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Institutionality: Nicholas Trott, the Inns of Court and the Value of Friendship

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Male Friendship and Testimonies of Love in Shakespeare’s England

Part of the book series: Early Modern Literature in History ((EMLH))

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Abstract

The Inns of Court, well studied as sites of literary patronage and production, are here revealed as institutions that enabled the construction and maintenance of friendship networks in early modern England. Using the example of Nicholas Trott, friend and financial backer of Anthony Bacon and a member of Gray’s Inn, the chapter reveals the powerful lines of alliance that tied members of the legal societies to offices of power throughout the land. Tosh argues that the Inns built their institutional identity around the idea that friendship among unrelated men might determine someone’s future professional success, a belief that found representation in their festive celebrations and masques.

From fairest creatures we desire increase.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Shakespeare, Sonnets, no. 1.

  2. 2.

    AS to EE, 14 June 1593, LPL MS 648, fol.147r (copy).

  3. 3.

    Philip J. Finkelpearl, John Marston of the Middle Temple: An Elizabethan Dramatist in his Social Setting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 11; Jessica Winston, ‘Literary Associations of the Middle Temple’, in Richard Havery, History of the Middle Temple (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2011), 147–71, 152. See also Wilfrid Prest, The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts, 1569–1640 (London: Longman, 1972), 4–1; Margaret McGlynn, The Royal Prerogative and the Learning of the Inns of Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 18. Wilfred Prest’s ‘Readers’ dinners and the culture of the early modern Inns of Court’, in Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth Goldring and Sarah Knight (eds), The Intellectual and Cultural World of the Early Modern Inns of Court (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 107–23, offers a fascinating reading of Inns sociability by focusing on dining traditions.

  4. 4.

    Attributed by Edward Foss, Judges of England; with Sketches of their Lives, 9 vols (London: Longman, 1848–1864), 5, 423; Finkelpearl observes a 30 % expansion in admissions in the last 30 years of the sixteenth century (John Marston, 5).

  5. 5.

    George Buc, The Third Vniversitie of England (London: Augustine Mathewes for Richard Meighen, 1631), sig. 4O3r-v. Buc’s text was from its publication included in the various editions of John Stowe’s Annales, edited and continued by Edmund Howes throughout the seventeenth century.

  6. 6.

    John Baker points out that fewer than 10 % of Inns of Court men in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries took the legal profession as a career (‘The third university 1450–1550: law school or finishing school?’ in Archer et al. (eds), Intellectual and Cultural World, 8–31, 9).

  7. 7.

    John Fortescue, De Laudibus Legum Angliae, S.B. Chrimes (trans. and ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942), 121.

  8. 8.

    Wilfred Prest calculates that ‘well over half’ of the men called to the bar in the period 1590–1640 had been to Oxford or Cambridge, although the majority had left without taking a degree (The Rise of the Barristers: A Social History of the English Bar, 1590–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 111).

  9. 9.

    James Orchard Halliwell (ed.), The Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, Bart., During the Reigns of James I and Charles I, 2 vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1845), 1, 147–9.

  10. 10.

    Sir Thomas Wroth, ‘Advice to a Templar’, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, MS V.a.575, fol.1r.

  11. 11.

    ‘To the Comaedians of Cambridge’, BL Sloane MS 1775, fol.71v; Abraham Fraunce, The Lawiers Logike (London: William How for Thomas Gubbin and T. Newman, 1588), sig.¶2r-v.

  12. 12.

    Anon., Sir Thomas Overbury His Wife. With additions of new characters, and many other Wittie Conceits never before printed (London: R.B. for Robert Allot, 1632), sig.K4r.

  13. 13.

    Joseph Hale, Quo Vadis? A Ivst Censvre of Travell as it is Commonly vndertaken by the Gentlemen of our Nation (London: Edward Griffin for Nathaniel Butter, 1617), sigs.B2v-B3r.

  14. 14.

    See for instance the ‘Yong Innes a Court Gentleman’ in F.[rancis] L.[enton], Characterismi: Or Lentons Leasvres. Expressed in Essayes and Characters (London: I.B. for Roger Michell, 1631), sigs.F4r-6r.

  15. 15.

    [Edward Hyde], The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon, Lord High Chancellor of England, and Chancellor of the University of Oxford … Written by Himself, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Printing House, 1760), 1, sig.A4r.

  16. 16.

    Francis Lenton, The Young Gallants Whirligigg: or Youths Reakes (London: M.F. for Robert Bostocke, 1629), quoted in Finkelpearl, John Marston, 13–14.

