(iv) Two Merry Women of Abingdon.
Feb. 1599.
(v) The Spencers.
With Chettle, March 1599.
THOMAS POUND (1538?-1616?).
Pound was of Beaumonds in Farlington, Hants, the son of William Pound and Anne Wriothesley, daughter of Thomas, first Earl of Southampton. William Pound had a brother Anthony, whose daughter Honora married Henry, fourth Earl of Sussex (V. H. Hants, iii. 149; Harl. Soc. lxiv. 138; Berry, Hants Genealogies, 194; Recusant Rolls in Catholic Record Soc. xviii. 278, 279, 330, 334). Thomas was in youth a Winchester boy, a Lincoln’s Inn lawyer, and a courtier of repute. About 1570 he left the world and became a fervent Catholic, and the record of his recusancy, of his relations with the Jesuit order, which he probably joined, of the help he gave to Edmund Campion, and of his long life of imprisonment and domiciliary restraint is written in H. Morus, Historia Missionis Anglicanae Societatis Jesu (1660); D. Bartoli, Dell’ Istoria della Compagnia di Gesu: L’Inghilterra (1667); N. Sanders and E. Rishton, De Origine Schismatis Anglicani (1586); M. Tanner, Societas Jesu Apostolorum Imitatrix (1694); R. Simpson in 2 Rambler (1857), viii. 29, 94; H. Foley, Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, iii (1878), 567; J. H. Pollen, English Catholics in the Reign of Elizabeth (1920), 333 sqq. I am only concerned with his worldly life and his quitting of it. As a Winchester alumnus, he is said to have delivered a Latin speech of welcome to Elizabeth (Bartoli, 51), presumably at her visit of 1560 (App. A), but he can hardly still have been a schoolboy; perhaps he was at New College. He had already been entered at Lincoln’s Inn on 16 Feb. 1560 (Adm. Reg. i. 66), and it was on behalf of Lincoln’s Inn that he wrote and pronounced two mask orations which are preserved in Bodl. Rawl. Poet. MS. 108, ff. 24, 29, whence they are described in E. Brydges, British Bibliographer, ii. 612. Both seem to have been before Elizabeth (cf. vol. i, p. 162, and App. A). The first, at the wedding of his cousin Henry, Earl of Southampton, in Feb. 1566, is headed in the manuscript ‘The copye of an oration made and pronounced by Mr. Pownde of Lyncolnes Inne, with a brave maske out of the same howse, all one greatte horses att the mariage off the yonge erle of South hampton to the Lord Mountagues dawghter abowt Shrouetyde 1565’. The second, at the wedding on 1 July 1566 of another cousin, Frances Radcliffe, is similarly headed ‘The copye of an oration made and pronounced by Mr. Pownd of Lincolnes Inne, with a maske att ye marriage of ye Earl of Sussex syster to Mr. Myldmaye off Lyncolnes Inne 1566’. From this, which is in rhyming quatrains, Brydges quotes 119 lines; they are of no merit. In 1580 Pound wrote from his prison at Bishop’s Stortford to Sir Christopher Hatton (S. P. D. Eliz. cxlii. 20) commending a petition to the Queen, ‘for her poeticall presents sake, which her Majesty disdayned not to take at poore Mercuries hands, if you remember it, at Killiegeworth Castle’. The reference must be to the Kenilworth visit of 1568, rather than 1573 or 1575, for soon after Thomas Pound’s days of courtly masking came to an abrupt end. The story is told in Morus, 46:
‘Natales Christi dies, ut semper solemnes, ita anno sexagesimo quarto fuere celeberrimi; dabantur in Curia ludi apparatissimi Thoma Pondo instructore. Inter saltandum, nudam eius manum manu nuda prensat Regina, tum ei caput, abrepto Leicestrie Comitis pileo, ipsa tegit, ne ex vehementi motu accensus subito refrigeraretur. Imposita ei videbatur laurea: cum (secundo eandem saltationis formam flagitante Regina) celerrime de more uno in pede circumuolitans, pronus concidit; Plausu in risum mutato, surge, inquit Regina, Domine Taure; ea voce commotus, surrexit quidem; at flexo ad terram poplite, vulgatum illud latine prolocutus, sic transit gloria mundi, proripuit se, et non longo interuallo Aulam spesque fallaces deseruit, consumptarum facultatum et violatae Religionis praemium ludibrium consecutus.’
There is a little difficulty as to the date. Morus puts it in 1564, but goes on to add that Pound was in his thirtieth year, and he was certainly born in 1538 or 1539. And Bartoli, 51, followed by Tanner, 480, gives 1569, citing, probably from Jesuit archives, a letter written by Pound himself on 3 June 1609. No doubt 1569, which may mean either 1568–9 or 1569–70, is right.
THOMAS PRESTON (> 1569–1589 <).
A Thomas Preston entered King’s, Cambridge, from Eton in 1553, and became Fellow in 1556, taking his B.A. in 1557 and his M.A. in 1561. At Elizabeth’s visit in 1564 he disputed with Thomas Cartwright before her in the Philosophy Act, and also played in Dido, winning such favour that she called him her ‘scholar’ and gave him a pension of £20 a year from the privy purse (Cunningham, xx; Nichols, Eliz. i. 270; Fuller, Cambridge, 137; Wordsworth, Ecclesiastical Memorials, iv. 322). He held his fellowship at King’s until 1581. In 1583 a newswriter reported him to be ‘withdrawen into Scotland as a malcontent and there made much of by the King’ (Wright, Eliz. ii. 215). In 1584 he became Master of Trinity Hall, and in 1589 was Vice-Chancellor. In 1592, with other Heads of Houses, he signed a memorial to Burghley in favour of the stay of plays at Cambridge (M. S. C. i. 192). It seems to me incredible that he should, as is usually taken for granted, have been the author of Cambyses, about which there is nothing academic, and I think that there must have been a popular writer of the same name, responsible for the play, and also for certain ballads of the broadside type, of which A Lamentation from Rome (Collier, Old Ballads, Percy Soc.) was printed in 1570, and A Ballad from the Countrie, sent to showe how we should Fast this Lent (Archiv, cxiv. 329, from Bodl. Rawl. Poet. MS. 185) is dated 1589. Both are subscribed, like Cambyses, ‘Finis Quod Thomas Preston’. A third was entered on S. R. in 1569–70 as ‘A geliflower of swete marygolde, wherein the frutes of tyranny you may beholde’.