SOUTHAMPTON, HENRY WRIOTHESLEY, 3RD EARL OF (1573-1624), one of Shakespeare's patrons, was the sec ond son of Henry Wriothesley, 2nd earl of Southampton, and his wife Mary Browne, daughter of the 1st Viscount Montague. He was born at Cowdray House, near Midhurst, on Oct. 6, 1573, and succeeded to the title in 1581, when he became a royal ward, under the immediate care of Lord Burghley. He entered St. John's Col lege, Cambridge, in 1585, graduating M.A. in 1589; and his name was entered at Gray's Inn before he left the university. At seven teen he was presented at court, where he made friends with the earl of Essex, and received extraordinary marks of the queen's favour. He became a munificent patron of poets. Nashe dedicated his romance of Jack Wilton to him, and Gervase Markham his poem on Sir Richard Grenville's last fight. His name is also asso ciated with Barnabe Barnes's Parthenophil and Parthenope, and with the Worlde of IV ordes of John Florio, who taught him Italian. But he is best known as a patron of the drama and especially of Shakespeare. Venus and Adonis (1593) is dedicated to Southampton in terms expressing respect, but no special inti macy; but in the dedication of Lucrece (1594) the tone is very different. "The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end . . . What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours." Nicholas Rowe, on the authority of Sir William Davenant, stated in his Life of Shake speare that Southampton on one occasion gave Shakespeare a pres ent of £i,000 to complete a purchase.
If the sonnets were addressed to Southampton, the earlier ones urging marriage upon him must have been written before the beginning (1595) of his intrigue with Elizabeth Vernon, cousin of the Earl of Essex, which ended in 1598 with a hasty marriage that brought down Queen Elizabeth's anger on both the contract ing parties, who spent some time in the Fleet prison.
Meanwhile in 1596 and 1597 Southampton had accompanied Essex on his two expeditions to Cadiz and to the Azores, in the latter of which he distinguished himself by his daring tactics. In 1598 he had a brawl at court with Ambrose Willoughby, and later in the same year he attended Sir Robert Cecil on an embassy to Paris. In 1599 he went to Ireland with Essex, who made him gen
eral of his horse, but the queen insisted that the appointment should be cancelled, and Southampton returned to London. He was deeply involved in Essex's conspiracy against the queen, and in February T 6o I was sentenced to death. Cecil obtained the corn mutation of the penalty to imprisonment for life.
On the accession of James I. Southampton resumed his place at court and received numerous honours from the new king. On the eve of the abortive rebellion of Essex he had induced the players at the Globe theatre to revive Richard II., and on his re lease from prison in 1603 he resumed his connection with the stage. In 1603 he entertained Queen Anne with a performance of Love's Labour's Lost by Burbage and his company, to which Shakespeare belonged, at Southampton House.
Southampton was an active member of the Virginia company's council. He seems to have been a born fighter, and engaged in more than one serious quarrel at court, being imprisoned for a short time in 1603. He was in more serious disgrace in 1621 for his determined opposition to Buckingham. He was a volunteer on the Protestant side in Germany in 1614, and in 1617 he pro posed to fit out an expedition against the Barbary pirates. In 1624 he and his elder son enrolled themselves as volunteers for the United Provinces of the Netherlands against Spain. Immediately on landing they were attacked with fever, to which both suc cumbed, the father surviving until Nov. 1o, There exist numerous portraits of Southampton, in which he is depicted with dark auburn hair and blue eyes, compatible with Shakespeare's description of a "man right fair." Sir John Beau mont (1583-1627) wrote a well-known elegy in his praise, and Gervase Markham wrote of him in a tract entitled Honour in his Perfection For further information see "Memoirs of Henry Wriothesley, the third Earl of Southampton," in Boswell's Shakespeare (1821), xx. 427 sqq., where many of the elegies on Southampton am printed.