A web-based edition of early seventeenth-century political poetry from manuscript sources. It brings into the public domain over 350 poems, many of which have never before been published.
Pi5 A yere of wonder to the world was 88
Notes. This poem comments on and combines the Buckingham 1628 chronogram, two lines from verses that typically accompanied the chronogram, and the “Georgivs Villerivs” anagram. The final product is a prophecy of Buckingham’s death, imagined significantly as a providential deliverance comparable to the defeat of the Spanish Armada forty years earlier. Whether the prophecy pre-dates or post-dates the assassination is uncertain.
“Chronogrammata”
“Gorgius dux Buckinghamia. 1628”
A yere of wonder to the world was 88.1
What wonder shall we expecte from 28.
If fate to name doth answere thus in numbers
Then in this yere shall sure appeare some wonders
sith number with thy name do thus agree
5this yeere is fatall to the state or thee
for not thy chronogram alone is fearefull
But thy Anagram with it is direfull. {Georgius Villerus
{Regis, Vulgi, Elusor:2
Source. Bodleian MS Eng. Poet. f.10, fol. 96v
Pi5
1 A yere of wonder...was 88: 1588 saw the defeat of the Spanish Armada, an occasion still commemorated in 1620s’ England as a spectacular example of God’s providential deliverance of the Protestant nation. <back>
2 Regis, Vulgi, Elusor: “deceiver of the King and the people”. <back>
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