Edmund Spenser.
Edmund Spenser had been with Lord Deputy Grey when Ralegh was a Munster captain. But, if the poet be taken literally, they were not acquainted before 1589. His Irish services, as Ralegh's, were rewarded out of the Desmond forfeitures. He received 3028 acres in Cork, with Kilcolman Castle, two miles from Doneraile. The estate formed part of a wide plain, well watered, and, in the sixteenth century, well wooded. The castle is now a roofless ivy-clad ruin. The poet was turning it into a pleasant residence. Ralegh came to see it and him. Spenser has described the visit in the tenderest and least artificial of his poems.Colin Clout's Come Home Again, printed in 1595, was inscribed to his friend in 1591. The dedication was expressed to be in part payment of an infinite debt. The poet declared it unworthy of Sir Walter's higher conceit for the meanness of the style, but agreeable to the truth in circumstance and matter. Lines in the poem corroborate the hypothesis that Elizabeth had for a time, perhaps in the summer of 1589, been estranged from Ralegh:—
His song was all a lamentable layOf great unkindness, and of usage hard,Of Cynthia, the Ladie of the Sea,Which from her presence faultlesse him debard.
They equally imply that, before Colin Clout's lay was indited, great Cynthia had been induced by his complainings to abate her sore displeasure—
And moved to take him to her grace againe.
The circumstances of Spenser's own introduction to Court indicate thatThe Faerie Queene.Ralegh had recovered favour. He read or lent to Ralegh during the visit to Kilcolman the first three books of theFaerie Queene. According to Ben Jonson he also delivered to him now or later 'the meaning of the Allegory in papers.' The poem enchanted the visitor, who offered to become the author's sponsor to Elizabeth. Together, if Colin Clout is to be believed, they crossed the sea, and repaired to the Court. There—
The Shepheard of the Ocean—quoth he—Unto that Goddesse grace me first enhanced,And to my oaten pipe enclin'd her eare.
The first three books of theFaerie Queenewere published early in 1590, with an expository letter from the most humbly affectionate author to the Right Noble and Valorous Sir Walter Ralegh. First of all the copies of commendatory verses prefixed to the poems stood two signed W.R.
Spenser, inColin Clout, lauded Ralegh as a poet:—
Full sweetly tempered is that Muse of his,That can empierce a Princes mightie hart.
Ralegh must have shown him part of a poem addressed to Elizabeth as Cynthia, and estimated to have contained as many as 15,000 lines when completed, if ever. This prodigious elegy was never published by Ralegh, and no entire manuscript of it is known to exist. Some years ago a paper was found in the Hatfield collection, endorsed as 'in Sir Walter's own hand.' The handwriting resembles that of Ralegh in1603. It comprises altogether 568 verses. Two short poems, of seven and fourteen lines, come first; and the manuscript terminates with an unfinished poem of sevenCynthia.stanzas in a variety of terza rima. The body of the contents consists of 526 elegiac verses, described in the manuscript as 'The twenty-first and last book of the Ocean, to Cynthia.' Archdeacon Hannah, in hisCourtly Poets from Ralegh to Montrose, concludes, with some hesitation, that the whole was composed as a sequel, between 1603 and 1612, to a much earlier poem. He sees in it allusions to the death of the Queen, which would more or less fix the date. Mr. Edmund Gosse, in theAthenaeum, in January, 1886, has contested that hypothesis. He thinks, in the first place, that the twenty-one lines which precede, and the twenty-one which follow, the so-called twenty-first book, have no relation to the poem ofCynthia. The rest he holds to be not a continuation ofCynthia, but an integral portion of the original work. That work, as a whole, he has convinced himself, was produced during the author's transient disgrace, between August, 1589, and its end, which may be taken to have been not later than December in the same year. That no part ofCynthia, as we have it, was written later than 1603 scarcely admits of doubt. Ralegh would not have sat down in the reign of James to write love ditties to Elizabeth. His repinings and upbraidings are manifestly all pointed at a dead heart, not at a dead queen. Mr. Gosse is, however, more successful in his argument that the main Hatfield poem was written in the lifetime of Elizabeth, than in his attempt to date it in 1589. He assumes that the poem was a finished composition when Ralegh read from it to Spenser. It is not likely that it ever was finished. Spenser's allusions to it point to a conception fully formed, rather than to a work ready for publication. In the latter case it is improbable, to the verge of impossibility, that Ralegh should not have communicated it to his circle. An initial objection to the view that the twenty-first book was penned in 1589 is its reference to the—
Twelve years entire I wasted on this war,
that war being his struggle for the affection of Elizabeth. This Mr. Gosse ingeniously, but not satisfactorily, appropriates as the main support of his chronology. In the Paunsford recognizance Ralegh is set down as of the Court in 1577. On no other evidence Mr. Gosse infers that he was layingDate of the Poem.siege to Elizabeth's heart before he went to Ireland. Thus the dozen years of the campaign would be conveniently over by the autumn of 1589. A simpler solution seems to be to assign the rough-hewing of the entire project ofCynthia, and its partial accomplishment, to the term of Ralegh's short occultation in 1589. He might well have disclosed to Spenser his project, and read out passages. They would be melancholy for their sorrow's crown of sorrow, their recalling of former undimmed felicity—
Of all which past the sorrow only stays.
