(It’s best to read Part One first)
When Harry came of age, his mother, Countess Mary, had to get out of Titchfield.
Mother and son had never got on since her husband accused her of adultery. She had used the six year old Harry to send a letter to him protesting her innocence. He had sent back the letter but kept his son. Denying her all access to the child, and leaving all he possessed to his manservant, he went to his grave loathing her.
Countess Mary soon overturned the will, but kept Harry’s hands off the money till he reached his majority. This was probably just as well: as we have seen, as soon as he could, he gave his friend and lover William Shakespeare a gift of £1,000 – half a million in today’s money.
Harry was now the boss. Countess Mary’s exit strategy was to marry Sir Thomas Heneage of Copped Hall in Essex – and old favourite of Queen Elizabeth’s.
There was to be a massive celebration at Copped Hall, the Queen, of course, was to be invited – and who better to write the nuptial celebration than cousin Will?
Shakespeare had two problems. First, the Queen loathed weddings – especially weddings of her old favourites. She seemed to take them as an affront to her virginity.
Second was the bridegroom. Heneage was a campaigning Protestant who had supervised the execution of the Papist Mary Queen of Scots.
Countess Mary’s first husband, a fanatical Catholic, had plotted with a number of other Earls to assassinate Queen Elizabeth and the Queen of Scots on the throne of England.
Half of Countess Mary’s wedding guests would be Catholic and half would be Protestant. Half would hate Queen Elizabeth and half would hate Queen Mary. What could Shakespeare do in these impossible circumstances?
He could have fun.
He could write A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Subversive Essex Fairies.
The play was performed over several days, between bouts of feasting, dancing and jousting. Aristocrats, then as now, loved dressing up: so Shakespeare cast and costumed Heneage as Theseus and Countess Mary as Hyppolita – taking care, of course, not to upstage the elaborate frocks of the Virgin Queen. Raised and canopied on a throne, hitting a rouged and hollow-cheeked sixty, Elizabeth loved to be compared to the chaste moon…
Heneage strode into the Great Hall with the most audacious opening to a play ever written:
Now fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour
Draws on apace; four happy days bring in
Another moon: but o methinks how slow
This old moon wanes!
Having mocked the Queen’s age, Shakespeare goes on to mock Countess Mary’s parsimony:
She lingers my desires
Like to a step-dame or a dowager
Long withering out a young man’s revenue.
Shakespeare then forces Heneage to apologise to Countess Mary for his brutality to her fellow Catholics:
Hippolyta I wooed thee with my sword
And won thy love doing thee injuries;
But I will wed thee in another key,
With pomp, with triumph and with revelling.
Theseus later warns Hermia that if she refuses her father’s choice of husband, she must live a life of chastity – not unlike the supposed life-style of the Queen:
For aye to be in shady cloister mew’d
To live a barren sister all your life
Chanting faint hymns to the cold, fruitless moon.
Thrice blessèd they that master so their blood
To undergo such maiden pilgrimage.
But earthlier happy is the rose distill’d
Than that which, withering on the virgin thorn,
Grows lives and dies in single blessèdness.
The pro-Queen Elizabeth faction in the audience would hear the words ‘thrice blessèd’ ‘master so their blood’ ‘maiden pilgrimage’and ‘single-blessedness’. The pro-Queen Mary faction would hear ‘barren’ ‘faint’ ‘cold’ ‘fruitless’ ‘withering’ and ‘dies’.
Later Oberon, the King of the Fairies, in the moonlit grounds of Copped Hall, addresses his attendant spirit:
My gentle Puck, come hither. Thou rememb’rest
Since once I sat upon a promontory
And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath
That the rude sea grew civil at her song
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres
To hear the sea-maid’s music…
Catholics in the audience would know that the mermaid was the personal symbol of Mary Queen of Scots. They would interpret ‘the ‘dulcet and harmonious breath’ of the mermaid as Queen Mary’s ambition to unite England and Scotland.
‘The rude sea’ was the historic contention between the Scots and the English which Queen Mary intended to ‘civilise’ with her ‘song’ of national unity. The ‘certain stars’ which ‘shot madly from their spheres’ were the English Lords who rebelled against Elizabeth – including the Countess Mary’s first husband.
Protestants, however, would hear the passage differently. They would take ‘mermaid’ as the Tudor slang for ‘prostitute’ – ‘the dolphin’ that the mermaid sits on as the Dauphine, Queen Mary’s French Catholic husband.
