Chapter XXV: Part 25

Rawleigh, unrolling an old map which had been presented to her royal father, charmed the queen by the visions which had long charmed himself. Her majesty granted letters patent to secure to him the property of the countries which he might discover or might conquer. Rawleigh minutely planned the future operations, and by the captains he sent, for the queen would not part with her favourite, that country was discovered to which had the royal maiden not so eagerly given the name of "Virginia," had probably borne that of Rawleigh; for subsequently he betrayed this latent design when he proposed founding a city with that romantic name.

But the pressing interests of our home affairs withdrew his mind from undiscovered dominions. Rawleigh was a chief adviser of Elizabeth in the great Spanish invasion. He was eminently active in various expeditions, and not less serviceable in parliament. The ceaseless topic of his counsels, and the frequent exercise of his pen, was the alarming aggrandisement of the Spanish power. At this day, perhaps, we can form no adequate notion of that Catholic and colossal dominion which Rawleigh dwells on. "No prince in the west hath spread his wing far over his nest but the Spaniard, and made many attempts to make themselves masters of all Europe." Possibly he may have ascribed too great an influence to the treasures of India, which seem to have been always exaggerated; however, he assures us, and as a statesman he may have felt a conviction, that "its Indian gold endangers and disturbs all the nations of Europe; it creeps into counsels, purchases intelligence, and sets bound loyalty at liberty in the greatest monarchies. When they dare not with their own forces invade, they basely entertain the traitors and vagabonds of all nations." We have here a complete picture of those arts of policy which, in the revolutionary system of France, endangered Europe, and which may yet, should ever a colossal power again overshadow its independent empires.

To clip "the wing that had spread far over its nest," by cutting off the uninterrupted supplies of the plate fleets of Spain, was a course in which the queen only perceived the earnest loyalty of the intrepid adventurer; nor was that loyalty less for its perfect accordance with his own personal concerns.

Rawleigh and his joint adventurers in these discoveries were carrying on their expeditions at the risk of their private fortunes, and it appears that his own zeal had beguiled young men to change their immoveable lands for light pinnaces. The prudential ministers looked on with a cold eye, and the economical sovereign, as she was wont, rewarded her hero in her own way. Elizabeth bestowed titular honours, and cut out a seignory in Ireland from the Earl of Desmond's domains, which Rawleigh's own sword had chiefly won; twelve thousand acres, yielding no rents; dismantled farms and tenantless hamlets--an estate of fire and blood! A more substantial patent was conferred on him, to license taverns for the sale of wines; and at length it was enlarged to levy tonnage and poundage, specifying that the grant was "to sustain his great charges in the discovery of remote countries."

This was one of those odious monopolies by which the parsimonious sovereign pretended to reward the services of the individual by the infliction of a great public grievance, infinitely more intolerable than any pension-list; for every monopoly was a traffic admitting all sorts of abuses. Rawleigh's inventive faculty often broke forth into humbler schemes in domestic affairs. He seems first to have perceived in the expansion of society, the difficulty of communication for the wants of life. He projected an office for universal agency; and in this he anticipated that useful intelligence which we now recognise by the term of advertisement. New enterprises and ceaseless occupation were the aliment of that restless and noble spirit. But these monopolies, severely exacted, provoking complaints and contests, were one among other causes which may account for Rawleigh's unpopularity, even at his meridian.

To his absorbing devotion to obtain the queen's favour, he has himself ascribed his numerous enemies. While Elizabeth listened to his ingenious solutions of all her inquiries, many close at hand took umbrage lest they themselves were being supplanted; while he himself, with marked expressions, disdained all popularity. Hence, from opposite quarters, we learn how haughtily his genius bore him in commanding the world under him. And there is no doubt, as Aubrey tells us, that he was "damnably proud." Even in the height of court favour, this great man was obnoxious to the people. This we see by an anecdote of Tarleton, the jester of Elizabeth, famed for his extemporal acting. Performing before the queen, while Rawleigh stood by her majesty, shuffling a pack of cards, and pointing to the royal box, the jesting comedian exclaimed, "See, the knave commands the queen!" Her majesty frowned; but the audience applauding, the queen, ever chary in checking any popular feeling, reserved her anger till the following day, when Tarleton was banished from the royal presence. Nor was Rawleigh less unpopular in the succeeding reign, when the mob hooted this great man, and when this great man condescended to tell them how much he despised such rogues and varlets! The inconsiderate multitude, in the noble preface to his great work, he compared to "dogs, who always bark at those they know not, and whose nature is to accompany one another in these clamours."

However busied by the discovery of remote countries, the armed ships of Rawleigh often brought into port a Spanish prize. The day arrived--the short but golden day--when, as his contemporary and a secretary of state has told us, "he who was first to roll through want, and disability to exist, before he came to a repose," betrayed a sudden affluence--in the magnificence about him--in the train of his followers, when he seemed to be the rival of the chivalrous Essex--in the gorgeousness of his dress, from the huge diamond which buttoned his feather, to his shoes powdered with pearls, darting from every point of his person the changeful light of countless jewels. In this habiliment, fitted to be the herald of that goddess of beauty to which Elizabeth was familiarly compared, beside the Queen during her royal progresses, stood the captain of her guard, and her eyes were often solaced as they dwelt on the minion of fortune, her own prosperous adventurer; it was with secret satisfaction that she knew his treasure was not taken out of her exchequer. It could only have been some great Spanish galleon, like that of "The Madre de Dios," which furnished Rawleigh with that complete suit of armour of solid silver which fixed all eyes at the tilt; or which went to build the stately mansion of Sherborne, and to plan its fanciful gardens and groves, drawing the river through the rocks. Curious in horticulture as in the slightest arts he practised, Rawleigh's hands transplanted the first orange trees which breathed in this colder clime, as he had given Ireland the Virginian potato, and England the Virginian tobacco, and perhaps the delicious ananas. But Sherborne was Church land. It is said that Sir Walter had often cast a wistful eye on it as it lay in his journeys from Devonshire. It gave umbrage to some in Church and State that, by frightening a timid Bishop of Salisbury, he had prevailed on him to alienate the manor of Sherborne from his see in favour of the Crown, that it might the more securely be transferred to him who had coveted it, till another coveter, in the despicable Carr, plundered him who had despoiled the diocese.

