Persons and pictures from the histories of France and England from the Norman conquest to the fall of the Stuarts |
Sir Walter Raleigh and his Wife.
1618. |
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 | Persons and pictures from the histories of France and England |  |
Sir Walter Raleigh and his Wife.
1618.
It is commonly said, and appears generally to be believed,
by superficial students of history, that with the reigns of the
Plantagenets, with the Edwards and the Henries of the fifteenth
century, the age of chivalry was ended, the spirit of romance
became extinct. To those, however, who have looked carefully
into the annals of the long and glorious reign of the great
Elizabeth, it becomes evident that, so far from having passed
away with the tilt and tournament, with the complete suits of
knightly armor, and the perilous feats of knight-errantry, the
fire of chivalrous courtesy and chivalrous adventure never blazed
more brightly, than at the very moment when it was about to
expire amid the pedantry and cowardice, the low gluttony and
shameless drunkenness, which disgraced the accession of the first
James to the throne of England. Nor will the brightest and
most glorious names of fabulous or historic chivalry, the Tancreds
and Godfreys of the crusades, the Olivers and Rolands of
the court of Charlemagne, the Cid Campeador of old Castile, or
the preux Bayard of France, that chevalier sans peur et sans reproche,
exceed the lustre which encircles, to this day, the characters
of Essex, Howard, Philip Sidney, Drake, Hawkins, Frobisher,
and Walter Raleigh.
It was full time that, at this period, maritime adventure had
the levelled spear: and that to foray on the Spanish colonies
beyond the line, where, it was said, truce or peace never came;
to tempt the perils of the tropical seas in search of the Eldorado,
or the Fountain of Health and Youth, in the fabled and magical
realms of central Florida; and to colonize the forest shores of
the virgin wilderness of the west, was now paramount in the
ardent minds of England's martial youth, to the desire of obtaining
distinction in the bloody battle-fields of the Low Countries,
or in the fierce religious wars of Hungary and Bohemia. And
of these hot spirits, the most ardent, the most adventurous, the
foremost in everything that savored of romance or gallantry,
was the world-renowned Sir Walter Raleigh.
Born of an honorable and ancient family in Devonshire, he
early came to London in order to push his fortunes, as was the
custom in those days with the cadets of illustrious families
whose worldly wealth was unequal to their birth and station, by
the chances of court favor, or the readier advancement of the
sword. At this period, Elizabeth was desirous of lending assistance
to the French Huguenots, who had been recently defeated
in the bloody battle of Jarnae, and who seemed to be in considerable
peril of being utterly overpowered by their cruel and
relentless enemies the Guises; while she was at the same time
wholly disinclined to involve England in actual strife, by regular
and declared hostilities.
She gave permission, therefore, to Henry Champernon to raise
a regiment of gentlemen volunteers, and to transport them into
France. In the number of these, young Walter Raleigh enrolled,
and thenceforth his career may be said to have commenced;
for from that time scarce a desperate or glorious
adventure was essayed, either by sea or land, in which he was
not a participator. In this, his first great school of military
display of gallantry and aptitude for arms, that he immediately
attracted attention, and, on his return to England in 1570, after
the pacification, and renewal of the edicts for liberty of conscience,
found himself at once a marked man.
It seems that, about this time, in connexion with Nicholas
Blount and others, who afterwards attained to both rank and
eminence, Raleigh attached himself to the Earl of Essex, who
at that time disputed with Leicester the favors, if not the affection,
of Elizabeth; and, while in his suite, had the fortune to
attract the notice of that princess by the handsomeness of his
figure, and the gallantry of his attire; she, like her father Henry,
being quick to observe and apt to admire those who were eminently
gifted with the thews and sinews of a man.
A strangely romantic incident was connected with his first
rise in the favor of the virgin queen, which is so vigorously
and brilliantly described by another and even more renowned
Sir Walter in his splendid romance of Kenilworth, that it shames
us to attempt it with our far inferior pen; but it is so characteristic
of the man and of the times that it may not be passed
over in silence.
Being sent once on a mission—so runs the tale—by his lord
to the queen, at Greenwich, he arrived just as she was issuing
in state from the palace to take her barge, which lay manned
and ready at the stairs. Repulsed by the gentlemen pensioners,
and refused access to her majesty until after her return from
the excursion, the young esquire stood aloof, to observe the
passing of the pageant; and, seeing the queen pause and hesitate
on the brink of a pool of rain-water which intersected her path,
no convenience being at hand wherewith to bridge it, took off
his crimson cloak, handsomely laid down with gold lace, his
only courtlike garment, fell on one knee, and with doffed cap
queen passed across dry-shod, and swore by God's life—her
favorite oath—that there was chivalry and manhood still in
England.
