| |
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 |
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 1554 - 1628 (73 years)
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| Name |
Foulke GREVILL |
| Prefix |
Sir |
| Suffix |
Kt., 1st Baron Brooke |
| Born |
3 Oct 1554 |
Of Beauchampe Court, Alcester, Warwickshire, England  |
| Gender |
Male |
| Died |
30 Sep 1628 |
| Person ID |
I14840 |
Young Kent Ancestors |
| Last Modified |
26 Sep 2021 |
| Father |
Sir Fulke GREVILL, 4th Lord Willoughby de Broke, b. 1536, d. 15 Nov 1606, Beauchamp Court, Alcester, Warwickshire, England (Age 70 years) |
| Mother |
Lady Anne NEVILLE, b. Abt 1536, bur. 17 Jul 1583, Alcester, England (Age ~ 47 years) |
| Married |
1553 |
| Family ID |
F4469 |
Group Sheet | Family Chart |
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| Notes |
- It is alleged that this man never married but adopted his distant cousin Robert Greville to ensure continuation of the family's estates.
So, then, who is Mary Grevill.
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Arms: Sable, on a cross engrailed or five pellets a bordure engrailed of the second see image.
Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke, de jure 13th Baron Latimer and 5th Baron Willoughby de Broke KB PC (/fʊlk ˈɡrɛvɪl/; 3 October 1554 – 30 September 1628), known before 1621 as Sir Fulke Greville, was an Elizabethan poet, dramatist, and statesman who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1581 and 1621, when he was raised to the peerage.
Greville was a capable administrator who served the English Crown under Elizabeth I and James I as, successively, treasurer of the navy, chancellor of the exchequer, and commissioner of the Treasury, and who for his services was in 1621 made Baron Brooke, peer of the realm. Greville was granted Warwick Castle in 1604, making numerous improvements. Greville is best known today as the biographer of Sir Philip Sidney, and for his sober poetry, which presents dark, thoughtful and distinctly Calvinist views on art, literature, beauty and other philosophical matters.
Fulke Greville, born 3 October 1554, at Beauchamp Court, near Alcester, Warwickshire, was the only son of Sir Fulke Greville (1536–1606) and Anne Neville (d.1583), the daughter of Ralph Neville, 4th Earl of Westmorland.[1] He was the grandson of Sir Fulke Greville (d. 10 November 1559) and Elizabeth Willoughby (buried 15 November 1562), eldest daughter of Robert Willoughby, 2nd Baron Willoughby de Broke,[2] the only other child of the marriage was a daughter, Margaret Greville (1561–1631/2), who married Sir Richard Verney.[3] He was educated at Shrewsbury School before enrolling at Jesus College, Cambridge in 1568.[4]
Sir Henry Sidney, Philip's father, and president of the Council of Wales and the Marches, gave Greville in 1576 a post connected with the court of the Welsh Marches, but Greville resigned it in 1577 to go to attend court of Queen Elizabeth I along with Philip Sidney. There, Greville became a great favourite with the Queen, who valued his sober character and administrative skills. In 1581, he was elected in a by-election as Member of Parliament for Southampton.[5] Queen Elizabeth made him secretary to the principality of Wales in 1583. However he was put out of favour more than once for leaving the country against her wishes.
Warwick Castle on River Avon in October 2004.
Greville, Philip Sidney and Sir Edward Dyer were members of the "Areopagus", the literary clique which, under the leadership of Gabriel Harvey, supported the introduction of classical metres into English verse. Sidney and Greville arranged to sail with Sir Francis Drake in 1585 in his expedition against the Spanish West Indies, but Elizabeth forbade Drake to take them with him, and also refused Greville's request to be allowed to join Robert Dudley's army in the Netherlands. Philip Sidney, who took part in the campaign, was killed on 17 October 1586. Greville memorialized his beloved friend in his Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney.
Greville participated in the Battle of Coutras in 1587.[6] About 1591 Greville served further for a short time in Normandy under King Henry III of Navarre in the French Wars of Religion. This was his last experience of war.
Greville represented Warwickshire in parliament in 1592-1593, 1597, 1601 and 1621. In 1598 he was made Treasurer of the Navy, and he retained the office through the early years of the reign of James I.
Greville was granted Warwick Castle—situated on a bend of the River Avon in Warwickshire—by King James I in 1604.[7] Dilapidated when he took possession of the castle, he spent £20,000 to restore it to former glory.[5][8]
In 1614 he became chancellor and under-treasurer of the exchequer, and throughout the reign he was a valued supporter of James I, although in 1615 he advocated the summoning of Parliament. In 1618 he became commissioner of the treasury, and in 1621 he was raised to the peerage with the title of Baron Brooke, a title which had belonged to the family of his paternal grandmother.
Death and legacy[edit]
In 1628 Greville was stabbed inside Warwick Castle by Ralph Heywood, a servant who believed that he had been cheated in his master's will. Heywood then turned the knife on himself. Greville's physicians treated his wounds by filling them with pig fat rather than disinfecting them, the pig fat turned rancid and infected the wounds, and he died in agony four weeks after the attack. He was buried in the Collegiate Church of St Mary, Warwick, and on his tomb was inscribed the epitaph he had composed:
Folk Grevill
Servant to Queene Elizabeth
Conceller to King James
and Frend to Sir Philip Sidney.
Trophaeum Peccati.[9]
Greville has numerous streets named after him in the Hatton Garden area of Holborn, London (see Hatton Garden#Street names etymologies).
Works[edit]
Greville is best known by his biography of Sidney, the full title of which expresses the scope of the work.[n 1] He includes some autobiographical matter in what amounts to a treatise on government.
Greville's poetry consists of closet tragedies, sonnets, and poems on political and moral subjects. His style is grave and sententious.
Greville's works include:
Biography
The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney (1625)
Closet drama
Alaham
Mustapha
Verse poems
Caelica in CX Sonnets
Of Monarchy
A Treatise of Religion
A Treatie of Humane Learning
An Inquisition upon Fame and Honour
A Treatie of Warres
Miscellaneous prose
a letter to an "Honourable Lady,"
a letter to Grevill Varney in France,
a short speech delivered on behalf of Francis Bacon
Editions[edit]
Greville's works were collected and reprinted by Alexander Balloch Grosart, in 1870, in four volumes. Poetry and Drama of Fulke Greville, edited by Geoffrey Bullough, was published in 1938. The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, edited by John Gouws, were published in 1986. The Selected Poems of Fulke Greville edited by Thom Gunn, with an afterword by Bradin Cormack, was published in 2009 (University of Chicago Press, ISBN 978-0-226-30846-3.)
The Tragedy of Mustapha (London: Printed by J. Windet for N. Butter, 1609).
Certaine Learned and Elegant Workes (London: Printed by E. Purslowe for H. Seyle, 1633)--comprises A Treatise of Humane Learning, An Inquisition upon Fame and Honour, A Treatise of Wars, Alaham, Mustapha, Caelica, A Letter to an Honorable Lady, and A Letter of Travel.
