Sir Walter Ralegh: A Biography. W. Stebbing
fellow happened to be a very good archer. Having been grossly abused by another, he bemoaned himself to Ralegh, and asked what he should do to repair the wrong that had been offered him. 'Why, challenge him,' answered Ralegh, 'to a match of shooting.' If the sarcasm is not very keen its preservation in academical memory implies an impression of distinction in its author. Perhaps as much may be said for another anecdote of his University career, for which John Aubrey solemnly vouches, that he borrowed a gown at Oxford of one T. Child, and never restored it. Bacon's anecdote, in any case, being contemporary testimony, answers the useful purpose of confirming the reality of Ralegh's membership of the University, Chronological difficulties. which otherwise would have to be believed on the faith simply of vague tradition, and of Wood's hasty assertions. No evidence indeed of Ralegh's connection with Oxford has ever been discovered in the College or University papers and books, beyond the entry, a little below the name of C. Champernoun, of 'W. Rawley,' in the list of members of Oriel, dated 1572. It is printed in Mr. Andrew Clark's valuable Oxford Register. This W. Rawley must have been, like Champernoun, an undergraduate; for the name has not the graduate's prefix of 'Mr' or 'Sr'. The presence of the name in the list, with that of Champernoun, would be known to Wood. He may have built upon it the whole of his account of the periods both of Ralegh's admission into Oriel, and his departure after some three years. It would seem to him reasonable enough that Ralegh should have entered about 1568 at sixteen, and be still in residence three or four years later. Unfortunately an interlude, put apparently by Wood several years later, separates 1568 and 1572 in Ralegh's career. His academical course cannot fill up the gap; and it at once renders the chronology of the Athenae impossible, and that of the Oriel list hard to understand. Ralegh is known to have been out of England for part, if not the whole, of 1569, and is believed with good cause to have remained abroad over 1572. There are ways of explaining the consequent discrepancies. The W. Rawley on the Oriel list may have been, and probably was, our Walter Ralegh, retained among the number of undergraduates, though he had ceased to reside. A century later the name of the Duke of Monmouth, who had resided for a few months only, was kept on the Corpus books for many years. Again, to take and revise Wood's reference, Ralegh may well have entered long before he was sixteen. If, having been, in accordance with the common belief, born in 1552, he had, like his son Walter, gone up at fourteen, he would, in 1569, have passed three years at Oxford. But at all events Wood is mistaken in the assertion that he resided there about three years from 1568; for in 1569 he certainly was campaigning in France.
In France.
It happened in this way. His maternal kinsmen, the Champernouns, were connected by marriage with the Huguenot Comte de Montgomerie. One of them, Henry, had obtained the leave of Elizabeth to raise a troop of a hundred mounted gentlemen volunteers for the Protestant side. He collected them chiefly from the West. Ralegh is said to have been among those who accepted his invitation; 'admodum adolescens,' writes Camden in the Annals, 'jam primum fatis monstratus.' He must have quitted Oriel, perhaps in company with C. Champernoun, for the purpose. Generally it has been supposed that he crossed the Channel with the rest of the troop. But there is some reason for holding that he reached France earlier. The contingent entered the Huguenot camp on October 5, 1569, two days after the defeat at Moncontour. Ralegh alludes to himself in the History of the World as of the beaten army. Praising Count Lewis of Nassau for his skilful conduct of the Huguenot retreat, he remarks: 'Of which myself was an eye-witness, and was one of them that had cause to thank him for it.' The passage proves that he was in the Huguenot camp after Moncontour. Nothing in the remark is inconsistent with his earlier arrival, if there be, as there is, evidence to support it. Elsewhere in the History he says: 'I remember it well, that, when the Prince of Condé was slain after the battle of Jarnac,' the Huguenots consoled themselves for his death. Jarnac was fought on March 13, 1669. If, then, the phrase, 'I remember,' refer to Ralegh's personal experiences of Huguenot sentiment on the field, he must have joined the army at least half a year before the retreat after Moncontour. The only way of avoiding that conclusion is to take the violent course of supposing that he was recalling French criticisms delivered some time after the actual event.
