It has often been said that if you fell asleep and woke up in St. Mary le Strand, you would think you were in Rome.
What is remarkable is that the Church was consecrated in 1724 – ten years into the reign of a Lutheran King.
Many of the people on the Commission for Building 50 Churches were Jacobites and must have known what Gibbs was going to design. And as Gibbs was given the commission AFTER the Coronation of George I, it is hard not to see the building of St. Mary le Strand as an act of subversion.
Gibbs liked to live dangerously. In the introduction to his 1728 book on architecture he wrote:
‘Designs should not be altered by the caprice of ignorant, assuming Pretenders.’
Anyone with the slightest knowledge of Gibbs would know by ‘Pretenders’ he wasn’t referring to James III and Bonnie Prince Charlie – he was referring to what were for him the real ‘Pretenders’ Kings George I and George II – or Dunce the First and Dunce the Second – as Gibbs’s great friend, Alexander Pope, called them.
[The bust of Pope which Gibbs commissioned and was found in Gibbs’s house after Gibbs’death]
Also Gibbs was a Scottish Freemason and, as we have seen, Freemasonry there was associated with second sight. Swift’s ‘Grand Mistress of the Female Masons’ goes even further to suggest that Scottish Freemasons were thought to be ‘conjurers and magicians’.
By creating a ‘Roman Catholic’ church, was Gibbs willing Roman Catholicism back into the country – and with it James III?
Gibbs remained a Catholic and Jacobite all his life. He took the Last Rites and left money for a Mass to be said for him on his death.
The most striking feature of St. Mary le Strand is its ceiling, filled with white flowers.….
But if you look closer you can see oak leaves and fruits….
And if you look closer still, the five leaf rosa alba….
….the inspiration for the White Cockade.
Chrysostom Wilkins plastered the ceiling to Gibbs’s design in 1718 – the very year white roses were banned from London.
The walls of the church were left blank….
.
……but clearly Gibbs hoped they would one day be painted – as they were in the chapel of Wimpole Hall which he designed for Edward Harley, 2nd Earl of Oxford….
Perhaps the subject would have been ‘King Solomon’ – in honour of King James VI and I, ‘The Scottish Solomon’ – or the ‘Return of the Israelites to Israel’ – pre-figuring the return of the Stuarts….
Perhaps even celebrating it.
On 17th March 1720 the Commission for Building 50 Churches demanded to see the design for the pulpit – and they were right to do so. Not only is it oak – a subversive act in itself – it is covered with carvings of oak leaves….
……with little faces peeping through them – like re-incarnations of King Charles II hiding in the tree.
Bonnie Prince Charlie was still a toddler when these putti were carved.
If we move to the apse we see a bird flying towards us – and we experience Parker’s Civil War ballad, carved in stone.
It is Noah’s dove of peace returning to England.
…..as it does on Jacobite drinking glasses….
But it is also the Blackbird – James III – flying back to his home, surrounded by luscious fruits and grapes – symbols of the Stuart fertility.
There are starbursts in the apse – suggestive of the star that appeared at the birth of Bonnie Prince Charlie….
And the putti here – and indeed – all over the Church – have wings that – as at Chiswick House – could be taken for the ostrich feathers of the Prince of Wales.
Gibbs also went in for caricature – the equivalent in plaster and stone of the ‘Wee, wee German Lairdie’ song.
As the putti get higher and more out of sight…
……..they get more grotesque…..
……..and even demonic…
…….and start to look more and more like ‘Pig Snout’!
And even the Hanoverian crest isn’t all it seems to be.
If you look closely at the unicorn you’ll see it has a massive horn – a mocking reference to ‘cuckold Geordie’.
And it even has Stuart oak leaves carved into it….
But the real mystery are the two pillars that lead into the Church Garden.
They were not part of the original design and seem to have appeared around 1740. There is no record of the church having paid for them – so they seem to be a gift….
In 1740 Bonnie Prince Charlie was 20 – and the Jacobites were hoping he would lead another rebellion. They were even sending him tartan trews and a sword and buckler.
The piers show more putti with Prince of Wales feathers round them –
……..and even disguised ‘saltires’ – St. Andrew’s Crosses…
……….at the same angle as Gibbs designed a house for the Earl of Mar in Scotland…..
There are even thistles….then banned in England….
……but carved upside down…..
…….pretending to be tasells!
If you look for them, you can even find five petal Jacobite roses…..
Were these a ‘magic’ enticement to Bonnie Prince Charlie to make a bid for the British throne?
All of the elements on these pillars add up to the insignia of ‘The Order of the Thistle’ – given to Bonnie Prince Charlie the day he was born – and this is said to be the flash he wore at Culloden….
Who paid for these pillars? And, it must be asked, who really paid for the Church?
Officially the Hanoverian Commisioners – who on 26 January 1721 were demanding ‘plain and cheap carving’ for Deptford Church – finally paid a total of £17,000 for St. Mary le Strand – the equivalent of just over £4 million in today’s money.
It has recently been estimated that to replace St. Mary le Strand today – with all its elaborate stone carving – would cost around £32 million.
Who had the equivalent of that sort of money in the 1720s?
Is the answer carved high up on the outside East wall of the Church?
Here we can see, if we know what we’re looking for (and our eyesight is good enough!) an ouroboros again – with the background of a ‘V’.
Is this a reference to the Jacobite ‘National Anthem’? ‘Send him Victorious’?
The ouroboros – as well as being the symbol of Charles II and the Freemasons – was the symbol of a Jacobite group on the Welsh border called the ‘Cycle of the White Rose’ Club’ – who struck a commemorative medal in 1780.
This Club – which also campaigned for the abolition of slavery – was quasi-Masonic, with codewords and secret handshakes, but met in each others houses around Wrexham. Their habit was to toast the ‘King over the Water’ by standing with one foot on a chair, another on the table, and holding their glasses of claret over a massive bowl of rosewater.
The Tories drank claret because it was from France, while the Whigs drank port, because it was not.
Unmarried women – accompanied by a companion – were sometimes invited to meetings, perhaps in a long-term bid to boost numbers…
The club – consisting mostly of landed gentry – was run by a Welsh Tory land-owner of such fabulous wealth he was called ‘The Prince of Wales’ – Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn. He died in a fall from his horse, leaving debts of £120,000 – the equivalent today of £34 million.
Here he is shown wearing the ‘True Blue’ of a Tory.
He was also an M.P. – so he was often in London – and, like Burlington, financed the Jacobite Rebellion. He secretly organised Jacobite riots, but publicly burnt a portrait of George I in 1722. In 1740 he even offered to help finance the French Army if they were to invade Britain with Bonnie Prince Charlie.
Like Lord Burlington, he was a double agent. At the same time as serving in Henry Pelham’s ministry, he secretly travelled to Versasilles to plot with King Louis XV – even though France and England were at war at the time.
Sir Watkin was a devout, High Church Anglican – who would have loved Gibbs’s work on St. Mary le Strand.
He was also a great friend of William King – the Jacobite Master of St. Mary’s College, Oxford – who in turn was one of Gibbs’s closest friends. King and Gibbs later created the Radcliffe Library in Oxford – and Sir Watkin Williams acted as their Trustee.
In 1719 Sir Watkin added the ‘Wynn’ to his name because he had inherited the land of the Wynn family. The Wynn family crest included an eagle – and on a Jacobite drinking glass engraved with his name……
….. Sir Watkin has added that eagle.
On the outside East Wall of St. Mary le Strand, two eagles perch above the ouroboros and V – both looking South to France…
The White Rose medal also has a love-knot as part of its design….
……a reference to the Jacobite rallying cry ‘Look, Love and Follow’……
St. Mary le Strand is covered with love-knot designs…
….even on its oak pulpit…..
…..and there are ‘White Roses’ – the name of Sir Watkin’s Club – on the ceiling.
Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn seems to have left his calling card all over St. Mary le Strand. He could well be the reason that Gibbs was able to design the Church without a fee, why the two front pillars arrived as an anonymous gift in the 1740s and why the whole building looks so opulent and so stunningly beautiful.
But was St. Mary le Strand ‘Masonic’?
At the time the Church was being built, most Masonic meetings in London took place in ‘imaginary’ temples – small rooms in taverns……..
[The Goose and Gridiron, site of ‘The Grand Lodge’ in 1717]
……marked-up with charts and symbols as in this Parisian Lodge….
There are still many small rooms in many small taverns along the Strand – and it has been estimated that between 1725 and 1825 – when Freemasonry was at the height of its popularity – over 57 different Lodges held meetings there.
In my home town of Southend-on-Sea – which, like many British seaside towns, has a strong Masonic presence – there are what are called ‘Lodges of Instruction’ – in which Masonic rites are ‘rehearsed’ and there are Temples where they are enacted for ‘real’.
Were these Strand taverns Lodges of Instruction?
We know the first purpose built Grand Lodge in London was erected in 1775. What did Masons do before that?
Did they, by any chance, use St. Mary le Strand Church?
It may come as a surprise to learn that Churches in Britain had been used for this purpose before.
According to Anderson in his ‘Constitutions,’ Scottish Masons – who at one point held their rituals in the open air – would retire into monasteries if the weather became inclement.
Both John Aubrey and John Evelyn tell us that Wren was adopted into the Masonic fraternity at St. Paul’s Church, Covent Garden, on 18th May 1691. According to Anderson, Wren at that time was re-working Inigo Jones’s designs for Hampton Cout for King William – where ‘a bright lodge was held during the building’.
Masonic Meetings, it seems, were held in daylight on building sites – with ‘tylers’ [look-outs] keeping ‘cowans’ [the uninitiated or unqualified masons] at bay.
There is evidence that this happened at St. Mary le Strand.
On 12th September 1717 the Commission for Building 50 Churches noted that the workmen had been ‘guilty of great disorder at Strand church upon finishing of tower, master mason and other master workmen to attend at next meeting’.
On 10th October 1717 the minutes recorded ‘Townsend attending was asked to explain disorders at the finishing of tower of Strand church, and charged to try to prevent such disorders in future’.
This placing of the capstone on the tower was a great Masonic ceremony – followed by heavy drinking. Gibbs was to get involved in a similar ceremony four years later when the foundation stone to St. Martin-in-the-Fields – which Gibbs had designed – was levelled. The Masons then toasted ‘The King and the Craft’ – but this time they went to a tavern.
In 1722 Nathaniel Blackerby – Nicholas Hawksmoor’s son-in-law – became the Treasurer of the Commission for Building 50 Churches. He was a leading Freemason and an advocate for the Craft who wrote Masonic Prologues for Drury Lane.
According to Masonic Sources he was the also the Treasurer for St. Mary le Strand, St Clement Danes and St. Martin-in-the Fields – so might well have encouraged Masonic Rites in the Church when it was being built.
Matthew Birkhead – a singer and actor at Drury Lane and a member of The Lodge of Friendship associated with the theatre. -– was given a full Masonic funeral and burial at next door St. Clement Dane’s Church early in 1723, following a procession by ‘a vast number of Accepted Masons’ walking ‘two by two in their white aprons’.
[Masonic Procession in the Strand – by Somerset House – in 1742.]
Birkhead was the writer of the famous ‘Enter’d Aprentice Song’ which was, in all likelihood, sung by him, Gibbs and all the other Freemasons at the scenes of ‘great disorder’ in the Church in 1717:
‘Then join Hand in Hand
To each other firm stand;
Let’s be merry, and put a bright face on
What mortal can boast
So noble a Toast as a Free and an Accepted Mason!’
But were Masonic meetings held at St. Mary le Strand after it was consecrated?
Secret movements leave few traces behind. Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn’s wife, for instance, burnt all her husband’s papers the night he died.
In recent years, the Masonic movement has become far more open than it was and has given me – a non-Mason – access to its records, many of which are available on line.
This Post will lay out the evidence in the form of ‘notes and queries’ – and leave it to the reader to decide!
The Design of the Church
St. Mary le Strand is ‘Masonic’ by virtue of its very design! Gibbs re-created the Temple of Solomon as described in the Bible – with a porch, winding staircase, inner sanctum, high windows and a Holy of Holies. All of these feature heavily in Masonic practices.
2. The Porch.
The Porch of the Temple of Solomon was a place of huge importance to Freemasons as the Craft was said to have originated there. Old plans show that a vault was built beneath the porch of St. Mary le Strand which has now been blocked up. Were rites enacted there?
3. The Winding Staircase
The St. Mary le Strand winding stairway is very similar to the one Inigo Jones designed for the Queens’ House in Greenwich – the first self-supporting staircase in Britain. The upper part of Jones’s staircase is divided into fifteen step sections.
Jones was a Freemason and the Queens’ House – with its starburst, tessallated black and white floor and cube hall – might well have been used as a Lodge.
The winding stairway at Chiswick House has fifteen steps. There are 45 steps in the St. Mary le Strand staircase leading up to the gallery – three units of fifteen. Freemasons further divide the fifteen steps into groups of three, five and seven.
This was a memory system – a way of filing knowledge – for people who could not read.
The St. Mary le Strand stairway was clearly built off-site. It doesn’t quite fit and bits of it have had to be shaved off.
This was in compliance with an order from the Commission on 29th July 1714 that ‘the masons employed to build the new church in the Strand to prepare their stones ready for setting before they build them on site.’
According to Anderson in his ‘Constitutions’, King Solomon built his Temple ‘by divine Direction, without the noise of Work-men’s tools’.
This idea makes up part of the ritual of Third Degree Masonry when the Apprentice is asked why he was divested of all metal when he became a Mason.
He replies: ‘There was neither the sound of axe or hammer or any other metal tool heard at the building of King Solomon’s Temple….All the stones were hewed, squared and numbered in the quarries where they were raised…Every part thereof fitted with an exact nicety, that it had more the resemblance of the handy workmanship of the Supreme Architect of the Universe than of human hands’.
Were the Masons on the Commission (at this date still both Jacobite and Hanoverian) trying to re-create the building of the Temple of Solomon?
It all stopped when Chief Mason Townsend reported to the Commission that it was impracticable to builf off-site.
4. The Graffiti in the Stairwell.
Ritualistically an Apprentice Mason – blindfolded and stripped down – with one slipper off and one on – is led up the stairs by a rope. He wears his white Masonic apron – but with the flap pinned up, the sign that he is an apprentice.
He knocks at the Outer Door of the Inner Chamber, gives the password and grip and is admitted. He then does the same at the Inner Door of the Inner Chamber – he is admitted and his ‘hoodwink’ removed to blinding light and claps and stamps as he is ‘Enlightened’. The flap on his apron is unpinned and lowered now he has been initiated.
Does the graffiti in the stairwell represent the aprons of Apprentice Masons before their initiation?
Did the Muniments Room in the gallery of St. Mary le Strand also double as a Masonic Inner Chamber? It has a lock that can only be opened with three keys……
…..which means three different people must be present to open the door.
This is similar to the famous ‘Lokit Kist’ of the Aberdeen Masonic lodge [c. 1700] – a box containing the Lodge’s ‘Mark Book’ (the book with Members’ names) that also has three keys for the same reasons of security and secrecy.
[Note: The St. Mary le Strand lock is clearly later than the 1720s – but it is likely to be a replacement for a similar three-lock design.]
Another piece of graffiti in the stairway features a gallows.
According to Swift’s Grand Mistress of the Freemasons, the gallows was important to Freemasons because it represented letters from the Hebrew language.
‘Cheth……
and Thau……
……are shaped like two standing gallowses, of two legs each’.
‘When two masons accost each other, the one cries Cheth and the other answers Thau; signifying that they would sooner be hanged on the gallows, than divulge the secret.’
Swift might be writing satire here, but the gallows certainly played a large part in Masonic Rituals in London in the 1720s…..
………employing ‘ladders in darkened rooms’…..
[Upstairs passageway and room beneath the steeple in St. Mary le Strand Church]
And in the Royal Arch Degree, a Knight of the Red Cross swears that if he violates the Laws of the Order he binds himself ‘under no less penalty than having my house torn down, the timbers thereof set up, and I hanged thereon….’
‘
5. The Inner Sanctum
(i) The High Windows in the Church follow a description of the Temple of Solomon in the Bible (1 Kings, 6:4). Gibbs claimed that St. Mary le Strand ‘consists of two orders in the upper of which the lights are placed: the wall in the lower being solid to keep out noises in the street.’
In reality, having the windows in the Church high up makes little difference to the sound penetrating the Church. But it does provide for extraordinary beams of light entering at different angles at different times of day.
Light is an essential symbol to Freemasons, who move from darkness to light in the course of their initiation and training. Also, having windows high up makes it difficult for ‘Cowans’ to see in.
Also the light from the gallery window floods the High Altar mid afternoon…..
(ii) The current floor to the St. Mary le Strand was laid in Victorian times – but there remain in the north and south aisles the original tessellated flooring, characteristic of Masonic Lodges.
(iii) The ceiling of the Inner Sanctum is curved and was, experts think, originally blue – as it is in Gibbs’s design for Wimpole Hall….
