Against Friendship An Essay By The Wizard Earl Of Northumberland

MISHA TERAMURA
Against Friendship:
An Essay by the ‘Wizard’ Earl of Northumberland
[with text]
Friendship was one of the most powerful social ideals in Renaissance
culture.1
Inﬂuenced by foundational classical accounts in such works
as Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Cicero’s De amicitia, early modern
writers advanced a model of perfect friendship as the consummate hu-
man relationship, found in the reciprocal love of two virtuous men, har-
monious in their tastes and opinions, whose company stimulates both to-
ward greater virtue and wisdom, and who consider each other, in the
Erasmian adage, an alter ipse, “another self.” The idealization of friendship
found in philosophical texts and in the classical legends of Damon and
Pythias, Orestes and Pylades, Achilles and Patroclus, and Theseus and
Pirithous was revived in works like Boccaccio’s Decameron, Sir Thomas
Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governour, Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, and
Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and further embellished by the age’s
preeminent essayists. According to Francis Bacon, “it was a Sparing Speech
of the Ancients, to say, That a Frend is another Himself: For that a Frend is
I am grateful to the British Library for permission to quote from Add. MS 12504. I would also
like to thank Stephen Greenblatt, who provided valuable feedback on an earlier version of this
essay, and Benjamin Auger, for his assistance with the classical texts consulted.
1. The subject is helpfully surveyed in Reginald Hyatte, The Arts of Friendship: The Idealization
of Friendship in Medieval and Early Renaissance Literature (Leiden, 1994) and Ullrich Langer, Perfect
Friendship: Studies in Literature and Moral Philosophy from Boccaccio to Corneille (Geneva, 1994). For
more recent accounts of the role of friendship in Renaissance English literature, see Laurie Shan-
non, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago, 2002); Tom MacFaul,
Male Friendship in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Cambridge, Eng., 2007); and John S. Garrison,
Friendship and Queer Theory in the Renaissance: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern England (New
York, 2014). For a relatively recent yet nevertheless seminal study of the subtle variations of friend-
ship in the medieval and early modern world, see Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago, 2003).
380
English Literary Renaissance, volume 47, number 3.
© 2017 by English Literary Renaissance, Inc. All rights reserved. 0013-8312/2017/4703/0003$10.00.
This content downloaded from 134.010.074.244 on November 10, 2017 15:18:08 PM
All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).

farre more then Himselfe”; indeed, “it is a meere, and miserable Solitude,
to want true Friends; without which the World is but a Wildernesse.”2
Even more powerfully, Montaigne in “De l’Amitié” described his rela-
tionship with the late Étienne de la Boétie as “surpass[ing] even the pre-
cepts of philosophy,” a friendship so perfect that “our souls mingle and
blend with each other so completely that they efface the seam that joined
them, and cannot find it again,” a friendship that could only be accounted
for by saying (in perhaps the most beloved marginalium ever written) “Be-
cause it was he, because it was I.”3
That both the iconoclastic Bacon and the archskeptic Montaigne should
endorse the traditional classical inheritance makes all the more striking the
radically cynical demolition of the ancient ideal of friendship in a hitherto
unpublished essay by Henry Percy (1564–1632), ninth Earl of Northum-
berland.4
Notorious in his own time for his purported complicity in the
Gunpowder Plot, for which he spent fifteen years imprisoned in the Tower
of London, Northumberland would be known to posterity as the “Wizard
Earl” for his passionate interest in science and alchemy—as Bacon himself
described it, a “love towards studies and contemplations of an higher and
worthier nature than popular (a nature rare in this world, and in a person
of your Lordship’s quality almost singular).”5
His influential patronage of
natural philosophers earned him a reputation as the “Mecænas of learned
men,”6
who famously included Thomas Harriot, Robert Hues, and Wal-
ter Warner, a group “usually called the Earle of Northumberlands three
2. Sir Francis Bacon, The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall (1625), sigs. Y1v, V3v.
3. The Complete Essays of Montaigne tr. Donald Frame (Stanford, 1958), pp. 143, 139. Cf.
Montaigne, Les Essais, ed. Jean Balsamo et al. (Paris, 2007), pp. 200, 194–95.
4. British Library [hereafter BL], Add. MS 12504, fols. 58–62 (“My Lord of Northumberlands
conceipt concerning ffriends and ffriendshipp”). The inclusion of Northumberland’s essay was noted
in the eighteenth-century Catalogue of the Manuscripts of The Right Honourable and Right Worshipful Sir
Julius Cæsar, Knight (1757), p. 11 (lot 178), and in the Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts in the
British Museum in the Years [1841] to [1845] (1850), p. 35. It was brought to the attention of literary
scholars by Mark Eccles, in Christopher Marlowe in London (Cambridge, Mass., 1934) as “a brief essay
by the Earl, not hitherto known” (pp. 160–61). Quotations from Northumberland’s essay will appear
cited parenthetically in the text.
5. BL, Add. MS 5503, fol. 19 (Bacon to Northumberland, “a few days before Queen Eliz
abeth’s death”); qtd. in James Spedding et al., The Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon (London,
1861–1879), 3, 58.
6. Alexander Read, The Chirurgicall Lectures of Tumors and Vlcers (1635), sig. X2; qtd. G.R.
Batho, “The Library of the ‘Wizard’ Earl: Henry Percy Ninth Earl of Northumberland (1564–
1632),” The Library, series 5, 15 (1960), 246.
Misha Teramura 381

Magi.”7
A friend to literary luminaries such as Sir Walter Ralegh, Christo-
pher Marlowe, and John Donne, Northumberland was himself an original
writer and an incisive thinker, a quality captured by George Chapman in
his epithet “deepe searching Northumberland.”8
The Earl’s essay on friendship takes the form of a memoir of intellectual
epiphany. Beginning with the story of his youth, Northumberland recalls
his naïve entry into a world of glittering wealth with friends in abun-
dance: “The Paradize was too glorious for weake eyes to discouer what
future discontentmentes might be vnderhidden [. . .] All thinges were soe
plausible that ffawnelike simplicity feared noe hunters” (fol. 58). Friends
were easily found and easily lost (“soe fast did friendshipp slipp away, and
new like puppettes leaped in their places”), and erstwhile friends quickly
became enemies. Exhausted by these disappointments, he retires to a pri-
vate life, hoping to discover “the originall Cause” of his errors. What he
realizes instead is that “this happiness of mutuall friendshipp” is an illu-
sion, “firmely established in Mens mindes [. . .] hauing taken soe deepe
roote from generation to generation by ignorance and idle searchers into
these Causes in particular, whereby these hopes and absurdities, are growne
to soe stedfast assurance, and mens Conceiptes soe bent after dwellinges in
these airye Castles, running forward in Childish Credulytie soe long, till
death makes meanes of further Considering lifeless, and old Ignorance
by yt
death in others to be newe borne” (fol. 59). Tracing a genealogy
of morals, Northumberland blames ancient philosophers for creating
the ideal of friendship as a kind of jeu d’esprit, “to laye open the high reach
of their Conceiptes, and how by their fine wittes they could frame an
heauen in an impossibility,” as well as the “fantasticall fancies of Poetts,”
whose fictions are propagated in each new generation by nurses with their
“ballad songes of Damon and Pithias to procure vs asleepe,” by schoolmas-
ters with their “faigned Comœdies of Nisus and Eurialus,” and by manip-
ulative gallants eager to exploit the idealism of the young (fols. 59v–60).
Rather, the “true friends” of philosophy and poetry remain chimeras in
the real world, perpetuated in men’s minds by the chief targets of North-
umberland’s essay, the endemic intellectual vices of “Custome, and wil-
full ignorance, the two mightie Ringleaders of the world” (fol. 60v).
7. John Aubrey, Brief Lives, with An Apparatus for the Lives of Our English Mathematical Writers, ed.
Kate Bennett (Oxford, 2015), I. 109. See John William Shirley, “The Scientific Experiments of
Sir Walter Ralegh, the Wizard Earl, and the Three Magi in the Tower 1603–1617,” Ambix 4
(1949), 60.
8. George Chapman, The Shadow of Night (1594), sig. A2v.
382 English Literary Renaissance

Those who wish to uphold the ideal of perfect friendship with recourse to
“an instinct of nature, makeing it a sanctuary and refuge for their igno-
rance,” do so at their own peril: to live under the thrall of an impossible
ideal is to suffer, and only with “the maske of Error being torne away by
truth to the viewe of all” can we attain real contentment (fol. 61).
Northumberland’s polemic is both an extraordinary intervention in
the early modern discourse of friendship and a remarkable work of auto-
biography. The Earl’s radical rejection of the classical ideals of friendship
stemmed from a life of “deepe searching” intellectual pursuits counter-
pointed by hard worldly lessons, and his essay offers a vividly confessional
account of how life experience shaped a singular cast of mind. The pres-
ent essay seeks to contextualize Northumberland’s on friendship within
the larger corpus of the Earl’s extant writings and to serve more broadly
as an introduction to an historical ﬁgure, who, as one contemporary ob-
served, was “so unlike any body elce, that it were pitty he should not be
like himselfe.”9
II
Henry Percy was born at Tynemouth Castle in April 1564.10
In 1572, his
uncle Thomas Percy, seventh Earl of Northumberland, was executed for
his involvement in the Catholic rebellion of the north, whereupon the
young Henry’s father and namesake inherited the earldom. Percy re-
ceived his early education at the parsonage of Egremont in Cumberland
9. The National Archives [hereafter TNA], SP 78/51, fol. 300v (Toby Matthew to Dudley
Carleton, 2 November 1604); qtd. Mark Nicholls and Penry Williams, Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life
and Legend (London, 2011), p. 43.
10. The major biographical accounts of Northumberland’s life are Thomas Percy’s history of
the family in Arthur Collins, The Peerage of England, 5th ed. (London, 1779), II. 408–36; Edward
Barrington De Fonblanque, Annals of the House of Percy, (London, 1887), II. 177–364; Gerald
Brenan, A History of the House of Percy (London, 1902), II. 31–209; John W. Shirley, Thomas Harriot:
A Biography (Oxford, 1983); Mark Nicholls, Investigating Gunpowder Plot (Manchester, 1991). For
shorter accounts, see Advice to His Son ed. G.B. Harrison (London, 1930), pp. 5–36; Gordon R.
Batho, “A Brief Life of the Ninth Earl of Northumberland,” The Wizard Earl’s Advices to His
Son: A Facsimile and Transcript from the Manuscripts of Henry Percy, Ninth Earl of Northumberland at
Petworth House, ed. Gordon R. Batho and Stephen Clucas (London, 2002), pp. xvii–xl; and Mark
Nicholls’s entry for the Oxford DNB (Oxford, 2004). Some of the many invaluable articles by
Gordon R. Batho and Mark Nicholls on speciﬁc aspects of Northumberland’s life and family will
be cited below.
Misha Teramura 383

