mud and slush was the miserable dodge to carry out this scheme of
darkness which neither Coke nor Popham would have dared to perpetrate in
the broad light of London. It was, as all the world knows, a mock trial.
The prisoners Raleigh, Cobham, Gray, and Markham were condemned and
sentenced to death as traitors, and Raleigh, for the grim sport of the
royal Nimrod, was made to witness a mock execution of his
fellow-convicts, but being in due course all respited by a warrant which
the Governorof Winchester Castle had carried three days in his pocket,
were carted back to the Tower, where, not pardoned, their sentences not
commuted, but simply deferred, they were tortured with a living death
hanging over them, like the sword of Damocles depending on royal caprice.

Here Raleigh dragged out his long imprisonment, and (as tersely & truly
expressed by his son) was, after thirteen years, beheaded for opposing
the very thing he was condemned and sentenced for favouring. The whole
story is a bundle of inconsistencies, like that of Henry Percy, the 9th
Earl of Northumberland, committed to the Tower in 1606, and his fifteen
years' imprisonment. The stories of these two celebrated men are
inseparably connected with that of Hariot. But it is not our purpose to
trace either Raleigh's or Percy's progress through these long and dreary
years any further than is necessary to illustrate the life of Hariot,
who was the light of the outer world to them both. Incarcerated and
watched as they were, Hariot was the ears, the eyes, and the hands of
these two noble captives.

The depth and variety of Hariot's intellectual and scientific resources,
his honesty of purpose, his fidelity of character, his eminent
scholarship, his unswerving integrity, and his command of tongue,
rendered him alike invulnerable to politicians and to royal minions. He
was with Raleigh at Winchester and in the Tower, off and on, as