Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (53 page)

A cause has to be strong to sustain resistance on a point of principle. Burying whatever reservations they might still have held, the Council did as they were told and summoned Ralegh before them on 22 October.
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Sir Henry Yelverton, the Attorney General, accused him of blatant lies: Ralegh had deceived a King who had generously overlooked his treasons, he had known all along that there was no treasure in Guiana. 'Not weary of his fault, but of his restraint of liberty', he had given 'promise of a golden mine'. Ralegh had planned to foment war between England and Spain, he had abandoned his men, and he had betrayed his King. In accordance with James's injunctions the Solicitor General Sir Thomas Coventry then highlighted Ralegh's shifty behaviour since his return to England, his attempts to run away, his efforts to win over Manoury and Stucley, his pretence of illness at Salisbury (he had 'fancied himself mad, and...looked vomative') and his criticism of the King as, to paraphrase Manoury, a monarch whose word was not to be trusted. Once again, things said in the heat of the moment, to those he considered friends, were being laid to his charge. Ralegh found it difficult to contest many of the details; instead, he challenged their significance. In his reply he reached back further across time, recalling the apparent harshness of the verdict handed down at Winchester: 'he hath heard that the King said that he would not bee tried by a jury of Middlesex'. He had, he insisted, fully believed in the mine, and he had not abandoned his own men in Guiana. Certainly he had spoken of attacking the Spanish silver fleet had the main project failed, and he had indeed said that his confidence in James had been 'deceaved'. But he also denied, rather desperately, that he had 'used any other ill speeches against the King'.
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His words were to no purpose. The Commissioners, who as the acute and sympathetic Harlow reminds us 'cannot be said to have been a packed tribunal', were convinced that the mine had been a politic fantasy, that the voyage to Guiana had been in some measure prompted by France, and that relations between England and Spain had been jeopardized by the ambitions and delusions of one man.
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Englishmen remembered all too clearly the protracted misery of war in the 1590s, and like their King they were in no mood to return to those evils. James was informed that no doubt remained in respect of the prisoner's new offences. When making that assessment, the Commission held Ralegh, as commander of the expedition, accountable for the mistakes of subordinates, and it is hard to see how they could reasonably have done anything else. Setting their 'Declaration' alongside the testimony of those examined during the summer, evidence supported judgement. So the matter was settled. Ralegh was notified on 24 October that James had resolved to proceed with execution of the original sentence, and that he must prepare himself for death.
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On 28 October, sentence was confirmed in the prisoner's presence by Sir Henry Montagu, Lord Chief justice, at the highest criminal court in England, the Court of King's Bench in Westminster. An attempt was again made to suggest that this was the culmination of a familiar legal process, for John Chamberlain, when writing to Carleton just after the event, stated that the protocol followed, 'as they say the manner...when a man lives above a yeare and a day after he is condemned'.
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'The Recordes of his arraignment at Winchester was opened', and Ralegh was asked why execution should not proceed according to that judgement.
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For once, he seemed at a loss. Not knowing what else to do, Ralegh tried yet again to excuse his proceedings on the voyage to Guiana, only to be cut short. The King, he was told, had decided, 'upon some occasions best knowne to himselfe', that the old sentence should now be executed, and only arguments in law against that decision could be entertained.
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Here, again, there is a sense in which scrupulous judges distance themselves from the arbitrary exercise of royal power; they ostentatiously confine themselves to process. Testing the only legal argument that came to his mind, Ralegh suggested that the commission issued to him before his voyage, conferring on him as it did powers of life and death, amounted to a pardon for any previous offences. This tactic had been foreseen, however, and the omission of the standard words 'trusty and well-beloved' was now used against him: when the commission was issued he had not yet earned the trust that would imply a pardon, and no broad construction might be placed upon an act of pragmatic royal opportunism. Montagu reminded him again that, since he had not been pardoned expressly in his commission, what he had or had not done in Guiana was quite irrelevant to the question at hand, which was whether the King might indeed now confirm a sentence of execution passed in November 1603.

