THOMAS POUND (1538?-1616?).
Pound was of Beaumonds in Farlington, Hants, the son of William Pound and Anne Wriothesley, daughter of Thomas, first Earl of Southampton. William Pound had a brother Anthony, whose daughter Honora married Henry, fourth Earl of Sussex (V. H. Hants, iii. 149; Harl. Soc. lxiv. 138; Berry, Hants Genealogies, 194; Recusant Rolls in Catholic Record Soc. xviii. 278, 279, 330, 334). Thomas was in youth a Winchester boy, a Lincoln's Inn lawyer, and a courtier of repute. About 1570 he left the world and became a fervent Catholic, and the record of his recusancy, of his relations with the Jesuit order, which he probably joined, of the help he gave to Edmund Campion, and of his long life of imprisonment and domiciliary restraint is written in H. Morus, Historia Missionis Anglicanae Societatis Jesu (1660); D. Bartoli, Dell' Istoria della Compagnia di Gesu: L'Inghilterra (1667); N. Sanders and E. Rishton, De Origine Schismatis Anglicani (1586); M. Tanner, Societas Jesu Apostolorum Imitatrix (1694); R. Simpson in 2 Rambler (1857), viii. 29, 94; H. Foley, Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, iii (1878), 567; J. H. Pollen, English Catholics in the Reign of Elizabeth (1920), 333 sqq. I am only concerned with his worldly life and his quitting of it. As a Winchester alumnus, he is said to have delivered a Latin speech of welcome to Elizabeth (Bartoli, 51), presumably at her visit of 1560 (App. A), but he can hardly still have been a schoolboy; perhaps he was at New College. He had already been entered at Lincoln's Inn on 16 Feb. 1560 (Adm. Reg. i. 66), and it was on behalf of Lincoln's Inn that he wrote and pronounced two mask orations which are preserved in Bodl. Rawl. Poet. MS. 108, ff. 24, 29, whence they are described in E. Brydges, British Bibliographer, ii. 612. Both seem to have been before Elizabeth (cf. vol. i, p. 162, and App. A). The first, at the wedding of his cousin Henry, Earl of Southampton, in Feb. 1566, is headed in the manuscript 'The copye of an oration made and pronounced by Mr. Pownde of Lyncolnes Inne, with a brave maske out of the same howse, all one greatte horses att the mariage off the yonge erle of South hampton to the Lord Mountagues dawghter abowt Shrouetyde 1565'. The second, at the wedding on 1 July 1566 of another cousin, Frances Radcliffe, is similarly headed 'The copye of an oration made and pronounced by Mr. Pownd of Lincolnes Inne, with a maske att y^e marriage of y^e Earl of Sussex syster to Mr. Myldmaye off Lyncolnes Inne 1566'. From this, which is in rhyming quatrains, Brydges quotes 119 lines; they are of no merit. In 1580 Pound wrote from his prison at Bishop's Stortford to Sir Christopher Hatton (S. P. D. Eliz. cxlii. 20) commending a petition to the Queen, 'for her poeticall presents sake, which her Majesty disdayned not to take at poore Mercuries hands, if you remember it, at Killiegeworth Castle'. The reference must be to the Kenilworth visit of 1568, rather than 1573 or 1575, for soon after Thomas Pound's days of courtly masking came to an abrupt end. The story is told in Morus, 46:
'Natales Christi dies, ut semper solemnes, ita anno sexagesimo quarto fuere celeberrimi; dabantur in Curia ludi apparatissimi Thoma
