Dan Snow's History Hit - Sir Walter Raleigh's Search for El Dorado

Episode Date: September 10, 2024

Sir Walter Raleigh's life was a turbulent one, to say the least. The Elizabethan statesman and explorer climbed to the top rung of Queen Elizabeth's court; he founded the ill-fated Roanoke colony in North America; he was imprisoned in the Tower of London for various offences against the crown - not once, but three times. Ultimately, he was beheaded outside the Palace of Westminster. But perhaps his most outlandish exploits were two failed expeditions to find the legendary city of gold, El Dorado.Mathew Lyons joins us to tell us about what Raleigh was like, and why he undertook these expeditions to find a lost city in the jungles of South America. Mathew is the author of 'The Favourite: Ralegh and His Queen'.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. There's really something about Devon in the 16th century. I guess it has deep water harbours, it's positioned perfectly on the edge of the Atlantic, it's close to Ireland, it's reasonably close to Spain and the routes taken by its treasure convoys as they cross from the New World. In the 16th century, Devon found itself at exactly the right place at the right time. It could exploit this new Atlantic world that was opening up after Columbus sailed west and bumped into that vast continent, or two continents in fact.

And the people of Devon took full advantage of this. They had salt water in their blood after all. They were long-time seafarers. They didn't need Columbus to tell them about the riches of the Atlantic Ocean. They knew the Atlantic and they knew adventure. They were hardy, they were tough, they were far from London, which I think meant that they would have been left to their own devices. There was a spirit of risk-taking and a spirit of independence, ignoring central authority in Devon. They did as they pleased. They sought their fortune on the seas,

and they chose the religion that suited them. For their preachers, they selected those of more radical Protestant leanings, the ones that emphasised the evils of the Catholic empires of Europe, of the Pope, and supported a certain kind of rugged individualism. Many, many of the names that we are so familiar with in this period are Devon men. Sir Francis Drake, explorer, first Englishman to circumnavigate the world,

pirate privateer, the man who humbled the Spanish Armada, one of the leading lights of English maritime history but you've also got Sir Richard Grenville who helped Drake see off the Armada he died fighting a mighty Spanish fleet on his ship Revenge so other ships in his squadron could escape William Hawkins who was the first Englishman to sail to Brazil

John Hawkins, his son who pioneered the terrible trade in African men and women across the Atlantic. He also fought alongside Drake to crush the Spanish Armada. There was Humphrey Gilbert, coloniser of Ireland, adventurer in the New World. So it was in the air, it ran in family, it was in people's blood, I should say. And actually, that's literally true. Grenville's cousin and Humphrey Gilbert's little brother was one Walter Raleigh, another Devon man. Like the rest of them, he looked to the West. First, he looked to Ireland, where he took

part in the savage fighting, the brutal colonisation of the 16th century, and then, like so many others, schooled in Ireland, he looked beyond it to the Americas. He became a famous royal favourite, throwing his cloak on the ground, perhaps, so Elizabeth wouldn't have to step in a puddle. Whether he threw his cloaks on the ground or not, in 1584, Elizabeth granted him a royal charter to, quote,

explore, colonise and rule any remote, heathen and barbarous lands not actually possessed of any Christian prince or inhabited by Christian people. In return, good old canny Elizabeth, he had to give her 20% of any gold or silver he found there, and he organised an expedition to a part of the Atlantic seaboard of North America, which he named Virginia in honour of his patron, the Virgin Queen. He sent out the first colony. It settled on Roanoke Island, but that failed and survivors were evacuated a year later. And he then sent out a second colony, the fabled one, the notorious one.

