainly not the quondam Marshal of Munster
+under whom Raleigh served at Smerwick six-and-thirty years
+ago.&nbsp; He would be nearly eighty years old; and as Lord
+Doneraile&rsquo;s pedigree gives three Sir Warhams, we cannot
+identify the man.&nbsp; But it is a strong argument in
+Raleigh&rsquo;s favour that a St. Leger, of a Devon family which
+had served with him in Ireland, and intimately connected with him
+his whole life, should keep his faith in Raleigh after all his
+reverses.&nbsp; Nevertheless, the mere fact of an unpardoned
+criminal, said to be <i>non ens</i> in law, being able in a few
+months to gather round him such a party, is proof patent of what
+slender grounds there are for calling Raleigh
+&lsquo;suspected&rsquo; and &lsquo;unpopular.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>But he does not sail without a struggle or two.&nbsp; James is
+too proud to allow his heir to match with any but a mighty king,
+is infatuated about the Spanish marriage; and Gondomar is with
+him, playing with his hopes and with his fears also.</p>
+<p>The people are furious, and have to be silenced again and
+again: there is even fear of rioting.&nbsp; The charming and
+smooth-tongued Gondomar can hate, and can revenge, too.&nbsp;
+Five &rsquo;prentices who have insulted him for striking a little
+child, are imprisoned and fined several hundred pounds
+each.&nbsp; And as for hating Raleigh, Gondomar had been no
+Spaniard (to let alone the private reasons which some have
+supposed) had he not hated Spain&rsquo;s ancient scourge and
+unswerving enemy.&nbsp; He comes to James, complaining that
+Raleigh is about to break the peace with Spain.&nbsp; Nothing is
+to be refused him which can further the one darling fancy of
+James; and Raleigh has to give in writing the number of his
+ships, men, and ordnance, and, moreover, the name of the country
+and the very river whither he is going.&nbsp; This paper was
+given, Carew Raleigh asserts positively, under James&rsquo;s
+solemn promise not to reveal it; and Raleigh himself seems to
+have believed that it was to be kept private; for he writes
+afterwards to Secretary Winwood in a tone of astonishment and
+indignation, that the information contained in his paper had been
+sent on to the King of Spain before he sailed from the
+Thames.&nbsp; Winwood could have told him as much already; for
+Buckingham had written to Winwood, on March 28, to ask him why he
+had not been to the Spanish Ambassador &lsquo;to acquaint him
+with the order taken by his Majesty about Sir W. R.&rsquo;s
+voyage.&rsquo;&nbsp; But however unwilling the Secretary (as one
+of the furtherers of the voyage) may have been to meddle in the
+matter, Gondomar had had news enough from another source; perhaps
+from James&rsquo;s own mouth.&nbsp; For the first letter to the
+West Indies about Raleigh was dated from Madrid, March 19; and
+most remarkable it is that in James&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Declaration,&rsquo; or rather apology for his own conduct,
+no mention whatsoever is made of his having given information to
+Gondomar.</p>
+<p>Gondomar offered, says James, to let Raleigh go with one or
+two ships only.&nbsp; He might work a mine, and the King of Spain
+would give him a safe convoy home with all his gold.&nbsp; How
+kind.&nbsp; And how likely would Raleigh and his
+fellow-adventurers have been to accept such an offer; how likely,
+too, to find men who would sail with them on such an errand, to
+be &lsquo;flayed alive,&rsquo; as many who travelled to the
+Indies of late years had been, or to have their throats cut, tied
+back to back, after trading unarmed and peaceably for a month, as
+thirty-six of Raleigh&rsquo;s men had been but two or three years
+before in that very Orinoco.&nbsp; So James is forced to let the
+large fleet go; and to let it go well armed also; for the plain
+reason, that otherwise it dare not go at all; and in the
+meanwhile letters are sent from Spain, in which the Spaniards
+call the fleet &lsquo;English enemies,&rsquo; and ships and
+troops are moved up as fast as possible from the Spanish
+main.</p>
+<p>But, say some, James was justified in telling Gondomar, and
+the Spaniards in defending themselves.&nbsp; On the latter point
+there is no doubt.</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;They may get who have the will,<br />
+And they may keep who can.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>But it does seem hard on Raleigh, after having laboured in
+this Guiana business for years, and after having spent his money
+in vain attempts to deliver these Guianians from their
+oppressors.&nbsp; It is hard, and he feels it so.&nbsp; He sees
+that he is not trusted; that, as James himself confesses, his
+pardon is refused simply to keep a hold on him; that, if he
+fails, he is ruined.</p>
+<p>As he well asks afterwards, &lsquo;If the King did not think
+that Guiana was his, why let me go thither at all?&nbsp; He knows
+that it was his by the law of nations, for he made Mr. Harcourt a
+grant of part of it.&nbsp; If it be, as Gondomar says, the King
+of Spain&rsquo;s, then I had no more right to work a mine in it
+than to burn a town.&rsquo;&nbsp; An argument which seems to me
+unanswerable.&nbsp; But, says James, and others with him, he was
+forbid to meddle with any country occupate or possessed by
+Spaniards.&nbsp; Southey, too, blames him severely for not having
+told James that the country was already settled by
+Spaniards.&nbsp; I can excuse Southey, but not James, for
+overlooking the broad fact that all England knew it, as I have
+shown, since 1594; that if they did not, Gondomar would have
+taken care to tell them; and that he could not go to Guiana
+without meddling with Spaniards.&nbsp; His former voyages and
+publications made no secret of it.&nbsp; On the contrary, one
+chief argument for the plan had been all through the delivery of
+the Indians from these very Spaniards, who, though they could not
+conquer them, ill-used them in every way: and in his agreement
+with the Lords about the Guiana voyage in 1611, he makes especial
+mention of the very place which will soon fill such a part in our
+story, &lsquo;San Thom&eacute;, where the Spaniards
+inhabit,&rsquo; and tells the Lords whom to ask as to the number
+of men who will be wanted &lsquo;to secure Keymish&rsquo;s
+passage to the mine&rsquo; against these very Spaniards.&nbsp;
+What can be more clear, save to those who will not see?</p>
+<p>The plain fact is that Raleigh went, with his eyes open, to
+take possession of a country to which he believed that he and
+King James had a right, and that James and his favourites, when
+they, as he pleads, might have stopped him by a word, let him go,
+knowing as well as the Spaniards what he intended; for what
+purpose, but to have an excuse for the tragedy which ended all,
+it is difficult to conceive.&nbsp; &lsquo;It is evident,&rsquo;
+wisely says Sir Robert Schomburgk, &lsquo;that they winked at
+consequences which they must have foreseen.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>And here Mr. Napier, on the authority of Count Desmarets,
+brings a grave charge against Raleigh.&nbsp; Raleigh in his
+&lsquo;Apology&rsquo; protests that he only saw Desmarets once on
+board of his vessel.&nbsp; Desmarets says in his despatches that
+he was on board of her several times&mdash;whether he saw Raleigh
+more than once does not appear&mdash;and that Raleigh complained
+to him of having been unjustly imprisoned, stripped of his
+estate, and so forth; and that he was on that account resolved to
+abandon his country, and, if the expedition succeeded, offer
+himself and the fruit of his labour to the King of France.</p>
+<p>If this be true, Raleigh was very wrong.&nbsp; But Sir Robert
+Schomburgk points out that this passage, which Mr. Napier says
+occurs in the last despatch, was written a month after Raleigh
+had sailed; and that the previous despatch, written only four
+days after Raleigh sailed, says nothing about the matter.&nbsp;
+So that it could not have been a very important or fixed
+resolution on Raleigh&rsquo;s part, if it was only to be
+recollected a month after.&nbsp; I do not say&mdash;as Sir Robert
+Schomburgk is very much inclined to do&mdash;that it was
+altogether a bubble of French fancy.&nbsp; It is possible that
+Raleigh, in his just rage at finding that James was betraying him
+and sending him out with a halter round his neck, to all but
+certain ruin, did say wild words&mdash;That it was better for him
+to serve the Frenchman than such a master&mdash;that perhaps he
+might go over to the Frenchman after all&mdash;or some folly of
+the kind, in that same rash tone which, as we have seen, has got
+him into trouble so often already: and so I leave the matter,
+saying, Beware of making any man an offender for a word, much
+less one who is being hunted to death in his old age, and knows
+it.</p>
+<p>However this may be, the fleet sails; but with no bright
+auguries.&nbsp; The mass of the sailors are &lsquo;a scum of
+men&rsquo;; they are mutinous and troublesome; and what is worse,
+have got among them (as, perhaps, they were intended to have) the
+notion that Raleigh&rsquo;s being still <i>non ens</i> in law
+absolves them from obeying him when they do not choose, and
+permits them to say of him behind his back what they list.&nbsp;
+They have long delays at Plymouth.&nbsp; Sir Warham&rsquo;s ship
+cannot get out of the Thames.&nbsp; Pennington, at the Isle of
+Wight, &lsquo;cannot redeem his bread from the bakers,&rsquo; and
+has to ride back to London to get money from Lady Raleigh.&nbsp;
+The poor lady has it not, and gives a note of hand to Mr. Wood of
+Portsmouth.&nbsp; Alas for her!&nbsp; She has sunk her
+&pound;8000, and, beside that, sold her Wickham estate for
+&pound;2500; and all is on board the fleet.&nbsp; &lsquo;A
+hundred pieces&rsquo; are all the ready money the hapless pair
+had left on earth, and they have parted them together.&nbsp;
+Raleigh has fifty-five and she forty-five till God send it
+back&mdash;if, indeed, He ever send it.&nbsp; The star is sinking
+low in the west.&nbsp; Trouble on trouble.&nbsp; Sir John Fane
+has neither men nor money; Captain Witney has not provisions
+enough, and Raleigh has to sell his plate in Plymouth to help
+him.&nbsp; Courage! one last struggle to redeem his good
+name.</p>
+<p>Then storms off Sicily&mdash;a pinnace is sunk; faithful
+Captain King drives back into Bristol; the rest have to lie by a
+while in some Irish port for a fair wind.&nbsp; Then Bailey
+deserts with the &lsquo;Southampton&rsquo; at the Canaries; then
+&lsquo;unnatural weather,&rsquo; so that a fourteen days&rsquo;
+voyage takes forty days.&nbsp; Then &lsquo;the distemper&rsquo;
+breaks out under the line.&nbsp; The simple diary of that sad
+voyage still remains, full of curious and valuable nautical
+hints; but recording the loss of friend on friend; four or five
+officers, and, &lsquo;to our great grief, our principal refiner,
+Mr. Fowler.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;Crab, my old
+servant.&rsquo;&nbsp; Next a lamentable twenty-four hours, in
+which they lose Pigott, the lieutenant-general, &lsquo;mine
+honest frinde, Mr. John Talbot, one that had lived with me a
+leven yeeres in the Tower, an excellent general skoller, and a
+faithful and true man as ever lived,&rsquo; with two &lsquo;very
+fair conditioned gentleman,&rsquo; and &lsquo;mine own cook
+Francis.&rsquo;&nbsp; Then more officers and men, and my
+&lsquo;cusen Payton.&rsquo;&nbsp; Then the water is near spent,
+and they are forced to come to half allowance, till they save and
+drink greedily whole canfuls of the bitter rain water.&nbsp; At
+last Raleigh&rsquo;s own turn comes; running on deck in a squall,
+he gets wet through, and has twenty days of burning fever;
+&lsquo;never man suffered a more furious heat,&rsquo; during
+which he eats nothing but now and then a stewed prune.</p>
+<p>At last they make the land at the mouth of the Urapoho, far
+south of their intended goal.&nbsp; They ask for Leonard the
+Indian, &lsquo;who lived with me in England three or four years,
+the same man that took Mr. Harcourt&rsquo;s brother and fifty men
+when they were in extreme distress, and had no means to live
+there but by the help of this Indian, whom they made believe that
+they were my men&rsquo;; but the faithful Indian is gone up the
+country, and they stand away for Cayenne, &lsquo;where the
+cacique (Harry) was also my servant, and had lived with me in the
+Tower two years.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Courage once more, brave old heart!&nbsp; Here at least thou
+art among friends, who know thee for what thou art, and look out
+longingly for thee as their deliverer.&nbsp; Courage; for thou
+art in fairyland once more; the land of boundless hope and
+possibility.&nbsp; Though England and England&rsquo;s heart be
+changed, yet God&rsquo;s earth endures, and the harvest is still
+here, waiting to be reaped by those who dare.&nbsp; Twenty stormy
+years may have changed thee, but they have not changed the
+fairyland of thy prison dreams.&nbsp; Still the mighty Ceiba
+trees with their wealth of parasites and creepers tower above the
+palm-fringed islets; still the dark mangrove thickets guard the
+mouths of unknown streams, whose granite sands are rich with
+gold.&nbsp; Friendly Indians come, and Harry with them, bringing
+maize, peccari pork, and armadillos, plantains and pine-apples,
+and all eat and gather strength; and Raleigh writes home to his
+wife, &lsquo;to say that I may yet be King of the Indians here
+were a vanity.&nbsp; But my name hath lived among
+them&rsquo;&mdash;as well it might.&nbsp; For many a year those
+simple hearts shall look for him in vain, and more than two
+centuries and a half afterwards, dim traditions of the great
+white chief who bade them stand out to the last against the
+Spaniards, and he would come and dwell among them, shall linger
+among the Carib tribes; even, say some, the tattered relics of an
+English flag, which he left among them that they might
+distinguish his countrymen.</p>
+<p>Happy for him had he stayed there indeed, and been their
+king.&nbsp; How easy for him to have grown old in peace at
+Cayenne.&nbsp; But no; he must on for honour&rsquo;s sake, and
+bring home if it were but a basketful of that ore to show the
+king, that he may save his credit.&nbsp; He has promised Arundel
+that he will return.&nbsp; And return he will.&nbsp; So onward he
+goes to the &lsquo;Triangle Islands.&rsquo;&nbsp; There he sends
+off five small vessels for the Orinoco, with four hundred
+men.&nbsp; The faithful Keymis has to command and guide the
+expedition.&nbsp; Sir Warham is lying ill of the fever, all but
+dead; so George Raleigh is sent in his place as sergeant-major,
+and with him five land companies, one of which is commanded by
+young Walter, Raleigh&rsquo;s son; another by a Captain Parker,
+of whom we shall have a word to say presently.</p>
+<p>Keymis&rsquo;s orders are explicit.&nbsp; He is to go up; find
+the mine, and open it; and if the Spaniards attack him, repel
+force by force: but he is to avoid, if possible, an encounter
+with them: not for fear of breaking the peace, but because he has
+&lsquo;a scum of men, a few gentlemen excepted, and I would not
+for all the world receive a blow from the Spaniards to the
+dishonour of our nation.&rsquo;&nbsp; There we have no
+concealment of hostile instructions, any more than in
+Raleigh&rsquo;s admirable instructions to his fleet, which, after
+laying down excellent laws for morality, religion, and
+discipline, go on with clause after clause as to what is to be
+done if they meet &lsquo;the enemy.&rsquo;&nbsp; What
+enemy?&nbsp; Why, all Spanish ships which sail the seas; and who,
+if they happen to be sufficiently numerous, will assuredly
+attack, sink, burn, and destroy Raleigh&rsquo;s whole squadron,
+for daring to sail for that continent which Spain claims as its
+own.</p>
+<p>Raleigh runs up the coast to Trinidad once more, in through
+the Serpent&rsquo;s Mouth, and round Punto Gallo to the lake of
+pitch, where all recruit themselves with fish and armadillos,
+&lsquo;pheasant&rsquo; (Penelope), &lsquo;palmitos&rsquo;
+(Moriche palm fruit?), and guavas, and await the return of the
+expedition from the last day of December to the middle of
+February.&nbsp; They see something of the Spaniards
+meanwhile.&nbsp; Sir John Ferns is sent up to Port of Spain to
+try if they will trade for tobacco.&nbsp; The Spaniards parley;
+in the midst of the parley pour a volley of musketry into them at
+forty paces, yet hurt never a man; and send them off calling them
+thieves and traitors.&nbsp; Fray Simon&rsquo;s Spanish account of
+the matter is that Raleigh intended to disembark his men, that
+they might march inland on San Joseph.&nbsp; He may be excused
+for the guess; seeing that Raleigh had done the very same thing
+some seventeen years before.&nbsp; If Raleigh was treacherous
+then, his treason punished itself now.&nbsp; However, I must
+believe that Raleigh is not likely to have told a lie for his own
+private amusement in his own private diary.</p>
+<p>On the 29th the Spaniards attack three men and a boy who are
+ashore boiling the fossil pitch; kill one man, and carry off the
+boy.&nbsp; Raleigh, instead of going up to Port of Spain and
+demanding satisfaction, as he would have been justified in doing
+after this second attack, remains quietly where he is, expecting
+daily to be attacked by Spanish armadas, and resolved to
+&lsquo;burn by their sides.&rsquo;&nbsp; Happily, or unhappily,
+he escapes them.&nbsp; Probably he thinks they waited for him at
+Margarita, expecting him to range the Spanish main.</p>
+<p>At last the weary days of sickness and anxiety succeeded to
+days of terror.&nbsp; On the 1st of February a strange report
+comes by an Indian.&nbsp; An inland savage has brought confused
+and contradictory news down the river that San Thom&eacute; is
+sacked, the governor and two Spanish captains slain (names given)
+and two English captains, nameless.&nbsp; After this entry follow
+a few confused ones, set down as happening in January, concerning
+attempts to extract the truth from the Indians, and the
+negligence of the mariners, who are diligent in nothing but
+pillaging and stealing.&nbsp; And so ends abruptly this sad
+document.</p>
+<p>The truth comes at last&mdash;but when, does not
+appear&mdash;in a letter from Keymis, dated January 8.&nbsp; San
+Thom&eacute; has been stormed, sacked, and burnt.&nbsp; Four
+refiners&rsquo; houses were found in it; the best in the town; so
+that the Spaniards have been mining there; but no coin or bullion
+except a little plate.&nbsp; One English captain is killed, and
+that captain is Walter Raleigh, his firstborn.&nbsp; He died
+leading them on, when some, &lsquo;more careful of valour and
+safety, began to recoil shamefully.&rsquo;&nbsp; His last words
+were, &lsquo;Lord have mercy upon me and prosper our
+enterprise.&rsquo;&nbsp; A Spanish captain, Erinetta, struck him
+down with the butt of a musket after he had received a
+bullet.&nbsp; John Plessington, his sergeant, avenged him by
+running Erinetta through with his halbert.</p>
+<p>Keymis has not yet been to the mine; he could not, &lsquo;by
+reason of the murmurings, discords, and vexations&rsquo;; but he
+will go at once, make trial of the mine, and come down to
+Trinidad by the Macareo mouth.&nbsp; He sends a parcel of
+scattered papers, a roll of tobacco, a tortoise, some oranges and
+lemons.&nbsp; &lsquo;Praying God to give you health and strength
+of body, and a mind armed against all extremities, I rest ever to
+be commanded, your lordship&rsquo;s, Keymish.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Oh Absalom, my son, my son, would God I had died for
+thee!&rsquo;&nbsp; But weeping is in vain.&nbsp; The noble lad
+sleeps there under the palm-trees, beside the mighty tropic
+stream, while the fair Basset, &lsquo;his bride in the sight of
+God,&rsquo; recks not of him as she wanders in the woods of
+Umberleigh, wife to the son of Raleigh&rsquo;s deadliest
+foe.&nbsp; Raleigh, Raleigh, surely God&rsquo;s blessing is not
+on this voyage of thine.&nbsp; Surely He hath set thy misdeeds
+before Him, and thy secret sins in the light of His
+countenance.</p>
+<p>Another blank of misery: but his honour is still safe.&nbsp;
+Keymis will return with that gold ore, that pledge of his good
+faith for which he has ventured all.&nbsp; Surely God will let
+that come after all, now that he has paid as its price his
+first-born&rsquo;s blood?</p>
+<p>At last Keymis returns with thinned numbers.&nbsp; All are
+weary, spirit-broken, discontented, mutinous.&nbsp; Where is the
+gold ore?</p>
+<p>There is none.&nbsp; Keymis has never been to the mine after
+all.&nbsp; His companions curse him as a traitor who has helped
+Raleigh to deceive them into ruin; the mine is imaginary&mdash;a
+lie.&nbsp; The crews are ready to break into open mutiny; after a
+while they will do so.</p>
+<p>Yes, God is setting this man&rsquo;s secret sins in the light
+of His countenance.&nbsp; If he has been ambitious, his ambition
+has punished itself now.&nbsp; If he has cared more for his own
+honour than for his wife and children, that sin too has punished
+itself.&nbsp; If he has (which I affirm not) tampered with truth
+for the sake of what seemed to him noble and just ends, that too
+has punished itself; for his men do not trust him.&nbsp; If he
+has (which I affirm not) done any wrong in that matter of Cobham,
+that too has punished itself: for his men, counting him as <i>non
+ens</i> in law, will not respect or obey him.&nbsp; If he has
+spoken, after his old fashion, rash and exaggerated words, and
+goes on speaking them, even though it be through the pressure of
+despair, that too shall punish itself; and for every idle word
+that he shall say, God will bring him into judgment.&nbsp; And
+why, but because he is noble?&nbsp; Why, but because he is nearer
+to God by a whole heaven than others whom God lets fatten on
+their own sins, having no understanding, because they are in
+honour, and having children at their hearts&rsquo; desire, and
+leaving the rest of their substance to their babes?&nbsp; Not so
+does God deal with His elect when they will try to worship at
+once self and Him; He requires truth in the inward parts, and
+will purge them till they are true, and single-eyed, and full of
+light.</p>
+<p>Keymis returns with the wreck of his party.&nbsp; The scene
+between him and Raleigh may be guessed.&nbsp; Keymis has excuse
+on excuse.&nbsp; He could not get obeyed after young
+Raleigh&rsquo;s death: he expected to find that Sir Walter was
+either dead of his sickness or of grief for his son, and had no
+wish &lsquo;to enrich a company of rascals who made no account of
+him.&rsquo;&nbsp; He dare not go up to the mine because (and here
+Raleigh thinks his excuse fair) the fugitive Spaniards lay in the
+craggy woods through which he would have to pass, and that he had
+not men enough even to hold the town securely.&nbsp; If he
+reached the mine and left a company there, he had no provisions
+for them; and he dared not send backward and forward to the town
+while the Spaniards were in the woods.&nbsp; The warnings sent by
+Gondomar had undone all, and James&rsquo;s treachery had done its
+work.&nbsp; So Keymis, &lsquo;thinking it a greater error, so he
+said, to discover the mine to the Spaniards than to excuse
+himself to the Company, said that he could not find
+it.&rsquo;&nbsp; From all which one thing at least is evident,
+that Keymis believed in the existence of the mine.</p>
+<p>Raleigh &lsquo;rejects these fancies&rsquo;; tells him before
+divers gentlemen that &lsquo;a blind man might find it by the
+marks which Keymis himself had set down under his hand&rsquo;:
+that &lsquo;his case of losing so many men in the woods&rsquo;
+was a mere pretence: after Walter was slain, he knew that Keymis
+had no care of any man&rsquo;s surviving.&nbsp; &lsquo;You have
+undone me, wounded my credit with the King past recovery.&nbsp;
+As you have followed your own advice, and not mine, you must
+satisfy his Majesty.&nbsp; It shall be glad if you can do it: but
+I cannot.&rsquo;&nbsp; There is no use dwelling on such vain
+regrets and reproaches.&nbsp; Raleigh perhaps is bitter,
+unjust.&nbsp; As he himself writes twice, to his wife and Sir
+Ralph Winwood, his &lsquo;brains are broken.&rsquo;&nbsp; He
+writes to them both, and re-opens the letters to add long
+postscripts, at his wits&rsquo; end.&nbsp; Keymis goes off;
+spends a few miserable days; and then enters Raleigh&rsquo;s
+cabin.&nbsp; He has written his apology to Lord Arundel, and begs
+Raleigh to allow of it.&nbsp; &lsquo;No.&nbsp; You have undone me
+by your obstinacy.&nbsp; I will not favour or colour your former
+folly.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;Is that your resolution,
+sir?&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;It is.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;I know not
+then, sir, what course to take.&rsquo;&nbsp; And so he goes out,
+and into his own cabin overhead.&nbsp; A minute after a
+pistol-shot is heard.&nbsp; Raleigh sends up a boy to know the
+reason.&nbsp; Keymis answers from within that he has fired it off
+because it had been long charged; and all is quiet.</p>
+<p>Half an hour after the boy goes into the cabin.&nbsp; Keymis
+is lying on his bed, the pistol by him.&nbsp; The boy moves
+him.&nbsp; The pistol-shot has broken a rib, and gone no further;
+but as the corpse is turned over, a long knife is buried in that
+desperate heart.&nbsp; Another of the old heroes is gone to his
+wild account.</p>
+<p>Gradually drops of explanation ooze out.&nbsp; The
+&lsquo;Sergeant-major, Raleigh&rsquo;s nephew, and others,
+confess that Keymis told them that he could have brought them in
+two hours to the mine: but as the young heir was slain, and his
+father was unpardoned and not like to live, he had no reason to
+open the mine, either for the Spaniard or the King.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Those latter words are significant.&nbsp; What cared the old
+Elizabethan seaman for the weal of such a king?&nbsp; And,
+indeed, what good to such a king would all the mines in Guiana
+be?&nbsp; They answered that the King, nevertheless, had
+&lsquo;granted Raleigh his heart&rsquo;s desire under the great
+seal.&rsquo;&nbsp; He replied that &lsquo;the grant to Raleigh
+was to a man <i>non ens</i> in law, and therefore of no
+force.&rsquo;&nbsp; Here, too, James&rsquo;s policy has worked
+well.&nbsp; How could men dare or persevere under such a
+cloud?</p>
+<p>How, indeed, could they have found heart to sail at all?&nbsp;
+The only answer is that they knew Raleigh well enough to have
+utter faith in him, and that Keymis himself knew of the mine.</p>
+<p>Puppies at home in England gave out that he had killed himself
+from remorse at having deceived so many gentlemen with an
+imaginary phantom.&nbsp; Every one, of course, according to his
+measure of charity, has power and liberty to assume any motive
+which he will.&nbsp; Mine is simply the one which shows upon the
+face of the documents; that the old follower, devoted alike to
+the dead son and to the doomed father, feeling that he had, he
+scarce knew how, failed in the hour of need, frittered away the
+last chance of a mighty enterprise which had been his fixed idea
+for years, and ruined the man whom he adored, avenged upon
+himself the fault of having disobeyed orders, given peremptorily,
+and to be peremptorily executed.</p>
+<p>Here, perhaps, my tale should end; for all beyond is but the
+waking of the corpse.&nbsp; The last death-struggle of the
+Elizabethan heroism is over, and all its remains vanish slowly in
+an undignified, sickening way.&nbsp; All epics end so.&nbsp;
+After the war of Troy, Achilles must die by coward Paris&rsquo;s
+arrow, in some mysterious, confused, pitiful fashion; and stately
+Hecuba must rail herself into a very dog, and bark for ever
+shamefully around lonely Cynossema.&nbsp; Young David ends as a
+dotard&mdash;Solomon as worse.&nbsp; Glorious Alexander must die,
+half of fever, half of drunkenness, as the fool dieth.&nbsp;
+Charles the Fifth, having thrown all away but his follies, ends
+in a convent, a superstitious imbecile; Napoleon squabbles to the
+last with Sir Hudson Lowe about champagne.&nbsp; It must be so;
+and the glory must be God&rsquo;s alone.&nbsp; For in great men,
+and great times, there is nothing good or vital but what is of
+God, and not of man&rsquo;s self; and when He taketh away that
+divine breath they die, and return again to their dust.&nbsp; But
+the earth does not lose; for when He sendeth forth His Spirit
+they live, and renew the face of the earth.&nbsp; A new
+generation arises, with clearer sight, with fuller experience,
+sometimes with nobler aims; and</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;The old order changeth, giveth place to the
+new,<br />
+And God fulfils himself in many ways.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The Elizabethan epic did not end a day too soon.&nbsp; There
+was no more life left in it; and God had something better in
+store for England.&nbsp; Raleigh&rsquo;s ideal was a noble one:
+but God&rsquo;s was nobler far.&nbsp; Raleigh would have made her
+a gold kingdom, like Spain, and destroyed her very vitals by that
+gold, as Spain was destroyed.&nbsp; And all the while the great
+and good God was looking steadfastly upon that little struggling
+Virginian village, Raleigh&rsquo;s first-born, forgotten in his
+new mighty dreams, and saying, &lsquo;Here will I dwell, for I
+have a delight therein.&rsquo;&nbsp; There, and not in Guiana;
+upon the simple tillers of the soil, not among wild reckless
+gold-hunters, would His blessing rest.&nbsp; The very coming
+darkness would bring brighter light.&nbsp; The evil age itself
+would be the parent of new good, and drive across the seas
+steadfast Pilgrim Fathers and generous Royalist Cavaliers, to be
+the parents of a mightier nation than has ever yet possessed the
+earth.&nbsp; Verily, God&rsquo;s ways are wonderful, and His
+counsels in the great deep.</p>
+<p>So ends the Elizabethan epic.&nbsp; Must we follow the corpse
+to the grave?&nbsp; It is necessary.</p>
+<p>And now, &lsquo;you gentlemen of England, who sit at home at
