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- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Copyright
- © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press 2018; all rights reserved
- ISSN
- 0034-6551
- eISSN
- 1471-6968
- DOI
- 10.1093/res/hgy044
- Publisher site
- See Article on Publisher Site
Abstract
Abstract A copy of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, printed in Venice in 1539, came to England by 1545. This article discovers the first readers of this particular book—Mary, Duchess of Richmond, William Pickering, servant of Mary’s brother Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and one whose identity remains anonymous—and the circumstances in which they read it. They did more than claim ownership; they wrote private messages at special moments in the text where its fantasy world had significance for their lives. Their marginalia may testify to secrets shared, to trysts, to princely honour and aspiration, and to political thinking. This little company ventured in the Furioso to write inscriptions which might threaten them. In Venice in 1539 Agostino Bindoni printed an edition of Ludovico Ariosto’s great poem, Orlando Furioso. Through a quarter of a century Ariosto constantly revised the Furioso, publishing three editions: in 1516, 1521 and the last, of forty-six cantos, in 1532.1 Printing this final version with la giunta, the addition, Bindoni was publishing a new work. But it was a new work which he had printed before, in 1536, for it was wildly popular.2 Vernacular romance epics had been seized by eager readers from the beginning of the printed book trade in the 1470s, but the popularity of Orlando Furioso was different in kind. It became the rage for anyone who could read Italian, and was finding and creating new audiences.3 In a dialogue by Pietro Aretino of 1536 the courtesan Nanna advises her daughter Pippa that, to be fashionable, she must always keep on her table Petrarch, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and Orlando Furioso.4 Bindoni was part of a generation of Venetian printers, publishers, editors and booksellers who were producing books for a new audience of readers which included the lay and unlearned, who might be youthful and female. In fierce competition for this new market, they were ingenious in devising ways to distinguish their editions from those of their rivals. Grander readers preferred grander books: quarto volumes in roman type. That Bindoni chose a quite different format for his 1539 edition suggests the more democratic readership he envisaged for his little book. So that as many as possible might buy it he printed in the smaller, more economical octavo format, in double columns, and used the cruder printing type, gothic rotunda.5 In the frontispiece was a slightly damaged portrait of Ariosto (perhaps by Titian), but there were none of the woodcut illustrations which enlivened more expensive editions. Bindoni probably intended a print run of about a thousand copies. So great is the attrition rate of early printed books that it is perhaps surprising that any copies of this printing survive.6 But six—perhaps seven—are still to be found in institutional libraries.7 Another copy is in private hands, probably has always been in private hands. It is now mine, for the while. It is this copy and its first owners and readers which are considered here. Orlando Furioso, with its tales of love and war, of paladins and princesses, sorcerers, enchantresses, magic rings and swords, enchanted palaces, sea monsters, storms and shipwrecks, and flying steeds had, and has, the power to fascinate.8 The quest of Orlando, mad for love of the heart-breakingly beautiful princess Angelica, captivates. But the work is far more than airy fantasy and chivalric romance. That Ariosto himself had another audience in mind than the daughters of courtesans is suggested by the publication privileges he sought, by the dedications within the work, but much more by the poem’s themes and by the exigencies of the times in which he wrote. He intended ‘delightful teaching’ for a courtly and humanist readership, for princes called to rule and their courtiers and counsellors.9 In the age of humanism, those educated in the classics, thinking on classical ethics, did not abandon chivalric tales of romance drawn from the age of feudalism; they did not spend all their time composing Latin hendecasyllables.10 Ariosto had continued the Orlando Innamorato of Boiardo, but in his revisions, especially in the last cantos, he turned increasingly from the romance of Orlando to the dynastic epic of Ruggiero and Bradamante, and to their long journey towards their prophesied union and the founding of the house of Este.11 It is Ruggiero, ‘di eterna gloria degno [worthy of eternal glory]’ (X.57.1), descendant of Hector of Troy, who is the chief, though far from perfect, hero of the Furioso: his quest for love and glory, his overweening pride and selfish sense of honour, his derelictions and distractions, his wrong choices and spectacular falls, the working out of his grand and fatal destiny, dominate the poem. Ruggiero’s strenuous course of moral training and his return ‘per via alpestre e dura/alla vera virtù, mal grado d’esso [by a rough and hard way to true virtue, despite himself]’ (VII.42.3–4) provide a model for anyone reading of his vicissitudes—for to such all-too-human temptations everyone is susceptible—but especially for princes, who must learn to govern themselves before governing others. The consciousness of history and dynasties doomed pervade the poem, and also a dark vision of contemporary politics which princes and nobles must read as a call to duty.12 Ariosto portrays Italy ravaged by pitiless armies, ‘Most Catholic’ and ‘Most Christian’ monarchs fighting each other, killing fellow Christians, and leaving the infidel triumphant in the holy places (XVII.73–9). While the common people keep their promises, princes break their vows (XLIV.1–3). Nobles pursue false notions of honour, and tyrants listen to flatterers (XXXIX.76). Throughout Europe, courtly and humanist readers began to read this most popular work of the sixteenth century. Whether they were heeding the stern moral lessons or were merely revelling in the delights of the tales is usually impossible to tell. Bindoni envisaged a popular readership for his little book, while Ariosto wrote for an international humanist audience. Though the land of Arthur loomed in Ariosto’s imagination, neither he nor Bindoni could have imagined how and by whom this copy of Orlando Furioso would be read in England. Ariosto tells of the paladins of Charlemagne visiting England. Circling the earth on his flying horse, swooping over the Thames, Ruggiero sees a vast army marshalled. A knight explains to him each noble ensign, including the lance broken in three, the emblem of the Duke of Norfolk (X.79). In England, a descendant of the Duke of Norfolk and her coterie read Bindoni’s edition of the Furioso not long after its publication and found in this mirror for princes a mirror for their own lives. For them, as for other Renaissance readers, the act of reading was itself a dynamic process, which informed action.13 On the last page, hesitantly then boldly, Mary, Duchess of Richmond, daughter of the 3rd Duke of Norfolk, wrote in her italic hand ‘e mio mary Rychemond’ (see Figure 2). I A Renaissance reader’s response to a work of literature is rare to discover. Some left clues. Lady Margaret Beaufort commissioned Caxton to print Blanchardin and Eglantine because the romance’s action—Blanchardin exiled and Eglantine besieged—mirrored her family’s circumstances.14 Reading Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, Henry VIII’s courtiers imagined the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table prefiguring the events of their own lives.15 The chivalric romance The castell of loue was translated by Lord Berners at the behest of Lady Carew, wife and widow of Sir Nicholas Carew, who was executed for treason in 1539.16 She possessed a manuscript of Lydgate’s ‘Fall of Princes’, his translation of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium, which passed into the ownership of the wife and sister of Lord Dacre, who suffered their own tragedy when Dacre was executed in 1541.17 When we find noblewomen using this manuscript as a liber amicorum we may imagine that the account of the dangers incident to greatness had a particular significance for them. In 1549 a manuscript of ‘The book of Bochas’—the ‘Fall of Princes’—passed between John Godsalve, who had been a member of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey’s household at Kenninghall, and other Norfolk gentlemen who had watched the fall of princes at close hand.18 In her copy of the Furioso Mary and her intimates did more than inscribe their signatures: they wrote intensely private, esoteric messages at special moments in the text where its fantasy world adverted to their own real lives. Their marginalia may testify to hopes and fears, to trysts, to noble aspirations and perhaps to political thinking. Reading them is to witness secrets shared, never meant to be betrayed. This little company, intimately bound, had special reason to keep their liaisons and ambitions concealed. Their world was dangerous. It would be ‘a strange worlde, saying words be made treason’, said Lord Montague, but Henry VIII’s Treason Act of 1534 had made it so.19 Reckless in their youth and pride, standing close to the throne, when succession to it was so uncertain, Mary and her friends wrote incriminating inscriptions in their Furioso. We will discover something of the romantic and tragic possibilities of this book. In the margin of canto I, we find Mary Richmond’s italic hand again. Here she wrote ‘de mallo en pegio [from bad to worse]’ (Figure 1). Figure 1 View largeDownload slide Orlando Fvrioso di Messer Ludouico Ariosto (Venice, 1539), f. 3v. Figure 1 View largeDownload slide Orlando Fvrioso di Messer Ludouico Ariosto (Venice, 1539), f. 3v. In this passage Angelica, ‘proud daughter of the Grand Khan of Cathay’ (XIX.17.8), flees into the dark forest—the forest of imagination and desire—to no certain safety. Errant knights, Saracens and Christians, wild for love, pursue her, with intentions less than honourable. She flees through dark and terrifying forests, through places uninhabited, waste and savage. The movements of the twigs and leaves that she heard from the oaks, the elms and the beeches had made her take strange paths in sudden fright, now here, now there, for at every shadow she saw in either mountain or valley, she always feared Rinaldo was behind her (I.33) Angelica was hardly a model for virtuous maidens to follow. Images of her are so often of flowers and of deflowering. When Mary Richmond wrote her pessimistic judgement—‘de mallo en pegio’—as she read of Angelica’s plight, she may have had reason to identify herself with the ardently desired princess of Cathay. Mary was a princess by birth, married to one prince, then offered to others. She was an object of desire, and maybe saw herself so. Mary’s was a royal inheritance. She was born Lady Mary Howard in 1519, only daughter of Thomas Howard, future Duke of Norfolk, and his second wife, Elizabeth, daughter of the ‘high & mighty prince’ the 3rd Duke of Buckingham. Her elder brother, born in 1516 or 1517, was Henry Howard, styled Earl of Surrey, their younger brother, Lord Thomas Howard.20 On their mother’s side they were descendants of Edward III. A mother who contested for precedence at court with her husband’s step-mother might well bring up her children with an acute sense of their rank and ancient descent.21 But