Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

Published by the St Edward’s School Press, Oxford, 2025

© Susan Brigden, Richard Davenport Hines, Alexandra Gajda, Rachel Hammersley, Tom Holt, John Morrill, Paul Seaward, John Spurr and Brian Young

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

St Edward’s School, Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 7NN www.stedwardsoxford.org

ISBN: 978-1-0369-1340-3

Contents

Foreword .................................................................................................................................................................... 1

A Good Man’s Life Richard Davenport Hines .............................................................................................................................. 2 A Suitor For Queen Elizabeth Susan Brigden ......................................................................................................................................................... 6 Autobiographical Apology As Political Intervention In Late Elizabethan And Early Stuart England Alexandra Gajda .................................................................................................................................................. 16 Cromwell In The King’s Inn or What Did He Say On 4th July 1653? John Morrill .......................................................................................................................................................... 30 Two Speeches Made In The House Of Peers and the Civil War Polemic of Edward Hyde Paul Seaward ......................................................................................................................................................... 40 An Honest Archdeacon And A Reasonable Philosopher John Spurr .............................................................................................................................................................. 50 Cromwell Among The Radicals: The Puzzling Case Of Thomas Hollis Rachel Hammersley . ....................................................................................................................................... 60 In Christ Church Meadow: Dr Johnson, The Reverend John Taylor, And The Pursuit Of Happiness In Enlightenment England Brian Young ........................................................................................................................................................... 70 Ode to Blair Tom Holt ................................................................................................................................................................ 80

Foreword

I N SEPTEMBER 1980 we sat together in the tea-room of Cambridge University Library and contemplated Susan’s impending remove to Oxford, where she knew no one. John, oracular, spoke of who and what she would find there, until finally he pronounced ‘Blair Worden is the person you must meet’. He described the wit, the brilliance, the kindness, the mischief of his friend of many years. Now, more than forty years on, and improbably to mark Blair’s eightieth birthday, we have brought together tributes from other devoted friends. The idea of the celebratory day and of this volume is that it should reflect the whole of Blair’s career. So there are contributions by those he taught as undergraduates, those whose excellent doctorates he supervised, those he mentored, and those who he first knew as colleagues. All became his friends. Everyone approached agreed with joy to contribute, and we selected those who first met him from each of the last four decades of the twentieth century. We were prompted to devise a day in celebration and gratitude by Chris Jones. His was the vision and his was the power to make it happen. Chris first met Blair when he arrived from Blair’s old school – St Edward’s in Oxford – to Selwyn College Cambridge where Blair spent a couple of happy years before returning to Oxford. Chris combines devotion to Blair with dynamism and he ensured that all the arrangements for the day of celebration (4 April 2025) and the printing of this volume was a collaboration between himself and the current authorities at St Edward’s School, urged on by Malcolm Oxley, Blair’s wondrous history master in the early 1960s and still his close friend. That tells us much about both of them. Blair’s gift of friendship inspired this book and its title.

SEB | JSM | 12 January 2025

1

BLAIR WORDEN - A BOOK OF FRIENDSHIP

A Good Man’s Life Richard Davenport Hines

2

RICHARD DAVENPORT HINES

F IFTY YEARS AGO , reviewing Antonia Fraser’s biography of Oliver Cromwell in the New York Review of Books , Blair Worden doubted that she could tell a rising gentleman from a falling one, or a Presbyterian Independent from an Independent Presbyterian. Nor can I. When Conrad Russell wrote in The Causes of the English Civil War that Sir John Culpepper’s remarks on monopolies in 1640 were ‘too well known to need quoting’ he had not met me. My ignorance of the Stuart kingdoms is too sad a fact to insist upon. I am here by one happy chance: that I was an undergraduate at Selwyn College, Cambridge in 1972-3, the first academic year that Blair was Director of Studies in History there . I am here to do Wordsworth’s bidding: to show ‘that best portion of a good man’s life, | His little, unremembered, nameless acts | Of kindness and of love’. Blair was twenty-seven when first I met him: so spry, keen, and gleeful; boyish, festive, and chirpy . He had a sharp sense of performance, and a rich pictorial imagination, which both came to the fore in his direction of an acclaimed production of Chekhov at Cambridge. I kept notes of some of his apothegms at this time: ‘There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.’ Or: ‘Advances to historical understanding are rarely achieved without temporary costs to a sense of historical proportion.’ Blair had a dynamic father, a pioneer of Life Sciences who was appointed to his first professorial chair at the age of 28, a man who hurtled into rooms at full throttle and was full of initiatives and experimental ideas: I remember his beaming pride at the critical acclaim of The Rump Parliament in 1974. Blair was self-aware whereas his father had an unguarded naivete; but the two of them had the same vitality and systematic inquisitiveness. It felt odd to know that the house in Huntingdon where Alastair Worden opened his laboratory in 1951 was Cromwell’s birthplace. Odd to know, too, that Blair helped to buy his father’s first rabbits. Selwyn undergraduate historians basked in the glow of the reviews of The Rump Parliament . Let me quote from Geoffrey Elton’s piece in the Spectator : ‘This is political history at its best – anchored in reality, fascinated by men’s motives and doings, marching steadily through the events to bring out the issues and confusions.’ Blair’s investigative scholarship, his critical scrutiny of evidence, and literary gifts were shot through by his sense of fun. ‘Worden,’ Elton wrote, ‘can jest without destroying the atmosphere of the scene – a rare gift.’ ‘Without a powerful and disciplined historical imagination Dr Worden would, on such a subject, have written … [a] worthy dull book. As it is, he has written one to fascinate and captivate.’