They would exaggerate royal unkindness. They would hardly have descanted on the tenderness as absolutely extinct. Even before Spenser extolled theCynthiainColin Cloutin 1591, the harshness was softened, and had melted back to the playing at love in which Elizabeth was wont to indulge with her courtiers. When he resumed the theme on his banishment from Court in 1592, he would feel that he had solid cause for lamentation. By 1594 his disgrace seemed definite; the royal kindness won by years of devotion—
Twelve years of my most happy younger days—
appeared to have been utterly killed; and he was preparing to sail away into space. The twenty-first book might have been written at any time between 1592 and 1595, and its most dismal groans be fairly explicable. Looking back to his regrets in 1589 for an episode of neglect, he could wonder at himself—
At middle day my sun seemed under land,When any little cloud did it obscure.
Had Spenser seen the twenty-first book ofCynthiain 1591, with its real or unreal blackness of despair, he would not have spoken of Ralegh as basking in the renewed radiance of happyprospects. SoCynthia, as far as it was ever composed, may be considered one poem, to which the extant twenty-first book essentially belongs. There is not, therefore, necessarily any hope, or fear, that the whole exists, or ever existed, in a perfect shape. Ralegh would nurse the idea for all the years in which the Queen's withdrawal of the light of her countenance gave him comparative leisure. The twenty-first book itself would be written with the direct purpose of softening his mistress's obduracy. The explanation of its preservation among the Hatfield papers may be that, on the eve of his departure, forsaken, withered, hopeless, for Guiana, it was confided, in 1594 or 1595, to Cecil, then a good friend, for seasonable production to the Queen. Viewed as written either in 1589, or in the reign of James, much of the twenty-first book is without meaning. Its tone is plain and significant for the years 1592 to 1595. If traced to that period, it tells both of the bold coming adventure of 1595,
To kingdoms strange, to lands far-off addressed,
and of the irresistible power of 'her memory' in 1592
To call me back, to leave great honour's thought,To leave my friends, my fortune, my attempt;To leave the purpose I so long had sought,And hold both cares and comforts in contempt.
Concurrent testimony in favour of a date for the book later than 1589, though much prior to 1603, is afforded by the use in it of the name Belphoebe:
A queen she was to me—no more Belphoebe;A lion then—no more a milk-white dove;A prisoner in her breast I could not be;She did untie the gentle chains of love.
Belphoebe.
Belphoebe was a word coined apparently by Spenser. To the poem ofCynthiaSpenser had said he owed the idea of the name, implying that it was of his coinage. It was fashioned, he stated, 'according to Ralegh's excellent conceit of Cynthia, Cynthia and Phoebe being both names of Diana.' Ralegh, by the introductionof the name into hisCynthia, at once has dated the canto in which it occurs as not earlier than 1591, or, perhaps, than 1595, and indicated his desire to link his own verses to the eventful meeting
among the coolly shadeOf the green alders, by the Mulla's shore.
Spenser referred again to the poem ofCynthia, and to Ralegh's poetic greatness, in the most beautiful of the sonnets offered to his several patrons at the end of his surpassing romance and allegory:
To thee, that art the Summer's Nightingale,Thy Sovereign Goddess's most dear delight,Why do I send this rustic Madrigal,That may thy tuneful ear unseason quite?Thou only fit this argument to write,In whose high thoughts Pleasure hath built her bower,And dainty Love learned sweetly to indite.My rhymes I know unsavoury and sour,To taste the streams that, like a golden shower,Flow from the fruitful head of thy Love's praise;Fitter perhaps to thunder martial stowre,Whenso thee list thy lofty Muse to raise;Yet, till that thou thy Poem wilt make known,Let thy fair Cynthia's praises be thus rudely shown.
Ralegh's Sonnet.