from one Mr. Thompson,11
before travelling to the Continent to com-
plete his studies; he was, however, soon distracted by indulgences.12
It
was during this period that his father came under suspicion for his com-
plicity in the Throckmorton plot and was sent to the Tower in January
1584. During his imprisonment, the eighth Earl, according to his wife,
deplored the conduct of his prodigal sons Henry and Thomas in France,
“how vnproffitablye his twoo eldest sonnes doth bestowe their tymes
here, yea in that sorte that rather he wissheth them to carye a hargebuse
vpon their neckes to sarue a worthie prince then to live as they do.”13
The young Henry was still abroad when he received the news that his
father had died violently in the Tower on June 21, 1585 (a suicide, offi-
cially). Percy’s succession to the earldom a mere two months after his
twenty-first birthday meant that he narrowly avoided the financial perils
of wardship, and became the recipient of annual revenues from the Percy
lands of approximately £3,000 per annum.14
Surviving household ac-
counts record the new Earl’s lavish spending on luxuries like horses, fine
clothes, hunting, and gambling, subsidized in part by the sale of inherited
lands.15
He quickly discovered, however, that this lifestyle was not sus-
tainable. As he recalled to his son decades later: “Then were my felicities,
(bycause I knew noe better,) hawlkes, hounds, horses, dice, cards, apparell,
mistresses; all other riott of expence that follow them, were soe farre a foot
and in excesse, as I knew not where I was, or what I did, till out of my
means of 3000ll
yearely, I had made shift in one yeare and a halfe, to be
15000ll
in debt.”16
These imprudent early years were followed not only
11. De Fonblanque, Annals, II. 178n; Batho, “Brief Life,” p. xix. See also B. Nightingale, The
Ejected of 1662 in Cumberland & Westmorland, Their Predecessors and Successors, (Manchester, 1911),
pp. 2, 821.
12. He was in Orléans by January 15, 1579–1580 according to a letter from his father to Lord
Burghley (BL, Lansdowne MS 29, fol. 90). In 1582, Sir Charles Paget wrote from Paris that he
found the young Percy “not being in so commendable courses as I wished, nether for his studyes
nor manners” (TNA, SP 15/27A, fol. 97 [Paget to Walsingham, March 4, 1582]; cited De Fon-
blanque, Annals, II. 178). His immoderate course of life seems to have resulted in extreme sickness
by the autumn of that year, as Percy’s father reported to Burleigh (BL, Harley MS 6993, fols. 29–
29v [letter of September 25, 1582]; qtd. in Brennan, History, II. 35).
13. BL, Egerton MS 2074, fol. 95 (Countess of Northumberland, April 9, 1585); qtd. Nicholls,
Investigating Gunpowder Plot, p. 86.
14. For a detailed overview, see Gordon R. Batho, “The Finances of an Elizabethan Noble-
man: Henry Percy, Ninth Earl of Northumberland (1564–1632),” Economic History Review
9 (1957), 433–50.
15. G.R. Batho, ed., The Household Papers of Henry Percy, Ninth Earl of Northumberland (1564–
1632) (London, 1962), pp. 45–80; see Batho, “Brief Life,” pp. xx–xxi.
16. Batho and Clucas, ed., Advices, p. 50; cf. Harrison, ed., Advice, p. 81.

by a wiser conduct of estate management, but also by a pivotal conversion
in which the Earl exchanged riotous behavior for serious study. By the
time he was inducted to the Order of the Garter in 1593, George Peele
could lavishly praise him as an intellectual who, by
following the auncient reuerend steps
Of Trismegistus and Pythagoras,
Through vncouth waies and vnaccessible,
Doost passe into the spacious pleasant ﬁeldes
Of diuine science and Phylosophie,
From whence beholding the deformities
Of common errors and worlds vanitie,
Doost heere enioy that sacred sweet content
That baser soules not knowing, not affect.17
Sir John Davies, the poet of Nosce Teipsum, would make a similar paean to
the Earl, praising him for his “heav’nly mind” that “only longs to learne &
know the Truth; / the Truth of every thing, which never dies.”18
Certainly
this was the period in which Northumberland began to associate with in-
tellectual ﬁgures like Sir Walter Ralegh (a frequent gaming companion)
and the scientist Thomas Harriot, the latter of whom the Earl would pa-
tronize for his entire life with a generous annual pension of £80 as well as a
residence and laboratory at Syon House.19
His circle of acquaintances also
included important playwrights and poets of the time: Christopher Mar-
lowe claimed “to be very wel known” to the Earl, and John Donne solic-
ited his assistance after his imprudent marriage to Anne More.20
Northumberland’s own marriage in 1594 to Lady Dorothy Perrott (née
Devereux) made him brother-in-law to the Earl of Essex. The relation-
ship between the two Earls began warmly but cooled as a result of
Northumberland’s matrimonial troubles well before the catastrophic up-
rising of 1601 led to Essex’s execution. (Two of Northumberland’s broth-
17. George Peele, The Honovr of the Garter. Displaied in a Poeme gratulatorie: Entitled to the worthie
and renowned Earle of Northumberland (1593), sig. A2. Peele received £3 from the Earl for his poem
(De Fonblanque, Annals, II. 195n).
18. The lines come from Davies’ dedication to the Earl in a manuscript presentation copy of
Nosce Teipsum: Archives of the Duke of Northumberland at Alnwick Castle, DNP: MS 474, fols. 1–
1v; cf. Robert Krueger and Ruby Nemser, ed., The Poems of Sir John Davies (Oxford, 1975), p. 3.
19. Shirley, Thomas Harriot, pp. 211–16, 226.
20. On Marlowe, see TNA, SP 84/44, fol. 60 (Robert Sidney to Burghley, January 26, 1592);
qtd. R. B. Wernham, “Christopher Marlowe at Flushing in 1592,” English Historical Review 91
(1976), 344–45. On Donne, see R.C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (Oxford, 1970), pp. 133–34.
Misha Teramura 385

ers, Charles and Josceline, were implicated in the uprising, having been
among the group of Essex’s followers who commissioned the perfor-
mance of Shakespeare’s Richard II on February 7, 1601.) Unlike Essex (and
despite his own father’s sarcastic wish), Northumberland was never a cele-
brated martialist, although he did tour the battle sites of the Low Countries
in 1600–1601 and remained compulsively fascinated by the art of war
throughout his life.
The early years of the seventeenth century saw the apex of Northum-
berland’s political career. Although one observer ranked the Earl eighth in
line to succeed Elizabeth,21
Northumberland was among those who se-
cretly sent letters to King James in Scotland to settle affairs in the event
of Queen Elizabeth’s death, even raising the issue of Catholic toleration.22
He was rewarded upon James’s accession to the throne with new roles and
responsibilities, including a position on the Privy Council. Northumber-
land’s brief period of political influence came to an abrupt halt, however,
with the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. In his capacity as Captain of the Gen-
tlemen Pensioners, the Earl had appointed one of his kinsmen, Thomas
Percy, to the King’s bodyguard without administering the requisite oaths.
When Percy was discovered to be one of the Gunpowder conspirators,
Northumberland himself came under scrutiny. While subsequent interro-
gations found no direct evidence connecting him to the plot, Northum-
berland was tried for contempt in Star Chamber, fined an astronomical
£30,000, and sentenced to imprisonment in the Tower, where he would
remain until 1621.23
Notwithstanding his initial bitterness at the unjust sentence, it was dur-
ing his years in the Tower that Northumberland could turn with even
greater attention to his studies. He spent lavishly on books, amassing one
of the most impressive libraries of his time, as well as on scientific curiosities
and materials for alchemical experiments, such as the skeleton acquired in
1607 and the elaborate “still-house” he had constructed for distilling oper-
ations.24
Combined with the company of his scientist friends and his young
21. TNA, SP 12/280, fol. 3 (“The State of England Anno Dom: 1600 by Thomas Wilson”);
cited in De Fonblanque, Annals, II. 584. See ed. Arthur F. Kinney, Elizabethan and Jacobean England:
Sources and Documents of the English Renaissance (Malden, MA, 2011), p. 5.
22. Nicholls, Investigating Gunpowder Plot, pp. 112–22.
23. For the details of the trial, see Mark Nicholls, “The ‘Wizard Earl’ in Star Chamber: The
Trial of the Earl of Northumberland, June 1606,” Historical Journal 30 (1987), 173–89; Investigating
Gunpowder Plot, pp. 185–96.
24. Batho, “The Library of the ‘Wizard’ Earl,” pp. 246–61; Shirley, “Scientific Experiments,”
pp. 60–63. According to Shirley, the Earl’s financial records suggest that no systematic experimen-

son Algernon, eating decadent meals, and playing at bowling and kriegspiel,
by 1614 he was, in the words of John Chamberlain, “so well inured to a
restrained life, that were yt not that the world takes notice that he is in
his princes displeasure, he would not seeke to chaunge.”25
It was also dur-
ing this period that Northumberland would turn seriously to writing. These
were the same years that the Earl’s friend and fellow prisoner Sir Walter
Ralegh was compiling his massive History of the World, printed eventually
in 1614. While Northumberland never published any of his writings (nor
would he ever undertake any project on the scale of Ralegh’s History), a
number of texts that survive in manuscript bear witness to the breadth of
his interests and intellectual commitments, and thus shed important con-
textual light on his essay concerning friends and friendship.
The earliest datable writing is an educational program addressed to his
son Algernon, composed originally around 1595 but subsequently revised
during his years in the Tower.26
Framed as a set of recommendations for
how Algernon should raise his own son, the treatise provides a glimpse of
Northumberland’s perspective on the field of knowledge (his curriculum
prescribes language training, followed by the “deeper contemplations” of
science, metaphysics, ethics, politics, economics, and the art of war), and
even more relevantly, how a child should be educated in virtue. As in
tation was conducted in the Tower, although in July 1608 Francis Bacon considered soliciting the
assistance of the imprisoned Northumberland in the compilation of the Magna Instauratio, he “be-
ing already inclined to experiments” (ed. Spedding, Letters, IV, p. 63).
25. TNA, SP 14/78, fol. 137v ( John Chamberlain to Dudley Carleton, December 22, 1614);
McClure, ed., The Letters of John Chamberlain, (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society,
1939), I. 566. On Northumberland’s life in the Tower, see De Fonblanque, Annals, II, 329–36;
Gordon Batho, “The Education of a Stuart Nobleman,” British Journal of Educational Studies 5
(1957), 131–43.
26. The manuscript texts of Northumberland’s advice writings are Petworth House, Leconfield
MSS 24/1 and 24/2, and Yale University, MS Osborn c431. The Yale manuscript, corresponding
to Leconfield MS 24/2, was edited by G. B. Harrison as Advice to His Son by Henry Percy, Ninth Earl
of Northumberland (1609) (London: Ernest Benn, 1930); the Leconfield manuscripts by Gordon R.
Batho and Stephen Clucas as The Wizard Earl’s Advices to His Son: A Facsimile and Transcript from the
Manuscripts of Henry Percy, Ninth Earl of Northumberland at Petworth House (London: Roxburghe
Club, 2002). Leconfield MS 24/1 had previously been published in The Antiquarian Repertory
ed. Francis Grose et al., (1809), IV. 374–80, and an abridged transcription of Leconfield MS 24/
2 was transcribed by Edmund Malone and published in Archaeologia 27 (1838), 306–58. Of the three
discrete parts, only the second is explicitly dated, “An: 1609,” although Northumberland’s com-
ment that this was “written 14 years after the former” allows us to infer the date of the prior part
(Batho and Clucas, ed., Advices, p. 41). For the argument about revision, see Harrison, ed., Advice,
pp. 43–45.
Misha Teramura 387

