An intrigue of less guiltiness than these dark machinations of heartless men banished Rawleigh from court. In the dalliance of the ladies of the privy-chamber, through the long tedious days of audience, he once too wittily threw out an observation on that seductive but spotless circle, the maids of honour, who, he declared were “like witches, who could do hurt, but do no good.” There was one, however, the bewitching Throgmorton, who was all goodness; the impassioned knight was resistless; and subsequently the law consecrated what love had already irrevocably joined. But envy with its evil eye was peering. The Queen of Virgins, implacable in love-treasons, sent the lovers to the Tower.
In this desperate predicament, Rawleigh had lost in an hour the proud work of his highest ambition, the favour of his mistress-sovereign. The forlorn hero had recourse to one of those prompt and petty stratagems in which he was often so dexterous. At his prison-window, one day, he beheld the Queen passing in her barge, and suddenly raved like a distracted lover. He entreated to be allowed to go in disguise to rest his eyes once more on the idol of his heart; and when the governor refused this extraordinary request of a state-prisoner, he, in his agony, struggled. Their daggers were clutched; till Sir Arthur Gorge, seeing “the cold iron walking about,” rushed between these terrible combatants. All this, Gorge, then a friend of Rawleigh, minutely narrates in a letter to Cecil, at the same time gently hinting that, if the minister deem it proper, it may be communicated to the queen, that such was the miserable condition of Rawleigh, that he fell distracted only at the distant sight of her majesty. This theatrical scene was got up for the nonce, and served as a prologue to another characteristic effusion, a letter of raving gallantry, which Orlando Furioso himself might have penned, potent with the condensed essence of old romance. The amorist in his prison thus sorrows: “I was wont to behold her riding like Alexander, hunting like Diana, walking like Venus; the gentle wind blowing her fair hair about her pure cheeks like a nymph; sometime sitting in the shade like a goddess, sometime singing like an angel.” Sir Walter knew how high the pulse beat of his royal mistress, now aged by her sixtieth year. He obtained his freedom, but was banished the presence. And now, cast out of court favour, and calling himself “The Queen’s Captive,” Rawleigh, whom many had feared and few had not admired, found that even fools had the courage to vex a banished favourite.
There was no hope; yet Rawleigh, in his exile at his own Sherborne, addressed more than one letter to the queen, warning her of “the dangers of a Spanish faction in Scotland.” But the letters were received in silence. Rawleigh then attempted to awaken Cecil to the state of Ireland, then on the point of exploding into a rebellion. He compares himself to the Trojan soothsayer, “who cast his spear against the wooden horse, and was not believed.” The language of complaint was not long tolerable to a spirit which would have commanded the world; and at once he took his flight from the old to the new, and his fleet and himself were again buoyant on the ocean.
This was Rawleigh’s first voyage to “the empire of Guiana,” as it was then called. His interesting narrative Hume has harshly condemned, as containing “the most palpable lies ever imposed on the credulity of mankind.” Our romantic adventurer has incurred censure for his own credulity in search of mines which appear to have existed, and of “the golden city,” which lying Spaniards had described; and he had even his honour impeached by the baffled speculators of his own day, whom he had beguiled with his dreams; but he who sacrificed life and fortune in a great enterprise, left the world a pledge that he at least believed in his own tale.
Rawleigh, like other men of genius, was influenced by the spirit of the age, which was the spirit of discovery; and to the brave and the resolved, what could be impracticable which opened a new world? The traditions of the Spaniards had been solemnly recorded in the collections of their voyages, and had been sanctioned by the reports of Rawleigh’s own people: and he himself had fed his eyes and his dreams on the novel aspect of those fertile plains and branching rivers, inhabited by fifty nations; on animals of a new form, and birds of a new plumage; and on a vegetable world of trees and plants, and flowers, and fruits, on which the eye dwelt for the first time—a fresh creation, “the face of whose earth hath not been torn, nor the virtue and salt of the soil spent by manurance.”
The origin of those puerile tales which the Europeans brought home with them has not been traced. Some have the air of religious legends, descriptive of the Paradise of the Blacks, such as that chimerical Manoa, where they said, “the king had golden images of every object on earth.” Or were such marvellous fictions the shrewd inventions of these children of nature, more cunning than the men of Europe, stupified and credulous from their sovereign passion? When the Indians on the coast found that the whites seemed insatiate of gold and pearls, they fostered the madness, directing their strange invaders far up into the land, to the great city of Manoa, the El-Dorado of the Spaniards, and which no one ever reached. In this manner they probably designed to rid themselves of their ambiguous guests, sending them to stray in the deserts of primeval forests, or to sail along interminable rivers, wrecked amid rapid falls.
Rawleigh endured many miseries; and on his return his narrative was deemed fabulous. The pathos of his language, however, perpetuates his dignified affliction. “Of the little remaining fortune I had, I have wasted in effect all herein; I have undergone many constructions, been accompanied with many sorrows, with labour, hunger, heat, sickness, and peril. From myself I have deserved no thanks, for I am returned a beggar and withered.”
An enterprise which was, as he himself considered it to be, national, crushed the resources of the individual. He assures us that he might have enriched himself, had “it become the former fortune in which he once lived, and sorted with all the offices of honour, which by her majesty’s grace he held that day in England, for him to go journies of picory;” that is, in Gondomar’s plain Spanish “piracy;” for the Spaniards applied the term picarro, a rogue or thief, to every one sailing in their forbidden seas. The dedication of his narrative, though directed to Howard and Cecil, was evidently addressed to “the lady of ladies,” who, however, could not break her enchanted silence.
Spain trembled at the efforts of a single hero of England; she seemed to anticipate her uncertain dominion over that new world. Spain, though proud and mighty, standing on her golden feet, yet found them weak as unbaked clay, while her treasure-fleets were either burned or sunk, or carried into our ports. But at home there were those who dreaded the ascendancy of that bold spirit, which even in his present sad condition asserted that “there were men worthy to be kings of these dominions, and who, by the queen’s grace and leave, would undertake it of themselves.” His adversaries would cloak their private envy under the fair colour of the public safety, or seemed wise with prudential scepticism. Yet the dauntless soul of Rawleigh, amid his distresses, despatched two ships under his devoted Keymis, to keep up the intercourse with the weak colony he had left behind; this was the second voyage to Guiana, which only increased the anxiety for a third, which soon followed.