Sir Walter Raleigh and His Time

by Charles Kingsley

So down comes Rehoboam, taking counsel with the young men, and makes answer to England, ‘My father chastised you with whips; but I will chastise you with scorpions.’ He takes a base pleasure, shocking to the French ambassador, in sneering at the memory of Queen Elizabeth; a perverse delight in honouring every rascal whom she had punished. Tyrone must come to England to be received into favour, maddening the soul of honest Sir John Harrington. Essex is christened ‘my martyr,’ apparently for having plotted treason against Elizabeth with Tyrone. Raleigh is received with a pun—‘By my soul, I have heard rawly of thee, mon’; and when the great nobles and gentlemen come to court with their retinues, James tries to hide his dread of them in an insult; pooh-poohs their splendour, and says, ‘he doubts not that he should have been able to win England for himself, had they kept him out.’ Raleigh answers boldly, ‘Would God that had been put to the trial.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because then you would have known your friends from your foes.’ ‘A reason,’ says old Aubrey, ‘never forgotten or forgiven.’ Aubrey is no great authority; but the speech smacks so of Raleigh’s offhand daring that one cannot but believe it; as one does also the other story of his having advised the lords to keep out James and erect a republic. Not that he could have been silly enough to propose such a thing seriously at that moment; but that he most likely, in his bold way, may have said, ‘Well, if we are to have this man in without conditions, better a republic at once.’ Which, if he did say, he said what the next forty years proved to be strictly true. However, he will go on his own way as best he can. If James will give him a loan, he and the rest of the old heroes will join, fit out a fleet against Spain, and crush her, now that she is tottering and impoverished, once and for ever. But James has no stomach for fighting; cannot abide the sight of a drawn sword; would not provoke Spain for the world—why, they might send Jesuits and assassinate him; and as for the money, he wants that for very different purposes. So the answer which he makes to Raleigh’s proposal of war against Spain is to send him to the Tower, and sentence him to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, on a charge of plotting with Spain.

Having read, I believe, nearly all that has been written on the subject of this dark ‘Cobham plot,’ I find but one thing come brightly out of the infinite confusion and mystery, which will never be cleared up till the day of judgment, and that is Raleigh’s innocence. He, and all England, and the very men who condemned him, knew that he was innocent. Every biographer is forced to confess this, more or less, in spite of all efforts to be what is called ‘impartial.’ So I shall waste no words upon the matter, only observing that whereas Raleigh is said to have slandered Cecil to James, in the same way that Cecil had slandered him, one passage of this Cobham plot disproves utterly such a story, which, after all, rests (as far as I know) only on hearsay, being ‘spoken of in a manuscript written by one Buck, secretary to Chancellor Egerton.’ For in writing to his own wife, in the expectation of immediate death, Raleigh speaks of Cecil in a very different tone, as one in whom he trusted most, and who has left him in the hour of need. I ask the reader to peruse that letter, and say whether any man would write thus, with death and judgment before his face, of one whom he knew that he had betrayed; or, indeed, of one who he knew had betrayed him. I see no reason to doubt that Raleigh kept good faith with Cecil, and that he was ignorant till after his trial that Cecil was in the plot against him.

I do not care to enter into the tracasseries of this Cobham plot. Every one knows them; no one can unravel them. The moral and spiritual significance of the fact is more interesting than all questions as to Cobham’s lies, Brooke’s lies, Aremberg’s lies, Coke’s lies, James’s lies:—Let the dead bury their dead. It is the broad aspect of the thing which is so wonderful; to see how

‘The eagle, towering in his pride of place,
Was by a mousing owl hawked at and killed.’

This is the man who six months ago, perhaps, thought that he and Cecil were to rule England together, while all else were the puppets whose wires they pulled. ‘The Lord hath taken him up and dashed him down;’ and by such means, too, and on such a charge! Betraying his country to Spain! Absurd—incredible—he would laugh it to scorn: but it is bitter earnest. There is no escape. True or false, he sees that his enemies will have his head. It is maddening: a horrible nightmare. He cannot bear it; he cannot face—so he writes to that beloved wife—‘the scorn, the taunts, the loss of honour, the cruel words of lawyers.’ He stabs himself. Read that letter of his, written after the mad blow had been struck; it is sublime from intensity of agony. The way in which the chastisement was taken proves how utterly it was needed, ere that proud, success-swollen, world-entangled heart could be brought right with God.

