Westward Ho! Or, The Voyages and Adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh, Knight, of Burrough, in the County of Devon, in the Reign of Her Most Glorious Majesty Queen Elizabeth

Other little facts came to light one by one. They were all connected (as was natural in a savage) with some animal or other natural object. Whatever impressions her morals or affections had received, had been erased by the long spiritual death of that forest sojourn; and Mrs. Leigh could not elicit from her a trace of feeling about her mother, or recollection of any early religious teaching. This link, however, was supplied at last, and in this way.

Sir Richard had brought home an Indian with him from Virginia. Of his original name I am not sure, but he was probably the “Wanchese” whose name occurs with that of “Manteo.”

This man was to be baptized in the church at Bideford by the name of Raleigh, his sponsors being most probably Raleigh himself, who may have been there on Virginian business, and Sir Richard Grenville. All the notabilities of Bideford came, of course, to see the baptism of the first “Red man” whose foot had ever trodden British soil, and the mayor and corporation-men appeared in full robes, with maces and tipstaffs, to do honor to that first-fruits of the Gospel in the West.

Mrs. Leigh went, as a matter of course, and Ayacanora would needs go too. She was very anxious to know what they were going to do with the “Carib.”

“To make him a Christian.”

“Why did they not make her one?”

Because she was one already. They were sure that she had been christened as soon as she was born. But she was not sure, and pouted a good deal at the chance of an “ugly red Carib” being better off than she was. However, all assembled duly; the stately son of the forest, now transformed into a footman of Sir Richard’s, was standing at the font; the service was half performed when a heavy sigh, or rather groan, made all eyes turn, and Ayacanora sank fainting upon Mrs. Leigh’s bosom.

She was carried out, and to a neighboring house; and when she came to herself, told a strange story. How, as she was standing there trying to recollect whether she too had ever been baptized, the church seemed to grow larger, the priest’s dress richer; the walls were covered with pictures, and above the altar, in jewelled robes, stood a lady, and in her arms a babe. Soft music sounded in her ears; the air was full (on that she insisted much) of fragrant odor which filled the church like mist; and through it she saw not one, but many Indians, standing by the font; and a lady held her by the hand, and she was a little girl again.

And after, many questionings, so accurate was her recollection, not only of the scene, but of the building, that Yeo pronounced:

“A christened woman she is, madam, if Popish christening is worth calling such, and has seen Indians christened too in the Cathedral Church at Quito, the inside whereof I know well enough, and too well, for I sat there three mortal hours in a San Benito, to hear a friar preach his false doctrines, not knowing whether I was to be burnt or not next day.”

So Ayacanora went home to Burrough, and Raleigh the Indian to Sir Richard’s house. The entry of his baptism still stands, crooked-lettered, in the old parchment register of the Bideford baptisms for 1587-3:

     “Raleigh, a Winganditoian: March 26.”

His name occurs once more, a year and a month after:

     “Rawly, a Winganditoian, April 1589.”

But it is not this time among the baptisms. The free forest wanderer has pined in vain for his old deer-hunts amid the fragrant cedar woods, and lazy paddlings through the still lagoons, where water-lilies sleep beneath the shade of great magnolias, wreathed with clustered vines; and now he is away to “happier hunting-grounds,” and all that is left of him below sleeps in the narrow town churchyard, blocked in with dingy houses, whose tenants will never waste a sigh upon the Indian’s grave. There the two entries stand, unto this day; and most pathetic they have seemed to me; a sort of emblem and first-fruits of the sad fate of that worn-out Red race, to whom civilization came too late to save, but not too late to hasten their decay.

But though Amyas lay idle, England did not. That spring saw another and a larger colony sent out by Raleigh to Virginia, under the charge of one John White. Raleigh had written more than once, entreating Amyas to take the command, which if he had done, perhaps the United States had begun to exist twenty years sooner than they actually did. But his mother had bound him by a solemn promise (and who can wonder at her for asking, or at him for giving it?) to wait at home with her twelve months at least. So, instead of himself, he sent five hundred pounds, which I suppose are in Virginia (virtually at least) until this day; for they never came back again to him.

