As He Lived In
A Roughling Time, So He Loved Sword And Buckler Men, And Such As Our
Fathers Were Wont To Call Men Of Their Hands; Of Which Sort He Had
Many Brave Gentlemen That Followed Him, Yet Not Taken For A Popular
And Dangerous Person:
And this is one that stood among the TOGATI,
of an honest, stout heart, and such a one, that, upon occasion,
would have fought for his prince and country, for he had the charge
of the Queen's person, both in the Court and in the camp at Tilbury.
RALEIGH.
Sir Walter Raleigh was one that, it seems, Fortune had picked out of
purpose, of whom to make an example and to use as her tennis-ball,
thereby to show what she could do, for she tossed him up of nothing,
and to and fro to greatness, and from thence down to little more
than to that wherein she found him, a bare gentleman; and not that
he was less, for he was well descended, and of good alliance, but
poor in his beginnings: and for my Lord Oxford's jests of him for
the jacks and upstarts, we all know it savoured more of emulation,
and his honour than of truth; and it is a certain note of the times,
that the Queen, in her choice, never took in her favour a mere
viewed man, or a mechanic, as Comines observes of Lewis XI., who did
serve himself with persons of unknown parents, such as were Oliver,
the barber, whom he created Earl of Dunoyes, and made him EX
SECRETIS CONSILIIS, and alone in his favour and familiarity.
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