The weather is terrible: ‘a fouler day could hardly have been picked out, or fitter for such a tragedy’, writes Dudley Carleton to his fellow news-gatherer, John Chamberlain.
Sir Griffin Markham is the first conspirator to be brought to the scaffold, walking past the slowly rotting quarters and severed heads of the priests who had received the Crown’s justice days earlier. There is a commotion in the crowd. John Gib, a Groom of the King’s Bedchamber, is struggling to get the Sheriff’s attention. At last he succeeds, the Sheriff stepping down to ‘secretly’ confer with Gib while Markham awaits his death. The Sheriff climbs back up on to the scaffold but only to tell Markham that he is ‘so ill prepared’ in a spiritual sense that it has been decided by the King that he can have ‘two hours’ respite’. Markham is taken away and ‘locked’ into ‘the great hall to walk with Prince Arthur’.
Now it is the turn of Thomas Grey, 15th Baron Grey de Wilton. He approaches the scaffold surrounded by his friends, with ‘such gaiety and cheer in his countenance’ that he seems like a ‘dapper young bridegroom’. His hot Protestant faith sustains Grey to the last but his fervent, zealous prayers test the patience of the crowd, keeping them standing in the rain for half an hour. Too long on such a filthy day. They are here for an execution, not a prayer meeting.
Grey is hardly spiritually ‘ill prepared’ but the Sheriff again intervenes, saying he has ‘received orders from the king to change the order of execution and that the Lord Cobham was to go before’ Grey. The crowd becomes restless, as a second conspirator is led away to Prince Arthur’s Hall.
Lord Cobham is then brought to the scaffold, only to be joined by the other two men. What was happening? All three men together ‘looked strange one upon the other, like men beheaded, and met again in the other world’. Dudley Carleton views the day as theatre, every move ‘part of the same play’. If it is theatre, this is a drama written and directed by King James, and he has given his Sheriff the script. A ‘short speech’ is read to the three men, informing them just how appalling their offences have been, how lawful their condemnation was and spelling out what is to happen: their imminent deaths. The three men, broken, assent to every word.
James delivers his final plot twist. The Sheriff pronounces: ‘see the mercy of your prince, who of himself hath sent a countermand and given you your lives’. The King has changed his mind. The three men will live. The crowd go wild, ‘such hues and cries that it went down from the castle into the town and there began afresh, as if there had been some such like accident’.
What of Sir Walter? He was watching every moment of the drama unfold, because he ‘had a window opened that way’. He had (Carleton again) ‘hammers working in his head to beat out the meaning of this stratagem’, knowing that his ‘turn was to come on Monday next’.
His turn did not come, for he finds, after an agonising interval, that ‘the king had pardoned him with the rest, and confined him with the two lords to the Tower of London, there to remain during his pleasure’. His body would be spared but he remained attaindered. He was, and remained, a traitor. Sir Walter Ralegh, the man, was declared legally dead.