theirs was a shadowed inheritance. In 1521 the Duke of Buckingham was condemned for the treason of intending to exalt himself to the throne, and executed.22 The Earl of Surrey was not only born but educated to highest honour. In 1529 his father boasted of his son’s Latin, his progress in his studies, his following ‘the path of virtue’, which would prepare him to be ‘incitateur [tutor]’ to the King’s illegitimate, but then only son, Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond and Somerset.23 Later, Surrey remembered how With a kinges soon my childishe yeres did passe, In greater feast then Priams sonnes of Troye.24 The Howards’ royal ambitions were encouraged when one of the family became Queen, a ‘cosine crowned’.25 As Anne Boleyn’s cousin and maid-of-honour, Mary Howard knew the glories and triumphs of the court, and shone in the bright light of royal favour. When Anne was created Marquess of Pembroke in September 1532, Mary carried her crimson velvet mantle and her coronet; when she went to her first mass as Queen, Mary bore her train; at the baptism of Princess Elizabeth Mary carried the chrism.26 Queen Anne’s fear that her cousins pressed too close to the succession thwarted the Duke of Norfolk’s plan for his elder son to marry Princess Mary, but she could not prevent the Duchess’s design for her daughter to marry the Duke of Richmond.27 This grandest of marriages was made at the King’s command: ‘he hemselfe alone mayd the maryage’.28 When Mary married Henry Fitzroy in November 1533 she became the daughter-in-law of Henry VIII and acquired quasi-royal status.29 In the heady days of Anne Boleyn’s supremacy over the King, while she presided over the ‘game of love’ at court, where everyone pretended—or more than pretended—to love and serve, Mary shared in the world of rhyming and romance. She danced after the Queen’s coronation.30 She owned the manuscript volume which became known as the ‘Devonshire Manuscript’ (British Library, MS Additional 17492), where she and her friends transcribed and rewrote the poetry of the ‘courtly makers’ and real lovers tried to express poetically the pains of love. This is a poetic album amicorum, in which ‘the romance of reading is a family matter’, and may even have been a wedding gift to his sister from her poet brother.31 But there were deeper purposes than pastime in the Queen’s chamber. Anne was won to the ‘true religion’, and determined to live according to Scripture precept. Long afterwards, Mary remembered approvingly the Queen’s setting her ladies to make ‘smockes for the poore’. Anne, who had once written words of love in her prayer book, now forbade her maids to waste time ‘in vayne toyes and poeticall fanses’.32 Grand court ladies, the court’s heartbreakers and muses, like Mary Richmond, became patrons of evangelical religion. At Anne’s fall in May 1536, her court disbanded. In the Tower, she was denied the consolation of her ladies’ company, and they of hers.33 Mary lost her place at court, for the while. But Anne’s death brought the Howards dynastic opportunity as well as disaster. For a brief period, all Henry’s children were illegitimate: Richmond by birth, Princesses Mary and Elizabeth by statute.34 It was openly said, now that Princess Elizabeth was declared illegitimate, that the Duke of Richmond should have pre-eminence: the way would be open for Richmond to inherit the throne, with Mary as his queen.35 But all such hopes, or fears, ended with the death of Richmond in July 1536. Mary’s marriage to Richmond was never celebrated, never consummated. When he died, to the unending sorrow of her brother and disappointment of the family, Mary was left both widow and maiden, losing the magnificent life she might have had. She was a royal duchess, a princess, but left, under the ‘tuityon’ of her father, in a liminal and vulnerable position.36 By the time of Mary’s marriage, her mother was utterly alienated from her husband, cast out of his household. Her son and daughter spurned her, too. ‘Ther was never woman that bare so vngracyus a eldyst son or so vngracyus a dawter’, so she lamented.37 Mary remained far from court at Kenninghall in Norfolk, with Bess Holland, the Duke’s mistress, as her dubious chaperone. There she waited for her promised jointure which the King was very slow to grant.38 Surely Mary would marry again, but whom? Her father found no one suitable in England: ‘ther is neyther lord nor lordes son nor other gode inheritor in this realme that I can remember of convenient age to marry her, so that in maner I rekon herselff undone […] pite it wer she shuld not be maried’. He feared that ‘she myght bestowe herselff otherwise than I wold she shuld’. No young widow could have comported herself more ‘discretly’ than Mary—‘unto this tyme’, so far.39 But she had already been too close to forbidden romance. Not only had she witnessed the indiscreet—at the least—games of love in the Queen’s chamber, but she had also colluded in the secret and treasonable ‘love-matters’ of her friend Lady Margaret Douglas, the King’s niece. Lord Thomas Howard (Mary’s half-uncle) would ‘resort unto her [Margaret] when my lady of Richmond was present’.40 Testimony to their doomed love and the terror of their plight is the poetry they inscribed in the ‘Devonshire manuscript’, where ‘faythfull louers’ bewail cruel imprisonment and separation.41 Their clandestine marriage early in 1536 led them both to the Tower, where Lord Thomas, attainted for his lèse-majesté, pined and died in October 1537. Lady Margaret was banished to Syon Abbey.42 Extraordinary anxiety attended the widowed Lady Richmond’s return to court, and not only her own. Sequestered in benighted Kenninghall, revolving her fate, ‘more then half in desspeare’, at the New Year of 1538 she was writing letters in a chaotic secretary hand, quite different from the steady italic in her Furioso. If only she could put the case for her dower to the King in person, surely he ‘wold be moved to have compasyon’. ‘He is so iust a prynce so gracious & of syche eqyte that I am suer he wolde neuer suffer the iustyce of his laws to be denyed to me the unworthe desolat widow of his late son’.43 Writing to Thomas Cromwell on 8 January, Mary’s father lamented her unseemly independence of thought and action. ‘My Lorde in all my lif I never com[m]oned with her in any seriouse cause or nowe, and wold not haue thought she had be suche as I fynde her, wich as I thinke is but to wise for a woman’.44 The Duke feared a tantrum. Being ‘to wise for a woman’ had alienated Anne Boleyn from the King, and after her fall his favour towards the Howards faltered. Norfolk had been ‘half exiled the court’ in 1536 and under suspicion in the following year.45 At court in late July or early August 1537 the Earl of Surrey fought a man who had challenged his honour and allegiance. Norfolk could hardly express the ‘prickes of agonye that ar in my hert’.46 Spared the penalty of the loss of his right—fighting—hand, Surrey was imprisoned in Windsor Castle, where once in happier times he had lived with Richmond.47 The Duke’s fear about Mary coming to court lay in her impetuosity, in the King’s unpredictability, and the great uncertainty concerning not only Mary’s remarriage but also the King’s. In the autumn of 1537 the succession was secured by the birth of Prince Edward, but the prince’s birth brought the death of Jane Seymour, and the urgent quest for a new queen. In 1538 John Cheke came to court to debate a question of great personal and political moment for the King: should Henry marry a foreign princess or an English noblewoman?48 At the New Year of 1538 the King was questioning the validity of his first son’s marriage, desiring to be ‘resolued in the caase of matrymony, bitwene the late Duke of Richmond and my Lorde of Norfolkes dawghter […] whither such mariege be matrimony, or no’.49 Perhaps Henry was simply trying to dodge paying Mary’s dower. Yet if there were no marriage, if Mary were not the King’s daughter-in-law, did her father briefly, dangerously hope for another royal alliance? The fantasy that the King ‘might cast some love vnto’ his sister lurked in the Earl of Surrey’s mind, and later, when she was a less glittering, less pristine matrimonial prospect he conceived a ‘strange practise’ to effect it.50 Excruciating negotiations preceded the Duchess’s return to court. By early April Mary, ‘contynewally with wepyng and wayling’, was imploring her father’s leave to ride to London. Asking Cromwell to ‘feel’ the King’s mind, Norfolk offered to bring her to court with a retinue of eighty—twice his usual riding household.51 He insisted: would he ‘displease his maiestie with bryngyng her vppe or not’?52 Mary did come to court, staying for several weeks.53 By the summer Norfolk, protesting too much, disavowed any grand dynastic ambitions: ‘perceyvyng there ensueth comenly no grete good by conjunction of grete bloodes togyther, he sought not therefore […] to mary his doughter, in any high bloode or degree’. Finding no prince to marry Mary, he looked beyond the old nobility and made virtue of necessity. There were two candidates for Mary’s hand: one—to whom the Duke’s ‘herte is most inclyned’—was the King’s new brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Seymour. Henry ‘meryly’, suggestively assented: if the Duke chose to ‘bestowe’ his daughter on Seymour ‘he shoulde be sure to couple her with one of such lust and youth, as shoulde be able to please her well at all poyntes’. Yet Norfolk only seemed to abandon matrimonial ambition; Seymour, uncle to a future king, had grand dynastic ambition of his own.54 Testament to a new political alignment was the contact between Norfolk and Edward Seymour, newly-created Earl of Hertford. Boats plied between their London residences in the early summer of 1538, carrying them to dinner with each other, bringing messages and presents.55 But the marriage proposal was abandoned, for the while. Whether Mary and her brother had welcomed it may be doubted. In prison the previous year, seething with resentment against the forces ranged against his ‘fredome’—his nobility and his liberty—Surrey had known who to blame. Mary recalled how ‘the Earl her Brother should say, ‘“These new men loved no Nobility; and if God call’d away the King, they should smart for it”. And that her Brother hated them all since his being in custody in Windsor Castle’.56 In Mary Richmond’s Furioso there is evidence of the great expectations Mary and her companions shared for her. To Mary’s signature—‘e mio mary Rychemond’—she appended an R. That R has a dangerous doubleness: R for Richmond, certainly, but perhaps also R as the royal cipher, R for Regina.57 Not ‘Mary R’, but still a signature distinctly regal, one which her late husband had not employed. In Holbein’s sketch of Mary the letter RRRR is scattered—though perhaps with no particular inwardness.58 At the end of her brother’s life, Mary deposed, fatally, that beneath Surrey’s arms ‘was a cipher, which she took to be the Kings cipher, HR’.59Henricus Rex. And beside Mary’s signature in an exquisite italic hand someone wrote: ‘Assai più d’altrui [far beyond others]’ (Figure 2). Figure 2 View largeDownload slide Orlando Furioso di Messer Ludouico Ariosto (Venice, 1539), f. 244r. Figure 2 View largeDownload slide Orlando Furioso di Messer Ludouico Ariosto (Venice, 1539), f. 244r. II If not an English prince for Mary perhaps there would be an Italian one. In September 1538 Henry’s ambassador Sir Thomas Wyatt proposed to the agent of Cosimo de’ Medici, Duke of Florence, that his master marry in England, either Lady Margaret Douglas, whom the King loved as a daughter, or Mary Duchess of Richmond, the one no less beautiful and virtuous than the other.60 Henry pledged to bestow the princesses ‘upon such of the princes of Italy as shall be thought convenient’.61 That these noble friends dreamt of Italy—even if the sentiment is proverbial—there is evidence in a tragic poem in the ‘Devonshire Manuscript’ copied in Lady Margaret Douglas’s hand. thys touer ye se ys strong and hye and the dooris fast barred haue y that no wyght my purpose let shold for to be quen off all ytaly nat on day lengere leve y wold.62 Mary Richmond, an English princess, would be sent to Italy to marry a prince—a prospect of glory and romance. Was she learning Italian in preparation? Her ownership of two Italian books, at least, may suggest so. Mary possessed a copy of the Operette del Parthenopeo Suavio, printed in Bari in 1535. In the opening sequence of sonnets the lover writes in adoration of his divinity—‘la mia Dea’, ‘cara mia Dea’, ‘essendo tu divina & io mortale’—and of his unending sorrow, ‘mio gran dolore’. Beside Sonetto XXVII, where the lover runs to contemplate the heavenly eyes of his lady and laments ‘O vita disperata de gli Amanti [O, the desperate life of lovers]’, Mary wrote in her italic hand ‘e meo mary Rychemond’.63 Here she insists on no regal R (Figure 3). Figure 3 View largeDownload slide Operette del Parthenopeo Suavio, B2v. