With the accession of Elizabeth the headsman rested. For a century hardly a year had passed without political executions. During the long reign of Elizabeth they were few, and for twelve years there were none at all. Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, who engaged in the plot to raise Mary Queen of Scots to the throne, was the first; the Earl of Northumberland was mysteriously murdered in the Bloody tower in 1585, and Philip, Earl of Arundel, died on the block in 1595. Nor must we forget Elizabeth's darling, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, who died on Tower Green inside the walls in 1601, though the loving but jealous queen was longing to grant his pardon if he would only ask it. But the grim old walls held many tenants, even if the extreme penalties were not invoked. Margaret, Countess of Lennox, mother of Lord Darnley, and so grandmother of James I, lived in the Belfry until after Darnley's death, when she was released, a broken old woman. Philip Howard, son of Thomas mentioned above, though guilty of high treason in aiding the enemies of his country, finally died in the Beauchamp tower. It was during Elizabeth's reign that Sir Walter Raleigh endured the first of his four imprisonments, this time for the seduction of the queen's maid of honour and his subsequent disobedience. At the accession of James I Raleigh returned to the Tower, as a concession to Spain, against whose power and influence he had done so much. He was tried, convicted on perjured testimony and sent back to remain fourteen years a prisoner. The cowardly king feared to put the sentence into effect, and so first in the Bloody tower and then in the Garden house he received his friends, studied geography and chemistry, seeking a method to sweeten sea water, distilling his wonderful elixir, and awaiting further evidences of the king's petty nature. The story that in a little dark cell in the White tower his History of the World was written has no foundation. That work was written in the Garden house. On his return from his unsuccessful and unhappy voyage, he lived in the Brick tower for a little while, was then removed to the Wardrobe tower, and then brought back to the Brick tower and tempted to commit suicide. Meanwhile the Spanish court continued to clamour for his blood, and James, crazed by the hope of the Spanish marriage for his son, at length signed the death warrant of, perhaps, the greatest man in England. The king's cousin, Lady Arabella Stuart, because of her birth spent most of her life as a prisoner of state, though she was not brought to the Tower until after her unsuccessful attempt to escape to France in 1611. From that time until her death in 1615, she was a resident of the old prison. It is said that James would sometimes come to see prisoners tortured in the gloomy crypt under the White tower, the place where Guy Fawkes suffered after the discovery of the Gunpowder plot in 1606, before his execution.