Raleigh

ve years passed over him without leaving any marks of months or days upon his chronicle of patience. A hopeless prisoner ceases to take any interest in the pa

the age of fifty-one to that of sixty-three the inherent vigour of his constitution, and his invincible desire to live, were unabated. From all his pains and sorrows he took refuge, as so

sitors as the dungeon in which Raleigh wrote The History of the World, never, in all probability, heard the sound of his footsteps. It is a myth that he was confined at all in such a dungeon as this. According to Mr. Loftie, his apartments were those immediately above the pr

the Lords of the Council, Raleigh mentions that he has lost 3,000l. (or 15,000l. in Victorian money) a year by being deprived of his five main sources of income, namely the Governorship of Jersey, the Patent of the Wine Office, the Wardenship of the Stannaries, the Rangership of Gillingham Forest, and the Lieutenancy of Portland Castle. He besought that he might not be reduced to utter beggary, and he did his best to retain the Duchy of Cornwall and his estates at Sherborne. The former, as he might have supposed, could not be left in the charge of a prisoner. It was given to a friend, to the Earl of Pembroke, and Raleigh showed a dangerous obstinacy in refusing to give

ll this havoc, and sent the commissioners about their business. Of the latter, one was the infamous Meeres, Raleigh's former bailiff, and this fact was particularly galling to Raleigh. On July 30 in the same year, Sherborne Castle and the surrounding manors were conveyed to Sir Alexander Brett and others in trust for Lady Raleigh and her son Walter, Sir Walter nominally forfeiting the life interest in the estates which he had reserved to himself in the conveyance of 1602. On the moneys collected by these trustees Lady Raleigh supported herself and her husband also. She was not turned out of the castle at first. Twi

eigh thereupon, in a fit of extreme dejection, 'presumed to tell their Lordships of his miserable estate, daily in danger of death by the palsy, nightly of suffocation by wasted and obstructed lungs.' He entreated to be removed to more wholesome lodgings. His prayer was not answered. Earlier in the year he had indeed enjoyed a short excursion from the Tower. At Easter the King had come to attend a bull-baiting on Tower Hill, and Raleigh was hastily removed to the Fleet prison beforehand, lest the eti

ars bustled hither and thither, intriguing in not always the most judicious manner for her family, but never resting, never leaving a stone unturned which might lead to their restitution. The sudden discovery that the lawyers had found a flaw in the conveyance was more than her overstrung nerves cou

her crying and bewailing, who will return in post when she hears of your Lordship's departure, and nothing done. She hath already brought her eldest son in one hand, and her sucking child [Carew Raleigh, born in the winter of 1604] in another, crying out of her and their destruction; charging me with unnatural negligence, and that having provided for my own life, I am without s

; and finding that the prisoner was engaged in various chemical experiments, he lent him his private garden to set up his still in. In one of Raleigh's few letters of this period, we get a delightful little vignette. Raleigh is busy working in the garden, and, the pale being down, the charming young Lady Effingham, his old friend Nottingham's daughter, strolls by along the terrace on the arm of the Countess of Beaumont. The ladies lean over the paling, and watch the picturesque ol

ted the garden for his own use, and that he thought the paling an insufficient barrier between Raleigh and the world. Meanwhile Salisbury did not take the hint, and the brick wall Waad wished built up was not begun. Waad evidently looked upon the chemical experiments with suspicion. 'Sir Walter Raleigh,' he wrote, 'hath converted a little hen-house in the garden into a still, where he doth spend hi

construction. When finished it was not very formidable, for Waad complains that Raleigh was in the habit of standing upon it, in the sight of passers-by. The increased confinement in the spring of 1606 brought his ill-health to a climax. He thought he was about to suffer an apoplectic seizure, and he was allowed to take medical advice. The doctor's cer

become Admiral of the Danish fleet. But matters never got so far as this. James I. had an inkling of what was coming, and he took an early opportunity of saying to Christian IV., 'Promise me that you will be no man's solicitor.' In spite of this, before he left England, Christian did ask for Raleigh's pardon, and was refused. When he had left England, and all hope was over, in September, Lady Raleigh made her way to Ham

before the Lord Chief Justice nothing intelligible could be extracted from him. About the same time we find Raleigh, encouraged, it would appear, by the Queen, proposing to Lord Salisbury that he should be allowed to go to Guiana on an expedition for gold. It is pathetic to read the earnest phrases in which he tries to wheedle out of the cold Minister permission to set out westward once

