The Project Gutenberg EBook of Raleigh, by Edmund Gosse
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Title: Raleigh
Author: Edmund Gosse
Editor: Andrew Lang
Release Date: December 20, 2008 [EBook #27580]
Language: English
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RALEIGH
ENGLISH WORTHIES.
EDITED BY ANDREW LANG.
_Price 2s. 6d. each._
ALREADY PUBLISHED:
CHARLES DARWIN. By GRANT ALLEN.
MARLBOROUGH. By GEORGE SAINTSBURY.
SHAFTESBURY (the First Earl). By H. D. TRAILL.
ADMIRAL BLAKE. By DAVID HANNAY.
IN PREPARATION:
STEELE By AUSTIN DOBSON.
SIR T. MORE By J. COTTER MORISON.
WELLINGTON By R. LOUIS STEVENSON.
LORD PETERBOROUGH By WALTER BESANT.
CLAVERHOUSE By MOWBRAY MORRIS.
LATIMER By Canon CREIGHTON.
DRAKE By W. H. POLLOCK.
BEN JONSON By J. A. SYMONDS.
ISAAK WALTON By ANDREW LANG.
CANNING By FRANK H. HILL.
London: LONGMANS, GREEN, & CO.
English Worthies
EDITED BY ANDREW LANG
RALEIGH
BY
EDMUND GOSSE, M.A.
CLARK LECTURER IN ENGLISH LITERATURE AT TRINITY COLLEGE CAMBRIDGE
LONDON
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
1886
_All rights reserved_
PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
LONDON
PREFACE.
The existing Lives of Raleigh are very numerous. To this day the most
interesting of these, as a literary production, is that published in
1736 by William Oldys, afterwards Norroy King at Arms. This book was a
marvel of research, as well as of biographical skill, at the time of its
appearance, but can no longer compete with later lives as an authority.
By a curious chance, two writers who were each ignorant of the other
simultaneously collected information regarding Raleigh, and produced two
laborious and copious Lives of him, at the same moment, in 1868. Each of
these collections, respectively by Mr. Edward Edwards, whose death is
announced as these words are leaving the printers, and by the late Mr.
James Augustus St. John, added very largely to our knowledge of Raleigh;
but, of course, each of these writers was precluded from using the
discoveries of the other. The present Life is the first in which the
fresh matter brought forward by Mr. Edwards and by Mr. St. John has been
collated; Mr. Edwards, moreover, deserved well of all Raleigh students
by editing for the first time, in 1868, the correspondence of Raleigh. I
hope that I do not seem to disparage Mr. Edwards's book when I say that
in his arrangement and conjectural dating of undated documents I am very
frequently in disaccord with him. The present Life contains various
small data which are now for the first time published, and more than one
fact of considerable importance which I owe to the courtesy of Mr. John
Cordy Jeaffreson. I have, moreover, taken advantage up to date of the
_Reports_ of the Historical MSS. Commission, and of the two volumes of
_Lismore Papers_ this year published. In his prospectus to the latter
Dr. Grosart promises us still more about Raleigh in later issues. My
dates are new style.
The present sketch of Raleigh's life is the first attempt which has been
made to portray his personal career disengaged from the general history
of his time. To keep so full a life within bounds it has been necessary
to pass rapidly over events of signal importance in which he took but a
secondary part. I may point as an example to the defeat of the Spanish
Armada, a chapter in English history which has usually occupied a large
space in the chronicle of Raleigh and his times. Mrs. Creighton's
excellent little volume on the latter and wider theme may be recommended
to those who wish to see Raleigh painted not in a full-length portrait,
but in an historical composition of the reigns of Elizabeth and James I.
I have to thank Dr. Brushfield for the use of his valuable Raleigh
bibliography, now in the press, and for other kind help.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. YOUTH 1
II. AT COURT 17
III. IN DISGRACE 40
IV. GUIANA 65
V. CADIZ 88
VI. LAST DAYS OF ELIZABETH 111
VII. THE TRIAL AT WINCHESTER 132
VIII. IN THE TOWER 161
IX. THE SECOND VOYAGE TO GUIANA 189
X. THE END 204
INDEX 225
MAPS.
SOUTH OF ENGLAND AND IRELAND _To face p. 16_
GUIANA " 70
RALEIGH.
CHAPTER I.
YOUTH.
Walter Raleigh was born, so Camden and an anonymous astrologer combine
to assure us, in 1552. The place was Hayes Barton, a farmstead in the
parish of East Budleigh, in Devonshire, then belonging to his father; it
passed out of the family, and in 1584 Sir Walter attempted to buy it
back. 'For the natural disposition I have to the place, being born in
that house, I had rather seat myself there than anywhere else,' he wrote
to a Mr. Richard Duke, the then possessor, who refused to sell it.
Genealogists, from himself downwards, have found a rich treasure in
Raleigh's family tree, which winds its branches into those of some of
the best Devonshire houses, the Gilberts, the Carews, the Champernownes.
His father, the elder Walter Raleigh, in his third marriage became the
second husband of Katherine Gilbert, daughter of Sir Philip Champernoun
of Modbury. By Otto Gilbert, her first husband, she had been the mother
of two boys destined to be bold navigators and colonists, Humphrey and
Adrian Gilbert. It, is certainly the influence of his half-brother Sir
Humphrey Gilbert, of Compton, which is most strongly marked upon the
character of young Raleigh; while Adrian was one of his own earliest
converts to Virginian enterprise.
The earliest notice of Sir Walter Raleigh known to exist was found and
communicated to the _Transactions of the Devonshire Association_ by Dr.
Brushfield in 1883. It is in a deed preserved in Sidmouth Church, by
which tithes of fish are leased by the manor of Sidmouth to 'Walter
Rawlegh the elder, Carow Ralegh, and Walter Ralegh the younger,' on
September 10, 1560. In 1578 the same persons passed over their interest
in the fish-titles in another deed, which contains their signatures. It
is amusing to find that the family had not decided how to spell its
name. The father writes 'Ralegh,' his elder son Carew writes 'Caro
Rawlyh,' while the subject of this memoir, in this his earliest known
signature, calls himself 'Rauleygh.'
His father was a Protestant when young Walter was born, but his mother
seems to have remained a Catholic. In the persecution under Mary, she,
as we learn from Foxe, went into Exeter to visit the heretics in gaol,
and in particular to see Agnes Prest before her burning. Mrs. Raleigh
began to exhort her to repentance, but the martyr turned the tables on
her visitor, and urged the gentlewoman to seek the blessed body of
Christ in heaven, not on earth, and this with so much sweet
persuasiveness that when Mrs. Raleigh 'came home to her husband she
declared to him that in her life she never heard any woman, of such
simplicity to see to, talk so godly and so earnestly; insomuch, that if
God were not with her she could not speak such things--"I was not able
to answer her, I, who can read, and she cannot."' It is easy to perceive
that this anecdote would not have been preserved if the incident had not
heralded the final secession of Raleigh's parents from the creed of
Philip II., and thus Agnes Prest was not without her share in forging
Raleigh's hatred of bigotry and of the Spaniard. Very little else is
known about Walter and Katherine Raleigh. They lived at their manorial
farm of Hayes Barton, and they were buried side by side, as their son
tells us, 'in Exeter church.'
The university career of Raleigh is vague to us in the highest degree.
The only certain fact is that he left Oxford in 1569. Anthony à Wood
says that he was three years there, and that he entered Oriel College as
a commoner in or about the year 1568. Fuller speaks of him as resident
at Christ Church also. Perhaps he went to Christ Church first as a boy
of fourteen, in 1566, and removed to Oriel at sixteen. Sir Philip
Sidney, Hakluyt, and Camden were all of them at Oxford during those
years, and we may conjecture that Raleigh's acquaintance with them began
there. Wood tells us that Raleigh, being 'strongly advanced by
academical learning at Oxford, under the care of an excellent tutor,
became the ornament of the juniors, and a proficient in oratory and
philosophy.' Bacon and Aubrey preserved each an anecdote of Raleigh's
university career, neither of them worth repeating here.
The exact date at which he left Oxford is uncertain. Camden, who was
Raleigh's age, and at the university at the same time, says
authoritatively in his _Annales_, that he was one of a hundred gentlemen
volunteers taken to the help of the Protestant princes by Henry
Champernowne, who was Raleigh's first-cousin, the son of his mother's
elder brother. We learn from De Thou that Champernowne's contingent
arrived at the Huguenot camp on October 5, 1569. This seems
circumstantial enough, but there exist statements of Raleigh's own which
tend to show that, if he was one of his cousin's volunteers, he yet
preceded him into France. In the _History of the World_ he speaks of
personally remembering the conduct of the Protestants, immediately after
the death of Condé, at the battle of Jarnac (March 13, 1569). Still more
positively Raleigh says, 'myself was an eye-witness' of the retreat at
Moncontour, on October 3, two days before the arrival of Champernoun. A
provoking obscurity conceals Walter Raleigh from us for the next six or
seven years. When Hakluyt printed his _Voyages_ in 1589 he mentioned
that he himself was five years in France. In a previous dedication he
had reminded Raleigh that the latter had made a longer stay in that
country than himself. Raleigh has therefore been conjectured to have
fought in France for six years, that is to say, until 1575.
During this long and important period we are almost without a glimpse of
him, nor is it anything but fancy which has depicted him as shut up by
Walsingham at the English embassy in Paris on the fatal evening of St.
Bartholomew's. Another cousin of his, Gawen Champernoun, became the
son-in-law and follower of the Huguenot chief, Montgomery, whose murder
on June 26, 1574, may very possibly have put a term to Raleigh's
adventures as a Protestant soldier in France. The allusions to his early
experiences are rare and slight in the _History of the World_, but one
curious passage has often been quoted. In illustration of the way in
which Alexander the Great harassed Bessus, Raleigh mentions that, 'in
the third civil war of France,' he saw certain Catholics, who had
retired to mountain-caves in Languedoc, smoked out of their retreat by
the burning of bundles of straw at the cave's mouth. There has lately
been shown to be no probability in the conjecture, made by several of
his biographers, that he was one of the English volunteers in the Low
Countries who fought in their shirts and drawers at the battle of
Rimenant in August 1578.
On April 15, 1576, the poet Gascoigne, who was a _protégé_, of Raleigh's
half-brother, issued his satire in blank verse, entitled _The Steel
Glass_, a little volume which holds an important place in the
development of our poetical literature. To this satire a copy of
eighteen congratulatory verses was prefixed by 'Walter Rawely of the
middle Temple.' These lines are perfunctory and are noticeable only for
their heading 'of the middle Temple.' Raleigh positively tells us that
he never studied law until he found himself a prisoner in the Tower, and
he was probably only a passing lodger in some portion of the Middle
Temple in 1576. On October 7, 1577, Gascoigne died prematurely and
deprived us of a picturesque pen which might have gossiped of Raleigh's
early career.
I am happy, through the courtesy of Mr. J. Cordy Jeaffreson, in being
able for the first time to prove that Walter Raleigh was admitted to the
Court as early as 1577. So much has been suspected, from his language to
Leicester in a later letter from Ireland, but there has hitherto been
no evidence of the fact. In examining the Middlesex records, Mr.
Jeaffreson has discovered that on the night of December 16, 1577, a
party of merry roisterers broke the peace at Hornsey. Their ringleaders
were a certain Richard Paunsford and his brother, who are described in
the recognisances taken next day before the magistrate Jasper Fisher as
the servants of 'Walter Rawley, of Islington, Esq.,' and two days later
as yeoman in the service of Walter Rawley, Esq., 'of the Court (_de
curia_).'
It is very important to find him thus early officially described as of
the Court. As Raleigh afterwards said, the education of his youth was a
training in the arts of a gentleman and a soldier. But it extended
further than this--it embraced an extraordinary knowledge of the sea,
and in particular of naval warfare. It is tantalising that we have but
the slenderest evidence of the mode in which this particular schooling
was obtained. The western ocean was, all through the youth of Raleigh,
the most fascinating and mysterious of the new fields which were being
thrown open to English enterprise. He was a babe when Tonson came back
with the first wonderful legend of the hidden treasure-house of the
Spaniard in the West Indies. He was at Oxford when England thrilled with
the news of Hawkins' tragical third voyage. He came back from France
just in time to share the general satisfaction at Drake's revenge for
San Juan de Ulloa. All through his early days the splendour and perilous
romance of the Spanish Indies hung before him, inflaming his fancy,
rousing his ambition. In his own family, Sir Humphrey Gilbert
represented a milder and more generous class of adventurers than Drake
and Hawkins, a race more set on discovery and colonisation than on mere
brutal rapine, the race of which Raleigh was ultimately to become the
most illustrious example. If we possessed minute accounts of the various
expeditions in which Gilbert took part, we should probably find that his
young half-brother was often his companion. As early as 1584 Barlow
addresses Raleigh as one personally conversant with the islands of the
Gulf of Mexico, and there was a volume, never printed and now lost,
written about the same time, entitled _Sir Walter Raleigh's Voyage to
the West Indies_. This expedition, no other allusion to which has
survived, must have taken place before he went to Ireland in 1580, and
may be conjecturally dated 1577.
The incidents of the next two years may be rapidly noted; they are all
of them involved in obscurity. It is known that Raleigh crossed the
Atlantic for a second time on board one of the ships of Gilbert's
ill-starred expedition to the St. Lawrence in the winter of 1578. In
February of the next year[1] he was again in London, and was committed
to the Fleet Prison for a 'fray' with another courtier. In September
1579, he was involved in Sir Philip Sidney's tennis-court quarrel with
Lord Oxford. In May of this same year he was stopped at Plymouth when in
the act of starting on a piratical expedition against Spanish America.
He had work to do in opposing Spain nearer home, and he first comes
clearly before us in connection with the Catholic invasion of Ireland in
the close of 1579. It was on July 17, 1579, that the Catholic
expedition from Ferrol landed at Dingle. Fearing to stay there, it
passed four miles westward to Smerwick Bay, and there built a fortress
called Fort del Ore, on a sandy isthmus, thinking in case of need easily
to slip away to the ocean. The murder of an English officer, who was
stabbed in his bed while the guest of the brother of the Earl of
Desmond, was recommended by Sandars the legate as a sweet sacrifice in
the sight of God, and ruthlessly committed. The result was what Sandars
had foreseen; the Geraldines, hopelessly compromised, threw up the
fiction of loyalty to Elizabeth. Sir Nicholas Malby defeated the rebels
in the Limerick woods in September, but in return the Geraldines burned
Youghal and drove the Deputy within the walls of Cork, where he died of
chagrin. The temporary command fell on an old friend of Raleigh's, Sir
Warham Sentleger, who wrote in December 1579 a letter of earnest appeal
which broke up the apathy of the English Government. Among other steps
hurriedly taken to uphold the Queen's power in Ireland, young Walter
Raleigh was sent where his half-brother, Humphrey Gilbert, had so much
distinguished himself ten years before.
The biographer breathes more freely when he holds at last the earliest
letter which remains in the handwriting of his hero. All else may be
erroneous or conjectural, but here at least, for a moment, he presses
his fingers upon the very pulse of the machine. On February 22, 1580,
Raleigh wrote from Cork to Burghley, giving him an account of his
voyage. It appears that he wrote on the day of his arrival, and if that
be the case, he left London, and passed down the Thames, in command of
a troop of one hundred foot soldiers, on January 15, 1580. By the same
computation, they reached the Isle of Wight on the 21st, and stayed
there to be transferred into ships of Her Majesty's fleet, not starting
again until February 5. On his reaching Cork, Raleigh found that his men
and he were only to be paid from the day of their arrival in Ireland,
and he wrote off at once to Burghley to secure, if possible, the
arrears. His arrival was a welcome reinforcement to Sentleger, who was
holding Cork in the greatest peril, with only forty Englishmen. It must
be recollected that this force under Raleigh was but a fragment of what
English squadrons were busily bringing through this month of January
into every port of Ireland. Elizabeth had, at last, awakened in earnest
to her danger.
Raleigh, in all probability, took no part in the marchings and
skirmishings of the English armies until the summer. His 'reckoning,' or
duty-pay, as a captain in the field, begins on July 13, 1580, and
perhaps, until that date, his services consisted in defending Cork under
Sentleger. In August he was joined with the latter, who was now
Provost-marshal of Munster, in a commission to try Sir James, the
younger brother of the Earl of Desmond, who had been captured by the
Sheriff of Cork. No mercy could be expected by so prominent a Geraldine;
he was hanged, drawn and quartered, and the fragments of his body were
hung in chains over the gates of Cork. Meanwhile, on August 12, Lord
Grey de Wilton arrived in Dublin to relieve Pelham of sovereign command
in Ireland. Grey, though he learned to dislike Raleigh, was probably
more cognisant of his powers than Pelham, who may never have heard of
him. Grey had been the patron of the poet Gascoigne, and one of the most
prominent men in the group with whom we have already seen that Raleigh
was identified in his early youth.
From the moment of Grey's arrival in Ireland, the name of Raleigh ceased
to be obscure. Sir William Pelham retired on September 7, and Lord Grey,
who had brought the newly famous poet, Edmund Spenser, with him as his
secretary, marched into Munster. With his exploits we have nothing to
do, save to notice that it must have been in the camp at Rakele, if not
on the battle-field of Glenmalure, that Raleigh began his momentous
friendship with Spenser, whose _Shepherd's Calender_ had inaugurated a
new epoch in English poetry just a month before Raleigh's departure for
Ireland. It is scarcely too fanciful to believe that this tiny anonymous
volume of delicious song may have lightened the weariness of that winter
voyage of 1580, which was to prove so momentous in the career of 'the
Shepherd of the Ocean.' Lodovick Bryskett, Fulke Greville, Barnabee
Googe, and Geoffrey Fenton were minor songsters of the copious
Elizabethan age who were now in Munster as agents or soldiers, and we
may suppose that the tedious guerilla warfare, in the woods had its
hours of literary recreation for Raleigh.
The fortress on the peninsula of Dingle was now occupied by a fresh body
of Catholic invaders, mainly Italians, and Smerwick Bay again attracted
general interest. Grey, as Deputy, and Ormond, as governor of Munster,
united their forces and marched towards this extremity of Kerry;
Raleigh, with his infantry, joined them at Rakele; and we may take
September 30, 1580, which is the date when his first 'reckoning'
closes, as that on which he took some fresh kind of service under Lord
Grey. Hooker, who was an eye-witness, supplies us with some very
interesting glimpses of Raleigh in his _Supply of the Irish Chronicles_,
a supplement to Holinshed. We learn from him that when Lord Grey broke
into the camp at Rakele, Raleigh stayed behind, having observed that the
kerns had the habit of swooping down upon any deserted encampment to rob
and murder the camp followers. This expectation was fulfilled; the
hungry Irish poured into Rakele as soon as the Deputy's back was turned.
Raleigh had the satisfaction of capturing a large body of these poor
creatures. One of them carried a great bundle of withies, and Raleigh
asked him what they were for. 'To have hung up the English churls with,'
was the bold reply. 'Well,' said Raleigh, 'but now they shall serve for
an Irish kern,' and commanded him 'to be immediately tucked up in one of
his own neck-bands.' The rest were served in a similar way, and then the
young Englishman rode on after the army.
Towards the end of October they came in sight of Smerwick Bay, and of
the fort on the sandy isthmus in which the Italians and Spaniards were
lying in the hope of slipping back to Spain. The Legate had no sanguine
aspirations left; every roof that could harbour the Geraldines had been
destroyed in the English forays; Desmond was hiding, like a wild beast,
in the Wood. By all the principles of modern warfare, the time had come
for mercy and conciliation, and one man in Ireland, Ormond, thought as
much. But Lord Grey was a soldier of the old disposition, an implacable
enemy to Popery, what we now call a 'Puritan' of the most fierce and
frigid type. There is no evidence to show that the gentle Englishmen who
accompanied him, some of the best and loveliest spirits of the age,
shrank from sharing his fanaticism. There was massacre to be gone
through, but neither Edmund Spenser, nor Fulke Greville, nor Walter
Raleigh dreamed of withdrawing his sanction. The story has been told and
retold. For simple horror it is surpassed, in the Irish history of the
time, only by the earlier exploit which depopulated the island of
Rathlin. In the perfectly legitimate opening of the siege of Fort del
Ore, Raleigh held a very prominent commission, and we see that his
talents were rapidly being recognised, from the fact that for the first
three days he was entrusted with the principal command. It would appear
that on the fourth day, when the Italians waved their white flag and
screamed 'Misericordia! misericordia!' it was not Raleigh, but Zouch,
who was commanding in the trenches. The parley the Catholics demanded
was refused, and they were told they need not hope for mercy. Next day,
which was November 9, 1580, the fort yielded helplessly. Raleigh and
Mackworth received Grey's orders to enter and 'fall straight to
execution.'
It was thought proper to give Catholic Europe a warning not to meddle
with Catholic Ireland. In the words of the official report immediately
sent home to Walsingham, as soon as the fort was yielded, 'all the Irish
men and women were hanged, and 600 and upwards of Italians, Spaniards,
Biscayans and others put to the sword. The Colonel, Captain, Secretary,
Campmaster, and others of the best sort, saved to the number of 20
persons.' Of these last, two had their arms and legs broken before
being hanged on a gallows on the wall of the fort. The bodies of the six
hundred were stripped and laid out on the sands--'as gallant goodly
personages,' Lord Grey reported, 'as ever were beheld.' The Deputy took
all the responsibility and expected no blame; he received none. In reply
to his report, Elizabeth assured him a month later that 'this late
enterprise had been performed by him greatly to her liking.' It is
useless to expatiate on a code of morals that seems to us positively
Japanese. To Lord Grey and the rest the rebellious kerns and their
Southern allies were enemies of God and the Queen, beyond the scope of
mercy in this world or the next, and no more to be spared or paltered
with than malignant vermin. In his inexperience, Raleigh, to be soon
ripened by knowledge of life and man, agreed with this view, but,
happily for Ireland and England too, there were others who declined to
sink, as Mr. Froude says, 'to the level of the Catholic continental
tyrannies.' At Ormond's instigation the Queen sent over in April 1581 a
general pardon.
Severe as Lord Grey was, he seemed too lenient to Raleigh. In January
1581, the young captain left Cork and made the perilous journey to
Dublin to expostulate with the Deputy, and to urge him to treat with
greater stringency various Munster chieftains who were blowing the
embers of the rebellion into fresh flame. Among these malcontents the
worst was a certain David Barry, son of Lord Barry, himself a prisoner
in Dublin Castle. David Barry had placed the family stronghold, Barry
Court, at the disposal of the Geraldines. Raleigh obtained permission to
seize and hold this property, and returned from Dublin to carry out his
duty. On his way back, as he was approaching Barry's country, with his
men straggling behind him, the Seneschal of Imokelly, the strongest and
craftiest of the remaining Geraldines, laid an ambush to seize him at
the ford of Corabby. Raleigh not only escaped himself, but returned in
the face of a force which was to his as twenty to one, in order to
rescue a comrade whose horse had thrown him in the river. With a
quarter-staff in one hand and a pistol in the other, he held the
Seneschal and his kerns at bay, and brought his little body of troops
through the ambush without the loss of one man. In the dreary monotony
of the war, this brilliant act of courage, of which Raleigh himself in a
letter gives a very modest account, touched the popular heart, and did
as much as anything to make him famous.
The existing documents which illustrate Raleigh's life in Ireland during
1581, and they are somewhat numerous, give the student a much higher
notion of his brilliant aptitude for business and of his active courage
than of his amiability. His vivacity and ingenuity were sources of
irritation to him, as the vigour of an active man may vex him in wading
across loose sands. There was no stability and apparently no hope or aim
in the policy of the English leaders, and Raleigh showed no mock-modesty
in his criticism of that policy. Ormond had been on friendly terms with
him, but as early as February 25 a quarrel was ready to break out.
Ormond wished to hold Barry Court, which was the key to the important
road between Cork and Youghal, as his own; while Raleigh was no less
clamorous in claiming it. In the summer, not satisfied with complaining
of Ormond to Grey, he denounced Grey to Leicester. In the meantime he
had succeeded in ousting Ormond, who was recalled to England, and in
getting himself made, if not nominally, practically Governor of Munster.
He proceeded to Lismore, then the English capital of the province, and
made that town the centre of those incessant sallies and forays which
Hooker describes. One of these skirmishes, closing in the defeat of Lord
Barry at Cleve, showed consummate military ability, and deserves almost
to rank as a battle.
In August, Raleigh's temporary governorship of Munster ended. He was too
young and too little known a man permanently to hold such a post. Zouch
took his place at Lismore, and Raleigh, returning to Cork, was made
Governor of that city. It was at this time, or possibly a little earlier
in the year, that Raleigh made his romantic attack upon Castle
Bally-in-Harsh, the seat of Lord Roche. On the very same evening that
Raleigh received a hint from head-quarters that the capture of this
strongly fortified place was desirable, he set out with ninety men on
the adventure. His troop arrived at Harsh very early in the morning, but
not so early but that the townspeople, to the number of five hundred,
had collected to oppose his little force. He soon put them to flight,
and then, by a nimble trick, contrived to enter the castle itself, to
seize Lord and Lady Roche at their breakfast-table, to slip out with
them and through the town unmolested, and to regain Cork next day with
the loss of only a single man. The whole affair was a piece of military
sleight of hand, brilliantly designed, incomparably well carried out.
The summer and autumn were passed in scouring the woods and ravines of
Munster from Tipperary to Kilkenny. Miserable work he found it, and
glad he must have been when a summons from London put an end to his
military service in Ireland. In two years he had won a great reputation.
Elizabeth, it may well be, desired to see him, and talk with him on what
he called 'the business of this lost land.' In December 1581 he returned
to England.
One point more may be mentioned. In a letter dated May 1, 1581, Raleigh
offers to rebuild the ruined fortress of Barry Court at his own expense.
This shows that he must by this time have come into a certain amount of
property, for his Irish pay as a captain was, he says, so poor that but
for honour he 'would disdain it as much as to keep sheep.' This fact
disposes of the notion that Raleigh arrived at the Court of Elizabeth in
the guise of a handsome penniless adventurer. Perhaps he had by this
time inherited his share of the paternal estates.[2]
[Illustration: SOUTH OF ENGLAND AND IRELAND.]
CHAPTER II.
AT COURT.
Raleigh had not completed his thirtieth year when he became a recognised
courtier. We have seen that he had passed, four years before, within the
precincts of the Court, but we do not know whether the Queen had noticed
him or not. In the summer of 1581 he had written thus to Leicester from
Lismore:--
I may not forget continually to put your Honour in mind of my
affection unto your Lordship, having to the world both professed
and protested the same. Your Honour, having no use of such poor
followers, hath utterly forgotten me. Notwithstanding, if your
Lordship shall please to think me yours, as I am, I will be
found as ready, and dare do as much in your service, as any man
you may command; and do neither so much despair of myself but
that I may be some way able to perform so much.
To Leicester, then, we may be sure, he went,--to find him, and the whole
Court with him, in the throes of the Queen's latest and final
matrimonial embroilment. Raleigh had a few weeks in which to admire the
empty and hideous suitor whom France had sent over to claim Elizabeth's
hand, and during this critical time it is possible that he enjoyed his
personal introduction to the Queen. Walter Raleigh in the prime of his
strength and beauty formed a curious contrast to poor Alençon, and the
difference was one which Elizabeth would not fail to recognise. On
February 1, 1582, he was paid the sum of 200_l._ for his Irish services,
and a week later he set out under Leicester, in company with Sir Philip
Sidney, among the throng that conducted the French prince to the
Netherlands.
When Elizabeth's 'poor frog,' as she called Alençon, had been duly led
through the gorgeous pageant prepared in his honour at Antwerp, on
February 17, the English lords and their train, glad to be free of their
burden, passed to Flushing, and hastened home with as little ceremony as
might be. Raleigh alone remained behind, to carry some special message
of compliment from the Queen to the Prince of Orange. It is Raleigh
himself, in his _Invention of Shipping_, who gives us this interesting
information, and he goes on to say that when the Prince of Orange
'delivered me his letters to her Majesty, he prayed me to say to the
Queen from him, _Sub umbra alarum tuarum protegimur_: for certainly,
said he, they had withered in the bud, and sunk in the beginning of
their navigation, had not her Majesty assisted them.' It would have been
natural to entrust to Leicester such confidential utterances as these
were a reply to. But Elizabeth was passing through a paroxysm of rage
with Leicester at the moment. She ventured to call him 'traitor' and to
accuse him of conspiring with the Prince of Orange. Notwithstanding
this, his influence was still paramount with her, and it was
characteristic of her shrewd petulance to confide in Leicester's
_protégé_, although not in Leicester himself. Towards the end of March,
Raleigh settled at the English Court.
On April 1, 1582, Elizabeth issued from Greenwich a strange and
self-contradictory warrant with regard to service in Ireland, and the
band of infantry hitherto commanded in that country by a certain Captain
Annesley, now deceased. The words must be quoted verbatim:--
For that our pleasure is to have our servant Walter Rawley [this
was the way in which the name was pronounced during Raleigh's
lifetime] trained some time longer in that our realm [Ireland]
for his better experience in martial affairs, and for the
especial care which We have to do him good, in respect of his
kindred that have served Us, some of them (as you know) near
about Our person [probably Mrs. Catherine Ashley, who was
Raleigh's aunt]; these are to require you that the leading of
the said band may be committed to the said Rawley; and for that
he is, for some considerations, by Us excused to stay here. Our
pleasure is that the said band be, in the meantime, till he
repair into that Our realm, delivered to some such as he shall
depute to be his lieutenant there.
He is to be captain in Ireland, but not just yet, not till a too tender
Queen can spare him. We find that he was paid his 'reckoning' for six
months after the issue of this warrant, but there is no evidence that he
was spared at any time during 1582 to relieve his Irish deputy. He was
now, in fact, installed as first favourite in the still susceptible
heart of the Virgin Star of the North.
This, then, is a favourable opportunity for pausing to consider what
manner of man it was who had so suddenly passed into the intimate favour
of the Queen. Naunton has described Raleigh with the precision of one
who is superior to the weakness of depreciating the exterior qualities
of his enemy: 'having a good presence, in a handsome and well-compacted
person; a strong natural wit, and a better judgment; with a bold and
plausible tongue, whereby he could set out his parts to the best
advantage.' His face had neither the ethereal beauty of Sidney's nor the
intellectual delicacy of Spenser's; it was cast in a rougher mould than
theirs. The forehead, it is acknowledged, was too high for the
proportion of the features, and for this reason, perhaps, is usually
hidden in the portraits by a hat. We must think of Raleigh at this time
as a tall, somewhat bony man, about six feet high, with dark hair and a
high colour, a facial expression of great brightness and alertness,
personable from the virile force of his figure, and illustrating these
attractions by a splendid taste in dress. His clothes were at all times
noticeably gorgeous; and to the end of his life he was commonly
bedizened with precious stones to his very shoes. When he was arrested
in 1603 he was carrying 4,000_l._ in jewels on his bosom, and when he
was finally captured on August 10, 1618, his pockets were found full of
the diamonds and jacinths which he had hastily removed from various
parts of his person. His letters display his solicitous love of jewels,
velvets, and embroidered damasks. Mr. Jeaffreson has lately found among
the Middlesex MSS. that as early as April 26, 1584, a gentleman named
Hugh Pew stole at Westminster and carried off Walter Raleigh's pearl
hat-band and another jewelled article of attire, valued together in
money of that time at 113_l._ The owner, with characteristic
promptitude, shut the thief up in Newgate, and made him disgorge. To
complete our picture of the vigorous and brilliant soldier-poet, we must
add that he spoke to the end of his life with that strong Devonshire
accent which was never displeasing to the ears of Elizabeth.
The Muse of History is surely now-a-days too disdainful of all
information that does not reach her signed and countersigned. In
biography, at least, it must be a mistake to accept none but documentary
evidence, since tradition, if it does not give us truth of fact, gives
us what is often at least as valuable, truth of impression. The later
biographers of Raleigh have scorned even to repeat those anecdotes that
are the best known to the public of all which cluster around his
personality. It is true that they rest on no earlier testimony than that
of Fuller, who, writing in the lifetime of men who knew Raleigh, gives
the following account of his introduction to Elizabeth: 'Her Majesty,
meeting with a plashy place, made some scruple to go on; when Raleigh
(dressed in the gay and genteel habit of those times) presently cast off
and spread his new plush cloak on the ground, whereon the queen trod
gently over, rewarding him afterwards with many suits for his so free
and seasonable tender of so fair a footcloth.' The only point about this
story which is incredible is that this act was Raleigh's introduction to
the Queen. Regarded as a fantastic incident of their later attachment,
the anecdote is in the highest degree characteristic of the readiness of
the one and the romantic sentiment of the other.
Not less entertaining is Fuller's other story, that at the full tide of
Raleigh's fortunes with the Queen, he wrote on a pane of glass with his
diamond ring:--
Fain would I climb, but that I fear to fall,
whereupon Elizabeth replied,
If thy heart fail thee, then climb not at all.
Of these tales we can only assert that they reflect the popular and
doubtless faithful impression of Raleigh's mother-wit and audacious
alacrity.
If he did not go back to fight in Ireland, his experience of Irish
affairs was made use of by the Government. He showed a considerable
pliancy in giving his counsel. In May 1581 he had denounced Ormond and
even Grey for not being severe enough, but in June 1582 he had veered
round to Burghley's opinion that it was time to moderate English tyranny
in Ireland. A paper written partly by Burghley and partly by Raleigh,
but entitled _The Opinion of Mr. Rawley_, still exists among the Irish
Correspondence, and is dated October 25, 1582. This document is in the
highest degree conciliatory towards the Irish chieftains, whom it
recommends the Queen to win over peacefully to her side, this policy
'offering a very plausible show of thrift and commodity.' It is
interesting to find Raleigh so supple, and so familiar already with the
Queen's foibles. It was probably earlier in the year, and about this
same Irish business, that Raleigh spoke to Elizabeth, on the occasion
which Naunton describes. 'Raleigh,' he says, 'had gotten the Queen's ear
at a trice; and she began to be taken with his elocution, and loved to
hear his reasons to her demands; and the truth is, she took him for a
kind of _oracle_, which nettled them all.' Lord Grey, who was no
diplomatist, had the want of caution to show that he was annoyed at
advice being asked from a young man who was so lately his inferior. In
answer to a special recommendation of Raleigh from the Queen, Lord Grey
ventured to reply: 'For my own part I must be plain--I neither like his
carriage nor his company, and therefore other than by direction and
commandment, and what his right requires, he is not to expect from my
hands.' Lord Grey did not understand the man he was dealing with. The
result was that in August 1582 he was abruptly deposed from his dignity
as Lord Deputy in Ireland. But we see that Raleigh could be exceedingly
antipathetic to any man who crossed his path. That it was wilful
arrogance, and not inability to please, is proved by the fact that he
seems to have contrived to reconcile not Leicester only but even Hatton,
Elizabeth's dear 'Pecora Campi,' to his intrusion at Court.
As far as we can perceive, Raleigh's success as a courtier was unclouded
from 1582 to 1586, and these years are the most peaceful and uneventful
in the record of his career. He took a confidential place by the Queen's
side, but so unobtrusively that in these earliest years, at least, his
presence leaves no perceptible mark on the political history of the
country. Great in so many fields, eminent as a soldier, as a navigator,
as a poet, as a courtier, there was a limit even to Raleigh's
versatility, and he was not a statesman. It was political ambition which
was the vulnerable spot in this Achilles, and until he meddled with
statecraft, his position was practically unassailed. It must not be
overlooked, in this connection, that in spite of Raleigh's influence
with the Queen, he never was admitted as a Privy Councillor, his advice
being asked in private, by Elizabeth or by her ministers, and not across
the table, where his arrogant manner might have introduced discussions
fruitless to the State. In 1598, when he was at the zenith of his power,
he actually succeeded, as we shall see, in being proposed for Privy
Council, but the Queen did not permit him to be sworn. Nothing would be
more remarkable than Elizabeth's infatuation for her favourites, if we
were not still more surprised at her skill in gauging their capacities,
and her firmness in defining their ambitions.
Already, in 1583, Walter Raleigh began to be the recipient of the
Queen's gifts. On April 10 of that year he came into possession of two
estates, Stolney and Newland, which had passed to the Queen from All
Souls College, Oxford. A few days later, May 4, he became enriched by
obtaining letters patent for the 'Farm of Wines,' thenceforward to be
one of the main sources of his wealth. According to this grant, which
extended to all places within the kingdom, each vintner was obliged to
pay twenty shillings a year to Raleigh as a license duty on the sale of
wines. This was, in fact, a great relief to the wine trade, for until
this time the mayors of corporations had levied this duty at their own
judgment, and some of them had made a licensing charge not less than six
times as heavy as the new duty. The grant, moreover, gave Raleigh a part
of all fines accruing to the Crown under the provisions of the wines
statute of Edward VI. From his 'Farm of Wines' Raleigh seems at one
time to have obtained something like 2,000_l._ a year. The emoluments
dwindled at last, just before Raleigh was forced to resign his patent to
James I., to 1,000_l._ a year; but even this was an income equivalent to
6,000_l._ of our money. The grant was to expire in 1619, and would
therefore, if he had died a natural death, have outlived Raleigh
himself. We must not forget that the cost of collecting moneys, and the
salaries to deputy licensers, consumed a large part of these receipts.
While Raleigh was shaking down a fortune from the green ivy-bushes that
hung at the vintners' doors, the western continent, at which he had
already cast wistful glances, remained the treasure-house of Spain. His
unfortunate but indomitable half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, recalled
it to his memory. The name of Gilbert deserves to be better remembered
than it is; and America, at least, will one day be constrained to honour
the memory of the man who was the first to dream of colonising her
shores. Until his time, the ambition of Englishmen in the west had been
confined to an angry claim to contest the wealth and beauty of the New
World with the Spaniard. The fabulous mines of Cusco, the plate-ships of
Lima and Guayaquil, the pearl-fisheries of Panama, these had been
hitherto the loadstar of English enterprise. The hope was that such
feats as those of Drake would bring about a time when, as George Wither
put it,
the spacious West,
Being still more with English blood possessed,
The proud Iberians shall not rule those seas,
To check our ships from sailing where they please.
Even Frobisher had not entertained the notion of leaving Spain alone,
and of planting in the northern hemisphere colonies of English race. It
was Sir Humphrey Gilbert who first thought of a settlement in North
America, and the honour of priority is due to him, although he failed.
His royal charter was dated June 1578, and covered a space of six years
with its privilege. We have already seen that various enterprises
undertaken by Gilbert in consequence of it had failed in one way or
another. After the disaster of 1579 he desisted, and lent three of his
remaining vessels to the Government, to serve on the coast of Ireland.
As late as July 1582 the rent due to him on these vessels was unpaid,
and he wrote a dignified appeal to Walsingham for the money in arrears.
He was only forty-three, but his troubles had made an old man of him,
and he pleads his white hairs, blanched in long service of her Majesty,
as a reason why the means of continuing to serve her should not be
withheld from him. Raleigh had warmly recommended his brother before he
was himself in power, and he now used all his influence in his favour.
It is plain that Gilbert's application was promptly attended to, for we
find him presently in a position to pursue the colonising enterprises
which lay so near to his heart. The Queen, however, could not be induced
to encourage him; she shrewdly remarked that Gilbert 'had no good luck
at sea,' which was pathetically true. However, Gilbert's six years'
charter was about to expire, and his hopes were all bound up in making
one more effort. He pleaded, and Raleigh supported him, until Elizabeth
finally gave way, merely refusing to allow Raleigh himself to take part
in any such 'dangerous sea-fights' as the crossing of the Atlantic might
entail.
On June 11, 1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert sailed from Plymouth with a
little fleet of five vessels, bound for North America. According to all
authorities, Raleigh had expended a considerable sum in the outfit;
according to one writer, Hayes (in Hakluyt), he was owner of the entire
expedition. He spent, we know, 2,000_l._ in building and fitting out one
vessel, which he named after himself, the 'Ark Raleigh.'
Sir Humphrey Gilbert was not born under a fortunate star. Two days after
starting, a contagious fever broke out on board the 'Ark Raleigh,' and
in a tumult of panic, without explaining her desertion to the admiral,
she hastened back in great distress to Plymouth. The rest of the fleet
crossed the Atlantic successfully, and Newfoundland was taken in the
Queen's name. One ship out of the remaining four had meanwhile been sent
back to England with a sick crew. Late in September 1583 a second sailed
into Plymouth with the news that the other two had sunk in an Atlantic
storm on the 8th or 9th of that month. The last thing known of the
gallant admiral before his ship went down was that 'sitting abaft with a
book in his hand,' he had called out 'Be of good heart, my friends! We
are as near to heaven by sea as by land.'
At the death of Gilbert, his schemes as a colonising navigator passed,
as by inheritance, to Raleigh. That he had no intention of letting them
drop is shown by the fact that he was careful not to allow Gilbert's
original charter to expire. In June 1584 other hands might have seized
his brother's relinquished enterprise, and therefore it was, on March
25, that Raleigh moved the Queen to renew the charter in his own name.
In company with a younger half-brother, Adrian Gilbert, and with the
experienced though unlucky navigator John Davis as a third partner,
Raleigh was now incorporated as representing 'The College of the
Fellowship for the Discovery of the North West Passage.' In this he was
following the precedent of Gilbert, who had made use of the Queen's
favourite dream of a northern route to China to cover his less
attractive schemes of colonisation. Raleigh, however, took care to
secure himself a charter which gave him the fullest possible power to
'inhabit or retain, build or fortify, at the discretion of the said W.
Raleigh,' in any remote lands that he might find hitherto unoccupied by
any Christian power. Armed with this extensive grant, Raleigh began to
make his preparations.
It is needful here to pass rapidly over the chronicle of the expeditions
to America, since they form no part of the personal history of Raleigh.
On April 27 he sent out his first fleet under Amidas and Barlow. They
sailed blindly for the western continent, but were guided at last by 'a
delicate sweet smell' far out in ocean to the coast of Florida. They
then sailed north, and finally landed on the islands of Wokoken and
Roanoke, which, with the adjoining mainland, they annexed in the name of
her Majesty. In September this first expedition returned, bringing
Raleigh, as a token of the wealth of the new lands, 'a string of pearls
as large as great peas.' In honour of 'the eternal Maiden Queen,' the
new country received the name of Virginia, and Raleigh ordered his own
arms to be cut anew, with this legend, _Propria insignia Walteri
Ralegh, militis, Domini et Gubernatoris Virginiæ_. No attempt had been
made on this occasion to colonise. It was early in the following year
that Raleigh sent out his second Virginian expedition, under the brave
Sir Richard Grenville, to settle in the country. The experiment was not
completely successful at first, but from August 17, 1585, which is the
birthday of the American people, to June 18, 1586, one hundred and eight
persons under the command of Ralph Lane, and in the service of Raleigh,
made Roanoke their habitation. It is true that the colonists lost
courage and abandoned Virginia at the latter date, but an essay at least
had been made to justify the sanguine hopes of Raleigh.
These expeditions to North America were very costly, and by their very
nature unremunerative for the present. Raleigh, however, was by this
time quite wealthy enough to support the expense, and on the second
occasion accident befriended him. Sir Richard Grenville, in the 'Tiger,'
fell in with a Spanish plate-ship on his return-voyage, and towed into
Plymouth Harbour a prize which was estimated at the value of 50,000_l._
But Raleigh was, indeed, at this time a veritable Danaë. As though
enough gold had not yet been showered upon him, the Queen presented to
him, on March 25, 1584, a grant of license to export woollen
broad-cloths, a privilege the excessive profits of which soon attracted
the critical notice of Burghley. Raleigh's grant, however, was long left
unassailed, and was renewed year by year at least until May 1589. It
would seem that his income from the trade in undyed broad-cloth was of
a two-fold nature, a fixed duty on exportation in general, and a charge
on 'over-lengths,' that is to say, on pieces which exceeded the maximum
length of twenty-four yards. When Burghley assailed this whole system of
taxation in 1591, he stated that Raleigh had, in the first year only of
his grant, received 3,950_l._ from a privilege for which he paid to the
State a rent of only 700_l._ If this was correct, and no one could be in
a better position than Burghley to check the figures, Raleigh's income
from broad-cloth alone was something like 18,000_l._ of Victorian money.
Such were the sources of an opulence which we must do Raleigh the credit
to say was expended not on debauchery or display, but in the most
enlightened efforts to extend the field of English commercial enterprise
beyond the Atlantic. We need not suppose him to have been unselfish
beyond the fashion of his age. In his action there was, no doubt, an
element of personal ambition; he dreamed of raising a State in the West
before which his great enemy, Spain, should sink into the shade, and he
fancied himself the gorgeous viceroy of such a kingdom. His imagination,
which had led him on so bravely, gulled him sometimes when it came to
details. His sailors had seen the light of sunset on the cliffs of
Roanoke, and Raleigh took the yellow gleam for gold. He set his faith
too lightly on the fabulous ores of Chaunis Temotam. But he was not the
slave of these fancies, as were the more vulgar adventurers of his age.
More than the promise of pearls and silver, it was the homely products
of the new country that attracted him, and his captains were bidden to
bring news to him of the fish and fruit of Virginia, its salts and dyes
and textile grasses. Nor was it a goldsmith that he sent out to the new
colony as his scientific agent, but a young mathematician of promise,
the practical and observant Thomas Hariot.
Some personal details of Raleigh's private life during these two years
may now be touched upon. He was in close attendance upon the Queen at
Greenwich and at Windsor, when he was not in his own house in the still
rural village of Islington. In the summer of 1584, probably in
consequence of the new wealth his broad-cloth patent had secured him, he
enlarged his borders in several ways. He leased of the Queen, Durham
House, close to the river, covering the site of the present Adelphi
Terrace. This was the vast fourteenth-century palace of the Bishops of
Durham, which had come into possession of the Crown late in the reign of
Henry VIII. Elizabeth herself had occupied it during the lifetime of her
brother, and she had recovered it again after the death of Mary.
Retaining certain rooms, she now relinquished it to her favourite, and
in this stately mansion as his town house Raleigh lived from 1584 to
1603. In spite of his uncertain tenure, he spent very large sums in
repairing 'this rotten house,' as Lady Raleigh afterwards called it.
Some time between December 14, 1584, and February 24, 1585, Raleigh was
knighted. On the latter date we find him first styled Sir Walter, in an
order from Burghley to report on the force of the Devonshire Stannaries.
His activities were now concentrated from several points upon the West
of England, and he became once more identified with the only race that
ever really loved him, the men of his native Devonshire. In July he
succeeded the Earl of Bedford as Lord Warden of the Stannaries; in
September he was appointed Lieutenant of the County of Cornwall; in
November, Vice-Admiral of the two counties. He, appointed Lord Beauchamp
his deputy in Cornwall, and his own eldest half-brother, Sir John
Gilbert of Greenway, his deputy in Devonshire. In the same year, 1585,
he entered Parliament as one of the two county members for Devonshire.
As Warden of the Stannaries he introduced reforms which greatly
mitigated the hardships of the miners.
It is pleasanter to think of Raleigh administering rough justice from
the granite judgment-seat on some windy tor of Dartmoor, than to picture
him squabbling for rooms at Court with 'Pecora Campi,' or ogling a
captious royal beauty of some fifty summers, Raleigh's work in the West
has made little noise in history; but it was as wholesome and capable as
the most famous of his exploits.
