The Shakespeare Code

 (It’s best to read Part One first)

As promised in the last Post, Trixie the Cat…..

……who is working night and day on…

‘Queen Elizabeth, the Earl of Essex and the Ring’

…….has agreed to do a guest spot on ‘The Background to King Lear‘ Trilogy…….

She will now give a potted summary of the changes William Shakespeare made to the original King Leir story and play…..

Take it away, Trix…

•

Hi, Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code!!!

Fasten your seatbelts!

We’re in for a bumpy ride!

The Earl of Gloucester has two sons.

One, Edgar, is legitimate……

…..the other is a bastard, Edmund…..

Edmund wants Edgar’s inheritance, so persuades Gloucester that Edgar is plotting to kill him.

Edgar is proclaimed a traitor and has to flee into the countryside and disguise himself as mad Tom.

Poor Tom’s a-cold!

Lear has a faithful follower, Kent, whom he banishes, but who returns in disguise as the blunt old soldier, Caius.

If but as well I other accents borrow

That can my speech defuse, my good intent

May carry through itself to that full issue

For which I razed my likeness.

Goneril and Regan throw Lear out into the storm, accompanied by his Fool and Kent…..

Blow winds and crack your ….

Lear starts to go mad and the trio encounter Mad Tom.

An extraordinary scene ensues in which one character is pretending to be mad, one is genuinely going mad, one makes a living out of madness and one is in rustic disguise.

It doesn’t get more complicated than that!

Cornwall and Regan discover that Gloucester is aiding the old King……

…..so tear out his eyes as a punishment.

Out, vile jelly!

One of Cornwall’s servants, shocked by what is happening, kills his master.

Regan throws Gloucester out of his own house ordering him to….

…..smell his way to Dover.

The lustful widow Regan is now free to pursue Gloucester’s dishy bastard son, Edmund. Goneril fancies Edmund as well and ends up in deadly rivalry with her sister.

Goneril’s husband, the Duke of Albany, finally sees the truth about his wife.…

O Goneril, you are not worth the dust which the rude wind

Blows in your face….

But it is too late! Cordelia has set sail from France to save her father with the French army. Gloucester decides to kill himself…..

…. and his son, Edgar, still disguised as Mad Tom, leads his father to the edge of a cliff.

Except it isn’t the edge of a cliff. It’s flat ground.

Edgar wants his father to think that when he jumps, he has been saved by a miracle.

Lear, now completely mad, enters fantastically dressed in flowers….

…. but…

Every inch a king!

He and Gloucester meet and Lear rails against the ills of society.

Cordelia sedates Lear with herbs and, in one of the most touching scenes in all drama, father and daughter are reconciled.

BUT…

Cordelia’s forces are overcome in battle, Edgar kills his brother Edmund, Goneril poisons Regan then stabs herself, Cordelia is hanged in prison and Lear enters with Cordelia dead in his arms…..

He then dies himself.

And Kent isn’t feeling too well either….

‘Bye, now….

•

Thanks, Trix.

And now back to me.

•

What is going on? 

How could such a light and optimistic play turn into such a dark and strange one?

To try to understand, we must look at what had happened to Shakespeare….

……and what had happened to England……

…….after the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots.

First, the Spanish tried to conquer the English…..

The battle that ensued was nothing short of a holy war.

Queen Elizabeth……

…..wrote a special prayer to be read in churches twice every week…..

O let Thine enemies know that Thou hast received England, which they most of all for thy Gospel’s sake do malign, into thy protection. Set a wall about it, O Lord, and evermore mightily defend it. Let it be a comfort to the afflicted, a help to the oppressed, and a defence to Thy Church and people prosecuted abroad. O give good and prosperous success to all those that fight this battle against the enemies of thy Gospel.

And King Philip II of Spain….

…..according to Gregorio Leti…

……caused to be placed in all the vessels of the Armada, a quantity of relics of saints, of crosses, of crucifixes and images which he had blessed by the Nuncio on behalf of the Pope. Each vessel was like a church; mass was said every morning and vespers with music every evening.

The Protestant winds blew and the Spanish ships were scattered.

This was great if you were an English Protestant.

But what if you were an English Catholic?

How would it look to you?

How, in fact, would it look to William Shakespeare……..

…….whose parents were Catholic……..

……..whose patrons, the Southampton family, were Catholic……..

…..and who, according to Richard Davies, the Dean of Lichfield, writing in 1690…..

Died a Papist

Would you still believe in a Catholic God?

After the Armada victory, Elizabeth persecuted Catholics even more violently than before. Catholicism had to go underground……

……..Jesuit priests arrived with bogus identities and codenames……

…….and masses were held, often at night, in conditions of the utmost secrecy.

Shakespeare joined the Southampton household at this time as a ‘fac totum’……

See Shakespeare the Movie.

……and was commissioned by the Countess of Southampton……..

…….to write seventeen sonnets for her son’s seventeenth birthday. Their aim was to persuade her son…..

……the gay, wayward, Third Earl of Southampton…….

…….to get married and have an heir.

[See: Just how gay was the Third Earl of Southampton? This Post has received nearly 10,ooo Views]

The problem was the young man was more interested in Shakespeare than he was in fatherhood . And Shakespeare, finally, reciprocated. He wrote…..

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day…..

….. to Southampton and the two began an affair that was to last into the reign of King James.

Shakespeare witnessed, at first hand, the agony Queen Elizabeth caused the Southamptons.

In 1591 she executed Swithin Wells……..

……an old family friend, outside Southampton House in London.

Her psychotic hangman, Richard Topcliffe, went on to hang, draw and quarter Shakespeare’s own cousin, the Jesuit mystic, Robert Southwell.

Topcliffe even wrote a letter to Elizabeth, describing in detail the tortures he intended for Southwell, for the Queen’s…..

….pleasure….

Southwell, he wrote, should be manacled at the wrists…

……his feet standing upon the ground and his hands but as high as he can reach against the wall. It will be as though he were dancing a trick or a figure at trenchmore.

Topcliffe also boasted how he would fondle Queen Elizabeth’s body, telling her that she had….

…..the softest belly of any womankind….

…..to which Elizabeth, allegedly, replied….

Be not these the arms, legs and body of King Henry?

And when Topcliffe affirmed they were…..

…..Elizabeth gave him a present of….

….a white linen hose wrought with white silk….

But Elizabeth’s sado-masochism was not confined to torturers….

She was also having an affair with Southampton’s friend, the impoverished Earl of Essex…….

……..a man literally half her age. Everything had turned into a gigantic game of who would dominate whom.

To excite the aging Queen, Essex writes….

….if my horse could run as fast as my thoughts do fly, I would as often make mine eyes rich in beholding the treasure of my love, as my desires do triumph when I see myself in a strong imagination to conquer your resisting will….

In 1596, though, real life intruded on Shakespeare…

His son, Hamnet, died, aged 11.

Shakespeare threw himself into work, gambling, drinking, sex and violence…….

He was even bound over by a London magistrate to keep the peace.

We know, from Sonnet 37, he turned the Earl of Southampton into his surrogate son….

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…

Shakespeare, in fact, did everything except what he should have done…..

……mourn with his family back at Stratford-upon-Avon.

Hamnet had a twin sister, Judith, and an older sister, Susanna.

And, of course, a mother, Anne….

•

Queen Elizabeth became too much, even for Essex….

She refused to name her successor…….

….so Essex rebelled against her to secure the throne for King James VI of Scotland…….

…….Mary Queen of Scots’ son.

Initially Shakespeare was in favour of this rebellion as he believed it would lead to religious freedom for Catholics: but when Essex failed so spectacularly in his campaign against the rebels in Ireland, Shakespeare realised all was lost.

He tried to give Essex coded messages through his plays……

………particularly Julius Caesar…….

………that the rebellion was doomed…..

But Essex wasn’t listening. He went ahead.

And Elizabeth played the ultimate sado-masochistic game.

She chopped off his head.

Southampton was sentenced to death and sent to the Tower.

He was reprieved…..

…..but Shakespeare believed he would never see his lover again.

