Raleigh

by Edmund Gosse

Meeres was ready in the law, and during the month of September sent twenty-six subpœnas down to Sherborne. But on October 3 he was subdued for the time being, and wrote to Cecil from his prison in the Gatehouse that he was very sorry for what he had said so 'furiously and foolishly' about Sir Walter Raleigh, and begged for a merciful consideration of it. He was pardoned, but he proved a troublesome scoundrel then and afterwards.

Early in September 1601, Raleigh came up on business from Bath to London, meaning to return at once, but found himself unexpectedly called upon to stay and fulfil a graceful duty. Henry IV. of France, being at Calais, had sent the Duc de Biron, with a retinue of three hundred persons, to pay a visit of compliment to Elizabeth. It was important that the French favourite should be well received in England, but no one expected him in London, and the Queen was travelling. Sir Arthur Savage and Sir Arthur Gorges were the Duke's very insufficient escort, until Raleigh fortunately made his appearance and did the honours of London in better style. He took the French envoys to Westminster Abbey, and, to their greater satisfaction, to the Bear Garden. The Queen was now staying, as the guest of the Marquis of Winchester, at Basing, and so, on September 9, Raleigh took the Duke and his suite down to the Vine, a house in Hampshire, where he was royally entertained. The Queen visited them here, and on the 12th they all came over to stay with her at Basing Park. By the Queen's desire, Raleigh wrote to Cobham, who had stayed at Bath, to come over to Basing and help to entertain the Frenchmen; he added, that in three or four days the visit would be over, and he and Cobham could go back to Bath together. The letters of Raleigh display an intimate friendship between Lord Cobham and himself which is not to be overlooked in the light of coming events. The French were all dressed in black, a colour Raleigh did not possess in his copious wardrobe, so that he had to order the making of a black taffeta suit in a hurry, to fetch which from London he started back late on Saturday night after bringing the Duke safe down to Basing. It was on the next day, if the French ambassador said true, that he had the astounding conversation with Elizabeth about Essex, at the end of which, after railing against her dead favourite, she opened a casket and produced the very skull of Essex. The subject of the fall of favourites was one in which Biron should have taken the keenest interest. Ten months later he himself, abandoned by his king, came to that frantic death in front of the Bastille which Chapman presented to English readers in the most majestic of his tragedies. The visit to Elizabeth occupies the third act of Byron's Conspiracy, which, published in 1608, contains of course no reference to Raleigh's part on that occasion.

It may be that in the autumn of 1601, James of Scotland first became actively cognisant of Raleigh's existence. Spain was once more giving Elizabeth anxiety, and threatening an invasion which actually took place on September 21, at Kinsale. By means of the spies which he kept in the Channel, Raleigh saw the Spanish fleet advancing, and warned the Government, though his warnings were a little too positive in pointing out Cork and Limerick as the points of attack. Meanwhile, he wrote out for the Queen's perusal a State paper on The Dangers of a Spanish Faction in Scotland. This paper has not been preserved, but the rumour of its contents is supposed to have frightened James in his correspondence with Rome, and to have made him judge it prudent to offer Elizabeth three thousand Scotch troops against the invader. Raleigh's casual remarks with regard to Irish affairs at this critical time, as we find them in his letters to Cecil, are not sympathetic or even humane, and there is at least one passage which looks very much like a licensing of assassination; yet it is certain that Raleigh, surveying from his remote Sherborne that Munster which he knew so well, took in the salient features of the position with extraordinary success. In almost every particular he showed himself a true prophet with regard to the Irish rising of 1601.

In November the Duke of Lennox came somewhat hastily to London from Paris, entrusted with a very delicate diplomatic commission from James of Scotland to Elizabeth. It is certain that he saw Raleigh and Cobham, and that he discussed with them the thorny question of the succession to the English throne. It moreover appears that he found their intentions 'traitorous to the King,' that is to say unfavourable to the candidature of James. The whole incident is exceedingly dark, and the particulars of it rest mainly on a tainted authority, that of Lord Henry Howard. It may be conjectured that what really happened was that the Duke of Lennox, learning that Raleigh was in town, desired Sir Arthur Savage to introduce him; that he then suggested a private conference, which was first refused, then granted, in Cobham's presence, at Durham House; that Raleigh refused King James's offers, and went and told Cecil that he had done so. Cecil, however, chose to believe that Raleigh was keeping something back from him, and his attitude from this moment grows sensibly colder to Raleigh, and he speaks of Raleigh's 'ingratitude,' though it is not plain what he should have been grateful for to Cecil.

