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.