New support for the Monument theory of the Sonnets has come from the discovery in the British Library of a 74-line poem by Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, written in the Tower of London while he awaited execution for his role in the Essex rising of 8 February 1601. In this unique scribal copy of a “verse letter,” Southampton pleads with Queen Elizabeth for mercy.
My thanks to the scholar Ricardo Mena for passing on this discovery, reported by Lara Crowley, Assistant Professor of English at Texas Tech University, in the winter 2011 edition of English Literary Renaissance. The poem, entitled “The Earle of Southampton prisoner, and condemned. To Queen Elizabeth,” was found in BL Manuscript Stowe 962, which contains 254 miscellaneous folios prepared mainly in the 1620’s and 1630’s.
The “high level of accuracy” of attributions in the manuscript “enhances the likelihood” that the ascription to Southampton “proves accurate as well,” Professor Crowley writes, adding that this “heartfelt” plea to Elizabeth points to a familiarity with “specific, intimate details” of the earl’s career and health and even writing style. “Multiple references” identify Southampton as appealing to the Queen for a pardon.
The Monument theory holds that Edward de Vere the seventeenth Earl of Oxford arranged the Sonnets to record that he worked behind the scenes to save Southampton’s life and gain his freedom with a royal pardon. The theory claims that part of the price Oxford paid, forced upon him by Secretary Robert Cecil, was the permanent destruction of his identity as author of the “Shakespeare” works (“My name be buried where my body is” – Sonnet 72).
Professor Crowley offers some speculations which, when viewing Oxford-Shakespeare as helping Southampton, are striking:
“It seems possible, even likely, that someone or something else influenced Elizabeth’s decision, making one wonder if, at his time of greatest need, Southampton – a ‘dere lover and cherisher’ of poets * – composed what could be his lone surviving poem … One possibility is that the poem was composed in 1601 to mollify the Queen, but by a more practiced poet who composed the verses for Southampton to offer Elizabeth as his own … Yet the notion that Shakespeare, or any other poet, provided Southampton with the poem proves improbable. Access to the earl early in his imprisonment was restricted …”
[*Thomas Nashe, in his dedication of The Unfortunate Traveler, 1594, to Southampton]
The Monument theory is supported in a number of other ways; for one, we may now claim that all three earls – Oxford, Essex and Southampton – wrote verse in relation to this same situation of English political history:
Oxford: If he was the author of the Sonnets, then at the very least he wrote Sonnet 107 celebrating Southampton’s liberation by King James in April 1603, after the death of the Queen as “the mortal Moon” a few weeks earlier.
Essex: During his final four days in the Tower before he was executed on 25 February 1601, he wrote a 384-line poem to Elizabeth entitled The Passion of a Discontented Mind.
Southampton: Here we have Southampton, the fair youth of the Sonnets, also in the Tower with expectation of execution, writing a 74-line poem to the Queen in February or March 1601, pleading for her mercy and a pardon.
A remarkable aspect of Southampton’s verse epistle is how close he comes to a theme Oxford expressed in a letter to Cecil on 7 May 1603, alluding to a monarch’s ability to offer Christ-like mercy and forgiveness: “Nothing adorns a king more than justice, nor in anything doth a king more resemble God than in justice, which is the head of all virtue, and he that is endued therewith hath all the rest.”
More than two years earlier, Southampton wrote in his poem to Elizabeth from the Tower:
If faults were not, how could great Princes then
Approach so near God, in pardoning men?
Wisdom and valor, common men have known,
But only mercy is the Prince’s own.
Mercy’s an antidote to justice…
Southampton had been “supposed as forfeit to a confined doom,” as Oxford writes in Sonnet 107 of the Fair Youth Series; and in Sonnet 145 of the Dark Lady Series, as I see it, he describes Elizabeth’s decision to spare Southampton this way:
Straight in her heart did mercy come,
Chiding that tongue that ever sweet
Was used in giving gentle doom…
The phrase “Great Princes” used by Southampton also appears in Sonnet 25: “Great Princes’ favorites their fair leaves spread…”
At one point Southampton writes that “prisons are living men’s tombs” and that “there I am buried quick” – recalling Sonnet 31, which in the Monument theory corresponds to 12 February 1601: “Thou art the grave where buried love doth live…”
He refers to himself as “dead in law,” reflecting his status in the Tower as “the late earl,” who has become legally dead.
He mentions his “legs’ strength decayed,” reflecting the fact that, while in the Tower at this early stage, he was suffering from a “quartern ague” that caused a dangerous “swelling in his legs and other parts,” as the Council reported to Sir John Peyton, Lieutenant of the Tower.
