SYMHC Classics: The Beheading of Sir Walter Raleigh

This 2018 episode covers the famed courtier, explorer, historian, Member of Parliament and soldier. He was part of England's defense against the Spanish armada, as well the Tudor conquest of Ireland, some of which was truly horrifying. According to some people, he is now a ghost.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. A couple of Saturdays ago, we replayed our
episode on Thomas Harriet because he had been mentioned in
our new episode on Evangelista Torch Jelly. Someone that came
up a few times in that classic episode was Sir
Walter Raleigh. Yep. Yeah. Over the weekend, I was doing dishes.
It's like, why do I keep thinking about best the

(00:23):
rock Morton's Secret Baby. Oh yeah, it was because I
had re listened to that Thomas Harriet episode for Classics. Yeah.
So for anyone who wants to fill in the gaps
on all of the voyages, those secret marriages, the imprisonment,
and the beheadings, they were only briefly mentioned in the
Thomas Harriet episode. Here is our episode on the beheading

(00:44):
of Sir Walter Raleigh, which originally came out October. So enjoy.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History class A production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.

(01:05):
I'm Tracy the Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. As folks
probably no, I grew up in North Carolina and it's capital,
Raleigh is named after Sir Walter Raleigh. And aside from
that fact, here are the things I could have told
you about Sir Walter Raleigh before researching today's podcast. Number one,
he wrote some poems. I probably could not name any

(01:26):
of them. There's actually a reason for that. He on
purpose didn't publish most of them during his lifetime. He
tried to keep his name out of it. But anyway,
in anyway, I knew he wrote some poems, couldn't really
say which ones. Number two he was Queen Elizabeth, the
first favorite. And this one time he put a cloak
down over a puddle so she wouldn't get her feet wet.

(01:47):
That's probably not even true, and it never made sense
to me as a child, because I was like, cloaks
are not waterproof. She's just gonna step on that and
her feet are still going to get wet, and his
cloak is ruined. So I'm gonna get a little nerdy
with you right now, because a lot of times the
textile weaves at that time we're really tight compared to
what we would have today. So for at least a moment,

(02:07):
it would have prevented water from seeping through. Awesome, it
would not have been waterproof, no, But for as long
as it took her delicate little feet to cross over
the offending puddle. She probably would have been covered. Thank
you for resolving that question I've had since I was
maybe five. Uh, but anyway, that's probably not even true.

(02:31):
We're gonna get to that later. And the number three
is sort of like blah blah something Roanoke Colony like.
I just had a very vague understanding of Sir Walter Raleigh,
even though I grew up in a place whose capital
is named after him. Among other things, Sir Walter Ralegh
was a courtier and an explorer and a historian and
a member of parliaments, which we're not going to even

(02:51):
get into that part today really at all. Also a soldier,
he was part of England's defense against the Spanish Armada
as well as the Tutor conquest of Ireland, some of
which was truly horrifying. Very conveniently, since this episode is
coming out in October, according to some people, he's a
ghost now, and we are also coming up on the
fourth anniversary of his beheading, which is why he's making

(03:13):
an appearance on the show today. He's a scary headless ghost.
Is Walter Raleigh was born about fifteen fifty four in Devonshire, England.
Some sources put that day as January twenty two, but
the year remains a little murky. His parents were Walter
and Catherine Raleigh, and the younger Walter was the third
of their surviving children. He also had half siblings from

(03:37):
his parents previous marriages. Walter was the youngest boy of
all of these siblings and half siblings. Their family was
part of the Protestant gentry, and they weren't particularly well
off or prominent, but they had been in Devonshire for
a very long time and they had a lot of
connections to people who were more well off and more
well known. We don't know much at all about Walter's

(03:59):
childhood or youth, but he eventually went to Oriel College, Oxford.
He didn't finish his studies, though. In fifteen sixty nine
he went to France with the Devon Volunteers to fight
on the side of the Huguenots in the French Wars
of Religion. He served for about five years, seeing two
major battles and surviving the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in