A group of colonisers, quite a big group went. They included men, women, children, families. Three years later, I think it was, a supply ship returned to find no sign of life. Raleigh's Roanoke colony had completely disappeared. But as you'll hear in this podcast, he didn't just send out expeditions, he mounted them himself. This is a podcast about Raleigh, He mounted them himself. This is a podcast about Raleigh, but also particularly his obsession with El Dorado, the mysterious city of gold that haunted the fever dreams of so many European explorers

and led so many to their deaths. I asked the wonderful Matthew Lyons, he's a historian and he's author of the favourite, Raleigh and His Queen, all about Raleigh and his astonishing life. We talk all about it, the twists, the turns, the eventual tragic end. I really think there have been few more interesting lives in British history. Enjoy.

T-minus 10. The Thomas bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Matthew, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. It's a pleasure.

Now, you know what? We all talk about Eldorado. We all talk about the City of Gold. We all watched the cartoon when we were young and loved it. But what's the historiography of just the idea of a city of gold? Is there one idea? Does it spring from somewhere? Or have humans always talked about cities of gold,

whether it's in West Africa, the New World? Is it less precise than being located somewhere in the New World? It's kind of both of those things. I mean, when the Americas were discovered, there were like a number of golden cities that were talked about, Quivira and so on. But El Dorado kind of, I think one of the reasons El Dorado has stuck is because of Raleigh and the way he wrote about it. But the actual origins of the El Dorado myth, or there's kind of various myths actually, but the idea, El Dorado, the golden one, the golden man. So originally, the first stories come from around 1530-ish, during and after the conquest of Peru.

And it seems that an Incan soldier or leader was captured, and he tells the Spanish about this indigenous chief who walks around covered in gold dust. Obviously, this sets a lot of hairs running for the Spanish. I think one thing that's important to say about El Dorado, you know, it's a byword for something that doesn't exist, for a fantasy. But it wasn't, you know, 1530s. The Spanish, in very short order, have taken Mexico and Peru. Fabulous wealth.

It wasn't unreasonable to think that in the whole of South America, because they didn't know how big it was, but they knew it was big, that there would be one or more other such cities, other such civilizations to conquer and rob. Yeah, and indeed, the Spanish did get a lot of gold out of Peru. Yeah. And there was in Coricancha, there was a golden temple in Cusco. So, yeah, I guess this is rumours.

You can see how these rumours would start. Absolutely. And also, there are persistent rumours that a large part of the Incan treasure had been scrawled away. So that's kind of all in with the mix. As El Dorado, the golden man, over the course of the 16th century, it becomes, in various kind of iterations, it becomes, you know, a city on a lake. In some versions, it's like a valley that they're looking for. It sort of like becomes a catch-all term for the riches that they think are still out there that they can find. And presumably this dream drives explorers, adventurers,

whatever you wish to call them, to astonishing lengths and into astonishing hardship and miserable deaths in the Orinoco or in the Andes. We remember Walter Raleigh, and we'll come to him in a second, but are there other Europeans doing this kind of thing? Prior to Raleigh, I mean, it's primarily the Spanish. There are some German adventurers, conquistadors involved. But again, that's sort of through the Spanish because Charles V owed an augsburg

banking family a lot of money and instead of repaying them he kind of licensed venezuela to them so through that stream there's uh a number of german uh explorers in the area but it's let's say 78 of them are spanish and yeah there's a whole series of um i mean bizarro's brother in sort of 1540 1541 goes essentially to the head of the Amazon or to that area looking for El Dorado. There is a sense in which the El Dorado story is true in that one of the places that they went searching for early was essentially where Bogotá is now, kind of up in the Colombian highlands, where there was or there had been a tribe who did have a ritual on a lake

which involved the king going out onto the lake and throwing golden ornaments and so on into the lake as part of a ritual and that three separate exhibitions actually ended up there in sort of 1536 to 8 took all the gold that they could find which was quite a lot but not enough it didn't fulfill their idea of El Dorado you know what, there wasn't enough gold. There wasn't Incan-level gold. There was just some gold. If there is any truth in the story, it's there, the Muisca people of what's now Bogota. But because they didn't find the kind of gold that they imagined they were going to find, the myth didn't kind of settle. It spurred on. So, you know, you have Bizarro. A lot of people know the story about Aguirre coming down the Amazon

