SOURCE: "The Renaissance Imagination," in Sir Walter Ralegh, Longmans, Green and Co., 1953, pp. 46-71.

We have grown rather shy of using the term 'Renaissance': as we know more, it becomes increasingly hard to say when it was or what it was. I use the word to define that long period of overlap between the medieval and the modern worlds: a period for which the thirteenth century is hardly too early a beginning or the eighteenth too late a close, when new values, our values, began to contest the old; a period whose commonest quality is tension, in which two ages, one dying and one being born, strive for mastery. The tension is in religion, philosophy, morals, politics, economic and social structure. The peculiar vigour that we recognise in the period in both literature and action derives, perhaps, from this very tension: a safe sleep is impossible when all assumptions and traditions are challenged; either the old ways must be explained and defended or the new ways must be fought for. The period in England when the tension between old and new is at its peak, and most stirred men's minds, is of course, the late Elizabethan and the Stuart period; Shakespeare's tragedies, the growth of nonconformity, The Advancement of Learning, the colonising of America, the Civil War and Paradise Lost, are all witnesses of the clash of meeting currents.

It is hard to think of any one person who better embodies the various elements, the conflicts and contradictions of old beliefs and new attitudes, who better sums up in himself the inimitable imagination of this period of stress that we call the Renaissance in England, than Sir Walter Ralegh. He is the ideal Renaissance case-history.

The Compleat Gentleman

His very versatility points to the ideal of the age that the courtier or 'compleat gentleman' should strive to fulfil all the functions open to a man, should live with the whole of his being and not just a part of it. It was not enough for a man to be a statesman, or a poet, or an expert in the history of his country, or a soldier; he must try to unite the practical, the active, the artistic, the intellectual ways of living within his own life. In his Mother Hubberds Tale Spenser describes the perfect courtier (to fashion whom, he wrote his Faerie Queene), who desires to serve his Prince with honour, and can do so

Whether for armes and warlike amenaunce
Or else for wise and civill governaunce,

who delights as much in exercising his body as feeding his mind or entertaining himself with music; one for whom there is no greater pleasure than

That the ideal was more than mere talk is obvious if one thinks of men like Sir Philip Sidney, a pattern of Christian behaviour, a highly skilled poet and critic, interested in the new science, and an example of service to his country in peace and war. That Ralegh was considerably less than a model of Christian behaviour and that he was never officially a statesman, goes without saying. But by his capacity for excellence in so very many spheres, as courtier, soldier, historian, poet, scientist, explorer, administrator, he too is a living example of the belief of his age that a man should develop all his potentialities and realise his whole personality.

He was, first, very closely identified with the intellectual life of his times: he sought knowledge as zealously as he sought position and honour. It was, of course, much easier in his day for a man whose life was largely spent in business and active matters to acquire a real proficiency in all branches of learning because the extent of human knowledge was so much smaller than it is now. Nevertheless, supreme energy was needed to become more than a mere dabbler in the various arts and sciences, and that Ralegh had this energy is clear from the early accounts. 'He was an indefatigable reader, whether by sea or land', said Naunton, and David Lloyd tells us that 'five hours he slept, four he read, two he discoursed, allowing the rest to his business and necessities…. So contemplative he was, that you would think he was not active: so active that you would say he was not prudent—a great soldier, and yet an excellent courtier; an accomplished gallant and yet a bookish man.' At his trial, when questioned about his possession of a suspicious writing, by one Snagge, which Cobham had borrowed from his library, he protested that there was no book published in those days, when he was a young man, that he did not buy. In the Tower, he took more true comfort in those prison-companions, his books, 'than ever he took of his courtly companions in his chiefest bravery', according to Sir John Harrington.¹

Interest in the past was one of the significant intellectual developments of the Renaissance; it is associated with the growth both of science and of nationalism—science, in the sense that man begins to be curious about himself, sees himself as an object for empirical study and begins to question his own development from early times; nationalism, in the sense that a people's awareness of themselves as a nation made them inquisitive about their background. There will be much to say in a later chapter of Ralegh's efforts as an historian. His History of the World is one of the major achievements of his life. He gave years to the work, and the patience and pains and thought expended in tackling the many formidable difficulties are not to be made light of. In its time, his History was a great and original contribution to the study of man and it still expounds, to an age which has outgrown Ralegh's methods of research, an important philosophy and outlook on life. That this philosophy is largely a medieval philosophy at once reminds us of the strange blending of the old and the new in this typical Renaissance man.

