Sir Walter Ralegh Part 1

Sir Walter Ralegh.

by William Stebbing.

PREFACE

Students of Ralegh's career cannot complain of a dearth of materials.

For thirty-seven years he lived in the full glare of publicity. The social and political literature of more than a generation abounds in allusions to him. He appears and reappears continually in the correspondence of Burleigh, Robert Cecil, Christopher Hatton, Ess.e.x, Anthony Bacon, Henry Sidney, Richard Boyle, Ralph Winwood, Dudley Carleton, George Carew, Henry Howard, and King James. His is a very familiar name in the Calendars of Domestic State Papers. It holds its place in the archives of Venice and Simancas. No family muniment room can be explored without traces of him. Successive reports of the Historical Ma.n.u.scripts Commission testify to the vigilance with which his doings were noted. No personage in two reigns was more a centre for anecdotes and fables. They were eagerly imbibed, treasured, and circulated alike by contemporary, or all but contemporary, statesmen and wits, and by the feeblest scandal-mongers. A list comprising the names of Francis Bacon, Sir John Harington, Sir Robert Naunton, Drummond of Hawthornden, Thomas Fuller, Sir Anthony Welldon, Bishop Goodman, Francis...o...b..rn, Sir Edward Peyton, Sir Henry Wotton, John Aubrey, Sir William Sanderson, David Lloyd, and James Howell, is far from exhausting the number of the very miscellaneous purveyors and chroniclers.

Antiquaries, from the days of John Hooker of Exeter, the continuer of Holinshed, Sir William Pole, Anthony a Wood, and John Prince, to those of Lysons, Polwhele, Isaac D'Israeli, Payne Collier, and Dr. Brushfield, have found boundless hunting-ground in his habits, acts, and motives.

Sir John Hawles, Mr. Justice Foster, David Jardine, Lord Campbell, and Spedding have discussed the technical justice of his trials and sentences. No historian, from Camden and de Thou, to Hume, Lingard, Hallam, and Gardiner, has been able to abstain from debating his merits and demerits. From his own age to the present the fascination of his career, and at once the copiousness of information on it, and its mysteries, have attracted a mult.i.tude of commentators. His character has been repeatedly a.n.a.lysed by essayists, subtle as Macvey Napier, eloquent as Charles Kingsley. There has been no more favourite theme for biographers. Since the earliest and trivial account compiled by William Winstanley in 1660, followed by the anonymous and tolerably industrious narrative attributed variously to John, Benjamin, and James, Shirley in 1677, and Lewis Theobald's meagre sketch in 1719, a dozen or more lives with larger pretensions to critical research have been printed, by William Oldys in 1736, Thomas Birch in 1751, Arthur Cayley in 1805, Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges in 1813, Mrs. A.T. Thomson in 1830, Patrick Fraser Tytler in 1833, Robert Southey in 1837, Sir Robert Hermann Schomburgk in 1848, C. Whitehead in 1854, S.G. Drake, of Boston, U.S., in 1862, J.A. St. John in 1868, Edward Edwards in the same year, Mrs.

Creighton in 1877, and Edmund Gosse in 1886.

Almost every one of this numerous company, down even to bookmaking Winstanley the barber, has shed light, much or little, upon dark recesses. By four, Oldys, Cayley, Tytler, and Edwards, the whole learning of the subject, so far as it was for their respective periods available, must be admitted to have been most diligently acc.u.mulated.

Yet it will scarcely be denied that there has always been room for a new presentment of Ralegh's personality. That the want has remained unsatisfied after all the efforts made to supply it is to be imputed less to defects in the writers, than to the intrinsic difficulties of the subject. Ralegh's multifarious activity, with the width of the area in which it operated, is itself a disturbing element. It is confusing for a biographer to be required to keep at once independent and in unison the poet, statesman, courtier, schemer, patriot, soldier, sailor, freebooter, discoverer, colonist, castle-builder, historian, philosopher, chemist, prisoner, and visionary. The variety of Ralegh's powers and tendencies, and of their exercise, is the distinctive note of him, and of the epoch which needed, fashioned, and used him. A whole band of faculties stood ready in him at any moment for action. Several generally were at work simultaneously. For the man to be properly visible, he should be shown flashing from more facets than a brilliant.