The rebels had performed Shakespeare’s Richard II on the eve of the rebellion……

….. and Elizabeth knew she was the target of the satire.

She said to the old scholar, William Lambarde…

I am Richard II. Know ye not that?

Shakespeare, who hated Elizabeth just as much as she hated him, considered suicide….

In Sonnet 66, he launches a scathing attack on the sort of society that Elizabeth…..

…..who at this stage walked with a stick…

…..had created….

He loathes its disparities in wealth, its frivolity, its Godlessness, its apostasy, its perversion, its censorship and its tyranny…

Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,

As to behold desert a beggar born,

And needy nothing trimmed in jollity,

And purest faith unhappily forsworn,

And gilded honor shamefully misplaced,

And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,

And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,

And strength by limping sway disablèd,

And art made tongue-tied by authority,

And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,

And simple truth miscalled simplicity,

And captive good attending captain ill.

Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,

Save that to die, I leave my love alone…

Alone in the Tower of London…

But suddenly Elizabeth died……

…..James became king of England and everything turned round.

The Earl of Southampton…….

……. became a hero rather than a traitor……..

……. and was released from the Tower.

Everyone thought he would become James’s new favourite…

But James preferred much younger men.

Blocked from the centre of power, Southampton became bitterly homophobic.

His affair with Shakespeare had survived his marriage to Elizabeth Vernon……

……and the birth of two daughters.

But in 1605, Southampton finally had a son.

Shakespeare, the actor, had to go.

Shakespeare’s response was to send Southampton the infamous Sonnet 126…..

…….a poem of pure, distilled poison.

It begins positively by stating that Southampton has conquered Old Father Time….

…..and even holds Time’s hour glass and sickle in his own hands.

Southampton has become even more fortunate and  more good-looking with the passing of the years.

He has, miraculously….

……by waning grown…

But as Southampton’s baby son……

……whom Shakespeare’s calls his….

…sweet self….

…grows…..

……..Southampton neglects his lover, Shakespeare, leaving him….

…..withering…..

Shakespeare, though, warns Southampton…..

…….termed, ironically, his…

…lovely boy….

….that he is simply a pawn in the battle between Dame Nature and Father Time.

Nature may be keeping her….

…minion….

….her toyboy Southampton….

…..preternaturally young. But in the end she will have to pay back her debt to Father Time……

…..and she will do it by…..

….. rendering….

……Southampton.

‘Rendering’ here has two meanings…

It means giving Southampton over to the ravages of time….

….but it also means breaking down Southampton’s body….

….as you ‘render’ a lump of meat for it’s fat….

Sonnet 126

O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power

Dost hold Time’s fickle glass, his sickle, hour;

Who hast by waning grown, and therein show’st

Thy lover’s withering as thy sweet self grow’st;

If Nature, sovereign mistress over wrack,

As thou goest onwards, still will pluck thee back,

She keeps thee to this purpose, that her skill

May time disgrace and wretched minutes kill.

Yet fear her, O thou minion of her pleasure;

She may detain, but not still keep, her treasure:

Her audit, though delay’d, answer’d must be,

And her quietus is to render thee.

The sonnet – which at twelve lines isn’t a sonnet at all – concludes with two pairs of empty brackets….

….the empty, gaping, grave that, Shakespeare hopes, awaits Southampton.

Shakespeare’s real son had died. Now he wants his surrogate son dead as well.

It was in this murderous, bloody frame of mind that Shakespeare wrote King Lear….

CLICK HERE FOR PART THREE!!!

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 This Trilogy of Posts is based on a dramatised talk…..

….Stewart Trotter….

…..gave at…..

……. The Grosvenor Chapel……

….Mayfair, London, W.1…..

…….on Sunday, 2nd March, 2014.

Taking part were Amanda Walker, Kate Godfrey, Karen Little and Patrick Godfrey.

•

Part One

AND MY POOR FOOL IS HANGED…..

For William Shakespeare, King Lear…..

…..or rather King Leir as he was first known….

……was a real, historical figure. He reigned in England 800 years before Christ was born, founded Leicester and is buried in a vault under the River Soar….

Geoffrey of Monmouth, a monk……

…..first recorded Leir’s story in the 12th Century….

It later appeared in Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles in 1577….

…..then, in a new edition, in 1587.

Shakespeare had a copy of the 1587 edition. He doodled on the index page…..

Black soap, pig-meat and honey mingled together: good for a horse’s leg, swollen.

Here is Holinshed’s version of the story of King Leir…

Leir was a prince of right noble demeanour, governing his land and subjects in great wealth.

He had, by his wife, three daughters……

… whose names were….

Gonorilla…….

Ragan……

….and Cordeilla.

….which daughters he greatly loved, but specially Cordeilla, the youngest.

When this Leir therefore was come to great age, he thought to prefer her whom he best loved, to the succession over the kingdom. Whereupon he first asked Gonorilla, the eldest, how well she loved him: who calling her gods to record, protested that she loved him more than her own life, which by right and reason should be most dear unto her…

…..with which answer, the father being well pleased, turned to the second, and demanded of her how well she loved him: who answered (confirming her sayings with great oaths)….

……that she loved him more than tongue could express, and far above all other creatures of the world.

Then called he his youngest daughter, Cordeilla, before him, and asked of her what account she made of him…..

Knowing the great love and fatherly zeal that you have always borne towards me, (for the which I may not answer you otherwise than I think, and as my conscience leadeth me) I protest unto you, that I have loved you ever, and will continually (while I live) love you as my natural father.

Leir, being nothing content with this answer, married his two eldest daughters, the one the Duke of Cornwall, and the other to the Duke of Albania, betwixt whom he willed and ordained that his land should be divided after his death: but for the third daughter, Cordeilla, he reserved nothing.

Nevertheless it fortuned that the Prince of France, hearing of the beauty, womanhood, and good conditions of the said Cordeilla, sent over to her father, requiring that he might have her to wife: to whom answer was made…..

….that he might have his daughter, but as for any dower, he could have none, for all was promised and assured to her other sisters already….

The Prince of France, notwithstanding this answer, took Cordeilla to wife.

After that Leir was fallen into age, the two dukes that had married his two eldest daughters, arose against him in armour, and reft from him the governance of the land. But the greatest grief that Leir took, was to see the unkindness of his daughters, in so much they scarcely would allow him one servant to wait upon him.

In the end, such was the unkindness, or (as I may say) the unnaturalness which he found in his two daughters that he fled the land, and sailed into France, there to seek some comfort of his youngest daughter Cordeilla.

The lady Cordeilla first sent to him, privily, a certain sum of money to apparel himself withal, and to retain a certain number of servants that might attend upon him in honourable wise. When he came to court, he was so joyfully, honourably, and lovingly received, both by his son in law, the Prince of France, and also by his daughter Cordeilla, that his heart was greatly comforted.

The Prince of France caused a mighty army to be put in readiness, and likewise a great navy of ships to be rigged, to pass over into Britain with Leir to see him again restored to his kingdom.

Leir and his daughter Cordeilla with her husband, arriving in Britain, fought with their enemies, and discomfited them in battle, in the which the Dukes of Cornwall and Albania were slain: and then was Leir restored to his kingdom, which he ruled after this by the space of two years and then died..

Cordeilla was admitted Queen and supreme governess of Britain. She ruled right worthily during the space of five years, in which time her husband died; but her two nephews, sons to her aforesaid sisters, disdaining to be under the government of a woman, levied war against her and finally took her prisoner, and laid her fast in ward, wherewith she took such grief, being a woman of a manly courage, there she slew herself.

The End.

An anonymous play, called The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his three daughters, Gonorill, Ragan and Cordeilla appeared in the same year as Shakespeare’s edition of the Chronicles….

The action has been transported to Christian times. Not only Christian times but Protestant times. And not only Protestant times, but Calvinist times.

Calvinists…..who follow John Calvin…..

………believe that everything has been pre-ordained by God. He has chosen those who will go to heaven…..

………and those who will go to Hell…..

….. before they were even born.