But soon came a sharper trial of Amyas’s promise to his mother; and one which made him, for the first time in his life, moody, peevish, and restless, at the thought that others were fighting Spaniards, while he was sitting idle at home. For his whole soul was filling fast with sullen malice against Don Guzman. He was losing the “single eye,” and his whole body was no longer full of light. He had entered into the darkness in which every man walks who hates his brother; and it lay upon him like a black shadow day and night. No company, too, could be more fit to darken that shadow than Salvation Yeo’s. The old man grew more stern in his fanaticism day by day, and found a too willing listener in his master; and Mrs. Leigh was (perhaps for the first and last time in her life) seriously angry, when she heard the two coolly debating whether they had not committed a grievous sin in not killing the Spanish prisoners on board the galleon.

It must be said, however (as the plain facts set down in this book testify), that if such was the temper of Englishmen at that day, the Spaniards had done a good deal to provoke it; and were just then attempting to do still more.

For now we are approaching the year 1588, “which an astronomer of Konigsberg, above a hundred years before, foretold would be an admirable year, and the German chronologers presaged would be the climacterical year of the world.”

The prophecies may stand for what they are worth; but they were at least fulfilled. That year was, indeed, the climacterical year of the world; and decided once and for all the fortunes of the European nations, and of the whole continent of America.

No wonder, then, if (as has happened in each great crisis of the human race) some awful instinct that The Day of the Lord was at hand, some dim feeling that there was war in heaven, and that the fiends of darkness and the angels of light were arrayed against each other in some mighty struggle for the possession of the souls of men, should have tried to express itself in astrologic dreams, and, as was the fashion then, attributed to the “rulers of the planetary houses” some sympathy with the coming world-tragedy.

But, for the wise, there needed no conjunction of planets to tell them that the day was near at hand, when the long desultory duel between Spain and England would end, once and for all, in some great death-grapple. The war, as yet, had been confined to the Netherlands, to the West Indies, and the coasts and isles of Africa; to the quarters, in fact, where Spain was held either to have no rights, or to have forfeited them by tyranny. But Spain itself had been respected by England, as England had by Spain; and trade to Spanish ports went on as usual, till, in the year 1585, the Spaniard, without warning, laid an embargo on all English ships coming to his European shores. They were to be seized, it seemed, to form part of an enormous armament, which was to attack and crush, once and for all—whom? The rebellious Netherlanders, said the Spaniards: but the queen, the ministry, and, when it was just not too late, the people of England, thought otherwise. England was the destined victim; so, instead of negotiating, in order to avoid fighting, they fought in order to produce negotiation. Drake, Frobisher, and Carlisle, as we have seen, swept the Spanish Main with fire and sword, stopping the Indian supplies; while Walsingham (craftiest, and yet most honest of mortals) prevented, by some mysterious financial operation, the Venetian merchants from repairing the Spaniards’ loss by a loan; and no Armada came that year.

In the meanwhile, the Jesuits, here and abroad, made no secret, among their own dupes, of the real objects of the Spanish armament. The impious heretics,—the Drakes and Raleighs, Grenvilles and Cavendishes, Hawkinses and Frobishers, who had dared to violate that hidden sanctuary of just half the globe, which the pope had bestowed on the defender of the true faith,—a shameful ruin, a terrible death awaited them, when their sacrilegious barks should sink beneath the thunder of Spanish cannon, blessed by the pope, and sanctified with holy water and prayer to the service of “God and his Mother.” Yes, they would fall, and England with them. The proud islanders, who had dared to rebel against St. Peter, and to cast off the worship of “Mary,” should bow their necks once more under the yoke of the Gospel. Their so-called queen, illegitimate, excommunicate, contumacious, the abettor of free-trade, the defender of the Netherlands, the pillar of false doctrine throughout Europe, should be sent in chains across the Alps, to sue for her life at the feet of the injured and long-suffering father of mankind, while his nominee took her place upon the throne which she had long since forfeited by her heresy.

