Great Ralegh

by Hugh De Sélincourt

But Ralegh's possession of Sherborne was temporary and uncertain. He tried to save it entirely from the ruin of his fortune, that his wife and children might have a place in which to live. On this subject he writes continually to Cecil and Lord Cranborne. Sorrow sat by him as he wrote, and for long and long he could not resign himself to the prospect of captivity. "If I had a pardon, I may notwithstanding be restraynd or confined. If I may not be here about London (which God caste my sowle into hell if I desire, but to do your Lordship some kind of service) I shalbe most contented to be confined within the Hundred of Sherburn; or if I cannot be allowed so much I shalbe contented to live in Holland, wher, I shall perchance gett some imployment uppon the Indies, or else, if I be apoyncted to any bishope or other gentelman or nobelman, or that your Lordship would lett me keep but a park of yours—which I will buy from some one that hath it—your Lordship shalbe sure that I will never break the order which you shall pleas to undertake for me. And, if I bee any wher nire yow, yow shall find that in sume kind or other I shall do your Lordship service. For God douth know that if I cannot go to the Bathe this fall I am undun, for my health; and shalbe dead, or disabled for ever."

He wrote to Viscount Cranborne, imploring his aid to preserve this remnant of his fortune. "That life which cann be of no use to others and is now also weery of mee, at parting putts mee in mind of thos whom Nature and Charetie commands me not to neglect—a wife and a childe, and a wife with childe, whom, God knowes, have nothing else to inherite then my shame and ther own misery. How to healp it or to whom to complain, I know not, whose fortune is over darck for the reason of the world to peirce.... And while I know that the best of men are but the spoyles of Tyme and certayne images wherwith childish Fortune useth to play—kisse them to-day and break them to-morrow—and therefore can lament in my sealf but a common destiney, yet the pitifull estate of thos who are altogether healpless and who dayly wound my sowle with the memory of their miseries, force mee in despite of all resolvednesse, bothe to bewayle them and labor for them.... For my own tyme, good my Lord consider that it cannot be calde a life, but only misery drawne out and spoone into a long thride without all hope of other end then Death shall provide for mee; who without the healp of kings or frinds, will deliver me out of prison."

The humiliation of his position was forced upon his notice, for little men began to cheat him in little ways, and he could find no redress. The law knew him but as dead. He writes to Levinus Muncke, secretary to Lord Cranborne.... "I solde of late two peeces of ordenance to one Mr. Aloblaster, a marchant, whome you knowe. Hee that made the bargayne between us was one Thomas Scott, a broker,—one that I have done much for in my tyme, and one that, since I came back from Winchester, offred to sell his howse for me, if I wanted, with protestations too shamless to be dissembled. But having gotten my mony into his hands which Mr. Aloblaster sent mee and five pound waight of tobacco, hath sold the tobacco and reteyneth my money; finding mee now fitt for all men to tread on."

The man jackal is more impatient than his animal brother. For nearly two years Ralegh beat against the prison walls, bruising himself, unable to give up hope that some measure of freedom might be his. His health failed. The plague broke out in the Tower. A woman with the plague on her slept in the next room to his eldest son, with only a partition of paper between them. Every trouble and annoyance fell upon him. Indifference could not come to him with its peace of apathy. He continued to live and to resent and to suffer. A weaker man would have broken down, would have given up this horrible struggle for existence against such overwhelming odds. Ralegh did not. And slowly he emerged from the struggle the conqueror even of these circumstances. He found work and worked. At first he obtained permission to turn a little disused hen-house that leant against a wall in the Tower into a laboratory. He made lotions and a medicine, which remained in constant use for very many years after his death. In modern times that alone would have been sufficient to give him the prestige of millions, and probably with a little discreet management, a peerage.

Few men have turned necessity to gain (that is the quality of the warrior in life) so greatly as Ralegh, such constricting necessity to such glorious gain. By sheer will power he kept in touch with the life, from which he was excluded. He wrote pamphlets on questions that were paramount in interest. His treatise on The Prerogative of Parliaments shows him in the vanguard of the fighters for liberty of thought, before that movement developed into a baser servitude. He wrote arguments against an alliance by marriage with Spain. He wrote at Prince Henry's request a treatise on the building and management of ships. In every sphere his presence was felt. Ladies were eager to use his lotions for the preservation of beauty. His medicine was famous. The Queen sent an urgent messenger to the Tower when the Prince was dying, thinking to save her son's life by its means. But it was too late. The medicine only served to alleviate the agony of his last moments.

