ives to caverns half way up
precipitous cliffs. Then they smoked them out with their treasures by
lighted bundles of straw let down by iron chains opposite the mouth.
General Pelissier plagiarised the device, with more murderous details,
in Algeria in 1849. It is a specimen of the brutalities of a conflict,
which its English assistants, though they had countenanced, would not
care to chronicle minutely. To Ralegh's keen sight the struggle would
soon have displayed itself shorn of the glamour of religious enthusiasm.
He regarded it simply as a civil war, by which 'the condition of no
nation,' as he wrote later, 'was ever bettered.' Of one of its prime
authors, Admiral Coligny, he has recorded his belief that he 'advised
the Prince of Conde to side with the Huguenots, not only out of love to
their persuasion, but to gain a party.' English troopers on their return
were not likely to dilate on their exploits at the Court of Elizabeth,
who audaciously disavowed to the French Catholic Court the auxiliaries
she had licensed.

[Sidenote: _In the Netherlands._]

[Sidenote: _The Middle Temple._]

On the authority of an observation of the younger Hakluyt's, that Ralegh
had resided longer in France than he, the period is computed to have
been not less than six years. As he appears to have been in London at
the end of February, 1575, that term would be completed within a
fortnight, if he were present at the battle of Jarnac. The time covered
the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day, August 24, 1572. But there is no
foundation for the story that he was then in Paris, and was one of the
Englishmen sheltered in Walsingham's house. He had enlisted as a lad of
seventeen. He emerged a man of twenty-three. Of this long and critical
stage in his education we know really nothing, as we know nothing of his
youth at school and college. After he quitted France it would appear
from allusions by several contemporary writers that he served, about
1577-78, in the Netherlands with Sir John Norris's contingent under the
Prince of Orange. Modern enquirers have doubted the fact, on the ground
of evidence that he was in England between 1576 and 1578. The reasoning
is not demonstrative. He may, if a regular combatant, have obtained a
furlough to cross over, and see his family; or, from his English home,
he may have paid a flying visit or visits to his brother, Sir Humphrey
Gilbert, who commanded a regiment of the English auxiliaries. The dates
are not in