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 ANNE OF DENMARK. 437 have ceased to breathe, England would be too small for him- self and Raleigh to contend for power within it ; and there is reason to believe that, among the first words he spoke to James, were those which deprived that formidable rival, al- ready out of favor with the people for his conduct at Essex, of his captaincy of the guards, and wardenship of the Stan- neries. He precipitated him into rebellion. Within a few weeks after Beaumont wrote, Raleigh, Cobham, and the lead- ing men of their party were seized upon a charge of treason. Nor, having made the charge, could Cecil afford that the ac- cused should escape. The scruples of our day were unknown in theirs ; and a statesman of the sixteenth century prepared to drive his rival to the scaffold, as a statesman of the nine- teenth hopes to drive his out of Downing-street. The unscrupulous brutality of Coke was employed against Raleigh (in the "Taunt him with the license of ink," of Sir Toby Belch to Sir Andrew Ague-Cheek, "if thou thou'st him some thrice, it shall not be amiss ;" it is pleasant to note Shakes- peare's sympathy for the gallantest and most illustrious of contemporary Englishmen) ; and though he_def ended himself with a temper, wit, learning, courage, and judgment, which all men pronounced incomparable a verdict was obtained. He went into court on the day of his trial, as M. de Beaumont rightly describes him, the most unpopular man in England ; he left the court the most popular of Englishmen, but he left it a convicted traitor. Those who would have gone a hundred miles to see him hanged in the morning, would have gone so far to save his life before they parted in the evening ; but Cecil could not narrow the field of his displays, and put a distance between him and his adherents that no zeal could overlap. The gates of the Tower were opened to receive the greatest man of action which that age had produced, and never again beheld its outward walls for more than thirteen years. "There is nobody but my father," exclaimed Prince Henry, "who could keep such a noble bird shut up in a cage." Cecil knew he could rely upon his gaoler. When he escaped at last, it was when Cecil's death, and the king's debts, had left anything attainable by corruption. He was liberated on payment of a bribe to two courtiers of some two thousand pounds; he received the king's commission for an expedition to Guiana on promise that its results should load the king's coffers with gold ; and on failure of the expedition, and be-