INTRODUCTION

The following epyllion about William Parry’s conspiracy against Elizabeth, issued anonymously in 1585 by Joseph Barnes, printer to the University of Oxford, merits our attention for at least three reasons: it was evidently written by George Peele, a former student of Christ Church; it and some related works on the same subject seem to have been highly significant for the foundation of what evolved into the Oxford University Press; and it exerted a rather surprising influence on a number of subsequent writers.
2. The case for attributing Pareus to Peele, made by Tucker Brooke, NOTE 1 is worth quoting in full:

Lo, I, the man who sportingly once writ
The goddess-contest on Mt. Ida’s top,
The apple, Trojan fire, and rape of Helen,
Harping in tutelage to Grecian Homer,
Address myself to sing another theme.

The foregoing is an accurate summary of the contents of George Peele’s Tale of Troy, an English poem of about the same length as Pareus. The Tale was not printed till 1589, but was then published by Peele as “an old poem of mine own,” and has been shown to be earlier in composition than his Arraignment of Paris (printed in 1584), which handles some of the same material. Peele was capable of Latin verse, though it has not been known that he wrote more than short bits in that language; he was a friend of Gager, and had been in Oxford in June, 1583, assisting in the production of two of Gager’s plays. I suggest that it was Gager who arranged for the publication of Pareus by the Oxford Press, in a form similar to that in which Gager’s odes were appearing. Gager probably revised the text and cut it to the precise limits of a sixteen-page pamphlet. There is, of course, a possibility that Gager translated the entire poem out of English verse into Latin, for that was an art in which he had much skill and practice; but in that case one would have expected Peele to publish the English original, and I doubt whether Gager was ever guilty of as bad a verse as the twelfth in this poem, artibus, et sacro late loca fervere bello.

3. Although this attribution is only noted in passing in one footnote in the biography and edition of minor poems that counts as the first volume of the Yale edition of Peele’s complete works, NOTE 2 it deserves to be taken seriously: nobody has ever challenged Brooke’s diagnosis. In introducing the text of Pareus Brooke alluded to two passages in which the author writes of himself, at the beginning and the end of the poem. He did not consider whether a third might contain a clue about the writer’s identity (210 - 12):

These lines are very hard to understand — they are discussed in a note ad loc. — but it is tempting to think that the allusion is to Peele’s presumptive Oxford friend, Alberico Gentili. Mattaeo Gentili and his two sons Alberico and Scipio had been hounded out of Italy by the Inquisition, and had found temporary refuge in Austria, which because of current political alliances could reasonably be called a regnum Iberum. NOTE 3 Ejected from Austria, the Gentilis came to England armed with letters of introduction to the Earl of Leicester, Sir Philip Sidney, and Dean Tobie Mathew of Christ Church, and through Mathew’s agency he was granted an Oxford doctorate and appointed to a law tutorship (in 1587 he would be made Regius Professor of that subject). NOTE 4 At Oxford he belonged to the same intellectual and literary circle as did Gager and Peele. Although Peele had incepted for the M. A. in 1579, he stayed on at Oxford for two more years, during which time he probably wrote A Tale of Troy. He therefore had every opportunity of forming a friendship with Gentili. And so this passage scarcely discourages the conclusion that Peele wrote Pareus. NOTE 5
4. Neither, of course, does it serve to confirm the attribution. But to question it one would have to suggest a plausible alternative: an Oxford man who had previously written a piece about the Trojan War. The objection that, save for scraps embedded in his vernacular works, Peele is not known to have composed any Latin poetry, is not fatal. Latin prose and verse composition were standard fare in the secondary school curriculum, NOTE 6 so any University man can be assumed to have had at least a modicum of ability at the art. Gager’s 1583 tragedy Dido, which had to be written at remarkably short notice, shows strong internal signs of multiple authorship, NOTE 7 and Peele is known to have collaborated in the production of this play and conceivably lent a hand in its writing. All in all, at least until someone can propose another possible author for the piece, Peele’s responsibility for Pareus ought to be provisionally accepted.

