Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (54 page)

There was nothing in his heart for Keymis, who had betrayed him through incompetence as certainly as Stucley had betrayed him in malice. Manoury - 'a runnagate frenchman' - was dismissed as unworthy of further reflection. Manoury's reports of dishonourable words spoken against James should be set aside as unreliable, Ralegh implied - as if that mattered any more. In explaining why he had given the time of day to such a man, Ralegh pointed to a shared interest in 'Chiinicall medicines', and conceded his weakness for 'a merry Witt'.
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As for James, himself, detachment rather than apology set the tone. 'Now what have I to doe with Kings; I have nothing to doe with them, neither doe I feare them; I have onely now to doe with my God, in whose presence I stand, therefore to tell a lye, were it to game the Kings favour, were vaine.
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Some meaner, milder sins he confessed readily: he had indeed tried to escape to France, and he had indeed pretended to be ill at Salisbury. Then again, 'the Prophet David did make himself a Fool, and did suffer Spittle to fall upon his Beard to escape the hands of his Enemies, and it was not imputed to him as sin'. Ralegh had done this only 'to prolong Time till his Majesty came, hoping for some Commiseration from him'.
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The evident procrastination and dissimulation should, he said, be set down to passing weakness rather than cunning design: 'I had advertisement from above that yt would goe hard with me; I desired to save my life'.
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That life, he reflected, had been full. Ralegh summarized his own career, a career lived in a world already far remote from this good and Godly death on the scaffold. He had been, he admitted, 'a Man full of all Vanity'; he had lived 'a sinful Life, in all sinful Callings, having been a Souldier, a Captain, a Sea-Captain, and a Courtier, which are all places of Wickedness and Vice'.
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Here, from the man himself, were the roles that Greenblatt and others see him playing, but the valedictory retrospect states only bare truth. By his own, credible, assessment, Ralegh had filled these roles, not played them. If in recent months he had valued life too highly, he was concerned now only to make the best impression possible, to remind people of what they were losing and, in so doing, to emphasize the significance of his death. No one in the crowd questioned his courage. Putting off his doublet and gown, he 'called to the Headman to shew him the Ax, which being not presently shewed him, he said, I pray thee let me see it, Dost thou think that I am afraid of it?' Touching the edge of the blade he jested with the Sheriff that here was 'a sharp Medicine...a Physitian for all Diseases'.
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Gestures were as important as words. 'Going to and fro upon the Scaffold, on every side he prayed the Company to pray to God to assist him and strengthen him.'The energy of the man does not dissipate, he was as Aubrey reminds us 'no Slug'. There is a hint in Ralegh's words of irony iii exfrentis, and a rather more certain measure of sound and bombast looking into the abyss.
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The modern reader can find it all rather terrifying, for there is savagery here on both sides. Contemporaries, though, saw piety and resolution. As far as anyone might discern, wrote Chamberlain, his end was in 'every way perfect'.
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Writing four decades later, Francis Osborne took the view that Ralegh's 'death was by him managed with so high and religious a resolution, as if a Roman had acted a Christian, or rather a Christian a Roman'.
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Aubrey recorded another subtlety, remembered by those present: 'In his speech on the Scaffold, I have heard my cosen Whitney say (and I thinke 'tis printed) that he spake not one word of Christ, but of the great and incomprehensible God, with much zeale and adoration, so that he concluded that he was an a-christ, not an atheist.'
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Ralegh then forgave the kneeling executioner.
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The man had, it seems, been unsettled by the tone, or more likely by the length of Ralegh's oration. He was 'much daunted', according to one account, 'att [Ralegh's] resolution and courage, in so much that Sr Walter Raleigh clapped him on his back divers times; and cheered him up'.
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In these ways a prisoner might pretend that he had in his own hands the direction of the scene.
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At no point, however, had Ralegh confessed the crimes for which he was now to die. And at no point did he expressly glorify the King. To the discerning crowd at a public execution, so used to formulaic expatiation of sins and praise of royal justice, much could be said through omission. By departing from a norm, Ralegh again succeeded in committing the scene to public memory.

