Sir Walter Raleigh and His Times | Page 7

indictment breaks down. The truth is, that as people begin to believe
more in nobleness, and to gird up their loins to the doing of noble deeds,
they discover more nobleness in others. Raleigh's character was in its
lowest nadir in the days of Voltaire and Hume. What shame to him?
For so were more sacred characters than his. Shall the disciple be above
his master? especially when that disciple was but too inconsistent, and
gave occasion to the uncircumcised to blaspheme? But Cayley, after a
few years, refutes triumphantly Hume's silly slanders. He is a stupid
writer: but he has sense enough, being patient, honest, and loving, to do
that.
Mr. Fraser Tytler shovels away a little more of the dirt-heap; Mr.
Napier clears him (for which we owe him many thanks), by simple

statement of facts, from the charge of having deserted and neglected his
Virginia colonists; Humboldt and Schomburgk clear him from the
charge of having lied about Guiana; and so on; each successive writer
giving in generally on merest hearsay to the general complaint against
him, either from fear of running counter to big names, or from mere
laziness, and yet absolving him from that particular charge of which his
own knowledge enables him to judge. In the trust that I may be able to
clear him from a few more charges, I write these pages, premising that I
do not profess to have access to any new and recondite documents. I
merely take the broad facts of the story from documents open to all;
and comment on them as every man should wish his own life to be
commented on.
But I do so on a method which I cannot give up; and that is the Bible
method. I say boldly that historians have hitherto failed in
understanding not only Raleigh and Elizabeth, but nine-tenths of the
persons and facts in his day, because they will not judge them by the
canons which the Bible lays down--by which I mean not only the New
Testament but the Old, which, as English Churchmen say, and Scotch
Presbyterians have ere now testified with sacred blood, is 'not contrary
to the New.'
Mr. Napier has a passage about Raleigh for which I am sorry, coming
as it does from a countryman of John Knox. 'Society, it would seem,
was yet in a state in which such a man could seriously plead, that the
madness he feigned was justified' (his last word is unfair, for Raleigh
only hopes that it is no sin) 'by the example of David, King of Israel.'
What a shocking state of society when men actually believed their
Bibles, not too little, but too much. For my part, I think that if poor dear
Raleigh had considered the example of David a little more closely, he
need never have feigned madness at all; and that his error lay quite in
an opposite direction from looking on the Bible heroes, David
especially, as too sure models. At all events, let us try Raleigh by the
very scriptural standard which he himself lays down, not merely in this
case unwisely, but in his 'History of the World' more wisely than any
historian whom I have ever read; and say, 'Judged as the Bible taught
our Puritan forefathers to judge every man, the character is intelligible
enough; tragic, but noble and triumphant: judged as men have been
judged in history for the last hundred years, by hardly any canon save

those of the private judgment, which philosophic cant, maudlin
sentimentality, or fear of public opinion, may happen to have forged,
the man is a phenomenon, only less confused, abnormal, suspicious
than his biographers' notions about him.' Again I say, I have not solved
the problem: but it will be enough if I make some think it both soluble
and worth solving. Let us look round, then, and see into what sort of a
country, into what sort of a world, the young adventurer is going forth,
at seventeen years of age, to seek his fortune.
Born in 1552, his young life has sprung up and grown with the young
life of England. The earliest fact, perhaps, which he can recollect is the
flash of joy on every face which proclaims that Mary Tudor is dead,
and Elizabeth reigns at last. As he grows, the young man sees all the
hope and adoration of the English people centre in that wondrous maid,
and his own centre in her likewise. He had been base had he been
otherwise. She comes to the throne with such a prestige as never
sovereign came since the days when Isaiah sang his paean over young
Hezekiah's accession. Young, learned, witty, beautiful (as with such a
father and mother she could not help being), with an expression