A genius versatile as ambitious, moving in the eventful court of a female sovereign, though often musing on "remote countries" or Spanish galleons, could not stand as a mere spectator amid the agitated amphitheatre of politics, nor in the luxuriance of courtly idleness save himself from softer, but not always less fatal, intrigues. Rawleigh was the victim of love and of politics.

On his first entrance to a court life, Rawleigh found Burleigh and Leicester watchful of each other. They were the heads of dark factions which clouded the Court of Elizabeth, and crooked were the ways our aspirant had to wind. Leicester seems to have been an early patron of Rawleigh, by means of his nephew Sir Philip Sidney. At length, perceiving his ascendancy over the Queen, the great lord, to overturn this idol of womanish caprice, introduced his youthful son-in-law, the famous and unfortunate Essex; nor had he, who himself had been a reigning favourite, miscalculated on the fascination of a new lover. The contest for the royal smile became too apparent; ruptures and reconciliations followed, till death closed these eventful jealousies. Rawleigh had glided over to the opposition under the subtle and the plotting Cecil.

An intrigue of less guiltiness than these dark machinations of heartless men banished Rawleigh from court. In the dalliance of the ladies of the privy-chamber, through the long tedious days of audience, he once too wittily threw out an observation on that seductive but spotless circle, the maids of honour, who, he declared were "like witches, who could do hurt, but do no good." There was one, however, the bewitching Throgmorton, who was all goodness; the impassioned knight was resistless; and subsequently the law consecrated what love had already irrevocably joined. But envy with its evil eye was peering. The Queen of Virgins, implacable in love-treasons, sent the lovers to the Tower.

In this desperate predicament, Rawleigh had lost in an hour the proud work of his highest ambition, the favour of his mistress-sovereign. The forlorn hero had recourse to one of those prompt and petty stratagems in which he was often so dexterous. At his prison-window, one day, he beheld the Queen passing in her barge, and suddenly raved like a distracted lover. He entreated to be allowed to go in disguise to rest his eyes once more on the idol of his heart; and when the governor refused this extraordinary request of a state-prisoner, he, in his agony, struggled. Their daggers were clutched; till Sir Arthur Gorge, seeing "the cold iron walking about," rushed between these terrible combatants. All this, Gorge, then a friend of Rawleigh, minutely narrates in a letter to Cecil, at the same time gently hinting that, if the minister deem it proper, it may be communicated to the queen, that such was the miserable condition of Rawleigh, that he fell distracted only at the distant sight of her majesty. This theatrical scene was got up for the nonce, and served as a prologue to another characteristic effusion, a letter of raving gallantry, which Orlando Furioso himself might have penned, potent with the condensed essence of old romance. The amorist in his prison thus sorrows: "I 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; sometime sitting in the shade like a goddess, sometime singing like an angel." Sir Walter knew how high the pulse beat of his royal mistress, now aged by her sixtieth year. He obtained his freedom, but was banished the presence. And now, cast out of court favour, and calling himself "The Queen's Captive," Rawleigh, whom many had feared and few had not admired, found that even fools had the courage to vex a banished favourite.

There was no hope; yet Rawleigh, in his exile at his own Sherborne, addressed more than one letter to the queen, warning her of "the dangers of a Spanish faction in Scotland." But the letters were received in silence. Rawleigh then attempted to awaken Cecil to the state of Ireland, then on the point of exploding into a rebellion. He compares himself to the Trojan soothsayer, "who cast his spear against the wooden horse, and was not believed." The language of complaint was not long tolerable to a spirit which would have commanded the world; and at once he took his flight from the old to the new, and his fleet and himself were again buoyant on the ocean.

This was Rawleigh's first voyage to "the empire of Guiana," as it was then called. His interesting narrative Hume has harshly condemned, as containing "the most palpable lies ever imposed on the credulity of mankind." Our romantic adventurer has incurred censure for his own credulity in search of mines which appear to have existed, and of "the golden city," which lying Spaniards had described; and he had even his honour impeached by the baffled speculators of his own day, whom he had beguiled with his dreams; but he who sacrificed life and fortune in a great enterprise, left the world a pledge that he at least believed in his own tale.

Rawleigh, like other men of genius, was influenced by the spirit of the age, which was the spirit of discovery; and to the brave and the resolved, what could be impracticable which opened a new world? The traditions of the Spaniards had been solemnly recorded in the collections of their voyages, and had been sanctioned by the reports of Rawleigh's own people: and he himself had fed his eyes and his dreams on the novel aspect of those fertile plains and branching rivers, inhabited by fifty nations; on animals of a new form, and birds of a new plumage; and on a vegetable world of trees and plants, and flowers, and fruits, on which the eye dwelt for the first time--a fresh creation, "the face of whose earth hath not been torn, nor the virtue and salt of the soil spent by manurance."

