Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

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.

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