Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall
Elizabeth capped it with
If thy heart fails thee, climb not at all
Some of Ralegh's later biographers have felt so intensely the seriousness of their task, that they either omit or ridicule the legend. The whole appeared first in the Worthies, published in 1662. No documentary proof can be given of its veracity; and there is no disproof. The opportunity might easily have occurred; and Ralegh was of an eagerness and an adroitness not to have let it slip. Undoubtedly the anecdote has the intrinsic merit beyond the rest of pointing to the final and determining agent in his change of fortune. All the other answers to the enigma may contain an ingredient of truth. Leicester would recognize his capacity, and might have been ready to use him. Sussex would perceive the danger of allowing so redoubtable a free lance to pass to a rival service. Walsingham and Burleigh were manifestly impressed with his extraordinary sagacity and strength of will. His Irish services, which had called forth the admiration of Grey himself so long as Ralegh fought under him, could not fail to be appreciated by the Queen's wise councillors. He was backed by the vast family circles of the Gilberts and Champernouns. In his later life he could speak of 'an hundred gentlemen of my kindred.' He was no novice at the Court itself, which he had studied for years before it recognized him as an inmate. But Leicester and Sussex, like Grey, and even Burleigh and Walsingham, though they might have employed him, and have bandied him among them, would have concurred in keeping him in the background. To Elizabeth herself may confidently be ascribed the personal decision that he was to be acknowledged, and not merely used, but distinguished.
The Queen's Choice.
To the Queen he owed his emergence from an obscurity, which posterity wonders to find enveloping him till thirty. His was not a nature which ripens late. As a boy at home, as an undergraduate at Oxford, as an adventurer in France, as a seaman in the Atlantic, as a military leader in Munster, as a commencing courtier, he might have been expected to flash forth from the mass of his comrades. No apathy of contemporary opinion is to blame for the long delay. Rather it was the hurry and the glitter of contemporary life. A nation, like the English under Elizabeth, facing the dawn of a new age, does not pause to mark degrees of individual brightness. All eyes are dazzled with the radiance of the era itself. The few rare and peculiar stars are not discriminated as shining with a lustre of their own. The Queen would not be better able than her subjects to measure the particular mode in which Ralegh overtopped his neighbours. She discerned the special gifts which others discerned, the 'good presence in a handsome and well compacted person; the strong natural wit and a better judgment, with a bold and plausible tongue, whereby he could set out his parts to the best advantage.' She was diverted by his flights of fancy emphasized by the broad Devon accent, which, to the day of his death, he never lost, or tried to lose. She must have been conscious of depths of capacity, to which, whatever the exigency, appeal was never made in vain. But the surpassing attraction for her was the feeling that he and his grandeur were her creature and creation.
Personally she chose him, and she exacted that his service should be personally rendered to her. He understood the conditions of his tenure of influence, and generally fulfilled them faithfully. She knew, and he knew, that he was selected for gifts which made him a valuable servant of the State, as impersonated in its chief. Yet it is not strange that, in an age of coarse feeling, and coarser language, his elevation should have been Scandal. attributed to mere feminine weakness. It is much more surprising that the warning, 'No scandal about Queen Elizabeth,' should have been disregarded by grave modern historians and biographers. Mr. Edward Edwards, for instance, Ralegh's most thorough and painstaking biographer since the learned but unmethodical Oldys, takes the report for granted, and appears to think it honourable. The belief cannot bear the least examination. Elizabeth was in the habit of requiring all her courtiers to kneel to her as woman as well as Queen, to hail her at once Gloriana and Belphoebe. The fashion was among her instruments of government. By appealing to the devotion of her courtiers as lovers, she hoped to kindle their zeal in serving their Queen. They who mock at her claims to adoration as the Lady of the land are ungrateful to a policy which preserved the tone of English society for a generation romantic, poetical, and chivalrous. In pursuance of her usual system, and in innocence of any vice but vanity, she was sure to invite the language of passion from the owner of genius and looks like Ralegh's. She played upon his Christian name, writing it as she and others pronounced it, Water. She enjoyed the anger her kindness aroused in other admirers, such as Hatton. He was willing to offer the homage for which she thirsted. So were other courtiers by the dozen. Cautious methodical George Carew wrote to her when she was seventy, and nearing the grave, envying 'the blessing others enjoy in beholding your Royal person whose beauty adorns the world.' Of sensual love between her and Ralegh there is not a tittle of evidence which will be accepted by any who do not start by presuming in her the morals of a courtesan. In support of the calumny, passages of the Faerie Queene have been cited, in which the poet has been interpreted as literally and as illiberally as the courtier. Fastidious Spenser would have shuddered to imagine the coarse construction against his Queen to which his delicate allegories were to be wrested. Had there been ground for the legend, we may feel tolerably certain that Lady Ralegh would have known of it. She could not have refrained from hinting at a motive for the wrath with which, it will hereafter be seen, her mistress visited her transgression.
Ralegh's Versatility.
Ralegh himself may not have been sufficiently careful to guard against a fable flattering to his charms, if injurious to his independence. He furthered malignant humours in his own time by his fondness for personal adornment. His lavish vanity seems to have been taken as proof of his and his Sovereign's amours. He must in any case, by no fault of his own, but by the excessive bounty of nature in heaping courtly graces upon him, have been exposed to the liability of misconstruction by later ages. Measured by his force of character and his acts he has as little as possible in common with a Leicester or a Hatton. Yet posterity, misled by tradition, has never been sure whether his distinctive vocation were not that of a fine gentleman. Contemporaries, partly from misapprehension, partly from admiration, and partly from jealousy, tried to fasten him to that. When the splendour of his exploits by sea and land demonstrated him to be more than a courtier, they ranked him as seaman or swordsman. His versatility lent itself to the error, and operated to the disappointment of his real aim. His constant effort was to be accepted and trusted as a serious statesman. He might have attained his end more completely if his absorption in it had dimmed the brightness of his marvellous intelligence, or deadened his delight in its gymnastics. But he had to live his life according to his nature. The multiplicity of his interests separates him from others of his mental level. He loved power, both the contest for it and its exercise. He coveted money for its uses, and equally for the inspiring experiences involved in its acquisition. He liked to act the patron, and was content in turn to play the client. He loved toil, and he could enjoy ease. He revelled in the strifes of statesmanship and the physical perils of battles and travel. He resembled his period, with its dangers and glories, its possibilities of Spanish dungeons and Spanish plunder, its uncertainties of theology and morality. He had a natural gift for deriving pleasure from his actual circumstances, a dull and brutal civil war, or a prison, though none could utter more dismal groans. By predilection he basked in a Court, where simultaneously he could adore its mistress and help to sway her sceptre.
His Aspect.