Sir Walter Raleigh or Ralegh[1] (c. 1552 – 29 October 1618), was a famed English writer, poet, courtier and explorer.

Raleigh was born to a protestant family in Devon, the son of Walter Raleigh and Katherine Champernowne. Little is known for certain of his early life, though he spent some time in Ireland, in Killuagh castle, Clonmellon county Westmeath, taking part in the suppression of rebellions and becoming a landlord there. He rose rapidly in Queen Elizabeth I's favour, being knighted in 1585, and was involved in the early English colonisation of the New World in Virginia under a royal patent. In 1591 he secretly married one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting, without requesting the Queen's permission, for which he and his wife were sent to the Tower of London. After his release they retired to his estate at Sherborne, Dorset.

In 1594 Raleigh heard of a "golden city" in South America and sailed to find it, publishing an exaggerated account of his experiences in a book that contributed to the legend of El Dorado. After Elizabeth died in 1603, Raleigh was again imprisoned in the Tower, this time for alleged treason against King James who was not favourably disposed toward him. However in 1616 he was released in order to conduct a second expedition in search of El Dorado. This was unsuccessful and the Spanish outpost at San Thomé was ransacked by men under his command. After his return to England he was arrested and after a show trial, mainly to appease the Spanish, he was beheaded at Westminster.

Between 1579 and 1583, Raleigh took part in the suppression of the Desmond Rebellions. He was present at the siege of Smerwick, where he oversaw the slaughter of some 700 Italian soldiers after they had surrendered unconditionally.[2] Upon the seizure and distribution of land following the attainders arising from the rebellion, Raleigh received 40,000 acres (160 km²), including the coastal walled towns of Youghal and Lismore. This made him one of the principal landowners in Munster, but he enjoyed limited success in inducing English tenants to settle on his estates.

During his seventeen years as an Irish landlord, frequently domiciling at Killulagh Castle, Clonmellon, county Westmeath, Raleigh made the town of Youghal his occasional home, where he was mayor from 1588 to 1589. He is credited with having planted the first potatoes in Ireland[citation needed], but it is far more likely that the plant arrived in Ireland through trade with the Spanish. His town mansion, Myrtle Grove, is assumed to be the setting for the story that his servant doused him with a bucket of water after seeing clouds of smoke coming from Raleigh's pipe, in the belief he had been set alight. But this story is also told of other places related to Raleigh: the Virginia Ash inn in Henstridge near Sherborne, Sherborne Castle, and South Wraxall Manor in Wiltshire, home of Raleigh's friend, Sir Walter Long.

Amongst Raleigh's acquaintances in Munster was another Englishman who had been granted land there, the poet Edmund Spenser. In the 1590s, he and Raleigh travelled together from Ireland to the court at London, where Spenser presented part of his allegorical poem, the Faerie Queen, to Elizabeth I.

Raleigh's management of his Irish estates ran into difficulties, which contributed to a decline in his fortunes. In 1602, he sold the lands to Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork. Boyle subsequently prospered under kings James I and Charles I, such that following Raleigh's death, Raleigh family members approached Boyle for compensation on the basis that Raleigh had struck an improvident bargain.

Raleigh's plan for colonization in the "Colony and Dominion of Virginia" (which included the present-day states of North Carolina and Virginia) in North America ended in failure at Roanoke Island, but paved the way for subsequent colonies.[3] His voyages were funded primarily by himself and his friends, never providing the steady stream of revenue necessary to start and maintain a colony in America. (Subsequent colonization attempts in the early 17th century were made under the joint-stock Virginia Company which was able to pull together the capital necessary to create successful colonies.)