As for the stars that shot ‘madly’ from their spheres, Catholics would interpret ‘madly’ as ‘ecstatically’ and Protestants as ‘insanely’. And both groups would be rightBut Catholicism has the last word in the play. Calvinists insisted there could be no intercourse between the living and the dead, Purgatory was a myth, and all fairies, ghosts and spirits were tricks of Satan to damn us.
As a cradle-Catholic, country boy, Shakespeare would have thought differently. All rural folk have their stories to tell and the Catholic Church in England had been clever enough to incorporate folk-lore, instinct and imagination into its liturgical practices.
Catholics in Shakespeare’s audience would have believed that the soul of Mary’s first husband was in Purgatory. It would be profoundly affected by what happened on Earth.
The toxic row between his wife and himself had to be resolved before the new marriage could go forward. And before the soul of the Earl could enter into heaven.
When Oberon and Titania, King and Queen of the Fairies, fight for possession of ‘a little changeling boy’ they are re-enacting the fight between Countess Mary and her first husband for possession of little Harry.
Shakespeare shows, in the wild disturbance of nature, the cosmic repercussions such a bitter conflict can have:
The ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his seat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ‘ere his youth attained a beard;
The fold stands empty in the drownèd field
And crows are fatted with the murrion flock
The nine men’s morris is filled up with mud
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green
For lack of tread are undistinguishable.
The human mortals want their winter cheer:
No night is now with hymn or carol blest….
Oberon and Titania, after pain and humiliation, are finally reconciled with a stately dance in the wood. The old Southampton marriage has been symbolically closed and the new one can begin.
Officially at least, Anglican priests could no longer bless bed-chambers and houses the way the old Catholic priests had done: so Shakespeare has fairy folk do the job inste
Now until the break of day
Through the house each fairy stray.
To the best bride-bed will we
Which by us shall blessèd be.
And the issue there create ever shall be fortunate.
So shall all the couples three
Ever true in loving be…
With this field dew-consecrate,
Every fairy take his gait;
And each several chamber bless
Through this palace with sweet peace;
And ever shall in safety rest
And the owner of it blest.’
The blessing worked. The marriage between Countess Mary and Heneage, though short, was very happy. The redoubtable Mary was to get through yet another husband before she died – one half her age. But in her final will she asked to be interred ‘as near as may be to the body of my dearly loved husband, Henry, late Earl of Southampton, in the church at Titchfield.’
Shakespeare had healed an old family wound with poetry.
Courtly Intrigue.
Later in the year, Harry Southampton made his first appearance at Queen Elizabeth’s court. He was handsome and gallant with shoulder length hair – so everyone assumed he would be Elizabeth’s next favourite.
The hated Earl of Leicester, the Queen’s long term companion, had died six years before, poisoned, it was rumoured, by his second wife. Her son, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, was a dreamy, romantic boy who loved the Welsh countryside: but on step-father Leicester’s death, the Queen had seized all the family money. Essex, for the honour of his family name, had to seek his fortune at court.
Leicester’s death had created a power vacuum there – a situation the Queen was happy to exploit. She loved to surround herself with ambitious young men of high family but low means, who would fight each other, literally, for her attention. She could control them with huge sums of money tax money raised from her long-suffering subjects.
Apart from Essex, the two main contenders for the Queen’s favour were the tall, swart, driven, Devonshire man, Sir Walter Raleigh, nicknamed The Fox, and the short, unprepossessing, round-shouldered, Sir Robert Cecil, nicknamed The Ape.
No-one ever replaced Leicester in the Queen’s affection: but Essex had a good try. Night after night, for seven long years, he had played cards – ‘or one game or other’ – with the Queen ‘till the birds sang in the morning’.
He much preferred to be away from the court, gaining glory at sea or on the field of battle. The Queen, terrified that he might be killed or, worse, that he might become more popular, made him the Master of the Horse. Her horse.
So Essex was relieved when his close friend Harry arrived at the court: the two men could share between them the exhausting demands of the Queen.
One day, however, Elizabeth publicly refused Harry’s offer of help to mount her horse: Harry fled the court, mortified. His crime? Courting one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting…
Elizabeth had excluded all attractive and powerful older women from her court: but, as a supreme test of loyalty to her favourites (and as a masochistic torment to herself) she surrounded herself with a gaggle of nubile young beauties. These she would dress in black and white so she could dazzle all the more in colour.
