“Sir Walter arrived with his keeper, Mr. Blount. I assure you sir, his poor servants, to the number of a hundred and forty goodly men, and all the mariners, came to him with such shouts of joy as I never saw a man more troubled to quiet them in my life.”
—Robert Cecil 1

Our court shall be a little Academe,
Still and contemplative in living Art.
—Love’s Labour’s Lost

“And truly if the school of Gauthier Raulay [Walter Raleigh] continues its present growth in propagating atheism, admitting for this purpose a certain necromancer and astrologer [John Dee?] who lulls and beguiles the tender minds of the youthful nobility with the ingenious and agreeable fables by which he teaches them to scorn both Old and New Testament; if, I say, Raulay’s deceptions take root and he is called to participate in public affairs, as is said to be probable, since the Queen already looks on none more favourably than he (apart from Dudlay and Hatton), and has raised him from being a humble soldier of Ireland to the first rank in her Court, though he deserves it not; what are we to expect but a decree which will smack of the atheism and magic of this Epicurean and by which, on the Queen’s authority, the divine nature, and the confidence in the immortality of the soul, will be denied, and those who contradict or hesitate to accept this doctrine (fine and fair to those who wallow in the pleasures of the flesh) will be accused of lèse majesté and of disturbing the peace of the realm?”
—Jean Pilehotte 2

Delia Bacon, attempting in 1856 to dig up the relics of Elizabethan Wits, gave her reasons in simple terms:

“I have promised to perform the experiment without removing a particle of the stone, or leaving a trace of harm, and what is very gratifying to me under the circumstances, neither the clerk nor the vicar appears disposed to take it for granted that I am insane. I have told them my reasons for it. The archives of this secret philosophical society are buried somewhere, perhaps in more places than one. The evidence points very strongly this way, it points to a tomb, Lord Bacon’s tomb would throw some light on it I think. Spenser’s I know contains, or did when it was closed, verses, and the pens that writ them, the verses of his brother poets, the poets of this school, Raleigh’s school.” 3

In 1857, she published her laborious work The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded. 4 It was in form an octavo, of about seven hundred pages, including a hundred pages, separately numbered, of the author’s Introduction and extracts from an altogether separate and unpublished Life of Raleigh: Raleigh’s School and The New Academy:

Delia Bacon
(1811-1859)

The fact that this hero [Raleigh] throughout all his great public career so full of all kinds of excitement and action enough, one would say, to absorb the energies of a mind of any or binary human capacity that this soldier whose name had become, on the Spanish coasts, what the name of Cœur de Lion was in the Saracen nursery, that this foreign adventurer who had a fleet of twenty-three ships sailing at one time on his errands this legislator, for he sat in Parliament as representative of his native shire this magnificent Courtier, who had raised himself, without any vantage-ground at all, from a position wholly obscure, by his personal achievements and merits, to a place in the social ranks so exalted; to a place in the state so near that which was chief and absolute the fact that this many-sided man of deeds, was all the time a literary man, not a scholar merely, but himself an Originator, a Teacher, the Founder of a School this is the explanatory point in this history this is the point in it which throws light on all the rest of it, and imparts to it its true dignity.

For he was not a mere blind historical agent, driven by fierce instincts, intending only their own narrow ends, without any faculty of comprehensive survey and choice of intentions; impelled by thirst of adventure, or thirst of power, or thirst of gold, to the execution of his part in the great human struggle for conservation and advancement; working like other useful agencies in the Providential Scheme like the stormy wind fulfilling his pleasure.

There is, indeed, no lack of the instinctive element in this heroic composition; there is no stronger and more various and complete development of it. That lumensiccum, which his great contemporary is so fond of referring to in his philosophy, that dry light which is so apt, he tells us, in most men’s minds, to get drenched a little sometimes, in the humours and affections and distorted and refracted in their mediums, did not always, perhaps, in its practical determinations, escape from that accident even in the philosopher’s own; but in this stormy, world-hero, there was a latent volcano of will and passion; there was, in his constitution, a complexion which might even seem to the bystanders to threaten at times, by its overgrowth, the very pales and forts of reason; but the intellect was, notwithstanding, in its due proportion in him; and it was the majestic intellect that triumphed in the end. It was the large and manly comprehension, the large discourse looking before and after, it was the overseeing and active principle of the larger whole that predominated and had the steering of his course. It is the common human form which shines out in him and makes that manly demonstration, which commands our common respect, in spite of those particular defects and overgrowths which are apt to mar its outline in the best historical types and patterns of it, we have been able to get as yet. It was the intellect, and the sense which belongs to that in its integrity it was the truth and the feeling of its obligation, which was sovereign with him. For this is a man who appears to have been occupied with the care of the common-weal more than with anything else; and that, too, under great disadvantages and impediments, and when there was no honour in caring for it truly, but that kind of honour which he had so much of; for this was the time precisely which the poet speaks of in that play in which he tells us that the end of playing is to give to the very age and body of the time its form and pressure.

This was the time when virtue of vice must pardon beg, and curb and beck for leave to do it good. It was the relief of man’s estate, or the Creator’s glory, that he busied himself about; that was the end of his ends; or if not, then was he, indeed, no hero at all. For it was the doctrine of his own school, and the first human principle taught in it, that men who act without reference to that distinctly human aim, without that manly consideration and kindness of purpose, can lay no claim either to divine or human honours; that they are not, in fact, men, but failures; specimens of an unsuccessful attempt in nature, at an advancement; or, as his great contemporary states it more clearly, “only a nobler kind of vermin.”

During all the vicissitudes of his long and eventful public life, Raleigh was still persistently a scholar. He carried his books in his trunk of books with him in all his adventurous voyages; and they were his companions in the toil and excitement of his campaigns on land. He studied them in the ocean-storm; he studied them in his tent, as Brutus studied in his. He studied them year after year, in the dim light which pierced the deep embrasure of those walls with which tyranny had thought to shut in at last his world-grasping energies.

He had had some chance to study men and manners in that strange and various life of his, and he did not lack the skill to make the most of it; but he was not content with that narrow, one-sided aspect of life and human nature, to which his own individual personal experience, however varied, must necessarily limit him. He would see it under greater varieties, under all varieties of conditions. He would know the history of it; he would delve it to the root. He would know how that particular form of it, which he found on the surface in his time, had come to be the thing he found it. He would know what it had been in other times, in the beginning, or in that stage of its development in which the historic light first finds it. He was a man who wished even to know what it had been in the Assyrian, in the Phoenician, in the Hebrew, in the Egyptian, he would see what it had been in the Greek, and in the Roman. He was indeed, one of that clique of Elizabethan Naturalists, who thought that there was no more curious thing in nature; and instead of taking a Jack Cade view of the subject, and inferring that an adequate knowledge of it comes by nature, as reading and writing do in that worthy’s theory of education, it was the private opinion of this school, that there was no department of learning which a scholar could turn his attention to, that required a more severe and thorough study and experiment, and none that a man of a truly scientific turn of mind would find better worth his leisure.

And the study of antiquity had not yet come to be then what it is now; at least, with men of this stamp. Such men did not study it to discipline their minds, or to get a classic finish to their style. The books that such a man as this could take the trouble to carry about with him on such errands as those that he travelled on, were books that had in them, for the eager eyes that then over-ran them, the world’s news the world’s story. They were full of the fresh living data of his conclusions. They were notes that the masterminds of all the ages had made for him; invaluable aid and sympathy they had contrived to send to him. The man who had been arrested in his career, more ignominiously than the magnificent Tully had been in his, in a career, too, a thousand times more noble, by a Caesar, indeed, but such a Caesar; the man who had sat for years with the executioner’s block in his yard, waiting only for a scratch of the royal pen, to bring down upon him that same edge which the poor Cicero, with all his truckling, must feel at last, such a one would look over the old philosopher’s papers with an apprehension of their meaning, somewhat more lively than that of the boy who reads them for a prize, or to get, perhaps, some classic elegancies transfused into his mind.

During the ten years which intervene between the date of Raleigh’s first departure for the Continent and that of his beginning favour at home, already he had found means for ekeing out and perfecting that liberal education which Oxford had only begun for him, so that it was as a man of rarest literary accomplishments that he made his brilliant debut at the English Court, where the new Elizabethan Age of Letters was just then beginning.

He became at once the centre of that little circle of highborn wits and poets, the elder wits and poets of the Elizabethan age, that were then in their meridian there. Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Lord Buckhurst, Henry Lord Paget, Edward Earl of Oxford, and some others, are included in the cotemporary list of this courtly company, whose doings are somewhat mysteriously adverted to by a critic, who refers to the condition of the Art of Poesy at that time. The gentleman who wrote the late Shepherd’s Calendar was beginning then to attract considerable attention in this literary aristocracy.

The brave, bold genius of Raleigh flashed new life into that little nucleus of the Elizabethan development. The new Round Table, which that newly-beginning age of chivalry, with its new weapons and devices, and its new and more heroic adventure had created, was not yet full till he came in. The Round Table grew rounder with this Knight’s presence. Over those dainty stores of the classic ages, over those quaint memorials of the elder chivalry, that were spread out on it, over the dead letter of the past, the brave Atlantic breeze came in, the breath of the great future blew, when the turn came for this Knight’s adventure; whether opened in the prose of its statistics, or set to its native music in the mystic melodies of the bard who was there to sing it. The Round Table grew spheral, as he sat talking by it; the Round Table dissolved, as he brought forth his lore, and unrolled his maps upon it; and instead of it, with all its fresh yet living interests, tracked out by land and sea, with the great battle-ground of the future outlined on it, revolved the round world. Universality was still the motto of these Paladins; but The Globe, with its two hemispheres, became henceforth their device.