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Y.9.1. Figure 3 View largeDownload slide Operette del Parthenopeo Suavio, B2v. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Y.9.1. How Mary Richmond learnt Italian is uncertain. Probably she already knew French, perhaps learning it, along with her brothers, in the household of their grandfather, the 2nd Duke of Norfolk, where John Leland was employed as tutor.64 At court Lord Thomas Howard learnt French from John Palsgrave.65 In the Howard household at Framlingham in 1526 ‘Master Scholemaster’ had a place in ‘my lord Surr[ey’s] chambre’. A scholar named Smythe adduced five years as tutor to the children of the Duke of Norfolk as he sought admission to oppose in theology at Cambridge.66 Other noblewomen were learning Italian. Maud, Lady Parr maintained in her household a school where languages were taught. There her daughter Katherine learnt Italian. When she was Queen, Katherine encouraged her step children in their more advanced studies in the language.67 In her French psalter Princess Elizabeth inscribed a motto in Italian ‘Miser è chi speme in cosa mortal pone [unhappy is s/he who places hope in mortal thing[s]]’—a slight misquotation from Petrarch’s Triumph of Death—and in July 1544 wrote an accomplished letter complaining of the ‘inimica fortuna’ which had exiled her from Katherine.68 Katherine Parr owned Italian manuscripts, and perhaps around the same time that Mary was reading Ariosto, she was reading Petrarch.69 If Mary’s father, who thought her too clever, and wayward, had known what she was reading in Italian, he might have worried. Stern moralists and watchful mothers warned against reading Italian romance. To read Italian at all, let alone lascivious fiction, might be undesirable for noble daughters. Knowledge of the Italian language, becoming italianizzato, was the rage for the cultivated. But once reformed ideas spread, Italy came to be associated with the tyrant Bishop of Rome, with idolatrous religion, dangerous trains of thought, subversive humours, and shadowed allegiances. Even to study Italian came to be seen as a slippery slope to forbidden pleasures. Translating the sermons of Ochino and dedicating them to her mother in about 1551, Anne Cooke recalled how ‘it hath pleased you, often, to reprove my vaine studye in the Italyan tonge’.70 Mary had no such careful mother to protect her from moral harm. Here, in the Furioso, at Angelica’s moment of danger, she was not only reading, but writing in Italian. ‘De mallo en pegio’. While Mary knew enough Italian to read and write it, though probably inexpertly, her brother was mastering the language in formal, literary ways. In 1543 his father’s secretary praised the ‘excedyng great paynes and trauayles susteyned by your selfe in traductions aswell out of the Laten, Italien as the Spanyshe and Frenche’.71 Surrey was reading Italian poetry, and translating it. Following Wyatt, who ‘taught what might be sayd in ryme’, he turned to translating Petrarch, to developing the sonnet form.72 That he knew Orlando Furioso is evident: he translated stanzas from it.73 But he was also reading Italian poets who were composing versi sciolti, learning what might be said without rhyme.74 Mary was not alone as she read. Other inscriptions in her Furioso take us to the company of her intimates. In 1545 this book belonged to William Pickering: with his flamboyant signature he claimed it (Figure 4). Figure 4 View largeDownload slide Orlando Fvrioso di Messer Ludouico Ariosto (Venice, 1539), f. 2r. Figure 4 View largeDownload slide Orlando Fvrioso di Messer Ludouico Ariosto (Venice, 1539), f. 2r. Born in 1516, Pickering was the son of Sir William Pickering, Knight Marshal at Henry VIII’s court.75 Pickering senior spent much of his time disporting himself, gambling with the King—racing his own dog in 1532—often losing, spectacularly even by the court’s heroic standards.76 His debts burdened his son decades later.77 The younger William Pickering had a quite different education from his father and far grander aspirations. He belonged to a brilliant generation in Cambridge in the 1530s, where he was one of the ‘Athenian tribe’ gathered around John Cheke at St John’s College, inspired by classical study, won to evangelical doctrine, and bound to Cheke and to each other by lasting ties of friendship.78 From Cambridge, Pickering was recruited to the service of Thomas Cromwell. In 1538 his name appears in a list of ‘Gentlemen most mete to be daily waiters upon my said lord [Cromwell] and allowed in his house’.79 Perfectly educated in languages and rhetoric to serve his King abroad, Pickering was destined for a career as an ambassador. But he stayed in London, for the while. William Pickering became the owner of a celebrated library, a great collector of Italian books.80 Maybe his interest in Italian language and literature began in the service of Cromwell, the most italianizzato of Englishmen. Cromwell owned tracts and verses and satires in Italian, maps and paintings of Italy, attesting to a deep interest in Italy which went back to his youthful, picaresque travels there.81 He frequently and familiarly corresponded with Italians, with Italian merchants in London, but also with Italians in Italy, including Pietro Aretino.82 (Pickering owned a copy of Aretino’s Lettere, printed in 1539.) Unusually, in his copy of the Furioso, Pickering signed his name and gave a date ‘1545’. Unusual, because his books, though quite often signed, were rarely dated. The principal proof of Pickering’s ownership is usually his armorial binding, which exists in several versions, and was devised later in his life.83 The Italian books Pickering owned which were printed before 1545 (the date he signed the Furioso) may have entered his library later than their date of publication, perhaps while he was in exile in Italy in Mary’s reign—but perhaps not, or not all of them. They reveal a marked interest in Italian literature, and in works of classical literature and history translated into Italian: Vellutello’s editions of Petrarch and of Dante’s Commedia; Italian translations of Cicero, Sallust and Appian and of Aristophanes’ comedies; La Eneide di virgilio tradotta in terza rima per M. Giovanpaulo Vasio, printed in Venice in 1539.84 For Pickering to own the Aeneid has a special significance, for after the fall of Cromwell in the summer of 1540, his patron became the Earl of Surrey, who was himself notably Italianate, and soon began his own great translation of the Aeneid. Mary Richmond never became an Italian princess. Surrey never travelled to Italy; nor did Pickering until his exile in the Veneto in Mary’s reign. Yet like all the most cultivated and cosmopolitan of Englishmen and women they were fascinated by Italy. Surrey ‘lov’d to converse with Strangers [the contemporary synonym for Italians], and to conform his behaviour to them’, according to Edmund Knyvet, who believed ‘he had therein some ill device’. In the Earl’s service were Italians and Italianate Englishmen, of doubtful allegiance: ‘a servant of his had been in Italy with Cardinal Poole, and was received again at his return. Moreover, that he kept one Pasquil an Italian as a Jester, but more likely a Spy, and so reputed’.85 One servant who had been in Italy with Pole was John a Legh who, growing in consequence when his half-sister Katherine Howard became Queen, was recalled to England in 1540.86 Pasquil, Surrey’s jester, was named after Pasquino, the speaking statue of Rome. This ‘Paskall, a strawngier’ spoke truth to power, like the statue, and for ‘vnfitting words lewdely spoken […] touching the kings highnes’ he was arrested in London in December 1541 by the night watch.87 Surrey also entertained ‘one Peregrine an Italian’.88 (Like Pasquil, Peregrine—peregrinus; stranger—is likely to be a pseudonym.) An Italian astrologer cast the horoscope of Thomas, Surrey’s son and heir, on 10 March 1538—a horoscope foretelling sorrow and misfortune and an untimely death for the Earl himself.89 When Surrey commissioned what would be his last portrait it was almost certainly an Italian artist he chose.90 How did this copy of Orlando Furioso which Mary Richmond and Pickering claimed come to England and into their hands? Perhaps it came privately with an Italian visitor, or perhaps with an English traveller returning home. If it was bought through the London book trade, there were booksellers and printers who had possible links with the Earl, with Pickering, or with Orlando Furioso. John Harington, a newcomer to the printing trade in the 1540s, was himself a reader of Orlando Furioso, translating a stanza from it ‘many years since’, so his son, the Furioso’s famous translator, recalled.91 That Harington printed Thomas Wyatt’s paraphrase of the penitential psalms in 1549 may associate him with a circle who venerated Wyatt’s memory.92 A more likely vendor was the London bookseller, importer, and ‘scholar-printer’, Rayner Wolfe. The petition of Anne Boleyn in January 1536 for Wolfe’s admission to the freedom of the City proves his closeness to the court.93 In 1542 he set up a press in London, and in that year printed, anonymously, at his sign of the Brazen Serpent, John Leland’s Naeniae, mourning songs for Wyatt, dedicated to Surrey and naming him as Wyatt’s heir.94 This was also the year in which Surrey published, anonymously, his epitaph, ‘Wyat resteth here’.95 In the following year John Cheke, Pickering’s Cambridge tutor, entrusted Wolfe with the printing of his Christmas gift to the King.96 Thomas Chaloner, Pickering’s contemporary at Cambridge and in Cromwell’s household, who himself translated passages from Orlando Furioso, bought books from Wolfe.97 Maybe the Furioso was a gift from the Duchess, who acquired it sometime after its printing in 1539, to Pickering, who signed it in 1545. Unless Pickering owned it first, and she coveted it: perhaps it was his gift to her, in 1545 or afterwards. Pickering was intellectually gifted, but he was also a gallant: ‘of tall stature, and handsome, and very successful with women’. Much later, when this particularly mattered, he was reported to have ‘enjoyed the intimacy of many and great ones’.98 He was devoted to the service of the Earl, but also to Mary Richmond. In their copy of the Furioso, this book which was album amicorum and more, the inscription beneath Mary’s signature—‘Assai