In the words of Royal Arch Masonry, ‘Blue is an emblem of universal friendship and benevolence, and instructs us, that in the mind of a Mason those virtues should be as expansive as the blue arch of Heaven itself.’
Scottish Masons, it will be remembered, originally held their meetings in the open air.
Many Masonic Lodges have curved blue ‘sky’ ceilings. This one is from eighteenth century America….
……and this was designed by Sir John Soanes in the late 1820s…..
In Royal Arch Masonry, three groups of three form a ‘Living Arch’ by grasping each others wrists and raising their arms.
At initiation, ‘Apprentice Knights’ have to crawl on their hands and knees, blindfolded and tethered, beneath the living arch which then collapses on top of them.
To be a Royal Arch Mason you had to be a practising Christian and the Masonic injunction in this ceremony is reminiscent of the Magnificat:
‘Let them enter under a Living Arch, and remember to stoop low, for he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.’
In another rite, the Knights form an ‘Arch of Steel….their swords elevated above their heads, forming a cross, each placing his left hand upon the other’s right shoulder’.
(iv) On the 16th May 1717 the Commission approved Gibbs’s plan ‘for the pewing of the Strand Church, except that the aisle be ten foot wide’. We don’t know if the Commission were increasing or decreasing Gibbs’s original aisle width – but it is far wider than the Victorian pews are now.
There had been the purge of Jacobites from the Commission by this time – but there were still many Hanoverian Masons on the Commission. The wide aisles would be perfect for processions and for the acting out of the central story of Third Degree Masonry – the murder, by three ‘Cowans’, of Harim Abiff – the Architect of the Temple of Solomon – because he refused to divulge the Mason Word to them.
6. The Vaults.
The vaults of St. Mary le Strand are a mystery.
On 22nd April 1714 the Commission for Building 50 Churches suddenly came up with an extraordinary change of plan. Every church – including the ones already half-built like Greenwich – should be ‘vaulted under the pavements’. The surveyors were asked to estimate how much extra this would cost.
The Commission was insistent that no bodies were to be buried in the vaults – so what were the vaults for?
There are three vaults beneath the flooring of St. Mary le Strand which clearly lead into a space beneath the High Altar – but these passages have been bricked up.
Also, to add to the confusion, many skeletons were placed in the vaults in the early nineteenth century. Templar Masons often employed skulls and crossbones in their rites as they brooded, Hamlet-like, on their mortality. In one rite, a Knight drinks wine from the top of a skull – swearing that if he ever divulges the secrets of the Templars he will take on, as well as his own, the sins of the man whose skull he is holding.
This ritual forms the opening sequence in Dan Brown’s novel, ‘The Lost Symbol’….
By a bizarre freak, the top of a human skull has been discovered on a shelf in the vault – probably put there in the nineteenth century – but still worth a D.N.A test!
Excavations are planned. But in the meantime the most obvious question to ask is:
‘Were the vaults used for Masonic Rituals?’
THIRD DEGREE MASONRY
In Third Degree Masonry the ‘body’ of Harim Abiff is buried by the Cowans in a shallow grave. It is discovered when a sprig of acacia is dislodged and then buried with full honour in the vault of the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Solomon.
If excavations under the High Altar find a hollow space, the ‘body’ could have been lowered from the apse down into a vault. Probably Matthew Birkhead’s Masonic Funeral at St. Clement Danes in 1722 followed this rite.
Vaults play an even more crucial role in Royal Arch Masonry.
ROYAL ARCH MASONRY – THE SCOTTISH RITE
No-one knows for certain when or where Royal Arch Masonry began. Jane Clark believes it was created at the time of the Restoration of King Charles II – but there is growing evidence that it goes back, as much of Masonry seems to do, to the reign of James VI. Language and imagery – and even thought – in Royal Arch Masonry is very similar to William Shakespeare’s plays – particularly ‘Macbeth’.
King James built his own Temple of Solomon – together with a vault – at Stirling Castle in 1594 to celebrate the baptism of his son, Prince Henry. Gibbs was Surveyor of the Castle – and the design of the arched entry to the Temple…
….has clearly influenced the design of St. Mary le Strand…..
At Prince Harry’s baptism, King James dressed as a Knight of Malta. He also staged battles between the Templars and the Turks – one of the central motifs of Royal Arch Masonry.
Legend has it that Robert the Bruce gave shelter to the Knights Templar in Scotland when they were persecuted in Europe – and in gratitude they fought with him against the English at Bannockburn.
Legend also has it that Bonnie Dundee revived the Order of the Temple when he was fighting the Government Forces at Killiekrankie. He was said to have been wearing a Templar Cross beneath his breast plate when he was shot.
But what we do know for certain is that the Earl of Mar was made Grand Master of the Order of the Temple by James III in 1722 – and that Bonnie Prince Charlie himself inherited the title in Holyrood House in 1745.
Of this gathering the Duke of Perth wrote to Lord Ogilvy that ‘it is truly a proud thing to see our Prince in the Palace of his fathers with all the best blood in Scotland around him. Our noble Prince looked most gallant in the white robe of the Order and took his profession like a worthy Knight.’
[A Knight of the Order of the Temple]
Legend also has it that the Knights Templar brought fabulous treasures and sacred objects with them from Jerusalem – and how they discovered them forms the basis of the most demanding rite of Royal Arch Masonry.
In one of the rites the ‘Knights’ discover a hollow-sounding rock in the floor of the ruins of the Temple of Solomon. They remove it by means of an attached metal ring and discover a dark, secret vault – filled with rubbish and noxious air.
Lots are cast, a Knight has ropes tied round his waist and is lowered into the vault, either by hand or by a winch. He has a smaller rope in his hand that he can pull on if he is overcome by fumes or exhaustion – and with a spade and pickaxe he searches for treasure. If he is in luck, he pulls on his rope and emerges, triumphant, with the Ark of the Covenant.
The High Altar at St. Mary le Strand was originally in the form of the Ark of the Covenant….perhaps a reference to this rite.
Another rite – enacted by ‘The Knights of the Ninth Arch’ – is set at the time of King Solomon himself. It has the same actions and narrative – but this time the treasure sought is ‘the brilliant triangle’ – ‘the most precious jewel of Masonry’ – ‘a triangular plate of gold, richly adorned’ – the Delta of Enoch….
The Delta, as visitors to St. Mary le Strand will know, features prominently in the Church’s apse….
It had originally been vouchsafed to Enoch – the great grandfather of Noah – who had been transported by angels to a high mountain in the heavens where he saw the Sacred Triangle – carved with strange letters he did not understand. He was then transported through the bowels of the earth down to a secret vault where he saw the Delta again – without the letters – and he was told to carve on it the Hebrew name for God.
At St Mary le Strand the Delta has the first syllable of that name – ‘Jah’ – which is also the first syllable of the tri-syllabic Royal Arch ‘Mason Word’.
Enoch hid the Delta in a Sacred Vault because, with his ‘Second Sight’, he foresaw that the world would be overwhelmed with a flood…
The vaults at St. Mary le Strand would be perfect for this rite – it even has an old spade….
……and rubble……..
But where would the winch and ropes be placed and how would the vault be entered?
We may have discovered the answer by accident. Last year architects were working on the stone flaming urns on the roof – many of which have fallen with time and rust….
……when, to their amazement, they discovered, by camera, a hidden room above the South Vestry.
It has a wooden structure above the window that could well have been a cradle for a winch – and the vestry below has a central hole through which a rope could be fed.
Excavations will reveal if one of the stone slabs on the floor could be removed for entry to the crypt.
Chiswick House – although it’s not been commented on before – has exactly the same set up. An upstairs door opening onto to a gaping drop…..
………to the cellar below…….
……which could well have doubled as a round chapel for Templar Knight ceremonies.
We are told that there used to be a pulley system there to winch up wine. But that system could have also been used to winch down Knights.…
And what of the secret staircase in St. Mary le Strand?
It appears to lead to a bridge corridor across the apse behind the Hanoverian Crest, then, perhaps, down another stairway, to the North Vestry.
Until we can access the area, we cannot know for certain but, it would seem you had to ‘stoop low’ through the brick arch to make your way across the apse.
You certainly had to ‘duck’ when you entered or left the staircase at the west end of the church….
The roof over the east stairway system – shown on the right of this photo – is flat….
This could well be another Royal Arch rite – where you move from light into darkness and back into light again – humbling yourself, blindfolded and tethered, beneath a Brick Arch so you can be ‘exalted’.
And that ‘exaltation’ would have been built into your journey. You might have to ‘stoop low’ and fumble your way across the apse – behind the triangular Hanoverian Crest – but you would also be, like Enoch, up in the Heavens, way above the High Altar and even above the Delta….
And after these humiliations you would be granted your ‘enlightenment’ – the sight of a burning bush….
……an effect created by an ‘inflamed urn’….
Could this be why there seems to be soot on the walls of the hidden chamber……
…as well as the vaults, in places far away from the Victorian boiler?
And why the church was originally decorated with no fewer than forty flaming urns?
…….including one above the High ‘Ark of the Covenant’ Altar.
Let’s hope the planned excavations in the Church will give us the answers to at least some of these questions.
POST SCRIPT
David Hume – the Scottish philosopher and historian – claimed in a letter he wrote on 10th February 1773 to Sir John Pringle that Bonnie Prince Charlie had secretly visited London in 1753 and had abjured his Roman Catholicism at the ‘The new church in the Strand’.
Hume didn’t go to live in London till the1760s and he got the date wrong: it was 1750. Prince Charlie was planning another rebellion. Although the Battle of Culloden had been a blood bath from which the Young Pretender had fled, he had done well before that. Many people thought that if he had marched on London – as he wanted to do – he would have won. King George II had packed his bags and was ready to go.
The new plan was to infiltrate London with Jacobite troops – all staying separately at different taverns and boarding houses – and then to storm the Tower of London and murder – or deport – the whole Hanoverian Royal Family.
Hume’s letter to Sir John Pringle was published, after Hume’s death, in the Gentleman’s Magazine of January 1788 – and an anonymous contributer challenged this, claiming that the church where this happened was in Gray’s Inn.
That is probably the case. But we do know that Bonnie Prince Charlie was at Lady Primerose’s house in Essex Street on 16th September – a three to four minute walk from St. Mary le Strand – and that William King visited him.
King, as we have seen, was one of Gibbs’s closest friends – and had just spent ten years working with him on the Radcliffe Library (now ‘Camera’) in Oxford.
To my mind it is inconceivable that King didn’t take Charles Stuart across the road to see his beloved colleague’s masterpiece…..
[A Bust of Gibbs which is thought he gifted to Alexander Pope]
Thanks, as ever, to the great esoteric scholar, Marsha Keith Schuchard, who encouraged my researches and introduced me to Ricky Pound who shared with me his knowledge of Chiswick House. Also to my ‘Investigative Team’: David Kral who spotted the ouroborus on the outside East Wall and Shaun O’Brien who spotted the Rosa Alba on the ceiling. Sean also discovered a dragonfly which I shall cover in a later postscript….
James Gibbs was seven years old when Bonnie Dundee was killed at Killiecrankie. He was born in Aberdeen to Roman Catholic parents who continued to practice their faith, even though it had been banned in Scotland. Young James was a devout Catholic – so devout he determined to go to Rome to train as a renegade priest. When Gibbs’s parents died, around 1700, he sold their isolated home to the Aberdeen Freemasons to use as a Lodge.
There had been Lodges in Aberdeen since the beginning of the sixteenth century – but they had been for working Stonemasons – and were like early Trades Union. Many of the Masons were unlettered – so rote-learning took the place of books, and handshakes and passwords took the place of certificates of proof of training. These were called Operative Lodges.
But in 1670 a Speculative Lodge was established in Aberdeen for those not in the building trade but interested in the history and philosophy of Masonry – and eager to embark on its course of self-improvement and enlightenment. All that was required was a nomination, a wish to enter a supportive brotherhood and a belief in a Supreme Architect of the Universe. So Jewish people, Roman Catholics and even Quakers, were welcome as Brothers to the Aberdeen Lodge.
Gibbs was a Freemason: James Anderson in his ‘Constitutions of the Freemasons’ describes him as ‘Bro. Gib’ and describes him walking in a Masonic procession in 1721 to the ‘levelling’ ceremony at St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church. It is perfectly possible Gibbs’s father was a Mason and that Gibbs, then 18, was ‘fast-tracked’ into the Aberdeen Lodge before he left for Rome.
We know that on the way there he visited Paris and may well have introduced himself to the exiled Catholic Stuart family. But when he arrived at Rome, he was so terrified of the Italian Jesuit who ran the Scots College that he left without taking his oath. He became apprenticed to some of the top architects in Rome, including Carlo Fontana, sold his water colours to aristocrats on their Grand Tour and acted as a guide.
Word reached him that his half-brother was dying, so he returned to Scotland in 1709 – but arrived too late. There was no money for him in his native country – so he journeyed down to England.
But there was no money for him there, either.
For ‘four years he starved’ and wrote that he had ‘a great many very good friends here … of the first rank and quality … but their promises are not a present relief for my circumstances.’
But being ‘of good parts and virtuously inclined and well disposed’…….
……Gibbs was lucky enough to catch the eye of John Erskine, 23rd Earl of Mar – a fellow Scottish Freemason and architect – who was in London working on the Union between England and Scotland.
Mar called Gibbs ‘Signor Gibbi’, gave him some minor architectural work in Alloa in Scotland and appointed him Surveyor of Stirling Castle. The money for Gibbs’s Surveyorship soon ran out.
But Mar had another idea….
Two years after Gibbs came to England, there had been a massive power shift at Queen Anne’s Court. The Queen had fallen out with her friend, Sarah Churchill, an ardent Whig.
So the Tories were back in power.
They came up with a plan to build fifty new churches, in the High Church Anglican style, in the suburbs of the City of London – to celebrate the piety and power of the Stuart dynasty. Queen Anne – like all the Stuarts – loved architecture – and gave her full backing to the scheme.
Mar introduced Gibbs to Sir Christopher Wren, who was then in his late 70s.
A Tory (he sat as an M.P. in the Loyal Parliament to support James II), a Jacobite (he had been Surveyor of the King’s Works to Charles II) and a Freemason (to this day his gavel is on show at the Museum of Freemasonry in London), he became ‘much Gibbs’ friend and pleased with his drawings’. Wren and Mar came up with a scheme to make Gibbs one of the two surveyors on the Commission for Building 50 Churches.
But there was a problem. John Vanbrugh, the playwright and architect, was on the Commission as well….
……and he and Wren hated each other. Vanbrugh was also a Freemason – but he was a Hanoverian Freemason. An irrevocable split had begun in the Brotherhood…..
Vanbrugh supported a different candidate for the Surveyor’s post – John James – ten years older than Gibbs and with a lot more experience. Wren and Mar had to call on the help of Queen Anne’s proto-Prime Minister, Lord Harley (Tory, Jacobite and Freemason) her Chancellor of the Exchequer, Robert Benson – newly created Lord Bingley (Tory, Jacobite and Freemason) and even her Physician, Dr. Arbuthnot (Tory, Jacobite and Freemason) to push the appointment through….
ST MARY LE STRAND CHURCH
By 1714 the Maypole that Charles II had erected in the Strand had fallen into disrepair and the Commission decided to replace it with a church – St. Mary le Strand. It would be on the Processional Route from Westminster to St. Paul’s Cathedral and Queen Anne loved processions.
The Church would also raise the tone of the area which had become a notorious red light district since the Restoration.
It was planned to place a statue of Queen Anne over the Church’s porch. But the Jacobites on the Commission came up with an even more striking idea. A huge column – like Trajan’s Column in Rome – even higher than Wren’s Monument to the Great Fire – with an internal spiral staircase and viewing platform, four guardian lions round the base, and a statue of Queen Anne at the top.
Gibbs, who had submitted a design for the Church, but had lost out to Thomas Archer, was given the consolation prize of designing the column.
But the Queen’s health, which had never been good, was getting worse. By 8th July it was so bad the Commission considered a six week adjournment. On 15th July a Committee was set up ‘to confer together’ about the design of the Strand Church. If the Queen died, everything would change.
The Commission, though, took a chance and went ahead with the column. But on 1st August, 1714 the Queen did die.
Intestate.
Four days later work on the column was stopped…. and everyone started to plot…..
The Tory Party at the time was hopelessly divided, so the Whigs swept back into power. Sophia of Hanover had died a few weeks earlier, at the age of 83, so the Elector of Hanover was proclaimed King George I of Britain, France and Ireland.
To the Jacobites, of course, this was a catastrophe. Loyalty to the Stuart Family suddenly became treason. If you drank a toast to ‘James III’ you could be put in jail for two years. One poor soldier knelt as he toasted the ‘King over the Water’ and was flogged to death.
Secret Jacobite symbols had to be employed all over again – and new songs written – collected by James Hogg and published in two volumes in 1819 and 1821. Hogg – ‘the Ettrick Shepherd’…..
