A Mirror for Magistrates was one of the most widely read works of poetry in early modern England, appearing in a remarkable seven editions and six reissues over its more than sixty years in print (1559–1621). Despite its popularity in its own time, this collection of historical verse tragedies presented chiefly in the voices of ghosts from Britain’s late-medieval past still remains understudied, and the bulk of scholarship devoted to it overwhelmingly focuses solely on the first two editions of the text, those of 1559 and 1563. Particularly overlooked are the two editions in the middle of the life of the Mirror, those of 1571 and 1574. This is not surprising, since these two texts add no new poems to augment those of the earlier editions of the collection, but the works are well worth close scholarly attention, particularly the edition of 1571, since they are the first Mirror editions prepared for publication by someone other than the original compiler William Baldwin (1526/7–63).

While the title page of the 1571 edition prominently announces that the collection has been “newly corrected and augmented,” nowhere in the text is there any indication of just who did that correcting and augmenting. As its title page suggests, the editor of the 1571 Mirror introduces numerous important changes to the text of the previous edition, that of 1563. First, he revises and often adds material to many of the prose passages that link the poems of the Mirror. Second, he rewrites lines in every poem of the collection, and he offers particularly extensive revisions to three tragedies, namely “Sir Robert Tresilian,” “King Richard II,” and “Edmund, Duke of Somerset.” He also adds dates of death for the ghostly narrators (and for Roger Mortimer, first earl of March, whose story is told by another ghost in the poem “The Two Rogers”) in the titles of the tragedies. Third, he rearranges several of the Mirror poems for the sake of chronology. His edition, unlike the first two editions of the Mirror, provides no closing prose commentary to end the work: it simply concludes with the final lines of the poem “Shore’s Wife” (moved in this edition to its proper chronological place in the last position in the collection) and the words “quod Thomas Churchyard” before the printer’s colophon.

The military narrative preserved in College of Arms MS M 9 may have begun its life as a chronicle designed for a single fifteenth-century reader, but its unique status as a detailed account, offered from the English perspective, of martial activity in France between 1415 and 1429 helped to win for it a wide audience in the succeeding century and beyond. Two early modern authors in particular became inspired by this narrative's material, and they employed it to enrich their own written works. As we have seen in Chapter 6, the first was the chronicler Edward Hall, who introduced sixteenth-century readers to the M 9 chronicle's narrative by incorporating nearly all of it (with his own additions and emendations) into his massive history of English affairs c. 1398–1547, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York (1548). The second was the anonymous author of the tragic verse monologue ‘How Thomas Montagu the Earl of Salisbury, in the Mids of his Glory, was Chanceably Slain with a Piece of Ordnance’ (composed 1554, first published 1559).

In the conceit of this 280-line, rhyme-royal work, a ghostly Thomas Montague, fourth earl of Salisbury, rises from the grave to recall his many military triumphs and his shocking, untimely death (3 November 1428). After a brief lament for the tarnished memory of his father, a man executed for his participation in the Epiphany Rising against King Henry IV (December 1399–January 1400), Salisbury's ghost embarks on a stirring account of his own glorious career in the second and third decades of the fifteenth century. As a young man, Salisbury quickly rose to prominence under Henry V, winning numerous military victories abroad and participating in the negotiation of all English treaties. After Henry V's death, Salisbury found favour with Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, and John, duke of Bedford, the two great noblemen who ruled as protector of England and Regent of France respectively during the infancy of King Henry VI. Both men held great confidence in him, Salisbury's ghost recalls in the poem, trusting him to ‘rule at home as often as they willed’ and sending him several times to campaign in France ‘when they it needful deemed’.