Immediately thereafter, he was summoned to be a member
of the royal household, and was retained about the person of the
queen, who condescended to acts of much familiarity, jesting,
capping verses, and playing at the court games of the day with
him—not a little, it is believed, to the chagrin of the haughty
and unworthy favorite, Dudley, Earl of Leicester.
It does not appear, however, that, although she might coquet
with Raleigh to gratify her own love of admiration, and to
enjoy the charms of his rich and fiery eloquence and versatile
wit, though she might advance him in his career of arms, and
even stimulate his vaulting ambition to deeds of yet wilder
emprise, she ever esteemed Raleigh as he deserved to be esteemed,
or penetrated the depths of his imaginative and creative
genius, much less beloved him personally, as she did the vain
and petty ambitious Leicester, or the high-spirited, the valorous,
the hapless Essex.
Another anecdote is related of this period, which will serve
in no small degree to illustrate this trait of Elizabeth's strangely-mingled
nature. Watching with the ladies of her court in the
gardens of one of her royal residences, as was her jealous and
suspicious usage, the movements of her young courtier, when
he either believed, or affected to believe himself unobserved, she
saw him write a line on a pane of glass in a garden pavilion
with a diamond ring, which, on inspecting it subsequently to
his departure, she found to read in this wise:—
“Fain would I climb, but that I fear to fall—”
encouragement to so keen and fiery a temperament as that of
him for whom she wrote, when given to him from such a source—
“If thy heart fail thee, do not climb at all.”
But his heart never failed him—not in the desperate strife with
the Invincible Armada—not when he discovered and won for
the English crown the wild shores of the tropical Guiana—not
when he sailed the first far up the mighty Orinoco—not when,
in after days, he stormed Cadiz—not when the favor of Elizabeth
was forfeited—not in the long years of irksome, solitary, heartbreaking
imprisonment, endured at the hands of that base, soulless
despot, the first James of England—not at his parting from
his beloved and lovely wife—not on the scaffold, where he died
as he had lived—a dauntless, chivalrous, high-minded English
gentleman.
The greatest error of his life was his pertinacious hostility to
Essex, originating in the jealousy of that brave, but rash and
headstrong leader, who disgraced and suspended him after the
taking of Fayal, a circumstance which he never forgave or
forgot—an error which ultimately cost him his own life, since
it alienated from him the affections of the English people, and
rendered them pitiless to him in his own extremity.
But his greatest crime, in the eyes of Elizabeth, the crime
which lost him her good graces for ever and neutralized all his
services on the flood and in the field, rendering ineffective even
the strange letter which he addressed to his friend, Sir Robert
Cecil, and which was doubtless shown to the queen, although it
failed to move her implacable and iron heart, was his marriage,
early in life, to the beautiful and charming Elizabeth Throgmorton.
The letter to which I have alluded is so curious that I
cannot refrain from quoting it entire, as a most singular illustration
of that strange compound, Elizabeth, who, to the “heart of a
man, and that man a king of England,” to quote her own eloquent
and noble diction, added the vanity and conceit of the
weakest and most frivolous of womankind; and who, at the age
of sixty years, chose to be addressed as a Diana and a Venus,
a nymph, a goddess, and an angel.
“My heart,” he wrote, “was never 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 here, in a dark prison all alone. While
she was yet near at hand, that I might hear of her once in two
or three days, my sorrows were the less; but even now my
heart is cast into the depth of all misery. I, that was wont to
behold her riding like Alexander, hunting like Diana, walking
like Venus, the gentle wind blowing her hair about her pure
cheeks like a nymph, sometimes sitting in the shade like a
goddess, sometimes singing like an angel, sometimes playing
like Orpheus. Behold the sorrow of this world! Once a
miss has bereaved me of all. Oh! glory, that only shineth
in misfortune, what is become of thy assurance? All wounds
have scars but that of fantasy: all affections their relentings
but that of womankind. Who is the judge of friendship
but adversity? or when is grace witnessed but in offences?
There was no divinity but by reason of compassion; for revenges
are brutish and mortal. All those times past, the loves,
the sighs, the sorrows, the desires, cannot they weigh down one
frail misfortune? Cannot one drop of gall be his in so great
heaps of sweetness? I may then conclude, `spes et fortuna
valete;' she is gone in whom I trusted, and of me hath not one
thought of mercy, nor any respect of that which was. Do with
me now, therefore, what you list. I am more weary of life
been for her, as it is by her, I had been too happily born.”
