The greatest error of his life was his pertinacious hostility to Essex, originating in the jealousy of that brave, but rash and headstrong leader, who disgraced and suspended him after the taking of Fayal, a circumstance which he never forgave or forgot—an error which ultimately cost him his own life, since it alienated from him the affections of the English people, and rendered them pitiless to him in his own extremity.
But his greatest crime, in the eyes of Elizabeth, the crime which lost him her good graces for ever, and neutralized all his services on the flood and in the field, rendering ineffective even the strange letter which he addressed to his friend, Sir Robert Cecil, and which was doubtless shown to the queen, although it failed to move her implacable and iron heart, was his marriage, early in life, to the beautiful and charming Elizabeth Throgmorton. The letter to which I have alluded is so curious that I cannot refrain from quoting it entire, as a most singular illustration of the habits of that age of chivalry, and of the character of that strange compound, Elizabeth, who, to the "heart of a man, and that man a king of England," to quote her own eloquent and noble diction, added the vanity and conceit of the weakest and most frivolous of womankind, and who, at the age of sixty years, chose to be addressed as a Diana and a Venus, a nymph, a goddess, and an angel.
"My heart," he wrote, "was never till this day, that I hear the queen goes away so far off, whom I have followed so many years, with so great love and desire, in so many journeys, and am now left behind here, in a dark prison all alone. While she was yet near at hand, that I might hear of her once in two or three days, my sorrows were the less; but even now my heart is cast into the depth of all misery. I, that 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, sometimes sitting in the shade like a goddess, sometimes singing like an angel, sometimes playing like Orpheus. Behold the sorrow of this world! Once a miss has bereaved me of all. Oh! glory, that only shineth in misfortune, what is become of thy assurance? All wounds have scars but that of fantasy: all affections their relentings but that of womankind. Who is the judge of friendship but adversity? or when is grace witnessed but in offences? There was no divinity but by reason of compassion; for revenges are brutish and mortal. All those times past, the loves, the sighs, the sorrows, the desires, cannot they weigh down one frail misfortune? Cannot one drop of gall be his in so great heaps of sweetness? I may then conclude, 'spes et fortuna valete;' she is gone in whom I trusted, and of me hath not one thought of mercy, nor any respect of that which was. Do with me now, therefore, what you list. I am more weary of life than they are desirous that I should perish; which, if it had been for her, as it is by her, I had been too happily born."
It is singular enough that such a letter should have been written, under any circumstances, by a middle-aged courtier to an aged queen; but it becomes far more remarkable and extraordinary when we know that the life of Raleigh was not so much as threatened at the time when he wrote; and, so far had either of the parties ever been from entertaining any such affection the one for the other as could alone, according to modern ideas, justify such fervor of language, that Elizabeth was at that time pining with frustrated affection and vain remorse for the death of her beloved Essex; a remorse which, in the end, broke a heart which had defied all machinations of murdereous conspiracies, all menaces, all overtures of the most powerful and martial princes to sway it from its stately and impressive magnanimity; while Raleigh was possessed by the most perfect and enduring affection to the almost perfect woman whom he held it his proudest trophy to have wedded, and who justified his entire devotion by her love unmoved through good or ill report, and proved to the utmost in the dungeon and on the scaffold—the love of a pure, high-minded, trusting woman, confident, and fearless, and faithful to the end.
It does not appear that Raleigh suspected the true cause of Elizabeth's alienation from so good and great a servant: perhaps no one man of the many whom for the like cause she neglected, disgraced, persecuted, knew that the cause existed in the fact of their having taken to themselves partners of life and happiness—a solace which she sacrificed to the sterile honors of an undivided crown—of their enjoying the bliss and perfect contentment of a happy wedded life, while she, who would fain have enjoyed the like, could she have done so without the loan of some portion of her independent and undivided authority, was compelled, by her own jealousy of power and obstinacy of will, to pine in lonely and unloved virginity.
Yet such was doubtless the cause of his decline in the royal favor, which he never, in after days, regained; for, after Essex was dead by her award and deed, Elizabeth, in her furious and lion-like remorse, visited his death upon the heads of all those who had been his enemies in life, or counseled her against him, even when he was in arms against her crown; nor forgave them any more than she forgave herself, who died literally broken-hearted, the most lamentable and disastrous of women, if the proudest and most fortunate queens, in the heyday of her fortunes, when she had raised her England to that proud and pre-eminent station above rather than among the states of Europe, from which she never declined, save for a brief space under her successors, those weakest and wickedest of English kings, the ominous and ill-starred Stuarts, and which she still maintains in her hale and superb old age, savoring, after nearly nine centuries of increasing might and scarcely interrupted rule, in no respect of decrepitude or decay.
Her greatest crime was the death of Mary Stuart; her greatest misfortune, the death of Essex; her greatest shame, the disgrace of Walter Raleigh. But with all her crimes, all her misfortunes, all her shame, she was a great woman, and a glorious queen, and in both qualities peculiarly and distinctively English. The stay and bulwark of her country's freedom and religion, she lived and died possessed of that rarest and most divine gift to princes, her people's unmixed love and veneration.
She died in an ill day, and was succeeded by one in all respects her opposite: a coward, a pedant, a knave, a tyrant, a mean, base, beastly sensualist—a bad man, devoid even of a bad man's one redeeming virtue, physical courage—a bad weak man with the heart of a worse and weaker woman—a man with all the vices of the brute creation, without one of their virtues. His instincts and impulses were all vile and low, crafty and cruel; his principles, if his rules of action, which were all founded on cheatery and subtle craft, can be called principles, were yet baser than his instinctive impulses.
He is the only man I know, recorded in history, who is solely odious, contemptible, and bestial, without one redeeming trait, one feature of mind or body that can preserve him from utter and absolute detestation and damnation of all honorable and manly minds.
He is the only king of whom, from his cradle to his grave, no one good deed, no generous, or bold, or holy, or ambitious, much less patriotic or aspiring, thought or action is related.