by Robert Nye
*
No one comes. But one has gone. The preacher—
I’ll write about that in a minute.
*
The King taunts me. How else to explain the non-appearance of his officers bearing the warrant for my arrest? This ‘freedom’ he consigns me to. Pure torture. Does he want me to run away? or try to? To prove to the world that I’m a coward? (I shall not, for my own reasons. That lesson’s learned.) Or does he guess at the anguish of my waiting? Guess at it, savour it, enjoy it? Let it dribble in his beard like his Greek wine? By such torments of teasing James gets pleasure. I’d forgotten. But now remember well
*
Remember in particular that day. A Friday, it was. A rainy Friday.
Friday the 10th of December, 1603. Cobham, Grey, and Markham to be executed. My ‘accomplices in treason’, so they said. James knew there was no treason. So did Coke. He never let me face my base accusers. Face them in open court. Deny their story. Force them to spout their damned lies looking at me. Of course not. Coke feared those liars would break down, that’s why. My trial was a farce in consequence. It injured and degraded English justice. Judge Sir Francis Gawdy died confessing that with his last breath, five years later. No matter. That’s not the point. What I witnessed that Friday—
Cobham, Grey, and Markham were the only traitors. Not traitors to King James. Traitors to me. They lied to save their skins. But they lied too well. They made the whole trumped- up ‘plot’ sound so plausible that the Judge found he had no choice but to condemn them to death along with me, the alleged arch-villain. James must have gnashed his teeth. Then he saw how he could have some sport from this turn of events
I was led to a window, overlooking the execution yard. Markham came first. He lay down with his head on the block. The headsman raises the axe. But, suddenly, a shrill shout from the crowd. It’s one of the King’s catamites, Johnny Gibb, a pretty little page. He’s waving a piece of rolled paper. The paper gets handed to the Sheriff. He reads it. He tells Markham he’s been granted brief respite. Grey and Cobham to be executed before him, by order of the King!
Markham is marched away. Grey comes to the scaffold. It’s pouring with rain now. His prayers and his confessions seem interminable. At last, he says he’s ready for the headsman. But no sooner is his neck stretched on the block than Johnny Gibb pops up again, yet another sheet of paper is handed over, and the Sheriff announces that Cobham must die first, that this is his Majesty’s pleasure!
His Majesty’s pleasure indeed I stood at the window- pane, the rain scalding down it. I had hammers working in my head to beat out the meaning of this stratagem.
Grey escorted from the scaffold. Here comes Cobham. He struts like an actor. He has a great grin on his face. His prayers and his confessions go on even longer than boring Grey’s. The crowd get restive. Tor Sir Walter Ralegh,’ cries Cobham, ‘all I said of him was true! I swear it now, who am about to meet my Maker, upon my very soul, before God and his angels: that Ralegh is a traitor! He plotted with Spain ‘
Et cetera, et cetera.
The hammers click home.
Cobham knows very damned fine he won’t be meeting his Maker.
Not here. Not today. Not by execution, ever.
He’s been promised a reprieve. The whole bloody (unbloody!) rain-soaked drama has been the King’s pantomime.
As for Markham and Grey, I don’t know if they knew. I don’t care. Perhaps they were just better actors. In any case, those two vile canaries are brought back onto the scaffold to join Cobham. The Sheriff steps forward. He addresses the three of them:
‘You are all agreed that you were justly tried and lawfully condemned to execution?’
They nod their heads. Such enthusiasm. Men glad that they have heads left to nod with.
A roll on the drums as the Sheriff prepares for the pay-off. He waves his papers aloft. They’re sodden. The ink runs with the rain. It doesn’t matter. The Sheriff knows his last crass lines by heart. He roars them out like Burbage in his prime:
‘Then see the mercy of your Prince, who of himself has sent hither a countermand! Gentlemen, the King gives you back your lives!’
Applause (most probably paid-for) from the crowd. But not all have been delighted by these antics, I can see that. Some are disappointed. Others, being of better character, disguise their disgust. It was the first public revelation in England of the Scotch King’s perverse and pawky practical jokes.
