[Sidenote: _Ralegh"s Decline._]
Ess.e.x spoke, and perhaps thought, thus of Ralegh in 1587. So the nation at large spoke and thought of him then, and for many years afterwards.
If he had only been such as he had as yet shown himself, posterity might have found it difficult to prove the condemnation unjust. He had risen in virtue of a handsome person and a courtly wit. He had equipped expeditions of discovery, in which he took no share of the perils, and the whole of the glory. He had fought and spoiled the Spaniards, chiefly by deputy, risking his own person as little as "the n.o.ble warrior" of his reputed epigram, "that never blunted sword." The hardships and dangers he had st.u.r.dily braved in France and Ireland were for his contemporaries simple myths, as they would have been for us, had he died at thirty-five. Had he retained the Queen"s favour uninterrupted, had she not been capricious, had there been no Ess.e.x, had there been no Elizabeth Throckmorton, he might have died at sixty, at seventy, or at eighty, and a verdict hardly less severe been p.r.o.nounced. It is not certain. Possibly in any event, the vigour inherent in the man, his curiosity, his instinct for stamping his will on the world outside, his eagerness to impel his nation to empire westwards, might have had their way. They might have mastered the contradictory ambition to be victorious in a contest of factions. While he was still absorbed in Court strifes, and in the seductive labour of building up a fortune, he had proved that he was no mere carpet knight. But it was well that his natural tendencies towards a life of action were braced by the experience of a chill in the ardour of royal benevolence. From 1587, as the star of Ess.e.x rose, and his was supposed to be waning, his...o...b..t can be seen widening. It became more independent. As reigning favourite he had vicariously explored, colonized, plundered, and fought. Henceforth he was to do a substantial part of his own work.
[Sidenote: _Antedated._]
Ess.e.x, at the period of the North Hall scene, was new to the Court. He must soon have discovered that Ralegh was not to be spurned as a clown, or to be stormed out of the Queen"s graces by insolence. He did not grow therefore the less hostile. He rejected Elizabeth"s inducements to him to live on terms of amity with a rival in all essential respects infinitely his superior. Persuaded that she could not dispense with himself, he persisted in putting her to her option between them. The rank and file at Elizabeth"s Court had a keen scent for their Sovereign"s bias. They foresaw the inevitable end, though they antedated by several years the actual catastrophe. In 1587 Arabella Stuart, a girl of twelve, was at Court. She supped at Lord Burleigh"s. The other guests were her uncle, Sir Charles Cavendish, and Ralegh. Cavendish mentions the entertainment in a letter to a friend. He relates that Burleigh praised to Ralegh "Lady Arbell," who had been congratulating herself that "the Queen had examined her nothing touching her book," for her French, Italian, music, dancing, and writing. Burleigh wished she were fifteen years old. "With that he rounded Sir Walter in the ear, who answered, it would be a very happy thing." Cavendish goes on to observe that Sir Walter was in wonderful declination, yet laboured to underprop himself by my Lord Treasurer and his friends. He inferred from the contrast between Ralegh"s former pride and his present too great humility, that he would never rise again. My Lord Treasurer and his friends were not given to the support of discarded favourites. Ralegh"s presence at so intimate a gathering, and the confidence vouchsafed him, are signs that he was still potent. The stream of the royal bounty continued to flow. The Babington grant was in 1587. For several years to come other similar tokens of regard were accorded him. Towards the close of 1587 itself signal testimony was offered of the trust of the Queen and her counsellors in his wisdom and martial skill.
[Sidenote: _A Council of War._]
In February, 1587, Queen Mary Stuart was executed. It is the one important event of the period with which Ralegh"s name is not connected.
He does not appear to have been consulted, nor to have spoken on the matter either in or out of Parliament. Its consequences concerned him.
The act quickened the Spanish preparations for the invasion of England.
King Philip had no thought of concealment. He published his designs to all Europe. The menaced kingdom had full notice. In November, 1587, a council of war was instructed to consider the means of defence. Its members were Lord Grey, Sir Thomas Knolles, Sir Thomas Leighton, Sir Walter Ralegh, described as Lieutenant-General of Cornwall, Sir John Norris, Sir Richard Grenville, Sir Richard Bingham, who had been Ralegh"s early comrade in Ireland, Sir Roger Williams, and Mr. Ralph Lane. They advised that Milford Haven, the Isle of Wight, the Downs, Margate, the Thames, and Portland should be fortified against Spanish descents. They thought it improbable the King of Spain would venture his fleet far within the Sleeve before he had mastered some good harbour.
