Last Dying Speeches

The highly charged performance of a person facing execution has recently drawn a great deal of critical attention, especially in the three decades since Michel Foucault's controversial thesis concerning the “spectacle of the scaffold” in ^{Discipline and Punish}.Footnote ²⁵ In early modern England, the moments between the condemned person's emergence from the place of detention and the execution of justice were fraught with meaning. The assembled witnesses, in smaller private executions or larger public displays, trained their attention on every movement and word of the condemned, attaching great significance to the smallest details. In cases in which these spectacles were part of the state's implicit efforts to enforce religious orthodoxy, the nuances of the moments preceding the execution would be recorded in the martyrologies that challenged the ideological import of such deaths.Footnote ²⁶ Even when the execution was less obviously about religion, and especially when the condemned had once enjoyed popular acclaim, the scene at the scaffold still drew a great deal of attention, with witnesses noting and occasionally contesting details of the death.Footnote ²⁷ In particular, the account of the last dying speech of the person about to be executed—including the details surrounding those final moments—was especially significant and would circulate widely after the event.Footnote ²⁸

Certain informal conventions governed the bearing of the condemned on the scaffold. Typically, the prisoner would confess the crime, or at least confess to having lived an immoral life, ask forgiveness both from the sovereign and from God, and finally ask for the prayers of those witnessing the execution.Footnote ²⁹ In most cases, the scaffold speech affirmed the justice of the scene. It also may have served to affirm the ideology of the state. As an English translation of a pamphlet describing the French regicide Ravilliac's execution observed, the spectacle served as “an example of terror made knowne to the world to conuert all bloody minded traitors from the like enterprise.”Footnote ³⁰ In the most conflicted executions, the crown would publish an official justification for its actions, as when William Cecil defended the regime's actions against Thomas Campion.Footnote ³¹ Such printed accounts, which could be cheaply and widely disseminated in a standardized version, served a polemic purpose. The cases that have most engaged critics recently have been those such as Campion's in which religion was an issue or the lurid accounts attached to the final days of common criminals described in pamphlets such as those produced by Goodcole. But these conventions applied to the well-born traitors of the period as well.

The execution of the rebellious Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, may serve as an example of the performance conventions of the tragedy on the scaffold. Given the many links between the earl and his rival, Ralegh, each of whom haunted the margins of the other's execution, a brief discussion of Devereux's end will serve as a good foil for understanding the complexities of Ralegh's fashioning of his death. Eleven days after his failed rebellion on 8 February 1601, Essex was quickly tried and convicted of treason. During the six days after his conviction, Devereux moved from denying his guilt to a signed confession. He seems to have experienced a change of heart following meetings with his chaplain as he awaited execution, accounting for his submission to the sentence and his willingness to confess his crimes and the justice of his trial.Footnote ³² On 25 February, once Devereux had brought himself to accept the inevitable, the conventions of the scaffold performance proceeded. William Barlowe reported that Essex made a brief speech on the scaffold, submitting to the justice and authority of the sentence. Confessing a general unworthiness, a Christian sense of sinfulness, Essex acknowledged the particular crime, “this my last sinne, this great, this bloudy, this crying, this infectious sinne.”Footnote ³³ Following the conventions for such speeches, he sought the forgiveness of God first, then asked for his queen's forgiveness, and prayed, “O Lorde blesse her and the Nobles, and the ministers of the church and state” (E4v). Mitigating his crime by professing that he never intended to harm the queen, Essex expressed his hope for salvation and concluded with a request that the assembly join with him in prayer. One of the ministers prompted Devereux over a missed cue—he had neglected to pray for his enemies, so he asked “all the world to forgiue me, euen as I do freely and from my hart forgiue all the world”—before he made his final prayers. Returning to the script, he then removed the outer layers of his clothing, forgave the executioner, rehearsed the creed, removed more layers of clothing, recited either Psalm 51, 54, or 91 (Barlowe points to one of the few disputed details of the event), and then stretched himself on the ground with his head on the block, declaring that his prostration signaled his “humilitie and obedience to thy commaundement … O God,” and adding “I prostrate myself to my deserued punishment” (E7r). Commending his spirit to God in imitation of Christ—“Lord into thy hands I commend my spirite”—Devereux quietly received the fall of the axe. The scene of the once-proud earl's submission was complete. Essex's comportment in his final hour reaffirmed the crown's justice, even as it inadvertently rehabilitated his posthumous reputation: Elizabeth seems to have regretted his death to the end of her days; Barlowe became anathema for the sermon he preached on submission; a mob attacked the executioner as he left the scaffold; Francis Bacon produced an extensive justification of the crown's actions against Devereux, including the confessions of many of his confederates, because while “publik iustice … do in it selfe carie an sufficient satisfaction towards all men,” there remains some of the earl's confessed infectious sin in the hearts of “some misaffected persons”;Footnote ³⁴ and many people blamed Ralegh for Essex's downfall, so that during his own turn on the scaffold Ralegh felt compelled to excuse his behavior toward his rival.

“The Testimony of a Dying Man”: The Official Response

In an effort to tar Ralegh's posthumous reputation, Sir Lewis Stucley would claim that the adventurer had insulted Essex by declaring, Essex “dyed like a Calfe … he died like a foole and like a coward.”Footnote ³⁵ Stucley had escorted Ralegh from Plymouth to London and spied on him along the way. Despite Tounson's report that following Ralegh's execution the disquiet was “blowen over, and he allmost forgotten,” popular opinion had again turned in the adventurer's favor. As a result, Stucley suffered under the people's calumny, who called him “Judas Stucley.”Footnote ³⁶ To vindicate himself, he published The humble petition and information of Sir Lewis Stucley on 27 November 1618, in coordination with the crown's official response to Ralegh's execution.

