CHAP. II. comprised one side of Cork harbour, with the island now occupied by Queenstown. The Queen, through the influence, it is said, of Burleigh, refused her sanction. Next year Ralegh was writing again to Grey in vehement censure of Ormond. He repudiated any complicity in the defencelessness of the great wood of Conoloathe, and the country between the Dingle and Kilkenny. The commissariat of Cork, he charged, had been recklessly neglected; and Desmond's and Barry's wives were being encouraged to gather help for their traitor lords. Discontent. Denunciations of a general by his officer have an evil sound. Ralegh's apology, such as it is, must be sought in his just sense of a masterly capacity. He knew he was right; from the point of view of the prevalent Elizabethan policy towards Ireland, though not from Burleigh's, he was right. He raged at his want of official authority to correct the wrong. He fretted, moreover, at being left in Ireland at all. Ormond quarrelled with Grey, and was recalled in the spring of 1581. The lieutenancy of Munster was assigned jointly to Ralegh, Sir William Morgan, and Captain Piers. Ralegh continued discontented. He sighed for a wider sphere. From his quarters at Lismore he wrote in August, 1581, to Lord Leicester. He desired 'to put the Earl in mind of his affection, having to the world both professed and practised the same.' Incidentally he intimated more than readiness to return to England. 'I have spent,' he writes, 'some time here under the Deputy, in such poor place and charge as, were it not for I knew him to be one of yours, I would disdain it as much as to keep sheep.' His tone implied that he understood he had come on probation for more exalted functions elsewhere, and that he had a claim upon Leicester's patronage. How he had established it is unknown. Probably the intimacy began in London before he received his Irish commission. He was at any rate sufficiently intimate to be able to recommend a man of some eminence, as was Sir Warham St. Leger, to the Earl's protection. He did not wish to stay in Ireland. The immediate success CHAP. II. of his hardness and resoluteness, when he was given a free hand, would have deprived him of the option, if he had wished it. After Ormond's dismissal the pacification of Munster went rapidly on under him and his fellow lieutenants. Captain John Zouch, an officer as ruthless to Irishmen as himself, who was appointed Governor of the province in August, 1581, worked on the same lines. It became practicable to disband part of the English forces. Ralegh's own company was paid off without apparent dissatisfaction on his part. Being needed no longer in Ireland he was sent home by Grey in December, Return to 1581, with despatches. For his expenses he was paid on December 29, at the liberal rate of £20, which may be roughly reckoned as equivalent to £100. England. CHAP. III. Grey. CHAPTER III. ROYAL FAVOUR (1581-1582). THIS visit of Ralegh's to the Court was the turning-point in his career. How it became that has been explained in different ways. According to Naunton a variance between him and Ralegh and Grey drew both over to plead their cause. Naunton goes on to say that Ralegh 'had much the better in telling of his tale; and so much that the Queen and the lords took no slight mark of the man and his parts; for from thence he came to be known, and to have access to the Queen and the lords.' It is natural to suppose that Ralegh's Irish campaigns were concerned with his sudden rise at Court. Thenceforward he was a high authority on Irish policy. His Irish experience continued to be the sheet-anchor of his ascendency with the Queen. Naunton's tale, too, is supported by evidence from the Hatfield and the Irish State papers of Ralegh's disposition to form and push Irish plans of his own, and of Grey's keen jealousy of the habit. Burleigh on January 1, 1582, in a letter to the Lord Deputy, mentioned that Mr. Rawley had informed her Majesty how the charge of five or six hundred soldiers for the garrison of Munster might be shifted from the Queen to the province without umbrage to Ormond, its most powerful land-owner. To this the Lord Deputy speedily replied, vehemently criticising 'the plot delivered by Captain Rawley unto her Majesty.' He condemned it as a plausible fancy, 'affecting credit with profit,' but 'framed upon impossibilities for others to execute.' To Walsingham he complained bitterly of misrepresentations at Court in the same January, and, in the following April, declared that he 'neither liked CHAP. III. Captain Rawley's carriage, nor his company.' On the other hand, Grey is not known to have returned from Ireland till August, 1582; and the Council Register contains no reference to a personal controversy between Ralegh and him. But Ralegh may well have privately expounded to the Queen and some Privy Councillors his views, which would then have been transmitted to Grey to answer. Naunton's mistake in confronting the Deputy and the self-confident Captain directly at the Council board does not seriously affect the value otherwise of his statement. Still, the account of Ralegh's admittance to the Queen's favour, with its particular circumstances, rests, it must be remembered, on Naunton's own not unimpeachable authority. Other authors who tell the same story, have simply and unsuspiciously borrowed it from him. Students of Ralegh's history have to accustom themselves to the use by successive biographers of the same hypothetical facts with as much boldness as if they had been the fruit of each writer's independent research. Another account attributes to Leicester Ralegh's sudden favour on his return from Ireland. A few months before he was, we have seen, soliciting the Earl for a change of employment. His introduction at Court may have been the answer. Sir Henry Wotton, adopting the view, cynically surmised that Leicester wished to 'bestow handsomely upon another some part of the pains, and perhaps of the envy, to which long indulgent fortune is obnoxious.' By others, whom Scott has partly followed, the Earl of Sussex has been credited with the elevation of Ralegh, as a counterpoise to Leicester. Neither the one noble nor the other, it was supposed, could have patriotically desired to enrol in the public service the most effective of recruits. Amongst all the subtle solutions of the mystery of Ralegh's leap into prominence, Fuller's well- Fuller's worn story, which is now Scott's, commends itself for comparative simplicity. Everybody has heard how her Majesty, meeting with a plashy place, made some scruple to go on; when Tale. - Not Improbable. CHAP. III. Ralegh, dressed in the gay and genteel habit of those times, presently cast off and spread his new plush cloak on the ground, whereon the Queen trod gently over, rewarding him afterwards with many suits for his so free and seasonable tender of so fair a footcloth. Fuller, again, it is who vouches for the Ralegh, he says, having thus attracted notice, wrote on a window, which Elizabeth was to pass— sequel of the incident. Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall. Elizabeth capped it with If thy heart fails thee, climb not at all. Some of Ralegh's later biographers have felt so intensely the seriousness of their task, that they either omit or ridicule the legend. The whole appeared first in the Worthies, published in 1662. No documentary proof can be given of its veracity; and there is no disproof. The opportunity might easily have occurred; and Ralegh was of an eagerness and an adroitness not to have let it slip. Undoubtedly the anecdote has the intrinsic merit beyond the rest of pointing to the final and determining agent in his change of fortune. All the other answers to the enigma may contain an ingredient of truth. Leicester would recognize his capacity, and might have been ready to use him. Sussex would perceive the danger of allowing so redoubtable a free lance to pass to a rival service. Walsingham and Burleigh were manifestly impressed with his extraordinary sagacity and strength of will. His Irish services, which had called forth the admiration of Grey himself so long as Ralegh fought under him, could not fail to be appreciated by the Queen's wise councillors. He was backed by the vast family circles of the Gilberts and Champernouns. In his later life he could speak of an hundred gentlemen of my kindred.' He was no novice at the Court itself, which he had studied for years before it recognized him as an inmate. But Leicester and Sussex, like Grey, and even Burleigh and Walsingham, though they might have employed him, and have bandied him among them, would have concurred in keeping |