The origin of those puerile tales which the Europeans brought home with them has not been traced. Some have the air of religious legends, descriptive of the Paradise of the Blacks, such as that chimerical Manoa, where they said, "the king had golden images of every object on earth." Or were such marvellous fictions the shrewd inventions of these children of nature, more cunning than the men of Europe, stupified and credulous from their sovereign passion? When the Indians on the coast found that the whites seemed insatiate of gold and pearls, they fostered the madness, directing their strange invaders far up into the land, to the great city of Manoa, the El-Dorado of the Spaniards, and which no one ever reached. In this manner they probably designed to rid themselves of their ambiguous guests, sending them to stray in the deserts of primeval forests, or to sail along interminable rivers, wrecked amid rapid falls.

Rawleigh endured many miseries; and on his return his narrative was deemed fabulous. The pathos of his language, however, perpetuates his dignified affliction. "Of the little remaining fortune I had, I have wasted in effect all herein; I have undergone many constructions, been accompanied with many sorrows, with labour, hunger, heat, sickness, and peril. From myself I have deserved no thanks, for I am returned a beggar and withered."

An enterprise which was, as he himself considered it to be, national, crushed the resources of the individual. He assures us that he might have enriched himself, had "it become the former fortune in which he once lived, and sorted with all the offices of honour, which by her majesty's grace he held that day in England, for him _to go journies of picory_;" that is, in Gondomar's plain Spanish "piracy;" for the Spaniards applied the term _picarro_, a rogue or thief, to every one sailing in their forbidden seas. The dedication of his narrative, though directed to Howard and Cecil, was evidently addressed to "the lady of ladies," who, however, could not break her enchanted silence.

Spain trembled at the efforts of a single hero of England; she seemed to anticipate her uncertain dominion over that new world. Spain, though proud and mighty, standing on her golden feet, yet found them weak as unbaked clay, while her treasure-fleets were either burned or sunk, or carried into our ports. But at home there were those who dreaded the ascendancy of that bold spirit, which even in his present sad condition asserted that "there were men worthy to be kings of these dominions, and who, by the queen's grace and leave, would undertake it of themselves." His adversaries would cloak their private envy under the fair colour of the public safety, or seemed wise with prudential scepticism. Yet the dauntless soul of Rawleigh, amid his distresses, despatched two ships under his devoted Keymis, to keep up the intercourse with the weak colony he had left behind; this was the second voyage to Guiana, which only increased the anxiety for a third, which soon followed.

It is a curious instance of that alarm of jealousy prevalent with the favourites of those days, that during the time of Rawleigh's disgrace at court merely his sudden appearance in the metropolis, as the news is cautiously indicated, "gave cause of discontent to some other"--that is, the reigning favourite, Essex; possibly there might be some cause, for the writer tells, that Rawleigh was "in good hope to return into grace;"[1] but this restorative was not then administered to the lorn stroller from Sherborne. The queen was imperturbable.

The royal anger of Elizabeth never interfered with her policy, nor dulled her sagacity. Two years after, in 1596, it was decided to attack the Spanish fleet in their own harbours, according to a plan laid down by Rawleigh, as far back as in 1588; he was now wanted, and therefore he was remembered, as far as his appointment, to be one of the four commanders in the famous expedition against Cadiz. Essex, as commander-in-chief, betrayed his incompetence, and Rawleigh the prompt energy of his military and his maritime abilities. Essex, at all times his rival, and never his friend, saw his own lustre dusked by the eminence of his inferior; and on his return fatally read in the eyes of his royal mistress the first omen of his decline. During his absence, his recommendation of Sir Thomas Bodley for the secretaryship of state had been rejected, and the hated Cecil had triumphed. Rawleigh now undertook a more difficult affair than the victory of Cadiz--he effected an amicable arrangement between Cecil and Essex; and this seems to have been a most grateful service to the queen, for a month afterwards, we find him again at court. Five years must have elapsed,--so long the queen could preserve the royalty of her anger.

Restored to the queen's favour, the lover had lost nothing of his fascination. The very day on which Cecil led Rawleigh in "as captain of the guard," he rode in the evening with the queen, and held a private conference; where, probably, many secrets and counsels were divulged, too long and too proudly suppressed.[2] All this was done in the absence of Essex, but not without his consent: for the three enemies were now to be friends.

The second great expedition followed. Again Essex betrayed his inexperience and his failure, while Rawleigh, in a brilliant action, took Fayal. The reception of Essex at court levelled his ambition, and he retreated from the queen's reproaches, sick at heart, to bury himself in sullen seclusion. The remainder of his days exhibit a series of disturbed acts, in the continued conflict between his own popularity and the variable favour of the queen. To complete this tale of political intrigues, we have a letter, remarkable for its style, its matter, and its object, from Rawleigh to Cecil, urging the annihilation of "the tyrant," before "it is too late," in terms hardly ambiguous enough to save Rawleigh from the charge of having hurried on the fate of Essex, at whose execution he shed tears;[3] and in the confession of one of Essex's desperate advisers, in their mad rising, we learn that the earl had fixed on Rawleigh to be got rid of.

