by Michael Wood
THE FAMILY’S TROUBLES MOUNT
So although John was unwilling or unable to pay his levies and fines, he was being protected by friends on the council. It was at this point, in autumn 1578, that John and Mary began to dispose of their land and other property. In November they transferred 86 acres to Thomas Webbe and Humphrey Hooper, who may have been distant relatives of the Ardens. The lease contained a strange condition: it stipulated that the tenant for twenty-one years was to be George Gibbes, a friend of the Ardens, who was to pay ‘a quarter of wheat and a quarter of barley annually’. This peppercorn rent strongly suggests that the real object of the transaction was not to raise cash but to temporarily transfer ownership of the land. (Subletting property, handing it over to friends or family, was a common tactic, especially among Catholics, to thwart government attempts to locate their land and goods.) Two days later John and Mary mortgaged their newly built house at Wilmcote with upwards of 80 acres to Mary’s brother-in-law Edmund Lambert in Barton-on-the-Heath. Again, it seems to have been a short-term ploy, for a year or so later John tried (unsuccessfully) to retrieve the property.
It was a terrible winter in 1578, with a long, hard frost and heavy snow ‘whose drifts in many places, by reason of a North-East wind went so deep that the mere report of them may seem incredible’, according to one observer. The thaw, when it came, caused widespread flooding: in London, for instance, the Thames burst its banks and flooded Westminster Hall. With such a wet spring everywhere, there was much sickness among both people and livestock. At the start of April, William’s seven-year-old sister Anne died. The church accounts show that John paid an 8d fee ‘for the bell and pall’ – clearly a high-status funeral for a family anxious to keep their heads up in the community. But the Shakespeares were being hit hard from every side. When troubles come, as their eldest son would say, they come not in single spies but in battalions.
That October John and Mary made their last sell-off, giving up their interest in Mary’s share of her father’s property in Snitterfield to their kinsman Robert Webbe – only this time for far more than it was worth. During this period John had also accumulated debts, for which he was being sued by his creditors. In other documents he is shown as being exempted from the levy for poor relief: evidently there were still men on the corporation who stood by their old friend and colleague. Still only in his late forties, he had effectively given up his civic position. For ten years, until he was finally expelled in 1586, he did not attend meetings except on one occasion to vote for the son of an old and close friend, John Sadler. After twenty years of service to the town, John had bowed out.
WILLIAM LEAVES SCHOOL
Seeing his popular, successful father go down a slippery slope, hounded for money, selling off all his carefully acquired parcels of land, and being publicly humiliated, might well have left its mark on William. Certainly, in his adult life the son would work hard to restore the family’s land, property and fortunes in Stratford – even acquiring for his father the gentlemanly status to which he had aspired unsuccessfully just before the crash.
William would have expected to leave school at about sixteen in 1580, possibly even later if he had wanted to go on to university. But an early eighteenth-century source, Nicholas Rowe, asserts that he was taken out early from school, that his father’s circumstances ‘and the want of his assistance at Home, forc’d his Father to with draw him from thence’. Given the family’s problems, this is plausible. Very likely William left school when he turned fourteen in 1578. With five children under twelve, his parents needed the eldest, able-bodied son to become another breadwinner.
What did he do next? A job as a scrivener in a local lawyer’s office has been suggested, but there is no evidence for this beyond his very good working knowledge of legal terminology, which might simply have come from living with a litigious father. One tradition has it that Shakespeare was a country schoolmaster for a while, but surely not yet – at fourteen he would have been too young. By far the likeliest answer is that to begin with he worked for his father, as both Rowe and the seventeenth-century diarist John Aubrey say. But two years later an extraordinary event took place which had repercussions right across England and which left its mark on the Shakespeare family and their Warwickshire friends. It puts John Shakespeare’s problems in the late 1570s in an entirely different light.
