SHAXSPER

Chapter 3:                                    HIDDEN TO HISTORY

London,

September, 1562

A long line of liveried riders, two-abreast and dressed in Reading Tawny with gold chains around their necks, enter the City of London from the north-east.  This is a display of feudal might – a dozen-dozen horsemen, all uniformly dressed, with the de Vere’s emblem of the Blue Boar embroidered on their left shoulders.   They have come from Castle Hedingham in Essex, the ancestral home of the Earls of Oxford.  The de Vere family is the oldest aristocratic family in the realm.  The de Veres had first come to England at the time of the Conquest in 1066. Aubrey de Vere had been granted the Earldom of Oxford in 1142.

At the head of this procession is a young boy, sitting astride a huge black warhorse draped in black crepe.  The boy, too, is dressed in black.  Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, had assumed this title a few days earlier on the death of his father.

The usual bustle of The City’s cramped streets comes to a halt as the parade proceeds down Cheapside and then westwards, out of the Old City, through Ludgate.  The city-dwellers gawp at this spectacle of feudal might.  In a country that is just two generations removed from civil war, this is a highly visible reminder that the old aristocracy is still a force to be reckoned with.

On reaching The Strand, the slow march westwards stops for a few moments, in front of the great house called London Stone (also known to the locals as Oxford House).  Respects are being paid to its former lord, Lord John, who was also Great Chamberlain of England.  Then, the cavalcade moves past Temple Bar before coming to a halt farther down The Strand, in front of Cecil House, which is on the north side of the thoroughfare.  It is described by a contemporary as being “verie fayre…raysed with brickes, proportionablie adorned with four turrets placed at the four quarters of the howse.”

On the steps of Cecil House, there is a small assembly of black-dressed men, women and children.  The stern-faced man with a pudgy face and a long beard is Sir William Cecil, the young Queen Elizabeth’s most-trusted councilor – he is now entitled to be called The Queen’s Principal Secretary.  Beside him is his wife, Mildred Cooke, reputed to be the second-best educated woman in England.  Her achievements are only surpassed by the Queen herself.  Standing slightly behind the Cecils is the dour Sir Thomas Smith; who had been Lord Oxford’s personal tutor at Castle Hedingham and later when, as Viscount Bulbec, he was a child-scholar at Cambridge.  Smith is a trusted member of the Protestant cabal surrounding the Queen, which is very much involved in their monarch’s day-to-day administration.  On the other side of the Cecils, are two of their surviving children.  Sir Thomas, the child of Sir William’s first marriage, is now twenty years old.  The little girl is Lady Anne – a shy six-year old who is called “Tannikyn” by her doting parents.   Baby Robert is in the nursery.

Lord Oxford dismounts.  He then walks up the steps of Cecil House.  When he has reached the top-step, he kneels before Sir William Cecil, joining his hands together in front of him.  Sir William clasps the boy’s joined-hands.  This is an age-old ritual of subordination.  Edward de Vere is publicly acknowledging his fealty – with all due pomp and ceremony – to his new master, Sir William Cecil.  Until he reaches his majority, Lord Oxford is to be William Cecil’s “ward”.

Wardship is a mutated form of “knight’s service” which was enacted when one of the Crown’s tenants-in-chief inherits his lands as a minor.  The under-age ward is appointed a guardian who is supposed to fulfill the tenant-in-chief’s military obligations.  But, under the Tudors – who relentlessly worked to break the military powers of the great aristocrats by executing some, asset-stripping others, and making all creatures of the sovreign’s court – the system of wardship has become yet-another way of sucking wealth from the main aristocrats and siphoning it into the royal coffers.  The ward’s guardian is a willing accomplice in this system of legalized theft.  For the Tudor sovreigns, wardship is a cheap way to pay their main administrators without reaching into their own treasury.

Furthermore, the legal entanglements of wardship make extrication a very long and very expensive process.  For a family like de Vere’s, the accumulated debts and lost income of one generation are like finding themselves buried alive underneath an avalanche of mystifying liabilities, obscure fines, and costly obligations.  Even the most assiduous estate managers could expect to take several decades to extricate the family finances from this ensnarement and re-establish complete solvency.  But, unfortunately, the de Veres are anything but financially prudent.