In March, 1586, Leicester found himself in disgrace with Elizabeth, and
so openly attributed it to Raleigh that the Queen ordered Walsingham to
deny that the latter had ceased to plead for his former patron. Raleigh
himself sent Leicester a band of Devonshire miners to serve in the
Netherlands, and comforted him at the same time by adding, 'The Queen is
in very good terms with you, and, thanks be to God, well pacified. You
are again her "Sweet Robin."' It seems that the strange accusation had
been made against Raleigh that he desired to favour Spain. This was
calculated to vex him to the quick, and we find him protesting (March
29, 1586): 'I have consumed the best part of my fortune, hating the
tyrannous prosperity of that State, and it were now strange and
monstrous that I should become an enemy to my country and conscience.'
Two months later he was threatened with the loss of his post as
Vice-Admiral if he did not withdraw a fleet he had fitted out to harass
the Spaniards in the Newfoundland waters. About the same time he
strengthened his connection with the Leicester faction by marrying his
cousin, Barbara Gamage, to Sir Philip Sidney's younger brother Robert.
This lady became the grandmother of Waller's Sacharissa. The collapse of
the Virginian colony was an annoyance in the summer of this year, but it
was tempered to Raleigh by the success of another of his enterprises,
his fleet in the Azores. One of the prizes brought home by this purely
piratical expedition was a Spanish colonial governor of much fame and
dignity, Don Pedro Sarmiento. Raleigh demanded a ransom for this
personage, and while it was being collected he entertained his prisoner
sumptuously in Durham House.
On October 7, 1586, Raleigh's old friend Sir Philip Sidney closed his
chivalrous career on the battle-field at Zutphen. Raleigh's solemn elegy
on him is one of the finest of the many poems which that sad event
called forth. It blends the passion of personal regret with the dignity
of public grief, as all great elegiacal poems should. One stanza might
be inscribed on a monument to Sidney:
England doth hold thy limbs, that bred the same;
Flanders thy valour, where it last was tried;
The camp thy sorrow, where thy body died;
Thy friends thy want; the world thy virtues' fame.
This elegy appeared with the rest in _Astrophel_ in 1595; but it had
already been printed, in 1593, in the _Phoenix Nest_, and as early as
1591 Sir John Harington quotes it as Raleigh's.
It was not till the following spring that Raleigh took possession of
certain vast estates in Ireland. The Queen had named him among the
'gentlemen-undertakers,' between whom the escheated lands of the Earl of
Desmond were to be divided. He received about forty-two thousand acres
in the counties of Cork, Waterford, and Tipperary, and he set about
repeopling this desolate region with his usual vigour of action. He
brought settlers over from the West of England, but these men were not
supported or even encouraged at Dublin Castle. 'The doting Deputy,' as
Raleigh calls him, treated his Devonshire farmers with less
consideration than the Irish kerns, and although it is certain that of
all the 'undertakers' Raleigh was the one who, after his lights, tried
to do the best for his land, his experience as an Irish colonist was on
the whole dispiriting. By far the richest part of his property was the
'haven royal' of Youghal, with the thickly-wooded lands on either side
of the river Blackwater. He is scarcely to be forgiven for what appears
to have been the wanton destruction of the Geraldine Friary of Youghal,
built in 1268, which his men pulled down and burned while he was mayor
of the town in 1587. Raleigh's Irish residences at this time were his
manor-house in Youghal, which still remains, and Lismore Castle, which
he rented, from 1587 onwards, of the official Archbishop of Cashel,
Meiler Magrath.
We have now reached the zenith of Raleigh's personal success. His fame
was to proceed far beyond anything that he had yet gained or deserved,
but his mere worldly success was to reach no further, and even from this
moment sensibly to decline. Elizabeth had showered wealth and influence
upon him, although she had refrained, at her most doting moments, from
lifting him up to the lowest step in the ladder of aristocratic
preferment. But although her favour towards Raleigh had this singular
limit, and although she kept him rigidly outside the pale of politics,
in other respects her affection had been lavish in the extreme. Without
ceasing to hold Hatton and Leicester captive, she had now for five years
given Raleigh the chief place in her heart. But, in May 1587, we
suddenly find him in danger of being dethroned in favour of a boy of
twenty, and it is the new Earl of Essex, with his petulant beauty, who
'is, at cards, or one game or another, with her, till the birds sing in
the morning.' The remarkable scene in which Essex dared to demand the
sacrifice of Raleigh as the price of his own devotion is best described
by the new favourite in his own words. Raleigh had now been made Captain
of the Guard, and we have to imagine him standing at the door in his
uniform of orange-tawny, while the pert and pouting boy is half
declaiming, half whispering, in the ear of the Queen, whose beating
heart forgets to remind her that she might be the mother of one of her
lovers and the grandmother of the other. Essex writes:
I told her that what she did was only to please that knave
Raleigh, for whose sake I saw she would both grieve me and my
love, and disgrace me in the eye of the world. From thence she
came to speak of Raleigh; and it seemed she could not well
endure anything to be spoken against him; and taking hold of my
word 'disdain,' she said there was 'no such cause why I should
disdain him.' This speech did trouble me so much that, as near
as I could, I did describe unto her what he had been, and what
he was.... I then did let her know, whether I had cause to
disdain his competition of love, or whether I could have comfort
to give myself over to the service of a mistress which was in
awe of such a man. I spake, with grief and choler, as much
against him as I could; and I think he, standing at the door,
might very well hear the worst that I spoke of himself. In that
end, I saw she was resolved to defend him, and to cross me.
It was probably about this time, and owing to the instigation of Essex,
that Tarleton, the comedian, laid himself open to banishment from Court
for calling out, while Raleigh was playing cards with Elizabeth, 'See
how the Knave commands the Queen!' Elizabeth supported her old
favourite, but there is no doubt that these attacks made their
impression on her irritable temperament. Meanwhile Raleigh, engaged in a
dozen different enterprises, and eager to post hither and thither over
land and sea, was probably not ill disposed to see his royal mistress
diverted from a too-absorbing attention to himself.
On May 8, 1587, Raleigh sent forth from Plymouth his fourth Virginian
expedition, under Captain John White. It was found that the second
colony, the handful of men left behind by Sir Richard Grenville, had
perished. With 150 men, White landed at Hatorask, and proposed to found
a town of Raleigh in the new country. Every species of disaster attended
this third colony, and in the midst of the excitement caused the
following year by the Spanish Armada, a fifth expedition, fitted out
under Sir Richard Grenville, was stopped by the Government at Bideford.
Raleigh was not easily daunted, however, and in the midst of the
preparations for the great struggle he contrived to send out two
pinnaces from Bideford, on April 22, 1588, for the succour of his
unfortunate Virginians; but these little vessels were ignominiously
stripped off Madeira by privateers from La Rochelle, and sent helpless
back to England. Raleigh had now spent more than forty thousand pounds
upon the barren colony of Virginia, and, finding that no one at Court
supported his hopes in that direction, he began to withdraw a little
from a contest in which he was so heavily handicapped. In the next
chapter we shall touch upon the modification of his American policy. He
had failed hitherto, and yet, in failing, he had already secured for his
own name the highest place in the early history of Colonial America.
We now reach that famous incident in English history over which every
biographer of Raleigh is tempted to linger, the ruin of Philip's
Felicissima Armada. Within the limits of the present life of Sir Walter
it is impossible to tell over again a story which is among the most
thrilling in the chronicles of the world, but in which Raleigh's part
was not a foremost one. We possess no letter of 1588 in which he refers
to the fight.
On March 31, he had been one of the nine commissioners who met to
consider the best means of resisting invasion. In the same body of men
sat two of Raleigh's captains, Grenville and Ralph Lane, as well as his
old opponent, Lord Grey. Three months before this, Raleigh had reported
to the Queen on the state of the counties under his charge, and his
counsel on the subject had been taken. That he was profoundly excited at
the crisis in English affairs is proved by the many allusions he makes
to the Armada in the _History of the World_. It is on the whole
surprising that he was not called to take a more prominent part in the
event.[3]
It is believed that he was in Ireland when the storm actually broke,
that he hastened into the West of England, to raise levies of Cornish
and Devonian miners, and that he then proceeded to Portland, of which,
among his many offices, he was now governor, in order that he might
revise and complete the defences of that fortress. Either by land or
sea, according to conflicting accounts, he then hurried back to
Plymouth, and joined the main body of the fleet on July 23. There is a
very early tradition that his advice was asked by the Admiral, Howard of
Effingham, on the question whether it would be wise to try to board the
Spanish galleons. The Admiral thought not, but was almost over-persuaded
by younger men, eager for distinction, when Raleigh came to his aid
with counsel that tallied with the Admiral's judgment. In the _History
of the World_ Raleigh remarks:
To clap ships together without any consideration belongs rather
to a madman than to a man of war. By such an ignorant bravery
was Peter Strozzi lost at the Azores, when he fought against the
Marquis of Santa Cruz. In like sort had Lord Charles Howard,
Admiral of England, been lost in the year 1588, if he had not
been better advised than a great many malignant fools were that
found fault with his demeanour. The Spaniards had an army aboard
them, and he had none. They had more ships than he had, and of
higher building and charging; so that, had he entangled himself
with those great and powerful vessels, he had greatly endangered
this kingdom of England.
Raleigh's impression of the whole comedy of the Armada is summed up in
an admirable sentence in his _Report of the Fight in the Azores_, to
which the reader must here merely be referred. His ship was one of those
which pursued the lumbering Spanish galleons furthest in their wild
flight towards the Danish waters. He was back in England, however, in
time to receive orders on August 28 to prepare a fleet for Ireland.
Whether that fleet ever started or no is doubtful, and the latest
incident of Raleigh's connection with the Armada is that on September 5,
1588, he and Sir Francis Drake received an equal number of wealthy
Spanish prisoners, whose ransoms were to be the reward of Drake's and of
Raleigh's achievements. More important to the latter was the fact that
his skill in naval tactics, and his genius for rapid action, had very
favourably impressed the Lord Admiral, who henceforward publicly treated
him as a recognised authority in these matters.
CHAPTER III.
IN DISGRACE.
For one year after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, Raleigh resisted
with success, or overlooked with equanimity, the determined attacks
which Essex made upon his position at Court. He was busy with great
schemes in all quarters of the kingdom, engaged in Devonshire, in
Ireland, in Virginia, in the north-western seas, and to his virile
activity the jealousy of Essex must have seemed like the buzzing of a
persistent gnat. The insect could sting, however, and in the early part
of December 1588, Raleigh's attention was forcibly concentrated on his
rival by the fact that 'my Lord of Essex' had sent him a challenge. No
duel was fought, and the Council did its best to bury the incident 'in
silence, that it might not be known to her Majesty, lest it might injure
the Earl,' from which it will appear that Raleigh's hold upon her favour
was still assured.
A week later than this we get a glance for a moment at one or two of the
leash of privateering enterprises, all of them a little under the rose,
in which Sir Walter Raleigh was in these years engaged. An English ship,
the 'Angel Gabriel,' complained of being captured and sacked of her
wines by Raleigh's men on the high seas, and he retorts by insinuating
that she, 'as it is probable, has served the King of Spain in his
Armada,' and is therefore fair game. So, too, with the four butts of
sack of one Artson, and the sugar and mace said to be taken out of a
Hamburg vessel, their capture by Raleigh's factors is comfortably
excused on the ground that these acts were only reprisals against the
villainous Spaniard. It was well that these more or less commercial
undertakings should be successful, for it became more and more plain to
Raleigh that the most grandiose of all his enterprises, his determined
effort to colonise Virginia, could but be a drain upon his fortune.
After Captain White's final disastrous voyage, Raleigh suspended his
efforts in this direction for a while. He leased his patent in Virginia
to a company of merchants, on March 7, 1589, merely reserving to himself
a nominal privilege, namely the possession of one fifth of such gold and
silver ore as should be raised in the colony. This was the end of the
first act of Raleigh's American adventures. It may not be needless to
contradict here a statement repeated in most rapid sketches of his life.
It is not true that at any time Raleigh himself set foot in Virginia.
In the Portugal expedition of 1589 Raleigh does not seem to have taken
at all a prominent part. He was absent, however, with Drake's fleet from
April 18 to July 2, and he marched with the rest up to the walls of
Lisbon. This enterprise was an attempt on the part of Elizabeth to place
Antonio again on the throne of Portugal, from which he had been ousted
by Philip of Spain in 1580. The aim of the expedition was not reached,
but a great deal of booty fell into the hands of the English, and
Raleigh in particular received 4,000_l._ His contingent, however, had
been a little too zealous, and he received a rather sharp reprimand for
capturing two barks from Cherbourg belonging to the friendly power of
France. It must be understood that Raleigh at this time maintained at
his own expense a small personal fleet for commercial and privateering
ends, and that he lent or leased these vessels, with his own services,
to the government when additional naval contributions were required. In
the _Domestic Correspondence_ we meet with the names of the chief of
these vessels, 'The Revenge,' soon afterwards so famous, 'The Crane,'
and 'The Garland.' These ships were merchantmen or men-of-war at will,
and their exploits were winked at or frowned upon at Court as
circumstances dictated. Sometimes the hawk's eye of Elizabeth would
sound the holds of these pirates with incredible acumen, as on that
occasion when it is recorded that 'a waistcoat of carnation colour,
curiously embroidered,' which was being brought home to adorn the person
of the adventurer, was seized by order of the Queen to form a stomacher
for his royal mistress. It would be difficult to say which of the
illustrious pair was the more solicitous of fine raiment. At other times
the whole prize had to be disgorged; as in the case of that bark of
Olonne, laden with barley, which Raleigh had to restore to the Treasury
on July 21, 1589, after he had concluded a very lucrative sale of the
same.
In August 1589 Sir Francis Allen wrote to Anthony Bacon: 'My Lord of
Essex hath chased Mr. Raleigh from the Court, and hath confined him to
Ireland.' It is true that Raleigh himself, five months later, being
once more restored to favour, speaks of 'that nearness to her Majesty
which I still enjoy,' and directly contradicts the rumour of his
disgrace. This, however, is not in accordance with the statement made by
Spenser in his poem of _Colin Clout's come home again_, in which he says
that all Raleigh's speech at this time was
Of great unkindness and of usage hard
Of Cynthia, the Lady of the Sea,
Which from her presence faultless him debarred,
and this may probably be considered as final evidence. At all events,
this exile from Court, whether it was enforced or voluntary, brought
about perhaps the most pleasing and stimulating episode in the whole of
Raleigh's career, his association with the great poet whose lines have
just been quoted.
We have already seen that, eight years before this, Spenser and Raleigh
had met under Lord Grey in the expedition that found its crisis at
Smerwick. We have no evidence of the point of intimacy which they
reached in 1582, nor of their further acquaintance before 1589. It has
been thought that Raleigh's picturesque and vivid personality
immediately and directly influenced Spenser's imagination. Dean Church
has noticed that to read Hooker's account of 'Raleigh's adventures with
the Irish chieftains, his challenges and single combats, his escapes at
fords and woods, is like reading bits of the _Faery Queen_ in prose.'
The two men, in many respects the most remarkable Englishmen of
imagination then before the notice of their country, did not, however,
really come into mutual relation until the time we have now reached.
In 1586 Edmund Spenser had been rewarded for his arduous services as
Clerk of the Council of Munster by the gift of a manor and ruined castle
of the Desmonds, Kilcolman, near the Galtee hills. This little
peel-tower, with its tiny rooms, overlooked a county that is desolate
enough now, but which then was finely wooded, and watered by the river
Awbeg, to which the poet gave the softer name of Mulla. Here, in the
midst of terrors by night and day, at the edge of the dreadful Wood,
where 'outlaws fell affray the forest ranger,' Spenser had been settled
for three years, describing the adventures of knights and ladies in a
wild world of faery that was but too like Munster, when the Shepherd of
the Ocean came over to Ireland to be his neighbour. Raleigh settled
himself in his own house at Youghal, and found society in visiting his
cousin, Sir George Carew, at Lismore, and Spenser at Kilcolman. Of the
latter association we possess a most interesting record. In 1591,
reviewing the life of two years before, Spenser says:
One day I sat, (as was my trade),
Under the foot of Mole, that mountain hoar,
Keeping my sheep among the cooly shade
Of the green alders, by the Mulla's shore;
There a strange shepherd chanced to find me out;
Whether allurèd with my pipe's delight,
Whose pleasing sound yshrilled far about,
(the secret of the authorship of the _Shepherd's Calender_ having by
this time oozed out in the praises of Webbe in 1586 and of Puttenham in
1589,)
Or thither led by chance, I know not right,--
Whom, when I askèd from what place he came
And how he hight, himself he did ycleepe
The _Shepherd of the Ocëan_ by name,
And said he came far from the main-sea deep;
He, sitting me beside in that same shade,
Provokèd me to play some pleasant fit,
(that is to say, to read the MS. of the _Faery Queen_, now approaching
completion,)
And, when he heard the music which I made,
He found himself full greatly pleased at it;
Yet æmuling my pipe, he took in hond
My pipe,--before that, æmulèd of many,--
And played thereon (for well that skill he conned),
Himself as skilful in that art as any.
Among the other poems thus read by Raleigh to Spenser at Kilcolman was
the 'lamentable lay' to which reference had just been made--the piece in
praise of Elizabeth which bore the name of _Cynthia_. In Spenser's
pastoral, the speaker is persuaded by Thestylis (Lodovick Bryskett) to
explain what ditty that was that the Shepherd of the Ocean sang, and he
explains very distinctly, but in terms which are scarcely critical, that
Raleigh's poem was written in love and praise, but also in pathetic
complaint, of Elizabeth, that
great Shepherdess, that Cynthia hight,
His Liege, his Lady, and his life's Regent.
This is most valuable evidence of the existence in 1589 of a poem or
series of poems by Sir Walter Raleigh, set by Spenser on a level with
the best work of the age in verse. This poem was, until quite lately,
supposed to have vanished entirely and beyond all hope of recovery.
Until now, no one seems to have been aware that we hold in our hands a
fragment of Raleigh's _magnum opus_ of 1589 quite considerable enough to
give us an idea of the extent and character of the rest.[4]
In 1870 Archdeacon Hannah printed what he described as a 'continuation
of the lost poem, _Cynthia_,' from fragments in Sir Walter's own hand
among the Hatfield MSS. Dr. Hannah, however, misled by the character of
the handwriting, by some vague allusions, in one of the fragments, to a
prison captivity, and most of all, probably, by a difficulty in dates
which we can now for the first time explain, attributed these pieces to
1603-1618, that is to say to Raleigh's imprisonment in the Tower. The
second fragment, beginning 'My body in the walls captived,' belongs, no
doubt, to the later date. It is in a totally distinct metre from the
rest and has nothing to do with _Cynthia_. The first fragment bears the
stamp of much earlier date, but this also can be no part of Raleigh's
epic. The long passage then following, on the contrary, is, I think,
beyond question, a canto, almost complete, of the lost epic of 1589. It
is written in the four-line heroic stanza adopted ten years later by Sir
John Davies for his _Nosce teipsum_, and most familiar to us all in
Gray's _Churchyard Elegy_. Moreover, it is headed 'the Twenty-first and
Last Book of _The Ocean to Cynthia_.' Another note, in Raleigh's
handwriting, styles the poem _The Ocean's Love to Cynthia_, and this was
probably the full name of it. Spenser's name for Raleigh, the Shepherd,
or pastoral hero, of the Ocean, is therefore for the first time
explained. This twenty-first book suffers from the fact that stanzas,
but apparently not very many, have dropped out, in four places. With
these losses, the canto still contains 130 stanzas, or 526 lines.
Supposing the average length of the twenty preceding books to have been
the same, _The Ocean's Love to Cynthia_ must have contained at least ten
thousand lines. Spenser, therefore, was not exaggerating, or using the
language of flattery towards a few elegies or a group of sonnets, when
he spoke of _Cynthia_ as a poem of great importance. As a matter of
fact, no poem of the like ambition had been written in England for a
century past, and if it had been published, it would perhaps have taken
a place only second to its immediate contemporary, _The Faery Queen_.
At this very time, and in the midst of his poetical holiday, Raleigh was
actively engaged in defending the rights of the merchants of Waterford
and Wexford to carry on their trade in pipe-staves for casks. Raleigh
himself encouraged and took part in this exportation, having two ships
regularly engaged between Waterford and the Canaries. Traces of his
peaceful work in Munster still remain. Sir John Pope Hennessy says:
The richly perfumed yellow wallflowers that he brought to
Ireland from the Azores, and the Affane cherry, are still found
where he first planted them by the Blackwater. Some cedars he
brought to Cork are to this day growing, according to the local
historian, Mr. J. G. MacCarthy, at a place called Tivoli. The
four venerable yew-trees, whose branches have grown and
intermingled into a sort of summer-house thatch, are pointed out
as having sheltered Raleigh when he first smoked tobacco in his
Youghal garden. In that garden he also planted tobacco.... A few
steps further on, where the town-wall of the thirteenth century
bounds the garden of the Warden's house, is the famous spot
where the first Irish potato was planted by him. In that garden
he gave the tubers to the ancestor of the present Lord
Southwell, by whom they were spread throughout the province of
Munster.
These were boons to mankind which the zeal of Raleigh's agents had
brought back from across the western seas, gifts of more account in the
end than could be contained in all the palaces of Manoa, and all the
emerald mines of Trinidad, if only this great man could have followed
his better instinct and believed it.
Raleigh's habitual difficulty in serving under other men showed itself
this autumn in his dispute with the Irish Deputy, Sir William
Fitzwilliam, and led, perhaps, to his return early in the winter. We do
not know what circumstances led to his being taken back into Elizabeth's
favour again, but it was probably in November that he returned to
England, and took Spenser with him. Of this interesting passage in his
life we find again an account in _Colin Clout's come home again_.
Spencer says:
When thus our pipes we both had wearied well,
... and each an end of singing made,
He [Raleigh] gan to cast great liking to my lore,
And great disliking to my luckless lot;
and advised him to come to Court and be presented to 'Cynthia,'
Whose grace was great and bounty most rewardful.
He then devotes no less than ninety-five lines to a description of the
voyage, which was a very rough one, and at last he is brought by Raleigh
into the Queen's presence:
The shepherd of the ocean ...
Unto that goddess' grace me first enhanced,
And to my oaten pipe inclined her ear,
That she thenceforth therein gan take delight,
And it desired at timely hours to hear,
finally commanding the publication of it. On December 1, 1589, the
_Faery Queen_ was registered, and a pension of 50_l._ secured for the
poet. The supplementary letter and sonnets to Raleigh express Spenser's
generous recognition of the services his friend had performed for him,
and appeal to Raleigh, as 'the Summer's Nightingale, thy sovereign
goddess's most dear delight,' not to delay in publishing his own great
poem, the _Cynthia_. The first of the eulogistic pieces prefixed by
friends to the _Faery Queen_ was that noble and justly celebrated sonnet
signed W. R. which alone would justify Raleigh in taking a place among
the English poets.
Raleigh's position was once more secure in the sunlight. He could hold
Sir William Fitzwilliam informed, on December 29, that 'I take myself
far his better by the honourable office I hold, as well as by that
nearness to her Majesty which still I enjoy, and never more.' The next
two years were a sort of breathing space in Raleigh's career; he had
reached the table-land of his fortunes, and neither rose nor fell in
favour. The violent crisis of the Spanish Armada had marked the close of
an epoch at Court. In September 1588 Leicester died, in April 1590
Walsingham, in September 1591 Sir Christopher Hatton, three men in
whose presence, however apt Raleigh might be to vaunt his influence, he
could never have felt absolutely master. New men were coming on, but for
the moment the most violent and aggressive of his rivals, Essex, was
disposed to wave a flag of truce. Both Raleigh and Essex saw one thing
more clearly than the Queen herself, namely, that the loyalty of the
Puritans, whom Elizabeth disliked, was the great safeguard of the nation
against Catholic encroachment, and they united their forces in trying to
protect the interests of men like John Udall against the Queen's
turbulent prejudices. In March 1591 we find it absolutely recorded that
the Earl of Essex and Raleigh have joined 'as instruments from the
Puritans to the Queen upon any particular occasion of relieving them.'
With Essex, some sort of genuine Protestant fervour seems to have acted;
Raleigh, according to all evidence, was a man without religious
interests, but far before his age in tolerance for the opinions of
others, and he was swayed, no doubt, in this as in other cases, by his
dislike of persecution on the one hand, and his implacable enmity to
Spain on the other.
In May 1591, Raleigh was hurriedly sent down the Channel in a pinnace to
warn Lord Thomas Howard that Spanish ships had been seen near the Scilly
Islands. There was a project for sending a fleet of twenty ships to
Spain, and Raleigh was to be second in command, but the scheme was
altered. In November 1591 he first came before the public as an author
with a tract in which he celebrated the prowess of one of his best
friends and truest servants, Sir Richard Grenville, in a contest with
the Spaniard which is one of the most famous in English history.
Raleigh's little volume is entitled: _A Report of the Truth of the Fight
about the Iles of the Açores this last Sommer betwixt the 'Reuenge' and
an Armada of the King of Spaine_. The fight had taken place on the
preceding 10th of September; the odds against the 'Revenge' were so
excessive that Grenville was freely blamed for needless foolhardiness,
in facing 15,000 Spaniards with only 100 men. Raleigh wrote his _Report_
to justify the memory of his friend, and doubtless hastened its
publication that it might be received as evidence before Sir R.
Beville's commission, which was to meet a month later to inquire into
the circumstances of Grenville's death. Posterity has taken Raleigh's
view, and all Englishmen, from Lord Bacon to Lord Tennyson, have united
in praising this fight as one 'memorable even beyond credit, and to the
height of some heroical fable.'
The _Report_ of 1591 was anonymous, and it was Hakluyt first who, in
reprinting it in 1599, was permitted to state that it was 'penned by the
honourable Sir Walter Ralegh, knight.' Long entirely neglected, it has
of late become the best known of all its author's productions. It is
written in a sane and manly style, and marks the highest level reached
by English narrative prose as it existed before the waters were troubled
by the fashion of Euphues. Not issued with Raleigh's name, it was yet no
doubt at once recognised as his work, and it cannot have been without
influence in determining the policy of the country with Spain. The
author's enmity to the Spaniard is inveterate, and he is careful in an
eloquent introduction to prove that he is not actuated by resentment on
account of this one act of cruel cowardice, but by a divine anger,
justified by the events of years, 'against the ambitious and bloody
pretences of the Spaniard, who, seeking to devour all nations, shall be
themselves devoured.' The tract closes with a passionate appeal to the
loyalty of the English Catholics, who are warned by the sufferings of
Portugal that 'the obedience even of the Turk is easy and a liberty, in
respect of the slavery and tyranny of Spain,' and who will never be so
safe as when they are trusting in the clemency of her Majesty. All this
is in the highest degree characteristic of Raleigh, whose central idea
in life was not prejudice against the Catholic religion, for he was
singularly broad in this respect, but, in his own words, 'hatred of the
tyrannous prosperity of Spain.' This ran like a red strand through his
whole career from Smerwick to the block, and this was at once the
measure of his greatness and the secret of his fall.
It was formerly supposed that Raleigh came into possession of Sherborne,
his favourite country residence, in 1594, that is to say after the
Throckmorton incident. It is, however, in the highest degree improbable
that such an estate would be given to him after his fatal offence, and
in fact it is now certain that the lease was extended to him much
earlier, probably in October 1591. There is a pleasant legend that
Raleigh and one of his half-brothers were riding up to town from
Plymouth, when Raleigh's horse stumbled and threw him within the
precincts of a beautiful Dorsetshire estate, then in possession of the
Dean and Chapter of Salisbury, and that Raleigh, choosing to consider
that he had thus taken seisin of the soil, asked the Queen for
Sherborne Castle when he arrived at Court. It may have been on this
occasion that Elizabeth asked him when he would cease to be a beggar,
and received the reply, 'When your Majesty ceases to be a benefactor!'
His first lease included a payment of 260_l._ a year to the Bishop of
Salisbury, who asserted a claim to the property. In January 1592, after
the payment of a quarter's rent, Raleigh was confirmed in possession,
and began to improve and enjoy the property. It consisted of the manor
of Sherborne, with a large park, a castle which had to be repaired, and
several farms and hamlets, together with a street in the borough of
Sherborne itself. It is a curious fact that Raleigh had to present the
Queen with a jewel worth 250_l._ to induce her 'to make the Bishop,'
that is to say, to appoint to the see of Salisbury, now vacant, a man
who would consent to the alienation of such rich Church lands as the
manors of Sherborne and Yetminster. John Meeres, afterwards so
determined and exasperating an enemy of Raleigh's, was now[5] appointed
his bailiff, and Adrian Gilbert a sort of general overseer of the works.
Raleigh had been but two months settled in possession of Sherborne, with
his ninety-nine years' lease clearly made out, when he passed suddenly
out of the sunlight into the deepest shadow of approaching disfavour.
The year opened with promise of greater activity and higher public
honours than Raleigh had yet displayed and enjoyed. An expedition was to
be sent to capture the rich fleet of plate-ships, known as the Indian
Carracks, and then to push on to storm the pearl treasuries of Panama.
For the first time, Elizabeth had shown herself willing to trust her
favourite in person on the perilous western seas. Raleigh was to command
the fleet of fifteen ships, and under him was to serve the morose hero
of Cathay, the dreadful Sir Martin Frobisher. Raleigh was not only to be
admiral of the expedition, but its chief adventurer also, and in order
to bear this expense he had collected his available fortune from various
quarters, stripping himself of all immediate resources. To help him, the
Queen had bought The Ark Raleigh, his largest ship, for 5,000_l._; and
in February 1592 he was ready to sail. When the moment for parting came,
however, the Queen found it impossible to spare him, and Sir John
Burrough was appointed admiral.
It is exceedingly difficult to move with confidence in this obscure part
of our narrative. On March 10, 1592, we find Raleigh at Chatham, busy
about the wages of the sailors, and trying to persuade them to serve
under Frobisher, whose reputation for severity made him very unpopular.
He writes on that day to Sir Robert Cecil, and uses these ambiguous
expressions with regard to a rumour of which we now hear for the first
time:
I mean not to come away, as they say I will, for fear of a
marriage, and I know not what. If any such thing were, I would
have imparted it to yourself, before any man living; and
therefore, I pray, believe it not, and I beseech you to
suppress, what you can, any such malicious report. For I protest
before God, there is none, on the face of the earth, that I
would be fastened unto.
Raleigh was now in a desperate embarrassment. There was that concealed
in his private life which could only be condoned by absence; he had seen
before him an unexpected chance of escape from England, and now the
Queen's tedious fondness had closed it again. The desperate fault which
he had committed was that he had loved too well and not at all wisely a
beautiful orphan, Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, a
maid of honour to the Queen. It is supposed that she was two or three
and twenty at the time. Whether he seduced her, and married her after
his imprisonment in the Tower, or whether in the early months of 1592
there was a private marriage, has been doubted. The biographers of
Raleigh have preferred to believe the latter, but it is to be feared
that his fair fame in this matter cannot be maintained unsullied. Among
Sir Walter Raleigh's children one daughter appears to have been
illegitimate, 'my poor daughter, to whom I have given nothing, for his
sake who will be cruel to himself to preserve thee,' as he says to Lady
Raleigh in 1603, and it may be that it was the birth of this child which
brought down the vengeance of Queen Elizabeth upon their heads.
His clandestine relations with Elizabeth Throckmorton were not in
themselves without excuse. To be the favourite of Elizabeth, who had now
herself attained the sixtieth summer of her immortal charms, was
tantamount to a condemnation to celibacy. The vanity of Belphoebe
would admit no rival among high or low, and the least divergence from
the devotion justly due to her own imperial loveliness was a mortal sin.
What is less easy to forgive in Raleigh than that at the age of forty
he should have rebelled at last against this tyranny, is that he seems,
in the crisis of his embarrassment, to have abandoned the woman to whom
he could write long afterwards, 'I chose you and I loved you in my
happiest times.' After this brief dereliction, however, he returned to
his duty, and for the rest of his life was eminently faithful to the
wife whom he had taken under such painful circumstances.
There is a lacuna in the evidence as to what actually happened early in
1592; the late Mr. J. P. Collier filled up this gap with a convenient
letter, which has found its way into the histories of Raleigh, but the
original of which has never been seen by other eyes than the
transcriber's. What is certain is that Raleigh contrived to conceal the
state of things from the Queen, and to steal away to sea on the pretext
that he was merely accompanying Sir Martin Frobisher to the mouth of the
Channel. He says himself that on May 13, 1592, he was 'about forty
leagues off the Cape Finisterre.' It was reported that the Queen sent a
ship after him to insist on his return, but such a messenger would have
had little chance of finding him when once he had reached the latitude
of Portugal, and it is more reasonable to suppose that after straying
away as far as he dared, he came back again of his own accord. On June 8
he was still living unmolested in Durham House, and dealing, as a person
in authority, with certain questions of international navigation. Three
weeks later the Queen seems to have discovered, what everyone about her
knew already, the nature of Raleigh's relations with Elizabeth
Throckmorton. On July 28 Sir Edward Stafford wrote to Anthony Bacon:
'If you have anything to do with Sir Walter Raleigh, or any love to make
to Mrs. Throckmorton, at the Tower to-morrow you may speak with them.'
It was four years before Raleigh was admitted again to the presence of
his enraged Belphoebe.
Needless prominence has been given to this imprisonment of Raleigh's,
which lasted something less than two months. He was exceedingly restive
under constraint, however, and filled the air with the picturesque
clamour of his distress. His first idea was to soften the Queen's heart
by outrageous protestations of anxious devotion to her person. The
following passage from a letter to Sir Robert Cecil is remarkable in
many ways, curious as an example of affected passion in a soldier of
forty for a maiden of sixty, curious as a piece of carefully modulated
Euphuistic prose in the fashion of the hour, most curious as the
language of a man from whom the one woman that he really loved was
divided by the damp wall of a prison:
My heart was never broken till this day, that I hear the Queen
goes away so far off, whom I have followed so many years with so
great love and desire, in so many journeys, and am now left
behind her, in a dark prison all alone. While she was yet nigher
at hand, that I might hear of her once in two or three days, my
sorrows were the less; but even now my heart is cast into the
depth of all misery. I that was wont to behold her riding like
Alexander, hunting like Diana, walking like Venus, the gentle
wind blowing her fair hair about her pure cheeks, like a nymph;
sometime sitting in the shade like a goddess; sometime singing
like an angel; sometime playing like Orpheus. Behold the sorrow
of this world! Once amiss, hath bereaved me of all. O Glory,
that only shineth in misfortune, what is become of thy
assurance? All wounds have scars, but that of fantasy; all
affections their relenting, but that of womankind. Who is the
judge of friendship, but adversity? or when is grace witnessed,
but in offences? There were no divinity, but by reason of
compassion for revenges are brutish and mortal. All those times
past, the loves, the sights, the sorrows, the desires, can they
not weigh down one frail misfortune? Cannot one drop of salt be
hidden in so great heaps of sweetness? I may then conclude,
_Spes et fortuna, valete_! She is gone in whom I trusted, and of
me hath not one thought of mercy, nor any respect of that that
was. Do with me now, therefore, what you list. I am more weary
of life than they are desirous I should perish.
He kept up this comedy of passion with wonderful energy. One day, when
the royal barge, passing down to Gravesend, crossed below his window, he
raved and stormed, swearing that his enemies had brought the Queen
thither 'to break his gall in sunder with Tantalus' torment.' Another
time he protested that he must disguise himself as a boatman, and just
catch a sight of the Queen, or else his heart would break. He drew his
dagger on his keeper, Sir George Carew, and broke the knuckles of Sir
Arthur Gorges, because he said they were restraining him from the sight
of his Mistress. He proposed to Lord Howard of Effingham at the close of
a business letter, that he should be thrown to feed the lions, 'to save
labour,' as the Queen was still so cruel. Sir Arthur Gorges was in
despair; he thought that Raleigh was going mad. 'He will shortly grow,'
he said, 'to be Orlando Furioso, if the bright Angelica persevere
against him a little longer.'
It was all a farce, of course, but underneath the fantastic affectation
there was a very real sentiment, that of the intolerable tedium of
captivity. Raleigh had been living a life of exaggerated activity, never
a month at rest, now at sea, now in Devonshire, now at Court, hurrying
hither and thither, his horse and he one veritable centaur. Among the
Euphuistic 'tears of fancy' which he sent from the Tower, there occurs
this little sentence, breathing the most complete sincerity: 'I live to
trouble you at this time, being become like a fish cast on dry land,
gasping for breath, with lame legs and lamer lungs.' There was no man
then in England whom it was more cruel to shut up in a cage. This
reference to his lungs is the first announcement of the failure of his
health. Raleigh's constitution was tough, but he had a variety of
ailments, and a tendency to rheumatism and to consumption was among
them. In later years we shall find that the damp cells of the Tower
filled his joints with pain, and reduced him with a weakening cough. But
long before his main imprisonment his joints and his lungs were
troublesome to him.
Meanwhile the great privateering expedition in which Raleigh had
launched his fortune was proceeding to its destination in the Azores. No
such enterprise had been as yet undertaken by English adventurers. It
was a strictly private effort, but the Queen in her personal capacity
had contributed two ships and 1,800_l._, and the citizens of London
6,000_l._, but Raleigh retained by far the largest share. Raleigh had
been a week in the Tower, when Admiral Sir John Burrough, who had
divided the fleet and had left Frobisher on the coast of Spain, joined
to his contingent two London ships, the 'Golden Dragon' and the
'Prudence,' and lay in wait under Flores for the great line of
approaching carracks. The largest of these, the 'Madre de Dios,' was the
most famous plate-ship of the day, carrying what in those days seemed
almost incredible, no less than 1,800 tons. Her cargo, brought through
Indian seas from the coast of Malabar, was valued when she started at
500,000_l._ She was lined with glowing woven carpets, sarcenet quilts,
and lengths of white silk and cyprus; she carried in chests of
sandalwood and ebony such store of rubies and pearls, such porcelain and
ivory and rock crystal, such great pots of musk and planks of cinnamon,
as had never been seen on all the stalls of London. Her hold smelt like
a garden of spices for all the benjamin and cloves, the nutmegs and the
civet, the ambergris and frankincense. There was a fight before
Raleigh's ship the 'Roebuck' could seize this enormous prize, yet
somewhat a passive one on the part of the lumbering carrack, such a
fight as may ensue between a great rabbit and the little stoat that
sucks its life out. When she was entered, it was found that pilferings
had gone on already at every port at which she had called; and the
English sailors had done their share before Burrough could arrive on
board; the jewels and the lighter spices were badly tampered with, but
in the general rejoicing over so vast a prize this was not much
regarded. Through seas so tempestuous that it seemed at one time likely
that she would sink in the Atlantic, the 'Madre de Dios' was at last
safely brought into Dartmouth, on September 8.
The arrival of the 'Madre de Dios' on the Queen's birthday had something
like the importance of a national event. No prize of such value had ever
been captured before. When all deduction had been made for treasure
lost or pilfered or squandered, there yet remained a total value of
141,000_l._ in the money of that day. The fact that all this wealth was
lying in Dartmouth harbour was more than the tradesmen of London could
bear. Before the Queen's commissioners could assemble, half the usurers
and shopkeepers in the City had hurried down into Devonshire to try and
gather up a few of the golden crumbs. Raleigh, meanwhile, was ready to
burst his heart with fretting in the Tower, until it suddenly appeared
that this very concourse and rabble at Dartmouth would render his
release imperative. No one but he could cope with Devonshire in its
excitement, and Lord Burghley determined on sending him to Dartmouth.
Robert Cecil, writing from Exeter to his father on September 19,
reported that for seven miles everybody he met on the London road smelt
of amber or of musk, and that you could not open a bag without finding
seed-pearls in it. 'My Lord!' he says, 'there never was such spoil.'
Raleigh's presence was absolutely necessary, for Cecil could do nothing
with the desperate and obstinate merchants and sailors.
On September 21, Raleigh arrived at Dartmouth with his keeper, Blount.
Cecil was amazed to find the disgraced favourite so popular in
Devonshire. 'I assure you,' he says, 'his poor servants to the number of
one hundred and forty, goodly men, and all the mariners, came to him
with such shouts and joy as I never saw a man more troubled to quiet
them in my life. But his heart is broken, for he is extremely pensive
longer than he is busied, in which he can toil terribly, but if you did
hear him rage at the spoils, finding all the short wares utterly
devoured, you would laugh as I do, which I cannot choose. The meeting
between him and Sir John Gilbert was with tears on Sir John's part; and
he belike finding it known he had a keeper, wherever he is saluted with
congratulation for liberty, he doth answer, "No, I am still the Queen of
England's poor captive." I wished him to conceal it, because here it
doth diminish his credit, which I do vow to you before God is greater
among the mariners than I thought for. I do grace him as much as I may,
for I find him marvellously greedy to do anything to recover the conceit
of his brutish offence.'
Raleigh broke into rage at finding so many of his treasures lost, and he
gave out that if he met with any London jewellers or goldsmiths in
Devonshire, were it on the wildest heath in all the county, he would
strip them as naked as when they were born. He raved against the
commissioners and the captains, against Cecil and against Cross. As was
his wont, he showed no tact or consideration towards those who were
engaged with or just above him; but about the end of September business
cooled his wrath, and he settled down to a division of the prize. On
September 27, the Commissioners of Inquiry sent in to Burghley and
Howard a report of their proceedings with respect to the 'Madre de
Dios'; this report is signed by Cecil, Raleigh, Sir Francis Drake, and
three other persons. They had carried on their search for stolen
treasure so rigorously that even the Admiral's chests were examined
against his will. They confess their disappointment at finding in them
nothing more tempting than some taffetas embroidered with Chinese gold,
and a bunch of seed-pearl.
Sir Walter Raleigh now married or acknowledged Elizabeth Throckmorton,
and in February 1593 Sir Robert Cecil procured some sort of surly
recognition of the marriage from the Queen. For this Lady Raleigh thanks
him in a strange flowery letter[6] of the 8th of that month, in which
she excuses her husband for his denial of her--'if faith were broken
with me, I was yet far away'--and shows an affectionate solicitude for
his future. It seems that Raleigh's first idea on finding himself free
was to depart on an expedition to America, and this Lady Raleigh
strongly objects to. In her alembicated style she says to Cecil, 'I hope
for my sake you will rather draw for Walter towards the east than help
him forward toward the sunset, if any respect to me or love to him be
not forgotten. But every month hath his flower and every season his
contentment, and you great councillors are so full of new councils, as
you are steady in nothing, but we poor souls that have bought sorrow at
a high price, desire, and can be pleased with, the same misfortune we
hold, fearing alterations will but multiply misery, of which we have
already felt sufficient.' The poor woman had her way for the present,
and for two full years her husband contented himself with a quiet and
obscure life among the woods of Sherborne.
For the next year we get scanty traces of Raleigh's movements from his
own letters. In May 1593 his health, shaken by his imprisonment, gave
him some uneasiness, and he went to Bath to drink the waters, but
without advantage. In August of that year we find him busy in
Gillingham Forest, and he gives Sir Robert Cecil a roan gelding in
exchange for a rare Indian falcon. In the autumn he is engaged on the
south coast in arranging quarrels between English and French fishermen.
In April 1594 he captures a live Jesuit, 'a notable stout villain,' with
all 'his copes and bulls,' in Lady Stourton's house, which was a very
warren of dangerous recusants. But he soon gets tired of these small
activities. The sea at Weymouth and at Plymouth put out its arms to him
and wooed him. To hunt 'notable Jesuit knaves' and to sit on the granite
judgment-seat of the Stannaries were well, but life offered more than
this to Raleigh. In June 1594 he tells Cecil that he will serve the
Queen as a poor private mariner or soldier if he may only be allowed to
be stirring abroad, and the following month there is a still more urgent
appeal for permission to go with the Lord Admiral to Brittany. He has a
quarrel meanwhile with the Dean and Chapter of Sarum, who have let his
Sherborne farms over his head to one Fitzjames, and 'who could not deal
with me worse withal if I were a Turk.' But a month later release has
come. The plague has broken up his home, his wife and son are sent in
opposite directions, and he himself has leave to be free at last; with
God's favour and the Queen's he will sail into 'the sunset' that Lady
Raleigh had feared so much, and will conquer for England the fabulous
golden cities of Guiana.
CHAPTER IV.
GUIANA.
The vast tract in the north-east of the southern continent of America
which is now divided between Venezuela and three European powers, was
known in the sixteenth century by the name of Guiana. Of this district
the three territories now styled English, Dutch, and French Guiana
respectively form but an insignificant coast-line, actually lying
outside the vague eastern limit of the traditional empire of Guiana. As
early as 1539 a brother of the great Pizarro had returned to Peru with a
legend of a prince of Guiana whose body was smeared with turpentine and
then blown upon with gold dust, so that he strode naked among his people
like a majestic golden statue. This prince was El Dorado, the Gilded
One. But as time went on this title was transferred from the monarch to
his kingdom, or rather to a central lake hemmed in by golden mountains
in the heart of Guiana. Spanish and German adventurers made effort after
effort to reach this _laguna_, starting now from Peru, now from Quito,
now from Trinidad, but they never found it: little advance was made in
knowledge or authority, nor did Spain raise any definite pretensions to
Guiana, although her provinces hemmed it in upon three sides.
There is no doubt that Raleigh, who followed with the closest attention
the nascent geographical literature of his time, read the successive
accounts which the Spaniards and Germans gave of their explorations in
South America. But it was not until 1594 that he seems to have been
specially attracted to Guiana. At every part of his career it was
'hatred of the tyrannous prosperity' of Spain which excited him to
action. Early in 1594 Captain George Popham, sailing apparently in one
of Raleigh's vessels, captured at sea and brought to the latter certain
letters sent home to the King of Spain announcing that on April 23,
1593, at a place called Warismero, on the Orinoco, Antonio de Berreo,
the Governor of Trinidad, had annexed Guiana to the dominions of his
Catholic Majesty, under the name of El Nuevo Dorado. In these same
letters various reports of the country and its inhabitants were
repeated, that the chiefs danced with their naked bodies gleaming with
gold dust, and with golden eagles dangling from their breasts and great
pearls from their ears, that there were rich mines of diamonds and of
gold, that the innocent people were longing to exchange their jewels for
jews-harps. Raleigh was aroused at once, less by the splendours of the
description than by the fact that this unknown country, with its
mysterious possibilities, had been impudently added to the plunder of
Spain. He immediately fitted out a ship, and sent Captain Jacob Whiddon,
an old servant of his, to act as a pioneer, and get what knowledge he
could of Guiana. Whiddon went to Trinidad, saw Berreo, was put off by
him with various treacherous excuses, and returned to England in the
winter of 1594 with but a scanty stock of fresh information. It was
enough, however, to encourage Raleigh to start for Guiana without delay.
On December 26 he writes: 'This wind breaks my heart. That which should
carry me hence now stays me here, and holds seven ships in the river of
Thames. As soon as God sends them hither I will not lose one hour of
time.' On January 2, 1595, he is still at Sherborne, 'only gazing for a
wind to carry me to my destiny.' At last, on February 6 he sailed away
from Plymouth, not with seven, but with five ships, together with small
craft for ascending rivers. What the number of his crew was, he nowhere
states. The section of them which he took up to the Orinoco he describes
as 'a handful of men, being in all about a hundred gentlemen; soldiers,
rowers, boat-keepers, boys, and all sorts.' Sir Robert Cecil was to have
adventured his own ship, the 'Lion's Whelp,' and for her Raleigh waited
seven or eight days among the Canaries, but she did not arrive. On the
17th they captured at Fuerteventura two ships, Spanish and Flemish, and
stocked their own vessels with wine from the latter.
