A MORAL RACK (August 10-October 15).
[Sidenote: _Ralegh's Trinkets._]
On the morning of Monday, August 10, Ralegh finally entered the Tower.
This time he was made to feel that he was a prisoner indeed. He had
meant to transport to France charts of Guiana, the Orinoko, Nuova
Regina, and Panama, with five assays of the ore of the Mine. They were
on him, and they were taken from him. He was stripped also of his
trinkets, except a spleen stone. This and an ounce of ambergris were
left with him for his personal use. A gold picture-case set with
diamonds was, by his wish, consigned to the Lieutenant of the Tower.
There were other ornaments. Among them was a diamond ring, supposed by
Naunton to have been a present from Queen Elizabeth, though Ralegh told
Sir Thomas Wilson he had never any such of the Queen's giving. There
were a Guiana idol of gold and copper, and sixty-three gold buttons with
sparks of diamonds. All these were entrusted to Stukely by the
Lieutenant of the Tower. It would be strange if some did not stay with
their custodian. It may have been with reference to them that Ralegh
admitted the traitor to a last interview in the Lieutenant's lodgings on
the Wednesday after his committal. We may be sure it was not to affirm,
as Stukely declared, that he 'loved him as well as any friend he had in
the world.'
[Sidenote: _Examinations by Privy Councillors._]
More exalted persecutors than Stukely were now let loose upon him. The
old game of 1603 was resumed. Lords of the Council and the Law Officers
of the Crown worked their hardest to discover that he was a criminal.
First on August 17, and twice afterwards, he was examined upon
interrogatories by a committee of the Privy Council, consisting of Lord
Chancellor Bacon, Archbishop Abbot, Lord Worcester, Coke, since
November, 1616, no longer Chief Justice, Caesar, and Naunton. The
examinations were not directed in a way either to do justice to the
prisoner, or to elicit the truth, so far as can be discovered from the
records of them. Those among the Lords Commissioners who desired
something more than merely to extricate their master from a diplomatic
difficulty, were incapacitated by an invincible prejudice. All started
by taking for granted that the prisoner never intended to search for the
Mine, that none existed, and that his single purpose since he prepared
for his expedition was to attack piratically the Spanish colonies and
commerce. Mr. Gardiner, who is one of his severest critics, acknowledges
that they blundered and failed, because they were not content to convict
him of having cared simply to find the Mine, and been reckless of the
means.
James and his Ministers could convince themselves of the expediency and
moral propriety of slaying a man capable, as they believed, of schemes,
however qualified, for the capture of the Spanish treasure ships. They
saw the difficulty of proving to the country the capital criminality of
the avowal of a project never acted upon. They had hoped they might
fabricate supplementary treasonable matter out of the communications
between Ralegh and the French Agency. After a long competition between a
French and a Spanish family compact, the Spanish faction at Court, which
was James's own, was absolutely predominant. The Government did not
shrink from offending French susceptibilities. In September it arrested
and repeatedly examined de Novion, whose diplomatic character was not
very definitive. Le Clerc, the resident Agent, was himself summoned
before the Council at Hampton Court, and confronted with de Novion. He
stood upon his privilege, and refused to answer. The Council solemnly
rebuked him for his secret conferences with, and offers of means of
escape to, an English subject attainted of high treason, and since
'detected in other heinous crimes.' He was informed he had forfeited, by
the law of nations, his immunities, and was required to confine himself
to his house. The French Government was wrathful; but it had a weak
case. Its conduct, though its original advances to Ralegh had the
sanction of the English Ministers, was clearly a breach of diplomatic
propriety. The proof against the Frenchmen was of no use towards the end
for which the Council laid stress on it. Ralegh, it was seen, could not
be accounted liable for overtures he had rejected. The Crown still was
thrown back on the chance of confessions by himself for a provision of
assignable pretexts for his destruction.
