“When Sir Walter Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower of London,” writes George Orwell in his As I Please column for 4 February 1944, “he occupied himself with writing a history of the world. He had finished the first volume, and was at work on the second, when there was a scuffle between some workmen beneath the window of his cell, and one of the men was killed. In spite of diligent inquiries, and in spite of the fact that he had actually seen the thing happen, Sir Walter was never able to discover what the quarrel was about: whereupon, so it is said – and if the story is not true it certainly ought to be – he burned what he had written, and abandoned the project.”

Raleigh is one of those larger-than-life characters – an inveterate buccaneer and a gifted poet, parodied by Shakespeare in Love’s Labours Lost – who has long been an object of awestruck anecdote. See, for instance, John Aubrey’s sexual gossip about Raleigh in Brief Lives No 54 in this series. Nevertheless, in the composition of Raleigh’s History of the World, Orwell’s apocryphal tale does not quite square with the facts.

Sir Walter, who came from the West Country, had sprung to prominence under Elizabeth I, for whom he acted as an explorer and coloniser, notably in Virginia. His devotion to his queen (“My fidelity towards Her,” he writes in his preface to the History, “whom I must still honour in the dust”) always made him suspect in the eyes of her successor. On the death of the queen in 1603, he was tried for high treason on trumped-up charges and imprisoned in the Tower of London.

This was hardly an ideal research centre, but with characteristic energy Raleigh devoted years of work to his History of the World. Created with the aid of several assistants and a library of more than 500 books that Raleigh was allowed to keep in his quarters, this remarkable work of English vernacular would become a bestseller, with nearly 20 editions, and abridgments, in the years that followed its author’s execution.

Written during the first seven years of his long (1603-1616) incarceration, The History of the World is Raleigh’s most important prose work. It was originally intended as a multi-volume project, covering the creation of the world through Greek, Egyptian and biblical history to 146BC. Initially, the book seems to have been intended as an educational tool for Henry, Prince of Wales (1594-1612), with many references to warfare, kingship and strategy: “Whosoever commands the sea commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.”

Thanks to its association with the prince, the book was entered on the list of officially approved books held at Stationers’ Hall in 1611 and all seemed set fair. But when Henry died in 1612, Raleigh was forced to bring the project to a sudden and premature conclusion. His narrative ends abruptly with the second Macedonian war instead of continuing through two more volumes as originally intended.

Whatever the full explanation for this curtailment, it seems that Raleigh had already provoked some serious regal displeasure. In addition to his advice to the Prince of Wales, like many writers at this time, Raleigh used ancient history as a sly commentary on contemporary issues. The work, close to a million words in total, was eventually published in 1614. His work exemplifies the culture of history writing and historical thinking in the late Renaissance.

Like many early modern Europeans, Raleigh placed a special value on the study of the past. He was a scholar and a politico who saw historical expertise as not just a foundation for political practice and theory, but as a means of advancing his power in the court. The rise of historical scholarship during this period encouraged the circulation of its methods to other disciplines, such as philosophy, transforming Europe’s intellectual – and political – regimes.

It’s for these reasons, principally, that Raleigh’s work was construed by King James as critical of the new Stuart dynasty. Several months after publication in 1614, James ordered further sales of the book suppressed and all unsold copies to be confiscated “for divers exceptions, but especially for being too saucy in censuring Princes”. Once the king had suppressed it, it would later be subsequently reissued with no title page and no authorial identification. This did not prevent it from becoming a hot seller.

In 1616, through another twist, Raleigh was released from the Tower to lead one final expedition to South America to search out the gold mine he claimed to have discovered in Guyana 20 years before. The expedition was a disaster; his men attacked a Spanish outpost and in the battle his eldest son was killed. A commission of inquiry set up under Spanish pressure decided that the gold mine was a fantasy and revived the 1603 charge of treason. Raleigh was executed upon his return to England in 1618. This event has also entered folklore.

On feeling the edge of the axe before his execution, he is said to have remarked “’Tis a sharp remedy, but a sure one for all ills.” Reportedly, his last words were: “I have a long journey to take, and must bid the company farewell.”

After his death, Raleigh’s History of the World had a bibliographical history almost as exotic as its author, replete with success, controversy and more royal disapprobation. Despite James I’s ambivalence about the book, it survived through sheer popularity and the posthumous reputation of its swashbuckling author.

This is a just appreciation of an English classic. Raleigh’s History has many reflective passages, characteristically elegiac in tone, and one memorably famous passage which, in hindsight, expresses a kind of premonition about his fate. Raleigh was never less than mesmerising. His History speaks the man (pirate, poet, politician and provocateur): “O eloquent, just and mightie Death! Whom none could advise, thou hast perswaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised: thou hast drawne together all the farre stretched great-nesse, all the pride, crueltie, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, Hic jacet [here lies].”

A signature sentence

For this tide of mans life, after it once turneth and declineth, ever runneth with a perpetuall ebbe and falling streame, but never floweth againe: our leafe once fallen, springeth no more, neither doth the Sunne or the Summer adorne us againe, with garments of new leaves and flowers.

Three to compare

Edward Gibbon: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776)
TB Macaulay: The History of England From the Accession of James the Second (1848)
EH Gombrich: A Little History of the World (1935)