By this time he had felt both extremes of fortune to the full.  During the travesty of justice at his trial the attorney-general, having no sound argument, covered him with slanderous abuse.  These are three of the false accusations on which he was condemned to death:  ’Viperous traitor,’ ‘damnable atheist,’ and ‘spider of hell.’  Hawkins, Drake, Frobisher, and Grenville, all were dead.  So Raleigh, last of the great Elizabethan lions, was caged and baited for the sport of Spain.

Six of his twelve years of imprisonment were lightened by the companionship of his wife, Elizabeth Throgmorton, most beautiful of all the late Queen’s maids of honor.  Another solace was the History of the World, the writing of which set his mind free to wander forth at will although his body stayed behind the bars.  But the contrast was too poignant not to wring this cry of anguish from his preface:  ’Yet when we once come in sight of the Port of death, to which all winds drive us, and when by letting fall that fatal Anchor, which can never be weighed again, the navigation of this life takes end:  Then it is, I say, that our own cogitations (those sad and severe cogitations, formerly beaten from us by our health and felicity) return again, and pay us to the uttermost for all the pleasing passages of our life past.’

At length, in the spring of 1616, Raleigh was released, though still unpardoned.  He and his devoted wife immediately put all that remained of their fortune into a new venture.  Twenty years before this he thought he could make ’Discovery of the mighty, rich, and beautiful Empire of Guiana, and of that great and golden city, which the Spaniards call El Dorado, and the natives call Manoa.’  Now he would go back to find the El Dorado of his dreams, somewhere inland, that mysterious Manoa among those southern Mountains of Bright Stones which lay behind the Spanish Main.  The king’s cupidity was roused; and so, in 1617, Raleigh was commissioned as the admiral of fourteen sail.  In November he arrived off the coast that guarded all the fabled wealth still lying undiscovered in the far recesses of the Orinocan wilds. Guiana, Manoa, El Dorado—­the inland voices called him on.

But Spaniards barred the way; and Raleigh, defying the instructions of the King, attacked them.  The English force was far too weak and disaster followed.  Raleigh’s son and heir was killed and his lieutenant committed suicide.  His men began to mutiny.  Spanish troops and ships came closing in; and the forlorn remnant of the expedition on which such hopes were built went straggling home to England.  There Raleigh was arrested and sent to the block on the 29th of October, 1618.  He had played the great game of life-and-death and lost it.  When he mounted the scaffold, he asked to see the axe.  Feeling the edge, he smiled and said:  ’Tis a sharp medicine, but a cure for all diseases.’  Then he bared his neck and died like one who had served the Great Queen as her Captain of the Guard.