But from that earth, that grave, that dust,
The Lord shall raise me up I trust.”
Raleigh wrote these lines in a Bible which he had brought with him from the Tower.
Carlyle has summed up Raleigh’s life and death in the following pregnant lines, in his “Historical Sketches”:—
“On the morning of the 29th of October 1618 in Palace Yard, a cold morning, equivalent to our 8th of November, behold Sir Walter Raleigh, a tall gray-headed man of sixty-five gone. He has been in far countries, seen the El Dorado, penetrated into the fabulous dragon-realms of the West, hanged Spaniards in Ireland, rifled Spaniards in Orinoco—for forty years in quest a most busy man; has appeared in many characters; this is his last appearance on any stage. Probably as brave a soul as lives in England;—he has come here to die by the headman’s axe. What crime? Alas, he has been unfortunate: become an eyesore to the Spanish, and did not discover El Dorado mine. Since Winchester, when John Gibb came galloping (with a reprieve), he has been lain thirteen years in the Tower; the travails of that strong heart have been many. Poor Raleigh, toiling, travelling always: in Court drawing-rooms, on the hot shore of Guiana, with gold and promotions in his fancy, with suicide, death, and despair in clear sight of him; toiling till his brain is broken (his own expression) and his heart is broken: here stands he at last; after many travails it has come to this with him.”
Sir Walter Raleigh died a martyr to the cause of a Greater Britain; his life thrown as a sop to the Spanish Cerberus by the most debased and ignoble of our kings. Raleigh’s faults were undoubtedly many, but his great qualities, his superb courage, his devotion to his country, his faith in the future greatness of England, were infinitely greater, and outweighed a thousand times all his failings. The onus of the guilt of his death—a judicial murder if ever there was one—must be borne by the base councillors who truckled to the King, and by the King himself who, Judas-like, sold Raleigh to Spain.
Some less interesting State prisoners occupied the Tower towards the close of the inglorious reign of James Stuart. Among these were Gervase, Lord Clifford, imprisoned for threatening the Lord Keeper in 1617. Clifford committed suicide in the Tower in the following year. About the same time, Sir Thomas Luke, one of the Secretaries of State, and his daughter, were imprisoned in the Tower on the charge of insulting Lady Exeter, whom they accused of incest and witchcraft, but, whether the charges were true or false, they were soon liberated. James’s court seems to have combined all the vices, for Lord and Lady Suffolk were also prisoners in the fortress about the same time, accused of bribery and corruption.
To the Tower also were sent the two great lawyers—Lord Chancellor Bacon, and Sir Edward Coke—the former for having received bribes, the latter for the part he had taken in supporting the privileges of the House of Commons. Here, also, two noble lords, the Earl of Arundel and Lord Spencer, were in durance, owing to a quarrel between them in the House of Lords, when Arundel had insulted Spencer by telling him that at no distant time back his ancestors had been engaged in tending sheep, to which Lord Spencer responded: “When my ancestors were keeping sheep, yours were plotting treason.” The dispute seems scarcely of sufficient importance to have sent both disputants to the Tower.
In 1622 the Earl of Oxford and Robert Philip, together with some members of Parliament, were sent to the fortress for objecting too publicly to the suggested marriage of the Prince of Wales, afterwards Charles I., with a Spanish princess; and the Earl of Bristol was also in the Tower for matters connected with the same projected alliance. It was not always safe to have an opinion of one’s own under James the First.
The last State prisoner of mark to be sent to the Tower in James’s reign was Lionel Cranfield, Earl of Middlesex, who had been found guilty of receiving bribes in his official capacity as Lord High Treasurer.