by Michael Wood
The brevity spares us the full horror. Following custom, Arden was dragged on a hurdle behind horses from Newgate through the waking city to the place of execution at Smithfield. Capital punishment in the Elizabethan state was long drawn out, savage, humiliating and very public. When sentenced, you were told by the judge to prepare to be ‘hanged by the neck, and being alive cut down, and your privy members to be cut off, and your bowels to be taken out of your belly and there burned, you being alive’. This meant they would castrate and disembowel you while you were still alive, burning your insides before your own eyes. Then your heart would be cut out and displayed to the crowd, before your body was carved up with a butcher’s knife. To send a message to the people, this theatre of cruelty took place on a public stage, often in a market or meeting place, such as Tyburn, Smithfield, Cheapside or St Giles.
Arden’s end sent shock waves through the Catholic community, especially in Warwickshire, where for sixty years tales persisted that he had been framed, and had only been killed because he was a leading Catholic in the shire and an enemy of Dudley. Circumstantial stories of how Arden was trapped came down to William Dugdale, the great seventeenth-century historian of Warwickshire, who concluded:
The woefull end of this gentleman, who was drawne in by the cunning of the priest, and cast by his testimony, was commonly imputed to Leicester’s malice. For certaine it is that he had incurred Leicester’s heavie displeasure, and not without cause, against whom he had rashly opposed himself in all he could, had reproached him as an adulterer, and detracted him as an upstart.
‘SEARCH THEIR HOUSES’
Throughout December 1583 and January 1584 Thomas Lucy’s investigation of the Arden–Somerville plot widened to the villages north of Stratford: Lapworth, Baddesley Clinton and Rowington. In the Public Record Office are preserved state papers detailing, for example, the interrogations of the leading Catholic family in Rowington, the Skinners, who were believed to have sheltered priests on the Campion mission and since. Among those questioned were house servants, the vicar, the village clerk, the tanner, the old schoolmaster at the nearby grammar school at Solihull, and several local farmers who were ‘suspected to be papists, friends of Mr Skinner’. The old order in the countryside outside Stratford was still in place.
Out of these interviews came the stuff of the Privy Council’s nightmares: confessions about the sheltering of priests, a defence of Mary Queen of Scots’ title, denials of Elizabeth’s supremacy and talk of the ‘trewe succession’. There were tales of masses said in house and garden, of Latin books and secret schoolmasters. One telling piece in direct speech in a Midlands accent underlines the difficulty that Lucy experienced in getting anywhere with straightforward interrogation: ‘this is our religion here amongst us, and therefore if yow will know anything of our secret yow must wring it from us by another means than by oaths, or else yow shall know very little’. Skinner himself, a ‘deadly enemy to the gospel these twenty years’ according to informers, was dogged and cunning; it was said he had ‘great friends and money’ and was reported to be ‘in good hope that religion wold turne or else that there wolde be a decree that every man shoold live as he list’. ‘Thou are a fool to think this religion is the truth,’ Skinner had said; given a choice, ‘thinkest thou how many would come to church? Less than ten in our parish.’ Astonishing given the date, but it may well have been true.
Such, then, was the political and religious climate in this part of Warwickshire when the newly married Shakespeare was nineteen. But was the family itself touched? Did Lucy and his men search the house in Henley Street? Arden’s trial had been preceded by raids on many Warwickshire Catholics’ homes, but especially on the kinsmen of the Ardens. The instructions from London to Wilkes and Lucy were that they should ‘apprehend such as shall be in any way akin to all touched, and to search their houses’. William was a distant kinsman of Edward Arden, but Tudor families were much more aware of their extended family than we are today. Arden and he shared a great-great-grandfather, and the Shakespeares’ later submission to the College of Arms reveals that William and his parents were proud of the connection. He would, then, have seen himself as Arden’s ‘cousin’. And as John Shakespeare, a former mayor of the town, was actually married to an Arden, this made the family an obvious target, especially perhaps given John’s surety case three years earlier. Operating with Wilkes from the Privy Council, it would have been Sir Thomas Lucy who was responsible for enforcing any search.
In the Stratford district Henry Rogers, town clerk and Lucy’s agent, assisted these two in their search for ‘books and writings’ of an incriminating character – for which services Rogers was later paid sixty shillings from the government purse. If the house in Henley Street was indeed searched, it was perhaps at this point that John Shakespeare felt he must get rid of the incriminating testament he had received from Persons. But as he had promised to keep it with him and not destroy it, perhaps it is not too fanciful to conjecture that John hid the booklet in the eaves of his house, where, with its startling profession of undying loyalty to the old ways, it was found in the eighteenth century.
CONSCIENCE AND POWER
So before the poet was out of his teens the state’s machine of terror and the taint of treason had touched his family. And the cost of conscience was all too plain in the spectacle of their kinsman’s tarred head displayed, as was the grim custom, on London Bridge, and his quarters on the gates of Warwickshire towns. Next summer there would be more searches as Cecil retrospectively tried to prove there really had been a plot. Following up the patterns of kinship and friendship, and the whispers of informers, the government now searched suspected houses in London. Printers too were investigated for ‘books tending to papistry’: at the house of Gabriel Cawood, a printer of well-known Catholic sympathies, a son of Edward Arden was detained. On the same day, during a search of Southampton House in the Strand (the London home of the Catholic earl whose son would later be Shakespeare’s patron), one Robert Arden was found, ‘who had likewise been lately imprisoned’.
