Walter Ralegh: Architect of Empire

by Alan Gallay

Overview

From a Bancroft Prize-winning historian, a biography of the famed poet, courtier, and colonizer, showing how he laid the foundations of the English Empire

Sir Walter Ralegh was a favorite of Queen Elizabeth. She showered him with estates and political appointments. He envisioned her becoming empress of a universal empire. She gave him the opportunity to lead the way.

In Walter Ralegh,Alan Gallay shows that, while Ralegh may be best known for founding the failed Roanoke colony, his historical importance vastly exceeds that enterprise. Inspired by the mystical religious philosophy of hermeticism, Ralegh led English attempts to colonize in North America, South America, and Ireland. He believed that the answer to English fears of national decline resided overseas — and that colonialism could be achieved without conquest. Gallay reveals how Ralegh launched the English Empire and an era of colonization that shaped Western history for centuries after his death.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541645790
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	11/19/2019
Pages:	576
Sales rank:	784,629
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.90(d)

About the Author

Alan Gallay is the Lyndon B. Johnson chair of United States history at Texas Christian University and the author of several books including The Indian Slave Trade, which won the Bancroft Prize. Gallay lives in Fort Worth, Texas.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations xi

Note to Reader xiii

The Inventory 1

Part 1 "Thei saw the heddes of theyre dedde fathers": The Foundations of English Colonialism

Chapter 1 Toward an Empire 11

Chapter 2 Annoying the King of Spain: Blueprints, Legalities, and Baby Steps 26

Chapter 3 Ralegh and the Second Desmond War 37

Part 2 Catholics, Morris Dancers, and Genocide: How to Colonize America

Chapter 4 "a man noted of not good happ by sea": Humphrey Gilbert Prepares to Colonize America 51

Chapter 5 The Case for Genocide: George Peckham Visualizes Colonization 66

Part 3 "especiall grace, certeyne science and meere mocyon": Mysticism and the Empress of English Colonialism

Chapter 6 The Courtier 81

Chapter 7 The Cult of Elizabeth 97

Part 4"The land itself would wage war on them": The Roanoke Adventure

Chapter 8 Planting a New World Colony 117

Chapter 9 Summer of Discontent 133

Chapter 10 Singeing the Spaniard's Beard 143

Part 5 "a brave new world, That has such people in't": Roanoke as Cultural Production

Chapter 11 A Briefe and True Report 167

Chapter 12 Publicizing Ralegh's Virginia 184

Chapter 13 Fire and Smoke: The Hermeticists' Indians 199

Part 6 Fictions of Colonization: "Re-peopling" Munster

Chapter 14 Planning the Munster Plantation 223

Chapter 15 Bloodlines: Captain Ralegh and the Desmonds 238

Chapter 16 Ralegh in Youghal 248

Part 7 Our right existed as long as "the memory of man runneth": Settlement and Resistance on the Ralegh Seignories

Chapter 17 Preparing the Plantation: Establishing Authority 269

Chapter 18 Resistance to Plantation 279

Chapter 19 Ralegh's Colonists 290

Part 8 Colonization as an Economic Enterprise

Chapter 20 The Plantation Economy 303

Chapter 21 Of Friendship, Marriage, and Goddesses 317

Chapter 22 A Courtier's Disgrace and the Shipping of Staves 328

Part 9 The Colonial Impulse: Search, Discovery, Redemption

Chapter 23 The Search for El Dorado 339

Chapter 24 The Discovery of Guiana 347

Chapter 25 The Benevolent Empire 363

Chapter 26 Wheel of Fortune 374

Chapter 27 Reincarnation: Ireland and the Course of Colonialism 389

Part 10 "The arte of Magicke is the arte of worshipping God": Colonialism as a History of the World and Universe

Chapter 28 Treasons 411

Chapter 29 The Great Cordial 430

Chapter 30 Prince Henry 441

Chapter 31 History of the World 447

Chapter 32 "He called to the Headman to shew him the Ax" 459

Acknowledgments 477

Notes 481

Index 529

Editorial Reviews

"Raleigh's insistence on intellectual liberation, even within the walls of the world's most famous prison, is what lingers after reading Gallay's masterfully researched biography. He was, we learn, a free spirit in the truest sense and not such a loser after all."—Washington Examiner

"Gallay has crafted a richly detailed portrait of a courtier, poet, author and alchemist who, he argues, should inspire readers to approach history from a different angle. Rather than teleology, or "reading history backward from what occurred at its end," we'd do well to start from the beginning and learn how people like Ralegh's "activities and ideas paved the way forward.""—BookPage

