Walter Raleigh Biography Quotes 2 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family
Walter Raleigh was born around 1552 in Devon, in the west of England, into a gentry family whose fortunes and loyalties had been shaped by the religious tumults of the Tudor age. His mother, Katherine (Champernowne), had earlier married into the Gilbert family, making Raleigh a half-brother of the explorer Sir Humphrey Gilbert, a connection that would draw him toward ventures overseas. The young Raleigh grew up in a world where service, patronage, and the crown's restless search for power and profit defined success. He absorbed languages and the humanist ideals common among aspiring gentlemen, but early ambition and circumstance carried him into soldiering more than scholarship.

Soldier and Rising Courtier
In his youth Raleigh served as a soldier on the Protestant side in France and later in Ireland, experience that hardened his character and honed his command. He fought in the brutal campaigns of the late 1570s and early 1580s that helped extend English authority in Ireland. Those years brought him to the notice of the crown. Under Queen Elizabeth I, his wit, presence, and readiness to serve made him a favorite at court. He received grants, including responsibilities in the southwest, and came to hold important offices such as Captain of the Queen's Guard and Warden of the Stannaries, positions that tied him closely to the machinery of power. Patronage from William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and the evolving relationship with Burghley's son, Robert Cecil, mattered to Raleigh's career, as did his rivalry with Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, whose own star rose and fell in the same orbit.

Ireland, Estates, and Literary Friendship
Service in Ireland also reshaped Raleigh's material life. He received lands confiscated after rebellion, resided for periods at Youghal, and played a civic role there. The starkness of war never fully eclipsed his literary gifts and friendships: he knew Edmund Spenser, visited him in Ireland, and encouraged him to bring The Faerie Queene to the English court. Raleigh's own poetry, though now known from a small and scattered body of verse, showed a plain yet polished voice. His "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd", an answer to Christopher Marlowe's pastoral, stands as a concise expression of his skeptical, worldly sensibility.

Visions of Empire and the Virginia Project
Raleigh's name became inseparable from early English ventures in North America. In 1584 he obtained a patent to explore and settle lands not yet claimed by a Christian prince. He never sailed to Virginia himself, but he organized and financed expeditions led by men such as Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe, whose reconnaissance praised the Outer Banks region. Queen Elizabeth I allowed the new territory to be called "Virginia", a gesture linking imperial ambition to her image. The 1585 colony under Sir Richard Grenville and Governor Ralph Lane tried to settle on Roanoke Island. Scientific and linguistic work by Thomas Harriot and John White, amid contact with Algonquian-speaking peoples and figures such as Manteo, marked this effort as part exploration, part experiment in coexistence. Yet shortages, strained relations, and strategic misjudgments doomed the first colony. A second attempt in 1587, with John White as governor and families in tow, ended in the famous "Lost Colony", known from the word "CROATOAN" carved into a post after White's return to a deserted site. Raleigh's hopes of a durable plantation foundered on distance, war with Spain, and the fragility of supply lines, but these ventures left a lasting cartographic, scientific, and imaginative imprint on England's imperial future.

War at Sea and the Spanish Conflict
The broader war with Spain defined the 1580s and 1590s, and Raleigh's career knit together strategy, commerce, and privateering. He was closely associated with Sir Richard Grenville, whose last stand aboard the Revenge in 1591 became a legend that Raleigh himself helped shape in his account of the battle. Raleigh organized and took part in raids that targeted Spanish shipping, notably the 1592 capture of the Portuguese carrack Madre de Deus, a spectacular prize that fed both his wealth and his enemies' jealousy. He played senior roles in the 1596 expedition that seized Cadiz alongside Charles Howard, Lord Admiral, and the Earl of Essex, and in the 1597 "Islands Voyage" toward the Azores. Admirals, courtiers, and navigators such as Francis Drake and Richard Hakluyt formed the network within which Raleigh operated, blending national strategy with mercantile ambition.

Marriage, Disgrace, and Return
Raleigh's secret marriage in 1591/1592 to Elizabeth ("Bess") Throckmorton, one of the queen's maids of honor, brought a sharp reversal. Elizabeth I's displeasure at the clandestine union led to a period of confinement in the Tower and banishment from court. In time, Raleigh recovered much of his standing, continued to manage estates such as Sherborne in Dorset, and returned to service at sea and ashore. He and Bess had children, including Walter (often called Wat), who later accompanied his father to Guiana, and Carew, who outlived him. Domestic life, however, was always overshadowed by Raleigh's restless projects and the political dangers of court.

Scholarship, Science, and Patronage
Raleigh was neither a mere soldier nor solely an adventurer. He gathered around himself men of learning. Thomas Harriot, the mathematician and natural philosopher, worked with instruments and ideas in Raleigh's circle and accompanied early American voyages. Raleigh's houses were places where maps, mathematics, navigation, and poetic culture intersected. He experimented with distillation and maintained a curiosity about natural knowledge. His writings included poems, political meditation, and prose such as The Discovery of Guiana (1596), which combined reportage with rhetorical ambition and helped fix the golden promise of the Orinoco in the English imagination.

