splendidly there himself, to be
buried in its minster, and to leave it to a long line of descendants.
While he had only a ninety-nine years' lease, he had conveyed his term
to trustees for his son Walter. He had done this by two conveyances.
These he revoked in 1598. His motives, he explained later, were several:
'I found my fortune at Court towards the end of her Majesty's reign to
be at a stand, and that I daily expected dangerous employments against
her Majesty's enemies, and had not in the former grants made any
provision for my wife.' He re-settled the property on his son, reserving
L200 a year to Lady Ralegh for her life. After he had acquired the fee,
he conveyed it by deed at Midsummer, 1602, to himself for life, with
successive remainders to his son Walter, to any future sons, and to his
brother Carew Ralegh. The deed had been drawn by Doddridge, afterwards a
judge, many months before it was sealed. The reason of the date chosen
for its formal execution was stated by himself at his trial to have been
a challenge from Sir Amias Preston in the summer of 1602. Preston was
the captain who, being too late to join the Guiana expedition, went off
with Sommers on an independent quest. He had signalized himself at
Cadiz, where Essex knighted him. The challenge may have arisen out of
the Essex feud, for Sir Ferdinando Gorges, Essex's vehement partisan, is
known to have been concerned in it. No duel was fought. Fuller, who errs
in describing Ralegh as a Privy Councillor, says in his _Worthies_: 'Sir
Walter Ralegh declined the challenge without any abatement to his
valour; for having a fair and fixed estate, with wife and children,
being a Privy Councillor, and Lord Warden of the Stannaries, he looked
upon it as an uneven lay to stake himself against Sir Amias, a private
and single person, though of good birth and courage, yet of no
considerable estate.' Fuller's account is not to be rejected because the
ground assigned may not seem very heroic. Duelling was governed by
prosaic laws. Nobody was expected to risk his life on unequal terms.
There had to be a parity of ranks; and the same principle might well
apply to fortunes. Ralegh himself had no such fondness for the
fashionable mode of adjusting quarrels as to waive any orthodox right of
refusal. In his History he denounces 'the audacious, common, and brave,
yet outrageous vanity of duellists.' Men who die in single combat he
styles 'martyrs of the Devil.' He derides the v