Few are the pens which can vividly reflect versatility like his. The temptation to diffuseness and irrelevancy is as embarra.s.sing and dangerous. At every turn Ralegh's restless vitality involved him in a web of other men's fortunes, and in national crises. A biographer is constantly being beguiled into describing an era as well as its representative, into writing history instead of a life. Within an author's legitimate province the perplexities are numberless and distracting. Never surely was there a career more beset with insoluble riddles and unmanageable dilemmas. At each step, in the relation of the most ordinary incidents, exactness of dates, or precision of events, appears unattainable. Fiction is ever elbowing fact, so that it might be supposed contemporaries had with one accord been conspiring to disguise the truth from posterity. The uncertainty is deepened tenfold when motives have to be measured and appraised. Ralegh was the best hated personage in the kingdom. On a conscientious biographer is laid the burden of allowing just enough, and not too much, for the gall of private, political, and popular enmity. He is equally bound to remember and account, often on the adverse side, for inherent contradictions in his hero's own moral nature. While he knows it would be absurdly unjust to accept the verdict of Ralegh's jealous and envious world on his intentions, he has to beware of construing malicious persecution as equivalent to proof of angelic innocence.

One main duty of a biographer of Ralegh is to be strenuously on the guard against degenerating into an apologist. But, above all, he ought to be versed in the art of standing aside. While explanations of obscurities must necessarily be offered, readers should be put into a position to judge for themselves of their sufficiency, and to subst.i.tute, if they will, others of their own. Commonly they want not so much arguments, however unegotistical and dispa.s.sionate, as a narrative.

They wish to view and hear Ralegh himself; to attend him on his quick course from one field of fruitful energy to another; to see him as his age saw him, in his exuberant vitality; not among the few greatest, but of all great, Englishmen the most universally capable. They desire facts, stated as such, simply, in chronological sequence, and, when it is at all practicable, in the actor's own words, not artificially carved, coloured, digested, and cla.s.sified. As for failings and infirmities, they are more equitable and less liable to unreasonable disgusts than a biographer is inclined to fancy. They are content that a great man's faults, real or apparent, should be left to be justified, excused, or at all events harmonized, in the ma.s.s of good and ill.

No biographer of Ralegh need for lack of occupation stray from the direct path of telling his readers the plain story of an eventful life.

The rightful demands on his resources are enough to absorb the most plentiful stores of leisure, patience, and self-denial. He should be willing to spend weeks or months on loosing a knot visible to students alone, which others have not noticed, and, if they had, would think might as profitably have been left tied. He should collect, and weigh, and have the courage to refuse to use, piles of matter which do not enlighten. He should be prepared to devote years to the search for a clue to a career with a bewildering capacity for sudden transformation scenes. He should have the courage, when he has lost the trace, to acknowledge that he has wandered. He should feel an interest so supreme in his subject, in its shadows as in its lights, as neither to count the cost of labour in its service, nor to find affection for the man incompatible with the condemnation of his errors. Finally, after having arrived at a clear perception of the true method to be pursued, and ends to be aimed at, he should be able to recognize how very imperfectly he has succeeded in acting up to his theory.

W.S.

LONDON: _September_, 1891.

_SIR WALTER RALEGH._

CHAPTER I.

GENEALOGY.

The Raleghs were an old Devonshire family, once wealthy and distinguished. At one period five knightly branches of the house flourished simultaneously in the county. In the reign of Henry III a Ralegh had been Justiciary. There were genealogists who, though others doubted, traced the stock to the Plantagenets through an intermarriage with the Clares. The Clare arms have been found quartered with those of Ralegh on a Ralegh pew in East Budleigh church. The family had held Smallridge, near Axminster, from before the Conquest. Since the reign of Edward III it had been seated on the edge of Dartmoor, at Fardell. There it built a picturesque mansion and chapel. The Raleghs of Fardell were, writes Polwhele, 'esteemed ancient gentlemen.' But the rapacious lawyers of Henry VII had discovered some occasion against Wimund Ralegh, the head of the family in their day. They thought him worth the levy of a heavy fine for misprision of treason; and he had to sell Smallridge.

