The Pastimes of George Ferrers: Reconstructing the Life and Career of a Tudor Renaissance Gentleman
The following is the keynote address I delivered at the annual joint meeting of the South-Central Renaissance
Conference and the Elizabeth I Society, March 8 2007, in Kansas City, Mo. It represents the first work from my
current research topic, the life and career of the obscure but colorful figure, George Ferrers.
So who was George Ferrers? And, whoever he was, what does he have to do with the fabulous Virgin Queen?
Actually, I’ll bet some of you English literary scholars or constitutional and court historians might know who George
Ferrers was; I have just begun to explore his life and career, and I am here today to share with you the results of my
preliminary research. I suspect he might be the quintessential English Renaissance gentleman. I do not yet know
whether Queen Elizabeth I of England and gentleman George ever met in person; although there are a number of
occasions when it certainly was within the realm of probability that they would have crossed paths. I do know that
they did speak to one another on one rather unique occasion. Well, sort of.
Let me take you back to a beautiful, sunny, summer day in the year 1575, in the seventeenth year of her reign, as
our favorite queen, Elizabeth, made her way to a party so fabulous it lasted nineteen days. While we know that
Elizabeth’s wealthiest subjects always picked up the tabs for her summer progresses, a policy that accorded nicely
with the Queen’s own fiscal priorities, nevertheless, all that traveling and partying had to have been wearying at
times; the packing, the bumpy roads, and the seemingly endless addresses and salutes from towns and villages
along the royal path, when she always projected an engagingly regal personality that consistently won for her the
hearts of her subjects. We could certainly forgive her if she had been in a less than sanguine mood that summer
day; and we all know that Elizabeth could be a bit mercurial in her temperament; you all are probably familiar with this
contemporary quote: “when she smiled it was pure sunshine that everyone did choose to bask in if they could; but
anon came a storm from a sudden gathering of clouds and the thunder fell in wondrous manner on all alike.” But
sunshine apparently reigned in her world that day, and she undoubtedly had her game face on as she approached
Kenilworth Castle for that festive occasion. This was, however, no humdrum summer progress party being thrown by
any ordinary party-giver- but by royal favorite Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester. By 1575, the inevitable march of
time had begun to sap Leicester’s undoubted physical charms, as he geared up for his most ambitious campaign to
march the queen to the altar, or, at the very least, to sell her on an ambitious Protestant foreign policy.
Undoubtedly, Elizabeth was fully aware of the political implications pregnant in Kenilworth. Nevertheless, the “Tracey
and Hepburn” of the sixteenth century continued to maintain that affection for each other that had survived a number
of rough patches, and the festivities at Kenilworth broadcasted to the political nation the unique place he held in her
heart.
George Ferrers had some kind of relationship with Leicester, I have not uncovered the nature of this just yet, but as
Elizabeth entered Kenilworth, on July 9, 1575, she was met by a big strong buff Hercules, who, “dazzled by the rare
beauty and princely countenance of her majesty,” immediately surrendered custody of the castle into her charge. As
Elizabeth then walked through the gate into the base court, a lady and two attendants began to careen across a pool
as if walking on water, conveyed either by a raft or a moveable island. It was the lady of the island, king Arthur’s lady
of the lake, and the words of her recitation had been written by none other than George Ferrers. The lady’s address
was both poetry and history, as it described how she had persevered through Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Normans, and
Plantagenets, concluding with the statement, “the lake, the lodge, the lord, are yours to command.” The entire
oration smacked with obscure historical double- entendres, with oblique references to the Yorkist roots of the Tudor
dynasty, as it suggested that Elizabeth did not possess power in the castle until the lady of the island handed it
over. Was all this Leicester’s motivation?
We all know Elizabeth had a quick wit. Thankfully, for all concerned, without any hint of possible storm clouds,
Elizabeth immediately responded to the lady’s oration, remarking, “we had thought indeed the lake had been ours,
and do you call it yours now? Well, we will herein common more with you hereafter.” As we shall see, the exchange
could very well be a metaphor for Elizabeth’s attitude towards all the circumstances that conceivably brought George
Ferrers to her attention. However, I do not yet know whether Elizabeth and the lady, or George, ever had that follow
up interview, or if she was aware of the identity of the author of the oration.
What I can say with much more certainty is that Elizabeth knew who George Ferrers was, as his multi-faceted career
brought him periodically into the limelight over the course of the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and
Elizabeth. Ferrers, at various stages of his life, was a poet, a soldier, a historian, a lawyer, a courtier, and a
sixteenth century version of Johnny Carson all rolled into one. I suspect he possessed quite a winning personality
too, when he chose to employ it; his enjoyment of favor and patronage from Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary I, and
his lack of prosecution or imprisonment under Elizabeth I, would be akin to a figure in contemporary American society
enjoying the trust and affection of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bushes one and two, and Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Much like recent American history, politics and religion, and radical demographic and economic instabilities had a
polarizing effect on sixteenth century Tudor society. Amazingly, Ferrers appears to have successfully negotiated his
way through such an historical land mine, and died comfortably in his bed.
So why isn’t he famous? Perhaps because the various forms of primary and secondary sources describing his life
are so compartmentalized in a number of specific contexts, encompassing legal and parliamentary history, literary
criticism, foreign affairs, and those brief mentions describing the life of a minor courtier and Hertfordshire landowner,
no historian before me has ever attempted to subject his life and career to any historical analysis. The most
information found in one place on George Ferrers is successive biographies in various volumes of the Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography. While these essays do a fine job of creating a timeline- there is no analysis, no
speculation concerning the possible motivations behind the twists and turns of George’s career. Trying to uncover
the historical motivations behind obscure historical figures, as my friend and colleague Barbara Harris recently
warned me, can be a slippery slope to climb, but I remained determined to walk the plank, if necessary, to uncover
the possible motivations behind the life of George Ferrers.
I first encountered George at the Folger Shakespeare library, as he routinely crashed the afternoon teatime!
Actually, his name cropped up periodically while I performed research on the reign of Edward VI, and I did bend more
than a few people’s ears discussing him at teatime. In the last week of my fellowship, as it dawned on me that I had
accumulated more than enough material to finish off Edward VI, whose death, as Carole Levin will tell you, was a sad
but necessary prerequisite for the career of our favorite queen, I suddenly found myself frantically in the midst of
piecing together as much of the George Ferrers story as I could haul away from the Folger Library.
We will begin with his name and his family. The name itself is a bit tricky; there existed a number of noble and
gentry families in sixteenth century England associated with the name of Ferrers or ennobled as Lords Ferrers.
