In his virtues and in his faults, in his brilliance and in his limitations, in his greatness and in his defects, Walter Raleigh is the very type of Elizabeth’s England. Like Robert Cecil, Spenser, and Sidney, he was a child when the great queen ascended the throne; like Shakespeare and Bacon, he had not passed the full vigour of manhood when she died. He was a year older than Henry of Navarre, whom he outlived by eight years. Walsingham was a grown man and William Cecil a Secretary of State before any one of this younger group was born. All of them were young men still when the crisis of Elizabeth’s reign was reached and the Armada was dispersed. The older generation raised England from weakness to strength; the younger saw her strength made patent to the world. The older generation maintained her on the defensive; it was the part of the younger to assert her primacy in every field of endeavour.

Of this younger generation, Raleigh stands out as the typical representative. In an age of men of action, he was one of the greatest of the men of action. In one of the two greatest ages of English poetry he was acclaimed as one of their peers by the poets. In the age which saw the creation of English prose, he was one of the masters of prose. The military world and the naval world were developing new theories of strategy and tactics; in both fields he was a first-rate authority and a brilliant performer. The expansion of Spain and Portugal had brought new political conceptions into being; we owe the conception of Greater Britain and all the first stubborn efforts to realise it to the genius of Sir Walter. In a day of brilliant courtiers, none was more brilliant than he; and in the day when Bacon was formulating anew the principles of scientific inquiry, Raleigh was incidentally an ardent experimentalist. In every field his versatility was exercised, and in every field his place was in the front rank.

And yet perhaps—save in one thing—never quite in the first rank. His literary achievement does not set him beside Shakespeare and Spenser. Drake was a greater commander and John Davis a greater seaman. By land he was never tested in a great command. His scientific pursuits were merely a parergon. As a statesman he never achieved the control of England’s destinies; wily Robert Cecil was the craftier politician. But two things he did: he taught Englishmen that the might of England lay in her fleets—not as the accident of a moment but as a permanent principle; and he created the idea of a Britain beyond the seas, struggled for it almost alone year after year with persistent tenacity, through good report and evil report and failure—finally died for it. He it was that sowed the seed; ours is the tree that sprang from it.

II
RALEIGH’S RISE

Walter Raleigh was born in 1552, a year before Mary Tudor ascended the English throne. He was of a Devon house; himself, one of a large and composite family, for his mother, Katharine Champernoun, was his father’s third wife, and was herself a widow with several children when she married him. It must have counted for something for a small boy to have had two such big half-brothers as Humphrey and Adrian Gilbert, both dreamers and idealists, and one of them a by-no-means contemptible man of action to boot. The child was six years old when the great persecution was ended by Elizabeth’s accession, and for the next ten years he had endless opportunities of listening with all his ears to mariners’ tales of Eldorado and of the Spanish Inquisition, and learning at least watermanship if not seamanship. In 1568 he went up to Oxford, at the moment when Alva was goading the Netherlands into open rebellion and France was on the verge of a fresh outbreak of the Huguenot wars. Raleigh’s career as an undergraduate was interrupted. He went off to France as a volunteer, to get his baptism of blood at Jarnac in March, and to be present at Montcontour later in the year. After that, his career for some while is not easy to trace. It looks as if he had returned to Oxford, for his name was still on the list of undergraduates at Oriel in 1572; but it is also said that he remained in France for five years, and even that he was in Paris at the time of the massacre. In 1575 he entered—pro forma—at the Middle Temple; and two or three years later appears to have been in the field again, fighting in the Low Countries under Sir John Norreys. The chances are that he had had some further military practice in the interval between 1569 and 1578, in France or the Netherlands or both, especially as his brother Humphrey Gilbert was in command of the English contingent at Flushing and elsewhere for some while. In 1578 Gilbert sailed on his first colonising venture, and young Walter was one of his captains; but the expedition, after a collision with some Spaniards, was driven back to Plymouth by weather. In 1580, Raleigh emerges definitely as a captain in the army employed for the suppression of Desmond’s rebellion in Ireland—in which capacity he was present at the capture of Smerwick, and had the unsavoury business of superintending the massacre of the garrison.

