This famous passage is one of those over which the virtuosity of modern times,rejoicing in evil,has hung so fondly,as giving melancholy proof of the 'duplicity of Raleigh's character';as if a man who once in his life had told an untruth was proved by that fact to be a rogue from birth to death:while others have kindly given him the benefit of a doubt whether the letter were not written after a private marriage,and therefore Raleigh,being 'joined unto'some one already,had a right to say that he did not wish to be joined to any one.But I do not concur in this doubt.Four months after,Sir Edward Stafford writes to Anthony Bacon,'If you have anything to do with Sir W.R.,or any love to make to Mistress Throgmorton,at the Tower to-morrow you may speak with them.'This implies that no marriage had yet taken place.And surely,if there had been private marriage,two people who were about to be sent to the Tower for their folly would have made the marriage public at once,as the only possible self-justification.But it is a pity,in my opinion,that biographers,before pronouncing upon that supposed lie of Raleigh's,had not taken the trouble to find out what the words mean.In their virtuous haste to prove him a liar,they have overlooked the fact that the words,as they stand,are unintelligible,and the argument self-contradictory.He wants to prove,we suppose,that he does not go to sea for fear of being forced to marry Miss Throgmorton.It is,at least,an unexpected method of so doing in a shrewd man like Raleigh,to say that he wishes to marry no one at all.'Don't think that I run away for fear of a marriage,for I do not wish to marry any one on the face of the earth,'is a speech which may prove Raleigh to have been a fool,and we must understand it before we can say that it proves him a rogue.If we had received such a letter from a friend,we should have said at once,'Why the man,in his hurry and confusion,has omitted THE word;he must have meant to write,not "There is none on the face of the earth that I would be fastened to,"but "There is none on the face of the earth that I would RATHER be fastened to,"'which would at once make sense and suit fact.For Raleigh not only married Miss Throgmorton forthwith,but made her the best of husbands.My conjectural emendation may go for what it is worth:but that the passage,as it stands in Murdin's State Papers (the MSS.I have not seen)is either misquoted,or mis-written by Raleigh himself,I cannot doubt.He was not one to think nonsense,even if he scribbled it.
The Spanish raid turns out well.Raleigh overlooks Elizabeth's letters of recall till he finds out that the King of Spain has stopped the Plate-fleet for fear of his coming;and then returns,sending on Sir John Burrough to the Azores,where he takes the 'Great Carack,'the largest prize (1600tons)which had ever been brought into England.The details of that gallant fight stand in the pages of Hakluyt.It raised Raleigh once more to wealth,though not to favour.Shortly after he returns from the sea,he finds himself,where he deserves to be,in the Tower,where he does more than one thing which brought him no credit.How far we are justified in calling his quarrel with Sir George Carew,his keeper,for not letting him 'disguise himself,and get into a pair of oars to ease his mind but with a sight of the Queen,or his heart would break,'hypocrisy,is a very different matter.Honest Arthur Gorges,a staunch friend of Raleigh's,tells the story laughingly and lovingly,as if he thought Raleigh sincere,but somewhat mad:and yet honest Gorges has a good right to say a bitter thing;for after having been 'ready to break with laughing at seeing them two brawl and scramble like madmen,and Sir George's new periwig torn off his crown,'he sees 'the iron walking'and daggers out,and playing the part of him who taketh a dog by the ears,'purchased such a rap on the knuckles,that I wished both their pates broken,and so with much ado they staid their brawl to see my bloody fingers,'and then set to work to abuse the hapless peacemaker.After which things Raleigh writes a letter to Cecil,which is still more offensive in the eyes of virtuous biographers--how 'his heart was never broken till this day,when he hears the Queen goes so far off,whom he followed with love and desire on so many journeys,and am now left behind in a dark prison all alone.'I that 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,'and so forth,in a style in which the vulturine nose must needs scent carrion,just because the roses are more fragrant than they should be in a world where all ought to be either vultures or carrion for their dinners.
As for his despair,had he not good reason to be in despair?By his own sin he has hurled himself down the hill which he has so painfully climbed.He is in the Tower--surely no pleasant or hopeful place for any man.Elizabeth is exceedingly wroth with him;and what is worse,he deserves what he has got.His whole fortune is ventured in an expedition over which he has no control,which has been unsuccessful in its first object,and which may be altogether unsuccessful in that which it has undertaken as a pis-aller,and so leave him penniless.
