Ralegh is taken to the Gatehouse Prison, originally the gatehouse to Westminster Abbey, now a place to keep the most treacherous of the Crown’s subjects. A lifetime later, another prisoner incarcerated here would write the famous lines that ‘Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage’. A lifetime earlier, Ralegh, imprisoned in the Tower, had written that it was his mind that suffered when he was confined, rather than his ‘body in the walls captived’. In 1592, despair had bolted the doors; he could only speak to dead walls. This time, he is determined to have a voice. He will be heard at the day of his death.
He is visited by the Dean of Westminster, Robert Tounson, who has news for the prisoner. The all-merciful King has issued a royal warrant; Ralegh will be beheaded rather than hung, drawn and quartered. Nobility always received this commutation, gentlemen less often. How lucky he was.
As Dean and prisoner talk, workers are busy providing ‘some fit and convenient place or scaffold’ at the Palace of Westminster, as per the instructions received earlier in the day from the Court of the King’s Bench. Old Palace Yard is chosen for the scaffold, the Yard where Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators had rented a house and begun to tunnel from there to the House of Lords, until they realised it would be easier to hire a cellar under the House itself. Fittingly, in the eyes of the Crown, Old Palace Yard was also where Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators were hung, drawn and quartered. It is less clear why Old Palace Yard is chosen for Ralegh’s execution, although it is just possible that its proximity to St Margaret’s Church (the parliamentarians’ church) is a factor.
The venue for, and means of, death had been decided but during this night there remained much confusion where Ralegh’s body could, or would, be taken once it had been severed from his head. Some believed it would be taken to Exeter Cathedral, to lie with Sir Walter’s parents. Lady Ralegh believed she would have charge of her husband’s body and be able to take it to her brother’s estate in Surrey. Most likely was that Ralegh would be interred in St Margaret’s Church, the shortest of journeys, the safest of destinations; there would be little time or opportunity for trouble.
Sir Walter still has one more evening in this world. He is visited by Bess, from whom he has been separated since late summer. He has recovered his poise and his wit: she is the one who is distressed after years of determined struggle on his behalf:
His Lady had leave to visit him that night, and told him she had obtained the disposing of his body, to which he answered smiling, it is well Bess that thou may dispose of it dead, that had not always the disposing of it when it was alive.
Would she have the disposing of his body? Only time would tell.
Ralegh is determined to speak from the scaffold but knows it is possible this will not be permitted. He knows he has been ‘cut off from speaking somewhat he would have said at the king’s Bench’ earlier in this long, long day. He scribbles a ‘remembrance’, which he leaves with ‘his Lady, written likewise that night, to acquaint the world withal, if perhaps he should not have been suffered to speak at his death’. She finds the ‘remembrance’ in her pocket the next day.
Would he be allowed to speak from the scaffold? Only time would tell.
Ralegh picks up his Bible, the only book left to him, and writes a poem on its flyleaf. His mind is in another place and at another time. The first six lines he writes are taken directly from the closing verse of a poem of courtship and seduction, written in the 1580s, at the height of his success. Then, the lines were the culmination of an exercise in carpe diem-driven wit, celebrating the ‘wantonness and wit’, the soft belly, the hair, breath and lips of the ideal woman. Perhaps, if we are being sentimental, the woman who is with him, now, as darkness falls in the Gatehouse Prison:
Nature, that washed her hands in milk,
And had forgot to dry them,
Instead of earth took snow and silk,
At love’s request to try them,
If she a mistress could compose
To please love’s fancy out of those.
Her eyes he would should be of light,
A violet breath, and lips of jelly;
Her hair not black, nor overbright,
And of the softest down her belly;
As for her inside he’d have it
Only of wantonness and wit.
Ralegh, always drawn to the dark side, even in his courtier heyday, especially in his courtier heyday, reminds the reader that ‘the light, the belly, lips, and breath’ will be dimmed, discoloured and destroyed by time; that wantonness will dry and wit will dull. The poem concludes in melancholy, rather than eroticism:
Oh, cruel time! which takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, and all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust;
Who in the dark and silent grave
When we have wandered all our ways
Shuts up the story of our days.
