The day after the fire John Combe died. He named as his executors his residual legatee, Thomas Combe, with Sir Richard Verney and Bartholomew Hales. He left more than £1,500 in bequests, including £100 to be laid out in loans to tradesmen wishing to expand their business, £30 to the poor, an endowment for a learned preacher to give two sermons a year at Holy Trinity, £60 for his tomb in the church—and £5 to William Shakespeare. Combe had drawn up his will eighteen months before his death; Francis Collins wrote it out for him on 28 January 1613, so Shakespeare must already have endeared himself to the old man, but only to the value of £5. Lawyer Collins received twice as much. Sir Francis Smith was left as much to ‘buy him a hawk’ but his wife got £40 ‘to buy her a basin and ewer’.22
The threatened enclosure loomed ever closer. On 23 September the council voted unanimously to oppose it. In October Shakespeare and Thomas Greene entered into agreement with William Replingham that they and their heirs would be indemnified for any loss of value in their tithe fields ‘by reason of any enclosure or decay of tillage there meant and intended’—damages to be assessed by ‘four indifferent persons’.23 Our guide to what happened next is the sheet of memoranda written by Thomas Greene when he was preparing the case to be made by the Bailiff and Burgesses of Stratford to the lord chief justice and the Privy Council the following year.24 By 15 November Greene was in London where he met with Mainwaring, who assured him that he ‘should have no wrong’ by the enclosure and that he ‘would rather get a penny than a half-penny, and rather get twopence than lose a penny’. Mainwaring then offered to buy Greene’s interest, whereupon Greene asked him ‘whether he had ever thought with himself what they were worth’, but Mainwaring was in a hurry to go into the Chancery court and promised to let him know.
Two days later, Greene wrote in his memorandum book:
At my cousin Shakespeare coming yesterday to town I went to see him how he did. He told me that they assured him they meant to enclose no further than to Gospel Bush and so up straight (leaving out part of the Dingles to the field) to the gate in Clopton Hedge and take in Salisbury’s piece and that they mean in April to survey the land, and then to give satisfaction and not before, and he and Mr Hall say they think there will be nothing done at all.
Greene was right not to be convinced, for the land was surveyed within days, in December. If Mainwaring had come forward with an irresistible offer Greene would probably have sold, but as it happened nothing was concluded before he returned to Stratford. On 5 December the company agreed that six of their number should ‘go to Mr Combe in the name of the rest to present their loves and desire he would be pleased to forbear to enclose and to desire his love as they will be ready to deserve it’. At a follow-up visit, Combe told the aldermen that he would be glad of their loves and that the ‘enclosures would not be hurtful to the town that he had not to do with it but to have some profit by it and that he thought Mr Mainwaring was so far engaged therein as he would not be entreated and therefore he would not bestow his labour to entreat him in any sort saying if the frost broke the ditching would go presently forward’.25
On 10 December Greene found himself at the centre of the dispute; somehow it had become known that Replingham and Mainwaring were trying to do business with him. He assured the Corporation that he knew his duty as town clerk to represent its interest, only to be challenged by Alderman William Walford, younger half-brother of Bess Quiney. Greene advised the aldermen about the kinds of action they might lawfully take if Combe’s men began digging. They decided that, until he did, there was no need to do anything. As luck would have it, the frost broke on 19 December and Combe’s men moved at once, digging a trench 275 yards long in preparation for the hedging and ditching.
On 23 December Greene noted: ‘Letters written, one to Mr Mainwaring, another to Mr Shakespeare with almost all the company’s hands to either: I also writ of myself to my cousin Shakespeare the copies of all our oaths…also a note of the inconveniences that would grow by the enclosure’. The letters, which went to the owner of Bishopton, a Mr Archer of Tamworth, and to Sir Francis Smith who owned land at Welcombe, as well as to Mainwaring and Shakespeare, warned them that the enclosure would bring the curses of the 700 almspeople of Stratford upon their heads. Shakespeare was still in London. At New Place Ann oversaw the hospitality offered to the Christmas preacher. The Christmas accounts of Chamberlain of Stratford list twenty pence paid for ‘one quart of sack and one quart of claret wine given to the preacher at New Place’. Some have interpreted this as evidence that Ann had turned fanatical puritan, and even that in a fanatical puritan way she had committed indecencies with the visiting preacher.
