In Search of Shakespeare

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In Search of Shakespeare Page 10

by Michael Wood


  ‘AN OLD PRIEST AND UNSOUND IN RELIGION’

  So why Temple Grafton and not their own parish church? Was this an instance of Bishop Whitgift’s ‘reasonable secrecy’? Perhaps one or both of the parties did not want to make a fuss because the bride was pregnant; perhaps the Shakespeares even considered the marriage a social mismatch, although this is less likely. But there are other kinds of secrecy, too. On the face of it, Anne and William seem to have gone to some length to avoid marrying in Stratford, where the vicar at that time, Henry Haycroft, was a strong Protestant. His counterpart in Temple Grafton, however, crops up in a government spy’s report written four years after Shakespeare’s wedding, and clearly he was a very different kettle of fish: ‘John Frith vicar an old priest and Unsound in religion, he can neither preach nor read well, his chiefest trade is to cure hawkes that are hurt or diseased, for which purpose many do usually repair to him.’

  So ‘Sir’ John Frith was an old priest from Queen Mary’s time, a man who had been a vicar in the days of Catholic England nearly thirty years before. Still accused by informers of papistry, he was typical of the rural Warwickshire clergy we have already encountered: men who stayed loyal to their flock, baptizing, marrying and burying them according to the old rituals if so desired; taking some elements of the Protestant Church on board but still holding on to traditions, such as churching new mothers and praying for the dead.

  In the copious archives of the Elizabethan state there is more on Frith. For example, he witnessed, and probably wrote, the will of Richard Smart of Luddington, a Catholic who in 1571 bequeathed his soul ‘unto almighty God and to all the company of heaven’. And most pointedly, only two years before Anne and William’s wedding, Frith had been reported for solemnizing marriages illicitly outside the times laid down by the Protestant Church and without proper reading of the banns. So there must be a strong suspicion that Frith was resorted to because he bent the rules and performed the old ceremonies. Anne and William – or more likely their families – probably wanted a marriage in the traditional English style, ending with a Roman mass.

  SHAKESPEARE’S FIRST POEM?

  So after Shakespeare, Richardson and Sandells got back to Stratford there was only the one day left for reading the banns: St Andrew’s Day. As it happens, Temple Grafton church is dedicated to St Andrew, a saint who traditionally protected unmarried women and especially those who hoped to become mothers; an old country superstition asserted that if a woman prayed to him and slept naked on St Andrew’s Eve she would see her future husband in a dream.

  Most likely the banns were read out by Frith just once at the church door that Friday, and the wedding ceremony took place the same day. There is no surviving record, for the early parish registers of Temple Grafton have been lost. But there is one tantalizing clue. Nearly thirty years later, in 1609, Shakespeare, now a famous writer in London, published a collection of sonnets describing his passionate relationship with a beautiful young man, and his obsessive sexual desire for a woman who was not his wife. Near the end he slipped in a poem so juvenile that until recently scholars refused to believe it was by him. But, intriguingly, in the penultimate line, it seems to contain a pun on his wife’s surname:

  Those lips that Love’s own hand did make

  Breath’d forth the sound that said, ‘I hate,’

  To me that languish’d for her sake:

  But when she saw my woeful state,

  Straight in her heart did mercy come,

  Chiding that tongue, that ever sweet

  Was used in giving gentle doom;

  And taught it thus anew to greet:

  ‘I hate’ she alter’d with an end

  That follow’d it as gentle day

  Doth follow night, who like a fiend

  From heaven to hell is flown away.

  ‘I hate’ from hate away she threw,

  And sav’d my life, saying ‘not you.’

