Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 63.djvu/170

 capacities of warrior, councillor, father, and husband, but chiefly as a literary patron. To the same effect are some twenty poems which were published in 1624, just after Southampton's death, in a volume edited by his chaplain, William Jones, entitled ‘Teares of the Isle of Wight, Shed on the Tombe of their most noble, valorous, and loving Captaine and Governor the right honorable Henrie, Earl of Southampton;’ this was reprinted by Malone in the ‘Variorum Shakespeare,’ 1821, xx. 450 seq.

Southampton's countenance probably survives in more canvases than that of any of his contemporaries. Fifteen extant portraits have been identified on good authority. Two portraits representing the earl in early manhood are at Welbeck Abbey. One, in which he is resplendently attired, is reproduced in Mr. Fairfax Murray's catalogue of the pictures at Welbeck, and in the present writer's ‘Life of Shakespeare;’ it was probably painted when the earl was just of age. The second portrait at Welbeck depicts Southampton five or six years later in prison; a cat and a book in richly jewelled binding are on a desk at the right hand (cf., Catalogue of the Pictures at Welbeck). Of the remaining eight paintings, two are assigned to Van Somer, and represent the earl in early middle age; one, a half-length, a charming picture, once belonged to Sir James Knowles, of Queen Anne's Lodge, London; the other, a full-length in drab doublet and hose, is in the Shakespeare Memorial Gallery at Stratford-on-Avon. To Mereveldt, who painted the earl later, four portraits are assigned, those now at Woburn Abbey (the seat of the Duke of Bedford), at Althorpe, at Hardwicke Hall, and at the National Portrait Gallery, London. A sixth picture, assigned to Mytens, belongs to Viscount Powerscourt; a seventh, by an unknown artist, belongs to Mr. Wingfield Digby; and the eighth (in armour) is in the master's lodge at St. John's College, Cambridge, where Southampton was educated. The miniature by Isaac Oliver, which also represents Southampton in late life, was formerly in Dr. Lumsden Propert's collection. It now belongs to a collector at Hamburg. The two miniatures assigned to Peter Oliver belong respectively to Mr. Jeffery Whitehead and Sir Francis Cook, bart. (cf. Catalogue of Exhibition of Portrait Miniatures at the Burlington Fine Arts Club, London, 1889, pp. 32, 71, 100). In the best preserved portraits the eyes are blue and the hair a dark shade of auburn. Among middle-life portraits Southampton looks best in the one assigned to Van Somer, formerly in the collection of Sir James Knowles. There is a good print by Pass.

[Gervase Markham supplied a brief biography of Southampton as well as of Henry de Vere, earl of Oxford, Robert, third earl of Essex, and Robert Bertie, lord Willoughby of Eresby, in a work entitled Honour in his Perfection, 1624. Nathan Drake, in his Shakespeare and his Times (1817), ii. 1–73, supplied the first full argument in favour of Southampton's identity with the hero of Shakespeare's sonnets. Much space is devoted to Southampton's early life and his relations with Shakespeare and the Elizabethan poets in the present writer's Life of Shakespeare, 1898 (illustrated edit. 1899). Mr. Samuel Butler, in Shakespeare's Sonnets Reconsidered (1899), questions the conclusions there reached. See also Brydges's Memoirs of the Peers of England, p. 324 seq.; Memoirs of Henry Wriothesley in Malone's Shakespeare, edited by James Boswell the younger, Variorum edition, 1821, vol. xx.; Malone's Inquiry into the Authenticity of the Ireland Manuscripts, 1796, pp. 180–94; Gerald Massey's The Secret Drama of Shakespeare's Sonnets; Lodge's Portraits, iii. 155 seq.; Edward Edwards's Life of Ralegh, 1868, i. 251 seq., 346; Devereux's Lives of the Earls of Essex; Spedding's Life of Bacon; Gardiner's History of England; Brown's Genesis of the United States; Doyle's Baronage; G. E. C[okayne]'s Complete Peerage.] 

WRIOTHESLEY (more correctly WRITH or WRYTHE), JOHN (d. 1504), Garter king-of-arms, is represented in the pedigree drawn up by his son Sir Thomas as descended from a Wriothesley who lived in the reign of John. That form of the name is, however, an invention by Sir Thomas, and probably the pedigree is also. The family name was Writh or Wrythe, and incidental notices of various members of it occur in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; a Nicholas Wryth (d. 1499) was fellow of Merton College, Oxford (, Memorials, pp. 236–7; cf. Brit. Mus. Add. Charters, 26932–3; Cal. Ancient Deeds, P.R.O., i. 558).

Sir John is said to have been brought to the court of Henry V, and made by that king antelope pursuivant extraordinary, but both these statements are practically impossible. He was, however, faucon herald in the reigns of Henry VI and Edward IV, and was made Norroy king-of-arms on 25 Jan. 1477; he was promoted Garter king on 16 July 1479, being the third holder of that office. He was sent to proclaim war with Scotland at Edinburgh in 1480 and on many similar missions, and officiated at the funeral of Edward IV and coronation of Richard III, who renewed his grant. Writh was thus its official head when the College of Heralds was incorporated in 1483, and in