The Lodger Shakespeare

by Charles Nicholl

  And then there is that troubling discrepancy which I mentioned at the beginning of the book. When Daniel Nicholas (or, as we might now think, Mary Belott) asked him what dowry Mountjoy had promised the couple, Shakespeare said it was about £50. But when he was asked the same question in court, he claimed he could not remember the figure. A sum was promised, he says, ‘but what certain portion he remembereth not’. The reason he gives for his ignorance is that he had not been privy to the financial discussions at the time of the marriage. He says, ‘The plaintiff was dwelling with the defendant in his house, and they had amongest themselves many conferences about their marriadge’ - implying that he was not present at these ‘conferences’. Nonetheless the anomaly remains: his story has changed.

  This seems to imbue his deposition with a note of betrayal, a refusal to involve himself. He was probably the only person who could swing the court - he was a gentleman, he was broadly impartial, and he had been personally involved in the negotiations. How much he would have pleased Mary if he had told the court what he had earlier told her and Daniel Nicholas - that Mountjoy had promised the sum of £50.

  But he does not. Caution prevails: a man must be careful what he says in a court of law. In his failure to remember, his shrug of non-involvement, he sides with the unforgiving father and against the spurned daughter. And so the deposition, a unique record of Shakespeare speaking, contains also this faintly sour note of silence. He follows the example of his own Parolles, that creature of the Silver Street nights, whose last words are, ‘I will not speak what I know.’

  ‘Mr Words’ has spoken enough.

  He appends the hurried, perfunctory signature which one sees at the bottom of the paper. The pen blotches on the k and tails off: ‘Willm Shaks’. It will do. It will get him out of that courtroom, away from all these questions and quarrels, the interminable loose ends of other people’s lives, like a ‘ravell’d sleave’ of silk whose tangles can never be unpicked. The signature attests his presence at that moment, but in his mind he is already leaving. After a last few formalities he bids good day to the Mountjoys and the Belotts. He walks down to the wharf at Westminster Stairs to catch a boat downriver. He does not know if he will see them again, and we do not know if he did.

  Epilogue

  The characters who have populated this little corner of Shakespeare’s life now slip back into the shadows briefly penetrated by the Belott-Mountjoy suit.

  Other than his marriage to Isabel d’Est, in the summer of 1615, nothing further is heard of Christopher Mountjoy. When he drew up his will on 26 January 1620 (see Plate 35) he was living in St Giles, Cripplegate. It would be nice to think this betokens some reconciliation with his daughter and son-in-law, who also lived in the parish, but the financial contortions of the will itself seem to argue against this. The will has a faint connection with Mr Mountjoy’s erstwhile lodger - one of its overseers was a man called Thomas Seaman, who would later perform the same service for Elizabeth Condell, widow of Shakespeare’s old colleague Henry Condell. In her will she bequeathed Seaman £10 and ‘all her books’ - the latter probably including a copy of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, of which Condell had been co-editor.1

  The burial register of St Giles records the funeral of ‘Christopher Mountioie Tyremaker’ on 29 March 1620 (see Plate 36). Administration of his goods was granted to Isabel on 5 April. His grieving widow did not remain so for long, however, for on 17 July she was married at St Giles to one William Broxon. He is described elsewhere as a ‘smith’, and was himself recently widowed. We might perceive in Isabel a penchant for elderly husbands, for within a few years Broxon was also dead, and she was at the altar for (at least) the third time, at St Dunstan’s in Stepney, where she married John Fisher on 1 May 1627.

  The Belotts continued to live in St Giles at least until the early 1620s. They had six children - all daughters - of whom two died in infancy. Three were later married: Anne, the eldest, to William Haier or Hayer, ‘wiredrawer’; Jane to Francis Overing, a glover; and Hester - or, as Stephen Belott wrote it, ‘Easter’ - to a Christopher Bates.2 The husbands sound English, their professions artisan; the wiredrawing son-in-law may be a partner in the tiremaking business. Of their youngest daughter Elizabeth, born in 1621, there is no further record, and she is not mentioned in Belott’s will. Perhaps she died young, or perhaps - families being one of the chief ways in which history repeats itself - she is another shunned daughter.