5. Pareus is interesting for another reason, having to do with the foundation and early operation of the Oxford University Press. Printing presses had existed at both Oxford and Cambridge before the 1520’s, but had been closed down soon after the rift between England and Rome. The Tudors were strong on the subject of press censorship, especially on matters of religion and morals, and the Universities were regarded as hotbeds of Papists and nonconformists. Therefore the government adopted an adamant policy against academic presses. NOTE 7A This meant that academics who desired to publish were obliged to submit to the inconvenience, and the humiliation, of dealing with London printers; for although there were printers at London who could set type in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and even languages using more exotic alphabets, the necessity of relying on them may well have been galling to academic self-esteem. Therefore in 1584 Convocation petitioned the Earl of Leicester, Chancellor of the University, for permission to operate a press. Such permission being rapidly granted, Convocation then voted to advance a loan of £100 to Joseph Barnes, a local bookseller and wine merchant, to set up a press, permitting him to designate himself Printer to the University and to use the University seal as his personal printer’s mark. NOTE 8 Save for a broadsheet designed to flatter Leicester, Barnes’ first publication was Speculum Moralium Quaestionum in Universam Ethicen Aristotelis, by the philosopher John Case, issued in 1585. Pareus and William Gager’s cycle of poems about Sir William Parry presently to be mentioned appear to have been Barnes’ next publications. Between then and his death in 1617, he published just about 300 books; the title of Printer to the University passed to others, and thus the arrangement continued until well into the seventeenth century, when Dr. John Fell employed the Clarendonian Grant to establish a press owned and operated by the University itself.
6. Such is the standard account of the foundation of the O. U. P., as set forth in its official history. NOTE 9 In one crucial respect this story looks incomplete, for it fails to answer what at least should be an obvious question. Why did the government suddenly reverse its long-standing policy against university presses? Indeed, the question is even more puzzling, for prior to 1604 Barnes was not required to join the Stationers’ Company, the primary instrument by which the government controlled the printing of books. In the case of the new press at Cambridge, founded at the same time as that of Barnes, the Archbishop of Canterbury was empowered to exercise censorship, and did so on at least one occasion in what looks like a trial case designed to affirm his authority. NOTE 10 One does not hear of any similar control imposed on Barnes. Thus at one moment a press at Oxford was forbidden; then, at a stroke, one was not only sanctioned but also, evidently, exempted from any censorship at all during the reign of Elizabeth. (I have discussed the foundation of the press in greater detail here).
7. It is tempting to suppose that the reason for this sudden volte-face was a new awareness on the part of the government that university presses could play a useful role in disseminating propaganda and organizing educated public opinion regarding the war with Spain that had just erupted, and that the impetus came from Leicester, a dedicated anti-Catholic with a history of using literature for such purposes NOTE 11 and also the Chancellor of the University of Oxford. The frequent use of Neo-Latin literature to speed this effort was only a fraction the entire exercise. It was aimed at a limited segment of the population but one whose support was crucial for the success of the Tudor dynasty because it supplied the educated workforce which, if it did not run the nation, at least worked to keep it running.
8. As explained here, it would seem that in the early days of Barnes’ press Peele’s friend and one-time collaborator the poet-playwright William Gager and Barnes had some special relationship. Further reason for thinking this is that in 1587 Gager was hand-picked by Leicester’s chaplain Dr. James, the current Dean of Christ Church — which probably means by Leicester himself — to edit the University’s memorial volume on the death of Sir Philip Sidney, as we know from its dedicatory epistle to Leicester. NOTE 12 This is the first of a considerable series of such academic anthologies, many of which had some distinct political or propagandistic angle. So Gager did not only write pro-Establishment poetry on national themes himself, (wars always requite the creation of national heroes), he also extracted it from other Oxford men, assembled it, and saw it through press. Tucker Brooke has suggested that he played a similar role in the case of Pareus. Did Gager act as a kind of intermediary between Barnes and the University, and as the organizer of the press’s propagandistic activities? In the dedicatory epistle to Leicester prefacing the Sidney anthology he rather mysteriously writes as if Leicester was his strong supporter, although there is no evidence that he ever enjoyed a standard patronage relationship with the Earl. What this all amounts to is far from clear, but one gains the general impression that, with the blessing of Leicester, Gager played an important role in the early days of the press, contributing material himself and drumming up similar stuff by others. Pareus has interest as a specimen of this kind of propaganda aimed at an educated and at least largely academic readership. Since works of this type usually appeared bearing the University seal, which lent them a quasi-official character, they also performed a secondary function of displaying the University’s loyalty to the government and its policies.
