The jury, but with evident reluctance, returned a verdict of guilty. On being asked, in the usual form, whether he had anything to say why judgment should not be pronounced against him, he replied that he was perfectly innocent of the charges of Cobham, but that he submitted himself to the king's mercy, and recommended to the compassion of his majesty his wife and his son of tender years. After the sentence of high treason, with all its disgusting details, had been pronounced, Raleigh asked to speak privately with Cecil, Lord Henry Howard, and the Earls of Suffolk and Devonshire, entreating them that, in consideration of the position which he had held under the crown, his death might not be so ignominious as the strict sentence required. They promised to use their influence, and he was taken back to his quarters.
The charges of complicity which were made against Arabella Stuart, in the indictment against Raleigh, were of a nature which called for denial on her part. She was present at the trial in a gallery; and Charles Howard, Earl of Nottingham, who was sitting by her, arose, and in her name protested, on her salvation, that she had never meddled in any such matters. There appeared, indeed, no disposition at this moment to implicate the Lady Arabella, though her relation to the Crown made her an object of anxiety to James, as we shall soon have occasion to see. Cecil himself acquitted her of any concern in this treason, admitting that though she had received a letter from Cobham, entreating her to countenance it, she only laughed at it and at once sent it to the king. Of the actual extent of Raleigh's participation, and what was his real object, we have no means of judging, for though James was in possession of the letters between the accused parties and Aremberg, they could not, as already stated, be produced.
Cobham and Grey were arraigned before a tribunal of their peers, consisting of eleven earls and nineteen barons. Nothing could be more striking than the cowardice and meanness of Cobham, and the noble dignity of Grey. They were both condemned.
The two priests were first conducted to execution. They suffered all the bloody horrors of the law at Winchester, on the 29th of November. It was surmised that James was glad to be rid of Watson as one of the individuals to whom, before coming to the English throne, he had promised toleration to the Catholics. There was an attempt to prove the non-existence of such a promise, but it was crude and convinced nobody. At the gallows both Watson and Clarke declared that they were convinced they owed their death to their priesthood. They were cut down alive and their bowels torn out—a revolting practice which but too well illustrates the vindictive spirit of the age.
The next execution was that of Brooke. He was simply beheaded, also at Winchester, on the 5th of December. The people expressed great sympathy for him, under a belief that he had first been employed by Cecil in the troubled waters of these conspiracies, and then victimised by him. Markham, Grey, and Cobham were brought to the scaffold, induced to confess, and, after an interval of suspense, reprieved. Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower of London for many years.
The effect of this conspiracy was to deepen James's suspicion of the Catholics and his dislike of the Puritans. The Catholics, since his coming to the English throne, had conducted themselves with more policy than their robustious rivals, the Puritans. They had claimed, indeed, the fulfilment of his promises whilst merely King of Scotland, to favour them as the staunch friends of his mother and serious sufferers on her account; but they had preferred their claims with a degree of courtesy and moderation to which the brusque Reformers were strangers. The pope, Clement VIII., probably led by the same expectations, had by two breves addressed to the archpriest and provincial of the Jesuits, strictly enjoined the missionaries to confine themselves to their spiritual duties, and on no account to mix themselves up with the agitators for political change. He condemned unequivocally the conduct of Watson and Clarke, and sent a secret envoy to the English Court, expressing his abhorrence of all acts of disloyalty, and offering to withdraw any missionary from the kingdom who was in any way obnoxious to the king and Council. James appeared so far influenced by this moderation, that though he stoutly refused all application for a free exercise of the Catholic worship, and even committed individuals to the Tower who offended in this respect, yet he invited the Catholics to frequent his Court, he conferred knighthood on some of them, and assured them generally that they should not suffer for recusancy so long as they abstained from a breach of the laws as regarded religion, and from all acts of political insubordination.
SIR WALTER RALEIGH. (From the Portrait by Zucchero.)
But towards the Puritans he was by no means so courteous. He could never forget that they had kept him in restraint in his infancy and youth; that they had been the defamers and persecutors of his mother; and that to the very hour in which he escaped into the larger field of English power, they had goaded him with their demands and defied his authority. As he drew nearer to the English throne, the charms of the English church increased in his imagination. A church which set up the king as its head was a church as much after James's own heart as after that of Henry VIII. Like that monarch, he dearly loved to shine in polemics, and long before he arrived in England, it required no great shrewdness to perceive where his affections lay.
