Ten Tudor Statesmen

by Arthur D. Innes

For a time, however, Raleigh was not much at Court. But Essex, who was popular with the mob, as the other was not, was jealous of every one, and nearly every one was jealous of Essex. Old Lord Burghley died, and a considerable part of the story of the Queen’s last years is really the story of the crafty intriguing by which Robert Cecil first urged Essex to the ruin on which he was ready enough to rush, and then laid his mines for the destruction of Raleigh—while carefully avoiding the odium in both cases. Essex, when in Ireland, acquired a fixed idea that Sir Walter was the principal person whose machinations were compassing his downfall; but there is little enough reason to suppose that he had any one but himself to thank. The only effective machinations were those of the people who covertly encouraged his own arrogance and misconduct. Nevertheless, it is matter of regret that when Essex fell, Raleigh—who had recently received insults from him—did take a vindictive line, while Cecil was posing as the advocate of magnanimity.

A sketch such as this does not permit of an examination of the intricate plottings that surrounded the old Queen as she was wearing rapidly to her grave. Roughly speaking, the English Catholics outside the country were zealous for the quite impossible succession of Philip III. of Spain—a plan which did not appeal to the Catholics in England. There were schemes for the succession of that monarch’s sister, which found supporters only on the basis of her uniting the crowns of the Netherlands and England, in independence of Spain. There were ideas of marrying Arabella Stewart and Lord Beauchamp—each of whom had some sort of title—with the object of preventing the accession of James VI., whose claim on purely legitimist grounds was quite indisputable. Cecil, satisfied that James was the winning candidate, made it his business to convince that prince that his peaceful accession would be entirely due to Cecil’s own masterly management, and that Raleigh in particular was extremely antagonistic; while Raleigh himself was at no pains to curry favour with the Scots king.

Scarcely was Elizabeth dead and James on the throne when a plot for his removal and the substitution of Arabella was brought to light, and Raleigh was charged with having sold himself to Spain and being a principal agent in the conspiracy, which involved the introduction of Spanish troops. The conduct of the trial was a monstrous perversion of justice, and Raleigh was condemned as a traitor. Apart from the inadequacy of the evidence and the palpable fact that it was full of contradictions and of perjury, it remains incredible that Raleigh should ever have seriously intended to support a Spanish domination. It would not only have been a flat contradiction of his whole career, a merely amazing folly in the man who in all England was the most absolutely convinced of the rottenness of the power of Spain; there was also no man alive who more thoroughly appreciated the historical truth, that he who sells his own country to her enemies purchases for himself not power and confidence but suspicion and contempt. The part of Themistocles would not have attracted him. He might have been capable of playing a selfish game; he was certainly not likely to play a consciously unpatriotic one; but the game attributed to him by his enemies would have been in his own eyes not only unpatriotic, but, from the selfish point of view, egregiously stupid.

VI
CAPTIVE AND VICTIM

Raleigh was condemned to die as a traitor; but the sentence was not carried out. Instead, he was relegated to the Tower, and was there held a prisoner for twelve years—mainly occupied in scientific and literary pursuits, varied by petitions for release. His chemical experiments may be accounted as a hobby; but his writings would have assured his fame had he possessed no other claim to recognition. They range over the whole field of what the Greeks included under the term “politics”—economics, the art of war, the art of government, political institutions, as well as other subjects. The incidental discourses on such matters, illustrated from the events quorum pars magna fuerat, with his comments thereon, give the main permanent interest to his “History of the World”—in itself a monument of such historical learning as was available in his day. On every subject he touched he wrote with a knowledge of facts and a penetrating perception of causes which distinguish him as a political thinker of a high order; alive, like Thomas More, to truths which had hardly won general recognition two centuries after he was in his grave. He who in the great days had been the intimate of Edmund Spenser was in the days of his captivity on terms of friendship with Ben Jonson. He, too, wrote poetry, but this was for him rather in the nature of an intellectual exercise or accomplishment than of a creative order; little that can with certainty be attributed to him has been handed down, though that little includes lines (like “The Lie” and the sonnet to Spenser) which are immortal, assuring him his place on the English Helicon. But his magnum opus was that “History of the World” which King James condemned because it spoke too “saucily” of the doings of princes, but which was ranked by Oliver Cromwell next to his Bible.