The promotion of Raleigh at Court was all that was needed to make him the centre and organizer of that new intellectual movement which was then just beginning there. He addressed himself to the task as if he had been a man of literary tastes and occupations merely, or as if that particular crisis had been a time of literary leisure with him, and there were nothing else to be thought of just then. The relation of those illustrious literary partners of his, whom he found already in the field when he first came to it, to that grand development of the English genius in art and philosophy which follows, ought not indeed to be overlooked or slightly treated in any thorough history of it. For it has its first beginning here in this brilliant assemblage of Courtiers, and soldiers, and scholars, this company of Poets, and Patrons and Encouragers of Art and Learning. Least of all should the relation which the illustrious founder of this order sustains to the later development be omitted in any such history, the Prince and mirror of all chivalry, the patron of the young English Muse, whose untimely fate keeps its date forever green, and fills the air of this new Helicon with immortal lamentations. The shining foundations of that so splendid monument of the later Elizabethan genius, which has paralyzed and confounded all our criticism, were laid here. The extraordinary facilities which certain departments of literature appeared to offer, for evading the restrictions which this new poetic and philosophic development had to encounter from the first, already began to attract the attention of men acquainted with the uses to which it had been put in antiquity, and who knew what gravity of aim, what height of execution, that then rude and childish English Play had been made to exhibit under other conditions; men fresh from the study of those living and perpetual monuments of learning, which the genius of antiquity has left in this department. But the first Essays of the new English scholarship in this untried field, the first attempts at original composition here, derive, it must be confessed, their chief interest and value from that memorable association in which we find them. It was the first Essay, which had to be made before those finished monuments of art, which command our admiration on their own account wholly, could begin to appear. It was the tuning of the instruments, that those who came afterwards might play the better.

We see, of course, the stiff, cramped hand of the beginner here, instead of the grand touch of the master, who never comes till his art has been prepared to his hands, till the details of its execution have been mastered for him by others. In some arts there must be generations of Essays before he can get his tools in a condition for use. Ages of prophetic genius, generations of artists, who dimly saw afar off, and struggled after his perfections, must patiently chip and daub their lives away, before ever the star of his nativity can begin to shine.

Considering what a barbaric age it was that the English mind was emerging from then; and the difficulties attending the first attempt to create in the English literature, anything which should bear any proportion to those finished models of skill which were then dazzling the imagination of the English scholar in the unworn gloss of their fresh revival here, and discouraging, rather than stimulating, the rude poetic experiment; considering what weary lengths of Essay there are always to be encountered, where the standard of excellence is so far beyond the power of execution; we have no occasion to despise the first bold attempts to overcome these difficulties which the good taste of this company has preserved to us. They are just such works as we might expect under those circumstances; yet full of the pedantries of the new acquisition, overflowing on the surface with the learning of the school, sparkling with classic allusions, seizing boldly on the classic original sometimes, and working their new fancies into it; but, full already of the riant vigour and originality of the Elizabethan inspiration; and never servility copying a foreign original.

The English genius is already triumphant in them. Their very crudeness is not without its historic charm, when once their true place in the structure we find them in, is recognized. In the later works, this crust of scholarship has disappeared, and gone below the surface. It is all dissolved, and gone into the clear intelligence; it has all gone to feed the majestic current of that new, all-subduing, all-grasping originality. It is in these earlier performances that the stumbling-blocks of our present criticism are strewn so thickly. Nobody can write any kind of criticism of the Comedy of Errors, for instance, without recognizing the Poet’s acquaintance with the classic model, without recognizing the classic treatment. Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Taming of the Shrew, the condemned parts of Henry VI., and generally the Poems which are put down in our criticism as doubtful, or as the earlier Poems, are just those Poems in which the Poet’s studies are so flatly betrayed on the surface.

Among these are plays which were anonymously produced by the Company performing at the Rose Theatre, and other companies which English noblemen found occasion to employ in their service then. These were not so much as produced at the theatre which has had the honour of giving its name to other productions, bound up with them. We shall find nothing to object to in that somewhat heterogeneous collection of styles, which even a single Play sometimes exhibits, when once the history of this phenomenon accompanies it.

The Cathedrals that were built, or re-built throughout, just at the moment in which the Cathedral Architecture had attained its ultimate perfection, are more beautiful to the eye, perhaps, than those in which the story of its growth is told from the rude, massive Anglo-Saxon of the crypt or the chancel, to the last refinement of the mullion, and groin, and tracery. But the antiquary, at least, does not regret the preservation. And these crude beginnings here have only to be put in their place, to command from the critic, at least, a similar respect. For here, too, the history reports itself to the eye, and not less palpably.

It may seem surprising, and even incredible, to the modern critic, that men in this position should find any occasion to conceal their relation to those quite respectable contributions to the literature of the time, which they found themselves impelled to make. The fact that they did so is one that we must accept, however, on uncontradicted cotemporary testimony, and account for it as we can. The critic who published his criticisms when the gentleman who wrote the late Shepherd’s Calendar was just coming into notice, however inferior to our modern critics in other respects, had certainly a better opportunity of informing himself on this point, than they can have at present.

They have writ excellently well he says of this company of Poets, this courtly company, as he calls them, they have writ excellently well, if their doings could be found out and made public with the rest. Sir Philip Sidney, Raleigh, and the gentleman who wrote the late Shepherd’s Calendar, are included in the list of Poets to whom this remark is applied. It is Raleigh’s verse which is distinguished, however, in this commendation as the most lofty, insolent, and passionate; a description which applies to the anonymous poems alluded to, but is not particularly applicable to those artificial and tame performances which he was willing to acknowledge. And this so commanding Poet, who was at the same time an aspiring Courtier and meddler in affairs of state, and who chose, for some mysterious reason or other, to forego the honours which those who were in the secret of his literary abilities and successes, the very best judges of poetry in that time, too, were disposed to accord him, and we are not without references to cases in antiquity corresponding very nearly to this; and which seemed to furnish, at least, a sufficient precedent for this proceeding; this so successful poet, and Courtier, and great man of his time, was already in a position to succeed at once to that chair of literary patronage which the death of Sir Philip Sidney had left vacant.

Instinctively generous, he was ready to serve the literary friends whom he attracted to him, not less lavishly than he had served the proud Queen herself, when he threw his gay cloak in her obstructed path, at least, he was not afraid of risking those sudden splendours which her favour was then showering upon him, by wearying her with petitions on their behalf. He would have risked his new favour, at least with his Cynthia that twin sister of Phoebus Apollo, to make her the patron, if not the inspirer of the Elizabethan genius.

“When will you cease to be a beggar, Raleigh?” She said to him one day, on one of these not infrequent occasions. “When your Majesty ceases to be a most gracious mistress” was this Courtier’s reply. It is recorded of her, that she loved to hear his reasons to her demands.

But though, with all his wit and eloquence, he could not contrive to make of the grand-daughter of Henry the Seventh, a Pericles, or an Alexander, or a Ptolemy, or an Augustus, or an encourager of anything that did not appear to be directly connected with her own particular ends, he did succeed in making her indirectly a patron of the literary and scientific development which was then beginning to add to her reign its new lustre, which was then suing for leave to lay at her feet its new crowns and garlands. Indirectly, he did convert her into a patron, a second-hand patron of those deeper and more subtle movements of the new spirit of the time, whose bolder demonstrations she herself had been forced openly to head. Seated on the throne of Henry the Seventh, she was already the armed advocate of European freedom; Raleigh had contrived to make her the legal sponsor for the New World’s liberties; it only needed that her patronage should be systematically extended to that new enterprise for the emancipation of the human life from the bondage of ignorance, from the tyranny of unlearning, that enterprise which the gay, insidious Elizabethan literature was already beginning to flower over and cover with its devices, it only needed that, to complete the anomaly of her position. And that through Raleigh’s means was accomplished.

He became himself the head of a little Alexandrian establishment. His house was a home for men of learning. He employed men in literary and scientific researches on his account, whose business it was to report to him their results. He had salaried scholars at his table, to impart to him their acquisitions, Antiquities, History, Poetry, Chemistry, Mathematics, scientific research of all kinds, came under his active and persevering patronage. Returning from one of his visits to Ireland, whither he had gone on this occasion to inspect a seignorie which his sovereign goddess had then lately conferred upon him, he makes his re-appearance at Court with that so obscure personage, the poet of the Faerie Queene, under his wing; that same gentleman, as the Court is informed, whose bucolics had already attracted so much attention in that brilliant circle. By a happy coincidence, Raleigh, it seems, had discovered this Author in the obscurity of his clerkship in Ireland, and had determined to make use of his own influence at Court to push his brother poet’s fortunes there; but his efforts to benefit this poor bard personally, do not appear to have been attended at any time with much success. The mysterious literary partnership between these two, however, which dates apparently from an earlier period, continues to bring forth fruit of the most successful kind; and the Faerie Queene is not the only product of it.

All kinds of books began now to be dedicated to this new and so munificent patron of arts and letters. His biographers collect his public history, not from political records only, but from the eulogies of these manifold dedications. Ladonnier, the artist, publishes his Sketches of the New World through his aid. Hooker dedicates his History of Ireland to him; Hakluyt, his Voyages to Florida. A work On Friendship is dedicated to him; another On Music, in which art he had found leisure, it seems, to make himself a proficient; and as to the poetic tributes to him, some of them at least are familiar to us already.

In that gay Court, where Raleigh and his haughty rivals were then playing their deep games, where there was no room for Spenser’s muse, and the worth of his Old Song was grudgingly reckoned, the rustling in silks is long since over, but the Courtier’s place in the pageant of the Faerie Queene remains, and grows clearer with the lapse of ages. That time, against which he built so perseveringly, and fortified himself on so many sides, will not be able to diminish there “one dowle that’s in his plume.” 5

In the Lord Timon of the Shakespeare piece, which was re-written from an Academic original after Raleigh’s consignment to the Tower, in that fierce satire into which so much Elizabethan bitterness is condensed, under the difference of the reckless prodigality which is stereotyped in the fable, we get, in the earlier scenes, some glimpses of this Athenian also, in this stage of his career.