più d’altrui [far beyond others]’—is written in an exquisite italic script. The forming of the italic letters here is so close to that of the italic in Pickering’s holograph letters that it seems to be his hand (see Figure 5). Figure 5 View largeDownload slide TNA, SP 68/10, f. 84r. Reproduced by kind permission of the National Archives, UK. Figure 5 View largeDownload slide TNA, SP 68/10, f. 84r. Reproduced by kind permission of the National Archives, UK. If further proof is needed that the inscription is Pickering’s, he leaves more: an appended π—π for Pickering, to show his splendid, if largely abandoned, education in Greek (see Figure 2).99 Who, or what, was ‘far beyond others’? Maybe it was Pickering himself; much more likely it was Mary Richmond. III As they met and read together, with such seeming freedom, they were almost certainly in London. His father had a house in the parish of St Andrew Undershaft, but William Pickering lived elsewhere, independently.100 By 1543 the Duke of Norfolk was established in Lambeth.101 But Surrey did not always stay at this Howard mansion, choosing the greater freedom of lodging with his companions—including Pickering—at Arundel’s, an inn for the nobility, in St Laurence Lane. Mary, too, was in London, but not under her father’s wing. In London, nobles entertained each other.102 They dined and gambled together, sent their minstrels and players to each other’s households. Between their riverside mansions little boats plied, carrying lords and their ladies to dine with friends, and servants with messages and presents and invitations.103 The novel, and fragile, alignment between the ancient family of the Howards and the newly risen Seymours is signalled by their conviviality. Richmond’s death had left Surrey stranded in a court full of new men, and now he and his sister dined in their company. Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, had a newly renovated house on the river: Beauchamp Place, ‘besides Stronde in the subburbes of London’.104 Day after day, at dinner and supper the Earl and his Countess welcomed their friends and peers and their servants there, or at Sheen. ‘My lady Richmond’ was their very frequent guest. Between mid-February 1539 and July 1540 her name appears in the dining lists on nearly a hundred occasions. Sometimes—as between October 1539 and the New Year of 1540—she seems to have been staying at Beauchamp Place. Always in attendance were her women servants, sometimes two or three, sometimes six, and almost always Mistress Zouche, her ‘gentlewoman’. Surrey also dined with the Seymours often: twenty-nine times between November 1538 and June 1541, sometimes with his sister.105 Whenever Surrey was the Seymours’ guest, Thomas Seymour was markedly absent. Players and minstrels, trumpeters and fools entertained the Seymours and their guests, and poets, too. Edmund Knyvet, cousin of ‘my lady Richmond’, was one of the ‘makers’ of the ‘Devonshire manuscript’; in extremis, awaiting execution, Thomas Seymour wrote pitiful verses.106 Once, on 23 December 1539, Surrey dined alone with the Countess, who had an ambivalent role as muse.107 Like Wyatt, Surrey played poetically on a strange relationship with her. In ‘Eache beast can chuse his feere’, the prancing white lion [the heraldic badge of the Howards] reproaches the wolf [the badge of the Countess’s family, the Stanhopes] for declining to dance with him. Behind the parody lies the deadly truth that one of lion’s family had died for love—Lord Thomas Howard for marrying Lady Margaret Douglas: ffor you your self dothe know/ it is not long agoe sins that for love one of the race/ did end his life in woe In towre both strong and highe/ for his assured truthe.108 Soon other Howards would suffer for love. By the end of 1541 Lady Norfolk (the Duke’s step-mother)—with her daughter the Countess of Bridgewater, and her son, Lord William Howard and his wife—was in prison. For concealing from the King the ‘evil and carnal life’ of his fifth queen, Katherine Howard, they were indicted for misprision of treason.109 Amidst the revelations of the Queen’s liaisons came the discovery of Lady Margaret Douglas’s dalliance with Lord Charles Howard. Warned to ‘beware the thirde tyme’, she was packed off to Kenninghall with ‘my lady Richmond’.110 Once again, with the dishonour of a ‘cosine crowned’, Mary was exiled from the court. In the following summer the Earl of Surrey suffered a great overthrow. From the Fleet prison in July 1542, he sent William Pickering as emissary to members of the Council, one by one: ‘I have of late seuerally requered eche of you by my servant Pickeringe of yor favores from whome as yet I have receavyd no nother comfort then my passed follye hathe deserved’. Pickering’s oratory was unavailing. Surrey’s crime had been to challenge John a Legh to a duel within the precincts of the court. This challenge was no private one, Surrey insisted, but ‘this symple bodye rashelye aventuryd in the revenge of his [the King’s] owne quarrell’.111 In prison Surrey was allowed two servants to attend him (maybe Pickering was one).112 The Earl’s promise to ‘brydle my heddye will’ was soon broken. In January 1543, Surrey, with ‘yong’ Pickering, his ‘man’, Thomas Clere, Thomas Wyatt the younger, Edward Shelley, and their servants (Pickering’s men in white russet coats), left their lodgings late at night and ran wild though London in Lenten misrule.113 Surrey ‘cowlde nott denye butt he hadde verye evyll don’,114 though Pickering and Wyatt ‘utterlye stode in denyall’. Only when Thomas Clere ‘avowed it unto his face’ did Pickering confess. He was sent to the Tower.115 Mistress Millicent Arundel, the Earl’s landlady, was questioned about the misrule and ‘what pastyme ABC [Surrey and his companions: too sensitive to name] hathe used commonly in the evenynges after supper’.116 Her answer does not survive, but there is evidence enough of the night games, of aristocratic ‘frays’, of Surrey’s ‘rydyng with many men in the streetes’.117 But Arundel’s was the scene, too, of dissident conversations and dangerous questioning. Young men and women, scions of great houses, were being won to the new religion, among them Surrey, Mary Richmond, and their younger brother. At court and in London they debated the great matters of faith which were still hazardous to confess. Impatient of old rules and constraints, thinking Catholic prohibitions and mortifications pointless, they defied the Lenten fast. So Surrey did at Arundel’s in 1543.118 And Mary Richmond did also. In February 1545 she sought a licence for herself and two guests to avoid the Lenten fast. As did William Pickering. But that Lent ‘my lady Richmond’ was among the nobles who were summoned before the City authorities for breaking the fast.119 The reformed faith was a powerful bond, but just as it united believers it also divided them if they faltered. Later, Mary claimed that her brother, back-sliding from his adherence to evangelical religion, ‘disswaded her from going too far in reading the Scripture’.120 Mary was living with remarkable freedom, a life far different from that once imagined for her. No husband, royal or otherwise, was ever found for her, after the death of Richmond. She was not improvident, at first, for in March 1539 she began to receive her jointure—£700 per annum, a princely sum—but soon she was in debt.121 With the ambivalent status of widow and maiden, she remained under the faltering care of her father. Migrating between Howard residences, she was often in the company of Lady Margaret Douglas. By early 1543, the time of her brother and Pickering’s misrule, she had returned to London. While her father campaigned in Scotland, she was living independently, in the City mansion of Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, in Silver Street. Writing his testament as he left for the wars, Mountjoy willed that for two years from Easter 1543 ‘my ladye Richemonde do occupie my howse at London’.122 Cast in each other’s company, at court or in Norfolk or London, Mary and Lady Margaret Douglas read and rhymed. They were principal among the literary coterie who composed the ‘Devonshire Manuscript’. Above the poem, ‘my ywtheful days ar past/my plesant erese [years] ar gon’, someone wrote ‘Madame margeret et madame de Richemont/ Je vodroy bien quil fult [I dearly wish that it were]’.123 Into this manuscript, perhaps in the summer or early autumn of 1544 during her London sojourn, Mary copied Surrey’s poem ‘O happy dames’, ventriloquizing a lady’s lament. She revealed thereby her admiration for her brother’s poetry and her engagement in the poetic enterprise.124 Within these courtly coteries, to copy a poem was to claim it. Other literary works, other literary circles link Mary to her brother, to the life of the ‘courtly makers’. The first stanza of ‘O happy dames’ also appears in a manuscript associated with Lord Mountjoy.125 Living at Mountjoy House, Mary joined another company devoted to the life of poetry; the house was praised as ‘home of the Muses’. Splendidly educated, by illustrious tutors at home, and at court with other noble youths, including Lord Thomas Howard, Mountjoy cherished the poetry of Surrey and the late lamented Thomas Wyatt.126 Within BL, MS Harley 78 is Surrey’s verse, his letter to ‘the Lords of the Council’ of 1542, and the epitaphs for Wyatt which he and Anthony St Leger wrote to preserve Wyatt’s fame.127 At Mountjoy House Mary was at the heart of a company bound by honour, faith, friendship, and poetry. Her irregular life may tell of insecurity and disappointment. In September 1543, Mary’s cousin, Sir Henry Knyvet, received a letter from a friend expressing hope against hope for Stoic calm for their mutual friends: ‘I wishe honor longe life and quyet myndes vnto my Lady Margaretes grace and my Lady Richemont and no lesse to my Lorde of Surrey’.128 How could young noblewomen find honour or stability if no marriage were provided for them? The ‘Spanish Chronicler’ tells of a row between Mary and her brother. Often a fantasist, the chronicler sometimes deviated to the truth; some of his stories originated in the London rumour mill and have a shadowy plausibility. According to him, Mary refused to re-marry. ‘She was one of the most beautiful dames in the land, but she was young, and, it was suspected, too free with her favours’. Surrey ‘went to her one day and said, “Sister, I am very sorry to hear what I do about you, and if it be true I will never speak to you again, but will be your mortal enemy” ’. She still ‘gave herself up to her pleasures’. Before this time, he ‘always visited her, and showed great affection for her, telling her all his affairs’.129 Other witnesses, testifying under great pressure, told of a breach between Mary and the Earl. To Sir Gawen Carew Mary confided in the summer of 1546 ‘as strange a practise of her Brothers as ever he herd of’. At the time of her proposed marriage to Thomas Seymour—not at the first proposal in 1538, but at its revival in 1546—Surrey advised Mary that ‘although her fantasy would not serve to marry’ Seymour, ‘she should dissemble’. Surrey ‘would finde the means’ that the King should send for her, ‘and so possibly that his Maiestie might caste some love vnto her wherby […] she shuld beare as greate a stroke aboute him as Madame Destampz [the royal mistress] doth abowt the ffrenche king’. ‘It is possible’, Surrey advised, ‘that the King should take such a fantezey to you that ye shall be able to govern like unto Madame Distamps which should not only be a meane to helpe her selfe, but all her freinds should receive a commodite by the same’. Mary ‘defyed her brother’, so she told Carew, ‘and said that all they should