As soon as the holidays were over the Corporation made its counter-move. Acting on Greene’s advice, two of the alderman, Masters Chandler and Walford, managed to secure a lease at Welcombe giving them rights of common.26 Chandler was Greene’s stepson and married to Bess Quiney’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth. On the evening of Saturday 7 January William Combe let it be known that he had heard that ‘some of the better sort would go to throw down the ditch’.27 Master Chandler was told by Master Bayliss that Combe ground his teeth and snarled, ‘O would they durst!’ in ‘great passion and anger’. The following Monday Master Chandler went to see Combe for himself and told Greene on his return that Combe called them all ‘factious knaves’, ‘puritan knaves’ and ‘underlings in their colour’, threatening to ‘do them all the mischief he can’. Undeterred Chandler and Walford sent spades to be hidden at the worksite in advance so that they could go in person and ‘throw down some of the ditch’. Greene, concerned that they would find themselves in breach of the peace, advised them to ‘go in such private manner as none might see them go lest others might perhaps follow in companies and so make a riot or a mutiny’. The conclusion was thus foregone. When the two aldermen turned up they were outnumbered by Combe’s workmen who knocked them to the ground and beat them: ‘the said Mr Combe for a long space sat laughing on horseback and said they were very good football players and bade the diggers get on for those that did set them on work would bear them out’.28
That afternoon an attempt was made to get Greene to come over to the side of the enclosers. He was offered £10 to buy himself a gelding, if he would intercede with Sir Henry Rainsford. Greene explained that he needed to remain impartial in the affair and to continue to do his duty by the Borough whether he agreed with them or not. He was startled to learn that the area of arable land to be laid down to pasture was as much as 600 acres. The next day Greene sought assistance from a justice of the peace in swearing out an injunction to prevent a breach of the peace. It was agreed that to avert public disorder the names of the members of the consortium would not be divulged to the public. By evening the Corporation had arrived at the following accommodation with them.
It is agreed for preventing of tumults and avoiding of meeting of the people of Stratford and Bishopton for the present:
That any further ditching stay until the 25 of March next
That there be no ploughing on the common or any part thereof until then
And it is meant there shall be a cartway left under Rowley and other usual ways to lie open
It is meant that there shall be no throwing down of the ditches already set up but after such ways as aforesaid until after the said 25 March.
But they were too late. Greene’s side note simply remarks: ‘While this was doing as it stands, the ditches by women and children of Bishopton and Stratford were filled up again.’29
Greene’s memoranda were intended for his use in the event of legal action; though they are not easy to follow it seems clear that he had no idea what was toward.30 The women must have taken this action entirely on their own initiative. On one of the coldest nights of the year they had shouldered spades and mattocks, and led their children out of the town, across the bridge and down into the pitch-dark meadow of Welcombe, where they knocked down the hedge mound and back-filled the ditch. Either Combe’s thugs were all at hom
e in bed and not keeping watch, or they didn’t dare lay hands on the women. When the 275 yards of mound and ditch were flattened, the women marched their troops back to Stratford and Bishopton and so to bed.