But it was not as a Patron only, or chiefly, that he aided the new literary development. A scholar, a scholar so earnest, so indefatigable, it followed of course that he must be, in one form or another, an Instructor also; for that is still, under all conditions, the scholar’s destiny it is still, in one form or another, his business on the earth. But with that temperament which was included among the particular conditions of his genius, and with those special and particular endowments of his for another kind of intellectual mastery, he could not be content with the pen with the Poet’s, or the Historian’s, or the Philosopher’s pen as the instrument of his mental dictation. A Teacher thus furnished and ordained, seeks, indeed, naturally and instinctively, a more direct and living and effective medium of communication with the audience which his time is able to furnish him, whether few or many, whether fit or unfit, than the book can give him. He must have another means of delivery and tradition, when the delivery or tradition is addressed to those whom he would associate with him in his age, to work with him as one man, or those to whom he would transmit it in other ages, to carry it on to its perfection those to whom lie would communicate his own highest view, those whom he would inform with his patiently-gathered lore, those whom he would instruct and move with his new inspirations. For the truth has become a personality with him it is his nobler self. He will live on with it. He will live or die with it.

For such a one there is, perhaps, no institution ready in his time to accept his ministry. No chair at Oxford or Cambridge is waiting for him. For they are, of course, and must needs be, the strong-holds of the past those ancient and venerable seats of learning, “the fountains and nurseries of all the humanities” as a Cambridge Professor calls them, in a letter addressed to Raleigh. The principle of these larger wholes is, of course, instinctively conservative. Their business is to know nothing of the new. The new intellectual movement must fight its battles through without, and come off conqueror there, or ever those old Gothic doors will creak on their reluctant hinges to give it ever so pinched an entrance.

When it has once fought its way, and forced itself within when it has got at last some marks of age and custom on its brow then, indeed, it will stand as the last outwork of that fortuitous conglomeration, to be defended in its turn against all comers. Already the revived classics had been able to push from their chairs, and drive into corners, and shut up finally and put to silence, the old Aristotelian Doctors the Seraphic and Cherubic Doctors of their day in their own ancient halls.

It would be sometime yet, perhaps, however, before that study of the dead languages, which was of course one prominent incident of the first revival of a dead learning, would come to take precisely the same place in those institutions, with their one instinct of conservation and abhorrence of change, which the old monastic philosophy had taken in its day; but that change once accomplished, the old monastic philosophy itself, religious as it was, was never held more sacred than this profane innovation would come to be. It would be some time before those new observations and experiments, which Raleigh and his school were then beginning to institute, experiments and inquiries which the universities would have laughed to scorn in their day, would come to be promoted to the Professor’s chair; but when they did, it would perhaps be difficult to convince a young gentleman liberally educated, at least, under the wings of one of those ancient and venerable seats of learning, now gray in Raleigh’s youthful West ambitious, perhaps, to lead off in this popular innovation, where Saurians, and Icthyosaurians and Entomologists, and Chonchologists are already hustling the poor Greek and Latin teachers into corners, and putting them to silence with their growing terminologies it would perhaps be difficult to convince one who had gone through the prescribed course of treatment in one of these nurseries of humanity, that the knowledge of the domestic habits and social and political organizations of insects and shell-fish, or even the experiments of the laboratory, though never so useful and proper in their place, are not, after all, the beginning and end of a human learning.

It was no such place as that that this department of the science of nature took in the systems or notions of its Elizabethan Founders. They were Naturalists, indeed; but that did not imply, with their use of the term, the absence of the natural common human sense in the selection of the objects of their pursuits. It is a part of science to make judicious inquiries and wishes, says the speaker in chief for this new doctrine of nature; speaking of the particular and special applications of it which he is forbidden to make openly, but which he instructs, and prepares, and charges his followers to make for themselves.

One of those innovations, one of those movements in which the new ground of ages of future culture is first chalked out a movement whose end is not yet, whose beginning we have scarce yet seen was made in England, not very far from the time in which Sir Walter Raleigh began first to convert the eclat of his rising fortunes at home, and the splendour of his heroic achievements abroad, and all those new means of influence which his great position gave him, to the advancement of those deeper, dearer ambitions, which the predominance of the nobler elements in his constitution made inevitable with him. Even then he was ready to endanger those golden opinions, waiting to be worn in their newest gloss, not cast aside so soon, and new-won rank, and liberty and life itself, for the sake of putting himself into his true intellectual relations with his time, as a philosopher and a beginner of a new age in the human advancement. For “spirits are not finely touched but to fine issues.”

If there was no Professor’s Chair, if there was no Pulpit or Bishop’s Stall waiting for him, and begging his acceptance of its perquisites, he must needs institute a chair of his own, and pay for leave to occupy it. If there was no university with its appliances within his reach, he must make a university of his own. The germ of a new universality would not be wanting in it. His library, or his drawing-room, or his banquet, will be Oxford enough for him. He will begin it as the old monks began theirs, with their readings. Where the teacher is, there must the school be gathered together. And a school in the end there will be: a school in the end the true teacher will have, though he begin it, as the barefoot Athenian began his, in the stall of the artisan, or in the chat of the Gymnasium, amid the compliments of the morning levee, or in the woodland stroll, or in the midnight revel of the banquet.

When the hour and the man are indeed met, when the time is ripe, and one truly sent, ordained of that Power which chooses, not one only what uncloaked atheism is that, to promulgate in an age like this not the Teachers and Rabbies of one race only, but all the successful agents of human advancement, the initiators of new eras of man’s progress, the inaugurators of new ages of the relief of the human estate and the Creator’s glory when such an one indeed appears, there will be no lack of instrumentalities. With some verdant hill-side, it may be some blossoming knoll or mount for his chair, with a daisy or a lily in his hand, or in a fisherman’s boat, it may be, pushed a little way from the strand, he will begin new ages.

The influence of Raleigh upon his time cannot yet be fully estimated; because, in the first place, it was primarily of that kind which escapes, from its subtlety, the ordinary historical record; and, in the second place, it was an influence at the time necessarily covert, studiously disguised. His relation to the new intellectual development of his age might, perhaps, be characterized as Socratic though certainly not because he lacked the use, and the most masterly use, of that same weapon with which his younger contemporary brought out at last, in the face of his time, the plan of the Great Instauration. In the heart of the new establishment which the magnificent Courtier, who was a Queen’s delight, must now maintain, there soon came to be a little Academe. The choicest youth of the time, the Spirits of the Morning Sort, gathered about him. It was the new philosophic and poetic genius of the age that he attracted to him; it was on that philosophic and poetic genius that he left his mark for ever.

He taught them, as the masters taught of old, in dialogues in words that could not then be written, in words that needed the master’s modulation to give them their significance. For the new doctrine had need to be clothed in a language of its own, whose inner meaning only those who had found their way to its inmost shrine were able to interpret.

We find some contemporary and traditional references to this school, which are not without their interest and historical value, as tending to show the amount of influence which it was supposed to have exerted on the time, as well as the acknowledged necessity for concealment in the studies pursued in it. The fact that such an Association existed, that it began with Raleigh, that young men of distinction were attracted to it, and that in such numbers, and under such conditions, that it came to be considered ultimately as a School, of which he was the head-master the fact that the new experimental science was supposed to have had its origin in this association, that opinions, differing from the received ones, were also secretly discussed in it, that anagrams and other devices were made use of for the purpose of infolding the esoteric doctrines of the school in popular language, so that it was possible to write in this language acceptably to the vulgar, and without violating preconceived opinions, and at the same time instructively to the initiated, all this remains, even on the surface of statements already accessible to any scholar, all this remains, either in the form of contemporary documents, or in the recollections of persons who have apparently had it from the most authentic sources, from persons who profess to know, and who were at least in a position to know, that such was the impression at the time. 6

But when the instinctive dread of innovation was already so keenly on the alert, when Elizabeth was surrounded with Courtiers still in their first wrath at the promotion of the new favourite indignant at finding themselves so suddenly over shadowed with the growing honours of one who had risen from a rank beneath their own, and eagerly watching for an occasion against him, it was not likely that such an affair as this was going to escape notice altogether. And though the secrecy with which it was conducted, might have sufficed to elude a scrutiny such as theirs, there was another, and more eager and subtle enemy, an enemy which the founder of this school had always to contend with, that had already, day and night, at home and abroad, its Argus watch upon him.

That vast and secret foe, which he had arrayed against him on foreign battle fields, knew already what kind of embodiment of power this was that was rising into such sudden favour here at home, and would have crushed him in the germ that foe which would never rest till it had pursued him to the block, which was ready to join hands with his personal enemies in its machinations, in the Court of Elizabeth, as well as in the Court of her successor, that vast, malignant, indefatigable foe, in which the spirit of the old ages lurked, was already at his threshold, and penetrating to the most secret chamber of his Councils. It was on the showing of a Jesuit that these friendly gatherings of young men at Raleigh’s table came to be branded as a “school of Atheism.” And it was through such agencies, that his enemies at Court were able to sow suspicions in Elizabeth’s mind in regard to the entire orthodoxy of his mode of explaining certain radical points in human belief, and in regard to the absolute conformity of his views on these points with those which she had herself divinely authorized, suspicions which he himself confesses he was never afterwards able to eradicate.

The matter was represented to the Queen, we are told, “as if he had set up for a doctor in the faculty and invited young gentlemen into his school, where the Bible was jeered at” and the use of profane anagrams was inculcated. The fact that he associated with him in his chemical and mathematical studies, and entertained in his house, a scholar labouring at that time under the heavy charge of getting up “a philosophical theology” was also made use of greatly to his discredit.

And from another un-contradicted statement, which dates from a later period, but which comes to us worded in terms as cautious as if it had issued directly from the school itself, we obtain another glimpse of these new social agencies, with which the bold, creative, social genius that was then seeking to penetrate on all sides the custom-bound time, would have roused and organized a new social life in it. It is still the second-hand hearsay testimony which is quoted here. “He is said to have set up an Office of Address, and it is supposed that the office might respect a more liberal intercourse a nobler mutuality of advertisement, than would perhaps admit of all sorts of persons.” “Raleigh set up a kind of Office of Address” says another, in the capacity of an agency for all sorts of persons. John Evelyn refers also to that long dried fountain of communication which Montaigne first proposed, Sir Walter Raleigh put in practice, and Mr. Hartlib endeavoured to renew.