In 1587, Raleigh attempted a second expedition again establishing a settlement on Roanoke Island. This time, a more diversified group of settlers was sent, including some entire families, under the governance of John White. After a short while in America, White was recalled to England in order to find more supplies for the colony. He was unable to return the following year as planned, however, because the Queen had ordered that all vessels remain at port in case they were needed to fight the Spanish Armada. It was not until 1591 that the supply vessel arrived at the colony, 4 years later, only to find that all colonists had disappeared. The only clue to their fate was the word "CROATOAN" and letters "CRO" carved into separate tree trunks, suggesting the possibility that they were either massacred, absorbed or taken away by Croatoans or perhaps another native tribe. Other speculation includes their being swept away or lost at sea during the stormy weather of 1588 (credited with aiding in the defeat of the Spanish Armada). However, it is worth noting that a hurricane prevented John White and the crew of the supply vessel from actually visiting Croatoan to investigate the disappearance, and no further attempts at contact were recorded for some years. Whatever the fate of the settlers, the settlement is now remembered as the "Lost Colony of Roanoke Island".

In December 1581 Raleigh came back to England from Ireland with despatches as his company had been disbanded. He took part in Court life and became a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I. The various colourful stories told about him at this period are unlikely to be literally true.[4][5] In 1592, Raleigh was given many rewards by the Queen, including Durham House in the Strand and the estate of Sherborne, Dorset. He was appointed Captain of the Guard, and as Lord Warden of the Stannaries of Devon and Cornwall. Raleigh was knighted in 1585.[6] However, he had not been given any of the great offices of state. In the Armada year of 1588 he was employed as Vice Admiral of Devon, looking after the coastal defenses and military levies.

In 1591, Raleigh was secretly married to Elizabeth ("Bess") Throckmorton (or Throgmorton). She was one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting, eleven years his junior, and was pregnant at the time of their marriage. She gave birth to a son, believed to be named "Damerei", who was given to a wet nurse at Durham House; the infant does not seem to have survived, and Bess resumed her duties. The following year, the unauthorized marriage was discovered and the Queen ordered Raleigh imprisoned and Bess dismissed from court. He was released from prison to divide the spoils from a captured Spanish ship, the Madre de Dios ("Mother of God").

It would be several years before Raleigh returned to favour. The couple remained devoted to each other. During Raleigh's absences, Bess proved a capable manager of the family's fortunes and reputation. They had two more sons, Walter (known as Wat) and Carew. Raleigh retired to his estate at Sherborne where he built a new house, completed in 1594, known then as Sherborne Lodge but is now extended and known as Sherborne (new) Castle. He made friends with the local gentry, such as Sir Ralph Horsey of Clifton Maybank and Charles Thynne of Longleat. During this period at a dinner party at Horsey's, there was a heated discussion about religion which later gave rise to charges of atheism against Raleigh. He was elected to Parliament, speaking on religious and naval matters.

In 1594 he came into possession of a Spanish account of a great golden city at the headwaters of the Caroní River, and a year later he explored what is now eastern Venezuela in search of "Manoa," the legendary city in question. Once back in England, he published "The Discovery of Guiana" [1] an account of his voyage which made exaggerated claims as to what had been discovered. The book can be seen as a contribution to the El Dorado legend. Although Venezuela has gold deposits, there is no evidence Raleigh found any mines. He is sometimes said to have discovered Angel Falls, but these claims are considered "far-fetched" [2].

Raleigh took part in the capture of Cadiz in 1596, where he was wounded. He also participated in a voyage to the Azores in 1597.

From 1600 to 1603, Raleigh was the Governor of the Channel Island of Jersey, and he was responsible for modernizing the defences of the island. He named the new fortress protecting the approaches to Saint Helier Fort Isabella Bellissima, or Elizabeth Castle.

Though royal favour with Queen Elizabeth I had been restored by this time, it did not last. Elizabeth died in 1603, and Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower of London on 19 July. Later that year, on 17 November, Raleigh was tried in the converted Great Hall of Winchester Castle for treason due to his supposed involvement in the Main Plot against King James. Raleigh conducted his defence with great skill, which may, in part, explain why King James spared his life, despite the guilty verdict. He was left to languish in the Tower of London until 1616. While imprisoned, he wrote many treatises and the first volume of The Historie of the World, about the ancient history of Greece and Rome. His son Carew was conceived and born while Raleigh was legally 'dead' and imprisoned in the Tower of London (1604).

