Sir Walter Raleigh and His Time

At last the weary days of sickness and anxiety succeeded to days of terror.  On the 1st of February a strange report comes by an Indian.  An inland savage has brought confused and contradictory news down the river that San Thomé is sacked, the governor and two Spanish captains slain (names given) and two English captains, nameless.  After this entry follow a few confused ones, set down as happening in January, concerning attempts to extract the truth from the Indians, and the negligence of the mariners, who are diligent in nothing but pillaging and stealing.  And so ends abruptly this sad document.

The truth comes at last—but when, does not appear—in a letter from Keymis, dated January 8.  San Thomé has been stormed, sacked, and burnt.  Four refiners’ houses were found in it; the best in the town; so that the Spaniards have been mining there; but no coin or bullion except a little plate.  One English captain is killed, and that captain is Walter Raleigh, his firstborn.  He died leading them on, when some, ‘more careful of valour and safety, began to recoil shamefully.’  His last words were, ‘Lord have mercy upon me and prosper our enterprise.’  A Spanish captain, Erinetta, struck him down with the butt of a musket after he had received a bullet.  John Plessington, his sergeant, avenged him by running Erinetta through with his halbert.

Keymis has not yet been to the mine; he could not, ‘by reason of the murmurings, discords, and vexations’; but he will go at once, make trial of the mine, and come down to Trinidad by the Macareo mouth.  He sends a parcel of scattered papers, a roll of tobacco, a tortoise, some oranges and lemons.  ‘Praying God to give you health and strength of body, and a mind armed against all extremities, I rest ever to be commanded, your lordship’s, Keymish.’

‘Oh Absalom, my son, my son, would God I had died for thee!’  But weeping is in vain.  The noble lad sleeps there under the palm-trees, beside the mighty tropic stream, while the fair Basset, ‘his bride in the sight of God,’ recks not of him as she wanders in the woods of Umberleigh, wife to the son of Raleigh’s deadliest foe.  Raleigh, Raleigh, surely God’s blessing is not on this voyage of thine.  Surely He hath set thy misdeeds before Him, and thy secret sins in the light of His countenance.

Another blank of misery: but his honour is still safe.  Keymis will return with that gold ore, that pledge of his good faith for which he has ventured all.  Surely God will let that come after all, now that he has paid as its price his first-born’s blood?

At last Keymis returns with thinned numbers.  All are weary, spirit-broken, discontented, mutinous.  Where is the gold ore?

There is none.  Keymis has never been to the mine after all.  His companions curse him as a traitor who has helped Raleigh to deceive them into ruin; the mine is imaginary—a lie.  The crews are ready to break into open mutiny; after a while they will do so.

Yes, God is setting this man’s secret sins in the light of His countenance.  If he has been ambitious, his ambition has punished itself now.  If he has cared more for his own honour than for his wife and children, that sin too has punished itself.  If he has (which I affirm not) tampered with truth for the sake of what seemed to him noble and just ends, that too has punished itself; for his men do not trust him.  If he has (which I affirm not) done any wrong in that matter of Cobham, that too has punished itself: for his men, counting him as non ens in law, will not respect or obey him.  If he has spoken, after his old fashion, rash and exaggerated words, and goes on speaking them, even though it be through the pressure of despair, that too shall punish itself; and for every idle word that he shall say, God will bring him into judgment.  And why, but because he is noble?  Why, but because he is nearer to God by a whole heaven than others whom God lets fatten on their own sins, having no understanding, because they are in honour, and having children at their hearts’ desire, and leaving the rest of their substance to their babes?  Not so does God deal with His elect when they will try to worship at once self and Him; He requires truth in the inward parts, and will purge them till they are true, and single-eyed, and full of light.

Keymis returns with the wreck of his party.  The scene between him and Raleigh may be guessed.  Keymis has excuse on excuse.  He could not get obeyed after young Raleigh’s death: he expected to find that Sir Walter was either dead of his sickness or of grief for his son, and had no wish ‘to enrich a company of rascals who made no account of him.’  He dare not go up to the mine because (and here Raleigh thinks his excuse fair) the fugitive Spaniards lay in the craggy woods through which he would have to pass, and that he had not men enough even to hold the town securely.  If he reached the mine and left a company there, he had no provisions for them; and he dared not send backward and forward to the town while the Spaniards were in the woods.  The warnings sent by Gondomar had undone all, and James’s treachery had done its work.  So Keymis, ‘thinking it a greater error, so he said, to discover the mine to the Spaniards than to excuse himself to the Company, said that he could not find it.’  From all which one thing at least is evident, that Keymis believed in the existence of the mine.

