Читать книгу Great Ralegh - Hugh De Sélincourt - Страница 6

Table of Contents

The spread of news—Birth—Influence of birthplace—His father—His mother.

Life is a series of accidents more or less controlled; the play of circumstances upon character infinitely various and infinitely involved. Elizabethan life was superb for the reason that there were fewer men, and they had the immense advantage of realizing their power and of possessing scope for their energy. It was the age of discovery, not only of new lands, but of discovery in every branch of life. Now, a man may grow old before he has acquired an inkling of what has been found out, before he has read what has been written finely. The world stands at ease uneasily, and has time for shuffling and discontent. Vitality and opportunity then worked in wonderful harmony. We are not less vital, but our energy is apt to be stifled. Everything is so easy. We read day by day what has happened throughout the world. There is nothing surprising except our friends and ourselves—and they are apt to surprise us too much. Effort begets effort, and effort, strength. The Elizabethan, without railways, without posts, without telegraphs, was bound to rely upon himself for everything.

Man brought news to man by word of mouth, without warning or previous discussion, or the help of photography. An errand-boy can now know more easily what is happening in the whole world than a wise man could then know of what was happening in his county. You did not know of a battle till you saw the wounded fighters.

They were shut out from the outside world, and from time to time dramatically news fired their imagination and minds. And their minds were trained so that they did not gape and wonder. Their minds were stored with the wisdom of the Greeks and Romans, and were thrilled as only trained minds can be thrilled, and roused to a veritable storm of energy by the huge possibilities of life. The difficulties to be overcome were material and romantic, and triumphs were more easily attained. Life was as adventurous as the true tales of adventure that were circulated at every fireside.

Nowhere were these tales more frequent or fresher than near the great sea-ports in Devonshire, where Walter Ralegh was born. The farmhouse still stands, at Hayes, near Budleigh-Salterton. The country-side has remained strangely the same in its appearance, a little more populous, and, after waking to the arrival of trains, has sunk back to its long, prosperous sleep, contented. No longer do strange ships with stranger tidings disturb its rest; they are watched for and quietly expected; the sailors land to learn news, and can tell little but gossip in return. No longer do horses carry messengers on the Queen's service with packets marked "Haste," "Post Haste," "For Life," galloping to the Queen's Chief Secretary, in London.

News was spread slowly; its effect must have been incredibly impressive.

In the year 1552 Walter Ralegh was born. He was the second son of his father's third wife, and so the universal accident of birth seems in his case to be intensified. It was the sixth year of Edward VI.'s reign, and an astrologer has noted that year as "a year remarkable in our chronicles, first, for that strange shoal of the largest sea-fishes which, quitting their native waters for fresh and untasted streams, wandered up the Thames so high, till the river no longer retained any brackishness; and, secondly, for that it is thought to have been somewhat stained in our annals with the blood of the noble Seymer, Duke of Somerset—events surprisingly analogous both to the life of this adventurous voyager, Sir Walter Ralegh, whose delight was in the hazardous discovery of unfrequented coasts, and also to his unfortunate death."

It is not possible to determine exactly the effect of these largest "sea fishes" on his after-life; their coming may have been mere coincidence, or it may have been that the same element of an unknown power that sent the fishes hurrying to untasted streams, made Ralegh restless as the fish. The point lends itself to straining by its nature, though it is staidly mentioned by the staid biographer who has been quoted.

The dominating influence of his life was not the date of his birth, but his birthplace in the quiet of the country, and yet within the easiest reach of the fabulous outside world. That influence cannot be exaggerated.

Old sailors, who, as young men, had sailed with Jaques Carthier, of St. Malo, must have stirred the boy's mind with the stories of their adventures up the river of Canada to Saguenay, where there was gold and silver and red copper; how they visited the town of Hochelaga, their captain very gorgeously attired; and how, when their guides had led them to the midst of the town, they were saluted by the women first and then by the men; and a comedy was rehearsed for their amusement until, borne on ten men's shoulders, Agouhanna, the lord and king of the country, wearing the skins of red hedgehogs in place of a crown, was brought in and placed by the side of their captain, on a great stag's skin; and how their captain, seeing the people's misery, read them in a loud, clear voice the first chapter of St. John's Gospel. Tales, too, young Ralegh would hear of other wild men and of their prodigious wealth, which they knew not the value of; of rubies and of pearls bartered for iron and toys; of the great creatures morses or sea-oxen, "which fish is very big, and hath two great teeth, and the skinne of them is like Buffe's leather, and they will not go away from their young ones." And at Bristol was living Mr. Alexander Woodson, an excellent mathematician and skilful physician, and he, writes Hakluyt, "shewed me one of these beast's teeth which were brought from the isle of Ramea in the first prize, which was half a yard long or very little less; and assured mee that he had made tryall of it in ministring medicine to his patients, and had found it as soveraigne against poyson as any Unicornes horne."

