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CHAPTER XXVIII

RALEIGH, SIDNEY, SPENSER

THE Elizabethan time had many examples of that combination of temperament and aptitude which we call genius. The term will not be denied Sir Walter Raleigh, a complete and wonderful Elizabethan and a brilliant illustration of the variety of human phase attaching to the same name and form." One would not call him good; nor was he religious: hatred, avarice, harbored in him; arrogance welled from his nature: a man of vivid desire, energy, imagination, vision, intellectual appetition; of jealousies and complainings, and of ready melancholy, with corresponding faculties of expression. His calamities proved a foil to his desires: they instructed him in sorrow and duress; to his worldly experience they added a more bitter realization of human hypocrisy, ingratitude, and treachery. His tragic lot evoked the further potentialities of his being.

No man of his time has attracted more biographers. Half-brother to Sir Humphrey Gilbert, he was born of fine Devonshire stock, possibly in 1552. The record of his Oxford life is scanty, and scanty the record of his youthful military service in France. The sea soon drew him. Besides other ventures, he made one voyage to the West Indies, another, and a tragic one, to the St. Lawrence, all before he went as an officer to harry Irish rebels in 1580. His brilliant service in Ireland was neutralized by his criticisms upon his superiors and his personal complaints. By the spring of 1582 he is found settled at Court and a prime favorite with the Queen. A gorgeous figure, bespangled with jewels, he also fastened attention by a display of knowledge, and his lively imaginative talk. He could make himself acceptable to other favorites, like Leicester; but proved a dangerous enemy to those who crossed him. His fortunes

advanced apace, the Queen bestowing on him sundry estates and, what cost her less, a patent by which all vintners in the kingdom should pay him annual license fees. This so-called "Farm of Wines " brought as much as ten thousand pounds a year, reckoned in modern values. A license granted him later to export woollen cloths may have trebled his revenues. He spent a good part of them in fitting out expeditions to North America; for the mantle of the drowned Sir Humphrey had settled upon his opulent and energetic shoulders, and his mind dilated with the vision of the West.

Raleigh's first expedition landed at Roanoke, and the land was named Virginia; a second one attempted colonization. At the same time, buccaneering ventures fed his hostility to Spain and brought him timely gold; with which he equipped other unsuccessful expeditions to Virginia. In 1587 the youthful Essex, more magnificently overweening even that Sir Walter, became a serious rival for Elizabeth's affection. But Raleigh's sea-activities did not lessen, while his repute for naval knowledge was enhanced by the Armada year. It was his clandestine marriage with a maid of honor that in 1592 cast him out of the Queen's favor-into the Tower. The melancholy of that temporary restraint drew from him an absurd letter, written on hearing of the Queen's departure from London:

"My heart was never broken till this day, that I hear the Queen goes away so far off, whom I have followed so many years with so great love and desire, in so many journeys, and am now left behind her, in a dark prison all alone. While she was yet near at hand. . . my sorrows were the less. . . I that was wont to behold her riding like Alexander, hunting like Diana, walking like Venus, the gentle wind blowing her fair hair about her pure cheeks, like a nymph; sometime sitting in the shade like a goddess; sometime singing like an angel," and more besides, all written to the still friendly but cold-blooded Robert Cecil,1 at a time when Raleigh,

1 Raleigh's Letters, ed. Edwards, p. 51 (Vol. II of Edwards' Life of Raleigh).

recently married, was about forty and the goddess queen twenty years his senior. It was a long time before Elizabeth would see him.

No need to recount Raleigh's own voyage to Guiana, made in 1595, of which he has left a splendid story; nor to go over again the tale of his part in the attack upon Cadiz and the Spanish fleet, and the expedition against the Açores. His activities and expeditions went on till Elizabeth died. James hated him, and soon after the new reign began, Raleigh was somehow involved with others in a charge of treason. Sent to the Tower, he was harshly tried, convicted and sentenced to execution. Realizing his ruin, expecting death, in a mood which drove him to attempted suicide, Raleigh addressed a letter to his wife very different in tone from the one he had written to Cecil eleven years before: "You shall receive, dear wife, my last words in these my last lines. My love I send you, that you may keep it when I am dead: and my counsel, that you may remember it when I am no more. I would not, with my last Will, present you with sorrows, dear Besse. Let them go to the grave with me, and be buried in the dust. And, seeing it is not the will of God that ever I shall see you in this life, bear my destruction gently and with a heart like yourself." The letter continues speaking of herself, and their joint affairs, and closes with a prayer that God would show mercy to her and forgive her husband's false accusers.2

