The Death of Ralegh

 On this day in 1618, having fallen foul of the monarch once too often, Sir Walter Ralegh, explorer, statesman, soldier and superb writer of poetry and prose, faced death on the scaffold in Old Palace Yard, Westminster. He urged the executioner to make haste, for 'at this hour my ague comes upon me. I would not have my enemies think I quaked from fear.' Inspecting the blade that was to dispatch him, he remarked, 'This is a sharp medicine, but it is a physician for all diseases and miseries.' With his last words, he urged the hesitating executioner to strike: 'What dost thou fear? Strike, man, strike!' Men knew how to die in those days. 

  'What is our life?' Ralegh asked in a poem – 

'What is our life? The play of passion.
Our mirth? The music of division:
Our mothers’ wombs the tiring-houses be,
Where we are dressed for life’s short comedy.
The earth the stage; Heaven the spectator is,
Who sits and views whosoe’er doth act amiss.
The graves which hide us from the scorching sun
Are like drawn curtains when the play is done.
Thus playing post we to our latest rest,
And then we die in earnest, not in jest.'

On the eve of his execution, he answered his question again – a dusty answer:

'Even such is time, which takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, and all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust,
Who in the dark and silent grave
When we have wandered all our ways
Shuts up the story of our days,
And from which earth, and grave, and dust
The Lord will raise me up, I trust.'

After his execution, Ralegh's head was embalmed and given to his wife. His body was to be buried at St Mary's, Beddington (one of my old Surrey haunts), but it ended up at St Margaret's, Westminster. Lady Ralegh reportedly kept her husband's head in a velvet bag for the rest of her life, after which it was reunited with the rest of Sir Walter's body at St Margaret's.