The Shakespeare Code

Sadly, Ken Groves – the President of the Titchfield History Society – recently died.

But at his Memorial in Titchfield’s Great Barn, it was revealed he had just finished a book, The Trio and William Shakespeare’s Erudition (August, 2019) which has been published posthumously.

The trio referred to is Shakespeare himself……

….Henry Wriothesley, the Third Earl of Southampton……

 

……and the lexicographer and writer John Florio.

Ken’s book covers the same ground as my own book, Love’s Labour’s Found – published seventeen years ago in 2002.

Indeed, Ken read my book in manuscript in 1999 and shared his genealogical charts with me, a kindness I acknowledged.

Ken’s book revisits the ideas I put forward in mine – that Love’s Labour’s Lost was first performed at Titchfield, that Shakespeare worked, wrote and taught there and formed a close friendship with Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton.

But there are important differences in Ken’s use of this material.

I would, of course, have much preferred to have debated with Ken himself, but the best I can do is offer a detailed response to the most contentious of his points over several Posts.

Ken writes:

It is well known that by far the most important member of the Wriothesley family was Henry Wriothesley, the Third Earl [of Southampton].

HW, as Ken calls Henry Wriothesley, fought gallantly as a soldier, especially in Ireland where he led ‘a very brave charge’ on 15th April 1599. But he fell out of favour with Queen Elizabeth, first, when he married without her permission and, second, when he rebelled against her.  He was released from the Tower by King James when he acceded to the throne of England in 1603 and, according to Anthony Weldon (1583-1648) ‘there was an apparition of Southampton being a favourite to his Majesty’.

But James preferred younger men as his lovers and Robert Cecil, James’s right hand man, was HW’s sworn enemy. So HW never achieved high office beyond the Governorship of the Isle of Wight and the Lord Lieutenancy of Hampshire – a position which he shared.

His grandfather, Thomas Wriothesley, on the other hand, was Henry VIII’s Ambassador to Brussels, Secretary to the Privy Council and Lord Chancellor.

It was said of him that in 1542 that he ‘governed almost everything in England’. HW never came anywhere near that sort of power. His ‘importance’ comes from his relationship with Shakespeare.

Ken writes:

However it is obvious, by the actions of Henry Wriothesley the 3rd Earl and his mother Mary Browne, the 2nd Countess [of Southampton], in the mature periods of their lives, that they were not sympathetic to Catholicism

One of the reasons both HW and his friend the Earl of Essex rebelled against the Queen in 1601 was to ensure freedom of worship for Roman Catholics. According to the Venetian Ambassador, HW remained a Catholic up to 1603 (when HW was 30) and only renounced his Roman Catholicism to please the James, who declared himself Head of the Anglican Church.

On 26th February, 1605, John Chamberlain wrote to his friend Winwood: ‘eight or ten days since [ago] there were above £200 worth of popish books taken about Southampton House and burnt in St. Paul’s Churchyard’. Clearly James was unconvinced by the sincerity of HW’s conversion.

Mary Southampton, HW’s mother, was an active recusant……

….as  was her father Lord Montague, England’s leading Catholic, who celebrated the illegal Latin Mass right to the end of his life.

 

Her husband, Henry, 2nd Earl of Southampton, was an equally devout Catholic.

Ken describes him as:

 ‘feeble minded’, ‘a demented Papist’ and even ‘mad’ –

…..but there is no evidence at all for this. Like many Catholics, he was in a dilemma: he had sworn to Queen Elizabeth’s Act of Supremacy in 1563 but Pope Pius V’s Bull of 1570, ‘Regnans in Excelsis’, excommunicated the Queen and forbade Catholics to obey her. He met Bishop Ross to discuss the matter and said he would prefer: t

to lose all that he had’ than be troubled ‘by a continual fear of conscience’.

Ross confessed, under torture, that he had spoken to the 2nd Earl on the Lambeth marshes – so the Earl was imprisoned from October 1571 to May 1573. Then when the martyr to be, Edmund Campion, came to England in 1580, the 2nd Earl arranged, through a highly complex network of Catholics, to meet him.  But Campion was seized, tortured and confessed to the proposed meeting, so the 2nd Earl was examined….

what Jesuits or priests he had known, where they have been harboured and by whom relieved, what letters or messages he hath received or sent unto them, and where they remain.