The triumph of the state over the individual Ralegh, another disgraced favorite of the venerated queen, rested on shaky ground. Just as Essex's suffering had earned the fallen earl new admiration, so Ralegh's execution had again redeemed the reputation of a man who had occasionally tested the patience of both the monarch and the common person in England. And just as Elizabeth's advisors had mobilized the power of the press to try to quiet the public's continued murmuring after Devereux's death, so the Jacobean regime turned to print in an effort to quell popular discontent about the events of late October 1618. It published ^{A Declaration of the Demeanor and Cariage of Sir Walter Raleigh} the day after Stucley's Humble Petition. At the end of his 28 November letter to Dudley Carleton, John Chamberlain mentions that Stucley's ineffectual printed justification of his behavior with Ralegh, published the day before, “finds little credit” and adds that he had just received the crown's explanation of its actions, published that morning.Footnote ³⁷ Stucley's Humble Petition and the crown's Declaration of the Demeanor both appeared from the presses of the king's printers, Bonham Norton and John Bill, and attempted to undermine Ralegh's posthumous popularity and to persuade the public to accept his execution.Footnote ³⁸ Both texts help to call that public into existence and testify to the role that official publications played in creating a public sphere.Footnote ³⁹

In vindicating his treatment of Ralegh, Stucley casts the adventurer as a mendacious, self-serving hypocrite. He focuses on the self-consciously dramatic flair of Ralegh's final performance, suggesting that it masked an interior malice. As a master of equivocation, Ralegh, “an Angel of darknesse, did put on him the shape of an Angel of light at his departure, to performe two Parts most cunningly” and had been able to win the “hearts of discontented people” while simultaneously “blemish[ing] me in my good name, a poore instrument of the iust desires of the State” (^{Humble Petition}, 2). Stucley counters two of Ralegh's claims that he thought had contributed to his popular rehabilitation. On the one hand, he reminded his readers that Ralegh rejoiced in Essex's death and claimed to have witnesses who would attest to Ralegh's malice toward the deceased earl (9). He contrasts Devereux's genuine repentance with Ralegh's insincere words on the scaffold. If only Ralegh had learned from Essex's saintly humility on the scaffold, then “hee had not called [Essex’s] repentance and Saintship so farre into question, as now he hath done, and so seditiously haue poisoned the hearts of discontented people, nor so maliciously wounded the reputation of an honest Subject” (10). In the second thread of his defense, Stucley undermines Ralegh's efforts to defend his actions on the Guiana expedition, rejecting Ralegh's claim that the king's commission constituted an implicit pardon and insisting that Ralegh had dealt with the French in order to bring England into a costly war with Spain, attempting to break “the League, and to imbroyle the two States” (5). Casting Ralegh as a reckless troublemaker, Stucley blithely assumes that a public already unhappy with some of the monarch's preliminary moves toward the great enemy of Elizabeth would regard war with Spain as a mark against him.Footnote ⁴⁰

If “Dying mens wordes are euer remarkable,” the power of Ralegh's words and his position as a popular hero would be hard to rebut. Stucley recognized the difficulty of overcoming the objections of a public that would say, “Yea, but it was the testimony of a dying man, now a penitent (as al say) as some say, a Saint” (Humble Petition, 3–4). Frustrated that the conventions of the scaffold bolstered the apparent sincerity of Ralegh's words, Stucley returns again and again to the fact that Ralegh had been executed for a crime and that his final words should not be trusted. Ralegh's words from the scaffold may have been entirely untrue, but the traitor was no longer available for cross-examination. “I haue noe pleasure to fight with a ghost,” he admits at one point (2). Nevertheless, Stucley tries his best, reminding the public that Ralegh's words were those of “an Outlaw after Iudgement, euen in a case of high Treason” (11). For Stucley, the fact of Ralegh's treason should impugn his credibility. “And therefore how this man equivocates at his death, all the world may see,” Stucley assures his readers (13). And yet to his dismay, the world did not see these events as Stucley did. More damaging than Ralegh's treasons in life, however, was that in “his death through false testimony to traduce the Iustice & instruments of the State” (3), he had left words that could not be refuted or recanted. Stucley concludes his Humble Petition with his fear that the public “say [Ralegh] died like a Souldier & a saint, & therefore then to be beleeued, not only against me, but against the attestation of the State” and requests that the king “will be so gracious vnto mee, as to suffer a declaration to come forth from the State, for the cleering of these matters” (17). If recent events had upset the public, Stucley concludes, the crown has an interest in making its case to the people. Asserting the authority of the king to adjudicate the truth of events, Stucley expected an official address to the public concerning Ralegh's demise.

The state's justification for the proceedings against Ralegh appeals to a public to make a rational assessment of the evidence. The ^{Declaration of the Demeanor} presents a narrative of recent events, reproduces documents to support the official interpretation of those events, and expects the English public to reach the same conclusion. The quintessential trait of Habermas's public sphere is the “people's public use of their reason,” not unlike the appeal Bacon and his collaborators make throughout the Declaration.Footnote ⁴¹ Momentarily bracketing the king's prerogative, since “Kings be not bound to giue Account of their Actions to any but god alone,” the tract calls into existence a rational public as it asserts that the just and benevolent King James “hath alwayes been willing to bring [his proceedings] before Sunne and Moone, and carefull to satisfie all his good people with his Intentions and courses.”Footnote ⁴² Differentiating between scandalous actions that “passe in vncertaine Reports” and the king's own irreproachable justice, the author claims that he willingly desires to have them “published in open manifests” (1). The tract invites the public to determine for itself how the king had come to the point of executing Ralegh.

