Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (38 page)

Ralegh, however, was not quite finished. He 'desired that the King might know the proofes against him', and hoped that his jury would never have to answer for their verdict. He said that 'the death of him and my Lord Cobham should witnesse betweene them', conceded only that he ought never to have concealed Cobham's 'offer', and, emphasizing the limits of his concession, sought forgiveness for that failing alone. Beyond this, there was nothing to do but seek mercy from the King and keep his dignity. He 'talked a while with the Lords in private' and then 'went back with the Sheriffe to the prison, with admirable erection, yet in such sort, as a condemned man should doe'.
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The story of Ralegh's trial does not end with the sentence passed on 17 November, for Cobham's subsequent confessions, after Ralegh's conviction, confirm the impression that he was at last ready to restate, in a modified form, his accusations made in the heat of the moment, months earlier. Cobham's own trial was postponed for a few days, apparently to permit further questioning. Examined on 22 November, the prisoner provided some fascinating further detail on the discussions that had followed Ralegh's arrival from the Court at Greenwich that spring night, introduced with such telling effect at the recent trial. The course of this evening conversation now becomes clear enough; very recent events had left Ralegh furious and scheming, to the point of indiscretion. According to Cobham Ralegh had arrived full of'discontent uppon certeine woords that that day as he sayed had passed between the lord Cecill and him'.
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 In the heat of the moment, he had then pressed Cobham to negotiate with Arenberg 'that he should doe best to advertise and advise the king of Spaine to send an armie against England to Milford Haven'. Popham was right; a desire for revenge had moved him to this folly. Characteristically, Ralegh had advocated a bold approach, informed by history: 'many more', he had growled, in a prophetic utterance, 'had been hanged for words then for dedes'.
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 It is important to note that no specific accusation relating to an invasion landfall had been made at Ralegh's trial.
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Cobham's 22 November confession then repeats the story of the Spanish pension, essentially in the same words employed in his earlier letter read at the trial. Ralegh, he declared, had asked him 'at another tyme after this', to solicit from Spain a personal pension of x1,500 in return for intelligence, ,that any thing that the king of England should attempt against Spaine or concerning the Lowe countries or the Indiaes might be prevented'. Here again, Ralegh is cast as the instigator, since Cobham by his own admission approached Arenberg for money after this meeting.

This short confession at first sight appears to dot the 'i's and cross the 't's in testimony already given.
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 The initial impression is of an interrogation with specific ends in view That interpretation, though, may mask an altogether more radical resifting of the evidence. Though brief, the testimony in the confession of 22 November marks the end of a long ordeal. Just three days later, Cobham at last appeared in court at Winchester; as a peer, he was tried by his fellow noblemen in the Court of the Lord Steward. Insofar as we can reconstruct proceedings at this rather poorly reported trial, the Milford Haven charge, and the accusation that Ralegh sought a pension from Spain, must be seen as replacing everything that had been alleged before. Dudley Carleton, who attended the arraignment, noted that Cobham accused Ralegh on these two points, and does not mention other charges laid against Sir Walter in July, but it was Cecil who detailed the change in emphasis most clearly when he summarized the trials a few days later for the benefit of English ambassadors in foreign courts. As always, he chose his words very carefully. No longer did Cobham suggest that Ralegh had known about his plans for travel to Spain and no longer was Ralegh guilty of conspiring to raise a large sum of money for sinister ends. The terribly damaging hints at regicide and at a transfer of the crown to Arbella Stuart were now set down to the imagination of George Brooke alone.
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Ralegh instantly saw the significance: his conviction had been based upon flawed evidence, now reshaped by his only accuser. Writing on 28 November to five Privy Counsellors who had confronted him the day before with Cobham's fresh evidence, he reminded them that 'the first accusation for which I was committed, indyted and arrayned your lordships do know to be falce, and yet it was by your lordships most constantly beleved, and my Lord CheifJustice avowed that it could not be otherwize because the Lord Cobhame accused hyme sealf also therin. Then, my lords, if I had perished therfore yow all finde that I had perished innocent and that the presumption of the mony was also inferred agaynst mee and would have strenghtned my condemnation: and yet neather trew.'