The young boy’s most illustrious predecessor, the Thirteenth Earl, had had the temerity to ostentatiously display the de Vere’s wealth on a royal visit to Castle Hedingham.  When the Earl of Richmond – known to history as Henry VII – won the throne at the battle of Market Bosworth, the Thirteenth Earl of Oxford had been by his side.  But he was later deemed to be an “overmighty subject” by Henry Tudor, and had his estates pillaged.  Young Edward’s father, the sixteenth Earl, had spent like a drunken lord which is, in fact, exactly what he was.  Lord John had spent as if there was no tomorrow.   When he died suddenly in 1562, the de Vere estates were already heavily encumbered with debts and the young heir’s prospects were further complicated by his entry into the black hole of wardship.

Young Edward thus arrives in London on that September afternoon, full of promise and laden with debts.  The next few years, during his wardship with Sir William Cecil, that promise is to be richly realized but his debts are to weigh ever-more heavily on his vast estates.  Perhaps a more sensible, prudent man might take advantage of his great promise to re-establish the family’s inherited wealth with patient long-term estate-planning abetted by sound, prudent management.  But young Edward would not grow up to be that kind of man.

***

St John’s College,

Wednesday, afternoon

Professor Sir Peter Schofield begins the afternoon’s session.

“After the electric interest in the morning meeting, this coming session has a lot to live up to.  I am sure, however, that we will find much excitement with the presentations for this session, which is called “Following the Money: Declining Noblemen and Rising Gentlemen”.  To begin our afternoon session, our colleague Professor Neddy Shorts, who currently teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will be discussing his pre-circulated paper on “Oxford’s money problems and Will Shaksper’s New-found wealth”.”

The participants turn their eyes towards the other side of the table where a long-haired, bearded man – an aging “young turk” – wearing blue denims and work boots with a loud floral-printed Hawaiian shirt, is fidgeting with the papers in front of him.  A few moments of anticipation ensue while he clears his throat and then, lifting his eyes up from the table, he hurls himself into a frenetic discourse.

Neddy Shorts is not a man who styles himself on the genteel, self-effacing style of his elders.  If they present themselves as Anglican deacons, Shorts is a camp-fire preacher.  His voice is rasping, but frequently succumbs to a high-pitched whine.  To say the least, it is an arresting performance for an audience whose ears are more attuned to either the dulcet sound of an avuncular master or the stern matriarchal tones of a female counterpart.  Shorts is something different – he is punk, and he does all he could to match his sound with an equally furious body language.  His gesticulations catch some in the audience unawares – these are the newcomers who had not witnessed his act before and, even if these novices had heard about his quite untraditional performance, they are unprepared for its rambunctious physicality.

“Let’s cut to the chase.  Edward de Vere was the poster-boy for the Elizabethan age’s declining nobility.  Of course, he was not alone because, as Lawrence Stone argued in his great book, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, the late sixteenth century was a time when two-in-three members of the peerage were indebted.  Two-in-three were in debt, despite their huge estates.  Keep this in mind.

From the time Edward de Vere came of age and got his hands on the very considerable assets of the family’s estate it was a tangle of mortgages, debts, outstanding wardship fees and fines that were never repaid to the Queen, as well as a huge number of unpaid bills which Oxford owed to anyone foolish enough to sell him luxury goods on credit.  The estate was essentially liquidated in an orgy of sales from 1575 through to the early 1590s, when he was bankrupt and solely dependent upon the royal subvention he received in 1586.

