Spanish Agent in
London, Julian Sanchez de Ulloa, to his Government from hearsay, it may
be gathered that the inquiry was held on October 22, and lasted for four
hours. No complete account has been discovered of the course it took, in
consequence, Mr. Spedding, in his _Life of Bacon_, supposes, of the
destruction of a mass of Council Chamber papers in the fire of January
12, 1619, at the Banqueting House. That is possible. As the Commission
sat as a Court, not as a Council, the explanation is not incompatible
with the circumstance that the Council Register for 1618, which, as it
happens, did not suffer from the conflagration, contains no allusion to
a meeting of the Council on October 22. Nevertheless it is more likely
that the want of official record is due to the extreme anxiety of the
King's advisers for secrecy. They were afraid of popular feeling. The
fact of the imitation trial might have been itself doubtful, but for a
fragmentary sketch in a volume of Sir Julius Caesar's notes, preserved
among the Lansdowne Manuscripts in the British Museum. The report, which
breaks off in the middle of a sentence, is on Council paper, and may
have been drawn up for official use, if not with a view to ultimate
insertion in the Privy Council Register. In Mr. Spedding's opinion only
the first sheet has been kept, and the condition of the paper seems to
me clearly to favour the hypothesis. He believes that the full note
contained additional evidence against Ralegh, for instance, on the
question of the expedition's provision of mining tools, with his replies
to it, and the decision of the Commissioners upon the whole. The report,
in its existing form, needs to be eked out with the suggestions,
necessarily not very sympathetic, in the subsequent Royal _Declaration_
of Ralegh's line of defence against the charges. Such as it is, it must
be read with caution and uncertainty. Caesar, who was Master of the
Rolls, was generous, and, for a Jacobean placeman, just. The only grave
imputation on his memory is his connivance, as a Commissioner, at the
collusive divorce of Lady Essex. It is not impugning the good faith of
any reporters of proceedings, like the present, against Ralegh, to look
sceptically at their narrative. Law reporters in general had lax notions
in those days of the distinction between actual statements and
inferences by themselves as to the construction they bore. Coke's
Reports show it abundantly. Caesar in particular would