Chapter X: Part 10

Meantime the complete revelation of the Ridolfi conspiracy brought conclusive proofs of the real hostility of Spain to Elizabeth. In the following spring (1572) the Netherlands were set ablaze once more by La Marck’s capture of Brille, and Alva found his hands full; a timely occurrence, since the crushing defeat of the Turks at Lepanto by Don John in October had greatly strengthened the hands of Philip. In the summer of 1572 Walsingham was more than ever convinced that a French marriage, and support on the most liberal scale to Orange, composed the policy which it was imperative for England to adopt. Everything was pointing to a Huguenot ascendency in France; Marguerite of Valois was on the point of marrying young Henry of Navarre, head of the Bourbons, and next in succession to the throne after the reigning king’s brothers. To play fast and loose with the Alençon marriage would alienate France; to play fast and loose with Orange would be to throw him into the arms of France alienated from England. That Philip, seeing England thus isolated, would cheerfully forgive and forget all that he had suffered, for the sake of an unstable union with her, was almost unthinkable. Yet the months went by, and the Ambassador could get no guidance even from the sympathetic Burghley, who was as much in the dark as ever as to Elizabeth’s real intentions.

But there was a factor in the situation of which on one had taken full account; not Walsingham, nor Burghley, nor Elizabeth; not the Huguenots; not Philip nor Alva. This was Catherine de Medici’s overwhelming lust of personal power, and the passion of jealousy accompanying it. She saw her ascendency over her son Charles IX. slipping away and passing into the hands of Coligny and his associates. For victory and vengeance, she prepared to commit, perhaps, the most appalling crime in the annals of Christian Europe. Paris was crowded with Huguenots gathered to celebrate the pact of amity, to be sealed by the wedding of the Béarnais and the sister of the king. Stealthily and swiftly the plans were laid, the plot organised, the preparations completed. The wedding took place on August 18: three days later, an unsuccessful attempt was made to murder Coligny. It may be that if the assassin had killed the Admiral, the huge tragedy which followed would have been averted; as it was, hours before the sun of St. Bartholomew’s day (August 24) had risen, the floodgates had been opened, and the streets of Paris were running red with rivers of Huguenot blood. During the following days, like scenes were being enacted through the provinces.

For a moment Europe stood breathless, aghast. Whatever this appalling thing meant, it seemed at least an assured portent of developments undreamed of; probably a vast, all-embracing, Catholic conspiracy. England sprang to arms, ready to stand at bay against the united forces of France and Spain. If there was to be a life-and-death struggle between the religions, she would fight to the last gasp. The Englishmen in the French capital had been safeguarded on the night of the massacre, but it was some little time before they could be sure that their turn was not still to come. Yet Walsingham in Paris bore himself with the same lofty sternness that the English Queen and her Council displayed to the French Ambassador in London. It soon became evident that Catherine was frightened at what she had done; that her one desire was to minimise it, to declare that matters had never been intended to go so far, to shelter behind the plea that the victims had been on the verge of effecting a bloody _coup d’état_ and the counter-stroke had only been dealt in self-defence. Walsingham’s reply was in terms of courteous but scathing incredulity. The Queen-Mother tried to win him over by declaring that Coligny had warned Anjou against the machinations of England; he answered that the Admiral had acted therein as a loyal Frenchman.

The diplomatic fabric had collapsed, but at least there was no question of France holding Elizabeth to blame for the rupture; nor was there any question of Catherine turning to a junction with Spain. The Huguenots now were at bay; there would be work enough before they were either crushed or pacified; while the slaughter of their leaders had made the Guises more dangerous than ever. On the other hand, there could be no joint action on behalf of Orange. France had ruled herself out. Walsingham would still have stood boldly for “the Religion,” but the Queen and Burghley were not equally ready to fling themselves single-handed into the struggle on behalf of the Netherlands. The Spaniards deemed the opportunity a good one for seeking reconciliation with England. A more politic and less bloodthirsty Governor was dispatched to the Low Countries to take the place of Alva, who by his own desire was recalled. Walsingham went back to England, and for some time to come Philip and Elizabeth were engaged in an elaborate if insincere ostentation of amicable intentions.

IV

ENTANGLEMENTS

Burghley as Secretary had been so heavily worked that he was in danger of breaking down; to prevent such a catastrophe, he was made Lord Treasurer, Walsingham on his return to England being appointed joint Secretary of State with Sir Thomas Smith. Leicester continued to be Burghley’s chief rival with Elizabeth on the Council, owing to his personal favour with her; and his political line was the same as Walsingham’s, though the Secretary supplied the brains. Walsingham was neither the rival nor the follower of either; it was never in his mind to supplant Burghley either himself or by Leicester; but his counsels and those of the Lord Treasurer were often in disagreement in so far as his Protestantism was more energetic, and as he had no sympathy with the idea of amity with Spain, being thoroughly convinced of Philip’s fundamental hostility to England as a Protestant Power.