Astonishing as this action on the part of the women of Stratford may seem it was not all that unusual. In 1589 Sir Robert Wroth and Henry Middlemore enclosed 100 acres of pasture in the manor of Enfield:
On 7 July…forty women, for the most part wives of artisans and laborers, destroyed the offending enclosures. Twenty-nine of the women were arraigned at a petty sessions before Robert Wroth and Middlemore, and twenty-four of them sent to Newgate Gaol to await trial…A number of them were pregnant and actually gave birth while in Newgate. They were still imprisoned on August 20 when they wrote to Lord Burghley seeking relief.31
In cases where it could be established that the women had been put up to it by their menfolk, the menfolk were as likely to be arraigned for causing a riot. But if women and children could be shown to have acted spontaneously the law was powerless: ‘if a number of women (or children under the age of discretion) do flock together for their own cause, there is none assembly punishable by these statutes, unless a man of discretion moved them to assemble for the doing of some unlawful act…’32
Nevertheless the women of Stratford were taking a risk. In 1609, when the lord of the Warwickshire manor of Dunchurch enclosed eight acres and blocked his tenants’ access to their common pasture, and fifteen women came by night and destroyed his hedges, Star Chamber prosecuted not only the women but the men responsible for them, whether fathers, employers or husbands, and rejected the women’s claim to have acted spontaneously.33
Clearly someone must have organized the action at Welcombe, but that someone was not necessarily a man, or even a woman under the tutelage of a man. She was probably a woman without father, employer or husband. She was probably a widow. When Alderman Chandler arrived home after his drubbing, his wife, Bess Quiney’s eldest daughter Elizabeth, must have been among the first to hear of the outrage perpetrated by Combe. It looks very much as if, as the Corporation tried to come to some agreement with their powerful opposition, the Widow Quiney sent her maidservants to knock on doors in Stratford and Bishopton, and mobilize her troops. One thing is certain: the women who destroyed Combe’s earthworks that night were never arraigned on any charge in the Star Chamber or anywhere else. As he put together the case to be presented to the lord chief justice, Greene listed the crimes of Edward Greville against the Corporation, including the murder of Bess’s husband, Richard Quiney.34 Bess had gradually overcome the shock and grief of her husband’s murder in 1602 and assumed the role of de facto leader of the Quiney gang. In 1612 when the bailiff and burgesses sued Sir Edward Conway and Francis Cawdry, the witnesses were examined at her house. Other occasions were celebrated by banquets at Mistress Quiney’s.
There and then Greene feared that the women’s intervention had made the situation worse, for he could see no way that the aldermen would not be held ultimately responsible for what was in effect a riot. On Thursday the Corporation met in emergency session at Bess Quiney’s house; Masters Barker, Walford, Chandler, Henry Smith, Lewis Hiccox and Laurence Wheeler, plus Mistress Quiney, told Replingham ‘to his face’ that they disagreed with the intended enclosure. Replingham’s only reply was that ‘he would give names to Mr Bailiff for doing justice upon the women diggers’ and he was promised in return that ‘justice would be done’.
Ann must have been among the first to hear of the events at Welcombe, if indeed she wasn’t directly involved. Both her daughters may have been part of the hedge-breaker gang, and perhaps even Judith Hart and her boys. And perhaps none of them.
The Corporation’s petition to the lord chief justice was successful; he ordered a stay of enclosure. Combe and Replingham then resorted to their second strategy; the yardlands were all laid down to pasture, and four to five hundred sheep let in to graze it with four shepherds. Combe was still buying up land; Mistress Reynolds resisted his offers and even went so far as to defy him and plough her yardland, but Mistress Mary Nash was happy to pocket his fifty pounds. Combe then began to court Sir Edward Greville, sending him a ‘fat wether’ in order to get his favour in persuading Sir Arthur Ingram (who was buying up Greville’s estates) to sell the manor of Old Stratford to the consortium. In August Master Barker died. He was another who had dared to infuriate Combe by ploughing his holding within the enclosure area. His executors were not so tough, and soon accepted a ten-shilling deposit against a full price of £40. In September Shakespeare told Greene’s brother John Greene that Greene could not bar the enclosing of Welcombe.
