Part 8

By this time young Raleigh had become typical of his age, having its virtues and its vices. The age was wild, coveting money in order to fling it away on mad schemes, reveling in the dangers as well as the glories of battle and exploration, of plundering Spanish galleons, or of hunting untold riches in the world across the sea. Queen Elizabeth liked daring men, and Raleigh took every opportunity to bring himself before her notice.

The young courtier had learned all the arts that helped to make men's fortunes. He was tall and very handsome, a splendid swordsman, and a wit who could hold his own with poets and with statesmen. He still spoke with the strong broad accent of Devon, and when he learned that the Queen liked his unusual accent he was very careful to see that he never lost it. He studied each chance to please.

Elizabeth was extremely vain and extremely fond of romance. One day as she walked with certain of her lords and ladies she came to a marshy place, and stopped in hesitation, fearing to soil her slippers. This was the young courtier's chance. Raleigh had been in the background, but seeing the Queen hesitate he sprang forward, and sweeping his new plush cloak from his shoulders, spread it in the mire, so that she might cross. The Queen's face lighted up with pleasure at the graceful act, and she thanked the youthful gallant. Later she saw that he was given many court suits for the cloak he had so admirably ruined.

Having thus won her attention Raleigh next sought to fix himself in his Queen's mind. He wrote on the window of a room in which she passed much time the line:

"Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall."

Elizabeth learned who was author of the writing, and scratched the answer underneath:

"If thy heart fails thee, climb not at all."

Raleigh had no fear whatever of falling, but a becoming modesty sat well upon him. The Queen remembered the young man now for these two qualities, his gallantry and his becoming modesty, and saw to it that a man of such spirit should be kept at court. The ardent boy of Devon, the restless Oxford student, the wild Huguenot trooper, had grown to be a man worthy of notice.

He was now, as Walter Scott pictures him in "Kenilworth," the young seeker after royal favor, graceful, slender, restless, somewhat supercilious, with a sonnet ever ready on his lips to delight his friends or an epigram to sting his enemies.

We shall see him turn his many talents to great uses. He fell to planning voyages across the Atlantic to discover and settle parts of North America much as Sir Humphrey Gilbert had done, and as another young man about court, Sir Francis Drake, was doing. From the Queen, and from one noble or another who was interested in his marvelous schemes, he obtained the money to fit out several expeditions. Each in turn landed near what is now the Roanoke River, and each brought back rich gifts to the great English Queen. Among other things the explorer saw the Indians smoking a dried leaf called tobacco, tried the custom, liked it, and brought it back with him to England.

Raleigh had a stroke of genius when he named his colony Virginia, in honor of Elizabeth the Virgin Queen. It pleased her to think that a great empire in the western world should be named for her. She gave Raleigh whatever he asked, making him practically governor of all the English domain in America, and for a long time Virginia was supposed to cover even part of what later became New England. He started to colonize the land, but his colonies did not succeed, and he lost all the money he put into them. Nevertheless his Virginian scheme brought him a great deal of fame, which he now craved, and kept London talking of him.

London was soon to talk still more about this daring, brave, and brilliant Westcountryman. The prophecy of the old sailor at Budleigh Salterton Bay came true, and for a brief time all England held its breath while the famous Spanish fleet, called the Armada, bore down upon her coast. Then all over the country gentlemen of fortune manned ships and put to sea, but especially the men of Devon, of Somerset, and Cornwall, counties famed for their sailors.

Among these men was Raleigh; his advice was eagerly sought by the Queen's ministers, and when it came to the actual Channel fighting he made one of many gallant captains. The great Armada came to grief upon the English coast, and Raleigh had added another to his record of achievements.

Having been courtier, colonizer, warrior, Raleigh now blossomed forth as a poet, and became a friend and patron of Edmund Spenser. He had much skill in verse, and he was never lacking in imagination. But his real talents did not lie in that direction, and as in so many other things, he soon found himself distracted elsewhere.

The story of Raleigh's manhood belongs to history. Turn to tales of Elizabeth's court and you will find his name on almost every page. Now he is high in favor, braving it with the great Earl of Leicester, now down upon his luck, locked in some royal prison, writing verses to his many friends. His was a strange career; at one time there was no man in England whose favor was more sought, yet at the end he died upon the scaffold charged with treason. Time proved him guiltless of the charge, and almost at once the English people began to realize how great a light had been extinguished.

Through all his varying career he himself was the same brave, dreamy, ambitious man, the perfect type of that age which we call the Elizabethan. He could not stay in his native land of Devon; much as he loved its moorland and its bays, he had to listen to the call of London and the sea, and follow where their voices led him. Each way the road was set with many strange adventures, but he met and passed through them all with the high spirits that were part of his age. His courage never failed him, nor his joy in fighting his way to fortune with his own sharp wits.

Peter the Great

The Boy of the Kremlin: 1672-1725

The halls of the Kremlin, the Czar's palace in Moscow, were filled with a wild rabble of soldiers on a winter afternoon near the end of the seventeenth century. The guards of the late Czar Alexis were storming through the maze of corridors and state apartments, breaking statues, tearing down tapestries, and piercing and cutting to pieces invaluable paintings with their spears and swords.

They were big, savage-faced men, pets of the half-civilized Russian rulers, and were called the Streltsi Guard.

They had broken into the Kremlin in order to see the boy who was now Czar, so that they might be sure that his stepmother had not hidden him away, as the rumor went, in order that her own son Peter might have the throne for himself. But once inside the Kremlin many of the soldiers devoted themselves to pillage, until the ringleaders raised the cry, "Where is the Czar Ivan? Show him to us! Show the boy Ivan to us! Where is he?"

In a small room on one of the higher floors a little group of women and noblemen, all thoroughly frightened, were gathered about two boys. The noise of the attack on the palace had come to their ears some time before; they had seen from the windows the mutinous soldiers climbing the walls and beating down the few loyal servants who had withstood them. The din was growing more terrific every instant. It was the matter of only a few minutes before the rioters would break into the room.

"We must decide at once, friends," said the Czarina Natalia. "If they enter this room they'll not stop at killing any of us."

The smaller of the two boys, a sturdy lad of eleven years, spoke up: "Let me go out on to the Red Staircase with Ivan, mother. When they see that we are both here they'll be satisfied."

A dozen objections were raised by the frightened men and women of the court. It was much too dangerous to trust the lives of the two boys to the whim of such a maddened mob.

"Nevertheless Peter is right," said Natalia. "It's the only chance left to us. They think I have done some harm to Ivan. The only way to prove that false is for him to stand before them, and my son must go with him."

The small boy who had spoken before took these words as final. "Come, Ivan," said he, and took the other's hand in his. Ivan, a tall, delicate boy, whose face was white with fear, gripped Peter's hand hard. He was used to trusting implicitly to his half-brother, although the latter was two years younger than he.

One of the noblemen opened the door, and the two boys went out of the room and crossed the hall to the top of the great Red Staircase. They looked down on the mob of soldiers who were gradually surging up the stairs, brandishing swords and halberds, fighting among each other for the possession of some treasure, and calling continually, "The Czar! Where are the boys Ivan and Peter? Where are they?"