SIR WALTER RALEGH

(born c. 1552, executed 1618)

[A brief account of Ralegh's life and his significance printed as the programme note for the film of Michael Morpurgo's My Friend Walter when premiered on 19 March 1992 at the Princess Anne Theatre.]

Sir Walter Ralegh was the quintessential Elizabethan and Renaissance man: a man of action as well as a man of the intellect.

He was the brightest jewel in the most brilliant age in English History.

He excelled as a writer, as a soldier and a 'sea-faring man', as a businessman, administrator, courtier, free-thinker, patron of the Arts and the Sciences, and as a chemist. More than anyone else he was responsible for the English colonisation of America.

If his genius flowed more perhaps from his dazzling individuality than the sort of god-given talent of Shakespeare, Leonardo or Mozart, we nonetheless, because of the sheer quality and range of his achievement, clearly recognise him to have been a great man. And his interest for us is heightened by our inability to penetrate entirely his essential mystery - it seems that 'the fox', as he was sometimes called, continues to elude his captors.

He was one of the foremost poets of his day, best-known perhaps for the lines he wrote in the Tower the night before his execution:

Even such is Time which takes in trust
Our youth, our joys and all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust,
Who in the dark and shallow grave
When we have wandered all our ways
Shuts up the story of our days.
And from which earth and grave and dust
The Lord shall raise me up I trust.

Likewise, his imprisonment in the Tower fifteen years earlier evoked one of the greatest letters in the English language, what he thought was his last farewell to his beloved Bess:

'...As for me I am no more yours, nor you mine. Death hath cut me asunder, and God hath divided me from the world and you from me...I cannot write much. God knows how I hardly stole this time, when all sleep, and it is time to separate my thoughts from this world. Beg my dead body, which living was denied you...I can write no more. Time and Death call me away...Written by the dying hand of sometimes thy husband, but now (alas!) overthrown. Yours that was, but not now my own, W. Ralegh.'

In his million-word History of the World, the second half of which he threw in the fire, Ralegh revealed himself as a master of English prose:

'O eloquent, just and mighty Death! Whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded. What none hath dared, thou hast done. And whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised. Thou hast drawn together all the far stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty and ambitions of man and covered it all over with these two narrow words Hic jacet' [Here lies].

Ralegh appears to have been a man who expected automatic advancement because of his achievements, but was often disappointed through his own lack of political guile, coupled with an unerring ability to provoke the jealousy of others. He became Elizabeth I's personal confidant and Captain of her Guard, but never attained political office, and he consistently failed to overcome the prejudice fostered against him in James I's mind by his political enemies. His arrogance was legendary, typified perhaps by his refusal - and it was noted - to modulate his broad Devon accent in favour of a more courtly style.

In popular imagination, he is the man who laid down his cloak for Elizabeth, evoked the slurred 'swisser-swasser' from a lover beneath a tree, and was responsible for bringing back from the New World the tobacco plant and potatoes.

Roy Davids