3

BLAIR WORDEN - A BOOK OF FRIENDSHIP

To Elton’s praise I add another thought. Meekness is a disability in historians. One cannot write prose of beauty, grace and exactitude without a high level of self confidence. Blair wrote his masterwork in his twenties: his prodigious sureness of himself is still beautiful to behold. As Director of Studies Blair was patient and painstaking with troubled undergraduates. He made unavailing efforts to save a wilful boy who would not allow himself to succeed: a Traveller who was determined that Cambridge reject him because of his background. He went beyond reasonable limits to save a self absorbed worm who kept failing exams. But he had no truck with complacent idlers who used the varnish of snobbish charm to shine. I remember Blair’s grin after he had despatched, with a wigging, the senior history master of Radley, who had appeared at Selwyn to complain that Blair had not played a straight bat by rejecting an applicant who was a well-spoken, clean-limbed conformist without a spark of originality in his noddle. Blair had a wholesome distaste for the smarmy self-confidence of youths from those non-Clarendon boarding schools where Debenham was over-friendly with Freebody. Of St Edward’s School, Oxford, though, he spoke with pride, gratitude, love, and derision. The grateful love went to his inspirational teacher, Malcolm Oxley. The mockery, and O! it was delicious, was directed at Pat Brims, a dithering classicist, the most virginal and bewildered of bachelors, who was deputed to instruct Blair in the Facts of Life. Blair’s imitation of Brims stammering and wincing his way through his narrative, taking refuge in Latin at every step, is unforgettable: ‘Vagina! That of course means a sheath and is much used by Livy’. Blair’s best gifts to me were extracurricular. He allowed me to help him, in a small way, with the proofs and indexing of The Rump Parliament . The thrill of this work impelled me to follow him into authorship. Then there were the Watergate hearings. Blair used to take me into Selwyn’s senior common room at midnight and we would watch Professor Archibald Cox’s televised interrogation of Richard Nixon’s accomplices in the plot against American democracy. Blair’s commentary, with its shrieks of scornful hilarity, taught me as much about statecraft and historical criticism as Guiccardini or Clarendon.

4

RICHARD DAVENPORT HINES

Few of you will see the common ground between “Bongbong” Marcos and Hugh Trevor-Roper. But it exists. As Senior Tutor at St Edmund Hall, Blair had the exacting task of conciliating suave men from the Foreign Office who besought the college not to humiliate the worthless future president of the Philippines by sending him down after he failed his PPE exams. Blair, I think, devised the arrangement whereby Bongbong was awarded a face-saving, if meaningless, special diploma in social studies. It was time-consuming, mentally depleting bosh like this that for twenty-five years diverted Blair from his scholarly avocations. Blair has also given his time, munificently, to the Nachlass of Hugh Dacre, at great cost to his own research and writing. For over twenty years, as the Dacre literary executor, he has proven his loving unselfishness, indeed his sacred self abnegation. He gave lavish attention to rescuing the unfinished manuscript of Trevor-Roper’s best book, his biography of Sir Theodore de Mayerne. Blair criss crossed the continent to check its sources line by line. Europe’s Physician , which Yale published in 2006, expresses Blair’s capacity for love, charity and reverence. I have been one of Blair’s minions in the ordering of the Nachlass , editing four posthumous Trevor-Roper volumes and watching him oversee the selections of essays arranged by John Robertson, Jeremy Cater, and others. I stand agape at his passionate commitment and at his self-control when associates fail him or waste his time. Blair occasionally shows the noblest neurosis of intellectuals, what Germans call Torschlusspanik , that is, alarm at the shutting of gates of opportunity. Many of us over 60 have frantic moments of reckoning when we realise that the time and strength for new investigation and renewed critical thought are expiring. Blair has saintly tenderness. I have seen him shaken with sorrow at funerals of hard men whom others respected rather than loved. He hates physical or mental cruelty. On a visit to Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire he saw a field of goats which had such long toenails that they could barely walk. In distress, he wrote to the Dent-Brocklehurst family beseeching them to trim the goats’ toenails. That incident epitomises to me the pure, thoughtful and sumptuous goodness of Blair. I was a guest at his wedding to Vicki: truly the happiest, gentlest, most endearing and deftly-organized event of its kind. Nothing that I say about Blair as a tutor and mentor matters as much as saying what a joy it is to see the radiant serenity of the married man.

5

BLAIR WORDEN - A BOOK OF FRIENDSHIP

A Suitor For Queen Elizabeth Susan Brigden

6

SUSAN BRIGDEN

F OR THE CELEBRATION of your 60th birthday I essayed a paper on romance at the early Tudor court. Now twenty years on, I move twenty years on to consider a putative romance at Elizabeth’s court. Romance at Elizabeth’s court was a subject close to your heart as you pondered brilliantly and profoundly upon the queen’s greatly dreaded marriage to the duke of Anjou, on Sir Philip Sidney and his Old Arcadia , and penetrated the ethical and political meanings of that work. The romance I now imagine involves, perhaps, no deep ethical considerations. I take you to the English court, to the London streets, to the loggia of St Mark’s in Venice, and to foreign courts where the talk in 1558 and 1559 and later turned on the question of Queen Elizabeth of England’s marriage. Would she marry a foreign prince and turn her kingdom into the apanage of another state, or choose a subject as consort, thereby disparaging herself and bringing jealousy and disdain to disrupt her court? Would she be governed by her senses or by reason, by love or by duty? Memories of Catherine Parr’s marriage to Sir Thomas Seymour, and of Queen Mary’s to Philip of Spain were bright, and the example of Mary Queen of Scots’ marital adventures was instructive. Whom would Elizabeth choose, if anyone? Marriage did seem to be her most likely course. On 23rd January 1559 Il Schifanoya, a Venetian agent, reported to the Mantuan ambassador to King Philip on the varying opinions of whom the queen would marry. Some thought that she would choose ‘an individual who till now has been in France on account of his religion’, who had not yet returned to England, ‘it being known how much she loved and loves him. He is a very handsome gentleman, whose name I forget’. 1 A week later he knew his name: ‘the vulgar’ believed that ‘one Master Pickering ( Pincurin ) will be her husband’. Sir William Pickering had been lying ill in Dunkirk for three months, but ‘should he recover, I hear that he has something good in hand’. 2 A letter sent to Venice early in February reported the view that Elizabeth ‘will marry to please herself … and perhaps a person of not much lineage’. The person most fancied was a gentleman who was ill in Flanders.