I’ve been able to trace a total of 174 sales and mortgages but there is inevitably double (and perhaps triple) counting because Oxford ignored fiscal probity and traded on his reputation in a vicious cycle of debt and capital sales.  My colleague, Daphne Pearson, who has made an exhaustive study of the de Vere estate archive writes that “The components of the sales are astonishing in number; some eighty-six thousand acres of assorted land, one hundred and thirty-one dovecotes, fifty-three barns, seventy-eight mills, sixty-four manors, four castles, almost three and a half-thousand messuages, tofts and cottages, and nearly L 300 in rents, together with assorted fisheries, advowsons, rectories and rights, and these are just for the alientations for which full details survive”

How did a man like Edward de Vere end up penniless ?  We all have to admit that it’s a very pertinent question when set beside the money-grabbing of his contemporaries – William Cecil started out with not much more than a pot to piss in but ended his long life as the second wealthiest person in England.  Will Shaksper grew up as the son of a bankrupt but by the time of his death he was the wealthiest man in his backwater town.  So, let’s sharpen our question – did Cecil and Shaksper become rich at de Vere’s expense ?

To answer this refined question we have to follow the money – just as in film noir, the money-trail leads us down darkened avenues and into back rooms where we meet up with shady characters.  Things and information change hands, the world of riches gets turned upside-down, and the people who mediate between the polarized antimonies of good and evil end up holding the money-bags.  My paper has sought to explicate how this cinematic model from the 1940s and 1950s provides us with a very useful guide to late Tudor politics of finance.  It’s an upside-down, carnivalesque world in which suckers never got an even break.

At the center of this swirling shell game was William Cecil, the master of prestidigitation. Having survived the turmoil of the post-Henrician decade, he became the house-dealer in all games of chance and survival.  And, William Cecil always dealt himself his own cards from the bottom of the deck.  His grandfather was an innkeeper in the sleepy Lincolnshire town of Stamford.  His father became a “gentleman” and sent his son to Cambridge.  William Cecil never missed an opportunity to profit from an opportunity.  That’s how he came to be the owner of three palaces, three hundred manors, and several chests stuffed with treasures and coin.  Cecil has had a very good press.  Most historians have been easily beguiled by William Camden’s carefully crafted image of Cecil’s self-sacrificing service to the Crown.  They have been loathe to probe below that superficial image to detail the dirty tricks Cecil employed during his forty years of greed, accumulation, peculation, and simple theft.”

***

Willy’s AfterLife

Hearing Short’s attack on William Cecil’s character, Willy just explodes with glee.

“I like this guy, I really, really like him a lot.  He’s piercing outward appearances to expose the reality of William Cecil’s politics during our LifeOnEarth.  Cecil was a man raised from the dust and much of his rise was achieved at my expense.  Cecil got rich, I became poor – this was not coincidental.  Cecil had office and power, I was shut out.”

Turning to Bess, Willy stabs the air, “Cecil had your ear, I got other things from you but I was always playing second-fiddle, or even third-fiddle to Robert Dudley.  Those men were the bane of my life.  I could have been the star courtier but they made that impossible.

I can’t deny that I abdicated my responsibility to the Oxford estate. I can’t dispute that money matters bored me.  I was concerned with me.  I gave primacy to my own needs.  If I didn’t attend to my desires then who would have ?  It was just like what I wrote in As You Like It, when Rosalind said to Jaques, “I fear you have sold your own lands in order to see other men’s.”

If I didn’t break free from the thousand tiny fetters that bound me to a subservient role then I would have been nothing.  Fortunately, I had my own resources and when it became obvious to me that I would never rise to my proper station at court – one befitting the senior nobleman of the realm – I threw my lot in with players, writers, philosophers, and men for whom intellectual imagination was of more credit than the humdrum life of politics, preferment, and husbandry.

But I paid a heavy price for this choice.  I had ridden in to London in September, 1562, at the head of seven-score liveried men, who accompanied me from Castle Hedingham in Essex.  I was their liege lord; they were my retainers.  This act of bravado was a huge mistake – I paid for it dearly.  William Cecil saw that his twelve year-old ward was a ripe plum for picking. Bess, you were anxious about a young male threat to your throne.  I, too, had a noble lineage and ties to ancient monarchs.  My presumption was like a warning flag of an impending threat of renewed civil war.”

Willy turned to look directly at Bess “Isn’t that true ?”

