_Ralegh's Fellow Prisoners._]

[Sidenote: _Death of Cobham._]

On March 19, 1616, a royal warrant required the Lieutenant of the Tower
to 'permit Sir Walter Ralegh to go abroad to make preparations for his
voyage.' He then partially or entirely quitted the prison which had been
his home for twelve years. Its population had undergone some recent and
notable changes and exchanges. Sir George More was Lieutenant. Lord Grey
of Wilton had died in July, 1614. To the end he had hoped to be, through
the influence of Henry Howard and Carr, set free to serve Protestant
Holland against Catholic Spain. More pitiable Arabella Stuart, or
Seymour, had entered in 1611. She survived till September, 1615, ever
weak, but guilty of no crime except her contingent birthright. Ralegh
left in prison Northumberland. This splendid patron of letters, for the
dozen years he inhabited the Tower, has been said to have invested it
with the atmosphere of an university. He peopled it with students and
inquirers, such as Thomas Allen, William Warner, Robert Hues, Torporley,
and Hariot. Of an intelligence and capacity which won Sully's
admiration, but wayward, scornful, and, for his own interests very
little of the wizard he was reputed to be, he had been consigned thither
for no guilt, unless, like Ralegh, that he may have consorted with the
guilty. An injustice was not wholly fruitless which bestowed on Ralegh
the comfort of a companionship of learning. Death, eight years before
his release, had freed the last titular chieftain of the Fitzgeralds,
whose spoils he had shared; but he left there an older antagonist,
Florence McCarthy, the 'infinitely adored' Munster man, who in a
neighbouring cell emulated his historical researches. He left Cobham. A
rumour current at the commencement of 1616 that Cobham, like him, was to
be freed, was not confirmed till 1617, and then only partially. In that
year Cobham was allowed to visit Bath for the waters. He was on his way
back to the Tower in September, when, at Odiham, he had a paralytic
stroke. He was conveyed to London at the beginning of October, and
lingered between life and death till January 12, 1619. Probably he
expired in the Tower, though Francis Osborn, who had been master of the
horse to Lord Pembroke, was told by Pembroke that he died half starved
in the hovel of an old laundress in the Minories. The statement of his
poverty is in conflict with the fact mentioned by Ralegh in the
_Prerogative of Par