[Sidenote: _Pledges to Spain._]
In some way or other reasons had to be discovered. James saw the
Infanta's dower of two million crowns and jewels within his grasp. The
Spanish Court showed the friendliest disposition. It had expressed its
delight at the welcome news of its enemy's capture in the act of flight,
and his committal again to the Tower. Nothing was wanting, James
imagined, to crown the negotiations, but an English head which he was
very willing to sacrifice. He had given the Spanish Government the
option of a public execution either at Madrid or in London. It was
impossible that he should disappoint the agreeable expectation. At Court
the will to put Ralegh to death was matter of notoriety. The Queen's was
the only voice raised loudly against it. They who were ignorant how
faded was her influence imagined her protest might still be of avail. On
September 23, Sir Edward Harwood wrote to Carleton, that Ralegh was
struggling hard for life, and that, as the King was now with the Queen,
it was believed he might live. Courtiers in general knew better. On
August 29, Tyringham, another of Carleton's purveyors of news, wrote to
him: 'It is said that death will conclude Sir Walter Ralegh's troubles.
The Queen's intercession will rather defer than prevent his punishment.'
Yet ways and means had to be provided, and the difficulty grew rather
than diminished, until it was decided to cut the knot. Harwood reported
to Carleton on October 3, that 'the King is much inclined to hang
Ralegh; but it cannot handsomely be done; and he is likely to live out
his days.' As time went on, and the climax was not reached, the gossip
of the town, perhaps of the Court itself, spread a rumour that the delay
was intentional. Ralegh was said to have been promised his life if he
would help towards revelations of the misappropriation of crown jewels
or lands at the King's accession, with the connivance of the late
Treasurers, Salisbury and Suffolk. The tale may have had some sort of
basis in Ralegh's habit of charging Cecil with an abuse of his position
to his personal enrichment at the expense of the Crown, from which he
was alleged to have taken Hatfield by a profitable exchange, and
Cobham's escheated estates. No evidence exists that the question was
ever seriously raised, or had any connexion with the delay. Of that the
one real cause was the inability of the Court to elicit damning
testimony against himself.
[Sidenote: _Sir Thomas Wilson._]
To patch up the gaps in the inquiry before the Lords Commissioners, the
same system was tried as in the preliminary investigations of 1603.
Ralegh was placed, from September 11 till October 15, under a special
keeper. The keeper's business, like that of a Juge d'Instruction, was to
ransack him, and worry him into supplying a case against himself. For
the office Sir Thomas Wilson, Keeper of the State Paper Office, was
chosen. As Wilson himself confessed, his arrival produced an impression
on the officers of the Tower as well as Ralegh, that 'a messenger of
death had been sent.' He had entered the public service as a spy of
Cecil's. He was now enjoying a pension for the intelligence he had
collected in Spain concerning the Main and Bye Plots. His defect in his
new office was an excess of zeal in suspiciousness. He began by
regarding Ralegh as an arch hypocrite, and a lying impudent impostor,
from whom the truth could be extracted only by 'a rack, or a halter.'
Though otherwise a man of some learning, and a diligent guardian of the
public records, he seems to have been very ignorant of physics. He
thought Ralegh was an empty boaster for his statement that he could
distil salt-water into fresh by means of copper furnaces. He treated his
ailments, which Ralegh's somewhat hypochondriacal temperament may have a
little exaggerated, as wholly feigned, 'that he might not be thought in
his health to enterprise any such matter as perhaps he designeth.' Their
symptoms, the swollen left side and liver, the painful sores over his
body, the ague-fits, his lameness from the Cadiz wound, he conjectured
were caused by the patient's own applications. With his wife to share
his watch, he was given absolute control. No person was to have speech
with Ralegh, unless in his hearing. The Council was to be told all he
observed. He was cunning, though he was fond of enlarging on his simple
honesty. He had a high sense of his own importance, and magnified his
very extensive powers. He was furious with the door-keeper of the
Council for delaying one day to carry in a message from him while the
Council was deliberating. He quarrelled with Sir Allen Apsley, now
Lieutenant of the Tower, for withholding the keys of Ralegh's apartment
at night.
