When still quite a boy, Walter Raleigh went to Oriel College, Oxford, but we know nothing of what he did there, and the next we hear of him is that he is fighting for the Huguenots in France.  How long he remained in France, and what he did there beyond this fighting, we do not know.  But this we know, that when he went to France he was a mere boy, with no knowledge of fighting, no knowledge of the world.  When he left he was a man and a tried soldier, a captain and leader of men.

When next we hear of Raleigh he is in Ireland fighting the rebels.  There he did some brave deeds, some cruel deeds, there he lived to the full the life of a soldier as it was in those rough times, making all Ireland ring with his name.  But although Raleigh had won for himself a name among soldiers, he was as yet unknown to the Queen; his fortune was still unmade.

You have all heard the story of how Raleigh first met the Queen.  The first notice we have of this story is in a book from which I have already quoted more than once—­The Worthies of England.

“This Captain Raleigh,” says Fuller, “coming out of Ireland to the English Court in good habit (his clothes being then a considerable part of his estate), found the Queen walking, till, meeting with a splashy place, she seemed to scruple going thereon.  Presently Raleigh cast and spread his new plush cloak on the ground, whereon the Queen trod gently, rewarding him afterwards with many suits for his so free and seasonable tender of so fair a foot cloth.”

Thomas Fuller, who wrote the book in which this story is found, was only a boy of ten when Raleigh died, so he could not have known the great man himself, but he must have heard many stories about him from those who had, and we need not disbelieve this one.  It is one of those things which might very well have happened even if it did not.

And whether Raleigh first came into Queen Elizabeth’s notice in this manner or not, after he did become known to her, he soon rose in her favor.  He rose so quickly that he almost feared the giddy height to which he rose.  According to another story of Fuller’s, “This made him write in a glasse window, obvious to the Queen’s eye,

    ‘Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall.’

“Her Majesty, either espying or being shown it, did underwrite: 

    ‘If thy heart fails thee, climb not at all.’

“However he at last climbed up by the stairs of his own desert.”

Honors and favors were heaped upon Raleigh, and from being a poor soldier and country gentleman he became rich and powerful, the lord of lands in five counties, and Captain of the Queen’s Own Body-Guard.  Haughty of manner, splendid in dress, loving jewels more than even a woman does, Raleigh became as fine a courtier as he was a brave soldier.  But soldier though Raleigh was, courtier though he was, loving ease and wealth and fine clothes, he was at heart a sailor and adventurer, and the sea he had loved as a boy called to him.