What if the true cryptogram were concealed in this strangely emphasised and deeply noted line? What if it were left to me to solve the mystery?
By Jove! here was a discovery! Writing "interest" "interrest," as it would be written in the manuscript, the letters in the line spell the words
"Mistress Mary Fitton";
and Mistress Mary Fitton, as everybody knows, is the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, the lady who had "her Will, and Will to boot, and Will in overplus"; to wit, Will Shakespeare; her young lover, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke; and the respectable elderly lover whom she was plighted to marry at his wife's death—Sir William Knollys, Comptroller of the Household to Queen Elizabeth!
Mary Fitton's identity with the lady of the Sonnets has been established beyond question by Lady Newdegate's publication of Passages in the Lives of Anne and Mary Fitton. The perfect anagram which I had accidentally discovered in the most pointedly accentuated line in the whole of the Sonnets, was therefore something more than curious.
I next took the entire passage:—
But be contented: when that fell arrest
Without all bail shall carry me away,
My life hath in this line some interest,
Which for memorial still with me shall stay.
After an hour's wrestling I had extracted from the letters forming these four lines, these words:—
"Learn ye that have a little wit yt Francis Bacon these lines to Mistress Mary Fitton, Elizabeth's maid of honour at Whitehalle, hath writt."