Raleigh remained in Ireland on duty for something over a year, till the end of 1581. While there he accomplished sundry feats of arms of a brilliant character, all being of the kind in which personal daring and skill, and resourcefulness in emergency, are the leading characteristics—deeds in which he was acting with only some very small escort. It was very much in the nature—mutatis mutandis—of police work among hostile frontier tribes in India to-day. The young soldier’s ideas of Irish government were derived from Humphrey Gilbert, who, in all other relations of life, was a noble-hearted generous Christian gentleman, but in this particular relation was as perfectly ruthless as Alva himself might have been. It is one of the puzzles of the period that men who upheld elsewhere the highest standards of chivalry and honour—men such as Sussex, Henry Sidney, Walter Devereux—adopted towards the native Irish the attitude of the primitive Hebrew towards the Canaanites, seeming to account the human population as if they were an irredeemably pernicious species of wild beasts; and Raleigh was no exception to the rule.

Immediately on his return to England he sprang into high favour with Elizabeth, partly through his brilliant abilities, partly through the personal fascination which no one could exercise better when he chose. But this charm was accompanied by an insatiable ambition, pridefulness, and fiery temper, which effectually prevented him from making any attempt to conciliate rivalry or hostility, cut him off from his natural alliance with the court section of the war-party, and rather associated him with Burghley. Favourite as he was, and in some ways influential with the Queen, he was never admitted by her into the Privy Council, though he was knighted so early as 1584, and received numerous and exceedingly substantial marks of the royal goodwill.

In fact, it would seem that his imagination carried his mind away from the current problems of administration and policy to another field. He was less occupied with the question how war with Spain might be precipitated or deferred than with that of setting up a rival empire. If, as is most probable, the conception was primarily that of his brother Humphrey Gilbert, the younger man made it his own; and in these years the attempt to establish a colony in North America absorbed his best energies and enthusiasms. For Burghley, Spain was primarily the European Power which—however interests might clash—was a necessary counterpoise to France; for Walsingham, she was the aggressive enemy of Protestantism; for Raleigh, she was the claimant to the New World, whose rights might be and ought to be successfully challenged by England. Thus, the first desired to avert conflict; the second was at least ready to join issue at once, lest it should be too late; whereas, from Raleigh’s point of view, the time when Spain and England should grapple was a matter of comparative indifference, provided that when it arrived England should be ready. But there was probably no man in England—not Drake himself—in whose political creed fundamental hostility to Spain was a more essential article.

There is, however, a curious story that in 1586 Raleigh was engaged in Spanish negotiations on his own account, which negotiations had as their object that he should take measures to hamper the English preparations for war, himself selling a couple of ships to Spain; and it appears to be implied that he was one of those young gentlemen about the Queen’s person who were going to put through Babington’s plot for her assassination. We may therefore recall the fact that in the Ridolfi days John Hawkins had figured as an enemy of his Queen, only thirsting to betray the fleet to Philip. Hawkins, of course, was really working in collusion with Burghley, and the whole thing was a trick. It need not surprise any one, therefore, if Raleigh played the same game at this time, though on a smaller scale. It would be a matter of course, then, that pains would be taken to give the Spaniards—and their informants in England—the impression that Sir Walter was really disaffected. As for Ballard and Babington, they were so completely in the toils of Walsingham from the outset that Raleigh may very well have actually been the Secretary’s accomplice in tricking them. Patriotism, principle, and consistency apart, no one has ever accused him of lacking intelligence, of which he would stand hopelessly convicted if the suggested allegations were true. Moreover, a man with so many enemies would not have escaped without being incriminated. The only definitely known facts are that he was at this time in communication with Spain, and that the Spaniards had an idea that he was well-affected towards them. The only inference we can quite confidently draw is that he was hoodwinking them, though nothing definite seems to have resulted.

When the Armada was expected, Raleigh was Vice-Admiral of the West, and was also one of the special Defence Commission. It was on the great ship which he had himself designed, the Ark Raleigh, that Admiral Howard hoisted his flag; but Raleigh was not one of the commanders in the fleet. He had been largely occupied in organising the defences in the West Country, and had been urgent in pressing the true strategical policy of fighting and beating the Spaniard on the sea—of an offensive naval war as the only true defensive war. But it is not quite certain whether he even had any personal part in the Armada engagements at all; though, on the whole, there is not sufficient ground for discarding the common report that he joined the fleet as a volunteer after the engagement off Portland. At that stage, all fears had passed that the Spaniard might effect a landing in the western division of the channel, where Raleigh was responsible for the arrangements for meeting the invader. Until then, he had been bound to remain at his post on shore. But now, not only did the English fleet know that it was a match for the enemy, but, if chance should enable them to attempt a landing, it would certainly not be in Raleigh’s district. So there is an a priori probability that, being free to join the ships, he would not have missed the opportunity if it offered. There is no doubt, in any case, that he fully understood and appreciated the tactics adopted—a complete innovation in the methods of naval warfare—whether he did or did not take actual part, as a gentleman-volunteer, in the manoeuvres.