"If Americans know of Sir Walter Ralegh today, it is as the founder of the "Lost Colony" of Roanoke, which disappeared without a trace a few years after it was established on the North Carolina coast. Some, perhaps, associate him with his quixotic quest for the golden city of "El Dorado" in the South American jungle. But such wispy associations fail to do justice to the colonial visionary, swashbuckling pirate, poet, courtier and alleged traitor whom Alan Gallay has vividly conjured in "Walter Ralegh : Architect of Empire," a richly researched and engagingly written biography."—Wall Street Journal

"[Gallay] manages to convey the enormous sense of how the gallant courtier, alchemist, humanist, and author helped create the cult of the goddess queen-who summarily ejected him out of her orbit. An enriching, sympathetic consideration of an extraordinary character in the fraught time of Tudor England."—Kirkus Reviews

"A good choice for those already familiar with the broad strokes of Elizabethan England, and for readers seeking to expand their knowledge of Ralegh's life and works."—Library Journal

"In this lively and accessible biography of the pirate, scientist, poet, and courtier Walter Ralegh, Alan Gallay challenges us to rethink what we know about Elizabethan colonialism. Gallay whisks his readers to London and to Ireland, to Roanoke and to Guiana, in a whirl of activity that shows us the global reach as well as the limits of Ralegh's ambitions and ingenuity."—Rebecca Anne Goetz, author of The Baptism of EarlyVirginia: How Christianity Created Race

"Alan Gallay offers us a myth-busting view of Walter Ralegh, and he does not disappoint. He delves deeply into Ralegh's world to show how this complex, multi-talented, and surprisingly enlightened man paved the way for the creation of the British empire and the era of European colonization. Meticulously researched, Walter Ralegh is an impressive achievement that highlights its subject's importance to history."—Roger Crowley, author of The Accursed Tower: TheFall of Acre and the End of the Crusades

"Never again will readers see Sir Walter Ralegh as the man who gallantly laid down his cape in the mud so a queen could pass. Alan Gallay has breathed vision and depth into a man who was, indeed, one of the greatest courtiers, politicians, explorers, poets, alchemists, and hermeticists of his day. This book is not just the story of an exceptional historical figure, but a carefully crafted study of sixteenth-century colonialism and how Ralegh and others understood the wisdom of the unseen and knowable universe, in all its breadth. From designing plantations in Ireland to establishing peaceful settlements in Virginia to lionizing his diplomatic encounters with the indigenous peoples of Guiana, Ralegh naively believed in a tri-continental English empire that could undermine Spanish power. In poetry, treatises, and his expansive history of the world, written during his last years as a prisoner in the Tower of London, Ralegh imagined a utopian alchemy of peoples and cultures, with a transcendent God at the helm. Walter Ralegh is a beautifully crafted and captivating work that takes the reader on a wonderful journey."—Nancy E. van Deusen, authorof Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-CenturySpain

"It is hard to know which is better: Sir Walter Ralegh as fascinating subject of global biography or Alan Gallay as gifted biographer. Together, they make for a big, important, and gloriously good book about the nature of power in the early modern world."—Marcus Rediker, author of The Slave Ship: A HumanHistory

From the Publisher

2019-08-26
A new biography of the Englishman who was both celebrated and excoriated in his Tudor era as a model colonizer.

Beloved by Queen Elizabeth, Walter Ralegh (c. 1552-1618) was handsome, dashing, imaginative, and intelligent. In addition, he could write beautiful poetry. "Imagination was a powerful, creative force in his life," writes Bancroft Prize winner Gallay (Chair, History/Texas Christian Univ.; Colonial and Revolutionary America: Text and Documents, 2017, etc.). Cutting his teeth during the Desmond Rebellions, the Irish attempts to halt Elizabeth's colonization of the Munster province in Ireland in advance of the certain Spanish invasion, Ralegh showed himself to his queen as the ultimate courtier. His service to Elizabeth was absolute, and in 1584, she "granted [him] a patent to found and possess a colony in America." Famous for planting a colony on Roanoke Island, Virginia—and then abandoning it when war with Spain called him back—Ralegh, as the author ably delineates, was determined to promote a colony far different from the brutally disastrous Spanish model. Ralegh did not believe in enslaving the Native peoples; rather, he worked toward a benevolent, mutually beneficial partnership between the two. Naturally, there was much propaganda involved in this colonizing effort; so too in Ireland, where great circumstantial evidence suggests Ralegh had a significant role in the introduction of the potato crop, brought from America, as well as tobacco. There was also plenty of self-promotion during his search for El Dorado in South America, which was part of his effort to vindicate himself under the new king, James I. Though Gallay is unfortunately not interested in Ralegh's personal life, he manages to convey the enormous sense of how the gallant courtier, alchemist, humanist, and author helped create the cult of the goddess queen—who summarily ejected him out of her orbit.

An enriching, sympathetic consideration of an extraordinary character in the fraught time of Tudor England.

Kirkus Reviews