the essay on friendship, Northumberland is keenly apprehensive about
the role of custom and authority in the development of moral convictions.
His solution is that instruction must be provided in both reason and virtue,
but only until the former is developed enough to justify the latter:
“disgested instructions must rest authenticall, vntil sutche tyme as their
farther knowledge out of a stronger iudgement, may giue those instruc-
tions either fallacious or allowable.”27
The moral education he advocates
is one of “naturall morallite,” defined in opposition to “that morallite that
consisteth vppon precepts only,” along with a correlative politics “not con-
sisting vppon stories and examples, but out of grounds, more certain and
vnfallible.”28
A later set of advices to Algernon prepared in 1609 shows Northum-
berland addressing more worldly concerns in a series of counsels on how
to consolidate control over one’s estate and relationships. Unlike much
of the paternal advice literature of the period,29
Northumberland’s 1609
advices are richly autobiographical, sharing the fruits of his own painful
education. As in the friendship essay, Northumberland devotes special at-
tention to his succession to the earldom, the self-interested jockeying of
his late father’s officers, and his own imprudent selection of servants “an-
swerable to my humor, whiche was to be yonge, handsomme, braue,
swaggering, debaucht, wilde, abbetting all my yong desiers.”30
It was only
after he reached financial crisis that Northumberland was able to amend
his ways and dismiss his unfaithful servants: “with in a littel tyme these er-
rors hauing vnmasked them selfes to me, I beganne to take vp and to looke
to myne owne affaires [. . .] soe as in tyme, I redemed my selfe out of [the
disquiet of ] disquited thoughts.”31
A similar pattern of naiveté and disil-
lusionment characterizes Northumberland’s memory of the friendly fol-
lowers who flocked around him in the same period, a cast of stock char-
acters who duly make an appearance at the beginning of the friendship
essay. These include the false friends who attempted to cajole him into
29. On the impersonal voice of fatherly instructions, see Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan
Prodigals (Berkeley, 1976), pp. 16–22. Fred B. Tromly, however, has recently argued this imper-
sonal facade is often undermined by writers’ attention to intensely personal concerns: see “Masks
of Impersonality in Burghley’s ‘Ten Precepts’ and Ralegh’s Instructions to His Son,” Review of English
Studies 66 (2015), 480–500.
31. Batho and Clucas, ed., Advices, p. 53; the words in square brackets appear in the manuscript
but are omitted from the transcription. Cf. Harrison, ed., Advice, pp. 83–84.

marriage; the ambitious would-be “state men” angling after their own ad-
vancement, who, “as soone as a crosse fortun shall falle vpon yow, [. . .] are
gone like lice from a dead carcasse”; and the pleasure-seeking gallants who
merely desire “to passe there tymes here, by the helpes of yowr expence,
or by the grace of yowr fauors, whiche beginning to ebbe in ether of those
powers, then fayrewell those followers, and soone will they fynd occa-
sions to seuer that societie, that freindshippe, that acquaintance.”32
Undergirding Northumberland’s advices to his son is a deep skepticism
about other people’s abilities and motives, haunted by the admonitory leit-
motif that “All men loue ther owen eases, and them selfes best.”33
Conso-
nant with the generalizing cynicism of his friendship essay, he writes of his
own experience of friends with chilly clear-sightedness: “I haue found soe
many and soe weke harted in cases of aduersitie, inclining soe mutche to
the ouer louing of there owen perticulars, that the very respects of com-
mon humanyte and fortitude, haue bene laid aside.”34
During his years in the Tower, Northumberland composed another
shorter set of instructions for Algernon’s travels to the Continent, and
produced extensive writings on the art of war.35
However, the most re-
vealing companion piece to Northumberland’s essay on friendship is his
essay on love and learning, the sole extant copy of which is preserved
among the State Papers in the National Archives.36
Both essays are struc-
tured around moments of intellectual revelation that entail a skeptical
devaluation of human relationships. The essay on love begins with the
speaker recounting his youthful days of license, during which he compiled
a thorough catalogue of strategies for seducing different kinds of women,
maneuvering around their hesitations, overprotective parents, religious
scruples, and other impediments to his pleasure, “my wittes wch
were then
nimble in this kind (for nimblenes groweth by exercise and exercise from a
purpose to obtaine).”37
Obsessed with these devices, “[t]umblinge these
conceites from corner to corner of my braines [. . .] vntill I grewe giddie
32. Batho and Clucas, ed., Advices, pp. 92, 90; cf. Harrison, ed., Advice, pp. 116, 113.
35. The travel instructions (Leconﬁeld MS 24/1) are transcribed in Batho and Clucas, ed.,
pp. 105–10. On Northumberland’s martial writings, see Batho, “Library,” p. 250, n1; some of these
are discussed in Nina Taunton, 1590s Drama and Militarism: Portrayals of War in Marlowe, Chapman
and Shakespeare’s ‘Henry V’ (Aldershot, 2001), esp. pp. 36–55.
36. TNA, SP 14/11, fols. 15–16, endorsed “My lo. of Northumb.” (fol. 16v). The essay was
published by Francis Yates in A Study of ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ (Cambridge, Eng., 1936), pp. 206–11.
37. TNA, SP 14/11, fol. 15.
Misha Teramura 389

with thinckinge,” he seeks to calm his mind by reading: at first hunting
for some romantic literature, “Tharcadia, or bookes of the like subiecte
whereby I might learne to vtter my lethargious passions with there sweete
flimflams.” By accident or fate, he instead encounters a copy of Alhazen’s
Opticae Thesaurus: “amongest the rest, as a destenie from eternetie prepared
to crosse my desires, there lay an owld Arabian called Alhazen, which wth
some anger I angrylie removed, it flying open perhapps by reason of a Sta-
tioners thred vncutt, yet superstitiouse in my religion that it was the spirrit
that directed me by hidden and vnconceaveable meanes what was good for
my purpose, with a discontented eye I beheld it.”38
In leafing through the
book, a remarkable illustration, “awakeinge me out of my muses,” captures
his attention: “there did I behold a demonstration declaring the hight of the
aier with no small wonder.”39
His distracted mind, however, torn between
the book and his mistress, cannot adequately follow the text: “thus leapinge
from the demonstration to my Mistris, and returning from my Mistris to
the demonstration, I gayned so much in the eand as I vnderstood nether
rightly.” After struggling between their two contrary attractions, he re-
solves that the constancy, gravity, and “hidden misteries” of Knowledge
are greater than his mistress’ changeable, trifling attitude, which at best,
yieldssexualexhaustion:“itproducedoutofconclusionsperpetuallcontent-
ment, shee in conclusion produced sadnes, for they say Omne animall post
coitum triste.” Thus, he dedicates his service to the “infinite worthy Mistris”
of Knowledge and, with her, the “myndes quiet, sowles felicitie, resolution
of futur state, wonderinge at nothinge, Inseeinge into all.”40
In retrospect,
the essay is a love letter to knowledge, its pivotal moment the coup de foudre
when a passion to understand the rules of nature ensnares an unsuspecting
young man, “little thinckinge that a Mathematicall line beinge lesse then
anvntwinedthreddcouldhavebenestrongertohavestayedme,theneyther
fetters or Chaynes.”41
38. TNA, SP 14/11, fol. 15v. While no work by Alhazen remains in the Northumberland li-
brary, Shirley noted that a surviving copy of the 1572 edition of the Opticæ Thesaurus contains
markings made by Thomas Harriot, dated “Syon.1597” (Harriot, p. 238). The copy, which is held
at the Universitetsbiblioteket, Oslo, has been digitized by the library and is accessible online.
39. TNA, SP 14/11 fol. 15v. We can locate the illustration that fascinated Northumberland
with some precision. Friedrich Risner’s 1572 edition of Alhazen’s Opticæ Thesaurus was supple-
mented by Witelo’s Perspectiva, which includes a calculation of the height of the earth’s atmosphere
based on the angle of the sun at twilight (Vitellonis Opticæ, pp. 451–53). It was probably the figure
on p. 453, in which the calculation is demonstrated, that caught Northumberland’s attention and
not (pace Yates, p. 142) the book’s attractive frontispiece.
40. TNA, SP 14/11, fol. 16.
41. TNA, SP 14/11, fol. 15v.

As in his essay on friendship, Northumberland’s essay on love and
learning documents the birth of an intellectual in whose eyes, from the
vantage point of enlightenment, the attractions of his former desires look
pale, their pitfalls painfully obvious: “myndes disquiet, attendant servitude,
flatteringe observance, losse of tyme, passion without reason.” However,
despite the clear moral that the intemperate pursuit of a mistress is incom-
patible with the pursuit of knowledge, Northumberland reluctantly con-
cedes that it is at least possible to enjoy both learning and a mistress, “least I
showld open my humor to be over enclyning to a Cynicall disposition.”42
In the essay on friendship, this cynical disposition is given free rein: if the
essay on knowledge tells a story of one love eclipsing another, the essay on
friendship sets out violently to demolish an idol of the mind. Taking as its
quarry an enduring philosophical tradition, the friendship essay is more
directly an intellectual intervention than any of Northumberland’s other
writings.
III
The ideal of perfect friendship had a long history, stemming chiefly from
its seminal articulation by Aristotle. In treating the broad concept of philia
in books 8 and 9 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes teleia philia
(perfect friendship) as that rare relationship of similarly virtuous men who
desire good things for one another and whose trust in each other’s goodness
constitutes the source of their enduring love (1156b–57b).43
This model
of perfect friendship is the subject of Cicero’s philosophical dialogue De
amicitia, whose main interlocutor, Laelius, articulates an account of ideal
friendship based on his own relationship with the late Scipio Aemilianus.
Cicero’s treatise on friendship was familiar to every educated reader in Re-
naissance England, largely because of its widespread use in pedagogical
contexts: according to Laurie Shannon, De amicitia played “an astonish-
ingly key role in the school curricula formulated by humanist and educa-
tion writers.”44
As an indication of the text’s centrality, in The Scholemaster
(1570), Roger Ascham’s influential educational program specifically de-
signed for private education of aristocratic children, not only is De amicitia
42. TNA, SP 14/11, fol. 16.
43. Roger Crisp, tr., Nicomachean Ethics (Cambridge, Eng., 2000), pp. 147–49.
44. Shannon, Sovereign Amity, pp. 26–27. T.W. Baldwin found it frequently prescribed by
sixteenth-century educational theorists, both for grammar schools and private tutors: William
Shakespere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, (Urbana, 1944), esp. 2, 590–93.
Misha Teramura 391

