Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 11.djvu/562

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NOTES AND QUERIES. [io s. XL JUNE 12, im

written to all appearance some years earlier. There are a group of obituary acrostics on King James (ob. 27 March, 1625), Lodowick, Duke of Richmond (ob. 30 July, 1624), James, Marquess of Hamilton (ob. 2 March, 1624/5), and Arthur, Lord Chichester (ob. 19 Feb., 1624/5). These poems were surely written immediately after the deaths of their subjects. The Caius man was then a Devonshire schoolboy of thirteen or fourteen.

Sir Thomas Stanley married as his second wife Mary Hammond of St. Albans, near Dover. Their son Thomas Stanley the poet was born in 1625 ('D.N.B.'). Is the Devonshire schoolboy likely to have written the poems printed in the collection of 1630 : ' At the marriage of my honour 'd friend Sir Thomas Stanley with. . . .his wife that now is,' or the one ' Upon S r Thomas Stanley his Lady her first beeing with childe ' ?

In his poem ' The Jesuite,' originally printed in 1630, the author says :

I 've knowne in Spaine,

The Traitors death so moan'd, such credit gaine .... There Monster Jesuites make a Martyr'd saint,

and explains his meaning by describing the adoration paid to a picture of the English Jesuit Garnet in a Spanish church. The passage has all the marks of being inspired by ocular experience. That the author had been in Spain is again made likely by a passage in ' The Divine Dreame ' in the poems of 1641 :

me thou[g]ht I read, and read it ore Peccair no majs : that is, sinne no more Written in Spanish.

But could the Caius freshman of 1630 have been in Spain ?

The poetical encomia of the author's friends prefixed to ' Messallina ' make no reference to his being a clergyman or an LL.B. of Cambridge, though such titles would be an unusual adornment to a man who had had a successful play on the London stage.

The portrait prefixed to ' Messallina ' is that of a man rather of forty or fifty than of twenty-nine, the age of the Caius man in 1640.

The author's dedication of his poems of 1641 to Thomas Soame, Esq., Alderman of the City of London, clearly implies that his book emanated from London, and not from Devonshire : " Witness this city's approba- tion," &c.

I conclude that there is neither external nor internal evidence for the usually accepted identification of the author of " Messallina.'

Can we go further than this ?

We have a useful clue in the coat of arms

represented on the portrait prefixed to ' Messallina.' The arms are Sable, a chevron between three fleurs-de-lis argent, a mullet for difference (i.e., to signify that the bearer of the arms was a third son). These arms are stated in Burke's ' General Armory ' to be those of Richards of " Rowley " (a misprint for Rowling), co. Kent. Hasted (' History of Kent,' iii. 704) gives much information about this family in speaking of the hundred of Wingham and parish of Goodneston, in which the manor of Rolling or Rowling was situated.

In the College of Arms a short pedigree of the family, with a representation of its arms as described above, is given in Book C. 16, f. 105b. The arms are there sur- mounted by a crest : a gryphon's head erased arg., wounded in the neck gules.

Although Nathanael's name does not occur among the half-dozen names given in the pedigree, there can be little doubt that he belonged to this family. His writings yield one little scrap of confirmatory evi- dence. We saw that the second wife of Sir Thomas Stanley, in whose connubial life the poet had shown so marked an interest, was by birth Mary Hammond of St. Albans, near Dover. St. Albans was in the parish of Nonington, which adjoins Goodneston. And the will of Gabriel Richards of Rowling (ob. 1672) provides that after certain con- tingencies his estate should pass to William Hammond, " eldest son of my cousin William Hammond of St. Albans, Esq." We learn from Hasted that it did so pass, and William Hammond sold it in 1696 to Sir John Narborough, whose only sister and heir Elizabeth, wife of Sir Thomas D'aeth of Knolton, Bt., brought it into the D'aeth family.

I conclude, therefore, that the author of ' Messallina ' was a Richards of Rowling, Kent, and not a Richards of Kentisbury, Devon. More than this one cannot say with any certainty ; but I suggest that he was the third son of Capt. William Richards, " periti et exercitati ducis," to quote the words of the monument erected to him in Brabourne Church in accordance with the terms of the will of the above-mentioned Gabriel Richards, who was his second son.

Gabriel is said to have been seventy- seven at the time of his death in 1672. If Nathanael was the next brother, he would be born about 1599 or 1600, which would agree well with the evidence for the dra- matist's age afforded by the poems.

G. C. MOORE SMITH.

The University, Sheffield.