Fall Under James I and Long Imprisonment
The death of Elizabeth I in 1603 and the accession of James VI and I transformed the political landscape. Raleigh's sharp temper, past enmities, and reputation as a hard-edged champion of war with Spain left him exposed. He was arrested in connection with alleged treason involving Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham, and others. Tried at Winchester and condemned on disputed testimony, Raleigh was spared immediate execution but remained a prisoner in the Tower for many years. In confinement he wrote his massive, unfinished History of the World (published 1614), a learned and skeptical survey that moved from ancient times toward Rome and beyond, suffused with reflections on power and providence. He tended a garden, pursued experiments, and cultivated hopes through contact with figures around Prince Henry, whose early death in 1612 was a heavy blow. The chessboard of influence included Robert Cecil until his death, and then new courtiers around the king, among them George Villiers, later Duke of Buckingham.

The Guiana Dream and the 1617 Voyage
Even in prison, Raleigh never relinquished the vision of Guiana, a region he had described decades earlier as rich in gold and possibility. The policy of James I, seeking peace with Spain, was a constant obstacle. Yet in 1616 Raleigh secured release under conditions that bound him not to harm Spanish subjects. Backed by officials such as Sir Ralph Winwood, he prepared an expedition to the Orinoco. Old allies and subordinates returned to his side, including Lawrence Keymis, who had been with him in earlier Guiana ventures. Raleigh, now an older man worn by years in the Tower, led the enterprise with hope, maps, and memory standing in for certainty.

The voyage in 1617, 1618 went badly. Disease struck; provisions ran low; the fabled riches proved elusive. In the interior, Keymis led a detachment that attacked the Spanish settlement of San Tome de Guayana against Raleigh's explicit orders and the diplomatic limits imposed at his release. In the fighting Raleigh's son Wat was killed, a loss that broke whatever remained of his leader's personal hope. Keymis, unable to answer for his decision and for the catastrophe it brought, took his own life. The Spanish crown protested, and its ambassador in London, Don Diego Sarmiento de Acuna, Count of Gondomar, pressed King James I for redress.

Trial, Execution, and Final Poise
Raleigh returned to England a diminished figure and an inconvenient symbol of a policy the king no longer favored. The old sentence from 1603 was revived. Political calculation, pressure from Gondomar, and the wishes of those who had long distrusted Raleigh's defiant posture combined to seal his fate. In October 1618 he was executed by beheading in London. His comportment at the scaffold, calm and composed, impressed witnesses; he examined the axe and made the often-quoted remark about the sharpness of his physician. According to tradition, his wife, Bess, kept his embalmed head, a detail that, whether literal or emblematic, fit the mournful legend that grew around his death.

Reputation and Legacy
Raleigh's legacy is paradoxical and enduring. As an architect of English expansion, he failed in his own lifetime to plant a lasting colony, yet his patents, propaganda, and networks helped lay intellectual and practical groundwork for later settlements in Virginia and beyond. He stood at the junction of courtly ambition, naval war, science, and poetry, a figure who could converse with Richard Hakluyt about voyages, with Thomas Harriot about mathematics, with Edmund Spenser about verse, and with admirals and captains about gunnery and tides. His patronage and employment created spaces where new knowledge and new empire could be imagined together.

Politically he was a victim both of his temperament and of changing times. Under Elizabeth I, Raleigh's audacity often served the realm; under James I, the same audacity looked like provocation. The circle of powerful contemporaries around him, Essex, Burghley, Robert Cecil, Charles Howard, and later Buckingham, both advanced and imperiled his fortunes. The Spanish-English rivalry that had made him a kind of national champion in the 1590s condemned him in the era of rapprochement after 1604. Yet the writings he left, especially The Discovery of Guiana and the History of the World, preserve the scope of his mind: skeptical, learned, and alive to the doubleness of glory and ruin.

As a man he was many things at once: courtier and commander; sponsor of American colonization and author of elegant, sometimes biting verse; husband to Bess Throckmorton and father to sons who bore the costs of his dreams; sometime governor (notably of Jersey) and manager of mines and revenues; prisoner of the Tower who turned confinement into study. He often signed his name "Ralegh", an austere spelling that matches the flinty resolve history remembers. Born around 1552 and dying in 1618, he stands as one of the defining figures of the long Elizabethan moment, a life stretched between the sword and the pen, between New World visions and Old World courts, and finally between the promise of discovery and the limits of power.

Our collection contains 2 quotes who is written by Walter, under the main topics: Truth - Fear.

Other people realated to Walter: John Churton Collins (Critic), Francis Drake (Soldier), Nicholas Breton (Poet), Thomas Cavendish (Explorer), Robert Bridges (Poet)