The Shakespeare Code

PROVING AN OLD ROMANTIC MYTH IS TRUE….

A Trixie Special

(It’s best to read Parts Parts One , Two, Three, Four and Five first)

Your Cat  would like to make it clear that……

……ALISON WEIR….

….is a VERY GOOD THING INDEED!!!

She has sold over two million copies of her books……

…..and they are PAGE-TURNERS!!!

She believes that history belongs to EVERYBODY…..

…..and has brought the Tudor period to vibrant life….

….often to people who might not otherwise know about it.

However, on the subject of Queen Elizabeth, Essex and the Ring…….

A. W.  – J’accuse!!!

In her 1998 biography, Elizabeth the Queen……

 

…..A.W. writes…..

There is a legend often repeated, that Elizabeth had once, in happier times, given Essex a ring, saying that, if ever he was in trouble, he was to send it to her and she would help him….in the seventeenth century , it was claimed that, whilst in the Tower, Essex leaned out of his window and entrusted the ring to a boy, telling him to take it to Lady Scrope and ask her to give it to the Queen: however, the boy mistakenly gave it to Lady Scope’s sister, the Countess of Nottingham, wife of Essex’s rival, the Admiral, who, out of malice, made her keep the ring to herself. The story went that that she only revealed the existence to the Queen when herself was on her deathbed in 1603, whereupon Elizabeth is said to have told her bitterly, ‘May God forgive you, but I never can….’

Brothers and Sisters who have been following these Posts will recognise this passage is….

……. very similar indeed……

…. to one Lytton Strachey wrote….

…..in his 1928,  Elizabeth and Essex…

Afterwards a romantic story was told, which made the final catastrophe the consequence of a dramatic mishap. The tale is well known: how in happier days, the Queen gave the Earl a ring, with the promise that, whenever he sent it back to her, it would always bring forgiveness; how Essex, leaning from a window of the Tower, entrusted the ring to a boy, bidding him take it to Lady Scrope, and beg her to present it to her Majesty; how the boy, in mistake, gave the ring to Lady Scrope’s sister, Lady Nottingham, the wife of the Earl’s enemy; how Lady Nottingham kept it, and said nothing, until, on her deathbed two years later, she confessed all to the Queen…. with the exclamation ‘God may forgive you, Madam, but I never can’!

Where Strachey describes the ring episode as….

……a romantic story……

…..A.W. describes it as….

……a legend…

Where Strachey says…

….the tale is well known….

….A.W. says it is….

….often repeated….

Strachey’s…

…..happier days…..

….becomes A.W.’s….

…..happier times…

Strachey describes….

…..how Essex, leaning from a window of the Tower, entrusted the ring to a boy….

….and A. W. describes how…..

……Essex leaned out of his window and entrusted the ring to a boy….

…..Strachey concludes that the story…..

…..does not belong to history….

A. W. concludes…..

…the story is a fabrication….

Strachey writes:

A reference to the legend in its rudimentary form occurs in The Devil’s Law Case (circa 1620)…

A.W. writes:

It [the story] is first referred to in 1620 in John Webster’s The Devil’s Law Case….

‘SO WHAT!’

….I hear you  all cry….

‘The truth is the truth…..

 ……so the same facts and phrases will appear NATURALLY….

……. in the works of two different historians…….

….. when they write about the same subject…’

HOLD YOUR HORSES, BROTHERS AND SISTERS OF THE CODE!!!

Strachey goes on to claim that the ring story was….

…..first fully elaborated…..

…..in…..

…..a sentimental novelette….

(The Secret History of the most renowned Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Essex, by a Person of Quality)

A.W. also goes on to claim that the story was….

….recounted in detail….in a work of fiction….

(Again, The Secret History)

But Your Cat has shown that the story was NOT ‘first fully elaborated’ in this novel…..

………nor was it ‘recounted in detail’…..

The window in the Tower does not appear in the novel, nor does the boy, nor does Lady Scrope, nor does the boy’s mistake..

Strachey goes on to say that novel was published in 1695….