The new spirit of scientific historical enquiry found expression in England in the formation of the Society of Antiquaries, probably about the year 1580. All too little is known about the Society, but the seriousness of the group can be measured by the terms of their application to the Queen to become formally incorporated as a royal historical society, with a library; this society and library would have a national responsibility for collecting and preserving records and matters of general historical interest. It is not certain whether Ralegh was an official member of this very select group, but he was closely associated with several of its fellows (who included Camden, Lancelot Andrewes, Lambard and Stowe). There exists an interesting letter of Ralegh's, written from the Tower to Sir Robert Cotton, a guiding spirit of the society, giving a list of books and manuscripts relating to British antiquities that Ralegh wished to borrow. John Hooker and Richard Carew were other antiquaries with whom Ralegh was in intimate association.

Ralegh's close connexions with the scientific movements of his day are extremely important, but as they bring up the whole general problem of his intellectual attitude, they must be left for later discussion.

Ralegh's preoccupation with the world of learning can be seen in the delight he had in being surrounded by scholars. His patronage of the mathematician Thomas Harriot brings him as much credit, almost, as anything else in his life. His lieutenant and assistant, Keymis, had been a Fellow of Balliol; his interests extended from the writing of Latin verse to geography and mathematics. One John Talbot shared Ralegh's imprisonment for eleven years and went on the last Guiana expedition with him, to win only a brief epitaph that Ralegh scribbled in his journal: '… my honest friend, an excellent general scholar, and as faithful and true man as lived'.

Turning now to Ralegh's interest in the arts, we find that here he is indeed at the centre of the life of his time. Music and painting he encouraged with his purse, and in poetry there is the wealth that it is a chief part of this book's purpose to discuss. Ralegh was deservedly one of the most admired of the court-poets and, as we should expect, he was in some way associated with three of the four major poets of his time, Spenser, Marlowe and Jonson, as well as lesser figures from an earlier period, like Gascoigne and Churchyard. Ralegh's associations with Shakespeare have naturally been explored by some who have been determined that the exploration should not be unfruitful: but there is no real evidence of any association….

Ralegh's most important poetic fellowships were with those gifted amateurs at court whose work so enriches Elizabethan literature. In Henry VIII's reign, Wyatt and Surrey had set a high standard for court poetry. George Puttenham, in his Art of English Poesie, described their successors:

And in Her Majesty's time that now is, are sprung up another crew of courtly makers, noblemen and gentlemen of Her Majesty's own servants, who have written excellently well, as it would appear if their doings could be found out and made public with the rest, of which number is first that noble gentleman, Edward, Earl of Oxford, Thomas, Lord of Buckhurst (when he was young), Henry Lord Paget, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Ralegh, Master Edward Dyer, Master Fulke Greville, Gascoigne, Breton, Turberville and a great many other learned gentlemen, whose names I do not omit for envy, but to avoid tediousness, and who have deserved no little commendation.

These courtly poets, as Puttenham's words indicate, gave little thought to publishing their works. Their poems were not written for unknown men who bought books and read them in their scattered homes. They wrote for their own circle in court; poems were passed round in manuscript and then thought of no more. Written for particular occasions and for a particular group, written without an eye to fame among a wide public or among after-generations, this verse is yet often the freshest and finest of the age. Like the popular dramatist, the courtier-poet effaced himself as a personality and took no particular care to prolong the life of his art. Though this attitude is in many ways admirable, it has left a heritage of problems to the modern scholar. Much court-poetry has not survived, and the authorship of what has been (almost by accident) preserved is often very uncertain. A typical perplexity is the difficulty of disentangling the poems of Sir Arthur Gorges (Ralegh's close friend and captain of his flagship in the Islands Voyage) from Ralegh's own.

The extent of Ralegh's verse-writing is very difficult to assess. Much that he wrote has been lost, and no-one can say how much, or whether what we have represents his best work. At every turn there is the problem of authorship: poems which are indisputably Ralegh's are very scarce; works are given to him on the slender evidence of initials in printed anthologies or ascriptions in manuscript collections and commonplace books—or on the dangerous logic of style. There is hardly a poem where the true text can be confidently established: most poems appear in widely different versions in different manuscripts. (Luckily, we have the long poem of The Ocean to Cynthia in Ralegh's own handwriting, and here these problems do not arise.)