The Declaration of the Demeanor presents the evidence and asks the public to accept the king's justice. Briefly reminding the public that Ralegh had “beene condemned of high Treason, at his Maiesties entrance into this Kingdome” and had lived the intervening years at the king's pleasure, the author describes the context of Ralegh's release to pursue the “Enterprise of a golden Mine in Guiana” (3). After recalling the warnings the king had made that Ralegh should not trouble the peaceful relationship between England and Spain and the king's painstaking efforts to craft a “limited Commission” that would satisfy Gondomar's objection that Ralegh would terrorize Spanish colonies in the Americas (5), the author reproduces the first of two documents included in the Declaration, the full sixteen-page commission the king had granted to Ralegh. He inserts “the words of the Commission” for the public to read and consider, so that “his Maiesties honest intention may heerin the better appeare” (7). Following this document, the author sets out to show that Ralegh disregarded his commission's strict limits, narrating the events of the expedition so that to the public “it appeareth plainely, by the whole sequell of his Actions, that he went his owne way” (26). In explaining Ralegh's deceit, the author expects the public to draw logical conclusions, as the king had. Ralegh's unwillingness to share the location of the mine with his subordinates and the fact that he told different people that it was located at different distances and in different directions from San Thomé should prove that “this Mine was not onely imagineary, but moueable” (35). Similarly, the reader should find it as “easie to discerne” the adventurer's guilty conscience as the crown did “by his immediate attempt to escape from [Plymouth]” on making landfall in England (41). The author then introduces the twenty-page testimony of a French medico, Stucley's servant Manoury, whom Ralegh suborned to help him plot an escape or feign grave illness, as he “himselfe reporteth to haue passed in this manner” (43). Having produced the evidence that had induced the crown to find that Ralegh “had made himselfe vtterly vnwoorthy of his Maiesties further mercy” and reminding the public that as a man dead before the law Ralegh could not be tried for his most recent suspicious activities, the author turns to a final summation (62). Certain that his “iust and honourable proceedings” must be “manifest to all his good Subiects by this preceding Declaration,” the king “leaues it to the world to iudge” how else he could have satisfied the demands of justice (62). He appeals to the public to reach the same conclusion.

Despite the crown's assertions, the justice executed upon Ralegh was not self-evident. In his final peroration, interpreting the justice meted out at the conclusion of the narrative woven in the Declaration of the Demeanor, the author confronts exactly the problem that Stucley had previously faced: how to counter a dying man's final words. “But as to Sir Walter Raleigh his confession at his Death,” the pamphlet complains, “what he confessed or denied … his Maiestie leaues him and his conscience therein to God” (63). This flawed response, leaving the actual validity of the traitor's final words unresolved in this world, moots the point of the state's justifications after the fact. Having granted the public a potentially destabilizing space in which to engage the monarch's evidence, the state returns to the territory of the prerogative. The Declaration sounds Foucauldian indeed when it explains that in order to uphold justice and to keep the goodwill of Philip III, the king had “by a Legal punishment of the Offender, giuen an example, as well of terrour to all his other Subiects, not to abuse his gracious meanings, in taking contrary courses for the attaining to their owne vnlawfull endes” (63). Torn between the public's doubts about the execution and the fact that it could not be undone, the tract merely concludes by admitting that “Soueraigne Princes cannot make a true iudgement vpon the bare speeches or asseuerations of a delinquent at the time of his death” (63–64). And with that, the state rests its case in the court of public opinion.

Ralegh's Speech in Manuscript

Left with these responses to the execution, one might infer that Ralegh had railed against his demise from the scaffold or impugned the king's justice in some way. Such events did sometimes occur, but their rarity testifies to the power of the last dying speech's conventions.Footnote ⁴³ Given the defensive tone and vociferous attacks of the official justifications for the execution, it might appear that Stucley and Bacon needed to counter a polemical defense of Ralegh that had somehow escaped the state's ability to censor the printing of inflammatory, even slanderous, works.Footnote ⁴⁴ However, the Humble Petition and the Declaration of the Demeanor do not respond to a printed critique of the proceedings. Printing a text certainly made it widely and immediately available, but throughout the seventeenth century, scribal publication and manuscript circulation offered a lively alternative to the fixity of print, with the added advantage that such texts could more easily evade official censorship and could still be produced relatively quickly.Footnote ⁴⁵ In the case of Ralegh's performance on the scaffold, the ability of manuscript to preserve and adapt the memory of the recuperated Ralegh as a martyr to the machinations of the Spanish faction at court helped to turn his otherwise muted speech into a powerful talisman of Stuart absolutism.Footnote ⁴⁶ The manuscript circulation of Ralegh's final speech brings these many threads into fruitful consideration. Taken together, these media attest to the emergence of temporary “public spheres” in early modern England.

The earliest details of Ralegh's death are recorded on a narrow slip of paper, full of gaps and abbreviations, that may actually reflect notes taken at the foot of the scaffold by Ralegh's old companion in skepticism, Thomas Hariot.Footnote ⁴⁷ These notes reflect the main points of what Ralegh may have said on the scaffold that cold October morning: thanksgiving to God, who is called to witness the truth of what Ralegh will speak; a profession of loyalty to the king; several references to Lewis Stucley; a reference to £10,000; phrases related to the Guiana voyage and to his feigned illness; and “The E. of Essex.” The list concludes with “Lastly he desired the company / to joyne with him in prayer. &c.” This skeletal account of Ralegh's last words resembles the key points of most other versions of the speech. Moreover, the open-ended ambiguity of the actions suggested by “&c” would be supplied in some crucial variations in subsequent reports of his final moments. The accretion of details surrounding Ralegh's comportment during and after the speech and the accumulation of commentary on his bearing as he awaited the fall of the axe help to construct the legend of Ralegh as a victim of Stuart treachery.