The Remains of Sir Fvlk Grevill Lord Brooke: Being Poems of Monarchy and Religion: Never Before Printed (London: Printed by T. N. for H. Herringman, 1670)--comprises A Treatise of Monarchy and A Treatise of Religion.
Poems and Dramas of Fulke Greville, First Lord Brooke, 2 volumes, edited by Geoffrey Bullough (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1939; New York: Oxford University Press, 1945)--comprises Caelica, A Treatise of Humane Learning, An Inquisition upon Fame and Honor, A Treatise of Wars, Mustapha, and Alaham.
The Remains: Being Poems of Monarchy and Religion, edited by G. A. Wilkes (London: Oxford University Press, 1965)--comprises A Treatise of Monarchy and A Treatise of Religion.
The Prose Works Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, edited by John Guows (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)—published as part of the Oxford English Texts series. A scholarly edition of his prose works, with an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.
The principal repository for Fulke Greville's papers is the British Library (Add. Mss. 54566-71, the Warwick Manuscripts; letters in the as-yet uncatalogued Earl Cowper mss.). Individual manuscripts of the Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney are to be found in Headington, Oxford (the private collection of Dr. B. E. Juel-Jensen); Trinity College, Cambridge (Mss. R.7.32 and 33); and Shrewsbury Public Library (Ms. 295).
Critical reception[edit]
Of Brooke Charles Lamb says . .
"He is nine parts Machiavel and Tacitus, for one of Sophocles and Seneca... Whether we look into his plays or his most passionate love-poems, we shall find all frozen and made rigid with intellect."
He goes on to speak of the obscurity of expression that runs through all Brooke's poetry.
Andrea McCrea sees the influence of Justus Lipsius in the Letter to an Honourable Lady, but elsewhere detects a scepticism more akin to Michel de Montaigne.[10]
A rhyming elegy on Brooke, published in Henry Huth's Inedited Poetical Miscellanies, brings charges of miserliness against him.
Robert Pinsky has asserted that this work is comparable in force of imagination to John Donne.[11]
Family[edit]
Lord Brooke left no natural heirs, and his senior (Brooke) barony passed to his cousin and adopted son, Robert Greville (1608–1643), who took the side of Parliament part in the English Civil War, and defeated the Royalists in a skirmish at Kineton in August 1642. Robert was killed during the siege of Lichfield on 2 March 1643, having survived the elder Greville by only fifteen years. His other barony (Willoughby de Broke) was inherited by his sister Margaret who married Sir Richard Verney.
See also[edit]
icon Poetry portal
Wikiquote has quotations related to: Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke
Canons of Elizabethan poetry
List of owners of Warwick Castle
Notes[edit]
Jump up ^ the complete title: The Life of the Renowned Sr. Philip Sidney. With the true Interest of England as it then stood in relation to all Forrain Princes: And particularly for suppressing the power of Spain Stated by Him: His principall Actions, Counsels, Designes, and Death. Together with a short account of the Maximes and Policies used by Queen Elizabeth in her Government.
References[edit]
Jump up ^ Gouws 2004
Jump up ^ Richardson I 2011, pp. 336–8; Richardson II 2011, p. 269.
Jump up ^ Worthies of the Area 1 - Fulke Greville III Alcester & District Local History Society; Spring 1985.
Jump up ^ "Greville, Fulke (GRVL568F)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
^ Jump up to: a b "History of Parliament". Retrieved 2011-10-22.
Jump up ^ Adriana McCrea, Constant Minds: Political virtue and the Lipsian paradigm in England, 1584-1650 (1997), p. 107.
Jump up ^ "The Ghost Tower of Warwick Castle". Great Castles. Retrieved 26 December 2012.
Jump up ^ "Local Worthies 1 - Sir Fulke Greville III". Spring 1985 Index. Alcester & District Local History Society. Retrieved 26 December 2012.
Jump up ^ "Fulke GREVILLE (1º B. Willoughby of Broke)". Bios. Tudor Place. Retrieved 29 December 2012.[unreliable source]
Jump up ^ Adriana McCrea, Constant Minds: Political virtue and the Lipsian paradigm in England, 1584-1650 (1997), pp. 115-116.
Jump up ^ "Susan Orlean, David Remnick, Ethan Hawke, and Others Pick Their Favorite Obscure Books". Village Voice. 2 December 2008.
Sources[edit]
Gouws, John (2004). "Greville, Fulke, first Baron Brooke of Beauchamps Court (1554–1628)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/11516. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
Richardson, Douglas (2011). Everingham, Kimball G., ed. Magna Carta Ancestry: A Study in Colonial and Medieval Families. I (2nd ed.). Salt Lake City. ISBN 1449966373.
Richardson, Douglas (2011). Everingham, Kimball G., ed. Magna Carta Ancestry: A Study in Colonial and Medieval Families. II (2nd ed.). Salt Lake City. ISBN 1449966381.
Saunders, A W L (2007). Master of Shakespeare. MoS Publishing Ltd. ISBN 976821211X.
Elliott, Ward E. Y.; Valenza, Robert J. (2004). "Oxford by the Numbers: What Are the Odds That the Earl of Oxford Could Have Written Shakespeare's Poems and Plays?" (PDF). Tennessee Law Review. Tennessee Law Review Association. 72 (1): 323–452. ISSN 0040-3288. Retrieved 2 March 2011.
"Greville, Fulke". Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.
Further reading[edit]
The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, edited by John Gouws (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986)
Paula Bennet, "Recent Studies in Greville," English Literary Renaissance, 2 (Winter 1972): 376-382.
Ronald Rebholz, The Life of Fulke Greville, First Lord Brooke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
Joan Rees, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, 1554-1628 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).
John Gouws, "Fact and Anecdote in Fulke Greville's Account of Sidney's Last Days," in Sir Philip Sidney: 1586 and the Creation of a Legend, edited by Jan van Dorsten and others (Leiden: E. J. Brill/Leiden University Press, 1986), pp. 62–82.
W. Hilton Kelliher, "The Warwick Manuscripts of Fulke Greville," British Museum Quarterly, 34 (1970): 107-121.
Charles Larson, Fulke Greville (Boston: Twayne, 1980).
David Norbrook, "Voluntary Servitude: Fulke Greville and the Arts of Power," in his Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 157–174.
Richard Waswo, The Fatal Mirror: Themes and Techniques in the Poetry of Fulke Greville (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1972).
G. A. Wilkes, "The Sequence of the Writings of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke," Studies in Philology, 56 (July 1959): 489-503.
Attribution
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Cousin, John William (1910). A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London: J. M. Dent & Sons. Wikisource
External links[edit]
Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Brooke, Fulke Greville, 1st Baron.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Fulke Greville.