There was time for a final example of confidence, and resolution. 'Being asked which way he would lay himself, on which side the Block, as he stretched himself along and laid his Head on the Block, he said, So the Heart be right, it is no matter which way the Head lieth.'
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He rejected a blindfold, saying that, since he had no fear of the axe itself, he would not tremble at its shadow The usual arrangements were made, that the condemned prisoner would pray a while, and then stretch out his arms as a signal to the headsman. Ralegh prayed, and reached forward. The axe did not fall. Again he pushed forward, urging an end: What do you fear? he asked. 'Strike, man.'
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Even in the horror of death Ralegh seemed to control his own final moment, and 'the last act', according to the familiar contemporary proverb, 'carrieth away the applause'.
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The axe fell, rose and fell again. His head, severed at the second blow, was placed into a red leather bag, and his 'wrought velvett gowne' was placed over his body.
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The head was then removed in a mourning coach of Lady Ralegh. Bess, characteristically, kept it by her thereafter.
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More familiar than most with history's capricious judgements, Ralegh had feared the verdict of posterity, asking Arundel when the Earl left the scaffold 'to desire the King, that no Scandalous Writing to Defame him may be Published after his Death'. But he need not have worried. Onlookers were impressed, and their reports impressed others. A 'muttring went through the multitude never died a braver spirritt'.
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Someone in the crowd shouted that the country had 'not such another head to cut of'.
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Another, more politically minded individual is said to have wished that Secretary Naunton possessed such a head, and such brains! It was his own words that survived, and left an enduring impression: the eighty or so surviving manuscript copies of those last words are often coupled in manuscript commonplaces to accounts of events at Winchester in 1603: bookends to Jacobean tyranny.
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Plans were hatched to publish his speech, although no English version appeared before 1648.11]
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That really did not matter; Ralegh's last words would in time gain vitality from the flexibility of manuscript circulation. 'Denied the fixity of print' by a hostile government, they continued through the 'scandalous world of manuscript coverage' to respond very effectively to the views of scribes and owners'.
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As Anna Beer points out, the theatre of the scaffold might represent justice done, but it did from time to time also highlight the opposite. Stucley was obliged to admit, in the course of desperate attempts to clear his name, that 'they say he died like a Souldier and a Saint, and therefore then to be beleeved, not only against me, but against the attestation of the State'.
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Ralegh's refusal to admit his guilt on any capital charge and his constant equanimity led many observers to believe - some for the first time - that he had been innocent all along, and that King and state had put to death a loyal Englishman on contrived charges. Even the Spanish agent conceded that Ralegh had behaved with exemplary courage, showing a spirit that had 'never faltered'. 'The death of this man', he wrote, 'has produced a great commotion and fear here.'
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Pragmatic onlookers were left to marvel at the 'large Effusion of Blood, which proceeded from his Veins', concluding that Ralegh had 'had stock enough left of Nature, to have surviv'd many Years, though now near Fourscore Years old'.
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Arithmetic was clearly not their strong point. Though one account suggests that it was taken away by Bess for burial in Exeter, next to Ralegh's parents, and though a surviving letter from Bess hints at the possibility of an interment at Beddington, the home of Arthur Throckmorton, it is virtually certain that the body, minus the head, was buried 'privately', without monument, at St Margaret's Westminster on the day following, close to the place of execution.
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So most contemporary accounts insist, and so the burial register for St Margaret's records. Why should it lie? Some have suggested that Ralegh was buried there at the behest of a government fearful that the sight of a headless corpse on its progress to Beddington might rally discontent against the regime.
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It may equally be the case that Bess had second thoughts. A few have even seen a final if rather obscure touch of defiance against the King.

The scaffold speech is only one part of Ralegh's testament. Latham and Youings accept as Ralegh's last surviving letter a short text, surviving only in John Donne's Collection of letters made by Sir Tobic Mathews, addressed to the King, or, perhaps, to Queen Anne. They suggest that its elegance makes an appropriate final word. Certainly it shows Ralegh at his best: the man who could face his end with fortitude and equanimity, like those admirable Romans of old.

My sad destiny hath been such that I could never present Your Majesty but with a prospect upon my complaints and miseries, in stead of doing you services which might have been acceptable to you. I have not spared my labour, my poor estate and the howerly hazard of my life, but God have otherwise disposed of all, and now end the dayes of my hope. I must neverthelesse, in this little time which I am to live, acknowledge and admire your goodnesse and in all my thoughts, and even with my last breath, confesse that you have beheld my affliction with compassion. And I am yet in nothing so miserable as in that I could never meet an occasion wherin to be torn in pieces for Your Majesties service.
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The measure of sad destiny, and life wasted, was apparent to all. After the execution the crowd dispersed, carrying away their own impressions of this act of mean legality. It is interesting, and perhaps significant to note that several future political opponents of Charles I were present that morning, including John Eliot, John Hampden, John Pym and Algernon Percy, future tenth Earl of Northumberland. Pym recalled that Ralegh had met his end 'with great applause of the beholders, most constantly, most Christianly, most religiously'.
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The Jacobean regime had faced a political test of how best to deal with a dissident; how to proceed handsomely. Time would judge how well the King and his ministers had met that test.

Taking his farewell of Arundel on the scaffold, Ralegh the pilgrim picked up his burden. 'I have a long journey to go,' he said, 'and therefore will take my leave.
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However, he has never really gone away. A focus for gossip and legend when alive, Ralegh has not been forgotten in death. As Isaac D'Israeli observed, he continues to fill 'a space in our imagination'.
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For Aubrey, he possessed an 'awfulness and ascendancy in his Aspect over other mortalls', an 'ascendancy' - call it charisma, or dash, or swagger - that is remembered, analysed and admired, if not always excused.
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Writing in the early 1960s, A. L. Rowse dwelt on that magnetism; even then, Ralegh had 'not ceased to compel the imagination of the English public, indeed of English-speaking people across the world, in America as much as in Britain'.
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