The Shakespeare Code

 (It’s best to read Part ONE first)

To appreciate what William Shakespeare was up to with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we need to understand the woman who commissioned it……..

……the extraordinary Mary Browne, Second Countess of Southampton…..

She was the daughter of Anthony Browne, first Viscount Montague……..

………one of England’s leading Catholics who had refused to take the Oath of Supremacy when Elizabeth came to the throne.

Mary married the Second Earl of Southampton………

………another committed Catholic……

……..and both families plotted to overthrow Queen Elizabeth and put Catholic Mary Queen of Scots on the throne.

The rebellion failed and Montague and Southampton nearly lost their heads.

But canny Elizabeth – wanting the bad boys on her side – made the repentant Montague a Lord Lieutenant.

The unrepentant Second Earl, however, was thrown into the Tower. His wife Mary must have had very liberal visiting rights. While he was still a prisoner she bore him a son – Henry Wriothesely, the third Earl of Southampton, also known as Harry.

The Second Earl’s mother, Jane, had warned her son about marrying the strong-willed Mary – and she was right. Mary fell in love with…..

….a common person….

…..and her husband, worked on by a family ‘friend’, disowned her.

She wrote a letter to her husband, pleading her innocence and got six year old Harry to deliver it.

But, as she later wrote to her father…..

….his heart was too great to bestow the reading of it, coming from me. Good my lord, procure as soon as you conveniently may, some end to my misery for I am tired of this life…..

The Second Earl seized the boy, cut off all relationships with the Montague family and in the words of Mary….

….made his manservant his wife….

He also passed on his hatred of women to his son and surrounded himself with an all-male entourage of…

….at least a hundred well-mounted gentlemen and yeomen – tall goodly fellows that kept a constant pace…

The servants of the Southampton family would fight with the servants of the Montague family – just as they do in Romeo and Juliet…

The Catholic Faith was the Second Earl’s undoing. He tried to arrange a meeting with the Jesuit Missionary, Edmund Campion……..

……..but Campion was arrested and tortured and revealed names. The Second Earl was thrown into the Tower again and ‘examined’. He died two months later, under house arrest, at the age of 36.

He had written a will leaving the care of his eight year old son and his estates to his manservant: but Mary was having none of it.

She pulled aristocratic strings and got the will reversed …..

One of her husband’s requests had been for a solitary tomb to be set up for him at St. Peter’s Church in Titchfield…….

……..as an eternal rebuke to his wife…

Mary ignored this request for thirteen years – then subverted it in 1594…..

This was the year young Harry was to come of age.

Like his father, he was fiercely Catholic and, also like his father, loathed women – his mother in particular.

So Mary had commissioned fellow Catholic, William Shakespeare, to write a series of Sonnets to persuade her son of the joys of marriage.

William Cecil, now Lord Burghley……….

…….had become Harry’s guardian and wanted him to marry his Protestant grand-daughter, Lady Elizabeth de Vere.

If Harry refused, the Southampton family faced a gigantic £5,000 fine…

Mary knew that Harry would throw her out of the family estate at Titchfield when he reached his majority. So she decided to marry an old friend and widower, Sir Thomas Heneage………

……..who lived at Copped Hall in Essex.

But there were problems.

First, Heneage was a committed and politically active Protestant.

Second, he had no son: so his hated his son-in-law stood to inherit his estate. Heneage was in his sixties – but Mary was only forty two. So Bride and Groom HAD to produce a son to block the inheritance.

And then there was the question of the Second Earl’s tomb…..

Unless Mary moved quickly, Harry would carry out his father’s wishes.

So she ordered a family tomb instead, which displayed the effigies of her husband’s father and mother as well as the Second Earl himself…….

……and engraved her own name and history at the back.

The actual bodies remained in the crypt and do so to this day – preserved in the purest honey….

There had never been any reconciliation between Mary and her husband. He had gone to the grave hating her – and she herself had written….

That his lordship continued his hard mind towards me to his last I grieve more for his soul than any harm he hath done therein, for my assurance of living rested not in his arms to bear. For the rest I weigh not, but by my troth am rather glad he hath given me so just a cause to forget him that otherwise I should have carried my remembrance with grief more than enough to my last hour….

For a Catholic woman, this was a catastrophe. She knew – despite what the Calvinist State was telling her – she still had active, spiritual links with her dead husband.

What either of them did or thought would affect the other – in this world and the next.

What she wanted was an old-fashioned, Roman Catholic priest who could hold Requiem Masses for the soul of her first husband and bless the wedding bed of her second….

But what she got instead – to our lasting benefit – was William Shakespeare……

To read Part Three, click:HERE!