prescribed as a suitable text for daily reading, but Ascham also includes a
personal recollection of teaching Latin to his “deare frende” John Whit-
ney through double translation exercises using Cicero’s treatise as their
text.45
Northumberland knew both Aristotle and Cicero directly. His anno-
tated copy of a 1593 edition of the Nicomachean Ethics in Latin translation
survives at Petworth House,46
as does his copy of Cicero’s Opera (Paris,
1555), although some of the phrases in the essay suggest the influence of
John Harington’s Englishing of De amicitia, which would have been the most
current vernacular rendering when Northumberland began his schooling
at Egremont.47
That the Aristotelian-Ciceronian model of perfect friend-
ship is Northumberland’s target becomes explicit on the final page of his
essay (fol. 62) when he enumerates the constitutive criteria of friendship
as defined by the ancient philosophers, taken almost verbatim from De
amicitia. Northumberland was not alone in his skepticism about the possi-
bility of teleia philia: the ancient sources often cite the paucity of historical
examples of perfect friendship, while more modern commentators won-
dered whether the moral erosion since antiquity had undermined the very
conditions requisite for true friendship.48
Aristotle himself was thought to
45. Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster Or plaine and perfite way of teachyng children, to vnderstand,
write, and speake, the Latin tong, but specially purposed for the priuate brynging vp of youth in Ientlemen
and Noble mens houses (1570), sigs. K4–K4v. See Shannon, Sovereign Amity, pp. 23–24.
46. Aristotelis I Tomus Ethicus: in quo; Ethicorum ad Nicomachum Libri X (Frankfurt, 1593). See
Batho, “Library,” p. 259. As Northumberland told his son, “[t]he attaining to the Latin is most
of vse, the Greeke but losse of tyme” (Batho and Clucas, ed., Advices, p. 31; cf. Harrison, ed., Ad-
vice, p. 67). Subsequent citations to the Latin translation of Aristotle will refer to the 1593 Frankfurt
edition.
47. John Harington, tr., The booke of freendeship of Marcus Tulie Cicero (1550). Harington’s trans-
lation (from Jean Collin’s French translation of 1537) was reprinted in 1562, before Thomas New-
town’s translation appeared in Fowre Seuerall Treatises of M. Tullius Cicero (1577). On North-
umberland’s annotations in his copy of Cicero’s Opera, see Stephen Clucas, “‘Noble virtue in
extremes’: Henry Percy, Ninth Earl of Northumberland, Patronage and the Politics of Stoic Con-
solation,” Renaissance Studies 9 (1995), 267–91, 268–70.
48. According to Sir Thomas Elyot, friendship “is nowe so infrequent or straunge amonge
mortall men, by the tyrannie of couetise & ambition, whiche haue longe reigned, and yet do, that
amitie may nowe vnethe be knowen, or founden throughout the worlde”: The boke named the
Gouernour (1531) sig. S2. Both ancient philosophers and early modern essayists were also acutely
aware that many “friendly” relationships fell short of the high standard for perfect friendship: dis-
tinguishing the varieties of philia is a central concern for Aristotle, and Plutarch included an essay in
the Moralia on how to tell a flatterer from a friend (“Comment on pourra discerner le flatteur
d’auec l’amy” in Jacque Amyot’s French translation, owned by Northumberland). See also Keith
Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2009), p. 198.

have lamented helplessly, “O my friends, there is no friend.”49
Northum-
berland, however, was exceptional in holding the ancient criteria of perfect
friendship to be “manifest Impossibilyties,” categorically dispelling any hope
that the philosophical ideal could ever be attained.
From the perspective of intellectual history, Northumberland’s resis-
tance to the vision of friendship put forward in Nicomachean Ethics might
be taken as a symptom of an anti-Aristotelian bias associated with the
new experimental philosophy, especially as articulated by Francis Bacon.
However, as Stephen Clucas has shown, Aristotle remained an intellec-
tual foundation in the thinking of the Northumberland circle, including
Thomas Hariot and the Earl himself.50
Indeed, in 1615 Northumberland
himself advised one of his son’s tutors that “a generall insight into Aris-
totells Philosophy will not be amisse.”51
Rather, his real targets in the es-
say are the tenacity of ungrounded convictions, blindly passed on from
generation to generation by the credulity of both teachers and students,
and those who would ignorantly defend those convictions against the ob-
jections of reason and experience.52
Since friendship is an impossibility,
“and since impossible I thinke both harmefull and daingerous,” rational
contentmentcanonlybeattainedbytheexposureanderadicationof harm-
ful idealism: “the maske of Error being torne away by truth to the viewe of
all, at least to the greater multitudes, wch
Inconveniences may mightyly be
Corrected hereafter, they being acquainted wth
the Roote from whence
they spring” (fol. 61). In this respect, Northumberland identifies a Baconian
idolum theatri, the demolition of which is necessary for the advancement of
learning and the pursuit of happiness.
49. The exclamation, quoted as such by Montaigne (Essais, ed. Balsamo et al, p. 197; Frame, tr.,
Essays, p. 140), comes from a widespread corruption in the text of Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the
Eminent Philosophers (5.21): see Langer, Perfect Friendship, 15–20. Daniel Tuvill erroneously attrib-
uted the saying to Socrates: see Essaies Politicke, and Morall (1608), sig. M2v. Much later the apoc-
ryphal utterance would form the point of departure for Derrida’s Politiques de l’amitié (1994), tr.
George Collins as Politics of Friendship (London, 1997).
50. Whereas Robert Hugh Kargon argued that the scientific work of Northumberland,
Hariot, and their associates was predicated on a “complete rejection of Aristotelianism” (Atomism
in England from Hariot to Newton [Oxford, 1966], p. 9), Clucas demonstrates that even when they
departed from an Aristotelian understanding of nature, they often took its positions as a starting
point (“The 1595 Advice and the Philosophical Milieu of the Northumberland Circle,” in Batho
and Clucas, ed., Advices, pp. lvi–lvii). See also Clucas, “‘The Infinite Variety of Formes and Mag-
nitudes’: 16th- and 17th-century English Corpuscular Philosophy and Aristotleian Theories of
Matter and Form,” Early Modern Science and Medicine 2 (1997), 251–71.
51. Archives of the Duke of Northumberland at Alnwick Castle, Sy: P.I.3.x (Northumberland
to Daniel Horsmanden, October 6, 1615).
52. On the broader early modern context of custom’s opponents and proponents, see Law-
rence Manley, Convention, 1500–1750 (Cambridge, Mass., 1980).
Misha Teramura 393

If George Peele could describe Northumberland in 1593 as a denizen of
“the spacious pleasant fieldes / Of diuine science and Phylosophie, [. . .]
beholding the deformities / Of common errors,” the essay on friendship
would seem to be a vivid testament to this facet of Northumberland’s
thought at that time. The date of essay is, however, uncertain. The text
provides no clear temporal indicators and even the manuscript (discussed
below) offers us no reliable terminus ante quem. Compared to the Earl’s other
writings, the friendship essay shares concerns with both datable parts of
the advices to Algernon, and the piece to which it bears its closest resem-
blance, the essay on love and learning, is comparably difficult to date.53
The
essay’s valorization of a life of seclusion and the virtue of “self resolucion”
(fol. 62) resonates with the Earl’s attention to stoicism during his years in the
Tower,54
although he seems to have been naturally inclined to privacy
throughout his life, and even during his years of political influence on
the Privy Council, “leaned more [. . .] to priuat domesticall pleasures, then
to other ambitions.”55
Formally speaking, the essay on friendship illustrates Mark Nicholls’s
general assessment of Northumberland’s prose: “A sometimes laboured
style does not obscure either an originality in his writings or a sharp, enqui-
53. The sole manuscript (TNA, SP 14/11, fols. 15–16) is undated. Modern scholars assembling
the State Papers conjectured a date of either 1604 or 1605 (fol. 16v) and it was tentatively assigned
to the former year in the Calendar (CSP Domestic, 1603–1625, p. 183). Frances Yates, who wished to
connect the essay to the composition of Love’s Labour’s Lost, claimed that it was in circulation by
1594, and that its style aligned it more closely with the earlier part of the Advices than the later one:
Study of ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, pp. 143–45. Hilary Gatti argued against Yates’s stylistic argument by
demonstrating the essay’s indebtedness to Giordano Bruno’s De gl’heroici furori, a text that North-
umberland studied during his years in the Tower, and proposing instead a new range of 1611–1614:
“Giordano Bruno: The Texts in the Library of the Ninth Earl of Northumberland,” Journal of the
Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 46 (1983), 63–77, p. 71; The Renaissance Drama of Knowledge:
Giordano Bruno in England (London, 1989), pp. 35–48, esp. 44. It is striking that in a letter to Edward
Bruce written in December 1601, Henry Howard (soon to be Earl of Northampton) provides a
scurrilous description of Northumberland that includes the same Latin proverb “omne animal post
coitum triste” that appears in the Earl’s essay on love and learning: see The Secret Correspondence of
Sir Robert Cecil with James VI, King of Scotland, ed. David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes (Edinburgh, 1766),
p. 32; qtd. Harrison, ed., Advice, p. 21.
54. For a reading of this interest in Northumberland’s annotations, as well as in poems ad-
dressed to the Earl by John Davies of Hereford and John Ford, see Clucas, “Noble virtue in ex-
tremes,” pp. 267–91.
55. TNA, SP 14/16, fol. 146; qtd. Nicholls, Investigating Gunpowder Plot, p. 144. The letter,
dated November 15, 1605, was written by Northumberland to the Privy Council in the wake
of the Gunpowder Plot as an attempt to exonerate himself from the suspicion of ambition; how-
ever, as Mark Nicholls observes, this protestation would have been too dangerous to advance
were it not already known to be true (p. 144).

