Walter Raleigh - Pirate Who Bewitched Elizabeth

From the Mail Online:

You could not be alive in Elizabethan England and not feel that it was a young country, full of vigour and possessing the capacity to reinvent itself. There was a palpable sense of rebirth, of creative energy, of newness and expansion. 

This was the age of glory when our nation put civil wars behind it and emerged into the broad, sunlit uplands. 

It is no exaggeration to say that modern history began with the Elizabethans. British explorers went out to every corner of the known world to form the foundation of power and prosperity for future generations.

Central to this vision of an expanding British domain was the fervently ambitious and multi-talented soldier, sailor and poet Walter Raleigh. He was from an old West Country family that had come down in the world. 

Article:

Very interesting article from the Times Online, which speculates that Sir Walter Raleigh may have adopted a young native boy who returned with him from his voyages to the Americas.

"Much less known is Sir Walter Raleigh’s kinship with a young black boy from Guyana, whom he brought back with him from the Americas and who became ensconced in the explorer’s household, according to newly discovered records.

The register, uncovered by archive staff and The Times, records the baptism of a young Guyanan boy in the Parish of Saint Luke, in Chelsea, on February 13, 1597. It reveals that the boy, named Charles and estimated to be aged between 10 and 12 years old, was brought to the church by “Sir Walter Rawlie” – a common spelling of the explorer’s name at the time. "

Website:

Luminarium: Walter Raleigh

Elizabeth I & Her Toyboy Essex

From Mail Online:

In his major new examination of the Elizabethans, historian A.N. Wilson details the passionate love Queen Elizabeth I felt for several men throughout her reign. Here, in the final part of the Mail’s exclusive serialisation, Wilson reflects on the Queen’s later years — and her disastrous infatuation with a courtier young enough to be her grandson . . .

By the time she was in her mid-60s, the Virgin Queen had grown prematurely old, with a ‘goggle throat’ and ‘a great gullet hanging out’.

But if Elizabeth was long past her springtime, so was her once dynamic country. The new French ambassador travelled from Dover to London in 1597 through a landscape he described as ‘wild and untilled’.

In her palace in Whitehall, he was taken to meet her as she sat in a low chair, all by herself and melancholy, almost as if she had been abandoned. Her long, thin face was lined. Her ‘teeth were very yellow and unequal’. On either side of her ears, two great curls hung from beneath a somewhat fantastical red wig.