Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/27

1603] and again asseverated that of Raleigh. He was in the act of taking his last farewell when the sheriff bade him wait, for there was something yet to do; that he must once more be confronted with the other prisoners. At this moment Grey and Markham were again brought forward and placed before him. The astonished men looked, according to a spectator, in strange amazement on each other, "like men beheaded, and met again in the other world." Not less full of wonder were the spectators, who now crowded eagerly round the scaffold, marvelling at the mysterious proceeding. Whilst they gazed in breathless suspense, the sheriff demanded of the prisoners if they admitted their guilt, and acknowledged the justice of their sentences, and they assenting, he then exclaimed, "See the mercy of your prince, who hath sent hither the countermand, and given you your lives." At this finale, the crowd raised a shout so loud that it reached the town, and the cry being understood as one of pardon, it was taken up and repeated from end to end of the city.

George Buchanan, Tutor of King James I. of England.

Perhaps more puzzled than any one else by these singular movements, was the other prisoner, Sir Walter Raleigh, who was himself ordered for execution on the following Monday, and had surveyed the whole inexplicable transaction from the window of his prison. It was clear that he had been kept apart from the other prisoners out of dread of his extraordinary talents and powers of persuasion; for the real object of James was, according to Cecil, to see how far Cobham at his death would stand to his accusation of Raleigh. The whole was a scheme of the king's, a secret, to the participation in which he admitted not, so far as we can. learn, even his most trusty counsellors. Having planned the whole, and signed and sent off the death-warrants on Wednesday, on Thursday morning he summoned John Gib, the Scottish messenger, and despatched him to Winchester with a sealed packet containing the reprieve. In his haste, for the time was little enough to give room for any unforeseen hindrance, he had forgotten to sign it, and the messenger had to be recalled. The delay had nearly proved fatal to Markham, who was at the point of execution before the messenger arrived. The danger was increased by the fact that Gib, being unknown at Winchester, found himself repelled from the scaffold by the crowd, and could only with difficulty catch the attention of Sir James Hayes, by shouting to him on the scaffold, and begging him to bring him to the sheriff on the king's business. Well may Sir James Mackintosh exclaim in his History of England— "What a government, with the penal justice in such hands, and the lives of men at the hazard of such sad buffoonery!"

But James prided himself on this buffoonery as the very essence of kingcraft. There were those who doubted the truth of Cobham's charge against Raleigh, nay, many doubted of the existence of any plot at all; but by this stratagem he brought the public to hear Cobham in his last moments, as he believed, not only confers the plot, but reassert Raleigh's guilt. In his exultation at his success, James called together the lords of the counsel, and told