  17. 17.

    [William Fulbecke], A Direction or Preparatiue to the Study of the Lawe (London: Thomas Wight, 1600), sig.D4r.

  18. 18.

    ‘Constitutionis Iurisperitorum Medii Templi London’, BL Cotton MS Vitellius C.IX, fol.231v.

  19. 19.

    Gilles Monsarrat, Brian Vickers and R.J.C. Watt, The Collected Works of John Ford, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012), 1, 16–17.

  20. 20.

    John Ferne, The Blazon of Gentrie (London: John Windet for Andrew Maunsell, 1586), sig.Aiiiir.

  21. 21.

    Folger MS V.a.575, fol.2r.

  22. 22.

    Hale, Quo Vadis?, sig.B3r.

  23. 23.

    Prest, Inns of Court, 138–9.

  24. 24.

    Folger MS V.a.575, fol.1v.

  25. 25.

    Michelle O’Callaghan, The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 10. William Dugdale describes new entrants being ‘bound’ to existing members in Origines Juridiciales, 3rd edn. (London: Christopher Wilkinson, Thomas Dring and Charles Harper, 1666, 1680), sig.Dd1v.

  26. 26.

    Hyde, Life, 1, sig.B4r.

  27. 27.

    Hyde, Life, 1, sig.C7v.

  28. 28.

    John Hutchinson, A Catalogue of Notable Middle Templars, with Biographical Notices (London: privately printed by Butterworth & Co., 1902), 140, 183, 260.

  29. 29.

    Hyde, Life, 1, sig.C8r.

  30. 30.

    John Bruce (ed.), Liber Famelicus of Sir James Whitelocke (London: Camden Society, 1858), 82.

  31. 31.

    Prest, Inns of Court, 17.

  32. 32.

    O’Callaghan, English Wits, 3.

  33. 33.

    Prest, Inns of Court, 21–28; Prest, Rise of the Barristers, 87–90.

  34. 34.

    Fortescue, De Laudibus Legum Angliae, 119.

  35. 35.

    ‘Constitutionis Iurisperitorum Medii Templi London’, BL Cotton MS Vitellius C.IX, fol.319r.

  36. 36.

    Prest, Inns of Court, 27–8.

  37. 37.

    O’Callaghan, English Wits, 1–3.

  38. 38.

    ‘Ben Johnsons Sociable rules for the Apollo’, in Alexander Brome, Songs and other Poems (London: Henry Brome, 1661), sig.C12r-v (irregular gathering of 12).

  39. 39.

    Robert Parker Sorlien (ed.), The Diary of John Manningham of the Middle Temple 1602–1603 (Hanover: University of Rhode Island Press, 1976), 21. Anthony Arlidge has characterised the members of Middle Temple at this time as a ‘college of witcrackers’ (Shakespeare and the Prince of Love: The Feast of Misrule in the Middle Temple (London: Giles de la Mare, 2000), 6).

  40. 40.

    Sorlien (ed.), Diary, 67–70.

  41. 41.

    Richard Brathwait, A Spirituall Spicerie: Containing Sundrie Sweet Tractates of Devotion and Piety (London: I.H. for George Hutton, 1638), sig.S12v.

  42. 42.

    Anon., Sir Thomas Overbury, sig.K4r.

  43. 43.

    O’Callaghan, English Wits, 13.

  44. 44.

    Paul Raffield, ‘The Inner Temple revels (1561–62) and the Elizabethan rhetoric of signs: legal iconography and the earl modern Inns of Court’, in Archer et al. (eds), Intellectual and Cultural World, 32–50, 38.

  45. 45.

    MacCaffrey, ‘Place and Patronage in Elizabethan Politics’, 101.

  46. 46.

    Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1601 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 703.

  47. 47.

    Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric, 30–5, 75–7.

  48. 48.

    Bodleian Library, Oxford, Rawlinson Poet MS 166, fols.89–90r.

  49. 49.

    BL Lansdowne MS 40, fol.82r.

  50. 50.

    HMCS, 10, 394.

  51. 51.

    TNA SP 12/253, fol.24r.

  52. 52.

    HMCS, 21, 373.

  53. 53.

    TNA SP 14/66, fol.119r.

  54. 54.

