He was admitted to Lincoln's Inn on 16 February 1559/60, and with the death of his father the same month, he succeeded to Belmont, and soon after was appointed esquire of the body to Queen Elizabeth.
[1] He acted the part of Mercury in George Gascoigne's Masque, performed before the queen at Kenilworth Castle in 1565.
Pounde, humiliated, replied "Sic transit gloria mundi" and thenceforward retired from court life.
[2] Shortly afterwards he was reconciled to the Roman Catholic Church, probably by Father Henry Alway, and, after some time of seclusion at Beaumond, began an active career as a proselytiser.
Traditionally, Pounde has been thought to be the author of a long poem which exists in a unique manuscript in The National Archives: "A challenge unto ffox the martirmonger (John Foxe, the martyrologist) .
[4] Written in the Tower in 1582, about the time of the trial of Edmund Campion, the 512-line poem was probably addressed to Francis Tregian the Elder.
[5] Long forgotten, the poem was discovered by Richard Simpson in the 1850s in the course of his monumental labours transcribing documents of recusant history from the Public Records Office (now The National Archives) for an intended "martyrology," publishing the results in a sequence of essays in The Rambler.