Raleigh, SIR WALTER, the typical gallant and hero of England's heroic age, was born of an ancient but decayed family at the manor-house of
Hayes, near Budleigh in East Devonshire, in 1552. He was the second son of his father's third wife, who herself had been married before, and had borne her husband the famous Humphrey and Adrian Gilbert. He entered Oriel College, Oxford, in 1566, but left without a degree, most probably in 1569, to volunteer into the Huguenot cause in France. Here he served his apprenticeship to arms, but, beyond the fact that he was present at Montecour, we know little of this period of his life. In 1578 he joined Humphrey Gilbert's luckless expedition, having most probably already crossed the Atlantic; and early in 1580 he landed in Cork at the head of a troop of one hundred foot to act against the Irish rebels. He quickly attracted notice by his dash and daring, took part in the assault of the fort at Smerwick and subsequent massacre of the six hundred Italian and Spanish prisoners, and seems to have approved thoroughly of all the drastic measures taken by the government to stamp out rebellion. He saw some months of further hard and thankless service in Munster, but in December 1581 returned to England.
He now made his entry to the circle of the court as a protégé of the favourite Leicester, and in February 1582 accompanied him in his convoy of the Duc d'Alençon to the Netherlands. Almost immediately after his return he became prime favourite of the queen, whose heart was still susceptible despite the weight of almost fifty years. Fuller's well-known story of how he first caught her eye by flinging down on the ground his fine plush cloak to save her feet from the mire is most likely completely apocryphal, but well befits the romantic temper of the times and the manner of fantastic devotion with which the Virgin Queen loved to be wooed or worshipped by the fine gentlemen of her court. Raleigh was now in the prime of manly beauty; his tall and handsome figure, dark hair, high colour, lofty forehead, resolute and manly bearing, alert expression, and spirited wit combined to form an imposing personality, and all the advantage that nature had given him he heightened by a gorgeous splendour in dress and in jewels. But he was proud, haughty, and impatient, and everywhere, save in his native Devonshire, the broad accent of which he preserved all his life, he made himself a multitude of jealous and envious enemies. He was consulted confidentially on Irish affairs, but never to the last took a public place in the queen's counsels, perhaps because his royal mistress, with all her fondness, distrusted his ambition, and divined that he lacked that sagacity of the statesman which she recognised in the less splendid Burghley and Walsingham. The playful name of 'Water' by which she called him seems itself to imply a recognition of that instability of character which was his constant foible and, in the fullness of time, the occasion of his ruin. But meantime she heaped her favours lavishly upon him: in April 1583 he received two estates; next month the 'farm of wines,' a license duty of twenty shillings a year from every vintner in the kingdom, which at one time yielded £2000 a year; and in March 1584 a grant of license to export woollen broadcloths, which Burghley estimated had yielded him in the first year as much as £3950. About the close of 1584 he was knighted; in July 1585 he was appointed Lord Warden of the Stannaries, in September Lieutenant of Cornwall, in November Vice-admiral of Devonshire and Cornwall; and in the same year he was elected to parliament as one of the two county members for Devonshire. In 1587 he succeeded Sir Christopher Hatton as Captain of the Queen's Guard. During the summer of 1584 he leased of the queen the stately mansion of Durham House, spent much money on its repair, and kept it as his town-house from that time down to 1603. It was not till about the beginning of 1592 that he came into possession, on a ninety-nine years' lease, of the splendid park and castle of Sherborne alienated from the see of Salisbury.