Two months later, at the age of 36, the 2nd Earl was dead.

We know from the English Catholic Cardinal, William Allen, that even when Lord Burghley became HW’s guardian….

…….Mary made sure her son still was ‘under Catholic masters’.

Like her husband, Mary also risked imprisonment for her faith. On 14th August, 1586, when Mary was 34, the Privy Council questioned suspected recusants about ‘their knowledge of Swithin Wells and others who were entertained in his mistress’s house.’ [i.e. Southampton House, the family’s London residence, outside the city walls in Holborn].

Wells – a great friend of Mary’s…….

 

……was finally hanged outside Southampton House in 1591 in an attempt to intimidate her.  But Charlotte Stopes, HW’s biographer, states that three years later – in May 1594 – ‘many priests sought refuge’ at Southampton House and concludes that Mary must have been in residence.

The fact that Mary married a Protestant, Sir Thomas Heneage, in 1594, does not mean, as Ken suggests, that she changed her faith. In fact in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which the Shakespeare Code believes was written to celebrate the marriage, Shakespeare manages to work in a compliment to the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots.

Oberon says to Puck:

……….Thou rememb’rest

Since once I sat upon a promontory,

And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back

Uttering such sweet 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’

‘The Mermaid’ here is a reference to Mary Queen of Scots, beloved of Catholics, whose symbol was the mermaid.

E. Cobham Brewer wrote in 1870:

 

(1) The Mermaid and sea-maid, that is Mary Queen of Scots (2) On the Dolphin’s back, she married to Dolphin or Dauphin of France (3) the rude sea grew civil, the Scotch rebels (4)certain stars, the Earl of Northumberland, the Earl of Westmoreland and the Duke of Norfolk (5) shot madly from their spheres, that is, revolted from Queen Elizabeth, bewitched by the sea-maids sweetness.

Ken writes:

HW’s guardian, Lord Burghley, ‘tolerated Catholicism, provided that it was practised only in secure privacy’.

Toleration of Catholicism was the State’s official policy – but the reality was different. In 1583 the Jesuit Edward Rishton wrote that Elizabeth (and, by association, Burghley) ‘pretended to a moderation to mask their true intentions’ and in the same year Allen wrote that Catholics lived ‘in such slavery that they detest the Queen’.

Catholics were not safe in their own houses. On 10th August, 1578, Queen Elizabeth stayed with a Mr Rookwood at Thetford.  A statue of the Virgin Mary was found in the house which Elizabeth ordered to be burnt. Rookwood was later arrested and put in Norwich gaol until his death 20 years later. In all 22 Catholic recusants were admitted to jail after her visit.

When the 2nd Earl of Southampton died, the Privy Council ordered the Recorder to raid Southampton House, apprehend anyone who was practising against the State and search for ‘books, letters and ornaments for massing’.

When the Queen visited rich subjects on her Progresses, she would take over their homes for Privy Council meetings and her soldiers would smash up the wainscot, searching for Priest Holes.  During The Queen’s 1591 visit to Cowdray – the home of Lord Montague…..

…her Privy Council actually drew up Anti-Catholic legislation in his house: anyone aiding or abetting Jesuits would be thrown into prison. This proclamation was written by Burghley, but issued under Elizabeth’s name.

Ken writes:

‘almost all of his [HW’s] friends were Protestants’.

This is something we cannot possibly know as people kept their Catholic faith secret. In fact, William Allen, in 1583, estimated that two thirds of the English were Catholics but were frightened to make public confession of their faith.

What we do know is that many of HW’s Protestant friends, like Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, favoured freedom of worship for Catholics. Essex even held Latin Masses at his London home for recusants.

The fact that HW fought against Spanish Catholics does not, as Ken suggests, make him anti-Catholic. Even Lord Montague raised a force to fight the Armada. Catholics hated the Spanish just as much as other Englishmen did.

Ken writes:

there is not one scrap of historical evidence to identify his [HW’s] name with any man (fair youth) who is part of the brilliant verses’ [of Shakespeare’s Sonnets]

This is such a heady claim, I shall devote the whole of my next Post to discussing it!