Arundel Harington Manuscript, Henry Goodyer, Elizabeth I, Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, Ruth Hughey, Doubt of Future Foes
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60
sphere. The effectiveness of this ruse, if such it is, is evident from the extent of the poem’s subsequent circulation both in manuscript and in Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie.
111
The two poems that extend and rework this verse conversation exhibit a similar dynamic relationship to that existing between the poems exchanged between Elizabeth and Mary, whereby the second poem argues that the first is a wilfully insincere protestation of loyalty to Elizabeth. They appear in the Arundel Harington Manuscript and the first is by Sir Henry Goodyer, beginning “If fortune good could awnswer present ill” (1572), which like Elizabeth’s verse opens by making a comparison between a present predicament and future well-being.
112
It is a petition written from the Tower following Goodyer’s imprisonment for smuggling correspondence between Mary, who was incarcerated at Coventry, and Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, the man that the northern rebels had hoped she would marry, who was himself in the Tower at that time.
113
Ruth Hughey suggests that Goodyer’s verses “were very likely intended for Queen Elizabeth herself”, and this seems especially likely since the poem almost certainly answers ‘Doubt of Future Foes’, and at the very least gestures towards its awareness of the context in which it was written.
114
Since Goodyer had privileged knowledge of Mary’s correspondence, it seems probable that he would have recognised Elizabeth’s verse as a direct response to her fellow monarch. Goodyer’s acquaintance with Mary during her imprisonment meant that he had privileged access to information regarding the context of Elizabeth’s verse as a direct answer to that of Mary and, now Elizabeth’s prisoner himself, he attempted to dispel
111 On the poem’s manuscript circulation see May (1999), p.47 (n.10) and Summit (1996), p.408.
112 Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry, ed. Ruth Hughey, 2 vols (Colorado: Ohio State UP, 1960), I. no. 147.
113 See, for instance, Hughey ed. (1960), II. p.196.
114 Hughey ed. (1960), II. p.199.
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