Sir Walter Raleigh and His Time

Sanderson, who had married his niece, instead of paying up the arrears which he owes on the wine and other offices, brings in a claim of £2000.  But the rogue meets his match, and finds himself, at the end of a lawsuit, in prison for debt.  Greater rogues, however, will have better fortune, and break through the law-cobwebs which have stopped a poor little fly like Sanderson.  For Carr, afterwards Lord Somerset, casts his eyes on the Sherborne land.  It has been included in the conveyance, and should be safe; but there are others who, by instigation surely of the devil himself, have had eyes to see a flaw in the deed.  Sir John Popham is appealed to.  Who could doubt the result?  He answers that there is no doubt that the words were omitted by the inattention of the engrosser—Carew Raleigh says that but one single word was wanting, which word was found notwithstanding in the paper-book, i.e. the draft—but that the word not being there, the deed is worthless, and the devil may have his way.  To Carr, who has nothing of his own, it seems reasonable enough to help himself to what belongs to others, and James gives him the land.  Raleigh writes to him, gently, gracefully, loftily.  Here is an extract: ‘And for yourself, sir, seeing your fair day is now in the dawn, and mine drawn to the evening, your own virtues and the king’s grace assuring you of many favours and much honour, I beseech you not to begin your first building upon the ruins of the innocent; and that their sorrows, with mine, may not attend your first plantation.’  He speaks strongly of the fairness, sympathy, and pity by which the Scots in general had laid him under obligation: argues from it his own evident innocence; and ends with a quiet warning to the young favourite not to ‘undergo the curse of them that enter into the fields of the fatherless.’  In vain.  Lady Raleigh, with her children, entreats James on her knees: in vain again.  ‘I mun ha’ the land,’ is the answer; ‘I mun ha’ it for Carr.’  And he has it; patching up the matter after a while by a gift of £8000 to her and her elder son, in requital for an estate of £5000 a year.

So there sits Raleigh, growing poorer day by day, and clinging more and more to that fair wife, and her noble boy, and the babe whose laughter makes music within that dreary cage.  And all day long, as we have seen, he sits over his still, compounding and discovering, and sometimes showing himself on the wall to the people, who gather to gaze at him, till Wade forbids it, fearing popular feeling.  In fact, the world outside has a sort of mysterious awe of him, as if he were a chained magician, who, if he were let loose, might do with them all what he would.  Certain great nobles are of the same mind.  Woe to them if that silver tongue should once again be unlocked!

The Queen, with a woman’s faith in greatness, sends to him for ‘cordials.’  Here is one of them, famous in Charles the Second’s days as ‘Sir Walter’s Cordial’:—

Which, so the world believes, will cure all ills which flesh is heir to.  It does not seem that Raleigh so boasted himself; but the people, after the fashion of the time, seem to have called all his medicines ‘cordials,’ and probably took for granted that it was by this particular one that the enchanter cured Queen Anne of a desperate sickness, ‘whereof the physicians were at the farthest end of their studies’ (no great way to go in those days) ‘to find the cause, and at a nonplus for the cure.’

Raleigh—this is Sir Anthony Welden’s account, which may go for what it is worth—asks for his reward, only justice.  Will the Queen ask that certain lords may be sent to examine Cobham, ‘whether he had at any time accused Sir Walter of any treason under his hand?’  Six are sent.  Cobham answers, ‘Never; nor could I: that villain Wade often solicited me, and not so prevailing, got me by a trick to write my name on a piece of white paper.  So that if a charge come under my hand it was forged by that villain Wade, by writing something above my hand, without my consent or knowledge.’  They return.  An equivocation was ready.  ‘Sir, my Lord Cobham has made good all that ever he wrote or said’; having, by his own account, written nothing but his name.  This is Sir Anthony Welden’s story.  One hopes, for the six lords’ sake, it may not be true; but there is no reason, in the morality of James’s court, why it should not have been.