The great dÉbÂcle initiated a new phase in the relations of Spain to England and to Europe generally. The defeat, of course, was not of itself a death-blow, though if victory had gone the other way—if the English fleet had been in effect annihilated—an invasion under Parma would have followed; and Parma was the best general living, while the whole number of Englishmen who had any real experience of military service was small. But hitherto, wherever the Spaniards went, afloat or ashore, they had the prestige of success; now at a single blow the prestige passed from Spain to England—the theory of Spanish invincibility was shattered. The change had no less effect on Spain’s enemies on the Continent than in England, where for years past the seamen at least had been in the habit of taking for granted that they understood the art of fighting on the sea infinitely better than their antagonists. Now, however, the landsmen and the men of peace had had ocular demonstration of what the sailors had long been affirming as the conclusion from their own practical experience. England, hitherto on the defensive, was converted into the attacking power, and was filled with the spirit of aggression.

III
VIRGINIA

Between his seventeenth and his thirtieth years, Raleigh was completing his education as a soldier by his experiences in varied fields from Jarnac to Munster—sandwiching in, as it would appear, some residence at Oxford, and some in London as a nominal student of the law; not actually becoming a courtier but making his first entrÉe among the associates of the court. In his thirtieth year he returned from Ireland to London, with a reputation as a dashing officer, and immediately made his way into the good graces of the Maiden Queen who, already verging on fifty, was demanding with increased instead of diminished avidity the amorous adulation of those who would find favour in her eyes. Raleigh made love to her on the recognised lines; with distinguished success, also on the recognised lines; to his own profit, and the extreme annoyance of the Leicesters and Hattons. The famous story of the cloak may or may not be true—it rests only on the authority of that chronicler whom every self-respecting author is obliged to refer to as “old Fuller”—but it is one of those traditions which, like King Alfred’s cakes and George Washington’s little hatchet, can never be surrendered. In these years there are tales of Hatton’s jealousy; records of appeals to the favourite to intervene now on behalf of Burghley, now of Leicester, to mitigate the royal displeasure; rumours, such as may have been concocted by spite, of not over-scrupulous methods employed in the pursuit of personal aggrandisement. Beside these stories of court-gossip and intrigue are those of his association with Bohemian literary circles, of his originating the meetings at the Mermaid, of his friendship with Marlowe, and his reputed “atheism”—a quite incredible, if by no means surprising, charge against a man whose speculations were probably as bold and unconventional in the field of religion as in those of political, naval, and military theory. But assuredly the author of the “History of the World” was no atheist. But during these years, between 1582 and 1588, he was something more than the brilliant courtier, keen-witted humanist, and active member of the Defence Commission—he was the pioneer of colonial expansion.

Humphrey Gilbert was thirteen years older than his half-brother, whose hero he would seem to have been, not undeservedly, in Raleigh’s younger days. Of brilliant attainments, the bravest of the brave, intensely religious, an idealist and dreamer, he was a kind of incarnation of Arthurian knighthood; for the very mercilessness he displayed in Ireland was by no means the outcome of inhumanity but of a fixed belief that the Irish ought to be accounted not as human beings but as beasts of prey. Raleigh himself was hardly more than a boy when his brother was already fixing his thoughts on the colonisation of North America and the discovery of the North West Passage. It cannot therefore be claimed for Sir Walter that he actually originated the Colonial idea, which was Gilbert’s; but he entered into it from the first and made it his own; while Gilbert lived, they worked for it together; and when the Atlantic billows swallowed up Sir Humphrey, it was to Raleigh that his mantle passed undisputed.

About the time that the young man was entered at the Temple, Sir Humphrey was at work on the treatise “to prove a passage by the North West to Cathay and the East Indies,” which was published in 1576 by Gascoign. In 1578 he obtained a charter authorising what he had already been petitioning for four years earlier, an expedition to discover and take possession of unknown lands—the charter extending over six years. We have already noted Raleigh’s participation in the first expedition, which put to sea late in 1579 but was obliged to return to port with nothing accomplished. In 1583 the second expedition sailed; but this time Raleigh, though he had embarked everything he could in the venture, was at the last moment peremptorily forbidden to accompany it in person by his exigent mistress. Quite definitely, the purpose of the expedition was not to hunt for precious metals but to establish a permanent agricultural settlement. Incidentally, it is to be noted that Walsingham was active in furthering the project. The expedition took formal possession of Newfoundland, but this was not its actual destination. Disasters overtook it, and Gilbert finding himself compelled for the time to abandon the design, sailed for England. On the course of the voyage, the little Squirrel, in which he was sailing, went down in a storm with all hands on board. Raleigh was left to struggle single-handed for the carrying out of his brother’s conception.

