Sir Walter Raleigh: Roanoke, El Dorado and an Embalmed Head in a Velvet Bag

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Sir Walter Raleigh was born in Devon around 1552 or 1554 to a Protestant gentry family. His father hid in a church tower to escape Mary I's persecution, and as a teenager Raleigh fought for the Huguenots in France. In Ireland he led the party that beheaded about 600 surrendered soldiers after the 1580 siege of Smerwick, and was rewarded with 40,000 acres in Munster. Queen Elizabeth knighted him in 1585 and made him warden of the Stannaries and captain of her guard. Under a 1584 charter he funded the expedition that named Virginia, the failed 1585 fort on Roanoke Island, and John White's 1587 colony of families, abandoned by 1590 with "Croatoan" carved on a post. Raleigh never set foot in North America.

His secret 1591 marriage to Elizabeth Throckmorton, a lady-in-waiting, landed them both in the Tower, and he was released only to divide the spoils of the captured Madre de Deus. Banished from court, he searched the Orinoco for El Dorado in 1595 and published The Discovery of Guiana. Under James I he was convicted of treason in 1603 on Lord Cobham's written confession after demanding to face his accuser, and spent 13 years in the Tower writing The History of the World. Freed in 1616 to find gold without fighting Spain, he fell ill while Lawrence Keymis attacked Santo Tomé, where Raleigh's son Wat was killed and Keymis later took his own life. Raleigh was beheaded at Westminster on October 29, 1618.

• He built the Ark Raleigh, which the queen bought and renamed the Ark Royal, flagship against the Armada.
• The Madre de Deus cargo was worth nearly half of England's yearly treasury.
• His trial argument influenced the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment.
• James I found The History of the World too saucy in its judgments of kings.
• Testing the axe, he called it a sharp medicine, and his widow Bess kept his embalmed head in a velvet bag for 29 years.