REPRIEVE (December 10, 1603).
[Sidenote: _Bathos._]
[Sidenote: _Ralegh's Abasement._]
The nation was doing a great man justice, though tardily. Not even its
hero's temporary self-abasement could put it out of conceit with him.
One of the many curious surprises in Ralegh's history is the manner in
which a sudden change in his demeanour seemed to give the lie to the
general admiration. Almost a worse grievance against the Court and its
legal tools than their persecution is the effect it had in humiliating
and degrading him for a time. Though the proceedings had been a travesty
of justice, they had been invested hitherto with a scenic stateliness.
Ralegh had borne himself gallantly. He had kept and left the stage with
unfailing dignity. The prosecution had at least evinced the respectable
earnestness of stubborn hate. At the moment after the catastrophe the
nobility, whether of persecuted greatness or of murderous vengefulness,
evaporated. Ralegh's enemies appeared to have lost their motive and
plan. They seemed no longer sure why or how they wished to wreak their
rage. He, from his condemned cell, demanded justice for wronged
innocence in the accents of a detected cut-throat. To the Lords
Commissioners he wrote: 'The law is passed against me. The mercy of my
Sovereign is all that remaineth for my comfort. If I may not beg a
pardon or a life, yet let me beg a time. Let me have one year to give to
God in a prison and to serve him. It is my soul that beggeth a time of
the King.' He spoke of his fear that the power of law might be greater
than the power of truth. He reminded Cecil that he was a Councillor to a
merciful and just King, if ever we had any, and that the law ought not
to overrule pity, but pity the law.' 'Your Lordship,' he proceeds, 'will
find that I have been strangely practised against, and that others have
their lives promised to accuse me.' In the same November in which he had
told Cecil it would be presumption for him to ask grace directly of the
King, he asked it. He assured his most dread Sovereign he was not one of
the men who were greatly discontented, and therefore the more likely to
be disloyal. He protested he had loved the King 'now twenty years'; that
he had never invented treason, consented to treason, or performed
treason. He invoked mercy in the name of English law, 'who knowing her
own cruelty, and that she is wont to compound treasons out of
presumptions and circumstances, does advise the King to be
_misericorditer justus_.' In a rather loftier strain he exclaimed, 'If
the law destroy me, your Majesty shall put me out of your power, and I
shall then have none to fear, none to reverence, but the King of Kings.'
But the burden throughout is the pitiful 'Send me my life.'
[Sidenote: _Its motive._]
These prayers by Walter Ralegh to a most dread Sovereign, who happened
to be James I, these genuflections of spirit to a Minister who must have
been suspected of malevolent jealousy, if not of treason to ancient
friendship, present a strange and sad spectacle. Excessive importance
should not be attached to the phraseology. Not a little of the apparent
abjectness was matter of style: 'What,' Ralegh himself has said, 'is the
vowing of service to every man whom men bid but good morrow other than a
courteous and Court-like kind of lying?' Much must be allowed for the
fashion of the age in dealing with Princes and their Ministers. Grey, no
more than Ralegh, could resist the impulse. The Puritan Baron had bidden
a magnanimous farewell to his peers at Winchester: 'The House of the
Wiltons have spent many lives in their Princes' service; Grey cannot beg
his!' Within a few days he was grovelling in gratitude for an insulting
reprieve: 'As your mercy draws out my life, I cannot deny it the only
object it aspires to, by unfeigned confession and contrition to diminish
my offence, and your displeasure.' Not till the Civil War had cleared
the atmosphere through which royalty was seen, was the demeanour of
subjects to the Sovereign in general conformity with the modern standard
of manliness. Ralegh, the Court favourite, the poet, was cast in a more
plastic mould than Grey. The suddenness of his ruin may well have thrown
him off his balance now, as at the original explosion of the tempest in
the summer. The tendency of men endowed with genius like his to indulge
in extravagances of dejection when fortune frowns is notorious. But his
long course of importunities to all possessed of the means of helping or
hindering in the years after 1603 is not to be explained either by
style, or by spasms of despair. Both their impulse and something too of
an apology for them are to be found in the basis of his character, which
was tough as well as elastic. After the shock of the plunge into the
depths he braced himself to the task of rising to the surface, and
reaching shore. Life, freedom, wealth, career, were forfeited. He
determined to redeem the whole. He availed himself of the instruments at
hand, though they were tarnished. He did not scruple to soil his fingers
in groping his way out of a sea of mud.