This is the scheme described by Sir W. Pellis, which is referred traditionally to Raleigh and Montaigne: “An Office of Address whereby the wants of all may be made known to all (that painful and great instrument of this design), where men may know what is already done in the business of learning, what is at present in doing, and what is intended to be done, to the end that, by such a general communication of design and mutual assistance, the wits and endeavours of the world may no longer be as so many scattered coals, which, for want of union, are soon quenched, whereas being laid together they would have yielded a comfortable light and heat such as advanced rather to the improvement of men themselves than their means.” 7

This then is the association of which Raleigh was the chief; this was the state, within the state which he was founding. “See the reach of this man,” says Coke on his trial. It is true that the honour is also ascribed to Montaigne; but we shall find, as we proceed with this inquiry, that all the works and inventions of this new English school, of which Raleigh was chief, all its new and vast designs for man’s relief, are also claimed by that same aspiring gentleman, as they were, too, by another of these Egotists, who came out in his own name with this identical project.

It was only within the walls of a school that the great principle of the new philosophy of fact and practice, which had to pretend to be profoundly absorbed in chemical experiments, or in physical observations, and inductions of some kind though not without an occasional hint, of a broader intention, it was only in esoteric language that the great principles of this philosophy could begin to be set forth in their true comprehension. The very trunk of it, the primal science itself, must needs be mystified and hidden in a shower of metaphysical dust, and piled and heaped about with the old dead branches of scholasticism, lest men should see for themselves how broad and comprehensive must be the ultimate sweep of its determinations; lest men should see for themselves, how a science which begins in fact, and returns to it again, which begins in observation and experiment, and returns in scientific practice, in scientific arts, in scientific re-formation, might have to do, here all was done, with facts not then inviting scientific investigation with arts not then inviting scientific reform.

In consequence of a sudden and common advancement of intelligence among the leading men of that age, which left the standard of intelligence represented in more than one of its existing institutions, very considerably in the rear of its advancement, there followed, as the inevitable result, a tendency to the formation of some medium of expression, whether that tendency was artistically developed or not, in which the new and nobler thoughts of men, in which their dearest beliefs, could find some vent and limited interchange and circulation, without startling the ear. Eventually there came to be a number of men in England at this time, and who shall say that there were none on the continent of this school, occupying prominent positions in the state, heading, it might be, or ranged in opposite factions at Court, who could speak and write in such a manner, upon topics of common interest, as to make themselves entirely intelligible to each other, without exposing themselves to any of the risks, which confidential communications under such circumstances involved.

For there existed a certain mode of expression, originating in some of its more special forms with this particular school, yet not altogether conventional, which enabled those who made use of it to steer clear of the Star Chamber and its sister institution; inasmuch as the terms employed in this mode of communication were not in the more obvious interpretation of them actionable, and to a vulgar, unlearned, or stupid conceit, could hardly be made to appear so.

There must be a High Court of Wit and a Bench of Peers in that estate of the realm, or ever these treasons could be brought to trial. For it was a mode of communication which involved in its more obvious construction the necessary submission to power. It was the instructed ear, the ear of a school, which was required to lend to it its more recondite meanings; it was the ear of that new school in philosophy which had made History the basis of its learning, which, dealing with principles instead of words, had glanced, not without some nice observation in passing, at their more conspicuous historical instances; it was the ear of a school which had everywhere the great historical representations and diagrams at its control, and could substitute, without much hindrance, particulars for generals, or generals for particulars, as the case might be; it was the ear of a school entrusted with discretionary power, but trained and practiced in the art of using it.

Originally an art of necessity, with practice, in the skilful hands of those who employed it, it came at length to have a charm of its own. In such hands, it became an instrument of literary power, which had not before been conceived of; a medium too of densest ornament, of thick crowding conceits, and nestling beauties, which no style before had ever had depth enough to harbour. It established a new, and more intimate and living relation between the author and his reader, between the speaker and his audience. There was ever the charm of that secret understanding lending itself to all the effects. It made the reader, or the hearer, participator in the artist’s skill, and joint proprietor in the result. The author’s own glow must be on his cheek, the author’s own flash in his eye, ere that result was possible. The nice point of the skilful pen, the depth of the lurking tone was lost, unless an eye as skilful, or an ear as fine, tracked or waited on it. It gave to the work of the artist, nature’s own style; it gave to works which had the earnest of life and death in them the sport of the enigma.

It is not too much to say, that the works of Raleigh and Bacon, and others whose connection with it is not necessary to specify just here, are written throughout in the language of this school. Our glorious Willy (it is the gentleman who wrote the Faerie Queene who claims him, and his glories, as ours ), our glorious Willy was born in it, and knew no other speech. It was that Round Table at which Sir Philip Sydney presided then, that his lurking meanings, his unspeakable audacities first set in a roar. It was there, in the keen encounters of those flashing “wit combats” that the weapons of great genius grew so fine. It was there, where the young wits and scholars, fresh from their continental tours, full of the gallant young England of their day, the Mercutios, the Benedicts, the Birons, the Longuevilles, came together fresh from the Court of Navarre, and smelling of the lore of their foreign Academe or hot from the battles of continental freedom, it was there, in those reunions, that our Poet caught those gracious airs of his those delicate, thick-flowering refinements those fine impalpable points of courtly breeding those aristocratic notions that haunt him everywhere.

It was there that he picked up his various knowledge of men and manners, his acquaintance with foreign life, his bits of travel led wit, that flash through all. It was there that he heard the clash of arms, and the ocean-storm. And it was there that he learned his old ward. It was there, in the social collisions of that gay young time, with its bold over-flowing humours, that would not be shut in, that he first armed himself with those quips and puns, and lurking conceits, that crowd his earlier style so thickly, those double, and triple, and quadruple meanings, that stud so closely the lines of his dialogue in the plays which are clearly dated from that era, the natural artifices of a time like that, when all those new volumes of utterance which the lips were ready to issue, were forbidden on pain of death to be extended, must needs be crushed together, infolded within themselves.

Of course it would be absurd, or it would involve the most profound ignorance of the history of literature in general, to claim that the principle of this invention had its origin here. It had already been in use, in recent and systematic use, in the intercourse of the scholars of the Middle Ages; and its origin is coeval with the origin of letters. The free-masonry of learning is old indeed. It runs its mountain chain of signals through all the ages, and men whom times and kindreds have separated ascend from their week-day toil, and hold their Sabbaths and synods on those heights. They whisper, and listen, and smile, and shake the head at one another; they laugh, and weep, and complain together; they sing their songs of victory in one key. That machinery is so fine, that the scholar can catch across the ages, the smile, or the whisper, which the contemporary tyranny had no instrument firm enough to suppress, or fine enough to detect.

It was the author of the Faerie Queene, indeed, his fine, elaborate, fertile genius burthened with its rich treasure, and stimulated to new activity by his poetical alliance with Raleigh, whose splendid invention first made apparent the latent facilities which certain departments of popular literature then offered, for a new and hitherto unparalleled application of this principle. In that prose description of his great Poem which he addresses to Raleigh, the distinct avowal of a double intention in it, the distinction between a particular and general one, the emphasis with which the elements of the ideal name, are discriminated and blended, furnish to the careful reader already some superficial hints, as to the capabilities of such a plan to one at all predisposed to avail himself of them. And, indeed, this Poet’s manifest philosophical and historical tendencies, and his avowed view of the comprehension of the Poet’s business would have seemed beforehand to require some elbow-room, some chance for poetic curves and sweeps, some space for the line of beauty to take its course in, which the sharp angularities, the crooked lines, the blunt bringing up everywhere, of the new philosophic tendency to history would scarcely admit of. There was no breathing space for him, unless he could contrive to fix his poetic platform so high, as to be able to override these restrictions without hindrance.

“For the Poet thrusteth into the midst, even where it most concerneth him; and then re-coursing to the things fore-past, and divining of things to come, he maketh a pleasing analysis of all.”

And it so happened that his Prince Arthur had dreamed the poet’s dream, the hero’s dream, the philosopher’s dream, the dream that was dreamed of old under the Olive shades, the dream that all our Poets and inspired anticipators of man’s perfection and felicity have always been dreaming; but this one awakening determined that it should be a dream no longer. It was the hour in which the genius of antiquity was reviving; it was the hour in which the poetic inspiration of all the ages was reviving, and arming itself with the knowledge of things not dreamt of by old reformers that know ledge of nature which is power, which is the true magic. For this new Poet had seen in a vision that same excellent beauty which the divine ones saw of old, and The New Atlantis, the celestial vision of her kingdom; and being also ravished with that excellence, and awakening, he determined to seek her out. And so being by Merlin armed, and by Timon thoroughly instructed, he went forth to seek her in Fairy Land.

There was a little band of heroes in that age, a little band of philosophers and poets, secretly bent on that same adventure, sworn to the service of that same Gloriana, though they were fain to wear then the scarf and the device of another Queen on their armour. It is to the Prince of this little band the Prince and mirror of all chivalry that this Poet dedicates his poem. But it is Raleigh’s device which he adopts in the names he uses, and it is Raleigh who thus shares with Sydney the honour of his dedication.

“In that Faerie Queene, I mean,” he [Sydney] says in his prose description of the Poem addressed to Raleigh, “in that Faerie Queene, I mean Glory in my general intention; but, in my particular, I conceive the most glorious person of our sovereign the Queen, and her kingdom in Fairy Land. And yet, in some places, I do otherwise shadow her. For considering she beareth two persons, one of a most Royal Queen or Empress, the other of a most Virtuous and Beautiful the latter part I do express in Bel-Phebe, fashioning her name according to your own most excellent conceit of Cynthia, Phebe and Cynthia being both names of Diana.”

“Of me,” says Raleigh, in a response to this obscure partner of his works and arts, a response not less mysterious, till we have found the solution of it, for it is an enigma:

“Of me no lines are loved, no letters are of price,
Of all that speak the English tongue, but those of thy device.”

It was a device that symbolized all. It was a circle containing the alphabet, or the A B C, and the esoteric meaning of it was all in each, or all in all, the new doctrine of the unity of science (the Ideas of the New Academe). That was the token-name under which a great Book of this Academy was issued.

It is to Sidney, Raleigh, and the Poet of the Faerie Queene, and the rest of that courtly company of Poets, that the cotemporary author in the Art of Poetry alludes, with a special commendation of Raleigh’s vein, as the most lofty, insolent, and passionate when he says, “they have writ excellently well, if their doings could be found out and made public with the rest.”