It was his return for tribute in kind. By the side of Ralegh's sonnet its flattery hardly seems extravagant:—
Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay,Within that temple where the vestal flameWas wont to burn; and passing by that way,To see that buried dust of living fame,Whose tomb fair Love and fairer Virtue kept,All suddenly I saw the Fairy Queen,At whose approach the soul of Petrarch wept;And from thenceforth those graces were not seen,For they this Queen attended; in whose steadOblivion laid him down on Laura's hearse.Hereat the hardest stones were seen to bleed,And groans of buried ghosts the heavens did pierce:Where Homer's spright did tremble all for grief,And cursed the access of that celestial thief.
Before this, or Spenser's eulogy on him, was printed, Ralegh had acquired the reputation at Court of a poet. Puttenham, a critic of high repute, had,Poetic Gifts.inThe Art of English Poesy, printed in 1589, pronounced 'for ditty and amorous ode, Sir Walter Ralegh's vein most lofty, insolent, and passionate.' By 'insolent,' not 'condolent,' as Anthony Wood quotes, Puttenham meant original. His first public appearance as a poet was in 1576, when in grave and sounding lines he maintained Gascoigne's merits against envious detractors, as if with a presentiment of his own fate—
For whoso reaps renown above the rest,With heaps of hate shall surely be oppressed.
His flow of inspiration never dried up till his head rolled in the dust. But the years between 1583 and 1593 seem, so far as dates, always in Ralegh's career distracting, can be fixed, to have been the period of his most copious poetic fruitfulness.
Throughout his life he won the belief of men of letters and refinement in his poetic power. Their admiration has never failed him in the centuries which have followed. He has not been as fortunate in gaining and keeping the ear of the reading public. For that a poet has not only to be born, but to be made. Ralegh had a poet's gifts. He had music in his soul. He chose to think for himself. He possessed the art of the grand style. The twenty-first book of theCynthiaerrs in being overcharged with thought. It abounds in noble imagery. There is pathos as well as dignity. Its author, had he lived in the nineteenth century, in default of new worlds to explore, or Armadas to fight, might have written anIn Memoriam. In previous English poetry no such dirge is to be found as his Epitaph on Sir Philip Sidney. A couple of stanzas will indicate its solemn music:—
There didst thou vanquish shame and tedious age,Grief, sorrow, sickness, and base fortune's might;Thy rising day saw never woeful night,But passed with praise from off this worldly stage.
What hath he lost that such great grace hath won?Young years for endless years, and hope unsureOf fortune's gifts for wealth that still shall dure:O happy race, with so great praises run!
He had as light a touch. He understood how to play with a conceit till it glances and dances and dazzles, as in his, for probably it is his,Grace of Wit, of Tongue, of Face, and inFain would I, but I dare not. Praed was not happier in elaborate trifling than he in hisCards and Dice. Prior might have envied himThe Silent Lover. HisNymph's Reply to the Passionate Shepherd, if it be his, as Izaak Walton without suspicion assumes, and, if it did not compel comparison with Marlowe's more exquisite melody, would assure his place among the poets of the age. He was able to barb a fierce sarcasm with courtly grace. How his fancy could swoop down and strike, and pierce as it flashed, may be felt in each ringing stanza ofThe Lie—
Say to the Court, it glowsAnd shines like rotten wood;Say to the Church, it showsWhat's good, and doth no good:If Church and Court reply,Then give them both the lie.
His fancy could inspire in hisPilgrimageone of the loftiest appeals in all literature to Heaven from the pedantry of human justice or injustice.Their Limitations.He could match Cowley in metaphysical verse, as inA Poesy to prove Affection is not Love. But the Court spoilt him for a national poet, as it spoilt Cowley; as it might, if it had been more generous, have spoilt Dryden. He desired to be read between the lines by a class which loved to think its own separate thoughts, and express its own separate feelings in its own diction, sometimes in its own jargon. He hunted for epigrams, and too often sparkled rather than burned. He was afraid not to be witty, to wrangle, as he himself has said,
In tickle points of niceness.