He protects his chosen ones, his ‘elect’, and rewards them by giving them money, power and success.

Gonorill and Ragan in the play are definitely NOT among God’s elect…

They are, in fact, the ‘Ugly Sisters’…..

…..envious of Cordeilla’s good looks….

Gonorill says of her…..

Besides, she is so nice and so demure;

So sober, courteous, modest, and precise,

That all the Court hath work enough to do,

To talk how she exceedeth me and you.

And both sisters are clearly Roman Catholic……

Ragan says…..

Peace (Puritan) dissembling hypocrite,

Which art so good, that thou wilt prove stark naught:

Anon, when as I have you in my fingers,

I’ll make you wish yourself in Purgatory.

Although Cordeilla……

……like Cinderella…..

…….is cast out penniless and in rags…..

…….she insists that she will only marry for love. Prince Charming arrives in the figure of the King of France , together with his Dandini, Lord Mumford.

He woos Cinders in the disguise of a poor pilgrim to make sure she loves him for his self alone.

Then he whisks her off to France…..

The Uglies now strip their father of his entourage of servants and begin to plot his death: they even hire a murderer.

But Lear IS one of God’s elect….

When the murderer raises his dagger to kill the King, a clap of thunder sends him scurrying off.

God sends Leir a dream in which Gonorill and Ragan hack off his limbs……

……but Cordeilla revives him by pouring balsam into his bleeding wound.

As luck would have it, Cordeilla is ‘elect’ as well….

…..As she tells the King of France….

……God miraculously hath bestowed on me,

In raising me out of my mean estate,

When as I was devoid of worldly friends,

And placing me in such a sweet content,

As far exceeds the reach of my deserts….

Leir seeks out Cordeilla in France and they have a reconciliation which develops into a kneeling competition…

Cordeilla

Condemn not all, because of other’s crime:

But look, dear father, look behold and see

Thy loving daughter speaketh unto thee. [She kneels.]

Leir

O, stand thou up, it is my part to kneel, [She stands]

And ask forgiveness for my former faults. [He kneels.]

Cordeilla

O, if you wish, I should enjoy my breath, [She kneels]

Dear father rise, or I receive my death.

Leir

Then I will rise to satisfy your mind,[He riseth]

But kneel again, til pardon be resigned. [He kneels]

Leir goes to France, Cordeilla and the King of France sail to back to England, they kill the Uglies and their husbands and restore Leir to his rightful throne.

The play does NOT include Leir’s death…..

…..nor does it include the rebellion of Cordeilla’s cousins….

…disdaining to be under the government of a woman….

….for an obvious reason….

Elizabeth was on the throne!!!

So what was the point of this play?

1587 was a highly significant year for England…….

…….and, indeed, Scotland…..

On 8th February, Mary Stuart, the Queen of Scots, went to the block…..

 

Mary Stuart….

 

…….had been a thorn in Elizabeth’s side ever since she had fled to England, thirty years before. A devout Catholic, she was the focus of all the Catholic hopes that England would return to Rome. And, as the granddaughter of Henry VII…

 

…….she had a legitimate claim on the English throne.

In 1569 a plot had been hatched by the Catholic Northern Lords to depose Elizabeth and crown Mary Stuart Queen of England. Elizabeth’s troops crushed the rebellion in days……

…….but Elizabeth ordered the hanging of 700 of…

…..the meaner sort of rebels. For the terror of others…

The following year Pope Pius V…….

……. issued a bull which excommunicated Elizabeth…..

…..the pretended Queen of England and the servant of crime….

…..and all those who obeyed her laws.

In 1585 the Catholics returned to the attack – this time in print. A book was published which claimed that Henry VIII’s wife, Anne Boleyn…….

…..had been the King’s own illegitimate daughter.

And that the King…….

……had known this all along…..

Princess Elizabeth, therefore…….

…….was the bastard product of this incestuous union, and when she had come to the throne….

……Satan, and the power of darkness, took possession of the whole of England.

Next, in 1586, came the Catholic Babbington plot on Elizabeth’s life……

When the conspirators were sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered………

 

…..Elizabeth insisted that her Council invent…..

….some new device…

….of execution….

….for MORE TERROR…

Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, Lord Burghley……..

……writing to Lord Hatton…….

……said…

……I told her Majesty, if the fashion of the execution shall be duly and orderly executed , by the protracting of the same both to the extremity of the pains in the action and to the sight of the people to behold it, the manner of the death would be as terrible as any new device could be….but therewith her majesty was not satisfied….

In the event, the crowd was so revolted by the disembowelling of the first batch of conspirators that the executioners were forced to just hang the rest…..

But when it came to executing Mary Stuart, Elizabeth hesitated…. .

Not only was she the Lord’s anointed, she was Elizabeth’s cousin as well.

Like Hamlet pondering the death of Claudius….

…..Queen Elizabeth…..

……gave herself over wholly to solitariness, sat many times melancholic and mute and frequently sighing muttered to herself, ‘Aut fer aut feri: either bear with her or smite her. And ‘ne feriare, feri – Strike lest thou be stricken….’

Elizabeth needed Mary dead: but she didn’t want to go down in history as a tyrant.

So she hit on an age-old solution. She blamed her secretary. She claimed she had only signed Mary Stuart’s death warrant as a precaution.

When news arrived in London of her execution , bonfires were lit and cheering broke out. Elizabeth, feigning ignorance of her death……

…..like Lady Macbeth with Duncan……

……put her head out of the window and demanded to know what the commotion was about.

When told the reason, she cried….

What? Is the Queen my sister dead? And who has put her to death? They have deceived me then….

As a contemporary observed….

The Queen’s countenance altered, her speech faltered and failed her and through excessive sorrow she stood in a manner astonished; then she gave herself over to passionate grief, putting herself into mourning habit and shedding abundance of tears….

One nobleman who was present could not help remarking…..

…..See, there, the very trick of a play-actress….

Elizabeth desperately needed an image make-over: enter the Queen’s Men…

This was a company set up four years earlier by the hard-nosed spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham…..

 

…..and Elizabeth’s debauched favourite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.

 

Its aims were simple: to promote Elizabeth, promote Elizabeth and promote Elizabeth.

The players, highly-paid and swaggering round in the Queen’s scarlet livery…….

…..were exempt from arrest…..

…..and exempt from all parish duties.

It was the Queen’s Men who staged The True Chronicle History of King Leir in the year of Mary Stuart’s execution….

And in so doing, exonerated Elizabeth….

How?

At one point , Ragan, hoping to bamboozle her father, says….

O that I had some pleasing Mermaid’s voice,

For to enchant his senseless senses with!

Everyone in the audience in 1587 would know that this was a reference to Mary Queen of Scots. The mermaid was her trade-mark……..

She had been lampooned in a cartoon as a bare-breasted mermaid, with her hair falling down to her shoulders…..

……..and had actually appeared at the window of a jail in Edinburgh with, as Alison Weir puts it….

…… her bodice undone, her breasts exposed and her tangled hair loose, and with ‘piteous lamentations’ ….

But if Ragan represents Mary, Queen of Scots, who is Gonorill?

Well, we know she’s Roman Catholic…..

…..But we also know she is jealous of Cordeilla’s beauty…

…..And her ability to attract men….

Exactly as Mary Tudor – Bloody Mary…….

……had been jealous of her half-sister, Princess Elizabeth….

When the dashing young Edward Courtney……

…… had been freed from wrongful imprisonment in 1553, the new Queen Mary suggested he might like to become King of England.

But Courtney was far more attracted to Princess Elizabeth. In the words of the great American Regency historian, Lucy Aikin….

Mary was left to vent her disappointment in resentment against the ill-fated object of her preference, Courtney, and in every demonstration of a malignant jealousy towards her innocent and unprotected rival, Princess Elizabeth.

Mary sent Elizabeth to the Tower….by way of Traitors’ Gate…

So if Ragan and Gonorill are the two Catholic Marys, it needs no Sherlock Holmes to tell us who Cordeilla is….

QUEEN ELIZABETH HERSELF!!!

