When Sir John Harington visited court in 1601, some time after the aborted putsch of the Earl of Essex, he found the Queen still terribly disturbed. She ate little, dressed carelessly, and frowned on all the ladies. Harington wrote to his friend Sir John Portman, ‘I must not say much, even by this trustie and sure messenger; but the many evil plots and designs have overcome all her Highness’ sweet temper. She walks much in her privy chamber, and stamps with her feet at ill news, and thrusts her rusty sword at times into the arras in great rage…. the dangers are over, and yet she always keeps a sword by her table.

Modern biographers of Thomas Lodge have presented a remarkably clear record of his activities, both as writer and physician. However, the period of Lodge's second exile still remains obscure. Although Lodge's biographers agree that because of his Catholicism he fled to the continent during the first decade of the seventeenth century, none has been able accurately to record these years abroad. For example, Lodge's recent scholarly biographer, Charles Sisson, says that this second exile may have begun as early as May 8, 1604. But this statement is inaccurate, for on January 9, 1605/06 Lodge was indicted in London for recusancy, along with Ben Jonson and Edmund Boulton. Professor Sisson also argues that ‘Lodge was allowed to return [to England] early in 1611, as appears from an Act of the Privy Council of 28 January 1611, protecting him from indictment for recusancy, and from the letter dated 17 January 1611 in which he expressed his thanks to Sir Thomas Edmondes for help in bringing about his repatriation.’ But Lodge had returned to London as early as September 21, 1609 as will appear below.

Two small nuggets of information have come to light which would not seem important in themselves did not their implications touch on matters of more general interest concerning music and literature in the Renaissance. At any rate, it seemed to me that they deserve more than a footnote. Both are connected one way or another with Sidney and with Robert Dowland's anthology of English and continental lute-songs, A Musicall Banquet (1610).

One of the composers represented in A Musicall Banquet, along with John Dowland and Giulio Caccini, is Daniell Batchelar. Batchelar's contribution is a setting of a poem by the Earl of Essex, ‘To plead my faith’ (No. VI).