And it is brought right. The wound is not mortal. He comes slowly to a better mind, and takes his doom like a man. That first farewell to his wife was written out of hell. The second rather out of heaven. Read it, too, and compare; and then see how the Lord has been working upon this great soul: infinite sadness, infinite tenderness and patience, and trust in God for himself and his poor wife: ‘God is my witness, it was for you and yours that I desired life; but it is true that I disdain myself for begging it. For know, dear wife, that your son is the son of a true man, and one who, in his own respect, despiseth death and all his ugly and misshapen forms . . . The everlasting, powerful, infinite, and omnipotent God, who is goodness itself, the true life and light, keep thee and thine, have mercy upon me, and teach me to forgive my persecutors and accusers, and send us to meet in His glorious kingdom.’

Is it come to this then? Is he fit to die at last? Then he is fit to live; and live he shall. The tyrants have not the heart to carry out their own crime, and Raleigh shall be respited.

But not pardoned. No more return for him into that sinful world, where he flaunted on the edge of the precipice, and dropped heedless over it. God will hide him in the secret place of His presence, and keep him in His tabernacle from the strife of tongues; and a new life shall begin for him; a wiser, perhaps a happier, than he has known since he was a little lad in the farmhouse in pleasant Devon far away. On the 15th of December he enters the Tower. Little dreams he that for more than twelve years those doleful walls would be his home. Lady Raleigh obtains leave to share his prison with him, and, after having passed ten years without a child, brings him a boy to comfort the weary heart. The child of sorrow is christened Carew. Little think those around him what strange things that child will see before his hairs be gray. She has her maid, and he his three servants; some five or six friends are allowed ‘to repair to him at convenient times.’ He has a chamber-door always open into the lieutenant’s garden, where he ‘has converted a little hen-house into a still-room, and spends his time all the day in distillation.’ The next spring a grant is made of his goods and chattels, forfeited by attainder, to trustees named by himself, for the benefit of his family. So far, so well; or, at least, not as ill as it might be: but there are those who cannot leave the caged lion in peace.

Sanderson, who had married his niece, instead of paying up the arrears which he owes on the wine and other offices, brings in a claim of £2000. But the rogue meets his match, and finds himself, at the end of a lawsuit, in prison for debt. Greater rogues, however, will have better fortune, and break through the law-cobwebs which have stopped a poor little fly like Sanderson. For Carr, afterwards Lord Somerset, casts his eyes on the Sherborne land. It has been included in the conveyance, and should be safe; but there are others who, by instigation surely of the devil himself, have had eyes to see a flaw in the deed. Sir John Popham is appealed to. Who could doubt the result? He answers that there is no doubt that the words were omitted by the inattention of the engrosser—Carew Raleigh says that but one single word was wanting, which word was found notwithstanding in the paper-book, i.e. the draft—but that the word not being there, the deed is worthless, and the devil may have his way. To Carr, who has nothing of his own, it seems reasonable enough to help himself to what belongs to others, and James gives him the land. Raleigh writes to him, gently, gracefully, loftily. Here is an extract: ‘And for yourself, sir, seeing your fair day is now in the dawn, and mine drawn to the evening, your own virtues and the king’s grace assuring you of many favours and much honour, I beseech you not to begin your first building upon the ruins of the innocent; and that their sorrows, with mine, may not attend your first plantation.’ He speaks strongly of the fairness, sympathy, and pity by which the Scots in general had laid him under obligation: argues from it his own evident innocence; and ends with a quiet warning to the young favourite not to ‘undergo the curse of them that enter into the fields of the fatherless.’ In vain. Lady Raleigh, with her children, entreats James on her knees: in vain again. ‘I mun ha’ the land,’ is the answer; ‘I mun ha’ it for Carr.’ And he has it; patching up the matter after a while by a gift of £8000 to her and her elder son, in requital for an estate of £5000 a year.

So there sits Raleigh, growing poorer day by day, and clinging more and more to that fair wife, and her noble boy, and the babe whose laughter makes music within that dreary cage. And all day long, as we have seen, he sits over his still, compounding and discovering, and sometimes showing himself on the wall to the people, who gather to gaze at him, till Wade forbids it, fearing popular feeling. In fact, the world outside has a sort of mysterious awe of him, as if he were a chained magician, who, if he were let loose, might do with them all what he would. Certain great nobles are of the same mind. Woe to them if that silver tongue should once again be unlocked!