‘ROME HAS HER MUSTERS IN ENGLAND’
In 1580 the simmering religious divisions within Elizabeth’s realm were still a source of deep concern to her government. The Privy Council minutes from the spring of that year reveal these and other anxieties. The threat of foreign invasion was always at the back of their minds, and the council called for coastal defence forces in Suffolk from Aldeburgh to Lowestoft. Victualling the English forces in Ireland, who were protecting Protestant settlers there, was another headache forever compromised by the shambolic and corrupt system of supply. And amidst all this, strange tales of sorcery were reported from Shropshire, Worcestershire and the Welsh borders, among other places. There were dark whispers of witchcraft with graven images and wax dolls, and in Essex a wax figure of the queen herself had been stabbed with pins. Up and down the land government agents and justices of the peace were reporting a ‘falling away of religion … people who conform but secretly use the Popish service’. It is not surprising, then, that the Privy Council were in a panic about losing the hearts and minds of the next generation, given the ongoing failure to control schools and schoolmasters and the seepage of books and ‘unlawful stuff’ brought in from overseas though England’s porous coastline.
That spring, too, news came that a small force of papal troops and refugee English Catholics intended to land in Ireland. At the same time Elizabeth’s spies in the Jesuit colleges in Rheims and Rome spoke of a planned attempt to send priests to England, the spearhead of a spiritual underground to revive the Old Faith. It was a dangerous moment, rumoured by some to be the prelude to a new Spanish attempt to invade England, to overthrow Elizabeth and re-establish the Catholic religion.
Obsessed with enemies internal and external, the government began to compile new lists of freeholders to distinguish those on whom they could rely for military help and those who were suspected of Catholic sympathies. On 18 March 1580 military commissioners were appointed for musters throughout England ‘in defence of her Majesty, Crown, Realm and Good Subjects against all attempts both inward and outward’. Writing to the sheriff of Lancashire on 14 April, the Privy Council clearly associated the recusants with the musters, letting him know ‘Her Majesty’s intention being to terrify the offenders’.
John Shakespeare appeared in the Stratford lists among the ‘gentlemen and freeholders’; then, a few weeks later, he suddenly ran up against the power of the state, bound over with many others to present himself at the Queen’s Bench in Westminster on a specified day in June with sureties that he would ‘keep the peace towards the queen and her subjects’. The list of codefendants numbered over 200 and included gentlemen, hatters, tailors, glovers, drapers, silk weavers, vintners and grocers; there were many yeomen and husbandmen, and even a couple of Middle Temple lawyers; both men and women were named. Among them is this entry:
John Shakespeare Stratford upon Avon Warwickshire
Yeoman £20
John Audeley of Nottingham, in the county of Nottingham, hatmaker surety of John Shakespeare £10
Thomas Cooley Stoke Staffs yeoman surety of John Shakespeare £10
On the same sheet John Audeley stood for £40; his sureties were Shakespeare and Cooley for £20 each, along with two more men from the local area: Nicholas Walton from Kidderminster and William Lonley, a yeoman from Elmley, both in Worcestershire.
What was the significance of this mysterious web of contacts in a central government document? Strangely enough, the motive for the drawing up of the list is still not known, and it is even possible that the co-defendants’ cases are unrelated. But, on the face of it, at a critical moment in national politics, the list concern
s the peace and security of the realm. Something other and deeper than neighbourhood seems to have united the people on it. Circumstantial evidence suggests that religion was the key. ‘Rome has her musters in England, intestine and inward,’ the lord keeper of the Great Seal, Sir Nicholas Bacon, had written to the queen. A survey of the inmates of London’s jails in April 1580 produced lists of Catholic prisoners who had been ‘covenanted’ on sureties. The next year the system was put on the statute books: every person above the age of sixteen who did not obey the requirements of Elizabeth’s Act of Uniformity would be fined ‘twenty pounds by the month exacted of such as are able to pay it’, rising to ‘all their goods and the third part of their lands’. Those who had not attended church for twelve months were, in addition to the fine, ‘to be bound with sufficient sureties in the sum of £200 at the least to good behaviour until their conformity’.
