d she were consulting how she was to vindicate his
fame, if he should be hindered from speech on the scaffold, the Abbey
clock struck twelve. She rose to go, that he might rest. Then, with a
burst of anguish, she told him she had leave to bury his body. 'It is
well, dear Bess,' said he with a smile, 'that thou mayst dispose of that
dead, which thou hadst not always the disposing of when alive.' On her
return home, between night and morning, she wrote to 'my best brother,'
Sir Nicholas Carew, of Beddington: 'I desire, good brother, that you
will be pleased to let me bury the worthy body of my noble husband, Sir
Walter Ralegh, in your church at Beddington, where I desire to be
buried. The Lords have given me his dead body, though they denied me his
life. This night he shall be brought you with two or three of my men.
Let me hear presently. God hold me and my wits.'

Ralegh, when his wife left him, wrote his last testamentary note. It was
a rehearsal of the topics on which he meant to speak on the scaffold. If
his mouth were closed it was intended to be a substitute. He repeated in
it his constant affirmation of his loyalty: 'If,' he said, 'I had not
loved and honoured the King truly, and trusted in his goodness somewhat
too much, I had not suffered death.' Then the poet awoke in him. He
wrote in the Bible which he gave to Dean Tounson the famous lines:

Even such is time, that takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
And pays us but with earth and dust;
Who, in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days;
But from this earth, this grave, this dust,
My God shall raise me up, I trust.

[Sidenote: _'Innocent in the Fact.'_]

Early in the morning came Tounson again, and administered the Sacrament.
Tounson wrote in the letter to Sir John Isham, from which I have already
quoted, that Ralegh hoped to persuade the world he died an innocent man.
The Dean objected that his assertions of innocence obliquely denied the
justice of the Realm upon him. In reply he confessed justice had been
done; that was to say, that by course of law he must die; but he claimed
leave, he said, to stand upon his innocency in the fact; and he thought
both the King, and all who heard his answers, believed verily he was
innocent for that matter. Tounson then pressed him to call to mind what
he had done formerly. Though perhaps in that particular for which he