[Sidenote: _Doggedness of Purpose._]
It is necessary continually to remind ourselves, when we are tempted to
be incensed at his deportment, of the mode in which he had been treated,
of his consuming sense of a mission, and his determination, little short
of monomania, to return to its service. He and everybody knew that his
conviction was an act of legal violence. There was no prospect of rescue
through the machinery of the law from an overwhelming disaster which
demonstrated law to be without a conscience or sense of responsibility.
As soon as the law with its automatic violence had possession of his
case, he felt himself held in a grasp not to be relaxed. He knew he must
look outside law for justice as well as mercy. It and its ministers were
not intentionally cruel. Simply their craft had assumed a scientific
shape from which morality and common sense alike were absent. A
defendant had a right to evade the penalties of the most manifest guilt
by any loopholes and gaps he could discover in the works. It had the
right to pursue him to the death, whether innocent or criminal, so long
as the rules of the art were observed. Its point of honour was not to
let the accused escape. Ralegh was penetrated with an acute and
indignant consciousness of the iniquity of the Court intrigue from which
he suffered. He despaired of correcting the wrong by the help of the law
which had lent itself to be the agent. His struggle was to salve the
malice of law with the remorse of the Prerogative which had been seduced
into setting it in motion. The shape his efforts took was by no means
admirable. Had he been more uniformly heroic, or less absolutely
irrepressible, he would have gone to his prison, and laid himself down
magnanimously or passively mute. There, early or late, he would have
died. Never would his foes have opened the doors of their own good will.
But his nature was not of that kind. He burnt with a longing to be up
and doing. He knew he was caught in toils he could not burst by force.
For his career's sake, he condescended to plead with and beseech them
through whom alone he could emerge into the daylight. They who have
idealized him as a downtrodden martyr will find the Ralegh portrayed by
his own pen in scores of letters to princes, statesmen, and nobles,
little to their taste. The real Ralegh will not cease to be honoured by
all whom the sight of indomitable courage and doggedness in the
accomplishment of a purpose moves. Only in his words and style could we
wish him to have been less supple and less meek. That we have to wish in
vain. He thought too highly both of the objects he meant to attain, and
of the strength of those who kept him from them, to be sparing of such
slight things as entreaties.
[Sidenote: _Reverence for Kingship._]
Life was the first article in his programme of ends to be pursued, or
losses to be redeemed. He prized life more than most. He had so much to
do with a life. Half his work still, as he reckoned, was incomplete. The
world was young, and abounded in possibilities. To save himself for
life and work was worth playing at servility. He could hardly see the
pettiness in a James, in his parasites, in his Ministers, for absorption
in their one essential quality, their ability, as holding headsman and
gaolers in a leash, to keep alive or kill, to bind or let loose. To this
age James is an awkward, ludicrous pedant. The spectacle of Ralegh's
veneration is exasperating. For Ralegh he was a symbol of sovereign
authority, a mysterious keeper of the scales of fate. He represented for
Ralegh a power above courts of law, and entitled to set right their
mistakes or misdeeds. Of his mere will he could free Ralegh from
persecution. For Ralegh he was a redresser of grievances; and he was
more. He impersonated potentiality to do as well as undo. The idea of
the opportunities embodied in an occupant of the throne was too
engrossing for Ralegh to weigh the character of the individual. He
imagined himself not merely pardoned, but trusted by the depositary of
boundless national resources, which he was conscious of an infinite
competence to employ. His admiration of the capabilities of the royal
Prerogative, if utilized as he perceived that they could be utilized,
embraced its titular tenant whoever he might be. He was dominated by an
intense sense of all he might accomplish for the indistinguishable
duality of himself and his country, if the King would. Sincerely he
could profess he had loved James ever since he beheld in him the heir of
the national crown.
