HERE is a trivial, everyday incident, a family quarrel: ‘My father began to chyde and square with me at ye Table: I præsently, & doing my duty, ryse fro m ye bowrd, saying only: I pray you good Father, pray for me and I will pray for you.’1 We have to imagine a tall and handsome young man with black hair and a dark complexion who has something of the look of an Italian.2 He may, at this point, sport a moustache and almost certainly has a taste for fine clothes. Throughout his life, he seeks to rise early, at five o’clock, and to eat little and to drink less. This is Gabriel Harvey: his father, John, is a prominent citizen and landowner in the town of Walden (now better known as Saffron Walden) in Essex; the father also has a rope-making business. The family, John and his wife Alice, and their children, of whom Gabriel is the eldest, four boys and three girls, live in a substantial house in the centre of the town. They are not grand, but claim kinship with another local citizen, Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, Sir Thomas Smith, that ‘bladder, full of Branes’, as Gabriel Harvey called him.3 Smith was Harvey’s patron and hero: when he died in 1577, the young scholar produced a volume of Latin poems commemorating him under the evocative title Smithus.
The man who recorded his quarrel with his father remembered in his own words ‘to leaue some memorials behinde him’, 4 and the memorials have not entirely perished. He published Latin lectures and poems; the private letters he exchanged with Edmund Spenser, and which were printed in 1580, are amusing; the pamphlet war with Thomas Nashe helped establish how to be rude in print. Yet, it is in Harvey’s handwritten works, his manuscripts and the marginalia he so carefully and beautifully wrote in his printed books, that he appears most fully and willingly to have memorialized himself: ‘giue me entrance, & lett me alone … giue me footing, & I will finde elbow roome’, he wrote in his copy of Erasmus.5 As a scholarly academic he can be brilliant in print, but only in Latin. When he writes for publication in English, he is diffuse and over-elaborate: something always seems to go wrong. Print, in his view, was the perfect medium for self-advertisement but, as he found to his cost, it could also be confining, not affording him sufficient elbow-room. He can only fully become himself in what is handwritten. Blank pieces of paper, leaves, sheets, gatherings, notebooks, commonplace books, letter-books, the endpapers of printed books, their gutters and margins, even between the lines of print: these alone seemed to give him the space he needed in which to express his self.
Hence, it has often been said it is possible to get closer to Gabriel Harvey than to almost any other Englishman of the Renaissance.6 His manuscripts, especially his marginalia, present him, it would appear, as he really was: his mind, his hopes, and his thoughts, his very mental processes appear to be laid open.7 Harvey’s own interest in using manuscript, as opposed to print, provides a context in which to examine an account in his Letter-Book of the attempted seduction of his sister by a nobleman.
For Harvey, the books he owned were storehouses of useful material, the means to an end, not an end in themselves. The titles of just over 150 of his books are known, of which around 130 can now be located: the books and their annotations bear eloquent witness to his interest in law, history, politics, rhetoric, medicine, and contemporary literature. Harvey’s marginalia have probably become his best-known prose writings: his comments on recent writing (including Hamlet) in his copy of Speght’s 1598 edition of Chaucer are read more frequently and with more pleasure than, say, Pierces supererogation.
Harvey cultivated a version of the distinctive italic hand so highly prized in Tudor Cambridge; Nashe referred sneeringly to it as his ‘faire capitall Romane hand’.8 Some books are scarcely touched by Harvey’s pen beyond a signature or his initials. In others, almost every inch of paper has been covered. Moore Smith believed that the notes were ‘written only for his own eye’, 9 but reading in the Renaissance was by no means always an exclusively solitary activity. Books were often social instruments to be read in company, as Harvey read Livy with (on different occasions) Philip Sidney, Thomas Smith’s son, and Thomas Preston. In a less high-minded way, he could snigger over copies (bound together) of Scoggin, Skelton, Lazarillo de Tormes, and Howleglas with Spenser in London. Books were also to be read with his pupils and passed around among family and friends as gifts or purchases: they might be inscribed ‘gabrielis harveij et amicorum’.10 Harvey’s library and his attachment to the notes he wrote in the books were sufficiently well known to be joked about in the Cambridge Latin comedy Pedantius, acted at Trinity College in 1581 and later to be referred to in his dispute with Nashe.11
In books from his library, the potent mixture of manuscript and print, of reading and writing, suggests that Harvey was involved in an extensive and interminable conversation with himself and others.12 He makes the speaker in one of his poems say, ‘I reade, and I reade, till I needes must cease,/And insteade of drye studdy, fall to gentle chatt’ (Letter-Book, p. 134), as if the one naturally went with the other. The marginalia have a semi-public status, providing what has been called a ‘manuscript personality’, but it is of Harvey’s own making. This may account, in part, for his characteristic boasting: ‘I redd ouer this Ciceronianus twise in twoo dayes, being then Sophister in Christes College’, he noted in a book by Ramus, or in a French-language manual, ‘Apt & reddy pronunciation of the Alphabet, one weeks exercise’, or in his copy of Foorth’s Synopsis Politica, ‘This synopsis filled the weight of scarcely three hours: at the third I was an expert at it.’13 It is quite probable that Harvey had some of his printed books open in front of him when he lectured and that he taught using their marginalia.14
Those marginalia were also quarried as a source for books both written and unwritten: they served as manuscript miscellanies, and like such miscellanies, they had a relatively public character. As might be expected, Harvey is well aware of the distinction that can be drawn between what has been printed and what is manuscript. For example, he bets Spenser ‘al the Books and writings in my study, which you know, I esteeme of greater value, than al the golde and siluer in my purse, or chest’ that the poet will not be sent abroad in the near future.15 Similarly, in a work by Ramus (1570) he notes ‘This whole booke, written & printed, of continual & perpetual use’. Yet, the distinction is not an absolute or simple one: Harvey’s marginalia raise the question of whether the print or the handwritten annotation is the text, whether what appears literally to be marginal is not in fact central: ‘the glosse oftentymes marreth the Text’, as he noted in his copy of Erasmus’s Parabolae, but what if the gloss is the text?16 Perhaps this is what he meant when he wrote ‘The Glosse,/Is grosse:/The Texte/Is nexte’ (Letter-Book, p. 125).