1 Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Relating to English Affairs, Existing in the Archives of Venice and in Other Libraries of Northern Italy , VII, 1558-1580 , ed. Rawdon Brown and G. Cavendish Bentinck (London, 1890) ( CSPVen. ), 11, p. 19. 2 CSPVen. , 18, p. 27.

7

BLAIR WORDEN - A BOOK OF FRIENDSHIP

‘Guess who he is!’ 3 At the end of the month the general opinion was that Elizabeth would take as consort ‘Master Pickering ( quel Mastro Pincarin )’. 4 In early May ‘ M[aest]ro. Piccherin ’ was ‘regarded by all the people as the future husband of her Majesty. He remains at home ( in casa ) [in London], courted by many lords of the council, and by very many other lords and knights. He has not yet appeared at court’. Reportedly, Parliament was to settle what title he should be given, ‘but nothing was done’. 5 Spanish observers, too, took notice of Pickering. Already in December 1558 the Count of Feria believed that Elizabeth would not marry a foreigner, but ‘for caprice’. He named Pickering. 6 By 10th May 1559 he reported that in London ‘they are giving 25 to 100’ that Pickering would be king. Feria’s evidence was that Pickering, who had very recently returned to England from Germany, had been ‘much visited by the queen’s favourites’. ‘She saw him secretly two days after his arrival, and yesterday he came to the palace publicly and remained with her four or five hours’. Moreover, ‘they tell me Lord Robert is not so friendly with him as he was’. On the day of Pickering’s secret visit Dudley was hunting in Windsor and did not know of it. ‘If these things were not of such great importance and so lamentable some of them would be very ridiculous’, thought Feria. 7 The Spanish ambassador, Alvaro de Quadra, bishop of Aquila, reported that ‘Pickering entertains largely and is very extravagant. He himself always dines apart with music playing’. 8 The scene of this entertainment was his ‘faire greate house’ in St Andrew Undershaft in the City of London. 9 On 21st June, so De Quadra reported, the queen had gone to Greenwich, ‘where she is very solitary’, many of her courtiers having left for their country estates. ‘She has ordered Pickering, with whom she has had long conversations lately, to be given lodgings in the palace, and they say that she has made him a member of the council’. 10 But, as for Pickering himself, he said that ‘the queen would laugh at him, and all the rest of them as he knew that she meant to die a maid’. 11 3 CSPVen ., 19, p. 28. 4 CSPVen ., 28, pp. 36-7. 5 CSPVen ., 71, p. 85. 6 Calendar of Letters and State Papers relating to English Affairs preserved principally in the Archives of Simancas , 1, Elizabeth, 1558-1567 , ed. M.A.S. Hume (London, 1892) ( CLSP ), 4, p. 8. 7 CLSP , 31, p. 67. 8 CLSP , 35, pp. 73-4. 9 A Survey of London by John Stow , ed. C.L. Kingsford, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1908), I, p. 146.

10 CLSP , 39, p. 79. 11 CLSP , 35, p. 74.

8

SUSAN BRIGDEN

Pickering’s perceived intimacy with the queen stirred enmity at court; not only because some had hopes for marriage to Elizabeth themselves, but also because he was not noble. In September De Quadra wrote to the duke of Alva that Pickering was sending a challenge to the earl of Bedford – in fact, to the earl of Arundel – ‘for having spoken ill of him at a banquet’. Pickering’s second was to be Dudley, who had promised to deliver the challenge. 12 If the duel did take place, it remained secret, and did not end the animosity. Late in October, as ‘Pickering was about to enter the chapel, which is inside the queen’s apartments, the earl of Arundel came to the door and told him that he knew very well that that was a place for lords, and he must go to the presence chamber’. Pickering answered ‘that he knew that, and he also knew that Arundel was an impudent, discourteous knave’. Hearing this, ‘without answering a word’, Arundel stormed off, leaving Pickering to enter. Pickering talked openly of the encounter but refrained from challenging Arundel ‘as he holds him of small account’. 13 Arundel was said to have sold his lands and was ready to flee the realm with the money ‘because he could not abide in England if Mr Pickering should marry the queen for they were enemies’. 14 In Venice, where the news of the world was ventilated among the ‘ galantuomini ’ gathering of a morning under the loggia of St Mark’s, they speculated upon the marriage of ‘ la regina d’Inghilterra ’. Among them was the papal protonotary Pietro Carnesecchi, who was intrigued by the romance of ‘ la divina principessa ’. We know of his speculation because, ominously, the Holy Office became interested in it as part of their long investigation of Carnesecchi’s heresy and heretical associations. One such association was with Edward’s resident ambassador at the court of Henry II of France. Under interrogation in 1567, Carnesecchi claimed at first that he could not remember the ambassador’s name, but then admitted that he had been more than usually ‘ adomesticato ’ with ‘ il cavalliero Picherino ’. 15 Carnesecchi learnt – from Guido Giannetti da Fano, who heard from friends in England 16 – that Elizabeth had promised Parliament not to marry a foreigner. Rather, she had chosen ‘a private gentleman, who was, however, noble and well-endowed in body and mind, who had followed her in every fortune’. He had gone into exile in Mary’s reign as Elizabeth’s 12 CLSP , 62, p. 96. That the challenge was to the earl of Arundel is shown, from Spanish sources, by ed. Simon Adams, Household Accounts and Disbursement Books of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, 1558-1561, 1584-1586 , Camden Fifth Series, 6 (Royal Historical Society, 1995), p. 46, n. 44. 13 CLSP , 70, p. 109. 14 Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, of the Reign of Elizabeth, 2 , 1559-1560, ed. J. Stevenson (1865) ( CSPFor ), 3(5). 15 I Processi Inquisitoriali di Pietro Carnesecchi (1557-1567): Edizione Critica , II, I Processi sotto Paolo IV e Pio IV (1557-1567) , eds. Massimo Firpo and Dario Marcatto (3 vols., Collectanea Archivi Vaticani, 48, Città del Vaticano, Archivio Segreto Vaticano, 2000) ( PC ), II.2, p. 509. 16 PC, II.2 , p. 512.

