Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/88

74 less severe by the presence in the Tower of other prisoners of intelligence, and more than all the rest of the earl of Northumberland, whom we have already noticed as collecting round him in his prison men of science and literature, and thus converting his cell into a palace of knowledge and refined delight. Northumberland was another of those men who delighted in learning, whom a king really wise and learned would have delighted to honour. But James's love was not a love of learning or literature on its own account, it was a love of himself. It was the vanity of passing for a sagacious and learned king which he possessed, and not the sagacity and the learning themselves. Therefore, so far from cherishing science and learning, and loving the possessor of them, James was too shallow to comprehend the one, and so egotistical that he hated the other. Northumberland had been in prison ever since the year of the gunpowder plot, 1605, eleven years, a victim to the suspicions of the king and the tyranny of the star-chamber, for no participation in the plot was ever proved against him. Amongst his visitants and pensioners were, as we have stated, the most profound mathematicians of the age, Allen, Hariot, Warner, "the Atlantes of the mathematical world," Burchill, the celebrated Greek and Hebrew scholar, and other noted characters. Amongst them Sir Walter found the pleasure of cultivating inquiries which his busy public and court life had before kept unknown to him. He commenced a series of chemical experiments, and the celebrated Lucy Hutchinson, who was the daughter of Sir Allen Apsley, lieutenant of the Tower, in the preface to her interesting life of her husband, colonel Hutchinson, says, "Sir Walter Raleigh and Mr. Ruthin, being prisoners in the Tower, and addicting themselves to chemistry, my mother suffered them to make their rare experiments at her cost, partly to comfort and divert the poor prisoners, and partly to gain the knowledge of their experiments and the medicines, to help such poor people as were not able to seek physicians."

In these chemical inquiries, Sir Walter imagined that he had discovered a universal panacea. The queen in an illness had taken it, and appeared cured by it, and afterwards, as we have seen, tried it in the case of prince Henry, but without effect.

Sir Walter next turned his attention to history, and commenced a history of the world, a gigantic undertaking, but no doubt one that offered great consolation to the mind of a prisoner for life, from the very fact of its immensity, thus promising to him a constant forgetfulness of his captivity, and a busy discursiveness amid the peoples of the whole world. Such men as Burchill, who was not only a great classical scholar, but distinguished Latin poet, could furnish him with books and translations, by which means he has displayed so vast an acquaintance with Greek and rabbinical writers. Raleigh commenced his history for the instruction of prince Henry, who had a great regard for the author, and the death of that prince, in 1612, gave a check to the undertaking, and the whole which Raleigh completed, extends from the Creation to about a century and a half before the Christian era.

The fall of Carr, in 1614, and the rise of Buckingham, awoke new hopes of liberty in Raleigh. His friends made zealous applications to the favourite, which for a time produced little effect, because the true persuasive with the greedy Villiers family was not applied. Meantime, Raleigh managed to interest secretary Winwood in a grand scheme which he had for discovering and working gold mines in Guiana Raleigh, as our readers are aware, was of a romantic and adventurous turn. The admirals Drake, Hawkins, and Frobisher, with whom he had had the honour of defeating the grand Armada, had brought home immense treasure from the Spanish and Portuguese territories of South America. Raleigh himself had been engaged in the scheme of settling Virginia in North America, in the year 1584, when he procured a patent from Elizabeth—a copy of one granted still earlier to his half-brother. Sir Humphrey Gilbert—with full power to discover and settle any heathen lands not already in the possession of any Christian prince. In consequence, he had equipped various expeditions to the coast of Virginia, which, however, had all proved failures, and Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who conducted one of them, lost his life at sea. Sir Walter's enterprises, which had cost him much money, were immediate failures, failures to himself and his associates, but ultimate successes to the country, for they led to the settlement of that great northern American continent.

But still earlier, in 1595, he had made a voyage to Guiana. The glories of Drake and the other piratical admirals, and the wondrous legend of the golden empire of Guiana, with its inconceivable affluence, and the reported splendour of its capital, Manoa, called by the Spaniards El Dorado, or the golden city, inflamed his imagination. He sailed thither, touching at Trinidad, as if on his way to Virginia; and the Spaniards, deluded by this belief, entered into friendly relations, and bartered various commodities with him. But suddenly Raleigh, watching his opportunity, fell on the garrison, killed the guard, and secured the person of Berrio, the governor, whom he carried away as guide to Guiana, Berrio having already settled a colony there. This transaction, which was in the true spirit of Drake and the rest, who acted in those regions as if the Spaniards were at war, though they were at entire peace with England, was one of the charges afterwards brought against him. To this Raleigh replied that Berrio, at Trinidad, had formerly made prisoners of eight Englishmen, and that to leave him at his back when he was about to ascend the Orinoco, was to have been an ass. Whether the story of the eight Englishmen was true or not, it was clearly no business of Raleigh's, and the real motive was partly the last assigned, to secure so dangerous a person as Berrio, and at the same time so valuable a guide. In fact, Raleigh, with all his genius, was never renowned for very scrupulous ideas of right and wrong, and shared in all the loose maritime notions of the age.

Thus provided, he sailed for the Orinoco, and advanced up it three hundred miles in boats. He seems to have heard many wonderful rumour of gold mines, and cities built of gold and silver, and embossed with precious stones; but he discovered no magnificent Manoa, with pinnacles blazing with diamonds and rubies, nor any gold mines, only signs of gold in the mountains beyond the Spanish town of St. Thomas. He gave out to the natives that he was come to relieve them of the Spaniards, and by their assistance explored the country for a month, when the waters of the mighty Orinoco rose so