Sir Walter Raleigh and His Time

by Charles Kingsley

So ends the Elizabethan epic. Must we follow the corpse to the grave? It is necessary.

And now, ‘you gentlemen of England, who sit at home at ease,’ what would you have done in like case?—Your last die thrown; your last stake lost; your honour, as you fancy, stained for ever; your eldest son dead in battle—What would you have done? What Walter Raleigh did was this. He kept his promise. He had promised Lord Arundel to return to England; and return he did.

But it is said his real intention, as he himself confessed, was to turn pirate and take the Mexico fleet.

That wild thoughts of such a deed may have crossed his mind, may have been a terrible temptation to him, may even have broken out in hasty words, one does not deny. He himself says that he spoke of such a thing ‘to keep his men together.’ All depends on how the words were spoken. The form of the sentence, the tone of voice, is everything. Who could blame him, if seeing some of the captains whom he had most trusted deserting him, his men heaping him with every slander, and, as he solemnly swore on the scaffold, calling witnesses thereto by name, forcing him to take an oath that he would not return to England before they would have him, and locking him into his own cabin—who could blame him, I ask, for saying in that daring off-hand way of his, which has so often before got him into trouble, ‘Come, my lads, do not despair. If the worst comes to the worst, there is the Plate-fleet to fall back upon’? When I remember, too, that the taking of the said Plate-fleet was in Raleigh’s eyes an altogether just thing; and that he knew perfectly that if he succeeded therein he would be backed by the public opinion of all England, and probably buy his pardon of James, who, if he loved Spain well, loved money better; my surprise rather is, that he did not go and do it. As for any meeting of captains in his cabin and serious proposal of such a plan, I believe it to be simply one of the innumerable lies which James inserted in his ‘Declaration,’ gathered from the tales of men who, fearing (and reasonably) lest their heads should follow Raleigh’s, tried to curry favour by slandering him. This ‘Declaration’ has been so often exposed that I may safely pass it by; and pass by almost as safely the argument which some have drawn from a chance expression of his in his pathetic letter to Lady Raleigh, in which he ‘hopes that God would send him somewhat before his return.’ To prove an intention of piracy in the despairing words of a ruined man writing to comfort a ruined wife for the loss of her first-born is surely to deal out hard measure. Heaven have mercy upon us, if all the hasty words which woe has wrung from our hearts are to be so judged either by man or God!

Sir Julius Cæsar, again, one of the commission appointed to examine him, informs us that, on being confronted with Captains St. Leger and Pennington, he confessed that he proposed the taking of the Mexico fleet if the mine failed. To which I can only answer, that all depends on how the thing was said, and that this is the last fact which we should find in Sir Julius’s notes, which are, it is confessed, so confused, obscure, and full of gaps, as to be often hardly intelligible. The same remark applies to Wilson’s story, which I agree with Mr. Tytler in thinking worthless. Wilson, it must be understood, is employed after Raleigh’s return as a spy upon him, which office he executes, all confess (and Wilson himself as much as any), as falsely, treacherously, and hypocritically as did ever sinful man; and, inter alia, he has this, ‘This day he told me what discourse he and the Lord Chancellor had about taking the Plate-fleet, which he confessed he would have taken had he lighted on it.’ To which my Lord Chancellor said, ‘Why, you would have been a pirate.’ ‘Oh,’ quoth he, ‘did you ever know of any that were pirates for millions? They only that wish for small things are pirates.’ Now, setting aside the improbability that Raleigh should go out of his way to impeach himself to the man whom he must have known was set there to find matter for his death, all, we say, depends on how it was said. If the Lord Chancellor ever said to Raleigh, ‘To take the Mexico fleet would be piracy,’ it would have been just like Raleigh to give such an answer. The speech is a perfectly true one: Raleigh knew the world, no man better; and saw through its hollowness, and the cant and hypocrisy of his generation; and he sardonically states an undeniable fact. He is not expressing his own morality, but that of the world; just as he is doing in that passage of his ‘Apology,’ about which I must complain of Mr. Napier. ‘It was a maxim of his,’ says Mr. Napier, ‘that good success admits of no examination.’ This is not fair. The sentence in the original goes on, ‘so the contrary allows of no excuse, however reasonable and just whatsoever.’ His argument all through the beginning of the ‘Apology,’ supported by instance on instance from history, is—I cannot get a just hearing, because I have failed in opening this mine. So it is always. Glory covers the multitude of sins. But a man who has failed is a fair mark for every slanderer, puppy, ignoramus, discontented mutineer; as I am now. What else, in the name of common sense, could have been his argument? Does Mr. Napier really think that Raleigh, even if, in the face of all the noble and pious words which he had written, he held so immoral a doctrine, would have been shameless and senseless enough to assert his own rascality in an apology addressed to the most ‘religious’ of kings in the most canting of generations?