At one point near the end of the poem, he reveals his terror and dwindling hope for mercy:
Horror and fear, like cold in ice, dwell here;
And hope (like lightning) gone ere it appear…
Southampton uses many words in his poem that also appear in the Sonnets, among them the following forty-seven words: Blood, Buried, Cancel, Cheeks, Chest, Condemned, Countenance, Crimes, Dear, Dead, Die, Eyes, Faults, Favor, Furrows, Grace, Grave, Grief, Groans, Ill, Lamed, Liberty, Light, Loss, Mercy, Offend, Offenses, Pardon, Parts, Power, Princes, Prison, Prisoners, Proceed, Rain, Religious, Sacred, Sorrow, Stain, Stone, Tears, Tombs, True, Vial, Worm, Worthy, Wrinkles.
A number of these words are related literally to Southampton’s situation: Condemned, Crimes, Faults, Liberty, Mercy, Offend, Offenses, Pardon, Prison, Prisoners – more evidence, in my view, that Oxford uses the same words in the Sonnets to refer to Southampton’s plight in the same circumstances.
There is much more about this discovery to be examined here, in future posts; but meanwhile, here is the text of Southampton’s poem, based on Professor Crowley’s transcription from secretary hand and put into (mostly) modern spelling/punctuation for readers of this blog:
The Earl of Southampton Prisoner, and Condemned, to Queen Elizabeth:
Not to live more at ease (Dear Prince) of thee
But with new merits, I beg liberty
To cancel old offenses; let grace so
(As oil all liquor else will overflow)
Swim above all my crimes. In lawn, a stain
Well taken forth may be made serve again.
Perseverance in ill is all the ill. The horses may,
That stumbled in the morn, go well all day.
If faults were not, how could great Princes then
Approach so near God, in pardoning me?
Wisdom and valor, common men have known,
But only mercy is the Prince’s own.
Mercy’s an antidote to justice, and will,
Like a true blood-stone, keep their bleeding still.
Where faults weigh down the scale, one grain of this
Will make it wise, until the beam it kiss.
Had I the leprosy of Naaman,
Your mercy hath the same effects as [the river] Jordan.
As surgeons cut and take from the sound part
That which is rotten, and beyond all art
Of healing, see (which time hath since revealed),
Limbs have been cut which might else have been healed.
While I yet breathe, and sense and motion have
(For this a prison differs from a grave),
Prisons are living men’s tombs, who there go
As one may, sith say the dead walk so.
There I am buried quick: hence one may draw
I am religious because dead in law.
One of the old Anchorites, by me may be expressed:
A vial hath more room laid in a chest:
Prisoners condemned, like fish within shells lie
Cleaving to walls, which when they’re opened, die:
So they, when taken forth, unless a pardon
(As a worm takes a bullet from a gun)
Take them from thence, and so deceive the sprights [spirits]
Of people, curious after rueful sights.
Sorrow, such ruins, as where a flood hath been
On all my parts afflicted, hath been seen:
My face which grief plowed, and mine eyes when they
Stand full like two nine-holes, where at boys play
And so their fires went out like Iron hot
And put into the forge, and then is not
And in the wrinkles of my cheeks, tears lie
Like furrows filled with rain, and no more dry:
Mine arms like hammers to an anvil go
Upon my breast: now lamed with beating so
Stand as clock-hammers, which strike once an hour
Without such intermission they want power.
I’ve left my going since my legs’ strength decayed
Like one, whose stock being spent give over trade.
And I with eating do no more ingross
Than one that plays small game after great loss
Is like to get his own: or then a pit
With shovels emptied, and hath spoons to fill it.
And so sleep visits me, when night’s half spent
As one, that means nothing but complement.
Horror and fear, like cold in ice, dwell here;
And hope (like lightning) gone ere it appear:
With less than half these miseries, a man
Might have twice shot the Straits of Magellan
Better go ten such voyages than once offend
The Majesty of a Prince, where all things end
And begin: why whose sacred prerogative
He as he list, we as we ought live.
All mankind lives to serve a few: the throne
(To which all bow) is sewed to by each one.
Life, which I now beg, wer’t to proceed
From else whoso’er, I’d first choose to bleed
But now, the cause, why life I do Implore
Is that I think you [Elizabeth] worthy to give more.
The light of your countenance, and that same
Morning of the Court favor, where at all aim,
Vouchsafe unto me, and be moved by my groans,
For my tears have already worn these stones.
[As mentioned, there’s more commentary on this to be posted here in the future.]
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