On July 27, 1603, there was unusual activity at the Water Stairs, a pier in the Tower of London leading to the Traitor's Gate, through which all state criminals in England usually passed. Crowds of citizens were eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Tower Commandant's boat, which was carrying Queen Elizabeth's former favorite, 52-year-old Walter Raleigh. A navigator who founded the first English colony in the New World - Virginia, a pirate, one of the main participants in the defeat of the Spanish "Invincible Armada", but at the same time a scientist and poet who headed the humanist circle in London, Raleigh gained wide fame. The story of Raleigh's fall, which led him to the scaffold, is one of the most dramatic episodes in the political struggle of the first quarter of the seventeenth century, i.e., at a time when the immediate prerequisites for the English bourgeois Revolution were already taking shape.
Why was there so much fuss about the Raleigh case? This is explained by the place of this figure in the conditions of the origin of capitalist relations. In England, a significant part of the fencing of peasant lands had already been carried out, bloody legislation against expropriated ones continued to operate, and capital was growing. Another external source of so-called initial accumulation was income from the unfolding colonial policy. The capture of" their " overseas colonies was combined with the robbery of others, primarily Spanish. England gradually ousted Spain and Portugal from the ocean expanses, attacked their foreign possessions. The British fleet was returning home with holds full of gold and silver that had previously been siphoned off by the Spaniards through the exploitation of the New World. Some invaders plundered others and at the same time joined in the colonial adventures themselves. "Such was the dawn of the capitalist era of production." 1 And Raleigh was one of the "heroes" of this epic. His pirate exploits under Queen Elizabeth made him a n ...
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