Walter Raleigh

• 1. Introduction

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  Walter Raleigh spent the final morning of his life handling the axe that was about to kill him. "This is a sharp Medicine," he reportedly said, "but it is a Physician for all diseases and miseries." He was beheaded in the Old Palace Yard at the Palace of Westminster on the 29th of October 1618. One of the judges from his original trial later observed that English justice had never been so degraded as by the condemnation of Raleigh. The question worth asking is how a man who had been a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I, a knight, a privateer, a poet, a coloniser, and a historian ended up on a scaffold in his own capital city.

  Raleigh was born around 1552 or 1554 in the parish of East Budleigh in East Devon, the youngest of five sons. His world was shaped by religious conflict from the very start. His family was deeply Protestant, and during the Catholic reign of Queen Mary I, his father had to hide in a tower to avoid being killed. That early experience left Raleigh with a hatred of Roman Catholicism he would never lose. When Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558, everything changed for a family like his. What follows is the story of a man who seized that moment more boldly than almost anyone, and whose end came just as dramatically as his rise.

• 2. A Soldier Made at Court

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  In 1569, at the age of about seventeen, Raleigh crossed the Channel to fight alongside the Huguenots in France's religious civil wars. In his History of the World he later claimed to have been an eyewitness at the Battle of Moncontour on the 3rd of October 1569. That was the kind of experience that shaped him: early, violent, and firsthand.

  He returned to England by 1575 or 1576, having briefly enrolled at Oriel College, Oxford, without ever taking a degree, and passed through the Inns of Court without, as he admitted at his own trial in 1603, ever truly studying law. His real education came elsewhere. In 1577, and again in 1579, he sailed with his half-brother Sir Humphrey Gilbert in attempts to find a Northwest Passage. They failed to find the passage but succeeded in raiding Spanish ships, which gave Raleigh his first taste of the privateering world that would define so much of his career.

  From 1579 to late 1580, Raleigh fought in Ireland during the suppression of the Desmond Rebellions. At the siege of Smerwick he led the party that executed roughly 600 Spanish and Italian soldiers who had surrendered. It was brutal work, and it brought him back to England with a reputation. By December 1581 he was at court, and he rose fast. By 1585, Queen Elizabeth I had knighted him, appointed him warden of the tin mines of Cornwall and Devon, made him Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall and vice-admiral of the two counties. He was also elected member of parliament for Devonshire.

• 3. The Colonies He Never Visited

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  On the 25th of March 1584, Queen Elizabeth granted Raleigh a royal charter to explore, colonise, and rule any remote lands not already claimed by a Christian ruler. In return, the Crown would receive one-fifth of all gold and silver mined there. Raleigh had seven years to establish a settlement or forfeit the right. The charter had originally been held by his half-brother Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who had died at sea trying to accomplish exactly that.

  Raleigh's response was swift. On the 27th of April 1584, the Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe expedition set sail. They returned with two local inhabitants, Manteo and Wanchese, and reports of resources along the east coast. The region received the name "Virginia" in honour of the Virgin Queen. In 1585, Raleigh dispatched a militarised group under Sir Richard Grenville to establish a fort on Roanoke Island. The colony ran short of food after clashes with local inhabitants and eventually left with Sir Francis Drake in June 1586. Grenville arrived shortly after, left fifteen men and supplies, then sailed for England. Those fifteen men were never seen again.

  A second attempt followed on the 22nd of July 1587, this time with entire families included, governed by John White. White returned to England for supplies, intending to come back within a year. Instead, Queen Elizabeth ordered all vessels to remain at port ahead of the threatened Spanish Armada. After England's 1588 victory over the Armada, White's small fleet was finally permitted to sail, but his crew insisted on hunting Spanish merchant ships first. When the supply ship reached Roanoke three years after it should have, the settlers had vanished. The only clues were the word "CROATOAN" and the letters "CRO" carved into tree trunks. A hurricane prevented White from reaching Croatoan Island to investigate. Raleigh himself never once set foot in North America throughout all of this.

• 4. The Forbidden Marriage

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  In 1591, Raleigh secretly married Elizabeth "Bess" Throckmorton, one of Queen Elizabeth's own ladies-in-waiting, eleven years his junior and pregnant at the time. He had not asked the Queen's permission, which was required. Their son, believed to be named Damerei, was given to a wet nurse at Durham House and died of plague in October 1592. Bess quietly resumed her duties at court.

  The secret did not hold. When the unauthorised marriage was discovered, the Queen had both of them imprisoned in the Tower of London in June 1592. Raleigh was released in August of that year to manage the spoils from a recently captured Spanish merchant ship called Madre de Deus, or "Mother of God", taken off Flores. He then returned to the Tower. By early 1593 he was free again and had taken a seat in Parliament.

  The marriage that had cost him so much turned out to be one of the most durable things in his life. Raleigh and Bess remained devoted to one another. They had two more sons: Walter, known as Wat, born in 1593, and Carew, born in 1605. The younger of the two, Carew, was conceived while Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower a second time, years later. After their release from their first imprisonment, Raleigh retired with Bess to his estate at Sherborne in Dorset, where he built a new house completed in 1594, known then as Sherborne Lodge and later extended into what is now called Sherborne New Castle.

