For a moment it seemed as if Ralegh had been superfluously mistrustful of English justice. A mass of tremendous charges had been rolled together. To Waad's hopeful fancy they appeared, he told Cecil, to have gravely implicated Ralegh, as well as Cobham. Investigated with a view to a positive arraignment, the pile broke up and evaporated. Watson's and Brooke's stories proved as unsubstantial as the astonishing romance adopted by grave de Thou. According to the French annalist, Ralegh, in disgust at the loss of his Captaincy of the Guard, had joined in a plot to kill the King, started by a band of Englishmen incensed at the Scottish irruption. He had accepted the post of assassin. But his sister's report of his agitation, of which she misapprehended the cause, induced inquiry. Improbability of
Ralegh's Complicity. Arrested, he confessed the whole to James, and bought his life by the betrayal of Grey, Cobham, and Markham. Silly as is that tale, there was almost a more obvious dearth of motive for the prominent part assigned to him in the most circumstantial of the extorted depositions. Evidence was given that the other conspirators had agreed upon the apportionment among themselves of the high offices of State. No one testified that any had been reserved for the most competent, the most distinguished, and the most ambitious of the company. Ralegh's sole reward for the alleged terrible risk was, by Waad's report of Brooke's and Watson's admissions, to be some such sum of eight or ten thousand crowns as was to be offered to Cecil and Northumberland, who incurred no danger.
Soon it must have become apparent that success in a prosecution of Ralegh depended solely on the plausibility and consistency of Cobham's accusations. They were peculiarly deficient in those qualities. Ralegh has recorded that Cobham's remorse for the evil wrought by his charges of July 20 commenced within the building in which they had been uttered. At any rate, on the 29th he retracted them more or less completely. By a letter of that date, addressed to the Lords of the Council, he admitted he had pressed Arenberg for four or five hundred thousand crowns, though nothing was decided about their application. He had expected, he said, a general discontentment, and the money was to be expended as occasion offered. At his oral examination on the same day he is stated by Cecil, in a letter to Parry, to have 'cleared Sir Walter in most things, and to have taken all the burden to himself.' It may be inferred from an allusion by him in a letter that some of the Lords who had been interrogating him allowed their indignation at his apparent calumnies against Ralegh to be perceptible. The result was a growing impression that the proceedings against Ralegh would have to be abandoned. Lord Grey, an austere Protestant, and Sir Griffin Markham, a Catholic, already, it was rumoured, had denied that he had been a conspirator. They had affirmed they would have given up their project upon any suspicion that he was mixed up with it. Now Cobham also was become a broken reed. M. de Beaumont wrote to King Henry that the Lords found it difficult in consequence to sustain Ralegh's prosecution. 'God forgive Sir Walter Ralegh,' Cobham had exclaimed in August to Sir John Peyton's son; 'he hath accused me; but I cannot accuse him.'
Cobham's Remorse.
Cobham's awakened sense of justice prompted him in the autumn to a step which might have been decisive. Peyton was no longer at the Tower. Ralegh's guilt had so far been presumed, as early as August, that his patent as Governor of Jersey had been declared forfeited through his grievous treason intended against the King. The office was conferred on Peyton, in some measure, perhaps, that he might be removed from the charge of Ralegh. The current belief was that his preferment was disgrace for connivance at communications between him and Cobham. To his successor, Sir George Harvey, Cobham wrote on October 24, desiring the grant of facilities to him to address the Council on Ralegh's behalf: 'Mr. Lieutenant, If that I may write unto the Lords I would, touching Sir Walter Ralegh; besides my letter to my Lord Cecil; God is my witness, it doth touch my conscience. As you shall send me word so I will do, that my letter may be ready against your son's going. I would very fain have the words that the Lords used of my barbarousness in accusing him falsely.' Harvey received this brief and not very coherent, but significant, epistle, and locked the request up in his own bosom. He did worse. From the language of his tardy explanation to Cecil it is plain that he effectually discouraged Cobham's disposition to be Ralegh's apologist to the Council. He underrated, however, Ralegh's energy and dexterity. Cecil imagined that Ralegh had solicited from Cobham the original retractation. Messages, he suspected, had passed between the two in which Ralegh had 'expostulated Cobham's unkind using of him.' The correctness of his conjecture for the past is unknown. It was true of the present. Ralegh managed to have a letter, inclosed