12 April 2025

· Time to talk about Prince Tudor, sort of ·

· HOUSE ANNOUNCEMENT ·

This is a long work, like the uncut Hamlet. A break is included. A souvenir programme will be available at no charge at the end of the performance.

· PROLOGUE ·

When I began writing online in 2015, I made the decision not to discuss a pair of disputed conjectures called the Prince Tudor theory. I recused myself in Regarding Prince Tudor, an early page in my About menu.

At first I kept mum because I was a neophyte on the internet, unsure if posthumous blogging was a feat I could pull off. There were lots of less provocative things to scribble about. Even after I found my legs I wanted a good look at the field before I tossed my UFH (Ugly French Hat) into the PT ring.

The first Prince Tudor hypothesis:

[PT1] In mid 1574 when she was forty years old, Queen Elizabeth secretly gave birth to a child fathered by me. The baby boy was raised by Henry Wriothesley, 2nd Earl of Southampton and his countess, as their own. He was named Henry, his birthdate fudged backwards to 6 October 1573.

Independent of PT1, arising later though suppositionally occurring earlier, the second hypothesis:

[PT2] In late 1548 when she was fifteen years old, the lady Elizabeth secretly gave birth to a child fathered by Thomas Seymour⁠. The baby boy was raised by John de Vere, 16th Earl of Oxford and his countess, as their own. He was named Edward, his birthdate fudged forward to 12 April 1550. Happy birthdayIf you’re observant you will have already noticed that today is #475.⁠⁠ to me.

Obvious problems are obvious. More PTers favour PT1 than PT2 (or far less often, both together), but the whole thing is fraught. It polarised my partisans at its outset in the 1930s. It still does [1].

What follows pertains to PT, though PT it is not. Instead of an argument, a storystory (n): connected account or narration, oral or written, c. 1200, originally narrative of important events or celebrated persons of the past, true or presumed to be; history, from Anglo-French storie, estorie, Old French estoire story, chronicle, history, and directly from Late Latin storia, shortened from Latin historia history, account, tale, story (see history). [etymonline.com]⁠. Calling it a story doesn’t mean it isn’t true, it means that stories are what I have to work with now. In terms of Prince Tudor this may be only half the story, but the other half isn’t my story to tell. This half, my half, is not the story of my parents, but of Henry Wriothesley’s.

· ACTUS PRIMUS ·

The First Part of Thomas the Fourth (Duke of Norfolk)

Autumn, 1571. I was twenty-one. My cousin Tom Howard, older by a dozen years and as close to a brother as I had, cooked his own goose. At the beginning of September he went to the Tower for the second time, accused of involvement in the Ridolfi plot to overthrow Elizabeth, conspiring (again) to marry Mary Stuart, the captive Catholic ex-Queen of Scots. Tom was a fool and he was caught, but he was used by his enemies as well as his friends. His political opponents wanted him out of the way, and he made it easy for them.

At this same time I was under pressure to marry William Cecil’s, now Lord Burghley’s, daughter Anne. Quiet, naïve, only fourteen, she’d made sheep’s eyes at me for as long as I could remember. I balked at an earlier date, but a Yuletide wedding was now planned.

As the leaves yellowed and fell I pleaded with Cecil to take my cousin for the gullible blunderer he was but no worse, to convince the queen to let him live. Tom was her cousin, too. Catholic plots were a real threat to Elizabeth after the pope’s bull of excommunication, but it was Cecil and Leicester who were baying for Tom’s blood.

· ACTUS SECUNDUS ·

The First Part of Henry the Second (Earl of Southampton)

Henry Wriothesley inherited his title in 1550 when he was five years old. His father’s death left him a royal ward but his mother paid to retain custody, and she raised her son to be a devout Catholic like herself. This was not a problem while Mary Tudor was queen. Then Elizabeth gained the throne and the young earl’s religion began to complicate his life.

February, 1566. Southampton, now twenty, married 13-year-old Mary Browne, daughter of Anthony, 1st Viscount Montague, a wealthy Catholic peer from Sussex. I knew Mary from my early days in London following the death of my father in 1562. We were only two years apart, and of similar complexion and temperament– what we called our colour and choler. We met at holiday gatherings, laughed when people mistook her for Mary my sister, shared a few adolescent secrets. After her marriage I seldom saw her and there were no more secrets, but I knew that her life as Countess of Southampton was not an easy one. Her mother-in-law didn’t like her, her husband was moody and self-⁠indulgent, and her first two children were girls.