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nto the Tower in her coach. She was informed that she must do so no more. It was probably these long quiet evenings which specially predisposed Raleigh to literary composition. He borrowed books, mainly of an historical character, in all directions. A letter to Sir Robert Cotton is extant in which he desires the loan of no less than thirteen obscure and bulky historians, and we may imagine his silent evenings spent in poring over

it for Carr.' It is said that, losing all patience, Elizabeth Raleigh started to her feet, and implored God to punish this robbery of her household. Sir Walter was more politic, and on January 2, 1609, he wrote a letter to the favourite, imploring him not to covet Sherborne. It is to be regretted that Raleigh, whose opinion of James's minions was not on private occasions concealed, should write to Carr of all people in England as 'one whom I know not, but by an honourable fame;' and that the eloquence of his appeal should be thrown away on such a recipient. 'For yourself, Sir,' he says, 'seeing your day is but now in the dawn, and mine come to the evening, your own virtues and the King's grace assuring you of many good fortunes and much honour, I beseech you not to begi

er fashion.' In consequence of their interview with Raleigh and other prisoners, the Lords recommended that 'the lawless liberty' of the Tower should no longer be allowed to cocker and foster exorbitant hopes in the braver sort of captives. Raleigh was immediately placed under closer restraint, not even being allowed to take his customary walk with

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hich we may learn that in the opinion of that practised hand six things were chiefly required in a well-conditioned ship of the period: '1, that she be strong built; 2, swift in sail; 3, stout-sided; 4, that her ports be so laid, as she may carry out her guns all weathers; 5, that she hull and try well; 6, that she stay well, when boarding or turning on a wind is required.' Secure in the interest of the Prince of Wales,

ning of his death the Queen sent to Raleigh for his famous cordial, and it was forwarded, with the message that if it was not poison that the Prince was dying of, it must save him. The Queen herself believed that Raleigh's cordial had once saved her life; on the other hand, in the preceding August his medicines were vulgarly supposed to have hastened the death of Sir Philip Sidney's daughter, the Countess of Rutland. The cordial soot

onson being utterly overwhelmed with a beaker of that famed canary that he loved too well. Jonson, on his return from abroad, seems to have superintended the publication of the History of the World in 1614. A fine copy of verses, printed opposite the frontispiece of that volume, was reprinted among the pieces called Underwoods in the 1641 folio of Ben Jonson's Works. These lines have, therefore, ever since been attributed to that poet, but, as it appears to me, rashly. In the first place, this volume was posthumous; in the second, for no less than twenty-three years Ben Jonson allowed the verses

ion. He is said to have anticipated that his book would need to consist of not less than four such folios. In the opening lines he expresses some consciousness of the fact that it was late in life for him, a prisoner of State condemned to death at the King's pleasure, to undertake so vast a literary adventure. 'Had it been begotten,' he confesses, 'with my first dawn of day, when the light of common knowledge began to open itself to my younger years, and before any wound received either from fortune or time, I might yet well have doubted that the darkness of age and death would ha

he matter, 'behoves him now both sail and oar.' It is not fair to dwell upon the eminent beauties of the History of the World without at the same time acknowledging that the book almost wilfully deprives itself of legitimate value and true human interest by the remoteness of the period which it describes, and by the tiresome pedantry of its method. It is leisurely to the last excess. The first chapter, of seven long sections, takes us but to the close of the Creation. We cannot proceed without knowing what it is that Tostatus affirms of the empyrean heavens, and whether, with Strabo, we may dare assume that they are filled with angels. To hasten onwards would be impossible, so long as one of the errors of Steuchius Eugubinus remains unconfuted

take for granted that he will be fine. For example, the series of sections on the Terrestrial Paradise are singularly crabbed and dusty in their display of Rabbinical pedantry, and the little touch in praise of Guiana is almost the only one that redeems the general dryness. It is not mirth, or beauty, or luxury that fires the historian, but death. Of mortality he has always some rich sententious thing to say, praising 'the workmanship of death, that finishes the sorrowful business of

