His Death on the Scaffold

Among the statesmen and adventurers of England who directed the earliest efforts of subjects of that realm for the colonization of America, the name of Raleigh will ever stand brightest. In courage, perseverance, comprehensive views, lavish expenditure and ever-buoyant hopefulness, he had no peer. He was not only a soldier and statesman, but he was a historian, poet and philosopher--a scholar in most departments of learning. When, at the age of about thirty-seven years, he abandoned the scheme for colonizing Virginia, he proceeded to perform other services which, alone, would have made his name immortal. He did much toward the destruction of the Spanish Armada; accompanied Drake in his expedition to seat Don Antonio on the throne of Portugal; brought Edmund Spenser from Ireland and introduced him to the queen; discovered the "large, rich and beautiful empire of Guiana," in South America; assisted in the capture of Cadiz; was ambassador to the Netherlands, and governor of the island of Jersey. Immoralities stained his fair fame, and when Elizabeth died in 1603, the sun of his glory went down among clouds, yet none the brighter in itself because obscured to the visions of men. When King James of Scotland came to the throne of England, he stripped Raleigh of all his preferments. The great man was then a paralytic, but his lofty spirit bore him above repining.

Raleigh was soon afterward arrested on a false charge of conspiring to place Arabella Stuart on the English throne, and on conviction without proof he was condemned to death. Reprieved, he was sent to the Tower, where he was confined many years, accompanied much of the time by his faithful wife, who had been one of Elizabeth's maids of honor. There he was in 1615, when the base and avaricious king, wanting his services to search for gold in Guiana, released him from prison, on condition that he would go there, but did not pardon him. Raleigh was then sixty-three years of age and an invalid; but he went to South America with fourteen ships, in the fitting out of which he embarked the whole of his wife's fortune and his own. The expedition was a failure, and he returned to Plymouth in the summer of 1618 a wreck in fortune, health, reputation and spirits. The king, disappointed in his expectations of wealth as the fruits of the expedition, and jealous of Raleigh even in his almost helplessness, recommitted the old man to the Tower, and soon afterward caused him to be beheaded, in execution of the unjust sentence pronounced fifteen years before. "This is a sharp medicine, but it is a cure for all diseases," said the white-haired patriot, on the scaffold, as he felt the keen edge of the axe and handed it to the executioner.

That murderous act of King James was one of the foulest of all the foul performances of the detested monarch. Upon the altar of his lust he sacrificed one of the noblest patriots, far-seeing statesmen and brilliant scholars of the British realm. Raleigh's very existence, even in the obscurity of the Tower, wherein he wrote his " History of the World," was a perpetual honor to the reign of the bad king.

Raleigh had lived to see his scheme for colonizing Virginia carried out by other Englishmen. Ten years before his death, when he was in the Tower, Jamestown was founded; and when the axe finished his earthly course, a congregation of English Puritans were contemplating that emigration to America which occurred two years later, and which resulted in the founding of the commonwealths of New England. The French navigator, Champlain, had laid the foundations of a permanent settlement on the St. Lawrence River; and whilst Raleigh was in Guiana, the Dutch were laying plans for a colony in New Netherland, which Hudson had discovered a few years before. George Calvert had just received the honors of knighthood, taken a seat in the Privy Council, and gained that special friendship of King James which finally led to his elevation to the peerage as Lord Baltimore, his attempts to colonize Newfoundland, and the possession of the fine domain of Maryland by his family. And after a lapse of almost two centuries, the inhabitants of North Carolina, on the shores of whose State the great adventurer had made his attempts at settlement, showed their sense of justice by giving to their capital the name of Raleigh.