out of any love towards hyme. The less yow make hyme, the less he shalbe able to harme yow and your's. And if her Majesties favor faile hyme, hee will agayne decline to a common parson. For after-revenges, feare them not; for your own father was estemed to be the contriver of NORFOLK'S1 ruin, yet his son 2 followeth your father's son, and loveth him. Humors of men succeed not; butt grow by occasions, and accidents of tyme and poure. 4 SUMMERSETT made no revendge on the Duke of NORTHUMBERLAND'S heares. NORTHUMBERLAND,5 that now is, thincks not of HATTON'S issew. KELLOWAY lives, that murderd the brother of HORSEY; and HORSEY lett hyme go by, all his lifetime. I could name yow a thowsand of thos; and therefore afterfears are but profesies-or rather conjectures-from cawses remote. Looke to the present, and yow do wisely. His soonne shalbe the youngest Earle of Ingland butt on, and, if his father be now keipt down, WILL CECILL shalbe abell to keip as many men att his heeles as hee, and more to. Hee may also mache in a better howse then his; and so that feare is not worth the fearinge. Butt if the father continew, he wilbe able to break the branches, and pull up the tree; root and all. Lose not your advantage; if you do, I rede your destiney.-Your's to the end, W. R. [Written across the margin.] Lett the Q. hold Bothwell 6 while she hath hyme. Hee will ever be the canker of her estate 1 Thomas, Duke of Norfolk, beheaded in 1572 in connection with the affairs of the Queen of Scots. 2 Lord Thomas Howard, afterwards Earl of Suffolk, half-brother of Philip Arundel (see p. 93 above). 3 i.e. "are not inherited." • Edward Seymour, son of the Protector Somerset, who was beheaded. The Act of 5 and 6 Edward VI., passed by the influence of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, deprived him of his titles and lands. Queen Elizabeth, in the first year of her reign, created him Earl of Hertford. "The terms on which he lived with the Earls of Leicester and Warwick led Ralegh to take this case as an illustration of the doctrine that in the rivalry of political strife hereditary feuds are little to be feared."-Edwards. 6 Henry Percy, ninth Earl, son of the Earl who was imprisoned in the Tower on a charge of conspiring with the Guises for invading England and setting free the Queen of Scots, and who was found dead in his bed, shot with bullets, in 1585. Suspicion was cast upon a servant of Sir Christopher Hatton, who had been charged with the custody of the Earl just before his death. (See "Blandamour," p. 93 above.) By this name the Earl of Essex is intended, and the suggestion presumably is that he would, if set free from restraint, prove as troublesome to the Queen as Francis Stuart, Earl of Bothwell, had then recently proved to the Scottish King. and sauftye. Princes ar lost by securetye; and preserved by prevention. I have seen the last of her good dayes,1 and all ours, after his libertye.2 Addressed: "To the right honorabell Sir Roberte Cecyll, Knight, Principall Secritory to her Majestye." Endorsed, in Sir Robert Cecil's hand, "Sir Walter Ralegh"; and, in a later hand, "1601." Edwards prints a letter undated of 1618 "alleged (by T. Mathew or by J. Donne) to have been written by Sir W. Ralegh to King James." 3 It is thus headed by Tobie Mathew : Sir Walter Rauleigh to King James; which seemes rather to acknowledge favours, than to desire them. The letter ends as follows: I must neverthelesse, in this little time in which I am to live, acknowledge and admire your goodnesse, and in all my thoughts and even with my last breath confesse that you have beheld my affliction with compassion. And I am yet in nothing so miserable, as in that I could never meet an occasion wherein to be torn in pieces for Your Majestie's service; I, who am still Your, etc. Edwards "wholly declines to belive that Ralegh wrote thus to King James in October 1618." I agree with him; moreover, though Ralegh had been accustomed to the use of flattery, the style is not Ralegh's. The letter is also suspect as coming from the collections of Sir Tobie Matthew. He was Bacon's literary friend, and this fact renders it probable, to my mind, that the letter was penned by Bacon and sent by him to the King as though from Ralegh. Moreover, the attitude adopted coincides with that which Bacon recommended to Essex when he was in trouble with Queen Elizabeth. In the same way I believe that Bacon sent the "Ralegh" poem, referred to at p. 454 below, to the Queen, Anne of Denmark. They would thus, together, represent his secret effort to secure a pardon for Ralegh, while in his official 1 Cf. "the 'continuance of her Majesty, in whom our good days do consist."