If we reflect a moment on this triumvirate of political friends--and Cecil secretly assured the Scottish monarch, that "he and they would never live under one apple-tree"--we may see how the wiles and jealousies of love are not more fatal than those of intriguing statesmen. Rawleigh, for a purpose reconciles Essex with Cecil; but in reality, the three alike bear a mutual antipathy. When Essex in disgrace lay sick at home, and the queen half-repentant in her severity sent a friendly message to the earl, this appearance of returning favour towards Essex startled Rawleigh, who is seized with sickness in his turn; and the queen, at once the royal slave and mistress of her court-lovers, is compelled to send him a cordial of an equivalent kindness; and both these political patients were cured by the same prescription.

Cecil and Rawleigh paused not till they laid the head of Essex on the block; and that day sealed their own fortunes, for, left without a rival, they became rivals to each other. "Those," said Rawleigh on the scaffold, "who set me against him, set themselves afterwards against me, and were my greatest enemies." This may be placed among the confessions of criminal friendships!

Cecil "bore no love to Rawleigh," tells a contemporary; but we know more than contemporaries, and we possess secrets which Rawleigh could not discover while Elizabeth was on the throne, though a lurking suspicion of the hollowness of his friend "Robin" may have lain on his mind when he wrote this verse on the ambidextrous Talleyrand, who through all changes

Still kept on the mountain, and left us on the plain.

It was while this subdolous minister was holding most intimate intercourse with Rawleigh, while his son was placed under his guardian care at Sherborne, and he himself, with Lord Cobham his brother-in-law, was there a guest, that this extraordinary Machiavel was daily working at the destruction of both his friends! This was effectually done by instilling into the Scottish monarch antipathies never to be uprooted. On the demise of the queen, Rawleigh was for raising up an English against a Scottish party; he was for keeping the government in their own hands, and, looking on the successor to the English throne as a foreigner, and his people as a needy race, would have only admitted him on terms; or, as Aubrey hints, was for "setting up a commonwealth." Little dreamed Rawleigh that he was already sold and disposed of; that his friend, Secretary Cecil, was surrounding Durham-House, Rawleigh's town residence, by domestic and midnight spies; and, as the secretary was wont, laying traps to decoy his associate in the councils of Elizabeth into something which might be shifted into a semblance of treason against the future sovereign.[4]

The train so covertly laid, the mine was sprung at the due hour. Rawleigh's reception by the king was the prognostic of his fall. Rawleigh announced, James exclaimed, _more suo_,--"Rawleigh! Rawleigh! o' my saul, mon, I have heard _rawly_ of thee!"[5] Cecil, who had participated in the fall of Essex, the chief of the Scottish party, all expected would have shared in the same royal repulse. Lady Kildare once aptly described Cecil, when she threatened "to break the neck of that weasel;" and afterwards the Scottish monarch, admiring the quick shiftings and keen scent of the crafty creature in the playful style of the huntsman, characterised his minister, in his kennel of courtiers, as his "little beagle." "The weasel," had all along, moving to and fro, kept his unobserved course; and, to the admiration of all, now "came out of the chamber like a giant, to run his race for honour and fortune." That astute Machiavel had long prepared staunch friends for himself in well-paid Scots. James was hardly seated on his new throne, when his minister opened one of his political exhibitions by the incomprehensible Cobham conspiracy; and this ingenious artificer of state-plots had knotted the present with one apparently more real; but though they would not hold together, they served to put his friend on his memorable trial. When the eloquence of Rawleigh had baffled his judges, and the evidence failed, Cecil, then sitting in court in the character of a friend, secretly conveyed an insidious letter, sufficient to serve as an ambiguous plea for a mysterious conviction. Rawleigh was judicially but illegally condemned; and the affair terminated in a burlesque execution, where men were led to the block, and no one suffered decapitation.[6]

A remarkable circumstance, however, occurred, which must not be passed over in this psychological history of Rawleigh. In the Tower, during the examination of the weak and worthless Cobham, who was shifting evidence, Rawleigh affected a recklessness of life; suddenly, he inflicted upon himself what his enemies afterwards called "the guilty blow in the Tower;" in the blow he did not risk his life, "being, in truth, rather a cut than a stab" in his breast. Mortified passion may have overcome for a moment the hero whose fortitude had often been more nobly tried; but in my own mind, I cannot avoid including the present incident among those similar minor artifices, designed for some grand effect.

Rawleigh, condemned, was suffered to live twelve years in the Tower, whence he obtained a release, but not a pardon; the condemnation was suspended over his head like the pointed sword, ready to drop on the guest invited to the mockery of a festival. A new secretary, Winwood, and a new favourite, Buckingham, had listened to the vision of a gold mine, and an English colony. The sage, who had passed through that school of wisdom, his own "History of the World," when called into action, was still the same romantic adventurer. What else for him remained in England, but the dream of his early days? The military and the naval writings, as well as the "History of the World," of Rawleigh, had been designed by their great author to mould the genius of that prince to whom he looked for another Elizabethan reign; but Prince Henry had sunk into an untimely grave, and the sovereign who loved as much as any one an awful volume, was deterred from valuing the man.