Cordeilla, as we have seen, believes she is one of God’s elect, and so, protected by him.

Elizabeth thought the same about herself . She wrote in her prayers…

Thou hast willed me to be not some wretched girl from the meanest rank of the common people, who would pass her life miserably in poverty and squalor, but to a kingdom thou hast destined me, born of royal parents, and nurtured and educated at court. When I was surrounded and thrown about by various snares of enemies, Thou hast preserved me with thy constant protection from prison and the most extreme danger; and though I was freed at the very last moment, Thou hast entrusted me on earth with royal sovereignty and majesty….

Cordeilla, in the play, wants to marry only for love. She says…..

For if the greatest Monarch on the earth,

Should sue to me in this extremity,

Except my heart could love, and heart could like,

Better than any that I ever saw,

His great estate no more should move my mind,

Than mountains move by blast of every wind.

And Queen Elizabeth said to the French Ambassador…

I do not want a husband who honours me as a Queen, if he does not love me as a woman.

Cordeilla says…

I will betake me to my thread and Needle,

And earn my living with my fingers’ ends…

Queen Elizabeth said…..

I thank God I am endued with such qualities that if I were turned out of the realm in my petticoat I were able to live in any place in Christome.

Cordeilla is wooed by two romantic Frenchman: Elizabeth had been wooed by two equally romantic Frenchmen, the Duc D’Anjou…..

……..and Jean Simier…….

…….eight years earlier.

But the biggest signpost is a verbal one….

When Elizabeth’s parliament asked her, point blank, if she intended to execute Mary Stuart, she replied…

You must take an answer without answer at my hands. For if I should say I would not do it, I should peradventure say that which I did not think, and otherwise than it might be. If I should say I would do it, it were not fit in this place and at this time, although I did mean it….

…..and having completely baffled her parliament, she concluded triumphantly…..

Wherefore I must desire to hold yourselves satisfied with this answer answerless.

In the play, when Cordeilla replies to Leir’s question about how much she loves him, Gonorill retorts….

Here is an answer answerless indeed…

So the author of The True Chronicle History of King Leir has turned a piece of ancient history into a political allegory……

Leir is England, taken over and wounded by the Roman Catholicism of the two Marys.

Elizabeth restores it by pouring the healing balsam of Calvinism into its wounds.

So next time you go with the kids to see Cinderella……

…..remember it’s a piece of Anti-Papist propaganda.

So who wrote the play? Would you be shocked to learn that the older, scholars thought it was by Shakespeare?

And would you be even more shocked to learn that I agree with them?

But with this, same, proviso: Shakespeare was twenty-three at the time, and a junior collaborator on the play with Thomas Kyd, six years older than Shakespeare and already an established playwright.

Kyd was a free-thinker who was later to share lodgings with Christopher Marlowe…..

……and get tortured by the state on suspicions of atheism……

 

But he was a hired gun. If the state wanted propaganda, he gave them propaganda….

But Leo Tolstoy……..

……who looks rather like Lear himself….

……famously preferred this Leir play to Shakespeare’s later one.

And there are some remarkable passages in it…..

Cordeilla, addressing the King of France disguised as a pilgrim, says….

I’ll hold thy Palmer’s staff within my hand,

And think it is the Sceptre of a Queen,

Sometime I’ll set thy Bonnet on my head,

And think I wear a rich imperial Crown,

Sometime I’ll help thee in thy holy prayers,

And think I am with thee in Paradise.

Thus I’ll mock fortune, as she mocketh me,

And never will my lovely choice repent:

For having thee, I shall have all content.

 Only Shakespeare could have written this…

When he came to write his own version of the Leir story twenty years later, Shakespeare set it back in pre-Christian times…….

…….threw in a jester…….

……. and lifted a subplot from the Arcadia of Sir Philip Sidney….

In our Next Post, Trixie the Cat will give a potted version of ….

….ALL THE CHANGES….. 

…..Shakespeare made to the original Leir story….

….AND THEY ARE EXTRAORDINARY!!!

To find out HOW extraordinary, click: HERE!

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Yes, Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code….

…..on February 20th, 2014….

….The Code notched up….

……ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY THOUSAND VIEWS!!!

…..and welcomed into its ranks…

THE REPUBLIC OF LIBERIA

This brings the number of participating countries to an awe-inspiring…..

…..ONE HUNDRED AND NINETY!!!

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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….

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Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code…

……on the 20th January, 2014, The Code clocked up its…..

135,000th VIEW!!!

….and welcomed THREE NEW COUNTRIES to its ranks…..

They are:

MADAGASCAR

COTE D’IVOIRE

and

SAINT VINCENT AND THE GRENADINES

This brings the total number of participating nations to….

ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY NINE!!!

See: THE SHAKESPEARE CODE SALUTES THE NATIONS!!!

 

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PROVING AN OLD ROMANTIC MYTH IS TRUE…..

A Trixie Special.

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

…..The German historian….

…….Leopold von Ranke……..

…….in his efforts to disparage the story of Queen Elizabeth, Essex and the Ring….

(For the story itself, see Part One )

…..writes in his History of England:

…..attempts have been made to get rid of the improbabilities of the first [ring story] by fresh fictions in the second.

Von Ranke is claiming that, in the past, a group of mendacious aristocrats has conspired to invent the story of the ring….

……..for reasons best known to itself….

(See: Part Four)

Realising that their FIRST story was a no-hoper….

……the aristocrats went on to invent a SECOND….

In the FIRST story, the Earl of Essex…..

……sends Queen Elizabeth’s ring to Katherine Carey, Countess of Nottingham…..

 

In the SECOND, Essex intends to send the ring to her sister, Philadelphia Carey, Lady Scrope…..

…..but the likely lad entrusted with the ring gives it to the Countess of Nottingham instead…..

…..whose husband was Essex’s sworn enemy, the Earl of Nottingham.

Von Ranke continues:

Lady Spelman has tried to clear away the improbability involved in it [the FIRST story] that Essex should have applied to the wife of one of his enemies, by making Essex give the ring to a boy passing by, who was to give it, not to the Countess of Nottingham, but to her sister, and then mistook the two ladies.

By using the phrase…

…clear away improbabilities…..

…..von Ranke is implying that Lady Elizabeth Spelman…..

…..along with Sir Dudley Carleton, Prince Maurice of Orange and Chavalier Louis Aubrey de Maurier…..

(See Part: Four )

…..is lying in her teeth….

What von Ranke DOESN’T tell us is that Lady Spelman was herself a…..

…….MEMBER OF THE CAREY FAMILY!!!

The Careys were the nearest Queen Elizabeth came to having a family of her own….

Henry Carey, first Lord Hunsdon….

…the Lord Chamberlain and patron of William Shakespeare’s acting company…

…and the ‘keeper’ of Aemilia Bassano, Shakespeare’s Dark Lady….

(See: How Shakespeare’s Dark Lady found God.)

……was the son of Mary Boleyn……

……sister of Anne Boleyn…..

….the ill-fated second wife of King Henry VIII…..

…..and mother of Queen Elizabeth…..

So Lord Hunsdon was Queen Elizabeth’s cousin…..

He was sometimes critical of the Queen…..

……and often likened her to the vacillating and treacherous King Richard II……

…..(‘I was never one of King Richard’s men,’ he once said)…..

But he was also fiercely loyal to her……

…..and was her personal bodyguard during the Armada crisis…..

Hunsdon had sixteen children…

…..(not counting the illegitimate ones)…..

……including the ‘Ring Sisters’….

……Katherine Carey, married to the Earl of Nottingham……

…….and Philadelphia Carey, married to Thomas, 10th Baron Scrope of Bolton….

Lord Hunsdon’s eldest son, George Carey……

…..inherited his father’s title and position as Lord Chamberlain……

He was a bon viveur and rioter who, The Shakespeare Code believes, was the original for Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night….

……just as Queen Elizabeth was the original for Olivia…..