Often he refined instead of soaring. In place of sympathisinghe was ever striving to concentrate men's regards on himself. Egotism is not inconsistent with the heat of inspiration, when it is unconscious, when the poet sings because he must, and bares his own heart. Ralegh rarely loses command of himself. He is perpetually seen registering the effects his flights produce. Apparently he had no ambition for popular renown as a poet. He did not print his verses. He cannot be said to have claimed any of themDisputed Authorship.but theFarewell to the Court. His authorship of some, now admitted to be by him, has been confidently questioned. A critic so judicious as Hallam, for reasons which he does not hint, and a student as laborious as Isaac D'Israeli, have doubted his title toThe Lie, otherwise described asThe Soul's Errand, which seems to demonstrate his authorship by its scornful and cynical haughtiness embodied in a wave of magnificent rhythm. Verses, instinct with his peculiar wit, likeThe Silent Lover, have been given away to Lord Pembroke, Sir Robert Ayton, and others. Its famous stanza—
Silence in love bewrays more woeThan words, though ne'er so witty;A beggar that is dumb, you know,Deserveth double pity!
was in the middle of last century boldly assigned to Lord Chesterfield. His compositions circulated from hand to hand at Court. They were read in polished coteries. So little did they ever become a national possession that, complete or incomplete, the most considerable of them has vanished, all but a fragment. Small as is the whole body of verse attributed to him, not all is clearly his. Dr. Hannah, and other ardent admirers of his muse, have been unable to satisfy themselves whether he really wroteFalse Love and True Love, with its shifting rhythm, and its bewitching scattered phrases; the Shepherd's fantastically wittyDescription of Love, orAnatomy of Love—
It is a yea, it is a nay;
or the perfect conceit, which Waller could not have bettered in wit or equalled in vivacity, with the refrain—
What care I how fair she be!
Twenty-seven other poems, among them, the bright sneeringInvective against Women, have been put down to him on no other ground than that they cannot be traced to a different source. He might have been the author of the gracefulPraise of his Sacred Diana. He might have sighed for a land devoid of envy,
Unless amongThe birds, for prize of their sweet song.
From him might have come the airy melody of the charming ecloguePhyllida's Love-call to her Corydon, which invites the genius of a Mendelssohn to frame it in music. He might have penned in his prison cell the knell for the tragedy of human life,De Morte. He might have been the shepherd minstrel of the flowers—
You pretty daughters of the earth and sun.
But, unfortunately, the sole pretext for affirming his title, as the editors of the 1829 collection of his works affirmed it, is that the poems are found in theReliquiae Wottonianae, in Davison'sPoetical Rhapsody, or inEngland's Helicon, and are there marked 'Ignoto.'
The assignment, often, as Mr. Bullen shows in his editions ofEngland's Helicon, andA Poetical Rhapsody, without the slightest authority or foundation, of poetic foundlings of rare charm and distinction to Ralegh isCarelessness ofLiterary Renown.a token of the prevalent belief in the unfathomed range of his powers. At the same time it implies that he had never been adopted, and identified, by the contemporary public specifically as a poet. He would not be discontented with the degree and kind of the poetic fame conceded to him. Had he coveted more he would have been at more pains to stamp his verses. His poetic gift he valued merely as a weapon in his armoury, like many others. It held its own and a moreimportant place in his career. Imagination, which might have made a poet, elevated and illuminated the captain's and the courtier's ambition and acts. If it put him at a disadvantage in a race for power with a Robert Cecil, it carried him to Guiana, and gave him the palm in the glorious struggle at the mouth of Cadiz harbour; it inspired him in the more tremendous strife with judicial obliquity; it supported him on the scaffold in Palace Yard.
The Revenge.(September, 1591).
Long after Ralegh began to be recognized in his new circle as a poet, he first showed himself a master of prose diction. The occasion came from his loss of an opportunity for personal distinction of a kind he preferred to literary laurels. The hope and the disappointment alike testify that, whatever had been the Queen's demeanour in 1589, she frowned no longer in 1591. Essex's temporary disgrace, on account of his marriage with Lady Sidney in 1590, had improved Ralegh's prospects. So much in favour was he that, in the spring of 1591, he had been commissioned as Vice-Admiral of a fleet of six Queen's ships, attended by volunteer vessels and provisionSir Richard Grenville.boats. Lord Thomas Howard, second son of the Duke of Norfolk beheaded in 1572, commanded in chief. The object of the expedition was to intercept the Spanish plate fleet at the Azores. Ralegh's cousin and friend, the stern and wayward but gallant Sir Richard Grenville, finally was substituted for him. There is no evidence that the change was meant for a censure. Much more probably it was a token of the Queen's personal regard. He sent with the squadron his ship, the Ark Ralegh, under the command of Captain Thynne, another of his innumerable connexions in the West. The English had to wait for the plate galleons so long at the Azores that news was brought to Spain. A fleet of fifty-three Spanish sail was despatched as convoy. Ralegh was engaged officially in Devonshire. The Council directed him in May to send off a pinnace to tell Howard that this great Spanish force had been descried off Scilly.