There want not,too,those who will trample on the fallen.The deputy has been cruelly distraining on his Irish tenants for a 'supposed debt of his to the Queen of 400pounds for rent,'which was indeed but fifty marks,and which was paid,and has carried off 500milch kine from the poor settlers whom he has planted there,and forcibly thrust him out of possession of a castle.Moreover,the whole Irish estates are likely to come to ruin;for nothing prevails but rascality among the English soldiers,impotence among the governors,and rebellion among the natives.Three thousand Burkes are up in arms;his 'prophecy of this rebellion'ten days ago was laughed at,and now has come true;and altogether,Walter Raleigh and all belonging to him is in as evil case as he ever was on earth.No wonder,poor fellow,if he behowls himself lustily,and not always wisely,to Cecil,and every one else who will listen to him.
As for his fine speeches about Elizabeth,why forget the standing-point from which such speeches were made?Over and above his present ruin,it was (and ought to have been)an utterly horrible and unbearable thing to Raleigh,or any man,to have fallen into disgrace with Elizabeth by his own fault.He feels (and perhaps rightly)that he is as it were excommunicated from England,and the mission and the glory of England.Instead of being,as he was till now,one of a body of brave men working together in one great common cause,he has cut himself off from the congregation by his own selfish lust,and there he is left alone with his shame.We must try to realise to ourselves the way in which such men as Raleigh looked not only at Elizabeth,but at all the world.There was,in plain palpable fact,something about the Queen,her history,her policy,the times,the glorious part which England,and she as the incarnation of the then English spirit,were playing upon earth,which raised imaginative and heroical souls into a permanent exaltation--a 'fairyland,'as they called it themselves,which seems to us fantastic,and would be fantastic in us,because we are not at their work,or in their days.
There can be no doubt that a number of as noble men as ever stood together on the earth did worship that woman,fight for her,toil for her,risk all for her,with a pure chivalrous affection which has furnished one of the most beautiful pages in all the book of history.
Blots there must needs have been,and inconsistencies,selfishnesses,follies;for they too were men of like passions with ourselves;but let us look at the fair vision as a whole,and thank God that such a thing has for once existed even imperfectly on this sinful earth,instead of playing the part of Ham and falling under his curse,--the penalty of slavishness,cowardice,loss of noble daring,which surely falls on any generation which is 'banausos,'to use Aristotle's word;which rejoices in its forefathers'shame,and,unable to believe in the nobleness of others,is unable to become noble itself.
As for the 'Alexander and Diana'affectations,they were the language of the time:and certainly this generation has no reason to find fault with them,or with a good deal more of the 'affectations'and 'flattery'of Elizabethan times,while it listens complacently night after night 'to honourable members'complimenting not Queen Elizabeth,but Sir Jabesh Windbag,Fiddle,Faddle,Red-tape,and party with protestations of deepest respect and fullest confidence in the very speeches in which they bring accusations of every offence short of high treason--to be understood,of course,in a 'parliamentary sense,'as Mr.Pickwick's were in a 'Pickwickian'one.
If a generation of Knoxes and Mortons,Burleighs and Raleighs,shall ever arise again,one wonders by what name they will call the parliamentary morality and parliamentary courtesy of a generation which has meted out such measure to their ancestors'failings?
'But Queen Elizabeth was an old woman then.'I thank the objector even for that 'then';for it is much nowadays to find any one who believes that Queen Elizabeth was ever young,or who does not talk of her as if she was born about seventy years of age covered with rouge and wrinkles.I will undertake to say that as to the beauty of this woman there is a greater mass of testimony,and from the very best judges too,than there is of the beauty of any personage in history;and yet it has become the fashion now to deny even that.The plain facts seem that she was very graceful,active,accomplished in all outward manners,of a perfect figure,and of that style of intellectual beauty,depending on expression,which attracted (and we trust always will attract)Britons far more than that merely sensuous loveliness in which no doubt Mary Stuart far surpassed her.And there seems little doubt that,like many Englishwomen,she retained her beauty to a very late period in life,not to mention that she was,in 1592,just at that age of rejuvenescence which makes many a woman more lovely at sixty than she has been since she was thirty-five.No doubt,too,she used every artificial means to preserve her famous complexion;and quite right she was.This beauty of hers had been a talent,as all beauty is,committed to her by God;it had been an important element in her great success;men had accepted it as what beauty of form and expression generally is,an outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace;and while the inward was unchanged,what wonder if she tried to preserve the outward?If she was the same,why should she not try to look the same?And what blame to those who worshipped her,if,knowing that she was the same,they too should fancy that she looked the same,the Elizabeth of their youth,and should talk as if the fair flesh,as well as the fair spirit,was immortal?Does not every loving husband do so when he forgets the gray hair and the sunken cheek,and all the wastes of time,and sees the partner of many joys and sorrows not as she has become,but as she was,ay,and is to him,and will be to him,he trusts,through all eternity?There is no feeling in these Elizabethan worshippers which we have not seen,potential and crude,again and again in the best and noblest of young men whom we have met,till it was crushed in them by the luxury,effeminacy,and unbelief in chivalry,which are the sure accompaniment of a long peace,which war may burn up with beneficent fire.
