he took and burnt a little town called SAINT THOMAS. For this he
was denounced to his Sowship by the Spanish Ambassador as a pirate;
and returning almost broken-hearted, with his hopes and fortunes
shattered, his company of friends dispersed, and his brave son (who
had been one of them) killed, he was taken – through the treachery
of SIR LEWIS STUKELY, his near relation, a scoundrel and a Vice-
Admiral – and was once again immured in his prison-home of so many
years.
His Sowship being mightily disappointed in not getting any gold,
Sir Walter Raleigh was tried as unfairly, and with as many lies and
evasions as the judges and law officers and every other authority
in Church and State habitually practised under such a King. After
a great deal of prevarication on all parts but his own, it was
declared that he must die under his former sentence, now fifteen
years old. So, on the twenty-eighth of October, one thousand six
hundred and eighteen, he was shut up in the Gate House at
Westminster to pass his late night on earth, and there he took
leave of his good and faithful lady who was worthy to have lived in
better days. At eight o’clock next morning, after a cheerful
breakfast, and a pipe, and a cup of good wine, he was taken to Old
Palace Yard in Westminster, where the scaffold was set up, and
where so many people of high degree were assembled to see him die,
that it was a matter of some difficulty to get him through the
crowd. He behaved most nobly, but if anything lay heavy on his
mind, it was that Earl of Essex, whose head he had seen roll off;
and he solemnly said that he had had no hand in bringing him to the
block, and that he had shed tears for him when he died. As the
morning was very cold, the Sheriff said, would he come down to a
fire for a little space, and warm himself? But Sir Walter thanked
him, and said no, he would rather it were done at once, for he was
ill of fever and ague, and in another quarter of an hour his
shaking fit would come upon him if he were still alive, and his
enemies might then suppose that he trembled for fear. With that,
he kneeled and made a very beautiful and Christian prayer. Before
he laid his head upon the block he felt the edge of the axe, and
said, with a smile upon his face, that it was a sharp medicine, but
would cure the worst disease. When he was bent down ready for
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death, he said to the executioner, finding that he hesitated, ‘What
dost thou fear? Strike, man!’ So, the axe came down and struck
his head off, in the sixty-sixth year of his age.
The new favourite got on fast. He was made a viscount, he was made
Duke of Buckingham, he was made a marquis, he was made Master of
the Horse, he was made Lord High Admiral – and the Chief Commander
of the gallant English forces that had dispersed the Spanish
Armada, was displaced to make room for him. He had the whole
kingdom at his disposal, and his mother sold all the profits and
honours of the State, as if she had kept a shop. He blazed all
over with diamonds and other precious stones, from his hatband and
his earrings to his shoes. Yet he was an ignorant presumptuous,
swaggering compound of knave and fool, with nothing but his beauty
and his dancing to recommend him. This is the gentleman who called
himself his Majesty’s dog and slave, and called his Majesty Your
Sowship. His Sowship called him STEENIE; it is supposed, because
that was a nickname for Stephen, and because St. Stephen was
generally represented in pictures as a handsome saint.
His Sowship was driven sometimes to his wits’-end by his trimming
between the general dislike of the Catholic religion at home, and
his desire to wheedle and flatter it abroad, as his only means of
getting a rich princess for his son’s wife: a part of whose