Sir Walter Raleigh and His Times | Page 5

Compton Castle, and had borne him three
brave sons, John, Humphrey, and Adrian; all three destined to win

knighthood also in due time, and the two latter already giving promises,
which they well fulfilled, of becoming most remarkable men of their
time. And yet the fair Champernoun, at her husband's death, had chosen
to wed Mr. Raleigh, and share life with him in the little farm-house at
Hayes. She must have been a grand woman, if the law holds true that
great men always have great mothers; an especially grand woman,
indeed; for few can boast of having borne to two different husbands
such sons as she bore. No record, as far as we know, remains of her;
nor of her boy's early years. One can imagine them, nevertheless.
Just as he awakes to consciousness, the Smithfield fires are
extinguished. He can recollect, perhaps, hearing of the burning of the
Exeter martyrs: and he does not forget it; no one forgot or dared forget
it in those days. He is brought up in the simple and manly, yet
high-bred ways of English gentlemen in the times of 'an old courtier of
the Queen's.' His two elder half-brothers also, living some thirty miles
away, in the quaint and gloomy towers of Compton Castle, amid the
apple-orchards of Torbay, are men as noble as ever formed a young
lad's taste. Humphrey and Adrian Gilbert, who afterwards, both of them,
rise to knighthood, are--what are they not?--soldiers, scholars,
Christians, discoverers and 'planters' of foreign lands, geographers,
alchemists, miners, Platonical philosophers; many-sided, high-minded
men, not without fantastic enthusiasm; living heroic lives, and destined,
one of them, to die a heroic death. From them Raleigh's fancy has been
fired, and his appetite for learning quickened, while he is yet a daring
boy, fishing in the gray trout-brooks, or going up with his father to the
Dartmoor hills to hunt the deer with hound and horn, amid the wooded
gorges of Holne, or over the dreary downs of Hartland Warren, and the
cloud-capt thickets of Cator's Beam, and looking down from thence
upon the far blue southern sea, wondering when he shall sail thereon, to
fight the Spaniard, and discover, like Columbus, some fairy-land of
gold and gems.
For before this boy's mind, as before all intense English minds of that
day, rise, from the first, three fixed ideas, which yet are but one--the
Pope, the Spaniard, and America.
The two first are the sworn and internecine enemies (whether they
pretend a formal peace or not) of Law and Freedom, Bible and Queen,
and all that makes an Englishman's life dear to him. Are they not the

incarnations of Antichrist? Their Moloch sacrifices flame through all
lands. The earth groans because of them, and refuses to cover the blood
of her slain. And America is the new world of boundless wonder and
beauty, wealth and fertility, to which these two evil powers arrogate an
exclusive and divine right; and God has delivered it into their hands;
and they have done evil therein with all their might, till the story of
their greed and cruelty rings through all earth and heaven. Is this the
will of God? Will he not avenge for these things, as surely as he is the
Lord who executeth justice and judgment in the earth?
These are the young boy's thoughts. These were his thoughts for
sixty-six eventful years. In whatsoever else he wavered, he never
wavered in that creed. He learnt it in his boyhood, while he read 'Fox's
Martyrs' beside his mother's knee. He learnt it as a lad, when he saw his
neighbours Hawkins and Drake changed by Spanish tyranny and
treachery from peaceful merchantmen into fierce scourges of God. He
learnt it scholastically, from fathers and divines, as an Oxford scholar,
in days when Oxford was a Protestant indeed, in whom there was no
guile. He learnt it when he went over, at seventeen years old, with his
gallant kinsman Henry Champernoun, and his band of a hundred
gentlemen volunteers, to flesh his maiden sword in behalf of the
persecuted French Protestants. He learnt it as he listened to the shrieks
of the San Bartholomew; he learnt it as he watched the dragonnades,
the tortures, the massacres of the Netherlands, and fought manfully
under Norris in behalf of those victims of 'the Pope and Spain.' He
preached it in far stronger and wiser words than I can express it for him,
in that noble tract of 1591, on Sir Richard Grenville's death at the
Azores--a Tyrtaean trumpet-blast such as has seldom rung in human
ears; he discussed it like a cool statesman in his pamphlet of 1596, on
'A War with Spain.' He sacrificed for it the last hopes of his old age, the
wreck of his fortunes, his just recovered