Sir Walter Raleigh and His Time

By possession, then?  That may hold for Mexico, Peru, New Grenada, Paraguay, which have been colonised; though they were gained by means which make every one concerned in conquering them worthy of the gallows; and the right is only that of the thief to the purse, whose owner he has murdered.  But as for the rest—Why the Spaniard has not colonised, even explored, one-fifth of the New World, not even one-fifth of the coast.  Is the existence of a few petty factories, often hundreds of miles apart, at a few river-mouths to give them a claim to the whole intermediate coast, much less to the vast unknown tracts inside?  We will try that.  If they appeal to the sword, so be it.  The men are treacherous robbers; we will indemnify ourselves for our losses, and God defend the right.

So argued the English; and so sprung up that strange war of reprisals, in which, for eighteen years, it was held that there was no peace between England and Spain beyond the line, i.e., beyond the parallel of longitude where the Pope’s gift of the western world was said to begin; and, as the quarrel thickened and neared, extended to the Azores, Canaries, and coasts of Africa, where English and Spaniards flew at each other as soon as seen, mutually and by common consent, as natural enemies, each invoking God in the battle with Antichrist.

Into such a world as this goes forth young Raleigh, his heart full of chivalrous worship for England’s tutelary genius, his brain aflame with the true miracles of the new-found Hesperides, full of vague hopes, vast imaginations, and consciousness of enormous power.  And yet he is no wayward dreamer, unfit for this work-day world.  With a vein of song ‘most lofty, insolent, and passionate,’ indeed unable to see aught without a poetic glow over the whole, he is eminently practical, contented to begin at the beginning that he may end at the end; one who could ‘toil terribly,’ ‘who always laboured at the matter in hand as if he were born only for that.’  Accordingly, he sets to work faithfully and stoutly, to learn his trade of soldiering, and learns it in silence and obscurity.  He shares (it seems) in the retreat at Moncontour, and is by at the death of Condé, and toils on for five years, marching and skirmishing, smoking the enemy out of mountain-caves in Languedoc, and all the wild work of war.  During the San Bartholomew massacre we hear nothing of him; perhaps he took refuge with Sidney and others in Walsingham’s house.  No records of these years remain, save a few scattered reminiscences in his works, which mark the shrewd, observant eye of the future statesman.

When he returned we know not.  We trace him, in 1576, by some verses prefixed to Gascoigne’s satire, the ‘Steele Glass,’ solid, stately, epigrammatic, ‘by Walter Rawley of the Middle Temple.’  The style is his; spelling of names matters nought in days in which a man would spell his own name three different ways in one document.

Gascoigne, like Raleigh, knew Lord Grey of Wilton, and most men about town too; and had been a soldier abroad, like Raleigh, probably with him.  It seems to have been the fashion for young idlers to lodge among the Templars; indeed, toward the end of the century, they had to be cleared out, as crowding the wigs and gowns too much; and perhaps proving noisy neighbours, as Raleigh may have done.  To this period may be referred, probably, his Justice done on Mr. Charles Chester (Ben Jonson’s Carlo Buffone), ‘a perpetual talker, and made a noise like a drum in a room; so one time, at a tavern, Raleigh beats him and seals up his mouth, his upper and nether beard, with hard wax.’  For there is a great laugh in Raleigh’s heart, a genial contempt of asses; and one that will make him enemies hereafter: perhaps shorten his days.

One hears of him next, but only by report, in the Netherlands under Norris, where the nucleus of the English line (especially of its musquetry) was training.  For Don John of Austria intends not only to crush the liberties and creeds of the Flemings, but afterwards to marry the Queen of Scots, and conquer England: and Elizabeth, unwillingly and slowly, for she cannot stomach rebels, has sent men and money to the States to stop Don John in time; which the valiant English and Scotch do on Lammas day, 1578, and that in a fashion till then unseen in war.  For coming up late and panting, and ‘being more sensible of a little heat of the sun than of any cold fear of death,’ they throw off their armour and clothes, and, in their shirts (not over-clean, one fears), give Don John’s rashness such a rebuff, that two months more see that wild meteor, with lost hopes and tarnished fame, lie down and vanish below the stormy horizon.  In these days, probably, it is that he knew Colonel Bingham, a soldier of fortune, of a ‘fancy high and wild, too desultory and over-voluble,’ who had, among his hundred and one schemes, one for the plantation of America as poor Sir Thomas Stukely (whom Raleigh must have known well), uncle of the traitor Lewis, had for the peopling of Florida.