(04:20):
fifteen seventy two. In fifteen seventy six, Raleigh was back
in London and he was enrolled at the Middle Temple,
which was one of the four ends of Court. But
it doesn't seem like he was really studying law while
he was there, which would have been a normal thing
to be doing at the Middle Temple. He was more
treating it kind of like a gentleman's club. Even though

(04:41):
he never seems to have finished a course of study
at Oxford or at the Middle Temple. He would go
on to really develop a reputation for being very highly educated.
Maybe he was just good at pr I'm super smart.
You guys have studied a bunch. You get a drink. Uh.
Raleigh published his first poem in the fifteen seven These
as well. It was printed in the preface to The

(05:03):
Steel Glass by George Gascoigne, and the poem appears under
the heading Walter Raleigh of the Middle Temple in Commendation
of the Steel Glass, with Raleigh spelled r A W
l e y. This is one of no joke seventy
different spellings of Walter Raleigh's name in the historical record,

(05:23):
and as a side note, the common spelling of r
A L e I g h is not one that
he used himself. He never signed his name with an
eye in it. Raleigh is also pronounced slightly differently depending
on where you are from. I will tell you I
struggle with it because we have a cat named Raleigh.
I say it that way all the time, even though
he is in fact named after imagineer Role Crump, but

(05:45):
saying it really just doesn't feel right with the cat.
I don't know why well, And an odd thing that
I discovered. Even though a lot of search technologies are
good at interpreting your different spellings to give you results
that are what you're looking for, there are meaningfully different
responses for Walter Raleigh spelled r a l e i

(06:08):
g h and Walter Raleigh spelled r A l e
g H with no eye in it, which meant that
I got to redo all of my searching part way
through this process, like why didn't I find this paper before?
Because I had an eye in it? In Raleigh and
his half brother Sir Humphrey Gilbert went on an expedition,

(06:31):
possibly to try to find the Northwest Passage, but this
expedition was largely a failure. Storms forced their little fleet
of ships back to Plymouth almost immediately after they left,
and then they turned to what multiple writers described as
unauthorized privateering against Spanish ships. I'm not sure who decided

(06:51):
to call it unauthorized privateering. That's just piracy. This unauthorized
privateering brought them all lot of casualties and very little reward,
so their reception wasn't particularly favorable when they got back
to England. Plus, Raleigh, who had already had a reputation
for being stubborn and hotheaded, kept getting in trouble for

(07:13):
disturbing the peace and dueling. He wound up spending time
in both Fleet and marshal Sea prisons for brawling. Possibly
to try to keep him out of all this trouble,
some of Raleigh's friends secured a commission for him as
a captain in the army, and he was sent to Ireland.
The Tutor Conquest of Ireland was going on. It had
started long before Queen Elizabeth ascended to the throne. In

(07:38):
part of Ireland was solely under English control, and the
English part of Ireland, which was mostly around Dublin, was
known as the Pale, So the Tutor conquest was meant
to expand the Pale and also to solidify English rule
within the Pale. Side note, A lot of people believed
that the phrase beyond the Pale is a specific reference

(07:59):
to this part of Ireland and the areas beyond it,
but according to the Oxford English Dictionary, that is not
supported by historical evidence. It is probably an association that
people made later. During the Tutor Conquest, the province of
Munster in the southwest of Ireland saw two major rebellions
against English rule, and they were known as the Desmond Rebellions.

(08:19):
The first one took place from fifteen sixty nine to
fifteen seventy three, and Raleigh's half brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert,
was knighted for his service and that rebellion. The Second
Desmond Rebellion started in fifteen seventy nine, and it was
fueled both by resistance to English rule and by the
Catholic counter Reformation. Gerald Fitzgerald, the Earl of Desmond, had

(08:40):
gotten the support of the Pope and of King Philip
the Second of Spain in this uprising. Raleigh served with
the English army during several engagements and the Second Desmond Rebellion,
but the most notorious of these engagement was the Siege
of Smerwick. Troops from Spain and Italy who were aiding
the Fitzgerald's were being garrisoned at Smerway, and Queen Elizabeth

