Some Diversions of a Man of Letters | Page 6

of Spanish dynastic militarism, but no other man before or
since was so luminously identified with resistance. He struts upon the
stage of battle with the limelight full upon him. The classic writing of
the crisis is contained in the Last Fight of the Revenge at Sea of 1591,
where the splendid defiance and warning of the Preface are like
trumpets blown to the four quarters of the globe. Raleigh stands out as
the man who above all others laboured, as he said, "against the
ambitious and bloody pretences of the Spaniards, who, seeking to
devour all nations, shall be themselves devoured."
There is a blessing upon the meek of the earth, but I do not present
Raleigh to you as a humble-minded man. In that wonderful Elizabethan
age there were blossoming, side by side, the meekness of Hooker, the

subtlety of Bacon, the platonic dream of Spenser, the imperturbable
wisdom of Shakespeare. Raleigh had no part in any of these, and to
complain of that would be to grumble because a hollyhock is neither a
violet nor a rose. He had his enemies during his life and his detractors
ever since, and we may go so far as to admit that he deserves them. He
was a typical man of that heroic age in that he possessed, even to
excess, all its tropic irregularity of ethics. He lived in a perpetual
alternation of thunderstorm and blazing sunshine. He admitted himself
that his "reason," by which he meant his judgment, "was exceeding
weak," and his tactlessness constantly precluded a due appreciation of
his courage and nobility. For long years his violent and haughty temper
made him the most unpopular man in England, except in Devonshire,
where everybody doted on him. He was "a man of desperate fortunes,"
and he did not shrink from violent methods. In studying his life we are
amused, we are almost scandalised, at his snake-like quality. He moves
with serpentine undulations, and the beautiful hard head is lifted from
ambush to strike the unsuspecting enemy at sight. With his
protestations, his volubility, his torrent of excuses, his evasive
pertinacity, Sir Walter Raleigh is the very opposite of the "strong
silent" type of soldier which the nineteenth century invented for
exclusive British consumption.
In judging his character we must take into consideration not only the
times in which he lived, but the leaders of English policy with whom he
came into collision. He was not thirty years of age, and still at the
height of his vivacity, when he was taken into the close favour of
Queen Elizabeth. There can be no question that he found in the temper
of the monarch something to which his own nature intimately
responded. The Queen was an adventurer at heart, as he was, and she
was an Englishman of Englishmen. We are accustomed to laugh at the
extravagance of the homage which Raleigh paid to a woman old
enough to be his mother, at the bravado which made him fling his new
plush cloak across a puddle for the Queen to tread over gently, as Fuller
tells us, "rewarding him afterwards with many suits for his so free and
seasonable tender of so fair a footcloth," or at the story of the rhymes
the couple cut on the glass with their diamond rings. In all this, no
doubt, there was the fashion of the time, and on Raleigh's part there

was ambition and the desire to push his fortunes without scruple. But
there was, you may be sure, more than that; there was the instinctive
sympathy between the two who hated with the most unflagging and the
most burning hate the wicked aggression of Spain. We may be sure that
Elizabeth never for a day forgot that Pope Alexander VI. had
generously bestowed the Western world on the Crown of Spain.
Raleigh spoke a language which might be extravagant and which might
be exasperating, which might, in fact, lead to outrageous quarrels
between his Cynthia and himself, but which, at least, that Cynthia
understood.
But in 1602, when Raleigh was fifty years of age and had his
splendours behind him, there came another Pharaoh who knew not
Joseph. James I. was the type of the cautious man who only looks to the
present, who hopes by staving off a crisis till Tuesday that something
fresh will "turn up" by Wednesday. He was disposed, from the very
first, to distrust and to waylay the plans of Raleigh. We are told, and
can well believe it, that he was "diffident" of Sir Walter's designs. He
was uncomfortable in the presence of that breezy "man of desperate
fortunes." A very excellent example of the opposition of the two types
is offered by the discussion about the golden city of Manoa. Raleigh
believed, and after all