Works by or about Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke at Internet Archive
Works by Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke at the "Luminarium"
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Beauchamp Court
http://www.ourwarwickshire.org.uk/content/catalogue_her/site-of-medieval-manor-house-at-beauchamp-court-alcester
The site of the ancient manor house of Alcester. In 1340 Giles de Beauchamp obtained a licence to crenellate his manor house here and to surround it with a wall of stone and lime. Leyland notes that Fulke Greville rebuilt the manor house in 1545 with stone taken from Alcester Priory. It ceased to be the principal seat of the Grevilles after the 1st Lord Brooke had acquired Warwick Castle and the last member of the family to occupy Beauchamp’s Court appears to have died in 1653. It was empty in 1665 and by 1667 had been partly pulled down and the remainder let as a farm-house.
2
In 1928 the fall of a tree uncovered a small moulded stone of C14 date from an arch. It was deeply moulded with 2 ball flowers.
3
What the fortified house was like we do not know. When one remembers what is to be seen at Maxstoke with a moat of about this size and what was found by excavation at Weoley, one wonders whether a similar structure once stood here.
4
Medieval coins of the C15 and Post Medieval coins from the C17 to C18 were found at this location.
5
Scheduling Information. The scheduled complex takes the form of a moated island (MWA 6146) together with a fishpond (MWA6147), enclosures and ridge and furrow cultivation. It is believed that they represent the remains of a Medieval manorial complex.
Small remains of wall noted.
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Baron Brooke Fulke Greville
1554–1628
Fulke Greville, first Lord Brooke, survived most of his contemporaries. His active literary life of almost fifty years (the late 1570s to the 1620s) makes him the principal courtly writer of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras (apart from his short-lived friend Sir Philip Sidney). Although some attention has been paid to him as a writer of short poems, the main interest in Greville has been focused not on his closet dramas Alaham (1633) and Mustapha (1609), his sonnet sequence Caelica (1633), nor on his verse treatises An Inquisition upon Fame and Honor (1633), A Treatise of Humane Learning (1633), A Treatise of Wars (1633), A Treatise of Monarchy (1670), and A Treatise of Religion (1670), but on his relationship with the Sidney circle, especially as it emerged from the biographical material on Sidney in Greville's Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney (originally published as Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney, 1652). The principal anecdotal material of Sidney mythography derives from this work, and posterity has in consequence tended to accept Greville's presentation of himself as a secondary rather than a principal figure, or, to use Greville's own terms, as an adjective rather than a substantive.
Fulke Greville was born on 3 October 1554, the only son of an influential landowning Warwickshire family with aristocratic connections: his father, Sir Fulke Greville, de jure Lord Willoughby de Broke, married Ann Neville, daughter of the earl of Westmoreland. From childhood Greville had a sense of his own great, though perhaps unrecognized, worth; but it was only in middle age that he managed to achieve some sense of real autonomy. Born when his father was eighteen years old, he had to wait until the elder Greville's death in 1606 before coming into his inheritance. Only in 1621, after much petitioning and bargaining, was he accorded the title of Lord Brooke.
In 1564, at the age of ten, Greville was sent to join the young Philip Sidney at the newly founded school at Shrewsbury in the neighboring county of Shropshire. The friendship of the two boys was cemented by the three years they spent together at this school and was to influence Greville for the rest of his life. In 1568 the friends were parted: Greville entered Jesus College, Cambridge, while Sidney pursued his studies at Christ Church, Oxford. As was common for someone of his standing, Greville left Cambridge after three or four years without taking a degree. Nothing is known of his activities in England during the period of Sidney's extended continental travels from 1572 to 1575.
Partly because he had been imbued with the humanist notion of service to one's prince, partly because he undoubtedly wished to keep company with his brilliant friend, and partly because he realized that he would probably be an old man before he came into his inheritance, Greville had by 1575 determined on a career at court, where he attached himself to the radical Protestant faction headed by Sidney's uncle, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Sidney was a member of this faction, but his political ambitions were frustrated by his failure to secure any significant office. Greville discovered that the distrust of the queen and her advisers, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and his son Sir Robert, was extended to him, so that any of his own more modest forays into conduct that could possibly be construed as having political significance were frustrated.
In 1585 Greville and Sidney were prevented from joining Sir Francis Drake's expedition to the West Indies. Greville's account of these events is particularly revealing. Drake, in order to facilitate the equipping of the expedition, may have secretly agreed to allow Sidney, frustrated by inactivity, to accompany him. He might even have fostered in Sidney the belief that he would have the standing of a joint commander. But it is clear that he had no intention of sharing the command, and it is probable that he never intended Sidney and Greville to leave the shores of England in his company. The skeptical and observant Greville soon discerned that Drake's conduct lacked candor and that his delaying tactics were intended to invite a royal order forbidding Sidney's attempt at independent action. Sidney's own forthright nature would not credit such duplicity, and he refused to heed his less-trusting companion's advice. In due course, the peremptory prohibition arrived, forcing Greville and Sidney to return to the court in disgrace. An account such as this reveals Greville as a willing seconder rather than initiator of action, but also as someone capable of distancing himself from events by a profound distrust of the apparent motives of human actions.
The chronology of Greville's literary works is by no means certain. It is clear that his earliest writing was undertaken in collaboration with Sidney, and to a lesser extent with Sir Edward Dyer. Sonnets 1 through 76 and 83 of Caelica appear to have been written after 1577, when the three friends were experimenting with verse forms. Many of Greville's poems can be seen as responses to rather than imitations of those of Sidney. The nature of this friendly rivalry is revealed by the titles of their sonnet sequences: Sidney's mistress is a single star (Stella); Greville addresses his poems to the entire sky (Caelica). Greville's poems thus need to be read in the context of his friend's. Sonnet 6 of Caelica, for example, his only poem in quantitative verse (rhymed sapphics), gains by being set against one of Sidney's generally less successful attempts to write in classical meters, "If Mine Eyes Can Speak to Do Hearty Errand."
But Greville's early poems cannot be treated simply as the poetic exercises of a young courtier bent on establishing a name for himself by initiating a new vernacular literature. In many ways, both he and Sidney can be seen as responding to the challenges presented by the literary practice of Petrarchan love. Sidney's sequence fails to resolve the conflicting demands of selfless adoration and physical desire in the lover, while Greville, from an initial exploration of the psychological consequences of these conflicting demands, turns to a cynical denial of the possibility of ideal love in this world, because women are unfaithful and the men who worship them are duped by self-deception.
The personal relationship between Sidney and Penelope Rich that underlies Astrophil and Stella (1591) should also be treated as part of the context of Caelica. Given the skepticism and disenchantment Greville expresses about the nature and possibility of love as his sequence progresses, he is the obvious candidate for the admonishing friend in sonnets 14, 21, and 69 of Astrophil and Stella; it is clear that even poems as late as sonnets 66 and 76 of Caelica are critical responses to the situation in songs 2 and 8 of Astrophil and Stella.