and kind of the Reign of Terror. That's an El Dorado story. And then later on in the century, you've got a man called Antonio Barrio, late 1570s, 1580s, so kind of getting towards the Riley era, becomes convinced that it's up at the head of the Orinoco. He actually met someone who claimed that they'd lived in... At that point, the idea was Eldorado was a Spanish name for an indigenous city called Manoa

on something called Lake Parima, which doesn't actually exist. But there's something that might have been it. It's a long story. So that's sort of the myth, as Barrio understands it. That's sort of the myth that Raleigh hears. Well, let's come on to the man himself now. Who was Walter Raleigh and why is he in a position to start chasing down these myths? Walter Raleigh is kind of, I mean, he's an interesting ambivalent figure

because he came from, well, we wouldn't understand it as poor, but in his week in terms of poor background, very, very minor gentry in the West Country. And for reasons that aren't really clear now. So he was born in the 1550s, and by the early 1580s, he is, like, established as one of, if not Elizabeth's favourite favourite. He seems to have gotten to court in 1580, 1581. There's various kind of stories about how that might have happened. Everyone knows the cloak on the ground story, which almost certainly isn't true. But yeah, so Bias in the early 1580s has come from nothing to be incredibly wealthy. Elizabeth's like showered monopolies and lands on him and very powerful

because he has her ear. And it was said that she took him for an oracle and that nettled everyone. And William Cecil, who was kind of right at the centre of the Elizabethan state, I mean, he was its lynchpin, he said to someone that Raleigh could do more damage in an hour than he, Cecil, could do good in a year just by talking to Elizabeth. So he had a lot of power, a lot of money suddenly, very arrogant, loathed by almost everyone apart from Elizabeth. And he's liked by Elizabeth, and he's given land in Ireland, for example,

so he cuts his teeth in Ireland. Yeah, well, it's interesting. One of the interesting things about Raleigh in Ireland and then Raleigh in the Americas, and Raleigh in Ireland is, as Elizabethans and many English people have been, was unspeakably violent, very much slash and burn and hang and kill everyone.

The epitome of the brutal colonizer in the americas he or his people seem an entirely different kind of have an entirely different kind of attitude and it's um he clearly had a great deal of respect for the indigenous peoples that he met he talks about them you know with um yeah a lot of respect and affection and understanding of their intelligence and very interested in how the societies were organised, the cultures and so on. And this is also true of the colony that he tried to found in North America in the 1580s, which he tried twice, in Roanoke.

There's some absolutely beautiful drawings that one of his men did, or paintings, really, of indigenous societies. It's really some of the first genuine work of ethnography there is that was written out there. People tried to learn the language and learn the cultures and things went badly wrong in the end, as they tended to do. As often with Riley, you know, he's multifaceted. A lot of those facets are quite bad. So again, in the 1580s, the Babington conspiracy, Babington's family pays Riley a thousand pounds to bend Elizabeth's ear in Babbage's favour.

Riley takes the money, Sydney does nothing, and then when Babbage dies, Riley gets all of Babbage's estates. So, you know, cruel. Arrogant, cruel, obviously charming and eloquent. We'll come on to that a bit later. And so is that why Elizabeth liked him? She liked eloquent, charming people. Was it poetry? Did she like his ideas?

I think she certainly liked all of that. I mean, there's an exchange of poems between them. She certainly liked playing people off against each other. And it's useful to have someone, in some ways, it's useful for someone who people don't like, who you favour, just to keep people on their toes. Obviously, she did listen to him. She must have done, people said she did. And she showered riches on him, but she never gave him the kind of political status that he wanted. So he really wanted to be on the Privy Council to have that kind of formal political influential role. She never let him do that. but there's also distance and control from her point of view. Their relationship was intimate. The depths of it are unknowable. But it certainly unsettled Cecil, unsettled Walsingham, unsettled Leicester. And perhaps that's one of the things she liked about it.