[Sidenote: _Ralegh's Parents._]

[Sidenote: _Their Character._]

Wimund married into the Grenville family; and in 1497 his son and heir, Walter, was born. Before the boy attained majority the father died. As Dr. Brushfield, a Devon antiquarian, to whose diligence and enthusiasm all students of the life of Walter Ralegh are indebted, has shown, Walter Ralegh of Fardell, on the termination of his minority, in 1518, was possessed, in addition to Fardell, of the manors of Colaton Ralegh, Wythecombe Ralegh, and Bollams. He may be presumed to have succeeded to enc.u.mbrances likewise. Part of Colaton was sold by him; and he did not occupy Fardell. As he is known to have owned a bark in the reign of Mary, it has been supposed that he took to commerce. Whether for the sake of contiguity to Exeter, then the centre of a large maritime trade, or for economy, he fixed his residence in East Budleigh parish, on a farm, which was his for the residue of an eighty years' term. His choice may have been partly determined by his marriage to Joan, daughter to John Drake of Exmouth. The Exmouth Drakes were connected with East Budleigh; and Joan's nephew, Robert Drake, bequeathed charitable funds in 1628 for the benefit of East Budleigh parish in which he lived. The dates of Joan's marriage and death are uncertain. It is only known that the two events occurred between 1518 and 1534. Her tomb is in East Budleigh church, with an inscription asking prayers for her soul. She left two sons, George and John. Secondly, Walter married a lady of the family of Darell or Dorrell, though some genealogists describe her as Isabel, daughter of de Ponte, a Genoese merchant settled in London. She left a daughter, Mary, who married Hugh Snedale. On her death, some time before 1549, Walter married thirdly Katherine, daughter of Sir Philip Champernoun. She was widow of Otho Gilbert, of Compton and Greenway Castles, to whom she had borne the three Gilbert brothers, John, Humphrey, and Adrian. By her marriage to Walter Ralegh of Fardell she had three more children, Carew, and Walter, 'Sir Walter Ralegh,' with a daughter, Margaret, described sometimes as older, and sometimes as younger than Walter.

At the time of Ralegh's birth the family had lost its pristine splendour. But there has been a tendency to exaggeration of the extent of the decadence, by way of foil to the merit which retrieved the ruin.

John Hooker, a contemporary Devonshire antiquary, uncle to the author of _The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity_, described the family as 'consopited,' and as having 'become buried in oblivion, as though it had never been.' Yet Walter Ralegh of Fardell was still a land-owner of importance. His third marriage indicates that he had not fallen out of the society of his cla.s.s. Not even personally can he and his wife Katherine be set down as altogether obscure. Holinshed names one of them, and Foxe names both. Walter seems to have had much of his great son's restlessness and independence of character, if without the genius and the gift of mounting. After his first wife's death he energetically adopted reformed doctrines. In 1549 during the rising in the West his religious zeal endangered his life.

[Sidenote: _In Peril of Death._]

The story is thus told in Holinshed's _Chronicles_. 'It happened that a certain gentleman named Walter Ralegh, as he was upon a side holy day riding from his house to Exeter, overtook an old woman going to the parish church of Saint Mary Clift, who had a pair of beads in her hands, and asked her what she did with those beads. And entering into further speech with her concerning religion which was reformed, and as then by order of law to be put in execution, he did persuade with her that she should, as a good Christian woman and an obedient subject, yield thereunto; saying further that there was a punishment by law appointed against her, and all such as would not obey and follow the same, and which would be put in execution upon them. This woman nothing liking, nor well digesting this matter, went forth to the parish church, where all the parishioners were then at the service; and being impatient, and in an agony with the speeches before pa.s.sed between her and the gentleman, beginneth to upbraid in the open church very hard and unseemly speeches concerning religion, saying that she was threatened by the gentleman, that, except she would leave her beads, and give over holy bread and holy water, the gentlemen would burn them out of their houses and spoil them, with many other speeches very false and untrue, and whereof no talk at all had pa.s.sed between the gentleman and her.