9. Peele invented a highly effective propagandistic formula, appropriated by a number of subsequent writers. The source of this formula can be located in the infernal council at the beginning of Canto IV of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata. NOTE 14 Tasso, doubtless with Dante in mind, was responsible for creating a hybrid Pluto-Satan, described in Edward Fairfax’ 1600 translation as The ancient foe to man and mortal seed. This Pluto, an inveterate enemy of Christianity, is distraught by the French presence in Palestine and convokes a council of his followers. But he himself hatches no scheme for their ruination: he only intervenes when he is summoned by the Syrian wizard Hidroart, who seeks his counsel. Peele modified Tasso’s dramatic situation to suit local English requirements, by converting Pluto into an enemy of Protestantism. The tale he tells invites a kind of Manichean world-view, with a sharp division of the forces of Catholic darkness and Protestant light engaged in a perpetual struggle. At the same time, he attributes to Satan a fertility of invention and a dynamism absent from his Italian model: this new Satan-Pluto devises his own scheme for England’s subjugation and, through the agency of his lieutenant Deception, actively recruits human agents to execute his plan. The ploy of having Pluto or one of his henchmen appear to someone in a dream has no basis in Tasso. Its inspiration comes from quite a different source. In Book VII of the Aeneid, Aeneas’ great enemy Juno commands the Fury Allecto to fly to Italy and fill the hearts of Turnus and his mother Amata with hatred of the Trojans, and Allecto appears to the sleeping Turnus to rouse him to action: hence the war between the Trojan immigrants and the native forces of Italy. Peele adapted this narrative move to the present situation. In so doing, he introduced into English literature a new kind of Satan who would eventually come to full flower in Milton’s Paradise Lost:, an intellectual schemer, shrewdly manipulative with his use of rhetoric, a kind of Machiavelli writ large
10. The reader will doubtless be impressed by the striking resemblance of the first part of Pareus to Milton’s Latin poem on the Gunpowder Plot, In Quintum Novembris, Anno Aetatis 17 (1626). Both poems begin with the same literary creation, introducing as ruler of the Underworld a hybrid Pluto-Satan (named Summanus by Milton), who conceives a violent dislike of the English, expressed in a ranting monologue: Satan’s speech at Pareus 10 - 31 is quite comparable with In Quintum Novembris 25 - 44 in terms of both style and contents. Peele’s Satanic Pluto summons Deception and bids her fly to Rome. A suitably sinister description of her journey is provided (53 - 6). In Milton Summanus makes the flight himself, coming in for a landing at the same place (45 - 7, 53). Both Deception and Summanus then appear to the sleeping Pope and plant a malevolent impulse in his mind. In Peele, the Pope sends for Cardinal Como and instructs him to find a sympathetic expatriate to assassinate Elizabeth. Milton’s pontiff sends for various otherworldly agents lurking about Rome (Murder, Treason, Discord, Guile, Quarrels, Calumny, Fear, and Horror) and orders them to hasten to England and launch the Gunpowder Plot. These resemblances between Pareus and In Quintum Novembris are sufficiently striking that we are entitled to wonder whether Milton was writing under Peele’s influence. More likely, he was following what had become a traditional narrative pattern instituted by Peele and copied by a succession of later writers, the last of whom was Milton. With individual variations, these poets reproduced Peele’s Protestant reinvention of Tasso’s Pluto and imitate Tasso’s Hellish council; most of them also appropriated Peele’s plot device of having Pluto or one of his lieutenants enlist a human agent, usually the Pope, to carry out his great scheme for England’s defeat. Often (although not in Pareus) this scheme is defeated by some manner of divine intervention, and these poems routinely end with praise of the sovereign, sometimes coupled with the advice that a harder line should be taken against England’s enemies. I shall now provide brief summaries of the items in this series standing between Pareus and Milton’s poem, in their approximate chronological order. NOTE 15

