Abstract
In early January 1540, the English ambassador Sir Thomas Wyatt sprung a trap for the attainted traitor and expatriate Robert Brancester. Using two English scholars in Paris to watch over his target, Wyatt brought the French provost with him to seize Brancester at his lodgings. His subsequent report to Henry VIII is a masterpiece of narrative correspondence, featuring the moment of the traitor’s capture as the centrepiece of an elaborate plot.1 Nearly lost - and intentionally so - in the detail of his narrative and the subsequent discussion of an interview with Emperor Charles V is the fact that Wyatt had failed in his attempt to extradite Brancester, who was later released by the French king upon a request from the emperor.
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Notes and References
John Swerder’s bequest of Old Poole’s farm to the Harlow parish church and poor continued to yield benefits into the twentieth century. See W.R. Powell (ed.) (1983) A History of the County of Essex (Oxford: Oxford University Press), vol. 8, pp. 131–49.
D.G. Newcombe (2004) ‘Hawkins, Nicholas (c.1495–1534)’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press) http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/12678
See W. Page (1926) A History of the County of Kent (London: St Catherine’s Press), vol. II, pp. 209–16.
W.H. Ireland (1930) England’s Topographer (London: G. Virtue), p. 396. This could be a separate William Weldon, though we know that this family had links to or derived from Northumberland, to which county our William Weldon is linked in J. Foster (ed.) (1968) Alumni Oxoniensis (Netherlands: Kraus Reprints), p. 1595. There, Weldon is uncertainly linked to his canonry in Lincoln (the prevendary of Welton Beckhall - see below); however, the succession to that canonry upon his death in 1545 of one Roger Weldon, also of Northumberland and Corpus Christi College, Oxford (Ibid., p. 1594), makes it fairly certain that William was his father or uncle and connected to the same county and canonry.
D.F. Sutton (ed.) (2007) John Leland’s Epigrammata (Birmingham: The Philological Museum), poem CXXXIXhttp://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/lelandpoems
J.P. Carley (1986) ‘John Leland in Paris: The Evidence of his Poetry’ Studies in Philology LXXXIII, pp. 1–50, 8. See also L. Bradner (1956) ‘Some Unpublished Poems by John Leland’ PMLA LXXI, pp. 827–36, 828. On Weldon, see also Alumni Oxoniensis, p. 1595.
J.L. Chester and G. J. Armitage (ed.) (1883) The Parish Registers of St. Antholin, Budge Row, London (London: Harleian Society), p. 5.
Stanford Lehmberg (2004) ‘Grey, Lord John (d. 1564)’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press); online edn, Jan 2008 http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/11548.
L.M. Higgs (1998) Godliness and Governance in Tudor Colchester (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), p. 133 (ftn. 18).
For a discussion that touches on this issue, see Marjorie Curry Woods (2001) ‘Boys Will Be Women: Musings on Classroom Nostalgia and the Chaucerian Audience(s)’ in R.F. Yeager and C.C. Morse (eds.) Speaking Images: Essays in Honor of V.A. Kolve, ed. (Asheville: Pegasus Press), pp. 143–66.
See A.J. Slavin (1979) ‘The Rochepot Affair’ The Sixteenth Century Journal X, pp. 3–19, especially pp. 12–13.
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© 2011 Jason Powell
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Powell, J. (2011). Scholars, Servants, Spies: William Weldon and William Swerder in England and Abroad. In: Adams, R., Cox, R. (eds) Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230298125_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230298125_3
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