Printed books circulate, but Harvey’s manuscripts (apart from presentation copies for patrons) tend towards the private and secret. Where he mentions manuscripts, he usually does so in terms suggesting private knowledge to be kept to oneself. For Harvey, manuscripts do not circulate, are not published, or made available for multiple copying. Some knowledge was not to be shared, but to be stored in what he almost always referred to as a paper-book, a book of blank paper in which to write. His enemy Nashe had a ‘great Paper-boke’ of commonplaces, but his heroes also tended to keep their most valuable ideas and information in these sorts of compilations: ‘Erasmus three cheefist Paper bookes’ were ‘His Similes’, ‘His prouerbes’, and ‘His Apothegges’.17 Elsewhere, Harvey notes:
Doctor Dale—the great pragmatic, and the most judicious ambassador I have known—used to say ‘Give me no. 1’ when he wanted Justinian; ‘Give me no. 2’ when he wanted his Speculum iuris; ‘Give me no. 3’ when he wanted Livy. For he made more of these three authors than of all the rest, and he supplied himself with a manuscript notebook of secrets.18
The key word here is perhaps ‘secrets’, as in the second item of a collection of manuscripts Harvey owned: ‘This torne booke was found amongst the paper bookes, & secret writings of Doctor Caius.’19 The professional’s knowledge is cheapened if it is made public. In 1589, Harvey noted of a physician and surgeon who practised in Leicester, ‘The best instructions [for treating disease are] in Mr Leas paperbooke. which he commonly called his boosum-booke: sumtime his Vade mecum.’20 Elsewhere, Harvey referred to the alchemist and medical man John Hester’s ‘Chymical Epistle’ as ‘An other Vade mecum’;21 no known printed work by Hester quite fits this title, and the term ‘vade mecum’ seems here to signify a medical manuscript. Doctors do not publish their hard-earned skills since doing so would put them out of a job.
Some of Harvey’s obsession with paper-books and secret knowledge can be traced to his distinctive paranoia; part of it also comes from an early and determining incident in his career. At Sir Thomas Smith’s funeral in 1577, Harvey quarrelled with the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, Andrew Perne, another keen book collector. The dispute was over ‘certaine rare manuscript bookes’ of Smith’s which his widow and co-executors wished Harvey to have, and which Perne was after for himself or for the university.22 There was no sense in which the ‘rare manuscript bookes’ could be copied and shared: they were for their owner’s eyes only. Smith’s manuscripts were like Dale’s paper-books, private collections of secrets and laboriously acquired knowledge. In a passage in his Letter-Book, Harvey refers to his having ‘on suer frende’, which he calls ‘my Familiar’; then, assuming an editorial role, he adds, ‘by his familiar, it is most likely he menith his Paperbooke’ (Letter-Book, pp. 72–3). The definition is not exclusive: in one of his most heavily annotated printed books (Demosthenes’s Gnomologiae), he writes of how he does not miss other Greek authors as long as he has this book, calling it ‘One of mie pockettings; & familiar spirits’.23 The paper-book and the heavily annotated printed book are where secrets are hidden from public view and where ideas and dreams can be privately explored. Although he undoubtedly had other personal notebooks, 24 the manuscript known as his Letter-Book, now in the British Library, is stuffed with autograph material illustrating these dual purposes.
The manuscript measures about 6 by 8 inches and consists now of just over 100 leaves. Harvey began it as a place for keeping fair copies of letters relating to his academic troubles over his MA in 1573. The first page has two poignant Stoic epigraphs, the first in Greek, which can be translated as ‘My sufferings have been my lessons’, and the second in Greek and Latin: ‘It is better to be wronged than to do wrong’. At the end of the book he also copied several letters of an academic and personal nature from the early 1570s. The bulk of the volume is taken up by various literary pieces, including verses on the death of the poet George Gascoigne, letters and compositions which may have been intended in some form for publication, a Skeltonical poem, ‘The Schollers Looue’, and the story of his sister’s seduction by an unnamed nobleman. These literary pieces are full of false datings, the invocation of various friends in their proposed publication, ‘distancing frameworks’, ruses, and shifts.25 For example, he claims to have found two of the letters copied in the Letter-Book by chance ‘amongst A nu m ber of myne oulde scatterid Papers’, when he can be caught almost in the act of composing them there (Letter-Book, p. 77). Among the publication plans is one for ‘Certayne younge Conceytes, and Poeticall deuises’ that have been ‘copied owt of A schollars Paperbooke’ and published by a gentleman friend who had borrowed them ‘as once his priuate exercises of pleasure, at idle howers’. The paper-book is explicitly where the scholar indulges in his ‘priuate exercises of pleasure’ (Letter-Book, p. 143): nothing can be printed from it without the fair copying and revision which Harvey once called ‘transcripting and reforming’.26