John Shakespeare was now a marked man in the eyes of the government. Yet despite his apparently dire financial situation, he failed to turn up in London on the appointed day for his sureties case. He was therefore fined £40: £20 as pledge for Audeley, and another £20 for his non-appearance. This was big money – it was what John had raised on the Wilmcote property – and especially so for a man supposedly in debt who had gone to the trouble of selling off his wife’s share of one property to raise a mere £6. Just why did he decide to stay away and pay up?
THE MISSION OF EDMUND CAMPION
On 12 June, right in the middle of the sureties affair, a well-dressed stranger landed at Dover. He sported the black coat and hat of a gentleman, but his dark hair was cropped unfashionably short and the sharp-eared listener might have picked up the faintest hint of an Italian accent. After the phoney war of the first ten years of Elizabeth’s Protestant revolution, and the gathering storm of the last ten, the crisis had come in the form of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. This was the start of the Jesuit mission of Edmund Campion.
The government had been expecting him. Reacting like any modern regime, they had provided customs officials at the Channel ports with artist’s impressions of Campion done from descriptions supplied by double agents who had been posing as theological students in the seminaries in Rheims and Rome. The first Jesuit undercover operators had in fact entered the country six years before. But Campion was the biggest fish: the most gifted scholar of his generation, in his Oxford heyday he had declaimed in Latin in front of the queen. Now, re-entering the country at Dover, he was detained for a while and underwent a routine interrogation by the mayor, but was then released. Others were not so lucky; one of his companions was arrested and charged with bringing ‘books from overseas’. Shaking with nerves, Campion disappeared gratefully into the darkness and headed on foot for London.
Intending to meet up with him were three other Jesuits who had close connections with the Stratford region. Thomas Cottam was a former schoolmaster and the brother of William’s Stratford teacher. Robert Debdale, a relative of Shakespeare’s mother, came from the nearby village of Shottery and had probably been educated at the grammar school. And lastly there was Robert Persons, who, luxuriantly moustached, had already landed in the flamboyant disguise of an army officer. He counted Edward Arden, another of Mary Shakespeare’s kinsmen, as a friend, and would use his house as a base.
Campion found refuge in a safe house in the bustling London suburb of Southwark, and there announced the opening gambit of his mission. From now on it would no longer be acceptable for Catholics to be church papists and to go to Protestant church; to do so was the ‘greatest iniquity that can be imagined’. Like the excommunication of Elizabeth, it was a disastrously misjudged step and only hastened the destruction of the English Catholic community.
Alarmed at the Protestant regime’s growing grip on education and the care of souls as the old generation of Queen Mary’s priests faded away, the Jesuits hoped to organize an underground movement to succour the Catholic population. They knew that conformity and accommodation would mean the death of the Catholic tradition in England. ‘What on earth would Gregory the Great and St Augustine think if they could see their country now,’ asked one, ‘which they evangelized in the name of God in 597?’ A new generation was growing up which had known nothing else; which believed the pope to be the antichrist, the mass a mummery, and hell and purgatory tricks to awe the simple-minded: a generation that did not look back to Catholic England as their own.
In the language of such battles everywhere, then as now, the authorities saw the Jesuits as terrorists, but to the Catholics they were freedom fighters. After a few weeks the newcomers left London. In July Campion went to Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire and East Anglia; Persons to the West Mid-lands, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire. Their portable altars and surplices hidden in packs, they told travellers whom they met on the road that they were merchants. Persons headed into Warwickshire. Cottam too had planned to come this way, and Debdale wrote a letter, commending him to his parents at Shottery. But the letter was intercepted and Cottam captured. More heat was drawn on to Stratford: the net was tightening.
From the government’s inquisitions we can piece together Persons’ route that summer. He stayed with the Grants, business partners of John Shakespeare, at Northbrook, close to the Shakespeare family farm at Snitterfield. He was received by the Skinners at Rowington, then went on to Lapworth Hall and perhaps to Bushwood, the home of Sir William Catesby and a famous refuge for recusants; Campion himself stayed there the following year. The Ferrars’ house at Baddesley Clinton was another: ‘a very safe refuge which we had nearly always used previously for our meetings’, wrote one of the Jesuits later. The government’s informers also reported that Campion was entertained 20 miles north of Stratford at Park Hall, the residence of Shakespeare’s mother’s kinsman, Edward Arden. This was never proved, but a letter written by the Jesuit Robert Southwell confirms that Edward Arden was an active supporter, ‘a friend of Father Persons, in whose house he generally used to hide’.