[Sidenote: _The Apsleys._]
[Sidenote: _'Chemical Stuffs.'_]
Apsley, a near connexion by his third wife of Villiers, through whom he
had been enabled to buy his office, must have been an acquaintance of
Ralegh's. He had served in the commissariat department in the Cadiz
expedition, and in Ireland. His second wife was niece, and almost
adopted daughter, of George Carew. On Ralegh's return to the Tower, his
old lodgings in the Bloody tower being tenanted by Lord and Lady
Somerset, he was quartered in the Lieutenant's own house. There he was
sure of hospitable treatment, both on account of the past, and as one of
the persons eminent in learning and in arms, for whom, we are told, Sir
Allen had a singular kindness. He had the especial happiness of
association there with the third Lady Apsley, the mother of Lucy,
afterwards the noble wife of Colonel Hutchinson. Lady Apsley was
interested in physical science. Mrs. Hutchinson has recorded how her
mother, as well from curiosity as from her abounding benignity, which
made her desire that the illustrious prisoner should be comforted and
diverted, persuaded the less scientifically enlightened Sir Allen to
tolerate his chemical investigations. Sir Allen allowed her an income
for herself of L300 a year. Among other good works on which this
'mother' of the Tower spent her pin-money, was the payment of the cost
of Ralegh's experiments. According to Mrs. Hutchinson, herself a capable
surgeon, Ralegh taught Lady Apsley in return many valuable chemical
prescriptions. After a time he was removed to good quarters in the
Wardrobe tower, looking over the Queen's garden. With that arrangement
Wilson professed himself much dissatisfied. He affected to apprehend
communications between Ralegh and confederates outside. Finally he had
his way. Against the wishes of Apsley, as much as his own, Ralegh was
transported to a little upper room in the Brick tower. 'Though it
seemeth nearer Heaven, yet,' wrote Wilson to Naunton, 'there is there no
means to escape but into Hell.' It had been occupied by his servants
when he was confined in that building for his offence of 1592. He was
not allowed now to have the attendance of his own valet. He was
threatened with separation from the 'chemical stuffs,' with which he
loved constantly to drench himself from phials containing all spirits,
sneered ignorant Wilson, but the spirit of God. The Tower physician
could not tell what they were. He, and apparently Sir Allen Apsley too,
at first apprehended another attempt at suicide. They need not. Ralegh,
landless, ruined, had no longer aught to gain by self-destruction for
his family. Apart from a sense of religious duty, he had every motive
for reserving his head for the block, for wishing to 'die in the light.'
Wilson's employers might not have been sorry had his view been
different. Though sometimes the conversation turned on the topic of
noble Roman suicides, Ralegh showed no inclination to take his own life.
Wilson said with a taunt he did not abstain out of principle, but simply
because he, who knew not what fear was, 'had no such Roman courage.'
[Sidenote: _Promises in the King's Name._]
It would be unfair to Wilson and to his confederate Naunton, who had
hoped that the other would 'not long be troubled with that cripple,' to
infer that they were disappointed at Ralegh's reluctance to disembarrass
the Court by self-murder of the trouble of him. There can be no doubt of
the dishonesty of the devices Wilson adopted to secure him for the
block. He tempted him with mendaciously ambiguous declarations that, if
he disclosed all he knew, the King would forgive him, and do him all
kindness. Wilson, James, and Naunton were engaged in a common
conspiracy, that the first, without directly pledging the royal word to
a grant of grace, should coax from Ralegh a confession by allowing him
to fancy such a pledge had been given. Naunton's rebukes, as well as
Wilson's own avowals to him, indicate that Wilson all but positively
bound the King. He need scarcely have resorted to falsehoods, which did
not impose upon his prisoner. Ralegh's experience of the King's justice
and clemency had been too long and intimate for him to be deluded by a
Sir Thomas Wilson. Though he had a right to tax the King with promises
given in the King's name, he did not hope, he told Wilson, thus to save
his life. 'He knew that the more he confessed, the sooner he should be
hanged.' But he was not unwilling to talk and write. He wished, absurd
as seemed to Wilson his pretension to such a possession, 'to discharge
his conscience in all things to his Majesty.' He rejoiced besides in an
opportunity for clearing up obscurities in his career. Ultimately he
grew reserved with Wilson, as may easily be understood. At first, before
he had thoroughly gauged his companion, he conversed freely. He
discoursed almost too freely and fully for Wilson's ability to condense
the whole into a narrative which would be plausible enough to give the
King a sense that they were on the verge of real discoveries. Wilson
complained to Naunton that he often tried to gain information by talking
on matters which might lead to it.