“What nobler work? How could the Church of God be more gloriously propagated? How could higher merit be obtained by faithful Catholics? It must succeed. Spain was invincible in valor, inexhaustible in wealth. Heaven itself offered them an opportunity. They had nothing now to fear from the Turk, for they had concluded a truce with him; nothing from the French, for they were embroiled in civil war. The heavens themselves had called upon Spain to fulfil her heavenly mission, and restore to the Church’s crown this brightest and richest of her lost jewels. The heavens themselves called to a new crusade. The saints, whose altars the English had rifled and profaned, called them to a new crusade. The Virgin Queen of Heaven, whose boundless stores of grace the English spurned, called them to a new crusade. Justly incensed at her own wrongs and indignities, that ‘ever-gracious Virgin, refuge of sinners, and mother of fair love, and holy hope,’ adjured by their knightly honor all valiant cavaliers to do battle in her cause against the impious harlot who assumed her titles, received from her idolatrous flatterers the homage due to Mary alone, and even (for Father Parsons had asserted it, therefore it must be true) had caused her name to be substituted for that of Mary in the Litanies of the Church. Let all who wore within a manly heart, without a manly sword, look on the woes of ‘Mary,’—her shame, her tears, her blushes, her heart pierced through with daily wounds, from heretic tongues, and choose between her and Elizabeth!”

So said Parsons, Allen, and dozens more; and said more than this, too, and much which one had rather not repeat; and were somewhat surprised and mortified to find that their hearers, though they granted the premises, were too dull or carnal to arrive at the same conclusion. The English lay Romanists, almost to a man, had hearts sounder than their heads, and, howsoever illogically, could not help holding to the strange superstition that, being Englishmen, they were bound to fight for England. So the hapless Jesuits, who had been boasting for years past that the persecuted faithful throughout the island would rise as one man to fight under the blessed banner of the pope and Spain, found that the faithful, like Demas of old, forsook them and “went after this present world;” having no objection, of course, to the restoration of Popery: but preferring some more comfortable method than an invasion which would inevitably rob them of their ancestral lands and would seat needy and greedy Castilians in their old country houses, to treat their tenants as they had treated the Indians of Hispaniola, and them as they had treated the caciques.

But though the hearts of men in that ungodly age were too hard to melt at the supposed woes of the Mary who reigned above, and too dull to turn rebels and traitors for the sake of those thrones and principalities in supra-lunar spheres which might be in her gift: yet there was a Mary who reigned (or ought to reign) below, whose woes (like her gifts) were somewhat more palpable to the carnal sense. A Mary who, having every comfort and luxury (including hounds and horses) found for her by the English Government, at an expense which would be now equal to some twenty thousand a year, could afford to employ the whole of her jointure as Queen Dowager of France (probably equal to fifty thousand a year more), in plotting the destruction of the said government, and the murder of its queen; a Mary who, if she prospered as she ought, might have dukedoms, and earldoms, fair lands and castles to bestow on her faithful servants; a Mary, finally, who contrived by means of an angel face, a serpent tongue, and a heart (as she said herself) as hard as a diamond, to make every weak man fall in love with her, and, what was worse, fancy more or less that she was in love with him.

Of her the Jesuits were not unmindful; and found it convenient, indeed, to forget awhile the sorrows of the Queen of Heaven in those of the Queen of Scots. Not that they cared much for those sorrows; but they were an excellent stock-in-trade. She was a Romanist; she was “beautiful and unfortunate,” a virtue which, like charity, hides the multitude of sins; and therefore she was a convenient card to play in the great game of Rome against the Queen and people of England; and played the poor card was, till it got torn up by over-using. Into her merits or demerits I do not enter deeply here. Let her rest in peace.

To all which the people of England made a most practical and terrible answer. From the highest noble to the lowest peasant, arose one simultaneous plebiscitum: “We are tired of these seventeen years of chicanery and terror. This woman must die: or the commonweal of England perish!” We all know which of the two alternatives was chosen.

All Europe stood aghast: but rather with astonishment at English audacity, than with horror at English wickedness. Mary’s own French kinsfolk had openly given her up as too bad to be excused, much less assisted. Her own son blustered a little to the English ambassador; for the majesty of kings was invaded: whereon Walsingham said in open council, that “the queen should send him a couple of hounds, and that would set all right.” Which sage advice (being acted on, and some deer sent over and above) was so successful that the pious mourner, having run off (Randolph says, like a baby to see the deer in their cart), returned for answer that he would “thereafter depend wholly upon her majesty, and serve her fortune against all the world; and that he only wanted now two of her majesty’s yeoman prickers, and a couple of her grooms of the deer.” The Spaniard was not sorry on the whole for the catastrophe; for all that had kept him from conquering England long ago was the fear lest, after it was done, he might have had to put the crown thereof on Mary’s head, instead of his own. But Mary’s death was as convenient a stalking-horse to him as to the pope; and now the Armada was coming in earnest.

