Walter Raleigh

This article is about the sixteenth-century explorer. For other uses of Raleigh, see Raleigh

Not to be confused with Walter Raleigh (professor).

For the essay by Henry David Thoreau, see Sir Walter Raleigh (essay).

Walter Ral
File:Nicholas Hilliard 007.jpgthumb
Born	c. 1552 Devonshire, England
Died	(1618-10-29)29 October 1618 London, England
Occupation	writer, poet, courtier, explorer

Sir Walter Raleigh or Ralegh (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 participating in two famous massacres at Rathlin Island and Smerwick, later becoming a landlord of lands confiscated from the Irish. 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 Elizabeth Throckmorton, 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 the Tower of London.

Early life

Raleigh was born in the year 1552, the exact month is unknown, in the house of Hayes Barton, in the village of East Budleigh, not far from Budleigh Salterton in Devon, England. He was the youngest of five sons born to Katherine Champernowne in two successive marriages. His half brothers, Sir John Gilbert, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Adrian Gilbert, and full brother Carew Raleigh were also prominent during the reigns of Elizabeth I or James I. Katherine Champernowne was a niece of Kat Ashley, Elizabeth's governess, who introduced the young men at court. (Ronald, p. 249)

Raleigh's family was strongly Protestant in religious orientation and experienced a number of near-escapes during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary I of England. In the most notable of these, Raleigh's father had to hide in a tower to avoid being killed. As a result, during his childhood, Raleigh developed a hatred of Catholicism, and proved himself quick to express it after the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I of England came to the throne in 1558.

In 1568 or 1572, Raleigh was registered as an undergraduate at Oriel College, Oxford, but does not seem to have taken up residence, and in 1575 he was registered at the Middle Temple. His life between these two dates is uncertain but from a reference in his History of the World he seems to have served with the French Huguenots at the battle of Jarnac, 13 March 1569. At his trial in 1603 he stated that he had never studied law.

Ireland

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. 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 , 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 Queene, 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.

The New World

Engraved portrait of Raleigh.

Raleigh's plan in 1584 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. 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 Croatans 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".

Death

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, 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". After Raleigh's execution, his head was embalmed and presented to his wife. She died twenty-nine years later and it was returned to Raleigh's tomb at St. Margaret's. Raleigh's body was finally laid to rest in St. Margaret's Church, Westminster, where his tomb may still be visited today.

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. 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."

Poetry

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.

Raleigh in culture

• 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.
• The 1963 historical novel The Grove of Eagles by Winston Graham is told from the point of view of a younger Devon man who admires Raleigh, accompanies him on his 1596 expedition to Cadiz, but eventually abandons him due to loving an opportunistic woman who correctly senses that Raleigh's fortunes are sinking.
• The Beatles mention Sir Walter Raleigh in the John Lennon penned song I'm so tired in their White Album.
• A quotation from Walter Raleigh serves as the motto of Nevile Shute's 1927 novel So Disdained, and is also the source of its name.
• Sir Walter Raleigh appears as a secondary character (bass) in Benjamin Britten's 1953 opera Gloriana.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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).
• In the 1996 film The Rock, Sean Connery's character John Mason mentions Raleigh's name, along with Alcmene and Solzhenitsyn, as men who have been "wrongfully imprisoned", thus suggesting that his fate is very much like theirs.
• 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.

Bibliography

• Adamson, J.H. and H.F. Folland, Shepherd of the Ocean, 1969.
• Fuller, Thomas. Angolorum Speculum or the Worthies of England, 1684.
• Lewis, C.S. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, 2004.
• Naunton, Robert. Fragmenta Regali 1694, reprinted 1824.
• Nicholls, Mark and Penry Williams, ‘Ralegh, Sir Walter (1554-1618)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004
• Trevelyan, Raleigh. Sir Walter Raleigh, 2003.
• Ronald, Susan. The Pirate Queen: Queen Elizabeth I, her Pirate Adventurers, and the Dawn of Empire. Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 2007. ISBN 0-06-082066-7.
• The Sir Walter Raleigh Collection in Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

External links

• Sir Walter Raleigh Lodge, R.A.O.B.
• Sir Walter Raleigh's Grave
• Biography of Sir Walter Raleigh at Britannia.com
• Sir Walter Raleigh at the Fort Raleigh website
• Quotes attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh
• Poetry by Sir Walter Raleigh, plus commentary
• Searching for the Lost Colony Blog

Texts by Raleigh

• Works by Walter Raleigh at Project Gutenberg
  • Project Gutenberg edition of The Discovery of Guiana
• Worldly Wisdom from The Historie of the World