The Lewkenor Circle · Soldiers and divided allegiance
Rowland Yorke: Betrayal, Preferment and Iago
And what’s he, then, that says I play the villain,
When this advice is free I give and honest?
Iago, Othello, II.iii.
The villain of this piece is Rowland Yorke: soldier, turncoat and disappointed seeker of command.
Rowland Yorke served in the Low Countries, won praise for his courage, quarrelled with fellow officers and eventually delivered the fort near Zutphen to the Spanish. Lewkenor’s account follows him beyond that betrayal into a contest over command, disappointed advancement and a death he attributes to poisoning.
That sequence makes Yorke a significant historical comparison for Iago: a professional soldier whose services, ambition and resentment belong within a military hierarchy. The comparison gains substance from Lewkenor’s detailed account of the men and their dealings.
A soldier with a reputation to lose
Yorke’s final reputation as a traitor should not obscure the military standing he had previously acquired. Roger Williams appealed to Walsingham on his behalf in June 1584, when Yorke was in danger over the affairs of Ghent:
Rowland Yorke is like to be executed, unless there be some means for him from England, but it is no man lives without faults. I know not what he has done in the broils of Ghent; if he did anything against the Religion I would not speak for him.
Roger Williams to Sir Francis Walsingham, Delft, 26 June 1584; spelling modernised.
Williams then sets out the service behind his recommendation:
Yorke was a man which had carried credit a long time as well with the Prince of Orange and the States General as with them of Ghent, and for anything that I could perceive, was always at their devotion until they failed him both countenance and means to live. They cannot excuse themselves in that, for they abused others greater than he, which could not be disproved in any point of service and duty. I will stand to it never Englishman in these wars did them greater service than Yorke saving Mr. Norrys; if her Majesty knew the value of the man, I think she would make some means for him.
Williams to Walsingham, 26 June 1584.
The defence is qualified: Williams does not claim to know everything Yorke had done. His argument instead turns on previous service, loss of support and material need. These are precisely the pressures that make a soldier’s claims on his employers politically consequential.
“Of the thirteen months, I have been paid four”
Yorke’s own letter to Walsingham from the camp by Oudenaarde describes the difference between his stated income and the money he actually received:
First, I have as sergeant-major or Sergent-de-bataille of all these troops here 400 florins a month, and two “in pay” at 35 florins a month to attend upon me; besides the entertainment of my company, which is worth as much more. Of the 13 months, I have been paid 4 well and truly; yet all this, wherein I may do you any service, I will, I protest, set as nothing.
Rowland Yorke to Walsingham, camp by Oudenaarde, 27 November 1581; spelling modernised.
Pay, employment and professional recognition are entwined in the letter. Yorke presents himself as ready for service but obstructed by envy, insisting that his complaint concerns the freedom to perform worthwhile actions as well as his own maintenance.
The fort of Zutphen
The fort of Zutphen
In January 1587 Yorke surrendered the fort under his command near Zutphen to the Spanish. Sir William Stanley separately surrendered Deventer. Lewkenor introduces the two men by acknowledging the experience that made their defection so damaging:
Shortly after came Sir William Stanley and Rowland Yorke, either of them being a man of great courage, well approved valour, and long experience in the wars, the one rendering unto the king the town of Deventer, and the other betraying the fort of Zutphen: the one being coronel over a regiment of foot, and the other captain of a company of lances.
Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595); spelling modernised.
Lewkenor’s ensuing question concerns the rewards offered by their new master. He makes their later treatment an argument against the expectation that Spanish service would bring security and advancement.
Undermining Stanley
Undermining Stanley
Lewkenor describes a quarrel between Stanley and Yorke within a larger contest involving Francisco Verdugo and Tassis. Yorke, he says, helped Verdugo find a means of removing Stanley from Deventer, in the expectation that he would receive the governorship himself:
hoping, and therein being by Verdugo comforted and confidently assured, that upon the remove of Sir William, the government of the town should remain wholly in himself
Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595); spelling modernised.
According to Lewkenor, Yorke pressed reports about Stanley’s instability and the English soldiers’ wish to recover their country’s favour. Verdugo passed the alarm to Parma, and Stanley’s troops were drawn out of the town in stages under the appearance of military necessity.
Lewkenor himself doubts that the threatened recovery of the town for the English was genuinely intended. The force of his narrative lies in how allegations could be useful to men seeking to remove a rival.
The promised place goes to another man
The promised place goes to another man
Having helped secure Stanley’s removal, Yorke discovers that the promised reward has not followed:
But now to return to Yorke, whom I left in Deventer, assured both by Verdugo’s promises and his own hopes, of the town’s government: when he saw Grave Harman make his entry as new created governor by the Duke’s appointment, you must imagine that it grieved him to the very gall: but forced he was to dissemble it with his best patience.
Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595); spelling modernised.
The sequence combines expectation, another man’s appointment, resentment and the need to conceal it. Iago states his own grievance at the beginning of Othello:
’Tis the curse of service.
Preferment goes by letter and affection,
And not by old gradation, where each second
Stood heir to th’ first.
Iago, Othello, I.i.
Yorke’s circumstances differ from Iago’s, but the comparison is specific. Both narratives concern a soldier’s expectation of advancement, the preference of another man and resentment hidden beneath continued service.
Lewkenor’s account of the end
Lewkenor says that Yorke retained a company of lances and continued to gain wealth through military activity. His discontent and dangerous reputation, however, made his employers distrust him. Lewkenor attributes his death to a poisoned dinner:
This prosperity of his was a great blemish in their eye, for they knew him to be discontented and of a dangerous humour, so that they did not greatly trust him: him therefore fairly one day at dinner they caused to be poisoned.
Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595); spelling modernised.
He goes on to describe the seizure of Yorke’s property, the killing of the Bowcer brothers who resisted it, and the dismissal of his company without payment. These claims are part of Lewkenor’s hostile account of the Spanish administration. The attribution of poisoning should remain attached to that account.
A rebuke at the dinner table
Elsewhere Lewkenor records an episode in which Yorke’s speech about Elizabeth provoked a rebuke from Count Charles of Mansfeld:
Likewise Rowland Yorke at dinner one day with Count Charles of Mansfeld, at his house in Brussels, beginning to use unbeseeming speeches of her majesty, was commanded by the count to hold his peace; praying him thence forward to be better acquainted with the customs of his table, which did not give any man privilege to speak unreverently of princes.
Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595); spelling modernised.
The scene is a small but telling reversal. Service on the opposing side does not give an Englishman permission to speak freely against his own sovereign at a foreign nobleman’s table. Lewkenor uses the rebuke to expose the uncertain standing of the expatriate soldier.
Yorke and Iago
J. Thomas Looney proposed Yorke as a historical comparison for Iago. The strongest material here is the account of military ambition and concealed resentment: the experienced soldier, the promised command, the rival removed, the disappointment and the necessity of dissimulation.
This does not establish Yorke as Iago’s sole original, or turn Lewkenor’s narrative into the plot of Othello. It gives the comparison a documentary basis in the professional and political conflicts of soldiers whom Lewkenor describes.
Sources
Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), account of Stanley, Yorke, Tassis and Verdugo, and the dinner at Count Charles of Mansfeld’s house.
Rowland Yorke to Sir Francis Walsingham, 27 November 1581; Roger Williams to Walsingham, 26 June 1584. Prose quotations use modernised spelling.
J. Thomas Looney, “Shakespeare” Identified, for the proposed Yorke–Iago comparison. William Shakespeare, Othello, I.i.