Now begins the story of Raleigh’s persistent effort at the colonisation of Virginia.

A fresh patent was issued to Sir Walter, who had just been knighted, in March 1584—just two years after his first entry into Elizabeth’s court. The first step was taken immediately—an exploring expedition, which found its way to the island of Roanoak on the coast of what is now Carolina, opened friendly intercourse with the natives, took formal possession, and returned to report. Raleigh was largely interested in the series of Arctic voyages undertaken by John Davis during the three ensuing years: exploration and discovery pure and simple had an attraction for him only less powerful than colonisation; but it was to this that he devoted his keenest energies, and on this that he poured out the wealth he was acquiring. In the spring of 1585 his fleet sailed for Virginia, as the new settlement was called, under the command of his kinsman, Richard Grenville. Raleigh himself the Queen, of course, could not spare. The open breach with Spain and the open alliance with Orange were now approaching rapidly, and Grenville’s voyage seems to have been, in his own eyes, directed more against Spaniards than with a single eye to the colony. In due course, however, Roanoak was reached, and the settlement established with Ralph Lane as governor; and Grenville came home. Unluckily, the original friendly relations with the natives were upset; the quarrel led the colonists into “making an example” of an Indian village; and the Indians resolved to retaliate. Till their opportunity should come, they merely made things as difficult as they could for the Englishman. A relief-expedition had been promised for the following Easter. It did not appear; but Drake did, with the fleet which had just been employed in sacking Cartagena. The settlers resolved to throw up their attempt, and returned to England with Drake. A few days after they had sailed, the delayed relief party under Grenville arrived to find the settlement abandoned. Fifteen volunteers were now left behind, to keep the place in occupation; but when a new band of settlers with a new governor arrived in the following spring (1587), they found that the little garrison had been massacred. The party set about establishing a settlement once more; but under the existing conditions they induced John White, the governor, to return himself to England to bring fresh supplies and reinforcements.

This was the year in which the Armada ought to have sailed against England; but Drake’s successful raid on the harbour of Cadiz deferred the invasion for a year. In the meantime, however, it was a matter of extreme difficulty to get permission for any ship to leave an English port. The demands of the coming duel were paramount. A couple of relief vessels with White were hardly allowed to sail; and these returned without reaching the colony. Again, the next year there was an expedition, but it found Roanoak deserted, and learned that the settlers had taken up fresh quarters. But neither did it discover them, nor did any one of the search expeditions which Raleigh subsequently despatched one after another.

He had spent £40,000—the equivalent of something like five times that sum at the present day. For a dozen years his ships sailed—sometimes with fresh settlers, sometimes with stores only; to meet only with disappointment—often with nothing but reports that the bones of the last party left behind were bleaching in some undiscovered spot. Half of the pioneers themselves were ready to turn back, abandoning the adventure, as soon as they realised that their business was not going to be picking up gold and silver. Men of Grenville’s type enjoyed themselves thoroughly when they were boarding Spanish galleons against immense odds, or engaged in any other form of dare-devilry; a different type was required to settle down to a stubborn fight with Nature, and found rural or commercial communities. The necessary type was forthcoming in course of time, but it had not yet realised the field that was open to it. As yet there were none to experiment, save adventurers who wanted something quite other than North America had to give. At last Raleigh felt that for a time, but only for a time, he was beaten; that to obtain support he must have prospects to suggest, at least, of gold mines and silver mines; and his next great venture was in another region where the golden city of Manoa was fabled to be hidden. But he never lost faith in his own ideal, or recanted his prophecy that the northern Continent would yet be possessed and peopled by men of his own race, that he would live to see Virginia an English nation. His own experiment failed; yet he lived to see the beginnings of fulfilment under other auspices, when again a colony of Virginia received a charter in 1606—this time to establish and maintain herself as the mother of the American people.