“Of course; I’d have been a fool not to see that your claim to the throne was hardly less worthy than mine.  And I knew that your family could be traced back to The Conqueror whereas my line emerged from the Welsh mist during the glory years of the Plantagenet kings.  Even if you didn’t pose a direct threat to me in 1562 – because you weren’t taking up arms against the Tudor supremacy – your show of feudal might in the streets of London could only be so interpreted by me.  How could I not ?  I was a young woman who had only been recognized as Queen by a minority of the political nation.  Your entry into London might not have been meant to be a direct provocation but it was quite obviously a not-so-veiled forewarning.”

“Bess, I never imagined that I was doing anything unfaithful or treasonous.”

“Of course you didn’t realize that at that time – you were just a boy.  But you would soon grow up to be a man; a very dangerous man like your cousins, Norfolk, Northumberland and Westmoreland – those other wolfish earls who caused so much danger just a few years later. So I concocted the scheme with Cecil that we would keep you from active service in the army and, at the same time, we would do whatever was possible to draw you away from military life by encouraging your obvious literary talents.  And, like with Robin Dudley, I would treat you as my love-toy.  You very well know that I had read Castiglione’s story of female-centered court but I never needed telling that I had to keep my friends close, and those potential enemies much closer to me. We drained your wealth and encouraged your spending habits – actually, not much encouragement was needed because you wanted whatever you saw.”

“Really.  I never knew that you had conspired so closely with Cecil.”

“Of course, Willy.  You were the seventeenth Earl of Oxford.  You could make a claim to be king yourself – or maybe my consort.  We had to neuter you.”

“So, you were in it with Cecil ?  You turned a blind eye to his thefts.”

“Oh, Willy, you are still so naïve !  I also benefitted from his peculation.  We kept you in debt and charged interest on those debts so that you could never free yourself from them.  Don’t forget, I needed money, too.  I may have had huge estates and been the richest landowner in England but being Queen was a costly business and I never had enough funds.  Asking Parliament for more money was tricky because those jumped-up burghers always asked for a quid pro quo and that usually meant selling off my prerogatives and/or limiting my discretionary powers.  Cecil advised me to never do that.  He was wise that way.”

“I suppose that he was “wise” in many ways !”

“Yes, he was not a man to be underestimated.  In fact, even though your play-writing rubbed him against his puritanical grain, he recognized its value.  He agreed with Sir Francis Walsingham’s suggestion that I provide you with that annual pension.  He knew that in the mid-1580s we were fighting a three-way battle – against the Catholics at home, against the Spanish abroad, and for popular opinion, which wanted a male Protestant on the throne.  So William Cecil encouraged me to find some hush-money to funnel to you so that you could write patriotic works.”

“You’re telling me that I was confined to writing in ways that enhanced your prestige and diverted me from seeking glory in military activity because William Cecil saw he could use me in that role ?”

“Willy, that’s exactly what I’m telling you. Some of your plays were historical and others were comedies – but in the comedies, women were always on top.  Those female roles – Portia the lawyer in The Merchant of Venice is perhaps the best example of the way you made my case.  And, don’t forget, we didn’t have to force you to do this – it was what you were already doing on your own.”

“Yes, that’s true.  I’d been actively writing poetry and masques as well as other scripts even before I went to Italy.”

“But what we had to do was to keep you hungry; to keep you subservient.  We did that in two ways: first, I kept you on the hook, so to speak, with promises of royal favour; and, second, we bilked you so that you were always desperate for funds.  I did my job by favouring you, to my great pleasure; Cecil did his job, to his own strong sense of self-promotion.  He was paid well for looking after the details and I never paid much attention to his peculation.  It was done in the aid of my survival.”

Will and Henry looked at one another, Will asked, “Did you know about this arrangement ?”

“No.  But don’t forget that it was only much, much later that I began to suspect that these two were my natural parents.  It was a world of secrets.”

“That’s right, boys”, said Bess, “and those secrets would only be revealed on what is called a need-to-know-basis. Actually, that’s the point of political secrecy – only those in the know, get to know.  For everyone else, there’s a smokescreen.”

***

Cecil House, London,

Christmas, 1574

Sitting in front of the fire in his study, William Cecil is quietly leafing through a sheaf of papers.  Next to him, sitting upright in her little chair, his wife is reading from her Geneva Bible.  Mildred Cooke Cecil’s piety was legendary.  She was always thumbing through the English text to see if she could locate further evidence of God’s plan for her and her family.

