Sir Walter Raleigh and His Time

   ‘Words that have beenSo nimble, and so full of subtle flame,As if that every one from whom they cameHad meant to put his whole wit in a jest.’

Anything to forget the handwriting on the wall, which will not be forgotten.  But he will do all the good which he can meanwhile, nevertheless.  He will serve God and Mammon.  So complete a man will surely be able to do both.  Unfortunately the thing is impossible, as he discovers too late: but he certainly goes as near success in the attempt as ever man did.  Everywhere we find him doing justly and loving mercy.  Wherever this man steps he leaves his footprint ineffaceably in deeds of benevolence.  For one year only, it seems, he is governor of Jersey; yet to this day, it is said, the islanders honour his name, only second to that of Duke Rollo, as their great benefactor, the founder of their Newfoundland trade.  In the west country he is ‘as a king,’ ‘with ears and mouth always open to hear and deliver their grievances, feet and hands ready to go and work their redress.’  The tin-merchants have become usurers ‘of fifty in the hundred.’  Raleigh works till he has put down their ‘abominable and cut-throat dealing.’  There is a burdensome west-country tax on curing fish; Raleigh works till it is revoked.  In Parliament he is busy with liberal measures, always before his generation.  He puts down a foolish act for compulsory sowing of hemp in a speech on the freedom of labour worthy of the nineteenth century.  He argues against raising the subsidy from the three-pound men—‘Call you this, Mr. Francis Bacon, par jugum, when a poor man pays as much as a rich?’  He is equally rational and spirited against the exportation of ordnance to the enemy; and when the question of abolishing monopolies is mooted he has his wise word.  He too is a monopolist of tin, as Lord Warden of the Stannaries.  But he has so wrought as to bring good out of evil; for ‘before the granting of his patent, let the price of tin be never so high, the poor workman never had but two shillings a week’; yet now, so has he extended and organised the tin-works, ‘that any man who will can find work, be tin at what price soever, and have four shillings a week truly paid . . . Yet if all others may be repealed, I will give my consent as freely to the cancelling of this as any member of this house.’  Most of the monopolies were repealed: but we do not find that Raleigh’s was among them.  Why should it be if its issue was more tin, full work, and double wages?  In all things this man approves himself faithful in his generation.  His sins are not against man, but against God; such as the world thinks no sins, and hates them, not from morality, but from envy.