  The pun depends on the Warwickshire pronunciation of Hathaway. In the last line, the listener might also have also heard ‘Anne saved my life’. The poem is not very good, but there is growing consensus that William composed it for his marriage day and that it is his earliest surviving work. If this is so, it reveals something more at this time about Shakespeare the poet as well as the lover. For the teenager had obviously read Thomas Watson’s collection of sonnets, Hekatompathia or The Passionate Century of Love, which had been published only that year. Watson, who had Warwickshire connections, wrote the book partly as a model of metrical form: a teaching manual for aspiring poets, a ‘perfectly pathetical’ reference book of Petrarchan themes (that is, as first developed by the medieval Italian poet Petrarch). Watson’s sonnets demonstrated the different ways of prettifying classical history and myth in extended conceits. And in his hyperbolical complication of thought, his self-conscious exaggeration of emotion, he set a tone for the sonnet boom of the next twenty years. These were songs for Elizabethan lovers: ‘If’t be not love I feel, what is it then? If love it be, what kind of thing is love?’

  So young Shakespeare was already ambitious to be a versifier. He had bought or borrowed Watson’s book and, like any young lover, he used it to sonnet his lady love. Did the nervous teenage groom recite it to his pregnant new wife at the marriage feast in Henley Street, over the fruit pies and gamebirds and country ale? He would write better, more powerfully, more passionately, about others – both men and women – apparently in an autobiographical way. But there is no more touching or personal poem in all his works.

  There is one other point to make about this first surviving work, and it concerns the strange prickle in the second line: the use of the words ‘I hate’. Similar jokes by the despised lover appear in Watson. But had Anne rejected William at first? The conundrums of their marriage have given rise to endless speculation ever since: the birth of their last children when William was only twenty-one (why no more?), the lives spent apart (why did they not live together?), the curt and enigmatic bequest in the poet’s will (why no affectionate word?). But one can never judge a relationship from the outside. William was eighteen, his innocence lost, his father ruined. He was vulnerable. Anne was twenty-six and knew the world. Reading between the lines, she would be the rock on which he relied through his life, supporting his career in London. Perhaps he really did mean that she had ‘sav’d my life’. Years later, those words stood when he published the poem. And later still Anne would desire to be buried with him. Perhaps that poem is the key to the mystery of their marriage.

  Be that as it may, a shotgun wedding is perhaps not the best start to married life. In those days, too, for a man, marriage precluded going to university or even taking up an apprenticeship to learn a trade. It was probably not what William’s father would have wished for his eldest son.

  TERROR STRIKES THE FAMILY: THE SOMERVILLE PLOT

  In May 1583 William and Anne’s first child was born. They christened her Susanna. Anne and her baby presumably lived with John and Mary and William’s younger brothers and sister, all together under one roof in the Henley Street house. With John nervous of ambush by enemies, creditors and informers, it cannot have been easy, although Tudor people were much less demanding of privacy and personal space than we are today.

  That autumn, less than a year into their marriage, the atmosphere in the crowded household took another turn for the worse. Important national events now began to unfold which would affect a number of leading Warwickshire people, including the family’s own kinsmen, in a gruesome and terrible manner. Around this time, the government began to receive ‘informations’ about an alleged Catholic plot against Elizabeth, linked, it was rumoured, with the Throgmorton family who lived close to Stratford. In an increasingly paranoid atmosphere informers and spies were everywhere, and loose words were seized upon. On 25 October a young man called John Somerville from the village of Edstone, near Stratford, was apprehended in a roadside inn at Aynho, between Banbury and Bicester on the road to London. It was alleged, incredible as it may seem,
that he had waved a gun about, declaring that it was Queen Elizabeth who was the real heretic, that it was her head that should be stuck on a spike on London Bridge. Somerville, it was asserted, had then declared that he intended to assassinate her. Whether this unlikely scene ever took place has been doubted, and the opinion at the time was that Somerville was in any case mentally ill. Somerville’s father-in-law, however, was none other than Edward Arden, the head of Shakespeare’s mother’s family.

  Arden, of course, was a prominent Catholic who kept a priest disguised as a gardener and was rumoured to have sheltered members of Campion’s mission. He had enemies, especially Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester. Dudley, suave and handsome, was one of the new men in Elizabeth’s body politic: if the queen loved anyone, it was Dudley. But he was hated by the old community of Warwickshire. In 1575, when Elizabeth had visited Kenilworth, an event memorably recalled by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Arden had publicly insulted Dudley by refusing to wear his livery and calling him an ‘upstart and an adulterer’. Now Somerville had given Dudley and his local allies a chance to crush Arden and his friend and relative Robert Throgmorton.

