Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

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