The Shakespeare Code

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 12^th 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 12^th 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.

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It is with great sadness that The Shakespeare Code records the passing of one of its most distinguished Fellows – the great Glaswegian poet – Eddie Linden. Here is his photo, rightly placed in the National Portrait Gallery of London.

And here is his most celebrated poem about Glasgow – ‘City of Razors’:

‘Cobbled streets, littered with broken milk bottles,

Reeking chimneys and dirty tenement buildings,

Walls scrawled with FUCK THE POPE and blue-lettered

Words GOD BLESS THE RANGERS.

An old woman at the corner, arms folded, babe in pram,

A drunk man’s voice from the other pavement,

And out come the Catholics from evening confessional;

A woman roars from an upper window

‘They’re at it again, Maggie!

Five stiches in our Tommie’s face, Lizzie!

Eddie’s in the Royal wi’a sword in his stomach

And the razor’s floating in the River Clyde.’

There is roaring in Hope Street,

They’re killing in the Carlton,

There’s an ambulance in Bridgeton,

And a laddie in the Royal.‘

R.I.P. Fab Eddie.

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by Trixie the Cat

Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code

Tomb Raiders, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu….

….and Laura Croft…

Sorry! Your Cat meant Laura Matthias…

……..have done a magnificent job!

They have managed to persuade the Ecclesiastical Authorities to let them open the Southampton Family Vault….

…..and they presented their findings last night to a packed and excited audience in St. Peter’s Church, Titchfield, Hampshire.

A slide show was part of the presentation, but because of the sensitive nature of the material – many dead bodies – photography was forbidden.

So Your Cat will have to fall back on her descriptive powers….

Now the fact is that most of what The Tomb Raiders discovered is actually in the public domain.

But legend has long shrouded the truth – and the truth really did set us free, last night, in a shocking way.

The tomb was last opened in the 1950s when a Visiting Preacher fell through the floor – and the whole structure of the Church had to be stabilised.

The Vicar of St. Peter’s at the time – Norman Miller – gave an honest account of what he saw in the vault:

Fifteen to twenty great lead coffins, piled one on top of each other, the lower ones being in a poor state of preservation.

This tallies with a description by William Pavey in 1719 – when the vault was still being used….

[The bodies are] in lead coffins or wrapped in lead with inscribed plates indicating their identities and dates of death.

The last internment was made in 1737 and the tomb was sealed. Around 1899 the vault was opened by the Victorians, who had no qualms in taking of the lids of the coffins and reporting that the bodies had been embalmed.

This lead to a journalistic caprice in 1950.

Our Chief Agent, Stewart Trotter, came across a 1950 newspaper article stored in the Winchester Record Office, describing how the lids of the coffins had been taken off – and the bodies found swimming in the purest honey – perfectly preserved.

This story turned into fact – and was included in Church Literature and Guides.

So you can imagine the consternation last night which followed Laura’s photo of the contents of the vault…

….lumpen lead coffins, falling apart, imploding, thrust, higgledy-piggledy and disrespected, into the left corner of the vault.

If the vault had been in this condition when Mary Browne died she wouldn’t have asked to be placed ‘as near as may be’ to her beloved husband: she would have asked to be thrown in his general direction. 

And there is evidence that the vault was always a touch chaotic. It seems to have been a general, public vault, commandeered by the Southampton family.

They built their memorial ‘tomb’ away from the East Wall……

– and, under a slab of stone in front of the tomb, built a stairway and brick passsageway which led to the old vault which may or may not have contained bodies from other families.  

Rev. Norman Miller bricked up the entry to the old vault and removed the Tudor steps down to the crypt. He must have thought that was that.

But it certainly wasn’t. The Tomb Raiders now want to identify the bodies. They have smashed down Miller’s brick wall and re-built the steps.

But DNA tests have been forbidden by the Authorities, so only two bodies have been ‘confirmed’:

1. Elizabeth Vernon….

….who became the wife of Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton….

2. James Wriothesley, Lord Wriothesley, the son of the Third Earl, who died of dysentery at the age of nineteen, five days before his father. They were onn a military campaign in the Lowlands.

The Tomb Raiders have not identified any remains yet of Mary Browne….

……BUT they do have one the ‘inscribed plates’ William Pavey described in 1719 with Mary’s name on it.

So it seems that her son DID respect her dying wish and allowed her into the family vault.

BUT we don’t know if she or her coffin are still there.

So, as Your Cat said at the beginning…..

Mary Browne’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave. And doesn’t.

Just call me Schrodinger’s Cat!

‘Bye, now!

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An Important Statement from Trixie the Cat

Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code!

Your Cat brings you the most important news for Shakespeare Scholarship this Century!

In September 2021, Lord Montagu, Fourth Baron of Beaulieu….