Rawleigh gathered together all the wrecks of his battered fortune, and, with a company of adventurers, equipped the fleet which was hastening to found a new empire. Ere its sails were filled with propitious gales, its ruin was prepared. The secret plans of its great conductor, confided to our government, by their order were betrayed to the jealous council of Castille. Lying in sickness, Rawleigh lands on a hostile coast; his son, with filial emulation, combated and fell; his confidential Keymis, whose life was devoted to him, could not endure reproach, and closing his cabin-door, ended his days; and if he himself bore up with life, it was that his life was still due to many. "I could die heart-broken, as Drake and Hawkins had died before, when they failed in their enterprise. My brains are broken, and I cannot write much; I live, and I told you why." But he knew his life was a pledge no longer redeemable. His "rabble of idle rascals" mutinied, till the hope of falling in with the Spanish treasure-fleet lured them homewards. The letters to his wife are among the most tragical communications of a great mind greatly despairing, and may still draw tears.

On Rawleigh's return, a proclamation was issued for his arrest, and he surrendered to his near kinsman, Sir Lewis Stukeley, vice-admiral of Devon. On their journey to London, they were joined by Manoury, a French physician, not unskilled in chemistry, a favourite study with Rawleigh.

It was in this journey that Rawleigh contrived one of those humiliating stratagems which we have several times noted with astonishment. In a confidential intercourse with the French chemist, he procured drugs by which he was enabled to counterfeit a strange malady. Alas! the great man was himself cozened. Manoury was the most guileful of _Moutons_, and his near kinsman, Stukeley, the most infamous of traitors![7]

The conflict of opposite emotions which induced this folly who shall describe? Rawleigh died in the elevation of his magnanimous spirit; as truly great when he took his farewell of his world, as when he closed the last sublime page of his great volume. He knew his fate, and he had come to meet it. The moment was disastrous; the Spanish match lay in one scale, and the head of Rawleigh was put in the other by the implacable Spaniard; and when a state-victim is required, the political balance is rarely regulated by simple justice.

An eminent critic has pronounced, that "the 'History of the World,' by Rawleigh, is rather an historical dissertation, than a work rising to the majesty of history."

It sometimes happens that the application of an abstract principle of the critical art to some particular work may tend to injure the writer, without conveying any information to the reader; for thus the rare qualities of originality are wholly passed by, should the masterly genius have composed in a manner unprescribed by any canon of criticism.

Our author was not ignorant of the laws of historical composition, which, he observes, "many had taught, but no man better, and with greater brevity, than that excellent learned gentleman, Sir FRANCIS BACON."

The ardent and capricious genius of our author projected a universal history which was to occupy three mighty folios, at a time when our language had not yet produced a single historical work; he had no model to look up to; nor, had there been, was he disposed to be casting in other men's moulds. The design and the execution were a creation of his own. Masses of the most curious parts of learning were to be drawn out of recondite tomes, from the Rabbins, the Fathers, the historians and the poets of every nation; all that the generations of men have thought, and whatever they have memorably acted. But in this voluminous scroll of time, something was to enter of not less price--what his own searching spirit thought, what his diligence had collected, and farther, what his own eyes had observed in the old and the new worlds. TRUTH and EXPERIENCE were to be the columns which supported and adorned HISTORY. And this we read in "The MIND of the Frontispiece," one of those emblematical representations of "the mind" of the author, which the engravers of that day usually rendered less pictorial than perplexing.[8]

A universal genius was best able to compose a universal history; statesman, soldier, and sage, in writing the "History of the World," how often has Rawleigh become his own historiographer! He had been a pilgrim in many characters; and his philosophy had been exercised in very opposite spheres of human existence. A great commander by land and by sea, he was critical in all the arts of stratography, and delights to illustrate them on every occasion. The danger of having two generals for one army, is exemplified by what he himself had witnessed at Jarnac; in a narrative of Carthage, when the Romans lost their fleet, he points out the advantages of a flying navy, from what had occurred under his own eye in the wars of the Netherlands, and of Portugal; and concludes that "it is more difficult to defend a coast than to invade it." In the midst of a narrative of the siege of a town of Carthage, when the besieged rushed out of the town eager to learn the terms of the capitulation before they were concluded, the Roman general seized on this advantage by entering with his army, without concluding the capitulation. "A similar incident happened when I was a young man in France, of Marshal Monluc, while a parley was held about the surrender; but noble men held this conduct as not honourable." Foreign mercenaries, he observes, are not to be relied on, for at the greatest extremity, they have not only refused to fight, but have passed over to the enemy; or they have become the masters of those who hired them, as the Turks were called in by the Greeks, and the Saxons by the Britons; and here he distinguishes the soldiery consisting of English, French, and Scotch, which established the independence of the Netherlands; in this case, these mercenaries were bound together by one common interest with the people who had required their aid; therefore, these stood in the condition of allies, as well as of foreigners solely retained by pay.

His digressions are never more agreeable than when they become dissertations; the most ordinary events of history assumed a new face by the noble speculations which he builds on them, full of a searching, critical spirit, of sound morality, and of practicable policy; often profound, always eloquent. One on the Mosaic code as a precedent for the laws of other nations, would have delighted Montesquieu. On the inviolability of oaths, he admirably describes them as "the chains by which free-men are tied to the world." On slavery--on idolatry--on giving the lie--on the point of honour--on the origin of local names of America by their first discoverers--such topics abound in his versatile pages. Even curious matters engaged his attention, and in the new world he inspected nature with the close eye of a naturalist;[9] nor has he disdained, at times, a pleasant tale. There are few pages of this venerable, but genial volume, where we do not find that it is Rawleigh who speaks or who acts, making legible his secret thoughts, charming the story of four thousand years with the pleasures of his own memory.