As for me, I had to sweat it out for three more days, until the following Monday. Then I was told that James’ mercy extended even to myself, the greatest ‘traitor’. With the difference that I was to go to the Tower, and to stay there for good. No public announcement. No pantomime. At the same time, my death-sentence was never revoked, and I was warned that if at any point his Majesty felt less generous —
The truth was that King James dared not behead me. He knew all England knew I was never a traitor. What’s more, he knew Spain knew I was never its friend. But James wanted me out of the way. I was just a dangerous ghost from a world beyond his ken. To let Ralegh rot in the Tower must have seemed like a reasonable act of exorcism.
*
I refused to rot. I read, I wrote, I kept a busy spirit. James put a woman with a running plague sore in the cell next to mine. I declined to die of the plague. I kept reading, I kept writing, I walked every day, miles and miles, by going up and down a thousand times on the terrace at the top of the inner wall. The years passed. The King forgot me, or seemed to. I was visited by my friends. I took an interest in expeditions, following their progress on a sea chart I had pinned above my bed. A new Governor came. I was allowed the use of a still-house in the garden. I cured my own tobacco. I made medicines. Keymis brought me ore from Guiana; I kept trying it, using cruset, coal, and bellows to melt it down. I found nothing. I kept trying, I worked day and night in that shed. I found nothing. Then Keymis took more ore to Gosson, that refiner in Goldsmiths’ Row. He came back excited. Gosson reported that 12 grains of the ore, beaten with half an ounce of filed lead and a quarter of an ounce of sandiver, then put to the proper process under a muffle until all the lead was consumed, had produced of the 12 grains a quarter of a grain of pure gold. Did that refiner cheat us for the money? (I was foolish; I’d promised him £20 if he could find gold or silver in the ore.) Gosson must have cheated us. But it doesn’t matter. I needed to believe in the gold. I could lie on my bed, then, and reach up with my fingers to my maps. The Caroni Falls. Putijma’s Mountain. I could feel the gold there with my fingertips. The dream kept me going. If it hadn’t been gold, it would have been some other folly. I needed to believe in the gold. So I cheated myself. That’s all. That’s the point. No matter.
Then real gold! But in the shape of a person. Such a person. Prince Henry, James’s elder son, started visiting me. He was thirteen, the same age as my Wat. He came first in the company of his mother, Queen Anne. Anne was drunk. She drank like a fish. Anne was flighty and stupid. She came to collect a phial of my Great Cordial. The French Ambassador’s wife had told her it was good for the nerves. So it was, so it should have been. The ingredients were as follows: mint, borage, gentian, a compound of pearl, musk, and hart’s horn, bezoar stone, mace, aloes, with sugar and sassafras, all mixed in with powerful spirits of wine. Anne kept coming back for more. The Prince started coming on his own.
He was in all things the opposite of his father. He studied deliberately to set himself apart from the Court. James doted on hunting; Henry hated it. James pawed at his catamites; his son scorned them. James was foul in his speech; the young Prince had boxes in his apartments, if his servants swore they were told to pay fines into those boxes for punishment. James was timorous; Prince Henry fought in the tournaments. The father was despised by the son.
Prince Henry was my pupil in the Tower for the last five years of his glorious but all-too-brief life. I wrote essays for the boy. I instructed him in foreign policy, the need to keep England from the clutches of Spain and the Pope
. He was quick, he was able, he was witty. (Not his father’s low wit; something lovely and lively sparked in him.) Queen Anne encouraged his visits. I designed a ship for him: the Prince Royal.
Henry would have made a splendid King. He was worthy of all England’s glory. (A glory now gone, but I must not suppose it lost for ever.) His friendship gave me hope in my captivity. I began my History of the World for his instruction. I dropped it, dispirited, the day he died. The hope of all
England, and my hope But he died. I couldn’t save him.
Typhoid, they said. But the queen said poison.
I’d refused to die. I’d survived. But I’d done worse. In James’s eyes, that is. I’d adopted his son.
Fathers and sons.
How madly the world wags!
