Mr. Gardiner's Case
against Ralegh.
By this time the Government recognised that it had done all in its power for the completion of its case against Ralegh. Students of the proceedings will think the same. They have cause to be grateful to Mr. Gardiner for marshalling the medley in his essay under that title in the Fortnightly Review. With the fullest desire to be impartial, he sums up strongly against the defendant; and his skill and patience in the collection of evidence are such as to ensure that he has neglected nothing available for a decisive condemnation. According to him, Ralegh was guilty of a flagrant breach of the conditions on which his expedition was authorized. He had pledged his own faith and that of his friends and companions that he could reach and work his Mine in Guiana without attacking resident Spaniards, or trespassing on lands in Spanish occupation. James, it is said, was not inconsistent with his own principles in sanctioning an enterprise thus qualified. The King's doctrine, frankly stated by Mr. Gardiner, was that nothing less than occupancy carried the right to territorial dominion; and it had been declared to him that the locality of the Mine was not occupied by Spaniards. He was sceptical of the existence of the Mine, and he was mistrustful of Ralegh's disposition to comply with the compact. The national eagerness, however, for the adventure, and the confidence of Ralegh's well-wishers, overpowered his reluctance. He was moved also by the venial hope of a vast influx of innocent profit into his empty Treasury. From the first it was understood plainly that the admiral accepted the entire responsibility for the maintenance of a peaceable attitude towards Spanish possessions. The postponement of a pardon was a sign. Ralegh's conduct in despatching his men to a spot where a collision was inevitable, indicated a deliberate disregard of his covenants. James could not have known that the situation of the new San Thome necessitated a conflict, if the Mine were to be approached, since Ralegh himself had in England not been aware of the resettlement. As soon The King's
good Faith. as he heard, his duty was either to retire, or to choose a fresh route. He did neither, and thus fairly laid himself open to the punishment he had invoked before he started. Mr. Gardiner does not allow that James is chargeable with double dealing which should have tied his hands as against Ralegh, on account of the disclosure of Ralegh's memorial and plans to Gondomar. The memorial, which, Mr. Gardiner is sure, included no specification of the place of the Mine, would tell the Ambassador little of novelty or practical importance. Besides, Mr. Gardiner believes Ralegh was aware that it was to be shown. Finally, Ralegh's designs against the plate fleet, and his intrigues with Savoy and France, in Mr. Gardiner's opinion, sufficiently demonstrate his want of scrupulousness. The evidence of them would naturally disincline the King for passing indulgently over proved violations of agreement. On the whole, he concludes, 'no one who now constructs a narrative of Ralegh's voyage on the basis of a belief in his veracity will be likely to obtain a hearing.'
It is a large indictment resting upon a very slender basis. The question of the alleged schemes of freebooting, none of which issued in action, has been considered already. For the present its relevancy depends on the answer to the main charge of an unlicensed and deliberate rupture by Ralegh of the peace between his own Sovereign and the King of Spain. For a determination of the point it must be remembered how much Mr. Gardiner concedes in Ralegh's favour, as well as how much he decides adversely. If Weakness of
the Case. San Thome had remained in 1618 where it was in 1596, and Spanish troops, having taken up a temporary post a score or so of miles lower down, had from that barred the quiet passage of young Walter and Keymis, Mr. Gardiner apparently must have exonerated Ralegh. He would have been safe within his commission, which appointed him leader of an armed force for the obvious purpose of resisting impediments to his progress about Guiana, unless where Spaniards were in immediate possession. Warfare with Spaniards in Guiana is not in itself represented as criminal. His sole offence was in combating them voluntarily on ground they positively occupied. The same defence which he might have conclusively urged if soldiers, descending from the original San Thome, had blocked his transit, is justly pleadable for his men's voyage on the Orinoko past the new town. Guiana in general being free to Englishmen, it is manifest that a settlement on the bank could not appropriate the channel. The whole question of the guilt or innocence of Ralegh on James's reading of international law, is narrowed to the minute issue whether the Spaniards or the Englishmen on the particular scene of the fight were the aggressors. Whatever the decision upon that, it is difficult to see how it could properly affect Ralegh. His right and his duty were to find and take possession of the Mine, if it were not in Spanish hands, as nobody alleges it was. He was entitled to break through obstacles in his way, so long as he did not violate actual Spanish soil. Lawfully he sent his comrades along the Orinoko. If on their road the Spaniards compelled a contest, neither Ralegh nor his subordinates were in fault. If his captains compelled it, he cannot have been liable, unless he be proved, as he has not been, to have so instructed them. In any event, when all Spanish officers in America notoriously deemed an Englishman a pirate who entered the Orinoko without their leave, and King James claimed authority to send his subjects wherever in Guiana Spaniards were not permanently planted, it is unreasonable to throw the liability for an armed brawl between Spaniards and Englishmen in Guiana upon the English chief. His Sovereign, who with eyes open despatched him with an armament to work a mine of prodigious value, cannot be permitted to shift on him the odium of a bloody struggle because the goal turned out to be some eight miles off, instead of the twenty more or less at which both master and subject had judged it to be.
