A Finding List: Part 3.

Elizabethan Facts and Historical References

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Watch-candle Queen Elizabeth’s nickname for Bacon. A watch-candle is the emblem of “care and observation.” In a letter to King James I., on May 31, 1612 Bacon says: “My good old mistress [Queen Elizabeth] was pleased to call me her watch-candle, because it pleased her to say I did continually burn (and yet she suffered me to waste almost to nothing).”

Westminster Originally called Thorney Island, from its having been “overgrown with thorns, and environed with water.” This fact is substantiated by a charter granted in the year 785, by Offa, the Mercian King, wherein the Isle of Thorney is expressly mentioned in conjunction with Westminster, the latter appellation having arisen from the new Minster, then supposed to have been built, being situated to the West, either of London or of St. Paul’s Minster, or Cathedral. (Stow). 1 The years 604, 605, and 610, have been assigned as the dates of the foundation of the church at Westminster. King James I., made his public entry into London on May 7, 1603; and it is remarkable that on the twelfth day afterwards, he granted a license under the Privy Seal, tested by himself at Westminster, to Laurence Fletcher, Will. Shaksper, and others, “Freely to use and exercise the art and faculty of playing Comedies, Tragedies, Histories, Enterludes, Morals, Pastoralls, Stage-plaies, and such others, like as theie have alreadie studied or hereafter shall use or studie,” either at the Globe Theatre, in Surrey, or elsewhere, “within anie Toun Halls or Moote Halls, or other convenient places,” throughout his dominions. 2 On June 4, 1610 James created his eldest son, Henry, Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester, in full Parliament, in “the Great White Chamber” of the Old Palace at Westminster. On this occasion the King made twenty-five Knights of the Bath, and the whole attendant proceedings were conducted with great magnificence. A “most rich and glorious Masque of ladies” was exhibited at Whitehall; a splendid tournament was held in the Tilt-yard attached to that Palace; and “novell triumphs and pastimes, with a sea-fight and radient fire-works,” were displayed upon the river Thames, “over against the Court.” 3

What d’ye lack Sir John Bingley was Knighted at Theobald, where the Play or Interlude did not reassure to the expectation, but rather fell out the wrong way, specially by reason of a certain song sung by Sir John Finett, wherein the rest bore the bourdon, of such scurrilous and base stuff, that it put the King out of his good humour, and all the rest that heard it. When the Earl of Suffolk was accused of taking bribes in July 1617–18, his underling Sir John Bingley was committed to prison. Francis Bacon, in his Speech against the Earl in the Star Chamber, compared his Countess to an exchange-woman who kept her shop, while Sir John Bingley cried, “What d’ye lack.”

Where are they? In the spring of 1598 the French King concluded a separate peace with Spain, and opinions were greatly divided in England as to the advisability of Elizabeth doing the same. Supported by Burleigh, it was bitterly opposed by Essex, who accordingly prepared a document, addressed: “An Apologie for the Earl of Essex against those who Falsely and Maliciously say him to be the only Hindrance of the Peace of his Country.” The work seems always to have been under Bacon’s control, as he admits in his Apologie for Essex. The Queen disliked this appeal to the public, and treated him coolly in consequence. When next at Court, in the heat of dispute, the Earl, with a gesture of contempt, turned his back upon Elizabeth, saying “her conditions were as crooked as her carcase,” whereupon the Queen boxed his ears, and told him to go “in malam rem.” And a “bad thing” he went in for there and then, putting his hand to his sword, swearing that he would not bear such an indignity from Henry VIII., and leaving the Court. A great coolness ensued; a letter of Lord Essex to Lord Keeper Egerton added fuel to the fire, and Bacon brought this last up against Essex on the proceedings in June 1600, as bold, presumptuous, and derogatory to Her Majesty going on to say that it had been published by the Earl’s friends, of whom the brothers Bacon, by the way, were at that time the chief, and ran the Scrivenery where the copies had been translated and written out. Camden and other historians distinctly say that, although the quarrel was apparently patched up in the following October, from this time dated Essex’s fall.
For the Bacons translated this Apologie into French, had it copied at the Scrivenery, and distributed in Italy, France, and Spain, causing there great irritation by its outspoken language about the King. Spaniards marvelled that such libels, “sent by the Earl to Mr. Bacon, should be allowed by Elizabeth to be written in her country, making comedies and jests of the King of Spain upon stages.” These are the words written from Liege by Petit, a spy, under date June 10, 1599 extant in the Domestic State Papers, Vol. 270. It must have been a matter of common notoriety to be circulating at the same time in both London and Liege. The spy says that a copy had been sent to the King of Spain, as if Standen had turned it into Spanish. Things looked gloomy at this time for Essex. He had forfeited the Queen’s favour, and made things worse by his goings on with the Maids of Honour, with four of whom he was credited with intimacy at the same time. Two of them, named Bridges and Russell, were driven from Court by the Queen with oaths and blows.
Essex was committed to custody in September 1599, and for eight months confined to his house. He was in debt, and though the fees of his great offices regularly came in, yet none of such princely gifts as the £7,000 in cochineal were now to be looked for from the Queen. On the contrary, his monopoly of sweet wines, which had expired at Michaelmas, was not renewed, but fell into the Exchequer. The Bacons, too, were at their wits end. In March 1600, Francis Bacon had begged Elizabeth for a gift in fee simple of three parcels of Crown Land, value £80 odd, on the grounds that his brother was being forced to sell Gorhambury and on another plea, in order to free himself from “the contempt of the contemptible that measure a man by his estate” his creditors were evidently getting rude to him. The request was certainly not granted by Elizabeth. In January 1600, suits were pending against Bacon, and on January 25 he applies to his old creditor Hickes for a further loan of £200, on sureties whose consent he says he had not asked. Anthony, by a threat to divulge Essex’s intrigues with the King of Scots (who was next heir to the throne) to Cecil, obtained a gift of Essex House (all, apparently, Essex had left at his disposal), which had to be ransomed afterwards for £4,000. This is attested by both Wotton and Chamberlain, the last in Domestic State Papers (1599), p. 222. Anthony, probably from shame and remorse, appears to have destroyed all his correspondence with Essex, for the valuable series in Lambeth Palace Library, from which so much of this monograph has been derived, and from which much more is evidently derivable, ceases here and a new topic continues in Part III: Essex’s Apologie.