9

BLAIR WORDEN - A BOOK OF FRIENDSHIP

‘most faithful and devoted servant’. This gentleman was ‘ il cavalliero Picherino ’. 17 But Carnesecchi could hardly believe the marriage rumours to be true, even if he wished to, even though this ‘ gentilhomo sia amico mio ’, ‘ quello mio amico ’. The marriage must be to Elizabeth’s dishonour, because Pickering was ‘of low fortune .. . having no more to recommend him than physical beauty, which would give people reason to think that she had allowed herself to be led more by her senses than by reason’. 18 No portrait of Pickering survives. Although a full-length portrait of him on canvas hung in the gallery of his old friend, the earl of Leicester, at Kenilworth in c. 1578. 19 Only a funeral monument exists, at St Helen Bishopsgate in the City of London, donated by Pickering’s devoted friends at his death in 1575; not by his grieving widow for he never married. 20 We hear that he was ‘of tall stature, and handsome’. 21 Moreover, and crucially, he was eligible – as Dudley was not, as other married courtiers and nobles were not – to be Elizabeth’s consort. Pickering had had a turbulent career before he returned to England on 4th May 1559. 22 The son of Henry VIII’s knight marshal, he was part of a brilliant generation at St John’s College, Cambridge, where, with Robert Ascham and John Ponet, he became an advocate of John Cheke and Thomas Smith’s attempt to reform the pronunciation of Greek. 23 He was soon noticed by Thomas Cromwell, and joined his household. From Cromwell’s service, he passed to the earl of Surrey’s, and from his to that of John Dudley, duke of Northumberland. Having three successive patrons who died on the scaffold concentrated his aversion to court service. Offered a place in Edward VI’s privy chamber, ‘he seyth he can [not] abyde to take the paynes yn that place’; instead, he served the king as ambassador at the French court. 24 When he returned to England in Mary’s reign, Pickering became one of the principal 17 PC , II.2, p. 537: ‘ un cavaliere privato, ma però nobile et ben dotato del corpo et de l’animo, il quale ha seguitato constantemente le parte sue in ogni fortuna ’; ‘ troppo fedele et affettionato servitore di essa ’. 18 PC , II.2 , pp. 510-511, 541: ‘ di bassa fortuna quanto perché, non essendo in lui parte niuna più eccellente che la bellezza del corpo, daria occasione di pensare che ella si fusse lasciata tirare del senso più che dalla ragione ’. 19 Elizabeth Goldring, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and the World of Elizabethan Art (New Haven and London, 2014), pp. 184, 262. 20 The Parish of St. Helen, Bishopsgate , pp. 66-7, plates 84-6. 21 CSPVen ., 28, p. 36. 22 For Pickering’s career: Susan Doran, ‘Pickering, Sir William (1516/17-1575)’, ODNB ; Susan Brigden, ‘Epic Romance: How the Duchess of Richmond read her Ariosto’, The Review of English Studies, new series, 69:291 (2018), pp. 644-6, 650-1, 659. 23 Richard Simpson, ‘Disputed Sounds: Thomas Smith on the Pronunciation of Ancient Greek – Representing the Evanescent in Sound and Language’ in The Cambridge Connection in Tudor England: Humanism, Reform, Rhetoric, Politics , eds. John F. McDiarmid and Susan Wabuda (Leiden and Boston, 2021), pp. 24, 52. 24 Ed. Susan Brigden, ‘The Letters of Richard Scudamore to Sir Philip Hoby, September 1549-March 1555’, Camden Miscellany , 30, Camden Fourth Series, 30 (1990), p. 144.

10

SUSAN BRIGDEN

conspirators, with Thomas Wyatt, who opposed Mary’s marriage to Philip of Spain and conceived a shadowy plot to place Elizabeth on the throne. 25 As the conspiracy was discovered he escaped to France and joined Sir Peter Carew in exile, where they were suspected of planning an invasion of the English coast. 26 When his fellow conspirators began to doubt his allegiance – ‘perceyving hym nothing forwarde but ever to draw back’ – Pickering, fearing assassination, left their company secretly and travelled in Italy and Germany. 27 Pardoned in December 1554, he came home to England. In March 1558 he went to Germany to recruit soldiers in Germany for Mary’s defence of Calais. 28 When Elizabeth ascended the throne he might have expected high office, at the least. An ambivalent picture of Pickering emerges. His friend Carnesecchi described him as ‘cavalliero et literato ’. Asked what they had talked about in France, Carnesecchi remembered nothing in particular, except that ‘it delighted him more to talk of love than of religion’. 29 But reformers claimed him as one of their own and, as became Edward’s ambassador, Pickering professed himself evangelical. Carnesecchi recalled him ‘making open profession of believing as his king did and speaking freely’. 30 To amuse his life-long friend William Cecil, and himself, Pickering mocked the ‘company of vncomly cardinalles’, reporting the endless popish ceremonies at Michaelmas 1551: ‘at last wt divers benediccions and combersom cortoyses this pageant … ended wt a masking mas of romishe requiem’. 31 At Rheims in October 1552, when the cardinal of Lorraine showed him the sacred ampoule holding the ‘precius oyntement’ which sanctified the French crown, ‘sent from heven above a 1000 yeres ago and ever since by a miracle preserved’, by which the French kings cured scrofula, ‘I iudged by his lookes he thought I lytle beleved’. 32 John Jewel described Pickering, the queen’s suitor, as ‘a wise and religious man, and highly gifted as to personal qualities’. 33 An ambassador sent by Edward to reside at the French court might well combine courtly grace with loyal adherence to evangelical religion. 25 Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the reign of Mary I, 1553-1558 , ed. C.S. Knighton (London, 1998) ( CSPDom, Mary ), 40; Calendar of Letters, Despatches and State Papers, relating to the Negotiations between England and Spain , XII, Mary, January-July 1554 , ed. Royall Tyler (1949) ( CSPSp ), pp. 94, 124, 130; E. Harris Harbison, Rival Ambassadors at the Court of Queen Mary (Princeton, 1940), pp. 111, 121, 125, 126. 26 Harbison, Rival Ambassadors , pp. 156-7. 27 TNA, SP 69/4, fo. 65r-66r ( CSPFor, Mary , 198, p. 79); CSPSp , XII, pp. 252-3. 28 CSPDom, Mary , 728, 776-7. 29 PC , II(2), p. 512. ‘ Si diletettava più presto di parlare d’amore che della religione’. 30 PC , II(2), p. 512. ‘ che faceva professione aperta di creder come il re suo con parlare liberamente ’.