George’s family, however, were solid gentry stock who had lived in or near St. Albans, Hertfordshire, for many
generations. George’s first discernible career was as an undergraduate at Cambridge, where he received a
bachelor’s degree in Canon Law while still in his early twenties, during those momentous years in which the “kings’
great matter” transformed into the English Reformation, and young lawyers clamored to fill the administrative ranks
of the “Tudor Revolution in Government.” The noted antiquarian John Leyland considered George a particularly
skillful orator and litigator. But George was also a scholar; in 1533 bearing the primary responsibility for editing and
translating The Great Boke of Statutes, and the next year, the first published English translation of Magna Carta. In
the end of that same year, he was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn to practice law. At this point, there are just a few clues to
suggest to me what his character might have been like. He was an obvious go-getter, but go-getters often need a
team to make sure that they go and they get, and sometimes this can get in the way of the orderly flow of business-
the management at Lincoln’s Inn censured George for continually having his lackeys around the common buildings,
which was apparently causing a commotion. Here I have images of Richard Lester’s slapstick version of The Three
Musketeers, the one with Michael York and Raquel Welch. Could it be that George was not only high maintenance
but also required continual entertainment?
Despite his legal prowess and obvious scholarly talents, George apparently craved the glitz and the glitter of the life
of the courtier, and sought a place at the epicenter of the Henrician royal court, in the King’s privy chamber, the
sixteenth century version of the West Wing. George quickly leap-frogged his way through the hierarchy of the Tudor
food chain as he came to the attention of Thomas Cromwell, who always had his eye out for good talent. Cromwell
found a place for George in his own household the same year that George began to build up his landholdings in
Hertfordshire in the area of Caddington, obtaining a grant for the manor of Flamsteed in 1535. But prior to Cromwell’
s fall in 1540, Gentleman George had caught the eye of Henry VIII, who apparently liked what he saw and heard from
the man referred to as “Young Ferres.” George entered Henry’s privy chamber in 1538, and was a participant in the
festivities surrounding the arrival in England of Henry’s fourth wife Anne of Cleves.
Henry VIII really liked George Ferrers. Henry also liked his women, obviously, but, like many aging athletes who were
also kings, he was also a big fan of good old fashioned locker room style male bonding. Henry might have gotten
older and larger over the course of the 1530s and into the last decade of his life, but most of the men who stalked
his privy chamber as pages, like George, remained young, athletic, entertaining, and always ready to laugh heartily
at the king’s jokes, as ideally, we all expect our students to do when presented with our own matchless wits. Look at
Henry’s numero uno boon companion, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, a man who obviously had that special
something that caused even women of royal rank to go weak in the knees. But Brandon was no Karl Rove- Henry
had Wolsey, Gardiner, and Cromwell for that. George Ferrers was no Karl Rove either, nor was he the legend
Brandon was in the tournament lists, but it is likely that George captivated Henry, not only by his intellectual and
legal gifts, but also by his ability to listen to a war story enraptured, and perhaps spin a good one himself. We shall
take the 100 marks left to George in Henry’s will as the measure of the king’s high esteem.
Fortunately, favor translates into patronage. George had been friends with another gentleman of the privy
chamber, one Humphrey Bourchier, whose wife Elizabeth came from a long line of gentry in the Caddington area of
Hertfordshire, specifically in the region of what used to be Markyate priory, which had been dissolved during the late
1530s along with all the rest of the former monasteries and religious lands in England, part and parcel of one of the
greatest transfers of real estate in English history, that ultimately bolstered an English gentry class with the wealth
and power to drive the seventeenth century Stuart monarchs crazy. Anyway, Humphrey Bourchier had a lease on
Markyate, but was having a hard time coming up with the cash for outright purchase when he died in 1540. In
December of 1541, at the age of 31, George’s bachelorhood ended when he married Bourchier’s widow Elizabeth,
the first of his three wives. If George’s mama had told him to “shop around,” he did a good job; waiting for the right
deal to come along; the marriage was just one important strategic move towards George’s ultimate goal, which was
full possession of Markyate, which Edward VI granted him by letters patent in July 1548.
But we are getting ahead of our story. Nearly five years prior to Henry VIII’s death in January 1547, George was the
catalyst for a truly groundbreaking moment in English constitutional history. In 1542, George was elected MP for
Plymouth, through an old family connection on his mother’s side, accepting a satin doublet in lieu of wages- George
undoubtedly recognized the wisdom behind dressing for success while sitting in the Commons. Prior to the session,
George had apparently offered surety for a loan of 200 marks that one White of Salisbury had obtained from a
lender named Weldon. White was obviously experiencing a cash-flow problem, and had welched on the loan, so, as
George was walking down the streets of London town, minding his own business, he was apprehended and taken to
the Compter, a jail on Bread Street. George, however, was no intellectual dilettante; he was a decidedly martial man
when circumstances required, and he did not submit to his arrest without a fight. When the House of Commons was
informed that an MP had been arrested for debt, they immediately sent the sergeant with his mace down the the
Compter to demand George’s release, which turned into a scuffle as two London sheriffs turned up, in which the
sergeant was constrained to use the mace as a weapon, breaking off the crown in the process.
What emerged from this episode, besides black eyes and bruised limbs for all participants, including George, was
the recognition of immunity from arrest for sitting members of parliament. Henry VIII, in fact, took this episode very
seriously and personally. The king in fact, surrounded by his judges, and a select group of notables from both
houses, felt compelled by the incident to make his most famous statement on Tudor constitutional theory: “we be
informed by our judges that we at no time stand so highly in our estate royal as in the time of parliament, wherein we
as head and you as members are co-joined and knit together as one body politic.” This whole episode seems to
give George a sort of “Forrest Gump- like” quality, and it is sometimes considered his most famous performance- I
know this, because the Wikipedia article on George Ferrers only mentions this incident, and nothing else about his
life, which would be like Arnold Schwarzenegger only being remembered for being a championship body lifter, and
not for his other great claim to fame, which is being married to Maria Shriver..