But still more astonished am I at the use which has been made of Captain Parker’s letter. The letter is written by a man in a state of frantic rage and disappointment. There never was any mine, he believes now. Keymis’s ‘delays we found mere delusions; for he was false to all men and hateful to himself, loathing to live since he could do no more villany. I will speak no more of this hateful fellow to God and man.’ And it is on the testimony of a man in this temper that we are asked to believe that ‘the admiral and vice-admiral,’ Raleigh and St. Leger, are going to the Western Islands ‘to look for homeward-bound men’: if, indeed, the looking for homeward-bound men means really looking for the Spanish fleet, and not merely for recruits for their crews. I never recollect—and I have read pretty fully the sea-records of those days—such a synonym used either for the Mexican or Indian fleet. But let this be as it may, the letter proves too much. For, first, it proves that whosoever is not going to turn ‘pirate,’ our calm and charitable friend Captain Parker is; ‘for my part, by the permission of God, I will either make a voyage or bury myself in the sea.’ Now, what making a voyage meant there is no doubt; and the sum total of the letter is, that a man intending to turn rover himself accuses, under the influence of violent passion, his comrades of doing the like. We may believe him about himself: about others, we shall wait for testimony a little less interested.

But the letter proves too much again. For Parker says that ‘Witney and Woolaston are gone off a-head to look for homeward-bound men,’ thus agreeing with Raleigh’s message to his wife, that ‘Witney, for whom I sold all my plate at Plymouth, and to whom I gave more credit and countenance than to all the captains of my fleet, ran from me at the Grenadas, and Woolaston with him.’

And now, reader, how does this of Witney, and Woolaston, and Parker’s intentions to ‘pirate’ separately, if it be true, agree with King James’s story of Raleigh’s calling a council of war and proposing an attack on the Plate-fleet? One or the other must needs be a lie; probably both. Witney’s ship was of only 160 tons; Woolaston’s probably smaller. Five such ships would be required, as any reader of Hakluyt must know, to take a single Carack; and it would be no use running the risk of hanging for any less prize. The Spanish main was warned and armed, and the Western Isles also. Is it possible that these two men would have been insane enough in such circumstances to go without Raleigh, if they could have gone with him? And is it possible that he, if he had any set purpose of attacking the Plate-fleet, would not have kept them, in order to attempt that with him which neither they nor he could do without each other. Moreover, no ‘piratical’ act ever took place; if any had, we should have heard enough about it; and why is Parker to be believed against Raleigh alone, when there is little doubt that he slandered all the rest of the captains? Lastly, it was to this very Parker, with Mr. Tresham and another gentleman, that Raleigh appealed by name on the scaffold, as witnesses that it was his crew who tried to keep him from going home, and not he them.

My own belief is, and it is surely simple and rational enough, that Raleigh’s ‘brains,’ as he said, ‘were broken’; that he had no distinct plan: but that, loth to leave the New World without a second attempt on Guiana, he went up to Newfoundland to re-victual, ‘and with good hope,’ as he wrote to Winwood himself, ‘of keeping the sea till August with some four reasonable good ships,’ probably, as Oldys remarks, to try a trading voyage; but found his gentlemen too dispirited and incredulous, his men too mutinous to do anything; and seeing his ships go home one by one, at last followed them himself, because he had promised Arundel and Pembroke so to do; having, after all, as he declared on the scaffold, extreme difficulty in persuading his men to land at all in England. The other lies about him, as of his having intended to desert his soldiers in Guiana, his having taken no tools to work the mine, and so forth, one only notices to say that the ‘Declaration’ takes care to make the most of them, without deigning, after its fashion, to adduce any proof but anonymous hearsays. If it be true that Bacon drew up that famous document, it reflects no credit either on his honesty or his ‘inductive science.’

So Raleigh returns, anchors in Plymouth. He finds that Captain North has brought home the news of his mishaps, and that there is a proclamation against him, which, by the bye, lies, for it talks of limitations and cautions given to Raleigh which do not appear in his commission; and, moreover, that a warrant is out for his apprehension. He sends his men on shore, and starts for London to surrender himself, in company with faithful Captain King, who alone clings to him to the last, and from whom we have details of the next few days. Near Ashburton he is met by Sir Lewis Stukely, his near kinsman, Vice-Admiral of Devon, who has orders to arrest him. Raleigh tells him that he has saved him the trouble; and the two return to Plymouth, where Stukely, strangely enough, leaves him at liberty and rides about the country. We should be slow in imputing baseness: but one cannot help suspecting from Stukely’s subsequent conduct that he had from the first private orders to give Raleigh a chance of trying to escape, in order to have a handle against him, such as his own deeds had not yet given.