If Harvey’s reading was only a means to an end, at worst a distraction from the real business of humanist life, writing was also largely a waste of time, a displacement activity. In his Commonplace Book, he notes ‘Auoyde all writing, but necessary: wch consumith unreasonable much tyme, before you ar aware: you haue alreddy plaguid yourselfe this way: Two Arts lernid, whilest two sheetes in writing.’27 More strikingly, he cites two of his heroes who did not write. ‘This vulgar bad habit of writing’, he noted, ‘often makes readers dilatory and usually makes actors cowardly. The followers of Socrates were wiser: they preferred teachings that were unwritten, spoken, preserved by memorization. “Take your hand from the picture”, runs the old saying. “Take the pen from your hand”, so runs my saying now.’28 Christ did not write his gospels: he charged people not to write, but to preach. ‘Don’t sit around and write’. Elsewhere, he records a story of Apollonius Tyaneus, who, when asked ‘why he writt nothing, being so excellently hable: answered, It was not his dessigne, To sitt still.’ Harvey preserves his own command: ‘Throw your pen away and sharpen your tongue.’ As he puts it, ‘All writing layd abedd, as tædious, & needles. All is now, jn bowld Courtly speaking, and bowld Industrious dooing.’29
The contempt for writing takes a distinctive form. In a richly annotated volume of Guicciardini’s writings, Harvey records a remark made to him by John Young, Bishop of Rochester, ‘Leaue scribling … & now in deed to the purpose’.30 ‘Scribling’, the Juvenalian insanabile scribendi cacoēthes, is another word like ‘secrets’ that seems to acquire a significance for Harvey all of its own: ‘Read as much as you can every day as quickly as you can’, but the results should be kept in the mind, not expressed through the pen, for the itch to write, the incurable passion for scribbling, is a waste of time. ‘There is nothing more vain than being in the habit of writing with a passion for scribbling.’31 Books and manuscripts are not enough in themselves: Harvey despises ‘Bookewormes: & Scriblers: pen & inkhorn men: paperbook men, men in their bookes or papers: not in their heds, or harts’.32 Modern writers, ‘this scribling generation’, who are no good, can be dismissed as ‘scribling paltryes’; his foe Robert Greene and the ballad-maker William Elderton are ‘the very ringleaders of the riming, and scribbling crew’; Greene himself was the one with ‘the running Head, and the scribling Hand’. The psychology of Harvey’s opposition to scribbling goes deeper: when he wants to excuse himself, as over the publication of letters to Spenser, he argues that it was unfortunate ‘to imprint in earnest, that was scribled in iest’.33 Likewise, his ‘Answer to A Millers vayne Letter’ in the Letter-Book is said to have been ‘scriblid longe since’, and ‘The Schollers Looue’ was ‘scribled at the first in a hurlewind of conceit’ (Letter-Book, pp. 90, 102).
Perhaps all writing, even of marginalia, is scribbling: ‘No more scribling’, he wrote in a heavily annotated volume, ‘but enjoy the excellent, & divine notes, which you have alreddi written’.34 After one reading of Livy, undertaken with Thomas Preston, Master of Trinity Hall, in around 1584, Harvey noted how: ‘Owr special notes & particular obseruations, both moral, politique, militarie, stratagematical, & other of anie worth or importance, wee committed to writing.’35 Books have to be read, and what is of value has to be written down, yet the fact remains that for Harvey, reading and writing are only means to a larger end.
Harvey commits nothing to paper without a purpose of some kind: the Letter-Book provides a place—between marginalia and print—for his own designs and compositions. Most attention has been focused on the central part of the manuscript, in which Harvey wrote and rewrote the compositions which would eventually emerge in print in 1580 as the letters he exchanged with Spenser. The process of transforming these ‘Patcheries, and fragments’ from manuscript into print is complicated, involving false starts, rewritings, and changes of mind:36 it is important because of the flickering light it sheds on Spenser’s life, the making of The shepheardes calender, and on the links he may have had with Sidney and his friends. Uniquely, Harvey’s drafts allow the process of composition to be charted from manuscript to print and back again to manuscript, since his own copy of the 1580 letters survives with his corrections and revisions.37
The Letter-Book drafts combine Harvey’s characteristic play of the literary composition and the autobiographical fragment; as Nielson has put it, ‘what gives Harvey’s drafts in manuscript their unique air of authenticity is more than anything else how inauthentic we can see him being’.38 The pattern is one that Harvey seems unable to resist. He claimed that his first significant publication, the Ode Natalitia of 1575, was written during the morning and afternoon of St Stephen’s Day (26 December 1574: the date is significant), pouring forth, as it were, extempore in a few hours before and after lunch.39 In the prefatory letter to the Ciceronianus, he tells William Lewin that the work is just what ‘I was able to throw together in about five days’.40 This sort of public boasting in print is like his more private declarations of how long it took him to read and master the books he annotated.
Harvey’s public persona combines with what Moore Smith coolly called ‘a certain inclination to finesse or trickery in Harvey’s character’.41 It is as if his boasting can be offset or mitigated by a degree of mystification: if Harvey is part of a hidden, secret world of which the reader is only allowed hints or glimpses, then perhaps he really does have something special to boast about. Mystification is particularly useful in relation to names: identities can be hidden and disguised, rendered in the shorthand of first names or initials, or referred to in a riddling, unspecific way. The special few will understand who is intended. This is what has made Spenser’s The shepheardes calender (1579) such a happy hunting-ground for allegorists, allusion-seekers, and other conspiracy theorists.