+ease,&rsquo; what would you have done in like case?&mdash;Your
+last die thrown; your last stake lost; your honour, as you fancy,
+stained for ever; your eldest son dead in battle&mdash;What would
+you have done?&nbsp; What Walter Raleigh did was this.&nbsp; He
+kept his promise.&nbsp; He had promised Lord Arundel to return to
+England; and return he did.</p>
+<p>But it is said his real intention, as he himself confessed,
+was to turn pirate and take the Mexico fleet.</p>
+<p>That wild thoughts of such a deed may have crossed his mind,
+may have been a terrible temptation to him, may even have broken
+out in hasty words, one does not deny.&nbsp; He himself says that
+he spoke of such a thing &lsquo;to keep his men
+together.&rsquo;&nbsp; All depends on how the words were
+spoken.&nbsp; The form of the sentence, the tone of voice, is
+everything.&nbsp; Who could blame him, if seeing some of the
+captains whom he had most trusted deserting him, his men heaping
+him with every slander, and, as he solemnly swore on the
+scaffold, calling witnesses thereto by name, forcing him to take
+an oath that he would not return to England before they would
+have him, and locking him into his own cabin&mdash;who could
+blame him, I ask, for saying in that daring off-hand way of his,
+which has so often before got him into trouble, &lsquo;Come, my
+lads, do not despair.&nbsp; If the worst comes to the worst,
+there is the Plate-fleet to fall back upon&rsquo;?&nbsp; When I
+remember, too, that the taking of the said Plate-fleet was in
+Raleigh&rsquo;s eyes an altogether just thing; and that he knew
+perfectly that if he succeeded therein he would be backed by the
+public opinion of all England, and probably buy his pardon of
+James, who, if he loved Spain well, loved money better; my
+surprise rather is, that he did not go and do it.&nbsp; As for
+any meeting of captains in his cabin and serious proposal of such
+a plan, I believe it to be simply one of the innumerable lies
+which James inserted in his &lsquo;Declaration,&rsquo; gathered
+from the tales of men who, fearing (and reasonably) lest their
+heads should follow Raleigh&rsquo;s, tried to curry favour by
+slandering him.&nbsp; This &lsquo;Declaration&rsquo; has been so
+often exposed that I may safely pass it by; and pass by almost as
+safely the argument which some have drawn from a chance
+expression of his in his pathetic letter to Lady Raleigh, in
+which he &lsquo;hopes that God would send him somewhat before his
+return.&rsquo;&nbsp; To prove an intention of piracy in the
+despairing words of a ruined man writing to comfort a ruined wife
+for the loss of her first-born is surely to deal out hard
+measure.&nbsp; Heaven have mercy upon us, if all the hasty words
+which woe has wrung from our hearts are to be so judged either by
+man or God!</p>
+<p>Sir Julius C&aelig;sar, again, one of the commission appointed
+to examine him, informs us that, on being confronted with
+Captains St. Leger and Pennington, he confessed that he proposed
+the taking of the Mexico fleet if the mine failed.&nbsp; To which
+I can only answer, that all depends on how the thing was said,
+and that this is the last fact which we should find in Sir
+Julius&rsquo;s notes, which are, it is confessed, so confused,
+obscure, and full of gaps, as to be often hardly
+intelligible.&nbsp; The same remark applies to Wilson&rsquo;s
+story, which I agree with Mr. Tytler in thinking worthless.&nbsp;
+Wilson, it must be understood, is employed after Raleigh&rsquo;s
+return as a spy upon him, which office he executes, all confess
+(and Wilson himself as much as any), as falsely, treacherously,
+and hypocritically as did ever sinful man; and, <i>inter
+alia</i>, he has this, &lsquo;This day he told me what discourse
+he and the Lord Chancellor had about taking the Plate-fleet,
+which he confessed he would have taken had he lighted on
+it.&rsquo;&nbsp; To which my Lord Chancellor said, &lsquo;Why,
+you would have been a pirate.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;Oh,&rsquo;
+quoth he, &lsquo;did you ever know of any that were pirates for
+millions?&nbsp; They only that wish for small things are
+pirates.&rsquo;&nbsp; Now, setting aside the improbability that
+Raleigh should go out of his way to impeach himself to the man
+whom he must have known was set there to find matter for his
+death, all, we say, depends on how it was said.&nbsp; If the Lord
+Chancellor ever said to Raleigh, &lsquo;To take the Mexico fleet
+would be piracy,&rsquo; it would have been just like Raleigh to
+give such an answer.&nbsp; The speech is a perfectly true one:
+Raleigh knew the world, no man better; and saw through its
+hollowness, and the cant and hypocrisy of his generation; and he
+sardonically states an undeniable fact.&nbsp; He is not
+expressing his own morality, but that of the world; just as he is
+doing in that passage of his &lsquo;Apology,&rsquo; about which I
+must complain of Mr. Napier.&nbsp; &lsquo;It was a maxim of
+his,&rsquo; says Mr. Napier, &lsquo;that good success admits of
+no examination.&rsquo;&nbsp; This is not fair.&nbsp; The sentence
+in the original goes on, &lsquo;so the contrary allows of no
+excuse, however reasonable and just whatsoever.&rsquo;&nbsp; His
+argument all through the beginning of the &lsquo;Apology,&rsquo;
+supported by instance on instance from history, is&mdash;I cannot
+get a just hearing, because I have failed in opening this
+mine.&nbsp; So it is always.&nbsp; Glory covers the multitude of
+sins.&nbsp; But a man who has failed is a fair mark for every
+slanderer, puppy, ignoramus, discontented mutineer; as I am
+now.&nbsp; What else, in the name of common sense, could have
+been his argument?&nbsp; Does Mr. Napier really think that
+Raleigh, even if, in the face of all the noble and pious words
+which he had written, he held so immoral a doctrine, would have
+been shameless and senseless enough to assert his own rascality
+in an apology addressed to the most &lsquo;religious&rsquo; of
+kings in the most canting of generations?</p>
+<p>But still more astonished am I at the use which has been made
+of Captain Parker&rsquo;s letter.&nbsp; The letter is written by
+a man in a state of frantic rage and disappointment.&nbsp; There
+never was any mine, he believes now.&nbsp; Keymis&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;delays we found mere delusions; for he was false to all
+men and hateful to himself, loathing to live since he could do no
+more villany.&nbsp; I will speak no more of this hateful fellow
+to God and man.&rsquo;&nbsp; And it is on the testimony of a man
+in this temper that we are asked to believe that &lsquo;the
+admiral and vice-admiral,&rsquo; Raleigh and St. Leger, are going
+to the Western Islands &lsquo;to look for homeward-bound
+men&rsquo;: if, indeed, the looking for homeward-bound men means
+really looking for the Spanish fleet, and not merely for recruits
+for their crews.&nbsp; I never recollect&mdash;and I have read
+pretty fully the sea-records of those days&mdash;such a synonym
+used either for the Mexican or Indian fleet.&nbsp; But let this
+be as it may, the letter proves too much.&nbsp; For, first, it
+proves that whosoever is not going to turn &lsquo;pirate,&rsquo;
+our calm and charitable friend Captain Parker is; &lsquo;for my
+part, by the permission of God, I will either <i>make a
+voyage</i> or bury myself in the sea.&rsquo;&nbsp; Now, what
+making a voyage meant there is no doubt; and the sum total of the
+letter is, that a man intending to turn rover himself accuses,
+under the influence of violent passion, his comrades of doing the
+like.&nbsp; We may believe him about himself: about others, we
+shall wait for testimony a little less interested.</p>
+<p>But the letter proves too much again.&nbsp; For Parker says
+that &lsquo;Witney and Woolaston are gone off a-head to look for
+homeward-bound men,&rsquo; thus agreeing with Raleigh&rsquo;s
+message to his wife, that &lsquo;Witney, for whom I sold all my
+plate at Plymouth, and to whom I gave more credit and countenance
+than to all the captains of my fleet, ran from me at the
+Grenadas, and Woolaston with him.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>And now, reader, how does this of Witney, and Woolaston, and
+Parker&rsquo;s intentions to &lsquo;pirate&rsquo; separately, if
+it be true, agree with King James&rsquo;s story of
+Raleigh&rsquo;s calling a council of war and proposing an attack
+on the Plate-fleet?&nbsp; One or the other must needs be a lie;
+probably both.&nbsp; Witney&rsquo;s ship was of only 160 tons;
+Woolaston&rsquo;s probably smaller.&nbsp; Five such ships would
+be required, as any reader of Hakluyt must know, to take a single
+Carack; and it would be no use running the risk of hanging for
+any less prize.&nbsp; The Spanish main was warned and armed, and
+the Western Isles also.&nbsp; Is it possible that these two men
+would have been insane enough in such circumstances to go without
+Raleigh, if they could have gone with him?&nbsp; And is it
+possible that he, if he had any set purpose of attacking the
+Plate-fleet, would not have kept them, in order to attempt that
+with him which neither they nor he could do without each
+other.&nbsp; Moreover, no &lsquo;piratical&rsquo; act ever took
+place; if any had, we should have heard enough about it; and why
+is Parker to be believed against Raleigh alone, when there is
+little doubt that he slandered all the rest of the
+captains?&nbsp; Lastly, it was to this very Parker, with Mr.
+Tresham and another gentleman, that Raleigh appealed by name on
+the scaffold, as witnesses that it was his crew who tried to keep
+him from going home, and not he them.</p>
+<p>My own belief is, and it is surely simple and rational enough,
+that Raleigh&rsquo;s &lsquo;brains,&rsquo; as he said,
+&lsquo;were broken&rsquo;; that he had no distinct plan: but
+that, loth to leave the New World without a second attempt on
+Guiana, he went up to Newfoundland to re-victual, &lsquo;and with
+good hope,&rsquo; as he wrote to Winwood himself, &lsquo;of
+keeping the sea till August with some four reasonable good
+ships,&rsquo; probably, as Oldys remarks, to try a trading
+voyage; but found his gentlemen too dispirited and incredulous,
+his men too mutinous to do anything; and seeing his ships go home
+one by one, at last followed them himself, because he had
+promised Arundel and Pembroke so to do; having, after all, as he
+declared on the scaffold, extreme difficulty in persuading his
+men to land at all in England.&nbsp; The other lies about him, as
+of his having intended to desert his soldiers in Guiana, his
+having taken no tools to work the mine, and so forth, one only
+notices to say that the &lsquo;Declaration&rsquo; takes care to
+make the most of them, without deigning, after its fashion, to
+adduce any proof but anonymous hearsays.&nbsp; If it be true that
+Bacon drew up that famous document, it reflects no credit either
+on his honesty or his &lsquo;inductive science.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>So Raleigh returns, anchors in Plymouth.&nbsp; He finds that
+Captain North has brought home the news of his mishaps, and that
+there is a proclamation against him, which, by the bye, lies, for
+it talks of limitations and cautions given to Raleigh which do
+not appear in his commission; and, moreover, that a warrant is
+out for his apprehension.&nbsp; He sends his men on shore, and
+starts for London to surrender himself, in company with faithful
+Captain King, who alone clings to him to the last, and from whom
+we have details of the next few days.&nbsp; Near Ashburton he is
+met by Sir Lewis Stukely, his near kinsman, Vice-Admiral of
+Devon, who has orders to arrest him.&nbsp; Raleigh tells him that
+he has saved him the trouble; and the two return to Plymouth,
+where Stukely, strangely enough, leaves him at liberty and rides
+about the country.&nbsp; We should be slow in imputing baseness:
+but one cannot help suspecting from Stukely&rsquo;s subsequent
+conduct that he had from the first private orders to give Raleigh
+a chance of trying to escape, in order to have a handle against
+him, such as his own deeds had not yet given.</p>
+<p>The ruse, if it existed then, as it did afterwards,
+succeeds.&nbsp; Raleigh hears bad news.&nbsp; Gondomar
+has&mdash;or has not&mdash;told his story to the king by crying,
+&lsquo;<i>Piratas</i>! <i>piratas</i>! <i>piratas</i>!&rsquo; and
+then rushing out without explanation.&nbsp; James is in terror
+lest what had happened should break off the darling Spanish
+match.</p>
+<p>Raleigh foresees ruin, perhaps death.&nbsp; Life is sweet, and
+Guiana is yet where it was.&nbsp; He may win a basketful of the
+ore still, and prove himself no liar.&nbsp; He will escape to
+France.&nbsp; Faithful King finds him a Rochelle ship; he takes
+boat to her, goes half way, and returns.&nbsp; Honour is sweeter
+than life, and James may yet be just.&nbsp; The next day he
+bribes the master to wait for him one more day, starts for the
+ship once more, and again returns to Plymouth&mdash;so King will
+make oath&mdash;of his own free will.&nbsp; The temptation must
+have been terrible and the sin none.&nbsp; What kept him from
+yielding but innocence and honour?&nbsp; He will clear himself;
+and if not, abide the worst.&nbsp; Stukely and James found out
+these facts, and made good use of them afterwards.&nbsp; For now
+comes &lsquo;a severe letter from my Lords&rsquo; to bring
+Raleigh up as speedily as his health will permit; and with it
+comes one Mannourie, a French quack, of whom honest King takes
+little note at the time, but who will make himself
+remembered.</p>
+<p>And now begins a series of scenes most pitiable;
+Raleigh&rsquo;s brains are indeed broken.&nbsp; He is old,
+worn-out with the effects of his fever, lamed, ruined,
+broken-hearted, and, for the first time in his life, weak and
+silly.&nbsp; He takes into his head the paltriest notion that he
+can gain time to pacify the King by feigning himself sick.&nbsp;
+He puts implicit faith in the rogue Mannourie, whom he has never
+seen before.&nbsp; He sends forward Lady Raleigh to
+London&mdash;perhaps ashamed&mdash;as who would not have
+been?&mdash;to play the fool in that sweet presence; and with her
+good Captain King, who is to engage one Cotterell, an old servant
+of Raleigh&rsquo;s, to find a ship wherein to escape, if the
+worst comes to the worst.&nbsp; Cotterell sends King to an old
+boatswain of his, who owns a ketch.&nbsp; She is to lie off
+Tilbury; and so King waits Raleigh&rsquo;s arrival.&nbsp; What
+passed in the next four or five days will never be truly known,
+for our only account comes from two self-convicted villains,
+Stukely and Mannourie.&nbsp; On these details I shall not
+enter.&nbsp; First, because one cannot trust a word of them;
+secondly, because no one will wish to hear them who feels, as I
+do, how pitiable and painful is the sight of a great heart and
+mind utterly broken.&nbsp; Neither shall I spend time on
+Stukely&rsquo;s villanous treatment of Raleigh, for which he had
+a commission from James in writing; his pretending to help him to
+escape, his going down the Thames in a boat with him, his trying
+in vain to make honest King as great a rogue as himself.&nbsp;
+Like most rascalities, Stukely&rsquo;s conduct, even as he
+himself states it, is very obscure.&nbsp; All that we can see is,
+that Cotterell told Stukely everything: that Stukely bade
+Cotterell carry on the deceit; that Stukely had orders from
+headquarters to incite Raleigh to say or do something which might
+form a fresh ground of accusal; that, being a clumsy rogue, he
+failed, and fell back on abetting Raleigh&rsquo;s escape, as a
+last resource.&nbsp; Be it as it may, he throws off the mask as
+soon as Raleigh has done enough to prove an intent to escape;
+arrests him, and conducts him to the Tower.</p>
+<p>There two shameful months are spent in trying to find out some
+excuse for Raleigh&rsquo;s murder.&nbsp; Wilson is set over him
+as a spy; his letters to his wife are intercepted.&nbsp; Every
+art is used to extort a confession of a great plot with France,
+and every art fails utterly&mdash;simply, it seems to me, because
+there was no plot.&nbsp; Raleigh writes an apology, letters of
+entreaty, self-justification, what not; all, in my opinion, just
+and true enough; but like his speech on the scaffold, weak,
+confused&mdash;the product of a &lsquo;broken brain.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+However, his head must come off; and as a last resource, it must
+be taken off upon the sentence of fifteen years ago, and he who
+was condemned for plotting with Spain must die for plotting
+against her.&nbsp; It is a pitiable business: but as Osborne
+says, in a passage (p.108 of his Memoirs of James) for which one
+freely forgives him all his sins and lies, and they are
+many&mdash;&lsquo;As the foolish idolaters were wont to sacrifice
+the choicest of their children to the devil, so our king gave up
+his incomparable jewel to the will of this monster of ambition
+(the Spaniard), under the pretence of a superannuated
+transgression, contrary to the opinion of the more honest sort of
+gownsmen, who maintained that his Majesty&rsquo;s pardon lay
+inclusively in the commission he gave him on his setting out to
+sea; it being incongruous that he, who remained under the notion
+of one dead in the law, should as a general dispose of the lives
+of others, not being himself master of his own.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>But no matter.&nbsp; He must die.&nbsp; The Queen intercedes
+for him, as do all honest men: but in vain.&nbsp; He has
+twenty-four hours&rsquo; notice to prepare for death; eats a good
+breakfast; takes a cup of sack and a pipe; makes a rambling
+speech, in which one notes only the intense belief that he is an
+honest man, and the intense desire to make others believe so, in
+the very smallest matters; and then dies smilingly, as one weary
+of life.&nbsp; One makes no comment.&nbsp; Raleigh&rsquo;s life
+really ended on that day that poor Keymis returned from San
+Thom&eacute;.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>And then?</p>
+<p>As we said, Truth is stranger than fiction.&nbsp; No dramatist
+dare invent a &lsquo;poetic justice&rsquo; more perfect than fell
+upon the traitor.&nbsp; It is not always so, no doubt.&nbsp; God
+reserves many a greater sinner for that most awful of all
+punishments&mdash;impunity.&nbsp; But there are crises in a
+nation&rsquo;s life in which God makes terrible examples, to put
+before the most stupid and sensual the choice of Hercules, the
+upward road of life, the downward one which leads to the
+pit.&nbsp; Since the time of Pharaoh and the Red Sea host,
+history is full of such palpable, unmistakable revelations of the
+Divine Nemesis; and in England, too, at that moment, the crisis
+was there; and the judgment of God was revealed
+accordingly.&nbsp; Sir Lewis Stukely remained, it seems, at
+court; high in favour with James: but he found, nevertheless,
+that people looked darkly on him.&nbsp; Like many self-convicted
+rogues, he must needs thrust his head into his own shame; and one
+day he goes to good old Lord Charles Howard&rsquo;s house; for
+being Vice-Admiral of Devon, he has affairs with the old Armada
+hero.</p>
+<p>The old lion explodes in an unexpected roar.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Darest thou come into my presence, thou base fellow, who
+art reputed the common scorn and contempt of all men?&nbsp; Were
+it not in mine own house I would cudgel thee with my staff for
+presuming to speak to me!&rsquo;&nbsp; Stukely, his tail between
+his legs, goes off and complains to James.&nbsp; &lsquo;What
+should I do with him?&nbsp; Hang him?&nbsp; On my sawle, mon, if
+I hung all that spoke ill of thee, all the trees in the island
+were too few.&rsquo;&nbsp; Such is the gratitude of kings, thinks
+Stukely; and retires to write foolish pamphlets in
+self-justification, which, unfortunately for his memory, still
+remain to make bad worse.</p>
+<p>Within twelve months he, the rich and proud Vice-Admiral of
+Devon, with a shield of sixteen quarterings and the blood-royal
+in his veins, was detected debasing the King&rsquo;s coin within
+the precincts of the royal palace, together with his old
+accomplice Mannourie, who, being taken, confessed that his
+charges against Raleigh were false.&nbsp; He fled, a ruined man,
+back to his native county and his noble old seat of Affton; but
+At&eacute; is on the heels of such&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;Slowly she tracks him and sure, as a
+lyme-hound, sudden she grips him,<br />
+Crushing him, blind in his pride, for a sign and a terror to
+mortals.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>A terrible plebiscitum had been passed in the West country
+against the betrayer of its last Worthy.&nbsp; The gentlemen
+closed their doors against him; the poor refused him&mdash;so
+goes the legend&mdash;fire and water.&nbsp; Driven by the Furies,
+he fled from Affton, and wandered westward down the vale of Taw,
+away to Appledore, and there took boat, and out into the
+boundless Atlantic, over the bar, now crowded with shipping, for
+which Raleigh&rsquo;s genius had discovered a new trade and a new
+world.</p>
+<p>Sixteen miles to the westward, like a blue cloud on the
+horizon, rises the ultima Thule of Devon, the little isle of
+Lundy.&nbsp; There one outlying peak of granite, carrying up a
+shelf of slate upon its southern flank, has defied the waves, and
+formed an island some three miles long, desolate, flat-headed,
+fretted by every frost and storm, walled all round with four
+hundred feet of granite cliff, sacred only, then at least, to
+puffins and pirates.&nbsp; Over the single landing-place frowns
+from the cliff the keep of an old ruin, &lsquo;Moresco
+Castle,&rsquo; as they call it still, where some bold rover, Sir
+John de Moresco, in the times of the old Edwards, worked his
+works of darkness: a gray, weird, uncanny pile of moorstone,
+through which all the winds of heaven howl day and night.</p>
+<p>In a chamber of that ruin died Sir Lewis Stukely, Lord of
+Affton, cursing God and man.</p>
+<p>These things are true.&nbsp; Said I not well that reality is
+stranger than romance?</p>
+<p>But no Nemesis followed James.</p>
+<p>The answer will depend much upon what readers consider to be a
+Nemesis.&nbsp; If to have found England one of the greatest
+countries in Europe, and to have left it one of the most
+inconsiderable and despicable; if to be fooled by flatterers to
+the top of his bent, until he fancied himself all but a god,
+while he was not even a man, and could neither speak the truth,
+keep himself sober, nor look on a drawn sword without shrinking;
+if, lastly, to have left behind him a son who, in spite of many
+chivalrous instincts unknown to his father, had been so
+indoctrinated in that father&rsquo;s vices as to find it
+impossible to speak the truth even when it served his purpose; if
+all these things be no Nemesis, then none fell on James
+Stuart.</p>
+<p>But of that son, at least, the innocent blood was
+required.&nbsp; He, too, had his share in the sin.&nbsp; In Carew
+Raleigh&rsquo;s simple and manful petition to the Commons of
+England for the restoration of his inheritance we find a
+significant fact stated without one word of comment, bitter or
+otherwise.&nbsp; At Prince Henry&rsquo;s death the Sherborne
+lands had been given again to Carr, Lord Somerset.&nbsp; To him,
+too, &lsquo;the whirligig of time brought round its
+revenges,&rsquo; and he lost them when arraigned and condemned
+for poisoning Sir Thomas Overbury.&nbsp; Then Sir John Digby,
+afterwards Earl of Bristol, begged Sherborne of the King, and had
+it.&nbsp; Pembroke (Shakspeare&rsquo;s Pembroke) brought young
+Carew to court, hoping to move the tyrant&rsquo;s heart.&nbsp;
+James saw him and shuddered; perhaps conscience stricken, perhaps
+of mere cowardice.&nbsp; &lsquo;He looked like the ghost of his
+father,&rsquo; as he well might, to that guilty soul.&nbsp; Good
+Pembroke advised his young kinsman to travel, which he did till
+James&rsquo;s death in the next year.&nbsp; Then coming
+over&mdash;this is his own story&mdash;he asked of Parliament to
+be restored in blood, that he might inherit aught that might fall
+to him in England.&nbsp; His petition was read twice in the
+Lords.&nbsp; Whereon &lsquo;King Charles sent Sir James
+Fullarton, then of the bed-chamber, to Mr. Raleigh to command him
+to come to him; and being brought in, the King, after using him
+with great civility, notwithstanding told him plainly that when
+he was prince he had promised the Earl of Bristol to secure his
+title to Sherborne against the heirs of Sir Walter Raleigh;
+whereon the earl had given him, then prince, ten thousand pounds;
+that now he was bound to make good his promise, being king; that,
+therefore, unless he would quit his right and title to Sherborne,
+he neither could nor would pass his bill of
+restoration.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Young Raleigh, like a good Englishman, &lsquo;urged,&rsquo; he
+says, &lsquo;the justness of his cause; that he desired only the
+liberty of the subject, and to be left to the law, which was
+never denied any freeman.&rsquo;&nbsp; The King remained
+obstinate.&nbsp; His noble brother&rsquo;s love for the mighty
+dead weighed nothing with him, much less justice.&nbsp; Poor
+young Raleigh was forced to submit.&nbsp; The act for his
+restoration was passed, reserving Sherborne for Lord Bristol, and
+Charles patched up the affair by allowing to Lady Raleigh and her
+son after her a life pension of four hundred a year.</p>
+<p>Young Carew tells his story simply, and without a note of
+bitterness; though he professes his intent to range himself and
+his two sons for the future &lsquo;under the banner of the
+Commons of England,&rsquo; he may be a royalist for any word
+beside.&nbsp; Even where he mentions the awful curse of his
+mother, he only alludes to its fulfilment by&mdash;&lsquo;that
+which hath happened since to that royal family is too sad and
+disastrous for me to repeat, and yet too visible not to be
+discerned.&rsquo;&nbsp; We can have no doubt that he tells the
+exact truth.&nbsp; Indeed the whole story fits Charles&rsquo;s
+character to the smallest details.&nbsp; The want of any real
+sense of justice, combined with the false notion of honour; the
+implacable obstinacy; the contempt for that law by which alone he
+held his crown; the combination of unkingliness in commanding a
+private interview and shamelessness in confessing his own
+meanness&mdash;all these are true notes of the man whose
+deliberate suicide stands written, a warning to all bad rulers
+till the end of time.&nbsp; But he must have been a rogue early
+in life, and a needy rogue too.&nbsp; That ten thousand pounds of
+Lord Bristol&rsquo;s money should make many a sentimentalist
+reconsider&mdash;if, indeed, sentimentalists can be made to
+reconsider, or even to consider, anything&mdash;their notion of
+him as the incarnation of pious chivalry.</p>
+<p>At least the ten thousand pounds cost Charles dear.</p>
+<p>The widow&rsquo;s curse followed him home.&nbsp; Naseby fight
+and the Whitehall scaffold were surely God&rsquo;s judgment of
+such deeds, whatever man&rsquo;s may be.</p>
+<h2>FOOTNOTES</h2>
+<p><a name="footnote87"></a><a href="#citation87"
+class="footnote">[87]</a>&nbsp; <i>North British Review</i>, No.
+XLV.&mdash;1.&nbsp; &lsquo;Life of Sir Walter
+Raleigh.&rsquo;&nbsp; By P. Fraser Tytler, F.R.S.&nbsp; London,
+1853.&mdash;2.&nbsp; &lsquo;Raleigh&rsquo;s Discovery of
+Guiana.&rsquo;&nbsp; Edited by Sir Robert Schomburgk (Hakluyt
+Society), 1848.&mdash;3.&nbsp; &lsquo;Lord Bacon and Sir Walter
+Raleigh.&rsquo;&nbsp; By M. Napier.&nbsp; Cambridge,
+1853.&mdash;4.&nbsp; &lsquo;Raleigh&rsquo;s Works, with Lives by
+Oldys and Birch.&rsquo;&nbsp; Oxford, 1829&mdash;5.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Bishop Goodman&rsquo;s History of his own
+Times.&rsquo;&nbsp; London, 1839.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote95"></a><a href="#citation95"
+class="footnote">[95]</a>&nbsp; I especially entreat
+readers&rsquo; attention to two articles in vindication of the
+morals of Queen Elizabeth, in &lsquo;Fraser&rsquo;s
+Magazine&rsquo; of 1854; to one in the &lsquo;Westminster&rsquo;
+of 1854, on Mary Stuart; and one in the same of 1852, on
+England&rsquo;s Forgotten Worthies, by a pen now happily well
+known in English literature, Mr. Anthony Froude&rsquo;s.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote138"></a><a href="#citation138"
+class="footnote">[138]</a>&nbsp; Since this was written, a
+similar Amazonian bodyguard has been discovered, I hear, in
+Pegu.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote155"></a><a href="#citation155"
+class="footnote">[155]</a>&nbsp; It is to be found in a MS. of
+1596.</p>
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME***</p>
+<pre>
+
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+Title: Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from
+       "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays"
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+Author: Charles Kingsley
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+Puritans and Other Historical Essays" edition by David Price, email
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+
+
+
+
+SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND HIS TIME {1}
+
+by Charles Kingsley
+
+
+
+
+'Truth is stranger than fiction.'  A trite remark.  We all say it
+again and again:  but how few of us believe it!  How few of us, when
+we read the history of heroical times and heroical men, take the
+story simply as it stands!  On the contrary, we try to explain it
+away; to prove it all not to have been so very wonderful; to impute
+accident, circumstance, mean and commonplace motives; to lower every
+story down to the level of our own littleness, or what we (unjustly
+to ourselves and to the God who is near us all) choose to consider
+our level; to rationalise away all the wonders, till we make them at
+last impossible, and give up caring to believe them; and prove to our
+own melancholy satisfaction that Alexander conquered the world with a
+pin, in his sleep, by accident.
