Amenities of Literature Part 53

The second great expedition followed. Again Ess.e.x betrayed his inexperience and his failure, while Rawleigh, in a brilliant action, took Fayal. The reception of Ess.e.x at court levelled his ambition, and he retreated from the queen's reproaches, sick at heart, to bury himself in sullen seclusion. The remainder of his days exhibit a series of disturbed acts, in the continued conflict between his own popularity and the variable favour of the queen. To complete this tale of political intrigues, we have a letter, remarkable for its style, its matter, and its object, from Rawleigh to Cecil, urging the annihilation of "the tyrant," before "it is too late," in terms hardly ambiguous enough to save Rawleigh from the charge of having hurried on the fate of Ess.e.x, at whose execution he shed tears;[3] and in the confession of one of Ess.e.x's desperate advisers, in their mad rising, we learn that the earl had fixed on Rawleigh to be got rid of.

If we reflect a moment on this triumvirate of political friends--and Cecil secretly a.s.sured the Scottish monarch, that "he and they would never live under one apple-tree"--we may see how the wiles and jealousies of love are not more fatal than those of intriguing statesmen. Rawleigh, for a purpose reconciles Ess.e.x with Cecil; but in reality, the three alike bear a mutual antipathy. When Ess.e.x in disgrace lay sick at home, and the queen half-repentant in her severity sent a friendly message to the earl, this appearance of returning favour towards Ess.e.x startled Rawleigh, who is seized with sickness in his turn; and the queen, at once the royal slave and mistress of her court-lovers, is compelled to send him a cordial of an equivalent kindness; and both these political patients were cured by the same prescription.

Cecil and Rawleigh paused not till they laid the head of Ess.e.x on the block; and that day sealed their own fortunes, for, left without a rival, they became rivals to each other. "Those," said Rawleigh on the scaffold, "who set me against him, set themselves afterwards against me, and were my greatest enemies." This may be placed among the confessions of criminal friends.h.i.+ps!

Cecil "bore no love to Rawleigh," tells a contemporary; but we know more than contemporaries, and we possess secrets which Rawleigh could not discover while Elizabeth was on the throne, though a lurking suspicion of the hollowness of his friend "Robin" may have lain on his mind when he wrote this verse on the ambidextrous Talleyrand, who through all changes

Still kept on the mountain, and left us on the plain.

It was while this subdolous minister was holding most intimate intercourse with Rawleigh, while his son was placed under his guardian care at Sherborne, and he himself, with Lord Cobham his brother-in-law, was there a guest, that this extraordinary Machiavel was daily working at the destruction of both his friends! This was effectually done by instilling into the Scottish monarch antipathies never to be uprooted.

On the demise of the queen, Rawleigh was for raising up an English against a Scottish party; he was for keeping the government in their own hands, and, looking on the successor to the English throne as a foreigner, and his people as a needy race, would have only admitted him on terms; or, as Aubrey hints, was for "setting up a commonwealth."

Little dreamed Rawleigh that he was already sold and disposed of; that his friend, Secretary Cecil, was surrounding Durham-House, Rawleigh's town residence, by domestic and midnight spies; and, as the secretary was wont, laying traps to decoy his a.s.sociate in the councils of Elizabeth into something which might be s.h.i.+fted into a semblance of treason against the future sovereign.[4]

The train so covertly laid, the mine was sprung at the due hour.

Rawleigh's reception by the king was the prognostic of his fall.

Rawleigh announced, James exclaimed, _more suo_,--"Rawleigh! Rawleigh!

o' my saul, mon, I have heard _rawly_ of thee!"[5] Cecil, who had partic.i.p.ated in the fall of Ess.e.x, the chief of the Scottish party, all expected would have shared in the same royal repulse. Lady Kildare once aptly described Cecil, when she threatened "to break the neck of that weasel;" and afterwards the Scottish monarch, admiring the quick s.h.i.+ftings and keen scent of the crafty creature in the playful style of the huntsman, characterised his minister, in his kennel of courtiers, as his "little beagle." "The weasel," had all along, moving to and fro, kept his un.o.bserved course; and, to the admiration of all, now "came out of the chamber like a giant, to run his race for honour and fortune."

