Among these men was Raleigh; his advice was eagerly sought by the Queen's ministers, and when it came to the actual Channel fighting he made one of many gallant captains. The great Armada came to grief upon the English coast, and Raleigh had added another to his record of achievements.
Having been courtier, colonizer, warrior, Raleigh now blossomed forth as a poet, and became a friend and patron of Edmund Spenser. He had much skill in verse, and he was never lacking in imagination. But his real talents did not lie in that direction, and as in so many other things, he soon found himself distracted elsewhere.
The story of Raleigh's manhood belongs to history. Turn to tales of Elizabeth's court and you will find his name on almost every page. Now he is high in favor, braving it with the great Earl of Leicester, now down upon his luck, locked in some royal prison, writing verses to his many friends. His was a strange career; at one time there was no man in England whose favor was more sought, yet at the end he died upon the scaffold charged with treason. Time proved him guiltless of the charge, and almost at once the English people began to realize how great a light had been extinguished.
Through all his varying career he himself was the same brave, dreamy, ambitious man, the perfect type of that age which we call the Elizabethan. He could not stay in his native land of Devon; much as he loved its moorland and its bays, he had to listen to the call of London and the sea, and follow where their voices led him. Each way the road was set with many strange adventures, but he met and passed through them all with the high spirits that were part of his age. His courage never failed him, nor his joy in fighting his way to fortune with his own sharp wits.
IV
Peter the Great
The Boy of the Kremlin: 1672-1725
The halls of the Kremlin, the Czar's palace in Moscow, were filled with a wild rabble of soldiers on a winter afternoon near the end of the seventeenth century. The guards of the late Czar Alexis were storming through the maze of corridors and state apartments, breaking statues, tearing down tapestries, and piercing and cutting to pieces invaluable paintings with their spears and swords.
They were big, savage-faced men, pets of the half-civilized Russian rulers, and were called the Streltsi Guard.