The Sonnets: Bound for a Friend

On 31 July 1602 Henry Neville told Robert Cecil that the Queen already possessed land belonging to some of his friends. They had made it over to help him meet the terms of his fine. Neville remained confined, and without his pardon he could not complete the transactions needed to repay them:

Now till I have my pardon, I can neither give my friends any recompense, for the land which they have made over for me, nor receive money for the land I have sold as mine own.¹

His friends’ assistance had drawn their property into his punishment. The Crown held their land, but he could neither repay them nor secure his own freedom. Sonnet 134 drives that disturbing separation between another person’s loss and the speaker’s release to its limit:

Sonnet 134, lines 11–14

And sue a friend came debtor for my sake;
So him I lose through my unkind abuse.
Him have I lost; thou hast both him and me.
He pays the whole, and yet am I not free.²

The friend has become liable “for my sake”; the creditor now holds both people. Neville’s letters show how helping a debtor could entangle the helper, and how one obligation generated another.

A friend’s assistance becomes a liability

Some obligations predated the Crown’s demands. On 25 July 1601 Neville explained what had happened to his valuable possessions:

Those I had, as my plate and other things of best value, I have been forced to sell since my trouble, to pay my debts and to disengage my friends that stood bound for me, as became an honest man.³

Selling the goods released friends who had already stood bound for him. It also reduced what remained available for his fine.

The fine brought a fresh demand. By 3 April 1602 the Queen had accepted an offer of £5,000, payable through money on delivery of pardon, land and later instalments. Neville offered his own recognizances—acknowledged obligations of record. The Lord Treasurer required “bonds with sureties.”⁴ A surety made another person answerable if Neville failed to pay.

That was precisely the risk friends hesitated to take. His estate was exhausted, and the Queen’s claim stood before those of other creditors. He had little left with which to protect the people who might guarantee him. On 18 April he proposed another form of security:

Whereas my Lord Treasurer required bonds of me with sureties, I finding that my friends are willinger to engage their land for me than their bonds, have offered of mine own and my friends’, land of the yearly rent of about six score pounds.⁵

He offered land producing about £120 a year, first for £2,000 of the remaining debt and then at a reduced valuation. Every part accepted in land would reduce what still required sureties. His explanation shows why the form of the assistance mattered:

I protest by the faith of a Christian, that I do it not with any meaning to let the land fall into the Queen’s hands, for there were small honesty for me to deal so with my friend, but only to avoid the necessity of providing sureties for so great sums, which I find to be so hard a matter, and which, though I should obtain it at my friends’ hands, would infinitely entangle the poor remnant of my estate, with counter-assurances to them.⁵

“Land is better assurance than any man’s bond” was his practical conclusion.⁵ To obtain his friends’ guarantees, he would have to secure them in turn. Those counter-assurances would further encumber the remnant of the estate already needed to meet the original penalty. He was trying to prevent help from becoming another means of ruin. By July, friends’ land had passed to the Crown, yet the uncompleted pardon still prevented him compensating them.

Both men held

Sonnet 133 makes another person’s involvement the cause of the speaker’s protest:

Sonnet 133

Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groan
For that deep wound it gives my friend and me.
Is ’t not enough to torture me alone,
But slave to slavery my sweet’st friend must be?
Me from myself thy cruel eye hath taken,
And my next self thou harder hast engrossed;
Of him, myself, and thee I am forsaken,
A torment thrice threefold thus to be crossed.
Prison my heart in thy steel bosom’s ward,
But then my friend’s heart let my poor heart bail.
Whoe’er keeps me, let my heart be his guard;
Thou canst not then use rigor in my jail.
And yet thou wilt, for I, being pent in thee,
Perforce am thine, and all that is in me.²

It is not enough for the mistress to hold one heart: she also possesses the friend’s. The speaker offers his own captivity as bail for the other, but cannot make the exchange work. She already holds him and everything within him.