ring mind.”56
Indeed, Northumberland was attentive to style throughout
his life. In the 1595 advice, he counsels Algernon to train his children to
read rather from “books well written for the phrase, then chosen for the
matter, bycause the first impression of a proper stile, giues facilite in writing
for euer.”57
However, by 1609 his attitude on writing had changed: “Won-
der not at the alteration of the style,” he tells Algernon, “whiche perhapps
yow may fynd, for ether haue I gott muche since that tyme in looking after
other matters of greater waight or lost mutche forme in phrase whiche
youth commonly pleaseth it se[l]fe with.”58
If this difference in style might
be taken as an index for dating Northumberland’s other works,59
then some
stylistic parallels between the elaborate friendship essay and the earlier (1595)
part of the advices, such as a proclivity for anadiplosis and a distinctive
phraseology,60
might suggest a date of composition before his imprison-
ment in the Tower, by which time he was convinced that “things plai[n]
liest written are the best way for doctrine, [fyne phrases] and labored styles
are but to please those who are more taken with shaddows then wth
sub-
stances.”61
However, even if Northumberland endeavored to write “in
the plainest characters I could deuise,” he nevertheless remained distinc-
tive to his contemporaries: receiving a letter from Northumberland in
1612, Robert Cecil remarked “that yf yt had had no name yet he shold
have knowne by the stile whence yt came.”62
Related to the issue of style is that of genre. The title attributed to the
text in the sole manuscript, “My Lord of Northumberlands conceipt con-
56. Nicholls, Investigating Gunpowder Plot, p. 86.
59. See, e.g.,Yates,Studyof‘Love’sLabour’sLost’,p.145,andGatti,“GiordanoBruno,”pp.71–72.
60. Some examples of anadiplosis in the 1595 advice include: “for wearisomnes desiers ease, and
ease safety, and safety groes out of knowledge and assurance”; “This custom begetts an habit and
aptnes to encline to vertu and reason, and vertu and reason makes theim happy in their dayes boeth
to theim selues and others; to others in their actions and good counsells, to theim selues out of true
aduise”; “that estimatio[n] doeth but ryse from others oppinions, and those opinions doe follow
out of desart or flattery, and flattery out of diuers ends in the ende will transform a man vnreasonable”
(Batho and Clucas, ed., Advices, pp. 17, 18, 24–25; cf. Harrison, ed., Advice, pp. 59, 62–63). The phrase
“tyed wth
the Chaines of good Conceipt” (fol. 60v) in the friendship essay occurs as “linked, with the
chains of good conceit” in the 1595 advice: in both cases, Northumberland is referring to the favor-
able opinions that induce children to obey their teachers (Batho and Clucas, ed., Advices, p. 29;
cf. Harrison, ed., Advice, p. 65).
61. Batho and Clucas, ed., Advices, p. 41; cf. Harrison, ed., Advice, p. 73. The words “fyne
phrases” are cancelled in the Leconfield MS.
62. TNA, SP 14/69, fol. 121v (Chamberlain to Carleton, June 25, 1612); qtd. McClure, ed.,
Letters of John Chamberlain, 1, 363. Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, had died on May 24, 1612.
Misha Teramura 395

cerning ffriends and ffriendshipp,” offers not so much a generic designa-
tion as an indication of content: that is, conceit probably means a “private
opinion” (OED, n.II.4a) rather than its literary critical denotation as an in-
genious expression of wit, and the word (like the title as a whole) seems
non-authorial, possibly suggested to a copyist by its ubiquity within the
text itself. Throughout the present introduction, I have used the word “es-
say” as a provisional designation given the proximity of Northumberland’s
composition to the emergence of the essay as a genre in English letters after
the publication of Montaigne’s Essais.63
The antagonism toward custom
was a characteristically Montaignian theme, especially for his English read-
ers,64
and the subject of friendship was widely addressed by the early En-
glish essayists.65
In fact, in some ways Northumberland’s cynical treatment
of friendship is typical (at least more so than Bacon’s adulatory treatment)
of the seventeenth-century essayists, who, as David Wooton observes,
tend to consider friendship circumspectly as “a focus of anxiety, [. . .]
the most difficult of all social negotiations.”66
Both of Northumberland’s
63. Some helpful surveys and definitions include Elbert N.S. Thompson, The Seventeenth-
Century English Essay, University of Iowa Humanistic Studies (Iowa City, 1926); Ted-Larry
Pebworth, “Not Being, But Passing: Defining the Early English Essay,” Studies in the Literary Imag-
ination 10 (1977), 17–27; The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. Michael Kiernan, The Ox-
ford Francis Bacon, XV. (Oxford, 1985/2000), pp. xlvii–liii; Joshua Scodel, “The Early English
Essay,” A Companion to British Literature, ed. Robert DeMaria, Jr., Heesok Chang, and Samantha
Zacher (Malden, Mass., 2014), pp. 2, 213–30.
64. William M. Hamlin, Montaigne’s English Journey: Reading the Essays in Shakespeare’s Day
(Oxford, 2013), pp. 67–94.
65. Haly Heron, A Newe Discourse of Morall Philosophie, Entituled, The Kayes of Counsaile (1579),
pp. 21–28 (“Of Company and felowship”); William Paulet, Marquis of Winchester, The Lord Marques
Idlenes (1586), pp. 36–39 (“Of Friendship and Friends”); “Anonymus,” Remedies Against Discontent-
ment (1596), sigs. C7–8 (“Of the choice of frendes”); William Cornwallis, Essayes (1600), sigs. E1v–
E6v (“Of Friendship & Factions”); Robert Johnson, Essaies (1601), sigs. E4v–E8v (“Of Affabilitie”);
D[aniel] T[uvil], Essaies Politicke, and Morall (1608), fols. 79v–97 (“Cautions in Friendship”); John Rob-
inson, New Essayes (1628), pp. 199–208 (“Of Societie, and Freindship [sic]”).
66. David Wooton, “Francis Bacon: Your Flexible Friend,” The World of the Favourite, ed. J.H.
Elliott and L.W.B. Brockliss (New Haven, 1999), pp. 184–204, esp. pp. 189–92. E.g., Cornwallis
writes: “I laugh, and wonder, at the straunge occasions that men take now a dayes to say they loue
[. . .] if their new-fangled inuentions can finde out any occasion, they are sworn brothers, they will
liue, and dye together: but they scarce sleep in this mind, the one comes to make vse of the other,
and that spoyles all”: Cornwallis, Essayes, sigs. D8–D8v (“Of Loue”); qtd. Bray, The Friend, 75. Ac-
cording to Wooton, Bacon’s 1625 essay on friendship is both an endorsement of the Jacobean pol-
itics of friendship addressed to the volume’s dedicatee the Duke of Buckingham, and a genuine
celebration of his own friendship with Toby Matthew (196–202); perhaps if we were to assign
it a late date of composition, it is possible that Northumberland’s essay might have been motivated
by a hostility to this culture of favoritism.

two short essayistic compositions—that on friendship and that on love and
learning—offer narratives less resembling Montaignian exhibitionism than
a kind of Augustinian exemplarity, although the direct second-person ad-
dress of the latter suggests a kinship to Seneca’s Epistulae Morales, which
was a key classical model for the Renaissance essay tradition.67
In later life
Northumberland seems to have held an ambivalent view of the essay
genre, or at least its practitioners, as when he distinguishes for Algernon
the differences between true lovers of knowledge and impostors: “And
belieue me, Empericks [cancelled: Impostures], what maskes they putt on,
ether concerning matter of enginns for vse, or proiects to serue there
cuntry, or of healthe to helpe them selues or there frends, or of essayes
to passe a way the tyme, hauing nothing else to doe, [cancelled: they shall
propound,] yett shall yow fynd, that ether gayne or glory is there end,
not knowledge.”68
The posturing of scientiﬁc frauds involves not only
searching into purportedly useful inventions, but also the composition of
essays, neither of which is motivated by a true desire for enlightenment.
Whether or not Northumberland’s description implicates the essay itself
as an inherently dilettantish form, he clearly speaks from a familiarity with
a cultural milieu in which the casual writing of essays was a regular practice,
perhaps one with which he had direct experience in his earlier years.
However, the middle-aged Northumberland’s aversion to elaborate
style and his ambivalence about the composition of essays, regardless of
their utility in helping us assign a date to his writing on friendship, both
resonate with one of its most interesting characteristics: an acutely jaun-
diced assessment of the literary. For Northumberland, literary narratives
inculcate moral values, and his two speciﬁc examples—”our Nurces bal-
lad songes of Damon and Pithias to procure vs asleepe” and “our Schoole-
Maisters faigned Comœdies of Nisus and Eurialus to delight and drawe
young Creatures wth
more desire to learning”—are likely, in such an au-
tobiographically confessional piece of writing, taken from his own life.
The plausibility is supported by external evidence. Shortly after North-
67. As Bacon wrote of the “essay”: “The word is late, but the thing is auncient. For Senecaes
Epistles to Lucilius, yf youe marke them well, are but Essaies,—That is dispersed Meditacions,
thoughe conveyed in the forme of Epistles” (BL, Add. MS 4259, fol. 155; qtd. Kiernan, ed.,
Essayes, 317).
68. Batho and Clucas, ed., Advices, 94; cf. Harrison, ed., Advice, 118. It may be possible that
Northumberland’s “essayes” refers to experimentation, but the attendant mention of idle leisure
time closely matches the tone of early literary essayists describing their own writing.
Misha Teramura 397

umberland’s birth in 1564, the Stationers’ Register records (in 1565–
1566) a printing license that was acquired for “a ballet intituled tow
[i.e. two] lamentable songes pithias & damon.”69
This ballad on the leg-
endary friends does not survive, although its popularity is evident from
another extant ballad, published in 1568, set “[t]o the tune of Damon
and Pithias.”70
The song may even have been remembered at the close
of the sixteenth century by none other than Shakespeare, when Hamlet
serenades Horatio with a ballad that begins, “For thou dost know, O Da-
mon dear.”71
If it is possible that Northumberland may have recalled this
ballad from his own cradle years, so too might he have participated in
the pedagogical performance exercise based on characters from Vergil’s
Aeneid: not the mobled Queen Hecuba, but the tragic Trojan friends Ni-
sus and Euryalus. The performance of Latin drama was widespread in pub-
lic and grammar schools,72
and Northumberland’s account plausibly offers
evidencethatsimilarexercisescouldbeusedinprivateeducationsuchasthat
he received at Egremont.73
But just as interesting as Northumberland’s fragmentary memories of
literary consumption is the literary theory that they imply. If in the essay
on love and learning, Sidney’s Arcadia simply serves as an emblem of mis-
guided carnal passions to be contrasted against Alhazen’s Opticae Thesau-
rus, emblematizing scientiﬁc enlightenment,74
literature is taken far more
69. Book A, fol. 136v. Cf. A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–
1640, ed. Edward Arber (London, 1875–1894), 1, 304.
70. A Newe Ballade of a Louer/ Extollinge his Ladye. To the tune of Damon and Pithias (1568).
71. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. G.R. Hibbard (Oxford, 1987), 3.2.265. See also Ross W.
Dufﬁn, Shakespeare’s Songbook (New York, 2004), pp. 116–18.
72. Ursula Potter, “Performing Arts in the Tudor Classroom,” Tudor Drama before Shakespeare
1485–1590, ed. Lloyd Kermode, et al (New York, 2004), pp. 143–65, esp. 152–54; Lynn Enterline,
Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (Philadelphia, 2012), pp. 38–48, esp. 41, 43.
The avowed goal of these performances was more often to develop students’ oral delivery than
simply to make language learning more appealing.
73. I assume that by “Schoole-Maisters” Northumberland means private tutors (OED, 1c), the
sense understood by Ascham, rather than grammar school headmasters.
74. Sidney’s Arcadia is similarly disparaged in Northumberland’s advices to his son as the reading
material of unambitious young girls: “if any doe excelle there fellowes in matter of language as
somme Ladies doe; if it be in Frenche commonly yow shall fynd it noe farther improued then
to the study of an Amadis; if in Italien to the reading of an Ariosto; or if in Spanische to the looking
vpon a Diana de Monto mayor [i.e., Jorge de Montemayor]; if in Englische our naturall tonge to an
Arcadia or some loue discourses, to make them able to entertaine a stranger vpon a harthe in a priuy
chamber” (Batho and Clucas, ed., Advices, p. 63; cf. Harrison, ed., Advice, pp. 91–92). As Frances
Yates observed, Northumberland’s own wife, along with her sister Lady Penelope Rich, appeared
allegorically as characters within Arcadia itself (Study of ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, p. 151).

