His projects, prayers, and expeditions came to nothing at the time. They were not without their effect. They kept the thought of Guiana before the nation. As James in his Declaration afterwards asserted, the confident asseveration of that which every man was willing to believe, enchanted the world. To a certain degree it influenced the King and Court. James was not Other Voyagers
to Guiana. of a nature to undervalue dignities and opportunities of wealth. While he imprisoned the explorer, he had asserted the title to Guiana acquired through him. He commissioned Captain Charles Leigh in 1604, and, after his death, Captain Robert Harcourt in 1608, to take possession of all from the Amazon to the Dessequebe, with the neighbouring islands. The result was a settlement on the Oyapoco. After three years the colonists abandoned the enterprise, and returned to England. Harcourt experienced the effect of the local renown of Ralegh, and of the success of his efforts to keep alive the recollection of the fealty once offered through him to England. Leonard the Indian, who had resided in England three or four years with Ralegh, obtained for Harcourt supplies he sorely needed. The help was rendered in the belief, says Ralegh, that Harcourt was a follower of his. The natives visited Harcourt's vessel dressed in European clothes, which Ralegh had sent them the year before. They were disappointed at not finding him in command. Leigh's and Harcourt's expeditions confirmed his assertions of the immense possibilities of the country. Harcourt expressly stated his 'satisfaction that there be rich mines in the country.' The actual fruits were so meagre as to demonstrate that supreme capacity was needed to extract its treasures.
Ralegh's adversaries, including James, were as persuaded as his friends of his unbounded ability. They hated him for it. They were covetous of gold and territory. They thought he might justify his boasts, and enrich them as well as himself, if he were let go. Failure, on the other hand, would, they calculated, blast his power to hurt. At all events, in the existing popular mood, it was easier to despatch him at his own expense for their contingent gain to America, than to confine him in the Tower. Their personal relations with Spain supplied rather a motive for his liberation for such a purpose than a fatal objection. James longed for a family league with the Escurial. Spain was reserved and proud, and responded coldly to his advances. He did not care what harm came to Ralegh, upon whom, as Mr. Gardiner says, he knew the Spaniards would fall wherever they found him. Meanwhile he hoped to warm his coy allies by letting loose upon the Spanish Main their and his inveterate aversion. Ralegh was a convenient firebrand to show Spain the harm England, if an enemy, could do. He was a scapegoat to immolate in proof of all England was prepared to sacrifice in return for Spain's love. Suddenly, for many mixed reasons, it was decided to free him. He was to be licensed to discover gold mines and affirm the English title to the Orinoko.
Ralegh's Opportunity.
He himself was at the moment in a strong position for demanding liberty and a commission. The arms and hands which had, according to his expression, abused their Sovereign's borrowed authority to fling stones at him, were now, as with doubtful discretion as well as taste he reminded James in the Prerogative of Parliaments, 'most of them already rotten.' Robert Cecil, though nowise to be ranked with Howard as demoniacally malevolent, had evinced no disposition to release him. Certainly he would, if only for Ralegh's own sake, not have abetted his wild quest of Guiana gold. But he too was dead. Robert Carr was worse than dead. The terrible exposure of his and his wife's crimes had made James and his counsellors peculiarly sensitive to public opinion. Hallam thinks it 'more likely than anything else that James had listened to some criminal suggestion from Overbury and Somerset, and that, through apprehension of this being disclosed, he had pusillanimously acquiesced in the scheme of Overbury's murder.' That is Hallam's deliberate view of the King who claimed the right to sit in judgment on Ralegh. The