liaments_, that the Crown allowed him L500 a year
till his death for his maintenance. An explanation has been offered that
the tale may have been founded on the delay in his burial. His wealthy
wife and relatives tried to throw upon the Crown the liability for the
cost of an obscure funeral by night at Cobham. But for some unknown
reason he appears to have been in pecuniary straits. Camden speaks of
his return to the Tower 'omnium rerum egentissimus,' and of his death
'miser et inops.' Certainly he had been, as he deserved to be, more
harshly treated in respect of money than Ralegh. On his conviction his
estates had been confiscated. Even his valuable library, which, in the
Tower, he had retained, was claimed in 1618 for the King's use by the
Keeper of State Papers. He had no wife to tend him as had Ralegh. Lady
Kildare was more literally faithful than Sir Griffin Markham's wife,
who, while he was in exile, wedded her serving man, and had to do
penance for bigamy at St. Paul's in a white sheet. But she neglected her
husband, whom she had once ardently loved, and allowed him to pine
alone. Ralegh's admirers too cannot but despise him, though their
feeling is less anger than impatience that so poor a creature should
have warped the fate of one so great.

[Sidenote: _Carr and his Wife._]

Another and newer prisoner Ralegh left, who was to stay till 1622, as
notorious as Cobham, and yet more ignoble. Robert Carr, Viscount
Rochester, and Earl of Somerset, had been committed to the Tower on
October 18, 1615, on the charge of having procured the murder of Sir
Thomas Overbury. The guiltier Countess was joined in the accusation, and
committed in April, 1616. Both were convicted in the May after Ralegh's
release. They were lodged in Ralegh's old quarters, he in the Bloody
tower, she in the garden pavilion erected or remodelled for Ralegh's
accommodation. It had been hastily prepared for her in response to her
passionate entreaties to the Lieutenant not to be put into Overbury's
apartment. Carr's imprisonment and Ralegh's liberation are said, in a
treatise attributed to Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, to have given great
occasion of speech and rumour. Quips and taunts upon Carr, on the same
authority, are imputed to Ralegh. Town gossip was always busy with his
name. In the absence of facts it invented. He was capable of sharp
epigrams, and may have exulted in the fall of his unworthy supplanter.
He would not have condescended to hur