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Lewkenor’s writings · 1594
The Resolved Gentleman: Arms, Letters and the Last Encounter
It teacheth nothing more, than how to live virtuously, and die blessedly.
Lewkenor, address to the reader, The Resolved Gentleman (1594); spelling modernised.
A knight’s journey towards death, translated by a soldier turning from war to literature.
Published in London in 1594, The Resolved Gentleman places Lewes Lewkenor’s name on the title page as translator. Its story follows a knight towards an encounter no human being can avoid. The opponents are Accident and Debility, champions in the service of Death. Courage remains necessary, but it must learn the limits of physical strength, worldly success and the hope of escaping time.
The preliminary pages make the book unusually important for Lewkenor’s biography. He thanks Anne, Countess of Warwick, for assistance at court and acknowledges obligations shared by his father and friends. Maurice Kyffin praises his virtue, arms and languages. Robert Dallington addresses his departure from warfare and urges him to keep writing.
From Burgundy through Spain to England
Lewkenor explains the route by which the work reached him. Olivier de la Marche’s French Le Chevalier délibéré had been translated into Spanish verse by Hernando de Acuña. Lewkenor followed that Spanish version:
It hath been since translated into sundry languages, and among the rest, by Don Hernando de Acunia into Spanish verse, and dedicated unto the Emperor Charles the fifth: whose translation I do here follow, because I could never yet light on any of the French originals.
Lewkenor, address to the reader, The Resolved Gentleman (1594); spelling modernised.
He also recognises that translation can alter a work. Acuña, he says, “in some places much altered the Author’s meaning, adding and taking away, according to his own fancy, and fitness of the time in which he translated it”. Lewkenor’s English prose is therefore part of a sequence of adaptations, each made for another language and readership.
His own change from verse to prose becomes the subject of a candid defence:
Some perchance may blame me, of having done the Author whom I follow wrong, by translating into an uneloquent barren Prose, his excellent conceit, expressed in such heroic Verse, and beautified with so many fair Tables and portraits, marvellously delighting with the variety of the one, and the sweetness of the other, both the ear and the eye of the reader. To this I answer, with the confession of my fault, that it is true, and withal, that this matter being for the most part allegorical, had indeed been far better to have been handled in verse.
Lewkenor, address to the reader, The Resolved Gentleman (1594); spelling modernised.
He nevertheless asks readers to value substance in plain speech. He has given the author an “English habit”, even if it cannot match the beauty of his former clothing. The metaphor presents translation as a new dress for a work whose moral substance can survive the change.
The Countess of Warwick: help at court
The dedication describes a relationship of active patronage. Lewkenor does not merely praise a distant noblewoman; he remembers the Countess’s readiness to help him after his entry into royal service:
I owe you many other duties, as well in regard of your many honourable favours, and continual readiness to do me good in Court, since my first coming to her Majesty’s service, as also of the infinite obligations, which not only I, but also my Father, and sundry of my friends, do owe unto the memory of your noble deceased Husband, and his most worthy and ever memorable Brother.
Lewkenor, dedication to Anne, Countess of Warwick, The Resolved Gentleman (1594); spelling modernised.
The deceased husband was Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick; his brother was Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. The acknowledgement joins Lewkenor’s own court career to a wider set of family obligations. It gives named patrons and a precise kind of assistance: favour within the court.
His preceding compliment says that the translation represents the Countess’s virtues:
Accept therefore, good Madame, with your wonted favour this poor Translation, the greatest part of whose best substance is your own, as lively, though under the shadow of other names, representing the innated virtues of your own noble mind.
Lewkenor, dedication, The Resolved Gentleman (1594); spelling modernised.
“Your own” is explained through resemblance to her virtues. It is a patronal compliment within an allegorical dedication, rather than a statement that she wrote most of the book. The passage shows Lewkenor presenting moral literature as an appropriate offering to the person who had helped him.
Maurice Kyffin: “Virtue, Arms, and Languages”
Kyffin’s fourteen-line poem tells the reader how to approach the story. Its enemies are the dangers of life; its defence is moral resolution. Courtly deception appears among the things to avoid:
See, here, laid open to thy sight and sense,
Th’ Error, and Terror, of this wretched Life:
Thy many Foes, the means for thy Defence;
The glorious End, succeeding all this strife.Learn to redeem the precious Time here lent thee:
Shun false allurements, and Court’s subtlety:
Resolve herein: Of thine amiss repent thee;
So mayst thou vanquish Chance and Debility.This Allegory, shaped first in French,
And thence transferred into Castilian verse,
Containing Rules our follies to retrench,
Lewknor, by Metaphrase, doth here rehearse.
Him virtue, Arms, and Languages adorn;
Hateful reprovers he may justly scorn.
Maurice Kyffin, “to the Reader”, complete poem, The Resolved Gentleman (1594); spelling modernised.
The closing couplet is direct printed testimony to Lewkenor’s reputation. Military service and linguistic accomplishment sit beside moral worth. The poem also links the book’s spiritual advice to the practical hazards of court life: time is precious, appearances deceive, and judgement must be exercised.
Dallington: “Oh loss of arm”
The other commendatory poem addresses Lewkenor as “sweet Lewes” and speaks more personally of injury, friendship and future writing. Printed under “Rob. Dillington”, it is associated with Robert Dallington:
Enforced cause unfeigned Love, prove both constraints in me,
To raise my Muse (Oh worthless Muse) to sing the worth of thee:
But what I sing, is that I see, what I assured ever,
Hopes of your friends are springing still, sweet Lewes do still persevere.
And though nor Arms (oh loss of Arm) nor Muses now are minded,
Despair not friend, men worthy know, that now the time is blinded.
