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  SIR WALTER RALEGH

  _STEBBING_




  HENRY FROWDE, M.A.

  PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

  [Illustration]

  LONDON, EDINBURGH, AND NEW YORK




  [Illustration: SIR WALTER RALEGH
    _From the Duke of Rutland's Miniature_]




  SIR WALTER RALEGH

  A Biography

  By

  WILLIAM STEBBING, M.A.

  FORMERLY FELLOW OF WORCESTER COLLEGE, OXFORD
  AUTHOR OF
  'SOME VERDICTS OF HISTORY REVIEWED'


  _REISSUE_

  _WITH A FRONTISPIECE AND A LIST OF AUTHORITIES_


  Oxford
  AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
  1899




  Oxford

  PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

  BY HORACE HART, M.A.
  PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY




  CONTENTS

                                                      PAGE

           PREFACE                                     vii

           LIST OF AUTHORITIES                        xiii

           CORRIGENDA                                xxvii

     CHAP.

        I. GENEALOGY                                     1

       II. IN SEARCH OF A CAREER (1552-1581)             6

      III. ROYAL FAVOUR (1581-1582)                     22

       IV. OFFICES AND ENDOWMENTS (1582-1587)           32

        V. VIRGINIA (1583-1587)                         42

       VI. PATRON AND COURTIER (1583-1590)              53

      VII. ESSEX. THE ARMADA (1587-1589)                60

     VIII. THE POET (1589-1593)                         69

       IX. THE REVENGE (September, 1591)                82

        X. IN THE TOWER. THE GREAT CARACK (1592)        88

       XI. AT HOME; AND IN PARLIAMENT (1592-1594)      100

      XII. GUIANA (1594-1595)                          108

     XIII. CADIZ. THE ISLANDS VOYAGE (1596-1597)       125

      XIV. FINAL FEUD WITH ESSEX (1597-1601)           141

       XV. THE ZENITH (1601-1603)                      155

      XVI. COBHAM AND CECIL (1601-1603)                168

     XVII. THE FALL (April-June, 1603)                 180

    XVIII. AWAITING TRIAL (July-November, 1603)        186

      XIX. THE TRIAL (November 17)                     207

       XX. ITS JUSTICE AND EQUITY                      222

      XXI. REPRIEVE (December 10, 1603)                232

     XXII. A PRISONER (1604-1612)                      241

    XXIII. SCIENCE AND LITERATURE (1604-1615)          265

     XXIV. THE RELEASE (March, 1616)                   287

      XXV. PREPARING FOR GUIANA (1616-1617)            298

     XXVI. THE EXPEDITION (May, 1617-June, 1618)       313

    XXVII. RETURN TO THE TOWER (June-August, 1618)     331

   XXVIII. A MORAL RACK (August 10-October 15)         343

     XXIX. A SUBSTITUTE FOR A TRIAL (October 22, 1618) 359

      XXX. RALEGH'S TRIUMPH (October 28-29, 1618)      371

     XXXI. SPOILS AND PENALTIES                        380

    XXXII. CONTEMPORARY AND FINAL JUDGMENTS            394

           INDEX                                       401




PREFACE


Students of Ralegh's career cannot complain of a dearth of materials.
For thirty-seven years he lived in the full glare of publicity. The
social and political literature of more than a generation abounds in
allusions to him. He appears and reappears continually in the
correspondence of Burleigh, Robert Cecil, Christopher Hatton, Essex,
Anthony Bacon, Henry Sidney, Richard Boyle, Ralph Winwood, Dudley
Carleton, George Carew, Henry Howard, and King James. His is a very
familiar name in the Calendars of Domestic State Papers. It holds its
place in the archives of Venice and Simancas. No family muniment room
can be explored without traces of him. Successive reports of the
Historical Manuscripts Commission testify to the vigilance with which
his doings were noted. No personage in two reigns was more a centre for
anecdotes and fables. They were eagerly imbibed, treasured, and
circulated alike by contemporary, or all but contemporary, statesmen and
wits, and by the feeblest scandal-mongers. A list comprising the names
of Francis Bacon, Sir John Harington, Sir Robert Naunton, Drummond of
Hawthornden, Thomas Fuller, Sir Anthony Welldon, Bishop Goodman, Francis
Osborn, Sir Edward Peyton, Sir Henry Wotton, John Aubrey, Sir William
Sanderson, David Lloyd, and James Howell, is far from exhausting the
number of the very miscellaneous purveyors and chroniclers.