A very quiet knock on the door interrupts the silence between them.  William looked up and in a word give his command, “Come.”

The door opens.  His teenaged daughter, Anne, walks into the cosy little study.  Behind her – aglow in bright colours, tight leggings and a large cod-piece – her husband Edward de Vere announces his presence.

The dark room is familiar to the Earl of Oxford who had lived in this house for many years, while he had been a ward og Sir William Cecil, who has since been raised to the peerage and so he is now known as Lord Burghley.  This room always gives Edward de Vere a sense of uneasiness.  It is not a place for pleasantries or conviviality.

The Cecils are abstemious in their habits so a little drink to break the ice is out of the question.  For Edward de Vere, coming to this room is rather like a long visit with his dentist.  Instead of pliers, the two Cecils prod, probe, and pull at him with their insistently puritanical self-righteousness.  It is always an ordeal for the young, gallant Earl of Oxford.  But he has no choice but to endure it – he is still under William Cecil’s thumb.  All he can do is to act in the way Machiavelli recommended, “smile and remember”.

Mildred Cooke Cecil rises to greet her daughter and allows the girl to kiss her outstretched hand.  She nods towards de Vere, who replies in kind.  Anne Cecil de Vere turns to her father and hugs him in the way that a five year-old would greet her grandfather.  William Cecil proffers his right hand towards Edward de Vere, who kneels before the older man and bows his head while placing his right underneath Cecil’s.  These acts of fealty and devotion make it perfectly clear that a graded system of subordination is at work in William Cecil’s household, in both private and public relationships.

Having made manifest their respective places in this ordered system of hierarchy, the women retire to an even smaller room beside the study, where the Cecils make their reckoning with divine providence.  This is a special time for making their peace with their God.  The previous evening, in this room, Edward had announced to his parents-in-law that Anne was with child.  She is now experiencing violent bouts of morning sickness; adding to her discomfort, her breasts are swollen.  But, despite these issues, Anne is happy – she has done her duty by her parents and her husband.

The announcement occasions a respite from the strictly-observed formalities which characterize the domestic life of the Cecils.  There is a brief moment of unbridled joy and unfettered emotions.  But that was what happened the night before – now, it is back to order, subordination, and hierarchy.

In the study, William indicates to Edward that he should seat himself in the now-vacant chair in which Mildred had previously sat.  It is smaller.than William’s chair – and lower, too.  Another indication of the way in which all social relations are ranked so that William Cecil is always on top, as befits his higher position in the domestic chain of command.  In a puritan household, the pater familias is always on top, closer to God.

The muffled voices of the women from the little room pierce the silence for a few moments before Edward de Vere addresses his father-in-law.

“My Lord William, as you well know it was agreed that you would forward my case with Her Majesty, Elizabeth.  Now that Anne is pregnant, I can see no reason that you cannot speak with the Queen concerning my wish to travel and visit Italy.”

“You shock me, sir.  Your wife is in a very tender state and you want to be away !”

“Come, now, my lord.  Let’s not have sentimental niceties stand between us.  You well know – and so do I – that this marriage is an alliance of convenience which has benefitted you and your family.  Noble families like ours are not just the site of domestic happiness, our families are also meant to be pillars of the state.  And so, unlike the common people, our marriages are not now, nor never have been down the ages, a matter of individual choice or personal happiness.  It is fortuitous that Anne and I should have been so well acquainted before our marriage – we were like brother and sister living in the same household for almost ten years – but neither of us would consider that that acquaintance was the stuff of love.  In fact, when you proposed this match to me I was taken aback – it smacked of incest.  Certainly, it was not the love-match of which Petrarch wrote.”

“Edward, please leave aside your obsession with those Italians from this weighty matter.”

“My lord, I cannot do that.  As you very well know, I am not a man for the everyday business of administration or statesmanship.  I am not a man for clerical matters, either !”

“I should say not; your personal behavious is scandalous and your flirtation with those other Catholic nobles is most vexing.”