Aubrey held that Ralegh 'was sometimes a poet: not often', but the sureness of style and discipline of craftsmanship in the majority of poems which are fairly certainly his would seem to argue that Ralegh was very much more than an occasional versifier. Miss Latham well says that to a man like Ralegh, poetry was 'as natural as breathing'; his first poem which can be dated was written when he was twenty-four, and on the night before his death (so goes the tradition) he composed his own epitaph in verse: all his life, Ralegh was a poet. He was not, of course, a poet in the dedicated sense like the English Romantics, nor was he a man for whom poetry was the only means of expressing his imagination; he was a poet because his age encouraged him, as a courtier and gentleman, to write verse, because the circles in which he moved provided an attentive audience with sensibility like his own, and because his own genius continually found occasions needing the comment of poetry, which his talents could most ably supply.

If, to these wide interests of Ralegh, we add his achievements in so many directions in the world of action, we see how his versatility not only reflects the Renaissance ideal of courtly behaviour, but shows how he shares the life of his age in all its variety.

The Spirit of the Age

It remains to look at Ralegh as the embodiment of his age at deeper levels of the spirit. We may well begin with his intense and individualistic ambition, which is a Renaissance theme if there ever was one. The modern American belief in the virtue and necessity of 'getting to the top' has as its illustrious ancestor the spirit that drove those Elizabethans who were not born to great place and wealth to exercise their whole beings in the colourful attainment of them. Tamburlaine the Great may or may not have been an object of admiration to the Elizabethans, but, as Marlowe presents him, he is certainly the incarnation of an Elizabethan spirit of self-assertion, which the modern world must also recognise as its own. Ralegh possessed this spirit of self-assertion to the full; in a way, his whole life is a record of striving for money, position and power for himself. But immediately we find the Renaissance paradox. The History of the World is unceasing in its condemnation of personal ambition, that 'eldest and most monstrous vice', synonymous with Pride, the first of the seven deadly sins. Ralegh's attitude to the struggle of nations shows exactly the same paradox as his attitude to the struggle of individuals: in his writings, he condemns the strife of nations for mastery as mere viciousness and greed, yet in his life he is an ardent nationalist, believing wholeheartedly in the greatness of his nation and the need for England to exalt herself among other nations by crushing her rivals, particularly Spain.

This paradox between words and deeds shows lack of logic and consistency, but no more hypocrisy than the age itself must answer for. For the notion that the unprincipled struggle for power in both nations and individuals was evil, was something the age inherited from the Middle Ages and was very deeply embedded in its thinking. But the world of ideas was lagging behind the world of action. The static medieval age was over; 'progress' had begun, and progress demanded self-assertion. Ralegh seems unaware of the discrepancy between the two ideals, but he reflects the tension of his age in sanctioning in his active career the ambition which he denounced as selfishness and self-aggrandisement when he reflected on it sub specie aeternatis.

The age's paradoxes and ambiguities are reflected very clearly in Ralegh's colonial ambitions. What was he trying to achieve? What spirit led him on? There are a dozen answers, cynical or romantic in varying degrees, all perhaps partly true and no one wholly true. Ralegh was out for personal profit and power; he was the instrument of the laws of economic development, ushering in the period of imperialist expansion; he was a symbol of the awakening mind of man, seeking to explore the globe and extend mastery over nature; he was a conscious exponent of nationalism; he was the embodiment of the Elizabethan spirit of adventure. Ralegh himself, as he wrote his History of the World, was often perplexed to account for the leading motives of men in bringing about some important action. Had he understood how subtle and tangled his own motives were, and of necessity were, as the spearhead of Elizabethan imperialism, he might have worried less about choosing a single, dominant motive inspiring the behaviour of others.