+
+And yet in this mood, as in most, there is a sort of left-handed
+truth involved.  These heroes are not so far removed from us after
+all.  They were men of like passions with ourselves, with the same
+flesh about them, the same spirit within them, the same world
+outside, the same devil beneath, the same God above.  They and their
+deeds were not so very wonderful.  Every child who is born into the
+world is just as wonderful, and, for aught we know, might, 'mutatis
+mutandis, do just as wonderful deeds.  If accident and circumstance
+helped them, the same may help us:  have helped us, if we will look
+back down our years, far more than we have made use of.
+
+They were men, certainly, very much of our own level:  but may we not
+put that level somewhat too low?  They were certainly not what we
+are; for if they had been, they would have done no more than we:  but
+is not a man's real level not what he is, but what he can be, and
+therefore ought to be?  No doubt they were compact of good and evil,
+just as we:  but so was David, no man more; though a more heroical
+personage (save One) appears not in all human records but may not the
+secret of their success have been that, on the whole (though they
+found it a sore battle), they refused the evil and chose the good?
+It is true, again, that their great deeds may be more or less
+explained, attributed to laws, rationalised:  but is explaining
+always explaining away?  Is it to degrade a thing to attribute it to
+a law?  And do you do anything more by 'rationalising' men's deeds
+than prove that they were rational men; men who saw certain fixed
+laws, and obeyed them, and succeeded thereby, according to the
+Baconian apophthegm, that nature is conquered by obeying her?
+
+But what laws?
+
+To that question, perhaps, the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the
+Hebrews will give the best answer, where it says, that by faith were
+done all the truly great deeds, and by faith lived all the truly
+great men who have ever appeared on earth.
+
+There are, of course, higher and lower degrees of this faith; its
+object is one more or less worthy:  but it is in all cases the belief
+in certain unseen eternal facts, by keeping true to which a man must
+in the long run succeed.  Must; because he is more or less in harmony
+with heaven, and earth, and the Maker thereof, and has therefore
+fighting on his side a great portion of the universe; perhaps the
+whole; for as he who breaks one commandment of the law is guilty of
+the whole, because he denies the fount of all law, so he who with his
+whole soul keeps one commandment of it is likely to be in harmony
+with the whole, because he testifies of the fount of all law.
+
+I shall devote a few pages to the story of an old hero, of a man of
+like passions with ourselves; of one who had the most intense and
+awful sense of the unseen laws, and succeeded mightily thereby; of
+one who had hard struggles with a flesh and blood which made him at
+times forget those laws, and failed mightily thereby; of one whom God
+so loved that He caused each slightest sin, as with David, to bring
+its own punishment with it, that while the flesh was delivered over
+to Satan, the man himself might be saved in the Day of the Lord; of
+one, finally, of whom nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a
+thousand may say, 'I have done worse deeds than he:  but I have never
+done as good ones.'
+
+In a poor farm-house among the pleasant valleys of South Devon, among
+the white apple-orchards and the rich water-meadows, and the red
+fallows and red kine, in the year of grace 1552, a boy was born, as
+beautiful as day, and christened Walter Raleigh.  His father was a
+gentleman of ancient blood:  few older in the land:  but,
+impoverished, he had settled down upon the wreck of his estate, in
+that poor farm-house.  No record of him now remains; but he must have
+been a man worth knowing and worth loving, or he would not have won
+the wife he did.  She was a Champernoun, proudest of Norman squires,
+and could probably boast of having in her veins the blood of
+Courtneys, Emperors of Byzant.  She had been the wife of the famous
+knight Sir Otho Gilbert, and lady of Compton Castle, and had borne
+him three brave sons, John, Humphrey, and Adrian; all three destined
+to win knighthood also in due time, and the two latter already giving
+promises, which they well fulfilled, of becoming most remarkable men
+of their time.  And yet the fair Champernoun, at her husband's death,
+had chosen to wed Mr. Raleigh, and share life with him in the little
+farm-house at Hayes.  She must have been a grand woman, if the law
+holds true that great men always have great mothers; an especially
+grand woman, indeed; for few can boast of having borne to two
+different husbands such sons as she bore.  No record, as far as we
+know, remains of her; nor of her boy's early years.  One can imagine
+them, nevertheless.
+
+Just as he awakes to consciousness, the Smithfield fires are
+extinguished.  He can recollect, perhaps, hearing of the burning of
+the Exeter martyrs:  and he does not forget it; no one forgot or
+dared forget it in those days.  He is brought up in the simple and
+manly, yet high-bred ways of English gentlemen in the times of 'an
+old courtier of the Queen's.'  His two elder half-brothers also,
+living some thirty miles away, in the quaint and gloomy towers of
+Compton Castle, amid the apple-orchards of Torbay, are men as noble
+as ever formed a young lad's taste.  Humphrey and Adrian Gilbert, who
+afterwards, both of them, rise to knighthood, are--what are they
+not?--soldiers, scholars, Christians, discoverers and 'planters' of
+foreign lands, geographers, alchemists, miners, Platonical
+philosophers; many-sided, high-minded men, not without fantastic
+enthusiasm; living heroic lives, and destined, one of them, to die a
+heroic death.  From them Raleigh's fancy has been fired, and his
+appetite for learning quickened, while he is yet a daring boy,
+fishing in the gray trout-brooks, or going up with his father to the
+Dartmoor hills to hunt the deer with hound and horn, amid the wooded
+gorges of Holne, or over the dreary downs of Hartland Warren, and the
+cloud-capt thickets of Cator's Beam, and looking down from thence
+upon the far blue southern sea, wondering when he shall sail thereon,
+to fight the Spaniard, and discover, like Columbus, some fairy-land
+of gold and gems.
+
+For before this boy's mind, as before all intense English minds of
+that day, rise, from the first, three fixed ideas, which yet are but
+one--the Pope, the Spaniard, and America.
+
+The two first are the sworn and internecine enemies (whether they
+pretend a formal peace or not) of Law and Freedom, Bible and Queen,
+and all that makes an Englishman's life dear to him.  Are they not
+the incarnations of Antichrist?  Their Moloch sacrifices flame
+through all lands.  The earth groans because of them, and refuses to
+cover the blood of her slain.  And America is the new world of
+boundless wonder and beauty, wealth and fertility, to which these two
+evil powers arrogate an exclusive and divine right; and God has
+delivered it into their hands; and they have done evil therein with
+all their might, till the story of their greed and cruelty rings
+through all earth and heaven.  Is this the will of God?  Will he not
+avenge for these things, as surely as he is the Lord who executeth
+justice and judgment in the earth?
+
+These are the young boy's thoughts.  These were his thoughts for
+sixty-six eventful years.  In whatsoever else he wavered, he never
+wavered in that creed.  He learnt it in his boyhood, while he read
+'Fox's Martyrs' beside his mother's knee.  He learnt it as a lad,
+when he saw his neighbours Hawkins and Drake changed by Spanish
+tyranny and treachery from peaceful merchantmen into fierce scourges
+of God.  He learnt it scholastically, from fathers and divines, as an
+Oxford scholar, in days when Oxford was a Protestant indeed, in whom
+there was no guile.  He learnt it when he went over, at seventeen
+years old, with his gallant kinsman Henry Champernoun, and his band
+of a hundred gentlemen volunteers, to flesh his maiden sword in
+behalf of the persecuted French Protestants.  He learnt it as he
+listened to the shrieks of the San Bartholomew; he learnt it as he
+watched the dragonnades, the tortures, the massacres of the
+Netherlands, and fought manfully under Norris in behalf of those
+victims of 'the Pope and Spain.'  He preached it in far stronger and
+wiser words than I can express it for him, in that noble tract of
+1591, on Sir Richard Grenville's death at the Azores--a Tyrtaean
+trumpet-blast such as has seldom rung in human ears; he discussed it
+like a cool statesman in his pamphlet of 1596, on 'A War with Spain.'
+He sacrificed for it the last hopes of his old age, the wreck of his
+fortunes, his just recovered liberty; and he died with the old God's
+battle-cry upon his lips, when it awoke no response from the hearts
+of a coward, profligate, and unbelieving generation.  This is the
+background, the keynote of the man's whole life.  If we lose the
+recollection of it, and content ourselves by slurring it over in the
+last pages of his biography with some half-sneer about his putting,
+like the rest of Elizabeth's old admirals, 'the Spaniard, the Pope,
+and the Devil' in the same category, then we shall understand very
+little about Raleigh; though, of course, we shall save ourselves the
+trouble of pronouncing as to whether the Spaniard and the Pope were
+really in the same category as the devil; or, indeed, which might be
+equally puzzling to a good many historians of the last century and a
+half, whether there be any devil at all.
+
+The books which I have chosen to head this review are all of them
+more or less good, with one exception, and that is Bishop Goodman's
+Memoirs, on which much stress has been lately laid, as throwing light
+on various passages of Raleigh, Essex, Cecil, and James's lives.
+Having read it carefully, I must say plainly, that I think the book
+an altogether foolish, pedantic, and untrustworthy book, without any
+power of insight or gleam of reason; without even the care to be
+self-consistent; having but one object, the whitewashing of James,
+and of every noble lord whom the bishop has ever known:  but in
+whitewashing each, the poor old flunkey so bespatters all the rest of
+his pets, that when the work is done, the whole party look, if
+possible, rather dirtier than before.  And so I leave Bishop Goodman.
+
+Mr. Fraser Tytler's book is well known; and it is on the whole a good
+one; because he really loves and admires the man of whom he writes:
+but he is sometimes careless as to authorities, and too often makes
+the wish father to the thought.  Moreover, he has the usual sentiment
+about Mary Queen of Scots, and the usual scandal about Elizabeth,
+which is simply anathema; and which prevents his really seeing the
+time in which Raleigh lived, and the element in which he moved.  This
+sort of talk is happily dying out just now; but no one can approach
+the history of the Elizabethan age (perhaps of any age) without
+finding that truth is all but buried under mountains of dirt and
+chaff--an Augaean stable, which, perhaps, will never be swept clean.
+Yet I have seen, with great delight, several attempts toward removal
+of the said superstratum of dirt and chaff from the Elizabethan
+histories, in several articles, all evidently from the same pen (and
+that one, more perfectly master of English prose than any man
+living), in the 'Westminster Review' and 'Fraser's Magazine.' {2}
+
+Sir Robert Schomburgk's edition of the Guiana Voyage contains an
+excellent Life of Raleigh, perhaps the best yet written; of which I
+only complain, when it gives in to the stock-charges against Raleigh,
+as it were at second-hand, and just because they are stock-charges,
+and when, too, the illustrious editor (unable to conceal his
+admiration of a discoverer in many points so like himself) takes all
+through an apologetic tone of 'Please don't laugh at me.  I daresay
+it is very foolish; but I can't help loving the man.'
+
+Mr. Napier's little book is a reprint of two 'Edinburgh Review'
+articles on Bacon and Raleigh.  The first, a learned statement of
+facts in answer to some unwisdom of a 'Quarterly' reviewer (possibly
+an Oxford Aristotelian; for 'we think we do know that sweet Roman
+hand').  It is clear, accurate, convincing, complete.  There is no
+more to be said about the matter, save that facts are stubborn
+things.
+
+The article on Raleigh is very valuable; first, because Mr. Napier
+has had access to many documents unknown to former biographers; and
+next, because he clears Raleigh completely from the old imputation of
+deceit about the Guiana mine, as well as of other minor charges.
+With his general opinion of Raleigh's last and fatal Guiana voyage, I
+have the misfortune to differ from him toto coelo, on the strength of
+the very documents which he quotes.  But Mr. Napier is always
+careful, always temperate, and always just, except where he, as I
+think, does not enter into the feelings of the man whom he is
+analysing.  Let readers buy the book (it will tell them a hundred
+things they do not know) and be judge between Mr. Napier and me.
+
+In the meanwhile, one cannot help watching with a smile how good old
+Time's scrubbing-brush, which clears away paint and whitewash from
+church pillars, does the same by such characters as Raleigh's.  After
+each fresh examination, some fresh count in the hundred-headed
+indictment breaks down.  The truth is, that as people begin to
+believe more in nobleness, and to gird up their loins to the doing of
+noble deeds, they discover more nobleness in others.  Raleigh's
+character was in its lowest nadir in the days of Voltaire and Hume.
+What shame to him?  For so were more sacred characters than his.
+Shall the disciple be above his master? especially when that disciple
+was but too inconsistent, and gave occasion to the uncircumcised to
+blaspheme?  But Cayley, after a few years, refutes triumphantly
+Hume's silly slanders.  He is a stupid writer:  but he has sense
+enough, being patient, honest, and loving, to do that.
+
+Mr. Fraser Tytler shovels away a little more of the dirt-heap; Mr.
+Napier clears him (for which we owe him many thanks), by simple
+statement of facts, from the charge of having deserted and neglected
+his Virginia colonists; Humboldt and Schomburgk clear him from the
+charge of having lied about Guiana; and so on; each successive writer
+giving in generally on merest hearsay to the general complaint
+against him, either from fear of running counter to big names, or
+from mere laziness, and yet absolving him from that particular charge
+of which his own knowledge enables him to judge.  In the trust that I
+may be able to clear him from a few more charges, I write these
+pages, premising that I do not profess to have access to any new and
+recondite documents.  I merely take the broad facts of the story from
+documents open to all; and comment on them as every man should wish
+his own life to be commented on.
+
+But I do so on a method which I cannot give up; and that is the Bible
+method.  I say boldly that historians have hitherto failed in
+understanding not only Raleigh and Elizabeth, but nine-tenths of the
+persons and facts in his day, because they will not judge them by the
+canons which the Bible lays down--by which I mean not only the New
+Testament but the Old, which, as English Churchmen say, and Scotch
+Presbyterians have ere now testified with sacred blood, is 'not
+contrary to the New.'
+
+Mr. Napier has a passage about Raleigh for which I am sorry, coming
+as it does from a countryman of John Knox.  'Society, it would seem,
+was yet in a state in which such a man could seriously plead, that
+the madness he feigned was justified' (his last word is unfair, for
+Raleigh only hopes that it is no sin) 'by the example of David, King
+of Israel.'  What a shocking state of society when men actually
+believed their Bibles, not too little, but too much.  For my part, I
+think that if poor dear Raleigh had considered the example of David a
+little more closely, he need never have feigned madness at all; and
+that his error lay quite in an opposite direction from looking on the
+Bible heroes, David especially, as too sure models.  At all events,
+let us try Raleigh by the very scriptural standard which he himself
+lays down, not merely in this case unwisely, but in his 'History of
+the World' more wisely than any historian whom I have ever read; and
+say, 'Judged as the Bible taught our Puritan forefathers to judge
+every man, the character is intelligible enough; tragic, but noble
+and triumphant:  judged as men have been judged in history for the
+last hundred years, by hardly any canon save those of the private
+judgment, which philosophic cant, maudlin sentimentality, or fear of
+public opinion, may happen to have forged, the man is a phenomenon,
+only less confused, abnormal, suspicious than his biographers'
+notions about him.'  Again I say, I have not solved the problem:  but
+it will be enough if I make some think it both soluble and worth
+solving.  Let us look round, then, and see into what sort of a
+country, into what sort of a world, the young adventurer is going
+forth, at seventeen years of age, to seek his fortune.
+
+Born in 1552, his young life has sprung up and grown with the young
+life of England.  The earliest fact, perhaps, which he can recollect
+is the flash of joy on every face which proclaims that Mary Tudor is
+dead, and Elizabeth reigns at last.  As he grows, the young man sees
+all the hope and adoration of the English people centre in that
+wondrous maid, and his own centre in her likewise.  He had been base
+had he been otherwise.  She comes to the throne with such a prestige
+as never sovereign came since the days when Isaiah sang his paean
+over young Hezekiah's accession.  Young, learned, witty, beautiful
+(as with such a father and mother she could not help being), with an
+expression of countenance remarkable (I speak of those early days)
+rather for its tenderness and intellectual depth than its strength,
+she comes forward as the champion of the Reformed Faith, the
+interpretress of the will and conscience of the people of England--
+herself persecuted all but to the death, and purified by affliction,
+like gold tried in the fire.  She gathers round her, one by one,
+young men of promise, and trains them herself to their work.  And
+they fulfil it, and serve her, and grow gray-headed in her service,
+working as faithfully, as righteously, as patriotically, as men ever
+worked on earth.  They are her 'favourites'; because they are men who
+deserve favour; men who count not their own lives dear to themselves
+for the sake of the queen and of that commonweal which their hearts
+and reasons tell them is one with her.  They are still men, though;
+and some of them have their grudgings and envyings against each
+other:  she keeps the balance even between them, on the whole,
+skilfully, gently, justly, in spite of weaknesses and prejudices,
+without which she had been more than human.  Some have their
+conceited hopes of marrying her, becoming her masters.  She rebukes
+and pardons.  'Out of the dust I took you, sir! go and do your duty,
+humbly and rationally, henceforth, or into the dust I trample you
+again!'  And they reconsider themselves, and obey.  But many, or most
+of them, are new men, country gentlemen, and younger sons.  She will
+follow her father's plan, of keeping down the overgrown feudal
+princes, who, though brought low by the wars of the Roses, are still
+strong enough to throw everything into confusion by resisting at once
+the Crown and Commons.  Proud nobles reply by rebellion, come down
+southwards with ignorant Popish henchmen at their backs; will restore
+Popery, marry the Queen of Scots, make the middle class and the
+majority submit to the feudal lords and the minority.  Elizabeth,
+with her 'aristocracy of genius,' is too strong for them:  the
+people's heart is with her, and not with dukes.  Each mine only blows
+up its diggers; and there are many dry eyes at their ruin.  Her
+people ask her to marry.  She answers gently, proudly, eloquently:
+'She is married--the people of England is her husband.  She has vowed
+it.'  And yet there is a tone of sadness in that great speech.  Her
+woman's heart yearns after love, after children; after a strong bosom
+on which to repose that weary head.  More than once she is ready to
+give way.  But she knows that it must not be.  She has her reward.
+'Whosoever gives up husband or child for my sake and the gospel's,
+shall receive them back a hundredfold in this present life,' as
+Elizabeth does.  Her reward is an adoration from high and low, which
+is to us now inexplicable, impossible, overstrained, which was not so
+then.
+
+For the whole nation is in a mood of exaltation; England is
+fairyland; the times are the last days--strange, terrible, and
+glorious.  At home are Jesuits plotting; dark, crooked-pathed, going
+up and down in all manner of disguises, doing the devil's work if men
+ever did it; trying to sow discord between man and man, class and
+class; putting out books full of filthy calumnies, declaring the
+queen illegitimate, excommunicate, a usurper; English law null, and
+all state appointments void, by virtue of a certain 'Bull'; and
+calling on the subjects to rebellion and assassination, even on the
+bedchamber--woman to do to her 'as Judith did to Holofernes.'  She
+answers by calm contempt.  Now and then Burleigh and Walsingham catch
+some of the rogues, and they meet their deserts; but she for the most
+part lets them have their way.  God is on her side, and she will not
+fear what man can do to her.
+
+Abroad, the sky is dark and wild, and yet full of fantastic
+splendour.  Spain stands strong and awful, a rising world-tyranny,
+with its dark-souled Cortezes and Pizarros, Alvas, Don Johns, and
+Parmas, men whose path is like the lava stream; who go forth slaying
+and to slay, in the name of their gods, like those old Assyrian
+conquerors on the walls of Nineveh, with tutelary genii flying above
+their heads, mingled with the eagles who trail the entrails of the
+slain.  By conquest, intermarriage, or intrigue, she has made all the
+southern nations her vassals or her tools; close to our own shores,
+the Netherlands are struggling vainly for their liberties; abroad,
+the Western Islands, and the whole trade of Africa and India, will in
+a few years be hers.  And already the Pope, whose 'most Catholic' and
+faithful servant she is, has repaid her services in the cause of
+darkness by the gift of the whole New World--a gift which she has
+claimed by cruelties and massacres unexampled since the days of
+Timour and Zinghis Khan.  There she spreads and spreads, as Drake
+found her picture in the Government House at St. Domingo, the horse
+leaping through the globe, and underneath, Non sufficit orbis.  Who
+shall withstand her, armed as she is with the three-edged sword of
+Antichrist--superstition, strength, and gold?
+
+English merchantmen, longing for some share in the riches of the New
+World, go out to trade in Guinea, in the Azores, in New Spain:  and
+are answered by shot and steel.  'Both policy and religion,' as Fray
+Simon says, fifty years afterwards, 'forbid Christians to trade with
+heretics!'  'Lutheran devils, and enemies of God,' are the answer
+they get in words:  in deeds, whenever they have a superior force
+they may be allowed to land, and to water their ships, even to trade,
+under exorbitant restrictions:  but generally this is merely a trap
+for them.  Forces are hurried up; and the English are attacked
+treacherously, in spite of solemn compacts; for 'No faith need be
+kept with heretics.'  And woe to them if any be taken prisoners, even
+wrecked.  The galleys, and the rack, and the stake are their certain
+doom; for the Inquisition claims the bodies and souls of heretics all
+over the world, and thinks it sin to lose its own.  A few years of
+such wrong raise questions in the sturdy English heart.  What right
+have these Spaniards to the New World?  The Pope's gift?  Why, he
+gave it by the same authority by which he claims the whole world.
+The formula used when an Indian village is sacked is, that God gave
+the whole world to St. Peter, and that he has given it to his
+successors, and they the Indies to the King of Spain.  To acknowledge
+that lie would be to acknowledge the very power by which the Pope
+claims a right to depose Queen Elizabeth, and give her dominions to
+whomsoever he will.  A fico for bulls!
+
+By possession, then?  That may hold for Mexico, Peru, New Grenada,
+Paraguay, which have been colonised; though they were gained by means
+which make every one concerned in conquering them worthy of the
+gallows; and the right is only that of the thief to the purse, whose
+owner he has murdered.  But as for the rest--Why the Spaniard has not
+colonised, even explored, one-fifth of the New World, not even one-
+fifth of the coast.  Is the existence of a few petty factories, often
+hundreds of miles apart, at a few river-mouths to give them a claim
+to the whole intermediate coast, much less to the vast unknown tracts
+inside?  We will try that.  If they appeal to the sword, so be it.
+The men are treacherous robbers; we will indemnify ourselves for our
+losses, and God defend the right.
+
+So argued the English; and so sprung up that strange war of
+reprisals, in which, for eighteen years, it was held that there was
+no peace between England and Spain beyond the line, i.e., beyond the
+parallel of longitude where the Pope's gift of the western world was
+said to begin; and, as the quarrel thickened and neared, extended to
+the Azores, Canaries, and coasts of Africa, where English and
+Spaniards flew at each other as soon as seen, mutually and by common
+consent, as natural enemies, each invoking God in the battle with
+Antichrist.
+
+Into such a world as this goes forth young Raleigh, his heart full of
+chivalrous worship for England's tutelary genius, his brain aflame
+with the true miracles of the new-found Hesperides, full of vague
+hopes, vast imaginations, and consciousness of enormous power.  And
+yet he is no wayward dreamer, unfit for this work-day world.  With a
+vein of song 'most lofty, insolent, and passionate,' indeed unable to
+see aught without a poetic glow over the whole, he is eminently
+practical, contented to begin at the beginning that he may end at the
+end; one who could 'toil terribly,' 'who always laboured at the
+matter in hand as if he were born only for that.'  Accordingly, he
+sets to work faithfully and stoutly, to learn his trade of
+soldiering, and learns it in silence and obscurity.  He shares (it
+seems) in the retreat at Moncontour, and is by at the death of Conde,
+and toils on for five years, marching and skirmishing, smoking the
+enemy out of mountain-caves in Languedoc, and all the wild work of
+war.  During the San Bartholomew massacre we hear nothing of him;
+perhaps he took refuge with Sidney and others in Walsingham's house.
+No records of these years remain, save a few scattered reminiscences
+in his works, which mark the shrewd, observant eye of the future
+statesman.
+
+When he returned we know not.  We trace him, in 1576, by some verses
+prefixed to Gascoigne's satire, the 'Steele Glass,' solid, stately,
+epigrammatic, 'by Walter Rawley of the Middle Temple.'  The style is
+his; spelling of names matters nought in days in which a man would
+spell his own name three different ways in one document.
+
+Gascoigne, like Raleigh, knew Lord Grey of Wilton, and most men about
+town too; and had been a soldier abroad, like Raleigh, probably with
+him.  It seems to have been the fashion for young idlers to lodge
+among the Templars; indeed, toward the end of the century, they had
+to be cleared out, as crowding the wigs and gowns too much; and
+perhaps proving noisy neighbours, as Raleigh may have done.  To this
+period may be referred, probably, his Justice done on Mr. Charles
+Chester (Ben Jonson's Carlo Buffone), 'a perpetual talker, and made a
+noise like a drum in a room; so one time, at a tavern, Raleigh beats
+him and seals up his mouth, his upper and nether beard, with hard
+wax.'  For there is a great laugh in Raleigh's heart, a genial
+contempt of asses; and one that will make him enemies hereafter:
+perhaps shorten his days.
+
+One hears of him next, but only by report, in the Netherlands under
+Norris, where the nucleus of the English line (especially of its
+musquetry) was training.  For Don John of Austria intends not only to
+crush the liberties and creeds of the Flemings, but afterwards to
+marry the Queen of Scots, and conquer England:  and Elizabeth,
+unwillingly and slowly, for she cannot stomach rebels, has sent men
+and money to the States to stop Don John in time; which the valiant
+English and Scotch do on Lammas day, 1578, and that in a fashion till
+then unseen in war.  For coming up late and panting, and 'being more
+sensible of a little heat of the sun than of any cold fear of death,'
+they throw off their armour and clothes, and, in their shirts (not
+over-clean, one fears), give Don John's rashness such a rebuff, that
+two months more see that wild meteor, with lost hopes and tarnished
+fame, lie down and vanish below the stormy horizon.  In these days,
+probably, it is that he knew Colonel Bingham, a soldier of fortune,
+of a 'fancy high and wild, too desultory and over-voluble,' who had,
+among his hundred and one schemes, one for the plantation of America
+as poor Sir Thomas Stukely (whom Raleigh must have known well), uncle
+of the traitor Lewis, had for the peopling of Florida.
+
+Raleigh returns.  Ten years has he been learning his soldier's trade
+in silence.  He will take a lesson in seamanship next.  The court may
+come in time:  for by now the poor squire's younger son must have
+discovered--perhaps even too fully--that he is not as other men are;
+that he can speak, and watch, and dare, and endure, as none around
+him can do.  However, there are 'good adventures toward,' as the
+'Morte d'Arthur' would say; and he will off with his half-brother
+Humphrey Gilbert to carry out his patent for planting Meta Incognita-
+-'The Unknown Goal,' as Queen Elizabeth has named it--which will
+prove to be too truly and fatally unknown.  In a latitude south of
+England, and with an Italian summer, who can guess that the winter
+will outfreeze Russia itself?  The merchant-seaman, like the
+statesman, had yet many a thing to learn.  Instead of smiling at our
+forefathers' ignorance, let us honour the men who bought knowledge
+for us their children at the price of lives nobler than our own.
+
+So Raleigh goes on his voyage with Humphrey Gilbert, to carry out the
+patent for discovering and planting in Meta Incognita; but the voyage
+prospers not.  A 'smart brush with the Spaniards' sends them home
+again, with the loss of Morgan, their best captain, and 'a tall
+ship'; and Meta Incognita is forgotten for a while; but not the
+Spaniards.  Who are these who forbid all English, by virtue of the
+Pope's bull, to cross the Atlantic?  That must be settled hereafter;
+and Raleigh, ever busy, is off to Ireland to command a company in
+that 'common weal, or rather common woe', as he calls it in a letter
+to Leicester.  Two years and more pass here; and all the records of
+him which remain are of a man valiant, daring, and yet prudent beyond
+his fellows.  He hates his work, and is not on too good terms with
+stern and sour, but brave and faithful Lord Grey; but Lord Grey is
+Leicester's friend, and Raleigh works patiently under him, like a
+sensible man, just because he is Leicester's friend.  Some modern
+gentleman of note--I forget who, and do not care to recollect--says
+that Raleigh's 'prudence never bore any proportion to his genius.'