(09:01):
had sent English troops to put down this rebellion, including
dealing with these troops. When the Spanish and Italian forces
stood down, Lord Arthur Gray, the Lord Deputy of Ireland,
ordered for all of them to be massacred. This was
one hundred percent how England dealt with rebels at the time.
Had England been at war with Spain or Italy, the

(09:22):
soldiers would have been offered some protection under the rules
of war, but they weren't. In the Crown's view. They
were helping royal subjects rebel against their monarch, so they
needed to be dealt with quickly, efficiently, decisively, seriously. Tutor
England's treatment of Irish rebels could be extremely brutal, and
the first Desmond rebellions their Humphrey Gilbert was known to

(09:45):
decapitate civilians who supported the rebels and then display their
heads on pikes along the path to his tent. Two
companies totaling about one eighty men, were tasked with killing
the enemy soldiers at Smerwick. Walter Raleigh was one of
the two captains in charge the English army massacred about
six hundred people after this siege, about a hundred of

(10:07):
them were women and children. Raleigh was also one of
the English officers granted lands in Ireland after the end
of the Second Desman Rebellion. His allotment was actually the
largest of any of the ones that were granted out
of the Munster lands that were claimed after all of
this was over. He also helped govern the province of
Munster after this, and when he went back to London,

(10:28):
he positioned himself as an expert in Irish affairs, which
might have been part of what got him into such
close confidence with Queen Elizabeth. And we're going to talk
about that a little bit more after we first paused
for a little sponsor break. Like we said at the

(10:50):
top of the show, the Raleigh family wasn't all that prominent,
but they did have some pretty high up connections. One
of these connections was Katherine Astley. She was walt Rs
aunt on his mother's side, and she had been Queen
Elizabeth's governess back when she was still a princess, starting
before Walter was born. After Elizabeth became Queen, Astley became

(11:10):
the chief gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber and then the
Chief Gentlewoman of the Bedchamber, and it might have been
Catherine Astley who introduced Walter Raleigh to Queen Elizabeth. The
introduction may also have been a byproduct of Raleigh's military service.
After the massacre at Smerwick, Raleigh and his men searched
through the bodies of the soldiers and collected letters and

(11:30):
other documents to deliver to London. Raleigh was the one
who carried them there, which he did in December of
eight Regardless of exactly how Raleigh made his first connection
to Queen Elizabeth, he quickly became a favorite. He was
very tall and handsome, flamboyant, and quite the flatterer. Soon
Elizabeth just didn't want him to leave her side. In

(11:53):
two Sir Humphrey Gilbert put together a scheme to resettle
English Catholics in North America, and Raleigh invested some in it,
but the Queen forbade him from personally going on the voyage.
When she sent him on a mission to the Low
Countries later that year, she told him to write to
her every day. Through the fifteen eighties, Raleigh continued to
get more and more recognition and favors from the Queen.

(12:16):
He was knighted on February six five. He was also
made Warden of the Stannaries, or coal mining districts in
Devon and Cornwall. He was also named Lord Lieutenant of
Cornwall and Vice Admiral of the West. On top of
all that, the Queen granted Raleigh multiple estates in England
and Ireland, including Durham Place on the Strand, which was

(12:37):
one of her favorite residences. She also gave him a
monopoly on the sale of wine licenses and on the
export of broadcloth, and a lot of this was very lucrative,
I mean fabric and wine. And he's got this thing
covered um in the middle of all of this since
September three, Sir Humphrey Gilbert drowned in a shipwreck. He

(12:59):
had recently claimed Newfoundland for England, and he had a
royal charter to try to colonize it. After his death,
Raleigh was granted a charter to explore and colonize North America.
He was given quote free liberty and license from time
to time and at all times forever hereafter to discover, search,
find out, and view such remote heathen and barbarous lands

