Elsewhere Nashe associates it with “the nature of an upstart”, “a malcontent… a squire of low degree … who complains like a decayed earl, of the ruin of ancient houses”. The scabrous pampleteer Thomas Nashe later offered another take on the motto, which might reflect on either man: the phrase, he said, excused poets their “dagger drunkenness every stanzo they pen after dinner… full-pointed with a stab”. It said much more about how Ralegh – and before him Gascoigne – wanted to be seen, than how they actually were. The description approximated reality, and had some purchase thereon but it was primarily positional. A man of action and a man of judgement: that was the pitch, and like today’s corporate slogans, it was notionally accurate, but also wishful. After Gascoigne’s death – in fact he died on 7 October 1577, at the Lincolnshire home of George Whetstone, around the time Harvey bought The Steele Glas – Ralegh would appropriate the motto for his own.
Writing retrospectively to defend his first foray into print in 1573 Gascoigne would say: “Being busied in martial affairs (whereby I also sought some advancement) I thought good to notify unto the world before my return, that I could as well persuade with pen, as pierce with lance or weapon: So that yet some noble mind might be encouraged both to exercise me in time of peace and to employ me in time of service in war.”īut the motto had another significance, too, exemplifying Gascoigne’s personal influence on Ralegh. This, like the commendatory poems, is another kind of advertisement, a personal strap line, articulating what ‘brand Gascoigne’ had to offer. Beneath the portrait is Gascoigne’s latest motto, tam marti quam mercurio – made for war as much as wisdom. George Gascoigne looks out at the reader, books over his left shoulder, an arquebus and other weapons over his right. This, a poem for his friend Gascoigne, was Ralegh’s first step on the public stage.īut when Gabriel Harvey picked up his copy of that book, the first thing he would have seen was a portrait of the author on the verso. Is the gentleman’s name, that bears the good face.īeside this, in the margin, Harvey wrote by way of explanation: “Rawley”. The enemy to the stomach, and the word of disgrace A compulsive – indeed, obsessive – annotator of other men’s work, Harvey paused to note down a rebus he had heard, perhaps among his friends in Leicester’s circle, based on the poet’s name: It was signed: “Walter Rawely of the Middle Temple”. Sometime in London in the autumn of 1577, Gabriel Harvey, the son of a Saffron Waldon ropemaker and a self-consciously brilliant young Cambridge academic, opened up his copy of The Steele Glas, and turned to one of the volume’s three commendatory poems.
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