CHAPTER VIII.

You would have stirred England and Scotland both. You incited the Lord Cobham, as soon as Count Aremberg came into England, to go to him. The night he went, you supped with the Lord Cobham, and he brought you after supper to Durham House; and then the same night by a back-way went with La Renzi to Count Aremberg, and got from him a promise for the money. After this it was arranged that the Lord Cobham should go to Spain and return by Jersey, where you were to meet him about the distribution of the money; because Cobham had not so much policy or wickedness as you. Your intent was to set up the Lady Arabella asa titular Queen, and to depose our present rightful King, the lineal descendant of Edward IV. You pretend that this money was to forward the Peace with Spain. Your jargon was 'peace,' which meant Spanish invasion and Scottish subversion.

This was plain language, at least; this was the case for the prosecution, stripped of all pedantic juggling; and Raleigh now drew himself together to confute these charges as best he might. 'Let me answer,' he said; 'it concerns my life;' and from this point onwards, as Mr. Edwards remarks, the trial becomes a long and impassioned dialogue. Coke refused to let Raleigh speak, and in this was supported by Popham, a very old man, who owed his position in that court more to his age than his talents, and who was solicitous to be on friendly terms with the Attorney. Coke then proceeded to argue that Raleigh's relations with Cobham had been notoriously so intimate that there was nothing surprising or improbable in the accusation that he shared his guilt. He then nimbly went on to expatiate with regard to the circumstances of Cobham's treason, and was deft enough to bring these forward in such a way as to leave on the mind of his hearers the impression that these were things proved against Raleigh. To this practice, which deserved the very phrases which Coke used against the prisoner's dealings, 'devilish and machiavelian policy,' Raleigh protested again and again that he ought not to be subjected, until Coke lost his temper once more, and cried, 'Ithouthee, thou traitor, and I will prove thee the rankest traitor in all England.' A sort of hubbub now ensued, and the Lord Chief Justiceagain interfered to silence Raleigh, with a poor show of impartiality.

Coke, however, had well nigh exhausted the slender stock of evidence with which he had started. For a few minutes longer he tried by sheer bluster to conceal the poverty of the case, and last of all he handed one of Cobham's confessions to the Clerk of the Crown to be read in court. It entered into no particulars, which Cobham said their lordships must not expect from him, for he was so confounded that he had lost his memory, but it vaguely asserted that he would never have entered into 'these courses' but for Raleigh's instigation. The reading being over, Coke at last sat down. Raleigh began to address the jury, very quietly at first. He pointed out that this solitary accusation, by the most wavering of mortals, uttered in a moment of anger, was absolutely all the evidence that could be brought against him. He admitted that he suspected Cobham of secret communications with Count Aremberg, but he declared that he knew no details, and that whatever he discovered, Cecil also was privy to. He had hitherto spoken softly; he now suddenly raised his voice, and electrified the court by turning upon Sir Edward Coke, and pouring forth the eloquent and indignant protest which must now be given in his own words.

Master Attorney, whether to favour or to disable my Lord Cobham you speak as you will of him, yet he is not such a babe as you make him. He hath dispositions of such violence, which his best friends could never temper. But it is very strange that I, at this time, should be thought to plot with the Lord Cobham, knowing him a man that hath neither love nor following; and, myself, at this time havingresigned a place of my best command in an office I had in Cornwall. I was not so bare of sense but I saw that, if ever this State was strong, it was now that we have the Kingdom of Scotland united, whence we were wont to fear all our troubles—Ireland quieted, where our forces were wont to be divided—Denmark assured, whom before we were always wont to have in jealousy—the Low Countries our nearest neighbour. And, instead of a Lady whom time had surprised, we had now an active King, who would be present at his own businesses. For me, at this time, to make myself a Robin Hood, a Wat Tyler [in the inadvertence of the moment he seems to have said 'a Tom Tailor,' by mistake], a Kett, or a Jack Cade! I was not so mad! I knew the state of Spain well, his weakness, his poorness, his humbleness at this time. I knew that six times we had repulsed his forces—thrice in Ireland, thrice at sea, once upon our coast and twice upon his own. Thrice had I served against him myself at sea—wherein, for my country's sake, I had expended of my own property forty thousand marks. I knew that where beforetime he was wont to have forty great sails, at the least, in his ports, now he hath not past six or seven. And for sending to his Indies, he was driven to have strange vessels, a thing contrary to the institutions of his ancestors, who straitly forbade that, even in case of necessity, they should make their necessity known to strangers. I knew that of twenty-five millions which he had from the Indies, he had scarce any left. Nay, I knew his poorness to be such at this time that the Jesuits, his imps, begged at his church doors; his pride so abated that, notwithstanding his former high terms, he was become glad to congratulate his Majesty, and to send creeping unto him for peace.

In these fiery words the audience was reminded of the consistent hatred which Raleigh had always shownto Spain, and of the services which he himself, now a prisoner at the bar, had performed for the liberties of England. The sympathies of the spectators began to be moved; those who had execrated Raleigh most felt that they had been deceived, and that so noble an Englishman, however indiscreet he might have been, could not by any possibility have intrigued with the worst enemies of England.

But the prisoner had more to do than to rouse the irresponsible part of his audience by his patriotic eloquence. The countenances of his judges remained as cold to him as ever, and he turned to the serious business of his defence. His quick intelligence saw that the telling point in Coke's diatribe had been the emphasis he had laid on Raleigh's intimate friendship with Cobham. He began to try and explain away this intimacy, stating what we now know was not exactly true, namely that his 'privateness' with Cobham only concerned business, in which the latter sought to make use of his experience. He dwelt on Cobham's wealth, and argued that so rich a man would not venture to conspire. All this part of the defence seems to me injudicious. Raleigh was on safer ground in making another sudden appeal to the sentiment of the court: 'As for my knowing that he had conspired all these things against Spain, for Arabella, and against the King, I protest before Almighty God I am as clear as whosoever here is freest.'

