The Queen's Man: A John Shakespeare Mystery

by Clements, Rory

  Hugh Hall: a priest in the household of Edward Arden. Like many such Catholic priests, he disguised himself as a servant, in this case a gardener. He had various conversations with John Somerville and spoke approvingly of a notorious plot to assassinate the Prince of Orange, pointing out that the would-be killer would be absolved of any sin if he did the deed for God, not gain. After Somerville’s plot to kill the Queen was foiled, Hugh Hall was among several servants and family members arrested. He was convicted of conspiring to ‘compass the death of the Queen’. After the deaths of Somerville and Arden, Hall was questioned again, but was eventually pardoned.

  Simon Hunt: schoolmaster at the King’s New School in Stratford from 1571 to 1575, where he would have known and taught William Shakespeare until he was about eleven. Hunt, a devout Catholic, then went into exile to the English College at Douai, where he was closely associated with Thomas Cottam (see below) and where they were both joined by Hunt’s former pupil Robert Dibdale of Shottery, which is a mile from the centre of Stratford and was the home village of William’s bride Anne Hathaway. Simon Hunt later became a Jesuit and travelled to Rome, where he became English Penitentiary at St Peter’s.

  Robert Dibdale: close neighbour of Anne Hathaway in the tiny hamlet of Shottery, which is now a suburb of Stratford-upon-Avon. He was the son of John Dibdale, a Catholic farmer, and attended the King’s New School, like William Shakespeare, though he was certainly a few years older than the poet, probably born in the mid to late 1550s. He would have been taught by Simon Hunt and in 1576 followed him to the seminaries of Europe, at Douai, Rheims and Rome, also becoming good friends with Thomas Cottam. Dibdale returned to England in 1580 and was promptly arrested, being held at the Gatehouse prison in Westminster from July to September, when he was freed. He was next heard of in the spring of 1583 when he entered the English College at Rheims, being ordained a priest a year later. Returning to England once more, he became close friends with the Jesuit priest William Weston and together they conducted exorcisms at Denham in Buckinghamshire, until both were arrested in 1586. Weston was held prisoner but Dibdale was executed with two other priests at Tyburn.

  The Cottam brothers: John Cottam was one of the schoolmasters who succeeded Simon Hunt at Stratford. He was elder brother to Thomas Cottam, also a schoolmaster, who went to Douai in 1577 and later Rome, where he became a Jesuit priest in 1580. Thomas returned to England but was recognised and arrested on arrival at Dover. He was found to be carrying a letter and Catholic artefacts (including a crucifix and rosary beads) from Robert Dibdale to deliver to his father in Shottery. After being tortured by rack and scavenger’s daughter, Thomas was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn in May 1582. John Cottam left the King’s New School in the same year.

  Francis Throckmorton: he was a member of the powerful Midlands family who held property in Warwickshire. Francis was brought up at Feckenham, fourteen miles from Stratford and close to the most important of the family’s homes, Coughton Court, which is associated with two great conspiracies: Francis Throckmorton’s own plot to kill the Queen and the Gunpowder Plot. By 1580, several members of the Throckmorton family were already in trouble for persistent Catholicism and refusal to conform. Francis went to France where he became involved with various angry English exiles. He returned to England and entered into secret correspondence with Mary, Queen of Scots until Walsingham learnt of his activities through a spy in the French embassy. Under torture, Throckmorton confessed to knowing of a plot by the Duke of Guise to invade England, free Mary and kill or kidnap Elizabeth. He was executed at Tyburn in July 1584. Twenty-one years later, in 1605, Gunpowder plotters took refuge at his family’s home, Coughton Court.

