ed simply for the advancement of the peace. An identical defence
might be offered for Ralegh, if not for Cobham himself. But it was
convenient for James and his Court to exonerate the envoy; it was
convenient for them to use the same transaction for a deadly weapon
against Ralegh. Of any care or sense of actual truthfulness in King or
counsellors throughout the whole business, not a trace can be found.

All concerned in Ralegh's trial and conviction have a heavy burden of
bloodguiltiness to bear. But the Judges were less culpable than their
lay colleagues and the Crown counsel; the whole bench of Commissioners
and the Bar than the jury; the jury than the King, his Ministers, and
courtiers. Sir John Hawles, afterwards Solicitor-General, in a printed
reply in 1689 to Shower's apology, called _The Magistracy and Government
of England Vindicated_, for Lord Russell's conviction, censured Popham
for dispensing with a second witness, and with the presence of Cobham.
He argued from the practice of a later period, that Judges who had
deviated from it must have been violating their consciences. That is
unreasonable. The course taken by the Chief Justice and his brethren
conformed, as we have seen, to the legal usage of their time, however
opposed to natural justice. The fault was greater in the lay members of
the Court, and in the Attorney-General, who might undoubtedly, as
representing more directly the Crown, have produced Cobham. All that the
Judges declared was that the Crown need not, not that it must not. Still
more heinous was the verdict based upon evidence which, if enough in
quantity, was manifestly worthless in quality. Twelve worthy gentlemen
awarded a horrible death to a man guilty of no other offence, as they
knew, than that he had been offered a sum of Spanish money, which he
denied he would have accepted, and certainly never received. Most
shameful of all was the conduct of the Government which knew the
emptiness of the entire case, yet strained every nerve to extort a
conviction.

[Sidenote: _Legal and Moral Innocence._]

The question of Ralegh's moral innocence is not the same as that of his
legal innocence. All writers answer the latter unanimously in his
favour. On the former they are divided. Hume, indeed, a far from partial
critic, who could not sympathise with one of his 'great but ill
regulated mind,' pronounces wholly for him. He finds no proof or any
circumstance to justify the condemnation, which he r