In 1583 Raleigh risked £2000 in Sir Humphrey Gilbert's last ill-fated expedition, and on the news of his half-brother's loss took up a fresh charter of discovery and colonisation. In April 1584 he sent out a fleet under Amadas and Barlowe to explore the coast north of Florida. They made a prosperous voyage, and formally took possession of a district to which Elizabeth was pleased to give the name Virginia. Next year Raleigh fitted out a stronger expedition under Ralph Lane and Sir Richard Grenville, but the hundred men who lived a year under Lane's command on the island of Roanoke returned to England in Drake's fleet completely dispirited with their hardships. Soon after they set sail, Sir Richard Grenville arrived with three ships, and left on the island fifteen men well furnished with stores. One of the hundred colonists—the first citizens of America—Thomas Hariot, in his account of the colony and the causes of its failure, speaks of the herb, 'called by the inhabitants Yppowoe,' which was destined to become one of the closest comforts of life to half the world. Raleigh himself took to the new luxury, and would enjoy it in pipes of silver, the queen sitting by him while he smoked. In May 1587 he sent out three ships, under Captain Charles White, with 150 colonists, seventeen of whom were women. They found the fifteen men had perished, and ere long misfortune after misfortune overtook themselves. White returned to England for supplies, and at length, after many delays and difficulties, reached Virginia in August 1590 to find the settlement ruined and the colonists dispersed, never afterwards to be seen. It was the last direct attempt of Raleigh himself at the colonisation of Virginia. The undertaking, says Hakluyt, 'required a prince's purse to have it thoroughly followed out'—it is supposed that Raleigh himself had spent forty thousand pounds upon it.
Already in May 1587 the appearance of the handsome young Earl of Essex at court had endangered Raleigh's paramount place in the favour of the queen. Hatton and Leicester long ere now had shown their jealousy of him, but this impetuous and petulant boy openly flouted him, and at length drove him from the court to Ireland. He had already received in the spring of 1587 a grant of 42,000 acres in Munster, and with characteristic vigour he at once set about repopulating this tract with English settlers. He was in Ireland when the Invincible Armada appeared in English waters, but he hastened to the south of England to superintend the coast defence, and he was present with the fleet a trusted counsellor throughout that glorious week of toil and triumph. His vessels scoured the seas in privateering enterprises, which gratified at once his inborn hate of Spain and helped to provide the means for his vast expense and his Virginian ventures. His over-zealous seamen sometimes transgressed the forbidden limit of piracy, but the Treasury winked at such accidents or made itself a receiver by claiming a share of the plunder. Raleigh sailed with Drake on his Portugal expedition of 1589, but by the autumn of that year was again in Ireland, where he quickly became a warm friend of Spenser, with the endless fame of whose great poem his name is imperishably linked. The poet had settled on his estate at Kilcolman three years before, and here the 'Shepherd of the Ocean' [Raleigh] visited him, and read him his poem of The Ocean's Love to Cynthia [Elizabeth], which Mr Gosse thinks must have contained at least 10,000 lines, the extant 130 stanzas being a fragment. In Colin Clout's Come Home Again we read how Raleigh carried the poet into the presence of the queen, who took delight to hear his poem, and commanded it to be published. In his Youghal garden during this breathing-space Raleigh planted tobacco, as well as the first potatoes that grew on Irish soil. He quickly recovered all his influence at court, and busied himself with further schemes for reprisals on the Spaniards down to the moment of his fall. His famous tract, A Report of the Truth of the Fight about the Isles of the Açores this last Summer, appeared anonymously in 1591. It is a splendid piece of heart-stirring prose, and three hundred years later it gave the inspiration to Tennyson's noblest ballad. Early in 1592 Raleigh prepared a new expedition to seize the Spanish treasure-ships, but again his doting mistress forbade him to sail with the fleet, which he had reluctantly to entrust to Frobisher and Sir John Borough. Hardly had he returned before she seems to have discovered his intrigue with Bessy Throckmorton, one of her own maids-of-honour—an infidelity to her