An ordained priest, Hakluyt held important positions at Bristol Cathedral and Westminster Abbey and was personal chaplain to Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, principal Secretary of State to Elizabeth I and James I.

Hakluyt's patrilineal ancestors were of Welsh extraction, rather than Dutch as is often suggested;[2] they appear to have settled in Herefordshire in England around the 13th century, and, according to antiquary John Leland, took their surname from the "Forest of Cluid in Radnorland.

A man named Walter Hakelut was knighted in the 34th year of Edward I (1305) and later killed at the Battle of Bannockburn, and in 1349 Thomas Hakeluyt was chancellor of the diocese of Hereford.

"[11] Entering Christ Church, Oxford,[12] in 1570 with financial support from the Skinners' Company,[10] "his exercises of duty first performed,"[11] he set out to read all the printed or written voyages and discoveries that he could find.

[10] Hakluyt's first publication[13] was one that he wrote himself, Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America and the Ilands Adjacent unto the Same, Made First of all by our Englishmen and Afterwards by the Frenchmen and Britons (1582).

At the age of 30, being acquainted with "the chiefest captaines at sea, the greatest merchants, and the best mariners of our nation,"[11] he was selected as chaplain and secretary to accompany Stafford, now English ambassador at the French court, to Paris in 1583.

In accordance with the instructions of Secretary Francis Walsingham, he occupied himself chiefly in collecting information of the Spanish and French movements, and "making diligent inquirie of such things as might yield any light unto our westerne discoveries in America.

[11] The first fruits of Hakluyt's labours in Paris were embodied in his important work entitled A Particuler Discourse Concerninge the Greate Necessitie and Manifolde Commodyties That Are Like to Growe to This Realme of Englande by the Westerne Discoueries Lately Attempted, Written in the Yere 1584, which Sir Walter Raleigh commissioned him to prepare.

His objective was to recommend the enterprise of establishing English plantations in the region of North America not yet colonized by Europeans, and thus gain the Queen's support for Raleigh's expedition.

[10] In May 1585 when Hakluyt was in Paris with the English Embassy, the Queen granted to him the next prebendary at Bristol Cathedral that should become vacant,[5][15] to which he was admitted in 1585 or 1586 and held with other preferments till his death.

[16] The attention that the book excited in Paris encouraged Hakluyt to prepare an English translation and publish it in London under the title A Notable Historie Containing Foure Voyages Made by Certayne French Captaynes unto Florida (1587).

Between 1598 and 1600 appeared the final, reconstructed and greatly enlarged edition of The Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation in three volumes.

In the dedication of the second volume (1599) to his patron, Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, Hakluyt strongly urged the minister as to the expediency of colonising Virginia.

[5] A few copies of this monumental work contain a map of great rarity, the first on the Mercator projection made in England according to the true principles laid down by Edward Wright.

[10] These religious occupations have occasioned reconsideration of the role played by spiritual concerns in Hakluyt's writings on exploration, settlement, and England's relations with its Catholic rivals.

This work was intended to encourage the young colony of Virginia; Scottish historian William Robertson wrote of Hakluyt, "England is more indebted for its American possessions than to any man of that age.

George Bruner Parks has theorized that publication at that time would have been inconvenient to England because after England had successfully helped Holland and Spain to negotiate the Twelve Years' Truce during the Eighty Years' War, the work would have supported English claims for free seas against Spain, but not its claims for closed seas against Holland.

[10] By the time of his death, he had amassed a small fortune out of his various emoluments and preferments, of which the last was the clergy house of Gedney, Lincolnshire, presented to him by his younger brother Oliver in 1612.

In Svalbard (Spitsbergen), the Hakluythovden headland and Hakluytodden landspit in the northwestern region of Amsterdam Island are named after Richard Hakluyt.