From the moment of its departure misfortune attended the expedition of Raleigh: sickness decimated his crews and stretched him upon a bed of suffering. He found the Spaniards warned of his approach and disposed to oppose his progress. The little squadron which he commissioned to ascend the river Oronoco, in search of the gold-mine, was attacked by the Spaniards of the town of St. Thomas; in return, the English captured and burnt down the town.
Sir Walter Raleigh.
The son of Raleigh was killed, the crews mutinied, and the expedition returned without gold and almost without soldiers. Sir Walter Raleigh, distracted with grief and anger, flew into a passion with Captain Kemyss, who commanded the detachment; his old friend, in despair, killed himself. Other captains abandoned their unfortunate chief. The sailors were in revolt, those who remained urged Sir Walter to return to former methods, and to overrun the sea and the coasts with them in order to seize and pillage the Spanish ships and settlements. Raleigh resisted, not without some efforts and relapses. He set sail, however, for England. When he landed in the month of June, 1618, he learnt that a warrant of arrest had been issued against him. Spain had complained of the capture of St. Thomas. The governor, who had been killed, was a relative of Gondomar, the ambassador in England; the latter had raised the cry of piracy and made threats of royal vengeance. The moment was fatal to Raleigh. James was negotiating for the marriage of his son with the Infanta, Donna Anna, daughter of Philip III. He was resolved to please Spain at any price. Raleigh was soon lodged in the Tower once more. "The guilty man is in our hands," wrote Buckingham to Gondomar, "and we have seized his ships; if it please the king your lord, his Majesty will punctually fulfill his engagements, by sending the criminals to suffer their punishment in Spain, unless he should find it more satisfactory and exemplary that the chastisement should be inflicted upon them in England." Philip III. deigned to entrust this business to King James.
Raleigh was still under the weight of the old sentence of death pronounced against him fifteen years previously, without which it would have been difficult to convict him this time of a crime involving capital punishment. "Your recent offences have roused the justice of his Majesty," declared the great judge Montague; "May God have mercy on your soul!" Weak and ill as he was, Raleigh defended himself with as much skill as complacency. He asked for a short delay, in order to put his affairs in order. "Not," he said, "that I desire to gain a minute of existence. Old, sick, and dishonored, and approaching my end, life has become wearisome to me." It was, indeed, the expression of supreme weariness in this man, who had always loved life more than he had dreaded death, even according to the statements of his enemies. The respite was refused. Lady Raleigh, on going to say farewell to her husband, announced to him that she had obtained the favor of receiving his body after the execution. The hideous punishment of traitors had been commuted. Raleigh was to be beheaded. "Well done, Bess," he said, smiling; "it is fortunate that you will be able to dispose in death of a husband whom you have not always had when alive at your disposal." He had cast aside, by an effort of his powerful will, all the ambitious projects, all the romantic, adventurous, strange ideas, which still crowded in his brain. The greatness of his soul, often darkened during lifetime by many faults and even vices, was freed from the dark mist at the hour of death. On the 29th of October he was calm, grave, pious. He received the sacrament before walking to the scaffold, erected at Westminster. An immense crowd surrounded it. He addressed the people and made a long speech, protesting his innocence. The morning was cold. It was proposed to the condemned man that he should warm himself for an instant before the fatal moment. "No," said Raleigh, "it is the day of my ague; if I were to tremble presently, my enemies will say I quake for fear. It were better to have done with it." He knelt, uttering aloud a beautiful prayer. He touched the axe, "'Tis a sharp medicine, but a sound cure for all diseases," he said, and he laid his head upon the block. The executioner delayed. "What do you fear?" exclaimed Raleigh; "strike." His head fell immediately. The great soldier, the illustrious sailor, the statesman, the scholar, the incomparable adventurer, was not yet sixty-seven years of age. King James had truckled to Spain, and had added one more stain to his name.
One of the most implacable of the judges who were the instruments of the ruin of Raleigh was already threatened in his exalted seat. At the beginning of 1621 the king was compelled to convoke a Parliament, to obtain the subsidies which he needed. His son-in-law, the Elector-Palatine, placed by the Protestant faction on the throne of Bohemia, had imprudently accepted that offer without measuring the opposition which was about to be raised against him on the part of the Catholics of the Empire. He was now in danger of being driven from Bohemia, and deprived at the same time of his hereditary states. The Lower Palatinate had been attacked by the Catholic armies. James hesitated, lamented, cursing the ambition of his son-in-law, which had placed this business upon his shoulders; but he had already sent a small army corps to his assistance, and promised larger reinforcements. Parliament alone could place him in a position to keep his promises.
Parliament had no objection to this war, popular in England as a Protestant crusade; but it desired to set a price upon its liberality, and demanded that several retainers of monopolies should be tried, who had unworthily abused their scandalous privileges. From Sir Giles Mompesson and Sir Francis Mitchell, they soon came to the Attorney-General, Sir Henry Yelverton, and from him to one of the judges of the court of prerogatives, to the Bishop of Llandaff, convicted of having sold or bought justice. The vengeance of the Commons aimed even higher still: the Chancellor Bacon had said that corruption was the vice of the time. He had been profoundly smitten with it, and was to bear a signal punishment for his offences. On the 21st of March, 1621, the commission of Parliament entrusted with the inquiry into abuses in the matter of justice accused the Lord Chancellor, viscount of St. Alban's, upon twenty-two personal counts, while at the same time he was reproached with his connivance at offences of the same nature among his subordinates.