(It’s best to read Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five,  Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten and Eleven first.)

Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum…

….’Hail God, King of the Jews’…

 begins with praise of ‘Cynthia’……

…..Queen Elizabeth……

 ….who had died nearly a decade before…..

…….and who…..

…….like the Virgin Mary……..

……… had …..

……ascended to that rest

Of endless joy and true Eternity….

….Where Saints and Angels do attend her throne,

And she gives glory unto God alone….

So Aemilia places Queen Elizabeth……

ABOVE THE SAINTS AND ANGELS!!!

……and just a little below God…..

Avisa, in Willobie his Avisa, as we have seen, had used Elizabeth’s motto…..

……Semper Eadem…..

….Englished into…..

…Alwaies the same…..

….and now Aemilia draws on the dead Elizabeth’s power……

….as though she were a divinity….

Aemilia writes….

And this great Lady [Elizabeth] whom I love and honour,

And from my very tender years have known,

This holy habit so to take upon her,

Still to remain the same, and still her own:

And what our fortunes do enforce us to,

She of devotion and mere zeal doth do…

Which makes me think our heavy burden light,

When such a one as she will help to bear it….

When Aemilia came to live at the Court at the age of seven, Elizabeth was being wooed by the dashing Duc d’Anjou……

…… who swept the forty-five year old Queen off her feet……

But Elizabeth………

………thinking of the good of England……..

………as well as her own…….

………said ‘no’ to all her suitors…..

Exactly what Avisa says to hers in Willobie!!!

(that is why some scholars mistakenly believe that Avisa is a portrait of Elizabeth)

In Armada year, Elizabeth appointed Lord Hunsdon…….

…… as Lord Chamberlain Lieutenant and Principal Captain and Governor of the army….

…….for the defence and surety of our own Royal Person……

 Aemilia, as Hunsdon’s teenage mistress, would have witnessed Elizabeth’s heroism close up…..

She might even have heard Elizabeth’s great speech to the troops at Tilbury…….

I am come amongst you, as you see, at this time, to live and die amongst you all; to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom, and my people, my honour and my blood, even in the dust. I know I have the body of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too…..

When, as a young woman, Elizabeth was imprisoned in the Tower by her step-sister, Bloody Mary……

……she believed she was going to die……

She prayed to God to save her……

So when she was released, she believed that God had saved her…..

…..and that he had chosen her for the task of converting England from Catholicism to Protestantism…..

In the same way, when Aemelia…..

……received in sleep…..

…..the title of her poem, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum….

…..she believed it was……

….a significant token…..

….that she……

…..was appointed to perform this work……

…..by God…..

…..and convert from Judaism to Protestantism…..

…..the religion of her beloved Queen and friend….

•

Salve Deus is also addressed to the Lady Margaret, Countess Dowager of Cumberland…..

…..the woman who inspired Aemilia to write……

Aemilia praises her for retiring from the court…..

Thou from the Court to the Country art retired,

Leaving the world, before the world leaves thee:

That great enchantress of weak minds admired,

Whose all-bewitching charms so pleasing be

To wordly wantons; and too much desired

Of those that care not for eternity:

But yield themselves as preys to lust and sin

Loosing their hopes of Heav’n, Hell pains to win…

Aemilia knew all about the sins of the court….

…….having practised most of them herself….

But Lady Margaret, a zealous puritan, demonstrated to Aemilia that she could lead a perfectly fulfilled and fulfilling life…..

OUTSIDE THE COURT!!!

Lady Margaret, working under her own steam, had founded an almshouse for widows at Skipton…..

……and, as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography tells us……

She also had a scientific and entrepreneurial bent. She practised alchemy, distilled medicines, and invested in lead-mining in Craven and in experiments to smelt iron with coal. Emulating her husband, she invested in the East India Company.

Her daughter, Lady Anne, said that she…..

 ……never yielded to ill fortune or opposition…..

Sir William Wentworth described her as…..

……..much experienced and very politic…..

When her husband excluded her and his daughter, Lady Anne, from her inheritance in favour of his brother, Lady Margaret amassed documentary evidence which in 1607 undermined his pleas in the court of wards….

…..and which provided the basis for the family history which her daughter compiled….

Lady Margaret had fought and fought and fought till she got her way….

At the end of ‘The Description of Cooke-ham’, Aemilia claims her poem will make the countryside of Cookham immortal…….

This last farewell to Cooke-ham here I give,

When I am dead thy name in this may live,

And she makes a solemn vow to Lady Margaret……

Wherein I have perform’d her [Margaret’s] noble hest,

Whose virtues lodge in my unworthy breast,

And ever shall, so long as life remains,

Tying my heart to her by those rich chains….

The years after Salve Deus would sorely try this vow…..

Aemilia would need to call on ALL the strengths of BOTH her heroines if she were to survive….