11. It will be seen that, in their several ways, each of these poems replicates narrative and thematic elements first found in Pareus. The commonest of these is the initial wrathful speech, in every case but one (Herring’s Pietas Pontifica) this speech is delivered either by Satan or by a Pluto to whom distinctly satanic attributes are given. Often this harangue is made in the context of an infernal council. Satan-Pluto’s anger at England then sets in train a narrative sequence, the end result of which is some sort of subversive plot launched against England and her sovereign. NOTE 23 The sequence in question often takes the form of a more or less elaborate chain reaction in which Satan-Pluto or his agent recruits the Pope or some other personification of the Catholic Church, who in turn recruits human agents to commit the wicked deed in question. In Pareus, and also in Alabaster’s Elisaeis and Fletcher’s Locustae, as well as Milton’s In Quintum Novembris, the arrival at Rome of Satan-Pluto or his agent provides the occasion for a more or less satirical description of the Vatican and its denizens. The poems in this group often conclude with praise of the sovereign coupled with the advice that she or he should adopt a harsher policy towards England’s external or internal Catholic enemies.
12. The similarity of these works is thematic as well as narratological. Peele invented a formula which involved the mythologization of historical episodes and the literal demonization of Protestant England’s enemies, and imparted greater significance to contemporary events by making them part of an ongoing cosmological struggle between the forces of good and evil. Likewise, internal Catholic opponents to the government are portrayed as agents of Rome, itself the instrument of Satan’s empire on earth. This formula invented by Peele proved remarkably successful and enduring. It is after all, a powerful one, that works by exactly inverting the claims of Britain’s Catholic enemies, so that the self-professed agents of God on earth are revealed to be doing the work of the devil. Obviously, it was calculated to stimulate and give shape to the reader’s paranoia by encouraging a Manichaean view of contemporary history and by manufacturing or at least giving literary form to “conspiracy theories” to explain current events.
13. The question of the relation of Pareus to Milton’s in Quintum Novembris can now be considered in its proper perspective. The exact relationship of the individual items within this series remains to be worked out, and doubtless will repay further study, but on the basis of what has been written two things are tolerably clear. The origin of this tradition is to be located in Pareus, but by the time Milton wrote in Quintum Novembris its narrative and thematic contents were well established. The resemblance between these two poems would appear to be generic rather than specific. I shall discuss this issue a little more in an Appendix.