So Raleigh must remain where he is, and work on.  And he does work.  As his captivity becomes more and more hopeless, so comes out more and more the stateliness, self-help, and energy of the man.  Till now he has played with his pen: now he will use it in earnest; and use it as few prisoners have done.  Many a good book has been written in a dungeon—‘Don Quixote,’ the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’: beautiful each in its way, and destined to immortality: Raleigh begins the ‘History of the World,’ the most God-fearing and God-seeing history which I know of among English writings; though blotted by flattery of James in the preface: wrong: but pardonable in a man trying in the Tower to get out of that doleful prison.  But all his writings are thirty years too late; they express the creed of a buried generation, of the men who defied Spain in the name of a God of righteousness,—not of men who cringe before her in the name of a God of power and cunning.  The captive eagle has written with a quill from his own wing—a quill which has been wont ere now to soar to heaven.  Every line smacks of the memories of Nombre and of Zutphen, of Tilbury Fort and of Calais Roads; and many a gray-headed veteran, as he read them, must have turned away his face to hide the noble tears, as Ulysses from Demodocus when he sang the song of Troy.  So there sits Raleigh, like the prophet of old, in his lonely tower above the Thames, watching the darkness gather upon the land year by year, ‘like the morning spread over the mountains,’ the darkness which comes before the dawn of the Day of The Lord; which he shall never see on earth, though it be very near at hand; and asks of each newcomer, ‘Watchman, what of the night?’

But there is one bright point at least in the darkness; one on whom Raleigh’s eyes, and those of all England, are fixed in boundless hope; one who, by the sympathy which attracts all noble natures to each other, clings to the hero utterly; Henry, the Crown Prince.  ‘No king but my father would keep such a bird in a cage.’  The noble lad tries to open the door for the captive eagle; but in vain.  At least he will make what use he can of his wisdom.  He asks him for advice about the new ship he is building, and has a simple practical letter in return, and over and above probably the two valuable pamphlets, ‘Of the Invention of Ships,’ and ‘Observations on the Navy and Sea Service’; which the Prince will never see.  In 1611 he asks Raleigh’s advice about the foolish double marriage with the Prince and Princess of Savoy, and receives for answer two plain-spoken discourses as full of historical learning as of practical sound sense.

These are benefits which must be repaid.  The father will repay them hereafter in his own way.  In the meanwhile the son does so in his way, by soliciting the Sherborne estate as for himself, intending to restore it to Raleigh.  He succeeds.  Carr is bought off for £25,000, where Lady Raleigh has been bought off with £8000; but neither Raleigh nor his widow will ever be the better for that bargain, and Carr will get Sherborne back again, and probably, in the King’s silly dotage, keep the £25,000 also.

In November 1612 Prince Henry falls sick.

When he is at the last gasp, the poor Queen sends to Raleigh for some of the same cordial which had cured her.  Medicine is sent, with a tender letter, as it well might be; for Raleigh knew how much hung, not only for himself, but for England, on the cracking threads of that fair young life.  It is questioned at first whether it shall be administered.  ‘The cordial,’ Raleigh says, ‘will cure him or any other of a fever, except in case of poison.’

The cordial is administered; but it comes too late.  The prince dies, and with him the hopes of all good men.

* * *

At last, after twelve years of prison, Raleigh is free.  He is sixty-six years old now, gray-headed and worn down by confinement, study, and want of exercise: but he will not remember that.

‘Still in his ashes live their wonted fire.’

Now for Guiana, at last! which he has never forgotten; to which he has been sending, with his slender means, ship after ship to keep the Indians in hope.

He is freed in March.  At once he is busy in his project.  In August he has obtained the King’s commission, by the help of Sir Ralph Winwood, Secretary of State, who seems to have believed in Raleigh.  At least Raleigh believed in him.  In March next year he has sailed, and with him thirteen ships, and more than a hundred knights and gentlemen, and among them, strange to say, Sir Warham St. Leger.  This is certainly not the quondam Marshal of Munster under whom Raleigh served at Smerwick six-and-thirty years ago.  He would be nearly eighty years old; and as Lord Doneraile’s pedigree gives three Sir Warhams, we cannot identify the man.  But it is a strong argument in Raleigh’s favour that a St. Leger, of a Devon family which had served with him in Ireland, and intimately connected with him his whole life, should keep his faith in Raleigh after all his reverses.  Nevertheless, the mere fact of an unpardoned criminal, said to be non ens in law, being able in a few months to gather round him such a party, is proof patent of what slender grounds there are for calling Raleigh ‘suspected’ and ‘unpopular.’

But he does not sail without a struggle or two.  James is too proud to allow his heir to match with any but a mighty king, is infatuated about the Spanish marriage; and Gondomar is with him, playing with his hopes and with his fears also.

