s dated October 25, 1582. This document is in the
highest degree conciliatory towards the Irish chieftains, whom it
recommends the Queen to win over peacefully to her side, this policy
'offering a very plausible show of thrift and commodity.' It is
interesting to find Raleigh so supple, and so familiar already with the
Queen's foibles. It was probably earlier in the year, and about this
same Irish business, that Raleigh spoke to Elizabeth, on the occasion
which Naunton describes. 'Raleigh,' he says, 'had gotten the Queen's ear
at a trice; and she began to be taken with his elocution, and loved to
hear his reasons to her demands; and the truth is, she took him for a
kind of _oracle_, which nettled them all.' Lord Grey, who was no
diplomatist, had the want of caution to show that he was annoyed at
advice being asked from a young man who was so lately his inferior. In
answer to a special recommendation of Raleigh from the Queen, Lord Grey
ventured to reply: 'For my own part I must be plain--I neither like his
carriage nor his company, and therefore other than by direction and
commandment, and what his right requires, he is not to expect from my
hands.' Lord Grey did not understand the man he was dealing with. The
result was that in August 1582 he was abruptly deposed from his dignity
as Lord Deputy in Ireland. But we see that Raleigh could be exceedingly
antipathetic to any man who crossed his path. That it was wilful
arrogance, and not inability to please, is proved by the fact that he
seems to have contrived to reconcile not Leicester only but even Hatton,
Elizabeth's dear 'Pecora Campi,' to his intrusion at Court.

As far as we can perceive, Raleigh's success as a courtier was unclouded
from 1582 to 1586, and these years are the most peaceful and uneventful
in the record of his career. He took a confidential place by the Queen's
side, but so unobtrusively that in these earliest years, at least, his
presence leaves no perceptible mark on the political history of the
country. Great in so many fields, eminent as a soldier, as a navigator,
as a poet, as a courtier, there was a limit even to Raleigh's
versatility, and he was not a statesman. It was political ambition which
was the vulnerable spot in this Achilles, and until he meddled with
statecraft, his position was practically unassailed. It must not be
overlooked, in this connection, that in spite of Raleigh's influence
with the Queen, he never was admitted as a Privy Cou