In 1607 the Council instituted an inquiry into the manner in which Harvey had played the gaoler. Ralegh was brought before it, and interrogated. So was Edward or William Cottrell, described as 'alias Captain Sampson.' He was found to have been living for some time past at Sherborne, perhaps under his alias, on a pension granted him by Ralegh. In terror, or through an offer of better terms, he now confessed his part in the bygone transmission of messages between Ralegh, Keymis, and Cobham. Again, in 1610 some new and shadowy charges were brought against Ralegh. The Council sat Lady
Ralegh's Expulsion. at the Tower. On Cecil was thrown the task, we will hope, the very ungrateful task, of addressing to him a solemn rebuke. He was subjected to three months of close imprisonment, and his wife was obliged to leave the Tower. An order was served upon her: 'The Lady Raleighe must understand his Majesty's express will and commandment that she resort to her house on Tower Hill or ellswhere with her women and sonnes to remayne there, and not to lodge hereafter within the Tower.' Ralegh prayed earnestly that she might 'again be made a prisoner with me, as she hath been for six years last past, in this unsavoury place—a miserable fate for her, and yet great to me, who in this wretched estate can hope for no other thing than peaceable sorrow.' The offence for which he was censured and immured was never revealed to the public; for the excellent reason, it may be presumed, that to the public it would have appeared frivolous. His true criminality now and throughout is to be gathered from the testimony of Henry Howard in the year following. In July, 1611, fresh rumours of offences committed by him were spread. Howard, now Earl of Northampton and Lord Chamberlain, and another Privy Councillor, were commissioned to inquire. To Howard's taste, his spirit was not at all sufficiently subdued. In a letter to his notable accomplice and pupil, and the future husband of his great niece, Carr, Lord Rochester and Privy Seal, Howard expressed his spite: 'We had a bout with Sir Walter Ralegh, in whom we find no change, but the same boldness, pride, and passion, that heretofore hath wrought more violently, but never expended itself in a stronger passion. Hereof his Majesty shall hear when the Lords come to him. The lawless liberty of the Tower, so long cockered and fostered with hopes exorbitant, hath bred suitable desires and affections. And yet you may assure his Majesty that by this publication he won little ground.' He gained so little that, as he wrote in this year, he was, after eight years of imprisonment, as straitly locked up as he had been the first day.
When his imprisonment was most severe, it was moderate for his guilt if he were guilty. In its times of least oppressiveness it was an enormity, if he were innocent. To himself, who knew that he was guiltless of the treason imputed to him, and was convinced that his gaolers knew it, his imprisonment under any conditions appeared a monstrous iniquity. He could never desist from protesting against the wrong. It was the grievance as much of his enemies that they had him fast in prison, and could neither Search for
Evidence of Guilt. browbeat him into acknowledging the justice of his doom, nor prove its justice. They had obtained his condemnation rather than his conviction. They were incited by his appeals to redoubled efforts to establish his original guilt. Some, the King for example, may, from rooted prejudice, have believed him guilty. No less than his most malignant and unscrupulous foes they resented furiously their inability to demonstrate it. They regarded it as evidence merely of his abominable craft. The ordinary and extraordinary laxity of his confinement indicated their doubt of his fair liability to any. The intervals of rigour were meant to notify to the sceptical that the Government was at last on the track of evidence which would confirm the equity of everything from the beginning done against him. Constantly he had to stand on his defence against attempts to palliate the effrontery of the Winchester judgment by experimental accusations that he had been tampering with new conspiracies. For ten years the contest proceeded between him and the Court on that basis. He asseverated the right of an innocent man to freedom, and the Court went on searching for proofs of its right to put him into captivity. His adversaries might have been content with the degree of ruin they had wrought if he would have acquiesced in his fall. He insisted on regarding himself as living, though he could not deny that he was civilly dead. He looked forth from his prison on the world as a stage on which he still played a part, and might once more lead. He would keep digging up the buried past. He assumed the offensive against the majesty of the law. He was not patient of injustice because a court of justice was its source. He had the audacity to speak, think, and write, as if he were entitled to canvass affairs of State. From his gaol he became audible in the recesses of the Palace. He troubled the self-complacency of its master by teaching his consort and his heir-apparent to question his infallible wisdom.
Queen
Anne's Favour.