November, 1569. The Revolt of the (Catholic) Northern Earls. When the uprising failed, Southampton and his father-in-law, spooked, tried to flee to Flanders. Contrary winds forced them back. Called on the royal carpet to explain themselves, somehow they kept their heads and kept their heads. From that point on Lord Montague made sure to trumpet his loyalty, and the queen considered him a ‘good’ Catholic subject. It was a prudent strategy that his son-in-law failed to adopt.

· ACTUS TERTIUS ·

The Second Part of Henry the Second

When Pius’s bull arrived in May 1570, Southampton worried for his soul’s future if he remained loyal to a heretic queen. He took his crisis of conscience to John Lesley, Bishop of Ross, Mary Stuart’s agent in England. The men met secretly in a Lambeth marsh, where the watch discovered them. Southampton was held until November in the custody of Sir William More in Surrey, to keep an eye on him.

1571 saw the Ridolfi plot exposed. Tom went to the Tower in September. Bishop Lesley, questioned, complicit to the eyeballs, revealed the details of his meeting in the marsh with Southampton the year before. The earl joined the duke at the end of October.

· ACTUS QUARTUS ·

The Second Part of Thomas the Fourth

1571 neared its end with Tom awaiting trial for treason. As my wedding loomed I told myself that marrying Anne would soften her father’s enmity, or at least make him feel that he owed me a quid pro quo. (Anne wasn’t alone in her naïveté.) Tom wasn’t the only reason I gave in, but he was the reason that mattered at the moment. December 5th was Anne’s fifteenth birthday. On the 16th we were married. A month later Tom’s trial began and ended. The verdict was unanimous, the sentence death. He remained in the Tower as Elizabeth signed execution warrants [tangent post] and countermanded them.

· ACTUS QUINTUS ·

Love’s Labour’s Lost

Late May, 1572. Burghley and the Council pressured Parliament to appeal to the queen for an end to the royal dithering. Knowing she could delay no longer, Elizabeth sent Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk to the block at dawn on June 2nd, barely forestalling the Commons’ petition. All my labour had gone for naught, and I was tied to a wife for whom I felt no more than occasional twinges of pity.

The rest of the year fared no better. News came of the French massacre on St Bartholomew’s Day, thousands of Protestants murdered by Catholic mobs. Southampton passed his first year as a prisoner. I passed my first year as a married man.

· SEXTUS ACTUS ·

Twelfth Night

The 5th of January, 1573At the time new years didn’t begin until 25 March, but in this post I’ve conformed to modern dating.⁠⁠. The traditional revel at the end of the twelve days of Christmas. There hadn’t been much merrymaking in recent years, but worthies in London thought a big gathering would be a good idea. One of the wealthier city merchants opened his house for the occasion.

Events like this intimidated Anne. A year in as Countess of Oxford, she was as yet unable to perform the role her father had striven to give her. She begged off with one of her megrims. I left without her.

The crowded hall was loud with feigned gaiety. People laughed with friends they didn’t like, said hopeful things they didn’t believe. Musicians played beneath the din, but there was no room for dancing. Great bowls of steaming wassail and lambswoolspiced ale with baked-apple purée floating on top were filled, emptied, filled again. Many a sore head would greet the morrow’s noon.

Midnight chimes had rung when I gave my thanks and bid good night to the host and hostess whose names I have forgotten. As I hunted for the back stairs to the street entrance, I nearly collided with another hunter. Mary Wriothesley. I hadn’t known she was at the revel.

• – Oh, Ned! Let’s find a quiet place where we
• Can sit and talk. I’m glad it’s you I see.
• So much has happened and it’s been so long,
• I need to tell you everything that’s wrong.

• – I feel just as you do. Trapped in a cage,
• Or playing the wrong part on my own stage.
• Come with me, quickly now. We’ll find some nook;
• They think we both have gone, no one will look.

I took her arm and led her down a corridor into an empty parlour. Nine months to the day later, Mary gave Southampton an heir.