That astute Machiavel had long prepared staunch friends for himself in well-paid Scots. James was hardly seated on his new throne, when his minister opened one of his political exhibitions by the incomprehensible Cobham conspiracy; and this ingenious artificer of state-plots had knotted the present with one apparently more real; but though they would not hold together, they served to put his friend on his memorable trial. When the eloquence of Rawleigh had baffled his judges, and the evidence failed, Cecil, then sitting in court in the character of a friend, secretly conveyed an insidious letter, sufficient to serve as an ambiguous plea for a mysterious conviction. Rawleigh was judicially but illegally condemned; and the affair terminated in a burlesque execution, where men were led to the block, and no one suffered decapitation.[6]

A remarkable circ.u.mstance, however, occurred, which must not be pa.s.sed over in this psychological history of Rawleigh. In the Tower, during the examination of the weak and worthless Cobham, who was s.h.i.+fting evidence, Rawleigh affected a recklessness of life; suddenly, he inflicted upon himself what his enemies afterwards called "the guilty blow in the Tower;" in the blow he did not risk his life, "being, in truth, rather a cut than a stab" in his breast. Mortified pa.s.sion may have overcome for a moment the hero whose fort.i.tude had often been more n.o.bly tried; but in my own mind, I cannot avoid including the present incident among those similar minor artifices, designed for some grand effect.

Rawleigh, condemned, was suffered to live twelve years in the Tower, whence he obtained a release, but not a pardon; the condemnation was suspended over his head like the pointed sword, ready to drop on the guest invited to the mockery of a festival. A new secretary, Winwood, and a new favourite, Buckingham, had listened to the vision of a gold mine, and an English colony. The sage, who had pa.s.sed through that school of wisdom, his own "History of the World," when called into action, was still the same romantic adventurer. What else for him remained in England, but the dream of his early days? The military and the naval writings, as well as the "History of the World," of Rawleigh, had been designed by their great author to mould the genius of that prince to whom he looked for another Elizabethan reign; but Prince Henry had sunk into an untimely grave, and the sovereign who loved as much as any one an awful volume, was deterred from valuing the man.

Rawleigh gathered together all the wrecks of his battered fortune, and, with a company of adventurers, equipped the fleet which was hastening to found a new empire. Ere its sails were filled with propitious gales, its ruin was prepared. The secret plans of its great conductor, confided to our government, by their order were betrayed to the jealous council of Castille. Lying in sickness, Rawleigh lands on a hostile coast; his son, with filial emulation, combated and fell; his confidential Keymis, whose life was devoted to him, could not endure reproach, and closing his cabin-door, ended his days; and if he himself bore up with life, it was that his life was still due to many. "I could die heart-broken, as Drake and Hawkins had died before, when they failed in their enterprise. My brains are broken, and I cannot write much; I live, and I told you why."

But he knew his life was a pledge no longer redeemable. His "rabble of idle rascals" mutinied, till the hope of falling in with the Spanish treasure-fleet lured them homewards. The letters to his wife are among the most tragical communications of a great mind greatly despairing, and may still draw tears.

On Rawleigh's return, a proclamation was issued for his arrest, and he surrendered to his near kinsman, Sir Lewis Stukeley, vice-admiral of Devon. On their journey to London, they were joined by Manoury, a French physician, not unskilled in chemistry, a favourite study with Rawleigh.

It was in this journey that Rawleigh contrived one of those humiliating stratagems which we have several times noted with astonishment. In a confidential intercourse with the French chemist, he procured drugs by which he was enabled to counterfeit a strange malady. Alas! the great man was himself cozened. Manoury was the most guileful of _Moutons_, and his near kinsman, Stukeley, the most infamous of traitors![7]

The conflict of opposite emotions which induced this folly who shall describe? Rawleigh died in the elevation of his magnanimous spirit; as truly great when he took his farewell of his world, as when he closed the last sublime page of his great volume. He knew his fate, and he had come to meet it. The moment was disastrous; the Spanish match lay in one scale, and the head of Rawleigh was put in the other by the implacable Spaniard; and when a state-victim is required, the political balance is rarely regulated by simple justice.