perishe & she would cutt her own troat rather then she would consent to such a villainy’.130 The rumour of the plot was breathed among their friends and she confirmed it later.131 Perhaps it was during the time of her freedom in London that Surrey conceived this plot which so disparaged his sister. Literary sources associated with the Earl and his sister celebrate greater sibling fidelity. A chivalric romance—A certayn treatye moste wyttely deuysed orygynally wrytten in the spaynysshe, lately traducted in to frenche entytled, Lamant mal traicte de samye—was dedicated to Surrey by John Clerk in March 1543.132 The romance tells of the sorrowful knight Arnaulte, who loves Lucenda unavailingly and is betrayed by his friend Yerso. In his suffering, Arnaulte is comforted by his sister, Belysa. Her brother’s grief is hers, says Belysa. It is the two of them against the world. I pray thee make my harte secretarye of thy passyons. To whome oughtest thou to gyue suche thynges in kepynge, but only to me […] yf thou wylt the death I desire not the lyef, yf thou abhorre the pleasure, the displeasure is to me agreeable […] So that thyne ylles and my torment do ponysshe one selfsame hert. All her honour and safety rest in him.133 That this work, composed for Surrey, tells of a betrayal, of the love of a brother and a sister and the secrets between them, may signify little. But another romance which narrates the heroic destiny of a brother and sister takes us closer to Mary Richmond and her brother. IV In Mary’s copy of Orlando Furioso is one more italic hand, one more motto, written by another reader. In the lower margin of Canto XXXVI is written: ‘Guardate bene de tenere fede [Be sure to keep faith]’ (see Figure 6). Figure 6 View largeDownload slide Orlando Fvrioso di Messer Ludouico Ariosto (Venice, 1539), f. 184v. Figure 6 View largeDownload slide Orlando Fvrioso di Messer Ludouico Ariosto (Venice, 1539), f. 184v. Whose is the hand? An assured italic script, it belongs to someone seemingly used to writing in Italian. It is contemporary with the other inscriptions in the book although, as with them, we cannot tell exactly when it was written. Whether Mary Richmond or Pickering passed their copy of the Furioso directly to the writer of the motto is unknown, but if they did he or she was close to them. Among the court and family circles in which they moved no one has been found whose handwriting accords exactly with that of the motto. Examples of italic handwriting among Mary’s friends and relatives are uncommon, not only because the writing of italic demanded an elevated education but also because surviving holograph letters are usually written in secretary hand, in English. The flower motif may be significant. The 2nd Duke of Norfolk and the 3rd Duke and his Duchess—Mary’s grandfather, father and mother—all habitually appended a flower to their signatures, which was rare, if not unique, among the nobility.134 But the Howard children did not do so. Here the flower by the motto is inscribed as a marker, as was the flower in the margin of the copy of Surrey’s letter to the Council of 1542. ‘Guardate bene de tenere fede [Be sure to keep faith]’. Keep faith to what, to whom? This inscription in the Furioso appears at a crux in the poem. Canto XXXVI—characteristically, for the mode of the Furioso is serio ludere, delightful teaching—veers between comedy and tragedy. Moments of playfulness are followed by dark prediction. The canto begins pessimistically: ‘sempre cortese sia un cor gentil [a noble heart will always be gracious]’, but so, too, ‘un cor villan si mostri similmente. Natura inchina al male [a churlish heart must always reveal itself. Nature inclines to evil]’ (1.1–7). Comparing ancient valour with modern cruelty, Ariosto turns to the ‘valorosa e bella [valiant and beautiful]’ Bradamante (11.1), the heroine of this canto, and of the whole Orlando Furioso. It is in Canto XXXVI that the destiny of Bradamante and Ruggiero is finally revealed to them. At first, we find Bradamante in disguise, challenging a knight from the Saracen army to joust with her. She issues the challenge, not knowing that it is Ruggiero who will answer; he accepts, not knowing that Bradamante issues the challenge. Enter Marfisa, a Saracen warrior-maiden, who is forever in armour and on her helmet bears a phoenix, whether through pride or as symbol of her virginity (17–18). She determines to fight Ruggiero herself. Bradamante, constant in her love, terrible in her jealousy, imagines that Ruggiero has fallen for Marfisa. Ruggiero looks on, in agony; he loves them both, one with ‘fiamma e furore [flame and fury]’, the other with ‘benivolenza più ch'amore [good will more than love]’ (27.7–8). Bradamante recognises Ruggiero, and speaks with passion: ‘Dunque baciar sí belle e dolce labbia/deve altra, se baciar non le poss’io [Is another, then, to kiss such sweet lips, if I am not able to kiss them?]’ (32.1-2). ‘Guàrdati (grida), perfido Ruggiero [Take care (she cries), treacherous Ruggiero]’ (35.2). And Bradamante charges at him, driven on by sorrow and rage. But she turns aside, to vent her fury instead on the Moorish army, under King Agramante, and ‘ella sola quel dí vinse la guerra [she alone that day won the battle]’ (39.3), with her lance of gold and her faithful steed Rabicano. But as the warm south winds melt the snow, so Bradamante’s heart melts when she hears Ruggiero’s prayers. To be alone together, she beckons him towards a grove of cypresses, traditional emblems of death, where there lies a white marble sepulchre. Marfisa follows. ‘Quanto sua giunta ad ambi sia molesta, chi vive amando, il sa, senza ch’io ’l scriva [How much her coming annoyed them both anyone who lives and loves knows without my writing it]’ (44.3–4)—one of Ariosto’s wonderful, knowing asides about the ways of love. ‘Guardate bene de tenere fede’. It is at this moment that the inscription appears in Mary’s copy of the Furioso. Again, Bradamante calls Ruggiero faithless—‘Perfido Ruggier’. Ruggiero assails Marfisa. As his sword strikes a cypress, an earthquake shakes the grove, and a terrible voice issues from the tomb to make a revelation, to give a warning, and a promise. Non sia lite tra voi: gli è ingiusto et inumano ch’alla sorella il fratel morte dia, o la sorella uccida il suo germano. Tu, mio Ruggiero, e tu, Marfisa mia, credete al mio parlar che non è vano: in un medesimo utero d’un seme foste concetti, e usciste al mondo insieme. [Let there be no strife between you; it is unjust and inhuman for a brother to kill his sister or a sister to slay her brother. You, my Ruggiero, and you, my Marfisa, believe my words which are not empty: you were conceived of one seed in one same womb and came into the world together] (XXXVI.59). They are twin brother and sister, ‘eletti a glorïose imprese [chosen for glorious deeds]’ (61.2), rescued at birth by Atlante, the magus. With great joy, Ruggiero recognizes Marfisa as his sister and embraces her. As Ruggiero recounts their descent ‘da’ Troiani per la linea d’Ettorre [from the Trojans through the line of Hector]’ (XXXVI.70.1–2), ‘De la progenie nostra i chiari gesti/ per l’istorie vedrai celebri al mondo [the famous deeds of our family celebrated throughout the world in story]’ (72.5-6), Marfisa stands ‘con serena fronte fisa [with serene brow intent]’ (75.1). But when she hears that their father had been killed by the father and grandfather of King Agramante, whom Ruggiero serves, she protests: ‘Fratel mio (salva tua grazia), avuto hai troppo torto a non ti vendicar del padre morto [My brother (begging your pardon), you have been very wrong in not avenging your dead father]’ (76.6–8). Though he could not kill his father’s murderers, who were already dead, ‘dei figli vendicar tu ti dovevi [You should have taken vengeance on their sons]’ (77.3). Perché, vivendo tu, vive Agramante? Questa è una macchia che mai non ti levi dal viso; poi che dopo offese tante non pur posto non hai questo re a morte, ma vivi al soldo suo ne la sua corte. [Why, if you live, does Agramante live? This is a spot you can never wipe from your face, since after such great wrongs you not only have not put this king to death but you live on his pay in his court] (77.4–8). Marfisa vows to the Christian God that she will not remove her armour until she has avenged her father, and will grieve for her brother if she finds him in the service of King Agramante or any Moorish lord, ‘se non col ferro in man per danno loro [except with steel in your hand for their harm]’ (78.8). But Ruggiero demurs: Ora, essendo Agramante che gli pose la spade al fianco, farebbe opra rea dandogli morte, e saria traditore che già tolto l’avea per suo signore. [Now, since it was Agramante who had put the sword by his side, it would be an evil deed to cause his death, and he would be a traitor, since long ago he had taken him as his lord] (80.5–8). Ruggiero turns his horse to return to his pagan King (83.7–8). The two inscriptions—Guardate bene de tenere fede and Assai più d’altrui—take us close not only to the spirit of Orlando Furioso but also to the ethics and aspirations of its noble readers in England. Within this imaginative world are circumstances which resonate with the real lives of Mary Richmond and her friends. We see Mary’s sympathy for Angelica and her plight. When we contemplate them thinking on the fates of Ruggiero, Bradamante and Marfisa, it is hard to escape the consciousness of history, in the poem or their own lives. A real life dilemma is portrayed. Could a true knight, in honour, serve a prince who has destroyed the knight’s family? Like Ruggiero, Surrey chose service to the King who had ‘put the sword by his side’. Yet in his poetry lies evidence of questioning of royal power and its abuse. The shadow of the tyrant looms.135 Memories of ‘our old aunceturys’ who had stood against kings were bright for the high nobility of Henry VIII’s reign who feared the extension of royal power.136 In 1519, the year of his marriage to the Duke of Buckingham’s daughter, the overmighty George Neville, Lord Bergavenny—Surrey’s uncle by marriage—possessed a chronicle of England in the reign of Edward I: Thys boke ys myn G Bergevenny whyche I leve yn my chamber att London the xxj day of October A xj H viij 137 A prudent noble would distance himself from Buckingham and his treason. Not Surrey. At Buckingham’s attainder the Duke of Norfolk had placed a blank-quarter in his coat of arms, where the arms of his wife (Buckingham’s daughter) had been, but Surrey reassumed them.138 Reading Canto XXXVI of Orlando Furioso, perhaps these readers remembered the execution of Mary’s grandfather by the prince her brother served and asked how faith could be kept at such a court? Maybe Mary, if she read so far, contemplated not only the romance of Angelica but also the heroism of Marfisa as she challenged her brother and his choice. V The inscriptions in Mary Richmond’s Orlando Furioso are prologue, or epilogue, to a tragedy. By the end of the poem Ruggiero’s vainglory and desire for power win him a kingdom but bring his downfall. Some believed that the Earl of Surrey, too, sought a kingdom. He saw himself as a prince. ‘By princely acts thus strave I still to make my fame indure’, he wrote, in a passage of invention, in his ‘Ecclesiastes’.139 In his grand Renaissance house, Mount Surrey, and in his late, full-length portrait his magnificence is manifested.140 Visiting England in 1540, the great Prince of Salerno found Surrey ‘very proud’.141 Enquiries into the misrule of 1543 uncovered disquieting evidence of the extremity of that pride. Maidservants at Arundel’s recalled how the Earl ‘fumed’: ‘I marveyl they [citizens of London] woll thus mock a prynce’. ‘Whie […] is he a prince?’ asked Alice Flaner. ‘Yea, mary, is he’, answered Mistress Arundel. ‘And if ought shuld com at the King but good his father shuld stand for King’.142 At court they talked of his ‘pryde & vayne glory’.143 Such conversations were dangerous, especially once it was certain that the King was not long for the world and that a minor would succeed him. A memorandum belonging to the last days of 1546 noted ‘My lorde of Surreys pryde and his gowne of gold’.144 One of his friends came forward with evidence against him, and on 2 December Surrey was arrested.145 ‘Guardate bene de tenere fede’. The inscription in the Furioso insisted on fidelity. Ruggiero, through a lack of will and self-knowledge, is so often not faithful but faithless. The choice to remain true to his pagan lord, Agramante, who ‘put the sword by his side’, while awaiting an occasion to forsake him ‘giustamente’ (XXXVI. 82.8), is hardly that of the epic hero. Only at the end does he learn to act in accord with the imperatives of dynastic epic.146 Surrey’s fidelity—to his faith, his family, his King—had been questioned. In his extremity his family and his friends did not keep faith with him, or could not. His father was arrested. Lord Thomas Howard’s arrest was expected, too, but he was allowed his freedom.147 Arriving at Kenninghall in the darkness before daybreak on 14 December, taking the household unaware, royal agents brought news of the arrest of Surrey and her father to the appalled Duchess of Richmond. They found her in despair—‘a woman sore perplexed trimbleng and like to fall downe’. Searching her coffers and closet they ‘founde noo writinges worthie sending’. Nor did they find much else; all her jewels were sold or pawned. Mary, with Bess Holland and their women, was sent to London to testify.148 The Countess of Surrey, distraught, lost her child due at Candlemas.149 Looking for any evidence of treasonable words impugning the King and his sovereignty, the councillors did not search hard enough in Surrey’s poetry, or read it imaginatively, if they read it at all. Yet in the poetry were allusions enough to the cruelty and vice of kings. No mention was made of his library or that of his sister. In the very last days of Henry VIII, on 13 January 1547, Surrey was tried for high treason.150 Mary Richmond brought the most damning evidence against him, including the allegation that he had exhorted her to come to court ‘and lay herself out to please the King, and so to gain his favour’. Surrey denied it and, shown ‘a certain writing’ in his sister’s hand, exclaimed, ‘Must I, then, be condemned on the word of a wretched woman?’ So the Imperial ambassador reported.151 According to Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Mary had ‘grown an extreme enemy of her Brother’, and the ‘intestine division’ in the family had been ‘many secret ways fomented’.152 But she was desperate, fearful for her father, and under extraordinary pressure to testify. Surrey’s friends betrayed him, whether through fear, or hope of gain, or doubt about what he would do with power. Some found a higher loyalty to the King, or to the evangelical faith they thought Surrey had abandoned. ‘There is not one of them, however devoted to him, who does not regard him as suspect’.153 In the end, the charge that he had incorporated royal heraldry into his coat of arms destroyed Surrey: a charge which was emblematic of an alleged grander design to assume the Protectorship, of an aspiration to rule.154 VI William Pickering was not a witness against his master. His first two patrons, Cromwell and Surrey, were beheaded as traitors; so, too, his third, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland. Pickering tried to avoid the English court. Offered a place in Edward VI’s Privy Chamber, ‘he seyth he can [not] abyde to take the paynes yn that place’.155 Instead, he served as ambassador for Edward VI and Elizabeth, using his arts of eloquence at foreign courts. In Mary’s reign, implicated in the rebellion of his former companion, Sir Thomas Wyatt, he went into exile in France and Italy. He never married, though at Queen Elizabeth’s accession he was a plausible candidate for her hand. Bets were placed in London that he would be King. It was then that his success with women was remembered, his liaisons with ‘many and great ones’.156 Some of his time he spent in the celestial realms of Renaissance philosophy and mathematics. In 1549, when John Dee was in Louvain, immersed in ‘in studies philosophicall and mathematicall’, Pickering came to study with him—logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, the use of the astronomer’s staff and ring, the astrolabe. Dee called him ‘amicus noster singularis’.157 Always, Pickering was collecting books, for others and for his own great library. He died in 1574. After her family’s cataclysm Mary Richmond devoted herself to those who remained. She was her father’s staunch defender, making ‘ernest suytt’ for his release from prison in December 1549.158 Appointed guardian to Surrey’s five young children, she raised them in the reformed religion, and by 1548 chose John Foxe, the future martyrologist, as tutor for the three eldest, Thomas, Jane and Henry. Their schoolroom was at her manor at Reigate in Surrey, and there they learnt Italian along with Scripture. Her niece Katharine became ‘skillfull in the french, but perfect in the Italian tongue, wherein she most desired her daughters to bee instructed’. Mary’s former friendship with the Seymours lost, she spent little time at court, but was in London sometimes, at Mountjoy House, now in the company of divines not poets.159 In 1552 she was found expounding prophecies passed between the Duchess of Suffolk and Countess of Sussex.160 For Mary—so undaunted a reformer, with a sometime claim to the throne while married to Richmond—favour under Queen Mary was never likely. As Mary Tudor seized her throne, the Duchess wrote in protest to the Council. Coming to seek the new Queen’s forgiveness, she did not find it.161 Mary Richmond died in December 1557, and was attended to her funeral and buried with the honour her great rank demanded.162 Surrey’s children, Mary’s charges, suffered for adhering to an older tradition of nobility. His eldest son, Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, went to the block. His daughter Jane married Charles Neville, the last Neville Earl of Westmorland, who fled into exile after the revolt of the Northern Earls in 1569. As he left, Neville sent a letter to his sister-in-law Margaret, Surrey’s youngest daughter, which reveals something of their lost play world, their reading of Orlando Furioso. Bidding farewell to Margaret, whom he would never see again, he wrote: ‘I dare not nowe wryte. Fare well good syster, and I trust to God yeat for all wee shalbe as mearye as wee weare when you weare named angelyca’.163 And the little copy of the Orlando Furioso? It may once have been bound by the so-called Oxford binder.164 It was sold at Sotheby’s in 1854, and again in 1994.165 In between these sales the aesthete and great collector of Italian books, Charles Fairfax Murray, owned it.166 It has passed through private hands, its history mostly mysterious. Footnotes * This paper was originally written in honour of Mary Robertson, and first presented at the Henry Huntington Library while I held the Mary Robertson Fellowship. I thank the audience there and those at seminars at the Universities of Cambridge and Sussex. I gratefully acknowledge the advice and help of Cristina Dondi, Alexandra Gajda, George Southcombe, Nigel Wilson and Henry Woudhuysen. I thank the anonymous reviewers who dissuaded me from the more unscholarly consequences of my enthusiasm. 1 Michele Catalano, Vita di Ludovico Ariosto, ricostruita su nuovi documenti, 2 vols (Geneva, 1930). 2 For Agostino Bindoni, who was active in Venice between 1523 and 1558, see Ilde Menis, ‘Bindoni, Agostino’ in Marco Menato, Ennio Sandal and Giuseppina Zapella (eds), Dizionario dei tipografi e degli editori italiani: il Cinquecento, vol. 1, A-F (Milan, 1997–), 134–5. For a precise description of Bindoni’s editions, see Antonio C. Ricci, ‘The Orlando Furioso in Print, 1516–1542: An historical study and a descriptive bibliography’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Toronto, 1998), 275–9, 285–8. 3 Marina Beer, Romanzi di Cavalleria: Il ‘Furioso’ e il romanzo italiano del primo Cinquecento (Rome, 1987); Daniel Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic: The Canonization of Orlando Furioso (Princeton, NJ, 1991), ch. 1. 4 Pietro Aretino, Sei Giornate, cited in Brian Richardson, Print Culture in Renaissance Italy: The Editor and the Vernacular Text, 1470–1600 (Cambridge, 1994), 92–3. 5 Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic, 13–14; Paul F. Grendler, ‘Form and Function in Italian Renaissance Popular Books’, Renaissance Quarterly, 46 (1993), 451–85; Antonio Ricci, ‘“Si gran volume in piccola e manigevole forma”: Bindoni and Pasini’s 1535 edition of the Orlando Furioso’, Quaderni d’Italianistica, 18 (1997), 183–204. Horatio F. Brown, The Venetian Printing Press (New York, NY, & London, 1891). 6 This was the normal press run for non-devotional works, though the publisher of the Furioso may have been more optimistic: Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic, 10. New evidence from the project ‘15cBOOKTRADE: An Evidence-based Assessment and Visualization of the Distribution, Sale and Reception of Books in the Renaissance’, led by Dr Cristina Dondi, will be revelatory. Preliminary findings suggest an extremely high rate of attrition. 7 British Library, G.10975; Houghton Library, University of Harvard, *IC5.Ar434.516o 1539c; Wrocław University Library, SDr 450132; Bibliothèque nationale de France, Arsenal, 8-BL-6875; Biblioteca comunale—Palazzo Sormani, Milan, VET.E.Vet. 341; Biblioteca della Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, SDA 8989. Whether the Biblioteca communale dell’archiginnasio, Bologna possesses a copy awaits confirmation. Ricci, ‘The Orlando Furioso in Print’, 287–8; http://opac.sbn.it (accessed 10 June 2018); CERL—Heritage of the Printed Book Database. 8 Apart from Bindoni’s 1539 edition, I have read Lanfranco Caretti (ed), Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, 2 vols (Turin, 1966 & 1992). I have often, but not always, followed the English translation of Guido Waldman: Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, 2 vols (Oxford, 1974 & 1983). 9 Ricci, ‘The Orlando Furioso in Print’, 49–50; Conor Fahy, L’ ‘Orlando Furioso’ del 1532: profilo di una edizione (Milan, 1989), 98. Peter V. Marinelli, Ariosto & Boiardo: The Origins of Orlando Furioso (Columbia, MO, 1987); Albert Russell Ascoli, Ariosto’s Bitter Harmony: Crisis and Evasion in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton, NJ, 1987); ‘Ariosto and the “Fier Pastor”: Form and History in Orlando Furioso’, Renaissance Quarterly, 54 (2001), 487–522. 10 Jane E. Everson, The Italian Romance Epic in the Age of Humanism: The Matter of Italy and the World of Rome (Oxford, 2001). 11 Marinelli, Ariosto & Boiardo, ch. 2; Everson, Italian Romance Epic, 251–5; Marco Dorigatti, ‘Rugiero and the Dynastic Theme from Boiardo to Ariosto’ in Jane E. Everson and Diego Zancani, Italy in Crisis, 1494 (Oxford, 2000), 92–128. 12 Peter deSa Wiggins, Figures in Ariosto’s Tapestry: Character and Design in the Orlando Furioso (Baltimore, MD, & London, 1986), 67–108; Marinelli, Ariosto & Boiardo, ch. 3; Ascoli, ‘Ariosto and the “Fier Pastor”’. 13 Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton: ‘“Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey read his Livy’, Past & Present, 129 (1990), 30–78. 