Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

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 .

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