Death of the Fox

by George Garrett

  Perhaps, to the King, this was the greater punishment, to be so placed and preserved as to be tormented, not by common darkness and discomfort, but by a keen awareness of the life he must soon lose.

  In time the aims of the King came clearer to him. And there was time to see much of it, to hear news of what he could not see, to weigh and to think it through.

  Before any action, death or mercy, all of those in the alleged plots against the King, joined together, though separately named as the Main and the Bye Plots, must be tried. The two English Catholic priests, of whom Ralegh knew nothing, had already been tried and convicted. They suffered and waited elsewhere. Likely in chains in the deep dungeon. There were more to be tried before any blood or pardon was possible. Which left time to think on his condition. Time, like a wild bird in a cage, to wear himself into a stony despair. Time, like the thrashing of wings against a cage, to write letters, to seek to rally support and petitions to save his skin, if not his soul. Time to write more than once, if only for the sake of his wife and son, pleading for the King’s mercy.

  Very well, if that was the stratagem of the King, Ralegh would not resist it. If the King desired to break his pride, to see him humbled, he would give the King that pleasure, taking on humility by free choice. As a man might don a cloak against the weather. Live or die, he could satisfy the King’s desires in such a way that there would be no satisfaction.

  Immediately he wrote to the King, pleading for his life, yet asking, if he must die, to die last. Embracing the King’s stratagem blindly. Back came the answer. His request to die last was granted. And he knew he had surmised the King’s purposes with some truth. Better, by craft he had made a change. He was no longer a pawn or a knight, but now a player, hard-pressed, but still free to move and to counter the moves of his opponent.

  And meantime the two were equal and together in one thing. For the present both could only watch and wait upon events. King and condemned culprit must wait upon the other trials, one by one.

  The King must have been disappointed at how things had turned against him at Ralegh’s trial. But that was done with and the King would not cry like a country milkmaid over the spilling of one pail of milk.

  Perhaps the trial of Cobham could restore some order. Henry Brooke, Earl of Cobham, Warden of the Cinque Ports by proud inheritance. A foolish, vain, fearful, extravagant man, a man of quick tongue and slow wit, true. But Cobham would want to save his life above all things. He must know that his best hope was to please the King by repairing the damage of Ralegh’s trial.

  But Cobham feared for his life too much to see things clear or to contain himself. He was abject, trembling, sniveling. He mumbled, he wept, he blamed Ralegh for everything. And so he was doubted and scorned as a fool.

  So much for the Main Plot of Ralegh and Cobham.

  Next came Lord Grey de Wilton, charged with the Bye. With the priests already tried and convicted, Lord Grey’s trial was certain to be swift and simple. Lord Grey was a young man and likely to value his life more dearly than even Cobham. Lord Grey was proud. He would value his good name as much as his life.

  Value life and good name he did, but, alas for the King’s design, he did so as only the young can. Without one least concession or hint of compromise. At his trial Lord Grey showed high spirits, energy, pride, and condescension. He fought back, fruitlessly to be sure, but point by point and without discrimination among large and small. The trial lasted more than twelve hours, wore on into evening and the lighting of torches in the hall.

  The last of the public trials ended with dull yawns and the murmur of empty stomachs.

  The effect of both these trials was to strengthen Ralegh. If Cobham defined one extreme, cowardice, then Lord Grey’s bravado was the other—rashness. The mean they defined, exemplary of true courage, became Ralegh.

  A slight setback for the King. The trials had failed to achieve their purpose. But now events returned to the hands of the King. His moves and no others to interfere. He could demonstrate the power of justice or mercy or both.

  The King had given much thought to the exercise of justice and mercy, and he had published his thoughts some years before in Basilikon Doron, a book on the subject of kingship addressed to his heir, Prince Henry. Addressed to Henry and to his Scots kingdom, but published, most likely, to speak to the English as well, to prove himself worthy of the English crown long before it was to be given to him. He spoke out for stern and strict justice against certain crimes—“horrible crimes you are bound in conscience never to forgive, such as witchcraft, willful murder, incest (especially within the degrees of consanguinity), sodomy, poisoning, and false witness.” No mercy possible in such cases, but his ideal king possessed great freedom in dealing with any crimes directed against himself: “As for offenses against your own person and authority, since the fault concerns yourself, I remit to your choice to punish or to pardon therein as your heart serves you and according to the circumstances and the quality of the committer.”