(13:22):
countries and territories not actually possessed of any Christian prince
nor inhabited by Christian people. This was England's first meaningful
attempt to establish a colony in North America. Yes, half
brother had been kind of dabbling at this idea of
colonizing Newfoundland, and there had of course been lots of
voyages back and forth between Europe and North America, but

(13:44):
in terms of England attempting to establish a colony, this
was the first serious effort. So Raleigh first mounted a
reconnaissance expedition in four and that landed on the outer
banks of what's now in North Carolina. This reconnaissance expedition
return with at least two indigenous men known as Manteo
and Wanches. They stayed at one of Raleigh's residences when

(14:06):
they arrived in England. Manteo and Wanch's were two of
the first Indigenous Americans to be brought to England, and
they each obviously have their own stories outside the scope
of Walter Raleigh's. Both of them returned to North America
with Raleigh's next voyage in five eight five voyage was
intended to establish a colony, but this colony failed. The

(14:28):
indigenous peoples in the area were divided in their opinions
of the colonists, and this was also true of Manteo
and Wanchese. Manteo stayed with the colony to work as
an interpreter and a guide, but wan She's left and
warned his people that the English should not be trusted.
Aside from this division and their relationships with the indigenous
people in the area, the colony was also struck by

(14:49):
illness and a lack of planning and supplies. When Sir
Francis Drake coincidentally passed through the area on his way
back from the Caribbean, most of the colonists took the
opportun unity to go back to England with him. Mantio
returned to England with Sir Francis Drake. Also, Raleigh planned
one more expedition to North America and Mantio traveled on
that expedition. These colonists arrived in August of seven and

(15:14):
became the famous Lost Colony of Roanoke. The colony's governor,
John White, was sent back to England for more supplies,
but England was at war with Spain by the time
that he got there, and when White finally got back
to North America in fifteen ninety. The colony was gone,
with the word Croatoan carved into a post as the
only evidence that anyone had ever been there. Archaeologists tried

(15:37):
to work out exactly what happened, and this comes up
from time to time on on Earth. It's one of
every history buff's favorite mysteries. M uh, partly to bring
tourists see an outdoor drama and to launch an entire
TV series. So these expeditions are why Walter Raleigh is

(15:59):
often in directly credited with introducing potatoes and tobacco to
England and Ireland specifically, or to Europe in general. But
number one, he didn't go on any of these personally,
the Queen did not want him to go. But potatoes
were introduced to Spain more than a decade before these
voyages took place, and Ireland had also established trade with

(16:22):
Spain before Raleigh's voyages, so it's entirely possible that there
were potatoes in Ireland before ships from Raleigh's expeditions arrived
there with potatoes on board, and there were definitely potatoes
elsewhere in Europe for sure, way before any of this happened.
Tobacco was also introduced to Europe long before Raleigh's voyages,

(16:43):
and had been grown in England for more than ten
years before his first ships left for North America. Raleigh
probably did help popularize its use in England, though so
like I said earlier, Walter Raleigh didn't go on any
of these actual voyage is and even though they weren't
particularly successful, his position continued to rise at court while

(17:06):
he stayed behind. In fifteen six or fifteen eighty seven,
Ralegh was made captain of the Queen's personal Guard. The
Anglo Spanish War started just before that happened in fifteen
eighty five, and Raleigh served on the War Council. He
also helped organize the Devon Militia to fight against the
Spanish Armada. In eight he also commissioned a ship called

(17:27):
the Ark Raleigh that he gave to the Queen, who
renamed the Arc Royal and made it the flagship of
the British naval fleet. Throughout all of this Raleigh was
making friends and enemies at and outside of court. He
was friends with poet Edmund Spencer and introduced him to
Queen Elizabeth. Spencer was later named Poet Laureate and he

(17:48):
wrote The Fairy Queen, one of the great epic poems
in English, in part as an allegory about Queen Elizabeth
the First and the Tutors. Raleigh also wrote a couple
of commendatory sonnets for The Fairy Queen, and he makes
a number of appearances in Spencer's work, and as a
side note, Spencer also served England during the Desmond Rebellion
as Lord Gray's secretary. If you had to read The