I have thought of it often this last week, sitting here smoking my long silver pipe, staring down at poor Carew.
While I was playing father to Prince Henry (his own father being less than a man), my imprisonment left Wat fatherless. Or something worse than fatherless. For he turned to Ben Jonson for father - of which the less said, God knows, the better. And James himself, unable to inspire his true son’s love, had his male lovers fawn on him and call him their
‘Dear Dad’ As for Carew, playing clumsily over there with
his toy soldiers, my death will leave him more fatherless than Wat was.
Fathers and sons. Sons and fathers.
James hates me the more for being a father to his son.
I hate myself the more for failing to be a father to my real sons. You will say I had no choice. But I had a choice. If my climbing to power by the winding stair had not led me to seem like a threat to James, I would never have been in the Tower all those years. The choice was made long ago, and
I’m the one who made it. Fain would I rise I could have
been a decent country gentleman, looking after my wife and my estate, my own garden, in the company of my sons. I chose otherwise. I have no one to blame but myself. My pride, my ambition, my self-insulting pursuit of Elizabeth’s favour—
O antic father! I am as bad as King James. Whether he had his son poisoned, I know not. I know only that I have been the murderer of my own.
The King was wrong about one thing. I never said a word against him to Prince Henry. James supposed that I did, but I always avoided the subject.
As for the Prince, only once did he make any comment that could be construed as criticism of James. He was leaving. He stood at the door of my cell with his back turned to me. He spoke softly, addressing the shafts of sunlight which fell through the barred window. He said: ‘Who but my father would keep such a bird in a cage!’ It was the end of his last visit to the Tower. I said nothing. I never saw him again.
*
The preacher has gone. He fled in the night, last night, without paying his bill. I had wondered why he stayed with me here at the Pope’s Head. He kept himself always to his own chamber, with hardly a word spoken to any of us. I had to summon him into my presence each day for evening prayers. He prayed in a most perfunctory manner -I might almost say with reluctance. Once he objected irritably to the Indian being with us in the room. This heathen, he said. The Indian laughed and went out. I was angry. I am angrier now.
Sam King found a nest of half-burnt papers in the grate in the clergyman’s room. Drafts of a letter he’d been working on all the time since coming ashore with me. We have pieced them together. Parts are evidently missing. There are many corrections, where the religious rogue laboured over his prose to get the best effect. The result is, as I say, fragmentary. But the drift is clear as day. I attach the wretched document here intact. I have no heart or stomach to copy it out.
*
To the Right Honourable the Lords of His Majesty’s most Honourable Privy Council. A true and brief Relation of Sir Walter Rawley his late voyage to Guiana. By the Reverend Mr Samuel Jones (M.A. 1604; B.D. 1611), Chaplain in one of his ships called the Destiny.
Right Honourable—
A common report of his Majesty’s large commission to Sir Walter Rawley, the great expectation of success, the importunity of many worthy gentlemen, the good report I heard of Mr Robert Burwick, joined with the consideration of my want of employment at that time in the Church (under which misery I still suffer, despite my academic attainments noted above), were the inducements that prevailed with me to undertake so dangerous a voyage.
To which we set sail from Plymouth the 12th of June Anno 1617. We put in again at Falmouth in Cornwall, after at Kinsale in Ireland, where we arrived the 25 th of June, and remained till the 19th of August. These delays, however occasioned, forced divers young gentlemen and others to sell their private provisions both of apparel and diet, to the untimely death of many of them….
The first ship we gave chase unto at sea.a…******************** The next day other four ships we took; and found to be Frenchmen ******************** At Lancerok, one of the Canary islands, we put in, desiring only water and some other provisions ************ basely murdered, but at Gomera, after some intercourse of messages, they (seeing our force) gave us free leave to water, for at first they withstood us.
These passages I the rather relate because they put not only myself but many other gentlemen in some small hope that Sir W, R. had a certainty of his project, whereof by his many former delays we made great doubt ********************* *********** at the Grand Canaries a Spanish carvel was taken, her men ******************** Then from these islands we made to the Isles of Cape de Verde, in most of the seamen’s judgments very impertinently: I am sure to the danger of all, and the loss of many men. For by steering such uncertain and unnecessary courses we were so becalmed that above a hundred persons, gentlemen most of them, died between those islands and the continent of Guiana.
