(c.1552–October 29, 1618), was an English navigator, writer, courtier and colonizer. He explored the eastern seaboard of America and named it “Virginia” after the “Virgin Queen” Elizabeth I. Sir Walter Raleigh received the first colonial grant to colonize America in 1584, resulting the ill-fated Lost Colony. The charter he was granted authorized him to enact statutes for the government of the proposed colony, provided that:
They be not against the true Christian Faith. … 106
Sir Walter Raleigh’s valor in the attacks on Cadiz (1596) and the Azores (1597) gained him renown. He was later imprisoned by King James I in the Tower of London (1603–16), where he devoted himself to writing poetry and his History of the World. Though freed for two years, the king had him executed for treason in 1618.
In his Bible, found in the Gatehouse at Westminster after his death, Sir Walter Raleigh left this version of one of his earlier poems:
Even such is time, that takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust;
Who in the dark and silent 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.107