seriously in the friendship essay, and its assumptions even overlap with
the arguments of Sidney’s Defense of Poetry. While Northumberland’s de-
scription of the “fantasticall fancies of Poetts” may simply reproduce a cli-
chéd anti-poetic prejudice,75
his proposition that poets themselves “wilbe
found the first Inventors” of the philosophical ideal of friendship (fols.
59v–60) effectively exemplifies Sidney’s argument, in his response to Plato,
that ancient philosophers “picked out of the sweet mysteries of poetry the
right discerning true points of knowledge.”76
Of course, for Northumber-
land, this lineage is the root of the problem, both in the philosophical tra-
dition and in each person’s moral development. He shares with Plato the
assumption that literary narratives irrevocably impress young minds with
moral convictions, an assumption shared in turn by the Horatian-Sidneian
postulate that poetry both delights and instructs. However, this didactic
power makes poetry capable of indoctrinatory miseducation. If for Spen-
ser—whose Faerie Queene featured a dedicatory sonnet to Northumber-
land—the telos of poetry was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in
vertuous and gentle discipline,” for Northumberland it is precisely this
moral project that makes poetry so dangerous.77
As a concluding thought, returning to the essay’s theme of friendship,
it is perhaps worth mentioning that although writers like Sidney and
Spenser were among those whom Northumberland might accuse of up-
holding the false ideal of teleia philia, there was also a strong dissenting tra-
dition in early modern literary depictions of friendship, especially those
written for the theater.78
Northumberland—whose brothers included a
playwright (William Percy) and two of Essex’s followers who commis-
sioned the notorious 1601 performance of Richard II (Charles and Josce-
line)—was himself a reader of plays and evidently familiar with Shakespeare’s
1 Henry IV.79
It is suggestive, then, that the deeply skeptical treatments of
75. On “fantastical” as a conventional epithet for poets, see [George Puttenham], The Arte of
English Poesie (1589), pp. 13–14 (sigs. D3–D3v).
76. Sir Philip Sidney, The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford, 2002), p. 238
(lines 1077–78).
77. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Qveene (1590), sigs. 2Q1v (dedicatory sonnet to Northumber-
land), 2P1 (epistle to Ralegh).
78. See, e.g., Robert Stretter, “Cicero on Stage: Damon and Pithias and the Fate of Classical
Friendship in English Drama,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 47 (2005), 345–65; MacFaul,
Male Friendship; John D. Cox, “Shakespeare and the Ethics of Friendship,” Religion and Literature
40.3 (2008), 1–29.
79. Northumberland’s annotated copies of Guarini’s Il pastor fido and Oddi’s Comedie survive at
Petworth House and Alnwick Castle, respectively (Batho, “Library,” pp. 259–60), and other Italian
playbooks are listed among the Earl’s volumes removed from the Tower in 1614 (De Fonblanque,
Misha Teramura 399

the fortunes of friendship in dramatic works like Shakespeare’s The Two
Gentlemen of Verona, Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen,
and The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second by
Northumberland’s erstwhile acquaintance Christopher Marlowe present
us, ironically, with perhaps the closest parallels for Northumberland’s
own cynical view that the philosophical ideal of perfect friendship is noth-
ing but an idolum theatri.
IV
Northumberland’s essay on friendship survives in only one copy, pre-
served in British Library, Additional MS 12504, a composite folio volume
of state and legal papers owned by the lawyer and politician Sir Julius Cae-
sar (1558–1636), who served under King James as Chancellor of the Ex-
chequer, a Privy Councilor, and Master of the Rolls. The volume was sold
at the auction of Caesar’s manuscripts in 1757, entering the library of Hor-
ace Walpole, before its acquisition by the British Museum in 1842, and is
now part of the extensive collection of Caesar’s papers held at the British
Library.80
The essay came into Caesar’s possession as part of a modest pre-
sentation manuscript of three texts sent by one “Wal: Jeffes” as an overture
to soliciting Caesar’s patronage.81
Jeffes’s manuscript (fols. 45–65v) appears
to have consisted of 21 foliated leaves measuring approximately 31 by
21cm.82
The three texts, in order, are: “A short viewe of the Life of Henry
the third” (fols. 47–57), unattributed to its author, Sir Robert Cotton83
;
2, 626–30). Northumberland’s allusion to 1 Henry IV appears in a letter to William Cecil, second
Earl of Salisbury, likely from 1628: Hatﬁeld House, Cecil Papers 126/168–69, discussed in Helen E.
Sandison, “The Ninth Earl of Northumberland Quotes His Ancestor Hotspur,” Review of English
Studies 12 (1936), 71–75.
80. Catalogue of the Manuscripts of the Right Honourable and Right Worshipful Sir Julius Cæsar,
Knight, p. 11 (lot 178); Catalogue of Additions, pp. v, 35–38. The price paid at the 1757 sale ( £8
13s. 6d.) appears on fol. 2, as does another annotation recording the volume’s purchase at the
Strawberry Hill sale on April 30, 1842. The armorial bookplate of Horace Walpole appears on
fol. 1v.
81. The Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts in the British Museum records the name of the
sender as “Walter Jefferies,” perhaps interpreting the otiose ﬂourish above the signature as an ab-
breviation (p. 35).
82. The package’s foliation starts on fol. 47.
83. Cotton’s history and its appearance in this manuscript are discussed in Stephen Clucas,
“Robert Cotton’s A Short View of the Life of Henry the Third and Its Presentation in 1614,” The Crisis
of 1614 and The Addled Parliament: Literary and Historical Perspectives, ed. Stephen Clucas and Rosalind
Davies (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 177–89.

“My Lord of Northumberlands conceipt concerning ffriends and ffriend-
shipp” (fols. 58–62); and, “When[c]e proceedeth the litle Securitie of
ffavouritts” (fols. 63–65), apparently Jeffes’ own translation84
from the
Spanish “De donde proçeda la poca seguridad de Priuados” by Antonio
Pérez.85
The texts themselves are preceded by a title-page listing the pack-
age’s contents (fol. 45), and a brief prefatory epistle to “To the right hon:
Sir Iulius Cæsar kt
. Mr
of the Rolls, and one of his Mats
. most hon: Priuy
Counsell,” in which Jeffes writes that necessity has emboldened him “to
comend vnto your viewe a Copie of these short discourses, not doubting
but each subiect is such, and soe well written, as may easily perswade your
honour to entertaine soe good Companions, and the rather because they
desire not to be ouerchargeable vnto yow” (fol. 46v). The manuscript
was incorporated into the present volume by Caesar, whose table of con-
tents neglects to list Northumberland’s essay, despite naming the life of
Henry III and the Spanish text on favorites (fol. 3).86
It is unclear when exactly Jeffes’ presentation manuscript was prepared.
His epistle is undated, although the address to Caesar as Master of the
Rolls indicates a date after 1614, in which year he assumed that office,
holding it until his death in 1636.87
Roughly the same terminus a quo is pro-
vided by the inclusion of Cotton’s Short View of the Long Life and Reign of
Henry the Third, King of England, which was presumably completed about
84. In the MS, the passage begins with a translator’s note: “I haue followed the originall as neare
as our language would admytt, wch
obseruance of proprietie hath Compelled me to enlarge some
proporcions and to pare from others, that the Spanish garment might be more fashionable in or
Eyes” (fol. 63).
85. Cf. Segvndas Cartas de Ant. Perez. Mas los Aphorismos dellas sacados por el Cvrioso que sacò los de
las Primeras. Del mismo las Aphorismos del libro de las relaciones (Paris, 1603), fols. 115–21v. The colorful
Pérez, an exile from Spain, resided in England from April 1593 to July 1595, returning in 1596, and
again in 1604: see Gustav Ungerer, A Spaniard in Elizabethan England: The Correspondence of Antonio
Pérez’s Exile, (London, 1974–1976). In England, Pérez was closely associated with the Essex circle:
an edition of his Pedaços de Historia ô Relaciones was printed by Richard Field (1594) with a dedi-
cation to Essex, later reprinted in Segvndas Cartas (fols. 153v–54v). Pérez distributed copies of the
Relaciones to English noblemen, and an English translation (Bodleian Library, MS Eng. hist. c. 239)
was prepared by Arthur Atye for Anthony Bacon shortly after the publication: see Ungerer, Span-
iard in Elizabethan England, pp. 249–70.
86. Caesar’s foliation, however, assures us that the essay was present in the original manuscript.
87. Caesar was granted reversion of the mastership in January 1611 when the office had been
assumed by Sir Edward Phelips. Phelips died on September 11, and Caesar was formally granted
the office on October 1 (see, e.g., the patents doquets in TNA, SP 14/141, fol. 74). On Caesar’s
career, see L.M. Hill, Bench and Bureaucracy: The Public Career of Sir Julius Caesar, 1580–1636 (Stan-
ford, 1988).
Misha Teramura 401