For some years the Protestant policy was out of court so far as Spain and the Netherlands were concerned; the comparative moderation of the new Governor, Requesens, giving plausibility to the hope that a _modus vivendi_ might be arrived at--that Philip’s maximum of concession and Orange’s minimum of demand might prove capable of adjustment. In Scotland, however, Walsingham and Burghley both recognised the necessity of maintaining friendly relations with the capable but sinister Regent, the Earl of Morton. It was impossible to ignore the danger of a reconstruction of parties there, which might again result in French intervention being invited; a consummation equally abhorrent to the Treasurer and the Secretary. Elizabeth’s parsimony here proved too strong for her policy. Burghley and Walsingham both believed that liberal but judicious expenditure would prove economical in the long run. But the Queen would not relax the purse-strings; the unrest of Scotland continued to be a thorn in her side, and to be also a perpetual strain on the anxiety of her ministers and a drain on her Exchequer.

Requesens died in 1576; before his successor, Don John, arrived, the Spanish soldiery--whose pay was in arrear--got completely out of hand; and the autumn saw the hideous butchery in Antwerp known as the “Spanish Fury.” The whole of the provinces--Catholic as well as Protestant--were united thereby in a solid demand for the restoration of their old constitutional privileges, and the withdrawal of Spanish troops; and in a flat refusal to admit the new Governor or recognise his government, until their main demands were conceded. Don John made provisional terms and was admitted in the spring following; but he was known to be harbouring audacious designs against England, the Hollanders suspected his good faith, and the old state of serious tension was renewed. Drake was planning his great voyage, to the entire satisfaction of the anti-Spanish party--but with an obvious certainty of giving extreme offence to Philip, which caused them to make a vain attempt to keep the thing secret from Burghley; while Elizabeth--who liked playing with fire and was also greedy for money--made her own bargain with the adventurer. Thus, in 1578 a curious state of affairs arose. Philip, jealous of his half-brother, and still extremely anxious to avoid a rupture with England, once more accredited an ambassador to the English Court, Bernardino de Mendoza, whose business was to be conciliation; Elizabeth’s Council swayed to the views of Walsingham and Leicester, while Burghley seemed to be outweighted. The Queen started on one of her most exasperating pieces of political jugglery, snubbing Orange on the one hand, and on the other reviving the Alençon marriage project; while Alençon himself was now posing as a would-be figure-head for the Huguenots, and at odds with his brother Henry III., who had succeeded Charles IX. two years after St. Bartholomew.

To his own intense disgust, Walsingham was despatched to the Netherlands on the most thoroughly uncongenial task that could be conceived: one, moreover, which it would have been quite impossible for him to accomplish even if his heart had been in it. He was to urge the Protestant States to accept the Spanish terms, which would have deprived them of the exercise of their religion; he was to refuse the promised issue of the bonds on which they were relying for the sinews of war; in effect, he was to represent England in what he himself looked upon as an act of betrayal. Of course, the mission was a failure. Betrayed or not, Orange and his party would never accept the Spanish terms; they would rather take the risk of a French Protectorate, or die fighting. Walsingham loathed the job, and wrote home in very bitter terms of the shame the whole of the proceedings were bringing on the name of England. The only glimmer of satisfaction he extracted from it was in the retraction of the monstrous breach of faith about the bonds. It was bad enough that Elizabeth’s name should be made a by-word for falsehood; it was only less bad that France, instead of England, should become for her own ends the friend and protector of the Low Countries; it was sickening that he, of all men, should be made the agent of such perfidy, held personally responsible for it abroad, and rewarded by his mistress with abuse because it failed. “It is given out,” he wrote, “that we shall be hanged on our return, so ill have we behaved ourselves here: I hope we shall enjoy our ordinary trial--my Lord Cobham [his colleague] to be tried by his peers, and myself by a jury of Middlesex.... If I may conveniently, I mean, with the leave of God, to convey myself off from the stage and to become a looker-on.”

Elizabeth, however, was far too keenly alive to his value to allow him to become a looker-on; nor could Burghley have spared him, however their views might differ on some points. The Queen might ignore his advice, but she relied on his penetration and his loyalty, and was more afraid of his righteous indignation than of the Lord Treasurer’s sober disapprobation. Neither minister would countenance what they accounted perfidy, and in act she never in the long run degraded her honour as much as she repeatedly threatened to do. Both of them spoke their minds. She knew they were in the right; she resisted, abused, flouted, defied them; but she always yielded enough, and in time, to save some shreds of credit.

The death of Don John about the end of September was followed by the appointment of Alexander of Parma, a statesman and soldier of the first rank, as his successor; who at the outset skilfully severed the union between the northern or Protestant and the southern or Catholic provinces. If Burghley could have had his own way untrammelled, he would have dealt straightforwardly with Orange, giving him support enough to keep him from calling in France, and still hoping to bring about an accommodation with Parma possible of acceptance by both parties. Neither he nor Walsingham now had any belief in joint action with France, in which their confidence had been permanently blotted out by the Paris massacre. Neither of them, therefore, saw good in the Alençon marriage as a genuine project, while both saw infinite danger in merely playing with it. They differed, as it would seem, only as to the length they were prepared to go in helping Orange, Burghley drawing the line at the point where he thought Philip might be driven into a declaration of open war, while the Secretary would have taken bigger risks, accepting open war if Philip chose. The Queen’s object was the same as Burghley’s, but she elected, according to her habit, to seek it not by straightforward, but by crooked, courses. She would give Orange the minimum of help, but she would, by playing with Alençon, either keep France out of it, or else embroil France and Spain, keeping herself out of it till she could strike in as arbiter. To do which, she had to induce every one to believe that she probably meant marrying, while trusting to her own ingenuity and the chapter of accidents to effect, if the worst came to the worst, an escape not too ruinously ignominious. If she really did know what she wanted, it was more than any of her Council did, and she drove them almost to despair.

