Love's Will

by Meredith Whitford

  Judith Shakespeare was thirty-one when she married Thomas Quiney, son of a prominent Stratford family, in February 1616. The following month her husband was found to have impregnated one Margaret Wheeler, who with her baby died in childbirth. It must have been a juicy Stratford scandal, and may have accounted for Shakespeare's reducing Judith's portion of his estate and making sure Quiney couldn't get his hands on her inheritance. None of Judith's children survived her. She died in 1662.

  Shakespeare's father died in 1601, his mother in 1608. None of his brothers married. Gilbert died in February 1612, Richard in February 1613, and Edmund in December 1607, five months after the death of his illegitimate son. He is buried in Southwark Cathedral, and it can be assumed that William paid for his funeral with the expensive tolling of the passing bell.

  Joan Shakespeare married William Hart, who died a few days before his famous brother-in-law and presumably of the same disease. Joan died in 1646, and it was the descendants of her several children who eventually inherited what was left of Shakespeare's estate.

  The Earl of Southampton was released from prison by King James on 5 April 1603, and restored to his titles and properties. He had married Elizabeth Vernon in 1598, only just before the birth of their first child, Penelope. They had four other children, and their marriage seems to have been happy and affectionate. In 1624 Southampton, like Shakespeare, suffered the anguish of watching his son die, then himself died the next day, presumably of whatever killed his son. By his daughter Penelope's marriage to a Spencer of Althorp, Southampton was the ancestor on their mother's side of Their Royal Highnesses The Princes William and Harry of Wales.

  Except for the Dark Lady, the boy Nol and Anne's old cousin, everyone in this novel actually existed. Although the author followed historical data, their characters, emotions and actions are her own invention and any resemblance to any real living person is entirely coincidental.

  The only spelling of his name that Shakespeare never used was 'Shakespeare'. His extant signatures, and the way his name was spelt in official records (‘Shagsper’, ‘Shaxberd’) suggest that in his time his name was pronounced with a short 'a' in the first syllable, and an unstressed second syllable. His actual last will and testament, dated in 1660, was headed ‘Shackspeare’ and signed ‘Shakespere’. Only in print was he, for technical reasons, ‘Shakespeare’. In this novel I've used 'Shakspere' as a half-and-half measure.

  'Wriothesley' is pronounced 'Rizley'. 'Henry' was always pronounced 'Harry'.

  Many biographies of Shakespeare use a multiplier of 500 to convert money in his time to ours. Other sources use a multiplier of 100. A mark was worth two-thirds of a pound.

  I have always read a lot of and about Shakespeare. In the 1990s, when I was stuck between a contemporary novel and what would become my first published novel, Treason, I became very irritated with so many (mostly male) authors’ insistence that the tortured genius fled a carping, illiterate farmer’s daughter who, thoroughly on the shelf at twenty-six (in fact exactly the average women for Tudor women to marry), trapped him into a shotgun marriage and saddled him with three children before he was twenty-one. We all have our own ‘vision’ of Shakespeare, and mine did not include the unhappy marriage or horrible wife that is so readily assumed. So I started writing a novel about a happily married but unfaithful, bisexual Shakespeare. And then the film Shakespeare in Love came along, and suddenly there was a new novel about Shakespeare almost every week. So this book went on being my ‘security blanket’ when I was stuck with other writing – until one day I realised I’d finished it and had nothing more to say.

  Hard, provable facts about William Shakespeare and his wife are scarce, although as research and scholarship march on, one would now need not the back of a stamp but perhaps a postcard to fill with what is known. We know the date of his baptism (26 April 1564) and the date of his death (23 April 1616) but not the date he was born. We know he married Anne Hathaway in November 1582 and that their first child, Susanna, was born six months later. We know the baptismal dates and names of his three children, the date of publication of his long narrative poems, and when, but not why, his son Hamnet died.

  There are records of his land and house purchases and of his endearing refusal to pay taxes, and of his (evidently reluctant) involvement in legal disputes. There is nothing provably in his handwriting. There are six extant signatures, all different, three of them (possibly forged or "assisted") on that curious document, his will, clearly made when he was too ill to know what he was doing, and in which he almost forgot to leave his wife anything.

