Blair Worden in his paper on Sejanus ( unpublished ) describes Essex as " a rebel without a theory " .sx In the sense of theory as a single coherent ideology or a practical political programme he is certainly right .sx There was indeed no single theory in the Essex circle - rather various strands of anti-absolutist feeling and interest which found space and encouragement there .sx The milieu included aristocrats who intensely resented their increased economic dependence on the Court and its 'upstart' favourites and the restriction of their military power , but also City Puritan ministers and ambitious army officers ; rising diplomats , historians , and Oxford classical scholars ; and a remarkable number of writers , playwrights , and poets , involved either as patrons or clients .sx The commitment to an active anti-Spanish foreign and military policy in Europe and the New World , and to protection of non-separatist Puritanism at home against increasing persecution by the State church , Essex partly took over from Sidney and from his own stepfather Leicester , together with much of the faction itself , the Dudley family , for whatever reasons , having been protectors of radical Protestants since Reformation times .sx Along with the bequest of Sidney's best sword , Essex inherited connexions with the Huguenot aristocracy and theories of justified resistance to royal tyranny in religion , expounded by Sidney's friends Mornay and Languet .sx A new emphasis on scientific history and secular realism in politics came with the rediscovery and English translation of Tacitus , in which Essex himself was especially interested , and which had strong republican connotations .sx While Puritan preachers and divines looked to Essex as their general against the Popish Antichrist as well as defender of their rights within the established church , his Catholic supporters ( many of them fellow-soldiers knighted by him or semi-feudal adherents from the Welsh borders ) believed he could ensure greater toleration for loyal Catholics in the succeeding reign , besides careers for military talent ; and tolerationist writers dedicated works to him .sx The very variety of anti-absolutist ideas and oppositional views of history within the Essex circle , openly discussed as they could never have been at Court , may indeed have contributed to Shakespeare's astonishingly multi - vocal drama .sx Essex seems to have imagined himself uniting all the varied and contradictory currents of ideological and practical hostility to the government into a single movement , bound by his own charisma , and this proved a gross overestimation and self-delusion .sx He expected and gambled on active popular and City support for his revolt , but did not get it , and went to execution as a traitor .sx His friends had plenty of time to ponder on what went wrong , especially those who were lucky to escape beheading and remained imprisoned in the Tower till Elizabeth's death .sx Soon after James's accession , however , the verdict of treason began to be openly questioned , and Essex became retrospectively - and still more in popular culture - a Protestant or even a Puritan patriot-martyr ( witness the evidence of Lucy Hutchinson from one end of the political spectrum and the Earl of Newcastle from the other , or Thomas Scot's pamphlet Robert Earl of Essex His Ghost in 1624) .sx The ideological and practical alliance which had failed to cohere in the 1590s did so up to a point in the 1620s , with Essex's son the third Earl and Essex's close friend the Earl of Southampton among its most prominent figures , but this time alongside a powerful City interest , many members of Parliament and country gentry , Puritan preachers , professional soldiers , and much of the London working population .sx Instead of a minority coup by force of arms , dissidence was now expressed within Parliament , the City , and the popular culture .sx Economic and political developments during James's reign helped to bring about this alteration , but 'mentalities' were also affected by cultural and ideological influences , including the Puritan preachers and the commercial theatres and London shows , the nearest thing to our modern mass media .sx The drama did not merely reflect , but helped over a period to articulate and reinforce something like a political public opinion - or rather opinions - despite the variable but ever-present censorship .sx To study this process for the Essexians as a group would be a formidable undertaking .sx I shall attempt only a few tentative ideas on the later patronage of the third Earl of Southampton , next to Essex the main leader of the revolt :sx and since even that is too large a subject for a single paper , especially on the connexions he may have had with citizen and popular culture .sx II It is at least thought-provoking that Southampton , the only man named by Shakespeare as a personal patron , should later have earned a reputation , both among friends and enemies , as the outstanding 'popular' nobleman of Jacobean times , popular both in the modern and the equivocal Jacobean sense of the word .sx This seems also to have been how he saw his own role as politician and patron , when he wrote to his friend Sir Dudley Carleton on his belated elevation to the Privy Council in the critical year of 1619 :sx I had much rather have continued a spectator than become an actor .sx But I will make the same request to you that I have made to others , not to expect too much of me .sx You know well how things stand with us , and how little one vulgar councillor is able to effect .sx ( DeLisle MSSv , p. 221 , 233 :sx cited Rowse , Shakespeare's Southampton p. 227) .sx .sx Before considering his patronage in detail we need to recall briefly some of the main facts about the Earl's public life after the Essex revolt .sx Immediately on James's accession in 1603 he released Southampton and other Essexians from the Tower and restored him to his honours and titles .sx The Earl also received important financial grants , notably the farm of sweet wines which Essex had formerly held :sx James regarded Essex as his committed ally , and was prepared to reward his friends .sx Southampton , however , was never trusted by Robert Cecil , the powerful Secretary , and failed to get either major office or the high military command he hoped for .sx After Cecil's death , when Southampton was one of the leaders ( with the Earls of Pembroke and Sheffield ) of the anti-Howard faction at Court , a reputation for radicalism and even republicanism still kept