a schoolmistress in the
country,
with 'smalle Latine' and no
Greek,
Sauerlach, February 2002
In a nutshell, that his father
John's ancestry is 99.99% certain in the Shakeshaftes of Lancashire and Mary
Arde(r)n(e)'s ancestry 100% certain in the Ardernes of Cheshire. She was
related to pretty well everyone who has ever appeared in the 'Shakespeare in
Lancashire' story and was John's third wife and William's stepmother. They
married in c. 1575 as a genteel widow and a rich widower, and their combined
families included ten or eleven children. They spent most of the 1580s in the
North West and most of the 1590s in London.
It doesn't really, but an
awful lot of people have been hunting for the last few centuries and never
found it, so there is a certain satisfaction in having solved some of these
particular puzzles. It also serves to explain many anomalies and mysteries that
have bedevilled all biographers since Rowe,
who attempted to produce the first seamless biography in 1709.
That has been a constant
mystery to me, but the basic answer is that by concentrating most of their
efforts on Shakespeares/ shaftes and Ardernes/ Ardens in the Midlands they
were, quite simply, looking in the wrong place. I just seem to have come along
at the right time with my Lancashire genealogical research and wide reading in
the history of the county. I also happen to have spent most of my youth in a
valley round the corner of the moors from Hoghton
Tower and known most of my life about the tradition that he had spent a
couple of years there and a short time with the Heskeths
of Rufford
Old Hall. Like so many others, I've always been a fan of his works and
never paid much attention to his biography, but was intrigued when I kept
bumping into so many of his associates and contemporaries in my little bit of
Lancashire, and started to investigate further.
Among the most important were Edmund Spenser, a
fellow poet and admirer, whom tradition places in the family of Hurstwood Hall
near Burnley; Edward
Alleyn, a fellow actor, whose mother was a Towneley of
Towneley (Keen); Ferdinando Stanley, Lord
Strange, whose Players performed some of Shakespeare's early works, and whose
wife Alice, a kinswoman of Spenser's, was a close friend of Alexander Standish
of Duxbury; and Ferdinando's brother William, 6th Earl of Derby, who was a
strong contestant as an authorship candidate at the beginning the 20th century.
In pursuing Myles Standish's story I had also come across many Lancashire
religious luminaries who had continued to prominent positions in Elizabeth's reign
and in some cases produced prominent children and also founded local grammar
schools (Kay). Every time I pursued any of these I
found myself going around in the same circles, with Shakespeare always in the
middle or hovering at the edge. During this time I was living in Bavaria (for
twenty-two years in the meantime) and pursuing its history. Particularly when
reading about the Holy Roman Empire and the Counter-Reformation, I was reminded
again and again of so many Lancastrian connections that somehow seemed to be
connected with Shakespeare.
Well, yes. To give but two
examples: Ferdinando, Lord Strange (son and heir of the 4th Earl of Derby of
Lancashire) was named in 1558 after the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand
II (whose family regularly married Bavarian princesses), which introduced this
name into Lancashire. Many local gentry
sons were later given this name, one can only presume as god-sons or in
emulation. I found it intriguing that lots of little Lancashire lads were
running around at the end of the 16th century, whose name, at least, connected
them to an Emperor and Ferdinand and Isabel of Spain. Also Munich was one of
the main bastions of the Jesuits north of the Alps at a time when Catholic
Lancashire gentry were sending large numbers of children to be educated abroad,
with several returning to England as Jesuit priests. Many passed through Munich
on their way from the schools-in-exile in Flanders and Northern France to the
English College in Rome. All these connections gradually started to fall into
place when pursuing Shakespeare's ancestry and biography.
He's often been associated
with Strange's Players, both in London in the 'conventional' biography and as
part of the 'Shakespeare in Lancashire' theory. And he's often been associated
with the Jesuits. In his lifetime his name was linked to Robert Parsons
(sometimes spelt Persons), head of the English Jesuits in Rome, and if he
really did spend time in Lancashire, it would have coincided with the stay
there in 1580-1 of Edmund
Campion. In reading the history of the Preston area (where my father
was born) it is difficult to miss the presence of Edmund Campion, as it
is so widely reported. People still remembered his charisma and oratorical
skills a century later, and he was similarly praised for a sermon in Munich on
his way from Rome to Lancashire. From the Munich end I knew about Jesuit drama
and their use of theatricals as a pedagogical aid and from the Lancashire end I
knew about it mainly because of Stonyhurst College, not
far from Hoghton
Tower. If Shakespeare really was with the Catholic Hoghtons and
Heskeths, this would certainly help to explain his early interest and
involvement in the theatre.
Mainly about the relevance of
his ancestry for his biography
I conclude that it explains
many of the mysteries and controversies of today.
For starters: (1) Was he a
Catholic? (2) Were the two independent traditions that he spent some of his
youth in Lancashire merely myths or based on the truth? (3) Who wrote his
works? (4) Why were there so few Stratford traditions about him and his family?
(5) How did he achieve what he did with his 'conventional' background?
My findings produced a
resounding YES to the first two questions as the only story that makes sense of
some of his 'lost years' and several
anomalies beyond those. The answer to the third is a little more complicated.
He certainly wrote his own works, but probably with more than a little help
from his friends, the most important early Earl friend from his teenage days
being William Stanley, later 6th Earl of Derby. The answer to the fourth was
clear: few of the Shakespeare family were in Stratford permanently during
William's formative and most successful years; John, Mary and William just went
back there in retirement or to die. The answer to the fifth lies partly in
Mary's kinsmen and noble family connections.