How did the Countess get her January pregnancy past a husband who didn’t leave the Tower until the first of May? Had she paid bribes to spend time with him, near enough to Twelfth Night? There were no records of visits, but for that sort of visit there wouldn’t be. Mary’s father saw Southampton not long before his release, leading some to wonder whether a deal was made: semi-freedom in private custody in return for playing along about the baby. Doesn’t sound like the sort of thing Southampton would agree to, but after a year and a half behind bars, who can say. He spent two months again with William More, then in July was moved to Montague’s Cowdray estate, where on the 6th of October Mary gave birth to Henry.

Having an heir didn’t make the surly earl a happy husband. Later in the decade he would accuse Mary of consorting with some lowborn fellow. She denied it but Southampton broke with her completely, packed her off to one of his manors in Hampshire, kept her watched. Did he think she had seen this man while he was locked up?

I can’t answer these questions. That one moment of commiseration was all that Mary and I had. We never tried to repeat it. It wasn’t possible, and it wasn’t necessary.

The point that matters here is not whether or not I was Henry’s actual father. What matters is that I believed I was⁠. The calendar was my prima facie evidence, then my eyes added their testimony when I finally saw the boy. To everyone else he was the image of Mary and they looked no further. His less obvious resemblance to me was masked by mine to her, but I saw it. I knew it. Beyond doubt. After Tom’s contrived execution and my misguided marriage to Anne, Henry Wriothesley was my Truth.

And that’s all you need to know to see the things I wrote to him, or wrote about him, in their proper light.

Time for that break.

· INTERVAL ·

· ACTUS SEPTIMUS ·

Songs and Sonnets

Scena Prima

As Henry passed his twentieth year,
my pseudonym emerged in print for the
first time. The name combined the goddess
of wisdom, strategic warfare, and the arts,
Pallas Athena the Spear-Shaker,
with the most fortuitously named
red herring in literary history,
William Shakspere the Board-⁠Treader.

Sonnet 3
by SHAKE-SPEAREThy mother’s glassmirror:
[L] Mary at 13, near her 1566 wedding
by Hans Eworth
[R] Henry’s earliest known portrait
at ~18, 1590-93
attributed to John de CritzHenry, 2nd Earl of Southampton at ~20
near his 1566 wedding
by Hans Eworth

Scena Secunda

It should not shock you to hear that the Sonnets were written well before their publication in 1609. Some go back farther than others, and all were revised and polished over time. (Nothing I ever wrote was static while it was in my hands.) Most of the sonnets now called Procreation (1–⁠17) and some of those called Fair Youth (1–⁠126) come from the same period as my two long poems⁠⁠⁠⁠, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece [2]. The early 1590s. Henry neared his twenties, his wardshipSouthampton died in 1581 at the age of 36, in trouble again, shortly before Henry’s eighth birthday. The young 3rd Earl became a royal ward in William Cecil’s custody, just as I had been nineteen years earlier. with Burghley neared its end, and my own life changed its shape after my remarriageAnne died in 1588, just before the Armada sailed. The two events are conjoined in my memory. at the end of 1591. No longer at court making white paper black for the queen’s entertainment, I had long stretches of quiet time for thinking before writing. Even after my other Henry was born in 1593, his mother kept the nursery from becoming too much of a distraction.

I returned to poetry. Ovid. Livy. And then I wrote from no source but myself, for no audience but myself.

My sonnets were personal, intimate, admittedly obsessive, frequently depressive, and above all, cathartic. I had far more need to write them than I did to see them read, even by their subjects. I knew that unless I burnt them they would be seen in time to come, but not many read the ‘sugredSugared, as Francis Meres described them in Palladis Tamia in 1598. Not many fit that adjective, and in any case he wasn’t referring to the whole batch, only a few individual poems that a few ‘private friends’ saw. If you think his Shakeſpeare meant Willy, you didn’t read the caption under the dedications in Scena Prima.⁠’ poems while I was alive. I gave no copies away.

Scena Tertia

In 1599 two of the sonnets surfaced in a pirated anthology, The Passionate Pilgrim. They were poorly transcribed, like they were memorised in a hurry. When the time to come arrived five years after my death, the published Sonnets did not repeat the success of the long poems. To account for the few quartos that have survived (13) some posit that many copies were confiscated and destroyed. The simpler explanation is that the Sonnets simply laid an egg. Venus and Adonis and Lucrece had been new verse versions of old stories– complete, linear, comprehensible without subtext. The Sonnets were episodic, thematically repetitive. Baffling without the subtext, which by 1609 was outdated and irrelevant anyway. Later, as the misidentification of my pseudonym took root and spread, the poems grew even more inexplicable.

