SOURCE: "Ralegh—Science, History, and Politics," in Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution, 1965. Reprint by Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1980, pp. 131–224.

In the following excerpt, taken from an expanded version of a lecture originally delivered at Oxford University in 1962, Hill provides an overview of Raleigh's social, political, and intellectual background, focusing in particular on the courtier's literary and scientific pursuits and his involvement in foreign policy during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I.

Sir Walter Ralegh was born in 1554, so he was not fifty when Elizabeth died and his career as a royal favourite came to an end. But Ralegh had been no mere courtier. He founded the first English colony in America, in Virginia, though it failed to survive. He wrote The Discovery of Guiana, a first-rate travel book as well as a classic of empire. But within a year of James I's accession the...