I STUPIDLY forgot to take my binoculars to the exhibition of miniatures at the National Portrait Gallery. Luckily, they lent out magnifying glasses, helpful in making out the tiny masterpieces of Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver, contemporaries of Shakespeare.

I STUPIDLY forgot to take my binoculars to the exhibition of miniatures at the National Portrait Gallery. Luckily, they lent out magnifying glasses, helpful in making out the tiny masterpieces of Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver, contemporaries of Shakespeare.

One mysterious panel by Oliver is a bit larger, 10 inches high. It shows three brothers standing in black hats, doublets, breeches and hose, arms linked in fraternal solidarity. A little detached from the group is an unknown man in a costume of silver.

Perhaps it is the third Earl of Southampton, who some claimed was the “fair youth” in Shakespeare’s sonnets and was certainly the dedicatee of Venus and Adonis and of The Rape of Lucrece, which, as Clare Asquith has been emphasising in her latest book, Shakespeare and the Resistance, were bestsellers in their day, if almost unread now. Southampton, fearless and energetic, was a leading Catholic in dangerous times.

I’ve no evidence the mystery man is Southampton but he was a first cousin of the brothers John and William Browne, flanking Anthony Maria Browne, who in 1592 had become the second Viscount Montagu. Not much is generally known about him, but, as the historian Michael Questier points out, a couple of days before the Gunpowder Plot an informer urged that action be taken against him, since “the Viscount is of the Romish church in England held for their grand captain and firm pillar”.

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