Very. She could claim an
ancestry in a female line from Charlemagne via the Dukes of Burgundy and her
family tree was riddled with knights and barons, with the odd Welsh Prince thrown in. Pedigree Charts and all the
documentation from the Cheshire end are in Ormerod
and Earwaker. Their problem was that
they both died before it became well known that Mary's coat of arms was that of
the Cheshire Arderne
family and not the Warwickshire Arden family. Rather amazingly, this was not
re-discovered until 1863 (Gough Nichols) and he
refused to believe it, followed by Sir Sidney Lee, who
wrote the monumental biography of Shakespeare that dominated all biographies in
the 20th century. A few small voices in the last half century have raised the
suggestion again, but none, it seems, before me, has actually read everything
written on the Cheshire Ardernes. The
answers were all there in Cheshire documents, although disguised by a few 19th
century muddles that needed sorting out via other documents, heraldic laws and
coats of arms. One of her cousins was Sheriff of Warwickshire in 1568-9 (French), the year when John Shakespeare was High
Bailiff of Stratford, a coincidence which may or may not be significant.
Another was steward to his (and Mary's) kinsman the 4th Earl of Derby on his
mission to France in early 1585 (Coward) and to
the Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth's favourite, on his mission to the Netherlands
later that year (Thoms).
Quite. With my findings about
Mary's ancestry and cousins in high places, this makes nonsense of his poverty
and need for a humble job at this time. Mary's connections would have provided
him with access to the highest circles long before. We know he knew Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of
Southampton, before he dedicated Venus
and Adonis to him in 1593, and now it has emerged that through Mary's
cousins he would have had easy access to the Earls of Derby and Leicester.
I have no idea, other than
that she was John's second wife, and possibly (from names evidence) a daughter
of Gilbert and Joan X and herself Joan. She might have been from Lancashire or
Warwickshire, or anywhere else.
From my point of view at the
moment, not much. They must have married before 1557, which is too early for
most surviving Parish Registers, and as a wife, she wouldn't have left a will.
The main chance would come from a will naming John Shakespeare of Stratford as
a son-in-law. As every document in Warwickshire mentioning Shakespeare seems to
have been scoured thoroughly, there seems little hope there, although for the
past two centuries everyone has assumed his first and only wife was Mary. Maybe
a wider search will produce something - or not.
No idea, and I doubt if she
will ever be identified, but reliable early reports and dates alone indicate
that she existed.
I have no idea, but the Greene
alias Shakespeare family of Stratford provides the best clue for future
research. Greenes in other places have been identified as potentially
significant by Enos and Conlan.
Because of all the following
facts. I have no doubt that it will be disputed until all have been sifted
through by others, but for me this is the only possible conclusion on the basis
of the following:
All over the place, but the
texts of the documents themselves prove that John was the one to apply and be
awarded them. William, as his son, was entitled to use these arms, of course,
and seems to have been the butt of a few jokes about this in Jonson's Poetaster. But he never quartered
Mary's arms because he wasn't allowed to under heraldic laws.
Very. She provided William
with an instant set of gentry and noble connections, including the Stanleys,
Hoghtons, Heskeths and pretty well everyone else ever mentioned in the
'Shakespeare in Lancashire' theory. These provided young William with his
passport to his future career and sponsored him for the rest of his life.
Four survivors were from
John's second marriage, four from his marriage to Mary and the rest Mary
brought with her from her previous marriage(s).
Several facts converge on this
date. It had to be after 1574 when the last child from the second marriage was
baptised. It had to be before 1578 when he started selling Mary's property. In
1576 he obtained a coat of arms, although it was twenty years before he carried
through the official application. Several have puzzled over this, but the very
date inbetween the two outside dates for the marriage make one suspect there
had been some change in his life, and marriage to an heraldic heiress would be
one highly plausible explanation. Also, from the beginning of 1577 onwards he
disappeared from sight in Stratford for two decades, apart from the occasional
return to do with lands and properties and the death of friends. They also had
to have time to produce two children before 1580. Put all these dates and facts
together and the only two sensible years are 1575 or 1576. Hence c. 1575.
Not located so far, but there
was never any record of their supposed marriage in 1557 (which never took
place), so I can't think there can be much objection to no record of a marriage
which obviously did take place. Parish records before 1600 are so patchy or
non-extant that there is little hope of locating precise details. Stratford is
one of the exceptions, with its rather complete (all have assumed) Bishop's
Transcript starting in 1558. Their marriage is not recorded there, presumably
for the simple reason that they married somewhere else, where records have not
survived. It was normal, then as now, to marry in the bride's parish. Mary's
native parish was Aston Cantlowe in Warwickshire, where marriage records
survive from 1560 onwards, but there is no record there. One can assume
whatever one wants, but my conclusion is that they probably married in the
parish where she had lived with her previous husband, perhaps in Warwickshire
or perhaps in Cheshire (the two most likely candidate counties) or perhaps
somewhere else. I doubt if we will ever know.
A few more 'Hows and Whys' about ancestries
I didn't need to discover it.
He told us so himself in almost as many words in his application for a coat of
arms in 1596 and various subsequent documents at the College of Arms. His final
refinement was that his great-grandfather had been awarded 'lands and
tenements' in Warwickshire because of service for Henry VII. The most obvious
reason for this was participating in the winning army at Bosworth, composed almost
exclusively of Lancashire and Cheshire men. For the full transcriptions and
facsimiles of the coat of arms documents, see Gough
Nichols and Howard.
I honestly have no idea. Many
in the past have interpreted his claim of 'service to Henry VII' because of
fighting at Bosworth. It
seems, amazingly to me, that none of those who have made this suggestion knew
that 90+% of Englishmen on Henry's side were from Lancashire and Cheshire, in
the two Stanley armies. Read Michael Bennett's Bosworth for all the numbers and
details. Contemporary estimates in the Stanley armies were twenty thousand,
since scaled down to about five thousand, but the Earls of Derby regularly
mustered armies much larger than five thousand in the following century. (One
muster list in 1536, to counter the Pilgrimage of Grace, had well over seven
thousand just from Lancashire. Coward
(pp. 98, 108) gives the muster list (P.R.O. SP, Hen. VII, fols 157-160) and
references to sources for later Lancashire musters.) Henry's own army consisted
of about two thousand French (provided by the King of France), about a thousand
Scots (in the service of the King of France) and about two thousand Welsh
(picked up on the way largely because of his Welsh Tudor ancestry and the Stanley
interest in North Wales), plus a few hundred English fellow-exiles. Work out
for yourself the ratio between 5-20,000 from Lancashire and Cheshire and 500(?)