When George was not in the capital keeping his king entertained, or creating the circumstances for grand
pronouncements on constitutional theory, he was back home on his now considerable estates in Hertfordshire,
engaging in what had became a very popular pastime for the gentry class, the enclosure of common lands. George
was, in fact, an enthusiastic enclosurer (this word now exists- I added to the Wikipedia dictionary), despite the close
relationship he developed with that ultimate pariah of the enclosing classes, Edward Seymour, duke of Somerset and
Lord Protector during the first phase of Edward VI’s minority reign. Economic historians tell us that enclosing was a
necessary economic prerequisite to the development of commercialized agriculture and animal husbandry geared to
a market economy in early modern England, the sixteenth century equivalent to the contemporary practice of
corporations gutting their medical plans and pensions funds; and sticking it to their employees so they can remain
viable and competitive. To the owners of the means of production, then as now, these were necessary tonics to
keep pace with economic growth and inflation, but they just aren’t nice, and seemed as grossly unfair to sixteenth
century peasants as they do to twenty-first century workers today. Apparently, George’s tenants took him to court in
1546 to reopen lands enclosed in flagrant violation of the judgment of the Caddington manor court, which, by 1569,
recognized those and many other enclosures as legitimate done deals.
As popular as George became with members of the Tudor ruling classes, the people that George Ferrers chose to
share his winning personality with seems to have been decided along class lines. Columnist Dave Barry, that astute
observer of modern class relations, once wrote that, “if you go out to dinner, and you are rude to the waiter, you are
not a nice person.” George may have charmed the pants off of Henry VIII, Edward VI, and the dukes of Somerset
and Northumberland, even Mary Tudor was not immune, but court records tell us that George obviously saw no
purpose in being a nice guy to the tenants who worked and lived upon his estates, and suffered under his exacting
style of estate management.
By this time, George correctly sniffed out the future nexus of power, or else he had a good astrologer, as Edward VI’
s reign inevitably approached. Indeed, George was able to ingratiate himself with both of the Seymour brothers,
Edward and Thomas, lord Sudeley, uncles to the young king, no mean balancing act concerning the animosity that
was soon to arise between these ambitious siblings eager to dominate those political free for alls known as royal
minorities. Edward VI later consented to the executions of both his uncles, while he himself fell prey to George’s
considerable charms just like his father.
King Edward VI of England, although only a child and youth during his reign, was a providential prodigy,
intellectually, religiously, but he also had a keen admiration for successful martial exploits conducted in the heat of
battle, as the young king paid careful attention to the Scottish policy of his uncle, Protector Somerset, the “Hammer
of the Scots.” It is not surprising, then, that such a well-rounded figure like George would appeal to the king; George
was no stranger to the battlefield, and had participated in Henry VIII’s final continental military escapade in 1544, the
one that netted him the French city of Bolougne. George was in Somerset’s train during the 1547 Scottish
campaign, as part of the last big surge of the “rough wooing” designed to bring Scotland firmly into the English orbit,
culminating with the Battle of Pinkie, which allowed Somerset to claim that the surge had been worth it, and that they
should stay the course in Scotland, or else the French terrorists would be further emboldened. A gentleman named
William Patten wrote a first hand account of this campaign, referring to George as “a gentleman of my lord Protector’
s and one of the commissioners of carriages in this army.” George went about his military tasks with decided relish
and enthusiasm. On one occasion, when he suspected some Scots were hiding in a cave, Somerset, after
experiencing a particularly wild and crazy dream, granted George leave to do whatever was necessary. After the
renegade Scots refused to come out of the cave and surrender, Patten described how George attempted to smoke
them out by plugging the cave’s vents with burning straw, but the fire soon became “so great a force and so long a
while, that we could not but think they within, must needs get them out or smother. And forasmuch, as we found not
that they did the one: we thought it for certain , they were sure of the other.” Could it be that George had a sadistic
streak? Or was it simply a tragic accident? Or maybe the Scots got away?
It was in the next year, in 1548, that George began to reap some serious benefits from his close relationship with the
young king and his Seymour kinsmen. This was, of course, before Protector Somerset and his brother, the Lord
Admiral, had fallen out with each other. The Protector undoubtedly had a share in George’s land grants, while the
Admiral apparently helped get George a seat in the Commons from Cirencester in Edward’s first parliament. The
king himself presented George with a copy of an account of the 1547 Scottish campaign written by one Le Sieur
Berteville. By this time, George had married again, this time to Jane, daughter of John Southecote of St. Albans.
Despite his presence at the epicenter of royal government, George firmly remained a Hertfordshire boy who always
saw fit to marry a local girl. And his appointment as justice of the peace for Hertfordshire, a post he held until Mary’s
reign, may very well have been the summit of George’s political aspirations.
George did have literary aspirations, though. By the end of 1549, however, the Seymour connection could have
been a serious liability, as the reckless admiral had been beheaded the previous March, while Somerset was toppled
from power in October by a coup led by John Dudley, earl of Warwick, whom Edward later created duke of
Northumberland. As George made the leap from Cromwell to Henry VIII, he negotiated a similar transition from
Somerset to Northumberland, who dominated the minority government for the remainder of the reign. This time,
however, it was a rockier road. Now, I want to remind you that I have just begun this project, this is just a preliminary
report, and I will resume work once again as soon as I finish grading finals. So, I have not yet followed up on all of
my leads; one is from my friend and colleague Scott Lucas at the Citadel, he is a literary scholar whose forthcoming
book concerns the writing of the series of volumes known as The Mirror For Magistrates, George wrote a number of
essays for this, and Scott gave me a citation for a contemporary letter describing how in April 1550 George had
been apprehended and put under house arrest in Northumberland’s house in Greenwich on suspicion of writing
inflammatory pamphlets in support of Somerset. However, a year and a half later, George found himself appointed
to reign as ‘lord of misrule’ over Edward’s Christmas court of 1551/1552, while Edward’s uncle, the newly convicted
felon Somerset, waited in the tower under a death sentence.
The historian Richard Grafton, who was also printer for Edward VI, later wrote during Elizabeth’s reign that the
Christmas festivities constituted a plot hatched by Northumberland and George designed to divert a heavy hearted
king Edward from Somerset’s impeding execution. Others, including myself, have argued otherwise. It was in the
process of explaining Edward’s agency as a minority king that George Ferrers first came to my attention. As it turns
out, Scott Lucas came to the same conclusion that I did, in a completely different way, that it was Edward’s idea to
appoint George as lord of misrule, that he was not sitting around moping for Somerset, and that Northumberland, the
king of political expediency, not only expedited the king’s wishes, but outwardly reconciled himself to George, whom
he rewarded with 50£ from his own hands following the conclusion of the Christmas festivities of 1551/52. George,
however, never made it into Edward’s privy chamber, despite the evidence that clearly pointed to the affection
Edward felt for George, nor did he gain any political office under Northumberland. Was Northumberland only
outwardly reconciled? Or was George simply not ambitious for office? These are questions I will answer for you all
at a later date.