As time folds in on Ralegh on the night of 28 October 1618, he returns to this closing stanza, written so many years before, changing a word here, a word there but – crucially – rounding it out with a couplet that acknowledges his imminent journey to the grave. His final poem is done:
Even such is time that takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, and all we have
And pays us but with age and dust
Who in the dark and silent grave
When we have wandered all our ways
Shuts up the story of our days.
And from which earth and grave and dust
The Lord shall raise me up I trust.
Are those final two lines an expression, at last, of his private faith, his tentative trust in the Lord God? Are they a veiled critique of the thoroughly legal, but nevertheless cruelly unjust, process that has brought him to this point? Or is Ralegh making a plea that the story of his days will be told, even when he is no longer here to tell it?
He is the poet-courtier to the last. And the explorer and colonialist: even unto death he carries totemic objects from Guiana, a ‘stob’ of gold (possibly given him by Topiawari), a Guiana idol of gold, a ‘plot’ (map) of the river Orinoco. ‘As if possession of these images were to possess Guiana itself’, writes Neil Whitehead, who understands as much as anyone the spell that Ralegh’s journeys to South America cast over him.
It is possible that he wrote a further couple of lines, ‘on the snuff of a candle’:
Cowards fear to die but courage stout
Rather than live in snuff will be put out.
However, as one scholar points out, ‘enough poems have been ascribed to Ralegh on the night before he died to have kept him versifying without pause’. Maybe, as John Chamberlain wrote at the time, he wrote ‘half a dozen verses […] to take his farewell of Poetry wherein he had been a piddler even from his youth’. But maybe he did not, because Ralegh is preoccupied with what he will say, if he has the chance to say it, the next morning. He must prepare himself.
Ralegh, the man whose words have both saved and imperilled his life, brought both favour and scorn, spends his final night seeking the right words. Because he hopes he will have one more chance to speak, he picks up his pen. He knows ‘dying men’s words are ever remarkable, & their last deeds memorable to succeeding posterities, by them to be instructed, what virtues or vices they followed and embraced, and by them to learn to imitate that which was good, and to eschew evil’. So wrote a contemporary, but for Ralegh it was not just a matter of providing a moral lesson, it was his last chance to vindicate himself to the world.
At last, Walter says goodbye to Bess, dismissing her ‘after midnight’. He settles himself ‘to sleep for three or four hours’.
Ralegh is woken long before the dawn.
He is again visited by Dean Robert Tounson, with whom he celebrates communion. The two men talk, Tounson bringing up the vexed subject of the Earl of Essex and ‘how it was generally reported that he [Ralegh] was a great instrument of his death’. Was there no escaping the Earl, even in death? No, for Ralegh had only the day before received ‘many reproachful taunts of the vulgar (taxing him with Essex)’ as he was taken to his arraignment. Ralegh listens to Tounson, remembers the taunts and gathers his wits for one last response to his great rival.
Ralegh is calm, strangely calm, smoking his pipe, insisting that death is simply another journey to be taken. Tounson remembers Ralegh, after receiving communion, is:
Very cheerful and merry, and hoped to persuade the world that he died an innocent man, as he said. Thereat I told him, that he should do well to advise what he said: men in these days did not die in that sort innocent, and his pleading innocency was an oblique taxing of the Justice of the Realm upon him.
It is the clearest indication that if Ralegh had to go, he would not go quietly. He was innocent, and he would proclaim his innocence, even if it meant challenging the justice of the realm.
He has his final breakfast (a ‘dish of fried steaks [and] eggs roasted, and sack burned’) and dresses for his final performance:
His attire was: a wrought Night Cap, a ruff band, a hare-coloured satin doublet, with a black wrought waistcoat under it; a pair of black cut taffeta breeches, a pair of ash-coloured silk stockings, and a wrought black velvet gown.
According to most witnesses, the ‘wrought black velvet gown’ was a nightgown, a fitting garment as Ralegh went to his final rest. Nightgowns could be luxurious, elegant garments: a beauty, a gown of purple silk damask lined with grey silk shag and trimmed with gold braid, survives in the Verney family collection at Claydon House. Ralegh, the man who rode all night to London to make sure he had the black suits to look good for a French delegation, will die wearing the right clothes. Some say he wore a diamond ring given to him by Queen Elizabeth: his loyalty now is to the past.