The people are furious, and have to be silenced again and again: there is even fear of rioting.  The charming and smooth-tongued Gondomar can hate, and can revenge, too.  Five ’prentices who have insulted him for striking a little child, are imprisoned and fined several hundred pounds each.  And as for hating Raleigh, Gondomar had been no Spaniard (to let alone the private reasons which some have supposed) had he not hated Spain’s ancient scourge and unswerving enemy.  He comes to James, complaining that Raleigh is about to break the peace with Spain.  Nothing is to be refused him which can further the one darling fancy of James; and Raleigh has to give in writing the number of his ships, men, and ordnance, and, moreover, the name of the country and the very river whither he is going.  This paper was given, Carew Raleigh asserts positively, under James’s solemn promise not to reveal it; and Raleigh himself seems to have believed that it was to be kept private; for he writes afterwards to Secretary Winwood in a tone of astonishment and indignation, that the information contained in his paper had been sent on to the King of Spain before he sailed from the Thames.  Winwood could have told him as much already; for Buckingham had written to Winwood, on March 28, to ask him why he had not been to the Spanish Ambassador ‘to acquaint him with the order taken by his Majesty about Sir W. R.’s voyage.’  But however unwilling the Secretary (as one of the furtherers of the voyage) may have been to meddle in the matter, Gondomar had had news enough from another source; perhaps from James’s own mouth.  For the first letter to the West Indies about Raleigh was dated from Madrid, March 19; and most remarkable it is that in James’s ‘Declaration,’ or rather apology for his own conduct, no mention whatsoever is made of his having given information to Gondomar.

Gondomar offered, says James, to let Raleigh go with one or two ships only.  He might work a mine, and the King of Spain would give him a safe convoy home with all his gold.  How kind.  And how likely would Raleigh and his fellow-adventurers have been to accept such an offer; how likely, too, to find men who would sail with them on such an errand, to be ‘flayed alive,’ as many who travelled to the Indies of late years had been, or to have their throats cut, tied back to back, after trading unarmed and peaceably for a month, as thirty-six of Raleigh’s men had been but two or three years before in that very Orinoco.  So James is forced to let the large fleet go; and to let it go well armed also; for the plain reason, that otherwise it dare not go at all; and in the meanwhile letters are sent from Spain, in which the Spaniards call the fleet ‘English enemies,’ and ships and troops are moved up as fast as possible from the Spanish main.

But, say some, James was justified in telling Gondomar, and the Spaniards in defending themselves.  On the latter point there is no doubt.

‘They may get who have the will,And they may keep who can.’

But it does seem hard on Raleigh, after having laboured in this Guiana business for years, and after having spent his money in vain attempts to deliver these Guianians from their oppressors.  It is hard, and he feels it so.  He sees that he is not trusted; that, as James himself confesses, his pardon is refused simply to keep a hold on him; that, if he fails, he is ruined.

As he well asks afterwards, ‘If the King did not think that Guiana was his, why let me go thither at all?  He knows that it was his by the law of nations, for he made Mr. Harcourt a grant of part of it.  If it be, as Gondomar says, the King of Spain’s, then I had no more right to work a mine in it than to burn a town.’  An argument which seems to me unanswerable.  But, says James, and others with him, he was forbid to meddle with any country occupate or possessed by Spaniards.  Southey, too, blames him severely for not having told James that the country was already settled by Spaniards.  I can excuse Southey, but not James, for overlooking the broad fact that all England knew it, as I have shown, since 1594; that if they did not, Gondomar would have taken care to tell them; and that he could not go to Guiana without meddling with Spaniards.  His former voyages and publications made no secret of it.  On the contrary, one chief argument for the plan had been all through the delivery of the Indians from these very Spaniards, who, though they could not conquer them, ill-used them in every way: and in his agreement with the Lords about the Guiana voyage in 1611, he makes especial mention of the very place which will soon fill such a part in our story, ‘San Thomé, where the Spaniards inhabit,’ and tells the Lords whom to ask as to the number of men who will be wanted ‘to secure Keymish’s passage to the mine’ against these very Spaniards.  What can be more clear, save to those who will not see?

The plain fact is that Raleigh went, with his eyes open, to take possession of a country to which he believed that he and King James had a right, and that James and his favourites, when they, as he pleads, might have stopped him by a word, let him go, knowing as well as the Spaniards what he intended; for what purpose, but to have an excuse for the tragedy which ended all, it is difficult to conceive.  ‘It is evident,’ wisely says Sir Robert Schomburgk, ‘that they winked at consequences which they must have foreseen.’

