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Sir Walter Raleigh

Sir Walter Raleigh may be taken as the great typical figure of the age of Elisabeth. Courtier and statesman, soldier and sailor, scientist and man of letters, he engaged in almost all the main lines of public activity in his time, and was distinguished in them all. One of the great streams of events in modern history has been the expansion of western Europe, which carried European influence all over the world and brought the influence of distant places back to Europe in the backwash. Sir Walter Ralegh played a pivotal role in the expansion of England into the New World.

Sir Walter Raleigh (1554? - 1618) was the imaginative force behind the Roanoke colonies. His meteoric rise to favor in the court of Queen Elizabeth was dazzling. Sustained by his service as explorer, soldier, seaman, and by his gifts as a writer, Raleigh's position brought him vast estates, influence, and knighthood. However, Raleigh's star faded following his unapproved marriage to Lady Elizabeth Throckmorton. By 1618, after a long stay in the Tower of London, he was executed for allegedly plotting to dethrone Queen Elizabeth's successor, James I.

Is his name properly spelled RawleygheM as he signed it once in 1587, Rauley as he signed it until 1583, or Ralegh as he signed it more or less consistently from 1584 until his death in 1618? The spelling we prefer today is one he may never have used. How should his name be pronounced-rawly or rolly? Both questions and their several answers are appropriate to any consideration of this well-known, yet oddly enigmatic man.

Raleigh was born at Hayes Farm, near Budleigh Salterton, on the Devonshire coast, sometime between 1552 and 1553. His father was a Devonshire gentleman of property, connected with many of the distinguished families of the south of England. Of his childhood and boyhood singularly little is known, save what it is possible to infer from the position of his family and the nature of his surroundings. With regard to the first, antiquarians and genealogists have vied with each other in providing him with pedigrees, dating sometimes back to Norman, sometimes to still earlier days ; whilst by one authority it is asserted that Plantagenet blood ran in his veins. Leaving these more doubtful matters on one side, it is at least certain that the Raleighs had been settled in Devonshire for several generations. Of what influences, besides such as would naturally have given an adventurous and seaward direction to his imagination, were brought to bear upon his early years the material for hazarding any conjecture is scanty.

He first saw military service in the Huguenot army in France in 1569. In 1572 he was at Oriel College, Oxford; and 1575 he was at the Middle Temple, one of the Inns of Court. His career was exciting - fighting for his fellow Protestants in France; exploring the New World with his half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert; subduing and colonizing Ireland; catching the fancy of Queen Elizabeth and becoming important at court.

The great wealth that poured into Spain from the colonies in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Peru provoked great interest on the part of the other European powers. Emerging maritime nations such as England, drawn in part by Francis Drake's successful raids on Spanish treasure ships, began to take an interest in the New World. In 1578 Humphrey Gilbert, the author of a treatise on the search for the Northwest Passage, received a patent from Queen Elizabeth to colonize the "heathen and barbarous landes" in the New World that other European nations had not yet claimed. It would be five years before his efforts could begin. When he was lost at sea, his half-brother, Walter Raleigh, took up the mission.

After some service in Ireland, he attracted the attention of the Queen, and rapidly rose to the perilous position of her chief favorite. Did he really put his cape in the mud for the Queen to walk upon as legend goes? Probably not, but it makes an interesting story. On 25 March 1584 he received from Queen Elizabeth a patent to lands discovered in the name of the Crown of England. The patent allows Raleigh to claim and settle any lands in the New World not yet occupied by other Christians. With her approval, he fitted out two expeditions for the colonisation of Virginia, neither of which did his royal mistress permit him to lead in person, and neither of which succeeded in establishing a permanent settlement.

On 27 April 1584 an expedition commanded by Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe sailed from Plymouth with Simon Fernandez as pilot. They arrived off the coast of what is now North Carolina on 13 July 1584, took possession of the area in the name of the Queen, explored the region, and returned to England, with two young Indian men, Manteo and Wanchese. As a result of this expedition, Ralegh was knighted on 6 January 1585. Later in 1585 Ralegh sent to America a colony under Sir Richard Grenville with Ralph Lane as its governor. The men in this colony, who included John White and Thomas Harriot, gathered a great deal of information and explored as far north as the Chesapeake Bay. But in 1586 they returned to England with Sir Francis Drake. Although disappointed by their unexpedited return, Ralegh did not give up.

Soon after Christopher Columbus had chronicled the use of tobacco among local natives, plants and seeds were brought to Europe. In 1577 the Englishman John Frampton wrote "Joyful News Out of the New Found World" describing the curative virtues of tobacco. European traders dispersed tobacco throughout Asia and Africa and by 1605 it was recognized the world over. From England, Sir Walter Raleigh set up a tobacco-growing colony in Roanoke, Virginia (now North Carolina), but its failure did not dampen his enthusiasm for smoking tobacco. Queen Elizabeth was reputed to have consoled herself with a witticism, telling Sir Walter "that she had heard of those who turned their gold into smoke, but had never before seen the man who could turn smoke into gold." In 1587 he sent a second colony, one including women and children, with John White as its governor. The disappearance of this colony sometime between John White's departure from Roanoke Island in August 1587 and his return in 1590 is one of the enduring mysteries of American history.

