allowed to be often at sea in person, he vindicated by his CHAP. V. eager promotion of maritime adventures a full right to be entered, as we find him in January, 1586, in an official list of 'sea captains.'

Piracy.

As Vice-Admiral of the South-West, he possessed advantages beyond most for private raids upon Spanish commerce. When he was not on the spot, his faithful and affectionate deputy in Devonshire, Sir John Gilbert, was at hand to look after his ships' stores. Doubtless outrages were committed under shelter of his Court favour. He joined the evil experiences of the sailor with those of the soldier and courtier in his dying regrets. Occasionally the Privy Council Charges of had to expostulate energetically. In 1589 a ship of his took two barks of Cherbourg. He and his officers were charged to minister no cause of grief to any of the French king's subjects. In the same year, Albert Reynerson was lodging complaints againt Ralegh's captain of the Roebuck. Another of his captains, John Floyer, in 1592, was accused of having captured a ship of Bayonne with a load of cod, beside a waistcoat of carnation colour, curiously embroidered. Filippo Corsini sued him in that year for a ship his people had seized. In 1600 the Republic of Venice was aggrieved at the capture of a Venetian merchantman by Sir John Gilbert, junior, eldest son of Sir Humphrey, in command of one of Ralegh's vessels. At other times Venice claimed the surrender of Venetian goods in Spanish bottoms, though Ralegh stoutly argued against the claim. Sometimes the Government could not but interfere when neutrals had been pillaged. It was always reluctant to discourage the buccaneering trade, which it knew to be very lucrative. For instance, Ralegh and eleven other adventurers in 1591 equipped, at a cost of £8000, privateers which brought home prizes worth £31,150. The profit to the partnership was £14,952, which must be multiplied five times to express the present value. In high places no repugnance to the pursuit was felt. The Queen not rarely adventured, and looked for the lion's share of the spoil. Robert

CHAP. V. Cecil, after he had succeeded to his father's ascendency, was willing to speculate, if his association might be kept secret : 'For though, I thank God, I have no other meaning than becometh an honest man in any of my actions, yet that which were another man's Pater noster, would be accounted in me a charm.' Ralegh's views and character obliged him to no bashful dissimulation of the practice. To him privateering His Defence. seemed strictly legal, and unequivocally laudable. He boasted in 1586 that he had consumed the best part of his fortune in abating the tyrannous prosperity of Spain. He acted as much. in defence and retaliation as for offence. He stated in the House of Commons in 1592 that the West Country had, since the Parliament began, been plundered of the worth of £440,000. In 1603 he wrote that a few Dunkirk privateers under Spanish protection had 'taken from the West Country merchants within two years above three thousand vessels, beside all they had gotten from the rest of the ports of England.' He himself, as the State Papers testify, had often to lament losses of ships through Spanish and French privateers. Public opinion entirely justified the vigour with which he conducted his retaliation. If he were unpopular among his countrymen, or any section of them, the fact is not to be explained by the employment of his riches and influence in onslaughts upon foreign commerce. As he has written in his History, Englishmen never objected to the most fearful odds, when royals of plate and pistolets' were in view. They might have been expected to be grateful to a leading promoter of lucratively perilous enterprises; and in the West they were.

CHAPTER VI.

PATRON AND COURTIER (1583-1590).

IN social and private as well as public life Ralegh was open- CHAP. VI. handed and liberal in kind offices. Those are not unpopular characteristics. He was a patron of letters. His name may

be read in many dedications. Few of them can have been gratuitous. Martin Bassanière of Paris inscribed to him very appropriately his publication of Laudonnière's narrative of the French expedition to Florida. Richard Hakluyt, junior, during his residence in France, had lighted upon Laudonnière's manuscript. From him Bassanière received it. He translated the volume in 1587, and dedicated his version to Ralegh. Hakluyt had to thank Ralegh also for material assistance Hakluyt. both with money and with advice in the compilation of his celebrated collection of voyages. The manuscript, for example, of the Portuguese narrative of de Gama's voyage in 1541 to the Red Sea had been bought for £60 by Ralegh, who presented it to him. Ralegh again was 'at no small charges' towards the production by the French painter, Jacques Morgues, of a series of coloured illustrations of Florida, whither he had accompanied Laudonnière. In 1586 the publisher of John Case's Praise of Music dedicated it to Ralegh, as a virtuoso. In 1588 Churchyard dedicated to him the Spark of Friendship. Hooker, the antiquary, introduced the continuation of the Irish history of Giraldus Cambrensis with a fervent encomium on the illustrious Warden of the Stannaries, who was 'rather a servant than a commander to his own fortune.' A medical treatise was inscribed to him as an