own supremacy which her jealous temper could not brook. In July 1592 Raleigh was committed to the Tower, and it was more than four years before he was again admitted to his mistress' presence. He bore his imprisonment with characteristic impatience, and vexed the air with exaggerated complaints of his loss expressed in the fantastic fashion of the time. Meantime Borough had captured the Madre de Dios, a huge carrack, which he brought into Dartmouth in September. So great was the excitement and such the capacity of the vultures that gathered to the spoil that none but Raleigh could control the tumult. He was sent down to Dartmouth with a keeper, and Sir Robert Cecil describes with astonishment his popularity and influence among his sailors and his countrymen. 'But his heart is broken,' he writes his father, 'for he is extremely pensive longer than he is busied, in which he can toil terribly.' Raleigh now married Bessy Throckmorton, and for the next two years lived with her in quiet happiness, building and gardening at Sherborne. About 1593 his imagination seems first to have been fired by the descriptions of Guiana, with its vast city of Manaó and its El Dorado, and in 1594 he sent out Captain Whiddon to Trinidad to make inquiries for him. In February 1595 he himself sailed with five ships, explored the coasts of Trinidad, sailed up the Orinoco, and had his imagination set aglow for life by the tropical splendours of vegetation that he saw, and still more by the auriferous quartz and glittering stones he found, and marvellous stories of stores of gold beyond brought to him by the native Indians. Six months after his return he sent Captain Lawrence Keymis to make further explorations, and later Captain Berry, but he himself failed to rouse any great public interest in England in his splendid dream of a new world and untold wealth from the mines of Guiana. Early in 1596 he published The Discovery of the large, rich, and beautiful Empire of Guiana (Hakluyt Society, edited by Sir R. Schomburgk, 1848), a splendid piece of vigorous prose. In June 1596 he sailed in the expedition under Howard and Essex to Cadiz, and it was his advice that governed the whole plan of action in that splendid triumph which a second time shattered the naval strength of Spain. His faults ever fell from him in the hour of action, but never before or again in life did he show such tact and temper as in the skilful persuasions by which he forced the Lord Admiral and Essex to agree to his plans. Yet he was mortified to the heart, as he lay in his ship suffering from a wound in the leg, when their lack of energy allowed the Spaniards, two days later, to burn the whole fleet of treasure-laden carracks before his eyes. His spirited Relation of Cadiz Action remains the best history of the exploit. Despite his heroic conduct, it was almost the midsummer of 1597 before Raleigh was again admitted to court and allowed to take up his place as Captain of the Guard. Cecil showed himself friendly to him, and Essex was glad of his support in his desire for a more active opposition to Spain. Raleigh at once set himself to prepare and victual ships for the projected expedition, which at length, in July 1597, was permitted by the queen to set sail from Plymouth. A desperate storm compelled many of the ships to put back for shelter, but at length Raleigh met Essex off the island of Flores. They agreed to attack together the Isle of Fayal, and Essex sailed off first, but Raleigh reached the harbour before him, and, after waiting three days, on the fourth landed his men and carried the town by storm. Next morning the squadron of Essex made the harbour, to find all the laurels of the 'Island Voyage' already reaped. Essex's mortification was great, and was made greater by his cold reception at home. His surly temper grew upon him, and soon his helpless failure in dealing with Tyrone's rebellion in Ireland and his insane attempt at an insurrection in the streets of London brought him to the block. His hatred of Raleigh had become so desperate that he charged him, together with Cecil and Cobham, with a plot to murder him in his house—an absurd accusation, which Sir Christopher Blount on the scaffold confessed was 'a word cast out to colour other matters.' In 1600 Raleigh succeeded Sir Anthony Paulet as governor of Jersey, and in his three years' rule did much to foster its trade and relieve its fiscal burdens. About this time also he was active in parliament, advocating freedom of tillage, and of church-going, and the repeal of the more vexatious monopolies. His Irish estates he sold in 1602 to Richard Boyle.