An eminent critic has p.r.o.nounced, that "the 'History of the World,' by Rawleigh, is rather an historical dissertation, than a work rising to the majesty of history."

It sometimes happens that the application of an abstract principle of the critical art to some particular work may tend to injure the writer, without conveying any information to the reader; for thus the rare qualities of originality are wholly pa.s.sed by, should the masterly genius have composed in a manner unprescribed by any canon of criticism.

Our author was not ignorant of the laws of historical composition, which, he observes, "many had taught, but no man better, and with greater brevity, than that excellent learned gentleman, Sir FRANCIS BACON."

The ardent and capricious genius of our author projected a universal history which was to occupy three mighty folios, at a time when our language had not yet produced a single historical work; he had no model to look up to; nor, had there been, was he disposed to be casting in other men's moulds. The design and the execution were a creation of his own. Ma.s.ses of the most curious parts of learning were to be drawn out of recondite tomes, from the Rabbins, the Fathers, the historians and the poets of every nation; all that the generations of men have thought, and whatever they have memorably acted. But in this voluminous scroll of time, something was to enter of not less price--what his own searching spirit thought, what his diligence had collected, and farther, what his own eyes had observed in the old and the new worlds. TRUTH and EXPERIENCE were to be the columns which supported and adorned HISTORY.

And this we read in "The MIND of the Frontispiece," one of those emblematical representations of "the mind" of the author, which the engravers of that day usually rendered less pictorial than perplexing.[8]

A universal genius was best able to compose a universal history; statesman, soldier, and sage, in writing the "History of the World," how often has Rawleigh become his own historiographer! He had been a pilgrim in many characters; and his philosophy had been exercised in very opposite spheres of human existence. A great commander by land and by sea, he was critical in all the arts of stratography, and delights to ill.u.s.trate them on every occasion. The danger of having two generals for one army, is exemplified by what he himself had witnessed at Jarnac; in a narrative of Carthage, when the Romans lost their fleet, he points out the advantages of a flying navy, from what had occurred under his own eye in the wars of the Netherlands, and of Portugal; and concludes that "it is more difficult to defend a coast than to invade it." In the midst of a narrative of the siege of a town of Carthage, when the besieged rushed out of the town eager to learn the terms of the capitulation before they were concluded, the Roman general seized on this advantage by entering with his army, without concluding the capitulation. "A similar incident happened when I was a young man in France, of Marshal Monluc, while a parley was held about the surrender; but n.o.ble men held this conduct as not honourable." Foreign mercenaries, he observes, are not to be relied on, for at the greatest extremity, they have not only refused to fight, but have pa.s.sed over to the enemy; or they have become the masters of those who hired them, as the Turks were called in by the Greeks, and the Saxons by the Britons; and here he distinguishes the soldiery consisting of English, French, and Scotch, which established the independence of the Netherlands; in this case, these mercenaries were bound together by one common interest with the people who had required their aid; therefore, these stood in the condition of allies, as well as of foreigners solely retained by pay.

His digressions are never more agreeable than when they become dissertations; the most ordinary events of history a.s.sumed a new face by the n.o.ble speculations which he builds on them, full of a searching, critical spirit, of sound morality, and of practicable policy; often profound, always eloquent. One on the Mosaic code as a precedent for the laws of other nations, would have delighted Montesquieu. On the inviolability of oaths, he admirably describes them as "the chains by which free-men are tied to the world." On slavery--on idolatry--on giving the lie--on the point of honour--on the origin of local names of America by their first discoverers--such topics abound in his versatile pages. Even curious matters engaged his attention, and in the new world he inspected nature with the close eye of a naturalist;[9] nor has he disdained, at times, a pleasant tale. There are few pages of this venerable, but genial volume, where we do not find that it is Rawleigh who speaks or who acts, making legible his secret thoughts, charming the story of four thousand years with the pleasures of his own memory.

