When the manuscript was finished he took it to London to find a printer, who must, he said, set it out before the New Year. He was much up and down to Durham House in those months with Keymis and Carew Ralegh; but I was usually left behind. Only once did I go with him and stayed three days. I saw then what state he still kept in London.
On the second day I had time off and went with an apprentice staying in the house to a performance at the Blackfriars Theatre. There I saw a Greek play performed in English. It was called Oedipus and was about a young man who had incestuous relations with his mother and murdered his father, not knowing until too late who they were. This made a profound impression on me. Partly perhaps it was because it was the first play I had ever seen, but mainly the subject of the play bit deep into my mind. It was as if the story laid bare knowledge I had never reached to before but which I had always had.
All that winter Elizabeth Ralegh stayed at Sherborne with her son, so I attended on her often. Sir Walter was a deeply complex character, difficult, volatile, unpredictable, of sudden tremendous energies and equal depressions; his wife had a resolved calmness which cushioned these explosive forces. It was only when he was away that one discovered how much the effort cost her; she would herself be irritable and exhausted and at a low ebb though she never ceased to count the days till his return.
Before I left Cornwall Mrs Killigrew had been much concerned for my spiritual safety at being put in Ralegh’s charge. Sir Walter, she said, had more than once come near to being brought to trial for atheism; not long ago a commission had sat to determine what evidence there was to proceed; it was acknowledged that he had been a close and loving friend of that noted rake and blasphemer, Kit Marlowe, and there were rumours of much evil in his home; that a friend of his had been seen to tear out leaves of the Bible to dry tobacco on, that God was as often cursed as praised in his presence. I wondered if Mrs Killigrew would still think my soul in peril if she had seen me walking with Lady Ralegh on the green terrace below the house of a winter’s afternoon, or playing ball with Wat in one of the preached alleys, or trying to help Lady Ralegh with her erratic spelling when she wrote an important letter, or fishing for trout with Hardwicke, a cousin of theirs, or listening to George Chapman putting forward his profound Christian convictions at the supper table.
What did obtain in this house, as distinct from any other I ever knew, was that no dogma was accepted without a fair examination of its merits. Royden, the free-thinker, or Hariot, the mathematician, were as free to express their views and just as subject to examination and criticism on them. No opinions were sacrosanct.
After Sir Walter in importance in the house and greater in intellectual stature was this Thomas Hariot. Of Lancashire blood but Oxford birth, he had first been Sir Walter’s mathematical tutor, though himself by eight years the younger; then later he had been steward for the new Sherborne estate. Now, though no longer living permanently in the house, he was still Ralegh’s personal accountant and adviser. Few knew the limits of his genius. The scandalous Marlowe had once asserted that “Moses was but a juggler and Hariot can do more than he,” and there were others who thought him little less capable.
It was round him, I thought, rather than round Sir Walter that it seemed likely that accusations of blasphemy might centre, for in talk one night I heard him cast away the whole of the Old Testament and throw grave doubts on the divine inspiration of the New. Nor, he said, did he believe in the story of the creation of the world nor in any of the miracles. Natural laws, he said, could not be disrupted by spiritual forces nor, if there. was a God, would it be in the divine interest so to disrupt them.
Recently he had accepted the patronage of the Earl of Northumberland, and now divided his time between Sherborne and Isleworth where he was building himself a telescope on the principles laid down by Roger Bacon three hundred years ago. When it was finished he hoped this telescope would magnify the sun and the moon and the stars by fifty times. He was an enthusiastic believer in the atheistic theory that the earth revolved round the sun, and he often strove vainly I am glad to say to convince Sir Walter of this.
According to Keymis who was himself a mathematician, Hariot was turning topsy-turvy the whole science of algebra. Keynus tried to explain to me something of his new methods. Equations had long existed but for the most part were cumbersome and unusable; Hariot, again by some magic which I could not follow, brought all the symbols over to one side and equated them to zero. While I could not see quite how it was done I could just perceive the gateway that this opened and the vast empires of unexplored thought which lay beyond.
Hariot, though so brilliant, suffered from ill-health and lassitude. Keymis said he was a fool not to publish more of his speculations and conclusions otherwise lesser men or later men would seize upon his ideas and take the credit but Hariot would not bestir himself. Ideas were of the brain and needed only intellectual energy of which he had a plenitude. Promulgating those ideas in written form needed application at the desk and physical effort.
No less than Hariot, Sir Walter too was prone to ill-health and lassitude. Running along with his great energy, his intense application to whatever he had in view, his enthusiasm for the new idea or the splendid conception, was a narrow streak of hypochondria. He would of a sudden and without good reason become utterly depressed about his prospects of success and about his health. Once in a month or so he would be taken with pains in his abdomen or with serious digestive disorders or with gout in his back which would prostrate him and, when it was gone, leave him in complete melancholia for a day or so. Not even his wife or son could shift him out of it before it was due time. He would never be seen by an apothecary but would dose himself with infusions of bark or herbs brought back from his travels.
Even when in good health he was fond of experimenting on himself with dosages and brews; sometimes out of scientific interest, sometimes I believe out of a morbid curiosity in his own body’s strength and weakness. All around him who were unable to refuse were dosed from time to time, I among them; and I believe it was his sudden discovery that I knew something of the uses of herbs that weakened the barrier which my youth and his great position put between us.
The samples of strange medicines and infusions he had brought back from the Indies filled half a room, and where Katherine Footmarker would have been satisfied to make from them a salve to cure a burn, he would delight in heating the ingredients in a crucible to see if they would explode. Many times he burst tubes and bottles and the mixture ran to waste on the floor. Sometimes he would laugh like a mischievous boy at the result.
It was strange to see him so, because most times the shadows sat upon his face as if they marked it for their own.
After he came back from Cornwall he was much busied writing a forceful report of the deficiencies of the defencesof the West Country. He also wrote constantly on war matters to the Privy Council, bombarding them with ideas and suggestions and warnings. His policy was always that offense was the best defence, and he argued that if an attack on England were to be warded off, a resumption of active war was the best way to avert it. He even offered to send a pinnace at his own expense to discover so far as it could the present state of Spanish preparations. For the most part it seemed that the Privy Council paid no heed to his advice.