In which great mortality I, visiting as many of the sick men in the duty of my ministry as the occasions of the sea would give me leave, heard sad complaints from many sick and dying gentlemen of Sir Walter’s hard usage of them, in denying even those that were large adventurers with him such things upon necessity, of which there was at that time sufficient store. Others of great worth, either by birth or place of employment, of being neglected if not condemned and despised by Sir W.R.: of which number was Captain John Pigott, then our Lieutenant General, who complained to me thereof on his death bed During this time Sir Walter himself, taking a fall in our ship, being bruised, fell into a dangerous fever He desired me to pray for him, spake religiously, and among other things told me that it grieved him more for the gentlemen than for himself, whose estates would be hazarded by his death, yet that he would leave such notes of direction behind him as should be sufficient for them. Which notes, however, I never saw, nor for aught I know any man else in the fleet ever saw.
At Cayenne, in November last, Sir Walter being somewhat recovered, he opened his project for the Mine, which upon the map he demonstrated to be within three or four miles of the town of Sancti Thomae. His conversation at this time made it clear to me that he knew the aforesaid town to be inhabited by the Spaniards, and he remarked oftentimes in my hearing that he cared not whether it had been reinforced or no.
Sir Warham St Leger was now made Lieutenant General. Yet had he gone up to the town, as I heard himself often say, he had not been given any particular directions concerning the Mine But God suddenly visiting him with a violent sickness, George Rawley, then being Sergeant Major, went up Commander-in-cHicf…. Captain Keymis as director for the Mine ********** Sir W.R. with four other ships remaining at Trinidado near the main mouth of the Oronoque ********** ….reason for this remaining I never heard; he spoke much of his fever, but the surgeon made little of it in my company.
We parted with those forces that went in discovery of the Mine about the midst of December, and heard not of them again until the 13th of February following: during which time I very seldom heard Sir Walter speak of any Mine: and when he did, it was with far less confidence than formerly, intermixing new projects, propounding often
the taking of St Joseph’s in Trinidado, expressing the great conceit of wealth that might be there among the Spaniards, and the undoubted great quantity of tobacco ********** by this, and by many other things I heard, his contempt for the lawful Subjects of the King of Spain was made apparent. As for those who were performing his adventure up the river, they were so slightly respected, especially the landmen, that he would often say for the most of them it was no matter whether ever they returned or no, they were good for nothing but to eat his victuals, and were sent to sea on purpose that their friends might be rid of them. And divers times did Sir W.R. propound to go away and leave them, but to which villainous course none other of his Captains remaining would ever agree.
Our companies that went up the river, as by the cHicf gentlemen at their return I was given to understand, arrived near the town of Sancti Thomae the second day of January, where the Captains desired Captain Keymis first to shew them the Mine, which Sir Walter had formerly said to be three or four miles nearer than the town, and that then if the Spaniard withstood them they would vim vi repellere.
This Keymis would by no means yield to, but alleged divers reasons to the contrary; as that if the town were reinforced, he should open then a mine in behalf of the King of Spain, and the like, which not on any terms would he be please to do ***************************************** and in which conflict four or thereabouts of either side were slain, the rest of the Spaniards being forced to quit the town and flee for their lives.
The town being next day their own, and the place as it were in their possession, every man’s expectation looked hourly for the discovery of the Mine. But Captain Keymis minded rather the tobacco, apparel, household stuff, and other pillage; often saying these would help if all else failed. Then one night, so I was told, Keymis himself, accompanied only with his own men, went out privately and brought in some mineral ore which he claimed to have cut. This was shown cheerfully by him to Captain Thornhurst. But being tried by a refiner, it proved worth nothing, and was no more spoken of. Hence it was reliably considered that Keymis himself might be deluded, even by Sir Walter Rawley, both in the ore and the place, and indeed in the very existence of any Mine at all —