31 TNA, SP 68/9, fo. 4r-v ( CSPFor, 1547-1553 , 455, pp. 176-7). 32 TNA, SP 68/10, fo. 84r ( CSPFor, 1547-1553 , 567, p. 222). 33 The Zurich Letters , A.D. 1558-1579 , ed. H. Robinson (Parker Society, Cambridge, 1842), p. 34.

11

BLAIR WORDEN - A BOOK OF FRIENDSHIP

We hear of Pickering’s glamour and personal charms. The Venetian ambassador in Brussels reported that ‘he was of tall stature, and handsome, and very successful with women, for he is said to have enjoyed the intimacy of many and great ones’. 34 If he cut swathes through the ladies of the French court or the English one, we are given no names, but some fleeting evidence remains, some of it in his books. Pickering had a notable library. 35 In his will of 31st December 1574 he insisted that it should not be dispersed and left it entire to whoever would marry his illegitimate daughter Hester. 36 Pickering’s books have since been dispersed, among at least twelve libraries, and in private collections. More than forty survive, and are recognizable as his either because of his armorial bindings or his flamboyant signature. Some have revealing inscriptions and show shared ownership. And three do suggest his closeness to particular women, two of whom stood close to the throne. His copy of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso , signed ‘WPykerynge 1545’, and with a Greek ‘π’ for Pickering, shows his admiration for and service of Mary, duchess of Richmond, Henry VIII’s daughter-in-law. She was, for ‘π’, ‘ Assai più d’altrui [far beyond others]’. They inscribed private messages at special moments in the book where its fantasy world had significance for their own lives. 37 Inscriptions in a copy of the second volume of the Greek New Testament printed by Robert Estienne at Paris in 1546 find Pickering once again among his noble and literary friends. One was ‘Margaret Duddeley’, wife of Lord Henry Dudley, or his widow, for he died at the siege of San Quentin in 1557. In this volume she – as did Pickering, and her brother-in-law Robert Dudley – transliterated her English name into Greek letters. 38 Pickering’s copy of the chivalric romance Amadis di Gaula , in French translation (1550), may be a witness of a tragic romance. It bears the inscription ‘Katherin Seymour ow n eth this Booke’. 39 Perhaps this owner was Katherine Grey, sister of Lady Jane, one of the queen’s maids of honour. 40 When she married secretly, for love, Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, late in 1560, their forbidden, treasonable marriage brought them both to the Tower in 1561. 41 Pickering, who had been implicated with Katherine’s 34 CSPVen , VII, 28, pp. 36-7. 35 I.G. Philp, ‘Sir William Pickering and his Books’, The Book Collector , 5 (1956), pp. 231-8. Colonel W.E. Moss began a study of Pickering’s library; I have benefited from consulting his notes in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. I have discovered further books which were once in Pickering’s library. 36 TNA, Prerogative Court of Canterbury, PROB 11/57, fos. 2r-3v. 37 Brigden, ‘Epic Romance’. 38 Upon my retirement in 2016 Henry Woudhuysen delivered an as yet unpublished paper: ‘Two Dudleys and a Pickering’. 39 Cambridge University Library, MS F 155.d.4.1. 40 The Elizabethan New Year’s Gift Exchanges, 1559-1603 , ed. Jane A. Lawson, Records of Social and Economic History , new series, 51 (The British Academy, 2013), 59.373. 41 Susan Doran, ‘Seymour [née Grey], countess of Hertford (1540?-1568)’, ODNB .

12

SUSAN BRIGDEN

father and brothers in the conspiracy against Mary, may have known her at court. But how and when she, and Pickering, might have acquired the book is mysterious. Pickering was in Elizabeth’s secret counsels, before and after she was queen. What they discussed remains hidden, but their private matters were inescapably of public interest. As Mary’s reign began and Pickering returned from France, Princess Elizabeth confided in him. In October 1553 they talked together for over two hours. This was just as a party of Mary’s counsellors attempted to persuade her to marry Edward Courtenay, earl of Devon. The Spanish ambassador thought that their conversation concerned his French counterpart, and it was true that Pickering had been in close touch with Antoine de Noailles. 42 A shadowy plot was underway to set Elizabeth on the throne, married to Courtenay. Pickering, who may have known something of the counsels of the French king, may also have known Courtenay’s, for he was said to have great influence over him. 43 How and where they met each other is unknown. Courtenay had been in the Tower from 1538 until Mary pardoned him and allowed his release. 44 Pickering and Elizabeth spoke together again, privately, secretly, in May and June 1559 after Elizabeth became queen and as the people speculated upon their romance. Of course, they might have spoken of German mercenaries, of French court politics, of reform of the coinage. 45 Perhaps they did. But it is hard to forget Philip Sidney’s wise aperçu about ‘Basileus (that was old enough to know that women are not wont to appoint secret night meetings for the purchasing of land)’. 46 Communing with this famed heart throb, who was a former conspirator, however rehabilitated, threatened to compromise the queen, and to arouse jealousy against Pickering. What they talked about remains hidden. Did they speak of religion? The preamble to Pickering’s will attests to his devout Calvinism, but works of theology and scripture – save for the Greek New Testament – are notably absent from his library. 47 Perhaps this is an accident of survival. 42 CSPSp , XI, p. 314. E. Harris Harbison, ‘French Intrigue at the court of Queen Mary’, American Historical Review , XLV (April 1940), pp. 533-51, at pp. 539, 548. 43 M.J. Rodríguez-Salgado and Simon Adams (ed. and trans.), ‘The Count of Feria’s Despatch to Philip II of 14 November 1558’, Camden Miscellany , 28, Camden Fourth Series, 29 (1984), p. 343. For Courtenay, see Anne Overell, ‘A Nicodemite in England and Italy: Edward Courtenay, 1548-1556’ in D. M. Loades (ed.), John Foxe at Home and Abroad (Aldershot & Burlington, VT, 2004), pp. 117-136. 44 Calendar of Patent Rolls, Philip and Mary, I, A.D. 1553-1554 (London, 1937), p. 425. 45 Pickering wrote a ‘treatise concerning the exchange’ in Edward’s reign: TNA, SP 16/528, fo. 177 ( Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Charles I: Addenda , 23, n. 84). 46 Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia) , ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford & New York, 1985), p. 194. 47 TNA, PCC/PROB 11/57, fo. 2r.