Greville's seventy-seven poems on human love are markedly different from Sidney's. They are not organized in the form of a narrative of a single passionate relationship. Instead, Caelica is more like a miscellany of predominantly short, often introspective poems in which no fewer than three mistresses are named: Caelica, Myra, and Cynthia. On the occasions when Greville writes sonnets, he prefers the English form to the Italian. Unlike Sidney, whose poems typically move from an abstraction to passionate attention to the beloved, Greville wrote poems throughout his career that turn from a particular experience to a generalized philosophical observation.
In the years following Sidney's death in 1586, Greville found no way of advancing his political career apart from representing the county of Warwickshire in all the remaining Parliaments of Elizabeth's reign and continuing to hold the lucrative office of secretary to the Council of the Marches of Wales. However, he naturally attached himself to Sidney's political heir, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, who had inherited Sidney's sword and married his widow. After many years of submitting, often unwillingly, to the queen's restraint of his activities, Greville eventually obtained, with Essex's support, the office of treasurer of the navy. This was his first significant appointment, one that he retained despite his patron's disgrace and subsequent execution in 1601. Greville had had the foresight to distance himself timeously from Essex. The queen, moreover, had come to take the measure of his capacity for independent action and knew that his loyalties lay with her. In this way, he avoided the immediate retaliation of Essex's great enemy, the ever-distrustful Sir Robert Cecil. Although Greville was knighted at the accession of King James in 1603, Cecil saw to it that he was forced from office because of the embarrassment Greville suffered when he refused to connive at the corruption of his fellow naval administrators. At the age of forty-nine, he retired to Warwickshire, seemingly at the end of his career.
The shock of Sidney's death did not prevent Greville from stopping the unauthorized publication of Sidney's Arcadia and, with the aid of Matthew Gwinne and John Florio, seeing the first authorized edition through the press in 1590. This publication was Greville's first significant contribution to Sidney mythography. In his own writing, he produced no more poems of human love; and the handful of poems written between 1577 and 1603, Caelica sonnets 77-81, turn to the political and religious concerns that were to preoccupy him in the writing of his poetic closet dramas, Alaham, Mustapha, and the lost Antony and Cleopatra, during the last five years of the century.
In the extant plays Greville's immediate concern is with the dangers and evils of power and intrigue in an absolute monarchy. In addition to the examination of the public vices of tyranny, ambition, and intrigue, however, there is a somberly pessimistic view of the bewildered individual as radically incapable of escaping the consequences of political corruption. As such, the plays embody Greville's Protestant acceptance of the necessity of living in the world while yet being convinced of the irremediable fallibility and degeneracy of human nature since the Fall. The complexity of this view, which does not entail withdrawal from the world, is encapsulated in a remark of Greville in a letter to Sir John Coke dated 1 February 1613: "I know the world and believe in God."
It is likely that Greville's unfinished prose work, A Letter to an Honorable Lady, was composed during the period 1595-1601. Written in the literary tradition of the consolatio and of the Senecan epistle, the work attempts to persuade a virtuous aristocrat who has been ill-treated by her husband to lead a life of stoic, Christian patience. The material is deployed according to the rules of deliberative oratory. Chapter 1 constitutes the introductory exordium, followed by the narratio, which states the fact of the marriage as starting with love and ending in neglect and ill-treatment of the wife. The refutatio of chapter 2 dismisses the possibility of remedying the situation by reforming the husband. The succeeding three chapters provide the positive advice, or confirmatio: chapter 3 advocates turning inward in the face of the uncertainties of this life; chapter 4 suggests that the only proper response to the husband's authority is patience, stoic apathia; and in chapter 5 the advantages of this approach are asserted, since the wife retains her integrity and might even attain the reputation of a good wife. Where one would expect a concluding peroratio, in the unfinished chapter 6 there is a digressive extension of the confirmatio, in which Greville adds a specifically Christian dimension to the argument by suggesting the possibility of a spiritual augmentation, though not a replacement, of stoic ideas. The new ideas of chapter 6 disrupt the overall design of the work, and this might be the reason Greville left it incomplete.
The addressee of A Letter to an Honorable Lady has not been identified, though the circumstances of Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland, match those assumed by the work. Lady Cumberland's plight is also touched on in two poems by Greville's protégé, Samuel Daniel: "A Letter from Octavia to Marcus Antonius" (1599) and "To Lady Margaret, Countess of Cumberland" (1603). The evidence is not decisive, however, and Greville could simply be exploring a favorite idea: the wife's secondary relation to her husband is figured as that between a subject and monarch. As such, the Letter has a great deal in common with the plays Greville was writing in the 1590s and also with Caelica sonnet 86, which advocates patience in the face of the vicissitudes of life and trust in the consolation of Heaven. In this work one can see Greville coming to terms with a central issue in his life and writings, the frustration at the lack of personal autonomy.
Greville was neither impoverished nor idle in his retirement. With an annual income of between £5,000 and £7,000, he was able to maintain six residences, and he spent a great deal of time overseeing the practical affairs connected with them. A major project was the refurbishment, at a cost of £10,000 over several years, of Warwick Castle, his seventh residence, which he acquired in 1604. These matters did not distract him from writing. In fact, the loss of office led directly to his most productive period.
A Treatise of Monarchy, Greville's first discursive poem, was written early in his retirement. According to his account in the Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney, the poem had its origin in the choruses of his plays. He might thus have begun work on it some time before 1599, at the time he was encouraging Daniel to write philosophical verse, and when the Caelica poems began to show a preference for the six-line stanza that was to be the standard form of his long poems. By 1610, after several major revisions, A Treatise of Monarchy took its final form. The 664 stanzas are divided into fifteen sections. The first five sections focus on the problematic nature of wielding monarchal power, with Greville not distinguishing between kingship and tyranny, or attempting to exempt monarchs from human fallibility. Sections 6-12 deal with the monarch's responsibility in the spheres of religion, law, the nobility, commerce, revenue, peace, and war. His main concern is with the practicalities of cautious but effective political government. In the last three sections, where the traditional alternatives of aristocracy and democracy are compared with monarchy, monarchy is upheld as the best hope against disorder.
The advice offered by Greville in A Treatise of Monarchy is that of a retired but committed politician. The same stance underlies the Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney, composed in its final form between 1610 and 1612. The first part of the work consists of a laudatory biography of Sidney as an ideal subject, hence the commonly misleading title "The Life of Sidney." The second part is an encomiastic history of Queen Elizabeth's reign, which by indirections makes clear Greville's opinion of the reign of her successor, James I. The awkward structure of the Dedication disappears once it is realized that the work was most likely intended for the eyes of Henry, Prince of Wales. By 1610 Henry had established a measure of independence from his father and had become the center of a circle advocating a vigorously anti-Catholic foreign policy that ran counter to that of James I. Given Henry's independence, his patronage would have been ideally suited to someone out of favor and office. Unfortunately for Greville, Henry died suddenly in November 1612, though by then it looked as if Greville's political fortunes would change. His old enemy Cecil had died in May. The rancor that fuels so much of the Dedication no longer had an object, while the prospect of once again attaining office and so of being able to influence political decisions made advice to a potential patron irrelevant. Though Greville had to wait until October 1614 before returning to office, he appears to have abandoned the work. This possibility might explain the absence of the Dedication from the collection of manuscript fair copies of his works that Greville had prepared under his supervision.