In the meanwhile, the evil which, so Spenser had prophesied, only waited Raleigh’s death breaks out in his absence, and Ireland is all aflame with Tyrone’s rebellion.  Raleigh is sent for.  He will not accept the post of Lord Deputy and go to put it down.  Perhaps he does not expect fair play as long as Essex is at home.  Perhaps he knows too much of the ‘common weal, or rather common woe,’ and thinks that what is crooked cannot be made straight.  Perhaps he is afraid to lose by absence his ground at court.  Would that he had gone, for Ireland’s sake and his own.  However, it must not be.  Ormond is recalled, and Knollys shall be sent: but Essex will have none but Sir George Carew; whom, Naunton says, he hates, and wishes to oust from court.  He and Elizabeth argue it out.  He turns his back on her, and she gives him—or does not give him, for one has found so many of these racy anecdotes vanish on inspection into simple wind, that one believes none of them—a box on the ear; which if she did, she did the most wise, just, and practical thing which she could do with such a puppy.  He claps his hand—or does not—to his sword, ‘He would not have taken it from Henry VIII.,’ and is turned out forthwith.  In vain Egerton, the Lord Keeper, tries to bring him to reason.  He storms insanely.  Every one on earth is wrong but he: every one is conspiring against him; he talks of ‘Solomon’s fool’ too.  Had he read the Proverbs a little more closely, he might have left the said fool alone, as being a too painfully exact likeness of himself.  It ends by his being worsted, and Raleigh rising higher than ever.  I cannot see why Raleigh should be represented as henceforth becoming Essex’s ‘avowed enemy,’ save on the ground that all good men are and ought to be the enemies of bad men, when they see them about to do harm, and to ruin the country.  Essex is one of the many persons upon whom this age has lavished a quantity of sentimentality, which suits oddly enough with its professions of impartiality.  But there is an impartiality which ends in utter injustice; which by saying carelessly to every quarrel, ‘Both are right, and both are wrong,’ leaves only the impression that all men are wrong, and ends by being unjust to every one.  So has Elizabeth and Essex’s quarrel been treated.  There was some evil in Essex; therefore Elizabeth was a fool for liking him.  There was some good in Essex; therefore Elizabeth was cruel in punishing him.  This is the sort of slipshod dilemma by which Elizabeth is proved to be wrong, even while Essex is confessed to be wrong too; while the patent facts of the case are, that Elizabeth bore with him as long as she could, and a great deal longer than any one else could.  Why Raleigh should be accused of helping to send Essex into Ireland, I do not know.  Camden confesses (at the same time that he gives a hint of the kind) that Essex would let no one go but himself.  And if this was his humour, one can hardly wonder at Cecil and Raleigh, as well as Elizabeth, bidding the man begone and try his hand at government, and be filled with the fruit of his own devices.  He goes; does nothing; or rather worse than nothing; for in addition to the notorious ill-management of the whole matter, we may fairly say that he killed Elizabeth.  She never held up her head again after Tyrone’s rebellion.  Elizabeth still clings to him, changing her mind about him every hour, and at last writes him such a letter as he deserves.  He has had power, money, men, such as no one ever had before.  Why has he done nothing but bring England to shame?  He comes home frantically—the story of his bursting into the dressing-room rests on no good authority—with a party of friends at his heels, leaving Ireland to take care of itself.  Whatever entertainment he met with from the fond old woman, he met with the coldness which he deserved from Raleigh and Cecil.  Who can wonder?  What had he done to deserve aught else?  But he all but conquers; and Raleigh takes to his bed in consequence, sick of the whole matter; as one would have been inclined to do oneself.  He is examined and arraigned; writes a maudlin letter to Elizabeth.  Elizabeth has been called a fool for listening to such pathetical ‘love letters’: and then hardhearted for not listening to them.  Poor Lady! do what she would, she found it hard enough to please all parties while alive; must she be condemned over and above in æternum to be wrong whatsoever she did?  Why is she not to have the benefit of the plain straightforward interpretation which would be allowed to any other human being; namely, that she approved of such fine talk as long as it was proved to be sincere by fine deeds: but that when these were wanting, the fine talk became hollow, fulsome, a fresh cause of anger and disgust?  Yet still she weeps over Essex when he falls sick, as any mother would; and would visit him if she could with honour.  But a ‘malignant influence counteracts every disposition to relent.’  No doubt, a man’s own folly, passion, and insolence has generally a very malignant influence on his fortunes; and he may consider himself a very happy man if all that befalls to him thereby is what befell Essex, namely, deprivation of his offices and imprisonment in his own house.  He is forgiven after all; but the spoilt child refuses his bread and butter without sugar.  What is the pardon to him without a renewal of his licence of sweet wines?  Because he is not to have that, the Queen’s ‘conditions are as crooked as her carcase.’  Flesh and blood can stand no more, and ought to stand no more.  After all that Elizabeth has been to him, that speech is the speech of a brutal and ungrateful nature.  And such he shows himself to be in the hour of trial.  What if the patent for sweet wines is refused him?  Such gifts were meant as the reward of merit; and what merit has he to show?  He never thinks of that.  Blind with fury, he begins to intrigue with James, and slanders to him, under colour of helping his succession, all whom he fancies opposed to him.  What is worse, he intrigues with Tyrone about bringing over an army of Irish Papists to help him against the Queen, and this at the very time that his sole claim to popularity rests on his being the leader of the Puritans.  A man must have been very far gone, either in baseness or in hatred, who represents Raleigh to James as dangerous to the commonweal on account of his great power in the west of England and Jersey, ‘places fit for the Spaniard to land in.’  Cobham, as Warden of the Cinque Ports, is included in his slander; and both he and Raleigh will hear of it again.

