Born in 1552, the last year of the reign of
Edward
VI, we find that not long
after, by such instinct as makes the young crab seek the seashore, he has
already marched into France, as one of
“a
troop of a hundred gentlemen volunteers,” who are described as
“a
gallant company, nobly mounted and accoutred, having on their colors the
motto, Finem det mihi virtus — ‘Let valor be my
aim.’”
And so in fact he marched on through life with this motto in his heart
always. All the peace of those days seems to have been but a truce, or casual
interruption of the order of war. War with Spain, especially, was so much
the rule rather than the exception that the navigators and commanders of
these two nations, when abroad, acted on the presumption that their countries
were at war at home, though they had left them at peace; and their respective
colonies in America carried on war at their convenience, with no infraction
of the treaties between the mother countries.
Raleigh seems to have regarded the Spaniards as his natural enemies, and he
was not backward to develop this part of his nature. When England was
threatened with foreign invasion, the Queen looked to him especially for
advice and assistance; and none was better able to give them than he. We
cannot but admire the tone in which he speaks of his island, and how it is to
be best defended, and the navy, its chief strength, maintained and improved.
He speaks from England as his castle, and his (as no other man’s) is
the voice of the state; for he does not assert the interests of an individual
but of a commonwealth, and we see in him revived a Roman patriotism.
His actions, as they were public and for the public, were fit to be publicly
rewarded; and we accordingly read with equanimity of gold chains and
monopolies and other emoluments conferred on him from time to time for his
various services — his military successes in Ireland, “that
commonweal of common woe,” as he even then described it; his enterprise
in the harbor of
Cadiz; his capture of
Fayal from the
Spaniards; and other exploits which perhaps, more than anything else, got him
fame and a name during his lifetime.
If war was his earnest work, it was his pastime too; for in the peaceful
intervals we hear of him participating heartily and bearing off the palm in
the birthday tournaments and tilting matches of the Queen, where the
combatants vied with each other mainly who should come on to the ground in
the most splendid dress and equipments. In those tilts it is said that his
political rival,
Essex,
whose wealth enabled him to lead the costliest train, but who ran very ill
and was thought the poorest knight of all, was wont to change his suit from
orange to green, that it might be said that “There was one in green who
ran worse than one in orange.”
None of the worthies of that age can be duly appreciated if we neglect to
consider them in their relation to the New World. The stirring spirits stood
with but one foot on the land. There were Drake,
Hawkins, Hudson,
Frobisher, and
many others, and their worthy companion was Raleigh. As a navigator and naval
commander he had few equals, and if the reader who has at tended to his other
actions inquires how he filled up the odd years, he will find that they were
spent in numerous voyages to America for the purposes of discovery and
colonization. He would be more famous for these enterprises if they were not
overshadowed by the number and variety of his pursuits.
