Walter Raleigh Totally Explained

Everything about Walter Raleigh totally explained

Sir Walter Raleigh or Ralegh (c. 1552 – 29 October, 1618), was a famed English writer, poet, soldier, 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 Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, Raleigh was again imprisoned in the Tower, this time for allegedly being involved in the Main Plot against King James I who wasn't 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 held mainly to appease the Spanish, he was beheaded at Whitehall.

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 doesn't 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'd 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 Italian and Spanish soldiers after they'd surrendered. 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 wasn't 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's 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".

Parliamentary career

In 1584 he was knighted, and in 1585 was appointed warden of the stannaries, that's of the mines of Cornwall and Devon, Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall, and vice-admiral of the two counties. Both in 1585 and 1586 he sat in parliament as member for Devonshire.
   He was elected a burgess of Mitchell, Cornwall, in the parliament of 1593.
   In 1597 he was chosen member of parliament for Dorset, and in 1601 for Cornwall. 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 Church, Westminster Raleigh's body was finally laid to rest in St. Margaret's Church, 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, for example "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

In the 1948 short, Fiddlers Three, starring The 3 Stooges, Shemp references Raleigh's final words by saying "It's sharp medicine, but a sure cure for all diseases" about the axe that's being sharpened in preparation for their execution.
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's 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".
Raleigh is mentioned in "Gyasi Went Home", a single by Canadian rock/reggae band Bedouin Soundclash from the album Sounding a Mosaic.
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's 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 Aleksandr 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, starring Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth I, which is a sequel to Elizabeth (1998). Clive Owen stars as Raleigh.
In the musical Mack & Mabel (1974), Sir Walter Raleigh is used as a comparison to the character Mack Sennett by Mabel Normand in the reprise of "I Won't Send Roses;" music and lyrics by Jerry Herman.
George Garrett wrote a novel about Raleigh: "Death of the Fox"
In Sid Meier's "Colonization" he leads English expedition to the New World (if player doesn't change the name)
A painting of Sir Walter Raleigh as a young boy hangs in the bedroom of Saleem Sinai, protagonist of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children.

Notes and references

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.Further Information

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