‘They brought him on foot, surrounded by 60 guards, to the square at Westminster, near the palace, where the scaffold had been erected’, wrote a Spanish diplomat to his King, pleased that this enemy of Spain was at last being brought to account. Spain’s enemy was, however, old, ill and broken by the death of his son. He cannot have needed those sixty armed men to guard him on his last journey, that short walk from the Gatehouse to Old Palace Yard.
It may have been a short walk, but Ralegh nevertheless finds time for one of his characteristic gestures. En route, he gives his nightcap to a bald well-wisher: ‘thou has more need of it now than I’. The memorable one-liners, the gestures of largesse to the ordinary man, continue to the last. In his hand he carries his notes.
The crowds are gathered. Among them are Christopher, the Indian servant of the Governor of San Thome, and Ralegh’s closest, most loyal, friends. Thomas Harriot will take notes as events unfold: his scribbled memorandum survives to this day. Nobles scramble for the best views, crowding around the windows of surrounding buildings.
This is not the plan. It is Lord Mayor’s Day in the City of London; the Crown hopes Ralegh’s death will be buried beneath other news, ‘that the pageants and fine shows might draw away the people from beholding the tragedy’ of the execution. But the execution of Sir Walter Ralegh should not have mattered and should not have been considered a ‘tragedy’. Legally dead for fifteen years, the subject of popular vilification after his arrest in 1603, with no faction of his own and no great family behind him. His death should have been unremarkable.
That it was not is due to Ralegh’s words and actions in the final hour of his life. His performance is the more remarkable given the failures in communication over the previous months, given that Ralegh’s brains were, by his own admission, broken, given that he was desperately ill (suffering shivering fits, probably from malaria) and given that he could barely hold a pen. But he was determined. As he had said the day before: ‘I have something to do in discharge of my conscience, and something to satisfy his Majesty in, something to satisfy the world in, and I desire I may be heard at the day of my death’. The question remained: would he be allowed to speak?
Ralegh approaches the scaffold smiling, sharing jokes with the crowds. Now is his time. He inclines his ‘body with an observant respect’ towards the assembled lords and asks them to come closer, to join him on the scaffold. He ‘reverently saluted, and embraced them’, as ‘if he had met them at some feast’. Ralegh would use these lords for his own purposes. But not yet.
He is allowed to speak. He begins by saying (would there have been irony in his tone?) how ‘indebted’ he was to ‘his Majesty who had permitted him to die in this public place, where he might with freedom disburden himself’. In the event, Ralegh disburdens himself for a full forty-five minutes. That too is not the plan: ‘they had no thanks that suffered him to talk so long on the scaffold, but the fault was laid on the sheriffs and there it rests’. Forty-five minutes later, his large audience had heard an apologia pro vita sua (a defence of his life); a profoundly aggressive, politically charged apologia, and witnessed an unprecedented ‘play of passion’, delivered ‘without appearance of fear or distraction’.
Ralegh made utterly sure that all those present saw him, even if they could not hear him, as the hero of his own execution. Did he weep? Some say he did, but passion now elevates rather than diminishes. Did he shiver? If he did, it was because of illness, not fear. Some of the more dramatic features were inherent in the occasion but Ralegh exploits every opportunity to make the moment more visually memorable. He always had known that sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. In the 1590s, he had shown the indigenous peoples of Guiana images of the cruelties perpetrated by the Spaniards, ‘neatly wrought for the better credit of our workmanship, and their easier understanding’. He would now make it easy for the Westminster crowd to understand his death.
