Threatened Suppression.
Commonly it has been believed that the King's sympathy with his caste provoked him to the monstrosity of an attempt to stifle its censor's volume. Chamberlain wrote to Carleton at Venice on January 5, 1615: 'Sir Walter Ralegh's book is called in by the King's commandment, for divers exceptions, but specially for being too saucy in censuring princes. I hear he takes it much to heart, for he thought he had won his spurs, and pleased the King extraordinarily.' The author of the Observations on Sanderson's History in 1656 writes to the same effect, but somewhat less definitely: 'It is well known King James forbad the book for some passages in it which offended the Spaniards, and for being too plain with the faults of princes in his preface.' There is no other evidence, and the majority of Ralegh's biographers have simply accepted the fact on the authority of Chamberlain's assertion. Yet it is almost incredible that so extreme an act of prerogative, carried out against so remarkable a work, should have been suffered to pass without popular protests. Ralegh and his wife never complained; and they were not given to suffering in silence. Copies of the first edition are extant in an abundance which, though not absolutely contradictory to the tale, renders it unlikely. Dr. Brushfield, who has made the history of the publication his especial study, conjectures that a compromise with the royal censorship was effected on the terms that a title-page, which he thinks the first, like all subsequent editions, originally contained, should be removed, leaving the volume apparently anonymous. The surmise is ingenious; but it is very hard to believe that such an arrangement, if made, would have excited no discussion. Chamberlain's language, moreover, implies that the book was already in circulation. It would be exceedingly strange if its previous purchasers had the docility to eliminate the title-page from their copies, in deference to an order certainly not very emphatically promulgated. The readiest explanation is that Chamberlain, in his haste to give his correspondent early information, reported to him a rumour, and perhaps a threat, upon which James happily had not the hardihood to act.
Successive Editions.
At all events, the book weathered the storm of royal displeasure, however manifested. A second edition appeared in 1617. Down to the standard Oxford collection of Ralegh's works in 1829, which includes it, eight have been published since. The last folio edition appeared, with a biography by the editor, Oldys, in 1736. Gibbon commends it as the best which had to that time appeared, though it is open to charges of gross carelessness in the printer, and of arbitrary alterations by the editor, to the injury of the sense. The work was popular enough to attract epitomists. Alexander Ross, in 1650, condensed it into his Marrow of History, which is rather its dry bones. Philip Ralegh, Sir Walter's grandson, in 1698 printed an abridgment. The Tubus Historicus, or Historical Perspective, published in 1631, a brief summary of the fortunes of the four great ancient Empires, which bears Ralegh's name on the title-page, suggests rather the hand of a book-maker. For half a century from the time of the original issue it was an accepted classic. No folio of the period, it has been said, approached it in circulation. Its success tempted Alexander Ross to put forth in 1652 a second part, B.C. 160 to A.D. 1640. The popular favour was enough to have encouraged the author to continue his own design. Two explanations of his interruption of it have been invented. For the first, the eldest authority is W. Winstanley's English Worthies, published in 1660. Winstanley, whom Aubrey Two Fables. follows, relates that Ralegh, a few days before his execution, asked Burre how that work of his had sold. So slowly, answered Burre, that it had undone him. Thereupon Ralegh, stepping to his desk, took the other unprinted part of his work into his hand with a sigh, saying 'Ah, my friend, hath the first part undone thee? The second volume shall undo no man; this ungrateful world is unworthy of it.' Then immediately, going to the fireside, he threw it in, and set his foot on it till it was consumed. The story is impossible, if only for the circumstance that the publication notoriously was not a failure. At the period to which the fable is assigned a second edition had been printed. So rapid was its sale, furthered, it may be admitted, by the circumstances of the author's death, that a third edition appeared in 1621. As, moreover, has been with prosaic common sense observed, a manuscript of some 1000 printed pages would have taken very long to burn.
The other story is still more complicated, and, if possible, more insolently mythical. John Pinkerton, writing under the name of Robert Heron, Esq., in 1785, in his eccentric Letters on Literature, is its source. According to him Ralegh, who had just completed the manuscript of a second volume, looking from his window into a court-yard, saw a man strike an officer near a raised stone. The officer drew his sword, and ran his assailant through. The man, as he fell, knocked the officer down, and died. His corpse and the stunned officer were carried off. Next day Ralegh mentioned the affray to a visitor of known probity and honour. His acquaintance informed him he was entirely in error. The seeming officer, he said, a servant of the Spanish Ambassador, struck the first blow. The other snatched out the servant's sword, and with it slew him. A bystander wrested away the sword, and a foreigner in the crowd struck down the murderer, while other foreigners bore off their comrade's body. The narrator, to Ralegh's assurances that he could not be mistaken, since he had witnessed the whole affair as it happened round the stone, replied that neither could he be, for he was the bystander, and on that very stone he had been standing. He showed Ralegh a scratch on the cheek he had received in pulling away the sword. Ralegh did not persist in his version. As soon as his friend was gone, he cast his manuscript into the fire. If he could not properly estimate an event under his own eyes, he despaired of appreciating human acts done thousands of years before he was born. 'Truth!' he cried, 'I sacrifice to thee.' Pinkerton, whose judgment and veracity were not equal to his learning, led astray both Guizot and Carlyle. Carlyle talks of 'the old story, still a true lesson for us.'
The Fact.