    For Nicholas Trott, see HF, 204–8 and ‘Trott, Nicholas’, in Hasler (ed.), House of Commons 1558–1603, 3, 531. For the Council in the North, see Robert Beale’s memorandum on the Council, BL Additional MS 48152, fols.205–212; Rachel R. Reid, The King’s Council in the North (London: Longman, 1921); F.W. Brooks, York and the Council of the North (London: St Anthony’s Press, 1954).

  55. 55.

    Robert Beale to WC, 24 April 1595, BL Additional MS 48116, fol. 344r.

  56. 56.

    Thomas Eynns was promoted from deputy to secretary in 1550, George Blythe in 1578 and Ralph Rokeby in 1589. The same would happen to John Ferne, appointed deputy in 1595, in 1604 (Reid, King’s Council in the North, 488–9).

  57. 57.

    Sir Nicholas Bacon sent all five of his sons (three by his first wife Jane; two by Anne) to Gray’s Inn to follow his path in the law. Only Francis made a name for himself in the profession. For an account of life in sixteenth-century Gray’s Inn, see Francis Cowper, A Prospect of Gray’s Inn, revised edn. (London: GRAYA on behalf of Gray’s Inn, 1985), and Henry Edward Duke and Bernard Campion, The Story of Gray’s Inn: An outline history of the Inn from earliest times to the present day (London: Chiswick Press, 1950).

  58. 58.

    Thomas Hughes and others, Certaine deuises and shewes presented to her Maiestie by the Gentlemen of Grayes-Inne at her Highnesse Court in Greenewich (London: Robert Robinson, 1587 [1588]). Trott provided the prologue. Francis Bacon’s contribution is assessed in Alan Stewart (ed.), The Oxford Francis Bacon I: Early Writings 1584–1596 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012), 65–6.

  59. 59.

    BL Lansdowne MS 51, fol.11r; LL, 1, 65 (Spedding dates his elevation to 1586); Stewart (ed.), Oxford Francis Bacon I, xxiii.

  60. 60.

    HF, 205.

  61. 61.

    As a member of the Privy Council, the Earl of Essex was entitled to use the royal post (Daybell, Material Letter in Early Modern England, 118).

  62. 62.

    Edward Stanhope to John Stanhope, 27 March 1595, LPL MS 650, fol.142r (copy) (misendorsed 1594).

  63. 63.

    Anon. to WC, 7 June 1595, TNA SP 12/252, fol.103r mentions five candidates and names Trott and Gee. Wilkes’s interest is evident from Trott’s remark that he abandoned his suit in April (LPL MS 651 fol.78r).

  64. 64.

    Reid, King’s Council in the North, 228 and Simon Healy, ‘Ferne, Sir John (c.1560–1609)’, ODNB (accessed 18 August 2015).

  65. 65.

    Simon Adams, ‘Davison, William (d.1608)’ and John Considine, ‘Davison, Francis (1573/4 – 1613x19)’, ODNB (accessed 18 August 2015).

  66. 66.

    NT to Charles Hales, 9/10 April 1595, LPL MS 651, fol.289r (copy).

  67. 67.

    Trott refers to Beale as ‘your brother’ when writing to Charles Hales, as Beale’s widowed mother Amy Morison Beale went on to marry Stephen Hales, brother to the John Hales in whose household Robert Beale was raised. Charles Hales was Stephen’s heir: Charles Hales and Robert Beale probably regarded themselves as step-brothers, although the precise nature of the link is obscure (Gary M. Bell, ‘Beale, Robert (1541–1601)’, ODNB (accessed 18 August 2015). I am most grateful to Alan Stewart for helping me uncover this link.)

  68. 68.

    NT to Humphrey Purefoy, 9 April 1595, LPL MS 651, fol.77r (copy). Purefoy had entered Gray’s Inn in 1556, and had been a northern councillor since 1582 (Joseph Foster (ed.), The Register of Admissions to Gray’s Inn, 1521–1889, Together with the Register of Marriages in Gray’s Inn Chapel, 1695–1754 (London: privately printed by The Hansard Publishing Union, 1889), 27, and Reid, Council in the North, 495).

  69. 69.

    Edward Stanhope to John Stanhope, 27 March 1595, LPL MS 650, fol.142r.

  70. 70.

    Jonathan Riley-Smith, ‘Prologue: The Knights Templar’, and John Toulmin, ‘The Temple Church’, in Havery (ed.), History of the Middle Temple, 1–30.

  71. 71.

    Inderwick (ed.), Inner Temple Records, 1, 215–19.

  72. 72.

    Gerard Legh, The Accedence of Armorie (London: Richard Cottill, 1562), sigs.Ccvi.r-Ddviii.v.

