re was no more jesting of this kind, but the whole trial
has remained a type of what was uncouth and undesirable in the conduct
of criminal trials through the beginning of the seventeenth century. The
nation so rapidly increased in sensitiveness and in a perception of
legal decency, that one of the very judges who conducted Raleigh's
trial, Gawdy, lived to look back upon it with horror, and to say, when
he himself lay upon his death-bed, that such a mode of procedure
'injured and degraded the justice of England.'

When Hale had ceased his fooling, Coke began in earnest. He was a man a
little older than Raleigh, and of a conceited and violent nature, owing
not a little of his exaggerated reputation to the dread that he
inspired. He was never more rude and brutal than in his treatment of Sir
Walter Raleigh upon this famous occasion, and even in a court packed
with enemies, in which the proud poet and navigator might glance round
without meeting one look more friendly than that in the cold eyes of
Cecil, the needless insolence of Coke went too far, and caused a
revulsion in Raleigh's favour. Coke began by praising the clemency of
the King, who had forbidden the use of torture, and proceeded to charge
Sir Walter Raleigh with what he called 'treason of the Main,' to
distinguish it from that of George Brooke and his fellows, which was 'of
the Bye.' He described this latter, and tried to point out that the
former was closely cognate to it. In order to mask the difficulty, nay,
the impossibility, of doing this successfully on the evidence which he
possessed, he wandered off into a long and wordy disquisition on
treasonable plots in general, ending abruptly with that of Edmund de la
Pole. Then, for the first time, Coke faced the chief difficulty of the
Government, namely, that there was but one witness against Raleigh. He
did not allow, as indeed he could not be expected to do, that Cobham had
shifted like a Reuben, and was now adhering, for the moment, to an
eighth several confession of what he and Raleigh had actually done or
meant to do. It was enough for Coke to insist that Cobham's evidence,
that is to say, whichever of the eight conflicting statements suited the
prosecution best, was as valuable, in a case of this kind, as 'the
inquest of twelve men.'

Having thus, as he thought, shut Raleigh's mouth with regard to this one
great difficulty, he continued to declaim against 'those traitors,'
obstinately persisting in mixin