He laughed mirthlessly. ‘No. It was enough to gather me in and hold me while they found better, no more. They have better grounds now, and in part, of my own providing. Did I not say I botched all that I set my hand to?’
‘What — do you mean?’
‘Like a fool, I denied all knowledge of the plots at my first examination. I was bewildered, taken by storm, I had had no time to think. Then later, having thought a little, I saw the danger of that, since every soul about the Court knew Cobham to be hatching something with Arenburg, and I wrote to Cecil and told him that I had heard something, but had given no heed to it, thinking it — as I told you — mere vapouring; also that I had from time to time known Cobham to visit a man called La Renzi, an agent of Arenburg’s. That told him nothing he did not know already, but I hoped that it might serve to cover my blunder.’ His voice strained hoarsely for a moment. ‘Cecil took my letter to Cobham. He managed the affair most cleverly — so that my Lord Cobham, conceiving that I sought to save my skin at the cost of his, lost all head he ever had, and denounced me as having been not only aware of every detail, but the ringleader of the whole affair.’
‘Cecil,’ Bess said dully, and her mouth felt dry.
‘Aye, Cecil. You were right, you see, Bess,’ Ralegh said. He turned his face into her shoulder. ‘Mine own familiar friend.’
Presently he began to talk again, quietly and intently. Having failed in his attempt to kill himself, he seemed to have put away all thought of a quick way out; his courage had returned to him, and he began giving Bess her directions for the things that she must do, the people who she must apply to for help, to save what could be saved out of the wreck for herself and the child. And Bess listened and tried to remember, since that was the only thing she could do for him now.
He was very collected, with a kind of brittle calm, planning for the future in which he would have no part. ‘Bess, when all this is over, you must not hide over long from the world. You are too warm and sweet for the dark. One day you must marry again.’ Then at her passionate gesture of denial. ‘Ah, but indeed you must, for the Imp’s sake and your own. Marry for security, when that time comes, Bess. Marry for comfort and position — for companionship if you will. Only do not love him.’ Suddenly his calm was swept away, and his arms were round her, straining her to him until she was terrified that he would re-open the wound; and his words came hot with an aching .urgency. ‘Don’t love him, My Heart, not as you love me — and I will not lie torn with jealousy in my grave.’
Chapter 14 - The Verdict
KING’S BENCH kept their next term at Winchester, for the plague was raging in London. And so it was in the Great Hall of Wolvesey Castle, that on November 17th, Elizabeth’s Accession Day, the last of her Round Table stood his trial for treason.
The solemn medieval hall was already packed like a popular bear-garden, and enterprising onlookers had climbed on to the stone seats of the windows and the bases of the pillars for a better view of the proceedings on and below the dais at the Western end. And a woman in a dark cloak had come out from the private doorway into the gallery that spanned the East end of the hall, and stood unnoticed in the shadows, gazing, like all those others, down the crowded length of the hall towards the dais.
There, under a brocade canopy, sat the mountainous Lord Chief Justice, Sir John Popham; and with him the Special Commissioners, and the three judges. There too, was Sir Edward Coke the Attorney General, who was to conduct the trial.
The woman in the dark cloak turned her eyes with an aching intensity from one face to another, as though in search of some shred of hope. Popham, who had begun his career as a cut-purse; Henry Howard; Waad, who was Cecil’s creature — but they were nearly all Cecil’s creatures; Cecil himself. No, there was no hope to be had from such a Court. Her strained gaze turned from them to the figure of the prisoner, who had just been brought in.
He seemed as unaware of all the greedy and curious eyes fixed upon him now, as he had lately been of the crowds that had milled around him and his guards in the streets of London and Winchester, clearly considering it a suitable moment to avenge their lost darling by the murder of the man they still held responsible for his death. A hostile crowd in the streets, a hostile crowd in the Court; whispering, pointing, come to see the best hated man in England condemned to a traitor’s death. Their hostility seemed powerless to touch him, but the woman standing in the shadowed gallery felt it beating up to her in dark engulfing waves.
