THOMAS CLAYTON

6 6 Sir Henry @s Farewell t o the Court”:

“His Golden .@& %‘me Hath t o SiZver Ttrned”

IS golden locks time hath to silver turned” has been a much circulated and anthologized poem ever since it was written, almost certainly not long before November 17, isgo, when it

was first sung by the royal lutanist, Robert Hales. The occasion was the handing over of the office of Queen’s Champion to the Earl of Cumber- land by Sir Henry Lee, who is the subject of the poem and in whose presence it was sung as part of the “splendid pageantry” of Sir Henry’s retirement from the tilt. An elaborate description of the ceremonies is given by Sir William Segar, in Honor, Military and Civil1 (1602), where we are told that “the musicke aforesayd, was accompanied with these verses, pronounced and sung by M. Hales, hcr Majesties servant, a Gentleman in that Arte excellent, and for his voice both commendable and admirable.” A version of “these verses,” ‘‘My golden locks time hath to silver turn’d,” follows. Sir Henry’s part in this extravagant masque of retirement con- cluded when “he himselfe disarmed, offered up his armour at the foot of her Majesties crowned pillar; and kneeling upon his knees, presented the Eark of Cumberland, humbly beseeching that she would be pleased to accept him for her Knight, to continue the yecrely exercises aforesaid. Her Majesty gratiously accepting of that offer, this aged Knight armed the Eark, and mounted him upon his horse. That being done, he put upon his owne person a side coat of blacke Velvet pointed under the arme, and covercd his head (in liew of an hclmet) with a buttoned cap of the

Thomas Clayton 269 countrey fashion.”’ Among the poem’s most recent presentations was its imaginative use on ELR’s Christmas card for 1972, which revived my interest in the problems of text and authorship associated with the poem.

It seems time to assert with some firmness that Sir Henry Lee is more likely than anyone else to have been the author of the poem, and that the conventional ascription to George Peele is just that and no more. Enough has recently been written on this subject to make worthwhile a summing up and a critical edition, and those are what I offer here. The evidence for establishing an authoritative text and the authorship of the poem consists substantially in the same data, the texts of “His golden locks” and of two closely related poems. The early printed texts of “His golden locks” are dated 1590 (Polyhymnia), 1597 (First Book) , and 1602 (Honor), respec- tively; the early manuscript texts known to me-two in the Bodleian Library, three in the British Museum, one in the Kent County Archives Ofice, and one in the Folger Shakespeare Library-are not certainly datable, but the handwriting and the known historical associations indicate that they date from around the turn of the century, except for the Folger MS, which is two or three decades later. The facts, in brief, are these.

(A) In George Peek’s Polyhymnia Describing, The honourable Triumph at Tylt, before her Maiestie, on the 17. o f Nouember, last past, . . . With Sir Henrie Lea, his resignation of honour at Tylt, to her Maiestie, . . . 1590, “His golden locks” appears, headed “A Sonet,” on the last page (sig. B~v), a f t r the “Finis” that concludes Peek’s Polyhymnia (sig. ~4). David Horne rightly suggests the possible use of the poem “as a filler and ipsofacto that Peele need not have been the author. . . . To make the ascription to Peele with positiveness one should have further evidence than inclusion with the printed Polyhymnia, and this evidence is not forthcoming” (p. 169) in 1952 or at the time of the present writing. In the most recent work on Peele, Sally Purcell comments further that “Certainly none of his contemporaries

1. Segar’s account is quoted here from E. K. Chambers, Sir Henry Lee: An Elizabethan Portrait (Oxford, 1936), pp. 137-40 (hereafter cited as “Chambers”). His account is also given in, for example, The Works oJCeorge Peele, ed. A. H. Bullen (London, 1888; rpt. Port Washington, N.Y., 1966), II, 281-85; and in David H. Home, The L$e and Minor Works of George Peele (New Haven, I~SZ) , pp. 167-69 (hereafter “Home”).

For generous assistance in providing me with texts and information to which I should have had no quick and ready access otherwise, and for other kinds of aid, I am indebted to my friends and fellow scholars Charles Gdans (UCLA), Geoffrey Little (Sydney), and Gordon W. O’Brien (Minnesota); to Mr. Carey Bliss of the Henry E. Huntington Library; to my teaching assistants, Joel Jackson and Samuel Holt Monk Teaching Fellow Rita Lagace George; to my graduate students Charles Bergman, Anders Christensen, and Arthur Walzer; and to the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota.