(See: Sir Toby Belch as George, Lord Hunsdon and Olivia as Queen Elizabeth)

Lord Hunsdon’s youngest son (and consequently Katherine and Philadelphia’s brother) was Robert Carey, later Baron of Leppington and 1st Earl of Monmouth….

…… who was married to Elizabeth Trevannion…..

Robert, famously, was the first person to tell King James of Scotland he was the new King of England……

James had sent Philadelphia, his sister, a sapphire ring with the instructions that, when Queen Elizabeth died, she should send the ring back to him…

Philadelphia dropped the ring through a window to Robert, who was waiting on horseback below….

He galloped north…..

….and got to Scotland three days later…

…exhausted and bloody from a fall from his horse.

As he writes in his Memoirs of the Life of Robert Carey, Baron of Leppington and Earl of Monmouth:

I kneeled by him [King James] and saluted him by his title of England, Scotland, France and Ireland. He gave me his hand to kiss, and bade me welcome. After he had long discoursed of the manner of the Queen’s sickness and of her death, he asked what letters I had rom the Council. I told him, none: and acquainted him how narrowly I escaped from them. And yet I had brought him a blue ring from a fair lady [Robert’s sister, Philadelphia] that I hoped would give him assurance of the truth that I had reported. He took it and looked upon it, and said, ‘It is enough: I know by this you are a true messenger…

Robert had a son, Henry, who can be seen standing at the far left of this Carey family portrait, to the right of his mother, Elizabeth and his father, Robert, the 1st Earl of Monmouth…..

Henry Carey, who became 2nd Earl of Monmouth…..

………married Martha Cranfield….

They had ten children…..

….and one was a daughter, named Martha after her mother…..

She married John, 1st Earl of Middleton……

………and the couple had a daughter called Elizabeth…..

………who in turn married William Spelman of Wickmer, Norfolk, on 20th July 1693…..

………and became Lady Elizabeth Spellman….

…..ROBERT CAREY’S GREAT-GRANDDAUGHTER….

She wasn’t – as von Ranke would have it – inventing……

….fresh fictions….

SHE WAS RECOUNTING HER FAMILY HISTORY!!!

She was left the Carey family group portrait shown above…..

…..which she willed to the Rt. Hon. James Hamilton, Lord Viscount Limerick…….

 

……great-great-grandson of William Hamilton, whose brother James had been King James VI agent in London…

……and had brought James the OFFICIAL notification that he was King of England……

Lady Spelman also possessed a copy of her great-grandfather’s, Robert Carey’s then unpublished Memoirs……

…..which she passed on to John Boyle, 5th Earl of Cork and 5th Earl of Orrery….

…..(a publisher and great friend of Alexander Pope)…..

……together with the Carey family’s oral account of the Essex ring story.

Boyle wrote that he…..

…..had the honour of being in some degree of affinity with….Lady Elizabeth Spelman, daughter of the Earl of Middleton….

……..and the common ancestor was Lionel Cranfield, first Earl of Middlesex…..

….whose daughter, Martha, by his first wife, married Robert Carey’s eldest son, Henry…..

…..and so was Lady Elizabeth Spelman’s grandmother…..

Boyle first published the Memoirs in 1759…….

…….but an extract from them – covering the death of Queen Elizabeth – was first published ten years earlier by the antiquarian, priest and Fellow of the Royal Society, Thomas Birch…..

…..in his An Historical View of the Negotiations between the Courts of England France and Brussels From the Year 1592 to 1617 (1749).

In the extract, Robert describes a visit he made to Queen Elizabeth just before she died:

When I came to court, I found the Queen ill-disposed, and she kept her inner lodging; yet she, hearing of my arrival, sent for me. I found her in one of her withdrawing chambers, sitting low upon her cushions. She called me to her: I kissed her hand , and told her it was my chiefest happiness to see her in safety, and in health, which I wished might long continue. She took me by the hand, and wrung it hard, and said, No Robin, I am not well: and then discoursed with me of her indisposition, and that her heart had been sad and heavy for ten or twelve days…

Birch….

…..who was later to write the scrupulously researched Two Volume Memoirs of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, from the Year 1581 Till Her Death….

……was fascinated by this melancholy that overwhelmed Queen Elizabeth in the last months of her life.

He writes a lengthy footnote to the Memoirs extract:

Camden [William Camden, the contemporary historian] says that she [Queen Elizabeth] was extremely melancholy, which the friends of the Earl of Essex imputed to her majesty’s concern for the loss of him. With this historian agrees the writer of a letter from London, 3rd of April, 1603, N.S. printed in the third volume of  M. de Villeroy’s Memoires d’Estat.  [Note: Katherine, Countess of Nottingham, died on 24th February, 1603] The writer, who was probably M. de Beaumont the French ambassador, observes that the common opinion, and that of the physicians, and those who attended the Queen in her chamber, was that her sickness proceeded from a melancholy, which she had fallen into several days before she had made any complaint , and which was ascribed to her regret for the Earl of Essex’s death. But this does not seem a sufficient cause for the Queen’s excessive concern at that time, since his Lordship [Essex] had been executed above two years before [in 1601]

Birch then writes:

I shall add as the best commentary upon the Earl of Monmouth’s [Robert Carey’s] Memoirs a story which was frequently told by his great granddaughter, the late Lady Elizabeth Spelman….

Birch then gives Lady Spelman’s family tree….

……and recounts her story…..

……(which he got from Boyle)….

…… in full…..

When Katherine, Countess of Nottingham, wife of the Lord High Admiral, and sister of the Earl of Monmouth [Robert Carey] was dying (as she did, according to his Lordship’s own account, about a fortnight before the Queen) she sent to her Majesty, to desire that she might see her, in order to reveal something to her Majesty, without the discovery of which she could not die in peace. Upon the Queen’s coming, Lady Nottingham told her, that, while the Earl of Essex lay under the sentence of death, he was desirous of asking her Majesty’s mercy, in the manner prescribed by herself, during the height of his favour; the Queen having given him a ring , which being sent to her as a token of his distress, might entitle him to her protection. But the Earl, jealous of those about him, and not caring to trust any one of them with it, as he was looking out of his window one morning, saw a boy, with whose appearance he was pleased; and engaging him by money and promises, directed him to carry the ring, which he took from his finger, and threw down, to Lady Scrope, a sister of the countess of Nottingham, and a friend of his Lordship [Essex] who attended upon the Queen; and to beg of her, that she would present it to her Majesty. The boy, by mistake, carried it to Lady Nottingham, who showed it to her  husband, the Admiral, an enemy of Lord Essex, in order to take his advice. The Admiral forbid [sic] her to carry it, or return any answer to the message; but insisted upon her keeping the ring.

The Countess of Nottingham having made this discovery, begged the Queen’s forgiveness; but her Majesty answered, God may forgive you, but I never can; and left the room with great emotion. Her mind was so struck with this story, that she never went into bed, nor took any sustenance, from that instant: for Camden is of the opinion that her chief reason for suffering the Earl to be executed, was his supposed obstinacy, in not applying to her for mercy…

So here we have it…..

……. the first COMPLETE, PRINTED account of the ring story…..

…….given, in 1749, by a respected historian with no axe to grind……

…….based on observations made by contemporaries of Queen Elizabeth……

……. and a piece of family history preserved by the Careys……

……. handed on by Lady Spelman to the publisher Boyle….

……..just as she handed on the Carey group portrait to Viscount Limerick…

This was nearly 15o years after the original incident……

…..and this fuels von Ranke’s contempt……

They [the ring stories] are both so late and rest so completely on hearsay that they can no longer stand before historical criticism…..

But ANYONE who has ever done ANY historical research will know that it takes AT LEAST a hundred and fifty years for all the information about an event to be revealed….

…..especially if it shows someone in a bad light…..

(Katherine Carey had, after all, indirectly killed the Second Earl of Essex and the Queen of England!)

In Britain it’s taken THIRTY YEARS to discover that, during the Miners’ Strike in the 1980’s, union leader, Arthur Scargill….

….was telling the truth about pit closures…..

….while Margaret Thatcher…..

…….was lying…..

