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.
D19 Passer by know heere is interrd
Notes. In a fascinating and politically aggressive appropriation of anti-libel discourse, this verse on Cecil at first seems to diminish the allegations against the Lord Treasurer by repeating the commonplace charge that libellers are “base detractors”. The poem then, however, continues on both to repeat those charges and, in an extended pun at the end, to add a distinctive twist to one of the most commonly made allegations.
Passer by know heere is interrd
The little great1 that so was feard
who in his life none durst think evill
but being dead is said a divell
And monstrous Crimes laid to his charg
5by base detractors, who at larg
did set them forth to his infamy
As a taper2 of the Comonwealth touchd with sodomy3
An usurer, subtle and ful of trechery
And least of al his monstrous lechery
10Why put the case twere al as they do say
[illegible: ms torn] gone the right way
And hath no doubt a place of heaven
at least if penitents may be forgiven
for he oft was knowen with zeal devine
15To go a pilgrimag to our ladies shrine
At Walsingham and neare staid by the way
Save nowe and then in Suffolk lay.4
Source. BL MS Harley 6947, fol. 211r
D19
1 the little great: Cecil was both a powerful man (“great”) and of small physical stature (“little”). The same juxtaposition is made in the poem “Heere lyes Salisbury that little great comaunder”, and more sympathetically in Samuel Daniel’s “If greatnes, wisedome, pollicie of state”. <back>
2 taper: candle. The libel “This Taper, fedd, & nurst with court-oyle” also describes Cecil as a taper. <back>
3 sodomy: this is the only extant verse on Cecil that explicitly makes this allegation. <back>
4 And hath...lay: the last six lines of the libel develop a resonant and multi-layered pun to deliver the widely-repeated charge that Cecil had been the lover of both Audrey, Lady Walsingham, and Catherine Howard, Countess of Suffolk. The pun hints at Cecil’s possible religious unorthodoxy by presenting him as a Catholic penitent who performed penance for his sins by making the pilgrimage to the famous late medieval shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. <back>
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