They then sailed on into the west, and on March 22 arrived on the south
side of Trinidad, casting anchor on the north shore of the Serpent's
Mouth. Raleigh personally explored the southern and western coasts of
the island in a small boat, while the ships kept to the channel. He was
amazed to find oysters in the brackish creeks hanging to the branches of
the mangrove trees at low water, and he examined also the now famous
liquid pitch of Trinidad. Twenty years afterwards, in writing _The
History of the World_, we find his memory still dwelling on these
natural wonders. At the first settlement the English fleet came to,
Port of Spain, they traded with the Spanish colonists, and Raleigh
endeavoured to find out what he could, which was but little, about
Guiana. He pretended that he was asking merely out of curiosity, and was
on his way to his own colony of Virginia.
While Raleigh was anchored off Port of Spain, he found that Berreo, the
Governor, had privately sent for reinforcements to Marguerita and
Cumana, meaning to attack him suddenly. At the same time the Indians
came secretly aboard the English ships with terrible complaints of
Spanish cruelty. Berreo was keeping the ancient chiefs of the island in
prison, and had the singular foible of amusing himself at intervals by
basting their bare limbs with broiling bacon. These considerations
determined Raleigh to take the initiative. That same evening he marched
his men up the country to the new capital of the island, St. Joseph,
which they easily stormed, and in it they captured Berreo. Raleigh found
five poor roasted chieftains hanging in irons at the point of death, and
at their instance he set St. Joseph on fire. That very day two more
English ships, the 'Lion's Whelp' and the 'Galleys,' arrived at Port of
Spain, and Raleigh was easily master of the situation.
Berreo seems to have submitted with considerable tact. He insinuated
himself into Raleigh's confidence, and, like the familiar poet in
Shakespeare's sonnet, 'nightly gulled him with intelligence.' His
original idea probably was that by inflaming Raleigh's imagination with
the wonders of Guiana, he would be the more likely to plunge to his own
destruction into the fatal swamps of the Orinoco. It is curious to find
even Raleigh, who was eminently humane in his own dealings with the
Indians, speaking in these terms of such a cruel scoundrel as Berreo, 'a
gentleman well descended, very valiant and liberal, and a gentleman of
great assuredness, and of a great heart: I used him according to his
estate and worth in all things I could, according to the small means I
had.' Berreo showed him a copy he held of a journal kept by a certain
Juan Martinez, who professed to have penetrated as far as Manoa, the
capital of Guiana. This narrative was very shortly afterwards exposed as
'an invention of the fat friars of Puerto Rico,' but Raleigh believed
it, and it greatly encouraged him. When Berreo realised that he
certainly meant to attempt the expedition, his tone altered, and he 'was
stricken into a great melancholy and sadness, using all the arguments he
could to dissuade me, and also assuring the gentlemen of my company that
it would be labour lost,' but all in vain.
The first thing to be done was to cross the Serpent's Mouth, and to
ascend one of the streams of the great delta. Raleigh sent Captain
Whiddon to explore the southern coast, and determined from his report to
take the Capuri, or, as it is now called, the Macareo branch, which lies
directly under the western extremity of Trinidad. After an unsuccessful
effort here, he started farther west, on the Caño Manamo, which he calls
the River of the Red Cross. He found it exceedingly difficult to enter,
owing to the sudden rise and fall of the flood in the river, and the
violence of the current. At last they started, passing up the river on
the tide, and anchoring in the ebb, and in this way went slowly onward.
The vessels which carried them were little fitted for such a task.
Raleigh had had an old galley furnished with benches to row upon, and so
far cut down that she drew but five feet of water; he had also a barge,
two wherries, and a ship's boat, and in this miserable fleet, leaving
his large vessels behind him in the Gulf of Paria, he accomplished his
perilous and painful voyage to the Orinoco and back, with one hundred
persons and their provisions. Of the misery of these four hundred miles
he gives a graphic account:
We were all driven to lie in the rain and weather, in the open
air, in the burning sun, and upon the hard boards, and to dress
our meat, and to carry all manner of furniture, wherewith [the
boats] were so pestered and unsavoury, that what with victuals
being most fish, with the wet clothes of so many men thrust
together, and the heat of the sun, I will undertake there was
never any prison in England that could be found more unsavoury
and loathsome, especially to myself, who had for many years
before been dieted and cared for in a sort far different.
On the third day, as they were ascending the river, the galley stuck so
fast that they thought their expedition would have ended there; but
after casting out all her ballast, and after much tugging and hauling to
and fro, they got off in twelve hours. When they had ascended beyond the
limit of the tide, the violence of the current became a very serious
difficulty, and at the end of the seventh day the crews began to
despair, the temperature being extremely hot, and the thick foliage of
the Ita-palms on either side of the river excluding every breath of air.
Day by day the Indian pilots assured them that the next night should be
the last. Raleigh had to harangue his men to prevent mutiny, for now
their provisions also were exhausted. He told them that if they returned
through that deadly swamp they must die of starvation, and that the
world would laugh their memory to scorn.
[Illustration: GUIANA.]
Presently things grew a little better. They found wholesome fruits on
the banks, and now that the streams were purer they caught fish. Not
knowing what they saw, they marvelled at the 'birds of all colours, some
carnation, orange tawny,' which was Raleigh's own colour, 'purple,
green, watchet and of all other sorts both simple and mixed, as it was
unto us a great good passing of the time to behold them, besides the
relief we found by killing some store of them with our fowling pieces.'
These savannahs are full of birds, and the brilliant macaws which
excited Raleigh's admiration make an excellent stew, with the flavour,
according to Sir Robert Schomburgk, of hare soup. Their pilot now
persuaded them to anchor the galley in the main river, and come with him
up a creek, on the right hand, which would bring them to a town. On this
wild-goose chase they ascended the side-stream for forty miles; it was
probably the Cucuina, which was simply winding back with them towards
the Gulf of Paria. They felt that the Indian was tricking them, but
about midnight, while they were talking of hanging him, they saw a light
and heard the baying of dogs. They had found an Indian village, and here
they rested well, and had plenty of food and drink. Upon this new river
they were charmed to see the deer come feeding down to the water's
brink, and Raleigh describes the scene as though it reminded him of his
own park at Sherborne. They were alarmed at the crowds of alligators,
and one handsome young negro, who leaped into the river from the galley,
was instantly devoured in Raleigh's sight.
Next day they regained the great river, and their anxious comrades in
the 'Lion's Whelp.' They passed on together, and were fortunate enough
to meet with four Indian canoes laden with excellent bread. The Indians
ran away and left their possessions, and Raleigh's dreams of mineral
wealth were excited by the discovery of what he took to be a 'refiner's
basket, for I found in it his quicksilver, saltpetre, and divers things
for the trial of metals, and also the dust of such ore as he had
refined.' He was minded to stay here and dig for gold, but was prevented
by a phenomenon which he mentions incidentally, but which has done much
to prove the reality of his narrative. He says that all the little
creeks which ran towards the Orinoco 'were raised with such speed, as if
we waded them over the shoes in the morning outward, we were covered to
the shoulders homeward the very same day.' Sir R. Schomburgk found
exactly the same to be the case when he explored Guiana in 1843.
They pushed on therefore along the dreary river, and on the fifteenth
day had the joy of seeing straight before them far away the peaks of
Peluca and Paisapa, the summits of the Imataca mountains which divide
the Orinoco from the Essequibo. The same evening, favoured by a strong
northerly wind, they came in sight of the great Orinoco itself, and
anchored in it a little to the east of the present settlement of San
Rafael de Barrancas. Their spirits were high again. They feasted on the
eggs of the freshwater turtles which they found in thousands on the
sandy islands, and they gazed with rapture on the mountains to the south
of them which rose out of the very heart of Guiana. A friendly chieftain
carried them off to his village, where, to preserve the delightful
spelling of the age, 'some of our captaines garoused of his wine till
they were reasonable pleasant,' this wine being probably the cassivi or
fermented juice of the sweet potato. It redounds to Raleigh's especial
credit that in an age when great license was customary in dealing with
savages, he strictly prohibited his men, under threat of punishment by
death, from insulting the Indian women. His just admiration of the fair
Caribs, however, was quite enthusiastic:
The casique that was a stranger had his wife staying at the port
where we anchored, and in all my life I have seldom seen a
better-favoured woman. She was of good stature, with black eyes,
fat of body, of an excellent countenance, and taking great pride
therein. I have seen a lady in England so like her, as but for
the difference of colour I would have sworn might have been the
same.
They started to ascend the Orinoco, having so little just understanding
of the geography of South America that they thought if they could only
sail far enough up the river they would come out on the other side of
the continent at Quito. It has been noticed that Raleigh passed close to
the Spanish settlement of Guayana Vieja, which Berreo had founded four
years before. Perhaps it was by this time deserted, and Raleigh may
really have gone by it without seeing it. More probably, however, its
existence interfered with his theory that all this territory was
untouched by Europeans, and therefore open to be annexed in the name of
her English Majesty. Passing up the Orinoco, he came at last to what he
calls 'the port of Morequito,' where he made some stay, and enjoyed the
luxury of pine-apples, which he styles 'the princess of fruits.' He was
also introduced to that pleasing beast the armadillo, whose powers and
functions he a little misunderstood, for he says of it, 'it seemeth to
be all barred over with small plates like to a rhinoceros, with a white
horn growing in his hinder parts, like unto a hunting horn, which they
use to wind instead of a trumpet.' What Raleigh mistook for a
hunting-horn was the stiff tail of the armadillo. Raleigh warned the
peaceful and friendly inhabitants of Morequito against the villanies of
Spain, and recommended England to them as a safe protector. He then
pursued his westerly course to an island which he calls Caiama, and
which is now named Fajardo, which was the farthest point he reached upon
the Orinoco. This island lies at the mouth of the Caroni, the great
southern artery of the watershed, and Raleigh's final expedition was
made up this stream. He reached the foot of the great cataract, now
named Salto Caroni, and his description of this noble natural wonder may
be quoted as a favourable instance of his style, and as the crown of his
geographical enterprise:
When we ran to the tops of the first hills of the plains
adjoining to the river, we behold that wonderful breach of
waters, which ran down Caroli [Caroni]; and might from that
mountain see the river how it ran in three parts, above twenty
miles off, and there appeared some ten or twelve overfalls in
sight, every one as high over the other as a church tower,
which fell with that fury that the rebound of waters made it
seem as if it had been all covered over with a great shower of
rain; and in some places we took it at the first for a smoke
that had risen over some great town. For mine own part, I was
well persuaded from thence to have returned, being a very ill
footman, but the rest were all so desirous to go near the said
strange thunder of waters, that they drew me on by little and
little, till we came into the next valley, where we might better
discern the same. I never saw a more beautiful country, nor more
lively prospects, hills so raised here and there over the
valleys, the river winding into divers branches, the plains
adjoining without bush or stubble, all fair green grass, the
ground of hard sand easy to march on either for horse or foot,
the deer crossing in every path, the birds towards the evening
singing on every tree with a thousand several tunes, cranes and
herons of white, crimson, and carnation perching on the river's
side, the air fresh with a gentle easterly wind, and every stone
that we stooped to take up promised either gold or silver by his
complexion.
The last touch spoils an exquisite picture. It is at once dispiriting to
find so intrepid a geographer and so acute a merchant befooled by the
madness of gold, and pathetic to know that his hopes in this direction
were absolutely unfounded. The white quartz of Guiana, the 'hard white
spar' which Raleigh describes, confessedly contains gold, although, as
far as is at present known, in quantities so small as not to reward
working. Humboldt says that his examination of Guiana gold led him to
believe that, 'like tin, it is sometimes disseminated in an almost
imperceptible manner in the mass of granite rocks itself, without our
being able to admit that there is a ramification and an interlacing of
small veins.' It is plain that Raleigh got hold of unusually rich
specimens of the sparse auriferous quartz. He was accused on his return
of having brought his specimens from Africa, but no one suggested that
they did not contain gold. No doubt much of the sparkling dust he saw in
the rocks was simply iron pyrites, or some other of the minerals which
to this day are known to the wise in California as 'fool's gold.' His
expedition had come to America unprovided with tools of any kind, and
Raleigh confesses that such specimens of ore as they did not buy from
the Indians, they had to tear out with their daggers or with their
fingers.
It has been customary of late, in reaction against the defamation of
Raleigh in the eighteenth century, to protest that gold was not his
chief aim in the Guiana enterprise, but that his main wish, under cover
of the search for gold, was to form a South American colony for England,
and to open out the west to general commerce. With every wish to hold
this view, I am unable to do so in the face of the existing evidence.
More humane, more intelligent than any of the adventurers who had
preceded him, it yet does not seem that Raleigh was less insanely bitten
with the gold fever than any of them. He saw the fleets of Spain return
to Europe year after year laden with precious metals from Mexico, and he
exaggerated, as all men of his age did, the power of this tide of gold.
He conceived that no one would stem the dangerous influence of Spain
until the stream of wealth was diverted or divided. He says in the most
direct language that it is not the trade of Spain, her exports of wines
and Seville oranges and other legitimate produce, that threatens
shipwreck to us all; 'it is his Indian gold that endangereth and
disturbeth all the nations of Europe; it purchased intelligence,
creepeth into councils, and setteth bound loyalty at liberty in the
greatest monarchies of Europe.' In Raleigh's exploration of Guiana, his
steadfast hope, the hope which led him patiently through so many
hardships, was that he might secure for Elizabeth a vast auriferous
colony, the proceeds of which might rival the revenues of Mexico and
Peru. But we must not make the mistake of supposing him to have been so
wise before his time as to perceive that the real wealth which might
paralyse a selfish power like that of Spain would consist in the cereals
and other products which such a colony might learn to export.
Resting among the friendly Indians in the heart of the strange country
to which he had penetrated, Raleigh became in many ways the victim of
his ignorance and his pardonable credulity. Not only was he gulled with
diamonds and sapphires that were really rock-crystals, but he was made
to believe that there existed west of the Orinoco a tribe of Indians
whose eyes were in their shoulders, and their mouths in the middle of
their breasts. He does not pretend that he saw such folks, however, or
that he enjoyed the advantage of conversing with any of the Ewaipanoma,
or men without heads, or of that other tribe, 'who have eminent heads
like dogs, and live all the day-time in the sea, and speak the Carib
language.' Of all these he speaks from modest hearsay, and less
confidently than Othello did to Desdemona. It is true that he relates
marvellous and fabulous things, but it is no less than just to
distinguish very carefully between what he repeats and what he reports.
For the former we have to take the evidence of his interpreters, who but
dimly understood what the Indians told them, and Raleigh cannot be held
personally responsible; for the latter, the testimony of all later
explorers, especially Humboldt and Schomburgk, is that Raleigh's
narrative, where he does not fall into obvious and easily intelligible
error, is remarkably clear and simple, and full of internal evidence of
its genuineness.
They had now been absent from their ships for nearly a month, and
Raleigh began to give up all hope of being able on this occasion to
reach the city of Manoa. The fury of the Orinoco began to alarm them;
they did not know what might happen in a country subject to such sudden
and phenomenal floods. Tropical rains fell with terrific violence, and
the men would get wetted to the skin ten times a day. It was cold, it
was windy, and to push on farther seemed perfectly hopeless. Raleigh
therefore determined to return, and they glided down the vast river at a
rapid pace, without need of sail or oar. At Morequito, Raleigh sent for
the old Indian chief, Topiawari, who had been so friendly to him before,
and had a solemn interview with him. He took him into his tent, and
shutting out all other persons but the interpreter, he told him that
Spain was the enemy of Guiana, and urged him to become the ally of
England. He promised to aid him against the Epuremi, a native race which
had oppressed him, if Topiawari would in his turn act in Guiana for the
Queen of England. To this the old man and his followers warmly assented,
urging Raleigh to push on, if not for Manoa, at least for Macureguarai,
a rich city full of statues of gold, that was but four days' journey
farther on. This, Raleigh, in consideration of the sufferings of his
followers, declined to do, but he consented to an odd exchange of
hostages, and promised the following year to make a better equipped
expedition to Manoa. He carried off with him the son of Topiawari, and
he left behind at Morequito a boy called Hugh Goodwin. To keep this boy
company, a young man named Francis Sparrey volunteered to stay also; he
was a person of some education, who had served with Captain Gifford.
Goodwin had a fancy for learning the Indian language, and when Raleigh
found him at Caliana twenty-two years later, he had almost forgotten his
English. He was at last devoured by a jaguar. Sparrey, who 'could
describe a country with his pen,' was captured by the Spaniards, taken
to Spain, and after long sufferings escaped to England, where he
published an account of Guiana in 1602. Sparrey is chiefly remembered by
his own account of how he purchased eight young women, the eldest but
eighteen years of age, for a red-hafted knife, which in England had cost
him but a halfpenny. This was not the sort of trade which Raleigh left
him behind to encourage.
As they passed down the Orinoco, they visited a lake where Raleigh saw
that extraordinary creature the manatee, half cow, half whale; and a
little lower they saw the column of white spray, rising like the tower
of a church, over the huge cascades of the crystal mountains of Roraima.
At the village of a chieftain within earshot of those thundering waters,
they witnessed one of the wild drinking feasts of the Indians, who were
'all as drunk as beggars, the pots walking from one to another without
rest.' Next day, the contingent led by Captain Keymis found them, and to
celebrate the meeting of friends, they passed over to the island of
Assapana, now called Yayo, in the middle of the Orinoco, and they
enjoyed a feast of the flesh of armadillos. On the following day,
increased cold and violent thunderstorms reminded them that the autumn
was far spent, and they determined to return as quickly as possible to
the sea. Their pilots told them, however, that it was out of the
question to try to descend the River of the Red Cross, which they had
ascended, as the current would baffle them; and therefore they attempted
what is now called the Macareo channel, farther east. Raleigh names this
stream the Capuri.
They had no further adventures until they reached the sea; but as they
emerged into the Serpent's Mouth, a great storm attacked them. They ran
before night close under shore with their small boats, and brought the
galley as near as they could. The latter, however, very nearly sank, and
Raleigh was puzzled what to do. A bar of sand ran across the mouth of
the river, covered by only six feet of water, and the galley drew five.
The longer he hesitated, the worse the weather grew, and therefore he
finally took Captain Gifford into his own barge, and thrust out to sea,
leaving the galley anchored by the shore. 'So being all very sober and
melancholy, one faintly cheering another to show courage, it pleased God
that the next day, about nine of the clock, we descried the island of
Trinidad, and steering for the nearest part of it, we kept the shore
till we came to Curiapan, where we found our ships at anchor, than which
there was never to us a more joyful sight.'
In spite of the hardships of the journey, the constant wettings, the bad
water and insufficient food, the lodging in the open air every night,
he had only lost a single man, the young negro who was snapped up by the
alligator at the mouth of the Cucuina. At the coast there are dangerous
miasmata which often prove fatal to Europeans, but the interior of this
part of South America is reported by later travellers to be no less
wholesome than Raleigh found it.
During Raleigh's absence his fleet had not lain idle at Trinidad.
Captain Amyas Preston, whom he had left in charge, determined to take
the initiative against the Spanish forces which Berreo had summoned to
his help. With four ships Preston began to harry the coast of Venezuela.
On May 21 he appeared before the important town of Cumana, but was
persuaded to spare it from sack upon payment of a large sum by the
inhabitants. Captain Preston landed part of his crew here, and they
crossed the country westward to Caracas, which they plundered and
burned. The fleet proceeded to Coro, in New Granada, which they treated
in the same way. When they returned is uncertain, but Raleigh found them
at Curiapan when he came back to Trinidad, and with them he coasted once
more the northern shore of South America. He burned Cumana, but was
disappointed in his hopes of plunder, for he says, 'In the port towns of
the province of Vensuello [Venezuela] we found not the value of one real
of plate.' The fact was that the repeated voyages of the English
captains--and Drake was immediately to follow in Raleigh's steps--had
made the inhabitants of these northern cities exceedingly wary. The
precious products were either stored in the hills, or shipped off to
Spain without loss of time.
Raleigh's return to England was performed without any publicity. He
stole home so quietly that some people declared that he had been all the
time snug in some Cornish haven. His biographers, including Mr. Edwards,
have dated his return in August, being led away by a statement of
Davis's, manifestly inaccurately dated, that Raleigh and Preston were
sailing off the coast of Cuba in July. This is incompatible with
Raleigh's fear of the rapid approach of winter while he was still in
Guiana. It would also be difficult to account for the entire absence of
reference to him in England before the winter. It is more likely that he
found his way back into Falmouth or Dartmouth towards the end of October
1595. On November 10, he wrote to Cecil, plainly smarting under the
neglect which he had received. He thought that coming from the west,
with an empire in his hand as a gift for Elizabeth, the Queen would take
him into favour again, but he was mistaken. He writes to Cecil nominally
to offer his services against a rumoured fleet of Spain, but really to
feel the ground about Guiana, and the interest which the Government
might take in it. 'What becomes of Guiana I much desire to hear, whether
it pass for a history or a fable. I hear Mr. Dudley [Sir Robert Dudley]
and others are sending thither; if it be so, farewell all good from
thence. For although myself, like a cockscomb, did rather prefer the
future in respect of others, and rather sought to win the kings to her
Majesty's service than to sack them, I know what others will do when
those kings shall come singly into their hands.'
Meanwhile he had been writing an account of his travels, and on November
13, 1595, he sent a copy of this in manuscript to Cecil, no doubt in
hope that it might be shown to Elizabeth. In the interesting letter
which accompanied this manuscript he inclosed a map of Guiana, long
supposed to have been lost, which was found by Mr. St. John in the
archives of Simancas, signed with Raleigh's name, and in perfect
condition. It is evident that Raleigh could hardly endure the
disappointment of repulse. He says, 'I know the like fortune was never
offered to any Christian prince,' and losing his balance altogether in
his extravagant pertinacity, he declares to Cecil that the city of Manoa
contains stores of golden statues, not one of which can be worth less
than 100,000_l._ If the English Government will not prosecute the
enterprise that he has sketched out, Spain and France will shortly do
so, and Raleigh, in the face of such apathy, 'concludes that we are
cursed of God.' Amid all this excitement, it is pleasant to find him
remembering to be humane, and begging Cecil to impress the Queen with
the need of 'not soiling this enterprise' with cruelty; nor permitting
any to proceed to Guiana whose object shall only be to plunder the
Indians. He sends Cecil an amethyst 'with a strange blush of carnation,'
and another stone, which 'if it be no diamond, yet exceeds any diamond
in beauty.'
Raleigh now determined to appeal to the public at large, and towards
Christmas 1595 he published his famous volume, which bears the date
1596, and is entitled, after the leisurely fashion of the age, _The
Discovery of the large, rich, and beautiful Empire of Guiana, with a
Relation of the Great and Golden City of Manoa, which the Spaniards call
El Dorado, and the Provinces of Emeria, Arromaia, Amapaia, and other
Countries, with their Rivers, adjoining_. Of this volume two editions
appeared in 1596, it was presently translated into Latin and published
in Germany, and in short gained a reputation throughout Europe. There
can be no doubt that Raleigh's outspoken hatred of Spain, expressed in
this printed form, from which there could be no escape on the ground of
mere hearsay, was the final word of his challenge to that Power. From
this time forth Raleigh was an enemy which Spain could not even pretend
to ignore.
The _Discovery of Guiana_ was dedicated to the Lord Admiral Howard and
to Sir Robert Cecil, with a reference to the support which the author
had found in their love 'in the darkest shadow of adversity.' There was
probably some courtly exaggeration, mingled with self-interest, in the
gratitude expressed to Cecil. Already the relation of this cold-blooded
statesman to the impulsive Raleigh becomes a crux to the biographers of
the latter. Cecil's letters to his father from Devonshire on the matter
of the Indian carracks in 1592 are incompatible with Raleigh's outspoken
thanks to Cecil for the trial of his love when Raleigh was bereft of all
but malice and revenge, unless we suppose that these letters represented
what Burghley would like to hear rather than what Robert Cecil actually
felt. In 1596 Burghley, in extreme old age, was a factor no longer to be
taken into much consideration. Moreover, Lady Raleigh had some hold of
relationship or old friendship on Cecil, the exact nature of which it is
not easy to understand. At all events, as long as Raleigh could hold the
favour of Cecil, the ear of her Majesty was not absolutely closed to
him.
The _Discovery_ possesses a value which is neither biographical nor
geographical. It holds a very prominent place in the prose literature of
the age. During the five years which had elapsed since Raleigh's last
publication, English literature had been undergoing a marvellous
development, and he who read everything and sympathised with every
intellectual movement could not but be influenced by what had been
written. During those five years, Marlowe's wonderful career had been
wound up like a melodrama. Shakespeare had come forward as a poet. A new
epoch in sound English prose had been inaugurated by Hooker's
_Ecclesiastical Polity_. Bacon was circulating the earliest of his
_Essays_. What these giants of our language were doing for their own
departments of prose and verse, Raleigh did for the literature of
travel. Among the volumes of navigations, voyages, and discoveries,
which were poured out so freely in this part of the reign of Elizabeth,
most of them now only remembered because they were reprinted in the
collections of Hakluyt and Purchas, this book of Raleigh's takes easily
the foremost position. In comparison with the bluff and dull narratives
of the other discoverers, whose chief charm is their naïveté, the
_Discovery of Guiana_ has all the grace and fullness of deliberate
composition, of fine literary art, and as it was the first excellent
piece of sustained travellers' prose, so it remained long without a
second in our literature. The brief examples which it has alone been
possible to give in this biography, may be enough to attract readers to
its harmonious and glowing pages.
Among the many allusions found to this book in contemporary records,
perhaps the most curious is an epic poem on Guiana, published almost
immediately by George Chapman, who gave his enthusiastic approval to
Raleigh's scheme. It is the misfortune of Chapman's style that in his
grotesque arrogance he disdained to be lucid, and this poem is full of
tantalising hints, which the biographer of Raleigh longs to use, but
dares not, from their obscurity. These stately verses are plain enough,
but show that Chapman was not familiar with the counsels of Elizabeth:
Then in the Thespiads' bright prophetic font,
Methinks I see our Liege rise from her throne,
Her ears and thoughts in steep amaze erect,
At the most rare endeavour of her power;
And now she blesses with her wonted graces
The industrious knight, the soul of this exploit,
Dismissing him to convoy of his stars:
Chapman was quite misinformed; and to what event he now proceeds to
refer, it would be hard to say:
And now for love and honour of his wrath,
Our twice-born nobles bring him, bridegroom like,
That is espoused for virtue to his love,
With feasts and music ravishing the air,
To his Argolian fleet; where round about
His bating colours English valour swarms
In haste, as if Guianian Orenoque
With his full waters fell upon our shore.
Early in 1596, Raleigh sent Captain Lawrence Keymis, who had been with
him the year before, on a second voyage to Guiana. He did not come home
rich, but he did the special thing he was enjoined to do--that is to
say, he explored the coast of South America from the mouth of the
Orinoco to that of the Amazon. About the same time Raleigh drew up the
very remarkable paper, not printed until 1843, entitled _Of the Voyage
for Guiana_. In this essay he first makes use of those copious
quotations from Scripture which later on became so characteristic of his
writing. His hopes of interesting the English Government in Guiana were
finally frustrated by the excitement of the Cadiz expedition, and by the
melancholy fate of Sir Francis Drake. It is said that during this winter
he lived in great magnificence at Durham House, but this statement seems
improbable. All the letters of Raleigh's now in existence, belonging to
this period, are dated from Sherborne.
CHAPTER V.
CADIZ.
The defeat of the Spanish Armada had inflicted a wound upon the prestige
of Spain which was terrible but by no means beyond remedy. In the eight
years which had elapsed since 1588, Spain had been gradually recovering
her forces, and endangering the political existence of Protestant Europe
more and more. Again and again the irresolution of Elizabeth had been
called upon to complete the work of repression, to crush the snake that
had been scotched, to strike a blow in Spanish waters from which Spain
never would recover. In 1587, and in 1589, schemes for a naval
expedition of this kind had been brought before Council, and rejected.
In 1596, Charles Lord Howard of Effingham, with the support of Cecil,
forced the Government to consent to fit out an armament for the attack
of Cadiz. The Queen, however, was scarcely to be persuaded that the
expenditure required for this purpose could be spared from the Treasury.
On April 9, levies of men were ordered from all parts of England, and on
the 10th these levies were countermanded, so that the messengers sent on
Friday from the Lords to Raleigh's deputies in the West, were pursued on
Saturday by other messengers with contrary orders.
The change of purpose, however, was itself promptly altered, and the
original policy reverted to. The Earl of Essex was joined in commission
with the Lord Admiral Howard, and as a council of war to act with these
personages were named Sir Walter Raleigh and Lord Thomas Howard. The
Dutch were to contribute a fleet to act with England. It is an
interesting fact that now for the first time the experience and naval
skill of Raleigh received their full recognition. From the very first he
was treated with the highest consideration. Howard wrote to Cecil on
April 16--and Essex on the 28th used exactly the same words--'I pray
you, hasten away Sir Walter Raleigh.' They fretted to be gone, and
Raleigh was not to be found; malignant spirits were not wanting to
accuse him of design in his absence, of a wish to prove himself
indispensable. But fortunately we possess his letters, and we see that
he was well and appropriately occupied. In the previous November he had
sent in to the Lords of the Council a very interesting report on the
defences of Cornwall and Devon, which he had reason to suppose that
Spain meant to attack. He considered that three hundred soldiers
successfully landed at Plymouth would be 'sufficient to endanger and
destroy the whole shire,' and he discussed the possibility of levying
troops from the two counties to be a mutual protection. It was doubtless
his vigour and ability in performing this sort of work which led to his
being selected as the chief purveyor of levies for the Cadiz expedition,
and this was what he was doing in the spring of 1596, when the creatures
of Essex whispered to one another that he was malingering.
On May 3, he wrote to Cecil: 'I am not able to live, to row up and down
every tide from Gravesend to London, and he that lies here at Ratcliff
can easily judge when the rest, and how the rest, of the ships may sail
down.' And again, from a lower point of the Thames, at Blackwall, he is
still waiting for men and ships that will not come, and is 'more grieved
than ever I was, at anything in this world, for this cross weather.'
Through the month of May, we may trace Raleigh hard at work, recruiting
for the Cadiz expedition round the southern coast, of England. On the
4th he is at Northfleet, disgusted to find how little her Majesty's
authority is respected, for 'as fast as we press men one day, they come
away another, and say they will not serve. I cannot write to our
generals at this time, for the Pursuevant found me at a country village,
a mile from Gravesend, hunting after runaway mariners, and dragging in
the mire from alehouse to alehouse, and could get no paper.' On the 6th
he was at Queenborough, on the 13th at Dover, whence he reports disaster
by a storm on Goodwin Sands, and finally on the 21st he arrived at
Plymouth. His last letters are full of recommendations of personal
friends to appointments in the gift or at the command of Sir Robert
Cecil. He brought with him to Plymouth two of Bacon's cousins, the
Cookes, and his own wife's brother, Arthur Throckmorton. Unfortunately,
just as the fleet was starting, the last-mentioned, 'a hot-headed
youth,' in presence not only of the four generals, but of the commanders
of the Dutch contingent also, took Raleigh's side in some dispute at
table so intemperately and loudly that he was dismissed from the
service. This must have been singularly annoying to Raleigh, who
nevertheless persuaded his colleagues, no doubt on receipt of due
apology, to restore the young man to his rank, and allow him to proceed.
At Cadiz, Throckmorton fought so well that Essex himself knighted him.
The generals had other troubles at Plymouth. The men that Raleigh had
pressed along the coast hated their duty, and some of them had to be
tried for desertion and mutiny. Before the fleet got under way, two men
were publicly hanged, to encourage the others, 'on a very fair and
pleasant green, called the Hoe.' At last, on June 1, the squadrons put
to sea. Contrary winds kept them within Plymouth Sound until the 3rd. On
the 20th they anchored in the bay of St. Sebastian, half a league to the
westward of Cadiz. The four English divisions of the fleet contained in
all ninety-three vessels, and the Dutch squadron consisted of
twenty-four more. There were about 15,500 men, that is to say 2,600
Dutchmen, and the rest equally divided between English soldiers and
sailors.
The events of the next few days were not merely a crucial and final test
of the relative strength of Spain and England, closing in a brilliant
triumph for the latter, but to Raleigh in particular they were the
climax of his life, the summit of his personal prosperity and glory. The
records of the battle of Cadiz are exceedingly numerous, and were drawn
up not by English witnesses only, but by Dutch and Spanish historians
also. Mr. Edwards has patiently collected them all, and he gives a very
minute and lucid account of their various divergencies. Of them all the
most full and direct is that given by Raleigh himself, in his _Relation
of the Action in Cadiz Harbour_, first published in 1699. In a biography
of Raleigh it seems but reasonable to view such an event as this from
Raleigh's own standpoint, and the description which now follows is
mainly taken from the _Relation_. The joint fleet paused where the
Atlantic beats upon the walls of Cadiz, and the Spanish President wrote
to Philip II. that they seemed afraid to enter. He added that it formed
_la mas hermosa armada que se ha visto_, the most beautiful fleet that
ever was seen; and that it was French as well as English and Dutch,
which was a mistake.
Raleigh's squadron was not part of the fleet that excited the admiration
of Gutierrez Flores. On the 19th he had been detached, in the words of
his instructions, 'with the ships under his charge, and the Dutch
squadron, to anchor near the entrance of the harbour, to take care that
the ships riding near Cadiz do not escape,' and he took up a position
that commanded St. Lucar as well as Cadiz. He was 'not to fight, except
in self-defence,' without express instructions. At the mouth of St.
Lucar he found some great ships, but they lay so near shore that he
could not approach them, and finally they escaped in a mist, Raleigh
very nearly running his own vessel aground. Meanwhile Essex and Charles
Howard, a little in front of him, came to the conclusion in his absence
that it would be best to land the soldiers and assault the town, without
attempting the Spanish fleet.
Two hours after this determination had been arrived at, much to the
dismay of many distinguished persons in the fleet whose position did not
permit them to expostulate, Raleigh arrived to find Essex in the very
act of disembarking his soldiers. There was a great sea on from the
south, and some of the boats actually sank in the waves, but Essex
nevertheless persisted, and was about to effect a landing west of the
city. Raleigh came on board the 'Repulse,' 'and in the presence of all
the colonels protested against the resolution,' showing Essex from his
own superior knowledge and experience that by acting in this way he was
running a risk of overthrowing 'the whole armies, their own lives, and
her Majesty's future safety.' Essex excused himself, and laid the
responsibility on the Lord Admiral.
Raleigh having once dared to oppose the generals, he received instant
moral support. All the other commanders and gentlemen present clustered
round him and entreated him to persist. Essex now declared himself
convinced, and begged Raleigh to repeat his arguments to the Lord
Admiral. Raleigh passed on to Howard's ship, 'The Ark Royal,' and by the
evening the Admiral also was persuaded. Returning in his boat, as he
passed the 'Repulse' Raleigh shouted up to Essex 'Intramus,' and the
impetuous Earl, now as eager for a fight by sea as he had been a few
hours before for a fight by land, flung his hat into the sea for joy,
and prepared at that late hour to weigh anchor at once.
It took a good deal of time to get the soldiers out of the boats, and
back into their respective ships. Essex, whom Raleigh seems to hint at
under the cautious word 'many,' 'seeming desperately valiant, thought it
a fault of mine to put off [the attack] till the morning; albeit we had
neither agreed in what manner to fight, nor appointed who should lead,
and who should second, whether by boarding or otherwise.' Raleigh, in
his element when rapid action was requisite, passed to and fro between
the generals, and at last from his own ship wrote a hasty letter to the
Lord Admiral, giving his opinion as to the best way to arrange the order
of battle, and requesting him to supply a couple of great fly-boats to
attack each of the Spanish galleons, so that the latter might be
captured before they were set on fire.
Essex and Howard were completely carried away by Raleigh's vehement
counsels. The Lord Admiral had always shown deference to Raleigh's
nautical science, and the Earl was captivated by the qualities he could
best admire, courage and spirit and rapidity. Raleigh's old faults of
stubbornness and want of tact abandoned him at this happy moment. His
graceful courtesy to Essex, his delicacy in crossing dangerous ground,
won praise even from his worst enemies, the satellites of Essex. It was
Raleigh's blossoming hour, and all the splendid gifts and vigorous
charms of his brain and character expanded in the sunrise of victory.
Late in the busy evening of the 20th, the four leaders held a final
council of war, amiably wrangling among themselves for the post of
danger. At last the others gave way to what Raleigh calls his 'humble
suit,' and it was decided that he should lead the van. Essex, Lord
Howard of Effingham, and the Vice-Admiral, Lord Thomas Howard, were to
lead the body of the fleet; but it appeared next morning that the
Vice-Admiral had but seemed to give way, and that his ambition was still
to be ahead of Raleigh himself. As Raleigh returned to sleep on board
the 'War Sprite,' the town of Cadiz was all ablaze with lamps, tapers,
and tar barrels, while there came faintly out to the ears of the English
sailors a murmur of wild festal music.
Next day was the 21st of June. As Mr. St. John pleasantly says, 'that
St. Barnabas' Day, so often the brightest in the year, was likewise the
brightest of Raleigh's life.' At break of day, the amazed inhabitants of
Cadiz, and the sailors who had caroused all night on shore and now
hurried on board the galleons, watched the magnificent squadron sweep
into the harbour of their city. First came the 'War Sprite' itself; next
the 'Mary Rose,' commanded by Sir George Carew; then Sir Francis Vere in
the 'Rainbow,' carrying a sullen heart of envy with him; then Sir Robert
Southwell in the 'Lion,' Sir Conyers Clifford in the 'Dreadnought,' and
lastly, as Raleigh supposed, Robert Dudley (afterwards Duke of
Northumberland, and a distinguished author on naval tactics) in the
'Nonparilla.' As a matter of fact, the Vice-Admiral, hoping to contrive
to push in front, had persuaded Dudley to change ships with him. These
six vessels were well in advance of all the rest of the fleet. In front
of them, ranged under the wall of Cadiz, were seventeen galleys lying
with their prows to flank the English entrance, as Raleigh ploughed on
towards the galleons. The fortress of St. Philip and other forts along
the wall began to scour the channel, and with the galleys concentrated
their fire upon the 'War Sprite.' But Raleigh disdained to do more than
salute the one and then the other with a contemptuous blare of trumpets.
'The "St. Philip,"' he says, 'the great and famous Admiral of Spain, was
the mark I shot at, esteeming those galleys but as wasps in respect of
the powerfulness of the others.'
The 'St. Philip' had a special attraction for him. It was six years
since his dear friend and cousin, Sir Richard Grenville, under the lee
of the Azores, with one little ship, the 'Revenge,' had been hemmed in
and crushed by the vast fleet of Spain, and it was the 'St. Philip' and
the 'St. Andrew' that had been foremost in that act of murder. Now
before Raleigh there rose the same lumbering monsters of the deep, that
very 'St. Philip' and 'St. Andrew' which had looked down and watched Sir
Richard Grenville die, 'as a true soldier ought to do, fighting for his
country, queen, religion, and honour.' It seems almost fabulous that the
hour of pure poetical justice should strike so soon, and that Raleigh of
all living Englishmen should thus come face to face with those of all
the Spanish tyrants of the deep. As he swung forward into the harbour
and saw them there before him, the death of his kinsman in the Azores
was solemnly present to his memory, 'and being resolved to be revenged
for the "Revenge," or to second her with his own life,' as he says, he
came to anchor close to the galleons, and for three hours the battle
with them proceeded.
It began by the 'War Sprite' being in the centre and a little to the
front; on the one side, the 'Nonparilla,' in which Raleigh now perceived
Lord Thomas Howard, and the 'Lion;' on the other the 'Mary Rose' and the
'Dreadnought;' these, with the 'Rainbow' a little farther off, kept up
the fight alone until ten o'clock in the morning; waiting for the
fly-boats, which were to board the galleons, and which, for some reason
or other, did not arrive. Meanwhile, Essex, excited beyond all restraint
by the volleys of culverin and cannon, slipped anchor, and passing from
the body of the fleet, lay close up to the 'War Sprite,' pushing the
'Dreadnought' on one side. Raleigh, seeing him coming, went to meet him
in his skiff, and begged him to see that the fly-boats were sent, as the
battery was beginning to be more than his ships could bear. The Lord
Admiral was following Essex, and Raleigh passed on to him with the same
entreaty. This parley between the three commanders occupied about a
quarter of an hour.
Meanwhile, the men second in command had taken an unfair advantage of
Raleigh's absence. He hurried back to find that the Vice-Admiral had
pushed the 'Nonparilla' ahead, and that Sir Francis Vere, too, in the
'Rainbow,' had passed the 'War Sprite.' Finding himself, 'from being the
first to be but the third,' Raleigh skilfully thrust in between these
two ships, and threw himself in front of them broadside to the channel,
so that, as he says, 'I was sure no one should outstart me again, for
that day.' Finally, Essex and Lord Thomas Howard took the next places.
Sir Francis Vere, the marshal, who seems to have been mad for
precedence, 'while we had no leisure to look behind us, secretly
fastened a rope on my ship's side toward him, to draw himself up equally
with me; but some of my company advertising me thereof, I caused it to
be cut off, and so he fell back into his place, whom I guarded, all but
his very prow, from the sight of the enemy.' In his _Commentaries_ Vere
has his revenge, and carefully disparages Raleigh on every occasion.
For some reason or other, the fly-boats continued to delay, and Raleigh
began to despair of them. What he now determined to do, and what revenge
he took for Sir Richard Grenville, may best be told in his own vigorous
language:
Having no hope of my fly-boats to board, and the Earl and my
Lord Thomas having both promised to second me, I laid out a warp
by the side of the 'Philip' to shake hands with her--for with
the wind we could not get aboard; which when she and the rest
perceived, finding also that the 'Repulse,' seeing mine, began
to do the like, and the rear-admiral my Lord Thomas, they all
let slip, and ran aground, tumbling into the sea heaps of
soldiers, as thick as if coals had been poured out of a sack in
many ports at once, some drowned and some sticking in the mud.
The 'Philip' and the 'St. Thomas' burned themselves; the 'St.
Matthew' and the 'St. Andrew' were recovered by our boats ere
they could get out to fire them. The spectacle was very
lamentable on their side, for many drowned themselves, many,
half-burned, leaped into the water; very many hanging by the
ropes' end, by the ships' side, under the water even to the
lips; many swimming with grievous wounds, stricken under water,
and put out of their pain; and withal so huge a fire, and such
tearing of the ordnance in the great 'Philip' and the rest, when
the fire came to them, as, if a man had a desire to see Hell
itself, it was there most lively figured. Ourselves spared the
lives of all, after the victory, but the Flemings, who did
little or nothing in the fight, used merciless slaughter, till
they were by myself, and afterwards by my Lord Admiral, beaten
off.
The official report of the Duke of Medina Sidonia to Philip II. does not
greatly differ from this, except that he says that the English set fire
to the 'St. Philip.' Before the fight was over Raleigh received a very
serious flesh wound in the leg, 'interlaced and deformed with
splinters,' which made it impossible for him to get on horseback. He
was, therefore, to his great disappointment, unable to take part in
Essex's land-attack on the town. He could not, however, bear to be left
behind, and in a litter he was carried into Cadiz. He could only stay an
hour on shore, however, for the agony in his leg was intolerable, and in
the tumultuous disorder of the soldiers, who were sacking the town,
there was danger of his being rudely pushed and shouldered. He went back
to the 'War Sprite' to have his wound dressed and to sleep, and found
that in the general rush on shore his presence in the fleet was highly
desirable.
Early next morning, feeling eased by a night's rest, he sent on shore to
ask leave to follow the fleet of forty carracks bound for the Indies,
which had escaped down the Puerto Real river; this navy was said to be
worth twelve millions. In the confusion, however, there came back no
answer from Essex or Howard. A ransom of two millions had meanwhile been
offered for them, but this also, in the absence of his chiefs, Raleigh
had no power to accept. While he was thus uncertain, the Duke of Medina
Sidonia solved the difficulty on June 23, by setting the whole flock of
helpless and treasure-laden carracks on fire. From the deck of the 'War
Sprite' Raleigh had the mortification of seeing the smoke of this
priceless argosy go up to heaven. The waste had been great, for of all
the galleons, carracks, and frigates of which the great Spanish navy had
consisted, only the 'St. Matthew' and the 'St. Andrew' had come intact
into the hands of the English. The Dutch sailors, who held back until
the fight was decided, sprang upon the blazing 'St. Philip,' and saved a
great part of her famous store of ordnance; while, as Raleigh pleasantly
puts it, 'the two Apostles aforesaid' were richly furnished, and made
an agreeable prize to bring back to England.
The English generals, engaged in sacking the palaces and razing the
fortifications of Cadiz, were strangely indifferent to the anxieties of
their friends at home. In England the wildest rumours passed from mouth
to mouth, but it was a fortnight before anyone on the spot thought it
necessary to communicate with the Home Government. It is said that
Raleigh's letter to Cecil, written ten leagues to the west of Cadiz, on
July 7, and carried to England by Sir Anthony Ashley, contained the
first intimation of the victory. In this letter Raleigh is careful to do
himself justice with the Queen, and to claim a complete pardon on the
score of services so signal, for it was already patent to him that on a
field where every man that would be helped must help himself, his
wounded leg had shut him out of all hope of plunder. The cause of his
standing so far as ten leagues away from shore was that an epidemic had
broken out on board his ship. It proved impossible to cope with this
disease, and so it was determined that on August 1 the 'War Sprite'
should return to England, in company with the 'Roebuck' and the 'John
and Francis.' On the sixth day they arrived in Plymouth, and Raleigh
found that, although seven weeks had elapsed since the victory, no
authentic account of it had hitherto reached the Council. He was not
well, and instead of posting up to London, where he easily perceived he
would not be welcome, he asked pardon for staying with his ship. On
August 12 he landed at Weymouth, and passed home to Sherborne. The rest
of the fleet came back later in the autumn, and Essex, as he passed the
coast of Portugal, swooped down upon the famous library of the Bishop of
Algarve, which he presented on his return to Sir Thomas Bodley. The
Bodleian Library at Oxford is now the chief existing memorial of that
glorious expedition to Cadiz which shattered the naval strength of
Spain.
As to prize-money, there proved to be very little of it for the captors.
It was understood that the Lord Admiral was to have 5,000_l._, Essex as
much, and Raleigh 3,000_l._; but Essex, in his proud way, waived his
claim in favour of the Queen, just in time to escape spoliation, for
Elizabeth claimed everything. Her scandalous avarice had grown upon her
year by year, and now in her old age her finer and more generous
qualities were sapped by her greed for money. Even her political acumen
had failed her; she was unable to see, in her vexation at the loss of
the Indian carracks, that the blow to Spain had been one which relieved
her of a constant and immense anxiety. She determined that no one should
be the richer or the nobler for a victory which had resulted in the
destruction of so much treasure which might have flowed into her
coffers. Deeply disappointed at the Queen's surly ingratitude, Raleigh,
whom she still refused to see, retired for the next nine months into
absolute seclusion at Sherborne.