  In 1619 Belott was at loggerheads with the new monopoly on gold and silver thread. Strict production quotas were imposed on the thread-workers, who had to pay nearly 60 per cent of their earnings to the commissioners. At the apex of this pyramid of royally licensed robbery was the notorious Sir Giles Mompesson, who made huge profits until protests led to his investigation and impeachment; he is caricatured as the greedy schemer Sir Giles Overreach in Philip Massinger’s New Way to Pay Old Debts (c. 1621). Belott was one of many who suffered violent intimidation from the monopolists’ heavies, and as we know he was not a man to leave offences unanswered. His petition for redress, dated 20 March 1621, survives in the House of Lords Record Office, a stone’s throw from the former site of the Court of Requests. ‘About two yeares since,’ he complains, a ‘pursuivant’ named Ireland ‘did forciblie enter’ his house,

  and going into an upper room, where the chamber door was locked, the said Ireland did violentlie breake open the said doore & tooke out of the chamber the peticioners mill, the onlie instrument of his living, and caried away the same . . . wherebie the peticioner his wife & children are utterlie undone.3

  Another upstairs room in Cripplegate, another faint glimpse of Mary, shielding her frightened children as the men rifle through the chamber. Whether Belott ever got the ‘recompense’ he craved we do not know.

  The last record of Mary Belott ne’e Mountjoy is the baptism of her daughter Elizabeth on 21 September 1621. I have not found any record of her burial. She was dead when Stephen Belott drew up his will in July 1646. He had by then a second wife, Thomasine, though no children by her. Their address was ‘the Bowling Alley neere Long Lane’. The street ran down from Aldersgate to Smithfield. Stow describes it as ‘builded on both the sides with tenements for brokers, tipplers, and such like’; John Taylor the water-poet associates it with pawnshops.4 The neighbourhood has a down-at-heel air.

  Belott bequeathed money to Thomasine and his three married daughters, but the money was inconveniently overseas, in Holland - 900 guilders, then worth £90, left to him by his brother John, who had died in Haarlem: another pot of cash just out of reach. Stephen Belott died in early 1647, probably in his mid-sixties.5

  And what of Mr Shakespeare? These others all outlived him. When he walked out of that courtroom in the early summer of 1612 he had just under four years left. In literary terms he was already coasting downhill. The only plays later than this date are his three collaborations with John Fletcher. Two of them - Henry VIII and the lost Cardenio - were performed by the King’s Men in 1613; and the last, The Two Noble Kinsmen, probably in 1614.

  He was sometimes to be seen in London - indeed he became, for the first time, a property-owner in the city. The Blackfriars Gatehouse, which he bought in March 1613, was a rambling old house near the river, with ‘sundry back-dores and bye-ways’, and was probably a pied-à-terre as well as an investment. But most of what we know of these last years belongs to his life in Stratford: a well-off gentleman in well-earned retirement, surrounded by his family and his fruit-trees at New Place, though not entirely free of the small vexations that come with respectability. There was a brief but embarrassing court case, when his daughter Susanna Hall sued a man who said she had ‘bin naught with [had sex with] Rafe Smith’ and had ‘the runinge of the raynes [gonorrhea]’. There was the threat of enclosure in the Welcombe area, where he owned land - ‘My cosen Shakspeare’ (wrote the town clerk, Thomas Greene, in his diary) ‘told me that they assured him they ment to enclose noe further then to Gospell Bushe, and so upp straight . . .
[to] Clopton Hedge.’6

  And then there was the matter of his younger daughter Judith, who turned thirty in 1615 - one last piece of matrimonial business to be arranged. She was married at Holy Trinity church on 10 February 1616. Her husband was a feckless young man, Thomas Quiney, who had recently sired an illegitimate child. His business ventures would fail, his children by Judith would die young.7 Not quite an ‘honest fellow’, perhaps: a match made in haste rather than heaven. Six weeks later, already sick, Shakespeare drew up his will, and on 23 April 1616 he died.

  Half a century later, a Stratford vicar obligingly offered a cause of death - Shakespeare had over-indulged at a ‘merry meeting’ with fellow-poets Drayton and Jonson. ‘It seems [they] drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.’ This Parnassian binge is certainly too good to be true. Neither Shakespeare nor Drayton has any reputation for roistering, and Jonson (who could drink enough for all three of them) is not known to have visited Stratford. A more sober conjecture is that Shakespeare died of typhoid fever. The spring of 1616 was unseasonably warm and wet, favourable to water-borne infections. The mortality rate in Stratford was high that year, nearly 50 per cent up on recent years.8 He died in the company not of poets, but of his fellow-townspeople - one among many.

  In his last sole-authored play, The Tempest (1611), Prospero’s great speeches of recantation are often taken as Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage: ‘This rough magic I here abjure . . .’; ‘Our revels now are ended . . .’; and most poignantly in the Epilogue, also spoken by Prospero -

  Now my charms are all o’erthrown,

  And what strength I have’s my own,

  Which is most faint.

