Walter Raleigh
Walter Raleigh was a courtier, soldier, coloniser, poet and historian who was executed after fifteen years in the Tower. Born in Devon around 1552 into a Protestant gentry family, he fought with the Huguenots in France as a teenager, studied briefly at Oxford and the Middle Temple, and served in the brutal suppression of the Desmond rebellions in Ireland, where he was present at the massacre of a surrendered garrison at Smerwick in 1580. He became a favourite of Elizabeth I, who knighted him in 1585 and granted him monopolies, estates in Ireland and the right to colonise North America. The story of the cloak spread over a puddle first appears a century later. He sponsored the Roanoke expeditions from 1584 in what he named Virginia. He never went himself; the colony failed twice, and the second group vanished entirely. He was imprisoned in 1592 for secretly marrying Bess Throckmorton, one of the queen's maids of honour, without permission. Released, he sailed to Guiana in 1595 in search of El Dorado and wrote a book about it that was more persuasive than the expedition. He fought at Cadiz in 1596 and was wounded. James I disliked him. In 1603 he was convicted of treason on thin evidence in a trial notorious for its unfairness, reprieved on the scaffold, and held in the Tower until 1616, where he wrote his unfinished History of the World and conducted chemical experiments. Released to seek gold in Guiana, he was forbidden to fight Spaniards; his men sacked a Spanish settlement and his son was killed. He was beheaded in October 1618 on the old sentence.
- Lived: 1552 CE – 1618 CE
- Nationality: English
- Roles: explorer, politician, writer, privateer