……who really had been a farm worker before he turned writer – is not always reliable and may even have forged some of the songs himself. But many are contemporary – and even those written later – when Jacobitism became a remembered romance rather than a movement – give us an insight into what people were thinking and feeling at the time.
‘The Blackbird’, though, which Hogg describes as ‘a street song of the day’ is genuinely contemporary:
In this a ‘fair lady’ sobs and laments the loss of her ‘blackbird’ – the code-word for James III who had a swarthy complexion and dark hair – like Charles II who was called ‘The Black Boy’ by his mother. A Spanish gene seems to have been introduced to the Stuart family by Charles II’s maternal grandmother, Marie de Medici….
‘My blackbird for ever is flown.
He’s all my heart’s treasurer, my joy and my pleasure,
So justly, my love, my heart follows thee;
And I am resolved, in foul or fair weather
To seek out my blackbird, wherever he be.’
Britain, in many Jacobite songs, became a woman, yearning for her beloved bird – in the way Parker had yearned for the return of the dove of peace.
Scottish Jacobites were particularly scathing about King George I. In ‘The Wee Wee German Lairdie’, a song in almost impenetrable dialect, the Scots display contempt for the new monarch, not only because he is small, but because, when word came to him that he was King of England, he was found hoeing turnips in his garden.
And though he was the King of England, he could not speak English…
‘The very dogs o’ England’s court
They bark and howl in German’.
If he ever tries to enter Scotland ‘our Scots thristle [thistle] will jag [prick] his thumbs’.
In another Jacobite song, ‘At Auchindown’, George I is described as ‘cuckold Geordie’ and in ‘Jamie the Rover’ there is a reference to the King’s ‘horns’:
‘In London there’s a huge black bull
That would devour us at his will
We’ll twist his horns out of his skull
And drive the old rogue to Hanover’.
George I’s wife, Sophia Dorothea of Celle, had been accused of having an affair with Count Philip Christoph von Konigsmark. The Count went missing – murdered, it was rumoured by George, who locked up his wife at the Castle of Ahiden.
She took her revenge by always referring to him as ‘Hagenschnaut’ – ‘Pig Snout’.
George was crowned on 20th October 1714 – provoking Jacobite riots in twenty diffferent English towns….
A fortnight later, a meeting of the Building Committee of the Commission for Building 50 Churches convened, chaired by Lord Bingley and composed of Dr. Arbuthnot, Sir Christopher Wren and his son (also called Christopher and also a Tory, a Jacobite and a Freemason).
Vanbrugh (newly knighted by King George and with Blenheim Palace to his credit) and Gibbs (only 30 and without a single public building to his name) ‘both laid before the committee two designs for the next church ‘to be erected near the Maypole in the Strand’. The committee judged both designs were ‘proper to be put into execution’ and ‘referred to Commissioners to make the choice.
At this point two pages have been ripped out of the Minutes book of the Building Committee…
Two days later the designs were submitted to the Commission itself – who, as usual, voted by secret ballot. Wren was not in attendance – but his son was.
Gibbs was awarded the commission. The Jacobites had won.
But Gibbs nearly lost the job. His mentor, the Earl of Mar, was the leading Jacobite in Britain and he led the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715.
It failed, of course, but it introduced the most powerful Jacobite symbol of all…the five-petalled White Rose.
According to Hogg, there was a gathering of Northern Jacobite men and women at the ruined Auchindown Castle in Scotland on 10th June, 1715 – the anniversary of James III’s birthday.
The Castle had been the temporary headquarters of Bonnie Dundee during the 1689 Rebellion, so the Jacobites met there to drink to the memory of Dundee and the health of James III.
They picked wild, white alba roses……
……then pinned them to their bosoms and bonnets and danced.
‘Of all the days that’s in the year
The tenth of June I hold most dear,
When our white roses all appear
For the sake of Jamie the Rover.
In tartans braw our lads are drest
With roses glancing on the breast
For among them a’ we love him best,
Young Jamie they call the Rover.’
Legend has it that the Earl of Mar’s Jacobite soldiers wore white ribbons in their bonnets, shaped into roses.
The famous ‘White Cockade’ had been born.
‘My love was born in Aberdeen,
The bonniest lad that e’er was seen,
But now he makes our heart fu’ sad
He’s ta’en the field with his white cockade.
O he’s a ranting roving blade!
O he’s a brisk and bonny lad!
Betide what may my heart is glad
To see my lad with his white cockade!’
The Earl of Mar fled from Britain at the end of 1715 and at the beginning of 1716 all the suspected Jacobites were thrown off the Commission for Building 50 Churches – including Wren, Arbuthnot, Bingley and Gibbs.
A rival Scottish architect called Colen Campbell had written anonymously to the Commission, accusing Gibbs of being a ‘Papist’ and a ‘disaffected person’. Gibbs was sacked as the Commission’s Surveyor and taken off the St. Mary le Strand project.
Gibbs of course denied the charges – which were completely true – and made the Commission an astonishing proposal. He would design and build the Church for nothing. His only condition was to take his designs away with him – ‘and no-one be allowed to take a copy…. he intending to engrave it for his own use’.
This was an offer the Commission could not refuse. King George had no interest in architecture – certainly not Anglican architecture – and the Commission wanted to wrap up the fifty church project as quickly and as cheaply as possible.
But they came to regret their decision. It meant they could not check that Gibbs was following the designs they had agreed to and, because they were not paying him, they could not control him.
Gibbs was also in a secret, coded correspondence with the exiled Earl of Mar. It is clear from the letters that Gibbs was working as a Jacobite agent – using codewords like ‘landlady’ for King James III and ‘Benjamin Bing’ for Robert Benson, Lord Bingley.
Mar wrote to Gibbs on 16th April 1716 that ‘Benjamin Bing in Westminster now ought to build the lodge for himself or someone else’ [using ‘building the lodge’ as a code for recruiting Jacobites] and hopes ‘it may come to be built upon the bank where it was designed’ [i.e. take over the running of Parliament in Westminster].
At this point Gibbs was even planning to join Mar in France.
Dislike of Hanoverian rule was growing in London and all the rest of the country. People feared a Lutheran King would bring back the bad old days of Cromwell.
There were two flash points in the year: the first was 29th May, Restoration Day, when the King had returned to England from exile. People now wore sprays of oak leaves, decorated their front doors with oak boughs and danced round oak trees and maypoles.
The lads took heart, and dressed themselves
In rural garments gay
And round about like fairy elves,
They danced the live-long day;
Around around an oaken tree
They danced with joy, and so do we.
The educated Jacobites would paint their oak boughs gold – in memory of Aeneas who plucked a golden bough from a tree so he could enter the underworld.
Jacobites identified the exiled Aeneas with James III – hoping that in the way Aeneas founded Rome, James would found a new Augustan Age when he was back in Britain..
The Freemasons also hoped he would bring back the fashion for building in stone. Protestant Kings favoured brick…
The second flashpoint was the 10th June – James III’s birthday, White Rose Day – when people carried and wore bunches of white roses.
Soldiers went through London, snatching oak leaves and roses from the people and arresting those who resisted. But all over the country people made fun of George I by brandishing turnips and wearing horns on their heads.
And, of course, everyone was still dancing and singing to ‘The King shall enjoy his own again’…
In November 1718 the Commission Surveyors got suspicious and visited the St. Mary le Strand building site. They were horrified by what they saw and recommended to the Commission that ‘a stop should be put to the extravagant carvings within the Church’.
In March the following year the Commission resolved that ‘Before Gibbs direct any further carvers’ or painters’ work for finishing Strand Church design and estimate to be laid before Board so that agreement may be made with artificers before they are put in hand. Copy to Gibbs’.
But Gibbs was off. Word had got round about the beauty of St. Mary le Strand, as Gibbs predicted it would, and work came flooding in. Interestingly he had been employed by Lord Burlington at Chiswick House….
– but Burlington diplomatically ‘sacked’ him when he was accused of Jacobitism. The reason for this – as Jane Clark, and later Ricky Pound, have argued – is that Burlington – seemingly a pillar of the Hanoverian Establishment – was in fact a closet Jacobite.
In a letter to King James III in October, 1719, the Earl of Mar compares the exiled Stuarts to the exiled Israelites and hopes that King George I – like Cyrus the Great of Persia who invited the Israelites to return and rebuild the Temple of Solomon – will invite the Stuarts to return to Britain.
Clark believes that Chiswick House was a Jacobite Temple – dedicated to the return of the Stuarts. It is full of discreet Jacobite symbols – discreet because they had to be…
One of mantlepieces has a King Charles II Green Man –
….another has thistles, and roses, and grapes and fleur de lyses….
The reason for the fleur de lyses is that, at the end of 1720, James III and his wife, Maria Clementina Sobieska, had a son, Charles Edward Louis John Casimir Sylvester Severino Maria Stuart – better known to the world as ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’. At birth he was created the Prince of Wales and inducted into the Order of the Thistle. Jacobite astronomers claimed that a new star had appeared in the sky….
Now there was a distinct hope of a Stuart dynasty – and Chiswick House is full of the faces and bodies of putti and young men and women, encouraging Stuart procreation.
Some of them seem to have fleur de lyses in their hair…
And as we have seen, Freemasonry went hand in hand with Jacobitism from the very beginning. Chiswick House has a blue velvet room….
…..a colour associated with ‘Cabala’ Masonry (now called Third Degree Masonry) and a red velvet room…..
…….a colour associated with Knights Templar Masonry (now called Royal Arch Masonry).
Chiswick House is separated from the main family dwelling. It has no kitchen – but it does have a wine cellar and a spiral stairway – ideal conditions, Jane Clark argues, for Masonic Rites – designed to will the King over the Water back to England.
‘Jacobus’ is the Latin name for James – and the Jacobites were named after the followers of King James II who was crowned in 1685 and deposed three years later.
But ‘Jacobitism’ itself, as a philosophy, a movement and finally a romance, goes back to 1643, the fortieth anniversary of the coronation of King James VI of Scotland as King James I of England, and the end of the first year of the English Civil Wars.
Jacobitism started life as a song – written to a ‘sweet tune’ to which you could march – or dance – but whose lyrics, the writer insisted, must be sung ‘joyfully’. His name was Martin Parker – a hugely popular balladeer – as well as being, in his time, a vagrant, tapster, drunk and thief.
He was responding to a prediction made by John Booker, an eminent Astrologer who had successfully predicted the deaths of the Kings of Bohemia and Sweden – and was now predicting the downfall of King Charles I.
Parker’s ballad was originally titled ‘Upon the Defacing of Whitehall’ but soon became better known as ‘The King shall Enjoy his own Again’ or ‘The King shall come Home in Peace Again’. There are variations in the lyrics – but that is hardly surprising as the song was sung for over a hundred years.
It begins:
‘What Booker can prognosticate
Or speak of our Kingdom’s present state?
I think myself to be as wise
As he that most looks at the skies.
My skill goes beyond the depth of a pond
Or rivers in the greatest rain
By the which I can tell that all things will be well
When the King comes home in peace again’.
Parker sets himself up in opposition to Booker – not because he has more skill in prediction but because he has more common sense. Between 1642 and the summer of 1643 there were no fewer than 14 battles between the Parliamentarians and the Royalists.
Charles I had left his Whitehall Palace and set up a base in York, but at the end of 1642 he was denied entry to London by Parliamentarian troops at Turnham Green. He set up his base in Oxford which, became a Royalist stronghold way into the eighteenth century.
Parker is saying that while the King is away from his Palace in London, there will never be peace in the land. For Parker this is not prophecy – it is fact. And by writing so directly – and vividly – in the first person, he invites you to join in with him – and become him.
The ballad continues:
‘Though for a time you see White-hall
With cobwebs hanging over the wall
Instead of silk and silver brave
As formerly it used to have;
In every room, the sweet perfume,.
Delightful for that princely train;
The which you shall see, when the time it shall be
That the King comes home in peace again’.
Parker pictures the neglected Whitehall which Charles I’s father, James I, had beautified with the help of Inigo Jones. Charles himself had commissioned paintings from Peter Paul Rubens, depicting King James as Solomon – the King of Peace.
Even though Parker has been penniless at times, he enjoys the surrogate pleasure of describing King Charles surrounded by beautiful sights and smells.
‘For forty years the Royal Crown
Hath been his father’s and his own
And I am sure there’s none but he
Hath right to that sovereignty.
Then who better may the sceptre sway
Than he that hath such right to reign?
The hopes of your peace, for the wars will then cease
When the King enjoys his own again’.
Parker here celebrates the Divine Right of Kings which was introduced to England by James I. He believed that the monarchy was – in his own words to Parliament in 1610 – ‘the most supreme thing on earth’ and that ‘kings are God’s lieutenants sitting upon God’s throne’. The King’s successor should share the same blood line so that peace – not war – would follow the death of monarchs.
Oliver Cromwell was coming into prominence in 1643 when he was made a Colonel in the Parliamentarian Army.
Parker foresaw his coming threat, and challenges his right to ‘reign’ as he is not a Stuart. The ballad, in its early version, concludes with:
‘Till then upon Ararat’s Hill
My hope shall cast her anchor still
Until I see some peaceful dove
Bring home that branch which I do love
Still will I wait till the waters abate
Which most disturbs my troubled brain
For I’ll never rejoice till I hear the voice
That the King comes home in peace again’.
Parker refers to the story of Noah – whose ark came to rest on Mount Ararat. Like him, Parker will only know peace of mind when the dove returns with an olive branch.
Unknown – 17th Century.
Parker did not put his name to this ballad as it would have been dangerous to do so. He did, though, put his initials on one which supported the Anglican Bishops – and was threatened with jail by the Puritan Parliament.
He fell silent – but he had touched a nerve with the ‘ordinary’ English public. He captured their love of the Royal Family and their longing for peace.
Booker, of course, proved correct in his prediction about the decline of Charles I – even if he didn’t foresee his execution. But Parker had a poetic, even spiritual, truth about his poem that was to grow with time – especially when Charles I’s son, Charles II, had to flee to France. He became ‘the King Over the Water’ and people wanted to him to fly back, like Noah’s dove, to his own country.
This was to happen five years later, in 1660, when red wine flowed in the fountains of London and King Charles had a huge maypole erected where St. Mary le Strands Church now stands. The crowds at his Coronation danced round it and sang ‘The King shall enjoy his own again’.
Parker, who had died four years earlier, had been accused of being a Roman Catholic because of his support for the Stuarts – and Charles I and Charles II had both married Catholic wives. Charles II converted to Roman Catholicism on his deathbed in 1685, but his brother, James, who became King James II, was by then an open follower of ‘the Old Faith’.
James II wanted freedom of worship in Britain and appointed Catholics to leading positions in government and the army. This alarmed the newly formed Whig Party, who wanted to get rid of both Roman Catholicism and the Divine Right of Kings. So the King sought the support of the newly formed Tory party – and in March, 1686, the support of the Scottish Lords.
An anonymous Scottish poet wrote a poem called ‘Caledonia’s Farewell’ to the Duke of Perth and the Duke of Queensbury, urging them to travel down to London to kiss the hands of King James to prove that ‘Caledonia loves the Stuarts well’.
The poem has a strange, esoteric footnote – explaining, that because King James II was the hundredth and eleventh Scottish King since Fergus, he had a right to the throne by numerology as well as blood.
The ‘111’ can convert to an equilateral triangle which, for the ‘Grecians denominated a King’. The poet added the information that the base of the triangle represented Scotland – from which the Stuart line originated – with England on the left and Ireland on the right.
The Jacobites now had a symbol as well as a song. The great esoteric scholar Marsha Keith Schuchard tells us that supporters of the Stuarts would include a triangle formed of three dots in their correspondence.
But as we can see from the medallion struck in Paris by a Masonic Lodge to commemorate Benjamin Franklin…..
……the triangle was also a symbol of Freemasonry.
‘Caledonia’s Farewell’ was published, it is thought, by a group of Edinburgh Freemasons. Certainly the poem itself praises the loyalty to the King of ‘builders’ and ‘the cementing trade’. It also mentions Euclid and ‘the Architect’ – Harim Abiff – both central to Masonic philosophy and practice.
Some Masons believe that Freemasonry began in London in 1717 – but that wasn’t the view of Jonathan Swift – who was friends with many of the people engaged in building St. Mary le Strand.
In the persona of ‘the Grand Mistress of the Female Freemasons’ Swift claims that Freemasonry started in Scotland at the time of King Fergus ‘who reigned there more than two thousand years ago’ and was the ‘grand master’ of the Kilwinning Lodge ‘the antientest and purest now on earth’.
Masonry, the Grand Mistress claims, was first begun by Scottish Druids who worshipped – and carved – oak trees. The movement, influenced by Jewish people, developed into Rosicrucianism and ‘Cabala’ [Swift’s spelling]. The Knights Templar later ‘adorned the ancient Jewish and Pagan mystery with many religious and Christian rules’.