The warning arrived too late. The Spaniards surprised the fleet on September 10, when many of its men were ashore. Grenville in the Revenge covered the embarkation. Thus he lost the wind. He mustered on board his flagship scarce a hundred sound men. Soon he was hemmed in. The ForesightThe Fight.stayed near him for two hours, and battled bravely, but finally had to retire. For fifteen hours he fought the squadron of Seville, five great galleons, with ten more to back them. Crippled by many wounds, he kept the upper deck. Nothing was to be seen but the naked hull of a ship, and that almost a skeleton. She had received 800 shot of great artillery, some under water. The deck was covered with the limbs and carcases of forty valiant men. The rest were all wounded and painted with their own blood. Her masts had been shot overboard. All her tackle was cut asunder. Her upper works were razed and level with the water. She was incapable of receiving any direction or motion, except that given her by the billows. Three Spanish galleons had been burnt. One had been run aground to save her company. A thousand Spaniards had been slain or drowned. Grenville wished to blow up his shattered hulk. A majority of the handful of survivors preferred to accept the Spanish Admiral's terms. They were that all lives should be spared, the crew be sent to England, and the better sort be released on payment of ransom. Grenville was conveyed on board a Spanish galley, where he was chivalrously treated. He lingered till September 13 or 14 in sore pain, which he disdained to betray. Jan Huygen van Linschoten, a Dutch adventurer, who was at the time in the island of Terceira, heard of the struggle both from the Spaniards and from one of the English prisoners. He describes it briefly in a diary he kept. He was told how the English admiral would amaze the Spanish captains by crushing wine-glasses between his teeth, after he had tossed off the contents. The fragments he swallowed, while the blood ran out of his mouth. It is Linschoten, not Ralegh, who has preserved Grenville's dying words: 'Here die I, Richard Grenville, with a joyful andquiet mind, for that I have ended my life, as a true soldier ought, that hath fought for his country, Queen, religion, and honour.'
Ralegh might have met Grenville's fate. He took up the pen to celebrate hisRalegh's Narrative.kinsman's heroism, and to point the moral for England of the feats valour like his could accomplish against Spain. HisReport of the Truth of the Fight about the Isles of Azoreswas first published anonymously in November, 1591. Hakluyt reprinted it, as 'penned by Sir Walter Ralegh,' in his Collection of Voyages in 1599. Few finer specimens of Elizabethan prose diction exist. It is full of grandeur, and of generosity towards every one but Spaniards. Of the commander-in-chief, Thomas Howard, he spoke with especial courtesy. Ralegh's relations to the Howards, though always professionally intimate, were not always very friendly, either now or hereafter. About the period of Grenville's death, in particular, there had been some sharp dispute with the High Admiral. A letter written in the following October by Thomas Phelippes to Thomas Barnes, alludes to a quarrel and offer of combat between Ralegh and him. Ralegh was only the more careful on that account to do justice to a member of the family. Howard, it seems, had been severely criticised for a supposed abandonment of his comrade. Ralegh vindicated him from the calumny. The admiral's first impulse had been to return within the harbour to succour Grenville. It was a happy thing, in Ralegh's judgment, that he suffered himself to be dissuaded. 'The very hugeness of the Spanish fleet would have crushed the English ships to atoms; it had ill sorted with the discretion of a General to commit himself and his charge to assured destruction.' But the real aim of the narrative was to preach a crusade against Spanish predominance in the Old and New Worlds. Towards Grenville personally the behaviour of the Spaniards, it could not be denied, was magnanimous. Ralegh saw nothing but perfidy in their conduct otherwise. They broke, he declares, their engagement to send the captives home. Morrice FitzJohn of Desmond was allowed to endeavour to induce them to apostatize and enter the service oftheir enemy. That was the Spanish system, he exclaims: 'to entertain basely the traitors and vagabonds of allAn Indictmentof Spain.nations; by all kinds of devices to gratify covetousness of dominion,' 'as if the Kings of Castile were the natural heirs of all the world.' Yet 'what good, honour, or fortune ever man by them achieved, is unheard of or unwritten.' 'The obedience even of the Turk is easy, and a liberty, in respect of the slavery and tyranny of Spain. What have they done in Sicily, Naples, Milan, and the Low Countries?' 'In one only island, called Hispaniola, they have wasted three millions of the natural people, beside many millions else in other places of the Indies; a poor and harmless people, created of God, and might have been won to his knowledge, as many of them were.' 'Who, therefore, would repose trust in such a nation of ravenous strangers, and especially in these Spaniards, who more greedily thirst after English blood than after the lives of any other people in Europe;' 'whose weakness we have discovered to the world.' Historians, with whom Ralegh has never been a favourite, treat as merely dishonest rhetoric the compassion he now and again expressed for the millions of innocent men, women, and children, branded, roasted, mangled, ripped alive, by Spaniards, though as free by nature as any Christians. There is no just reason to think him insincere. The pity gave dignity and a tone of chivalry to his more local feeling, Protestant, political, commercial, of hatred and jealousy of Spain. Spain, he declared, was ever conspiring against us. She had bought the aid of Denmark, Norway, the French Parliament-towns, the Irish and Scotch malcontents. She threatened the foundations of English liberty of thought. She tried to starve the rising English instinct for territorial expansion. He summoned Englishmen eager for foreign trade to protest against the Spanish embargo, which everywhere they encountered. He pointed out to them, as they began to feel the appetite for wealth, the colonial treasury of Spain glittering in full view before them.