After a futile discussion as to the value of Cobham's evidence, the foreman of the jury asked a plain question: 'I desire to understand the time of Sir Walter Raleigh's first letter, and of the Lord Cobham's accusation.' Upon this Cecil spoke for the first time, spinning out along and completely unintelligible sentence which was to serve the foreman as an answer. Before the jury could recover from their bewilderment, this extraordinary trial, which proceeded like an Adventure in Wonderland, was begun once more by Coke, who started afresh with voluble denunciation of the defendant, for whom, he said, it would have been better 'to have stayed in Guiana than to be so well acquainted with the state of Spain.' Coke was still pouring out a torrent of mere abuse, when Raleigh suddenly interrupted him, and addressing the judges, claimed that Cobham should then and there be brought face to face with him. Since he had been in the Tower he had been studying the law, and he brought forward statutes of Edwards III. and IV. to support his contention that he could not be convicted on Cobham's bare accusation. The long speech he made at this point was a masterpiece of persuasive eloquence, and it is worth noting that Dudley Carleton, who was in court, wrote to a friend that though when the trial began he would have gone a hundred miles to see Raleigh hanged, when it had reached this stage he would have gone a thousand to save his life.

The judges, however, and Popham in particular, were not so moved, and Raleigh's objection to the evidence of Cobham was overruled. Coke was so far influenced by it that he now attempted to show that there was other proof against the prisoner, and tried, very awkwardly, to make the confessions of Watson and George Brooke in the 'Bye' tell against Raleigh in the 'Main.' Raleigh's unlucky statement, made at Windsor, to the effect that Cobham had offered him 10,000 crowns, and an examination in which Raleigh's friend CaptainKeymis admitted a private interview between Cobham and Raleigh during Count Aremberg's stay in London, were then read. In the discussion on these documents the court and the prisoner fell to actual wrangling; in the buzz of voices it was hard to tell what was said, until a certain impression was at last made by Coke, who screamed out that Raleigh 'had a Spanish heart and was a spider of hell.' This produced a lull, and thereupon followed an irrelevant dispute as to whether or no Raleigh had once had in his possession a book containing treasonable allusions to the claims of the King of Scotland. Raleigh admitted the possession of this volume, and said that Cecil gave him leave to take it out of Lord Burghley's library. He added that no book was published towards the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign that did not pass through his hands. It would be interesting to know whether he meant that he exercised a private censorship of the press, or that he bought everything that appeared. At all events, the point was allowed to drop.

Raleigh now gave his attention to the evidence which Keymis had given under threat of the rack. That this torture had been threatened, in express disobedience to the King's order, staggered some of the commissioners, and covered Sir William Waad with confusion. The eliciting of this fact seems to have brought over to Raleigh's side the most valuable and unexpected help, for, in the discussion that ensued, Cecil suddenly pleaded that Raleigh should be allowed fair play. The Attorney then brought forward the case of Arabella Stuart, and a fresh sensation was presented to the audience, who, after listening to Cecil, were suddenly thrilled to hear a voice at the back of the court shout, 'The Lady doth here protest, upon her salvation, that she never dealt in any of these things.' It was the voice of the Earl of Nottingham, who had entered unperceived, and who was standing there with Arabella Stuart on his arm. Their apparition was no surprise to the judges; it had been carefully prearranged.

The trial dragged on with irrelevant production of evidence by Coke, occasional bullying by the Lord Chief Justice, and repeated appeals for fairness from Cecil, who cautiously said that 'but for his fault,' he was still Raleigh's friend. Posterity has laughed at one piece of the Attorney's evidence:

There is one Dyer, a pilot, that being in Lisbon met with a Portugal gentleman, which asked him if the King of England was crowned yet. To whom he answered, 'I think not yet, but he shall be shortly.' 'Nay,' said the Portugal, 'that shall he never be, for his throat will be cut by Don Raleigh and Don Cobham before he be crowned.'

A prosecution that calls for evidence such as this has simply broken down. The whole report of the trial is so puerile, that it can only be understood by bearing in mind that, as Mr. Gardiner says, the Government were in possession of a good deal of evidence which they could not produce in court. The King wished to spare Arabella, and to accept Aremberg's protestations with the courtesy due to an ambassador. It was therefore impossible to bring forward a letter which Cecil possessed from Cobham to Arabella, and two from Aremberg to Cobham. The difficulty was not to prove Cobham's guilt, however, but to connect Raleigh closely enoughwith Cobham, and this Coke went on labouring to do. At last he laid a trap for Raleigh. He induced him to argue on the subject, and then Coke triumphantly drew from his pocket a long letter Cobham had written to the commissioners the day before, a letter in which Cobham disclosed all the secret correspondence Raleigh had had with him since his imprisonment, and even the picturesque story of the letter that was bound round the apple and thrown into Cobham's window in the Tower.