Yeah, she loved keeping people on their toes. And it's handy, isn't it, to have someone who's powerful, but who's entirely dependent on your patronage? Oh, absolutely. He was involved in privateering as well, which brought in a lot of money, which we can't account for. But his wealth and power was dependent on her. He was never a noble, so it didn't have that kind of power either. You mentioned privateering, which is, of course,

piracy with a little document from the Queen saying it's legal. In 1586, he captures this Spanish ship, doesn't he? Is this the beginning of his obsession with El Dorado? It seems to be, yes. So in the summer of 1586, his men captured, I think fairly elderly at that point, conquistador called Pedro de Sarmiento. And instead of doing what you would normally do with some of the wealth and status, which is ransom them, Raleigh kind of took him under his wing and kind of wined and dined him, eventually sent him home and so on. But it seems that Sarmiento told him the story of El Dorado,

and probably particularly the story of de Berrio, which is obviously the one that captures Raleigh's attention, but it's also like the most current version of the story. Well, it's kind of 1586. He doesn't seem to do anything about it, but comes from 1591,91 1592 he falls dramatically from favor um when just quickly i'd interrupt that i've got to say i know this was a period of horror in many ways and exploitation and conquest but the visceral excitement of those candlelit dinners

as aged conquistadors sort of poured out their knowledge of the new world, this kind of utterly, utterly foreign, bizarre place that 100 years before no one in Europe had known was there. And given some of it is corroborated by silver coming back on convoys from the new world, I mean, it must have been enough to send people wild. Yeah, absolutely mind-blowing. And you have, you know, the wealth that flooded through Europe, through Spain and so on, but how much more could there be? Why should that be all of it? I think Elizabeth I called it meta incognita sort of the unknown limit

and that visceral excitement and one of the interesting things actually about Raleigh's account of his search for El Dorado is just the sense of his mind being blown by what he's seeing and trying to fit it into, well, very intelligent, very sceptical kind of thinker for the period and perhaps generally. And he's

just trying to fit it into how he understands. So he's reaching around for things like Mandeville and so on, these kinds of things. He knows it's kind of essentially fantasy, but he's thinking like, well, wow, what is this? And how do I explain to people what I'm seeing so that they will believe me? And that must be true for, you know, all these people. Wild, wild. Wild. And if there's adventurers who've caught the bug, I'm sure there's lots of investors sitting around who don't mind being pitched to as well. Tell me about what happens in the 1590s, why he finds that actually a long foreign trip might be the best option for him. So 1591, he marries one of Elizabeth's ladies-in-waiting, a woman also called Elizabeth Throckmorton Bess. That wasn't a good thing to do.

From Elizabeth's point of view, he didn't tell her. He lied to lots of people about it. He lied to Robert Cecil, William Cecil's son, who was kind of the coming man in terms of court power. And actually, I mean, he tried to kind of uh go on a privateering expedition to like leave the country so he didn't have to explain it to anyone and hope that it will blow over by the time he came back elizabeth finds out incandescent he's under house arrest for a brief period and then they're both put in the tower but not for a long while i mean i think riley is out before the end of the year and I think she was out in 1593 I think but anyway Riley's out of favour he's like banished from the

court his wife is obviously banished from court too just that she's had a child and it's all the things that Elizabeth I doesn't like so he's out of favour and what can you do to get back into favour and also perhaps he's thinking am I going to need another stream of income? It's easy to be very cynical about Reilly, but also he did think in terms of the geopolitics of it. We're talking about the money that came in from the Americas. He was acutely aware, as Protestant men of his generation were, of how that distorted European power. He says that if it weren't for the American gold and silver, the King of Spain would be a King of figs and oranges. Whereas instead, he was able to corrupt and disturb all the power in Europe, all the order in Europe. And that's perfectly reasonable

assessment. So for Raleigh, there is also the point about, I mean, this is also one of the moral justifications for all the privateering is that they're kind of setting the balance right. the moral justifications for all the privateerings, that they're kind of setting the balance right. So for Raleigh, there was a serious, aside from the wealth and the wanting to get back the status and favour that he has lost, there is also a serious kind of geopolitical thing of disrupting Spanish power. Yeah, there's a strategic emphasis here, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. There are no colonies that he tried to set up in the mid-1580s. I mean, the primary aim of that wasn't so much colonisation as a base from which to attack Spanish shipping as it left South America.