In his retirement Raleigh continued to remember that his function was,
as Oldys put it, 'by his extraordinary undertakings to raise a grove of
laurels, in a manner out of the seas, that should overspread our island
with glory.' In October 1596 he was preparing for his third expedition
to Guiana, which he placed under the command of Captain Leonard Berrie.
This navigator was absent until the summer of the following year, when
he returned, not having penetrated to Manoa, but confirming with an
almost obsequious report Raleigh's most golden dreams. It is at this
time, after his return from Cadiz, that we find Sir Walter Raleigh's
name mentioned most lavishly by the literary classes in their
dedications and eulogistic addresses. Whether his popularity was at the
same time high with the general public is more easily asserted than
proved, but there is no doubt that the victory at Cadiz was highly
appreciated by the mass of Englishmen, and it is not possible but that
Raleigh's prominent share in it should be generally recognised.
On January 24, 1597, Raleigh wrote from Sherborne a letter of sympathy
to Sir Robert Cecil, on the death of his wife. It is interesting as
displaying Raleigh's intimacy with the members of a family which was
henceforth to hold a prominent place in the chronicle of his life, since
it was Henry Brooke, Lady Cecil's brother, who became, two months later,
at the death of his father, Lord Cobham. It was he and his brother
George Brooke who in 1603 became notorious as the conspirators for
Arabella Stuart, and who dragged Raleigh down with them. We do not know
when Raleigh began to be intimate with the Brookes, and it is just at
this time, when his fortunes had reached their climacteric, and when it
would be of the highest importance to us to follow them closely, that
his personal history suddenly becomes vague. If Cecil's letters to him
had been preserved we should know more. As it is we can but record
certain isolated facts, and make as much use of them as we can venture
to do. In May 1597, nearly five years after his expulsion, we find him
received again at Court. Rowland White says, 'Sir Walter Raleigh is
daily in Court, and a hope is had that he shall be admitted to the
execution of his office as Captain of the Guard, before he goes to sea.'
Cecil and Howard of Effingham had obtained this return to favour for
their friend, and Essex, although his momentary liking for Raleigh had
long subsided, did not oppose it. He could not, however, be present when
Timias was taken back into the arms of his pardoning Belphoebe. On
June 1, the Earl of Essex rode down to Chatham, and during his absence
Sir Walter Raleigh was conducted by Cecil into the presence of the
Queen. She received him very graciously, and immediately authorised him
to resume his office of Captain of the Guard. Without loss of time,
Raleigh filled up the vacancies in the Guard that very day, and spent
the evening riding with her Majesty. Next morning he made his appearance
in the Privy Chamber as he had been wont to do, and his return to favour
was complete. Essex showed, and apparently felt, no very acute chagrin.
He was busy in planning another expedition against Spain, and he needed
Raleigh's help in arranging for the victualling of the land forces. In
July all jealousies seemed laid aside, and the gossips of the Court
reported, 'None but Cecil and Raleigh enjoy the Earl of Essex, they
carry him away as they list.'
It lies far beyond the scope of the present biography to discuss the
obscure question of 'the conceit of _Richard the Second_' with which
these three amused themselves just before the Islands Voyage began. The
bare facts are these. On July 6, 1597, Raleigh wrote to Cecil from
Weymouth about the preparations for the expedition, and added: 'I
acquainted the Lord General [Essex] with your letter to me, and your
kind acceptance of your entertainment; he was also wonderful merry at
your conceit of _Richard the Second_. I hope it shall never alter, and
whereof I shall be most glad of, as the true way to all our good, quiet,
and advancement, and most of all for His sake whose affairs shall
thereby find better progression.' From this it would seem as though
Cecil had offered a dramatic entertainment to Essex and Raleigh on their
leaving town. This entertainment evidently consisted of Shakespeare's
new tragedy, then being performed at the Globe Theatre and to be entered
for publication just a month later. When this play was printed it did
not contain what is called the 'Deposition Scene,' but it would appear
that this was given on the boards at the time when Raleigh refers to it.
It will be remembered that in 1601 the lawyers accused Essex of having
feasted his eyes beforehand with a show of the dethronement of his
liege; but Raleigh's words do not suggest any direct disloyalty.
Raleigh was in a state of considerable excitement at the prospect of the
new expedition. Cecil wrote, 'Good Mr. Raleigh wonders at his own
diligence, as if diligence and he were not familiars;' and the fact that
Raleigh would sometimes write twice and thrice to him in one day, and on
a single occasion at least, four times, proves that Cecil had a right to
use this mild sarcasm. Several months before, Raleigh had attempted by
his manifesto entitled _The Spanish Alarum_ to stir up the Government to
be in full readiness to guard against a revengeful invasion of England
by her old enemy. He had thought out the whole situation, he had planned
the defences of England by land and sea, and his new favour at Court had
enabled him to put pressure on the royal parsimony, and to insist that
things should be done as he saw fit. He was perfectly right in thinking
that Philip II. would rather suffer complete ruin than not try once more
to recover his position in Europe, but he saw that the late losses at
Cadiz would force the Catholic king to delay his incursion, and he
counselled a rapid and direct second attack on Spain. As soon as ever he
was restored to power, he began to victual a fleet of ten men-of-war
with biscuit, beef, bacon, and salt fish, and to call for volunteers. As
the scheme seized the popular mind, however, it gathered in extent, and
it was finally decided to fit up three large squadrons, with a Dutch
contingent of twelve ships. These vessels met in Plymouth Sound.
On the night of Sunday, July 10, the fleet left Plymouth, and kept
together for twenty-four hours. On the morning of the 12th, after a
night of terrific storm, Raleigh found his squadron of four ships parted
from the rest, and in the course of the next day only one vessel beside
his own was in sight. This tempest was immortalised in his earliest
known poem by John Donne, who was in the expedition, and was described
by Raleigh as follows:
The storm on Wednesday grew more forcible, and the seas grew
very exceeding lofty, so that myself and the Bonaventure had
labour enough to beat it up. But the night following, the
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, the storm so increased, the
ships were weighty, the ordnance great, and the billows so
raised and enraged, that we could carry out no sail which to our
judgment would not have been rent off the yards by the wind; and
yet our ships rolled so vehemently, and so disjointed
themselves, that we were driven either to force it again with
our courses, or to sink. In my ship it hath shaken all her
beams, knees, and stanchions well nigh asunder, in so much on
Saturday night last we made account to have yielded ourselves up
to God. For we had no way to work, either by trying, hauling, or
driving, that promised better hope, our men being worsted with
labour and watchings, and our ship so open everywhere, all her
bulkheads rent, and her very cook-room of brick shaken down into
powder.
Such were the miseries of navigation in the palmy days of English
adventure by sea. The end of it was that about thirty vessels crept back
to Falmouth and Tor Bay, some were lost altogether, and Raleigh, with
the remainder, found harbour on July 18 at Plymouth. For a month they
lay there, recovering their forces, and Essex, whose own ship was at
Falmouth, came over to Plymouth and was Raleigh's guest on the 'War
Sprite.' Raleigh writes to Cecil: 'I should have taken it unkindly if my
Lord had taken up any other lodging till the "Lion" come: and now her
Majesty may be sure his Lordship shall sleep somewhat the sounder,
though he fare the worse, by being with me, for I am an excellent
watchman at sea.' In this same letter, dated July 26, 1597, the fatal
name of Cobham first appears in the correspondence of Raleigh: 'I pray
vouchsafe,' he says, 'to remember me in all affection to my Lord
Cobham.'
On August 18, in the face of a westerly wind, the fleet put out once
more from Plymouth. In the Bay of Biscay the 'St. Andrew' and the 'St.
Matthew' were disabled, and had to be left behind at La Rochelle. Off
the coast of Portugal, Raleigh himself had a serious accident, for his
mainyard snapped across, and he had to put in for help by the Rock of
Lisbon, in company with the 'Dreadnought.' Essex left a letter saying
that Raleigh must follow him as fast as he could to the Azores, and on
September 8 the 'War Sprite' came in view of Terçeira. On the 15th
Raleigh's squadron joined the main fleet under Essex at Flores.
The distress of the voyage and its separations had told upon the temper
of Essex, while he was surrounded by those who were eager to poison his
mind with suspicion of Raleigh. When the latter dined with Essex in the
'Repulse' on the 15th, the Earl with his usual impulsiveness made a
clean breast of his 'conjectures and surmises,' letting Raleigh know the
very names of those scandalous and cankered persons who had ventured to
accuse him, and assuring him that he rejected their counsel. On this day
or the next a pinnace from India brought the news that the yearly fleet
was changing its usual course, and would arrive farther south in the
Azores. A council of war was held in the 'Repulse,' and it was resolved
to divide the archipelago among the commanders. Fayal was to be taken by
Essex and Raleigh, Graciosa by Howard and Vere, San Miguel by Mountjoy
and Blount, while Pico, with its famous wines, was left for the
Dutchmen. Essex sailed first, and left Raleigh taking in provisions at
Flores, where he dined in a small inland town with his old acquaintance
Lord Grey, and others, including Sir Arthur Gorges, the minute historian
of the expedition. About midnight, when they were safe in their ships
again, Captain Arthur Champernowne, Raleigh's kinsman, arrived with a
letter from Essex desiring Raleigh to come over to Fayal at once, and
complete his supplies there. With his usual promptitude, he started
instantly, and soon outstripped Essex.
When Raleigh arrived in the great harbour of Fayal, the peaceful look of
everything assured him in a moment that Essex had not yet been heard of.
But no sooner did the inhabitants perceive the 'War Sprite' and the
'Dreadnought,' than they began to throw up defences and remove their
valuables into the interior. It was in the highest degree irksome to
Raleigh to wait thus inactive, while this handsome Spanish colony was
slipping from his clutch, but he had been forbidden to move without
orders. After three days' waiting for Essex, a council of war was held
on board the 'War Sprite.' On the fourth Raleigh leaped into his barge
at the head of a landing company, refusing the help of the Flemings who
were with him, and stormed the cliffs. It was comparatively easy to get
his troops on shore, but the Spaniards contested the road to the town
inch by inch. At last Raleigh and his four hundred and fifty men routed
their opponents and entered Fayal, a town 'full of fine gardens,
orchards, and wells of delicate waters, with fair streets, and one very
fair church;' and allowed his men to plunder it. The English soldiers
slept that night in Fayal, and when they woke next morning they saw the
tardy squadron of Essex come warping into the harbour at last. Sir Gilly
Meyrick, the bitterest of the parasites of Essex, slipped into a boat
and was on board the 'Repulse' as soon as she anchored, reporting
Raleigh's conduct to the Earl.
Raleigh must have known that Essex was not the man to be pleased at a
feat which took all the credit of the Islands Voyage out of his hands;
but he feigned unconsciousness. In his barge he came out from Fayal to
greet the Earl, and entered the General's cabin. After a faint welcome,
Essex began to reproach him with 'a breach of Orders and Articles,' and
to point out to him that in capturing Fayal without authority he had
made himself liable to the punishment of death. Raleigh replied that he
was exempt from such orders, being, in succession to Essex and Lord
Howard, himself commander of the whole fleet by the Queen's letters
patent. After a dispute of half an hour, Essex seemed satisfied, and
accepted an invitation to sup with Raleigh on shore. But another
malcontent, Sir Christopher Blount, obtained his ear, and set his
resentment blazing once more. Essex told Raleigh he should not sup at
all that night. Raleigh left the 'Repulse,' and prepared to separate his
squadron from the fleet, lest an attempt should be made to force him to
undergo the indignity of a court-martial. Howard finally made peace
between the two commanders, and Raleigh was induced to give some sort of
apology for his action.
The fleet proceeded to St. Miguel, when Raleigh was left to watch the
roadstead, while Essex pushed inland. While Raleigh lay here, a great
Indian carrack of sixteen hundred tons, laden with spices, knowing
nothing of the English invasion, blundered into the middle of what she
took to be a friendly Spanish fleet. She perceived her mistake just in
time to run herself ashore, and disembark her crew. Raleigh at the head
of a party of boats attempted to seize her, but her commander set her
on fire, and when the Englishmen came close to her she was one dangerous
splendour of flaming perfumes and roaring cannon. Raleigh was more
fortunate in securing another carrack laden with cochineal from Cuba.
The rest of the Islands Voyage was uneventful and ill-managed. For some
time nothing was heard of the fleet in England, and Lady Raleigh
'skrebbled,' as she spelt it, hasty notes to Cecil begging for news of
her husband. Early in October he came back to England, seriously
enfeebled in health. The only one of the commanders who gained any
advantage from the Islands Voyage was the one who had undertaken least,
Lord Howard of Effingham, who was raised to the earldom of Nottingham.
CHAPTER VI.
LAST DAYS OF ELIZABETH.
A slight anecdote, which is connected with the month of January 1598,
must not be omitted here. It gives us an impression of the personal
habits of Raleigh at this stage of his career. It was the custom of the
Queen to go to bed early, and one winter's evening the Earl of
Southampton, Raleigh, and a man named Parker were playing the game of
primero in the Presence Chamber, after her Majesty had retired. They
laughed and talked rather loudly, upon which Ambrose Willoughby, the
Esquire of the Body, came out and desired them not to make so much
noise. Raleigh pocketed his money, and went off, but Southampton
resented the interference, and in the scuffle that ensued Willoughby
pulled out a handful of those marjoram-coloured curls that Shakespeare
praised.
It is not easy to see why it was, that in the obscure year 1598, while
the star of Essex was setting, that of his natural rival did not burn
more brightly. But although now, and for the brief remainder of
Elizabeth's life, Raleigh was nominally in favour, the saturnine old
woman had no longer any tenderness for her Captain of the Guard. Her old
love, her old friendship, had quite passed away. There was no longer any
excuse for excluding from her presence so valuable a soldier and so
wise a courtier, but her pulses had ceased to thrill at his coming. If
Essex had been half so courteous, half so assiduous as Raleigh, she
would have opened her arms to him, but she had offended Essex past
forgiveness, and his tongue held no parley with her. It must have been
in Raleigh's presence--for he it is who has recorded it in the grave
pages of his _Prerogative of Parliament_--that Essex told the Queen
'that her conditions were as crooked as her carcass,' a terrible speech
which, as Raleigh says, 'cost him his head.' This was perhaps a little
later, in 1600. In 1598 these cruel squabbles were already making life
at Court a misery. The Queen kept Raleigh by her, but would give him
nothing. In January he applied for the post of Vice-chamberlain, but
without success. The new earl, Lord Nottingham, could theatrically wipe
the dust from Raleigh's shoes with his cloak, but when Raleigh himself
desired to be made a peer, in the spring of 1598, he was met with a
direct refusal. He would fain have been Lord Deputy in Ireland, but the
Queen declined to spare him. On the last day of August he was in the
very act of being sworn on the Privy Council, but at the final moment
Cecil frustrated this by saying that if he were made a councillor, he
must resign his Captainship of the Guard to Sir George Carew. This was,
as Cecil was aware, too great a sacrifice to be thought of, and the hero
of Cadiz and Fayal, foiled on every hand, had to submit to remain plain
Sir Walter Raleigh, Knight.
As the breach grew between Essex and the Queen, the temper of the former
grew more surly. He dropped the semblance of civility to Raleigh. In
his _Apothegms_, Lord Bacon has preserved an amusing anecdote of
November 17, 1598. On this day, which was the Queen's sixty-fifth
birthday, the leading courtiers, as usual, tilted in the ring in honour
of their Liege; the custom of this piece of mock chivalry demanded that
each knight should be disguised. It was, however, known that Sir Walter
Raleigh would ride in his own uniform of orange tawny medley, trimmed
with black budge of lamb's wool. Essex, to vex him, came to the lists
with a body-guard of two thousand retainers all dressed in orange tawny,
so that Raleigh and his men should seem a fragment of the great Essex
following. The story goes on to show that Essex digged a pit and fell
into it himself; but enough has been said to prove his malignant
intention. We have little else but anecdotes with which to fill up the
gap in Raleigh's career between December 1597 and March 1600. This was
an exceedingly quiet period in his life, during which we have to fancy
him growing more and more at enmity with Essex, and more and more
intimate with Cobham.
In September 1598, an unexpected ally, the Duke of Finland, urged
Raleigh to undertake once more his attempt to colonise Guiana, and
offered twelve ships as his own contingent. Two months later we find
that the hint has been taken, and that Sir John Gilbert is 'preparing
with all speed to make a voyage to Guiana.' It is said, moreover, that
'he intendeth to inhabit it with English people.' He never started,
however, and Raleigh, referring long afterwards to the events of these
years, said that though Cecil seemed to encourage him in his West Indian
projects, yet that when it came to the point he always, as Raleigh
quaintly put it, retired into his back-shop. Meanwhile, the interest
felt in Raleigh's narrative was increasing, and in 1599 the well-known
geographer Levinus Hulsius brought out in Nuremburg a Latin translation
of the _Discovery_, with five curious plates, including one of the city
of Manoa, and another of the Ewaipanoma, or men without heads. The
German version of the book and its English reprint in Hakluyt's
_Navigations_ belong to the same year. Also in 1599, the _Discovery_ was
reproduced in Latin, German, and French by De Bry in the eighth part of
his celebrated _Collectiones Peregrinationum_. This year, then, in which
we hardly hear otherwise of Raleigh, marked the height of his success as
a geographical writer. So absolutely is the veil drawn over his personal
history at this time that the only facts we possess are, that on
November 4 Raleigh was lying sick of an ague, and that on December 13 he
was still ill.
In the middle of March 1600 Sir Walter and Lady Raleigh left Durham
House for Sherborne, taking with them, as a playmate for their son
Walter, Sir Robert Cecil's eldest son, William, afterwards the second
Earl of Salisbury. On the way down to Dorsetshire, they stopped at Sion
House as the guests of the 'Wizard' Earl of Northumberland, a life-long
friend of Raleigh's, and presently to be his most intelligent
fellow-prisoner in the Tower. From Sherborne, Raleigh wrote on the 6th
of April saying frankly that if her Majesty persisted in excluding him
from every sort of preferment, 'I must begin to keep sheep betime.' He
hinted in the same letter that he would accept the Governorship of
Jersey, which was expected to fall vacant. The friendship with Lord
Cobham has now become quite ardent, and Lady Raleigh vies with her
husband in urging him to pay Sherborne a visit. Later on in April the
Raleighs went to Bath apparently for no other reason than to meet Cobham
there. Here is a curious note from Raleigh to the most dangerous of his
associates, written from Bath on April 29, 1600:
Here we attend you and have done this sevennight, and we still
mourn your absence, the rather because we fear that your mind is
changed. I pray let us hear from you at least, for if you come
not we will go hereby home, and make but short tarrying here. My
wife will despair ever to see you in these parts, if your
Lordship come not now. We can but long for you and wish you as
our own lives whatsoever.
Your Lordship's everest faithful, to honour you most,
W. RALEGH.
Raleigh's absence from Court was so lengthy, that it was whispered in
the early summer that he was in disgrace, that the Queen had called him
'something worse than cat or dog,' namely, 'fox.' The absurdity of this
was proved early in July by his being hurriedly called to town to
accompany Cobham and Northumberland on their brief and fruitless visit
to Ostend. The friends started from Sandwich on July 11, and were
received in the Low Countries by Lord Grey; they were entertained at
Ostend with extraordinary respect, but they gained nothing of political
or diplomatic value. Affairs in Ireland, connected with the Spanish
invasion, occupied Raleigh's mind and pen during this autumn, but he
paid no visit to his Munster estates. There were plots and counterplots
developing in various parts of these islands in the autumn of 1600, but
with none of these subterranean activities is Raleigh for the present
to be identified.
When Sir Anthony Paulet died, on August 26, 1600, Raleigh had the
satisfaction of succeeding him in the Governorship of Jersey. He had
asked for the reversion of this post, and none could be found more
appropriate to his powers or circumstances. It gave him once more the
opportunity to cultivate his restless energy, to fly hither and thither
by sea and land, and to harry the English Channel for Spaniards as a
terrier watches a haystack for rats. Weymouth, which was the English
postal port for Jersey, was also the natural harbour of Sherborne, and
Raleigh had been accustomed, as it was, to keep more than one vessel
there. The appointment in Jersey was combined with a gift of the manor
of St. Germain in that island, but the Queen thought it right, in
consideration of this present, to strike off three hundred pounds from
the Governor's salary. Cecil was Raleigh's guest at Sherborne when the
appointment was made, and Raleigh waited until he left before starting
for his new charge; all this time young William Cecil continued at
Sherborne for his health. At last, late in September, Sir Walter and
Lady Raleigh went down to Weymouth, and took with them their little son
Walter, now about six years old. The day was very fine, and the mother
and son saw the new Governor on board his ship. He was kept at sea
forty-eight hours by contrary winds, but reached Jersey at last on an
October morning.
Raleigh wrote home to his wife that he never saw a pleasanter island
than Jersey, but protested that it was not in value the very third part
of what had been reported. One of his first visits was to the castle of
Mont Orgueil, which had been rebuilt seven years before. His intention
had been to destroy it, but he was so much struck with its stately
architecture and commanding position that he determined to spare it, and
in fact he told off a detachment of his men then and there to guard it.
Raleigh's work in Jersey was considerable. While he remained governor,
he established a trade between the island and Newfoundland, undertook to
register real property according to a definite system, abolished the
unpopular compulsory service of the Corps de Garde, and lightened in
many directions the fiscal burdens which previous governors had laid on
the population. Raleigh's beneficent rule in Jersey lasted just three
years.
While he was absent on this his first visit to the island, Lady Raleigh
at Sherborne received news from Cecil of the partial destruction of
Durham House by a fire, which had broken out in the old stables. None of
the Raleigh valuables were injured, but Lady Raleigh suggests that it is
high time something were definitely settled about property in this
'rotten house,' which Sir Walter was constantly repairing and improving
without possessing any proper lease of it. As a matter of fact, when the
crash came, Durham House was the first of his losses. Early in November
1600, Raleigh was in Cornwall, improving the condition of the
tin-workers, and going through his duties in the Stannaries Court of
Lostwithiel. We find him protecting private enterprise on Roborough Down
against the borough of Plymouth, which desired to stop the tin-works,
and the year closes with his activities on behalf of the 'establishment
of good laws among tinners.'
The first two months of 1601 were occupied with the picturesque tragedy
of Essex's trial and execution. It seems that Raleigh was at last
provoked into open enmity by the taunts and threats of the Lord Marshal.
Among the strange acts of Essex, none had been more strange than his
extraordinary way of complaining, like a child, of anyone who might
displease him. In his letter to the Queen on June 25, 1599, he openly
named Raleigh and Cobham as his enemies and the enemies of England; not
reflecting that both of these personages were in the Queen's confidence,
and that he was out of it. We may presume that it was more than Raleigh
could bear to be shown a letter addressed to the Queen in which Essex
deliberately accused him of 'wishing the ill success of your Majesty's
most important action, the decay of your greatest strength, and the
destruction of your faithfullest servants.' There were some things
Raleigh could not forgive, and the accusation that he favoured Spain was
one of these. Shut up among his creatures in his house in the Strand,
and refused all communication with Elizabeth, Essex thought no
accusation too libellous to spread against the trio who held the royal
ear, against Raleigh, Cecil, and Cobham, whose daggers, he said, were
thirsting for his blood.
It was probably in the summer of 1600 that Raleigh wrote the curious
letter of advice to Cecil which forms the only evidence we possess that
he had definitely come to the decision that Essex must die. His language
admits of no doubt of his intention. He says:
If you take it for a good counsel to relent towards this tyrant,
you will repent it when it shall be too late. His malice is
fixed, and will not evaporate by any of your mild courses. For
he will ascribe the alteration to her Majesty's pusillanimity
and not to your good nature, knowing that you work but upon her
humour, and not out of any love towards him. The less you make
him, the less he shall be able to harm you and yours; and if her
Majesty's favour fail him, he will again decline to a common
person. For after-revenges, fear them not, for your own father
was esteemed to be the contriver of Norfolk's ruin, yet his son
followeth your father's son and loveth him.
This advice has been stigmatised as worse than ungenerous. It was, at
all events, extremely to the point, and it may be suggested that for
Raleigh and Cecil the time for showing generosity to Essex was past.
They took no overt steps, however, but it is plain that they kept
themselves informed of the mad meetings that went on in Essex House. On
the morning before the insurrection was to break out, February 18, 1601,
Raleigh sent a note to his kinsman, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who was one
of Essex's men, to come down to Durham House to speak with him. Gorges,
startled at the message, consulted Essex, who advised him to say that he
would meet Raleigh, not at Durham House, but half-way, on the river.
Raleigh assented to this, and came alone, while Gorges, with two other
gentlemen, met him. Raleigh told his cousin that a warrant was out to
seize him, and advised him to leave London at once for Plymouth. Gorges
said it was too late, and a long conversation ensued, in the course of
which a boat was seen to glide away from Essex stairs and to approach
them. Upon this Gorges pushed Raleigh's boat away, and bid him hasten
home. As he rowed off towards Durham House, four shots from the second
boat missed him; it had been manned by Sir Christopher Blount, who,
with three or four servants of Essex, had come out to capture or else
kill Raleigh.
For this treason Blount asked and obtained Raleigh's pardon a few days
later, on the scaffold. At the last moment of his life, Essex also had
desired to speak with Raleigh, having already solemnly retracted the
accusations he had made against him; but it is said that this message of
peace was not conveyed to Raleigh until it was too late. According to
Raleigh's own account, he had been standing near the scaffold, on
purpose to see whether Essex would address him, and had retired because
he was not spoken to. His words in 1618 were these:
It is said I was a persecutor of my Lord of Essex; that I puffed
out tobacco in disdain when he was on the scaffold. But I take
God to witness I shed tears for him when he died. I confess I
was of a contrary faction, but I knew he was a noble gentleman.
Those that set me up against him, did afterwards set themselves
against me.
Raleigh was accused of barbarity by the adherents of Essex, but there is
nothing to rebut the testimony of one of his own greatest enemies,
Blount, who confessed, a few minutes before he died, that he did not
believe Sir Walter Raleigh intended to assassinate the Earl, nor that
Essex himself feared it, 'only it was a word cast out to colour other
matters.' We are told that Raleigh suffered from a profound melancholy
as he was rowed back from the Tower to Durham House after the execution
of Essex, and that it was afterwards believed that he was visited at
that time by a presentiment of his own dreadful end.
During the summer of 1601, Raleigh became involved in a vexatious
quarrel between certain of his own Dorsetshire servants. The man Meeres,
whom he had appointed as bailiff of the Sherborne estates nine years
before, after doing trusty service to his master, had gradually become
aggressive and mutinous. He disliked the presence of Adrian Gilbert,
Raleigh's brother, who had been made Constable of Sherborne Castle, and
who overlooked Meeres on all occasions. There began to be constant petty
quarrels between the bailiff of the manor and the constable of the
castle, and when Raleigh at last dismissed the former bailiff and
appointed another, Meeres put himself under the protection of an old
enemy of Raleigh's, Lord Thomas Howard, now Lord Howard of Bindon, and
refused to quit. In the month of August, Meeres audaciously arrested the
rival bailiff, whereupon Raleigh had Meeres himself put in the stocks in
the market-place of Sherborne. The town took Raleigh's side, and when
Meeres was released, the people riotously accompanied him to his house,
with derisive cries. When Raleigh was afterward attainted, Meeres took
all the revenge he could, and succeeded in making himself not a little
offensive to Lady Raleigh. Sir Walter Raleigh's letters testify to the
great annoyance this man gave him. It appears that Meeres' wife, 'a
broken piece, but too good for such a knave,' was a kinswoman of Lady
Essex, and the most curious point is that Raleigh thought that Meeres
was trained to forge his handwriting. He tells Cecil:
The Earl did not make show to like Meeres, nor admit him to his
presence, but it was thought that secretly he meant to have used
him for some mischief against me; and, if Essex had prevailed,
he had been used as the counterfeiter, for he writes my hand so
perfectly that I cannot any way discern the difference.[7]
Meeres was ready in the law, and during the month of September sent
twenty-six subpoenas down to Sherborne. But on October 3 he was
subdued for the time being, and wrote to Cecil from his prison in the
Gatehouse that he was very sorry for what he had said so 'furiously and
foolishly' about Sir Walter Raleigh, and begged for a merciful
consideration of it. He was pardoned, but he proved a troublesome
scoundrel then and afterwards.
Early in September 1601, Raleigh came up on business from Bath to
London, meaning to return at once, but found himself unexpectedly called
upon to stay and fulfil a graceful duty. Henry IV. of France, being at
Calais, had sent the Duc de Biron, with a retinue of three hundred
persons, to pay a visit of compliment to Elizabeth. It was important
that the French favourite should be well received in England, but no one
expected him in London, and the Queen was travelling. Sir Arthur Savage
and Sir Arthur Gorges were the Duke's very insufficient escort, until
Raleigh fortunately made his appearance and did the honours of London in
better style. He took the French envoys to Westminster Abbey, and, to
their greater satisfaction, to the Bear Garden. The Queen was now
staying, as the guest of the Marquis of Winchester, at Basing, and so,
on September 9, Raleigh took the Duke and his suite down to the Vine, a
house in Hampshire, where he was royally entertained. The Queen visited
them here, and on the 12th they all came over to stay with her at Basing
Park. By the Queen's desire, Raleigh wrote to Cobham, who had stayed at
Bath, to come over to Basing and help to entertain the Frenchmen; he
added, that in three or four days the visit would be over, and he and
Cobham could go back to Bath together. The letters of Raleigh display an
intimate friendship between Lord Cobham and himself which is not to be
overlooked in the light of coming events. The French were all dressed in
black, a colour Raleigh did not possess in his copious wardrobe, so that
he had to order the making of a black taffeta suit in a hurry, to fetch
which from London he started back late on Saturday night after bringing
the Duke safe down to Basing. It was on the next day, if the French
ambassador said true, that he had the astounding conversation with
Elizabeth about Essex, at the end of which, after railing against her
dead favourite, she opened a casket and produced the very skull of
Essex. The subject of the fall of favourites was one in which Biron
should have taken the keenest interest. Ten months later he himself,
abandoned by his king, came to that frantic death in front of the
Bastille which Chapman presented to English readers in the most majestic
of his tragedies. The visit to Elizabeth occupies the third act of
_Byron's Conspiracy_, which, published in 1608, contains of course no
reference to Raleigh's part on that occasion.
It may be that in the autumn of 1601, James of Scotland first became
actively cognisant of Raleigh's existence. Spain was once more giving
Elizabeth anxiety, and threatening an invasion which actually took
place on September 21, at Kinsale. By means of the spies which he kept
in the Channel, Raleigh saw the Spanish fleet advancing, and warned the
Government, though his warnings were a little too positive in pointing
out Cork and Limerick as the points of attack. Meanwhile, he wrote out
for the Queen's perusal a State paper on _The Dangers of a Spanish
Faction in Scotland_. This paper has not been preserved, but the rumour
of its contents is supposed to have frightened James in his
correspondence with Rome, and to have made him judge it prudent to offer
Elizabeth three thousand Scotch troops against the invader. Raleigh's
casual remarks with regard to Irish affairs at this critical time, as we
find them in his letters to Cecil, are not sympathetic or even humane,
and there is at least one passage which looks very much like a licensing
of assassination; yet it is certain that Raleigh, surveying from his
remote Sherborne that Munster which he knew so well, took in the salient
features of the position with extraordinary success. In almost every
particular he showed himself a true prophet with regard to the Irish
rising of 1601.
In November the Duke of Lennox came somewhat hastily to London from
Paris, entrusted with a very delicate diplomatic commission from James
of Scotland to Elizabeth. It is certain that he saw Raleigh and Cobham,
and that he discussed with them the thorny question of the succession to
the English throne. It moreover appears that he found their intentions
'traitorous to the King,' that is to say unfavourable to the candidature
of James. The whole incident is exceedingly dark, and the particulars of
it rest mainly on a tainted authority, that of Lord Henry Howard. It
may be conjectured that what really happened was that the Duke of
Lennox, learning that Raleigh was in town, desired Sir Arthur Savage to
introduce him; that he then suggested a private conference, which was
first refused, then granted, in Cobham's presence, at Durham House; that
Raleigh refused King James's offers, and went and told Cecil that he had
done so. Cecil, however, chose to believe that Raleigh was keeping
something back from him, and his attitude from this moment grows
sensibly colder to Raleigh, and he speaks of Raleigh's 'ingratitude,'
though it is not plain what he should have been grateful for to Cecil.
It was now thirteen years since Raleigh had abandoned the hope of
colonising Virginia, though his thoughts had often reverted to that
savage country, of which he was the nominal liege lord. In 1602 he made
a final effort to assert his authority there. He sent out a certain
Samuel Mace, of whose expedition we know little; and about the same time
his nephew, Bartholomew Gilbert, with an experienced mariner, Captain
Gosnoll, went to look for the lost colony and city of Raleigh. These
latter started in a small barque on March 26, but though they enjoyed an
interesting voyage, they never touched Virginia at all. They discovered
and named Martha's Vineyard, and some other of the islands in the same
group; then, after a pleasant sojourn, they came back to England, and
landed at Exmouth on July 23. It was left for another than Raleigh,
while he was impoverished and a prisoner in the Tower, to carry out the
dream of Virginian settlement. Perhaps the most fortunate thing that
could have happened to Raleigh would have been for him to have
personally conducted to the West this expedition of 1602. To have been
out of England when the Queen died might have saved him from the calumny
of treason.
It has been supposed that Raleigh was a complete loser by these vain
expeditions. But a passage in a letter of August 21, 1602, shows us that
this was not the fact. He says: 'Neither of them spake with the people,'
that is, with the lost Virginian colonists, 'but I do send both the
barques away again, having saved the charge in sassafras wood.' From the
same letter we find that Gilbert and Gosnoll went off without Raleigh's
leave, though in his ship and at his expense, and the latter therefore
prays that his nephew may be stripped of his rich store of sassafras and
cedar wood, partly in chastisement, but more for fear of overstocking
the London market. He throws Gilbert over, and speaks angrily of him not
as a kinsman, but as 'my Lord Cobham's man;' then relents in a
postscript--'_all_ is confiscate, but he shall have his part again.'
Raleigh was feeble in health and irritable in temper all this time. Lady
Raleigh, with a woman's instinct, tried to curb his ambition, and tie
him down to Sherborne. 'My wife says that every day this place amends,
and London, to her, grows worse and worse.' Meanwhile, there is really
not an atom of evidence to show that Raleigh was engaged in any
political intrigue. He spent the summer and autumn of 1602, when he was
not at Sherborne, in going through the round of his duties. All the
month of July he spent in Jersey, 'walking in the wilderness,' as he
says, hearing from no one, and troubled in mind by vague rumours, blown
over to him from Normandy, of the disgrace of the Duc de Biron. He is
also 'much pestered with the coming of many Norman gentlemen, but cannot
prevent it.' On August 9, he left Jersey, in his ship the 'Antelope,'
fearing if he stayed any longer to exhaust her English stores, and get
no more 'in this poor island.' On landing at Weymouth on the 12th, he
wrote inviting Cecil and Northumberland to meet him at Bath. He was
justly exasperated to find that during his absence Lord Howard of Bindon
had once more taken up the wicked steward, Meeres, and persuaded Sir
William Peryam, the Chief Baron of the Exchequer, to try the suit again.
Raleigh complains to Cecil:
I never busied myself with the Lord Viscount's [Lord Bindon's]
wealth, nor of his extortions, nor poisoning of his wife, as is
here avowed, have I spoken. I have foreborne ... but I will not
endure wrong at so peevish a fool's hands any longer. I will
rather lose my life, and I think that my Lord Puritan Peryam
doth think that the Queen shall have more use of rogues and
villains than of men, or else he would not, at Bindon's
instances, have yielded to try actions against me being out of
the land.
The vexation was a real one, but this is the language of a petulant
invalid, of a man to whom the grasshopper has become a burden. We are
therefore not surprised to find him at Bath on September 15, so ill that
he can barely write a note to Cecil warning him of the approach of a
Spanish fleet, the news of which has just reached him from Jersey. He
grew little better at Bath, and in October we find him again at
Sherborne, in very low spirits, sending by Cobham to the Queen a stone
which Bartholomew Gilbert had brought from America, and which Raleigh
took to be a diamond. Immediately after this, he set out on what he
calls his 'miserable journey into Cornwall,' no other than his customary
autumn circuit through the Stannary Courts. Once he had enjoyed these
bracing rides over the moors, but his animal spirits were subdued, and
the cold mosses, the streams to be forded, the dripping October woods,
and the chilly granite judgment-seat itself, had lost their attraction
for his aching joints. In November, however, he is back at Sherborne,
restored to health, and intending to linger in Dorsetshire as long as he
can, 'except there be cause to hasten me up.'
Meanwhile he had paid a brief visit to London, and had spoken with the
Queen, as it would appear, for the last time. Cecil, who was also
present, has recorded in a letter of November 4 this interview, which
took place the previous day. On this last occasion Elizabeth sought
Raleigh's advice on her Irish policy. The President of Munster had
reported that he had seen fit to 'kill and hang divers poor men, women,
and children appertaining' to Cormac MacDermod McCarthy, Lord of
Muskerry, and to burn all his castles and villages from Carrigrohan to
Inchigeelagh. Cecil was inclined to think that severity had been pushed
too far, and that the wretched Cormac might be left in peace. But
Elizabeth had long been accustomed to turn to Raleigh for advice on her
Irish policy. He gave, as usual, his unflinching constant counsel for
drastic severity. He 'very earnestly moved her Majesty of all others to
reject Cormac MacDermod, first, because his country was worth her
keeping, secondly, because he lived so under the eye of the State that,
whensoever she would, it was in her power to suppress him.' This last,
one would think, might have been an argument for mercy. The Queen
instructed Cecil to tell Sir George Carew, that whatever pardon was
extended to others, none might be shown to Cormac.
It was in the same spirit of rigour that Raleigh had for two years past
advised the retention of the gentle and learned Florence MacCarthy in
the Tower, as 'a man reconciled to the Pope, dangerous to the present
State, beloved of such as seek the ruin of the realm;' and this at the
very time when MacCarthy, trusting in his twenty years' acquaintance
with Raleigh, was praying Cecil to let him be his judge. Raleigh little
thought that the doors which detained Florence MacCarthy would soon open
for a moment to inclose himself, and that in two neighbouring cells
through long years of captivity the _History of the World_ would grow
beside the growing _History of the Early Ages of Ireland_.
In this year, 1602, Raleigh parted with his vast Irish estates to
Richard Boyle, afterwards Earl of Cork, and placed the purchase-money in
privateering enterprises. It is known that Cecil had an interest in this
fleet of merchantmen, and as late as January 1603 he writes about a
cruiser in which Raleigh and he were partners, begging Raleigh, from
prudential reasons, to conceal the fact that Cecil was in the adventure.
There was no abatement whatever in the friendliness of Cecil's tone to
Raleigh, although in his own crafty mind he had decided that the death
of the Queen should set the term to Raleigh's prosperity. On March 30,
1603, Elizabeth died, and with her last breath the fortune and even the
personal safety of Raleigh expired.
We may pause here a moment to consider what was Raleigh's condition and
fame at this critical point in his life. He was over fifty years of age,
but in health and spirits much older than his time of life suggested;
his energy had shown signs of abatement, and for five years he had done
nothing that had drawn public attention strongly to his gifts. If he had
died in 1603, unattainted, in peace at Sherborne, it is a question
whether he would have attracted the notice of posterity in any very
general degree. To close students of the reign of Elizabeth he would
still be, as Mr. Gardiner says, 'the man who had more genius than all
the Privy Council put together.' But he would not be to us all the
embodiment of the spirit of England in the great age of Elizabeth, the
foremost man of his time, the figure which takes the same place in the
field of action which Shakespeare takes in that of imagination and Bacon
in that of thought. For this something more was needed, the long torture
of imprisonment, the final crown of judicial martyrdom. The slow tragedy
closing on Tower Hill is the necessary complement to his greatness.
All this it is easy to see, but it is more difficult to understand what
circumstances brought about a condition of things in which such a
tragedy became possible. We must realise that Raleigh was a man of
severe speech and reserved manner, not easily moved to be gracious,
constantly reproving the sluggish by his rapidity, and galling the dull
by his wit. All through his career we find him hard to get on with,
proud to his inferiors, still more crabbed to those above him. If policy
required that he should use the arts of a diplomatist, he overplayed his
part, and stung his rivals to the quick by an obsequiousness in speech
to which his eyes and shoulders gave the lie. With all his wealth and
influence, he missed the crowning points of his ambition; he never sat
in the House of Peers, he never pushed his way to the council board, he
never held quite the highest rank in any naval expedition, he never
ruled with only the Queen above him even in Ireland. He who of all men
hated most and deserved least to be an underling, was forced to play the
subordinate all through the most brilliant part of his variegated life
of adventure. It was only for a moment, at Cadiz or Fayal, that by a
doubtful breach of prerogative he struggled to the surface, to sink
again directly the achievement was accomplished. This soured and would
probably have paralysed him, but for the noble stimulant of misfortune;
and to the temper which this continued disappointment produced, we must
look for the cause of his unpopularity.
It is difficult, as we have said, to understand how it was that he had
the opportunity to become unpopular. From one of his latest letters in
Elizabeth's reign we gather that the tavern-keepers throughout the
country considered Raleigh at fault for a tax which was really insisted
on by the Queen's rapacity. He prays Cecil to induce Elizabeth to remit
it, for, he says, 'I cannot live, nor show my face out of my doors,
without it, nor dare ride through the towns where these taverners
dwell.' This is the only passage which I can find in his published
correspondence which accounts in any degree for the fact that we
presently find Raleigh beyond question the best-hated man in
England.[8]
CHAPTER VII.
THE TRIAL AT WINCHESTER.
Raleigh was in the west when the Queen died, and he had no opportunity
of making the rush for the north which emptied London of its nobility in
the beginning of April. King James had reached Burghley before Raleigh,
in company with his old comrade Sir Robert Crosse, met him on his
southward journey. It was necessary that he should ask the new monarch
for a continuation of his appointments in Devon and Cornwall; his posts
at Court he had probably made up his mind to lose. One of the blank
forms which the King had sent up to be signed by Cecil, nominally
excusing the recipient from coming to meet James, had been sent to
Raleigh, and this was of evil omen. The King received him ungraciously,
and Raleigh did not make the situation better by explaining the cause of
his disobedience. James, it is said, admitted in a blunt pun that he had
been prejudiced against the late Queen's favourite; 'on my soul, man,'
he said, 'I have heard but _rawly_ of thee.' Raleigh was promised
letters of continuance for the Stannaries, but was warned to take no
measures with regard to the woods and parks of the Duchy of Cornwall
until further orders. After the first rough greeting, James was fairly
civil, but on April 25 privately desired Sir Thomas Lake to settle
Raleigh's business speedily, and send him off.
In the first week of May, Sir Walter Raleigh was informed by the Council
that the King had chosen Sir Thomas Erskine to be Captain of the Guard.
It was the most natural thing in the world that James should select an
old friend and a Scotchman for this confidential post, and Raleigh, as
the Council Book records, 'in a very humble manner did submit himself.'
To show that no injury to his fortunes was intended, the King was
pleased to remit the tax of 300_l._ a year which Elizabeth had charged
on Raleigh's salary as Governor of Jersey. There does not seem to be any
evidence that Raleigh was led into any imprudent action by all these
changes. Mr. Gardiner appears to put some faith in a despatch of
Beaumont's to Villeroi, on May 2, according to which Raleigh was in such
a rage at the loss of one of his offices, that he rushed into the King's
presence, and poured out accusations of treason against Cecil. I cannot
but disbelieve this story; the evidence all goes to prove that he still
regarded Cecil, among the crowd of his enemies, as at least half his
friend. On May 13, Cecil was raised to the peerage, as a sign of royal
favour.
Lady Raleigh had always regretted the carelessness with which her
husband expended money upon Durham House, his town mansion, without ever
securing a proper lease of it. Her prognostications of evil were soon
fulfilled. James I. was hardly safe on his throne before the Bishop of
Durham demanded the restitution of the ancient town palace of his see.
On May 31, 1603, a royal warrant announced that Durham House was to be
restored to the Bishop--'the said dwellers in it having no right to the
same'--and Sir Walter Raleigh was warned to give quiet possession of the
house to such as the Bishop might appoint. Raleigh, much incommoded at
so sudden notice to quit, begged to be allowed to stay until Michaelmas.
The Bishop considered this very unreasonable, and would grant him no
later date than June 23. In this dilemma Raleigh appealed to the Lords
Commissioners, saying that he had spent 2,000_l._ on the house, and that
'the poorest artificer in London hath a quarter's warning given him by
his landlord.' It is interesting to us, as giving us a notion of
Raleigh's customary retinue, that he says he has already laid in
provision for his London household of forty persons and nearly twenty
horses. 'Now to cast out my hay and oats into the streets at an hour's
warning,' for the Bishop wanted to occupy the stables at once, 'and to
remove my family and stuff in fourteen days after, is such a severe
expulsion as hath not been offered to any man before this day.' What
became of his chattels, and what lodging he found for his family, is
uncertain; he gained no civility by his appeal. That he was disturbed by
the Bishop, and busily engaged in changing houses all through June, is
not unimportant in connection with the accusation, at the trial, that he
had spent so much of this month plotting with Cobham and Aremberg at
Durham House.
It was plain that he was not judicious in his behaviour to James. At all
times he had been an advocate of war rather than peace, even when peace
was obviously needful. Spain, too, was written upon his heart, as Calais
had been on Mary's, and even at this untoward juncture he must needs
thrust his enmity on unwilling ears. It is hardly conceivable that he
should not know that James was deeply involved with promises to the
Catholics; and though the King had said, in the face of his welcome to
England, that he should not need them now, he had no intention of
exasperating them. As to Spain, the King was simply waiting for
overtures from Madrid. Raleigh, who was never a politician, saw nothing
of all this, and merely used every opportunity he had of gaining the
King's ear to urge his distasteful projects of a war. On the last
occasion when, so far as we know, Raleigh had an interview with James,
they were both the guests of Raleigh's uncle, Sir Nicholas Carew, at
Bedingfield Park. It would seem that he had already placed in the royal
hands the manuscript of his _Discourse touching War with Spain, and of
the Protecting of the Netherlands_, and he offered to raise two thousand
men at his own expense, and to lead them in person against Spain. James
I. must have found this persistence, especially from a man against whom
he had formed a prejudice, exceedingly galling. No doubt, too, long
familiarity with Queen Elizabeth in the decline of her powers, had given
Raleigh a manner in approaching royalty which was not to James's liking.
In July the King's Catholic troubles reached a head. Watson's plot,
involving Copley and the young Lord Grey de Wilton, occupied the Privy
Council during that month, and it was discovered that George Brooke, a
younger brother of Lord Cobham's, was concerned in it. The Brookes, it
will be remembered, were the brothers-in-law of Cecil himself, but by
this time completely estranged from him. It is more interesting to us
to note that Cobham himself was the only intimate friend left to
Raleigh. With extraordinary rapidity Raleigh himself was drawn into the
net of Watson's misdoings. Copley was arrested on the 6th, and first
examined on July 12. He incriminated George Brooke, who was arrested on
the 14th. Cobham, who was busy on his duties as Lord Warden of the
Cinque Ports, was brought up for examination on the 15th or 16th; and on
the 17th,[9] Sir Walter Raleigh, who, it is said, had given information
regarding Cobham, was himself arrested at Windsor.