(To read about the more positive side of Margaret Thatcher, see Stewart Trotter’s:  ‘The Men who Made Margaret Thatcher’)

We are still learning fundamental things about the Second World War……

……and we will not know the full truth about the Kennedy assassination till the end of this century….

……at least…..

We may NEVER know the truth about the death of Princess Diana…..

Von Ranke has been lazy…..

He has not checked  his sources……

……and has impugned Lady Elizabeth Spelman’s integrity for NO GOOD REASON….

……other than it suits his ‘scientific’ theories….

But he has hoodwinked Lytton Strachey…..

….who, in turn, has hoodwinked one of the…..

……LEADING HISTORIANS OF OUR TIME….

(NOW READ PART SIX: ALISON WEIR -J’ACCUSE!)

‘Bye, now….

 

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PROVING AN OLD ROMANTIC MYTH TO BE TRUE….

A TRIXIE SPECIAL

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

IMPORTANT NOTICE

Lytton Strachey

…..in his attempt to discredit the story of Queen Elizabeth, the Earl of Essex and the Ring….

……writes, in Elizabeth and Essex, that it…

…….has been rejected by later writers , including the learned and judicious Ranke…

Strachey is referring to the German historian, Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886)……

……who was awarded his ‘von’ in 1865…..

…… and was considered important enough to appear on a postage stamp…..

He wrote, in his History of England…..

Who has not heard of the ring which Elizabeth is said to have once given to the Earl of Essex with the promise that, if it were presented to her, she would show him mercy, whatever might have occurred: he had, so the tale runs, in his last distresses wished to send it her through the Countess of Nottingham: but she was prevented from giving it by her husband who was an enemy of Essex, and so he had to die without mercy: the Queen, to whom the Countess revealed this on her death bed, fell into despair over it. The ring is still shown, and indeed several rings are shown as the true one……as also the tradition itself is extant in two somewhat varying forms; attempts have been made to get rid of the improbabilities of the first by fresh fictions in the second. They are both so late, and rest so completely on hearsay, that they can no longer stand before historical criticism.

Who has not heard of the ring?

People living in the twenty-first century, Leopold von Ranke……..

…….because you discredited the story in the nineteenth!!!

But what ARE von Ranke’s grounds for dismissing the story?

He says that that…..

…….several rings are shown as the real one….

…..as though that in itself invalidates the story…..

As a devout Christian, von Ranke would have known that there are thousands of pieces of the ‘true cross’ on display….

….but that doesn’t invalidate the Crucifixion!

 

Von Ranke continues…

also the tradition [of the ring story] itself is extant in two somewhat varying forms; attempts have been made to get rid of the improbabilities of the first by fresh fictions in the second. They are both so late, and rest so completely on hearsay, that they can no longer stand before historical criticism.

When von Ranke says……

 They are both so late……

……he clearly has no idea that John Webster mentions the story in 1620…..

(See:Part Two.)

Von Ranke gives himself away completely when he claims that the…..

…..fictions….

….as he likes to call them….

….rest so completely on hearsay they can no longer stand before historical criticism….

Von Ranke was trying to introduce a ‘scientific’ approach to history…..

‘Hearsay’ had no place in it…..

Von Ranke even formulated the mantra:

No documents…no history

We, fortunate enough to live in the ‘television age’,  know that this document-bound approach to history…..

….DIMINISHES THE PAST….

Your Cat has stated in her Last Post that if she wants to know about the Second World War, she reads books…..

…..BUT SHE ALSO WATCHES THE WORLD AT WAR!!!

No-one dismisses the extraordinary, living testament of the participants in the programme…..

…. as…..

….hearsay….

Documents have been enhanced….

…..even replaced….

…… by film…..

HISTORY IS NOW ANECDOTAL!!!

Von Ranke goes on to write that…..

The first [version of the ring story] appears in Aubery’s Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de Hollande 1687……Aubery asserts that he heard the history of the ring from his father’s mouth, who had heard it from Prince Maurice of Orange, to whom it had been communicated by the English ambassador Carleton……..

Again, von Ranke gives himself away by the use of the word……

 …..asserts……

It implies that Chevalier Louis Aubery de Maurier…..

…..for many years the French Minister in Holland…..

……was lying….

……also, that Aubery’s father was lying….

……also, that Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange was lying…..

…..and perhaps most important of all…..

…..the English ambassador, Sir Dudley Carelton (1574-1632)…..

…. 1st Viscount Dorchester and later Secretary of State to Charles I……

…..was lying as well!

Aubery goes out of his way to endorse Carelton as….

….un home d’un trés-grand mérite….bon et juste….

Carelton had travelled on an embassy to Paris in 1598 with the Earl of Nottingham……

…..whose wife, the Countess Katherine, was at the centre of the ring story…….

In 1603, when she made her death-bed confession to the Queen, Carleton was in his late twenties…..

…… and back in contact with the English Court as controller of the household to Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland…

In 1604 Carleton became M.P. for St. Mawes and was then appointed the English Ambassador to Venice in 1610…..

In 1616 he became Ambassador to Holland….

…..when he told Prince Maurice the story of the ring….

But perhaps Carleton’s most important contribution to history is his correspondence….

He wrote gossipy, bitchy letters about court affairs….

……often to the writer John Chamberlain…..

……and these letters now provide a guide for historians……

…..sometimes the ONLY guide……

…..to what was going on at the courts of Elizabeth and James.

We learn from them intimate details about the Essex and Southampton families……

…..and the politics (and fun) of the Court Masques in the reign of King James…

The conclusion MUST be this…….

If Carleton, instead of SPEAKING about the ring story, had WRITTEN about it in a letter….

VON RANKE WOULD HAVE TREATED THE STORY AS HISTORY…

Von Ranke continues:

According to him [Aubery] the Queen then took to her bed, dressed as she was, sprang from it a hundred times during the night, and starved herself to death. Who does not, in reading this, feel himself in a sphere of wild romance?

Von Ranke believes that the historian’s task is to tell ‘how things actually were’….

……wie es eigentlich gewesen ….

…..and to try to find the ‘essence’ of each age….

Your Cat will PROVE that Queen Elizabeth really DID behave like that…..

……that she LIVED in ‘a sphere of wild romance’…

…..and that the ‘essence’ of the Elizabethan age was its self-conscious theatricality……

THAT’S WHY IT PRODUCED SHAKESPEARE!!!

The Lutheran von Ranke wants us to find…..

…..the hand of God…..

….in history…….

…..what he calls…..

…….the holy hieroglyph……

In the blind chance, viciousness, violence and egotism of the ring story……

…..it’s hard to find God’s hand…..

And that’s one of the reasons von Ranke dismisses it……

But, as we shall see, it’s in his handling of ELIZABETH, LADY SPELMAN…..

…..that von Ranke disgraces himself completely……

(Now read: Part 5.)

‘Bye, now…

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PROVING AN OLD ROMANTIC MYTH IS TRUE…

A TRIXIE SPECIAL

(It’s best to read Parts One and Two first)

Lytton Strachey….

……attempting to show that the story of Queen Elizabeth, the Earl of Essex and the Ring is untrue…….

(For the full story, click: HERE)

…..writes in his Elizabeth and Essex that the story…..

 ……is explicitly contradicted by Clarendon, who, writing in the succeeding generation, was in a position to know the facts……

Edward Hyde, Lord Clarendon…..

…….1609 to 1674……

…….was born EIGHT YEARS after the execution of Essex……

…..how did that put him in a……

…..position to know the facts?

Your Cat has to look up HISTORY BOOKS…….

…..or watch  The World at War…..

……to discover what was going on eight years before she was born…..

Indeed Clarendon himself admits that….

……it may be I have been at my distance too bold an undertaker of these actions [of the Earl of Essex] which were performed so many years before my cradle….

Clarendon wrote his The Difference and Disparity between the Estates and Conditions of George Duke of Buckingham and Robert Earl of Essex

….in his younger days……

It was a reply to Sir Henry Wotton’s essay Of Robert Devereux Earl of Essex and George Villiers Duke of Buckingham Some Observations by way of PARALLEL in the time of their estates of favour…

We don’t know the exact date of Clarendon’s The Difference and Disparity: but it must have been after Buckingham’s murder in 1628.