Raleigh returns.  Ten years has he been learning his soldier’s trade in silence.  He will take a lesson in seamanship next.  The court may come in time: for by now the poor squire’s younger son must have discovered—perhaps even too fully—that he is not as other men are; that he can speak, and watch, and dare, and endure, as none around him can do.  However, there are ‘good adventures toward,’ as the ‘Morte d’Arthur’ would say; and he will off with his half-brother Humphrey Gilbert to carry out his patent for planting Meta Incognita—‘The Unknown Goal,’ as Queen Elizabeth has named it—which will prove to be too truly and fatally unknown.  In a latitude south of England, and with an Italian summer, who can guess that the winter will outfreeze Russia itself?  The merchant-seaman, like the statesman, had yet many a thing to learn.  Instead of smiling at our forefathers’ ignorance, let us honour the men who bought knowledge for us their children at the price of lives nobler than our own.

So Raleigh goes on his voyage with Humphrey Gilbert, to carry out the patent for discovering and planting in Meta Incognita; but the voyage prospers not.  A ‘smart brush with the Spaniards’ sends them home again, with the loss of Morgan, their best captain, and ‘a tall ship’; and Meta Incognita is forgotten for a while; but not the Spaniards.  Who are these who forbid all English, by virtue of the Pope’s bull, to cross the Atlantic?  That must be settled hereafter; and Raleigh, ever busy, is off to Ireland to command a company in that ‘common weal, or rather common woe’, as he calls it in a letter to Leicester.  Two years and more pass here; and all the records of him which remain are of a man valiant, daring, and yet prudent beyond his fellows.  He hates his work, and is not on too good terms with stern and sour, but brave and faithful Lord Grey; but Lord Grey is Leicester’s friend, and Raleigh works patiently under him, like a sensible man, just because he is Leicester’s friend.  Some modern gentleman of note—I forget who, and do not care to recollect—says that Raleigh’s ‘prudence never bore any proportion to his genius.’  The next biographer we open accuses him of being too calculating, cunning, timeserving; and so forth.  Perhaps both are true.  The man’s was a character very likely to fall alternately into either sin—doubtless did so a hundred times.  Perhaps both are false.  The man’s character was, on occasion, certain to rise above both faults.  We have evidence that he did so his whole life long.

He is tired of Ireland at last: nothing goes right there:—When has it?  Nothing is to be done there.  That which is crooked cannot be made straight, and that which is wanting cannot be numbered.  He comes to London and to court.  But how?  By spreading his cloak over a muddy place for Queen Elizabeth to step on?  It is very likely to be a true story; but biographers have slurred over a few facts in their hurry to carry out their theory of ‘favourites,’ and to prove that Elizabeth took up Raleigh on the same grounds that a boarding-school miss might have done.  Not that I deny the cloak story to be a very pretty story; perhaps it justifies, taken alone, Elizabeth’s fondness for him.  There may have been self-interest in it; we are bound, as ‘men of the world,’ to impute the dirtiest motive that we can find; but how many self-interested men do we know who would have had quickness and daring to do such a thing?  Men who are thinking about themselves are not generally either so quick-witted, or so inclined to throw away a good cloak, when by much scraping and saving they have got one.  I never met a cunning, selfish, ambitious man who would have done such a thing.  The reader may; but even if he has, we must ask him, for Queen Elizabeth’s sake, to consider that this young Quixote is the close relation of three of the finest public men then living, Champernoun, Gilbert, and Carew.  That he is a friend of Sidney, a pet of Leicester; that he has left behind him at Oxford, and brought with him from Ireland, the reputation of being a rara avis, a new star in the firmament; that he had been a soldier in her Majesty’s service (and in one in which she has a peculiar private interest) for twelve years; that he has held her commission as one of the triumvirate for governing Munster, and has been the commander of the garrison at Cork; and that it is possible that she may have heard something of him before he threw his cloak under her feet, especially as there has been some controversy (which we have in vain tried to fathom) between him and Lord Grey about that terrible Smerwick slaughter; of the results of which we know little, but that Raleigh, being called in question about it in London, made such good play with his tongue, that his reputation as an orator and a man of talent was fixed once and for ever.

Within the twelve months he is sent on some secret diplomatic mission about the Anjou marriage; he is in fact now installed in his place as ‘a favourite.’  And why not?  If a man is found to be wise and witty, ready and useful, able to do whatsoever he is put to, why is a sovereign, who has eyes to see the man’s worth and courage to use it, to be accused of I know not what, because the said man happens to be good-looking?