So the juggling went on; the Queen blew hot and cold with Alençon, and tried to inveigle France into a league without a marriage; the French tried to get the marriage secured as preliminary to a league. Drake came home, his ship loaded with spoils; but the remonstrances of Mendoza were met by complaints of the assistance given by Spain to the Desmond rebellion in Ireland. Walsingham was flatly opposing the marriage, and the Puritan element in the country at least was with him to a man. Parsons and Campion, and the Jesuit propaganda, had set Puritans and Catholics alike in a ferment. In the summer of 1581 Alençon was still dangling, France was still waiting to have the marriage question settled, Philip had just annexed Portugal, and Burghley himself was despairing of a peaceful outcome.

Under these circumstances, Elizabeth again chose to despatch Walsingham on an embassy to Paris. He was to get the Queen out of the marriage without upsetting the French. He was to get France to espouse the cause of Orange, while England was only to render secret pecuniary aid. Whether, in the last resort, the Queen would accede to the marriage for the sake of a secret league, or would accede to an open league to escape the marriage, or would positively on no condition have either marriage or open league, or would still keep the marriage unaccomplished but unrejected if she could, Walsingham did not know; for whatever instructions he received were liable to be contradicted in twenty-four hours. He was to extract his mistress from the tangle in which she had involved herself, and might understand that whatever means he found for doing so would be angrily condemned.

Naturally, he found the situation almost impossible. The King and the Queen-Mother would make an open league and let the marriage go; of that, he felt satisfied. But they would not have an undeclared league, nor commit themselves at any price to any war in the Low Countries, if there were any possible loophole for Elizabeth to back out of supporting them. She must be so committed that she could not back out. The suspicion that she was only dallying both with the marriage and the league could only be got rid of by the most straightforward dealing, and if she would not listen to advice there was the gravest danger that she would find France, Spain, and Scotland all united against her. He wrote in very plain terms that if she would not make up her mind to a liberal expenditure, and convince her neighbours that she had done so, ruin threatened. The instructions from England continued to be evasive, non-committal. The personal correspondence between Burghley and Walsingham is particularly interesting, as showing the complete confidence between them, the loyalty with which the Treasurer fought the Secretary’s battles with the Queen, though in vain, and Walsingham’s entire frankness to him.

“Sorry I am,” he writes, “to see her Majesty so apt to take offence against me, which falleth not out contrary to my expectation, and therefore I did protest unto her, after it had pleased her to make choice of me to employ me this way, that I should repute it a greater favour to be committed to the Tower, unless her Majesty may grow more certain in her resolutions there.” Twelve days later he fairly exploded in a letter to the Queen herself. He told her point-blank that she had already lost Scotland, and was like enough to lose England too, by her parsimony, and finished up--“If this sparing and improvident course be held still, the mischiefs approaching being so apparent as they are, I conclude therefore ... that no one that serveth in place of a Counciller, that either weigheth his own credit, or carrieth that sound affection to your Majestie as he ought to do, that would not wish himself in the farthest part of Ethiopia, rather than enjoy the fairest palace in England. The Lord God therefore direct your Majestie’s heart to take that way of councel that may be most for your honour and safety.”

Nothing came of the embassy; not even the ruin foretold by Walsingham. The wonderful Queen managed somehow to keep Alençon dangling; and while he dangled there would be no decisive breach with France. In November he was in England again. She promised to marry him, kissed him, and a few weeks later told Burghley that she would not marry the man on any terms. The ministers, of course, could see nothing possible but an irreconcilable quarrel with France over the affair sooner or later; and again Burghley’s efforts were directed to pacifying Mendoza, and Walsingham’s to forcing Elizabeth into openly supporting Orange. In the Council Burghley was practically alone; yet Walsingham could not effect his object. The impending avalanche did not fall--and then Alençon in effect committed suicide by trying to play the traitor and failing ignominiously to carry out his plot; thereby making himself obviously and hopelessly impossible. The rupture with France on that score was averted. His death a year later, in 1584, made Henry of Navarre actual heir presumptive to the crown of France; and then the question of the succession became, and remained, so critical that all parties in France were too hotly engaged in their own contests to take effective part in quarrels beyond their borders. Orange was assassinated; the Throgmorton plot had convinced Burghley himself that the duel with Spain was inevitable; and in 1585 Parma’s skill brought affairs in the Netherlands to a point at which nothing but the armed intervention of England could apparently save the revolted provinces from utter destruction. Before the end of the year Elizabeth was in open league with them. At last, circumstances had compelled her officially to commit herself to Walsingham’s policy, though even now she could not bring herself to resign either her systematic penuriousness or her systematic vacillation.

V

DETECTIVE METHODS

Walsingham has hitherto appeared in the character of a foreign minister or ambassador with two main functions--to gauge the intentions of foreign courts, and to carry out a policy with which he was dissatisfied by methods which he abominated: the ally of Leicester in the policy he advocated, the ally of Burghley in his moral attitude towards the Queen. She and Burghley were at one in the knowledge that she must preserve Continental Protestantism from sheer destruction, and in the determination to limit their help, so long as it was possible to do so, in such wise as to avoid war with Spain. Since 1577 Walsingham had been opposed to that limitation; in 1584 Burghley himself was relinquishing it with reluctance, and with the persistent hope that a reconciliation might again become possible.