And here Mr. Napier, on the authority of Count Desmarets, brings a grave charge against Raleigh.  Raleigh in his ‘Apology’ protests that he only saw Desmarets once on board of his vessel.  Desmarets says in his despatches that he was on board of her several times—whether he saw Raleigh more than once does not appear—and that Raleigh complained to him of having been unjustly imprisoned, stripped of his estate, and so forth; and that he was on that account resolved to abandon his country, and, if the expedition succeeded, offer himself and the fruit of his labour to the King of France.

If this be true, Raleigh was very wrong.  But Sir Robert Schomburgk points out that this passage, which Mr. Napier says occurs in the last despatch, was written a month after Raleigh had sailed; and that the previous despatch, written only four days after Raleigh sailed, says nothing about the matter.  So that it could not have been a very important or fixed resolution on Raleigh’s part, if it was only to be recollected a month after.  I do not say—as Sir Robert Schomburgk is very much inclined to do—that it was altogether a bubble of French fancy.  It is possible that Raleigh, in his just rage at finding that James was betraying him and sending him out with a halter round his neck, to all but certain ruin, did say wild words—That it was better for him to serve the Frenchman than such a master—that perhaps he might go over to the Frenchman after all—or some folly of the kind, in that same rash tone which, as we have seen, has got him into trouble so often already: and so I leave the matter, saying, Beware of making any man an offender for a word, much less one who is being hunted to death in his old age, and knows it.

However this may be, the fleet sails; but with no bright auguries.  The mass of the sailors are ‘a scum of men’; they are mutinous and troublesome; and what is worse, have got among them (as, perhaps, they were intended to have) the notion that Raleigh’s being still non ens in law absolves them from obeying him when they do not choose, and permits them to say of him behind his back what they list.  They have long delays at Plymouth.  Sir Warham’s ship cannot get out of the Thames.  Pennington, at the Isle of Wight, ‘cannot redeem his bread from the bakers,’ and has to ride back to London to get money from Lady Raleigh.  The poor lady has it not, and gives a note of hand to Mr. Wood of Portsmouth.  Alas for her!  She has sunk her £8000, and, beside that, sold her Wickham estate for £2500; and all is on board the fleet.  ‘A hundred pieces’ are all the ready money the hapless pair had left on earth, and they have parted them together.  Raleigh has fifty-five and she forty-five till God send it back—if, indeed, He ever send it.  The star is sinking low in the west.  Trouble on trouble.  Sir John Fane has neither men nor money; Captain Witney has not provisions enough, and Raleigh has to sell his plate in Plymouth to help him.  Courage! one last struggle to redeem his good name.

Then storms off Sicily—a pinnace is sunk; faithful Captain King drives back into Bristol; the rest have to lie by a while in some Irish port for a fair wind.  Then Bailey deserts with the ‘Southampton’ at the Canaries; then ‘unnatural weather,’ so that a fourteen days’ voyage takes forty days.  Then ‘the distemper’ breaks out under the line.  The simple diary of that sad voyage still remains, full of curious and valuable nautical hints; but recording the loss of friend on friend; four or five officers, and, ‘to our great grief, our principal refiner, Mr. Fowler.’  ‘Crab, my old servant.’  Next a lamentable twenty-four hours, in which they lose Pigott, the lieutenant-general, ‘mine honest frinde, Mr. John Talbot, one that had lived with me a leven yeeres in the Tower, an excellent general skoller, and a faithful and true man as ever lived,’ with two ‘very fair conditioned gentleman,’ and ‘mine own cook Francis.’  Then more officers and men, and my ‘cusen Payton.’  Then the water is near spent, and they are forced to come to half allowance, till they save and drink greedily whole canfuls of the bitter rain water.  At last Raleigh’s own turn comes; running on deck in a squall, he gets wet through, and has twenty days of burning fever; ‘never man suffered a more furious heat,’ during which he eats nothing but now and then a stewed prune.

At last they make the land at the mouth of the Urapoho, far south of their intended goal.  They ask for Leonard the Indian, ‘who lived with me in England three or four years, the same man that took Mr. Harcourt’s brother and fifty men when they were in extreme distress, and had no means to live there but by the help of this Indian, whom they made believe that they were my men’; but the faithful Indian is gone up the country, and they stand away for Cayenne, ‘where the cacique (Harry) was also my servant, and had lived with me in the Tower two years.’

