Henry Smith Williams - "A History of Science, Volume 1"

Charles A. Ellwood - "Sociology and Modern Social Problems"

Oscar Wilde - "The Soul of Man"

Horatio Alger - "The Young Musician "

Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from

C >> Charles Kingsley >> Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from




There two shameful months are spent in trying to find out some excuse
for Raleigh's murder. Wilson is set over him as a spy; his letters
to his wife are intercepted. Every art is used to extort a
confession of a great plot with France, and every art fails utterly--
simply, it seems to me, because there was no plot. Raleigh writes an
apology, letters of entreaty, self-justification, what not; all, in
my opinion, just and true enough; but like his speech on the
scaffold, weak, confused--the product of a 'broken brain.' However,
his head must come off; and as a last resource, it must be taken off
upon the sentence of fifteen years ago, and he who was condemned for
plotting with Spain must die for plotting against her. It is a
pitiable business: but as Osborne says, in a passage (p.108 of his
Memoirs of James) for which one freely forgives him all his sins and
lies, and they are many--'As the foolish idolaters were wont to
sacrifice the choicest of their children to the devil, so our king
gave up his incomparable jewel to the will of this monster of
ambition (the Spaniard), under the pretence of a superannuated
transgression, contrary to the opinion of the more honest sort of
gownsmen, who maintained that his Majesty's pardon lay inclusively in
the commission he gave him on his setting out to sea; it being
incongruous that he, who remained under the notion of one dead in the
law, should as a general dispose of the lives of others, not being
himself master of his own.'

But no matter. He must die. The Queen intercedes for him, as do all
honest men: but in vain. He has twenty-four hours' notice to
prepare for death; eats a good breakfast; takes a cup of sack and a
pipe; makes a rambling speech, in which one notes only the intense
belief that he is an honest man, and the intense desire to make
others believe so, in the very smallest matters; and then dies
smilingly, as one weary of life. One makes no comment. Raleigh's
life really ended on that day that poor Keymis returned from San
Thome.'

And then?

As we said, Truth is stranger than fiction. No dramatist dare invent
a 'poetic justice' more perfect than fell upon the traitor. It is
not always so, no doubt. God reserves many a greater sinner for that
most awful of all punishments--impunity. But there are crises in a
nation's life in which God makes terrible examples, to put before the
most stupid and sensual the choice of Hercules, the upward road of
life, the downward one which leads to the pit. Since the time of
Pharaoh and the Red Sea host, history is full of such palpable,
unmistakable revelations of the Divine Nemesis; and in England, too,
at that moment, the crisis was there; and the judgment of God was
revealed accordingly. Sir Lewis Stukely remained, it seems, at
court; high in favour with James: but he found, nevertheless, that
people looked darkly on him. Like many self-convicted rogues, he
must needs thrust his head into his own shame; and one day he goes to
good old Lord Charles Howard's house; for being Vice-Admiral of
Devon, he has affairs with the old Armada hero.

The old lion explodes in an unexpected roar. 'Darest thou come into
my presence, thou base fellow, who art reputed the common scorn and
contempt of all men? Were it not in mine own house I would cudgel
thee with my staff for presuming to speak to me!' Stukely, his tail
between his legs, goes off and complains to James. 'What should I do
with him? Hang him? On my sawle, mon, if I hung all that spoke ill
of thee, all the trees in the island were too few.' Such is the
gratitude of kings, thinks Stukely; and retires to write foolish
pamphlets in self-justification, which, unfortunately for his memory,
still remain to make bad worse.

Within twelve months he, the rich and proud Vice-Admiral of Devon,
with a shield of sixteen quarterings and the blood-royal in his
veins, was detected debasing the King's coin within the precincts of
the royal palace, together with his old accomplice Mannourie, who,
being taken, confessed that his charges against Raleigh were false.
He fled, a ruined man, back to his native county and his noble old
seat of Affton; but Ate is on the heels of such -


'Slowly she tracks him and sure, as a lyme-hound, sudden she grips
him,
Crushing him, blind in his pride, for a sign and a terror to
mortals.'


A terrible plebiscitum had been passed in the West country against
the betrayer of its last Worthy. The gentlemen closed their doors
against him; the poor refused him--so goes the legend--fire and
water. Driven by the Furies, he fled from Affton, and wandered
westward down the vale of Taw, away to Appledore, and there took
boat, and out into the boundless Atlantic, over the bar, now crowded
with shipping, for which Raleigh's genius had discovered a new trade
and a new world.

Sixteen miles to the westward, like a blue cloud on the horizon,
rises the ultima Thule of Devon, the little isle of Lundy. There one
outlying peak of granite, carrying up a shelf of slate upon its
southern flank, has defied the waves, and formed an island some three
miles long, desolate, flat-headed, fretted by every frost and storm,
walled all round with four hundred feet of granite cliff, sacred
only, then at least, to puffins and pirates. Over the single
landing-place frowns from the cliff the keep of an old ruin, 'Moresco
Castle,' as they call it still, where some bold rover, Sir John de
Moresco, in the times of the old Edwards, worked his works of
darkness: a gray, weird, uncanny pile of moorstone, through which
all the winds of heaven howl day and night.

In a chamber of that ruin died Sir Lewis Stukely, Lord of Affton,
cursing God and man.