(18:12):
Fairy Queen just hypothetically when you were studying literature in
college and you didn't find it a particularly enjoyable experience,
you could just blame Walter Raleigh having made all that possible,
and I do so. On the other end of this
spectrum was Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex, who was sometimes
Raleigh's friend and sometimes really his adversary, and always his

(18:36):
rival for the Queen's attention. The disputes that Raleigh started
having with Essex almost led them to a duel, And
then there was the relationship that caused Raleigh to fall
out of the Queen's favor almost for good. He started
a secret relationship with Elizabeth Throckmorton, known as best one
of the Queen's maids of honor, she wasn't supposed to

(18:58):
marry without the Queen's approval. When she became pregnant with
Raleigh's child, they got married in secret and Bess left
the court to give birth. Best delivered a son named
day Marie. We're not sure on that pronunciation on March
twenty nine, and this was during the better part of
Raleigh's relationship with the Earl of Essex, who was the

(19:19):
baby's godfather. Best came back to court in April, and
she and wallas Are both tried to keep their marriage
and baby secret from the Queen. Of course, that idea
was doomed to failure. Walter and Bess apologized to the
Queen after she found out that they were secretly married
and had a secret baby, but neither of them seemed

(19:39):
all that sincere about their apology, and that just made
things worse, so Queen Elizabeth had them imprisoned in separate
quarters in the Tower of London. Walter was released from
the tower after one of his ships returned to port
with a massive Portuguese ship in tow the Madre di Dios.
There were concerns that Raleigh's crew was going to mutiny,

(19:59):
so he was least to go down to the docks
and try to keep everything in order, and once the
Queen took most of the treasure, she finally released both
Walter and Best from the tower. Although she banished Walter
from court and stripped him of all his estates and privileges.
The Rallies went back to his home of Devonshire, and
sadly day Marie Raleigh died while still a baby. While

(20:20):
banished from court, Walter Raleigh spent some time hanging out
with some of the most notable literary figures of the time,
including William Shakespeare and Ben Johnson. Although he was banned
from court until fift Raleigh figured out a way he
might win back the Queen's good graces in and we're
going to get to that after we take another little

(20:40):
pause for a sponsor break. In February of Walter Raleigh
got the Queen's permission to go on an expedition on
the Orinoco River and what's now been a Ezuela, which
at the time was known as Guiana. He was searching

(21:04):
for the fabled city of El Dorado, and Robert Devreaux,
Earl of Essex, went on this expedition as well. This
is one of the times that they were getting along.
They did not find a city of gold, though, but
Raleigh did write a book called The Discovery of Guiana,
which came out in fift This book was extremely popular
and it was reprinted four times that year. He also

(21:26):
seems to have brought an indigenous boy of about ten
or twelve back with him, who he might have adopted.
The Anglo Spanish War was still ongoing, and Raleigh and
Essex were both part of a raid on the Spanish
port of Cadiz in fifteen ninety six, which destroyed more
than thirty Spanish ships. Raleigh was seriously wounded in the thigh,

(21:47):
which never fully healed, but this was a victory for
England and a somewhat lucrative one, so he did start
to win back some of the Queen's affections. She eventually
allowed him back to court and restored him to his
position as the Captain of the Queen's Guard. With things
starting to turn around after this Orinoco expedition and the

(22:07):
raid on Kiddies, soon Elizabeth's was starting to bestow more
favors on Walter Raleigh again, including making him the governor
of the Isle of Jersey and six, and she granted
him a monopoly on playing cards as well. I'm telling you,
with the fabric and the wine and the playing cards,
he really had the entertainment market cornered um. Then, in

(22:29):
sixteen o one, the Earl of Essex rebelled against the Queen,
and Raleigh helped put down that rebellion. Essex was executed
for treason. The Queen was devastated, but this meant that
Raleigh's chief rival at court was dead. Raleigh was widely
reported as gloating over Essex's execution, but in reality he