Wotton died in 1639 and his essay, it seems, was first posthumously published in 1641. 

Scholars think it was shortly after this that the ‘younger’ Clarendon wrote his reply to Wotton.

Clarendon was then in his early thirties…….

……but had already married twice……..

(1) Anne Aycliffe in 1629 (who died the same year)…….

……and……

(2)…..Frances Aylesbury in 1639.

He also enjoyed a…..

……passionate friendship….

…..with his first wife’s cousin, Anne Villiers, Countess of Morton…..

Clarendon’s marriages and ‘passionate friendship’ brought him into the heart of the Villiers family……

…..so he wrote The Difference and Disparity to vindicate the memory of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham……

Clarendon wanted to show that Buckingham, far from being ‘PARALLEL’ with Essex……

……was SUPERIOR to him.

Not only would this delight the Villiers family……….

……. it would also delight the reigning monarch, King Charles I…….

The Duke of Buckingham had been the lover of Charles’s father, King James I……

…and Charles inherited Buckingham as his OWN lover when King James died….

Indeed, Buckingham and Charles were rumoured to have slept together on Charles’s coronation night….

Adored by James and Charles, Buckingham was hated by everyone else……

Parliament tried to impeach him, mobs howled for his blood……..

…..and then in, 1628, he was stabbed to death in a tavern in Portsmouth……

King Charles, in Clarendon’s own words…..

………threw himself upon his bed, lamenting with much passion and with abundance of tears…..

……and refused to leave his bedroom for two days…..

Meanwhile his subjects were celebrating Buckingham’s murder in the streets of London….

So, when Clarendon wrote his hagiography of Buckingham, it was clearly a political act.

By flattering Buckingham, he was also flattering Charles….

Clarendon even ends his essay with heavy hints that Charles should commission him to write the full Life of Buckingham…

He that shall continue this argument further may haply begin his Parallel after their deaths and not unfitly….he may say that both their memories shall have a reverend with all posterity and all nations. He may tell you many more particulars, which I dare not do….

According to Clarendon’s friend, Sir John Bramston, the ploy worked…..

…..Charles asked Clarendon to write Buckingham’s official biography.

The Difference and Disparity, then, is a pitch for a job…..

IT IS NOT A SERIOUS WORK OF HISTORY!!!

To raise up Buckingham, Clarendon HAS to put Essex down…..

To do this he tries to show that the relationship between Charles and Buckingham……

……and between Elizabeth and Essex…

……differed in one vital aspect…..

CHARLES LOVED BUCKINGHAM…..

……BUT ELIZABETH HATED ESSEX!!!

Of the deaths of Buckingham and Essex, Clarendon writes…..

…one [Buckingham’s] had the Royal Sacrifice of his sovereign’s sorrow, which the other [Essex’s] wanted [lacked]….

Clarendon claims that Essex……

….had a spirit all too great for a subject….

….and…..

…..endeavoured rather to master than win…the Queen’s affections….

The Queen, Clarendon writes, suspected that as well as being…..

…..the darling of [her subjects’] eyes…..

…..Essex also wanted to be……

…..the darling of their hearts……

In his final summing up, Clarendon writes:

…..lastly if ever that uncouth speech fell from him to the Queen, which is delivered to us by one  that was much conversant then in the secrets of the court, that she was as crooked in her disposition as her carcase (when haply there was a little unevenness in her shoulders) all my wonder at his destruction is taken from me…..

Clarendon is using this incident to ‘prove’ that Elizabeth hated Essex……

……so he HAS to go on to dismiss the ring story…..

…..and I must needs confess I am nothing satisfied with that loose report  which hath crept into our discourse, that shortly after his miserable end (which indeed deserved compassion from all hearts) I know not upon what unseasonable delivery of a ring or jewel by some lady of the court, the queen expressed much reluctancy for his death…

BUT CLARENDON IS TRYING TO DISCREDIT A STORY WHICH HE DOESN’T EVEN KNOW…

……..OR PRETENDS HE DOESN’T KNOW….

He claims not to know whether it was ‘a ring or jewel’ that Essex sent…..

…..nor the identity of the Countess of Nottingham….

To ‘prove’ his point Clarendon continues…..

I am sure no discovery , no expression, either to his memory, friendship or dependants, can weigh down the indignity of the sermon at Pauls Cross, and set out by command, or that discourse that was so carefully commended abroad of his treasons, which were two of the most pestilent libels against his fame, that any age hath seen published against any malefactor, and could not  with that deliberation have been contrived, and justified by authority, had there not been some sparks of indignation in the Queen that were unquench’d even with his blood.

Essex was executed on 25th February, 1601…..

….Dr. William Barlowe delivered his sermon at St. Pauls Cross on the ‘first Sunday in Lent’, i.e. 1st March, 1601 ……

FOUR DAYS LATER!!!

Of course the Queen was still in a fury!

She didn’t know then that Essex had implored her forgiveness by sending the ring….

She wasn’t to learn that till 1603…..

Your Cat will show that there is NO DOUBT that Elizabeth loved Essex….

…..and in her next post will make short shrift of Strachey’s last Witness for the Prosecution….

……the German historian, Leopold von Ranke…….

(NOW READ: Part Four.)

 ‘Bye, now…

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PROVING AN OLD ROMANTIC MYTH IS TRUE….

A TRIXIE SPECIAL

(It’s best to read Part One first)

 

Simon Adams……..

……in his article in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography…….

….. on Catherine Howard, Countess of Nottingham….

…..writes:

the story that on her deathbed she [Countess of Nottingham] revealed to Elizabeth that in 1601 she and her husband had deliberately destroyed the earl of Essex, by secreting a ring he had sent the queen to save his life, is apocryphal, as Lytton Strachey proved…..

 

STRACHEY HAS DONE NO SUCH THING!!!

Let’s look at what Strachey actually wrote in his 1928 Elizabeth and Essex…

Afterwards [after the execution of Essex] 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 in 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, who, with the exclamation ‘God may forgive you, Madam, but I never can!’ brought down the curtain on the tragedy. Such a narrative is appropriate enough to the place where it was first fully elaborated – a sentimental novelette; but it does not belong to history. The improbability of its details is too glaring, and the testimony against it is overpowering.

Your Cat would like to make the following three points:

1. Just because an event is described in a novel, it doesn’t make it untrue….

 …….ask Hilary Mantel about Wolf Hall…..

2. In a footnote to this passage, Strachey informs us that the ‘sentimental novelette’ is called The Secret History of the most renowned Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Essex, by a Person of Quality and……

….. published in 1695.

THIS IS NOT TRUE!

It was a translation of Le Comte d’Essex. Histoire angloise by Claude Barbin – a Parisian publisher who edited the works of Molière, La Fontaine, Charles Perrault and Corneille – and who printed the book in Paris in 1678……

It was first published in English in 1680…….

…. FIFTEEN YEARS EARLIER THAN STRACHEY SAYS!!!

3. Strachey states that it was in the novel that the…..

….. narrative….

…. was…..

…first fully elaborated

 

THIS IS AGAIN NOT TRUE!

There is NO MENTION of Philadelphia, Lady Scrope in the novel…..

…..or of Essex giving the ring to a boy…..

….or the boy mistaking Katherine, Countess of Nottingham, for her sister.

THIS PART OF THE STORY CAME MUCH LATER……

…….FROM AN IMPECCABLE SOURCE…..

…….WHOM YOUR CAT WILL NAME IN SUBSEQUENT POSTS!!!

What Barbin has done in his novel is EMBELLISH the DETAILS of the story…

 …..the way a Hollywood writer would do……

He makes the Countess of Nottingham fall in love with Essex….

……but makes Essex fall in love with a sixteen year old ‘widow’, the Countess of Rutland…..

This motivates the Countess to take her revenge…..