But we must hasten on now;for Raleigh is out of prison in September,and by the next spring in parliament speaking wisely and well,especially on his fixed idea,war with Spain,which he is rewarded for forthwith in Father Parson's 'Andreae Philopatris Responsio'by a charge of founding a school of Atheism for the corruption of young gentlemen;a charge which Lord Chief-Justice Popham,Protestant as he is,will find it useful one day to recollect.
Elizabeth,however,now that Raleigh has married the fair Throgmorton and done wisely in other matters,restores him to favour.If he has sinned,he has suffered:but he is as useful as ever,now that his senses have returned to him;and he is making good speeches in parliament,instead of bad ones to weak maidens;so we find him once more in favour,and possessor of Sherborne Manor,where he builds and beautifies,with 'groves and gardens of much variety and great delight.'And God,too,seems to have forgiven him;perhaps has forgiven;for there the fair Throgmorton brings him a noble boy.Ut sis vitalis metuo puer!
Raleigh will quote David's example one day,not wisely or well.Does David's example ever cross him now,and those sad words,--'The Lord hath put away thy sin, nevertheless the child that is born unto thee shall die?'
Let that be as it may,all is sunshine once more.Sherborne Manor,a rich share in the great carack,a beautiful wife,a child;what more does this man want to make him happy?Why should he not settle down upon his lees,like ninety-nine out of the hundred,or at least try a peaceful and easy path toward more 'praise and pudding?'The world answers,or his biographers answer for him,that he needs to reinstate himself in his mistress's affection;which is true or not,according as we take it.If they mean thereby,as most seem to mean,that it was a mere selfish and ambitious scheme by which to wriggle into court favour once more--why,let them mean it:I shall only observe that the method which Raleigh took was a rather more dangerous and self-sacrificing one than courtiers are wont to take.
But if it be meant that Walter Raleigh spoke somewhat thus with himself,--'I have done a base and dirty deed,and have been punished for it.I have hurt the good name of a sweet woman who loves me,and whom I find to be a treasure;and God,instead of punishing me by taking her from me,has rendered me good for evil by giving her to me.I have justly offended a mistress whom I worship,and who,after having shown her just indignation,has returned me good for evil by giving me these fair lands of Sherborne,and only forbid me her presence till the scandal has passed away.She sees and rewards my good in spite of my evil;and I,too,know that I am better than I have seemed;that I am fit for nobler deeds than seducing maids of honour.How can I prove that?How can I redeem my lost name for patriotism and public daring?How can I win glory for my wife,seek that men shall forget her past shame in the thought,"She is Walter Raleigh's wife?"How can I show my mistress that I loved her all along,that I acknowledge her bounty,her mingled justice and mercy?
How can I render to God for all the benefits which He has done unto me?How can I do a deed the like of which was never done in England?'
If all this had passed through Walter Raleigh's mind,what could we say of it,but that it was the natural and rational feeling of an honourable and right-hearted man,burning to rise to the level which he knew ought to be his,because he knew that he had fallen below it?
And what right better way of testifying these feelings than to do what,as we shall see,Raleigh did?What right have we to impute to him lower motives than these,while we confess that these righteous and noble motives would have been natural and rational;--indeed,just what we flatter ourselves that we should have felt in his place?Of course,in his grand scheme,the thought came in,'And I shall win to myself honour,and glory,and wealth,'--of course.And pray,sir,does it not come in in your grand schemes;and yours;and yours?If you made a fortune to-morrow by some wisely and benevolently managed factory,would you forbid all speech of the said wisdom and benevolence,because you had intended that wisdom and benevolence should pay you a good percentage?Away with cant,and let him that is without sin among you cast the first stone.
