CH. XXI. her poor child. The Pil grimage. If you can live free from want, care for no more for the rest is but vanity. Love God, and begin betimes to repose yourself on Him. When you have wearied your thoughts on all sorts of worldly cogitations, you shall sit down by sorrow in the end.' He does not know to what friend to direct her, for all his had left him in the time of trial. 'I plainly perceive,' he continues, 'that my death was determined from the first day.' He asks her, 'for my soul's health, to pay all poor men.' He warns her against suitors for her money; 'for the world thinks that I was very rich.' He prays her, 'Get those letters, if it be possible, which I writ to the Lords, wherein I sued for my life. God knoweth that it was for you and yours that I desired it; but it is true that I disdain myself for begging it. And know it, dear wife, that your son is the child of a true man, and who, in his own respect, despiseth Death, and all his misshapen and ugly forms. Beg my dead body, which living was denied you; and either lay it at Sherborne, if the land continue, or in Exeter church by my father and mother. I can write no more. Time and Death call me away.' Yet he can hardly part with wife or child, and adds still something: 'God teach me to forgive my persecutors and false accusers. My true wife farewell. Bless my poor boy; pray for me. Yours, that was, but now not my own.' He was more than willing to live. He was not afraid to die. In the apparent presence of death his soul, as always, recovered its lofty serenity. With his head, as he thought, on the block, he burst into the grand dirge of the Pilgrimage. Such are the variances of taste that a writer of reputation has spoken of this noble composition as 'a strange medley in which faith and confidence in God appear side by side with sarcasms upon the lawyers and the courtiers.' That is a judgment with which few will agree. The poem in the most authoritative manuscript is described as having been composed the night before Ralegh was beheaded. But it can scarcely be doubted that it belongs to the present period, when he was daily expecting the arrival of the warrant for his execution at Winchester. His spirit had 'quenched its thirst at those clear wells where sweetness CH. XXI. dwells.' It was bound in quiet palmer's fresh apparel to Heaven's bribeless hall, Where no corrupted voices brawl; Against our souls black verdicts give, Christ pleads his death, and then we live. vention. At ten in the morning of December 10 Sir Griffin Markham was conducted to the scaffold, which had been erected in the Castle yard. He had said adieu to his friends, prayed, and was awaiting the axe. Suddenly the spectators in the Castle yard saw the Sheriff, Sir Benjamin Tichborne, stay the executioner. John Gibb, a Scotch groom of the royal bedchamber, had arrived, almost too late, at the edge of the crowd. He was the bearer of a reprieve. James himself, on December 7, Royal Interhad drawn it, with a preamble: The two prestis and George Brooke vaire the principall plotteris and intisairs of all the rest to the embracing of the saiddis treasonabill machinations.' He had kept it back to the last, as well to multiply the chances of eliciting confessions of guilt, as for the sake of the vividness of the stage play. He admired greatly his own ingenuity, and his courtiers applauded enthusiastically. Of the detestable feline cruelty he and they had no shame. Ralegh's window in the Castle overlooked the scaffold. of the interruption of the proceedings. seen Gibb. He must, says Carleton, 'have had hammers working in his head to beat out the meaning of the stratagem.' Beaumont, the French ambassador, was told by an imaginative reporter that he 'était à la fenêtre, regardant la comédie de ses compagnons avec un visage riant.' He would be sensible He could not have The Sheriff performed his part with a ready gravity which secured the King's approval. He was already a favourite for 1441 CH. XXI. having proclaimed James on the first news of the death of Elizabeth, before the Council had declared him her successor. For his deserts both now and then the custody of the Castle soon afterwards was bestowed upon him and his heirs. He said to Markham, 'You say you are ill-prepared to die; you shall have two hours' respite.' Then he led him away, and locked him in Scenes on the Arthur's Hall. Next Grey was brought on the scaffold. He Scaffold. asserted that his fault against the King was 'far from the greatest, yet he knew his heart to be faulty.' He too was ready for the axe, when the Sheriff led him away to Arthur's Hall, saying the order of the execution was changed by the King's command, and Cobham was to precede Grey. Cobham came, with so bold an air as to suggest he had heard; but he prayed so lengthily that a bystander ejaculated he had 'a good mouth in a cry, but was nothing single.' He