Ralegh, Sir Walter

Ralegh, Sir Walter (1554–1618), born in Hayes Barton in south Devon, spent four years as a volunteer with the Huguenot forces in France, and was at the battle of Montcontour in 1569. He than began his long career as an explorer and colonizer. Throughout the 1580s he seems to have enjoyed royal favour. His marriage to Elizabeth Throckmorton, one of the maids of honour, led to a period of imprisonment in the summer of 1592. Through his leadership of the expedition to sack Cadiz harbour in June 1596 and his dissociation from the earl of Essex, he maintained a strong position until the queen's death. Ralegh's trial, on largely trumped-up charges of high treason, was one of the first events of James I's reign, and from 1603 to 1616 he was imprisoned in the Tower with his wife and family. He was released to search out the goldmine he claimed to have discovered in Guiana 20 years before. On returning from this disastrous expedition, a commission of inquiry set up under Spanish pressure determined that the gold mine was a fabrication, the old charge of treason was renewed, and on 29 Oct. 1618 Ralegh was executed.

His poems are beset by uncertainties as to date and authenticity, though a few of them, including the fragmentary ‘21th: the last booke of the Ocean to Scinthia’, survive in his own handwriting. Two well-known poems formerly attributed to him, ‘Walsingham’ (‘As you came from the holy land’) and ‘The Passionate Mans Pilgrimage’ (‘Give me my Scallop shell of quiet’), are not now thought to be his work. Among the authentic poems are his ‘An Epitaph upon Sir Philip Sidney’ and the prefatory sonnet to The Faerie Queene which begins, ‘Methought I saw the grave, where Laura lay’. There are numerous prose works. His Report of the Truth of the Fight about the Iles of Açores (1591) was a source of Tennyson's ‘The Revenge’ (1878). His Discoverie of Guiana (1596) includes a description of ‘Eldorado’, and describes the plain-lands as a natural Eden. The History of the World (1614), written during his long imprisonment, and originally intended for Henry, prince of Wales (d. 1612), is an ambitious book, which deals with Greek, Egyptian, and biblical history up to 168 bc.