Newsletter writers quickly spread the news of Ralegh's death, and again they focused on key details. John South's account provides the earliest movement of news of Ralegh's demise from London to the provinces.Footnote ⁴⁸ This rapid transmission of news from center to periphery also contributes to the formation of an informed public.Footnote ⁴⁹ Writing to an aristocratic recipient in Oxford, South apologizes for not being there in person and, as a substitution, has “written the conclusion of Sir Walter Rawley, who was beheaded on Thursday in the Palais Yard.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Capturing slightly more of the flavor of Ralegh's speech than Hariot's speech headings, the writer comments that “His speech on the Scaffold was reducible to these 2 Heads, The first concern’d ye Reasons why his condemnation was now renewd, and execution to bee done, The second answered, such Imputations, as formerly haue beene made against his credite, & Reputation” (4v). Although the words would vary, some of these details would recur in subsequent reports of the speech, including his initial preface to the speech: “His Introduction to these [themes] was, first, That hee thought himselfe happie, being to dye in ye open view of the world, and not stifled or otherwise privately made away, as some haue formerly beene” (4v). After proceeding through some of the specific charges Ralegh sought to dispel, including his league with France and misunderstandings about financial dealings and his apology for the factious treatment of Essex, South finishes with Ralegh's rejection of the “Imputacon of Athysme” (5r), a charge rarely stated so explicitly in versions of the speech, noting that Ralegh went to his end “confessing himselfe a Christian, & true Protestant, depending only on the meritts of Christ Jesus,” so that “to the great contentacon of all men he seem’d to dy bouldly, & religiously” (5r).Footnote ⁵¹ For South, the remarkable events surrounding Ralegh's death carry some value to his correspondent in the countryside.

Comments about Ralegh's bearing in his last moments become increasingly important in reports of the execution. The letter writer John Pory combines one of the earliest accounts of Ralegh's words with greater attention to the theatricality on the scaffold before and after the speech. Writing on 31 October 1618 to Dudley Carleton in The Hague, Pory commends the pathos of the event to his patron since it was a “matter of so muche marke & renowne it is fitt, that all tongues & pennes both good & bad shoulde be employed about it.”Footnote ⁵² The account begins with Ralegh's appearance before Montagu to receive his sentence. Pory then recounts the details of Ralegh's speech: “The first words he uttered were, I give god thankes, I am come to dye in the light and not in the darknes” (71). This theme of execution in public marks the beginning of nearly every account of his speech, perhaps explaining why the official account of King James's actions would itself have recourse to language of bringing events “before sun and moon” and “in open manifests.” Pory's report remains mostly in the third person, providing more details of Ralegh's justification for his suspicious behavior that summer—this is the earliest account suggesting that Ralegh justified his simulated illness by recalling King David's feigned madness—before concluding with the story that Ralegh swore to the “Deane of Westminster” that he was to die “in the faith professed by the Churche of Englande, and that he hoped he would be saved, & to have his Sinnes washed away by the pretious bloud and Merits of our Saviour Christ” (72).Footnote ⁵³ At this point, Pory includes the theatrical elements that make Ralegh's death famous: his refusal to take warmth at a fire after his speech because “(said he) lett us dispatche; for within this quarter of this hower mine ague will come upon me and if I be not dead before then mine enemies will saye that I quake for feare”; his prayers; his exchange with the headsman: “He then bid the hangman shewe him his axe, which having poized in his hand he felte upon the edge, saying here is medicin will cure me of all my diseases”; and his leave-taking and his scorning the offer of a blindfold, “you think I feare the shadowe of the axe, when I fear not the axe itself ” (72). Such details elaborate on his bold end, figuring Ralegh as fearlessly confronting his death. Ralegh's comment about the axe's blade as medicine for all life's diseases, not just the malaria of the recent voyage, adds to the legend of his stoic end.

Pory, of course, could tell a good story and was paid for his newsletters. He concluded his description with a sort of cliffhanger: “Many other circumstances and pointes of substance there were bothe before and at the time of his execution, which were very memorable. … The rest I must of force leave till the next Saturday” (72). But before sending off the letter, Pory adds in the margin a comment about the events, a gloss that begins the process of shaping Ralegh's posthumous reputation: “Every man that sawe Sir Walter Ralegh dye said it was impossible for any man to shewe more Decorum, courage, or piety; and that his death will doe more hurte to the faction that sought it, then ever his life could have done” (73). The public's comments on Ralegh's performance on the scaffold, in his actions and bearing before and after the speech, in which he did not appear meek or submissive but bravely stoic to the end, point to the challenges his last dying speech posed. The sorts of embellishments that become attached to reports of the execution quickly gave that performance a vitality that Stucley could not hope to counter, especially once his defense ossified in print.

As the reported speech becomes more elaborate, the sense that Ralegh had been sacrificed to a pro-Spanish faction would become more pronounced. Another of Carleton's prolific correspondents, John Chamberlain, sent news of Ralegh's execution while it was still fresh and included more theatrical details and glossing. Writing on 31 October, the same day as Pory, Chamberlain recounts events of the week since his last letter, describing Ralegh's unsuccessful appearance before the King's Bench and reporting a detailed summary of his “speach of more then halfe an howre” from the scaffold.Footnote ⁵⁴ He describes Ralegh's bearing and speech, which “moved much commiseration” (177). He records the significant details of Ralegh's last few minutes after the speech, including both the famously stoic comment about the medicinal axe and other details Pory does not mention. One of the most important of these involves Ralegh's positioning of himself on the scaffold. Chamberlain reports that following his speech, Ralegh had lain on the scaffold facing west. Someone in the crowd suggested that he should face east (i.e., toward the resurrection). Somewhat exasperated, Ralegh stood up and stated “yt was no great matter which way a mans head stoode so his heart lay right,” but he reoriented himself as requested (177). Chamberlain's letter also includes details of the crowd's reaction, missing in most other accounts. “The people were much affected at the sight,” Chamberlain reported, “insomuch that one was heard to say that we had not such another head to cut of ” (177). He also speculates that the speech might be fatal to James's unpopular affinity for Spain, that there would soon be “some declaration set out touching the causes of his execution,” but that despite Spanish fears of reprisal, “whether his protestations and manner of dieng may alter the case God knows” (178). Chamberlain later wryly notes that “they had no thancks that suffered him to talke so longe on the scaffold” (179). His letters throughout November testify to the continuing interest in and public discussion of Ralegh's demise. “We are so full still of Sir Walter Raleigh,” he reports on 21 November, and adds that scandalous ballads lamenting his fall were being called in (185). Ralegh's speech, though not printed, had already begun to circulate to an interested public, and anticipation of an official declaration ran high, though Chamberlain expected that any such justification “will hardly prevaile” (185). His subsequent letters about Stucley's Humble Petition and the official Declaration and Demeanor would bear that expectation out.