The actual condition of society; the politics of past governments; the arts, the trades, the inventions of past ages, matters deeply interesting in the history of man, often forgotten, and hardly recoverable, judged by that large mind which had so boldly planned the "History of the World," cannot properly be censured as "Digressions."

"True it is," he adds, "that I have also made many others, which, if they shall be laid to my charge, I must cast the fault into the great heap of human error. For seeing we digress in all the ways of our lives--yea, seeing the life of man is nothing else but digression, it may the better be excused in writing of their lives and actions. _I am not altogether ignorant in the laws of history and of the kinds._"

It is evident that our author was conscious that he had struck into a virgin vein, and however amenable to the code of historical composition, very gracefully apologises for indulging the novelty. The novelty indeed was so little comprehended by those gross feeders on the carrion of time who can discover nothing in history but its disjointed and naked facts, that, rejecting every "digression" as interrupting the chronology, they put forth their abridgments; and Alexander Ross rejoiced to call his "The Marrow of History;" but probably found, to his dismay, that he had only collected the dry bones; and that in all this "History of the World," nothing was more veritable than the author's own emotions. All which these matter-of-fact retailers had so carefully omitted we now cla.s.s by a t.i.tle which such writers rarely recognise as the philosophy of history. Great writers admit of no abridgment. If you do not follow the writer through all the ramifications of his ideas, and imbue your mind with the fulness of the author's mind, you can receive only interrupted impressions, and retain but an imperfect and mutilated image of his genius. The happiest of abridgments is the author's own skill in composition: to say all that is necessary and to omit all that is superfluous--this is the secret of abridgment, and there is no other of a great original work.

"The History of the World" appeared as a literary phenomenon, even to the philosophical Hume. He expresses his astonishment at "the extensive genius of the man who being educated amid naval and military enterprises, had _surpa.s.sed in the pursuits of literature even those of the most recluse and sedentary lives_."

This is much from him who has taught us not to wonder but to inquire.

Rawleigh, however, had dropped some hints on his Hebraic studies; acknowledging his ignorance of that recondite language, he was indebted to some preceding interpreters and to "some learned friends;" and he adds with good humour, but with a solemn feeling, "Yet it were not to be wondered at had I been beholding to neither, having had _eleven years'

leisure_ to obtain the knowledge of that or any other language." It did not occur to our historian that "eleven years" of uninterrupted leisure yields a full amount of "the most recluse and sedentary life." With a universal mind Rawleigh was eager after universal knowledge; and we have positive and collateral evidence that he sought in his learned circle whatever aid the peculiar studies of each individual could afford him.

A circ.u.mstance as remarkable as the work itself occurred in the author's long imprisonment. By one of those strange coincidences in human affairs, it happened that in the Tower Rawleigh was surrounded by the highest literary and scientific circle in the nation. Henry, the ninth Earl of Northumberland, on the suspicion of having favoured his relative Piercy, the gunpowder-plot conspirator, was cast into this state-prison, and confined during many years. This earl delighted in what Anthony Wood describes as "the obscure parts of learning." He was a magnificent Mecaenas, and not only pensioned scientific men, but daily a.s.sembled them at his table, and in this intellectual communion partic.i.p.ating in their pursuits he pa.s.sed his life. His learned society were designated as "the Atlantes of the mathematical world;" but that world had other inhabitants, antiquaries and astrologers, chemists and naturalists.

There was seen Thomas Allen, another Roger Bacon, "terrible to the vulgar," famed for his _Bibliotheca Alleniana_, a rich collection of ma.n.u.scripts, most of which have been preserved in the Bodleian; the name of Allen survives in the ardent commemorations of Camden, of Spelman, and of Selden. He was accompanied by his friend Doctor Dee, but whether Dee ever tried their patience or their wonder by his "Diary of Conferences with Spirits" we find no record; and by the astronomical Torporley, a disciple of Lucretius, for his philosophy consisted of atoms; several of his ma.n.u.scripts remain in Sion College. The muster-roll is too long to run over. In this galaxy of the learned, the brightest star was Thomas Hariot, who merited the distinction of being "the universal philosopher;" his inventions in algebra, Descartes, when in England, silently adopted, but which Dr. Wallis afterwards indignantly reclaimed; his skill in interpreting the text of Homer excited the grateful admiration of Chapman when occupied by his version; Bishop Corbet has described--

Deep Hariot's mine, In which there is no dross.