+The next biographer we open accuses him of being too calculating,
+cunning, timeserving; and so forth.  Perhaps both are true.  The
+man's was a character very likely to fall alternately into either
+sin--doubtless did so a hundred times.  Perhaps both are false.  The
+man's character was, on occasion, certain to rise above both faults.
+We have evidence that he did so his whole life long.
+
+He is tired of Ireland at last:  nothing goes right there:- When has
+it?  Nothing is to be done there.  That which is crooked cannot be
+made straight, and that which is wanting cannot be numbered.  He
+comes to London and to court.  But how?  By spreading his cloak over
+a muddy place for Queen Elizabeth to step on?  It is very likely to
+be a true story; but biographers have slurred over a few facts in
+their hurry to carry out their theory of 'favourites,' and to prove
+that Elizabeth took up Raleigh on the same grounds that a boarding-
+school miss might have done.  Not that I deny the cloak story to be a
+very pretty story; perhaps it justifies, taken alone, Elizabeth's
+fondness for him.  There may have been self-interest in it; we are
+bound, as 'men of the world,' to impute the dirtiest motive that we
+can find; but how many self-interested men do we know who would have
+had quickness and daring to do such a thing?  Men who are thinking
+about themselves are not generally either so quick-witted, or so
+inclined to throw away a good cloak, when by much scraping and saving
+they have got one.  I never met a cunning, selfish, ambitious man who
+would have done such a thing.  The reader may; but even if he has, we
+must ask him, for Queen Elizabeth's sake, to consider that this young
+Quixote is the close relation of three of the finest public men then
+living, Champernoun, Gilbert, and Carew.  That he is a friend of
+Sidney, a pet of Leicester; that he has left behind him at Oxford,
+and brought with him from Ireland, the reputation of being a rara
+avis, a new star in the firmament; that he had been a soldier in her
+Majesty's service (and in one in which she has a peculiar private
+interest) for twelve years; that he has held her commission as one of
+the triumvirate for governing Munster, and has been the commander of
+the garrison at Cork; and that it is possible that she may have heard
+something of him before he threw his cloak under her feet, especially
+as there has been some controversy (which we have in vain tried to
+fathom) between him and Lord Grey about that terrible Smerwick
+slaughter; of the results of which we know little, but that Raleigh,
+being called in question about it in London, made such good play with
+his tongue, that his reputation as an orator and a man of talent was
+fixed once and for ever.
+
+Within the twelve months he is sent on some secret diplomatic mission
+about the Anjou marriage; he is in fact now installed in his place as
+'a favourite.'  And why not?  If a man is found to be wise and witty,
+ready and useful, able to do whatsoever he is put to, why is a
+sovereign, who has eyes to see the man's worth and courage to use it,
+to be accused of I know not what, because the said man happens to be
+good-looking?
+
+Now comes the turning-point of Raleigh's life.  What does he intend
+to be?  Soldier, statesman, scholar, or sea-adventurer?  He takes the
+most natural, yet not the wisest course.  He will try and be all four
+at once.  He has intellect for it; by worldly wisdom he may have
+money for it also.  Even now he has contrived (no one can tell
+whence) to build a good bark of two hundred tons, and send her out
+with Humphrey Gilbert on his second and fatal voyage.  Luckily for
+Raleigh she deserts and comes home, while not yet out of the Channel,
+or she surely had gone the way of the rest of Gilbert's squadron.
+Raleigh, of course, loses money by the failure, as well as the hopes
+which he had grounded on his brother's Transatlantic viceroyalty.
+And a bitter pang it must have been to him to find himself bereft of
+that pure and heroic counsellor just at his entering into life.  But
+with the same elasticity which sent him to the grave, he is busy
+within six months in a fresh expedition.  If Meta Incognita be not
+worth planting, there must be, so Raleigh thinks, a vast extent of
+coast between it and Florida, which is more genial in climate,
+perhaps more rich in produce; and he sends Philip Amadas and Arthur
+Barlow to look for the same, and not in vain.
+
+On these Virginian discoveries I shall say but little.  Those who
+wish to enjoy them should read them in all their naive freshness in
+the originals; and they will subscribe to S. T. Coleridge's dictum,
+that no one nowadays can write travels as well as the old worthies
+who figure in Hakluyt and Purchas.
+
+But to return to the question--What does this man intend to be?  A
+discoverer and colonist; a vindicator of some part at least of
+America from Spanish claims?  Perhaps not altogether:  else he would
+have gone himself to Virginia, at least the second voyage, instead of
+sending others.  But here, it seems, is the fatal, and yet pardonable
+mistake, which haunts the man throughout.  He tries to be too many
+men at once.  Fatal:  because, though he leaves his trace on more
+things than one man is wont to do, he, strictly speaking, conquers
+nothing, brings nothing to a consummation.  Virginia, Guiana, the
+'History of the World,' his own career as a statesman--as dictator
+(for he might have been dictator had he chosen)--all are left
+unfinished.  And yet most pardonable; for if a man feels that he can
+do many different things, how hard to teach himself that he must not
+do them all!  How hard to say to himself, 'I must cut off the right
+hand, and pluck out the right eye.  I must be less than myself, in
+order really to be anything.  I must concentrate my powers on one
+subject, and that perhaps by no means the most seemingly noble or
+useful, still less the most pleasant, and forego so many branches of
+activity in which I might be so distinguished, so useful.'  This is a
+hard lesson.  Raleigh took just sixty-six years learning it; and had
+to carry the result of his experience to the other side of the dark
+river, for there was no time left to use it on this side.  Some
+readers may have learnt the lesson already.  If so, happy and blessed
+are they.  But let them not therefore exalt themselves above Walter
+Raleigh; for that lesson is, of course, soonest learnt by the man who
+can excel in few things, later by him who can excel in many, and
+latest of all by him who, like Raleigh, can excel in all.
+
+Few details remain concerning the earlier court days of Raleigh.  He
+rises rapidly, as we have seen.  He has an estate given him in
+Ireland, near his friend Spenser, where he tries to do well and
+wisely, colonising, tilling, and planting it:  but like his Virginia
+expeditions, principally at second hand.  For he has swallowed (there
+is no denying it) the painted bait.  He will discover, he will
+colonise, he will do all manner of beautiful things, at second hand:
+but he himself will be a courtier.  It is very tempting.  Who would
+not, at the age of thirty, have wished to have been one of that
+chosen band of geniuses and heroes whom Elizabeth had gathered round
+her?  Who would not, at the age of thirty, have given his pound of
+flesh to be captain of her guard, and to go with her whithersoever
+she went?  It is not merely the intense gratification to carnal
+vanity--which if any man denies or scoffs at, always mark him down as
+especially guilty--which is to be considered; but the real, actual
+honour, in the mind of one who looked on Elizabeth as the most
+precious and glorious being which the earth had seen for centuries.
+To be appreciated by her; to be loved by her; to serve her; to guard
+her; what could man desire more on earth?
+
+Beside, he becomes a member of Parliament now; Lord Warden of the
+Stannaries; business which of course keeps him in England, business
+which he performs, as he does all things, wisely and well.  Such a
+generation as this ought really to respect Raleigh a little more, if
+it be only for his excellence in their own especial sphere--that of
+business.  Raleigh is a thorough man of business.  He can 'toil
+terribly,' and what is more, toil to the purpose.  In all the
+everyday affairs of life, he remains without a blot; a diligent,
+methodical, prudent man, who, though he plays for great stakes,
+ventures and loses his whole fortune again and again, yet never seems
+to omit the 'doing the duty which lies nearest him'; never gets into
+mean money scrapes; never neglects tenants or duty; never gives way
+for one instant to 'the eccentricities of genius.'
+
+If he had done so, be sure that we should have heard of it.  For no
+man can become what he has become without making many an enemy; and
+he has his enemies already.  On which statement naturally occurs the
+question--why?  An important question too; because several of his
+later biographers seem to have running in their minds some such train
+of thought as this--Raleigh must have been a bad fellow, or he would
+not have had so many enemies; and because he was a bad fellow, there
+is an a priori reason that charges against him are true.  Whether
+this be arguing in a circle or not, it is worth searching out the
+beginning of this enmity, and the reputed causes of it.  In after
+years it will be because he is 'damnable proud,' because he hated
+Essex, and so forth:  of which in their places.  But what is the
+earliest count against him?  Naunton, who hated Raleigh, and was
+moreover a rogue, has no reason to give, but that 'the Queen took him
+for a kind of oracle, which much nettled them all; yea, those he
+relied on began to take this his sudden favour for an alarm; to be
+sensible of their own supplantation, and to project his; which
+shortly made him to sing, "Fortune my foe."'
+
+Now, be this true or not, and we do not put much faith in it, it
+gives no reason for the early dislike of Raleigh, save the somewhat
+unsatisfactory one which Cain would have given for his dislike of
+Abel.  Moreover, there exists a letter of Essex's, written as
+thoroughly in the Cain spirit as any we ever read; and we wonder
+that, after reading that letter, men can find courage to repeat the
+old sentimentalism about the 'noble and unfortunate' Earl.  His
+hatred of Raleigh--which, as we shall see hereafter, Raleigh not only
+bears patiently, but requites with good deeds as long as he can--
+springs, by his own confession, simply from envy and disappointed
+vanity.  The spoilt boy insults Queen Elizabeth about her liking for
+the 'knave Raleigh.'  She, 'taking hold of one word disdain,' tells
+Essex that 'there was no such cause why I should thus disdain him.'
+On which, says Essex, 'as near as I could I did describe unto her
+what he had been, and what he was; and then I did let her see,
+whether I had come to disdain his competition of love, or whether I
+could have comfort to give myself over to the service of a mistress
+that was in awe of such a man.  I spake for 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 him.  In the end, I saw she
+was resolved to defend him, and to cross me.'  Whereupon follows a
+'scene,' the naughty boy raging and stamping, till he insults the
+Queen, and calls Raleigh 'a wretch'; whereon poor Elizabeth, who
+loved the coxcomb for his father's sake, 'turned her away to my Lady
+Warwick,' and Essex goes grumbling forth.
+
+Raleigh's next few years are brilliant and busy ones; and gladly, did
+space permit, would I give details of those brilliant adventures
+which make this part of his life that of a true knight-errant.  But
+they are mere episodes in the history; and we must pass them quickly
+by, only saying that they corroborate in all things our original
+notion of the man--just, humane, wise, greatly daring and enduring
+greatly; and filled with the one fixed idea, which has grown with his
+growth and strengthened with his strength, the destruction of the
+Spanish power, and colonisation of America by English.  His brother
+Humphrey makes a second attempt to colonise Newfoundland, and
+perishes as heroically as he had lived.  Raleigh, undaunted by his
+own loss in the adventure and his brother's failure, sends out a
+fleet of his own to discover to the southward, and finds Virginia.
+One might spend pages on this beautiful episode; on the simple
+descriptions of the fair new land which the sea-kings bring home; on
+the profound (for those times at least) knowledge which prompted
+Raleigh to make the attempt in that particular direction which had as
+yet escaped the notice of the Spaniards; on the quiet patience with
+which, undaunted by the ill-success of the first colonists, he sends
+out fleet after fleet, to keep the hold which he had once gained;
+till, unable any longer to support the huge expense, he makes over
+his patent for discovery to a company of merchants, who fare for many
+years as ill as Raleigh himself did:  but one thing one has a right
+to say, that to this one man, under the providence of Almighty God,
+do the whole of the United States of America owe their existence.
+The work was double.  The colony, however small, had to be kept in
+possession at all hazards; and he did it.  But that was not enough.
+Spain must be prevented from extending her operations northward from
+Florida; she must be crippled along the whole east coast of America.
+And Raleigh did that too.  We find him for years to come a part-
+adventurer in almost every attack on the Spaniards:  we find him
+preaching war against them on these very grounds, and setting others
+to preach it also.  Good old Hariot (Raleigh's mathematical tutor,
+whom he sent to Virginia) re-echoes his pupil's trumpet-blast.
+Hooker, in his epistle dedicatory of his Irish History, strikes the
+same note, and a right noble one it is.  'These Spaniards are trying
+to build up a world-tyranny by rapine and cruelty.  You, sir, call on
+us to deliver the earth from them, by doing justly and loving mercy;
+and we will obey you!' is the answer which Raleigh receives, as far
+as I can find, from every nobler-natured Englishman.
+
+It was an immense conception:  a glorious one:  it stood out so
+clear:  there was no mistake about its being the absolutely right,
+wise, patriotic thing; and so feasible, too, if Raleigh could but
+find 'six cents hommes qui savaient mourir.'  But that was just what
+he could not find.  He could draw round him, and did, by the
+spiritual magnetism of his genius, many a noble soul; but he could
+not organise them, as he seems to have tried to do, into a coherent
+body.  The English spirit of independent action, never stronger than
+in that age, and most wisely encouraged, for other reasons, by good
+Queen Bess, was too strong for him.  His pupils will 'fight on their
+own hook' like so many Yankee rangers:  quarrel with each other:
+grumble at him.  For the truth is, he demands of them too high a
+standard of thought and purpose.  He is often a whole heaven above
+them in the hugeness of his imagination, the nobleness of his motive;
+and Don Quixote can often find no better squire than Sancho Panza.
+Even glorious Sir Richard Grenvile makes a mistake:  burns an Indian
+village because they steal a silver cup; throws back the colonisation
+of Virginia ten years with his over-strict notions of discipline and
+retributive justice; and Raleigh requites him for his offence by
+embalming him, his valour and his death, not in immortal verse, but
+in immortal prose.  The 'True Relation of the Fight at the Azores'
+gives the keynote of Raleigh's heart.  If readers will not take that
+as the text on which his whole life is a commentary they may know a
+great deal about him, but him they will never know.
+
+The game becomes fiercer and fiercer.  Blow and counterblow between
+the Spanish king, for the whole West-Indian commerce was a government
+job, and the merchant nobles of England.  At last the Great Armada
+comes, and the Great Armada goes again.  Venit, vidit, fugit, as the
+medals said of it.  And to Walter Raleigh's counsel, by the testimony
+of all contemporaries, the mighty victory is to be principally
+attributed.  Where all men did heroically, it were invidious to
+bestow on him alone a crown, ob patriam servatam.  But henceforth,
+Elizabeth knows well that she has not been mistaken in her choice;
+and Raleigh is better loved than ever, heaped with fresh wealth and
+honours.  And who deserves them better?
+
+The immense value of his services in the defence of England should
+excuse him from the complaint which one has been often inclined to
+bring against him,--Why, instead of sending others Westward Ho, did
+be not go himself?  Surely he could have reconciled the jarring
+instruments with which he was working.  He could have organised such
+a body of men as perhaps never went out before or since on the same
+errand.  He could have done all that Cortez did, and more; and done
+it more justly and mercifully.
+
+True.  And here seems (as far as little folk dare judge great folk)
+to have been Raleigh's mistake.  He is too wide for real success.  He
+has too many plans; he is fond of too many pursuits.  The man who
+succeeds is generally the narrow mall; the man of one idea, who works
+at nothing but that; sees everything only through the light of that;
+sacrifices everything to that:  the fanatic, in short.  By fanatics,
+whether military, commercial, or religious, and not by 'liberal-
+minded men' at all, has the world's work been done in all ages.  Amid
+the modern cants, one of the most mistaken is the cant about the
+'mission of genius,' the 'mission of the poet.'  Poets, we hear in
+some quarters, are the anointed kings of mankind--at least, so the
+little poets sing, each to his little fiddle.  There is no greater
+mistake.  It is the practical, prosaical fanatic who does the work;
+and the poet, if he tries to do it, is certain to put down his spade
+every five minutes, to look at the prospect, and pick flowers, and
+moralise on dead asses, till he ends a Neron malgre lui-meme,
+fiddling melodiously while Rome is burning.  And perhaps this is the
+secret of Raleigh's failure.  He is a fanatic, no doubt, a true
+knight-errant:  but he is too much of a poet withal.  The sense of
+beauty enthrals him at every step.  Gloriana's fairy court, with its
+chivalries and its euphuisms, its masques and its tourneys, and he
+the most charming personage in it, are too charming for him--as they
+would have been for us, reader:  and he cannot give them up and go
+about the one work.  He justifies his double-mindedness to himself,
+no doubt, as he does to the world, by working wisely, indefatigably,
+and bravely:  but still he has put his trust in princes, and in the
+children of men.  His sin, as far as we can see, is not against man,
+but against God; one which we do not nowadays call a sin, but a
+weakness.  Be it so.  God punished him for it, swiftly and sharply;
+which I hold to be a sure sign that God also forgave him for it.
+
+So he stays at home, spends, sooner or later, 40,000 pounds on
+Virginia, writes charming court-poetry with Oxford, Buckhurst, and
+Paget, brings over Spenser from Ireland and introduces Colin Clout to
+Gloriana, who loves--as who would not have loved?--that most
+beautiful of faces and of souls; helps poor puritan Udall out of his
+scrape as far as he can; begs for Captain Spring, begs for many more,
+whose names are only known by being connected with some good deed of
+his.  'When, Sir Walter,' asks Queen Bess, 'will you cease to be a
+beggar?'  'When your Majesty ceases to be a benefactor.'  Perhaps it
+is in these days that he set up his 'office of address'--some sort of
+agency for discovering and relieving the wants of worthy men.  So all
+seems to go well.  If he has lost in Virginia, he has gained by
+Spanish prizes; his wine-patent is bringing him in a large revenue,
+and the heavens smile on him.  Thou sayest, 'I am rich and increased
+in goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art
+poor and miserable and blind and naked.'  Thou shalt learn it, then,
+and pay dearly for thy lesson.
+
+For, in the meanwhile, Raleigh falls into a very great sin, for
+which, as usual with his elect, God inflicts swift and instant
+punishment; on which, as usual, biographers talk much unwisdom.  He
+seduces Miss Throgmorton, one of the maids of honour.  Elizabeth is
+very wroth; and had she not good reason to be wroth?  Is it either
+fair or reasonable to talk of her 'demanding a monopoly of love,' and
+'being incensed at the temerity of her favourite, in presuming to
+fall in love and marry without her consent?'  Away with such cant.
+The plain facts are:  that a man nearly forty years old abuses his
+wonderful gifts of body and mind, to ruin a girl nearly twenty years
+younger than himself.  What wonder if a virtuous woman--and Queen
+Elizabeth was virtuous--thought it a base deed, and punished it
+accordingly?  There is no more to be discovered in the matter, save
+by the vulturine nose which smells carrion in every rose-bed.
+Raleigh has a great attempt on the Plate-fleets in hand; he hurries
+off from Chatham, and writes to young Cecil on the 10th of March, 'I
+mean not to come away, as some say I will, for fear of a marriage,
+and I know not what . . . For I protest before God, there is none on
+the face of the earth that I would be fastened unto.'
+
+This famous passage is one of those over which the virtuosity of
+modern times, rejoicing in evil, has hung so fondly, as giving
+melancholy proof of the 'duplicity of Raleigh's character'; as if a
+man who once in his life had told an untruth was proved by that fact
+to be a rogue from birth to death:  while others have kindly given
+him the benefit of a doubt whether the letter were not written after
+a private marriage, and therefore Raleigh, being 'joined unto' some
+one already, had a right to say that he did not wish to be joined to
+any one.  But I do not concur in this doubt.  Four months after, Sir
+Edward Stafford writes to Anthony Bacon, 'If you have anything to do
+with Sir W.  R., or any love to make to Mistress Throgmorton, at the
+Tower to-morrow you may speak with them.'  This implies that no
+marriage had yet taken place.  And surely, if there had been private
+marriage, two people who were about to be sent to the Tower for their
+folly would have made the marriage public at once, as the only
+possible self-justification.  But it is a pity, in my opinion, that
+biographers, before pronouncing upon that supposed lie of Raleigh's,
+had not taken the trouble to find out what the words mean.  In their
+virtuous haste to prove him a liar, they have overlooked the fact
+that the words, as they stand, are unintelligible, and the argument
+self-contradictory.  He wants to prove, we suppose, that he does not
+go to sea for fear of being forced to marry Miss Throgmorton.  It is,
+at least, an unexpected method of so doing in a shrewd man like
+Raleigh, to say that he wishes to marry no one at all.  'Don't think
+that I run away for fear of a marriage, for I do not wish to marry
+any one on the face of the earth,' is a speech which may prove
+Raleigh to have been a fool, and we must understand it before we can
+say that it proves him a rogue.  If we had received such a letter
+from a friend, we should have said at once, 'Why the man, in his
+hurry and confusion, has omitted THE word; he must have meant to
+write, not "There is none on the face of the earth that I would be
+fastened to," but "There is none on the face of the earth that I
+would RATHER be fastened to,"' which would at once make sense and
+suit fact.  For Raleigh not only married Miss Throgmorton forthwith,
+but made her the best of husbands.  My conjectural emendation may go
+for what it is worth:  but that the passage, as it stands in Murdin's
+State Papers (the MSS. I have not seen) is either misquoted, or mis-
+written by Raleigh himself, I cannot doubt.  He was not one to think
+nonsense, even if he scribbled it.
+
+The Spanish raid turns out well.  Raleigh overlooks Elizabeth's
+letters of recall till he finds out that the King of Spain has
+stopped the Plate-fleet for fear of his coming; and then returns,
+sending on Sir John Burrough to the Azores, where he takes the 'Great
+Carack,' the largest prize (1600 tons) which had ever been brought
+into England.  The details of that gallant fight stand in the pages
+of Hakluyt.  It raised Raleigh once more to wealth, though not to
+favour.  Shortly after he returns from the sea, he finds himself,
+where he deserves to be, in the Tower, where he does more than one
+thing which brought him no credit.  How far we are justified in
+calling his quarrel with Sir George Carew, his keeper, for not
+letting him 'disguise himself, and get into a pair of oars to ease
+his mind but with a sight of the Queen, or his heart would break,'
+hypocrisy, is a very different matter.  Honest Arthur Gorges, a
+staunch friend of Raleigh's, tells the story laughingly and lovingly,
+as if he thought Raleigh sincere, but somewhat mad:  and yet honest
+Gorges has a good right to say a bitter thing; for after having been
+'ready to break with laughing at seeing them two brawl and scramble
+like madmen, and Sir George's new periwig torn off his crown,' he
+sees 'the iron walking' and daggers out, and playing the part of him
+who taketh a dog by the ears, 'purchased such a rap on the knuckles,
+that I wished both their pates broken, and so with much ado they
+staid their brawl to see my bloody fingers,' and then set to work to
+abuse the hapless peacemaker.  After which things Raleigh writes a
+letter to Cecil, which is still more offensive in the eyes of
+virtuous biographers--how 'his heart was never broken till this day,
+when he hears the Queen goes so far off, whom he followed with love
+and desire on so many journeys, and am now left behind in a dark
+prison all alone.' . . . '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,' and so forth, in a
+style in which the vulturine nose must needs scent carrion, just
+because the roses are more fragrant than they should be in a world
+where all ought to be either vultures or carrion for their dinners.
+As for his despair, had he not good reason to be in despair?  By his
+own sin he has hurled himself down the hill which he has so painfully
+climbed.  He is in the Tower--surely no pleasant or hopeful place for
+any man.  Elizabeth is exceedingly wroth with him; and what is worse,
+he deserves what he has got.  His whole fortune is ventured in an
+expedition over which he has no control, which has been unsuccessful
+in its first object, and which may be altogether unsuccessful in that
+which it has undertaken as a pis-aller, and so leave him penniless.
+There want not, too, those who will trample on the fallen.  The
+deputy has been cruelly distraining on his Irish tenants for a
+'supposed debt of his to the Queen of 400 pounds for rent,' which was
+indeed but fifty marks, and which was paid, and has carried off 500
+milch kine from the poor settlers whom he has planted there, and
+forcibly thrust him out of possession of a castle.  Moreover, the
+whole Irish estates are likely to come to ruin; for nothing prevails
+but rascality among the English soldiers, impotence among the
+governors, and rebellion among the natives.  Three thousand Burkes
+are up in arms; his 'prophecy of this rebellion' ten days ago was
+laughed at, and now has come true; and altogether, Walter Raleigh and
+all belonging to him is in as evil case as he ever was on earth.  No
+wonder, poor fellow, if he behowls himself lustily, and not always
+wisely, to Cecil, and every one else who will listen to him.
+
+As for his fine speeches about Elizabeth, why forget the standing-
+point from which such speeches were made?  Over and above his present
+ruin, it was (and ought to have been) an utterly horrible and
+unbearable thing to Raleigh, or any man, to have fallen into disgrace
+with Elizabeth by his own fault.  He feels (and perhaps rightly) that
+he is as it were excommunicated from England, and the mission and the
+glory of England.  Instead of being, as he was till now, one of a
+body of brave men working together in one great common cause, he has
+cut himself off from the congregation by his own selfish lust, and
+there he is left alone with his shame.  We must try to realise to
+ourselves the way in which such men as Raleigh looked not only at
+Elizabeth, but at all the world.  There was, in plain palpable fact,
+something about the Queen, her history, her policy, the times, the
+glorious part which England, and she as the incarnation of the then
+English spirit, were playing upon earth, which raised imaginative and
+heroical souls into a permanent exaltation--a 'fairyland,' as they
+called it themselves, which seems to us fantastic, and would be
+fantastic in us, because we are not at their work, or in their days.
+There can be no doubt that a number of as noble men as ever stood
+together on the earth did worship that woman, fight for her, toil for
+her, risk all for her, with a pure chivalrous affection which has
+furnished one of the most beautiful pages in all the book of history.
+Blots there must needs have been, and inconsistencies, selfishnesses,
+follies; for they too were men of like passions with ourselves; but
+let us look at the fair vision as a whole, and thank God that such a
+thing has for once existed even imperfectly on this sinful earth,
+instead of playing the part of Ham and falling under his curse,--the
+penalty of slavishness, cowardice, loss of noble daring, which surely
+falls on any generation which is 'banausos,' to use Aristotle's word;
+which rejoices in its forefathers' shame, and, unable to believe in
+the nobleness of others, is unable to become noble itself.
+
+As for the 'Alexander and Diana' affectations, they were the language
+of the time:  and certainly this generation has no reason to find
+fault with them, or with a good deal more of the 'affectations' and
+'flattery' of Elizabethan times, while it listens complacently night
+after night 'to honourable members' complimenting not Queen
+Elizabeth, but Sir Jabesh Windbag, Fiddle, Faddle, Red-tape, and
+party with protestations of deepest respect and fullest confidence in
+the very speeches in which they bring accusations of every offence
+short of high treason--to be understood, of course, in a
+'parliamentary sense,' as Mr. Pickwick's were in a 'Pickwickian' one.
+If a generation of Knoxes and Mortons, Burleighs and Raleighs, shall
+ever arise again, one wonders by what name they will call the
+parliamentary morality and parliamentary courtesy of a generation
+which has meted out such measure to their ancestors' failings?
+
+'But Queen Elizabeth was an old woman then.'  I thank the objector
+even for that 'then'; for it is much nowadays to find any one who
+believes that Queen Elizabeth was ever young, or who does not talk of
+her as if she was born about seventy years of age covered with rouge
+and wrinkles.  I will undertake to say that as to the beauty of this
+woman there is a greater mass of testimony, and from the very best
+judges too, than there is of the beauty of any personage in history;
+and yet it has become the fashion now to deny even that.  The plain
+facts seem that she was very graceful, active, accomplished in all
+outward manners, of a perfect figure, and of that style of
+intellectual beauty, depending on expression, which attracted (and we
+trust always will attract) Britons far more than that merely sensuous
+loveliness in which no doubt Mary Stuart far surpassed her.  And
+there seems little doubt that, like many Englishwomen, she retained
+her beauty to a very late period in life, not to mention that she
+was, in 1592, just at that age of rejuvenescence which makes many a
+woman more lovely at sixty than she has been since she was thirty-
+five.  No doubt, too, she used every artificial means to preserve her
+famous complexion; and quite right she was.  This beauty of hers had
+been a talent, as all beauty is, committed to her by God; it had been
+an important element in her great success; men had accepted it as
+what beauty of form and expression generally is, an outward and
+visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace; and while the inward
+was unchanged, what wonder if she tried to preserve the outward?  If
+she was the same, why should she not try to look the same?  And what
+blame to those who worshipped her, if, knowing that she was the same,
+they too should fancy that she looked the same, the Elizabeth of
+their youth, and should talk as if the fair flesh, as well as the
+fair spirit, was immortal?  Does not every loving husband do so when
+he forgets the gray hair and the sunken cheek, and all the wastes of
+time, and sees the partner of many joys and sorrows not as she has
+become, but as she was, ay, and is to him, and will be to him, he
+trusts, through all eternity?  There is no feeling in these
+Elizabethan worshippers which we have not seen, potential and crude,
+again and again in the best and noblest of young men whom we have
+met, till it was crushed in them by the luxury, effeminacy, and
+unbelief in chivalry, which are the sure accompaniment of a long
+peace, which war may burn up with beneficent fire.
