Raleigh. Gosse Edmund

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      Flanders thy valour, where it last was tried;

      The camp thy sorrow, where thy body died;

      Thy friends thy want; the world thy virtues' fame.

      This elegy appeared with the rest in Astrophel in 1595; but it had already been printed, in 1593, in the Phœnix Nest, and as early as 1591 Sir John Harington quotes it as Raleigh's.

      It was not till the following spring that Raleigh took possession of certain vast estates in Ireland. The Queen had named him among the 'gentlemen-undertakers,' between whom the escheated lands of the Earl of Desmond were to be divided. He received about forty-two thousand acres in the counties of Cork, Waterford, and Tipperary, and he set about repeopling this desolate region with his usual vigour of action. He brought settlers over from the West of England, but these men were not supported or even encouraged at Dublin Castle. 'The doting Deputy,' as Raleigh calls him, treated his Devonshire farmers with less consideration than the Irish kerns, and although it is certain that of all the 'undertakers' Raleigh was the one who, after his lights, tried to do the best for his land, his experience as an Irish colonist was on the whole dispiriting. By far the richest part of his property was the 'haven royal' of Youghal, with the thickly-wooded lands on either side of the river Blackwater. He is scarcely to be forgiven for what appears to have been the wanton destruction of the Geraldine Friary of Youghal, built in 1268, which his men pulled down and burned while he was mayor of the town in 1587. Raleigh's Irish residences at this time were his manor-house in Youghal, which still remains, and Lismore Castle, which he rented, from 1587 onwards, of the official Archbishop of Cashel, Meiler Magrath.

      We have now reached the zenith of Raleigh's personal success. His fame was to proceed far beyond anything that he had yet gained or deserved, but his mere worldly success was to reach no further, and even from this moment sensibly to decline. Elizabeth had showered wealth and influence upon him, although she had refrained, at her most doting moments, from lifting him up to the lowest step in the ladder of aristocratic preferment. But although her favour towards Raleigh had this singular limit, and although she kept him rigidly outside the pale of politics, in other respects her affection had been lavish in the extreme. Without ceasing to hold Hatton and Leicester captive, she had now for five years given Raleigh the chief place in her heart. But, in May 1587, we suddenly find him in danger of being dethroned in favour of a boy of twenty, and it is the new Earl of Essex, with his petulant beauty, who 'is, at cards, or one game or another, with her, till the birds sing in the morning.' The remarkable scene in which Essex dared to demand the sacrifice of Raleigh as the price of his own devotion is best described by the new favourite in his own words. Raleigh had now been made Captain of the Guard, and we have to imagine him standing at the door in his uniform of orange-tawny, while the pert and pouting boy is half declaiming, half whispering, in the ear of the Queen, whose beating heart forgets to remind her that she might be the mother of one of her lovers and the grandmother of the other. Essex writes:

      It was probably about this time, and owing to the instigation of Essex, that Tarleton, the comedian, laid himself open to banishment from Court for calling out, while Raleigh was playing cards with Elizabeth, 'See how the Knave commands the Queen!' Elizabeth supported her old favourite, but there is no doubt that these attacks made their impression on her irritable temperament. Meanwhile Raleigh, engaged in a dozen different enterprises, and eager to post hither and thither over land and sea, was probably not ill disposed to see his royal mistress diverted from a too-absorbing attention to himself.

      On May 8, 1587, Raleigh sent forth from Plymouth his fourth Virginian expedition, under Captain John White. It was found that the second colony, the handful of men left behind by Sir Richard Grenville, had perished. With 150 men, White landed at Hatorask, and proposed to found a town of Raleigh in the new country. Every species of disaster attended this third colony, and in the midst of the excitement caused the following year by the Spanish Armada, a fifth expedition, fitted out under Sir Richard Grenville, was stopped by the Government at Bideford. Raleigh was not easily daunted, however, and in the midst of the preparations for the great struggle he contrived to send out two pinnaces from Bideford, on April 22, 1588, for the succour of his unfortunate Virginians; but these little vessels were ignominiously stripped off Madeira by privateers from La Rochelle, and sent helpless back to England. Raleigh had now spent more than forty thousand pounds upon the barren colony of Virginia, and, finding that no one at Court supported his hopes in that direction, he began to withdraw a little from a contest in which he was so heavily handicapped. In the next chapter we shall touch upon the modification of his American policy. He had failed hitherto, and yet, in failing, he had already secured for his own name the highest place in the early history of Colonial America.

      We now reach that famous incident in English history over which every biographer of Raleigh is tempted to linger, the ruin of Philip's Felicissima Armada. Within the limits of the present life of Sir Walter it is impossible to tell over again a story which is among the most thrilling in the chronicles of the world, but in which Raleigh's part was not a foremost one. We possess no letter of 1588 in which he refers to the fight.

      On March 31, he had been one of the nine commissioners who met to consider the best means of resisting invasion. In the same body of men sat two of Raleigh's captains, Grenville and Ralph Lane, as well as his old opponent, Lord Grey. Three months before this, Raleigh had reported to the Queen on the state of the counties under his charge, and his counsel on the subject had been taken. That he was profoundly excited at the crisis in English affairs is proved by the many allusions he makes to the Armada in the History of the World. It is on the whole surprising that he was not called to take a more prominent part in the event.3

      It is believed that he was in Ireland when the storm actually broke, that he hastened into the West of England, to raise levies of Cornish and Devonian miners, and that he then proceeded to Portland, of which, among his many offices, he was now governor, in order that he might revise and complete the defences of that fortress. Either by land or sea, according to conflicting accounts, he then hurried back to Plymouth, and joined the main body of the fleet on July 23. There is a very early tradition that his advice was asked by the Admiral, Howard of Effingham, on the question whether it would be wise to try to board the Spanish galleons. The Admiral thought not, but was almost over-persuaded by younger men, eager for distinction, when Raleigh came to his aid with counsel that tallied with the Admiral's judgment. In the History of the World Raleigh remarks:

      Raleigh's impression of the whole comedy of the Armada is summed up in an admirable sentence in his Report of the Fight in the Azores, to which the reader СКАЧАТЬ