  Robert Catesby: leader of the Gunpowder plotters, Robert Catesby was brought up in Lapworth, Warwickshire, twelve miles north of Stratford. He was the son of the recusant Sir William Catesby and Anne, daughter of Sir Robert Throckmorton of Coughton Court. Robert was cousin to that other notorious conspirator Francis Throckmorton and related by marriage to Edward Arden, through whom they were all related to William Shakespeare. The Catesby family was said to have harboured the Jesuit priest Edmund Campion before his arrest and martyrdom. Robert Catesby’s first taste of rebellion came in 1601 when he was part of the Earl of Essex’s ill-fated insurrection against Queen Elizabeth. He was wounded and fined £3,000. Four years later, aged about thirty-three, he conceived the idea of blowing up parliament and King James. He recruited other conspirators, including Guy Fawkes, but the plot was foiled and Catesby died in a shoot-out as he tried to escape.

  Religious strife in the late sixteenth century

  Queen Elizabeth I declared that she did not wish to open windows into men’s souls, but once the Pope had excommunicated her and intimated that it would not be considered a crime for Catholics to kill her and usurp her, Catholics found themselves persecuted throughout England.

  In all, it has been estimated that 250 priests and other Catholic dissidents were executed for their faith (though treason was invariably the crime cited) in the last twenty years of Elizabeth’s reign.

  This is how the iron vice of the law was tightened.

  1570: Pope Pius V issues a papal bull, Regnans in Excelsis, which calls the Queen of England a heretic and releases her Catholic subjects from their allegiance to her.

  1571: in England, the government retaliates against the Vatican by enacting a law making it high treason to describe the Queen as a heretic. Treason is always punishable by death. Importing rosary beads, crucifixes and declarations from the Pope becomes illegal. Anyone leaving the country without permission for six months can have their property confiscated. This is to deter Catholics fleeing persecution in England.

  1581: Edmund Campion is executed for adhering to the Pope against the Queen, compassing and imaging the destruction of the Queen and entering England to disturb the quiet state of the realm. Fines are increased for refusing to attend the parish (Protestant) church. The penalty for saying mass is £133; for hearing it £66 and imprisonment; for neglecting to attend church £20 a month in fines (increased from sixpence). Priests or others trying to convert anyone to Roman Catholicism are guilty of high treason. Anyone helping them is guilty of treason. New powers are given to magistrates to order raids on recusants’ houses on the slightest suspicion.

  1585: it is declared a capital offence merely to be a Catholic priest entering England or to harbour a priest. Any priest ordained by the Pope since the start of Elizabeth’s reign must leave England within forty days or face a charge of treason. Anyone sending a child abroad to be educated at a Catholic school can be fined £100. Anyone knowing the whereabouts of a priest and failing to report it to the authorities within twelve days can be jailed indefinitely.

  1593: you can be jailed for non-attendance at the parish church. Known Catholics cannot go more than five miles from their home without a licence.

  Were the Shakespeares secret Catholics?

  To be a Roman Catholic in England during the late sixteenth century was always uncomfortable and often terrifying.

  As tensions grew, so did the penalties for not complying with the religious settlement dictated by Queen Elizabeth’s government. Everyone was required by law to attend the parish church with its Protestant prayer book and services – and you were liable to face heavy fines for refusing to go.

  You could be jailed simply for hearing mass and, worst of all, you could be executed for treason for harbouring Catholic priests or assisting them to convert people.

  And so papists – as the Catholics were called – tended to keep themselves to themselves, avoiding making any display of their faith and hearing mass in utmost secrecy. Yet despite the danger, it is certain that many people living in Stratford-upon-Avon and the surrounding countryside at the time did still adhere to the old religion.

  The question that has intrigued historians for centuries is whether their number included William Shakespeare and his father, John.

  The evidence is compelling. In 1757 a b
uilder named Joseph Mosely was working on the roof of the Stratford-upon-Avon house in which William Shakespeare had been born almost two hundred years earlier, and he found an ancient religious document hidden between the tiles and the rafters.

  It consisted of six small pages, stitched together, each page signed John Shakespeare – or a variant of the spelling. What it amounted to was a declaration that the poet’s father was a Roman Catholic and that he would remain so until death. It was, in effect, his spiritual will and testament entreating God to consider him among the faithful even though he might die unconfessed and without extreme unction because of the difficulty in finding a priest to administer the sacraments.