Atheism and Science

Ralegh's religious views were in his own day, and have remained ever since, the subject of a babel of ill-founded gossip. His 'atheism' was as much a matter of course as his pride, in popular judgment. The Jesuit controversialist, Robert Parsons, made in 1592 the famous attack on Sir Walter Ralegh's 'School of Atheism', 'wherein both Moses and Our Saviour, the Old and New Testament are jested at, and the scholars taught among other things to spell God backward.' In 1594, a commission which met at Cerne Abbas to investigate allegations of godlessness and heretical opinions in Dorset heard alarming stories about Ralegh. The Rev. Nicholas Jeffries had 'heard by report of divers that Sir Walter Ralegh and his retinue are generally suspected of atheism' and had also heard that Harriot had been before the Lords of the Council for denying the resurrection of the body. The minister of Gillingham could not remember who told him, but he had heard that Ralegh's man Harriot had brought the Godhead into question. The curate of Motcombe knew the general report that Ralegh could reason against the omnipotence of God. The Reverend Ralph Ironside had a longer tale to tell, and, what is more, a tale not based on hearsay, but his evidence must be considered later. In 1603, at his trial, Ralegh was a 'damnable atheist' to Coke, and Popham would not repeat the 'heathenish, blasphemous, atheistical and profane opinions' which the world taxed Ralegh with holding and which Christian ears could not endure to hear.

Well after Ralegh's death, the 'scandal of atheism' still clung to his name. Aubrey had heard the stories, and had come to the conclusion that, rather than an atheist, Ralegh was a non-Christian Deist—a position taught to him by Harriot. In the present century, a new and ingenious story has emerged: the story of the 'School of Night'. According to this, the School of Atheism was a society of satanists, including literary figures, Marlowe, Chapman and Roydon; noblemen, the Earls of Derby and Northumberland; scholars, Harriot, Keymis and Walter Warner. This esoteric society dedicated itself to the arcane and occult in art and science, and its members were distinguished for holding in common very 'advanced' and 'progressive' views on religion and politics. Opposed to it was a group owing allegiance to Essex and Southampton, the spokesman of which was Shakespeare, whose Love's Labour's Lost was the group's manifesto and an attack on Ralegh's society. Much has been written about this society,² but I have never been persuaded that the 'School of Night' ever existed in reality; the evidence adduced to support the theory has to my mind been convincingly discredited by two American scholars, P. H. Kocher and E. A. Strathmann.³

Professor Strathmann has, indeed, earned the gratitude of all interested in Ralegh and the Elizabethan intellectual climate for his very patient and thorough examination of Ralegh's religious views. He is able to show that, however the pregnant and versatile term 'atheist' might have been intended to apply to Ralegh, his expressed opinions everywhere clear him of the charge. Sometimes, of course, 'atheist' is simply used as a term of abuse. Parsons' charges are shown to be part of a Catholic campaign to discredit Elizabeth's counsellors and favourites and to have no value as evidence. If Ralegh had been an atheist or a violent heretic or a Deist or a pagan or an agnostic, the whole argument of this chapter would crumble, for he would cease to represent his very religious and orthodox age. But no one who has paid careful attention to Ralegh's own words can have doubt that he was a sincere and fundamentally orthodox Christian.

It is easy enough to see why Ralegh and orthodox religious feeling have never seemed to go together. He was associated with the avant-garde of the scientific movement which eventually broke down the medieval Christian attitude of mind and, secondly, his haughtiness of manner, determination to question things, lack of restraint in expressing his opinions, would often obscure from his contemporaries his genuine and profound piety. Let us look at some of the cross-currents in Ralegh's faith, and first, his connexions with science.

Science was still a suspect occupation in Ralegh's day—an impious prying into the secrets of Creation, an arrogant presumption and a seeking for a power that God did not intend man to have. Chapter Eleven of the first book of Ralegh's History of the World contains a very interesting and spirited defence of 'lawful magic'; it makes a separation of that knowledge of the secrets of nature which can be considered not only legitimate but laudable, from the black and devilish arts of the Faustian kind: a defence, in fact, of the fundamental piety of proper scientific investigation. 'The third kind of magic,' he says, for example, 'containeth the whole philosophy of nature; not the brabblings of the Aristotelians, but that which bringeth to light the inmost virtues and draweth them out of nature's hidden bosom to human use.' God had given hidden properties to His Creation, and it is a right and necessary endeavour of man to investigate these virtues and apply them for 'the help and comfort of mankind'.

