Sir Walter Ralegh: A Biography

by W. Stebbing

Care for Accuracy.

Formerly, his reading necessarily had been desultory. For his History it had to be concentrated. He distrusted the exactness of his information, and was willing to accept advice freely. For criticism, Greek, Mosaic, Oriental and remoter antiquities, he consulted the learned Robert Burhill. Hariot had since 1606 been lodging or boarding in the Tower at the charge of the munificent Earl of Northumberland. He, Hues, and Warner were the Earl's 'three magi.' For chronology, mathematics, and geography, Ralegh relied upon him. 'Whenever he scrupled anything in phrase or diction,' he would refer his doubt to that accomplished serjeant-at-law, John Hoskyns or Hoskins. Hoskyns, now remembered, if at all, by some poor little epigrams, belongs to the class of paragons of one age, whose excellence later ages have to take on trust. He is described by an admirer as the most ingenious and admired poet of his time. Wotton loved his company. Ben Jonson considered him his 'father' in literature: ''Twas he that polished me.' In the summer of 1614 he became, in consequence of a speech in the House of Commons, Ralegh's fellow prisoner. He is said to have revised the History before it went to press. Ralegh's intense desire to secure accuracy, his avowal of it, and its notoriety, have given occasion for charges against his title to the credit of the total result. Ben Jonson and Algernon Sidney are the only independent authorities for the calumny. But it has been caught up by other writers, especially by Isaac D'Israeli, who seems to have thought charges brought, as Mr. Bolton Corney showed, on the flimsiest evidence, of an impudent assumption of false literary plumage, in no way inconsistent with fervid admiration for the alleged pretender.

Ben Jonson was associated incidentally in the work. He prefaced it with a set of anonymous verses explanatory of an allegorical frontispiece. The manuscript of them was found among his papers. They have always been included in his Underwoods. Though the version there differs materially from that prefixed to the History, no reasonable doubt of his authorship of both exists. His omission openly to claim the lines is supposed, not unreasonably, by Mr. Edwards, to have been due to his fear of the prejudice his favour at Court might sustain from an open connexion with a fame so Borrowed Learning. odious there as Ralegh's. But a year after Ralegh's death he boasted over his liquor to civil sneering Drummond at Hawthornden, of other 'considerable' contributions. He had written, he said, 'a piece to him of the Punic War, which Sir Walter altered and set in his book.' In general, the best wits of England were, he asserted, engaged in the production. Algernon Sidney, in his posthumous Discourses concerning Government, repeated this insinuation of borrowed plumes of learning. Ralegh, he stated, was 'so well assisted in his History of the World, that an ordinary man with the same helps might have performed the same thing.' This is all bare assertion, and refuted by the internal evidence of the volume itself, which in its remarkable consistency of style, method and thought, testifies to its emanation from a single mind. Ralegh had himself explained with a manly frankness, which ought to have disarmed suspicion, the extent to which alone he was indebted for assistance. In his preface he admits he was altogether ignorant of Hebrew. When a Hebrew passage did not occur in Arias Montanus, or in the Latin character in Sixtus Senensis, he was at a loss. 'Of the rest,' he says, 'I have borrowed the interpretation of some of my learned friends; yet, had I been beholden to neither, yet were it not to be wondered at; having had an eleven years' leisure to attain to the knowledge of that or any other tongue.' As a whole, the History must be recognised as truly his own, his not only in its multitude of grand thoughts and reflections, but in the narrative and general texture. It cannot be the less his that some of the 660 authors it cites may have been searched for him by assistants.

Period of Publication.