Elizabeth would scream at her ladies, strike them and even break their fingers if they so much as looked at one of her admirers. But the ladies got their revenge. The Queen, fearful of time’s inroads, had banned all true looking glasses from the court. When her ladies did her make-up, they would often paint her nose bright red.
The lady who had attracted Harry’s attention was Elizabeth Vernon, an impoverished cousin of the Earl of Essex. Essex encouraged the match as he desperately needed a spy close to the Queen. Countess Mary encouraged the match as she desperately needed a grandson.
So, to encourage Harry’s tentative heterosexuality, Essex and Mary commissioned Shakespeare to write Romeo and Juliet for a private performance at Titchfield. As part of the therapy, Harry played Romeo and Elizabeth Vernon Juliet.
Shakespeare couldn’t resist another ‘moon’ joke. Romeo, seeing Juliet at her balcony window, exclaims:
But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east and Juliet is the sun!
Arise fair sun and kill the envious moon
Who is already pale and sick with grief
That thou her maid are far more fair than she.
Be not her maid since she is envious,
Her vestal livery is but sick and green
And none but fools do wear it. Cast it off!
Shakespeare was ambivalent about Harry’s love affair with Elizabeth Vernon. He knew Harry needed a son to carry on the Southampton line, but he didn’t want to lose Harry, the love of his life. He dramatised this dilemma in the charged, febrile passions of Mercutio – a character that was so close to his heart, he said he had to kill him off at the start of the third act.
In the event, Harry’s stormy affair with Elizabeth Vernon did not preclude a stormy affair with Shakespeare. Or stormy affairs with a lot of other people as well, mostly lower class young men.
Shakespeare, mind you, was no angel himself. In Sonnet 110 he confesses to Harry that he has been unfaithful. It’s all part of the touring actor’s life, he protests: you meet new people and you have to go to bed with them. But these affairs, he argues, made him feel young again and made him realise just how important Harry was:
Alas ‘tis true, I have gone here and there,
And made myself a motley to the view,
Gor’d mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
Made old offences of affections new.
Most true it is, that I have look’d on truth
Askance and strangely: but by all above,
These blenches gave my heart an other youth,
And worse essays prov’d thee my best of love.
Now all is done, have what shall have no end.
Mine appetite I never more will grind
On newer proof to try an older friend,
A God in love, to whom I am confin’d.
Then give me welcome, next my heaven the best,
Even to thy pure and most most loving breast.
Rebellion.
It wasn’t just the Catholics who were critical of Elizabeth: many Protestants were as well, especially ambitious young soldiers like Essex, who wanted to go to war with the Spanish in Europe and create an Empire in the New World.
Elizabeth would have none of it. God had put her in charge of an island and that was enough. She wanted to be a Protestant shepherdess to a Protestant flock. Warfare, unless it was used to defend her realm, was a waste of time.
Piracy of Spanish ships was, of course, an entirely different matter.
Every Catholic, though, could unite with every Protestant on one thing: fear of the future. What would happen when Queen Elizabeth, who resolutely refused to name her successor, died? Would England revert to the horrors of civil war?
A plot began to form in the minds of Essex and Southampton. They would raise an army, eliminate the Fox and the Ape and force Queen Elizabeth to name her successor as James VI of Scotland. The son of Mary Queen of Scots, he was Protestant, but Catholic friendly. He was bisexual, cultured, peace-loving and tolerant. He wanted, as his mother had done, to unite England and Scotland.
To steel themselves to action, the plotters needed a play. What better story was there than the overthrow of Richard II? And who better to write it than cousin Will?
Shakespeare gives us a Richard II who changes his mind, heaps gold on his favourites, robs sons of their inheritance, surrounds himself with flatterers, murders his relatives, detests success in others and loathes war with its ‘untun’d drums’ and ‘harsh-resounding trumpets’. Not unlike Queen Elizabeth.
It features a debonair rebel, Bollingbroke, who doffs his cap to oyster wenches, bends his knee to draymen, plays the crowd and plots to lead a movement to depose the King. Not unlike the Earl of Essex.
But Shakespeare was incapable of writing pure propaganda. At the end of the play, when Richard, deposed and humiliated, is imprisoned at Pomfret Castle, he receives a surprise visit from his groom.