So that was geopolitical. Obviously, if he had established a private-owning base, he would have benefited from it too. I mean, by all accounts, he spent a vast amount of his own money on the failure of Roanoke. I think I've read something like £40,000, which is an enormous amount of money in the 1580s. So, yeah, so geopolitics come into it,

but you have to think mid-1590s, Raleigh is casting about, thinking, how can I get back into favour? You're listening to Dan Snow's History, talking about Walter Raleigh and El Dorado. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonaga.

And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder.

Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Was this a big exhibition? Did he leave with a bit of noise? Or did he sort of sneak off as someone who was unpopular at court and fallen from fashion? A lot of these, even the privateering voyages, they were funded by merchants and by people at court.

And so this is something, whether he was unwilling to or unable to fund himself, the 1595 expedition cost around £60,000, which is a huge amount, actually, and actually a huge amount even for this kind of expedition. So he has funding from people like Robert Cecil and various other people around court. It was long in planning. It wasn't a spur-of-the-moment thing. He'd sent a ship the previous year come scout out where the Spanish were in the region and so it was not a what am I going to do now moment it was something he clearly had thought about for a long time and you know perhaps since he had met Sarmiento maybe that was it was always been bubbling away certainly he's going because he wants geopolitics to upset Spanish power in the region be loads of loads of money, and C, to be Elizabeth's golden boy again, you know? Well, Matthew, take me through it. What happens? What happens? Well,

his first move actually is to attack the Spanish settlements on Trinidad, Spanish garrison, for two reasons. One is that he doesn't want to go up the Orinoco and then come back down to a Spanish army. So it's a very sensible kind of military precaution. But also because Antonio de Barrio, the last man to go searching for El Dorado, is in the garrison. And so Riley captures him. You might think it would be like an interrogation scenario. But again, he kind of does his best to charm him and to learn everything that he can learn. But again, he kind of does his best to charm him and to learn everything that he can learn.

And he hears from him the story about a man called Juan Martinez, who said that he'd lived in the Golden City in Manoa in El Dorado for, I think, six months for quite a long time. So for Riley, it must have felt really close at that point. And then he, I think he took 250 men to the region from England. He takes 100 of them in small boats up to Yorinoko. It takes them four weeks to get to kind of where they end up going at the head of the river. Essentially, we know all about this from Riley's own account, which was published when he got back in the autumn of 95. It's fantastically written and fantastically absorbing narrative.

One of the things that comes out for me anyway is Riley's qualities of leadership because the men very quickly are like, this isn't what we bargained for. You know, they're going up river, sometimes carrying the boats, wading up the water in their necks. And Riley's kind of, you know, for days, weeks, he's like, no, tomorrow it's just around the next bend, you know, and he keeps them going all the way up river.

And one of them's eaten by a crocodile. Yeah, one of the native guides, one of them's eaten by a crocodile yeah one of the uh native guides i think is eaten by a crocodile but i'm pretty sure riley wouldn't have known what a crocodile was at that point it's really interesting like reading the account because he's seeing this prodigious extraordinarily fertile landscapes forest and so on but also worked agricultural land and he's just trying to explain it to people and one of the things that people have criticized for him over the years is just the way he talks about it as being kind of like England talks about you know coppiced woodland and parks and farmlands and so on as if it's like a bit of Surrey or something for a long time people have like mocked him for that but actually that you know there's increasing evidence that the kinds of cultures that he talks about actually did exist on the