country entertained a similar suspicion. It might have been dangerous to hold a national hero confined under the same prison roof with the principals in the crime. Moreover, a sympathetic politician, Sir Ralph Winwood, was Secretary of State. Personally, Winwood was in high favour with the King, notwithstanding discrepancies in their estimates of the value of a Spanish alliance. Of that he and Archbishop Abbot both were vehement opponents. They thought Ralegh a likely instrument for bringing about a collision with Spain in the most advantageous circumstances. For the moment Winwood's admiration of Ralegh and dislike of Spain, and the King's contrary feelings, together with his general disposition to shift responsibility, worked to the same end. George Villiers was inclined to befriend Ralegh out of opposition to the Howards, who had been Carr's supporters. Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, had died in June, 1614. The King Christian. credit of Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk, the Lord Treasurer, was waning. The old Lord High Admiral Nottingham's naval administration had been unsuccessful and wasteful. King Christian, the Queen's brother, when recently in England, had warmly interceded for Ralegh, whom, if Sir Thomas Wilson's reports of subsequent conversations with Ralegh are to be believed, he would gladly have borrowed of James for the Danish navy. Ralegh believed the King had, on a previous visit, asked for his liberty. That is not certain. Carleton, writing to Chamberlain in August, 1606, stated that Christian had declined the office. In any case he exerted himself on his second visit. The fact must be set off for him against another, that he was a sot, and, as Harington shows, set an evil example of drunken bouts to the imitative English Court. Ralegh wrote to Winwood in January, 1616, on the wealth of Guiana: 'Those that had the greatest trust were resolved not to believe it; not because they doubted the truth, but because they doubted my disposition towards themselves, had I recovered his Majesty's favour and good opinion. Our late worthy Prince of Wales was extreme curious in searching out the nature of my offences; the Queen's Majesty hath informed herself from the beginning; the King of Denmark, at both times his being here, was thoroughly satisfied of my innocency. The wife, the brother, and the son of a King do not use to sue for mere suspect. It is true, sir, that his Majesty hath sometimes answered that his Council knew me better than he did; meaning some two or three of them; and it was indeed my infelicity. For had his Majesty known me, I had not been where I now am; or had I known his Majesty, they had never been so long where they now are. His Majesty's misknowing of them hath been the ruin of a goodly part of his estate; but they are all of them—some living, and some dying—come to his Majesty's knowledge. But to die for the King, and not by the King, is all the ambition I have in the world.'
Gifts of Money.
No further explanation of Ralegh's deliverance might seem to be required. Without the co-operation of these various coincidences which aided his claim to justice, and weakened the resistance to it, he must indeed have remained in prison. But the popular belief was that the immediate agency to which he owed his freedom was neither equity nor policy; it was the prisoner's own money. A half-brother of George Villiers, Sir Edward Villiers, and Sir William St. John, a kinsman of Sir Edward's wife, are alleged in the Observations on Sanderson's History of King James, to have procured Sir Walter Ralegh's liberty, and to have had £1500 for their labour. The story has been denied. Unfortunately it is by no means intrinsically improbable. It agrees with Ralegh's confident allusion at his death to the ease with which he could have bought his peace, even after his return from Guiana, if he had been rich enough. There is a miserable consistency in his imprisonment on a false charge of treason, and his release through a bribe to relatives of the King's favourite. He wrote to George Villiers: 'You have by your mediation put me again into the world.' The service cannot be questioned, but its motive.
