Sonnet 66: To Die, I Leave My Love Alone

In August 1601 Henry Neville asked Robert Cecil to put a value on the remainder of his life. His lands were largely settled on his children; what he could offer Queen Elizabeth was the income available to him while he lived. From this he begged that something be reserved for the “necessary sustenance of my wife and my eight poor children.” The petition then turned from the price of his life to his desire to be rid of it:

Unless I be so happy as to obtain some mitigation of that indignation which is kindled in her against me, I shall account my life but a burden unto me, and hope to be eased of it ere it be long.¹

On the same page he asked Cecil to persuade Elizabeth to “lay the punishment upon myself, which have only deserved it, and not upon my poor children which are innocent.” He was willing to undergo misery, even the loss of his life, to purchase her grace for them. His wish for death came with an urgent attempt to secure the lives of those who depended on him.

Sonnet 66 holds those two thoughts together. The speaker wants to leave the world; the person he loves would be left in it:

Sonnet 66

Tired with all these, for restful death I cry:
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimmed in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honor shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,
And simple truth miscalled simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill.
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.²

Ten successive lines begin with And, accumulating reasons to wish for death. The couplet brings the list to a halt. “Save that” introduces the one thing the speaker cannot dismiss: the cost of his departure to someone else. Neville’s petitions give that conflict an immediate setting in the welfare of his household.

Two August petitions

In another petition that August, Neville calculated what remained after the expenses of his embassy, his debts and the charges on his estate. He proposed payments and security for the fine. If the Queen would not accept them, he had no further means:

If this be not accepted, I must resolve to endure what will be laid upon me in any kind with patience, for other means I have none to redeem myself with. And my mind is so prepared already for misery, as nothing can be much more welcome to me than that which is the end of all misery.³

Both August petitions turn from financial calculations to welcoming death if relief is refused. A few weeks earlier, on 25 July 1601, he had pleaded for his wife and children:

I beseech your honour therefore even for God’s sake to take compassion upon my poor wife and children, and let not my folly be their utter overthrow. I wish the whole punishment might light upon myself, for I only have deserved it, and they are innocent.⁴

He admits the fault and tries to contain its consequences. His wife and children must not suffer his “utter overthrow” with him. In the second August petition he asks not to be made “the only precedent of rigour” among so many examples of mercy.³ The appeal to the Queen’s compassion is also an attempt to preserve a reason to live.

Unequal judgment and disabling power

In March 1602 Neville made the unequal treatment explicit:

She hath been pleased to give better conditions to some other of greater state than mine, who were in the eye of law as great offenders as myself, and from whom she took nothing else but their bare fine.⁵

The men better able to pay had received better terms. Neville calculated that his offer would leave scarcely £50 a year for himself, his wife and eight children. Keeping him imprisoned would cost more than £150 a year: accepting his terms, he argued, would bring the Queen more than continued confinement.⁵ Sonnet 66 turns comparable reversals into its indictment of public life: merit begs, empty worth wears finery, strength is disabled, and good serves evil.

On 3 April Neville reported that his wife was burdened with grief “with the late loss of one of her children, and the likelihood to lose another.”⁶ The danger to his dependants was no longer only what might follow his own death.

A year earlier, even comforting her by letter had required permission. In an appeal from about 26 February 1601 he wrote:

I have made bold, according to your honour’s permission, to write unto my wife a word or two to comfort her, which I desire, if it so please your honour, that J. Packer may carry.⁷

This is a concrete restriction on private speech. The sonnet’s “art made tongue-tied by authority” extends the grievance to art. Neville’s position supplies the experience of speaking only by another’s leave.

In “strength by limping sway disabled,” it is the ruling power that limps.⁸ Neville’s correspondence also records bodily trouble. His sister-in-law Dorothy Seymour hoped that a journey to Bath would bring “health to your leg,” which had troubled him the previous summer.⁹ On 1 November 1604 Neville wrote to Winwood “in much pain of the gout,” “from my bed at the Star Chamber”; he had “not yet been present at any meeting” of the Union conference.¹⁰ Sonnet 37 turns lameness into the speaker’s own condition: “made lame by fortune’s dearest spite.”

Living through another

On 3 February 1602 Neville asked for enough revenue to maintain his eldest son at university:

For seeing I may account myself a man in some sort dead to this world, I have nothing left to wish or hope but that my house and fortune may revive in him.¹¹

His own public existence seemed over. He hoped to preserve his family’s standing and estate through his son. Sonnet 37 opens with a father finding pleasure in his child, then makes that relation the model of the speaker’s consolation:

Sonnet 37

As a decrepit father takes delight
To see his active child do deeds of youth,
So I, made lame by fortune’s dearest spite,
Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth.
For whether beauty, birth, or wealth, or wit,
Or any of these all, or all, or more,
Entitled in thy parts do crowned sit,
I make my love engrafted to this store.
So then I am not lame, poor, nor despised
Whilst that this shadow doth such substance give
That I in thy abundance am sufficed
And by a part of all thy glory live.
Look what is best, that best I wish in thee.
This wish I have, then ten times happy me.¹²

The father is the poem’s comparison, not an identification of the beloved. Its force lies in the movement from personal loss to another person’s abundance: the speaker lives by a share of the other’s glory. Neville’s letter gives that movement a literal father and son, and makes sustaining the son the surviving object of his ambition.

Sonnet 13 pictures a related hope as a house kept from decay:

Sonnet 13, lines 9–14

Who lets so fair a house fall to decay,
Which husbandry in honor might uphold
Against the stormy gusts of winter’s day
And barren rage of death’s eternal cold?
O, none but unthrifts, dear my love, you know.
You had a father; let your son say so.¹³

Neville’s son already existed; the sonnet urges the beloved to become a father. Both make a son’s continuance the answer to a threatened house. Neville calls himself dead to the world and asks that his house revive in his son; the poem asks for a son who can say he had a father.