  This King was said to be, by nature, a merciful man, generous and gentle. In the execution of the sentences at Winchester was his first occasion to show his nature to his subjects. Likely he would show mercy to some. Just as likely some must die. For the example of kingly mercy to be efficacious, there must be contrast, some fear and trembling. For mercy to have meaning there must be an example of rigor.

  The certain victims were the lesser fry in the net. The two priests, Clarke and Watson, dim-witted and unimportant, would have to die.

  Watson was crazed and cracked by the ordeal. Suffering had left him lunatic. Watson was an awkward man, ridiculously short and ridiculous for his odd blinking, squinting eyes. It had been bruited about, and he had shown the folly of asserting it at his trial, that he had served as an agent for the King and that he had obtained certain promises, notably a promise to be more gentle with loyal English Catholics and to cease inflicting upon them the burden of recusancy fines. Possibly so, but for a king to limit his freedom by adherence to private assurances given to persons of no consequence, would be to be no king at all. Moreover, had the King found it practical and politic to keep those promises, he could not have done so. The Spanish Jesuits were clear. They wanted Watson dead.

  So the execution of two priests served divers purposes. A demonstration of justice. A warning to discontented English Catholics not to depend upon the King for succor and, by the same token, against the futility of attempting mischief against him. A bone to the Jesuits, yet a bone they could share with the English Protestants and even with those who so feared and hated Spain that they conceived all Catholics to be of the Spanish faction. Finally, by paradox, having shown himself rigorous against Catholic discontent, the King gained freedom to be more lenient with them in the future, without apology, when and if he chose to be so.

  The King underestimated the capacity of the English to follow the trail of his motives. And he did not know them well enough to imagine a singular paradox of the English character.

  On a clear cold day Ralegh stood at the tower window and watched the priests dance the dance of empty air and bleed on the butcher’s block. They died courageously, but in horrid agony as, for once, that full sentence was executed to the letter.

  At whose command?

  Traditionally English executioners did all their busy work of disemboweling, castrating, and quartering upon the bodies of dead men. The stunned crowd did not cry out. The victims behaved with neither unseemly arrogance nor cowardice. Surely the executioners acted upon instructions.

  The priests died and their grimacing heads, frozen in pain, were stuck upon poles above the tower. The quarters of their flesh hung over Winchester’s gates. Sides of raw meat. As if ancient Winchester were a butcher’s stall.

  The King had not learned that the English, for all the bombast and blood of their plays, for all their bloody sports and pastimes, are not so bloody-minded as to be either frightened or pleased by cruel executions.

  Next came George Brooke, brother
of Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham. Since he was the brother-in-law of Robert Cecil, he was to be spared the pains of hanging, drawing, and quartering. He was to be beheaded. But before he died he won over the crowd with his courage, and he had left the truth of the Bye conspiracy veiled in doubts.

  “There is something still hidden in all this!” he cried out. “And it will appear one day for my justification.”

  Did he die for what he knew or what he had done?

  According to the ancient tradition of heading, the executioner gripped the severed head tight by the hair and held it up for the crowd to see.

  “God save King James!”

  Only one voice, the sheriff’s, echoed him. The throng stood silent and staring.

  After that there were four men left to die—Cobham, Lord Grey, one Markham, a soldier, and Ralegh. Three would die on the same morning. Ralegh must see their fate settled, too, before his own would be resolved.

  The morning for the three was dark and cold. The yard and the scaffold were rain-swept, blown by wet wind. Yet, foul weather or no, there was a press of people. Drenched, hooded, and mantled, staring toward the scaffold. Guards, cloaked, rain glistening in beads on their ridged helmets, clinging to the points and edges of their partizans. The hangman and his helpers had hung the ropes, each noose an idiot’s yawn, and propped up the ladders. They had their covered kettles of steaming water, baskets stuffed with wet straw. The thick wood block lay stained, clean, and rain-slick. Sharp knife for the butcher’s work of drawing, short-handled, heavy-bladed ax for quartering, were nearby, handy.