And A.W. goes on to say it was published in 1695 as well…..

……MAKING EXACTLY THE SAME MISTAKE THAT STRACHEY MAKES!!!……

As Brothers and Sisters who have been following these Posts well know….

…..THE NOVEL WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN ENGLISH in 1680!!!….

(It was first published in French in 1678!!!)

As we have seen, the FULL story wasn’t printed till 1749……

……by Thomas Birch, F.R.S….

…..in his An Historical View of the Negotiations between the Courts of England France and Brussels From the Year 1592 to 1617.

His source was the Lady Elizabeth Spelman…..

….who was a member of the Carey family….

…..and who had told her story to  John Boyle, 5th Earl of Cork and 5th Earl of Orrery….

 …..the publisher of her great grandfather, Robert Carey’s, Memoirs.

(See Part Five)

The conclusion must be that A.W…..

…..HAS SWALLOWED STRACHEY WHOLESALE….

….without checking the facts….

…..just as poor Simon Adams has done….

…….writing  about the Countess of Nottingham in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography……

A.W. digs a further hole for herself when she goes on to say:

Camden, Elizabeth’s usually well-informed biographer, knew of the tale [about the Essex ring] and condemned it as false…..

William Camden……

……certainly wrote about ONE of Elizabeth’s rings….

She [Queen Elizabeth] then [1603] commanded that ring werewith she had been as it were joined in marriage to her kingdom at her inauguration , and had never since taken off, to be filed off from her finger because it was so grown into her flesh, that it could not be drawn off. Which was taken as a sad omen, as if it portended that her marriage with the Kingdom, contracted by that ring, would now be dissolved.

But to Your Cat’s certain knowledge, Camden NEVER mentions the Essex ring…..

As we have seen, he described….

…..the secrets of Princes…..

…..as being….

…..an inextricable labyrinth…..

…..and never wrote about the Queen’s private life.

Perhaps A.W. is ‘mis-remembering’ Strachey’s statement that…..

It [the ring story] is implicitly denied by Camden, the weightiest of contemporary historians….

(See Part Two)

Bizarrely though, A.W. accepts the OTHER romantic ring/window story connected to Queen Elizabeth.

She writes:

As soon as she realised that her mistress had died, Lady Scrope, as pre-arranged, removed a sapphire ring from the late Queen’s finger and dropped it through a window to her brother, Robert Carey, who was waiting below, ready saddled to ride to Scotland. King James knew that, when he received that ring, he would be King of England in truth…

A.W., though, gets the story wrong….

The ring was never on Elizabeth’s finger…

John Boyle, Robert Carey’s publisher, wrote in  1759….

King James kept a constant and private correspondence with several persons of the English court during many years before Queen Elizabeth died. Among them was Lady Scroop, sister to our Earl of Monmouth, to whom his Majesty sent (by Sir James Fullerton) a sapphire ring, with positive orders to return it to him, by a special messenger, as soon as the Queen was actually expired. Lady Scroop had no opportunity of delivering it to her brother Sir Robert Carey whilst he was in the palace of Richmond; but waiting at a window till she saw him on the outside of the gate, she threw it out to him, and he well knew to what purpose he received it….

Ten years earlier, in 1749, Thomas Birch, in a footnote to his Negotiations, wrote:

Lady Elizabeth Spelman used to relate, that the lady Scroope, who waited on the Queen in her last moments, as soon as her Majesty expired, threw this ring out of the window to her brother, which appears to have been a token agreed upon between her and the King of Scots, as the notice of the Queen’s death….

So A.W. ACCEPTS the authority of Lady Elizabeth Spelman on ONE ring story….

……BUT NOT THE OTHER…..

AND THE AUTHORITY OF STRACHEY WITHOUT CHECKING HIS FACTS!!!

But in its Next Post The Shakespeare Code will reveal how Strachey himself has ‘lifted’ the information about The Secret History novel from another historian…..

WITHOUT CHECKING THE FACTS HIMSELF!!!

CLICK: HERE!

‘Bye, now….