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“At the time of his death”: Manuscript Instability and Walter Ralegh's Performance on the Scaffold

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Andrew Fleck
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , January 2009 , pp. 4 - 28
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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2009

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References

1 Chamberlain, John to Carleton, Dudley, 14 November 1618, in The Complete State Papers Domestic Series One, 1547–1625 James I (SP) (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Microform, 1980), 14/103/93Google Scholar.

2 Goodcole, Henry, A True Declaration of the happy Conuersion, contrition, and Christian preparation of Francis Robinson, Gentleman (London, 1618)Google Scholar, C3r. Randall Martin traces the career of Goodcole, “the first English writer to establish a reputation as an authority about real crime,” in “Henry Goodcole, Visitor of Newgate: Crime, Conversion, and Patronage,” Seventeenth Century 20, no. 2 (2005): 153. Goodcole wrote several accounts of the criminals he counseled. See Dolan, Frances E., Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550–1700 (Ithaca, NY, 1994), 203Google Scholar, for his importance in countering sensationalist reporting. Lake, Peter and Questier, Michael discuss several of Goodcole's accounts of minor criminals’ executions in The Antichrist's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven, CT, 2002), 149Google Scholar. Watt, Tessa provides a useful framework for reading this sort of “repentence” in Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991), 109Google Scholar.

3 Sharpe, J. A. points to the Foucauldian scene on the scaffold as “a theatre of punishment, which offered not merely a spectacle, but also a reinforcement of certain values,” in “‘Last Dying Speeches’: Religion, Ideology and Public Execution in Seventeenth Century England,” Past and Present, no. 107 (1985): 156Google Scholar. Lake and Questier qualify the sufficiency of that paradigm in those ideologically charged instances of executions of priests and religious dissenters (Lewd Hat, 230). In the case of Goodcole's pioneering role, Randall Martin sees him as an agent of the state who helped secure confessions that would “justify court sentences, above all capital punishment” (“Henry Goodcole, Visitor of Newgate,” 162). For Foucault's, Michel formulation of the scene on the scaffold as the reinscription of power rather than justice, see Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1979), 48Google Scholar.

4 For a succinct account of Ralegh's final day, see May, Steven W., Sir Walter Ralegh (Boston, 1989), 121–22Google Scholar.

5 Ralegh, claimed that he participated in the scheme in order to reveal it to the king. Mark Nicholls adroitly explains these complex plots in “Two Winchester Trials: The Prosecution of Henry, Lord Cobham and Thomas, Lord Grey of Wilton, 1603,” Historical Research 68, no. 165 (1995): 26–48Google Scholar. Reading a Bodleian manuscript summary of the crown's evidence, Nicholls concludes that Ralegh was probably guilty of treasonous expressions, if not intent, in “SirRalegh's, Walter Treason: A Prosecution Document,” English Historical Review 110, no. 438 (1995): 912Google Scholar. Cunningham, Karen discusses the meaning of treason and the discovery of intentionality in “‘A Spanish heart in an English body’: The Ralegh Treason Trial and the Poetics of Proof,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 22, no. 3 (1992): 327–51Google Scholar.

6 I refer here to the most commonly available account of the trial in Jardine, David, Criminal Trials, 2 vols. (London, 1897), 1:428Google Scholar.

7 Carleton, Dudley would use theatrical conceits throughout his correspondence on this topic. For his description of events in Winchester in November and December 1603, see Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain, 1603–1624: Jacobean Correspondence, ed. Lee, Maurice (New Brunswick, NJ, 1972), 51Google Scholar.

8 Key documents in Ralegh, life, including from his time in the Tower, can easily be found in the standard Works of Sir Walter Ralegh (1829; repr., New York, 1964)Google Scholar or Edwards's, EdwardThe Life of Ralegh, 2 vols. (London, 1868)Google Scholar.

