Posterity

Abstract

Bess obtained the disposing of her husband’s head only, not of the body, which was buried in St. Margaret’s, Westminster to the south of the altar. Ralegh’s head, upon its severance from the body, ‘was showed on each side of the scaffold and then put into a red leather bag, and his wrought velvet gown thrown over it, which was afterwards conveyed away in a mourning coach of his lady’s’.¹ It seems that Bess had it embalmed and kept it with her to her dying day, and after her it came to their son Carew, with whom it was buried. Bishop Goodman, in his account of the Court of King James, wrote that ‘no man doth honour the memory of Sir Walter Ralegh and his excellent parts more than myself; and in token thereof I know where his skull is kept to this day, and I have kissed it.’² This is somewhat curious coming from a bishop, even from a bishop addicted to ritualistic practices and inclining to Catholicism: one hardly thinks of Ralegh’s head as a holy relic.