English exiles on Henry's side and you already have the chances that any
Englishman at Bosworth
and immigrant to the Midlands in the generation after Bosworth was a Stanley tenant. Whichever figures you
choose, you will arrive at 90+%.
His coat of arms grants make
it clear that it was his great-grandfather who had inherited the estate, but
that others had subsequently inherited it and were still living there and in
other local areas in 1599. The obvious explanation from the law of
primogeniture is that he or his father was a younger brother, who had to make
his own way in the world.
I don't know, but as his
eldest son was William (from Stratford Registers and from early reports), in
all likelihood his own father was William. It certainly wasn't Richard of
Snitterfield, the only candidate on offer so far.
Several reasons, but the main
one is that his son John was never labelled 'Mr' or 'Gent.', whereas 'our' John
always was. There really were very strict rules in operation at the time, which
were apparently not known by 19th century researchers who found Richard the
best candidate. He was obviously another recent immigrant in the generation
after Bosworth, however,
so might well have been a relative.
By reading Earwaker on the Ardernes of Cheshire, where
I immediately spotted Thomas Arderne, Esq., founder of the branch in
Leicestershire. He turned out to be Mary's great-grandfather, by total
elimination of all other candidates and his and Mary's coat of arms. The story
was rather tangled in the Midlands because of various 19th century muddles, but
Mary's coat of arms made it very clear that her grandfather was a fourth son of
the Cheshire family. Robert Glover
(1544-88), herald and King of Arms, had recorded Visitation Pedigrees of
Cheshire families in 1566 and 1580 (Rylands)
and recorded many coats of arms of Midlands Arde(r)n(e) families in the 1580s,
which allowed him, and later me, to sort out the whole story and disentangle
most Ardernes from Ardens. I realise I am making this claim without offering
the ultimate proof, just indicating where I found it, but the proof really is
there. The main problem was all the 19th century muddles, which led to later
muddles, which led to the 'conventional' story, which require several chapters
(in a future book) to sort out. Or maybe we can just forget about the
intervening muddles and go back to the primary sources from people who actually
knew the real story and reported it in the 16th century, and start again from
scratch? Glover presents most of the answers; French presents most of the muddles.
I don't think we will ever
know, but there are several examples in the Midlands of people using both names
in the 16th century, and also Shakestaff (Stopes,
Eccles). Shakespeare was the local
Midlands name and I suspect it was under pressure of the local version that
they just got fed up of trying to insist on Shakeshafte. (They have my
sympathy, as we Moorwoods have to fight long and hard to be recorded as this
rather than better known versions of Moorehead, etc. I had Moorcroft recently from an old school-friend - shame on
you, Dr Chadwick!) Or maybe they thought it sounded nicer? Keen in 1954 reported that a solicitor in the
Midlands had seen a document where Shakeshafte had been crossed out and
Shakespeare inserted, but unfortunately no one since seems to have managed to
locate this. However, we know that the Shakeshaftes of Snitterfield ended up as
Shakespeares. We also have the evidence of the peculiar hyphen in William's
surname, printed so often as Shake-speare, and Robert Greene's
'Shake-scene' in 1592. (Greene's story is told in all recent Shakespeare
biographies; start with Schoenbaum.)
The hyphen really is so strange that this in itself demands an explanation, but
no one so far has produced a convincing one for me or anyone else. I conclude
that it had something to do with the Shakespeare/ shafte puzzle.
Mainly about William Stanley and other
authorship candidates
He was proposed as an
alternative authorship candidate in 1918 by a French Professor and with good
reason, as it is impossible not to associate him and his brother Ferdinando
closely with Love's Labour's Lost.
Then there are all the Stanleys and Lancastrians with enhanced or gratuitous
roles in his early King plays. Stanley also wrote plays and had a troupe of
players. A good recent summary of these and other connections is in Michell. My findings are mainly in establishing
that he really was the 'great traveller' of ballad and legend, and his ancestry
and biography presents so many parallels and contacts with people in
Shakespeare's circle that it becomes difficult to dismiss him to the sidelines.
Professor Daugherty, his recent biographer (see Dictionary
of National Biography), is convinced they were closely involved and
that Stanley had Catholic sympathies. I agree. One comment by my husband
several years ago was, "The answer to all of your questions is 'The Earl
of Derby'." This is not quite true, but perhaps illustrates that they
obviously played a central role in my research - and in Shakespeare's
biography. One of the first comments from Professor Daugherty, after establishing
contact was, "Do you realise, Helen, that we are the only two people in
the world interested in William Stanley?" I replied, "I can double
that." Meanwhile I can triple this number, and predict that many more will
become interested in him.
I doubt it, but he might have
provided an embryo version of Love's
Labour's Lost, suggestions for the content of other early plays, and
knowledge and stories that he brought back from his travels.
Forget them, other than as
'extras' on the sidelines. The other two main earl candidates, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford
and Roger Manners, 5th Earl of
Rutland, were both closely related to William Stanley
(and the latter closely related to the Cheshire Ardernes), so Shakespeare would
have known them well enough to pick up ideas from them, too. The only reason
any alternative candidates were offered in the first place was because some
people could not reconcile the 'son of an illiterate wool-dealer' in a small
market-town in the Midlands with the genius and knowledge of Shakespeare. I
sympathise with these doubts because the 'conventional' biography does present
so many anomalies, but the answers don't lie in alternative authorship
candidates. Many of these anomalies are now explained by his parents and their
religious leanings, which led to his upbringing in upper gentry and
aristocratic circles.