9 This Guiana voyage figures prominently in the biography by Greenblatt, Stephen, Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles (New Haven, CT, 1973), 163Google Scholar. Harlow, V. T. argues that James, desperate for funds, had a tacit understanding and plausible deniability in permitting Ralegh to pursue the mine in Ralegh's Last Voyage (1932; repr., New York, 1971), 97Google Scholar. The journal of Ralegh's expedition, Cotton MSS Titus B VIII, is reprinted in Robert Schomburgk, ed., Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana (London, 1848). Pauline Croft comments on Ralegh's oblique role as a pawn in the increasingly unpopular Spanish Match in King James (New York, 2003), 104. Alastair Bellany discusses the factional politics involved in the impoverished king's attempts to marry his eldest son to a Catholic princess with a dowry, hefty in The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: New Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (Cambridge, 2002), 62Google Scholar.

10 A Proclamation declaring His Maiesties pleasure concerning Sir Walter Ravvleigh, and those vvho aduenteured with him (London, 1618).

11 Croft notes that the public viewed Ralegh's treatment as “base appeasement of Spain” to further the Spanish Match (King James, 104). A contemporary letter, dated 26 September 1618, recorded that James had offered to hand Ralegh over to Spain for punishment, but that the Spanish king insisted that since his crimes were “notorious, and publick,” Ralegh's “Chastisement should be Exemplarie also” (Philip III to Sanchez de Ulloa [English trans.], SP 14/99/74). The execution might fruitfully be considered in light of the opening salvos of the Bohemian crisis and King James's attempts to pacify the Spanish at a delicate moment in the marriage negotiations. See Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution and the Coming of War, 1621–1624 (Cambridge, 1989), 16.

12 Jardine, , Criminal Trials, 1:499Google Scholar.

13 Ralegh's contemporaries discussed his public performances in theatrical terms. At the Winchester trial, Dudley Carleton thought that Ralegh “played all the parts himself ” (Lee, Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain, 39), while Sir Thomas Wilson, in reporting Ralegh's behavior in his final days called him an “Arch-hypocrite” (Sir Thomas Wilson to the King, 18 September 1618, SP 14/99/48) and “Archimpostor” (Wilson to the King, 30 September 1618, SP 14/99/96). This emphasis on the roles Ralegh played has influenced modern biographers; see Anna Beer's sense that Ralegh “acted” throughout his life in Sir Walter Ralegh and His Readers in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1997), 95. Perhaps the best treatment of Ralegh's histrionic life—that if we “strip away Ralegh's role” we “look into the abyss” of a man made entirely of a series of masks—is in Greenblatt's study (Sir Walter Ralegh, 16).

14 For the 24 November 1618 registration of Goodcole's pamphlet, see Arber, Edward, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–1640, 5 vols. (1876; repr., Gloucester, MA, 1967), 3:295Google Scholar.

15 The arraignment and conviction of Sr VValter Rawleigh (London, 1648) offers a thorough account of Ralegh's troubles with the king, including an account of his original conviction for treason, the brief proceedings at the King's Bench in 1618, one version of his speech from the scaffold, and letters to the king and to his own wife. Perhaps the declining fortunes of the king's son allowed the inflammatory material to finally come through the press. Certainly within a few years of this sympathetic printing of Ralegh's demise, anti-Stuart writers would vindicate the adventurer's actions. Arthur Wilson's secret history of James's corrupt court describes Gondomar's plot to rid Spain of the danger posed by Ralegh, (The History of Great Britain [London, 1653], 116)Google Scholar. And Osborne, Francis takes Ralegh's execution as an early manifestation of the “Spanish Cruelty, who about this time begun to dazzle the weaker eyes of James,” in Historical Memoires on the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth, and King James (London, 1658), 2:15Google Scholar.

16 Love, Harold, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993), 37–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Bellany shows how reports of the nearly contemporary scandal around the Overbury murder constituted an alternative to print publication in The Politics of Court Scandal, 131.

17 Lake, Peter and Pincus, Steve argue that a series of ephemeral “public spheres” emerged in moments of crisis between 1580 and 1630 as the state, its agents, and its critics appealed to a public in multiple media (“Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies 45, no. 2 [2006]: 276–77)Google Scholar. The different channels of official print and unregulated manuscript circulation that I am tracing in the context of Ralegh's lamented execution might serve as an example of such a temporary public sphere.

18 See Beal, Peter, Index of English Literary Manuscripts, 4 vols. (London, 1980) 1, pt. 2, for an indication of the wide appeal of Ralegh's final wordsGoogle Scholar.