13

BLAIR WORDEN - A BOOK OF FRIENDSHIP

Elizabeth and Pickering were preeminent among the inglesi italianati , for whom Italy and its language were all the rage. As princess, Elizabeth had learnt Italian with Giovanni Battista Castiglione as her tutor. In her French psalter she inscribed a motto in Italian from Petrarch’s Triumph of Death – ‘ Miser è chi Speme in cosa mortal pone [unhappy is s/he who places hope in mortal thing[s]]’ – and in July 1544 she wrote an accomplished letter to Katherine Parr complaining of the ‘ inimica fortuna ’ which separated them. 48 Pickering knew six languages. 49 He became so noted an Italianist that Edward’s ambassador in Venice recommended that Pickering be sent to ‘gentylly entertayn’ the duke of Ferrara’s son in the summer of 1552. He was to bring him to England so that ‘peradventure’ – and ironically for our story – he and one of the king’s sisters might fall for each other and make ‘the best mariage in cristendome’. 50 That eligible princeling never came. Pickering’s library reveals his addiction to Italian language and literature. The great majority of his surviving books are in Italian: thirty five Italian literary works and collections of letters, or translations of classical philosophy and history, most of them published in Venice. Pickering’s friend Dudley was also noted for his facility in Italian. In 1565, signing his copy of Il Cavallarizzo (Venice, 1562), Claudio Corte’s work on horsemanship, Pickering noted that it was Leicester’s gift to him. 51 It was not to Dudley, though, but to his old friend William Cecil, Lord Burghley, for whom he had collected Italian books while in embassy, that he bequeathed ‘all my papers of Antiquities that are pasted together of the monuments of Rome’. 52 We might imagine Pickering and Elizabeth sharing their love of Petrarch. Celestial mathematics also drew the queen and Pickering. John Dee claimed that ‘ S.W.P ’ ‘for skill in the Mathematicall Sciences, and Languages is the Od man of this land’. 53 In 1549, when Dee was in Louvain, Pickering studied with him – logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, the use of the astronomer’s staff and ring, the astrolabe, and ‘of both Globes’. Dee called Pickering, his patron, ‘ amicus noster singularis ’. 54 In Pickering’s 48 Royal Collection, RC1N 1051956. Eds., Janel Mueller and Joshua Scodel, Elizabeth I: Translations, 1544-1589 (Chicago, IL, and London, 2009), pp. 400, 461. BL, Cotton MS Otho, fo. 312r. 49 So his funeral monument attests: The Parish of St. Helen, Bishopsgate , plate 86. 50 TNA, SP 10/14, fo. 108r ( Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Edward VI, 1547-1553 , ed. C.S. Knighton (1992), 684). 51 Goldring, Robert Dudley , pp. 40-2. 52 TNA, PCC, PROB 11/57, fo. 3r. CSPFor, 1547-1553 , 516. 53 John Dee’s preface to The Elements of Geometrie of … Euclide of Megara (1570), sig. bi v. 54 ‘The compendious rehearsal of John Dee’ in Johannis, confratris & monachi Glastoniensis, chronica sive historia de rebus Glastoniensibus , ed. T. Hearne, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1726), II, p. 503. Glyn Parry, The Arch-Conjurer of England (New Haven & London, 2012), pp. 19-20.

14

SUSAN BRIGDEN

copy of Regiomontanus’ Scripta Clarissimi Matematici (Nuremberg, 1544), with its observations on the armillary sphere and the movements of the comets and of the sun and stars, is his mathematical puzzle in his own hand. 55 He shared scientific enquiry with friends. In 1564 Richard Worsley left him ‘my peece of vnicornes horne and one portinque [perhaps a portolan chart]’. 56 William Cecil and Pickering were armchair travellers, plotting distant lands on their maps and charts. To Cecil Pickering bequeathed a ‘celestial globe … and one globe of mettell unfinished, a case of my beste compases’. 57 In his house in St Andrew Undershaft Pickering kept ‘a marueilous Glasse’, a distorting mirror which produced optical illusions. The queen came to visit this ‘Glass so famous’, but it was not to Pickering’s London house that she came; rather to John Dee’s at Mortlake, on 16th March 1575, two months after Pickering’s death. 58 We cannot know whether Elizabeth and Pickering ever met privately again after their clandestine trysts which had led the world to wonder. In February 1564 Elizabeth thought to send Pickering to the French court. 59 But he did not go, and never went in embassy again. The first part of his life spent perilously at court, in embassy and exile, often in the bright light of royal favour, Pickering retreated thereafter to the quiet of his library, to mathematics, to his celestial globes and maps. Sometimes he was in London, sometimes in his Yorkshire estates. Only speculation provides the reasons for Pickering’s closeness to Elizabeth as princess and as queen, which threatened to compromise both of them. ‘All fancies but his own placed his person in her Bed’. 60 We have entertained the what-if and might-have-been in history and shared the perfervid imaginings of the Londoners, who believed that their young queen had fallen for Pickering’s charms, and who offered such high odds for their marriage. Perhaps Elizabeth did countenance his courtship for a while. More likely, she trusted his guidance. Perhaps he was the nearest to a friend that a queen could have. It is possible that she did confide in him her resolve never to marry. Pickering said that ‘the queen would laugh at him, and all the rest of them as he knew that she meant to die a maid’. 61 A tale of romance, seemingly trivial, might have consequences for Christendom.