  But though these lines may be, in part, Shakespeare’s swansong, they are not his last words on the stage. These are to be found in the little-read and seldom performed Two Noble Kinsmen of c. 1614. The play, an elegant tragicomedy set in ancient Athens, has more Fletcher and less Shakespeare than Henry VIII, and was not included in the Folio, but the final act is demonstrably his.

  A speech by Theseus - one of those ‘kingly parts’ that Shakespeare himself used to take - brings the play to a close.9 Its concluding lines, addressed to the ‘gods’, are the nearest we have to Shakespeare’s last words - oddly unfamous, quietly spoken, serenely puzzling:

  O you heavenly charmers,

  What things you make of us! For what we lack

  We laugh; for what we have are sorry; still

  Are children in some kind. Let us be thankful

  For that which is, and with you leave dispute

  That are above our question. Let’s go off

  And bear us like the time. (5.6.131-7)

  The stage direction calls for a ‘flourish’ of music before the characters walk off.

  Appendix:

  The Belott-Mountjoy Papers

  The chief documents relating to the Belott-Mountjoy case are here transcribed in full, arranged as follows:

  Pleadings (Complaint, Answer, Replication and Rejoinder; January-May 1612)

  Depositions (witness statements at three sessions of the Court of Requests; May-June 1612)

  Arbitration (referral from the Court of Requests and deliberations of the French Church; June 1612-February 1614)

  I also give, under the heading Other Documents, some later papers not connected with the lawsuit - Mountjoy’s will (January 1620), Belott’s petition to the House of Lords (March 1621) and Belott’s will (July 1646).

  Most of these documents were first published by Charles William Wallace in 1910 (University of Nebraska Studies 10/4, 8-44). The scarcity of that volume makes this reprint desirable. His transcripts, checked against the originals at the National Archives and the French Church of London, are remarkably accurate. Mountjoy’s will and Belott’s petition are published here for the first time, from manuscripts at the Guildhall Library and the House of Lords Record Office.

  1. PLEADINGS

  a. Stephen Belott’s Bill of Complaint, 28 January 1612 [TNA Pro REQ 4/1/3/1]

  To the Kinges moste Excellent Maty

  In all humblenes Complayninge sheweth vnto yor moste excellent Ma:tie yor highnes poore and faythfull and obedient subpliant Stephen Belott of London Tyermaker, That whereas yor Suppliant aboute nyne yeares sithence laste paste beinge then a Servant vnto one Christopher Mountioye of London Tyer maker [did] well Carry and behaue himselfe in the tyme of his saide service wth the saide Christopher bothe iustly & to the greate proffitt and advantage of the [said] Christopher, as that thereby yor saide Suppliant in all outwarde appearance did obtayne the good will and affecion of him the saide Christopher in suche sorte as hee then offered vnto yor saide Suppliant, that yf hee would accept in marriage one Marie Mountioye beinge his daughter and only Child that then hee would giue in Marriage wth his saide daughter vnto yor saide Suppliant the somme of three scoore poundes or thereaboutes for a porcion vppon yor saide Suppliantes daye of Marriage or shortlie after and would likewise at the tyme of his deceasse leaue vnto yor said Suppliant and his saide daughter the somme of two hundred pounds more vppon wch offers of ye saide Compt.lt and vppon his perswacions yor said Supp.lt did shortly after entermarry wth the saide Mary and haue liued togeather by the space of theis five yeares and haue had diuers Children betwixt them to the greate encrease of theire Chardge and are likelie to haue manie more so that theire poore trade is not able to giue them maintenance and yor saide Suppliant lent the saide Christopher the somme of fortie shillinges wch hee denies to paye or to performe his former promise, But so it is may it please yor moste excellent Matie. that yor said Suppliant growinge since his saide entermarriage wth the saide Mary into some want and necessitie by the reason of the encrease of his Chardge as a fore saide yor saide Supp.lt therefore repaired vnto him the saide Christopher desiringe him to satisfy and paye vnto yor saide Supp.lt the said somme of three scoore poundes soe promised by him vnto yor saide Supp.lt as all so to putt in suertyes to leaue yor Supp.lt and his wiffe two hundred poundes att his deathe, who all together forgettinge his ffatherlie promisses nor pityinge the distressed poore estate of yor said poore Subiecte and his greate Chardge verie vnnaturally dothe not only nowe deny his said promisse and refuse to paye the said somme of three scoore poundes but likewise denieth the payment of the saide somme of ffortie shillinges so lent him as a fore said. As allso hath sithence giuen forthe diuers tymes to diuers persons, that hee intendeth not to leaue vnto yor Supp.lt his wiffe nor Children the vallue of one penny when soever hee shall departe this naturall lyffe, beinge not onlie to the greate [hurt] and hinderance of yor said Supp.lt his wiffe & famyly but alsoe to theire vtter vndoeinge yf they bee not releiued by the iustice of this honorable Courte, & beinge a man of good estat & wth out charge. In Tender Consideracion whereof and for asmuche as by ye strict Course of the Common lawes of this Realme yor said pore subjecte is remediles either to recover the said three scoore poundes soe promissed as aforesaid or to Compell him the saide Cristopher Mountioye to putt in suretyes to leaue tow hundred poundes to yor highnes poore subject & his wiffe at his death beinge of late inclyned to waste his estate for that yor said subject cannott prove the saide promisses in soe strict manner as by the Common lawe is required or yf hee Could yet hath not yor said subject by the said Common lawes of this Realme ffitt or apt remedy neither is yor saide loyall subject able to proove the loane of the said fforty shillinges to ye said Christopher Mountioye but perswadeth himselfe that the said Christopher either to dischardge a good Conscience as knowinge periurye is a moste damnable sinn or to avoide the punishment inflicted on such as comit the saide sinn, may it therefore please yor highnes the premisses Considered, To graunt vnto yor subject yor highnes moste gracious writt of privie seale to be directed vnto the said Christopher Mountioy Commaundinge him thereby at a Certayne day and vnder a Certayne payne therein to be directed personally to appeare before yor highnes in yor highness Courte of White Hall Comonlie called the Court of Requestes Then & there to make a direct answer to the premisses a
nd to stande to suche further order & direction therein as by yor highnes or yor said Counsell shalbe thought meete to stand wth equity & good conscience, And yor said loyall subjecte accordinge to his bounden dutye shall hartely pray to god to prolonge yor highness happy Raigne and lyfe longe to Contynewe./

