Sir Walter Raleigh is one of those figures, like Shakespeare or Leonardo da Vinci, who seems not so much born as invented. In American history textbooks, he typically makes a cameo appearance as the Englishman behind the doomed colony of Roanoke. But that wasn’t his only episode of bad luck. A onetime favorite of Queen Elizabeth, Raleigh spent the last 20 years of his life in and out of trouble with the authorities. He was imprisoned in the Tower of London three times, eventually losing his head in 1618 after he got on the wrong side of King James I.
History loves a winner, and Raleigh, with his string of personal and professional defeats, hasn’t been a consistent inspiration for biographers. When the last landmark account of his life, Raleigh Trevelyan’s Sir Walter Raleigh, was published in 2002, it was hailed as the first comprehensive biography in 75 years. We haven’t had to wait quite so long for a subsequent take, thanks to Alan Gallay’s latest work, Walter Ralegh: Architect of Empire, published on Nov. 19.
The first thing one notices about Gallay’s book is the alternate version of Raleigh’s name. Raleigh, Gallay explains, “spelled his name many ways, and it has become usual now to spell it as he did in later years,” without the “i.” It’s a small point, but the ambiguity concerning what to call Raleigh hints at his broader elusiveness.
As Gallay makes clear, there is a lot we don’t know about Raleigh’s early life, including the year he was born, “though it is thought to have been between 1552 and 1554.” We do know that his aunt had been Queen Elizabeth’s governess before she rose to the throne and that these family connections brought him to Elizabeth’s attention and allowed him to rise rapidly in politics. Yet the biographer’s task is complicated by Raleigh’s unreliability as a narrator of his own life. He loved a good yarn and was willing to bend facts for the sake of a story, as evidenced by one of his most quoted maxims: “Whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may happily strike out his teeth.”
A soldier, explorer, poet, and prose writer, Raleigh helped settle Ireland and organized expeditions to North and South America, including two in search of El Dorado. He also pursued medicine, concocting herbal potions that were still in use into the 20th century. He “had so many interests,” Gallay writes, “that it is difficult to portray him and his colonial endeavors holistically. To assess him, too many biographers have grasped measuring sticks made of sand, too imprisoned by their own cultural concerns as to be unable to determine whether he was a hero or a Devil’s minion.”
What joined and animated Raleigh’s multiplicity of pursuits, Gallay argues, was his capacious imagination, which was informed by an Elizabethan sense of possibility. In his introduction to Shakespeare’s Montaigne, Stephen Greenblatt explains how the New World explorations of the Elizabethan age enlarged the horizons of writers and artists back in Europe. Gallay extends this theme, detailing the degree to which the exotic societies of the Americas illuminated Raleigh’s political, spiritual, and literary vision.
Raleigh embraced the Christian philosophy of Hermeticism, which encouraged religious tolerance and understanding. Hermeticists generally assumed an underlying unity binding all spiritual thought, and in England, they looked to Elizabeth as a universal monarch who would reconcile the nation’s post-Reformation religious divisions. Raleigh’s travels in the New World deepened this sense of tolerance. Gallay notes that Raleigh “ultimately questioned the idea of sending missionaries to convert America’s Indians” and “believed there was much to be learned from the Natives,” whose “piety often surpassed that of the Christians.”
Gallay, whose previous book on the enslavement of Native Americans won the Bancroft Prize, is aware that encounters between Europeans and native peoples didn’t usually spark a kumbaya moment. He goes to some lengths, however, to explain that such relationships were often complicated, not easily reducible to a confrontation between colonizer and colonized. Raleigh, for instance, envisioned a Roanoke colony in which whites would live in harmony with the natives. His project ended in shambles at least in part because his surrogates didn’t share his somewhat progressive views.
Raleigh did indulge his own forms of exploitation, often through the written word. To whip up interest in his South American expeditions, he published wild accounts, marketed as true, of the Ewaipanoma, a bizarre native tribe with heads located in the middle of their breasts. He also fed the sexual fantasies of Englishmen by popularizing lurid tales of mythical Amazon women who ravished male prisoners. He was, at base, a clever marketer. His enthusiasm for smoking, for example, popularized tobacco as a New World import, which would later provide an economic lifeline for America’s fledgling economy.
Raleigh’s creative life, frequently expressed in his writings, takes center stage in Gallay’s biography. One of its liveliest chapters summarizes Raleigh’s History of the World, written during one of his stays in the Tower of London. The history, a projected multi-volume work, ends before the birth of Jesus, but the parts Raleigh finished unfold like a literary curio cabinet, touching on everything from the nature of wealth to the workings of royalty to the merits of astrology.
Raleigh’s imprisonments, in other words, weren’t uniformly tragic. He was given fairly comfortable lodgings, allowed to entertain guests, and granted an extensive library and laboratory. But ultimately, he drew a losing hand. Freed from the tower in 1616 to launch an expedition to South America, Raleigh came back essentially empty-handed. To make matters worse, those under his command had attacked Spanish settlers at a time when James I was trying to preserve a fragile peace with Spain. “If Ralegh had returned with a large quantity of gold,” Gallay writes, “James would have forgiven most anything. Failing that, Ralegh was eminently disposable.” On Oct. 29, 1618, he was beheaded outside of Westminster Palace.
Head up a narrow stone staircase in today’s Tower of London, and you can still see the chamber where Raleigh set up house. In a nearby garden, staffers cultivate masterwort, bistort, and mint, the kinds of herbs he would have used in his curative cordials. In this way, Raleigh’s legacy spills from beyond his rooms — a testament to the way that in death, as in life, he has resisted confinement.
Raleigh’s insistence on intellectual liberation, even within the walls of the world’s most famous prison, is what lingers after reading Gallay’s masterfully researched biography. He was, we learn, a free spirit in the truest sense and not such a loser after all.
Danny Heitman, a columnist for the Advocate newspaper in Louisiana, is the author of A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.