in, or fastened to, an apple, thrown, in November, four nights before they came to Winchester, into Cobham's window in Wardrobe tower. At the time the Lieutenant was at supper. In it he entreated Cobham to do him justice by his answer, and to signify to him that he had wronged him in his accusation. He added: 'Do not, as my Lord of Essex did, take heed of a preacher. By his persuasion he confessed, and so made himself guilty.' Cobham, though later he forgot the fact, appears to have duly replied in a letter, which was pushed under Ralegh's door. In it he admitted the wrong he had done to Ralegh. The language was not distinct enough. It was 'not to my contenting,' as afterwards said Ralegh, who wrote again. He did not ask for another written confession. Written Retractations. Instead, he besought Cobham to declare his innocence when he should himself be arraigned. Thereupon Cobham sent a letter described by Ralegh as 'very good,' a complete and solemn justification, of which Howell in his State Trials adopts the following transcript: 'Seeing myself so near my end, for the discharge of my own conscience, and freeing myself from your blood, which else will cry vengeance against me, I protest upon my salvation I never practised with Spain by your procurement. God so comfort me in this my affliction, as you are a true subject for anything that I know. I will say, as Daniel, Purus sum a sanguine hujus. So God have mercy upon my soul as I know no treason by you.' According to another version, differing in language, not in tenor, the letter ran: 'To free myself from the cry of blood, I protest upon my soul, and before God and His angels, I never had conference with you in any treason, nor was ever moved by you to the things I heretofore accused you of; and, for anything I know, you are as innocent and as clear from any treasons against the King as is any subject living. And God so deal with me and have mercy upon my soul, as this is true.' Ralegh seems to have kept to himself the knowledge of the existence of this letter for the present, as Sir George Harvey, with less excuse, concealed the fact of Cobham's prayer to himself.
The correspondence was arranged partly through Edward Cottrell, a Tower servant who waited upon Ralegh. Partly it was through the Lieutenant's son, George, whom Ralegh had won over, as he had won over Sir John Peyton's son, John. It was on account of the discovery by the Council, through Ralegh's production at the trial of Cobham's letter to him, of George Harvey's mediation, and of the youth's imprisonment for it, that on December 17, Sir George
Harvey's Disclosure. several weeks after the end of the trial, at which it might have benefited Ralegh, the Lieutenant gave Cecil the letter of October 24. In the confidence that the infraction of discipline by his son, as well as by his two prisoners, would be extenuated by his own confession of an excess of official zeal, he acknowledged his suppression of the October letter. Incidentally he testified to the sincerity of Cobham's remorse. Cobham's 'great desire to justify Sir Walter,' he admitted to Cecil, 'having been by me then stopped, he diverted it, as I conceive, and it is very likely, unto Sir Walter himself.' In this penitent mood Cobham had confessed his misdeeds to others besides. He is reported to have told the vicar of Cobham parish that Ralegh 'had done him no hurt, but he had done Ralegh a great deal.' At last Ralegh might think that Cobham had ceased to be his accuser. Prepared as he was for his companion's 'fashion of uttering things easily,' he could scarcely have anticipated the layers of retractation still latent in that voluminous repository.
His trust in the return of Cobham's veracity would not blind him to the peril he continued to incur from the 'cruelty' of the law of treason; from its willingness, in jealousy for the sovereign's safety, to have an innocent scapegoat rather than no example. He knew that the people took his guilt for granted, and that a jury would reflect popular opinion. He could look for no real help in any quarter. To honest, but unimaginative, politicians, he was an enigma and a trouble with his ideas. They simply wished him out of the way. He was sure of the hatred of the new men, 'very honourable men,' like the Tissaphernes of his History, 'if honour may be valued by greatness and place in Court.' He could calculate on no Animosity of
the Howards. benevolence from the old courtiers. His claims of equality had always been an offence to the ancient nobility, which held itself entitled to precedence in glory as in its rewards. One from whom better things were to have been expected, the Lord Admiral, though he did not actively join in the prosecution, had his personal reasons for rejoicing in the downfall of a sharp censor of his naval administration. Between him and the Howard interest in general there had been frequent feuds, and they were opposed on many important questions. Lord Henry was not the only Howard who bore him ill-will, though the rest were not equally malignant.
