Mark Sharon

October 29, 1618. Walter Raleigh asked to inspect the axe before they used it on him, ran his thumb along the edge, and said it was sharp medicine that would cure all his diseases. Then the executioner hesitated, and Raleigh told him to strike. He was being killed for a fifteen year old treason conviction that everyone knew was rigged, revived to satisfy the Spanish ambassador over something Raleigh's son had done in South America. Raleigh's career under Elizabeth I was the Elizabethan age in one man. He put down a Catholic rising in Munster, became Captain of the Queen's Guard in 1587, and worked as a privateer, which is the polite term for a pirate with a royal licence. In 1591 he secretly married Bess Throckmorton, one of Elizabeth's ladies in waiting, which the Queen regarded as a personal betrayal, and both of them went to the Tower for a month. He bought his way back with the capture of the Madre de Deus in 1592, a Portuguese carrack whose cargo was worth a staggering amount, and in 1595 he was commissioned to go and find El Dorado. He went to Guiana, found no golden city, and wrote a book about it that was more persuasive than the evidence warranted. That book is why he kept believing in it for the next twenty years. Then Elizabeth died, and James I came south from Scotland with one overriding foreign policy goal, which was peace with Spain. Raleigh was the most famous Spain-hating privateer in England. He was the opposite of everything the new reign wanted. In 1603 he was accused of involvement in a plot to put Arbella Stuart on the throne. The trial was a disgrace even by the standards of the time. The main evidence was a confession from Lord Cobham, who retracted it and then re-made it, and Raleigh was denied the right to have Cobham brought into court to face him. The prosecutor Edward Coke abused him from the bench. Raleigh defended himself so well that the trial started turning public opinion in his favour, which is a rare thing for a man already convicted in everyone's mind. He was condemned, then reprieved at the last moment, and spent the next thirteen years in the Tower. And that is where he did the work he should be remembered for. He had rooms, his wife and son with him at times, a garden and a laboratory, and he wrote The History of the World, an enormous unfinished book that got as far as 130 BC and was a bestseller for a century. It was one of Oliver Cromwell's recommended books for his son. He also kept telling anybody who would listen that there was a gold mine in Guiana. In 1617, James was broke. So he let Raleigh out to go and find it, with one absolute condition. Do not fight the Spanish. The expedition was a catastrophe. Disease wrecked the crews. Raleigh fell ill and stayed in Trinidad while his son Walter led the party up the Orinoco. They attacked the Spanish settlement of San Thomé. Walter Raleigh the younger was killed in it, along with Spanish settlers. So Raleigh came home with no gold, no son, and a war crime against a country his king was trying to befriend. The Spanish ambassador, the Count of Gondomar, who had enormous influence at James's court, demanded his death. And here is the mechanism, which is the bit that makes it so cold. James did not need a new trial. Raleigh was still a condemned man under the 1603 sentence, which had only ever been suspended. All James had to do was let the original sentence take effect. He was executed for a treason he almost certainly did not commit, in order to punish him for something he had not personally done. On October 29, 1618, at Old Palace Yard in Westminster, he turned up extravagantly dressed and in evidently good humour. He gave a long speech denying the treason. He asked to see the axe and made the line about sharp medicine. He told the crowd that the heart was what mattered, not which way his head lay on the block. When the executioner froze, he said strike, man, strike. It took two blows. His wife Bess took his head home and kept it. In 1660 it was found and buried at St Mary's Church in West Horsley, where his son Carew is also buried. His body is under the chancel of St Margaret's, Westminster, next to the Abbey. James got his Spanish peace, briefly. Within four years his son was in Madrid failing to arrange a Spanish marriage and England was sliding toward the war with Spain that Raleigh had spent his whole life arguing for. The last thing he ever wrote, reportedly in his Bible the night before, was a short poem ending on the hope that the Lord would raise him up.