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point at least, "completely false." The speech itself by no means loses its interest in the face of such conflicting judgments, and every contemporaneous version of it may haply aid in solving the problem of its authenticity and of its truth.

Let us turn then to the speech and the contemporary accounts of it. The earliest notice of it which we have been able to find is in a Letter of Rev. Thomas Lorkin to Sir Thomas Puckering, Bart., printed in Birch's "Court and Times of James the First" (vol. ii. p. 99). It is dated November 3, 1618, just a week after the execution of Raleigh, in which the scene and the speech are described minutely, and in substantial conformity to the detailed report given by Mr. Edwards. Next, in order of date, is a letter, found at page 104 of the same volume, from John Chamberlain, Esq., to Sir Dudley Carleton, then Minister at the Hague, which, after acknowledging some papers he had received from Sir Dudley, proceeds as follows: "For some part of amends, I return you two papers in exchange; the one a letter from Sir Walter Raleigh to the King, before he came to Salisbury; and withal half a dozen verses he made the night before his death, to take farewell of poetry, wherein he had been a pidler even from his youth. The other is a remembrancer left with his lady, written likewise that night, to acquaint the world withal, if perhaps he should not have been suffered to speak at his death, as he was cut off from speaking somewhat he would have said at the King's Bench; and they had no thanks that suffered him to talk so long on the scaffold; but the fault was laid on the sheriff, and there it rests. His lady had been to visit him that night, and told him she had obtained the disposing of his body. To which he answered smiling, It is well, Besse, that thou mayest dispose of that dead, that had'st not always the disposing of it when it was alive'; and so dismissed her anon, after midnight, when he settled himself to sleep for three or four hours." A third notice of the scene and speech is in a letter from Dr. Robert Tounson. Dean of Westminster, afterward Bishop of Sarum, who attended Sir Walter Raleigh on the scaffold, and wrote a letter to Sir John Isham, dated November 9, 1618, only a fortnight after the event of which he had been an eye-witness, in which he says: "I hope you had the relation of Sir Walter Raleigh's death; for so I gave order, that it should be brought unto you. I was commaunded by the lords of the counsayle to be with him, both in prison and att his death as nere as I could: there be other reports of itt, but that which you have from me is

It is thus clear that the speech was not a short one.

treu: one Craford, who was sometimes Mr. Rodeknight's pupil, hath penned it pretily, and meaneth to putt itt to the presse, and came to me about it, but I heare not that it is come forth. The summe of that which he spake att his death, you have, I suppose, already." (See p. 780 of "Sir W. Raleigh's Works," vol. viii. Oxford, 1829.)

Lastly, in Walter Scott's Edition of "The Somers Tracts" (vol. ii. p. 438), there is a detailed report of the scene and speech, which is ascribed to "Crawford, or Craford."

We might allude to other reports or descriptions of the speech and the scene. But that which is thus traced to "Crawford, or Craford," who, it seems, had consulted with the Dean of Westminster, who was with Raleigh on the scaffold "as nere as he could," and who must have heard every word he said,— would seem to be the most authentic. The Dean's expression that Craford hath penned it pretily, and meaneth to putt itt to the presse," may, perhaps, be construed to imply that the account was skilfully arranged, or even adorned, but it certainly casts no discredit upon its accuracy.

We are not in the way of ascertaining exactly where Archbishop Sancroft's account in the Tanner MSS. came from. The Archbishop himself was born in Suffolk County, England, in January, 1617, which, according to old style, would be less than one year before Raleigh's death. Of course, he could have had no personal knowledge on the subject.

The account contained in Adam Winthrop's Common-Place Book was undoubtedly written soon after the event, and it is substantially Craford's account. Now and then there is something transposed or omitted; and now and then there is a difference of phraseology. But after a careful comparison it can hardly be doubted that it was taken from the "pretily penned " report which the Dean of Westminster described, and of which he said that Craford "meaneth to putt itt to the presse." It may have been printed on a broadside at the time, but we believe that not even the countless treasures of the British Museum, as thus far searched, contain a contemporaneous printed copy. The earliest printed report of "the Speech on the Scaffold," to which any allusion has been found, bears date 1648; but of that no copy is at command for comparison. We should hardly know where to look for one on this side of the The earliest within reach is that appended to the Life of Sir Walter, printed in 1677, of which our Recording Secretary

ocean.

* Adam Winthrop died in April, 1623. The latest date in his MS. book is Nov. 24, 1621.

t See Watt's Bib. Brit., II. 788°.

(Mr. Deane) has a copy in his valuable library, which he has kindly placed at our disposal, with other rare volumes on the subject. That version of the Speech conforms, also, to the one ascribed to" Crawford or Craford" in the Somers Tracts, but with some omissions and variations of phraseology. Under such circumstances Adam Winthrop's copy may have an interest and even a value. It may, at least, contribute something to "the various readings" out of which the true version is to be made up, if it has not been made up already.