Henry Howard's confederate in the Scottish intrigues, Robert Cecil, had no family grievances to avenge. If he once feared Ralegh's rivalry, he could fear it no more. It is very difficult now, as before, to believe that he entertained sentiments of positive animosity or vindictiveness against Ralegh. Canon Kingsley's description of him as one of the most 'accomplished villains in history,' as the archplotter, who had managed the whole conspiracy against Ralegh, though Ralegh knew nothing of it till after the trial, is extravagant. Even Hallam's reference to 'the hostility of Cecil, so insidious and implacable,' seems exaggerated and unjust. The Minister was conscious of no malice. He took no pleasure in the present prosecution. But moral cowardice and incapacity to dispense with power now, as formerly, explain an attitude, which, it must be admitted, is hardly to be distinguished from that of an inveterate enemy. He could not afford, having, after a struggle, clambered on board the new ship of State, to identify himself with wrecked comrades known to be distasteful to his present master. It was convenient for him to assume an air of reluctant conviction that his friend was guilty, and that the only question was whether sufficient evidence could be collected to prove it judicially. On October 3 he wrote that Cobham's original accusation was 'so well fortified with other demonstrative circumstances, and the retractation so blemished by the discovery of the intelligence which they had, as few men can conceive Sir Walter Ralegh's denial comes from a clear heart.' He who knew well the habits of judges and juries in trials for treason, affected to think Ralegh could desire no fairer opportunity. 'Always,' he wrote in October to Winwood, 'he shall be left to the law, which is the right all Cecil's Coldness. men are born to.' His elaborate statements of the charges and proceedings to Parry, which were intended for circulation through Europe, convey the same impression of willingness to warp facts under cover of a cold concern for nothing but the truth. He did not deceive foreigners. M. de Beaumont, whose diplomatic interest it was to abet a prosecution which implicated Spain, spoke of him, in language already quoted, as undertaking the affair with so much warmth that it was said he acted more from interest and passion than for the good of the kingdom. He did not deceive unbiassed Englishmen. Harington wrote in 1603: 'I doubt the dice not fairly thrown, if Ralegh's life be the losing stake.' He has not deceived posterity.
To the new Court, its head, and his Scotch favourites, Ralegh necessarily was an object of aversion. He was not the less odious that he was incomprehensible. For years he and his designs had been subjects of suspicion and dread at Holyrood. Now, when he was no longer directly dangerous, he was an obstruction and a perplexity. In spite of the current charges against him, he represented hatred of Spain, with which James was eager to be on terms of amity. He represented the spirit of national unrest and adventurousness, which James abhorred. The obstinate calumny of his scepticism served as a pretext to the King's conscience for the unworthier instinct of personal dislike. His wisdom, learning, and wit were no passports to the favour of the one privileged Solomon of these isles.
He understood all he had to face. Vehemently as he fretted and complained, he was equal to the ordeal. He may Compensations for
Ralegh's Sufferings. be said to have been happy in undergoing it. Unless for it, neither his contemporaries nor posterity could have fully comprehended the scope and strength of his character. Unversed in law, he was more than a match for the incomparable legal learning of Coke and for his docile bench of judges. His trial, which is the opprobrium of forensic and judicial annals, makes a bright page in national history for the unique personality it reveals, with all its wealth of subtlety, courage, and versatility. Figures of purer metal have often stood in the dock, with as small chance of safety. Ralegh was a compound of gold, silver, iron, and clay. The trial, and all its circumstances, brought into conspicuous relief the diversity which is no less the wonder of the character than it is of the career. The Ralegh who has stamped himself upon English history, who has fascinated English imagination, is not so much the favourite of Elizabeth, the soldier and sailor; it is the baited prey of Coke and Popham, the browbeaten convict of Winchester, the attainted prisoner of the Tower. Against the Court of James and its obsequious lawyers he was struggling for bare life, for no sublime cause, for no impersonal ideal. Yet so high was his spirit, and his bearing so undaunted, that he has ever appeared to subsequent generations a martyr on the altar of English liberties.