Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Paul Hyland is the author of the acclaimed books Indian Balm and Backwards Out of the Big World.
<p>‘This is a little-know slice of a well-known life… Ralegh’s Last Journey demonstrates that the subject’s path to death is as important as the path through life.’<br />Independent</p>
<p>Moving in its portrait of a mind at the end of its tether, Hyland’s account gives us a new perspective on Ralegh as man and explorer.’<br />Sunday Times</p>
<p>‘A brilliant example of a recurring type in English politics, the arrogant court favourite wo fell from the heavens, gained reinstatement but fell again in a shower of sparks.’<br />Financial Times</p>
A study in vanity and ambition, madness and resignation
Sir Walter Ralegh was the greatest courtier of his day, Elizabeth's favourite, dashing, brilliant, wily and powerful. But by the summer of 1618, his last voyage a failure and suffering the hostility of James I, he was escorted from Plymouth to London and the scaffold.
Paul Hyland unfurls the story of the last twenty weeks of Sir Walter's life, of that fateful journey, of Ralegh's grotesque behaviour along the way, of the web of deceit and counter-treachery woven between him and his reviled betrayer 'Judas' Stucley, and of their travelling companion the French physician and double agent Dr Manoury.
Around this last journey are intertwined other key players: Bes – Elizabeth Throckmorton – Ralegh's handsome, resourceful and distracted wife; Carew, their thirteen-year-old son; and Samuel King, privateering captain and link with past glories. On several occasions Ralegh has the opportunity to escape, and refuses it; then, when at last he opts for freedom (wearing a false beard), in a sprint down the Thames by rowing boat, he finds himself again betrayed.
A study in vanity and ambition, madness and resignation
- 35 b/w plates (16pp)
•Narrative history of the highest order – an irresistably fascinating tale of treachery and double-bluff
•Ralegh is popularly associated with Elizabeth I, America, tobacco and the potato. This book moves away from the well-trodden Elizabethan years to Sir Walter’s last months – when a lifetime of glamour, adventure and dash reaches its fatal climax under the new king, James I, as Ralegh delivers his famous speech at the scaffold
• The book’s ironic postscript is the story of the Judas figure, Sir Lewis Stucley, who, unable to cope with the posthumous veneration of Ralegh and his own scapegoating, suffers exile to Lundy Island, then madness and death.
Competition: None
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Paul Hyland is the author of the acclaimed books Indian Balm and Backwards Out of the Big World.