29 April 1614, as the work is so dated in several extant manuscripts,88
and
the publication of that text in 1627 might perhaps suggest a possible termi-
nus ante quem, although manuscript copies were produced into the 1630s.
Nothing known about Jeffes assists us in narrowing the date range fur-
ther,89
nor do the manuscript’s watermarks.90
If the other contents of the
composite volume might be taken to offer some guidance, a date of late
1610s might be cautiously proposed.
What follows is a semi-diplomatic transcription of Northumberland’s
essay as it appears in Additional MS 12504. It was written in a hybrid sec-
retary and italic hand, with frequent variation between characteristic fea-
tures of both: no attempt has been made to distinguish these variations
besides the unambiguous case of proper names and quotations, which
are indicated by italicized words. Italics within words represent expanded
contractions. The few cancellations and insertions in the manuscript are
taken to be the result of mistakes made by the scribe while copying and
have not been recorded.
REED COLLEGE
88. BL, Add. MS 5994, fols. 178–84v, Harley MS 2245, fols. 1–8, Sloane MS 3073, fols. 38–49,
and Cambridge University Library, MS Gg. 2. 28, fols. 59v–67. See Peter Beal, Catalogue of English
Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700, CtR 389, 397, 403, and 408, respectively.
89. In 2003, Stephen Clucas, in a study of the early circulation of Robert Cotton’s History of
Henry the Third, reported: “So far my attempts at uncovering details of Walter Jeffes and his in-
volvement in this document have been unsuccessful. Dr Christopher Thompson has kindly drawn
my attention to Norfolk Record Ofﬁce, Hare MS 2723, in which a ‘Walter Jeffes’ appears as a sig-
natory witness to a deed of release by Sir Thomas Barrington, Sir William Marsham, Sir Nathaniel
Rich, John Pym, and Peter Phesaunt to Sir John Hare of the manor and estate of Shouldham in
Norfolk. This might indicate that Jeffes was a lawyer to one of the parties. The document is dated
1632” (“Cotton’s A Short View,” p. 189, n60). To this, one might add that a “Walter Jeffes” also
appears as a witness on a lease and an assignment of leasehold terms pertaining to a farm in Corn-
wall, dated March 1, 1624 and March 18, 1628, respectively (Cornwall Record Ofﬁce, DS/315 and
316), and also that a “Walter Jeffe” died at sixty years old and was buried at St Botolph, Bishops-
gate, on November 19, 1638 (London Metropolitan Archive, P69/BOT4/A/001/MS04515/
002).
90. The scribe used two kinds of paper. One watermark (featuring the arms of Burgundy and
Austria with the Golden Fleece) resembles Heawood 481, Briquet 2291, and, most closely, Gravell
ARMS.401.1, found used in the 1590s in Germany, the Netherlands, and eastern France. The
other watermark (featuring a Basel crozier within a shield) is similar to the type represented by Bri-
quet 1347, produced by Niklaus Hüsler in Basel from the 1580s to the early seventeenth century;
the particular variation used in the Jeffes manuscript most closely resembles Heawood 1199, which
Heawood found used in 1616.

[TEXT]
My Lord of Northumberlands conceipt
concerning ffriends and ffriendshipp
Time, and yeares, hauing wedded my youth to the worldes benefittes,
Liberty, wealth, and honour, and at an instant being leapt from bondage,
want, and meaner titles; Alteracions too Contrary for youth at first either
to gouerne or dispose of rightly: The Paradize was too glorious for weake
eyes to discouer what future discontentmentes might be vnderhidden:
ffriendes were in multitudes, or at least friendly professors, pleasing wordes,
and the worldes greate expectation (wth
the Conclusion of lending) were
to myne Eares noe niggardes: kindnesses in such aboundance, as made an-
cient definers of friendshipp esteemed wise men; Albeit not then agreeing
wth
Aristotle that ffriendshipp could be but betweene two;91
All thinges
were soe plausible92
that ffawnelike simplicity feared noe hunters. Some
were friendes for likenes in yeares, others for factions, some to Compass
marriage,93
others for gaine, some for play, others for Company; Some
for Iestes, others for Creditt, some for horsflying iuges,94
other for feather
wearinges: besides soe many many deare friendes as either men had humors
or occasions to be serued, whose purposes being once gayned, or those
fancies being spent in that degree by either side, soe fast did friendshipp
slipp away, and new like puppettes leaped in their places; those that were
91. Nicomachean Ethics, 1171a. According to Diogenes Laertius (Lives of Eminent Philosophers,
5.21), one of Aristotle’s “habitual sayings” was “He who has friends [i.e. more than one friend]
can have no true friend” (R.D. Hicks, trans., Lives of Eminent Philosophers [Cambridge, Mass.,
1972], 465), although early modern editions often misrepresented this line before Isaac Casaubon’s
emendation in Notæ, Ad Diogenis Laërtij libros de vitis, dictis & decretis principum Philosophorum (Bern,
1583), sig. L1v. See Langer, Perfect Friendship, pp. 18–19.
92. plausible: pleasing.
93. In his advices, Northumberland cautioned his son against the machinations of those who
would try to arrange his marriage: “To giue yow to a wyfe is probable will be the first attempt,
for then will yow be yonge, and packs will be the easiliest layd; in whiche my first dayes can
say somwhat, for almost I had bene caught, by the combination of fre[n]d and followers, to haue
bene marryed to a long sorrow, had not my fortun bene the better” (Batho and Clucas, ed., Advices,
p. 88; cf. Harison, ed., Advice, pp. 110–11).
94. The obscure phrase “horsflying iuges” (i.e. adjudicators of horse racing?) represents my best
interpretation of the manuscript, which offers no obvious clearer reading here. In a comparable
passage in his 1609 advices, Northumberland warns against the company of gallants, including
“dicers, carders, bowlers, cockers, horse runners &c” (Batho and Clucas, ed., Advices, p. 90; cf.
Harison, ed., Advice, p. 113). An alternative interpretation of the minims—“horsfly iuginges”—
might be preferred for the sake of parallelism.
Misha Teramura 403

past spared not to requite good turnes wth
slaunderous reproaches, back-
bitings and such kind of mallice, as their simplicity had taught them. An-
other sort of friendes there were, I meane States-men,95
or Chamber-talkers,
more witty, less honest, ambitious out of measure, most by their owne over-
weaning, some by reading of Plutarck,96
free speakers of all mens Condicions;
Medlers in euery matter nothing Concerned them; discouerers97
of se-
crettes, wth
this Caveat, Say nothing, when a thousand shall knowe it; This finer
sort were ordynarily possest with mightie suspition and Iealousie; gessing at
mens mindes by their gestures, and Condemning [fol. 58v] vpon farr fett98
supposalls: These were most subiect to the receaveing of vnkindnesses, from
vnkindnesses to concealing them, from Concealeing to mistrust; Then fol-
lowed like headles multitudes, Mallice, dissembling, deuises to seperate
friendes, if they bare but mislike to either, alleadgeing want of good Na-
ture, disclosing what before tyme in friendshipp had bene reuealed; Imper-
fections laid open to the vttermost, and innumerable other Inconve-
niences, besides amongst this kind an aptnes to beleeue tales against how
deare a friend soeuer, if it carried the least tast of any probabillity. / Being
tyred wth
these friendly Comfortes soe often tasted of, and discontented at
the soe often remove99
of affections in opinion soe firmely established, A
priuatt life embraced me, rather for griefe and melancholy, then alloweing
any way that retirednes for its owne worth: yet still wth
a minde of return-
ing. Griefe Contynued in his full scope, drawing on Consideracions how
like Errors might hereafter be prevented, by amending what might here-
after bee found the originall Cause of these hartbreakers. / Amongst other
disquieted thoughtes, first burdening my self as faulty, attributing it to my
want of Iudgement in Choice, then to their dispositions, wch
might hap-
95. As Northumberland warned his son, “There are an other kind of men emongest the rest,
that will seeke to bestow yowr courses called state men, whoe thinke them selues soe or at least
would be thought soe; very witty they are, but poore withall, and want noe ambition; there endes
are employments; by employments to ryse [. . .] Yett, this note, by the way of my experience, that
as soone as a crosse fortun shall falle vpon yow, things not sorting according to there layd proiects,
they are gone like lice from a dead carcasse, striuing then to shew them selues wyse by being base
excusing it thus, to doe yow noe good, and our selues harm, weare a great point of indiscretion”
(Batho and Clucas, ed., Advices, p. 91–92; cf. Harrison, ed., Advice, pp. 114–16.)
96. Presumably the Parallel Lives, Thomas North’s translation of which (from Jacques Amyot’s
French) would have been newly available in 1579.
97. discouerers: revealers.
98. farr fett: far-fetched.
99. soe often remove: so frequent withdrawal. (The adjectival use of often, rare today, was com-
mon in early modern writing.)

pily be found Contrary in others, and wth
such like slender perswasions my
hopes were kept liveing till some light of impossibilyty was presented to
my vnderstanding, one Conceipt draweing on an other. / Then grewe
there better meanes of Comfort, and strong Reasons pleaded, that retired-
ness was the most happie State, and that perswaders to ambitious thoughtes
in any sort, either for ffriendshipp, or second Endes, were the Nourcers of
all vnhappines, the overthrowers of most, and the greatest abusers of young
men. / These Reasons being entertained [fol. 59] Discontentmentes were
shaken of, soe as Cogitations possest quietness, where they enioyed free-
dome, and freedome gaue me Abillytie to sett downe, what I had either
by experience or reason assured my self, this happiness of mutuall friend-
shipp was or might bee: a happiness I might well terme it, if it were possible
those friendes were in proofe100
according to the defining of it by many:
or that men might enioy by any labour, desert, or fortune, soe blessed
an associacion, as hath drawne such multitudes, to beleeue that such there
is to be found, Which opinion soe firmely established in Mens mindes will
hardly be remoued at first blush, hauing taken soe deepe roote from gen-
eration to generation by ignorance and idle searchers into these Causes in
particular, whereby these hopes and absurdities, are growne to soe stedfast
assurance, and mens Conceiptes soe bent after dwellinges in these airye
Castles, running forward in Childish Credulytie soe long, till death makes
meanes of further Considering lifeless, and old Ignorance by yt
death in
others to be newe borne: And those that perhaps haue had that good happ
rightly to haue Considered esteeme the Iewell too precious once being
attayned, to lett euery one be partaker wth
out trauaile or worthyness,
of the like quiett purchased by Consideracion, encreast by Iudgement,
and Contynued by treading downe partiallytie. But to Content and stay
vntempred mindes from hastie Condemninges, and passionated humoured
men from laying downe the book before they haue perused any part, or
almost vouchsafed it a glaunce wth
theyr Eye, beholding the Content han-
dled Contrary to their accustomed bredd opinions: I am forced for some-
time to procure patience, and suspence of Iudgement without perempto-
riness by this litle warning, howe apt that mens spirittes are, to entertayne
into their spirituall Chambers hast and inconsideracion, and how hast and
Inconsideracion distempers spirittes for the tyme, allmost [fol. 59v] to
meere madness, how vnfitt guestes they are for such a mansion and how
seldome without patience those Mansions are haunted wth
Temperaunce
100. in proofe: in actual experience.
Misha Teramura 405