It is singular enough that such a letter should have been
written, under any circumstances, by a middle-aged courtier to
an aged queen; but it becomes far more remarkable and extraordinary
when we know that the life of Raleigh was not so
much as threatened at the time when he wrote; and, so far had
either of the parties ever been from entertaining any such affection
the one for the other as could alone, according to modern
ideas, justify such fervor of language, that Elizabeth was at that
time pining with frustrated affection and vain remorse for the
death of her beloved Essex; which, in the end, broke a heart
which had defied all machinations of murderous conspiracies, all
menaces, all overtures of the most powerful and martial princes
to sway it from its stately and impassive magnanimity; while
Raleigh was possessed by the most ardent and enduring affection
to the almost perfect woman whom he held it his proudest trophy
to have wedded, and who justified his entire devotion by her love
unmoved through good or ill report, and proved to the utmost
in the dungeon and on the scaffold—the love of a pure, high-minded,
trusting woman, confident, and fearless, and faithful to
the end.
It does not appear that Raleigh suspected the true cause of
Elizabeth's alienation from so good and great a servant: perhaps
no one man of the many whom for the like cause she neglected,
disgraced, persecuted, knew that the cause existed in the
fact of their having taken to themselves partners of life and
happiness—a solace which she sacrificed to the sterile honors of
an undivided crown—of their enjoying the bliss and perfect
contentment of a happy wedded life, while she, who would fain
have enjoyed the like, could she have done so without the loss
of some portion of her independent and undivided authority,
will, to pine in lonely and unloved virginity.
Yet such was doubtless the cause of his decline in the royal
favor, which he never, in after days, regained; for, after Essex
was dead by her award and deed, Elizabeth, in her furious and
lion-like remorse, visited his death upon the heads of all those
who had been his enemies in life, or counselled her against him,
even when he was in arms against her crown: nor forgave them
any more than she forgave herself, who died literally broken-hearted,
the most lamentable and disastrous of women, if the
proudest and most fortunate of queens, in the heyday of her fortunes,
when she had raised her England to that proud and pre-eminent
station above rather than among the states of Europe,
from which she never declined, save for a brief space under her
successors, those weakest and wickedest of English kings, the
ominous and ill-starred Stuarts, and which she still maintains
in her hale and superb old age, savoring, after nearly nine centuries
of increasing might and scarcely interrupted rule, in no
respect of decrepitude or decay.
Her greatest crime was the death of Mary Stuart; her greatest
misfortune, the death of Essex; her greatest shame, the disgrace
of Walter Raleigh. But with all her crimes, all her misfortunes,
all her shame, she was a great woman and a glorious
queen, and in both qualities peculiarly and distinctively English.
The stay and bulwark of her country's freedom and religion,
she lived and died possessed of that rarest and most divine gift
to princes, her people's unmixed love and veneration.
She died in an ill day, and was succeeded by one in all
respects her opposite: a coward, a pedant, a knave, a tyrant, a
mean, base, beastly sensualist—a bad man, devoid even of a bad
man's one redeeming virtue, physical courage—a bad, weak man,
with the heart of a worse and weaker woman—a man with all
His instincts and impulses were all vile and low, crafty and
cruel; his principles—if his rules of action, which were all
founded on cheatery and subtle craft, can be called principles—
were yet baser than his instinctive impulses.
He is the only man I know, recorded in history, who is solely
odious, contemptible, and bestial, without one redeeming trait,
one feature of mind or body that can preserve him from utter
and absolute detestation and damnation of all honorable and
manly minds.
He is the only king of whom, from his cradle to his grave,
no one good deed, no generous, or bold, or holy, or ambitious,
much less patriotic or aspiring, thought or action is related.
His soul was akin to the mud, of which his body was framed
—to the slime of loathsome and beastly debanchery, in which
he wallowed habitually with his court and the ladies of his court,
and his queen at their head, and could no more have soared
heavenward than the garbage-battened vulture could have soared
to the noble falcon's pitch and pride of place.
