his largest ship, for 5,000_l._; and
in February 1592 he was ready to sail. When the moment for parting came,
however, the Queen found it impossible to spare him, and Sir John
Burrough was appointed admiral.

It is exceedingly difficult to move with confidence in this obscure part
of our narrative. On March 10, 1592, we find Raleigh at Chatham, busy
about the wages of the sailors, and trying to persuade them to serve
under Frobisher, whose reputation for severity made him very unpopular.
He writes on that day to Sir Robert Cecil, and uses these ambiguous
expressions with regard to a rumour of which we now hear for the first
time:

I mean not to come away, as they say I will, for fear of a
marriage, and I know not what. If any such thing were, I would
have imparted it to yourself, before any man living; and
therefore, I pray, believe it not, and I beseech you to
suppress, what you can, any such malicious report. For I protest
before God, there is none, on the face of the earth, that I
would be fastened unto.

Raleigh was now in a desperate embarrassment. There was that concealed
in his private life which could only be condoned by absence; he had seen
before him an unexpected chance of escape from England, and now the
Queen's tedious fondness had closed it again. The desperate fault which
he had committed was that he had loved too well and not at all wisely a
beautiful orphan, Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, a
maid of honour to the Queen. It is supposed that she was two or three
and twenty at the time. Whether he seduced her, and married her after
his imprisonment in the Tower, or whether in the early months of 1592
there was a private marriage, has been doubted. The biographers of
Raleigh have preferred to believe the latter, but it is to be feared
that his fair fame in this matter cannot be maintained unsullied. Among
Sir Walter Raleigh's children one daughter appears to have been
illegitimate, 'my poor daughter, to whom I have given nothing, for his
sake who will be cruel to himself to preserve thee,' as he says to Lady
Raleigh in 1603, and it may be that it was the birth of this child which
brought down the vengeance of Queen Elizabeth upon their heads.

His clandestine relations with Elizabeth Throckmorton were not in
themselves without excuse. To be the favourite of Elizabeth, who had now
herself attained the sixtieth summer of her immortal charms, was
tantamount t