As a diplomatist, Sir Francis appears to have possessed in a high degree the quality of impenetrability, the precision of veracity which has the effect of _suppressio veri_ or of _suggestio falsi_, misleading of set purpose but without deviation from formal truth. The ethics of the twentieth century have not yet learnt to condemn skilful deception in this kind, at any rate where it is not directed to personal ends. But the means which, in other capacities than that of an ambassador, Walsingham employed for obtaining information, were not always such as would be ventured on to-day by a politician who was unwilling to be called unscrupulous. Yet they were means which--so far as they can with certainty be attributed to him--would have been unhesitatingly sanctioned by almost every contemporary.

It has to be borne in mind, in the first place, that throughout the Elizabethan period every country in Europe was thick with plots, with the political intention of a violent _coup d’état_, or the religious intention of removing an obnoxious personality. While Elizabeth was on the throne the list of successful assassinations included those of two Dukes of Guise, a King of France, the Prince of Orange, Darnley, Moray, and the victims of St. Bartholomew. Attempts which only just failed were made on Orange and Coligny. There were at least three plots--those known by the names of Ridolfi, Throgmorton, and Babington--in favour of Mary Stewart, and involving the assassination of Elizabeth, in which Philip, or some of his ministers, or the Guises, or the Pope, or Cardinal Allen, were implicated, besides minor ones. Rizzio’s murder was political; and Burghley’s life was the object of a conspiracy. These are merely a few conspicuous instances out of a very long roll. The ingenuity of zealots, on either side, who honestly believed that in slaying a leader of heretics or of persecutors they were rendering acceptable service to the Almighty, was backed by the unscrupulousness of politicians, who might not, indeed, themselves be prepared to stab or poison, but were quite ready to make use of those who would do so. In England especially there were vast interests involved in the removal of Elizabeth, whose legitimate heir was, beyond all question, the Catholic Queen of Scots. Plots merely directed against the Queen’s person were serious enough; but they might be combined with schemes for invasion or concerted insurrection, like the revolt of the northern Earls. The plotters were perfectly unscrupulous. Nothing could be more certain than that, so long as the Queen of Scots was alive and in captivity, there would be a series of conspiracies, with or without her connivance, having it as their object to place her on the throne of England. And we must remember, further, that, to intensify the situation, a Papal Bull had declared that while it was not incumbent upon Catholics in England actively to hatch treason against the Queen of England, it was incumbent on them to countenance, and meritorious to take part in it.

With the tremendous issues at stake, both national and religious, with the forces engaged in setting conspiracy in motion or in encouraging it, with the untrammelled character of its operations, the nature of the fight was obviously very different from anything with which modern statesmen have to deal. Yet where active secret societies are in existence, the police methods of modern Governments are the police methods of Walsingham. The spy, the paid informer, the _agent provocateur_, play the same part now as in the sixteenth century. It was in the risks for a Spanish ambassador or agent that his secretary, or some other person standing to him in a confidential relation, might be in the pay of the English Secretary of State. Any influential person suspected of Catholic leanings might wake up one morning to find that a tolerably complete copy of his correspondence was in Walsingham’s hands. A plot, big or small, might progress merrily while the plotters hugged themselves on their skill and secrecy--till the psychological moment arrived for dropping the mask, and they found that they had merely been drawn into a carefully prepared trap.

Walsingham had no qualms about employing liars, perjurers, the basest kind of scoundrels in this business. When he had caught his culprits he quite deliberately applied the rack and other forms of torture to extract evidence. He would have argued that the Queen’s enemies had chosen their own method of fighting, and it was legitimate to meet them with their own weapons--as Clive argued in the case of Omichund; that, in fact, it was only by the use of their own weapons that he could make sure of defeating them. Also he did not originate the system--espionage and the rack were in full play when his foot was only on the lowest rung of the ladder. Also, these methods were not employed vindictively, but with the single object of obtaining true information by which treasonous designs might be frustrated. Also, in acting as he did, he did not violate the public conscience--or his own, with its rigid Old Testament limitations.

But there is one case in which he is charged with having gone farther.

It would be difficult to find any even approximate parallel to the position of Mary Stewart in England. Whatever her own attitude might be, she was the inevitable centre of Catholic plots of the most far-reaching order. While she lived, the throne of Elizabeth and the triumph of the Reformation in England could never be secure. She was held captive on no legitimate ground, but solely because her title to the English throne was so strong that the Queen could not afford to set her at liberty. In plain terms, the national security required her death, but unless she could be convicted of plotting against the life of Elizabeth, there was no legitimate ground for putting her to death. The eighth Henry would have made short work with her; there was no European sovereign who would not have made short work with any dangerous pretender to his crown who lay completely in his power. Yet even the Throgmorton conspiracy was not turned to her destruction; Elizabeth had her own reasons for preferring to keep her captive alive. But the Throgmorton revelations, with the assassination of Orange, the death of Alençon, the approach of the Spanish crisis, and the growing certainty that Mary’s son would not take her place as the figure-head for Catholic conspiracies, went far to cancel Elizabeth’s reasons. To Walsingham, alike as patriot and protestant, the death of Mary had long been about the most desirable event that could occur; and now he saw his way to compass it--to inveigle her within reach of the law.

