* Dom.  Eliz., February 1601, Vol. 278; R.O.

On the accession of James I. the Catholics presented a petition to parliament, begging to be allowed to practise their religion, at least in secret, and they went on to say that there were “four classes of religionists in England Protestant who domineered all the late reign:  Puritans who have crept up amongst them, atheists, who live on brawls; and Catholics."*

* Dom.  James I., vol. i., 1603; R.O.

The stigma of atheist clung to Raleigh long after he had ceased to deserve it.  In his trial for high treason in 1603, it considerably damaged his cause, and gave another handle to his many enemies.  The king’s attorney, in addressing him, exclaimed:  “O damnable atheist!” and the Lord Chief Justice Coke, in his address to the prisoner after his condemnation, harangued him in these words:—­

“Your case being thus, let it not grieve you if I speak a little out of zeal and love to your good.  You have been taxed by the world with the defence of the most heathenish and blasphemous opinions, which I list not to repeat, because Christian ears cannot endure to hear them, nor the authors and maintainers of them be suffered to live in any Christian commonwealth.  You know what men said of Harpool.* You shall do well before you go out of the world to give satisfaction therein, and not to die with these imputations upon you.  Let not any devil persuade you (the Harleian version adds, ‘Hariot or any such doctor’) to think there is no eternity in Heaven; for if you think thus, you shall find eternity in hell-fire."**

* A mistake probably for Harriot.  The name is variously spelt.  Edwards, in his Life of Raleigh, corrects it and says, “Either he applied to the illustrious mathematician Thomas Harriot, the epithet ‘devil,’ or he said that Harriot’s opinions were devilish” (p. 436).  The judge’s words are variously reported, but their purport is always the same.  Stebbing, in his monograph Sir Walter Raleigh, says that Harriot was accused by zealots of atheism, because his cosmogony was not orthodox, and that his ill-repute for free-thinking was reflected on Raleigh, who hired him to teach mathematics (probably in what Father Parsons termed his school of atheism) and engaged him in his colonising projects.  Harriot was the friend whose society he chiefly craved when he was in the Tower, and is doubtless the “Herryott” of the examinations.

** Dom.  James I., vol. 4, f. 83.

Between Raleigh’s sentence and its execution fifteen years were allowed to elapse, during which time the prisoner in the Tower occupied himself with the compilation of his famous History of the World, and with chemical experiments.  And as if all should be exceptional in the life of this remarkable man, he was allowed an interval during this period in which to flash once more upon the world in another expedition to Guiana, in search of the gold mine which he had declared to be there.  After the ill-fated