Stone came to replace oak as the central symbol of Freemasonry and, according to ‘Swift’, ‘after King James VI’s accession to the throne of England, he revived masonry, of which he was grand master, both in Scotland and England. It had been entirely suppressed by Queen Elizabeth, because she could not get into the secret’.
How much of this is ‘literally’ true is difficult to say – but a number of modern historians believe that Freemasonry did, indeed, originate in Scotland and was developed by King James VI who brought it into England in 1603.
King James’s son, Charles I, attended Masonic ceremonies at Somerset House in the Strand and he too had links with the Scottish Freemasons even before the Civil Wars.
In 1638 Henry Adamson, a Scottish poet and Freemason, had written to King Charles I asking him to repair the great stone bridge at Perth. He predicted to his fellow Masons:
‘Therefore I courage take, and hope to see
A bridge yet built although I aged be’.
He then explains to his brothers why he is so certain this will happen:
‘For we be brethren of the Rosie Crosse
We have the Mason Word, and second sight,
Things for to come we can foretell aright,
And shall we show what misterie we mean
In fair acrostics ‘Carolus Rex’ is seen.
Describ’d upon that bridge in perfect gold…’
‘Carolus Rex’ is King Charles I – and it has been suggested that the acrostic reads ‘Roseal cross’ – a reference to Rosicrucianism.
Etienne Morin, an eighteenth century French sea-faring trader and leading Freemason, claimed that Charles I’s son, Charles II, also had links with the Freemasons in Europe and formed Masonic Lodges in France when he was in exile.
Another eighteenth century Freemason, Nicholas de Bonville, also suggested that a network of Freemasons – led by Colonel George Monck (who was said to have converted from the Parliamentary Army to Freemasonry in Scotland) engineered King Charles II’s Restoration to the British Throne.
We know from papers left by Thomas Hearne, the Jacobite underkeeper of the Bodleian Library, that Charles II, when in exile, adopted for his personal symbol the ouroboros – the snake that feeds on itself.
This symbolised the immortality of the Stuart line and its constant return, but it was also associated with Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism, as we can see when we look at the Franklin Medal again, where it symbolises Craft ideas of renewal and rebirth.
Another symbol emerged at the Restoration which was linked to both Freemasonry and the Stuarts was the oak tree – worshipped by the Druids – which came to represent Charles I – chopped down by Cromwell.
Saplings, though, spring from the oak tree, which represent Charles I’s sons, Charles II and James II.
Charles II also famously hid in an oak tree, disguised as a peasant, after his defeat at the Battle of Worcester.
The idea grew that he took on himself the power and fertility of the oak – which loses its leaves in winter but regains them in summer. He became associated with fruit and flowers, pomegranates and grapes – and all the joys of spring. Charles II is celebrated as the Garland King or Green Man on Oak Apple Day in parts of England up to present times.
Oak Apple Day, 29th May.
Charles II’s wife – Catharine of Breganza – was unable to bear children, but Charles himself was certainly fecund: he fathered at least fourteen of them outside his marriage, two with the beautiful Nell Gwn…
Charles’s brother James II managed to produce a son with his wife, Mary of Modena in 1688 – also named James. James II’s daughters, Mary and Anne, were both Protestants, but now he had a son, Whigs feared it would be the start of a Roman Catholic dynasty. King James’s enemies put it around that the baby boy had been smuggled into the Queen’s bedchamber in a bedpan.
Seven notables – including aristocrats and the Bishop of London – invited the Calvinist William of Orange – who was married to King James II’s daughter Mary – to invade Britain.
King James was arrested, but escaped from his Dutch guards and fled abroad.
Loyalist Jacobites rose up in Ireland and Scotland, but King William and the Government Army defeated them. The Scottish Highland Jacobites – under John Graham of Claverhouse – known as ‘Bonnie Dundee’ – had a famous victory at Killiekrankie…..
.
……..but Dundee himself was shot and killed in the battle.
Political songs started up again and many Jacobite scholars believe that ‘God save the King’ began life as a Jacobite anthem. It existed in a Latin form sung in James II’s Catholic Chapel in Whitehall and its lyrics, especially ‘Send him victorious’, sound as though they are addressed to a ‘King over the Water’. The anthem – which is also engraved on Jacobite drinking glasses….
…..has the phrase ‘Soon to reign over us’ and asks God to bless ‘The True Born Prince of Wales’ – which sounds like a reply to the bedpan scandal.
The song goes on to bless what is clearly the Roman Catholic Church and hopes that it will remain….
‘Pure and against all heresy
And Whigs’ hypocrisy
Who strive maliciously
Her to defame’.
The last verse runs….
‘God bless the subjects all,
And save both great and small
In every station.
That will bring home the King,
Who hath best right to reign
It is the only thing
Can save the Nation’.
This is a re-run of ‘The King shall enjoy his own again’ – which the Irish Jacobites were still marching to in the 1690s and which the Bristol Jacobites were still dancing to when Queen Mary died in 1694…
James II died in exile in 1701. The Pope in Rome immediately acknowledged James’s son as ‘King James III’ ….
…….but in London the Act of Settlement was passed the same year which decreed that only a Protestant could become King or Queen of England.
King William died the following year – following a fall from his horse which had stumbled over a molehill. The Jacobites had a new coded toast: ‘To the little gentleman in the black velvet waistcoat.’
James II’s younger daughter, Anne, a High Church Anglican, became Queen of England.
Loyalists hoped that Queen Anne and her husband, Prince George of Denmark, would produce heirs to secure the Stuart line – but though Anne had 18 pregnancies, none of her children survived.
When Prince George died in 1708, it became clear to everyone that Anne – then 43 – would have to nominate her successor. She was rumoured to favour her half-brother, James III, known as ‘The Pretender’ to his enemies.
Most of the Tories also backed James III and tried to persuade him to become a Protestant.
The Whig Party, however, favoured Sophia of Hanover, but she was approaching 80. Failing her, they would invite George Louis, the Elector of Hanover, to become King of Britian.
He was 54th in line to the throne, but a Protestant.
It was now a waiting game to see who Queen Anne would nominate in her will.
Meanwhile, Militia Men marched through the City of London in 1711 – to the tune of ‘The King shall enjoy his own again’….
As you can imagine, the Academic World at the time roared with laughter.
But never forget!
The number of Views that The Shakespeare Code has enjoyed to this date stands at:
397, 520!!!
But when our Chief Agent, in 1971, submitted his Finals Long Essay to the English Faculty at Cambridge University he was equally derided.
In fact he was instructed by his Supervisor NOT to submit it – an injunction Stewart ignored.
He had no other essauy to submit!
And what was so shocking? Stewart’s assertion that, from his study of the Sonnets, William Shakespeare was Bi-Sexual!
THIS IS NOW A TRUTH UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED!!!
(almost)
The Code, as Brothers and Sisters well know, is a great admirer of John Dover Wilson – who sadly came to the Sonnets too late in life.
He famously said that you needed more than one lifetime to understand them…
Dover Wilson argued that Shakespeare was intimately tied up with the Earl of Southampton’s circle of friends – and many of his plays were a debate with Southampton and Essex about the wisdom (or otherwise) of their plot to overthrow Queen Elizabeth.
Sadly he was mocked and derided by his nemesis W.W. Greg….
…….a textual scholar who hated real life to be brought into Shakespeare Studies – an attitude that was still around during our Chief Agent’s time at Cambridge University.
Greg described Dover Wilson’s ideas about Shakespeare as “the careerings of a not too captive balloon in a high wind”.
THE HORROR IS DOVER WILSON LISTENED TO HIM!
He even went as far to withdraw his ideas – saying he no longer believed in them.
BUT HE WAS RIGHT!
Dover Wilson believed that ‘Macbeth’ was first performed in Scotland in 1599 in an attempt to involve King James VI in the Essex Plot. The Code believes this is true – and has been developing these ideas on this blog and in a film script.
We believe that Shakespeare fled to Scotland after the Essex Plot failed – and became an intimate friend of King James VI.
The two men influenced each others thinking.
For example, both wrote poems comparing their male lovers to the fabulous Phoenix Bird…
The Code also believes that Shakespeare was up in Scotland earlier – in 1594 – as part of the English party to celebrate the baptism of Prince Henry at Stirling Castle.
The Earl of Sussex represented Queen Elizabeth.
He was part of the Southampton-Essex circle – and his men had performed ‘Titus Andronicus’ at the Rose Theatre earlier that year.
Originally King James was to include a live lion in the masque – they had one in Stirling Castle! – but dropped the idea because he thought the women would be frightened….Shakespeare, of course, recycles this in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’….
‘You ladies you whose gentle hearts do fear
The smallest monstous mouse that creps
May now perchance to quake and tremble here
While lion rough in wildest rage doth roar
Then know that I as Snug the joiner am…’
King James had built a replica of the Temple of Solomon at Stirling Castle….
….together with a Vault.
He staged pageants where the Templar Knights defeated the Turks – and wandered round dressed as a Templar Knight….
Recent research suggests that Freemasonry has its roots in Scotland – and was developed both by King James VI and his Master of Works, William Schaw……
…….who is known as ‘The Father of Freemasonry’. He designed the Temple at Stirling Castle.
The Temple of Solomon – both before its completion and after its destruction – is the setting for many Masonic rites – as is the Temple’s ‘Sacred Vault’.
Were Masonic Rites performed there in 1594? And was Shakespeare in attendance?
The Code will try to answer these questions – but in a ‘synchronistic’ way….
When Your Cat was on her Rehabilitation Programme she became very attracted to Muscular Christianity – and started to become a bit of a Church Cat.
Among the churches she visited was St. Mary le Strand……
……designed in 1714 by a young Scottish Freemason – and Jacobite! – called James Gibbs……
…….known to friends as ‘Signor Gibbi’.
Your Cat fell in love with the Church – and dragged the Code’s Chief Agent along with her – and he fell in love with it too. So much so that he became a member of the Parish Church Council there – and a Trustee!
Stewart became fascinated by the Church’s history – particularly a symbol in the apse….
He had a ‘hunch’ about it – as he does with most of his research – and followed it up.
The result is the Posts – ”Is St. Mary le Strand a Jacobite Church’ – Parts I, II and III – which will follow in the next few days…..
Jacobitism leads to Freemasonry leads to Scotland leads to James VI leads to William Shakespeare himself!
So Brothers and Sisters- please check for new posts – and above all
The Shakespeare Globe are currently staging ‘All’s Well that Ends Well’ – and they have come to the conclusion that Bertram and Parolles are having a gay affair….
The Shakespeare Code came to this conclusion some time ago – so we thought it was time to re-post our thoughts on the play….
Enjoy!
In the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson wrote:
I cannot reconcile my heart to Bertram; a man noble without generosity, and young without truth; who marries Helen as a coward, and leaves her as a profligate: when she is dead by his unkindness, sneaks home to a second marriage, is accused by a woman whom he has wronged, defends himself by falsehood, and is dismissed to happiness.
In the twentieth century, Arthur Quiller-Couch wrote :
We hold this play to be one of Shakespeare’s worst.
Even John Dover Wilson…..
…..the eminent Shakespearean who, in 1933, first suggested Shakespeare had been a teacher, factotum and entertainer for the Southampton family in Titchfield – wrote:
In the final scene it is hard to tell whether the verse or the sentiment it conveys is the more nauseating.
So is the play a failure?
It all depends on what Shakespeare was setting out to do….
Samuel Taylor Coleridge……
……the great poet and critic, was the first to suggest (in 1813) that…
All’s Well that Ends Well as it has come down to us, was written at two different and rather distant points of the poet’s life.
Coleridge thought that there were two distinct styles, not only of thought but of expression. This, The Shakespeare Code believes, also springs from the change in Shakespeare’s INTENTION from the first play to the second.
But what was this first play? And where and when was it performed?
The clue comes from a passage in Palladis Tamia, written by Francis Meres in 1598:
…..witness his [Shakespeare’s] Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love labors lost, his Love labors wonne, his Midsummers night dream, & his Merchant of Venice…
In All’s Well that Ends Well Helena says to Bertram:
Will you be mine, now you are doubly won?
…and the whole play rests on her heroic labours to make her husband love her.
It is The Code’s belief that Love’s Labour’s Won was the first version of All’s Well that Ends Well, that it was an answer to Love’s Labour’s Lost and, like that play, was performed in 1592 by a cast of professional actors and aristocrats (women as well as men) in private performance in Titchfield – to a commission from Mary Browne, Second Countess of Southampton.
Love’s Labour’s Lost is a light hearted, satirical play in praise of heterosexual love.
But it does not resolve in marriage: the Princess of France’s father dies in the course of the action.
This is because Countess Mary’s father, Lord Montague…..
…..and twin brother Anthony were both dying when the play was first performed at Whitsun.
A joyous ending to the play would have been totally inappropriate.
By December, though, both men were dead and it is highly probable from the title (though obviously we don’t have the text) that Love’s Labour’s Won was….
a Christmas comedy
…..that ended happily in love and marriage.
Given the bitterness of All’s Well that Ends Well, this may seem hard to believe: but Shakespeare’s source for the play – William Paynter’s translation of Boccaccio’s The Story of Giletta from his Decamerone – is a warm hearted romance, a fairy-story even….
‘Giletta’, who loves the ‘aimiable and fair’ Count Beltramo, [let’s call them Helena and Bertram from now on] is the rich and beautiful daughter of a celebrated Physician who has died. Because Bertram is an aristocrat, he has to leave Rossillion and became the King’s Ward of Court.
Helena – who from childhood has loved him…..
more than is meet for a woman of her age
…..determines to follow him and win his hand in marriage.
She does this by curing the King’s fistula with one of her father’s prescriptions….
….and the help of God.
The King has promised her that she can have the husband of her choice if she succeeds in curing him, but is horrified when she chooses the aristocratic Count Bertram .
Bertram is also horrified at the thought of marrying a commoner , but obeys his King.
However, he rushes off to the wars without consummating the marriage and Countess Helena returns to Rossillion , which has fallen into disrepair because Bertram has been away.
She gains everyone’s respect by the way she restores Rossillion, then sends word to her husband that she is prepared to leave the city if her presence there means he will never return.
Bertram replies that he will only live with her when she has his ring – valued for its healing powers – in her possession and…..
…a son in her arms begotten by me.
When she hears this, Helena leaves Rossillion so that he can return and, much to her subjects distress, sets off to become a Pilgrim.
By chance she encounters Bertram, from a distance, and learns he has fallen in love with another woman, respectable but poor.
Helena persuades the woman to gain Bertram’s ring as a token of his love, then, under cover of night, sleeps with her husband, posing as the woman he loves.
God arranges it that Helena conceives and, when she knows she is pregnant, she and the woman, richly rewarded by Helena, leave the town .
Helena gives birth to twins and nurses them while Bertram, urged back by his subjects, returns to Rossillion.
One day he is about to celebrate the All Saints Festival when Helena arrives in her pilgrim’s clothes, with two sons, not one, in her arms and her husband’s ring.
Bertram is astonished at her ‘constant mind and good wit’, clothes her in a beautiful dress fit for a Countess and….
….kept great chere. From that time forth, hee loued and honoured her, as his dere spouse and wyfe.’
Bertram, in the Boccaccio story, is in a situation very similar to Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton (‘Harry Southampton’), the Countess Mary’s only son .
Harry, like Betram, had a father who had died and was a ward of court. He was eager, like Bertram, to go off to fight the wars and, also like Bertram, was being asked to wed against his will.
Lord Burghley, his guardian…….
…….wanted Harry to marry Elizabeth de Vere, his granddaughter…….
…..and was threatening to impose a tremendous £5,000 fine on the Southampton family.
But there was one major difference between Harry and the Bertram in the story:
Harry was gay!
Countess Mary had commissioned Shakespeare to write seventeen Sonnets for Harry’s seventeenth birthday in 1590, urging him to marry Elizabeth and father a son and heir.
Mary had followed this up with another commission two years later – Love’s Labour’s Lost – in which a group of aristocratic men swear to give up the company of women to pursue their studies, but one by one succumb to their charms.
Shakespeare cast the dark-skinned musician and courtesan, Amelia Bassano – whom he had met and fallen in love with on the Queen’s Progress to Hampshire in 1591 – as the dark skinned coquette, Rosaline.
He cast himself as Berowne (a play on Countess Mary’s family name) as a Lord who attempts to seduce her…
After the show Amelia stayed on at Titchfield because the plague was raging in London and, as we know from Shakespeare’s Sonnets, art turned into life.
Harry was jealous of Amelia (he wanted to be the centre of Shakespeare’s attention) and when Shakespeare asked him to plead his love-suit with Amelia, Amelia swooped on Harry. Harry (despite himself) also swooped on Amelia.
A painful love-triangle ensued which ended in Amelia’s pregnancy and marriage to a minstrel ‘for colour’. It also ended in Shakespeare’s own realisation he was more in love with the boy than he was with the girl.