As mentioned, he and his
associates, particularly the Earls of Derby, kept popping up all over the place
in my Lancashire research. Almost by chance I visited Hoghton
Tower in August 1999, alerted by announcements about the recent
Shakespeare conference there and at Lancaster
University. I bought the books on sale, read them (starting with Honigmann, 1985), and immediately realised
I already had the answers to many questions and puzzles in the 'Shakespeare in
Lancashire' episode, although many puzzles still remained. These remaining
puzzles continued to haunt me and still haunt me today, but I have hopes that
they might be resolved in the next few years.
I just kept on reading, with
books and documents supplied by helpful bookshops and libraries on visits back
to England, and other details provided by my 'stalwarts', as I came to call my main
supporters. I also spent much time and money ordering facsimiles of original
Shakespeare and Standish of Duxbury documents.
Mainly about the Duxbury to Standish to
Shakespeare connections
The main connection was
Alexander Standish of Duxbury (1570/1-1622), whose mother was a Hoghton and who
himself was named after his uncle Alexander Hoghton, who wrote his will in
August 1581 naming William Shakeshafte. He was also a close friend of Dowager
Countess Alice, widow of Ferdinando, 5th Earl of Derby, who, as Lord and Lady
Strange in the early 1590s, were patrons of Strange's Players, who performed
some of Shakespeare's early plays. Alexander also had Duxbury blood flowing in
his veins and quartered the Duxbury arms in pride of second place (on the
magnificent oak Standish pew in St Laurence's, Chorley). He was Myles's closest
relative in Duxbury and several documents allow one to confidently assume that
Myles and Alexander knew each other rather well. One can also be certain that
Alexander Standish, with all his family connections, knew both William
Shakespeare when staying with his uncle Alexander Hoghton, and knew who William
Shakeshafte was. As Edmund
Spenser claimed kinship with Alice, it seems likely that he knew him
too. If only some letters from this period had survived among the Standish of
Duxbury MSS, the problem might have been solved once and for all, but alas,
none did.
Because she is named in his
will of 1621 (in the Lancashire Record
Office) as the only one not in his immediate family, and she was still
living, rent-free, in Alexander's neighbouring manor of Anglezarke the
following year at his inquisition post
mortem. I gave references to these in my articles.
Good question. She deserves a
biography in her own right. Briefly, she was one of the daughters of Sir John
Spencer of Althorpe in Northamptonshire (and we all know who another recent
member of this family was). They had their roots in Lancashire before the move
to the Midlands, and, true to form in staying allied to the same families,
often looked back in this direction for brides and grooms. She married
Ferdinando, Lord Strange and they had three daughters before he died, probably
poisoned, shortly after Catholic Lancashire exiles had offered Spanish and
papal support to put him on Elizabeth's throne (Bagley,
Coward). The earldom then went to
brother William and she later married Sir Thomas Egerton of Cheshire, Baron
Ellesmere and Elizabeth's Privy Seal. He died in 1617 and it was during her
second widowhood that, we now know, she moved to Anglezarke. All her adult life
she attracted dedications from poets, including Jonson and Milton
(Heywood) as well as her kinsman Spenser,
and it is impossible for her not to have known Shakespeare very early on, given
that her first husband's troupe of players put on some of his early plays. So
she is another one who would have known about the Shakespeare/ shafte puzzle.
Not directly, but there are so
many links stretching all over Lancashire and down to London to other people
who must have known him.
Because the gentry were
constantly on the move visiting friends and relatives and actors were
constantly on the move performing for the gentry. And when they were in London
they all met again at each others' houses and the theatre.
There are endless well
documented meetings in London in many diaries and letters of the period, and we
know that Ben Jonson,
one of his best friends, moved in circles at every level of society. One very
interesting Lancashire diary that survived was by Nicholas Assheton, the squire
of Downham, and first cousin of Alexander Standish's wife Alice Assheton, so we
know who many of his friends and what many of his activities were between 1617
and 1619 (Whitaker; Bagley, Diarists).
He thought nothing of riding half way across the county to visit his
gentlemen friends, to hunt with them, or attend a sermon by a noted preacher,
or theatricals or to attend a funeral; and travelled to London twice during
this period for a legal matter. Among many others he visited 'coz. Standish'
and hunted with William Stanley,
6th Earl of Derby. He also knew the Towneleys well, and the mother of Edward Alleyn,
may I remind you, was a Towneley. And he visited the Hoghtons, most importantly
during the three days when James I stayed in 1617 (and was drunk for the next
two days!). In short, he knew everyone in the Hoghton circle and all of these
appear on the lists of Preston Guild Rolls (Abram,
Preston) and all turned up on the
Earl of Derby's doorstep in groups (Raines). He
was born in the early 1590s, so wasn't around when young Shakespeare was with
the Hoghtons, but the theatricals he enjoyed must have included some
Shakespeare plays by some of the touring companies that passed through the
area. Unfortunately his diary starts the year after Shakespeare's death, but
the picture of Lancashire he left behind cannot have been too different for the
generation before him.
Mainly about Shakespeare and Lancashire
traditions
For me, the most important
evidence lies in the two old and persistent traditions in the Hoghton and
Hesketh families, which not only corroborate each other but are the only two in
the whole country associating him with specific families. These continued
completely independently in both families and both can be demonstrably traced
back to way before any Shakespeare scholarly interest was shown.
Not until 1923, when Chambers
noted Alexander Hoghton's will of 1581 naming William Shakeshafte, partially
transcribed by Piccope and printed by
the Chetham Society in 1860. There had, however, been several publications in
Lancashire before, which linked Shakespeare with the County Palatine.
A mystery to me, but most were
picked up later.
Oliver Baker was the first to
wax enthusiastic about the possibility of Shakespeare having spent some of his
'lost years' in Lancashire and published his speculations in 1937.
