commissioned two gentlemen,
Roger Ashton and a Scotchman, to report. They carried the news of the
trial to the King at Wilton House. 'Never,' stated Ashton, according to
Carleton, 'man spake so well in the time past, nor would in the time to
come.' The Scotchman seems to have reported that, 'whereas, when he saw
Sir Walter Ralegh first, he was so led with the common hatred that he
would have gone a hundred miles to see him hanged, he would, ere they
parted, have gone a thousand to save his life.'

[Sidenote: _Legends._]

The shock inflicted upon the national instinct of fairness by the
conviction of such a man, on such evidence, and after such a defence,
showed itself by legends which clustered round the facts of the trial.
'Some of the jury,' it is related by Francis Osborn in his _Memorials on
the Reign of King James_, 'were, after he was cast, so far touched in
conscience as to demand of him pardon on their knees.' Coke himself was
rumoured to have been astonished at the form of the verdict. He was in a
garden resting his brazen lungs and his venomous temper, when his man
announced that the jury had brought in Ralegh guilty of treason.
'Surely,' observed Coke, 'thou art mistaken; for I myself accused him
but of misprision of treason.' The story, which its narrator, in the
anonymous _Observations upon Sanderson's History of Queen Mary and King
James_, issued in 1656, 'upon the word of a Christian received from Sir
Edward Coke's own mouth,' will appear to any reader of the trial a
manifest fable. Not the less does it, like the myth of the fraud by
which Cobham's accusing Winchester deposition is alleged to have been
procured, testify to the difficulty the public experienced in digesting
the judicial outrage upon reason. Similarly must be explained the
anecdote, though told by Ralegh himself to the Privy Council after his
return from Guiana, on the authority of his physician, Dr. Turner, of
Sir Francis Gawdy's death-bed lament that 'Never before had the justice
of England been so depraved and injured as in the condemnation of Sir
Walter Ralegh.' Gawdy had uttered no word of protest against the
shameless misbehaviour of his Chief and the Attorney throughout the
hearing. On the contrary, his one remark was against the prisoner. If he
really considered the conduct or result of the trial iniquitous, it is a
pity he was not more prompt in denouncing it. His judicial sensitiveness
needed to be awakened by a fit of apoplexy