The material on Sidney is written from within the rhetorical tradition of the panegyric biography and is the sole source of three anecdotes central to the Sidney myth: the tennis-court quarrel with the earl of Oxford, the high-minded abandoning of leg armor at the battle of Zutphen, and the resignation of some water to a fellow casualty in the battle with the words "Thy necessity is yet greater than mine." Greville was present at the quarrel but was not in the Netherlands to witness his beloved friend's last days. The idealization of Sidney during the succeeding centuries was focused particularly in terms of the story of what came to be known as the cup of water. In more-recent times the story has become a subject of controversy.
The second part of the Dedication is an essay in the new civil history being pioneered by Greville's friend and client, William Camden. Greville indicates how his ambition to write a history of Elizabeth was frustrated by Cecil, who was only too aware of the political uses to which such a history could be put in the reign of James. But the material on Elizabeth in the Dedication cannot be regarded as the torso of this failed project, for Greville simply translated material from Camden's original Latin manuscript of his Annals (1625). This use of Camden's unpublished material is not as predatory as it might appear, since it is more than likely that Camden's friendship with Greville allowed him access to material that would otherwise have been unavailable.
The Dedication, which survives in four manuscripts, was not published until 1652 under the cumbersome title of The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney, with the True Interest of England as It Then Stood in Relation of All Foreign Princes, and Particularly for Suppressing the Power of Spain Stated by Him, His Principal Actions, Counsels, Designs, and Death, Together with a Short Account of the Maxims and Policies Used by Queen Elizabeth in Her Government. Written by Sir Fulke Greville, Knight, Lord Brook, a Servant to Queen Elizabeth, and His Companion and Friend. From the lengthy subtitle it would seem as if the publication was motivated by an attempt to use the reputations of Sidney and Elizabeth to influence foreign-policy decisions in Commonwealth England.
Greville's collaboration with Camden indicates the nature of the tradition of patronage which he had inherited from Sidney. Through Greville, Camden had obtained the position of Clarenceux, King of Arms in the Herald's Office, which freed him to undertake his historical research. Another historian, John Speed, also received support from Greville. It is clear from Bishop Joseph Hall's dedication in Epistles and Contemplations upon the Principal Passages of the Holy Bible (1610), however, that Greville's patronage was valued more for his capacity for intellectual exchange with his clients than for material and social benefits that could arise from association with him: "The world hath long and justly both noted and honored you for eminence in wisdom and learning, and I above the most; I am ready with the awe of a learner to embrace all precepts from you: you shall expect nothing from me but testimonies of respect and thankfulness." Certainly in his retirement Hall was in no position to exercise the kind of influence by which, in the last years of Elizabeth's reign, he was able to gain the deanships of Westminster and St. Paul's for Lancelot Andrewes and John Overall, respectively. As with Camden, the client-patron relationship could develop into one of friendship. This seems to have happened also in the case of Daniel, whose writing career was profoundly influenced by his relationship with Greville.
Four other writers' names have been linked with Greville. Francis Bacon, with whom he exchanged ideas about the nature and methods of writing history, is unlikely to have been in need of Greville's support during his early career. With Bacon's disgrace in 1620, the ever-cautious Greville severed all contact with him. The young William Davenant was a member of Greville's household, but there is no evidence to show that the aging Greville took an interest in his writing. The two remaining authors were linked to Greville in David Lloyd's Statesmen and Favorites of England since the Reformation (1670). According to Lloyd, Greville was known for "his respect of the worth of others, desiring to be known to posterity under no other notion than of Shakespeare's and Ben Jonson's Master." There is no evidence to substantiate this tantalizing suggestion, though the obvious Warwickshire connection with William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson's connection with Camden do lend it some plausibility. The greatest instance of Greville's political patronage is his friend Sir John Coke, whom he met when he was secretary to the navy. Coke subsequently looked after Greville's affairs and later rose to the office of secretary of state during the reign of Charles I.
During the period between the death of Prince Henry and his return to office as chancellor and treasurer of the exchequer and as privy councillor in October 1614, Greville composed An Inquisition upon Fame and Honor. The poem goes beyond his earlier preoccupation with merit and its implied neglect during James's reign. Although he brings to bear the double perspective of the temporal and divine in terms of which he tends to view all human conduct, the overall strategy is what one would expect from a revisionary metaphysician: Greville spends the first seventy-two stanzas undermining what he takes to be the commonly understood conceptions of fame and honor, and then in stanzas 73-86 offers virtue grounded in faith as the only possible alternative to the delusive idols of opinion (Fame) and worth (Honor). His Calvinist assumption is that in a spiritually degenerate and mutable world, human beings are deluded by pride in their own worth, by pride in their rank or office, and by vanity (stanzas 60-68). From a Christian perspective, stoic apathia, consisting of a withdrawal from worldly concerns, is therefore dismissed in the orthodox fashion: it is a manifestation of human pride, since, in not affirming human fallibility and human dependence on the divine, it attempts to establish the individual self as God. An Inquisition upon Fame and Honor thus provides an outright rejection of the stoic ideas espoused in the first five chapters of A Letter to an Honorable Lady.
Greville's concerns with the nature of merit, reward, and recognition (and with the human desire for them) are characteristic of a man coming to terms with a sense of his own unrecognized merit. If the Caelica poems are indeed arranged in roughly chronological order, then those that take up the concern with fame and honor can be used to trace his self-understanding during this period of his life. In Caelica sonnet 91, titles of honor are seen as being used by rulers to maintain their own power, while fame is merely the rationalization of evil. In the companion poem, Caelica sonnet 92, ennoblement is seen not as a recognition of merit but as a concealment of evil, and one is tempted to think of Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset's rise from obscurity and his subsequent disgrace. The possibility of contemporary reference is further enhanced when, in Caelica sonnet 101, Greville seemingly returns to an earlier perspective: in his warning against kings who fail to recognize merit and instead indulge their own pleasures in the distribution of honor, he appears to be responding to James I's advancement of young Scot's favorites, which so scandalized Greville and his contemporaries. Caelica sonnets 104 and 105 place the preoccupation with fame and honor in a divine, consolatory perspective.
Other poems in Caelica following the "farewell to love" of sonnet 84 either enjoin or enact a renunciation of the values of the fallen world for inner dependence on divine grace. Of these, the most telling is a pair of poems whose modulated refrains represent an altered spiritual perspective or state. In sonnet 98 the refrain of the first two stanzas, "Lord, I have sinned, and mine iniquity, / Deserves this hell; yet Lord deliver me," is transformed in the third and last stanza to the reassurance of "Lord, from this horror of iniquity, / And hellish grave, thou would'st deliver me." In sonnet 99, a poem brought to prominence by Yvor Winters's discussion of it, the refrain undergoes a double transformation. "Deprived of human graces, and divine, / Even there appears this saving God of mine" of the first two stanzas is first modified to reflect a realistic acceptance of the human condition, "Deprived of human graces, not divine, / Even there appears this saving God of mine." Only then can the assurance of salvation be asserted in the fourth and last refrain: "Deprived of human graces, not divine / Thus has His death raised up this soul of mine." It is on the basis of poems such as these that claims have been advanced for Greville as a religious poet comparable with John Donne.