Two others were Walter Warner, who is said to have suggested to Harvey the great discovery of the circulation of the blood, and Robert Hues, famed for his "Treatise on the Globes." These, with Hariot, were the earl's constant companions; and at a period when science seemed connected with necromancy, the world distinguished the earl and his three friends as "Henry the Wizard, and his three Magi." We may regret that no Symposia have come down to us from this learned society in the Tower, which we may consider as the first philosophical society in our country. All these persons, eminent in their day, appear to have written in their various departments, and were inventors in science; yet few of their works have pa.s.sed through the press. This circ.u.mstance is a curious evidence in our literary history, that in that day the studious composed their works without any view to their publicity; the difficulty of obtaining a publisher for any work of science might also have conduced to confine their discoveries to their private circle. Some of these learned men probably were uncouth writers; Dee never could end a sentence in his rambling, confused style. Many of these works, scattered in their forlorn state of ma.n.u.script, often fell into hands who appropriated them to their own purpose. Even Hariot's treatise, which furnished Descartes with a new idea of the science, was a posthumous publication by his friend Warner, merely to secure a continuance of the pension which had been granted to him by the Earl of Northumberland.

These philosophers appear to have advanced far into their inquiries, for they were branded by atheism or deism. What therefore has reached us coming from ignorant or prejudiced reporters will not satisfy our curiosity. Of Hariot, Wood tells that "he always undervalued the old story of the creation of the world, and could never believe the trite position _ex nihilo nihil fit_. He made a _philosophical theology_, wherein he cast off the Old Testament, so that consequently the New would have no foundation. He was a deist, and his doctrine he did impart to the Earl of Northumberland and to Sir Walter Rawleigh, when he was compiling his 'History of the World.' He would controvert the matter with eminent divines, who therefore having no good opinion of him, did look on the matter of his death as a judgment for nullifying the Scriptures." Hariot died of a cancer on his lip.

From such accounts we can derive no knowledge of the _philosophical theology_ of Hariot. He was the philosopher, however, who went to Virginia with the design of establis.h.i.+ng a people of peace, with the Bible in his hand. He taught those children of nature its pure doctrines till they began to idolise the book itself, embracing it, kneeling to it, and rubbing their bodies with it. This new Manco Capac checked this innocent idolatry, but probably found some difficulty in making them rightly comprehend that the Bible was but a book like any other, made by many hands; but that the spiritual doctrine contained in it was a thing not to be touched nor seen, but to be obeyed. Such a philosopher, could he have remained among these Indians, would have become the great legislator of a tribe of primitive Christians; and as he actually contrived to construct an alphabet for them, this seems to have been his intention.

The doctrines of Hariot, which Wood has reprobated, certainly were not infused into the pages of Rawleigh; his divinity is never sceptical; his researches only lead to speculations purely ethical and political--what men have done, and what men do.[10]

Such were the men of science, daily guests in the Tower during the imprisonment of Rawleigh; and when he had constructed his laboratory to pursue his chemical experiments, he must have multiplied their wonders.

With one he had been intimately connected early in life; Hariot had been his mathematical tutor, was domesticated in his house, and became his confidential agent in the expedition to Virginia. Rawleigh had earnestly recommended his friend to the Earl of Northumberland, and Sion House in consequence became for Hariot a home and an observatory.

The scholastic Dr. Burhill is supposed to have been one among the learned friends whose a.s.sistance in his Hebraic researches Rawleigh acknowledges. It was such a student that might have led Rawleigh into his singular discussion on the site of paradise. One great name has claimed the tracings of his hand in the "History of the World." Ben Jonson has positively told that he wrote a piece on the Punic wars, which Rawleigh "altered and set in his book." The verses prefixed to the "Mind of the Frontispiece" are Jonson's. There was an intimacy between Jonson and Rawleigh which appears to have been interrupted, and this may possibly have given occasion to the remarkable sharp stricture from Jonson, in his conversation with Drummond, that "Rawleigh esteemed more fame than conscience; the best wits in England were employed in making his 'History of the World.'"