The groom has seen Bollingbroke, at his coronation as King Henry IV, riding on King Richard’s beloved horse, Roan Barbary. He anticipates how upset the King will be when he learns of this, so seeks him out to share his grief:
Groom: Hail royal prince.
Richard: What art thou? And how com’st thou hither?
Where no man ever comes but that sad dog
That brings me food, to make misfortune live?
Groom: I was a poor groom of thy stable, King,
When thou were’t King, who travelling towards York
With much ado, at length hath gotten leave
To look upon my (sometime royal) master’s face.
Oh how it yearned my heart, when I beheld
In London streets, that coronation day,
When Bollingbrooke rode on Roan Barbary,
That horse that thou so often hast bestrid,
That horse that I so carefully have dressed.
Richard:Rode he on Barbary? Tell me gentle friend
How went he under him?
Groom:So proudly as if he had distained the ground.
Richard: So proud that Bollingbrooke was on his back?
That jade hath eat bread from my royal hand.
This hand hath made him proud with clapping him.
Would he not stumble? Would he not fall down
(Since pride must have a fall) and break the neck
Of that proud man, that did usurp his back?
Forgiveness, horse: why do I rail on thee,
Since thou, created to be awed by man,
Was’t born to bear? I was not made a horse
And yet I bear a burden like an ass,
Spur-gall’d and tir’d by jaunting Bollingbroke.
Keeper: Fellow give place, here is no longer stay.
Richard:If thou love me ‘tis time thou wert away.
Groom: What my tongue dares not, that my heart shall say.
Forget Catholic and Protestant. Only a Christian could have written this scene and, given the horse involvement, an English Christian at that.
Shakespeare carries on the Bollingbroke story in Henry IV Parts One and Two, and creates one of his most loved characters, the fat knight, Falstaff. Sir John adores the young Prince Hal, but leads him astray in the taverns of Eastcheap. Or perhaps it’s the other way around.
For Hal read Harry, for Falstaff, Shakespeare. Or at least an aspect of him. In the Sonnets Shakespeare warns Harry time and time again against liaisons with lower class men. Somehow he forgets that he is a lower class man himself.
But Shakespeare’s unconscious never forgets. In the play Shakespeare dramatises his deepest fear: Hal rejects Falstaff when he becomes King. Plump Jack withers away…
It was during the Henry IV plays that Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, died – a boy of only eleven whom Shakespeare, though he spent his summers at Stratford, can hardly have known.
He had wanted a boy so much he continued sexual relations with his hated wife till she provided him with one. Then he stopped. Now it was too late for more.
Shakespeare stifled his grief – which was to surface overwhelmingly a full decade later – and, like so many men, went clear off the rails the rails instead.
He became Falstaff. Dressed in flashy Italianate clothes, he bedded down with crooks, lent money, cheated at dice, slept with prostitutes, smoked, swore and ran girls in the notorious Paris Gardens on the South Bank where his company were playing.
He was hauled up before the magistrates for a violent gang attack and bound over to keep the peace.
This public disgrace meant a temporary break with Harry: but no weakening of love on either side. In fact, Harry had become his surrogate son as well as his lover:
As a decrepit father takes delight
To see his active child do deeds of youth,
So I, made lame by Fortune’s dearest spite
Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth.
For whether beauty, birth, or wealth or wit,
Or any of these, or all, or more
Intitled in their parts do crowned sit,
I make my love engraftèd to this store.
Even when Elizabeth Vernon became pregnant and produced a little girl, Shakespeare remained ‘engrafted’ to Harry – and Harry ‘engrafted’ to him.
But the pregnancy meant marriage and marriage meant the fury of the Queen – not only with Southampton but with Essex as well. Both men were banished from the court. The time was coming for their plot – and the chance came in an extraordinary way. Essex was sent to Ireland to quell the rebellion.
This was not the Queen’s idea: she thought Essex far too volatile for the job. But the Fox and the Ape had persuaded her, against her legendary instincts. They wanted to give Essex enough rope to hang himself.
The plot developed: Essex would lead a victorious English army to quell the Irish then return and join with the citizens of London to overthrow Elizabeth. If King James VI would consent to lead the army, so much the better.