Raleigh was walking to and fro on the great terrace at Windsor on the
morning of July 17, 1603, waiting to ride with the King, when Cecil came
to him and requested his presence in the Council Chamber. What happened
there is unknown, but it is plain amid the chaos of conflicting
testimony that Cecil argued that what George Brooke knew Cobham must
know, and that Raleigh was privy to all Cobham's designs. What form the
accusation finally took, we shall presently see. When it was over
Raleigh wrote a letter to the Council, in which he made certain random
statements with regard to offers made to Cobham about June 9 by a
certain attendant of Count Aremberg, the ambassador of the Archduke
Albert. From the windows of Durham House he had seen, he said, Cobham's
boat cross over to the Austrian's lodgings in St. Saviour's. He probably
felt himself forced to state this from finding that the Council already
knew something of Cobham's relations with Aremberg. Still, in the light
of later events, the writing of this letter may seem to us a grave
mistake. It was instantly shown, on the very next day, to Cobham, and
doctored in such a way as to make the latter suppose that Raleigh had
gratuitously betrayed him.
On the day that Raleigh was arrested, July 17, George Brooke said in
examination that 'the conspirators among themselves thought Sir Walter
Raleigh a fit man to be of the action.' This did not amount to much, but
Brooke soon became more copious and protested a fuller tale day by day.
Nothing, however, that could touch Raleigh was obtained from any witness
until, on the 20th, Lord Cobham, who had been thoroughly frightened by
daily cross-examination, was shown the letter, or part of the letter,
from Raleigh to Cecil to which reference has just been made. He then
broke out with, 'O traitor! O villain! now will I tell you all the
truth!' and proceeded at once to say that 'he had never entered into
those courses but by Raleigh's instigation, and that he would never let
him alone!' This accusation he entirely retracted nine days later, in
consequence of some expostulation from Raleigh which had found its way
from one prisoner to the other, for Raleigh was by this time safe in the
Tower of London.
It is most probable that he was taken thither on July 18, immediately
after his arrest. On the 20th, after Cobham's formal accusation, he was
evidently more strictly confined, and it must have been immediately
after receiving news of this charge that he attempted to commit suicide.
He would be told of Cobham's words, in all likelihood, on the morning of
the 21st; he would write the letter to his wife after meditating on the
results of his position, and then would follow the scene that Cecil
describes in a letter dated fifteen days later:
Although lodged and attended as well as in his own house, yet
one afternoon, while divers of us were in the Tower, examining
these prisoners, Sir Walter Raleigh attempted to have murdered
himself. Whereof when we were advertised, we came to him, and
found him in some agony, seeming to be unable to endure his
misfortunes, and protesting innocency, with carelessness of
life. In that way, he had wounded himself under the right pap,
but no way mortally.
There is no reason whatever for supposing that this was not a genuine
attempt at suicide. We can have no difficulty in entering into the mood
of Raleigh's mind. Roused to fresh energy by misfortune, his brain and
will had of late once more become active, and he was planning adventures
by land and sea. If James did oust him from his posts about the Court in
favour of leal Scotchmen, Raleigh would brace himself by some fresh
expedition against Cadiz, some new settlement of Virginia or Guiana. In
the midst of such schemes, the blow of his unexpected arrest would come
upon him out of the blue. He could bear poverty, neglect, hardships,
even death itself; but imprisonment, with a disgraceful execution as the
only end of it, that he was not at first prepared to endure. He had
tasted captivity in the Tower once before; he knew the intolerable
tedium and fret of it; and the very prospect maddened him. Nor would his
thoughts be only or mainly of himself. He would reflect that if he were
once condemned, nothing but financial ruin and social obloquy would
attend his wife and children; and this it was which inspired the
passionate and pathetic letter which he addressed to Lady Raleigh just
before he stabbed himself. This letter seems to close the real life of
Raleigh. He was to breathe, indeed, for fifteen years more, but only in
a sort of living death. He begins thus distractedly:
Receive from thy unfortunate husband these his last lines: these
the last words that ever thou shalt receive from him. That I can
live never to see thee and my child more! I cannot! I have
desired God and disputed with my reason, but nature and
compassion hath the victory. That I can live to think how you
are both left a spoil to my enemies, and that my name shall be a
dishonour to my child! I cannot! I cannot endure the memory
thereof. Unfortunate woman, unfortunate child, comfort
yourselves, trust God, and be contented with your poor estate. I
would have bettered it, if I had enjoyed a few years.
He goes on to tell his wife that she is still young, and should marry
again; and then falls into a tumult of distress over his own accusation.
Presently he grows calmer, after a wild denunciation of Cobham, and bids
his wife forgive, as he does:
Live humble, for thou hast but a time also. God forgive my Lord
Harry [Howard], for he was my heavy enemy. And for my Lord
Cecil, I thought he would never forsake me in extremity. I would
not have done it him, God knows. But do not thou know it, for he
must be master of thy child, and may have compassion of him. Be
not dismayed, that I died in despair of God's mercies. Strive
not to dispute, but assure thyself that God has not left me, nor
Satan tempted me. Hope and despair live not together. I know it
is forbidden to destroy ourselves, but I trust it is forbidden
in this sort--that we destroy not ourselves despairing of God's
mercy.
After an impassioned prayer, he speaks of his estate. His debts, he
confesses, are many, and as the latest of them he mentions what he owes
to an expedition to Virginia then on the return voyage, the expedition
in which Cecil had a share. Then his shame and anger break out again:
What will my poor servants think, at their return, when they
hear I am accused to be Spanish who sent them, at my great
charge, to plant and discover upon his territory! O intolerable
infamy! O God! I cannot resist these thoughts. I cannot live to
think how I am divided, to think of the expectation of my
enemies, the scorns I shall receive, the cruel words of lawyers,
the infamous taunts and despites, to be made a wonder and a
spectacle!... I commend unto you my poor brother Adrian Gilbert.
The lease of Sandridge is his, and none of mine. Let him have
it, for God's cause. He knows what is due to me upon it. And be
good to Keymis, for he is a perfect honest man, and hath much
wrong for my sake. For the rest I commend me to thee, and thee
to God, and the Lord knows my sorrow to part from thee and my
poor child. But part I must.... I bless my poor child; and let
him know his father was no traitor. Be bold of my innocence, for
God--to whom I offer life and soul--knows it.... And the Lord
for ever keep thee, and give thee comfort in both worlds.
There are few documents of the period more affecting than this, but he
suffered no return of this mood. The pain of his wound and the weakness
it produced quieted him at first, and then hope began to take the place
of this agony of despair. Meanwhile his treason was taken for granted,
and he was stripped of his appointments. He had been forced to resign
the Wardenship of the Stannaries to Sir Francis Godolphin, and the wine
patent was given to the Earl of Nottingham, who behaved with scant
courtesy to his old friend and comrade. Sir John Peyton, after guarding
Raleigh for ten days at the Tower, was released from the post of
Lieutenant, and was given the Governorship of Jersey, of which Raleigh
was deprived. On the next day, August 1, Sir George Harvey took Peyton's
place as Lieutenant of the Tower, the last report from the outgoing
officer being that 'Sir Walter Raleigh's hurt is doing very well.' It
was evidently not at all severe, for on the 4th he was pronounced cured,
'both in body and mind.' On the 3rd, De Beaumont, the French ambassador,
had written confidentially to Henry IV. that Raleigh gave out that this
attempt at suicide 'was formed in order that his fate might not serve as
a triumph to his enemies, whose power to put him to death, despite his
innocence, he well knows.'
On August 10 there had still been made no definite accusation linking
Raleigh or even Cobham with Watson's plot. All that could be said was
that Raleigh and Cobham were intimate with the plotters, and that they
had mutually accused each other, vaguely, of entering into certain
possibly treasonable negotiations with Austria. On that day De Beaumont
was inclined to think that both would be acquitted. It does not seem
that James was anxious to push matters to an extremity; but the
Government, instigated by Suffolk, insisted on severity. On August 13,
Raleigh was again examined in the Tower, and this time more rigorously.
A distinct statement was now gained from him, to the effect that Cobham
had offered him 10,000 crowns to further a peace between Spain and
England; Raleigh had answered, '"When I see the money I will make you an
answer," for I thought it one of his ordinary idle conceits.' He
insisted, however, that this conversation had nothing to do with
Aremberg. All through the month of September the plague was raging in
London. In spite of all precautions, it found its way into the outlying
posts of the Tower. Sir George Harvey sent away his family, and Wood,
who was in special charge of the State prisoners, abandoned them to the
Lieutenant. On September 7 we find Harvey sending Raleigh's private
letters by a man of the name of Mellersh, who had been Cobham's steward
and was now his secretary. Raleigh and Cobham had become convinced that,
whatever was their innocence or guilt, it was absolutely necessary that
each should have some idea what the other was confessing.
On September 21, Raleigh, Cobham, and George Brooke were indicted at
Staines. The indictment shows us for the first time what the Government
had determined to accuse Raleigh of plotting. It is plainly put that he
is charged with 'exciting rebellion against the King, and raising one
Arabella Stuart to the Crown of England.' Without going into vexed
questions of the claim of this unhappy woman, we may remind ourselves
that Arabella Stuart was James I.'s first cousin, the daughter of
Charles Stuart, fifth Earl of Lennox, Darnley's elder brother. Her
father had died in 1576, soon after her birth. About 1588 she had come
up to London to be presented to Elizabeth, and on that occasion had
amused Raleigh with her gay accomplishments. The legal quibble on which
her claim was founded was the fact that she was born in England, whereas
James as a Scotchman was supposed to be excluded. Arabella was no
pretender; her descent from Margaret, the sister of Henry VIII., was
complete, and if James had died childless and she had survived him, it
is difficult to see how her claim could have been avoided in favour of
the Suffolk line. Meantime she had no real claim, and no party in the
country. But Elizabeth, in one of her fantastic moods, had presented
Arabella to the wife of a French ambassador, as 'she that will sometime
be Lady Mistress here, even as I am.' Before the Queen's death
Arabella's very name had become hateful to her, but this was the slender
ground upon which Cobham's, but scarcely Raleigh's, hopes were based.
The jury was well packed with adverse names. The precept is signed by
Raleigh's old and bitter enemy, Lord Howard of Bindon, now Earl of
Suffolk. The trial, probably on account of the terror caused by the
ravages of the plague, was adjourned for nearly two months, which
Raleigh spent in the Tower. Almost the only remnant of all his great
wealth which was not by this time forfeited, was his cluster of estates
at Sherborne. He attempted to tie these up to his son, and his brother,
Adrian Gilbert, and Cecil appears to have been a friend to Lady Raleigh
in this matter. It was so generally taken for granted that Raleigh would
be condemned, that no mock modesty prevented the King's Scotch
favourites from asking for his estates. In October Cecil informed Sir
James Elphinstone that he was at least the twelfth person who had
already applied for the gift of Sherborne. Fortunately Raleigh, as late
as the summer of 1602, had desired the judge, Sir John Doddridge, to
draw up a conveyance of Sherborne to his son, and then to his brother,
with a rent-charge of 200_l._ a year for life to Lady Raleigh. For the
present Cecil firmly refused to allow anyone to tamper with this
conveyance, and Sherborne was the raft upon which the Raleighs sailed
through the worst tempest of the trial. Cecil undoubtedly retained a
certain tenderness towards his old friend Lady Raleigh, and for her
sake, rather than her husband's, he extended a sort of protection to
them in their misfortune. She appealed to him in touching language to
'pity the name of your ancient friend on his poor little creature, which
may live to honour you, that we may all lift up our hands and hearts in
prayer for you and yours. If you truly knew, you would pity your poor
unfortunate friend, which relieth wholly on your honourable and wonted
favour.' Cecil listened, and almost relented.
At first Cobham was not confined in the Tower, and before he came there
Raleigh was advised by some of his friends to try to communicate with
him. According to Raleigh's account, he wrote first of all, 'You or I
must go to trial. If I first, then your accusation is the only evidence
against me.' Cobham's reply was not satisfactory, and Raleigh wrote
again, and Cobham then sent what Raleigh thought 'a very good letter.'
The person who undertook to carry on this secret correspondence was no
other than young Sir John Peyton, whom James had just knighted, the son
of the late Lieutenant of the Tower. Sir George Harvey seems to have
suspected, without wishing to be disagreeable, for Raleigh had to hint
to Cobham that the Lieutenant might be blamed if it were discovered that
letters were passing. Cobham shifted from hour to hour, and changed
colour like a moral chameleon; Raleigh could not depend on him, nor even
influence him. Meanwhile Cobham was transferred to the Tower, and now
communication between the prisoners seemed almost impossible. However,
the servant who was waiting upon Raleigh, a man named Cotterell,
undertook to speak to Cobham, and desired him to leave his window in the
Wardrobe Tower ajar on a certain night. Raleigh had prepared a letter,
entreating Cobham to clear him at all costs. This letter Cotterell tied
round an apple, and at eight o'clock at night threw it dexterously into
Cobham's room; half an hour afterwards a second letter, of still more
complete retractation, was pushed by Cobham under his door. This Raleigh
hid in his pocket and showed to no one.
Thus October passed, and during these ten weeks the popular fury against
the accused had arisen to a tumultuous pitch. On November 5, Sir W. Waad
was instructed to bring Raleigh out of the Tower, and prepare him for
his trial. As has been said, the plague was in London, and the prisoner
was therefore taken down to Winchester, to be tried in Wolvesey Castle.
So terrible was the popular hatred of Raleigh, that the conveyance of
him was attended with difficulty, and had to be constantly delayed. 'It
was hob or nob whether he should have been brought alive through such
multitudes of unruly people as did exclaim against him;' and to escape
Lynch law a whole week had to be given to the transit. 'The fury and
tumult of the people was so great' that Waad had to set watches, and
hasten his prisoner by a stage at a time, when the mob was not expecting
him. The wretched people seemed to forget all about the plague for the
moment, so eager were they to tear Raleigh to pieces. When he had
reached Winchester, it was thought well to wait five days more, to give
the popular fury time to quiet down a little. A Court of King's Bench
was fitted up in the castle, an old Episcopal palace, not well suited
for that purpose.
On Thursday, November 17, 1603, Raleigh's trial began. In the centre of
the upper part of the court, under a canopy of brocade, sat the Lord
Chief Justice of England, Popham, and on either side of him, as special
commissioners, Cecil, Waad, the Earls of Suffolk and Devonshire, with
the judges, Anderson, Gawdy, and Warburton, and other persons of
distinction. Opposite Popham sat the Attorney-General, Sir Edward Coke,
who conducted the trial. It was actually opened, however, by Hale, the
Serjeant, who attempted, as soon as Raleigh had pleaded 'not guilty' to
the indictment, to raise an unseemly laugh by saying that Lady Arabella
'hath no more title to the Crown than I have, which, before God, I
utterly renounce.' Raleigh was noticed to smile at this, and we can
imagine that his irony would be roused by such buffoonery on an occasion
so serious. There was no more jesting of this kind, but the whole trial
has remained a type of what was uncouth and undesirable in the conduct
of criminal trials through the beginning of the seventeenth century. The
nation so rapidly increased in sensitiveness and in a perception of
legal decency, that one of the very judges who conducted Raleigh's
trial, Gawdy, lived to look back upon it with horror, and to say, when
he himself lay upon his death-bed, that such a mode of procedure
'injured and degraded the justice of England.'
When Hale had ceased his fooling, Coke began in earnest. He was a man a
little older than Raleigh, and of a conceited and violent nature, owing
not a little of his exaggerated reputation to the dread that he
inspired. He was never more rude and brutal than in his treatment of Sir
Walter Raleigh upon this famous occasion, and even in a court packed
with enemies, in which the proud poet and navigator might glance round
without meeting one look more friendly than that in the cold eyes of
Cecil, the needless insolence of Coke went too far, and caused a
revulsion in Raleigh's favour. Coke began by praising the clemency of
the King, who had forbidden the use of torture, and proceeded to charge
Sir Walter Raleigh with what he called 'treason of the Main,' to
distinguish it from that of George Brooke and his fellows, which was 'of
the Bye.' He described this latter, and tried to point out that the
former was closely cognate to it. In order to mask the difficulty, nay,
the impossibility, of doing this successfully on the evidence which he
possessed, he wandered off into a long and wordy disquisition on
treasonable plots in general, ending abruptly with that of Edmund de la
Pole. Then, for the first time, Coke faced the chief difficulty of the
Government, namely, that there was but one witness against Raleigh. He
did not allow, as indeed he could not be expected to do, that Cobham had
shifted like a Reuben, and was now adhering, for the moment, to an
eighth several confession of what he and Raleigh had actually done or
meant to do. It was enough for Coke to insist that Cobham's evidence,
that is to say, whichever of the eight conflicting statements suited the
prosecution best, was as valuable, in a case of this kind, as 'the
inquest of twelve men.'
Having thus, as he thought, shut Raleigh's mouth with regard to this one
great difficulty, he continued to declaim against 'those traitors,'
obstinately persisting in mixing up Raleigh's 'Main' with the 'Bye,' in
spite of the distinction which he himself had drawn. Raleigh appealed
against this once or twice, and at last showed signs of impatience. Coke
then suddenly turned upon him, and cried out, 'To whom, Sir Walter, did
you bear malice? To the royal children?' In the altercation that
followed, Coke lost his temper in earnest, and allowed himself to call
Raleigh 'a monster with an English face, but a Spanish heart.' He then
proceeded to state what the accusation of Sir Walter really amounted to,
and in the midst of the inexplicable chaos of this whole affair it may
be well to stand for a moment on this scrap of solid ground. Coke's
words were:
You would have stirred England and Scotland both. You incited
the Lord Cobham, as soon as Count Aremberg came into England, to
go to him. The night he went, you supped with the Lord Cobham,
and he brought you after supper to Durham House; and then the
same night by a back-way went with La Renzi to Count Aremberg,
and got from him a promise for the money. After this it was
arranged that the Lord Cobham should go to Spain and return by
Jersey, where you were to meet him about the distribution of the
money; because Cobham had not so much policy or wickedness as
you. Your intent was to set up the Lady Arabella as a titular
Queen, and to depose our present rightful King, the lineal
descendant of Edward IV. You pretend that this money was to
forward the Peace with Spain. Your jargon was 'peace,' which
meant Spanish invasion and Scottish subversion.
This was plain language, at least; this was the case for the
prosecution, stripped of all pedantic juggling; and Raleigh now drew
himself together to confute these charges as best he might. 'Let me
answer,' he said; 'it concerns my life;' and from this point onwards, as
Mr. Edwards remarks, the trial becomes a long and impassioned dialogue.
Coke refused to let Raleigh speak, and in this was supported by Popham,
a very old man, who owed his position in that court more to his age than
his talents, and who was solicitous to be on friendly terms with the
Attorney. Coke then proceeded to argue that Raleigh's relations with
Cobham had been notoriously so intimate that there was nothing
surprising or improbable in the accusation that he shared his guilt. He
then nimbly went on to expatiate with regard to the circumstances of
Cobham's treason, and was deft enough to bring these forward in such a
way as to leave on the mind of his hearers the impression that these
were things proved against Raleigh. To this practice, which deserved the
very phrases which Coke used against the prisoner's dealings, 'devilish
and machiavelian policy,' Raleigh protested again and again that he
ought not to be subjected, until Coke lost his temper once more, and
cried, 'I _thou_ thee, thou traitor, and I will prove thee the rankest
traitor in all England.' A sort of hubbub now ensued, and the Lord Chief
Justice again interfered to silence Raleigh, with a poor show of
impartiality.
Coke, however, had well nigh exhausted the slender stock of evidence
with which he had started. For a few minutes longer he tried by sheer
bluster to conceal the poverty of the case, and last of all he handed
one of Cobham's confessions to the Clerk of the Crown to be read in
court. It entered into no particulars, which Cobham said their lordships
must not expect from him, for he was so confounded that he had lost his
memory, but it vaguely asserted that he would never have entered into
'these courses' but for Raleigh's instigation. The reading being over,
Coke at last sat down. Raleigh began to address the jury, very quietly
at first. He pointed out that this solitary accusation, by the most
wavering of mortals, uttered in a moment of anger, was absolutely all
the evidence that could be brought against him. He admitted that he
suspected Cobham of secret communications with Count Aremberg, but he
declared that he knew no details, and that whatever he discovered, Cecil
also was privy to. He had hitherto spoken softly; he now suddenly raised
his voice, and electrified the court by turning upon Sir Edward Coke,
and pouring forth the eloquent and indignant protest which must now be
given in his own words.
Master Attorney, whether to favour or to disable my Lord Cobham
you speak as you will of him, yet he is not such a babe as you
make him. He hath dispositions of such violence, which his best
friends could never temper. But it is very strange that I, at
this time, should be thought to plot with the Lord Cobham,
knowing him a man that hath neither love nor following; and,
myself, at this time having resigned a place of my best command
in an office I had in Cornwall. I was not so bare of sense but I
saw that, if ever this State was strong, it was now that we have
the Kingdom of Scotland united, whence we were wont to fear all
our troubles--Ireland quieted, where our forces were wont to be
divided--Denmark assured, whom before we were always wont to
have in jealousy--the Low Countries our nearest neighbour. And,
instead of a Lady whom time had surprised, we had now an active
King, who would be present at his own businesses. For me, at
this time, to make myself a Robin Hood, a Wat Tyler [in the
inadvertence of the moment he seems to have said 'a Tom Tailor,'
by mistake], a Kett, or a Jack Cade! I was not so mad! I knew
the state of Spain well, his weakness, his poorness, his
humbleness at this time. I knew that six times we had repulsed
his forces--thrice in Ireland, thrice at sea, once upon our
coast and twice upon his own. Thrice had I served against him
myself at sea--wherein, for my country's sake, I had expended of
my own property forty thousand marks. I knew that where
beforetime he was wont to have forty great sails, at the least,
in his ports, now he hath not past six or seven. And for sending
to his Indies, he was driven to have strange vessels, a thing
contrary to the institutions of his ancestors, who straitly
forbade that, even in case of necessity, they should make their
necessity known to strangers. I knew that of twenty-five
millions which he had from the Indies, he had scarce any left.
Nay, I knew his poorness to be such at this time that the
Jesuits, his imps, begged at his church doors; his pride so
abated that, notwithstanding his former high terms, he was
become glad to congratulate his Majesty, and to send creeping
unto him for peace.
In these fiery words the audience was reminded of the consistent hatred
which Raleigh had always shown to Spain, and of the services which he
himself, now a prisoner at the bar, had performed for the liberties of
England. The sympathies of the spectators began to be moved; those who
had execrated Raleigh most felt that they had been deceived, and that so
noble an Englishman, however indiscreet he might have been, could not by
any possibility have intrigued with the worst enemies of England.
But the prisoner had more to do than to rouse the irresponsible part of
his audience by his patriotic eloquence. The countenances of his judges
remained as cold to him as ever, and he turned to the serious business
of his defence. His quick intelligence saw that the telling point in
Coke's diatribe had been the emphasis he had laid on Raleigh's intimate
friendship with Cobham. He began to try and explain away this intimacy,
stating what we now know was not exactly true, namely that his
'privateness' with Cobham only concerned business, in which the latter
sought to make use of his experience. He dwelt on Cobham's wealth, and
argued that so rich a man would not venture to conspire. All this part
of the defence seems to me injudicious. Raleigh was on safer ground in
making another sudden appeal to the sentiment of the court: 'As for my
knowing that he had conspired all these things against Spain, for
Arabella, and against the King, I protest before Almighty God I am as
clear as whosoever here is freest.'
After a futile discussion as to the value of Cobham's evidence, the
foreman of the jury asked a plain question: 'I desire to understand the
time of Sir Walter Raleigh's first letter, and of the Lord Cobham's
accusation.' Upon this Cecil spoke for the first time, spinning out a
long and completely unintelligible sentence which was to serve the
foreman as an answer. Before the jury could recover from their
bewilderment, this extraordinary trial, which proceeded like an
Adventure in Wonderland, was begun once more by Coke, who started afresh
with voluble denunciation of the defendant, for whom, he said, it would
have been better 'to have stayed in Guiana than to be so well acquainted
with the state of Spain.' Coke was still pouring out a torrent of mere
abuse, when Raleigh suddenly interrupted him, and addressing the judges,
claimed that Cobham should then and there be brought face to face with
him. Since he had been in the Tower he had been studying the law, and he
brought forward statutes of Edwards III. and IV. to support his
contention that he could not be convicted on Cobham's bare accusation.
The long speech he made at this point was a masterpiece of persuasive
eloquence, and it is worth noting that Dudley Carleton, who was in
court, wrote to a friend that though when the trial began he would have
gone a hundred miles to see Raleigh hanged, when it had reached this
stage he would have gone a thousand to save his life.
The judges, however, and Popham in particular, were not so moved, and
Raleigh's objection to the evidence of Cobham was overruled. Coke was so
far influenced by it that he now attempted to show that there was other
proof against the prisoner, and tried, very awkwardly, to make the
confessions of Watson and George Brooke in the 'Bye' tell against
Raleigh in the 'Main.' Raleigh's unlucky statement, made at Windsor, to
the effect that Cobham had offered him 10,000 crowns, and an examination
in which Raleigh's friend Captain Keymis admitted a private interview
between Cobham and Raleigh during Count Aremberg's stay in London, were
then read. In the discussion on these documents the court and the
prisoner fell to actual wrangling; in the buzz of voices it was hard to
tell what was said, until a certain impression was at last made by Coke,
who screamed out that Raleigh 'had a Spanish heart and was a spider of
hell.' This produced a lull, and thereupon followed an irrelevant
dispute as to whether or no Raleigh had once had in his possession a
book containing treasonable allusions to the claims of the King of
Scotland. Raleigh admitted the possession of this volume, and said that
Cecil gave him leave to take it out of Lord Burghley's library. He added
that no book was published towards the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign
that did not pass through his hands. It would be interesting to know
whether he meant that he exercised a private censorship of the press, or
that he bought everything that appeared. At all events, the point was
allowed to drop.
Raleigh now gave his attention to the evidence which Keymis had given
under threat of the rack. That this torture had been threatened, in
express disobedience to the King's order, staggered some of the
commissioners, and covered Sir William Waad with confusion. The
eliciting of this fact seems to have brought over to Raleigh's side the
most valuable and unexpected help, for, in the discussion that ensued,
Cecil suddenly pleaded that Raleigh should be allowed fair play. The
Attorney then brought forward the case of Arabella Stuart, and a fresh
sensation was presented to the audience, who, after listening to Cecil,
were suddenly thrilled to hear a voice at the back of the court shout,
'The Lady doth here protest, upon her salvation, that she never dealt in
any of these things.' It was the voice of the Earl of Nottingham, who
had entered unperceived, and who was standing there with Arabella Stuart
on his arm. Their apparition was no surprise to the judges; it had been
carefully prearranged.
The trial dragged on with irrelevant production of evidence by Coke,
occasional bullying by the Lord Chief Justice, and repeated appeals for
fairness from Cecil, who cautiously said that 'but for his fault,' he
was still Raleigh's friend. Posterity has laughed at one piece of the
Attorney's evidence:
There is one Dyer, a pilot, that being in Lisbon met with a
Portugal gentleman, which asked him if the King of England was
crowned yet. To whom he answered, 'I think not yet, but he shall
be shortly.' 'Nay,' said the Portugal, 'that shall he never be,
for his throat will be cut by Don Raleigh and Don Cobham before
he be crowned.'
A prosecution that calls for evidence such as this has simply broken
down. The whole report of the trial is so puerile, that it can only be
understood by bearing in mind that, as Mr. Gardiner says, the Government
were in possession of a good deal of evidence which they could not
produce in court. The King wished to spare Arabella, and to accept
Aremberg's protestations with the courtesy due to an ambassador. It was
therefore impossible to bring forward a letter which Cecil possessed
from Cobham to Arabella, and two from Aremberg to Cobham. The difficulty
was not to prove Cobham's guilt, however, but to connect Raleigh closely
enough with Cobham, and this Coke went on labouring to do. At last he
laid a trap for Raleigh. He induced him to argue on the subject, and
then Coke triumphantly drew from his pocket a long letter Cobham had
written to the commissioners the day before, a letter in which Cobham
disclosed all the secret correspondence Raleigh had had with him since
his imprisonment, and even the picturesque story of the letter that was
bound round the apple and thrown into Cobham's window in the Tower.
At the production of this document, Sir Walter Raleigh fairly lost his
self-possession. He had no idea that any of these facts were in the
hands of the Government. His bewilderment and dejection soon, however,
left him sufficiently for him to recollect the other letter of Cobham's
which he possessed. He drew it from his pocket, and, Cobham's writing
being very bad, he could not, from his agitation, read it; Coke desired
that it should not be produced, but Cecil interposed once more, and
volunteered to read it aloud. This letter was Raleigh's last effort. He
said, when Cecil had finished, 'Now, my masters, you have heard both.
That showed against me is but a voluntary confession. This is under
oath, and the deepest protestations a Christian man can make. Therefore
believe which of these hath more force.' The jury then retired; and in a
quarter of an hour returned with the verdict 'Guilty.' Raleigh had, in
fact, confessed that Cobham had mentioned the plot to him, though
nothing would induce him to admit that he had asked Cobham for a sum of
money, or consented to take any active part. Still this was enough; and
in the face of his unfortunate prevarication about the interview with
Renzi, the jury could hardly act otherwise. For a summing up of both
sides of the vexed question what shadow of truth there was in the
general accusation, the reader may be recommended to Mr. Gardiner's
brilliant pages.
Raleigh had defended himself with great courage and intelligence, and
the crowd in court were by no means in sympathy with the brutal and
violent address in which Popham gave judgment. On the very day on which
Raleigh was condemned, there began that reaction in his favour which has
been proceeding ever since. When the Lord Chief Justice called the noble
prisoner a traitor and an atheist, the bystanders, who after all were
Englishmen, though they had met prepared to tear Raleigh limb from limb,
could bear it no longer, and they hissed the judge, as a little before
they had hooted Coke. To complete the strangeness of this strange trial,
when sentence had been passed, Raleigh advanced quickly up the court,
unprevented, and spoke to Cecil and one or two other commissioners,
asking, as a favour, that the King would permit Cobham to die first.
Before he was secured by the officers, he had found time for this last
protest: 'Cobham is a false and cowardly accuser. He can face neither me
nor death without acknowledging his falsehood.' He was then led away to
gaol.
For a month Raleigh was retained at Winchester. He found a friend,
almost the only one who dared to speak for him, in Lady Pembroke, the
saintly sister of Sir Philip Sidney, who showed _veteris vestigia
flammæ_, the embers of the old love Raleigh had met with from her
brother's family, and sent her son, Lord Pembroke, to the King. She did
little good, and Raleigh did still less by a letter he now wrote to
James, the first personal appeal he had made to his Majesty. It was a
humble entreaty for life, begging the King to listen to the charitable
advice which the English law, 'knowing her own cruelty, doth give to her
superior,' to be pitiful more than just. This letter has been thought
obsequious and unmanly; but it abates no jot of the author's
asseverations that he was innocent of all offence, and, surely, in the
very face of death a man may be excused for writing humbly to a despot.
Lady Raleigh, meanwhile, was clinging about the knees of Cecil, whose
demeanour during the trial had given her fresh hopes. But neither the
King nor Cecil gave any sign, and in the gathering reaction in favour of
Raleigh remained apparently firm for punishment. The whole body of the
accused were by this time convicted, Watson and all his companions on
the 16th, Raleigh on the 17th, Cobham and Gray on the 18th. On the 29th
Watson and Clarke, the other priest, were executed. Next day, the
Spanish ambassador pleaded for Raleigh's life, but was repulsed. The
King desired the clergy who attended the surviving prisoners to prepare
them rigorously for death, and the Bishop of Winchester gave Raleigh no
hope. On December 6, George Brooke was executed. And now James seems to
have thought that enough blood had been spilt. He would find out the
truth by collecting dying confessions from culprits who, after all,
should not die.
The next week was occupied with the performance of the curious burlesque
which James had invented. The day after George Brooke was beheaded, the
King drew up a warrant to the Sheriff of Hampshire for stay of all the
other executions. With this document in his bosom, he signed
death-warrants for Markham, Gray, and Cobham to be beheaded on the 10th,
and Raleigh on the 13th. The King told nobody of his intention, except a
Scotch boy, John Gibb, who was his page at the moment. On December 10,
at ten o'clock in the morning, Sir Walter Raleigh was desired to come to
the window of his cell in Wolvesey Castle. The night before, he had
written an affecting letter of farewell to his wife, and--such, at
least, is my personal conviction from the internal evidence--the most
extraordinary and most brilliant of his poems, _The Pilgrimage_. By this
time he was sorry that he had bemeaned himself in his first paroxysm of
despair, and he entreated Lady Raleigh to try to get back the letters in
which he sued for his life, 'for,' he said, 'I disdain myself for
begging it.' He went on:
Know it, dear wife, that your son is the child of a true man,
and who, in his own respect, despiseth Death, and all his
misshapen and ugly forms. I cannot write much. God knows how
hardly I stole this time, when all sleep; and it is time to
separate my thoughts from the world. Beg my dead body, which
living was denied you; and either lay it at Sherborne, if the
land continue [yours], or in Exeter Church, by my father and
mother. I can write no more. Time and Death call me away.
From his window overlooking the Castle Green, Raleigh saw Markham, a
very monument of melancholy, led through the steady rain to the
scaffold. He saw the Sheriff presently called away, but could not see
the Scotch lad who called him, who was Gibb riding in with the reprieve.
He could see Markham standing before the block, he could see the
Sheriff return, speak in a low voice to Markham, and lead him away into
Arthur's Hall and lock him up there. He could then see Grey led out, he
could see his face light up with a gleam of hope, as he stealthily
stirred the wet straw with his foot and perceived there was no blood
there. He could see, though he could not hear, Grey's lips move in the
prayer in which he made his protestation of innocence, and as he stood
ready at the block, he could see the Sheriff speak to him also, and lead
him away, and lock him up with Markham in Arthur's Hall. Then Raleigh,
wondering more and more, so violently curious that the crowd below
noticed his eager expression, could see Cobham brought out, weeping and
muttering, in a lamentable disorder; he could see him praying, and when
the prayer was over, he could see the Sheriff leave him to stand alone,
trembling, on the scaffold, while he went to fetch Grey and Markham from
their prison. Then he could see the trio, with an odd expression of hope
in their faces, stand side by side a moment, to be harangued by the
Sheriff, and then suddenly on his bewildered ears rang out the plaudits
of the assembled crowd, all Winchester clapping its hands because the
King had mercifully saved the lives of the prisoners. And still the
steady rain kept falling as the Castle Green grew empty, and Raleigh at
his window was left alone with his bewilderment. He was very soon told
that he also was spared, and on December 16, 1603, he was taken back to
the Tower of London. Such was James's curious but not altogether inhuman
sketch for a burlesque.
CHAPTER VIII.
IN THE TOWER.
It is no longer possible for us to follow the personal life of Raleigh
as we have hitherto been doing, step by step. In the deep monotony of
confinement, twelve years passed over him without leaving any marks of
months or days upon his chronicle of patience. A hopeless prisoner
ceases to take any interest in the passage of time, and Raleigh's few
letters from the Tower are almost all of them undated. His comfort had
its vicissitudes; he was now tormented, now indulged. A whisper from the
outer world would now give him back a gleam of hope, now a harsh answer
would complete again the darkness of his hopelessness. He was vexed with
ill-health, and yet from the age of fifty-one to that of sixty-three the
inherent vigour of his constitution, and his invincible desire to live,
were unabated. From all his pains and sorrows he took refuge, as so many
have done before him, in the one unfailing Nepenthe, the consolatory
self-forgetfulness of literature. It was in the Tower that the main bulk
of his voluminous writings were produced.
He was confined in the upper story of what was called the Garden Tower,
now the Bloody Tower, and not, as is so often said, in the White Tower,
so that the little cell with a dim arched light, the Chapel Crypt off
Queen Elizabeth's Armoury, which used to be pointed out to visitors as
the dungeon in which Raleigh wrote _The History of the World_, never, in
all probability, heard the sound of his footsteps. It is a myth that he
was confined at all in such a dungeon as this. According to Mr. Loftie,
his apartments were those immediately above the principal gate to the
Inner Ward, and had, besides a window looking westward out of the Tower,
an entrance to themselves at a higher level, the level of the
Lieutenant's and Constable's lodgings. They probably opened directly
into a garden which has since been partly built over.
Raleigh was comfortably lodged; it was Sir William Waad's complaint that
the rooms were too spacious. Lady Raleigh and her son shared them with
him for a considerable time, and Sir Walter was never without three
personal servants. He was poor, in comparison with his former opulent
estate, but he was never in want. Sherborne just sufficed for six years
to supply such needs as presented themselves to a prisoner. His personal
expenses in the Tower slightly exceeded 200_l._, or 1,000_l._ of our
money; there was left a narrow margin for Lady Raleigh. The months of
January and February 1604 were spent in trying to make the best terms
possible for his wife and son. In a letter to the Lords of the Council,
Raleigh mentions that he has lost 3,000_l._ (or 15,000_l._ in Victorian
money) a year by being deprived of his five main sources of income,
namely the Governorship of Jersey, the Patent of the Wine Office, the
Wardenship of the Stannaries, the Rangership of Gillingham Forest, and
the Lieutenancy of Portland Castle. He besought that he might not be
reduced to utter beggary, and he did his best to retain the Duchy of
Cornwall and his estates at Sherborne. The former, as he might have
supposed, could not be left in the charge of a prisoner. It was given to
a friend, to the Earl of Pembroke, and Raleigh showed a dangerous
obstinacy in refusing to give up the Seal of the Duchy direct to the
Earl; he was presently induced to resign it into Cecil's hands, and then
nothing but Sherborne remained. His debts were 3,000_l._ His rich
collections of plate and tapestry had been confiscated or stolen. If the
King permitted Sherborne also to be taken, it would be impossible to
meet the exorbitant charges of the Lieutenant, and under these
circumstances it is only too probable that Raleigh might have been
obliged to crouch in the traditional dungeon ten feet by eight feet. The
retention of Sherborne, then, meant comfort and the status of a
gentleman. It is therefore of the highest interest to us to see what had
become of Sherborne.
We have seen that up to the date of the trial Cecil held at bay the
Scottish jackals who went prowling round the rich Dorsetshire manor; and
when the trial was over, Cecil, as Lady Raleigh said, 'hath been our
only comfort in our lamentable misfortune.' As soon as Raleigh was
condemned, commissioners hastened down to Sherborne and began to prepare
the division of the prize. They sold the cattle, and began to root up
the copses. They made considerable progress in dismantling the house
itself. Raleigh appealed to the Lords of the Council, and Cecil sent
down two trustees, who, in February 1604, put a sudden stop to all this
havoc, and sent the commissioners about their business. Of the latter,
one was the infamous Meeres, Raleigh's former bailiff, and this fact was
particularly galling to Raleigh. On July 30 in the same year, Sherborne
Castle and the surrounding manors were conveyed to Sir Alexander Brett
and others in trust for Lady Raleigh and her son Walter, Sir Walter
nominally forfeiting the life interest in the estates which he had
reserved to himself in the conveyance of 1602. On the moneys collected
by these trustees Lady Raleigh supported herself and her husband also.
She was not turned out of the castle at first. Twice at least in 1605 we
find her there, on the second occasion causing all the armour to be
scoured. Some persons afterwards considered that this act was connected
with Gunpowder Plot, others maintained that it was merely due to the
fact that the armour was rusty. The great point is that she was still
mistress of Sherborne. Lord Justice Popham, however, as early as 1604,
pronounced Raleigh's act of conveyance invalid, and in 1608 negotiations
began for a 'purchase,' or rather a confiscation of Sherborne to the
King. To this we shall presently return. In the meanwhile Captain Keymis
acted as warden of Sherborne Castle.
As soon as the warm weather closed in, in the summer of 1604, the
malaria in the Tower began to affect Raleigh's health. As he tells
Cecil, now Lord Cranborne, in a most dolorous letter, he was withering
in body and mind. The plague had come close to him, his son having lain
a fortnight with only a paper wall between him and a woman whose child
was dying of that terrible complaint. Lady Raleigh, at last, had been
able to bear the terror of infection no longer, and had departed with
little Walter. Raleigh thereupon, in a fit of extreme dejection,
'presumed to tell their Lordships of his miserable estate, daily in
danger of death by the palsy, nightly of suffocation by wasted and
obstructed lungs.' He entreated to be removed to more wholesome
lodgings. His prayer was not answered. Earlier in the year he had indeed
enjoyed a short excursion from the Tower. At Easter the King had come to
attend a bull-baiting on Tower Hill, and Raleigh was hastily removed to
the Fleet prison beforehand, lest the etiquette of such occasions should
oblige James, against his inclination, to give obnoxious prisoners their
liberty. Raleigh was one of five persons so hurried to the Fleet on
March 25: on the next day the King came, and 'caused all the prisons of
the Tower to be opened, and all the persons then within them to be
released.' After the bull-baiting was over, the excepted prisoners were
quietly brought back again. This little change was all the variety that
Raleigh enjoyed until he left for Guiana in 1617.
When it transpired in 1605 that through, as it appears, the negligence
of the copying clerk, the conveyance by which Raleigh thought that he
had secured Sherborne to his son was null and void, he had to suffer
from a vindictive attack from his wife herself. She, poor woman, had now
for nearly two years bustled hither and thither, intriguing in not
always the most judicious manner for her family, but never resting,
never leaving a stone unturned which might lead to their restitution.
The sudden discovery that the lawyers had found a flaw in the conveyance
was more than her overstrung nerves could endure, and in a fit of temper
she attacked her husband, and rushed about the town denouncing him.
Raleigh, in deepest depression of mind and body, wrote to Cecil, who had
now taken another upward step in the hierarchy of James's protean House
of Lords, and who was Earl of Salisbury henceforward:
Of the true cause of my importunities, one is, that I am every
second or third night in danger either of sudden death, or of
the loss of my limbs or sense, being sometimes two hours without
feeling or motion of my hand and whole arm. I complain not of
it. I know it vain, for there is none that hath compassion
thereof. The other, that I shall be made more than weary of my
life by her crying and bewailing, who will return in post when
she hears of your Lordship's departure, and nothing done. She
hath already brought her eldest son in one hand, and her sucking
child [Carew Raleigh, born in the winter of 1604] in another,
crying out of her and their destruction; charging me with
unnatural negligence, and that having provided for my own life,
I am without sense and compassion of theirs. These torments,
added to my desolate life--receiving nothing but torments, and
where I should look for some comfort, together with the
consideration of my cruel destiny, my days and times worn out in
trouble and imprisonment--is sufficient either utterly to
distract me, or to make me curse the time that ever I was born
into the world, and had a being.
Things were not commonly in so bad a way as this, we may be sure.
Raleigh, who did nothing by halves, was not accustomed to underrate his
own misfortunes. His health was uncertain, indeed, and it was still
worse in 1606; but his condition otherwise was not so deplorable as this
letter would tend to prove. Poor Lady Raleigh soon recovered her
equanimity, and the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir George Harvey,
indulged Raleigh in a variety of ways. He frequently invited him to his
table; and finding that the prisoner was engaged in various chemical
experiments, he lent him his private garden to set up his still in. In
one of Raleigh's few letters of this period, we get a delightful little
vignette. Raleigh is busy working in the garden, and, the pale being
down, the charming young Lady Effingham, his old friend Nottingham's
daughter, strolls by along the terrace on the arm of the Countess of
Beaumont. The ladies lean over the paling, and watch the picturesque old
magician poring over his crucibles, his face lighted up with the flames
from his furnace. They fall a chatting with him, and Lady Effingham
coaxes him to spare her a little of that famous balsam which he brought
back from Guiana. He tells her that he has none prepared, but that he
will send her some by their common friend Captain Whitlock, and
presently he does so. A captivity which admitted such communications
with the outer world as this, could not but have had its alleviations.
The letter quoted on the last page evidently belongs to the summer of
1605, when, for a few months, Raleigh was undoubtedly in great
discomfort. On August 15, Sir George Harvey was succeeded by Sir William
Waad, who had shown Raleigh great severity before his trial. He,
however, although not well disposed, shrank from actually ill-treating
his noble prisoner. He hinted to Lord Salisbury that he wanted the
garden for his own use, and that he thought the paling an insufficient
barrier between Raleigh and the world. Meanwhile Salisbury did not take
the hint, and the brick wall Waad wished built up was not begun. Waad
evidently looked upon the chemical experiments with suspicion. 'Sir
Walter Raleigh,' he wrote, 'hath converted a little hen-house in the
garden into a still, where he doth spend his time all the day in his
distillations.' Some of the remedies which the prisoner invented became
exceedingly popular. His 'lesser cordial' of strawberry water was
extensively used by ladies, and his 'great cordial,' which was
understand to contain 'whatever is most choice and sovereign in the
animal, vegetable, and mineral world,' continued to be a favourite
panacea until the close of the century.
When, in November, Gunpowder Plot was discovered, Sir Walter Raleigh was
for a moment suspected. No evidence was found inculpating him in the
slightest degree; but his life was, for the moment at least, made
distinctly harder. When he returned from examination, the wall which
Waad had desired to put between the prisoner and the public was in
course of construction. When finished it was not very formidable, for
Waad complains that Raleigh was in the habit of standing upon it, in the
sight of passers-by. The increased confinement in the spring of 1606
brought his ill-health to a climax. He thought he was about to suffer an
apoplectic seizure, and he was allowed to take medical advice. The
doctor's certificate, dated March 26, 1606, is still in existence; it
describes his paralytic symptoms, and recommends that Sir Walter Raleigh
should be removed from the cold lodging which he was occupying to the
'little room he hath built in the garden, and joining his still-house,'
which would be warmer. This seems to have been done, and Raleigh's
health improved.
During the year 1606 various attempts were made to persuade the King to
release Raleigh, but in vain. The Queen had made his acquaintance, and
had become his friend, and there was a general hope that when her
father, the King of Denmark, came over to see James in the summer, he
would plead for Raleigh. There is reason to believe that if he had done
so with success, he would have invited Raleigh to return with him, and
to become Admiral of the Danish fleet. But matters never got so far as
this. James I. had an inkling of what was coming, and he took an early
opportunity of saying to Christian IV., 'Promise me that you will be no
man's solicitor.' In spite of this, before he left England, Christian
did ask for Raleigh's pardon, and was refused. When he had left England,
and all hope was over, in September, Lady Raleigh made her way to
Hampton Court, and, pushing her way into the King's presence, fell on
her knees at his feet. James went by, and neither spoke nor looked at
her. It must have been about this time, or a little later, that Queen
Anne brought her unfortunate eldest son Henry to visit Raleigh at the
Tower. Prince Henry, born in 1594, was now only twelve years of age. His
intimacy with Sir Walter Raleigh belongs rather to the years 1610 to
1612.
In February 1607, Raleigh was exposed to some annoyance from Edward
Cotterell, the servant who in 1603 had carried his injudicious
correspondence with Lord Cobham to and fro. This man had remained in
Lady Raleigh's service, and attended on her in her little house,
opposite her husband's rooms, on Tower Hill. He professed to be able to
give evidence against his master, but in examination before the Lord
Chief Justice nothing intelligible could be extracted from him. About
the same time we find Raleigh, encouraged, it would appear, by the
Queen, proposing to Lord Salisbury that he should be allowed to go to
Guiana on an expedition for gold. It is pathetic to read the earnest
phrases in which he tries to wheedle out of the cold Minister permission
to set out westward once more across the ocean that he loved so much. He
offers, lest he should be looked upon as a runagate, to leave his wife
and children behind him as hostages; and the Queen and Lord Salisbury
may have the treasure he brings back, if only he may go. He pleads how
rich the land is, and how no one knows the way to it as he does. We seem
to hear the very accents of another weary King of the Sea:
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world;
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars until I die.
