Sir Walter Ralegh: A Biography

On December 16, 1603, Ralegh, with his fellow convicts, returned to London. That would have been the close of an ordinary man's career. To him alone it did not seem the end, and...

In prison as in freedom, if Ralegh failed in one effort for the reconstruction whether of his fortune, or of his career, he was always ready for another. He felt all the tedium...

We now enter the period of the plot and plot within plot in which Anthony Copley, the priests William Watson and Francis Clarke, George Brooke and his brother Cobham, Sir Griffi...

More judicious or less prejudiced observers than James and his confidants would have suspected earlier the rise of the popular tide of sympathy and indignation. Strangers had re...

On May 3 he published his orders to the fleet. They were a model of godly, severe, and martial government, as testified a gentleman of his company. Divine service was to be sole...

Had not history preserved the memory of Ralegh's exile from Court, his public life was so animated that the displeasure of the Queen need hardly have been remarked. To himself t...

On the morning of Monday, August 10, Ralegh finally entered the Tower. This time he was made to feel that he was a prisoner indeed. He had meant to transport to France charts of...

Walter, the second son by the third marriage of Walter Ralegh of Fardell and Hayes, was born in the reign of Edward VI, it has been supposed, in 1552. The exact date is not beyo...

On September 21 Ralegh had been indicted at Staines for having, with Cobham and Brooke, compassed in the Parish of St. Martin in the Fields to deprive the King of his crown, to...

Ralegh, like his wife and Keymis, may have thought his labour and his money thrown away. They had not been. Guiana, after all, rehabilitated him. His advice that England should...

Ralegh's freedom was for a period conditional. The King's warrant 'fully and wholly enlarging' him, was not issued till January 30, 1617. From the preceding March 19, or, Camden...

A shudder is said to have run through the crowd of spectators as the axe fell. The trunk was carried from the scaffold to St. Margaret's Church, and buried in front of the Commu...

The Islands Voyage was the last for many years of Ralegh's personal adventures at sea. After it he found enough, and too much, to occupy him at home. He speaks of himself as 'ma...

From Essex's execution to the death of Elizabeth, on March 24, 1603, is a period of two years wanting a month. It constitutes another stage in Ralegh's career. No more fascinati...

Immediately on his return, if not before, he understood the reason of his recall. He had written to Cecil on March 10: 'I mean not to come away, as they say I will, for fear of...

He did not know it, but he was now at the culmination of his prosperity. His kinsman, the learned Richard Carew, dedicated to him at the beginning of 1602 the _Survey of Cornwal...

He arrived in his flagship the Destiny at Plymouth on June 21. No other ships accompanied him. At the news Lady Ralegh, sorrowing and glad, hastened from London. No painter has...

Bacon, his fellow Commissioners, and the Law Officers were consulted by the Crown on the fitting procedure for the setting up of the old conviction. Coke seems to have been depu...

Ralegh would have been happier if he could have gone on fighting Spain instead of returning to the discord of Court rivalries. Before the summer was over he was again immersed i...

No merits of his, and no sense of justice to him, opened, or ever would have opened, his prison doors. But at length it was become inconvenient to keep him under duress. The gao...

Ralegh was not freer from the faults of his class than the rest. Beyond the rest, he showed public spirit in his expenditure. By arguments, by his influence, by his example, he...

This visit of Ralegh's to the Court was the turning-point in his career. How it became that has been explained in different ways. According to Naunton a variance between him and...

The nation was doing a great man justice, though tardily. Not even its hero's temporary self-abasement could put it out of conceit with him. One of the many curious surprises in...

Students of English judicial history, with all their recollections of the strange processes by which criminal courts in Ralegh's age leaped to a presumption of a State prisoner'...

Ralegh was confined in the Gate-house of the old monastery of St. Peter. It was a small two-storied building of the age of Edward III, standing at the western entrance to Tothil...

His promotion, when it commenced, was liberal; it was not meteoric. He had won his full entry at Court before he gained permanent offices and emoluments. For a time he continued...

As a favourite Ralegh was certain to have originally been hated by the people. His favour might have been tolerated by courtiers, or by a sufficient section of them, if he had b...

Ralegh generally could hold his own, even in a bargain with his Queen. In 1592 his hands were tied. He had to use his prize, as he said himself, for his ransom; and it effected...

In social and private as well as public life Ralegh was open-handed and liberal in kind offices. Those are not unpopular characteristics. He was a patron of letters. His name ma...

Long after Ralegh began to be recognized in his new circle as a poet, he first showed himself a master of prose diction. The occasion came from his loss of an opportunity for pe...

Elizabeth died on March 24, 1603. In the previous September Howard had reported her 'never so gallant many years, nor so set upon jollity.' James set out from Scotland on April...

-- _Leicester's Commonwealth_, 'by Robert Parsons, Jesuite, London, 1641' (according to Lowndes, and the _Dictionary of National Biography_, falsely attributed to him. Reprinted...

The Raleghs were an old Devonshire family, once wealthy and distinguished. At one period five knightly branches of the house flourished simultaneously in the county. In the reig...