ACT 1, SCENE 3.

_Boling_. Your will be done: this must my comfort be, That sun, that warms you here, shall shine on me; And those his golden beams, to you here lent, Shall point on me, and gild my banishment.

_North_. A dearer merit, not so deep a maim As to be cast forth in the common air, Have I deserved at your highness’ hand. The language I have learn’d these forty years, My native English, now I must forego, etc., etc. What is my sentence then, but speechless death, Which robs my native tongue from breathing native breath?

Does not every thoughtful reader pause over it and say to himself, why does he bring forward Busby and Green and rate them and sentence them to death? What for? treason? rebellion? murder? sedition? some rash crime? No; but for having “disparked” his parks and pulled down “his impress” (_only one_!), and his “household coat,” and tells us what he would like to have done to his enemies at Court if he had had the chance, as they had done when they cut off his patron and his kinsman Essex’s head. Now to return to the reason why he should have written a play to unfold the reasons of his family decay. To Cecil from Anthony Sherley, “The worst sort of the world have taken advantage to lay upon _me_ all sorts of defamation” (p. 37), and again, and therefore to clear himself, he shows how it came to pass, and that his father was not in his right senses who incurred “this great debt” (p. 37, Sherley Brothers). Elizabeth had actually “_distrained_” upon his father’s goods, had carried off even his blankets and sheets, chairs and arras hangings, feather beds, and silver spoons, and left his mother scanty and beggarly supply for her dowry house, not sufficient for the necessities of everyday life. She had seized and sold the vast lands and possessions of his ancestors. (Stemmata Shirleana, Roxburgh Club, p. 251.) “A description of the Manors sold, all save Wiston dowry.” “In 1578 Sir T. Sherley served the office of Sheriff for the counties of Surrey and Sussex. He afterwards became Treasurer at War in the Low Countries, and having fallen under the displeasure of Queen Elizabeth, and become indebted to the Crown, his estates and personal effects, with the exception of the Manor of Wiston, settled on his wife, were seized.” See Lansdowne MSS. Goods seized at Wiston by Sheriff, 1588. Here again I earnestly request comparison with the story in the “Yorkshire Tragedy.” Rowland Whyte, “he owed the Queen more than he was worth; his own doings have undone him.”