Burleigh and Walsingham and Essex were her Counsellors;
Drake and Hawkins; the Gilberts and Howards were among
her seamen; Sidney and Raleigh were among her courtiers; and
Raleigh, greatest of all her Statesmen, was but a Knight,
knighted for Virginia.
    While the statesmen helped her to play her great game in
Europe; her sea captains helped her to bring it to success in
those seas where Spain's overreaching power had decreed it to
be death to fly any flag but her own.
    The wealth, the power and the arrogance of Spain, with
her bigotry, aroused the people of England to a pitch which
had, possibly, not been known since the Norman conquest.
    Although England claimed the middle part of North
America by virtue of the discovery made in 1496, by John
Cabot, under Patent of Henry VII., the Continent was won a
hundred years later in the War with Spain, which lasted sub-
stantially through the last half of the Sixteenth Century.
    For a generation the great sea captains of England had
been training in western waters, and garnering up implacable
hate against Spain. Sir Philip Sidney had written vigorously
of England's opportunity and duty; Hawkins, Drake, the Gil-
berts, Grenville, and others had flouted Spain and fought her
from Cadiz to Peru. And then in God's Providence came
Walter Raleigh. Of all the great men of the time, as has been
said, to him more than to any other was due the capture of
this New World for England and her People. It was his far-
reaching prevision that foresaw her worth-his lofty ambition
that desired and his all-mastering genius that conceived and
carried through the mighty plans which made her an English
possession. He was the first and "Chief Governor of Virginia."
To him more than to any other one man this Nation owes a
monument; and stands as one.
    We -may not go into the long struggle he made to plant
here the Banner of England and of Protestantism. He died
after long imprisonment, a victim to the hate of the nation he
had so long and implacably fought-the most foolish and



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