But Shakespeare knew that, as an aristocrat, Harry had to get married and have a son. Shakespeare, after all, was married with children himself. So he was happy to pen Love’s Labour’s Won to please Countess Mary and celebrate the worth of women and the worth of marriage.
But why, in All’s Well that Ends Well, written fifteen years later, did Shakespeare turn Bertram/Harry into a psychopath – that is, someone displaying……
…….amoral and antisocial behaviour, lack of ability to love or establish meaningful personal relationships, extreme egocentricity and failure to learn from experience?
The King in the play even suspects Bertram of murder….
Why did Shakespeare turn Bertram in to a psychopath?
The answer can again be found in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
They reveal an affair between Shakespeare and Harry that lasted from 1592…..
…….to 1605…..
There were infidelities and betrayals on both sides – lots of door-slamming and walk outs.
But the love survived Harry’s sudden onset of heterosexuality when he married Elizabeth Vernon – whom he adored…..
……and the birth of daughters.
It even survived the Essex Rebellion when Harry, along with his intimate friend the Earl of Essex, tried to overthrow Queen Elizabeth.
Essex was beheaded…….
…. and Harry, under sentence of death, was locked in the Tower.
What Shakespeare’s affair with Harry couldn’t survive, though, was the birth of a son to Elizabeth in 1605.
Shakespeare writes about this in 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 therin shows
Thy lover’s withering as thy sweet self growst;
Shakespeare had used the phrase……
…..sweet self……
…..in his Birthday Sonnets, fifteen years earlier, to mean Harry’s baby boy.
By having a son, Harry is able, miraculously, to both wane and wax at the same time.
He will grow weaker as time passes, but his baby will grow stronger.
Harry, besotted with his son, had neglected Shakespeare and this had led to his…..
….lover’s [Shakespeare’s] withering’….
In fact Harry had done more than neglect Shakespeare: he had rejected him outright.
Harry had hoped to become King James’s new boyfriend when he was released from the Tower: but James preferred prettier, younger men. The Tower and illness had taken their toll on Harry’s good looks.
Pushed from the gay centre of power, Harry became bitterly homophobic. He wanted his son to grow up to be a brave, straight soldier.
Sir Philip Sidney…….
…….Harry’s hero…..
…… had demonstrated in his Arcadia that a man could dress up as a woman on one day….
……and kill a lion the next.
Prince Pyrocles – cross-dressed as the Amazon Warrior, Zalmena – prepares to kill a lion. (From Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’).
But times had changed.
Shakespeare, the Player, had to go.
In Sonnet 126 Shakespeare finally wishes death on Harry:
If nature, sovereign mistress over wrack,
As thou gowest onwards still will pluck thee back,
She keeps thee to this purpose: that her skill
May time disgrace, and wretched minute kill.
Yet fear her, O thou minion of her pleasure:
She may detain, but not still keep her treasure!
Her audit, though delayed, answered must be,
And her quietus is to render thee.
Dame Nature might be keeping him preternaturally young and beautiful, but in the end she will have to give him over to Old Father Time and
….render….
….him – break down his body – in the grave….
The brackets at the end of the ‘Sonnet’……
….which at 12 lines isn’t a Sonnet at all…..
…..indicate that lines are missing from the poem….
…..and represent the yawning family tomb waiting for Harry in St. Peter’s Church in Titchfield.
Shakespeare then turned his attention to Love’s Labour’s Won.
He re-wrote it as an attack on his old lover.
All of Bertram’s redeeming features in the Boccaccio tale are wiped out.
He is no longer
a goodly young gentleman…
…or even…
….a courteous knight well-beloved in the city.
He becomes an unredeemed brute, snobbish, selfish, manipulative, mendacious, lustful and foolish….
…..whom even his mother condemns and disowns.
To make sure the audience would know Bertram was Harry, all the actor would have needed was to enter with a wig with long curly hair…..
But Shakespeare flashes up Bertram’s identity in the text as well….
Bertram becomes a General of Horse: Harry was a General of Horse on the Irish campaign.
Bertram woos Diana with song: Harry, in Shakespeare’s mind at least, was…..
…..music to hear……
Bertram hates cats: Harry hated cats.
He had himself painted with one in the Tower to show he had mastered his passions.
But Shakespeare’s intention wasn’t solely revenge.
He makes a fascinating change to the Boccaccio tale by introducing Bertram’s mother, the Countess of Rossillion.
Countess Mary died in 1607……
…….the year scholars now think Shakespeare wrote the play……
…..and was entombed close to her first husband, the Second Count of Southampton, in the family vault of St. Peter’s, Titchfield.
Shakespeare clearly loved Mary, who gave him his first real chances in life.
He celebrates her warmth and her wisdom and even her Roman Catholicism.
She makes a coded reference to the Virgin Mary in the play, Bertram’s only hope!
What angel shall
Bless this unworthy husband? he cannot thrive,
Unless her prayers, whom heaven delights to hear
And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath
Of greatest justice.
This was something very dangerous for a playwright to do two years after the Roman Catholic Gunpowder Plot.
Shakespeare also acknowledges the remarkable part Count Mary played in his relationship with Harry.
In this re-write of Love’s Labour’s Won, Helena is clearly Shakespeare in drag.
Boccaccio’s Helena is rich and independent: the All’s Well Helena is poor and vulnerable….
…..just as Shakespeare was when he joined the Southampton household in 1590.
When Helena says:
Twere all one
That I should love a bright particular star
And think to wed it, he is so above me:
In his bright radiance and collateral light
Must I be comforted, not in his sphere
…it could be Shakespeare himself speaking about Harry…..
….a point made by the visionary scholar Dover Wilson, in his Essential Shakespeare, as far back as the 1930s.
It is my belief that the remarkable scene in which Helena confesses her love to the Countess happened in real life….
…. and that Shakespeare confessed his love for Harry to Mary.
Early in her marriage, Countess Mary had fallen deeply in love with….
…..a common person…..
…..and her husband, Henry, the Second Count of Southampton…..
….disowned her and turned gay.
According to Countess Mary he made…
…His manservant his wife….
Mary swore in a letter to her father, Lord Montague……
…..England’s leading Roman Catholic….
…..that she had fallen in love with someone other than her husband……
…..but had never made love to him.
Helena, in the play, asks the Countess to empathise with her love for Bertram.
Had she herself ever loved passionately in her youth?
But restrained herself from acting out that love…..
….finding fulfilment in an act of non-fulfilment?
but if yourself,
Whose aged honour cites a virtuous youth,
Did ever in so true a flame of liking
Wish chastely and love dearly, that your Dian
Was both herself and love: O, then, give pity
To her, whose state is such that cannot choose
But lend and give where she is sure to lose;
That seeks not to find that her search implies,
But riddle-like lives sweetly where she dies!
The Countess, silently saying ‘yes’, gives her blessing to Helena’s liaison with her son…..
…..just as Mary gave hers to Shakespeare.
The Countess’s love had crossed barriers of class……
Shakespeare’s love crossed barriers of sex as well.
Shakespeare, in the play, was clearly examining his own feelings and behaviour.
He had often been a ‘Helena’ in his relationship with Harry…..
……besotted, passive and accepting…….
……sometimes waiting for hours for Harry to turn up.
Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desires?
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do, till your require:
Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour
Wjhilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,
Nor think the bitterness of absence sour
When you have bid your servant once adieu. (Sonnet 57)
Had he been right to cast himself as a…
…slave..
….and Harry as his….
…sovereign….?
As he was writing All’s Well, Shakespeare was also working on A Lover’s Complaint …..
……a narrative poem which concluded the volume of his Sonnets.
Here he does something similar to All’s Well……
….he casts himself as another woman and Harry as another psychopath!
To make sure everyone knew it was Harry, he described his….
….browny locks
…..which hung…..
…..in crooked curls
And every light occasion of the wind
Upon his lips their silken parcels hurls…
The woman/Shakespeare describes her seducer’s….
…..passion
…..like Harry/Bertram’s, as
…..an art of craft…..
She/he also observes that…
When he most burned in heart-wish’d luxury
He preached pure maid, and praised cold chastity.
But at the conclusion of the poem the woman – who is ‘the lover’ of the title – claims that she would go through the whole affair again!
A Lover’s Complaint was published a year or two after the first performance of All’s Well.
Had Shakespeare reached the same, positive conclusion when he wrote the play?
Not quite.
He was still trying to establish the truth of things.
He admits that Bertram/Harry…..
……however appalling they are as lovers…..
……are brave and skilful on the field of war.
That is what redeems them.
As the First Lord, speaking in what is surely Shakespeare’s own voice, says:
The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud, if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair, if they were not cherished by our virtues.
Also the Countess notices that, when Diana produces the ring that six generations of Bertram’s family have worn…..
…..and which he has traded in for a one-night stand with her…..
Bertram has the decency to blush.
So Harry was not entirely Satanic!
But what about Parolles?
Samuel Johnson wrote:
Parolles is a boaster and a coward, such as has always been the sport of the stage, but perhaps never raised more laughter or contempt than in the hands of Shakespeare.
Parolles – design by Osbert Lancaster.
Also:
Parolles has many of the lineaments of Falstaff and seems to be the character which Shakespeare delighted to draw, a fellow that has more of wit than virtue.
It is The Shakespeare Code’s belief that Parolles featured in the original Love’s Labour’s Won and has been re-written in All’s Well to make him darker and more loathsome.
He is sometimes similar to the braggart Spaniard, Armado, in Love’s Labour’s Lost…..
………who started off life as a satire on Sir Walter Raleigh…..
…….and even uses some of the same words and phrases.
But is the Parolles of All’s Well a satire as well?
The Code believes he is.
First of all, he is a satire on a ‘type’.
Harry Southampton had a taste for lower class young men, just as his mother had.
In his famous ‘They that have power to hurt’ Sonnet (94) Shakespeare warns Harry of the political, moral and sexual consequences of mixing with – and making love to – men outside his class.
It is better to masturbate than go to bed with a pleb!
The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die
But if that flower with base infection meet
The basest weed outbraves his dignity.
‘Base infection’ here means both moral contamination and the very real chance of contracting venereal disease.
The final couplet graphically nails this idea home:
For sweetest things [!] turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
Parolles contaminates Bertram.
Old Lafew describes him as…..
a snipt-taffeta fellow whose villanous saffron would have made all the unbaked and doughy youth of a nation in his colour
By the time Shakespeare came to write All’s Well, he had a real Captain in mind – Piers Edmondes.
A manuscript in the Marquis of Salisbury’s collection states:
Captain Piers Edmondes was also known to the Earl of Essex: he was so favoured as he often rode in a coach with him, and was wholly of his charges maintained, being a man of base birth in St. Clement’s Parish.
The Earl of Essex pursued a secret gay life from his own private bath house on the Strand…..
For a man to ride in a coach at the time was considered the height of effeminacy: for two men to ride together was an act of gross indecency. A….
coach-companion
…..according to Francis Bacon’s mother, was a synonym for a…..
bed-companion.
During the trial of Essex and Southampton after the Rebellion a letter was produced from William Reynolds (probably brother of Essex’s secretary, Edward) in which he…
marvelled what had become of Piers Edmondes, the Earl of Essex’s man, born in the Strand near me, who had many preferements by the Earl. His villainy I have often complained of. He was Corporal General of the Horse in Ireland under the Earl of Southampton. He ate and drank at his table and lay in his tent. The Earl of Southampton gave him a horse which Edmunds refused a hundred marks for him, the Earl of Southampton would cole and huge [embrace and hug] him in his arms and play wantonly with him. This Piers began to fawn and flatter me in Ireland, offering me great courtesy, telling me what pay, graces and gifts the Earls bestowed upon him, thereby seeming to move and animate me to desire and look for the like favour.
Just after the Rebellion, Edmondes himself had written to a Mr. Wade, explaining that….
….he had spent 20 years in the Queen’s service and when his old hurts received in that service burst out afresh, he was enforced to come to London for remedy but two days before that dismal day [the Rebellion] by which mischance, being among his Lordship’s people innocently, he stands in the like danger they do.
Hugging and kissing Harry to get presents from him, fawning and flattering Reynoldes to recruit him as a rent boy, sucking up to the two Earls for cash and favours and explaining to Wade that he may have been physically present at the Essex Rebellion but was NOT part of it, is pure, pure Parolles.
Simply the thing he was made Edmondes live…..
Two Academic Footnotes:
(1) Samuel Taylor Coleridge…..
……loved the character of Helena but was disturbed that she told a lie when she said to the widow:
His face I know not.
This was not a lie – it was an equivocation!
The word…..
face
…….for the Elizabethans and Jacobeans could mean the genital area.
As King Lear says at the height of his madness and sexual disgust…..
Behold yon simpering dame whose face between her forks presages snow….
And as Shakespeare says in his own voice in Sonnet 94, in praise of chaste people who do not sleep around:
They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces
And husband nature’s riches from expense [seminal emission]
They are the lords and owners of their faces
Others but stewards of the excellence.
So, as Helena had not yet been to bed with her husband at that point in the play, she was telling ‘the truth’!
(2) The Shakespeare Code has established that the text of All’s Well has NINE words or phrases that Shakespeare never uses again – but which Thomas Nashe does……
Shakespeare’s Links with the Church of St. Giles’ Without Cripplegate.
Fr. Jack Noble, the Rector of St. Giles’ without Cripplegate, invited Stewart Trotter to give a talk to the congregation on Sunday, 1st September, 2024.
Here is the transcipt.
XXX
William Shakespeare had two certain links with St. Giles’ Without Cripplegate.
From around 1604 he lodged with an immigrant family in a house on the corner of Silver Street and Muggle Street – near the Church but within the City Walls and in a different parish.
The two streets have since become part of the London Wall Car Park.
We also know that Shakespeare’s baby nephew, Edward – son of Shakespeare’s brother Edmund – was buried in the Churchyard of St. Giles on 12th August 1607.
But in the 1870s a Roman Catholic priest, Richard Simpson, suggested a much earlier, deeper, link with St. Giles’ that I should like to develop in this talk.
But first, and I have Father Jack’s permission to do so, I’d like to question some statements about Shakespeare on the Church’s website. To be honest I did this sometime in the last century – when the Church had leaflets rather than websites. No-one took any notice, so I’m here for a second go.
The Church website reads:
It is said that Shakespeare had to escape from Stratford-upon-Avon because he was going to be prosecuted for stealing deer from Charlecote Park, owned by Sir Thomas Lucy. Shakespeare fled to Cripplegate to stay with his brother, Edmund – and if he had attended St Giles’ he would have bumped into the Lucy family, as it was their parish church! Edmund, who was an actor like his brother and who is buried in Southwark Cathedral, had two sons who were baptised in St Giles’, and tradition has it that William Shakespeare acted as the chief witness.
It would have been difficult for Shakespeare to have stayed with his brother Edmund as he was only two at the time and living in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Edmund only had one son, Edward, who was certainly buried in the St. Giles’ churchyard, but was baptised at St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch – more than a mile away – on 12th July 1607.
The St. Giles’ clerk can’t have known Edmund very well because he mixes up his name with his baby’s name – but he does give gives us the information that Edmund was a ‘player’ and that his little son was ‘base born’ – that is, illegitimate.
It is unlikely at this time that Shakespeare attended services here. He was a mendacious Roman Catholic in league with a plotting Jesuit. At least that was the view of a parishioners of St. Giles’ who is buried in the church and has a monument on the south wall: the eminent historian and cartographer, John Speed.
He published his attack on Shakespeare in his ‘History of Britian’ in 1611 – when Shakespeare was still alive, at the height of his fame and was probably living round the corner.
But the laws of libel were draconian: in 1579 Queen Elizabeth had the right hand of a writer – who had dared criticise her wooing of Anjou – chopped off with a cleaver. He went under the unfortunate name of John Stubb.
So Speed couldn’t name Shakespeare directly. Instead, he referred to his plays.
When Shakespeare first created ‘the fat knight’, Falstaff, he gave him a different name – Sir John Oldcastle. Oldcastle had really existed – a Lollard who had been hanged for dissent at the beginning of the fifteenth century. He was revered by Protestants as a hero and martyr – but Shakespeare lampooned him as a scapegrace, a drunk and a thief.
Robert Persons – the radical Jesuit – followed suit.
He described Oldcastle as ‘a ruffian, a robber and a rebel.’
Speed attacks Persons and Shakespeare as ‘this papist and his poet, of like conscience for lies, the one ever feigning and the other ever falsifying the truth’.
‘Papist’ even in 1611 was a term of abuse – and in 1655 Thomas Fuller, an Anglican priest and historian, tells exactly the same story.
He writes about ‘malicious papists’ and ‘petulant poets’.
But we have to wait till 1688 for a direct statement Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic. Another Anglican priest and historian, called Richard Davies inherited the papers of yet another Anglican priest and historian, William Fullman, who claimed that Shakespeare ‘Died a papist’.