Ralegh did not know that she was in the hall; it was better that way. She should not have been there, she knew; but nothing that anyone could say had had power to hold her back. So here she stood, with Mary Herbert’s young William — now the Earl of Pembroke — close behind her for escort. Lawrence Kemys would have been with her, but he was in the Tower himself. Dear, dependable Lawrence Kemys, who had dared the rack to get messages from Ralegh to Cobham, bidding him, since two prosecution witnesses were needful in a treason case, to deny his whole confession and abide by the denial, if he would save himself as well as the man he had falsely accused. Cobham had pulled himself together and retracted his confession, she knew; but could that have any value in such a Court?
She realised that the proclamation for silence was being made; and struggled to focus her swerving and distraught mind as the trial began.
‘Sir Walter Ralegh, hold up your right hand.’
She saw Ralegh’s hand go up, and she tried feverishly to understand, as the Clerk of the Court rose to read the indictment. ‘Conspiracy to deprive the King of his government,’ she heard. ‘To raise up sedition within the realm, to bring in the Romish Superstition, to aid Foreign enemies to invade the Kingdom.’ The words ran round senselessly in her head, and she could force no sense from them. Walter had done none of these things; Walter, of all men; they must know that, these men with their scarlet robes and raptor faces. The Clerk was still reading: how that on July 9th Ralegh and Cobham had met and laid plans to bring Arabella Stuart to the throne, and for Cobham to apply to Arenburg for a hundred and fifty thousand pounds to finance the treason. How, when it occurred to them that Arenburg’s Master could not even pay his own troops in the Netherlands, they had determined to apply to King Philip III. The end of the indictment was reached at last, and the Clerk looked up. ‘Sir Walter Ralegh, do you plead guilty, or not guilty, to the charges?’
‘Not guilty,’ Ralegh said.
The Clerk sat down, and in his place Sergeant Heale rose to open the case for the Crown. And then somehow it was not Sergeant Heale but Sir Edward Coke; hard and handsome and horribly formidable, fingering his furred gown. And instantly the trial, which until that moment had been a mere inanimate form of word and movement, leapt to life and became a duel. The Attorney General was renowned for the brutality of his methods, and the onlookers, who had been growing restive, drew their breaths in pleasurable expectancy, feasting their eyes and their lust for sensation on the two men who stood before them more like equally matched antagonists than accuser and accused. But there was to be no equality in this duel, for Ralegh was to fight for his life virtually weaponless, without legal advice, without the power to call and question witnesses. The mob had not yet realised that.
Coke, following his usual method, plunged straightaway into a vitriolic attack upon the monstrous wickedness of one who could plot treason against so good a King as he who now sat upon the throne of England. Ralegh cut into the flow of words presently, on a quick note of challenge. ‘Mr. Attorney, your words cannot condemn me, my innocence is my defence. Prove one of these things wherewith you have charged me, and I will confess the whole indictment.’
Interrupted in his harangue, Coke seemed to swell, his handsome face mottling with the rage into which he was deliberately lashing himself. ‘Nay, but I shall prove them all! Before this trial is brought to an end, we shall prove you, Sir Walter Ralegh, to have set yourself at the head of this most infamous plot, with Lord Cobham’s aid, to deliver this country into the hands of Spain. You mon
ster with an English face but a Spanish heart!’
‘I have neither set myself at the head of such a plot, nor had any part in it.’ Usually Ralegh had some difficulty in making himself heard at a distance, but today, although he did not raise his voice, every word had a chiselled clarity that reached to the farthest end of the hall, even to the gallery, where his wife stood listening. ‘If, as you say — though for myself I know nothing of it — My Lord Cobham is a traitor, what is that to me?’
Coke’s head was low between his shoulders, thrust forward and menacing in the way that had cowed so many in his time. He looked as though he could barely keep his hands off the quiet figure at the bar. ‘All that he did was by thy instigation, thou viper! And so we shall shortly prove!’ He sat down and leaned back, breathing quickly, and beginning again to finger the fur of his gown. And the Judges and Commissioners glanced at each other, nodding.
