Sir Walter Raleigh and His Time

Charles Kingsley

Sir Walter Raleigh and His Time

‘Truth is stranger than fiction.’  A trite remark.  We all say it again and again: but how few of us believe it!  How few of us, when we read the history of heroical times and heroical men, take the story simply as it stands!  On the contrary, we try to explain it away; to prove it all not to have been so very wonderful; to impute accident, circumstance, mean and commonplace motives; to lower every story down to the level of our own littleness, or what we (unjustly to ourselves and to the God who is near us all) choose to consider our level; to rationalise away all the wonders, till we make them at last impossible, and give up caring to believe them; and prove to our own melancholy satisfaction that Alexander conquered the world with a pin, in his sleep, by accident.

And yet in this mood, as in most, there is a sort of left-handed truth involved.  These heroes are not so far removed from us after all.  They were men of like passions with ourselves, with the same flesh about them, the same spirit within them, the same world outside, the same devil beneath, the same God above.  They and their deeds were not so very wonderful.  Every child who is born into the world is just as wonderful, and, for aught we know, might, mutatis mutandis, do just as wonderful deeds.  If accident and circumstance helped them, the same may help us: have helped us, if we will look back down our years, far more than we have made use of.

They were men, certainly, very much of our own level: but may we not put that level somewhat too low?  They were certainly not what we are; for if they had been, they would have done no more than we: but is not a man’s real level not what he is, but what he can be, and therefore ought to be?  No doubt they were compact of good and evil, just as we: but so was David, no man more; though a more heroical personage (save One) appears not in all human records but may not the secret of their success have been that, on the whole (though they found it a sore battle), they refused the evil and chose the good?  It is true, again, that their great deeds may be more or less explained, attributed to laws, rationalised: but is explaining always explaining away?  Is it to degrade a thing to attribute it to a law?  And do you do anything more by ‘rationalising’ men’s deeds than prove that they were rational men; men who saw certain fixed laws, and obeyed them, and succeeded thereby, according to the Baconian apophthegm, that nature is conquered by obeying her?

But what laws?

To that question, perhaps, the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews will give the best answer, where it says, that by faith were done all the truly great deeds, and by faith lived all the truly great men who have ever appeared on earth.

There are, of course, higher and lower degrees of this faith; its object is one more or less worthy: but it is in all cases the belief in certain unseen eternal facts, by keeping true to which a man must in the long run succeed.  Must; because he is more or less in harmony with heaven, and earth, and the Maker thereof, and has therefore fighting on his side a great portion of the universe; perhaps the whole; for as he who breaks one commandment of the law is guilty of the whole, because he denies the fount of all law, so he who with his whole soul keeps one commandment of it is likely to be in harmony with the whole, because he testifies of the fount of all law.

I shall devote a few pages to the story of an old hero, of a man of like passions with ourselves; of one who had the most intense and awful sense of the unseen laws, and succeeded mightily thereby; of one who had hard struggles with a flesh and blood which made him at times forget those laws, and failed mightily thereby; of one whom God so loved that He caused each slightest sin, as with David, to bring its own punishment with it, that while the flesh was delivered over to Satan, the man himself might be saved in the Day of the Lord; of one, finally, of whom nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand may say, ‘I have done worse deeds than he: but I have never done as good ones.’

In a poor farm-house among the pleasant valleys of South Devon, among the white apple-orchards and the rich water-meadows, and the red fallows and red kine, in the year of grace 1552, a boy was born, as beautiful as day, and christened Walter Raleigh.  His father was a gentleman of ancient blood: few older in the land: but, impoverished, he had settled down upon the wreck of his estate, in that poor farm-house.  No record of him now remains; but he must have been a man worth knowing and worth loving, or he would not have won the wife he did.  She was a Champernoun, proudest of Norman squires, and could probably boast of having in her veins the blood of Courtneys, Emperors of Byzant.  She had been the wife of the famous knight Sir Otho Gilbert, and lady of Compton Castle, and had borne him three brave sons, John, Humphrey, and Adrian; all three destined to win knighthood also in due time, and the two latter already giving promises, which they well fulfilled, of becoming most remarkable men of their time.  And yet the fair Champernoun, at her husband’s death, had chosen to wed Mr. Raleigh, and share life with him in the little farm-house at Hayes.  She must have been a grand woman, if the law holds true that great men always have great mothers; an especially grand woman, indeed; for few can boast of having borne to two different husbands such sons as she bore.  No record, as far as we know, remains of her; nor of her boy’s early years.  One can imagine them, nevertheless.