Yes, this was all they still
were. Although he visited Lancashire and some of the main sites, he did no
research amongst documents; but over the next few decades more and more
documentary evidence piled up. These all caused little flurries of excitement
and Keen's findings caused a great stir in
the 1950s, but nothing came of these until Honigmann
produced the first scholarly book in 1985. This caused another stir, but was
then largely ignored until rather recently, when the conference at Lancaster University and Hoghton
Tower in 1999 attracted a lot of media attention and greater general
interest. At the same time there has been an explosion in 'Catholic
Shakespeare' literature, coming from very different directions but all
converging on the Hoghtons.
By no means.
There seems to be an insistence
on the production of a document actually stating that William Shakespeare was
William Shakeshafte.
I agree completely when
tracing a family history back through censuses and civic records in the 19th
century, and parish and other records back to the beginning of the 17th
century. But from the 16th century back these are just not available in many
cases. So many family papers disappeared without trace and without any record
of how and why they might have disappeared. What is quite remarkable in the
case of four of 'my' families is that documentary records have survived of how,
when and where some of these disappeared. Many Stanley papers were lost when Lathom House
was razed to the ground in the Civil War and more went into a furnace later (Coward). The Shakespeare family papers went up
in flames in a fire in Warwick in 1694, reported by witnesses and printed in
1729 (Schoenbaum, pp. 305-6). Arderne
family papers are reported as disappearing by an eye-witness at the beginning
of the 19th century in a letter printed by Earwaker.
Many Hoghton portraits and papers disappeared in a fire, reported by Miller. In cases like this, there is little
hope of discovering documents that prove certain events. If a tradition has
survived as the only record, let us just be thankful that it has.
How reliable are oral family
traditions?
Some would say not at all and
immediately throw them out of the window. However, I have come across so many
that were demonstrably true and proved by documents that I would never reject a
tradition out of hand and certainly not an early report within two or three
generations after the event or death of the person in question, and
particularly in an age when telling stories at the family hearth was a common
pastime. My requirements for an oral tradition are that it must be dateable
back to the first half of the 19th century, have no self-serving interest, and
make sense within surrounding historical facts. If these conditions are met,
then strip away any peripheral details, particularly the weird and wonderful,
and the kernel, in my experience, usually contains the historical truth.
Many, but let's concentrate
here on two published rather early. The first concerns Myles Standish, and in
his case the family traditions were all printed by the middle of the 19th
century (Winsor), so there are no problems with
proving those dates. As mentioned in my 'Main conclusions',
the family tradition that he had inherited Duxbury Hall was ultimately proved
by a single document in the Standish of Duxbury MSS, which at the same
time proved his ancestry in this family. This was a case where the tradition
was far more reliable than the documentation pieced together painstakingly by
Rev. Porteus (1914, 1920). After two
centuries, however, the family had become rather vague as to how and why he
might have inherited Duxbury Hall and forgotten that his son Alexander had
renounced his claim when the Assize Court in Lancaster awarded him compensation
in 1655. They had also lost his will (not yet discovered and printed), so
didn't realise that the lands that he had never managed to regain possession of
were a Standish of Standish estate and nothing to do with Duxbury Hall. All these
details had been fused and confused and the final version was that he had been
cheated out of Duxbury Hall - the wrong estate. The kernels were therefore
'cheated out of an estate' (proved by the text of his will) and 'inherited
Duxbury Hall' (proved by the document mentioned above). The reason Rev. Porteus did not discover this is that he
died in the 1950s before the Standish of Duxbury MSS resurfaced in 1965.
All versions sent William
Stanley to Russia for three years, although one with a ridiculous itinerary and
another with impossible dates, and all had garbled versions of him meeting Dr
Dee, an old family friend, at the Emperor's court in Moscow. The accepted facts
(all well established in documents and published long ago) are that he did
indeed know Dr John Dee
(the famed traveller to various Eastern European courts as mathematician,
astrologer, alchemist, etc.) very well, but visited him mainly in Manchester,
where he was appointed Warden of the College in 1595 and where he lived in a
house owned by the Earls of Derby; Dr John Dee
never visited Moscow (most of his time in Eastern Europe was in Poland and
Bohemia); the Dr Dee, physician to the Russian Emperor for seventeen years, but
far too late for William Stanley to have visited him, was his eldest son Dr
Arthur Dee. My findings included that William Stanley was mysteriously missing
from any documentation in Lancashire or anywhere else in England from 1590-3,
which for various other solid reasons was the most logical date for a potential
stay in Russia. The inevitable conclusion was that the two Dr Dees, father and
son, had become muddled in local folk-lore by someone whose knowledge of
history and geography was not too sparkling. The two kernels left in all
versions were 'Russia' and 'three
years' and I doubt if we will ever know any more details. As mentioned
before, the Derby family papers largely disappeared during the Civil War,
including perhaps any letters written from Russia. An additional relevant fact
was that by the time the tradition of him as 'a great traveller' was recorded
in the 1740s, the senior line had died out and the Derby title inherited by a
junior line (incidentally, married to a Standish of Duxbury widow). Although
this family must have heard a lot about William's travels at the time, on the
other hand it was not their own family tradition, so had even less chance of
surviving intact.
Mainly about Shakespeare Midlands traditions
Most were written down before
the middle of the 18th century, so I would accept the kernels of all these,
particularly the very early reports. I strongly suspect, however, that some of them
were transposed in time and place (as with the Dr Dee muddle). For example, the
story of him starting in the theatre by holding gentlemen's horses makes much
more sense as a teenage 'servant' of the Hoghtons than as a married man
recently 'escaped' to London. Also, given the 'Shakespeare in Lancashire'
episode coinciding with Edmund
Campion's stay, and given that Campion wrote plays and was a teacher and
is known to have stayed with at least one Hoghton family, it is just plain
common sense to place the very reliable tradition that he was 'in his younger
days a schoolmaster in the country' with the Hoghtons; also the other tradition
that he started in the theatre as a prompter makes more sense here than in
London.
