Sir Walter Raleigh and His Time

Raleigh sails for Guiana.  The details of his voyage should be read at length.  Everywhere they show the eye of a poet as well as of a man of science.  He sees enough to excite his hopes more wildly than ever; he goes hundreds of miles up the Orinoco in an open boat, suffering every misery, but keeping up the hearts of his men, who cry out, ‘Let us go on, we care not how far.’  He makes friendship with the caciques, and enters into alliance with them on behalf of Queen Elizabeth against the Spaniards.  Unable to pass the falls of the Caroli, and the rainy season drawing on, he returns, beloved and honoured by all the Indians, boasting that, during the whole time he was there, no woman was the worse for any man of his crew.  Altogether, we know few episodes of history so noble, righteous, and merciful as this Guiana voyage.  But he has not forgotten the Spaniards.  At Trinidad he payed his ships with the asphalt of the famous Pitch-lake, and stood—and with what awe such a man must have stood—beneath the noble forest of Moriche fan-palms on its brink.  He then attacked, not, by his own confession, without something too like treachery, the new town of San José, takes Berreo prisoner, and delivers from captivity five caciques, whom Berreo kept bound in one chain, ‘basting their bodies with burning bacon’—an old trick of the Conquistadores—to make them discover their gold.  He tells them that he was ‘the servant of a Queen who was the greatest cacique of the north, and a virgin; who had more caciqui under her than there were trees on that island; that she was an enemy of the Castellani (Spaniards) in behalf of their tyranny and oppression, and that she delivered all such nations about her as were by them oppressed, and having freed all the coast of the northern world from their servitude, had sent me to free them also, and withal to defend the country of Guiana from their invasion and conquest.’  After which perfectly true and rational speech, he subjoins (as we think equally honestly and rationally), ‘I showed them her Majesty’s picture, which they so admired and honoured, as it had been easy to have brought them idolaters thereof.’

This is one of the stock charges against Raleigh, at which all biographers (except quiet, sensible Oldys, who, dull as he is, is far more fair and rational than most of his successors) break into virtuous shrieks of ‘flattery,’ ‘meanness,’ ‘adulation,’ ‘courtiership,’ and so forth.  One biographer is of opinion that the Indians would have admired far more the picture of a ‘red monkey.’  Sir Robert Schomburgk, unfortunately for the red monkey theory, though he quite agrees that Raleigh’s flattery was very shocking, says that from what he knows—and no man knows more—of Indian taste, they would have far preferred to the portrait which Raleigh showed them—not a red monkey, but—such a picture as that at Hampton Court, in which Elizabeth is represented in a fantastic court dress.  Raleigh, it seems, must be made out a rogue at all risks, though by the most opposite charges.  The monkey theory is answered, however, by Sir Robert; and Sir Robert is answered, I think, by the plain fact that, of course, Raleigh’s portrait was exactly such a one as Sir Robert says they would have admired; a picture probably in a tawdry frame, representing Queen Bess, just as queens were always painted then, bedizened with ‘browches, pearls, and owches,’ satin and ruff, and probably with crown on head and sceptre in hand, made up, as likely as not, expressly for the purpose for which it was used.  In the name of all simplicity and honesty, I ask, why is Raleigh to be accused of saying that the Indians admired Queen Elizabeth’s beauty when he never even hints at it?  And why do all commentators deliberately forget the preceding paragraph—Raleigh’s proclamation to the Indians, and the circumstances under which it was spoken?  The Indians are being murdered, ravished, sold for slaves, basted with burning fat; and grand white men come like avenging angels, and in one day sweep their tyrants out of the land, restore them to liberty and life, and say to them, ‘A great Queen far across the seas has sent us to do this.  Thousands of miles away she has heard of your misery and taken pity on you; and if you will be faithful to her she will love you, and deal justly with you, and protect you against these Spaniards who are devouring you as they have devoured all the Indians round you; and for a token of it—a sign that we tell you truth, and that there is really such a great Queen, who is the Indian’s friend—here is the picture of her.’  What wonder if the poor idolatrous creatures had fallen down and worshipped the picture—just as millions do that of the Virgin Mary without a thousandth part as sound and practical reason—as that of a divine, all-knowing, all-merciful deliverer?  As for its being the picture of a beautiful woman or not, they would never think of that.  The fair complexion and golden hair would be a sign to them that she belonged to the mighty white people, even if there were no bedizenment of jewels and crowns over and above; and that would be enough for them.  When will biographers learn to do common justice to their fellow-men by exerting now and then some small amount of dramatic imagination, just sufficient to put themselves for a moment in the place of those of whom they write?