Raleigh ‘rejects these fancies’; tells him before divers gentlemen that ‘a blind man might find it by the marks which Keymis himself had set down under his hand’: that ‘his case of losing so many men in the woods’ was a mere pretence: after Walter was slain, he knew that Keymis had no care of any man’s surviving.  ‘You have undone me, wounded my credit with the King past recovery.  As you have followed your own advice, and not mine, you must satisfy his Majesty.  It shall be glad if you can do it: but I cannot.’  There is no use dwelling on such vain regrets and reproaches.  Raleigh perhaps is bitter, unjust.  As he himself writes twice, to his wife and Sir Ralph Winwood, his ‘brains are broken.’  He writes to them both, and re-opens the letters to add long postscripts, at his wits’ end.  Keymis goes off; spends a few miserable days; and then enters Raleigh’s cabin.  He has written his apology to Lord Arundel, and begs Raleigh to allow of it.  ‘No.  You have undone me by your obstinacy.  I will not favour or colour your former folly.’  ‘Is that your resolution, sir?’  ‘It is.’  ‘I know not then, sir, what course to take.’  And so he goes out, and into his own cabin overhead.  A minute after a pistol-shot is heard.  Raleigh sends up a boy to know the reason.  Keymis answers from within that he has fired it off because it had been long charged; and all is quiet.

Half an hour after the boy goes into the cabin.  Keymis is lying on his bed, the pistol by him.  The boy moves him.  The pistol-shot has broken a rib, and gone no further; but as the corpse is turned over, a long knife is buried in that desperate heart.  Another of the old heroes is gone to his wild account.

Gradually drops of explanation ooze out.  The ‘Sergeant-major, Raleigh’s nephew, and others, confess that Keymis told them that he could have brought them in two hours to the mine: but as the young heir was slain, and his father was unpardoned and not like to live, he had no reason to open the mine, either for the Spaniard or the King.’  Those latter words are significant.  What cared the old Elizabethan seaman for the weal of such a king?  And, indeed, what good to such a king would all the mines in Guiana be?  They answered that the King, nevertheless, had ‘granted Raleigh his heart’s desire under the great seal.’  He replied that ‘the grant to Raleigh was to a man non ens in law, and therefore of no force.’  Here, too, James’s policy has worked well.  How could men dare or persevere under such a cloud?

How, indeed, could they have found heart to sail at all?  The only answer is that they knew Raleigh well enough to have utter faith in him, and that Keymis himself knew of the mine.

Puppies at home in England gave out that he had killed himself from remorse at having deceived so many gentlemen with an imaginary phantom.  Every one, of course, according to his measure of charity, has power and liberty to assume any motive which he will.  Mine is simply the one which shows upon the face of the documents; that the old follower, devoted alike to the dead son and to the doomed father, feeling that he had, he scarce knew how, failed in the hour of need, frittered away the last chance of a mighty enterprise which had been his fixed idea for years, and ruined the man whom he adored, avenged upon himself the fault of having disobeyed orders, given peremptorily, and to be peremptorily executed.

Here, perhaps, my tale should end; for all beyond is but the waking of the corpse.  The last death-struggle of the Elizabethan heroism is over, and all its remains vanish slowly in an undignified, sickening way.  All epics end so.  After the war of Troy, Achilles must die by coward Paris’s arrow, in some mysterious, confused, pitiful fashion; and stately Hecuba must rail herself into a very dog, and bark for ever shamefully around lonely Cynossema.  Young David ends as a dotard—Solomon as worse.  Glorious Alexander must die, half of fever, half of drunkenness, as the fool dieth.  Charles the Fifth, having thrown all away but his follies, ends in a convent, a superstitious imbecile; Napoleon squabbles to the last with Sir Hudson Lowe about champagne.  It must be so; and the glory must be God’s alone.  For in great men, and great times, there is nothing good or vital but what is of God, and not of man’s self; and when He taketh away that divine breath they die, and return again to their dust.  But the earth does not lose; for when He sendeth forth His Spirit they live, and renew the face of the earth.  A new generation arises, with clearer sight, with fuller experience, sometimes with nobler aims; and

‘The old order changeth, giveth place to the new,And God fulfils himself in many ways.