This justification of science as a means of ministering to the needs of mankind is characteristic of the age, and is reminiscent of Francis Bacon's approach. Actually, science was identified in the sixteenth century with practical needs: 'pure' investigation was not very interesting to a man like Ralegh. The union of mathematics and astronomy with the practical needs of navigation is a classic example of how knowledge and its application went hand in hand. John Dee and Thomas Harriot were the greatest of the sixteenth-century scientists in England, and with both of them Ralegh associated for the main purpose of aiding discovery and exploration. Ralegh (and others like him) financed and encouraged these men; the work they did in solving the kind of problems he set them really marks the beginning of the co-operative scientific activity in England that culminated in the founding of the Royal Society at the Restoration…. Hakluyt was one who learned from Dee, and he very clearly recognises the association of research with practical needs in his dedication to Ralegh of Peter Martyr's Decades of the New World (1587):

Since you clearly saw that skill in the arts of navigation, the chief glory of an insular nation, would obtain its greatest splendour among us by the firm support of the mathematical sciences, you have trained up and supported now a long time, with a most liberal salary, Thomas Harriot, a young man well versed in those studies, in order that you might acquire in your spare hours by his instruction a knowledge of those noble sciences, and your own numerous sea-captains might unite profitable theory with practice.

Harriot worked with Ralegh in many capacities over a number of years. He was sent to Virginia, and he returned with a very fine account of the country (printed in Hakluyt), his survey ranging from Indian religious customs to the potentialities for agriculture. It is important to understand just what care Ralegh took, as in this instance, to make sure that all his expeditions should be fully scientific explorations. With the men and means at his disposal, he had as much concern in this matter as the organisers of a modern polar expedition have. His own Discovery of Guiana is spoken of highly as a 'geographical classic' by the great authority on Tudor geography, Professor E. G. R. Taylor. We have to remember that men whose heads grow beneath their shoulders are but one mistaken report in an account that shows Ralegh's great interest in and capacity for studying 'human' and physical geography. As in The History of the World, we cannot fail to be aware of Ralegh's absorption in the awakening sciences of man: in, for example, what we should call ethnography, anthropology and comparative religion.

Shipbuilding may seem a far cry from astronomy, but there is no drawing a hard and fast line between where research ended and its application to voyages of discovery began…. Ralegh was noted for his exper iments and innovations in shipbuilding, and for the money he spent on them. The Bark Ralegh, the Ark Ralegh (sold to the Crown in 1592) and the Roebuck were famous ships, and Howard, who used the Ark Ralegh as his flagship against the Armada called it 'the oddest ship in the world, and the best for all conditions'….

There is no doubt at all that the scientific spirit, which Ralegh certainly shared, proved in the long run incompatible with the Christian modes of thought that inspired St. Augustine and Dante. The expense of time in measuring the phenomena of the visible world seemed a profitless activity to men who considered the purpose of existence to be the union of the soul with its creator…. Modern scientific man seeks a different kind of knowledge from medieval religious man, and seeks it by different means. He seeks to know, not God, but the material world, in order that he may have power over the material world; faith, conscience and reason are not his instruments, but observation and experiment. There is a fundamental disagreement of attitude here; there was another disagreement which seems more superficial, but it was almost more important because more obvious: the fact that the results of the new scientific enquiry often seemed to deny the account of the world and human history given in the Bible.

Francis Bacon is perfectly aware that the new directions he wishes human thought to take are incompatible with traditional religious thought, and God holds an equivocal place in The Advancement of Learning; Bacon is not very much interested in knowledge that cannot be proved by experiment and put to the use of relieving man's physical estate. Sir Thomas Browne, on the other hand, is passionately concerned to preserve belief, and struggles hard to reconcile what are often, for him, the opposed teachings of faith and scientific enquiry. In Ralegh's work it is remarkable not to find either Bacon's avoidance or Browne's reconciliation. The core of his belief, which is that of the medieval Christian, is most surprisingly free from the kind of questionings and conflicts that one would have expected in one who did enthusiastically foster the new science. It is not stupidity or intellectual shortsightedness that produces this effect. Ralegh knows he has to make a choice, and traditional thinking is what he chooses. His religious faith is primary with him: God and the word of God are for him mightier things than the questionings of the human mind. Scientific knowledge may be used, as it is in The History of the World, to provide confirmation of the truth of the miracles and mysteries of the Christian faith; where human knowledge provides disturbingly different answers from those taught in the Bible and by the Church, it must be rejected, since it is arrogance for man to pit his petty mind against the received word of God. Ralegh does not reject scientific enquiry out of hand any more than he blindly and unquestioningly accepts his faith, but the point that must be made here is that his acquaintance with science has convinced him of the limitations of human knowledge; has taught him not arrogance, but humility. He turns to accept as fundamental a knowledge which he considers to derive from a higher source than the enquiries of the human mind….

