The Grove of Eagles

by Winston Graham

  But worse was to come. A rumour spread—no one knew whence it came but Keymis was of the opinion that it had originated with the Bacons—that Sir Walter, a man of action in his youth but a courtier tied to the Queen for far too long, had thought better of personally undertaking such an expedition with all its hardships and hazards and at the last had not accompanied it at all but had spent the summer with his relatives the Killigrews in Cornwall and had rejoined the ships at Falmouth when they returned.

  I remember the evening when Sir Walter came back from Westminster and first told this story to his wife and Carew Ralegh and Laurence Keymis and Arthur Throgmorton, Lady Ralegh’s brother. Sir Walter was a man of considerable temper, but under strain he went white, his skin more sallow, that was all. However, neither Keymis nor Throgmorton—a great supporter of his brother-in-law—were so concerned with restraint. Their anger overflowed like lava from the lip of a volcano. Carew Ralegh, Sir Walter’s elder brother, was quieter in his manner and more sophisticated.

  “It is at best a foolish story,” he said, “for it can so easy be denied. Slander is most dangerous when it’s hard disproved. We have a hundred men who can swear where Walter spent his summer.”

  “My hundred men are in Portsmouth and Weymouth and dissipated over the west country. Where this calumny will do harm is at Westminster and Greenwich. Those of influence in those places who can answer for me are relatives and friends whose word may be suspect.”

  “I’m surprised that Robert Cecil does not speak for you,” Lady Ralegh said. “I wrote him so soon as I heard you was home. And none could be closer to the Queen.”

  “Oh, Cecil,” said Arthur Throgmorton, contemptuously, “ you rest too much on his goodwill. His only concern is for himself, and his friends can go hang.”

  “You’re wrong, Arthur,” Ralegh said sharply. “Robert Cecil is our friend and always will be. But his position is delicate, with the Queen still favouring Essex. In any event he could only recommend my case to Her Majesty, he can prove nothing of my whereabouts since he only has my word for ’ em.”

  “And your word is not enough!” said Keymis explosively. “That’s what I find hard to stomach. They even choose to cast doubts upon the whole voyage by saying we picked up Topiawari’s son on the Barbary coast. One is truly staggered to observe the lengths malice will go to!”

  “You have kept notes and diaries, Walter,” Lady Ralegh said. “Why do you not send them to the Queen or to Cecil asking that they be examined and pronounced on? It’s impossible to fabricate such pages, thumbed and stained with the marks of travel.”

  Ralegh tapped out his unlit pipe. “By the living God, Bess, I think it is an idea! But I would improve on it: the story would be better writ up and published, not as diaries but as a sober account of all we saw and did. If they pretend to believe I could conjure out of my imagination all the wonders of that voyage, then they’ll defeat their own object by making fools of themselves!”

  “Even then it will not succeed unless it reaches the Queen,” murmured his brother. “There will be jealous hands ever ready to snatch it away.”

  “She cannot fail to read it!” Sir Walter said, getting up sharply and moving about the tall green candle-lit room on his long legs. Again his height seemed greater than it was, and the flames scrawled calculating shadows over his face. “The problem is not how to get it to her but how quickly it may be got to her. If I’m to prepare for a full expedition next spring, things must be set in train before the turn of the year.”

  “I’ll help you, Walter,” said Keymis. “ There must be a good map drawn and all scientific data. Is John Shelbury free?”

  “No, he’s in Islington on business for me and will not be back for two weeks. If—”

  “Can this boy write?”

  Sir Walter looked coldly at me. “That’s what he was brought for.”

  “And is it readable what he writes?”

  “You’ve read it in letters already without hardship.”

  “Try me,” I said.

  “That we will.” Sir Walter in his pacing passed by his wife and laid a loving hand on her shoulder. “And tonight.”

  “Tonight?” said Lady Ralegh. “But no! You’ve rid all day. Supper is waiting.”

  “I’ll sup lightly with a glass of canary in my chamber. So’ll Laurence. So’ll this lad. There’s no time to waste.”

  I did not normally sleep in the house, but in the small Norman castle on the other side of the stream where Walter Ralegh had first lived when the estate was granted him four years ago and where he now housed the outdoor servants and any servants visitors might bring. But for the several weeks during which the account of the voyage was being written I slept on a couch in an ante-room off Sir Walter’s study, and I saw that couch too seldom.

  At ordinary times Sir Walter retired to sleep at midnight and rose at 5 a.m., from then on driving through the day with immense and consuming energy. But this was not an ordinary time, and while he was writing the account of his experiences in Guiana his endurance was limitless and he expected ours to match. I recollect chiefly hours with aching limbs and pricking eyes, sitting copying or making notes or sharpening his pen or standing at his elbow for new instructions.

  Although it was all done in a fever of inspiration most pages were written twice and many more often. I remember one lovely day in late October we had worked from six until twelve, and then broke for dinner and a rest. There were a few personal belongings I had left in the castle, so I hurried over in the hot afternoon to fetch them.

  The narrow valley between the two houses was threaded by a trout stream, and at the higher end amid a copse of trees Sir Walter had had the stream dammed and a pool created where the Ralegh family and their guests—and sometimes the servants at stated hours—swam in the summer. At the lower end the stream was spanned by an old stone bridge which also carried the London road on the other side of the wall bordering the estate. Here was a big raised stone seat sheltered by an ancient durmast oak, where Ralegh sometimes sat, and he was already there this afternoon and beckoned me. I saw that he had an ink-horn and some sheets of paper with him.