and not rash Iudgementes. Thus if that humour soe by nature enclyned,
Chaunce to stirr I doubt not but this Caueat will make them soone
Conceaue it, and force their hasty Natures, from hasty Censuringes, till
proofes and reasons try it most vnworthy of that worthy Estimacion, I
meane not vnworthy of it self if it were possible to be, but not being pos-
sible in my Conceipt, vnfitt to beare the title of happiness. I thinke the la-
bour of soe many Philosophers & learned Men, in the defining of true
friendes, was rather to laye open the high reach of their Conceiptes, and
how by their fine wittes they could frame an heauen in an impossibility,
and diuine ioyes in earthly bodies, then that such wise men Could euer
be Charmed wth
any thought that such vnlikelihoodes might bee, whose
Iudgementes were soe great in naturall Causes101
what might belong either
to necessity of inward motions, or how those motions might be framed
either by higher workeinges, or lower discordes, how tymes made greate
diffrences, and how these diffrences indifferently ordred, made humours
not mutually agreeing, and generally how Equallityes working vpon
Equallyties produced the same effect; And Contrary Inequallyty workeing
in or vpon varyety, what multitude of Chaunges it did worke and bring
forth; how strictly they seemed to Canvas these Causes and many moe
of the same effect as may appeare at large by diuers of their discourses
makes me Conceaue that these impossibilityes were followed by them
for the former Causes, if not for greater Consideracions, and farther am-
plified by fantasticall102
fancies of Poetts, for the persons, their braines be-
ing fitted both by humour and practice for the receipt103
and Invention of
more wonderfull and straunger Cogitacions then these, and being well
101. In the following passage Northumberland appears to draw upon and echo Aristotle’s dis-
cussion of the varieties of philia. For Aristotle, friendship stems from self-love: true self-love will
lead the good man to virtuous actions (and to desire good for his friend), whereas base men are
conflicted in their desires and subject to discord in their souls (1166a–b: “In eorum enim amino
discordiæ & seditiones concitantur” [p. 181]). Elsewhere Aristotle describes mutability in friendships,
as when childhood friends mature and grow to differ in their likes and dislikes (1165b: “qui fieri
potest, vt sint amici, qui neque eadem probent, neque eisdem aut delectentur, aut offendantur?” [pp. 178–
79]). Throughout his discussion of philia, Aristotle distinguishes those relationships that are based
on equality, in which the two parties exchange the same benefits or two different ones (1158b:
“In æqualitate igitur eæ, quas supra diximus, amicitiæ positæ sunt. Aut eadem enim ab vtroque præstantur,
eademque alter alteri vult euenire: aut aliud cum alio commutant, verbi gratia, cum vtilitate voluptatem”
[p. 160]), from those based on inequality (e.g. father and son), which operate through non-
reciprocal exchange. Northumberland’s abstract language in this passage, however, might suggest
that he has in mind Aristotelian precepts of causes and effects in nature.
102. A contemptuous epithet commonly applied to poets. See [George Puttenham], The Arte of
English Poesie (1589), pp. 13–14 (sigs. D3–D3v).
103. receipt: capacity for receiving.

and throughly sifted, I Conceaue these running and vnstayed104
heades
wilbe found the first Inventors of [fol. 60] this supposed heaven, drawne
downe by their ffables to the earth, howsoeuer by tyme and ignorance
wee were ledd to the hope of it, A hope rather taught vs by our Nurces
ballad songes of Damon and Pithias to procure vs asleepe,105
or by our
Schoole-Maisters faigned Comœdies of Nisus and Eurialus to delight
and drawe young Creatures wth
more desire to learning,106
and afterward
Contynued, as it is most likely, by sharkeing107
gallantes well practiced in
youthes Condicions, knoweing the passionate humours of young braynes
fitt for any impression; And wth
what extraordynary love those silly young
men (not yet tired wth
friendly Conclusions) might be held wth
that bridle,
the name of true friendshipp, deeming it the best way to cloake their
deuises from poore vnexperienced Eyes, then of any such beliefe could
growe out of their sound Iudgementes, whose Craft might well haue
taught them a higher strayne of that Condicion, or perhaps they deliuered
it in good will, desireing to drawe them to their owne opinions, as it is
seene most Commonly in whatsoeuer men affect. / These ending the
world,108
one ignorantly forgetting that she had wrought in Cradle such
begining of fancies; the other noe farther Considering then that he had
followed his predecessors footstepps, wch
was well in him since other of
auncienter tyme had soe allowed it, litle remembring what he had
grounded by his Comœdies; The third if simply Comitting the absurditie
in perswading, then likely died as simply wth
out amending the fault, if
otherwise hauing once compast his plottes, and made vniust meanes his
Succors
was as willing to Conceale his deuises, as to manifest them, and
to lay to rest wth
him in his graue the report of honestie, as the infamie
of deceyte: Soe wee remayning not further in searching into these Causes,
hindred eyther by youth that will not suffer any leisure to Consideracion,
drawne on to pleasures and fancies first appearing to their Eyes: or by
wilfullnes peremptorily to beleeue it, because they had affirmed it, to
104. running and vnstayed: changeable and unrestrained.
105. The story of Damon and Phintias was most readily accessible in Cicero’s De officiis (3.45),
although it was retold by Sir Thomas Elyot in The boke named the Governour (sigs. S5v–S6v) and was
dramatized by Richard Edwards in the mid-1560s as The excellent Comedie of two the moste faithfullest
Freendes, Damon and Pithias (1571).
106. In the Aeneid, the Trojan Nisus helps Euryalus win the footrace at the funeral games for
Anchises (5.286–361); later, during the night raid on the Rutulians, he is unable to save his friend’s
life, and is himself killed avenging his death (9.176–472).
107. sharkeing: parasitically sponging; swindling.
108. ending the world: dying.
Misha Teramura 407

whome wee [fol. 60v] were tyed wth
the Chaines of good Conceipt,109
as it is in most thinges vnder the heavens, not weighing further then our
affections perswade vs, and how those affections are moved to such a
likeing wee nothing Consider or search out, wch
if they did I am per-
swaded the groundes would be found fickle foundations for such hoped
Truthes. These also as I gess may be some of the spring heades from
whence these Imaginatiue faire friendes proceed, easily ouerthrowne by
proofes, that it is not possible any such friendes can be; if there be noe such
friendes, then absolutely noe true friendes, and if noe true friendes, then
not to be esteemed or desired farther then in reason is necessary; And
how farr that necessity may require it is hard to lymitt, since euery mans
occasions may be more or less; Therefore must Iudgement and discretion
procure happie liueing wth
Contentment, free from Crosses and troubles of
the mind, burdens that most seeke to shake of, yet fewest neare to ease and
quiett, takeing the wrong path in Pithagoras his Letter.110
Thus farr in secrett haue I opened some Conceipt111
of Custome, and
wilfull ignorance, the two mightie Ringleaders of the world, how the
one is of power, how the other may perswade men to innumerable ab-
surdities. ffor Custome many Examples might be alleaged more plainly
and familiarly to our sences to prove it of greater force then most men
can at first thought imagine, because it is Contrary to some false groundes,
taught vs for principles. / Couering thinges of Custome wth
the vayles of
nature and high wonders: for the other I will demaund noe better proofe,
then partiallitie to be banished, if these were farther requisitt to be treated
of: Now is there already light enough geven to the wiser by particular
examinacion quickly to be satisfied, as for the duller sort, I leaue them
to be Cured by tyme, the Phisicion of fooles, holding wordes ill spent,
where [fol. 61] truth112
by want of knowledge shalbe made false./
And now whatsoeuer hath bene said, as to some preiudicate113
opin-
ions may appeare, to the disallowing of mutuall friendes, and soe by Con-
sequent, of their friendshipp, hardly Censuring wth
out reason (wch
more
109. good Conceipt: favorable opinion.
110. Namely, upsilon (Y), representing life’s forking paths towards vice or virtue (Persius, Sat-
ires 3.56–57).
111. opened some Conceipt: shared an idea. The phrase “in secret” may mean either confiden-
tially, or in seclusion.
112. The word “where,” redundantly repeated at the beginning of fol. 61, is omitted in this
transcription.
113. preiudicate: prejudiced.

trulie they might iudge void of womanly passions) and being contrarie to
their first imprest fancies, not knoweing how to answeare it but by an
instinct of nature, makeing it a sanctuary and refuge for their ignorance,
when as they neither knowe, nor haue the least Conceipt what nature or
instinct is, but raylingly affirme it is laboured to be proved euill, pernitious,
and not praise worthy, Contrary to all Common sence, when in truth this
Course, tendes but to the refelling114
of those hopes grounded vpon soe
slight Causes, finding it neither to be gotten or enioyed by worldly Crea-
tures. And Conceauing in it an extreame impossibity [sic], and since im-
possible I thinke both harmefull and daingerous, wth
out forewarning the
world of abuses, and those abuses to be laid open to the world, that euery
one wth
this benefitt, added to their experience, might forme a greater
force to this prevention, the maske of Error being torne away by truth
to the viewe of all, at least to the greater multitudes, wch
Inconveniences
may mightyly be Corrected hereafter, they being acquainted wth
the Roote
from whence they spring: Euery one skillfull, none being able to execute
witt in that degree of perswading matters as probable as footepathes in the
seas,115
noe doubt but those hopes wilbe in a good way to be disinhabited,
and lye to rest wth
dead memorie, none finding it were fitt to be vttered to
their best advantage, and soe may by discontynuance erect in the world and
mens mindes, honestie true, and iust dealinges, for Conscience and Charitie
sake, till a cold evening assemble apes to the bloweing at a gloeworme and a
faggott,116
and soe for the fires sake renue friendshipp; the first originall of
this wee soe discontentedly enioy to our hartes sorrowes. But this dis-
gression shall noe longer wth
hold me from my purpose, wch
now is noe
more but to shewe what friendshipp is, by the defining of [fol. 61v] them
that thought they could well say to the matter. In wch
the Philosophers doe
differ in their opinions, some in parte, some in wholle, that if there were
noe other Cause of doubt ministred, or rather to be assured in these fancies,
yet might it vpon smalle Consideracion appeare to indifferent Iudges,
howesoeuer by way of discourse they were Content to sett it downe, it
should be: yet did they not averr it to be as knowne by proofe, or their
114. refelling: refuting.
115. perswading. . . seas: propounding claims as believable (or testable) as footpaths in the seas
(i.e. sophistries?). Cf. Isa. 43.16: “Thus saith the Lorde, euen he that maketh away in the sea,
and a foote path in the mightie waters” (Bishops’ Bible).
116. An Aesopic fable tells of a group of apes who try in vain to warm themselves by piling fuel
on a glowworm, ignoring the advice of nearby popinjays. See Thomas North, tr., The Morall
Philosophie of Doni (1570), fols. 58–59v.
Misha Teramura 409

Against Friendship An Essay By The Wizard Earl Of Northumberland

Against Friendship An Essay By The Wizard Earl Of Northumberland

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

Similar to Against Friendship An Essay By The Wizard Earl Of Northumberland

Similar to Against Friendship An Essay By The Wizard Earl Of Northumberland (10)

More from Daphne Smith

More from Daphne Smith (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Against Friendship An Essay By The Wizard Earl Of Northumberland