Elizabeth began negotiating; but fancy not that she does nothing more, as the following letter testifies, written about midsummer, 1587.

“F. Drake to Captain Amyas Leigh. This with haste.

“DEAR LAD,

“As I said to her most glorious majesty, I say to you now. There are two ways of facing an enemy. The one to stand off, and cry, ‘Try that again, and I’ll strike thee’; the other to strike him first, and then, ‘Try that at all, and I’ll strike thee again.’ Of which latter counsel her majesty so far approves, that I go forthwith (tell it not in Gath) down the coast, to singe the king of Spain’s beard (so I termed it to her majesty, she laughing), in which if I leave so much as a fishing-boat afloat from the Groyne unto Cadiz, it will not be with my good will, who intend that if he come this year, he shall come by swimming and not by sailing. So if you are still the man I have known you, bring a good ship round to Plymouth within the month, and away with me for hard blows and hard money, the feel of both of which you know pretty well by now.

“Thine lovingly,

“F. Drake.”

Amyas clutched his locks over this letter, and smoked more tobacco the day he got it than had ever before been consumed at once in England. But he kept true to his promise; and this was his reply:—

“Amyas Leigh to the Worshipful Sir F. Drake, Admiral of her Majesty’s Fleet in Plymouth.

“MOST HONORED SIR,

“A magician keeps me here, in bilboes for which you have no picklock; namely, a mother who forbids. The loss is mine: but Antichrist I can fight any year (for he will not die this bout, nor the next), while my mother—but I will not trouble your patience more than to ask from you to get me news, if you can, from any prisoners of one Don Guzman Maria Magdalena Sotomayor de Soto; whether he is in Spain or in the Indies; and what the villain does, and where he is to be found. This only I entreat of you, and so remain behind with a heavy heart.

“Yours to command in all else, and I would to Heaven, in this also,

“AMYAS LEIGH.”

I am sorry to have to say, that after having thus obeyed his mother, Master Amyas, as men are too apt to do, revenged himself on her by being more and more cross and disagreeable. But his temper amended much, when, a few months after, Drake returned triumphant, having destroyed a hundred sail in Cadiz alone, taken three great galleons with immense wealth on board, burnt the small craft all along the shore, and offered battle to Santa Cruz at the mouth of the Tagus. After which it is unnecessary to say, that the Armada was put off for yet another year.

This news, indeed, gave Amyas little comfort; for he merely observed, grumbling, that Drake had gone and spoiled everybody else’s sport: but what cheered him was news from Drake that Don Guzman had been heard of from the captain of one of the galleons; that he was high in favor in Spain, and commandant of soldiers on board one of the largest of the marquis’s ships.

And when Amyas heard that, a terrible joy took possession of him. When the Armada came, as come it would, he should meet his enemy at last! He could wait now patiently: if—and he shuddered at himself, as he found himself in the very act of breathing a prayer that Don Guzman might not die before that meeting.

