Author: Virginia F. SternPublisher: Susquehanna University Press
ISBN: 9780945636229
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 260
Book Description
This reconstruction of Sir Stephen Powle's life (1553?-1630) is based on some nine hundred letters, diaries, and legal documents that he recorded, and it concludes with a summary of his extensive manuscripts. Making this previously unexplored primary source material lucidly and chronologically available within a narrative of Powle's life should prove of unique importance to scholars and yet of interest to the general reader as well, for Powle has given color and illuminating detail to an eventful era. Being more introspective than most of his contemporaries, he enables a modern reader to understand some of the motivating feelings of the period. Powle tells us first of his education at Oxford and at the Middle Temple of his struggles to achieve independence from an autocratic and parsimonious father, and of a young man's subsequent three years of travel on the Continent and in Scotland. After this, he became a government agent: first for Lord Treasurer Burghley in Heidelberg at the court of Duke John Casimir and later under the aegis of Sir Francis Walsingham in Venice and northern Italy during the eighteen months preceding the Spanish Armada's "Enterprise of England." During this period Powle sent back biweekly newsletters of considerable political and historical interest, which proved of value to Burghley and Walsingham in London. Upon Powle's return to London in 1588 he was knighted, and he made use of his legal education by serving as Clerk of the Crown in Chancery during the last eventful years of Elizabeth's reign and as one of the Six Clerks of Chancery during the early Jacobean period. His marginal comments on some of the important documents (which it was his function to record) provide new sidelights on the government's handling of the Essex Rebellion. Powle's adored first wife died in childbirth in 1590, but after a period of mourning from which he gradually recovered he married the heiress Margaret Turner Smith in 1593 and retired to their country estate in Essex, where he became a conscientious and hardworking Justice of the Peace. In 1608 he was elected to the Council of the Virginia Company of London, which gave paternal protection to the new young American settlements, and Powle served faithfully until the company's demise in the mid 1620s. He died in 1630 at the age of about seventy-seven, leaving for future generations the important legacy of his papers. Among these are lively, hitherto unprinted letters to and from his friend John Chamberlain and many exchanges of memoranda and comments with Sir Walter Raleigh, Powle's roommate at the Middle Temple and his firm friend thereafter. There are also letters of medical advice from his physician and literary crony Thomas Lodge, as well as unprinted brief verses by the poet Nicholas Breton, who so aptly dedicated his 1618 dialogue, The Court and Country, to Sir Stephen Powle.