IV
AFTER THE ARMADA

The spirit of aggression engendered by the Armada was too strong for Burghley and his mistress to oppose directly. Their object was to give it such an outlet as would satisfy popular sentiment without ruining Spain; and popular sentiment, as they saw, would find satisfaction in a mere extension of the old raiding warfare upon Spanish commerce. The danger, in their eyes, was that the control of operations might fall into the hands of men who not only desired to annihilate Spain but knew how to do it. Drake and Raleigh recognised in Spain the one Power which stood in the way of a complete English dominion of the seas, with everything that would mean: that dominion was already almost won, and could be made good. But if Drake were discredited, Raleigh would be unable to give their policy effect. This was duly brought about by the manipulation from headquarters of the Lisbon expedition, which caused it to fail of accomplishing its immediate object. Thereafter the policy was indeed anti-Spanish, but on the lines advocated by Hawkins and Essex (who may now be said to have taken the place occupied by Leicester till his death in 1588), not by Raleigh and Drake.

The distinction between Raleigh’s political conceptions and those of his contemporaries marks the transition of which he was conscious and they were not. Their eyes were fixed upon Europe. Burghley’s calculations were always directed to the preservation of a balance of power on the Continent; he was afraid of France, and knew the commercial value of the Burgundian alliance. The New World did not appeal to him at all—a rivalry there would hardly have seemed to him desirable. The ordinary Englishman, on the other hand, felt that Spain had proved herself the enemy of his country and his creed, and in the moment of victory his views were roughly summed up in two phrases—vae victis; and, the spoils for the victors. He had no very definite ideas as to the further results, though he might have the triumph of “the Religion” over Popery in his mind. If he thought of the New World, it was not as a land where he might make himself a new home, but as a Tom Tiddler’s ground for bold adventurers. Raleigh saw the vision of the boundless empire occupied by the men of his own race. There are indications that if Walsingham had lived Raleigh would have stood less alone; but Walsingham died, poor and in disfavour, in 1590.

Roughly speaking, then, for some years after the Armada the war party at large predominated; maintaining the system of persistent warfare on Spanish commerce, varied at intervals with more effective blows such as the attack on the Bretagne forts held by the Spaniards (in league with the Guises), and the great Cadiz expedition. In these moves Raleigh’s voice and hand were heard and felt; but they were isolated moves, not followed up—largely owing to the clever management of the Cecils, in whom the Queen really placed her reliance. The war party itself was ruled in effect by the young Earl of Essex, whose personality was particularly obnoxious to the Cecils, while his policy was comparatively acceptable to them. Essex, being desperately jealous of Raleigh’s general favour with the Queen, Sir Walter was generally on friendly terms with the Cecils; whereas anything but a very temporary show of amity between the two Court rivals was entirely out of the question. And whenever Essex had access to the Queen he had the better of the contest. These controlling conditions make Raleigh’s career at this time intelligible.

Both Raleigh and Essex accompanied the Lisbon expedition in 1589. Raleigh was with Drake; Essex, who had joined in defiance of orders, with the land force. The fleet was in no way responsible for the failure, though the blame was carefully laid on Drake; Raleigh, ostensibly at any rate, rather gained in favour with the Queen, who was extremely angry with Essex. The Earl, however, recovered his ascendency while his rival was in Ireland in this same year. Then came another period of Raleigh’s ascendency. Essex married Philip Sidney’s widow, thereby infuriating his mistress; and, when he had been forgiven, was not kept at Court, but sent to command the English contingent in France in support of the king, Henry IV.—who was warring for his throne against the Guises, backed by Philip. Still, the raiding policy held the field, and the naval operations of 1590 were conducted by Hawkins and Frobisher. The Treasure fleet, against which it was directed, had warning and did not sail into the trap, so that the expedition was practically a failure. A similar expedition was planned for the next year, in which Raleigh was to have sailed as Vice-Admiral, Lord Thomas Howard being in command; but, Essex being in France, Elizabeth would not spare him, and Grenville went instead, to meet his death in the last famous fight of the Revenge. The next year, Raleigh and the Earl of Cumberland had a great enterprise on hand; but, again, Raleigh was ordered to turn back and resign his command to Frobisher.

At this time Sir Walter fell into complete disgrace at Court, partly because he did not at first obey the Queen’s orders, partly because of the discovery of his liaison with Elizabeth Throgmorton, who became his wife—whether he was already secretly married to her is a matter of some doubt. He was placed in confinement, and wrote the most outrageous letters to Robert Cecil anent the misery of being deprived of the sunshine of the Royal presence; in the then conventional form of adulation for Gloriana. He was more or less forgiven when the ships under the command of his lieutenant, Borough, returned, with a very rich prize, of the value whereof Elizabeth took one-half for herself. Incidentally, the whole story of this enterprise shows that Raleigh could make himself as popular with sailors as unpopular elsewhere; for the crews nearly mutinied when they found he was to be displaced by Frobisher; and after they landed, Robert Cecil was quite perturbed at the discovery of their devotion to him, their wrath at his imprisonment, and his influence over them when he was sent down to the port to keep matters straight.