Just as he awakes to consciousness, the Smithfield fires are extinguished.  He can recollect, perhaps, hearing of the burning of the Exeter martyrs: and he does not forget it; no one forgot or dared forget it in those days.  He is brought up in the simple and manly, yet high-bred ways of English gentlemen in the times of ‘an old courtier of the Queen’s.’  His two elder half-brothers also, living some thirty miles away, in the quaint and gloomy towers of Compton Castle, amid the apple-orchards of Torbay, are men as noble as ever formed a young lad’s taste.  Humphrey and Adrian Gilbert, who afterwards, both of them, rise to knighthood, are—what are they not?—soldiers, scholars, Christians, discoverers and ‘planters’ of foreign lands, geographers, alchemists, miners, Platonical philosophers; many-sided, high-minded men, not without fantastic enthusiasm; living heroic lives, and destined, one of them, to die a heroic death.  From them Raleigh’s fancy has been fired, and his appetite for learning quickened, while he is yet a daring boy, fishing in the gray trout-brooks, or going up with his father to the Dartmoor hills to hunt the deer with hound and horn, amid the wooded gorges of Holne, or over the dreary downs of Hartland Warren, and the cloud-capt thickets of Cator’s Beam, and looking down from thence upon the far blue southern sea, wondering when he shall sail thereon, to fight the Spaniard, and discover, like Columbus, some fairy-land of gold and gems.

For before this boy’s mind, as before all intense English minds of that day, rise, from the first, three fixed ideas, which yet are but one—the Pope, the Spaniard, and America.

The two first are the sworn and internecine enemies (whether they pretend a formal peace or not) of Law and Freedom, Bible and Queen, and all that makes an Englishman’s life dear to him.  Are they not the incarnations of Antichrist?  Their Moloch sacrifices flame through all lands.  The earth groans because of them, and refuses to cover the blood of her slain.  And America is the new world of boundless wonder and beauty, wealth and fertility, to which these two evil powers arrogate an exclusive and divine right; and God has delivered it into their hands; and they have done evil therein with all their might, till the story of their greed and cruelty rings through all earth and heaven.  Is this the will of God?  Will he not avenge for these things, as surely as he is the Lord who executeth justice and judgment in the earth?

These are the young boy’s thoughts.  These were his thoughts for sixty-six eventful years.  In whatsoever else he wavered, he never wavered in that creed.  He learnt it in his boyhood, while he read ‘Fox’s Martyrs’ beside his mother’s knee.  He learnt it as a lad, when he saw his neighbours Hawkins and Drake changed by Spanish tyranny and treachery from peaceful merchantmen into fierce scourges of God.  He learnt it scholastically, from fathers and divines, as an Oxford scholar, in days when Oxford was a Protestant indeed, in whom there was no guile.  He learnt it when he went over, at seventeen years old, with his gallant kinsman Henry Champernoun, and his band of a hundred gentlemen volunteers, to flesh his maiden sword in behalf of the persecuted French Protestants.  He learnt it as he listened to the shrieks of the San Bartholomew; he learnt it as he watched the dragonnades, the tortures, the massacres of the Netherlands, and fought manfully under Norris in behalf of those victims of ‘the Pope and Spain.’  He preached it in far stronger and wiser words than I can express it for him, in that noble tract of 1591, on Sir Richard Grenville’s death at the Azores—a Tyrtæan trumpet-blast such as has seldom rung in human ears; he discussed it like a cool statesman in his pamphlet of 1596, on ‘A War with Spain.’  He sacrificed for it the last hopes of his old age, the wreck of his fortunes, his just recovered liberty; and he died with the old God’s battle-cry upon his lips, when it awoke no response from the hearts of a coward, profligate, and unbelieving generation.  This is the background, the keynote of the man’s whole life.  If we lose the recollection of it, and content ourselves by slurring it over in the last pages of his biography with some half-sneer about his putting, like the rest of Elizabeth’s old admirals, ‘the Spaniard, the Pope, and the Devil’ in the same category, then we shall understand very little about Raleigh; though, of course, we shall save ourselves the trouble of pronouncing as to whether the Spaniard and the Pope were really in the same category as the devil; or, indeed, which might be equally puzzling to a good many historians of the last century and a half, whether there be any devil at all.

