accordance with his practice to do so.1 After all, who except Cecil can have persuaded the Queen to sign the warrant? He was head and shoulders above everybody else, and we read that about that period the Queen was so irritable that no other counsellor dared approach her. There is evidence also that Cecil's courtesy to Essex at the York House inquiry, which he renewed at the final trial, and which, it will be remembered, he also showed to Ralegh at his trial in 1603, was only a mask to keep himself right with the public. Evidence for this view occurs in the letter of Ralph Adderley from which I have previously quoted : "There were some that said they would move Her Majesty for my Lord's liberty, and that was Mr. Secretary; and he said he did not doubt but to bring a discharge before it were long, which God grant it may be; I doubt he spake not as he meant." It may be said that Ralegh was the man, but in the same letter we read: " Ralegh is gone into the country with bag and baggage, as wife and children; and Her Majesty called him worse than cat and dog." It is clear therefore that at that particular time (9th June, 1600), Ralegh had no influence. It is also to be noticed that, at the final trial, after clearing himself in a rather dramatic manner from the charge brought against him by Essex of favouring the claim of the Infanta, Cecil could not resist the temptation of prejudicing the Earl's case by adding, "I confess I have said that the king of Spain is a competitor of the Crown of England, and that the king of Scots is a competitor, and my lord of Essex I have said is a competitor; for he would depose the Queen, and call a parliament, and so be king himself; but as to my affection to advance the Spanish title to England, I am so far from it," etc. By cunning, under the pretext of political necessity, it would seem that Cecil destroyed the man of rank whom he hated and feared. " In the next chapter we will consider the evidence of the Cynthia " poem, supposed to be by Ralegh. 1 Lives of the Devereux, ii. 107. 2 Ibid, ii., 107. • Secret Correspondence, Introduction by Bruce, p. xxxiii. (Camden Soc.). We come now to the Cynthia poem, In the passage quoted at p. 83, above from Bacon's Apology, it will be observed that Bacon refers to the "Sonnet" which he says he wrote for the Queen as a "toy." It will be remembered that he uses the same expression in the Essay Of Masques and Triumphs -"These things are but toys." This, I consider, was part of the method of concealment of which I gave examples above, and of which the "though I profess not to be a poet "here is another. Bacon did not really think of poetry as a toy, but, desiring to become a counsellor of state, he did not wish to be known as a writer of it. A certain author, now defunct, who was better known for his zeal than his discretion, suggested that this " Sonnet" was the speech, "The quality of mercy," in the Merchant of Venice in sonnet form, and he had the temerity to reproduce it in that form as an example of what Bacon may be supposed to have put into the Queen's hands at Twickenham. Let us, however, do him the justice of admitting that it would have been very appropriate to the occasion, and that, coming from Seneca, it would have had attractions for Bacon. In my book on Spenser's Works I showed the insuperable objections there are to the commonly accepted view that Ralegh was the author of this poem, and how entirely inapplicable it is to his life and circumstances.1 In that opinion I am more than ever confirmed. In my book I fell back on the suggestion, to which I have since realised that I was led by a misapprehension of the real scope and meaning of "Timias" in the Faerie Queene, that under the love-tragedy in Cynthia, Bacon was expressing his own disappointments 1 Edmund Spenser, etc., ch. xvi. in the loss of favour and access which lasted from 1593 to about 1596. I felt at the time that the interpretation was rather lame, and nothing but the certainty of the Bacon authorship, and the impossibility of applying the poem to the case of Ralegh, would have induced me to publish it. A further study of the history, however, has now convinced me that I was wrong, not as to the authorship, but as to the subject. It is clear to me now that this poem was written for Essex in his troubles, and further that he, not the author of the Faerie Queene, is intended under the allegory of Timias. This, in view of the peculiar method of that writer (which I fully discussed in my book), does not preclude his being presented under another form as Arthegal. The fact that Essex is so represented seems to me clear beyond the possibility of dispute; but under Timias Essex is in the poem, not as a possible ruler of the country, but as a young aspirant to the Queen's favour, and as the squire (or pupil) of Prince Arthur, in whom, as I explained, the author, with