19 This is how Robert Tounson, in the role Henry Goodcole played for Francis Robinson, remembered the events a week later in a letter to John Isham. Edwards, Life of Ralegh, 2:489.

20 No critical edition of Ralegh's execution exists, for reasons that will become obvious. For the sake of referring to a readily available edition as a starting point, I draw on the main details of the account in the 1829 Works.

21 Aubrey's Brief Lives, ed. Dick, Oliver Lawson (Ann Arbor, MI, 1957), 259Google Scholar.

22 Of Ralegh's two comments about the axe, one or the other is frequently omitted. Both, however, occur in the first printed English edition of 1648 (The arraignment and conviction of Sr VValter Rawleigh, 34). Leah Marcus has recently worked carefully through the relationship between variant written versions of another famous speechmaker and the speeches that may actually have been delivered. Her work, particularly on others’ memories of speeches, is helpful in trying to work through the variations among versions of Ralegh's final speech (“From Oral Delivery to Print in the Speeches of Elizabeth I,” in Print, Manuscript and Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England, ed. Arthur Marotti and Michael D. Bristol [Columbus, OH, 2000], 46).

23 SP 14/103/52. This account of the event emphasizes that the first strike did not kill Ralegh, who did not cry out between the blows. This and other archival accounts with no formal title all refer to Ralegh's words on the scaffold.

24 While some of the urgency in the scholarship of the tension between king and Parliament leading to the “high road to Civil War” has dissipated (see Russell, Conrad, Unrevolutionary England, 1603–1642 [London, 1990], 39)Google Scholar, there were hints of public dissatisfaction with James's style of rule in his second decade on the English throne. See the historiographical reassessment outlined in Cogswell, Thomas, Cust, Richard, and Lake, Peter, “Revisionism and Its Legacies: The Work of Conrad Russell,” in Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain, ed. Cogswell, Thomas, Cust, Richard, and Lake, Peter (Cambridge, 2002), 14Google Scholar. The unpopular preparations for the marriage of Prince Charles to the Spanish Infanta (the “Spanish Match”) in 1616 show some of this initial discontent. See Andrew Thrush, “The Personal Rule of James I, 1611–1620,” in Cogswell, Cust, and Lake, eds., 93.

25 The classic study, predating Foucault and focusing on treason in England, is Smith, Lacey Baldwin, “English Treason Trials and Confessions in the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas 15, no. 4 (1954): 483Google Scholar. Smith, discusses these conventions as Essex performed them at his execution in Treason and Tudor England: Politics and Paranoia (Princeton, NJ, 1986), 273Google Scholar.

26 Many Catholic priests who went to the gallows claimed to be loyal to their monarch and to be dying as a result of religious persecution; those inflicting the execution denied that religion was the cause for the performance of justice, pointing instead to the priests’ treason. See Lake, and Questier, , Lewd Hat, 239Google Scholar. On the contest for meaning in the period's great martyrologies, see Monta, Susannah, Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005), 35Google Scholar. Even executions for apparently secular crimes could be the site of ideological contest, as Jesuits and Protestants such as Goodcole sought to publicize successful conversions at the scaffold. See Questier, Michael, Conversion, Politics, and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (Cambridge, 1996), 193Google Scholar.

27 Laqueur, Thomas W. argues that the scene of execution was a site of festivity, placing the “carnivalesque crowd” at the center of the event (“Crowds, Carnival and the State in English Executions, 1604–1868,” in The First Modern Society, ed. Beier, A. L., Cannadine, David, and Rosenheim, James M. [Cambridge, 1989], 309)Google Scholar. Lake and Questier pursue some of these contested accounts in Lewd Hat, 13.

28 I read the events surrounding Ralegh in this light, drawing on J. A. Sharpe's analysis of the conventions and purposes of “last dying speeches” unencumbered by the additional weight of religious martyrdom. See n. 3.