The design of the Government had been to discover proof of fresh crimes since Ralegh's liberation in 1616, and to try him for them. It had failed. Much of the testimony it had painfully collected was dubious, vague, biassed, interested, or plainly corrupt. Such as it was the Council either would not, or could not, rely upon it for a conviction. Ralegh's transactions with the Frenchmen were unwarrantable, if its view of them were correct. But they had resulted in nothing, and they were a continuation of relations which it had itself promoted. At San Thome, if he Difficulties of
the Government. were liable for his men, as partially he did not deny, though he might have denied it, he had broken the King's peace by an invasion of Spanish territory, if Guiana were Spanish. He maintained that it was as much English as it was Spanish, if not more; and they neither dared, in the existing state of national opinion, nor perhaps cared, to gainsay the doctrine. His alleged schemes for the maritime spoliation of Spaniards may well have been to his mind lawful. All English seamen, and the nation at large, believed that the articles of peace between the two kingdoms did not extend beyond the Equator. In the latest treaty with Spain, that of 1604, the Indies and their trade were intentionally not mentioned, on account of the insoluble difficulties arising out of the Spanish determination to shut the region to free European trade. For Ralegh and a multitude of Englishmen, and Spaniards also, England and Spain were in America always at war. Neither national nor international law countenanced the doctrine. Any Englishman who had devastated Spanish commerce in the West Indies, would, during a large part of Elizabeth's reign, have been amenable to criminal justice, if the State had prosecuted. But the State then was not inclined to prosecute for such acts. During the next reign some statesmen continued to hold, like the people, that there was no peace beyond the Line. If there were peace, the State could not have proceeded against Ralegh for the thought of breaking it. The single criminal act proved was his attempt at escape. For it he might have been tried and punished. But the most triumphant prosecution on such a charge would not have given the Government the pound of flesh it owed to Spain. Nothing less was of use.
The administration floundered about in futile efforts. Perpetually it was deluded by a sensation of solid ground which immediately slipped from under its feet. It was the more enraged with Ralegh that he seemed to be ever offering clues, which only led astray. It imputed its embarrassment to his cunning. He had no intention to deceive, or even to abstain from promoting a revelation of the truth, which he did not fear. Simply he and it were radically at cross purposes. They were mutually unintelligible. The sincerity of his ardour for the attainment of a footing in Guiana is unquestionable. He was honestly eager for it in the Tower, in Trinidad Ralegh's real
Motive. after the return from San Thome, at Plymouth, when he was grovelling in counterfeit madness at Salisbury, and when he was a fugitive on the Thames. But Guiana was not his real end. Guiana was the means he had finally and deliberately chosen to inflame the English people and Crown with an inextinguishable ambition for the creation of an American empire. He did not much mind how the national imagination was kindled, provided that it caught fire. His motive was patriotic and vast, and his judges and accusers, conscientious men like Cæsar and Abbot, as well as others, had not the faintest understanding of it. All except the motive was talk, much of it reprehensible talk, but much not truly reported; and his censors let their prejudices seduce them into treating the entire mass as evidence of facts and acts. If he ever instructed his officers to commence the The Rest Talk. expedition to the Mine by taking the initiative in an attack on San Thome, the direction was confined to talk. If, whether before or after the San Thome incident, he spoke of the capture of the plate fleet, that was nothing but talk. Captain Parker's report of the project of Ralegh and St. Leger for lying in wait for homeward bound ships referred, if not wholly untrue, to talk, like his own and Whitney's similar plans. When Ralegh told his wife he hoped for something ere his return, that was talk. If he ever said he should not come back, that was talk. If he boasted of a French commission, and affirmed his preference for France, that was talk. The entire pile of charges against him, proved, unproved, or disproved, was talk. All began and ended in talk, unless that Bayley captured French boats, and Ralegh redeemed them; that the Lancerota islanders murdered English sailors, and he did not retaliate; that the San Giuseppe Spaniards were aggressors, and he bore it; and that the garrison of San Thome laid an ambush for his men, to hinder their access to a district which his Sovereign had commissioned him to enter, and were soundly beaten for their hostility.
The Government was in a dilemma. It meant to put Ralegh to death, and the process was as behindhand as at Ralegh's return to Plymouth, or more so. Spain had the promise of his blood, as soon as it should decide whether itself or England were to provide the scaffold. On October 15 the Spanish Legation in London received the answer of the Escurial. Philip III had no mind to accept the odium before Europe of murdering a redoubtable foe. He expressed his preference for an execution in England, and at once. Only in one way could the object be effected. Ralegh must be put to death, not ostensibly for San Thome, but for the Main Plot. Both for Ralegh and his heroic wife the immediate results were solacing. There was no need for tormenting either further for the concoction of a fresh indictment, if the original indictment retained strength to do the work. A warrant was addressed to Wilson for Lady Ralegh's release from his supervision. By another he was discharged from attendance upon her husband. Ten days earlier he had pretended to pray the King's leave to give up his trust at the Tower. He said he was anxious to resume the arrangement of the State papers of the previous six or seven years. For Ralegh at all events it was a happy respite to be restored, for the last dozen days of his Tower life, to the honest keeping of Sir Allen, and the charitable offices of Lady Apsley.
CHAPTER XXIX.
A Substitute for a Trial (October 22, 1618).