policy of peace by pardoning all the rebels except Desmond and his brothers. For a time Ormond was withdrawn, and the government of Munster given in commission to Raleigh and two others. Raleigh had his headquarters first at Lismore and afterwards at Cork. From Lismore he wrote, in August, 1581, to the Earl of Leicester, as an adherent whom the earl appeared to have forgotten: "Your honour having no use of such poor followers hath utterly forgotten me. Yet I will be found as ready and dare as much in your service as any man you may command." In December, 1581, Raleigh left Cork for England with despatches. In February, 1582, Raleigh—who often signed his name as it was pronounced, Rauley, and had his name written by others Rawley-went in the train of Leicester to Raleigh in the Netherlands as part of the escort of the Duke of Anjou to Antwerp, Anjou being then Duke of 1582-1586. Brabant and chosen sovereign of the Netherlands. In April, 1582, there was a new warrant for a commission to Raleigh in Ireland. He was to be captain of a band of footmen, "chiefly that our pleasure is to have our servant Walter Rawley trained some time longer in that our realm for his better experience in martial affairs"; but also his charge was to be committed to a lieutenant until his arrival in Ireland, because he is for some considerations detained in England." One consideration that detained Raleigh in England was the queen's high favour, which at this time he acquired. He remained at Court, and did not return to military service in Ireland. In May, 1583, Captain Raleigh's influence with the queen caused him to be intercessor, by Lord Burghley's wish, for the Earl of Oxford, who was in trouble. for a brawl with Thomas Knevett, of the Privy Council. Raleigh was then thirty years old, poet and man of action, vigorous of mind and body; as a courtier tall, handsome, richly dressed; with oval features, dark hair, and dark eyes. He shared his half-brother's enthusiasm for colonisation. He was adventurous, and would take upon himself responsibilities at sea by which his country might be served and the Government not compromised. He sang the queen's praise as Cynthia. He poured into her ear in private talk great dreams of empire yet to be acquired beyond the sea, that should balance or outweigh the power drawn by Spain from the New World. To what good use he could put ships sent out under his own private orders, if he were but rich enough to put much money to such uses! The queen, warmed by the eloquence that set such visions before her and appealed to by what was noble in her sense of her great office, began now to heap upon Raleigh the means of making money. She began in March, 1584, and continued in 1585, 1587, 1589, to bestow on him profitable grants of licence to export woollen broadcloths. She gave him, in 1584, a valuable licence for the farm of wines. In July, 1585, she made him, upon the death of Francis Earl of Bedford, Lord Warden of the Stannaries. Two months later she made him Lieutenant of the county of Cornwall, and soon afterwards Vice-Admiral of Cornwall and Devon. The conspiracy of Anthony Babington, that led in 1586 to his attainder, was followed on the seventeenth of March, 1587, by the queen's grant to Raleigh of nearly all the estates Babington had forfeited. To his small patrimony in Devonshire there were thus added three manors and other lands in Lincolnshire; a manor, besides other lands and tenements, in Derbyshire; and possessions in Nottinghamshire. In the same year, 1587, Raleigh succeeded Sir Christopher Hatton as Captain of the Queen's Guard. That was an office costly to its holder, but it gave the gain of constant nearness to the person of the queen. To the expedition made by his half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, for the colonisation of Newfoundland, Colonisation: Newfoundland and Sir Humphrey Gilbert. in 1583-the last year before the expiration of his charter -Raleigh contributed the largest of the five vessels, a bark named The Raleigh. On Monday, the fifth of August, Gilbert, in the name of the queen, took possession of the harbour of St. John and two hundred leagues every way around it, so planting the first English colony in North America. On his way homeward, after many troubles, in his little craft The Squirrel of ten tons burthen, his friends on The Golden Hind, a companion vessel, saw him on the ninth of September, 1583, sitting in storm abaft The Squirrel with a book in his hand. When they were tossed within hearing he called to them, "Courage, friends! We are as near heaven by sea as by land." At midnight the watch on The Golden Hind saw the lights of The Squirrel disappear as the waves swept over the little overloaded craft, engulphing all who were on board. Colonisa Raleigh and But the work went on. The spirit of Humphrey Gilbert was in Walter Raleigh, who, on