| Chapter 1: | Barnfield's Ganymede |
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was the longstanding “historical” linkage of the Stanley family with the Ganymede myth, a complicated identification dating back to a fourteenth-century legend. Sir John Stanley, a hero of Medieval romance, married the wealthy Isabel Latham, from whose side of the family the legend originated. In the words of A.W. Titherley:
“From this legend, the famous Stanley Eagle Crest [and Eagle Tower of Latham] took its form,” Titherley adds (10). Then somehow, between the twelfth or thirteenth century and the fifteenth, this legend became entwined with the Greek myth of Ganymede in Stanley family history. Stanleys and non-Stanleys alike seemed a bit confused during these years as to whether Stanleys were the eagle or the child—a problem the Stanleys and their flattering protégés in both London and Lancashire solved by claiming they were both at once. From the evidence, however, it seems clear that to the pastoral poets, only the sitting Stanley earl (or Stanley whose succession to the earldom was imminent) was to be figured as the pastoral Ganymede. It is thus that Thomas Nashe speaks of his beloved Ferdinando Stanley, the fifth earl, as “Ioves Eagle-Born Ganimed…” Chapman, in The Shadow of Night, also praises “ingenious Derby”—Earl Ferdinando again, just before his premature death—as Ganymede. To my knowledge, all Stanley historians from the