s more freely when he holds at last the earliest
letter which remains in the handwriting of his hero. All else may be
erroneous or conjectural, but here at least, for a moment, he presses
his fingers upon the very pulse of the machine. On February 22, 1580,
Raleigh wrote from Cork to Burghley, giving him an account of his
voyage. It appears that he wrote on the day of his arrival, and if that
be the case, he left London, and passed down the Thames, in command of
a troop of one hundred foot soldiers, on January 15, 1580. By the same
computation, they reached the Isle of Wight on the 21st, and stayed
there to be transferred into ships of Her Majesty's fleet, not starting
again until February 5. On his reaching Cork, Raleigh found that his men
and he were only to be paid from the day of their arrival in Ireland,
and he wrote off at once to Burghley to secure, if possible, the
arrears. His arrival was a welcome reinforcement to Sentleger, who was
holding Cork in the greatest peril, with only forty Englishmen. It must
be recollected that this force under Raleigh was but a fragment of what
English squadrons were busily bringing through this month of January
into every port of Ireland. Elizabeth had, at last, awakened in earnest
to her danger.

Raleigh, in all probability, took no part in the marchings and
skirmishings of the English armies until the summer. His 'reckoning,' or
duty-pay, as a captain in the field, begins on July 13, 1580, and
perhaps, until that date, his services consisted in defending Cork under
Sentleger. In August he was joined with the latter, who was now
Provost-marshal of Munster, in a commission to try Sir James, the
younger brother of the Earl of Desmond, who had been captured by the
Sheriff of Cork. No mercy could be expected by so prominent a Geraldine;
he was hanged, drawn and quartered, and the fragments of his body were
hung in chains over the gates of Cork. Meanwhile, on August 12, Lord
Grey de Wilton arrived in Dublin to relieve Pelham of sovereign command
in Ireland. Grey, though he learned to dislike Raleigh, was probably
more cognisant of his powers than Pelham, who may never have heard of
him. Grey had been the patron of the poet Gascoigne, and one of the most
prominent men in the group with whom we have already seen that Raleigh
was identified in his early youth.

From the moment of Grey's arrival in Ireland, the name of Raleigh ceased
to be obscure. Sir William Pelham retired on Septembe