Ronald Rebholz argues in The Life of Fulke Greville, First Lord Brooke (1971) that Greville experienced a major religious conversion sometime before 1614. Although this assumption allows Rebholz a plausible narrative in terms of which he can organize Greville's writings, there is no external evidence of a spiritual crisis in Greville's life at this time. Moreover, Rebholz's theory depends on two questionable assumptions. The first of these is the anachronistic post-Romantic myth that an author's works are a direct expression of his spiritual and psychological being. The second is that for works for which no separate versions are extant there is a single temporal moment of composition that can be tied to the inner life of the author. Given that Greville was an inveterate reviser, and given his self-presentation as a Calvinist throughout his writings, there are insufficient grounds for pressing selective literary evidence to underpin a supposition as to a specific religious experience.
The date of composition of the three remaining philosophical poems is uncertain, but it is thought to be after Greville's return to office. In the two-year period after his creation as Lord Brooke, and his loss of the chancellorship of the exchequer in 1621, he attended few Privy Council meetings. It is possible that in the absence of public duties and commitments he once again devoted his energies to writing.
In the first four stanzas of A Treatise of Humane Learning, Greville reveals the extent of his commitment to the tradition of Renaissance skepticism. Like Michel de Montaigne and Bacon, he acknowledges the human incapacity for accurate perception and intellectual conception, which results in universal disagreement and lack of self-knowledge. Unlike them, however, his views are grounded in his convictions about original sin. Montaigne's delight in relativism and Bacon's humanistic optimism hold no attractions for him.
Although A Treatise of Humane Learning has much in common with Bacon's Advancement of Learning (1605), it has even been seen as a response to that work, since Greville never endorses the project for redeeming the consequences of the Fall through learning. Instead he follows his initial dismissal of all human learning as vanity with an assertion of the double perspective of the temporal and the eternal: thus ignorance is the nurse and mother of lust, and learning is "A bunch of grapes sprung up among thorns, / Where, but by caution, none the harm can miss."
Setting aside the Elect, whose only concern is obedience to God, Greville presents a program for the reform of learning. His target is the same as Bacon's: scholastic speculation conducted in terms of the deductive method. The branches of learning he discusses are those of the university faculties. Theology should not meddle with the mysteries of divinity, but should be concerned with the relationship between humans and God. Law should be based on divine injunctions, protect the individual citizen, and maintain royal authority. Both medicine and moral philosophy must be concerned with practical and ethical matters, while political philosophy should enable kings to avoid impediments to their authority.
The "instrumental arts" of the traditional trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) must be simplified. Of the "Arts of Recreation," music should properly enhance worship and inspire martial valor; poetry, based on truth "while it seemeth but to please, / Teacheth us order under pleasure's name." Arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy are all to have a practical application. Conversely, the use of knowledge for evil ends is to be condemned. Turning then from these "vanities" to the Elect, Greville suggests that the faithful should obey willingly their temporal prince as part of their submission to God's providential scheme, since the only human obligation is to come to terms with the spiritual degradation precipitated by the Fall.
The two remaining treatises seem to be much more the work of an aging, disillusioned statesman and politician. In the first five stanzas of A Treatise of Wars, the benefits of peace to fallen mankind are celebrated. This is followed by a representation of war as "the perfect type of hell." In the remaining thirty-eight stanzas Greville treats his subject from a providential perspective. Rather than seeing war as an instrument of monarchal power (as in A Treatise of Monarchy and the Dedication), or as a means to personal honor (as in the Dedication or Caelica sonnet 108), he sees it primarily as a divine scourge of human wickedness, as a trial of the Elect, as a purge for the excesses of peace, and as an instrument for sustaining the vicissitudes of the fallen condition.
Greville then turns from the causes to the varieties of war. He distinguishes between human war and divine war (by which he appears to mean not holy wars such as the Crusades but something like the angelic wars against Satan). Of human wars, the only ones in which the Elect may participate are those having the divine sanctions of prophecies and angelic wonders, and then only on condition that they are conducted mercifully and charitably by lawfully constituted authorities. That being the case, there can be justification neither for involvement in war in order to attain honor or power, nor for rebellion or its suppression. War thus has value only to those whose undertakings are limited by this world. For this reason, the Elect must not be like nominal Christians and Mohammedans in being unable "to leave the world for God, nor God for it." Any superstitious compromise as to the benefits of war merely augments the evil of war. What is required is an absolute commitment: war will be brought to an end only when humans "begin / For God's sake to abhor this world of sin."
In A Treatise of Religion Greville writes directly about the topic that has dominated most of his thinking. The first four stanzas establish the assumption that fallen human nature can be redeemed only by grace through Christ; neither human passion nor reason is capable of redeeming us. Nevertheless, human beings naturally have such a sense of the need for redemption that if human nature were not radically corrupt, they would "grow happily adorers of the good." Instead, human affection and reason lead people to find external remedies for their condition in superstition and hypocrisy, respectively. True religion, however, is not external, but is manifested initially in virtue attained through grace.
By insisting that this virtue is not the pagan self-sufficiency of stoicism, Greville rejects the equanimity he advocated in A Letter to an Honorable Lady. He now maintains that regeneration is possible only through supernatural grace, by means of which the faithful, the "Church invisible," must devote themselves to prayer and obedience, not to the "book-learning" of a subservient external church professing faith in God but not obeying Him. In maintaining that the Elect are those who accept, and are regenerated by, grace, and so persevere in faith and good works, Greville implicitly rejects the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination. For him, humans are not eternally either redeemed or reprobate. Instead, they can either devote themselves to God, as Abel did, or seek some external manifestation of divinity and so fail in their obedience, as did Cain. Those who seek peace through other than heavenly things--rulers, the learned, and the clergy of an outward church--will all be brought to desolation, a vision of which is presented in the appropriately apocalyptic concluding poem of Caelica, sonnet 109. The Elect, who are such by their faith in and devotion to Christ the Redeemer, will find peace and joy.
Greville obviously considered A Treatise of Religion the most important of his shorter philosophical poems. In a note in one of the volumes of the fair copies of his works prepared for him between 1619 and 1625, he indicates the order in which the poems are to be placed: "1. Religion. 2. Humane learning. 3. Fame and Honor. 4. War." However, when his works were put through the press by Coke and Sir Kenelm Digby, A Treatise of Religion ran afoul of the censors. All copies of Certain Learned and Elegant Works (1633) lack the pages that should have contained it, and it has generally been assumed that someone like William Lord, then bishop of London, would have taken exception to the slur on episcopacy in stanza 92 and to the criticism of an Established Church in stanzas 30-31 and 68-69. Two other works are also absent from the 1633 volume.