…….and the Queen herself to explode in a paroxysm of jealous, Bette Davis-type rage…

 

But Barbin has the BASICS of the story…..as far as he knows it… correct……

…….Elizabeth gives the ring to Essex……

……..the Countess of Nottingham doesn’t pass it on to Queen….

……..on her deathbed, the Countess confesses all….

……..and the Queen…..

………cries out, with looks full of indignation, ‘Wretch! What remorse hast thou exposed me to? Whether heaven will pardon thy crimes, I know not: sure I am I shall never forget them…..’

Strachey then adds, in the same footnote to Elizabeth and Essex:

A reference to the legend in its rudimentary form occurs in The Devil’s Law Case (circa 1620) Cf. The Works of John Webster, ed. Lucas, ii.343.

Again, by using the word…..

….legend….

……and the phrase….

….rudimentary form….

….Strachey asserts……..

……….WITHOUT EVIDENCE…….

……….that the story is in the process of being INVENTED…..

But if you look at Webster’s The Devil’s Law Case…..

…..first performed, scholars believe, around 1620….

…..the story is not in a ‘rudimentary form’ at all….

IT IS MORE COMPLETE THAN THE NOVEL!!!

In the play, the sixty year old Leonora conceives a passion for a much younger man……

…….her daughter’s suitor, the noble Contarino….

…….just as Queen Elizabeth conceived a passion for the young, noble, Earl of Essex…..

When Contarino asks for her….

….picture…..

….meaning her daughter, Jolenta, as well as her portrait….

Leonora replies…..

My looking glass is a true one, and as yet it does not terrify me….

This would put Webster’s audience in mind of Queen Elizabeth…….

……who famously called for a ‘true glass’ at the end of her reign….

When a false report comes of Contarino’s death, Leonora falls into a mad rage….

…..as Elizabeth also did at the end of her reign…..

…..when many thought she had gone insane….

…o that my care,

And absolute study to preserve his life,

Should be his absolute ruin…..

[Just as Elizabeth’s gift of the ring – which had meant to preserve Essex’s life – had been the cause of his death ……]

O I shall run mad,

For as we love our youngest children best:

So the last fruit of our affection,

Wherever we bestow it is most strong,

Most violent, most unresistable,

Since ’tis indeed our last Harvest-home,

Last merriment for winter; and we widows

As men report of our best picture-makers

We love the piece we are in hand with better

Then all the excellent work we have done before…..

And to point the parallel with Elizabeth even further, Webster has Leonara make direct reference to the Queen and the story of the ring..

…let me die

In the distraction [madness] of that worthy princess, [Queen Elizabeth]

Who loathed food, and sleep, and ceremony,

For thought of losing that brave gentleman,

She would fain have saved, had not a false conveyance

Exprest him stubborn-hearted.

Clearly Webster….

……(who was in his early twenties when Elizabeth died in 1603)….

…..and Webster’s public……..

….knew all about the story of the ring in 1620!!!

And, from the phrase……

….false conveyance….

ALSO KNEW THAT THE RING HAD BEEN DELIVERED TO THE WRONG PERSON!!!

Strachey continues…..

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

William Camden……

…..makes clear in his History of the most renowned and victorious Princess Elizabeth, late Queen of England that he has no intention of covering the private life of the Queen.

For example, Camden refuses to speculate about what happened when, in 1579, the Duc D’Anjou came to Greenwich and saw Elizabeth privately.

He states clearly that….

……the Secrets of Princes are an inextricable labyrinth….

……so he wouldn’t have discussed the ring story ANYWAY…..

…..EVEN IF HE HAD KNOWN IT TO BE TRUE!!!

Strachey goes on to state that the story….

……is explicitly contradicted by Lord Clarendon, who, writing in the succeeding generation, was in a position to know the facts……

‘Know the facts’?

Watch Trixie make CATSMEAT of this sycophantic Lord…..

……..in her next….

….. GAME-CHANGING POST….

NOW READ Part Three.

‘Bye now…

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 A TRIXIE SPECIAL

Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code……

Your Cat would like to recount….

 AN  OLD ROMANTIC MYTH THAT DATES FROM THE REIGN OF GOOD QUEEN BESS….

•

Elizabeth I, it is said……

……gave her much younger lover the Earl of Essex……

…….a ring to wear on his finger…..

……..as he went off to fight the wars……

…….along with the promise that if he sent it back to her…..

……she would protect him……

…..UNCONDITIONALLY!!!

No matter what he had done…….

No matter how badly he had behaved…..

SHE WOULD FORGIVE HIM EVERYTHING!!!

As Brothers and Sisters of The Code well know…..

……..Essex later rebelled against his Queen…..

……and led a group of armed men through the streets of London…..

……intending to settle the problem of succession to the English throne……

……by replacing the childless Elizabeth as monarch…..

….. with James VI of Scotland……

Essex, who had earlier abandoned his military post in Ireland…..

…….and had been put under house arrest……

……. was disgraced, penniless, mad and drunk at the time of the rebellion….

……..which had failed hopelessly……

(Elizabeth by then was unpopular…….

…….but not THAT unpopular…..

…….and as William Camden says, the citizens of London were relatively well off so had no intention of rebelling)

Essex was sentenced to death by beheading.

While waiting to be executed in the Tower of London….

….Essex looked at the ring on his finger……

….and decided now was time to cash in the promise Queen Elizabeth had made to him…..

He knew that if he gave the ring to a guard it would end up in the hands of his enemies…..

…..and never reach Elizabeth….

So he threw it through the window of his cell to a likely-looking lad below…….

…….and told  him to take it to his friend, Philadelphia, Lady Scrope…..

……(pronounced SCROOP)….

……..the daughter of the Queen’s cousin, Henry Carey, First Lord Hunsdon……..

Philadelphia was the only person at Court who remained loyal to Essex……

She had worn black ever since he had fallen out of favour…..

But……..

……AS LUCK WOULD HAVE IT……

…….the boy, by mistake, took it to her sister, Katherine, the Countess of Nottingham……

She was Elizabeth’s most intimate female friend…..

……but she was married to Essex’s greatest enemy…..

…..Charles Howard, the Lord High Admiral and First Earl of Nottingham…

HE made certain the ring never reached the Queen…..

So, on the eve of his execution……..

………Essex was waiting for a reprieve from Elizabeth…….

……..while Elizabeth was waiting for the ring.

•

Two years later……..

……..when Katherine, Countess of Nottingham, was dying………

……..she asked Elizabeth to visit her……..

She showed Elizabeth the ring……..

….. and confessed what she had done.

Elizabeth struck Katherine……

……even though she was on her death-bed…..

……and cried out in fury…..

God may forgive you but I never can…

The Queen stopped eating and sleeping………

…….and refusing to go to her bed…..

…….once stood, stock still, for fifteen hours…….

She claimed to be in mourning for Katherine…..

But she was really in mourning for Essex…..

When the widowed Lord Admiral remonstrated with Elizabeth, she said….

If you were in the habit of seeing such things in your bed as I do when in mine you would not persuade me to go there.

People began to doubt the Queen’s sanity…..

……..and Elizabeth told Philadelphia, Lady Scrope…..

that she saw one night her own body exceedingly lean and fearful in a light of fire.

Elizabeth wept silently in the dark….

………spoke to few…….

Then died of grief…..

•

Simon Adams…..

……the distinguished Tudor historian and children’s non-fiction editor……

……who has contributed EIGHTEEN chapters to the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography….

……claims there that Lytton Strachey…..

……in his famous 1928 Elizabeth and Essex….

……has….

.….proved….

…..that the ring story is….

…..apocryphal….

 STRACHEY…..

….THE ARCH-CYNIC OF THE BLOOMSBURY GROUP…

…….HAS DONE NO SUCH THING MR. ADAMS!!!

IN HER FOLLOWING POSTS, YOUR CAT WILL….

‘PROVE’

….BEYOND A WHISKER OF A DOUBT….

….THAT THE WHOLE RING STORY IS TRUE…..

SHE WILL EVEN PRODUCE THE RING ITSELF!!!

NOW READ Part Two.

 

‘Bye, now….

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