—Letter attributed to Bacon re Squire's conspiracy, Spedding, Life, ii. 119. 2 Edwards, Life, ii. 222. 3 Ibid. ii. lxvii. capacity he was giving effect to the wishes of the King. This is discussed more fully on p. 458 below. I come now to the poems, and first to the poem to "Cynthia," an unfinished piece which from the title purports to be the last of twenty-one books. It is entitled "The 21st and last book of the Ocean, to Cynthia," the "Ocean" being Ralegh, Spenser's "shepheard of the Ocean," and "Cynthia" the Queen. It is regarded as a continuation of Ralegh's lost poem, "Cynthia.” 1 I do not, however, believe that there was any lost poem, or that Ralegh was the author of the pretended fragment. These devices are, to my mind, only part of the real author's usual method of mystification. The MS. of this poem is in Ralegh's handwriting, but as it is evidently a fair copy, that does not necessarily prove that he was the author. So far as I recollect there is only one erasure, and the writing is of that "extreme precision and neatness of hand" which Edwards notes in the case of the MS. of Ralegh's letter to the Queen about the succession quoted above (p. 434), and which he says is "so entirely unusual with the writer at this period of his life" (ie. during Elizabeth's reign). The fair copy was presumably made for the Queen, but it is the original draft with which we are concerned, not the copy, and this has not been preserved. The use of poetry for practical purposes has probably always been a feature of Court life at a certain point in a country's civilisation, and this has created a demand for the services of men who, like the scribes of the East, could adapt their thoughts and feelings to the case of others less gifted than themselves with the power of expression. Under such conditions no sense of dishonesty attaches to the use of the document as though it were the composition of the person in whose name it appears. Similarly, and having regard in particular to Ralegh's nature, I think he would have thought very little of the morality of such an 1 See Chapter XIV. impersonation, and the Queen perhaps less, so long as she was entertained by it. And in any case it lent distinction to her attachment for the man whom she had raised, and was a tribute to her charms, that he should be thought the author of love poems in her honour, and that some one, in a treatise addressed to herself, should write about them that "for ditty and amorous ode, I find Sir Walter Raleigh's vein most lofty, insolent and passionate."1 Ralegh depended for his position entirely on the Queen's favour, and to make a fair copy of the poem, even one of 100 stanzas (the length of "Cynthia "), was not a very extraordinary thing to do, if, by showing it to the Queen as his own, or at any rate as representing his feelings, he could have mitigated her resentment at his marriage. Bacon (who in my opinion is the author of the poem) makes use of the opportunity, in taking up the personality of Ralegh, to express his own feelings. He was undoubtedly most unhappy at his exclusion from access and the waning of all his hopes of advancement. This is what is reflected, under the disguise of Ralegh's loss of favour, in the poem. The poem, though diffuse and ill connected as a whole, contains some wonderful pieces of writing. It opens by an address to his "joys interred": You that then died when first my fancy erred. His complaint will be couched "in simple words." Ralegh's condition is described: The blossoms fallen, the sap gone from the tree, From these so lost what may affections be? What heat in cinders of extinguished fires? He describes the Queen and her power over him : Oh, princely form, my fancy's adamant, Divine conceit, my pains' acceptance, Oh, all in one! oh, heaven on earth transparent ! 1 The Arte of English Poesie, 1589. Out of that mass of miracles, my muse Gathered those flowers, to her pure senses pleasing ; When she did well, what did there else amiss? She gave, she took, she wounded, she appeased. The honour of her love love still devising, To seek new worlds for gold, for praise, for glory, More strong than were ten thousand ships of war ; To call me back, to leave great honour's thought, And hold both cares and comforts in contempt. His changed fortunes: So my forsaken heart, my withered mind,— Alone, forsaken, friendless, on the shore, With many wounds, with death's cold pangs embraced, Writes in the dust, as one that could no more, Whom love, and time, and fortune had defaced. The "angel" allusion1: Such force her angelic appearance had To master distance, time or cruelty ; and lower down, "angelical in voice." 1 See Chapter XIV. and p. 455 below. |