  First from the castle into the yard came Sir Griffin Markham, soldier, friend and companion to the dead priests, a principal of the Bye Plot. Black of hair and beard, broad of face, his great nose broken in a struggle somewhere. If not in skirmish or battle, then in a tavern brawl. His left arm withered, the hand a claw, from wounds. He aroused interest, for malcontent and villain or no, in his lonely, bitter, battered toughness he was of a type from the last age.

  But now, led or pushed toward the scaffold, he was clumsy, stumbled-footed, dazed. Shocked not so much by fear, as ambushed without warning.

  It was believed that he did not dissemble, lacking the talent for subtlety. No, someone, upon authority, had told him he would not die. And he, upon good reason, had believed it.

  At the scaffold he protested, pleading he had not prepared himself for death. Nevertheless he was forced to mount the scaffold. Once he stood there, he could draw upon a soldier’s shrug of courage. Could compose his body, turn his face to stone. He bade farewell to his friends and began to say his prayers.

  As he said his prayers, the sheriff of Hampshire, Sir Benjamin Tichbourne, suddenly left the scaffold. He pushed through the crowd to speak to a young man at the far edge. This was John Gibb, groom of the King’s bedchamber. Who had come late and, unable to push through the crowd, had been shouting into the wind and rain, trying to gain the attention of the sheriff.

  After a time the sheriff returned and, without explanation, motioned to the guards. Markham was removed from the scaffold and marched across the yard to the hall.

  He was told he had two hours to meditate and to prepare himself for death.

  Next came young Lord Grey. Came forward in the same manner as he had stood trial. Came to the scaffold as to some diverting occasion. Surrounded by friends, blithe, apparently fearless.

  But he reacted with surprise when he saw no sign of Markham’s death. All three ropes in place. And even though it was the practice of executioners, particularly for the execution of a gentleman, to sluice scaffold and chopping block, to wipe the blades of knife and ax, and to replace fouled straw with fresh, still, no amount of care could disguise all the signs.

  As soon as he stood on the scaffold, looked from the ropes to the wet straw at his feet, Grey knew Markham was still alive. But he could not know what his fate might be. And could not, out of honor, permit himself the luxury of hope. Therefore, he, too, said farewell to his friends. And, indifferent to how it might be taken, he knelt to say his prayers.

  When he was finished and rose and stood ready, the sheriff ordered him removed and placed in the hall with Markham.

  As Lord Grey de Wilton, still fastidious and arrogant, though unsmiling, descends the rude steps of the scaffold, step by step, a murmuring of voices runs through the crowd, the sound rising to Ralegh at the window. Hooded faces, blurred by rain, follow the guards and the ambling stiff-necked progress of Lord Grey toward the hall. As he vanishes within, one and another of those faces glances to the top of the tower and its three rotting heads. A glance becomes a stare. One points and says something aloud. Continues to point as more and more look up into the rain. More looking and the murmuring noise of voices rising to him in scraps, like pieces of a torn book, scraps of paper blowing, until even the executioners pause to look, too, and the sheriff, upon the scaffold, clamps one hand on the brim of his hat to hold it against the wind and tilts his head to see also.

  They are looking at Ralegh. His room is lit with fat-dipped rushes and a fire. He needs no cover but his loose white shirt. Can picture how he appears to them, framed by the window, lit from the flames of his cell, high, small, white-shirted, and white-faced, a figure of fire and ice against the wet stone of the tower, whose crenellations, whose eyeless skulls on pikes seem the axle for the windy turning of a sky full of bruised clouds.

  He returns their stare, motionless, except for a wide gritting of teeth. Which at that distance and in that light will be taken for a smile. Is taken so, for some wave their hands, a few doff caps. A woman calls out something he cannot hear.

