Both Raleigh and Essex accompanied the Lisbon expedition in 1589. Raleigh was with Drake; Essex, who had joined in defiance of orders, with the land force. The fleet was in no way responsible for the failure, though the blame was carefully laid on Drake; Raleigh, ostensibly at any rate, rather gained in favour with the Queen, who was extremely angry with Essex. The Earl, however, recovered his ascendency while his rival was in Ireland in this same year. Then came another period of Raleigh’s ascendency. Essex married Philip Sidney’s widow, thereby infuriating his mistress; and, when he had been forgiven, was not kept at Court, but sent to command the English contingent in France in support of the king, Henry IV.—who was warring for his throne against the Guises, backed by Philip. Still, the raiding policy held the field, and the naval operations of 1590 were conducted by Hawkins and Frobisher. The Treasure fleet, against which it was directed, had warning and did not sail into the trap, so that the expedition was practically a failure. A similar expedition was planned for the next year, in which Raleigh was to have sailed as Vice-Admiral, Lord Thomas Howard being in command; but, Essex being in France, Elizabeth would not spare him, and Grenville went instead, to meet his death in the last famous fight of the Revenge. The next year, Raleigh and the Earl of Cumberland had a great enterprise on hand; but, again, Raleigh was ordered to turn back and resign his command to Frobisher.

At this time Sir Walter fell into complete disgrace at Court, partly because he did not at first obey the Queen’s orders, partly because of the discovery of his liaison with Elizabeth Throgmorton, who became his wife—whether he was already secretly married to her is a matter of some doubt. He was placed in confinement, and wrote the most outrageous letters to Robert Cecil anent the misery of being deprived of the sunshine of the Royal presence; in the then conventional form of adulation for Gloriana. He was more or less forgiven when the ships under the command of his lieutenant, Borough, returned, with a very rich prize, of the value whereof Elizabeth took one-half for herself. Incidentally, the whole story of this enterprise shows that Raleigh could make himself as popular with sailors as unpopular elsewhere; for the crews nearly mutinied when they found he was to be displaced by Frobisher; and after they landed, Robert Cecil was quite perturbed at the discovery of their devotion to him, their wrath at his imprisonment, and his influence over them when he was sent down to the port to keep matters straight.

Raleigh was released, but he no longer basked in the sunshine of the Virgin Queen’s favour, and lived away from the Court, spending much of his time at his newly acquired estate of Sherborne. About this time his rival, returned from France, was admitted to the Privy Council, from which he himself was still excluded; but he became active in Parliament, in private matters relating to his various estates, and in planning his great expedition for the “discovery of Guiana”; while he was also an energetic advocate of the policy of expelling the Spaniards from Brittany, relying—in full accord with the school of Drake—on the navy as England’s instrument for fighting her great foe. The persuasive eloquence of his tongue would seem to have equalled the picturesque force of his pen, which had been displayed in more than one pamphlet, notably in his extremely vivid account of the great fight in which his kinsman Grenville lost his life—where his narrative powers are associated with a singularly telling rhetorical invective directed against the Spaniards.

For a dozen years past, however, Raleigh had hardly put to sea in his own person, or seen much fighting. In 1595 he reappears as emphatically a man of action.

V
FAVOUR AND FALL

The Virginia project was for the time abandoned, since it had become clear that no serviceable co-operation could be expected from any quarter. If the establishment of a working colony in North America was out of his power, Raleigh came to the conclusion that territorial acquisitions on the southern continent might prove more attractive. Rumour declared that the Peruvian Incas had set up in the interior a new empire, known as Guiana, whose capital was the golden city of Manoa; Spanish attempts to penetrate inland had failed. If England established her sovereignty in the heart of South America, taking possession of what was believed to be the richest country in the world, the most short-sighted could see what a prospect was offered of dominating her rival, in the field to which that rival laid exclusive claim; and the most avaricious might anticipate opportunities of accumulating enormous wealth.