…was given permission to open the spectatcular tomb of the Southampton family in St. Peter’s Church, Titchfield!

In attendance was the Revd Susan Allman….

….who had been Priest-in-Charge at St. Peter’s Church…..

…..and returned to bless the proceedings.

The Shakespeare Southampton Legacy Trust reported that:

The Southampton monument is supported by a vaulted Tudor passage running its entire length to the north. Access to the Wriothesley vault was re-established through the original acces point on the chapel floor near the organ. Access involved lifting one stone slab that was fully re-instated upon completion.

There are three recumbent figures in alabaster on the tomb.

On the top is Jane, first Countess of Southampton….

[Photo: Ross Underwood]

To her right lies her husband Thomas Wriothesley, First Earl of Southampton…

[Photo: Ross Underwood]

…..and to her left her handsome son, Henry, Second Earl of Southampton….

[Photo: Ross Underwood]

Henry was married to Mary, Second Countess of Southampton, née Browne….

…..who was daughter of Anthony Browne, First Viscount Montagu…..

…….England’s leading Roman Catholic.

On the side of the tomb is depicted, kneeling in prayer, the young Henry Wriothesley – Third Earl of Southampton….

…..known as ‘Harry Southampton’ – the son of Mary, Second Countess of Southampton and Henry, Second Earl of Southampton.

A St. Peter’s Church tomb was commissioned by Henry, Second Earl. But when he died in 1581, his orders were not carried out by his widow.

He wanted a tomb for his father Thomas and mother Jane – and a tomb for himself…..

A SINGLE TOMB!

This was intended to be a direct insult to his wife Mary – who he believed had commited adultery with a lower-class person – a charge she swore in a letter to her father, Viscount Montague – was untrue.

But she added:

He may blame me of folly, but never justly condemn me of fault.

The ‘folly’ The Shakespeare  Code believes, was to fall in love.

Mary disregarded her husband’s wishes – and ordered a single tomb – the one we have now – thirteen years later in 1594.

That was also the year her son – Harry Southampton – came of age and might have his own ideas about the family tomb….

For the Second Earl had snatched little Harry at the age of six away from his mother – and taught him to hate her – and, it seems to hate all women.

Mary confessed to her father her husband had made her so unhappy that she wanted to die…..

…..but in a way she was glad he had been so horrible to her because it meant she could forget him all the sooner.

BUT….

…in her will she asked to be interred…..

as near as may be unto the body of my honorable and dearly beloved Lord and Husband, the Late Earl of Southampton.

So what had happened?

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE!

We believe at The Shakespeare Code that in 1590 Shakespeare took up residence in Titchfield – as part of the Southampton family entourage.

Among his duties was tutoring Harry Southampton and Mary Southampton commissioned Shakespeare to write 17 sonnets on Harry’s seventeenth birthday to persuade him to get married.

However, the sonnets had the reverse effect……

Harry and Shakespeare became long-term lovers.

In 1594 Mary Southamton also re-married, and we believe she commissioned Shakespeare to write an entertainment to celebrate the wedding…

But Shakespeare – a Roman Catholic like Mary and her son – and indeed her dead husband the Second Earl – believed that the spiritual discord of Mary’s first marriage needed to be healed before the second could prosper.

For Elizabethan Catholics, the Fairy World – with its blessing,benedictions and enchantments – had become a substitute for Roman Catholicism….

…indeed, Bishop Richard Corbett – who would have been twelve years old when the play was written – went so far as to observe that, though Fairies had been seen in the reign of Queen Mary, they had not been seen in the reigns of Elizabeth or James….

By which we note that fairies were of the old profession/Their songs were Ave Maries/Their dances were procession.

The ‘old profession’ was the ‘Old Faith’.

With all this in mind, Shakespeare set about writing….

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

The Fairy Protagonists – Oberon the King….

…..and Titania the Queen…..

…like Mary Southampton….

……and the Second Earl…..

…..are in a fight over a little boy……

….like the fight over the young Harry Southampton……

Also Titania suffers the ‘folly’ of falling in love with an ass…..

The contention between the Fairy King and Queen creates disorder in the seasons in the play….

…..and in real life the summer of 1594 was the coldest and wettest anyone could recall…

But order is restored when Oberon and Titania fall back in love…

…and dance together….

……and the fairies bless the house, not with holy water, but with field dew….

Shakespeare by writing the play has reconciled the souls of Mary and the Second Earl.

He has performed the role of a Priest.

Whether Mary’s wish was honoured – to be interred ‘as near as may be’ to the body of her dead first husband…..

…..or whether her body had even been interred in the tomb…..

……will be revealed by Lord Montagu in Titchfield on Monday night…..

Your Cat will certainly be there!

Swooning at his Lordship’s feet….

So watch out all Church Mice…..

Your Cat wouldn’t miss this for the world!!!

‘Bye, now…

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