Queen Anne perhaps scarcely needed the lesson. She was fond of power, and 'bold and enterprising,' records Sully. Her husband appears to have stood in some awe of her criticisms. She commonly took a line of her own. Henry Howard, whose policy she had opposed before the death of Elizabeth, insinuated that she was a foolish, garrulous, and intriguing woman. She may not have been very wise, but she had generous emotions and courage. She disliked the Spanish connexion, of which she was at one period esteemed a supporter. She admired Ralegh's great qualities and great deeds. His faithful cousin George Carew, her Vice-Chamberlain, would remind her of them. Lady Ralegh, whom she is said on her first arrival from Scotland to have repulsed, had gained her ear and sympathy. She had, from the time of Ralegh's trial, tried to help him. By a medicine of his invention she believed herself subsequently to have been cured of a violent malady. In gratitude she is reported, or fabled, to have gained the King's consent to a re-examination of Cobham's charge against him. Reference has already been made to the story, as told by Sir Anthony Welldon. Cecil, Lenox, Worcester, Suffolk, Carew, and Julius Cæsar are said to have been deputed to ask Cobham if he had not really accused Ralegh at Winchester. Cobham answered: 'Never, nor could I; but that villain Waad got me by a trick to write my name upon a piece of white paper, which I, thinking nothing, did; Cobham's Winchester
Letter again. so that, if any charge came under my hand, it was forged by Waad by writing something above my hand.' Then returning to the King the rest chose Cecil for spokesman. He said: 'Sir, my Lord Cobham hath made good all that ever he wrote or said.' Altogether it is a most improbable tale. Waad disliked Ralegh; there is no ground for belief that he would have perpetrated a cold-blooded fraud to gratify his ill-will. He was arrogant and tyrannical, not criminal, as the circumstances of the loss of his Lieutenancy show. The presence of honest and friendly Carew as one of the royal commissioners, renders the account as it stands all but incredible. He certainly would not have been a party to a lying and wicked prevarication. Cecil would not, nor Sir Julius Cæsar. But it is one of the many Ralegh myths, with a possible particle of truth in it, which cannot be sifted out of the mass of fiction.
Ralegh built more hopes on the favour of the Prince of Wales than on that of his mother. Prince Henry was of a high spirit. He would have rejoiced in war at which his father shuddered. Through his mother he made Ralegh's acquaintance in his boyhood, and for him the prisoner was a hero. Everybody has heard his saying: 'Who but my father would keep such a bird in a cage!' Ralegh eagerly responded to the advances of one through whom he might become not only free but powerful. The Prince delighted in the company of Ralegh, who states that he had intended the History of the World for him; and he is said to have looked over the manuscript. He consulted Ralegh in 1611 on the proposal by Duke Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy for a double intermarriage. The Elector Palatine was negotiating for the hand of Princess Elizabeth. Spain and the whole Catholic party in Europe dreaded Ralegh on a
Piedmontese Alliance. an alliance of the English royal family with German Protestantism. They tried to engage James to affiance Elizabeth to the Duke of Savoy's son, the Prince of Piedmont, and Henry to the Duke's daughter. Ralegh combated the scheme in two Discourses, printed long after his death. The first mainly discussed the plan of Elizabeth's marriage to 'a prince jesuited,' her removal far from her country to a family circle of another faith, a dependent now and ever, as Ralegh not prophetically declared, 'either upon France or upon Spain.' He foreboded how, in default of male heirs in England, 'a Savoyan, of Spanish race, might become King of England.' 'I do prize,' he declared, 'the alliance of the Palatine of the Rhine, and of the House of Nassau, more than I do the alliance of the Duke of Savoy.' In the second Discourse Ralegh argued against the Prince's alliance with Dukes of the blood of Spain, and servants of 'Spain, which to England is irreconcilable.' Such an alliance would increase the jealousy of the Netherlands, a country which was for England a necessary friend. He lamented the present weakness of England, 'through the detested covetousness of some great ones of ours. Whereas, in my time, I have known one of her Majesty's ships command forty Hollanders to strike sail, they will now take us one to one, and not give us a good morrow. They have our own ordnance to break our own bones withal.' Besides, the Prince was only about eighteen. So long as he continued unmarried all the eyes of Christendom were upon him. 'Let him for a while not entangle himself.' When he desired to wed he would find, Ralegh suggested, a French family alliance more honourable and advantageous than a Spanish.