The Clerk rose again, to read Cobham’s first statement before the Commission, in which he swore that he would never have entered the action save at Ralegh’s instigation. And that, it appeared, was all the Crown’s direct evidence.
‘God knoweth how they may convict him on such a case!’ the young Earl of Pembroke whispered to Bess. She shook her head, but no hope came to her.
And now it was Ralegh’s turn to defend himself against the charges.
There was a long, expectant hush, while he glanced unhurriedly through the notes that he had taken. (He had been allowed pen and paper to aid his memory.) Then he began to speak. Words were to be his only weapon in this fight; he had always been a master of words, and he used his mastery now, to the full. He admitted freely that his first denial of all knowledge of the Arenburg plot had not been true; bidding his hearers remember that it had been made by a man fetched in from the sunlit threshold of a day’s hunting, to face without warning what even then amounted to a treason charge. When he had had time to think more clearly, and to realise the gravity of his error, he had at once written to Sir Robert Cecil, admitting that he had heard somewhat of it from Lord Cobham, but had been too little interested to give the matter further thought. He would remind them that he had himself warned Sir Robert Cecil of the man La Renzi. Working up to his final argument, he drew a careful and detailed picture of the present fortunes of Spain and the Spanish King. ‘My Lords, and Gentlemen of the Jury, I pray you tell me this: why should I have intrigued with my Lord Cobham, a man of no repute, to the advantage of Spain, a sinking power? What had I to gain by such a course? ... Of twenty-five hundred thousand pounds come from the Indies, the King of Spain has now scarce one hundred thousand left; how then, think you, should this money, of which there has been so much talk, be paid?’
There was a quickly suppressed buzz in the Court, and men looked eagerly to see how the prosecution would answer that argument. But the prosecution was not there to answer the unanswerable, but to secure a conviction; and so, hastily, the Clerk rose to read Cobham’s second examination, and thereafter the proceedings tangled themselves into legal chaos which lasted until Cecil brought a lucid interval by rising to speak quietly and most movingly of the affection between himself and Ralegh, and the esteem in which he had held the other man before he fell into evil ways.
‘My Lords.’ It was Ralegh again now, quick and impatient. ‘All this, surely, can but confuse the issue. It seems that all your accusation against me rests on the uncorroborated word, spoken in haste and fear, and afterwards repented, of my Lord Cobham, whereas, in conformity with the 1st Statute of Edward VI, no man may be condemned for treason unless he be accused by two lawful witnesses; and they must be brought in person before him at his arraignment, if they be living.’
‘That Statute was found to be inconvenient, and was repealed by one and two of Philip and Mary,’ Coke cut in, up again, and returning to the attack.
‘If that be so, then has justice suffered thereby.’ Ralegh turned on him in cold accusation. ‘If you condemn me by bare inference, without an oath, without a subscription, without witnesses, upon a paper accusation, you try me by the Spanish Inquisition!’
‘That is a treasonable speech!’
‘It was not meant to be so,’ Ralegh said. He made a small gesture of the open hands. ‘Since I may not have two accusers, Mr. Attorney, at least let the one I have be brought to face with me.’
‘So that you, by your devilish influence, may bring him to forswear himself on your behalf?’
Ralegh said gently, ‘If Christ requireth it, as it appeareth in the eighteenth chapter of Matthew, if by the Common Law, Civil Law and God’s Word, it be required that there must be two witnesses at the least, brought before the accused, bear with me if I desire my one.’
For a moment the Judges and Commissioners seemed to waver, and Bess, straining every sense to catch the gist of their murmured conference, felt a flicker of bewildered hope as she realised that Cecil was supporting her husband’s claim. But the thing was hopeless, after all. The Judges, clearly afraid of Ralegh’s devilish influence, ruled that his demand was dangerous and unreasonable, refused it, and hurried on to the next stage of the trial with almost indecent haste.
The prosecution had begun calling witnesses (there were to be none for the defence), but the supply was so poor that at last they were reduced to using a seaman whose testimony was that in Lisbon a man had asked him if the King was yet crowned, and when told that he was shortly to be so, had replied; ‘Nay, he shall never be crowned, for Don Ralegh and Don Cobham will cut his throat ere that day comes.’