  On 31 October a warrant was issued for the apprehension of ‘such as shall be in any way kin to all touched, and to search their houses’. On 2 November the clerk to the Privy Council, Thomas Wilkes, arrived at Thomas Lucy’s house at Charlecote, just outside Stratford, which he would use as his base for the next fifteen days. The next day Wilkes and Lucy, accompanied by Lucy’s retainers, mounted an armed raid on the Ardens’ house 20 miles away at Park Hall.

  Although well known in Elizabeth’s time – it is marked on Saxton’s 1575 map of Warwickshire – the site of Park Hall has vanished from today’s maps. Where the M6 motorway skirts the industrial landscape northeast of Birmingham, a little belt of countryside appears around Coleshill Hall and Water Orton. Then the motorway curves westwards into the valley of the river Tame, and a strip of woodland can be seen above the river. This is Park Hall Wood. The site of the house lies in the flood plain between the M6 and the railway, where a huge sewage works now straddles the river. A stony track winds down a 100-foot escarpment into a narrow strip of water meadow. Arden’s house was still standing, though derelict, in the 1960s and was only demolished at the end of the twentieth century. The site is now overlooked by huge electricity pylons beyond which high-speed trains compete with the incessant roar of the motorway.

  Richard Chattock, a local man who knew the place in the 1820s, described the house as ‘a fine old residence which could not be surpassed for beauty and romantic interest … the hill opposite studded with wild cherries, roses and honeysuckle. The river as clear as crystal, ran by the garden wall below woods which were then filled with gigantic oak, beech, ash, and fir, completely overhanging and darkening the stream.’ His family had lived in the hamlet of Park Hall before the sixteenth century, and he records a family tradition that Shakespeare stayed there. Old photographs show a pretty brick farmhouse, its windows and gables modified in the eighteenth century but with a Tudor core. All that remains now, below the motorway and the wood, is an overgrown heap of debris, a cluster of ancient fruit trees, and the traces of a large walled garden with the tell-tale signs of thin, flat Tudor bricks.

  The Ardens had lived here since the eleventh century and had distinguished themselves in the Wars of the Roses, but they belonged to the Old Religion, and since the Reformation had become objects of deep suspicion. In the shifting politics of Elizabeth’s reign, newcomers like Dudley were ranged against old families like the Ardens. The Ardens were doubly vulnerable now because of their links to the great Catholic family of the Throgmortons. Edward Arden had been a ward of the Throgmorton family as a child and had married their daughter Mary. It was this link that proved fatal, for the agents of the Secretary of State Sir Francis Walsingham were tracking the movements of Francis Throgmorton, the alleged instigator of another plot in these paranoid times, when they heard the story of Somerville’s boast of wanting to kill the queen. That was enough for the government, and it doomed Edward Arden.

  A TOWER DIARY

  Somerville was taken to the Tower of London, and a diary written by a priest imprisoned there captures the tension and fear of the time: ‘30 October. John Somerville, lay gentleman, son-in-law of that famous man Edward Arden, as he was a Catholic, was thrown into the Tower accused of plotting to kill the queen.’ Arden was indicted at Warwick and escorted to London by Henry Rogers, the town clerk of Stratford, with ‘seven or eight boxes of evidences’. (His accommodation bills survive: as in all authoritarian states, the Elizabethan government was a stickler for detail.) The Tower diary’s next entry shows how the government was working to connect Arden and Somerville with the alleged Throgmorton plot: ‘Francis Throgmorton a famous and richly endowed young man was arrested and accused of plotting on behalf of the Queen of Scots and was placed into the torture chamber called Little Ease on the first day’; this was a stone box so cramped that its occupant could neither stand up nor lie down. A week later Arden’s wife Mary, their daughter Margaret and Somerville’s sister were all thrown into the Tower along with Throgmorton’s brother George.