So ends his voyage, in which, he says, ‘from myself I have deserved no thanks, for I am returned a beggar and withered.’  The only thing which, as far as I can find, he brought home was some of the delicious scaly peaches of the Moriche palm—the Arbol de Vida, or tree of life, which gives sustenance and all else needful to whole tribes of Indians.  ‘But I might have bettered my poor estate if I had not only respected her Majesty’s future honour and riches.  It became not the former fortune in which I once lived to go journeys of piccory’ (pillage); ‘and it had sorted ill with the offices of honour which, by her Majesty’s grace, I hold this day in England, to run from cape to cape and place to place for the pillage of ordinary prizes.’

So speaks one whom it has been the fashion to consider as little better than a pirate, and that, too, in days when the noblest blood in England thought no shame (as indeed it was no shame) to enrich themselves with Spanish gold.  But so it is throughout this man’s life.  If there be a nobler word than usual to be spoken, or a more wise word either, if there be a more chivalrous deed to be done, or a more prudent deed either, that word and that deed are pretty sure to be Walter Raleigh’s.

But the blatant beast has been busy at home; and, in spite of Chapman’s heroical verses, he meets with little but cold looks.  Never mind.  If the world will not help to do the deed, he will do it by himself; and no time must be lost, for the Spaniards on their part will lose none.  So, after six months, the faithful Keymis sails again, again helped by the Lord High Admiral and Sir Robert Cecil.  It is a hard race for one private man against the whole power and wealth of Spain; and the Spaniard has been beforehand with them, and re-occupied the country.  They have fortified themselves at the mouth of the Caroli, so it is impossible to get to the gold mines; they are enslaving the wretched Indians, carrying off their women, intending to transplant some tribes and to expel others, and arming cannibal tribes against the inhabitants.  All is misery and rapine; the scattered remnant comes asking piteously why Raleigh does not come over to deliver them?  Have the Spaniards slain him, too?  Keymis comforts them as he best can; hears of more gold mines; and gets back safe, a little to his own astonishment; for eight-and-twenty ships of war have been sent to Trinidad to guard the entrance to El Dorado, not surely, as Keymis well says, ‘to keep us only from tobacco.’  A colony of 500 persons is expected from Spain.  The Spaniard is well aware of the richness of the prize, says Keymis, who all through shows himself a worthy pupil of his master.  A careful, observant man he seems to have been, trained by that great example to overlook no fact, even the smallest.  He brings home lists of rivers, towns, caciques, poison-herbs, words, what not; he has fresh news of gold, spleen-stones, kidney-stones, and some fresh specimens; but be that as it may, he, ‘without going as far as his eyes can warrant, can promise Brazil-wood, honey, cotton, balsamum, and drugs, to defray charges.’  He would fain copy Raleigh’s style, too, and ‘whence his lamp had oil, borrow light also,’ ‘seasoning his unsavoury speech’ with some of the ‘leaven of Raleigh’s discourse.’  Which, indeed, he does even to little pedantries and attempts at classicality; and after professing that himself and the remnant of his few years he hath bequeathed wholly to Raleana, and his thoughts live only in that action, he rises into something like grandeur when he begins to speak of that ever-fertile subject, the Spanish cruelties to the Indians; ‘Doth not the cry of the poor succourless ascend unto the heavens?  Hath God forgotten to be gracious to the work of his own hands.  Or shall not his judgments in a day of visitation by the ministry of his chosen servant come upon these bloodthirsty butchers, like rain into a fleece of wool?’  Poor Keymis!  To us he is by no means the least beautiful figure in this romance; a faithful, diligent, loving man, unable, as the event proved, to do great deeds by himself, but inspired with a great idea by contact with a mightier spirit, to whom he clings through evil report, and poverty, and prison, careless of self to the last, and ends tragically, ‘faithful unto death’ in the most awful sense.

But here remark two things: first, that Cecil believes in Raleigh’s Guiana scheme; next, that the occupation of Orinoco by the Spaniards, which Raleigh is accused of having concealed from James in 1617, has been ever since 1595 matter of the most public notoriety.