He reckoned it as a certainty that if she found herself able to communicate with her partisans undetected, she would soon enough get involved in some plot of a character which would justify her doom in the eyes of the world. A supposed adherent of hers, a Jesuit, devised means of communicating with her and of passing her secret correspondence in and out of Chartley Manor. She fell into the trap: the supposed adherent was Walsingham’s agent. Every letter was opened and copied. A plot was soon on foot for her liberation, an invasion, and the deposition of Elizabeth, whose assassination by Anthony Babington was part of the scheme. From Walsingham’s point of view, the vital point was to get her definitely implicated in Babington’s part of the conspiracy. At last, Philips, the decipherer of the correspondence, produced a letter which was decisive. Then Walsingham struck. The bubble burst; Mary was tried and condemned.

Now an issue appears between Walsingham and Mary. The Scots Queen admitted participation in the plot up to a certain point: she denied _in toto_ knowledge of the intended assassination. Apart from certain phrases in one letter, it cannot be conclusively shown that she was lying. The conditions made it possible that she never wrote those incriminating phrases; that they were forged. Did Walsingham fabricate that evidence in order that Mary might be prevented from escaping what he regarded as her just and necessary doom, on a technical plea? Did Philips forge it and persuade him that it was genuine? Or was it in fact genuine? Mendoza believed that Mary was in the secret, but Mendoza may have been under a misapprehension. No one will ever be able to answer that riddle decisively. But the form of Walsingham’s denial, when the imputation of forgery was made in court, is worth noting. “As a private person, I have done nothing unbecoming an honest man, nor, as I bear the place of a public person have I done anything unworthy my place.” If Walsingham did fabricate the evidence, he did it with a clear conscience; that is, with an honest conviction that he was discharging a duty; that he was “doing nothing unworthy his place.” The thing is perfectly conceivable. No one will deny that John Knox was a conscientious man; but John Knox justified assassination. Walsingham himself thought it permissible in certain circumstances. But the case is not proved one way or the other. The twist in his rigid conscience may not have been crooked enough for that. Yet the whole business of deliberately making arrangements to facilitate plotting on his victim’s part is hardly on a different plane. The point of interest lies in the fact that under sixteenth-century conditions such acts were committed and were sanctioned without compunction not only by men without conscience, or of careless conscience, or of conventional or adaptable conscience, but by the very men who held hardest to moral ideals: men whose serious purpose was to do all to the glory of God.

VI

THE END

For all her confidence in and dependence on Walsingham, the Secretary was never _persona grata_ with Elizabeth. She abused him more roundly and more frequently than any other member of her Council. If an opportunity offered of setting him a task which was utterly against the grain, she would not let it go; and she liked him none the better for his share in making her responsible for the death of Queen Mary. In that, as in passing from covert to overt war with Spain, she was compelled to follow his policy; but she did not increase her favour to him and his allies, and she followed the policy with marked ill-will. Nothing could avert a desperate conflict, yet she continued to the last to drive the war-party half-frantic by parsimony, by issuing impracticable orders, by imposing paralysing restrictions, by temporising with Parma and threatening to betray her allies. And when the great Armada was triumphantly shattered by English seamen, and thereafter overwhelmed by the winds and the waves, and Drake would have delivered a still more fatal blow by rending Portugal from Philip, she carefully tied the Admiral up with instructions which doomed the Lisbon expedition to fruitlessness and its great organiser to discredit and practical retirement.

If Walsingham lived to see England freed from the nightmare of Mary Stewart, and on a palpable equality with Spain, the accession of the leader of “the Religion” in France to the throne, if not as yet to the rulership, of that country, and the rise of a worthy successor to William the Silent in the person of Maurice of Nassau, yet his last years were full enough of bitterness. He had striven devotedly with a single eye to the welfare of his country, so loyally and with such absence of self-seeking that he had beggared himself in the process. His services--invaluable yet unwelcome--were requited by chill disfavour; the assistance to which gratitude and justice should have entitled him was denied, since lavish bounty to Walter Raleigh suited the Queen’s humour better at the time; and the statesman who with Burghley had done most, for twenty years, for the honour and the safety of England, died so poor that he was buried quietly and privately--at his own desire--that his heirs might be spared the charges of a costly funeral. Whether he was in alliance with Burghley, or in occasional antagonism to the policy of his great colleague, the personal friendship and fidelity of the two to each other remained unbroken to the end. That is almost the only pleasing reflection to which his closing years give rise. For the rest, he passed from the world, one more example of the ingratitude of princes.

SIR WALTER RALEIGH

I

CHARACTER

In his virtues and in his faults, in his brilliance and in his limitations, in his greatness and in his defects, Walter Raleigh is the very type of Elizabeth’s England. Like Robert Cecil, Spenser, and Sidney, he was a child when the great queen ascended the throne; like Shakespeare and Bacon, he had not passed the full vigour of manhood when she died. He was a year older than Henry of Navarre, whom he outlived by eight years. Walsingham was a grown man and William Cecil a Secretary of State before any one of this younger group was born. All of them were young men still when the crisis of Elizabeth’s reign was reached and the Armada was dispersed. The older generation raised England from weakness to strength; the younger saw her strength made patent to the world. The older generation maintained her on the defensive; it was the part of the younger to assert her primacy in every field of endeavour.