A multitude of Englishmen, especially in Ralegh's owncountry of the West, were conscious of all this. Ralegh gave the sentiment a voice in his story of his cousin's gallant death. Henceforth he never ceased to consecrate his energies and influence directly to the work of lowering the flag of Spain, and replacing it by that of England. From the beginning of his career he had been a labourer in this field. He now asserted his title to be the champion of his nation. Previously he had usually striven by deputy. Now he was to display his personal prowess as a warrior and a great captain. For years he was to be seen battling with Philip's empire by sea and land, plundering his merchantmen, storming his strongholds, bursting through his frontiers, and teaching Englishmen to think that sheer usurpation which for Spaniards was right divine. His own countrymen did not at first accept his leadership. They affirmed his principle, but preferred that others than he should have the primary honour of applying it. Gradually competitors dropped off; and he remained. Through popular odium, popular curiosity, and, finally, popular enthusiasm, he grew to be identified with the double idea of English rivalry with Spain and of English naval supremacy. The act in which he appears challenging the right to be its representative is about to open. But previously the curtain has to fall upon the courtier. The conqueror at Cadiz, the explorer of Guiana, steps from behind a veil of darkness and disgrace which would have overwhelmed other men utterly, and served him as a foil.
Philip replied to Lord Thomas Howard's unfortunate expedition by theProposedExpeditionto Panama.equipment of a fleet of sixty ships. Plymouth was understood to be their object. Ralegh persuaded the Queen to parry the blow by striking at Panama, and at the plate fleet which would be gathered in its harbour. Elizabeth contributed the Garland and Foresight. Ralegh provided the Roebuck, and his elder brother, Carew Ralegh, the Galleon Ralegh. Two ships were equipped by the citizens of London. Lord Cumberland had been arranging for an independent cruise. Ultimately he joined with six vessels. The Queenalso invested £1800 in the adventure, and London £6000. Ralegh had been named General of the Fleet. He exhausted all his resources to ensure success. 'I protest,' he wrote, 'both my three years' pension of the Custom-house, and all I have besides, is in this journey.' He had borrowed £11,000 at interest; and in addition was heavily in debt to the Crown. In part discharge of his obligations, he assigned to the Queen the Ark Ralegh at the price of £5000. Calumny asserted that the apparent sale was a mere pretext for a present from the Treasury to him. The preparations were still incomplete in February, 1592. He travelled to the West for additional stores. When all was ready for departure westerly winds set in. For many weeks the fleet was weather-bound in the Thames. Some time before it was able to move his own relation to it was become uncertain. Elizabeth, he was aware, wished to keep him at Court. He was not unwilling to consent to a compromise. He wrote to Robert Cecil from Chatham on March 10: 'I have promised her Majesty, if I can persuade the companies to follow Sir Martin Frobisher, I will, without fail, return, and bring them but into the sea some fifty or threescore leagues, though I dare not be known thereof to any creature.' Certainly he meant to embark. In May he was angrily complaining of 'this cross weather.' 'I am notSails and returns.able to live to row up and down with every tide from Gravesend to London.' At length on the 6th of May, 1592, the fleet was under sail with him on board. On the 7th, he was overtaken by Frobisher with orders to come back. He was to leave Sir John Burgh, Borough, or Brough, and Frobisher to command as his lieutenants. Choosing to construe the orders as optional in date, Ralegh proceeded as far as Cape Finisterre. Thence, after weathering a terrific storm on May 11, he himself returned. Before his departure he arranged the plan of operations. Half the fleet he stationed under Frobisher off the Spanish coast to distract the attention of the Spaniards. The rest he sent to watch for the treasure fleet at the Azores. For an attack on Panama the season was too late.