It’s ironic that this spurious inexplicability contributes to the Sonnets’ current popularity. (So does having no copyright.) Readers and postgrads love mysteries; the Sonnets have begotten their own industrya tiny fraction of what’s out there⁠. Some sleuths use the poems to explain relationships that never were, some use the never-were relationships to explain the poems. Neither approach succeeds, but that doesn’t stop them trying. Others choose not to see what’s there, and claim there’s nothing there. Well, that’s one way to avoid the problem.

Folks may be put out that I decline to put out a code-book that decrypts the Sonnets. Picks them apart like Stephen Booth did, nails them down as he could not. (In his defence, he wasn’t trying to.) Sorry, nope⁠⁠. I have no wish to disinter such long-buried emotions, and it might do the poems more harm than good. Would it advance my claim to being their author? Perhaps, but you needn’t solve the Sonnets to know I wrote them. If some measure of my privacy remains, that’s as it should be.

With that said, here is one authorial comment I will make about Sonnet 3 (given above), since it relates directly to PT-⁠or-⁠not-⁠PT.

• Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee
• Calls back the lovely April of her prime

If this is mis-taken to refer to Elizabeth as the mother of my son, the second line rings false. With seventeen years between the queen and me, I never knew her in the lovely April of her prime. A few childhood glimpses of her during her stay at Hedingham in 1561 don’t justify such a poignant reminiscence. I would have written something else.

Scena Quarta

Back to the 1590s. In the first group of sonnets I urged Harry to marryHis family called him Harry, but I never did. I use it here only because the rhyme makes me sound like Cole Porter. and father a son, but it was the Lord Treasurer who pressed him to marry my daughter Elizabeth. Lizzy’s grandsire put the same squeeze on Henry that he put on me a generation before, for the same reason. I did not want my son repeating my star-crossed history with that family, any more than he already had. I was proud at a distance when he did not give in.

Did Burghley ever suspect that Henry was my child? I never saw any reason to think so. Henry’s mother and grandfather wanted the match as well. Whatever Mary told Montague (he died in late 1592), it wasn’t what took place on Twelfth Night. And even if she was as certain as I was that I was Henry’s father, she couldn’t object to Lizzy without revealing our commiseration, making our son illegitimate, nullifying his inheritance and titles. That wasn’t happening. But here’s a twist: if you don’t believe that Lizzy was truly my daughter, the half-sibling serpent swallows its tail and disappears. The gods play games with us.

None of it mattered in the end. Burghley extorted a huge fine of £5000 from Henry for his refusal, and Lizzy was married to Will Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby, in 1595. Henry remained single until 1598 when he secretly married another Elizabeth– his pregnant mistress, royal maid of honour Elizabeth Vernon. Wags were amused when the news got out, as they saw in her name a snook cocked at Burghley (Ver-⁠⁠⁠non, that is not-⁠⁠⁠Vere). The queen was not amused, and tossed them both (separately) into the Fleet until her anger cooled. The baby was a girl.

· ACTUS OCTAVUS ·

The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex

Scena Prima

By this time Henry was involved in the factional frictions of his friend the Earl of Essex. Robert Devereux was a man of many mood swings, the overindulged object of the queen’s final infatuation. (At the end of 1598 Essex was thirty-three, Elizabeth sixty-five.) In 1599 with Henry as his wingman, Essex bungled his promise to defeat the Earl of Tyrone’s rebels in Ireland. He scarpered back to England in what amounted to desertion of his command, and over the next year lost his way in the paranoia that led to the failed putsch of 8th February, 1601. His attempt to remove Robert Cecil from the queen’s presence and protection was called a rebellion, but it came off more like a Mack Sennett one-reeler⁠⁠⁠⁠.

Eleven days later Essex and Henry were tried for treason. I held the highest rank among the twenty-five peers who were their judges. They were guilty, they were convicted. No dithering over Essex: his head was smitten off on the 25th. The inexpert executioner needed three terrible strokes to do the job.