Consequently they recommended the defence of Plymouth by strong works, and a garrison of 5000 men from Cornwall and Devon. Portland they reported should be guarded by 2700 from Dorset and Wilts. If the enemy landed, the country was to be driven so as to leave no victuals for the invader. Ralegh separately pet.i.tioned Burleigh for cannon for Portland and Weymouth. Thence some have inferred that he was now Governor of the former.
[Sidenote: _The Armada._]
In December, 1587, he was employed, in concert with Sir John Gilbert and Lord Bath, in levying a force of 2000 foot and 200 horse in Cornwall and Devon. Exeter claimed exemption on account of its heavy expenses for the defence of its trade against Barbary corsairs. By the beginning of 1588 the immediate fear of attack had abated. The invasion was thought to have been put off. Ralegh took the opportunity to visit Ireland. There he had both public and private duties. He retained his commission in the army. Moreover, he was answerable, as a Crown tenant, for twenty hors.e.m.e.n, though his charges for them were refunded. Thus, in March, 1588, an order was made for the payment to him of 244 for the previous half year. Always he had his estate to put in order, and functions connected with it to perform. According to the local records, he served this year the office of Mayor of Youghal. During a considerable portion of the term he must have been an absentee. In Ireland the news reached him that the Armada had started or was starting. Hastening back he commenced by mustering troops in the West, and strengthening Portland Castle. But his own trust was in the fleet. In his _History of the World_ he propounds the question whether England without its fleet would be able to debar an enemy from landing. He answers by showing how easily ships, without putting themselves out of breath, will outrun soldiers marching along the coast. The Spaniards in July, 1588, could, in his opinion, but for the English ships, have chosen a landing-place with no sufficient army at hand to resist them. The Armada might have failed, he admits, against the choice troops gathered about the Queen. He did not believe in the ability of the remainder round the coast to encounter an army like that which the Prince of Parma could have landed in England.
His advice had its weight in inducing Elizabeth to fit out the fleet, which did n.o.ble service under Howard of Effingham.
[Sidenote: _Against "Grappling"._]
He acted upon his own doctrine. On July 21 the Defiance a.s.sailed a Spanish ship near the Eddystone. On the 23rd the Spaniards were over against Portland. Thereupon Ralegh gave over his land charge to others.
With a body of gentlemen volunteers he embarked, and joined in the universal rush at and about the enemy. All day the battle raged. Ships started out of every haven, to the number of a hundred. All hurried to Portland, "as unto a sea-field where immortal fame and glory was to be attained, and faithful service to be performed unto their prince and country." It was for the Englishmen "a morris dance upon the waters." We may be sure he applied his principle of the worse armed but handier fleet, not "grappling," as "a great many malignant fools" contended Lord Howard ought, but "fighting loose or at large." "The guns of a slow ship," he observes, "make as great holes as those of a swift. The Spaniards had an army aboard them, and Howard had none; they had more ships than he had, and of higher building and charging; so that had he entangled himself with those great and powerful vessels he had greatly endangered this Kingdom of England. But our admiral knew his advantage, and held it; which had he not done he had not been worthy to have held his head." Camden reports advice given to Howard by one of his officers to grapple on July 23. It has been surmised that Ralegh dissuaded him.
It may be so; and Ralegh can be construed as wishing it to be so understood.
