Contributions
A Devon gentleman, soldier in Ireland and then favourite of Elizabeth I, Walter Ralegh embodies the Elizabethan ideal of the "universal man": brilliant courtier, captain, poet, historian and promoter of colonisation. In the 1580s he sponsored the expeditions that sought to plant the first English colony in North America, at Roanoke, and gave the territory the name "Virginia" in honour of the Virgin Queen. As an explorer he led a 1595 expedition to Guiana in search of El Dorado, from which he drew his celebrated account, "The Discoverie of Guiana." A refined poet, close to the literary circle of his time and friend of Edmund Spenser, he left verse of powerful melancholy. Fallen from favour after his secret marriage to a maid of honour, and imprisoned in the Tower under James I, he composed there his ambitious "History of the World" (1614). Accused of treason, he was finally executed in 1618 to appease Spain.
Significance
Ralegh is one of the most alluring and tragic figures of the Elizabethan age, a man who lived on the border of every world: the court and the ocean, the sword and the pen, favour and the scaffold. His colonial audacity, though ending in the failure of Roanoke, opened the English imagination to the New World and prepared the lasting foundation of Virginia a generation later. A patron and scholar, he kept a circle of free minds — among them the mathematician Thomas Harriot — and was suspected of atheism by his enemies for his boundless curiosity. His writings, above all his monumental "History of the World" composed in captivity, made him one of the great prose stylists of the English language. The shadow in his fate lay in his own character: proud, hungry for glory and riches, he made as many enemies as admirers, and his ambition finally undid him. Under James I, who sought peace with Madrid, the former hero became an awkward relic. His execution, met with a courage that struck the witnesses, sealed his legend: that of a man too large for his time, sacrificed to reason of state.
Influence
He was a pioneer of the English colonisation of America, naming Virginia and shaping the imagination of Atlantic expansion. As a protector of scholars and poets he nourished Elizabethan intellectual life, and his prose and his destiny left a lasting mark on writers; his "History of the World" was read for more than a century. He had been formed by the war in Ireland and by Elizabeth's court, and drank in the humanism of the Renaissance, the poetry of his friend Edmund Spenser, and the new sciences through Thomas Harriot; the example of the Iberian navigators and conquerors fed his colonial dreams and his quest for El Dorado.
Anecdote
On the morning of 29 October 1618, led to the scaffold at Westminster, Ralegh asked to see the axe that was to behead him. Taking it in hand and running his thumb along the edge, he returned it to the executioner with a composure that gripped the onlookers, calling it a sharp medicine but a sovereign cure for every ill. Then, refusing to be blindfolded or to be told how to lay his head, he knelt and received the blow. His death, more than his life, made him a hero.