“”Those other Catholic nobles” are my kinsmen.  My ties to them are based on our intertwined lineages.  We share more than a personal connection because we are joined together by our common ancestries.”

“Yes, yes, yes.  I well understand that – and so does Her Majesty.  After the Northern Uprising and then Norfolk’s duplicitous dealings with the Scottish Queen, I was able to prevail with Her Majesty to keep a close eye on all of you.  The Ridolfi plot put Thomas Howard’s life in my power and I was not unwilling to have is head chopped off in order to protect the head of our Queen.  I know full well that my willingness to urge this on Her Majesty has always come between us.  And, it has indirectly come between you and Anne.  I was hoping that this new circumstance would be an indication that you had put your grievance with me behind you.  But I can now see that you merely provided stud services to my daughter.”

“Well, to be perfectly frank with you, that is exactly what I did – and what you had expected me to do.  Isn’t that right ?”

The older man is distracted, lost in thought.  He doesn’t immediately reply.

Edward de Vere hates these silences and he repeats his reply, with an undercurrent of irritation in his voice. “You expected what you call “stud services” from me.”

“I suppose that that’s a rather inelegant way of stating the matter.  But since we are talking frankly, I will admit that your marriage to my daughter was a part-and-parcel of my dynastic ambitions.”

“We all knew that but, of course, delicacy prevented anyone from speaking the words.  It is good to clear the air because it gives me hope that we can come to a more mature and honest relationship.  I am now no longer your ward.  After I collect the last installment of the dowry in the Low Countries, we will hereafter be on more equal terms.  But while I have a long, noble lineage, you have unrivalled access to Her Majesty’s decision-making.  Surely, we can begin a new relationship based on those realities.”

“Yes, Edward, you are no longer a boy – you are now a man in your own right.   But as long as your wife – my daughter – is carrying my grandchild there will be a family connection between us.  And in this family, I am the supreme head.”

“Lord William, I know that.  I’m never allowed to forget that.  But that’s not all there is to our relationship.  We are also members of Her Majesty’s court.  And while we serve her in quite different ways”

William Cecil couldn’t repress a guffaw at Oxford’s mentioning his “service”.  In response, he couldn’t avoid sarcasm.

“Why, yes, we do “serve” her in different ways.  I know all about how you “serve” Her Majesty.  My wife is outraged by your dalliances but I have to tell Lady Burghley quite firmly that it’s none of her business; it’s the Queen’s business and you are the Queen’s “servant” in all things.  Besides, having you acting so ardently in the Queen’s “service” is not altogether unwelcome to me.  It lessens Robert Dudley’s hold on her.”

“Right you are.  I know that you regard me as just a pawn in your game.  But you have to grant that this pawn has ideas of his own.  And, it’s to forward my own ideas that I want to clear the air with you concerning my intense desire to quit the court and travel.  I’m now twenty-three and there’s no time like the present to take this matter in hand.  Since I was not much more than a little boy, translating Ovid in this household under the instruction of my uncle Golding, I have been fascinated by all things Roman and Italian.  As you know, I eagerly purchase any Italian books that I can find here in London.  But I want more.”

“More ?”

“That’s right, I want the chance to absorb Italian culture and learning and theatre at the source.”

“How much do you want this ?  I think that that’s the real sticking point.”

“I suppose you are asking me a couple of separate questions: first, can you expect me to be a good husband to your daughter ? and, second, can you expect me to be loyal to you in your rivalry with Robert Dudley ?  Isn’t that so ?”

“Quite right, as far as you go.”

“Well, let me answer each one.  About Anne, I think that you can see that I have done my duty by her.  I might not have the same, puritanical attitude to marriage and husbandly responsibility as you have (or, indeed, as Mother Mildred has) but now you cannot gainsay that she is well on the way to providing our marriage with issue and you with a grandchild.  But you know and I know that Anne is a meek, mild, and submissive girl – she’s still far too attached to you and her mother to be my partner.  First and foremost, she still sees herself – and maybe always will see herself – to be your daughter.  And, of course, she’s hardly a passionate woman.  But, all that said, I have done my duty by her – and by you.  So I think that that is about the best answer I can provide you to the first question you seem to be asking me.  Don’t you agree ?”

