came into collision. He was not thirty years of age, and still at the
height of his vivacity, when he was taken into the close favour of Queen
Elizabeth. There can be no question that he found in the temper of the
monarch something to which his own nature intimately responded. The
Queen was an adventurer at heart, as he was, and she was an Englishman
of Englishmen. We are accustomed to laugh at the extravagance of the
homage which Raleigh paid to a woman old enough to be his mother, at the
bravado which made him fling his new plush cloak across a puddle for the
Queen to tread over gently, as Fuller tells us, "rewarding him
afterwards with many suits for his so free and seasonable tender of so
fair a footcloth," or at the story of the rhymes the couple cut on the
glass with their diamond rings. In all this, no doubt, there was the
fashion of the time, and on Raleigh's part there was ambition and the
desire to push his fortunes without scruple. But there was, you may be
sure, more than that; there was the instinctive sympathy between the two
who hated with the most unflagging and the most burning hate the wicked
aggression of Spain. We may be sure that Elizabeth never for a day
forgot that Pope Alexander VI. had generously bestowed the Western world
on the Crown of Spain. Raleigh spoke a language which might be
extravagant and which might be exasperating, which might, in fact, lead
to outrageous quarrels between his Cynthia and himself, but which, at
least, that Cynthia understood.

But in 1602, when Raleigh was fifty years of age and had his splendours
behind him, there came another Pharaoh who knew not Joseph. James I. was
the type of the cautious man who only looks to the present, who hopes by
staving off a crisis till Tuesday that something fresh will "turn up" by
Wednesday. He was disposed, from the very first, to distrust and to
waylay the plans of Raleigh. We are told, and can well believe it, that
he was "diffident" of Sir Walter's designs. He was uncomfortable in the