Notes. This epitaph is best read as another essentially ambivalent assessment of Ralegh that nevertheless registers the impact of his good death on the scaffold.

“An Epitaph on Sir Walter Raleigh”

Heare heddlesse heedlesse matchlesse Rawly lies

who by deaths stroke gott life, that never dies

his body was the store house of good parts

and quintessence he was of armes and artes

Time wronged him but he more wronged time1

His right for wronge payes the deserts of crime.

Source. Folger MS V.a.339, fol. 252v

Other known sources. Ralegh, Poems 195; Bodleian MS Ashmole 781, p. 151; Bodleian MS Eng. Hist. c.272, p. 51

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¹   Time...time: this somewhat opaque line captures the ambivalent tone of the poem. Ralegh was both a victim and a villain; his death may have been for the wrong reasons, but it was nevertheless deserved (“Essex thy death’s reveng’d, Lo here I lie”). <back>