29 Wunderli, Richard and Broce, Gerald point to this typical structure and its importance to the condemned's efforts to “control his final moment” with an eye toward the struggle for salvation that would ensue on his death in “The Final Moment before Death in Early Modern England,” Sixteenth Century Journal 20, no. 2 (1989): 272Google Scholar. John Bellamy also traces the import of the different phases of the appearance on the scaffold or under the gallows, focusing on cases of treason in The Tudor Law of Treason: An Introduction (London, 1979), 195–97. Scaffold performances became so typical that they contributed to conventions in the theater, ultimately troubling the sincerity of the scaffold speech. Lemon, Rebecca examines these conventions in Macbeth in Treason by Words: Literature, Law, and Rebellion in Shakespeare's England (Ithaca, NY, 2006), 88–89Google Scholar.

30 The Terrible and Deserued Death of Francis Ravilliack … (Edinburgh, 1610), 4. Adopting Foucault's formulation of the “dissymmetry” between the sovereign's power and the powerless criminal and on the display of this power to the public (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 50, 58), J. A. Sharpe understands these executions as the authorities’ attempt “to reassert certain values of obedience and conformity” (“Last Dying Speeches,” 158).

31 Cecil, William, The Execution of Justice in England (London, 1583)Google Scholar.

32 For details of the timeline between his conviction and his execution, see Jardine, Criminal Trials, 1:367.

33 Barlowe, William, A Sermon preached at Paul's Crosse, on the first Sunday of Lent, Martii 1 1600. With a short discourse of the late Earle of Essex his confession, and penitence, before and at the time of his death (London, 1601)Google Scholar, E4r. Bettie Anne Doebler reads Essex's final days within the ars moriendi tradition. See her “Rooted Sorrow”: Dying in Early Modern England (Rutherford, NJ, 1994), 61.

34 On the sermon and Barlowe's role as apologist, see Nowak, Thomas S., “Propaganda and the Pulpit: Robert Cecil, William Barlow, and the Essex and Gunpowder Plots,” in The Witness of Times: Manifestations of Ideology in Seventeenth Century England, ed. Keller, Katherine and Schiffhorst, Gerald (Pittsburgh, 1993), 39–40Google Scholar; Stowe, John records the executioner's peril in The Annales of England (London, 1605), 1408Google Scholar; [Bacon, Francis], A Declaration of the Practises & Treasons attempted and committed by Robert late Earle of Essex (London, 1601)Google Scholar, A3r, A4r. Hammer, Paul has discussed the conflicting appeals to the public surrounding the execution of Devereux in “The Smiling Crocodile: The Earl of Essex and Late Elizabethan ‘Popularity,’” in The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England, ed. Lake, Peter and Pincus, Steven (New York, 2007), 107Google Scholar.

35 Stucley, Lewis, The humble petition and information of Sir Lewis Stucley … (London, 1618), 9Google Scholar. Leonell Sharpe may have ghostwritten this pamphlet.

36 Edwards, Life of Ralegh, 2:492.

37 McClure, Norman Egbert, ed., The Letters of John Chamberlain, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1939), 2:188Google Scholar.

38 Beer notes that James and his advisors coordinated this response and speculates that James's penchant for tinkering with texts may explain the tardiness of the crown's reaction (Ralegh and His Readers, 97, 108 n. 35).

39 The traditional model of a public sphere, associated with the work of Jürgen Habermas, posits its emergence around economic developments a century later, as a result of private individuals engaging the sovereign over the regulation of the marketplace (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence [Cambridge, MA, 1989], 27). In revising Habermas's theory, Lake and Pincus have recently argued that the Elizabethan and Stuart regimes helped to create a “post-Reformation public sphere” in their willingness to appeal to common readers outside the establishment coterie (“Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England,” 274). In her treatment of censorship, Clegg, Cyndia observes a kind of public sphere emerging in response to the opening moves of the Thirty Years' War and Jacobean efforts to control access to printed news in the midst of that crisis. See her Press Censorship in Jacobean England (Cambridge, 2001), 162CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Thrush argues that despite the advantage a sitting parliament would have given James in his negotiations with Spain for Charles's marriage, the king feared that previously unpredictable body, which might have undermined the unpopular Spanish Match. Thrush, “Personal Rule of James I,” 94.

41 Habermas, Structural Transformation, 27.

42 [Bacon, Francis], A Declaration of the Demeanor and Cariage of Sir Walter Raleigh (London, 1618), 1Google Scholar.