Of the extent to which Ralegh had proceeded in the continuation of his work he had himself informed the public. In his preface he 'forbears to promise a second or third volume, which he intends if the first receives grace and good acceptance; for that which is already done may be thought enough and too much.' At the conclusion he wrote: 'Whereas this book calls itself the first part of the General History of the World, implying a second and third volume, which I also intended, and have hewn out; besides many other discouragements persuading my silence, it hath pleased God to take that glorious prince out of the world, to whom they were directed.' His language points evidently to the collection of 'apparatus for the second volume,' as Aubrey says. It may have comprised very possibly not a few such scattered gems of thought and rich experience as are the glory of the printed volume. A Ralegh Society, should it ever be instituted, might have the honour of disinterring and reuniting some of them. No less clearly he indicates that he had not advanced beyond the preliminary processes of inquiry and meditation.
The motive for his abandonment at this point of the thorough realization of his plan was probably a combination of disturbing causes, disappointment, hope, and rival occupations. Prince Henry's favour had brought liberty and restitution very close. With a nature like his the abrupt catastrophe did not benumb; it even stimulated; but it took the flavour out of many of his pursuits. He could no longer indulge in learned ease, and trust for his rehabilitation to spontaneous respect and sympathy. The near breath of freedom had set his nerves throbbing too vehemently for him to be able to settle down, as if for an eternity of literary leisure, to tasks like the History of the World, or the Art of War by Sea. He began working mines as busily as ever, but in new directions. He sought to make himself recognised as necessary either by the King or by the nation. With the The Prerogative
of Parliaments. sanguine elasticity which no failures could damp, he tried to storm his way as a politician into the royal confidence a few months after he is said to have experienced as a scholar an effect of the King's invincible prejudice. At some period after May, 1615, he wrote, and dedicated to James, an imaginary dialogue between a Counsellor of State and a Justice of the Peace. Under the title of The Prerogative of Parliaments in England it was published first posthumously in 1628, at Middleburg. In his lifetime it circulated in manuscript copies.
A conspicuous instance of the misconceptions of which he was the habitual victim is the view taken of this treatise by Algernon Sidney, and by the judicious and fair-minded Hallam. Its object was to influence the King to call a Parliament. Ralegh's point of view of the royal prerogative was, it must be admitted and remembered, that of a Tudor courtier. It was very different from that which the Long Parliament learnt and taught. But it was liberal for his own day, according to a Tudor standard of liberalism. It was too liberal for the taste Hallam's Misconception. of the Court of James. Hallam has caught at some phrases couched in the adulatory style, 'so much,' Hallam allows, 'among the vices of the age, that the want of it passed for rudeness.' Ralegh told James in his dedication that 'the bonds of subjects to their kings should always be wrought out of iron, the bonds of kings unto subjects but with cobwebs.' Sidney had already protested against these obsequious phrases; and to Hallam they seem 'terrible things.' He is equally horrified by a statement in the dialogue that Philip II 'attempted to make himself not only an absolute monarch over the Netherlands, like unto the Kings of England and France, but Turk like to tread under his feet all their national and fundamental laws, privileges, and ancient rights.' The tenor of the essay itself only has to be equitably considered to enable its readers to place a more lenient construction than Hallam's even upon the former sentence. Ralegh merely was pursuing his object, with some carelessness, after his manner, as to form. Throughout he endeavoured to sweeten advice he knew to be unpalatable, by assurances that the King need not fear his prerogative would be permanently impaired by deference to the representatives of the people. The language is, for the nineteenth century, indefensible. Taken in connexion with the general argument, it resolves itself into a courtly seventeenth century solace to the monarch for an obligatory return to Parliamentary government.
For the second quotation such an excuse is scarcely requisite. The theories of the royal prerogative in France and in England were not originally dissimilar, profoundly unlike as was the practice. Since, as well as before, the Revolution of 1689, the absolute character of the English sovereignty has been a common theory of lawyers. Blackstone, writing in the reign of George the Third, asserts dogmatically that an English King is absolute in the exercise of his prerogative. Blackstone was able to find room beside an absolute prerogative for the national liberties and Parliamentary privileges. So was Ralegh able. His language seems now unconstitutional, when, in his Maxims of State, he distinguishes the English 'Empire' from a 'limited Kingdom'; or when, in this Prerogative of Parliaments, he declares that 'the three Estates do but advise, as the Privy Council doth.' To him, however, 'limited' meant more than now, and 'absolute' less. He saw no inconsistency between the theory of royal absolutism and the application of popular checks. Their reconciliation was Not shared by James. the purpose of the essay of 1615. That was evident to many excellent patriots of the next reign, who circulated and gloried in a composition which proved the writer their fellow worker. It was too apparent, though not to Hallam, to James, for the dissertation to move him to any kindness. The basis and principle of the discussion affronted all his prejudices. He was not to be beguiled by admissions of his theoretical omnipotence into affection for a wise and constitutional policy, which recognised popular rights. He had no inclination to traverse the golden bridge Ralegh had built for his return within the lines, whether of the Constitution, or of personal justice. In all relations Ralegh was antipathetic to James without consciousness of it. He could declare his implicit belief, in consonance with strict constitutional orthodoxy, that the King loved the liberties of his people, and that none but evil counsellors intercepted the signs of his liberality. He could acknowledge the tender benignity of his sovereign to himself, and throw upon betrayers of the royal trust the shame of his persecution. He could be excessively deferential and grateful in words and demeanour. He could not but act and reason with a mental independence as hateful to James as to Henry Howard, and as condemnatory. Whether he discoursed on Assyrian or on English politics, or on his private wrongs, he sat visibly on the seat of judgment. Nothing but tame silence and spiritual petrifaction could have made his peace at the Stuart Court. It was the one kind of fealty he was incapable of rendering.