you have been found guilty of these horrible Treasons,
the judgment of this court is, That you shall be had from hence
to the place whence you came, there to remain until the day of
execution; and from thence you shall be drawn upon a hurdle
through the open streets to the place of execution, there to be
hanged and cut down alive, and your body shall be opened, your
heart and bowels plucked out, and your privy members cut off,
and thrown into the fire before your eyes; then your head to be
stricken off from your body, and your body shall be divided into
four quarters, to be disposed of at the king's pleasure: And God
have mercy upon your soul.

The execution of sentence on Raleigh was deferred, and he was committed
to the Tower, where he remained as a State prisoner for the next
thirteen years, engaged in philosophic and scientific pursuits and the
education of Prince Henry, the then Prince of Wales. All this time,
however, he remained a person of considerable political importance,
owing to the assistance which the opponents of the proposed marriage
between Prince Charles and the Spanish Infanta hoped to derive from his
general popularity, and his reputation as the leading representative of
English hatred of Spain. At last, in 1616, he was released from custody,
though he was still technically a condemned man, and allowed to prepare
his expedition in search of the gold-mine which he believed to exist in
Guiana, on the banks of the Orinoco. The expedition was in fact promoted
by Winwood, then Secretary, and Villiers, who was at the moment in the
hands of the enemies of Somerset and the Spanish faction, and was always
intended by them as an act of hostility to Spain. How far Raleigh
entered into it in the spirit in which he represented it to the King,
may be judged of from the fact that he was ready at one time to direct
it against the Spaniards in Genoa, as a relief to the Duke of Savoy,
with whom they were then at war, and at another against the French, to
support a rebellion against the Queen-Mother, then in power. He had also
entered into negotiations with the French Court to bring his ships back
to France rather than England when its end was accomplished. What
Raleigh's actual intentions were when he started, it is impossible to
say. But they were all frustrated when a force which he sent up the
Orinoco was disastrously defeated in January 1617, in an attack on a
Spanish settl