The move against printers was inevitable. On the eve of Arden’s execution the government had felt the need to publish a propaganda justification of their treatment of such plots, Cecils On the Execution of Justice in England. But such was its bias that it provoked a pamphlet war, with rebuttals rolling off secret presses in England and coming in from abroad. The ironical Leicester’s Commonwealth, published abroad the following year, broadcast incriminating gossip against Dudley. Then, from Douai, William Allen offered his True Sincere and Modest Defence of the English Catholics, which included a character sketch of Arden, a detailed refutation of the charges against him and bitter allegations over ‘certain shameful practises about the condemnation and making away of the worshipful, valiant, and innocent gentleman, M. Arden … which brought him to his pitiful end, to the great regret of the whole nation’.
There is a strange Shakespearean footnote to the Somerville Plot. In his plays Shakespeare often drops in the names of real people, which perhaps only he would ever notice. All writers do this: Dickens, for instance, uses an amazing plethora of names from real life for his minor characters. But Shakespeare’s choices sometimes seem uncannily pointed. Bardolph and Fluellen, for example, in Henry V are both Stratford names which appear on the 1592 recusant list with his father. Another example occurs in one of his earliest plays, Henry VI Part 2. The mayor of Coventry is standing on the city walls with the Earl of Warwick, who doesn’t know that it is a two-hour march from Southam to Coventry. Shakespeare then brings on a character who provides one of those snippets of local Warwickshire detail that sometimes crop up in the plays. Warwick looks in the wrong direction for his enemy Clarence, and is corrected:
It is not his, my lord. Here Southam lies.
The drum your honour hears marcheth from Warwick.
The character has no other role in the play. The name Shakespeare gives him is Somerville.
CHAPTER SIX
THE LOST YEARS<
br />
NOW THE TRAIL goes cold. This is the time when the aspiring teenage poet became a skilled playwright, who ten years later would suddenly appear as a star on the scene in London. But how did Shakespeare do it? These have become known as the ‘lost years’, a time whose opacity has only added fuel to the fantasies and conspiracy theories that have come to surround his life. Frustratingly, between his marriage in 1582 and his first definite mention in the London theatre in 1592, the only sure evidence of his continued existence is the baptism records of his children and a court case of September 1587, when he and his parents tried to recover their lost inheritance in Wilmcote. No wonder there is a Shakespeare mystery!
THE TWINS ARE BORN
Around Easter 1584 Anne became pregnant again. The twins were christened in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford on 2 February 1585, and named after their neighbours Hamnet and Judith Sadler, old Catholics who presumably were the godparents. Twins, of course, are special children, and Shakespeare would put twins into his plays – they appear in Twelfth Night, for example, and, bewilderingly, there are two sets in The Comedy of Errors.
Why, though, did he and Anne have no more children? The English middle class were tending to have smaller families in his time, but still, only two births is unusual in a sixteenth-century family. Anne was nearly thirty – but not beyond child-bearing age by any means. Had giving birth to the twins caused her gynaecological problems? Or did the physical side of their marriage soon die away?
THE POACHING MYTH
As for what happened next, and when and why Shakespeare left Stratford, myths abound. But, as we have already seen in this story, myths have a knack of proving true. So let’s start the ‘lost years’ with the myth.
The story told around Stratford since the seventeenth century goes like this. Shakespeare was driven away from his home town by the enmity of Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, who had been active in the government interest against Edmund Campion and the Somerville Plot. Their enmity began, so it was said, with William poaching Lucy’s deer and rabbits, for which he was beaten and thrown into prison. To get his own back, Shakespeare penned a bitter satirical ballad full of personal insults, which he stuck up on Lucy’s front gate. That was the final straw and William was forced to leave town.
These days the poaching story is dismissed out of hand. But the story comes in no fewer than three seventeenth-century versions, which suggests that it should be taken more seriously. There is no question that the family would have known Lucy: an important landowner and JP, he would on occasion have been entertained by Stratford borough officials with the customary pint of sack. And John Shakespeare rented Ingon meadow in Hampton Lucy parish, right next to Lucy’s land.
But to be beaten just for poaching? The idea has been derided by scholars, but it is not totally implausible. In the sixteenth century the Lucys had no deer, but they did have coney warrens; and in the terrible conditions of the early 1580s, with famine and destitution across Warwickshire, people certainly poached. John Fisher’s local stories from the Warwick town book, for example, include from the summer of 1581 an account of a case of rabbit poaching that led to a violent beating and a fracas in the streets of Warwick, after which the poachers were bonded to appear at the next general sessions of the peace in front of local magistrates, one of whom was Sir Thomas Lucy.