Neville likewise tried to prevent his punishment from spreading to others. His petitions for his wife and children belong to the preceding Sonnet 66 discussion; the friends’ letters show a different mechanism. They helped willingly, but their property and credit became answerable for his obligations. Read in full, Sonnet 134 explains how the friend reaches the predicament announced in its closing lines. The mistress’s possession of both men becomes a financial action:

Sonnet 134

So, now I have confessed that he is thine
And I myself am mortgaged to thy will,
Myself I’ll forfeit, so that other mine
Thou wilt restore to be my comfort still.
But thou wilt not, nor he will not be free,
For thou art covetous, and he is kind;
He learned but surety-like to write for me
Under that bond that him as fast doth bind.
The statute of thy beauty thou wilt take,
Thou usurer that put’st forth all to use,
And sue a friend came debtor for my sake;
So him I lose through my unkind abuse.
Him have I lost; thou hast both him and me.
He pays the whole, and yet am I not free.²

The speaker is mortgaged; the friend writes under a bond; the creditor can sue him. His kindness has helped bring about the speaker’s loss, and he too will not be free. The sonnet’s creditor is the mistress, its statute is beauty, and its forfeiture concerns the relations among all three. Legal obligations become the workings of desire.

Neville’s letters supply the practical force of that language. Standing surety is an act of friendship that creates liability. In Neville’s case, help had already placed his friends’ property in the Crown’s hands while his pardon remained uncompleted. The poem drives the failure of release further: the friend pays the whole, yet the speaker is still held.

Valuing a limited possession

An August 1601 petition places another unusual term beside the valuation of property. Neville said that nothing could be strained against him beyond misprision, the legal limit of his offence. He asked Cecil and the other lords:

To estimate what my estate for life might be worth, in lands of that yearly value, and to make an offer thereof unto her Majesty in my name.⁶

Much of the land was already settled on his son. What Neville could offer was principally his own lifetime interest, not the whole inheritance. After allowances, he calculated the available income at about £500 a year and its value at six years’ purchase: £3,000.⁶

Sonnet 87 also joins estimate, worth and misprision to the limits of possession:

Sonnet 87

Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing,
And like enough thou know’st thy estimate.
The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing;
My bonds in thee are all determinate.
For how do I hold thee but by thy granting,
And for that riches where is my deserving?
The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting,
And so my patent back again is swerving.
Thy self thou gav’st, thy own worth then not knowing,
Or me, to whom thou gav’st it, else mistaking;
So thy great gift, upon misprision growing,
Comes home again, on better judgment making.
Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter,
In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.⁶

The gift rests on an error in value or in the recipient’s deserving. Correct that error, and the grant returns to its giver. In Neville’s petition, misprision names an offence; in the poem, a mistake. The senses differ, but in both passages the word belongs to an assessment of what someone can properly hold and what he may lose. The poem’s charter, patent and ended bonds give the loss the form of a title withdrawn.

Release, and what follows it

Neville was still seeking liberty in January 1603. Cecil’s intercession gave him joy, but had not yet secured his delivery.⁷ Elizabeth died on 24 March. On 5 April James’s letter concerning Southampton’s release added an instruction for Neville’s. The same royal letter dealt with both prisoners; contemporary reports establish that both were out by 10 April.⁸

Sonnet 107 moves from a lease threatened with forfeiture to an assured crown and renewed hope:

Sonnet 107

Not mine own fears nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom.
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,
And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assured,
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.
Now with the drops of this most balmy time
My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes,
Since, spite of him, I’ll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults o’er dull and speechless tribes;
And thou in this shalt find thy monument
When tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent.⁹

Sidney Lee read the mortal moon’s eclipse as Elizabeth’s death, the assured crown as James’s accession, and the renewal as Southampton’s release.⁹ On that historical reading, the public change directly transforms the beloved’s prospects. Neville was the other prisoner named in the instruction. Read as his address to Southampton, the poem becomes the celebration of one released prisoner speaking to another.

The “lease” supposed forfeit also continues the language of limited possession. Neville’s petitions had tried to preserve what remained of his life and interest; the poem passes from a threatened term to life secured in verse. Its last promise outlasts the new ruler’s mercy. When the monuments of rulers have worn away, the person addressed will still have his monument in the poem.