Notwithstanding, she had not so soon spoken but that she was believed, and in all haste like a sort of wasps they fling out of the church, and get them to the town which is not far from thence, and there began to intrench and fortify the town, sending abroad into the country round about the news aforesaid, and of their doings in hand, flocking, and procuring as many as they could to come and to join with them. But before they came into the town they overtook the gentleman Master Ralegh aforesaid, and were in such a choler, and so fell in rages with him, that, if he had not shifted himself into the chapel there, and had been rescued by certain mariners of Exmouth which came with him, he had been in great danger of his life, and like to have been murdered. And albeit he escaped for this time, yet it was not long before he fell into their hands, and by them was imprisoned and kept in prison in the tower and church of Saint Sidwell, without the east gate of the city of Exeter, during the whole time of the commotion, being many times threatened to be executed to death.' He was not released till the battle of Clyst, called by Holinshed, Clift, Heath, won on August 4, 1549, by Lords Grey and Bedford near the scene of his misadventure, followed by a second victory on the next day, forced the Catholic insurgents to raise the siege of Exeter, which they had been blockading since July 2.

He was no fair weather theologian. His Protestantism out-lived King Edward. He sympathized with the demonstration in 1553 against the Spanish marriage. On the failure of the Devonshire movement his cousin, Sir Peter Carew, the ringleader at Exeter, is stated in official depositions to have effected his escape abroad through Walter Ralegh, whom he 'persuaded to convey him in his bark' to France from Weymouth.

The wording implies active and conscious intervention. The strange thing is that he should not have been punished for complicity. Later in the reign of Mary his wife exposed herself to similar peril, and similarly escaped. Foxe in his _Acts and Monuments_ relates that Agnes Prest, before she was brought to the stake in 1557 at Southernhay, had been comforted in Exeter gaol by the visits of 'the wife of Walter Ralegh, a woman of n.o.ble wit, and of good and goodly opinion.'

[Sidenote: _Death and Burial._]

Unless that Walter was churchwarden of East Budleigh in 1561, and that a conveyance by him of the Sidmouth Manor fish t.i.thes proves him to have been alive in April, 1578, nothing more is known of him. It has not been ascertained when he and Katherine died, though they are believed to have been dead in 1584. The interest in the East Budleigh farm had by that time run out; and it is surmised they had removed into Exeter, if they had not previously possessed a residence there, perhaps by the Palace Gate. On the authority of a request by their son in 1603 to be buried, if not at Sherborne, beside them in 'Exeter Church,' it has been concluded that they were interred in the Cathedral. A monument erected to Katherine's son by her first marriage, Sir John Gilbert, was long accepted as theirs. In fact no trace of their burial in any Exeter church has been found. The present inclination of local archaeologists seems to be to a.s.sume that they were not buried at Exeter at all. It is hard to a.s.sent in the face of Ralegh's words. At all events, nothing else of any kind is remembered of the pair; or could reasonably be expected to have been remembered. History has told much more of them than of most country gentlemen and their wives.

CHAPTER II.

IN SEARCH OF A CAREER (1552-1581).

[Sidenote: _Ralegh's Birthplace._]

Walter, the second son by the third marriage of Walter Ralegh of Fardell and Hayes, was born in the reign of Edward VI, it has been supposed, in 1552. The exact date is not beyond doubt; for the registration of baptisms at East Budleigh was not begun till two or three years later.

If the inscription on the National Portrait Gallery picture, '1588, aetatis suae 34,' and that on Zucchero's in the Dublin Gallery, 'aet.

44, 1598,' be correct, his birth must have been not in 1552, but about 1554. A similar, or nearly similar, inference may be drawn from the statement, on a miniature of him at Belvoir Castle, of his age as sixty-five in 1618. One local writer, R. Izacke, has claimed the honour of his birthplace for a house in Exeter, adjoining the Palace-gate.