Raleigh was released, but he no longer basked in the sunshine of the Virgin Queen’s favour, and lived away from the Court, spending much of his time at his newly acquired estate of Sherborne. About this time his rival, returned from France, was admitted to the Privy Council, from which he himself was still excluded; but he became active in Parliament, in private matters relating to his various estates, and in planning his great expedition for the “discovery of Guiana”; while he was also an energetic advocate of the policy of expelling the Spaniards from Brittany, relying—in full accord with the school of Drake—on the navy as England’s instrument for fighting her great foe. The persuasive eloquence of his tongue would seem to have equalled the picturesque force of his pen, which had been displayed in more than one pamphlet, notably in his extremely vivid account of the great fight in which his kinsman Grenville lost his life—where his narrative powers are associated with a singularly telling rhetorical invective directed against the Spaniards.

For a dozen years past, however, Raleigh had hardly put to sea in his own person, or seen much fighting. In 1595 he reappears as emphatically a man of action.

V
FAVOUR AND FALL

The Virginia project was for the time abandoned, since it had become clear that no serviceable co-operation could be expected from any quarter. If the establishment of a working colony in North America was out of his power, Raleigh came to the conclusion that territorial acquisitions on the southern continent might prove more attractive. Rumour declared that the Peruvian Incas had set up in the interior a new empire, known as Guiana, whose capital was the golden city of Manoa; Spanish attempts to penetrate inland had failed. If England established her sovereignty in the heart of South America, taking possession of what was believed to be the richest country in the world, the most short-sighted could see what a prospect was offered of dominating her rival, in the field to which that rival laid exclusive claim; and the most avaricious might anticipate opportunities of accumulating enormous wealth.

So Raleigh organised his expedition for the exploration of the Orinoco in 1595, taking command of it in person. The record of it we have from his own pen. As a matter of course, he had sundry collisions with the Spaniards, very much of his own seeking, capturing Berreo, the Governor of Trinidad, from whom he extracted a certain amount of information. Then he made his way some distance up the great river, enduring many hardships, seeing many strange sights, and gathering still more astonishing reports; collecting also samples of ore which suggested the auriferous character of the district. It seems, however, a somewhat curious omission on his part that he had sailed without proper means either for mining or assaying. In all other respects he proved himself an extremely competent explorer, in especial recognising the necessity of cultivating—in contrast to the Spaniards—the confidence and friendliness of the natives; carrying out his scheme, not on the hypothesis of bringing home the maximum of loot, but of preparing the way for the systematic entry of England into a great inheritance. He was again doomed to disappointment. The Cecils at this period were cooperating with him cautiously, but he could still get no other support; the Queen was minded to participate royally in profits, but she preferred to leave all the risks to others—and the others preferred the immediate return from raids to any systematic and laborious methods, however paying in the long run. Moreover, the credit which Sir Walter gave to apparently authentic but fabulous tales of Amazons and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders, brought undeserved discredit on the explorer’s account of what he had actually seen. In short, the result of his adventure seemed very likely to be, that adventurers with very different methods would visit Guiana in search of Eldorado; but the beginnings of an English Empire in America were brought no nearer.

By this time Elizabeth was awaking to the fact that Spain’s power of aggression on the seas had by no means disappeared; and Drake had once more been called into counsel. In the winter of 1595, the great seaman and his old colleague and rival John Hawkins were in joint command of a new Panama expedition, in the course of which both of them died. The Cadiz expedition next year was the fruit of the more efficient policy which was being forced to the front by circumstances. General reconciliation was the order of the day in England; the Cecils, the Howards, Raleigh, and Essex were all on formal terms of alliance. Philip was making great naval preparations, when an English force appeared off Cadiz; Essex was the General, Effingham the Admiral; his cousin, Lord Thomas Howard and Raleigh, were both on the War Council. Effingham wished to land the soldiers and attack the town; Raleigh, who had been absent from the Council of War, appeared in time to get a hearing; the decision arrived at was reversed, and Raleigh in his vessel headed the squadron as it sailed into Cadiz harbour. There is no doubt that Sir Walter was the hero of the occasion, setting the example of doing the right thing in the right way. The result was that thirteen of Philip’s best warships were sunk or captured, a great fleet of forty sail packed full of riches was taken or burnt, and Cadiz itself was sacked completely and thoroughly, while the persons of the inhabitants were protected and cared for with a most unaccustomed generosity. Raleigh’s own narrative—he was badly wounded during the engagement—gives the fullest account of the proceedings, but is in the main substantiated by other evidence; and if he had no qualms about asserting the merits of his own performance, he was also at pains to emphasise with generous frankness the frank generosity displayed towards him by his personal rival. In all the relations between him and Essex, this is the pleasantest—one might almost say the only really pleasing—episode.