Of this younger generation, Raleigh stands out as the typical representative. In an age of men of action, he was one of the greatest of the men of action. In one of the two greatest ages of English poetry he was acclaimed as one of their peers by the poets. In the age which saw the creation of English prose, he was one of the masters of prose. The military world and the naval world were developing new theories of strategy and tactics; in both fields he was a first-rate authority and a brilliant performer. The expansion of Spain and Portugal had brought new political conceptions into being; we owe the conception of Greater Britain and all the first stubborn efforts to realise it to the genius of Sir Walter. In a day of brilliant courtiers, none was more brilliant than he; and in the day when Bacon was formulating anew the principles of scientific inquiry, Raleigh was incidentally an ardent experimentalist. In every field his versatility was exercised, and in every field his place was in the front rank.

_From the Painting by_ FEDERIGO ZUCCARO _in the National Portrait Gallery_]

And yet perhaps--save in one thing--never quite in the first rank. His literary achievement does not set him beside Shakespeare and Spenser. Drake was a greater commander and John Davis a greater seaman. By land he was never tested in a great command. His scientific pursuits were merely a parergon. As a statesman he never achieved the control of England’s destinies; wily Robert Cecil was the craftier politician. But two things he did: he taught Englishmen that the might of England lay in her fleets--not as the accident of a moment but as a permanent principle; and he created the idea of a Britain beyond the seas, struggled for it almost alone year after year with persistent tenacity, through good report and evil report and failure--finally died for it. He it was that sowed the seed; ours is the tree that sprang from it.

II

RALEIGH’S RISE

Walter Raleigh was born in 1552, a year before Mary Tudor ascended the English throne. He was of a Devon house; himself, one of a large and composite family, for his mother, Katharine Champernoun, was his father’s third wife, and was herself a widow with several children when she married him. It must have counted for something for a small boy to have had two such big half-brothers as Humphrey and Adrian Gilbert, both dreamers and idealists, and one of them a by-no-means contemptible man of action to boot. The child was six years old when the great persecution was ended by Elizabeth’s accession, and for the next ten years he had endless opportunities of listening with all his ears to mariners’ tales of Eldorado and of the Spanish Inquisition, and learning at least watermanship if not seamanship. In 1568 he went up to Oxford, at the moment when Alva was goading the Netherlands into open rebellion and France was on the verge of a fresh outbreak of the Huguenot wars. Raleigh’s career as an undergraduate was interrupted. He went off to France as a volunteer, to get his baptism of blood at Jarnac in March, and to be present at Montcontour later in the year.

After that, his career for some while is not easy to trace. It looks as if he had returned to Oxford, for his name was still on the list of undergraduates at Oriel in 1572; but it is also said that he remained in France for five years, and even that he was in Paris at the time of the massacre. In 1575 he entered--_pro forma_--at the Middle Temple; and two or three years later appears to have been in the field again, fighting in the Low Countries under Sir John Norreys. The chances are that he had had some further military practice in the interval between 1569 and 1578, in France or the Netherlands or both, especially as his brother Humphrey Gilbert was in command of the English contingent at Flushing and elsewhere for some while. In 1578 Gilbert sailed on his first colonising venture, and young Walter was one of his captains; but the expedition, after a collision with some Spaniards, was driven back to Plymouth by weather. In 1580, Raleigh emerges definitely as a captain in the army employed for the suppression of Desmond’s rebellion in Ireland--in which capacity he was present at the capture of Smerwick, and had the unsavoury business of superintending the massacre of the garrison.

Raleigh remained in Ireland on duty for something over a year, till the end of 1581. While there he accomplished sundry feats of arms of a brilliant character, all being of the kind in which personal daring and skill, and resourcefulness in emergency, are the leading characteristics--deeds in which he was acting with only some very small escort. It was very much in the nature--_mutatis mutandis_--of police work among hostile frontier tribes in India to-day. The young soldier’s ideas of Irish government were derived from Humphrey Gilbert, who, in all other relations of life, was a noble-hearted generous Christian gentleman, but in this particular relation was as perfectly ruthless as Alva himself might have been. It is one of the puzzles of the period that men who upheld elsewhere the highest standards of chivalry and honour--men such as Sussex, Henry Sidney, Walter Devereux--adopted towards the native Irish the attitude of the primitive Hebrew towards the Canaanites, seeming to account the human population as if they were an irredeemably pernicious species of wild beasts; and Raleigh was no exception to the rule.

Immediately on his return to England he sprang into high favour with Elizabeth, partly through his brilliant abilities, partly through the personal fascination which no one could exercise better when he chose. But this charm was accompanied by an insatiable ambition, pridefulness, and fiery temper, which effectually prevented him from making any attempt to conciliate rivalry or hostility, cut him off from his natural alliance with the court section of the war-party, and rather associated him with Burghley. Favourite as he was, and in some ways influential with the Queen, he was never admitted by her into the Privy Council, though he was knighted so early as 1584, and received numerous and exceedingly substantial marks of the royal goodwill.