But he was not to die then. At the edge of the scaffold, the sentences of the alleged traitors were suspended, and Raleigh was left to an interminable imprisonment. Enough was rescued from the wreck of his fortune to enable him to occupy an apartment in the Tower with his wife, where he devoted himself to study and writing. The gall and wormwood of his life were tempered by his occupations. For a time he was permitted to use a garden, where he "converted a little hen-house into a still " and spent "all the day in his distillations." The ladies who passed by, and saw him from over the wall, begged his cordials and balsams. But his health was poor, and 2 Edwards, o. c. II, p. 284.

he was ageing fast. At the end of thirteen years, he was released and permitted - this man of nearly seventy to equip and sail upon an expedition to Guiana, under the impossible terms of doing nothing to impair the King's good relations with his friends the Spaniards. He sailed, infringed those terms, lost his son, and failed lamentably in his hopeless enterprise. From somewhere, in his ship, he writes his wife-"I was loath to write, because I knew not how to comfort you; and, God knows, I never knew what sorrow meant till now."3 On his landing in England, after a brief trial, his execution came to him as a release, and gave him an opportunity to right himself with his contemporaries and posterity, speaking from the scaffold.

The brilliant activities of Raleigh's outer life, his over-splendid fortunes, errors of conduct, rancours, and his fifteen years of dolorous meditation in the Tower are mirrored in his writings. One will remember, however, that verse and prose are apt to be more meditative and perhaps sentimental than action, and may render the man's life in other hues. There was a vein of melancholy in Raleigh which appears in his verses, even while his fortunes were rising and most eagerly pursued.

Raleigh and Edmund Spenser had met before in Ireland; but it was not till the former's return there in 1589 that the intercourse between them became fruitful. They were both souls of high romance; and although Spenser is using pastoral convention in his Colin Clout's come home again, it is clear that an impression had been made on him by the "strange shepherd" who "chanced to find me out " when seated piping "by the Mulla's shore." himself he did ycleepe

The shepherd of the Ocean by name,

And said he came far from the main sea deep ...

Spenser turned into poetry the quite unpoetic complaints. of this "strange shepherd."

Of great unkindness and of usage hard

Of Cynthia, the Lady of the Sea,

Who from her presence, faultless him debarred.

3 Edwards, o. c. II, p. 359.

4

The same strange shepherd brought with him a long idyllic poem of his own, in which the Ocean told its love to Cynthia; doubtless a charming poem, though one suspects it of lengthiness, without a beginning, a middle, or an end. Shepherd Spenser followed the duly pardoned Ocean Shepherd to Cynthia's court, and was presented to the goddess-queen. Soon the first three books of the Faery Queen appeared, prefaced with a noble sonnet by Raleigh, beginning,

Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay

The gift and fashion of verse was everywhere, and men of action had their lyric moods. Raleigh wrote love verses, as of course; but strains of cynicism or melancholy mark most of the poetry ascribed to him. The qualities discovered by the cynic in the world are those from which he is not free. Raleigh drew from his own nature when he wrote:

Tell men of high condition,
That manage the estate,
Their purpose is ambition,
Their practice only hate:
And if they once reply,
Then give them all the lie.

Tell them that brave it most,

They beg for more by spending,

Who, in their greatest cost,

Seek nothing but commending.

Cynicism is touched with melancholy in the next

verse:

Tell zeal it wants devotion;

Tell love it is but lust;

Tell time it is but motion;

Tell flesh it is but dust:

And wish them not reply,

For thou must give the lie.

Another poem is sad:

4 The last book survives and is printed in J. Hannah's Poems of Sir Walter Raleigh (London, 1892), pp. 32-51.