About Sir Walter Raleigh:
- He had a passionate belief in man’s power, the power to conquer, to discover, to restructure the world.
- He dreamt of national and personal glory, of unlimited riches, of a vast English empire far surpassing the Spanish.
- Raleigh had never given up the idea of Guiana.
- He had an utter reliance upon the existence of the gold mine.
- In 1616, the age of great discoveries was given way to the age of patient colonization.
- He ultimately succeeded in making his life his greatest work of art.
- With the ruins of his last great adventure all around him – his lands and fortune gone, his son dead, his dream of empire shattered – Raleigh ascended the scaffold with a strange air of triumph. (( In his last words “Strike man!”, he united assertion and death. The work of art was complete.)
- treason trail in 1603
- Raleigh had a longstanding personal interest in colonizing voyages.
- unending dialect in Raleigh’s life between optimism and despair
- He attacked upon Cadiz in 1596. (He lost his son during this fight.)
- Raleigh walked as if in a dream.
- Raleigh was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death in 1618.
- Enemies declared that he had never left England at all, but hidden all the while in the remote regions of Cornwall. The slanders and calumnies sent Raleigh rushing to pen and ink.
- Raleigh was beheaded with an axe at Whitehall on 29th October 1618.
- He was thrown into the Tower by the orders of the Queen, who had discovered an intrigue between him an one of her ladies whom he subsequently married.
- On the death of Elizabeth, Raleigh’s misfortune increased
- We cannot follow all the ups and downs of his court life, for we are told “Sir Walter Raleigh was in and out at court, so often that he was commonly called the tennis ball of fortune.”
- Raleigh came home a sad and ruined man, and had the pity of the King been as easily aroused...