Ralegh uses language both visual and urgent, even, in true dramatic style, drawing attention to the clock’s ticking down. He is come from the dark of the Tower into the light to speak to his audience; he will stand before ‘the tribunal seat of god within this quarter of this hour’. It is no surprise that the audience recorded the speech as drama and judged it in terms of performance. Public executions were ceremonies designed to generate more than simply terror, but what a performance this was turning out to be. One commentator uses the discriminating tone of the theatre critic: ‘His voice and courage never failed him (insomuch that some might think it forced than natural, and somewhat overdone)’. Ralegh’s ‘performance’, both at the arraignment and on the scaffold, is such that even the ‘severest critic could take no just exception either against his countenance or carriage’, argues another. John Chamberlain sums the performance up: ‘In conclusion he spake and behaved himself so, without any show of fear or affectation that he moved much commiseration, and all that saw him confess that his end was omnibus numeris absolutus [perfect in every detail], and as far as man can discern every way perfect’.
Ralegh’s perfect death allows him to acknowledge his sinful life or, more precisely, his immensely rich, active and successful sinful life of service to his country. He asks God to be merciful toward him:
For I have been a great sinner in all kinds and my course of life hath been such as hath been a great inducement unto it. For I have been a soldier, a captain, a sea-captain, and a courtier which is the course to breed in a man all villainy if by grace he be not prevented.
As another witness puts it, Ralegh admits he has spent his life in ‘places of wickedness and vice’; been ‘a man full of all Vanity’. How could he not be, given what he has done? It is a high-risk strategy, but it works. Sir Walter ‘I’ll tell it as it is’ Ralegh has done it again.
What is more, Ralegh’s behaviour on the scaffold serves to validate his claims of political truth-telling, later ruefully acknowledged by ‘Judas’ Stukeley: ‘they say he died like a Soldier & a Saint, & therefore then to be believed, not only against me, but against the attestation of the State’. Make no mistake, to the very last, Ralegh is making a political point.
His first challenge to the ‘attestation’ of the state was his insistence that death will free him from being a subject, thus permitting him freedom of speech: ‘I come not hither either to fear or flatter kings. I am now the subject of Death, and the great God of Heaven is my sovereign before whose tribunal I am shortly to appear’. He can now ‘speak freely and to the discharge of mine own conscience’. It’s radical stuff: ‘Now what have I to do with kings; I have nothing to do with them, neither do I fear them; I have only now to do with my God, in whose presence I stand, therefore to tell a lie, were it to gain the king’s favour, were vain’.
As he had said at his arraignment, he was looking forward to his execution because, on the scaffold, he could speak out ‘where I shall not fear the face of any King on earth’. In 1603, he had argued that if the law destroyed him, he would be out of the reach of the King’s power and would have ‘none to fear, none to reverence, but the king of kings’. These are inflammatory words in a world in which the doctrine of the divine right of Kings was even used to justify tyranny.
Ralegh challenges another ‘attestation’ of the state: his guilt. Nowhere in his speech does Ralegh admit to having committed the crimes of which he is accused. Even more shockingly, nowhere does he praise the King. The claim of innocence was in itself seditious, flying in the face of the usual form of ‘last speeches’, which followed the pattern of a confession of crimes (temporal matters), a profession of faith (spiritual matters) and closed with laudatory comments about the monarch. Tounson had warned him earlier that to plead his innocence ‘was an oblique taxing of the Justice of the Realm upon him’. As both men knew, Essex had done precisely the opposite, following the accepted format to the letter, acknowledging the justice of his execution, recognising the depth of his sin and begging for forgiveness from his divinely-appointed Queen. The closest Ralegh got to the pattern was forgiving his enemies and traducers but, as Nicholls and Williams say, that was ‘common form and he did not necessarily mean what he said’.
Ralegh gives his own account of the Guiana voyage and its aftermath, invoking a vanished era of political honour to endorse his version of events. He had no ulterior motive in going to Guiana. He had not plotted with France nor ever considered seeking refuge there. He was, he admits, duped by Manourie, a ‘runnagate Frenchman’, because the runnagate had shown interest in Ralegh’s chemical experiments and had a ‘merry wit’.
He admits he faked illness at Salisbury, because ‘I had advertisement from above that it would go hard with me; I desired to save my life’. In this, he has the nerve to compare himself to the ‘prophet David’ who ‘did make himself a fool, and did suffer spittle to fall upon his beard to escape the hands of his enemies, and it was not imputed to him as a sin’. The message is simple: Ralegh may have been foolish, but he is not evil. He is stretching the truth, if not downright lying, especially about his dealings with France and his plans for escape. But, on the scaffold, as the minutes pass, he is utterly convincing.
