Great Ralegh. Hugh De Sélincourt

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СКАЧАТЬ it hath pleased God to raise the same even from the dead. … And whereof cometh this that the Lord hath so blessed you, but only that you should be beneficial and profitable to all men?" And he ends his discourse, in which a note of almost fatherly concern is heard, with an apt euphuism about the bee, to clinch his argument and perhaps to show his knowledge of courtly style (did not he too go to London as member for Exeter?) "As the bee is no longer suffered to have a place in the hive than whiles he worketh, no more is that man to have place in the public weal than whiles he doth some good therein."

       THE BIRTHPLACE OF SIR WALTER RALEGH, BUDLEIGH, SALTERTON

      His father, too, was a man to know and appreciate his son's worth. He had led no uneventful life, though he was, for the most part, sequestered in the country. He took a leading part in the affairs of the little town of Budleigh-Salterton. In the great Rising of the West, in 1549, he came perilously near to losing his life. He was riding with some mariners from Hayes to Exeter, when he came upon an old woman telling her beads; he stopped to ask her why she defied authority by telling beads, and the old woman, furious, rushed into the church of Clyst St. Mary, and inveighed against the gentlemen who would burn the houses of poor folk over their heads. Ralegh had ridden on towards Exeter; a body of insurgents overtook him, and he was saved from being murdered only by hastening into a chapel by the road-side. But he went on his way again, and again fell into the hands of the rebels; and this time he did not manage to escape, but was shut up in the tower of a church at St. Sidwell's—a suburb of Exeter in the hands of the rebels—until Lord Grey of Wilton won the great battle of Clyst Heath, in which four thousand perished, and relieved the siege of Exeter. The incident serves to show the calibre of the father.

      

      But when young Ralegh was a boy, his father's adventurous days were over; and in 1561 he is mentioned as churchwarden of East Budleigh parish, and no doubt led his family regularly each Sunday to the family pew, on which the family arms are still discernible, though much disfigured—probably too at the command of King James I. of England, who feared his too ambitious subject even after his death. Little the father thought of that as he watched the little boy to see that he behaved with propriety in church and did not sleep or play as little boys are wont to do during a sermon. Old Ralegh, remembering the terrible reaction during Mary's reign, would be specially punctilious in such matters; and fathers then were not lenient to their children. Young Peter Carew, when he played truant at Exeter Grammar School, was leashed to a great hound by his father: and we are not told whether Peter and the dog were on friendly terms. They may have become so; we will hope for Peter's sake that they did. Certainly, with three young Gilberts, young Walter's step-brothers—sons of Otho Gilbert—and a family of Raleghs of all ages, there would be need for stern discipline in church as well as out of church, and there is little reason for doubting of its existence, though no account has been handed down of severity as ingenious as that shown by Peter Carew's honest father. Probably, in young Walter's upbringing, there was a touch of the ewe lamb, that would account in a measure for the "naeve of pride" which was such a conspicuous feature of his developed character. Not that he was spoiled; but his parents had a soft place in their hearts for him, which he well would know of, and he was not suppressed so rigorously as he would have been otherwise … but this is pleasant conjecture.

      His mother was a woman of character: "a woman of noble wit, and of good and godly opinions," writes John Foxe of her, and proceeds to tell how she visited poor Agnes Prest when she was in prison for having Protestant opinions (that was when Mary was on the throne, and Philip of Spain was powerful in England), and conversed with her before she was burned at the stake on Southernhay. "Mistress Ralegh came home to her husband and declared to him that in her life she never heard any woman, of such simplicity to see, to talk so godly and so earnestly; insomuch that if God were not with her she could not speak such things. I was not able to answer her: I, who can read, and she cannot."

      The story does not relate what answer Mistress Ralegh wanted to give; it does not necessarily show her a Catholic in sympathy, though she probably did not sympathize with Agnes Prest's desire for martyrdom, and wanted to prevent the old woman from losing her life in such a terrible way. The story illustrates how inextricably religion was bound up with patriotism, and what a quandary the ordinary peace-loving gentlefolk, whose wish was to serve God and their country, must have been in, when the interests of either changed with the sovereign. That was why Elizabeth, by her policy of gradually cutting the ties that linked England to the Pope and the countries under his authority, gave such immense strength to the English; she united, as it were, the strength drawn from patriotism and the strength drawn from religion, by forcing England to rely on herself alone; and so she overcame the countries weakened by the constant antagonism between the welfare of their religion and the welfare of their state. She saw, as her father Henry had seen, the value of religion as a political asset; and with cold common sense she used that asset for all its peculiar worth. Her policy is more praiseworthy than her religion. Never was woman less religious; few women have been dowered with her state-craft. Religion and patriotism became practically identical: their interests were no longer conflicting.

      The Pope and his followers became, for adventurous Englishmen, comfortingly akin to the devil and the devil's workers, to have at whom has always been the privilege of good men since the world began. Moreover, in this case the powers of evil were wealthy and pompous, but unwarlike; and wealth is a pleasant perquisite to virtue.

      The time did not lend itself to contemplation. There was too much to be done. It was a time of action. The material world, with all its tremendous possibilities, was opening out before the astonished gaze of Englishmen, and left but little time for the exploration of the spiritual world. Men of action and men of art passed on their way triumphantly, "if not to heaven—then hand in hand to hell."

      Young Ralegh would accept his religion from his parents much as he accepted his sword, resolved to keep both bright and becoming a gentleman. He was a man of the world; and the world then was boisterous and unruly. Men revelled in life like boys; their code of honour was as chivalrous and strange as that of boys. They lived, and they relished living.

      Into this world young Ralegh went to make his way. He was poor, but had friends who had caused the spirit of life to thrive in him, who had nurtured his own belief in himself, and showed him what the world had in store for the courageous and skilful man. He was proud and ambitious, and few men have had better reason for pride, or have carried out their ambition with such success as he. He was always an aristocrat; so distinguished that ostentation became him, which, on a meaner man, would have passed into vulgarity. He was the most romantic figure of the most romantic age in the annals of English history.

      His life was fuller of great accidents than life is wont to be, and all these accidents of good fortune and of bad he used to the full extent of a man's power, and by so doing he controlled them and became the master of his fate.

CHAPTER II

       Table of Contents

EARLY DAYS

       Table of Contents

      His early going to Oxford—Old Ascham on quick wit and education—Life at a University—The Queen at Oxford—To the wars in France—Henry Champernoun—Stories of the wars.

      Of Ralegh's early education little is known: it is uncertain whether he was taught at home, or went to one of the Grammar Schools which Stowe records with pride existed in nearly every country town. When he was sixteen he went to Oriel College, Oxford, of which his СКАЧАТЬ