Raleigh or Ralegh, Sir Walter 1552-1618
English courtier, navigator and poet

Walter Raleigh was born in Hayes Barton in Devon. He studied briefly at Oxford, but left to volunteer for the Huguenot cause in France. In 1578 he joined a piratical expedition against the Spaniards organized by his half-brother Sir Humphrey Gilbert; and in 1580 he went to Ireland, where he brutally suppressed the rising of the Desmonds. He became a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I, who heaped favours upon him, including estates, the 'farm of wines', and a licence to export woollen broadcloths. However, the story of Raleigh laying his plush cloak over a puddle for the queen to walk on, which is told by Thomas Fuller, is probably untrue. In 1585 he was appointed Lord Warden of the Stannaries and Vice-Admiral of Devon and Cornwall. The same year he entered parliament as the member for Devon.

From 1584 to 1589 he sent an expedition to America to take unknown lands in the queen's name, and despatched an abortive settlement to Roanoke Island, North Carolina (1585-86). He later made unsuccessful attempts to colonize Virginia, and introduced tobacco and potatoes into Britain. Eclipsed as court favourite in 1587 by the young 2nd Earl of Essex, he went to Ireland and planted his estates in Munster with settlers, and became a close friend of the poet Edmund Spenser. On his return to England in 1592 he was committed to the Tower for a secret affair with Bessy Throckmorton, one of the queen's maids of honour, and for more than four years was excluded from the queen's presence; he and Bessy later married.

In 1595, with five ships, he explored the coasts of Trinidad, and sailed up the Orinoco, and in 1596 took part with Charles Howard and Essex in the sack of Cadiz. In 1600 he became Governor of Jersey, and in three years did much to promote the island's trade. He took little part in the dark intrigues at the end of Elizabeth's reign, but was arrested on 17 July 1603, and attempted suicide. He defended himself ably at his trial at Winchester, but even so he was condemned to death, and it was only on the scaffold that his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. In the Tower of London Raleigh spent his time studying and writing, and carrying out chemical experiments.

In 1616 he was released to make an expedition to the Orinoco in search of a goldmine. But the mission was a failure; Raleigh lost his fleet, and his son, and broke his terms by razing a Spanish town. On his return in 1618 the Spanish Minister in London invoked the suspended death-sentence, and he was beheaded at Whitehall.

Bibliography: Raleigh's expedition of 1595 is described in The Discovery of Guiana. His History of the World (1614), of which the first and only volume reaches the second Roman war with Macedonia, was written in the Tower. During captivity he also wrote The Prerogative of Parliaments (1628), The Cabinet Council (1658) and A Discourse of War. Only fragments of his poetry survive, and some poems formerly attributed to him, such as 'The Lie', are now thought to be not his work. See also Stephen Coote, The Play of Passion: The Life of Sir Walter Raleigh (1993); A Sinclair, Sir Walter Raleigh and the Age of Discovery (1984); Robert Lacey, Sir Walter Raleigh (1974).