* * *
At last, after twelve years of prison, Raleigh is free. He is sixty-six years old now, gray-headed and worn down by confinement, study, and want of exercise: but he will not remember that.
‘Still in his ashes live their wonted fire.’
Now for Guiana, at last! which he has never forgotten; to which he has been sending, with his slender means, ship after ship to keep the Indians in hope.
He is freed in March. At once he is busy in his project. In August he has obtained the King’s commission, by the help of Sir Ralph Winwood, Secretary of State, who seems to have believed in Raleigh. At least Raleigh believed in him. In March next year he has sailed, and with him thirteen ships, and more than a hundred knights and gentlemen, and among them, strange to say, Sir Warham St. Leger. This is certainly not the quondam Marshal of Munster under whom Raleigh served at Smerwick six-and-thirty years ago. He would be nearly eighty years old; and as Lord Doneraile’s pedigree gives three Sir Warhams, we cannot identify the man. But it is a strong argument in Raleigh’s favour that a St. Leger, of a Devon family which had served with him in Ireland, and intimately connected with him his whole life, should keep his faith in Raleigh after all his reverses. Nevertheless, the mere fact of an unpardoned criminal, said to be non ens in law, being able in a few months to gather round him such a party, is proof patent of what slender grounds there are for calling Raleigh ‘suspected’ and ‘unpopular.’
But he does not sail without a struggle or two. James is too proud to allow his heir to match with any but a mighty king, is infatuated about the Spanish marriage; and Gondomar is with him, playing with his hopes and with his fears also.
The people are furious, and have to be silenced again and again: there is even fear of rioting. The charming and smooth-tongued Gondomar can hate, and can revenge, too. Five ’prentices who have insulted him for striking a little child, are imprisoned and fined several hundred pounds each. And as for hating Raleigh, Gondomar had been no Spaniard (to let alone the private reasons which some have supposed) had he not hated Spain’s ancient scourge and unswerving enemy. He comes to James, complaining that Raleigh is about to break the peace with Spain. Nothing is to be refused him which can further the one darling fancy of James; and Raleigh has to give in writing the number of his ships, men, and ordnance, and, moreover, the name of the country and the very river whither he is going. This paper was given, Carew Raleigh asserts positively, under James’s solemn promise not to reveal it; and Raleigh himself seems to have believed that it was to be kept private; for he writes afterwards to Secretary Winwood in a tone of astonishment and indignation, that the information contained in his paper had been sent on to the King of Spain before he sailed from the Thames. Winwood could have told him as much already; for Buckingham had written to Winwood, on March 28, to ask him why he had not been to the Spanish Ambassador ‘to acquaint him with the order taken by his Majesty about Sir W. R.’s voyage.’ But however unwilling the Secretary (as one of the furtherers of the voyage) may have been to meddle in the matter, Gondomar had had news enough from another source; perhaps from James’s own mouth. For the first letter to the West Indies about Raleigh was dated from Madrid, March 19; and most remarkable it is that in James’s ‘Declaration,’ or rather apology for his own conduct, no mention whatsoever is made of his having given information to Gondomar.
Gondomar offered, says James, to let Raleigh go with one or two ships only. He might work a mine, and the King of Spain would give him a safe convoy home with all his gold. How kind. And how likely would Raleigh and his fellow-adventurers have been to accept such an offer; how likely, too, to find men who would sail with them on such an errand, to be ‘flayed alive,’ as many who travelled to the Indies of late years had been, or to have their throats cut, tied back to back, after trading unarmed and peaceably for a month, as thirty-six of Raleigh’s men had been but two or three years before in that very Orinoco. So James is forced to let the large fleet go; and to let it go well armed also; for the plain reason, that otherwise it dare not go at all; and in the meanwhile letters are sent from Spain, in which the Spaniards call the fleet ‘English enemies,’ and ships and troops are moved up as fast as possible from the Spanish main.
But, say some, James was justified in telling Gondomar, and the Spaniards in defending themselves. On the latter point there is no doubt.
‘They may get who have the will,
And they may keep who can.’