Such was Raleigh's purpose; but it was not that of James and of
Salisbury. On the contrary, he was kept a faster prisoner. In July 1607,
fresh regulations came into force in the Tower, by which at 5 P.M.
Raleigh and his servants had to retire to their own apartments, and Lady
Raleigh go back to her house, nor were guests any longer to be admitted
in the evening. Lady Raleigh had particularly offended Sir William Waad
by driving into the Tower in her coach. She was informed that she must
do so no more. It was probably these long quiet evenings which specially
predisposed Raleigh to literary composition. He borrowed books, mainly
of an historical character, in all directions. A letter to Sir Robert
Cotton is extant in which he desires the loan of no less than thirteen
obscure and bulky historians, and we may imagine his silent evenings
spent in poring over the precious manuscripts of the _Annals of
Tewkesbury_ and the _Chronicle of Evesham_. In this year young Walter
Raleigh, now fourteen years of age, proceeded to Oxford, and
matriculated at Corpus on October 30, 1607. His tutors were a certain
Hooker, and the brilliant young theologian, Dr. Daniel Featley,
afterwards to be famous as a controversial divine. Throughout the year
1608, Raleigh, buried in his _History_, makes no sign to us.
Early in 1609, the uncertain tenure of Sherborne, which had vexed
Raleigh so much that he declared himself ready to part with the estate
in exchange for the pleasure of never hearing of it again, once more
came definitely before the notice of the Government. A proposition had
been made to Raleigh to sell his right in it to the King, but he had
refused; he said that it belonged to his wife and child, and that 'those
that never had a fee-simple could not grant a fee-simple.' About
Christmas 1608 Lady Raleigh brought the matter up again, and leading her
sons by the hand she appeared in the Presence Chamber, and besought
James to give them a new conveyance, with no flaw in it. But the King
had determined to seize Sherborne, and he told her, 'I maun hae the
lond, I maun hae it for Carr.' It is said that, losing all patience,
Elizabeth Raleigh started to her feet, and implored God to punish this
robbery of her household. Sir Walter was more politic, and on January
2, 1609, he wrote a letter to the favourite, imploring him not to covet
Sherborne. It is to be regretted that Raleigh, whose opinion of James's
minions was not on private occasions concealed, should write to Carr of
all people in England as 'one whom I know not, but by an honourable
fame;' and that the eloquence of his appeal should be thrown away on
such a recipient. 'For yourself, Sir,' he says, 'seeing your day is but
now in the dawn, and mine come to the evening, your own virtues and the
King's grace assuring you of many good fortunes and much honour, I
beseech you not to begin your first building upon the ruins of the
innocent; and that their griefs and sorrows do not attend your first
plantation.' Carr, of course, took no notice whatever, and on the 10th
of the same month the estates at Sherborne were bestowed on him. At
Prince Henry's request the King presently purchased them back again, and
gave them to his son, who soon after died. Mr. Edwards has discovered
that Sherborne passed through eight successive changes of ownership
before 1617. To Lady Raleigh and her children the King gave 8,000_l._ as
purchase-money of the life security in Sherborne. The interest on this
sum was very irregularly paid, and the Guiana voyage in 1617 swallowed
up most of the principal. Thus the vast and princely fortune of Raleigh
melted away like a drift of snow.
In the summer of 1611, Raleigh came into collision with Lord Salisbury
and Lord Northampton on some matter at present obscure. Northampton
writes: 'We had afterwards a bout with Sir Walter Raleigh, in whom we
find no change, but the same blindness, pride, and passion that
heretofore hath wrought more violently, but never expressed itself in a
stranger fashion.' In consequence of their interview with Raleigh and
other prisoners, the Lords recommended that 'the lawless liberty' of the
Tower should no longer be allowed to cocker and foster exorbitant hopes
in the braver sort of captives. Raleigh was immediately placed under
closer restraint, not even being allowed to take his customary walk with
his keeper up the hill within the Tower. His private garden and gallery
were taken from him, and his wife was almost entirely excluded from his
company. The final months of Salisbury's life were unfavourable to
Raleigh, and there was no quickening of the old friendship at the last.
When Lord Salisbury died on May 24, 1612, Raleigh wrote this epigram:
Here lies Hobinall our pastor whilere,
That once in a quarter our fleeces did sheer;
To please us, his cur he kept under clog,
And was ever after both shepherd and dog;
For oblation to Pan, his custom was thus,
He first gave a trifle, then offered up us;
And through his false worship such power he did gain,
As kept him on the mountain, and us on the plain.
When these lines were shown to James I. he said he hoped that the man
who wrote them would die before he did.
The death of Salisbury encouraged Raleigh once more. His intimacy with
the generous and promising Prince of Wales had quickened his hopes.
During the last months of his life, Henry continually appealed to
Raleigh for advice. The Prince was exceedingly interested in all matters
of navigation and shipbuilding, and there exists a letter to him from
Raleigh giving him elaborate counsel on the building of a man-of-war,
from which we may learn that in the opinion of that practised hand six
things were chiefly required in a well-conditioned ship of the period:
'1, that she be strong built; 2, swift in sail; 3, stout-sided; 4, that
her ports be so laid, as she may carry out her guns all weathers; 5,
that she hull and try well; 6, that she stay well, when boarding or
turning on a wind is required.' Secure in the interest of the Prince of
Wales, and hoping to persuade the Queen to be an adventurer, Raleigh
seized the opportunity of the death of Salisbury to communicate his
plans for an expedition to Guiana to the Lords of the Council. He
thought he had induced them to promise that Captain Keymis should go,
and that if so much as half a ton of gold was brought back, that should
buy Raleigh his liberty. But the negotiations fell through, and Keymis
stayed at home.
In September 1612, Raleigh was writing the second of his _Marriage
Discourses_, that dealing with the prospects of his best and youngest
friend. A month later that friend fell a victim to his extreme rashness
in the neglect of his health. The illness of the Prince of Wales filled
the whole of England with dismay, and when, on November 6, he sank under
the attack of typhoid fever, it was felt to be a national misfortune. On
the very morning of his death the Queen sent to Raleigh for his famous
cordial, and it was forwarded, with the message that if it was not
poison that the Prince was dying of, it must save him. The Queen herself
believed that Raleigh's cordial had once saved her life; on the other
hand, in the preceding August his medicines were vulgarly supposed to
have hastened the death of Sir Philip Sidney's daughter, the Countess of
Rutland. The cordial soothed the Prince's last agony, and that was all.
Henry had with great difficulty obtained from his father the promise
that, as a personal favour to himself, Raleigh should be set at liberty
at Christmas 1612. He died six weeks too soon, and the King contrived to
forget his promise. The feeling of the Prince of Wales towards Raleigh
was expressed in a phrase that was often repeated, 'No man but my father
would keep such a bird in a cage.'
We learn from Izaak Walton that Ben Jonson was recommended to Raleigh
while he was in the Tower, by Camden. That he helped him in obtaining
and arranging material for the _History of the World_ is certain. In
1613 young Walter Raleigh, having returned to London, and having, in the
month of April, killed his man in a duel, went abroad under the charge
of Jonson. They took letters for Prince Maurice of Nassau, and they
proceeded to Paris, but we know no more. It was probably before they
started that young Walter wheeled the corpulent poet of the _Alchemist_
into his father's presence in a barrow, Ben Jonson being utterly
overwhelmed with a beaker of that famed canary that he loved too well.
Jonson, on his return from abroad, seems to have superintended the
publication of the _History of the World_ in 1614. A fine copy of
verses, printed opposite the frontispiece of that volume, was reprinted
among the pieces called _Underwoods_ in the 1641 folio of Ben Jonson's
_Works_. These lines have, therefore, ever since been attributed to that
poet, but, as it appears to me, rashly. In the first place, this volume
was posthumous; in the second, for no less than twenty-three years Ben
Jonson allowed the verses to appear as Raleigh's without protest; in the
third, where they differ from the earlier version it is always to their
poetical disadvantage. They were found, as the editor of 1641 says,
amongst Jonson's papers, and I would suggest, as a new hypothesis, that
the less polished draft in the _Underwoods_ is entirely Raleigh's,
having been copied by Jonson verbatim when he was preparing the _History
of the World_ for the press, and that the improved expressions in the
latter were adopted by Raleigh on suggestion from the superior judgment
of Jonson. The character of the verse is peculiarly that of Raleigh.
It was in 1607, as I have conjectured, that Raleigh first began
seriously to collect and arrange materials for the _History of the
World_; in 1614 he presented the first and only volume of this gigantic
enterprise to the public. It was a folio of 1,354 pages, printed very
closely, and if reprinted now would fill about thirty-five such volumes
as are devised for an ordinary modern novel. Yet it brought the history
of the world no lower down than the conquest of Macedon by Rome, and it
is hard to conceive how soon, at this rate of production, Raleigh would
have reached his own generation. He is said to have anticipated that his
book would need to consist of not less than four such folios. In the
opening lines he expresses some consciousness of the fact that it was
late in life for him, a prisoner of State condemned to death at the
King's pleasure, to undertake so vast a literary adventure. 'Had it been
begotten,' he confesses, 'with my first dawn of day, when the light of
common knowledge began to open itself to my younger years, and before
any wound received either from fortune or time, I might yet well have
doubted that the darkness of age and death would have covered over both
it and me, long before the performance.' It is greatly to be desired
that Raleigh could have been as well advised as his contemporary and
possible friend, the Huguenot poet-soldier, Agrippa d'Aubigné, who at
the close of a chequered career also prepared a _Histoire Universelle_,
in which he simply told the story of his own political party in France
through those stormy years in which he himself had been an actor. We
would gladly exchange all these chronicles of Semiramis and Jehoshaphat
for a plain statement of what Raleigh witnessed in the England of
Elizabeth.
The student of Raleigh does not, therefore, rise from an examination of
his author's chief contribution to literature without a severe sense of
disappointment. The book is brilliant almost without a rival in its best
passages, but these are comparatively few, and they are divided from one
another by tracts of pathless desert. The narrative sometimes descends
into a mere slough of barbarous names, a marish of fabulous genealogy,
in which the lightest attention must take wings to be supported at all.
For instance, the geographical and historical account of the Ten Tribes
occupies a space equivalent to a modern octavo volume of at least four
hundred pages, through which, if the conscientious reader would pass
'treading the crude consistence' of the matter, 'behoves him now both
sail and oar.' It is not fair to dwell upon the eminent beauties of the
_History of the World_ without at the same time acknowledging that the
book almost wilfully deprives itself of legitimate value and true human
interest by the remoteness of the period which it describes, and by the
tiresome pedantry of its method. It is leisurely to the last excess. The
first chapter, of seven long sections, takes us but to the close of the
Creation. We cannot proceed without knowing what it is that Tostatus
affirms of the empyrean heavens, and whether, with Strabo, we may dare
assume that they are filled with angels. To hasten onwards would be
impossible, so long as one of the errors of Steuchius Eugubinus remains
unconfuted; and even then it is well to pause until we know the opinions
of Orpheus and Zoroaster on the matter in hand. One whole chapter of
four sections is dedicated to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil,
and the arguments of Goropius Becanus are minutely tested and found
wanting. Goropius Becanus, whom Raleigh is never tired of shaking
between his critical teeth, was a learned Jesuit of Antwerp, who proved
that Adam and Eve spoke Dutch in Paradise. It is not until he reaches
the Patriarchs that it begins to occur to the historian that at his
present rate of progress it will need forty folio volumes, and not four,
to complete his labours. From this point he hastens a little, as the
compilers of encyclopædias do when they have passed the letter B.
With all this, the _History of the World_ is a charming and delightful
miscellany, if we do not accept it too seriously. Often for a score of
pages there will be something brilliant, something memorable on every
leaf, and there is not a chapter, however arid, without its fine things
somewhere. It is impossible to tell where Raleigh's pen will take fire.
He is most exquisite and fanciful where his subject is most unhopeful,
and, on the other hand, he is likely to disappoint us where we take for
granted that he will be fine. For example, the series of sections on the
Terrestrial Paradise are singularly crabbed and dusty in their display
of Rabbinical pedantry, and the little touch in praise of Guiana is
almost the only one that redeems the general dryness. It is not mirth,
or beauty, or luxury that fires the historian, but death. Of mortality
he has always some rich sententious thing to say, praising 'the
workmanship of death, that finishes the sorrowful business of a wretched
life.' So the most celebrated passages of the whole book, and perhaps
the finest, are the address to God which opens the _History_, and the
prose hymn in praise of death which closes it. The entire absence of
humour is characteristic, and adds to the difficulty of reading the book
straight on. The story of Periander's burning the clothes of the women
closes with a jest; there is, perhaps, no other occasion on which the
solemn historian is detected with a smile upon his lips.
By far the most interesting and readable, part of the _History of the
World_ is its preface. This is a book in itself, and one in which the
author condescends to a lively human interest. We cheerfully pass from
Elihu the Buzite, and the conjectures of Adricomius respecting the
family of Ram, to the actualities of English and Continental history in
the generation immediately preceding that in which Raleigh was writing.
When we consider the position in which the author stood towards James I.
and turn to the pages of his Preface, we refuse to believe that it was
without design that he expressed himself in language so extraordinary.
It would have been mere levity for a friendless prisoner, ready for the
block, to publish this terrible arraignment of the crimes of tyrant
kings, unless he had some reason for believing that he could shelter
himself successfully under a powerful sympathy. This sympathy, in the
case of Sir Walter Raleigh, could be none other than that of Prince
Henry; and it may well have been in the summer of 1612, when, as we
know, he was particularly intimate with the Prince and busied in his
affairs, that he wrote the Preface. With long isolation from the world,
he had lost touch of public affairs, as _The Prerogative of Parliament_
would alone be sufficient to show. It is probable that he exaggerated
the influence of the young Prince, and estimated too highly the promise
of liberty which he had wrung from his father.
It took James some time to discover that this grave Rabbinical
miscellany, inspired by Siracides and Goropius Becanus, was not
wholesome reading for his subjects. On January 5, 1615, after the book
had been selling slowly, the King gave an order commanding the
suppression of the remainder of the edition, giving as his reason that
'it is too saucy in censuring the acts of kings.' It is said that some
favoured person at Court pushed inquiry further, and extracted from
James the explanation that the censure of Henry VIII. was the real cause
of the suppression. Contemporary anecdote, however, has reported that
the defamation of the Tudors in the Preface to the _History of the
World_ might have passed without reproof, if the King had not discovered
in the very body of the book several passages so ambiguously worded that
he could not but suspect the writer of intentional satire. According to
this story, he was startled at Raleigh's account of Naboth's Vineyard,
and scandalised at the description of the impeachment of the Admiral of
France; but what finally drew him up, and made him decide that the book
must perish, was the character of King Ninias, son of Queen Semiramis.
This passage, then, may serve us as an example of the _History of the
World_:
Ninus being the first whom the madness of boundless dominion
transported, invaded his neighbour princes, and became
victorious over them; a man violent, insolent, and cruel.
Semiramis taking the opportunity, and being more proud,
adventurous, and ambitious than her paramour, enlarged the
Babylonian empire, and beautified many places therein with
buildings unexampled. But her son having changed nature and
condition with his mother, proved no less feminine than she was
masculine. And as wounds and wrongs, by their continual smart,
put the patient in mind how to cure the one and revenge the
other, so those kings adjoining (whose subjection and calamities
incident were but new, and therefore the more grievous) could
not sleep, when the advantage was offered by such a successor.
For _in regno Babylonico hic parum resplenduit_: 'This king
shined little,' saith Nauclerus of Ninias, 'in the Babylonian
kingdom.' And likely it is, that the necks of mortal men having
been never before galled with the yoke of foreign dominion, nor
having ever had experience of that most miserable and detested
condition of living in slavery; no long descent having as yet
invested the Assyrian with a right, nor any other title being
for him pretended than a strong hand; the foolish and effeminate
son of a tyrannous and hated mother could very ill hold so many
great princes and nations his vassals, with a power less
mastering, and a mind less industrious, than his father and
mother had used before him.
It is in passages like this, where we read the satire between the lines,
and in those occasional fragments of autobiography to which we have
already referred in the course of this narrative, that the secondary
charm of the _History of the World_ resides. It is to these that we turn
when we have exhausted our first surprise and delight at the great
bursts of poetic eloquence, the long sonorous sentences which break like
waves on the shore, when the spirit of the historian is roused by some
occasional tempest of reflection. In either case, the book is
essentially one to glean from, not to read with consecutive patience.
Real historical philosophy is absolutely wanting. The author strives to
seem impartial by introducing, in the midst of an account of the
slaughter of the Amalekites, a chapter on 'The Instauration of Civility
in Europe, and of Prometheus and Atlas;' but his general notions of
history are found to be as rude as his comparative mythology. He
scarcely attempts to sift evidence, and next to Inspiration he knows no
guide more trustworthy than Pintus or Haytonus, a Talmudic rabbi or a
Jesuit father. In the midst of his disquisitions, the reward of the
continuous reader is to come suddenly upon an unexpected 'as I myself
have seen in America,' or 'as once befell me also in Ireland.'
Another historical work, the _Breviary of the History of England_, has
been claimed for Sir Walter Raleigh. This book was first published in
1692, from a manuscript in the possession of Archbishop Sancroft, and,
as it would appear, in Raleigh's handwriting. Before its publication,
however, the Archbishop had noted that 'Samuel Daniel hath inserted into
his _History of England_ [1618], almost word for word, both the
Introduction and the Life; whence it is that you have sometimes in the
margin of my copy a various reading with "D" after it.' Daniel, a gentle
and subservient creature, was the friend of Camden, and a paid servant
of Queen Anne, during Raleigh's imprisonment. He died a few months after
Raleigh's execution. It is very likely that he was useful to Raleigh in
collecting notes and other material. It may even have been his work for
the interesting prisoner in the Tower that caused Jonson's jealous
dislike of Daniel. The younger poet's own account, as Mr. Edwards
pointed out, by no means precludes the supposition that he used material
put together by another hand. At the same time Sancroft's authority
cannot be considered final as regards Raleigh's authorship of the
_Breviary_, for the manuscript did not come into his hands until
nineteen years after Raleigh's death.
No such doubt attaches to the very curious and interesting volume
published nominally at Middelburg in 1628, and entitled _The Prerogative
of Parliament_. This takes the form of a dialogue between a Counsellor
of State and a Justice of the Peace. The dramatic propriety is but
poorly sustained, and presently the Justice becomes Raleigh, speaking in
his own person. The book was written in the summer of 1615, a few months
after the suppression of the _History of the World_, and by a curious
misconstruction of motive was intended to remove from the King's mind
the unpleasant impression caused by those parables of Ahab and of
Ninias. It had, however, as we shall see, the very opposite result. The
preface to the King expresses an almost servile desire to please: 'it
would be more dog-like than man-like to bite the stone that struck me,
to wit the borrowed authority of my sovereign misinformed.' But Raleigh
was curiously misinformed himself regarding the ways and wishes of
James. His dialogue takes for its starting-point the trial of Oliver St.
John, who had been Raleigh's fellow-prisoner in the Tower since April
for having with unreasonable brutality protested against the enforced
payment of what was called the Benevolence, a supposed free-will
offering to the purse of the King. So ignorant was Raleigh of what was
going on in England, that he fancied James to be unaware of the tricks
of his ministers; and the argument of _The Prerogative of Parliament_ is
to encourage the King to cast aside his evil counsellors, and come face
to face with his loyal people. The student of Mr. Gardiner's account of
the Benevolence will smile to think of the rage with which the King must
have received Raleigh's proffered good advice, and of Raleigh's
stupefaction at learning that his well-meant volume was forbidden to be
printed. His manuscript, prepared for the press, still remains among the
State Papers, and it was not until ten years after his death that it was
first timidly issued under the imprints of Middelburg and of Hamburg.
Not the least of Raleigh's chagrins in the Tower must have been the
composition of works which he was unable to publish. It is probable that
several of these are still unknown to the world; many were certainly
destroyed, some may still be in existence. During the thirty years which
succeeded his execution, there was a considerable demand for scraps of
Raleigh's writing on the part of men who were leaning to the Liberal
side. John Hampden was a collector of Raleigh's manuscripts, and he is
possibly the friend who bequeathed to Milton the manuscript of _The
Cabinet Council_, an important political work of Raleigh's which the
great Puritan poet gave to the world in 1658. At that time Milton had
had the treatise 'many years in my hands, and finding it lately by
chance among other books and papers, upon reading thereof I thought it a
kind of injury to withhold longer the work of so eminent an author from
the public.' _The Cabinet Council_ is a study in the manner of
Macchiavelli. It treats of the arts of empire and mysteries of
State-craft, mainly with regard to the duties of monarchy. It is
remarkable for the extraordinary richness of allusive extracts from the
Roman classics, almost every maxim being immediately followed by an apt
Latin example. At the end of the twenty-fourth chapter the author wakes
up to the tedious character of this manner of instruction, and the rest
of the book is illustrated by historical instances in the English
tongue. The book closes with an exhortation to the reader, who could be
no other than Prince Henry, to emulate the conduct of Amurath, King of
Turbay, who abandoned worldly glory to embrace a retired life of
contemplation. _The Cabinet Council_ must be regarded as a text-book of
State-craft, intended _in usum Delphini_.
Probably earlier in date, and certainly more elegant in literary form,
is the treatise entitled _A Discourse of War_. This may be recommended
to the modern reader as the most generally pleasing of Raleigh's prose
compositions, and the one in which, owing to its modest limits, the
peculiarities of his style may be most conveniently studied. The last
passage of the little book forms one of the most charming pages of the
literature of that time, and closes with a pathetic and dignified
statement of Raleigh's own attitude towards war. 'It would be an
unspeakable advantage, both to the public and private, if men would
consider that great truth, that no man is wise or safe but he that is
honest. All I have designed is peace to my country; and may England
enjoy that blessing when I shall have no more proportion in it than what
my ashes make.' There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of these
words; yet we must not forget that this pacific light was not that in
which Raleigh's character had presented itself to Robert Cecil or to
Elizabeth.
None of Raleigh's biographers have suggested any employment for his
leisure during the year which followed his release from the Tower. Yet
the expressions he used in the preface to his _Observations on Trade and
Commerce_ show that it must have been prepared during the year 1616 or
1617: 'about fourteen or fifteen years past,' that is to say in 1602, 'I
presented you,' he says to the King, 'a book of extraordinary
importance.' He complains that this earlier book was suppressed, and
hopes for better luck; but the same misfortune, as usual with Raleigh,
attended the _Observations_. That treatise was an impassioned plea,
based upon a survey of the commercial condition of the world, in favour
of free trade. Raleigh looked with grave suspicion on the various duties
which were levied, in increasing amount, on foreign goods entering this
country, and he entreated James I. to allow him to nominate
commissioners to examine into the causes of the depression of trade,
and to revise the tariffs on a liberal basis. It must have seemed to the
King that Raleigh wilfully opposed every royal scheme which he examined.
James had been a protectionist all through his reign, and at this very
moment was busy in attempting to force the native industries to flourish
in spite of foreign competition. Raleigh's treatise must have been put
into the King's hands much about the time at which his violent
protectionism was threatening to draw England into war with Holland.
Raleigh's advice seems to us wise and pointed, but to James it can only
have appeared wilfully wrong-headed. The _Observations upon Trade_
disappeared as so many of Raleigh's manuscripts had disappeared before
it, and was only first published in the _Remains_[10] of 1651.
Of the last three years of Raleigh's imprisonment in the Tower we know
scarcely anything. On September 27, 1615, a fellow-prisoner in whom
Raleigh could not fail to take an interest, Lady Arabella Stuart, died
in the Tower. In December, Raleigh was deprived, by an order in Council,
of Arabella's rich collection of pearls, but how they had come into his
possession we cannot guess. Nor can we date the stroke of apoplexy from
which Raleigh suffered about this time. But relief was now briefly
coming. Two of Raleigh's worst enemies, Northampton and Somerset, were
removed, and in their successors, Winwood and Villiers, Raleigh found
listeners more favourable to his projects. It has been said that he owed
his release to bribery, but Mr. Gardiner thinks it needless to suppose
this. Winwood was as cordial a hater of Spain as Raleigh himself; and
Villiers, in his political animus against the Somerset faction, would
need no bribery. Sir William St. John was active in bringing Raleigh's
claims before the Court, and the Queen, as ever, used what slender
influence she possessed. Urged on so many sides, James gave way, and on
January 30, 1616, signed a warrant for Raleigh's release from the Tower.
He was to live in his own house, but, with a keeper; he was not to
presume to visit the Court, or the Queen's apartments, nor go to any
public assemblies whatever, and his whole attention was to be given to
making due preparations for the intended voyage to Guiana. This warrant,
although Raleigh used it to leave his confinement, was only provisional;
and was confirmed by a minute of the Privy Council on March 19. Raleigh
took a house in Broad Street, where he spent fourteen months in discreet
retirement, and then sailed on his last voyage.
CHAPTER IX.
THE SECOND VOYAGE TO GUIANA.
Raleigh had been released from the Tower expressly on the understanding
that he should make direct preparations for a voyage to Guiana. The
object of this voyage was to enrich King James with the produce of a
mine close to the banks of the Orinoco. In the reign of Elizabeth,
Raleigh had stoutly contended that the natives of Guiana had ceded all
sovereignty in that country to England in 1595, and that English
colonists therefore had no one's leave to ask there. But times had
changed, and he now no longer pretended that he had a right to the
Orinoco; he was careful to insist that his expedition would infringe no
privileges of Spain. He was anxious by every diplomatic subtlety to
avoid failure, and for the first few months he kept extremely quiet. He
had called in the 8,000_l._ which had been lying at interest ever since
he had received it as part of the compensation for the Sherborne
estates. Lady Raleigh had raised 2,500_l._ by the sale of some lands at
Mitcham.[11] 5000_l._ more were brought together by various expedients,
some being borrowed in Amsterdam through the famous merchant, Pieter
Vanlore,' and 15,000_l._ were contributed by Raleigh's friends, who
looked upon his enterprise much as men at the present day would regard a
promising but rather hazardous investment.
His first business was to build one large ship of 440 tons in the
Thames. This he named the 'Destiny,' and he received no check in fitting
her up to his desire; the King paid 700 crowns, as the usual statutable
bounty on shipbuilding, without objection. At the same time Raleigh
built or collected six other smaller vessels, and furnished them all
with ordnance. The preparation of such a fleet in the Thames could not
pass unobserved by the representatives of the foreign courts, and during
the last six months of 1616 Raleigh's name became the centre of a tangle
of diplomatic intrigue, and one which frequently occurs in the
correspondence of Sarmiento, better known afterwards as Gondomar, the
Spanish ambassador, and in that of Des Marêts, the French ambassador.
Mr. Edwards has remarked, with complete justice, that the last two years
of Raleigh's life were simply 'a protracted death-struggle between him
and Gondomar.' The latter had been in England since 1613, and had
acquired a singular art in dealing with the purposes of James I. At the
English Court during 1616 we find Spain watching France, and Venice
watching Savoy, all of them intent on Raleigh's movements in the river.
For the unravelment of these intrigues in detail, the reader must be
referred to Mr. Gardiner's masterly pages.
On August 26, a royal commission was issued, by which Raleigh was made
the commander of an expedition to Guiana, under express orders, more
stringently expressed than usual, not to visit the dominions of any
Christian prince. This was to allay the alarm of the Spanish ambassador,
who from the first rumour of Raleigh's voyage had not ceased to declare
that its real object was piracy, and probably the capture of the Mexican
plate fleet. At the same time James I. allowed Gondomar to obtain
possession of copies of certain documents which Raleigh had drawn out at
the royal command describing his intended route, and these were at once
forwarded to Madrid, together with such information as Gondomar had been
able to glean in conversation with Raleigh. Spain instantly replied by
offering him an escort to his gold mine and back, but of course Raleigh
declined the proposition. He continued to assert that he had no
piratical intention, and that any man might peacefully enter Guiana
without asking leave of Spain.
It is doubtful whether the anecdote is true which records that Raleigh
at this time applied to Bacon to know whether the terms of his
commission were tantamount to a free pardon, and was told that they
were. But it rests on much better testimony that Bacon asked him what he
would do if the Guiana mine proved a deception. Raleigh admitted that he
would then look out for the Mexican plate fleet. 'But then you will be
pirates,' said Bacon; and Raleigh answered, 'Ah, who ever heard of men
being pirates for millions?' There was no exaggeration in this; the
Mexican fleet of that year was valued at two millions and a half. The
astute Gondomar was at least half certain that this was Raleigh's real
intention, and by October 12 he had persuaded James to give him still
more full security that no injury should be done, at the peril of
Raleigh's life, to any subject or property of the King of Spain.
The building of the 'Destiny' meanwhile proceeded, and Raleigh received
many important visitors on board her. He was protected by the cordial
favour of the Secretary, Sir Ralph Winwood; and if the King disliked him
as much as ever, no animosity was shown. In the first days of 1617,
Raleigh ventured upon a daring act of intrigue. He determined to work
upon the growing sympathy of the English Court with Savoy and its
tension with Spain, to strike a blow against the rich enemy of the one
and ally of the other, Genoa. He proposed to Scarnafissi, the Savoyard
envoy in London, that James I. should be induced to allow the Guiana
expedition to steal into the Mediterranean, and seize Genoa for Savoy.
Scarnafissi laid the proposal before James, and on January 12 it was
discussed in the presence of Winwood. There was talk of increasing
Raleigh's fleet for this purpose by the addition of a squadron of
sixteen ships from the royal navy. For a fortnight the idea was
discussed in secret; but on the 26th, Scarnafissi was told that the King
had determined not to adopt it. Four days later Raleigh was released
from the personal attendance of a keeper, and though still not pardoned,
was pronounced free. On February 10, the Venetian envoy, who had been
taken into Scarnafissi's counsel, announced to his Government that the
King had finally determined to keep Raleigh to his original intention.
Raleigh was next assailed by secret propositions from France. Through
the month of February various Frenchmen visited him on the 'Destiny,'
besides the ambassador, Des Marêts. He was nearly persuaded, in
defiance of James, to support the projected Huguenot rebellion by
capturing St. Valéry. To find out the truth regarding his intention, Des
Marêts paid at least one visit to the 'Destiny,' and on March 7 gave his
Government an account of a conversation with Raleigh, in which the
latter had spoken bitterly of James, and had asserted his affection for
France, and desire to serve her. It is in the correspondence of Des
Marêts that the names of Raleigh and Richelieu become for a moment
connected; it was in February 1617 that the future Cardinal described
his English contemporary as 'Ouastre Raly, grand marinier et mauvais
capitaine.' In March the English Government, to allay fresh
apprehensions on the part of Spain, forwarded by Gondomar most implicit
assertions that Raleigh's expedition should be in no way injurious to
Spain. And so it finally started after all, not bound for Mexico, or
Genoa, or St. Valéry, but for the Orinoco. Up to the last, Gondomar
protested, and his protestations were only put aside after a special
council of March 28. Next day Raleigh rode down to Dover to go on board
the 'Destiny,' which had left the Thames on the 26th.
His fleet of seven vessels was not well manned. His own account of the
crews is thus worded in the _Apology_: 'A company of volunteers who for
the most part had neither seen the sea nor the wars; who, some forty
gentlemen excepted, were the very scum of the world, drunkards,
blasphemers, and such others as their fathers, brothers, and friends
thought it an exceeding good gain to be discharged of, with the hazard
of some thirty, forty, or fifty pound.' He was himself Admiral, with his
son Walter as captain of the 'Destiny;' Sir William Sentleger was on
the 'Thunder;' a certain John Bailey commanded the 'Husband.' The
remaining vessels were the 'Jason,' the 'Encounter,' the 'Flying Joan,'
and the 'Page.' The master of the 'Destiny' was John Burwick, 'a
hypocritical thief.' Various tiresome delays occurred. They waited for
the 'Thunder' at the Isle of Wight; and when the rest went on to
Plymouth, the 'Jason' stayed behind ignominiously in Portsmouth because
her captain had no ready money to pay a distraining baker. The 'Husband'
was in the same plight for twelve days more. The squadron was, however,
increased by seven additional vessels, one of them commanded by Keymis,
through the enforced waiting at Plymouth, where, on May 3, Raleigh
issued his famous _Orders to the Fleet_. On June 12 the fleet sailed at
last out of Plymouth Sound.
West of Scilly they fell in with a terrific storm, which scattered the
ships in various directions. Some put back into Falmouth, but the
'Flying Joan' sank altogether, and the fly-boat was driven up the
Bristol Channel. After nearly a fortnight of anxiety and distress, the
fleet collected again in Cork Harbour, where they lay repairing and
waiting for a favourable wind for more than six weeks. From the _Lismore
Papers_, just published (Jan. 1886), we learn that Raleigh occupied this
enforced leisure in getting rid of his remaining Irish leases, and in
collecting as much money as he could. Sir Richard Boyle records that on
July 1 Raleigh came to his house, and borrowed 100_l._ On August 19 the
last _Journal_ begins, and on the 20th the fleet left Cork, Raleigh
having taken a share in a mine at Balligara on the morning of the same
day. Nothing happened until the 31st, when, being off Cape St. Vincent,
the English fleet fell in with four French vessels laden with fish and
train oil for Seville. In order that they might not give notice that
Raleigh was in those waters, where he certainly had no business to be,
he took these vessels with him a thousand leagues to the southward, and
then dismissed them with payment. His conduct towards these French boats
was suspicious, and he afterwards tried to prove that they were pirates
who had harried the Grand Canary. It was also Raleigh's contention, that
the enmity presently shown him by Captain Bailey, of the 'Husband,'
arose from Raleigh's refusal to let him make one of these French ships
his prize.
On Sunday morning, September 7, the English fleet anchored off the shore
of Lanzarote, the most easterly of the Canaries, having hitherto crept
down the coast of Africa. These Atlantic islands were particularly open
to the attacks of Algerine corsairs, and a fleet of 'Turks' had just
ravaged the towns of the Madeiras. The people of Lanzarote, waking up
one morning to find their roadstead full of strange vessels, took for
granted that these were pirates from Algiers. One English merchant
vessel was lying there at anchor, and by means of this interpreter
Raleigh endeavoured to explain his peaceful intention, but without
success. He had a meeting on shore with the governor of the island, 'our
troops staying at equal distance with us,' and was asked the pertinent
question, 'what I sought for from that miserable and barren island,
peopled in effect all with Moriscos.' Raleigh asserted that all he
wanted was fresh meat and wine for his crews, and these he offered to
pay for.
On the 11th, finding that no provisions came, and that the inhabitants
were carrying their goods up into the hills, the captains begged Raleigh
to march inland and take the town; 'but,' he says, 'besides that I knew
it would offend his Majesty, I am sure the poor English merchant should
have been ruined, whose goods he had in his hands, and the way being
mountainous and most extreme stony, I knew that I must have lost twenty
good men in taking a town not worth two groats.' The Governor of
Lanzarote continued to be in a craven state of anxiety, and would not
hear of trading. We cannot blame him, especially when we find that less
than eight months later his island was invaded by genuine Algerine
bandits, his town utterly sacked, and 900 Christians taken off into
Moslem slavery. After three Englishmen had been killed by the islanders,
yet without taking any reprisals, Raleigh sailed away from these sandy
and inhospitable shores. But in the night before he left, one of his
ships, the 'Husband,' had disappeared. Captain Bailey, who is believed
to have been in the pay of Gondomar, had hurried back to England to give
report of Raleigh's piratical attack on an island belonging to the
dominion of Spain. As the great Englishman went sailing westward through
the lustrous waters of the Canary archipelago, his doom was sealed, and
he would have felt his execution to be a certainty, had he but known
what was happening in England.
He called at Grand Canary, to complain of the Lanzarote people to the
governor-general of the islands, but, for some reason which he does not
state, did not land at the town of Palmas, but at a desert part, far
from any village, probably west of the northern extremity of the island.
The governor-general gave him no answer; but the men found a little
water, and they sailed away, leaving Teneriffe to the north. On
September 18 they put into the excellent port of the island of Gomera,
'the best,' he says, 'in all the Canaries, the town and castle standing
on the very breach of the sea, but the billows do so tumble and overfall
that it is impossible to land upon any part of the strand but by
swimming, saving in a cove under steep rocks, where they can pass
towards the town but one after the other.' Here, as at Lanzarote, they
were taken for Algerines, and the guns on the rocks began to fire at
them. Raleigh, however, immediately sent a messenger on shore to explain
that they were not come to sack their town and burn their churches, as
the Dutch had done in 1599, but that they were in great need of water.
They presently came to an agreement that the islanders should quit their
trenches round the landing-place, and that Raleigh should promise on the
faith of a Christian not to land more than thirty unarmed sailors, to
fill their casks at springs within pistol-shot of the wash of the sea,
none of these sailors being permitted to enter any house or garden.
Raleigh, therefore, sent six of his seamen, and turned his ships
broadside to the town, ready to batter it with culverin if he saw one
sign of treachery.
It turned out that when the Governor of Gomera knew who his visitors
were, he was as pleased as possible to see them. His wife's mother had
been a Stafford, and when Raleigh knew that, he sent his countrywoman a
present of six embroidered handkerchiefs and six pairs of gloves, with a
very handsome message. To this the lady rejoined that she regretted that
her barren island contained nothing worth Raleigh's acceptance, yet
sent him 'four very great loaves of sugar,' with baskets of lemons,
oranges, pomegranates, figs, and most delicate grapes. During the three
days that they rode off Gomera, the Governor and his English lady wrote
daily to Sir Walter. In return for the fruit, deeming himself much in
her debt, he sent on shore a very courteous letter, and with it two
ounces of ambergriece, an ounce of the essence of amber, a great glass
of fine rose-water, an excellent picture of Mary Magdalen, and a
cut-work ruff. Here he expected courtesies to stay, but the lady must
positively have the last word, and as the English ships were starting
her servants came on board with yet a letter, accompanying a basket of
delicate white manchett bread, more clusters of fruits, and twenty-four
fat hens. Meanwhile, in the friendliest way, the sailors had been going
to and fro, and had drawn 240 pipes of water. So cordial, indeed, was
their reception, that, as a last favour, Raleigh asked the Governor for
a letter to Sarmiento [Gondomar], which he got, setting forth 'how nobly
we had behaved ourselves, and how justly we had dealt with the
inhabitants of the islands.' Before leaving Gomera, Raleigh discharged a
native barque which one of his pinnaces had captured, and paid at the
valuation of the master for any prejudice that had been done him. On
September 21 they sailed away from the Canaries, having much sickness on
board; and that very day their first important loss occurred, in the
death of the Provost Marshal of the fleet, a man called Stead.
On the 26th they reached St. Antonio, the outermost of the Cape Verde
Islands, but did not land there. For eight wretched days they wandered
aimlessly about in this unfriendly archipelago, trying to make up their
minds to land now on Brava, now on St. Jago. Some of the ships grated on
the rocks, all lost anchors and cables; one pinnace, her crew being
asleep and no one on the watch, drove under the bowsprit of the
'Destiny,' struck her and sank. When they did effect a landing on Brava,
they were soaked by the tropical autumnal rains of early October. Men
were dying fast in all the ships. In deep dejection Raleigh gave the
order to steer away for Guiana. Meanwhile Bailey had arrived in England,
had seen Gondomar, and had openly given out that he left Raleigh because
the admiral had been guilty of piratical acts against Spain. It does not
seem that Winwood or the King took any notice of these declarations
until the end of the year.
The ocean voyage was marked by an extraordinary number of deaths, among
others that of Mr. Fowler, the principal refiner, whose presence at the
gold mine would have been of the greatest importance. On October 13,
John Talbot, who had been for eleven years Raleigh's secretary in the
Tower, passed away. The log preserved in the _Second Voyage_ is of great
interest, but we dare not allow its observations to detain us. On the
last of October, Raleigh was struck down by fever himself, and for
twenty days lay unable to eat anything more solid than a stewed prune.
He was in bed, on November 11, when they sighted Cape Orange, now the
most northerly point belonging to the Empire of Brazil. On the 14th they
anchored at the mouth of the Cayenne river, and Raleigh was carried from
his noisome cabin into his barge; the 'Destiny' got across the bar,
which was lower then than it now is, on the 17th. At Cayenne, after a
day or two, Raleigh's old servant Harry turned up; he had almost
forgotten his English in twenty-two years. Raleigh began to pick up
strength a little on pine-apples and plantains, and presently he began
to venture even upon roast peccary. He proceeded to spend the next
fortnight on the Cayenne river, refreshing his weary crews, and
repairing his vessels. An interesting letter to his wife that he sent
home from this place, which he called 'Caliana,' confirms the _Second
Voyage_, and adds some details. He says to Lady Raleigh: 'To tell you I
might be here King of the Indians were a vanity; but my name hath still
lived among them. Here they feed me with fresh meat and all that the
country yields; all offer to obey me. Commend me to poor Carew my son.'
His eldest son, Walter, it will be remembered, was with him.
In December the fleet coasted along South America westward, till on the
15th they stood under Trinidad. Meanwhile Raleigh had sent forward, by
way of Surinam and Essequibo, the expedition which was to search for the
gold mine on the Orinoco. His own health prevented his attempting this
journey, but he sent Captain Keymis as commander in his stead, and with
him was George Raleigh, the Admiral's nephew; young Walter also
accompanied the party. On New Year's Eve Raleigh landed at a village in
Trinidad, close to Port of Spain, and there he waited, on the borders of
the land of pitch, all through January 1618. On the last of that month
he returned to Punto Gallo on the mainland, being very anxious for news
from the Orinoco. The log of the _Second Voyage_ closes on February 13,
and it is supposed that it was on the evening of that day that Captain
Keymis' disastrous letter, written on January 8, reached Raleigh and
informed him of the death of his son Walter. 'To a broken mind, a sick
body, and weak eyes, it is a torment to write letters,' and we know he
felt, as he also said, that now 'all the respects of this world had
taken end in him.' Keymis had acted in keeping with what he must have
supposed to be Raleigh's private wish; he had attacked the new Spanish
settlement of San Thomé. In the fight young Walter Raleigh had been
struck down as he was shouting 'Come on, my men! This is the only mine
you will ever find.' Keymis had to announce this fact to the father, and
a few days afterwards, with only a remnant of his troop, he himself fled
in panic to the sea, believing that a Spanish army was upon him. The
whole adventure was a miserable and ignominious failure.
The meeting between Raleigh and Keymis could not fail to be an
embarrassing one. Raleigh could not but feel that all his own mistakes
and faults might have been condoned if Keymis had brought one basket of
ore from the fabulous mine, and he could not refrain from reproaching
him. He told him he 'should be forced to leave him to his arguments,
with the which if he could satisfy his Majesty and the State, I should
be glad of it, though for my part he must excuse me to justify it.'
After this first interview Keymis left him in great dejection, and a day
or two later appeared in the Admiral's cabin with a letter which he had
written to the Earl of Arundel, excusing himself. He begged Raleigh to
forgive him and to read this letter. What followed, Sir Walter must tell
in his own grave words:
I told him he had undone me by his obstinacy, and that I would
not favour or colour in any sort his former folly. He then asked
me, whether that were my resolution? I answered, that it was. He
then replied in these words, 'I know then, sir, what course to
take,' and went out of my cabin into his own, in which he was no
sooner entered than I heard a pistol go off. I sent up, not
suspecting any such thing as the killing of himself, to know who
shot a pistol. Keymis himself made answer, lying on his bed,
that he had shot it off, because it had long been charged; with
which I was satisfied. Some half-hour after this, his boy, going
into the cabin, found him dead, having a long knife thrust under
his left pap into his heart, and his pistol lying by him, with
which it appeared he had shot himself; but the bullet lighting
upon a rib, had but broken the rib, and went no further.
Such was the wretched manner in which Raleigh and his old faithful
servant parted. In his despair, the Admiral's first notion was to plunge
himself into the mazes of the Orinoco, and to find the gold mine, or die
in the search for it. But his men were mutinous; they openly declared
that in their belief no such mine existed, and that the Spaniards were
bearing down on them by land and sea. They would not go; and Raleigh,
strangely weakened and humbled, asked them if they wished him to lead
them against the Mexican plate fleet. He told them that he had a
commission from France, and that they would be pardoned in England if
they came home laden with treasure.
What exactly happened no one knows. The mutiny grew worse and worse, and
on March 21, when Raleigh wrote a long letter to prepare the mind of
Winwood, he was lying off St. Christopher's on his homeward voyage; not
knowing of course that his best English friend had already been dead
five months. Next day, he made up his mind that he dared not return to
England to face his enemies, and he wrote to tell his wife that he was
off to Newfoundland, 'where I mean to make clean my ships, and
revictual; for I have tobacco enough to pay for it.' But he was
powerless, as he confesses, to govern his crew, and no one knows how the
heartbroken old man spent the next two dreadful months. His ships slunk
back piecemeal to English havens, and on May 23, Captain North, who had
commanded the 'Chudleigh,' had audience of the King, and told him the
whole miserable story. On May 26,[12] Raleigh made his appearance, with
the 'Destiny,' in the harbour of Kinsale, and on June 21 he arrived in
Plymouth, penniless and dejected, for the first time in his life utterly
unnerved and irresolute. On June 16 he had written an apologetic letter
to the King. By some curious slip Mr. Edwards dated this letter three
months too late, and its significance has therefore been overlooked. It
is important as showing that Raleigh was eager to conciliate James.
CHAPTER X.
THE END.
Gondomar had not been idle during Raleigh's absence, but so long as
Winwood was alive he had not been able to attack the absent Admiral with
much success. As soon as Bailey brought him the news of the supposed
attack on Lanzarote, he communicated with his Government, and urged that
an embargo should be laid on the goods of the English merchant colony at
Seville. This angry despatch, the result of a vain attempt to reach
James, is dated October 22; and on October 27 the sudden death of
Winwood removed Gondomar's principal obstacle to the ruin of Raleigh. At
first, however, Bailey's story received no credence, and if, as Howel
somewhat apocryphally relates, Gondomar had been forbidden to say two
words about Raleigh in the King's presence, and therefore entered with
uplifted hands shouting 'Pirates!' till James was weary, he did not seem
to gain much ground. Moreover, while Bailey's story was being discussed,
the little English merchant vessel which had been lying in Lanzarote
during Raleigh's visit returned to London, and gave evidence which
brought Bailey to gaol in the Gate House.
On January 11, 1618, before any news had been received from Guiana, a
large gathering was held in the Council Chamber at Westminster, to try
Bailey for false accusation. The Council contained many men favourable
to Raleigh, but the Spanish ambassador brought influence to bear on the
King; and late in February, Bailey was released with a reprimand,
although he had accused Raleigh not of piracy only, but of high treason.
The news of the ill-starred attack on San Thomé reached Madrid on May 3,
and London on the 8th. This must have given exquisite pleasure to the
baffled Gondomar, and he lost no time in pressing James for revenge. He
gave the King the alternative of punishing Raleigh in England or sending
him as a prisoner to Spain. The King wavered for a month. Meanwhile
vessel after vessel brought more conclusive news of the piratical
expedition in which Keymis had failed, and Gondomar became daily more
importunate. It began to be thought that Raleigh had taken flight for
Paris.
