THE SCENE: John Aubrey relates the various stories surrounding one of the most chaotic figures in 17th Century English history: Sir Walter Raleigh.
THE TEXT: When he was attached by the officer about the business which cost him his head, he was carried by a rowboat, I think with only two men. King James was wont to say that he was a coward to be so taken and conveyed, for else he might easily have made his escape from so slight a guard.
He was prisoner in the Tower. He there (besides his compiling of his History of the World), studied Chemistry. I heard my cousin Whitney say that he saw him in the Tower. He had a velvet cap laced, and a rich gown, and trunk hose.
He was scandalized with atheism; but he was a bold man, and would venture at discourse which was unpleasant to the churchmen. I remember the first lord Scudamour say, ’Twas basely said of Sir Walter Raleigh to talk of the anagram of Dog.’
In his speech on the scaffold, I heard my cousin Whitney say (and I think ‘tis printed) that he spake not one word of Christ, but of the great and incomprehensible God, with much zeal and adoration, so that he concluded he was an a-christ, not an atheist.
He took a pipe of tobacco a little before he went to the scaffold, which some formal persons were scandalized at, but I think ‘twas well and properly done, to settle his spirits.
The time of his execution was contrived to be on my Lord Mayor’s day, 1618, that the pageants and fine shows might draw away the people from beholding the tragedy of one the gallantest worthies that ever England bred.
Buried privately under the high altar at St. Margaret’s church, in Westminster. Mr. Elias Ashmole told me that his son Crew Raleigh told him that he had his father’s skull; that some years since, upon digging up the grave, his skull and neck-bone being views, they found the bone of his neck lapped over so, that he could not have been hanged.
– Brief Lives, John Aubrey, 17th Century AD