So Raleigh hits upon a noble project;a desperate one,true:but he will do it or die.He will leave pleasant Sherborne,and the bosom of the beautiful bride,and the first-born son,and all which to most makes life worth having,and which Raleigh enjoys more intensely than most men;for he is a poet,and a man of strong nervous passions withal.But,-'I could not love thee,dear,so much,Loved I not honour more.'
And he will go forth to endure heat,hunger,fever,danger of death in battle,danger of the Inquisition,rack,and stake,in search of El Dorado.What so strange in that?I have known half a dozen men who,in his case,and conscious of his powers,would have done the same from the same noble motive.
He begins prudently;and sends a Devonshire man,Captain Whiddon--probably one of The Whiddons of beautiful Chagford--to spy out the Orinoco.He finds that the Spaniards are there already;that Berreo,who has attempted El Dorado from the westward,starting from New Granada and going down the rivers,is trying to settle on the Orinoco mouth;that he is hanging the poor natives,encouraging the Caribs to hunt them and sell them for slaves,imprisoning the caciques to extort their gold,torturing,ravishing,kidnapping,and conducting himself as was usual among Spaniards of those days.
Raleigh's spirit is stirred within him.If 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,'fiction as it is,once excited us,how must a far worse reality have excited Raleigh,as he remembered that these Spaniards are as yet triumphant in iniquity,and as he remembered,too,that these same men are the sworn foes of England,her liberty,her Bible,and her Queen?What a deed,to be beforehand with them for once!To dispossess them of one corner of that western world,where they have left no trace but blood and flame!He will go himself:he will find El Dorado and its golden Emperor;and instead of conquering,plundering,and murdering him,as Cortez did Montezuma,and Pizarro Atahuallpa,he will show him English strength;espouse his quarrel against the Spaniards;make him glad to become Queen Elizabeth's vassal tributary,perhaps leave him a bodyguard of English veterans,perhaps colonise his country,and so at once avenge and protect the oppressed Indians,and fill the Queen's treasury with the riches of a land equal,if not superior,to Peru and Mexico.
Such is his dream;vague perhaps:but far less vague than those with which Cortez and Pizarro started,and succeeded.After a careful survey of the whole matter,I must give it as my deliberate opinion,that Raleigh was more reasonable in his attempt,and had more fair evidence of its feasibility,than either Cortez or Pizarro had for theirs.It is a bold assertion.If any reader doubts its truth,he cannot do better than to read the whole of the documents connected with the two successful,and the one unsuccessful,attempts at finding a golden kingdom.Let them read first Prescott's 'Conquests of Mexico and Peru,'and then Schomburgk's edition of Raleigh's 'Guiana.'They will at least confess,when they have finished,that truth is stranger than fiction.
Of Raleigh's credulity in believing in El Dorado,much has been said.
I am sorry to find even so wise a man as Sir Robert Schomburgk,after bearing good testimony to Raleigh's wonderful accuracy about all matters which he had an opportunity of observing,using this term of credulity.I must dare to differ on that point even with Sir Robert,and ask by what right the word is used?First,Raleigh says nothing about El Dorado (as every one is forced to confess)but what Spaniard on Spaniard had been saying for fifty years.Therefore the blame of credulity ought to rest with the Spaniards,from Philip von Huten,Orellano,and George of Spires,upward to Berreo.But it rests really with no one.For nothing,if we will examine the documents,is told of the riches of El Dorado which had not been found to be true,and seen by the eyes of men still living,in Peru and Mexico.
Not one-fifth of America had been explored,and already two El Dorados had been found and conquered.What more rational than to suppose that there was a third,a fourth,a fifth,in the remaining four-fifths?The reports of El Dorado among the savages were just of the same kind as those by which Cortez and Pizarro hunted out Mexico and Peru,saving that they were far more widely spread,and confirmed by a succession of adventurers.I entreat readers to examine this matter in Raleigh,Schomburgk,Humboldt,and Condamine,and judge for themselves.As for Hume's accusations,I pass them by as equally silly and shameless,only saying,for the benefit of readers,that they have been refuted completely by every one who has written since Hume's days;and to those who are inclined to laugh at Raleigh for believing in Amazons and 'men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders'I can only answer thus -About the Amazons,Raleigh told what he was told;what the Spaniards who went before him,and Condamine who came after him,were told.