The actual condition of society; the politics of past governments; the arts, the trades, the inventions of past ages, matters deeply interesting in the history of man, often forgotten, and hardly recoverable, judged by that large mind which had so boldly planned the "History of the World," cannot properly be censured as "Digressions." "True it is," he adds, "that I have also made many others, which, if they shall be laid to my charge, I must cast the fault into the great heap of human error. For seeing we digress in all the ways of our lives--yea, seeing the life of man is nothing else but digression, it may the better be excused in writing of their lives and actions. _I am not altogether ignorant in the laws of history and of the kinds._"

It is evident that our author was conscious that he had struck into a virgin vein, and however amenable to the code of historical composition, very gracefully apologises for indulging the novelty. The novelty indeed was so little comprehended by those gross feeders on the carrion of time who can discover nothing in history but its disjointed and naked facts, that, rejecting every "digression" as interrupting the chronology, they put forth their abridgments; and Alexander Ross rejoiced to call his "The Marrow of History;" but probably found, to his dismay, that he had only collected the dry bones; and that in all this "History of the World," nothing was more veritable than the author's own emotions. All which these matter-of-fact retailers had so carefully omitted we now class by a title which such writers rarely recognise as the philosophy of history. Great writers admit of no abridgment. If you do not follow the writer through all the ramifications of his ideas, and imbue your mind with the fulness of the author's mind, you can receive only interrupted impressions, and retain but an imperfect and mutilated image of his genius. The happiest of abridgments is the author's own skill in composition: to say all that is necessary and to omit all that is superfluous--this is the secret of abridgment, and there is no other of a great original work.

"The History of the World" appeared as a literary phenomenon, even to the philosophical Hume. He expresses his astonishment at "the extensive genius of the man who being educated amid naval and military enterprises, had _surpassed in the pursuits of literature even those of the most recluse and sedentary lives_."

This is much from him who has taught us not to wonder but to inquire. Rawleigh, however, had dropped some hints on his Hebraic studies; acknowledging his ignorance of that recondite language, he was indebted to some preceding interpreters and to "some learned friends;" and he adds with good humour, but with a solemn feeling, "Yet it were not to be wondered at had I been beholding to neither, having had _eleven years' leisure_ to obtain the knowledge of that or any other language." It did not occur to our historian that "eleven years" of uninterrupted leisure yields a full amount of "the most recluse and sedentary life." With a universal mind Rawleigh was eager after universal knowledge; and we have positive and collateral evidence that he sought in his learned circle whatever aid the peculiar studies of each individual could afford him.

A circumstance as remarkable as the work itself occurred in the author's long imprisonment. By one of those strange coincidences in human affairs, it happened that in the Tower Rawleigh was surrounded by the highest literary and scientific circle in the nation. Henry, the ninth Earl of Northumberland, on the suspicion of having favoured his relative Piercy, the gunpowder-plot conspirator, was cast into this state-prison, and confined during many years. This earl delighted in what Anthony Wood describes as "the obscure parts of learning." He was a magnificent Mecaenas, and not only pensioned scientific men, but daily assembled them at his table, and in this intellectual communion participating in their pursuits he passed his life. His learned society were designated as "the Atlantes of the mathematical world;" but that world had other inhabitants, antiquaries and astrologers, chemists and naturalists. There was seen Thomas Allen, another Roger Bacon, "terrible to the vulgar," famed for his _Bibliotheca Alleniana_, a rich collection of manuscripts, most of which have been preserved in the Bodleian; the name of Allen survives in the ardent commemorations of Camden, of Spelman, and of Selden. He was accompanied by his friend Doctor Dee, but whether Dee ever tried their patience or their wonder by his "Diary of Conferences with Spirits" we find no record; and by the astronomical Torporley, a disciple of Lucretius, for his philosophy consisted of atoms; several of his manuscripts remain in Sion College. The muster-roll is too long to run over. In this galaxy of the learned, the brightest star was Thomas Hariot, who merited the distinction of being "the universal philosopher;" his inventions in algebra, Descartes, when in England, silently adopted, but which Dr. Wallis afterwards indignantly reclaimed; his skill in interpreting the text of Homer excited the grateful admiration of Chapman when occupied by his version; Bishop Corbet has described--

Deep Hariot's mine,
In which there is no dross.

Two others were Walter Warner, who is said to have suggested to Harvey the great discovery of the circulation of the blood, and Robert Hues, famed for his "Treatise on the Globes." These, with Hariot, were the earl's constant companions; and at a period when science seemed connected with necromancy, the world distinguished the earl and his three friends as "Henry the Wizard, and his three Magi." We may regret that no Symposia have come down to us from this learned society in the Tower, which we may consider as the first philosophical society in our country. All these persons, eminent in their day, appear to have written in their various departments, and were inventors in science; yet few of their works have passed through the press. This circumstance is a curious evidence in our literary history, that in that day the studious composed their works without any view to their publicity; the difficulty of obtaining a publisher for any work of science might also have conduced to confine their discoveries to their private circle. Some of these learned men probably were uncouth writers; Dee never could end a sentence in his rambling, confused style. Many of these works, scattered in their forlorn state of manuscript, often fell into hands who appropriated them to their own purpose. Even Hariot's treatise, which furnished Descartes with a new idea of the science, was a posthumous publication by his friend Warner, merely to secure a continuance of the pension which had been granted to him by the Earl of Northumberland.