The books which I have chosen to head this review are all of them more or less good, with one exception, and that is Bishop Goodman’s Memoirs, on which much stress has been lately laid, as throwing light on various passages of Raleigh, Essex, Cecil, and James’s lives.  Having read it carefully, I must say plainly, that I think the book an altogether foolish, pedantic, and untrustworthy book, without any power of insight or gleam of reason; without even the care to be self-consistent; having but one object, the whitewashing of James, and of every noble lord whom the bishop has ever known: but in whitewashing each, the poor old flunkey so bespatters all the rest of his pets, that when the work is done, the whole party look, if possible, rather dirtier than before.  And so I leave Bishop Goodman.

Mr. Fraser Tytler’s book is well known; and it is on the whole a good one; because he really loves and admires the man of whom he writes: but he is sometimes careless as to authorities, and too often makes the wish father to the thought.  Moreover, he has the usual sentiment about Mary Queen of Scots, and the usual scandal about Elizabeth, which is simply anathema; and which prevents his really seeing the time in which Raleigh lived, and the element in which he moved.  This sort of talk is happily dying out just now; but no one can approach the history of the Elizabethan age (perhaps of any age) without finding that truth is all but buried under mountains of dirt and chaff—an Augæan stable, which, perhaps, will never be swept clean.  Yet I have seen, with great delight, several attempts toward removal of the said superstratum of dirt and chaff from the Elizabethan histories, in several articles, all evidently from the same pen (and that one, more perfectly master of English prose than any man living), in the ‘Westminster Review’ and ‘Fraser’s Magazine.’ 1

Sir Robert Schomburgk’s edition of the Guiana Voyage contains an excellent Life of Raleigh, perhaps the best yet written; of which I only complain, when it gives in to the stock-charges against Raleigh, as it were at second-hand, and just because they are stock-charges, and when, too, the illustrious editor (unable to conceal his admiration of a discoverer in many points so like himself) takes all through an apologetic tone of ‘Please don’t laugh at me.  I daresay it is very foolish; but I can’t help loving the man.’

Mr. Napier’s little book is a reprint of two ‘Edinburgh Review’ articles on Bacon and Raleigh.  The first, a learned statement of facts in answer to some unwisdom of a ‘Quarterly’ reviewer (possibly an Oxford Aristotelian; for ‘we think we do know that sweet Roman hand’).  It is clear, accurate, convincing, complete.  There is no more to be said about the matter, save that facts are stubborn things.

The article on Raleigh is very valuable; first, because Mr. Napier has had access to many documents unknown to former biographers; and next, because he clears Raleigh completely from the old imputation of deceit about the Guiana mine, as well as of other minor charges.  With his general opinion of Raleigh’s last and fatal Guiana voyage, I have the misfortune to differ from him toto coelo, on the strength of the very documents which he quotes.  But Mr. Napier is always careful, always temperate, and always just, except where he, as I think, does not enter into the feelings of the man whom he is analysing.  Let readers buy the book (it will tell them a hundred things they do not know) and be judge between Mr. Napier and me.

In the meanwhile, one cannot help watching with a smile how good old Time’s scrubbing-brush, which clears away paint and whitewash from church pillars, does the same by such characters as Raleigh’s.  After each fresh examination, some fresh count in the hundred-headed indictment breaks down.  The truth is, that as people begin to believe more in nobleness, and to gird up their loins to the doing of noble deeds, they discover more nobleness in others.  Raleigh’s character was in its lowest nadir in the days of Voltaire and Hume.  What shame to him?  For so were more sacred characters than his.  Shall the disciple be above his master? especially when that disciple was but too inconsistent, and gave occasion to the uncircumcised to blaspheme?  But Cayley, after a few years, refutes triumphantly Hume’s silly slanders.  He is a stupid writer: but he has sense enough, being patient, honest, and loving, to do that.