“I do agree with that.  But Anne does love you – actually, she adores you.  She has been raised to be submissive and that probably doesn’t quite go down right with you.  You seem to be more excited by an independent woman like Her Majesty but we both know that you are – and always will be – just a plaything for her.”

“Sadly, I know that all too well.  Bess plays me like a fiddle.  She’s the one on top.  And, really, there’s not much I can do except enjoy our all-too-brief times together since she is clearly playing me off against Robert Dudley.”

“Right you are.  Her association with Lord Leicester is complicated but it has withstood the test of time, too.  It’s hard for me to understand it but I do know enough to keep their connection at arm’s length when I am dealing with Her Majesty.  I don’t trust Robert Dudley now.  Actually, I’ve never been confident in him – perhaps it’s got to do with his family’s reach continually over-stepping its grasp, generation after generation.”

“Me, too.  When I was just a little boy, before he died my father told me to be watchful with the Dudleys.  I believe that he had had a very bad experience with Lord Robert’s father in the last days of King Edward’s brief reign.”

“Without a doubt that was so.  Lord John Dudley was an arrogant knave who thought he could re-make the royal line of succession for his own benefit.  He knowingly sacrificed his eldest son to that mad-cap plot of his.  When I got wind of what he was trying to do by marrying off his boy to Lady Jane Grey, I played the double game, seeming to devise a inheritance strategy for the Dudleys but secretly making contact with Princess Mary’s followers.

Lord John Dudley had no chance whatsoever of getting public acceptance of his naked grab for power.  No one was surprised when it failed.  What was surprising is that even though John and Lord Guildford were executed alongside Lady Jane, the rest of his family kept their lands and titles under Mary.  The late Queen did not heed my advice to follow the ancient example of the second Punic War and destroy them utterly, in the same way that Carthage was laid waste and desolated.  During Mary’s brief, sad reign, the other two boys – Ambrose and Robin  – were imprisoned in gilded cages.  In fact, it was during their captivity that Robin was able to “serve” Her Majesty, who was then just Princess Elizabeth but who was treated like a traitor (or potential traitor) by the Spanish faction that held sway over Mary.”

“My father told me about that but, as I said, I was still just a boy and these intrigues were very confusing to me.”

“I suppose so.  But your father was most wise to warn you against the Dudleys.  One of my primary strategic goals has always been to contain them.  Robin is actually no match for Her Majesty and he, too, is a play-thing for her.  Still he has always had dreams, well beyond his station in life. Of course, she loves him dearly and wildly but she has been careful to keep her personal feelings separate from her royal duties.  However, you are a bit off-the-mark in your second question because it’s not the Dudleys who I want to keep under surveillance but your friends and relations among the older nobility.”

“I never thought about that.”

“In politics, my boy, you always have to be two or three moves ahead of the game.  Right now, the older nobility is a bit at sixes-and-sevens since their failure in the Northern Rising and then Thomas Howard’s execution for his role in the Ridolfi Plot.  But they are still a force to be reckoned with.  My best estimate is that while most of them – indeed, most of the country – are loyal to Her Majesty, they are less than thrilled with the ordinances that have restricted their practice of the Old Religion.  This attachment to Catholic rites and Popish connections is likely to be a big, big problem in England for a long time to come.”

“I am, as you know, friendly with a number of those people. They are my peers.  I would think though that they are all loyal servants of the Tudor monarchy.”

“Today, perhaps they are.  Maybe even next year, too.  But their continued loyalty cannot be presumed.  It would be a great folly to expect otherwise.  I think, though, that there is a common ground that you and I can work upon in this regard.”

“I’m not following you.”

“Listen closely, Edward.  If I am going to advance your Italian cause with the Queen then you are going to have to be willing to play a double game on Her Majesty’s behalf.  It won’t be pleasant and it will be dangerous.  Are you willing to make sacrifices in order to protect the Tudor monarchy ?”

“Lord William, as you know, it was my ancestor that put the crown on the head of the first Tudor monarch, the present Queen’s grandfather.  The de Veres have all been loyal servants to the Tudors.  I would do no less than my father, his father before him, and their predecessors have done to save our country from another civil war.’