[Sidenote: _Apology for Flight._]
From the Tower, though one biographer believes it was from Devonshire,
he wrote to the King, asking why it should be lawful for Spaniards to
murder thirty-six Englishmen, tying them back to back, and then cutting
their throats, yet be unlawful for Englishmen--'O miserable English! O
miserable Ralegh!--to repel force by force.' The Spanish atrocities are
not disputed. The strange thing is that historians who condemn Ralegh's
alleged violence to Spaniards never seem to suppose he was really
resentful of them. They treat his indignation as factitious. Another
letter he appears, at Wilson's instigation, to have written to the King
on September 17 or 18, which has been lost or suppressed. In it, from an
indorsement, dated September 19, on Wilson's covering letter, it seems
that he asked for an examination of one Christofero, the Governor of
Guiana's mulatto valet, whom Keymis had brought from San Thome. He would
be able to speak, it was mentioned, of 'seven or eight several mines of
gold that are there.' It was not convenient to order any such
examination. Ralegh wrote other letters from the Tower. He wrote to
Villiers, to explain, not so much to him or his master, as to his own
wounded self-respect, the one act of which he was really ashamed. It was
his ineffectual flight, that 'late and too late lamented resolution.' He
recounted to deaf ears the dreams on which he had brooded of permission
to lead yet another expedition in search of his El Dorado; his despair,
when the peremptory summons by the Council to London demonstrated to him
that his vision of treasures and glory was to be extinguished for ever
by actual or virtual death. In a much bolder letter to George Carew,
intended for the King's perusal, which sounds more like a manifesto to
the English nation, he frankly avowed the things he had left undone as
well as the things he had done, and his reasons. He admitted he had not,
in his description of his project, reminded the King that the Spaniards
had already a footing in Guiana. Though the King's advisers were as well
aware as himself of the foundation of the original San Thome, he was
willing to facilitate the King's efforts to purge himself individually
of complicity with the attack on a Spanish settlement. He admitted
further that his patent did not formally authorize him to remove the
Spaniards when they blocked the path to the Mine. His defence was that
he required no distinct authority. The natural lords of Guiana had
acknowledged Elizabeth their sovereign, and the Spaniards had no title
to forbid the entry of Englishmen. He did not deny his responsibility
for the capture of San Thome as part of the operations for the discovery
of the Mine, and he justified it. His right to march about Guiana
without let or hindrance was, he contended, implied in the Royal
commission. Unless the King's title to Guiana were clear, his entrance
for any purpose could not have been sanctioned. If Guiana were Spanish
soil, he would have been as manifestly a thief for taking gold anywhere
out of it, and the Crown as manifestly an accessary to theft, as the
Spaniards now asserted him to be a peace breaker.