On November 29, 1603, the priests, Watson and Clarke, underwent the
hideous doom which had been pronounced upon Ralegh. They were drawn,
hanged, and quartered. They still lived when the quartering began. On
December 6 Brooke was beheaded. His last words were: 'There is somewhat
yet hidden, which will one day appear for my justification.' Nothing
ever has appeared. James at Wilton House signed warrants for the
execution of Cobham, Grey, and Markham on Friday, December 10. He had
not the hardihood to sign the warrant for Ralegh's execution; but it is
believed to have been fixed for the Monday after. Queen Anne, it is
said, was interceding for his life. So was the King's host, Lord
Pembroke, at his mother's bidding. Cecil wrote to Winwood, afterwards
Secretary of State, that the King 'pretended to forbear Sir Walter
Ralegh for the present, till the Lord Cobham's death had given some
light how far he would make good his accusation.' James, we will hope,
had been staggered in conscience by the reports of his own messengers
from Winchester. He and his courtiers had won from the criminal law
Ralegh's condemnation. They were still hunting after apologies for the
conviction. Watson, Clarke, and Brooke had supplied none of the missing
links. In vain had Commissioners been examining and re-examining the
prisoners. Their forlorn hope was the agony or recklessness of the two
lords and Markham on the scaffold.
[Sidenote: _Farewell to his Wife._]
Meanwhile, in his prison in the Castle, Ralegh made ready for death. He
had the spiritual assistance of Bishop Bilson of Winchester, whom the
King had deputed to console or confess him. Bishop Bilson, who was said
by an admirer to carry prelature in his very aspect, furthered later on
the divorce of Lord and Lady Essex. Ralegh found no fault with his
behaviour to him, and gratefully characterized him in his History as
grave and learned. He satisfied the Bishop of his Christian state; he
could not be persuaded to acknowledge the truth of any of the charges
against him, unless, very partially, as to the pension. That, he said,
was 'once mentioned, but never proceeded in.' The day appointed for his
death, he thought, was December 13. He had penned a last farewell to his
wife on December 9, 1603. It reads very unlike the All Souls' College
paper. He sends his 'love, that, when I am dead, you may keep it, not
sorrows, dear Bess; let them go to the grave with me, and be buried in
the dust. Bear my destruction gently, and with a heart like yourself.'
He gives 'all the thanks my heart can conceive for your many troubles
and cares taken for me.' He bids her, for the love she bare him living,
not hide herself many days, but by her travail seek to help her
miserable fortunes, and the right of her poor child. 'If you can live
free from want, care for no more: for the rest is but vanity. Love God,
and begin betimes to repose yourself on Him. When you have wearied your
thoughts on all sorts of worldly cogitations, you shall sit down by
sorrow in the end.' He does not know to what friend to direct her, for
all his had left him in the time of trial. 'I plainly perceive,' he
continues, 'that my death was determined from the first day.' He asks
her, 'for my soul's health, to pay all poor men.' He warns her against
suitors for her money; 'for the world thinks that I was very rich.' He
prays her, 'Get those letters, if it be possible, which I writ to the
Lords, wherein I sued for my life. God knoweth that it was for you and
yours that I desired it; but it is true that I disdain myself for
begging it. And 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. Beg my dead body, which living was denied you; and
either lay it at Sherborne, if the land continue, or in Exeter church by
my father and mother. I can write no more. Time and Death call me away.'
Yet he can hardly part with wife or child, and adds still something:
'God teach me to forgive my persecutors and false accusers. My true wife
farewell. Bless my poor boy; pray for me. Yours, that was, but now not
my own.'
[Sidenote: _The Pilgrimage._]
He was more than willing to live. He was not afraid to die. In the
apparent presence of death his soul, as always, recovered its lofty
serenity. With his head, as he thought, on the block, he burst into the
grand dirge of the _Pilgrimage_. Such are the variances of taste that a
writer of reputation has spoken of this noble composition as 'a strange
medley in which faith and confidence in God appear side by side with
sarcasms upon the lawyers and the courtiers.' That is a judgment with
which few will agree. The poem in the most authoritative manuscript is
described as having been composed the night before Ralegh was beheaded.