At the production of this document, Sir Walter Raleigh fairly lost his self-possession. He had no idea that any of these facts were in the hands of the Government. His bewilderment and dejection soon, however, left him sufficiently for him to recollect the other letter of Cobham's which he possessed. He drew it from his pocket, and, Cobham's writing being very bad, he could not, from his agitation, read it; Coke desired that it should not be produced, but Cecil interposed once more, and volunteered to read it aloud. This letter was Raleigh's last effort. He said, when Cecil had finished, 'Now, my masters, you have heard both. That showed against me is but a voluntary confession. This is under oath, and the deepest protestations a Christian man can make. Therefore believe which of these hath more force.' The jury then retired; and in a quarter of an hour returned with the verdict 'Guilty.' Raleigh had, in fact, confessed that Cobham had mentioned the plot to him, though nothing would induce him to admit that he had asked Cobham for a sum of money, or consented to take any active part. Still this was enough; and in the face of his unfortunate prevarication about the interview with Renzi, the jury could hardly actotherwise. For a summing up of both sides of the vexed question what shadow of truth there was in the general accusation, the reader may be recommended to Mr. Gardiner's brilliant pages.

Raleigh had defended himself with great courage and intelligence, and the crowd in court were by no means in sympathy with the brutal and violent address in which Popham gave judgment. On the very day on which Raleigh was condemned, there began that reaction in his favour which has been proceeding ever since. When the Lord Chief Justice called the noble prisoner a traitor and an atheist, the bystanders, who after all were Englishmen, though they had met prepared to tear Raleigh limb from limb, could bear it no longer, and they hissed the judge, as a little before they had hooted Coke. To complete the strangeness of this strange trial, when sentence had been passed, Raleigh advanced quickly up the court, unprevented, and spoke to Cecil and one or two other commissioners, asking, as a favour, that the King would permit Cobham to die first. Before he was secured by the officers, he had found time for this last protest: 'Cobham is a false and cowardly accuser. He can face neither me nor death without acknowledging his falsehood.' He was then led away to gaol.

For a month Raleigh was retained at Winchester. He found a friend, almost the only one who dared to speak for him, in Lady Pembroke, the saintly sister of Sir Philip Sidney, who showedveteris vestigia flammæ, the embers of the old love Raleigh had met with from her brother's family, and sent her son, Lord Pembroke, to the King. She did little good, and Raleigh didstill less by a letter he now wrote to James, the first personal appeal he had made to his Majesty. It was a humble entreaty for life, begging the King to listen to the charitable advice which the English law, 'knowing her own cruelty, doth give to her superior,' to be pitiful more than just. This letter has been thought obsequious and unmanly; but it abates no jot of the author's asseverations that he was innocent of all offence, and, surely, in the very face of death a man may be excused for writing humbly to a despot. Lady Raleigh, meanwhile, was clinging about the knees of Cecil, whose demeanour during the trial had given her fresh hopes. But neither the King nor Cecil gave any sign, and in the gathering reaction in favour of Raleigh remained apparently firm for punishment. The whole body of the accused were by this time convicted, Watson and all his companions on the 16th, Raleigh on the 17th, Cobham and Gray on the 18th. On the 29th Watson and Clarke, the other priest, were executed. Next day, the Spanish ambassador pleaded for Raleigh's life, but was repulsed. The King desired the clergy who attended the surviving prisoners to prepare them rigorously for death, and the Bishop of Winchester gave Raleigh no hope. On December 6, George Brooke was executed. And now James seems to have thought that enough blood had been spilt. He would find out the truth by collecting dying confessions from culprits who, after all, should not die.

The next week was occupied with the performance of the curious burlesque which James had invented. The day after George Brooke was beheaded, the King drew up a warrant to the Sheriff of Hampshire for stayof all the other executions. With this document in his bosom, he signed death-warrants for Markham, Gray, and Cobham to be beheaded on the 10th, and Raleigh on the 13th. The King told nobody of his intention, except a Scotch boy, John Gibb, who was his page at the moment. On December 10, at ten o'clock in the morning, Sir Walter Raleigh was desired to come to the window of his cell in Wolvesey Castle. The night before, he had written an affecting letter of farewell to his wife, and—such, at least, is my personal conviction from the internal evidence—the most extraordinary and most brilliant of his poems,The Pilgrimage. By this time he was sorry that he had bemeaned himself in his first paroxysm of despair, and he entreated Lady Raleigh to try to get back the letters in which he sued for his life, 'for,' he said, 'I disdain myself for begging it.' He went on:

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. I cannot write much. God knows how hardly I stole this time, when all sleep; and it is time to separate my thoughts from the world. Beg my dead body, which living was denied you; and either lay it at Sherborne, if the land continue [yours], or in Exeter Church, by my father and mother. I can write no more. Time and Death call me away.

From his window overlooking the Castle Green, Raleigh saw Markham, a very monument of melancholy, led through the steady rain to the scaffold. He saw the Sheriff presently called away, but could not see the Scotch lad who called him, who was Gibb riding in with the reprieve. He could see Markham standingbefore the block, he could see the Sheriff return, speak in a low voice to Markham, and lead him away into Arthur's Hall and lock him up there. He could then see Grey led out, he could see his face light up with a gleam of hope, as he stealthily stirred the wet straw with his foot and perceived there was no blood there. He could see, though he could not hear, Grey's lips move in the prayer in which he made his protestation of innocence, and as he stood ready at the block, he could see the Sheriff speak to him also, and lead him away, and lock him up with Markham in Arthur's Hall. Then Raleigh, wondering more and more, so violently curious that the crowd below noticed his eager expression, could see Cobham brought out, weeping and muttering, in a lamentable disorder; he could see him praying, and when the prayer was over, he could see the Sheriff leave him to stand alone, trembling, on the scaffold, while he went to fetch Grey and Markham from their prison. Then he could see the trio, with an odd expression of hope in their faces, stand side by side a moment, to be harangued by the Sheriff, and then suddenly on his bewildered ears rang out the plaudits of the assembled crowd, all Winchester clapping its hands because the King had mercifully saved the lives of the prisoners. And still the steady rain kept falling as the Castle Green grew empty, and Raleigh at his window was left alone with his bewilderment. He was very soon told that he also was spared, and on December 16, 1603, he was taken back to the Tower of London. Such was James's curious but not altogether inhuman sketch for a burlesque.