Henry’s unsmitten head remained in the Tower, attached to the rest of him. Same crime, different punishment. Why? Did I go limping to the queen to beg her not to kill our son? Agree to bury my identity as Shake-Speare, forfeit Henry’s right to be the next King of England, in exchange for his life? Of course not, that was Hollywood. I didn’t go limping to anyone.

The following quote comes from the post I wrote about Essex in early 2020. (The link follows in the related posts list.)

⁠⁠The customary explanation is that Robert Cecil considered Southampton to be an impressionable young man of weak character (he was twenty-seven, with a wife and two daughters) who was led astray by his devotion to Essex. Magnanimous in victory after eliminating his rival, Cecil advocated to commute Southampton’s death sentence to life in prison, and the queen agreed. Henry spent the final two years of Elizabeth’s reign in the Tower.⁠⁠

Of weak character is not how I’d describe a young man who, when barely out of his teens, said no to the most powerful man in the realm, knowing it would cost him thousands of pounds and earn the great man’s great displeasure. But slur aside, the quote isn’t wrong. There was something more to it though, at least I think there was.

Because his body was rudely stamped, Robert Cecil had to outwit all those he was unable to best in other ways. As a result he was subtler than his father, more detached, better at lateral thinking. When Rob was a boy at Cecil House he saw what I went through in my unsuccessful attempt to save my cousin. He saw how miserable I was after Tom’s death, and he saw when, if not why, my misery was left behind. If there was one man alive who would notice the muted likeness between Henry now and me then, think back, run the numbers, and keep it all to himself, that man was my ex-⁠brother-in-law. He knew what my judgement at Henry’s trial, that verdict cost me. He could see the irony in deciding as his father would not: to be merciful, to me as well as to Henry. He could afford to be. Henry alone was no threat. Essex was the enemy Cecil needed rid of, and Essex was gone.

Scena Secunda

Trixie and Henry in the Tower (detail)
probably 1603 by John de Critz

When James Stuart succeeded Elizabeth Tudor in 1603, one of the first things he did was to liberate Henry from the Tower. Soon afterwards Henry’s titles and privileges were restored. The once-again Earl of Southampton was granted manors, elected a Garter knight, and given the income from duties on sweet wines that had previously gone to Essex. Once again, why? Did the king feel that Henry had been punished enough? It’s more likely that Cecil arranged for his new master to begin his reign with a show of royal clemency. Cecil knew that Henry could become politically useful, a good man to have in his debt.

Perhaps James just liked Henry’s looks.

Scena Tertia

A year later. 24 June 1604. It’s fitting that I stop here, on the day of my death. Life ends like this, with things unfinished, unanswered, untidy. One storyteller gives way to another.

· EPILOGUE ·

Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, and his elder son James (the longed-for grandson I did not live to see) died in the Low Countries within the same week in November 1624, not of battle wounds but fever. Henry was fifty-one years old, James nineteen. Henry’s younger son Thomas, fifteen, succeeded to the earldom.

Henry de Vere, 18th Earl of Oxford died in June 1625 in the same place, of the same cause. He was thirty-two, married but childless. The Oxford earldom passed to a second cousin.

Why, what is pomp, rule, reign,
but earth and dust?
And live we how we can,
yet die we must.

— Henry VI Part 3, Act 5, Scene 2

⬇⬇ Souvenir programme ⬇⬇

Acknowledgement

• • Vice Admiral Sir Ian McGeoch, KCB, DSO, DSC [Times obituary at archive.org]
• · 26 March 1914 – 12 August 2007
• · Sir Ian presented In Loco Parentis – An Heir and an Invention at the Annual General Meeting of the De Vere Society held 14 May 2006, at Hedingham Castle
• · published in the DVS Newsletter, July 2006, Vol 13 No 2, pages 5-7
• · downloadable from the DVS members archive

• Sir Ian saw more with his one good eye than many others have ever done with both of theirs. A detail or two may have been off by a hair but he wasn’t as close to the action this time, and the lion’s share of his insight was remarkable.

Notes

[1] For some pro-ing and con-ing over PT, see the list of references at the end of Regarding Prince Tudor. For now at least I’ve left the page as I originally wrote it, with the addition of a comment at the top which links back to this post. [jump return]

[2] Neither poem is long compared to my go at Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but that was translation, and done thirty years earlier behind a different front man. (Did you really think it was Uncle Arthur’s?) [jump return]

Tangent and related posts

• The first warrant for Tom’s execution, along with my transcription of its text, can be seen at Tangent: His Head To Be Smitten Off, dated today to accompany this post.

