Sir Walter Raleigh (c. 1554–1618) was an English poet, explorer, and soldier who ended his career in disgrace and was executed for treason. For his unauthorized attacks on the Spanish, he was beheaded on the order of King James I (1566– 1625). Raleigh’s most nefarious legacy, however, may be the exotic new habit from the Americas that he popularized in England: smoking.
Raleigh was born in western England into a zealously Protestant family. He fought in religious wars in Ireland and France and developed an intense hatred for Roman Catholics and for the Spanish. Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603) rewarded him for his service with a huge estate, trade monopolies, a tin mine, and, in 1585, a knighthood.
Beginning in 1584, Raleigh launched the first major effort to establish English colonies in the New World. An expedition he sponsored established a colony in present-day Roanoke, North Carolina, in 1587, but it vanished within a few years. Raleigh also named the planned colony of Virginia after the unmarried queen. It was through his colonial enterprises that Raleigh discovered tobacco and became its primary English importer.
Raleigh envisioned English colonization of the Americas as a way of counterbalancing Spanish power, which had reached its height in the late sixteenth century. Catholic Spain and Protestant England fought intermittently throughout Elizabeth’s rule, culminating in the defeat of the Spanish armada in 1588.
By the time of the queen’s death, Raleigh was already losing popularity due to his extravagant spending and scandalous marriage to Elizabeth Throckmorton (c. 1565–c. 1647), one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting. Elizabeth’s successor, James, favored more conciliatory policies toward Spain and had Raleigh arrested in 1603 for treason. He was condemned to death, but James commuted the sentence and sent him to the Tower of London instead. While in prison, Raleigh wrote The History of the World.
Raleigh was released in 1616 and asked to lead another expedition. During his trip, Raleigh attacked a Spanish outpost without permission, and when he returned to London, the Spanish ambassador demanded that the king reinstate his death sentence. To placate the Spanish, Raleigh was executed on October 29, 1618.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- King James I not only loathed Raleigh, but also hated smoking. In 1604—380 years before the tobacco industry acknowledged a link between cigarettes and lung cancer—the king called smoking “a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.”
- The capital of North Carolina, Raleigh, is named for the explorer.
- The fate of the Roanoke Island settlement—the Lost Colony—remains one of American history’s great unsolved mysteries. The only clue found was the word Croatoan carved into a post. Historians theorize that the colonists may have assimilated with local Indian tribes or drowned while attempting to sail back to England.
