His soul was akin to the mud, of which his body was framed—to the slime of loathsome and beastly debauchery, in which he wallowed habitually with his court and the ladies of his court, and his queen at their head, and could no more have soared heavenward than the garbage-battened vulture could have soared to the noble falcon's pitch and pride of place.
This beast,[[1]] for I cannot bring myself to write him man or king, with the usual hatred and jealousy of low foul minds towards everything noble and superior, early conceived a hatred for the gallant and great Sir Walter Raleigh, whose enterprise and adventure he had just intellect enough to comprehend so far as to fear them, but of whose patriotism, chivalry, innate nobility of soul, romantic daring, splendid imagination, and vast literary conceptions—being utterly unconscious himself of such emotions—he was no more capable of forming a conception, than is the burrowing mole of appreciating the flight of the soaring eagle.
So early as the second year of his reign, he contrived to have this great discoverer and gallant soldier—to whom Virginia is indebted for the honor of being the first English colony, Jamestown having been settled in 1606, whereas the Puritans landed on the rock of Plymouth no earlier than 1620, and to whom North Carolina has done honor creditable to herself in naming her capital after him, the first English colonist—arraigned on a false charge of conspiracy in the case of Arabella Stuart, a young lady as virtuous and more unfortunate than sweet Jane Grey, whose treatment by James would alone have been enough to stamp him with eternal infamy, and for whose history we refer our readers to the fine novel by Mr. James on this subject.
At this time, Raleigh was unpopular in England, on account of his supposed complicity in the death of Essex; and, on the strength of this unpopularity, he was arraigned, on the single written testimony of one Cobham, a pardoned convict of the same conspiracy, which testimony he afterwards retracted, and then again retracted the retractation, and without one concurring circumstance, without being confronted with the prisoner, after shameless persecution from Sir Edward Coke, the great lawyer, then attorney-general, was found guilty by the jury, and sentenced, contrary to all equity and justice, to the capital penalties of high treason.
From this year, 1604, until 1618, a period of nearly fourteen years, not daring to put him at that time to death, he caused him to be confined strictly in the Tower, a cruel punishment for so quick and active a spirit, which he probably expected would speedily release him by a natural death from one whom he regarded as a dangerous and resolute foe, whom he dared neither openly to dispatch nor honorably to release from unmerited and arbitrary confinement.
But his cruel anticipations were signally frustrated by the noble constancy, and calm, self-sustained intrepidity of the noble prisoner, who, to borrow the words of his detractor, Hume, "being educated amid naval and military enterprises, had surpassed, in the pursuits of literature, even those of the most recluse and sedentary lives."
Supported and consoled by his exemplary and excellent wife, he was enabled to entertain the irksome days and nights of his solitary imprisonment by the composition of a work, which, if deficient in the points which are now, in the advanced state of human sciences, considered essential to a great literary creation, is, as regarded under the circumstances of its conception and execution, one of the greatest exploits of human ingenuity and human industry—"The History of the World, by Sir Walter Raleigh."
It was during his imprisonment also that he projected the colonization of Jamestown, which was carried out in 1606, at his instigation, by the Bristol Company, of which he was a member. This colony, though it was twice deserted, was in the end successful, and in it was born the first child, Virginia Dare by name, of that Anglo-Saxon race which has since conquered a continent, and surpassed, in the nonage of its republican sway, the maturity of mighty nations.
In 1618, induced by the promises of Raleigh to put the English crown in possession of a gold mine which he asserted, and probably believed he had discovered in Guiana, James, whose avidity always conquered his resentments, and who, like Faustus, would have sold his soul—had he had one to sell—for gold, released him, and, granting him, as he asserted, an unconditional pardon—but, as James and his counselors maintain, one conditional on fresh discoveries, sent him out at the head of twelve armed vessels.
What follows is obscure; but it appears that Raleigh, failing to discover the mines, attacked and plundered the little town of St. Thomas, which the Spaniards had built on the territories of Guiana, which Raleigh had acquired three-and-twenty years before for the English crown, and which James, with his wonted pusillanimity, had allowed the Spaniards to occupy, without so much as a remonstrance.