Now comes the turning-point of Raleigh’s life.  What does he intend to be?  Soldier, statesman, scholar, or sea-adventurer?  He takes the most natural, yet not the wisest course.  He will try and be all four at once.  He has intellect for it; by worldly wisdom he may have money for it also.  Even now he has contrived (no one can tell whence) to build a good bark of two hundred tons, and send her out with Humphrey Gilbert on his second and fatal voyage.  Luckily for Raleigh she deserts and comes home, while not yet out of the Channel, or she surely had gone the way of the rest of Gilbert’s squadron.  Raleigh, of course, loses money by the failure, as well as the hopes which he had grounded on his brother’s Transatlantic viceroyalty.  And a bitter pang it must have been to him to find himself bereft of that pure and heroic counsellor just at his entering into life.  But with the same elasticity which sent him to the grave, he is busy within six months in a fresh expedition.  If Meta Incognita be not worth planting, there must be, so Raleigh thinks, a vast extent of coast between it and Florida, which is more genial in climate, perhaps more rich in produce; and he sends Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlow to look for the same, and not in vain.

On these Virginian discoveries I shall say but little.  Those who wish to enjoy them should read them in all their naive freshness in the originals; and they will subscribe to S. T. Coleridge’s dictum, that no one nowadays can write travels as well as the old worthies who figure in Hakluyt and Purchas.

But to return to the question—What does this man intend to be?  A discoverer and colonist; a vindicator of some part at least of America from Spanish claims?  Perhaps not altogether: else he would have gone himself to Virginia, at least the second voyage, instead of sending others.  But here, it seems, is the fatal, and yet pardonable mistake, which haunts the man throughout.  He tries to be too many men at once.  Fatal: because, though he leaves his trace on more things than one man is wont to do, he, strictly speaking, conquers nothing, brings nothing to a consummation.  Virginia, Guiana, the ‘History of the World,’ his own career as a statesman—as dictator (for he might have been dictator had he chosen)—all are left unfinished.  And yet most pardonable; for if a man feels that he can do many different things, how hard to teach himself that he must not do them all!  How hard to say to himself, ‘I must cut off the right hand, and pluck out the right eye.  I must be less than myself, in order really to be anything.  I must concentrate my powers on one subject, and that perhaps by no means the most seemingly noble or useful, still less the most pleasant, and forego so many branches of activity in which I might be so distinguished, so useful.’  This is a hard lesson.  Raleigh took just sixty-six years learning it; and had to carry the result of his experience to the other side of the dark river, for there was no time left to use it on this side.  Some readers may have learnt the lesson already.  If so, happy and blessed are they.  But let them not therefore exalt themselves above Walter Raleigh; for that lesson is, of course, soonest learnt by the man who can excel in few things, later by him who can excel in many, and latest of all by him who, like Raleigh, can excel in all.

Few details remain concerning the earlier court days of Raleigh.  He rises rapidly, as we have seen.  He has an estate given him in Ireland, near his friend Spenser, where he tries to do well and wisely, colonising, tilling, and planting it: but like his Virginia expeditions, principally at second hand.  For he has swallowed (there is no denying it) the painted bait.  He will discover, he will colonise, he will do all manner of beautiful things, at second hand: but he himself will be a courtier.  It is very tempting.  Who would not, at the age of thirty, have wished to have been one of that chosen band of geniuses and heroes whom Elizabeth had gathered round her?  Who would not, at the age of thirty, have given his pound of flesh to be captain of her guard, and to go with her whithersoever she went?  It is not merely the intense gratification to carnal vanity—which if any man denies or scoffs at, always mark him down as especially guilty—which is to be considered; but the real, actual honour, in the mind of one who looked on Elizabeth as the most precious and glorious being which the earth had seen for centuries.  To be appreciated by her; to be loved by her; to serve her; to guard her; what could man desire more on earth?

Beside, he becomes a member of Parliament now; Lord Warden of the Stannaries; business which of course keeps him in England, business which he performs, as he does all things, wisely and well.  Such a generation as this ought really to respect Raleigh a little more, if it be only for his excellence in their own especial sphere—that of business.  Raleigh is a thorough man of business.  He can ‘toil terribly,’ and what is more, toil to the purpose.  In all the everyday affairs of life, he remains without a blot; a diligent, methodical, prudent man, who, though he plays for great stakes, ventures and loses his whole fortune again and again, yet never seems to omit the ‘doing the duty which lies nearest him’; never gets into mean money scrapes; never neglects tenants or duty; never gives way for one instant to ‘the eccentricities of genius.’

