The ruse, if it existed then, as it did afterwards, succeeds. Raleigh hears bad news. Gondomar has—or has not—told his story to the king by crying, ‘Piratas! piratas! piratas!’ and then rushing out without explanation. James is in terror lest what had happened should break off the darling Spanish match.
Raleigh foresees ruin, perhaps death. Life is sweet, and Guiana is yet where it was. He may win a basketful of the ore still, and prove himself no liar. He will escape to France. Faithful King finds him a Rochelle ship; he takes boat to her, goes half way, and returns. Honour is sweeter than life, and James may yet be just. The next day he bribes the master to wait for him one more day, starts for the ship once more, and again returns to Plymouth—so King will make oath—of his own free will. The temptation must have been terrible and the sin none. What kept him from yielding but innocence and honour? He will clear himself; and if not, abide the worst. Stukely and James found out these facts, and made good use of them afterwards. For now comes ‘a severe letter from my Lords’ to bring Raleigh up as speedily as his health will permit; and with it comes one Mannourie, a French quack, of whom honest King takes little note at the time, but who will make himself remembered.
And now begins a series of scenes most pitiable; Raleigh’s brains are indeed broken. He is old, worn-out with the effects of his fever, lamed, ruined, broken-hearted, and, for the first time in his life, weak and silly. He takes into his head the paltriest notion that he can gain time to pacify the King by feigning himself sick. He puts implicit faith in the rogue Mannourie, whom he has never seen before. He sends forward Lady Raleigh to London—perhaps ashamed—as who would not have been?—to play the fool in that sweet presence; and with her good Captain King, who is to engage one Cotterell, an old servant of Raleigh’s, to find a ship wherein to escape, if the worst comes to the worst. Cotterell sends King to an old boatswain of his, who owns a ketch. She is to lie off Tilbury; and so King waits Raleigh’s arrival. What passed in the next four or five days will never be truly known, for our only account comes from two self-convicted villains, Stukely and Mannourie. On these details I shall not enter. First, because one cannot trust a word of them; secondly, because no one will wish to hear them who feels, as I do, how pitiable and painful is the sight of a great heart and mind utterly broken. Neither shall I spend time on Stukely’s villanous treatment of Raleigh, for which he had a commission from James in writing; his pretending to help him to escape, his going down the Thames in a boat with him, his trying in vain to make honest King as great a rogue as himself. Like most rascalities, Stukely’s conduct, even as he himself states it, is very obscure. All that we can see is, that Cotterell told Stukely everything: that Stukely bade Cotterell carry on the deceit; that Stukely had orders from headquarters to incite Raleigh to say or do something which might form a fresh ground of accusal; that, being a clumsy rogue, he failed, and fell back on abetting Raleigh’s escape, as a last resource. Be it as it may, he throws off the mask as soon as Raleigh has done enough to prove an intent to escape; arrests him, and conducts him to the Tower.
There two shameful months are spent in trying to find out some excuse for Raleigh’s murder. Wilson is set over him as a spy; his letters to his wife are intercepted. Every art is used to extort a confession of a great plot with France, and every art fails utterly—simply, it seems to me, because there was no plot. Raleigh writes an apology, letters of entreaty, self-justification, what not; all, in my opinion, just and true enough; but like his speech on the scaffold, weak, confused—the product of a ‘broken brain.’ However, his head must come off; and as a last resource, it must be taken off upon the sentence of fifteen years ago, and he who was condemned for plotting with Spain must die for plotting against her. It is a pitiable business: but as Osborne says, in a passage (p.108 of his Memoirs of James) for which one freely forgives him all his sins and lies, and they are many—‘As the foolish idolaters were wont to sacrifice the choicest of their children to the devil, so our king gave up his incomparable jewel to the will of this monster of ambition (the Spaniard), under the pretence of a superannuated transgression, contrary to the opinion of the more honest sort of gownsmen, who maintained that his Majesty’s pardon lay inclusively in the commission he gave him on his setting out to sea; it being incongruous that he, who remained under the notion of one dead in the law, should as a general dispose of the lives of others, not being himself master of his own.’
But no matter. He must die. The Queen intercedes for him, as do all honest men: but in vain. He has twenty-four hours’ notice to prepare for death; eats a good breakfast; takes a cup of sack and a pipe; makes a rambling speech, in which one notes only the intense belief that he is an honest man, and the intense desire to make others believe so, in the very smallest matters; and then dies smilingly, as one weary of life. One makes no comment. Raleigh’s life really ended on that day that poor Keymis returned from San Thomé.’
And then?
As we said, Truth is stranger than fiction. No dramatist dare invent a ‘poetic justice’ more perfect than fell upon the traitor. It is not always so, no doubt. God reserves many a greater sinner for that most awful of all punishments—impunity. But there are crises in a nation’s life in which God makes terrible examples, to put before the most stupid and sensual the choice of Hercules, the upward road of life, the downward one which leads to the pit. Since the time of Pharaoh and the Red Sea host, history is full of such palpable, unmistakable revelations of the Divine Nemesis; and in England, too, at that moment, the crisis was there; and the judgment of God was revealed accordingly. Sir Lewis Stukely remained, it seems, at court; high in favour with James: but he found, nevertheless, that people looked darkly on him. Like many self-convicted rogues, he must needs thrust his head into his own shame; and one day he goes to good old Lord Charles Howard’s house; for being Vice-Admiral of Devon, he has affairs with the old Armada hero.
The old lion explodes in an unexpected roar. ‘Darest thou come into my presence, thou base fellow, who art reputed the common scorn and contempt of all men? Were it not in mine own house I would cudgel thee with my staff for presuming to speak to me!’ Stukely, his tail between his legs, goes off and complains to James. ‘What should I do with him? Hang him? On my sawle, mon, if I hung all that spoke ill of thee, all the trees in the island were too few.’ Such is the gratitude of kings, thinks Stukely; and retires to write foolish pamphlets in self-justification, which, unfortunately for his memory, still remain to make bad worse.
Within twelve months he, the rich and proud Vice-Admiral of Devon, with a shield of sixteen quarterings and the blood-royal in his veins, was detected debasing the King’s coin within the precincts of the royal palace, together with his old accomplice Mannourie, who, being taken, confessed that his charges against Raleigh were false. He fled, a ruined man, back to his native county and his noble old seat of Affton; but Até is on the heels of such—
‘Slowly she tracks him and sure, as a lyme-hound, sudden she grips him,
Crushing him, blind in his pride, for a sign and a terror to mortals.’