  “It’s a good point of vantage, this,” he said when I climbed up. “Here I can watch the stream and the bubbles of the trout. Or I can see the keep and think of England’s past, or turn to view my house which I trust will play a part in England’s future. As for the present,” he looked over the wall, “ it passes by from time to time on horseback or in coach and four, and if I mind to I can greet it as it goes! That’s all helpful to thought and meditation.”

  “You have written some more, sir?” I asked, looking at the pages he held.

  “I have re-done a page or two. The break of dinner gives one a new sight.”

  “The break of dinner always sends my father to sleep.”

  “That’s a hazard of nature that comes on in later life … Not, I imagine, that your father is so much older than I. Here, see what you make of this.”

  I squatted on the wall and read the page he handed me. It was a description of a day when they had almost reached the limits of their endurance.

  “When we reached the tops of the first hills of the plains adjoining the river we beheld that wonderful breach of waters which ran down Caroli: and might from that mountain see the river, how it ran in three parts about twenty miles off, and there appeared some ten or twelve waterfalls in sight, every one as high over the other as a church tower, which fell with such fury that the rebound of water made it seem as if it had been all covered over with a great shower of rain: and in some places we took it at the first for a smoke that had arisen over some great town. For my own part I was well persuaded from thence to have returned, being a very ill footman, but the rest were all so desirous to go near the strange thunder of water, that they drew me on by little and little until we came into the next valley where we might discern the same. I never saw a more beautiful country nor more lively prospects, hills so raised here and there over the valleys, the r
iver winding into divers branches, the plains adjoining without bush or stubble, all fair green grass, the ground of hard sand easy to march on either for horse or foot, the deer crossing every path, the birds towards the evening singing on every tree with a thousand several tunes; cranes and herons of white, crimson and carnation perching on the river’s side, the air fresh with the gentle easterly wind, and every stone that one stopped to take up promising by its complexion either silver or gold.”

  For a moment the sonorous prose carried me with the scene he described.

  “Copy that, will you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He must have caught some hesitation for he said sharply: “You have some suggestion?”

  “Oh, no, sir … Except perhaps … if I may venture it, wasn’t the last line as you wrote it before superior to this one?”

  “What? Read it to me.”

  “Before, sir, you ended: ‘and every stone that we stepped on girt with grasses and strange flowers.’ Is that not more in keeping with the whole than: ‘and every stone that we stopped to take up promising by its complexion either silver or gold’?”

  “You have not lived as long as I.”

  “No, sir. Shall I write this now?”

  “In a moment. Sit where you are.”

  I sat and waited.

  “It’s possible, Killigrew, that the interests of style would best be served by the gentle cadences of the first ending. But you must educate yourself to discover that other aims must sometimes be served. This is not merely a journal recording the quest for empire. It is a broadsheet of persuasion, and so one weighs in the balance the virtues of rare flowers against promise of profit, the values of a ringing sentence against the musical clinking sound of coin, and in such case the former gives way.” He took the sheet from me and read it through again. “No, I think there is little wrong with the new ending. It has style of another sort. It lifts the end instead of letting it fall. I don’t fault it on any count.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  “One thing that’s not very good, Killigrew, is your obstinacy in not conceding a point when it is won. It’s a grave mistake in a secretary.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Even if you maintain your own opinion against the opinion of your betters, maintain it so in secrecy, not by an expression on your face like a flag nailed to the mast as the ship sinks.”

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “Did your father find you a handful?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “He told me he did. And now and then even here I have noticed that the rebel stirs. We have no ships to board here, boy. Have you found yourself a wench?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did you have one in Cornwall?”

  I hesitated, and wondered if he had been told something. “ I had one but I lost her, sir.”

  “By death?”

  “By marriage to another man.”

  Sir Walter turned to gaze over the wall into the road, but it was only a wagon passing drawn by two oxen, with an old man, drooping between wisps of white hair leaning forward in his seat, whip held crosswise like a bow.

  “It is never too young to be a rebel, but it is bad to feel too much about women too soon. At seventeen they should be a pleasant jest or a means of advancement.”

  “As you said, sir, I am not educated.”

  He glanced at me, his eyes assessing. “ Your acceptance of that fact, boy, would carry a greater conviction if you admitted it with a show of humility. The way you speak suggests that you think your ignorance is a better condition than my wisdom.”

  I did not know what to say so said nothing.

  “Not that I have paused always,” he said, “to give myself the best advice. Or I should not be here, reduced to pen and paper to explain myself at a tedious length when a single audience would do.”

  I picked up the sheet he had dropped.

  “This journal, Maugan, is in effect a letter to the Queen, who still holds me in disfavour for my marriage. She was my great love and remains so—on a queenly level. Knowing her with some closeness through the years I have come not only to an esteem of her brilliant qualities but to an understanding of her susceptibilities. And I have met few women with a greater susceptibility to the colour of gold. Now get off with those sheets and make a good copy. I have no liking for arrogant secretaries.”

  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 pleached 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 t
o 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. Keymis 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.