In the Tower. The Great Carack.(1592).
Immediately on his return, if not before, he understood the reason of his recall. He had written to Cecil on March 10: 'I mean not to come away, as they say I will, for fear of a marriage, and I know not what. If any such thing were, I should have imparted it unto yourself before any man living; and therefore, I pray, believe it not, and I beseech you to suppress, what you can, any such malicious report. For, I protest, there is none on the face of the earth that I would be fastened unto.' As soon as he reached London in June, he was thrown into the Tower. He had seemed before to be enjoying the plenitude of royal favour. So lately as in January it had been shown by the grant of a fine estate in Dorset. No official record is discoverable of the cause of his imprisonment. Disobedience to the order to quit the fleet would have been a sufficient pretext. It was not mentioned. The imprisonment was a domestic punishment within her own fortress-palace,Elizabeth Throckmorton.inflicted by the Queen as head of her household. The true reason was his courtship of Elizabeth, daughter to the Queen's devoted but turbulent servant and confidant, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton. He had died in 1571, at the age of fifty-seven, in Leicester's house. His eldest son, Nicholas, was adopted by a maternal uncle, the last Carew of Beddington, and became Sir Nicholas Carew. Elizabeth Throckmorton, who had as many cousins in high positions as Ralegh, was appointed a maid of honour.Her portrait proves her to have been handsome. She was tall, slender, blue-eyed and golden-haired. Her mental qualities will be in evidence during the rest of Ralegh's life. Never were written more charming letters than hers, in more unembarrassed phonetic spelling.
The Captain of the Guard and she attended on the Queen together. He made her an exception to his rule as to maids of honour, that, 'like witches, they can do hurt, but no good.' He found her only too amiable. Camden, in hisAnnals, published in 1615, explains Ralegh's crime and punishment: 'honorariâ Reginae virgine vitiatâ, quam postea in uxorem duxit.' Wood says the same in his Latinized English, merely translating Camden. A letter from Sir Edward Stafford to Sir Anthony Bacon, with the impossible date, July 30, couples Ralegh's and Miss Throckmorton's names in a burst of exultation, natural to Essex's friends: 'If you have anything to do with Sir Walter Ralegh, or any love to make to Mrs. Throckmorton, at the Tower to-morrow you may speak with them; if the countermand come not to-night, asScantiness ofTestimony.some think will not be, and particularly he that hath charge to send them thither.' Stafford does not specify the offence. The sole independent testimony is the single sentence of Camden's. Yet posterity has had no option but to accept the account. The error, if other courtiers had been the culprits, would have excited little surprise. Elizabeth's maids of honour were not more beyond suspicion than Swift asserts Anne's to have been. Essex's gallantries at Court, after as before his marriage, were notorious and many. Lord Southampton and his bride were the subjects of a similar tale a few years later. Palace gossip treated it as a very ordinary peccadillo. Cecil in February, 1601, tells Carew of the 'misfortune' of one of the maids, Mistress Fitton, with Lord Pembroke, as if it were a jest. Both the culprits, he remarks, 'will dwell in the Tower a while.' His phrases show none of the horror they breathed when he spoke of Ralegh, and the Queen was likely to read them. The English Court was pure in the time ofElizabeth for its time. It degenerated greatly under her successor. Harington contrasts manners then with the previous 'good order, discretion,Hard to believe.and sobriety.' But no little licence was permitted, and the tales of it commonly excite small surprise. As told of Ralegh, and yet more of Elizabeth Throckmorton, the story startles still. No evidence exists upon which he can justly be pronounced a libertine. How she, refined, faithful, heroic, should have been led astray, is hardly intelligible. She must have now been several years over twenty, probably twenty-eight or twenty-nine, and in her long after-life she bore herself as entitled to all social respect. She was allowed it by every one, except her Mistress, who never restored her to favour. By the Cecils she was treated with unfailing regard. In the whole of her struggle, by her husband's side, and over his grave, for his and her son's rights, not a whisper was heard of the blot on her fair fame. If Camden had not spoken, and if Ralegh and she had not stood mute, it would have been easy to believe that the imagined liaison was simply a secret marriage resented as such by the Queen, as, two years before, she had resented Essex's secret marriage to Sidney's widow. That seems to have been asserted by their friends, at the first explosion of the scandal. A letter, written on the eve of Ralegh's committal to the Tower, by one who manifestly did not hold the benevolent opinion, says, after a spitefully prophetic comparison of Ralegh with his own
Hermit poor in pensive place obscure:
'It is affirmed that they are married; but the Queen is most fiercely incensed.'