Connected to this sort of mystification was an admiration for tricks and ruses: in the copy of Howleglas that Spenser gave him, Harvey referred to ‘subtle & crafty feates’ and to ‘witty shiftes, & practises’.42 He warmed to these sorts of things: like the commonplaces and proverbs to which he was addicted, they mixed the high and the low, presenting a paradoxical view of the world. Low or common wisdom might be worth more than book-learning, just as native cunning might outwit aristocratic or courtly brilliance. There was something else about merry jests to which he responded: the circumstantial detail on which they rely. Harvey is one of the few people of the period who can be seen in various interiors—‘at the table’ with his father, in his galleried study at Trinity Hall, or ‘by ye fierside in his pore chamber’ (Letter-Book, p. 182). The letters in the first part of the Letter-Book are full of similar sorts of details: ‘the bel began to ring’, ‘This was after eiht A clock in the forenoon’, ‘We had talk not long sinc in M. Nuces chamber’, ‘I hauing bene veri sore sick, and at the self same time waring A charcher, feeling mi hed sumwhat could, (for it was in the deadist time of winter)’, and ‘we had now bene at it from immediatly after dinnar til thre A clock’.43 Circumstantial details mattered to Harvey and helped to establish authenticity, the truthfulness of his story, or to make a point. One of the accusations made against him during the matter of his MA in 1573 was that ‘I wuld needs in al hast be A studdiing in Christmas, when other were A plaiing, and was then whottist at mi book, when the rest were hardist at there cards.’ This seems to have stung, and in one of the letters to Spenser, dated 7 April 1580, the setting for his discourse on earthquakes is ‘a Gentlemans house, here in Essex’, where he was ‘well occupyed … at Cardes, (which I dare saye I scarcely handled a whole tweluemoonth before)’.44
Describing the setting and adding such extraneous details shows what has been called Harvey’s ‘amazing sensitivity to factors of time, place, weather and other circumambient conditions’.45 It can be linked to his interest in proverbs and colloquial speech, but it also comes out of the courtly fiction and courtesy literature that he so much enjoyed and admired. It would be wrong to underestimate Harvey’s debt to Castiglione, della Casa, Guazzo, and especially George Gascoigne. He took enormous pleasure in his much-mourned friend Gascoigne’s Posies of 1575, noting he bought his copy on 1 September 1577, and inscribing the title page with the word ‘Aftermeales’. By the revised version of The Adventures of Master F.J., he wrote ‘The wanton discourse of A. C. at idle howers’.46 A. C. was presumably Arthur Capel; the choice of ‘discourse’ is characteristic, but the precise sense of ‘wanton’ is hard to tie down, since it can stretch from the condemnatory to the merely amorous. Before Shakespeare had used it in the dedication to Venus and Adonis, ‘idle howers’ was a favourite phrase of Harvey’s.47
Harvey’s earliest surviving attempt to write in this ‘wanton’ vein appears to be his account in the Letter-Book of the attempted seduction of his sister by a nobleman.48 It combines hidden identities, circumstantial detail, vivid speech, the erotic narrative, and merry jests, the high and the low in a remarkable way. One of the story’s most striking features is the relative tightness of its telling. Despite several lacunae, the narrative and exposition are reasonably clear and form a contrast with Harvey’s often incomprehensible rants and ‘clever’ writing in the 1590s, where he seems determined to obscure what he is saying. The pieces against Lyly and Nashe deter readers by their lack of organization and sprawling, mannered prose, yet the seduction story is deftly and neatly told in just over 5,000 words.
It starts with a six-point summary of what is to come. On the next page, a heading announces that this is ‘A Noble Mans Sute to A Cuntrie Maid’. The nobleman has a servant called P., who initiates the attempted seduction by inviting the maid to a Sunday supper of rabbits at Mr S.’s in an unnamed town. The summary calls for a first meeting on Monday week, at which the unspecified ‘matter’ is indirectly moved, but ‘without offer of anie thing’: this meeting is not described elsewhere. The second meeting has P. armed with malmsey (a sweet wine) and shortcakes. He watches the maid, accompanied by a poor woman, go milking; the food and drink are consumed in a wood. While the woman gathers sticks, P. carefully begins his master’s suit to discover the maid’s mind. She finds the approach hard to accept since she can’t believe the nobleman knows her and because he has ‘so goodlie A ladie of his owne’. It turns out that the nobleman has seen the maid and fancies her more than his own lady. The maid protests her own lowly status (‘that she was but A milkmaide’) and ordinary looks and, when P. gives her a silk girdle and a pair of gloves from the nobleman who intends to look after her generously, the maid ‘kept aloofe’, suspecting that P., not the nobleman, is the real suitor. According to the summary, P.’s next gift comes three or four days later ‘at I. R.’ or, in the narrative, a day or two later at an unspecified place. It consists of an enamelled ring, with the inscription ‘ “Don IAMYE”’, on a ribbon of orange tawny; P. swears the nobleman took the ring from his own hat, where it had been sewn by his aunt ‘mieladie of W’.49
Uncertain what to do, the maid thanks her suitor ‘for his loouing tokens’, but says she cannot let him have his wicked way with her. P. professes to be astonished by her behaviour, saying he would advise his own sister to yield: he uses ‘whot and ernest wordes’ about how foolish she is being. The maid does not know how to respond but refuses again to yield. Changing his tack, P. now wants the maid to name a place where the nobleman can meet her. In the end, she agrees that the nobleman and P. can come ‘ouer to her fathers howse in sutch A streat, vppon sutch A daye towards ye euening’. The following Wednesday, on ‘A maruelous foggie mistie eveninge’ at about 5 p.m., the two men go up the street, but the maid is not there. Instead, one of her brothers is in the house, and in the malthouse P. finds the maid’s mother, sister, and two servants. Disappointed and fed up by their wasted journey on the ‘mistiest and foggiest night, that was that winter’, they leave ‘well mirid and weried’. A day or two later, P. tells the maid about how disappointed his master was not to find her at home. She said she was not mocking him by her absence and would send him a letter in a day or two. P. is pleased at this news, ‘for then he thought her deade suer’.
The narrative now alters to an epistolary exchange and the initial summary begins to fade out. Before doing so, it records that P. had ‘manie A shrode wettie iorney’ always in the evening, and that he only spoke to the maid ‘thurrough A pale’, never entering her father’s house. The next section begins with the narrator’s statement that ‘P. cummes me the next night for her letter’, which P. can only collect after two further visits. The first letter allows the maid to apologize for not being able to speak to the nobleman when he visited; it reveals he is ‘Milord A S.’. She still refuses to yield to his desires and asks him to destroy her letter. The nobleman writes a flattering reply, protesting his genuine love for her, and, agreeing with P.’s suspicion that the maid ‘had her secretarye’, wants an answer the next day. Two days later, the maid replies, protesting her chastity and begging the nobleman to take his affections elsewhere: she rejects his claims of her cruelty and his unhappiness in his ‘long letters’—of which only one has so far been provided. Again, she asks him to destroy her letter. The following night, the nobleman replies to her second letter, but what he says is not given. With it came ‘a small gould ring from his owne fingar’ or, according to the summary, ‘A prettie bowed goulden ring, wch P. swore Milord tooke from his owen fingar’.
