In his virtues and in his faults, in his brilliance and in his limitations, in his greatness and in his defects, Walter Raleigh is the very type of Elizabeth’s England. Like Robert Cecil, Spenser, and Sidney, he was a child when the great queen ascended the throne; like Shakespeare and Bacon, he had not passed the full vigour of manhood when she died. He was a year older than Henry of Navarre, whom he outlived by eight years. Walsingham was a grown man and William Cecil a Secretary of State before any one of this younger group was born. All of them were young men still when the crisis of Elizabeth’s reign was reached and the Armada was dispersed. The older generation raised England from weakness to strength; the younger saw her strength made patent to the world. The older generation maintained her on the defensive; it was the part of the younger to assert her primacy in every field of endeavour.
Of this younger generation, Raleigh stands out as the typical representative. In an age of men of action, he was one of the greatest of the men of action. In one of the two greatest ages of English poetry he was acclaimed as one of their peers by the poets. In the age which saw the creation of English prose, he was one of the masters of prose. The military world and the naval world were developing new theories of strategy and tactics; in both fields he was a first-rate authority and a brilliant performer. The expansion of Spain and Portugal had brought new political conceptions into being; we owe the conception of Greater Britain and all the first stubborn efforts to realise it to the genius of Sir Walter. In a day of brilliant courtiers, none was more brilliant than he; and in the day when Bacon was formulating anew the principles of scientific inquiry, Raleigh was incidentally an ardent experimentalist. In every field his versatility was exercised, and in every field his place was in the front rank.
SIR WALTER RALEIGH
From the Painting by Federigo Zuccaro in the National Portrait Gallery
And yet perhaps—save in one thing—never quite in the first rank. His literary achievement does not set him beside Shakespeare and Spenser. Drake was a greater commander and John Davis a greater seaman. By land he was never tested in a great command. His scientific pursuits were merely a parergon. As a statesman he never achieved the control of England’s destinies; wily Robert Cecil was the craftier politician. But two things he did: he taught Englishmen that the might of England lay in her fleets—not as the accident of a moment but as a permanent principle; and he created the idea of a Britain beyond the seas, struggled for it almost alone year after year with persistent tenacity, through good report and evil report and failure—finally died for it. He it was that sowed the seed; ours is the tree that sprang from it.
II
RALEIGH’S RISE
Walter Raleigh was born in 1552, a year before Mary Tudor ascended the English throne. He was of a Devon house; himself, one of a large and composite family, for his mother, Katharine Champernoun, was his father’s third wife, and was herself a widow with several children when she married him. It must have counted for something for a small boy to have had two such big half-brothers as Humphrey and Adrian Gilbert, both dreamers and idealists, and one of them a by-no-means contemptible man of action to boot. The child was six years old when the great persecution was ended by Elizabeth’s accession, and for the next ten years he had endless opportunities of listening with all his ears to mariners’ tales of Eldorado and of the Spanish Inquisition, and learning at least watermanship if not seamanship. In 1568 he went up to Oxford, at the moment when Alva was goading the Netherlands into open rebellion and France was on the verge of a fresh outbreak of the Huguenot wars. Raleigh’s career as an undergraduate was interrupted. He went off to France as a volunteer, to get his baptism of blood at Jarnac in March, and to be present at Montcontour later in the year.
After that, his career for some while is not easy to trace. It looks as if he had returned to Oxford, for his name was still on the list of undergraduates at Oriel in 1572; but it is also said that he remained in France for five years, and even that he was in Paris at the time of the massacre. In 1575 he entered—pro forma—at the Middle Temple; and two or three years later appears to have been in the field again, fighting in the Low Countries under Sir John Norreys. The chances are that he had had some further military practice in the interval between 1569 and 1578, in France or the Netherlands or both, especially as his brother Humphrey Gilbert was in command of the English contingent at Flushing and elsewhere for some while. In 1578 Gilbert sailed on his first colonising venture, and young Walter was one of his captains; but the expedition, after a collision with some Spaniards, was driven back to Plymouth by weather. In 1580, Raleigh emerges definitely as a captain in the army employed for the suppression of Desmond’s rebellion in Ireland—in which capacity he was present at the capture of Smerwick, and had the unsavoury business of superintending the massacre of the garrison.
Raleigh remained in Ireland on duty for something over a year, till the end of 1581. While there he accomplished sundry feats of arms of a brilliant character, all being of the kind in which personal daring and skill, and resourcefulness in emergency, are the leading characteristics—deeds in which he was acting with only some very small escort. It was very much in the nature—mutatis mutandis—of police work among hostile frontier tribes in India to-day. The young soldier’s ideas of Irish government were derived from Humphrey Gilbert, who, in all other relations of life, was a noble-hearted generous Christian gentleman, but in this particular relation was as perfectly ruthless as Alva himself might have been. It is one of the puzzles of the period that men who upheld elsewhere the highest standards of chivalry and honour—men such as Sussex, Henry Sidney, Walter Devereux—adopted towards the native Irish the attitude of the primitive Hebrew towards the Canaanites, seeming to account the human population as if they were an irredeemably pernicious species of wild beasts; and Raleigh was no exception to the rule.