14 Leon Kellner (ed), Caxton’s Blanchardyn and Eglantine, c. 1489, Early English Text Society, extra series, 58 (London, 1890); Malcolm K. Jones and Malcolm G. Underwood, The King’s Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby (Cambridge, 1992), 181–2. 15 David Starkey, ‘King Henry and King Arthur’, in James P. Carley and Felicity Riddy (eds), Arthurian Literature, 16 (1998), 171–96. 16 The castell of loue, translated out of Spanyshe into Englysshe, by Iohn Bowrchier, lord Bernes knyght (London, 1552?). 17 Carol M. Meale and Julia Boffey, ‘Gentlewomen’s reading’ in Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (eds), Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 3, 1400–1557 (Cambridge, 1999), 538. 18 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS 263. The manuscript is inscribed ‘Iohannes Godsaluus scribebat. 1549’ (f. 448r); ‘Wyngfeld’ (f. 271r); ‘Sir Fraunces Englefielde knighte’ (f. 449r). Margaret Aston, The King’s Bedpost: Reformation and Iconography in a Tudor Group Portrait (Cambridge, 1993), 177–8. In 1523 Lord Mounteagle owned ‘a parchment book in English, called Boccas’: J. S. Brewer, R. H. Brodie, and James Gairdner (eds), Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, 21 vols in 33 (London, 1862–1932), iii(2). 1989. Henceforth LP. Reference is to document numbers throughout, unless otherwise stated. 19 LP, xiii(2). 829(2), p. 339. 20 J. G. Nichols, ‘The Life of Mary, Duchess of Richmond’, Gentleman’s Magazine, new series, xxiii (1845), 480–87; George Frederick Nott, The Works of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, 2 vols (London, 1815–16); William A. Sessions, Henry Howard: The Poet Earl of Surrey. A Life (Oxford, 1999); Beverley A. Murphy, ‘Fitzroy [née Howard], Mary, duchess of Richmond (c.1519–1555?)’; Susan Brigden, ‘Howard, Henry, earl of Surrey (1516/17–1547)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online version). Henceforth ODNB. 21 G. A. Bergenroth et al. (eds), Calendar of Letters, Despatches and State Papers Relating to the Negotiations between England and Spain (London, 1862–1954), iv(1), 1529–1530, 368. Henceforth CSPSp. Reference is to page numbers. 22 Carole Rawcliffe, The Staffords, Earls of Stafford and Dukes of Buckingham, 1394–1521 (Cambridge, 1978), 36–44; Barbara J. Harris, Edward Stafford, Third Duke of Buckingham, 1478–1521 (Stanford, CA, 1986), 182–7, 193–202. 23 CSPSp, iv(1), 1529–1530, 360. Beverley A. Murphy, Bastard Prince: Henry VIII’s Lost Son (Stroud, 2001); J. Duncan M. Derrett, ‘Henry FitzRoy and Henry VIII’s scruple of conscience’, Renaissance News, 16 (Spring 1963), 1–9. 24 Emrys Jones (ed), Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey: Poems (Oxford, 1964), poem 27. 25 Surrey: Poems, poem 35. For the symbolic centrality of Anne, the ‘cosine crowned’, in Surrey’s epitaph to Clere, see Alastair Fowler, Conceitful Thought: The Interpretation of English Renaissance Poems (Edinburgh, 1975), 36–7. 26 LP, v. 1274; vi. 351, p. 167, 1111; Eric Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, ‘the Most Happy’ (Oxford, 2004), 158, 164. 27 CSPSp, iv(1), 1529–1530, 362, 468, 762. 28 BL, MS Cotton Vespasian F xiii, f. 144r (LP, xii(1). 2). 29 Dispensation was required because they were related within the forbidden degrees: Nott, Works of Henry Howard, xxviii. 30 John Stevens, Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (London, 1961); Chris Stamatakis, Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Rhetoric of Rewriting: ‘Turning the Word’ (Oxford, 2012), ch. 4. The National Archives, UK, SP 1/76, f. 195r (LP, vi. 613). 31 Elizabeth Heale (ed), Lady Margaret Douglas and others, The Devonshire Manuscript : A Women’s Book of Courtly Poetry (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, 19, Iter, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Toronto, 2012). For the suggestion that the manuscript was a wedding gift, see Sessions, The Poet Earl, 176–7. For the quotation: Seth Lerer, Courtly Letters in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge, 1997), 159. Helen Baron, ‘Mary (Howard) Fitzroy’s hand in the Devonshire Manuscript’, Review of English Studies, 45 (1994), 318–35; Elizabeth Heale, ‘Women and the Courtly Love Lyric: The Devonshire MS (BL Additional 17492)’, Modern Language Review, 90 (1995), 296–313. 32 John Foxe’s The Acts and Monuments Online, (1570), Book 8, 1237. Maria Dowling (ed), ‘William Latymer’s Chronickille of Anne Bulleyne’, Camden Miscellany, 30, Camden Fourth series, 39 (London, 1990), 54, 62–3. Ives, Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, ch. 18–19; Susan Brigden, Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest (London, 2012), 195–201. 33 S. W. Singer (ed), The Life of Cardinal Wolsey by George Cavendish (London, 1827), 456–7. 34 Mortimer Levine, Tudor Dynastic Problems, 1460–1571 (London and New York, NY, 1973), 66–7; Murphy, Bastard Prince, 163–7. 35 CSPSp, v(2), 1536–1538, 139. 36 TNA, SP 1/128, f. 11r (LP, xiii(1). 13). 37 BL, MS Cotton Titus B i, f. 391r (LP, xiv(1). 160). The Duchess’s letters to Cromwell are printed in Nott, Works of Henry Howard, appendix, xxvii–xxxi. 38 BL, MS Cotton Titus B i, f. 390r (LP, xii(2). 976); TNA, SP 1/111, f. 204r; SP 1/118, f. 216r; SP 1/120, f. 6r; SP 1/124, f. 1r; SP 1/114, f. 48r (LP, xi. 1138; xii(1). 967, 1157; xii(2). 479; State Papers, King Henry VIII, 11 vols (London, 1830–52), v, 99. Henceforth SP. Reference is to page numbers. LP, xii(1). 42). 39 TNA, SP 1/111, f. 204r–v (LP, xi. 1138). 40 LP, xi. 48. 41 BL, MS Additional 17492. See especially the poems at ff. 26r–30r and 88r. Bradley J. Irish, ‘Gender and Politics in the Henrician Court: the Douglas-Howard Lyrics in the Devonshire Manuscript (BL Add 17492)’, Renaissance Quarterly, 64 (2011), 79–114. 42 David M. Head, ‘“Beyng ledde and seduced by the Devyll”: The Attainder of Lord Thomas Howard and the Tudor Law of Treason’, The Sixteenth-Century Journal, 13 (1982), 3–16. 43 BL, MS Cotton Vespasian F xiii, f. 144r (LP, xii(1). 2). Baron dates this letter to late 1537, probably Wednesday 19 December: ‘Mary (Howard) Fitzroy’s hand’, 318–19. TNA, SP 1/128, f. 11r (LP, xiii(1).13). 44 TNA, SP 1/114, f. 48r (LP, xii(1).42). This letter is dated 1537 in LP, but must belong to 1538: see Mary Anne Everett Wood, Letters of Royal and Illustrious Ladies of Great Britain, 3 vols (London, 1846), ii, 374–5. 45 CSPSp, v(2), 1536–1538, 268. David M. Head, The Ebbs and Flows of Fortune: the Life of Thomas Howard, Third Duke of Norfolk (Athens, GA and London, 1995), 131–3, 146–53. 46 TNA, SP 1/124, f. 1v (LP, xii(2).479). 47 Surrey: Poems, poem 27. 48 BL, MS Sloane 325, f. 2v. Winthrop S. Hudson, The Cambridge Connection and the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 (Durham, NC, 1981), 52–3; Paul S. Needham, ‘Sir John Cheke at Cambridge and Court’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Harvard, 1971), 141. 49 TNA, SP 1/128, f. 69r (SP, i, 576). John Strype, Memorials of […] Thomas Cranmer (Oxford, 1840), 45. 50 TNA, SP 1/227, f. 104v (LP, xxi(2). 555(4)). 51 TNA, SP 1/131, f. 24r (LP, xiii(1). 690). In 1527 the Duke and Duchess rode to London with retinues of 40, 37, 28, and 46: Cambridge University Library, Pembroke MS 300 (without folio numbers). 52 TNA, SP 1/131, f. 67r (LP, xiii(1). 741). 53 TNA, SP 1/131, f. 192r (LP, xiii(1). 876). LP places the letter in April, but it may belong later. 54 TNA, SP 1/134, f. 160r–v (SP, i, 576–7). 55 Longleat, Seymour Papers, XVI, ff. 31r, 36r, 37r, 47r, 48r. Quotations from the Seymour Papers are included by permission of the Marquess of Bath, Longleat House, Warminster, Wiltshire. M.L. Bush, ‘The Rise to Power of Edward Seymour, Protector Somerset, 1500–1547’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Cambridge, 1965), 187–97. 56 Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, The Life and Raigne of King Henry the Eighth (London, 1649), 564. 57 In 1499 Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond, abandoned ‘M Richmond’ for ‘Margaret R’. Jones and Underwood, The King’s Mother, 86. 58 Susan Foister, Holbein & England (New Haven, CT, and London, 2004), 47. 59 Herbert, Life and Raigne, 564. 60 Archivio di Stato, Firenze, Mediceo del Principato, 4296, ff. 250v–252r. 61 LP, xiii(2). 622 (1). 62 BL, MS Additional 17492, f. 88r. Irish, ‘Gender and Politics’, 107–12. 63 Operette del Parthenopeo Suavio in varij tempi & per diversi subietti composte, et da Siluan Flammineo insiemi raccolte, et alla amorosa & moral sua Calamita intitulate (Bari, 1535). CUL, Y.9.1, B2v. David McKitterick, The Library of Sir Thomas Knyvett of Ashwellthorpe, c.1539–1618 (Cambridge, 1978), no. 1401, p. 154. Dennis E. Rhodes, ‘The First Book Printed at Bari’, Studies in Bibliography, 7 (1955), 208–211. 64 Barbara J. Harris, English Aristocratic Women, 1450–1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Careers (Oxford and New York, NY, 2002), 37, 261. Sessions, The Poet Earl, 50–3. J. P. Carley, ‘John Leland in Paris: The evidence of his poetry, Studies in Philology, 83 (1986), 1–50, especially 7, 9, 25. 65 John Palsgrave, Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse (London? 1530), A5r–A6r. 66 CUL, MS Pembroke 300, f. 8r. A. B. Emden, Biographical Register of the University of Oxford, A.D. 1501–1540 (Oxford, 1974), 521. 67 Susan James, Catherine Parr: Henry VIII’s Last Love (Stroud, 2008), 23–36, 113–18, 201. 68 Royal Collection, RC1N 1051956. I am grateful to Henry Woudhuysen for this reference. Janel Mueller and Joshua Scodel (eds), Elizabeth I: Translations, 1544–1589 (Chicago, IL, and London, 2009), 400, 461. BL, Cotton MS Otho Cx, f. 321r (LP, xix(1). 1020). 69 Katherine owned Il Petrarcha con l’espositione d’A. Vellutello (Gabriel Giolito de Ferrara, Venice, 1544): BL, C.27.e.19. James P. Carley, The Books of King Henry VIII and his Wives (London, 2004), 138–42. 70 Gemma Allen, The Cooke Sisters: Education, Piety and Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester and New York, NY, 2013), 23, 41–2. 71 A certayn treatye moste wyttely deuysed orygynally wrytten in the spaynysshe, lately traducted in to frenche entytled, Lamant mal traicte de samye (London, 1543?); Sergio Baldi, ‘The Secretary of the Duke of Norfolk and the First Italian Grammar in England’ in Siegfried Korninger (ed), Studies in English Language and Literature: presented to Professor Dr. Karl Brunner on the occasion of his seventieth birthday (Vienna, 1957), 12–13. 72 William A. Sessions, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (Boston, MA, 1986), ch. 3. 73 Surrey: Poems, poem 5 and 13; pp. 105, 112–13. 74 O. B. Hardison, Jr, Prosody and Purpose in the English Renaissance (Baltimore, MD, and London, 1989), 88–9, 130. 75 Susan Doran, ‘Pickering, Sir William (1516/17–1575)’, ODNB; S. T. Bindoff (ed), The House of Commons, 1509–1558, 3 vols (1982), iii, 107–8; David Lloyd, State-Worthies. Or, The Statesmen and Favourites of England since the Reformation, 2nd edn (London, 1679), 530–31. 76 N. H. Nicolas (ed), The Privy Purse Expenses of King Henry the Eighth, (London, 1827), 220; LP, v. 1799, f. 113; vii. 1672(2). David Starkey, ‘The Court: Castiglione’s Ideal and Tudor Reality: Being a Discussion of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Satire addressed to Sir Francis Bryan’, Journal of the Courtauld and Warburg Institutes, 45 (1982), 236. 77 Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, Elizabeth, 1601–1603; with Addenda, 1547–1565, 466. Henceforth SPDom. Reference is to page numbers. 78 Hudson, The Cambridge Connection, 28, 54, 66, 81; Needham, ‘Sir John Cheke’, 156–8. 79 LP, xiii(2). 1184(ii). 