Certainly Shakespeare’s early years follow a Roman Catholic profile. His father John – as well as a glover, wool-dealer and butcher – was also the Bailiff of Stratford-upon-Avon – so rich he actually lent money to the council. But when his son Will entered his teens, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester – Queen Elizabeth’s favourite and lover – came to live at nearby Kenilworth Castle.
He began to harass Roman Catholics – forcing their attendance at Anglican church and raising their rents, sometimes ten times over.
Leicester was aided and abetted in Warwickshire by his ruthless Protestant agent, Sir Thomas Lucy….
……so rich and powerful he was able to entertain Queen Elizabeth at his new mansion at Charlecote.
John Shakespeare clung to the Old Faith, so Leicester ruined his business. John became so poor he had to remove Will from school to help work in the shop.
But a Catholic support network was forming. John Cottam – a Lancashire Catholic – became the Stratford schoolmaster. He was a friend, neighbour and tenant of the Roman Catholic Hoghton family – and there is a tradition – and even documentary evidence – that the teenage Shakespeare became a children’s tutor and entertainer at Hoghton Hall.
But Hoghton Hall was raided by Leicester’s soldiers and Will had to return home. He fell in love with family friend, Anne Hathaway……
……..wooed her with ballads, got her pregnant and married her.
Just at this time Leicester and Lucy arrested Edward Arden – a distant, aristocratic cousin of Will’s mother.
They accused him of harbouring a Catholic priest in his household and plotting against the Queen. He was found guilty of treason and hanged drawn and quartered. In what could well have been a Roman Catholic revenge, Will poached Sir Thomas Lucy’s deer – then hung a libellous poem about him on the gates of Charlecote.
The refrain was: ‘Lucy is lousy’.
Nicholas Rowe……
……in his 1709 biography of Shakespeare, the first ever written – gives his version of this story:
In this kind of settlement Shakespeare continued for some time, till an extravagance that he was guilty of, forced him both out of his country and his way of living which he had taken up, and though it seemed at first to be a blemish on his good manners, and a misfortune to him, yet it afterwards happily proved the occasion of exerting one of the greatest Genius’s that ever was known in dramatic poetry.
He had by a misfortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company; and amongst them, some that made a frequent practice of deer-stealing, engaged with them more than once in robbing a park that belonged to Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, near Stratford.
For this he was prosecuted by that Gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and in order to revenge that ill usage, he made a ballad upon him.
And though this, probably the first essay of his poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter, that it redoubled the prosecution against him to that degree, that he was obliged to leave his business and family in Warwickshire, for some time, and shelter himself in London.
Here the story hits a brick wall. Edmond Malone……
……an Irish lawyer writing at the end of the eighteenth century – dismissed Rowe’s biography as rubbish – and, though Malone had no story to put in its place, scholars have followed him ever since.
They have, literally, lost the plot.
BUT – Rowe was working on information he got from Thomas Betterton……..
…..an actor obsessed with Shakespeare who was the first to do field-work in Stratford-upon-Avon. He had worked with Sir William Davenant…….
……Shakespeare’s godson, who himself got his information from ‘old Mr Lowen’ who had been directed by Shakespeare. So Rowe’s biography has a provenance that goes right back to the Bard himself.
And the deer-poaching story has three other sources that pre-date Rowe – one of which is William Fullman – the same Fullman that wrote Shakespeare ‘died a Papist’. He says that ‘Shakespeare was much given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits, particularly from Sir Blank Lucy who oft had him whipped and sometimes imprisoned and at last made him fly his native country to his great advancement’.
The fact that Fullman doesn’t know Lucy’s Christian name makes the story ring all the more true. And if it IS true, Shakespeare was in considerable danger. Poaching deer led to at least three months in prison, a fine of three times the cost of the deer and sureties for seven more years. And as we have seen, the libel laws were even more terrifying.
Shakespeare had to get out of town.
After 1688 there is no mention of Shakespeare’s Roman Catholicism for nearly two hundred years. But then Richard Simpson came along. Educated at the heavily Anglo-Catholic Oriel College – and ordained as an Anglican priest in 1844 – he married a rich cousin and then, in 1846, went over to Rome. He was therefore no longer able to be a priest – but he became a Shakespeare scholar instead – earning praise from Matthew Arnold and William Gladstone.
He was the first person in modern times to assert that Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic.
And this is where St. Giles’ comes into its own. Simpson studied the pamphlets, poems and plays of the so-called ‘University Wits’ – contemporaries of Shakespeare but graduates from Oxford and Cambridge – Robert Greene…..
and Thomas Nashe….
Simpson found coded attacks on both Shakespeare and playwright Thomas Kyd. The Wits dismissed them as ‘grammarians’ – that is, grammar school boys with delusions of grandeur.
Kyd came from a Catholic family like Shakespeare – and it could well be that the Catholic network put them together. Greene and Nashe reveal that they were both ‘noverints’ – that is, lawyers’ clerks – who worked and lived in the City of Westminster – but would collaborate by candlelight at night and then starch their beards and take a walk down the Strand to the City of London to ‘turn over French dowdie’ – that is, get up to no good – as Shakespeare’s young brother, Edmund, was clearly later to do….
But, intriguingly, Nashe describes how Kyd and Shakespeare would ‘shrift to the vicar of S. Fooles, who instead of a worser be such a Gothamist’s ghostly father’. People from the town of Gotham were famously stupid..
And Greene writes how Kyd and Shakespeare ‘cannot write true English without the help of clerks of Parish churches.’
Greene goes on to complain that Kyd and Shakespeare wrote plays that ‘abuse scripture’ by drawing on sentiments and whole phrases from the Bible – and quote examples of this from a play called ‘The Fair Em’ – first performed by Lord Strange’s Men……
………and attributed by King Charles II’s librarian to William Shakespeare.
It has resemblances to ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’. The lovers overhear their rivals reciting their love verse – and there is a part similar to Berowne – the plain-speaking Valingford, who falls in love with the Miller’s daughter, the Fair Em of the title – and stays true to her even though she feigns blindness to test his love. A perfect part for Shakespeare.
The play also has a low life character who lusts after Em, carries a chamber pot with him and threatens to break wind.
His name is Trotter.
The play was performed in the City of London – but has references, some of them topical, to Manchester, Lancashire and Cheshire.
Lord Strange was made Mayor of Liverpool in 1585, Alderman of Cheshire in 1587 and Lord Lieutenant of Lancashire and Cheshire in 1588 – so the play most probably toured the Midlands first.
Simpson believed that Shakespeare wrote ‘The Fair Em’ – as do some modern scholars – but others think it was Kyd. Kyd later became employed by Lord Strange – so my own belief is that ‘The Fair Em’ – which has a double plot – was a collaboration between the two men.
Greene finally spikes the identity of the ‘vicar of Saint Fooles’ and ‘the clerks of parish churches’ by writing:
In charity be it be spoken I am persuaded that the sexton of St. Giles without Cripplegate would have been ashamed of such blasphemous rhetoric.
This leads Simpson to hint in an index that the vicar of St. Fooles was the vicar of St. Giles, the Rev Robert Crowley – who was also a printer and poet and who was buried in the chancel of this church.
But I would like to suggest another priest was involved: John Foxe…..
………the author of ‘Acts and Monuments’, better known as ‘Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’ – who was also buried in the chancel, next to Crowley and under the same stone.
Crowley and Foxe were a double act from the start. They were both born in the Midlands around 1516 to 1519 in the reign of King Henry VIII. In the 1540s they became scholars at the fiercely Catholic Magdalen College, Oxford – where both men secretly converted to Protestantism. The authorities, becoming suspicious, spied on both men. Foxe said it was like being in prison.
The crunch came when – to continue as Fellows at the college – both men had to be ordained. Foxe described this proposed celibacy as ‘castration’.
Both men fled Oxford and became tutors to Protestant families – Crowley to the children of Sir Nicholas Poyntz at Iron Acton in Gloucestershire – and Foxe to the fourteen year old Thomas Lucy at Charlecote in Warwickshire.
Foxe ruled himself out of the priesthood – for the time being at least – by getting married.
In 1547 King Henry died………
King Edward succeeded him at the age of nine……..
…………..and England became a Protestant Country. Both Crowley and Foxe made their way to London.
Crowley started to write – and he had a lot to write about. By dissolving the monasteries, King Henry had ended one form of corruption – but had opened the door to another. It lead to a Protestant scramble for wealth and power – and the complete neglect of the poor and the sick who had been looked after by the monks.
Crowley and Foxe were no proto-Marxists. They hated Robert Kett’s rebellion in Norfolk in 1549.
They believed that the rich man was in his castle and the poor man at his gate because God had put them there. But what could be done about poverty and starvation?
Crowley and Foxe – along with other so-called ‘common wealth’ writers – came to the conclusion that the rich must re-distribute their wealth – and do so voluntarily.
Crowley furiously attacked all those ‘possessioners’—especially ‘engrossers of farms, rack-renters, enclosers, leasemongers, usurers and owners of tithes’—who failed to practise good stewardship. But to give charity a helping hand, Crowley and Foxe petitioned Parliament to change the law – and threatened the greedy rich with the torments of hell.
Crowley set up a printing press in Ely Rents, Holborn – and was the first university man to become a printer and publisher. Both Crowley and Foxe were evangelicals as well as puritans. Their dream was to popularise Protestant Christianity and make it accessible to everybody.
Crowley wrote a volume of epigrams – which attacked drunkenness – while admitting that Curates often drank more than their parishioners – attacked bear-baiting – ‘a full ugly sight’ – and even attacked bowling alleys.
But, most interesting of all, the epigrams attacked women who dyed their hair and used make-up:
Let thine apparel be honest;
Be not decked past thy degree
Neither let thou thine head be dressed
Otherwise than beseemeth thee.
Let thine hair bear the same colour
That nature gave it to endure;
Lay it not out as doeth a whore
That would men’s fanatasies allure.
Paint not thy face in any wise
But make thy manners for to shine
And thou shalt please all such men’s eyes
As do to Godliness incline.
Bishop Nicholas Ridley saw the potential in both Crowley and Fox…….
…….and ordained them deacons. But King Edward died at the age of fifteen, his half-sister Mary Tudor ascended the throne……..
………and England became Roman Catholic again.
And again a dangerous place for Crowley and Foxe. Both men fled to Europe – with Foxe and his pregnant wife narrowly escaping arrest. By 1555 they were both in Frankfurt – the year Bishop Ridley suffered a slow and agonising death at the stake…..
During this, Foxe later reported, Ridley continually cried out:
Let the fire come unto me. I cannot burn.
Foxe had already started to chronicle the lives and deaths of historical Protestant martyrs – but now he undertook to cover present-day martyrs as well. In a very modern way, he started to interview all those people who had witnessed their deaths.
It became his obsession, so all-consuming it finally killed him.
Crowley and Foxe now so hated the Pope – whom they denounced as ‘Satan’ and ‘The Antichrist’ – and all the ‘Romish rags’ of his ceremonials, they even refused to wear surplices.
Queen Mary died in 1558. Queen Elizabeth ascended the throne………
….. and England was Protestant again. Crowley and Foxe were heroes.
Crowley returned to England the following year with a new wife – and was immediately given a church sinecure. He gave up printing as he realised that he could reach more people by preaching.
Foxe was also given a sinecure which allowed him to write the first English version of his martyrology, printed in1563. It went on to become, after the Bible, the most popular book in English.
In his Epigrams Crowley had attacked Priests who held more than one office. By 1565 he held five – the last of which was Vicar of St. Giles’. But Foxe and Crowley really did practice what they preached. They gave all their own money to the poor – so much so that Crowley’s widow was left destitute and had to be bailed out by a pension from the Stationers’ Company.
But there was a problem. Queen Elizabeth, a mass of contradictions, had been brought up as a Calvinist – but was aesthetically attracted to Rome. She had lit candles on her private altar and celebrated the Mass in Latin months after it was illegal to do so.
She demanded her priests to wear copes and vestments.
Crowley confronted Archbishop Parker about this…..
….and accused the Queen of ‘caprice’. He insisted he would never wear ‘the conjuring garments of popery’. The following year, 1566, he entered St. Giles’ to find a funeral service being conducted with all the lay clerks wearing surplices.
What followed was described euphemistically as ‘a tumult’ – but it was a punch up so severe it led to Crowley’s imprisonment and dismissal.
Foxe unofficially took over the running of St. Giles’s for the next twelve years. He moved into Grub Street – now Milton Street – just round the corner from the Church and lived there, in the parish, till his death.
In 1571 Sir Thomas Lucy became the M.P. for Warwickshire which entailed attendances at Parliament in Westminster – and where better to worship than St. Giles’ where his old boyhood tutor, Foxe, was taking the services.
We know it later became a Lucy family church because his great granddaughter, Margaret, was buried here – and has a memorial.
Crowley softened in retirement – especially when the Pope issued his 1570 Bull which ordered Catholics to disobey Queen Elizabeth. He became fiercely patriotic and even agreed to wear vestments to please the Queen. He was forgiven and re-instated as the Vicar of St. Giles in 1578.
So when Lucy visited London again in 1584, Crowley was in situ but his old tutor was living round the corner.
Shakespeare by then had been in London for a couple of years – on the run from Lucy. What more natural than to seek help from the two priests who not only knew Lucy but were writers as well – one of them a celebrity.
And what more natural than for the priests to intercede with Lucy – and then to ask for something back from Shakespeare in return. My belief is that Crowley and Foxe got Shakespeare to write Biblical Plays and Morality plays – like ‘The Fair Em’ – and tour the Midlands with them.
But what evidence do we have? Again, the coded attacks of the University Wits. Greene’s famous ‘Upstart Crow’ attack on Shakespeare also has a passage which is rarely quoted in which ‘Roberto’ – Greene – confronts ‘The Player’ – Shakespeare.
‘Roberto’ says:
I took you rather for a Gentleman of great living, for if by outward habit men should be censured, I tell you, you would be taken for a substantial man.’
So am I where I dwell (quoth the player) reputed able at my proper cost to build a Windmill. The world once went hard with me, when I was fain to carry my playing fardle on footback; but it is otherwise now; for my very share in playing apparel will not be sold for two hundred pounds.
Truly (said Roberto) ‘tis strange that you should so prosper in that vain practice for that it seems to me your voice is nothing gracious. Nay then, said the Player, I mislike your judgement: why I am as famous for Delphrigus and the King of Fairies, as ever was any of my time. The twelve labours of Hercules have I terribly thundered on the stage, and played three scenes of the Devil on the High Way to Heaven. Have ye so? (said Roberto) then I pray you pardon me. Nay more (quoth the Player) I can serve to make a pretty speech, for I was a country Author, passing at a Moral, for ‘twas I that penned the Moral of Man’s Wit, the Dialogue of Dives, and for seven years space was absolute interpreter to the puppets. But now my almanac is out of date:
‘The people make no estimation
Of moral’s teaching education’.
After seven years, it seems, the public had tired of morally uplifting plays.
Simpson believes there is also a scurrilous satire on Shakespeare’s touring days in the play called ‘Histrio Mastix’ – which he thinks was originally written by another University Wit, George Peele.
Shakespeare becomes an actor called ‘Posthaste’ who leads a tiny troop of would-be actors – and whose artistic inspiration springs directly from alcohol. He and his actors cannot give any money to the poor because they are so poor themselves – and are entirely dependent on ‘the merry knight, Sir Oliver Owlet’ – a satire on Lord Strange – and their ‘ingles’ – their rich gay lovers – brewers and hobby horse makers – who are constantly ‘troubling’ rehearsals.
The company finally collapses with the threat of the Armada. People regard actors as skiving and unpatriotic – and soldiers seize the costumes of the actors for the ‘real men’ who are fighting the Spaniards. Postehaste says he has ‘no stomach for these wars’ – and resolves to ‘boldly fall to ballading again’.
There’s a member of the St. Giles’ congregation who would have despised this attitude of Postehaste’s – Martin Frobisher……
……..who led one of the four squadrons against the Armada – and is also buried in the church.
How much of Peele’s satire is true, we shall never know. But we do know that Foxe died in April 1587 and Crowley in June 1588 – Armada year.
And in November1589 Shakespeare’s touring career was brought to an abrupt end. Lord Burghley – Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary of State – had requested that the Lord Mayor stop all plays being performed in London. The Lord Mayor said he could answer for only two companies – the Lord Admiral’s and Lord Strange’s.
The Lord Admiral’s Men had obeyed him but ‘the latter parted from him in a very contemptuous manner’ – and went and played at Cross Keys that very afternoon: ‘whereupon he had admitted two to the Counter’.
The Counter was a prison – and ‘contemptuous manner’ sounds very like Shakespeare…..
Nashe’s nick-name for him was ‘Caesar’!
So how did Shakespeare – in the ‘Upstart Crow’ attack – end up possessing theatre costumes worth £200?
Was the Catholic network at work again?
Nicholas Rowe certainly suggests it was. He says – again with evidence from William Davenant – that the Roman Catholic Third Earl of Southampton……
……..gave Shakespeare the gift of £1,000. And all the indications are that by 1590 Shakespeare was in the pay of the Southampton family.