  73. 73.

    Dugdale, Origines Juridiciales, sigs.V3v-X2v.

  74. 74.

    Legh, Accedence of Armorie, sigs.Eei.v-ii.r.

  75. 75.

    Confusion appears to have arisen in analyses of these festivities over the role played by Dudley. Many have ascribed him the part of the ‘Prince’ in Legh’s account, but ‘Palaphilos’ is very clearly a different character to the Prince, whom the narrator is taken to see by Palaphilos. Dugdale explains that Dudley was ‘chief person (his title Palaphilos) being Constable and Marshall’, and it is the Constable-Marshal who makes his grand entrance on St Stephen’s Day requesting admission to his ‘lordship’s’ service, the lord in this instance being the festive ‘Lord Chancellor’, played in 1561 by a Mr Onslow.

  76. 76.

    Desmond Bland (ed.), Gesta Grayorum, or the History of the High and Mighty Prince Henry of Purpoole Anno Domini 1594 (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 1968); LL, 1, 325–43; W.R. Elton, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and the Inns of Court Revels (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 4 and 7.

  77. 77.

    Margaret Knapp and Michael Kobialka, ‘Shakespeare and the Prince of Purpoole: the 1594 production of The Comedy of Errors at Gray’s Inn Hall’, Theatre History Studies 4 (1984), 71–81.

  78. 78.

    Bland (ed.), Gesta Grayorum, 35–36. The staged reconciliation was followed by a series of six philosophic dialogues, written by Francis Bacon and performed by fellow Grayans (Stewart (ed.), Oxford Francis Bacon I, 583–606).

  79. 79.

    The Comedy of Errors, 1.2.35–38 (Riverside Shakespeare).

  80. 80.

    Bland (ed.), Gesta Grayorum, 58.

  81. 81.

    Montaigne, ‘On Friendship’ (Screech (trans. and ed.), Complete Essays, 207). On classical-­humanist friendship, and its currency in early modern England, see Chapter 2; Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 17–53; MacFaul, Male Friendship, 1–29.

  82. 82.

    Legh, Accedence of Armorie, sigs.Ccv.v-Ccvi.r.

  83. 83.

    See: MacCaffrey, ‘Place and Patronage’; Arthur F. Marotti, ‘John Donne and the Rewards of Patronage’, in Guy Fitch Lytle and Stephen Orgel (eds), Patronage in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 207–34; Linda Levy Peck, Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England (London: Routledge, 1993) (first published Unwin Hyman Ltd, 1990), chs. 1–3.

  84. 84.

    Patterson, Urban Patronage in Early Modern England, 15.

  85. 85.

    Peck, Court Patronage, 48.

  86. 86.

    G.A. Wilkes (ed.), The Complete Plays of Ben Jonson, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981–2), 1, 275–411, 279.

  87. 87.

    ‘A general Collection of all the offices in England with their fees and allowaunce in the Queenes gift’, c.1589, Folger MS. V.a.98; C.W. Brooks, ‘The Common Lawyers in England, c.1558–1642’, in Wilfrid Prest (ed.), Lawyers in Early Modern Europe and America (London: Croom Helm, 1981), 42–64.

  88. 88.

    Reid, Council in the North, 228, 233–4.

  89. 89.

    BL Lansdowne MS 683. The Gray’s Inn lawyers are fols.64v-65r.

  90. 90.

    NT to Edward Stanhope, 9 April 1595, LPL MS 651, fol.78r (copy).

  91. 91.

    NT to Charles Hales, 10 April 1595, LPL MS 651, fol.289v (copy).

  92. 92.

    NT to Mr Davison, 18 May 1595, LPL MS 651, fol.133r (copy).

  93. 93.

    EE to the Earl of Huntingdon, 7 April 1595, LPL MS 651, fol.100r (copy).

  94. 94.

    Paul Hammer, ‘The Uses of Scholarship: The Secretariat of Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, c.1585–1601’, English Historical Review 109 (1994), 26–51, 28 (note).

  95. 95.

    Robert Beale to WC, 24 April 1595, BL Additional MS 48116, fols.338-345v.

  96. 96.

    Trott wrote to Charles Hales that it was ‘Her Maiestes pleasure that he [Beale] should himself exequute’ the office (LPL MS 651, fol.289r).

  97. 97.

    NT to Charles Hales, 9 April 1595, LPL MS 51, fol.289v (copy).

  98. 98.

    PP, chapters 4, 5 and 7; HF, Chapters 6 and 7.

