Note 376b — APPENDIX

In 1588 his brother-in-law, Thomas Arundel, afterwards first Lord Arundel of Wardour (husband of his only sister, Mary), petitioned Lord Burghley to grant him an additional tract of the New Forest about his house at Beaulieu. Although in his ‘nonage,’ Arundel wrote, the Earl was by no means ‘of the smallest hope.’ Arundel, with almost prophetic insight, added that the Earl of Pembroke was Southampton’s ‘most feared rival’ in the competition for the land in question. Arundel was referring to the father of that third Earl of Pembroke who, despite the absence of evidence, has been described as Shakespeare’s friend of the sonnets (cf. Calendar of Hatfield MSS. iii. 365).