Verse Collectors and Buckingham's Assassination

Abstract

The final chapter continues to focus on Buckingham, turning to his assassination, which most late Buckingham libels celebrate. By surrounding them with verses on the murdered duke and his assassin, collectors effectively completed the recontextualization of anti-courtly love poems with early Stuart politics. Some collectors sketched a progression of erotic royal favoritism from Ralegh to Buckingham, and positioned Donne's “To his Mistress going to bed” as a tame predecessor to poetic criticisms of the later royal favorites. One collector imposed a decidedly radical political perspective on such poems. Another astonishingly misattributed a Buckingham libel to Donne, thereby associating its radical politics with the religious, satirical, and erotic poems that he also ascribed to Donne in his miscellany. This chapter also shows how collectors immersed other anti-courtly love poems by Donne, Francis Beaumont, Thomas Carew, and Sir John Davies in the context of Buckingham's assassination.