The only one of the 1580 mission to escape execution, Persons claimed that the Jesuits were received by thousands of people that summer. For Campion, too, it had been ‘a joyous harvest’. At their secret meetings, loyal families came to meet them and celebrate mass together. They were drawn from right across the social spectrum: gentry, gentlemen freeholders, yeomen and local priests. Swimming against the tide of history, although they perhaps did not yet know it, the old community of the shire turned out in force for the missionaries.
But the Jesuits were not there merely to celebrate mass. They had promised not to engage in politics (and protested that they intended no harm to the queen), but the agenda that Campion had set in Southwark was of course political in the extreme. He wanted people to be not church papists, but recusants. And the missionaries’ letters suggest that to do this they hoped to get lapsed Catholics to reaffirm their faith by swearing an oath of loyalty, a testament of faith to set against the oath of allegiance required by Elizabeth’s government.
In one letter Campion referred to old Catholics and new converts ‘signing their names’. But to what? Were Campion and Persons carrying some form of written testament of faith? Such testaments were in the air at this time. Shortly after the mission a Worcestershire Catholic, William Bell, wrote just such a testament, in the form of a will, with a confession of faith affirming the tradition that ‘England first received the Christian religion from Joseph of Arimathea that buried Christ and came after to England’. The Jesuits certainly brought pamphlets with them, for one of Campion’s party had been arrested at Dover carrying printed material from abroad. Writing back to Rome from Rheims that year, the Jesuit controller William Allen said the mission was proving so popular that Persons ‘would like 3 or 4000 or more of the testamenta’. The Latin word can mean either a form of will or the New Testament. But although the Catholic Rheims Bible was completed later that year, it seems unlikely that Allen was letting them know in Rome that Persons would like so many copies of an as yet unpublished 800-page book put
together in Rheims. There is a much more plausible explanation, which takes us to what may be the most sensational and controversial of all the Shakespeare family documents.
THE SECRET TESTAMENT OF JOHN SHAKESPEARE
In April 1757, some men working in the Shakespeare birthplace in Henley Street discovered, concealed between the eaves and the joists, a six-page hand-written Catholic testament of faith, in English, each page signed in the name of John Shakespeare. There were several witnesses to the find, including the foreman, members of the Hart family (descendants of Shakespeare’s sister Joan), the vicar of Stratford and a local alderman. Most importantly, though, the document was examined by the great eighteenth-century Shakespearean scholar Edmond Malone, in whose opinion it was written in a late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century hand. Malone later came to believe that it could not have been written by John or any of his family, but he was ‘perfectly satisfied’ about its authenticity as a late Tudor document.
Unfortunately the manuscript is now lost, but it was printed by Malone in 1790: ‘I John Shakspeare, do protest that I am willing, yea, I do infinitely desire and humbly crave, that of this my last will and testament the glorious and ever Virgin Mary, mother of god, refuge and advocate of sinners (whom I honour specially above all other saints) may be the chief Executresse, together with these other saints, my patrons …’ John names his particular patron as Saint Winifred of Holywell in Flintshire, whose pilgrimage was popular with people from the Stratford region and was never suppressed by the government (the head of the Jesuits, Henry Garnet, went to Holywell to pray before the Gunpowder Plot in 1605). Further on, John prayed and beseeched ‘all my dear friends parents and kinsfolks, by the bowles of our Saviour Jesus Christ … to do masses for my soul after my death’. Here the document touched on one of the most contentious tenets of the English Reformation: the denial of prayers and masses for the dead. Crucially, he also made a solemn promise ‘that I will patiently endure and suffer all kind of infirmity, sickness, yea and the pain of death itself’ rather than let go of the Catholic faith. Here, it might appear, is the oath of loyalty that the members of the 1580 mission were demanding.