never forfeited irrevocably. Ralegh long held the court office of captain of the guard. In her latest years, there was renewal of his sovereign's old show of regard for him. She liked to converse with him in private; and the envious declared that she took him for a kind of oracle.' To the last he addressed her in those adulatory strains which she loved. During all her reign, adversity had mingled in his lot with prosperity, but prosperity delusively seemed at the close to sway the scales. A bitter spirit of faction divided Queen Elizabeth's advisers against themselves. Ralegh's hot-temper and impatience of subordination, made him an easy mark for the hatred and uncharitableness which the factious Ralegh and Court factions. atmosphere fostered. The outspoken language which was habitual to him was violently resented by rival claimants to the Queen's favour. With one of these, the Earl of Essex, who was even more self-confident and impetuous than himself, he maintained an implacable feud until the Earl's death on the scaffold. Ralegh had come into conflict with Lord Howard of Effingham, the great admiral of the Armada, and an influential member of the Howard family. The admiral's numerous kindred regarded him with aversion. Sir Robert Cecil, the principal Secretary of State in Queen Elizabeth's last years, who held in his hand all the threads of England's policy, although more outwardly complacent, cherished suspicion of Ralegh. It was only royal favour that had hitherto rendered innocuous the shafts of his foes. Now that that favour was withdrawn Ralegh was to find that he had sown the wind and was to reap the whirlwind. Fortune, wrote a contemporary, 'picked him out of purpose to use as her tennis ball'; having tossed him up from nothingness to a point within hail of greatness she then unconcernedly tossed him down again. Το The acces James I. Between Ralegh and his new sovereign, James I., little sympathy subsisted. They knew little of one another. Ralegh's personal enemies at court James owed the easy road which led him to the English throne. sion of Ralegh on purely personal grounds, which court schisms fully account for, abstained from showing enthusiasm for James's accession. He fully recognised the justice of the Scottish monarch's title to the English crown. But he had not pledged himself like his private foes in a preliminary correspondence to support the new King actively. By that preliminary correspondence the King set great store. He was not prepossessed in favour of any of Elizabeth's courtiers who had failed before Elizabeth's death to avow in writing profoundest sympathy with his cause. As soon as James became King of England, Ralegh's position at court was seen to be insecure. His enemies were favourably placed for avenging any imagined indignity which his influence with the late sovereign had enabled him to inflict on them. He lay atthe mercy of factions which were markedly hostile to himself and held the ear of the new sovereign. There was no likelihood that the new wearer of the crown would exert himself to protect him from assault. At first a comparatively petty disgrace was put on him. He was unceremoniously superseded in his court office of captain of the guard, a post which had brought him into much personal contact with the late sovereign. He naturally resented the affront and showed irritation among his friends. The king's allies found ready charges of means of increasing their own importance and improving their prospects of advancement by drawing to light of day and exaggerating any hasty expression of doubt respecting James's legal title to the English crown of which they could find evidence. Dishonest agents easily distorted Fabricated treason. an inconsiderate word of dissatisfaction with the political situation into deliberate treason. An intricate charge of this character was rapidly devised against Ralegh by his factious foes, and almost without warning he was brought within peril of his life. He was accused on vague hearsay of having joined in a plot to surprise the king's person with a view to his abduction or assassination. It was alleged that he was conspiring to set up another on the throne, to wit, the king's distant cousin, Arabella Stuart. Ralegh was put under arrest. Thoroughly exasperated by the victory which his enemies had won over him, he for the first time in his life lost nerve. He made an abortive attempt at suicide. This rash act was held by his persecutors to attest his guilt. When he was brought to trial at Winchester—the plague in London had compelled the Court's migration-all legal forms Sentence of death. pressed against him. In the result he was condemned to a traitor's death (17 Nov. 1603). His estates were forfeited, and such offices as he still retained were taken from him. For three weeks Ralegh lay in Winchester Castle in almost daily expectation of the executioner's dread summons. He sought consolation in literature, and in letters and The respite. in poems addressed to his wife he sought to reconcile himself to his fate. He made no complaint of his perverse lot. He had drunk deep of life and was not averse in his passion for new experience to taste death. But James faltered at the last and hesitated to sign the death-warrant. A month after the trial Ralegh was informed that he was reprieved of the capital punishment. He was to be kept a prisoner in the Tower of London. He was not pardoned, nor was his sentence commuted to any fixed term of confinement. As long as he was alive, it was tacitly assumed by those in high places that liberty would be denied him. It was diffi cult for one of Ralegh's energy to reconcile himself to the situation. Bondage was for him barely thinkable. Long years of waiting could not vanquish the assured hope that freedom would again be his, and he would carry further the projects that were as yet only half begun. X Ralegh's intellectual activity was invincible, and there he found the main preservative against the numbing despair with which the prison's galling tedium menaced In the him. He was allowed some special privileges. At Tower. first, his lot was alleviated by the companionship of his wife and sons. Within the precincts of the Tower and its garden he was apparently free to move about at will. But he concentrated all his mental strength while in confinement on study-study of exceptionally varied kinds. Literature and science divided his allegiance. In a laboratory or still-house which he was allowed to occupy in the garden of the Tower he carried on a long series of chemical experi- Scientific ments. Many of his scientific investigations curiosity. proved successful; he condensed fresh water from salt, an art which has only been practised generally during the past century. He compounded new drugs against various disorders which became popular, and were credited with great efficacy. Chemistry, medicine, philosophy, all appealed to his catholic curiosity. Nevertheless his main intellectual energy was absorbed by literature. The grandeur of human life and aspiration impressed him in his enforced retirement from the world more deeply than when he was himself a free actor on the stage. He designed a noble contribution to English prose literature, his History of the World. He set himself the heavy task of surveying minutely and exactly human endeavours in the early days of human K History of the World. experience. He sought to write a history of the five great empires of the East of Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Persia, and Macedonia. Only a fragment of the work was completed; it broke off abruptly one hundred and thirty years before the Christian era, with the conquest of Macedon by Rome. But Ralegh's achievement is a lasting memorial of his genius and the elevated aspect of his career. Ralegh did not approach a study of history in a strictly critical spirit, and his massive accumulations of facts, which he collected from six or seven hundred volumes in many tongues, have long been superannuated. But he showed enlightenment in many an unexpected direction. He betrayed a lively appreciation of the need of studying geography together with history, and he knew the value of chronological accuracy. His active imagination made him a master of historic portraiture, and historical personages like Artaxerxes, Queen Jezebel, Demetrius, Pyrrhus, or Epaminondas, are drawn with a master's pencil. Ralegh's methods were discursive. He digressed from the ancient to the modern world. The insight which illumined his account of the heroes of a remote past was suffered now and again to play quite irrelevantly Censure of about the personalities of recent rulers of his own land. He was content to speak the truth as far as it was known, without fear of consequences. Of Henry VIII. he writes uncompromisingly, thus: 'If all the pictures and patterns of a merciless prince were lost in the world, they might all again be painted to the life out of the story of this king. For how many servants did he advance in haste (but for what virtue no man could suspect), and with the change of his fancy ruined again, no man knowing for what offence! What laws and wills did he devise, to establish this kingdom in his own issues? using his sharpest weapons to cut off and |