Probably the rumour points, as I have intimated, to its occupation at some time or other by his parents. Another author a.s.serts that he was born at Fardell. His own testimony, 'being born in that house,' is decisive in favour of his father's Budleigh home, a lonely, one-storied, thatched, late Tudor farmhouse, not a manor-house, of moderate size, with gabled wings, and a projecting central porch. Tradition has marked out the particular room in which he was born, as on the upper floor at the west end, facing southwards. The house, which is a mile west of East Budleigh church, and six from Exmouth, with the exception of some change at the end of the east wing, probably retains its original character. It was restored in 1627 by 'R.D.' For a century past it has been denominated Hayes Barton, or simply Hayes. Previously it had been called, after successive landlords, Poerhayes or Power's Hayes, and Dukes-hayes. The hollow in which it lies, among low hills, is on the verge of a tract of moorland; and Hayes Wood rises close at hand.

Through the oak wood to Budleigh Salterton Bay is two miles and a half.

[Sidenote: _At Oxford._]

In this quiet spot Ralegh spent his boyhood, in circ.u.mstances not very unlike those of more eminent county families with which his was connected. During the earlier half of the sixteenth century the majority of the gentry were continually growing poorer, and a minority were growing richer. The Raleghs, it is plain, had not met with the good fortune of the Russells, and others of their rural peers. They were declining, if hardly in the degree represented subsequently. But an ampler share of prosperity could not have made much difference in young Walter's prospects or training. Three brothers were all before him in the succession to the patrimony. His birthright could not have comprised more than the cadet's prescriptive portion of necessity and brains. It is unfair to the natural curiosity of posterity that his extraordinary endowments in the second respect are not traceable in anecdotes of his childhood. Naturally a local legend reports him to have loved the society of adventurous mariners. Sir John Millais in his 'Boyhood of Ralegh,' which was painted at Budleigh Salterton, has embodied it. In a narrative printed a century after his death a general a.s.sertion of his fondness for books of voyages occurs. Otherwise his boyish tastes and habits are wholly unknown. The name of his school has not been preserved. The first accepted fact after his birth is his entrance, as a commoner, into Oriel College, of which, says Anthony a Wood, his cousin, C. Champernoun, was a member. According to a statement by Thomas Fuller, of which there is no corroboration either in the books of Christ Church, or elsewhere, he belonged also to Christ Church, before or after his admission into Oriel. For any details of his academical course, as for the dates of its commencement and close, posterity is indebted to Wood, who remarks that he went up to Oriel 'in 1568, or thereabouts,' and, 'after he had spent about three years in that house, left the University without a degree.' Wood declares that 'his natural parts being strangely advanced by academical learning, under the care of an excellent tutor, he became the ornament of the juniors, and was worthily esteemed a proficient in oratory and philosophy.' It is exceedingly likely, Ralegh being Ralegh. At the same time, particulars would have been welcome.

[Sidenote: _Chronological difficulties._]

Lord Bacon has enshrined in his Apophthegms an example of Ralegh's wit at Oxford. A cowardly fellow happened to be a very good archer. Having been grossly abused by another, he bemoaned himself to Ralegh, and asked what he should do to repair the wrong that had been offered him. 'Why, challenge him,' answered Ralegh, 'to a match of shooting.' If the sarcasm is not very keen its preservation in academical memory implies an impression of distinction in its author. Perhaps as much may be said for another anecdote of his University career, for which John Aubrey solemnly vouches, that he borrowed a gown at Oxford of one T. Child, and never restored it. Bacon's anecdote, in any case, being contemporary testimony, answers the useful purpose of confirming the reality of Ralegh's membership of the University, which otherwise would have to be believed on the faith simply of vague tradition, and of Wood's hasty a.s.sertions. No evidence indeed of Ralegh's connection with Oxford has ever been discovered in the College or University papers and books, beyond the entry, a little below the name of C. Champernoun, of 'W.