Leaving Delia Bacon’s view, Raleigh, as a poet, belongs to the Elizabethan Court and is tagged as the most distinguished writer of that time. He was a generous patron of the arts and sciences, and the friend of many poets. Prince Henry, eldest son of King James, was an admirer of his mariner knowledge, ship building, and models of ships whilst Spenser being more intimate with him than with anyone else at the Court. Marlowe knew him; Chapman was in his circle; and Jonson was tutor to his son. Many scholars helped him to collect the material for his History of the World.

During Elizabeth’s reign, he was ranked among the first love poets: Puttenham, Meres and Gabriel Harvey mention him as deservedly famous. And though in his imprisonment he wrote less poetry, his History of the World was meant to interest James, who condemned it as ‘too saucy in censuring the acts of Kings’.

In 1662, Thomas Fuller in his Worthies of England offers a version of a poem written by Queen Elizabeth and the circumstances of its exchange with Sir Walter Raleigh who found some hopes of the Queen’s favours reflecting upon him. This made him write on a glass window, obvious to the Queen’s eye,

“Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall.”

Her Majesty, either spying or being shown it, did underwrite,

“If thy heart fails thee, climb not at all.”

Poetry was an opportunity to combine wit and the Pride of Life, and Elizabeth demanded both. The atmosphere in which it was written was competitive, taut and lively. Cut-throat jests and desperate compliments flew; a fortune or a reputation might be made and lost overnight. As Edmund Burke noted,

“Strip majesty of its externals and it is merely a jest.” [(m)ajest(y).]

London made ballads on Raleigh:

Raleigh doth time bestride,
He sits ‘twixt wind and tide,
Yet uphill he cannot ride,
For all his bloody pride.

He seeks taxes in the tin,
He polls the poor to the skin,
Yet he vows ‘tis no sin,
Lord for thy pity!

When he was yet a student of the Middle Temple, a friend wrote an anagram which afterwards grew very popular:

“The foe to the stomach and the word of disgrace shows the name of the gentleman with the bold face. For Raleigh did not confine his assertion of superiority to his enemies or restrict it to the bitter bob. In his youth his companions were boisterous blades, but generally those that had wit, one was Charles Chester, a perpetual talker, made a noise like a drum in a room, so one time at a tavern Sir W.R. beats him and seals up his mouth, his upper and neather beard, with hard wax.”

In his youth, Raleigh had been several times jailed for brawling, as Ben Jonson, but Raleigh did not persist in the habit. Yet in 1597, at the age of forty-five, he could rival the Earl of Essex in sporting enthusiasm at the attack on Cadiz. Essex cast his hat into the sea for joy when Raleigh at the harbour called out ‘Entramos’, but it was Raleigh who sailed into action answering the guns of the fort with scornful blares of the trumpet, and who swung his ship athwart the channel that none of the other English commanders might take the lead of him that day.

The fashionable pastoralism was adopted by the inner circle. Elizabeth was known as Cynthia or the Shepherdess. Her private name for Raleigh was ‘Water’, an obvious pun on his middle name and his profession. On one occasion Sir Christopher Hatton, being jealous of Raleigh, sent Elizabeth a reproachful letter and some tokens, among them a small bucket to signify ‘Water’. Raleigh adopted this name for his poetry. He called himself the ‘Ocean’; Spenser, the Shepherd of the Ocean; suggesting the magnetic control of Cynthia, who swayed him as the moon sways the tide.

In July 1587 the Earl of Essex wrote to Sir Edward Dyer describing a scene in which he had behaved with his customary violence. The Queen had snubbed his sister, and Essex took it that she had done so at Raleigh himself, who was on duty as Captain of the Bodyguard. The Queen refused to take any notice of him, and in a fit of rage he took horse and rode off from the Court. He said to Dyer,

“She came to speak of Raleigh and it seemed she could not well endure anything to be spoken against him: and taking hold of one word (disdain) she said there was no cause why she should disdain him. This speech disturbed me so much that as near as I could I did describe unto her what he had been and what he was, and then I did let her see whether I had cause to disdain his competition of Love, or whether I could have comfort to give myself over to the service of a Mistress that was in awe of such a man. I spoke what of grief and choler as much against him as I could, and I think he standing at the door might very well hear the worst that I spoke of him. She made no answer but turned her away to my Lady of Warwick.”

A short manuscript of Raleigh’s writing survives among the Cecil papers at Hatfield. It is generally voted ‘a riddle’ and has so far baffled all editors and commentators. Bit it fits so neatly into Essex’s letter that that document may reasonably be looked on, as the other half of the riddle. The poem runs:

If Cynthia be a Queen, a Princess and Supreme,
Keep those among the rest, or say it was a dream.
For those that like, expound, and those that loath, express,
Meanings according as their minds are moved more or less.
For writing what thou art or showing what thou were,
Adds to the one disdain, to the other but despair.
Thy mind of neither needs, in both seeing it exceeds.

Raleigh at his post could not reply, nor could he challenge Essex, as he was to do later, for officially, he had not heard what was said. Therefore this curt little verse was probably ‘put into a pocket’, like the love poem to Lady Laiton.

Raleigh’s interest in scholarship led him to join or to found several learned societies. He was a member of Archbishop Parker’s Society of Antiquaries, the forerunner of the Royal Society with Francis Bacon. This Society met every week for discussion. Camden and Selden were members also, and here Raleigh formed friendships which were to stand him in good stead when he undertook the History of the World. He is said to have founded Ben Jonson’s club at the Mermaid as well.

The licensing of plays evidently involved two questions, when they should be allowed, and what they should contain. Sometimes they were suppressed altogether; sometimes merely their content was restricted: they were censored.

According to most stage historians, a proclamation in 1533 attempted to regulate the content of plays. It forbade, we are told, all evil-disposed persons to preach, either in public or private, “after their own brains, and by playing of interludes and printing of false, fond books, ballads, rhymes, and other lewd treatises in the English tongue, concerning doctrines in matters now in question and controversy.” Were this authentic, it would be the earliest formal pronouncement concerning censorship. But no such edict was issued in 1533. This proclamation, as may be seen by a comparison of the phrasing, was that promulgated by Queen Mary on August 18, 1553. An ordinary licensing patent was granted to Sir Walter Raleigh in 1588, authorizing him ‘to make licenses for keeping of taverns and retailing of wines throughout England.’ 8

Among being a fantastic of history, philosophy and theology, Raleigh was also a known chemist, and engaged in the search for an Elixir of Life, as Francis Bacon for a Prolongation of Life stated in his New Atlantis and Sylva Sylvarum. Raleigh’s cordial, which in 1612 restored Prince Henry to a last flicker of consciousness, may have been compounded also of quinine, though we have the recipe and event of that fateful day by Dr. Welwood, in his notes on Wilson’s life of James in the Complete History of England, 9:

“it [the cordial] was sent at the desire of the Queen, [Anne of Denmark] who had received relief from it in a fever some time before. Raleigh sent with it a letter, expressing the tenderest concern for the Prince; and, boasting of his medicine, stumbled unluckily upon an expression to this purpose, that it would certainly cure him, or any other, of a fever, except in case of poison. The Prince dying though he took it, the Queen in the agony of her grief, showed Raleigh’s letter, and lay so much weight on the expression about poison, that to her dying day, she could never be dissuaded from the opinion that her beloved son had foul play.”

Raleigh’s expressions probably flowed from an overweening conceit in the force of his own medicine, but are perhaps to be numbered among the circumstances, which ensured his destruction. The report that the Prince was poisoned was extremely general. Some surmised that he was poisoned by a scent, but this Sir Charles Cornwallis, considering the premises, thought great folly. Raleigh’s cordial was afterwards celebrated, as is proved by the following extract from Evelyn’s Diary, September 20, 1662:

“I accompanied his Majesty to M. Febure, his chymist, (and who had formerly been my master in Paris) to see his accurate preparation for ye composing Sir Walter Raleigh’s rare cordial; he made a learned discourse before his Majesty in French on each ingredient: a compound of pearl, musk, hart’s horn (ammonia), bezoar stone (a concretion found in the intestine of ruminants), mint, borage, gentian, mace, aloes, sugar, sassafras, sprits of wine.” 10

During Raleigh’s voyages, he noted with care the medical remedies of the natives, and no doubt offered them to Francis Bacon who was an enthusiast on experimental recipes. Upon Raleigh’s journeys and studies, in all the more scholarly side of his life, he would be able to count upon Thomas Hariot. It was a friendship which was not without risk, for Hariot’s suspected traffic with the devil fitted in with the popular picture of ‘Raleigh the Mischievous Machiavel’. When the latter was condemned to death in 1603, the judge in passing sentence flung at him his association with ‘the devil Hariot’, as one of his notorious crimes. Anthony à Wood accuses Hariot of Deism, and goes on to say:

“He had strange thoughts of the Scriptures, and always undervalued the old story of the creation of the world. He made a Philosophical Theology wherein he cast off the Old Testament, so that consequently the New would have no foundation.”

It is probable that Hariot was intellectually the backbone of Raleigh’s School of Night. He may also have been responsible for the enticing of the young gentlemen of which Parsons speaks, for he was a mathematical tutor to many youths of distinguished families. Among others, Robert Sidney, Sir Philip’s ‘sweet Robyn’. There is no direct evidence for Hariot being irreligious. When in Virginia, he read the Bible to the Indians with fervour; and in 1616, under the pain of cancer of the lips, he wrote to his physician:

“I believe in God Almighty, I believe that medicine was ordained by Him; I trust the physician as His minister. My faith is sure, my hope is firm. I wait however with patience for everything in its own time according to His providence. We must act earnestly, fight boldly, but in His name, and we shall conquer.”

Collectors of rare English books speak reverently and even mysteriously of the Quarto Hariot as they do of the First Folio. It is given to but few of them ever to touch or to see it, for not more than seven copies were in existence in the late 1800’s. Even four of these were locked up in public libraries, whence they are never likely to pass into private hands, except upon library theft. One copy in the Grenville Library; another in the Bodleian; a third in the University of Leyden; a fourth in the Lenox Library; a fifth in Lord Taunton’s; a sixth in Henry Huth’s, and a seventh produced £300 in 1883 in the Drake sale.