The Elizabethan epic did not end a day too soon.  There was no more life left in it; and God had something better in store for England.  Raleigh’s ideal was a noble one: but God’s was nobler far.  Raleigh would have made her a gold kingdom, like Spain, and destroyed her very vitals by that gold, as Spain was destroyed.  And all the while the great and good God was looking steadfastly upon that little struggling Virginian village, Raleigh’s first-born, forgotten in his new mighty dreams, and saying, ‘Here will I dwell, for I have a delight therein.’  There, and not in Guiana; upon the simple tillers of the soil, not among wild reckless gold-hunters, would His blessing rest.  The very coming darkness would bring brighter light.  The evil age itself would be the parent of new good, and drive across the seas steadfast Pilgrim Fathers and generous Royalist Cavaliers, to be the parents of a mightier nation than has ever yet possessed the earth.  Verily, God’s ways are wonderful, and His counsels in the great deep.

So ends the Elizabethan epic.  Must we follow the corpse to the grave?  It is necessary.

And now, ‘you gentlemen of England, who sit at home at ease,’ what would you have done in like case?—Your last die thrown; your last stake lost; your honour, as you fancy, stained for ever; your eldest son dead in battle—What would you have done?  What Walter Raleigh did was this.  He kept his promise.  He had promised Lord Arundel to return to England; and return he did.

But it is said his real intention, as he himself confessed, was to turn pirate and take the Mexico fleet.

That wild thoughts of such a deed may have crossed his mind, may have been a terrible temptation to him, may even have broken out in hasty words, one does not deny.  He himself says that he spoke of such a thing ‘to keep his men together.’  All depends on how the words were spoken.  The form of the sentence, the tone of voice, is everything.  Who could blame him, if seeing some of the captains whom he had most trusted deserting him, his men heaping him with every slander, and, as he solemnly swore on the scaffold, calling witnesses thereto by name, forcing him to take an oath that he would not return to England before they would have him, and locking him into his own cabin—who could blame him, I ask, for saying in that daring off-hand way of his, which has so often before got him into trouble, ‘Come, my lads, do not despair.  If the worst comes to the worst, there is the Plate-fleet to fall back upon’?  When I remember, too, that the taking of the said Plate-fleet was in Raleigh’s eyes an altogether just thing; and that he knew perfectly that if he succeeded therein he would be backed by the public opinion of all England, and probably buy his pardon of James, who, if he loved Spain well, loved money better; my surprise rather is, that he did not go and do it.  As for any meeting of captains in his cabin and serious proposal of such a plan, I believe it to be simply one of the innumerable lies which James inserted in his ‘Declaration,’ gathered from the tales of men who, fearing (and reasonably) lest their heads should follow Raleigh’s, tried to curry favour by slandering him.  This ‘Declaration’ has been so often exposed that I may safely pass it by; and pass by almost as safely the argument which some have drawn from a chance expression of his in his pathetic letter to Lady Raleigh, in which he ‘hopes that God would send him somewhat before his return.’  To prove an intention of piracy in the despairing words of a ruined man writing to comfort a ruined wife for the loss of her first-born is surely to deal out hard measure.  Heaven have mercy upon us, if all the hasty words which woe has wrung from our hearts are to be so judged either by man or God!

Sir Julius Cæsar, again, one of the commission appointed to examine him, informs us that, on being confronted with Captains St. Leger and Pennington, he confessed that he proposed the taking of the Mexico fleet if the mine failed.  To which I can only answer, that all depends on how the thing was said, and that this is the last fact which we should find in Sir Julius’s notes, which are, it is confessed, so confused, obscure, and full of gaps, as to be often hardly intelligible.  The same remark applies to Wilson’s story, which I agree with Mr. Tytler in thinking worthless.  Wilson, it must be understood, is employed after Raleigh’s return as a spy upon him, which office he executes, all confess (and Wilson himself as much as any), as falsely, treacherously, and hypocritically as did ever sinful man; and, inter alia, he has this, ‘This day he told me what discourse he and the Lord Chancellor had about taking the Plate-fleet, which he confessed he would have taken had he lighted on it.’  To which my Lord Chancellor said, ‘Why, you would have been a pirate.’  ‘Oh,’ quoth he, ‘did you ever know of any that were pirates for millions?  They only that wish for small things are pirates.’  Now, setting aside the improbability that Raleigh should go out of his way to impeach himself to the man whom he must have known was set there to find matter for his death, all, we say, depends on how it was said.  If the Lord Chancellor ever said to Raleigh, ‘To take the Mexico fleet would be piracy,’ it would have been just like Raleigh to give such an answer.  The speech is a perfectly true one: Raleigh knew the world, no man better; and saw through its hollowness, and the cant and hypocrisy of his generation; and he sardonically states an undeniable fact.  He is not expressing his own morality, but that of the world; just as he is doing in that passage of his ‘Apology,’ about which I must complain of Mr. Napier.  ‘It was a maxim of his,’ says Mr. Napier, ‘that good success admits of no examination.’  This is not fair.  The sentence in the original goes on, ‘so the contrary allows of no excuse, however reasonable and just whatsoever.’  His argument all through the beginning of the ‘Apology,’ supported by instance on instance from history, is—I cannot get a just hearing, because I have failed in opening this mine.  So it is always.  Glory covers the multitude of sins.  But a man who has failed is a fair mark for every slanderer, puppy, ignoramus, discontented mutineer; as I am now.  What else, in the name of common sense, could have been his argument?  Does Mr. Napier really think that Raleigh, even if, in the face of all the noble and pious words which he had written, he held so immoral a doctrine, would have been shameless and senseless enough to assert his own rascality in an apology addressed to the most ‘religious’ of kings in the most canting of generations?

