in the name of English law, 'who knowing her
own cruelty, and that she is wont to compound treasons out of
presumptions and circumstances, does advise the King to be
_misericorditer justus_.' In a rather loftier strain he exclaimed, 'If
the law destroy me, your Majesty shall put me out of your power, and I
shall then have none to fear, none to reverence, but the King of Kings.'
But the burden throughout is the pitiful 'Send me my life.'

[Sidenote: _Its motive._]

These prayers by Walter Ralegh to a most dread Sovereign, who happened
to be James I, these genuflections of spirit to a Minister who must have
been suspected of malevolent jealousy, if not of treason to ancient
friendship, present a strange and sad spectacle. Excessive importance
should not be attached to the phraseology. Not a little of the apparent
abjectness was matter of style: 'What,' Ralegh himself has said, 'is the
vowing of service to every man whom men bid but good morrow other than a
courteous and Court-like kind of lying?' Much must be allowed for the
fashion of the age in dealing with Princes and their Ministers. Grey, no
more than Ralegh, could resist the impulse. The Puritan Baron had bidden
a magnanimous farewell to his peers at Winchester: 'The House of the
Wiltons have spent many lives in their Princes' service; Grey cannot beg
his!' Within a few days he was grovelling in gratitude for an insulting
reprieve: 'As your mercy draws out my life, I cannot deny it the only
object it aspires to, by unfeigned confession and contrition to diminish
my offence, and your displeasure.' Not till the Civil War had cleared
the atmosphere through which royalty was seen, was the demeanour of
subjects to the Sovereign in general conformity with the modern standard
of manliness. Ralegh, the Court favourite, the poet, was cast in a more
plastic mould than Grey. The suddenness of his ruin may well have thrown
him off his balance now, as at the original explosion of the tempest in
the summer. The tendency of men endowed with genius like his to indulge
in extravagances of dejection when fortune frowns is notorious. But his
long course of importunities to all possessed of the means of helping or
hindering in the years after 1603 is not to be explained either by
style, or by spasms of despair. Both their impulse and something too of
an apology for them are to be found in the basis of his character, which
was tough as well as elastic. After the shock of the plunge into