He wrote seventeen sonnets to celebrate the Third Earl’s seventeenth birthday. In these sonnets he plays on the family motto – ‘Ung par tout’ – ‘All for One’ – and praises the Earl’s dead father and beautiful, widowed mother, the Second Countess, Mary.
Mary was an ardent Roman Catholic – and even sheltered Jesuit Priests in her London home in Holborn. The Jesuit Robert Southwell………
……was thought to be the Third Earl’s confessor. He was also a poet and the ‘burning babe’ imagery he uses in his work is thought to have influenced the ‘naked, new-born babe’ image Shakespeare uses in ‘Macbeth’.
Shakespeare was also influenced by Robert Persons way before the Oldcastle scandal. Persons wrote the ironically titled ‘Leicester’s Commonwealth’ – an attack on the Earl of Leicester – comparing him, among other villains, to King Richard III.
Shakespeare’s ‘Richard III’ can be read as a satire on the Queen’s favourite.
Both men pose as holy men – and both murder and seduce their way to the top.
Shakespeare also makes an unconscious slip in an early printings of the of the play when he names King Richard ‘the Bear’…….
But the Bear and Ragged Staff was Leicester’s symbol . He should have written ‘the Boar’ which was King Richard III’s symbol.
He changed ‘bear’ to ‘boar’ in subsequent editions of the play.
Also Shakespeare’s only purchase of land in London, in 1613, was Blackfriars’ Gate – a notorious recusant hideaway, famous for its secret passages down to the Thames, priest holes and Latin Masses.
So Shakespeare had soon thrown off the influence of Crowley and Foxe.
But had he? There remains a bizarre Puritan streak in Shakespeare’s writing right to the end.
Hamlet attacks Ophelia for wearing make-up:
I have heard of your paintings too, well enough: God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another.
And King Lear – in his great prayer on the heath – calls for the voluntary redistribution of wealth:
Take physic, Pomp, expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou must shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just.
Of course, you could say these were the thoughts of characters in his plays – not Shakespeare’s own thoughts. But we can find Puritan ideas in his private sonnets as well.
They reveal Shakespeare hates make up. He hates the use of wigs. He hates artifice in writing. He hates artifice in speaking. He hates promiscuity. He hates lust. He hates, at times, the whole of greedy, power-driven, frivolous, Elizabethan society.
And his great sonnet 146 is actually a Puritan prayer. Shakespeare addresses his own soul and describes his body as his ‘sinful earth’. ‘Rebel powers’- his physical appetites – persuade his soul to dress his body in fine clothes and give him food and drink in excess.
He is like a man who paints the walls of his house in a flashy way to give the appearance of being rich while he is, in reality, drooping with hunger and want.
Shakespeare resolves to…
…..feed on death, that feeds on men,
And death once dead, there’s no more dying then.
Did Shakespeare follow this ascetic path? A glance at his monumental bust in Stratford Parish Church would suggest not.
Indeed there are anecdotes of his passing out during drinking bouts at Stratford – and the Stratford vicar, John Ward, reported in 1663 that he died after a ‘merry meeting’ with Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton.
And for every Puritan Sonnet you can find a Roman Catholic – or even a pagan one. Shakespeare employs images and phrases from Catholic church ceremonial – and even scripture – to celebrate his love for the Earl of Southampton. And at the end of the day he, like Ovid, is far more interested in the immortality of his verse than of his soul.
Shakespeare wandered furthest away from the teachings of Crowley at the end of his short life. He mixed with rich crooks and villains at the Bear tavern in Stratford – the Combe family and a man called Replingham who planned to do what Crowley hated most: enclose the land.
This meant that the poor would lose common pasture and fuel for their fires. Replingham would farm sheep which, according to Sir Thomas More, ‘eat up, and swallow down the very men themselves’.
The whole Puritan council of Stratford was against the enclosures – and wrote to Shakespeare for his support. Shakespeare stood to lose money as he had bought outright a share of the parish tithes – again a practice Cowley deplored.
The loss of peoples’ incomes would affect Shakespeare’s own pocket.
But instead of siding with the Council, Shakespeare came to an understanding with Replingham. He would be compensated for any loss. Shakespeare drafted the contract himself in his own hand.
He – and his son-in-law, the Puritan doctor John Hall – kept insisting the enclosures would never happen. But they did. There were fist fights between the Councillors and Replingham’s thugs – and by night the women and children of Stratford – including, it seems, Shakespeare’s own daughter Judith – would fill in the holes Replingham’s men had dug.
But Shakespeare did nothing – and this so shocked the playwright Edward Bond……
………he wrote his play ‘Bingo’ as a response. He had assumed Shakespeare would be as Socialist as he was.
But what Bond didn’t know about was a diary entry for September, 1615 by Thomas Greene – the Stratford Town Clerk and a relative of Shakespeare. He records how Shakespeare confessed to Greene’s brother, John, that:
he was not able to bear the enclosing of Welcombe.
Shakespeare died a few months later and the enclosures stopped. Whether he did anything to bring this about we may never know.
But I like to think he finally acted on the ‘common wealth’ principles he had heard Crowley preach, all those years ago, in this beautiful church.
At the Q. and A. session after The Shakespeare Code’s talk to the Titchfield History Society, there was one question on everybody’s lips…..
How could Titchfield – and the Earl of Southampton – have been so airbrushed from The Rise of a Genius – the BBC T.V. biography of Shakespeare?
Why was there no mention of the man to whom Will had dedicated, in respectful and loving terrms, two, long, narrative poems?
Several theories were put forward…..
The first was power. Stratford-upon-Avon was in no mood to yield its supremacy in the Shakespeare story.
The Code’s Chief Agent revealed that Melvyn Bragg…..
……..had written a letter to him (at the start of the century!) which said:
‘Watch out, Stratford-upon-Avon!’.
Also there are two modern assumptions which blinded the BBC to the truth:
(1) A genius is a lone figure producing masterpieces in solitude.
What the Titchfield Theory offers is the idea of a collective genius – a group of people coming together with like aims and ambitions – one of whom, at least, is very talented……
……and one of whom, at least, is very rich!
(2) Good art will always make money.
You only have to run a theatre, as The Code’s Chief Agent has done, to realise this is simply not true. The public are reluctant to attend anything that’s new or strange – and writers producing challenging scripts needs all the financial aid they can muster.
Southampton not only supplied Shakespeare with £1,000 – he provided him with an appreciative, intelligent, educated and daring public….
….the Elizabethan…..
…….and Jacobbean…….
…….royalty and aristocracy.
But there is another factor – which we have named ‘Swift Syndrome’.
Johnathan Swift…….
…….wrote:
‘When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him’.
We have observed, in our research for this talk, this phenomenon occurring time after time.
For example….
In 1709 Nicholas Rowe sleuths out two great stories about Shakespeare….
1. He poached deer from Sir Thomas Lucy’s park.
2. Harry gave him a gift of £1,000.
Edmond Malone – who never once visits Stratford – comes along seventy years later and rubbishes these discoveries.
Scholars then parrot what Malone said for the next 150 years!
Dover Wilson – linking literature with history – posits the theory in the 1920s and 30s that Will was a tutor to Harry at Titchfield, got involved in the Essex Rebellion and travelled to Scotland to persuade King James to invade England.
Dover Wilson’s nemesis, W.W. Greg, the editor of the Malone Society no less, describes Dover Wilson’s theories as…..
‘the careerings of a not too captive balloon in a high wind.’
Sadly, Dover Wilson, a sensitive man, takes this criticism to heart, and rescinds many of his theories.
He even follows fashion by declaring that ‘the lovely boy’ is in fact William Herbert.
This fashion comes largely from E. K. Chambers…….
…..(the first President of the Malone Society) who had originally thought ‘the lovely boy’ was Harry – but changes his mind in 1930 and names him as William Herbert, the Third Earl of Pembroke.
Many of the scholar-lemmings follow.
As late as 2010, Katharine Duncan-Jones – in her updated Arden edition of the Sonnets – writes:
‘Dover Wilson’s speculations are attractive. He suggested that the Countess of Pembroke ‘asked [Shakespeare] to meet the young lord at Wilton, on his seventeenth birthday’ and commissioned him to compose an appropriate number of pro-marriage sonnets for the occassion’. This would locate sonnets 1-17 in April 1597.’
But the Herbert Theory can be demolished in a second…..
In Sonnet 13 Will writes to the young man:
You had a father – let your son say so.
William Herbert’s father, though ill, was still alive in 1597.
Harry Southampton’s father in 1590 – the year of Harry’s seventeenth birthday – had been dead for nearly a decade!
[The Second Earl of Southampton – Photo Ross Underwood]
The Shakespeare Code sincerely hopes that it will hear no more about William Herbert as ‘the lovely boy’.
He was clearly Harry Southampton!
To return to ‘Swift Syndrome’….
The distinguished Cornish historian, A. L. Rowse….
……discovers in 1973 that the Dark Lady of the Sonnets was Amelia Bassano/Lanyer.
She fits the role to perfection – down to her musicianship, her flirtations and even the way she ‘rolls’ her eyes….
Rowse writes an article for The Times, makes a couple of unimportant technical mistakes and Stanley Wells rubbishes the whole theory on BBC radio…..
……..putting back Shakespeare Studies by at least fifty years.
Prof. Roger Prior – who believes, along with the Shakespeare Code, that Amelia was the Dark Lady and Harry the ‘lovely boy’ and that Will visited Italy in 1593 – puts Wells’s response down partly to the ‘New Criticism’ – a movement that came from America in the 1920s and 30s – which….
‘…removes the author from the text.The author’s thoughts and intentions, it is claimed, can never be known, and are in any case quite irrelevant to our understanding of his work. A Shakespeare sonnet may seem to be addressed to the Earl of Southampton, but this may be no more than a clever fictional trope…the literary work of art has nothing to do with the world…..’
This movement was inspired by an essay written by T.S. Eliot….
…..over a hundred yhears ago!
He wrote:
‘The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.’
The reason Eliot wrote this is that he was afraid that when people discovered how appalling he was in his private life, they would shun his poetry.
But F. R. Leavis – a Cambridge, bicycling don…..
…….was flattered by Eliot’s attention – and taken in by him – even if his wife Queenie wasn’t.
So Eliot’s beliefs swamped the whole of Academic life in Britain and America – up to Rowse’s ‘Dark Lady’ discovery in 1973.
But Stanley Wells is still everywhere….
Even the Code’s Chief Agent has been attacked by him!
He wrote Love’s Labour’s Found in 2000…
…….and appeared in a Meridian TV documentary – developing Dover Wilson’s theory that Love’s Labour’s Lost was first performed at Titchfield.
Wells – now the Director of the Shakespeare Birthplace Institute no less – describes the book as….
……’charming’….
…..but finally dismisses the book as….
‘semi-fiction’.
At least Stanley used the word ‘semi’!
He promised to write his own book on Will and Harry – but it has never seen the light of day.
*********
On the way back to West London on the train, Stewart shared an amazing coincidence with Your Cat.
His mother had been a talented tailoress – and had worked in the rag trade at Malone’s old house in London W1.
She managed to get a flat round the corner for her son – where he lived for seven years.
Now the extraordinary thing is that Malone’s house was in Langham Street –
….which was on property once owned by the Earl of Southampton…..
(It’s best to read Parts One and Two first. The Story continues…)
Mary Southampton summons Will…..
She has found out about the liaison between Will and Harry and is furious. But Will reminds her that her own love once crossed barriers of class.
Can’t she give her blessing to one that crosses barriers of sex?
She does – and Harry and Will travel to Europe in 1593 – as spies for the Earl of Essex and to celebrate their love.
In Spain Will and Harry see Titian’s paintings of Venus and Adonis...….
…..and The Rape of Lucrece..
They then travel on to Rome – where they see the newly erected obelisk in front of St. Peter’s…..
……and buy Italian novellas that Will transforms into plays.
When Harry and Will return to England, they find that Marlowe has been killed in a gay brawl – and that Kyd, under torture, has betrayed Marlowe’s atheism to the authorities. Mary Southampton commissions a narrative poem from Will based on Titian’sVenus and Adonis – and he uses the same colours in his verse that the artist does in his painting.
The poem has gay undertows – but basically celebrates the idea of heterosexual love – which remains unfulfilled.
Mary still hopes that her son will one day marry.
Harry is nominated for the Order of the Garter and Will warns him to be careful about his promiscuity with lower class young men, as this could be used against him politically – as indeed it was at his trial after the Essex Rebellion in 1601.
In 1594 – as we have seen – Harry commissions a poem from Will based on The Rape of Lucrece.
This is a massive chance for Will to write a serious poem – and he retires to Stratford to write it – again drawing on Titian’s original colours. But he neglects to write love-sonnets to Harry.
George Chapman…..
…….an older, impoverished poet – seizes his chance and starts to write poems to Harry that out-flatter even Will’s.
Will is desperate as he sees his source of income drying up – but Mary Southampton comes to his aid.
She commissions Will to write A Midsummer Night’s Dream to celebrate her wedding, in 1594, to Sir Thomas Heneage, at Copt Hall in Essex.
Despite the terrible summer weather, this play is such a triumph that Harry dumps Chapman and gives Will the famous present of £1,000. Will and Harry resume their affair – with lapses, it must be admitted, on both sides.
But Will finds it disturbing that Harry never shows any signs of guilt on his face…
In August 1596 Will’s son, Hamnet, dies. Will, ironically, is working on a new version of Hamlet at the Swan Theatre and has no time to mourn properly. He goes off the rails and is bound over to keep the peace – along with a bunch of low-lifers and prostitutes – after threatening violence to one William Wayte.
As a result Harry cannot be seen with Will – but in time, the two men resume their liaison, and Harry becomes Will’s surrogate son as well as his lover.
But finally Harry does fall in love with a woman – Elizabeth Vernon……
……a poor cousin of the Earl of Essex and lady-in-waiting to the Queen. Harry asks Will’s help to gain her favours by writing a love-play they can perform at Titchfield – Romeo and Juliet’
Will is ambivalent about this – and creates the disturbed figure of Mercutio for himself to play. But in the end he realises that he still has a spiritual relationship with Harry – ‘the marriage of true minds’.
Politics now take over from love. Both the Earl of Essex and Harry want to depose Queen Elizabeth because she will not name her successor – and they fear a civil war will ensue. Also Elizabeth refuses to give freedom of worship to Catholics – a cause Essex supports, though he is a Protestant.
Will is recruited into the plot – and is sent to Scotland in 1599 to persuade King James to invade England by performing Macbeth. This play prophesies – through the Three Witches – that the Stuart line will take over the throne of England as well as Scotland.
It also condemns the Macbeths for killing their royal guest – in the way Elizabeth has beheaded James’s mother, Mary Queen of Scots, when she sought refuge in England.
Will, though, realises that the rebellion is lost when Essex fails to quell an uprising in Ireland. He writes Julius Caesar to show how badly rebellions can go – but Essex and Harry go ahead with theirs and have the Chamberlain’s Men put on Richard II – a play about the deposition of a King – on the eve of the Essex rebellion.
Queen Elizabeth famously says: ‘I am Richard – know ye not that?’
Will flees to Scotland in a state of suicidal despair. Essex is beheaded – but Harry’s death sentence is commuted to life imprisonment in the Tower, where he becomes so ill people fear he will die.
But Elizabeth herself dies in 1603 and everything turns round. Will comes back to London and writes sonnets to his friend King James, imploring him to release Harry from the Tower: they are sent with a ‘wooing’ portrait of Harry…
…..depicting him with his hair loose, like a bride’s, and offering his left hand to the King.
Will writes:
Ah wherefore with infection should he live
And with his presence grace impiety,
That sin by him advantage should achieve
And lace itself with his society?
[Why should Harry still be locked up in the Tower of London, living with ‘infection’: (1) The literal infection of the Tower with its vermin (2) The moral infection of being imprisoned with criminals and (3) The infection of his own illness – his arm is still in a sling. And why should he give the grace of his being to sinful fellow convicts and allow them to hobnob with him as equals?]
The Sonnets do the trick – and on 5th April, James VI and I writes to the Privy Council:
‘Because the place is unwholesome and dolorous to him to whose body and mind we would give present comfort, intending unto him much further grace and favour, we have written to the Lieutenant of the Tower to deliver him out of prison presently.’
Harry is released from the Tower on 9th April, 1603 and Will writes a sonnet of pure joy.
Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come,
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Suppos’d as forfeit to a confin’d doom.
[Neither my own anxieties nor the predictions of everybody else about the future can stop the release from the Tower of my lover – whom everyone thought would die in prison]
The mortal Moon hath her eclipse indur’d,
And the sad Augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown them-selves assur’d,
And peace proclaims Olives of endless age.
[Queen Elizabeth – the Moon-Goddess – has proved to be a human being after all. She has died – and those who predicted strife and civil war at her death have been proved wrong and laugh at what they themselves prophesied. Anxieties have given way to confidence, and the peace that has greeted the accession of King James promises peace for all time].