  In the fourteen articles of faith contained in the document, John Shakespeare asked that the testament be buried with him. But of course that did not happen. Perhaps it was too well hidden for his widow and children to find when the hour of his death arrived.

  What we know is that the house in Henley Street, Stratford-upon-Avon, where the testament was found had stayed in the Shakespeare family, passing to William Shakespeare’s sister Joan, who married William Hart, a hatter, and then on through five generations to the Thomas Hart who lived there when master-bricklayer Joseph Mosely was repairing the roof.

  Mosely, who was described as an ‘honest, sober and industrious man’, gave the paper to an alderman named Peyton who passed it on to the Reverend James Davenport, vicar of Stratford, who in turn sent it to his good friend Edmond Malone, the renowned Shakespearean scholar and man of letters who had spent much time researching Shakespeare’s life and works.

  The document is now lost, but fortunately we know all about it from Malone, who copied it and put it into print. Malone wrote: ‘I have taken some pains to ascertain the authenticity of this manuscript and after a very careful inquiry am perfectly satisfied that it is genuine.’

  Others were not so sure and for the next century and a half the testament was treated with scepticism by scholars and historians. And then, in the 1920s, a Spanish version of the document turned up in the archives of the British Museum. Known as a ‘Last Will of the Soul’, it was devised by Carlo Borromeo (1538–84), the Cardinal of Milan, as a ‘formulary’ – a religious statement drawn up in a set form with blank spaces for the recipient’s signature.

  What is also known is that the English Jesuit and martyr Edmund Campion stayed with Borromeo in Milan on his way from Rome to England in 1580. It is known, too, that before he was captured and executed, Campion stayed in various houses in Warwickshire, including the home of Sir William Catesby in Lapworth, a mere twelve miles from Stratford. Catesby was related to the Shakespeares by marriage.

  It seems highly likely that Father Campion could have brought dozens – perhaps hundreds – of these formulaic testaments, translated into English, to distribute to the beleaguered faithful of his homeland.

  I can see no reason to doubt the authenticity of the John Shakespeare Spiritual Testament. Why would Joseph Mosely have conceived and forged such a document – especially as he received no money for it? And isn’t the loft space between the tiles and rafters just the sort of place that a worried man would have hidden something he considered hazardous to his health? After all, the pursuivants charged with rooting out Catholic priests, books, vestments and crucifixes were horribly thorough in their searches, often smashing through walls and panelling in their quest for evidence.

  The historian Peter Ackroyd writes in his scholarly book Shakespeare: The Biography that the document’s provenance ‘seems genuine enough’.

  He adds, intriguingly, that one passage in the testament bears a striking resemblance to a quote from Hamlet.

  In the testament, John Shakespeare puts his name to a declaration including the words ‘that I may be possibly cut off in the blossom of my sins’. In Hamlet, Ackroyd points out, the ghost laments that he was ‘cut off even in the blossoms of my sin’.

  It would not take a conspiracy theorist to wonder whether William Shakespeare might have read through his father’s Spiritual Testament – or even signed one of his own.

  Here is the full text of John Shakespeare’s Spiritual Testament, as recorded by Edmond Malone. NB: I have modernised and regularised various spellings.

  I

  In the name of God, the father, son, and holy ghost, the most holy and blessed Virgin Mary, mother of God, the holy host of archangels, angels, patriarchs, prophets, evangelists, apostles, saints, martyrs, and all the celestial court and company of heaven, I John Shakespeare, an unworthy member of the holy Catholic religion, being at this my present writing in perfect health of body, and sound mind, memory and understanding, but calling to mind the uncertainty of life and certainty of death, and that I may be possibly cut off in the blossom of my sins, and called to render an account of all my transgressions externally and internally, and that I may be unprepared for the dreadful trial either by sacrament, penance, fasting or prayer, or any other purgation whatever, do in the holy presence above specified, of my own free and voluntary accord, make and ordain this my last spiritual will, testament, confession, protestation, and confession of faith, hoping hereby to receive pardon for all my sins and offences, and thereby to be made partaker of life everlasting, through the only merits of Jesus Christ, my saviour and redeemer, who took upon himself the likeness of man, suffered death, and was crucified upon the cross, for the redemption of sinners.

