ABSTRACT
The 140 written pages of BL Add. MS 36529 (hereafter B) each measure 190 by 290 mm, and form a characteristic collection made by John Harington of Stepney and his son Sir John Harington of Kelston. The paper, with a watermark of a pot with a handle and trefoil, is similar to Briquet 12672, supporting the supposed date of the transcription outlined below.1 The collection includes a translation of one of Ovid’s epistles by Sir Thomas Chaloner, a unique transcription of many poems by Sir Thomas Wyatt, an important manuscript of 27 of the Earl of Surrey’s poems, as well as a pre-1555 manuscript version of Thomas Phaer’s translation of the first three books of the Aeneid. In the middle of all these poems, on fols 69v-78r, in a quite different hand, is one of the two extant versions of this poem.2 The fact that it is in this collection, a close companion manuscript to the Arundel Harington manuscript and British Library Egerton MS 2711, all primarily collections of John Harington of Stepney, suggests that the Campion poem was transcribed soon after composition in 1567-69. The seventeen pages consist of a single-page dedication and, on the other sixteen pages, a Latin hexameter poem by Edmund Campion beginning with a scribal title, nascentis ecclesiae generatio prim a :
Heroicis virtutibus ornatissimo viro D. Anthonio Browneo Vicecomiti montis acuti, Edmundus Campianus Oxon. aeternam et veram felicitatem praecatur: [For Anthony Brown, Viscount Montague, a man supremely endowed with heroic virtues: Edmund Campion of Oxford prays that he may enjoy eternal and true happiness.] (fol. 70r)
There are sixty lines on each of the seventeen pages, written in a neat secretary hand with italics for emphasis in key apostrophes or proper names and many detailed marginal glosses giving the biblical and historical references. The scribe of B appears to have written the text at a single session, because he has become very tired by the last four pages: the handwriting becomes less regular; there are many mistakes and corrections and the lines are less horizontal. The last page, for example, fol. 78r, contains five corrections in thirty-nine lines. That the scribe has had particular problems with the minims places it in close relation with Holkham MS 437, where there are many corrections of i, m, n and u.