Though the citizens of Stratford had the law on their side, they were helpless before the force majeure of the gentry. Workmen had appeared on the common again, this time claiming that they had instructions from Thomas Combe and Boughton, who would indemnify them against any action by the Corporation to prevent them from working. On 2 March 1616 Master Chandler sent his man ‘to the place where Stephen Sly, John Terry, Thomas Hiccox, William Whitehead and Michael Pigeon were working’, and they ‘assaulted him so he could not proceed with throwing down the ditches and Sly said if the best in Stratford were there to throw it down he would bury his head in the bottom of the ditch’.35 At this point Mainwaring, who had been anxious all along to be seen to do no wrong, withdrew from the consortium, which left William Combe effectively on his own.36 Combe resorted to main force, using casual labourers to drive his tenants off the land by kicking and beating them. At the Lenten Assizes in Warwick in March the next year, the Corporation finally learnt that it had won.
Upon the humble petition of the Bailiff and Burgesses of Stratford-upon-Avon, it was ordered at these assizes that no enclosure shall be made within the parish of Stratford, for that it is against the laws of the realm, neither by Mr Combe nor any other, until they shall show cause at open assizes to the Justices of Assize; neither that any of the commons being ancient greensward shall be ploughed up either by the said Mr Combe nor any other, until good cause be likewise shown at open assizes before the Justices of Assize; this order is taken for preventing of tumults and breaches of his Majesty’s peace; whereof in this very town of late there had like to have been an evil beginning of some great mischief.37
The victory was a real one; the Stratford town commons were never enclosed. Combe was not subdued, however; he continued to intimidate and beat his own tenants, impounded their livestock, and eventually succeeded in depopulating the village of Welcombe until only his own house remained standing.38 By that time William Shakespeare was dead and buried, and Thomas Combe was the proud possessor of his sword, which Shakespeare left to him in his will.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
of Shakespeare’s last illness and death and how Ann Shakespeare handled the situation
Perhaps Shakespeare headed for New Place because his health was failing.
Good broth and good keeping doth much now and then;
Good diet with wisdom best helpeth a man.
In health to be stirring shall profit thee best;
In sickness hate trouble, seek quiet and rest.1
That his terminal illness was of long standing is suggested by the fact that four months before he did die, Shakespeare knew that he was dying. Most people who died in Warwickshire in April 1616 were bowled over by a catastrophic infection. Very few of Shakespeare’s contemporaries were as long as four months a-dying, though there were a few who made a will as far in advance as Shakespeare did and some further. As we have seen, Shakespeare’s friend John Combe made his will eighteen months before he died.
The Rev. John Ward, who settled in Stratford forty-six years after the poet’s death, recalled gossip that ‘Shakespeare, Drayton and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and it seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.’2 Ward is using the late-seventeenth-century version of the theory of plethora to explain the poet’s death as a sort of melancholy accident. This won’t fit with what we know
of the poet’s gradual decline, or for that matter with what we know of his rather awkward relationship with Ben Jonson.3
The existence of Shakespeare’s will with its cancelled date of January 1616 gives the lie to the idea of a sudden eclipse. Fevers kill rapidly or not at all. Other terminal diseases, congestive heart failure for example, would have taken longer than four months to enter a terminal phase, and we would expect some evidence of illness to have manifested much earlier—which of course it may have. A possibly fatal circulatory disorder would probably not have been diagnosed. At fifty-two Shakespeare was young to be in the final stages of a disease of old age. For reasons that she does not divulge Duncan-Jones decides that Shakespeare was ‘increasingly tired and unwell’. She believes too that Shakespeare was probably morbidly obese.
As a man of considerable wealth he is likely to have indulged in the heavy diet of fat meat and sweet, or sweetened, wines habitual in his class. And if he was now spending longer periods in Stratford, he enjoyed greater access to the excellent veal and beef produced in the Forest of Arden. His ‘mountain belly’ may now have rivaled Ben Jonson’s, making the three-day ride from Stratford to London increasingly uncomfortable.4
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