[Sidenote: _Detention of Lady Ralegh._]
As may easily be imagined, these were not confessions of the sort James
desired. 'Farrago istius veteratoris' was the description applied to
them by Wilson in his classical moments. 'Mountebank's stuff' he called
them when writing for less classical eyes than the King's. Naunton
affected to despise them as 'roaring tedious epistles.' They were as
little satisfied with the undressed disclosures which they ungenerously
endeavoured to obtain through Lady Carew and Lady Ralegh. Lady Carew was
made to question him on his communications with the French Agent, and
also to question the Agent. She reported the Agent's answer to her
interrogation what Ralegh was to have done or to do in France if he had
succeeded, or should succeed, in escaping thither. It was: 'Il mangera,
il boyera, il fera bien.' Nothing more material was extracted from Lady
Ralegh. She had been committed on August 20 to the custody, in her own
house in Broad-street, of a London merchant, Wollaston. He was relieved
of the disagreeable duty on September 10, 'for his many great occasions
and affairs.' Another merchant, Richard Champion, succeeded him. He was
forbidden to allow any to have access to her, save only such as he
should think fit. Eventually she was subjected to the supervision of
Wilson. No crime was imputed to her. The object of the lawless outrage
was the interception of admissions in the letters husband and wife were
encouraged to write. All were submitted to the King's prying though lazy
eyes. Naunton remarked on one occasion to Wilson: 'I forbear to send
your long letter to the King, who would not read over the Lady's, being
glutted and cloyed with business.' The correspondence told little any of
the conspirators cared to learn. The letters breathed a trust and
affection James never inspired. None of the State secrets he expected to
detect were revealed in such a note as from Ralegh in September: 'I am
sick and weak. My swollen side keeps me in perpetual pain and unrest;'
or in her reply: 'I am sorry to hear amongst many discomforts that your
health is so ill. 'Tis merely sorrow and grief. I hope your health and
comforts will mend, and mend us for God.'
[Sidenote: _Mr. Gardiner's Case against Ralegh._]
[Sidenote: _The King's good Faith._]
By this time the Government recognised that it had done all in its power
for the completion of its case against Ralegh. Students of the
proceedings will think the same. They have cause to be grateful to Mr.
Gardiner for marshalling the medley in his essay under that title in the
_Fortnightly Review_. With the fullest desire to be impartial, he sums
up strongly against the defendant; and his skill and patience in the
collection of evidence are such as to ensure that he has neglected
nothing available for a decisive condemnation. According to him, Ralegh
was guilty of a flagrant breach of the conditions on which his
expedition was authorized. He had pledged his own faith and that of his
friends and companions that he could reach and work his Mine in Guiana
without attacking resident Spaniards, or trespassing on lands in Spanish
occupation. James, it is said, was not inconsistent with his own
principles in sanctioning an enterprise thus qualified. The King's
doctrine, frankly stated by Mr. Gardiner, was that nothing less than
occupancy carried the right to territorial dominion; and it had been
declared to him that the locality of the Mine was not occupied by
Spaniards. He was sceptical of the existence of the Mine, and he was
mistrustful of Ralegh's disposition to comply with the compact. The
national eagerness, however, for the adventure, and the confidence of
Ralegh's well-wishers, overpowered his reluctance. He was moved also by
the venial hope of a vast influx of innocent profit into his empty
Treasury. From the first it was understood plainly that the admiral
accepted the entire responsibility for the maintenance of a peaceable
attitude towards Spanish possessions. The postponement of a pardon was a
sign. Ralegh's conduct in despatching his men to a spot where a
collision was inevitable, indicated a deliberate disregard of his
covenants. James could not have known that the situation of the new San
Thome necessitated a conflict, if the Mine were to be approached, since
Ralegh himself had in England not been aware of the resettlement. As
soon as he heard, his duty was either to retire, or to choose a fresh
route. He did neither, and thus fairly laid himself open to the
punishment he had invoked before he started. Mr. Gardiner does not allow
that James is chargeable with double dealing which should have tied his
hands as against Ralegh, on account of the disclosure of Ralegh's
memorial and plans to Gondomar. The memorial, which, Mr. Gardiner is
sure, included no specification of the place of the Mine, would tell the
Ambassador little of novelty or practical importance. Besides, Mr.
Gardiner believes Ralegh was aware that it was to be shown. Finally,
Ralegh's designs against the plate fleet, and his intrigues with Savoy
and France, in Mr. Gardiner's opinion, sufficiently demonstrate his want
of scrupulousness. The evidence of them would naturally disincline the
King for passing indulgently over proved violations of agreement. On the
whole, he concludes, 'no one who now constructs a narrative of Ralegh's
voyage on the basis of a belief in his veracity will be likely to obtain
a hearing.'
