Notwithstanding, or because he desired to spare her a
discreditable scene, in the morning Lady Ralegh, with her retinue of
servants, continued her journey to London. King went too. He was to hire
a boat, which was to lie off Tilbury. According to him, the design was
that Ralegh should stop in France till the anger of Spain was lulled.
After their departure a servant of Ralegh's rushed to Stukely with the
news that his master was out of his wits, in his shirt, and upon all
fours, gnawing at the rushes on the boards. Stukely sent Manourie to
him. Manourie administered the emetic, and also an ointment compounded
of aquafortis. This brought out purple pustules over the breast and
arms. Strangers, and after a single visit Stukely too, were afraid to
approach. Lancelot Andrewes, then Bishop of Ely, happened to be at
Salisbury. He heard, and compassionately sent the best three physicians
of the town. None of them could explain the sickness. For four days the
cavalcade halted. Ralegh subsisted on a clandestine leg of mutton, and
wrote his _Apology for the Voyage to Guiana_, from which I have already
drawn for his view of disputed facts. Manourie he employed to copy his
manuscript. The wish to compose the narrative is believed by some to
have been the sole motive of his artifice. His own subsequent account of
it was that he had speculated on an interview with the King. With that
view he had compassed a delay. How an apparent attack of leprosy should
have helped him to an interview is not very intelligible. Chamberlain
wrote to Carleton on August 8 that Ralegh had no audience of James on
account of his malady. Probably the ruling motive of the comedy was a
passionate desire to win leisure for drawing up his narrative, which he
wildly hoped he might find means of bringing before the King during his
sojourn at Salisbury. That was the audience he really desired. As soon
as the treatise was written he recovered. Not now or afterwards was he
at all ashamed of the deception. So given was he to physicking himself,
that it occurred to him as a natural thing to use his drugs in order to
gain a few quiet literary days. He justified his pretence by the example
of David: 'David did make himself a fool, and suffered spittle to fall
upon his beard, that he might escape the hands of his enemies.'

[Sidenote: _Consistency of his Position._]

The statement which he had stolen a respite to write has been considered
by Mr. Gardiner, in his _Prince