Rawleigh, in his vast and recondite collection of criticism and chronology, would enrich his volume with the stores acc.u.mulated from the sources of brother-minds; it is even said that he submitted his composition to Serjeant Hoskyns, that universal Aristarchus of that day, at whose feet, to use the style of honest Anthony, all poets threw their verses;[11] but the most material characteristic of his work Rawleigh could borrow from no one--the tone and elevation of his genius.

But if the "History of the World" instructed his contemporaries, there was a greater history in his mind, which had secured the universal acceptance of posterity--the history of his own times. But the age of Elizabeth, in ma.n.u.script, might be an act of treason in the court of James the First, in the eyes of his redoubted rival Cecil; he who did not wholly escape from malicious applications in writing the history of the world that had pa.s.sed away, eluded the fatal struggle with contemporary pa.s.sions. He has himself acquainted us of this loss to our domestic political history: "It will be said by many that I might have been more pleasing to the reader if I had written the story of mine own times, having been permitted to draw water as near the well-head as another. To this I answer, that whosoever in writing a modern history shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth. There is no mistress or guide that hath led her followers and servants into greater miseries. He that goeth after her too far off, loseth her sight and loseth himself; and he that walks after her at a middle distance, I know not whether I should call that kind of course, temper or baseness."[12]

The miscellaneous writings of Rawleigh are so numerous and so various, that Oldys has cla.s.sed them under the heads, poetical, epistolary, military, maritime, geographical, political, philosophical, and historical.[13]

Of a character so exalted and a genius so varied, how has it happened that Gibbon, who had once intended to compose the wondrous tale of his life, has p.r.o.nounced his character to be "ambiguous;" and that Hume has described it as "a great, but ill-regulated mind?"[14]

The story of Rawleigh is a moral phenomenon; but what is there that moves in the sphere of humanity, of which, when we discover the principle of action, we cannot calculate even the most eccentric movements? Rawleigh from the first was to be the architect of his own fortunes; this was a calamity with him, for a perpetual impulse was communicated to the versatility and the boundless capacity of a genius which seemed universal. Soldier and sailor, sage and statesman, he could not escape from the common fate of becoming the creature of circ.u.mstance. What vicissitudes! what moral revelations! How he disdained his enviers! His towering ambition paused not in its alt.i.tude; he reached its apex, and having accomplished everything, he missed all!

He whose life is a life of adventure, who is now the daring child of fortune, and falls to be the miserable heir of misfortune, though glory sometimes disguises his recklessness, is doomed to be often humiliated as well as haughty.

The favourite of his sovereign, thrown amid the contending suitors of a female Court, we have found creeping in crooked politics, and intriguing in dark labyrinths. Rawleigh met his evil genius in Cecil; he saw his solitary hope vanish with Prince Henry. Awakening his last energies with the juvenile pa.s.sion of his early days, he pledged his life on a new adventure--it was his destiny to ascend the scaffold. He was always to be a victim of state. The day of his trial and the hour of his death told to his country whom they had lost. From the most unpopular man in England he became the object of the public sympathy, for they saw the permanent grandeur of the character, when its l.u.s.tre was no longer dusked by cloudy interests or temporary pa.s.sions.

There is no object in human pursuits which the genius of Rawleigh did not embrace. What science was that unwearying mind not busied in? What arts of h.o.a.r antiquity did he not love to seek? What sense of the beautiful ever pa.s.sed transiently over his spirit? His books and his pictures ever accompanied him in his voyages. Even in the short hour before his last morning, is he not still before us, while his midnight pen traces his mortuary verse, perpetuating the emotions of the sage, and of the hero who could not fear death.[15]

Such is the psychological history of a genius of the first order of minds, whom posterity hails among the founders of our literature.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Lodge's "Ill.u.s.trations of British History," iii. 67.

[2] Sidney Letters, ii. 45.