low reaches of the Orinoco in that period. An anthropologist called Neil Whitehead sat in along with us and done some brilliant work about talking essentially about how ultimately accurate a lot of Riley's writing on the journey is. But top of the river, he gets to an indigenous settlement and has long chats with a kind of local chieftain who he clearly hugely hugely respects but manco topiara and riley is told that el dorado is four days away but that he will need an army to take it so riley thinks well i haven't got enough men he looks at the river there's some falls up ahead the river he said is like as wide as the thames is at woolwich he says they can row for an hour and only make a few feet progress. So he realises that he can't find the thing that he's looking for. So he turns around and El Dorado is obviously the whole El Dorado story is a story of failure to find these riches. But for Ali, it's a very particular, very personal failure. So they

go back down river. Just out of interest, was there anything, I mean, obviously there was no El Dorado, but was there a culture living above the falls I mean was there any truth to that information you've been told by that indigenous person? For a long time I think everyone thought it was nonsense there is like increasing evidence now that gold was worked in the region there are actually mines in the area I mean as he went down river he spoke to another indigenous chief and he told him about mines not too far distant which is the thing he latches on to later in his life so there is gold in the region and there's evidence that there was gold work and gold pieces have been found but obviously nothing on the scale that he or any of the other

people were looking for there is a fair deal of evidence that he may be guilty of embellishing things but things like manoa you know there was a kind of you know native grouping known as manoans the lake perima which for a long time it was on the maps as a real thing and then it was taken off the maps because it doesn't exist but i think there's a fair bit of evidence that in that area a lake was formed on savannah plains when the rivers were in flood and a lake would form and so so a Victorian explorer called Robert Schumber went essentially to go and see where he knew El Dorado didn't. It wouldn't be, but he saw evidence of this kind of seasonal creation of a lake. It's not all fantasy, but the Golden City, absolutely fantasy.

So he arrives back in England. Are people quite impressed, to be fair to this courtier, that he has actually, he's walked the walk, he's been up crocodile-infested rivers? I mean, or do they call him a failure? Riley writes to Cecil when he gets back. That's one of the main backers. This is Robert Cecil, one of the main backers,

and said, I want to know if El Dorado of Guyana is going to pass as history or as a fable. So he's immediately concerned, and he's right to be concerned because, obviously, he's hated anyways and distrusted. Lots of people don't even believe he went to South America. People say, well, surely he was just a sculpting around Cornwall for a few weeks or sailing off the coast of Africa. And then obviously he came back without any gold. And one of the kind of rhetorical tricks he tries to pull off in his account of his discovery, he calls it,

is why he doesn't go back with any gold. And he kind of tries to say, you know, how crass that would have been. It wasn't really about the gold. It's all about countering Spanish dominion and creating an empire for Elizabeth and all this kind of stuff, which doesn't help him, to be honest. It's also easy to overstate the distrust.

So I don't know, about 20 years or so ago, in the library of Lambeth Palace, they discovered a manuscript copy of Riley's discovery. So before it was printed with Robert Cecil's editing on it. And essentially Cecil is going through and like calming Riley down. So you know, Riley says, I know this is the greatest river in the world. And Cecil kind of crosses out and says, no, you think it is the greatest river in the world. So when he just goes through it, you know, of saying come on calm down a bit which is one way kind of uh not humiliation for riley necessarily but it's kind of like a sign of distrust but another way it's a sign of cecil wanting something believable to

be out there in a sense cecil is still kind of um buying in because otherwise why would he bother cecil still wants to believe that the investment is worthwhile and you know Riley continues to send ships to the region and others do I mean one of the uh I suppose unfortunate side effects of his book when it's published and it's translated across Europe into Latin German French many editions is that everyone in Europe now knows how vulnerable the Spanish are in South America and including Spanish Spanish, in fact. So, you know, the French and the Dutch kind of send people out there in intervening years. He comes back. He does, I suppose, Eldorado, perhaps other things.