A haze of uncertainty shrouds his original advent among the Huguenots. It lifts for a moment to show him there; and that is all. As soon as he has Ferocities of
Civil War. ridden within the Huguenot lines the clouds gather once more, and darkness swallows up his individuality. He tells one anecdote in the History of the manner in which the Huguenots chased Catholics in the hills of Languedoc. They tracked the fugitives to caverns half way up precipitous cliffs. Then they smoked them out with their treasures by lighted bundles of straw let down by iron chains opposite the mouth. General Pelissier plagiarised the device, with more murderous details, in Algeria in 1849. It is a specimen of the brutalities of a conflict, which its English assistants, though they had countenanced, would not care to chronicle minutely. To Ralegh's keen sight the struggle would soon have displayed itself shorn of the glamour of religious enthusiasm. He regarded it simply as a civil war, by which 'the condition of no nation,' as he wrote later, 'was ever bettered.' Of one of its prime authors, Admiral Coligny, he has recorded his belief that he 'advised the Prince of Condé to side with the Huguenots, not only out of love to their persuasion, but to gain a party.' English troopers on their return were not likely to dilate on their exploits at the Court of Elizabeth, who audaciously disavowed to the French Catholic Court the auxiliaries she had licensed.
On the authority of an observation of the younger Hakluyt's, that Ralegh had resided longer in France than he, the period is computed to have been not less than six years. As he appears to have been in London at the end of February, 1575, that term would be completed within a fortnight, if he were present at the battle of Jarnac. The time covered the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day, August 24, 1572. But there is no foundation for the story that he was then in Paris, and was one of the Englishmen sheltered in Walsingham's house. He had enlisted as a lad of seventeen. He emerged a man of twenty-three. Of this long and critical stage in his education we know really nothing, as we know nothing of his youth at school and college. After he quitted France it would appear from allusions by several In the Netherlands. contemporary writers that he served, about 1577–78, in the Netherlands with Sir John Norris's contingent under the Prince of Orange. Modern enquirers have doubted the fact, on the ground of evidence that he was in England between 1576 and 1578. The reasoning is not demonstrative. He may, if a regular combatant, have obtained a furlough to cross over, and see his family; or, from his English home, he may have paid a flying visit or visits to his brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who commanded a regiment of the English auxiliaries. The dates are not incompatible even with a statement that he fought at the battle of Rimenant on August 1, 1578, though, had he been present on so famous an occasion, it would have been more like him to refer somewhere to the circumstance. But if there is no sufficient ground for questioning the belief in his participation in the war of the Low Countries, there is yet less for disputing his residence in England from 1576. His signature to a family deed, already mentioned, in The Middle Temple. April, 1578, testifies that in 1578 and in ensuing years he was for a time in Devonshire. Evidence exists that in 1576, if not earlier, he was living in London. For 1576 itself the proof consists of some commendatory verses by 'Walter Rawely of the Middle Temple' prefixed to the Steele Glasse by Gascoigne, published in that year. Upon the description Wood has based a distinct assertion that Ralegh went from Oxford to the Middle Temple to improve himself in the intricate knowledge of the municipal laws. Oldys says he had searched the Registers of the Inn and they yielded no sign of a Walter Rawely or Ralegh. Moreover, if Ralegh had ever been formally a law student, it has been argued he could scarcely have solemnly declared at his trial in 1603 that he had never read a word of law or the statutes. On the other hand, doubts of the identity of the Rawely of the poem with Ralegh always involved intrinsic difficulties. Ralegh would have known Gascoigne through Humphrey Gilbert, with whom Gascoigne served in Flanders; and there is not a trace of the existence of a namesake acquainted with Gascoigne, or able to compose the verses. Now, at any rate, no room for serious dispute remains. A list in two manuscript volumes of all members of the Middle Temple from the commencement of the sixteenth century has lately been completed by order of the Benchers. In it, under the date 157 4/5 , February 27, appears an entry 'Walter Rawley, late of Lyons Inn, Gent. Son of Walter R. of Budleigh, Co. Devon, Esq.' The specification of parentage is useful. Without it a hypothesis would have been possible, that the traditions both