+
+But we must hasten on now; for Raleigh is out of prison in September,
+and by the next spring in parliament speaking wisely and well,
+especially on his fixed idea, war with Spain, which he is rewarded
+for forthwith in Father Parson's 'Andreae Philopatris Responsio' by a
+charge of founding a school of Atheism for the corruption of young
+gentlemen; a charge which Lord Chief-Justice Popham, Protestant as he
+is, will find it useful one day to recollect.
+
+Elizabeth, however, now that Raleigh has married the fair Throgmorton
+and done wisely in other matters, restores him to favour.  If he has
+sinned, he has suffered:  but he is as useful as ever, now that his
+senses have returned to him; and he is making good speeches in
+parliament, instead of bad ones to weak maidens; so we find him once
+more in favour, and possessor of Sherborne Manor, where he builds and
+beautifies, with 'groves and gardens of much variety and great
+delight.'  And God, too, seems to have forgiven him; perhaps has
+forgiven; for there the fair Throgmorton brings him a noble boy.  Ut
+sis vitalis metuo puer!
+
+Raleigh will quote David's example one day, not wisely or well.  Does
+David's example ever cross him now, and those sad words,--'The Lord
+hath put away thy sin, . . . nevertheless the child that is born unto
+thee shall die?'
+
+Let that be as it may, all is sunshine once more.  Sherborne Manor, a
+rich share in the great carack, a beautiful wife, a child; what more
+does this man want to make him happy?  Why should he not settle down
+upon his lees, like ninety-nine out of the hundred, or at least try a
+peaceful and easy path toward more 'praise and pudding?'  The world
+answers, or his biographers answer for him, that he needs to
+reinstate himself in his mistress's affection; which is true or not,
+according as we take it.  If they mean thereby, as most seem to mean,
+that it was a mere selfish and ambitious scheme by which to wriggle
+into court favour once more--why, let them mean it:  I shall only
+observe that the method which Raleigh took was a rather more
+dangerous and self-sacrificing one than courtiers are wont to take.
+But if it be meant that Walter Raleigh spoke somewhat thus with
+himself,--'I have done a base and dirty deed, and have been punished
+for it.  I have hurt the good name of a sweet woman who loves me, and
+whom I find to be a treasure; and God, instead of punishing me by
+taking her from me, has rendered me good for evil by giving her to
+me.  I have justly offended a mistress whom I worship, and who, after
+having shown her just indignation, has returned me good for evil by
+giving me these fair lands of Sherborne, and only forbid me her
+presence till the scandal has passed away.  She sees and rewards my
+good in spite of my evil; and I, too, know that I am better than I
+have seemed; that I am fit for nobler deeds than seducing maids of
+honour.  How can I prove that?  How can I redeem my lost name for
+patriotism and public daring?  How can I win glory for my wife, seek
+that men shall forget her past shame in the thought, "She is Walter
+Raleigh's wife?"  How can I show my mistress that I loved her all
+along, that I acknowledge her bounty, her mingled justice and mercy?
+How can I render to God for all the benefits which He has done unto
+me?  How can I do a deed the like of which was never done in
+England?'
+
+If all this had passed through Walter Raleigh's mind, what could we
+say of it, but that it was the natural and rational feeling of an
+honourable and right-hearted man, burning to rise to the level which
+he knew ought to be his, because he knew that he had fallen below it?
+And what right better way of testifying these feelings than to do
+what, as we shall see, Raleigh did?  What right have we to impute to
+him lower motives than these, while we confess that these righteous
+and noble motives would have been natural and rational;--indeed, just
+what we flatter ourselves that we should have felt in his place?  Of
+course, in his grand scheme, the thought came in, 'And I shall win to
+myself honour, and glory, and wealth,'--of course.  And pray, sir,
+does it not come in in your grand schemes; and yours; and yours?  If
+you made a fortune to-morrow by some wisely and benevolently managed
+factory, would you forbid all speech of the said wisdom and
+benevolence, because you had intended that wisdom and benevolence
+should pay you a good percentage?  Away with cant, and let him that
+is without sin among you cast the first stone.
+
+So Raleigh hits upon a noble project; a desperate one, true:  but he
+will do it or die.  He will leave pleasant Sherborne, and the bosom
+of the beautiful bride, and the first-born son, and all which to most
+makes life worth having, and which Raleigh enjoys more intensely than
+most men; for he is a poet, and a man of strong nervous passions
+withal.  But, -
+
+
+'I could not love thee, dear, so much,
+Loved I not honour more.'
+
+
+And he will go forth to endure heat, hunger, fever, danger of death
+in battle, danger of the Inquisition, rack, and stake, in search of
+El Dorado.  What so strange in that?  I have known half a dozen men
+who, in his case, and conscious of his powers, would have done the
+same from the same noble motive.
+
+He begins prudently; and sends a Devonshire man, Captain Whiddon--
+probably one of The Whiddons of beautiful Chagford--to spy out the
+Orinoco.  He finds that the Spaniards are there already; that Berreo,
+who has attempted El Dorado from the westward, starting from New
+Granada and going down the rivers, is trying to settle on the Orinoco
+mouth; that he is hanging the poor natives, encouraging the Caribs to
+hunt them and sell them for slaves, imprisoning the caciques to
+extort their gold, torturing, ravishing, kidnapping, and conducting
+himself as was usual among Spaniards of those days.
+
+Raleigh's spirit is stirred within him.  If 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,'
+fiction as it is, once excited us, how must a far worse reality have
+excited Raleigh, as he remembered that these Spaniards are as yet
+triumphant in iniquity, and as he remembered, too, that these same
+men are the sworn foes of England, her liberty, her Bible, and her
+Queen?  What a deed, to be beforehand with them for once!  To
+dispossess them of one corner of that western world, where they have
+left no trace but blood and flame!  He will go himself:  he will find
+El Dorado and its golden Emperor; and instead of conquering,
+plundering, and murdering him, as Cortez did Montezuma, and Pizarro
+Atahuallpa, he will show him English strength; espouse his quarrel
+against the Spaniards; make him glad to become Queen Elizabeth's
+vassal tributary, perhaps leave him a bodyguard of English veterans,
+perhaps colonise his country, and so at once avenge and protect the
+oppressed Indians, and fill the Queen's treasury with the riches of a
+land equal, if not superior, to Peru and Mexico.
+
+Such is his dream; vague perhaps:  but far less vague than those with
+which Cortez and Pizarro started, and succeeded.  After a careful
+survey of the whole matter, I must give it as my deliberate opinion,
+that Raleigh was more reasonable in his attempt, and had more fair
+evidence of its feasibility, than either Cortez or Pizarro had for
+theirs.  It is a bold assertion.  If any reader doubts its truth, he
+cannot do better than to read the whole of the documents connected
+with the two successful, and the one unsuccessful, attempts at
+finding a golden kingdom.  Let them read first Prescott's 'Conquests
+of Mexico and Peru,' and then Schomburgk's edition of Raleigh's
+'Guiana.'  They will at least confess, when they have finished, that
+truth is stranger than fiction.
+
+Of Raleigh's credulity in believing in El Dorado, much has been said.
+I am sorry to find even so wise a man as Sir Robert Schomburgk, after
+bearing good testimony to Raleigh's wonderful accuracy about all
+matters which he had an opportunity of observing, using this term of
+credulity.  I must dare to differ on that point even with Sir Robert,
+and ask by what right the word is used?  First, Raleigh says nothing
+about El Dorado (as every one is forced to confess) but what Spaniard
+on Spaniard had been saying for fifty years.  Therefore the blame of
+credulity ought to rest with the Spaniards, from Philip von Huten,
+Orellano, and George of Spires, upward to Berreo.  But it rests
+really with no one.  For nothing, if we will examine the documents,
+is told of the riches of El Dorado which had not been found to be
+true, and seen by the eyes of men still living, in Peru and Mexico.
+Not one-fifth of America had been explored, and already two El
+Dorados had been found and conquered.  What more rational than to
+suppose that there was a third, a fourth, a fifth, in the remaining
+four-fifths?  The reports of El Dorado among the savages were just of
+the same kind as those by which Cortez and Pizarro hunted out Mexico
+and Peru, saving that they were far more widely spread, and confirmed
+by a succession of adventurers.  I entreat readers to examine this
+matter in Raleigh, Schomburgk, Humboldt, and Condamine, and judge for
+themselves.  As for Hume's accusations, I pass them by as equally
+silly and shameless, only saying, for the benefit of readers, that
+they have been refuted completely by every one who has written since
+Hume's days; and to those who are inclined to laugh at Raleigh for
+believing in Amazons and 'men whose heads do grow beneath their
+shoulders' I can only answer thus -
+
+About the Amazons, Raleigh told what he was told; what the Spaniards
+who went before him, and Condamine who came after him, were told.
+Humboldt thinks the story possibly founded on fact; and I must say
+that, after reviewing all that has been said thereon, it does seem to
+me the simplest solution of the matter just to believe it true; to
+believe that there was, about his time, or a little before, somewhere
+about the Upper Orinoco, a warlike community of women.  Humboldt
+shows how likely such would be to spring up where women flee from
+their male tyrants into the forests.  As for the fable which
+connected them with the Lake Manoa and the city of El Dorado, we can
+only answer, 'If not true there and then, it is true elsewhere now';
+for the Amazonian guards of the King of Dahomey at this moment, as
+all know, surpass in strangeness and in ferocity all that has been
+reported of the Orinocquan viragos, and thus prove once more that
+truth is stranger than fiction. {3}
+
+Beside--and here I stand stubborn, regardless of gibes and sneers--it
+is not yet proven that there was not, in the sixteenth century, some
+rich and civilised kingdom like Peru or Mexico in the interior of
+South America.  Sir Robert Schomburgk has disproved the existence of
+Lake Parima; but it will take a long time, and more explorers than
+one, to prove that there are no ruins of ancient cities, such as
+Stephens stumbled on in Yucatan, still buried in the depths of the
+forest.  Fifty years of ruin would suffice to wrap them in a leafy
+veil which would hide them from every one who did not literally run
+against them.  Tribes would die out, or change place, as the Atures
+and other great nations have done in those parts, and every
+traditional record of them perish gradually; for it is only gradually
+and lately that it has perished:  while if it be asked, What has
+become of the people themselves? the answer is, that when any race
+(like most of the American races in the sixteenth century) is in a
+dying state, it hardly needs war to thin it down, and reduce the
+remnant to savagery.  Greater nations than El Dorado was even
+supposed to be have vanished ere now, and left not a trace behind:
+and so may they.  But enough of this.  I leave the quarrel to that
+honest and patient warder of tourneys, Old Time, who will surely do
+right at last, and go on to the dogheaded worthies, without necks,
+and long hair hanging down behind, who, as a cacique told Raleigh,
+that 'they had of late years slain many hundreds of his father's
+people,' and in whom even Humboldt was not always allowed, he says,
+to disbelieve (so much for Hume's scoff at Raleigh as a liar), one
+old cacique boasting to him that he had seen them with his own eyes.
+Humboldt's explanation is, that the Caribs, being the cleverest and
+strongest Indians, are also the most imaginative; and therefore,
+being fallen children of Adam, the greatest liars; and that they
+invented both El Dorado and the dog-heads out of pure wickedness.  Be
+it so.  But all lies crystallise round some nucleus of truth; and it
+really seems to me nothing very wonderful if the story should be on
+the whole true, and these worthies were in the habit of dressing
+themselves up, like foolish savages as they were, in the skins of the
+Aguara dog, with what not of stuffing, and tails, and so forth, in
+order to astonish the weak minds of the Caribs, just as the Red
+Indians dress up in their feasts as bears, wolves, and deer, with
+foxtails, false bustles of bison skin, and so forth.  There are
+plenty of traces of such foolish attempts at playing 'bogy' in the
+history of savages, even of our own Teutonic forefathers; and this I
+suspect to be the simple explanation of the whole mare's nest.  As
+for Raleigh being a fool for believing it; the reasons he gives for
+believing it are very rational; the reasons Hume gives for calling
+him a fool rest merely on the story's being strange:  on which
+grounds one might disbelieve most matters in heaven and earth, from
+one's own existence to what one sees in every drop of water under the
+microscope, yea, to the growth of every seed.  The only sound proof
+that dog-headed men are impossible is to be found in comparative
+anatomy, a science of which Hume knew no more than Raleigh, and which
+for one marvel it has destroyed has revealed a hundred.  I do not
+doubt that if Raleigh had seen and described a kangaroo, especially
+its all but miraculous process of gestation, Hume would have called
+that a lie also; but I will waste no more time in proving that no man
+is so credulous as the unbeliever--the man who has such mighty and
+world-embracing faith in himself that he makes his own little brain
+the measure of the universe.  Let the dead bury their dead.
+
+Raleigh sails for Guiana.  The details of his voyage should be read
+at length.  Everywhere they show the eye of a poet as well as of a
+man of science.  He sees enough to excite his hopes more wildly than
+ever; he goes hundreds of miles up the Orinoco in an open boat,
+suffering every misery, but keeping up the hearts of his men, who cry
+out, 'Let us go on, we care not how far.'  He makes friendship with
+the caciques, and enters into alliance with them on behalf of Queen
+Elizabeth against the Spaniards.  Unable to pass the falls of the
+Caroli, and the rainy season drawing on, he returns, beloved and
+honoured by all the Indians, boasting that, during the whole time he
+was there, no woman was the worse for any man of his crew.
+Altogether, we know few episodes of history so noble, righteous, and
+merciful as this Guiana voyage.  But he has not forgotten the
+Spaniards.  At Trinidad he payed his ships with the asphalt of the
+famous Pitch-lake, and stood--and with what awe such a man must have
+stood--beneath the noble forest of Moriche fan-palms on its brink.
+He then attacked, not, by his own confession, without something too
+like treachery, the new town of San Jose, takes Berreo prisoner, and
+delivers from captivity five caciques, whom Berreo kept bound in one
+chain, 'basting their bodies with burning bacon'--an old trick of the
+Conquistadores--to make them discover their gold.  He tells them that
+he was 'the servant of a Queen who was the greatest cacique of the
+north, and a virgin; who had more caciqui under her than there were
+trees on that island; that she was an enemy of the Castellani
+(Spaniards) in behalf of their tyranny and oppression, and that she
+delivered all such nations about her as were by them oppressed, and
+having freed all the coast of the northern world from their
+servitude, had sent me to free them also, and withal to defend the
+country of Guiana from their invasion and conquest.'  After which
+perfectly true and rational speech, he subjoins (as we think equally
+honestly and rationally), 'I showed them her Majesty's picture, which
+they so admired and honoured, as it had been easy to have brought
+them idolaters thereof.'
+
+This is one of the stock charges against Raleigh, at which all
+biographers (except quiet, sensible Oldys, who, dull as he is, is far
+more fair and rational than most of his successors) break into
+virtuous shrieks of 'flattery,' 'meanness,' 'adulation,'
+'courtiership,' and so forth.  One biographer is of opinion that the
+Indians would have admired far more the picture of a 'red monkey.'
+Sir Robert Schomburgk, unfortunately for the red monkey theory,
+though he quite agrees that Raleigh's flattery was very shocking,
+says that from what he knows--and no man knows more--of Indian taste,
+they would have far preferred to the portrait which Raleigh showed
+them--not a red monkey, but--such a picture as that at Hampton Court,
+in which Elizabeth is represented in a fantastic court dress.
+Raleigh, it seems, must be made out a rogue at all risks, though by
+the most opposite charges.  The monkey theory is answered, however,
+by Sir Robert; and Sir Robert is answered, I think, by the plain fact
+that, of course, Raleigh's portrait was exactly such a one as Sir
+Robert says they would have admired; a picture probably in a tawdry
+frame, representing Queen Bess, just as queens were always painted
+then, bedizened with 'browches, pearls, and owches,' satin and ruff,
+and probably with crown on head and sceptre in hand, made up, as
+likely as not, expressly for the purpose for which it was used.  In
+the name of all simplicity and honesty, I ask, why is Raleigh to be
+accused of saying that the Indians admired Queen Elizabeth's beauty
+when he never even hints at it?  And why do all commentators
+deliberately forget the preceding paragraph--Raleigh's proclamation
+to the Indians, and the circumstances under which it was spoken?  The
+Indians are being murdered, ravished, sold for slaves, basted with
+burning fat; and grand white men come like avenging angels, and in
+one day sweep their tyrants out of the land, restore them to liberty
+and life, and say to them, 'A great Queen far across the seas has
+sent us to do this.  Thousands of miles away she has heard of your
+misery and taken pity on you; and if you will be faithful to her she
+will love you, and deal justly with you, and protect you against
+these Spaniards who are devouring you as they have devoured all the
+Indians round you; and for a token of it--a sign that we tell you
+truth, and that there is really such a great Queen, who is the
+Indian's friend--here is the picture of her.'  What wonder if the
+poor idolatrous creatures had fallen down and worshipped the picture-
+-just as millions do that of the Virgin Mary without a thousandth
+part as sound and practical reason--as that of a divine, all-knowing,
+all-merciful deliverer?  As for its being the picture of a beautiful
+woman or not, they would never think of that.  The fair complexion
+and golden hair would be a sign to them that she belonged to the
+mighty white people, even if there were no bedizenment of jewels and
+crowns over and above; and that would be enough for them.  When will
+biographers learn to do common justice to their fellow-men by
+exerting now and then some small amount of dramatic imagination, just
+sufficient to put themselves for a moment in the place of those of
+whom they write?
+
+So ends his voyage, in which, he says, 'from myself I have deserved
+no thanks, for I am returned a beggar and withered.'  The only thing
+which, as far as I can find, he brought home was some of the
+delicious scaly peaches of the Moriche palm--the Arbol de Vida, or
+tree of life, which gives sustenance and all else needful to whole
+tribes of Indians.  'But I might have bettered my poor estate if I
+had not only respected her Majesty's future honour and riches.  It
+became not the former fortune in which I once lived to go journeys of
+piccory' (pillage); 'and it had sorted ill with the offices of honour
+which, by her Majesty's grace, I hold this day in England, to run
+from cape to cape and place to place for the pillage of ordinary
+prizes.'
+
+So speaks one whom it has been the fashion to consider as little
+better than a pirate, and that, too, in days when the noblest blood
+in England thought no shame (as indeed it was no shame) to enrich
+themselves with Spanish gold.  But so it is throughout this man's
+life.  If there be a nobler word than usual to be spoken, or a more
+wise word either, if there be a more chivalrous deed to be done, or a
+more prudent deed either, that word and that deed are pretty sure to
+be Walter Raleigh's.
+
+But the blatant beast has been busy at home; and, in spite of
+Chapman's heroical verses, he meets with little but cold looks.
+Never mind.  If the world will not help to do the deed, he will do it
+by himself; and no time must be lost, for the Spaniards on their part
+will lose none.  So, after six months, the faithful Keymis sails
+again, again helped by the Lord High Admiral and Sir Robert Cecil.
+It is a hard race for one private man against the whole power and
+wealth of Spain; and the Spaniard has been beforehand with them, and
+re-occupied the country.  They have fortified themselves at the mouth
+of the Caroli, so it is impossible to get to the gold mines; they are
+enslaving the wretched Indians, carrying off their women, intending
+to transplant some tribes and to expel others, and arming cannibal
+tribes against the inhabitants.  All is misery and rapine; the
+scattered remnant comes asking piteously why Raleigh does not come
+over to deliver them?  Have the Spaniards slain him, too?  Keymis
+comforts them as he best can; hears of more gold mines; and gets back
+safe, a little to his own astonishment; for eight-and-twenty ships of
+war have been sent to Trinidad to guard the entrance to El Dorado,
+not surely, as Keymis well says, 'to keep us only from tobacco.'  A
+colony of 500 persons is expected from Spain.  The Spaniard is well
+aware of the richness of the prize, says Keymis, who all through
+shows himself a worthy pupil of his master.  A careful, observant man
+he seems to have been, trained by that great example to overlook no
+fact, even the smallest.  He brings home lists of rivers, towns,
+caciques, poison-herbs, words, what not; he has fresh news of gold,
+spleen-stones, kidney-stones, and some fresh specimens; but be that
+as it may, he, 'without going as far as his eyes can warrant, can
+promise Brazil-wood, honey, cotton, balsamum, and drugs, to defray
+charges.'  He would fain copy Raleigh's style, too, and 'whence his
+lamp had oil, borrow light also,' 'seasoning his unsavoury speech'
+with some of the 'leaven of Raleigh's discourse.'  Which, indeed, he
+does even to little pedantries and attempts at classicality; and
+after professing that himself and the remnant of his few years he
+hath bequeathed wholly to Raleana, and his thoughts live only in that
+action, he rises into something like grandeur when he begins to speak
+of that ever-fertile subject, the Spanish cruelties to the Indians;
+'Doth not the cry of the poor succourless ascend unto the heavens?
+Hath God forgotten to be gracious to the work of his own hands.  Or
+shall not his judgments in a day of visitation by the ministry of his
+chosen servant come upon these bloodthirsty butchers, like rain into
+a fleece of wool?'  Poor Keymis!  To us he is by no means the least
+beautiful figure in this romance; a faithful, diligent, loving man,
+unable, as the event proved, to do great deeds by himself, but
+inspired with a great idea by contact with a mightier spirit, to whom
+he clings through evil report, and poverty, and prison, careless of
+self to the last, and ends tragically, 'faithful unto death' in the
+most awful sense.
+
+But here remark two things:  first, that Cecil believes in Raleigh's
+Guiana scheme; next, that the occupation of Orinoco by the Spaniards,
+which Raleigh is accused of having concealed from James in 1617, has
+been ever since 1595 matter of the most public notoriety.
+
+Raleigh has not been idle in the meanwhile.  It has been found
+necessary after all to take the counsel which he gave in vain in
+1588, to burn the Spanish fleet in harbour; and the heroes are gone
+down to Cadiz fight, and in one day of thunder storm the Sevastopol
+of Spain.  Here, as usual, we find Raleigh, though in an inferior
+command, leading the whole by virtue of superior wisdom.  When the
+good Lord Admiral will needs be cautious, and land the soldiers
+first, it is Raleigh who persuades him to force his way into the
+harbour, to the joy of all captains.  When hotheaded Essex, casting
+his hat into the sea for joy, shouts 'Intramos,' and will in at once,
+Raleigh's time for caution comes, and he persuades them to wait till
+the next morning, and arrange the order of attack.  That, too,
+Raleigh has to do, and moreover to lead it; and lead it he does.
+Under the forts are seventeen galleys; the channel is 'scoured' with
+cannon:  but on holds Raleigh's 'Warspite,' far ahead of the rest,
+through the thickest of the fire, answering forts and galleys 'with a
+blur of the trumpet to each piece, disdaining to shoot at those
+esteemed dreadful monsters.'  For there is a nobler enemy ahead.
+Right in front lie the galleons; and among them the 'Philip' and the
+'Andrew,' two of those who boarded the 'Revenge.'  This day there
+shall be a reckoning for the blood of his old friend; he is 'resolved
+to be revenged for the "Revenge,"' Sir Richard Grenvile's fatal ship,
+or second her with his own life'; and well he keeps his vow.  Three
+hours pass of desperate valour, during which, so narrow is the
+passage, only seven English ships, thrusting past each other, all but
+quarrelling in their noble rivalry, engage the whole Spanish fleet of
+fifty-seven sail, and destroy it utterly.  The 'Philip' and 'Thomas'
+burn themselves despairing.  The English boats save the 'Andrew' and
+'Matthew.'  One passes over the hideous record.  'If any man,' says
+Raleigh, 'had a desire to see hell itself, it was there most lively
+figured.'  Keymis's prayer is answered in part, even while he writes
+it; and the cry of the Indians has not ascended in vain before the
+throne of God!
+
+The soldiers are landed; the city stormed and sacked, not without
+mercies and courtesies, though, to women and unarmed folk, which win
+the hearts of the vanquished, and live till this day in well-known
+ballads.  The Flemings begin a 'merciless slaughter.'  Raleigh and
+the Lord Admiral beat them off.  Raleigh is carried on shore with a
+splinter wound in the leg, which lames him for life:  but returns on
+board in an hour in agony; for there is no admiral left to order the
+fleet, and all are run headlong to the sack.  In vain he attempts to
+get together sailors the following morning, and attack the Indian
+fleet in Porto Real Roads; within twenty-four hours it is burnt by
+the Spaniards themselves; and all Raleigh wins is no booty, a lame
+leg, and the honour of having been the real author of a victory even
+more glorious than that of 1588.
+
+So he returns; having written to Cecil the highest praises of Essex,
+whom he treats with all courtesy and fairness; which those who will
+may call cunning:  we have as good a right to say that he was
+returning good for evil.  There were noble qualities in Essex.  All
+the world gave him credit for them, and far more than he deserved;
+why should not Raleigh have been just to him; even have conceived,
+like the rest of the world, high hopes of him, till he himself
+destroyed these hopes?  For now storms are rising fast.  On their
+return Cecil is in power.  He has been made Secretary of State
+instead of Bodley, Essex's pet, and the spoilt child begins to sulk.
+On which matter, I am sorry to say, historians talk much unwisdom,
+about Essex's being too 'open and generous, etc., for a courtier,'
+and 'presuming on his mistress's passion for him'; and representing
+Elizabeth as desiring to be thought beautiful, and 'affecting at
+sixty the sighs, loves, tears, and tastes of a girl of sixteen,' and
+so forth.  It is really time to get rid of some of this fulsome talk,
+culled from such triflers as Osborne, if not from the darker and
+fouler sources of Parsons and the Jesuit slanderers, which I meet
+with a flat denial.  There is simply no proof.  She in love with
+Essex or Cecil?  Yes, as a mother with a son.  Were they not the
+children of her dearest and most faithful servants, men who had lived
+heroic lives for her sake?  What wonder if she fancied that she saw
+the fathers in the sons?  They had been trained under her eye.  What
+wonder if she fancied that they could work as their fathers worked
+before them?  And what shame if her childless heart yearned over them
+with unspeakable affection, and longed in her old age to lay her
+hands upon the shoulders of those two young men, and say to England,
+'Behold the children which God, and not the flesh, has given me!'
+Most strange it is, too, that women, who ought at least to know a
+woman's heart, have been especially forward in publishing these
+scandals, and sullying their pages by retailing pruriences against
+such a one as Queen Elizabeth.
+
+But to return.  Raleigh attaches himself to Cecil; and he has good
+reason.  Cecil is the cleverest man in England, saving himself.  He
+has trusted and helped him, too, in two Guiana voyages; so the
+connection is one of gratitude as well as prudence.  We know not
+whether he helped him in the third Guiana voyage in the same year,
+under Captain Berry, a north Devon man, from Grenvile's country; who
+found a 'mighty folk,' who were 'something pleasant, having drunk
+much that day,' and carried bows with golden handles:  but failed in
+finding the Lake Parima, and so came home.
+
+Raleigh's first use of his friendship with Cecil is to reconcile him,
+to the astonishment of the world, with Essex, alleging how much good
+may grow by it; for now 'the Queen's continual unquietness will grow
+to contentment.'  That, too, those who will may call policy.  We have
+as good a right to call it the act of a wise and faithful subject,
+and to say, 'Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called
+the children of God.'  He has his reward for it in full restoration
+to the Queen's favour; he deserves it.  He proves himself once more
+worthy of power, and it is given to him.  Then there is to be a
+second great expedition:  but this time its aim is the Azores.
+Philip, only maddened by the loss at Cadiz, is preparing a third
+armament for the invasion of England and Ireland, and it is said to
+lie at the islands to protect the Indian fleet.  Raleigh has the
+victualling of the land-forces, and, like everything else he takes in
+hand, 'it is very well done.'  Lord Howard declines the chief
+command, and it is given to Essex.  Raleigh is to be rear-admiral.
+
+By the time they reach the Azores, Essex has got up a foolish quarrel
+against Raleigh for disrespect in having stayed behind to bring up
+some stragglers.  But when no Armada is to be found at the Azores,
+Essex has after all to ask Raleigh what he shall do next.  Conquer
+the Azores, says Raleigh, and the thing is agreed on.  Raleigh and
+Essex are to attack Fayal.  Essex sails away before Raleigh has
+watered.  Raleigh follows as fast as he can, and at Fayal finds no
+Essex.  He must water there, then and at once.  His own veterans want
+him to attack forthwith, for the Spaniards are fortifying fast:  but
+he will wait for Essex.  Still no Essex comes.  Raleigh attempts to
+water, is defied, finds himself 'in for it,' and takes the island out
+of hand in the most masterly fashion, to the infuriation of Essex.
+Good Lord Howard patches up the matter, and the hot-headed coxcomb is
+once more pacified.  They go on to Graciosa, where Essex's weakness
+of will again comes out, and he does not take the island.  Three rich
+Caracks, however, are picked up.  'Though we shall be little the
+better for them,' says Raleigh privately to Sir Arthur Gorges, his
+faithful captain, 'yet I am heartily glad for our General's sake;
+because they will in great measure give content to her Majesty, so
+that there may be no repining against this poor Lord for the expense
+of the voyage.'