On the next page there is another letter, headed ‘The Maides farewell’, and signed ‘cruell M.’. In this, her third letter, the maid’s resistance shows some signs of weakening; she refers to the failed ‘mistie foggie euening’ visit and to the nobleman’s two ‘larg and louing letters’. However, she still protests her social inferiority and that a liaison would ruin her: she bids him farewell, assuring him that his secret is safe with her. Just as the nobleman’s second letter is not given, so his ‘fresh Reioinder’ to the maid’s third letter is omitted. Having decided not to write any more, the maid is sufficiently moved by his ‘so loouing A letter’ that she wants ‘to make an ende’ with a ‘fewe lines’, some in verse, signed ‘pore M.’. She is not going to change her mind: she is not cruel, but wary; he is not unhappy, but unsatisfied. ‘Vnhappie am I rather, that, but there A strawe.’
Two days before Christmas Day in 1574, the nobleman sends P. to talk to the maid, who agrees to speak to her suitor ‘at sutch A neighbours howse’ and to meet him on St Stephen’s Day (26 December). When they meet at night, he is semi-undressed; he kisses her and tries to get her on to the bed, but she resists. The ‘good wife of ye howse’ gathers how things are going and puts an agreed plan into action, leaving the house by a side door, knocking ‘at her owne dore’, and saying that M.’s mother is asking for her. The nobleman is furious, swears, orders her to yield, demands another meeting, says he will be true only to her and to his wife, and tells her she can have anything she wants, using ‘him as familiarly and bowldly at any time, as her owne brother’. He makes her take the cash he extracts from his pocket. She goes, taking the money (it was only thirteen shillings, in shillings and sixpences), and promises to meet him on St Stephen’s Day (the chronology seems a little muddled at this point). The day was ‘marvelous wet’ and the falling rain and snow cause flooding. Despite this, before six o’clock, the maid walks seven miles in the morning to avoid seeing the nobleman. P. goes to the place appointed for the meeting, to be told the maid has gone into the country to see a friend, but that she is expected back around the New Year.
On 30 December, ‘hauing no other new yeares gift, but this sillie sheete of paper’, ‘by counsell of on, she trustid well’, she sent verses to the nobleman, explaining that her father had wanted her to go to a ‘kinsman’ a few miles away and that she had to obey him. She continues in prose: P. has told her that the nobleman has been asking after his old letters; he may send new letters ‘by P. to ye pore womans you wot of’. On the morning of ‘friday next’ (presumably 7 January 1575), she will ask ‘on, that can not reade himself’ to go to the poor woman’s and find a letter that she will say she wrote to be sent to her brother ‘the day before he cam downe of his owne accord vnsentfor’. The nobleman must therefore seal his letter and write on ‘ye backside, in a small raggid secretary hand’ the address: ‘To mie louing brother Mr G. H., on of ye fellowes of Pembrook hall in Cambridg’. If the illiterate servant gives her the nobleman’s disguised letter ‘before cumpany’ she can say: ‘it was A letter I had writt to be sent my brother Gabriell at sutch time as he cam home to mie fathers; and so kept it still; and by chaunce left it in sutch A place; and therefore sent now for it; being loth it should cu m in any others hands’. The nobleman is so taken with this ruse or so keen to correspond with the maid that he makes the bearer wait while he answers her, addressing the letter to ‘my louing brother | mr Gabriell Haruey’.
As before, with his other communications, the contents of the nobleman’s letter are not given, but it is intercepted and an unsigned letter is sent to the nobleman. The writer, who is at Walden, explains that on New Year’s Eve, as he was riding towards Cambridge, he met ‘A cuntrie fellowe’ he had often seen ‘at mie fathers here in Walden’. The countryman explains that he has a letter that should have been sent to the writer in Cambridge, ‘but that I [the writer] ca m home to miefathers that verie time, it should haue bene sent me’. The letter is from his sister Mercy and the writer asks to see it. Although it is addressed to the writer, the countryman at first refuses to let him see it, but when he gives it to him and the writer opens it, he claims to have been ‘sumdeale abasshid’ and ‘astonied’ by it. The greeting was: ‘Mine owne sweet Mercy, as if it had bene addressid to mie sister from sum loouer of hers, and not scriblid from mie sister to A brother of hers’, and the subscription signed by ‘Phil’. This was familiar enough, but what presumably shocks the writer—so that he had much ado ‘to dissemble mie suddain fansies, and comprimitt mie jnward passions’—was the reference in the nobleman’s letter to ‘ye possessing of her according to prommis’.50 The writer and the countryman engage in some banter over ‘A faier Inglish crowne’ in a ‘prettie paper’ accompanying the letter; the writer eventually claiming the money as his own. However, the countryman persuades the writer to return the letter and the crown, so that he may deliver them to the sister, from whom the writer can retrieve them. The writer adds his own ‘tokin, will her in mie name, to looke, ere she leape. She maie pick out ye Inglish of it herself.’
Having told this story of the meeting with the countryman, the writer conveys to the nobleman his puzzlement about ‘sutch A letter, and tokin, sent, not from you, as I take it, but in your L. name, from I knowe not whome, to A sister of mine’. He wonders who ‘this lustie suter should be’ and what the signature and the address signify, saying he means to get to the bottom of it all with his sister. However, circumstances stop him from doing this, and he says that he intends to ‘huddle up A word, or twoe to mi sister by sum of ye Markit folkes’.
The narrative has attracted a certain amount of attention as being ‘compelling reading’, a ‘distorted fancy’, and ‘a literary hoax’, but also as showing ‘marks of individual genius far beyond the ordinary’.51 Despite its relatively simple and familiar narrative, the issues it raises are complex. They include questions about its setting in the Letter-Book and hence, its relation to Harvey’s other writings and to contemporary writings, and, above all, its truthfulness.