His presumption in meddling with questions of State, and in answering them in a manner opposite to the King's inclination, may have had something to do with the unexplained chastisement inflicted upon him in the summer of 1611. Whatever their cause, rebukes and curtailments of privileges neither silenced him nor lost him the goodwill of his friend. The Prince not long after sought his assistance in the building of a model ship. The vessel was christened 'The Prince,' and it proved an excellent sailer. The prisoner of the Tower wrote about it as if he smelt the sea-breezes. Twenty-nine years earlier he had proved himself a master in the art of ship-building. In his time, as he has recorded, 'the shape of English ships had been greatly bettered.' Much of the credit of the reform is his due. Pett, the best naval architect in the kingdom, in whose family the post of Master Shipwright became almost hereditary, is reported to have been glad to gather hints from him. His communications with the Prince about the ship drew his thoughts back to maritime questions. Beside a letter, admirably terse and critical, to Prince Henry, he composed a treatise minutely practical, called a Discourse of the Invention of Ships, and also Observations concerning the Royal Navy and Sea Service. Both probably were intended for parts of an elaborate work on The Art of War by Sea, which the death of the Prince hindered him from completing. He alludes in the Observations to a Discourse of a Maritimal Voyage, as a previous product of his pen, which, unless it be the Discourse of the Invention of Ships, has disappeared. Had The Art of War by Sea come into systematic being, that might have stood as another of its chapters.
Prince Henry's death was the most cruel blow inflicted on him since his Robert Cecil's Death. trial. The disappointment was the severer that it had been preceded six months earlier by another death on which his friends, and perhaps himself, founded expectations. On May 16, 1612, died Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, and Lord High Treasurer. He was hastening to Court, to countermine his underminers, from Bath, where he had been taking the waters. At the inn at Marlborough he found himself grievously ill. He was removed, it has been variously stated, either to the parsonage, or to the house of a Mr. Daniel, which had formerly been St. Margaret's Priory. There he expired.
A born statesman, Cecil had been condemned by a passion for affairs, and incapacity for dispensing with office, to serve a great sovereign in little ways, and to emphasize or dissemble a feeble sovereign's feebleness. As a friend he could relieve adversity so far as not to cancel it; but he could not pardon in a companion prosperity which threatened rivalry, or risk his share of sunshine by screening a victim of popular and regal odium. By no class was he profoundly lamented. Veteran and well-endowed officials seldom are. Ralegh, it is to be feared, was never among the mourners. He had received benefits from Cecil, and acknowledged them thankfully. He could not forgive an acquaintance, who must have known his innocence of treason, for letting his life be blasted by the charge. He could not understand that the statesman and potent courtier, whose fortunes at no time were visibly clouded, should be unable, or honestly think himself unable, to lift a persecuted comrade out of the mire. If Cecil did Dumb Enmity. not come effectually to the rescue, he believed, at any rate at last, that it was because he would not. Cecil read his mind, had no faith in his gratitude, and accounted the duties of a dead friendship discharged by attempts to mitigate rather than to reverse his doom. Harassed by business and the toil of keeping his slippery footing, he would feel chiefly a dull irritation at the captive, whether guiltless or guilty, for the obstinacy of his dispute with accomplished facts. He ought, the Minister, like his avowed enemies, would think, to have acquiesced, and been still. Thus the two went on, mutually scornful and mistrustful, exchanging soft phrases which neither meant. The true condition of their hearts was not hidden from bystanders. They never confessed it one to the other, or frankly to themselves.
Historical scavengers, Aubrey and Osborn, have attributed to Ralegh's pen a coarse and truculent epigram on the dead statesman under the name of Hobbinol. John Shirley, Ralegh's honest but credulous biographer, in 1677, also alleges him to have been the author, 'on very good grounds,' by which probably is signified nothing better than common gossip. Aubrey vouches in support statements made to him by Mr. Justice Malet, who is not known to have had any especial means of procuring information. Mr. Edwards believes it to be genuine. I cannot, though King James's alleged expression of a 'hope that the writer of those lines might die before him,' of which he was so careful to secure the fulfilment, has to be discarded with it. The evidence for Ralegh's authorship is exceedingly weak; and the rude verses are marked by none of his elegance of style. But the attempt to father so wretched a foundling upon him is proof the more of the popular perception of the dissembled estrangement. In a less undignified shape than a scurrilous epitaph on a dishonest shepherd, the bitterness Ralegh felt was sometimes openly exhibited. It is not discernible merely in collective insinuations against men whose ascendency in the royal council had been his 'infelicity.' When he had an opportunity it found a vent in a formal written accusation against the dead Lord Treasurer of having violated his duty to the King and the Exchequer by diverting to his own use the mass of Cobham's forfeited wealth. Gradually, brooding over his wrongs, he had accustomed himself to think Cecil not only the egotist he was, but an unscrupulous plotter, who wished to keep under lock and key a man able to unmask his rapacity. The Minister's death would appear to him to have cleared the board for new and happier combinations in his favour.
Prince Henry.