+
+Raleigh begins to see that Essex is only to be pitied; that the
+voyage is not over likely to end well:  but he takes it, in spite of
+ill-usage, as a kind-hearted man should.  Again Essex makes a fool of
+himself.  They are to steer one way in order to intercept the Plate-
+fleet.  Essex having agreed to the course pointed out, alters his
+course on a fancy; then alters it a second time, though the hapless
+Monson, with the whole Plate-fleet in sight, is hanging out lights,
+firing guns, and shrieking vainly for the General, who is gone on a
+new course, in which he might have caught the fleet after all, in
+spite of his two mistakes, but that he chooses to go a roundabout way
+instead of a short one; and away goes the whole fleet, save one
+Carack, which runs itself on shore and burns, and the game is played
+out and lost.
+
+All want Essex to go home, as the season is getting late:  but the
+wilful and weak man will linger still, and while he is hovering to
+the south, Philip's armament has sailed from the Groyne, on the
+undefended shores of England, and only God's hand saves us from the
+effects of Essex's folly.  A third time the Armadas of Spain are
+overwhelmed by the avenging tempests, and Essex returns to disgrace,
+having proved himself at once intemperate and incapable.  Even in
+coming home there is confusion, and Essex is all but lost on the
+Bishop and Clerks, by Scilly, in spite of the warnings of Raleigh's
+sailing-master, 'Old Broadbent,' who is so exasperated at the general
+stupidity that he wants Raleigh to leave Essex and his squadron to
+get out of their own scrape as they can.
+
+Essex goes off to sulk at Wanstead; but Vere excuses him, and in a
+few days he comes back, and will needs fight good Lord Howard for
+being made Earl of Nottingham for his services against the Armada and
+at Cadiz.  Baulked of this, he begins laying the blame of the failure
+at the Azores on Raleigh.  Let the spoilt naughty boy take care; even
+that 'admirable temper' for which Raleigh is famed may be worn out at
+last.
+
+These years are Raleigh's noon--stormy enough at best, yet brilliant.
+There is a pomp about him, outward and inward, which is terrible to
+others, dangerous to himself.  One has gorgeous glimpses of that
+grand Durham House of his, with its carvings and its antique marbles,
+armorial escutcheons, 'beds with green silk hangings and legs like
+dolphins, overlaid with gold':  and the man himself, tall, beautiful,
+and graceful, perfect alike in body and in mind, walking to and fro,
+his beautiful wife upon his arm, his noble boy beside his knee, in
+his 'white satin doublet, embroidered with pearls, and a great chain
+of pearls about his neck,' lording it among the lords with an
+'awfulness and ascendency above other mortals,' for which men say
+that 'his naeve is, that he is damnable proud'; and no wonder.  The
+reduced squire's younger son has gone forth to conquer the world; and
+he fancies, poor fool, that he has conquered it, just as it really
+has conquered him; and he will stand now on his blood and his
+pedigree (no bad one either), and all the more stiffly because
+puppies like Lord Oxford, who instead of making their fortunes have
+squandered them, call him 'jack and upstart,' and make impertinent
+faces while the Queen is playing the virginals, about 'how when jacks
+go up, heads go down.'  Proud?  No wonder if the man be proud!  'Is
+not this great Babylon, which I have built?'  And yet all the while
+he has the most affecting consciousness that all this is not God's
+will, but the will of the flesh; that the house of fame is not the
+house of God; that its floor is not the rock of ages, but the sea of
+glass mingled with fire, which may crack beneath him any moment, and
+let the nether flame burst up.  He knows that he is living in a
+splendid lie; that he is not what God meant him to be.  He longs to
+flee away and be at peace.  It is to this period, not to his death-
+hour, that 'The Lie' belongs; {4} saddest of poems, with its
+melodious contempt and life-weariness.  All is a lie--court, church,
+statesmen, courtiers, wit and science, town and country, all are
+shams; the days are evil; the canker is at the root of all things;
+the old heroes are dying one by one; the Elizabethan age is rotting
+down, as all human things do, and nothing is left but to bewail with
+Spenser 'The Ruins of Time'; the glory and virtue which have been--
+the greater glory and virtue which might be even now, if men would
+but arise and repent, and work righteousness, as their fathers did
+before them.  But no.  Even to such a world as this he will cling,
+and flaunt it about as captain of the guard in the Queen's progresses
+and masques and pageants, with sword-belt studded with diamonds and
+rubies, or at tournaments, in armour of solid silver, and a gallant
+train with orange-tawny feathers, provoking Essex to bring in a far
+larger train in the same colours, and swallow up Raleigh's pomp in
+his own, so achieving that famous 'feather triumph' by which he gains
+little but bad blood and a good jest.  For Essex is no better tilter
+than he is general; and having 'run very ill' in his orange-tawny,
+comes next day in green, and runs still worse, and yet is seen to be
+the same cavalier; whereon a spectator shrewdly observes that he
+changed his colours 'that it may be reported that there was one in
+green who ran worse than he in orange-tawny.'  But enough of these
+toys, while God's handwriting is upon the wall above all heads.
+
+Raleigh knows that the handwriting is there.  The spirit which drove
+him forth to Virginia and Guiana is fallen asleep:  but he longs for
+Sherborne and quiet country life, and escapes thither during Essex's
+imprisonment, taking Cecil's son with him, and writes as only he can
+write about the shepherd's peaceful joys, contrasted with 'courts'
+and 'masques' and 'proud towers' -
+
+
+   'Here are no false entrapping baits
+   Too hasty for too hasty fates,
+      Unless it be
+      The fond credulity
+Of silly fish, that worlding who still look
+Upon the bait, but never on the hook;
+      Nor envy, unless among
+   The birds, for prize of their sweet song.
+
+   'Go! let the diving negro seek
+   For pearls hid in some forlorn creek,
+      We all pearls scorn,
+      Save what the dewy morn
+Congeals upon some little spire of grass,
+Which careless shepherds beat down as they pass
+      And gold ne'er here appears
+   Save what the yellow Ceres bears.'
+
+
+Tragic enough are the after scenes of Raleigh's life:  but most
+tragic of all are these scenes of vain-glory, in which he sees the
+better part, and yet chooses the worse, and pours out his self-
+discontent in song which proves the fount of delicacy and beauty
+which lies pure and bright beneath the gaudy artificial crust.  What
+might not this man have been!  And he knows that too.  The stately
+rooms of Durham House pall on him, and he delights to hide up in his
+little study among his books and his chemical experiments, and smoke
+his silver pipe, and look out on the clear Thames and the green
+Surrey hills, and dream about Guiana and the Tropics; or to sit in
+the society of antiquaries with Selden and Cotton, Camden and Stow;
+or in his own Mermaid Club, with Ben Jonson, Fletcher, Beaumont, and
+at last with Shakspeare's self to hear and utter
+
+
+   'Words that have been
+So nimble, and so full of subtle flame,
+As if that every one from whom they came
+Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest.'
+
+
+Anything to forget the handwriting on the wall, which will not be
+forgotten.  But he will do all the good which he can meanwhile,
+nevertheless.  He will serve God and Mammon.  So complete a man will
+surely be able to do both.  Unfortunately the thing is impossible, as
+he discovers too late:  but he certainly goes as near success in the
+attempt as ever man did.  Everywhere we find him doing justly and
+loving mercy.  Wherever this man steps he leaves his footprint
+ineffaceably in deeds of benevolence.  For one year only, it seems,
+he is governor of Jersey; yet to this day, it is said, the islanders
+honour his name, only second to that of Duke Rollo, as their great
+benefactor, the founder of their Newfoundland trade.  In the west
+country he is 'as a king,' 'with ears and mouth always open to hear
+and deliver their grievances, feet and hands ready to go and work
+their redress.'  The tin-merchants have become usurers 'of fifty in
+the hundred.'  Raleigh works till he has put down their 'abominable
+and cut-throat dealing.'  There is a burdensome west-country tax on
+curing fish; Raleigh works till it is revoked.  In Parliament he is
+busy with liberal measures, always before his generation.  He puts
+down a foolish act for compulsory sowing of hemp in a speech on the
+freedom of labour worthy of the nineteenth century.  He argues
+against raising the subsidy from the three-pound men--'Call you this,
+Mr. Francis Bacon, par jugum, when a poor man pays as much as a
+rich?'  He is equally rational and spirited against the exportation
+of ordnance to the enemy; and when the question of abolishing
+monopolies is mooted he has his wise word.  He too is a monopolist of
+tin, as Lord Warden of the Stannaries.  But he has so wrought as to
+bring good out of evil; for 'before the granting of his patent, let
+the price of tin be never so high, the poor workman never had but two
+shillings a week'; yet now, so has he extended and organised the tin-
+works, 'that any man who will can find work, be tin at what price
+soever, and have four shillings a week truly paid . . . Yet if all
+others may be repealed, I will give my consent as freely to the
+cancelling of this as any member of this house.'  Most of the
+monopolies were repealed:  but we do not find that Raleigh's was
+among them.  Why should it be if its issue was more tin, full work,
+and double wages?  In all things this man approves himself faithful
+in his generation.  His sins are not against man, but against God;
+such as the world thinks no sins, and hates them, not from morality,
+but from envy.
+
+In the meanwhile, the evil which, so Spenser had prophesied, only
+waited Raleigh's death breaks out in his absence, and Ireland is all
+aflame with Tyrone's rebellion.  Raleigh is sent for.  He will not
+accept the post of Lord Deputy and go to put it down.  Perhaps he
+does not expect fair play as long as Essex is at home.  Perhaps he
+knows too much of the 'common weal, or rather common woe,' and thinks
+that what is crooked cannot be made straight.  Perhaps he is afraid
+to lose by absence his ground at court.  Would that he had gone, for
+Ireland's sake and his own.  However, it must not be.  Ormond is
+recalled, and Knollys shall be sent:  but Essex will have none but
+Sir George Carew; whom, Naunton says, he hates, and wishes to oust
+from court.  He and Elizabeth argue it out.  He turns his back on
+her, and she gives him--or does not give him, for one has found so
+many of these racy anecdotes vanish on inspection into simple wind,
+that one believes none of them--a box on the ear; which if she did,
+she did the most wise, just, and practical thing which she could do
+with such a puppy.  He claps his hand--or does not--to his sword, 'He
+would not have taken it from Henry VIII.,' and is turned out
+forthwith.  In vain Egerton, the Lord Keeper, tries to bring him to
+reason.  He storms insanely.  Every one on earth is wrong but he:
+every one is conspiring against him; he talks of 'Solomon's fool'
+too.  Had he read the Proverbs a little more closely, he might have
+left the said fool alone, as being a too painfully exact likeness of
+himself.  It ends by his being worsted, and Raleigh rising higher
+than ever.
+
+I cannot see why Raleigh should be represented as henceforth becoming
+Essex's 'avowed enemy,' save on the ground that all good men are and
+ought to be the enemies of bad men, when they see them about to do
+harm, and to ruin the country.  Essex is one of the many persons upon
+whom this age has lavished a quantity of sentimentality, which suits
+oddly enough with its professions of impartiality.  But there is an
+impartiality which ends in utter injustice; which by saying
+carelessly to every quarrel, 'Both are right, and both are wrong,'
+leaves only the impression that all men are wrong, and ends by being
+unjust to every one.  So has Elizabeth and Essex's quarrel been
+treated.  There was some evil in Essex; therefore Elizabeth was a
+fool for liking him.  There was some good in Essex; therefore
+Elizabeth was cruel in punishing him.  This is the sort of slipshod
+dilemma by which Elizabeth is proved to be wrong, even while Essex is
+confessed to be wrong too; while the patent facts of the case are,
+that Elizabeth bore with him as long as she could, and a great deal
+longer than any one else could.  Why Raleigh should be accused of
+helping to send Essex into Ireland, I do not know.  Camden confesses
+(at the same time that he gives a hint of the kind) that Essex would
+let no one go but himself.  And if this was his humour, one can
+hardly wonder at Cecil and Raleigh, as well as Elizabeth, bidding the
+man begone and try his hand at government, and be filled with the
+fruit of his own devices.  He goes; does nothing; or rather worse
+than nothing; for in addition to the notorious ill-management of the
+whole matter, we may fairly say that he killed Elizabeth.  She never
+held up her head again after Tyrone's rebellion.  Elizabeth still
+clings to him, changing her mind about him every hour, and at last
+writes him such a letter as he deserves.  He has had power, money,
+men, such as no one ever had before.  Why has he done nothing but
+bring England to shame?  He comes home frantically--the story of his
+bursting into the dressing-room rests on no good authority--with a
+party of friends at his heels, leaving Ireland to take care of
+itself.  Whatever entertainment he met with from the fond old woman,
+he met with the coldness which he deserved from Raleigh and Cecil.
+Who can wonder?  What had he done to deserve aught else?  But he all
+but conquers; and Raleigh takes to his bed in consequence, sick of
+the whole matter; as one would have been inclined to do oneself.  He
+is examined and arraigned; writes a maudlin letter to Elizabeth.
+Elizabeth has been called a fool for listening to such pathetical
+'love letters':  and then hardhearted for not listening to them.
+Poor Lady! do what she would, she found it hard enough to please all
+parties while alive; must she be condemned over and above in aeternum
+to be wrong whatsoever she did?  Why is she not to have the benefit
+of the plain straightforward interpretation which would be allowed to
+any other human being; namely, that she approved of such fine talk as
+long as it was proved to be sincere by fine deeds:  but that when
+these were wanting, the fine talk became hollow, fulsome, a fresh
+cause of anger and disgust?  Yet still she weeps over Essex when he
+falls sick, as any mother would; and would visit him if she could
+with honour.  But a 'malignant influence counteracts every
+disposition to relent.'  No doubt, a man's own folly, passion, and
+insolence has generally a very malignant influence on his fortunes;
+and he may consider himself a very happy man if all that befalls to
+him thereby is what befell Essex, namely, deprivation of his offices
+and imprisonment in his own house.  He is forgiven after all; but the
+spoilt child refuses his bread and butter without sugar.  What is the
+pardon to him without a renewal of his licence of sweet wines?
+Because he is not to have that, the Queen's 'conditions are as
+crooked as her carcase.'  Flesh and blood can stand no more, and
+ought to stand no more.  After all that Elizabeth has been to him,
+that speech is the speech of a brutal and ungrateful nature.  And
+such he shows himself to be in the hour of trial.  What if the patent
+for sweet wines is refused him?  Such gifts were meant as the reward
+of merit; and what merit has he to show?  He never thinks of that.
+Blind with fury, he begins to intrigue with James, and slanders to
+him, under colour of helping his succession, all whom he fancies
+opposed to him.  What is worse, he intrigues with Tyrone about
+bringing over an army of Irish Papists to help him against the Queen,
+and this at the very time that his sole claim to popularity rests on
+his being the leader of the Puritans.  A man must have been very far
+gone, either in baseness or in hatred, who represents Raleigh to
+James as dangerous to the commonweal on account of his great power in
+the west of England and Jersey, 'places fit for the Spaniard to land
+in.'  Cobham, as Warden of the Cinque Ports, is included in his
+slander; and both he and Raleigh will hear of it again.
+
+Some make much of a letter, supposed to be written about this time by
+Raleigh to Cecil, bidding Cecil keep down Essex, even crush him, now
+that he is once down.  I do not happen to think the letter to be
+Raleigh's.  His initials are subscribed to it; but not his name and
+the style is not like his.  But as for seeing 'unforgiveness and
+revenge in it,' whose soever it may be, I hold and say there is not a
+word which can bear such a construction.  It is a dark letter:  but
+about a dark matter and a dark man.  It is a worldly and expediential
+letter, appealing to low motives in Cecil, though for a right end;
+such a letter, in short, as statesmen are wont to write nowadays.  If
+Raleigh wrote it, God punished him for doing so speedily enough.  He
+does not usually punish statesmen nowadays for such letters; perhaps
+because He does not love them as well as Raleigh.  But as for the
+letter itself.  Essex is called a 'tyrant,' because he had shown
+himself one.  The Queen is to 'hold Bothwell,' because 'while she
+hath him, he will even be the canker of her estate and safety,' and
+the writer has 'seen the last of her good days and of ours after his
+liberty.'  On which accounts, Cecil is not to be deterred from doing
+what is right and necessary 'by any fear of after-revenges' and
+'conjectures from causes remote,' as many a stronger instance--given-
+-will prove, but 'look to the present,' and so 'do wisely.'  There is
+no real cause for Cecil's fear.  If the man who has now lost a power
+which he ought never to have had be now kept down, then neither he
+nor his son will ever be able to harm the man who has kept him at his
+just level.  What 'revenge, selfishness, and craft' there can be in
+all this it is difficult to see; as difficult as to see why Essex is
+to be talked of as 'unfortunate,' and the blame of his frightful end
+thrown on every one but himself:  the fact being that Essex's end was
+brought on by his having chosen one Sunday morning for breaking out
+into open rebellion, for the purpose of seizing the city of London
+and the Queen's person, and compelling her to make him lord and
+master of the British Isles; in which attempt he and his fought with
+the civil and military authorities, till artillery had to be brought
+up and many lives were lost.  Such little escapades may be pardonable
+enough in 'noble and unfortunate' earls:  but readers will perhaps
+agree that if they chose to try a similar experiment, they could not
+complain if they found themselves shortly after in company with Mr.
+Mitchell at Spike Island or Mr. Oxford in Bedlam.  However, those
+were days in which such Sabbath amusements on the part of one of the
+most important and powerful personages of the realm could not be
+passed over so lightly, especially when accompanied by severe loss of
+life; and as there existed in England certain statutes concerning
+rebellion and high treason, which must needs have been framed for
+some purpose or other, the authorities of England may be excused for
+fancying that they bore some reference to such acts as that which the
+noble and unfortunate earl had just committed, as wantonly,
+selfishly, and needlessly, it seems to me, as ever did man on earth.
+
+I may seem to jest too much upon so solemn a matter as the life of a
+human being:  but if I am not to touch the popular talk about Essex
+in this tone, I can only touch it in a far sterner one; and if
+ridicule is forbidden, express disgust instead.
+
+I have entered into this matter of Essex somewhat at length, because
+on it is founded one of the mean slanders from which Raleigh never
+completely recovered.  The very mob who, after Raleigh's death, made
+him a Protestant martyr--as, indeed, he was--looked upon Essex in the
+same light, hated Raleigh as the cause of his death, and accused him
+of glutting his eyes with Essex's misery, puffing tobacco out of a
+window, and what not--all mere inventions, so Raleigh declared upon
+the scaffold.  He was there in his office as captain of the guard,
+and could do no less than be there.  Essex, it is said, asked for
+Raleigh just before he died:  but Raleigh had withdrawn, the mob
+having murmured.  What had Essex to say to him?  Was it, asks Oldys,
+shrewdly enough, to ask him pardon for the wicked slanders which he
+had been pouring into James's credulous and cowardly ears?  We will
+hope so; and leave poor Essex to God and the mercy of God, asserting
+once more that no man ever brought ruin and death more thoroughly on
+himself by his own act, needing no imaginary help downwards from
+Raleigh, Cecil, or other human being.
+
+And now begins the fourth act of this strange tragedy.  Queen
+Elizabeth dies; and dies of grief.  It has been the fashion to
+attribute to her, I know not why, remorse for Essex's death; and the
+foolish and false tale about Lady Nottingham and the ring has been
+accepted as history.  The fact seems to be that she never really held
+up her head after Burleigh's death.  She could not speak of him
+without tears; forbade his name to be mentioned in the Council.  No
+wonder; never had mistress a better servant.  For nearly half a
+century have these two noble souls loved each other, trusted each
+other, worked with each other; and God's blessing has been on their
+deeds; and now the faithful God-fearing man is gone to his reward;
+and she is growing old, and knows that the ancient fire is dying out
+in her; and who will be to her what he was?  Buckhurst is a good man,
+and one of her old pupils; and she makes him Lord Treasurer in
+Burleigh's place:  but beyond that all is dark.  'I am a miserable
+forlorn woman; there is none about me that I can trust.'  She sees
+through Cecil; through Henry Howard.  Essex has proved himself
+worthless, and pays the penalty of his sins.  Men are growing worse
+than their fathers.  Spanish gold is bringing in luxury and sin.  The
+last ten years of her reign are years of decadence, profligacy,
+falsehood; and she cannot but see it.  Tyrone's rebellion is the last
+drop which fills the cup.  After fifty years of war, after a drain of
+money all but fabulous expended on keeping Ireland quiet, the volcano
+bursts forth again just as it seemed extinguished, more fiercely than
+ever, and the whole work has to be done over again, when there is
+neither time nor a man to do it.  And ahead, what hope is there for
+England?  Who will be her successor?  She knows in her heart that it
+will be James:  but she cannot bring herself to name him.  To
+bequeath the fruit of all her labours to a tyrant, a liar, and a
+coward:  for she knows the man but too well.  It is too hideous to be
+faced.  This is the end then?  'Oh that I were a milke maide, with a
+paile upon mine arm!'  But it cannot be.  It never could have been;
+and she must endure to the end.
+
+'Therefore I hated life; yea, I hated all my labour which I had taken
+under the sun; because I should leave it to the man that shall be
+after me.  And who knows whether he shall be a wise man or a fool?
+yet shall he have rule over all my labour wherein I have showed
+myself wise, in wisdom, and knowledge, and equity . . . Vanity of
+vanities, and vexation of spirit!'  And so, with a whole book of
+Ecclesiastes written on that mighty heart, the old lioness coils
+herself up in her lair, refuses food, and dies.  I know few passages
+in the world's history more tragic than that death.
+
+Why did she not trust Raleigh?  First, because Raleigh, as we have
+seen, was not the sort of man whom she needed.  He was not the
+steadfast single-eyed statesman; but the many-sided genius.  Besides,
+he was the ringleader of the war-party.  And she, like Burleigh
+before his death, was tired of the war; saw that it was demoralising
+England; was anxious for peace.  Raleigh would not see that.  It was
+to him a divine mission which must be fulfilled at all risks.  As
+long as the Spaniards were opposing the Indians, conquering America,
+there must be no peace.  Both were right from their own point of
+view.  God ordered the matter from a third point of view.
+
+Besides, we know that Essex, and after him Cecil and Henry Howard,
+had been slandering Raleigh basely to James.  Can we doubt that the
+same poison had been poured into Elizabeth's ears?  She might
+distrust Cecil too much to act upon what he said of Raleigh; and yet
+distrust Raleigh too much to put the kingdom into his hands.
+However, she is gone now, and a new king has arisen, who knoweth not
+Joseph.
+
+James comes down to take possession.  Insolence, luxury, and
+lawlessness mark his first steps on his going amid the adulations of
+a fallen people; he hangs a poor wretch without trial; wastes his
+time in hunting by the way;--a bad and base man, whose only redeeming
+point--if in his case it be one--is his fondness for little children.
+But that will not make a king.  The wiser elders take counsel
+together.  Raleigh and good Judge Fortescue are for requiring
+conditions from the newcomer; and constitutional liberty makes its
+last stand among the men of Devon, the old county of warriors,
+discoverers, and statesmen, of which Queen Bess had said that the men
+of Devon were her right hand.  But in vain; James has his way; Cecil
+and Henry Howard are willing enough to give it him.
+
+So down comes Rehoboam, taking counsel with the young men, and makes
+answer to England, 'My father chastised you with whips; but I will
+chastise you with scorpions.'  He takes a base pleasure, shocking to
+the French ambassador, in sneering at the memory of Queen Elizabeth;
+a perverse delight in honouring every rascal whom she had punished.
+Tyrone must come to England to be received into favour, maddening the
+soul of honest Sir John Harrington.  Essex is christened 'my martyr,'
+apparently for having plotted treason against Elizabeth with Tyrone.
+Raleigh is received with a pun--'By my soul, I have heard rawly of
+thee, mon'; and when the great nobles and gentlemen come to court
+with their retinues, James tries to hide his dread of them in an
+insult; pooh-poohs their splendour, and says, 'he doubts not that he
+should have been able to win England for himself, had they kept him
+out.'  Raleigh answers boldly, 'Would God that had been put to the
+trial.'  'Why?'  'Because then you would have known your friends from
+your foes.'  'A reason,' says old Aubrey, 'never forgotten or
+forgiven.'  Aubrey is no great authority; but the speech smacks so of
+Raleigh's offhand daring that one cannot but believe it; as one does
+also the other story of his having advised the lords to keep out
+James and erect a republic.  Not that he could have been silly enough
+to propose such a thing seriously at that moment; but that he most
+likely, in his bold way, may have said, 'Well, if we are to have this
+man in without conditions, better a republic at once.'  Which, if he
+did say, he said what the next forty years proved to be strictly
+true.  However, he will go on his own way as best he can.  If James
+will give him a loan, he and the rest of the old heroes will join,
+fit out a fleet against Spain, and crush her, now that she is
+tottering and impoverished, once and for ever.  But James has no
+stomach for fighting; cannot abide the sight of a drawn sword; would
+not provoke Spain for the world--why, they might send Jesuits and
+assassinate him; and as for the money, he wants that for very
+different purposes.  So the answer which he makes to Raleigh's
+proposal of war against Spain is to send him to the Tower, and
+sentence him to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, on a charge of
+plotting with Spain.
+
+Having read, I believe, nearly all that has been written on the
+subject of this dark 'Cobham plot,' I find but one thing come
+brightly out of the infinite confusion and mystery, which will never
+be cleared up till the day of judgment, and that is Raleigh's
+innocence.  He, and all England, and the very men who condemned him,
+knew that he was innocent.  Every biographer is forced to confess
+this, more or less, in spite of all efforts to be what is called
+'impartial.'  So I shall waste no words upon the matter, only
+observing that whereas Raleigh is said to have slandered Cecil to
+James, in the same way that Cecil had slandered him, one passage of
+this Cobham plot disproves utterly such a story, which, after all,
+rests (as far as I know) only on hearsay, being 'spoken of in a
+manuscript written by one Buck, secretary to Chancellor Egerton.'
+For in writing to his own wife, in the expectation of immediate
+death, Raleigh speaks of Cecil in a very different tone, as one in
+whom he trusted most, and who has left him in the hour of need.  I
+ask the reader to peruse that letter, and say whether any man would
+write thus, with death and judgment before his face, of one whom he
+knew that he had betrayed; or, indeed, of one who he knew had
+betrayed him.  I see no reason to doubt that Raleigh kept good faith
+with Cecil, and that he was ignorant till after his trial that Cecil
+was in the plot against him.
+
+I do not care to enter into the tracasseries of this Cobham plot.
+Every one knows them; no one can unravel them.  The moral and
+spiritual significance of the fact is more interesting than all
+questions as to Cobham's lies, Brooke's lies, Aremberg's lies, Coke's
+lies, James's lies:- Let the dead bury their dead.  It is the broad
+aspect of the thing which is so wonderful; to see how
+
+
+'The eagle, towering in his pride of place,
+Was by a mousing owl hawked at and killed.'
+
+
+This is the man who six months ago, perhaps, thought that he and
+Cecil were to rule England together, while all else were the puppets
+whose wires they pulled.  'The Lord hath taken him up and dashed him
+down;' and by such means, too, and on such a charge!  Betraying his
+country to Spain!  Absurd--incredible--he would laugh it to scorn:
+but it is bitter earnest.  There is no escape.  True or false, he
+sees that his enemies will have his head.  It is maddening:  a
+horrible nightmare.  He cannot bear it; he cannot face--so he writes
+to that beloved wife--'the scorn, the taunts, the loss of honour, the
+cruel words of lawyers.'  He stabs himself.  Read that letter of his,
+written after the mad blow had been struck; it is sublime from
+intensity of agony.  The way in which the chastisement was taken
+proves how utterly it was needed, ere that proud, success-swollen,
+world-entangled heart could be brought right with God.
+
+And it is brought right.  The wound is not mortal.  He comes slowly
+to a better mind, and takes his doom like a man.  That first farewell
+to his wife was written out of hell.  The second rather out of
+heaven.  Read it, too, and compare; and then see how the Lord has
+been working upon this great soul:  infinite sadness, infinite
+tenderness and patience, and trust in God for himself and his poor
+wife:  'God is my witness, it was for you and yours that I desired
+life; but it is true that I disdain myself for begging it.  For know,
+dear wife, that your son is the son of a true man, and one who, in
+his own respect, despiseth death and all his ugly and misshapen forms
+. . . The everlasting, powerful, infinite, and omnipotent God, who is
+goodness itself, the true life and light, keep thee and thine, have
+mercy upon me, and teach me to forgive my persecutors and accusers,
+and send us to meet in His glorious kingdom.'
+
+Is it come to this then?  Is he fit to die at last?  Then he is fit
+to live; and live he shall.  The tyrants have not the heart to carry
+out their own crime, and Raleigh shall be respited.
