In his final imprisonment Lady Raleigh was not allowed a share. When she caught his youthful fancy it was as Elizabeth Throckmorton, maid of honor to Queen Elizabeth.
"Sweet Bess" was a favorite there among ladies of gentle blood. The flatterers of the dazzling court fluttered round the lovely young girl, conspicuous for beauty and grace; slender, fair, golden-haired. Her sighs were only for the sea-captain who expected to crown her with glory won by his sword, and riches, the spoil to be fought for in many lands. She was his loyal wife to the end, always pleading for pardon, defiant before King and court, where she appeared daily in her husband's cause, "holding little Wat by the hand." When her petition was refused, she was not afraid to call down curses on the head of the tyrant, who heeded not her wrath or her grief.
The water-way from the Thames is a dark passage under whose arch a pale procession of ghosts of the murdered may easily be fancied as coming up out of the past. Beneath it went Raleigh from prison to hear his sentence in Westminster Hall; from the King's Bench he was sent to Westminster Abbey. Crowds thronged to watch him pass, and from the carriage window he noticed his old friend Burton, and invited him to Palace Yard next day to see him die.
THE TRAITORS' GATE.
The warrant came on a dark October morning, 1618. Raleigh was in bed, but on hearing the Lieutenant's voice he sprang lightly to his feet, threw on hose and doublet, and left his room. At the door he met Peter, his barber, coming in. "Sir," said Peter, "we have not curled your head this morning." His master answered with a smile, "Let them comb it that shall have it." The faithful servant followed him to the gate insisting on the service. "Peter," he asked, "canst thou give me any plaster to set on a man's head when it is off?"
John Eliot wrote: "There is no parallel to the fortitude of Raleigh. Nothing petty disturbed his calm soul in ending a career of constant toil for the greatness and honor of his country. The hero who created a New England for Old England was fearless of death, the most resolute and confident of men, yet with reverence and conscience."
The executioner was deeply moved by the matchless spirit of the martyr. He knelt and prayed forgiveness—the usual formula at the block or scaffold. Raleigh placed both hands on the man's shoulders and said, "I forgive you with all my heart. Now show me the axe." He carefully touched the edge of the blade to feel its keenness, and kissed it. "This gives me no fear. It is a sharp and fair medicine to cure all my ills." Being asked which way he would lie on the block, he answered, "It is no matter which way the head lies, so that the heart be right." Presently he added, "When I stretch forth my hands, despatch me." There were omissions in his last speech, but we may be sure they were noble utterances. He prayed in an unbroken voice, and begged his friends to stand near him on the scaffold so they might better hear his dying words. Which being done, he concluded, "And now I entreat you all to join with me in prayer that the great God of Heaven, whom I have grievously offended—being a man full of vanity, and having lived a sinful life in all sinful callings, having been a soldier, a captain, and a sea-captain, and a courtier, which are all places of wickedness and vice—that God, I say, would forgive me and cast away my sins from me, and that He would receive me into everlasting life. So I take my leave of you making my peace with God.
"Give me heartily of your prayers," he repeated, turning right and left. The headsman cast down his own cloak that the victim might kneel on it after laying off his velvet robe. An act which reminds us of the happy chance for like courtesy that made Raleigh's fortune when he was a boyish adventurer in the train of Sussex; a beautiful youth watching the state barge of Queen Elizabeth.
