The attempt to escape had been encouraged by enemies who wished to strengthen the case against Ralegh. That was clear enough to him, even before he was brought face to face with the Lords of the Council at his trial. They strove again, as they had striven before, to win the King's favour by maligning him. They affirmed that the whole enterprise to Guiana was a fraud, which Ralegh had invented to gain his freedom. For two months they considered the most plausible means of bringing him to execution. During that time Ralegh wrote letters to those in authority, and especially a noteworthy letter to the King, thinking that there might remain some spark of just feeling in him.
"If it were lawfull," he wrote, "if it were lawfull for the Spanish to murther 26 Englishmen, tyenge them back to backe and then to cutt theire throtes, when they had traded with them a whole moneth, and came to them on the land without so much as one sword amongst them all; and that it may not be lawfull for your Majesties subjects, being forced by them, to repel force by force, we may justly say, 'O miserable English!'
"If Parker and Mutton took Campeach and other places in the Honduraes seated in the hart of the Spanish Indies; burnt townes, killed the Spaniards; and had nothing sayed to them at their returne—and that my selfe forbore to looke into the Indies, because I would not offend, I may as justly say, 'O miserable Sir Walter Ralegh!'
"If I had spent my poore estate, lost my sonne, suffred by sicknes and otherwise, a world of miseries; if I had resisted with the manifest hazard of my life the rebells and spoiles which my companyes would have made; if when I was poore I could have made my selfe rich; if when I had gotten my libertye which all men and Nature it selfe doth so much prise, I voluntarily lost it; if when I was master of my life, I rendred it again; if [though] I might elsewhere have sould my shipp and goods and put five or six thousand pounds in my purse, I have brought her into England; I beseech your Majestie to beleeve that all this I have done because it should not be sayed to your Majestie that your Majestie had given libertie and trust to a man whose ende was but the recovery of his libertie, and whoe had betrayed your Majesties trust."
It was to no purpose. Ralegh well knew by this time of what base fabric was the King's mind. The Lords in Council only delayed sentence because they could not determine on what grounds to execute their prisoner. At last, on October 24, Ralegh was told that sentence of death had been passed upon him. On October 28 he was summoned to Westminster, from his room in the Tower. A sharp attack of ague lessened the strength that still remained to him. He was old now and white haired as he stood before his judges. The Attorney-General read the writ against him and said: "My Lords, Sir Walter Ralegh, the prisoner at the bar, was fifteen years since convicted of high treason, by him committed against the person of His Majesty and the state of this kingdom, and then received the judgment of death, to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. His Majesty of his abundant grace hath been pleased to shew mercy upon him till now, that justice calls upon him for execution. Sir Walter Ralegh hath been a statesman, and a man who in regard of his parts and quality is to be pitied. He hath been as a star at which the world hath gazed; but stars may fall, nay, they must fall when they trouble the sphere wherein they abide. It is, therefore, His Majesty's pleasure now to call for execution of the former judgment, and I now require order for the same."
Ralegh listened to this pompous mockery and said, when asked what he could say for himself why execution should not be awarded against him, "My Lords, my voice is grown weak by reason of my late sickness, and an ague which I now have; for I was now brought hither out of it." And the Lord Chief Justice answered: "Sir Walter, your voice is audible enough."
Indeed, there was little to be said by Ralegh, or any man, against a charge thus raked up from the past. The affair of this trial was a mere form, and Ralegh reserved his strength for his last great avowal at the supreme moment of his life.
He was taken away to the Gatehouse prison. Immediately the carpenters set to work to erect the scaffold. His execution was fixed for an early hour on the following morning. For on that day men's attention would be turned from the happenings at Westminster; and towards the City where the Lord Mayor's show would take place. Men's attention was not desired for the morrow's deed at Westminster.
Ralegh was a poet. A man cannot be a poet in his spare time. There is a realm which Beauty rules—that Beauty which Castiglione celebrated, and the understanding of which he made the last and chief attribute of his Courtier, with that realm Ralegh was in communion. From it he drew strength for his life. Such communion does unfit a man for the business of life, but gives him power to cope with its difficulties by enabling him to look a little beyond them. It raises him above the pettiness of things, and makes him see more clearly because he sees things at their proper value and in their right proportion. This perception—this sensitiveness—made him suffer more acutely, but endowed him with the power of detachment, the power to rise above his personal griefs.
Ralegh was a poet. He expressed himself in his life in a way strangely akin to that in which he expressed himself in his actual poetry. He resembles some knight in a Morris romance in his adoration for his Queen, and in his love for his wife.
But true love is a durable fire,
In the mind ever burning,
Never sick, never old, never dead,
From itself never turning.