Antiquaries, from the days of John Hooker of Exeter, the continuer of
Holinshed, Sir William Pole, Anthony a Wood, and John Prince, to those
of Lysons, Polwhele, Isaac D'Israeli, Payne Collier, and Dr. Brushfield,
have found boundless hunting-ground in his habits, acts, and motives.
Sir John Hawles, Mr. Justice Foster, David Jardine, Lord Campbell, and
Spedding have discussed the technical justice of his trials and
sentences. No historian, from Camden and de Thou, to Hume, Lingard,
Hallam, and Gardiner, has been able to abstain from debating his merits
and demerits. From his own age to the present the fascination of his
career, and at once the copiousness of information on it, and its
mysteries, have attracted a multitude of commentators. His character has
been repeatedly analysed by essayists, subtle as Macvey Napier, eloquent
as Charles Kingsley. There has been no more favourite theme for
biographers. Since the earliest and trivial account compiled by William
Winstanley in 1660, followed by the anonymous and tolerably industrious
narrative attributed variously to John, Benjamin, and James, Shirley in
1677, and Lewis Theobald's meagre sketch in 1719, a dozen or more lives
with larger pretensions to critical research have been printed, by
William Oldys in 1736, Thomas Birch in 1751, Arthur Cayley in 1805, Sir
Samuel Egerton Brydges in 1813, Mrs. A.T. Thomson in 1830, Patrick
Fraser Tytler in 1833, Robert Southey in 1837, Sir Robert Hermann
Schomburgk in 1848, C. Whitehead in 1854, S.G. Drake, of Boston, U.S.,
in 1862, J.A. St. John in 1868, Edward Edwards in the same year, Mrs.
Creighton in 1877, and Edmund Gosse in 1886.

Almost every one of this numerous company, down even to bookmaking
Winstanley the barber, has shed light, much or little, upon dark
recesses. By four, Oldys, Cayley, Tytler, and Edwards, the whole
learning of the subject, so far as it was for their respective periods
available, must be admitted to have been most diligently accumulated.
Yet it will scarcely be denied that there has always been room for a new
presentment of Ralegh's personality. That the want has remained
unsatisfied after all the efforts made to supply it is to be imputed
less to defects in the writers, than to the intrinsic difficulties of
the subject. Ralegh's multifarious activity, with the width of the area
in which it operated, is itself a disturbing element. It is confusing
for a biographer to be required to keep at once independent and in
unison the poet, statesman, courtier, schemer, patriot, soldier, sailor,
freebooter, discoverer, colonist, castle-builder, historian,
philosopher, chemist, prisoner, and visionary. The variety of Ralegh's
powers and tendencies, and of their exercise, is the distinctive note of
him, and of the epoch which needed, fashioned, and used him. A whole
band of faculties stood ready in him at any moment for action. Several
generally were at work simultaneously. For the man to be properly
visible, he should be shown flashing from more facets than a brilliant.
Few are the pens which can vividly reflect versatility like his. The
temptation to diffuseness and irrelevancy is as embarrassing and
dangerous. At every turn Ralegh's restless vitality involved him in a
web of other men's fortunes, and in national crises. A biographer is
constantly being beguiled into describing an era as well as its
representative, into writing history instead of a life. Within an
author's legitimate province the perplexities are numberless and
distracting. Never surely was there a career more beset with insoluble
riddles and unmanageable dilemmas. At each step, in the relation of the
most ordinary incidents, exactness of dates, or precision of events,
appears unattainable. Fiction is ever elbowing fact, so that it might be
supposed contemporaries had with one accord been conspiring to disguise
the truth from posterity. The uncertainty is deepened tenfold when
motives have to be measured and appraised. Ralegh was the best hated
personage in the kingdom. On a conscientious biographer is laid the
burden of allowing just enough, and not too much