Her elder son had died before his father, her second, Henry, had become sole heir to his great house when he was eight years old. He seems to have inherited, not only her beauty and her natural tints, as may be seen by his fine portrait also preserved at Welbeck, but to have resembled her in her characteristics. Cultured in taste, with a strong appreciation of humour, refined in sentiment, religious in spirit, she was generally able to control the self-will of her temper by a strong sense of duty, though sometimes her hasty impulsiveness verged almost on imprudence; faithful and self-forgetting in her affections, yet, through her very sensitiveness, easily offended; Mary, Countess of Southampton, does not seem to have been very happy in her marriage. Her somewhat severe husband had conceived some unjust cause of jealousy against her after his temper had been soured by his imprisonment in the Tower for the matter of the Duke of Norfolk and Mary Stuart. She wrote to her father on 21st March 1580, “My Lord sent me word it was not his intention to keep me prisoner, only he barred me of his board and presence ... neither could I take that but in the highest degree of imprisonment, howsoever it pleased him otherwise to esteem it.... I sent what I wrote by my little boye, but his heart was too great to bestow reading on it, coming from me.” Possibly his misunderstanding was the precursor of illness, for he died the following year (1581). He left her as bare as he could, and she wrote to the Earl of Leicester, entreating his kind offices on behalf of herself and her children, Henry and Mary. (These letters are among the MSS. of Cottrel Dormer, Esq., but being evidently misdated in the second appendix to “Rep. of Roy. Hist. Com.,” I applied to the present owner, who kindly allowed me to see them.) Her son became, of course, a royal ward, and he and his great possessions were put under the supervision of Lord Burghley. Camden warmly praises Southampton, and says “he spent his young years in the study of learning and good letters, and afterwards confirmed that study with travel and foreign observation.”
In December 1585 he was admitted to St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he became M.A., 6th June 1589, and was incorporated of Oxford. Before leaving College he enrolled himself a member of Gray’s Inn, 1587, where he seems to have studied as creditably as he had done at Cambridge.
But domestic trouble was rising. Burghley was impressed with the engaging personality, as well as the extensive possessions of young Henry Wriothesley, and, backed by a guardian’s privilege, wanted to secure him for his granddaughter, Lady Elizabeth Vere, the daughter of the Earl of Oxford. The young Earl seems to have become, under the persuasions of his mother and grandfather, to some extent, engaged. It was a suitable marriage in every way, had but the young people loved each other.
The poor Countess had been handicapped in the battle of life, because her husband’s family and her own, as well as she herself, had persisted in the expensive indulgence of exercising the rites of the Catholic religion. She well knew the enormous advantage it would be to the family to be known to be “connected with my Lord Burghley,” the “searchings” and “fines” it would help her to evade, the public offices it would secure to her son.
She urged him to complete the arrangements, his grandfather urged him, too. Perhaps, because of the very urging, the burden of matrimonial responsibilities became more and more distasteful. Dreams of military glory under his admired Earl of Essex disturbed his studies in old Gray’s Inn. Burghley began to make inquiries. He could not understand how any young man in his senses could refuse such a splendid offer, or even hesitate in accepting it. He suspected interlopers. He fancied that Sir Thomas Stanhope might be trying to win him for his daughter; but that gentleman wrote a long and very full explanatory letter to Burghley on 10th July 1590, clearing himself of any such treacherous presumption.
The Countess had, it is true, gone with her son to see Mr. Harvey, who lived next door, and he had asked them to sup with him, that was all. Lady Southampton had told him “She knew what a stay you would be to him and to her ... in good fayth she would do her best in the cause.... She did not find a disposition in her son to be tied as yet; what will be hereafter time shall try, and no want shall be found on her behalf.” Burghley seems next to have consulted Viscount Montague, who replied on 19th September 1590 from Cowdray that he had “tried as orderly as he could, first to acquaint his mother, and then himself with your lordship’s letter, his lordship being with me at Cowdray....” His daughter had told him that she did not know of her son’s fancy having changed to any other maiden, and the youth had replied that “Your lordship was this last winter well pleased to yield unto him a further respite of one year to ensure resolution in respect of his young years.” I told him that the year was almost up, and said “that it was natural your lordship should wish to have the matter about his granddaughter settled.” The most he could get out of his grandson was a promise that he would himself carry his answer to Lord Burghley, and Montague arranged that he and his daughter should take him to London at the beginning of the term.
On the 6th of October Southampton completed his seventeenth year. He took, if he did not receive, another “year’s respite,” and on 2nd March following, 1590-1, he wrote from Dieppe to the Earl of Essex offering him the service of his sword. The Earl of Essex had lately married the widow of Sir Philip Sydney, much to the Queen’s wrath, and he was in some trouble himself. He did not risk accepting the offer of the Royal ward.
Southampton was recalled to London, and then, in the April of 1591, he probably first met, at least as a friend, that inland-bred actor, who so strangely fascinated him, and soothed him somewhat in his regret at being forbidden to follow Lord Essex. Someone suggested to the Countess, or to the new poet himself on her behalf, that he, a married man, should try to make the young lord “Suivez raison” (the family motto of the Brownes). The most likely person to do so was the stalwart and prudent Mr. William Harvey, who had won golden opinions from all sorts of people at the time of the Spanish Armada in 1588, and who was a devoted friend of the family. If we allow ourselves to realize the likelihood of this, we find one key to the mystery of the dedication to the sonnets lying ready to hand in a place where no one before has looked for it. (See my article, “Who is Mr. W. H.?” “Athenæum,” 4th August 1900.)
It was held a part of the higher culture, then, to be able to write verses and to sing them to the lute, and, as such, doubtless Southampton had essayed to do after the model of Thomas Watson at least, and we have noted what had been published by that date.
Manuscript copies of the verses of the Earl of Essex, poured forth when he wanted “to evaporate his feelings in a sonnet,” would probably also be found in that Holborn home, when, in that “mutual improvement society for two,” the principles of literature were discussed. The young Earl, with his beautiful expressive eyes lit up by intellectual fire, with his fair face, rich attire, gracious manners, ingenuous outlook into life and philosophy, and enthusiastic inclination to help, made a real conquest of the hungering home-sick heart of the poor player, and such a love was kindled as had not been sung since the days of Jonathan and David. It was because Shakespeare could feel as well as write that he found the sonnet silver and left it golden. Mr. Wyndham, in his splendid introduction to the “Poems of Shakespeare,” leaves nothing unsaid concerning their aesthetic charm. Excepting the first few I do not think the order of the sonnets at all correct. Some critics accept the 107th as necessarily the last, and we know that those to the lady should have been sandwiched in between those to the youth if the date of production had been the principle of arrangement. Within the two series also the order has evidently been disturbed somehow.