Cousin Will was in on the plan. He went to Scotland and staged Macbeth for King James – a play which demonstrated how fate would lead James to rule over a United Kingdom and how right it was to remove bloody minded usurpers from the throne. Like the Macbeths. Like Elizabeth Tudor.
Then Shakespeare returned to England for Henry V – a tub-thumper that Queen Elizabeth would have loathed. A Chorus mentions how all the citizens fled out of London to welcome Henry V at Blackheath – and predicts the same thing will happen for Essex:
But now behold
In the quick forge and working – house of Thought,
How London doth pour forth her citizens.
The mayor and all his brethren in best sort,
Like to the senators of th’antique Rome,
With the plebeians swarming at their heels,
Go forth and fetch their conqu’ring Caesar in.
As by a lower but no less loving likelihood
Were now the general of our gracious empress,
As in good time he may, from Ireland coming,
Bringing rebellion broached on his sword,
How many would the peaceful city quit
To welcome him!’
The campaign was a disaster. Harry proved a brave and resolute commander, but the Irish ran circles round poor Essex. The charismatic rebel, Tyrone, surrounded by wild, half-naked boys, all but persuaded Essex to join forces with the Irish instead.
Shakespeare realised the plot was doomed. Half the Essex entourage wanted to go ahead with it, the other half wanted appeasement with the Queen. Shakespeare favoured appeasement. He wrote Julius Caesar to show how all rebellions fail – and how even the most honest men can be corrupted by events.
Essex rushed back, unbidden, from Ireland. He burst into the Queen’s morning chamber before Elizabeth had time to put on her wig or make-up. He was likened by his enemies to Acteon who had gazed on the naked moon-Goddess, Diana: and like Acteon, he was destined to be torn apart.
Shakespeare appealed to the Queen for clemency: he painted her as Olivia in Twelfth Night – a beautiful young girl, with a heart full of love, unexpectedly running a great household after the death of her father and brother, surrounded by adoring, love-sick suitors, like Orlando Essex and Aguecheek Southampton – but threatened all around by false-servant Malvolio Foxes.
Ill and half mad, Essex gathered a group of hot-heads about him, as the Queen stripped him of all honours and finance. The rebels burst onto the streets of the City, hoping to inspire the citizens of London to join them. Fatally for Shakespeare, to hype themselves up, they had first paid for a special performance of Richard II at the Globe.
The citizens of London didn’t want to know. Essex was beheaded and Southampton, sentenced to death, was clapped in the Tower. Shakespeare fled back to Scotland, loathed by the Queen and by many of her subjects.
A few months later Elizabeth gave an audience to an old scholar, William Lambarde who recorded their conversation verbatim: Elizabeth was as repelled by Shakespeare’s private life as she was his politics:
Elizabeth: I am Richard II know ye not that?
Lambarde: Such a wicked imagination was determined and attempted by a most unkind gent. The most adorned creature that ever your Majesty made.
Elizabeth: He that will forget God, will also forget his benefactors; this tragedy was played 40 times in open streets and houses. Now the wit of the fox is everywhere on foot, so as hardly a faithful or virtuous man may be found. Farewell, good and honest Lambard.’
Love Birds.
Shakespeare could now get nothing from Harry, stripped of his titles and his money, disgraced and near death in the Tower: but his love grew in the profoundest way.
In the Sonnets Shakespeare often speaks of sharing one heart with Harry: now, with a physical distance between the two men, he speaks of sharing one soul.
In The Phoenix and the Turtle – Shakespeare’s great mystical poem – Harry is symbolised by the noble Phoenix and Shakespeare bythe work-a-day turtle dove: the two birds have fused in a mutual flame of love – and have moved on, together, to a place of peace.
So they lov’d, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one
Two distincts, division none;
Number there in love was slain.
Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance, and no space was seen
‘Twixt this turtle and his queen;
But in them it were a wonder.
So between them love did shine
That the turtle saw his right
Flaming in the Phoenix sight;
Either was the other’s mine.
Beauty, truth and rarity,
Grace in all simplicity,
Here, enclos’d, in cinders lie.
Death is now the Phoenix nest,
And the turtle’s loyal breast
To eternity doth rest.
Truth may seem but cannot be;
Beauty brag, but ‘tis not she;
Truth and beauty buried be.
To this urn let those repair
That are either true or fair:
For these dead birds sigh a prayer.
Good times, though, were just around the corner…..
(It’s best to read Part Three now.)
The Shakespeare Code 
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