Ralegh's Religion

Ralegh's real devotion and belief in God are clear in every section of his History. He is not a theologian, but he expresses with power and often with great beauty the traditional medieval view of God and man that found its last great expression in Paradise Lost. How his belief that man exists only for union with God in eternity informs his vision of human history will be discussed in Chapter Four. Here we may comment specifically on his expression of the Renaissance tradition of Christian humanism.

Belief in the existence of God, holds Ralegh, is a reasonable thing, even if faith did not teach us. 'As all the rivers in the world, though they have divers risings and divers runnings, though they sometimes hide themselves for a while underground and seem to be lost in sea-like lakes, do at last find and fall into the great ocean; so after all the searches that human capacity hath, and after all philosophical contemplation and curiosity, in the necessity of this Infinite Power, all the reason of man ends and dissolves itself.' But reason is only 'the beginning of knowledge', or it can only confirm what comes from a higher source. Nothing is more mistaken than to perpetuate, as some scholars do, Aubrey's error that Ralegh was a Deist. The nature and purpose of God can only be known in so far as they are revealed through Christ, and though this revelation is everywhere reasonable, 'they grow mad with reason' who endeavour to pursue their inquisition into the essence of God by their own efforts. 'But by his own Word, and by this visible world, is God perceived of men.'

That there is no knowledge of God or of the purpose of life save what is revealed in Scripture, but that the knowledge so gained is not antagonistic to 'natural' thinking, but is indeed everywhere acclaimed and assented to by man's reason, is a typical Christian humanist position—a position which enabled the humanists to fortify the scriptures by the teachings of the pagan writers of ancient Greece and Rome. But we must watch the two uses of the word 'reason'. As I have been using or quoting it, it means 'reasoning power'. But there is also the humanistic 'right reason', which Professor Douglas Bush describes as not an instrument of inquiry, or simply the religious conscience, but 'a kind of rational and philosophic conscience which distinguishes man from the beasts and links man with man and with God'. It is implanted in man to enable him to perceive the law of God. So Ralegh uses the term 'reason' in his discourse on laws (History of the World, Book II, Ch. 4) which leans heavily on Augustine and Aquinas. 'To love God, by whom we are, and to do the same right unto all men which we desire should be done unto us, is an effect of the purest reason, in whose highest turrets the quiet of conscience hath made her resting-place and habitation.' Worship of God is human and natural and reasonable; man is made able to receive the knowledge of the law of God. This is the essence of Ralegh's acceptance of Christian humanism. 'As the north-star is the most fixed director of the seaman to his desired port, so is the law of God the guide and conductor of all in general to the haven of eternal life.'

Ralegh accepts without question the fall of man: that God created man for eternal life in union with Himself, that He granted him reason, to be able to know Him and love Him, and free-will to be able to love Him willingly; that man denied the dictate of his reason, disobeyed God and rejected union. But God of His mercy left the light of right reason burning within man, to be attended to by those with eyes to see and ears to hear, and granted the possibility of salvation even to those who had erred and disobeyed. Almost any chapter of the History could be quoted to show how Ralegh believes that the fall of man is continually repeated, that man will sin and deny God in setting before himself objectives in this world which deny the fundamental truth that man is formed only for eternal life. Ralegh is constantly persuading man to reject the magnets of the world and to seek God again. Book I, Chapter Two contains this passage, for example:

Though nature, according to common understanding, have made us capable by the power of reason, and apt enough, to receive this image of God's goodness which the sensual souls of beasts cannot perceive, yet were that aptitude natural more inclinable to follow and embrace the false and dureless pleasures of this stage-play world than to become the shadow of God, by walking after him; had not the exceeding workmanship of God's wisdom and the liberality of his mercy formed eyes to our souls as to our bodies, which, piercing through the impurity of our flesh, behold the highest heavens, and thence bring Knowledge and Object to the mind and soul, to contemplate the ever-during glory and termless joy prepared for those which retain the image and similitude of their Creator, preserving undefiled and unrent the garment of the new man, which after the image of God is created in righteousness and holiness, as saith St Paul.