Now with the drops of this most balmy time,
My love looks fresh and death to me subscribes,
Since spite of him I’ll live in this poor rime,
While he insults ore dull and speechless tribes;
[The accession of King James has been like a healing balm to my beloved Harry, who now looks young and well. Even death now supports my writing since I will live on in this, my second-rate verse, while death triumphs over whole swathes of dim-witted and inarticulate people].
And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
When tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent.
[And this poem, Harry, will be your monument – when the crests and brass tombs of tyrants like Queen Elizabeth will be in ruins].
‘Crests’ is a coded dig at Elizabeth. She once described herself as ‘cloven and not crested.’ Here Will gives her a crest and turns her into a man – a rumour about Elizabeth that had circulated for years. But even her crest – her honorary penis – will crumble into dust.
Will had met Harry in the summer of 1590. Their relationship – with all its infidelities and ups and downs – had lasted a full thirteen years.
The pasteboard obelisks set up on James’s coronation route were blown down by the wind….
– but they reminded Will of the genuine obelisk he and Harry had seen in Rome – and Will compared his love with Harry to the eternity of its stone.
But their affair was soon to end. It had survived Harry’s marriage to Elizabeth Vernon – which proved a very happy one – and had survived the birth of daughters to the couple. But in 1605 everything changed. Elizabeth produced a son.
Harry, by this time, had grown disenchanted with the gay world of James’s Court. He had hoped to become the King’s favourite – but, although only thirty, he was too old for James. The younger sons of the Countess of Pembroke – William and Philip Herbert – became the King’s favourites. Harry was marginalised.
Harry, alienated by events, wanted his son – named James after the King – to become a brave and masculine soldier.
Will, the Old Player, had to go.
So, not only had Will lost his real son – he had now lost his surrogate son as well.
He responds by writing Harry a sonnet of pure poison: the phrase ‘lovely boy’ is bitter and sarcastic.
O thou my lovely Boy who in thy power
Dost hold time’s fickle glass, his sickle’s hour:
Who hast by waning grown, and therein show’st
Thy lover’s withering, as thy sweet self grow’st;
[Harry, you seem to have complete control of Father Time’s hour-glass and his sickle – with which he cuts life away. You have enacted the miracle of growing bigger by diminishing: you have waned but your other ‘self’ – your baby son – has waxed. But as your baby grows – and is given all your attention – I, your lover, am withering away from your neglect].
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.
[If Dame Nature – who is the supreme controlling mistress of decay – keeps you unnaturally young – by preserving your ‘loveliness’ and giving you a son – her motive for doing this is to humiliate Father Time and destroy his pitiful minutes.]
Yet fear her, O thou minion of her pleasure;
She may detain, but not still keep her treasure!
Her Audit(though delayed) answer’d must be,
And her Quietus is to render thee.
[But be very frightened of your mistress, Dame Nature – you plaything of her lust. She can hold on to objects that she values – but can’t keep them. Her final invoice to Father Time must be honoured – and when she settles her bill she will ‘render’ you in two ways. (1) By giving you back to time – and (2) by breaking your body down like meat.]
This Sonnet is NOT even a Sonnet. It is only twelve lines long – and where there should be a clinching couplet, Will has put two pairs of brackets.
I
It looks like a grave – yawning open for Harry’s body.
Will wants his old lover dead.
Will was clearly going through a crisis – a break-down even – and it led on to some of his darkest, most nihilistic plays – the bleakest being King Lear. He smashes down the play’s original happy ending – and finally mourns for his son through Lear’s grief for his dead daughter.
And he took his revenge on Harry four years later by publishing all his intimate sonnets to him.
He gets his publisher, T. T. – Thomas Thorpe – to wish Harry ‘All Happiness’ – as Will does, as we have seen, in his dedication to Lucrece– and Thorpe – by describing himself as ‘the well-wishing adventurer’ who is ‘setting forth’ – references Harry’s ship – ‘The Sea Adventure’ – which left Plymouth for Virginia on 2nd June 1609 – a fortnight after the Sonnets had been published.
But in what I believe is Will’s final sonnet – 146 – he resolves to enter on a spiritual path away from worldly excess, and, in his words….
……..feed on death
In The Tempest Prospero says: ‘Every third thought shall be my grave’– and in his final plays, Will seems to have come to accept the way things are.
William Davenant describes how, when he was a boy, Will would ‘cover his face with a hundred kisses’ when he visited him in Oxford, so perhaps Davenant had come to replace both Hamnet and Harry in Will’s heart, mind – and soul.
With the Sonnets, Will included a narrative poem ‘A Lover’s Complaint’. In this he splits himself into two – and has a conversation with himself. One half of Will is a young woman who has fallen in love with a psychotic young man whose‘browny locks hung in crooked curls’– not unlike Harry Southampton’s.
And, very much like Harry he…..
did in the general bosom reign
Of young, of old; and sexes both enchanted.
His other persona is….
A reverend man that grazed his cattle nigh– Sometime a blusterer, that the ruffle knew Of court, of city…
The O.E.D. guesses ‘blusterer’ means ‘boaster’ – but it could equally be a bombastic actor who ‘struts and frets his hour upon the stage.’
The young woman tells the older man how, like others, she fell besotted with the young man and…
Threw my affections in his charmed power, Reserved the stalk and gave him all my flower.
But the young woman finally wises up….
For, lo, his passion, but an art of craft, E’en there resolved my reason into tears; There my white stole of chastity I daff’d, Shook off my sober guards and civil fears; Appear to him, as he to me appears, All melting; though our drops this difference bore, His poison’d me, and mine did him restore.
[His passion was an artful, bogus one that transformed my rational mind into tears. There I took off my white dress of chastity, shook off my ‘sober guards’ – my moral protection and abstention – and ‘civil fears’ – fear of abandoning propriety and even the law itself – and appeared to him in same ‘melting’ – weeping and ejaculating state – as he appeared to me – with this difference: his ‘drops’ – tears and semen – poisoned me while mine made him better.]
But the Young Woman comes to a most surprising conclusion…
O, that infected moisture of his eye, O, that false fire which in his cheek so glow’d, O, that forced thunder from his heart did fly, O, that sad breath his spongy lungs bestow’d, O, all that borrow’d motion seeming owed… Would yet again betray the fore-betray’d, And new pervert a reconciled maid!
If she had her time over, she would do it all again!
At the end of the day, Will was glad he had met Harry….
********
At the end of Stewart’s talk – ‘When Will met Harry’ – there was a lively and provactive Q. and A. session – which Your Cat will report on soon in a ‘Trixie Special’.
(It’s best to read ‘When Will met Harry – a Riposte to the B.B.C’ – first.)
John Aubrey………
….. got his information about Will being country schoolmaster from the actor William Beeston – whom John Dryden described as ‘the chronicle of the age’. William in turn got the information from his father Christopher Beeston – who had been apprenticed to the actor Augustine Phillips, and who later acted with Will in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.
We know that there is a schoolhouse at the gates of Titchfield Abbey…..
The question is: did Will teach there?
There was an earlier William Beeston – who became part of the Southampton entourage – who died in Posbrook Farm in 1638.
The question is – was he related to Christopher Beeston? The almost universal cry has been ‘No’ – but let’s briefly examine the timeline for October 1638:
On 4th October Christopher Beeston – writing he is ‘sick and weak in body’, has ‘many great debts’ and is ‘engaged for great sums of money’ – completes his will – but signs it:
‘Christopher Hutchinson’.
7th October: Christopher Beeston/Hutchinson writes a codicil to his will.
Two days later – on 9th October – William Beeston of Posbrook Farm – stating he is ‘weak in body’ and bequeathing ‘to every child that God hath sent me five shillings a piece for their portions’ signs his will.
Seven days later – on 17th October – Christopher Beeston/Hutchinson is buried in St. Giles-in-the-Fields in London.
Seven weeks later, on 3rd December, William Beeston of Posbrook Farm is buried at St. Peter’s, Titchfield.
Either this is a coincidence of cosmic proportions or there is a link of some sort between the two men….
Let The Shakespeare Code propose one!
Christopher Beeston had an alternative name ‘Hutchinson’ – which suggests he might have been illegitimate. William Beeston of Posbrook Farm writes about the children ‘that God hath sent him’ which sounds to us like a euphemism for children born out of wedlock.
William Beeston of Posbrook fathers Christopher out of wedlock. Christopher studies at the Titchfield Grammar School and is briefly taught by Will, who encourages him to become the boy actor known as Kitt.
William Beeston of Posbrook becomes respectable because of his association with the Southampton family. He even marries a much younger wife in the 1630s, fathers legitimate children and 1637 even acquires a Coat of Arms.
Christopher, on the other hand, after acting with Will in The Chamberlain’s Men, gets wilder and wilder – he runs a brothel, gets accused of rape and sometimes uses an alias – ‘Christopher Hutchinson’.
William Beeston of Posbrook disowns him. But Christopher gets very ill and begs his natural father to visit him – and he does so out of humanity.
Christopher, completely impoverished, asks his father to help his son, named William after him, financially – but William Beeston of Posbrook – who by now has his own little William – refuses. Christopher cuts himself off completely from his father by using his Christopher Hutchinson name when he signs his will, and even refers to his son as ‘William Hutchinson’. William Beeston of Posbrook gives five shillings to all his children – legitimate and otherwise – as a blocking bequest to stop them from claiming any more. He leaves everything to his wife.
Unfortunately Posbrook Beeston catches the plague from his son and dies soon afterwards.
We cannot (at the moment at least) prove this theory – but The Code believes that forming a credible story from the known facts is a legitimate way of investigating the truth.
What we know for certain is that Harry Southampton graduated from St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1589 and was in residence in Titchfield in 1590. He was to turn 17 that year and massive pressure was being put on him by his guardian, Lord Burghley……
…….Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary of State – to marry his grand-daughter Elizabeth de Vere.
Harry was refusing – so his family faced an enormous £5,000 fine.
But Harry wasn’t interested in girls. His father, the Second Earl of Southampton…..
[Photo by Ross Underwood]
…..had accused his mother, Mary, of adultery with ‘a commonperson’ and had snatched his son away from her at the age of 6. In the words of Mary, the Second Earl ‘made his manservant hiswife’ and surrounded himself with….
‘a whole troupe of at least a hundred well-mounted gentlemen and yeomen and tall goodly fellows that kept a constant pace.’
The Second Earl had died when Harry was eight – and Harry became part of Lord Burghley’s household where he met the young Earl of Essex…..
….who had also lost his father.
Greene’s famous attack on Will suggests he did much more for the Southampton household than simply tutor Harry. Greene described him as….
‘an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger’s heart wrapped in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of us: and being an absolute Iohannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.’
A word of warning. It is highly unlikely Greene wrote these words. Nashe claimed to have found the manuscript in Greene’s garret after he died – but many people – including Will – thought that Nashe himself had written the libel, passing it off as off as Greene’s dying curse.
Nashe swore his innocence, but ‘divers of worship’ – most likely the Southampton family – complained to the publisher of the pamphlet, Henry Chettle, who issued a grovelling retraction and described Will’s…
‘uprightness of dealing which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing, which approves his art’.
To add to the complication, Nashe might well have been in Titchfield at the time – collaborating with Will when he wasn’t stabbing him in the back.
Intriguingly, Nashe dedicated his pamphlet ‘Strange Newes’ to a Mr. William Apis-Lapis.
‘Apis’ is Latin for ‘Bee’ and ‘Lapis’ Latin for ‘Stone’. Bee Stone. Mr William Bee-Stone – Mr. William Beeston. Posbrook Beeston even had bees on his coat of arms!
But back to the other Will…
As a ‘fac totum’ Will might well have taught the local schoolboys – and an American hand-writing expert – Charles Hamilton – discovered a letter signed by Harry that he believes to be in Will’s hand.
But Will was also the Southampton family poet. We know this for certain because of the Dedication of his two narrative poems to the Earl of Southampton – neither of which is mentioned by the B.B.C.’s ‘Rise of a Genius’.
The one to Venus and Adonis in 1593 is formal and tentative: this is because Harry’s mother had commissioned it. Harry had not yet come of age:
‘I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your Lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burden’.
But the next dedication – to Lucrece – was written in 1594 when Harry was in full control of his finances . Will let’s his feelings fly:
‘THE love I dedicate to your lordship is without end; whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety. The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance. What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater; meantime, as it is, it is bound to your lordship, to whom I wish long life, still lengthened with all happiness’.
This outpouring of love for Harry brings us naturally to Will’s Sonnets…
There are 154 of them. Some of them are letters, some of them reflections, some of them flatter, some of them insult, some of them seduce, some of them reject, some of them glory in life, some of them despair of it. In short, Will reveals there is not a single emotion that characters go through in his plays that he has not gone through himself.
We might say we know more about him than any man who has ever lived were it not for one thing. Will – when he published the Sonnets in 1609 – did not print them in chronological order – rather in two piles – ‘to him’ and ‘to her’. The ‘to him’ pile is much, much bigger than the ‘to her’ pile.
Using a data base built up over the years, The Shakespeare Code has put all the poems into chronological order – and we believe a tremendous story emerges which involves a Lovely Boy, a Dark Lady and a Rival Poet.
Can we assume, for the moment, that Nathan Drake was right in 1817 and Dover Wilson in 1932 when they named Harry as the Lovely Boy?
And can we also assume, for the moment, that A. L. Rowse was right in 1973 when he named Amelia Lanyer, nee Basanno, as the Dark Lady?
Can we also assume that the Rival Poet was the Spirit Medium George Chapman….
…..who would summon up the ghost of Christopher Marlowe at the drop of a hat.
So here is the story – drawing on history and anecdote, along with Will’s plays and sonnets.
Mary Southampton commissions Will to write seventeen sonnets to celebrate Harry’s seventeenth birthday in 1590 – urging him to marry and have a son. She chooses the fourteen-line sonnet form because it has been perfected by the late Sir Philip Sidney……
….who lived at Wilton – a day’s horse-ride away – whom young Harry worships because of his bravery and chivalry.
Will argues that a son will give Harry another ‘self’ – his son – who will ‘wax’ like the moon while he himself ‘wanes’.
But Will – stepping way outside his brief – hints that he could also make Harry immortal by the power of his verse alone.
But these seventeen sonnets have the reverse effect of what Mary intended. Harry becomes attracted to his tutor – and though Will has been introduced to same-sex love by Marlowe in London, and admits to finding Harry, with his shoulder length hair, even more attractive than a woman, denies any physical interest in the boy. Will wants their love to be platonic.
In 1591 Queen Elizabeth arrives on her progress to Cowdray and Titchfield. In her entourage is the Basanno family – dark-skinned Sephardic Jews who are renowned for their music making. Among them is the beautiful young clavichord player, Amelia Basanno, who is the mistress of the Queen’s cousin – old Lord Hunsdon…….
Plague is raging in the city – so Amelia stays in Titchfield as an entertainer and companion to Mary Southampton. Will falls desperately in love with Amelia – and writes the part of the dark-skinned Rosaline for her in Love’s Labour’s Lost – a play which satirises Queen Elizabeth and which Harry and his aristocratic friends perform in the Park of Place House at Whitsun in 1592.
Will attempts to seduce Amelia by playing Rosaline’s lover, Berowne, and sending her sonnets which flatter her and tease her. But Amelia has no interest in the balding, prematurely aged, playwright. In desperation, Will asks Harry to plead his case with Amelia – but Amelia takes the opportunity to seduce young Harry – and Harry plays along because it will upset Will.
Will, indeed, is distraught – and goes on tour with Lord Strange’s Men. As he thinks about things, he realises that he is more in love with the boy than the girl. Amelia gets pregnant and is married off to a minstrel. Will returns to Titchfield and declares his love for Harry in Sonnet 18 – one of the greatest poems ever written….
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
[Do you want me to compare you to a summer’s day as other poets might? You are much more beautiful and even-keeled than that! In England even in May harsh winds can shake the buds of the flowers and summer is so quickly over- like a short lease on a property.]
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair, from fair, sometime declines
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimm’d:
[Sometimes the sun is too hot and often it is covered with clouds – and everything beautiful on a summer’s day will at some point lose its beauty – either by chance events or simply the unaided workings of nature.]
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wandr’st in his shade
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
[But you will not be subject to this change – nor will you fade as the summer flowers fade, nor will you lose your beauty. Nor will you even die. Your summer will be an eternal because I am writing about you in verse.]
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
[This poem will survive as long as men are still alive to recite it or read it – and this will give you eternal life.]
Will has started off with praise of Harry – but ends up with lashings of praise for himself!
Mother Mary…..
…….finds out about Harry’s liaison with Will.
And mother Mary isn’t pleased….
*****
To find out what happened next, read When Will met Harry – Part Three…
To be published, Deo Volente, at midnight (G.M.T.) on Monday, 8th January, 2024.
The Shakespeare Code 
