Walter Raleigh.
I said that his mind had been poisoned against Raleigh;[1] that poison begins speedily to work. There are only too many at the King’s elbow who are jealous of the grave and courtly gentleman, now just turned of fifty, and who has packed into those years so much of high adventure; who has written brave poems; who has fought gallantly and on many fields; who has voyaged widely in Southern and Western seas; who has made discovery of the Guianas; who has, on a time, befriended Spenser, and was mate-fellow with the gallant Sidney; who was a favorite of the great Queen; and whose fine speech, and lordly bearing, and princely dress made him envied everywhere, and hated by less successful courtiers. Possibly, too, Raleigh had made unsafe speeches about the chances of other succession to the throne. Surely he who wore his heart upon his sleeve, and loved brave deeds, could have no admiration for the poltroon of a King who had gone a hunting when the stains upon the scaffold on which his mother suffered were hardly dry. So it happened that Sir Walter Raleigh was accused of conspiring for the dethronement of the new King, and was brought to trial, with Cobham and others. The street people jeered at him as he passed, for he was not popular; he had borne himself so proudly with his exploits, and gold, and his eagle eye. But he made so noble a defence—so full—so clear—so eloquent—so impassioned, that the same street people cheered him as he passed out of court—but not to freedom. The sentence was death: the King, however, feared to put it to immediate execution. There was a show, indeed, of a scaffold, and the order issued. Cobham and Gray were haled out, and given last talks with an officiating priest, when the King ordered stay of proceedings: he loved such mummery. Raleigh went to the Tower, where for thirteen years he lay a prisoner; and they show now in the Tower of London the vaulted chamber that was his reputed (but doubtful) home, where he compiled, in conjunction with some outside friends—Ben Jonson among the rest—that ponderous History of the World, which is a great reservoir of facts, stated with all grace and dignity, but which, like a great many heavy, excellent books, is never read. The matter-of-fact young man remembers that Sir Walter Raleigh first brought potatoes and (possibly) tobacco into England; but forgets his ponderous History.
I may as well finish his story here and now, though I must jump forward thirteen and more years to accomplish it. At the end of that time the King’s exchequer being low (as it nearly always was), and there being rumors afloat of possible gold findings in Raleigh’s rich country of Guiana, the old knight, now in his sixty-seventh year, felt the spirit of adventure stirred in him by the west wind that crept through the gratings of his prison bringing tropical odors; and he volunteered to equip a fleet in company with friends, and with the King’s permission to go in quest of mines, to which he believed, or professed to believe, he had the clew. The permission was reluctantly granted; and poor Lady Raleigh sold her estate, as well as their beloved country home of Sherborne (in Dorset) to vest in the new enterprise.
But the fates were against it: winds blew the ships astray; tempests beat upon them; mutinies threatened; and in Guiana, at last, there came disastrous fights with the Spaniards.
Keymis, the second in command, and an old friend of Raleigh’s, being reproached by this latter in a moment of frenzy, withdraws and shoots himself; Raleigh’s own son, too, is sacrificed, and the crippled squadron sets out homeward, with no gold, and shattered ships and maddened crews. Storm overtakes them; there is mutiny; there is wreck; only a few forlorn and battered hulks bring back this disheartened knight. He lands in his old home of Devon—is warned to flee the wrath that will fall upon him in London; but as of old he lifts his gray head proudly, and pushes for the capital to meet his accusers. Arrived there, he is made to know by those strong at court that there is no hope, for he has brought no gold; and yielding to friendly entreaties he makes a final effort at escape. He does outwit his immediate guards and takes to a little wherry that bears him down the Thames: a half-day more and he would have taken wings for France. But the sleuth-hounds are on his track; he is seized, imprisoned, and in virtue of his old sentence—the cold-hearted Bacon making the law for it—is brought to the block.
He walks to the scaffold with serene dignity—greets old friends cheerfully—dies cheerfully, and so enters on the pilgrimage he had set forth in his cumbrous verse:—
“There the blessed paths we’ll travel,
Strow’d with rubies thick as gravel;
Ceilings of diamonds, sapphire floors,
High walls of coral and pearly bowers.
From thence to Heaven’s bribeless hall,
Where no corrupted voices brawl;
No conscience molten into gold,
No forg’d accuser bought or sold,
No cause deferr’d, no vain-spent Journey,
For there Christ is the King’s Attorney,
Who pleads for all without degrees,
And He hath angels, but no fees.
And when the grand twelve-million jury
Of our sins, with direful fury,
Against our souls black verdicts give,
Christ pleads his death and then we live.”
Again to his wife, in a last letter from his prison, he writes:—
“You shall receive, my dear wife, my last words in these my last lines: my love I send you, that you may keep when I am dead; and my counsel, that you may remember when I am no more. I would not with my will, present you sorrows, my dear Bess: let them go to the grave with me and be buried in the dust. And seeing that it is not the will of God that I shall meet you any more, bear my destruction patiently, and with a heart like yourself.
“I beseech you for the love that you bear me living, that you do not hide yourself many days; but, by your labors seek to help my miserable fortunes, and the rights of your poor child. Your mourning cannot avail me, that am but dust. I sued for my life, but, God knows, it was for you and yours that I desired it: for, know it, my dear wife, your child is the child of a true man, who in his own respect, despiseth Death and his misshapen and ugly forms. I cannot write much (God knows how hardly I steal this time when all sleep), and it is also time for me to separate my thoughts from the world. Beg my dead body, which living was denied you, and either lay it in Sherborne or Exeter church, by my father and mother.
“My dear wife, farewell; bless my boy; pray for me; and let my true God hold you both in his arms.”
It is not as a literary man proper that I have spoken of Raleigh; the poems that he wrote were very few, nor were they overfine; but they did have the glimmer in them of his great courage and of his clear thought. They were never collected in book shape in his own day, nor, indeed, till long after he had gone: they were only occasional pieces,[2] coming to the light fitfully under stress of mind—a trail of fire-sparks, as we may say, flying off from under the trip-hammer of royal wrath or of desperate fortunes.
Even his History was due to his captivity; his enthusiasms, when he lived them in freedom, were too sharp and quick for words. They spent themselves in the blaze of battles—in breasting stormy seas that washed shores where southern cypresses grew, and golden promises opened with every sunrise.
And when I consider his busy and brilliant and perturbed life, with its wonderful adventures, its strange friendships, its toils, its quiet hours with Spenser upon the Mulla shore, its other hours amidst the jungles of the Orinoco, its lawless gallantries in the court of Elizabeth, its booty snatched from Spanish galleons he has set ablaze, its perils, its long captivities—it is the life itself that seems to me a great Elizabethan epic, with all its fires, its mated couples of rhythmic sentiment, its poetic splendors, its shortened beat and broken pauses and blind turns, and its noble climacteric in a bloody death that is without shame and full of the largest pathos.
When you read Charles Kingsley’s story of Westward, Ho! (which you surely should read, as well as such other matter as the same author has written relating to Raleigh) you will get a live glimpse of this noble knight of letters, and of those other brave and adventurous sailors of Devonshire, who in those times took the keels of Plymouth over great wastes of water. Kingsley writes of the heroes of his native Devon, in the true Elizabethan humor—putting fiery love and life into his writing; the roar of Atlantic gales breaks into his pages, and they show, up and down, splashes of storm-driven brine.