If he had done so, be sure that we should have heard of it.  For no man can become what he has become without making many an enemy; and he has his enemies already.  On which statement naturally occurs the question—why?  An important question too; because several of his later biographers seem to have running in their minds some such train of thought as this—Raleigh must have been a bad fellow, or he would not have had so many enemies; and because he was a bad fellow, there is an à priori reason that charges against him are true.  Whether this be arguing in a circle or not, it is worth searching out the beginning of this enmity, and the reputed causes of it.  In after years it will be because he is ‘damnable proud,’ because he hated Essex, and so forth: of which in their places.  But what is the earliest count against him?  Naunton, who hated Raleigh, and was moreover a rogue, has no reason to give, but that ‘the Queen took him for a kind of oracle, which much nettled them all; yea, those he relied on began to take this his sudden favour for an alarm; to be sensible of their own supplantation, and to project his; which shortly made him to sing, “Fortune my foe.”’

Now, be this true or not, and we do not put much faith in it, it gives no reason for the early dislike of Raleigh, save the somewhat unsatisfactory one which Cain would have given for his dislike of Abel.  Moreover, there exists a letter of Essex’s, written as thoroughly in the Cain spirit as any we ever read; and we wonder that, after reading that letter, men can find courage to repeat the old sentimentalism about the ‘noble and unfortunate’ Earl.  His hatred of Raleigh—which, as we shall see hereafter, Raleigh not only bears patiently, but requites with good deeds as long as he can—springs, by his own confession, simply from envy and disappointed vanity.  The spoilt boy insults Queen Elizabeth about her liking for the ‘knave Raleigh.’  She, ‘taking hold of one word disdain,’ tells Essex that ‘there was no such cause why I should thus disdain him.’  On which, says Essex, ‘as near as I could I did describe unto her what he had been, and what he was; and then I did let her see, whether I had come to disdain his competition of love, or whether I could have comfort to give myself over to the service of a mistress that was in awe of such a man.  I spake for grief and choler as much against him as I could: and I think he standing at the door might very well hear the worst that I spoke of him.  In the end, I saw she was resolved to defend him, and to cross me.’  Whereupon follows a ‘scene,’ the naughty boy raging and stamping, till he insults the Queen, and calls Raleigh ‘a wretch’; whereon poor Elizabeth, who loved the coxcomb for his father’s sake, ‘turned her away to my Lady Warwick,’ and Essex goes grumbling forth.

Raleigh’s next few years are brilliant and busy ones; and gladly, did space permit, would I give details of those brilliant adventures which make this part of his life that of a true knight-errant.  But they are mere episodes in the history; and we must pass them quickly by, only saying that they corroborate in all things our original notion of the man—just, humane, wise, greatly daring and enduring greatly; and filled with the one fixed idea, which has grown with his growth and strengthened with his strength, the destruction of the Spanish power, and colonisation of America by English.  His brother Humphrey makes a second attempt to colonise Newfoundland, and perishes as heroically as he had lived.  Raleigh, undaunted by his own loss in the adventure and his brother’s failure, sends out a fleet of his own to discover to the southward, and finds Virginia.  One might spend pages on this beautiful episode; on the simple descriptions of the fair new land which the sea-kings bring home; on the profound (for those times at least) knowledge which prompted Raleigh to make the attempt in that particular direction which had as yet escaped the notice of the Spaniards; on the quiet patience with which, undaunted by the ill-success of the first colonists, he sends out fleet after fleet, to keep the hold which he had once gained; till, unable any longer to support the huge expense, he makes over his patent for discovery to a company of merchants, who fare for many years as ill as Raleigh himself did: but one thing one has a right to say, that to this one man, under the providence of Almighty God, do the whole of the United States of America owe their existence.  The work was double.  The colony, however small, had to be kept in possession at all hazards; and he did it.  But that was not enough.  Spain must be prevented from extending her operations northward from Florida; she must be crippled along the whole east coast of America.  And Raleigh did that too.  We find him for years to come a part-adventurer in almost every attack on the Spaniards: we find him preaching war against them on these very grounds, and setting others to preach it also.  Good old Hariot (Raleigh’s mathematical tutor, whom he sent to Virginia) re-echoes his pupil’s trumpet-blast.  Hooker, in his epistle dedicatory of his Irish History, strikes the same note, and a right noble one it is.  ‘These Spaniards are trying to build up a world-tyranny by rapine and cruelty.  You, sir, call on us to deliver the earth from them, by doing justly and loving mercy; and we will obey you!’ is the answer which Raleigh receives, as far as I can find, from every nobler-natured Englishman.