Ralegh brings in one of the lords that he has called down from the window to be closer to the scaffold. He recounts a conversation with the Earl of Arundel, just before he set off for Guiana:
Then said his Lordship, give me your hand as you are a Gentleman, whether you speed well or ill in your voyage, to return again into England. I gave his Lordship my hand; and promised to do so, God willing, whatsoever fortune befell me.
Ralegh is delighted that Arundel is present and able to corroborate this anecdote: ‘I am very glad that my Lord is here present to satisfy whether this be true or no’. Arundel did just that, saying, ‘It is true’ and ‘I do very well remember it’, even taking off his hat, for this is a serious moment. The exchange, orchestrated by Ralegh, fixes in the crowd’s mind that Sir Walter’s word was indeed his bond; that he was a man of honour. Ralegh appeals to Arundel again before the end of his forty-five minutes, to ask him ‘to desire the king, that no scandalous writing to defame him might be published after his death’, and ‘that those things I have written be not destroyed when I am gone’. This was wise: the war over his reputation was just beginning. Ralegh was winning this battle.
There were those who believed they saw through the rhetoric, to the real Ralegh. ‘Judas’ Stukeley was one. Ralegh was truly ‘an Angel of darkness’, who put on himself ‘the shape of an Angel of light at his departure, to perform two Parts most cunningly; First, to poison the hearts of discontented people; Secondly to blemish me in my good name, a poor instrument of the just desires of the State, with false imputations’. No one listened.
Ralegh saves the best until last. All accounts of the speech record that the ‘last point’ is a statement of his innocence towards the Earl of Essex. He has listened to the heckles from the public, listened to Robert Tounson, knows only too well that he has been accused of desiring ‘to feed his eyes with a sight of the earl’s sufferings, and to satiate his hatred with his blood’. Now he asks for, and is permitted by the Sheriff, extra time to speak about this matter ‘unto the people’. He expresses both outrage (‘What barbarism were it in any man to laugh and be merry at the death of any Christian!’) and sincere feeling (‘I loved the Earl of Essex so well…’), then tackles, with disarming candour (honest Ralegh, yet again) the specific charges: that he grinned at the Earl’s execution and, worse, took tobacco. ‘There was a report spread, that I should rejoice at the death of my Lord of Essex, and that I should take Tobacco in his presence, when I protest I shed Tears at his Death, though I was of the contrary faction.’
The truth of the matter, or the truth that Ralegh reveals in his final minutes on earth, was that Essex had wanted to be reconciled with Sir Walter at the last. Unfortunately (and in a strategic reminder of just how important Sir Walter had once been), he had his duties as Captain of the Guard; he had to remain in the armoury at the Tower of London. He may have been Essex’s rival ‘but I wished not his death, for I knew when he was gone, I should not be so much accounted of’. He knew that ‘it would be worse with me when he was gone, for those that set up me against him, did afterwards set themselves against me’. Ralegh cannot resist a final swipe against Robert Cecil. It is a striking example of Ralegh’s straight-talking wit, his understanding that his very rivalry with Essex at least made him visible at court. The popular impression of a bitter antagonism between the two men is replaced by an impression of a cynical, but not vicious, political relationship. All talk of filthy water, cuckoos and parrots is forgotten. The way is cleared for the popular linking of Essex and Ralegh as twin symbols of the greatness that was Elizabeth’s reign.
Ralegh has made his last point.
The Sheriff, kindly, thinks Ralegh might be cold, for he has talked for so long. He asks him to come to warm himself by the fire since he would be ‘more able to endure what you are going about’. Ralegh rejects the offer: his ‘fit’ will come upon him in a few minutes and they had better get on with it.
First, he must pray. For a full fifteen minutes. Ralegh has taken God as his witness again and again in his speech but now he embraces the gathered lords and friends, moves from one side of the scaffold to the other to request the public to pray with him and for him, ‘to assist him and strengthen him’ and finally, kneels on the platform with his friends, in prayer. It goes without saying that he prays in ‘an audible voice’.
