mitted. Popham believed the omission to have been due to the
carelessness of the engrossing clerk. Through it the estate had remained
wholly in Ralegh. Consequently, by his attainder it was forfeited. Lady
Ralegh sought an audience of James. She prayed him not to take advantage
of the forfeiture. With the facility which was compatible equally with
generosity and with rapacious injustice, he promised. He directed Cecil
to have a grant to her and her children prepared. It never was. At first
the preposterous suspicion of Ralegh's sympathy with the Gunpowder Plot
may have caused delay. Later the King discovered that he wanted the
property for his own purposes. Alarmed at his own propensity for
indulging the caprice of the moment, and mindful of the extent to which
the Scottish Crown had been pauperized by royal improvidence, he had
accepted a self-denying ordinance. By this he bound himself not to grant
away the patrimony of the Crown. For the endowment of favourites he had
to rely, therefore, on windfalls from attainders and escheats. Robert
Carr now had to be provided for. Sherborne happened to suit his taste,
and the Ralegh family had to be ejected.

[Sidenote: _Lady Ralegh and the King._]

[Sidenote: _Escheat of Sherborne._]

Proceedings were commenced in 1607 on the Attorney-General's Information
to establish the claim of the Crown. Lady Ralegh again knelt before the
King. She implored a waiver of the forfeiture in her and young Walter's
favour. James rejected her petition either silently, or, according to
Carew Ralegh, with the ejaculation, 'I mun have the land; I mun have it
for Carr.' In a petition he addressed to the Long Parliament, Carew
related that she fell down upon her knees, with her young sons beside
her, and in the bitterness of her spirit invoked the vengeance of Heaven
upon those who had so wrongfully exposed her and her poor children to
ruin and beggary. James was used to her supplications for justice, and
to repulsing them. In the previous autumn she had knelt to him at
Hampton Court for her husband's liberty, and been passed without a word.
Ralegh himself wasted upon Carr an eloquent prayer that he would not
begin his first buildings upon the ruins of the innocent. He entreated
him not to 'give me and mine our last fatal blow by obtaining from his
Majesty the inheritance of my children and nephews, lost in law for want
of words.' He made the attempt after his manner of neglecting no
possibility. He