  It may be the King hopes yet for some gesture of public confession from Ralegh to save his life.

  He gives them nothing except a show of teeth.

  And here comes Lord Cobham, some measure of lost courage restored. He carries himself like a born nobleman, not the man who wept and implored pity at his trial.

  The crowd turns attention to him. Ralegh draws and spends a deep breath and observes Cobham, old friend and new mortal enemy, relieved to be again unobserved.

  They, as he, watch Cobham close and in silence. They note, even as he does, that not once does Cobham break stride or look up to the scaffold.

  Does not every condemned man, as if by a habit beyond control, look first to the destination, the place where he must die? Even Lord Grey, in his swagger, kept looking toward the scaffold.

  Cobham mounts the scaffold and notices nothing amiss. It seems … Reacts to nothing, if he sees the three empty nooses, clean straw, blades, block, and boards, the spotless executioners. Nods to the sheriff and turns, head high, to face the silent crowd. Begins to say his piece in a resonant calm voice.

  For the first time Ralegh hears patches of words.

  Loud and clear, not a catch in his throat or tremor of tongue, Cobham reaffirms Ralegh’s chief part in the Main Plot, naming him author and architect of it all.

  No halting pauses, no slips of tongue. It is a speech by rote. Is it also a speech by command?

  Others already asking the same question. For the quiet of the crowd is broken by murmuring again. Where they stood still there is much shifting and moving. Unruffled, Cobham raises his voice to be heard.

  True or false, not many there will ever be able to believe in such a remarkable transformation from effeminate cowardice to Roman courage.

  Cobham finishes his speech, makes brief farewells to a few friends and kin on the scaffold. Then bows his head to pray.

  Sheriff Tichbourne halts his devotions before they have begun. Signals for silence from all the crowd. Cups his hands and calls to the yeomen guarding the entrance to the hall.

  “Bring the prisoners forth to the scaffold!”

  Cobham replaces his hat to keep dry in the rain and stands waiting beside the sheriff, grave-faced, but at ease. He says nothing to the sheriff, not even asking what this may mean or why his prayers have been interrupted.

  The other two, each clearly baffled
now, mount the scaffold and are placed to stand beside Cobham.

  Now there is quiet in the press of people. The falling raindrops, splashing on the scaffold and the stones of the castle yard, sluicing down the walls in rivulets, are abruptly loud. But the sheriff has voice enough for his duty, though it has become a player’s part to be recited.

  Each of the three is asked to acknowledge the justice of his sentence. Markham nods, nervous; Lord Grey says something brief, inaudible but apparently affirmative; Cobham’s voice is equal to the sheriff’s as he acknowledges the perfect justice of the King.

  Then, brisk as a bishop at prayer, the sheriff announces the mercy of the King. Their lives shall be spared. He nods and the guards quickly lead them back to the castle buildings, each to his separate cell.

  Silent still—no cheers for the mercy of their monarch—the crowd turns away, breaks apart. Quickly, as if seizing upon the double-quick rhythm of the yeomen and the sheriff’s men—or is it because the rain is falling harder than before?—they disperse. And only one or two pause long enough to look again through swimming air for the man in a fiery tower window. They glance and are gone, too.

  He remains there, seeing it all to the end, observing the hasty departure of the hangman and his crew. They pour away boiling water, cram the stuff of death and the wet, unbloodied straw into sacks and chests. And last climb the ladders, set against the crossbeam for the culprits to climb to hang, untying the three ropes and stuffing them away too. While his assistants bring up the heavy, high-wheeled cart and pack it, the hangman surveys the scaffold, the empty yard, then, just as he leaves the scaffold, looks to Walter Ralegh, waves a wide hand and, unmistakably, grins.

  The hangman takes up the reins, cracks his whip, and the cart rattles out of the castle gate.

  The lone man at the window stares at nothing.…

  Except perhaps Cobham—how else to explain his pompous confidence?—the King must have told no one of his intended gesture of mercy. He kept strict counsel. And the fate of the three men rested wholly upon the King’s groom, who was almost too late.