  99. 99.

    NT to Edward Stanhope, 9 April 1595, LPL MS 651, fol.78r (copy).

  100. 100.

    PP, 31.

  101. 101.

    NT to John Stanhope, June 1595, LPL MS 651, fol.186r-v (auto copy).

  102. 102.

    NT to AB, 22 May 1595, LPL MS 651, fol.134r-v.

  103. 103.

    TNA SP 12/253, fol.118r.

  104. 104.

    ‘A General Collection’ identifies 35 named paid positions in the treasury, making it the biggest crown department by far (Folger MS V.a.98, fol.1r-v). MacCaffrey terms Burghley the queen’s ‘patronage minister’ (‘Place and Patronage’, 109).

  105. 105.

    Quoted in Stephen Alford, Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 29.

  106. 106.

    28 February 1585: Thomas Morison; 15 March 1585: William, Lord Evers, George Heneage, Edward Boughton, Nicholas Luke, Charles Howard, Richard Spencer, Reginald Smith (67); 29 February 1588: Henry, earl of Southampton, Thomas Holcroft; 11 March 1588: Christopher, Baron Delvin, Robert Sidney, Henry Brooke, Anthony Cooke, Fulke Greville, [Thomas] Posthumous Hoby, Edward Fritton, Simon Killigrew, Robert Oglethorpe (66); 26 February 1589: William Cecil, Richard Hatton, Garrett Aylmer, Robert Welby, Henry Goldsmith, Edward Warryn (74) (Foster (ed.), Gray’s Inn Admissions).

  107. 107.

    Inderwick (ed.), Inner Temple Records, 1, 219. All the Inns had orders similar to that which obtained at Middle Temple, that ‘Gentlemen are prohibited from suing by noblemen’s letters or otherwise for their calling and preferment to the bar, on pain of disgrace’, Charles Henry Hopwood (ed. and trans.), Minutes of Parliament of the Middle Temple, 3 vols (London: privately printed, 1904–05), 1, 234.

  108. 108.

    Inderwick (ed.), Inner Temple Records, 1, 217–18.

  109. 109.

    J. Douglas Walker (ed.), The Records of the Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn. The Black Books, 4 vols (London: H.C. Cartwright, 1897–1904), 2, xxx.

  110. 110.

    Dugdale, Origines Juridiciales, sig.Y1r.

  111. 111.

    Walker (ed.), Lincoln’s Inn Records, 2, 144. The specifics of special admission are addressed in Inderwick, Inner Temple Records, 1, 238.

  112. 112.

    Inderwick (ed.), Inner Temple Records, 1, 219–20.

  113. 113.

    Foster (ed.), Gray’s Inn Admissions, 87 (where Žerotín appears as ‘Johannes Dionysius’); Otakar Odložilík, ‘Karel of Žerotín and the English Court (1564–1636)’, Slavonic Review 15 (1936), 413–25, 421; Mears, Queenship and Political Discourse, 263.

  114. 114.

    William Camden, August 1592 (81); Lancelot Andrewes, March 1590 (77); Jean Hotman, January 1588 (72); John Whitgift, March 1593 (82); Richard Fletcher and Humphrey Tyndall, February 1594 (83). Thomas Conway, another gentleman usher, was admitted in March 1598, along with Randle Belling, one of the queen’s shewers (93) (Foster (ed.), Gray’s Inn Admissions).

  115. 115.

    Sir Richard Martyn and Henry Byllyngsley, February 1591 (78); John Garrard, Thomas Lowe and Edward Holmden, March 1599 (96); Leonard Halliday and William Craven, August 1600 (99) (ibid.).

  116. 116.

    Inderwick (ed.), Inner Temple Records, 1, 285–6.

  117. 117.

    Foster (ed.), Gray’s Inn Admissions, 87; Ian W. Archer, ‘Spencer, Sir John (d.1610)’, ODNB (accessed 21 August 2015); Hutchinson, Notable Middle Templars, 96.

  118. 118.

    Foster (ed.), Gray’s Inn Admissions, 65 and 68 (Cheke is entered twice), 103.

  119. 119.

    Dugdale quotes an Inner Temple regulation that banned ‘strangers’ from the Hall except those ‘as shall appear and seem to be of good sort and fashion’ (Origines Juridiciales, sig.V3v). The outsiders were not just men: female guests were entertained at Inner Temple, but they dined separately in the library (sig.X3r).

  120. 120.

    Bland (ed.), Gesta Grayorum, 35.

