es on
her visitor, and urged the gentlewoman to seek the blessed body of
Christ in heaven, not on earth, and this with so much sweet
persuasiveness that when Mrs. Raleigh 'came home to her husband she
declared to him that in her life she never heard any woman, of such
simplicity to see to, talk so godly and so earnestly; insomuch, that if
God were not with her she could not speak such things--"I was not able
to answer her, I, who can read, and she cannot."' It is easy to perceive
that this anecdote would not have been preserved if the incident had not
heralded the final secession of Raleigh's parents from the creed of
Philip II., and thus Agnes Prest was not without her share in forging
Raleigh's hatred of bigotry and of the Spaniard. Very little else is
known about Walter and Katherine Raleigh. They lived at their manorial
farm of Hayes Barton, and they were buried side by side, as their son
tells us, 'in Exeter church.'

The university career of Raleigh is vague to us in the highest degree.
The only certain fact is that he left Oxford in 1569. Anthony a Wood
says that he was three years there, and that he entered Oriel College as
a commoner in or about the year 1568. Fuller speaks of him as resident
at Christ Church also. Perhaps he went to Christ Church first as a boy
of fourteen, in 1566, and removed to Oriel at sixteen. Sir Philip
Sidney, Hakluyt, and Camden were all of them at Oxford during those
years, and we may conjecture that Raleigh's acquaintance with them began
there. Wood tells us that Raleigh, being 'strongly advanced by
academical learning at Oxford, under the care of an excellent tutor,
became the ornament of the juniors, and a proficient in oratory and
philosophy.' Bacon and Aubrey preserved each an anecdote of Raleigh's
university career, neither of them worth repeating here.

The exact date at which he left Oxford is uncertain. Camden, who was
Raleigh's age, and at the university at the same time, says
authoritatively in his _Annales_, that he was one of a hundred gentlemen
volunteers taken to the help of the Protestant princes by Henry
Champernowne, who was Raleigh's first-cousin, the son of his mother's
elder brother. We learn from De Thou that Champernowne's contingent
arrived at the Huguenot camp on October 5, 1569. This seems
circumstantial enough, but there exist statements of Raleigh's own which
tend to show that, if he was one of his cousin's volunteers, he yet
preceded him into France. In