A Letter to Mrs Arrabella Marow [with a prose opening: The favour of such an agreeable & most obliging letter as I received. . . ]
MS's: Wellesley, 82-4 (with annotations on people in margins); Additional 4457, 55-6 (with a different and more personal fifth stanza, and subscription which includes date and place of writing).
1988 Ellis d'Alessandro reprints Wellesley text, 111-2; McGovern & Hinnant, 47-48.
1929 Hughes prints Wellesley, 632-3 (Stanzas 1-11, omits final 12th).
This is a Jacobite conversation piece. Anne Finch excuses herself for not writing.
- In the present posture of affairs (a new Jacobite uprising lead by James Eriskine, the 11th Earl of Mar, and James Butler, the 2nd Duke of Ormonde) with the pro-Hanover Charles, 1st Earl of Cornwallis opening everyone's mail ("How can we then our hearts reveal ... "), the Muse (Prior) is in jail. "Golden-square allowed no Spleen" (a reference to a nototorious gang of highwaymen, the "Golden Farmer's" gang, a captured member of which told Chief Justice Holt "He did not own him for a judge, King James being his lawful sovereign."
- All is sad and dismal: Lady Marrow gone, Arabella fled to the country, badly missed by "Lady Staires" (Elizabeth, a Scots heiress, born 1673, wife to John Dalrymple, 2nd Earl of Stairs, active as a spy on behalf of William III and against the Pretender with the French diplomat Cardinal Dubuis and against a conspiracy undertaken by Cellamare to kill the French regent (these names turn up in Anne Finch's poems).
- Finch herself has been near death, "Philomela" (Elizabeth Rowe) gone to the country to mourn her husband's death, and "Cleone" (Mrs Grace Strode Thynne) "wealthy good and gay" has "left us e'er her time."
The unexplained references and openly Jacobite sympathiesof this poem suggest this, like many of the poems in the MS Wellesley (e.g, "The white mouses petition," To the Hon Mrs H--n, 1707 and 712) was never meant to be published.
In MS Additional 4457 it is subscribed "London, October 18 1715."
Page Last Updated 8 January 2003