[Sidenote: _Weakness of the Case._]
It is a large indictment resting upon a very slender basis. The question
of the alleged schemes of freebooting, none of which issued in action,
has been considered already. For the present its relevancy depends on
the answer to the main charge of an unlicensed and deliberate rupture by
Ralegh of the peace between his own Sovereign and the King of Spain.
For a determination of the point it must be remembered how much Mr.
Gardiner concedes in Ralegh's favour, as well as how much he decides
adversely. If San Thome had remained in 1618 where it was in 1596, and
Spanish troops, having taken up a temporary post a score or so of miles
lower down, had from that barred the quiet passage of young Walter and
Keymis, Mr. Gardiner apparently must have exonerated Ralegh. He would
have been safe within his commission, which appointed him leader of an
armed force for the obvious purpose of resisting impediments to his
progress about Guiana, unless where Spaniards were in immediate
possession. Warfare with Spaniards in Guiana is not in itself
represented as criminal. His sole offence was in combating them
voluntarily on ground they positively occupied. The same defence which
he might have conclusively urged if soldiers, descending from the
original San Thome, had blocked his transit, is justly pleadable for his
men's voyage on the Orinoko past the new town. Guiana in general being
free to Englishmen, it is manifest that a settlement on the bank could
not appropriate the channel. The whole question of the guilt or
innocence of Ralegh on James's reading of international law, is narrowed
to the minute issue whether the Spaniards or the Englishmen on the
particular scene of the fight were the aggressors. Whatever the decision
upon that, it is difficult to see how it could properly affect Ralegh.
His right and his duty were to find and take possession of the Mine, if
it were not in Spanish hands, as nobody alleges it was. He was entitled
to break through obstacles in his way, so long as he did not violate
actual Spanish soil. Lawfully he sent his comrades along the Orinoko. If
on their road the Spaniards compelled a contest, neither Ralegh nor his
subordinates were in fault. If his captains compelled it, he cannot have
been liable, unless he be proved, as he has not been, to have so
instructed them. In any event, when all Spanish officers in America
notoriously deemed an Englishman a pirate who entered the Orinoko
without their leave, and King James claimed authority to send his
subjects wherever in Guiana Spaniards were not permanently planted, it
is unreasonable to throw the liability for an armed brawl between
Spaniards and Englishmen in Guiana upon the English chief. His
Sovereign, who with eyes open despatched him with an armament to work a
mine of prodigious value, cannot be permitted to shift on him the odium
of a bloody struggle because the goal turned out to be some eight miles
off, instead of the twenty more or less at which both master and subject
had judged it to be.
[Sidenote: _Difficulties of the Government._]
The design of the Government had been to discover proof of fresh crimes
since Ralegh's liberation in 1616, and to try him for them. It had
failed. Much of the testimony it had painfully collected was dubious,
vague, biassed, interested, or plainly corrupt. Such as it was the
Council either would not, or could not, rely upon it for a conviction.
Ralegh's transactions with the Frenchmen were unwarrantable, if its view
of them were correct. But they had resulted in nothing, and they were a
continuation of relations which it had itself promoted. At San Thome, if
he were liable for his men, as partially he did not deny, though he
might have denied it, he had broken the King's peace by an invasion of
Spanish territory, if Guiana were Spanish. He maintained that it was as
much English as it was Spanish, if not more; and they neither dared, in
the existing state of national opinion, nor perhaps cared, to gainsay
the doctrine. His alleged schemes for the maritime spoliation of
Spaniards may well have been to his mind lawful. All English seamen, and
the nation at large, believed that the articles of peace between the two
kingdoms did not extend beyond the Equator. In the latest treaty with
Spain, that of 1604, the Indies and their trade were intentionally not
mentioned, on account of the insoluble difficulties arising out of the
Spanish determination to shut the region to free European trade. For
Ralegh and a multitude of Englishmen, and Spaniards also, England and
Spain were in America always at war. Neither national nor international
law countenanced the doctrine. Any Englishman who had devastated
Spanish commerce in the West Indies, would, during a large part of
Elizabeth's reign, have been amenable to criminal justice, if the State
had prosecuted. But the State then was not inclined to prosecute for
such acts. During the next reign some statesmen continued to hold, like
the people, that there was no peace beyond the Line. If there were
peace, the State could not have proceeded against Ralegh for the thought
of breaking it. The single criminal act proved was his attempt at
escape. For it he might have been tried and punished. But the most
triumphant prosecution on such a charge would not have given the
Government the pound of flesh it owed to Spain. Nothing less was of use.
