At the time fixed, Raleigh in disguise, and accompanied by King and Stukeley, who expressed much interest in seeing his relative safely off, took a boat and dropped down the river to reach the vessel at Gravesend. But from the moment that they were on the water, the quick eye of Raleigh noticed a wherry which kept steadily in their wake; and the tide failing, it was judged useless to proceed to Gravesend. They went, therefore, into Greenwich; the wherry also lay to there, and Sir Walter found himself immediately re-arrested by the traitor Stukeley, whose men were in the wherry. King also was arrested, and Sir Walter was conveyed next morning to the Tower. The French Envoy was forbidden the Court and soon after ordered to leave the country.
SIR WALTER RALEIGH BEFORE THE JUDGES. (See p. [478.])
The answer from the King of Spain did not arrive for five weeks. It stated that in his opinion the punishment of Raleigh's offences should take place where his commission—which he had violated—was issued. It was, therefore, necessary to bring him to trial in London. Meanwhile, he had been subjected to close and repeated interrogations before a commission appointed for the purpose, composed of Lord Chancellor Bacon, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sir Edward Coke, and several other members of Council. He was charged with having imposed upon the king, by representing that his object was to discover a gold mine, when he only wanted to get out of prison and commence piracy; that he had endeavoured to provoke a war with Spain; that he had barbarously deserted his ships' companies, and pushed them into unnecessary danger; that he had ridiculed and maligned the king; that he had feigned madness to deceive his majesty; and that he had attempted to escape in defiance of his authority.
Raleigh denied the charge of treating the name of the king disrespectfully; asserted that nothing proved his sincerity in expecting to reach mines so completely, as his having expended two thousand pounds in the necessary apparatus for refining the ore; that he had never exposed his men to any danger that he did not share himself, except when illness incapacitated him; and that as to feigning madness and trying to escape, the charges were true, but they were, under the circumstances, perfectly natural and pardonable.
The commissioners, finding that they could establish no real case against him of sufficient gravity to implicate his life, resorted to the usual stratagem of Government in those times, as well as in times long after—and set a spy upon him under the colour of a friend. The individual who accepted this dirty office—such villains are always plentifully at hand—was one Sir Thomas Wilson, Keeper of the State Paper Office. He appeared to be hit upon because he had as much learning and ingenuity as he had little principle, and could therefore easily draw out Raleigh to talk by assuming a kindly interest in him. Sir Walter appeared to talk freely, and related his adventures, and also what daily took place before the commission; yet this government pump could bring up nothing very criminating. Raleigh declared that had he fallen in with one of the Spanish galleons, he would have seized it with the same freedom that Drake had done; but his mere intention to do what had won so much fame and favour for other commanders, was not a charge likely to go down with the public. Raleigh remarked that when he made that avowal before the commission, Bacon said, "Why, you would have been a pirate!" and that he had replied, "Oh, my lord, did you ever know of any that were pirates for millions? They that work for small things are pirates."
Finding that there was nothing in Raleigh's proceedings on this occasion which had not been done, and far more than done, with high public approbation, by the greatest commanders of the British Navy, they dared not attempt to condemn him on that score, and therefore James demanded of his Council what other mode they could suggest to take his life. Coke and Bacon proposed that they should fall back simply on the plea of his old sentence, and the king sent to the Tower an order for his execution. The judges, therefore, received an order to issue a warrant for his immediate beheading, but they wisely shrank from such a responsibility, declaring that after such a lapse of time neither a writ of privy seal nor a warrant under the Great Seal would be legal without calling on the party to show cause against it. They accordingly summoned him before them by habeas corpus, and Raleigh, who was suffering from fever and ague, real enough this time, was the next day brought before them at the King's Bench, Westminster. Yelverton, the Attorney General, reminded the Court that Sir Walter had been sentenced to death for high treason, fifteen years before; that the king, in his clemency, had deferred the execution of the prisoner, but now deemed it necessary to call for it. He observed that Sir Walter had been a statesman, and a man who, in respect to his talents, was to be pitied, and that he had been as a star at which the world had gazed; but "stars," he continued, "may fall; nay, they must fall when they trouble the spheres wherein they abide." He called, therefore, at the command of his majesty, for their order for his execution. On being asked what he had to say against it, Raleigh replied that the judgment given against him so many years ago could not with any reason be brought against him then, for he had since borne his majesty's commission, which was equivalent to a pardon; and that no other charge was made against him. The Chief Justice told him that this pleading would not avail him; that in cases of treason nothing but a pardon in express words was sufficient. Raleigh then said, if that were the case, he could only throw himself on the king's mercy; but that he was certain that, had the king not been afresh exasperated against him, he might have lived a thousand years, if nature enabled him, without hearing anything more of the old sentence.