If in the case of the Dedication the work still survived among the manuscript fair copies, Greville's literary executors might have foreseen the difficulties that implicit criticism of James I could raise during his son's reign. They certainly did not even consider publication of A Treatise of Monarchy, with its notion of kingship as a product of human fallibility. With the absolute powers claimed by Charles I, the poem would have lent support to the increasingly vehement opposition to the king. Moreover, Coke and Digby would have recalled that Greville's plans for a lectureship in history at Cambridge had failed because of Laud's objection to the similar views of monarchy expressed by the first appointee, Isaac Dorislaus. The two potentially subversive treatises thus had to wait until 1670, when they were published in a volume titled The Remains of Sir Fulke Greville: Being Poems of Monarchy and Religion.
Greville's death followed shortly after the assassination on 23 August 1628 of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, the despised favorite of James I and Charles I. The attack on Greville by a servant, Ralph Hayward, on 1 September does not seem to have been politically motivated. Hayward appears to have been discontented with the terms of his employer's will and stabbed Greville in the stomach while he was assisting his master to fasten his breeches. There is no indication that the stabbing was occasioned by anything untoward happening while Hayward performed these personal services for his master, who prevented anyone from pursuing his assailant. Greville died of gangrene on 30 September, after physicians had replaced the depleted natural fatty membrane around their patient's intestines with animal fat. His corpse was transported from London to Warwick, where it was buried in the family crypt in St. Mary's Church. Nearby, now enclosed in a small room, stands the monumental tomb Greville had prepared for himself, bearing the inscription, "Fulke Greville / Servant to Queen Elizabeth / Councillour to King James / and Friend to Sir Philip Sidney. / Trophaeum Peccati." With its claims of only secondary fame and its awareness of the wages of sin, the inscription reveals much of Greville's complexity, while the location of the tomb aptly underscores the dominant mode of his life, frustration.
Greville's reputation has never stood as high as it does in the twentieth century. In the United States his standing as a poet of the "plain style" can in large measure be attributed to the critical writing of Winters, who regards him not only as a pivotal figure in literary history, but as a poet who "should be ranked with Jonson as one of the two great masters of the short poem in the Renaissance." Winters's estimation has not met with general critical assent, but it is clear that it has encouraged others to take Greville seriously. Much of the recent British writing on Greville has been from the perspective of cultural materialism, and it is likely that those interested in the poetics of culture and power in Renaissance England will find Greville's works central to their project. They will, however, find themselves hampered by the lack of recently edited scholarly texts: editions of the poems and dramas by G. A. Wilkes of Sydney University and of the letters by Norman K. Farmer of the University of Texas at Austin have been long awaited.
— John Gouws, Rhodes University, South Africa
Bibliography
Books
The Tragedy of Mustapha (London: Printed by J. Windet for N. Butter, 1609).
Certaine Learned and Elegant Workes (London: Printed by E. Purslowe for H. Seyle, 1633)--comprises A Treatise of Humane Learning, An Inquisition upon Fame and Honour, A Treatise of Wars, Alaham, Mustapha, Caelica, A Letter to an Honorable Lady, and A Letter of Travel.
The Life of the Renowned Sr Philip Sydney (London: Printed for Henry Seile, 1652).
The Remains of Sir Fvlk Grevill Lord Brooke: Being Poems of Monarchy and Religion: Never Before Printed (London: Printed by T. N. for H. Herringman, 1670)--comprises A Treatise of Monarchy and A Treatise of Religion.
Editions
Poems and Dramas of Fulke Greville, First Lord Brooke, 2 volumes, edited by Geoffrey Bullough (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1939; New York: Oxford University Press, 1945)--comprises Caelica, A Treatise of Humane Learning, An Inquisition upon Fame and Honor, A Treatise of Wars, Mustapha, and Alaham.
The Remains: Being Poems of Monarchy and Religion, edited by G. A. Wilkes (London: Oxford University Press, 1965)--comprises A Treatise of Monarchy and A Treatise of Religion.
The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, edited by John Gouws (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986)--comprises A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney ("The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney") and A Letter to an Honorable Lady.
The principal repository for Fulke Greville's papers is the British Library (the literary works are to be found in Add. Mss. 54566-71, the Warwick Manuscripts; there are also many letters in the as-yet uncatalogued Earl Cowper mss.). Individual manuscripts of the Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney are to be found in Headington, Oxford (the private collection of Dr. B. E. Juel-Jensen); Trinity College, Cambridge (Mss. R.7.32 and 33); and Shrewsbury Public Library (Ms. 295).
Further Readings
Paula Bennet, "Recent Studies in Greville," English Literary Renaissance, 2 (Winter 1972): 376-382.
Ronald Rebholz, The Life of Fulke Greville, First Lord Brooke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
Joan Rees, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, 1554-1628 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).
John Gouws, "Fact and Anecdote in Fulke Greville's Account of Sidney's Last Days," in Sir Philip Sidney: 1586 and the Creation of a Legend, edited by Jan van Dorsten and others (Leiden: E. J. Brill/Leiden University Press, 1986), pp. 62-82.
Gouws, "The Nineteenth-Century Development of the Sidney Legend," in Sir Philip Sidney's Achievements, edited by M. J. B. Allen and others (New York: AMS Press, 1990), pp. 251-260.
W. Hilton Kelliher, "The Warwick Manuscripts of Fulke Greville," British Museum Quarterly, 34 (1970): 107-121.
Charles Larson, Fulke Greville (Boston: Twayne, 1980).
David Norbrook, "Voluntary Servitude: Fulke Greville and the Arts of Power," in his Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 157-174.
Richard Waswo, The Fatal Mirror: Themes and Techniques in the Poetry of Fulke Greville (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1972).
G. A. Wilkes, "The Sequence of the Writings of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke," Studies in Philology, 56 (July 1959): 489-503.
Yvor Winters, "Aspects of the Short Poem in the English Renaissance," in his Forms of Discovery: Critical and Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1967), pp. 1-120.
Blair Worden, "Friend to Sir Philip Sidney," London Review of Books, 3 July 1986, pp. 19-22.
Michael B. Young, Servility and Service: The Life and Work of Sir John Coke (London: Boydell Press for the Royal Historical Society, 1986).
[Source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/fulke-greville, accessed 2017 Oct 11.]
Caelica 22: I, with whose colours Myra dress’d her head
BY BARON BROOKE FULKE GREVILLE
I, with whose colours Myra dress’d her head,
I, that ware posies of her own hand-making,
I, that mine own name in the chimneys read
By Myra finely wrought ere I was waking:
Must I look on, in hope time coming may
With change bring back my turn again to play?
I, that on Sunday at the church-stile found
A garland sweet, with true-love knots in flowers,
Which I to wear about mine arm was bound,
That each of us might know that all was ours:
Must I now lead an idle life in wishes,
And follow Cupid for his loaves and fishes?