The Roanoke Island colonies, however, were not Sir Walter's only colonial interests. He continued his involvement in Ireland, and in 1585 he acquired a plantation in Munster, an area where land had been confiscated from rebels. Much of the land he held was in County Waterford and in County Cook - sites to which he sent colonists in 1587, the same year he sent the second colony to Roanoke Island. Among the colonist in Ireland were Thomas Harriot and perhaps some of the other men who had returned from the Ralph Lane colony. Sir Richard Grenville was also active in Ireland. An Irish rebellion at the end of the sixteenth century forced many of these colonists to return to England. According to David Beers Quinn in Raleigh and the British Empire, Ralegh did go beyond his contemporaries in his efforts to promote colonies. His desire to end a Spanish monopoly in the Americas was sincere, but success would have brought Ralegh wealth, prestige and power as the ruler, under the Crown, of a huge area in America. According to Quinn "The picture of Ralegh as an idealist, pouring out his money in pursuit of a dream of empire for the good of his country and of future generations, is of course false. He was an acute and hard-dealing businessman. Colonization was a business which he undertook to promote." The Roanoke colonies were only part of his efforts-he also made attempts at colonization in Ireland and on the northern coast of South America, in what is now Venezuela. Ralegh never came to North Carolina, but he did visit both Ireland and South America.

Sir Walter Raleigh declared that "whoever commands the sea, commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself." In 1588 Raleigh donated "Ark Royal" to the English navy, which was chosen to lead the English fleet against the Armada. Sir Walter Raleigh & Sir Richard Grenville were responsible for the joint defence of Devon and Cornwall against the expected Spanish Armada.

During some time after Ralegh's return to England, he appears to have enjoyed the peculiar favor of the queen. For his services against the Armada, she rewarded him with an augmentation of his office of licenses. As a politician, his leading principles of action seem to have been, religious toleration, determined opposition to amity with Spain, and hatred of her encroachments.

After about six years of high favor, Raleigh found his position at court endangered by the rivalry of Essex. Promoted by Elizabeth to be one of the Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, Ralegh, who had neither the habits nor the soul of an idler, was constrained to come into very frequent communication with the ladies of the bed-chamber. At the height of his career, Sir Walter angered Queen Elizabeth by secretly marrying Elizabeth Throckmorton, one of her ladies in waiting. By Queen Elizabeth, it is to be feared, the sin was visited, more as a scandal to her court, and an offence to her own paramount charms, than as a dereliction from morality. In 1592, on returning from convoying a squadron he had fitted out against the Spanish, he was thrown into the Tower by the orders of the Queen. Raleigh was released when one of his ships brought back a huge treasure on the captured Spanish ship "Madre De Dios", engaged in various naval exploits, and in 1594 sailed for South America.

On 24 March 1603 Queen Elizabeth I died, and the last Tudor monarch was succeeded by the first Stuart monarch, King James II, the son of Mary Queen of Scots. In the reign of James I, Ralegh was never in favor. His anti-Spanish attitudes were unpopular with the new ruler, who sought peace with Spain. Until 1612 the worst influences at Court were kept in partial restraint by the presence at the head of affairs of Robert Cecil, become Earl of Salisbury and Lord Treasurer. So long as he lived, the Stuart House was never caught in the fatal net of alliance with Catholic powers. In everything he maintained the Elizabethan tradition, hostile to Spain without and to the Catholics within, but desirous of peace and unfavourable to the Puritans.

The other and less orthodox school of Elizabethan statesmanship, the war party that desired to seize the Spanish colonies, was represented by Sir Walter Raleigh. James from the first moment of his accession turned to the safer policy and the less brilliant man. Raleigh, warned from the royal presence, lost all footing in the heartl ess Court; his forward genius had made for him many enemies, and few admirers outside the taverns, where seafaring men celebrated the epic of the Spanish main. The conduct of the disgraced and angry courtier aroused false suspicions: his friend, Lord Cobham, no less disgusted with the distribution of favours at the new Court, had trifled criminally with the idea of placing James's cousin, Arabella Stuart, on the throne. Raleigh, though he may have heard more than was safe from his dangerous friend, was certainly not implicated.

James, eager to make peace with the Spanish, imprisoned Sir Walter Raleigh in the Tower of London on charges of treason. When the story came before the Privy Council, Cobham, contradicting and retracting his own evidence at every turn, accused Raleigh of having led him into the mischief. So little was the hero whom posterity celebrates understood by his contemporaries, that he was brought to trial on the charge of concocting this treason with his life-long foe, the Spaniard. The friendless prisoner, entrapped in the meshes of a legal procedure that required him to prove his innocence alone against a hostile tribunal, was mewed up, a condemned traitor, in the Tower of London. Cecil had taken little part in the persecution of his rival.