  Raf: Wormlaighton.

  b. Christopher Mountjoy’s Answer, 3 February 1612 [ibid./2]

  The Answeare of Christopher Mountioy to the Bill of Complainte of Stephen Belott Complt

  This defendante All advantages of exception to the Insufficiencie and Incertainty of the sayd Bill nowe and at all times saved vnto him for answeare thervnto and for the manifest declaration of the truth saith That about ten yeares last past the defendante was Contentented [sic] at the Entreaty of the sayd Complainauntes friendes to accept of the Complainaunte to serve him as a prentise to learne his trade being a Tyremaker his said frendes promis-singe to finde him Convenient apparrell while he shoulde so Continue in this deffendauntes service, and the said Complainaunte did serve this defendaunte as a Prentice to learne his trade the space of six yeares or thereaboutes. But dueringe all the time of his sayd service neither the Complaynaunte nor any of his friendes did according to theire promise fynde him any apparrell att all savinge Linen but this Defendaunte was enforced to finde him all the Residue of his apparrell duering all the sayd time neither had the Complainaunte duering all the sayd time of six yeares any further or other releefe or othr maintenaunce from any of his friendes but was duering all the saide time wholy and solye mayntayned by this Defendaunte. And after the said Complainaunt had served this Defendaunte as aforesayd the said time of six yeares then the said Complainaunte was desierus to travell into spaine and this Defendaunte did furnish him wth mony and other necessaryes for the Iorney to the vallue of six poundes or theraboutes after which time the sayd Complaynaunte returned from his travell vnto this Defendaunte againe and was a suter vnto this Defendauntes daughter to marry her and to that purpose did move this Defendaunte and his then wife for theire Concentes for the marriage which this Defendaunte and his sayd wyfe being poore and able to bestowe lyttle or nothinge wth their sayd Daughter in marryage (save yt this Defendante had then brought her to a good perfection in his sayd trade of Tyermakeinge) was Contented to yeelde vnto: though the said Complainaunte neither then had nor ever sithence to the knowledge of this Defendaunte any mony, or other valluable goodes or landes whatsoever from his sayd friendes nor any other thinge whatsoever but what he had gotten in this Defendauntes service and by the trade that this Defendaunte had learned him. And afterwardes vid. about five yeares past the sayd Complainaunte was marryed to the sayd Daughter of this Defendaunte at which mariyage it was agreed betweene the said Complainaunte and this Defendaunte that if the sayd Complainaunte with his wife shoulde Continue and worcke in theire trade to the benefitt of this Defendaunte in the house of this Defendaunte duering the space of twoe yeares or thereaboutes after the said Marriage this Defendaunte giveinge them Conveniente housrome and dayate Convenient for them so that this Defendaunte might only haue the benifitt of theire laboures. Then this Defendaunte at the end of the sayd twoe yeares would give vnto the sayd Complainaunte fiftie poundes or to that effect as this Defendt nowe remembreth aftr which time the sayd Complaynaunte did for a little time remayne in the house of this Defendaunte accordingly. But after the sayd Complaynaunte and his wife had stayed in the house of this Defendaunte as aforesayd the space of halfe a yeare or there aboutes he refused to stay there any longer and would needes take othr Courses for his better prefermente as he then pretended And at the end of the sayd halfe yeare when the said Complt Did departt from the house of this Defendaunte out of his love to the sayd Complainaunte and his wife (beinge no other way Compellable thervnto) did bestowe on them a good proportion