ry then retired; and in a
quarter of an hour returned with the verdict 'Guilty.' Raleigh had, in
fact, confessed that Cobham had mentioned the plot to him, though
nothing would induce him to admit that he had asked Cobham for a sum of
money, or consented to take any active part. Still this was enough; and
in the face of his unfortunate prevarication about the interview with
Renzi, the jury could hardly act otherwise. For a summing up of both
sides of the vexed question what shadow of truth there was in the
general accusation, the reader may be recommended to Mr. Gardiner's
brilliant pages.

Raleigh had defended himself with great courage and intelligence, and
the crowd in court were by no means in sympathy with the brutal and
violent address in which Popham gave judgment. On the very day on which
Raleigh was condemned, there began that reaction in his favour which has
been proceeding ever since. When the Lord Chief Justice called the noble
prisoner a traitor and an atheist, the bystanders, who after all were
Englishmen, though they had met prepared to tear Raleigh limb from limb,
could bear it no longer, and they hissed the judge, as a little before
they had hooted Coke. To complete the strangeness of this strange trial,
when sentence had been passed, Raleigh advanced quickly up the court,
unprevented, and spoke to Cecil and one or two other commissioners,
asking, as a favour, that the King would permit Cobham to die first.
Before he was secured by the officers, he had found time for this last
protest: 'Cobham is a false and cowardly accuser. He can face neither me
nor death without acknowledging his falsehood.' He was then led away to
gaol.

For a month Raleigh was retained at Winchester. He found a friend,
almost the only one who dared to speak for him, in Lady Pembroke, the
saintly sister of Sir Philip Sidney, who showed _veteris vestigia
flammae_, the embers of the old love Raleigh had met with from her
brother's family, and sent her son, Lord Pembroke, to the King. She did
little good, and Raleigh did still less by a letter he now wrote to
James, the first personal appeal he had made to his Majesty. It was a
humble entreaty for life, begging the King to listen to the charitable
advice which the English law, 'knowing her own cruelty, doth give to her
superior,' to be pitiful more than just. This letter has been thought
obsequious and unmanly; but it abates no jot of the author's
asseverations that he was innocent