July 1960
Whenever one reads about them, one is chiefly struck by the tremendous range of the Elizabethans - that the great ones were neither specialist nor common men is more palpably evident - both their actions and their words ring with a magnificent energy, in comparison with which we seem merely to fumble and mutter. Sir Walter Raleigh, ‘the last of the Elizabethans’, and certainly one of the greatest, with a vision which seems to have been on the scale of Henry the Navigator, stands by himself in one respect: that his manifold capacities - soldier, sailor, courtier, explorer, enlightened colonist, scientific discoverer, poet and author - all seem to have radiated from a heart as pure as it was active: in his age of blood and gold and poetry, when cupidity, treachery and violence were household equipment, Raleigh always lived on a larger, more innocent scale. Even his ‘bloody pride’ seems to have had an impersonal and redeeming element. Thus he served his country steadily in the face of the ageing Elizabeth’s lonely and possessive caprices which were often wearisome and sometimes dangerous and even more remarkably through the pusillanimous James’s uttermost malevolence. This, apart from the ordering of Raleigh’s trial, which has since been acknowledged as ‘a trial marked from first to last by injustice and crime’ and having him condemned ‘for being a friend to the Spaniard’ (there were no witnesses to substantiate the Crown’s allegations, and a year later four of the Judges concerned were secretly allotted pensions for any information they could supply to Spain), degenerated to sheer treachery when, not daring to execute Raleigh in the face of public opinion and so keeping him in the Tower for thirteen years, James sent him out as English Admiral to Guiana to find a gold mine, and having procured from Raleigh all the private particulars of his ships, armaments and proposed ports of call, sold them to the Spanish. When Raleigh returned, he was again condemned, this time for ‘being an enemy to Spain’, and put to death. James signing the warrant to coincide with the Lord Mayor’s Day, in the entirely vain hope that the pageant and fine shows would take the people’s mind of Raleigh.
Raleigh’s achievements were so various, his aims so wide and his disappointments so bitter that to understand him in relation to his contemporaries, and Miss Irwin not only throws a clear and in some cases new light upon them, she also shows how, throughout his life, he was quite unable to take their vanities and weaknesses into account. This landed him in the Tower for the first time when he married (for love) one of Elizabeth’s Maids of Honour; it generated such jealousy in Robert Cecil and Sir Edward Coke, and above all in James - none of whom could measure up to him and knew it - that they stripped him of his estates, appointments, liberty, and finally his life. Only their attempts upon his honour and the public affection in which he was held defeated them, and with these he died in most confident serenity. This portrait, in its informed and careful excellence, is an utterly absorbing piece of work, beautifully written, shining with Miss Irwin’s good appreciation of its hero and feeding - as this kind of book should - one’s curiosity to know more.