EMINENT ELIZABETHANS Also by A. L. Rowse The Elizabethan Age The England of Elizabeth I The Expansion of Elizabethan England The Elizabethan Renaissance: (i) The Life of the Society (ii) The Cultural Achievement The Elizabethans and America Ralegh and the Throckmortons Sir Richard Grenville of the Revenge Shakespeare's Southampton: Patron of Virginia Christopher Marlowe: A Biography Milton the Puritan: Portrait of a Mind Shakespeare Shakespeare the Man Shakespeare's Globe: His Moral and Intellectual Outlook The Poems of Shakespeare's Dark Lady Shakespeare's Sonnets, A modern version The Annotated Shakespeare, 3 vols, with Introductions Simon Forman: Sex and Society in Shakespeare's Age Cornwall Tudor Cornwall The Cornish in America A Cornish Childhood A Cornishman at Oxford A Cornishman Abroad A Man of the Thirties A Life: Collected Poems EMINENT ELIZABETHANS A. L. Rowse © A. L. Rowse 1983 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1983 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission First published 1983 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN 978-1-349-06587-5 ISBN 978-1-349-06585-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-06585-1 To ] acqueline Kennedy Onassis historic figure for her love of history Contents List of Plates Vlll Preface lX 1 Bess of Hardwick: Builder and Dynast 1 2 Father Parsons the Jesuit 41 3 Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford 75 4 Elizabeth I's Godson: Sir John Harington 107 5 Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon 153 Notes 192 Index 194 Vll List of Plates 1 Bess of Hardwick (Hardwick Hall, National Trust; Court­ auld Institute of Art) 2 Sir William Cavendish (Devonshire Collection, Hardwick Hall; Mansell Collection) 3 The Earl of Shrewsbury (Hardwick Hall, National Trust; Courtauld Institute of Art) 4 Father Robert Parsons (Mansell Collection) 5 Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (Welbeck Abbey, by courtesy of his Grace the Duke of Portland; Mansell Col­ lection) 6 Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon (Berkeley Castle, by permis­ sion of the Trustee of the Will of the 8th Earl of Berkeley; Courtauld Institute of Art) 7 Sir John Harington (National Portrait Gallery, by courtesy of the Abbot of Ampleforth) 8 Lady Arbella Stuart (Hardwick Hall, National Trust; Courtauld Institute of Art) 9 Elizabeth I (Corsham Court; photograph by A. C. Cooper, London) 10 Lord Burghley (National Portrait Gallery) Preface It is many years since I first entertained the hope of following up Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians with an Eminent Elizabethans. In the innocence of my younger years I thought it would provide a contrast, work out more heroically, certainly less cynically, than that work in which Strachey sat rather loosely to historical truth. He was more concerned to carica­ ture, and raise a laugh. The true historian is concerned only to get at the truth. My studies of famous Elizabethans are in no sense caricatures, though they come out less heroically than the ardour of youth expected. My chief obligation is in regard to the not unheroic figure of Bess of Hardwick. Her successor there, the late Evelyn, Duchess of Devonshire, most hospitably entertained me at Hardwick during three or four summers, and helped me enormously by having Bess's papers and household books brought over from Chatsworth for me to study - so that that portrait is largely based on research into original manuscripts. My great regret is that I have been so long in producing the result that my kind hostess is no longer here to see the work in which she took so much interest. The study of Father Parsons was given, in shortened form, as one of the annual lectures for Lambeth Palace Library. Some years ago the then Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C., urged me to write an account of the Elizabethan Earl of Oxford: here it is at last. In the portrait of Sir John Harington I have been able to identify two of the lX X Preface leading characters in his Epigrams, who appear under the names of Paulus and Faustus - and thus add something new. I am greatly indebted to Professor Jack Simmons for his kindly and critical scrutiny of my text. A. L. ROWSE .