14. Dr. William Parry M. P. was executed in Westminster Palace Yard on March 2, 1585 (new style). NOTE 24 This put an end to the chequered career of a man who was at least accused of planning the queen’s assassination. Born William ap Harry at Northop, Flintshire, Parry had something of a genius for getting in trouble. In 1570 he married a wealthy widow and thus acquired a number of manors in Linconshire and Kent. But he soon managed to squander this fortune, and rumors circulated that he had debauched his wife’s daughter by a previous marriage. Facing penury, he entered government service as a spy, and spent much time in Italy —where he could conveniently dodge his creditors — reporting on the activities of Anglo-Catholics. But his time abroad had an effect on him and he secretly converted to Catholicism. During a sojourn in England in 1580, he stabbed one of his creditors, Harry Hare, in an affray at the Temple, was convicted of burglary, and condemned to death. But because of irregularities in the trial Elizabeth commuted the sentence. A couple of years later we find him back on the Continent, ostensibly spying once more. In fact, his Catholic sympathies were coming to the fore, and he cultivated the acquaintance of various notable English expatriates. Beginning as an advocate of greater tolerance of Anglo-Catholics, by degrees he persuaded himself that more violent remedies were needed, and was deeply impressed by Cardinal Allen’s arguments that the assassination of Elizabeth was lawful. After trying, evidently without much success, to gain the support of Church authorities, he left Italy and, after passing through Paris, landed at Rye in January 1584. Upon his return he hastened to Court, where he revealed the sensational news of an alleged plot to murder Elizabeth, invade via Scotland (this was at a time when Scotland was governed by Esmé Stuart and the Earl of Lennox, so the threat seemed credible), and set Mary, Queen of Scots, on the English throne. In November he was elected to Parliament to represent a Kentish borough, and made sensational speeches in favor of religious toleration. Meanwhile he was conspiring with his “cousin” Edmund Neville about assaulting Elizabeth. His delays and vacillations were such that nothing came of all these conversations, and early in 1585 Neville turned Queen’s evidence. In the Tower, Parry first wrote a confession, then a retraction and various appeals for mercy, none of which did him any good.
15. Was Parry a man acting out of genuine conviction, though vacillating, or was he perhaps an English agent who grew confused in his loyalties or was even mentally disturbed? Although Peele represents his choices as rational and stage-managed by the Machiavellian Cardinal Como, his evident tendency to work both sides of the street at once are troublingly reminiscent of the behavior of Lee Harvey Oswald in his dealings with Cubans. But if a modern does not know quite what to make out of Parry, or how seriously to take the threat he ostensibly posed, Elizabeth’s government experienced no such difficulty. Here was a golden opportunity for an exercise in anti-Catholic, xenophobic propaganda, Parry was transformed into, if not exactly a human fiend, at least the instrument of sinister overseas forces bent on England’s subjugation. This was all the more plausible and easy to do since the Prince of Orange had recently been assassinated by a Jesuit agent. This viewpoint was expressed in a pamphlet quickly printed at London, A True and Plaine Declaration of the Horrible Treasons Practiced by William Parry, a kind of governmental “white paper” on the subject. Loyal subjects with a literary bent picked up the theme. The official interpretation is replicated, for example, in Holinshed’s account, tricked out with a piece of contemporary doggerel on the topic that shows a similar propagandistic co-option of poetry at the low end of the literary scale. NOTE 26 Gager’s volume of odes and epigrams on the subject does the same thing at a higher level, directed towards a more sophisticated kind of readership, but the viewpoints adopted by the chapman and the doctus poeta are exactly congruent. So too with Pareus. Like Gager, Peele refers to the various embarrassing episodes in Parry’s past, such as his supposed incest with his step-daughter and his assault on Harry Hare; both writers even manage to hold his Anglicized surname against him. But since Peele’s work is narrative by nature, he could go farther. Parry’s ambivalent behavior is interpreted as the sign of a master intelligence: not his own, but that of his puppeteer, Cardinal Como. The factual basis is slender indeed. Parry had written a letter to the Pope and, when in England, received an answer from Como. The Cardinal’s response was at best ambiguous. In the letter he said that he approved of Parry’s intentions but, since we have no idea what intentions Parry had revealed, we cannot be sure that this letter constitutes any kind of Church approval of his assassination plans. Certainly Peele’s version of events, that the Pope had been seeking a volunteer assassin, and that Parry had been recruited and pre-programmed by Como, is manufactured out of whole cloth.