With only a little less eagerness and a wiser discrimination between fact and fable would the elders of the great Devonshire families, with many of whom the Raleghs were connected, hear the news and plan schemes for outwitting their rivals on the sea—the Spaniards—and perhaps foresee the great part their sons would play in gaining for their country prestige in this unclosing of the outside world. They would spare no pains to make the youngsters worthy to carry on the great tradition of Devonshire gentlemen under the splendid new conditions, which were daily becoming more apparent.

A fine stock were the Devonshire gentlemen who watched over the years of Walter Ralegh's boyhood, whetting no doubt by their interest his keenness in Latin and Greek, in fencing and riding, and training his knowledge of men. Among the Gilberts and Champernounes and Raleghs and Carews, there would be men as skilful in the handling of a ship as in the proper management of a farm, and to all would young Ralegh listen with his mind feverishly alert for information, and from all he would learn what each could teach him.

Old John Hooker, who lived at Exeter, and helped to write the continuation of Holinshed's chronicle, knew the boy and took an interest in him; as is easy to see from his proud reference to the Raleghs' illustrious descent—royal even he would have it in despite of Sir William Pole—and from his fine warning to young Ralegh when he was emerging into distinction to remain worthy of it. "These all," he writes, "were men of great honour and nobility whose virtues are highly recorded sparsim in the Chronicles of England. But yet, as nothing is permanent in this life and all things variable under the sun, and Time hath devoured and consumed greatest men and mightiest monarchs and most noble communities in the world—according to the old country saying, 'Be the day never so long, yet at length it will ring to even-song'—so this honourable race … continued in great honour, nobility and reputation, yet in process of time seemed at length to be buried in oblivion.

"Now it hath pleased God to raise the same even from the dead. … And whereof cometh this that the Lord hath so blessed you, but only that you should be beneficial and profitable to all men?" And he ends his discourse, in which a note of almost fatherly concern is heard, with an apt euphuism about the bee, to clinch his argument and perhaps to show his knowledge of courtly style (did not he too go to London as member for Exeter?) "As the bee is no longer suffered to have a place in the hive than whiles he worketh, no more is that man to have place in the public weal than whiles he doth some good therein."

THE BIRTHPLACE OF SIR WALTER RALEGH, BUDLEIGH, SALTERTON

His father, too, was a man to know and appreciate his son's worth. He had led no uneventful life, though he was, for the most part, sequestered in the country. He took a leading part in the affairs of the little town of Budleigh-Salterton. In the great Rising of the West, in 1549, he came perilously near to losing his life. He was riding with some mariners from Hayes to Exeter, when he came upon an old woman telling her beads; he stopped to ask her why she defied authority by telling beads, and the old woman, furious, rushed into the church of Clyst St. Mary, and inveighed against the gentlemen who would burn the houses of poor folk over their heads. Ralegh had ridden on towards Exeter; a body of insurgents overtook him, and he was saved from being murdered only by hastening into a chapel by the road-side. But he went on his way again, and again fell into the hands of the rebels; and this time he did not manage to escape, but was shut up in the tower of a church at St. Sidwell's—a suburb of Exeter in the hands of the rebels—until Lord Grey of Wilton won the great battle of Clyst Heath, in which four thousand perished, and relieved the siege of Exeter. The incident serves to show the calibre of the father.