the twenty-fifth of March in the next year, 1584, obtained for himself, his heirs, and assigns, a new charter empowering tion: Walter him to discover remote heathen and barbarous lands not actually possessed by any Christian prince nor inhabited by Christian people; to hold them, by the queen's letters patent, with licence to inhabit or remain, build and fortify, at his or their discretion. Power was given him to take such of the queen's subjects as should willingly accompany him, and to use sufficient shipping and furniture for their transportation. He was to have all rights and royalties within the lands so colonised and the seas adjoining, reserving only to the Crown of England homage and a fifth part of all the ore of gold and silver that might be obtained. All inhabitants of such lands, and persons born in them after they had been colonised, were to have "all the privileges of free denizens and persons native in England in such ample manner as if they were born and personally resident in Our said realm." A few days after the granting of this charter Raleigh sent out two captains, Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlow, who, in July, 1584, took possession of Roanoake. This was the first act in the foundation of the colony named, after the Virgin Queen Elizabeth, Virginia. The right to give that name to the fertile region which it was now proposed to colonise was granted after the return of the discoverers in September, 1584. For this service Raleigh was knighted, and he then described himself as Sir Walter Raleigh, Lord and Governor of Virginia. By the end of March, in 1585, Raleigh had ready a new fleet of seven sail, that left Plymouth in April, with Sir Richard Grenville in command of the expedition, and a hundred householders. The householders were to become colonists under the direction of Ralph Lane, who had Philip Amadas for his deputy. No householder who joined in this adventure was offered less than five hundred acres of land. The colonists fell into difficulties and disasters which the coloniser sought continually, with undaunted energy, to avert or overRaleigh is said to have spent forty thousand pounds upon this effort to lay the foundations of another England on the other side of the Atlantic. It was for this work with a high aim that the queen honoured him, and gave him the substantial marks of favour by which he was helped to bear the heavy costs of his experiment. come. Spenser, meanwhile, remained in Ireland. On the twenty-second of March, 1581, he obtained by purchase Spenser in Ireland: 1581 to 1586. from Lodowick Bryskett the office of Clerk of the Irish Court of Chancery, or Registrar of Chancery for the Faculties. He held that office until 1588, when he was made Clerk of the Council of Munster. In the year 1581, Spenser obtained also a lease of the abbey and castle and manor of Enniscorthy, in Wexford. This he sold at once to Richard Synot, who sold it again, ten or eleven years later, to Sir Henry Wallop. With help of the money received for Enniscorthy, Spenser bought for re-sale another abbey in New Ross. In January, 1582, Spenser was entered in a list furnished by the Lord Deputy of persons benefited by the forfeited estates, as having a lease for six years of a house in Dublin, part of the forfeited estate of Lord Baltinglas. There was also entered in this list " a custodiam of John Eustace's land of the Newland to Edmund Spenser, one of the Lord Deputy's secretaries." On the twenty-fourth of August, 1582, letters patent were passed to Edmund Spenser giving possession of the dissolved House of Minorites of the New Abbey in the county of Kildare for twenty-one years, at a rent of sixty shillings, but when no rent had been paid for seven years and a half that lease was forfeited. Again, in the year 1582, the Book of Concordatums has an entry of £162 granted to Spenser for "rewards," or secret service money, paid by him as secretary to the Lord Deputy. On the thirty-first of August, 1582, Arthur Lord Grey of Wilton received the letter of recall for which he had long petitioned. Since the affair of the Fort del Ore he had frustrated a plot against the Government in Dublin; had brought Turlough O'Neil to submission in the North; had visited Munster and complained of the free pardoning of rebels, "whereby the soldiers were letted from the destruction of their corn." He had been thwarted at Court; the queen had ordered him to reduce the army to three thousand men ; and of his reputation also, notwithstanding his intense religious earnestness and his fidelity to his own sense of duty, Ireland threatened to become the grave. For Irish policy was tossed among the factions of self-interested men. Arthur Grey returned, therefore, to England in September, 1582, and settled again at Whaddon, pressed by debts that his service to the queen in Ireland had brought |