Its position and state in the Letter-Book point in different directions. Compared to many of the other compositions in the manuscript, the handwriting of the narrative is neat, suggesting that it is a fair copy. Yet, it is not included in Harvey’s publication plans (Letter-Book, pp. 77–8, 89; fos. 42r, 48v), and if he is transcribing, rather than composing or thinking about what he wants to say, there are some peculiar lacunae in the narrative. The initial summary is written in a looser and smaller hand than the following narrative and they do not match each other exactly. Blank space is left for the first and the third of the lord’s three missing letters, but there is scarcely sufficient room for the second of them (Letter-Book, pp. 149, 150–1, 156; fos. 76v, 77v, 82r).52 There is also Harvey’s rather unexpected use of the ampersand. After the unsuccessful meeting at the maid’s home, P. tells her that ‘Milord did half suspect she mockid him. &c.’; in the next paragraph, the maid explains her difficulties, adding that ‘if she had bine there, there had bene no speaking with Milord at that time. &c.’ (Letter-Book, pp. 146–7; fol. 74r). Later and more conventionally, when the lord is disappointed during their erotic encounter, he is made to expostulate ‘god confounde me, if thowe wantes, while I haue. &c.’ (Letter-Book, p. 152; fol. 79r). Perhaps there was more to come or Harvey was signalling that it did not need to be spelled out, as he may be doing when he uses the ampersand in a similar way elsewhere (Letter-Book, pp. 64–5, 88, 100–1, 182). Various deletions and corrections that Harvey makes to the narrative may result from simple errors of transcription, but some of his interlineations and marginal additions, as well as attempts at rearrangement, suggest his revising hand.
The narrative may be incomplete because Harvey did not have the original materials with which to finish it, or because his imagination failed him, or because he meant to return to it and produce a final version later. Readers have increasingly taken the view that the attempted seduction is founded on fact, but that the narrative itself is essentially invented.53 If this is right, then Harvey’s skill lies in his ability to create a sense of veracity through attention to circumstantial detail and in the story’s ambiguous sense of morality.
Although its time scheme is not entirely clear, it does have a distinct chronology of years, months, days, and dates, even of times (‘fiue A clock in ye euening’, ‘in ye morning before six A clocke’). A running element in the seduction narrative of that winter of 1574–5 is the weather: it takes place during ‘A marvelous foggie mistie eueninge’, on ‘sutch A mistie night’, involving ‘manie A shrode wettie iorney’, ‘the mistiest and foggiest night, that was that winter’, and ‘A marvelous wet day’, with flooding caused by ‘raine, and snowe’, when ‘The raine continued ye whole day’. The setting is in and around Walden, with journeys to and from Cambridge, where Pembroke Hall is named. There is a wood, a place where the maid goes milking a mile from Walden, streets in the town, a wooden fence around the father’s house, which has a parlour and a malthouse near it, a neighbour’s house with its ‘litle parlour’ and a useful side door, and the ‘pore womans’ house where letters are to be left. The people in the story are variously named, P., Mr S. (of the rabbit supper), J. R. (at whose property the ring is delivered—if he is a person and not a place), the nobleman ‘Milord A S.’ or ‘Phil.’, his aunt ‘miladie of W.’, the object of his desires ‘cruell M.’, ‘pore M.’, or Mercy, and her brother ‘Mr G. H.’, ‘Gabriell’, or ‘mr Gabriell Haruey’. Besides them there are various unnamed characters: ‘ye Maides mother, her sister, and two of her fathers servants: and in ye Parlour on of her bretheren’, the ‘pore woman’ who gathers sticks and who is presumably the owner of the house where letters are to be left, and the ‘on, that can not reade himself’, who may also be the witty ‘cuntrie fellowe’ Harvey meets on the road to Cambridge.
The country fellow refers to ‘ye best coate to mie back’, which highlights the aristocratic nature of the lord’s dress, his hat with the posy ring in it, and his undress, while waiting for the maid ‘in his dublet, and his hose, his points vntrust, and his shirt lying out round about him’. This state is Hamlet-like, with the ties between his doublet and hose undone and with his shirt extending all around him. Later on, poor P., on the other hand, ‘was fajnt to cu m on pattins, bycause of ye great wett’.
The country setting is further established by activities such as the family’s working in the malthouse (‘su m turning ye mault, su m steaping, su m looking on’), the maid’s hat blowing off while she is bowling, and the gathering of sticks in the wood for winter fires, the rabbits, and the malmsey and cakes. Proverbial language and country wit run through the narrative with, for example, the maid’s reluctance to be ‘cast up for hawks meate’. Two sorts of gifts are exchanged in the story, the letters which pass between the maid and the nobleman and the nobleman’s expensive presents to the maid. The letters are represented by their contents and their physical constituents, ‘this sillie sheete of paper’, 54 ‘this prettie paper’, the ‘inke, and paper’ that will not satisfy the lord, the pen that she might ‘put up’, and the seal, superscription, and subscription of the lord’s intercepted letter. Harvey actually writes the lord’s false address to him in the secretary hand the narrative calls for.
The lord’s gifts consist of fancy clothing (the ‘good faier sylk girdell, and A hansum paier of glooues’) and jewellery, the enamelled ring on a ribbon ‘of urring tanye’, and the ‘prettie bowed goulden ring … from his owen fingar’. The bowed or bent ring can be connected to the ‘twoe or thre crackd grotes, and bowd testerns’ that the country fellow retains for the maid, which, in turn, relate to the ‘crackd grote in ye opening’ that Harvey expects to find in the package. Wilson is right to detect a sexual innuendo here, since the adjective had a contemporary moral sense (OED 4); she also links the discussion to the countryman’s hope of finding ‘an ould Angell’, perhaps punning on Harvey’s Christian name; instead, there is ‘A faier Inglish crowne’, ‘A crowne of gould’.55 This contrasts with the ‘half A score ould aungels’ the lord might have sent the maid instead of the posy ring and the women of ‘fiue hundrid powndes A yeare’ who would be easier to seduce than the maid. The angels may have been old, but they would have been worth ten shillings each, so giving her five pounds, as opposed to the measly ‘13s in testers, and shillings’, the lord extracts from his pocket.