(22:50):
seems to have been a little more conflicted over it.
The two men had really been close earlier on in
their lives, and Raleigh didn't attend the execution, even though
he was expected to as captain of the Queen's Guard.
But Raleigh's return to relative favor at court was pretty
short lived because Queen Elizabeth died in sixteen o three, James,

(23:11):
the first of England and sixth of Scotland became king,
and James didn't particularly like Raleigh. Raleigh also had a
lot of enemies at court, some of whom had convinced
the King that Raleigh was ready to back a rival
claimant to the throne. This rumor was not particularly realistic.
It involved a Spanish claimant to the throne, and Raleigh

(23:33):
had spent much of his military career fighting against Spain.
He was also against the idea of England ending the
ongoing Anglo Spanish War, and he even wrote a treatise
about it. So the idea that he would support a
Spanish monarch while also advocating continuing the war with Spain
just doesn't make much sense. But soon Raleigh had way

(23:53):
bigger problems than these rumors. In November of sixteen o three,
he was charged with treason and a plot to overthrow
King James. This plot was known as the Main Plot
m A I N. It got its name because of
its relationship to a lesser, weirder plot known as the
by plot. And that's by leg b y E by

(24:15):
like Yes. It cracks me up that the names that
they settled on for these two plots are solely about
their relationship to one another, and neither of them is
about what the plot was actually meant to involve. The
by plot was discovered first, and it was a conspiracy
among Catholic priests and lay people to kidnap the King

(24:36):
in the spring of sixteen o three. Their goal was
to force him to grant religious tolerance to Catholics and Puritans,
and to place Catholics in office. On July eighteen, sixteen
oh three, George Brooke was giving testimony about this plot,
and as he was doing so, he revealed that his brother,
Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham, was involved in a whole different plot,

(24:58):
which was to kidnap the murder him and replaced them
with Lady Arbella Stewart. There were no real connections between
the main plot and the by plot, except for the
fact that George and Henry Brooke were brothers and each
of them was involved in one of these plots, and
that the authorities found out about the main plot while
investigating the by plot because of the connection between the

(25:20):
brothers Brook. This is one of those things that if
you wrote it in a forest, people would be like,
too far. The whole thing is so weird and convoluted.
During months of interrogations, Comma made and retracted a whole
huge string of ever changing confessions and accusations against Raleigh.
The most consistent and possibly believable charge was that Raleigh

(25:42):
sought out a pension from Spain in exchange for providing
information about British activities in the Low Countries or the Indies.
After Queen Elizabeth died, Raleigh had once again lost most
of his estates and monopolies and other favors. He needed money,
and it's possible that he needed it badly enough to
be willing to exchange information for it, even to the Spanish.

(26:05):
Raleigh was arrested based on Cobham's accusations. I mean, even
though they kept changing and he kept recanting them and
then having a completely different story. The fact that he
was implicating himself while making these accusations made people believe
it more so Raleigh was arrested. He was imprisoned in
the tower on July three. About a week later, he

(26:25):
tried to stab himself with a table knife, but he
struck a rib and didn't do a lot of lasting damage.
When Raleigh and the rest of the co conspirators were
put on trial, he spoke in his own defense, including
answering some questions about his actions back in the Siege
of Smerwick in eight His response to these questions about
whether he had acted appropriately was basically that he was

(26:46):
following his commander's orders. On November seventeen, Raleigh and the
co conspirators in the main plot were found guilty and
sentenced to death. About two weeks later, Cobham once again
retracted a lot of the ac uzations that he had
made against Raleigh, so it's not really clear whether Raleigh
had any involvement at all in the main plot, even

(27:08):
this whole question about whether he was trying to get
a pension from Spain. But regardless of that question, he
was definitely guilty of treason under the terms of the
law at the time, because the Treason Act of fifteen
thirty one included in its definition of treason this quote,
when a man doth compass or imagine the death of
our Lord the King, that was treason. Raleigh had definitely

(27:32):
been really vocal about his dislike of King James and
his general ill wishing of the monarch. So even though
his definitely real imagining of the death of the King
was basically just a bunch of idle griping among his friends,
it's still counted as treason under the law. On December
night six three, Walter Raleigh and the other condemned men

