tunities for placing on record his
delight in Sir Walter's pretty wit, and adventurous spirit. If it be an
excuse for his share in the persecution of the man and his memory, he
was animated by no personal antipathy. But his skill had been retained
for those who were hounding Ralegh to death, as it had been retained for
the destruction of his old patron Essex. He did not now let his
conscience afflict itself at the thought that he was about to gloss an
act, which a historian, not very friendly to the sufferer, has said 'can
hardly be dignified with the title of a judicial murder.' Neither
passion, pique, nor fear, inspired his pen. His function in official
life, as he interpreted it, was to be the advocate of authority; his
feeling for any but scientific truth was never acute; and he had
positive pleasure in the employment of his intellectual dexterity,
whatever the object. Acting on that system he did the best he could with
the case put before him on the present occasion. His and its misfortune
was that it was irretrievably bad. His instructions were that Ralegh had
gained his pardon by a lie; that there was no Mine, and that he never
supposed there was any; that he went to harry and plunder Spaniards, and
for nothing else; when he found spoil was not to be had as easily as he
had anticipated, he had determined to desert his men, and fly to the
East Indies, or stay behind in Newfoundland. The King was supposed to
have, with his wonted and infallible sagacity, made the discovery of
Ralegh's knavery long since. That royal hypothesis of stark imposture,
and no enthusiasm, was the clue which the Lords Commissioners, with
Bacon at their head, had obsequiously borrowed to hale Ralegh to the
scaffold. It was the strange sophism out of which Bacon again was set to
compose a sedative for the popular emotion.

[Sidenote: _His Majesty's Honour and Justice._]

[Sidenote: _His Princely Judgment._]

He had to begin by apologizing for the King, both to the indignant
nation and to the King's own injured sense of consistency. He had to try
to extricate his master from the cruel dilemma, either of having been an
accomplice in a scheme now denounced by himself as a pirate's
conspiracy, or of having betrayed, out of cowardice and cupidity, a
faithful servant to foreign vengeance. That is the meaning of the
exordium of this pamphlet published in November by the King's Printers,
Bonham Norton and John Bill: 'Although Kings be not bound to