s health
had been impaired. Only periodical visits to Bath for its waters
assuaged his ailments. He prayed in vain that he might be suffered to go
thither in the autumn after his conviction. His prognostication that, if
he 'could not go this fall, he should be dead or disabled for ever,' was
not likely to alarm his foes. They affected at all times to be
incredulous of the gravity of his infirmities. But there is no reason to
question his statement that he was 'daily in danger of death by the
palsy; nightly of suffocation by wasted and obstructed lungs.' His
complaints began in the early summer of 1604. After a week's sojourn in
the Tower he seems to have been sent to the Fleet, where Keymis was for
a short time his fellow prisoner. There bills for his diet show that he
was staying between Christmas 1603 and Lady Day, 1604, or rather a few
days later. He cannot have gone back to the Tower precisely by Lady Day
to stay, for reasons not of State, but of Court. On Monday, March 26,
1604, Easter games were to be performed before the Court at the Tower.
Two mastiffs were to be let loose on a lion, and the King wanted to have
his fortress-palace cleared, for the occasion, of melancholy captives. A
custom prevailed at such festivities of releasing prisoners. There was
no intention of liberating the Winchester convicts. So, according to the
rumour of the Court, as sent home by the Venetian Embassy, they 'were
removed from the Tower and placed in other prisons.' If this statement
is to be accepted literally, and to be reconciled with the Fleet bills
for food, they must, at some time before Easter, have returned from the
Fleet to the Tower, and then, before March 26, been sent back for a
brief space to the Fleet. Ralegh had no cause for rejoicing when the
time arrived for his permanent establishment in the Tower. After his
return it was again, as in 1603, visited by the Plague. He prayed to be
taken elsewhere, on the ground that the pestilence was come next door.
In the adjacent tenement, with a paper wall between, were, he told
Cecil, lying a woman and her child, dying of it. When the Tower was free
from the Plague it was still an unsuitable lodging for one of Ralegh's
constitution. Moisture oozed constantly into the walls from the wide
muddy ditch. The cells were bitterly cold, and Ralegh was chilled and
benumbed. 'Every second or third night,' he reiterated to Cecil in 1605,
'I am in danger either of sudden death, or of the loss