This beast,[1]
for I cannot bring myself to write him man or
king, with the usual hatred and jealousy of low foul minds
towards everything noble and superior, early conceived a hatred
for the gallant and great Sir Walter Raleigh, whose enterprise
and adventure he had just intellect enough to comprehend so
far as to fear them, but of whose patriotism, chivalry, innate
nobility of soul, romantic daring, splendid imagination, and vast
literary conceptions—being utterly unconscious himself of such
emotions—he was no more capable of forming a conception,
soaring eagle.
So early as the second year of his reign, he contrived to have
this great discoverer and gallant soldier—to whom Virginia is
indebted for the honor of being the first English colony, Jamestown
having been settled in 1606, whereas the Puritans landed
on the rock of Plymouth no earlier than 1620, and to whom
North Carolina has done honor creditable to herself in naming
her capital after him, the first English colonist—arraigned on a
false charge of conspiracy in the case of Arabella Stuart, a young
lady as virtuous and more unfortunate than sweet Jane Grey,
whose treatment by James would alone have been enough to
stamp him with eternal infamy, and for whose history we refer
our readers to the fine novel by Mr. James on this subject.
At this time, Raleigh was unpopular in England, on account
of his supposed complicity in the death of Essex; and, on the
strength of this unpopularity, he was arraigned, on the single
written testimony of one Cobham, a pardoned convict of the
same conspiracy, which testimony he afterwards retracted, and
then again retracted the retractation, and—without one concurring
circumstance, without being confronted with the prisoner,
after shameless persecution from Sir Edward Coke, the great
lawyer, then attorney-general—was found guilty by the jury, and
sentenced, contrary to all equity and justice, to the capital
penalties of high treason.
From this year, 1604, until 1618, a period of nearly fourteen
years, not daring to put him at that time to death, he caused
him to be confined strictly in the Tower, a cruel punishment for
so quick and active a spirit, which he probably expected would
speedily release him by a natural death from one whom he
regarded as a dangerous and resolute foe, whom he dared neither
and arbitrary confinement.
But his cruel anticipations were signally frustrated by the
noble constancy, and calm, self-sustained intrepidity of the noble
prisoner, who, to borrow the words of the detractor, Hume,
“being educated amid naval and military enterprises, had surpassed,
in the pursuits of literature, even those of the most
recluse and sedentary lives.”
Supported and consoled by his exemplary and excellent wife,
he was enabled to entertain the irksome days and nights of his
solitary imprisonment by the composition of a work, which, if
deficient in the points which are now, in the advanced state of
human sciences, considered essential to a great literary creation,
is, as regarded under the circumstances of its conception and
execution, one of the greatest exploits of human ingenuity and
human industry—“The History of the World, by Sir Walter
Raleigh.”
It was during his imprisonment also that he projected the
colonization of Jamestown, which was carried out in 1606, at
his instigation, by the Bristol Company, of which he was a
member. This colony, though it was twice deserted, was in the
end successful, and in it was born the first child, Virginia Dare
by name, of that Anglo-Saxon race which has since conquered
a continent, and surpassed, in the nonage of its republican sway,
the maturity of mighty nations.
In 1618, induced by the promises of Raleigh to put the English
crown in possession of a gold mine which he asserted, and
probably believed he had discovered in Guiana, James, whose
avidity always conquered his resentments, and who, like Faustus,
would have sold his soul—had he had one to sell—for gold,
released him, and granting him, as he asserted, an unconditional
pardon—but, as James and his counsellors maintain, one
twelve armed vessels.
What follows is obscure; but it appears that Raleigh, failing
to discover the mines, attacked and plundered the little town of
St. Thomas, which the Spaniards had built on the territories of
Guiana, which Raleigh had acquired three-and-twenty years
before for the English crown, and which James, with his wonted
pusillanimity, had allowed the Spaniards to occupy, without so
much as a remonstrance.
This conduct of Raleigh must be admitted unjustifiable, as
Spain and England were then in a state of profound peace;
and the plea that truce or peace with Spain never crossed the
line, though popular in England in those days of Spanish
aggression and Romish intolerance, cannot for a moment stand
the test either of reason or of law.
Falling into suspicion with his comrades, Sir Walter was
brought home in irons, and delivered into the hands of the pitiless
and rancorous king, who resolved to destroy him—yet,
dreading to awaken popular indignation by delivering him up
to Spain, caused to revive the ancient sentence, which had never
been set aside by a formal pardon, and cruelly and unjustly
executed him on that spot, so consecrated by the blood of noble
patriots and holy martyrs, the dark and gory scaffold of Tower
Hill.
And here, in conclusion, I can do no better than to quote
from an anonymous writer in a recent English magazine, the
following brief tribute to his high qualities, and sad doom,
accompanied by his last exquisite letter to his wife.