The little quarto volume of Hariot’s Virginia is as important as it is rare, and as beautiful as it is important. Few English books of its time, 1588, surpass it either in typographic execution or literary merit. It was not probably thrown into the usual channels of commerce, as it bears the imprint of a privately-printed book, without the name or address of a publisher, and is not found entered in the registers of Stationers’ Hall. It bears the arms of Sir Walter Raleigh on the reverse of the title, and is highly commended by Ralfe Lane, the late Governor of the Colony, who testifies,

“I dare boldly avouch it may very well pass with the credit of truth even amongst the most true relations of this age.”

It was manifestly put forth somewhat hurriedly to counteract, in influential quarters, certain slanders and aspersions spread abroad in England by some ignorant persons returned from Virginia, who

“would seem to know so much as no men more, and who had little understanding, less discretion, and more tongue than was needful or requisite.”

Hariot’s book is dated at the end; February 1588 that is 1589 by present reckoning. Raleigh’s assignment is dated March 7 following. It is probable therefore that the ‘influential quarters’ above referred to meant the Assignment of Raleigh’s Charter which would have expired by the limitation of six years on March 24, 1590 if no colonists had been shipped or plantation attempted. It is possible also that Theodore De Bry’s presence in London, may have hastened the printing of the volume. Indeed, the little book professes to be only an epitome of what might be expected, for near the end the author says,

“this is all the fruits of our labours, that I have thought necessary to advertise you of at present;” and, further on, “I have ready in a discourse by itself in manner of a Chronicle according to the course of times, and when time shall be thought convenient, shall also be published.”

Hariot’s Chronicle of Virginia among things long lost upon earth. It is to be hoped that someday the historic trumpet of Fame will sound loud enough to awaken it, together with Cabot’s lost bundle of maps and journals deposited with William Worthington; Ferdinand Columbus’ lost life of his father in the original Spanish; and Peter Martyr’s book on the first circumnavigation of the globe by the fleet of Magalhaens, which he so fussily sent to Pope Adrian to be read and printed, also lost. Hakluyt, in his volume of 1589, dated in his preface November 19, gives something of a chronicle of Virginian events, 1584–1589, with a reprint of this book. But there are reasons for believing that this is not the chronicle which Hariot refers to.

Without any preliminary flourish or subsequent reflections, the learned author simply and truthfully portrays in 1585 the land and the people of Virginia, the condition and commodities of the one, with the habits and character of the other, of that narrow strip of coast lying between Cape Fear and the Chesapeake, chiefly in the present State of North Carolina. This land, called by the natives Wingandacoa, was named in England in 1584 Virginia, in compliment to Queen Elizabeth. This name at first covered only a small district, but afterwards it possessed varying limits, extending at one time over North Virginia even to 45 degrees north.

Raleigh’s Virginia soon faded, but her portrait to the life is to be found in Hariot’s book, especially when taken with the pictures by Captain John White, so often referred to in the text. This precious little work is perhaps the most truthful, trustworthy, fresh, and important representation of primitive American human life, animals and vegetables for food, natural productions and commercial commodities that has come down to us. Though the ‘first colony’ of Raleigh, like all his subsequent efforts in this direction, was a present failure, Hariot and White have left us some, if not ample, compensation in their picturesque account of the savage life and lavish nature of pre-Anglo-Virginia, the like of which we look for in vain elsewhere, either in Spanish, French, or English colonization.

Thomas Hariot was born at Oxford, or as Anthony à Wood with more than his usual quaintness expresses it,

“tumbled out of his mother’s womb into the lap of the Oxonian muses in 1560.”

He was a battler or commoner of St Mary’s hall. He took the degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1579, and in the latter end of that year did complete it by determination in School Street. Nothing of his boyhood, or of his family, except a few hints in his will, has come to light. It is not known precisely at what time Hariot joined Walter Raleigh, who was only eight years his senior. From what their friend Hakluyt says of them both, their intimate friendship and mutually serviceable connection were already an old story as early as 1587. On the eighth calends of March 1587, that is on February 22, 1588 present reckoning, Hakluyt wrote from Paris to Raleigh in London:

To you therefore I have freely desired to give and dedicate these my labours. For to whom could I present these Decades of the New World [of Peter Martyr] more appropriately than to yourself, who, at the expense of nearly one hundred thousand ducats, with new fleets, are showing to us of modern times new regions, leading forth a third colony [to Virginia], giving us news of the unknown, and opening up for us pathways through the inaccessible; and whose every care, and thought, and effort tend towards this end, hinge upon and adhere to it. To whom have been present and still are present the same ideas, desires, and incentives as with that most illustrious Charles Howard, the Second Neptune of the Ocean, and Edward Stafford our most prudent Ambassador at the Court of France, in order to accomplish great deeds by sea and land.

But since by your skill in the art of navigation you clearly saw that the chief glory of an insular kingdom would obtain its greatest splendour among us by the firm support of the mathematical sciences, you have trained up and supported now a long time, with a most liberal salary, Thomas Hariot, a young man well versed in those studies, in order that you might acquire in your spare hours by his instruction a knowledge of these noble sciences; and your own numerous Sea Captains might unite profitably theory with practice.

What is to be the result shortly of this your wise and learned school, they who possess even moderate judgment can have no difficulty in guessing. This one thing I know, the one and only consideration to place before you, that first the Portuguese and afterwards the Spaniards formerly made great endeavours with no small loss, but at length succeeded through determination of mind. Hasten on then to adorn the Sparta [Virginia] you have discovered; hasten on that ship more than Argonautic, of nearly a thousand tons burthen which you have at last built and finished with truly regal expenditure, to join with the rest of the fleet you have fitted out.

From this extract one might perhaps reasonably infer that Hariot went directly from the University in 1580 at the age of twenty into Raleigh’s service, or at latest in 1582 when Raleigh returned from Flanders. As our translation of this important passage is rather a free one the old geographer’s words are here added, in his own peculiar Latin. Hakluyt in his edition of Peter Martyr’s Eight Decades, printed at Paris in 1587, writes of his young friend Hariot in his dedication to his older friend Sir Walter Raleigh.

From this early time for nearly forty years, till the morning of October 29, 1618 when Raleigh was beheaded, these two friends are found inseparable. Whether in prosperity or in adversity, in the Tower or on the scaffold, Sir Walter always had his Fidus Achates to look after him and watch his interests. With a sharp wit, close mouth, and ready pen Hariot was of inestimable service to his liberal patron. With rare attainments in the Greek and Latin Classics, and all branches of the abstract sciences, he combined that perfect fidelity and honesty of character which placed him always above suspicion even of the enemies of Sir Walter. He was neither a politician nor statesman, and therefore could be even in those times a faithful guide, philosopher, and friend to Raleigh.

The next early author whom we find speaking of Hariot is his lifelong friend and companion Robert Hues or Hughes in his Tractatus (1594). In the English edition of Robert Hues’ work, (London 1638), this very interesting but somewhat irrelevant passage appears as follows:

Among whom, the first that adventured on the discovery of these parts, were, Sir Hugh Willoughby, and Richard Chanceler: after them, Stephen Borough. And farther yet then either of these, did Arthur Pet, and Charles Lackman discover these parts. And these voyages were all undertaken by the instigation of Sebastian Cabot: that so, if it were possible, there might be found out a nearer passage to Cathay and China: yet all in vane; save only that by this means a course of traffic was confirmed betwixt us and the Moscovite.

When their attempts succeeded not this way, their next design was then to try, what might be done in the Northern Coasts of America: and the first undertaker of these voyages was Mr. Martin Frobisher, who was afterward seconded by Mr. John Davis. By means of all which Navigations, many errors of the Ancients, and their great ignorance was discovered.

But now that all these their endeavours succeeded not, our Kingdom at that time being well furnished in ships, and impatient of idleness, they resolved at length to adventure upon other parts. And first Sir Humphrey Gilbert with great courage and forces attempted to make a discovery of those parts of America, which were yet unknown to the Spaniard: but the success was not answerable. Which attempt of his, was afterward more prosperously prosecuted by that honourable Gentleman Sir Walter Raleigh: to whose means Virginia was first discovered unto us, the General of his Forces being Sir Richard Greenville, which country was afterwards very exactly surveyed and described by Mr. Thomas Hariot.

Robert Hues, who was an intimate friend and associate of Hariot, was born at Hertford in 1554. He became a poor scholar at Brazen nose, and was afterwards at St. Mary’s Hall with Hariot. He took his degree of A.B.in 1579. He is said to have been a good Greek scholar, and after leaving the University travelled and became an eminent geographer and mathematician. He attracted the attention, probably through Raleigh, of that noble patron of learning Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, who took him into his service, made him one of his scientific companions while in the Tower, supported him partly at Sion, entrusted him to instruct his children, and finally sent him to Oxford as tutor at Christ Church of his eldest surviving son, Algernon Percy, who on the death of his father on gunpowder treason day 1632, became the 10th Earl of Northumberland.

Hues died at Oxford May 24, 1632 and was buried in the Cathedral of Christ Church, according to the inscription on his monument. He is mentioned by Chapman in his translation of Homer’s Works (1616) as

“another right learned, honest, and entirely loved friend of mine.”

In 1595 Hariot was mentioned as a distinguished man of science in his Seaman’s Secrets by Captain John Davis the navigator, a friend and partner of Raleigh.

On July 11, 1596 Hariot under peculiar circumstances wrote a long and confidential letter to Sir Robert Cecil, Chief Secretary of State, in the interests of Raleigh’s Guiana projects. The letter is here given in full, as it shows better than anything else the close and confidential relations existing between Sir Walter and Hariot at that time.