But it can scarcely be doubted that it belongs to the present period,
when he was daily expecting the arrival of the warrant for his execution
at Winchester. His spirit had 'quenched its thirst at those clear wells
where sweetness dwells.' It was bound in quiet palmer's fresh apparel--
to Heaven's bribeless hall,
Where no corrupted voices brawl;
No conscience molten into gold,
No forged accuser bought or sold,
No cause deferred, no vain-spent journey;
For there Christ is the King's Attorney.
And when the grand twelve-million jury
Of our sins, with direful fury,
Against our souls black verdicts give,
Christ pleads his death, and then we live.
[Sidenote: _Royal Intervention._]
At ten in the morning of December 10 Sir Griffin Markham was conducted
to the scaffold, which had been erected in the Castle yard. He had said
adieu to his friends, prayed, and was awaiting the axe. Suddenly the
spectators in the Castle yard saw the Sheriff, Sir Benjamin Tichborne,
stay the executioner. John Gibb, a Scotch groom of the royal bedchamber,
had arrived, almost too late, at the edge of the crowd. He was the
bearer of a reprieve. James himself, on December 7, had drawn it, with a
preamble: 'The two prestis and George Brooke vaire the principall
plotteris and intisairs of all the rest to the embracing of the saiddis
treasonabill machinations.' He had kept it back to the last, as well to
multiply the chances of eliciting confessions of guilt, as for the sake
of the vividness of the stage play. He admired greatly his own
ingenuity, and his courtiers applauded enthusiastically. Of the
detestable feline cruelty he and they had no shame. Ralegh's window in
the Castle overlooked the scaffold. He would be sensible of the
interruption of the proceedings. He could not have seen Gibb. He must,
says Carleton, 'have had hammers working in his head to beat out the
meaning of the stratagem.' Beaumont, the French ambassador, was told by
an imaginative reporter that he 'etait a la fenetre, regardant la
comedie de ses compagnons avec un visage riant.'
[Sidenote: _Scenes on the Scaffold._]
The Sheriff performed his part with a ready gravity which secured the
King's approval. He was already a favourite for having proclaimed James
on the first news of the death of Elizabeth, before the Council had
declared him her successor. For his deserts both now and then the
custody of the Castle soon afterwards was bestowed upon him and his
heirs. He said to Markham, 'You say you are ill-prepared to die; you
shall have two hours' respite.' Then he led him away, and locked him in
Arthur's Hall. Next Grey was brought on the scaffold. He asserted that
his fault against the King was 'far from the greatest, yet he knew his
heart to be faulty.' He too was ready for the axe, when the Sheriff led
him away to Arthur's Hall, saying the order of the execution was changed
by the King's command, and Cobham was to precede Grey. Cobham came, with
so bold an air as to suggest he had heard; but he prayed so lengthily
that a bystander ejaculated he had 'a good mouth in a cry, but was
nothing single.' He expressed repentance for his offence against the
King. He corroborated all he had said against Sir Walter Ralegh as true
'upon the hope of his soul's resurrection.' The extortion of that
confirmation of his calumnies had been a main object of the whole
disgraceful farce. When he had thus bought his worthless life, the
Sheriff brought back upon the scaffold Grey and Markham to stand beside
him. All three were asked if their offences were not heinous, and if
they had not been justly tried and lawfully condemned. Each answered
affirmatively. Then said the Sheriff: 'See the mercy of your Prince, who
of himself hath sent hither a countermand, and hath given you your
lives.' At this the crowd burst into such hues and cries that they went
from the Castle into the town, and there began afresh. Grey said, 'Since
the King has given me my life without my begging, I will deserve life.'
Henry IV was sceptical as to the magnanimity of James. He wrote to
Beaumont to discover if 'Spanish gold' were concerned in the reprieves;
if Don Juan de Taxis and Cecil had used influence for them; 'for it is
rumoured that these persons, backed by money expended by Ralegh, brought
the thing about.' The faith in Ralegh's endless resources and skill
prevailed in France as in England.