Page:EB1911 - Volume 22.djvu/888

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
RALEIGH—RALPH
871

Raleigh was sent to the Tower, where he remained till the 19th of March 1616. His estate of Sherborne, which he had transferred to his son, was taken by the king, who availed himself of a technical irregularity in the transfer. A sum of £8000 offered in compensation was only paid in part. Raleigh’s confinement was easy, and he applied himself to chemical experiments and literature. He had been known as one of the most poetical of the minor lyric poets of an age of poetry from his youth. In prison he composed many treatises, and the only volume of his vast History of the World published. He also invented an elixir which appears to have been a very formidable quack stimulant. Hope of release and of a renewal of activity never deserted him, and he strove to reach the ear of the king by appealing to successive ministers and favourites. At last he secured his freedom in a way discreditable to all concerned. He promised the king to find a gold mine in Guiana without trenching on a Spanish possession. It must have been notorious to everybody that this was impossible, and the Spanish ambassador, Gondomar, warned the king that the Spaniards had settlements on the coast. The king, who was in need of money, replied that if Raleigh was guilty of piracy he should be executed on his return. Raleigh gave promises he obviously knew he could not keep, and sailed on the 17th of March 1617, relying on the chapter of accidents, and on vague intrigues he had entered into in Savoy and France. The expedition, on which the wreck of his fortune was spent, was ill-appointed and ill-manned. It reached the mouth of the Orinoco on the last day of 1617. Raleigh was ill with fever, and remained at Trinidad. He sent five small vessels up the Orinoco under his most trusted captain, Lawrence Keymis, with whom went his son Walter and a nephew. The expedition found a Spanish settlement on the way to the supposed mine, and a fight ensued in which Sir Walter’s son and several Spaniards were killed. After some days of bush fighting with the Spaniards, and of useless search for the mine, Keymis returned to Sir Walter with the news of his son’s death and his own utter ruin. Stung by Raleigh’s reproach Keymis killed himself, and then after a miserable scene of recriminations, hesitations and mutiny, the expedition returned home. Raleigh was arrested, and in pursuance of the king’s promise to Gondomar was executed under his old sentence on the 29th of October 1618. During his confinement he descended to some unworthy supplications and devices, but when he knew his end to be inevitable he died with serenity and dignity. His wife survived him, and he left a son, Carew Raleigh. His enmity to Spain made him a popular hero.

Authorities.—An edition of his Works in eight volumes was published in London in 1823. It contains a Life by Oldys and Birch, written with all the knowledge then available. A Life of Sir Walter Raleigh (London, 1806, 2nd ed.) was much used by Southey in his biography of Sir Walter Raleigh in vol. iv. of The British Admirals in the Cabinet Cyclopaedia (London, 1837). Two biographies appeared simultaneously, Life of Sir Walter Raleigh by J. A. Saint John, and Life of Sir Walter Raleigh by E. Edwards (London, 1868). Mr Edwards’s work is in two volumes, of which the second contains the correspondence, and is still the best authority. Smaller lives, which in some cases contain new matter, are those by E. W. Gosse, “Raleigh” in English Worthies (1886); W. Stebbing, Sir W. Raleigh (London, 1891, and 1899); Martin Hume, Sir Walter Raleigh (London 1897); and H. de Selincourt, Great Ralegh (1908). For special episodes see Sir John Pope Hennessy, Sir Walter Raleigh in Ireland (London, 1883), and T. N. Brushfield, Raleghana (Ashburton, 1896). Two separate editions of Raleigh’s poems have been published, Poems, with biography and critical introduction by Sir F. Brydges (London, 1813), and Poems of Raleigh with those of Sir H. Wotton, &c., edited by J. Hannah (London, 1892). S. R. Gardiner made a careful examination of the events of Raleigh’s life after 1603 in his History of England from the Accession of James I. to the Outbreak of the Civil War (1883–84).  (D. H.) 