He's allowed back into court in 1597. And he's sort of one of the big beasts of court alongside Essex and Robert Cecil. You listened to Dan Snow's History. Let's take another break. We're talking about Eldorado and it's Hunt by Walter Raleigh. More coming up.

I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings.

Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit.

Wherever you get your podcasts. It doesn't fare that well under James VI of Scotland, James I of England, who takes over from Elizabeth. Why does he end up in prison for 10 years? So James I comes to the throne. Obviously, smart money, Robert Cecil and so on, had been working closely with James for a while. Riley doesn't bother for whatever reason,

but also one of the people who has James's ear, Henry Howard, the Earl of Northampton, has loathed Riley for decades, since the 1580s, a very personal entity. And James doesn't like Riley from the get-go. He cancels all his monopolies. So Elizabeth I gave him Joram House on the Thames. He'd had that since the early 1580s. James I gives him two weeks' notice to get out.

He was captain of the guard under Elizabeth. He loses that. So he loses kind of all the status and all the favour that Elizabeth had given him. Just goes. And he gets caught up in kind of two of two plots plot is perhaps an exaggeration but the two kind of plots when james come to the throne one was called the bi-plot was supposedly to kidnap james and to ensure he was more tolerant to the catholics which is a bizarre way of doing it anyway and there's another when the authorities were uncovering that they uncovered this thing

called the main plot which seemingly riley was sort of involved in, which involved putting Arbella Stewart, one of James's cousins, on the throne with financial and perhaps military support from Spain. And Riley is arrested and put in the tower in July 1603. We perhaps haven't talked about it precisely, but Riley is big on gestures. You know, the famous throw of the cloak in the ground. Probably not true, but it's kind of true to the kind of man that Riley was. So Riley is thrown in jail for treason in the Tower. So he's put on trial. This is kind of, lots of kind of very unbelievable things happen with Riley.

He's put on trial. The trial isn't held in London because the plague is around. It's taken down to Winchester at the Great Hall in Winchester. Just to measure how hated he was, his guard at the tower, William Ward, who took him down to Winchester in a coat, said he thought it was touch and go whether they'd make it down there alive because the coach was being mobbed by people that hated Raleigh. They were throwing stones, throwing mud at the coach, shouting shouting at him throwing clay pipes as well anyway he gets down to winchester it's october november um 1603 treason trial lasts a day he's found guilty but i mean it sounds absurd um he defended himself so well and so charmingly so wittily that everyone in court sitting in the hall in winchester and then everyone who hears about it,

everyone suddenly loves him. It's very peculiar. So one of James I's closest allies said to James that whereas before he'd have gone 100 miles to see Riley hanged, having seen him defend himself in Winchester, he'd gone 1,000 miles to save his life. Overnight, he goes from being hated

to being revered and loved. He's found guilty. James decides not to execute him, probably because of how popular he now is, and also to show what a merciful king he is. But he keeps him in the tower, and the sentence of death is still holding over him. And he's in the tower for 12, 13 years.

I mean, famously, he spends his time writing the history of the world and various other political tracks. He becomes a kind of celebrity in there. People come to see him walk on the battlements. And I imagine James I didn't much like that either. I love the fact that he comes out, he says, let me out and I'll go on another expedition.

Again, is this anything's better than being in prison? Is this him thinking he can get back in James' good books? What's going on with Riley now? It's a good question. I mean, did he seriously think that it was achievable? Had he just spent 12 to 13 years in the tower kind of obsessing about these riches that were seemingly almost in his grasp?

I mean, the various voyages have gone out in intervening years and some sponsored by him. It's called The general conclusion is that the famous city of El Dorado didn't exist. We don't really know whether Riley accepted that, but when he goes out again, having been released from jail from the Tower of London, he goes to go and find the gold mines that he had been told existed in the region, which in fact do, but he didn't find them. But one of the things is that by that point, Spain is an ally of England and an ally of James, and he's explicitly told he cannot attack or engage militarily with the

Spanish in the region, which is a problem because they've built a settlement at the top of the Orinoco where Riley ended his first journey, and they're much more seriously in the region militarily than they had been. And the Spanish are a bit monopolistic when it comes to their possessions in the New World, aren't they? They don't really welcome outsiders. Yeah, no, no, there was no sharing, no sharing. I mean, most obviously no sharing with indigenous people, but also no sharing with anyone else from Europe. And why would they? The Spanish are incredibly rich.

