The Sonnets: The Judging Eye

On 8 May 1601 Neville asked Robert Cecil to look at him in two different capacities. As a councillor, Cecil judged the offence. As a friend, he knew the man whose wife and children would suffer with him:

Humbly beseeching you not to look upon my offences only with the severe eye of a councillor of state, but sometimes also with the affectionate eye of an honourable friend, and to think of my poor wife and children, whose good or ruin is now in your hands.¹

Neville placed his “chief and only confidence (after God)” in Cecil’s favour and compassion. He admitted a great fault, but asked that it be understood as more misfortune than malice. The councillor and the friend could see the same man differently.

Sonnet 29 moves from hostile eyes to the value of one person’s love:

Sonnet 29

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.¹

Neville asks one person to look with affection as well as severity. The sonnet’s speaker escapes public judgment by remembering someone’s love. Its three uses of state carry the reversal: the outcast condition becomes a state that rises like the lark and finally outweighs a king’s. In each, the public condition is not the final measure of the person: the letter asks affection to intervene in it, while the poem discovers a wealth that makes it bearable. Neville’s own words for his condition in April 1602—“my state is utterly overthrown”—show what that public measure meant.²

The misery of waiting

Affection had to produce action. Neville could not end his dependence on Cecil merely by remembering his kindness. In March 1602, after proposing terms for his fine, he closed by submitting:

For I am not so unreasonable to press any more, but will rather resolve to subject myself with patience to any misery that God hath appointed for me.³

Sonnet 58 gives dependence the form of waiting upon another’s freedom:

Sonnet 58

That god forbid, that made me first your slave,
I should in thought control your times of pleasure,
Or at your hand th’ account of hours to crave,
Being your vassal bound to stay your leisure.
O, let me suffer, being at your beck,
Th’ imprisoned absence of your liberty,
And patience, tame to sufferance, bide each check
Without accusing you of injury.
Be where you list, your charter is so strong
That you yourself may privilege your time
To what you will; to you it doth belong
Yourself to pardon of self-doing crime.
I am to wait, though waiting so be hell,
Not blame your pleasure, be it ill or well.³

One person controls the time; the other suffers the delay without claiming the right to condemn it. The privileged beloved may even pardon his own conduct. Neville seeks someone else’s pardon, but the pressure of his stance is similar: he needs action and must avoid making his urgency sound like an accusation.

In September 1601 he promised to urge nothing Cecil found inconvenient and to refer everything to his “good pleasure and favour.” Nobody would give Neville credit or contract with him until the pardon was sealed.⁴ The delay prevented the transactions needed to meet the conditions of release. Submission was the form his urgent request had to take.

Concealing a name to protect its bearer

A friend’s public intervention could rescue Neville. Acknowledging another relationship could ruin the person who had served him. A March 1601 letter gives that danger a practical form. Neville had employed Colville to obtain intelligence in Rome. He told Cecil that the man had travelled at Neville’s procurement and chiefly at his expense, and had gained the confidence of the people whose activities he was observing. Colville had required a promise:

He made me give him my faith that I would not reveal him to anybody, nor be acknowen that he held intelligence with me, for it would be, he said, his utter ruin.

Neville asked Cecil to preserve that protection:

Only I humbly beseech your honour that his name may be concealed, because I have given him my faith to that effect.⁵

Sonnets 36 and 89 likewise describe a relationship that must not be publicly acknowledged. Sonnet 36 says:

Sonnet 36, lines 9–14

I may not evermore acknowledge thee,
Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame,
Nor thou with public kindness honor me
Unless thou take that honor from thy name.
But do not so. I love thee in such sort
As, thou being mine, mine is thy good report.

And Sonnet 89 takes the separation into speech and conduct:

Sonnet 89, lines 8–12

I will acquaintance strangle and look strange,
Be absent from thy walks, and in my tongue
Thy sweet beloved name no more shall dwell,
Lest I, too much profane, should do it wrong
And haply of our old acquaintance tell.

The circumstances differ: Colville’s danger arose from the discovery of his intelligence work; the poems describe the danger of association with a disgraced speaker. The shared action is deliberate concealment of a name and connection to protect the other person. Neville’s letter supplies an instance in which silence about a relationship was an explicit promise, made because disclosure could ruin the person he was protecting.