Raleigh had returned from Guiana, his first El Dorado expedition, in August 1595, and had in the mean time employed such energy and enterprise that within about five months he had fitted out and dispatched his second El Dorado fleet under his friend Captain Keymis. This second expedition returned to Plymouth in June 1596, a few days after Raleigh had gone with Essex and Howard of Effingham on that world-renowned expedition against Cadiz. Raleigh appears to have left his affairs in the hands of his ever faithful Hariot, and hence this sensible and timely letter in the absence of his patron. There appears to have been no complaint against Keymis; but the master of his ship, Samuel Mace, seems to have been less discreet. The letter tells its own story, and gives a vivid picture of the intelligent earnestness of Raleigh respecting Guiana, and at the same time the earnest intelligence of Hariot during Raleigh’s absence in Spain.

Letter of Thomas Hariot To Mr. Secretary
Sir Robert Cecil 11

Right Honourable Sir,
These are to let you understand that whereas, according to your Honour’s direction, I have been framing of a Chart out of some such of Sir Walter’s notes and writings, which he hath left behind him, his principal Chart being carried with him, if it may please you, I do think most fit that the discovery of Captain Kemish be added, in his due place, before I finish it. It is of importance, and all Charts which had that coast before be very imperfect, as in many things else. And that of Sir Walter’s, although it were better in that part than any other, yet it was done but by intelligence from the Indians, and this voyage was specially for the discovery of the same; which is, as I find, well and sufficiently performed. And because the secrecy of these matters doth much import her Majesty and this State, I pray let me be so bold as to crave that the dispatch of the plotting and describing be done only by me for you, according to the order of trust that Sir Walter left with me, before his departure, in that behalf, and as he hath usually done heretofore. If your Honour have any notes from Sir Thomas Baskerville, if it may please you to make me acquainted with them, that which they will manifest of other particularities then that before Sir Walter hath described shall also be set down.

Although Captain Kemish be not come home rich, yet he hath done the special thing which he was enjoined to do, as the discovery of the coast betwixt the river of Amazons and Orinoco, where are many goodly harbours for the greatest ships her Majesty hath and any number; where there are great rivers, and more then probability of great good to be done by them for Guiana, as by any other way or to other rich countries bordering upon it. As also, the discovery of the mouth of Orinoco itself, a good harbour and free passage for ingresses and egresses of most of the ordinary ships of England, above three hundred miles into the country. Insomuch that Berreo wondered much of our men’s’ coming up so far; so that it seemeth they know not of that passage. Neither could they, or can possibly, find it from Trinidad; from whence usually they have made their discoveries. But if it be done by them the shortest way, it must be done out of Spain.

Now, if it shall please her Majesty to undertake the enterprise, or permit it in her subjects, by her order, countenance, and authority, for the supplanting of those that are now gotten thither, I think it of great importance to keep that which is done as secretly as we may, lest the Spaniards learn to know those harbours and entrances, and work to prevent us.

And because I understand that the master of the ship with Captain Kemish is somewhat careless of this, by giving and selling copies of his travels and plots of discoveries, I thought it my duty to remember it unto your wisdom, that some order might be taken for the prevention of such inconveniences as may thereby follow: by giving authority to some Justice, or the Mayor, to call him before them, and to take all his writings and charts or papers that concern this discovery, or any else, in other men’s’ hands, that he hath sold or conveyed them into; and to send them sealed to your Honour, as also to take bond for his further secrecy on that behalf. And the like order to be taken by those others, as we shall further inform your Honour of, that have any such plots, which yet, for mine own part, I know not of; or any other order, by sending for him up or otherwise, as to your wisdom shall seem best.

Concerning the Eldorado which hath been showed your Honour out of the Spanish book of Acosta, which you had from Wright, and I have seen, when I shall have that favour as but to speak with you I shall show you that it is not ours, that we mean, there being three. Nether doth he say, or mean, that Amazons River and Orinoco is all one, as some, I fear, do averse to your Honour; as by good proof out of that book alone I can make manifest; and by other means besides than this discovery, I can put it out of all doubt.

To be brief, I am at your Honour’s commandment in love and duty farther than I can solemnly express for haste. I will wait upon you at Court, or here at London, about any of these matters or any others, at any time, if I might have but that favour as to hear so much. I dare not presume of myself, for some former respects. My fidelity hath never been impeached, and I take that order that it never shall. I make no application. And I beseech your Honour to pardon my boldness, because of haste. My meaning is always good. And so I most humbly take my leave. This Sunday, 11th of July 1596.

Your Honour’s most ready at commandment in all services I may,
Tho. Hariot.
Addressed: To the Right Honourable Sir Robert Cecil, Knight Principal Secretary to Her Majesty, these endorsed: 11 July, 1596.
Mr Hariot to my Master.

The vigilant Secretary lost no time in acting upon Hariot’s suggestions. On July 31, Sir George Trenchard and Sir Ralph Horsey wrote to Cecil from Dorchester in reply to his instructions, that they had seized the charts and books of the ‘India Voyage’ [to Guiana] from one Samuel Mace and William Downe, which they would send up to the Secretary if desired. They were desired, and accordingly sent them by post on August 10. A few days later Raleigh returned to Plymouth with the first glorious news of the success of the English fleet at Cadiz; which news completely turned the heads of the people of England one way, and those of the Queen and the hungry politicians the other.
At what precise time Hariot, who never deserted Raleigh, became acquainted with Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, with whose honoured name, next to that of Raleigh’s, his must ever be associated, does not as yet appear. It is known, however, that there was an intimacy between Raleigh and Percy as early as 1586, when Raleigh presented Percy with a coat of mail on his going over to Flanders, and soon after a bedstead made of cedar from Virginia; while the Earl about the same time gave to Raleigh a ‘store coloured velvet saddle.’ From this time to the day of Raleigh’s triumph on the scaffold there exists plenty of evidence of their continued intimacy.

The earliest mention of Hariot’s name in connection with that of the Earl of Northumberland which we have met with is this of 1596, in the Earl’s pay-rolls, still preserved at Sion, and described in the Sixth Report of the Royal Commission of Historical Manuscripts, page 227, “To Mr. Herytt for a book of the Turk’s pictures, 7s.” It appears from the same rolls that from Michaelmas 1597 to 1610, if not earlier and later, an annual pension of £80 (not £120, or £150, £300, as variously stated) was paid to Hariot by the Earl. This pension was probably continued as long as Hariot lived; and besides there are not wanting many marks of the Earl’s liberality, friendship, and love for his companion and pensioner, who was long known as ‘Hariot of Sion on Thames,’ as expressed on his monument. In the Earl’s accounts for 1608 there is this entry, ‘Payment for repairing and finishing Mr Heriotts house at Sion.’

The Earl of Northumberland was a great book-collector, as appears by his payrolls. Books were carried from Sion to the Tower and back again, probably not only for the Earl’s own use when in captivity, but also for Raleigh’s in his writing of the History of the World. Many of these books, it is understood, are still preserved at Petworth, then and subsequently one of the Earl’s seats that were later occupied by the Earl of Leconsfield.

To look back a little, before either Raleigh or Henry Percy were shut up in the Tower, we find one of Hariot’s earliest and ablest mathematical disciples, Nathaniel Torporley, a learned clergyman, writing in high praise of him in his now rare mathematical book in Latin, entitled, Diclides Coelometricx, [Universal Gates of Astronomy] containing all the materials for calculation of the whole art in the moderate space of two tables, on a new general and very easy system, written by Nathaniel Torporley, of Shropshire, in his philosophical retreat, printed in 1602.

Raleigh’s imprisonment dragged long and as tersely and truly expressed by his son was, after thirteen years, beheaded for opposing the very thing he was condemned and sentenced for favouring. The whole story is a bundle of inconsistencies, like that of Henry Percy, the 9th Earl of Northumberland, committed to the Tower in 1606, and his fifteen years’ imprisonment. The stories of these two celebrated men are inseparably connected with that of Hariot. But it is not our purpose to trace either Raleigh or Percy’s progress through these long and dreary years any further than is necessary to illustrate the life of Hariot, who was the light of the outer world to them both. Incarcerated and watched as they were, Hariot was the ears, the eyes, and the hands of these two noble captives.

Raleigh, lodged in the Tower, innocent, as is now generally admitted, of the charges against him, but legally attainted of high treason, his worldly effects therefore escheated to the Crown. King James, out of pure cowardice (for he dared not carry out the sentence of the Court) waived the horrid parts of the sentence, and commuted it to execution by the block. He also waived the immediate forfeiture of property acquired under Elizabeth’s reign, and even allowed Raleigh to complete the entail of certain estates to his wife and son.

The Governor of the Tower and his Lieutenant were at first officially kind and friendly, extending many privileges to win his confidence. If there had been any treason in Sir Walter they would most certainly have worked it out of him, for his eyes at first were not fully open. He still believed in the honour and fidelity of his mock friends at Court. When no more satisfactory evidence of his guilt could be smuggled out of him, or his companions, in support of the unjust verdict, they began, in 1605, to abridge his privileges and darken his lights. At first his friends and visitors were cut down to a fixed number. There is a list among the William Cecil (Burghley) papers in the British Museum by which it appears that Lady Raleigh, her maid, and her son might visit. For this they took a house on Tower Hill near the old fortress, where they lived six years, or as long as this privilege lasted. Then Raleigh was to be allowed two men servants and a boy, who were to remain within the Tower. Besides these he was permitted to see on occasion, Mr Hawthorne, a clergyman; Dr Turner, his physician; Mr Johns, his surgeon; Mr Sherbery, his solicitor; his bailiff at Sherburne; and his old friend, Thomas Hariot, with no official designation.

It needs no ears under the walls of the Tower to tell us what were the duties of this learned and trusted friend, who had been Raleigh’s confidential factor for a quarter of a century in all his most important enterprises. Hariot, it will be perceived, was the only one named, in this house-list, without an assigned profession. Fortunately there is still preserved a ‘loggerhead of papers’ in Hariot’s handwriting, ill-assorted and hitherto un-sifted, which partially reveal the secrets of this prison-house, and show Hariot here, there, and everywhere, mixed up with all the studies, toils, experiments, books, and literary ventures of our honoured traitor.