Some make much of a letter, supposed to be written about this time by Raleigh to Cecil, bidding Cecil keep down Essex, even crush him, now that he is once down.  I do not happen to think the letter to be Raleigh’s.  His initials are subscribed to it; but not his name and the style is not like his.  But as for seeing ‘unforgiveness and revenge in it,’ whose soever it may be, I hold and say there is not a word which can bear such a construction.  It is a dark letter: but about a dark matter and a dark man.  It is a worldly and expediential letter, appealing to low motives in Cecil, though for a right end; such a letter, in short, as statesmen are wont to write nowadays.  If Raleigh wrote it, God punished him for doing so speedily enough.  He does not usually punish statesmen nowadays for such letters; perhaps because He does not love them as well as Raleigh.  But as for the letter itself.  Essex is called a ‘tyrant,’ because he had shown himself one.  The Queen is to ‘hold Bothwell,’ because ‘while she hath him, he will even be the canker of her estate and safety,’ and the writer has ‘seen the last of her good days and of ours after his liberty.’  On which accounts, Cecil is not to be deterred from doing what is right and necessary ‘by any fear of after-revenges’ and ‘conjectures from causes remote,’ as many a stronger instance—given—will prove, but ‘look to the present,’ and so ‘do wisely.’  There is no real cause for Cecil’s fear.  If the man who has now lost a power which he ought never to have had be now kept down, then neither he nor his son will ever be able to harm the man who has kept him at his just level.  What ‘revenge, selfishness, and craft’ there can be in all this it is difficult to see; as difficult as to see why Essex is to be talked of as ‘unfortunate,’ and the blame of his frightful end thrown on every one but himself: the fact being that Essex’s end was brought on by his having chosen one Sunday morning for breaking out into open rebellion, for the purpose of seizing the city of London and the Queen’s person, and compelling her to make him lord and master of the British Isles; in which attempt he and his fought with the civil and military authorities, till artillery had to be brought up and many lives were lost.  Such little escapades may be pardonable enough in ‘noble and unfortunate’ earls: but readers will perhaps agree that if they chose to try a similar experiment, they could not complain if they found themselves shortly after in company with Mr. Mitchell at Spike Island or Mr. Oxford in Bedlam.  However, those were days in which such Sabbath amusements on the part of one of the most important and powerful personages of the realm could not be passed over so lightly, especially when accompanied by severe loss of life; and as there existed in England certain statutes concerning rebellion and high treason, which must needs have been framed for some purpose or other, the authorities of England may be excused for fancying that they bore some reference to such acts as that which the noble and unfortunate earl had just committed, as wantonly, selfishly, and needlessly, it seems to me, as ever did man on earth.

I may seem to jest too much upon so solemn a matter as the life of a human being: but if I am not to touch the popular talk about Essex in this tone, I can only touch it in a far sterner one; and if ridicule is forbidden, express disgust instead.

I have entered into this matter of Essex somewhat at length, because on it is founded one of the mean slanders from which Raleigh never completely recovered.  The very mob who, after Raleigh’s death, made him a Protestant martyr—as, indeed, he was—looked upon Essex in the same light, hated Raleigh as the cause of his death, and accused him of glutting his eyes with Essex’s misery, puffing tobacco out of a window, and what not—all mere inventions, so Raleigh declared upon the scaffold.  He was there in his office as captain of the guard, and could do no less than be there.  Essex, it is said, asked for Raleigh just before he died: but Raleigh had withdrawn, the mob having murmured.  What had Essex to say to him?  Was it, asks Oldys, shrewdly enough, to ask him pardon for the wicked slanders which he had been pouring into James’s credulous and cowardly ears?  We will hope so; and leave poor Essex to God and the mercy of God, asserting once more that no man ever brought ruin and death more thoroughly on himself by his own act, needing no imaginary help downwards from Raleigh, Cecil, or other human being.

And now begins the fourth act of this strange tragedy.  Queen Elizabeth dies; and dies of grief.  It has been the fashion to attribute to her, I know not why, remorse for Essex’s death; and the foolish and false tale about Lady Nottingham and the ring has been accepted as history.  The fact seems to be that she never really held up her head after Burleigh’s death.  She could not speak of him without tears; forbade his name to be mentioned in the Council.  No wonder; never had mistress a better servant.  For nearly half a century have these two noble souls loved each other, trusted each other, worked with each other; and God’s blessing has been on their deeds; and now the faithful God-fearing man is gone to his reward; and she is growing old, and knows that the ancient fire is dying out in her; and who will be to her what he was?  Buckhurst is a good man, and one of her old pupils; and she makes him Lord Treasurer in Burleigh’s place: but beyond that all is dark.  ‘I am a miserable forlorn woman; there is none about me that I can trust.’  She sees through Cecil; through Henry Howard.  Essex has proved himself worthless, and pays the penalty of his sins.  Men are growing worse than their fathers.  Spanish gold is bringing in luxury and sin.  The last ten years of her reign are years of decadence, profligacy, falsehood; and she cannot but see it.  Tyrone’s rebellion is the last drop which fills the cup.  After fifty years of war, after a drain of money all but fabulous expended on keeping Ireland quiet, the volcano bursts forth again just as it seemed extinguished, more fiercely than ever, and the whole work has to be done over again, when there is neither time nor a man to do it.  And ahead, what hope is there for England?  Who will be her successor?  She knows in her heart that it will be James: but she cannot bring herself to name him.  To bequeath the fruit of all her labours to a tyrant, a liar, and a coward: for she knows the man but too well.  It is too hideous to be faced.  This is the end then?  ‘Oh that I were a milke maide, with a paile upon mine arm!’  But it cannot be.  It never could have been; and she must endure to the end.