The political and diplomatic import of Ralegh's execution appeared in many newsletter accounts of these events. English writers for English readers in the country or abroad speculated on the implications of Ralegh's fall. Similarly, foreign correspondents took note of these events. In the ^{Calendar of State Papers, Venice}, for instance, the diplomatic correspondence returns again and again to Ralegh, especially as it became evident that his conclusion was foregone. At the end of June they had reported the king's anger over Ralegh's disastrous expedition. In their first dispatch to Venice after the execution, Contarini and Donato record starkly that “Sir Walter Raleigh has suffered death” before taking up the question of the crisis in Bohemia.Footnote ⁵⁵ Despite recording that Ralegh “steadfastly denied” having plotted against the king, they refrain from further comment until mid-December, when they observe increased tensions between James and the French (350). Some in England had suspected French designs against Spain in Ralegh's Guiana voyage and in his subsequent behavior. At this point the Venetian diplomats report of the Declaration, “his Majesty has caused the crimes of Sir Walter Raleigh to be printed and he has not passed over the negotiations held with the French and the indecency of them” (382). The contest for the meaning of Ralegh's scaffold performance resonated beyond England's shores.

Newsletters were, of course, meant to carry current news. Ralegh's speech, however, seems to have been of interest for decades following the event. Once the details of the speech itself had become partially fixed, the text began to circulate as a “separate,” with the important mutation that the text of the speech usually adopted first-person, direct narration rather than the newsletters’ typically third-person, indirect or reported speech.Footnote ⁵⁶ In turn, these separates were often copied into collections or miscellanies, creating interesting juxtapositions and suggesting how readers understood these events. Thus, for instance, in a series of separates brought together by William Bull and continued by his nephew Henry Bull, Ralegh's final speech comes after accounts of the trial and execution of Essex, as well as the tribulations of his son in the divorce from Frances Howard. If the owners of this manuscript took a special interest in the Devereux family, they may have appreciated a version of Ralegh's speech that more fully apologizes for his behavior toward the rebel earl. In this account, after the basic elements common to most separates of the speech, Ralegh addresses the rumors of his exulting in Essex's downfall. This section of the speech—including the recognition that supporting a “contrary Faction” has now returned to cost him his own life—is common to many versions, but this one uniquely elaborates on his remorse, claiming that Ralegh protested that the rumor “doth make my heart Bleed” that “such an Imputation should be laid upon me.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Text and context can be made to speak to each other. Biography—the gathering of texts about a single individual—may be the most obvious principle for such collections; an interest in a particular event or controversy often motivates other collections.Footnote ⁵⁸ Sometimes texts appear next to each other because their owner recognizes some underlying thematic connection. Perhaps the Bulls acquired this version because it appealed to their interest in the Devereux family. Perhaps a scribe tailored this version to meet those interests. In any case, Ralegh's speech appears in numerous manuscript contexts like the Bulls’ miscellany, and while the details of the speech itself gain a kind of stability, the script remained a sort of hybrid. The outline of his “final” words obtained a near fixity they might have found in print, but small variations and the glosses that framed the speech—the emphasis on some details of behavior, the suppression of others, and the commentary at the margins—as well as the other texts that owners of the manuscript bound with the speech, all participated in shaping the ends to which Ralegh was put posthumously.

Once the text of Ralegh's speech achieved relative fixity, however, the shifting details framing the speech receive greater or lesser emphasis and modify the way the text signifies. Ralegh's more “spontaneous” comments and gestures on ascending the scaffold or those immediately preceding the fall of the axe take on greater theatricality, though paradoxically, their embellishment shows them to be less scripted, as they become part of the myth of Ralegh's legendary last words. Some ornate versions of the speech capture numerous details, the better to illustrate Ralegh's heroic demeanor. In such cases, the separate narrating Ralegh's performance might include more details of his activities on ascending the scaffold or elaborate versions of his actual words. For instance, Folger MS G.b.7 combines an extended record of his words with an extended narration of his actions following the speech itself: his prayers, gifts to three strangers, all his comments about the axe, his consultation with Tounson about whether he should reorient himself after lying down, and a distracted headsman whom Ralegh must ultimately entreat to perform the execution.Footnote ⁵⁹ Another account focuses on the crowd that thronged the scaffold to witness the death of the popular adventurer. As the sheriffs lead Ralegh through the crowd, he becomes “breathlesse and seemed faynting vpon his arryving vpon ye Scaffold. But after he had pawsed awhile his spiritts seemed very cheerefull.”Footnote ⁶⁰ This sense of stoic resolve persists to the end of this version, where the moments between the end of the speech itself and the execution are reported relatively tersely, eliding some of the more theatrical elements of the performance. After putting his head on the block, this Ralegh does not reposition himself or comment about the head and the upright heart. In fact he does not move at all during the execution: “At two blowes the Executioner presently strooke of his head, his body neuer shrinking nor moving” (24). The stage business following the focal point of the event—the speech itself—receives minimal attention.

