s imprisoned and kept in prison in the tower and
church of Saint Sidwell, without the east gate of the city of Exeter,
during the whole time of the commotion, being many times threatened to
be executed to death.' He was not released till the battle of Clyst,
called by Holinshed, Clift, Heath, won on August 4, 1549, by Lords Grey
and Bedford near the scene of his misadventure, followed by a second
victory on the next day, forced the Catholic insurgents to raise the
siege of Exeter, which they had been blockading since July 2.

He was no fair weather theologian. His Protestantism out-lived King
Edward. He sympathized with the demonstration in 1553 against the
Spanish marriage. On the failure of the Devonshire movement his cousin,
Sir Peter Carew, the ringleader at Exeter, is stated in official
depositions to have effected his escape abroad through Walter Ralegh,
whom he 'persuaded to convey him in his bark' to France from Weymouth.
The wording implies active and conscious intervention. The strange
thing is that he should not have been punished for complicity. Later in
the reign of Mary his wife exposed herself to similar peril, and
similarly escaped. Foxe in his _Acts and Monuments_ relates that Agnes
Prest, before she was brought to the stake in 1557 at Southernhay, had
been comforted in Exeter gaol by the visits of 'the wife of Walter
Ralegh, a woman of noble wit, and of good and goodly opinion.'

[Sidenote: _Death and Burial._]

Unless that Walter was churchwarden of East Budleigh in 1561, and that a
conveyance by him of the Sidmouth Manor fish tithes proves him to have been
alive in April, 1578, nothing more is known of him. It has not been
ascertained when he and Katherine died, though they are believed to have
been dead in 1584. The interest in the East Budleigh farm had by that time
run out; and it is surmised they had removed into Exeter, if they had not
previously possessed a residence there, perhaps by the Palace Gate. On the
authority of a request by their son in 1603 to be buried, if not at
Sherborne, beside them in 'Exeter Church,' it has been concluded that they
were interred in the Cathedral. A monument erected to Katherine's son by
her first marriage, Sir John Gilbert, was long accepted as theirs. In fact
no trace of their burial in any Exeter church has been found. The present
inclination of local archaeologists seems to be to assume that they were not
buried at Exeter at all. It is hard to assent in the