characteristic self-indealisation, generally represents himself, though also, in another aspect, and at the outset, the Earl of Leicester, who was living when the poem was begun. It is quite clear, from certain lines in "Cynthia," to which we shall come, that whoever is represented as the speaker in that poem is also the Timias of the Faerie Queene. And, for reasons which I gave in the same book, Ralegh could no more be Timias than he could be the speaker in this poem. One of the causes of my mistake was the reference to "tobacco "in the Belphoebe-Timias episode in Faerie Queene III. v. 33 (part of the first portion, published in 1590), and the common assumption, by which I was unduly influenced, that that marks the character to Ralegh. But other people in those days besides Ralegh smoked; he was not even the discoverer of tobacco, as he never went to Virginia himself. It was brought to England by one of his "men," the mathematician Harriot, who apparently also brought the potato1. A much better explanation for this allusion is to be found in a poem by Essex, entitled: "The Buzzeinge Bee's Com 1 Dict. Nat. Biogr., Ralegh. playnt," a very amateurish production, written evidently in one of his many retirements after a difference with the Queen, in which the line occurs: "Wished tabacco I will flee to thee !" and the line is used again in the same poem as a refrain. It has also been generally supposed that Amoret in the Belphoebe-Timias episode, in Book IV., vii. of the Faerie Queene (the second portion, published in 1596), stands for Elizabeth Throgmorton, Ralegh's wife, and here again I was too readily influenced by other writers. It is clear, as I think I showed, that Amoret represents generally the woman side of Queen Elizabeth,1 but she is used, in my opinion, in this particular scene to represent the ladies about the Queen, whose irregularities, in her peculiar way, she endeavoured to control. Amoret is there described as having been "rapt by greedie lust," and rescued from his clutches by Belphoebe, and in the action of Timias which draws from Belphoebe the indignant reproach "Is this the faith?" (36), the incontinence of Essex, by which Elizabeth was frequently angered is probably intended. In that case the scandal (represented as undeserved) connected with Timias and Serena finds a natural explanation, and there is no need to have recourse to the theory that it was connected with the author3. On 1 See Edmund Spenser, PP. 74, 94, 383. I should have added that the fact also that the golden girdle, the proof of chastity, refuses to stay clasped round the waist of any of the ladies at the tourney except that of Amoret (IV. v. 19) is obviously a compliment to the Virgin Queen, which, in a poem dedicated to her, would never have been paid to anyone else. Further evidence that the Queen is intended by Amoret is found in the speech of Britomart, who on the author's own statement represents the Queen (Introduction to Bk. III., st. 5 and IV. ii. 3): Ne ever was there wight to me more deare Than she, ne unto whom I more true love did beare. IV., vi., 35. "Serena "" was an 2 F. Q. VI., vi. I suggested that the name anagram (an imperfect one) for "Frances," namely Frances Walsingham, Essex's wife, and I remain of this opinion. See Edmund Spenser, etc., ch. xvii. the other hand we must never lose sight of Spenser's habit of duplicating his characters, and using them, at will, to express his own feelings. In an appendix (II) I have set out certain passages from the Faerie Queene with comments, in support of my conclusion that in Timias Essex is represented as a young aspirant to the Queen's favour. The proof that Essex is Arthegal will be found in my book on Spenser. To come now to the Cynthia poem. In it there is an obvious reference to the Belphoebe-Timias episode in the Faerie Queene. Complaining of his loss of favour the "That fair resemblance weareth out of date;" and further, "But I Have found her as a stranger so severe, Improving my mishap in each degree; But love was gone: so would I my life were I "A queen she was to me,—no more Belphoebe ; She did untie the gentle chains of love." These lines, on any reasonable interpretation, profess to identify the writer of the poem with "Timias." The first difficulty to be met is that the MS of this poem1 is in Ralegh's handwriting. But this proves nothing, as it is evidently a fair copy, and the fact that some of the stanzas are incomplete rather suggests that the poem was copied out by Ralegh than that it was his own as it looks as if he had thought some of it was not worth copying, or that he grew tired of the copying at certain points. Next, the poem is headed, "The 21st and last book of the Ocean to Cynthia," and it concludes with a note introducing a fresh piece, "The 1 At Hatfield, where by kind permission the writer was allowed to inspect it. |