It was now thirteen years since Raleigh had abandoned the hope of colonising Virginia, though his thoughts had often reverted to that savage country, of which he was the nominal liege lord. In 1602 he made a final effort to assert his authority there. He sent out a certain Samuel Mace, of whose expedition we know little; and about the same time his nephew, Bartholomew Gilbert, with an experienced mariner, Captain Gosnoll, went to look for the lost colony and city of Raleigh. These latter started in a small barque on March 26, but though they enjoyed an interesting voyage, they never touched Virginia at all. They discovered and named Martha's Vineyard, and some other of the islands in the same group; then, after a pleasant sojourn, they came back to England, and landed at Exmouth on July 23. It was left for another than Raleigh, while he was impoverished and a prisoner in the Tower, to carry out the dream of Virginian settlement. Perhaps the most fortunate thing that could have happened to Raleigh would have been for him to have personally conducted to the West this expedition of 1602. To have been out of England when the Queen died might have saved him from the calumny of treason.

It has been supposed that Raleigh was a complete loser by these vain expeditions. But a passage in a letter of August 21, 1602, shows us that this was not the fact. He says: 'Neither of them spake with the people,' that is, with the lost Virginian colonists, 'but I do send both the barques away again, having saved the charge in sassafras wood.' From the same letter we find that Gilbert and Gosnoll went off without Raleigh's leave, though in his ship and at his expense, and the latter therefore prays that his nephew may be stripped of his rich store of sassafras and cedar wood, partly in chastisement, but more for fear of overstocking the London market. He throws Gilbert over, and speaks angrily of him not as a kinsman, but as 'my Lord Cobham's man;' then relents in a postscript—'all is confiscate, but he shall have his part again.'

Raleigh was feeble in health and irritable in temper all this time. Lady Raleigh, with a woman's instinct, tried to curb his ambition, and tie him down to Sherborne. 'My wife says that every day this place amends, and London, to her, grows worse and worse.' Meanwhile, there is really not an atom of evidence to show that Raleigh was engaged in any political intrigue. He spent the summer and autumn of 1602, when he was not at Sherborne, in going through the round of his duties. All the month of July he spent in Jersey, 'walking in the wilderness,' as he says, hearing from no one, and troubled in mind by vague rumours, blown over to him from Normandy, of the disgrace of the Duc de Biron. He is also 'much pestered with the coming of many Norman gentlemen, but cannot prevent it.' On August 9, he left Jersey, in his ship the 'Antelope,' fearing if he stayed any longer to exhaust her English stores, and get no more 'in this poor island.' On landing at Weymouth on the 12th, he wrote inviting Cecil and Northumberland to meet him at Bath. He was justly exasperated to find that during his absence Lord Howard of Bindon had once more taken up the wicked steward, Meeres, and persuaded Sir William Peryam, the Chief Baron of the Exchequer, to try the suit again. Raleigh complains to Cecil:

I never busied myself with the Lord Viscount's [Lord Bindon's] wealth, nor of his extortions, nor poisoning of his wife, as is here avowed, have I spoken. I have foreborne ... but I will not endure wrong at so peevish a fool's hands any longer. I will rather lose my life, and I think that my Lord Puritan Peryam doth think that the Queen shall have more use of rogues and villains than of men, or else he would not, at Bindon's instances, have yielded to try actions against me being out of the land.

The vexation was a real one, but this is the language of a petulant invalid, of a man to whom the grasshopper has become a burden. We are therefore not surprised to find him at Bath on September 15, so ill that he can barely write a note to Cecil warning him of the approach of a Spanish fleet, the news of which has just reached him from Jersey. He grew little better at Bath, and in October we find him again at Sherborne, in very low spirits, sending by Cobham to the Queen a stone which Bartholomew Gilbert had brought from America, and which Raleigh took to be a diamond. Immediately after this, he set out on what he calls his 'miserable journey into Cornwall,' no other than his customary autumn circuit through the Stannary Courts. Once he had enjoyed these bracing rides over the moors, but his animal spirits were subdued, and the cold mosses, the streams to be forded, the dripping October woods, and the chilly granite judgment-seat itself, had lost their attraction for his aching joints. In November, however, he is back at Sherborne, restored to health, and intending to linger in Dorsetshire as long as he can, 'except there be cause to hasten me up.'

Meanwhile he had paid a brief visit to London, and had spoken with the Queen, as it would appear, for the last time. Cecil, who was also present, has recorded in a letter of November 4 this interview, which took place the previous day. On this last occasion Elizabeth sought Raleigh's advice on her Irish policy. The President of Munster had reported that he had seen fit to 'kill and hang divers poor men, women, and children appertaining' to Cormac MacDermod McCarthy, Lord of Muskerry, and to burn all his castles and villages from Carrigrohan to Inchigeelagh. Cecil was inclined to think that severity had been pushed too far, and that the wretched Cormac might be left in peace. But Elizabeth had long been accustomed to turn to Raleigh for advice on her Irish policy. He gave, as usual, his unflinching constant counsel for drastic severity. He 'very earnestly moved her Majesty of all others to reject Cormac MacDermod, first, because his country was worth her keeping, secondly, because he lived so under the eye of the State that, whensoever she would, it was in her power to suppress him.' This last, one would think, might have been an argument for mercy. The Queen instructed Cecil to tell Sir George Carew, that whatever pardon was extended to others, none might be shown to Cormac.