Some Diversions of a Man of Letters | Page 8

shipwreck of England's hopes of future prosperity. Nor was he
exclusively interested in England, though all his best hopes were ours.
When he had been a lad at Oxford he had broken away from his studies
in 1569 to help the Protestant princes as a gentleman volunteer in
France, and he took part in the famous battle of Jarnac. He is supposed
to have fought in France for six years. From early youth his mind was
"bent on military glory," and always in opposition to Spain. His escape
from the bloody Vespers of Saint Bartholomew had given him a deep
distrust of the policy of Rome. The Spaniard had "abused and
tormented" the wretched inhabitants of Flanders. Sir Walter Raleigh
dreamed that by the combination in arms of England, France, and the
Low Countries, the Spaniards "might not only be persuaded to live in
peace, but all their swelling and overflowing streams might be brought
back into their natural channels and old banks."
Raleigh stood out, as he put it himself, against "the continuance of this
boundless ambition in mortal men." The rulers in Madrid, transported
by their own arrogance, had determined to impose their religion, their
culture, their form of government, on the world. It was a question

whether the vastly superior moral and intellectual energy of England
and France would not be crushed beneath the heel of Spain. Raleigh
was ready to sacrifice everything, to imperil his own soul, to prevent
that. He says you might as well "root out the Christian religion
altogether" as join "the rest of all Europe to Spain." In his zeal to
prevent "the continuance of this boundless ambition in mortal men," he
lent himself to acts which we must not attempt to condone. There is no
use in trying to explain away the facts of his cruel and even savage
fanaticism in Ireland when he was governor of Munster. He was always
apt to be abruptly brutal to a man who crossed his path. But even his
Irish career offers aspects on which we may dwell with pure pleasure.
Nothing could be more romantic than those adventures, like the feats of
a paladin of the Faerie Queen, which he encountered in the great wood
of Lismore; while the story of how he carried off Lord and Lady Roche
from their breakfast-table in their own castle of Ballyinharsh, and how
he rode with them up ravines and round precipices in that mad flight
from their retainers, is as rousing as any scene ever imagined by Dumas
père.
Raleigh called himself the Shepherd of the Ocean, and the name fits
him well, even though his flock were less like sheep than like a leash of
hunting leopards. His theory was that with a pack of small and active
pinnaces he could successfully hunt the lumbering Spanish galleons
without their being able to hit back. He was, in contradistinction to
many preceding English admirals, a cautious fighter at sea, and he says,
in a striking passage of the History of the World, written towards the
end of his career, "to clap ships together without any consideration
belongs rather to a madman than to a man of war." He must have taken
the keenest interest in the gigantic failure of the Felicissima Armada in
1588, but, tantalisingly enough, we have no record of his part in it. On
the other hand, the two finest of his prose pamphlets, the Relation of
the Action in Cadiz Harbour and the incomparable Report on the Fight
in the Revenge, supply us with ample materials for forming an idea of
his value as a naval strategist. Raleigh's earliest biographer, Oldys the
antiquary, speaks of him as "raising a grove of laurels out of the sea,"
and it is certainly upon that element that he reaches his highest effect of
prominence. It was at sea that he could give fullest scope to his hatred

of the tyrannous prosperity of Spain. He had to be at once a
gamekeeper and a poacher; he had to protect the legitimate interests of
English shipping against privateers and pirates, while he was persuaded
to be, or felt himself called upon to become, no little of a pirate himself.
He was a passionate advocate of the freedom of the seas, and those who
look upon Raleigh as a mere hot-brained enthusiast should read his
little book called Observations on Trade and Commerce, written in the
Tower, and see what sensible views he had about the causes of the
depression of trade. These sage opinions did not check him, or his
fleets of hunting-pinnaces, from lying in wait for the heavy wallowing
plate-ships, laden with Indian carpets and rubies and sandalwood and
ebony, which came swinging up to the equator from Ceylon or Malabar.
The "freedom of the seas"