It is no longer possible for us to follow the personal life of Raleigh as we have hitherto been doing, step by step. In the deep monotony of confinement, twelve years passed over him without leaving any marks of months or days upon his chronicle of patience. A hopeless prisoner ceases to take any interest in the passage of time, and Raleigh's few letters from the Tower are almost all of them undated. His comfort had its vicissitudes; he was now tormented, now indulged. A whisper from the outer world would now give him back a gleam of hope, now a harsh answer would complete again the darkness of his hopelessness. He was vexed with ill-health, and yet from the age of fifty-one to that of sixty-three the inherent vigour of his constitution, and his invincible desire to live, were unabated. From all his pains and sorrows he took refuge, as so many have done before him, in the one unfailing Nepenthe, the consolatory self-forgetfulness of literature. It was in the Tower that the main bulk of his voluminous writings were produced.

He was confined in the upper story of what was called the Garden Tower, now the Bloody Tower, and not, as is so often said, in the White Tower, so that thelittle cell with a dim arched light, the Chapel Crypt off Queen Elizabeth's Armoury, which used to be pointed out to visitors as the dungeon in which Raleigh wroteThe History of the World, never, in all probability, heard the sound of his footsteps. It is a myth that he was confined at all in such a dungeon as this. According to Mr. Loftie, his apartments were those immediately above the principal gate to the Inner Ward, and had, besides a window looking westward out of the Tower, an entrance to themselves at a higher level, the level of the Lieutenant's and Constable's lodgings. They probably opened directly into a garden which has since been partly built over.

Raleigh was comfortably lodged; it was Sir William Waad's complaint that the rooms were too spacious. Lady Raleigh and her son shared them with him for a considerable time, and Sir Walter was never without three personal servants. He was poor, in comparison with his former opulent estate, but he was never in want. Sherborne just sufficed for six years to supply such needs as presented themselves to a prisoner. His personal expenses in the Tower slightly exceeded 200l., or 1,000l.of our money; there was left a narrow margin for Lady Raleigh. The months of January and February 1604 were spent in trying to make the best terms possible for his wife and son. In a letter to the Lords of the Council, Raleigh mentions that he has lost 3,000l.(or 15,000l.in Victorian money) a year by being deprived of his five main sources of income, namely the Governorship of Jersey, the Patent of the Wine Office, the Wardenship of the Stannaries, the Rangership of Gillingham Forest, and the Lieutenancy of PortlandCastle. He besought that he might not be reduced to utter beggary, and he did his best to retain the Duchy of Cornwall and his estates at Sherborne. The former, as he might have supposed, could not be left in the charge of a prisoner. It was given to a friend, to the Earl of Pembroke, and Raleigh showed a dangerous obstinacy in refusing to give up the Seal of the Duchy direct to the Earl; he was presently induced to resign it into Cecil's hands, and then nothing but Sherborne remained. His debts were 3,000l.His rich collections of plate and tapestry had been confiscated or stolen. If the King permitted Sherborne also to be taken, it would be impossible to meet the exorbitant charges of the Lieutenant, and under these circumstances it is only too probable that Raleigh might have been obliged to crouch in the traditional dungeon ten feet by eight feet. The retention of Sherborne, then, meant comfort and the status of a gentleman. It is therefore of the highest interest to us to see what had become of Sherborne.

We have seen that up to the date of the trial Cecil held at bay the Scottish jackals who went prowling round the rich Dorsetshire manor; and when the trial was over, Cecil, as Lady Raleigh said, 'hath been our only comfort in our lamentable misfortune.' As soon as Raleigh was condemned, commissioners hastened down to Sherborne and began to prepare the division of the prize. They sold the cattle, and began to root up the copses. They made considerable progress in dismantling the house itself. Raleigh appealed to the Lords of the Council, and Cecil sent down two trustees, who, in February 1604, put a sudden stop to all this havoc, and sent the commissioners about their business.Of the latter, one was the infamous Meeres, Raleigh's former bailiff, and this fact was particularly galling to Raleigh. On July 30 in the same year, Sherborne Castle and the surrounding manors were conveyed to Sir Alexander Brett and others in trust for Lady Raleigh and her son Walter, Sir Walter nominally forfeiting the life interest in the estates which he had reserved to himself in the conveyance of 1602. On the moneys collected by these trustees Lady Raleigh supported herself and her husband also. She was not turned out of the castle at first. Twice at least in 1605 we find her there, on the second occasion causing all the armour to be scoured. Some persons afterwards considered that this act was connected with Gunpowder Plot, others maintained that it was merely due to the fact that the armour was rusty. The great point is that she was still mistress of Sherborne. Lord Justice Popham, however, as early as 1604, pronounced Raleigh's act of conveyance invalid, and in 1608 negotiations began for a 'purchase,' or rather a confiscation of Sherborne to the King. To this we shall presently return. In the meanwhile Captain Keymis acted as warden of Sherborne Castle.