A local landowner called Brome had complained that a young man named Reynolds had, with two friends, poached ‘three or four couple of coneys’. The tale he told the magistrates takes us right into a Warwickshire country lane on a summer’s night. Reynolds denied he had been on Brome’s land but admitted the following, as Fisher records it:
In a lane not farre from Mr Bromes ground he had pitchid his hey [trap] and killid conyes. And that being about to tak up his hey and conyes Mr Bromes man came leapeng over the hedge with a long staff and askid what they did there, and bycause they woold not go with him Mr Bromes man strake at him with his straff and strok him upon the hed that he fell to the ground and being downe beat him with many stripes. And Mr Bromes man having striken down Reynolds so as he could not stirre ran at another of Mr Grenes man And strok him downe also and beat them both and took away the conyes and the heye….
It is not suggested that this is the real story behind Shakespeare’s poaching myth – though it is curious that one of Shakespeare’s best friends was called Reynolds – but this is evidence from just the right time that physical violence could be meted out even over rabbits. Is such a tale really a likely cause of Shakespeare’s quarrel with Lucy, though? Given what is now known about the background of the Shakespeare family, it is perhaps more to the point that Lucy was a JP and a Puritan, and that, in the dramatic events of 1583–4, as Elizabeth’s local enforcer he had pursued Edward Arden to the scaffold and searched the houses of all Arden’s kin in the neighbourhood.
Could there, then, be some truth, after all, in the tale that Lucy was the enemy of the Shakespeares – but for this much more serious cause? Where the poaching myth is concerned, it is interesting that two of the seventeenth-century sources say Shakespeare baited Lucy with a slanderous ballad, and insist that he was imprisoned for a time. Later tradition, of course, may have defused the religious and political element in the original events. Poaching and a little gentle satire, after all, could be put down to the exuberance of youth. But if the persecutions of 1583–4 were the real cause of their enmity, then perhaps the libelling of Lucy was of a more offensive nature. The Warwick quarter sessions for these years are missing, so we will never know for sure, but perhaps the poaching tale is another of those Shakespeare traditions that may contain a germ of truth after all.
A YEAR OF EXECUTIONS
The year after the twins were born was a crucial one in national politics. In this time of plotting and framing, conspiracy theories and religious hatred, 1586 was the year of the Babington Plot, which culminated in the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. The plot perhaps never really existed: the government was by now adept at setting traps to snare unwary and gullible Catholics in order to bring the disaffected out into the open. They used agents provocateurs, men rather like Shakespeare’s Iago, who pretended to be one thing but were another, and watched as their victims were led to destruction, or even destroyed themselves. The most sinister was Robin Poley, who would later be involved in the murder of Shakespeare’s fellow dramatist Christopher Marlowe. Poley was like a Cold War double agent in that no one – not even the government who paid him – ever knew for sure what he really was; whether, for example, he was Protestant or Catholic. He was simply ‘like himself’, as the priest and poet Robert Southwell memorably put it. Poley’s was, it seems, a motiveless malignity. A truly Shakespearean villain, he perhaps just took pleasure in destroying people.
Elizabeth asked for a new and even more horrible way to kill the plotters to ensure that they endured the maximum suffering. But she was assured that, applied with skill, hanging, drawing and quartering would satisfy her on that score. The punishments were so cruelly applied to the victims of this latest sting that, in revulsion after the first few had been butchered, the crowd spontaneously called for the hangman to let them die on the rope before he cut them down.
News of the Babington Plot came back to Henley Street. The Jesuit priest Robert Debdale, Shakespeare’s wife’s former neighbour in Shottery, his mother’s kinsman, and also, like Shakespeare, a former Stratford Grammar School boy, was captured and tortured in the aftermath. His contacts were interrogated, among them a serving girl called Sara Williams, a very touching personality, who revealed the story of the exorcisms conducted by Debdale at Denham in Buckinghamshire; years later her testimony was published verbatim, and would be carefully studied by Shakespeare when he was writing King Lear (see here).
The Babington plotters, it was claimed, had intended to murder Elizabeth and put Mary Queen of Scots on the throne in her stead. Mary was tried, and in December sentenced to death. In the fall-out from her trial lesser people were killed too, and this time Robert
Debdale did not escape. Twenty-six years old, he was publicly executed in London on 21 December 1586 ‘as a seminary priest and practiser of magic’ (that is, of exorcisms – a charge often made against Catholic priests). Debdale’s body was quartered and the parts sent to be hung on the gates of provincial towns with placards detailing his crimes. Many among his friends and neighbours in Shottery and Stratford, people like the Hathaways, must have felt that a member of their community had been done to death only for his conscience.
THE OLD ORDER CHANGES
That same year, times were changing in Stratford. John Shakespeare finally lost his position as an alderman, along with John Wheeler, another old Catholic, because they ‘doth not come to the halls when they be warned’. At the same meeting Alderman William Smith also refused to serve any longer and left the corporation. So John’s career as a prominent Stratford figure was over. Distraints on his goods followed, and not long afterwards John and Mary would describe themselves in a legal case as people of ‘small wealth and very few friends and alliances’. For their eldest son, the attractions of Stratford and the crowded house in Henley Street (with his ‘merry cheeked’ father perhaps feeling more than a little embittered) must have seemed less and less appealing.