Happy Birthday (?) to Sir Walter Raleigh, who may have been born on this day in either 1552 or 1554. Look, his birthdate is a little unclear, but we can still celebrate him. Have some Raleigh fast facts:
- Started English colonization in North America (although he himself never went there)
- Tried to find El Dorado / The City of Gold in South America
- Secretly married Elizabeth Throckmorton, one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting, without Queen Elizabeth’s permission. They both had to go to The Tower of London for a while.
- Popularized smoking tobacco in England. (Naughty, naughty.)
- Fought with England against Spain.
- After the queen died, he was imprisoned in the Tower *again* for being part of a plot against her successor, King James.
- Executed for messing with the Spanish (against the terms of his release from the above imprisonment).
- Supposedly said this about the axe that was going to behead him: “This is a sharp Medicine, but it is a Physician for all diseases and miseries.”
- Wrote poetry.
- Some people thought he wrote or helped write the works attributed to Shakespeare. (He didn’t.)
- Played by Clive Owen in Elizabeth: The Golden Age.
