“Sharp medicine,” quoth he, “but
a sound cure for all diseases.”
When presently the executioner bade him turn his head
to the East:
“It is no great matter which way a man’s
head stands, so that his heart lies right,”
he said.
Thus passed one of Englanl’s greatest heroes,
indeed one of the very makers of this England, and
than his death there is no more shameful blot upon
the shameful reign of that pusillanimous James, unclean
of body and of soul, who sacrificed him to the King
of Spain.
A spectator of his death, who suffered for his words—as
men must ever suffer for the regardless utterance
of Truth—declared that England had not
such another head to cut off.
As for Stukeley, the acquisitiveness which had made
a Judas of him was destined, by a poetic justice,
ever desired but rarely forthcoming for knaves, soon
to be his ruin. He was caught diminishing the
gold coin of the realm by the operation known to-day
as “clipping,” and with him was taken his
creature Manourie, who, to save himself, turned chief
witness against Stukeley. Sir Lewis was sentenced
to death, but saved himself by purchasing his pardon
at the cost of every ill-gotten shilling he possessed,
and he lived thereafter as bankrupt of means as he
was of honour.
Yet before all this happened, Sir Lewis had for his
part in Sir Walter Ralegh’s death come to be
an object of execration throughout the land, and to
be commonly known as “Sir Judas.”
At Whitehall he suffered rebuffs and insults that
found a climax in the words addressed to him by the
Lord Admiral, to whom he went to give an account of
his office.
“Base fellow, darest thou who art the contempt
and scorn of men offer thyself in my presence?”
For a man of honour there was but one course.
Sir Judas was not a man of honour. He carried
his grievance to the King. James leered at him.
“What wouldst thou have me do? Wouldst
thou have me hang him? On my soul, if I should
hang all that speak ill of thee, all the trees of
the country would not suffice, so great is the number.”
George Villier’s Courtship of Ann of Austria
He was Insolence incarnate.
Since the day when, a mere country lad, his singular
good looks had attracted the attention of King James—notoriously
partial to good-looking lads—and had earned
him the office of cup-bearer to his Majesty, the career
of George Villiers is to be read in a series of acts
of violent and ever-increasing arrogance, expressing
the vanity and levity inherent in his nature.
Scarcely was he established in the royal favour than
he distinguished himself by striking an offending
gentleman in the very presence of his sovereign—an
act of such gross disrespect to royalty that his hand
would have paid forfeit, as by law demanded, had not
the maudlin king deemed him too lovely a fellow to
be so cruelly maimed.