In 1616, Sir Walter was released from the Tower of London in order to conduct a second expedition to Venezuela in search of El Dorado. In the course of the expedition, Raleigh's men, under the command of Lawrence Keymis, sacked the Spanish outpost of San Thome on the Orinoco. During the initial attack on the settlement, Raleigh's son Walter was struck by a bullet and killed. On Raleigh's return to England, the outraged Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, the Spanish ambassador, demanded that King James reinstate Raleigh's death sentence. The ambassador's demand was granted.

Raleigh was beheaded at Whitehall on 29 October 1618. "Let us dispatch," he asked his executioner. "At this hour my ague comes upon me. I would not have my enemies think I quaked from fear." After he was allowed to see the axe that would behead him, he mused: "This is a sharp Medicine, but it is a Physician for all diseases and miseries". According to many biographers — Raleigh Trevelyan in his book Sir Walter Raleigh (2003) for instance — Sir Walter's final words (as he lay ready for the axe to fall) were: "Strike a match man, strike!"

The corpse was to be buried in the local church in Beddington, Surrey, the home of Lady Raleigh. "The Lords," she wrote, "have given me his dead body, though they have denied me his life. God hold me in my wits".[7] After Raleigh's execution, his head was embalmed and presented to his wife. She carried it with her in a velvet bag until she decided she didn't like the smell. She died twenty-nine years later and it was returned to Raleigh's tomb at St Margaret's. [8] Raleigh's body was finally laid to rest in St. Margaret's Church, Westminster, where his tomb may still be visited today. [9]

Although his popularity had waned considerably since his Elizabethan heyday, his execution was seen by many, both at the time and since, as unnecessary and unjust. It has been suggested that any involvement in the Main Plot appears to have been limited to a meeting with Lord Cobham.[citation needed] One of the judges at his trial later said: "the justice of England has never been so degraded and injured as by the condemnation of Sir Walter Raleigh."[10]

Raleigh is generally considered one of the foremost poets of the Elizabethan era. His poetry is generally written in the relatively straightforward, unornamented mode known as the plain style. C. S. Lewis considered Raleigh one of the era's "silver poets," a group of writers who resisted the Italian Renaissance influence of dense classical reference and elaborate poetic devices. In poems such as "What is Our Life" and "The Lie" Raleigh expresses a contemptus mundi (contempt of the world) attitude more characteristic of the Middle Ages than of the dawning era of humanistic optimism. However, his lesser-known long poem "The Ocean to Cynthia" combines this vein with the more elaborate conceits associated with his contemporaries Spenser and Donne, while achieving a power and originality that justifies Lewis' assessment, and contradicts it by expressing a melancholy sense of history reminiscent of The Tempest and all the more effective for being the product of personal experience. Raleigh is also Marlovian in terms of the terse line, e.g. "She sleeps thy death that erst thy danger sighed". A minor poem of Raleigh's captures the atmosphere of the court at the time of Queen Elizabeth I, when he wrote a reply to Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love". Releigh's response was "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd". Both of these poems were most probably written in the mid 1580s.