Willobie his Avisa This extract is taken from Dr. Grosart’s text: 4 In the Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 62, 1900 is an account of the Willoughby or Willobie Henry (1574–1596?), the eponymous hero of the poem called Willobies Avisa who was second son of Henry Willoughby, a country gentleman of Wiltshire, by Jane, daughter of one Dauntsey of Lavington, Wiltshire. A younger brother was named Thomas, the father’s father, Christopher Willoughby, was illegitimate son of Sir William Willoughby, the brother of Sir Robert Willoughby, first baron Willoughby de Broke, [q.v.]. Henry matriculated as a commoner from St. John’s College, Oxford, on December 10, 1591 at the age of sixteen. According to the report of a “friend and chamber fellow,” he was a scholar of good hope. He may be the Henry Willoughbie who graduated B.A, from Exeter College on February 28, 1594–95. 5 Soon after that date, being desirous to see the fashions of other countries for a time, he departed voluntarily to her Majesty’s service. Before 30 June 1596 he is reported to have died. On September 3, 1594 there was licensed for the press a book entitled Willoby his Avisa or The True Picture of a Modest Maid and of a Chaste and Constant Wife, 6 and shortly afterwards the work issued from the press of John Windet. In this volume, which mainly consists of seventy-two cantos in varying numbers of six-line stanzas (fantastically called by the author hexameters), the chaste heroine, Avisa, holds converse in the opening sections as a maid, and in the later sections as a wife with a series of passionate adorers. In every case she firmly repulses their advances midway through the book. Henry Willobie is introduced as an ardent admirer, in his own person, chiefly under the initials “H.W.” It is explained in a prose interpolation that Willobie has sought the advice of a friend, “W.S.” who had lately gone through the experience of a severe rebuff at the hands of a disdainful mistress. After “W.S.” light heartedly offers some tantalising advice in verse, “H.W.” in the twenty-nine cantos which form the last portion of the volume, is made to rehearse his woes and Avisa’s obduracy. Two prefaces, one addressed to “all the constant ladies and gentlewomen of England that fear God,” and the other to “the gentle and courteous reader,” are both signed Hadrian Dorrell. The second is dated from Dorrell’s chamber in Oxford. This first of October, Dorrell takes responsibility for the publication, stating that he found the manuscript in his friend Willobie’s rooms while he was absent from the country. [See Appendices for further reference on this work].

Wrangling lawyers On November 9, 1620 Mr. Chamberlain sent to Sir Dudley Carleton that “the Proclamation for the Parliament, penned by the King himself, and would not be entreated by the Lord Chancellor [Bacon] and Lord Chamberlain [Pembroke] to leave out the words wrangling lawyers.”