  There is little agreement about when most of his plays were written except where there is an extant record of someone seeing one of the plays. The few other facts give us no real picture of Shakespeare.

  No one knows whether the Sonnets tell the story of two real and passionate love affairs (as they do in this novel) or if they were simply sophisticated literary exercises. Certainly it seems Shakespeare made no attempt to publish them, but nor did he attempt to publish his play scripts, yet he took great care with the publication of his two long poems. That the plays still exist at all is due to the dedicated work of two of his fellow actors.

  So most biographies are about five percent fact and (except for Bill Bryson’s recent book) the rest wishful thinking, imagination or some very strange assumptions. Really we know nothing about the private Shakespeare.

  Might as well write fiction, then, and have some fun.

  Meredith Whitford. 2012

  Select Bibliography

  Ackroyd, Peter Shakespeare: The Biography. Chatto & Windus, London, 2005

  Akrigg, G P V Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton. Hamish Hamilton, London, 1968

  Auden, W H The Dyer's Hand and other essays. Vintage Books, 1968 edition

  Bate, Jonathon The Genius of Shakespeare. Picador, London, 1997

  Bryson, Bill Shakespeare. (For the Eminent Lives Series) Faber & Faber, 2007

  Cook, Judith Shakespeare's Players. Harrap, 1983

  Duff Cooper, Alfred Sergeant Shakespeare, Viking Press, New York, 1950

  Duncan-Jones, Katherine Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from his life. The Arden Shakespeare, 2001.

  Greenblatt, Stephen Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. Jonathon Cape, 2004.

  Greenblatt et al (eds.) The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd ed. WW Norton and Company,2008

  Greer, Germaine Shakespeare's Wife. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, London, 2007

  Honan, Park Shakespeare: A Life. OUP, 1998

  Kermode, Frank The Age of Shakespeare. New York Modern Library

  Kernan, Alvin Shakespeare, the King's Playwright. Yale University, 1995

  Kerrigan, John (ed) William Shakespeare: The Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint. Penguin Classics, 1986.

  Nolan, Stephanie Shakespeare's Face. Text Publishing, 2002.

  Nuttall, A D Shakespeare the Thinker. Yale University Press, 2007

  Plowden, Alison Tudor Women: queens and commoners. Sutton, London, 2002

  Schoenbaum, S Shakespeare's Lives. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991

  —————William Shakespeare: a compact documentary life. OUP, 1987

  Sim, Alison The Tudor Housewife. Sutton Publishing, 2001

  Stone, Lawrence The Family, Sex and Marriage in Engand 1500-1800. Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 1977

  Wells, Stanley Shakespeare for all time. Macmillan, 2002

  If you enjoyed Love’s Will you might be interested in Treason by Meredith Whitford, also published by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Extract from Treason by Meredith Whitford

  Prologue

  1505, the twenty-second day of August.

  Edinburgh

  Twenty years ago tonight I was riding for my life through England. Riding blind, most of the time, from the head wound I’d taken in the battle, and only Lovell’s hand on the bridle kept me going. Riding to tell York’s Duchess that the last of her sons was dead. The last true King of England.

 
I still keep the anniversary of his death. It is one of the few times I attend Mass, for I no longer believe, except when I pray for my dead. When we returned from the chapel tonight I fell into maudlin mood, drinking too much of what passes for wine here in Edinburgh. (To think I’ve ended my days in Scotland – twenty years ago I helped conquer the place.) My wife offered to sit up with me, but she was heavy-eyed with her own memories and I sent her up to bed. My children too offered to keep me company, but they have heard all my stories and they have no wish to live in the past. It was my daughter-in-law Mary who asked, why do I not write my story down? The others agreed with suspicious readiness; anything to save listening to another repetition, no doubt.

  But I shall do it. I’m fifty-three, but with luck I’ve a few years left, and I need a pastime. Perhaps my writings will amuse my grandchildren, should they ever read them. I daresay I’ll prove no author, not like Thomas Malory with his glamorous tales of King Arthur, but it seems important to record my story. Perhaps my mark on history is small, but I am at least an honest man, which in the company of monarchs has the charm of rarity. All I can tell is my own story, and there is much I never knew – but I was there, I saw it all, the quarter-century that changed England and the world forever. And, after all, it’s not everyone who can say he grew up with two kings.