Next day the Spaniards lay by to breathe. The English had leisure to send ash.o.r.e for powder and shot. These for the great guns had, he has recorded, been unduly stinted. On July 25 the battle was resumed, as the enemy sailed towards the Isle of Wight. A Portuguese galleon was captured. On moved both fleets to the Straits of Dover. Many fresh English volunteer ships kept streaming in till the English fleet numbered 140 sail. Here Camden alludes to Ralegh by name. So does a correspondent of Mendoza, describing him as "a gentleman of the Queen"s Privy Chamber." He must have been at the decisive struggle before Calais; "Never was seen by any man living such a battery." He was present at the desperate stand of the Spaniards opposite Gravelines. He helped to hunt the enemy into the northern seas. In a pa.s.sage, attributed by Strype to Drake, of his _Report of the Truth of the Fight about the Isles of the Azores_, he writes: "The navy of 140 sail, was by thirty of the Queen"s ships of war and a few merchantmen, beaten and shuffled together, even from the Lizard Point, in Cornwall, to Portland, where they shamefully left Don Pedro de Valdez with his mighty ship; from Portland to Calais, where they lost Hugo de Moncada, with the galleys of which he was captain; and from Calais, driven with squibs from their anchors, were chased out of the sight of England round about Scotland and Ireland; where, for the sympathy of their barbarous religion, hoping to find succour and a.s.sistance, a great part of them were crushed against the rocks; and those others who landed, being very many in number, were, notwithstanding, broken, slain, and taken, and so sent from village to village, coupled with halters, to be shipped into England; where her Majesty, of her princely and "invincible"
disposition, disdaining to put them to death, and scorning either to retain or entertain them, they were all sent back again to their own country, to witness and recount the worthy achievements of their "invincible navy"."
[Sidenote: _Retaliation on Spain._]
Ralegh had much to do with the preliminary arrangements for the repulse of the Armada. He advised on the manner in which the victory might be improved. Several of the n.o.ble Spanish prisoners were committed to his charge. A plan was formed, which the completeness of the Spanish overthrow rendered unnecessary, for the despatch of Sir Richard Grenville and him to Ireland for the suppression of any armed body of Spanish fugitives. His part in the actual Channel fighting had been that simply of one among many gallant captains. When next the State made a naval demonstration he continued to play a secondary character. In April, 1589, an expedition, under Drake and Norris, of six Queen"s men-of-war and 120 volunteer sail, started to restore Don Antonio to the throne of Portugal. It was retaliation for the Armada. Ralegh sailed in a ship of his own, as a volunteer without a command. Lisbon was a.s.sailed and Vigo burnt. Otherwise the chief result of the attempt was spoil. In the Tagus 200 vessels were burnt. Many of them were easterling hulks laden with stores for a new invasion of England. Disease, arising from intemperate indulgence in new wine, crippled the fleet, and led to a quarrel between Ralegh and another Adventurer. Colonel Roger Williams had lent men to bring home one of Ralegh"s prizes. Williams treated ship and cargo as therefore his in virtue of salvage. Ralegh, always tenacious of his rights, resisted, and the Privy Council upheld him. The expedition, which ended in June, though it did not gain much glory, was profitable. He, for example, effected some lucrative captures, and was paid 4000 as his share of the general booty.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE POET. (1589-1593).
[Sidenote: _Out of Favour._]
Ralegh would have been happier if he could have gone on fighting Spain instead of returning to the discord of Court rivalries. Before the summer was over he was again immersed in bickerings with Ess.e.x. The Earl was p.r.o.ne to take offence. After the defeat of the Armada he had challenged Ralegh to mortal combat. The unknown grievance was probably not more serious than the t.i.tle to a ribbon of the Queen"s, for which, a little later, he provoked a duel with Blount, Lord Mountjoy. Between him and Ralegh the Council interposed. It averted a combat, and endeavoured to suppress the fact of the challenge. The two could be bound over to keep the peace. They could not be reconciled. Too many indiscreet or malignant partisans were interested in inflaming the conflict. Elizabeth tried with more or less success to adjust the balance by a rebuff to each. She rejected Ralegh"s solicitation of the rangership of the New Forest for Lord Pembroke. She gave the post to Blount, Ess.e.x"s recent antagonist. Still, on the whole, there appears to have been some foundation for the gossip of courtiers that Ralegh was more really in the shade. Soon after his return from Portugal he had quitted the Court, first, for the West, and then for Ireland. Captain Francis Allen wrote, on August 17, 1589, to Francis Bacon"s elder brother, Anthony, who subsequently conducted Ess.e.x"s foreign correspondence: "My Lord of Ess.e.x hath chased Mr. Ralegh from the Court, and hath confined him into Ireland." The statement was not accurate. Ralegh was able practically to contradict it by his return, after a visit to Munster of a few months. In a letter of December, 1589, he a.s.sured his cousin Carew, "n.o.ble George," then Master of the Ordnance in Ireland: "For my retreat from Court, it was upon good cause to take order for my prize. If in Ireland they think I am not worth the respecting, they shall much deceive themselves. I am in place to be believed not inferior to any man, to pleasure or displeasure the greatest; and my opinion is so received and believed as I can anger the best of them. And therefore, if the Deputy be not as ready to stead me as I have been to defend him--be it as it may. When Sir William Fitzwilliams shall be in England, I take myself for his better by the honourable offices I hold, as also by that nearness to her Majesty which I still enjoy."
