“Such men as he are born once in a century. The warriors who are thinkers. The scholars with the courage to fight. In times of peace they rot, presumed upon by lesser men who fear their brilliance and their superiority. They are banished into obscurity by their fellows or their monarchs, pursued by envy and spite or ignored and derided. Only in need and in time of great peril do other men turn to them. L-Look at your master! A man chock full of faults I who know him so well would not deny one of them but also a man so full of talents and inspiration that he is like one with a quiverful of arrows, each sharp and true. A born leader, the greatest living strategist, a poet, a philosopher, an essayist, an orator, a skilled musician, a s-soldier, an explorer, a founder of new Englands overseas. The crowds hate him, the leaders of the country ignore him, the Queen banishes him. But we who know him we who know him, Killigrew, live to serve him! “
I thought as I climbed the spiral staircase that Laurence Keymis would never have spoken to me so freely if he had not been full of wine.
After Keymis had left Sir Walter remained in very low spirits. He felt, he said, that he had turned away from his true mission in search of a more immediate prize and a less enduring glory. Then, as often, he fell sick. He was certain he had a stone in the kidney, and sent for works on anatomy and surgery to see how it might be removed. Bess Ralegh waited on him personally, and on the fifth day he was suddenly weld again and writing a long urgent personal message to Essex on the recruitment of sailors for the fleet.
This done he turned to another interest. While ill he had had two young dogs for company in his room and he had been observing their behaviour.
“Animals,” he desired me to write down, “of a certainty can communicate one with another and have reasoning powers of a lower but similar order to man. Their senses, however, are .. more highly refined. Therefore I cannot see that my perception or any man’s perception is better than theirs. In so far as perceiving is a matter of sense and what else can it be then I can advance no reason why my apprehension of reality is preferable to theirs. If our perceptions differ, they may be in truth and I in error just as well as I in truth and they err. If I must be believed before them, then my perception must be proven truer than theirs. Without proof none should be asked to believe it. Even if by demonstration it seem to be true, then will it be a question whether it be indeed as it seems to be. To allege as a certain proof what of its nature must be uncertain is absurd!”
That night none of his favourite companions was in the house and he had only Lady Ralegh and me and Victor Hardwicke on whom to sharpen this argument. He paced up and down in his black satin suit, discoursing at us and expecting us to challenge his reasoning while we sat for the most part helplessly by.
It must have been about the fifth or sixth of February, and a gale was howling outside. A log fire burned in the hearth and half up the chimney. The two dogs, the object of his argument, lay well fed and dog-sleeping before the fire, their ears twitching once and again as their master passed, but giving no other sign of superior perception. The firelight flickered on Lady Ralegh’s composed face, on her dark velvet robe with its tufted sleeves and long hanging cuffs, and the close gown of white satin under it, on the chains of pearls at neck and waist.
I wondered if this gale would be blowing round the Cornish coast and whether my father was safe home after his experience. His creditors were becoming more desperate. So therefore would he. I wondered what it was like in Paul and where the Reverend and Mrs Reskymer were sleeping. Perhaps it would be cold and the Reverend Reskymer would say “Come into my bed this way we shall keep each other warm.” And Sue would slip out shivering in the dark, her hair like seaweed, her face like a water lily drifting in the dark, her night shift a reflection of the moon. So she would lie beside him, soft and slim and straight and he would put out his hand and stroke her thighs …
“Well, Maugan,” said Sir Walter, stopping in front of me. “What have you to say to that?”
“Sir,” I said, “I believe my apprehension of reality to be preferable to any, for I have not heard a word of what you’ve said.”
Lady Ralegh drew in a sharp breath at this insolence, which was greater than at first appeared, but Sir Walter after looking surprised suddenly laughed. He seldom laughed.
“You assert that my philosophical speculations have no validity outside the brain that breeds them? A stinging rebuke! Well, it’s true that intellectual speculation may run ahead of reason. But the reason of man in itself ends and dissolves like a river running into a sea. What do you advocate an end of curiosity? You at your age? Between birth and death, Maugan, there’s little time. What there is is not entirely wasted if it strikes a balance between questioning and faith.”
That week he rode again to London and supped in the company of Lord Admiral Howard, Lord Thomas Howard, the Earl of Essex, Sir Francis Vere, Sir Conyers Clifford and our cousin Sir George Carew. It must have been a strange meal for I knew that Sir Walter was on bitter terms with Lord Thomas Howard and he seldom saw eye to eye with Sir Francis Vere. However, he came back a Rear Admiral for the purposes of the expedition. The Queen still would not see him, but her consent to this appointment showed that his disgrace was less deep than it had been.
In the succeeding weeks the whole house was caught up in feverish preparations. Sir Walter was more often in London than at Sherborne, but without warning he would suddenly arrive, mud spattered, out of temper and on edge, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied, but always turning the house upside down.
With his second-in-command, a grizzled sailor of forty called Robert Crosse, who was Francis Drake’s favourite captain, Sir Walter had been given the responsibility of enlisting or otherwise obtaining crews for such of the ships as were to commission in the Thames. Most of these ships were transports and victuallers; they were scattered from Gravesend to Greenwich, and some were in poor shape and needed serious repair.
In March Cecil received secret confirmation of Drake’s capture of Havana, and he withdrew his opposition to the expedition, though he warned the Privy Council that a serious obstacle was appearing from another quarter. King Henry of France was bankrupt and weary of war. In order to keep him in the field at all he needed support. He needed, he said, an English army.
What was worse he now knew it existed. Massing some 10,000 strong under its finest commander, it was preparing to embark in English warships on one of the biggest enterprises ever to leave England not, however, to succour the French but to aid some secret adventure farther afield, perhaps to defend Ireland or to attack Blavet. This was not good enough. Though Henry distrusted English intentions to the extent that he would not grant them the port of Calais, which he held with a strong garrison, he wanted their troops inland at this crucial time. Meantime he edged nearer and nearer to that ominous peace treaty with Spain. The only way of preventing such a treaty might be to accede to his demands.
Sir Walter was in a fever lest the whole expedition should now come to nothing. The sixteenth of March was a Saturday and the day, I learned, when Sir Robert Cecil was drafting the Generals’ commissions which would give them authority to take this formidable fleet and army away from English shores. The Queen, said Sir Walter at dinner, though the most gifted and the most brilliant woman he had ever met, was much given to indecision. Now of all times she might be excused for hesitation in the signing. On her choice might hang the future of the world.
When home he would usually find respite from his activity in London by other activities of body or mind, all undertaken with the zest of youth; but now he drooped. One of his sick spells loomed. It rained all Sunday morning, and after divine service he retired to his study and sent word that he would take a light dinner in his room. Arthur Throgmorton and Carew Ralegh played at backgammon all afternoon, a game that was never now brought out in Sir Walter’s presence. Once he had played it largely, but since his friend Christopher Marlowe had been killed in a duel originating at the board he would not have the draughtsmen near him.