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 downby 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 Hezekiahs 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 Englandherself 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 fathers 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 peoples 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 marriedthe people of England is her husband. She has vowed it. And yet there is a tone of sadness in that great speech. Her womans 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 gospels, 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 daysstrange, terrible, and glorious. At home are Jesuits plotting; dark, crooked-pathed, going up and down in all manner of disguises, doing the devils 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 bedchamberwoman 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 Worlda 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 Antichristsuperstition, 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 Popes 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!
By possession, then? That may hold for Mexico, Peru, New Grenada, Paraguay, which have been colonised; though they were gained by means which make every one concerned in conquering them worthy of the gallows; and the right is only that of the thief to the purse, whose owner he has murdered. But as for the restWhy the Spaniard has not colonised, even explored, one-fifth of the New World, not even one-fifth of the coast. Is the existence of a few petty factories, often hundreds of miles apart, at a few river-mouths to give them a claim to the whole intermediate coast, much less to the vast unknown tracts inside? We will try that. If they appeal to the sword, so be it. The men are treacherous robbers; we will indemnify ourselves for our losses, and God defend the right.
So argued the English; and so sprung up that strange war of reprisals, in which, for eighteen years, it was held that there was no peace between England and Spain beyond the line, i.e., beyond the parallel of longitude where the Popes gift of the western world was said to begin; and, as the quarrel thickened and neared, extended to the Azores, Canaries, and coasts of Africa, where English and Spaniards flew at each other as soon as seen, mutually and by common consent, as natural enemies, each invoking God in the battle with Antichrist.
Into such a world as this goes forth young Raleigh, his heart full of chivalrous worship for Englands tutelary genius, his brain aflame with the true miracles of the new-found Hesperides, full of vague hopes, vast imaginations, and consciousness of enormous power. And yet he is no wayward dreamer, unfit for this work-day world. With a vein of song most lofty, insolent, and passionate, indeed unable to see aught without a poetic glow over the whole, he is eminently practical, contented to begin at the beginning that he may end at the end; one who could toil terribly, who always laboured at the matter in hand as if he were born only for that. Accordingly, he sets to work faithfully and stoutly, to learn his trade of soldiering, and learns it in silence and obscurity. He shares (it seems) in the retreat at Moncontour, and is by at the death of Condé, and toils on for five years, marching and skirmishing, smoking the enemy out of mountain-caves in Languedoc, and all the wild work of war. During the San Bartholomew massacre we hear nothing of him; perhaps he took refuge with Sidney and others in Walsinghams house. No records of these years remain, save a few scattered reminiscences in his works, which mark the shrewd, observant eye of the future statesman.
When he returned we know not. We trace him, in 1576, by some verses prefixed to Gascoignes satire, the Steele Glass, solid, stately, epigrammatic, by Walter Rawley of the Middle Temple. The style is his; spelling of names matters nought in days in which a man would spell his own name three different ways in one document.
Gascoigne, like Raleigh, knew Lord Grey of Wilton, and most men about town too; and had been a soldier abroad, like Raleigh, probably with him. It seems to have been the fashion for young idlers to lodge among the Templars; indeed, toward the end of the century, they had to be cleared out, as crowding the wigs and gowns too much; and perhaps proving noisy neighbours, as Raleigh may have done. To this period may be referred, probably, his Justice done on Mr. Charles Chester (Ben Jonsons Carlo Buffone), a perpetual talker, and made a noise like a drum in a room; so one time, at a tavern, Raleigh beats him and seals up his mouth, his upper and nether beard, with hard wax. For there is a great laugh in Raleighs heart, a genial contempt of asses; and one that will make him enemies hereafter: perhaps shorten his days.
One hears of him next, but only by report, in the Netherlands under Norris, where the nucleus of the English line (especially of its musquetry) was training. For Don John of Austria intends not only to crush the liberties and creeds of the Flemings, but afterwards to marry the Queen of Scots, and conquer England: and Elizabeth, unwillingly and slowly, for she cannot stomach rebels, has sent men and money to the States to stop Don John in time; which the valiant English and Scotch do on Lammas day, 1578, and that in a fashion till then unseen in war. For coming up late and panting, and being more sensible of a little heat of the sun than of any cold fear of death, they throw off their armour and clothes, and, in their shirts (not over-clean, one fears), give Don Johns rashness such a rebuff, that two months more see that wild meteor, with lost hopes and tarnished fame, lie down and vanish below the stormy horizon. In these days, probably, it is that he knew Colonel Bingham, a soldier of fortune, of a fancy high and wild, too desultory and over-voluble, who had, among his hundred and one schemes, one for the plantation of America as poor Sir Thomas Stukely (whom Raleigh must have known well), uncle of the traitor Lewis, had for the peopling of Florida.
Raleigh returns. Ten years has he been learning his soldiers trade in silence. He will take a lesson in seamanship next. The court may come in time: for by now the poor squires younger son must have discoveredperhaps even too fullythat he is not as other men are; that he can speak, and watch, and dare, and endure, as none around him can do. However, there are good adventures toward, as the Morte dArthur would say; and he will off with his half-brother Humphrey Gilbert to carry out his patent for planting Meta IncognitaThe Unknown Goal, as Queen Elizabeth has named itwhich will prove to be too truly and fatally unknown. In a latitude south of England, and with an Italian summer, who can guess that the winter will outfreeze Russia itself? The merchant-seaman, like the statesman, had yet many a thing to learn. Instead of smiling at our forefathers ignorance, let us honour the men who bought knowledge for us their children at the price of lives nobler than our own.
So Raleigh goes on his voyage with Humphrey Gilbert, to carry out the patent for discovering and planting in Meta Incognita; but the voyage prospers not. A smart brush with the Spaniards sends them home again, with the loss of Morgan, their best captain, and a tall ship; and Meta Incognita is forgotten for a while; but not the Spaniards. Who are these who forbid all English, by virtue of the Popes bull, to cross the Atlantic? That must be settled hereafter; and Raleigh, ever busy, is off to Ireland to command a company in that common weal, or rather common woe, as he calls it in a letter to Leicester. Two years and more pass here; and all the records of him which remain are of a man valiant, daring, and yet prudent beyond his fellows. He hates his work, and is not on too good terms with stern and sour, but brave and faithful Lord Grey; but Lord Grey is Leicesters friend, and Raleigh works patiently under him, like a sensible man, just because he is Leicesters friend. Some modern gentleman of noteI forget who, and do not care to recollectsays that Raleighs prudence never bore any proportion to his genius. The next biographer we open accuses him of being too calculating, cunning, timeserving; and so forth. Perhaps both are true. The mans was a character very likely to fall alternately into either sindoubtless did so a hundred times. Perhaps both are false. The mans character was, on occasion, certain to rise above both faults. We have evidence that he did so his whole life long.