270 English Literary Renaissance refer to the poem as being his, nor does it appear under his name in an- thologies of the time.”2 It seems significant that this text contains a textual error of some consequence (“turn’d” for “turne” in 1. 8), and it is certain that the lack of positive (including stylistic) evidence, combined with the accumulated negative evidence, says virtually nothing in favor of Peele’s traditional authorship.

(B) This is an excellent-anonymous-text in John Dowland’s First Booke ofsonges or Ayres, 1597, No. XVIII, sigs. I2v-K1.

(C) In Segar’s Honor, Military and Civifl (1602), in the account of the festivities a t which “His golden locks” was first sung, there is a version of the poem in which the first person (“My golden locks,” etc.) is used throughout. This text abounds in instances of demonstrable sophistication and manifest error otherwise, and a first-person speaker is inappropriate from virtually every critical and historical perspective: “My golden locks” and “My saint is sure of mine unspotted hart” are vain (indeed, smacking of hubris) and ludicrous enough under any circumstances, and it seems profoundly unlikely that the poem should have been sung-or written to be sung-in the first person by Robert Hales when Sir Henry Lee himself, the subject of the poem, was in his very presence and surely being actively referred to, Segar’s text seems to represent a combination of erroneous recollection and misguided elaboration.

(D) The first of the Bodleian texts, Eng. Poet. c. 50, fol. 59, is headed Certain verses causd to bee sunge to the Queenes Matie by Sr Hen: Lea

Kt when hee yealded vp his Helmit & Launce to the Earle of Cumberland at the tilt yard. An. do: 1590.” Unfortunately, “by S r Hen: Lea” is syn- tactically ambiguous-did he write the song or was the song only “causd [by him] to bee sunge”?-but the subscription, “Hen: Lea: Kt of ye Garter,” seems unequivocally enough to assert Sir Henry’s authorship, but on still more uncertain authority: the text in the manuscript is followed by an elegy on the death of Prince Henry (d. 1612) and is virtually identical with the first-person text in Segar, from which it differs at two points (11. 7 and 15-16), however, where it shares the authoritative reading with the majority.

(E) The other Bodleian text is MS. Mus. f. 7-10: f. 8, fol. iov, which has the musical setting from Dowland’s First Booke of 1597, with which it is textually identical, and shares the insignificant scribal error, “soule” for “soulesY” in line 16 (the same error occurs coincidentally in the Cranfield text).

6 6

2. George Peek (Oxford, 1972). p. 67.

Thomas Clayton 271 (F) The text of British Museum Add. MS. 28635, fol. 88v, is headed,

ambiguously, ‘‘ST H. lea./” This MS is a “transcript of a collection belong- ing to Sir John Harington” (Chambers, p. 142).

(G) The anonymous text in BM MS. Add. 33963, fol. log, was tran- scribed, according to a descriptive note written on the leaf to which the poem is affixed, on the flyleaf of Sidney’s translation of part of Du Plessis Mornay’s Work Concerning the Trueness of the Christian Religion (1587).

(H) The text in BM MS. Stowe 276, fol. 2, is superscribed “Sr. Henrye Lee” and subscribed “0. St John,” and is “in the hand of Oliver St. John, later Earl of Bolingbroke, who was only born about 1580, and can there- fore have been no more than a copyist” (Chambers, p. 142).

(I) The text in the Kent County Archives Oflice, Maidstone, which I found among the Cranfield Papers (and Sackville MSS) some years ago in Folder u.269.p.36, No. 16, occurs alone on a single leaf and is without superscription or subscription; it is written in a handsome and eminently legible Secretary hand of the late sixteenth or early seventeenth centuries.

(J) The text in the Folger Shakespeare Library,v.a.i03, Part I, fol. 52, is in a “manuscript volume of collected poems in the handwriting of the early part of the reign of Charles I. . . . The compiler has carefully marked the names of the writers when he was acquainted with them.” It is headed: “Panegyricks / Sr Henry Lea his Farewell to the Court.”

Of these ten texts, the only ones not in some way associated with Sir Henry Lee are B, E, G, and I; all are anonymous. The other six are asso- ciated, at the least direct, with Sir Henry’s “resignation of honour at Tylt” (title page, Peele’s Polyhymnia). Four MS texts have-ambiguous-super- scriptions with Sir Henry Lee’s name either in them or constituting the whole superscription (D, F, H, and J), and one (D) seems to give an unequivocally ascriptive subscription-if one could be certain that sub- scriptions were always unequivocal, as unfortunately one cannot (cf. H).