These philosophers appear to have advanced far into their inquiries, for they were branded by atheism or deism. What therefore has reached us coming from ignorant or prejudiced reporters will not satisfy our curiosity. Of Hariot, Wood tells that "he always undervalued the old story of the creation of the world, and could never believe the trite position _ex nihilo nihil fit_. He made a _philosophical theology_, wherein he cast off the Old Testament, so that consequently the New would have no foundation. He was a deist, and his doctrine he did impart to the Earl of Northumberland and to Sir Walter Rawleigh, when he was compiling his 'History of the World.' He would controvert the matter with eminent divines, who therefore having no good opinion of him, did look on the matter of his death as a judgment for nullifying the Scriptures." Hariot died of a cancer on his lip.

From such accounts we can derive no knowledge of the _philosophical theology_ of Hariot. He was the philosopher, however, who went to Virginia with the design of establishing a people of peace, with the Bible in his hand. He taught those children of nature its pure doctrines till they began to idolise the book itself, embracing it, kneeling to it, and rubbing their bodies with it. This new Manco Capac checked this innocent idolatry, but probably found some difficulty in making them rightly comprehend that the Bible was but a book like any other, made by many hands; but that the spiritual doctrine contained in it was a thing not to be touched nor seen, but to be obeyed. Such a philosopher, could he have remained among these Indians, would have become the great legislator of a tribe of primitive Christians; and as he actually contrived to construct an alphabet for them, this seems to have been his intention.

The doctrines of Hariot, which Wood has reprobated, certainly were not infused into the pages of Rawleigh; his divinity is never sceptical; his researches only lead to speculations purely ethical and political--what men have done, and what men do.[10]

Such were the men of science, daily guests in the Tower during the imprisonment of Rawleigh; and when he had constructed his laboratory to pursue his chemical experiments, he must have multiplied their wonders. With one he had been intimately connected early in life; Hariot had been his mathematical tutor, was domesticated in his house, and became his confidential agent in the expedition to Virginia. Rawleigh had earnestly recommended his friend to the Earl of Northumberland, and Sion House in consequence became for Hariot a home and an observatory.

The scholastic Dr. Burhill is supposed to have been one among the learned friends whose assistance in his Hebraic researches Rawleigh acknowledges. It was such a student that might have led Rawleigh into his singular discussion on the site of paradise. One great name has claimed the tracings of his hand in the "History of the World." Ben Jonson has positively told that he wrote a piece on the Punic wars, which Rawleigh "altered and set in his book." The verses prefixed to the "Mind of the Frontispiece" are Jonson's. There was an intimacy between Jonson and Rawleigh which appears to have been interrupted, and this may possibly have given occasion to the remarkable sharp stricture from Jonson, in his conversation with Drummond, that "Rawleigh esteemed more fame than conscience; the best wits in England were employed in making his 'History of the World.'"

Rawleigh, in his vast and recondite collection of criticism and chronology, would enrich his volume with the stores accumulated from the sources of brother-minds; it is even said that he submitted his composition to Serjeant Hoskyns, that universal Aristarchus of that day, at whose feet, to use the style of honest Anthony, all poets threw their verses;[11] but the most material characteristic of his work Rawleigh could borrow from no one--the tone and elevation of his genius.

But if the "History of the World" instructed his contemporaries, there was a greater history in his mind, which had secured the universal acceptance of posterity--the history of his own times. But the age of Elizabeth, in manuscript, might be an act of treason in the court of James the First, in the eyes of his redoubted rival Cecil; he who did not wholly escape from malicious applications in writing the history of the world that had passed away, eluded the fatal struggle with contemporary passions. He has himself acquainted us of this loss to our domestic political history: "It will be said by many that I might have been more pleasing to the reader if I had written the story of mine own times, having been permitted to draw water as near the well-head as another. To this I answer, that whosoever in writing a modern history shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth. There is no mistress or guide that hath led her followers and servants into greater miseries. He that goeth after her too far off, loseth her sight and loseth himself; and he that walks after her at a middle distance, I know not whether I should call that kind of course, temper or baseness."[12]

The miscellaneous writings of Rawleigh are so numerous and so various, that Oldys has classed them under the heads, poetical, epistolary, military, maritime, geographical, political, philosophical, and historical.[13]

Of a character so exalted and a genius so varied, how has it happened that Gibbon, who had once intended to compose the wondrous tale of his life, has pronounced his character to be "ambiguous;" and that Hume has described it as "a great, but ill-regulated mind?"[14]

The story of Rawleigh is a moral phenomenon; but what is there that moves in the sphere of humanity, of which, when we discover the principle of action, we cannot calculate even the most eccentric movements? Rawleigh from the first was to be the architect of his own fortunes; this was a calamity with him, for a perpetual impulse was communicated to the versatility and the boundless capacity of a genius which seemed universal. Soldier and sailor, sage and statesman, he could not escape from the common fate of becoming the creature of circumstance. What vicissitudes! what moral revelations! How he disdained his enviers! His towering ambition paused not in its altitude; he reached its apex, and having accomplished everything, he missed all! He whose life is a life of adventure, who is now the daring child of fortune, and falls to be the miserable heir of misfortune, though glory sometimes disguises his recklessness, is doomed to be often humiliated as well as haughty.

The favourite of his sovereign, thrown amid the contending suitors of a female Court, we have found creeping in crooked politics, and intriguing in dark labyrinths. Rawleigh met his evil genius in Cecil; he saw his solitary hope vanish with Prince Henry. Awakening his last energies with the juvenile passion of his early days, he pledged his life on a new adventure--it was his destiny to ascend the scaffold. He was always to be a victim of state. The day of his trial and the hour of his death told to his country whom they had lost. From the most unpopular man in England he became the object of the public sympathy, for they saw the permanent grandeur of the character, when its lustre was no longer dusked by cloudy interests or temporary passions.