George’s performance as lord of misrule for Edward’s final two Christmas courts was his finest performance, and
this will soon be reflected in George’s Wikipedia article. According to Grafton, Ferrers was “a gentleman both wise
and learned” while John Stow later remarked that “the king had great delight in his pastimes”; in other words, like
Mary Poppins, George provided highly entertaining interludes that were the sugar that helped the medicine of his
humanist historical musings to go down. George was assisted in writing the pastimes by a coterie of other learned
men, William Baldwin, and the Chaloner brothers Thomas and Francis, and clearly enjoyed the creative processes
behind devising Christmas entertainments, which complemented the scholarly tone of Edward’s royal court, but
George was above all a performer. Among the papers in the Losely manuscripts are numerous letters from George
to the hapless Thomas Cawarden, master of the revels, ordering costumes and complaining about their quality and
the time it took to produce them- George Ferrers was an impatient man- and Northumberland and the council shared
his impatience. Stow wrote vividly nearly thirty years later of George’s procession by water, at the conclusion of the
Christmas festivities, from Greenwich to a procession through the city in which he was the center of attention,
receiving adulation from all quarters of London- this may very well have been the most memorable event of George
Ferrers life, as he returned to Greenwich, loaded down with gold and silver, and wine, and a reputation that
celebrated a scholar who was also a quintessential gentleman. For his second Christmas as “lord of misrule,”
George requested costumes for a divine, a philosopher, an astronomer, a poet, a physician, an apothecary, and
various clowns, jugglers, and friars- all this sounds like vaudeville, but the reviews for the second Christmas were
positive as they had been for the first.
George’s reputation served him well during Mary’s reign, which also inaugurated bizarre new elements to the
George Ferrers story. According to the online John Foxe project, references in later Elizabethan editions of Actes
and Monuments mention a Ferys that was imprisoned in the Tower in Aug. 1553, perhaps in support of the Jane
Grey plot, and a Ferys who was present at Mary’s coronation in October- if both references were indeed our
George, he must have talked, or charmed, his way once more out of a tough spot. But the identification is not
conclusive; the next occasion when an individual who was indisputably our George Ferrers was during the Wyatt
Revolt which erupted at the end of January 1554. In the account written by Edward Underhill, who was on his way to
join Lord William Howard, who was in charge of the watch at London Bridge, after George joined Underhill, they came
upon Ludgate, which was locked, of the three men in the party, George was the only celebrity, identifying himself to
the custodian as “the lorde off misrule of kynge Edwarde.” While Underhill identified George as a Protestant, he
nevertheless fought bravely for Mary, whose government later rewarded him with £100. George sat as MP for
Brackley in Mary’s third parliament in 1554, and her fourth in 1555, but 1555 was a strange year for George. In
January, he failed to appear for the parliamentary session, and was informed against in King’s Bench, but no further
action was taken. But George’s most incomprehensible behavior in Mary’s reign was his accusation in May 1555
that certain individuals “did calculate the king’s and queen’s (Philip and Mary) and my lady Elizabeth’s nativity;
whereof one (John) Dee, and Cary, and Butler, and one other of my lady Elizabeth’s are accused. And that they
should have a familiar spirit; which is more the suspected, for that Ferys, one of the accusers, had, immediately upon
the accusation, both his children striken, the one with present death, the other with blindness.” After the accused
were arrested and taken to Hampton court, however, the Privy Council noted that as George had been sent out to
apprehend one more conspirator, named Stanley, George then disappeared himself, so that Edwarde Chamberlain
was ordered, if George did not reappear, to look for him in the “counties of Oxon, Stafford, Warwick and Wigorn.” It
is at this point that George drops from the historical record for the remainder of Mary’s reign. What happened to
George in that summer of 1555 is something I am eager to explain on another occasion.
Suffice it to say, considering the way in which George’s accusation against Dee, a grudge he bore apparently to the
end of his life, reflected upon Elizabeth at a critical moment in her life as an imperiled heir to the throne, as Elizabeth
was finishing a year long enjoyment of the hospitality of Sir Henry Bedingfield in Woodstock, (perhaps the worst
period of her life, but one of my students nonetheless once remarked that it was very cool that Elizabeth went to
Woodstock) that George’s days as a court darling were over. George does not appear to have enjoyed any
discernible favor from Elizabeth, surprise! But he suffered no retaliation either- and in fact he enjoyed the office of
escheator for various midland counties in the 1560s. However, George’s principle occupation during Elizabeth’s
reign was composing works of scholarship, writing poetry, most of it now lost, and contributing to various editions of
the volume known as The Mirror for Magistrates. This may very well be the most substantial of George’s
accomplishments, but my time is running out, and there are a few more things I wish to share with you all, so I will
postpone my discussion of George’s contributions to poetry and history for another occasion. That way, I can share
with you one more inexplicable episode.
In 1571, George was elected to parliament one more time, as MP for St. Albans, a clear sign that George’s local
standing in Hertfordshire had not been too adversely affected by Elizabeth’s accession, or that Elizabeth’s political
machine was not powerful enough to decide such local contests. Now this episode that I am about to tell you about
requires much more research, but apparently, George was drawn into the web of John Leslie, bishop of Ross, the
Scottish ambassador, who, in a deposition stated that George had composed a work in Latin supporting the claim of
Mary Queen of Scots to the English throne. This should have been political dynamite in the year of Ridolfi, but it
appears, though, that no harm came to George for his actions, which begs the question- did the Privy Council
consider him a harmless crank? Or, did he have a well placed patron at the center of power in a position to cushion
the fall?
Was it Leicester? I still have not figured out the nature of George’s connection to Leicester. However, in 1569,
George married for a third time, to Elizabeth Preston, a widow of St. Albans, with whom he had at least three sons
and two daughters, even though he was already in his late fifties. In 1573, George filed a suit in Star Chamber
against the marriage of Elizabeth Preston’s daughter to one Thomas Seale, a servant of the earl of Leicester. While
Ferrers and his wife claimed they had not consented to the marriage, the defendants claimed the marriage had been
witnessed by George’s daughters, and was legally binding. My delicate sense of intuition tell me that these
improbable occasions than linked George however tangentially to Leicester were responsible for the connection that
allowed George’s lofty poetry to be the words the lady of the lake used to regale Queen Elizabeth as she entered
Kenilworth castle on the summer day that began this discussion, and to prevent him from doing time for his
indiscretions with Bishop Leslie.
Which brings my story full circle. Well, almost. Another edition of The Mirror for Magistrates appeared in 1578, this
time with an essay on the fifteenth century Humphrey, duke of Gloucester and his notorious wife Eleanor Cobham,
was this an allusion to John Dee, a grudge George apparently carried with him to the grave? The following January
he was dead, in his bed, presumably satisfied with a career that spanned the many contexts of the English
Renaissance.