‘Therefore I hated life; yea, I hated all my labour which I had taken under the sun; because I should leave it to the man that shall be after me.  And who knows whether he shall be a wise man or a fool? yet shall he have rule over all my labour wherein I have showed myself wise, in wisdom, and knowledge, and equity . . . Vanity of vanities, and vexation of spirit!’  And so, with a whole book of Ecclesiastes written on that mighty heart, the old lioness coils herself up in her lair, refuses food, and dies.  I know few passages in the world’s history more tragic than that death.

Why did she not trust Raleigh?  First, because Raleigh, as we have seen, was not the sort of man whom she needed.  He was not the steadfast single-eyed statesman; but the many-sided genius.  Besides, he was the ringleader of the war-party.  And she, like Burleigh before his death, was tired of the war; saw that it was demoralising England; was anxious for peace.  Raleigh would not see that.  It was to him a divine mission which must be fulfilled at all risks.  As long as the Spaniards were opposing the Indians, conquering America, there must be no peace.  Both were right from their own point of view.  God ordered the matter from a third point of view.

Besides, we know that Essex, and after him Cecil and Henry Howard, had been slandering Raleigh basely to James.  Can we doubt that the same poison had been poured into Elizabeth’s ears?  She might distrust Cecil too much to act upon what he said of Raleigh; and yet distrust Raleigh too much to put the kingdom into his hands.  However, she is gone now, and a new king has arisen, who knoweth not Joseph.

James comes down to take possession.  Insolence, luxury, and lawlessness mark his first steps on his going amid the adulations of a fallen people; he hangs a poor wretch without trial; wastes his time in hunting by the way;—a bad and base man, whose only redeeming point—if in his case it be one—is his fondness for little children.  But that will not make a king.  The wiser elders take counsel together.  Raleigh and good Judge Fortescue are for requiring conditions from the newcomer; and constitutional liberty makes its last stand among the men of Devon, the old county of warriors, discoverers, and statesmen, of which Queen Bess had said that the men of Devon were her right hand.  But in vain; James has his way; Cecil and Henry Howard are willing enough to give it him.

So down comes Rehoboam, taking counsel with the young men, and makes answer to England, ‘My father chastised you with whips; but I will chastise you with scorpions.’  He takes a base pleasure, shocking to the French ambassador, in sneering at the memory of Queen Elizabeth; a perverse delight in honouring every rascal whom she had punished.  Tyrone must come to England to be received into favour, maddening the soul of honest Sir John Harrington.  Essex is christened ‘my martyr,’ apparently for having plotted treason against Elizabeth with Tyrone.  Raleigh is received with a pun—‘By my soul, I have heard rawly of thee, mon’; and when the great nobles and gentlemen come to court with their retinues, James tries to hide his dread of them in an insult; pooh-poohs their splendour, and says, ‘he doubts not that he should have been able to win England for himself, had they kept him out.’  Raleigh answers boldly, ‘Would God that had been put to the trial.’  ‘Why?’  ‘Because then you would have known your friends from your foes.’  ‘A reason,’ says old Aubrey, ‘never forgotten or forgiven.’  Aubrey is no great authority; but the speech smacks so of Raleigh’s offhand daring that one cannot but believe it; as one does also the other story of his having advised the lords to keep out James and erect a republic.  Not that he could have been silly enough to propose such a thing seriously at that moment; but that he most likely, in his bold way, may have said, ‘Well, if we are to have this man in without conditions, better a republic at once.’  Which, if he did say, he said what the next forty years proved to be strictly true.  However, he will go on his own way as best he can.  If James will give him a loan, he and the rest of the old heroes will join, fit out a fleet against Spain, and crush her, now that she is tottering and impoverished, once and for ever.  But James has no stomach for fighting; cannot abide the sight of a drawn sword; would not provoke Spain for the world—why, they might send Jesuits and assassinate him; and as for the money, he wants that for very different purposes.  So the answer which he makes to Raleigh’s proposal of war against Spain is to send him to the Tower, and sentence him to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, on a charge of plotting with Spain.