On March 19, 1616, a royal warrant required the Lieutenant of the Tower to 'permit Sir Walter Ralegh to go abroad to make preparations for his Ralegh's
Fellow Prisoners. voyage.' He then partially or entirely quitted the prison which had been his home for twelve years. Its population had undergone some recent and notable changes and exchanges. Sir George More was Lieutenant. Lord Grey of Wilton had died in July, 1614. To the end he had hoped to be, through the influence of Henry Howard and Carr, set free to serve Protestant Holland against Catholic Spain. More pitiable Arabella Stuart, or Seymour, had entered in 1611. She survived till September, 1615, ever weak, but guilty of no crime except her contingent birthright. Ralegh left in prison Northumberland. This splendid patron of letters, for the dozen years he inhabited the Tower, has been said to have invested it with the atmosphere of an university. He peopled it with students and inquirers, such as Thomas Allen, William Warner, Robert Hues, Torporley, and Hariot. Of an intelligence and capacity which won Sully's admiration, but wayward, scornful, and, for his own interests very little of the wizard he was reputed to be, he had been consigned thither for no guilt, unless, like Ralegh, that he may have consorted with the guilty. An injustice was not wholly fruitless which bestowed on Ralegh the comfort of a companionship of learning. Death, eight years before his release, had freed the last titular chieftain of the Fitzgeralds, whose spoils he had shared; but he left there an older antagonist, Florence McCarthy, the 'infinitely adored' Munster man, who in a neighbouring cell emulated his historical researches. He left Cobham. A rumour current at the commencement of 1616 that Cobham, like him, was to be freed, was not confirmed till 1617, and then only partially. In that year Cobham was allowed to visit Bath for the waters. He was on his way back to the Tower in September, when, at Odiham, he had a paralytic stroke. He was conveyed to London at the beginning of October, and lingered Death of Cobham. between life and death till January 12, 1619. Probably he expired in the Tower, though Francis Osborn, who had been master of the horse to Lord Pembroke, was told by Pembroke that he died half starved in the hovel of an old laundress in the Minories. The statement of his poverty is in conflict with the fact mentioned by Ralegh in the Prerogative of Parliaments, that the Crown allowed him £500 a year till his death for his maintenance. An explanation has been offered that the tale may have been founded on the delay in his burial. His wealthy wife and relatives tried to throw upon the Crown the liability for the cost of an obscure funeral by night at Cobham. But for some unknown reason he appears to have been in pecuniary straits. Camden speaks of his return to the Tower 'omnium rerum egentissimus,' and of his death 'miser et inops.' Certainly he had been, as he deserved to be, more harshly treated in respect of money than Ralegh. On his conviction his estates had been confiscated. Even his valuable library, which, in the Tower, he had retained, was claimed in 1618 for the King's use by the Keeper of State Papers. He had no wife to tend him as had Ralegh. Lady Kildare was more literally faithful than Sir Griffin Markham's wife, who, while he was in exile, wedded her serving man, and had to do penance for bigamy at St. Paul's in a white sheet. But she neglected her husband, whom she had once ardently loved, and allowed him to pine alone. Ralegh's admirers too cannot but despise him, though their feeling is less anger than impatience that so poor a creature should have warped the fate of one so great.
Another and newer prisoner Ralegh left, who was to stay till 1622, as notorious as Cobham, and yet more ignoble. Robert Carr, Viscount Rochester, and Earl of Somerset, had been committed to the Tower on October 18, 1615, on the charge of having procured the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. The guiltier Countess was joined in the accusation, and committed in April, 1616. Both were convicted in the May after Ralegh's release. They were lodged in Ralegh's old Carr and his Wife. quarters, he in the Bloody tower, she in the garden pavilion erected or remodelled for Ralegh's accommodation. It had been hastily prepared for her in response to her passionate entreaties to the Lieutenant not to be put into Overbury's apartment. Carr's imprisonment and Ralegh's liberation are said, in a treatise attributed to Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, to have given great occasion of speech and rumour. Quips and taunts upon Carr, on the same authority, are imputed to Ralegh. Town gossip was always busy with his name. In the absence of facts it invented. He was capable of sharp epigrams, and may have exulted in the fall of his unworthy supplanter. He would not have condescended to hurl gibes, as has further been alleged, in the face of the miserable being who was succeeding him as tenant of his cell. The story is that, possibly during a visit to the Tower after Carr's trial, he met the convict entering the dark archway from Water Lane, and thereupon remarked aloud: 'The whole History of the World had not the like precedent of a King's prisoner to purchase freedom, and his bosom favourite to have the halter, but in Scripture, in the case of Mordecai and Haman.' As improbably James is reported to have been told, and to have retorted that 'Ralegh might die in that deceit.'