16. Pareus was printed at Oxford by Joseph Barnes in 1585 (Short Title Catalogue 19340.5, Early English Books reel 969). A transcription of the text has been printed by Tucker Brooke, as noted above, with no translation supplied. Otherwise it appears to have eluded any serious study. Like most of the poetry volumes issued by Barnes, Pareus is a rare book: the two extant copies are owned by Winchester College and the Huntington Library of San Marino, California. This electronic edition was preceded by a print one, Oxford Poetry by Richard Eedes and George Peele (New York, 1995). I take this opportunity to expand on a few points and make some corrections.

Notes

NOTE 1 C. F. Tucker Brooke, “A Latin Poem by George Peele (?),” Huntington Library Quarterly 3 (1939 - 40) 48f. This attribution was endorsed by Leicester Bradner, Musae Anglicanae: A History of Anglo-Latin Poetry (New York, 1940, repr. New York, 1966) 65.

NOTE 2 David H. Horne, The Life and Minor Works of George Peele (New Haven, 1952) 42 n. 48. Did Horne fail to evaluate this attribution for no better reason than that he knew no Latin?

NOTE 3 The allegation that Cardinal Como was personally responsible for the persecution of the Gentili brothers — if this surmise about the identity of the writer’s nameless friend is correct — does not seem to be anything more than hyperbole.

NOTE 4 For Alberico, cf. Gesina H. van der Molen, Alberico Gentili and the Development of International Law, his Life, Work, and Times (2nd ed. Leiden, 1968), D. Panizza, Alberico Gentili, Giurista Ideologo nell’ Inghilterra Elisabettiana (Padova, 1981), and J. W. Binns, Intellectual Culture and Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings of the Age (Leeds, 1990) 338 - 57.

NOTE 5 Another consideration possibly favoring attribution to Peele is admittedly subjective: some of the speeches (notably those of Cardinal Como to Parry) are fine examples of ἠθοποιία such as one would expect of a writer with considerable talent as a dramatist. Also the author’s admission that he conceived the work in a series of Aristotelian episodes shows that he thought like a playwright, blocking out his narrative into scenes.

NOTE 6 W. T. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke (Urbana, 1944) Vol. II, Chapter XLI.

NOTE 7 But the possibility that Gager’s collaborator was another Christ Church playwright, Richard Eedes (author of the lost play Caesar Interfectus) cannot be ignored.

NOTE 7a A strategy of limited success since both Catholic and nonconformist presses on the Continent kept issuing a steady stream of publications for English consumption. I am not unaware that the nature and function of the Stationers’ Company has recently been subject to reappraisal: cf. most notably Cyndia S. Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, 1997) and the same author’s “The Stationers’ Company of London,” in The British Literary Book Trade 1475 - 1700 (edd. James K. Bracken and Joel Silver, Detroit, 1995) 275-291. Clegg and other recent writers on press censorship have not paid much attention to the situation of the University presses. The only discussion I have seen that explicitly addresses the relation of these presses to the Stationers’ Company is John Barnard, “Politics, Profits and ?Idealism: John Norton, the Stationers’ Company, and Sir Thomas Bodley,” The Bodleian Library Record XVII:9 (2002) 385 - 408, which only considers the University presses insofar as they presented a challenge to the Company’s otherwise complete monopoly on the printing of books in England. Hence, in view of the absence of any modern study of governmental censorship as it may or may not have been applied to the University presses, I shall stand by what I have written in the text.

NOTE 8 Or so it is sometimes said. Not all books issued from Barnes’ press bear the seal, and the reasons for its use or non-use could perhaps be clarified by further investigation.

NOTE 9 Harry Carter, A History of the Oxford University Press (Oxford, 1975) Chapter II.

NOTE 10 John Strype, Annals of the Reformation and Establishment of Religion and Various Other Occurrences in the Church of England during Queen Elizabeth’s Happy Days (Oxford, 1824) III.i 650f.

NOTE 11 Rosenberg, Eleanor, Leicester, Patron of Letters (New York, 1955).

NOTE 12 The grounds for attributing them to Gager are set forth in the General Introduction to Gager's poetry.

NOTE 13 Exequiae Illustrissimi Equitis D. Philippi Sidnaei, Gratissimae Memoriae ac Nomini Impensae.

NOTE 14 Tasso’s influence has been observed by Bradner, p. 38, and Walter R. Davis, The Works of Thomas Campion (New York, 1967), 359. There is no need to ask whether Peele knew enough Italian to read Tasso in the original. It is likely that he read this portion of Tasso’s epic in the Latin translation of the first part of Canto IV of Gerusalemme Liberata published by Scipio Gentili at London in 1584 under the title Plutonis Concilium.