The amount of detail in separates varies significantly. More typical are accounts such as Folger MS G.b.9, which contains the speech and many of the details of Ralegh's actions afterward but not every detail found elsewhere. It includes his discussion with the executioner but leaves out his entreaty that the witnesses would preserve his reputation with the king.Footnote ⁶¹ Many versions have a unique detail or two; thus New York Public Library MS Arents 7482 includes the details of Ralegh's breakfast—“a dishe of fried steakes, eggs roasted, and sacke burned” (74r)—not usually included in these accounts, whereas in another version Ralegh must clear himself of the charge that he would have “left my company att Guyana” if he could have saved himself.Footnote ⁶² Occasionally, an industrious scribe compares one version against another, interlineating details found elsewhere in an early collation of the speech. Morgan Library MS RE 50, for instance, is a messy document with more than a dozen instances of additions. While some of these carets may signal careless transcription, several seem to have been meant to amplify the text. Thus the scribe copies one line as “Sr Lewes stewkly hath affirmed,” then returns to insert the appositive “my keeper & kinsman” above Stucley's name.Footnote ⁶³ More than simple corrections, however, this scribe expands the text he copies, perhaps in an effort to capture as many details as possible. So in the midst of transcribing Ralegh's frustration with the French informer who had testified to the cause of his feigned illness, this scribe indents and adds several discontinuous lines of Ralegh's self-justifying comparison to King David, a detail included in only some versions of the speech, before returning to the regular margin and Ralegh's continued disgust with the French informer. This scribe seems to have had two versions of the speech before him and conflates details as he copied, producing a bloated and occasionally incoherent whole. At the other end of the spectrum, the scribe of University of Chicago MS 824 includes the bare necessities of the speech, leaving out the references to Essex and concluding vaguely “w[i]th many p[ro]testacons he vtterly denyed. Then was his head severed from his Bodye, at three Blowes. FINIS.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Versions of Ralegh's speech, then, run a gamut from extensive celebration of every gesture of the fallen hero to brief, matter-of-fact reporting, giving different senses of the courtier's end to different owners or readers.

The Hybrid Ralegh: Folger MS V.a.418

Most separates of the scaffold speech appear with other texts, offering a hint of how the owner of the manuscript thought of and contextualized Ralegh's last performance. Sometimes the text appears with other popular manuscript separates related to the events of 1603, such as accounts of Ralegh's trial or the tender letter he wrote to his wife as he anticipated the averted execution. Other collections of manuscripts containing the speech join it with the ^{Prerogative of Parliaments} or other sensitive texts that remained unpublished until years after his death, suggesting the illicit or subversive quality readers found in the speech. One especially interesting collection of Ralegh materials is Folger MS V.a.418. Among accounts of Ralegh's last words, MS V.a.418 occupies the loquacious end of the spectrum, transcribed by someone who appears loath to leave out any detail, capturing most of the elements found elsewhere. For instance, in this manuscript Ralegh says both that he does not fear the axe and that it is a medicine to cure all diseases, conflating details that occasionally occur singly. But MS V.a.418 is especially interesting as a hybrid text that limns the margins of manuscript and print. The quarto-sized aggregation, which includes many manuscripts associated with Ralegh's demise, binds together multiple media between its stab-sewn, limp vellum covers. These separates, quires of half sheets copied in multiple hands in several inks, surround two printed texts, the crown's Declaration of the Demeanor and Stucley's Humble Petition.Footnote ⁶⁵ Compiling texts in different media, the owner of MS V.a.418 records the traces of a kind of dialogue conducted before a fractious public. In this collection, the official world of print and the scandalous world of manuscript converge. This curious hybrid attests to the ways Jacobean readers adapted materials for their own uses and shows how at least one reader tried to make sense of the events of late 1618.

Opening the cover of MS V.a.418, one finds an elaborate version of Ralegh's ascent of the scaffold. It starts by carefully setting the scene, including day, date, year, time, location, and audience. A cramped, marginal note records that this was “the same day / that the Lord mayor / of London tooke / his oath” (MS V.a.418, fol. 1r). Ralegh begins his speech, finds that the lords attending the event cannot hear him, and offers to “straine my self, for I would faine have yo[u]r honn[o]rs heare me” (1r). When Arundel and his companions reseat themselves on the scaffold, he begins his speech again, giving thanks to God that he will die in the open rather than in the Tower's darkness. He responds to the fears James has formed about his French connections, denying that he had any dealings with them, adding the oath, “If I speake not true: O lord, lett me neuer come into thy kingdome” (1v). He takes a further oath that he never thought or spoke “dishon[o]rably, disloyally, nore dishonnestly of ye kinge” (2r). He proceeds to excuse his efforts to feign illness or to flee the country in order to save his life, using King David as his example. He adds an extensive denunciation of Stucley because he is “bound in Charritie” to warn others of Stucley's deceitful ways, though he has forgiven him (2r). He mentions the crew's mutiny in Guiana as an explanation for some of his misunderstood actions and asserts that he sincerely hoped for success in the voyage, contrary to rumors that he had sought his own liberty, recalling his oath to Arundel at his departure, and allowing Arundel to interrupt him to affirm that memory (3r). He tries to explain the bookkeeping error that some have bruited abroad as proof of his embezzling, again taking his oath that he will “render an Accompt to God; and I protest as I shall appeare before him, this that I haue spoken is true” (3v). He adds that he never meant to offend Essex or his memory and concludes by asking the witnesses to join him in prayer, aware that he has been “a man full of all vannyty hauing liued a sinfull and wicked life, in a sinfull calling: hauing bine a soldier, a Captaine, a Sea Captaine, and a Courtier, are the only wayes to make a man wicked, that haue Sinned in all these places” (3v–4r). This comment, as well as his request that his friends intercede with the king and “enforme his Ma[jes]tie of that he had spoken: and also to entreate his Ma[jes]tie that there might be no scandelous writtinge to defame him, be published after his death” (4r), is found only in some manuscript versions of the speech.