The man before the Court turned his intent gaze from the last witness back to the Attorney General, and asked curiously, ‘What is it that you infer upon this?’
‘That your treason hath wings!’
Ralegh leaned forward, his hands on the table, his gaze travelling unhurriedly from face to face of the men who sat in judgment on him. ‘My Lords, I find your whole case against me rests still, as it did at first, on the word of one man, who has since retracted it. Consider you, Gentlemen of the Jury: I that have always condemned the Spanish faction; methinks it is strange that I should now affect it ... If you would be contented on presumption to be delivered up to be slaughtered, to have your wives and children turned into the street to beg their bread; if you would be contented to be so judged, judge so of me.’
A murmuring arose in the body of the hall, a rising unrest among the close-packed throng who had come to hear their old enemy condemned to die. A strange thing was happening; the crowd’s hostility was changing its direction.
The rising fret was cut short by the Attorney General, who, with palpable triumph, produced from among his papers, a letter from Cobham which he proceeded to read aloud. It was a statement in which the wretched writer withdrew his recantation, and reverted to his original accusations against Ralegh.
The only man who seemed untouched by the sensation which followed was Ralegh himself. He listened to the Attorney General’s reading with quiet attention, and as soon as it was done, drew a paper from the breast of his doublet. ‘Sir Robert Cecil, will you be so good as to take and read this letter, since of all those here present, you will be the best able to identify your brother-in-law’s writing.’
Bess leaned forward, her hands gripped together until the knuckles shone white as bare bone, as the paper was handed up to the Secretary of State. Cecil took and unfolded it; and after glancing at the contents, read aloud, with no change of expression on his subtle face. ‘For the discharge of my own conscience, and freeing myself of your blood, which else will cry vengeance against me, I protest upon any salvation I never practised with Spain by your procurement. God so comfort me in this affliction as you are a true subject for anything I know. So God have mercy on my soul, as I know no treason by you. Cobham.’ And the date was several days later than that of the statement which the Attorney General had just read.
Almost before the last word was out of Cecil’s mouth, Coke was on his feet with the furious protest. ‘Extorted! Extorted!’ He was shouting, his voic
e thick with rage. Everybody was shouting, it seemed to Bess. This was a mad trial — unless she herself were mad.
Sergeant Heale was hammering the table and calling for order, and as the sudden uproar began to subside, an anonymous voice broke free of the turmoil. ‘Was the other not extorted?’ it cried. ‘Tell us that, Mr. Attorney!’
The cry brought some response, for when silence was restored, the dry voice of the Lord Chief Justice made itself heard almost for the first time. ‘Lest there be a doubt in any man’s mind, as to whether Lord Cobham’s statement in which he withdrew his retraction, was freely written, or was drawn from him by promise of mercy or fear of the reverse, I would have the Gentlemen of the Jury assured of that fact.’
The Earl of Devon rose with a little bow. ‘I can give the Gentlemen of the Jury the positive assurance that the statement in question was written by Lord Cobham of his own wish, and was not in any way extorted.’
The Lord Chief Justice bowed his head. ‘Thank you. There is then, no more that need be said.’ He turned to the Jury, to dismiss them to consider their verdict.
Lawrence Kemys had risked the rack to no purpose.
And now the Jury were filing out, and with their going, the pitch of tension in the Court sank like the note of a slackened lute-string. The Judges and Commissioners stretched and relaxed; Coke lounged out to a door which gave on to the Castle garden, and stood there, bland as a cat in the autumn sunshine. But the crowd in the body of the hall shifted and swayed, whispering among themselves, the change still working in them like a ferment. Only the unseen woman in the gallery remained utterly still, her gaze fixed on the prisoner, who yet stood in his place, for they had not troubled to remove him. His head was raised, his own gaze turned to the great three-light window above the dais, where a late peacock butterfly that had wandered in from the garden was beating jewelled wings against the glass in frantic and futile effort at escape.