Courage once more, brave old heart!  Here at least thou art among friends, who know thee for what thou art, and look out longingly for thee as their deliverer.  Courage; for thou art in fairyland once more; the land of boundless hope and possibility.  Though England and England’s heart be changed, yet God’s earth endures, and the harvest is still here, waiting to be reaped by those who dare.  Twenty stormy years may have changed thee, but they have not changed the fairyland of thy prison dreams.  Still the mighty Ceiba trees with their wealth of parasites and creepers tower above the palm-fringed islets; still the dark mangrove thickets guard the mouths of unknown streams, whose granite sands are rich with gold.  Friendly Indians come, and Harry with them, bringing maize, peccari pork, and armadillos, plantains and pine-apples, and all eat and gather strength; and Raleigh writes home to his wife, ‘to say that I may yet be King of the Indians here were a vanity.  But my name hath lived among them’—as well it might.  For many a year those simple hearts shall look for him in vain, and more than two centuries and a half afterwards, dim traditions of the great white chief who bade them stand out to the last against the Spaniards, and he would come and dwell among them, shall linger among the Carib tribes; even, say some, the tattered relics of an English flag, which he left among them that they might distinguish his countrymen.

Happy for him had he stayed there indeed, and been their king.  How easy for him to have grown old in peace at Cayenne.  But no; he must on for honour’s sake, and bring home if it were but a basketful of that ore to show the king, that he may save his credit.  He has promised Arundel that he will return.  And return he will.  So onward he goes to the ‘Triangle Islands.’  There he sends off five small vessels for the Orinoco, with four hundred men.  The faithful Keymis has to command and guide the expedition.  Sir Warham is lying ill of the fever, all but dead; so George Raleigh is sent in his place as sergeant-major, and with him five land companies, one of which is commanded by young Walter, Raleigh’s son; another by a Captain Parker, of whom we shall have a word to say presently.

Keymis’s orders are explicit.  He is to go up; find the mine, and open it; and if the Spaniards attack him, repel force by force: but he is to avoid, if possible, an encounter with them: not for fear of breaking the peace, but because he has ‘a scum of men, a few gentlemen excepted, and I would not for all the world receive a blow from the Spaniards to the dishonour of our nation.’  There we have no concealment of hostile instructions, any more than in Raleigh’s admirable instructions to his fleet, which, after laying down excellent laws for morality, religion, and discipline, go on with clause after clause as to what is to be done if they meet ‘the enemy.’  What enemy?  Why, all Spanish ships which sail the seas; and who, if they happen to be sufficiently numerous, will assuredly attack, sink, burn, and destroy Raleigh’s whole squadron, for daring to sail for that continent which Spain claims as its own.

Raleigh runs up the coast to Trinidad once more, in through the Serpent’s Mouth, and round Punto Gallo to the lake of pitch, where all recruit themselves with fish and armadillos, ‘pheasant’ (Penelope), ‘palmitos’ (Moriche palm fruit?), and guavas, and await the return of the expedition from the last day of December to the middle of February.  They see something of the Spaniards meanwhile.  Sir John Ferns is sent up to Port of Spain to try if they will trade for tobacco.  The Spaniards parley; in the midst of the parley pour a volley of musketry into them at forty paces, yet hurt never a man; and send them off calling them thieves and traitors.  Fray Simon’s Spanish account of the matter is that Raleigh intended to disembark his men, that they might march inland on San Joseph.  He may be excused for the guess; seeing that Raleigh had done the very same thing some seventeen years before.  If Raleigh was treacherous then, his treason punished itself now.  However, I must believe that Raleigh is not likely to have told a lie for his own private amusement in his own private diary.

On the 29th the Spaniards attack three men and a boy who are ashore boiling the fossil pitch; kill one man, and carry off the boy.  Raleigh, instead of going up to Port of Spain and demanding satisfaction, as he would have been justified in doing after this second attack, remains quietly where he is, expecting daily to be attacked by Spanish armadas, and resolved to ‘burn by their sides.’  Happily, or unhappily, he escapes them.  Probably he thinks they waited for him at Margarita, expecting him to range the Spanish main.