The Politics of the Scaffold: The Execution of Sir Walter Raleigh

Abstract

Sir Walter Raleigh’s performance on the scaffold in 1618 represented a turning point for his reputation. This dissertation uses the question of how Raleigh’s scaffold speech successfully transformed his legacy in the decade following his execution for treason as a case study of the operations of the early Stuart public sphere. Raleigh’s manipulation of the genre conventions of the last dying speech for an audience familiar with politique reasoning enabled his own narrative of his death to supersede the Crown-sponsored narratives of his execution in the evaluation of the publics which the competition between these accounts called into being. The popular interpretation of Raleigh as a victim rather than a traitor became entrenched in the 1620s as Raleigh the anti-Spanish Protestant hero became useful as a rhetorical counterpoint to Jacobean court corruption and as an oppositional voice in the Spanish match controversy. The competing interpretations of Raleigh’s death demonstrate the processes of the post-Reformation public sphere while the manuscript transmission of his scaffold speech and the predominance of sympathetic portrayals of Raleigh as a victim of Stuart injustice display the Jacobean regime’s inability to control popular political discourse during the period of transition from a post-Reformation to a pre-revolutionary public sphere. By contextualizing the range of source material invoking Raleigh’s memory – manuscript copies of his speech, libels and ballads reacting to his death, printed tracts justifying his execution or criticizing royal policies – this dissertation offers a holistic view of the Jacobean period and adds to the post-revisionist exploration of what form and extent of public sphere existed in early Stuart England.