Humboldt thinks the story possibly founded on fact;and I must say that,after reviewing all that has been said thereon,it does seem to me the simplest solution of the matter just to believe it true;to believe that there was,about his time,or a little before,somewhere about the Upper Orinoco,a warlike community of women.Humboldt shows how likely such would be to spring up where women flee from their male tyrants into the forests.As for the fable which connected them with the Lake Manoa and the city of El Dorado,we can only answer,'If not true there and then,it is true elsewhere now';for the Amazonian guards of the King of Dahomey at this moment,as all know,surpass in strangeness and in ferocity all that has been reported of the Orinocquan viragos,and thus prove once more that truth is stranger than fiction.{3}
Beside--and here I stand stubborn,regardless of gibes and sneers--it is not yet proven that there was not,in the sixteenth century,some rich and civilised kingdom like Peru or Mexico in the interior of South America.Sir Robert Schomburgk has disproved the existence of Lake Parima;but it will take a long time,and more explorers than one,to prove that there are no ruins of ancient cities,such as Stephens stumbled on in Yucatan,still buried in the depths of the forest.Fifty years of ruin would suffice to wrap them in a leafy veil which would hide them from every one who did not literally run against them.Tribes would die out,or change place,as the Atures and other great nations have done in those parts,and every traditional record of them perish gradually;for it is only gradually and lately that it has perished:while if it be asked,What has become of the people themselves?the answer is,that when any race (like most of the American races in the sixteenth century)is in a dying state,it hardly needs war to thin it down,and reduce the remnant to savagery.Greater nations than El Dorado was even supposed to be have vanished ere now,and left not a trace behind:
and so may they.But enough of this.I leave the quarrel to that honest and patient warder of tourneys,Old Time,who will surely do right at last,and go on to the dogheaded worthies,without necks,and long hair hanging down behind,who,as a cacique told Raleigh,that 'they had of late years slain many hundreds of his father's people,'and in whom even Humboldt was not always allowed,he says,to disbelieve (so much for Hume's scoff at Raleigh as a liar),one old cacique boasting to him that he had seen them with his own eyes.
Humboldt's explanation is,that the Caribs,being the cleverest and strongest Indians,are also the most imaginative;and therefore,being fallen children of Adam,the greatest liars;and that they invented both El Dorado and the dog-heads out of pure wickedness.Be it so.But all lies crystallise round some nucleus of truth;and it really seems to me nothing very wonderful if the story should be on the whole true,and these worthies were in the habit of dressing themselves up,like foolish savages as they were,in the skins of the Aguara dog,with what not of stuffing,and tails,and so forth,in order to astonish the weak minds of the Caribs,just as the Red Indians dress up in their feasts as bears,wolves,and deer,with foxtails,false bustles of bison skin,and so forth.There are plenty of traces of such foolish attempts at playing 'bogy'in the history of savages,even of our own Teutonic forefathers;and this Isuspect to be the simple explanation of the whole mare's nest.As for Raleigh being a fool for believing it;the reasons he gives for believing it are very rational;the reasons Hume gives for calling him a fool rest merely on the story's being strange:on which grounds one might disbelieve most matters in heaven and earth,from one's own existence to what one sees in every drop of water under the microscope,yea,to the growth of every seed.The only sound proof that dog-headed men are impossible is to be found in comparative anatomy,a science of which Hume knew no more than Raleigh,and which for one marvel it has destroyed has revealed a hundred.I do not doubt that if Raleigh had seen and described a kangaroo,especially its all but miraculous process of gestation,Hume would have called that a lie also;but I will waste no more time in proving that no man is so credulous as the unbeliever--the man who has such mighty and world-embracing faith in himself that he makes his own little brain the measure of the universe.Let the dead bury their dead.
Raleigh sails for Guiana.The details of his voyage should be read at length.Everywhere they show the eye of a poet as well as of a man of science.He sees enough to excite his hopes more wildly than ever;he goes hundreds of miles up the Orinoco in an open boat,suffering every misery,but keeping up the hearts of his men,who cry out,'Let us go on,we care not how far.'He makes friendship with the caciques,and enters into alliance with them on behalf of Queen Elizabeth against the Spaniards.Unable to pass the falls of the Caroli,and the rainy season drawing on,he returns,beloved and honoured by all the Indians,boasting that,during the whole time he was there,no woman was the worse for any man of his crew.
Altogether,we know few episodes of history so noble,righteous,and merciful as this Guiana voyage.But he has not forgotten the Spaniards.At Trinidad he payed his ships with the asphalt of the famous Pitch-lake,and stood--and with what awe such a man must have stood--beneath the noble forest of Moriche fan-palms on its brink.