Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

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.

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