The Shakespeare Code

(It is best to read Part One first.)

Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester , was the love of Queen Elizabeth’s life. He had protected (and financed) her during the reign of her step-sister, Bloody Mary Tudor, when few thought she would survive, let alone become Queen of England. 

Leicester (lying, as usual) claimed to be exactly the same age as Elizabeth, so contemporaries explained their intimacy in terms of planetary alignments. Elizabeth and Robert had even been imprisoned in the Tower at the same time.

Robert Dudley

Elizabeth, abused as a child and a teenager, only trusted those who had been kind to her before she ascended the throne, so Leicester was in a unique position. He contrtolled all access to the Queen and so made a fortune from those seeking her attention.

Realising, also, that he was above the law, he poisoned any man who got in his way (including, it was said, Sir Walter Devereux, the first Earl of Essex) and slept with any woman who took his fancy. He was rumoured to pay £300 a night (£150, 000) for the favours of Elizabeth’s beautiful ladies-in-waiting. 

At one point he had a chamber next to the Queen, so many people assumed he was her lover. Some even thought he had fathered an illegitimate child with her. But what was certain was that during the Queen’s bouts of illness, which were frequent, he would sit all night by her bedside.

And he would often dance with her….

●

The Roman Catholics hated Leicester for encouraging the Duke of Norfolk to marry Mary Queen of Scots, a plot designed to destroy them both. The Papists also claimed that Leicester had acted as an agent –provocateur  at  Place House in Titchfield, where the disastrous Rebellion of the Catholic Northern Earls was planned. (Mary Queen of Scots was to be sprung from prison at Tutbury and taken to Arundel Castle, twenty miles from Titchfield).

As a consequence of the failed  rebellion, the second Earl of Southampton was imprisoned in the Tower where Henry Wriothesley, the third Earl, William Shakespeare’s patron and lover, was conceived.

Shakespeare’s own family also suffered under Leicester (whose fabulously decadent Kenilworth Castle was only a dozen miles away from Stratford-upon-Avon). Leicester’s agent, Sir Thomas Lucy, had raided the home of Edward Arden, a devout Catholic on Shakespeare’s mother’s side, who had denounced Leicester as a serial adulterer. Arden was charged with ‘treason’ and hanged, drawn and quartered. The sadistic Lucy had also whipped the young Shakespeare for poaching on his land. (Poaching was a recognised ‘revenge’ tactic on the enemies of Catholicism which the Vatican positively encouraged).

Then, in 1584, the Jesuits dropped a bombshell.

They printed vast quantities of a green-backed book in Flanders and smuggled it into England. It was called Leicester’s Commonwealth and the public leapt on it. Francis Bacon had a manuscript copy and the American handwriting expert, Charles Hamilton, believes that some of the pages are in Shakespeare’s hand.

The book claimed that Leicester had set out to destroy all the claimants to the English throne except Queen Elizabeth, whom he would then proceed to assassinate. Next he would back the Yorkist claim of his brother-in-law, Huntingdon, but only as a step towards seizing completely power for himself.

The great Regency historian Lucy Aikin writes:

The success of this book [Leicester’s Commonwealth] was prodigious; it was read universally and with the utmost avidity. All who envied Leicester’s power and grandeur, all who had smarted under his insolence, or felt the gripe of his rapacity, all who had been scandalised, or wounded in family honour, by his unbridled licentiousness, all who still cherished in their hearts the image of the unfortunate Duke of Norfolk, whom he was believed to have entangled in a deadly snare, all who knew him for the foe and suspected him for the murder of the gallant and lamented Earl of Essex – finally, all, and they were nearly the whole of the nation, who looked upon him as a base and treacherous miscreant, shielded by the affection of his sovereign and wrapped in an impenetrable cloud of hypocrisy and artifice, who aimed in the dark his impenetrable weapons against the bosom of innocence exulted in the exposure of his secret crimes, and eagerly received and propagated for truth even the grossest of the exaggerations and falsehoods with which the narrative was intermixed.’

Aikin goes on to describe how Elizabeth ordered everyone in authority to suppress the books and punish anyone who circulated them. In what became known as ‘The Whitewash Manifesto’ Elizabeth:

testified in her conscience before God, that she knew in assured certainty the books and libels against the Earl to be most malicious, false and scandalous, and such as known but an incarnate devil could dream to be true.

Elizabeth also stated that she regarded the publication of the books as an attempt to discredit her own government…

as though she should have failed in good judgement and discretion in the choice of so principal a councillor about her; or to be without taste or care of all justice or conscience, in suffering such heinous and monstrous crimes, as by the said books and libels be famously imputed, to pass unpunished, or finally, at the least, to want either good will, ability or courage , if she knew these enormities were true, to call any subject of her’s whatsoever to render sharp account of them, according to the force of her laws.  

Elizabeth’s Privy Councillors, naturally enough, supported their monarch by declaring:

to do his lordship but right, of their sincere consciences must needs affirm these strange and abominable crimes to be raised of a wicked and venomous malice against the said Earl, of whose good service, sincerity of religion, and all other faithful dealings with her majesty, they had long and true experience.

Leicester was powerful enough to survive this attack and even a disastrous military campaign in the Lowlands. Elizabeth still trusted him enough to put him in charge of the defence of England in Armada year. But when, after the victory over the Spanish, Elizabeth planned to make Leicester Lieutenant-General of England, enough was enough. He died, mysteriously, on his way to Kennilworth Castle.

The rumours were his wife Lettice had poisoned him so she could take a young lover; but he was so unpopular the entire English (and Welsh) population could have been murder suspects. Even William Camden, the contemporary historian wrote:

Nor was the public joy [at the Armada victory] anything abated by Leicester’s death (though the Queen took it much to heart).

But his death left the field wide open – and safe – for the satirists, of whom Thomas Nashe was one and William Shakespeare another….

Leicester in middle age...

 (It is best to read Part Three next.)