If he had done so, be sure that we should have heard of it. For no man can become what he has become without making many an enemy; and he has his enemies already. On which statement naturally occurs the question—why? An important question too; because several of his later biographers seem to have running in their minds some such train of thought as this—Raleigh must have been a bad fellow, or he would not have had so many enemies; and because he was a bad fellow, there is an _à priori_ reason that charges against him are true. Whether this be arguing in a circle or not, it is worth searching out the beginning of this enmity, and the reputed causes of it. In after years it will be because he is ‘damnable proud,’ because he hated Essex, and so forth: of which in their places. But what is the earliest count against him? Naunton, who hated Raleigh, and was moreover a rogue, has no reason to give, but that ‘the Queen took him for a kind of oracle, which much nettled them all; yea, those he relied on began to take this his sudden favour for an alarm; to be sensible of their own supplantation, and to project his; which shortly made him to sing, “Fortune my foe.”’ Now, be this true or not, and we do not put much faith in it, it gives no reason for the early dislike of Raleigh, save the somewhat unsatisfactory one which Cain would have given for his dislike of Abel. Moreover, there exists a letter of Essex’s, written as thoroughly in the Cain spirit as any we ever read; and we wonder that, after reading that letter, men can find courage to repeat the old sentimentalism about the ‘noble and unfortunate’ Earl. His hatred of Raleigh—which, as we shall see hereafter, Raleigh not only bears patiently, but requites with good deeds as long as he can—springs, by his own confession, simply from envy and disappointed vanity. The spoilt boy insults Queen Elizabeth about her liking for the ‘knave Raleigh.’ She, ‘taking hold of one word disdain,’ tells Essex that ‘there was no such cause why I should thus disdain him.’ On which, says Essex, ‘as near as I could I did describe unto her what he had been, and what he was; and then I did let her see, whether I had come to disdain his competition of love, or whether I could have comfort to give myself over to the service of a mistress that was in awe of such a man. I spake for grief and choler as much against him as I could: and I think he standing at the door might very well hear the worst that I spoke of him. In the end, I saw she was resolved to defend him, and to cross me.’ Whereupon follows a ‘scene,’ the naughty boy raging and stamping, till he insults the Queen, and calls Raleigh ‘a wretch’; whereon poor Elizabeth, who loved the coxcomb for his father’s sake, ‘turned her away to my Lady Warwick,’ and Essex goes grumbling forth.