Raleigh’s condemnation produced a curious effect. Hitherto, he had been able to win the devotion of the few chosen intimates whom he accounted his intellectual peers, and of the mariners who sailed under his command, who adored him in much the same way and for the same reasons as they adored Francis Drake. Among courtiers his open and aggressive consciousness of intellectual superiority and his scornful attitude made him intensely unpopular; and he was the pet aversion of the mob, who had made a hero of Essex and regarded him as the Earl’s principal enemy. Yet the sense that he was a victim of gross injustice, the dignity and eloquence he displayed at his trial, the contrast between this typical Elizabethan and the minions of the new Stewart Court, brought about a revulsion of sentiment, and Raleigh in the Tower became an object of admiration, and to Henry Prince of Wales of hero-worship.

A curious psychological study is afforded by Sir Walter’s letters when he was lying under sentence of death. He condescended to appeal to the king for mercy in terms which can only be called abject; yet the ink was scarcely dry when he was writing to his wife with tender affection and beautiful dignity. The conclusion afforded by a comparison of the documents is that his personal attitude towards death was that expressed in the letter to his wife, but that for the sake of his family he felt bound to appeal for life, and the only form of appeal from which anything might be hoped must be couched in that style of pitiful self-abasement and fulsome flattery which he adopted—and by which he felt himself degraded.

While Robert Cecil lived there was never much hope of liberty for Sir Walter, who yet seems never to have realised that his old friend and colleague was, under the surface, his most determined enemy. But the prisoner, though now advanced in years—he was already fifty-one at the time of the trial—never ceased to dream of Eldorado, and to petition for liberty in order to make one more expedition to Guiana. Cecil died; the rising favourite, Villiers, was a person whose influence could be secured—at a price; and at last, after more than twelve years of captivity, Raleigh was released, to prepare for his last voyage. But the attitude of England to Spain had changed since Elizabeth’s death: the ambassador Gondomar could twist King James round his little finger. Raleigh meant to win his golden empire, and incidentally to teach the old lesson of Spanish incapacity over again; Gondomar intended to use that expedition for Raleigh’s destruction. Sir Walter played the game on the old familiar theory of twenty—thirty—forty years before: that success would excuse proceedings unauthorised, and even forbidden. Every soul, from the king down, knew perfectly well that if the adventurer did not set Spain at defiance, the adventure itself would be a stupid farce.

So the greatest living Englishman was sent forth to his carefully prepared destruction, to entangle himself in the toils laid by, and at the bidding of, the minister of England’s old foe. Of course, under the conditions the expedition was a disastrous failure. Raleigh returned from it with a perfect knowledge that he was coming back to irretrievable ruin and disgrace. It would have been easy enough for him to find refuge in a French port; that he deliberately faced his fate is sufficient proof that the charge of his having already sold himself to France was a base slander. Raleigh’s enemies were everlastingly accusing him of selling himself; they never produced a scintilla of proof, and the sales were singularly unremunerative to a man who was as careful of his own interests as any one when he did drive a bargain. He had hardly landed in Plymouth when he was placed under arrest. Even now he had an opportunity of escaping to France, but he refused to avail himself of it. His doom was a foregone conclusion; the death sentence passed on him in 1603 had never been cancelled.

He bore himself worthily; with the fortitude and dignity which were almost a commonplace with Englishmen of the Tudor tradition. The king of England, Elizabeth’s successor, struck off the head of the last of the Elizabethan heroes, at the orders of the king of Spain. But the degradation was only for a time. Spain had laid her enemy low; but the lesson he had spent his life to teach his countrymen was bearing its fruit even in the hour of his doom; to the men of Raleigh’s race was destined the Empire of the seas, and of the new worlds which Spain had arrogantly claimed.