There are even hints in this letter that some Counsellors may have shared Ralegh's doubts. 'Your lordships', wrote Ralegh, 'also saw that the night before my arrynment he spake not a word of this when he then studied all he could to distroy me.'
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 The prisoner certainly felt strong enough to adopt an 'I told you so' approach, recycling the case that he had prepared for his own trial, emphasizing that this was exactly why God's law and English custom together upheld the two-witness principle. In the end, though, he was sensible enough to admit that the law had run its course. Since the utter complexity of two and a half centuries of treason legislation had blurred any obligation on the prosecution to produce two witnesses in line, he said, with most proceedings under the Common Law, only the King's mercy could now save him from the scaffold.

It was a very different Coke who prosecuted the two peers, Cobham and Grey, in the days following Ralegh's arraignment. The Attorney General dealt 'very mildly and respectably' with both, though in both cases, of course, the status of the prisoner encouraged deference. Besides, Cobham and Grey lacked Ralegh's sense of the occasion and presented an altogether lesser challenge.
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Cobham 'heard his enditement with much fear and trembling, and would sometimes interrupt it by forswearing what he thought to be wrongly inserted'. The poor man did himself few favours at the bar. He answered 'submissively', but overdid the humility, making 'such a fasting-dayes peece of worke of it that he discredited the place to which he was caled. Never was seene so poore and abject a spirit.'
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Some spirit, some resolution was expected from a nobleman on trial for his life, even from those prepared to admit their faults. Just the same, Cobham's grovelling submission was perhaps a wiser strategy than that adopted on the following day by Grey, who addressed the court like a puritan minister for upwards of two hours, lecturing them on the punishments that God reserved for judges tempted into substituting a political decision for a just verdict, be they princes, lords, lawyers or peasants.
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 In the face of compelling evidence for his guilt - Grey had clearly planned to deliver a petition to the King backed up by armed force, and had also been embroiled in Watson's plot - he fought obstinately for his life, at one point launching into an 'invective speech against the law' which, unsurprisingly, failed to 'serve his turne'.
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 Rather, it was condemned by onlookers as 'most indiscreet'.
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 Coke, still smarting from recent events, warned Grey not to tread Ralegh's path; he should instead confess his guilt without further ado, for quibbling the week before had failed to help 'the master of shifts'.
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 Predictably, neither humility nor bombast prevailed. Both noblemen were duly convicted of treason, and sentenced to death.
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In seeking to understand the nature of Ralegh's treason, these clues from Cobham's trial are themselves reinforced by later evidence. The distinction between testimony given in July and November is soon reiterated. After the final arraignments, the Council ordered Thomas Bilson, Bishop of Winchester, to visit Cobham, ostensibly to cater for the prisoner's spiritual comfort, but also to resolve remaining discrepancies. Cobham, wrote the Bishop, when reporting an interview with the prisoner on 4 December, had repeated the assertions made at his own trial. He was also standing by his original accusation in regard to 'the other point of bringing money to Gersey', but - and the qualification is significant - Bilson added that Cobham was not now prepared to swear to this: 'He desireth this may be a direction...not that he avoucheth both thos to be certaynly true, but the later [that is, the Milford Haven story] only.'
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 While consistently denying knowledge of what Cobham had planned to do on the continent, Ralegh had never denied the planned rendezvous in Jersey, and Cobham was now in effect corroborating his friend's testimony on that point. He continued to insist that Ralegh had prompted and fostered his own treasonable offences, but the lack of detail in that charge was evident to all.

History has at no point been kind to Cobham and it was a harsh fate that overtook him in 1603. He showed considerable fortitude, and consistency, throughout a protracted nightmare. As the prosecution always emphasized, the confessions that he made were self-incriminating, and his vacillations were surely prompted by contemplation of this unpalatable fact. Ralegh attributed what we might call the November charges to the persuasions of Cobham's redoubtable wife, yet there is little reason to suspect that Cobham, at that late stage, really hoped to escape with his life.
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 Any expectation of clemency seeped away as the days passed, but still, in Frances Howard's account, he took the sacrament on 7 December, steadfast in his assertion of Ralegh's guilt.
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 On the scaffold, composed, dignified, and prepared for death, he repeated the same accusations.
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 Assuming that Cobham was induced, whether by his wife or through his own contemplation of eternity, to cast the blame elsewhere in this way - hardly a difficult assumption to make - the relative moderation in the charges that he then laid against Ralegh serves only to enhance their credibility.