• A different look at what led to Tom’s unhappy end, in The Jesuit Under the Floorboards, posted 5 January 2022.

• For my posthumous surmises as to how and why the Sonnets were published, see the timeline at 20 May 1609 in Much Noise No Nuts, Part 1, posted 23 April 2023.

• More about Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, in Essex: A Stranger to Moderation, posted 25 February 2020. Also, the uses of truth and fiction in that little film about me called Anonymous⁠. You can see in the post that I was dodging PT when talking about the film, which wasn’t easy because both parts of the theory underpin its plot. I dodged some more at the end when talking about Henry.

Sources and additional reading

• • Traitor’s Gate
• · printed image from Memorials of the Tower of London [archive.org]
• · by William Lennox Lascelles FitzGerald-de Ros, 22nd Baron de Ros of Helmsley, Deputy Lieutenant of the Tower
• · John Murray, London, 1867
• · page 88
• ·

• • Intermission video
• · from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, directed by the two most noble Terries, Jones and Gilliam, 1975
• · The film celebrated its 50th anniversary just nine days ago, 3 April.
• · And now for something completely similar, a gratuitous plug for Henry IV and the Holy Grail, from 12 May 2016. By far the most viewed post on this blog.

• • Mary Browne Wriothesley [commons.wikimedia.org]
• · at 13 in 1566, near her wedding
• · by Hans Eworth
• ·

• • Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton [commons.wikimedia.org]
• · as a teenager, 1590–1593
• · attributed to John de Critz the elder
• · National Trust, Hatchlands
• ·

• • Androgynous beauty: Henry Wriothesley’s performance of masculinity [artuk.org]
• · by Alice Blow
• · posted 3 Apr 2024
• · Read the piece, then look at Sonnet 20⁠. Note the rhymes are all feminine. Poet’s self-amusement, along with the one thing/nothing business and the prick pun.

• • Henry Wriothesley, 2nd Earl of Southampton
• · at ~20 in 1566, near his wedding
• · by Hans Eworth
• · printed image from A Life of Shakespeare [archive.org]
• · by Sidney Lee, 1898, illustrated library edition 1899
• · page 311
• ·
• · This image of H2 is all my Binger spaniels could flush from cover. It does its job.
• · The paired Eworth portraits would have been wedding gifts. Sir Sidney Lee, in his pipe-dream fairy tale A Life of Shakespeare, misattributed H2’s portrait to Lucas van Heere (see Goulding, below, pg 50). Lee had it in the Earl of Ellesmere’s collection at Bridgewater House at the end of the 19th century. I couldn’t guess where it is now.

• • Wriothesley Portraits: Authentic and Reputed [jstor.org]
• · by Richard W Goulding
• · The Volume of the Walpole Society, Vol 8, 1919–1920
• · pages 17-94

• • Inside St Peter’s Church in Titchfield, Hampshire, stands the Wriothesley family monument. The 2nd Earl was never a soldier, but his marble effigy wears full martial armour. Perhaps he needed it when he fought with Mary. There are photos in a 2016 talk given by Mr Stewart Trotter, transcribed on his blog The Shakespeare Code. The pictures are interesting (H2 in stone still looks nothing like Henry); the text is something else. Trotter’s Shakespeare is Willy, and boyo is he ever. Dan Brown has nothing on this fellow except… more money, and fewer ellipses. Another post on the blog describes a 2023 investigation of the crypt beneath the monument, which may or may not contain the remains of Mary and Henry. The things you find on the internet.

• • Inigo Montoya and incognito Westley discuss the limits of knowledge
• · Mandy Patinkin and Cary Elwes in The Princess Bride [imdb.com]
• · directed by Rob Reiner, 1987

• • Miniature of Henry Wriothesley at twenty years old [fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk]
• · by Nicholas Hilliard, 1594 (item 3856)
• · © The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge
• ·

• • Silent film clip [GIF in popup]
• · from The Riot [imdb.com]
• · directed by Mack Sennett, 1913
• · starring Mabel Normand, Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle, and the Keystone Cops (not all appearing in the clip)
• ·

• • Miniature of Robert Cecil [burghley.co.uk]
• · attributed to Isaac Oliver, circa 1600
• · © Burghley House Preservation Trust

• • “Little man, little man”: early modern representations of Robert Cecil [thefreelibrary.com]
• · by Catherine Loomis
• · Explorations in Renaissance Culture, 22 June 2011

• • Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, in the Tower with his cat Trixie (detail) [commons.wikimedia.org]
• · probably 1603
• · attributed to John de Critz the elder
• ·
• · I recalled the cat’s name, but here’s corroboration.

