Frances Prannell Seymour, Countess of Hertford

In 1601 Frances Prannell Seymour, Countess of Hertford and cousin of the infamous Frances Howard, found herself faced with a much more desperate and insidious attempt to assign her the role of Petrarchan heroine than Schede’s, and in her response she reordered the Petrarchan dynamic robustly. Although Frances was newly married to the ageing Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, another of her prospective suitors, Sir George Rodney, refused to back down gracefully and petitioned her with a lengthy Petrarchan verse replete with the usual oxymorons emblazoning the paradox of his “fair and cruel” object of devotion as “Sweet poison, precious woe, infectious jewel” (l.34 and l.33). ⁴¹⁷

Rodney styles himself as a melodramatic caricature of the Petrarchan lover, casting Seymour in the role of the implacable Petrarchan heroine. Mistaking the fictional role of the desperate Petrarchan lover for reality, he appears to have succumbed fully to the belief that self-extermination was the inevitable outcome of unrequited love and fell upon his sword shortly after receiving Seymour’s rejection. Here is one Petrarchan lover who did indeed die for love. His verse exhibits awareness that the Petrarchan lover is a straw man when faced with the reality of a living, breathing, articulate mistress, yet he proceeds regardless:

For too too well my fortunes make me know
My hapless love must work my overthrow;
Wherein [not] death itself can come with pain,
(Were not my death made woeful by disdain). (ll.17-20)

This is not serious courtship but the swansong of a man who knows he is defeated; an

⁴¹⁷ These events are recorded by Arthur Wilson in The History of Great Britain, Being the Life and Reign of King James the First (printed for Richard Lownds, 1653), p.258, Wing 2888. They are recounted and expanded by Foster (1994) who provides a biography of Seymour and the transcriptions of the poems used here (see n.403).