That Great Lucifer: A Portrait of Sir Walter Ralegh by Margaret Irwin

Author:Margaret Irwin [Irwin, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ipso Books
Published: 2018-04-09T05:00:00+00:00

22

‘The Happiest Day that ever he Spent’

CARLETON ON RALEGH AT HIS TRIAL

RALEGH was brought from his prison cell into the Court Room that had been set up in the great stone hall of Wolvesey Castle at Winchester. In the low-lying town, sunk in the valley, the autumn mists coiled white, for it was past mid-November, and the icy barred cell in which he had spent the previous night had increased his ague, so that his first concern was to keep his hands from shaking, as if from fear. There was good reason for fear. He had learned on arrival that six out of seven conspirators had already been condemned to death, a cheerless conclusion to a journey in which his guards had had to fight the mob howling for his blood. Erect as ever, his aching joints made him move more stiffly, and therefore proudly, and he seemed taller because thin to emaciation, his cheeks sunken from illness in the Tower, the bones showing clearly in the immensely high dome of his forehead.

His intent and wary eyes watched the blur of faces around the crowded hall, many of them there since daybreak, some waiting outside since the day before for the doors to open. The Lady Arabella or ‘Arbell’ Stuart herself was there, up in the minstrels’ gallery by the side of old Lord Nottingham. Her rather vacant, pink and white face was as childish now in her late twenties as when Ralegh had once met her at dinner about sixteen years before. ‘I never liked her,’ he said of the little ninny. Ironically, her passion for masquerade was to give her the rank of a queen at last, but by mistake, for after her death the portrait at Hampton Court of her in fancy dress was believed until just lately to be one of Queen Elizabeth.

Ralegh saw that a friendly neighbour of his had been removed from among the jury overnight, and his worst enemy appointed as an extra judge. Yet he declined to question them, which would have been useless, and merely answered courteously he ‘thought them all honest and Christian men’, as casual a touch as Hamlet’s careless question before his fencing match: ‘These foils have all a length?’

Yet on the special Commission of Judges appointed by James was Lord Henry Howard, who had always openly hated him, and as Ralegh had begun to know, though nothing like as clearly as we do now, had made it his chief business for the past two years to poison the King’s mind against him. With him was Robert Cecil, who had egged Lord Henry on to do this, while distilling his own poison in subtler and more discreet wording. The two together had laid all the groundwork for Ralegh’s prosecution well before James came to the throne.

At the head of the ‘honest and Christian men’ was Chief Justice Popham to pronounce judgment, huge as a barrel and grossly ugly, who had continued to share profits with highway-men even when

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