Montague, the Chief Justice, admitted this by saying that "new offences had stirred up his majesty's justice to revive what the law had formerly decreed;" and he ended with the fatal words—"Execution is granted."
Thus Raleigh was put to death to oblige the King of Spain, with whom James was anxious to form an alliance by his son's marriage to the Infanta. The old sentence was but the stalking-horse for the occasion, the Court not daring to allege as the true offence that he died for having invaded the territories of the King of Spain. The public having a strong repugnance to both Spain and any matrimonial alliance with it, which must introduce a Popish queen, would have gloried in the real chastisement of that nation and the capture of its treasure-ships. Sir Walter was executed on the 29th of October, 1618.
Hitherto James had contrived to avoid war for sixteen years. He now saw himself dragged into a hopeless contest by the folly of his son-in-law, Frederick, the Elector of the Palatinate. Frederick was a Calvinistic Protestant, and the Protestants of Bohemia, anxious to prevent the Catholic Emperor of Austria from acquiring their Crown, offered it to him, and the Elector was imprudent enough to accept it. James was thunderstruck by the news, and instantly avowed that the Elector had entered on an enterprise which would involve him in utter ruin. To enable the reader, however, to understand the question, we must take a brief review of the antecedents of the case. Bohemia, a country inhabited by a branch of the great Sclavonic race called Czechs, had early imbibed the doctrines of Protestantism. The people resisted the imposition of the Papal yoke by the Austrian princes, and insurrection and carnage were the consequences. At length the Emperor Rudolph was obliged to cede to the sturdy Bohemians the right of enjoying their own religious faith, and it was stipulated that they should be at liberty to erect churches on the Crown lands. The Calvinists, the most resolute sect of the Bohemian Protestants—for they were divided into Calvinists and Lutherans—declared the Church lands were in fact Crown lands, and began to build churches on estates belonging to the Archbishop of Prague and the Abbot of Braunau. These prelates appealed to the Emperor Matthias, who decided against the Protestants; and an order was issued to pull down again the churches both at Prague and Braunau. At Braunau the people made resistance, and some of their leaders were thrown into prison. This created a great excitement, and Count Thurm, the head of the Evangelical Church, called an assembly of the Protestants at Prague, on the 6th of March, 1618, to take measures for the maintenance of their privileges; but the enthusiasm with which this step was attended, from all parts of the country, much alarming the Austrians, menaces of punishment were issued by Imperial brief against those who took part in it. This roused the wrath of the people, who, headed by Count Thurm, on the 23rd of May, 1618, marched to the royal palace, seized two obnoxious councillors, and hurled them out of the window of the council chamber, which was eighty feet from the ground. These men had been the servile tools of the Austrian Court, and had thereby excited the hatred of the people. They refused the rites of marriage, baptism, and burial to all who would not consent to become Catholics; they were accused of having drawn up the threatening letter which came signed by the Emperor, and of hunting the Protestants into the Catholic churches with dogs. Luckily for them there was plenty of mud in the palace ditch, and they escaped with their lives to scourge the people at a later date.