This account continues with the memorable actions after the speech. The details of giving away “his bead hatt & wrought night Cap w[i]th some money” to those who were at the scaffold with him are embellished versions of the typical giving away of a simple nightcap (4r). He takes his leave of the noble witnesses, among “the rest taking his leaue of my Lord of Arundell” as a special favor, requesting that he safeguard his posthumous reputation. He prays with Tounson and then demands to see the axe and praises it as a “phissition for all diseases” (4r). The account further adds that Ralegh stoically forgives his executioner “with a smyling countenance” and that when he lay down on the block he was “asked w[hi]ch way he would lye, whither with his heade towards the Lords, or not … he said so the hart be straight, it is no matt[e]r w[hi]ch way the head lay” (4v). This moving about after initially lying down and the comment about the virtuous heart, while adding to the legend of Ralegh's stoic resolve, signal a more capacious reporting of the event and an effort to shape its meaning. This version ends with Ralegh twice giving the signal for the executioner to strike “as he lay praying & calling vpon god” (4v). It is one of the most complete accounts of the event. Ralegh's brief epitaph, “Even such is time,” supposed to have been copied into his Bible on the eve of the execution, immediately follows the separate of the last dying speech, along with five other epitaphs.Footnote ⁶⁶ The so-called Short Apology—an often-copied letter to Ralegh's friend on the Privy Council, George Carew, justifying his actions in Guiana—follows these poems. Perhaps most interesting, another widely circulated separate, Ralegh's letter to the king after the 1603 conviction, is modified in V.a.418, with the name of Ralegh's 1603 betrayer, Cobham, replaced with his more recently treacherous companion, “sr Lewes stukeley” (6r). As a sort of bookend, Ralegh's letter to his wife, written in 1603 on the eve before his reprieve from execution, appears at the end of the booklet, after the Declaration of the Demeanor and the Humble Petition, the two printed texts, that follow the manuscript separates at the beginning of the volume.

Among the common manuscript works in this collection is a unique address to Ralegh, possibly composed by the owner of the volume itself. Proceeding from the ^{ars moriendi} tradition—the opportunity to prepare for the assured moment of death and the judgment to follow—this pious text suggests the reason that some of the details of the scaffold speech receive embellishment.Footnote ⁶⁷ This valediction sympathetically apostrophizes the “Braue, knowinge, yet Ignorant Raleigh” (7r). Pointing out that his pursuit of self-interest has finally brought him low, the author adopts a moralizing tone as he advises Ralegh how he should meet his end. He should accept that he “owes a death,” and that having lost so much already—position, friends, wealth—“O Raleigh, by the missing of these, thou haste easie and smooth stepps made thee to the dwelling of death” (7r). Advising the absent Ralegh to submit to the searching judgments of “thy Creator,” the author suggests that Ralegh accept death “as a freind” and concludes by praising his “Monument,” his History of the World, which “shall so speake thee that thou shalt liue till thy Subiect hath ending” (8r). The short address, while faulting Ralegh for his pursuit of worldly vanities, stops short of condemnation. On the contrary, the author finds much to commend in Ralegh and takes the imagined opportunity of counseling the heroic figure that there is a time for worldly pursuits and a time to attend to the things of the next world. Perhaps the author imagines Ralegh in a better place, freed from the corruption implied in Ralegh's remembrance of the “sinfull calling” of the life of a courtier.

The emphasis on repentant submission in this brief apostrophe aligns the details of the other separates included in the volume with the collection's overarching concerns. Ralegh's final speech typically includes his oath that his final words are true, especially as he will quickly appear at the heavenly bar. Such oaths cannot easily be countered and certainly frustrated the official printed responses to the speech. Coming from a man whose enemies accused him of atheism, these oaths certainly left a strong impression on many who recorded Ralegh's final speech. In MS V.a.418, these oaths pepper the speech, sometimes in lengthy variations, as when Ralegh declares that he does not care to curb his speech to appease James: “Now what haue I to doe w[i]th Kings, I haue nothing to doe w[i]th them, neyther doe I feare them. I haue now to do w[i]th god. Therefore to tell a lye now, to gaine fauor of the kinge, were vaine” (2r). An additional mark of the way the scribe shapes this version of the speech to emphasize its piety appears in his variation from typical practice. While he transcribes most of the speech in a neat secretary hand, with italics used only for proper names, the scribe italicizes “repentance,” calling attention to it, in the midst of one of Ralegh's justifying oaths: “to call god to witness a falshood at the hower of death, is far more greuious and impious, that cannot haue salvation for he hath not tyme of repentance. And what should I expect that am going instantly to render my account” (1v). Such unimpeachable oaths bolster Ralegh's claims to speak truthfully, as his critics had discovered.

The adaptation of these manuscript separates, enveloping the state's official, if ineffectual, attempts to sway public opinion through cheap print, shows how readers could use the fluidity of manuscript to suit or assert their own understanding of Ralegh's end.Footnote ⁶⁸ The collection of these traces of Ralegh's words in Folger MS V.a.418 includes important variations not only in the speech but also in the manuscripts bound with it in response to the printed pamphlets on which some of the transcription occurs. The transformation of Ralegh's submissive 1603 letter to the king with an appositive that anachronistically reflects the details of his later circumstances, indicting the treacherous Stucley instead of the treacherous Cobham, for instance, or the appending of Ralegh's 1603 farewell to his wife at the end of the collection, with the transformed heading “Sr Walter Raleighes l[ett]re to his Wife the night before his death, w[hi]ch shoulde haue been at Winchester,” shows that the medium's pliability allowed Ralegh's demise to take on a vitality and malleability that Ralegh himself could not achieve in life. Moreover, this collection of texts shows not only that an individual manuscript could vary to fit a scribe or reader's interests but also that the assembling of other texts could shape the reading of a text like Ralegh's speech.

