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 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 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. 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 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. 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 health stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. 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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 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 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. 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 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. 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 health stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. 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