But when young Ralegh was a boy, his father's adventurous days were over; and in 1561 he is mentioned as churchwarden of East Budleigh parish, and no doubt led his family regularly each Sunday to the family pew, on which the family arms are still discernible, though much disfigured—probably too at the command of King James I. of England, who feared his too ambitious subject even after his death. Little the father thought of that as he watched the little boy to see that he behaved with propriety in church and did not sleep or play as little boys are wont to do during a sermon. Old Ralegh, remembering the terrible reaction during Mary's reign, would be specially punctilious in such matters; and fathers then were not lenient to their children. Young Peter Carew, when he played truant at Exeter Grammar School, was leashed to a great hound by his father: and we are not told whether Peter and the dog were on friendly terms. They may have become so; we will hope for Peter's sake that they did. Certainly, with three young Gilberts, young Walter's step-brothers—sons of Otho Gilbert—and a family of Raleghs of all ages, there would be need for stern discipline in church as well as out of church, and there is little reason for doubting of its existence, though no account has been handed down of severity as ingenious as that shown by Peter Carew's honest father. Probably, in young Walter's upbringing, there was a touch of the ewe lamb, that would account in a measure for the "naeve of pride" which was such a conspicuous feature of his developed character. Not that he was spoiled; but his parents had a soft place in their hearts for him, which he well would know of, and he was not suppressed so rigorously as he would have been otherwise … but this is pleasant conjecture.

His mother was a woman of character: "a woman of noble wit, and of good and godly opinions," writes John Foxe of her, and proceeds to tell how she visited poor Agnes Prest when she was in prison for having Protestant opinions (that was when Mary was on the throne, and Philip of Spain was powerful in England), and conversed with her before she was burned at the stake on Southernhay. "Mistress Ralegh came home to her husband and declared to him that in her life she never heard any woman, of such simplicity to see, to talk so godly and so earnestly; insomuch that if God were not with her she could not speak such things. I was not able to answer her: I, who can read, and she cannot."

The story does not relate what answer Mistress Ralegh wanted to give; it does not necessarily show her a Catholic in sympathy, though she probably did not sympathize with Agnes Prest's desire for martyrdom, and wanted to prevent the old woman from losing her life in such a terrible way. The story illustrates how inextricably religion was bound up with patriotism, and what a quandary the ordinary peace-loving gentlefolk, whose wish was to serve God and their country, must have been in, when the interests of either changed with the sovereign. That was why Elizabeth, by her policy of gradually cutting the ties that linked England to the Pope and the countries under his authority, gave such immense strength to the English; she united, as it were, the strength drawn from patriotism and the strength drawn from religion, by forcing England to rely on herself alone; and so she overcame the countries weakened by the constant antagonism between the welfare of their religion and the welfare of their state. She saw, as her father Henry had seen, the value of religion as a political asset; and with cold common sense she used that asset for all its peculiar worth. Her policy is more praiseworthy than her religion. Never was woman less religious; few women have been dowered with her state-craft. Religion and patriotism became practically identical: their interests were no longer conflicting.

The Pope and his followers became, for adventurous Englishmen, comfortingly akin to the devil and the devil's workers, to have at whom has always been the privilege of good men since the world began. Moreover, in this case the powers of evil were wealthy and pompous, but unwarlike; and wealth is a pleasant perquisite to virtue.

The time did not lend itself to contemplation. There was too much to be done. It was a time of action. The material world, with all its tremendous possibilities, was opening out before the astonished gaze of Englishmen, and left but little time for the exploration of the spiritual world. Men of action and men of art passed on their way triumphantly, "if not to heaven—then hand in hand to hell."

Young Ralegh would accept his religion from his parents much as he accepted his sword, resolved to keep both bright and becoming a gentleman. He was a man of the world; and the world then was boisterous and unruly. Men revelled in life like boys; their code of honour was as chivalrous and strange as that of boys. They lived, and they relished living.

Into this world young Ralegh went to make his way. He was poor, but had friends who had caused the spirit of life to thrive in him, who had nurtured his own belief in himself, and showed him what the world had in store for the courageous and skilful man. He was proud and ambitious, and few men have had better reason for pride, or have carried out their ambition with such success as he. He was always an aristocrat; so distinguished that ostentation became him, which, on a meaner man, would have passed into vulgarity. He was the most romantic figure of the most romantic age in the annals of English history.

His life was fuller of great accidents than life is wont to be, and all these accidents of good fortune and of bad he used to the full extent of a man's power, and by so doing he controlled them and became the master of his fate.