As soon as the warm weather closed in, in the summer of 1604, the malaria in the Tower began to affect Raleigh's health. As he tells Cecil, now Lord Cranborne, in a most dolorous letter, he was withering in body and mind. The plague had come close to him, his son having lain a fortnight with only a paper wall between him and a woman whose child was dying of that terrible complaint. Lady Raleigh, at last, had been able to bear the terror of infection no longer, and haddeparted with little Walter. Raleigh thereupon, in a fit of extreme dejection, 'presumed to tell their Lordships of his miserable estate, daily in danger of death by the palsy, nightly of suffocation by wasted and obstructed lungs.' He entreated to be removed to more wholesome lodgings. His prayer was not answered. Earlier in the year he had indeed enjoyed a short excursion from the Tower. At Easter the King had come to attend a bull-baiting on Tower Hill, and Raleigh was hastily removed to the Fleet prison beforehand, lest the etiquette of such occasions should oblige James, against his inclination, to give obnoxious prisoners their liberty. Raleigh was one of five persons so hurried to the Fleet on March 25: on the next day the King came, and 'caused all the prisons of the Tower to be opened, and all the persons then within them to be released.' After the bull-baiting was over, the excepted prisoners were quietly brought back again. This little change was all the variety that Raleigh enjoyed until he left for Guiana in 1617.

When it transpired in 1605 that through, as it appears, the negligence of the copying clerk, the conveyance by which Raleigh thought that he had secured Sherborne to his son was null and void, he had to suffer from a vindictive attack from his wife herself. She, poor woman, had now for nearly two years bustled hither and thither, intriguing in not always the most judicious manner for her family, but never resting, never leaving a stone unturned which might lead to their restitution. The sudden discovery that the lawyers had found a flaw in the conveyance was more than her overstrung nerves could endure, and in a fit of temper she attacked her husband, and rushed about thetown denouncing him. Raleigh, in deepest depression of mind and body, wrote to Cecil, who had now taken another upward step in the hierarchy of James's protean House of Lords, and who was Earl of Salisbury henceforward:

Of the true cause of my importunities, one is, that I am every second or third night in danger either of sudden death, or of the loss of my limbs or sense, being sometimes two hours without feeling or motion of my hand and whole arm. I complain not of it. I know it vain, for there is none that hath compassion thereof. The other, that I shall be made more than weary of my life by her crying and bewailing, who will return in post when she hears of your Lordship's departure, and nothing done. She hath already brought her eldest son in one hand, and her sucking child [Carew Raleigh, born in the winter of 1604] in another, crying out of her and their destruction; charging me with unnatural negligence, and that having provided for my own life, I am without sense and compassion of theirs. These torments, added to my desolate life—receiving nothing but torments, and where I should look for some comfort, together with the consideration of my cruel destiny, my days and times worn out in trouble and imprisonment—is sufficient either utterly to distract me, or to make me curse the time that ever I was born into the world, and had a being.

Things were not commonly in so bad a way as this, we may be sure. Raleigh, who did nothing by halves, was not accustomed to underrate his own misfortunes. His health was uncertain, indeed, and it was still worse in 1606; but his condition otherwise was not so deplorable as this letter would tend to prove. Poor Lady Raleigh soon recovered her equanimity, and the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir George Harvey, indulged Raleigh in a variety of ways. He frequently invited him to his table; and finding that the prisoner was engaged in various chemical experiments, he lent him his private garden to set up his still in. In one of Raleigh's few letters of this period, we get a delightful little vignette. Raleigh is busy working in the garden, and, the pale being down, the charming young Lady Effingham, his old friend Nottingham's daughter, strolls by along the terrace on the arm of the Countess of Beaumont. The ladies lean over the paling, and watch the picturesque old magician poring over his crucibles, his face lighted up with the flames from his furnace. They fall a chatting with him, and Lady Effingham coaxes him to spare her a little of that famous balsam which he brought back from Guiana. He tells her that he has none prepared, but that he will send her some by their common friend Captain Whitlock, and presently he does so. A captivity which admitted such communications with the outer world as this, could not but have had its alleviations.

The letter quoted on the last page evidently belongs to the summer of 1605, when, for a few months, Raleigh was undoubtedly in great discomfort. On August 15, Sir George Harvey was succeeded by Sir William Waad, who had shown Raleigh great severity before his trial. He, however, although not well disposed, shrank from actually ill-treating his noble prisoner. He hinted to Lord Salisbury that he wanted the garden for his own use, and that he thought the paling an insufficient barrier between Raleigh and the world. Meanwhile Salisbury did not take the hint, and the brick wallWaad wished built up was not begun. Waad evidently looked upon the chemical experiments with suspicion. 'Sir Walter Raleigh,' he wrote, 'hath converted a little hen-house in the garden into a still, where he doth spend his time all the day in his distillations.' Some of the remedies which the prisoner invented became exceedingly popular. His 'lesser cordial' of strawberry water was extensively used by ladies, and his 'great cordial,' which was understand to contain 'whatever is most choice and sovereign in the animal, vegetable, and mineral world,' continued to be a favourite panacea until the close of the century.

When, in November, Gunpowder Plot was discovered, Sir Walter Raleigh was for a moment suspected. No evidence was found inculpating him in the slightest degree; but his life was, for the moment at least, made distinctly harder. When he returned from examination, the wall which Waad had desired to put between the prisoner and the public was in course of construction. When finished it was not very formidable, for Waad complains that Raleigh was in the habit of standing upon it, in the sight of passers-by. The increased confinement in the spring of 1606 brought his ill-health to a climax. He thought he was about to suffer an apoplectic seizure, and he was allowed to take medical advice. The doctor's certificate, dated March 26, 1606, is still in existence; it describes his paralytic symptoms, and recommends that Sir Walter Raleigh should be removed from the cold lodging which he was occupying to the 'little room he hath built in the garden, and joining his still-house,' which would be warmer. This seems to have been done, and Raleigh's health improved.