• 5. El Dorado and the Book That Invented a Legend

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  In 1594, Raleigh came into possession of a Spanish account describing a great golden city at the headwaters of the Caroní River in South America. He set out the following year to find it, exploring what is now Guyana and eastern Venezuela in search of a lake called Parime and the legendary city of Manoa. He returned to England and published The Discovery of Guiana in 1596, an account that made exaggerated claims about what he had found. Venezuela does have gold deposits, but no evidence suggests Raleigh discovered any mines. Claims that he found Angel Falls are considered far-fetched by historians.

  The book nonetheless contributed significantly to the El Dorado legend. The quest consumed him across decades. In 1595 and again in 1617, Raleigh led expeditions to the Orinoco river basin. These were funded largely by Raleigh himself and his personal connections. Neither expedition produced the steady revenue that might have sustained ongoing American colonisation. The legend proved more resilient than any practical outcome.

  During this same period Raleigh served as rear admiral of the Islands Voyage to the Azores in 1597, participated in the capture of Cádiz in 1596 where he was wounded, and spent time from 1600 to 1603 as governor of the Channel Island of Jersey, where he modernised the island's defences, including constructing a new fort protecting approaches to Saint Helier, named Fort Isabella Bellissima or Elizabeth Castle.

• 6. Tower, Trial, and History of the World

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  Queen Elizabeth I died on the 24th of March 1603. Within months, Raleigh's position had collapsed. He was arrested on the 19th of July 1603 at what is now the Old Exeter Inn in Ashburton, charged with treason for his alleged involvement in the Main Plot, a conspiracy against the new king, James I.

  His trial began on the 17th of November in the converted Great Hall of Winchester Castle. Raleigh conducted his own defence. The chief evidence against him was the signed confession of his friend Henry Brooke, the 11th Baron Cobham. Raleigh repeatedly demanded that Cobham be brought to testify in person. "Let my acuser come face to face, and be deposed," he said. "Were the case but for a small copyhold, you would have witnesses or good proof to lead the jury to a verdict; and I am here for my life." The tribunal refused. Raleigh was convicted and sent to the Tower. King James spared his life but left him imprisoned.

  While in the Tower, Raleigh wrote his History of the World, drawing on sources in six languages and covering the ancient world with a heavy emphasis on geography. King James, who was supposed to benefit from the work, complained it was "too sawcie in censuring Princes." His son Carew was born in 1604 or 1605 while Raleigh was still confined. Raleigh remained in the Tower until 1616, a period of roughly thirteen years. His trial was later cited as influential in establishing the common law right to confront one's accusers in court.

• 7. The Last Expedition

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  In 1617, James I pardoned Raleigh and granted permission for a second expedition to Venezuela in search of El Dorado. A central condition of the pardon was that Raleigh avoid any hostility toward Spanish colonies or shipping.

  The expedition broke that condition. A detachment of Raleigh's men, commanded by his longtime friend Lawrence Kemys, attacked the Spanish outpost of Santo Tomé de Guayana on the Orinoco River. In the initial assault, Raleigh's son Walter was fatally shot. Kemys brought Raleigh the news and begged for forgiveness. He did not receive it. Kemys then committed suicide.

  Count Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador in London, demanded that Raleigh's original death sentence be reinstated. King James had little political choice and complied. Raleigh was brought from Plymouth to London by Sir Lewis Stukley, passing up numerous opportunities to escape along the way.

  On the morning of the 29th of October 1618, Raleigh was composed. "Let us dispatch," he told his executioner. "At this hour my ague comes upon me. I would not have my enemies think I quaked from fear." His final words, addressed to a hesitating executioner, were recorded as: "What dost thou fear? Strike, man, strike." In his cell afterward, searchers found a small tobacco pouch engraved with a Latin inscription: Comes meus fuit in illo miserrimo tempore, meaning "It was my companion at that most miserable time." His head was embalmed and presented to Bess. She is said to have kept it in a velvet bag until her own death, twenty-nine years later, when it was interred at St. Margaret's, Westminster.

• 8. The Poet and the Afterlife

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  C. S. Lewis ranked Raleigh among the Elizabethan era's "silver poets", a group who wrote in a plain, unornamented style that resisted the dense classical reference fashionable among their contemporaries. Raleigh's poems are mostly short lyrics shaped by real events, with recurring themes of love, loss, and the passage of time. Poems such as "What is Our Life" and "The Lie" express a contempt for worldly things that Lewis found more characteristic of the Middle Ages than of the humanist optimism usually associated with the Elizabethan period.

  His long poem "The Ocean's Love to Cynthia", written during his Tower imprisonment, blends this world-weariness with the elaborate conceits of contemporaries Edmund Spenser and John Donne. His poetic reply to Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love", titled "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd", follows Marlowe's structure of six four-line stanzas almost line-for-line, refuting Marlowe's sentiments directly. In 1968, John Lennon referenced Raleigh humorously in "I'm So Tired" on The Beatles' White Album, calling him "such a stupid get" due to his role in popularising tobacco in England.

  In 1792, the state capital of North Carolina was named Raleigh in his honour, as sponsor of the Roanoke Colony. The descendants of his only surviving child, Carew, included a genealogical branch that, by one line of descent, would eventually include the actor Hugh Grant and the present Lord Mountbatten. In 2002, the BBC poll of the 100 Greatest Britons featured him. One judge at his 1603 trial had said that English justice had never been so degraded as by his condemnation; the North Carolina capital suggests at least some of history agreed.