[Sidenote: _Ralegh's real Motive._]
[Sidenote: _The Rest Talk._]
The administration floundered about in futile efforts. Perpetually it
was deluded by a sensation of solid ground which immediately slipped
from under its feet. It was the more enraged with Ralegh that he seemed
to be ever offering clues, which only led astray. It imputed its
embarrassment to his cunning. He had no intention to deceive, or even to
abstain from promoting a revelation of the truth, which he did not fear.
Simply he and it were radically at cross purposes. They were mutually
unintelligible. The sincerity of his ardour for the attainment of a
footing in Guiana is unquestionable. He was honestly eager for it in the
Tower, in Trinidad after the return from San Thome, at Plymouth, when he
was grovelling in counterfeit madness at Salisbury, and when he was a
fugitive on the Thames. But Guiana was not his real end. Guiana was the
means he had finally and deliberately chosen to inflame the English
people and Crown with an inextinguishable ambition for the creation of
an American empire. He did not much mind how the national imagination
was kindled, provided that it caught fire. His motive was patriotic and
vast, and his judges and accusers, conscientious men like Caesar and
Abbot, as well as others, had not the faintest understanding of it. All
except the motive was talk, much of it reprehensible talk, but much not
truly reported; and his censors let their prejudices seduce them into
treating the entire mass as evidence of facts and acts. If he ever
instructed his officers to commence the expedition to the Mine by taking
the initiative in an attack on San Thome, the direction was confined to
talk. If, whether before or after the San Thome incident, he spoke of
the capture of the plate fleet, that was nothing but talk. Captain
Parker's report of the project of Ralegh and St. Leger for lying in wait
for homeward bound ships referred, if not wholly untrue, to talk, like
his own and Whitney's similar plans. When Ralegh told his wife he hoped
for something ere his return, that was talk. If he ever said he should
not come back, that was talk. If he boasted of a French commission, and
affirmed his preference for France, that was talk. The entire pile of
charges against him, proved, unproved, or disproved, was talk. All began
and ended in talk, unless that Bayley captured French boats, and Ralegh
redeemed them; that the Lancerota islanders murdered English sailors,
and he did not retaliate; that the San Giuseppe Spaniards were
aggressors, and he bore it; and that the garrison of San Thome laid an
ambush for his men, to hinder their access to a district which his
Sovereign had commissioned him to enter, and were soundly beaten for
their hostility.
The Government was in a dilemma. It meant to put Ralegh to death, and
the process was as behindhand as at Ralegh's return to Plymouth, or more
so. Spain had the promise of his blood, as soon as it should decide
whether itself or England were to provide the scaffold. On October 15
the Spanish Legation in London received the answer of the Escurial.
Philip III had no mind to accept the odium before Europe of murdering a
redoubtable foe. He expressed his preference for an execution in
England, and at once. Only in one way could the object be effected.
Ralegh must be put to death, not ostensibly for San Thome, but for the
Main Plot. Both for Ralegh and his heroic wife the immediate results
were solacing. There was no need for tormenting either further for the
concoction of a fresh indictment, if the original indictment retained
strength to do the work. A warrant was addressed to Wilson for Lady
Ralegh's release from his supervision. By another he was discharged from
attendance upon her husband. Ten days earlier he had pretended to pray
the King's leave to give up his trust at the Tower. He said he was
anxious to resume the arrangement of the State papers of the previous
six or seven years. For Ralegh at all events it was a happy respite to
be restored, for the last dozen days of his Tower life, to the honest
keeping of Sir Allen, and the charitable offices of Lady Apsley.