  121. 121.

    Essex was admitted in the autumn of 1588, and made a single request that a Mr John Hawyes be called to be the bar at the time of his own entry, but other than that his name does not appear in the Inner Temple records (Inderwick (ed.), Inner Temple Records, 1, 354).

  122. 122.

    This favouritism is implied by Foss, Judges of England, 5, 441.

  123. 123.

    An undated narrative, probably from 1607, entitled ‘The case of Sir Francis Bacon’s precedency when Queen Elizabeth and King James counsel and also when solicitor to King James’, was copied into the Inner Temple parliament records (Inderwick (ed.), Inner Temple Records, 2, 32).

  124. 124.

    ‘Mr Francis Bacon’s state of his account with Trott’, BL Lansdowne MS 88, fols.50–1; HF, 206–8.

  125. 125.

    Lettre de Monsieur Trott ou Monsieur Crewe a Monsieur touchant la terre de Barly 1593’ (LPL MS 649 fols.509–511).

  126. 126.

    Henry Gosnold to AB, 14 September 1594, LPL MS 650, fol.265r; 16 October 1594, LPL MS 650, fol.291r (accompanying enclosure now lost); undated, LPL MS 650, fol.353r (accompanying enclosure now lost); Hammer, ‘The Uses of Scholarship’, 29 (note).

  127. 127.

    Foster (ed.), Gray’s Inn Admissions, 81.

  128. 128.

    GL, 127.

  129. 129.

    Jardine and Sherman, ‘Pragmatic Readers’, 102–24.

  130. 130.

    Henry Gosnold to AB, 14 September 1594, LPL MS 650, fol.265r.

  131. 131.

    Morgan Colman [Ten sheets containing genealogies and portraits of James I and Queen Anne. With complimentary verses, addressed to Henry Prince of Wales, the Duke of York, the Princess Elizabeth, and with the coats of arms of all the nobles living in 1608 and of their wives] (London: no printer’s information, 1608). The BL copy—the only one known to survive—has no title page, but is inscribed in a seventeenth-century hand ‘Pedigree of King Iames’.

  132. 132.

    Foster (ed.), Gray’s Inn Admissions, 91.

  133. 133.

    Henry Gosnold to Anthony Bacon, 28 November [no year], LPL MS 653, fol.195r. In November 1593, Anthony Standen had sent his commendations to Anthony Bacon, Francis and Thomas Crewe at Gorhambury (LPL MS 649, fol.379r). Crewe had lived with Anthony before: Nicholas Faunt sent his salutations to a similar party at Gorhambury in September 1592 (LPL MS 648, fol.250v).

  134. 134.

    Hammer, ‘The Uses of Scholarship’, 28–30.

  135. 135.

    Fortescue, De Laudibus Legum Angliae, 119.

  136. 136.

    Legh, Accedence of Armorie, sigs.¶ii.r, CCvi.v.

  137. 137.

    Ferne, Blazon of Gentrie, sigs.Aiiii.r, Civ.v and Giiii.r; Healy, ‘Ferne, Sir John’, ODNB.

  138. 138.

    Buc, Third Vniversitie, sig.4O5v.

  139. 139.

    In 1604, by royal command, the Inns ordered that admission be limited to gentlemen by descent. It was an order that seems wholly to have been ignored (Walker (ed.), Lincoln’s Inn Records, 2, xxi).

  140. 140.

    Prest, Rise of the Barristers, 116–18.

  141. 141.

    The idea is Michael Warner’s, ‘New English Sodom,’ American Literature 64, 1 (1992), 19–47, 35.

  142. 142.

    Alan Bray, ‘Homosexuality and the signs of male friendship in Elizabethan England’. See also Jonathan Goldberg’s argument that the Renaissance regarded sodomy as any act that threatened familial alliance (Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities) and Alan Stewart, whose Close Readers understands accusations of sodomy as centrally concerned with disruption in various reproductive economies.

  143. 143.

    Anon., Sir Thomas Overbury, sigs.K4v-5r.

  144. 144.

    Mario DiGangi, ‘How queer was the Renaissance?’, in Katherine O’Donnell and Michael O’Rourke (eds), Love, Sex, Intimacy and Friendship Between Men, 1550–1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 128–47, 142.

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    Will Tosh

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Tosh, W. (2016). Institutionality: Nicholas Trott, the Inns of Court and the Value of Friendship. In: Male Friendship and Testimonies of Love in Shakespeare’s England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49497-9_4

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