Having read, I believe, nearly all that has been written on the subject of this dark ‘Cobham plot,’ I find but one thing come brightly out of the infinite confusion and mystery, which will never be cleared up till the day of judgment, and that is Raleigh’s innocence.  He, and all England, and the very men who condemned him, knew that he was innocent.  Every biographer is forced to confess this, more or less, in spite of all efforts to be what is called ‘impartial.’  So I shall waste no words upon the matter, only observing that whereas Raleigh is said to have slandered Cecil to James, in the same way that Cecil had slandered him, one passage of this Cobham plot disproves utterly such a story, which, after all, rests (as far as I know) only on hearsay, being ‘spoken of in a manuscript written by one Buck, secretary to Chancellor Egerton.’  For in writing to his own wife, in the expectation of immediate death, Raleigh speaks of Cecil in a very different tone, as one in whom he trusted most, and who has left him in the hour of need.  I ask the reader to peruse that letter, and say whether any man would write thus, with death and judgment before his face, of one whom he knew that he had betrayed; or, indeed, of one who he knew had betrayed him.  I see no reason to doubt that Raleigh kept good faith with Cecil, and that he was ignorant till after his trial that Cecil was in the plot against him.

I do not care to enter into the tracasseries of this Cobham plot.  Every one knows them; no one can unravel them.  The moral and spiritual significance of the fact is more interesting than all questions as to Cobham’s lies, Brooke’s lies, Aremberg’s lies, Coke’s lies, James’s lies:—Let the dead bury their dead.  It is the broad aspect of the thing which is so wonderful; to see how

‘The eagle, towering in his pride of place,Was by a mousing owl hawked at and killed.’

This is the man who six months ago, perhaps, thought that he and Cecil were to rule England together, while all else were the puppets whose wires they pulled.  ‘The Lord hath taken him up and dashed him down;’ and by such means, too, and on such a charge!  Betraying his country to Spain!  Absurd—incredible—he would laugh it to scorn: but it is bitter earnest.  There is no escape.  True or false, he sees that his enemies will have his head.  It is maddening: a horrible nightmare.  He cannot bear it; he cannot face—so he writes to that beloved wife—‘the scorn, the taunts, the loss of honour, the cruel words of lawyers.’  He stabs himself.  Read that letter of his, written after the mad blow had been struck; it is sublime from intensity of agony.  The way in which the chastisement was taken proves how utterly it was needed, ere that proud, success-swollen, world-entangled heart could be brought right with God.

And it is brought right.  The wound is not mortal.  He comes slowly to a better mind, and takes his doom like a man.  That first farewell to his wife was written out of hell.  The second rather out of heaven.  Read it, too, and compare; and then see how the Lord has been working upon this great soul: infinite sadness, infinite tenderness and patience, and trust in God for himself and his poor wife: ‘God is my witness, it was for you and yours that I desired life; but it is true that I disdain myself for begging it.  For know, dear wife, that your son is the son of a true man, and one who, in his own respect, despiseth death and all his ugly and misshapen forms . . . The everlasting, powerful, infinite, and omnipotent God, who is goodness itself, the true life and light, keep thee and thine, have mercy upon me, and teach me to forgive my persecutors and accusers, and send us to meet in His glorious kingdom.’

Is it come to this then?  Is he fit to die at last?  Then he is fit to live; and live he shall.  The tyrants have not the heart to carry out their own crime, and Raleigh shall be respited.

But not pardoned.  No more return for him into that sinful world, where he flaunted on the edge of the precipice, and dropped heedless over it.  God will hide him in the secret place of His presence, and keep him in His tabernacle from the strife of tongues; and a new life shall begin for him; a wiser, perhaps a happier, than he has known since he was a little lad in the farmhouse in pleasant Devon far away.  On the 15th of December he enters the Tower.  Little dreams he that for more than twelve years those doleful walls would be his home.  Lady Raleigh obtains leave to share his prison with him, and, after having passed ten years without a child, brings him a boy to comfort the weary heart.  The child of sorrow is christened Carew.  Little think those around him what strange things that child will see before his hairs be gray.  She has her maid, and he his three servants; some five or six friends are allowed ‘to repair to him at convenient times.’  He has a chamber-door always open into the lieutenant’s garden, where he ‘has converted a little hen-house into a still-room, and spends his time all the day in distillation.’  The next spring a grant is made of his goods and chattels, forfeited by attainder, to trustees named by himself, for the benefit of his family.  So far, so well; or, at least, not as ill as it might be: but there are those who cannot leave the caged lion in peace.