These things are true. Said I not well that reality is stranger than
romance?

But no Nemesis followed James.

The answer will depend much upon what readers consider to be a
Nemesis. If to have found England one of the greatest countries in
Europe, and to have left it one of the most inconsiderable and
despicable; if to be fooled by flatterers to the top of his bent,
until he fancied himself all but a god, while he was not even a man,
and could neither speak the truth, keep himself sober, nor look on a
drawn sword without shrinking; if, lastly, to have left behind him a
son who, in spite of many chivalrous instincts unknown to his father,
had been so indoctrinated in that father's vices as to find it
impossible to speak the truth even when it served his purpose; if all
these things be no Nemesis, then none fell on James Stuart.

But of that son, at least, the innocent blood was required. He, too,
had his share in the sin. In Carew Raleigh's simple and manful
petition to the Commons of England for the restoration of his
inheritance we find a significant fact stated without one word of
comment, bitter or otherwise. At Prince Henry's death the Sherborne
lands had been given again to Carr, Lord Somerset. To him, too, 'the
whirligig of time brought round its revenges,' and he lost them when
arraigned and condemned for poisoning Sir Thomas Overbury. Then Sir
John Digby, afterwards Earl of Bristol, begged Sherborne of the King,
and had it. Pembroke (Shakspeare's Pembroke) brought young Carew to
court, hoping to move the tyrant's heart. James saw him and
shuddered; perhaps conscience stricken, perhaps of mere cowardice.
'He looked like the ghost of his father,' as he well might, to that
guilty soul. Good Pembroke advised his young kinsman to travel,
which he did till James's death in the next year. Then coming over--
this is his own story--he asked of Parliament to be restored in
blood, that he might inherit aught that might fall to him in England.
His petition was read twice in the Lords. Whereon 'King Charles sent
Sir James Fullarton, then of the bed-chamber, to Mr. Raleigh to
command him to come to him; and being brought in, the King, after
using him with great civility, notwithstanding told him plainly that
when he was prince he had promised the Earl of Bristol to secure his
title to Sherborne against the heirs of Sir Walter Raleigh; whereon
the earl had given him, then prince, ten thousand pounds; that now he
was bound to make good his promise, being king; that, therefore,
unless he would quit his right and title to Sherborne, he neither
could nor would pass his bill of restoration.'

Young Raleigh, like a good Englishman, 'urged,' he says, 'the
justness of his cause; that he desired only the liberty of the
subject, and to be left to the law, which was never denied any
freeman.' The King remained obstinate. His noble brother's love for
the mighty dead weighed nothing with him, much less justice. Poor
young Raleigh was forced to submit. The act for his restoration was
passed, reserving Sherborne for Lord Bristol, and Charles patched up
the affair by allowing to Lady Raleigh and her son after her a life
pension of four hundred a year.

Young Carew tells his story simply, and without a note of bitterness;
though he professes his intent to range himself and his two sons for
the future 'under the banner of the Commons of England,' he may be a
royalist for any word beside. Even where he mentions the awful curse
of his mother, he only alludes to its fulfilment by--'that which hath
happened since to that royal family is too sad and disastrous for me
to repeat, and yet too visible not to be discerned.' We can have no
doubt that he tells the exact truth. Indeed the whole story fits
Charles's character to the smallest details. The want of any real
sense of justice, combined with the false notion of honour; the
implacable obstinacy; the contempt for that law by which alone he
held his crown; the combination of unkingliness in commanding a
private interview and shamelessness in confessing his own meanness--
all these are true notes of the man whose deliberate suicide stands
written, a warning to all bad rulers till the end of time. But he
must have been a rogue early in life, and a needy rogue too. That
ten thousand pounds of Lord Bristol's money should make many a
sentimentalist reconsider--if, indeed, sentimentalists can be made to
reconsider, or even to consider, anything--their notion of him as the
incarnation of pious chivalry.

At least the ten thousand pounds cost Charles dear.

The widow's curse followed him home. Naseby fight and the Whitehall
scaffold were surely God's judgment of such deeds, whatever man's may
be.



Footnotes:


{1} North British Review, No. XLV.--1. 'Life of Sir Walter
Raleigh.' By P. Fraser Tytler, F.R.S. London, 1853.--2. 'Raleigh's
Discovery of Guiana.' Edited by Sir Robert Schomburgk (Hakluyt
Society), 1848.--3. 'Lord Bacon and Sir Walter Raleigh.' By M.
Napier. Cambridge, 1853.--4. 'Raleigh's Works, with Lives by Oldys
and Birch.' Oxford, 1829--5. 'Bishop Goodman's History of his own
Times.' London, 1839.

{2} I especially entreat readers' attention to two articles in
vindication of the morals of Queen Elizabeth, in 'Fraser's Magazine'
of 1854; to one in the 'Westminster' of 1854, on Mary Stuart; and one
in the same of 1852, on England's Forgotten Worthies, by a pen now
happily well known in English literature, Mr. Anthony Froude's.

{3} Since this was written, a similar Amazonian bodyguard has been
discovered, I hear, in Pegu.

{4} It is to be found in a MS. of 1596.

Copyright (c) 2007. topbookz.net. All rights reserved.