It seems to me not to be stretching the implications of the evidence to suggest that if Sir Henry Lee did not write his own “retirement poem,” then this poem is unusually anonymous, given the associations, super- scriptions, and subscription. Additional evidence that he did write it is to be found in the general appropriateness and likelihood that the pageantry- loving Sir Henry should write a poem for a quasi-liturgical occasion of this kind (such evidence is to be found passim in Chambers); and, perhaps most telling, two other poems are so very like it “in rhyme, meter, syntax, subject matter, and tone that it is quite possible that all three have a common author” (Horne, p. 170), to put the matter quite modestly.

272 English Literary Renaissance One version of the first of the other two poems, in fact, is conflated with

“His golden locks,” the last stanza of which-with the pronouns changed to the second person-also serves as the last stanza of “Tymes eldest sonne, old age the heire of ease,” in the text given in Bodleian MS. 148, fol. 62; this is headed “In yeeldinge up his Tilt staff: sayd” and subscribed ‘‘qd S r Henry Leigh.” The same poem, without the stanza from “His golden locks,” appeared anonymously in John Dowland’s Second Booke of Songs or A y e s (1600).~ But it is the third of the poems that seems to offer the strongest support for Lee’s authorship of “His golden locks”: either the same person wrote both poeins, or the author of the later wrote deliber- ately and extensively in imitation of and allusion to “His golden locks.” Since Sir Henry Lee is named as the author of the later poem in Robert Dowland’s Musical Banquet (1610), where the poem was first printed (sig. E ~ V : VIII), by far the most plausible explanation of the associations and relationships is that Sir Henry wrote not only “Far from triumphing court and wonted glory” but also “his own” earlier retirement poem. I give a modernized text of the later poem here:

Far from triumphing court and wonted glory, He dwelt in shady, unfrequented places; Time’s prisoner now, he made his pastime story, Gladly forgets court’s erst afforded graces; That goddess whom he served to heaven is gone, And he on earth in darkness left to moan.

But lo! a glorious light from his dark Rest Shone from the place where erst this goddess dwelt, A light whose beams the world with fruit hath blest; Blest was the knight while he that light beheld: Since then a star fixed on his head hath shined, And a saint’s image in his heart is shrined.

Ravished with joy, so graced by such a saint, He quite forgot his cell, and self denied He thought it shame in thankfulness to faint: Debts due to princes must be duly paid; Nothing so hateful to a noble mind As, finding kindness, for to prove unkind.

But ah, poor knight, though thus in dream he ranged, Hoping to serve this saint in sort most meet, Time with his golden locks to silver changed

3. See Chambers, pp. 142-43, and Horne, pp. 170-72; both quote the poem in full.

Thomas Clayton 273 Hath with age-fetters bound him hands and feet; “Ay me!” he cries, “Goddess, my limbs grow faint; Though I time’s prisoner be, be you my saint.”

“An occasion for this,” Chambers writes, “may be found in a visit to Lee at his ‘Rest’ [hence the editorial capital in 1.7 here] by Anne of Den- mark, which is upon record” (p. 144); the visit was paid to Lee’s Little Rest, near Ditchley (four miles from Woodstock, Oxon.), in September 1608 (Chambers, p. 211). It seems worth noting that there is a hint of Jacobean strong lines in Sir Henry’s turning “his golden locks” of the earlier poem to “age-fetters” binding “him hands and feet” in this one. Whoever wrote the two poems, they reflect stylistic differences between late-Elizabethan and early-Jacobean idioms in their respective expressions of thematically similar matter versified in Venus and Adonis stanzas.

The textual situation of this poem makes the choice of the “most authoritative” text a matter of the “best” text, since the texts that are worse than the two or three best texts are so much worse that on a priori grounds they could not possibly be thought to have an “authority” that is also denied them by the available external evidence. Even among the good texts there is no single flawless text of “His golden locks”; but Dowland’s is nearly so in having only one manifest error, that a mechanical one; and the text of Polyhyrnnia has only one error, a more significant one (“turn’d” for “turn[e]”), that itself may be mechanical and due to an easy and common misreading of terminal d/e.