NOTE 15 Two other works appear to be influenced by Gentili’s translation of Tasso, and in one case by Pareus as well, since they contain equivalents of Pluto’s aggrieved and angry speech, although they do not reproduce Pareus’ narrative pattern: Eclogue VI from Thomas Watson’s Amintae Gaudia (1592) and Thomas Campion’s epyllion Ad Thamesin (printed 1595). For the influence of Pareus on the latter see the note on Pareus 339ff. Additionally, a number of works described here imitate Tasso in having Satan or a distinctly Satanic Pluto make his speech in the context of an infernal council, and it may be possible that this literary tradition exercised influence on John Donne’s Ignati Conclave (1611). Cf. the edition of this and of Donne’s parallel English work Ignatius his Conclave by T. S. Healy S. J. (Oxford, 1969).

NOTE 16 Unprinted until modern times but preserved in manuscript form, this poem has been edited by Michael O’Connor, The “Elisaeis” of William Alabaster (Studies in Philology monograph 76, 1979). Its intended Aeneid-like character is indicated by the statement on the title page that its author proposes to write it in twelve Books and by its many strategically-placed quotations from Vergil, a number of which are pointed out in sidenotes. Thus, for example, the reader is informed that Satan’s anger against England is based on the wrath of the Vergilian Juno (The historical parts of the work closely follow Holinshed).

NOTE 17 Edited by Estelle Haan, “Milton’s In Quintum Novembris and the Anglo-Latin Gunpowder Epic, Part II” Humanistica Lovaniensia 42 (1993), 368 - 401.

NOTE 18 Edited by Estelle Haan, “Milton’s In Quintum Novembris and the Anglo-Latin Gunpowder Epic,” Humanistica Lovaniensia 41 (1992) 221 - 95.

NOTE 19 Originally edited in The Poems of Phineas Fletcher B. D., Rector of Hilgay, Norfolk (ed. the Rev. Alexander H. Grosart, privately printed, 1869). II.3 - 58. On pp. 177 - 86 of the same volume Grosart reproduced a “spirited if somewhat periphrastic translation” by a Mr. Sterling that had appeared in a volume entitled Miscellaneous Poems, Original and Translated by several hands, viz., Dean Swift, Mr. Parnel, Dr. Delany, Mr. Brown, Mr. Ward, Mr. Sterling. Mr. Concawen and others. Published by Mr. Concawen. 1724. A superior edition, with a collation of the manuscripts, appears in the second volume of Frederick S. Boas The Poetical Works of Giles Fletcher and Phineas Fletcher (Cambridge U. K., 1909). For a modern edition cf. Estelle Haan, Phineas Fletcher: Locustae vel Pietas Iesuitica (Supplementa Humanistica Lovaniensia IX, Leuven, 1996).

NOTE 20 Likewise Thomas Campion places his Satan in America, conceived as a mysterious oceanic island, in Ad Thamesin.

NOTE 21 A name calculated to evoke the doctrine of Equivocation allegedly preached to the Gunpowder Plotters by Father Henry Garnet, the Jesuit Superior for England.

NOE 22 It was first edited by David Lindley with the help of Robin Sowerby, Thomas Campion: de Pulverea Coniuratione (Leeds Texts and Monographs n.s. 10, Leeds, 1987).

NOTE 23 In the case of Alabaster’s Elisaeis, against her future and rightful sovereign.

NOTE 24 The following facts are primarily drawn from the D. N. B. biography. Cf. the sources cited there and also Strype, Annals of the Reformation III.i. 360 - 82.

NOTE 25 In this pamphlet the discreditable of Parry’s career mentioned by Peele and Gager (his change of name, his profligacy, his seduction of his step-daughter, the Harry Hare affray) are touched upon, with suitable clucking.

NOTE 26 Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1587 edition); cf. the London edition of 1807 - 8 (reprinted New York, 1965) IV.536f.

NOTE 27 And also other Plot literature that does not conform to Pareus’ narrative formula, such as William Gager’s Pyramis of 1608.