RALEIGH, the capital of North Carolina, U.S.A., and the county-seat of Wake county, about 145 m. N. by W. of Wilmington. Pop. (1890) 12,678; (1900) 13,643, of whom 5721 were negroes; (1910, census) 19,218. Area 4 sq. m. It is served by the Southern, the Seaboard Air Line, the Raleigh & Southport, and the Norfolk Southern railways. The city lies about 360 ft. above sea-level on ground sloping gently in all directions from its centre, where there is a beautiful park of 4 acres known as Union Square, in which is the State Capitol and from which extend four broad streets. On the western border of the city is Pullen Park (about 40 acres), including the campus of the College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts; it was named in honour of the donor, R. Stanhope Pullen, who was also a benefactor of the college. The State Capitol (1840) is surmounted by a dome and modelled to some extent after the Parthenon and other buildings of ancient Greece; the first Capitol (begun in 1794) was burned in 1831. In the vicinity are the Governor’s Mansion, the Supreme Court Building, the State Library, the building of the State Department of Agriculture, housing the State Museum (of geology, mineralogy, agriculture and horticulture, botany, zoology, ethnology, &c.), and the Post Office. Elsewhere are the County Court House, the State Hospital for the Insane (1856), founded through the efforts of Dorothea Lynde Dix, situated on Dix Hill and having in connexion with it a colony for epileptics; a state school for white blind, deaf and dumb (1845), and a state institute for negro deaf mutes and blind (1867); the state penitentiary (with a department for the criminal insane); a National Cemetery and a Confederate Cemetery; a Methodist Orphanage (1900) and a Roman Catholic Orphanage, the St Luke’s Home for old ladies (1895; under the King’s Daughters), a State (Confederate) Soldiers’ Home (1891), and three private hospitals and the Rex public hospital (1909). Raleigh is the seat of the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts (1889), in connexion with which is an agricultural experiment station; of three schools for girls—Peace Institute (Presbyterian, 1857), St Mary’s School (Protestant Episcopal, 1842) and Meredith College (Baptist, 1891); of the medical department of the University of North Carolina; and of two schools for negroes—Shaw University (Baptist, 1865), with 530 students in 1908–1909, and St Augustine’s School (Protestant Episcopal, 1868), a training school, with 466 students in 1908–1909. In 1908 the State Library (founded 1841) contained 39,000 volumes, the Supreme Court Library (founded 1870) about 17,000 volumes and the Olivia Raney public library (founded 1901) 9250 volumes. The city is the see of a Protestant Episcopal bishop. The principal industrial interests are trade in leaf tobacco and cotton raised in the vicinity, and the manufacture of cotton goods, phosphate fertilizers, foundry and machine-shop products, wooden-ware, &c. The Seaboard Air Line and the Raleigh & Southport railways have repair shops here. In 1905 the factory product was valued at $1,086,671, 14.7% more than in 1900. Electric power is conveyed to the city from Buckhorn Falls, on the Cape Fear river, about 26 m. south of Raleigh, and from Milburnie on the Neuse river, 6 m. distant.

In 1788 the site of the city, then known as Wake Court House, was chosen for the capital of the state; and in 1792 the city was laid out and named in honour of Sir Walter Raleigh. In 1794 the state legislature met here for the first time. Raleigh was incorporated in 1795 and was reincorporated in 1803; its present charter dates from 1899. General William T. Sherman’s army, on its march through the Carolinas, passed through the city on the 13th of April 1865. Raleigh was the birthplace of President Andrew Johnson; the house in which he was born has been removed to Pullen Park. By an extension of its boundaries the city nearly doubled its area and increased its population in 1907.

RALPH (d. 1122), archbishop of Canterbury, called Ralph de Turbine, or Ralph d’Escures from his father’s estate of Escures, near Séez in Normandy, entered the abbey of St Martin at Séez in 1079, and ten years later became abbot of this house. Soon afterwards he paid a visit to England, where his half-brother, Seffrid Pelochin, was bishop of Chichester, and in 1100 he took refuge in England from the violence of Robert of Belesme, passing some time with his friends St Anselm and Gundulf. In March 1108 he succeeded Gundulf as bishop of Rochester. After Anselm’s death in April 1109 Ralph acted as administrator of the see of Canterbury until April 1114, when he himself was chosen archbishop at Windsor. In this capacity he was very assertive of the rights of the archbishop of Canter-