To Raleigh’s child, he was unquestionably the designer, the architect and the finisher of his History of the World. To him is due the honour and credit of the work. But who was the builder? The answer manifestly is Thomas Hariot of Sion on Thames, learned, patient, self-forgetting, painstaking, long-waiting, devoted Hariot. Many writers have claimed to be, or have been named as, Raleigh’s assistants and polishers, like Ben Jonson, Rev. Dr Burhill, John Hoskins the poet, Francis Bacon and others have each had their advocates, but without sufficient evidence. It may well be questioned if any one of them possessed the ability, the time, the access to the Tower, or the opportunity to perform such herculean labours of love. These claims are apparently all based on pure conjecture, or uncertified gossip, as shown by Mr Bolton Corney in his majorly reply to D’Israeli. But Thomas Hariot, on the contrary, possessed abundantly what they all lacked, the necessary credentials. For proof of this assertion the doubter, as well as the lover of confirmed historical accuracy, is referred to the Hariot papers still preserved partly at Petworth and partly in the British Museum.

The Hariot manuscripts, of which there are thousands of folio pages all in his own handwriting, seem to be still in the same confused state in which he left them. He directed that the ‘waste’ should be weeded out of his mathematical papers and destroyed. But this duty seems, fortunately for us, to have been neglected by his executors, and hence among this ‘waste’ one has even now no great difficulty in recognizing in the well-known Latin handwriting of the ‘magician,’ many jottings in chronology, geography and science, and many abstracts and citations of the classics, that in their time must have played parts in the History of the World.

Hariot’s will lets in a flood of light on the history of these valued papers, and dispels a great deal of the heaps of foreign pretension, domestic assertion, and mixed charlatanism that have since 1784 beclouded the memories of both Raleigh and Hariot. It is true that on a hint in the previous century from Camden of a will by the great mathematician, many conjectures were afloat from the days of Pell, Collins, Wallis and Wood, but it has not been possible until now for one, with due knowledge of the main events in the lives of these two men, each equally great in his own sphere, to satisfactorily clear away any considerable portion of the misconception and misstatements of biographers and historians concerning them and their achievements.

On the day of Raleigh’s execution, being granted in the King’s Bench Court, on the afternoon of October 28, 1618 he asked for a little time for preparation, but his request was refused, Francis Bacon having already in his pocket the death warrant duly signed by the King before the meeting of the Court. Raleigh then asked for paper, pen and ink; and when he came to die that he might be permitted to speak at his farewell. To these last requests he appears to have received no reply, but was with indecent haste hustled off to the Gate House for execution early the next morning, October 29, Lord Mayor’s day, when it was expected that the crowd would go to the main city. However, there was a crowd, and probably in consequence he was not prohibited from speaking. He had prepared himself, and is said to have consulted a Note of Remembrance which he held in his hand while speaking. It is possible, that this very same Note still survives in ‘paper-saving’ Hariot’s ‘waste,’ for a precious little waif, all crumpled and soiled, just such a Note of Remembrance, it is believed, as Raleigh held in his hand and consulted during that ever memorable speech, has come down to us, and is now preserved among the Hariot papers in the British Museum. It has been recognized and identified by Mr Stevens, who has placed it, with other newly discovered documents respecting our philosopher. It is thought to possess internal evidence of having been drawn out before the speech, and is not therefore Hariot’s jottings of remembrance after it. But positive proof is wanting. It is beyond all doubt, however, in the well-known handwriting of Hariot, and is presumed to be the note of remembrance for the speech, made in the Gate House, probably from dictation, during the night before the execution. It appears as if hurriedly penned with a blunt quill, and is on a narrow strip of thin foolscap paper such as Hariot used. It is about twelve inches long and nearly four inches wide, about one-third of the lower part of the paper being blank. There is no heading, date, or anything else on the paper. It is rather difficult to read, but every word, letter and point have been made out, and the whole Note is here given, line for line, and verbatim, the heading and press-mark only being added:

Sir Walter Raleigh’s Note Or Remembrance
For his speech on the Scaffold October 29, 1618 12

Two fits of an ague. Thanks to god of calling god to witness. Note: That He Speak justly and truly. (1) Concerning his loyalty to ye King. French Agent, & Commission from ye French King. (2) Of Slanderous speeches touching his Majesty a French man, Sir L. Stukely. (3) Sir L. Stukely. My Lord Carewe. (4) Sir L. Stukely. My Lord of Danchaster. (5) Sir L. St: S’ Edward Perham. (6) Sir L. St. A letter on London highway 10000li. (7) Mine of Guiana. (8) Came back by constraint. (9) My Lord of Arundell. (10) Company used ill in ye Voyage. (11) Spotting of his face & counterfeiting sickness. (12) The Earl of Essex. Lastly, he desired ye company to join with him in prayer.

The Bank of England, built round the churchyard of St. Christopher, may be called the monument to Thomas Hariot.

Stay, traveller, tread lightly;
Near this spot lies what was mortal
of that most celebrated man
THOMAS HARRIOT.
He was the very learned Harriot
of Sion on Thames;
by birth and education
an Oxonian, Who cultivated all the sciences,
and excelled in all,
In Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, Theology.
A most studious investigator of truth, A most pious
worshipper of the Triune God,
At the age of sixty, or thereabouts,
He bade farewell to mortality, not to life,
July 2d A.D. 1621.

Camden says that Hariot left his property to Viscount Lisle and Sir Thomas Aylesbury. Lord Lisle’s share of the papers appear to have been given up to his father-in-law, Henry Earl of Northumberland, who had been Hariot’s munificent patron, and they descended with the family property to the E. of Egremont, by whom a large portion has been given to the British Museum, and the remainder are still preserved at Petworth. Sir Thomas Aylesbury’s share became the property of his son-in-law Lord Chancellor Clarendon, to whom the Royal Society applied, but without obtaining them. 13

On August 11, 1607 John Kepler writes to Thomas Hariot, from Prague, thanking him for his table, which supplies matter for serious consideration; asks questions as to how he defines the angles of incidence and refraction; goes on to discuss the reasons of refraction; agrees with Hariot as to his views about the Rainbow but will be very glad to receive his treatises on Colours and the Rainbow. Another philosopher, Francis Bacon, also was in touch with Kepler via Tobie Matthews; Bacon’s sixth edition Sylva Sylvarum, published in 1651, page 176 talks of rainbows:

“It hath been observed by the Ancients, that when a Raine Bow seemeth to hang over or to touch, there breaketh forth a sweet smell. The cause is, for that this happenth but in certain matters which have in themselves some sweetness, which the Gentle Dew of the Raine Bow doth draw forth. And the like do soft showers; for they also make the ground sweet. But none are so delicate as the Dew of the Raine Bow, where it falleth. It may be also that the water itself hath some sweetness: for the Raine Bow consisteth of a glomeration of small drops which cannot possibly fall but from the Air that is very low. And therefore may hold giving sweetness of the herbs and flowers, as a distilled water.” 14

Was Kepler requiring information also from Bacon as from Hariot on Rainbows? As Francis Bacon played upon anagrams, so did Hariot. Among the manuscripts in the handwriting of Hariot in the British Museum (Add. 6789) are these samples of ingenious triflings. Here are a few specimens on his own name:

ANAGRAMS ON THOMAS HARIOTUS

Another member of Raleigh’s School of Night, was the already mentioned, Lawrence Keymis, a scholar and a sailor. He had been made a Fellow of Ballio in 1583; later he became Notary and Bursar, and remained Fellow till 1591. He was skilled in geography and mathematics to a fair degree. He could turn a neat Latin verse and must have been a man of general culture. In 1595 he accompanied Raleigh on a voyage to Guiana; he led the expedition of 1596 and wrote an account of it when he returned. For the rest of his life, Captain Keymis devoted himself to the service of Raleigh, regardless of the above-mentioned letter from Hariot to Robert Cecil about Keymis’ unnatural activities, in 1596; Raleigh was imprisoned for him in 1603. And this emerges in one of the bypasses during Raleigh’s trial:

Raleigh. This poor man (Keymis) hath been close prisoner these eighteen weeks. He was offered the rack to make him confess.

Lord Henry Howard. No circumstance moveth me more than this: Keymishe was never at the rack. The King gave charge that no rigour should be used.

The Other Commissioners. We protest before God, there was no such matter to our knowledge.

Raleigh. Was not the keeper of the rack sent for: and he threatened with it?

Sir William Waad. When Mr. Solicitor and myself came to examine Keymishe we told him “he deserved the rack” but did not threaten him with it.

The Other Commissioners. It was more than we knew.

During the years in the Tower, Keymis, like Hariot, acted as Raleigh’s agent. He advised Lady Raleigh about the management of the states, and became one of the trustees for Sherborne. It was chiefly on his information that the last expedition of Guiana was undertaken, and when Raleigh fell sick on the coast, he led the expedition up-country in which young Raleigh was killed.

In public, Keymis was hated, but the personal servants and the sailors whom he commanded were always loyal to him. At his execution he remembered a cook who had been accused of poisoning him, but who, having once been his servant, he was sure would go a thousand miles to do him good.

Raleigh’s relations with Keymis are as significant in their personal implications as those with Hariot. Such were the men who gathered in Raleigh’s house for discussion. There was also Kit Marlowe, poet and government agent; Chapman, poet and recluse; and perhaps ‘the first poet of the age’ who was no recluse, though exiled.

The connection of Spenser with Raleigh’s circle must remain conjectural, regardless of Delia Bacon’s Introduction; but if he were in contact with Marlowe sometime in the eighties, it would explain how Marlowe came to see a manuscript of the Faerie Queene before writing Tamburlaine Part II., and so to borrow the passage about the almond tree. Certainly Spenser’s philosophic ideas have a great resemblance to those of Raleigh’s School.

In 1593 Raleigh made a notable speech in defence of the Brownists in the House of Commons. In 1594 he sat up all night talking with the Jesuit John Cornelius who was imprisoned for his faith, whereas in 1591 he had championed the imprisoned Puritan John Udall, and even joined forces with Essex to petition the Queen for him.

Raleigh needed to be a schemer of a different school that Francis Bacon was chief master of; he needed to cultivate the truth and the false ever so intently standing before him. His School of Nights did just that; and if Bacon’s interest was to experiment on ‘Truth’, he would not stay for an answer, but instead, entered as a member as did Richard Baines, the libeller and traitor to Marlowe.