[26] The MS. of this poem is contained in a little volume bound in black morocco. Though evidently contemporary, some doubts have been expressed as to its authenticity, but a marked allusion to the writer’s position as a Consort of Henry VIII is supposed to be a sufficient guarantee as to the identity of the royal poetess, not to speak of the evidence of her handwriting.
[27] He is the gentleman with the beautiful saint-like head and angelic expression in the splendid series of drawings by Holbein at Windsor.
[28] This Mr. “Nudygate” or Newdigate’s son became in due time secretary to Anne Stanhope, Duchess of Somerset, and her second husband.
[29] British Museum, Vespasian, F. xiii. 183, f. 131.
[30] Lady Denny was the daughter of Sir Philip Champernoun of Modbury, Devonshire, and wife of Sir Andrew Denny, Privy Councillor and Groom of the Stole to Henry VIII. Her husband predeceased her on 10th September 1549, and she herself died on 15th May 1553.
[31] Lady Fitzwilliam was the daughter of Sir W. Sidney and wife of Sir William Fitzwilliam of Milton, Northamptonshire, Master of the King’s Bench. Sir H. Gough Nichols, however, thinks she was more probably the widow of that Sir William’s grandfather, Sir William Fitzwilliam of Milton and Alderman of London, who died in 1534. In this case she would have been the daughter of Sir John Ormonde and granddaughter of Anne Cooke, the learned daughter of Sir A. Cooke by his first wife, Anne Fitzwilliam.
[32] Lady Tyrritt or Tyrwhitt was not, as Miss Strickland says, the daughter of Katherine Parr’s first husband, but through her husband, Lord Robert Tyrwhitt of Leighton House, the cousin seven times removed of that gentleman. She was the daughter of Sir Gerald Oxenburgh of Sussex.
[33] This Countess of Sussex was Anne, daughter of Sir Philip Calthorpe and second wife of Henry, Earl of Sussex. She was sent to the Tower in April 1552 on a charge of witchcraft, and for having said that a son of Edward IV was yet living. Lodged in the Lieutenant’s apartments, she was liberated by order of the Duke of Northumberland in the following September, after six months’ imprisonment. In all probability the offence of which this lady was accused was merely that of having predicted the young King Edward VI’s early death.
[34] There were some very curious rumours circulating in London concerning the divorce of Anne of Cleves. Cranmer granted the divorce on the plea that the Queen was still virgo intacta; but “two honest citizens” (letter from Chapuys to Charles V) “were arrested on 9th December 1541 on a plea that they published particulars of Queen Katherine Howard’s inchastity, and said ‘the whole thing was a judgment of God,’ and that the lady of Cleves was the King’s real wife; and that she was in the family way by the King, notwithstanding rumours to the contrary. That it was not true the King had not behaved to her like a husband; and that she was gone away from London and had had a son in the country last summer.”
[35] Robert Testwood was a chorister belonging, with Marbeck, to the Chapel Royal, Windsor. Parsons was a priest, and Henry Filmer was a tailor. Marbeck, who is said to have had a very fine voice, was a fairly well-educated man, who at the time of his arrest had made some progress with a translation of Calvin’s works. Testwood was a well-known ribald jester who had frequently turned the anthem into ridicule, and on more than one occasion had been caught singing lewd words while the rest of the congregation were chanting the right ones. He was arrested for smashing the nose of a statue of the Virgin; Parsons was condemned for blasphemy; and Filmer for speaking ill of the Host. He had said that if Transubstantiation were true, he had eaten “twenty Gods” in his time.