by perseverance impose his
doctrines and himself upon the sovereign. In theory he understood, as he
lays down in his History, that it is not sufficient to be wise with a
wise prince, valiant with a valiant, and just with a just; a courtier,
who would have an estate in his prosperity, must, he teaches, live
altogether out of himself, study other men's humours, and change with
the successor to the throne. In practice none ever disobeyed this law of
advancement more signally than Ralegh in relation to James. His egotism
often before had blinded him to the idiosyncrasies of others. He seems
to have been more than ordinarily incapable of comprehending those of
his present ruler. He presumed eagerness in a young King to signalize
his accession by feats of arms. The high spirit of James was the source
from which he hoped to draw the motive force necessary for the
accomplishment of his vast designs against the colonial empire of Spain.
An accidental conjunction of circumstances enabled him to see speedily
the effect of his attempt to storm the royal confidence by displaying
his own martial propensities.

CHAPTER XVIII.

AWAITING TRIAL (July-November, 1603).

[Sidenote: _The Plots._]

We now enter the period of the plot and plot within plot in which
Anthony Copley, the priests William Watson and Francis Clarke, George
Brooke and his brother Cobham, Sir Griffin Markham and his brothers, the
Puritan Lord Grey of Wilton, and Sir Edward Parham were variously and
confusedly implicated. The intrigue, 'a dark kind of treason,' as
Rushworth calls it, 'a sham plot' as it is styled by Sir John Hawles,
belongs to our story only so far as the cross machinations involved
Ralegh. His slender relation to it is as hard to fix as a cobweb or a
nightmare. Even in his own age his part in it was, as obsolete Echard
says, 'all riddle and mystery.' Cobham had an old acquaintance with the
Count of Arenberg, Minister to the Archduke Albert and the Infanta
Isabel, joint sovereigns of the Low Countries. The Infanta was that
daughter of Philip II whose claims to the English throne Jesuits had
asserted, and Essex had affected to fear. During the late reign Cobham
had been in the habit of corresponding with the Count both openly and
secretly. De la Fayle and an Antwerp merchant, la Renzi or de Laurencie,
carried letters and messages to and fro. In November, 1602, the Count
had invited Cobham to come over and confer about peace, of which Cobham