which carried him off in 1606
to his grave in the next parish, he having turned his own church at
Wellington into a dog kennel.

CHAPTER XXI.

REPRIEVE (December 10, 1603).

[Sidenote: _Bathos._]

[Sidenote: _Ralegh's Abasement._]

The nation was doing a great man justice, though tardily. Not even its
hero's temporary self-abasement could put it out of conceit with him.
One of the many curious surprises in Ralegh's history is the manner in
which a sudden change in his demeanour seemed to give the lie to the
general admiration. Almost a worse grievance against the Court and its
legal tools than their persecution is the effect it had in humiliating
and degrading him for a time. Though the proceedings had been a travesty
of justice, they had been invested hitherto with a scenic stateliness.
Ralegh had borne himself gallantly. He had kept and left the stage with
unfailing dignity. The prosecution had at least evinced the respectable
earnestness of stubborn hate. At the moment after the catastrophe the
nobility, whether of persecuted greatness or of murderous vengefulness,
evaporated. Ralegh's enemies appeared to have lost their motive and
plan. They seemed no longer sure why or how they wished to wreak their
rage. He, from his condemned cell, demanded justice for wronged
innocence in the accents of a detected cut-throat. To the Lords
Commissioners he wrote: 'The law is passed against me. The mercy of my
Sovereign is all that remaineth for my comfort. If I may not beg a
pardon or a life, yet let me beg a time. Let me have one year to give to
God in a prison and to serve him. It is my soul that beggeth a time of
the King.' He spoke of his fear that the power of law might be greater
than the power of truth. He reminded Cecil that he was a Councillor to a
merciful and just King, if ever we had any, and that the law ought not
to overrule pity, but pity the law.' 'Your Lordship,' he proceeds, 'will
find that I have been strangely practised against, and that others have
their lives promised to accuse me.' In the same November in which he had
told Cecil it would be presumption for him to ask grace directly of the
King, he asked it. He assured his most dread Sovereign he was not one of
the men who were greatly discontented, and therefore the more likely to
be disloyal. He protested he had loved the King 'now twenty years'; that
he had never invented treason, consented to treason, or performed
treason. He invoked mercy