Few greater men have ever lived in England, or anywhere else, than Raleigh. No man contributed more, if so much, towards the earliest American Colonization. "It was Raleigh," says Mr. Edwards," who, in the teeth of Spain, when at her prime, laid the first foundations of the British Colonies in North America. . . . The future destinies of America, as well as the profits of a new trade, were with him themes of thought, of conversation, and of active effort, from the age of thirty-two (when he first joined in the enterprise of his half-brother (Sir Humphrey Gilbert) to his latest hour of life." No man has left grander monuments of enterprise, courage, and genius. That after a long and dreary imprisonment in the Tower, he should at last have been beheaded, at a day's notice, under a sentence passed fourteen or fifteen years before, which Bacon himself has been stated to have said was virtually superseded by his commission for Guiana, was an unspeakable atrocity. Well does John Forster, in his admirable Life of Sir John Eliot, pronounce it "the climax and consummation of the baseness of James's reign; - a shameless sacrifice of one of the greatest men of the English race to the rage and mortification of the power most hated by Englishmen." Sir John Eliot, an eye-witness, as is believed, of the tragedy,- himself afterwards a martyr to Free Speech, has included has included a description of Raleigh's bearing on the occasion, among his illustrations of the "Monarchy of Man." "Matchless, indeed," says he, "was his fortitude! All preparations that were terrible were presented to his eye. Guards and officers were about him, the scaffold and the executioner, the axe, and the more cruel expectation of his enemies. And what did all this work on the resolution of our Raleigh? Made it an impression of weak fear, or a distraction of his reason? Nothing so little did that great soul suffer. He gathered only the more strength and advantage; his mind became the clearer, as if already it had been freed from the cloud and oppression of the body; and such was his unmoved courage and placid temper, that, while 10 changed the affection of the enemies who had come to witness

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it and turned their joy to sorrow, it filled all men else with admiration and emotion, leaving with them only this doubt, whether death were more acceptable to him or he more welcome unto death."

All this does not look like the bearing of a man who had a lie, or even a prevarication, in his mouth. It is true, however, that the standard of morality, public and private, was any thing but exalted at that day. Bacon, who meanly consented to Raleigh's death, and vindicated his master for the act, was himself, at last, deposed for corruption. We would not suppress or extenuate any faults or follies of Raleigh, of which there is historical evidence. Faults, infirmities, and follies he certainly exhibited. The editor of Birch's Papers, in relation to Raleigh's feigned sickness, says in a foot-note: "The mind of the gallant Raleigh had given way beneath an accumulation of troubles. He had lost his son in a contest with the Spaniards, one of his captains had committed suicide, and the object of his voyage had been defeated by the treachery of the King, proof of which exists in a letter of Buckingham to Secretary Winwood, to be found in Hardwicke's State Papers, vol. i. p. 398." *

Indeed, if the account of Manourie, the French apothecary, as given by Lord Bacon, is to be taken for true, Raleigh must have been goaded to absolute madness during these last few weeks, and a jury in our time would have justly returned a verdict of insanity. But Manourie, the principal accuser of Sir Walter, (according to a letter of Rev. Thomas Lorkin to Sir Thomas Puckering, of 16 February, 1618-19,) was not only convicted soon afterwards as a clipper of gold, but "confessed that his accusation against Raleigh was false, and that he was moved thereto by the practice and importunity of Stukely, and now acknowledged this, his present miserable condition, to be a judgment of God upon him for that"!

Was there ever such "confusion worse confounded"? No wonder that Gibbon himself, even before Simancas unfolded her treasures, shrunk in despair from disentangling the truth from the falsehood of Raleigh's life. But make the worst of him, and still his execution, under such circumstances, will stand out forever, as one of the most abhorrent and abominable acts in English History. Occurring, as it did, a year or two only before the Pilgrims came over to Plymouth, and little more than ten years before the settlement of Massachusetts, it must have been one of the events by which the minds

* Court and Times of James I., p. 85.

MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY.

[SEPT. of the New England Colonists were impressed and agitated while they were meditating a departure from their native land. And the mere fact that the account now submitted comes from an ancient manuscript which was undoubtedly brought over by Governor Winthrop in 1630, and which has but recently been discovered among the old papers of his father, greatly enhances its interest. Even should it not add a single new reading, or one better phrase, for Sir Walter's last words, (as we think it does), it may serve to revive the remembrance of his marvellous career and of his heroic death,on our side of the Atlantic, where it would most have gratified him to know that he should not be forgotten.

To a Society like ours, devoted to historical pursuits, his career has a peculiar interest, in view of the well-remembered fact that so large a part of his long imprisonment in the Tower was employed in writing that "History of the World," which is one of the most remarkable works in English literature, and of which the closing passage is doubly impressive in connection with the fate which was so soon to befall him: "It is therefore Death alone," he says, "that can suddenly make man to know himself. He tells the proud and insolent that they are but abjects, and humbles them at the instant, makes them complain and repent, yea, even to hate their forepast happiness. He takes the account of the rich and proves him a beggar, a naked beggar, which hath interest in nothing but the gravel that fills his mouth. He holds a glass before the eyes of the beautiful, and makes them see therein their deformity and rottenness, and they acknowledge it. Oh, eloquent, just, and mighty Death! Whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised; thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, Hic jacet"!

In conclusion, we can hardly doubt that the speech was made substantially as it has been reported. A strong reason for questioning the authenticity of the Simancas copy of the alleged letter of October 5, or, as Mr. Gardiner gives the date, of September 25th, is found in the fact that it is not mentioned, or in any way referred to, in Lord Bacon's Vindication of his Master, printed within a few months of the execution. If the King had such an answer to Raleigh's dying words, as they were reported, how could it have failed to be used by Bacon to mitigate the popular indignation at the time? How could it have been unheard of for two centuries and a half, if it had

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