Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, and James the Sixth of Scotland became James the First of England. There were plots to prevent his accession and to put Lady Arabella Stewart, an Englishwoman of the royal house, on the throne. The cowardly Lord Cobham was at the head of the Main Plot, and when arrested he made a lying confession implicating Raleigh, who was tried and found guilty of compassing the death of the king, of endeavouring to set Arabella Stewart on the throne, of receiving bribes from the court of Spain, and of seeking to deliver the country into the hands of its enemy. Raleigh’s execution was ordered, and he wrote a touching farewell to his wife; but on the eve of the fatal day he was reprieved and committed to the Tower with the death sentence hanging over his head. For about twelve years he remained a prisoner. He was treated leniently, and given apartments in the Bloody Tower, where he lived with his wife and son and his attendants. Frequently the young Prince Henry visited him, and the lad grew fond of his gallant and brilliant friend. “No man but my father,” he once said, “would keep such a bird in a cage.” Raleigh now busied himself in a variety of occupations: he designed a model of a ship, he condensed fresh water from salt, he compounded drugs, he began his “History of the World,” and wrote verses and political pamphlets. About the year 1610 he revived his old project for discovering Manoa. Twenty years had now passed since he had returned from Guiana, but during his long solitude in the Tower his mind returned again and again to the fabulous riches of El Dorado, and he devised plan after plan for securing its wealth. He now made a proposition to certain lords of the Council, and they listened to it. “If I bring them not to a mountain covered with gold and silver ore,” he wrote, “let the commander have commission to cut off my head there.” All he stipulated for was that if half a ton of precious ore should be brought home he should have a free pardon. At length the king was persuaded to agree to the proposal, and in March 1617 the order for his release was signed. Raleigh and his wife adventured all they had in fitting out the expedition. Ere it sailed the Spanish ambassador intervened. He protested loudly that Guiana belonged to Spain, and that Raleigh’s expedition proposed an invasion of Spanish territory, and was simply a cloak for piracy on a gigantic scale. The ambassador believed that Raleigh had his eye on the Mexican Plate fleet, and as after events proved, he was right. James warned Raleigh that he was not to fight the Spaniards, and on this understanding he was permitted to sail.