It doesn't really matter at
the moment what I think and any future biographer must come to their own
conclusion on the basis of recent findings. The most interesting aspect of
Shakespeare traditions and early reports for me is that there were so few of
them in Stratford just two generations after his death, when descendants of his
sister were still living there, even though during his lifetime and ever since
he had been hailed as one of its most famous sons. No one who attended church
regularly - and that means almost the whole population - can have been unaware
of his rather large monument, and one might have expected that many local
families would have had their own Shakespeare story, proudly related to their
grandchildren. These might have been embellished in transmission or only the
kernels remained, but if he really lived there for the whole of his youth from
1564 to 1585 when the twins were born, returned regularly during his London
years and retired there, surely more stories would have survived? The same
applies to John and Mary, if they lived there for the whole of their married
life. And yet only one recorded anecdote about John has survived, not a single
record of William's mother, and the only early record of his marriage was that
she was the daughter of a local yeoman called Hathaway. We know that some who
visited Stratford went there specifically for this purpose and were determined
to discover all they could. And yet they discovered so little. Also, the
majority of the anecdotes they did discover smack of teenage pranks or
specifically refer to his retirement. All this occurred to me again and again
as I read the biographical literature, and you can probably guess the
conclusion I came to when this was set against John's disappearing acts. From
the last two sets of facts the only logical conclusion was that the whole
family disappeared from Stratford for years on end.
The only one I have come
across is in Michell, reporting on 'the
weighty opinion of the Right Hon. D. H. Madden, Vice-Chancellor of Dublin
University, a staunch upholder of Orthodoxy in opposition to Baconism', who
discovered a local legend in Dursley in Gloucestershire that Shakespeare had
lived there. He was not, apparently, associated with any particular family,
unlike the two families in Lancashire. I leave it up to others interested to
pursue this one. Conlan, intriguingly,
found a few Bristol connections so maybe these will all connect in the future.
Mainly about evidence for the 'Shakespeare in Lancashire' theory
The appearance of William
Shakeshafte in Alexander Hoghton's will in August 1581 is interesting. A lot
has been written about this and a lot remains to be written. I doubt if it will
ever be proved definitively one way or the other but there are so many
arguments in favour of it being William Shakespeare that I find it curious
there has been so much resistance to accepting it. The most important evidence
for me lies in the demonstrably old Hoghton and Hesketh traditions, which place
young Will with the Hoghtons about the time of the 1581 will and with the
Heskeths some time later. There is documentary proof that Alexander's
'instruments of musics' and William Shakeshafte's associate Fulke Guillom went
to the Heskeths (all documentary details in Honigmann,
1985). Whether William Shakeshafte (Shakespeare?) accompanied these
instruments or not has been remarkably controversial. For me, the problem can
be stated quite simply: either William Shakeshafte was William Shakespeare, or
he wasn't. If he was, this has certain implications; if he wasn't, it has other
implications. An analysis of all implications one way or the other in the light
of others' and my findings lead, as with John's ancestry, to a 99.99% chance on
a balance of probabilities that they were one and the same. I elaborate on
these arguments for and against in my book, after presenting all the evidence.
The percentage given, as
mentioned many times before, is on a balance of probabilities based on many
documented facts.
(1) His own 'Bosworth' claim
almost automatically gives him an ancestry in Lancashire or Cheshire.
Mainly about the Shakespeares' Catholicism
There seems very little doubt
to me and many others that they were. So many early reports stated this
explicitly and so many other documentary details associate him explicitly with
known Catholics. It might be appropriate to mention here (at the risk of
repetition elsewhere) that I was reared in a Congregationalist community, with
a fairly solid Non-conformist ancestry (in some cases back to Shakespeare's
life-time), including a strong Methodist element, and was even (I regret to
report) discouraged from playing with local Catholic children, not that they
were too thick on the ground in our street. I hope that this already
establishes that I have no Catholic axe to grind and am just interested in the
facts and whatever final story might emerge from these.
Let us take as our starting
point the bare documentary facts reported by Schoenbaum,
who is regarded (quite rightly) as one of the most authoritative scholarly
commentators in the late 20th century on Shakespeare biographical details. He
approached all from a scrupulously secular stance and, perhaps inevitably, came
to non-sectarian conclusions.
(5) One piece of hard evidence
is John Shakespeare's 'Spiritual Testament', hidden in the rafters of the
Shakespeare house in Henley Street in Stratford, presumably sometime in the
late 16th century during the most virulent anti-Catholic campaigns, but in any
case found there in 1757 during renovations. The full text and story is in Schoenbaum, who reports on various
previous doubts but concluded that there was no longer any doubt that it was
authentic. Despite reporting the facts above he concluded they were conforming
Anglicans. What he neglected to report was:
It hardly seems to require a great leap of imagination, in the
light of the facts above, to conclude that the Shakespeares might well have
been Catholic and if you put together all the dates, we find not just isolated
incidents but a lifelong commitment that was well known to a large number of
people. The surprising thing is that it has taken so long for so many to accept
this. I can only conclude and explain this because of a general reluctance for
so long to accept the importance of Catholicism and various Catholic
individuals in the mainstream of English history. They were excluded from any
public functions during Elizabeth's reign unless they swore the Oath of
Allegiance, which many committed Catholics found difficult or impossible, as it
placed Elizabeth above the Pope. Similar laws were enforced after the Glorious
Revolution, and they continued to suffer until the Catholic Emancipation Act of
1829, and even long after this from prejudice if not before the law. The way
they survived with their beliefs intact was mainly by keeping their heads down
and not attracting too much attention. All this, it seems, led to a reluctance
by Victorians to accept that the National Poet was not an adherent of the
national religion, even as all the facts listed above become known, and this
prejudice has lingered on until today.