43 As Smith's foundational essay posited, there were strong motives for the condemned to appear to submit. See Smith, “English Treason Trials,” 483. But, as Lake and Questier show in Lewd Hat, 245–46, it was possible to resist the scaffold's conventions.

44 Shuger, Debora points to Jacobean efforts to curtail damaging and scandalous speech, including James's own reaction to affronts to honor, in Censorship and Cultural Sensibility: The Regulation of Language in Tudor-Stuart England (Philadelphia, 2006), 163Google Scholar. Clegg argues that Jacobean censorship worked through multiple, sometimes ineffective, channels and that some instances that seem inscrutably autocratic may actually be the result of personal pique. See her Press Censorship, 91.

45 Woudhuysen, H. R. provides a useful introduction to the effective reproduction and circulation of dangerous works in manuscript in Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640 (Oxford, 1996), 11–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46 Francis Osborne would later bitterly recall the sacrifice of Ralegh to the interests of the “Spanish Faction” that dominated James's court and were “sole managers of the Kings power,” determined to keep the Spanish Match alive at any cost (Historical Memoires, 2:17).

47 The British Library manuscript Add. 6789, f. 533, is transcribed in B. J. Sokol, “Thomas Hariot's Notes on Sir Walter Raleigh's Address from the Scaffold,” Manuscripts 26, no. 3 (1974): 199.

48 Cust, Richard shows how news could spread quickly and in great volume from the political center, London, to the country in “News and Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England,” Past and Present, no. 112 (1986): 62Google Scholar. Newsletters, as we shall see, were one important form of manuscript transmission; another important genre was the “separate,” a manuscript account of a single event of great interest (63). The variations in the separates of Ralegh's last dying speech are of particular interest here.

49 Randall, David argues that newsletter writers of this period, who communicated objective news within the conventions of sociability, created something akin to a public sphere in “Joseph Mead, Novellante: News, Sociability, and Credibility in Early Stuart England,” Journal of British Studies 45, no. 2 (2006): 311Google Scholar. See also Colclough's, David work on country gentry who sought to remain engaged in the civic culture of London, Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 2005), 199Google Scholar.

50 John South letter, Folger Shakespeare Library, MS X.d.241 (d), fol. [4v].

51 In his efforts to clear Ralegh of the charge of atheism, Ernest Strathmann points to the pious impression he made on the scaffold and its reverberations in popular recollections of Ralegh's, Google Scholar professedly Christian speech. See Sir Walter Ralegh: A Study in Elizabethan Skepticism (New York, 1951), 135.

52 Powell, William Stevens, ed., John Pory, 1572–1636: The Life and Letters of a Man of Many Parts (Chapel Hill, NC, 1977), 69Google Scholar. Further references are to this edition.

53 Tounson's letter of a few days later also includes this profession of faith (Edwards, Life of Ralegh, 2:491).

54 Chamberlain Letters, 179.

55 Contarini, Piero and Donato, Antonio to the Doge and Senate, 16 November 1618, in Calendar of State Papers, Venice, ed. Hinds, Allen B., 38 vols. (London, 1909), 15:350Google Scholar.

56 There are exceptions, of course. One version, which primarily maintains the intimacy of first-person speech, occasionally shifts back to third-person description, perhaps in the interest of collapsing less interesting details. In the midst of his defense against Stucley's slanders, the speech abruptly inserts “Other speeches he vsed concerning Sr. Lewis Stukly his informac[i]ons which he utterlye desclaimed, as before the Lord of heauen, and as he had any hope too be saued by the meritts of Ihesus Christ,” before returning to a first-person explanation of the Guiana mishaps (New York Public Library, MS Arents 7482, fol. 74v).

57 University of North Carolina, Wilson Library, MS CSWR A32, fol. 271r. Love notes that separates might be tailored to fit the interests of individual customers in Scribal Publication, 22.

58 Colclough explores several such miscellanies that collected texts relating to James's, relations to Parliament in Freedom of Speech, 203Google Scholar. Marotti, Arthur focuses on manuscript collections of lyric verse in Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, NY, 1995), 30Google Scholar.