So Raleigh organised his expedition for the exploration of the Orinoco in 1595, taking command of it in person. The record of it we have from his own pen. As a matter of course, he had sundry collisions with the Spaniards, very much of his own seeking, capturing Berreo, the Governor of Trinidad, from whom he extracted a certain amount of information. Then he made his way some distance up the great river, enduring many hardships, seeing many strange sights, and gathering still more astonishing reports; collecting also samples of ore which suggested the auriferous character of the district. It seems, however, a somewhat curious omission on his part that he had sailed without proper means either for mining or assaying. In all other respects he proved himself an extremely competent explorer, in especial recognising the necessity of cultivating—in contrast to the Spaniards—the confidence and friendliness of the natives; carrying out his scheme, not on the hypothesis of bringing home the maximum of loot, but of preparing the way for the systematic entry of England into a great inheritance. He was again doomed to disappointment. The Cecils at this period were cooperating with him cautiously, but he could still get no other support; the Queen was minded to participate royally in profits, but she preferred to leave all the risks to others—and the others preferred the immediate return from raids to any systematic and laborious methods, however paying in the long run. Moreover, the credit which Sir Walter gave to apparently authentic but fabulous tales of Amazons and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders, brought undeserved discredit on the explorer’s account of what he had actually seen. In short, the result of his adventure seemed very likely to be, that adventurers with very different methods would visit Guiana in search of Eldorado; but the beginnings of an English Empire in America were brought no nearer.

By this time Elizabeth was awaking to the fact that Spain’s power of aggression on the seas had by no means disappeared; and Drake had once more been called into counsel. In the winter of 1595, the great seaman and his old colleague and rival John Hawkins were in joint command of a new Panama expedition, in the course of which both of them died. The Cadiz expedition next year was the fruit of the more efficient policy which was being forced to the front by circumstances. General reconciliation was the order of the day in England; the Cecils, the Howards, Raleigh, and Essex were all on formal terms of alliance. Philip was making great naval preparations, when an English force appeared off Cadiz; Essex was the General, Effingham the Admiral; his cousin, Lord Thomas Howard and Raleigh, were both on the War Council. Effingham wished to land the soldiers and attack the town; Raleigh, who had been absent from the Council of War, appeared in time to get a hearing; the decision arrived at was reversed, and Raleigh in his vessel headed the squadron as it sailed into Cadiz harbour. There is no doubt that Sir Walter was the hero of the occasion, setting the example of doing the right thing in the right way. The result was that thirteen of Philip’s best warships were sunk or captured, a great fleet of forty sail packed full of riches was taken or burnt, and Cadiz itself was sacked completely and thoroughly, while the persons of the inhabitants were protected and cared for with a most unaccustomed generosity. Raleigh’s own narrative—he was badly wounded during the engagement—gives the fullest account of the proceedings, but is in the main substantiated by other evidence; and if he had no qualms about asserting the merits of his own performance, he was also at pains to emphasise with generous frankness the frank generosity displayed towards him by his personal rival. In all the relations between him and Essex, this is the pleasantest—one might almost say the only really pleasing—episode.

At last Raleigh was restored to Court favour; but for a time a superficial friendliness with Essex was maintained, and the pair were again united with Lord Thomas Howard in the following year in what was known as the Islands voyage: a futile performance, in which the English fleet had the worst of luck in respect of weather, and Essex, who was in supreme command, showed grave incompetence—which was hardly unnatural, since he was quite inexperienced in naval warfare and knew nothing whatever of naval strategy. At one stage Raleigh, awaiting Essex off Fayal (in the Azores), with orders not to attack till the whole force was assembled, found sufficient reason, after some days’ delay, for effecting the capture of the place on his own responsibility—to the extreme annoyance of Essex. The action was executed with brilliant courage and success; but the Earl’s anger was with difficulty appeased, and the old animosity between the rivals was to a great extent revived by the incident.