When the jury returned, they had spent less than a quarter of an hour in deliberation. Sir Walter Raleigh had just defended himself for hours against a conspiracy whose design shifted with every deposition. The verdict was delivered in a single word: guilty. He did not inquire why the jurors had arrived at this conclusion. He merely reminded them that their decision cast his wife and infant son onto the street to beg, then turned toward the lords to protest the injuries he considered himself to have suffered since the hour of his arrest.
The trial had been convened at Winchester on November 17, 1603. At the head of his chapter, Borrow prints an erroneous year, 1602, yet the proceedings he reproduces plainly bear the former date. Raleigh, sickly and faint, petitioned to remain seated. He had by no means lost his composure: he saluted acquaintances, declined to challenge the jurors, and claimed the right to answer the charges article by article. Around him, the commissioners, judges, and king’s councillors had already heard the extensive indictment.
The prosecution confounded several distinct enterprises. Raleigh and Lord Cobham were accused of having sought to depose James I in favour of Arabella Stuart, the King’s cousin, with the backing of Spain and the Archduke of Austria. The promised subvention—six hundred thousand crowns—was supposedly intended to rally the disaffected. Another undertaking, designated in the proceedings as the “Bye Plot,” was alleged to have aimed at seizing the court and constraining the monarch. Raleigh stood arraigned for the former, yet the prosecution continually reverted to the second—a larger, more terrifying design, in which mention was made of laying hands upon the Sovereign and his children.
The Attorney General, Edward Coke, possessed a cruel and virulent tongue. He denounced Raleigh as the arch-conspirator and showered his adversary with insults. Raleigh answered that mere vituperation was no proof. He reiterated what he never ceased to maintain: he had never spoken of Arabella, had never encouraged the procurement of Spanish funds, and had never incited Cobham to betray his prince. He made no attempt to deny his meetings or his acquaintance with the lord; he contested their meaning. They had conversed, he affirmed, of private concerns, of leases, of books, and of a peace which he deemed far preferable to an open war with Spain.
At the center of the trial stood an absent man: Cobham. Following his arrest, the latter had accused Raleigh, only to retract or alter various particulars of his account. Yet the jury was not permitted to hear him in person. Raleigh demanded that he be brought into court, that he might put a question to him and confront these contradictory assertions face to face. He was answered that the law demanded no such thing, and that Cobham might peradventure alter his deposition to preserve his former associate. The accused was thus constrained to defend himself against the utterances of a living man, lodged under the very same roof, yet kept strictly apart from the chamber.
The judges did not treat the objection as a triviality. They debated the ancient rule of the two witnesses, the sufficiency of written depositions, and the legal weight to be accorded Cobham’s accusation. Raleigh invoked procedural safeguards and the authority of Holy Scripture; the Bench countered with the rules of evidence governing cases of treason and the perilous hazard of collusion between prisoners. He could not erase the fact that Cobham had initially spoken against him. He sought only that this testimony be tested in his presence. The petition was denied.
The tension mounted when the prosecution read a letter from Cobham. It portrayed Raleigh as a pensioner of Spain, labouring to advance its interests. Thereupon Raleigh produced another letter, also written by Cobham’s hand, which entirely exonerated him and swore that the lord had never conspired at his instigation. To the first document, the lords accorded great weight; the second was dismissed as a calculated contrivance. Thus did the same man appear alternately to condemn and to absolve his friend, while Raleigh remained powerless to demand of him why.
One deposition even reported that a Portuguese in Lisbon had predicted that the King would never be crowned, because “Don Raleigh and Don Cobham” would slit his throat. Raleigh inquired what the hearsay of a foreign mariner could possibly prove against him. The prosecution replied that treason had wings. The trial drifted through letters, reported conversations, and sinister interpretations of silence; every shred of evidence was presented as a fragment of a vast design which Raleigh denied ever having known.
Upon pronouncing sentence, the Lord Chief Justice reproached him for his ambition and avarice, affirming that he believed Cobham. Raleigh submitted himself to the King’s clemency and commended his family to his mercy. The penalty prescribed for high treason was barbarous: to be drawn upon a hurdle, hanged, disembowelled, and quartered. Yet the King suspended the execution; Raleigh remained a prisoner in the Tower of London, under a sentence that would be revived years later upon his return from Guiana. There he composed and completed, according to Borrow, a substantial portion of his History of the World. Borrow relates that upon hearing of the ruin of his printer, Raleigh cast into the fire the unpublished continuation of the manuscript. The scene illustrates the stark conflict between the labours of the scholar and the economic survival of the tradesman who printed him.
His freedom returned by degrees, without ever expunging his condemnation. He had already obtained leave to venture abroad from the Tower attended by a keeper when the royal warrant of January 30, 1617, commanded his complete release, as attested by the record preserved in the Folger Library. The expedition to Guiana, undertaken in search of a gold mine, set sail that same year. The Crown demanded a profitable venture; Raleigh pledged a service of high utility. He signed a detailed declaration concerning the destination and force of the fleet. Borrow records that the original document found its way into the hands of the Spanish governor of San Thomé before the arrival of the English, discerning therein proof of betrayal by the King’s own ministers. This accusation belongs to Borrow’s chronicle and is not established here by independent archival proof.
The fleet of twelve sail reached Guiana after a harrowing crossing. At San Thomé, a detachment of the expedition engaged in battle, and the town was put to the torch. During this time, Raleigh lay at anchor off the coast. He learned that his eldest son had fallen in the assault and that the mine had eluded discovery. A return was now inevitable. Certain companions urged him to make for another haven; Raleigh, according to his own plea recorded by Borrow, resolved to keep his faith and return to England, well aware that his enemies awaited him there.
Upon his return, he was not brought to trial for the conduct of the expedition. The King merely revived the condemnation of 1603. Prior to his execution, Raleigh attempted escape, feigning illness in order to gain time. His keeper and kinsman, Sir Lewis Stukely, betrayed him. On the scaffold, Raleigh addressed the concourse to answer the suspicions of collusion with France and disloyalty to King James. He acknowledged having dissembled in his attempt to flee; he denied the existence of any French commission and maintained that his sole intent had been to secure gold for his sovereign. He recalled, likewise, the promise given to the Earl of Arundel that he would return from Guiana.
On October 29, 1618, he mounted the scaffold at Westminster. He asked to see the axe, touched its edge, and jested upon its sharpness. Then he prayed, took his leave of the assembled gentlemen, and laid his head upon the block. Borrow relates that he expired without a tremor beneath two strokes of the blade. He thus imparts to this final scene the supreme self-command that Raleigh had strove to maintain before his judges: not the power to avert the verdict or preserve his life, but the fortitude to choose how he would meet his end. Between the indictment of 1603, the contradictory letters of Cobham, and the ill-fated return from Guiana, his entire judicial fate remains suspended upon a question that the court never silenced: what truth can reside in a testimony that the accused is forbidden to confront?