138 JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
afterwards he was appointed Lord-Lieutenant of Cornwall, and Vice- 
Admiral of that county and of Devon. He was then made Captain 
of the Guard, a place more of honour than of profit. He was 
granted 12,000 acres of forfeited land in various parts of Ireland; 
and finally, in 1591, he was presented with the manor of Sherborne, 
worth about £5,000 a year. With the money acquired in these 
various ways, and it is to be feared by various ventures partaking 
of the nature of piracy, he made a splendid figure at Court. The 
jewels on his shoes alone are said to have been valued at £6,600, 
and those on his dress at no less than £60,000. He continued 
stedfast in the work of colonization, and it has been calculated 
that he spent first and last as much as £40,000 on the expeditions 
to Virginia alone. In the great year 1588 he commanded a 
squadron of volunteers against the Armada, and his gallantry was 
so highly appreciated that he received as his share of the booty as 
many Spanish prisoners as were allotted to Drake. Next year he 
served as a volunteer in an expedition nominally undertaken for 
the purpose of seating Don Antonio, a refugee, on the throne of 
Portugal. From the point of view of Don Antonio the expedition 
proved a dead failure ; for the Portuguese could not be persuaded 
to have anything to do with him ; but the fleet managed to secure 
an immense booty, and came back by no means dissatisfied. On 
his return Raleigh renewed his old friendship with Edmund Spenser 
the poet by paying him a visit at his home in Ireland, where they 
composed a great many verses together. During this visit to Ireland 
Raleigh is said to have planted the first potato ever grown in that 
country. Hitherto Raleigh' s star has been continuously in the 
ascendant ; but soon there came a very serious check to his career 
of almost unexampled prosperity, a check for which he himself 
was alone to blame. During the summer of 1592, when he was 
just forty years old, he was detected in an intrigue with Elizabeth 
Throgmorton, one of the Queen's maids of honour, a beautiful girl 
exactly half his age. The Queen was perfectly furious, as well 
she might be ; for Raleigh's conduct was not only a disgrace to her 
Court, but a personal insult to herself. She promptly sent him to 
the Tower, where, instead of repenting of his misdeeds, he amused 
himself with writing absurd letters to Robert Cecil about the Queen, 
and quarreling with his jailor. 
Imprisonment seems, however, to have had a beneficial effect on 
Raleigh ; for in the course of the autumn he married Elizabeth 