(27:54):
were taken out to the scaffold one at a time
to be executed, but each one was given a last
minutes stay and sentenced to imprisonment instead. Raleigh was sentenced
to life in the Tower of London. He spent the
next thirteen years in prison in the Tower, but honestly,
this was a pretty luxurious incarceration. He had a large

(28:14):
apartment suite with living servants and a laboratory and a library,
and daily visits from his wife and their son, Walter,
who had been born in fifteen They had a second
son in sixteen o five while Raleigh was still incarcerated,
and the rest of the family moved into a home
on Tower Hill to be closer to the incarcerated Walter
and make it easier for all these daily visits to happen.

(28:37):
Ralei spent a lot of this time writing while in
the Tower. He wrote a morality book for boys called
Instructions to his son, and he also wrote The History
of the World, which started with creation and went to
the Second Macedonian War in one s b c. E.
He dedicated it to James's son, Henry, who he also
tutored while imprisoned. Henry advocated for Raleigh's release, but died

(29:01):
in sixteen twelve before he had secured it. Yeah. This uh,
This History of the World was five volumes something like
a million words long, and was clearly meant to be
the first in a series that was going to then
go on to cover the rest of the history of
the world after one. Finally, in sixteen sixteen, Raleigh convinced

(29:23):
King James to let him out of prison. James needed money,
and Raleigh made it sound like he could locate riches
in South America based on his previous voyage along the
Orinoco River. He was given leave to do this on
one condition that he not attacked Spain in any way.
The Anglo Spanish War was finally over and James did

(29:45):
not want to do anything to start it up again. Plus,
Spain had insisted that if Raleigh did cause any trouble
to its subjects that he would be sent to Madrid
for trial. Raley was released from the tower on March
nineteenth of sixteen sixte at the age of about sixty two,
But this voyage went terribly Raleigh was on board as
a civilian and his friend Lawrence Chemis, who you'll also

(30:08):
see spelled chemes with no eye in. It was the
one in charge. I like how just not leaving the
eye in. There is a running theme and names in
this episode. Chemis attacked the Spanish colonial town of Santo Tomey,
killing its governor, which was literally the thing they were
not supposed to do. The younger Walter Raleigh was also
with them on this expedition, and he was killed in

(30:31):
the battle. Also, they didn't find the gold mine that
had inspired them to go on this expedition in the
first place. Raleigh berated Chemis so incessantly about the death
of his son and the failure to find a mine
that he took his own life. Raleigh wrote a massive
apology for this whole incident on the way home, and
once he got there, he tried to use his illness

(30:53):
to buy himself some more time, but Spain demanded retribution
for what had happened on this voyage, and Ultimate Lee
Raleigh's death sentence from the main plot back in six
o three was reinstated. He was taken to the scaffold
outside the Palace of Westminster on October twenty nine, six eighteen.
He gave a speech before being executed, which was typical,

(31:15):
but he didn't admit any guilt or ask for the
King's forgiveness, which was not typical. Instead, according to newsletter
writer John Pory, the speech began quote, I give God thanks.
I am come to die in the light and not
in the darkness. And then he went on to justify
what he had done and forgive his accusers, but also
to deny his own guilt, for a total of about

(31:37):
forty five minutes. It went on to be a very
dramatic and theatrical execution. Raleigh refused to warm himself by
the fire that was there specifically for that purpose. Reportedly,
he also asked to see the executioner's acts, and then
after looking at it, he said, this is a sharp medicine,
but it is a physician for all diseases and miseries.