But still more astonished am I at the use which has been made of Captain Parker’s letter.  The letter is written by a man in a state of frantic rage and disappointment.  There never was any mine, he believes now.  Keymis’s ‘delays we found mere delusions; for he was false to all men and hateful to himself, loathing to live since he could do no more villany.  I will speak no more of this hateful fellow to God and man.’  And it is on the testimony of a man in this temper that we are asked to believe that ‘the admiral and vice-admiral,’ Raleigh and St. Leger, are going to the Western Islands ‘to look for homeward-bound men’: if, indeed, the looking for homeward-bound men means really looking for the Spanish fleet, and not merely for recruits for their crews.  I never recollect—and I have read pretty fully the sea-records of those days—such a synonym used either for the Mexican or Indian fleet.  But let this be as it may, the letter proves too much.  For, first, it proves that whosoever is not going to turn ‘pirate,’ our calm and charitable friend Captain Parker is; ‘for my part, by the permission of God, I will either make a voyage or bury myself in the sea.’  Now, what making a voyage meant there is no doubt; and the sum total of the letter is, that a man intending to turn rover himself accuses, under the influence of violent passion, his comrades of doing the like.  We may believe him about himself: about others, we shall wait for testimony a little less interested.

But the letter proves too much again.  For Parker says that ‘Witney and Woolaston are gone off a-head to look for homeward-bound men,’ thus agreeing with Raleigh’s message to his wife, that ‘Witney, for whom I sold all my plate at Plymouth, and to whom I gave more credit and countenance than to all the captains of my fleet, ran from me at the Grenadas, and Woolaston with him.’

And now, reader, how does this of Witney, and Woolaston, and Parker’s intentions to ‘pirate’ separately, if it be true, agree with King James’s story of Raleigh’s calling a council of war and proposing an attack on the Plate-fleet?  One or the other must needs be a lie; probably both.  Witney’s ship was of only 160 tons; Woolaston’s probably smaller.  Five such ships would be required, as any reader of Hakluyt must know, to take a single Carack; and it would be no use running the risk of hanging for any less prize.  The Spanish main was warned and armed, and the Western Isles also.  Is it possible that these two men would have been insane enough in such circumstances to go without Raleigh, if they could have gone with him?  And is it possible that he, if he had any set purpose of attacking the Plate-fleet, would not have kept them, in order to attempt that with him which neither they nor he could do without each other.  Moreover, no ‘piratical’ act ever took place; if any had, we should have heard enough about it; and why is Parker to be believed against Raleigh alone, when there is little doubt that he slandered all the rest of the captains?  Lastly, it was to this very Parker, with Mr. Tresham and another gentleman, that Raleigh appealed by name on the scaffold, as witnesses that it was his crew who tried to keep him from going home, and not he them.