Raleigh has not been idle in the meanwhile.  It has been found necessary after all to take the counsel which he gave in vain in 1588, to burn the Spanish fleet in harbour; and the heroes are gone down to Cadiz fight, and in one day of thunder storm the Sevastopol of Spain.  Here, as usual, we find Raleigh, though in an inferior command, leading the whole by virtue of superior wisdom.  When the good Lord Admiral will needs be cautious, and land the soldiers first, it is Raleigh who persuades him to force his way into the harbour, to the joy of all captains.  When hotheaded Essex, casting his hat into the sea for joy, shouts ‘Intramos,’ and will in at once, Raleigh’s time for caution comes, and he persuades them to wait till the next morning, and arrange the order of attack.  That, too, Raleigh has to do, and moreover to lead it; and lead it he does.  Under the forts are seventeen galleys; the channel is ‘scoured’ with cannon: but on holds Raleigh’s ‘Warspite,’ far ahead of the rest, through the thickest of the fire, answering forts and galleys ‘with a blur of the trumpet to each piece, disdaining to shoot at those esteemed dreadful monsters.’  For there is a nobler enemy ahead.  Right in front lie the galleons; and among them the ‘Philip’ and the ‘Andrew,’ two of those who boarded the ‘Revenge.’  This day there shall be a reckoning for the blood of his old friend; he is ‘resolved to be revenged for the “Revenge,”’ Sir Richard Grenvile’s fatal ship, or second her with his own life’; and well he keeps his vow.  Three hours pass of desperate valour, during which, so narrow is the passage, only seven English ships, thrusting past each other, all but quarrelling in their noble rivalry, engage the whole Spanish fleet of fifty-seven sail, and destroy it utterly.  The ‘Philip’ and ‘Thomas’ burn themselves despairing.  The English boats save the ‘Andrew’ and ‘Matthew.’  One passes over the hideous record.  ‘If any man,’ says Raleigh, ‘had a desire to see hell itself, it was there most lively figured.’  Keymis’s prayer is answered in part, even while he writes it; and the cry of the Indians has not ascended in vain before the throne of God!

The soldiers are landed; the city stormed and sacked, not without mercies and courtesies, though, to women and unarmed folk, which win the hearts of the vanquished, and live till this day in well-known ballads.  The Flemings begin a ‘merciless slaughter.’  Raleigh and the Lord Admiral beat them off.  Raleigh is carried on shore with a splinter wound in the leg, which lames him for life: but returns on board in an hour in agony; for there is no admiral left to order the fleet, and all are run headlong to the sack.  In vain he attempts to get together sailors the following morning, and attack the Indian fleet in Porto Real Roads; within twenty-four hours it is burnt by the Spaniards themselves; and all Raleigh wins is no booty, a lame leg, and the honour of having been the real author of a victory even more glorious than that of 1588.

So he returns; having written to Cecil the highest praises of Essex, whom he treats with all courtesy and fairness; which those who will may call cunning: we have as good a right to say that he was returning good for evil.  There were noble qualities in Essex.  All the world gave him credit for them, and far more than he deserved; why should not Raleigh have been just to him; even have conceived, like the rest of the world, high hopes of him, till he himself destroyed these hopes?  For now storms are rising fast.  On their return Cecil is in power.  He has been made Secretary of State instead of Bodley, Essex’s pet, and the spoilt child begins to sulk.  On which matter, I am sorry to say, historians talk much unwisdom, about Essex’s being too ‘open and generous, etc., for a courtier,’ and ‘presuming on his mistress’s passion for him’; and representing Elizabeth as desiring to be thought beautiful, and ‘affecting at sixty the sighs, loves, tears, and tastes of a girl of sixteen,’ and so forth.  It is really time to get rid of some of this fulsome talk, culled from such triflers as Osborne, if not from the darker and fouler sources of Parsons and the Jesuit slanderers, which I meet with a flat denial.  There is simply no proof.  She in love with Essex or Cecil?  Yes, as a mother with a son.  Were they not the children of her dearest and most faithful servants, men who had lived heroic lives for her sake?  What wonder if she fancied that she saw the fathers in the sons?  They had been trained under her eye.  What wonder if she fancied that they could work as their fathers worked before them?  And what shame if her childless heart yearned over them with unspeakable affection, and longed in her old age to lay her hands upon the shoulders of those two young men, and say to England, ‘Behold the children which God, and not the flesh, has given me!’  Most strange it is, too, that women, who ought at least to know a woman’s heart, have been especially forward in publishing these scandals, and sullying their pages by retailing pruriences against such a one as Queen Elizabeth.

