CHAPTER VIII.
IN THE TOWER.
It is no longer possible for us to follow the personal life of Raleigh as we have hitherto been doing, step by step. In the deep monotony of confinement, twelve years passed over him without leaving any marks of months or days upon his chronicle of patience. A hopeless prisoner ceases to take any interest in the passage of time, and Raleigh's few letters from the Tower are almost all of them undated. His comfort had its vicissitudes; he was now tormented, now indulged. A whisper from the outer world would now give him back a gleam of hope, now a harsh answer would complete again the darkness of his hopelessness. He was vexed with ill-health, and yet from the age of fifty-one to that of sixty-three the inherent vigour of his constitution, and his invincible desire to live, were unabated. From all his pains and sorrows he took refuge, as so many have done before him, in the one unfailing Nepenthe, the consolatory self-forgetfulness of literature. It was in the Tower that the main bulk of his voluminous writings were produced.
He was confined in the upper story of what was called the Garden Tower, now the Bloody Tower, and not, as is so often said, in the White Tower, so that the little cell with a dim arched light, the Chapel Crypt off Queen Elizabeth's Armoury, which used to be pointed out to visitors as the dungeon in which Raleigh wrote The History of the World, never, in all probability, heard the sound of his footsteps. It is a myth that he was confined at all in such a dungeon as this. According to Mr. Loftie, his apartments were those immediately above the principal gate to the Inner Ward, and had, besides a window looking westward out of the Tower, an entrance to themselves at a higher level, the level of the Lieutenant's and Constable's lodgings. They probably opened directly into a garden which has since been partly built over.
Raleigh was comfortably lodged; it was Sir William Waad's complaint that the rooms were too spacious. Lady Raleigh and her son shared them with him for a considerable time, and Sir Walter was never without three personal servants. He was poor, in comparison with his former opulent estate, but he was never in want. Sherborne just sufficed for six years to supply such needs as presented themselves to a prisoner. His personal expenses in the Tower slightly exceeded 200l., or 1,000l. of our money; there was left a narrow margin for Lady Raleigh. The months of January and February 1604 were spent in trying to make the best terms possible for his wife and son. In a letter to the Lords of the Council, Raleigh mentions that he has lost 3,000l. (or 15,000l. in Victorian money) a year by being deprived of his five main sources of income, namely the Governorship of Jersey, the Patent of the Wine Office, the Wardenship of the Stannaries, the Rangership of Gillingham Forest, and the Lieutenancy of Portland Castle. He besought that he might not be reduced to utter beggary, and he did his best to retain the Duchy of Cornwall and his estates at Sherborne. The former, as he might have supposed, could not be left in the charge of a prisoner. It was given to a friend, to the Earl of Pembroke, and Raleigh showed a dangerous obstinacy in refusing to give up the Seal of the Duchy direct to the Earl; he was presently induced to resign it into Cecil's hands, and then nothing but Sherborne remained. His debts were 3,000l. His rich collections of plate and tapestry had been confiscated or stolen. If the King permitted Sherborne also to be taken, it would be impossible to meet the exorbitant charges of the Lieutenant, and under these circumstances it is only too probable that Raleigh might have been obliged to crouch in the traditional dungeon ten feet by eight feet. The retention of Sherborne, then, meant comfort and the status of a gentleman. It is therefore of the highest interest to us to see what had become of Sherborne.
