Biography Chidiock Tichborne

Poet Biography

Chidiock Tichborne is a name as obscure as it is odd. The antiquarian
syllables, remembered only by a few, are difficult to place and harder
to locate. Tichborne does not appear in either The Golden Treasury or
the Oxford Book of English Verse or the Encyclopaedia Brittanica. Yet he
wrote one of the most moving poems of his century.

Tichborne was not pre-eminently a poet but a conspirator. History is not
sure of the part he played in the attempt to do away with Queen
Elizabeth. Conjecture has it that he was born about 1558 somewhere in
Southampton, and it is said that his father, Peter Tichburne, traced his
descent from Roger de Tichburne, a knight in the reign of Henry II. His
family was ardently Catholic and both Chidiock and his father were
zealous champions of the Church of Rome; they did not scruple to abet
the king of Spain in "holy" attacks on the English government. In 1583,
Chidiock and his father were questioned concerning the possession and
use of certain "popish relics"; somewhat later they were further
implicated as to their "sacrilegious and subversive practices". In April
1586, Chidiock joined a group of conspirators. In June, at a meeting
held in St.Giles-in-the-Fields he agreed to be one of the six who were
pledged to murder the Queen and restore the kingdom to Rome. The
conspiracy was discovered in time; most of the conspirators fled. But
Tichborne, who had remained in London because of an injured leg, was
captured on August 14th and taken to the Tower. On September 14th, he
was tried and pled guilty. He was executed on September 20th. In a grim
finale, history relates, he was "disembowelled before life was extinct"
and the news of the barbarity "reached the ears of Elizabeth, who
forbade the recurrence."

On September 19, 1586, the night before he was executed, Chidiock wrote
to his wife Agnes. The letter enclosed three stanzas beginning:"My prime
of youth is but a frost of cares."

This elegy is so restrained yet so eloquent, so spontaneous, and so
skillfully made that it must be ranked among the little masterpieces of
literature. The grave but not yet depressing music of the lines is
emphasized by the repetition of the rhymed refrain, as though the poet
were anticipating the slow tolling of the bell announcing his death.