But to return.  Raleigh attaches himself to Cecil; and he has good reason.  Cecil is the cleverest man in England, saving himself.  He has trusted and helped him, too, in two Guiana voyages; so the connection is one of gratitude as well as prudence.  We know not whether he helped him in the third Guiana voyage in the same year, under Captain Berry, a north Devon man, from Grenvile’s country; who found a ‘mighty folk,’ who were ‘something pleasant, having drunk much that day,’ and carried bows with golden handles: but failed in finding the Lake Parima, and so came home.

Raleigh’s first use of his friendship with Cecil is to reconcile him, to the astonishment of the world, with Essex, alleging how much good may grow by it; for now ‘the Queen’s continual unquietness will grow to contentment.’  That, too, those who will may call policy.  We have as good a right to call it the act of a wise and faithful subject, and to say, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.’  He has his reward for it in full restoration to the Queen’s favour; he deserves it.  He proves himself once more worthy of power, and it is given to him.  Then there is to be a second great expedition: but this time its aim is the Azores.  Philip, only maddened by the loss at Cadiz, is preparing a third armament for the invasion of England and Ireland, and it is said to lie at the islands to protect the Indian fleet.  Raleigh has the victualling of the land-forces, and, like everything else he takes in hand, ‘it is very well done.’  Lord Howard declines the chief command, and it is given to Essex.  Raleigh is to be rear-admiral.

By the time they reach the Azores, Essex has got up a foolish quarrel against Raleigh for disrespect in having stayed behind to bring up some stragglers.  But when no Armada is to be found at the Azores, Essex has after all to ask Raleigh what he shall do next.  Conquer the Azores, says Raleigh, and the thing is agreed on.  Raleigh and Essex are to attack Fayal.  Essex sails away before Raleigh has watered.  Raleigh follows as fast as he can, and at Fayal finds no Essex.  He must water there, then and at once.  His own veterans want him to attack forthwith, for the Spaniards are fortifying fast: but he will wait for Essex.  Still no Essex comes.  Raleigh attempts to water, is defied, finds himself ‘in for it,’ and takes the island out of hand in the most masterly fashion, to the infuriation of Essex.  Good Lord Howard patches up the matter, and the hot-headed coxcomb is once more pacified.  They go on to Graciosa, where Essex’s weakness of will again comes out, and he does not take the island.  Three rich Caracks, however, are picked up.  ‘Though we shall be little the better for them,’ says Raleigh privately to Sir Arthur Gorges, his faithful captain, ‘yet I am heartily glad for our General’s sake; because they will in great measure give content to her Majesty, so that there may be no repining against this poor Lord for the expense of the voyage.’

Raleigh begins to see that Essex is only to be pitied; that the voyage is not over likely to end well: but he takes it, in spite of ill-usage, as a kind-hearted man should.  Again Essex makes a fool of himself.  They are to steer one way in order to intercept the Plate-fleet.  Essex having agreed to the course pointed out, alters his course on a fancy; then alters it a second time, though the hapless Monson, with the whole Plate-fleet in sight, is hanging out lights, firing guns, and shrieking vainly for the General, who is gone on a new course, in which he might have caught the fleet after all, in spite of his two mistakes, but that he chooses to go a roundabout way instead of a short one; and away goes the whole fleet, save one Carack, which runs itself on shore and burns, and the game is played out and lost.

All want Essex to go home, as the season is getting late: but the wilful and weak man will linger still, and while he is hovering to the south, Philip’s armament has sailed from the Groyne, on the undefended shores of England, and only God’s hand saves us from the effects of Essex’s folly.  A third time the Armadas of Spain are overwhelmed by the avenging tempests, and Essex returns to disgrace, having proved himself at once intemperate and incapable.  Even in coming home there is confusion, and Essex is all but lost on the Bishop and Clerks, by Scilly, in spite of the warnings of Raleigh’s sailing-master, ‘Old Broadbent,’ who is so exasperated at the general stupidity that he wants Raleigh to leave Essex and his squadron to get out of their own scrape as they can.

Essex goes off to sulk at Wanstead; but Vere excuses him, and in a few days he comes back, and will needs fight good Lord Howard for being made Earl of Nottingham for his services against the Armada and at Cadiz.  Baulked of this, he begins laying the blame of the failure at the Azores on Raleigh.  Let the spoilt naughty boy take care; even that ‘admirable temper’ for which Raleigh is famed may be worn out at last.

