Part 24

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.

INDEX

A

Agrarian distress, 20-21, 90-91, 95, 211, 223-224, 262

Alençon, Duke of, 335-336, 341, 343-344, 347

Alva, Duke of, 308, 330, 331, 335, 338

Annates Act, 132, 135, 182

Armada, 315-316, 367-369

Arthur, Prince, 26, 30

Ascham, Roger, 282, 283

Askew, Anne, 328

Assassinations, 349-350

B

Babington plot, 315, 353, 366-367

Bacon, Nicholas, 282, 307

Beauchamp, Lord, 385

Benevolences, 51

Beton, Cardinal, 189-190, 200, 214, 300

Bible, vernacular version of, 185, 199, 218, 254

Blount, Elizabeth, 192

Bocher, Joan, 221

Boleyn, Anne, Henry’s passion for, 57, 171-172, 175, 192, 194-195; marriage, 55, 56, 104, 136, 170, 195, 248; Act of Succession for issue of, 104; Henry’s treatment of, 199; fall of, 249-251; Cranmer’s attitude towards, 192, 194-195; execution of, 148, 195

Boleyn, Mary, 192, 194, 251

Bonner, Bishop, 210, 219, 221, 231, 261, 268, 272

Buckingham, Duke of, 46, 50, 177

Bucer, 264

Burghley, Lord (William Cecil), family and early years of, 281-282; first marriage, 282; relations with Somerset, 283-284; second marriage, 283; relations with Warwick, 284; retirement, 288; ecclesiastical policy, 297; financial policy, 298-299; Scottish policy, 301-303; foreign policy, 303-306, 308, 311-312, 319; relations with Queen Elizabeth, 279-280, 289; views on privateering, 312-314; made Lord High Treasurer, 312 _note_, 339; war with Spain, 316; contrasted with Cromwell, Somerset, and Philip of Spain, 321; relations with Walsingham, 326, 346, 356-357; secret service created by, 330; death of, 318; characteristics of, 319-322

Burgundy, 292, 304, 317, 334, 377

Burning of heretics, 101, 271; repeal of statutes, 220, 226

C

Cabot, 19

Calais Conference, 167

Catherine de Medici, 295, 304, 332, 336-338

Catherine of Aragon, &c. _See_ Katharine of Aragon

Cecil, David, 281-282

Cecil, Robert, 317, 362, 379, 385, 386, 387, 389

Cecil, William. _See_ Burghley

Chantries Act, 219

Chapuys _cited_, 127, 132, 193, 195, 197

Charles V., Emperor, candidature of, for the Empire, 45, 164; relations with France, 46-47, 146-147, 152-154, 166, 169, 184; on More, 111; Katharine’s policy as to, 194; Cromwell’s attitude towards, 183; Henry VIII.’s alliance with, 189

Church: Act in Restraint of Appeals, 135, 137 Act of Uniformity, 220-221; second Act of Uniformity, 232 Annates Act, 132, 135, 182 Burning of heretics. _See_ that title Cranmer’s views as to, 244-245 Formularies, need for, 255 Henry VIII.’s anti-clerical campaign, 102-103, 130-134, 246; Henry proclaimed Supreme Head, 181 Indulgences, 241 Litany, vernacular, 255 Marriage of Secular clergy, 246, 259 Monasteries, suppression of, 141-142, 145, 211, 224, 253 Oath of Obedience to Pope, 247-248 _and note_ Parties in, under Elizabeth, 296-297 Prayer Books of Edward VI. (1549), 220, 261-262; (1552), 231, 265 Reformation. _See_ that title Six Articles Act. _See_ that title Submission of the clergy, 134, 181, 246, 247 Unpopularity of ecclesiastics, 64

Clarke, John, 282

Clement VII., Pope, 127, 133-135, 175, 241, 242

Cleves, Anne of, 196; marriage with Henry VIII., 152-153, 184, 196-197

Coinage, debasement of, 190, 229, 298; new issue under Elizabeth, 298

Colet, Dean, 38, 63, 65, 78-81, 83, 85, 185, 240, 241

Coligny, Admiral, 336-337

Columbus, Christopher, 19

Commercial and industrial policy, 16-18

Conscience, 174-175, 326-327, 354-355

Conservatism and Liberalism, 75-76