The narrative owes much to Chaucer, as well as to Gascoigne, and has been called a ‘Chaucerian fabliau’ in which the lord is the clear loser.56 Yet, as with Chaucer, the story is not as straightforward as it at first appears. The lord’s reported reference to ‘ye possessing of her according to prommis’ is easy to miss, but hard to forget; Mercy answers his letters and accepts his gifts. The substitutions of the servant P. for the lord as his proxy wooer, of the milkmaid for the lord’s lady, of brother for sister (the lord asks the maid to ‘vse him as familiarly and bowldly at any time, as her owne brother’), and of letters suggest a world turned upside down. A combination of country wit (Walden) and academic brilliance (Cambridge) defeat wealthy aristocratic desire. The narrative contrasts interestingly with another contained in the paper-book of an Oxford contemporary of Harvey’s, William Withie, who was also an admirer of Gascoigne.57 Where Withie fantasizes about town and gown relations in a merry story of an inn-keeper’s wife and her rings, Harvey produces a much more elaborate and elaborately structured story, inverting social relations. The story enacts what Eutrapelus, one of his alter egos, is able to do ‘to convert great matters into small ones, small into great ones. This is Eutrapelus’s secret metamorphosis: serious matters of others being converted into jests, your own jests into serious discussions.’58 If Harvey doesn’t quite manage to spell out the exact nature of the serious matters (besides his sister’s attempted seduction) in the narrative, it is because he lacks the literary ability. He is perhaps too close to the story to disentangle its personal meaning from his own desire to produce a masterpiece and to display his skill as a letter writer: the narrative flaw by which he appears to know that ‘Phil.’ is the lord is perhaps part of this. Harvey’s own role, introduced by ‘P. cummes me the next night for her letter’, hints that the sister’s letters are, in fact, his own work; this would justify the lord’s suspicion that she has ‘her secretarye’, while edging his sister out of the story, which ends with his plans to reprove her.
Harvey’s presence in his sister’s story allows him to elaborate on its personal significance in ways which may have amused him. For example, the erotic encounter between the nobleman and the maid takes place on St Stephen’s Day 1574, the day on which Harvey reports that he wrote the Ode Natalitia. The coincidence seems happily manufactured and is part of the piece’s genuine allusiveness. The maid’s letters are far more expressive than the single, rather brief example of the lord’s epistolary skill, even to the extent of her rather moving aposiopesis or breaking off in her third letter, signifying her sense of worthlessness: ‘Vnhappie am I rather, that, but there A strawe.’59 The only time Harvey reproduces the lord’s own words, it is with a strong element of mockery with his swearing at his sexual disappointment: ‘Heare was good M. good M. and A great deale more. god confounde me, god confounde me, if thowe wantes, while I haue. &c.’ His strong oaths and suggestive rage (what she wants and what he has done or what he possesses) belong to a different world from the clever dialogue of Harvey and the countryman. What gives the story a Richardsonian colouring is the mixture of ‘curious minuteness’ with the sister’s ‘somewhat ambiguous’ conduct.60
Whether all the details of the story are true or not, there is some external corroboration for it. Harvey had a sister called Mercy, who was born in about 1556;61 ‘Milord A S.’ or ‘Phil.’ can be identified with Philip Howard, who was entitled to be called Earl of Arundel and Surrey and whose aunt, ‘miladie of W.’ was Jane, the wife of Charles Neville, Earl of Westmorland. Philip Howard was born at Arundel House in London in June 1557; his father was Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and his maternal grandfather was the Earl of Arundel. Following his wife’s death, the Duke of Norfolk married the daughter of Thomas Audley, Baron Audley of Walden. At the time of the attempted seduction, Philip Howard, then seventeen and a half, and his wife Anne, daughter of Thomas, Lord Dacre of Gilsland, to whom he was married when they were both twelve in 1569 (the marriage was solemnized in 1571 when the couple were fourteen), were living at Audley House. He was a student at St John’s College, Cambridge, gaining his MA in 1576. His dissolute life in London eventually came to an end and, following his wife, he converted to Roman Catholicism, was arrested for treason, and died in 1595 in the Tower of London. In 1886, he was named Venerable Philip Howard, was beatified in 1929, and canonized in 1970.62
The piety surrounding St Philip Howard has, perhaps, obscured the episode with Mercy Harvey. An early Jesuit biography explicitly states that his dissolute life and neglect of his wife began after his coming to court in about 1576.63 More surprisingly, given the publication of the Letter-Book and Moore Smith’s identification of the lord in Notes and Queries, there is no reference to the attempted seduction in the Catholic Record Society’s volume devoted to him. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography does not touch on the part Mercy Harvey may have played in his life. However, there are some traces that tend to suggest a factual background to the narrative. High on a list of family and servants ‘appoynted to remove to Walden’ in or around October 1571, is the household’s Clerk Comptroller, Edward Pecocke, who had his own servant: Pecocke might have been the P. who assisted the lord in the seduction.64 In the marginalia in his copy of Erasmus’s Parabolae (1565), by a passage he marked about how great riches bring no pleasure to a fool while a wise man enjoys life even in humble circumstances, Harvey wrote: ‘You knowe, who vsed to write: Vnhappy Philip’. He cross-referred this passage to another one later on in which a servant, asked what his master was doing, replies that he is seeking bad things to do when he has good at hand: by this Harvey wrote ‘Vnhappie Philip’. The formula, suggesting both ill-fortune and unluckiness, as well as being miserable and wretched, seems to have been a favourite of Harvey’s and, as late as 15 February 1585, he signed a letter to Burghley about his wish to become Master of Trinity Hall ‘Vnhappy Haruey’.65
If there was a story about Harvey’s sister, it would not have been something Nashe could or would pass over. In Have with you to Saffron Walden (1596), he says that Harvey’s ‘nere neighbors’ have ‘whispred to me of his Sister, and how shee is as good a fellow as euer turnd belly to belly; for which she is not to be blam’d, but I rather pitie her and thinke she cannot doo withall, hauing no other dowrie to marie her’. This ‘baudy sister’ is not named, but in The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), the narrator insists that he is ‘by nature inclined to Mercie (for in deede I knewe two or three good wenches of that name)’.66 There is one further small piece of evidence about the affair. In his copy of Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton’s A defensatiue against the poyson of supposed prophesaies (1583), which was a reply to Richard Harvey’s An astrological discourse upon the conjunction of Saturne & Jupiter (1583), Gabriel Harvey wrote that ‘it is not the Astrological Discourse, but a more secret mark, whereat he shootith’, adding his own comment, after quoting from Virgil’s Eclogues 3, ‘Latet anguis in herba: et per me latebit, etiam adhuc’ (‘A snake lurks in the grass: and it will remain concealed even by me’).67 There were academic, as well as intellectual differences between Harvey and Howard, but the ‘more secret mark’ and the snake in the grass hint at something personal. Henry Howard was living at Audley House with his nephew Philip at the time of the attempted seduction.
