off from Chatham, and writes to young Cecil on the 10th of March, 'I
mean not to come away, as some say I will, for fear of a marriage,
and I know not what . . . For I protest before God, there is none on
the face of the earth that I would be fastened unto.'

This famous passage is one of those over which the virtuosity of
modern times, rejoicing in evil, has hung so fondly, as giving
melancholy proof of the 'duplicity of Raleigh's character'; as if a
man who once in his life had told an untruth was proved by that fact
to be a rogue from birth to death: while others have kindly given
him the benefit of a doubt whether the letter were not written after
a private marriage, and therefore Raleigh, being 'joined unto' some
one already, had a right to say that he did not wish to be joined to
any one. But I do not concur in this doubt. Four months after, Sir
Edward Stafford writes to Anthony Bacon, 'If you have anything to do
with Sir W. R., or any love to make to Mistress Throgmorton, at the
Tower to-morrow you may speak with them.' This implies that no
marriage had yet taken place. And surely, if there had been private
marriage, two people who were about to be sent to the Tower for their
folly would have made the marriage public at once, as the only
possible self-justification. But it is a pity, in my opinion, that
biographers, before pronouncing upon that supposed lie of Raleigh's,
had not taken the trouble to find out what the words mean. In their
virtuous haste to prove him a liar, they have overlooked the fact
that the words, as they stand, are unintelligible, and the argument
self-contradictory. He wants to prove, we suppose, that he does not
go to sea for fear of being forced to marry Miss Throgmorton. It is,
at least, an unexpected method of so doing in a shrewd man like
Raleigh, to say that he wishes to marry no one at all. 'Don't think
that I run away for fear of a marriage, for I do not wish to marry