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.
Notes. This couplet depends on the pun on the surname of Buckingham’s associate John Lambe, the astrologer-physician and convicted witch murdered in London in June 1628. The “Wolfe” is Buckingham, and the shepherd who kills him is John Felton.
“On the D.”1
The Shepheards struck, The sheepe are fledd,
For want of Lambe2 the Wolfe is dead.
Source. BL MS Sloane 826, fol. 185r
Other known sources. Bodleian MS Rawl. Poet. 84, fol. 74r
Pi6