“His mind was indeed of no common order. With him, the
wonders of earth and the dispensations of heaven were alike
welcome; his discoveries at sea, his adventures abroad, his
attacks on the colonies of Spain, were all arenas of glory to him
the spirits of the great in the history of his country—nay, was
even more contented in the gloom of his ill-deserved prison,
with the volume of genius or the book of life before him, than
in the most animating successes of the battle-field.
“The event which clouded his prosperity and destroyed his
influence with the queen—his marriage with Elizabeth Throgmorton—was
the one upon which he most prided himself; and
justly, too—for, if ever woman was created the companion, the
solace of man—if ever wife was deemed the dearest thing of
earth to which earth clings, that woman was his wife. Not
merely in the smiles of the court did her smiles make a world
of sunshine to her Raleigh; not merely when the destruction of
the Armada made her husband's name glorious; not merely
when his successes and his discoveries on the ocean made his
presence longed for at the palace, did she interweave her best
affections with the lord of her heart. It was in the hour of
adversity she became his dearest companion, his `ministering
angel;' and when the gloomy walls of the accursed Tower held
all her empire of love, how proudly she owned her sovereignty!
Not even before the feet of her haughty mistress, in her prayerful
entreaties for her dear Walter's life, did she so eminently
shine forth in all the majesty of feminine excellence as when she
guided his counsels in the dungeon, and nerved his mind to the
trials of the scaffold, where, in his manly fortitude, his noble
self-reliance, the people, who mingled their tears with his triumph,
saw how much the patriot was indebted to the woman.
“Were there no other language but that of simple, honest
affection, what a world of poetry would remain to us in the
universe of love! You may be excited to sorrow for his fate by
recalling the varied incidents of his attractive life; you may
mourn over the ruins of his chapel at his native village: you
you may glow over his successes in the field or on the wave;
your lip may curl with scorn at the miserable jealousy of Elizabeth—your
eye may kindle with wrath at the pitiful tyranny
of James—but how will your sympathies be so awakened as by
reading his last, simple, touching letter to his wife!
“ `You receive, my 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 will present you with sorrows,
dear Bess—let them go to the grave with me and be buried in
the dust—and, seeing that it is not the will of God that I
should see you any more, bear my destruction patiently, and
with a heart like yourself.
“ `First—I send you all the thanks which my heart can conceive,
or my words express, for your many travails and cares for
me, which, though they have not taken effect as you wished,
yet my debt to you is not the less; but pay it I never shall in
this world.
“ `Secondly—I beseech you, for the love you bear me living,
that you do not hide yourself many days, but by your travails
seek to help my miserable fortunes and the right of your poor
child—your mourning cannot avail me that am dust—for I am
no more yours, nor you mine—death hath cut us asunder, and
God hath divided me from the world, and you from me.
“ `I cannot write much. God knows how hardly I steal this
time when all sleep. Beg my dead body, which, when living,
was denied you, and lay it by our father and mother—I can say
no more—time and death call me away; the everlasting God—
the powerful, infinite, and inscrutable God, who is goodness
itself, the true light and life, keep you and yours, and have
and send us to meet in his glorious kingdom.
“My dear wife—farewell! Bless my boy—pray for me, and
let the true God hold you both in his arms.
“Thus a few fond words convey more poetry to the heart
than a whole world of verse.
“We know not any man's history more romantic in its commencement,
or more touching in its close, than that of Raleigh—
from the first dawn of his fortunes, when he threw his cloak
before the foot of royalty, throughout his brilliant rise and long
imprisonment to the hour when royalty rejoiced in his merciless
martyrdom.
“Whether the recital of his eloquent speeches, the perusal
of his vigorous and original poetry, or the narration of his
quaint yet profound `History of the World,' engage our attention,
all will equally impress us with admiration of his talent,
with wonder at his achievements, with sympathy in his misfortunes,
and with pity at his fall.”
When he was brought upon the scaffold, he felt the edge of
the axe with which he was to be beheaded, and observed, “ 'Tis
a sharp remedy, but a sure one for all ills,” harangued the people
calmly, eloquently, and conclusively, in defence of his character,
laid his head on the block with indifference, and died as
he had lived—undaunted, one of the greatest benefactors of both
England and America, judicially murdered by the pitiful spite
of the basest and worst of England's monarchs. James could
slay his body, but his fame shall live for ever.
| Persons and pictures from the histories of France and England | |