14 excuse for a baseness. The mass of it is an accumulation CH. XXXI. of hearsay evidence. Its chief object was to depict Ralegh as a man whom nobody need regret ; to sneer away his lustre and dignity. With this sordid view the trivial episode of the malingering scene at Salisbury is described with sickening minuteness. Few writers of authority have ventured to applaud the treatise. An exception is Mr. Spedding, who could An Apology for an not well let judgment pass against his idol without a word of Apology. defence for one of the worst blemishes in a pitiful official career. He shows here as elsewhere his admirable diligence in the collection of evidence; but he cannot be said to have shed any new light either on Ralegh's character, or on the part Bacon played in his slaughter, and in the endeavour to blacken his memory. For him both the King and the keeper of the King's conscience had no option but to put Ralegh to death. According to him the King's sanction of warlike preparations implied no understanding that it might be necessary to use them. According to him the commission to conduct an armed squadron and soldiery to a mine on the banks of the Orinoko conveyed no right to break a hostile Spanish blockade of the river. According to him, though in defiance of contemporary testimony, Ralegh alone employed violence; the San Thome garrison 'offered no provocation whatever, except an attitude of self-defence.' On these principles, while he laments the tardiness of its appearance, he necessarily considers the Declaration straightforward, honest, and convincing. National opinion judged differently. treated the whole as a piece of special pleading. In fairness it must be granted that, had it been much more cogent, it would have had as little effect. Chamberlain had prophetically written to Carleton on November 21, while it was known to be in process of composition, that it will not be believed, unless it be well proved.' It CH. XXXII. Popular In dignation. CHAPTER XXXII. CONTEMPORARY AND FINAL JUDGMENTS. MORE judicious or less prejudiced observers than James and his confidants would have suspected earlier the rise of the popular tide of sympathy and indignation. Strangers had remarked the tendency before the execution. A Spanish Dominican friar in England on a secret political mission had, Chamberlain told Carleton in October, been labouring for Ralegh's life from dread of the ill-will towards Spain which his death would cause. Many Englishmen were much nimbler than official and officious courtiers in perceiving the blunder. A great lord in the Tower, who may be presumed to have been Northumberland, another correspondent of Carleton's told him, had observed that, if the Spanish match went on, Spain had better have given £100,000 than have had him killed; and if not, that England had better have given £100,000 than have killed him. Pory assured Carleton, writing on October 31, that Ralegh's death would do more harm to the faction that procured it than ever he did in his life. As soon as his head was off, the authorities had to be hard at work suppressing ballads which were being sung in the streets against his adversaries. The jeer of the London goldsmith, Wiemark, the constant Paul's-walker,' that he wished such a head as had just been severed from Ralegh's body had been on Master Secretary's shoulders, was but a sample of a storm of sarcasms upon the Government which ran through the town. The anger dis It was played by Naunton and Villiers a couple of years later at the CH. XXXII. appearance of so poor a satire as Captain Gainsford's Vox Spiritus, or Sir Walter Ralegh's Ghost, which was being circulated in manuscript, and their zeal in suppressing it, testify to the durability of the alarm excited in the Court. no momentary and evanescent impulse. Dean Tounson had written on November 9, of Ralegh's execution, that 'it left a great impression on the minds of those that beheld him; inasmuch that Sir Lewis Stukely and the Frenchman grow very odious. This was the news a week since; but now it is blown over, and he almost forgotten.' The good Dean underrated the solidity and reasonableness of English feeling. The nation might not care to linger over creatures like Stukely and Manourie, even to execrate them. Its grief for Ralegh was a Its Duralasting sentiment. A spectator of his death declared that his Christian and truthful manner on the scaffold made all believe that he was not guilty of treason nor of malpractices. So sudden a conversion of the kingdom to faith in his innocence and heroism would have been almost as irrational as the original acquiescence without proof in his criminality, had it been as abrupt as it seemed. It would have been as shortlived as Dean Tounson anticipated, if its growth had been as gourd-like. In fact the nation only at the instant ascertained the state of its mind. The mood itself had been in course of formation for years. Ralegh, as we have seen, had