The following is the keynote address I delivered at the annual joint meeting of the South-Central Renaissance
Conference and the Elizabeth I Society, March 8 2007, in Kansas City, Mo. It represents the first work from my
current research topic, the life and career of the obscure but colorful figure, George Ferrers.
So who was George Ferrers? And, whoever he was, what does he have to do with the fabulous Virgin Queen?
Actually, I’ll bet some of you English literary scholars or constitutional and court historians might know who George
Ferrers was; I have just begun to explore his life and career, and I am here today to share with you the results of my
preliminary research. I suspect he might be the quintessential English Renaissance gentleman. I do not yet know
whether Queen Elizabeth I of England and gentleman George ever met in person; although there are a number of
occasions when it certainly was within the realm of probability that they would have crossed paths. I do know that
they did speak to one another on one rather unique occasion. Well, sort of.
Let me take you back to a beautiful, sunny, summer day in the year 1575, in the seventeenth year of her reign, as
our favorite queen, Elizabeth, made her way to a party so fabulous it lasted nineteen days. While we know that
Elizabeth’s wealthiest subjects always picked up the tabs for her summer progresses, a policy that accorded nicely
with the Queen’s own fiscal priorities, nevertheless, all that traveling and partying had to have been wearying at
times; the packing, the bumpy roads, and the seemingly endless addresses and salutes from towns and villages
along the royal path, when she always projected an engagingly regal personality that consistently won for her the
hearts of her subjects. We could certainly forgive her if she had been in a less than sanguine mood that summer
day; and we all know that Elizabeth could be a bit mercurial in her temperament; you all are probably familiar with this
contemporary quote: “when she smiled it was pure sunshine that everyone did choose to bask in if they could; but
anon came a storm from a sudden gathering of clouds and the thunder fell in wondrous manner on all alike.” But
sunshine apparently reigned in her world that day, and she undoubtedly had her game face on as she approached
Kenilworth Castle for that festive occasion. This was, however, no humdrum summer progress party being thrown by
any ordinary party-giver- but by royal favorite Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester. By 1575, the inevitable march of
time had begun to sap Leicester’s undoubted physical charms, as he geared up for his most ambitious campaign to
march the queen to the altar, or, at the very least, to sell her on an ambitious Protestant foreign policy.
Undoubtedly, Elizabeth was fully aware of the political implications pregnant in Kenilworth. Nevertheless, the “Tracey
and Hepburn” of the sixteenth century continued to maintain that affection for each other that had survived a number
of rough patches, and the festivities at Kenilworth broadcasted to the political nation the unique place he held in her
heart.
George Ferrers had some kind of relationship with Leicester, I have not uncovered the nature of this just yet, but as
Elizabeth entered Kenilworth, on July 9, 1575, she was met by a big strong buff Hercules, who, “dazzled by the rare
beauty and princely countenance of her majesty,” immediately surrendered custody of the castle into her charge. As
Elizabeth then walked through the gate into the base court, a lady and two attendants began to careen across a pool
as if walking on water, conveyed either by a raft or a moveable island. It was the lady of the island, king Arthur’s lady
of the lake, and the words of her recitation had been written by none other than George Ferrers. The lady’s address
was both poetry and history, as it described how she had persevered through Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Normans, and
Plantagenets, concluding with the statement, “the lake, the lodge, the lord, are yours to command.” The entire
oration smacked with obscure historical double- entendres, with oblique references to the Yorkist roots of the Tudor
dynasty, as it suggested that Elizabeth did not possess power in the castle until the lady of the island handed it
over. Was all this Leicester’s motivation?
We all know Elizabeth had a quick wit. Thankfully, for all concerned, without any hint of possible storm clouds,
Elizabeth immediately responded to the lady’s oration, remarking, “we had thought indeed the lake had been ours,
and do you call it yours now? Well, we will herein common more with you hereafter.” As we shall see, the exchange
could very well be a metaphor for Elizabeth’s attitude towards all the circumstances that conceivably brought George
Ferrers to her attention. However, I do not yet know whether Elizabeth and the lady, or George, ever had that follow
up interview, or if she was aware of the identity of the author of the oration.
What I can say with much more certainty is that Elizabeth knew who George Ferrers was, as his multi-faceted career
brought him periodically into the limelight over the course of the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and
Elizabeth. Ferrers, at various stages of his life, was a poet, a soldier, a historian, a lawyer, a courtier, and a
sixteenth century version of Johnny Carson all rolled into one. I suspect he possessed quite a winning personality
too, when he chose to employ it; his enjoyment of favor and patronage from Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary I, and
his lack of prosecution or imprisonment under Elizabeth I, would be akin to a figure in contemporary American society
enjoying the trust and affection of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bushes one and two, and Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Much like recent American history, politics and religion, and radical demographic and economic instabilities had a
polarizing effect on sixteenth century Tudor society. Amazingly, Ferrers appears to have successfully negotiated his
way through such an historical land mine, and died comfortably in his bed.
So why isn’t he famous? Perhaps because the various forms of primary and secondary sources describing his life
are so compartmentalized in a number of specific contexts, encompassing legal and parliamentary history, literary
criticism, foreign affairs, and those brief mentions describing the life of a minor courtier and Hertfordshire landowner,
no historian before me has ever attempted to subject his life and career to any historical analysis. The most
information found in one place on George Ferrers is successive biographies in various volumes of the Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography. While these essays do a fine job of creating a timeline- there is no analysis, no
speculation concerning the possible motivations behind the twists and turns of George’s career. Trying to uncover
the historical motivations behind obscure historical figures, as my friend and colleague Barbara Harris recently
warned me, can be a slippery slope to climb, but I remained determined to walk the plank, if necessary, to uncover
the possible motivations behind the life of George Ferrers.
I first encountered George at the Folger Shakespeare library, as he routinely crashed the afternoon teatime!
Actually, his name cropped up periodically while I performed research on the reign of Edward VI, and I did bend more
than a few people’s ears discussing him at teatime. In the last week of my fellowship, as it dawned on me that I had
accumulated more than enough material to finish off Edward VI, whose death, as Carole Levin will tell you, was a sad
but necessary prerequisite for the career of our favorite queen, I suddenly found myself frantically in the midst of
piecing together as much of the George Ferrers story as I could haul away from the Folger Library.
We will begin with his name and his family. The name itself is a bit tricky; there existed a number of noble and
gentry families in sixteenth century England associated with the name of Ferrers or ennobled as Lords Ferrers.