[Sidenote: _At Youghal._]
He could truly deny any permanent manifestation of a loss of royal goodwill. He had been receiving fresh marks of it. He was about to receive more. His Irish estate afforded sufficient ground for absence from Court, though no less agreeable motive had concurred. He had rounded off his huge concession by procuring from the Bishop of Lismore, in 1587, a lease of Lismore Manor at a rent of 13 _6s. 8d._ He was building on the site of the castle a stately habitation, which his wealthy successors have again transformed out of all resemblance to his work. He had conceived an affection for the Warden"s house attached to the Dominican Friary at Youghal, Myrtle Grove, or Ralegh"s House, as it came to be styled. Its present owner, Sir John Pope Hennessy, who has made it the occasion of a picturesque but bitter monograph, thinks he liked it because it reminded him of Hayes Barton. Other observers have failed to see the resemblance. At present it remains much as it was when Ralegh sat in its deep bays, or by its carved fire-place. The great myrtles in its garden must be almost his contemporaries. He had his experiments to watch, his potatoes and tobacco, his yellow wallflowers, in the pleasant garden by the Blackwater. He had to replenish his farms with well affected Englishmen whom he imported from Devon, Somerset, and Dorset. In 1592 it is officially recorded that, beside fifty Irish families, 120 Englishmen, many of whom had families, were settled on his property. He was developing a mineral industry by the help of miners he had hired from Cornwall. He was conducting, at a cost of some 200 a year, a lively litigation with his Lismore neighbours, of which he wrote in a few months to his cousin: "I will shortly send over an order from the Queen for a dismiss of their cavillations." It was the short way of composing law proceedings against Court favourites. He was planning the confusion by similar means of the unfriendly Fitzwilliam"s "connivances with usurpers of his land." Yet a cloud there seems to have been, if only a pa.s.sing one. A memorable incident of literary history, connected with this sojourn in Ireland, verifies the talk of the Court, and lends it importance. It may even point to a relation between the haze dimly discernible now, and the tempest which burst three years later.
[Sidenote: _Edmund Spenser._]
[Sidenote: _The Faerie Queene._]
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 circ.u.mstance 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 lay Of 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 circ.u.mstances of Spenser"s own introduction to Court indicate that Ralegh had recovered favour. He read or lent to Ralegh during the visit to Kilcolman the first three books of the _Faerie 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 G.o.ddesse grace me first enhanced, And to my oaten pipe enclin"d her eare.
The first three books of the _Faerie Queene_ were published early in 1590, with an expository letter from the most humbly affectionate author to the Right n.o.ble and Valorous Sir Walter Ralegh. First of all the copies of commendatory verses prefixed to the poems stood two signed W.R.
Spenser, in _Colin Clout_, lauded Ralegh as a poet:--
Full sweetly tempered is that Muse of his, That can empierce a Princes mightie hart.
[Sidenote:_Cynthia._]
[Sidenote:_Date of the Poem._]
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 ma.n.u.script 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 in 1603. It comprises altogether 568 verses. Two short poems, of seven and fourteen lines, come first; and the ma.n.u.script terminates with an unfinished poem of seven stanzas in a variety of terza rima. The body of the contents consists of 526 elegiac verses, described in the ma.n.u.script as "The twenty-first and last book of the Ocean, to Cynthia." Archdeacon Hannah, in his _Courtly 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 the _Athenaeum_, 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 of _Cynthia_. The rest he holds to be not a continuation of _Cynthia_, 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 of _Cynthia_, 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 a.s.sumes 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 laying 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 a.s.sign the rough-hewing of the entire project of _Cynthia_, 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 pa.s.sages. 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 the _Cynthia_ in _Colin Clout_ in 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 of _Cynthia_ in 1591, with its real or unreal blackness of despair, he would not have spoken of Ralegh as basking in the renewed radiance of happy prospects. So _Cynthia_, 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,