55 Henry Huntington Library, San Marino, 328981. 56 TNA, PCC, PROB 11/48, fo. 174v; Surrey History Centre, LM/1686. 57 TNA, PCC, PROB 11/57, fo. 3r. 58 Dee’s preface to The Elements of Geometrie , sig. bi v. Parry, The Arch-Conjurer , p. 20. 59 CSPFor, 1560-1561 , 958, p. 529. 60 State-Worthies, or the Statesmen and Favourites of England (2nd edn., 1679), p. 530. 61 CLSP , 35, pp. 73-4.

15

BLAIR WORDEN - A BOOK OF FRIENDSHIP

Autobiographical Apology As Political Intervention In Late Elizabethan And Early Stuart England Alexandra Gajda

16

ALEXANDRA GAJDA

T HE ‘APOLOGY’ is a modish theme in modern political life. Should governments, institutions, scholars, even private individuals apologise for those actions of our ancestors that we find morally reprehensible today? The ‘apology’ was also a striking - if under-studied - genre in early modern political exchange. Two of the most famous early modern English apologia were enmeshed: Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex’s Apologie against those which most falsely and maliciously taxe him to be the only hinderer of the peace and quiet of his country (1601, 1603) and a tract by Essex’s erstwhile client and advisor, Francis Bacon, about his relationship with the earl, His Apologie in certaine imputations concerning the late earle of Essex (1604). 1 These are famous tracts, indispensable to the political histories of both men. 2 Indeed, James Spedding, Bacon’s magisterial editor, observed that Bacon’s Apologie was the writing ‘by which I was first attracted long ago to the study of Bacon’s personal character and history’. 3 Analysed together these apologia reveal more than biographical information about their authors: they enshrine new insights into the discursive forms of public politics at the turn of the seventeenth century. There are other early modern English tracts that style themselves as apologia, but as far as I am aware, Essex’s and Bacon’s are the first such tracts to present their political narrative within an autobiographical framework. 4 This essay explores implications of the decision of Essex and of Bacon to personalise these political interventions for our understanding of English political culture at the turn of the seventeenth century. The history of the publication of both tracts, in manuscript and in print, is unusually complex. Essex’s Apologie was written in the first months of 1598, when England, at war with Spain since 1585, had been invited to join in peace talks taking place at Vervins between France and Spain, a peace to which the earl was vehemently ideologically opposed. 5 Framed as a letter to ‘Maister Anthony Bacon’, 1 Bacon’s Apologie was also printed in James Spedding ed., The Works of Francis Bacon. Volume 10. The Letters and Life, 3 (1868), pp. 136-62. 2 R. Malcolm Smuts, Political Culture, the State and the Problem of Religious War in Britain and Ireland, 1578-1625 (Oxford, 2023), ch. 7. Alexandra Gajda ‘Debating War and Peace in Late Elizabethan England’, The Historical Journal 52:4 (2009), 851-78; Paul E. J. Hammer, ‘The Smiling Crocodile: the Earl of Essex and Late-Elizabethan ‘Popularity’’ in Peter Lake and Steven C. A. Pincus eds., The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007), pp. 95-111. 3 Spedding, Works of Francis Bacon , 10, p. 136. 4 The earliest printed apologia were confessional tracts produced during the early Reformation: The Apologye of Syr Thomas More Knyght (1533), More’s defence of his writings about Tyndale and Barnes; The Apology of Iohan Bale Agaynst a Ranke Papyst … (1550). 5 This discussion draws primarily on Hugh Gazzard, ‘‘Idle Papers’: An Apology of the Earl of Essex’ in Annaliese Connolly and Lisa Hopkins eds., Essex: The Cultural Impact of an Elizabethan Courtier ( Manchester, 2013), pp. 179-200. Also see Alexandra Gajda, The Earl of Essex and Late Elizabethan Political Culture (Oxford, 2012), pp. 97-105.

17

BLAIR WORDEN - A BOOK OF FRIENDSHIP

Essex’s great friend and intelligence advisor (and Francis’s brother), the tract served a double purpose: the first to relieve Essex’s personal reputation from accusations levelled by his political enemies that he was a bloodthirsty warmonger; the second to put forward a case against the peace that was both impassioned and rational, and in the national and international interest – the freedom of ‘my contrey … and the libertie of Christendome’. 6 Essex’s Apologie first appeared in print in 1600, when he was under house arrest, following the debacle that was his disastrous campaign in Ireland; it was published along with a letter of his sister, Penelope Devereux, Lady Rich, imploring Elizabeth to reprieve her brother. 7 The treatise and Rich’s letter were reprinted again in May 1603, after Essex’s execution (in February 1601), and after the accession of King James to the throne of England. But Essex’s Apologie had a scribal circulation that co-existed with and even possibly outstripped the readership of the printed tract. We know of at least 49 copies of the Apologie that still exist in manuscript as single items, or within collections of political manuscripts from the Elizabethan and Jacobean period, particularly miscellanies relating to Essex’s career. 8 In terms of ‘scribal publication’, it was probably the most widely circulated and copied of all Elizabethan political tracts. 9 The circumstances of both scribal and print publication are tricky to disentangle. It is clear that Essex did not endorse the printed version of 1600, and was horrified at its appearance in the public realm. Under house arrest, he claimed that the action was an underhand ploy of his ‘enemies’ to destroy his reputation further with the queen: The prating tavern hunter speaks of me when he list: the frantick libeller writes of me when he list: already they print me, and mak me speak to the world; and shortly they will play me in what forms they list upon the stage. 10