of houshoulde stuffe and the thinges Concerninge theire trade according to this Defendauntes poore ability being to the vallue of Twenty poundes or thereaboutes and lykewyse ten poundes of ready mony to put into theire pursse and did hartely desier theire welfare and lykwise did Intende to leave vnto the sayd Complaynaunte and his wife beinge the only chylde of this Defendaunte all or the moste parte of that estate which god should have blessed them with at the time of his Death. And allso in his fatherly love to have ben helpfull to them from time to time accordinge to his poore ability After which time (yt the said Complainaunt was gon from the house of this Defendaunt) about a yeare This Defendauntes wife dyed and then the said Complaynaunte and his wife Came againe and lived wth this Deffendaunte as partneres in ther sayd trade of Tyeringe about the space of half a yeare duering which time this Defendaunte had in his handes the summe of forty shillinges of the Complaynauntes mony and at the end of the said Halfe yeare & about the time of the Complaynauntes depareture from this deftes house the sayd Complaynaunte being Indebted vnto a Bruer the summe of three poundes desiered this Defendaunt to pay it for him to the sayd Bruer which sayd somm of three poundes this Defendaunte payed for the sayd Complaynaunte accordingly but this deft was nevr sithenes repaide the said 311. or any parte therof other then the said 40s as aforsaid, and dueringe the sayd half yeare that the Complaynaunt was with this Defendaunte as aforesayd this Defendaunte did buy into the shopp with his owne mony silvered wyer and othr Comodyties Concerninge theire trade to the vallue of Ten poundes or theraboutes for which the sayd Complainaunte should by agreemente have payd halfe but did pay never a peny And this Defendaunte absolutely denyeth that he did ever to his knowledge offer vnto the sayd Complaynaunte in marryage wth his daughter the summe of Threescore poundes or any portion or other somme whatsoever other than the sayd summe of ffifty poundes at the end of the foresayd three yeares and vpon the Considderation as before is expressed. And this Defendante lykewyse denyeth that he did ever promise to leave to the sayd Complainaunte and his wife at his Death the some of two hundred poundes or any other Certaine summe but as aforesayd did Intende to deale with the Complaynaunt and his wife at the time of his Death as it is fittinge for a father to deale with his only Chylde But this Defendaunte neither then Coulde nor yet Canne set dowe any Certaynty thereof for that this deft, both then was and yet is a poore man and knows not howe it will please god to blesse him in his estate at the time of his Death nor how the sayd Complaynaunte and his wife will behave themselves towardes this Defendaunte In his life time wherby they may deserve this Defendauntes either more or lesse affection and love towardes them. And this defendaunt lykewyse denyeth that he to his knowledge doth owe the Complaynaunte forty shillinges or any other former somme of Mony whatsoever otherwyse than as before is expressed An this Defendaunte further saith that he did about a month sythence earnestly request the sayd Complaynaunte in the presence of his neighboures to account wth him for the sayd Reckoninge betweene them at which time the sayd Complaynaunte did give this Defendaunte Ill Languages and bid him Come by his mony howe he Coulde Without that that any other matter or thing Contained in the sayd Bill of Complaynt materiall or effectuall to be answered vnto and not heerin sufficiently Confessed and avoyded denyed or traversed is true All which matters this Defendante is ready to averr and prove as this most honorable Court shall award and humbly prayeth to be dismissed out of the same with his reasonable Chardges in this behalfe most wrongfully sustayned/