•

 In May, 1612, Alfonso finally received the monopoly on hay-weighing…….

EIGHT YEARS AFTER HE HAD APPLIED FOR IT!

It was granted him for twenty-one years….. 

…..but he died the following year….

Aemelia’s son, Henry, was a promising flautist, just out of his teens…..

But he hadn’t yet been appointed to the Court…..

So, financially, Aemilia was alone….

Then, on 21st November, 1616, Alfonso’s brother, Innocent, acquired the monopoly….

Aemilia claimed Alfonso had left her this grant…..

….but she had given it to Innocent so he could re-negotiate the fee and give her half the money….

By the time Innocent died, she had only received £8…..

The temptation to become a ‘good-fellow’ again must have been a strong one…..

But Lady Margaret’s ‘virtues’ were still ‘lodged’ in Aemilia’s ‘breast’…..

Just about….

She did what she had done for Lady Margaret at Cookham….

….she taught…..

But, being Aemilia, she set up her own school……

…to teach and educate the children of divers persons of worth and understanding….

In August, 1617, she approached a landlord called Edward Smith to rent his farmhouse in the parish of St. Giles-in-the Fields in an area east of Charing Cross – now known as Seven Dials…..

….but she didn’t want the stables and hay loft that came with it….

However, the venture didn’t last long…..

She was arrested twice for non-payment of rent…..

…..which can’t have pleased the parents of her pupils….

…..and in August, 1619 was evicted…..

The following year Aemilia sued her landlord for recovery of money spent for repairs…..

The landlord counter-sued, claiming she had left without paying the last quarter’s rent, and with the property in bad repair.

Aemilia accused Smith of setting up a lease he could break when he found a better tenant who would also rent the two outbuildings and whom he deemed the more reliable…..

…..she admitted she had been……

…..in the words of the official legal document….

…..content to refer the drawing of the said lease unto the said Edward Smith……because [he] was a counsellor at law and professed much friendship and kindness unto the said Oratrix….

Had Aemilia been up to her old tricks?

……had she exchanged ‘modest’ physical favours in return for a good deal from her landlord…..

……as she’d done with Simon Forman to get free astrological readings?

And had it all gone wrong?

But the official document that records all this describes Aemilia as an  ‘Oratrix’…..

It meant she was bold enough to plead her own cause in a Court of Law…

Both Elizabeth and Lady Margaret would have been proud of her….

But soon she was to have a lot more to fight for…..

Her son Henry married in 1623…….

……..and four years later his baby daughter was baptised in the Parish of St. James’s, Clerkenwell.

On 29th September, 1629, he was appointed to the Court as member of their flute consort…….

……..and a year later his son was baptised, also at St. James’s, Clerkenwell…….

But in 1633, Henry himself died at the age of forty…..

…..around the age his grandfather Baptista Bassano had died….

Mary, his daughter, was ten years old and his son, little Henry, was three.

Aemilia determined that what had happened to her…….

 WOULD NEVER HAPPEN TO HER GRANDCHILDREN!!!

She insisted that the money from the hay-making monopoly would pass to them when she died….

Innocent was dead – so now she sued his brother, Clement…….

She had no money, but that didn’t stop her…..

She sued him…..

in forma pauperis

…..which meant – as a pauper – she didn’t have to pay costs….

And when this case didn’t come to Court, Aemilia petitioned…..

THE PRIVY COUNCIL ITSELF!!!

She asked for £50 a year from Clement’s monopoly……

The Privy Council agreed on £20 a year for her….

Then £10 a year for her grandchildren after her death….

SHE HAD WON!!!

And to add to her triumph, a last edition of Willobie his Avisa appeared the same year, in 1635…..

Aemilia died in 1645, aged 76…..

…..just as Cromwell was forming his New Model Army…..

She was also buried at St. James’s, Clerkenwell…..

…..which indicates she was living with her daughter-in-law and grandchildren…..

She was  described in the Parish Register as a ‘pensioner’…….

…… which showed she still had a steady an income…

…..and she had long out-lived her old lovers, Shakespeare and Southampton….

She had also lived longer than either of her heroines, Queen Elizabeth and Lady Margaret…..

But by then she had become her own heroine….

Her conversion to Christianity had given her the strength to step back from herself……

…….look at herself…….

……judge what was right from what was wrong……

……and re-invent herself……

‘Aemilia’

……had become gloriously born again…..

…….as a real-life….

…..’Avisa’…..

•

For a summary of all twelve Posts, Brothers and Sisters of The Code might like to read…..

How Shakespeare’s Dark Lady found God

…a dramatized talk Stewart Trotter gave at…

……The Grosvenor Chapel, Mayfair, London, W.1…….

…on Sunday, 27th October, 2013.

If so, please click: HERE.