And as this perfect subject shows, the subject of thy mind:
So this pretends, unto thy friends, more resteth yet behind.
Thou leavest the Wars (so wills thy friends) leave not the Muses’ name.
All is not lost, though now liked least, what left is unto fame.
And rest not here, but still run on, we longing are for more.
Great are thy gifts, yet give us still, thou lessenest not thy store.
“Rob. Dillington”, complete commendatory poem, The Resolved Gentleman (1594); spelling modernised.
The poem makes the movement from soldiering to authorship explicit. Injury and the abandonment of war need not end a productive life. Friends expect more work, and Dallington frames that expectation as encouragement against despair. His “loss of Arm” should be read alongside Lewkenor’s 1587 petition describing the crippling of his right arm and hand; the phrase alone does not settle the medical details of the injury.
The final lines make the book an opening, rather than a conclusion: “we longing are for more”.
Accident and Debility
The narrative transforms mortality into a chivalric encounter. A knight receives warning of an unavoidable passage guarded by two champions:
It behoveth thee therefore well and wisely to ponderate with thyself, that thou now drawest on toward the exceeding dangerous horror of an inevitable passage, kept by an ever victorious enemy, called DEATH, who entertaineth in his daily wages, two mighty and puissant Champions, the one called Accident, the other Debility: the combat with one of which, thou canst not by any means avoid.
Narrative, warning concerning Death’s champions, The Resolved Gentleman (1594); spelling modernised.
Accident represents sudden and unpredictable destruction. Debility works through weakness and decline. The distinction lets the story range from the death of the young and vigorous to the gradual exhaustion of age. Military courage cannot guarantee survival against either opponent.
The reader is nonetheless asked to proceed with resolution. Knowing that the encounter cannot be escaped changes the meaning of preparation:
Such is the condition of mankind, and such the course and point whereunto you are now arrived, that fly back or retire, by any means you may not. Therefore proceed on a God’s name with a resolved courage: for as the danger is great, so great will be your glory, if you do but withstand Accident alone.
Narrative, advice concerning the coming encounter, The Resolved Gentleman (1594); spelling modernised.
“Resolved” carries the sense of a settled purpose. The knight must prepare to meet what strength cannot finally overcome. That moral problem gives the romance its seriousness beneath the armour, combats and personified guides.
Time written in the landscape
The passing seasons become another way of seeing a human life. The narrator is reminded that the natural world’s renewal offers no promise of personal rejuvenation:
Such as this of theirs, is thy estate, who having now overgone the sundry degrees and seasons, as the Spring, Summer, and Autumn of thy age, rest assured, that thy Winter is at hand: only this is the difference, that thou canst not be again renewed in this world, as are these vegetative creatures: for so is it by the eternal wisdom enacted, that there is no going back from that degree of age, whereunto a man is once arrived.
Narrative, meditation on the seasons of life, The Resolved Gentleman (1594); spelling modernised.
The comparison gives visible form to time. Bare trees and exhausted ground become an image of bodily decline. The gentleman’s journey joins moral instruction to experiences a reader can recognise: age, loss, memory and the discovery that earlier confidence is no longer enough.
History as a store of examples
The work’s exemplary world brings princes and celebrated figures before the reader as evidence of mortality. Its authority comes partly from the collapse of distinctions that worldly success seems to secure. The strong, wise, beautiful and powerful remain subject to the same encounter.
Lewkenor’s presentation encourages readers to look through the narrative to the moral life it represents. His address says that it teaches “how to live virtuously, and die blessedly”. The closing meditation brings that equality before death into a single stark comparison:
For in fine, all worldly pomp, Beauty, magnificence, and what else soever the world hath goodly or admirable, turneth to rottenness and corruption: and Death, enemy to nature, equalleth sceptres with mattocks, and king with beggars.
Closing meditation of the translated narrative, The Resolved Gentleman (1594); spelling modernised.
A sceptre and a labourer’s tool become equivalent before death. The military adventure has led towards a recognition of human dependence rather than a promise that honour or power can defeat it.
Lewkenor’s English voice
A translation can reveal a writer’s choices without turning every first-person speech into autobiography. The gentleman in the story belongs to the inherited allegory. Lewkenor’s own voice is most securely heard in the dedication and address to the reader: his patrons, his source, his language and his defence of prose.
His account of prose makes a useful statement of literary purpose. He hopes those who “more esteem substance than shadows” will accept plain speech. The inherited knight’s costume has been changed for an English one, while the translator asks to be judged by the work’s usefulness as well as its ornament.
The dedication and poems then restore the historical writer to view: a man helped by the Countess of Warwick, connected to the Dudleys, praised for arms and languages, and urged by friends to continue after a disabling military injury. These are unusually concrete points from which to follow his subsequent publications.
Read the original
The Resolved Gentleman (1594): EEBO–TCP transcription →
The Resolved Gentleman. Translated out of Spanish into English, by Lewes Lewkenor Esquire. London: Richard Watkins, 1594. The source sequence runs from Olivier de la Marche’s Le Chevalier délibéré, through Hernando de Acuña’s Spanish verse, to Lewkenor’s English prose.
The dedication to Anne, Countess of Warwick, the address to the reader and both commendatory poems are in the preliminary matter. The extracts above have been checked against the EEBO–TCP text; spelling is modernised. Both poems are quoted in full.
For a modern study, see Marco Nievergelt, “Catholic loyalism, service and careerism: Lewes Lewkenor’s quest for favour”, Renaissance Studies (2010), and his chapter “Lewes Lewkenor: The Humanist Quest” in Allegorical Quests from Deguileville to Spenser.
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