A Liberal Descent

The most familiar and most parodied of Victorian historical paintings, after ‘And When Did You Last See Your Father?’, is surely Millais' ‘Boyhood of Raleigh’ (1870): the two boys on the beach, their discarded toy boat half-revealed in the foreground; the future courtier and colonist, his pinched, anxious face and foetal pose unfortunately suggesting a rather recalcitrant attitude to the age of expansion, giving an air of expostulation to the seaman who, arm outstretched with nautical precision, at an angle to indicate El Dorado and the Indies rather than Dinard, points an imperious finger seaward.

James Anthony Froude, the historian of Tudor England and a leading promoter of the imperialist excitement of the closing years of the nineteenth century, had drawn, nearly twenty years earlier, his own fleeting pen-portrait of the same imagined scene at Dartmouth three centuries before, in what is perhaps his best-known essay, ‘England's Forgotten Worthies’, his influential celebration of the mariners and explorers of the Elizabethan age. It was a review of a new edition of Hakluyt, ‘the Prose Epic of the modern English nation’, as Froude called it, adding that ‘What the old epics were to the royally or nobly born, this modern epic is to the common people.’