There is no object in human pursuits which the genius of Rawleigh did not embrace. What science was that unwearying mind not busied in? What arts of hoar antiquity did he not love to seek? What sense of the beautiful ever passed transiently over his spirit? His books and his pictures ever accompanied him in his voyages. Even in the short hour before his last morning, is he not still before us, while his midnight pen traces his mortuary verse, perpetuating the emotions of the sage, and of the hero who could not fear death.[15]

Such is the psychological history of a genius of the first order of minds, whom posterity hails among the founders of our literature.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Lodge's "Illustrations of British History," iii. 67.

[2] Sidney Letters, ii. 45.

[3] When Rawleigh was himself in the place where he had put Essex--on
the scaffold, he solemnly declared that "he had no hand in his blood,
and was none of them that procured his death." How are we to
reconcile this declaration with the extraordinary letter which first
appeared in Murdin's Collection, and which Hume asserts "contains the
strongest proofs to the contrary?"--Mr. Lodge understands the advice
of Rawleigh in the very worst sense; Mr. Tytler, with ingenuity,
suggests that Cecil, with "a prospective wariness, which--not
satisfied with deceiving his contemporaries--provided _blinds for
posterity_," procured Rawleigh to address this letter to him; and, in
a word, that, in composing this energetic epistle, he was not so much
the writer as the agent in the plot. I am more disposed to believe
that when Rawleigh wrote so remarkable a letter, he was fully aware
of its import, and looked forwards to the result.

[4] The extraordinary means of the duplicity of this wily minister
are stated by Mr. TYTLER in the Appendix to his "Life of Rawleigh."

[5] As _Rawleigh_, like all his contemporaries, including Shakspeare,
wrote his name diversely, so that we are at a loss to pronounce it,
this spontaneous sally of the Scottish monarch reveals its real
pronunciation; which is also confirmed by a sort of epigram of that
day.

[6] The secret history of this state-riddle--the conspiracy of
Cobham, a disappointed courtier--as Mr. Lodge observes, might fill a
moderate volume of speculations on its darker parts. All historians
agree that it must remain insolvable, and "hopelessly obscure." It
is, however, opened with great vigour and novelty of research by Mr.
TYTLER in the Appendix to his biography of Rawleigh. But he passes
over too slightly the conversation and the offer of the "eight
thousand crowns;" and "the pension," of which Rawleigh said--"he
would tell him more when he saw the money." It is quite evident that
Rawleigh had been tampered with by the silly Cobham, whose ricketty
brains had been concocting a crude, fantastic plot, which was hardly
the initial of one. But Rawleigh had listened; he had not positively
refused his participation, neither had he yielded his consent. When
"the eight thousand crowns" had safely arrived, where were they to
go? Rawleigh declared that "when he saw the money, he would be ready
to talk more on the subject." Mr. Tytler, like Sir Walter, is pleased
to consider that the whole affair was "one of Lord Cobham's idle
conceits."

[7] This incident in the life of Rawleigh is told in the "Curiosities
of Literature," vol. iii. I have been enabled to give the secret
history of this Sir Lewis Stukeley, who having first despoiled, then
betrayed his great kinsman. That history offers one of the most
striking instances of moral retribution.

[8] The explanatory stanzas prefixed to this "Mind," though
unsubscribed by the name of the writer, were composed by Jonson, for
they appear in his works.

[9] Rawleigh notices a singular instinct in the birds in these new
regions, which built their nests on the twigs of trees, pendent over
the waters, rather than in the branches, to save their young from the
attacks of the monkeys. In such relations he is full and particular.
He collects the marvellous accounts of the _Ficus indica_--the
Banian, or sacred tree of the Brahmins; we nowhere find such a lively
picture of that singular curiosity of nature, the self-planting tree,
here minutely described.

[10] The authors of the "General Dictionary" censure Wood for his
unauthenticated assertions; and they infer that, as he was thus
evidently erroneous in his notion of Rawleigh's history, he may have
been equally so in his idea of the philosophical theology of Hariot.
Wood, however, could have alleged his authority, though a very
indifferent one. We have recently discovered that Wood here was only
transcribing the crude hearsays of his friend Aubrey; and, in these
matters, the Oxford antiquary, and the "magotie-headed" gossiper, as
Wood afterwards found him to be, were equally intelligent.

[11] Hoskyns wrote many poems. A manuscript volume of his poems,
fairly written we may presume for the press, and "bigger than all
Donne's works," was "lent by his son Sir Benedict," A. Wood tells us,
"who was a man that ran with the usurping Parliament, to a certain
person, in 1653, but he could never retrieve it." We are left in the
dark to know whether we have lost a great poet or only a loyalist;
whether the "certain person" was a parliamentary _enrage_, or only
utterly reckless of a collection of poems "bigger than Dr. Donne's!"
One poem of this great critic has come down to us, of which there is
more than one manuscript in the Museum, and one in the Ashmolean,--"A
Vision," addressed to the king during his confinement, in which he
introduces his mother, and his wife, and his child. By the frequency
of these copies we find how much temporary passion gave an interest
to very indifferent writings. It is printed by Dr. Bliss in the
"Athenae Oxonienses."

[12] Preface to the "History of the World."