A collation of the verbal variants yields corruptions of almost every kind, and there is no sufficient basis for attempting stemmatic study of texts when the readings vary as they do, almost at random, and usually in only a single text at a time. A full collation is not worth the space it would take to provide it, on just such accounts.4 On the other hand, the textual situation is also such that the substantives of a definitive text-as available on the basis of the ten texts known to rn-either are not in doubt or are of a kind that makes alternatives a matter of relative indifference (e.g., time and age” vs. “age and time” in 1.3). The major question seems to me to be whether an old-spelling or a modern-spelling text is wanted. One can always make choice of “the most readable sixteenth-century version . . . as

4. As an example of the kind of variants that occur, I give here a f d collation for the first five lines (excepting pronoun number, e.g., “His/My”): 2 0 [swiftness]] 0 corr.from al H, inJ; and C D hath ever] at youth hath C D ever] always H 4 But] Yet G; om. F 5 Beauty, strength, youth] (and youth C D); Youth, beauty, strength G flowers, but] ever G flowers] flower I but] om. C D seen] been C D

L<

3 time and age] A B I / ; age and timeF G H, age, and age [at youth] C D

274 English Literary Renaissance copy-text” and reproduce this “literatim except for the correction of demonstrable verbal and punctuation errors,”5 for example. But in the case of the two most eligible texts of “His golden locks” (Polyhymnia and Dowland’s), significantly different texts, or at any rate textures, would result from choosing and closely following either as copy-text, owing to substantial differences in capitalization and punctuation (both are heavy in Polyhymnia and light in Dowland), and neither could be said to have more commanding “authority,” especially if by that we mean assured authorial character. The textual data seem to me to warrant and make desirable three texts: both a modern-spelling text and old-spelling texts from, respectively, Polyhymnia and Dowland.6

Given below is a modern-spelling text in which the punctuation, too, is “modern,” but I have attended carefully to the punctuation of the better early texts in pointing as I do. This poem cannot be said to have an authoritative title, but the “title” I give (adopted from the Folger text) has self-evident merits as a descriptive heading and quasi-title. In a con- servative text it would be duly placed in square brackets, but in any event

His golden locks” is the most natural, economical, and convenient form of reference, and it is likely to continue the usual one.

L b

Sir Henry Lee’s Farewell to the Court

His golden locks time hath to silver turned (0 time too swift, 0 swiftness never ceasing); His youth gainst time and age hath ever spurned, But spumed in vain: youth waineth by increasing.

Beauty, strength, youth are flowers but fading seen; Duty, faith, love are roots and ever green.

5

His helmet now shall make a hive for bees, And lover’s sonnets turn to holy psalms; A man-at-arms must now serve on his knees, And feed on prayers, which are age’s alms. 10

But though from court to cottage he depart, His saint is sure of his unspotted heart.

And when he saddest sits in homely cell, He’ll teach his swains this carol for a song: “Blest be the hearts that wish my soveraign well, 15

5 . William A. Ringler Jr., ed., The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1962), p. xvii. 6. Horne gives the Polyhymnia text with a collation of variants in Segar (p. 244). For the

text in Dowland see the facsimile of the book in English Lute Songs 1597-1632: A Collection .f Facsimile Reprints, gen. ed. F. W. Sternfeld (Menston,Yorks.),Vol. 14, First BookeofSongesor Ayres (i597), ed. Diana Poulton (1968).

Thomas Clayton 27.5 Curst be the souls that think her any wrong.”

Goddess, allow this aged man his right, To be your beadsman now that was your knight.

T i t l e j o m FolgerMS;for other nrpersaiptions seepp. 269-71 above A l l texts are third-person ex- cept C and D, which arefirst-person (“My golden locks,” etc.) throughout 3 time and age] A B I]; age and time F G H, age, and age [at youth] C D 8 lover’s] no apostrophe in early texts turn] turned A F G; mainly paleographical, probably: turne/turnd 16 souls] soule B E I 17 allow] vouchsafe C G

“Sir Henry Lee’s Farewell to the Court” has made an affecting poem and a graceful song for nearly four centuries, and it seems time and right enough for Sir Henry to have a measure of due title restored to himself, his age, and his place.7

UNIVERSITY OF M I N N E S O T A

7. While this essay was in press, Sotheby’s, London, advertised in the TLS the auction on November 20,1973, of “Papers of Sir Henry Lee, K.G., Queen Elizabeth‘s Champion”; in consulting the catalogue, I found with some ambivalence that none of the Lee items (Nos. 1-8) had any bearing on Sir Henry’s “Farewell.” But readers of ELR are certain to be in- terested in item No. 72, “Heywood (Thomas. c. 1573-1641, dramatist) Early 17th-century manuscript notebook containing a hitherto unknown tragicomedy composed circa 1611 . . .” (the “Melbourne Hall MS”), which was sold to Mr. John Fleming ofNew York for E45,ooo; the catalogue gives two plates from the MS and a full description, pp. 29-35.