Dispersed throughout the centuries and across the globe – a sleepy Devonshire village, a 1950s Hollywood film set, a horse hurtling on a Victorian racecourse, the Beatles meditating in India, a border dispute in South America, and a storm raging in the Outer Banks of North Carolina in 1993… they all lead back to Sir Walter Raleigh. He is the man of paradoxes: the outsider who wanted access to the royal court, a monarchist who later became a republican hero, a lover and a fighter, a pirate and a poet, the last great Elizabethan superstar and the first victim of the Stuart dynasty. Let’s chart his rise, his fall, and his legacy.