Posthumous Ralegh

In 1619, Aert Meuris, a Dutch printer, produced a version of the speech, printing in Dutch translation something very close to the collection of materials of MS V.a.418: Stucley's ^{Humble Petition}, the official Declaration of the Demeanor, and Ralegh's speech. This Dutch translation of Ralegh's performance and address from the scaffold includes most of the points found in other versions of the speech. It finishes with some of the very dramatic gestures that are associated with Ralegh's execution: he asks for the spectators to pray with him; he beseeches his friends to ask the king to save his reputation in print and “naer sijn doodt geen schandalense schriften mochten werden ghepubliceert tot sijne diffamatie” [that no scandalous writings might be published after his death, to his defamation]; he fearlessly asks to view the axe and declares “hier is een medecijn voor alle sieckten” [here is a medicine for all diseases]; he lies down, then gets up to resettle himself, declaring “soo het hert oprecht is ten is gheen verlanck welcke luech het hooft leyt” [as long as the heart is true, it is no matter how the head lies]; and at last he does not stir as his head is severed in two blows.Footnote ⁶⁹

That the Dutch would be the first to print Ralegh's speech is not surprising. No English imprint was possible, given the official position on Ralegh, following his disgrace. After James's angry intervention in the Vorstius affair, his mercenary handling of the Dutch cautionary towns, and his evident dissatisfaction with the strife between Remonstrants and Contraremonstrants in the United Provinces, the Dutch could feel the increasing coolness from Whitehall, especially as James sought to conciliate the Dutch Republic's former overlords in Madrid.Footnote ⁷⁰ For the republican Dutch to treat Ralegh as a martyr for his opposition to Spanish absolutism and tyranny would serve as a subtle rebuke to a king who took increasingly absolutist stances in the second decade of his English reign. The circulation of the critical Prerogative of Parliaments and the temporary calling in of The History of the World would suggest that Ralegh pointed the way for this opposition.Footnote ⁷¹ Writers seeking to revive a classically republican mode in early Stuart England, decades before the outbreak of the civil wars, would honor Ralegh for his resistance to James's abuses. Thomas Scott, for instance, during his exile in the Netherlands, would revive the ghosts of Ralegh and Essex as spokesmen for his Hispanophobic and republican approaches to the crises of the 1620s.Footnote ⁷² At home and abroad, as voices disparaging the Stuarts grew louder, the unjust sacrifice of Ralegh served as a theme for many critiques of the regime.

English readers could eventually purchase a printed version of Ralegh's speech when it appeared from the London press of William Wilson in 1648.Footnote ⁷³ This pamphlet reproduces a collection of texts that must have circulated in manuscript as something very similar to Folger MS V.a.418, though it lacks the official response to the execution, suggesting its appeal to a reader in opposition.Footnote ⁷⁴ Arranged chronologically, this text prints separates that had been circulating for more than three decades: a version of Ralegh's 1603 trial, Montagu's reimposition of his death sentence in 1618, various letters, and of course his speech from the scaffold. It paved the way for other exposés of Stuart corruption, such as Arthur Wilson's History of Great Britain and Francis Osborne's Historical Memoires, texts that valorize Ralegh as a “courageous spirit” and an “incomparable jewel” sacrificed to ambitious Hispanophiles.Footnote ⁷⁵

One final variation among the contemporary manuscript separates of Ralegh's last dying speech points to the transformation of that event into another voice in the public chorus criticizing the Stuarts. Folger MS V.B.303, a separate copied in the first half of the seventeenth century, is not quite as elaborate as some versions of Ralegh's speech from the scaffold. It omits most of the scene-setting details, skips over the initial interruption for Arundel's party, and adopts an entirely first-person narration whose immediacy transfixes the reader. This more succinct speech moves along rapidly. As it reaches a crescendo, however, having caught up the reader in its compelling sense of hearing these moving final words, the details of Ralegh's gestures following the speech feel positively languid. The writer emphasizes Ralegh's resolve by exquisitely drawing out the space between the blows of the axe: “his head was cutt off at two little blowes. After he last lay downe his head, neither before the first stroake nor betweene the two stroakes nor after both there was not one of his ioynts seene to moue nor shake one jott.”Footnote ⁷⁶ The writer emphasizes the tragedy of the Stuart regime's punishment of the innocent, fearlessly stoic Ralegh, drawing out its cruelty between the axe's blows. More significantly, this version pointedly transforms Ralegh's rearranging himself on the scaffold, taking what in most versions is an innocuous reference to turning away from the “Lords” who are typically witnesses (but who are absent in this version) and transforming it into a politicized class, the House of Lords: “At first he lay downe vpon the scaffolde with his head towerds the L[or]ds but I know not vpon what occasion he was taken vp againe and turned his head directly oposite to the Lords vide[lici]t towerds the Parliament house at his riseing vp againe the executioner tould him his body lay not right to which he answered sayinge it is noe matter soe the hearte be right” (fol. 275; my emphasis). Reversing the usual order of events—the executioner commenting on his orientation, Ralegh's stoic exasperation about the upright heart, and his eventual repositioning—this version of the execution makes Ralegh's choice to face Parliament the cause for the executioner's comment, allowing Ralegh one final heroic comment about where his heart and sympathies lay. The detail of Ralegh turning away from the earls and other lords sympathetically witnessing his death is transformed here into a political gesture aligning Ralegh's lamentable demise with his gesture toward the people's institution, a gesture of wishful thinking in this scribe's hand. As the author of the valediction to Ralegh in Folger MS V.a.418 recognized, Ralegh owed a death and would pay that debt only once on his way to a better world.

In the telling and retelling—or, more accurately, copying and recopying—of the moment of Ralegh's death, a public could rally around the injustice perpetrated against one of their last Elizabethan heroes, sacrificed to the Spanish interests of absolutists in the Stuart regime. In part because James denied Ralegh's final words the fixity of print, forcing them to circulate through word of mouth and in manuscripts that could be transcribed and elaborated afresh to serve the purposes of scribes or owners, those final words gained a potency that could never be fully countered. They were words whose circulation would come back to haunt James and his son, as Ralegh became a hero of opposition to early Stuart absolutism.