Sir Walter Raleigh and His Times | Page 9

which she has claimed by cruelties and massacres unexampled
since the days of Timour and Zinghis Khan. There she spreads and
spreads, as Drake found her picture in the Government House at St.
Domingo, the horse leaping through the globe, and underneath, Non
sufficit orbis. Who shall withstand her, armed as she is with the
three-edged sword of Antichrist--superstition, strength, and gold?
English merchantmen, longing for some share in the riches of the New
World, go out to trade in Guinea, in the Azores, in New Spain: and are
answered by shot and steel. 'Both policy and religion,' as Fray Simon
says, fifty years afterwards, 'forbid Christians to trade with heretics!'
'Lutheran devils, and enemies of God,' are the answer they get in words:
in deeds, whenever they have a superior force they may be allowed to
land, and to water their ships, even to trade, under exorbitant
restrictions: but generally this is merely a trap for them. Forces are
hurried up; and the English are attacked treacherously, in spite of
solemn compacts; for 'No faith need be kept with heretics.' And woe to
them if any be taken prisoners, even wrecked. The galleys, and the rack,
and the stake are their certain doom; for the Inquisition claims the
bodies and souls of heretics all over the world, and thinks it sin to lose
its own. A few years of such wrong raise questions in the sturdy
English heart. What right have these Spaniards to the New World? The
Pope's gift? Why, he gave it by the same authority by which he claims
the whole world. The formula used when an Indian village is sacked is,
that God gave the whole world to St. Peter, and that he has given it to
his successors, and they the Indies to the King of Spain. To
acknowledge that lie would be to acknowledge the very power by

which the Pope claims a right to depose Queen Elizabeth, and give her
dominions to whomsoever he will. A fico for bulls!
By possession, then? That may hold for Mexico, Peru, New Grenada,
Paraguay, which have been colonised; though they were gained by
means which make every one concerned in conquering them worthy of
the gallows; and the right is only that of the thief to the purse, whose
owner he has murdered. But as for the rest--Why the Spaniard has not
colonised, even explored, one-fifth of the New World, not even one-
fifth of the coast. Is the existence of a few petty factories, often
hundreds of miles apart, at a few river-mouths to give them a claim to
the whole intermediate coast, much less to the vast unknown tracts
inside? We will try that. If they appeal to the sword, so be it. The men
are treacherous robbers; we will indemnify ourselves for our losses, and
God defend the right.
So argued the English; and so sprung up that strange war of reprisals, in
which, for eighteen years, it was held that there was no peace between
England and Spain beyond the line, i.e., beyond the parallel of
longitude where the Pope's gift of the western world was said to begin;
and, as the quarrel thickened and neared, extended to the Azores,
Canaries, and coasts of Africa, where English and Spaniards flew at
each other as soon as seen, mutually and by common consent, as
natural enemies, each invoking God in the battle with Antichrist.
Into such a world as this goes forth young Raleigh, his heart full of
chivalrous worship for England's tutelary genius, his brain aflame with
the true miracles of the new-found Hesperides, full of vague hopes, vast
imaginations, and consciousness of enormous power. And yet he is no
wayward dreamer, unfit for this work-day world. With a vein of song
'most lofty, insolent, and passionate,' indeed unable to see aught
without a poetic glow over the whole, he is eminently practical,
contented to begin at the beginning that he may end at the end; one who
could 'toil terribly,' 'who always laboured at the matter in hand as if he
were born only for that.' Accordingly, he sets to work faithfully and
stoutly, to learn his trade of soldiering, and learns it in silence and
obscurity. He shares (it seems) in the retreat at Moncontour, and is by
at the death of Conde, and toils on for five years, marching and
skirmishing, smoking the enemy out of mountain-caves in Languedoc,
and all the wild work of war. During the San Bartholomew massacre

we hear nothing of him; perhaps he took refuge with Sidney and others
in Walsingham's house. No records of these years remain, save a few
scattered reminiscences in his works, which mark the shrewd,
observant eye of the future statesman.
When he returned we know not. We trace him,