6 Essex, Apologie (1601), sig. A3r. 7 Essex, Apologie , second pagination, sig. A2r-[A3r].

8 In the British Library, in the Additional Manuscripts alone are the following copies: MSS 4128, fos. 29r-42v; 4129, fos. 1r-15v; 38137, fos. 161r-72v; 48063 (Yelverton MS 69), fos. 238r-341v; 72411, fos. 1r-14v. Gazzard, ‘Idle Papers’, 186-90. 9 For contrast, Philip Sidney’s 1579 Letter to Elizabeth Touching her Marriage with Monsieur , also scribally circulated to a wider audience than its royal recipient, survives in twenty manuscript copies: eds. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten, The Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1973), pp. 37-38. 10 T[he] N[ational] A[rchives], SP 12/274/38, fo. 323r, 12 May 1600.

18

ALEXANDRA GAJDA

The tract was not entered in the Stationers’ Register, and Essex’s servants helped Archbishop Whitgift hunt down the printer, one Dawson, who was briefly imprisoned. The print run of 292 books was called in and most copies destroyed. 11 And yet the posthumous edition of 1603 does seem to have been printed without any controversy: it was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 8th May, as was an abundance of other ballads and poems praising the earl that appeared immediately after the death of Elizabeth. 12 The political toxicity of Essex’s Apologie was brief. If the printing of the Apologie was undesired by Essex, its circulation in manuscript is a very different matter. Although Essex claimed that the tract had been one of his private papers, and stolen from his bedchamber, it seems almost certain that the earl had intended this tract to be circulated scribally at the very least amongst a select readership at court and in London. 13 This was a practice that was widely used by his secretariat and clients when they were trying, for example, to set forth an Essexian version of the raid on Cadiz in 1596. 14 But the most compelling evidence that this text was intended to have some sort of wider audience derives from the genre within which Essex couched his political advice. The tract is framed as a personal letter to Anthony Bacon who, at the time of composition, was living at Essex House working as Essex’s intelligence agent, and who hardly required the earl to write him a stirring letter setting out his foreign and domestic policy objectives. The use of the epistolary form, however, was a common means of framing a political treatise in early modern Europe, although the personae ‘narrating’ these artificial epistolary treatises were usually fictitious. The first of the radical presbyterian tracts by ‘Martin Marprelate’, published in October 1588, was a hilarious satire on conformist churchmen presented as an Epistle to the Terrible Priests of the Convocation House , while the most famous catholic libel, Leicester’s Commonwealth, published in 1584, a monstrous slander of the morality of the earl of Leicester, was styled as ‘a letter written by a Master

11 Cecil Papers, Hatfield House, 79/37, 41. Richard Barkley to Sir Robert Cecil; 75/40, Whitgift to Sir Robert Cecil. Whitgift claimed to have called in 210 of the 292 copies printed. 12 See, for example, George Carleton, Devoraxeidos (1603); Robert Pricket, Honors Fame in Triumph Riding. Or, the Life and Death of the Late Honorable Earl of Essex (1604); Anon., A Lamentable Ditty Composed upon the Death of Robert Lord Devereux, Late Earl of Essex (1603). 13 Cecil MS 79/74; Gajda, Earl of Essex , pp. 99, 173. 14 Paul E. J. Hammer, ‘Myth-Making: Politics, Propaganda and the Capture of Cadiz in 1596’, The Historical Journal , 40:3 (1997), 621-642.

19

BLAIR WORDEN - A BOOK OF FRIENDSHIP

of Art in Cambridge to his friend in London’. 15 In the 1590s, Catholic polemicists writing against William Cecil, Lord Burghley also confected attacks on the English establishment as letters written by imaginary English travellers: Richard Verstegan’s An Advertisement Written to a Secretarie of my Lord Treasurer of Ingland (1592) and Robert Parsons’s Newes from Spaine and Holland (1593) purported to be the confidential dispatches of English intelligencers. The vast anonymous treatise The State of Christendom , written by Anthony Bacon with other members of Essex’s secretariat in 1594-5, adopted a similar epistolary framework, presenting its defence of Elizabeth’s foreign and domestic policy as a newsletter from an English catholic exile loyal to the queen. 16 The epistolary framework adopted by Essex, then, clearly establishes that his tract had a public purpose of the highest significance – to convince its readers of the dangers of making peace with the Spanish tyrant. In this respect, Essex’s treatise against the peace was also one of a large number of similar position papers that circulated in manuscript during this period, arguing either for or against the putative peace with Spain. These were all also widely copied, and contributed to a vigorous semi-public debate about the desirability of peace with the catholic enemy which would persist until the Treaty of London signed between England and Spain in 1604; significantly all the other tracts debating war or peace were anonymous. 17 Essex’s Apologie , however, was defiantly personalised, framing the strategic and ideological case for continued war with Spain within a self-aggrandising account of his own biography and his martial career: ‘I haue thought good to answere some obiections of my detractors’. 18 In the wider exchange of tracts pro- and contra- the putative peace with Spain, Essex’s Apologie was unique in two respects: first, that it was printed (against his will or not); second, in that it enshrined its fierce arguments against the peace within an autobiographical framework.

15 D. C. Peck ed., Leicester’s Commonwealth: the Copy of a Letter Written by a Master of Art of Cambridge (1584) and Related Documents (Athens, Ohio, 1985). 16 Victor Houliston, ‘The Hare and the Drum: Robert Persons’s Writings on the English Succession, 1593-6’, Renaissance Studies (2000), 14:2, 235-250. For polemic of the period more generally see Peter Lake, Bad Queen Bess: Libels, Secret Histories and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I (2016). 17 See Gajda, ‘Debating War and Peace’; Gajda, ‘War, Peace, Commerce and the Treaty of London 1604’, Historical Research , 96: 274 (2023), 459-472. 18 Essex, Apologie , sig. Ar-v.

20