At, last, on June 11, James I. issued a proclamation inviting all who
had a claim against Raleigh to present it to the Council. Lord
Nottingham at the same time outlawed the 'Destiny' in whatever English
port she might appear. It does not seem that the King was unduly hasty
in condemning Raleigh. He had given Spain every solemn pledge that
Raleigh should not injure Spain, and yet the Admiral's only act had been
to fall on an unsuspecting Spanish settlement; notwithstanding this,
James argued as long as he could that San Thomé lay outside the
agreement. The arrival of the 'Destiny,' however, seems to have clinched
Gondomar's arguments. Three days after Raleigh arrived in Plymouth, the
King assured Spain that 'not all those who have given security for
Raleigh can save him from the gallows.' For the particulars of the
curious intrigues of these summer months the reader must be referred,
once more, to Mr. Gardiner's dispassionate pages.
On June 21, Raleigh moored the 'Destiny' in Plymouth harbour, and sent
her sails ashore. Lady Raleigh hastened down to meet him, and they
stayed in Plymouth a fortnight. His wife and he, with Samuel King, one
of his captains, then set out for London, but were met just outside
Ashburton by Sir Lewis Stukely, a cousin of Raleigh's, now Vice-Admiral
of Devonshire. This man announced that he had the King's orders to
arrest Sir Walter Raleigh; but these were only verbal orders, and he
took his prisoner back to Plymouth to await the Council warrant. Raleigh
was lodged for nine or ten days in the house of Sir Christopher Harris,
Stukely being mainly occupied in securing the 'Destiny' and her
contents. Raleigh pretended to be ill, or was really indisposed with
anxiety and weariness. While Stukely was thinking of other things,
Raleigh commissioned Captain King to hire a barque to slip over to La
Rochelle, and one night Raleigh and King made their escape towards this
vessel in a little boat. But Raleigh probably reflected that without
money or influence he would be no safer in France than in England, and
before the boat reached the vessel, he turned back and went home. He
ordered the barque to be in readiness the next night, but although no
one watched him, he made no second effort to escape.
On July 23 the Privy Council ordered Stukely, 'all delays set apart,' to
bring the body of Sir Walter Raleigh speedily to London. Two days later,
Stukely and his prisoner started from Plymouth. A French quack, called
Mannourie, in whose chemical pretensions Raleigh had shown some
interest, was encouraged by Stukely to attend him, and to worm himself
into his confidence. As Walter and Elizabeth Raleigh passed the
beautiful Sherborne which had once been theirs, the former could not
refrain from saying, 'All this was mine, and it was taken from me
unjustly.' They travelled quickly, sleeping at Sherborne on the 26th,
and next night at Salisbury. Raleigh lost all confidence as he found
himself so hastily being taken up to London. As they went from Wilton
into Salisbury, Raleigh asked Mannourie to give him a vomit; 'by its
means I shall gain time to work my friends, and order my affairs;
perhaps even to pacify his Majesty. Otherwise, as soon as ever I come to
London, they will have me to the Tower, and cut off my head.'
That same evening, while being conducted to his rooms, Raleigh struck
his head against a post. It was supposed to show that he was dizzy; and
next morning he sent Lady Raleigh and her retinue on to London, saying
that he himself was not well enough to move. At the same time, King went
on to prepare a ship to be ready in the Thames in case of another
emergency. When they had started, Raleigh was discovered in his bedroom,
on all fours, in his shirt, gnawing the rushes on the floor. Stukely was
completely taken in; the French quack had given Raleigh, not an emetic
only, but some ointment which caused his skin to break out in dark
purple pustules. Stukely rushed off to the Bishop of Ely, who happened
to be in Salisbury, and acted on his advice to wait for Raleigh's
recovery. Unless Stukely also was mountebanking, the spy Mannourie for
the present kept Raleigh's counsel. Raleigh was treated as an invalid,
and during the four days' retirement contrived to write his _Apology for
the Voyage to Guiana_. On August 1, James I. and all his Court entered
Salisbury, and on the morning of the same day Stukely hurried his
prisoner away lest he should meet the King. Some pity, however, was
shown to Raleigh's supposed dying state, and permission was granted him
to go straight to his own London house. His hopes revived, and he very
rashly bribed both Mannourie and Stukely to let him escape. So confident
was he, that he refused the offers of a French envoy, who met him at
Brentford with proposals of a secret passage over to France, and a
welcome in Paris. He was broken altogether; he had no dignity, no
judgment left.
Raleigh arrived at his house in Broad Street on August 7. On the 9th the
French repeated their invitation. Again it was refused, for King had
seen Raleigh and had told him that a vessel was lying at Tilbury ready
to carry him over to France. Her captain, Hart, was an old boatswain of
King's; before Raleigh received the information, this man had already
reported the whole scheme to the Government. The poor adventurer was
surrounded by spies, from Stukely downwards, and the toils were
gathering round him on every side. On the evening of the same August 9,
Raleigh, accompanied by Captain King, Stukely, Hart, and a page,
embarked from the river-side in two wherries, and was rowed down towards
Tilbury. Raleigh presently noticed that a larger boat was following
them; at Greenwich, Stukely threw off the mask of friendship and
arrested King, who was thrown then and there into the Tower. What
became of Raleigh that night does not appear; he was put into the Tower
next day. When he was arrested his pockets were found full of jewels and
golden ornaments, the diamond ring Queen Elizabeth had given him, a
loadstone in a scarlet purse, an ounce of ambergriece, and fifty pounds
in gold; these fell into the hands of the traitor 'Sir Judas' Stukely.
Outside the Tower the process of Raleigh's legal condemnation now
pursued its course. A commission was appointed to consider the charges
brought against the prisoner, and evidence was collected on all sides.
Raleigh was obliged to sit with folded hands. He could only hope that
the eloquence and patriotism of his _Apology_ might possibly appeal to
the sympathy of James. As so often before, he merely showed that he was
ignorant of the King's character, for James read the _Apology_ without
any other feeling than one of triumph that it amounted to a confession
of guilt. The only friend that Raleigh could now appeal to was Anne of
Denmark, and to her he forwarded, about August 15, a long petition in
verse:
Cold walls, to you I speak, but you are senseless!
Celestial Powers, you hear, but have determined,
And shall determine, to my greatest happiness.
Then unto whom shall I unfold my wrong,
Cast down my tears, or hold up folded hands?--
To Her to whom remorse doth most belong;
To Her, who is the first, and may alone
Be justly called, the Empress of the Britons.
Who should have mercy if a Queen have none?
Queen Anne responded as she had always done to Raleigh's appeals. If his
life had lain in her hands, it would have been a long and a happy one.
She immediately wrote to Buckingham, knowing that his influence was far
greater than her own with the King, and her letter exists for the wonder
of posterity. She writes to her husband's favourite: 'My kind Dog,' for
so the poor lady stoops to address him, 'if I have any power or credit
with you, I pray you let me have a trial of it, at this time, in dealing
sincerely and earnestly with the King that Sir Walter Raleigh's life may
not be called in question.' Buckingham, however, was already pledged to
aid the Spanish alliance, and the Queen's letter was unavailing.
On August 17 and on two subsequent occasions Raleigh was examined before
the Commissioners, the charge being formally drawn up by Yelverton, the
Attorney-General. He was accused of having abused the King's confidence
by setting out to find gold in a mine which never existed, with
instituting a piratical attack on a peaceful Spanish settlement, with
attempting to capture the Mexican plate fleet, although he had been
specially warned that he would take his life in his hands if he
committed any one of these three faults. It is hard to understand how
Mr. Edwards persuaded himself to brand each of these charges as 'a
distinct falsehood.' The sympathy we must feel for Raleigh's
misfortunes, and the enthusiasm with which we read the _Apology_, should
not, surely, blind us to the fact that in neither of these three matters
was his action true or honest. We have no particular account of his
examinations, but it is almost certain that they wrung from him
admissions of a most damaging character. He had tried to make James a
catspaw in revenging himself on Spain, and he had to take the
consequences.
It was of great importance to the Government to understand why France
had meddled in the matter. The Council, therefore, summoned La Chesnée,
the envoy who had made propositions to Raleigh at Brentford and at Broad
Street; but he denied the whole story, and said he never suggested
flight to Raleigh. So little information had been gained by the middle
of September, that it was determined to employ a professional spy. The
person selected for this engaging office was Sir Thomas Wilson, one of
the band of English pensioners in the pay of Spain. The most favourable
thing that has ever been said of Stukely is that he was not quite such a
scoundrel as Wilson. On September 9 this person, who had known Raleigh
from Elizabeth's days, and was now Keeper of the State Papers, was
supplied with 'convenient lodging within or near unto the chambers of
Sir Walter Raleigh.' At the same time Sir Allen Apsley, the Lieutenant,
who had guarded the prisoner hitherto, was relieved.
Wilson's first act was not one of conciliation. He demanded that Raleigh
should be turned out of his comfortable quarters in the Wardrobe Tower
to make room for Wilson, who desired that the prisoner should have the
smaller rooms above. To this, and other demands, Apsley would not
accede. Wilson then began to do his best to insinuate himself into
Raleigh's confidence, and after about a fortnight seems to have
succeeded. We have a very full report of his conversations with Raleigh,
but they add little to our knowledge, even if Wilson's evidence could
be taken as gospel. Raleigh admitted La Chesnée's offer of a French
passage, and his own proposal to seize the Mexican fleet; but both these
points were already known to the Council.
Towards the end of September two events occurred which brought matters
more to a crisis. On the 24th Raleigh wrote a confession to the King, in
which he said that the French Government had given him a commission,
that La Chesnée had three times offered him escape, and that he himself
was in possession of important State secrets, of which he would make a
clean breast if the King would pardon him. This important document was
found at Simancas, and first published in 1868 by Mr. St. John. On the
same day Philip III. sent a despatch to James I. desiring him in
peremptory terms to save him the trouble of hanging Raleigh at Madrid by
executing him promptly in London. As soon as this ultimatum arrived,
James applied to the Commissioners to know how it would be best to deal
with the prisoner judicially. Several lawyers assured him that Raleigh
was under sentence of death, and that therefore no trial was necessary;
but James shrank from the scandal of apparent murder. The Commissioners
were so fully satisfied of Raleigh's guilt that they advised the King to
give him a public trial, under somewhat unusual forms. He was to be
tried before the Council and the judges, a few persons of rank being
admitted as spectators; the conduct of the trial to be the same as
though it were proceeding in Westminster Hall. On receipt of the
despatch from Madrid, that is to say on October 3, Lady Raleigh, whose
presence was no longer required, was released from the Tower.
The trial before the Commissioners began on October 22. Mr. Gardiner has
printed in the _Camden Miscellany_ such notes of cross-examination as
were preserved by Sir Julius Cæsar, but they are very slight. Raleigh
seems to have denied any intention to stir up war between England and
Spain, and declared that he had confidently believed in the existence of
the mine. But he made no attempt to deny that in case the mine failed he
had proposed the taking of the Mexican fleet. At the close of the
examination, Bacon,[13] in the name of the Commissioners, told Raleigh
that he was guilty of abusing the confidence of King James and of
injuring the subjects of Spain, and that he must prepare to die, being
'already civilly dead.' Raleigh was then taken back to the Tower, where
he was left in suspense for ten days. Meanwhile the Justices of the
King's Bench were desired to award execution upon the old Winchester
sentence of 1603. It is thought that James hoped to keep Raleigh from
appearing again in public, but the judges said that he must be brought
face to face with them. On October 28, therefore, Raleigh was roused
from his bed, where he was suffering from a severe attack of the ague,
and was brought out of the Tower, which he never entered again. He was
taken so hastily that he had no time for his toilet, and his barber
called out that his master had not combed his head. 'Let them kem that
are to have it,' was Raleigh's answer; and he continued, 'Dost thou
know, Peter, any plaister that will set a man's head on again, when it
is off?'
When he came before Yelverton, he attempted to argue that the Guiana
commission had wiped out all the past, including the sentence of 1603.
He began to discuss anew his late voyage; but the Chief Justice,
interrupting him, told him that he was to be executed for the old
treason, not for this new one. Raleigh then threw himself on the King's
mercy, being every way trapped and fettered; without referring to this
appeal, the Chief Justice proceeded to award execution. Raleigh was to
be beheaded early next morning in Old Palace Yard. He entreated for a
few days' respite, that he might finish some writings, but the King had
purposely left town that no petitions for delay might reach him. Bacon
produced the warrant, which he had drawn up, and which bore the King's
signature and the Great Seal.
Raleigh was taken from Westminster Hall to the Gate House. He was in
high spirits, and meeting his old friend Sir Hugh Beeston, he urged him
to secure a good place at the show next morning. He himself, he said,
was sure of one. He was so gay and chatty, that his cousin Francis
Thynne begged him to be more grave lest his enemies should report his
levity. Raleigh answered, 'It is my last mirth in this world; do not
grudge it to me.' Dr. Tounson, Dean of Westminster, to whom Raleigh was
a stranger, then attended him; and was somewhat scandalised at this flow
of mercurial spirits. 'When I began,' says the Dean, 'to encourage him
against the fear of death, he seemed to make so light of it that I
wondered at him. When I told him that the dear servants of God, in
better causes than his, had shrunk back and trembled a little, he denied
it not. But yet he gave God thanks that he had never feared death.' The
good Dean was puzzled; but his final reflection was all to Raleigh's
honour. After the execution he reported that 'he was the most fearless
of death that ever was known, and the most resolute and confident; yet
with reverence and conscience.'
It was late on Thursday evening, the 28th, that Lady Raleigh learned the
position of affairs. She had not dreamed that the case was so hopeless.
She hastened to the Gate House, and until midnight husband and wife were
closeted together in conversation, she being consoled and strengthened
by his calm. Her last word was that she had obtained permission to
dispose of his body. 'It is well, Bess,' he said, 'that thou mayst
dispose of that dead, which thou hadst not always the disposing of when
alive.' And so, with a smile, they parted. When his wife had left him,
Raleigh sat down to write his last verses:
Even such is time, that takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
And pays us but with earth and dust;
Who in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days;
But from this earth, this grave, this dust,
My God shall raise me up, I trust.
At the same hour Lady Raleigh was preparing for the horrors of the
morrow. She sent off this note to her brother, Sir Nicholas Carew:
I desire, good brother, that you will be pleased to let me bury
the worthy body of my noble husband, Sir Walter Raleigh, in your
church at Beddington, where I desire to be buried. The Lords
have given me his dead body, though they denied me his life.
This night he shall be brought you with two or three of my men.
Let me hear presently. God hold me in my wits.
There was probably some difficulty in the way, for Raleigh's body was
not brought that night to Beddington.
In the morning the Dean of Westminster entered the Gate House again.
Raleigh, who had perhaps not gone to bed all night, had just finished a
testamentary paper of defence. Dr. Tounson found him still very cheerful
and merry, and administered the Communion to him. After the Eucharist,
Raleigh talked very freely to the Dean, defending himself, and going
back in his reminiscences to the reign of Elizabeth. He declared that
the world would yet be persuaded of his innocence, and he once more
scandalised the Dean by his truculent cheerfulness. He ate a hearty
breakfast, and smoked a pipe of tobacco. It was now time to leave the
Gate House; but before he did so, a cup of sack was brought to him. The
servant asked if the wine was to his liking, and Raleigh replied, 'I
will answer you as did the fellow who drank of St. Giles' bowl as he
went to Tyburn, "It is good drink, if a man might stay by it."'
This excitement lasted without reaction until he reached the scaffold,
whither he was led by the sheriffs, still attended by Dr. Tounson. As
they passed through the vast throng of persons who had come to see the
spectacle, Raleigh observed a very old man bareheaded in the crowd, and
snatching off the rich night-cap of cut lace which he himself was
wearing, he threw it to him, saying, 'Friend, you need this more than I
do.' Raleigh was dressed in a black embroidered velvet night-gown over a
hare-coloured satin doublet and a black embroidered waistcoat. He wore
a ruff-band, a pair of black cut taffetas breeches, and ash-coloured
silk stockings, thus combining his taste for magnificence with a decent
regard for the occasion. The multitude so pressed upon him, and he had
walked with such an animated step, that when he ascended the scaffold,
erect and smiling, he was observed to be quite out of breath.
There are many contemporary reports of Sir Walter Raleigh's deportment
at this final moment of his life. In the place of these hackneyed
narratives, we may perhaps quote the less-known words of another
bystander, the republican Sir John Elyot, who was at that time a young
man of twenty-eight. In his _Monarchy of Man_, which remained in
manuscript until 1879, Elyot says:
Take an example in that else unmatched fortitude of our Raleigh,
the magnanimity of his sufferings, that large chronicle of
fortitude. All the preparations that are terrible presented to
his eye, guards and officers about him, fetters and chains upon
him, the scaffold and executioner before him, and then the axe,
and more cruel expectation of his enemies, and what did all that
work on the resolution of that worthy? Made it an impression of
weak fear, or a distraction of his reason? Nothing so little did
that great soul suffer, but gathered more strength and advantage
upon either. His mind became the clearer, as if already it had
been freed from the cloud and oppression of the body, and that
trial gave an illustration to his courage, so that it changed
the affection of his enemies, and turned their joy into sorrow,
and all men else it filled with admiration, leaving no doubt but
this, whether death was more acceptable to him, or he more
welcome unto death.
At the windows of Sir Randolph Carew, which were opposite to the
scaffold, Raleigh observed a cluster of gentlemen and noblemen, and in
particular several of those who had been adventurers with him for the
mine on the Orinoco. He perceived, amongst others, the Earls of Arundel,
Oxford, and Northampton. That these old friends should hear distinctly
what he had to say was his main object, and he therefore addressed them
with an apology for the weakness of his voice, and asked them to come
down to him. Arundel at once assented, and all the company at Carew's
left the balcony, and came on to the scaffold, where those who had been
intimate with Raleigh solemnly embraced him. He then began his
celebrated speech, of which he had left a brief draft signed in the Gate
House. There are extant several versions of this address, besides the
one he signed. In the excitement of the scene, he seems to have said
more, and to have put it more ingeniously, than in the solitude of the
previous night. His old love of publicity, of the open air, appeared in
the first sentence:
I thank God that He has sent me to die in the light, and not in
darkness. I likewise thank God that He has suffered me to die
before such an assembly of honourable witnesses, and not
obscurely in the Tower, where for the space of thirteen years
together I have been oppressed with many miseries. And I return
Him thanks, that my fever [the ague] hath not taken me at this
time, as I prayed to Him that it might not, that I might clear
myself of such accusations unjustly laid to my charge, and leave
behind me the testimony of a true heart both to my king and
country.
He was justly elated. He knew that his resources were exhausted, his
energies abated, and that pardon would now merely mean a relegation to
oblivion. He took his public execution with delight, as if it were a
martyrdom, and had the greatness of soul to perceive that nothing could
possibly commend his career and character to posterity so much as to
leave this mortal stage with a telling soliloquy. His powers were drawn
together to their height; his intellect, which had lately seemed to be
growing dim, had never flashed more brilliantly, and the biographer can
recall but one occasion in Raleigh's life, and that the morning of St.
Barnaby at Cadiz, when his bearing was of quite so gallant a
magnificence. As he stood on the scaffold in the cold morning air, he
foiled James and Philip at one thrust, and conquered the esteem of all
posterity. It is only now, after two centuries and a half, that history
is beginning to hint that there was not a little special pleading and
some excusable equivocation in this great apology which rang through
monarchical England like the blast of a clarion, and which echoed in
secret places till the oppressed rose up and claimed their liberty.
He spoke for about five-and-twenty minutes. His speech was excessively
ingenious, as well as eloquent, and directed to move the sympathy of his
hearers as much as possible, without any deviation from literal truth.
He said that it was true that he had tried to escape to France, but that
his motive was not treasonable; he knew the King to be justly incensed,
and thought that from La Rochelle he might negotiate his pardon. What he
said about the commission from France is so ingeniously worded, as to
leave us absolutely without evidence from this quarter. After speaking
about La Chesnée's visits, he proceeded to denounce the base Mannourie
and his miserable master Sir Lewis Stukely, yet without a word of
unseemly invective. He then defended his actions in the Guiana voyage,
and turning brusquely to the Earl of Arundel, appealed to him for
evidence that the last words spoken between them as the 'Destiny' left
the Thames were of Raleigh's return to England. This was to rebut the
accusation that Raleigh had been overpowered by his mutinous crew, and
brought to Kinsale against his will. Arundel answered, 'And so you did!'
The Sheriff presently showing some impatience, Raleigh asked pardon, and
begged to say but a few words more. He had been vexed to find that the
Dean of Westminster believed a story which was in general circulation to
the effect that Raleigh behaved insolently at the execution of Essex,
'puffing out tobacco in disdain of him;' this he solemnly denied. He
then closed as follows:
And now I entreat that you will all join me in prayer to the
Great God of Heaven, whom I have grievously offended, being a
man full of all vanity, who has lived a sinful life in such
callings as have been most inducing to it; for I have been a
soldier, a sailor, and a courtier, which are courses of
wickedness and vice; that His almighty goodness will forgive me;
that He will cast away my sins from me; and that He will receive
me into everlasting life.--So I take my leave of you all, making
my peace with God.
Proclamation was then made that all visitors should quit the scaffold.
In parting with his friends, Raleigh besought them, and Arundel in
particular, to beg the King to guard his memory against scurrilous
pamphleteers. The noblemen lingered so long, that it was Raleigh himself
who gently dismissed them. 'I have a long journey to go,' he said, and
smiled, 'therefore I must take my leave of you.' When the friends had
retired he addressed himself to prayer, having first announced that he
died in the faith of the Church of England. When his prayer was done, he
took off his night-gown and doublet, and called to the headsman to show
him the axe. The man hesitated, and Raleigh cried, 'I prithee, let me
see it. Dost thou think that I am afraid of it?' Having passed his
finger along the edge, he gave it back, and turning to the Sheriff,
smiled, and said, ''Tis a sharp medicine, but one that will cure me of
all my diseases.' The executioner, overcome with emotion, kneeled before
him for pardon. Raleigh put his two hands upon his shoulders, and said
he forgave him with all his heart. He added, 'When I stretch forth my
hands, despatch me.' He then rose erect, and bowed ceremoniously to the
spectators to the right and then to the left, and said aloud, 'Give me
heartily your prayers.' The Sheriff then asked him which way he would
lay himself on the block. Raleigh answered, 'So the heart be right, it
matters not which way the head lies,' but he chose to lie facing the
east. The headsman hastened to place his own cloak beneath him, so
displaying the axe. Raleigh then lay down, and the company was hushed
while he remained awhile in silent prayer. He was then seen to stretch
out his hands, but the headsman was absolutely unnerved and could not
stir. Raleigh repeated the action, but again without result. The rich
Devonshire voice was then heard again, and for the last time. 'What dost
thou fear? Strike, man, strike!' His body neither twitched nor trembled;
only his lips were seen still moving in prayer. At last the headsman
summoned his resolution, and though he struck twice, the first blow was
fatal.
Sir Walter Raleigh was probably well advanced in his sixty-seventh year,
but grief and travel had made him look much older. He was still
vigorous, however, and the effusion from his body was so extraordinary,
that many of the spectators shared the wonder of Lady Macbeth, that the
old man had so much blood in him. The head was shown to the spectators,
on both sides of the scaffold, and was then dropped into a red bag. The
body was wrapt in the velvet night-gown, and both were carried to Lady
Raleigh. By this time, perhaps, she had heard from her brother that he
could not receive the body at Beddington, for she presently had it
interred in the chancel of St. Margaret's, Westminster. The head she
caused to be embalmed, and kept it with her all her life, permitting
favoured friends, like Bishop Goodman, to see and even to kiss it. After
her death, Carew Raleigh preserved it with a like piety. It is supposed
now to rest in West Horsley church in Surrey. Lady Raleigh lived on
until 1647, thus witnessing the ruin of the dynasty which had destroyed
her own happiness.
No success befell the wretches who had enriched themselves by Raleigh's
ruin. Sir Judas Stukely, for so he was now commonly styled, was shunned
by all classes of society. It was discovered very soon after the
execution, that Stukely had for years past been a clipper of coin of the
realm. He did not get his blood-money until Christmas 1618, and in
January 1619 he was caught with his guilty fingers at work on some of
the very gold pieces for which he had sold his master. The meaner
rascal, Mannourie, fell with him. The populace clamoured for Stukely's
death on the gallows, but the King allowed him to escape. Wherever he
met human beings, however, they taunted him with the memory of Sir
Walter Raleigh, and at last he fled to the desolate island of Lundy,
where his brain gave way under the weight of remorse and solitude. He
died there, a maniac, in 1620. Another of Raleigh's enemies, though a
less malignant one, scarcely survived him. Lord Cobham, who had been
released from the Tower while Raleigh was in the Canaries, died of
lingering paralysis on January 24, 1619. Of other persons who were
closely associated with Raleigh, Queen Anne died in the same year, 1619;
Camden in 1623; James I. in 1625; Nottingham, at the age of eighty-nine,
in 1624; Bacon in 1629; Ben Jonson in 1637; while the Earl of Arundel
lived on until 1646.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Mr. Edwards corrects the date to 1580 N.S., but this is manifestly
wrong; on the 7th of February 1580 N.S. Raleigh was on the Atlantic
making for Cork Harbour.
[2] Dr. Brushfield has found no mention of the elder Walter Raleigh
later than April 11, 1578. As he was born in 1497, he must then have
been over eighty years of age.
[3] Mr. J. Cordy Jeaffreson has communicated to me the following
interesting discovery, which he has made in examining the Assembly Books
of the borough of King's Lynn, in Norfolk. It appears that the Mayor was
paid ten pounds 'in respecte he did in the yere of his maioraltie
[between Michaelmas 1587 and Michaelmas 1588] entertayn Sir Walter
Rawlye knight and his companye in resortinge hether about the Queanes
affayrs;' the occasion being, it would seem, the furnishing and setting
forth of a ship of war and a pinnace as the contingent from Lynn towards
defence against the Armada. This is an important fact, for it is the
only definite record that has hitherto reached us of Raleigh's activity
in guarding the coast against invasion.
[4] In the first two numbers of the _Athenæum_ for 1886, I gave in full
detail the facts and arguments which are here given in summary.
[5] Raleigh says that he appointed this man, 'taking him out of prison,
because he had all the ancient records of Sherborne, his father having
been the Bishop's officer.'--_De la Warr MSS._
[6] Mr. Edwards has evidently dated this important letter a year too
late (vol. ii. 397-8).
[7] In a letter Raleigh goes still further, and says that he found
Meeres, 'coming suddenly upon him, counterfeiting my hand above a
hundred times upon an oiled paper.'
[8] Among Sir A. Malet's MSS., for instance, we find Raleigh spoken of,
so early as April 1600, as 'the hellish Atheist and Traitor,' and we
look in vain for the cause of such violence.
[9] This date, till lately uncertain, is proved from the journal of
Cecil's secretary.
[10] This was really the first edition of the _Remains_, although that
title does not appear until the third edition of 1657.
[11] More exactly, a house at the corner of Wykford Lane, with a small
estate at the back of it, an appendage to Lady Raleigh's brother's seat
at Beddington.
[12] I gather this date, hitherto entirety unknown, from the fact that
in the recently published _Lismore Papers_ Sir Richard Boyle notes on
May 27 that he receives letters from Raleigh announcing his arrival at
Kinsale.
[13] Among the Bute MSS. is a letter from Raleigh to Bacon beseeching
him 'to spend some few words to the putting of false fame to flight;'
but Bacon's enmity was unalterable.
INDEX.
NOTE.--_Read Raleigh for R._
Adricomius, 179
Albert, Aremberg, the Envoy of Archduke, 136
Alençon's contrast to R. at Court, 18;
pageant at Antwerp for, 18
Algarve, Bishop of, library captured by Essex and nucleus of Bodleian, 101
Algerine corsairs, 193;
sack Lanzarote, 194
Allen, Sir Francis, 42
America, its debt, to Sir H. Gilbert, 25;
Gilbert's last expedition to, 27;
R. renews Gilbert's charter, 28;
R.'s costly expeditions to, 29, 37
Amidas, a captain in R.'s American fleet, 28;
discovers Virginia, 29
Amurath, King of Turbay, 185
Anderson, one of R.'s Winchester judges, 146
'Angel Gabriel,' capture of ship, 40
_Annales_ by Camden, 3
Anne of Denmark. _See_ Queen
Annesley, R. takes up his command, 19
Antonio of Portugal, 41
_Apology for the Voyage to Guiana_ by R., 193, 208-10
_Apothegms_, Bacon's, 113
Apsley, Sir Allen, Lieutenant of Tower, 211;
relieved of R.'s custody, 211
Aremberg, Count, plotter in Durham House, 134;
ambassador of Archduke Albert, 136;
relations with Cobham, 137, 155;
communications with R., 148;
James accepts his protestations, 155
'Ark Raleigh' fitted for Gilbert's expedition by R., 27;
purchased by Elizabeth, 54
'Ark Royal,' Lord Howard's ship, 93
Armada, account of, 37-39;
Lynn contributes to resistance of, 38;
R.'s advice for boarding ships, 39;
R. and Drake receive prisoners from, 39
Armadillo in Guiana, 74, 80
Artson, R. captures sack from one, 41
Arundel, Earl of, Keymis writes to, 201;
at R.'s execution as a friend 218;
R. appeals to him in justification, 220;
death of, 223
Ashley, Mrs. Catherine, R.'s aunt, 19
Ashley, Sir Anthony, notifies Cadiz victory, 100
Assapana Islands, 80
_Astrophel_, Elegy by R. in, 34
d'Aubigné, _Histoire Universelle_ by, 177
Aubrey at Oxford with R., 3
Awbeg, river in Munster, sung by Spenser, 44
Azores, piratical expedition to, 33;
Peter Strozzi lost at, 39;
R.'s _Report of the Fight in the_, _ib._;
'Revenge' and Armada fight off, 51;
'Madre de Dios' captured off, 60;
second plate-ship expedition off, 107;
capture of its towns arranged, _ib._;
R. takes Fayal, 108;
Essex attacks San Miguel, 109
Bacon, Anthony, 42, 56
Bacon, Lord Francis, with R. at Oxford, 3;
praise of Grenville's fight, 51;
issues his _Essays_, 85;
his _Apothegms_, 113;
his cousins the Cookes, 90;
asked if R.'s Guiana commission is equivalent to pardon, 191;
if R. fails in Guiana asks what is his alternative? _ib._;
R. reveals his desire for Mexican plate fleet to, _ib._;
tells R. he must prepare to die, 213;
asked by R. to protect his fame, 213;
death of, 223
Bailey, John, commands 'Husband' in Guiana fleet, 194;
prevented from seizing French ship, 195;
deserts R.'s expedition, 196;
returns and charges R. with piracy, 196, 204;
in pay of Gondomar, 196;
imprisoned and story discredited, 204;
released with reprimand, 205
Balligara, R.'s share in, 194
Barlow, a captain in R.'s American fleet, 28;
discovers Virginia, _ib._
Barlow's reference to R., 7
Barry Court, Geraldine stronghold, 13;
source of quarrel between R. and Ormond, 14;
R. offers to rebuild, 16
Barry, David, Irish malcontent, 13
Barry, Lord, defeat at Cleve by R., 15
Basing House, Marquis of Winchester's, 122;
Queen Elizabeth and French envoys at, 123
Bath, R. visits, 63, 115, 122, 127
Bear Gardens, R. takes French envoys to, 122
Beauchamp, Lord, R.'s deputy in Cornwall, 32
Beaumont's story of R. and King James, 133
Beaumont, Countess of, 167
Becanus, Goropius, 178
Beddington, Lady R. sells land at, 189;
burial asked for R. at, 215
Bedford, Earl of, R. succeeds him in Stannaries, 32
Bedingfield Park, seat of Sir F. Carew, 135;
King James and R. entertained at, _ib._
Beeston, Sir Hugh, and R.'s execution, 214
Benevolence tax, 184
Berreo, Antonio de, Spanish Governor of Trinidad, describes Guiana, 66;
his cruelty, 68;
captured by R. at St. Joseph, _ib._;
attempts to lure R., _ib._;
submission to R., 68-69;
founded Guayana Vieja, 73
Berrie, Captain Leonard, makes voyage to Guiana for R., 102
Beville, Sir R., inquires into Sir R. Grenville's death, 51
Bideford, Grenville's Virginian expedition stopped at, 37;
R. sends ships to Virginia from, _ib._
Bindon, Lord. _See_ Howard
Biron, Duc de, special French Ambassador, 122-123;
disgrace, 127
Blount, Sir Christopher, R.'s keeper at Dartmouth, 61;
to make joint attack on San Miguel, 107;
excites Essex against R., 109;
tries to kill R., 120;
pardoned by R. before execution, _ib._
Bodleian Library, Bishop of Algarve's books captured by Earl of Essex
contained in, 101
'Bonaventure,' ship, 105
Boyle, Richard, afterwards Earl of Cork, buys R.'s Irish estates, 129;
lends R. 100_l._, 194;
R. announces his arrival at Kinsale to, 203
Brett, Sir Alex., trustee of Sherborne, 164
_Breviary of the History of England_ by R., 182-3
Broad-cloths, R.'s licence to export woollen, 29, 30
Broad Street, R. resides in, 188, 208
Brooke, George, conspires for Arabella Stuart, 102, 142;
concerned in Watson's plot, 135;
relationship to Cobham and Cecil, _ib._;
arrest, 136;
execution, 158
Brooke, Henry, brother to Lady Cecil. _See_ Cobham, 102
Brushfield, Dr., R.'s bibliography, vi.;
researches, 2, 16
Bryskett, Lodovick, in Munster, 10;
'Thestylis' of Spenser, 45
Burghley, R. corresponds with, 8, 9;
his moderate Irish policy, 22;
joint author of _The Opinion of Mr. Rawley_, 22;
assails R.'s broad-cloth patent, 30;
references to, 31, 84;
sends R. to Dartmouth to save prizes, 61
Burrow, Sir John, commands Indian Carrack venture, 54;
successful attack of plate-ships, 59-60
Burwick, John, master of 'Destiny,' 194
_Byron's Conspiracy_ by Chapman, 123
_Cabinet Council_ by R., 186;
published by Milton, _ib._
Cadiz expedition, 87, 88-102;
forced on by Lord Howard, 88;
Queen Elizabeth reluctantly permits, _ib._;
Essex, Howard, and R. to consider, 89;
Dutch to co-operate, _ib._;
R. to raise levies for, _ib._;
recruiting for, 90;
strength of English and Dutch fleets, 91;
R.'s _Relation of the Action_, 92;
details of destruction of Spanish fleet, 92-98;
the town sacked, 99-100;
R. wounded in the leg, 98;
fleet of carracks escape but burnt by Spaniards, 99;
Queen Elizabeth claims the prize money, 101;
the victory popular in England, 102
Cæsar, Sir Julius, notes of R.'s second trial, 213
Caiama Island, 74
Camden with R. at Oxford, 3;
his _Annales_, 3;
recommends Jonson to R., 175;
friend of Samuel Daniel, 183;
his death, 223
_Camden Miscellany_, account of R.'s second trial in, 213
Canary Islands, R.'s Guiana fleet off, 195;
exposed to Algerine corsairs, 195;
Lanzarote sacked, 196;
R. visits Gomera, 197
Cape Verde Islands, R.'s Guiana fleet off, 198;
R. lands at Brava, 199
Capuri river, 80
Caracas plundered and burnt, 81
Carews, connections of R., 1
Carew, Sir Francis, R.'s uncle, 135;
entertains King James and R., _ib._
Carew, Sir George, at Lismore, 44;
keeper of R. at Tower, 58;
at Cadiz in 'Mary Rose,' 95;
and Cormac MacDermod, 129
Carew, Sir Nicholas, and R.'s burial, 215
Carew, Sir Randolph, and friends witness R.'s execution, 218
Carleton, Dudley, at R.'s trial, 153
Caroni, river, 74
Carr, Earl of Somerset, and Sherborne, 171, 172, 187
Cashel, Magrath Archbishop of, 34
Castle Bally-in-Harsh, its capture, 15
Cayenne, R. off river, 199, 200
Cecil, Sir Robert, and R.'s marriage, 54, 63;
R.'s letter of devotion for Queen sent to, 57;
fails to control Devon sailors, 61;
inquires into pillage of 'Madre de Dios,' 62;
barters with R., 64;
promises ship for Guiana expedition, 67;
R. asks how result of Guiana voyage is viewed, 82;
R. sends MS. account and presents from Guiana, 83;
_Discovery of Guiana_ dedicated to, 84;
supports proposed attack on Cadiz, 88;
informed by R. of victory at Cadiz, 100;
death of his wife and R.'s sympathy, 102;
R.'s intimacy with his family, _ib._;
obtains R.'s return to Court, 103;
told of R.'s goodwill to Essex, 106;
thwarts R. in being sworn of P. Council, 112;
doubtful support of Guiana voyage, 113-4;
son and young Walter R. playmates, 114;
at Sherborne, 116;
accused by Essex, 118;
advised by R. to show Essex no mercy, 118-9;
decline of friendship with R., 125;
invited to Bath by R., 127;
R. complains of Lord Bindon to, _ib._;
craftiness towards R., 129;
created a peer by King James, 133;
estranged from the Brookes, 135;
describes R.'s attempted suicide, 138;
aids R. with Sherborne estate, 144;
sits on R.'s trial, 146, 157;
influence sought to save R., 158;
created Lord Cranborne, 164;
and Earl of Salisbury, 166;
R. writes of his condition to, _ib._;
references to, 167, 170, 173, 186;
his death and epigram on, 173
Cecil, William. _See_ Salisbury
Champernowne, Captain Arthur, in Azores, 108
Champernowne, Gawen, his career, 4
Champernowne, Henry, R.'s cousin, 4;
his Huguenot contingent, 4
Champernowne, Sir Philip, 1
Champernownes, connections of R., 1
Chapman, George, his epic poem on Guiana, 86;
his _Byron's Conspiracy_, 123
Chatham, R. raising sailors at, 54
Chaunis Temotam, its fabulous ores, 30
Cherbourg, R. takes barks from, 42
Christian IV. of Denmark and R., 169
Church, Dean, compares R.'s exploits with passages in _Faery Queen_, 43
Clarke executed for Watson's plot, 158
Cleve, Lord Barry defeated by R. at, 15
Clifford, Sir Conyers, at Cadiz, 95
Cobham, Lord, Henry Brooke succeeds as, 102;
first mention by R. of, 106;
R.'s increased intimacy, 113;
invited to Sherborne and Bath, 115;
goes to Ostend with R. _ib._;
called an enemy of England by Essex, 118;
attends at Basing to entertain French, 123;
plotting at Durham House, 134;
R. only intimate friend, 136;
Lord Warden of Cinque Ports, _ib._;
and Watson's plot, _ib._;
shown R.'s explanation, 137;
accuses R., but retracts, _ib._;
communicates with R. by Mellersh, 142;
tried at Staines for Arabella Stuart plot, 142;
communications with R., 144;
vacillation, 145;
retracts to R, _ib._;
R. asks that Cobham should die first, 157;
convicted of treason, 158;
led out for execution, but reprieved, 160;
death by paralysis, 223
Coke, Sir Edward, Attorney-General at R.'s Winchester trial, 146-7
_Colin Clout_, Spenser refers to R. in, 43, 48;
Queen Elizabeth commands its publication, 49
_Collectiones Peregrinationum_, by De Bry, 114
Collier, J. P., 56
_Commentaries_, by Sir F. Vere, 97
_Commerce_, R.'s _Observations on Trade and_, 186
Condé, Prince of, his death, 4
Cookes, the, R. takes to Cadiz, 90
Copley and Watson's plot, 135;
his arrest, 136
Corabby, R.'s courage at ford of, 14
Cordials made by R., 168
Cork, R. reinforces Sentleger at, 9;
Geraldine executed at, _ib._;
R. governor of, 15;
land granted to R. in, 34;
cedars planted by R. still at, 47;
R.'s second Guiana fleet takes refuge at, 194
Cornwall, R. Lieutenant and Vice-Admiral of, 32;
R.'s deputy in, 32;
R. collects miners to resist Armada, 38;
its defences considered, 89;
R.'s efforts for tin-workers in, 117;
R. tries to retain office, but superseded by Earl of Pembroke, 163
Coro, burned, 81
Cotterell, messenger between R. and Cobham, 145, 169;
examined against R., 170
Cotton, Sir Robert, lends books to R., 171
Court, early record of R.'s admission to, 5, 6;
R. not a penniless adventurer at, 16;
recognised courtier, 17, 19;
R. inferior to Leicester, Walsingham, and Hatton at, 50;
reference to R. at, 103, 115;
R. excluded by James I., 188
Cranborne, Lord. _See_ Cecil
'Crane,' the, R.'s ship, 42
Creighton's, Mrs., _Period of R._, vi.
