James was now all impatience to get rid of Raleigh as quickly as possible; he trembled at the threats of Gondomar, and had the sapient monarch not given his word that Raleigh should die? The great difficulty before the Council, however, was to find a pretext for condemning Raleigh to death. Bacon and his colleagues racked their wise brains to invent a cause by which he could be found guilty of high treason. At length the Lord Chief-Justice, Montagu, with a committee of the Council decided that the King should issue a warrant for the re-affirmation of the death sentence given at Winchester in 1603, by which it might be made valid and carried out. Sir Walter pleaded that the King’s commission appointing him head of the Guiana expedition with powers of life and death, invalidated the former sentence and its punishment, both in the eyes of justice and of reason. But Sir Walter was overruled. On the 24th of October the warrant for the execution was signed and sealed by the King, and four days later Sir Walter was taken from the Tower to the King’s Bench. He was then suffering from ague, and having been roused from his sleep very early had not had time to have his now snow-white hair dressed with his usual care. One of his servants noticed this as he was being taken away, and telling him of it, Raleigh answered, smiling, “Let them kem (comb) it that have it,” then he added, “Peter, dost thou know of any plaister to set a man’s head on again when it is cut off?”
Entrance to the Bloody Tower and Steps leading to Raleigh’s Walk
The end being now so certain and so near, the bright courage of the man returned; there was no shrinking with the closing scene so close at hand. He was not brought back to the Tower after his condemnation, and he passed his last night upon earth in the Gate House at Westminster, close to which the scaffold stood in Old Palace Yard. He had a last parting that evening with his devoted wife, his “dear Bess,” but neither dared to speak of their only remaining son—that would have been too bitter a pang for them to bear. Sir Walter’s last words to his wife were full of hope and courage: “It is well, dear Bess,” he said, referring to Lady Raleigh having been promised his body next day, the only mercy allowed her by the Council, “that thou mayest dispose of that dead which thou hadst not always the disposing of when alive.” Then she left him. During the long hours of that last night, he composed those beautiful lines which will last as long as the language in which they are written:
“Even such is time! who takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, and all we have,
And pays us but with earth and dust:
Who in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days.