As early as 1611 he must have settled the scheme, and even the title, of the book. On April 15 in that year notice was given in the Registers of the Stationers' Company of 'The History of the World, written by Sir Walter Rawleighe.' Part may be presumed to have been by that time written, and shown to Prince Henry. Three years passed before actual publication. Camden fixes that on March 29, 1614. Though it is almost impossible to think Camden in error, yet, if the story of the perusal of the manuscript by Serjeant Hoskyns be true, and apply, as has been presumed, to the period of the Serjeant's imprisonment, the publication must have been half a year or more later. The later date would also accord better with a rumour of the suppression of the volume at the beginning of 1615. The publisher was Walter Burre, of the sign of the Crane in St. Paul's Churchyard. Burre published several works for Ben Jonson; and out of that circumstance has been constructed the statement that Jonson superintended the publication of the History for Ralegh. The form was that of a massive folio, at a price vaguely put by Alexander Ross at 'twenty or thirty shillings.' The edition was struck off in two issues, the errata of the first being corrected in the second. None of the extant copies of either issue possess a title-page, or contain any mention of the writer's name. The explanation may be the modesty or the pride which had led him habitually to neglect the personal glory of authorship, apprehension of the odium in which his name was held at Court, or a reason which will be mentioned hereafter. There is an engraved frontispiece by Renold Elstracke, the most elaborate of its kind known in English bibliography. A naval battle in the North Atlantic is depicted, and the course of the river Orinoko, with various symbolical figures. Ben Jonson's lines point its application. All the pages of the volume bear the heading, 'The First Part of the History of the World.'

Defects.

For modern readers a defect of the work is the learning, which was the wonder and admiration of contemporaries. Since Ralegh's time the historical method, and historical criticism, have been entirely changed. The mass of historical evidences has been immensely increased, and their quality is as different as their quantity. Ralegh had studied the researches of his learned contemporaries. He had expended much thought on the reconciliation of apparent inconsistencies. From the point of view of his own time he was successful. Often he satisfied others better than himself. Thus, he acknowledges with vexation his inability to divide exactly the seventy years of the Jewish captivity among the successive kings of Babylon. Had he been not merely a disciple of the great scholars of his age, but himself a pioneer, his dissertations and conclusions would equally have been drowned in the flood of later knowledge. His information is become superannuated. The metaphysical subtleties which he loved to introduce no longer delight or surprise. With all this there is much in the work which can never be obsolete, or cease to interest and charm. He himself is always near at hand, sometimes in front. He does not shun to be discerned in the evening of a tempestuous life, crippled with wounds aching and uncured. He does not repress, he hails, opportunities for sallying outside his subject. He is easily tempted to tell of the tactics by which the Armada was vanquished, and how the battle Merits. might have had another issue had Howard been misled by malignant fools that found fault. He recollects how he won Fayal. He pauses in his narrative of Alexander's victories to glorify English courage. He does homage to the invincible constancy of Spain, and avows her right to all its rewards, if she would 'but not hinder the like virtue in others.' The story suddenly gleams with flashes of natural eloquence and insight. Nowhere is there stagnation. His characters are very human, and very dramatic. King Artaxerxes is shown wearing a manly look when half a mile off, till the Greeks, for whom the bravery was not meant, espied his golden eagle, and drew rudely near. Queen Jezebel is visible and audible, with her paint, which more offended the dogs' paunches than her scolding tongue troubled the ears of Jehu, struggling in vain with base grooms, who contumeliously did hale and thrust her. There Demetrius revels, discovering at length in luxurious captivity the happiness he had convulsed the world with travail and bloodshed to attain. Pyrrhus is painted to the life, flying from one adventure to another, which was indeed the disease he had, whereof not long after he died in Argos. Characters are drawn with an astonishing breadth, depth, and decision. Nothing in Tacitus surpasses the epitaph on Epaminondas, the worthiest man that ever was bred in that nation of Greece. Everywhere are happy expressions, with wisdom beneath. It is a history for the nurture of virtuous citizens and generous kings, for the confusion of sensuality and selfishness.