In fact, it would seem that his imagination carried his mind away from the current problems of administration and policy to another field. He was less occupied with the question how war with Spain might be precipitated or deferred than with that of setting up a rival empire. If, as is most probable, the conception was primarily that of his brother Humphrey Gilbert, the younger man made it his own; and in these years the attempt to establish a colony in North America absorbed his best energies and enthusiasms. For Burghley, Spain was primarily the European Power which--however interests might clash--was a necessary counterpoise to France; for Walsingham, she was the aggressive enemy of Protestantism; for Raleigh, she was the claimant to the New World, whose rights might be and ought to be successfully challenged by England. Thus, the first desired to avert conflict; the second was at least ready to join issue at once, lest it should be too late; whereas, from Raleigh’s point of view, the time when Spain and England should grapple was a matter of comparative indifference, provided that when it arrived England should be ready. But there was probably no man in England--not Drake himself--in whose political creed fundamental hostility to Spain was a more essential article.

There is, however, a curious story that in 1586 Raleigh was engaged in Spanish negotiations on his own account, which negotiations had as their object that he should take measures to hamper the English preparations for war, himself selling a couple of ships to Spain; and it appears to be implied that he was one of those young gentlemen about the Queen’s person who were going to put through Babington’s plot for her assassination. We may therefore recall the fact that in the Ridolfi days John Hawkins had figured as an enemy of his Queen, only thirsting to betray the fleet to Philip. Hawkins, of course, was really working in collusion with Burghley, and the whole thing was a trick. It need not surprise any one, therefore, if Raleigh played the same game at this time, though on a smaller scale. It would be a matter of course, then, that pains would be taken to give the Spaniards--and their informants in England--the impression that Sir Walter was really disaffected. As for Ballard and Babington, they were so completely in the toils of Walsingham from the outset that Raleigh may very well have actually been the Secretary’s accomplice in tricking them. Patriotism, principle, and consistency apart, no one has ever accused him of lacking intelligence, of which he would stand hopelessly convicted if the suggested allegations were true. Moreover, a man with so many enemies would not have escaped without being incriminated. The only definitely known facts are that he was at this time in communication with Spain, and that the Spaniards had an idea that he was well-affected towards them. The only inference we can quite confidently draw is that he was hoodwinking them, though nothing definite seems to have resulted.

When the Armada was expected, Raleigh was Vice-Admiral of the West, and was also one of the special Defence Commission. It was on the great ship which he had himself designed, the _Ark Raleigh_, that Admiral Howard hoisted his flag; but Raleigh was not one of the commanders in the fleet. He had been largely occupied in organising the defences in the West Country, and had been urgent in pressing the true strategical policy of fighting and beating the Spaniard on the sea--of an offensive naval war as the only true defensive war. But it is not quite certain whether he even had any personal part in the Armada engagements at all; though, on the whole, there is not sufficient ground for discarding the common report that he joined the fleet as a volunteer after the engagement off Portland. At that stage, all fears had passed that the Spaniard might effect a landing in the western division of the channel, where Raleigh was responsible for the arrangements for meeting the invader. Until then, he had been bound to remain at his post on shore. But now, not only did the English fleet know that it was a match for the enemy, but, if chance should enable them to attempt a landing, it would certainly not be in Raleigh’s district. So there is an _a priori_ probability that, being free to join the ships, he would not have missed the opportunity if it offered. There is no doubt, in any case, that he fully understood and appreciated the tactics adopted--a complete innovation in the methods of naval warfare--whether he did or did not take actual part, as a gentleman-volunteer, in the manœuvres.

The great _débâcle_ initiated a new phase in the relations of Spain to England and to Europe generally. The defeat, of course, was not of itself a death-blow, though if victory had gone the other way--if the English fleet had been in effect annihilated--an invasion under Parma would have followed; and Parma was the best general living, while the whole number of Englishmen who had any real experience of military service was small. But hitherto, wherever the Spaniards went, afloat or ashore, they had the prestige of success; now at a single blow the prestige passed from Spain to England--the theory of Spanish invincibility was shattered. The change had no less effect on Spain’s enemies on the Continent than in England, where for years past the seamen at least had been in the habit of taking for granted that they understood the art of fighting on the sea infinitely better than their antagonists. Now, however, the landsmen and the men of peace had had ocular demonstration of what the sailors had long been affirming as the conclusion from their own practical experience. England, hitherto on the defensive, was converted into the attacking power, and was filled with the spirit of aggression.

III

VIRGINIA

Between his seventeenth and his thirtieth years, Raleigh was completing his education as a soldier by his experiences in varied fields from Jarnac to Munster--sandwiching in, as it would appear, some residence at Oxford, and some in London as a nominal student of the law; not actually becoming a courtier but making his first _entrée_ among the associates of the court. In his thirtieth year he returned from Ireland to London, with a reputation as a dashing officer, and immediately made his way into the good graces of the Maiden Queen who, already verging on fifty, was demanding with increased instead of diminished avidity the amorous adulation of those who would find favour in her eyes. Raleigh made love to her on the recognised lines; with distinguished success, also on the recognised lines; to his own profit, and the extreme annoyance of the Leicesters and Hattons. The famous story of the cloak may or may not be true--it rests only on the authority of that chronicler whom every self-respecting author is obliged to refer to as “old Fuller”--but it is one of those traditions which, like King Alfred’s cakes and George Washington’s little hatchet, can never be surrendered. In these years there are tales of Hatton’s jealousy; records of appeals to the favourite to intervene now on behalf of Burghley, now of Leicester, to mitigate the royal displeasure; rumours, such as may have been concocted by spite, of not over-scrupulous methods employed in the pursuit of personal aggrandisement. Beside these stories of court-gossip and intrigue are those of his association with Bohemian literary circles, of his originating the meetings at the Mermaid, of his friendship with Marlowe, and his reputed “atheism”--a quite incredible, if by no means surprising, charge against a man whose speculations were probably as bold and unconventional in the field of religion as in those of political, naval, and military theory. But assuredly the author of the “History of the World” was no atheist.

