Sir Walter Raleigh, possibly in the late 1580s, at the height of his promise when he was tasked with the colonisation of North America and holding positions of responsibility, including a Parliamentary seat, in south-west England. A fascination with the legend of El Dorado, and the accession of a new and suspicious-minded King, were about to change his life dramatically.
WALTER Raleigh’s soldiering in Ireland, putting down the Desmond Rebellions, so impressed Queen Elizabeth I that in 1584 she engaged him to organise the founding of a gold-mining colony at Roanoke Island in the New World.
Raleigh himself remained at home, sitting as an MP for the south-west and co-ordinating defences against the Spanish Armada there. A secret marriage in 1591 to one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting strained his relationship with the Queen, and in 1595 he sailed for South America and the Orinoco, captivated by tales of El Dorado, the ‘lost city of gold’.
On his return he took part in the Capture of Cádiz in 1596 and was appointed Governor of Jersey, but he was itching to go back.
In 1603, Elizabeth’s nervous successor, James I, sent Raleigh to the Tower for thirteen years for conspiracy. James grudgingly sanctioned one last expedition to South America, but the ransacking of a Spanish outpost gave him an excuse to have Raleigh executed, on October 29th, 1618.
Sir Walter probably pronounced his surname ‘rawly’, to rhyme with ‘sorely’. However, the pronunciation ‘rally’ is more common today, and has been used here.
Précis
Sir Walter Raleigh was a favourite courtier of Elizabeth I, a soldier and adventurer tasked with establishing a colony in North America, though he preferred searching for El Dorado, the fabled lost city of gold, further south. Accusations of conspiracy against James I led to a long imprisonment in the Tower in 1603, and ultimately to Raleigh’s execution in 1618. (58 / 60 words)
