IN LOVE WITH THE SONNET – Elizabeth Fremantle

Anne boleyn

Valentine’s Day almost upon us, which means a plethora of gaudy scarlet gewgaws, overpriced cellophane-wrapped roses, the impossibility of booking a restaurant table for more than two people anywhere in the known universe and worst of all: bad poetry. A modern lover might be happy with a few kitsch emojis, or (perish the thought) a photograph of their beloved’s privates, but in the past expectations were higher and romance had more class and better poetry.

Tudor poet Tomas Wyatt introduced the sonnet to England during Henry VIII’s reign. Originating in Italy it was a form that became associated, more than any other, with the expression of love and particularly the forbidden or unrequited love of a man for a woman. In a sonnet the identity of the beloved is often deliberately obscured to protect her privacy, as is the case in Thomas Wyatt’s famous poem, Whoso List to Hunt, which is believed to be about the very married Anne Boleyn. There is no proof that Anne was ever Wyatt’s lover in a physical sense, and certainly not while she was married to Henry VIII, but when he wrote: 'there is written her fair neck round about,/Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am,' it is thought he was lamenting the fact that Anne had become the untouchable wife of Henry VIII – the Latin phrase translating as ‘touch me not’.

Lady Rich

It was sir Philip Sidney, the Elizabethan soldier poet, who wrote the first sonnet cycle in English. Astrophel and Stella, a sequence of 108 sonnets and 11 songs, is a heartrending expression of Sidney’s profoundly jealous love for Lady Rich, a woman who had once been suggested as a bride for him but had been forced into marriage with a man who would bring great wealth to her noble but impoverished family.

The poems express a sense of lovelorn masochism and Sidney reasons that in writing down his feelings, 'She might take some pleasure of my pain'. He repeatedly uses the word ‘Rich’ in his descriptions of his beloved and when he says she: 'Hath no misfortune, but that Rich she is', he makes no attempt to hide Lady Rich’s identity, which suggests his love for her was common knowledge in court circles, leaving little need for secrecy.

Secrecy though is a feature of Shakespeare’s sonnets. He experimented with the form, turning it on its head, as a large number of the sonnets in his collection are, unusually, addressed to a ‘fair youth’. The idea of the bard’s possible homosexuality has often been explained away by suggesting that the poems are written to express a platonic admiration for a benefactor, but whether or not they describe a chaste love the mystery of the person he described as ‘the master mistress of my passion’ has captivated Shakespeare scholars for centuries.

A number of sonnets in Shakespeare’s collection are addressed to a woman and in these he experiments further with the form. Traditionally a sonnet used particular tropes of fairness to describe female beauty. In his poet beginning: 'My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun', he goes on to list the ways in which the woman’s looks diverge from what was then considered beautiful. There has been much speculation about the identity of the so-called ‘Dark Lady’, but Shakespeare’s secret has never been unlocked.

Today’s young lovers are more reluctant than their sixteenth century counterparts to spill their feelings in poetic form, and are more likely to resort to a few trite lines of doggerel in a hastily bought Hallmark card. But I wonder if anyone has ever tried to write an emoji sonnet– now there’s a challenge.

Elizabeth Fremantle’s novel Watch the Lady explores the love between Lady Rich and sir Philip Sidney and takes a look at the possible identity of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady.

A FAIR WOMAN WITH A BLACK SOUL – Elizabeth Fremantle

'Stella, star of heavenly fire

Stella, lodestar of desire.'

Sir Philip Sidney – Astrophil and Stella

When the Earl of Devonshire married the divorced Penelope Devereux, James I is said to have told him he’d ‘bought himself a fair woman with a black soul.’ It marked the end of an illustrious court career for Penelope and her fall from grace was to be devastating.

For many years Penelope had transgressed expected early modern codes of female behaviour, by ‘living in sin’ with Devonshire and bearing his children. It was an open secret, which Elizabeth I and to an extent her successor James I appeared to overlook. Elizabeth’s reputation for the excessively harsh treatment of any sexual transgression in the women of her household was renowned and it is testimony to Penelope’s strength of character and ability to command respect that both monarchs turned a blind eye to her affair.

Penelope had arrived at court in 1581 aged eighteen and was soon reluctantly married off to the fantastically wealthy, and aptly named, Lord Rich as a means to replenish the empty Devereux coffers. Her brother the young Earl of Essex was dubbed the ‘poorest earl in England,’ a humiliation that was to have far reaching consequences for the Devereux family.

Penelope’s beauty was legendary and in her early days at court she caught the eye of Sir Philip Sidney, inspiring his angst-ridden sonnet cycle Astrophil and Stella. It is possible that they had a love affair, though this is unproven but the sonnets offer an understanding of the profundity of Sidney’s feelings for her and his extreme jealousy of Lord Rich. Whether their relationship was consummated or not has been the subject of much speculation and it is impossible to know the truth, but it is undeniable that there was something significant between them.

The marriage of Lord and Lady Rich was not a happy one; why this was is not known and the lasting mystery at its heart is that Rich inexplicably turned a blind eye to his wife’s infidelity. It was after Sidney’s tragic death on the battlefield that Penelope encountered Devonshire, then plain Charles Blount, a man on the rise it the Elizabethan court. The couple began an adulterous relationship that would last until Blount’s death, having a number of children together but somehow her reputation remained intact until, somewhat ironically, the couple married.

But Penelope was not simply a woman interested in getting away with adultery, she had a hand in the politics of the Tudor succession, writing secret and treasonous letters of allegiance with James VI in Scotland and supporting him for the English throne after Elizabeth. This was a dangerous game. Penelope’s brother the Earl of Essex had risen spectacularly in Elizabeth’s favour but as was often the case in the Tudor court, his was to be an Icarus story and his fall was equally dramatic. The coup he launched against Elizabeth’s regime was to be the end of him but Penelope, who was inextricably involved in his insurrection, was not only the sole woman one on the list of perpetrators, but the only one who was not tried for her involvement. She was back in favour at court almost before her brother’s body was cold, raising questions about how she achieved this.

When James VI came to the throne as James I of England, Penelope’s secret allegiance would pay off, ensuring her a position of favour in the new court, which she enjoyed for some time with Blount, newly made Earl of Devonshire for his military success in Ireland at her side. As a Jacobean power-couple, she and Devonshire wrongly believed their favour with the new King was insurmountable when, shortly after her divorce from Rich, they married in contravention to James’s specific order that she not remarry during her husband’s lifetime. It was Penelope rather than Devonshire who would feel the full force of James’s wrath when she was banished from court and publically disgraced.

Her amorous links with two great Protestant heroes, Sidney and Devonshire, made her an embarrassment in the context of a po-faced Protestant history and meant her story was swept under the carpet, for fear of sullying the upright reputations of the men who loved her. But hers is the intriguing tale of a woman who deliberately contravened the rigid codes of female modesty, who commanded respect, made secret alliances and had the courage to march to the beat of her own drum against all odds, at a time when women were required to be silent and meek. And so her story merits dusting off and celebrating by a new generation who choose to see the full historical picture rather than the edited male highlights.


Elizabeth Fremantle’s novel about Penelope Devereux WATCH THE LADY will be published by Penguin on June 18th and Simon&Schuster (USA) on June 9th.

'A pacy, powerful narrative that kept this reader riveted throughout.' Jane Thynne