• The 1955 film, The Virgin Queen, starring Bette Davis, Richard Todd, and Joan Collins, dramatizes the relationships between Queen Elizabeth I, Raleigh, and his wife.
• Sir Walter Raleigh appears as a secondary character (bass) in Benjamin Britten's 1953 opera Gloriana.
• Raleigh's name is quoted in The Beatles' White Album song I'm So Tired, where the lyrics chide him for bringing the tobacco plant to England - "Although I'm so tired, I'll have another cigarette. And curse Sir Walter Raleigh. He was such a stupid get!". (A northern English expression meaning idiot; variation of "git").[11]
• Raleigh, North Carolina, takes its name from Sir Walter. The Hayes Barton neighborhood takes its name from his birthplace. There are other cities and towns in the New World named "Raleigh", and a misspelling of it in Rolla, Missouri. In the namesake city, Raleigh, North Carolina, there is also a neighborhood called Budleigh.
• Raleigh County in southern West Virginia is named for Sir Walter Raleigh.
• There is a noted brand of American pipe tobacco called "Sir Walter Raleigh".
• Sir Walter Raleigh's fictional autobiography is the subject of Robert Nye's novel The Voyage of the Destiny.
• The name "Sir Walter Raleigh" is sometimes used in the odd "Prince Albert in a can" joke.
• In February 2006, a bronze statue of Raleigh by sculptress Vivien Mallock was unveiled in the Devonshire village of East Budleigh. Costing some £30,000, it was a source of controversy as it had been part-funded by the British American Tobacco company.
• The title of his comedy History of the World, Part I by Mel Brooks is a reference to Raleigh having finished only the first volume of his The Historie of the World at the time he was executed.
• Raleigh plays an important part in Anthony Burgess's novel A Dead Man in Deptford in which he is suggested as one of the persons who might have been responsible for the murder of Christopher Marlowe.
• In the second series of the television program Blackadder, in the episode Potato, Raleigh is portrayed by Simon Jones. Lord Blackadder tells Queenie that he'll sail around the Cape of Good Hope to show up, as Blackadder calls him, Walter "Ooh What A Big Ship I've Got" Raleigh. Blackadder also refers to him as "Sir Walter Rather-a-Wally Raleigh".
• One of Bob Newhart's stand-up comedy routines depicts one side of a telephone conversation between a skeptical businessman in London (played by Newhart) and "Nutty Walt" Raleigh who tries unsuccessfully to convince him of the merits of tobacco.
• Raleigh is the subject of a chapter in William Carlos Williams' historicist essay titled In the American Grain (1925). Other chapters in the book are devoted to Hernán Cortéz, Juan Ponce de Leon, Hernando De Soto, Samuel de Champlain, and figures of American culture and politics.
• Raleigh's name is mentioned in the Brobdingnagian Bards song "If I Had a Million Ducats" (a parody of "If I Had A Million Dollars" by Barenaked Ladies).
• Raleigh is mentioned in Paul Auster's novel Mr Vertigo, whose main character is called "Walt Rawley."
• One of the four houses of Queen Elizabeth's High School, Gainsborough, is named after Raleigh.
• A chapter from V. S. Naipaul`s book, "A Way in the World," includes a literary account of Raleigh's San Thome adventure, partly from the perspective of a mestizo servant captured during the raid on the Spanish settlement.
• Raleigh's relationship with Bess Throckmorton and Elizabeth I is portrayed in the 2007 film, Elizabeth: The Golden Age starring Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth I, which is a sequel to Elizabeth (1998). Clive Owen stars as Raleigh. Notes &

1. ^ Many alternate spellings of his surname exist, including Rawley, Ralegh, and Rawleigh; "Raleigh" appears most commonly today, though he, himself, used that spelling only once, as far as is known. His most consistent preference was for "Ralegh". The name is correctly pronounced "rawley", though in practice "rally" or even "rar-ley" are the usual modern pronunciations in England.
2. ^ Mark Nicholls and Penry Williams, ‘Ralegh, Sir Walter (1554–1618)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online ed., Oxford University Press, Oct 2006, ¶5, accessed December 29, 2006
3. ^ Markham, Jerry W. (2001). A financial history of the United States. Armonk, N.Y: M.E. Sharpe, 22. ISBN 0-7656-0730-1.
4. ^ Fragmenta Regalia.
5. ^ Fuller's Worthys
6. ^ "Raleigh, Sir Walter", Encyclopædia Britannica Online, 2006.
7. ^ Durant, Will, The Story of Civilizationvol. VII, Chap. VI, p.158
8. ^ Lloyd, J & Mitchinson, J: "The Book of General I.
9. ^ Williams, Norman Lloyd. "Sir Walter Raleigh", Cassell Biographies, 1962)
10. ^ Historical summary in Crawford v. Washington (page 10 of .pdf file)
11. ^ I'm So Tired, Steve's Beatles Page - Songs. Retrieved on 2006-01-19.
     

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