Rawley,' in the list of members of Oriel, dated 1572. It is printed in Mr. Andrew Clark's valuable _Oxford Register_. This W. Rawley must have been, like Champernoun, an undergraduate; for the name has not the graduate's prefix of 'Mr' or 'Sr.' The presence of the name in the list, with that of Champernoun, would be known to Wood. He may have built upon it the whole of his account of the periods both of Ralegh's admission into Oriel, and his departure after some three years. It would seem to him reasonable enough that Ralegh should have entered about 1568 at sixteen, and be still in residence three or four years later.

Unfortunately an interlude, put apparently by Wood several years later, separates 1568 and 1572 in Ralegh's career. His academical course cannot fill up the gap; and it at once renders the chronology of the _Athenae_ impossible, and that of the Oriel list hard to understand. Ralegh is known to have been out of England for part, if not the whole, of 1569, and is believed with good cause to have remained abroad over 1572. There are ways of explaining the consequent discrepancies. The W. Rawley on the Oriel list may have been, and probably was, our Walter Ralegh, retained among the number of undergraduates, though he had ceased to reside. A century later the name of the Duke of Monmouth, who had resided for a few months only, was kept on the Corpus books for many years. Again, to take and revise Wood's reference, Ralegh may well have entered long before he was sixteen. If, having been, in accordance with the common belief, born in 1552, he had, like his son Walter, gone up at fourteen, he would, in 1569, have pa.s.sed three years at Oxford. But at all events Wood is mistaken in the a.s.sertion that he resided there about three years from 1568; for in 1569 he certainly was campaigning in France.

[Sidenote: _In France._]

It happened in this way. His maternal kinsmen, the Champernouns, were connected by marriage with the Huguenot Comte de Montgomerie. One of them, Henry, had obtained the leave of Elizabeth to raise a troop of a hundred mounted gentlemen volunteers for the Protestant side. He collected them chiefly from the West. Ralegh is said to have been among those who accepted his invitation; 'admodum adolescens,' writes Camden in the _Annals_, 'jam primum fatis monstratus.' He must have quitted Oriel, perhaps in company with C. Champernoun, for the purpose.

Generally it has been supposed that he crossed the Channel with the rest of the troop. But there is some reason for holding that he reached France earlier. The contingent entered the Huguenot camp on October 5, 1569, two days after the defeat at Moncontour. Ralegh alludes to himself in the _History of the World_ as of the beaten army. Praising Count Lewis of Na.s.sau for his skilful conduct of the Huguenot retreat, he remarks: 'Of which myself was an eye-witness, and was one of them that had cause to thank him for it.' The pa.s.sage proves that he was in the Huguenot camp after Moncontour. Nothing in the remark is inconsistent with his earlier arrival, if there be, as there is, evidence to support it. Elsewhere in the History he says: 'I remember it well, that, when the Prince of Conde was slain after the battle of Jarnac,' the Huguenots consoled themselves for his death. Jarnac was fought on March 13, 1669.

If, then, the phrase, 'I remember,' refer to Ralegh's personal experiences of Huguenot sentiment on the field, he must have joined the army at least half a year before the retreat after Moncontour. The only way of avoiding that conclusion is to take the violent course of supposing that he was recalling French criticisms delivered some time after the actual event.

[Sidenote: _Ferocities of Civil War._]

A haze of uncertainty shrouds his original advent among the Huguenots.

It lifts for a moment to show him there; and that is all. As soon as he has ridden within the Huguenot lines the clouds gather once more, and darkness swallows up his individuality. He tells one anecdote in the History of the manner in which the Huguenots chased Catholics in the hills of Languedoc. They tracked the fugitives to caverns half way up precipitous cliffs. Then they smoked them out with their treasures by lighted bundles of straw let down by iron chains opposite the mouth.

General Pelissier plagiarised the device, with more murderous details, in Algeria in 1849. It is a specimen of the brutalities of a conflict, which its English a.s.sistants, though they had countenanced, would not care to chronicle minutely. To Ralegh's keen sight the struggle would soon have displayed itself shorn of the glamour of religious enthusiasm.