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.
Piii10 Reader stand still and read loe heere I am
Notes. This poem is often transcribed at the end of “Yet weere Bidentalls sacred, and the place”, and is printed with that poem in John Eliot, Poems. In one source, however, it is attributed to the Countess of Falkland (BL MS Egerton 2725), in another to “a lady” (Bodleian MS Rawl. Poet. 26), and in a third to Richard Corbett (NLW MS 5390D).
Reader stand still and read loe heere I am
That was of late the Mightie Buckingham
God gave me first my blessing,1 and my breath
Two Kings2 their favours and a slave3 my death
My Fame I clame, and therefore I doe crave
5That thou Two Kings beleive before a slave.
Source. Bodleian MS Malone 23, p. 140
Other known sources. Eliot 102; Bodleian MS Ashmole 38, p. 142; Bodleian MS CCC. 328, fol. 97r; Bodleian MS Dodsworth 79, fol. 161v; Bodleian MS Don. d.58, fol. 19r; Bodleian MS Eng. Poet. e.14, fol. 15v; Bodleian MS Rawl. Poet. 26, fol. 97v; Bodleian MS Rawl. Poet. 153, fol. 10r; BL Add. MS 18044, fol. 81r; BL Add. MS 25707, fol. 161v; BL Add. MS 29996, fol. 70v; BL Add. MS 44963, fol. 40r; BL MS Egerton 2026, fol. 12r; BL MS Egerton 2725, fol. 60r; NCRO MS Westmorland (A) 6.vi.I, fol. 11r; NLW MS 5390D, p. 429; Houghton MS Eng. 1278, item 15
Piii10
1 blessing: cf. “being” (Eliot). <back>
2 Two Kings: James I and Charles I. <back>
3 a slave: i.e. John Felton. This derogatory term not only helps exaggerate the gulf between the kings who promoted Buckingham and the assassin who murdered him, but may also allude to Felton’s somewhat precarious social staus as the scion of an obscure branch of a Suffolk gentry family. <back>
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