and either lay it at Sherborne, if the land continue, or in Exeter church, by my father and mother. I can write no more. Time and death call me away.

.

My true wife, farewell. Bless my poor boy; pray for me. My true God hold you both in His arms.

Written with the dying hand of sometime thy husband, but now (alas) overthrown.

"Yours that was; but now not my own,

"W. RALEIGH."

But there remained the last reprieve for the unhappy expedition to Guiana: James I was ready to pardon one who might make him rich. Raleigh's letters to Sherborne on that voyage are uneven; as a rule he is uncertain and despondent, but occasionally he says a word which must have sounded exotic to quiet Dorset. "To tell you I might be here King of the Indians were a vanity; but my name doth still live among them. Here they feed me with fresh meat, and all that the country yields; all offer to obey me.' His son died while he was on the voyage: I shall sorrow the less, because I have not long to sorrow, because not long to live. My brains are broken, and it is a torment for

me to write, and especially of misery."

66

He failed; Eldorado was not to be discovered by him, and he came back to pay the penalty of failure. He knew how to die "He was the most fearless of death that ever was known; and the most resolute and confident, yet with reverence and conscience. . . . He gave God thanks that he never feared death, and much less then, for it was but an opinion and imagination.” . "He was very cheerful that morning he died, ate his breakfast heartily, and took tobacco, and made no more of his death than if he had been to take a journey."

"At Sherborne, if the land continue . . .” As soon as Raleigh was dead, King James clutched at the estate for his favourite Robert Carr: "I mun ha' it for Robbie." Carew Raleigh, the son, remonstrated in vain : "they called the conveyance of Sherborne in question, in the

Exchequer," he wrote to the House of Commons, "and for want of one word (which word was found notwithstanding in the paper-book, and was the oversight of a clerk) they pronounced the conveyance invalid, and Sherborne forfeited to the Crown: a judgment easily to be foreseen without witchcraft; since his chiefest judge was his greatest enemy, and the case between a poor friendless prisoner and a King of England."

IX

for the deliverance of King James I, the Queen, the Prince, and all the Royal Branches, with the Nobility, Clergy, and Commons of England, by Popish treachery appointed as sheep to the slaughter, in a most barbarous and savage manner, beyond the examples of former ages."

The Book of Common Prayer.

"During the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called War; and such a war as is of every man against every man. The nature of War consisteth not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is Peace. "Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of War, where every man is enemy to every man, the same is consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such conditions, there is no place for Industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

THOMAS HOBBES,

Leviathan.

"The sons of Belial had a glorious time."

JOHN DRYDEN,

Absalom and Achitophel.

I

HAVE said more about economic and social changes than political, hitherto, because, on the whole, political ideas were hardly so diffused as to be the property of more than a limited class of Englishmen. The people in general felt the incidence of the policy informed by such ideas; but except for the brief outburst of the Peasants' Revolt, their concern with the state of society was material rather than reflective. In the seventeenth century, however, they tampered actively with the State machine. All classes were, at least potentially, property owners; all paid national taxes, received national justice or injustice, did national service through their local agency, the parish. Newspapers were started. A king was beheaded, his elder son chased, his younger son, also a king, exiled, his bastard grandson beheaded.