Ralegh was trapped, and he knew it. He took the only course open to him and threw himself on James's clemency, once again pointing out flaws, as he perceived them, in the Winchester verdict: 'as concerning that judgment which is so long past, and which I think here are some could witness, nay His Majesty was of opinion, that I had hard measure therein'.
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Yelverton spoke elegantly, superfluously pointing out once again that Ralegh had fifteen years past been 'convicted of high treason...and then received the judgment of death'. While the King had graciously permitted him to live until now, 'that justice calls unto him for execution'. Of course, one might regret the whole business, 'Sir Walter Ralegh bath been a statesman, and a man who in regard of his parts and quality is to be pitied. He bath been as a star at which the world hath gazed; but stars may fall, nay they must fall when they trouble the sphere wherein they abide.
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It was almost over. Montagu, a careerist but also a convinced Christian of a rather puritan cast, made a considered and in the circumstances courageous speech, affirming his own belief in the prisoner's character and religion, asserting that Ralegh could prepare to meet his end without superfluous advice even from a Lord Chief justice, and praising his The History of the World, an 'admirable work' that testified to its author's Christian beliefs. Perhaps here too there is a trace of implicit censure, laid upon a King who disliked the work, and who now insisted on severity. 'You must do', he said, 'as that valiant captain did, who perceiving himself in danger, said in defiance of death, death thou expectest iiie, but maugre tliy spite I expect thee.'
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Defiance and spite are words fit for subtlety, full of ambiguity in seventeenth-century English usage: if death was spiteful, so too, perhaps, was the royal agent of death. Nevertheless, Montagu concluded by doing what the King, and the law, expected him to do. He granted execution. Ralegh responded with his accustomed dignity, asserting his loyalty to the King, and asking that he might not be 'cut-off suddenly'. 'I have', he said, 'something to do in discharge of my conscience, and something to satisfy his Majesty in, something to satisfy the world in, and I desire I may be heard at the day of my death.'
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Like most other condemned prisoners he was granted this last favour. Ralegh then asked for pen and ink; he had some writing to do in preparation for the morrow.
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That same day, a royal warrant signified the King's wish that Ralegh should be spared the full legal penalty of treason: hanging, drawing and quartering. James would be satisfied with beheading, a commutation invariably granted to the nobility, and, less consistently, to a gentleman.
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Ralegh spent his last night in the Gatehouse prison, not far from the scaffold site, consulting with the courteous and devout Dean of Westminster, Robert Townson, writing letters and talking to Bess. He smiled on hearing that she had been granted the disposal of his body. It was well, he said, that she had the disposal of him when dead, for she had not always enjoyed such control over the living man!
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At some point in these hours of meditation, if a robust tradition in the titling of manuscript copies is to be credited, Ralegh wrote on the flyleaf of his Bible, the last of thousands of books to rest in his hands, a poignant couplet, 'on the Snuffe of a Candle', developing a stanza in what one might assume to have been a favourite among his own works, 'Nature that washt her hands in milke'.

He was woken at around four o'clock, long before the autumnal sunrise. First his cousin Charles Thynne called, then Townson arrived to celebrate communion. Ralegh ate his breakfast -'a dishe of fried steakes [and] eggs roasted' according to one account - and calmly smoked his pipe; Townson believed that he was treating death as just another journey.
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If he said so out loud, then Ralegh, never slow on his cue, took the metaphor with him to the scaffold. The condemned man dressed, smartly, swinging on a wrought black velvet gown, and choosing a hat. On one finger, so the story goes, he wore a diamond ring, given him by Elizabeth I. After a cup of sack to ward off the chill, he set out at around eight o'clock, as many as sixty guards escorting him to the scaffold in Old Palace Yard. Another report has him walking 'betweene the Sheriffs of Middlesex'.
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The crowd pressed around. Ralegh gave his nightcap to a bald well-wisher: 'thou hast more need of it now than I', he said. Stories congregate round the dying hero: setting aside the intentional humour, this one brings to mind the mortally wounded Sir Philip Sidney, passing a flask of water to a common soldier on the battlefield of Zutphen, more than thirty years earlier.
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This was to be Ralegh's final stage. His performance on the scaffold, like his performance when on trial for his life, was judged by contemporaries in both theatrical and moral terms, in keeping with the values of the age.