  PART I

  One

  1461

  There being nothing duller than the tale of someone’s happy childhood, I shall start with the day that childhood ended. The day the Lancastrians came. January, 1461. I was eight.

  I had been at the priest’s house in the village for my Latin lesson. Snow had fallen in the night, but the day was sparklingly clear and the air so crisp that despite the cold I dawdled on my way home. In the next year I would go to some nobleman’s household for my knight’s training, and I was wondering if the country would come to peace in time for me to go to the Duke of York – or, even better, his son Edward, Earl of March. Mother had written letters about the matter, but we could expect no answers until summer. So, with my mind a whirl of plans and the Latin subjunctive, I pottered home.

  As I crested the hill I had a clear view of our manor. The courtyard was full of horsemen. My father was back! Whooping with delight, I ran the rest of the way.

  But these were not our men. Too late I saw that they wore the Queen’s livery badge. There were a dozen or more of them, and they were loading their packhorses with our barrels of wine and salted meat. One was stuffing our precious silver plate into his baggage roll. I looked frantically around for my mother, and saw two men bundling her into the house. Her gown was torn right down the front and there was blood on her face.

  She saw me and screamed to me to run. Perhaps I would have obeyed, perhaps I would have tried to fight the men, but as I started instinctively towards her I tripped over something. It was one of our dogs. Its throat had been cut. As I stumbled one of the men grabbed me and twisted my arms up behind my back, jerking me off the ground. I squealed with the pain of it, and my mother broke loose and brought her knee hard up between one man’s legs and hit the other in the face with her fists. It was useless, of course, she was a small woman, and there were too many of them. My mother went very still then. She said, ‘Let the boy go.’

  ‘Who is he? Your son?’

  ‘No. A servant’s child. He is no one. Let him go.’

  The man holding me wrenched my arms until I thought my joints would rend apart. ‘Who are you, boy? What’s your name?’

  Mother’s eyes fixed wide and hard on mine. ‘I’m the steward’s son,’ I said, and somehow I found the wit to use the local accent I picked up from the village boys. ‘I work for my lady.’

  ‘This is the Robsart manor. Robsart has a son. Where is he?’

  It’s said that necessity is the mother of invention; well, terror makes a kindly stepmother. ‘Master Martin’s away at school. At King Henry’s new school near Windsor. Who are you? Where’s Sir Martin?’

  ‘Dead and carrion, like his master York and the rest of the traitors.’

  I heard the words, but they meant nothing. My mother gave one breathless sob, and the men holding her shoved her down onto the ground. She said quietly, ‘Not in front of the boy. Please,’ and, laughing, they hauled her up again and into the house. I heard her scream a few times, then there was no more sound.

  I don’t know how long it was before another man came, a man on horseback, in better clothes than the others. Dismounting, he kicked idly at a lump in the snow. Blood trickled out, and I saw that the lump was our steward, Robert, his eyes open and with a great wound in his head. A sword lay by his hand – he had done his best for us.

  ‘Find anything?’ the newcomer asked.

  ‘Meat and wine, a few beasts. They’ve got the women inside. If you’re quick you can join the queue to have your sport with Robsart’s wife.’

  With a flick of his eyebrow the newcomer went into the house. He came back in a moment, shaking his head. ‘I’ve no stomach for this work. Who’s this boy?’

  ‘The steward’s son.’

  The new man looked me over, and I knew he recognised that my clothes were too fine for a servant. But he had more Christian feeling than his fellows, for he said, ‘Let him go.’ My captor protested, but this new man had authority. ‘Go,’ he told me. ‘Get out while you can,’ and he gave me a slap on the backside that sent me stumbling forward. He shouted again, and I ran for my life. As I reached the top of the hill I saw smoke rising from our house.

  The village was deserted, silent, every door shut. Not a dog barked as I stumbled by. Obeying some age-old impulse I ran for the church. As I wrenched hopelessly at the latch the door opened a crack and a masculine arm snatched me inside. I screamed, then the smell of incense and unclean flesh told me it was Father Anselm who held me.

  ‘We saw the soldiers come – Martin, what’s happened?’

  ‘They’re the Queen’s men, they’re hurting my mother, the house is burning, please help, make them stop, go and help my mother!’

