Sir Walter Raleigh and His Time. Charles Kingsley
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