The court denied Raleigh's request to confront his "accuser." The court admitted Cobham's confession knowing Lord Cobham had later repudiated the confession in a letter to Raleigh. Cobham alleged that the confession was obtained by torture. In a dialogue with Raleigh, the court refused his request stating that they feared that criminals would escape if they could not be condemned without witnesses. Receiving a reprieve, Raleigh's sentence was changed to life in tower where he was imprisoned.

In an age when scientific methods of valuing evidence were quite unknown, the prejudice of the court against the prisoner led to results like the condemnation of Raleigh for a crime he would have abhorred to commit. The clumsy machine of English police, judicature and punishment maintained social order through the political convulsions of the century, but at the expense of the continual escape of the guilty, and in all probability of the condemnation of the innocent, besides horrible sufferings that the law inflicted confessedly on the merely unfortunate. Men of that less sensitive generation were more indifferent to the fate of others, partly because they were more ready themselves to endure pain and injustice. These they regarded as irremediable evils of human life. The natural right of "Fortune" to dispense death or ruin, shame or reward, with blinded eyes and wanton favor, was the constant theme of poets; who, when they were not contemplating "Mortality," were railing at "Fortune," to an audience only too familiar with the fickleness of "the jade," in the vagaries of the law. These defects of justice were left unaltered, partly from want of the humanitarian, but still more from want of the scientific spirit, a defect which showed itself alike in the organisation of police, in the treatment of evidence, and in the system of punishment.

Under James, Ralegh spent many years in the Tower - ironically, for conspiracy with the Spanish against the Crown and while imprisoned he wrote his Historie of the World. His rights to the New World reverted to the Crown; thus other men founded Jamestown.

He was released in 1612 and set out on an expedition to Guiana in 1616. The first instructions known to have been issued to an English fleet since Henry VIII's time were signed by Sir Walter Ralegh on May 3, 1617, at Plymouth, on the eve of his sailing for his ill-fated expedition to Guiana. Most of the articles are in the nature of ' Articles of War' and ' Sailing Instructions' rather than ' Fighting Instructions'. So far at least as they relate to discipline, some of Ralegh's articles may be traced back in the Black Book of the Admiralty to the fourteenth century, while the illogical arrangement of the whole points to a gradual growth from precedent to precedent by the accretion of expeditional orders added from time to time by individual admirals. The whole of them were based on an early Elizabethan precedent. For the history of English tactics the point is of considerable importance, especially in view of his twenty-ninth article, which lays down the method of attack when the weather-gage has been secured. This has hitherto been believed to be new and presumably Ralegh's own, in spite of the difficulty of believing that a man entirely without experience of fleet actions at sea could have hit upon so original and effective a tactical design. The evidence, however, that Ralegh borrowed it from an earlier set of orders is fairly clear.

The aging adventurer made one last attempt in America, his ill-fated expedition to the Orinoco River in 1618. Raleigh's inclinations had been early directed to maritime pursuits, with a greater zest than to any other means of acquiring fame; a preference resulting, probably, from the associations of his infancy with those whose lives were sedulously passed in advancing the interests of navigation. As maturer age brought to his view the advantages of speculation to his rising fortunes, Ralegh had continued his naval exploits with the avidity with which mercantile occupations are usually followed, and with the boldness and determination which characterize warlike affairs. In the decline of life, he now regarded his former researches in remote countries as a resource, by the aid of which he might raise his name from degradation, and his condition to affluence and honor. In a retirement of twelve years' continuance, schemes of fresh enterprise and exertion had been his solace and employment, and the first acquisition of liberty was devoted to the fruition of these cherished designs.

With the failure of this expedition and attacks on the Spanish, Ralegh's fate was sealed. Spain complained bitterly. He returned to England knowing that execution awaited him. He was executed on his original charges due to the insistence of the Spanish ambassador. According to tradition, he showed no fear of the axe and declined the blindfold saying "Think you I fear the shadow of the axe when I fear not the axe itself." Lady Ralegh had his head embalmed and kept it with her until her death. Their son, Carew, inherited it and the head was buried with him.

Sir Walter's ghost is said to appear at Sherborne Castle on St. Michael's Eve (20 September). He strolls through the grounds of the castle, granted to him by Elizabeth in 1592, and sits under the tree which bears his name. It was here where he supposedly, while smoking a pipe of the first tobacco brought from America, that he was "extinguished" by a terrified servant who doused him with a pitcher of beer. A fascinating character, Ralegh has been portrayed as a genius, as an idealist, a pirate, a statesman, a scientist, a writer, a gentleman and a rogue. He was probably all of these and more - truly a representative figure of the Elizabethan Age.