been cordially detested in his day of ascendency. All a reign's odium naturally condenses itself upon a royal favourite. His elaborate courtesy did not produce the effect of affability. His lavishness was thought ostentation. His good nature, for he was good natured, had too much an air of condescension. The scorn of rivals or his superiors in rank he met with scorn. His exploits by land and sea, as impartial critics noted, heightened instead of pacifying malignity. Later exposure to settled Court dislike blunted the edge of popular enmity; it hardly turned it into kindness. The national attitude towards Ralegh, downtrodden and harassed, bility. The kingdom Formerly it had CH. XXXII. long showed curiosity more than affection. wondered what he was doing, or would do. believed, with repugnance, in his ability to extricate himself from all difficulties, whether of war or of intrigue. It retained the same faith in the indomitable resources of the prisoner of the Tower, without much active sympathy, though without antipathy. He died; and the wonder, the observant admiration flamed into a fury of passionate regret. For six and thirty years Ralegh had been before its eyes, and in its thoughts, for good or evil. It could not imagine him not at its service; and he was irreparably gone. A reserve of force, upon which the nation unconsciously had depended in the event of any emergency, had been thrown away. A light in England had been extinguished. The people forgot how it had misconstrued and reviled him. It forgot how passively it had borne to see him worried by malicious rivals and upstart strangers. On the instant he became for it the representative of an era of national glory sacrificed to sordid machinations. The executioner's axe in Palace Yard scattered a film which had dimmed the sight of Englishmen for an entire generation. Death vindicated on Ralegh's own behalf its title to his panegyric: 'O eloquent, just, and mighty Death!' Popular ness. The nation persisted in grieving for him. The instruments of his destruction, courtiers and Ministers, it pursued with a storm of immediate hatred. Loyalty or awe of the Prerogative secured the Sovereign's person for the time from open reproaches. The country was willing to suppose that the King had been misled by evil counsellors, and had quickly repented of the iniquity. Spain, two years later, assisted Austria to dethrone the Elector Palatine and his Stuart wife. A story was invented that James, in anger at the news, exclaimed he would demand the Spanish general's head. A courtier, it was fabled, dared to question whether Philip would be as facile and obliging as James had been. 'Then I wish,' groaned James, 'that Ralegh's head were again on his shoulders.' Posterity has been the Consti Party. less ready to make any excuse for James, even the excuse of a CH. XXXII. selfish contrition. His memory has paid with interest for his escape at first from his rightful share in the obloquy. His injustice as an individual weakened the national faith in royalty. The wrongs suffered from the State caused Ralegh to be regarded as a martyr to freedom, which he was not. The growing party of champions of constitutional liberties watched over and exalted his fame. Pym, in his note-book of Memorable Accidents, has entered under the year 1618: 'Sir Walter An Idol of Ralegh had the favour to be beheaded at Westminster, where he tutional died with great applause of the beholders, most constantly, most Christianly, most religiously.' Hampden could not bear that any fragments of his writing should be lost. Cromwell pored over his History. Milton printed his essays. Eliot at the date of the execution was twenty-eight. He had long been a friend, and still followed the fortunes, of Villiers. He did not belong yet to the popular party. So far was he from forgetting the spectacle in a week that, many years after, he recalled the whole in a glow of enthusiasm both for the King's victim and the Devon hero. He wrote in the Monarchy of Man, which he did not complete till 1631, that all history scarcely contained a parallel to the fortitude of our Ralegh'; that the placid courage of 'that great soul,' while it turned to sorrow the joy of the enemies who had come to witness his sufferings, filled all men else with emotion; 'leaving with them only this doubt, whether death were more acceptable to him, or he more welcome unto death.' Something both of political and religious partisanship mixed with and exalted the zeal of Pym, Hampden, Eliot, Cromwell, and Milton for the foe of Jesuits and Bishops, the scapegoat of a Stuart's infatuation for Spain, the survivor of a Court which had believed in the present grandeur of England, and a future more splendid still. The feeling was wonderfully tenacious. Ralegh remained for the generation which witnessed his death, and for the next also, the patriot scourge of a still detested Spain. Gradually that especial ground of kindness for him |