with pudding, an olive-pye, capons and dowsets, sallats and
fricases"--all these and much more, with strong beer and spiced ale to
wash the dinner down, crowned the royal board, while the great boar's
head and the Christmas pie, borne in with great parade, were placed on
the table joyously decked with holly and rosemary and bay. It was a
great ceremony--this bringing in of the boar's head. First came an
attendant, so the old record tells us,

"attyr'd in a horseman's coat with a Boares-speare in his hande; next to
him another huntsman in greene, with a bloody faulchion drawne; next to
him two pages in tafatye sarcenet, each of them with a messe of mustard;
next to whom came hee that carried the Boares-head, crosst with a greene
silk scarfe, by which hunge the empty scabbard of the faulchion which
was carried before him."

After the dinner--the boar's head having been wrestled for by some of
the royal yeomen--came the wassail or health-drinking. Then the King
said:

"And now, Baby Charles, let us hear the boon ye were to crave of us at
wassail as the guerdon for the holder of the lucky raisin in Master
Sandy's snapdragon."

And the little eleven-year-old Prince stood up before the company in all
his brave attire, glanced at his brother Prince Henry, and then facing
the King said boldly:

"I pray you, my father and my liege, grant me as the boon I ask--the
freeing of Walter Raleigh."

At this altogether startling and unlooked-for request, amazement and
consternation appeared on the faces around the royal banqueting board,
and the King put down his untasted tankard of spiced ale, while
surprise, doubt and anger quickly crossed the royal face. For Sir Walter
Raleigh, the favourite of Queen Elizabeth, the lord-proprietor and
colonizer of the American colonies, and the sworn foe to Spain, had been
now close prisoner in the Tower for more than nine years, hated and yet
dreaded by this fickle King James, who dared not put him to death for
fear of the people to whom the name and valour of Raleigh were dear.

"Hoot, chiel!" cried the King at length, spluttering wrathfully in the
broadest of his native Scotch, as was his habit when angered or
surprised. "Ye reckless fou, wha hae put ye to sic a jackanape trick?
Dinna ye ken that sic a boon is nae for a laddie like you to meddle wi'?
Wha hae put ye to't, I say?"

But ere the young Prince could reply, the stately and solemn-faced
ambassador of Spain, the Count of Gondemar,