ration than the Irish kerns, and although it is certain that of
all the 'undertakers' Raleigh was the one who, after his lights, tried
to do the best for his land, his experience as an Irish colonist was on
the whole dispiriting. By far the richest part of his property was the
'haven royal' of Youghal, with the thickly-wooded lands on either side
of the river Blackwater. He is scarcely to be forgiven for what appears
to have been the wanton destruction of the Geraldine Friary of Youghal,
built in 1268, which his men pulled down and burned while he was mayor
of the town in 1587. Raleigh's Irish residences at this time were his
manor-house in Youghal, which still remains, and Lismore Castle, which
he rented, from 1587 onwards, of the official Archbishop of Cashel,
Meiler Magrath.

We have now reached the zenith of Raleigh's personal success. His fame
was to proceed far beyond anything that he had yet gained or deserved,
but his mere worldly success was to reach no further, and even from this
moment sensibly to decline. Elizabeth had showered wealth and influence
upon him, although she had refrained, at her most doting moments, from
lifting him up to the lowest step in the ladder of aristocratic
preferment. But although her favour towards Raleigh had this singular
limit, and although she kept him rigidly outside the pale of politics,
in other respects her affection had been lavish in the extreme. Without
ceasing to hold Hatton and Leicester captive, she had now for five years
given Raleigh the chief place in her heart. But, in May 1587, we
suddenly find him in danger of being dethroned in favour of a boy of
twenty, and it is the new Earl of Essex, with his petulant beauty, who
'is, at cards, or one game or another, with her, till the birds sing in
the morning.' The remarkable scene in which Essex dared to demand the
sacrifice of Raleigh as the price of his own devotion is best described
by the new favourite in his own words. Raleigh had now been made Captain
of the Guard, and we have to imagine him standing at the door in his
uniform of orange-tawny, while the pert and pouting boy is half
declaiming, half whispering, in the ear of the Queen, whose beating
heart forgets to remind her that she might be the mother of one of her
lovers and the grandmother of the other. Essex writes:

I told her that what she did was only to please that knave
Raleigh, for whose sake I saw she would both grieve me and my
love, and d