ur to be
scoured. Some persons afterwards considered that this act was connected
with Gunpowder Plot, others maintained that it was merely due to the
fact that the armour was rusty. The great point is that she was still
mistress of Sherborne. Lord Justice Popham, however, as early as 1604,
pronounced Raleigh's act of conveyance invalid, and in 1608 negotiations
began for a 'purchase,' or rather a confiscation of Sherborne to the
King. To this we shall presently return. In the meanwhile Captain Keymis
acted as warden of Sherborne Castle.

As soon as the warm weather closed in, in the summer of 1604, the
malaria in the Tower began to affect Raleigh's health. As he tells
Cecil, now Lord Cranborne, in a most dolorous letter, he was withering
in body and mind. The plague had come close to him, his son having lain
a fortnight with only a paper wall between him and a woman whose child
was dying of that terrible complaint. Lady Raleigh, at last, had been
able to bear the terror of infection no longer, and had departed with
little Walter. Raleigh thereupon, in a fit of extreme dejection,
'presumed to tell their Lordships of his miserable estate, daily in
danger of death by the palsy, nightly of suffocation by wasted and
obstructed lungs.' He entreated to be removed to more wholesome
lodgings. His prayer was not answered. Earlier in the year he had indeed
enjoyed a short excursion from the Tower. At Easter the King had come to
attend a bull-baiting on Tower Hill, and Raleigh was hastily removed to
the Fleet prison beforehand, lest the etiquette of such occasions should
oblige James, against his inclination, to give obnoxious prisoners their
liberty. Raleigh was one of five persons so hurried to the Fleet on
March 25: on the next day the King came, and 'caused all the prisons of
the Tower to be opened, and all the persons then within them to be
released.' After the bull-baiting was over, the excepted prisoners were
quietly brought back again. This little change was all the variety that
Raleigh enjoyed until he left for Guiana in 1617.

When it transpired in 1605 that through, as it appears, the negligence
of the copying clerk, the conveyance by which Raleigh thought that he
had secured Sherborne to his son was null and void, he had to suffer
from a vindictive attack from his wife herself. She, poor woman, had now
for nearly two years bustled hither and thither, intriguing in not
always the most judicious manner for her family, bu