That the royal anger had a better foundation than the mere jealousy of affection or of domination, it is to be feared, is the inevitable inference from the evidence, however concise and circumstantial. Had contradiction been possible, Camden would have been contradicted in 1615 by Ralegh and his wife. Cecil alluded to Ralegh's offence in1592 as 'brutish.' With allHarder to disbelieve.his zeal to indulge the Queen's indignation, he could not have used the term of a secret marriage. The prevailing absence of Court talk on the occurrence is not traceable to any doubt of its true character. Courtiers simply believed it dangerous to be outspoken on a matter affecting the purity of the Virgin Queen's household circle. Her prudery may indeed go some way towards accounting for, if not excusing, the fault. It was dangerous for one of her counsellors to be suspected of an attachment. So late as March, 1602, Cecil was writing earnestly to Carew in repudiation of a rumour that he was like to be enchanted for love or marriage. Almost borrowing Ralegh's words to himself of ten years earlier, he declares upon his soul he knows none on earth that he was, or, if he might, would be, married unto. In Elizabeth's view love-making, except to herself, was so criminal that at Court it had to be done by stealth. Any show of affection was deemed an act of guilt. From a consciousness of guilt to the reality is not always a wide step. In Ralegh's references and language to his wife may be detected a tone in the tenderness as though he owed reparation as well as attachment. The redeeming feature of their passion is that they loved with true love also, and with a love which grew. His published opinions, as in hisInstructions to his Son, on wives and marriage, like those of other writers of aphorisms in his age, ring harshly and coldly. But he did not act on frigid fragments of sententious suspiciousness. He was careful for his widow's worldly welfare. With death, as it seemed, imminent, he trusted with all, and in everything, his 'sweet Besse,' his 'faithful wife,' as scoffing Harington with enthusiasm called her. His constant desire was to have her by his side, but to spare her grieving.
When and where they were married is unknown. So careful were they to avoid publicity that Lady Ralegh's brother, Arthur Throckmorton, for some time questioned the fact, though his suspicions were dissipated, and he became an attached friend of the husband's. Probably the ceremony was performedafter the imprisonment and not before. If the threat of detention in the Tower, mentioned by Stafford, were carried into effect against the lady, Ralegh at all events betrayed no consciousness that she was his neighbour. In his correspondence at the time he never speaks of her. His business was to obtain his release. He understood that allusions to the partner in his misdeed would not move the Queen to kindness. Like Leicester, and like Essex, he continued, though married, to use loverlike phrases of the Queen, whenever they were in the least likely to reach her ear. The Cecils wereA Rhapsody.his allies against Essex. In July, 1592, under cover of an account for the Yeomen's coats for an approaching royal progress, he burst into a wonderful effusion to, not for, Robert Cecil: '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 nigher 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 fair 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 amiss, hath bereaved me of all. O Glory, that only shineth in misfortune, what is become of thy assurance? All wounds have scars, but that of fantasy; all affections their relenting, but that of womankind. Who is the judge of friendship, but adversity? Or when is grace witnessed, but in offences? There were 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—can they not weigh down one frail misfortune? Cannot one drop of gall be hidden in so great heaps of sweetness? I may then conclude, Spes et fortuna, valete. She is gone in whom I trusted, andof me hath not one thought of mercy, nor any respect of that that was. Do with me now, therefore, what you list. I am more weary of life than they are desirous I should perish; which, if it had been for her, as it is by her, I had been too happily born.' Did ever tailor's bill, though for the most resplendent scarlet liveries bespangled with golden roses, inspire a like rhapsody! By one writer on Ralegh it has been characterized, so various are tastes, as 'tawdry and fulsome.' To most it will seem a delightful extravagance. To contemporaries the extravagance itself would appear not very glaring. Elizabeth aroused both fascination and awe in her own period which justified high flights. After her goodness and wrath were become alike unavailing this is how a cynic like Harington spoke of her: 'When she smiled it was a pure sunshine that every one did choose to bask in if they could; but anon came a storm, and the thunder fell in wondrous manner on all alike.' Ralegh doubtless was sincere inA Comedy inthe Tower.repining for the radiance as in deprecating the scowls, though he overrated his ability to conjure that back, and these away. In the same July, apparently, on July 26, he played a little comedy of Orlando Furioso,—not the approach to a tragedy of eleven years after. His chamber in the Tower was the scene. The spectators were his Keeper and cousin, Sir George Carew, and Arthur Gorges. Gorges was still, like Carew, his friend in 1614, and was sung by him then as one