80 TNA, PCC, PROB 11/57, ff. 2r–3v. I. G. Philip, ‘Sir William Pickering and his Books’, The Book Collector, 5 (1956), 231–8. Colonel W. E. Moss began a study of Pickering’s library. I have benefited from consulting his notes, held in the Bodleian Library. Henry Woudhuysen and I intend a new study of Pickering and his library. 81 TNA, E36/143, ff. 1–22; E 36/139, ff. 42–88 (LP, vi. 299; vii.923). John Foxe’s The Acts and Monuments Online, 1570 edition, Book 8, 1385–6, 1396–7. Brigden, Thomas Wyatt, 120–21, 212–13. 82 Paolo Procaccioli (ed), Lettere Scritte a Pietro Aretino (Rome, 2003—), I, 207. 83 British Armorial Bindings: <http://armorial.library.utoronto.ca/search/armorial_search/pickering> (accessed 10 June 2018); E. Ph. Goldschmidt, Gothic & Renaissance Bookbindings, 2 vols. (London, 1928), i, 293–4; plate lxxxviii. 84 Petrarcha con l'espositione d'Alessandro Vellutello (Venice, 1544); Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (Venice, 1539); Pietro Aretino, Le Lettere (Venice, 1539); Marco Tullio Cicerone de gli uffici: Della amicitia. Della vecchiezza, &c (Venice, 1528); La commedia di Dante Aligieri con la nova espositione di Alessandro Vellutello (Venice, 1544); Iustino historico clarissimi, nelle historie di Trogo Pompeo, nuovamente in lingua Toscana tradotto (Venice, 1542); Salustio con alcune belle cose volgareggiate per Agostino Ortica della Porta (Venice, 1518); La Eneide di Virgilio tradotto in terza rima per M. Giovanpaulo Vasio (Venice, 1538); Appianus, Delle guerre civili de Romani tradotto da M. Alesandro Braccio (Venice, 1538); Le Vite dei dieci Imperatori, incominciando dal fine di Suetonio, tradotte per Mambrino Rosea da Fabriano (Venice, 1545); Aristophanes, Le Commedie tradutte in lingua commune d'Italia per Bartolomio & Pietro Rositini de Prat'Alboino (Venice, 1545). 85 Herbert, Life and Raigne, 564. 86 Brigden, Thomas Wyatt, 377–8, 515–16. 87 TNA, PC 2/1, ff. 296r, 310r, 325r; N. H. Nicolas (ed), Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council of England, 7 vols (London, 1834–37), i, 288, 303, 319; LP, xvii. 152. 88 Herbert, Life and Raigne, 564. 89 Neville Williams, Thomas Howard, Fourth Duke of Norfolk (London, 1964), 1. 90 Charlotte Bolland, ‘Sat super est: a portrait of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey’ in Tarnya Cooper, Aviva Burnstock, Maurice Howard and Edward Town (eds), Painting in Britain, 1500–1630: Production, Influences and Patronage (Oxford, 2015), 352–61. 91 Ruth Hughey (ed), The Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry, 2 vols (Columbus, OH, 1960), i, 3; ii, pp. 6–7. Ruth Hughey, John Harington of Stepney: Tudor Gentleman: His Life and Works (Columbus, OH, 1971), 64, 66, 288. 92 Peter W. M. Blayney, The Stationers’ Company and the Printers of London, 1501–1557, 2 vols (Cambridge, 2013), i, 524; ii, 659. 93 Blayney, Stationers’ Company, i, 321; ii, 607, 663. According to Needham, ‘Wolfe was England’s nearest approach to a scholar-printer at this time’: ‘Sir John Cheke’, ch. iii, n.80. 94 Blayney, Stationers’ Company, i, 461, 463–4, 475, 492–5. John Leland, Naeniae in mortem Thomae Viati equitis imcomparabilis (London, 1542), A3v. 95 An excellent Epitaffe of Syr Thomas Wyat (London, 1542), A1r–v. 96 Hudson, The Cambridge Connection, 74; Needham, ‘Sir John Cheke’, 156–7. 97 TNA, SP 70/58, f. 76v (Calendar of State Papers Foreign, Elizabeth, 1563, 397. Henceforth CSPF. Reference is to page numbers). BL, MS Lansdowne 824, f. 35v. 98 R. Brown et al. (eds), Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Relating to English Affairs, Existing in the Collections of Venice (London, 1864–1947), vii, 1558–1580, 36–7. Henceforth CSPVen. Reference is to page numbers. 99 At least one Greek text owned by Pickering survives: Archimedous tou Syrakousiou, Ta mechri nyn sozomena, hapanta = Archimedis Syracusani philosophi ac geometrae excellentissimi Opera (Basileae, 1544). CUL, M.2.12. His armorial binding proves his ownership, but he left no inscription in the pristine text. 100 R. G. Lang (ed), Two Tudor Subsidy Assessment Rolls for the City of London: 1541 and 1582, London Record Society, 29 (1993), 12. 101 Helen Miller, Henry VIII and the English Nobility (Oxford, 1986), 240, n. 222. 102 Felicity Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1990), 55, 74, 85–6. 103 See the household accounts of Edward Seymour: Longleat, Seymour Papers, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI. 104 Longleat, Seymour Papers, XIV, ff. 13r, 45r, 53r, 54r, 62r. 105 Longleat, Miscellaneous MSS XVIII, XIX; Seymour Papers, XV, XVIII. 106 Longleat, Seymour Papers, XVIII, f. 35v; Miscellaneous MS XVIII, ff. 67v, 146v, 151v; The Devonshire Manuscript, 16, 151, 157; Stanford Lehmberg, ‘Sir Edmund Knyvet (c.1508–1551)’, ODNB. Arundel Harington Manuscript, i, 291; ii, p. 438. 107 Longleat, Seymour Papers, XVIII, f. 55r. 108 In Wyatt’s ‘Accused though I be without desert’ her maiden name appears in an acrostic: ANNESTANHOPE: Sir Thomas Wyatt: the Complete Poems, ed. R. A. Rebholz (London, 1978), 100. Arundel Harington Manuscript, i, 78; Sessions, The Poet Earl, 223–7. 109 LP, xvi. 1339, 1469, 1470. 110 SP, i, 694–5, 692. 111 BL, MS Harley 78, f. 24r–v. 112 TNA, PC 2/1, f. 359 (J. R. Dasent (ed.), Acts of the Privy Council of England, vol. i, AD 1542–1547 (London, 1890), 17). Henceforth APC. Reference is to page numbers. 113 TNA, SP 1/175, ff. 82r, 83r, 84r–v; SP 1/ 176, ff. 137r, 141r (LP, xviii(1). 73 (3, 4, 5), 315(2), 327(2). A maid at Arundel’s called Pickering Surrey’s ‘man’: TNA, SP 1/176, f. 137r (LP, xviii(1). 315). 114 TNA, SP 1/176, f. 141r (LP, xviii(1). 327(2)); TNA, PC 2/1, f. 465 (APC, i, 104–5). 115 TNA, PC 2/1, ff. 465, 466; APC, i, 104–5, 125. 116 TNA, SP 1/176, f. 140r (LP, xviii(1). 327). 117 TNA, SP 1/227, f. 129r (LP, xxi(2). 555 (18)). 118 TNA, SP 1/175, ff. 80r–84v; 1/176, f. 141r (LP, xviii(1). 73(1–5), 327(2 )); APC, i, 104, 105, 106, 114, 399, 407, 410. 119 D. S. Chambers (ed.), Faculty Office Registers, 1534–1549: A Calendar of the first two Registers of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Faculty Office (Oxford, 1966), 254, 255. London Metropolitan Archives, COL/CA/01/01/011, ff. 174v, 176r. 120 Herbert, Life and Raigne, 564. 121 Nott, Works of Henry Howard, Appendix, p. xcvii. 122 BL, MS Harley 78, f. 22r. 123 BL, MS Additional 17492, f. 68r. The Devonshire Manuscript, 17, 164. 124 BL, MS Additional 17492, f. 55r–v. Baron, ‘Mary (Howard) Fitzroy’s hand’, 329; The Devonshire Manuscript, 17–18, 25, 68, 145–7; Sessions, The Poet Earl, 213; Susanne Woods, Natural Emphasis: English Versification from Chaucer to Dryden (San Marino, CA, 1994), 91–4. 125 BL, MS Harley 78, f. 30v. 126 Dr [J. A.] Giles, The Whole Works of Roger Ascham, 3 vols (1865), 1(i), 35–7. James P. Carley, ‘Blount, Charles, fifth Baron Mountjoy (1516–1544)’, ODNB; Sessions, The Poet Earl: The Poet Earl, 182–3. Palsgrave, Lesclarcissement, A5r–A6r. 127 BL, MS Harley 78. Seth Lerer, ‘British Library MS Harley 78 and the Manuscripts of John Shirley’, Notes & Queries, n.s., 37 (1990), 400–3. I am grateful to Dr Arnold Hunt for advice concerning this manuscript. 128 TNA, SP 1/181, f. 124r (LP, xviii(2). 190). My italics. 129 M.A.S. Hume (ed.), Chronicle of King Henry VIII of England (London, 1889), 142–3. 130 TNA, SP 1/227, f. 105r (LP, xxi(2). 555(5)); SP 1/227, f. 104r–v (LP, xxi(2). 555(4)). 131 Herbert, Life and Raigne, 563. 132 Baldi, ‘The Secretary of the Duke of Norfolk’, 1–16. 133 Lamant mal traicte de samye, G1r, S1v, S4v. 134 See, for example, BL, Cotton, MS Caligula Bii, f. 36r; TNA, SP 1/24, f. 55r (LP, i. 5477; iii(2). 2132) [2nd Duke of Norfolk] ; TNA, SP 1/70, f. 203r; 1/107, f. 150r; 1/124, f. 66r (LP, v. 1239; xi. 660; xii(2). 547) [3rd Duke]; BL, MS Cotton Vespasian F xiii, f. 151r; TNA, SP 1/91, f. 23r; SP 1/106, f. 219r; BL, MS Cotton Titus B i, ff. 388v, 390v, 389r, 162r, 391r; SP 1/144, f. 16r (LP, vii. 1083, viii. 319; xi. 502; xii(2). 143, 976, 1049, 1332; xiv(1). 160, 425) [the Duchess]. 135 Brigden, ‘Henry Howard and the ‘Conjured League’ ’, 508–9, 530–31; Greg Walker, Writing under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford, 2005), 400–7. 136 T. F. Mayer (ed.), Thomas Starkey, A Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, Camden Fourth Series, 37 (London, 1989); Thomas Starkey and the Commonweal: Humanist Politics and Religion in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge, 1989), 154ff. 137 Chronicon Angliae ad tempora Ed. Primi: Bodleian, MS Douce 120, f. iii r. 138 Herbert, Life and Raigne, 564. 139 Surrey: Poems, poem 44, l. 12. 140 Sessions, The Poet Earl, 143–9, 333–42; Bolland, ‘Sat super est’. 141 Archives Générales du Royaume, Brussels, Papiers Gachard, 644, ff. 198r–199r. 142 TNA, SP 1/176, f. 161r (LP, xviii(1). 351). 143 TNA, SP 1/227, f. 101r (LP, xxi(2). 555(3)). 144 TNA, SP 1/227, f.129r (LP, xxi(2). 555(18)). 145 Peter R. Moore, ‘The Heraldic Charge against the Earl of Surrey’, English Historical Review, 116 (2001), 557–83; Brigden, ‘Henry Howard and the ‘Conjured League’ ’, 527–37. 146 Andrew Fichter, Poets Historical: Dynastic Epic in the Renaissance (New Haven, CT, and London, 1982), ch. 3. 147 LP, xxi(2). 608, 652. 148 TNA, SP 1/227, ff. 82r–83r (SP, i, 888–90). 149 For the family’s lasting trauma, see Aston, The King’s Bedpost, 195–6, 204–6. 150 Herbert, Life and Raigne, 565. 151 CSPSp, ix, 1547–1549, 2–3. 152 Herbert, Life and Raigne, 562. 153 CSPSp, viii, 1545–1546, 533. Brigden, ‘Henry Howard and the ‘Conjured League’’, 533–7. 154 Moore, ‘The Heraldic Charge’, 557–83. 155 Susan Brigden (ed.), ‘The Letters of Richard Scudamore to Sir Philip Hoby, September 1549–March 1555’, Camden Miscellany, 30, Camden Fourth Series, 39 (London, 1990), 144. 156 CSPF, Elizabeth, 1558–1559, 270; CSPF, Elizabeth, 1559–1560, 2; CSPSp, Elizabeth, 1558–1567, 4, 67, 73–4, 79. 157 The Compendious Rehearsall of John Dee his Dutifull Declaracion, and Proof of the Course and Race of his Studious Lyfe […] Anno 1592. Nov. 9 (1726), 7; R. J. Roberts and Andrew G. Watson (eds), John Dee’s Library Catalogue (London, 1990), 10, 12, 42. 158 ‘Letters of Richard Scudamore’, 97, 102, 103–4. 159 Aston, The King’s Bedpost, 192–3; Thomas S. Freeman, ‘Foxe, John (1516/17–1587)’, ODNB; J. G. Nichols (ed.), Narratives of the Days of the Reformation, Camden Society, 28 (London, 1859), 59; Williams, Thomas Howard, Fourth Duke of Norfolk, 24–31. John Smyth of Nibley, The Berkeley Manuscripts: the lives of the Berkeleys, 3 vols (Gloucester, 1883–1885), ii, 383. 160 BL, MS Additional 5498, f. 37r–v. 161 Diarmaid MacCulloch (ed. and trans.), ‘The Vita Mariae Angliae Reginae of Robert Wingfield of Brantham’, Camden Miscellany, 28, Camden Fourth Series, 29 (London, 1984), 221, 269. 162 Williams, Thomas Howard, Fourth Duke of Norfolk, 30–31. 163 TNA, SP 15/17, f. 119r (CSPDom, Elizabeth, Addenda, 1566–1579, 211). My italics. 164 I am grateful to Henry Woudhuysen for this suggestion. 165 Sotheby’s sale, 6 July 1854; Sotheby’s sale, 13 December 1993, lot 2; Sotheby’s sale, July 19, 1994, lot 6. 166 Catalogo dei Libri Posseduti da Charles Fairfax Murray, parte prima (London, 1899), no. 106; Catalogue of a further portion of the Valuable Library collected by the late Charles Fairfax Murray, Esq. […] sold by auction by Messrs. Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge, on Monday 17 July, 1922 & three following days. First day’s sale, lot 48. Julie F. Codell, ‘Murray, Charles Fairfax (1849–1919)’, ODNB. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press 2018; all rights reserved This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
Journal
The Review of English Studies – Oxford University Press
Published: Sep 1, 2018