It was an immense conception: a glorious one: it stood out so clear: there was no mistake about its being the absolutely right, wise, patriotic thing; and so feasible, too, if Raleigh could but find ‘six cents hommes qui savaient mourir.’  But that was just what he could not find.  He could draw round him, and did, by the spiritual magnetism of his genius, many a noble soul; but he could not organise them, as he seems to have tried to do, into a coherent body.  The English spirit of independent action, never stronger than in that age, and most wisely encouraged, for other reasons, by good Queen Bess, was too strong for him.  His pupils will ‘fight on their own hook’ like so many Yankee rangers: quarrel with each other: grumble at him.  For the truth is, he demands of them too high a standard of thought and purpose.  He is often a whole heaven above them in the hugeness of his imagination, the nobleness of his motive; and Don Quixote can often find no better squire than Sancho Panza.  Even glorious Sir Richard Grenvile makes a mistake: burns an Indian village because they steal a silver cup; throws back the colonisation of Virginia ten years with his over-strict notions of discipline and retributive justice; and Raleigh requites him for his offence by embalming him, his valour and his death, not in immortal verse, but in immortal prose.  The ‘True Relation of the Fight at the Azores’ gives the keynote of Raleigh’s heart.  If readers will not take that as the text on which his whole life is a commentary they may know a great deal about him, but him they will never know.

The game becomes fiercer and fiercer.  Blow and counterblow between the Spanish king, for the whole West-Indian commerce was a government job, and the merchant nobles of England.  At last the Great Armada comes, and the Great Armada goes again.  Venit, vidit, fugit, as the medals said of it.  And to Walter Raleigh’s counsel, by the testimony of all contemporaries, the mighty victory is to be principally attributed.  Where all men did heroically, it were invidious to bestow on him alone a crown, ob patriam servatam.  But henceforth, Elizabeth knows well that she has not been mistaken in her choice; and Raleigh is better loved than ever, heaped with fresh wealth and honours.  And who deserves them better?

The immense value of his services in the defence of England should excuse him from the complaint which one has been often inclined to bring against him,—Why, instead of sending others Westward Ho, did be not go himself?  Surely he could have reconciled the jarring instruments with which he was working.  He could have organised such a body of men as perhaps never went out before or since on the same errand.  He could have done all that Cortez did, and more; and done it more justly and mercifully.

True.  And here seems (as far as little folk dare judge great folk) to have been Raleigh’s mistake.  He is too wide for real success.  He has too many plans; he is fond of too many pursuits.  The man who succeeds is generally the narrow mall; the man of one idea, who works at nothing but that; sees everything only through the light of that; sacrifices everything to that: the fanatic, in short.  By fanatics, whether military, commercial, or religious, and not by ‘liberal-minded men’ at all, has the world’s work been done in all ages.  Amid the modern cants, one of the most mistaken is the cant about the ‘mission of genius,’ the ‘mission of the poet.’  Poets, we hear in some quarters, are the anointed kings of mankind—at least, so the little poets sing, each to his little fiddle.  There is no greater mistake.  It is the practical, prosaical fanatic who does the work; and the poet, if he tries to do it, is certain to put down his spade every five minutes, to look at the prospect, and pick flowers, and moralise on dead asses, till he ends a Néron malgré lui-même, fiddling melodiously while Rome is burning.  And perhaps this is the secret of Raleigh’s failure.  He is a fanatic, no doubt, a true knight-errant: but he is too much of a poet withal.  The sense of beauty enthrals him at every step.  Gloriana’s fairy court, with its chivalries and its euphuisms, its masques and its tourneys, and he the most charming personage in it, are too charming for him—as they would have been for us, reader: and he cannot give them up and go about the one work.  He justifies his double-mindedness to himself, no doubt, as he does to the world, by working wisely, indefatigably, and bravely: but still he has put his trust in princes, and in the children of men.  His sin, as far as we can see, is not against man, but against God; one which we do not nowadays call a sin, but a weakness.  Be it so.  God punished him for it, swiftly and sharply; which I hold to be a sure sign that God also forgave him for it.