59 Folger MS G.b.7, fols. 137v–38v. This account is the most extensive I have observed. It includes a digression in the midst of the speech in which Ralegh speaks aside with James Hay, Viscount Doncaster, a detail lacking in most versions.

60 Library, Morgan, MS RE 49, fol. 1r. The manuscript is also transcribed in R. H. Bowers, “Raleigh's Last Speech: The ‘Elms’ Document,” Review of English Studies 2, no. 7 (1951): 212–15Google Scholar.

61 Folger MS G.b.9, fol. 169v. The separate owned by Sancroft, reprinted in the Works, similarly contained many details, but not every one associated with Ralegh's final performance.

62 SP 14/103/53. Although the original provenance of Arents 7482 cannot be traced, it appears that the tobacco magnate George Arents purchased this manuscript because it mentions Ralegh smoking “tabacco” (75r). Thus even long after the event, the details of particular separates could make unique versions of the speech appeal to the interests of individuals.

63 Morgan Library MS RE 50, fol. 1v.

64 University of Chicago MS 824, fol. 29r. Folger MS Z.e.1 comes to a similarly terse conclusion, “And this is all I have to saie,” and breaks off with Ralegh in prayer (fol. 2v). SP 14/103/52 begins without the usual preliminaries, including the interruption while Ralegh waited for the witnesses to come closer, but ends with some of the typical final details.

65 I am most grateful to Heather Wolfe, curator of manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library, for her assistance in helping me to describe the way this collection of materials was assembled. It would be wonderful if the provenance of this book could be recovered, but its compiler's name is lost, and we can only surmise that it belonged to a midcentury collector.

66 Marotti comments on the immense popularity of this epitaph in manuscript verse miscellanies in Print Manuscript, 100.

67 Wunderli and Broce find treatments of the scaffold as a fortunate event, since if the dying person could exert a strong enough will, he or she would know the exact moment of death and be utterly prepared for the contest for the afterlife. See “Final Moment,” 272. See also Doebler, “Rooted Sorrow,” 74.

68 Sharpe, Kevin points to the nearly impossible task of regulating how people read in Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT, 2000), 327Google Scholar.

69 These are my translations of the reproduction of the Dutch tract in Parker, John and Johnson, Carol, eds., Sir Walter Raleigh's Speech from the Scaffold: A Translation of the 1619 Dutch Edition, and Comparison with English Texts (Minneapolis, 1995), 54, 56, 58Google Scholar.

70 For James's interventions in Dutch affairs in the second decade of his reign, see Ferrell, Lori Anne, Government by Polemic: James I, the King's Preachers, and the Rhetorics of Conformity (Stanford, CA, 1998), 136Google Scholar; and Milton, Anthony, The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort (1618–1619) (Woodbridge, 2005), xxiiiGoogle Scholar.

71 On the troubled manuscript circulation of the Prerogative of Parliaments as a response to James's difficulties following the 1614 Parliament, see Beer, Ralegh and His Readers, 62. For Ralegh's troubles with the printed History of the World, see Greenblatt, , Sir Walter Ralegh, 138Google Scholar; and Patterson, Annabel, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison, WI, 1984), 130Google Scholar. The most recent treatment of Ralegh's encounters with censorship is Shuger's Censorship and Cultural Sensiblity, 207–8. Clegg treats this episode in depth, arguing that the text was offensive in the context of James's insecurities in 1614, but that it was republished in 1617 once Ralegh was free to pursue the Guiana project. See Press Censorship, 102.

72 Peltonen, Markku, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), 242CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Beer, Ralegh and His Readers, 118–19.

73 The first English printing of the speech is important to Beer's discussion of the uses to which the idea of Ralegh could be put during the 1640s and 1650s. See Ralegh and His Readers, 140.

74 By 1648, of course, the cracks of discontent beneath the surface of Stuart absolutism had split the nation apart. Thrush reads the stresses created under Charles as indebted to the style of rule adopted by James: “in seeking to rule without parliaments, Charles did no more than follow in his father's footsteps” (“Personal Rule,” 102).

75 History of Great Britain, 117; Historical Memoires, 2:16.

76 Folger MS V.b.303, fol. 275.