In the dark intrigues about the succession that filled the closing years of Elizabeth's reign Raleigh took little part, while the crafty Cecil and the faithless Lord Henry Howard got the ear of James, and for their own advantage poisoned his mind against Raleigh and Cobham. The king had long been an admirer of Essex, and no doubt knew from the beginning that Raleigh was indifferent to his cause. The cowardice, timid love of peace, and the whole personal habits of the royal pedant, as well as his overweening conceit of his own judgment in affairs of state, were all naturally repugnant to the bold, self-reliant hero who had so long been a trusted confidant of the great-hearted queen. He met James on his southward progress at Burghley in Lincolnshire, and was greeted with a wretched pun worthy of its source—'On my soul, man, I have heard but ravely of thee.' Ere long he was stripped of, or forced into resigning, all his offices, the captaincy of the Guard, the wardenship of the Stannaries, the wine-license monopoly, the governorship of Jersey. All this must have cut Raleigh to the heart, and as he was at no time guarded in his tongue it is possible enough he may have in his haste spoken, or at least listened to, words expressing a preference for Arabella Stuart to the rule of the Scottish king. But the only witness against him was the miserable Lord Cobham, and he made and unmade his eight several charges with such facility as to make them of no value at all. Neither in the 'Main' nor the 'Bye' Plot was there any really adequate evidence of Raleigh's complicity, and the refusal of the crown to allow him to be confronted with his accuser is of itself almost enough to justify belief in his innocence. 'But one thing,' says Kingsley, 'comes brightly out of the infinite confusion and mystery of this dark Cobham plot, and that is Raleigh's innocence.' Raleigh was arrested on the 17th July, and in his first despair tried to kill himself. The trial began at Winchester on November 17th, the prosecution conducted by the attorney-general, Sir Edward Coke, who disgraced his robe by a brutality almost beyond belief. Raleigh's defence was splendid, and for the first time in his life he made his way into the hearts of all Englishmen by the dauntlessness of his bearing and the burning eloquence of his words. Coke could call him 'a monster,' 'a viper,' 'the rankest traitor in all England,' 'damnable atheist,' and 'a spider of hell,' and Chief-justice Popham could jeer at him as an atheist as well as traitor; but it was too much for Englishmen to believe that the hero of Cadiz and of Fayal had 'a Spanish heart,' and all his unpopularity fell from him from that hour. Dudley Carleton, who heard the trial, wrote that when it began he would have gone a hundred miles to see Raleigh hanged, but ere it was closed he would have gone a thousand to save his life. Yet he was condemned to death, and only on the scaffold was his sentence committed to perpetual imprisonment. Sherborne he had conveyed to trustees for his wife and eldest son, but an invalidity in the deed of conveyance was soon found, and the unhappy wife's application to the king was met with the words, 'I maun hae the lond, I maun hae it for Carr.' In January 1609 it was given to the favourite, a payment of £8000 being made as compensation. Within the Tower Raleigh employed himself with study and with chemical experiments, and was treated on the whole with fair indulgence. The young prince Henry came often to him, for he greatly admired the noble captive: 'No man but my father would keep such a bird in a cage,' said he. But he died in November 1612, and the promise he had wrung from his father to release Raleigh the next Christmas was only remembered to be forgotten. The chief fruit of Raleigh's imprisonment was his History of the World, the first and only volume of which, extending to over 1300 folio pages, although coming down but to the second Roman war with Macedon (170 B.C.), was published in 1614. It is written throughout in admirable English; but the preface is the most interesting portion, for the subject itself is dreary, though lightened by glimpses of autobiography and occasional flashes of fire—scorching satire wrapped in ambiguous phrase. Its sale was suppressed in January 1615 as 'too saucy in censuring the acts of kings.' Oliver Cromwell, writing to his son Richard, in 1650, says, 'Recreate yourself with Sir Walter Raleigh's History; it is a body of history, and will add much more to your understanding than fragments of story.' The book was written for the young prince, and his death took from the author all heart to complete his work. Other writings of Raleigh's captivity were The Prorogative of Parliament (written 1615, published in 1628), which must have goaded the king still further; The Cabinet Council, published by John Milton in 1658; A Discourse of War, one of his most perfect pieces of writing; and Observations on Trade and Commerce, an appeal for free trade, suppressed like the rest.