During the year 1606 various attempts were made to persuade the King to release Raleigh, but in vain. The Queen had made his acquaintance, and had become his friend, and there was a general hope that when her father, the King of Denmark, came over to see James in the summer, he would plead for Raleigh. There is reason to believe that if he had done so with success, he would have invited Raleigh to return with him, and to become Admiral of the Danish fleet. But matters never got so far as this. James I. had an inkling of what was coming, and he took an early opportunity of saying to Christian IV., 'Promise me that you will be no man's solicitor.' In spite of this, before he left England, Christian did ask for Raleigh's pardon, and was refused. When he had left England, and all hope was over, in September, Lady Raleigh made her way to Hampton Court, and, pushing her way into the King's presence, fell on her knees at his feet. James went by, and neither spoke nor looked at her. It must have been about this time, or a little later, that Queen Anne brought her unfortunate eldest son Henry to visit Raleigh at the Tower. Prince Henry, born in 1594, was now only twelve years of age. His intimacy with Sir Walter Raleigh belongs rather to the years 1610 to 1612.

In February 1607, Raleigh was exposed to some annoyance from Edward Cotterell, the servant who in 1603 had carried his injudicious correspondence with Lord Cobham to and fro. This man had remained in Lady Raleigh's service, and attended on her in her little house, opposite her husband's rooms, on Tower Hill. He professed to be able to give evidence against his master, but in examination before the Lord ChiefJustice nothing intelligible could be extracted from him. About the same time we find Raleigh, encouraged, it would appear, by the Queen, proposing to Lord Salisbury that he should be allowed to go to Guiana on an expedition for gold. It is pathetic to read the earnest phrases in which he tries to wheedle out of the cold Minister permission to set out westward once more across the ocean that he loved so much. He offers, lest he should be looked upon as a runagate, to leave his wife and children behind him as hostages; and the Queen and Lord Salisbury may have the treasure he brings back, if only he may go. He pleads how rich the land is, and how no one knows the way to it as he does. We seem to hear the very accents of another weary King of the Sea:

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world;Push off, and sitting well in order smiteThe sounding furrows; for my purpose holdsTo sail beyond the sunset, and the bathsOf all the western stars until I die.

Such was Raleigh's purpose; but it was not that of James and of Salisbury. On the contrary, he was kept a faster prisoner. In July 1607, fresh regulations came into force in the Tower, by which at 5p.m.Raleigh and his servants had to retire to their own apartments, and Lady Raleigh go back to her house, nor were guests any longer to be admitted in the evening. Lady Raleigh had particularly offended Sir William Waad by driving into the Tower in her coach. She was informed that she must do so no more. It was probably these long quiet evenings which specially predisposed Raleighto literary composition. He borrowed books, mainly of an historical character, in all directions. A letter to Sir Robert Cotton is extant in which he desires the loan of no less than thirteen obscure and bulky historians, and we may imagine his silent evenings spent in poring over the precious manuscripts of theAnnals of Tewkesburyand theChronicle of Evesham. In this year young Walter Raleigh, now fourteen years of age, proceeded to Oxford, and matriculated at Corpus on October 30, 1607. His tutors were a certain Hooker, and the brilliant young theologian, Dr. Daniel Featley, afterwards to be famous as a controversial divine. Throughout the year 1608, Raleigh, buried in hisHistory, makes no sign to us.

Early in 1609, the uncertain tenure of Sherborne, which had vexed Raleigh so much that he declared himself ready to part with the estate in exchange for the pleasure of never hearing of it again, once more came definitely before the notice of the Government. A proposition had been made to Raleigh to sell his right in it to the King, but he had refused; he said that it belonged to his wife and child, and that 'those that never had a fee-simple could not grant a fee-simple.' About Christmas 1608 Lady Raleigh brought the matter up again, and leading her sons by the hand she appeared in the Presence Chamber, and besought James to give them a new conveyance, with no flaw in it. But the King had determined to seize Sherborne, and he told her, 'I maun hae the lond, I maun hae it for Carr.' It is said that, losing all patience, Elizabeth Raleigh started to her feet, and implored God to punish this robbery of her household. Sir Walter was morepolitic, and on January 2, 1609, he wrote a letter to the favourite, imploring him not to covet Sherborne. It is to be regretted that Raleigh, whose opinion of James's minions was not on private occasions concealed, should write to Carr of all people in England as 'one whom I know not, but by an honourable fame;' and that the eloquence of his appeal should be thrown away on such a recipient. 'For yourself, Sir,' he says, 'seeing your day is but now in the dawn, and mine come to the evening, your own virtues and the King's grace assuring you of many good fortunes and much honour, I beseech you not to begin your first building upon the ruins of the innocent; and that their griefs and sorrows do not attend your first plantation.' Carr, of course, took no notice whatever, and on the 10th of the same month the estates at Sherborne were bestowed on him. At Prince Henry's request the King presently purchased them back again, and gave them to his son, who soon after died. Mr. Edwards has discovered that Sherborne passed through eight successive changes of ownership before 1617. To Lady Raleigh and her children the King gave 8,000l.as purchase-money of the life security in Sherborne. The interest on this sum was very irregularly paid, and the Guiana voyage in 1617 swallowed up most of the principal. Thus the vast and princely fortune of Raleigh melted away like a drift of snow.

