Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

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.

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