These years are Raleigh’s noon—stormy enough at best, yet brilliant.  There is a pomp about him, outward and inward, which is terrible to others, dangerous to himself.  One has gorgeous glimpses of that grand Durham House of his, with its carvings and its antique marbles, armorial escutcheons, ‘beds with green silk hangings and legs like dolphins, overlaid with gold’: and the man himself, tall, beautiful, and graceful, perfect alike in body and in mind, walking to and fro, his beautiful wife upon his arm, his noble boy beside his knee, in his ‘white satin doublet, embroidered with pearls, and a great chain of pearls about his neck,’ lording it among the lords with an ‘awfulness and ascendency above other mortals,’ for which men say that ‘his næve is, that he is damnable proud’; and no wonder.  The reduced squire’s younger son has gone forth to conquer the world; and he fancies, poor fool, that he has conquered it, just as it really has conquered him; and he will stand now on his blood and his pedigree (no bad one either), and all the more stiffly because puppies like Lord Oxford, who instead of making their fortunes have squandered them, call him ‘jack and upstart,’ and make impertinent faces while the Queen is playing the virginals, about ‘how when jacks go up, heads go down.’  Proud?  No wonder if the man be proud!  ‘Is not this great Babylon, which I have built?’  And yet all the while he has the most affecting consciousness that all this is not God’s will, but the will of the flesh; that the house of fame is not the house of God; that its floor is not the rock of ages, but the sea of glass mingled with fire, which may crack beneath him any moment, and let the nether flame burst up.  He knows that he is living in a splendid lie; that he is not what God meant him to be.  He longs to flee away and be at peace.  It is to this period, not to his death-hour, that ‘The Lie’ belongs; 3 saddest of poems, with its melodious contempt and life-weariness.  All is a lie—court, church, statesmen, courtiers, wit and science, town and country, all are shams; the days are evil; the canker is at the root of all things; the old heroes are dying one by one; the Elizabethan age is rotting down, as all human things do, and nothing is left but to bewail with Spenser ‘The Ruins of Time’; the glory and virtue which have been—the greater glory and virtue which might be even now, if men would but arise and repent, and work righteousness, as their fathers did before them.  But no.  Even to such a world as this he will cling, and flaunt it about as captain of the guard in the Queen’s progresses and masques and pageants, with sword-belt studded with diamonds and rubies, or at tournaments, in armour of solid silver, and a gallant train with orange-tawny feathers, provoking Essex to bring in a far larger train in the same colours, and swallow up Raleigh’s pomp in his own, so achieving that famous ‘feather triumph’ by which he gains little but bad blood and a good jest.  For Essex is no better tilter than he is general; and having ‘run very ill’ in his orange-tawny, comes next day in green, and runs still worse, and yet is seen to be the same cavalier; whereon a spectator shrewdly observes that he changed his colours ‘that it may be reported that there was one in green who ran worse than he in orange-tawny.’  But enough of these toys, while God’s handwriting is upon the wall above all heads.

Raleigh knows that the handwriting is there.  The spirit which drove him forth to Virginia and Guiana is fallen asleep: but he longs for Sherborne and quiet country life, and escapes thither during Essex’s imprisonment, taking Cecil’s son with him, and writes as only he can write about the shepherd’s peaceful joys, contrasted with ‘courts’ and ‘masques’ and ‘proud towers’—

   ‘Here are no false entrapping baits   Too hasty for too hasty fates,      Unless it be      The fond credulityOf silly fish, that worlding who still lookUpon the bait, but never on the hook;      Nor envy, unless among   The birds, for prize of their sweet song.   ‘Go! let the diving negro seek   For pearls hid in some forlorn creek,      We all pearls scorn,      Save what the dewy mornCongeals upon some little spire of grass,Which careless shepherds beat down as they pass      And gold ne’er here appears   Save what the yellow Ceres bears.’

Tragic enough are the after scenes of Raleigh’s life: but most tragic of all are these scenes of vain-glory, in which he sees the better part, and yet chooses the worse, and pours out his self-discontent in song which proves the fount of delicacy and beauty which lies pure and bright beneath the gaudy artificial crust.  What might not this man have been!  And he knows that too.  The stately rooms of Durham House pall on him, and he delights to hide up in his little study among his books and his chemical experiments, and smoke his silver pipe, and look out on the clear Thames and the green Surrey hills, and dream about Guiana and the Tropics; or to sit in the society of antiquaries with Selden and Cotton, Camden and Stow; or in his own Mermaid Club, with Ben Jonson, Fletcher, Beaumont, and at last with Shakspeare’s self to hear and utter