Mary's ancestry provided her
with endless kinsmen who were Catholic and Jesuit priests, including John
Arderne, who escaped from the Tower with Jesuit John Gerard (another
kinsman), brother of one of the closest friends (Thomas Gerard of Bryn) of
Mary's cousin (Thomas Arderne), who both accompanied the Earl of Derby to
France in 1585 (Coward). The history of a
Catholic network throughout the country is well documented and well known (Fraser), but it was never known until now quite
where Mary's family fitted in. One important set of relatives were these
Gerards of Bryn near Wigan, notorious recusants involved in several plots to
free Mary, Queen of Scots (Baines, Farrer); their daughters married into all the
local Catholic gentry families, including the Ardernes and the Hoghtons (Ormerod, Baines,
Farrer). Another important family (who were
Mary's ancestors and close kinsmen via other Stanley-Arderne marriages) was the
Stanleys of Hooton in Cheshire, the senior line of the family whose junior line
became the Earls of Derby (Ormerod).
The most famous/ notorious Elizabethan member of this family was Sir William Stanley 'The
Adventurer/ Traitor' (depending on which side you were on), who provided the
Catholic sword when Cardinal
William Allen (from Lancashire) provided the Catholic word from the
community in exile.
As mentioned above, the
Catholic network ensured that many of them did stay in regular contact. Anyone
who has studied the history of this period and taken a close look at Visitation
Pedigrees knows that these families made sure they stayed allied by arranging a
marriage every few generations with the same families. This was partly for
ancestral reasons and, of course, partly financial, by raising the chances of
lands staying in the same families even in the case of a male line dying out.
Bearing or quartering the same coat of arms also provided affinities, and
several Stanley families quartered the Arderne arms, including the Stanleys of
Weever in Cheshire and Elford in Staffordshire (Ormerod).
There is documentary proof of these families staying in touch over generations,
including Mary's great-grandfather Thomas popping back to Cheshire from
Leicestershire in 1500 for a Stanley land transaction, marrying his son and
heir to a Gerard of Bryn, the Cheshire family retaining a memory of their
branch in the Midlands in 1580 when they added them to their own Visitation
Pedigree (Ormerod, Earwaker, Rylands)
and the public acknowledgement of Mary's ancestry in the Cheshire family in the
coat of arms grant of 1599 (Gough Nichols,
Howard).
No other conclusion makes
sense of the facts above but that the whole family was Catholic and Mary's
Midlands family stayed very much in touch with their relatives in Lancashire
and Cheshire.
Mainly about John and Mary in Stratford and
Lancashire
There has been evidence for a
long time that John had business contacts in many places, particularly through
his wool-dealing (Schoenbaum, Thomas). It has also been long established
that there was a brisk trade all over the country between wool-producing and
weaving areas. Cotswold wool was prized for its quality and Lancashire weavers
imported it. A close connection between the Coventry area and the Preston area
(both expanding cloth-manufacturing towns in the 16th century) is proved by the
appearance of several citizens of the Coventry area appearing as 'Out
Burgesses' on the Preston Guild Rolls
(Abram). So far no document has been detected
which proves that John was personally involved in this Midlands-North West
trade, but Stratford records see him keep disappearing from sight, not
attending certain meetings, and then in early 1577 disappearing almost
completely apart from the odd return visit until he and Mary finally returned
at the end of the 1590s. In 1586 the town council finally and reluctantly, it
seems, removed him from his rank as Alderman, because he had not appeared at
council meetings for so long (Halliwell-Phillipps).
They were different Johns and one
of the pieces of proof is similar to that mentioned above about Richard's son
John in Snitterfield. After his period as High Bailiff (the equivalent of
Mayor) 'our' John was pretty consistent in insisting on 'Mr' or 'Gent' being
attached to his name (Halliwell-Phillipps)
and later received a coat of arms as the final stamp of approval. As a former
mayor and one of the richest citizens of Stratford (Thomas)
there is no way he would have been recorded as 'husbandman' or plain 'John'. I
elaborate on these conventions in my book.
I am afraid this has its roots
in the 18th and 19th centuries, the great period of Shakespeare biographical
research, which produced an enormous amount of invaluable documentation, but at
the same time the birth of a few myths. When any local document referring to
'John Shakspere/ Shaxper', etc. was located, it was assumed that most of them
referred to 'our' John. Because of John's almost total absence from council
records from early 1577 onwards, his mortgage or sale of Mary's property during
the following few years, the appearance of many recordings of Johns in
financial difficulty, and 'for fear of process for debt' appearing on the
recusant list in 1593, it was obviously logical to put all these together and
assume poverty. This 'myth' became part of the 'conventional' story, with the
stamp of approval by Sir
Sidney Lee, and still lingers on today. However, since the 1980s this
has been constantly queried, particularly since the discovery in the Public
Record Office of documents that indicate he was not only solvent but rich
during the period in question (Thomas).
Very recently the document was discovered that proves he did actually pay his
hefty fines in 1580 (Colin Jory in Enos,
pp. 52, 60). It has been suggested by several since the discovery of the P.R.O.
documents (Thomas) that a different explanation
from poverty was required for the peculiar details of the sale and mortgage of
Mary's property and I agree.
When I first established to my
own satisfaction that he became rich and stayed rich until the end of his life,
the most logical story fell into place, as a 'working theory'. This
establishment had happened in parallel to the already extremely high
probability of his ancestry in Lancashire, Mary's definitive ancestry in
Cheshire, their recent marriage in c. 1575 and, of course, with the background
of my lifelong knowledge of the 'Shakespeare in Lancashire' traditions and more
recently acquired knowledge of the history of many Catholic Lancashire
families. This included many details of how they tried to cope with financial
problems during Elizabeth's reign as a result of the hefty fines. One standard
tactic was mortgaging or even giving away property to local friends or
relatives, to avoid their confiscation, on the understanding that when the
danger was over, they would receive them back again. Everything connected to
produce an explanation that combined all of these elements.
Yes, although one question I
asked myself very often was why he went to the Hoghtons and not to any of
Mary's other closer kinsmen's households.