(31:59):
He comforted the executioner before placing his head on the stand,
and then when the executioner didn't immediately begin the whole
beheading process, Raleigh said something along the lines of strike, man, strike.
Then it took two blows to decapitate him. A bystander
reportedly said quote, we have not such another head to
be cut off again. In the words of John Pory

(32:21):
quote every man that saw Sir Walter Raleigh die said
it was impossible for any man to show more decorum, courage,
or piety, and that his death will do more hurt
to the faction that sought it than ever his life
could have done. Raleigh's body, minus the head, was buried
at the church of St Margaret's, Westminster. His head was

(32:42):
placed in a red leather bag and given to his
widow Bess, who reportedly kept it for the rest of
her life, which was twenty nine more years. Often, this
head is described as having been embalmed, and there are
reports that she might have kept it in a glass
case and not in a bag. There's like, this is
one of those stories where I kind of go for real,

(33:02):
This seems a little fishy to me and maybe apocryphal.
But their son Carew took possession of this head, reportedly
after his mother's death, and then had it buried with
him when he died in sixteen sixty six. At least
that is one possibility for the location of Sir Walter
Raleigh's head. St Mary's and West Horseley has also said

(33:23):
it is the resting place of Sir Walter Raleigh's head
because Carrow had it buried there when his own sons
died during a plague. So it is unclear, but there
are multiple sources that say his head stayed separate from
his body and got carried around for a couple or
three decades. I'm a little lost in thought over what
one would do with the head of your beloved um,

(33:47):
Like do you look at it? Do you just leave
in the bag and pretend it's not there? But no,
it's there, Like I don't. There's a lot of debt,
but there's a lot of debunking about various things about
Sir Walter Raleigh's life, but this head I did not
find any debunky. Today, Sir Walter Raleigh is one of
the ghosts purportedly haunting the Tower of London. He also

(34:08):
reportedly haunts Beddington in South London, where he owned land
and where his wife had requested to be buried after
the execution. There were also rumors that he was actually
buried there in secret. During his life, Raleigh had not
been particularly beloved by the public at large, but his execution,
as indicated by some of the quotes we read earlier,

(34:29):
really earned him a lot of sympathy. So much sympathy
that the Crown commissioned its own right up of the execution,
which made him sound arrogant and combative instead of gallant
and poetic. This didn't really work out, though, and public
opinion grew that Walter Raleigh had been unfairly sacrificed to
appease Spain and that England had lost a worthy gentleman

(34:50):
by executing him. His popularity really grew after his death,
partly because he was so emblematic of this idea of
a Renaissance man and an Elizabethan knight. He was handsome
and valiant and chivalrous, and he was a writer and
a statesman in addition to being an explorer. So he
kind of had this whole, very romanticized package, especially if
you overlook some of the other parts of his life,

(35:13):
like the massacre that he helped work straight and all
that brawling. I'm still back on Brawley Raleigh um, which
brings us to that Cloak story. It is probably apocryphal,
but it has really stuck around and it's often repeated
as fact. I know I heard it like as part
of a lesson in elementary school on how to remember
who he was. I found it in very reputable websites

(35:35):
as like a real thing that happened. And a big
part of that is because, based on Raleigh's personality and
everything we've talked about today, you can think, yeah, but
he would probably be the type of guy who would
do something kind of uh, not just chivalrous, but also
a little showy that way, like that's kind of a
show body move to be like no, no, walk on
my beautiful clothes. And this cloak story, the earliest record

(35:59):
of it we have is from History of the Worthies
of England, written by Thomas Fuller in sixteen sixty two.
Since it's such an iconic story, it seems like a
good way to end today's show. So here is how
Thomas Fuller recounts it. Quote, This Captain Raleigh, coming out
of Ireland to the English court in good habit, his

(36:20):
clothes being then a considerable part of his estate, found
the Queen walking till meeting with a plashy place. She
seemed to scruple going there on. Presently Raleigh cast and
spread his new plush cloak on the ground, where on
the Queen trod gently, rewarding him afterwards with many suits
for his so free and sasonable tender of so fair

(36:43):
a footcloth. Thus an advantageous admission into the first notice
of a prince is more than half a degree to
perform it. Say so much for joining us on this
matter day. Since this episode is out of the archive,
if you heard an email address or Facebook U r

(37:04):
L or something similar over the course of the show,
that could be obsolete. Now. Our current email address is
History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old
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(37:25):
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