So Riley goes out. He's probably a little bit unfit having been in prison he's he's when he goes up to old rada the first time he comments on how unfit he is and uh how used to a softer more comfortable life he is so 20 years later he's old the voyage over he's really seriously poorly can't keep solid food down for 30 days. He's lived on stewed prunes, apparently. When they get to the bottom of the Orinoco, he stays back in the ships and a number of men go upriver under the leadership of a kind of trusted attendant of his, a guy called Lawrence Keams, and also Riley's, I think, 20-year-old son called Watt. And essentially what happens is that they attack the Spanish settlement at Sao Tome, at the top of the Orinoco. Riley's son is killed. And that, in a sense, Riley probably

thought had signed his death warrant. Not that it needed signing, because James had never lived with the old one. But Keams comes back down. Riley learns what happened. Keams kills himself in his cabin. Raleigh sails for home. He writes an absolutely beautiful letter to his wife, telling her about the death of their son, saying, I never knew what sorrow was until now. There were some suggestions that he thought about escaping to France,

fleeing, but he doesn't, ultimately. He comes back to England. James I doesn't want to put him on trial again. He says the phrase, the experiment at Winchester, I think, you know, we're not going to go through that again, not to give him a public platform, but he essentially convenes some kind of legal body to find a reason to fulfil the execution that had been hanging over Raleigh since 1603.

Autumn of 1618, he's executed at the Tower, apparently made a very powerful speech speech one of the many like curious things about raleigh is that a man famous for being a monopolist and for abuses of power essentially and privilege and access to the queen and this stuff he becomes weirdly a kind of prophet of the civil war and republicanism so a lot of his writings in when in the tower all about the team that runs through his history of the world is about the tyranny of kings and he wrote various other tracts against kingship. He becomes taken up as an icon by the parliamentarian people. John Eliot, one of the leading parliamentarians, saw his execution. Oliver Cromwell recommended reading

History of the World to his son, to understand how power works. Another weird reversal that this kind of man whose power and wealth came through royal privilege and royal favour becomes this kind of herald of the parliamentary cause. Very strange. He has this kind of afterlife in the 1620s and 30s where he becomes this other kind of icon. It's managed in part actually by his wife, Bess,

the extraordinary woman who kind of released his publication steadily over the ensuing years. He released his writings to kind of help build and maintain his reputation. Always very important. Have someone very brilliant to control and manage your archive after you're gone. Matthew, that really was an extraordinary, fascinating life that's contested and unusual and strange and has been held up by various groups in historiographical discourse as a villain,

as a hero over the centuries. I mean, a bit of everything. What a fascinating tale. Thank you. And if people want to know more about it, Matthew, what can they do? What can they do? Well, they could read my book. So yeah, I wrote a book about Riley's early career called The Favourite. But they can also go to your wonderful website where you've transcribed lots of the letters and you have a beautiful series of blog posts, if that's the right thing to call them.

Yes. Well, there's a trial transcript you can read on my blog and various other articles about him. And also I've started a sub stack recently, which will certainly have some Riley content. I'm writing actually about the Cecil manuscript edits quite shortly. Go check out my blog or go check out my sub stack, which is called The Broken Compass. So people Google that, they can find me.

I mean, he's a very strange man because you look at his life and you think, well, what did he really achieve? Did he achieve anything? And yet, you know, he's still talked about 100 years later. A great inspiration for those of us who have achieved nothing but hope to be talked about. Matthew,

thank you very much indeed. Thank you for coming on the podcast. It's a pleasure. you