At last Raleigh was restored to Court favour; but for a time a superficial friendliness with Essex was maintained, and the pair were again united with Lord Thomas Howard in the following year in what was known as the Islands voyage: a futile performance, in which the English fleet had the worst of luck in respect of weather, and Essex, who was in supreme command, showed grave incompetence—which was hardly unnatural, since he was quite inexperienced in naval warfare and knew nothing whatever of naval strategy. At one stage Raleigh, awaiting Essex off Fayal (in the Azores), with orders not to attack till the whole force was assembled, found sufficient reason, after some days’ delay, for effecting the capture of the place on his own responsibility—to the extreme annoyance of Essex. The action was executed with brilliant courage and success; but the Earl’s anger was with difficulty appeased, and the old animosity between the rivals was to a great extent revived by the incident.

For a time, however, Raleigh was not much at Court. But Essex, who was popular with the mob, as the other was not, was jealous of every one, and nearly every one was jealous of Essex. Old Lord Burghley died, and a considerable part of the story of the Queen’s last years is really the story of the crafty intriguing by which Robert Cecil first urged Essex to the ruin on which he was ready enough to rush, and then laid his mines for the destruction of Raleigh—while carefully avoiding the odium in both cases. Essex, when in Ireland, acquired a fixed idea that Sir Walter was the principal person whose machinations were compassing his downfall; but there is little enough reason to suppose that he had any one but himself to thank. The only effective machinations were those of the people who covertly encouraged his own arrogance and misconduct. Nevertheless, it is matter of regret that when Essex fell, Raleigh—who had recently received insults from him—did take a vindictive line, while Cecil was posing as the advocate of magnanimity.

A sketch such as this does not permit of an examination of the intricate plottings that surrounded the old Queen as she was wearing rapidly to her grave. Roughly speaking, the English Catholics outside the country were zealous for the quite impossible succession of Philip III. of Spain—a plan which did not appeal to the Catholics in England. There were schemes for the succession of that monarch’s sister, which found supporters only on the basis of her uniting the crowns of the Netherlands and England, in independence of Spain. There were ideas of marrying Arabella Stewart and Lord Beauchamp—each of whom had some sort of title—with the object of preventing the accession of James VI., whose claim on purely legitimist grounds was quite indisputable. Cecil, satisfied that James was the winning candidate, made it his business to convince that prince that his peaceful accession would be entirely due to Cecil’s own masterly management, and that Raleigh in particular was extremely antagonistic; while Raleigh himself was at no pains to curry favour with the Scots king.

Scarcely was Elizabeth dead and James on the throne when a plot for his removal and the substitution of Arabella was brought to light, and Raleigh was charged with having sold himself to Spain and being a principal agent in the conspiracy, which involved the introduction of Spanish troops. The conduct of the trial was a monstrous perversion of justice, and Raleigh was condemned as a traitor. Apart from the inadequacy of the evidence and the palpable fact that it was full of contradictions and of perjury, it remains incredible that Raleigh should ever have seriously intended to support a Spanish domination. It would not only have been a flat contradiction of his whole career, a merely amazing folly in the man who in all England was the most absolutely convinced of the rottenness of the power of Spain; there was also no man alive who more thoroughly appreciated the historical truth, that he who sells his own country to her enemies purchases for himself not power and confidence but suspicion and contempt. The part of Themistocles would not have attracted him. He might have been capable of playing a selfish game; he was certainly not likely to play a consciously unpatriotic one; but the game attributed to him by his enemies would have been in his own eyes not only unpatriotic, but, from the selfish point of view, egregiously stupid.