  Meanwhile, in Warwickshire, government agents raided the Somervilles’ house at Edstone; Bushwood, the home of the Catesbys; Shelfield Lodge in Rowington, where the Skinners lived; the home of the Grants – John Shakespeare’s business partners, who were linked by marriage to the Somervilles – near Snitterfield; and the house at Idlicote belonging to the Underhills, an old recusant family from whom Shakespeare would buy his own house, New Place, in 1597. At the Underhills’ house Arden’s priest, Hugh Hall, was arrested.

  But the government found it hard to pin anything on Arden. On 7 November Thomas Wilkes wrote from Charlecote to Walsingham: ‘Unless you can make Somerville, Arden, Hall the priest, Somerville’s wife and his sister, to speak directly to those things which you desire to have discovered, it will not be possible for us here to find out more than is found already, for that the papists in this country greatly do work upon the advantage of clearing their houses of all shows of suspicion.’

  PURGE IN WARWICKSHIRE

  The atmosphere of those days is dramatically revealed by the records of interrogations in Warwick, where Lucy was a justice of the peace and Dudley the most powerful figure. The town clerk’s book, which is still preserved by Warwick Town Council, shows that on 1 November, the day after the warrants were issued, several strangers were arrested, including a sawyer from Preston in Lancashire, a man called Robert Chadborne, who under questioning revealed he had not been to Protestant church for several years. What follows crystallizes the battle of conscience faced by many people at that time:

  And being asked why he would not come to the church he saith it was because his father and mother brought him up in the time of King Henry the Eighth and then there was another order. And he mindeth to observe that order and to serve the Lord God above all things.

  Being asked what is in the church that he mislikith … he praith the hearers to pardon him for he will say no more.

  Being demanded whither the queen’s majesty ought to be obeyed in those laws that she makith … as well in matters ecclesiastical as temporal, he answereth that first he is afraid to displease god above all things. And then afraide to displease his mighty prince.

  Being demanded whither the order set down and agreed upon and commanded by the queen’s majesty to be and that is now commonly used in the Church of England is according to god’s institution, or as it ought to be, he answereth that it is against his conscience.

  Being offered to be set at liberty upon condition that he will this night go to the church and report to the church in the time of divine service and sermons upon the Sabbath and holy days, he utterly refusith it and will not do it.

  THE EXECUTION OF EDWARD ARDEN

  While government agents and town clerks feverishly searched and questioned in Warwickshire, in London the interrogation of the Ardens and Somerville
continued. The accelerating momentum of the tragedy comes out grippingly in the Tower diary, which was now being written in cipher, for this was dangerous stuff: ‘13 November Francis Throgmorton arrived in the Tower.’ On the 18th Walsingham sent a note to Wilkes asking him to come ‘to witness the racking of Francis Throgmorton’. Five days later the diary noted: ‘Francis Throgmorton severely tormented on the rack and cast into the Pit in the same day.’ (This was a disused well-shaft under the White Tower.) ‘On the same day Edward Arden was also subjected to the rack.’ The diary continues: ‘24th Hugh Hall priest also tortured on the rack … 2nd December Francis Throgmorton again subjected to the rack, twice in the same day.’ (Finally tried in 1584, he would be hanged, drawn and quartered.)

  Events now moved with a terrible inevitability. On the 16th Arden, Somerville, Hall and Mary, Arden’s wife, were tried at the Guildhall in London and sentenced to death. Mary was to be hanged and burned, but was then reprieved. For the men, however, there was no reprieve. On the evening of the 19th they were moved to Newgate ready for execution, but within two hours Somerville was allegedly found dead in his cell, as the Tower diary explained: ‘John Somerville, who was hardly of sane mind, was transferred to another prison and the following night was found strangled in his prison cell whether by his own hand or by others was not established.’ The last diary entry that year runs: ‘20 December. Edward Arden was led to the scaffold and there hanged, protesting his innocence of that of which he was accused and claiming that his real crime was profession of the Catholic faith, with his usual high spirit, protesting to the last his innocence of anything save of being a Catholic.’

 

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