Family Tree Maker - Cemetarian

longingly as his beloved plays the keys of an early piano “the virginals”.
Courtesy of Kari Boyd McBride:
Aemilia Lanyer was christened at St. Botolph, Bishopsgate--the London neighborhood where "foreign
musicians and theatre-folk lived"--on January 27, 1569 (Rowse 13). She was the daughter of Baptista
Bassano and Margaret Johnson. Nothing certain is known of Lanyer's mother but that she was buried in
Bishopsgate on July 7, 1587 (Rowse 14). But it is possible that she was the Margaret Johnson born ca.
1545-1550 who was the aunt of Robert Johnson (1583?-1633), lutenist and composer, musician of
Shakespeare's company, and, later, musician to the court of Charles I (DNB s.v. "Robert Johnson";
Woods, Lanyer, 3-4). Lanyer's father's family, the Bassanos, were court musicians who had come to
England from Venice at the end of Henry VIII's reign. It has been argued that they were converted Jews
(Lasocki and Prior; Rowse, "Revealed at Last," and ensuing correspondence; Greer et al., s.v. "Aemilia
Lanyer"), but Ruffatti has argued persuasively that the family was Christian. Lanyer had an elder sister,
Angela (d. 1584), and two brothers, Lewes and Phillip, who did not survive to adulthood (Lasocki and
Prior 46). Lanyer's father died when she was seven and was also buried in Bishopsgate, on May 11,
1576 (Rowse 14). Internal evidence of Lanyer's poems tell us that she was fostered in the household of
Susan Bertie Wingfield, Countess Dowager of Kent (information also confirmed by Forman), and that
she was later attached to the household of Margaret, Countess of Cumberland, and her daughter, Anne
Clifford. Lanyer memorializes her time with them at the estate of Cookham Dean in "The Description of
Cooke-ham." Lanyer must have been educated along with the noble girls whom she attended, for her
work shows familiarity with poetic genres and verse forms and with the (Geneva) Bible (McBride,
Engendering Authority, "Appendix").
As a young woman, Lanyer frequented the court of Elizabeth I and was mistress to Henry Carey, Lord
Hunsdon, forty-five years her senior, who "maintained [her] in great pomp," says Forman, and provided
her with an income of forty pounds a year (Rowse 11). (There is no conclusive evidence that Lanyer was
William Shakespeare's mistress, an argument advanced by Rowse, nor, indeed, that she was the "darkeyed
lady" of Milton's sonnets, a theory advanced early in this century by John Smart.) She became
pregnant at the age of twenty-three, was paid off by Hunsdon, and married her cousin by marriage,
Alphonso Lanyer, a Queen's musician, on October 10, 1592 (Lasocki and Prior 106, 102). The Lanyers
were from Rouen and had come to England under Elizabeth (Rowse 14). Alphonso was a member of the
recorder consort originally started by the five Bassano brothers that included Lanyer's father, Baptista.
(Indeed, Alphonso was the recipient of the royal stipend that had once been Baptista's [Lasocki and
Prior 147].) Alphonso served as gentleman volunteer in the Essex Islands Voyage of 1597 and had also
done service in Ireland (Lewalski, "God" 205; Rowse 11; Woods 213). He was one of fifty-nine
musicians who played at Elizabeth's funeral, and he moved at her death into the service of James I
(Rowse 18). He had been preferred by Elizabeth's closest advisor, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and
granted a monopoly for the weighing of hay and straw in London (six pence for every load of hay and
three pence for every load of straw brought into London and Westminster) (Rowse 19; Lasocki and
Prior 108-09). When he died in 1613, Aemilia Lanyer made over the grant to her brother-in-law,
Innocent, evidently with an understanding that she would continue to receive a portion of it, though her
right to that income was a source of later dispute.
Lanyer told Forman that she had suffered many miscarriages (Rowse 11), but she had at least two
children: the first (presumably the son of Hunsdon) named Henry, born early in 1593, and a daughter,
Odillya, born in December of 1598, who died at ten months of age and was buried at St. Botolph's,
Bishopsgate (Rowse 11, 15; Woods 213). Henry became one of the king's flautists on September 29,
1629. He had two children by his wife, Joyce Mansfield, whom he married in 1623: Mary, baptized July
25, 1627, and Henry, baptized January 16, 1630. The children may have been orphaned on Henry's
death in October 1633. At any rate, Lanyer says in 1635 that she has "two grandchildren to provide for"
(Rowse 35).
Lanyer first consulted Simon Forman, the astrologer, on May 17, 1597 (Rowse 11). She was then living
in Longditch, Westminster, next to Canon Row, which Rowse calls "a fashionable quarter full of the
houses of grandees" (13-14). Forman provides the only physical description we have of Lanyer--that she
had a wart or mole in the pit of her throat (Rowse 12). Lanyer consulted Forman again on June 3 and
16, asking whether her husband would come into any preferment (Rowse 11). Forman reported that she
was unhappy with her husband who had "dealt hardly with her" and "spent and consumed her goods"
(Rowse 12). Forman thought her (supposed) emotional and financial neediness would make her "a good
fellow," that is, a willing sex partner, but, though she seems to have had continued contact with Forman
over the next few years and may have engaged in sexual play with him, she refused to have intercourse,
prompting him to wonder "whether or not she is an incuba" and to call her a whore (Rowse 12, 13).
Lanyer published her volume of poetry, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (Hail, God, King of the Jews), in
1611, when she was forty-two years old. All the poems are in iambic pentameter, though the verse forms
vary. Two prefatory pieces and an afterword are prose. "The Description of Cooke-ham" must have been
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