I, that did wear the ring her mother left,
I, for whose love she gloried to be blamed,
I, with whose eyes her eyes committed theft,
I, who did make her blush when I was named:
Must I lose ring, flowers, blush, theft, and go naked,
Watching with sighs till dead love be awaked?
I, that, when drowsy Argus fell asleep,
Like jealousy o’erwatched with desire,
Was even warned modesty to keep,
While her breath, speaking, kindled Nature’s fire:
Must I look on a-cold, while others warm them?
Do Vulcan’s brothers in such fine nets arm them?
Was it for this that I might Myra see
Washing the water with her beauties white?
Yet would she never write her love to me.
Thinks wit of change, while thoughts are in delight?
Mad girls must safely love as they may leave;
No man can print a kiss: lines may deceive.
Caelica 29: The nurse-life wheat within his green husk growing
BY BARON BROOKE FULKE GREVILLE
The nurse-life wheat within his green husk growing,
Flatters our hope, and tickles our desire,
Nature’s true riches in sweet beauties showing,
Which sets all hearts, with labor’s love, on fire.
No less fair is the wheat when golden ear
Shows unto hope the joys of near enjoying;
Fair and sweet is the bud, more sweet and fair
the rose, which proves that time is not destroying.
Caelica, your youth, the morning of delight,
Enamel’d o’er with beauties white and red,
All sense and thoughts did to belief invite,
That love and glory there are brought to bed;
And your ripe year’s love-noon; he goes no higher,
Turns all the spirits of man into desire.
Caelica 4: You little stars that live in skies
BY BARON BROOKE FULKE GREVILLE
You little stars that live in skies
And glory in Apollo’s glory,
In whose aspècts conjoinèd lies
The heaven’s will and nature’s story,
Joy to be likened to those eyes,
Which eyes make all eyes glad or sorry;
For when you force thoughts from above,
These overrule your force by love.
And thou, O Love, which in these eyes
Hast married Reason with Affection,
And made them saints of Beauty’s skies,
Where joys are shadows of perfection,
Lend me thy wings that I may rise
Up, not by worth, but thy election;
For I have vowed in strangest fashion
To love and never seek compassion.
Caelica 83: You that seek what life is in death
BY BARON BROOKE FULKE GREVILLE
You that seek what life is in death,
Now find it air that once was breath.
New names unknown, old names gone:
Till time end bodies, but souls none.
Reader! then make time, while you be,
But steps to your eternity.
Chorus Sacerdotum
BY BARON BROOKE FULKE GREVILLE
from Mustapha
O wearisome condition of humanity!
Born under one law, to another bound;
Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity;
Created sick, commanded to be sound.
What meaneth nature by these diverse laws?
Passion and reason, self-division cause.
Is it the mark or majesty of power
To make offenses that it may forgive?
Nature herself doth her own self deflower
To hate those errors she herself doth give.
For how should man think that he may not do,
If nature did not fail and punish, too?
Tyrant to others, to herself unjust,
Only commands things difficult and hard,
Forbids us all things which it knows is lust,
Makes easy pains, unpossible reward.
If nature did not take delight in blood,
She would have made more easy ways to good.
We that are bound by vows and by promotion,
With pomp of holy sacrifice and rites,
To teach belief in good and still devotion,
To preach of heaven’s wonders and delights;
Yet when each of us in his own heart looks
He finds the God there, far unlike his books.
Elegy for Philip Sidney
BY BARON BROOKE FULKE GREVILLE
Silence augmenteth grief, writing increaseth rage,
Staled are my thoughts, which loved and lost the wonder of our age;
Yet quickened now with fire, though dead with frost ere now,
Enraged I write I know not what; dead, quick, I know not how.
Hard-hearted minds relent and rigor's tears abound,
And envy strangely rues his end, in whom no fault was found.
Knowledge her light hath lost, valor hath slain her knight,
Sidney is dead, dead is my friend, dead is the world's delight.
Place, pensive, wails his fall whose presence was her pride;
Time crieth out, My ebb is come; his life was my spring tide.
Fame mourns in that she lost the ground of her reports;
Each living wight laments his lack, and all in sundry sorts.
He was (woe worth that word!) to each well-thinking mind
A spotless friend, a matchless man, whose virtue ever shined;
Declaring in his thoughts, his life, and that he writ,
Highest conceits, longest foresights, and deepest works of wit.
He, only like himself, was second unto none,
Whose death (though life) we rue, and wrong, and all in vain do moan;
Their loss, not him, wail they that fill the world with cries,
Death slew not him, but he made death his ladder to the skies.
Now sink of sorrow I who live—the more the wrong!
Who wishing death, whom death denies, whose thread is all too long;
Who tied to wretched life, who looks for no relief,
Must spend my ever dying days in never ending grief.
Farewell to you, my hopes, my wonted waking dreams,
Farewell, sometimes enjoyëd joy, eclipsëd are thy beams.
Farewell, self-pleasing thoughts which quietness brings forth,
And farewell, friendship's sacred league, uniting minds of worth.
And farewell, merry heart, the gift of guiltless minds,
And all sports which for life's restore variety assigns;
Let all that sweet is, void; in me no mirth may dwell:
Philip, the cause of all this woe, my life's content, farewell!
Now rhyme, the son of rage, which art no kin to skill,
And endless grief, which deads my life, yet knows not how to kill,
Go, seek that hapless tomb, which if ye hap to find
Salute the stones that keep the limbs that held so good a mind.
=============================================================================================
Perhaps it is not easy to find in all that generation
of high-thinking and brilliantly-writing men, anyone
who combines vivid expression with weighty thought
more notably than Brooke does. —George Saintsbury1
Portrait Fulke Greville was born on Oct. 3, 1554 in Beauchamp Court, Warwickshire, to a wealthy noble family, as the only son of Sir Fulke Greville. He entered Shrewsbury School in the same year as Sir Philip Sidney who was to become his close friend. After leaving Jesus College, Cambridge, he was offered a post by Sir Henry Sidney, Philip Sidney's father, but he gave it up in order to follow Sidney to the court of Queen Elizabeth I. At court, Greville fared well. He became part of the Areopagus club with Spenser and Sidney, and also counted among his friends Sir Edward Dyer, Samuel Daniel and Sir Francis Bacon.
Like many of their contemporaries, young courtiers yearning for adventure and eager to prove themselves in battle, Greville and Sidney tried to join Sir Francis Drake in his sail to capture Spanish cities in the West Indies in 1585. Queen Elizabeth expressly forbade Drake to take them along. In 1586, the Queen also refused Greville permission to join the Earl of Leicester in his campaign in the Netherlands. Sidney, however, was allowed to go; a decision all of England learned to regret, when he was killed by a musket shot at the battle of Zutphen in October, 1586. Greville was devastated by the loss of his childhood friend. He contributed an elegy on the death of Sidney to The Phoenix Nest (1593) and later authored a biography in his memory. Greville finally got a taste of war in 1591, when he served briefly in Normandy under Henry of Navarre.
Greville repres
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