+
+But not pardoned.  No more return for him into that sinful world,
+where he flaunted on the edge of the precipice, and dropped heedless
+over it.  God will hide him in the secret place of His presence, and
+keep him in His tabernacle from the strife of tongues; and a new life
+shall begin for him; a wiser, perhaps a happier, than he has known
+since he was a little lad in the farmhouse in pleasant Devon far
+away.  On the 15th of December he enters the Tower.  Little dreams he
+that for more than twelve years those doleful walls would be his
+home.  Lady Raleigh obtains leave to share his prison with him, and,
+after having passed ten years without a child, brings him a boy to
+comfort the weary heart.  The child of sorrow is christened Carew.
+
+Little think those around him what strange things that child will see
+before his hairs be gray.  She has her maid, and he his three
+servants; some five or six friends are allowed 'to repair to him at
+convenient times.'  He has a chamber-door always open into the
+lieutenant's garden, where he 'has converted a little hen-house into
+a still-room, and spends his time all the day in distillation.'  The
+next spring a grant is made of his goods and chattels, forfeited by
+attainder, to trustees named by himself, for the benefit of his
+family.  So far, so well; or, at least, not as ill as it might be:
+but there are those who cannot leave the caged lion in peace.
+
+Sanderson, who had married his niece, instead of paying up the
+arrears which he owes on the wine and other offices, brings in a
+claim of 2000 pounds.  But the rogue meets his match, and finds
+himself, at the end of a lawsuit, in prison for debt.  Greater
+rogues, however, will have better fortune, and break through the law-
+cobwebs which have stopped a poor little fly like Sanderson.  For
+Carr, afterwards Lord Somerset, casts his eyes on the Sherborne land.
+It has been included in the conveyance, and should be safe; but there
+are others who, by instigation surely of the devil himself, have had
+eyes to see a flaw in the deed.  Sir John Popham is appealed to.  Who
+could doubt the result?  He answers that there is no doubt that the
+words were omitted by the inattention of the engrosser--Carew Raleigh
+says that but one single word was wanting, which word was found
+notwithstanding in the paper-book, i.e. the draft--but that the word
+not being there, the deed is worthless, and the devil may have his
+way.  To Carr, who has nothing of his own, it seems reasonable enough
+to help himself to what belongs to others, and James gives him the
+land.  Raleigh writes to him, gently, gracefully, loftily.  Here is
+an extract:  'And for yourself, sir, seeing your fair day is now in
+the dawn, and mine drawn to the evening, your own virtues and the
+king's grace assuring you of many favours and much honour, I beseech
+you not to begin your first building upon the ruins of the innocent;
+and that their sorrows, with mine, may not attend your first
+plantation.'  He speaks strongly of the fairness, sympathy, and pity
+by which the Scots in general had laid him under obligation:  argues
+from it his own evident innocence; and ends with a quiet warning to
+the young favourite not to 'undergo the curse of them that enter into
+the fields of the fatherless.'  In vain.  Lady Raleigh, with her
+children, entreats James on her knees:  in vain again.  'I mun ha'
+the land,' is the answer; 'I mun ha' it for Carr.'  And he has it;
+patching up the matter after a while by a gift of 8000 pounds to her
+and her elder son, in requital for an estate of 5000 pounds a year.
+
+So there sits Raleigh, growing poorer day by day, and clinging more
+and more to that fair wife, and her noble boy, and the babe whose
+laughter makes music within that dreary cage.  And all day long, as
+we have seen, he sits over his still, compounding and discovering,
+and sometimes showing himself on the wall to the people, who gather
+to gaze at him, till Wade forbids it, fearing popular feeling.  In
+fact, the world outside has a sort of mysterious awe of him, as if he
+were a chained magician, who, if he were let loose, might do with
+them all what he would.  Certain great nobles are of the same mind.
+Woe to them if that silver tongue should once again be unlocked!
+
+The Queen, with a woman's faith in greatness, sends to him for
+'cordials.'  Here is one of them, famous in Charles the Second's days
+as 'Sir Walter's Cordial':-
+
+
+B.  Zedoary and Saffron, each       0.5 lb.
+Distilled water                       3 pints.
+Macerate, etc., and reduce to       1.5 pint.
+Compound powder of crabs' claws      16 oz.
+Cinnamon and Nutmegs                  2 oz.
+Cloves                                1 oz.
+Cardamom seeds                      0.5 oz.
+ Double refined sugar                  2 lb.
+        Make a confection.
+
+
+Which, so the world believes, will cure all ills which flesh is heir
+to.  It does not seem that Raleigh so boasted himself; but the
+people, after the fashion of the time, seem to have called all his
+medicines 'cordials,' and probably took for granted that it was by
+this particular one that the enchanter cured Queen Anne of a
+desperate sickness, 'whereof the physicians were at the farthest end
+of their studies' (no great way to go in those days) 'to find the
+cause, and at a nonplus for the cure.'
+
+Raleigh--this is Sir Anthony Welden's account, which may go for what
+it is worth--asks for his reward, only justice.  Will the Queen ask
+that certain lords may be sent to examine Cobham, 'whether he had at
+any time accused Sir Walter of any treason under his hand?'  Six are
+sent.  Cobham answers, 'Never; nor could I:  that villain Wade often
+solicited me, and not so prevailing, got me by a trick to write my
+name on a piece of white paper.  So that if a charge come under my
+hand it was forged by that villain Wade, by writing something above
+my hand, without my consent or knowledge.'  They return.  An
+equivocation was ready.  'Sir, my Lord Cobham has made good all that
+ever he wrote or said'; having, by his own account, written nothing
+but his name.  This is Sir Anthony Welden's story.  One hopes, for
+the six lords' sake, it may not be true; but there is no reason, in
+the morality of James's court, why it should not have been.
+
+So Raleigh must remain where he is, and work on.  And he does work.
+As his captivity becomes more and more hopeless, so comes out more
+and more the stateliness, self-help, and energy of the man.  Till now
+he has played with his pen:  now he will use it in earnest; and use
+it as few prisoners have done.  Many a good book has been written in
+a dungeon--'Don Quixote,' the 'Pilgrim's Progress':  beautiful each
+in its way, and destined to immortality:  Raleigh begins the 'History
+of the World,' the most God-fearing and God-seeing history which I
+know of among English writings; though blotted by flattery of James
+in the preface:  wrong:  but pardonable in a man trying in the Tower
+to get out of that doleful prison.  But all his writings are thirty
+years too late; they express the creed of a buried generation, of the
+men who defied Spain in the name of a God of righteousness,--not of
+men who cringe before her in the name of a God of power and cunning.
+The captive eagle has written with a quill from his own wing--a quill
+which has been wont ere now to soar to heaven.  Every line smacks of
+the memories of Nombre and of Zutphen, of Tilbury Fort and of Calais
+Roads; and many a gray-headed veteran, as he read them, must have
+turned away his face to hide the noble tears, as Ulysses from
+Demodocus when he sang the song of Troy.  So there sits Raleigh, like
+the prophet of old, in his lonely tower above the Thames, watching
+the darkness gather upon the land year by year, 'like the morning
+spread over the mountains,' the darkness which comes before the dawn
+of the Day of The Lord; which he shall never see on earth, though it
+be very near at hand; and asks of each newcomer, 'Watchman, what of
+the night?'
+
+But there is one bright point at least in the darkness; one on whom
+Raleigh's eyes, and those of all England, are fixed in boundless
+hope; one who, by the sympathy which attracts all noble natures to
+each other, clings to the hero utterly; Henry, the Crown Prince.  'No
+king but my father would keep such a bird in a cage.'  The noble lad
+tries to open the door for the captive eagle; but in vain.  At least
+he will make what use he can of his wisdom.  He asks him for advice
+about the new ship he is building, and has a simple practical letter
+in return, and over and above probably the two valuable pamphlets,
+'Of the Invention of Ships,' and 'Observations on the Navy and Sea
+Service'; which the Prince will never see.  In 1611 he asks Raleigh's
+advice about the foolish double marriage with the Prince and Princess
+of Savoy, and receives for answer two plain-spoken discourses as full
+of historical learning as of practical sound sense.
+
+These are benefits which must be repaid.  The father will repay them
+hereafter in his own way.  In the meanwhile the son does so in his
+way, by soliciting the Sherborne estate as for himself, intending to
+restore it to Raleigh.  He succeeds.  Carr is bought off for 25,000
+pounds, where Lady Raleigh has been bought off with 8000 pounds; but
+neither Raleigh nor his widow will ever be the better for that
+bargain, and Carr will get Sherborne back again, and probably, in the
+King's silly dotage, keep the 25,000 pounds also.
+
+In November 1612 Prince Henry falls sick.
+
+When he is at the last gasp, the poor Queen sends to Raleigh for some
+of the same cordial which had cured her.  Medicine is sent, with a
+tender letter, as it well might be; for Raleigh knew how much hung,
+not only for himself, but for England, on the cracking threads of
+that fair young life.  It is questioned at first whether it shall be
+administered.  'The cordial,' Raleigh says, 'will cure him or any
+other of a fever, except in case of poison.'
+
+The cordial is administered; but it comes too late.  The prince dies,
+and with him the hopes of all good men.
+
+* * *
+
+At last, after twelve years of prison, Raleigh is free.  He is sixty-
+six years old now, gray-headed and worn down by confinement, study,
+and want of exercise:  but he will not remember that.
+
+
+'Still in his ashes live their wonted fire.'
+
+
+Now for Guiana, at last! which he has never forgotten; to which he
+has been sending, with his slender means, ship after ship to keep the
+Indians in hope.
+
+He is freed in March.  At once he is busy in his project.  In August
+he has obtained the King's commission, by the help of Sir Ralph
+Winwood, Secretary of State, who seems to have believed in Raleigh.
+At least Raleigh believed in him.  In March next year he has sailed,
+and with him thirteen ships, and more than a hundred knights and
+gentlemen, and among them, strange to say, Sir Warham St. Leger.
+This is certainly not the quondam Marshal of Munster under whom
+Raleigh served at Smerwick six-and-thirty years ago.  He would be
+nearly eighty years old; and as Lord Doneraile's pedigree gives three
+Sir Warhams, we cannot identify the man.  But it is a strong argument
+in Raleigh's favour that a St. Leger, of a Devon family which had
+served with him in Ireland, and intimately connected with him his
+whole life, should keep his faith in Raleigh after all his reverses.
+Nevertheless, the mere fact of an unpardoned criminal, said to be non
+ens in law, being able in a few months to gather round him such a
+party, is proof patent of what slender grounds there are for calling
+Raleigh 'suspected' and 'unpopular.'
+
+But he does not sail without a struggle or two.  James is too proud
+to allow his heir to match with any but a mighty king, is infatuated
+about the Spanish marriage; and Gondomar is with him, playing with
+his hopes and with his fears also.
+
+The people are furious, and have to be silenced again and again:
+there is even fear of rioting.  The charming and smooth-tongued
+Gondomar can hate, and can revenge, too.  Five 'prentices who have
+insulted him for striking a little child, are imprisoned and fined
+several hundred pounds each.  And as for hating Raleigh, Gondomar had
+been no Spaniard (to let alone the private reasons which some have
+supposed) had he not hated Spain's ancient scourge and unswerving
+enemy.  He comes to James, complaining that Raleigh is about to break
+the peace with Spain.  Nothing is to be refused him which can further
+the one darling fancy of James; and Raleigh has to give in writing
+the number of his ships, men, and ordnance, and, moreover, the name
+of the country and the very river whither he is going.  This paper
+was given, Carew Raleigh asserts positively, under James's solemn
+promise not to reveal it; and Raleigh himself seems to have believed
+that it was to be kept private; for he writes afterwards to Secretary
+Winwood in a tone of astonishment and indignation, that the
+information contained in his paper had been sent on to the King of
+Spain before he sailed from the Thames.  Winwood could have told him
+as much already; for Buckingham had written to Winwood, on March 28,
+to ask him why he had not been to the Spanish Ambassador 'to acquaint
+him with the order taken by his Majesty about Sir W. R.'s voyage.'
+But however unwilling the Secretary (as one of the furtherers of the
+voyage) may have been to meddle in the matter, Gondomar had had news
+enough from another source; perhaps from James's own mouth.  For the
+first letter to the West Indies about Raleigh was dated from Madrid,
+March 19; and most remarkable it is that in James's 'Declaration,' or
+rather apology for his own conduct, no mention whatsoever is made of
+his having given information to Gondomar.
+
+Gondomar offered, says James, to let Raleigh go with one or two ships
+only.  He might work a mine, and the King of Spain would give him a
+safe convoy home with all his gold.  How kind.  And how likely would
+Raleigh and his fellow-adventurers have been to accept such an offer;
+how likely, too, to find men who would sail with them on such an
+errand, to be 'flayed alive,' as many who travelled to the Indies of
+late years had been, or to have their throats cut, tied back to back,
+after trading unarmed and peaceably for a month, as thirty-six of
+Raleigh's men had been but two or three years before in that very
+Orinoco.  So James is forced to let the large fleet go; and to let it
+go well armed also; for the plain reason, that otherwise it dare not
+go at all; and in the meanwhile letters are sent from Spain, in which
+the Spaniards call the fleet 'English enemies,' and ships and troops
+are moved up as fast as possible from the Spanish main.
+
+But, say some, James was justified in telling Gondomar, and the
+Spaniards in defending themselves.  On the latter point there is no
+doubt.
+
+
+'They may get who have the will,
+And they may keep who can.'
+
+
+But it does seem hard on Raleigh, after having laboured in this
+Guiana business for years, and after having spent his money in vain
+attempts to deliver these Guianians from their oppressors.  It is
+hard, and he feels it so.  He sees that he is not trusted; that, as
+James himself confesses, his pardon is refused simply to keep a hold
+on him; that, if he fails, he is ruined.
+
+As he well asks afterwards, 'If the King did not think that Guiana
+was his, why let me go thither at all?  He knows that it was his by
+the law of nations, for he made Mr. Harcourt a grant of part of it.
+If it be, as Gondomar says, the King of Spain's, then I had no more
+right to work a mine in it than to burn a town.'  An argument which
+seems to me unanswerable.  But, says James, and others with him, he
+was forbid to meddle with any country occupate or possessed by
+Spaniards.  Southey, too, blames him severely for not having told
+James that the country was already settled by Spaniards.  I can
+excuse Southey, but not James, for overlooking the broad fact that
+all England knew it, as I have shown, since 1594; that if they did
+not, Gondomar would have taken care to tell them; and that he could
+not go to Guiana without meddling with Spaniards.  His former voyages
+and publications made no secret of it.  On the contrary, one chief
+argument for the plan had been all through the delivery of the
+Indians from these very Spaniards, who, though they could not conquer
+them, ill-used them in every way:  and in his agreement with the
+Lords about the Guiana voyage in 1611, he makes especial mention of
+the very place which will soon fill such a part in our story, 'San
+Thome, where the Spaniards inhabit,' and tells the Lords whom to ask
+as to the number of men who will be wanted 'to secure Keymish's
+passage to the mine' against these very Spaniards.  What can be more
+clear, save to those who will not see?
+
+The plain fact is that Raleigh went, with his eyes open, to take
+possession of a country to which he believed that he and King James
+had a right, and that James and his favourites, when they, as he
+pleads, might have stopped him by a word, let him go, knowing as well
+as the Spaniards what he intended; for what purpose, but to have an
+excuse for the tragedy which ended all, it is difficult to conceive.
+'It is evident,' wisely says Sir Robert Schomburgk, 'that they winked
+at consequences which they must have foreseen.'
+
+And here Mr. Napier, on the authority of Count Desmarets, brings a
+grave charge against Raleigh.  Raleigh in his 'Apology' protests that
+he only saw Desmarets once on board of his vessel.  Desmarets says in
+his despatches that he was on board of her several times--whether he
+saw Raleigh more than once does not appear--and that Raleigh
+complained to him of having been unjustly imprisoned, stripped of his
+estate, and so forth; and that he was on that account resolved to
+abandon his country, and, if the expedition succeeded, offer himself
+and the fruit of his labour to the King of France.
+
+If this be true, Raleigh was very wrong.  But Sir Robert Schomburgk
+points out that this passage, which Mr. Napier says occurs in the
+last despatch, was written a month after Raleigh had sailed; and that
+the previous despatch, written only four days after Raleigh sailed,
+says nothing about the matter.  So that it could not have been a very
+important or fixed resolution on Raleigh's part, if it was only to be
+recollected a month after.  I do not say--as Sir Robert Schomburgk is
+very much inclined to do--that it was altogether a bubble of French
+fancy.  It is possible that Raleigh, in his just rage at finding that
+James was betraying him and sending him out with a halter round his
+neck, to all but certain ruin, did say wild words--That it was better
+for him to serve the Frenchman than such a master--that perhaps he
+might go over to the Frenchman after all--or some folly of the kind,
+in that same rash tone which, as we have seen, has got him into
+trouble so often already:  and so I leave the matter, saying, Beware
+of making any man an offender for a word, much less one who is being
+hunted to death in his old age, and knows it.
+
+However this may be, the fleet sails; but with no bright auguries.
+The mass of the sailors are 'a scum of men'; they are mutinous and
+troublesome; and what is worse, have got among them (as, perhaps,
+they were intended to have) the notion that Raleigh's being still non
+ens in law absolves them from obeying him when they do not choose,
+and permits them to say of him behind his back what they list.  They
+have long delays at Plymouth.  Sir Warham's ship cannot get out of
+the Thames.  Pennington, at the Isle of Wight, 'cannot redeem his
+bread from the bakers,' and has to ride back to London to get money
+from Lady Raleigh.  The poor lady has it not, and gives a note of
+hand to Mr. Wood of Portsmouth.  Alas for her!  She has sunk her 8000
+pounds, and, beside that, sold her Wickham estate for 2500 pounds;
+and all is on board the fleet.  'A hundred pieces' are all the ready
+money the hapless pair had left on earth, and they have parted them
+together.  Raleigh has fifty-five and she forty-five till God send it
+back--if, indeed, He ever send it.  The star is sinking low in the
+west.  Trouble on trouble.  Sir John Fane has neither men nor money;
+Captain Witney has not provisions enough, and Raleigh has to sell his
+plate in Plymouth to help him.  Courage! one last struggle to redeem
+his good name.
+
+Then storms off Sicily--a pinnace is sunk; faithful Captain King
+drives back into Bristol; the rest have to lie by a while in some
+Irish port for a fair wind.  Then Bailey deserts with the
+'Southampton' at the Canaries; then 'unnatural weather,' so that a
+fourteen days' voyage takes forty days.  Then 'the distemper' breaks
+out under the line.  The simple diary of that sad voyage still
+remains, full of curious and valuable nautical hints; but recording
+the loss of friend on friend; four or five officers, and, 'to our
+great grief, our principal refiner, Mr. Fowler.'  'Crab, my old
+servant.'  Next a lamentable twenty-four hours, in which they lose
+Pigott, the lieutenant-general, 'mine honest frinde, Mr. John Talbot,
+one that had lived with me a leven yeeres in the Tower, an excellent
+general skoller, and a faithful and true man as ever lived,' with two
+'very fair conditioned gentleman,' and 'mine own cook Francis.'  Then
+more officers and men, and my 'cusen Payton.'  Then the water is near
+spent, and they are forced to come to half allowance, till they save
+and drink greedily whole canfuls of the bitter rain water.  At last
+Raleigh's own turn comes; running on deck in a squall, he gets wet
+through, and has twenty days of burning fever; 'never man suffered a
+more furious heat,' during which he eats nothing but now and then a
+stewed prune.
+
+At last they make the land at the mouth of the Urapoho, far south of
+their intended goal.  They ask for Leonard the Indian, 'who lived
+with me in England three or four years, the same man that took Mr.
+Harcourt's brother and fifty men when they were in extreme distress,
+and had no means to live there but by the help of this Indian, whom
+they made believe that they were my men'; but the faithful Indian is
+gone up the country, and they stand away for Cayenne, 'where the
+cacique (Harry) was also my servant, and had lived with me in the
+Tower two years.'
+
+Courage once more, brave old heart!  Here at least thou art among
+friends, who know thee for what thou art, and look out longingly for
+thee as their deliverer.  Courage; for thou art in fairyland once
+more; the land of boundless hope and possibility.  Though England and
+England's heart be changed, yet God's earth endures, and the harvest
+is still here, waiting to be reaped by those who dare.  Twenty stormy
+years may have changed thee, but they have not changed the fairyland
+of thy prison dreams.  Still the mighty Ceiba trees with their wealth
+of parasites and creepers tower above the palm-fringed islets; still
+the dark mangrove thickets guard the mouths of unknown streams, whose
+granite sands are rich with gold.  Friendly Indians come, and Harry
+with them, bringing maize, peccari pork, and armadillos, plantains
+and pine-apples, and all eat and gather strength; and Raleigh writes
+home to his wife, 'to say that I may yet be King of the Indians here
+were a vanity.  But my name hath lived among them'--as well it might.
+For many a year those simple hearts shall look for him in vain, and
+more than two centuries and a half afterwards, dim traditions of the
+great white chief who bade them stand out to the last against the
+Spaniards, and he would come and dwell among them, shall linger among
+the Carib tribes; even, say some, the tattered relics of an English
+flag, which he left among them that they might distinguish his
+countrymen.
+
+Happy for him had he stayed there indeed, and been their king.  How
+easy for him to have grown old in peace at Cayenne.  But no; he must
+on for honour's sake, and bring home if it were but a basketful of
+that ore to show the king, that he may save his credit.  He has
+promised Arundel that he will return.  And return he will.  So onward
+he goes to the 'Triangle Islands.'  There he sends off five small
+vessels for the Orinoco, with four hundred men.  The faithful Keymis
+has to command and guide the expedition.  Sir Warham is lying ill of
+the fever, all but dead; so George Raleigh is sent in his place as
+sergeant-major, and with him five land companies, one of which is
+commanded by young Walter, Raleigh's son; another by a Captain
+Parker, of whom we shall have a word to say presently.
+
+Keymis's orders are explicit.  He is to go up; find the mine, and
+open it; and if the Spaniards attack him, repel force by force:  but
+he is to avoid, if possible, an encounter with them:  not for fear of
+breaking the peace, but because he has 'a scum of men, a few
+gentlemen excepted, and I would not for all the world receive a blow
+from the Spaniards to the dishonour of our nation.'  There we have no
+concealment of hostile instructions, any more than in Raleigh's
+admirable instructions to his fleet, which, after laying down
+excellent laws for morality, religion, and discipline, go on with
+clause after clause as to what is to be done if they meet 'the
+enemy.'  What enemy?  Why, all Spanish ships which sail the seas; and
+who, if they happen to be sufficiently numerous, will assuredly
+attack, sink, burn, and destroy Raleigh's whole squadron, for daring
+to sail for that continent which Spain claims as its own.
+
+Raleigh runs up the coast to Trinidad once more, in through the
+Serpent's Mouth, and round Punto Gallo to the lake of pitch, where
+all recruit themselves with fish and armadillos, 'pheasant'
+(Penelope), 'palmitos' (Moriche palm fruit?), and guavas, and await
+the return of the expedition from the last day of December to the
+middle of February.  They see something of the Spaniards meanwhile.
+Sir John Ferns is sent up to Port of Spain to try if they will trade
+for tobacco.  The Spaniards parley; in the midst of the parley pour a
+volley of musketry into them at forty paces, yet hurt never a man;
+and send them off calling them thieves and traitors.  Fray Simon's
+Spanish account of the matter is that Raleigh intended to disembark
+his men, that they might march inland on San Joseph.  He may be
+excused for the guess; seeing that Raleigh had done the very same
+thing some seventeen years before.  If Raleigh was treacherous then,
+his treason punished itself now.  However, I must believe that
+Raleigh is not likely to have told a lie for his own private
+amusement in his own private diary.
+
+On the 29th the Spaniards attack three men and a boy who are ashore
+boiling the fossil pitch; kill one man, and carry off the boy.
+Raleigh, instead of going up to Port of Spain and demanding
+satisfaction, as he would have been justified in doing after this
+second attack, remains quietly where he is, expecting daily to be
+attacked by Spanish armadas, and resolved to 'burn by their sides.'
+Happily, or unhappily, he escapes them.  Probably he thinks they
+waited for him at Margarita, expecting him to range the Spanish main.
+
+At last the weary days of sickness and anxiety succeeded to days of
+terror.  On the 1st of February a strange report comes by an Indian.
+An inland savage has brought confused and contradictory news down the
+river that San Thome is sacked, the governor and two Spanish captains
+slain (names given) and two English captains, nameless.  After this
+entry follow a few confused ones, set down as happening in January,
+concerning attempts to extract the truth from the Indians, and the
+negligence of the mariners, who are diligent in nothing but pillaging
+and stealing.  And so ends abruptly this sad document.
+
+The truth comes at last--but when, does not appear--in a letter from
+Keymis, dated January 8.  San Thome has been stormed, sacked, and
+burnt.  Four refiners' houses were found in it; the best in the town;
+so that the Spaniards have been mining there; but no coin or bullion
+except a little plate.  One English captain is killed, and that
+captain is Walter Raleigh, his firstborn.  He died leading them on,
+when some, 'more careful of valour and safety, began to recoil
+shamefully.'  His last words were, 'Lord have mercy upon me and
+prosper our enterprise.'  A Spanish captain, Erinetta, struck him
+down with the butt of a musket after he had received a bullet.  John
+Plessington, his sergeant, avenged him by running Erinetta through
+with his halbert.
+
+Keymis has not yet been to the mine; he could not, 'by reason of the
+murmurings, discords, and vexations'; but he will go at once, make
+trial of the mine, and come down to Trinidad by the Macareo mouth.
+He sends a parcel of scattered papers, a roll of tobacco, a tortoise,
+some oranges and lemons.  'Praying God to give you health and
+strength of body, and a mind armed against all extremities, I rest
+ever to be commanded, your lordship's, Keymish.'
+
+'Oh Absalom, my son, my son, would God I had died for thee!'  But
+weeping is in vain.  The noble lad sleeps there under the palm-trees,
+beside the mighty tropic stream, while the fair Basset, 'his bride in
+the sight of God,' recks not of him as she wanders in the woods of
+Umberleigh, wife to the son of Raleigh's deadliest foe.  Raleigh,
+Raleigh, surely God's blessing is not on this voyage of thine.
+Surely He hath set thy misdeeds before Him, and thy secret sins in
+the light of His countenance.
+
+Another blank of misery:  but his honour is still safe.  Keymis will
+return with that gold ore, that pledge of his good faith for which he
+has ventured all.  Surely God will let that come after all, now that
+he has paid as its price his first-born's blood?
+
+At last Keymis returns with thinned numbers.  All are weary, spirit-
+broken, discontented, mutinous.  Where is the gold ore?
+
+There is none.  Keymis has never been to the mine after all.  His
+companions curse him as a traitor who has helped Raleigh to deceive
+them into ruin; the mine is imaginary--a lie.  The crews are ready to
+break into open mutiny; after a while they will do so.
+
+Yes, God is setting this man's secret sins in the light of His
+countenance.  If he has been ambitious, his ambition has punished
+itself now.  If he has cared more for his own honour than for his
+wife and children, that sin too has punished itself.  If he has
+(which I affirm not) tampered with truth for the sake of what seemed
+to him noble and just ends, that too has punished itself; for his men
+do not trust him.  If he has (which I affirm not) done any wrong in
+that matter of Cobham, that too has punished itself:  for his men,
+counting him as non ens in law, will not respect or obey him.  If he
+has spoken, after his old fashion, rash and exaggerated words, and
+goes on speaking them, even though it be through the pressure of
+despair, that too shall punish itself; and for every idle word that
+he shall say, God will bring him into judgment.  And why, but because
+he is noble?  Why, but because he is nearer to God by a whole heaven
+than others whom God lets fatten on their own sins, having no
+understanding, because they are in honour, and having children at
+their hearts' desire, and leaving the rest of their substance to
+their babes?  Not so does God deal with His elect when they will try
+to worship at once self and Him; He requires truth in the inward
+parts, and will purge them till they are true, and single-eyed, and
+full of light.
+
+Keymis returns with the wreck of his party.  The scene between him
+and Raleigh may be guessed.  Keymis has excuse on excuse.  He could
+not get obeyed after young Raleigh's death:  he expected to find that
+Sir Walter was either dead of his sickness or of grief for his son,
+and had no wish 'to enrich a company of rascals who made no account
+of him.'  He dare not go up to the mine because (and here Raleigh
+thinks his excuse fair) the fugitive Spaniards lay in the craggy
+woods through which he would have to pass, and that he had not men
+enough even to hold the town securely.  If he reached the mine and
+left a company there, he had no provisions for them; and he dared not
+send backward and forward to the town while the Spaniards were in the
+woods.  The warnings sent by Gondomar had undone all, and James's
+treachery had done its work.  So Keymis, 'thinking it a greater
+error, so he said, to discover the mine to the Spaniards than to
+excuse himself to the Company, said that he could not find it.'  From
+all which one thing at least is evident, that Keymis believed in the
+existence of the mine.