George’s family, however, were solid gentry stock who had lived in or near St. Albans, Hertfordshire, for many
generations. George’s first discernible career was as an undergraduate at Cambridge, where he received a
bachelor’s degree in Canon Law while still in his early twenties, during those momentous years in which the “kings’
great matter” transformed into the English Reformation, and young lawyers clamored to fill the administrative ranks
of the “Tudor Revolution in Government.” The noted antiquarian John Leyland considered George a particularly
skillful orator and litigator. But George was also a scholar; in 1533 bearing the primary responsibility for editing and
translating The Great Boke of Statutes, and the next year, the first published English translation of Magna Carta. In
the end of that same year, he was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn to practice law. At this point, there are just a few clues to
suggest to me what his character might have been like. He was an obvious go-getter, but go-getters often need a
team to make sure that they go and they get, and sometimes this can get in the way of the orderly flow of business-
the management at Lincoln’s Inn censured George for continually having his lackeys around the common buildings,
which was apparently causing a commotion. Here I have images of Richard Lester’s slapstick version of The Three
Musketeers, the one with Michael York and Raquel Welch. Could it be that George was not only high maintenance
but also required continual entertainment?
Despite his legal prowess and obvious scholarly talents, George apparently craved the glitz and the glitter of the life
of the courtier, and sought a place at the epicenter of the Henrician royal court, in the King’s privy chamber, the
sixteenth century version of the West Wing. George quickly leap-frogged his way through the hierarchy of the Tudor
food chain as he came to the attention of Thomas Cromwell, who always had his eye out for good talent. Cromwell
found a place for George in his own household the same year that George began to build up his landholdings in
Hertfordshire in the area of Caddington, obtaining a grant for the manor of Flamsteed in 1535. But prior to Cromwell’
s fall in 1540, Gentleman George had caught the eye of Henry VIII, who apparently liked what he saw and heard from
the man referred to as “Young Ferres.” George entered Henry’s privy chamber in 1538, and was a participant in the
festivities surrounding the arrival in England of Henry’s fourth wife Anne of Cleves.
Henry VIII really liked George Ferrers. Henry also liked his women, obviously, but, like many aging athletes who were
also kings, he was also a big fan of good old fashioned locker room style male bonding. Henry might have gotten
older and larger over the course of the 1530s and into the last decade of his life, but most of the men who stalked
his privy chamber as pages, like George, remained young, athletic, entertaining, and always ready to laugh heartily
at the king’s jokes, as ideally, we all expect our students to do when presented with our own matchless wits. Look at
Henry’s numero uno boon companion, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, a man who obviously had that special
something that caused even women of royal rank to go weak in the knees. But Brandon was no Karl Rove- Henry
had Wolsey, Gardiner, and Cromwell for that. George Ferrers was no Karl Rove either, nor was he the legend
Brandon was in the tournament lists, but it is likely that George captivated Henry, not only by his intellectual and
legal gifts, but also by his ability to listen to a war story enraptured, and perhaps spin a good one himself. We shall
take the 100 marks left to George in Henry’s will as the measure of the king’s high esteem.
Fortunately, favor translates into patronage. George had been friends with another gentleman of the privy
chamber, one Humphrey Bourchier, whose wife Elizabeth came from a long line of gentry in the Caddington area of
Hertfordshire, specifically in the region of what used to be Markyate priory, which had been dissolved during the late
1530s along with all the rest of the former monasteries and religious lands in England, part and parcel of one of the
greatest transfers of real estate in English history, that ultimately bolstered an English gentry class with the wealth
and power to drive the seventeenth century Stuart monarchs crazy. Anyway, Humphrey Bourchier had a lease on
Markyate, but was having a hard time coming up with the cash for outright purchase when he died in 1540. In
December of 1541, at the age of 31, George’s bachelorhood ended when he married Bourchier’s widow Elizabeth,
the first of his three wives. If George’s mama had told him to “shop around,” he did a good job; waiting for the right
deal to come along; the marriage was just one important strategic move towards George’s ultimate goal, which was
full possession of Markyate, which Edward VI granted him by letters patent in July 1548.
But we are getting ahead of our story. Nearly five years prior to Henry VIII’s death in January 1547, George was the
catalyst for a truly groundbreaking moment in English constitutional history. In 1542, George was elected MP for
Plymouth, through an old family connection on his mother’s side, accepting a satin doublet in lieu of wages- George
undoubtedly recognized the wisdom behind dressing for success while sitting in the Commons. Prior to the session,
George had apparently offered surety for a loan of 200 marks that one White of Salisbury had obtained from a
lender named Weldon. White was obviously experiencing a cash-flow problem, and had welched on the loan, so, as
George was walking down the streets of London town, minding his own business, he was apprehended and taken to
the Compter, a jail on Bread Street. George, however, was no intellectual dilettante; he was a decidedly martial man
when circumstances required, and he did not submit to his arrest without a fight. When the House of Commons was
informed that an MP had been arrested for debt, they immediately sent the sergeant with his mace down the the
Compter to demand George’s release, which turned into a scuffle as two London sheriffs turned up, in which the
sergeant was constrained to use the mace as a weapon, breaking off the crown in the process.
What emerged from this episode, besides black eyes and bruised limbs for all participants, including George, was
the recognition of immunity from arrest for sitting members of parliament. Henry VIII, in fact, took this episode very
seriously and personally. The king in fact, surrounded by his judges, and a select group of notables from both
houses, felt compelled by the incident to make his most famous statement on Tudor constitutional theory: “we be
informed by our judges that we at no time stand so highly in our estate royal as in the time of parliament, wherein we
as head and you as members are co-joined and knit together as one body politic.” This whole episode seems to
give George a sort of “Forrest Gump- like” quality, and it is sometimes considered his most famous performance- I
know this, because the Wikipedia article on George Ferrers only mentions this incident, and nothing else about his
life, which would be like Arnold Schwarzenegger only being remembered for being a championship body lifter, and
not for his other great claim to fame, which is being married to Maria Shriver..
When George was not in the capital keeping his king entertained, or creating the circumstances for grand
pronouncements on constitutional theory, he was back home on his now considerable estates in Hertfordshire,
engaging in what had became a very popular pastime for the gentry class, the enclosure of common lands. George
was, in fact, an enthusiastic enclosurer (this word now exists- I added to the Wikipedia dictionary), despite the close
relationship he developed with that ultimate pariah of the enclosing classes, Edward Seymour, duke of Somerset and
Lord Protector during the first phase of Edward VI’s minority reign. Economic historians tell us that enclosing was a
necessary economic prerequisite to the development of commercialized agriculture and animal husbandry geared to
a market economy in early modern England, the sixteenth century equivalent to the contemporary practice of
corporations gutting their medical plans and pensions funds; and sticking it to their employees so they can remain
viable and competitive. To the owners of the means of production, then as now, these were necessary tonics to
keep pace with economic growth and inflation, but they just aren’t nice, and seemed as grossly unfair to sixteenth
century peasants as they do to twenty-first century workers today. Apparently, George’s tenants took him to court in
1546 to reopen lands enclosed in flagrant violation of the judgment of the Caddington manor court, which, by 1569,
recognized those and many other enclosures as legitimate done deals.