CHAP. VI. expert. A list which has been preserved of his signs for chemical substances and drugs, shows that as early as 1592 he had paid attention to medicine. He appears to have kept amanuenses to copy interesting manuscripts. Thus, John Peirson who, in 1585, was in trouble in connexion with a tract entitled Reasons why the King of Scots is unacceptable to the People of England, deposed that he delivered one of the five copies he made to 'Sir Walter Ralegh, my master.'

Hariot.

Throughout life he befriended Hariot, the universal philosopher, as he has been called. Hariot has been credited with the invention of the system of notation in Algebra. He discovered the solar spots before, and the satellites of Jupiter almost simultaneously with, Galileo. Hariot, who numbered Bishops among his admirers, was accused by zealots of atheism, because his cosmogony was not orthodox. They discerned a judgment in his death in 1621 from cancer in the lip or nose. His ill repute for freethinking was reflected on Ralegh who hired him to teach him mathematics, and engaged him in his colonizing projects. Ralegh introduced him to the Earl of Northumberland, who allowed him a liberal pension. But new ties did not weaken the old. Hariot and he remained constantly attached. Hariot was the friend whose society he chiefly craved when he was recovering from his wound in the Tower. During his long imprisonment Hariot was the faithful companion of his studies. Hariot brought to his notice another Oxford man, Lawrence Keymis. Keymis is described by Wood as well read in geography and mathematics. indebted to Professor Jowett for a confirmation from the Register of Balliol, which Keymis entered in 1579, graduating Master of Arts in 1586, of Wood's statement that he was elected a probationer Fellow in November, 1582. He was then nineteen years old, and an undergraduate. Five Bachelors of Arts were elected with him. To him also, of whom there will be much, too much, hereafter to say, Ralegh was a generous patron. Ralegh was equally ready to spend his court interest in the service of a pious theologian like John

6

Udal.

Udal the Hebraist. Udal in 1590 published of the Bishops, CHAP. VI. that they 'cared for nothing but the maintenance of their dignities, be it the damnation of their own souls, and infinite millions more.' He was tried for treason, since the Bishops, it was averred, governed the Church for the Queen. A jury convicted him of authorship of the book. The Judges iniquitously held that to amount to a conviction of felony. They therefore sentenced him to death. He prayed Ralegh to intercede with the Queen to commute his punishment to banishment, that the land might not be charged with his blood.' Ralegh accepted the office, and Essex combined with him. Retailers of court gossip conjectured that his kindness was policy. They imagined that he and Essex were secretly allied, and that Essex was employing him as 'an instrument from the Puritans to the Queen upon any particular question of relieving them.' A simpler and more generous motive is the more probable. He fought for Udal against the same lying spirit of legal casuistry which was to destroy himself. King James to his honour joined subsequently in mediating. Among them they saved the enthusiast's neck; but he died in the Marshalsea, pending a dispute whether he could safely be permitted to carry his anti-prelatic zeal and immense learning into a chaplaincy in Guinea.

Other instances could be mentioned of Ralegh's disposition to pass his favour on. 'When, Sir Walter,' asked Elizabeth of him, as he came with a petition from a friend, 'will you cease to be a beggar?' 'When your gracious Majesty,' was the answer, 'ceases to be a benefactor.' He has had attributed to him, though obscurely, the project of an institution, described as an 'office of address,' a species of entrepôt at which either information and useful services, or both, might be exchanged. Southey interprets it in the former sense, and regards it as an anticipation of the Royal Society. That was the view of Evelyn, who says that Ralegh put this 'fountain of communication in practice.' How is not remembered. At any rate, in the second sense he energetically applied the principle