Walter Raleigh Beheaded

October 29, 1618

On a frosty October morning in Old Palace Yard, Westminster, Sir Walter Raleigh mounted the scaffold, felt the edge of the axe, and told the executioner it was a sharp medicine but a sound cure. His head fell with one stroke. The Elizabethan age had now genuinely ended, its last great adventurer dispatched by a king who had never liked him.