When Popham had ended Ralegh spoke a few words. He prayed that the jury might never have to answer for its verdict. He 'only craved pardon for having concealed Lord Cobham's offer to him, which he did through a confidence that he had diverted him from those humours.' Praying then permission to speak to Lords Suffolk, Devonshire, Henry Howard, and Cecil, he entreated their intercession, which they promised, Cecil with tears, that his death might be honourable and not ignominious. He is alleged further to have requested their mediation with the King for a pardon, or, at least, that, if Cobham too were convicted, and if the sentence were to be carried out, Cobham might die first. The petition was not an ebullition of vindictiveness. It had a practical purpose. On the scaffold he could say nothing for Cobham; Cobham might say much for him. It was possible that, when nothing more was to be gained by falsehoods, his recreant friend would clear his fame once for all. Then he quitted the hall, accompanying Sir Benjamin Tichborne, the High Sheriff, to the prison, according to Sir Thomas Overbury, 'with admirable erection, yet in such sort as a condemned man should.' CHAPTER XX. JUSTICE AND EQUITY OF THE CONVICTION. [Sidenote: _Exceptionally iniquitous._] Students of English judicial history, with all their recollections of the strange processes by which criminal courts in Ralegh's age leaped to a presumption of a State prisoner's guilt, stand aghast at his conviction. Mr. Justice Foster, in his book, already cited, on _The Trial of the Rebels in Surrey in 1746_, professes his inability to see how the case, excepting the extraordinary behaviour of the King's Attorney, differed in hardship from many before it. He is referring to the legal points ruled by the judges against Ralegh. Possibly previous prisoners had been as ill-treated; and the fact amounts to a terrible indictment of English justice. But one broad distinction separates this from earlier convictions. Other prisoners in general were guilty, though their guilt may have been a form of patriotism, or may not have been logically proved. Ralegh's guilt of the crime imputed to him was not proved at Winchester, and has never been proved since. If to have cherished resentment for the loss of offices, to have incurred popular odium, to be reputed superhumanly subtle, to have been the sagacious comrade of a foolish malcontent, to have been alleged by that man, whom he was not permitted to interrogate, to be disaffected at a time at which strangers to him happened to be plotting rebellion, to have abstained from betraying overtures for the exertion by him of an influence he never used and did not possess on behalf of a pacification which the sovereign was negotiating, be high treason, then it is possible, though even then not certain, that Ralegh was a traitor. If none of these possibilities amount to the crime of treason, then he was not. [Sidenote: _The Spanish Pension._]