Conclusions thus become compelling. The consistent picture drawn from Cobham's later testimony, of a discontented Ralegh denouncing James along with his ministers, toying with the possibility of a Spanish assault on the nation that had treated him so shabbily and exploring the possibility of a pension from a foreign prince, surely captures his treasonous offence. Lost in the murky background to this picture are the instigators of that discontent. James and Cecil played their part, no doubt, but so too did Cobham. Maybe - and this is an uncomfortable thought to the biographer - he helped induce Ralegh's anger, was the promoter rather than the victim. Across the Channel at Fontainebleu, rumours in late April 1603 had associated Ralegh's dismissal as Captain of the Guard with Cobham's discontent. Indeed in these tales it is Cobham who returns 'very discontent' over the ill treatment he has received at Cecil's hands.
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Such rumours chine with William Watson's confession of 18 August, which emphasizes the bitterness that Cobham had felt after James's succession.108 There are two partners in this friendship, and the dynamic of friendship is more complicated than at first might appear. Ralegh never denied that he had listened patiently to Cobham's 'unwise and lavish projects'.
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 Again, it is possible that he was being honest.

In law, Ralegh's jury returned a correct verdict, even when that verdict is judged against Cobham's revised accusations, which they never heard. Decades later, Bishop Godfrey Goodman dismissed the Main as 'a kind of embryon, wherein discontented persons had but a kind of plot to betray one another', and his view has prevailed ever since. But there was more to it than that, even if the bounds of the plot remain obscure. The seventeenth-century historian and MP John Rushworth understood long ago that the Main was 'a dark kind of treason', with 'the veil...still upon it'.
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 Rushworth's veil certainly covers something, and that something does not reflect well on Ralegh. According to the Statute of 1351 it was high treason 'to compass or imagine' the death of a king, and there can be little doubt that Ralegh both imagined something of the kind and, crucially, gave voice to those thoughts. The dying words put into the mouth of one of Ralegh's judges, Francis Gawdy, that Ralegh's trial had 'injured and degraded the justice of England', the legend that has repentant jurymen begging Ralegh's 'Pardon on their Knees', and the absurd tale that Coke, waiting outside the Court, expressed bewilderment at a treason conviction, arguing that he had prosecuted Ralegh for misprision, represent the verdict of an overly sympathetic posterity, and overlook the judicial niceties of the case in question.
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Coke, who lived a long and busy life, did indeed eventually undergo a change of heart on the proof of treason, as lawyers in the seventeenth century began to wrestle with what it really meant to compass and imagine the death of a monarch, as the notion of mens yea continued to evolve, and as judges set out to ensure that there would be no repeat of the tragicomedy at Winchester. Another prominent seventeenth-century judge, Sir Matthew.
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 Hale, was among many to question the prudence, if not the legality, of Cobham's absence from the witness stand; the adversary process, he wrote, 'beats and bolts out the truth much better'.
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 That was all for the future. Lawyers in Britain and America have never forgotten Ralegh's ordeal, as a recent Supreme Court hearing in the United States makes clear: after reference to the Winchester trial, the justices concluded that 'dispensing with confrontation because testimony is obviously unreliable is akin to dispensing with jury trial because a defendant is obviously guilty'. This, they noted, 'is not what the Sixth Amendment [to the Constitution] prescribes.'
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A more immediate consequence of the trial lay outside the judicial sphere. In the popular imagination a broken man was transformed from villain into hero. The composure he had shown, a harsh if technically correct verdict, together with Coke's excesses turned loathing into sympathy. Many observers came to agree with Ralegh's assessment, reached during the trial, that he had not received his birthright as an Englishman, a fair hearing. As Dudley Carleton put it a few days later, 'never was a man so hated and so popular in so short a time'.
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 The same view was expressed by those indefatigable commentators on the political life of early modern England, the libellers and pamphleteers who had so consistently dismissed Ralegh as an upstart temporizer. Nor was this sympathy transient. Many years later, Archbishop William Sancroft drew on what he saw as the travesty of justice at Winchester in 1603 when tracing causes of the catastrophe of Civil War.
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