On January 30, 1616, Raleigh was released from the Tower through the influence of Sir Ralph Winwood and Villiers, expressly to make preparations for an expedition to the Orinoco in search of a gold-mine which he maintained existed there. He engaged not to molest the dominions of the king of Spain, but he had been brought up on the old Elizabethan theory of no peace beyond the line, and doubtless he thought he had everything to gain and nothing to lose by a desperate venture, and that the gold he would bring home would gild over any formal breach of his promise. It seems difficult to understand how James can have expected that such an expedition could be made without a collision with Spain, and we find that he was careful to give himself the cowardly safeguard of allowing Raleigh to go with his old sentence still hanging over his head, as well as communicating his route to Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador. And so in April 1617 the hero sailed to the doom which fate was weaving for him, while James even then was drawing into ever closer relations with Spain, and beginning his negotiations for the Spanish marriage. Before sailing Raleigh asked leave, but in vain, to make an attack on Genoa, an ally of Spain. His small fleet was manned, some forty gentlemen excepted, by 'the very scum of the world, drunkards, blasphemers.' Storms, desertion, disease, and death followed them from the first, and ere they reached the mouth of the river Raleigh was himself stricken down by sickness and compelled to stay behind with the ships, and entrust the command of the party who went to seek the mine to Keymis. He did not give his men distinct orders to avoid fighting with the Spaniards, and when they found in their way a new Spanish town, San Thomé, they attacked it and burned it down, but never reached the mine. In the fight young Walter Raleigh was struck down, as he shouted the words, 'Come on, my men! This is the only mine you will ever find.' Keymis lost control of his men, and came sadly back to his admiral, whose bitter reproaches made him drive a knife into his heart. The men now refused to return with Raleigh to the mine, whereupon he asked them if they would follow him in an attack on the Mexican fleet, telling them in his desperation that he had in his possession a commission from France. At length, on the 21st of June 1618, he arrived at Plymouth with his ship, the Destiny, alone and utterly cast down. His kinsman Sir Lewis [Judas] Stukely was sent to bring him up to London; at Salisbury on the way he feigned illness to gain four days' time to write his touching Apology for the Voyage to Guiana. Surrounded by a ring of spies, chiefest among whom was Stukely, he again intrigued for an escape to France, but was betrayed at every step. James dared not allow him to appear before the council of state, but had him formally examined before a commission of six, among them Coke, Archbishop Abbot, and Bacon, besides resorting to the infamy of sending a spy to gain his confidence and discover his secrets. In his perplexity Raleigh damaged his cause by contradictory statements and confessions, and his judges seem to have convinced themselves that he had never had any intention to find the mine at all, as appears from the Declaration of the Demeanour and Carriage of Sir Walter Raleigh, a feeble statement, though drawn up by the master-hand of Bacon. He was condemned to die the next morning (29th October 1618) on the old sentence, and neither the entreaties of the queen nor his own moving eloquence could save his life. 'You will come to-morrow morning,' he said to an old friend he met on his way back to prison; 'I do not know what you will do for a place. For my own part, I am sure of one.' One of his kinsmen warning him that his enemies would take exception at his high spirits, 'It is my last mirth in this world,' said he; 'do not grudge it to me. When I come to the sad parting, you shall see me grave enough.' His high courage never left him to the last. He wrote some verses the night before, and, says Dean Tounson, 'he ate his breakfast heartily, and took tobacco, and made no more of his death than if it had been to take a journey.' Of the cup of sack brought him he said, 'It is good drink, if a man might stay by it.' The speech he made on the scaffold was masterly in its persuasive eloquence—'as he stood there in the cold morning air,' says Mr Gosse, 'he foiled James and Philip at one thrust, and conquered the esteem of all posterity.'
He asked to see the axe, and touched the edge with the words, 'This gives me no fear. It is a sharp and fair medicine to cure me of all my diseases.' To some one who objected that he ought to lay his head toward the east he answered, 'What matter how the head lie so the heart be right,' than which, as Mr Gardiner well says, no better epitaph could be found for Raleigh's tomb.
The best edition of Raleigh's works is that in 8 vols. published at Oxford in 1829, with the 18th-century Lives by Oldys and Birch prefixed. Sir Egerton Brydges edited the Poems in 1814. See Dr T. N. Brushfield's Bibliography (Plymouth, 1886). There are Lives by Cayley (1805), Tytler (1833), Mrs Thomson (1830), Edward Edwards (the fullest, vol. i., life; vol. ii., letters, 1868), J. A. St John (1868), Louise Creighton (1877), Edmund Gosse (1886), and William Stebbing (1892). Gibbon thought of treating the subject, but abandoned it. Kingsley's glowing essay in Miscellanies (vol. i. 1859) is excellent; so also, but in a different way, is the treatment in S. R. Gardiner's History (vols. i.-iii.).