I don't think we will ever
know, so this is another case of a balance of
probabilities. The relevant surrounding facts seemed to lie in the
history of the Hoghton family, their status as the highest gentry family in Central
Lancashire, the most peculiar will of Alexander Hoghton in 1581, their proximity to Preston and the strong
presence of Shakeshaftes in Preston at the time.
Mainly
about questions surrounding the peculiar Hoghton will of 1581
In 1569 Thomas Hoghton, the
head of the family, went into exile in Flanders 'for conscience sake' (Miller
and passim in 'Shakespeare in
Lancashire literature). The very date leads one to suspect that he played some
role in the Northern Rebellion in that year. He left the estates in the hands
of his horde of younger brothers and half-brothers (Lumby)
and when he died in Flanders in June 1580, these came to his brother Alexander,
who promptly organised a very peculiar and elaborate scheme for ownership of
the estates and the setting up of a trust fund. Details of this fund were
repeated in his will of the following year, which named William Shakeshafte and
Fulk Guillom three times. These two were bracketed together three times and obviously
very special 'servants' among the thirty 'servants' listed elsewhere in the
will. I had read scores, if not hundreds, of Lancashire wills, but never come
across one like this before. The first full transcription of these Hoghton
documents was by Honigmann (1985),
and when I first read these I could fully understand his puzzlement about the
possible story that lay behind the very peculiar arrangements. I started asking
myself a lot of questions and exploring previous and subsequent 'Shakespeare in
Lancashire' literature.
The most important were:
Were all these facts somehow
connected?
Mainly about
answers to some of these 'Catholic' questions
Before I embark on answers, I
feel obliged to say that the answers only came slowly and after much further
reading and discussion during the last year or so with authors who have
grappled with the same problems. In brief, my current interim answers are that
all the questions on the page above were valid, that John Cottam, Edmund
Campion, the school in Douai and all other individuals and places associated
previously with Shakespeare will play a role in the 'final biography' of the
Bard. This will, however, require many more years of research. I can only hope
that I survive long enough to see some of the fruits of this research by
others. I already have a month by month biography of John, Mary and William
Shakespeare in my head and on my computer, but realise that these would be far
too controversial until I have published all the evidence and proof (from
recent discoveries by others). Be patient, Duxbury 'cousins', but it will come.
The main published background details came from the recent explosion of
'Shakespeare Catholic ' literature.
Yes. Not that I have been
influenced by this in using any 'new' details to support my conclusions, which
had been reached long before I started reading in this area, but as the only
background story that made sense of what I had discovered purely from
re-examining the primary biographical and genealogical sources.
First was the arrival of a
book in my postbox called Shakespeare and
the Catholic Religion by Carol Curt Enos
just a year ago, via the kind intermediary of Sir Bernard de Hoghton. When I
read this I came to the same conclusion as when I first embarked on
'Shakespeare in Lancashire' literature. Here was someone approaching from a
completely different direction, but our findings fitted together like the
proverbial glove (one made by John Shakespeare?). Her work answered many of my
questions and puzzles and vice versa. She had started from Catholic
biographical and internal evidence and come to the conclusions that the
Lancashire episode was the main link between Shakespeare and the theatre, and
that research among the Cheshire Ardernes might provide interesting results. I
had started with the Lancashire episode and purely biographical and
genealogical evidence, which proved the Cheshire Arderne connection, and come
to the inevitable conclusion that the Shakespeare family must have been
Catholic. Yet again, two people's totally independent research had met in the
same places. We have spent many hours over the last year discussing where we
agree or agree to disagree and these points are now incorporated in my
Shakespeare book (to be).
Largely head down and reading
and writing away in any free time away from many family, social and
professional commitments, but also some very interesting contacts with authors
who came to similar Catholic conclusions long ago or recently. See Conlan, Milward
and Hammerschmidt-Hummel, for starters.
It has become increasingly
obvious that a complete reappraisal of Shakespeare's 'conventional' biography
will happen during the next few years. Some of Enos's and Hammerschmidt-Hummel's 'Catholic Shakespeare'
biographical proposals, claims and conclusions are intriguing but I am
reserving judgement on some for the moment. Many of their dates fit in with my
findings and all may contribute in the future to solving a few anomalies that
still remain, but it is too early to say what the final consensus of opinion
might be. If some of Hammerschmidt-Hummel's
rather dramatic claims are researched further and even one of these proves to
be true, then, put together with mine, we really will be very close at last to
the elusive Bard's biography. This must remain an 'if', however, until every
last claim has been thoroughly checked and more necessary research undertaken.
I have indicated where some of this might lie in my annotations to Father
Thomas Conlan's letter.
Not at all in the seemingly
thousands of valuable works of the last century on the Elizabethan stage or
life at the time and in many other related areas, which have contributed
towards an ever deeper understanding of the man, the social and historical
background, his Works and how they were performed or interpreted at the time
and ever since. But it has to affect any future study dependent on his
biography. Every previous full biography has been an honest attempt to present
and interpret all documentary details known at that point in time, and to
present the current consensus of opinion or the author's own conclusions, with reasons.
I salute them all, from Rowe in 1709
onwards. It just happens that none of them knew about John and Mary's
ancestries and the enormous implications of these for their own and William's
biographies.
I'm afraid not. The main
conclusions, yes, but not many others concerning specific details of the
biographies of John, Mary, William and other family members. I have to keep a
few secrets up my sleeve, so that someone might buy my Shakespeare book. Until
this has been published, I shall keep these to myself and a few trusted
associates who have already read early draft versions of some chapters, and
have generously offered to read my final draft version.
When it is. This partially
depends on how much more information I put on this web site in the near future.
Many mini-essays on relevant background areas and brief biographies of relevant
individuals are already largely written, but completion of these and other
related distractions will all postpone the final books.
ãHelen Moorwood, Sauerlach,
Germany, March 2002
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