+
+Raleigh 'rejects these fancies'; tells him before divers gentlemen
+that 'a blind man might find it by the marks which Keymis himself had
+set down under his hand':  that 'his case of losing so many men in
+the woods' was a mere pretence:  after Walter was slain, he knew that
+Keymis had no care of any man's surviving.  'You have undone me,
+wounded my credit with the King past recovery.  As you have followed
+your own advice, and not mine, you must satisfy his Majesty.  It
+shall be glad if you can do it:  but I cannot.'  There is no use
+dwelling on such vain regrets and reproaches.  Raleigh perhaps is
+bitter, unjust.  As he himself writes twice, to his wife and Sir
+Ralph Winwood, his 'brains are broken.'  He writes to them both, and
+re-opens the letters to add long postscripts, at his wits' end.
+Keymis goes off; spends a few miserable days; and then enters
+Raleigh's cabin.  He has written his apology to Lord Arundel, and
+begs Raleigh to allow of it.  'No.  You have undone me by your
+obstinacy.  I will not favour or colour your former folly.'  'Is that
+your resolution, sir?'  'It is.'  'I know not then, sir, what course
+to take.'  And so he goes out, and into his own cabin overhead.  A
+minute after a pistol-shot is heard.  Raleigh sends up a boy to know
+the reason.  Keymis answers from within that he has fired it off
+because it had been long charged; and all is quiet.
+
+Half an hour after the boy goes into the cabin.  Keymis is lying on
+his bed, the pistol by him.  The boy moves him.  The pistol-shot has
+broken a rib, and gone no further; but as the corpse is turned over,
+a long knife is buried in that desperate heart.  Another of the old
+heroes is gone to his wild account.
+
+Gradually drops of explanation ooze out.  The 'Sergeant-major,
+Raleigh's nephew, and others, confess that Keymis told them that he
+could have brought them in two hours to the mine:  but as the young
+heir was slain, and his father was unpardoned and not like to live,
+he had no reason to open the mine, either for the Spaniard or the
+King.'  Those latter words are significant.  What cared the old
+Elizabethan seaman for the weal of such a king?  And, indeed, what
+good to such a king would all the mines in Guiana be?  They answered
+that the King, nevertheless, had 'granted Raleigh his heart's desire
+under the great seal.'  He replied that 'the grant to Raleigh was to
+a man non ens in law, and therefore of no force.'  Here, too, James's
+policy has worked well.  How could men dare or persevere under such a
+cloud?
+
+How, indeed, could they have found heart to sail at all?  The only
+answer is that they knew Raleigh well enough to have utter faith in
+him, and that Keymis himself knew of the mine.
+
+Puppies at home in England gave out that he had killed himself from
+remorse at having deceived so many gentlemen with an imaginary
+phantom.  Every one, of course, according to his measure of charity,
+has power and liberty to assume any motive which he will.  Mine is
+simply the one which shows upon the face of the documents; that the
+old follower, devoted alike to the dead son and to the doomed father,
+feeling that he had, he scarce knew how, failed in the hour of need,
+frittered away the last chance of a mighty enterprise which had been
+his fixed idea for years, and ruined the man whom he adored, avenged
+upon himself the fault of having disobeyed orders, given
+peremptorily, and to be peremptorily executed.
+
+Here, perhaps, my tale should end; for all beyond is but the waking
+of the corpse.  The last death-struggle of the Elizabethan heroism is
+over, and all its remains vanish slowly in an undignified, sickening
+way.  All epics end so.  After the war of Troy, Achilles must die by
+coward Paris's arrow, in some mysterious, confused, pitiful fashion;
+and stately Hecuba must rail herself into a very dog, and bark for
+ever shamefully around lonely Cynossema.  Young David ends as a
+dotard--Solomon as worse.  Glorious Alexander must die, half of
+fever, half of drunkenness, as the fool dieth.  Charles the Fifth,
+having thrown all away but his follies, ends in a convent, a
+superstitious imbecile; Napoleon squabbles to the last with Sir
+Hudson Lowe about champagne.  It must be so; and the glory must be
+God's alone.  For in great men, and great times, there is nothing
+good or vital but what is of God, and not of man's self; and when He
+taketh away that divine breath they die, and return again to their
+dust.  But the earth does not lose; for when He sendeth forth His
+Spirit they live, and renew the face of the earth.  A new generation
+arises, with clearer sight, with fuller experience, sometimes with
+nobler aims; and
+
+
+'The old order changeth, giveth place to the new,
+And God fulfils himself in many ways.
+
+
+The Elizabethan epic did not end a day too soon.  There was no more
+life left in it; and God had something better in store for England.
+Raleigh's ideal was a noble one:  but God's was nobler far.  Raleigh
+would have made her a gold kingdom, like Spain, and destroyed her
+very vitals by that gold, as Spain was destroyed.  And all the while
+the great and good God was looking steadfastly upon that little
+struggling Virginian village, Raleigh's first-born, forgotten in his
+new mighty dreams, and saying, 'Here will I dwell, for I have a
+delight therein.'  There, and not in Guiana; upon the simple tillers
+of the soil, not among wild reckless gold-hunters, would His blessing
+rest.  The very coming darkness would bring brighter light.  The evil
+age itself would be the parent of new good, and drive across the seas
+steadfast Pilgrim Fathers and generous Royalist Cavaliers, to be the
+parents of a mightier nation than has ever yet possessed the earth.
+Verily, God's ways are wonderful, and His counsels in the great deep.
+
+So ends the Elizabethan epic.  Must we follow the corpse to the
+grave?  It is necessary.
+
+And now, 'you gentlemen of England, who sit at home at ease,' what
+would you have done in like case?--Your last die thrown; your last
+stake lost; your honour, as you fancy, stained for ever; your eldest
+son dead in battle--What would you have done?  What Walter Raleigh
+did was this.  He kept his promise.  He had promised Lord Arundel to
+return to England; and return he did.
+
+But it is said his real intention, as he himself confessed, was to
+turn pirate and take the Mexico fleet.
+
+That wild thoughts of such a deed may have crossed his mind, may have
+been a terrible temptation to him, may even have broken out in hasty
+words, one does not deny.  He himself says that he spoke of such a
+thing 'to keep his men together.'  All depends on how the words were
+spoken.  The form of the sentence, the tone of voice, is everything.
+Who could blame him, if seeing some of the captains whom he had most
+trusted deserting him, his men heaping him with every slander, and,
+as he solemnly swore on the scaffold, calling witnesses thereto by
+name, forcing him to take an oath that he would not return to England
+before they would have him, and locking him into his own cabin--who
+could blame him, I ask, for saying in that daring off-hand way of
+his, which has so often before got him into trouble, 'Come, my lads,
+do not despair.  If the worst comes to the worst, there is the Plate-
+fleet to fall back upon'?  When I remember, too, that the taking of
+the said Plate-fleet was in Raleigh's eyes an altogether just thing;
+and that he knew perfectly that if he succeeded therein he would be
+backed by the public opinion of all England, and probably buy his
+pardon of James, who, if he loved Spain well, loved money better; my
+surprise rather is, that he did not go and do it.  As for any meeting
+of captains in his cabin and serious proposal of such a plan, I
+believe it to be simply one of the innumerable lies which James
+inserted in his 'Declaration,' gathered from the tales of men who,
+fearing (and reasonably) lest their heads should follow Raleigh's,
+tried to curry favour by slandering him.  This 'Declaration' has been
+so often exposed that I may safely pass it by; and pass by almost as
+safely the argument which some have drawn from a chance expression of
+his in his pathetic letter to Lady Raleigh, in which he 'hopes that
+God would send him somewhat before his return.'  To prove an
+intention of piracy in the despairing words of a ruined man writing
+to comfort a ruined wife for the loss of her first-born is surely to
+deal out hard measure.  Heaven have mercy upon us, if all the hasty
+words which woe has wrung from our hearts are to be so judged either
+by man or God!
+
+Sir Julius Caesar, again, one of the commission appointed to examine
+him, informs us that, on being confronted with Captains St. Leger and
+Pennington, he confessed that he proposed the taking of the Mexico
+fleet if the mine failed.  To which I can only answer, that all
+depends on how the thing was said, and that this is the last fact
+which we should find in Sir Julius's notes, which are, it is
+confessed, so confused, obscure, and full of gaps, as to be often
+hardly intelligible.  The same remark applies to Wilson's story,
+which I agree with Mr. Tytler in thinking worthless.  Wilson, it must
+be understood, is employed after Raleigh's return as a spy upon him,
+which office he executes, all confess (and Wilson himself as much as
+any), as falsely, treacherously, and hypocritically as did ever
+sinful man; and, inter alia, he has this, 'This day he told me what
+discourse he and the Lord Chancellor had about taking the Plate-
+fleet, which he confessed he would have taken had he lighted on it.'
+To which my Lord Chancellor said, 'Why, you would have been a
+pirate.'  'Oh,' quoth he, 'did you ever know of any that were pirates
+for millions?  They only that wish for small things are pirates.'
+Now, setting aside the improbability that Raleigh should go out of
+his way to impeach himself to the man whom he must have known was set
+there to find matter for his death, all, we say, depends on how it
+was said.  If the Lord Chancellor ever said to Raleigh, 'To take the
+Mexico fleet would be piracy,' it would have been just like Raleigh
+to give such an answer.  The speech is a perfectly true one:  Raleigh
+knew the world, no man better; and saw through its hollowness, and
+the cant and hypocrisy of his generation; and he sardonically states
+an undeniable fact.  He is not expressing his own morality, but that
+of the world; just as he is doing in that passage of his 'Apology,'
+about which I must complain of Mr. Napier.  'It was a maxim of his,'
+says Mr. Napier, 'that good success admits of no examination.'  This
+is not fair.  The sentence in the original goes on, 'so the contrary
+allows of no excuse, however reasonable and just whatsoever.'  His
+argument all through the beginning of the 'Apology,' supported by
+instance on instance from history, is--I cannot get a just hearing,
+because I have failed in opening this mine.  So it is always.  Glory
+covers the multitude of sins.  But a man who has failed is a fair
+mark for every slanderer, puppy, ignoramus, discontented mutineer; as
+I am now.  What else, in the name of common sense, could have been
+his argument?  Does Mr. Napier really think that Raleigh, even if, in
+the face of all the noble and pious words which he had written, he
+held so immoral a doctrine, would have been shameless and senseless
+enough to assert his own rascality in an apology addressed to the
+most 'religious' of kings in the most canting of generations?
+
+But still more astonished am I at the use which has been made of
+Captain Parker's letter.  The letter is written by a man in a state
+of frantic rage and disappointment.  There never was any mine, he
+believes now.  Keymis's 'delays we found mere delusions; for he was
+false to all men and hateful to himself, loathing to live since he
+could do no more villany.  I will speak no more of this hateful
+fellow to God and man.'  And it is on the testimony of a man in this
+temper that we are asked to believe that 'the admiral and vice-
+admiral,' Raleigh and St. Leger, are going to the Western Islands 'to
+look for homeward-bound men':  if, indeed, the looking for homeward-
+bound men means really looking for the Spanish fleet, and not merely
+for recruits for their crews.  I never recollect--and I have read
+pretty fully the sea-records of those days--such a synonym used
+either for the Mexican or Indian fleet.  But let this be as it may,
+the letter proves too much.  For, first, it proves that whosoever is
+not going to turn 'pirate,' our calm and charitable friend Captain
+Parker is; 'for my part, by the permission of God, I will either MAKE
+A VOYAGE or bury myself in the sea.'  Now, what making a voyage meant
+there is no doubt; and the sum total of the letter is, that a man
+intending to turn rover himself accuses, under the influence of
+violent passion, his comrades of doing the like.  We may believe him
+about himself:  about others, we shall wait for testimony a little
+less interested.
+
+But the letter proves too much again.  For Parker says that 'Witney
+and Woolaston are gone off a-head to look for homeward-bound men,'
+thus agreeing with Raleigh's message to his wife, that 'Witney, for
+whom I sold all my plate at Plymouth, and to whom I gave more credit
+and countenance than to all the captains of my fleet, ran from me at
+the Grenadas, and Woolaston with him.'
+
+And now, reader, how does this of Witney, and Woolaston, and Parker's
+intentions to 'pirate' separately, if it be true, agree with King
+James's story of Raleigh's calling a council of war and proposing an
+attack on the Plate-fleet?  One or the other must needs be a lie;
+probably both.  Witney's ship was of only 160 tons; Woolaston's
+probably smaller.  Five such ships would be required, as any reader
+of Hakluyt must know, to take a single Carack; and it would be no use
+running the risk of hanging for any less prize.  The Spanish main was
+warned and armed, and the Western Isles also.  Is it possible that
+these two men would have been insane enough in such circumstances to
+go without Raleigh, if they could have gone with him?  And is it
+possible that he, if he had any set purpose of attacking the Plate-
+fleet, would not have kept them, in order to attempt that with him
+which neither they nor he could do without each other.  Moreover, no
+'piratical' act ever took place; if any had, we should have heard
+enough about it; and why is Parker to be believed against Raleigh
+alone, when there is little doubt that he slandered all the rest of
+the captains?  Lastly, it was to this very Parker, with Mr. Tresham
+and another gentleman, that Raleigh appealed by name on the scaffold,
+as witnesses that it was his crew who tried to keep him from going
+home, and not he them.
+
+My own belief is, and it is surely simple and rational enough, that
+Raleigh's 'brains,' as he said, 'were broken'; that he had no
+distinct plan:  but that, loth to leave the New World without a
+second attempt on Guiana, he went up to Newfoundland to re-victual,
+'and with good hope,' as he wrote to Winwood himself, 'of keeping the
+sea till August with some four reasonable good ships,' probably, as
+Oldys remarks, to try a trading voyage; but found his gentlemen too
+dispirited and incredulous, his men too mutinous to do anything; and
+seeing his ships go home one by one, at last followed them himself,
+because he had promised Arundel and Pembroke so to do; having, after
+all, as he declared on the scaffold, extreme difficulty in persuading
+his men to land at all in England.  The other lies about him, as of
+his having intended to desert his soldiers in Guiana, his having
+taken no tools to work the mine, and so forth, one only notices to
+say that the 'Declaration' takes care to make the most of them,
+without deigning, after its fashion, to adduce any proof but
+anonymous hearsays.  If it be true that Bacon drew up that famous
+document, it reflects no credit either on his honesty or his
+'inductive science.'
+
+So Raleigh returns, anchors in Plymouth.  He finds that Captain North
+has brought home the news of his mishaps, and that there is a
+proclamation against him, which, by the bye, lies, for it talks of
+limitations and cautions given to Raleigh which do not appear in his
+commission; and, moreover, that a warrant is out for his
+apprehension.  He sends his men on shore, and starts for London to
+surrender himself, in company with faithful Captain King, who alone
+clings to him to the last, and from whom we have details of the next
+few days.  Near Ashburton he is met by Sir Lewis Stukely, his near
+kinsman, Vice-Admiral of Devon, who has orders to arrest him.
+Raleigh tells him that he has saved him the trouble; and the two
+return to Plymouth, where Stukely, strangely enough, leaves him at
+liberty and rides about the country.  We should be slow in imputing
+baseness:  but one cannot help suspecting from Stukely's subsequent
+conduct that he had from the first private orders to give Raleigh a
+chance of trying to escape, in order to have a handle against him,
+such as his own deeds had not yet given.
+
+The ruse, if it existed then, as it did afterwards, succeeds.
+Raleigh hears bad news.  Gondomar has--or has not--told his story to
+the king by crying, 'Piratas! piratas! piratas!' and then rushing out
+without explanation.  James is in terror lest what had happened
+should break off the darling Spanish match.
+
+Raleigh foresees ruin, perhaps death.  Life is sweet, and Guiana is
+yet where it was.  He may win a basketful of the ore still, and prove
+himself no liar.  He will escape to France.  Faithful King finds him
+a Rochelle ship; he takes boat to her, goes half way, and returns.
+Honour is sweeter than life, and James may yet be just.  The next day
+he bribes the master to wait for him one more day, starts for the
+ship once more, and again returns to Plymouth--so King will make
+oath--of his own free will.  The temptation must have been terrible
+and the sin none.  What kept him from yielding but innocence and
+honour?  He will clear himself; and if not, abide the worst.  Stukely
+and James found out these facts, and made good use of them
+afterwards.  For now comes 'a severe letter from my Lords' to bring
+Raleigh up as speedily as his health will permit; and with it comes
+one Mannourie, a French quack, of whom honest King takes little note
+at the time, but who will make himself remembered.
+
+And now begins a series of scenes most pitiable; Raleigh's brains are
+indeed broken.  He is old, worn-out with the effects of his fever,
+lamed, ruined, broken-hearted, and, for the first time in his life,
+weak and silly.  He takes into his head the paltriest notion that he
+can gain time to pacify the King by feigning himself sick.  He puts
+implicit faith in the rogue Mannourie, whom he has never seen before.
+He sends forward Lady Raleigh to London--perhaps ashamed--as who
+would not have been?--to play the fool in that sweet presence; and
+with her good Captain King, who is to engage one Cotterell, an old
+servant of Raleigh's, to find a ship wherein to escape, if the worst
+comes to the worst.  Cotterell sends King to an old boatswain of his,
+who owns a ketch.  She is to lie off Tilbury; and so King waits
+Raleigh's arrival.  What passed in the next four or five days will
+never be truly known, for our only account comes from two self-
+convicted villains, Stukely and Mannourie.  On these details I shall
+not enter.  First, because one cannot trust a word of them; secondly,
+because no one will wish to hear them who feels, as I do, how
+pitiable and painful is the sight of a great heart and mind utterly
+broken.  Neither shall I spend time on Stukely's villanous treatment
+of Raleigh, for which he had a commission from James in writing; his
+pretending to help him to escape, his going down the Thames in a boat
+with him, his trying in vain to make honest King as great a rogue as
+himself.  Like most rascalities, Stukely's conduct, even as he
+himself states it, is very obscure.  All that we can see is, that
+Cotterell told Stukely everything:  that Stukely bade Cotterell carry
+on the deceit; that Stukely had orders from headquarters to incite
+Raleigh to say or do something which might form a fresh ground of
+accusal; that, being a clumsy rogue, he failed, and fell back on
+abetting Raleigh's escape, as a last resource.  Be it as it may, he
+throws off the mask as soon as Raleigh has done enough to prove an
+intent to escape; arrests him, and conducts him to the Tower.
+
+There two shameful months are spent in trying to find out some excuse
+for Raleigh's murder.  Wilson is set over him as a spy; his letters
+to his wife are intercepted.  Every art is used to extort a
+confession of a great plot with France, and every art fails utterly--
+simply, it seems to me, because there was no plot.  Raleigh writes an
+apology, letters of entreaty, self-justification, what not; all, in
+my opinion, just and true enough; but like his speech on the
+scaffold, weak, confused--the product of a 'broken brain.'  However,
+his head must come off; and as a last resource, it must be taken off
+upon the sentence of fifteen years ago, and he who was condemned for
+plotting with Spain must die for plotting against her.  It is a
+pitiable business:  but as Osborne says, in a passage (p.108 of his
+Memoirs of James) for which one freely forgives him all his sins and
+lies, and they are many--'As the foolish idolaters were wont to
+sacrifice the choicest of their children to the devil, so our king
+gave up his incomparable jewel to the will of this monster of
+ambition (the Spaniard), under the pretence of a superannuated
+transgression, contrary to the opinion of the more honest sort of
+gownsmen, who maintained that his Majesty's pardon lay inclusively in
+the commission he gave him on his setting out to sea; it being
+incongruous that he, who remained under the notion of one dead in the
+law, should as a general dispose of the lives of others, not being
+himself master of his own.'
+
+But no matter.  He must die.  The Queen intercedes for him, as do all
+honest men:  but in vain.  He has twenty-four hours' notice to
+prepare for death; eats a good breakfast; takes a cup of sack and a
+pipe; makes a rambling speech, in which one notes only the intense
+belief that he is an honest man, and the intense desire to make
+others believe so, in the very smallest matters; and then dies
+smilingly, as one weary of life.  One makes no comment.  Raleigh's
+life really ended on that day that poor Keymis returned from San
+Thome.'
+
+And then?
+
+As we said, Truth is stranger than fiction.  No dramatist dare invent
+a 'poetic justice' more perfect than fell upon the traitor.  It is
+not always so, no doubt.  God reserves many a greater sinner for that
+most awful of all punishments--impunity.  But there are crises in a
+nation's life in which God makes terrible examples, to put before the
+most stupid and sensual the choice of Hercules, the upward road of
+life, the downward one which leads to the pit.  Since the time of
+Pharaoh and the Red Sea host, history is full of such palpable,
+unmistakable revelations of the Divine Nemesis; and in England, too,
+at that moment, the crisis was there; and the judgment of God was
+revealed accordingly.  Sir Lewis Stukely remained, it seems, at
+court; high in favour with James:  but he found, nevertheless, that
+people looked darkly on him.  Like many self-convicted rogues, he
+must needs thrust his head into his own shame; and one day he goes to
+good old Lord Charles Howard's house; for being Vice-Admiral of
+Devon, he has affairs with the old Armada hero.
+
+The old lion explodes in an unexpected roar.  'Darest thou come into
+my presence, thou base fellow, who art reputed the common scorn and
+contempt of all men?  Were it not in mine own house I would cudgel
+thee with my staff for presuming to speak to me!'  Stukely, his tail
+between his legs, goes off and complains to James.  'What should I do
+with him?  Hang him?  On my sawle, mon, if I hung all that spoke ill
+of thee, all the trees in the island were too few.'  Such is the
+gratitude of kings, thinks Stukely; and retires to write foolish
+pamphlets in self-justification, which, unfortunately for his memory,
+still remain to make bad worse.
+
+Within twelve months he, the rich and proud Vice-Admiral of Devon,
+with a shield of sixteen quarterings and the blood-royal in his
+veins, was detected debasing the King's coin within the precincts of
+the royal palace, together with his old accomplice Mannourie, who,
+being taken, confessed that his charges against Raleigh were false.
+He fled, a ruined man, back to his native county and his noble old
+seat of Affton; but Ate is on the heels of such -
+
+
+'Slowly she tracks him and sure, as a lyme-hound, sudden she grips
+him,
+Crushing him, blind in his pride, for a sign and a terror to
+mortals.'
+
+
+A terrible plebiscitum had been passed in the West country against
+the betrayer of its last Worthy.  The gentlemen closed their doors
+against him; the poor refused him--so goes the legend--fire and
+water.  Driven by the Furies, he fled from Affton, and wandered
+westward down the vale of Taw, away to Appledore, and there took
+boat, and out into the boundless Atlantic, over the bar, now crowded
+with shipping, for which Raleigh's genius had discovered a new trade
+and a new world.
+
+Sixteen miles to the westward, like a blue cloud on the horizon,
+rises the ultima Thule of Devon, the little isle of Lundy.  There one
+outlying peak of granite, carrying up a shelf of slate upon its
+southern flank, has defied the waves, and formed an island some three
+miles long, desolate, flat-headed, fretted by every frost and storm,
+walled all round with four hundred feet of granite cliff, sacred
+only, then at least, to puffins and pirates.  Over the single
+landing-place frowns from the cliff the keep of an old ruin, 'Moresco
+Castle,' as they call it still, where some bold rover, Sir John de
+Moresco, in the times of the old Edwards, worked his works of
+darkness:  a gray, weird, uncanny pile of moorstone, through which
+all the winds of heaven howl day and night.
+
+In a chamber of that ruin died Sir Lewis Stukely, Lord of Affton,
+cursing God and man.
+
+These things are true.  Said I not well that reality is stranger than
+romance?
+
+But no Nemesis followed James.
+
+The answer will depend much upon what readers consider to be a
+Nemesis.  If to have found England one of the greatest countries in
+Europe, and to have left it one of the most inconsiderable and
+despicable; if to be fooled by flatterers to the top of his bent,
+until he fancied himself all but a god, while he was not even a man,
+and could neither speak the truth, keep himself sober, nor look on a
+drawn sword without shrinking; if, lastly, to have left behind him a
+son who, in spite of many chivalrous instincts unknown to his father,
+had been so indoctrinated in that father's vices as to find it
+impossible to speak the truth even when it served his purpose; if all
+these things be no Nemesis, then none fell on James Stuart.
+
+But of that son, at least, the innocent blood was required.  He, too,
+had his share in the sin.  In Carew Raleigh's simple and manful
+petition to the Commons of England for the restoration of his
+inheritance we find a significant fact stated without one word of
+comment, bitter or otherwise.  At Prince Henry's death the Sherborne
+lands had been given again to Carr, Lord Somerset.  To him, too, 'the
+whirligig of time brought round its revenges,' and he lost them when
+arraigned and condemned for poisoning Sir Thomas Overbury.  Then Sir
+John Digby, afterwards Earl of Bristol, begged Sherborne of the King,
+and had it.  Pembroke (Shakspeare's Pembroke) brought young Carew to
+court, hoping to move the tyrant's heart.  James saw him and
+shuddered; perhaps conscience stricken, perhaps of mere cowardice.
+'He looked like the ghost of his father,' as he well might, to that
+guilty soul.  Good Pembroke advised his young kinsman to travel,
+which he did till James's death in the next year.  Then coming over--
+this is his own story--he asked of Parliament to be restored in
+blood, that he might inherit aught that might fall to him in England.
+His petition was read twice in the Lords.  Whereon 'King Charles sent
+Sir James Fullarton, then of the bed-chamber, to Mr. Raleigh to
+command him to come to him; and being brought in, the King, after
+using him with great civility, notwithstanding told him plainly that
+when he was prince he had promised the Earl of Bristol to secure his
+title to Sherborne against the heirs of Sir Walter Raleigh; whereon
+the earl had given him, then prince, ten thousand pounds; that now he
+was bound to make good his promise, being king; that, therefore,
+unless he would quit his right and title to Sherborne, he neither
+could nor would pass his bill of restoration.'
+
+Young Raleigh, like a good Englishman, 'urged,' he says, 'the
+justness of his cause; that he desired only the liberty of the
+subject, and to be left to the law, which was never denied any
+freeman.'  The King remained obstinate.  His noble brother's love for
+the mighty dead weighed nothing with him, much less justice.  Poor
+young Raleigh was forced to submit.  The act for his restoration was
+passed, reserving Sherborne for Lord Bristol, and Charles patched up
+the affair by allowing to Lady Raleigh and her son after her a life
+pension of four hundred a year.
+
+Young Carew tells his story simply, and without a note of bitterness;
+though he professes his intent to range himself and his two sons for
+the future 'under the banner of the Commons of England,' he may be a
+royalist for any word beside.  Even where he mentions the awful curse
+of his mother, he only alludes to its fulfilment by--'that which hath
+happened since to that royal family is too sad and disastrous for me
+to repeat, and yet too visible not to be discerned.'  We can have no
+doubt that he tells the exact truth.  Indeed the whole story fits
+Charles's character to the smallest details.  The want of any real
+sense of justice, combined with the false notion of honour; the
+implacable obstinacy; the contempt for that law by which alone he
+held his crown; the combination of unkingliness in commanding a
+private interview and shamelessness in confessing his own meanness--
+all these are true notes of the man whose deliberate suicide stands
+written, a warning to all bad rulers till the end of time.  But he
+must have been a rogue early in life, and a needy rogue too.  That
+ten thousand pounds of Lord Bristol's money should make many a
+sentimentalist reconsider--if, indeed, sentimentalists can be made to
+reconsider, or even to consider, anything--their notion of him as the
+incarnation of pious chivalry.
+
+At least the ten thousand pounds cost Charles dear.
+
+The widow's curse followed him home.  Naseby fight and the Whitehall
+scaffold were surely God's judgment of such deeds, whatever man's may
+be.
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+
+{1}  North British Review, No. XLV.--1.  'Life of Sir Walter
+Raleigh.'  By P. Fraser Tytler, F.R.S.  London, 1853.--2.  'Raleigh's
+Discovery of Guiana.'  Edited by Sir Robert Schomburgk (Hakluyt
+Society), 1848.--3.  'Lord Bacon and Sir Walter Raleigh.'  By M.
+Napier.  Cambridge, 1853.--4.  'Raleigh's Works, with Lives by Oldys
+and Birch.'  Oxford, 1829--5.  'Bishop Goodman's History of his own
+Times.'  London, 1839.
+
+{2}  I especially entreat readers' attention to two articles in
+vindication of the morals of Queen Elizabeth, in 'Fraser's Magazine'
+of 1854; to one in the 'Westminster' of 1854, on Mary Stuart; and one
+in the same of 1852, on England's Forgotten Worthies, by a pen now
+happily well known in English literature, Mr. Anthony Froude's.
+
+{3}  Since this was written, a similar Amazonian bodyguard has been
+discovered, I hear, in Pegu.
+
+{4}  It is to be found in a MS. of 1596.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time, by Kingsley
+
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