him marginalized .sx Early in James's reign Southampton became a close ally both in business and politics of Sir Edwin Sandys , recognized as the principal leader of opposition and anti-absolutist trends in the Commons from the Parliament of 1604 to the mid-1620s .sx Southampton was a principal investor in the Virginia Company ( among his other business interests ) , where he was not a mere sleeping partner but played an active role .sx When Sandys was pushed out of the Treasureship of the Company by James's intervention , Southampton was elected in his stead and continued his policies until the Company's charter was revoked in 1624 .sx Throughout his life Southampton remained committed to the old Essexian anti-Spanish foreign policy and support for Protestant forces in Europe .sx On the invasion of the Palatinate in 1618 he pressed strongly for English military aid .sx He planned to head a force of volunteers and contribute to financing it , but was not allowed to do so , and when a small force raised by voluntary subscription did finally go , Southampton as a Privy Councillor was refused permission to join it :sx for King James was still pursuing the vain aim of a Spanish alliance and a Spanish marriage for Prince Charles to restore peace in Europe .sx Southampton continued , in direct contact with the King and Queen of Bohemia , to work for English intervention , openly opposing the policy of the King and Buckingham .sx In 1621 he was arrested and interrogated , along with MPs Sir Edwin Sandys and John Selden , for organizing 'mischievous opposition' in both Houses of Parliament , and remained under house-arrest for a time .sx It was apparently the threat to deprive him of the Court grants which formed a large part of his income which induced him temporarily to withdraw from active Parliamentary opposition ; but in 1623 he refused to take the oath demanded of Privy Councillors to support the match .sx Finally when the Crown's policy changed in 1623-24 , and Buckingham and Prince Charles agreed on the need for some form of military intervention , Southampton was at last appointed to lead a force of 6,ooo volunteers to reinforce the English troops already fighting with the Dutch against the Spaniards , an expedition on which he and his eldest son died of fever .sx In his discussion of Sejanus , Blair Worden suggests that Jonson saw only two alternatives for noble political opponents under a despotic state :sx futile rebellion , or stoical acceptance and quietism , with the aim of securing minor concessions .sx Southampton seems consciously to have attempted a third way :sx to be 'popular' , to build support among people outside the Court , and even outside the 'political nation' .sx His career as patron gives many indications of this fairly consistent , if intermittent , political course .sx Southampton was one of the foremost Jacobean aristocrats turning increasingly to business investment - both in industry , in modernizing their estates and in overseas trade and colonization .sx The landed gentry indeed led the way in such investment in a way which did not happen in any other European country .sx No craftsman and few individual merchants could have laid hands on the kind of money the earls of Pembroke , Southampton , Salisbury , and De La Warr were able to invest in founding the Virginia Company .sx For Essexian peers excluded from the highest office at Court by Cecil's distrust , this also offered an alternative opportunity to salvage and extend their wealth and power with a degree of independence , and brought them into contact and sometimes active partnership with City merchants and the new entrepreneurial groups and their ways of thinking .sx Southampton himself modernized and rack-rented his estates , pressurizing copyholders into becoming lease-holders by increased fines .sx He also started a new ironworks at Titchfield and financed the first tinplate mill in England ; developed his London property in Holborn and Bloomsbury ; sponsored the voyage that led to the foundation of the Virginia Company , of which he was a leading member ; belonged to the East India and New England Companies , and backed Hudson's exploration of the North-West passage .sx As Lawrence Stone says , it would be impossible to draw up a list of merchants or country gentry with such a wide range of interests .sx Both mining and overseas ventures were high-risk undertakings , well-suited to aristocrats used ( as Southampton had been ) to losing pounds1,ooo a night gambling .sx Southampton's own reputation for republicanism went back to his association with Essex's secretary Henry Cuffe , a Puritan Oxford don and one of the translators of Tacitus , who read Aristotle's political theory with Southampton and Rutland in Paris and was alleged at Essex's trial to have influenced Southampton with republican opinions .sx Since Cuffe was not an aristocrat and did not have the powerful protectors who saved Southampton , he was made a scapegoat and barbarously executed , making a strongly Puritan speech from the scaffold .sx Some years later ( 1607 ) a philosophical tract by him , The Difference of the Ages of Man's Life , was published and dedicated to Lord Willoughby De Eresby ( another Essex knight ) by an anonymous editor R.M. who claimed to be a servant both of Willoughby and of the Puritan Lord Montagu of Boughton , whose daughter Willoughby had just married .sx The book was several times reprinted , and it is possible that its religious and political reference was clearer to contemporaries than it is now .sx This reputation was later reinforced by Southampton's association and friendship , first in the Virginia Company and then in Parliamentary opposition , with Sir Edwin Sandys , who really was a radical thinker as well as a practical politician , from the time of the 1604 Parliament a consistent opponent of royal absolutism and determined to limit the prerogative and assert the rights of the subject in accordance with ideas of natural law .sx Far from being the stereotype of intolerant dogmatic Protestantism , Sandys in his book Europae Speculum argued for an alliance against Papal domination by all the rest of Christendom , including the anti-Papal Catholic republic of Venice as well as the Dutch republicans .sx This attitude may well have been congenial to Southampton , who had converted from his family's Catholicism to Protestantism ( probably at some time in the 1590s , though Sandys claimed the credit for his conversion ) , but continued personally to protect individual Catholic loyalists .sx