Sir Walter Raleigh
born 1554?, Hayes Barton, near Budleigh
Salterton, Devon, England
died October 29, 1618, London
English adventurer and writer, a favourite of
Queen Elizabeth I, who knighted him in 1585.
Accused of treason by Elizabeth’s successor,
James I, he was imprisoned in the Tower of
London and eventually put to death.
Raleigh was a younger son of Walter Raleigh
(d. 1581) of Fardell in Devon, by his third
wife, Katherine Gilbert (née Champernowne). In
1569 he fought on the Huguenot (French
Protestant) side in the Wars of Religion in
France, and he is known later to have been at
Oriel College, Oxford (1572), and at the Middle
Temple law college (1575). In 1580 he fought
against the Irish rebels in Munster, and his
outspoken criticism of the way English policy
was being implemented in Ireland brought him to
the attention of Queen Elizabeth. By 1582 he had
become the monarch’s favourite, and he began to
acquire lucrative monopolies, properties, and
influential positions. His Irish service was
rewarded by vast estates in Munster. In 1583 the
queen secured him a lease of part of Durham
House in the Strand, London, where he had a
monopoly of wine licenses (1583) and of the
export of broadcloth (1585); and he became
warden of the stannaries (the Cornish tin
mines), lieutenant of Cornwall, and vice admiral
of Devon and Cornwall and frequently sat as a
member of Parliament. In 1587, two years after
he had been knighted, Raleigh became captain of
the queen’s guard. His last appointment under
the crown was as governor of Jersey (one of the
Channel Islands) in 1600.
In 1592 Raleigh acquired the manor of
Sherborne in Dorset. He wanted to settle and
found a family. His marriage to Elizabeth,
daughter of Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, possibly
as early as 1588, had been kept a secret from
the jealous queen. In 1592 the birth of a son
betrayed him, and he and his wife were both
imprisoned in the Tower of London. Raleigh
bought his release with profits from a
privateering voyage in which he had invested,
but he never regained his ascendancy at court.
The child did not survive; a second son, Walter,
was born in 1593 and a third son, Carew, in 1604
or 1605.
Although Raleigh was the queen’s favourite,
he was not popular. His pride and extravagant
spending were notorious, and he was attacked for
unorthodox thought. A Jesuit pamphlet in 1592
accused him of keeping a “School of Atheism,”
but he was not an atheist in the modern sense.
He was a bold talker, interested in skeptical
philosophy, and a serious student of mathematics
as an aid to navigation. He also studied
chemistry and compounded medical formulas. The
old idea that Shakespeare satirized Raleigh’s
circle under the name of the "School of Night"
is now entirely discredited.
Raleigh’s breach with the queen widened his
personal sphere of action. Between 1584 and 1589
he had tried to establish a colony near Roanoke
Island (in present North Carolina), which he
named Virginia, but he never set foot there
himself. In 1595 he led an expedition to what is
now Venezuela, in South America, sailing up the
Orinoco River in the heart of Spain’s colonial
empire. He described the expedition in his book
The Discoverie of Guiana (1596). Spanish
documents and stories told by Indians had
convinced him of the existence of Eldorado (El
Dorado), the ruler of Manoa, a supposedly
fabulous city of gold in the interior of South
America. He did locate some gold mines, but no
one supported his project for colonizing the
area. In 1596 he went with Robert Devereux, 2nd
earl of Essex, on an unsuccessful expedition to
the Spanish city of Cádiz, and he was Essex’s
rear admiral on the Islands voyage in 1597, an
expedition to the Azores.
Raleigh’s aggressive policies toward Spain
did not recommend him to the pacific King James
I (reigned 1603–25). His enemies worked to bring
about his ruin, and in 1603 he and others were
accused of plotting to dethrone the king.
Raleigh was convicted on the written evidence of
Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham, and, after a
last-minute reprieve from the death sentence,
was consigned to the Tower. He fought to save
Sherborne, which he had conveyed in trust for
his son, but a clerical error invalidated the
deed. In 1616 he was released but not pardoned.
He still hoped to exploit the wealth of
Venezuela, arguing that the country had been
ceded to England by its native chiefs in 1595.
With the king’s permission, he financed and led
a second expedition there, promising to open a
gold mine without offending Spain. A severe
fever prevented his leading his men upriver. His
lieutenant, Lawrence Kemys, burned a Spanish
settlement but found no gold. Raleigh’s son
Walter died in the action. King James invoked
the suspended sentence of 1603, and in 1618,
after writing a spirited defense of his acts,
Raleigh was executed.
Popular feeling had been on Raleigh’s side
ever since 1603. After 1618 his occasional
writings were collected and published, often
with little discrimination. The authenticity of
some minor works attributed to him is still
unsure. Some 560 lines of verse in his hand are
preserved. They address the queen as Cynthia and
complain of her unkindness, probably with
reference to his imprisonment of 1592. His
best-known prose works in addition to The
Discoverie of Guiana are A Report of the Truth
of the Fight About the Iles of Açores This Last
Sommer (1591; generally known as The Last Fight
of the Revenge) and The History of the World
(1614). The last work, undertaken in the Tower,
proceeds from the Creation to the 2nd century bc.
History is shown as a record of God’s
Providence, a doctrine that pleased
contemporaries and counteracted the charge of
atheism. King James was meant to note the many
warnings that the injustice of kings is always
punished.
Raleigh survives as an interesting and
enigmatic personality rather than as a force in
history. He can be presented either as a hero or
as a scoundrel. His vaulting imagination, which
could envisage both North and South America as
English territory, was supported by considerable
practical ability and a persuasive pen, but some
discrepancy between the vision and the deed made
him less effective than his gifts had promised.
Agnes M.C. Latham
