As we said, Truth is stranger than fiction. No dramatist dare invent a ‘poetic justice’ more perfect than fell upon the traitor. It is not always so, no doubt. God reserves many a greater sinner for that most awful of all punishments—impunity. But there are crises in a nation’s life in which God makes terrible examples, to put before the most stupid and sensual the choice of Hercules, the upward road of life, the downward one which leads to the pit. Since the time of Pharaoh and the Red Sea host, history is full of such palpable, unmistakable revelations of the Divine Nemesis; and in England, too, at that moment, the crisis was there; and the judgment of God was revealed accordingly. Sir Lewis Stukely remained, it seems, at court; high in favour with James: but he found, nevertheless, that people looked darkly on him. Like many self-convicted rogues, he must needs thrust his head into his own shame; and one day he goes to good old Lord Charles Howard’s house; for being Vice-Admiral of Devon, he has affairs with the old Armada hero. The old lion explodes in an unexpected roar. ‘Darest thou come into my presence, thou base fellow, who art reputed the common scorn and contempt of all men? Were it not in mine own house I would cudgel thee with my staff for presuming to speak to me!’ Stukely, his tail between his legs, goes off and complains to James. ‘What should I do with him? Hang him? On my sawle, mon, if I hung all that spoke ill of thee, all the trees in the island were too few.’ Such is the gratitude of kings, thinks Stukely; and retires to write foolish pamphlets in self-justification, which, unfortunately for his memory, still remain to make bad worse. Within twelve months he, the rich and proud Vice-Admiral of Devon, with a shield of sixteen quarterings and the blood-royal in his veins, was detected debasing the King’s coin within the precincts of the royal palace, together with his old accomplice Mannourie, who, being taken, confessed that his charges against Raleigh were false. He fled, a ruined man, back to his native county and his noble old seat of Affton; but Até is on the heels of such— ‘Slowly she tracks him and sure, as a lyme-hound, sudden she grips him, Crushing him, blind in his pride, for a sign and a terror to mortals.’ A terrible plebiscitum had been passed in the West country against the betrayer of its last Worthy. The gentlemen closed their doors against him; the poor refused him—so goes the legend—fire and water. Driven by the Furies, he fled from Affton, and wandered westward down the vale of Taw, away to Appledore, and there took boat, and out into the boundless Atlantic, over the bar, now crowded with shipping, for which Raleigh’s genius had discovered a new trade and a new world.