VI
CAPTIVE AND VICTIM

Raleigh was condemned to die as a traitor; but the sentence was not carried out. Instead, he was relegated to the Tower, and was there held a prisoner for twelve years—mainly occupied in scientific and literary pursuits, varied by petitions for release. His chemical experiments may be accounted as a hobby; but his writings would have assured his fame had he possessed no other claim to recognition. They range over the whole field of what the Greeks included under the term “politics”—economics, the art of war, the art of government, political institutions, as well as other subjects. The incidental discourses on such matters, illustrated from the events quorum pars magna fuerat, with his comments thereon, give the main permanent interest to his “History of the World”—in itself a monument of such historical learning as was available in his day. On every subject he touched he wrote with a knowledge of facts and a penetrating perception of causes which distinguish him as a political thinker of a high order; alive, like Thomas More, to truths which had hardly won general recognition two centuries after he was in his grave. He who in the great days had been the intimate of Edmund Spenser was in the days of his captivity on terms of friendship with Ben Jonson. He, too, wrote poetry, but this was for him rather in the nature of an intellectual exercise or accomplishment than of a creative order; little that can with certainty be attributed to him has been handed down, though that little includes lines (like “The Lie” and the sonnet to Spenser) which are immortal, assuring him his place on the English Helicon. But his magnum opus was that “History of the World” which King James condemned because it spoke too “saucily” of the doings of princes, but which was ranked by Oliver Cromwell next to his Bible.

Raleigh’s condemnation produced a curious effect. Hitherto, he had been able to win the devotion of the few chosen intimates whom he accounted his intellectual peers, and of the mariners who sailed under his command, who adored him in much the same way and for the same reasons as they adored Francis Drake. Among courtiers his open and aggressive consciousness of intellectual superiority and his scornful attitude made him intensely unpopular; and he was the pet aversion of the mob, who had made a hero of Essex and regarded him as the Earl’s principal enemy. Yet the sense that he was a victim of gross injustice, the dignity and eloquence he displayed at his trial, the contrast between this typical Elizabethan and the minions of the new Stewart Court, brought about a revulsion of sentiment, and Raleigh in the Tower became an object of admiration, and to Henry Prince of Wales of hero-worship. A curious psychological study is afforded by Sir Walter’s letters when he was lying under sentence of death. He condescended to appeal to the king for mercy in terms which can only be called abject; yet the ink was scarcely dry when he was writing to his wife with tender affection and beautiful dignity. The conclusion afforded by a comparison of the documents is that his personal attitude towards death was that expressed in the letter to his wife, but that for the sake of his family he felt bound to appeal for life, and the only form of appeal from which anything might be hoped must be couched in that style of pitiful self-abasement and fulsome flattery which he adopted—and by which he felt himself degraded.

While Robert Cecil lived there was never much hope of liberty for Sir Walter, who yet seems never to have realised that his old friend and colleague was, under the surface, his most determined enemy. But the prisoner, though now advanced in years—he was already fifty-one at the time of the trial—never ceased to dream of Eldorado, and to petition for liberty in order to make one more expedition to Guiana. Cecil died; the rising favourite, Villiers, was a person whose influence could be secured—at a price; and at last, after more than twelve years of captivity, Raleigh was released, to prepare for his last voyage. But the attitude of England to Spain had changed since Elizabeth’s death: the ambassador Gondomar could twist King James round his little finger. Raleigh meant to win his golden empire, and incidentally to teach the old lesson of Spanish incapacity over again; Gondomar intended to use that expedition for Raleigh’s destruction. Sir Walter played the game on the old familiar theory of twenty—thirty—forty years before: that success would excuse proceedings unauthorised, and even forbidden. Every soul, from the king down, knew perfectly well that if the adventurer did not set Spain at defiance, the adventure itself would be a stupid farce.

So the greatest living Englishman was sent forth to his carefully prepared destruction, to entangle himself in the toils laid by, and at the bidding of, the minister of England’s old foe. Of course, under the conditions the expedition was a disastrous failure. Raleigh returned from it with a perfect knowledge that he was coming back to irretrievable ruin and disgrace. It would have been easy enough for him to find refuge in a French port; that he deliberately faced his fate is sufficient proof that the charge of his having already sold himself to France was a base slander. Raleigh’s enemies were everlastingly accusing him of selling himself; they never produced a scintilla of proof, and the sales were singularly unremunerative to a man who was as careful of his own interests as any one when he did drive a bargain. He had hardly landed in Plymouth when he was placed under arrest. Even now he had an opportunity of escaping to France, but he refused to avail himself of it. His doom was a foregone conclusion; the death sentence passed on him in 1603 had never been cancelled.

He bore himself worthily; with the fortitude and dignity which were almost a commonplace with Englishmen of the Tudor tradition. The king of England, Elizabeth’s successor, struck off the head of the last of the Elizabethan heroes, at the orders of the king of Spain. But the degradation was only for a time. Spain had laid her enemy low; but the lesson he had spent his life to teach his countrymen was bearing its fruit even in the hour of his doom; to the men of Raleigh’s race was destined the Empire of the seas, and of the new worlds which Spain had arrogantly claimed.