expressed repentance for his offence against the King. He corroborated all he had said against Sir Walter Ralegh as true 'upon the hope of his soul's resurrection.' The extortion of that confirmation of his calumnies had been a main object of the whole disgraceful farce. When he had thus bought his worthless life, the Sheriff brought back upon the scaffold Grey and Markham to stand beside him. offences were not heinous, and tried and lawfully condemned. Then said the Sheriff: 'See the himself hath sent hither a countermand, and hath given you your lives.' At this the crowd burst into such hues and cries that they went from the Castle into the town, and there began afresh. Grey said, 'Since the King has given me my life without my begging, I will deserve life.' Henry IV was sceptical as to the magnanimity of James. He wrote to Beaumont to discover if Spanish gold' were concerned in the reprieves; if Don Juan de Taxis and Cecil had used influence for them; 'for it is rumoured that these persons, backed by money expended by Ralegh, brought the thing about.' The faith in Ralegh's endless resources and skill prevailed in France as in England, All three were asked if their if they had not been justly Each answered affirmatively. mercy of your Prince, who of CHAPTER XXII. A PRISONER (1604-1612). ON December 16, 1603, Ralegh, with his fellow convicts, CH. XXII. returned to London. That would have been the close of an ordinary man's career. To him alone it did not seem the end, and he resolved it should not be. He had his life. Liberty and fortune were still to be regained. He looked around him, and endeavoured to retrieve the scattered fragments of his wealth. Like all his peers in arms and politics he had ever believed in the importance of riches. But now he was grasping at the possibility of continuing by money in lieu of his imprisoned self his schemes of a Guiana sovereignty. He was striving to construct out of the wreck of his grandeur a refuge for his wife and his boy from the anguish and dependence of penury. 'Poverty,' he preached to his son, 'is a shame, an imprisonment of the mind. Poverty provokes a man to do infamous and detested deeds.' He was civilly dead. The division of his spoils had com- Civilly dead. menced before the trial. He had, as has been mentioned, been dismissed in July from his island government. In September Godolphin, High Sheriff of Cornwall, had been directed to take the musters, 'the commission of Lieutenancy granted to Sir Walter Ralegh being become void and determined.' Early in 1604 he formally returned the seal of the Duchy of Cornwall to Cecil. His successor was his connexion, Lord Pembroke. He was stripped of the Rangership of Gillingham Forest, and of the Lieutenancy of Port R Lord Not tingham's Rapacity. CH. XXII. land, though he would regret the loss of those offices the less that they remained in the hands of their joint tenant, his brother, Sir Carew. His enjoyment of his patent as wine licenser had been suspended, that it might be considered if the post were a monopoly. The Council came to the conclusion that it was not. But before Ralegh could collect the arrears from the vintners he was arraigned. Thereupon, not waiting for the result of the trial, the King revoked the patent, and granted it to the Lord Admiral. Nottingham, not content with the profit from new licenses, claimed the arrears. Lady Ralegh remonstrated. She indignantly computed to Cecil in 1604 that the Admiral 'hath £6000, and £3000 a year, by my husband's fall. And since it pleaseth God that his Lordship shall build upon our ruins, which we never suspected, yet the portion is great and, I trust, sufficient, out of one poor gentleman's fortune to take all that remains, and not to look back before his Majesty's grant, and take from us the debts past, which your Lordship knows were stayed from us by a proclamation before my husband was suspected of any offence.' Sherborne was attached. Commissioners for it had been appointed, Serjeant Phillips and Meere. They had pounced upon the domain, and were selling stock, felling timber, and dismantling the castle. Cecil interfered peremptorily by letter, and for a time stayed all proceedings. He is likely to have 'spoken the one word' about the wine licence arrears which Lady Ralegh implored. No more is heard of the Lord Admiral's demand. A more important favour was obtained. In February, 1604, all Ralegh's goods, chattels, and money due to him, though forfeited for treason, were granted by the Crown to trustees for payment of debts owing before his attainder, and for the maintenance of his wife and child. The trustees named were Robert Smith and John Shelbury. Shelbury was Ralegh's steward,' a man I can better entreat than know how to reward.' The grant included, beside the wine arrearages, money in the hands of the wine licenser's deputy, William Sanderson. |