In the meanwhile, rumor flew thousand-tongued through the length and breadth of the land; of vast preparations going on in Spain and Italy; of timber felled long before for some such purpose, brought down to the sea, and sawn out for shipbuilding; of casting of cannon, and drilling of soldiers; of ships in hundreds collecting at Lisbon; of a crusade preached by Pope Sixtus the Fifth, who had bestowed the kingdom of England on the Spaniard, to be enjoyed by him as vassal tributary to Rome; of a million of gold to be paid by the pope, one-half down at once, the other half when London was taken; of Cardinal Allen writing and printing busily in the Netherlands, calling on all good Englishmen to carry out, by rebelling against Elizabeth, the bull of Sixtus the Fifth, said (I blush to repeat it) to have been dictated by the Holy Ghost; of Inquisitors getting ready fetters and devil’s engines of all sorts; of princes and noblemen, flocking from all quarters, gentlemen selling their private estates to fit out ships; how the Prince of Melito, the Marquess of Burgrave, Vespasian Gonzaga, John Medicis, Amadas of Savoy, in short, the illegitimate sons of all the southern princes, having no lands of their own, were coming to find that necessary of life in this pleasant little wheat-garden. Nay, the Duke of Medina Sidonia had already engaged Mount-Edgecombe for himself, as the fairest jewel of the south; which when good old Sir Richard Edgecombe heard, he observed quietly, that in 1555 he had the pleasure of receiving at his table at one time the admirals of England, Spain, and the Netherlands, and therefore had experience in entertaining Dons; and made preparations for the visit by filling his cellars with gunpowder, with a view to a house-warming and feu-de-joie on the occasion. But as old Fuller says, “The bear was not yet killed, and Medina Sidonia might have catched a great cold, had he no other clothes to wear than the skin thereof.”

So flew rumor, false and true, till poor John Bull’s wits were well-nigh turned: but to the very last, after his lazy fashion, he persuaded himself that it would all come right somehow; that it was too great news to be true; that if it was true, the expedition was only meant for the Netherlands; and, in short, sat quietly over his beef and beer for many a day after the French king had sent him fair warning, and the queen, the ministry, and the admirals had been assuring him again and again that he, and not the Dutchman, was the destined prey of this great flight of ravenous birds.

At last the Spaniard, in order that there should be no mistake about the matter, kindly printed a complete bill of the play, to be seen still in Van Meteran, for the comfort of all true Catholics, and confusion of all pestilent heretics; which document, of course, the seminary priests used to enforce the duty of helping the invaders, and the certainty of their success; and from their hands it soon passed into those of the devout ladies, who were not very likely to keep it to themselves; till John Bull himself found his daughters buzzing over it with very pale faces (as young ladies well might who had no wish to follow the fate of the damsels of Antwerp), and condescending to run his eye through it, discovered, what all the rest of Europe had known for months past, that he was in a very great scrape.

Well it was for England, then, that her Tudor sovereigns had compelled every man (though they kept up no standing army) to be a trained soldier. Well it was that Elizabeth, even in those dangerous days of intrigue and rebellion, had trusted her people enough, not only to leave them their weapons, but (what we, forsooth, in these more “free” and “liberal” days dare not do) to teach them how to use them. Well it was, that by careful legislation for the comfort and employment of “the masses” (term then, thank God, unknown), she had both won their hearts, and kept their bodies in fighting order. Well it was that, acting as fully as Napoleon did on “la carriere ouverte aux talens,” she had raised to the highest posts in her councils, her army, and her navy, men of business, who had not been ashamed to buy and sell as merchants and adventurers. Well for England, in a word, that Elizabeth had pursued for thirty years a very different course from that which we have been pursuing for the last thirty, with one exception, namely, the leaving as much as possible to private enterprise.

There we have copied her: would to Heaven that we had in some other matters! It is the fashion now to call her a despot: but unless every monarch is to be branded with that epithet whose power is not as circumscribed as Queen Victoria’s is now, we ought rather to call her the most popular sovereign, obeyed of their own free will by the freest subjects which England has ever seen; confess the Armada fight to have been as great a moral triumph as it was a political one; and (now that our late boasting is a little silenced by Crimean disasters) inquire whether we have not something to learn from those old Tudor times, as to how to choose officials, how to train a people, and how to defend a country.

To return to the thread of my story.

January, 1587-8, had well-nigh run through, before Sir Richard Grenville made his appearance on the streets of Bideford. He had been appointed in November one of the council of war for providing for the safety of the nation, and the West Country had seen nothing of him since. But one morning, just before Christmas, his stately figure darkened the old bay-window at Burrough, and Amyas rushed out to meet him, and bring him in, and ask what news from Court.

“All good news, dear lad, and dearer madam. The queen shows the spirit of a very Boadicea or Semiramis; ay, a very Scythian Tomyris, and if she had the Spaniard before her now, would verily, for aught I know, feast him as the Scythian queen did Cyrus, with ‘Satia te sanguine, quod sitisti.’”