But during these years, between 1582 and 1588, he was something more than the brilliant courtier, keen-witted humanist, and active member of the Defence Commission--he was the pioneer of colonial expansion.

Humphrey Gilbert was thirteen years older than his half-brother, whose hero he would seem to have been, not undeservedly, in Raleigh’s younger days. Of brilliant attainments, the bravest of the brave, intensely religious, an idealist and dreamer, he was a kind of incarnation of Arthurian knighthood; for the very mercilessness he displayed in Ireland was by no means the outcome of inhumanity but of a fixed belief that the Irish ought to be accounted not as human beings but as beasts of prey. Raleigh himself was hardly more than a boy when his brother was already fixing his thoughts on the colonisation of North America and the discovery of the North West Passage. It cannot therefore be claimed for Sir Walter that he actually originated the Colonial idea, which was Gilbert’s; but he entered into it from the first and made it his own; while Gilbert lived, they worked for it together; and when the Atlantic billows swallowed up Sir Humphrey, it was to Raleigh that his mantle passed undisputed.

About the time that the young man was entered at the Temple, Sir Humphrey was at work on the treatise “to prove a passage by the North West to Cathay and the East Indies,” which was published in 1576 by Gascoign. In 1578 he obtained a charter authorising what he had already been petitioning for four years earlier, an expedition to discover and take possession of unknown lands--the charter extending over six years. We have already noted Raleigh’s participation in the first expedition, which put to sea late in 1579 but was obliged to return to port with nothing accomplished. In 1583 the second expedition sailed; but this time Raleigh, though he had embarked everything he could in the venture, was at the last moment peremptorily forbidden to accompany it in person by his exigent mistress. Quite definitely, the purpose of the expedition was not to hunt for precious metals but to establish a permanent agricultural settlement. Incidentally, it is to be noted that Walsingham was active in furthering the project. The expedition took formal possession of Newfoundland, but this was not its actual destination. Disasters overtook it, and Gilbert finding himself compelled for the time to abandon the design, sailed for England. On the course of the voyage, the little _Squirrel_, in which he was sailing, went down in a storm with all hands on board. Raleigh was left to struggle single-handed for the carrying out of his brother’s conception.

Now begins the story of Raleigh’s persistent effort at the colonisation of Virginia.

A fresh patent was issued to Sir Walter, who had just been knighted, in March 1584--just two years after his first entry into Elizabeth’s court. The first step was taken immediately--an exploring expedition, which found its way to the island of Roanoak on the coast of what is now Carolina, opened friendly intercourse with the natives, took formal possession, and returned to report.

Raleigh was largely interested in the series of Arctic voyages undertaken by John Davis during the three ensuing years: exploration and discovery pure and simple had an attraction for him only less powerful than colonisation; but it was to this that he devoted his keenest energies, and on this that he poured out the wealth he was acquiring. In the spring of 1585 his fleet sailed for Virginia, as the new settlement was called, under the command of his kinsman, Richard Grenville. Raleigh himself the Queen, of course, could not spare. The open breach with Spain and the open alliance with Orange were now approaching rapidly, and Grenville’s voyage seems to have been, in his own eyes, directed more against Spaniards than with a single eye to the colony. In due course, however, Roanoak was reached, and the settlement established with Ralph Lane as governor; and Grenville came home. Unluckily, the original friendly relations with the natives were upset; the quarrel led the colonists into “making an example” of an Indian village; and the Indians resolved to retaliate. Till their opportunity should come, they merely made things as difficult as they could for the Englishman. A relief-expedition had been promised for the following Easter. It did not appear; but Drake did, with the fleet which had just been employed in sacking Cartagena. The settlers resolved to throw up their attempt, and returned to England with Drake. A few days after they had sailed, the delayed relief party under Grenville arrived to find the settlement abandoned. Fifteen volunteers were now left behind, to keep the place in occupation; but when a new band of settlers with a new governor arrived in the following spring (1587), they found that the little garrison had been massacred. The party set about establishing a settlement once more; but under the existing conditions they induced John White, the governor, to return himself to England to bring fresh supplies and reinforcements.

This was the year in which the Armada ought to have sailed against England; but Drake’s successful raid on the harbour of Cadiz deferred the invasion for a year. In the meantime, however, it was a matter of extreme difficulty to get permission for any ship to leave an English port. The demands of the coming duel were paramount. A couple of relief vessels with White were hardly allowed to sail; and these returned without reaching the colony. Again, the next year there was an expedition, but it found Roanoak deserted, and learned that the settlers had taken up fresh quarters. But neither did it discover them, nor did any one of the search expeditions which Raleigh subsequently despatched one after another.