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.
B12 A Romane right, then rotten at the Kore
Notes.The incident behind this libel remains obscure. The poem was directed at William Cecil, 3rd Lord Burghley (since 1605), and the nephew of James I’s chief minister Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury. During the 1580s, Catholic agents had reported that the young William Cecil, travelling in France and Italy, had been “reconciled” to the Church of Rome (Read 350, 573 n.43), and while Cecil appears to have conformed to the English Church, this libel’s charge of crypto-popery—and thus of disloyalty to the Crown—was particularly explosive in the immediate aftermath of the Catholic Gunpowder Plot to murder the King in November 1605.
“Verses sett up over the Lo: Burgleys pew in newark churche,1 for which Mr Batts the preacher there was cited up before the ArchB: of Cant.2 1606”
A Romane right, then rotten at the Kore
no loyall love within his brest resides
unto his king faine warning given before
that painted hoodes foule cancred mallice hides,
Their volumes vaunt, but leaden are their reasons
5they proffer faire yet would supplant by treasons.
Source. BL MS Egerton 2877, fol. 88v
B12
1 newark churche: probably in Newark, Nottinghamshire. William Cecil married Elizabeth Manners in the chapel at Newark Castle in 1589, and their son William was baptised there in 1590. <back>
2 ArchB: of Cant.: the Archbishop of Canterbury, Richard Bancroft. <back>
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