  I got that much out, then the smith’s wife swept me up in her arms. Most of the villagers were there, huddled down by the altar. Vaguely I heard the gabble of voices and saw Father Anselm and the smith leave the church.

  ~~~

  Memory erects its own defences, and I remember almost nothing of the next few days. Were I an artist I could draw every vein, every age-spot, every swollen joint of the priest’s hands clasped in his lap as he told me that my mother was dead and my home destroyed, but I can’t remember the words he used. Nor do I remember Mother’s funeral.

  I suppose a full week had passed when Father Anselm sat me down in his parlour and asked what to do with me.

  ‘For you’ve no kin nearby, if I remember rightly?’

  ‘None, Father Anselm. My father had a brother but he died when I was little. Mother was an only child and her parents are dead.’

  He stared worriedly at me, biting his lip. ‘Not so much as a cousin?’

  The word broke through my apathy. ‘Yes!’ I cried. ‘Cousins! The Duchess of York is – was mother’s kinswoman; I used to live at Fotheringhay. The Duchess is in London, I’ll go to her!’

  Of course I had no idea what I was asking. It was the dead of winter and we were at least four days’ ride from London. There was no one to escort me. The Queen’s army was on the rampage, looting and burning its way south through England; that much news had made its way to us. The country was virtually at war. However, when it was put to an impromptu village parliament the smith said that a man what’d brought a horse for shoeing had said as how the Earl of March, young Edward of York, had his army not far away, two days’ ride at most; why shouldn’t Master Martin go there? Father Anselm could go with him, not even the Lancastrians would harm a priest. The little lad’s dad was one of the Duke of York’s men, it was right he should go to my lord.

  So it was decided. That night, as I snuggled into my makeshift bed in the priest’s house, some of my shock began to lift.
Grief for my parents still gripped me, but there was hope now, and the prospect of comfort. The Duchess of York awed me less than she did the rest of the world because I’d grown up in her household. I had the right to call her cousin, for she and my mother were connected through two marriages. Mother had been lady governess to the Yorks’ daughters Elizabeth and Margaret; that was how she met my father, accompanying the Duchess and her children when the Queen exiled the Duke to Ireland back in ’49. So yes, there was comfort in the thought of the Duchess – and in the thought of seeing Richard again. He was the Yorks’ youngest son, and my own age to within three months; his mother had helped deliver me, and mine had helped deliver him. I remembered him well, because it was not two years since my grandparents’ death had meant my mother had to leave Fotheringhay to manage our family manor. I liked Margaret and George, Richard’s next oldest brother, but Richard and I had grown up like twins. He had written to me once after we left Fotheringhay, carefully penning a postscriptum to his mother’s letter. Since then he had gone to Ludlow, the Duke’s castle over in the west, and met his elder brothers Edmund and Edward. He too had suffered from the Lancastrian outrages, for the Duke had been betrayed, men had gone over to Queen Margaret, and the Duke had had to disperse his army and flee for Ireland. My father had gone with him. The Duchess and her children had been taken prisoner. They’d only recently been safely released; my father had brought that news when he and the Duke returned from Ireland three months ago.

  Remembering my father like that made me cry, and I pulled the meagre blankets over my head so as not to awaken Father Anselm. A soldier’s son sees his father rarely, but I had loved him. He’d been as handsome as my mother was pretty, and his visits had meant fun, merrymaking, with Mother in her best clothes and happy. When he came back from Ireland Father had ridden in unannounced, a troop of men-at-arms at his back – for he was on his way to Yorkshire with the Duke – and when I forgot my manners and ran to hug him he swept me up in his arms and held me for a long time. That night, the only night he could stop with us, he told us of the flight from Ludlow, the urgent conferences as they decided that Edward and his uncle and cousin should go to Calais while the Duke and Edmund made for Ireland. To me it had been an adventure more exciting than any legend, and I’d been disappointed when the talk became serious and my father spoke of the Duke claiming the throne. Evidently that was a shocking matter, for my mother made a dubious mouth and spoke of the Duke’s loyalty to King Henry. Father had said, Yes, but... and went on to speak of the King’s unfitness to rule while his wife led the country to ruin. ‘... after all,’ he had said, ‘York has the right by descent.’ It was dull stuff to me, and I fell asleep on my father’s lap while they were arguing.