As popular as George became with members of the Tudor ruling classes, the people that George Ferrers chose to
share his winning personality with seems to have been decided along class lines. Columnist Dave Barry, that astute
observer of modern class relations, once wrote that, “if you go out to dinner, and you are rude to the waiter, you are
not a nice person.” George may have charmed the pants off of Henry VIII, Edward VI, and the dukes of Somerset
and Northumberland, even Mary Tudor was not immune, but court records tell us that George obviously saw no
purpose in being a nice guy to the tenants who worked and lived upon his estates, and suffered under his exacting
style of estate management.
By this time, George correctly sniffed out the future nexus of power, or else he had a good astrologer, as Edward VI’
s reign inevitably approached. Indeed, George was able to ingratiate himself with both of the Seymour brothers,
Edward and Thomas, lord Sudeley, uncles to the young king, no mean balancing act concerning the animosity that
was soon to arise between these ambitious siblings eager to dominate those political free for alls known as royal
minorities. Edward VI later consented to the executions of both his uncles, while he himself fell prey to George’s
considerable charms just like his father.
King Edward VI of England, although only a child and youth during his reign, was a providential prodigy,
intellectually, religiously, but he also had a keen admiration for successful martial exploits conducted in the heat of
battle, as the young king paid careful attention to the Scottish policy of his uncle, Protector Somerset, the “Hammer
of the Scots.” It is not surprising, then, that such a well-rounded figure like George would appeal to the king; George
was no stranger to the battlefield, and had participated in Henry VIII’s final continental military escapade in 1544, the
one that netted him the French city of Bolougne. George was in Somerset’s train during the 1547 Scottish
campaign, as part of the last big surge of the “rough wooing” designed to bring Scotland firmly into the English orbit,
culminating with the Battle of Pinkie, which allowed Somerset to claim that the surge had been worth it, and that they
should stay the course in Scotland, or else the French terrorists would be further emboldened. A gentleman named
William Patten wrote a first hand account of this campaign, referring to George as “a gentleman of my lord Protector’
s and one of the commissioners of carriages in this army.” George went about his military tasks with decided relish
and enthusiasm. On one occasion, when he suspected some Scots were hiding in a cave, Somerset, after
experiencing a particularly wild and crazy dream, granted George leave to do whatever was necessary. After the
renegade Scots refused to come out of the cave and surrender, Patten described how George attempted to smoke
them out by plugging the cave’s vents with burning straw, but the fire soon became “so great a force and so long a
while, that we could not but think they within, must needs get them out or smother. And forasmuch, as we found not
that they did the one: we thought it for certain , they were sure of the other.” Could it be that George had a sadistic
streak? Or was it simply a tragic accident? Or maybe the Scots got away?
It was in the next year, in 1548, that George began to reap some serious benefits from his close relationship with the
young king and his Seymour kinsmen. This was, of course, before Protector Somerset and his brother, the Lord
Admiral, had fallen out with each other. The Protector undoubtedly had a share in George’s land grants, while the
Admiral apparently helped get George a seat in the Commons from Cirencester in Edward’s first parliament. The
king himself presented George with a copy of an account of the 1547 Scottish campaign written by one Le Sieur
Berteville. By this time, George had married again, this time to Jane, daughter of John Southecote of St. Albans.
Despite his presence at the epicenter of royal government, George firmly remained a Hertfordshire boy who always
saw fit to marry a local girl. And his appointment as justice of the peace for Hertfordshire, a post he held until Mary’s
reign, may very well have been the summit of George’s political aspirations.
George did have literary aspirations, though. By the end of 1549, however, the Seymour connection could have
been a serious liability, as the reckless admiral had been beheaded the previous March, while Somerset was toppled
from power in October by a coup led by John Dudley, earl of Warwick, whom Edward later created duke of
Northumberland. As George made the leap from Cromwell to Henry VIII, he negotiated a similar transition from
Somerset to Northumberland, who dominated the minority government for the remainder of the reign. This time,
however, it was a rockier road. Now, I want to remind you that I have just begun this project, this is just a preliminary
report, and I will resume work once again as soon as I finish grading finals. So, I have not yet followed up on all of
my leads; one is from my friend and colleague Scott Lucas at the Citadel, he is a literary scholar whose forthcoming
book concerns the writing of the series of volumes known as The Mirror For Magistrates, George wrote a number of
essays for this, and Scott gave me a citation for a contemporary letter describing how in April 1550 George had
been apprehended and put under house arrest in Northumberland’s house in Greenwich on suspicion of writing
inflammatory pamphlets in support of Somerset. However, a year and a half later, George found himself appointed
to reign as ‘lord of misrule’ over Edward’s Christmas court of 1551/1552, while Edward’s uncle, the newly convicted
felon Somerset, waited in the tower under a death sentence.
The historian Richard Grafton, who was also printer for Edward VI, later wrote during Elizabeth’s reign that the
Christmas festivities constituted a plot hatched by Northumberland and George designed to divert a heavy hearted
king Edward from Somerset’s impeding execution. Others, including myself, have argued otherwise. It was in the
process of explaining Edward’s agency as a minority king that George Ferrers first came to my attention. As it turns
out, Scott Lucas came to the same conclusion that I did, in a completely different way, that it was Edward’s idea to
appoint George as lord of misrule, that he was not sitting around moping for Somerset, and that Northumberland, the
king of political expediency, not only expedited the king’s wishes, but outwardly reconciled himself to George, whom
he rewarded with 50£ from his own hands following the conclusion of the Christmas festivities of 1551/52. George,
however, never made it into Edward’s privy chamber, despite the evidence that clearly pointed to the affection
Edward felt for George, nor did he gain any political office under Northumberland. Was Northumberland only
outwardly reconciled? Or was George simply not ambitious for office? These are questions I will answer for you all
at a later date.