Mr. Fraser Tytler shovels away a little more of the dirt-heap; Mr. Napier clears him (for which we owe him many thanks), by simple statement of facts, from the charge of having deserted and neglected his Virginia colonists; Humboldt and Schomburgk clear him from the charge of having lied about Guiana; and so on; each successive writer giving in generally on merest hearsay to the general complaint against him, either from fear of running counter to big names, or from mere laziness, and yet absolving him from that particular charge of which his own knowledge enables him to judge.  In the trust that I may be able to clear him from a few more charges, I write these pages, premising that I do not profess to have access to any new and recondite documents.  I merely take the broad facts of the story from documents open to all; and comment on them as every man should wish his own life to be commented on.

But I do so on a method which I cannot give up; and that is the Bible method.  I say boldly that historians have hitherto failed in understanding not only Raleigh and Elizabeth, but nine-tenths of the persons and facts in his day, because they will not judge them by the canons which the Bible lays down—by which I mean not only the New Testament but the Old, which, as English Churchmen say, and Scotch Presbyterians have ere now testified with sacred blood, is ‘not contrary to the New.’

Mr. Napier has a passage about Raleigh for which I am sorry, coming as it does from a countryman of John Knox.  ‘Society, it would seem, was yet in a state in which such a man could seriously plead, that the madness he feigned was justified’ (his last word is unfair, for Raleigh only hopes that it is no sin) ‘by the example of David, King of Israel.’  What a shocking state of society when men actually believed their Bibles, not too little, but too much.  For my part, I think that if poor dear Raleigh had considered the example of David a little more closely, he need never have feigned madness at all; and that his error lay quite in an opposite direction from looking on the Bible heroes, David especially, as too sure models.  At all events, let us try Raleigh by the very scriptural standard which he himself lays down, not merely in this case unwisely, but in his ‘History of the World’ more wisely than any historian whom I have ever read; and say, ‘Judged as the Bible taught our Puritan forefathers to judge every man, the character is intelligible enough; tragic, but noble and triumphant: judged as men have been judged in history for the last hundred years, by hardly any canon save those of the private judgment, which philosophic cant, maudlin sentimentality, or fear of public opinion, may happen to have forged, the man is a phenomenon, only less confused, abnormal, suspicious than his biographers’ notions about him.’  Again I say, I have not solved the problem: but it will be enough if I make some think it both soluble and worth solving.  Let us look round, then, and see into what sort of a country, into what sort of a world, the young adventurer is going forth, at seventeen years of age, to seek his fortune.

Born in 1552, his young life has sprung up and grown with the young life of England.  The earliest fact, perhaps, which he can recollect is the flash of joy on every face which proclaims that Mary Tudor is dead, and Elizabeth reigns at last.  As he grows, the young man sees all the hope and adoration of the English people centre in that wondrous maid, and his own centre in her likewise.  He had been base had he been otherwise.  She comes to the throne with such a prestige as never sovereign came since the days when Isaiah sang his pæan over young Hezekiah’s accession.  Young, learned, witty, beautiful (as with such a father and mother she could not help being), with an expression of countenance remarkable (I speak of those early days) rather for its tenderness and intellectual depth than its strength, she comes forward as the champion of the Reformed Faith, the interpretress of the will and conscience of the people of England—herself persecuted all but to the death, and purified by affliction, like gold tried in the fire.  She gathers round her, one by one, young men of promise, and trains them herself to their work.  And they fulfil it, and serve her, and grow gray-headed in her service, working as faithfully, as righteously, as patriotically, as men ever worked on earth.  They are her ‘favourites’; because they are men who deserve favour; men who count not their own lives dear to themselves for the sake of the queen and of that commonweal which their hearts and reasons tell them is one with her.  They are still men, though; and some of them have their grudgings and envyings against each other: she keeps the balance even between them, on the whole, skilfully, gently, justly, in spite of weaknesses and prejudices, without which she had been more than human.  Some have their conceited hopes of marrying her, becoming her masters.  She rebukes and pardons.  ‘Out of the dust I took you, sir! go and do your duty, humbly and rationally, henceforth, or into the dust I trample you again!’  And they reconsider themselves, and obey.  But many, or most of them, are new men, country gentlemen, and younger sons.  She will follow her father’s plan, of keeping down the overgrown feudal princes, who, though brought low by the wars of the Roses, are still strong enough to throw everything into confusion by resisting at once the Crown and Commons.  Proud nobles reply by rebellion, come down southwards with ignorant Popish henchmen at their backs; will restore Popery, marry the Queen of Scots, make the middle class and the majority submit to the feudal lords and the minority.  Elizabeth, with her ‘aristocracy of genius,’ is too strong for them: the people’s heart is with her, and not with dukes.  Each mine only blows up its diggers; and there are many dry eyes at their ruin.  Her people ask her to marry.  She answers gently, proudly, eloquently: ‘She is married—the people of England is her husband.  She has vowed it.’  And yet there is a tone of sadness in that great speech.  Her woman’s heart yearns after love, after children; after a strong bosom on which to repose that weary head.  More than once she is ready to give way.  But she knows that it must not be.  She has her reward.  ‘Whosoever gives up husband or child for my sake and the gospel’s, shall receive them back a hundredfold in this present life,’ as Elizabeth does.  Her reward is an adoration from high and low, which is to us now inexplicable, impossible, overstrained, which was not so then.