• • Order of the Garter plaque at Windsor Castle [commons.wikimedia.org]
• · photo: Bernard Gagnon
• ·

• • The Conflicting Loyalties of a ‘vulger counselor’: The Third Earl of Southampton, 1597–1624 [academic.oup.com]
• · by Neil Cuddy
• · Chapter 8 in Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England: Essays Presented to G E Aylmer
• · John Morrill, Paul Slack, Daniel Woolf, editors
• · Oxford University Press, 1993
• · The book is out of print and used copies are pricey, but Chapter 8 can fill in for the Actus Nonus I didn’t write. If you have a login at academia.edu, the chapter is available to download at this link.

• • Henry de Vere, 18th Earl of Oxford and Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton [npg.org.uk]
• · line engraving by unknown artist
• · 17th century, probably not long after June 1625. Just as ever-living in the dedication of the Sonnets indicates a dead poet, revived in this engraved caption indicates that both Henries are deceased.
• · NPG D25777, © National Portrait Gallery, London
• ·

• • Shakespeare’s [sic] complete sonnets [opensourceshakespeare.org]
• · When I need to jog my memory quickly, this is usually where I go. The plays are there as well, and the long poems, and a concordance, all under the aegis of George Mason University. The site was redesigned to be mobile-friendly which means it suffers on desktop displays, but you can’t have everything.

• • As They Don’t Like It [politicworm.com]
• · by Stephanie Hopkins Hughes
• · posted 29 March 2021

• • Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton [archive.org]
• · by G P V Akrigg (George Philip Vernon)
• · Hamish Hamilton, London, 1968
• · The first part of the book is a biography of Henry, useful despite its many hedgeshedge n. 1. A self-negating, non-committal, or intentionally ambiguous qualifier in a statement. 2. A shrubbery.⁠. Then, the author’s disclaimer: “Part Two is devoted to Shakespeare’s work inasmuch as it may in places reflect Southampton’s influence. Here we quickly pass beyond what little we know, and enter into realms of speculation.” Don’t waste your time.

• • The Marriage ‘Arrangements’ for Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford [PDF, deveresociety.co.uk]
• · by Jane Greatorex
• · DVS Newsletter, Vol 31 No 2, Spring 2024, pages 28-40

• • British Library Collection: First edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 1609 [bl.uk]
• · public domain scans of all pages
• · In October 2023 the BL was hit with a huge ransomware attack, and as of today’s date a year and a half later, this link and many others still return “Sorry, we can’t find that page”. I include the link anyway in case they ever get their webs*ite back together. If I had any breath I wouldn’t be holding it.

• • Mary Wriothesley Arundell (1568–1607)
• • Jane Wriothesley (c1569–before 1573) [both at familysearch.org]
• · Not much online for these two daughters of Mary and H2, especially Jane who died before H3 was born. Mary’s husband Thomas Arundell got all the attention.

• • Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [oxforddnb.com, subscription required] entries for:
• · Wriothesley, Henry, 2nd Earl of Southampton
• · Wriothesley, Henry, 3rd Earl of Southampton
• · Devereux, Robert, 2nd Earl of Essex

Souvenir programme and supplement

The Very Condensed Version. A tabloid-sized page (11”x17”) with active links, or two unlinked LTR pages (8.5”x11”) for printing, with a timeline from Tom’s arrest through Henry’s birth, and some added commentary. Above the text is a multiple-families genealogy, showing relationships among the people who were involved here, and some who weren’t. The supplemental table (A4 and LTR) shows how to determine cousins and other relatives based on common ancestors.

• • commiserating-with-mary-TBD.pdf (108 KB)
• • commiserating-with-mary-LTRx2.pdf (99 KB)
• • table-of-relatives-A4.pdf (619 KB)
• • table-of-relatives-LTR.pdf (614 KB)

VERO NIHIL VERIUS