The narrative rises and falls with the occasion; it is always bright and apt. Charles James Fox bracketed Bacon, Ralegh, and Hooker, as the three writers of prose who most enriched the English language in the period between 1588 and 1640. The diction of the History establishes Ralegh's title to the praise. It is clear, flowing, elastic, and racy, and laudably free, as Hallam has testified, from the affectation and passion for conceits, the snare of contemporary historians, preachers, and essayists. If Pope, as Spence represents, rejected Ralegh's works as 'too affected' for one of the foundations of an English dictionary, he must have been talking at random. At all events, he contradicted his own judgment deliberately expressed in authentic verse. For style, for wit, mother wit The Moral. and Court wit, and for a pervading sense that the reader is in the presence of a sovereign spirit, the History of the World will, to students now as to students of old, vindicate its rank as a classic. But its true grandeur is in the scope of the conception, which exhibits a masque of the Lords of Earth, 'great conquerors, and other troublers of the world,' rioting in their wantonness and savagery, as if Heaven cared not or dared not interpose, yet made to pay in the end to the last farthing of righteous vengeance. They are paraded paying it often in their own persons, wrecked, ruined, humiliated; and always in those of their descendants. At times it has seemed as if God saw not. In truth 'He is more severe unto cruel tyrants than only to hinder them of their wills.' Israelite judges, Assyrian kings, Alexander, the infuriate and insatiable conqueror, May-game monarchs like Darius, Rehoboam with his 'witless parasites,' so unlike wise, merciful, generous King James and his, Antiochus, 'acting and deliberating at once, in the inexplicable desire of repugnancies, which is a disease of great and overswelling fortunes,' Consul Æmilius, sacking all innocent Epirus to show his vigour, down to Henry the Eighth, 'pattern of a merciless prince,' none of them escaped without penalties in their households; none elude their condemnation and sentences, sometimes, as in the case of Alexander, it may be deemed, a little too austere, before the tribunal of posterity. On moves the world's imperial pageant; now slowly and somewhat heavily, through the domain of Scriptural annals, with theological pitfalls at every step for the reputed freethinker; now, as Greek and Roman confines are reached, with more ease and animation; always under the conduct as if of a Heaven-commissioned teacher with a message to rulers, that no 'cords have ever lasted long but those which have been twisted by love only.' Throughout are found an instinct of the spirit of events and their doers, a sense that they are to be judged as breathing beings, and not as mummies, an affection for nobility of aim and virtuous conduct, a scorn of rapacity, treachery, selfishness, and cruelty, which account better for the rapture of contemporaries, than for the neglect of the History of the World in the present century.

Popular Favour.

It was hailed enthusiastically both by a host of illustrious persons and by the general public. The applause rolled thundering on. The work was for Cromwell a library of the classics. He recommended it with enthusiasm in a letter to his son Richard. Hampden was a devoted student of it, as of Ralegh's other writings. It was a text-book of Puritans, in whose number, Ralegh says, if the Dialogue with a Jesuit be his, he was reckoned, though unjustly. They had forgotten or forgiven under James his enmity to their old idol Essex. The admiration of Nonconformists did not deter Churchmen and Cavaliers from extolling it. Bishop Hall, in his Consolations, writes of 'an eminent person, to whose imprisonment we are obliged, besides many philosophical experiments, for that noble History of the World. The Tower reformed the courtier in him.' Montrose fed his boyish fancy upon its pictures of great deeds. Unless for a few prejudiced and narrow minds it, 'the most God-fearing and God-seeing history known of among human writings,' as Mr. Kingsley has described it, swept away the old calumny of its author's scepticism. All ranks welcomed it as a classic. That Princess Elizabeth made it her travelling companion is proved by the history of the British Museum copy of the 1614 edition, which formed part of her luggage captured by the Spaniards at Prague in 1620, and recovered by the Swedes in 1648. With the King alone it found no favour. Contemporaries believed that he was jealous of Ralegh's literary ability and fame. Causes rather less base for his distaste for the book may be assigned. Ralegh had endeavoured to guard in his preface against a suspicion that, in speaking of the Past, he pointed at the Present, and taxed the vices of those that are yet living in their persons that are long since dead. He had interspersed encomiums upon his own sovereign, the 'temperate, revengeless, liberal, wise, and just,' though 'he may err.' His doctrine was, as he has written in his Cabinet Council, that 'all kings, the bad as well as the good, must be endured' by their subjects. The murder even of tyrants is deprecated, as 'followed by inconveniences worse than civil war.' But posterity he did not think was debarred from judging worthless rulers; and he tried them in his History. In the eyes of James such freedom of speech, especially in Ralegh, was lèse majesté. An explanation by himself of his ill-will to the book, which has been handed down by Osborn, has an air of verisimilitude. In his Memoirs on King James, Osborn relates that 'after much scorn cast upon Ralegh's History, the King, being modestly demanded what fault he found, answered, as one surprised, that Ralegh had spoken irreverently of King Henry the Eighth.' He would be more indignant on his own account than on that of King Henry, against whom, says Osborn, 'none ever exclaimed more than usually himself.' James discovered his own features in the outlined face of Ninias, 'esteemed no man of war at all, but altogether feminine, and subjected to ease and delicacy,' the successor of valiant Queen Semiramis, too laborious a princess, as Ralegh held, to have been vicious.