  II

  Item, I John Shakespeare do, by this present protest, acknowledge and confess, that in my past life I have been a most abominable and grievous sinner, and therefore unworthy to be forgiven without a true and sincere repentance for the same. But trusting in the manifold mercies of my blessed Saviour and Redeemer, I am encouraged by relying on his sacred word, to hope for salvation and be made partaker of his heavenly kingdom, as a member of the celestial company of angels, saints and martyrs, there to reside for ever and ever in the court of my God.

  III

  Item, I John Shakespeare do by this present protest and declare that as I am certain I must pass out of this transitory life into another that will last to eternity, I do hereby most humbly implore and entreat my good and guardian angel to instruct me in this my solemn preparation, protestation and confession of faith, at least spiritually, in will adoring and most humbly beseeching my saviour, that he will be pleased to assist me in so dangerous a voyage, to defend me from the snares and deceits of my infernal enemies, and to conduct me to the secure haven of his eternal bliss.

  IV

  Item, I John Shakespeare do protest that I will also pass out of this life, armed with the last sacrament of extreme unction: the which if through any let or hindrance I should not then be able to have, I do now also for that time demand and crave the same: beseeching his divine majesty that he will be pleased to anoint my senses both internal and external with the sacred oil of his infinite mercy, and to pardon me all my sins committed by seeing, speaking, feeling, smelling, hearing, touching, or by any other way whatsoever.

  V

  Item, I John Shakespeare do by this present protest that I will never through any temptation whatsoever despair of the divine goodness, for the multitude and greatness of my sins; for which although I confess that I have deserved hell, yet will I steadfastly hope in God’s infinite mercy, knowing that he hath heretofore pardoned many as great sinners as myself, whereof I have good warrant sealed with his sacred mouth, in holy writ, whereby he pronounceth that he is not come to call the just, but sinners.

  VI

  Item, I John Shakespeare do protest that I do not know that I have ever done any good work meritorious of life everlasting: and if I have done any, I do acknowledge that I have done it with a great deal of negligence and imperfection; neither should I have been able to have done the least without the assistance of his divine grace. Wherefore let the devil remain confounded; for I do in no wise presume to merit heaven by such good works alone, but through the merits and blood of my lord and saviour, Jesus, shed upon the cross for me most miser
able sinner.

  VII

  Item, I John Shakespeare do protest by this present writing that I will patiently endure and suffer all kind of infirmity, sickness, yea and the pain of death itself: wherein if it should happen, which God forbid, that through violence of pain and agony, or by subtlety of the devil, I should fall into any impatience or temptation of blasphemy, or murmuration against God or the Catholic faith, or give any sign of bad example, I do henceforth and for that present repent me, and am most heartily sorry for the same: and I do renounce all the evil whatsoever, which I might have then done or said; beseeching his divine clemency that he will not forsake me in that grievous and painful agony.

  VIII

  Item, I John Shakespeare, by virtue of this present testament, I do pardon all the injuries and offences that any one hath ever done unto me, either in my reputation, life, goods, or any other way whatsoever; beseeching sweet Jesus to pardon them for the same: and I do desire that they will do the like by me, whom I have offended or injured in any sort howsoever.

  IX

  Item, I John Shakespeare do here protest that I do render infinite thanks to his divine majesty for all the benefits that I have received as well secret as manifest, & in particular for the benefit of my Creation, Redemption, Sanctification, Conservation, and Vocation to the holy knowledge of him & his true Catholic faith: but above all, for his so great expectation of me to penance, when he might most justly have taken me out of this life when I least thought of it, yea, even then, when I was plunged in the dirty puddle of my sins. Blessed be therefore and praised, for ever and ever, his infinite patience and charity.