So Ralegh gradually came to arrange his life according to its new limitations. And it came about that those years in the Tower were far from being the unhappiest in his life. Ralegh, like his friend Spenser who had died tragically a few years before his imprisonment, knew well the value of Court life; and though he was not cut off from intelligent society as completely in the Tower as Spenser was in Ireland; yet he was cut off from much that had no attraction to Spenser. But in spite of his disgrace, and in spite of the work he desired to do, he must surely have found something of the same peace that comforted Spenser among the savage Irish, before their outbreak took from him his wife and home and all that was dear to him on earth. There is a strange analogy in what life offered to the two men. Lady Ralegh was allowed to visit and stay with her husband, until she offended Waad, who had become governor, by driving into the courtyard of the Tower in her carriage. Then the privilege was curtailed. Ralegh had many visitors. Men who had returned from travels came to tell him their experiences; men who were starting on some voyage, came to ask his advice and listen to his counsel. Ben Jonson visited him, and other scholars and poets. Certainly gossiping cheery Coryat, who amused himself by walking through all countries of the world, would come and recount his experiences. The Odcombian leg stretcher, as he liked to call himself, was hail-fellow-well-met with every man in London and in the principal cities of Europe. A sort of standing amiable joke was Tom of Odcombe. "There is no man but to enjoy his company would neglect anything but business."

For two years he turned in prison as in a cage. Then he began to live. His mind expanded beyond the limits of body and his discomfort and of himself. Some sort of expression must be found for his mind's activity, and his means of expression were limited. As health came to him while he worked in his laboratory the proper expression for his mind's activity evolved itself. During the months of his retreat in Ireland, in his cabin as he made his way across the silent sea, he had read deeply and thought deeply about the past; in his active life at the Court and elsewhere he had known men who made history, and he had taken part in events which were history. He had seen and conversed with men whom civilization had not touched, he had known men of every country whom civilization had shaped to its culminating point; and now as he lived in the Tower- from which he could see the ships sailing down the Thames to the unknown lands, from which he could look down upon the busy men of London, slowly there formed itself in his great mind a project. The project was to write the history of the whole great world, from which he was now cut off, from its very beginnings down to the days in which he was living, aloof from the life around. He determined to write the History of the World. That was the proper expression for his great mind's activity. He felt unconsciously that in so doing he could express himself. He set to work. He felt he had the grip of everything from the creation of the world to his own birth and tempestuous life of more than fifty years. We have burrowed more deeply into the mystery of things than the great Elizabethan, as sublimely unaware of his ignorance, as we are of ours; he had complete confidence in his knowledge. We hesitate, we feel always on the brink of some great discovery, to which acquired knowledge is leading us. He explored continents, feeling limitless possibilities of the earth; and doubted not about the spiritual world. We know the limits of the earth; and explore these spiritual worlds, the mystery of existence. Therein lies the difference between two ages; therein without a boast, lies the progress, even, which has happened in the last three hundred years of man's existence. The adventurous whom the Unknown attracts are not drawn to explore the earth's surface; they turn towards the mystery of their own souls from which comes much profitless self-searching and a little eternal gain; they turn towards the mysteries of life and death and birth; they try to unravel the skein which men were then living tempestuously to entangle.

So Ralegh began his great work, greatly conceived and greatly executed, in the very spirit of the age to which he belonged—the age of Elizabeth, and to which King James's little favourites, Car and the rest, could never belong. Shut away from the bustle of the court and its splendour, now sinking to ignoble display; shut away from the voice of the nation, singing after the nation's deeds, as it had never sung before and has not sung since, he dreamed his great dream and found peace as he forced it to take shape and reality to his vision. From the creation of the world to the death of his own great Queen Elizabeth—everything that was—that was his subject; nothing less could satisfy him. He set the huge machinery of his idea slowly to work. His authorities were vast in number. He searched them all, and began to write. As he wrote the first sentences, he felt the world lay before his ken, outstretched with all its strange happenings, the rise and the fall of dynasties, the rise and fall of kingdoms and nations. All were within his knowledge and grip. And above he saw the God, who had called the world into existence, and man into being. About that God he writes his first paragraph, untroubled by any simian suspicions. The immense power of the man overawes you as you begin his tremendous task. That is the first impression, and the impression thrills, as every supreme evidence of man's power must. Then you realize that his whole vision of the world is wrong—is a myth, and you see the futility of man's power—that is the second impression. The two are singularly vivid; they clash splendidly—and the issue? You see limitless possibilities of life for the brave man and the strong man, as they only can be seen, when two ideas—two sincerities—have clashed splendidly.

"And on through brave wars waged."

One is feign to cry out, when the dream of things has passed.