A short life of the author
Sir Walter Raleigh was the supreme Elizabethan — a man who combined in a single life the roles of courtier, soldier, explorer, colonist, poet, historian, scientist, and prisoner with a brilliance and a recklessness that made him the most famous and most controversial figure of his age. He organised the first English colonies in Virginia, searched for the golden city of El Dorado in the jungles of Guiana, fought the Spanish Armada, wrote some of the finest lyric poems of the English Renaissance, composed an enormous and unfinished history of the world while imprisoned in the Tower of London for thirteen years, and was executed at the age of sixty-four on a charge of treason that was almost certainly unjust. His life was a Renaissance epic; his writings — scattered, incomplete, composed in the interstices of action — are the literary residue of a life lived at the highest possible pitch of ambition.
The Courtier
Walter Raleigh was born around 1554 in Devon, the son of a Protestant gentleman. He attended Oriel College, Oxford, fought with the Huguenots in France, and came to the court of Elizabeth I in the late 1570s, where his intelligence, his good looks, and his personal magnetism made him one of the Queen’s favourites. The legend that he spread his cloak over a puddle so Elizabeth could walk across it dry is almost certainly apocryphal, but it captures the essence of the relationship: Raleigh was the supreme courtier, a man who understood that royal favour was the currency of Elizabethan power and who pursued it with the same intensity he brought to everything else.
Elizabeth rewarded him with monopolies, estates, and the right to colonise lands in the New World. He organised the Roanoke expeditions of 1585 and 1587 — the first English attempts to establish a permanent colony in North America — which established English claims to Virginia even as the colonies themselves failed and the famous Lost Colony vanished without a trace.
The Discovery of Guiana
In 1595, Raleigh sailed to South America in search of El Dorado — the legendary city of gold that Spanish explorers believed existed somewhere in the interior of the continent. He penetrated several hundred miles up the Orinoco River, encountered Indigenous peoples whose accounts seemed to confirm the existence of a golden kingdom, and returned to England with The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana (1596), one of the great Elizabethan travel narratives.
The book was part exploration report, part promotional literature for future expeditions, and part literary achievement. Raleigh’s descriptions of the Orinoco landscape — the rivers, the forests, the extraordinary wildlife — were vivid and immediate, and his accounts of the Indigenous peoples, while shaped by European assumptions, were more sympathetic and more detailed than most contemporary accounts.
The Tower and The History of the World
When James I succeeded Elizabeth in 1603, Raleigh fell from favour. He was arrested, tried on trumped-up charges of treason, and imprisoned in the Tower of London, where he spent thirteen years (1603–1616). The imprisonment was relatively comfortable — he had a laboratory, a library, and visitors — and it was during this period that he wrote his most ambitious work.
The History of the World (1614) was a massive, unfinished universal history that began with the Creation and reached only to the second century BC before Raleigh abandoned it. The book was a work of enormous learning and philosophical ambition — a providentialist history that traced the hand of God through the rise and fall of empires. Its prose style, while often prolix by modern standards, contained passages of great eloquence, particularly the famous apostrophe to Death that closes the work: “O eloquent, just, and mighty Death! whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done.”
The book was a bestseller in the seventeenth century and was read by Milton, Cromwell, and many of the leading figures of the English Civil War.
The Poetry
Raleigh’s poems survive in small numbers — perhaps thirty genuine poems, many of uncertain attribution. But the best of them are among the finest lyrics of the English Renaissance. “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd,” a response to Marlowe’s “Passionate Shepherd,” is one of the most anthologised English poems. “The Lie” is a savage satire on courtly hypocrisy. “Even Such Is Time,” reportedly written the night before his execution, is a meditation on mortality of extraordinary compressed power.
Execution
In 1617, Raleigh was released from the Tower to lead another expedition to Guiana. The expedition was a disaster — his men attacked a Spanish settlement in violation of James’s orders, and Raleigh’s son Wat was killed. On his return to England, the original treason sentence was revived, and Raleigh was beheaded at Westminster on October 29, 1618. His reported last words — feeling the blade of the axe and saying “This is a sharp medicine, but it is a physician for all diseases and miseries” — were characteristically theatrical.
Collecting Raleigh
The History of the World (Walter Burre, 1614) in first edition is a significant early English book — a large folio with an elaborate engraved title page. The Discovery of Guiana (1596) is an important Americana title. Early collected editions of Raleigh’s works — particularly the 1751 Oxford edition — are collected. Modern scholarly editions and biographies are collected by Renaissance historians.