My own belief is, and it is surely simple and rational enough, that Raleigh’s ‘brains,’ as he said, ‘were broken’; that he had no distinct plan: but that, loth to leave the New World without a second attempt on Guiana, he went up to Newfoundland to re-victual, ‘and with good hope,’ as he wrote to Winwood himself, ‘of keeping the sea till August with some four reasonable good ships,’ probably, as Oldys remarks, to try a trading voyage; but found his gentlemen too dispirited and incredulous, his men too mutinous to do anything; and seeing his ships go home one by one, at last followed them himself, because he had promised Arundel and Pembroke so to do; having, after all, as he declared on the scaffold, extreme difficulty in persuading his men to land at all in England.  The other lies about him, as of his having intended to desert his soldiers in Guiana, his having taken no tools to work the mine, and so forth, one only notices to say that the ‘Declaration’ takes care to make the most of them, without deigning, after its fashion, to adduce any proof but anonymous hearsays.  If it be true that Bacon drew up that famous document, it reflects no credit either on his honesty or his ‘inductive science.’

So Raleigh returns, anchors in Plymouth.  He finds that Captain North has brought home the news of his mishaps, and that there is a proclamation against him, which, by the bye, lies, for it talks of limitations and cautions given to Raleigh which do not appear in his commission; and, moreover, that a warrant is out for his apprehension.  He sends his men on shore, and starts for London to surrender himself, in company with faithful Captain King, who alone clings to him to the last, and from whom we have details of the next few days.  Near Ashburton he is met by Sir Lewis Stukely, his near kinsman, Vice-Admiral of Devon, who has orders to arrest him.  Raleigh tells him that he has saved him the trouble; and the two return to Plymouth, where Stukely, strangely enough, leaves him at liberty and rides about the country.  We should be slow in imputing baseness: but one cannot help suspecting from Stukely’s subsequent conduct that he had from the first private orders to give Raleigh a chance of trying to escape, in order to have a handle against him, such as his own deeds had not yet given.

The ruse, if it existed then, as it did afterwards, succeeds.  Raleigh hears bad news.  Gondomar has—or has not—told his story to the king by crying, ‘Piratas! piratas! piratas!’ and then rushing out without explanation.  James is in terror lest what had happened should break off the darling Spanish match.

Raleigh foresees ruin, perhaps death.  Life is sweet, and Guiana is yet where it was.  He may win a basketful of the ore still, and prove himself no liar.  He will escape to France.  Faithful King finds him a Rochelle ship; he takes boat to her, goes half way, and returns.  Honour is sweeter than life, and James may yet be just.  The next day he bribes the master to wait for him one more day, starts for the ship once more, and again returns to Plymouth—so King will make oath—of his own free will.  The temptation must have been terrible and the sin none.  What kept him from yielding but innocence and honour?  He will clear himself; and if not, abide the worst.  Stukely and James found out these facts, and made good use of them afterwards.  For now comes ‘a severe letter from my Lords’ to bring Raleigh up as speedily as his health will permit; and with it comes one Mannourie, a French quack, of whom honest King takes little note at the time, but who will make himself remembered.

And now begins a series of scenes most pitiable; Raleigh’s brains are indeed broken.  He is old, worn-out with the effects of his fever, lamed, ruined, broken-hearted, and, for the first time in his life, weak and silly.  He takes into his head the paltriest notion that he can gain time to pacify the King by feigning himself sick.  He puts implicit faith in the rogue Mannourie, whom he has never seen before.  He sends forward Lady Raleigh to London—perhaps ashamed—as who would not have been?—to play the fool in that sweet presence; and with her good Captain King, who is to engage one Cotterell, an old servant of Raleigh’s, to find a ship wherein to escape, if the worst comes to the worst.  Cotterell sends King to an old boatswain of his, who owns a ketch.  She is to lie off Tilbury; and so King waits Raleigh’s arrival.  What passed in the next four or five days will never be truly known, for our only account comes from two self-convicted villains, Stukely and Mannourie.  On these details I shall not enter.  First, because one cannot trust a word of them; secondly, because no one will wish to hear them who feels, as I do, how pitiable and painful is the sight of a great heart and mind utterly broken.  Neither shall I spend time on Stukely’s villanous treatment of Raleigh, for which he had a commission from James in writing; his pretending to help him to escape, his going down the Thames in a boat with him, his trying in vain to make honest King as great a rogue as himself.  Like most rascalities, Stukely’s conduct, even as he himself states it, is very obscure.  All that we can see is, that Cotterell told Stukely everything: that Stukely bade Cotterell carry on the deceit; that Stukely had orders from headquarters to incite Raleigh to say or do something which might form a fresh ground of accusal; that, being a clumsy rogue, he failed, and fell back on abetting Raleigh’s escape, as a last resource.  Be it as it may, he throws off the mask as soon as Raleigh has done enough to prove an intent to escape; arrests him, and conducts him to the Tower.