George’s performance as lord of misrule for Edward’s final two Christmas courts was his finest performance, and
this will soon be reflected in George’s Wikipedia article. According to Grafton, Ferrers was “a gentleman both wise
and learned” while John Stow later remarked that “the king had great delight in his pastimes”; in other words, like
Mary Poppins, George provided highly entertaining interludes that were the sugar that helped the medicine of his
humanist historical musings to go down. George was assisted in writing the pastimes by a coterie of other learned
men, William Baldwin, and the Chaloner brothers Thomas and Francis, and clearly enjoyed the creative processes
behind devising Christmas entertainments, which complemented the scholarly tone of Edward’s royal court, but
George was above all a performer. Among the papers in the Losely manuscripts are numerous letters from George
to the hapless Thomas Cawarden, master of the revels, ordering costumes and complaining about their quality and
the time it took to produce them- George Ferrers was an impatient man- and Northumberland and the council shared
his impatience. Stow wrote vividly nearly thirty years later of George’s procession by water, at the conclusion of the
Christmas festivities, from Greenwich to a procession through the city in which he was the center of attention,
receiving adulation from all quarters of London- this may very well have been the most memorable event of George
Ferrers life, as he returned to Greenwich, loaded down with gold and silver, and wine, and a reputation that
celebrated a scholar who was also a quintessential gentleman. For his second Christmas as “lord of misrule,”
George requested costumes for a divine, a philosopher, an astronomer, a poet, a physician, an apothecary, and
various clowns, jugglers, and friars- all this sounds like vaudeville, but the reviews for the second Christmas were
positive as they had been for the first.
George’s reputation served him well during Mary’s reign, which also inaugurated bizarre new elements to the
George Ferrers story. According to the online John Foxe project, references in later Elizabethan editions of Actes
and Monuments mention a Ferys that was imprisoned in the Tower in Aug. 1553, perhaps in support of the Jane
Grey plot, and a Ferys who was present at Mary’s coronation in October- if both references were indeed our
George, he must have talked, or charmed, his way once more out of a tough spot. But the identification is not
conclusive; the next occasion when an individual who was indisputably our George Ferrers was during the Wyatt
Revolt which erupted at the end of January 1554. In the account written by Edward Underhill, who was on his way to
join Lord William Howard, who was in charge of the watch at London Bridge, after George joined Underhill, they came
upon Ludgate, which was locked, of the three men in the party, George was the only celebrity, identifying himself to
the custodian as “the lorde off misrule of kynge Edwarde.” While Underhill identified George as a Protestant, he
nevertheless fought bravely for Mary, whose government later rewarded him with £100. George sat as MP for
Brackley in Mary’s third parliament in 1554, and her fourth in 1555, but 1555 was a strange year for George. In
January, he failed to appear for the parliamentary session, and was informed against in King’s Bench, but no further
action was taken. But George’s most incomprehensible behavior in Mary’s reign was his accusation in May 1555
that certain individuals “did calculate the king’s and queen’s (Philip and Mary) and my lady Elizabeth’s nativity;
whereof one (John) Dee, and Cary, and Butler, and one other of my lady Elizabeth’s are accused. And that they
should have a familiar spirit; which is more the suspected, for that Ferys, one of the accusers, had, immediately upon
the accusation, both his children striken, the one with present death, the other with blindness.” After the accused
were arrested and taken to Hampton court, however, the Privy Council noted that as George had been sent out to
apprehend one more conspirator, named Stanley, George then disappeared himself, so that Edwarde Chamberlain
was ordered, if George did not reappear, to look for him in the “counties of Oxon, Stafford, Warwick and Wigorn.” It
is at this point that George drops from the historical record for the remainder of Mary’s reign. What happened to
George in that summer of 1555 is something I am eager to explain on another occasion.
Suffice it to say, considering the way in which George’s accusation against Dee, a grudge he bore apparently to the
end of his life, reflected upon Elizabeth at a critical moment in her life as an imperiled heir to the throne, as Elizabeth
was finishing a year long enjoyment of the hospitality of Sir Henry Bedingfield in Woodstock, (perhaps the worst
period of her life, but one of my students nonetheless once remarked that it was very cool that Elizabeth went to
Woodstock) that George’s days as a court darling were over. George does not appear to have enjoyed any
discernible favor from Elizabeth, surprise! But he suffered no retaliation either- and in fact he enjoyed the office of
escheator for various midland counties in the 1560s. However, George’s principle occupation during Elizabeth’s
reign was composing works of scholarship, writing poetry, most of it now lost, and contributing to various editions of
the volume known as The Mirror for Magistrates. This may very well be the most substantial of George’s
accomplishments, but my time is running out, and there are a few more things I wish to share with you all, so I will
postpone my discussion of George’s contributions to poetry and history for another occasion. That way, I can share
with you one more inexplicable episode.
In 1571, George was elected to parliament one more time, as MP for St. Albans, a clear sign that George’s local
standing in Hertfordshire had not been too adversely affected by Elizabeth’s accession, or that Elizabeth’s political
machine was not powerful enough to decide such local contests. Now this episode that I am about to tell you about
requires much more research, but apparently, George was drawn into the web of John Leslie, bishop of Ross, the
Scottish ambassador, who, in a deposition stated that George had composed a work in Latin supporting the claim of
Mary Queen of Scots to the English throne. This should have been political dynamite in the year of Ridolfi, but it
appears, though, that no harm came to George for his actions, which begs the question- did the Privy Council
consider him a harmless crank? Or, did he have a well placed patron at the center of power in a position to cushion
the fall?
Was it Leicester? I still have not figured out the nature of George’s connection to Leicester. However, in 1569,
George married for a third time, to Elizabeth Preston, a widow of St. Albans, with whom he had at least three sons
and two daughters, even though he was already in his late fifties. In 1573, George filed a suit in Star Chamber
against the marriage of Elizabeth Preston’s daughter to one Thomas Seale, a servant of the earl of Leicester. While
Ferrers and his wife claimed they had not consented to the marriage, the defendants claimed the marriage had been
witnessed by George’s daughters, and was legally binding. My delicate sense of intuition tell me that these
improbable occasions than linked George however tangentially to Leicester were responsible for the connection that
allowed George’s lofty poetry to be the words the lady of the lake used to regale Queen Elizabeth as she entered
Kenilworth castle on the summer day that began this discussion, and to prevent him from doing time for his
indiscretions with Bishop Leslie.
Which brings my story full circle. Well, almost. Another edition of The Mirror for Magistrates appeared in 1578, this
time with an essay on the fifteenth century Humphrey, duke of Gloucester and his notorious wife Eleanor Cobham,
was this an allusion to John Dee, a grudge George apparently carried with him to the grave? The following January
he was dead, in his bed, presumably satisfied with a career that spanned the many contexts of the English
Renaissance.