In the summer of 1611, Raleigh came into collision with Lord Salisbury and Lord Northampton on some matter at present obscure. Northampton writes: 'We had afterwards a bout with Sir Walter Raleigh, in whom we find no change, but the same blindness, pride,and passion that heretofore hath wrought more violently, but never expressed itself in a stranger fashion.' In consequence of their interview with Raleigh and other prisoners, the Lords recommended that 'the lawless liberty' of the Tower should no longer be allowed to cocker and foster exorbitant hopes in the braver sort of captives. Raleigh was immediately placed under closer restraint, not even being allowed to take his customary walk with his keeper up the hill within the Tower. His private garden and gallery were taken from him, and his wife was almost entirely excluded from his company. The final months of Salisbury's life were unfavourable to Raleigh, and there was no quickening of the old friendship at the last. When Lord Salisbury died on May 24, 1612, Raleigh wrote this epigram:

Here lies Hobinall our pastor whilere,That once in a quarter our fleeces did sheer;To please us, his cur he kept under clog,And was ever after both shepherd and dog;For oblation to Pan, his custom was thus,He first gave a trifle, then offered up us;And through his false worship such power he did gain,As kept him on the mountain, and us on the plain.

When these lines were shown to James I. he said he hoped that the man who wrote them would die before he did.

The death of Salisbury encouraged Raleigh once more. His intimacy with the generous and promising Prince of Wales had quickened his hopes. During the last months of his life, Henry continually appealed to Raleigh for advice. The Prince was exceedingly interested in all matters of navigation and shipbuilding,and there exists a letter to him from Raleigh giving him elaborate counsel on the building of a man-of-war, from which we may learn that in the opinion of that practised hand six things were chiefly required in a well-conditioned ship of the period: '1, that she be strong built; 2, swift in sail; 3, stout-sided; 4, that her ports be so laid, as she may carry out her guns all weathers; 5, that she hull and try well; 6, that she stay well, when boarding or turning on a wind is required.' Secure in the interest of the Prince of Wales, and hoping to persuade the Queen to be an adventurer, Raleigh seized the opportunity of the death of Salisbury to communicate his plans for an expedition to Guiana to the Lords of the Council. He thought he had induced them to promise that Captain Keymis should go, and that if so much as half a ton of gold was brought back, that should buy Raleigh his liberty. But the negotiations fell through, and Keymis stayed at home.

In September 1612, Raleigh was writing the second of hisMarriage Discourses, that dealing with the prospects of his best and youngest friend. A month later that friend fell a victim to his extreme rashness in the neglect of his health. The illness of the Prince of Wales filled the whole of England with dismay, and when, on November 6, he sank under the attack of typhoid fever, it was felt to be a national misfortune. On the very morning of his death the Queen sent to Raleigh for his famous cordial, and it was forwarded, with the message that if it was not poison that the Prince was dying of, it must save him. The Queen herself believed that Raleigh's cordial had once saved her life; on the other hand, in the preceding Augusthis medicines were vulgarly supposed to have hastened the death of Sir Philip Sidney's daughter, the Countess of Rutland. The cordial soothed the Prince's last agony, and that was all. Henry had with great difficulty obtained from his father the promise that, as a personal favour to himself, Raleigh should be set at liberty at Christmas 1612. He died six weeks too soon, and the King contrived to forget his promise. The feeling of the Prince of Wales towards Raleigh was expressed in a phrase that was often repeated, 'No man but my father would keep such a bird in a cage.'

We learn from Izaak Walton that Ben Jonson was recommended to Raleigh while he was in the Tower, by Camden. That he helped him in obtaining and arranging material for theHistory of the Worldis certain. In 1613 young Walter Raleigh, having returned to London, and having, in the month of April, killed his man in a duel, went abroad under the charge of Jonson. They took letters for Prince Maurice of Nassau, and they proceeded to Paris, but we know no more. It was probably before they started that young Walter wheeled the corpulent poet of theAlchemistinto his father's presence in a barrow, Ben Jonson being utterly overwhelmed with a beaker of that famed canary that he loved too well. Jonson, on his return from abroad, seems to have superintended the publication of theHistory of the Worldin 1614. A fine copy of verses, printed opposite the frontispiece of that volume, was reprinted among the pieces calledUnderwoodsin the 1641 folio of Ben Jonson'sWorks. These lines have, therefore, ever since been attributed to that poet, but, as it appears to me, rashly. In thefirst place, this volume was posthumous; in the second, for no less than twenty-three years Ben Jonson allowed the verses to appear as Raleigh's without protest; in the third, where they differ from the earlier version it is always to their poetical disadvantage. They were found, as the editor of 1641 says, amongst Jonson's papers, and I would suggest, as a new hypothesis, that the less polished draft in theUnderwoodsis entirely Raleigh's, having been copied by Jonson verbatim when he was preparing theHistory of the Worldfor the press, and that the improved expressions in the latter were adopted by Raleigh on suggestion from the superior judgment of Jonson. The character of the verse is peculiarly that of Raleigh.

It was in 1607, as I have conjectured, that Raleigh first began seriously to collect and arrange materials for theHistory of the World; in 1614 he presented the first and only volume of this gigantic enterprise to the public. It was a folio of 1,354 pages, printed very closely, and if reprinted now would fill about thirty-five such volumes as are devised for an ordinary modern novel. Yet it brought the history of the world no lower down than the conquest of Macedon by Rome, and it is hard to conceive how soon, at this rate of production, Raleigh would have reached his own generation. He is said to have anticipated that his book would need to consist of not less than four such folios. In the opening lines he expresses some consciousness of the fact that it was late in life for him, a prisoner of State condemned to death at the King's pleasure, to undertake so vast a literary adventure. 'Had it been begotten,' he confesses, 'with my first dawn of day, when the light of common knowledge began to open itself to my younger years, and before any wound received either from fortune or time, I might yet well have doubted that the darkness of age and death would have covered over both it and me, long before the performance.' It is greatly to be desired that Raleigh could have been as well advised as his contemporary and possible friend, the Huguenot poet-soldier, Agrippa d'Aubigné, who at the close of a chequered career also prepared aHistoire Universelle, in which he simply told the story of his own political party in France through those stormy years in which he himself had been an actor. We would gladly exchange all these chronicles of Semiramis and Jehoshaphat for a plain statement of what Raleigh witnessed in the England of Elizabeth.

