A web-based edition of early seventeenth-century political poetry from manuscript sources. It brings into the public domain over 350 poems, many of which have never before been published.

Pi10 Beehold this Obsequie: but without teares


Notes. Buckingham was buried in Westminster Abbey on 18 September 1628, in a subdued, tense and occasionally chaotic nocturnal ceremony. Couplets like this one reveal much of what troubled Buckingham’s mourners: for many, if not most, of Buckingham’s contemporaries, his death was a time not for grief but for celebration.


“Upon his Funerall”

Beehold this Obsequie:1 but without teares;

The birth of all our Joy, and grave of feares.



Source. BL MS Sloane 826, fol. 181v

Other known sources. Bodleian MS Malone 23, p. 197

Pi10






1   Obsequie: funeral rites. <back>