These fifteen minutes do their work. In the final act of leading the crowd in prayer ‘the hated atheist became their priest’, writes Chamberlain, while others were astonished, but utterly convinced, that Ralegh ‘died a true Christian and a protestant’. And this, even though to the last Ralegh ‘spake not one word of Christ’ but only of ‘the great and uncomprehensible God, with much zeal and adoration’. One observer concluded he ‘was an a-christ, not an atheist’. People had always wondered about Ralegh’s religious beliefs, been disturbed by his dangerously questioning mind. So it was this chilly morning in Old Palace Yard.
The Sheriff clears the scaffold but not before the condemned man uses ‘courtly compliments of discourse’ with the lords and his friends, not before he throws his hat to an acquaintance, gives his stitched cap (how many hats is he wearing?) to ‘Mr Smith’ (probably Robert Smith, his servant in the Tower) and hands his purse to an old man who stands by him on the scaffold.
Ralegh takes off his hare-coloured satin doublet and wrought black velvet nightgown. He asks to see the axe. He ‘feels the edge, and finding it sharp for his purpose, this is that, saith he, that will cure all sorrows, and so kissing it, laid it down again’. Or, as another remembers, he tests the edge of the blade and says: ‘here was a sharp medicine…a physician for all diseases’. The precise words don’t matter. What matters is the effect of such wit and insouciance in the face of death.
The executioner, the very embodiment of state justice, struggles: ‘the fellow was much daunted (as it seemed to me) at his resolution and courage, in so much that Sir Walter Ralegh clapped him on his back diverse times; and cheered him up’. To comfort your executioner suggests an extraordinary degree of self-control but reveals the extent to which Ralegh was master of his final performance.
He refuses a blindfold. He will look death in the eye. He has no fear of the axe and will not tremble at its shadow:
Then he began to fit himself for the block, without permitting any help and first laid himself down to try how the block fitted him. After rising up, the executioner kneeled down, and desired him to forgive him, which, with an embrace, he professed he did; but intreated him not to strike till he gave a token, by lifting up his hand; and then fear not, saith he, but strike home. So he laid himself down to receive the stroke, and the hangman directed him to lay his face towards the east. No matter how the head lie, answered he, so the heart be right. After he had lain a little while upon the block, conceiving some prayers to himself, he gave the watchword.
The aphorism ‘no matter how the head lie, so the heart be right’, is the stuff of heroic legend, and echoes through almost all the accounts of Ralegh’s last moments. Just as significant was the control he was able to exercise over the timing of his death. This mattered in popular belief, as opposed to orthodox theology, which insisted that even the most perfect death should not redeem a sinful life. For many people, however, this conclusion was too pessimistic. A person’s behaviour in their ‘final moment’ mattered and might be the difference between salvation and damnation: ‘the end sheweth the life’ and ‘the last act carryeth away the applause’. Ironically, therefore, execution was preferable to sudden death by other causes, since the victim could determine the moment of death. The executioner waits for a sign, ‘a token’, before striking. Ralegh is in control to the last.
One manuscript tells a different story. It makes painful reading, painting a far less heroic, a far less controlled, picture. It shows an old man wilfully shutting out the sight of his impending death, crawling around on his knees, his clothes ripped from his back by an oblivious executioner. This witness records Ralegh holding up his hands in devotion, with his eyes to heaven. He then ‘kneeled down upon the Executioner’s block, being spread of purpose, and, grovelling along on his arms and hands’, he attempted ‘to reach his neck to the block’. At the last, he pulled his nightcap over his eyes and tugged at the executioner’s breeches in an effort to communicate, to give the crucial signal. The executioner was ‘busied a-ripping the shirt and waistcoat with a knife, that he might more conveniently bring the axe to his neck’ and did not even notice the tug, bringing the axe ‘conveniently’ to the neck twice, in his own time.
It is easier to read the far more widespread account of Ralegh’s final seconds. Unflinching, he lies himself on the block and waits for the strike. It does not come. Has the executioner not heard? Ralegh takes command:
‘What do you fear?’
‘Strike, man.’
Two blows of the axe.
Ralegh did not shrink or move. It was over.