h's habit of charging Cecil with an abuse of his position
to his personal enrichment at the expense of the Crown, from which he
was alleged to have taken Hatfield by a profitable exchange, and
Cobham's escheated estates. No evidence exists that the question was
ever seriously raised, or had any connexion with the delay. Of that the
one real cause was the inability of the Court to elicit damning
testimony against himself.

[Sidenote: _Sir Thomas Wilson._]

To patch up the gaps in the inquiry before the Lords Commissioners, the
same system was tried as in the preliminary investigations of 1603.
Ralegh was placed, from September 11 till October 15, under a special
keeper. The keeper's business, like that of a Juge d'Instruction, was to
ransack him, and worry him into supplying a case against himself. For
the office Sir Thomas Wilson, Keeper of the State Paper Office, was
chosen. As Wilson himself confessed, his arrival produced an impression
on the officers of the Tower as well as Ralegh, that 'a messenger of
death had been sent.' He had entered the public service as a spy of
Cecil's. He was now enjoying a pension for the intelligence he had
collected in Spain concerning the Main and Bye Plots. His defect in his
new office was an excess of zeal in suspiciousness. He began by
regarding Ralegh as an arch hypocrite, and a lying impudent impostor,
from whom the truth could be extracted only by 'a rack, or a halter.'
Though otherwise a man of some learning, and a diligent guardian of the
public records, he seems to have been very ignorant of physics. He
thought Ralegh was an empty boaster for his statement that he could
distil salt-water into fresh by means of copper furnaces. He treated his
ailments, which Ralegh's somewhat hypochondriacal temperament may have a
little exaggerated, as wholly feigned, 'that he might not be thought in
his health to enterprise any such matter as perhaps he designeth.' Their
symptoms, the swollen left side and liver, the painful sores over his
body, the ague-fits, his lameness from the Cadiz wound, he conjectured
were caused by the patient's own applications. With his wife to share
his watch, he was given absolute control. No person was to have speech
with Ralegh, unless in his hearing. The Council was to be told all he
observed. He was cunning, though he was fond of enlarging on his simple
honesty. He had a high sense of his own importance, and magnified his
very extensive powers. He was furious