It is a strange misreading of Ralegh to suppose that he could believe in God as he did, and believe in the possibility of salvation, without accepting the fact of the Incarnation and the redemption of man through Christ. It is perfectly true that there is little debate in Ralegh's writings on the mystery of the Atonement. He seems to have a temperamental reluctance to explore the doctrine. But to accept a doctrine is not necessarily to dwell upon it. Christ is everywhere 'our Saviour'; there are many specific and devout references to redemption, and even where these are absent, his references to salvation must imply Christian doctrine. Most telling of all are his recorded utterances just before his death: Ralegh was not a man for deathbed repentances or one who would avow beliefs he did not hold in order to placate priests. The Dean of Westminster, who attended him in prison, was perfectly satisfied by his speaking 'very Christianly'. Ralegh received the Eucharist on the morning of his execution, and is reported to have said on the scaffold: 'I die in the faith professed by the Church of England. I hope to be saved and have my sins washed away by the precious blood and merits of our saviour Christ.'

Thus the man who stands at the threshold of the modern world in his enthusiasm for the discoveries of modern science and their application can still hold fast to the faith that, though it was central in the formulated beliefs of his age, was rapidly ceasing to be a reality in the lives of men. The conflict between the concept of the world as a divine harmony, the happiness of man depending on his aspiring to play his part in that harmony, and the concept of the world as a material entity to be measured and controlled by man, is the fundamental conflict of the Renaissance. Had Ralegh lived 50 years later he would not have been able to tuck science into a predominantly religious world-view so conveniently as he does; perhaps, like Milton, he would have had to reject scientific inquiry altogether.

Another way of expressing the Renaissance conflict is to say that it is a conflict between the notion of man as dependent on God and the notion of man as self-sufficient. In these terms we can see how Ralegh manages to find room in himself for both sides of the conflict at almost every turn. Religion and science, humility and pride, desire for wealth and contempt for the world, these can coexist within him as they coexisted in his age. Just as he touches Elizabethan life at every point, so he owns all its contradictions. Active and meditative, tolerant and intolerant, bellicose and pacific, romantic and cynical, humane and cruel, Ralegh is the Elizabethan world.

Notes

¹ In the extremely interesting notebook recently identified as Ralegh's by Mr. W. F. Oakeshott (see The Times, 29 November 1952, and below, pp. 101 and 147), Ralegh has set about making a catalogue of books. They may well be those he had with him in the Tower; most of them would be useful to an historian. The general books range from 'A treatis of specters' to "Opera Petrarchæ', 'Cassanion de gigantibus' to 'Es says French', 'Laurentius præservation of health' to 'Cardanus de subtilitate'; Copernicus, Machiavelli, Pico della Mirandola, Hakluyt and Camden are represented.

² e.g. M. C. Bradbrook, The School of Night (1936).

³Christopher Marlowe (1946), pp. 7-18; Sir Walter Ralegh: A Study of Elizabethan Scepticism (1951), pp. 262-271.

Works Cited

Ernest A. Strathmann, Sir Walter Ralegh, a Study in Elizabethan Skepticism (1951)….

R. W. Battenhouse, Marlowe's Tamburlaine (1941) (see pp. 50-68).

G. T. Buckley, Atheism in the English Renaissance (1932).

G. B. Harrison (editor), Willobie his Avisa (1594) (1926).

F. R. Johnson, Astronomical Thought in Renaissance England (1937).

F. R. Johnson, 'Gresham College: Precursor of the Royal Society', Journal of the History of Ideas, i (1940).

P. H. Kocher, Christopher Marlowe (1946).

E. G. R. Taylor, Tudor Geography, 1485-1583 (1930) and Late Tudor and Early Stuart Geography, 1583-1650 (1934).

I. A. Shapiro, 'The Mermaid Club', Modern Language Review, xlv (January 1950); see also P. Simpson, ibid., xlvi (January 1951).