The 1603 trial of Walter Ralegh

It is a curious fact that when Sir Walter Ralegh was finally executed – on 29 October 1618 – he had been legally dead for 15 years. Even by 17th-century standards, that was unusual. But then, not many people face the death penalty twice in court – particularly when found guilty the first time, as Ralegh was in November 1603.

Ralegh has, in some senses, been refusing to die for the past 400 years. This century alone has produced three full biographies – the latest being Anna Beer’s Patriot or Traitor (2018). But if you know nothing about Ralegh, the 1603 treason trial is a good place to start. Had Ralegh been executed in its immediate wake, it is doubtful his reputation would have long outlived him.

History remembers Ralegh as a polymath: a poet; a historian; a political theorist; a soldier; an explorer; and founder of the first English colony in the Americas who, it is thought, introduced tobacco to England, bringing it over from Virginia. But more than anything, the Ralegh of Elizabeth I’s reign was a man on the make. He came from a modest background – “a bare gentleman… poor in his beginnings,” one Jacobean commentator sniffed – but ended up as captain of the queen’s guard and holder of a hugely lucrative monopoly on wine licences, among other posts and perquisites.

But the 1603 treason trial changed everything. It made Ralegh into a hero, as iconic a victim of legal injustice as England has had: the US Supreme Court referred to his case extensively in a judgment as recently as 2004.

Now read on…