One thing Raleigh did which must not be forgotten. The men he sent to explore in America saw potatoes and tobacco growing there, and learnt from the Indians how to use them. When they came home they showed Raleigh the plants they had brought back with them. He tried smoking tobacco, and I think he must have liked it very much, for he used to give his friends pipes with silver bowls and teach them how to smoke. And he planted potatoes in the garden of a house he had in Ireland; his were the very first Irish potatoes. A few years later both potatoes and tobacco were growing in the garden of one of those fine houses in the Strand of which I have told you; people thought them very rare and curious plants.
Eight years before the great Queen died, Raleigh went himself to South America, and sailed far up the River Orinoco. He found a fertile land and friendly Indians, who told him wonderful stories of the great "city of Manoa" which was (so they said,) rich beyond the dreams of man; El Dorado, the Golden City, the Spanish called it. Raleigh never forgot these stories; more than twenty years later they helped to bring him back to America.
When Elizabeth died and James I. came to the throne he fell into disgrace, for some people said he had plotted against the King; so he was tried, found guilty, and condemned to death. But he was not killed; year after year he was kept a prisoner in the Tower of London. How did he pass his days there? was he very dull and sad? I think not. Part of the time his wife and son lived with him; he was very much interested in the new science of chemistry, and he worked at it and tried experiments in his cell; he began to write a wonderful History of the World; and I think he thought and dreamed much about Manoa, his Golden City, and the riches which lay hidden in South America. The Spanish said these riches were all theirs; but Raleigh did not believe this, and he thought Englishmen could so easily get possession of some of them. After many years he tried to persuade King James to let him cross the Atlantic and sail up the Orinoco to find a gold-mine he had heard of there; he said if only he might go and open it up, it would bring great wealth to the King. Had he another hope, I wonder, hidden away in his heart, of which he did not speak—that he might also search for and find his Golden City? However this may be, he certainly tried to persuade the King, and he succeeded, for James said, "Yes, you may go," though he well knew that Raleigh could not go to South America and bring home gold without offending the Spanish, and England was then at peace with Spain. So Raleigh sailed away. After fifteen months he came home with a sad tale to tell;—everything had gone wrong, the Spanish had killed many of his men, and he had found no gold. James sent him back to the Tower; and four months later, in the year 1618, he was beheaded, because (so he was told,) he had once plotted against the King. Thus died the last of the great men of Queen Elizabeth's Court who had done so much for England.
How different London is now from the London of Queen Elizabeth's reign! Old St. Paul's and its high tower,—I will tell you in the next story what became of them. The Globe Theatre, too, has quite disappeared. Busy shops have taken the places of the beautiful old houses in the Strand; nothing now reminds us of them except the names of some of the streets which turn off it; and Somerset House, the great building where now some of the business of the nation is carried on, is so called because it stands on the place where the Duke of Somerset, who lived in Edward VI.'s reign, began to build a palace for himself.
If you go down the river to Greenwich, will you see Queen Elizabeth's pleasant palace? Ah, no. Sixty years after she died it was so out of repair that Charles II. ordered it to be pulled down and a new one built in its place. This new palace was not finished until William and Mary's reign. Then there was a great war with France, and the Queen begged the King to finish the palace and to turn it into a hospital for sailors who had been wounded or crippled in one of the great sea-fights. So it came to pass that, instead of Placentia, we now have Greenwich Palace; you will find a picture of it facing [p. 48].
Perhaps you are thinking, "At any rate the Tower has not changed, and London still has a Lord Mayor." But even the Tower has changed, for in Queen Elizabeth's time it was a royal palace as well as a prison. She did not use it often; perhaps she did not like it, for she had been a prisoner there herself when her sister Mary was Queen. Now our Kings never live there; and prisoners are not kept there; and for more than a hundred and fifty years no one has been beheaded there. I must tell you of one other change, for I am sure it will interest all children. In Queen Elizabeth's reign, if you had gone to see the Tower, you would have been shown also the lions and other wild animals which, from very early times, had been kept there in dens near the part which is called, after them, the Lion Tower. Now you must go to the Zoological Gardens to see wild animals; there are none in the Tower; they were all sent away to the Zoo not long before Queen Victoria began to reign.