James I. and turn to the pages of his Preface, we refuse to believe that it was without design that he expressed himself in language so extraordinary. It would have been mere levity for a friendless prisoner, ready for the block, to publish this terrible arraignment of the crimes of tyrant kings, unless he had some reason for believing that he could shelter himself successfully under a powerful sympathy. This sympathy, in the case of Sir Walter Raleigh, could be none other than

at Court pushed inquiry further, and extracted from James the explanation that the censure of Henry VIII. was the real cause of the suppression. Contemporary anecdote, however, has reported that the defamation of the Tudors in the Preface to the History of the World might have passed without reproof, if the King had not discovered in the very body of the book several passages so ambiguously worded that he could not

and wrongs, by their continual smart, put the patient in mind how to cure the one and revenge the other, so those kings adjoining (whose subjection and calamities incident were but new, and therefore the more grievous) could not sleep, when the advantage was offered by such a successor. For in regno Babylonico hic parum resplenduit: 'This king shined little,' saith Nauclerus of Ninias, 'in the Babylonian kingdom.' And likely it is, that the necks of mortal men having been never before galled

ore, when the spirit of the historian is roused by some occasional tempest of reflection. In either case, the book is essentially one to glean from, not to read with consecutive patience. Real historical philosophy is absolutely wanting. The author strives to seem impartial by introducing, in the midst of an account of the slaughter of the Amalekites, a chapter on 'The Instauration of Civility in Europe, and of Prometheus and Atlas;

nd the Life; whence it is that you have sometimes in the margin of my copy a various reading with "D" after it.' Daniel, a gentle and subservient creature, was the friend of Camden, and a paid servant of Queen Anne, during Raleigh's imprisonment. He died a few months after Raleigh's execution. It is very likely that he was useful to Raleigh in collecting notes and other material. It may even have been his work for the interes

posite result. The preface to the King expresses an almost servile desire to please: 'it would be more dog-like than man-like to bite the stone that struck me, to wit the borrowed authority of my sovereign misinformed.' But Raleigh was curiously misinformed himself regarding the ways and wishes of James. His dialogue takes for its starting-point the trial of Oliver St. John, who had been Raleigh's fellow-prisoner in the Tower since April for having with unreasonable brutality protested against the enforced payment of what was called the Benevolence, a supposed free-will offering to the purse of the King. So ignorant was Raleigh of what was going on in England, that he f

political work of Raleigh's which the great Puritan poet gave to the world in 1658. At that time Milton had had the treatise 'many years in my hands, and finding it lately by chance among other books and papers, upon reading thereof I thought it a kind of injury to withhold longer the work of so eminent an author from the public.' The Cabinet Council is a study in the manner of Macchiavelli. It treats of the arts of empire and mysteries of State-craft, mainly with regard to the duties of monarchy. It is remarkable for the extraordinary richness of allusive extracts from the Roman cl

passage of the little book forms one of the most charming pages of the literature of that time, and closes with a pathetic and dignified statement of Raleigh's own attitude towards war. 'It would be an unspeakable advantage, both to the public and private, if men would consider that great truth, that no man is wise or safe but he that is honest.

tions. That treatise was an impassioned plea, based upon a survey of the commercial condition of the world, in favour of free trade. Raleigh looked with grave suspicion on the various duties which were levied, in increasing amount, on foreign goods entering this country, and he entreated James I. to allow him to nominate commissioners to examine into the causes of the depression of trade, and to revise the tariffs on a liberal basis. It must have seemed to the King that Raleigh wilfully opposed every royal scheme which he examined. James had been a protectionist all thr

heir successors, Winwood and Villiers, Raleigh found listeners more favourable to his projects. It has been said that he owed his release to bribery, but Mr. Gardiner thinks it needless to suppose this. Winwood was as cordial a hater of Spain as Raleigh himself; and Villiers, in his political animus against the Somerset faction, would need no bribery. Sir William St. John was active in bringing Raleigh's claims before the Court, and the Queen, as ever, used what slender influence she possessed. Urged on so many sides, James gave way, and on January 30, 1616, signed a warrant