Walter Raleigh

It's Christopher Hatton who provides him coaches to go on a journey and get away from court in his grief.

And what about, so the man we're going to be looking at in episode two is Raleigh, one of the most famous men of the Elizabethan age.

So Walter Raleigh, the great adventurer.

What about him and Dudley? Raleigh is

a very different sort of person.

And I think in some ways that's why he has an appeal to Elizabeth.

He's a little bit rougher, a little bit coarser, very direct.

They talk about him having a sort of unpolished tongue, whereas you can imagine Robert Dudley, very polished in his flattery.

Thank you.

When we think of Elizabethan seafarers and privateers, our minds invariably head straight for Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake.

But what of Thomas Cavendish? Cavendish became famous for his incredible voyage around the globe.

But his journey wasn't just about exploration.

And I perceived that to the extent that I carried out a PhD in it at the University of Southampton.

And that enabled me to, it gave me the time to research in the depths which I wanted to, and also to discover really why no one knew about him.

You know, why wasn't Cavendish up there with Drake and Raleigh? You know, he was...

the third circumnavigator, but not many people circumnavigate it.

So now how do we evaluate Hawking and the rest? First thing is we need to read what they say, and we need to read the accounts about their activities.

John Hawking, Martin Locke, Martin Faubuscher, Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, all of these people were involved in piracy, privateering, and some of them were involved in enslavement.

Many of them were involved in enslavement.

Most of them weren't.

Whether desire can create its own reality, whether love can survive time, whether pastoral escape is possible, And who gets to speak in a seduction poem? Considering these questions, and the fact a poem is one of the most frequently paraphrased and set-to-music poems in the Anglo-American world, perhaps frivolous is too dismissive a word.

Among the first notable responses is attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh, who uses the same six-quatrain structure and rhyming couplets, and even closely copies the meter and cadence.

to craft the nymph's reply to the shepherd if all the world and love are young and truth in every shepherd's tongue these pretty pleasures might me move to live with thee and be thy love time drives flocks from field to fold when rivers rage and rocks grow cold and philomel becometh dumb the rest complains of cares to come the flowers do fade and wanton fields to wayward winter reckoning yields a honey tongue a heart of gall is fancy spring but sorrows fall thy gown thy shoes thy beds of roses thy cap thy kirtle and thy posies soon break soon wither soon forgotten in folly ripe in reason rotten thy belt of straw and ivy buds thy coral clasps and amber studs all these in me no means can move to come to thee and be thy love but could youth last and love still breed at joy's no date nor age no need then these delights my mind might move to live with thee and be thy love so clearly in raleigh's response the nymph is not persuaded but she does question the worth of these transient pleasures the shepherd promises And while she doesn't necessarily deny love, her repeated ifs makes acceptance contingent upon the abolition of ageing and change.

In Greek myth, though nymphs possessed eternal youth, they weren't necessarily immortal.

So although some trees and freshwater streams can last hundreds or thousands of years, multiple human lifetimes, they are still transitory, and the nymph is forced to remind the overeager shepherd.

that even in Arcadia, death and change are inescapable.

So with Raleigh's response, we already have a pretty rich dialogue underway, where the central conflict becomes not simply love versus reluctance, but desire versus mutability.

And the more imminent the death, the more ardent the desire.

The English were strangers in a world they barely understood.

In the 1580s, Sir Walter Raleigh began sponsoring expeditions to establish an English settlement in the New World.

Initially, there was cooperation with the indigenous people, but disease, mistrust, and violence quickly took their toll.

In 1586, the English killed a local indigenous leader named Wingina, also known as Pemisapan.

and the European brewing traditions that we took over at the time.

Walter Raleigh exported sassafras from the Virginia colony in the 1600s.

And it was actually the most lucrative export that we had to Europe at the time.

What, sassafras?