XXXIVA. D. 1603SIR WALTER RALEIGH
Toits nether depths of shame and topmost heights of glory, the sixteenth century is summed up in Sir Walter Raleigh. He was Gilbert’s young half-brother, thirteen years his junior, and a kinsman of Drake, Hawkins and Grenville, all men of Devon.
He played the dashing young gallant, butchering Irish prisoners of war; he played the leader in the second sack of Cadiz; he played the knight errant in the Azores, when all alone he stormed the breached walls of a fort; he played the hero of romance in a wild quest up the Orinoco for the dream king El Dorado, and the mythical golden city of Manoa. Always he played to the gallery, and when he must dress the part of Queen Elizabeth’s adoring lover, he let it be known that his jeweled shoes had cost six thousand pieces of gold. He wrote some of the noblest prose in our language besides most exquisite verse, invented distilling of fresh water from the sea, and paid for the expeditions which founded Virginia.
Sir Walter Raleigh
Sir Walter Raleigh
So many and varied parts this mighty actor played supremely well, holding the center of the stage as long as there was an audience to hiss, or to applaud him. Only in private he shirked heights of manlinessthat he saw but dared not climb and was by turns a sneak, a toady, a whining hypocrite whose public life is one of England’s greatest memories, and his death of almost superhuman grandeur.
When James the Cur sat on the throne of great Elizabeth, his courtiers had Raleigh tried and condemned to death. The charge was treason in taking Spanish bribes, not a likely act of Spain’s great enemy, one of the few items omitted from Sir Walter’s menu of little peccadillos. James as lick-spittle and flunkey-in-chief to the king of Spain, kept Raleigh for fifteen years awaiting execution in the tower of London. Then Raleigh appealed to the avarice of the court, talked of Manoa and King El Dorado, offered to fetch gold from the Orinoco, and got leave, a prisoner on parole, to sail once more for the Indies.
They say that the myth of El Dorado is based on the curious mirage of a city which in some kinds of weather may still be seen across Lake Maracaibo. Raleigh and his people found nothing but mosquitoes, fever and hostile Spaniards; the voyage was a failure, and he came home, true to his honor, to have his head chopped off.
“I have,” he said on the scaffold, “a long journey to take, and must bid the company farewell.”
The headsman knelt to receive his pardon. Testing with his finger the edge of the ax, Raleigh lifted and kissed the blade. “It is a sharp and fair medicine,” he said smiling, “to cure me of all my diseases.”
Then the executioner lost his nerve altogether, “What dost thou fear?” asked Raleigh. “Strike, man, strike!”
“Oh eloquent, just, and mighty Death! Whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou hast cast out of the world and despised:
“Thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words,Hic jacet.”
James I
James I