For the whole nation is in a mood of exaltation; England is fairyland; the times are the last days—strange, terrible, and glorious.  At home are Jesuits plotting; dark, crooked-pathed, going up and down in all manner of disguises, doing the devil’s work if men ever did it; trying to sow discord between man and man, class and class; putting out books full of filthy calumnies, declaring the queen illegitimate, excommunicate, a usurper; English law null, and all state appointments void, by virtue of a certain ‘Bull’; and calling on the subjects to rebellion and assassination, even on the bedchamber—woman to do to her ‘as Judith did to Holofernes.’  She answers by calm contempt.  Now and then Burleigh and Walsingham catch some of the rogues, and they meet their deserts; but she for the most part lets them have their way.  God is on her side, and she will not fear what man can do to her.

Abroad, the sky is dark and wild, and yet full of fantastic splendour.  Spain stands strong and awful, a rising world-tyranny, with its dark-souled Cortezes and Pizarros, Alvas, Don Johns, and Parmas, men whose path is like the lava stream; who go forth slaying and to slay, in the name of their gods, like those old Assyrian conquerors on the walls of Nineveh, with tutelary genii flying above their heads, mingled with the eagles who trail the entrails of the slain.  By conquest, intermarriage, or intrigue, she has made all the southern nations her vassals or her tools; close to our own shores, the Netherlands are struggling vainly for their liberties; abroad, the Western Islands, and the whole trade of Africa and India, will in a few years be hers.  And already the Pope, whose ‘most Catholic’ and faithful servant she is, has repaid her services in the cause of darkness by the gift of the whole New World—a gift which she has claimed by cruelties and massacres unexampled since the days of Timour and Zinghis Khan.  There she spreads and spreads, as Drake found her picture in the Government House at St. Domingo, the horse leaping through the globe, and underneath, Non sufficit orbis.  Who shall withstand her, armed as she is with the three-edged sword of Antichrist—superstition, strength, and gold?

English merchantmen, longing for some share in the riches of the New World, go out to trade in Guinea, in the Azores, in New Spain: and are answered by shot and steel.  ‘Both policy and religion,’ as Fray Simon says, fifty years afterwards, ‘forbid Christians to trade with heretics!’  ‘Lutheran devils, and enemies of God,’ are the answer they get in words: in deeds, whenever they have a superior force they may be allowed to land, and to water their ships, even to trade, under exorbitant restrictions: but generally this is merely a trap for them.  Forces are hurried up; and the English are attacked treacherously, in spite of solemn compacts; for ‘No faith need be kept with heretics.’  And woe to them if any be taken prisoners, even wrecked.  The galleys, and the rack, and the stake are their certain doom; for the Inquisition claims the bodies and souls of heretics all over the world, and thinks it sin to lose its own.  A few years of such wrong raise questions in the sturdy English heart.  What right have these Spaniards to the New World?  The Pope’s gift?  Why, he gave it by the same authority by which he claims the whole world.  The formula used when an Indian village is sacked is, that God gave the whole world to St. Peter, and that he has given it to his successors, and they the Indies to the King of Spain.  To acknowledge that lie would be to acknowledge the very power by which the Pope claims a right to depose Queen Elizabeth, and give her dominions to whomsoever he will.  A fico for bulls!