We have seen that up to the date of the trial Cecil held at bay the Scottish jackals who went prowling round the rich Dorsetshire manor; and when the trial was over, Cecil, as Lady Raleigh said, 'hath been our only comfort in our lamentable misfortune.' As soon as Raleigh was condemned, commissioners hastened down to Sherborne and began to prepare the division of the prize. They sold the cattle, and began to root up the copses. They made considerable progress in dismantling the house itself. Raleigh appealed to the Lords of the Council, and Cecil sent down two trustees, who, in February 1604, put a sudden stop to all this havoc, and sent the commissioners about their business. Of the latter, one was the infamous Meeres, Raleigh's former bailiff, and this fact was particularly galling to Raleigh. On July 30 in the same year, Sherborne Castle and the surrounding manors were conveyed to Sir Alexander Brett and others in trust for Lady Raleigh and her son Walter, Sir Walter nominally forfeiting the life interest in the estates which he had reserved to himself in the conveyance of 1602. On the moneys collected by these trustees Lady Raleigh supported herself and her husband also. She was not turned out of the castle at first. Twice at least in 1605 we find her there, on the second occasion causing all the armour to be scoured. Some persons afterwards considered that this act was connected with Gunpowder Plot, others maintained that it was merely due to the fact that the armour was rusty. The great point is that she was still mistress of Sherborne. Lord Justice Popham, however, as early as 1604, pronounced Raleigh's act of conveyance invalid, and in 1608 negotiations began for a 'purchase,' or rather a confiscation of Sherborne to the King. To this we shall presently return. In the meanwhile Captain Keymis acted as warden of Sherborne Castle.
As soon as the warm weather closed in, in the summer of 1604, the malaria in the Tower began to affect Raleigh's health. As he tells Cecil, now Lord Cranborne, in a most dolorous letter, he was withering in body and mind. The plague had come close to him, his son having lain a fortnight with only a paper wall between him and a woman whose child was dying of that terrible complaint. Lady Raleigh, at last, had been able to bear the terror of infection no longer, and had departed with little Walter. Raleigh thereupon, in a fit of extreme dejection, 'presumed to tell their Lordships of his miserable estate, daily in danger of death by the palsy, nightly of suffocation by wasted and obstructed lungs.' He entreated to be removed to more wholesome lodgings. His prayer was not answered. Earlier in the year he had indeed enjoyed a short excursion from the Tower. At Easter the King had come to attend a bull-baiting on Tower Hill, and Raleigh was hastily removed to the Fleet prison beforehand, lest the etiquette of such occasions should oblige James, against his inclination, to give obnoxious prisoners their liberty. Raleigh was one of five persons so hurried to the Fleet on March 25: on the next day the King came, and 'caused all the prisons of the Tower to be opened, and all the persons then within them to be released.' After the bull-baiting was over, the excepted prisoners were quietly brought back again. This little change was all the variety that Raleigh enjoyed until he left for Guiana in 1617.
When it transpired in 1605 that through, as it appears, the negligence of the copying clerk, the conveyance by which Raleigh thought that he had secured Sherborne to his son was null and void, he had to suffer from a vindictive attack from his wife herself. She, poor woman, had now for nearly two years bustled hither and thither, intriguing in not always the most judicious manner for her family, but never resting, never leaving a stone unturned which might lead to their restitution. The sudden discovery that the lawyers had found a flaw in the conveyance was more than her overstrung nerves could endure, and in a fit of temper she attacked her husband, and rushed about the town denouncing him. Raleigh, in deepest depression of mind and body, wrote to Cecil, who had now taken another upward step in the hierarchy of James's protean House of Lords, and who was Earl of Salisbury henceforward:
Of the true cause of my importunities, one is, that I am every second or third night in danger either of sudden death, or of the loss of my limbs or sense, being sometimes two hours without feeling or motion of my hand and whole arm. I complain not of it. I know it vain, for there is none that hath compassion thereof. The other, that I shall be made more than weary of my life by her crying and bewailing, who will return in post when she hears of your Lordship's departure, and nothing done. She hath already brought her eldest son in one hand, and her sucking child [Carew Raleigh, born in the winter of 1604] in another, crying out of her and their destruction; charging me with unnatural negligence, and that having provided for my own life, I am without sense and compassion of theirs. These torments, added to my desolate life—receiving nothing but torments, and where I should look for some comfort, together with the consideration of my cruel destiny, my days and times worn out in trouble and imprisonment—is sufficient either utterly to distract me, or to make me curse the time that ever I was born into the world, and had a being.