The student of Raleigh does not, therefore, rise from an examination of his author's chief contribution to literature without a severe sense of disappointment. The book is brilliant almost without a rival in its best passages, but these are comparatively few, and they are divided from one another by tracts of pathless desert. The narrative sometimes descends into a mere slough of barbarous names, a marish of fabulous genealogy, in which the lightest attention must take wings to be supported at all. For instance, the geographical and historical account of the Ten Tribes occupies a space equivalent to a modern octavo volume of at least four hundred pages, through which, if the conscientious reader would pass 'treading the crude consistence' of the matter, 'behoves him now both sail and oar.' It is not fair to dwell upon the eminent beauties of theHistory of the Worldwithout at the same time acknowledging that the book almost wilfully deprives itself of legitimate value and true human interest by the remoteness of the period which it describes, and by the tiresome pedantry of its method. It is leisurely to the last excess. The first chapter, of seven long sections, takes us but to the close of the Creation. We cannot proceed without knowing what it is that Tostatus affirms of the empyrean heavens, and whether, with Strabo, we may dare assume that they are filled with angels. To hasten onwards would be impossible, so long as one of the errors of Steuchius Eugubinus remains unconfuted; and even then it is well to pause until we know the opinions of Orpheus and Zoroaster on the matter in hand. One whole chapter of four sections is dedicated to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the arguments of Goropius Becanus are minutely tested and found wanting. Goropius Becanus, whom Raleigh is never tired of shaking between his critical teeth, was a learned Jesuit of Antwerp, who proved that Adam and Eve spoke Dutch in Paradise. It is not until he reaches the Patriarchs that it begins to occur to the historian that at his present rate of progress it will need forty folio volumes, and not four, to complete his labours. From this point he hastens a little, as the compilers of encyclopædias do when they have passed the letter B.

With all this, theHistory of the Worldis a charming and delightful miscellany, if we do not accept it too seriously. Often for a score of pages there will be something brilliant, something memorable on every leaf, and there is not a chapter, however arid, without its fine things somewhere. It is impossible to tell where Raleigh's pen will take fire. He is most exquisite andfanciful where his subject is most unhopeful, and, on the other hand, he is likely to disappoint us where we take for granted that he will be fine. For example, the series of sections on the Terrestrial Paradise are singularly crabbed and dusty in their display of Rabbinical pedantry, and the little touch in praise of Guiana is almost the only one that redeems the general dryness. It is not mirth, or beauty, or luxury that fires the historian, but death. Of mortality he has always some rich sententious thing to say, praising 'the workmanship of death, that finishes the sorrowful business of a wretched life.' So the most celebrated passages of the whole book, and perhaps the finest, are the address to God which opens theHistory, and the prose hymn in praise of death which closes it. The entire absence of humour is characteristic, and adds to the difficulty of reading the book straight on. The story of Periander's burning the clothes of the women closes with a jest; there is, perhaps, no other occasion on which the solemn historian is detected with a smile upon his lips.

By far the most interesting and readable, part of theHistory of the Worldis its preface. This is a book in itself, and one in which the author condescends to a lively human interest. We cheerfully pass from Elihu the Buzite, and the conjectures of Adricomius respecting the family of Ram, to the actualities of English and Continental history in the generation immediately preceding that in which Raleigh was writing. When we consider the position in which the author stood towards James I. and turn to the pages of his Preface, we refuse to believe that it was without design that he expressed himself in language so extraordinary. It would havebeen mere levity for a friendless prisoner, ready for the block, to publish this terrible arraignment of the crimes of tyrant kings, unless he had some reason for believing that he could shelter himself successfully under a powerful sympathy. This sympathy, in the case of Sir Walter Raleigh, could be none other than that of Prince Henry; and it may well have been in the summer of 1612, when, as we know, he was particularly intimate with the Prince and busied in his affairs, that he wrote the Preface. With long isolation from the world, he had lost touch of public affairs, asThe Prerogative of Parliamentwould alone be sufficient to show. It is probable that he exaggerated the influence of the young Prince, and estimated too highly the promise of liberty which he had wrung from his father.

It took James some time to discover that this grave Rabbinical miscellany, inspired by Siracides and Goropius Becanus, was not wholesome reading for his subjects. On January 5, 1615, after the book had been selling slowly, the King gave an order commanding the suppression of the remainder of the edition, giving as his reason that 'it is too saucy in censuring the acts of kings.' It is said that some favoured person at Court pushed inquiry further, and extracted from James the explanation that the censure of Henry VIII. was the real cause of the suppression. Contemporary anecdote, however, has reported that the defamation of the Tudors in the Preface to theHistory of the Worldmight have passed without reproof, if the King had not discovered in the very body of the book several passages so ambiguously worded that he could not but suspect the writer of intentional satire. According to this story, hewas startled at Raleigh's account of Naboth's Vineyard, and scandalised at the description of the impeachment of the Admiral of France; but what finally drew him up, and made him decide that the book must perish, was the character of King Ninias, son of Queen Semiramis. This passage, then, may serve us as an example of theHistory of the World:

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