The blot and the cure

Concealment could protect a connection; Neville also sought a way to remove the disgrace that made association dangerous. On 31 July 1602 Neville thanked Cecil for kindness that had “even enthralled my heart unto you,” then proposed how he might remove his offence from the Queen’s sight:

If there be no other means to wipe away this blot wherewith I am soiled, yet it is possible, that if I were at liberty, I might shed so much of my blood, in some place where she hath occasion to use men, as might serve for a laver for the crime, which hath made me so ugly in her eye.⁶

His blood would become a laver, a means of washing. Release would allow him to serve where the Queen needed men; the service might kill him, but it could cleanse the offence that had made him ugly to her. Disgrace has become something on the body and in the sovereign’s eye.

The opening of Sonnet 36 gives the reason for the separation its later lines enforce:

Sonnet 36, lines 1–4

Let me confess that we two must be twain
Although our undivided loves are one;
So shall those blots that do with me remain,
Without thy help, by me be borne alone.⁷

Here the speaker bears the blots alone to separate the other person from their consequences. Neville asks for the liberty to wash his stain away through service. Sonnet 111 develops the language of a remedy through “double penance” and “correct correction.” Neville could turn the same penitential accounting into a joke between friends.

In a dinner apology to Windebank, on a letter later endorsed 15 September 1608, he explained that a deer chase had kept him away and his household had then failed to serve the guest. His own absence and their neglect made two faults:

I am much ashamed of the errors which were redoubled towards you yesterday. First by myself in forsaking you, and next by my people in their ill attending you.

But I perceive errors go not single, but one commonly begets another, as bad, if not worse than itself. I pray you pardon both; confession and contrition you have already, which are two parts of penance. The third, satisfaction, shall be when and how you will enjoin it.⁸

The penitential accounting is exact enough to make the joke work: two faults to pardon, two parts of penance already performed, and satisfaction left to the injured friend.

In Sonnet 111 the treatment is bitter, and the need for the friend’s compassion urgent:

Sonnet 111

O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public manners breeds.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand;
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.
Pity me, then, and wish I were renewed,
Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink
Potions of eisel ’gainst my strong infection;
No bitterness that I will bitter think,
Nor double penance, to correct correction.
Pity me, then, dear friend, and I assure ye
Even that your pity is enough to cure me.⁶

The occupation marks the worker as dye marks the dyer’s hand. Neville’s stain arises from his offence; the sonnet’s from the public means by which the speaker lives. Both make disgrace a bodily stain and imagine a remedy willingly undergone: service and blood in Neville’s letter, medicine and penance in the sonnet. The apology’s doubled errors and parts of penance show the same accounting in Neville’s ordinary speech. He leaves satisfaction to his friend; the sonnet’s speaker offers to swallow bitter medicine, then asks for the remedy that requires no further suffering: pity itself.

One voice against the world

Sonnet 112 takes up 111’s final appeal to the friend:

Sonnet 112

Your love and pity doth th’ impression fill
Which vulgar scandal stamped upon my brow;
For what care I who calls me well or ill,
So you o’ergreen my bad, my good allow?
You are my all the world, and I must strive
To know my shames and praises from your tongue;
None else to me, nor I to none alive,
That my steeled sense or changes right or wrong.
In so profound abysm I throw all care
Of others’ voices that my adder’s sense
To critic and to flatterer stopped are.
Mark how with my neglect I do dispense:
You are so strongly in my purpose bred
That all the world besides methinks are dead.⁹

The friend’s love fills the impression left by scandal. The speaker excludes critic and flatterer alike, accepting praise and blame from one tongue. “All the world” first becomes the friend, then names everyone shut out.

In the September 1601 petition Neville had written:

I owe more unto your honour than to all the world besides.⁴

The words follow the practical account of his unsealed pardon and unavailable credit. Cecil’s intervention could change what the world would allow him to do. In the sonnet, the declaration makes one person’s opinion sufficient against everyone else’s. The shared phrase gains its force from that concentration of dependence: Neville’s “all the world besides” counts the people to whom he owes less; the poem’s treats every other voice as dead.

At the chapter’s opening, Neville asked Cecil to see him with the affectionate eye of a friend. Sonnet 112 completes a more absolute withdrawal from hostile judgment. The friend no longer supplies a second view alongside the public one. The friend becomes the only judge whose voice can reach him.