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Once again he commanded that stage; exploiting the moment through gestures, embracing friends, kissing the axe, working the crowd, fixing the event in memory. To save his voice, counsellors and peers watching from a nearby window, including the Earl of Arundel and James Hay,Viscount Doncaster, recently married to Northumberland's daughter Lucy, came down to the scaffold to hear more clearly what he had to say. Their presence and cooperation demonstrated their support for the condemned man. Here were friends as well as witnesses; the nuances were always subtle in a scaffold crowd, but sympathy and regret for the royal decision were as evident now as they had been among the judges during the previous fortnight. Despite, or maybe because of the competing attractions of Lord Mayor's Day in the City, plenty of other men and women were on the scene too, including 'Christopher', a South American Indian, a former servant of the Governor of San Thome, brought by Ralegh from Guiana.
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Weeping frequently, and helped by his 'noate of remembrance', Ralegh embarked on a lengthy speech.
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The Spanish ambassador understood that it had lasted three-quarters of an hour, while Chamberlain wrote drily to Carleton that 'they had no thancks that suffered him to talke so longe on the scaffold'.
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It is a speech that survives in many different copies and forms, forms which in their variety demonstrate the authorial involvement of an audience as well as the speaker.
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Despite protestations of frailty, his voice held up well. One commentator, turning critic in response to the theatricality of the moment, observed that Ralegh's voice, like his courage, 'never failed him', even though there were some who thought it more forced 'than natural, and somewhat overdone'.
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The most likely sequence in which he took the many points recorded in contemporary accounts of his speech is preserved in Thomas Harriot's notes, for Harriot too stood in the crowd on that October morning.
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People hear what they want to hear, and later readers, busy constructing a political identity for a dead man, read what they want to read as well.
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The prologue was conventional, with the condemned prisoner discounting any shivers (they should be attributed to his recurrent fever, not to fear) and welcoming the fact that he was to die in a public place, 'where he might with freedome disburden himself'. Literally, he was walking from darkness to light, and, so the implication ran, his journey - the passionate man's pilgrimage - led on ultimately to eternal light.
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Forgiving his enemies and traducers - that too was common form, and he did not necessarily mean what he said - Ralegh worked through some well-worn themes. He insisted that there had been no ulterior motive to his expedition, that he had not plotted with France, and that he had never considered seeking refuge abroad. Late in his address he asked the Earl of Arundel to confirm that in conversation before the recent voyage, standing in the gallery of his ship, Ralegh had undertaken to return to England, come what may. On this they had shaken hands, as gentlemen bound in honour. Arundel obliged. 'It is true', he said. 'I do very well remember it.'

Ralegh was determined to confront every hostile story, even to the extent that, as Steven May suggests, the speech lacks proportion, is overly absorbed on the 'immediate' and the 'trifling', while omitting any reflections on the grand themes, the threat posed by Spain and the menace of resurgent continental Catholicism.
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Some of the old bravado was there still, compounding this distortion. Ralegh could not resist talking about the mutiny that had frustrated any further exploration for treasure in Guiana, reminding the crowd that he had won over the mutineers through force of personality, and that he had even honoured his pledge to seek their pardons. The execution of Essex still troubled him, and towards the end of his speech he glanced back to a February day in 1601.
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'There was a Report spread, that I should rejoice at the death of my Lord of Essex, and that I should take Tobacco in his presence; when I protest I shed Tears at his Death, though I was one of the contrary Faction'. And in another report:'I was of the contrarie faction I confesse, but I wished not his death, for I knew when he was gon, I should not be soe much accounted of'. Still another account puts it more bluntly: I knew, Ralegh said, 'that yt would be worse with mee when he was gone, For those that sett upp mee against him, did afterwards sett themselves against mee'.
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People, he suggested, had never really understood their relationship; they had been misled by Essex's paranoia. He said he would have liked to have stood closer to the Earl at his death, for he had known that Essex wished to be reconciled at the last. Unfortunately, the Captain of the Queen's Guard had been stationed in the Armoury that day, high in the White Tower. Duty had kept the two men apart.