A remarkable circumstance, however, occurred, which must not be passed over in this psychological history of Rawleigh. In the Tower, during the examination of the weak and worthless Cobham, who was shifting evidence, Rawleigh affected a recklessness of life; suddenly, he inflicted upon himself what his enemies afterwards called “the guilty blow in the Tower;” in the blow he did not risk his life, “being, in truth, rather a cut than a stab” in his breast. Mortified passion may have overcome for a moment the hero whose fortitude had often been more nobly tried; but in my own mind, I cannot avoid including the present incident among those similar minor artifices, designed for some grand effect.
Rawleigh, condemned, was suffered to live twelve years in the Tower, whence he obtained a release, but not a pardon; the condemnation was suspended over his head like the pointed sword, ready to drop on the guest invited to the mockery of a festival. A new secretary, Winwood, and a new favourite, Buckingham, had listened to the vision of a gold mine, and an English colony. The sage, who had passed through that school of wisdom, his own “History of the World,” when called into action, was still the same romantic adventurer. What else for him remained in England, but the dream of his early days? The military and the naval writings, as well as the “History of the World,” of Rawleigh, had been designed by their great author to mould the genius of that prince to whom he looked for another Elizabethan reign; but Prince Henry had sunk into an untimely grave, and the sovereign who loved as much as any one an awful volume, was deterred from valuing the man.
Rawleigh gathered together all the wrecks of his battered fortune, and, with a company of adventurers, equipped the fleet which was hastening to found a new empire. Ere its sails were filled with propitious gales, its ruin was prepared. The secret plans of its great conductor, confided to our government, by their order were betrayed to the jealous council of Castille. Lying in sickness, Rawleigh lands on a hostile coast; his son, with filial emulation, combated and fell; his confidential Keymis, whose life was devoted to him, could not endure reproach, and closing his cabin-door, ended his days; and if he himself bore up with life, it was that his life was still due to many. “I could die heart-broken, as Drake and Hawkins had died before, when they failed in their enterprise. My brains are broken, and I cannot write much; I live, and I told you why.” But he knew his life was a pledge no longer redeemable. His “rabble of idle rascals” mutinied, till the hope of falling in with the Spanish treasure-fleet lured them homewards. The letters to his wife are among the most tragical communications of a great mind greatly despairing, and may still draw tears.
On Rawleigh’s return, a proclamation was issued for his arrest, and he surrendered to his near kinsman, Sir Lewis Stukeley, vice-admiral of Devon. On their journey to London, they were joined by Manoury, a French physician, not unskilled in chemistry, a favourite study with Rawleigh.
It was in this journey that Rawleigh contrived one of those humiliating stratagems which we have several times noted with astonishment. In a confidential intercourse with the French chemist, he procured drugs by which he was enabled to counterfeit a strange malady. Alas! the great man was himself cozened. Manoury was the most guileful of Moutons, and his near kinsman, Stukeley, the most infamous of traitors![7]
The conflict of opposite emotions which induced this folly who shall describe? Rawleigh died in the elevation of his magnanimous spirit; as truly great when he took his farewell of his world, as when he closed the last sublime page of his great volume. He knew his fate, and he had come to meet it. The moment was disastrous; the Spanish match lay in one scale, and the head of Rawleigh was put in the other by the implacable Spaniard; and when a state-victim is required, the political balance is rarely regulated by simple justice.
An eminent critic has pronounced, that “the ‘History of the World,’ by Rawleigh, is rather an historical dissertation, than a work rising to the majesty of history.”
It sometimes happens that the application of an abstract principle of the critical art to some particular work may tend to injure the writer, without conveying any information to the reader; for thus the rare qualities of originality are wholly passed by, should the masterly genius have composed in a manner unprescribed by any canon of criticism.
Our author was not ignorant of the laws of historical composition, which, he observes, “many had taught, but no man better, and with greater brevity, than that excellent learned gentleman, Sir Francis Bacon.”