The Letter-Book itself may also contain further traces of the affair. Harvey had three sisters: Alice, who married in 1570, Mercy, and Mary, who was not baptized until 1567. When Harvey records that, in the spring of 1573, a fellow of Pembroke ‘riding thurrouh Walden calid in at mi fathers hous, and tould on of mi sisters, that I wuld be at Walden that niht’ (Letter-Book, p. 27), it may well have been Mercy. In the seduction narrative, when P. looks into the malthouse, Mercy’s sister is there: presumably, this is Mary, aged seven and a half. It seems reasonable, as Moore Smith suggested, 68 to connect the Mercy narrative with a letter Harvey wrote to Sir Thomas Smith’s wife, Philippa, from Pembroke Hall on 29 March in an unnoted year. He seeks to ‘to mooue an ernest sute … in the behalf of A pore sistar of mine: wch for sundri good causis … is maruelous desirous to do you seruice’ (Letter-Book, pp. 170–1). In the narrative, Mercy repeatedly calls herself a ‘pore wench’ and signs three of her letters ‘pore M.’. Harvey’s ‘bould request’, his ‘ouer sawci petition’, must have been written before 1577, since Sir Thomas was still evidently alive. In the letter, he reports that he repaired to Smith ‘about A litle busines I had of his’ seven or eight years ago. Smith helped Harvey in his earliest years as an undergraduate at Christ’s College, where he matriculated in 1566.69 If Harvey repaired to him towards the end of his first year or during his second year as an undergraduate, this could place the letter in March 1575, just after the seduction. Harvey tells Lady Smith that he has ‘A special regard, and brotherli consideration of mi sisters welfare’ and that he is moved to seek a post ‘thurrouh A certain inward affection of mine own’. If Lady Smith does take Mercy into her service, he goes on, he promises her she shall have ‘A diligent, and trusti, and tractable maiden of hir, besides sutch seruice as she is able to do in sowing, and the like qualities requisite in a maid’.
The first piece in the second series of Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader (1932) is an essay on ‘The Strange Elizabethans’, in which she examined the seduction narrative. She says of the maid’s letters that ‘she bears herself with a grace and expresses herself with a resonance that would have done credit to a woman of birth and literary training’, adding that ‘Words chime and ring in her ears, as if she positively enjoyed the act of writing.’ Her style is ‘natural and noble … incapable of vulgarity, and equally incapable of intimacy’. Woolf’s argument is that in the end ‘we know very little about Mercy Harvey, the milkmaid, who wrote so well’: finally, she concludes that ‘The background of Elizabethan life eludes us.’70 The essay does not concern itself with the truth of the narrative, but with its elusive nature. She captures the richness and immediacy of the story and of its language, but at the same time, suggests the unknowableness of the truth about it and of the people swept up in it.
Virginia Woolf is right that the Elizabethan prose-writers do not generally ‘solidify the splendid world of Elizabethan poetry’.71 Harvey is not a Spenser or a Sidney in prose, but in his narrative he appears to take the reader closer to the fabric of everyday life than might be expected—as long as the reader remembers that, like an episode from The Faerie Queene, it is no more than an appearance.
Bennett, Josephine W. ‘Spenser and Gabriel Harvey’s Letter-Book’, Modern Philology, 29 (1931): 163–86.
Harvey, Gabriel. Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1913).
——— Letter-Book of Gabriel Harvey, A.D. 1573–1580, ed. Edward John Long Scott, Camden Society, NS 33 (1884).
Jardine, Lisa, and Anthony Grafton. ‘ “Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy’, Past and Present, 129 (1990): 30–78.
Kintgen, Eugene R. Reading in Tudor England (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996).
Nashe, Thomas. The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, rev. F. P. Wilson, 5 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958).
Nielson, James. ‘Reading Between the Lines: Manuscript Personality and Gabriel Harvey’s Drafts’, Studies in English Literature, 33 (1993): 43–82.
Passannante, Gerard. ‘The Art of Reading Earthquakes: On Harvey’s Wit, Ramus’s Method, and the Renaissance of Lucretius’, Renaissance Quarterly, 61 (2008): 792–832.
Popper, Nicholas. ‘The English Polydaedali: How Gabriel Harvey Read Late Tudor London’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 66 (2005): 351–81.
Prewitt, Kendrick W. ‘Gabriel Harvey and the Practice of Method’, Studies in English Literature, 39 (1999): 19–39.
Relle, Eleanor. ‘Some New Marginalia and Poems of Gabriel Harvey’, Review of English Studies, NS 23 (1972): 401–16.
Scott-Warren, Jason. ‘Harvey, Gabriel’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, < http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/12517>, accessed 1 April 2011.
Sherman, William H. John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995).
Smith, G. C. Moore. ‘Gabriel Harvey’s Letter-Book’, Notes and Queries, 11.3 (1911): 261–3.
Spenser, Edmund. The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. J. C. Smith and E. De Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912).
Stern, Virginia F. Gabriel Harvey: His Life, Marginalia and Library (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
Wilson, Katherine. ‘Revenge of the Angel Gabriel: Harvey’s “A Nobleman’s Suit to a Country Maid”’, in Mike Pincombe, ed., The Anatomy of Tudor Literature: Proceedings of the First International Conference of the Tudor Symposium (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 79–89.
Wolfe, Jessica. Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).