Cross, Captain, and plate ship prize, 62
Crosse, Sir Robert, with R. meets King James, 132
Cucuina, river, R. ascends, 71
Cumana, Venezuela, spared by ransom and subsequently burnt by R.'s
ships, 81
_Cynthia_, R.'s supposed lost poem, 45-46;
fragments printed from Hatfield MS., 46;
style and importance, 46-47;
called _The Ocean to_, 46;
and _The Ocean's Love to_, _ib._;
treated of in _Athenæum_, 1886, _ib._;
publication urged by Spenser, 49
_Dangers of a Spanish Faction in Scotland_, by R., 124
Daniel, Samuel, and R, 182-3
Dartmouth, 'Madre de Dios' towed to, 60;
R. stops spoliation of, 61
Davies, Sir John, _Nosce teipsum_ and R.'s _Cynthia_, 46
Davis, John, R.'s partner for discovery of N.-W. passage, 28;
refers to whereabouts of R., July 1595, 82
De Beaumont, French ambassador, refers to R., 133, 141
De Bry prints R.'s _Discovery_ in his _Collectiones_, 114
'Destiny,' ship built by R. for Guiana expedition, 190;
Des Marêts visits the, 193;
commanded by young Walter R., _ib._;
John Burwick the master, 194;
outlawed, 205;
arrives at Plymouth, 205, 206
Des Marêts, French ambassador, 190;
suspicious of R.'s Guiana voyage, _ib._;
visits R.'s 'Destiny,' 193;
his correspondence, _ib._
Desmond, Earl of, murder of his brother's guest, 8;
R. shares escheated lands of, 34
Devonshire Association, _Transactions of_, and R., 2;
accent strong in R., 21;
R.'s popularity in, 31;
Stannaries, R.'s report on, _ib._;
R. Vice-Admiral of, 32;
Sir John Gilbert, R.'s deputy in, _ib._;
R. member of Parliament for, _ib._;
miners serve in Netherlands, _ib._;
farmers settle in south of Ireland, 34;
miners raised by R. to repel Armada, 38;
R. considers its defences, 89
Devonshire, Earl of, on R.'s trial at Winchester, 146
Dingle, expedition from Ferrol lands at, 8
_Discovery of Guiana_, published by R., 83-84;
literary value, 85;
translations in Latin, German, and French, 114;
reprinted by Hakluyt, _ib._
Doddridge, Sir John, 144
_Domestic Correspondence_ refers to R.'s ships, 42
Donne, John, earliest known poem, 105
Dover, R. at, 90, 193
Drake, Sir Francis, receives prisoners from Armada, 39;
expedition to Portugal, 41-42;
and spoil of 'Madre de Dios,' 62;
his fate, 6, 87
'Dreadnought,' Sir C. Clifford's Cadiz ship, 95
Dudley, Robert, D. of Northumberland, at Cadiz, _ib._
Duke, Richard, contemporary owner of R.'s birthplace, 1
Durham, Bishop of, demands Durham House, 133
Durham House leased by R., 31;
its site and history, _ib._;
Queen Elizabeth there in 1592, 56;
references to, 87, 114, 120;
fire at, 117;
Lady R. advises a proper lease for, _ib._;
Bishop of Durham demands and King James directs R. to surrender, 133-4;
R. forced to remove from, 134;
alleged plotting at, _ib._
Dutch to assist in attack on Cadiz, 89, 99;
take part in capture of Azores, 107
Dyer's evidence at R.'s trial, 155
Edwards, Edward, life and letters of R., v.;
collected evidence of battle of Cadiz, 91;
references to, 82, 190, 210
Effingham, Lady, converse with R., 167
Effingham. _See_ Howard
El Dorado, legendary prince of Guiana, 65;
supposed lake in heart of Guiana, _ib._;
efforts of Spaniards and Germans to reach, _ib._
Elizabeth, Queen, Duc d'Alençon her suitor, 17-18;
confers an Irish captaincy on R., 19;
R. first favourite with, 19-25;
gifts to R., 24, 25;
grants charter to R. for discovery of N.-W. passage, 28;
Virginia named in honour of, _ib._;
leases Durham House to R., 31;
feelings towards Leicester, 32;
keeps R. from politics, 35;
R. supplanted by Essex, 35;
appropriates pirated fine raiment, 42;
R. restored to favour by, 43, 49;
praised in _Cynthia_, 45;
Spenser introduced to, 48;
commands publication of _Colin Clout_, 49;
happy retort of R. to, 53;
instals a pliable Bishop of Salisbury and receives fine from R., 53;
supports R. in Spanish plate-ship venture, 54, 59;
buys the 'Ark Raleigh,' 54;
vanity and resentment, 55;
recalls R. from Frobisher's fleet, 56;
discovers R.'s Throckmorton intrigue, _ib._;
confines R. in Tower, 57;
R.'s letter of devotion to, _ib._;
acknowledges R.'s marriage, 63;
works of travel published in her reign, 85;
irresolution to attack Spain after Armada, 88;
R. seeks reconciliation with, 100;
claims Cadiz prize-money, 101;
R.'s position with, 101, 103, 111, 115;
reconfers captaincy of the Guard on R., 103;
her custom to retire early to rest, 111;
festivities on her sixty-fifth birthday, 113;
sends R. to Ostend, 115;
confers Governorship of Jersey and Manor of St. Germain on R., 116;
Essex accuses R., Cecil, and Cobham to, 118;
refuses communication with Essex, _ib._;
said to have shown skull of Essex, _ib._;
R. sends her a supposed diamond, 128;
interviews R. on Irish policy, _ib._;
R. advises as to MacDermod, _ib._;
her death, 129;
reference to, 186
Elizabethan poets engaged in Ireland, 10
El Nuevo Dorado, or Guiana, 66
Elphinstone, Sir James, eager for R.'s estate, 143
Elyot, Sir John, his _Monarchy of Man_, 217;
describes R.'s end, _ib._
_England, Breviary of the History of_, 182;
Archbishop Sancroft and MS. of, _ib._;
Samuel Daniel's share in, 183;
attributed to R., _ib._
Epuremi tribe in Guiana, 78
Erskine, Sir Thomas, supplants R. in the Guard, 133;
his position with King James, 133
_Essays_, Bacon issues his, 85
Essex, Earl of, competes with R. for royal favour, 35;
demands R.'s sacrifice, 35, 36;
Court attacks on R., 40;
challenges R., _ib._;
drives R. from Court, 42;
more friendly with R., 50;
perceives value of the Puritans, _ib._;
his Protestantism, _ib._;
to consider attack on Cadiz, 89;
his share in Cadiz expedition, 92-100;
captures library of Bishop of Algarve, 101;
presents it to Sir T. Bodley, _ib._;
and Cadiz prize money, _ib._;
at Chatham, 103;
planning fresh attack on Spain, _ib._;
charged with disloyalty, 104;
R.'s guest at Plymouth, 106;
expedition to Azores and result, 107-109;
Royal influence on the wane, 111;
offended past forgiveness by Queen, 112;
uncompromising speech to Elizabeth, _ib._;
surliness of temper, _ib._;
adopts for his men tilting colours of R., 113;
increasing enmity with R., _ib._;
complaints to Queen, 118;
Queen refuses communication with, _ib._;
conspiracy, 119-120;
R. and the execution of, 120;
Elizabeth shows his skull to Duc de Biron, 123
Eugubinus, Steuchius, 178
Euphuistic prose, example in R.'s letter to Cecil, 57
_Evesham, Chronicle of_, 171
Ewaipanoma tribe, 77
Execution of R., 217, 218-219;
his speech, 218;
his gallant bearing, 29
Exeter, R.'s parents buried at, 3
_Faery Queen_, R.'s adventures compared with those in, 43;
its progress, 45;
registered, Spenser obtains pension by, 49;
R.'s sonnet appended to, _ib._
Fajardo Isle, 74
Falmouth, expedition to Spain puts back into, 106
'Farm of Wines' granted by Q. Elizabeth to R., 24;
granted by King James to E. of Nottingham, 141
Fayal, Essex and R. arrange to capture, 107;
R. to meet Essex at, 108;
R. arrives before Essex, its attack and capture, _ib._;
arrival of Essex, _ib._;
dispute relative to capture, 109
Featley, Dr. Daniel, tutor to young Walter R., 171
Fenton, Geoffrey, in Munster, 10
Ferrol, Spanish expedition to Ireland from, 8
Finland, Duke of, offers assistance to R. in Guiana, 113
Fish tithes, in Sidmouth, leased to R.'s family, 2
Fisher, Jasper, 6
Fitzjames rents R.'s Sherborne farms, 64
Fitzwilliam, Sir William, Irish Deputy, dispute with R., 48;
reference to, 49
Fleet Prison, R. committed to, 7;
R. removed from Tower to, 165
Flemish ships captured off Fuerteventura, 67
Flores in Azores, R. joins fleet of Essex off, 107
Flores, Gutierrez, Spanish President, opinion of the enemies' fleet off
Cadiz, 92
Fort del Ore, Ireland, built by invaders, 6;
siege, capture and massacre at, 12
Fowler, R.'s gold refiner, death of, 199
France, R. aids Huguenot princes, 4;
Hakluyt in, _ib._;
R.'s return from, 6;
Henry IV.'s compliment to Queen Elizabeth, 122;
invited to support Huguenots, 193;
Ambassador visits R., 190, 192;
R. offered escape by, 208
Free trade, R. an advocate of, 186-7
French Ambassadors: Duc de Biron, 122;
De Beaumont, 133, 141;
Des Marêts, 190, 192
French envoy, La Chesnée, offers R. means of escape, 208, 211, 212
French vessels detained by R., 195
Frobisher, Sir Martin, 26;
fleet for capturing Indian carracks, 54;
reputed severity, _ib._;
R. with his fleet, 56;
off Spanish coast seeking plate ships, 59
Fuerteventura, R. captures ships off, 67
Fuller records R. at Oxford, 3;
story of R. making his cloak a mat for Queen, 21;
anecdotes, 22
Gamage, Barbara, marries Robert Sidney, 33;
grandmother of Waller's Sacharissa, _ib._
Gardiner, S. R., estimate of R.'s genius, 130;
credits Beaumont's story of, 133;
account of R.'s trial, 157, 213;
account of the Benevolence, 184;
details of intrigues in K. James's Court, 190, 206
'Garland,' the, R.'s ship, 42
Gascoigne, protégé of R.'s half-brother, 5;
his _Steel Glass_, _ib._;
death of, 5;
Lord Grey patron of, 10
Gate House, R. confined in, 214
Gawdy, one of R.'s Winchester judges, 146
Genoa, its seizure proposed, 192;
discussed before K. James and rejected, _ib._
Geraldine Friary, Youghal, destroyed, 34
Geraldine, Sir James, trial and execution, 9
Geraldines rebel, 8
Gibb, John, page to James I., 159
Gifford, Captain, reference to, 79, 80
Gilbert, Adrian, R.'s half-brother, 1;
partner in N.-W. expeditions, 28;
holds office at Sherborne, 53;
obnoxious to R.'s bailiff Meeres, 121;
commended to Lady R., 140;
and R.'s Sherborne estates, 143
Gilbert, Bartholomew, his voyage to America, 125;
sails from Virginia with rich woods, 126;
carries supposed diamond from R. to Queen, 127-8
Gilbert, Katherine. _See_ Raleigh, Mrs
Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, R.'s half-brother, 1;
R. companion of his voyages, 6, 7;
gained renown in Ireland, 8;
granted Charter to make settlements in America, 26;
lends ships to serve on Irish coast, 26;
misfortunes and vicissitudes of expedition, 26-27;
his death at sea, 27
Gilbert, Sir John, half-brother to R., 62;
preparing to sail for Guiana, 113
Gilbert, Otto, 1
Gillingham Forest, R. in, 64
Glenmalure, R. meets Spenser at battle of, 10
Globe Theatre, Shakespeare's _Richard the Second_ at, 104
Godolphin, Sir Francis, warden of Stannaries, 141
Gomera Islands, R. lands at, 197;
courtesy of governor and his lady to R., 197-198
Gondomar (Sarmiento), Spanish ambassador, 190;
suspicious of R., 190, 191;
pledged R.'s life against Spanish attack, 192;
protests against Guiana expedition, 193;
Captain Bailey in his pay, 196;
Bailey traduces R. to, 199;
activity for R.'s ruin, 204;
urges embargo on English at Seville, 204;
claims punishment of R., 205
Goodwin, Hugh, hostage with Topiawari, 79;
learns Indian language, _ib._;
serves under Gifford, _ib._;
meets R. after twenty-two years, 200
Googe, Barnabee, in Munster, 10
Gorges, Sir A., assaulted by R., 58;
believes R. mad, _ib._;
historian of Azores expedition, 107;
and Duc de Biron, 122
Gorges, Sir F., and Essex conspiracy, 119
Gosnoll, Captain, American discoveries, 125;
sails from Virginia without R.'s leave, 126
Gray's _Elegy_ and R.'s _Cynthia_, 46
Grenville, Sir Richard, and R.'s Virginian expeditions, 29, 37;
captures Spanish prize of 50,000_l._, 29;
and Armada, 37;
R.'s account of the fight in the 'Revenge' and his heroic death, 51, 96;
Sir R. Beville inquires into his death, 51;
praised by Tennyson and Bacon, 51;
R.'s cousin, 95;
R. revenges his death, 96, 98
Greville, Fulke, in Munster, 10
Grey, Lord de Wilton, in Dublin, 9;
dislikes R., 9;
patron of Gascoigne, 10;
hatred of Popery, 11;
treatment of Irish rebels, 13;
denounced by R. to Leicester, 14;
leniency in Ireland, 22;
and Armada, 37;
dines with R. at Flores, 107;
in Low Countries, 115
Grey, young Lord de Wilton, and Watson's plot, 135, 158, 160
Grosart's _Lismore Papers_, vi.
Guard, R. Captain of the, 35, 103;
Sir T. Erskine supplants R., 133
Guayana Vieja founded by Berreo, 73
Guiana, R.'s desire to conquer, 64;
its description, 65, 66;
capture of Spanish letters relative to, 66;
annexed by Berreo, governor of Trinidad, _ib._;
Captain Whiddon visits for R., 66;
R. explores part of, 67;
supposed mineral wealth, 72, 75;
Humboldt on its gold yield, 75;
leaves two sailors at Morequito, 79;
health of R.'s expedition, 81;
R. asks effect of expedition on Court, 83;
R.'s _Discovery of Guiana_ published, 83-84;
Chapman's poem on, 85-86;
Captain Keymis's voyage, 86;
R.'s _Of the Voyage for Guiana_, 87;
Government interest not excited by R., _ib._;
Captain L. Berrie's voyage, 102;
D. of Finland urges R. to colonise, 113;
Sir J. Gilbert preparing for, 113;
increased fame of _Discovery_, 114;
R. asks leave to revisit, 170;
R.'s funds for voyage, 172, 189-190;
R. released from Tower to go to, 189;
advantages promised King James, _ib._;
preparations for, excite Spaniards, 190;
R.'s Royal commission, 190-191;
composition of R.'s fleet, 193-194;
its delays, 194;
fleet detains French traders, 195;
fleet off Canaries, _ib._;
Captain Bailey deserts, 196;
courtesies with Governor of Gomera, 198;
R.'s log of _Second Voyage_, 199;
R. ill of fever in, 199-200;
R. meets Hugh Goodwin after twenty-two years, 200;
fleet at Trinidad, 200;
Keymis explores for gold, attacks San Thomé, 200-1;
R.'s son Walter killed, 201;
Keymis's failure and embarrassed meeting with R., 201;
Keymis commits suicide in, 202;
R.'s failure to find gold mines in, 202;
mutiny of fleet, 202;
R. sails to Newfoundland from, 203;
R.'s ignominious return from, _ib._;
_Apology for the Voyage to_, 208
Gunpowder Plot and R., 168
Hakluyt, R.'s contemporary at Oxford, 3;
his _Voyages_ and sojourn in France, 4;
reprints R.'s report of Grenville's fight, 51;
_Discovery of Guiana_, 114
Hale, the sergeant at R.'s Winchester trial, 146-7
Hamburg ship, R. takes sugar, &c., from a, 41
Hampden, John, collector of R.'s MSS., 185
Hannah, Archdeacon, printed R.'s _Cynthia_, 46
Harington, Sir John, 34
Hariot, Thomas, R.'s scientific agent in Virginia, 31
Harris, Sir C., R. lodged in his house, 206
Hart, Captain, betrays R., 208
Harvey, Sir G., Lieutenant of Tower, 141, 142;
suspects R.'s communications, 144;
indulges R., succeeded by Sir W. Waad, 167
Hatfield MSS. and R.'s _Cynthia_, 46
Hatton, Sir C., R. reconciles him to Queen Elizabeth, 23;
references to, and death, 32, 35, 50
Hawkins, his third voyage, 6;
character of his voyages, 7
Hayes relates R.'s expense in Gilbert's expedition, 27
Hayes Barton, R.'s birthplace, in Devon, 1, 3
Hennessy, Sir J. Pope, account of R. in Ireland, 47
Henri IV. of France, 122
Henry VIII. censured in R.'s _History_, 180
Henry, Prince, visits R. in Tower, 169;
seeks advice of R., 173, 174;
death agonies eased by R.'s cordial, 175;
efforts and sympathy for R., 175, 180;
opinion of his father's conduct, 175;
and R.'s _Cabinet Council_, 185
_Histoire Universelle_, by d'Aubigné, 177
Historical MSS. Commission _Reports_, vi.
_History of the World_, by R.'s personal reference, 4, 5, 162, 171;
references to Armada, 38;
on boarding galleons, 39;
refers to Trinidad, 67;
R. aided by Ben Jonson, 175;
size and contents, 176;
critically examined, 176-182;
its preface, when written, 180;
suppressed by King James, and cause, 180-181
Hooker's _Supply of the Irish Chronicles_ and references to R., 11, 43;
_Ecclesiastical Polity_, 85;
Oxford tutor of Walter R., jun., 171
Hornsey, R.'s servants disturb the peace at, 6
Howard of Bindon, Thomas Lord, R. to warn him if any Spaniards in
Channel, 50;
and Cadiz expedition, 89, 96, 97, 98;
takes R.'s servant under his protection, 121;
persuades Sir W. Peryam to re-try Meere's suit, 127;
juror on R.'s trial, 143, 146
Howard, Lord Henry, and R., interview with Lennox, 124-125;
R. prays forgiveness for, 139
Howard of Effingham, Lord Charles, R.'s advice on boarding Armada, 38, 39;
high opinion of R., 39;
_Discovery of Guiana_ dedicated to, 84;
forces expedition to Cadiz, 88;
on committee for attack on Cadiz, 89;
details of his action at Cadiz, 92-100;
ship 'Ark Royal,' 93;
obtains R.'s return to Court, 103;
to attempt capture of Graciosa, 107;
created E. of Nottingham, 110, 112;
granted R.'s wine patent, 141;
conducts Arabella Stewart to R.'s trial, 155;
outlaws R.'s ship 'Destiny,' 205;
death of, 223
Huguenots, R. offers to aid, 4;
Henry Champernowne's force aids, _ib._;
mode of smoking out Catholics, 5
Hulsius, Levinus, Latin translation of the _Discovery of Guiana_, 114
Humboldt's examination of Guiana gold, 75;
testified to the genuineness of R.'s account of Guiana, 78
'Husband' ship, 194, 196
Imataca mountains seen by R., 72
Imokelly, R. escapes ambush by Seneschal of, 14
Income of R., references to, 16, 24, 25, 30, 34, 133, 162, 172
Indian carracks (plate-ships) scheme for R. to seize, 53-54;
Sir J. Burrows to attack them, 54;
their capture, 59-60;
fleet of in Cadiz harbour, 99;
burnt by Spaniards to avoid capture, _ib._;
two destroyed by R. in Azores, 109
_Ireland, History of the Early Ages in_, MacCarthy's, 129
Ireland, R. in, 7;
Catholic invasion of, 7;
R.'s voyage to Cork, 8;
Lord Grey succeeds Pelham in, 9;
execution of Sir J. Geraldine, 10;
poets on service in, _ib._;
massacre at Fort del Ore, 12;
R.'s severity towards rebels, 13;
rebels pardoned through Ormond, 13;
R.'s seizure of Barry Court, 14;
Castle Bally-in-Harsh taken by R.'s strategy, 15;
R.'s return from, 16;
R. paid for service in, 18;
R. assigned a Captaincy in, 19;
_The Opinion of Mr. Rawley_ on, 22;
Lord Grey deprived of Deputyship, 23;
R.'s residences in, 34;
estates in Cork, Waterford, and Tipperary settled by R., 34;
R.'s experience as a colonist in, 34;
R. leaves to fight Armada, 38;
Essex forces R.'s return to, 42;
R.'s efforts in developing his estates in, 47;
potato and tobacco introduced by R., 48;
Sir William Fitzwilliam, Deputy in, _ib._;
R. refused Lord Deputyship, 112;
occupied with affairs of, 115;
invaded by Spain, 124;
R. on situation in, _ib._;
MacCarthy's _History of the Early Ages in_, 129;
Boyle, Earl of Cork, buys R.'s estates in, 129;
R. sells remainder of his leases, 194
_Irish Chronicles_, Hooker's _Supply of the_, 11
Islands voyage. _See_ Azores
Islington, R.'s residence in, 6
James I. first cognisant of R., 123;
offers Scotch troops to repel Spanish invasion, 124;
sends Lennox on mission to Elizabeth, _ib._;
R. and Cobham reported unfavourable to, 124;
met by London nobility at death of Elizabeth, 132;
R. and Sir R. Crosse meet him at Burghley, _ib._;
unfavourably received R., 132;
promises R. continuance of Stannaries, _ib._;
displaces R. from the Guard, 133;
increases R.'s salary as Governor of Jersey, _ib._;
deprives R. of Durham House on petition of Bishop of Durham, 133, 134;
involved in promises to Catholics, 135;
waiting Spanish overtures, _ib._;
guest of Sir F. Carew, _ib._;
given R.'s _Discourse on Spanish War, &c._, _ib._;
R.'s projects distasteful to, _ib._;
commits R. to Tower, 137;
R. begs his life of and refused hope by, 158;
prepares warrant for stay of R.'s execution, 158;
signs death-warrants for conspirators, 159;
intention to reprieve, _ib._;
at bull-baiting on Tower Hill, 165;
and Christian IV. of Denmark, 169;
suppresses R.'s _History of the World_, 180;
R. hopes to propitiate him, 183;
forbids printing of R.'s _Prerogative of Parliament_, 184;
and the Benevolence, 184;
a Protectionist, 187;
releases R., 188;
to be enriched by R.'s second voyage to Guiana, 189;
submits R.'s proposed route to Madrid, 191;
ignores statements of Bailey, 199;
Captain North relates R.'s failure to, 203;
R.'s apologetic letter to, _ib._;
Spain clamours for R.'s death, 205;
invites claims against R., _ib._;
his arguments for R., _ib._;
R. doomed by, 205, 206;
_Apology_ for Guiana voyage of no effect on, 209;
R.'s attempted catspaw against Spain, 211;
R.'s confession to, 212;
advised to give R. public trial, 212;
R. throws himself on his mercy, 214;
quits London and signs R.'s death-warrant, _ib._;
foiled by R.'s bearing at execution, 219;
R. begs his memory to be saved from scurrilous writers, 220;
death of, 223
Jarnac, battle of, 4
Jeaffreson, J. Cordy, contribution by, vi.;
researches in Middlesex Records, 6, 20;
researches in Assembly Books of K. Lynn, 38
Jersey, R. seeks Governorship of, 114;
R. succeeds Sir A. Paulet as Governor, 116;
account of and effect of R.'s rule in, 116-117;
Norman gentry in, 127;
King James increased R.'s salary for, 133;
R. displaced for Sir J. Peyton, 141;
references to R. in, 126, 127
Jesuit captured by R., 64
Jewels, R.'s love of, 20;
value on his person when arrested, 20, 209
Jonson, Ben, referred by Camden to R., 175;
assists R. in _History of the World_, 175, 176;
goes with young Walter R. to Paris, 175;
his _Works_, 175;
jealous of Samuel Daniel, 183;
death of, 223
Keymis, Captain, with R. in Guiana, 80;
his second voyage to Guiana, 86;
commended to Lady R., 140;
gives evidence on R.'s trial under fear of torture, 154;
warden of Sherborne, 164;
and Guiana, 174;
joins R.'s fleet at Plymouth, 194;
commands Orinoco gold expedition without success, 200, 201;
attacks San Thomé, 201;
announces to R. death of his son Walter R., _ib._;
dejection at R.'s reproach, asks forgiveness, _ib._;
writes to Earl of Arundel, _ib._;
commits suicide, 202
Kilcolman, Spenser's Irish seat, 44
King, Captain Samuel, attempts R.'s escape, 206-8;
his arrest, 208
King's Lynn entertains R., 38
Kinsale, Spanish landing at, 124;
R. returns from Guiana to, 203
La Chesnée, French envoy, offers escape to R., 208, 211, 212
Lake, Sir Thomas, to send R. from Court, 133
Lane, Ralph, leader of R.'s Virginian colony, 29;
considers defence against Armada, 37
Languedoc, Catholics smoked out at, 5
La Rienzi, reference to at R.'s trial, 148
Leicester, Earl of, R. writes from Lismore to, 17;
R. his protégé at Court, _ib._;
goes to Netherlands with R. and Sir P. Sidney, 18;
Queen Elizabeth quarrels with, _ib._;
reconciled to R.'s Royal favour, 23;
in Netherlands and in disgrace, R.'s sympathy, 32;
reference to, 35;
death of, 50
Lennox, Duke of, diplomatic visit to Elizabeth, 124;
believes R. and Cobham opposed King James, _ib._
Limerick, victory of Sir N. Malby in woods of, 8
'Lion,' Sir R. Southwell's ship at Cadiz, 95
'Lion Whelp,' Cecil's ship, 67;
R. reinforced at Port of Spain by, 68
Lisbon, Drake and R. with expedition at, 41-42
Lismore, Elizabethan capital of Munster, 15
Lismore Castle, R. rents from Archbishop of Cashel, 34
_Lismore Papers_ and R.'s references, vi., 194, 203
Loftie, Rev. W. J., account of R.'s lodgings in Tower, 162
London citizens aid privateering against Spain, 59;
eagerness to share spoil, 61;
jewellers or goldsmiths and Spanish prize, 62;
plague in, 142
Lostwithiel, Stannaries Court of, 117
Macareo, R. tried to enter river, 69;
channel, 80
MacCarthy, Florence, R. advises his retention in Tower, 129;
asks Cecil to permit R. to judge him, _ib._;
his _History of the Early Ages in Ireland_, 129
Mace, Samuel, commands a Virginian fleet for R., 125
MacDermod, Cormac, Lord of Muskerry, R.'s severity to, 128
Macureguarai, rich city of Guiana, 78
Madeira, R.'s Virginian ships stripped at, 37
'Madre de Dios,' plate-ship, value of its capture, 60;
inquiry as to disposal of treasure, 62
Magrath, Meiler, Archbishop of Cashel, 34
Malby, Sir Nicholas, defeats Irish rebels, 8
Malet, Sir A., MSS., R.'s unpopularity referred to in, 131
Manamo, R. enters the Orinoco by river, 69
Manatee seen by R. in Guiana, 79
Mannourie, French quack attendant and spy on R., 207;
gives R. a detrimental dose, _ib._;
bribed by R., 208;
denounced by R., 220;
his disgrace, 223
Manoa, capital of Guiana, 69
Markham led out for execution but reprieved, 159, 160
Marlowe's career, 85
Marriage of R. to Elizabeth Throckmorton, 63
Martinez, Juan, journal of visit to Manoa, 69
'Mary Rose,' Sir G. Carew's Cadiz ship, 95
Maurice of Nassau, letters taken to Prince, 175
Medina Sidonia, Duke of, his report to Philip II. of English attack on
Cadiz, 98;
burns fleet of carracks to avoid capture by English, 99
Meeres, John, R.'s bailiff at Sherborne, 53;
his dismissal and revenge, 121;
arrests R.'s new bailiff, 121;
brings civil action against R., 122, 127;
commissioner for despoiling Sherborne, 164
Mellersh, Cobham's secretary, 142
Mexican plate fleet, R.'s designs on, 191, 202, 210, 213
Mexico, Gulf of, R.'s early knowledge of, 7
Mexico, its revenue to Spain, 77
Meyrick, Sir Gilly, his conduct towards R., 108
Middle Temple, R. in, 5
Milton inherits and publishes R.'s _The Cabinet Council_, 185
Mitcham, Lady R. sells an estate at, 189
_Monarchy of Man_, by Sir J. Elyot, describes R.'s last moments, 217
Moncontour in France, R. at retreat of, 4
Montgomery, death of Huguenot chief, 4
Mont Orgueil, Jersey, 117
Morequito, port on River Orinoco, 74;
its chief Topiawari, 78
Mulla. _See_ Awbeg, 44
Munster, R. temporary governor of, succeeded by Zouch, 15;
Sentleger provost-marshal in, 9;
Spenser clerk of the council of, 44;
life in, _ib._;
R.'s efforts to improve, 47;
severity of President against Cormac MacDermod, 128
Muskerry, Lord of, severity against, 128
Naunton's description of R., 20, 22
Navigation, R. considering international, 56
Netherlands, Earl of Leicester in, 28, 32;
Devon miners serve in, 32;
R.'s _Discourse ... the Protecting of_, 135
Newfoundland, R. in, 33, 203;
R. establishes trade with Jersey, 117
Ninias, R.'s account of King, 181
'Nonparilla,' R., Dudley's ship at Cadiz, 95
North, Captain, tells the King of R.'s Guiana failure, 203
North-West Passage, R.'s efforts, its discovery, 28;
and northern route to China, 28
Northampton, Lord, interviews R. in Tower, 172;
R.'s enemy removed, 187;
at R.'s execution, 218
Northumberland, Earl of, R. visits at Sion House, 114;
goes to Ostend with R., 115;
invited to Bath, 127
Nottingham, Earl of. _See_ Howard
Old Palace Yard, R. executed at, 214
Oldys, William, _Life of R._, v.;
reference to, 101
Olonne, R. captures and forfeits to Treasury a bark of, 42
Orange, Prince of, Elizabeth sends R. to, 18;
Leicester accused of conspiracy with, _ib._
Orinoco, R.'s expedition to river, 67, 69-81;
second expedition up, 200;
failure to find gold, 201
Ormond, governor of Munster, 10;
desire to treat with Irish, 11;
obtains pardon for the rebels, 13;
quarrels with R., 15;
denounced for leniency, 22
Ostend, R. and Northumberland visit, 115
Oxford, R. educated at, 3, 6
Oxford's, Lord, quarrel with Sir P. Sidney, 7;
at execution of R., 218
Panama pearl fisheries, 25;
R.'s scheme to seize, 54
_Parliaments, Prerogative of_, 112, 180
Paulet, Sir Anthony, governor of Jersey, death, 116
Paunsford, Richard, servant of R., 6
Pecora Campi. _See_ Hatton
Pelham, Sir William, Irish command, 9, 10
Pembroke, Earl of, succeeds R. in Duchy of Cornwall, 163
Pembroke, Lady, R.'s friend in hour of trial, 157;
her son intercedes for R., _ib._
Peryam, Sir William, Chief Baron of Exchequer, 127
Pew, Hugh, steals R.'s pearl hat-band, &c., 20
Peyton, Sir John, succeeds R. in Jersey, 141;
Sir John the younger messenger between Cobham and R., 144
Philip of Spain's Armada, resistance to, 37;
expels Antonio from Portugal, 41;
desire to recover prestige, 105
Philip III. demands R.'s execution, 212;
foiled by R.'s conduct at execution, 219
_Phoenix Nest_, 34
_Pilgrimage_, R. writes _The_, 159
Piratical expedition by R. stopped, 7
Plymouth, 7, 27, 29, 36, 38, 67, 89, 90, 91, 100, 105, 106, 117, 194, 203
Popham, Lord Chief Justice, tries R. at Winchester, 146;
hissed at conclusion of R.'s trial, 157;
declares R.'s Sherborne conveyance invalid, 164
Popham, Captain George, captures Spanish letters, 66
Portland, R. as governor completes defences of, 38
Portugal, expedition to restore Antonio, 41;
R. serves under Drake at Lisbon, _ib._
Potato introduced into Ireland by R., 48;
distributed by ancestor of Lord Southwell, _ib._
_Prerogative of Parliaments_, by R., 112, 180;
its publication and intention, 183;
King James forbids its printing, 184;
issued posthumously, _ib._;
MS. in Record Office, _ib._
Preston, Captain Amyas, harries Venezuela, 81
Prest, Agnes, her martyrdom, 2;
indirect effect on R.'s religion, 3
'Prudence,' a London ship, 59
Puerto Rico friars, 69
Purchas, his collection of travels, 85
Puritans, Essex and R. their friends, 50
Puttenham's praise of _Shepherd's Calender_, 44
Queen of James I., R.'s friend, 169, 188;
her father, Christian IV., 169;
Samuel Daniel a servant of, 183;
R.'s rhyming petition to, 209;
exertions to save R., 210;
death of, 223
'Rainbow,' Sir F. Vere's ship at Cadiz, 95
Rakele, R. meets Spenser at, 10;
R.'s treatment of Irish kerns at, 11
Raleigh, Carew, son of Sir Walter, 166;
reference to, 200, 222
Raleigh, George, Sir Walter's nephew, 200
Raleigh _née_ Gilbert, Mrs., Sir Walter's mother, 1;
her religion, 2
Raleigh town, Virginia, 36
Raleigh, Walter, the elder, his third marriage, 1;
diversity of spelling his name, 2;
family lease of fish tithes, 2;
latest mention of, his age, 16
Raleigh, Sir Walter, Lives of, v.;
correspondence of, v.;
bibliography by Dr. Brushfield, vi.;
love of birthplace, 1;
connections and parentage, 1;
earliest record of, 2;
education and career at Oxford, 3;
convicted of assault, 7;
goes to Ireland, 9;
with Spenser, 10, 43, 48, 49;
character whilst in Ireland, 14;
pecuniary position, 16, 30, 34, 42, 116, 126, 129, 133, 141, 162, 189,
190, 194;
his person in 1582, 20;
mother wit and audacious alacrity, 22;
success as a courtier, 23;
Royal gifts to, 24, 25;
continues Sir H. Gilbert's efforts, 28;
and Virginia, 29, 37, 41, 125;
granted licence to export woollen broad-cloths, their nature and value,
29, 30;
resides at Durham House, 31;
receives knighthood, 31;
successful expedition to Azores, 33;
elegy on Sir Philip Sidney, _ib._;
experience as an Irish colonist, 34;
zenith of personal success, 35;
part in fighting Armada, 37;
privateering expeditions, their excuse, 40, 41;
forced return to Ireland, 42;
his poem of _Cynthia_, 45;
developes his Irish estates, 47;
introduces the potato, 48;
and Puritans, his toleration, 50;
_Report on Grenville's fight in the_ '_Revenge_,' 51;
obtains Sherborne Castle, 52-53;
clandestine relations with Elizabeth Throckmorton, 55;
embroilment between Queen and Mrs. Throckmorton, 55-57;
confined in the Tower, 57;
failure in health, 59, 63, 110, 114, 168, 187, 199, 200;
released to quell disturbance in Devon, 61;
his popularity in Devon, 61;
marriage with E. Throckmorton, 63;
eagerness for service, 64;
attracted to Guiana, 66;
and Guiana gold, 75-77;
publishes _Discovery of Guiana_, 84;
merit as a writer of travel, 85;
his _Of the Voyage for Guiana_, 87;
naval skill first fully recognised, 89;
taking of Cadiz, brilliant triumph for, 91;
his _Relation of the Action in Cadiz Harbour_, 92;
details of his Cadiz command, 92-99;
wounded in the leg, 98;
preparation for third Guiana expedition, 101;
lauded by literary classes on return from Cadiz, 102;
intimacy with Cecil and Brooke family, 102;
exertions to provoke second attack on Spain, 105;
sails with fleet to attack Azores; success at Fayal, which provokes
Essex, 105-109;
only nominally in Queen's favour, 111;
his _Prerogative of Parliament_, 112, 183-184;
seeks various dignities without success, _ib._;
increasing enmity with Essex, and friendship with Cobham, 113;
height of fame as a geographer, 114;
his share in the execution of Essex, 118-121;
comes under notice of James of Scotland, 123;
his _Dangers of the Spanish Faction in Scotland_, 124;
his view of Irish affairs in 1601, _ib._;
not a complete loser by his expeditions, 126;
severe action towards Cormac MacDermod, 128;
advises detention of F. MacCarthy in Tower, 129;
good fortune ceases with Elizabeth's death, _ib._;
character, condition, and fame in 1603, 130-131;
ungraciously received by King James, 132;
sent from Court of James, 133;
not judicious towards James, 134;
Spanish schemes distasteful to King, 135;
arrested for complicity in Watson's plot, 136;
compromised by Cobham, 136, 137;
committed to the Tower, 137;
attempts suicide, 137, 138, 141;
supposed farewell letter to his lady, 137-140;
stripped of his appointments, 141;
communications with Cobham, 141, 144, 145;
enmity of populace to, 145;
trial at Winchester, 146-157;
letter to K. James suing for life, 158, 159;
poem _The Pilgrimage_, 159;
reprieved at hour for execution, 160;
confinement in Tower, 160, 164, 167, 168;
efforts for his release, 169;
friendship with Queen and Prince Henry, 169;
asks permission to go to Guiana, 170, 174;
literary pursuits, 171;
consulted by P. Henry in shipbuilding, 173-4;
writing _Marriage Discourses_, 174;
_History of World_ and Ben Jonson, 175, 176-182;
demands for his MS., 184;
his _Cabinet Council_; _Discourse of War_; and _Observations on Trade
and Commerce_, 185, 186;
his release and conditions, 188, 189;
prepares second voyage to Guiana, 189-191;
intrigues for seizure of Genoa, 192;
leaves for Guiana--fleet vicissitudes, 193-194;
details of outward voyage, 195-200;
meets an old servant in Guiana, 200;
his son slain at San Thomé, 201;
fails to discover gold, 201;
his faithful Keymis commits suicide, 202;
mutiny of his fleet _ib._;
ignominious return to England, 203, 205;
arrest and attempted escape, 206, 208;
writes _Apology for the Voyage to Guiana_, 208;
valuables found on his person, 209;
James uninfluenced by _Apology_, _ib._;
rhyming petition to Queen; her exertions, 209, 210;
examined before Commissioners, 210, 212;
written confession to the King, 212;
if pardoned declares ability to reveal State secrets, _ib._;
trial, defence, condemnation, 212, 213, 214;
bearing night before execution, 214-5;
last interview with his Lady, 215;
last verses, _ib._;
proposed burial at Beddington, 215;
last moments, conduct on scaffold, 216-220;
reason for attempted escape to France, 219;
execution, 221;
body in St. Margaret's, Westminster, 222;
his head embalmed and preserved, _ib._;
death roll of his friends, 223
Raleigh, Walter, the younger, 114, 116;
and Sherborne estates, 143;
at Oxford; his tutors, 171;
wins a fatal duel, 175;
and Ben Jonson, _ib._;
Captain of the 'Destiny,' 193;
with Keymis in Orinoco gold expedition, 200;
killed at San Thomé, last words, 201
Raleigh, Lady, and _see_ Throckmorton;
influence over Cecil, 84;
appeals to Cecil, 110, 144, 158;
and Durham House, 117, 133;
her husband's supposed farewell letter, 137-140;
shares rooms in Tower, 162;
and Sherborne Estates, 144, 164, 165, 171, 172;
pleads with James for R.'s pardon, 169;
sells an estate at Mitcham, 189;
letter from R. in Guiana, 200;
meets R. at Plymouth, 206;
precedes R. to London, 207;
released from Tower, 212;
final interview with R., 215;
and burial of her husband, 215, 222;
her death, 222
Rebellion in Ireland, R.'s share in suppression, 9-16
_Remains_ of R.'s writings, 187
'Repulse,' Essex's ship off Cadiz, 93;
off Azores, 107
Revenge, R.'s ship, 42
'_Revenge_,' _A Report of the Truth of the Fight_, etc., 51;
its style and anonymous issue, _ib._
_Richard the Second_, Cecil entertains Essex and R. with Shakespeare,
103-104
Richelieu refers to R., 193
Rimenant, R. at battle of, 5
Roanoke, discovery of, 28;
settled by Ralph Lane, 29
Roche, Lord and Lady, captured by R., 15
Rochelle privateers strip R.'s ships, 37
'Roebuck,' R.'s ship captures 'Madre de Dios,' 60
Roraima, 79
Rutland, Countess of, Sir P. Sidney's sister, 175
Sacharissa, grand-daughter of R.'s cousin, 33
Saint Germain, R. receives manor of, 116
Salisbury, R. ill at, 207, 208;
K. James and Court at, 208
Salisbury, See of, and R.'s Sherborne estate, 52, 53, 64
Salisbury, Cecil created Earl of, 166
Salisbury, William, Second Earl of, playmate to young Walter R., 114;
at Sherborne, 116
Salto Caroni, cataract of, 74
San Juan de Ulloa, 6
San Miguel, its capture arranged, 107, 109
San Rafael de Barrancas settlement, 72
San Thomé, R.'s captain attacks, 201;
R.'s eldest son killed at, _ib._;
news of attack reaches Spain and England, 205
Sancroft, Archbishop, attributes _History of England_ to R., 182
Sandars, a legate, and Irish rebellion, 8
Sarmiento, Don Pedro, captured by R., 33
Sarmiento. _See_ Gondomar
Savage, Sir Arthur, and Duc de Biron, 122;
reference to, 125
Savoy watched by Venice, 190
Scarnafissi, Savoyard Envoy, 192;
R. suggests to him seizure of Genoa, _ib._;
lays R.'s scheme before King James; its rejection, _ib._
Schomburgk, Sir Robert, corroborates R. in Guiana, 71, 72
Sentleger, Sir Warham, Irish command, 8;
Provost Marshal of Munster, 9
Sentleger, Sir William, command in Guiana fleet, 194
Shakespeare's advent, 85;
performance of his _Richard the Second_, 104
Shepherd of the Ocean, R. so named by Spenser, 44, 46-7
_Shepherd's Calender_ by Spenser, 10, 44;
references to R. in, 45
Sherborne, R.'s favourite country abode, 52;
R.'s acquirement of, 52, 53;
R. at, 63, 67, 71, 87, 100, 114, 126, 127, 207;
Dean of Sarum lets farms over R.'s head, 64;
remnant of R.'s fortune: tries to tie it to his son and Adrian
Gilbert, 143;
Sir J. Elphinstone applies for, _ib._;
R. conveys it to his son with rent charge to Lady R., 144;
supports R. six years in Tower, 162;
King's Commissioners spoiling, 163;
Cecil stays commissioners, _ib._;
held on trust for Lady R. by Sir A. Brett, 164;
R.'s conveyance declared invalid, 164, 165;
Keymis warder of, 164;
Lady R. pleads for secure tenure of, 171;
James covets it for and bestows it on Carr, 171, 172;
repurchased for Prince Henry, 172;
Lady R. receives 8,000_l._ in lieu of, _ib._;
R.'s last sojourn at, 207
_Shipping_, R.'s _Invention of_, 18
Sidmouth Church, earliest R. deed preserved at, 2
Sidney, Sir Philip, R.'s contemporary at Oxford, 3;
tennis court quarrel, 7;
handsome features, 20;
R.'s elegy on, 33
Sidney, Robert, marries R.'s cousin, 33
Simancas, R.'s map of Guiana found at, 83;
R.'s confession of French intrigues found at, 212
Sion House, R. visits Earl of Northumberland at, 114
Smerwick Bay, Spanish invasion at, 8
Southwell, Sir Robert, with Cadiz expedition, 95
Southwell, Lord, his ancestor distributes R.'s potatoes, 48
Southampton, Earl of, his amusement, 111
Spain and R., 25, 30, 32, 50, 51, 52, 84;
attack and capture of its plate ships, 59-60;
R. tries to stem flow of gold to, 76-77;
effect of Cadiz expedition on, 101;
R. counsels a second attack on, 105;
expedition to, and its accidents, 105, 106;
alters destiny for Azores, 107;
invades Ireland at Kinsale, 124;
King James waiting overtures from, 135;
R.'s _Discourse touching War with_, _ib._;
R.'s offer to raise and lead troops against, _ib._;
watching France, 190;
Guiana route submitted to, 191;
offers R. escort to Guiana gold mines, _ib._;
promised security at peril of R.'s life, 192, 205;
asks punishment of R. for San Thomé attack, _ib._;
Buckingham favourable to, 210;
James, the attempted catspaw of R. against, 211;
English pensioners in pay of, _ib._
_Spanish Alarum, The_, by R., 104
Spanish Ambassador pleads for R.'s life, 158
Spanish Armada, 38-39, 88
_Spanish Faction in Scotland, the Dangers of a_, 124
Spanish invasion of England, R.'s advice against, 37-38
Sparrey, Francis, volunteers to stay in Guiana, 79;
captured by Spaniards; his account of Guiana, _ib._
Spenser, Edmund, secretary to Lord Grey in Ireland, 10;
his _Shepherd's Calender_; first meets R., _ib._, 20;
_Colin Clout_, evidence of R.'s position with Queen, 43;
effect of R.'s friendship on, _ib._;
his _Faery Queen_ and R.'s adventures compared, _ib._;
Clerk of Council of Munster, 44;
Irish estate, _ib._;
returns to England; at Court with R., 48;
secures a pension for _Faery Queen_, 49
'St. Andrew,' rich Spanish prize taken at Cadiz, 99
St. Bartholomew's, R. and massacre on, 4
St. John, J. A., _Life of R._, v.;
discovery of R.'s map of Guiana, 83;
prints R.'s confession, 212
St. John, Oliver, trial of, 184
St. John, Sir William, efforts for R.'s release, 188
St. Margaret's, Westminster, R.'s body buried in, 222
'St. Matthew,' valuable prize taken at Cadiz, 98, 99
'St. Philip,' R.'s contest at Cadiz with, 96, 98;
saved from total destruction by Dutch, 99
Stafford, Sir Edward, tells Bacon of R. in Tower, 57;
his kinswoman wife of Governor of Gomera, 197
Stannaries, R. Lord Warden of the, 32, 64, 128, 141
Stead, death of, 198
_Steel Glass_, Gascoigne's, 5;
verses prefixed by R. to, _ib._
Stourton, Lady, R. arrests a Jesuit in house of, 64
Strozzi, Peter, lost at Azores, 39
Stuart, Arabella, conspirators for, 102;
her descent and relationship to James I., 142, 143;
protests her ignorance of plot at R.'s trial, 155;
James wishes to spare, _ib._;
her death, R. deprived of her pearls, 187
Stukely, Sir Lewis, R.'s cousin, arrests R., 206;
hires French quack to inveigle R., 207;
bribed by and betrays R., 208;
valuables on R.'s person fall to, 209;
denounced by R., 220;
condemned for clipping coin, 222;
fled to Lundy and died a maniac, 223
Suffolk urges severity against R., 141
'Summer's Nightingale,' R. styled the, 49
Talbot, John, R.'s secretary in Tower, death of, 199
Tarleton, comedian, his remark against R. at Court, 36
Tax on tavern-keepers ascribed to R. but due to Queen, 131
Temple, Middle, R. in, 5
Tennyson, Lord, praise of Sir R. Grenville, 51
_Tewkesbury, Annals of_, 171
Throckmorton, Arthur, dispute and dismissal from fleet, 90;
restored by R.'s influence, 91;
gains distinction at Cadiz, 91
Throckmorton, Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Nicholas, 55;
her love of R., 55;
private marriage with R., _ib._, 63;
confined in Tower, 57;
_see_ R., Lady
Thynne, Francis, R.'s cousin, 214
'Tiger,' Sir R. Grenville's ship, 29
Tipperary, R. granted estates in, 34
Tonson, navigator, 6
Topiawari, friendly Guiana chief, 78, 79
Tounson, Dean of Westminster, R.'s spiritual adviser, 214;
describes R. in face of death, 214-215;
attends R.'s execution, 216
Tower, R. confined in, 57, 137, 138, 142, 145, 160, 161-188, 209;
R. attempts suicide in, 137;
plague in outlying posts of, 142;
R.'s apartments in Garden or Bloody Tower, 162;
malaria in, 164;
Lady R. and son leaves, 165;
R.'s experiments in garden of, 168;
death of Arabella Stuart in, 187;
release of R., 188
Tower, Lieutenants of, in charge of R., Sir G. Harvey and Sir J. Peyton,
141;
Sir William Waad, 167;
Sir A. Apsley and Sir T. Wilson, 211
_Trade and Commerce_, R. on, 186;
a plea for free trade, 186-187;
when published, 187
Trinidad, A. de Berreo Governor of, 66;
visited by R.'s expedition, 67, 200;
its liquid pitch and oysters, 67;
R. returns from Guiana to, 80
Udall, John, protected by R. and Essex, 50
_Underwoods_, verses by R. attributed to Ben Jonson, 175
Vanlore, Pieter, R. borrows of, 190
Venezuela coast plundered by R.'s expedition, 81;
precautions against English, _ib._
Venice watching Savoy, 190
Vere, Sir Francis, with Cadiz expedition, 95, 97;
to attempt with Howard capture of Graciosa, 107
Villiers, favourable to R., 187;
animus against Somerset, 188;
urged to intervene for R., 210;
pledged to Spanish alliance, _ib._
Virginia, discovery of, 28;
failure of a second expedition to, 29;
its products attract R., 30;
collapse of R.'s colony, 33;
a fourth expedition fails, 36;
expenditure on abortive fifth expedition, 37;
R.'s relief vessels stripped by privateers, _ib._;
drain on R.'s fortune; leases patent, 41;
never visited by R., _ib._;
R.'s final effort to colonise, 125;
R. not a complete loser by expeditions to, 126;
expected return of an expedition by R., 40
Waad, Sir W., takes R. to Winchester for trial, 145;
special commissioner at R.'s trial, 146;
thinks R. too comfortable in Tower, 162;
succeeds as Lieutenant of Tower, 167;
suspicion of R.'s experiments, 168;
reference to, 170
Walsingham and R. in Paris on St. Bartholomew's eve, 4;
massacre of Fort del Ore reported to, 12;
reference to, 32;
death of, 50
Walton, Izaak, accounts of Ben Jonson and R., 175
_War_, R.'s _A Discourse of_, 185-6;
most pleasing of R.'s prose writings, 185
Warburton, judge at R.'s Winchester trial, 146
'War Sprite,' R.'s ship in Cadiz expedition, 94
Waterford, R. granted estates in, 34;
trade in pipe-staves encouraged by R., 47
Watson's plot, 135;
his conviction and execution, 158
Webbe's praise of _Shepherd's Calender_, 44
_West Indies, Sir W. R.'s voyage to the_, 7;
R.'s early visits to, _ib._
West Horsley Church, R.'s head rests in, 222
Wexford, its trade in pipe-staves encouraged by R., 47
Weymouth, R. at, 100, 104, 116, 127
Whiddon, Captain Jacob, visits Guiana for R., 66;
examines mouths of Orinoco, 69
White, Captain John, fourth Virginian expedition, 36;
lands at Hatorask. His failure, _ib._
White, Roland, records R. at Court, 103
Whitlock, Captain, 167
Willoughby, Ambrose, Esquire of the body, 111
Wilson, Sir Thomas, spy on R., 211;
his acquaintance with Raleigh in Tower, _ib._
Winchester, Marquis of, entertains Queen and French envoys at Basing
House, 123
Winchester, R. tried at Wolvesey Castle, 145;
R. confined in, 157, 159;
R. removed from, 160
Winchester, Bishop of, attendant on, 158
Wines, farm of, R. granted, 24, 25;
King James transfers it to E. of Nottingham, 141
Winwood, Sir Ralph, favourable to R., 187, 204;
hater of Spain, 188;
visits R.'s ship 'Destiny,' 192;
ignores Bailey's charge against R., 199;
R. writes of his Guiana failure to, 202;
his death, 203, 204
Wither, George, prophecy of English supremacy in America, 25
Wokoken, discovery of, 28
Wood, Anthony à, records R. at Oxford, 3
_Works_ by Ben Jonson, and R.'s verses, 175
Yelverton, Attorney-General, prosecutes R., 210, 214
Yetminster Manor given to R., 53
Youghal burned by Geraldines, 8;
destruction of Geraldine Friary, 34;
R.'s residence at, 34, 44;
yew tree contemporary with R. still at, 48;
potato first planted at, 48
Zouch, in trenches at Fort del Ore, 12;
at Lismore, 15
_Spottiswoode & Co. Printers, New-street Square, London_
TRANSCRIBERS' NOTES
General: corrections to punctuation have not been individually documented
General: references to page iii changed to page v
Page 19: life-time standardised to lifetime
Page 28: "'a delicate sweet smell' far out in ocean" as in original
Pages 148, 238: Discrepancy in the spelling of Renzi/Rienzi as in original
Page 160: Gray's standardised to Grey's in "could not hear, Grey's lips"
Page 226: "Madre de Dio" standardised to "Madre de Dios"
Beddingfield Park standardised to Bedingfield Park
Page 228: Gavan standardised to Gawen
Psge 233: N.W. standardised to N.-W.
Page 238: 206-7-8 standardised to 206-8
Page 239: Meere standardised to Meeres
Montcontour standardised to Moncontour
Page 240: hatband standardised to hat-band
Page 242: broadcloths standardised to broad-cloths
McDermod standardised to MacDermod
Page 246: Page number corrected from 24 to 64 in entry Stourton
Page 247: Page number corrected from 517 to 175 in entry Underwoods
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