“Edward, I know all about that.  Really, it’s now ancient history.  Our situation nowadays is much more complicated and probably more dangerous, too.  Religious rivalries have added another dimension to international antagonisms as well as the usual beggar-your-neighbour struggles with France and Spain.  Scotland might now be neutered since we have its Queen in custody but we really have no idea of how her son will develop.  What is much more threatening to our national survival, however, is the potential for a religiously-driven civil war on English soil.  This is our nightmare.  It is also our Achilles heel.  The French and especially the Spanish are always angling in our waters and as the Queen gets older, remains unmarried, and continues to be without an acknowledged heir, we can only expect that their efforts at destabilization will become more intense.”

“That I understand but surely you don’t expect our nobles to throw in their lot with the Spanish or the French ?”

“My boy, I expect just that !  It might not happen but we have to be alert to the possibility that it could happen.  Just as in chess, you have to think ahead of your rival so, too, in the great game of diplomacy.  That’s why Her Majesty has commanded me to create a network of agents to keep us informed.  But there are circles that even Walsingham’s eyes and ears cannot infiltrate.”

“Who is Walsingham ? I’ve never heard of the man.”

“You may not know Francis Walsingham, but rest assured my boy, Francis Walsingham knows all about you.”

“So, he’s spying on me ?”

“Of course.”

***

St John’s College,

Wednesday afternoon (continued)

Neddy Shorts has just finished the first part of his presentation.  It had been agreed beforehand with the two respondents that he would first speak to the issues of Oxford’s declining wealth and that Professor Sefton Lewis of Manchester University would respond.  Then Neddy would speak again about Will Shaksper’s rising wealth.  Dr Ruby Hattenstone (from the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada) would present her comments on that part of his paper.

Professor Lewis, a rumpled man with wild eyebrows, begins: “Thank you so much Dr Shorts for drawing our attention to the financial peculiarities of the Tudor court.  I am going to confine my comments to the parts of your presentation concerning Edward de Vere’s financial problems.  After your remarks about Will Shaksper’s irresistible rise to provincial wealth, my colleague Professor Hattenstone will provide her response.”

Sefton Lewis was well known for his over-the-top academic presentations yet he was quite calm today, perhaps because he knew that he was no match for Neddy Shorts’ histrionic energy.  Perhaps when he was a younger man, when he was known as a wild-and-crazy guy, he might have acted as if Shorts has thrown down a challenge to him but now he is just a self-styled “old fart”, sailing into retirement on his earlier reputation.  Anyone expecting a reprise of those performances – which had won him his strange notoriety – is going to be disappointed.  He begins his talk in a very quiet, almost formal manner.

“It’s often said that absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence.  I wonder if Dr Shorts has not fallen into this historiographical trap ?  I raise this point not because I don’t doubt the truth of Dr Shorts’ understanding of Oxford’s financial difficulties – these were, after all, common knowledge at the time.  But I am unconvinced that we can follow his bold assertion that Oxford’s problems were the result of William Cecil’s malevolence.  There is no question that Oxford became poor and that Cecil became rich, but what must be considered a moot point is whether Oxford’s poverty was caused by William Cecil’s activities which, in turn, made Lord Burghley a wealthy man.”

Neddy Shorts fidgets in his chair, wanting to respond but knowing that he was forbidden to do so by the rules of conduct that Professor Sir Peter Schofield had invoked when he set up the protocols by which the meeting was to be organized.  Fidgeting and seething at Lewis’ rather patronizing tone and what he thought is a supercilious argument.

Lewis went on, “What I would like to know is quite simple: did William Cecil have a plan to beggar Edward de Vere in order to line his own pockets ?  And, correlatively, did the Queen take part in this plan ?  I don’t believe that this can be proven with direct evidence therefore I think we have to find another way of making the argument because, to make another historiographical point, correlation is not the same as causation.

I have studied Lord Burghley’s financial records and there is no evidence in them that he either directed or participated in any such scheme.  Quite the contrary.  In point of fact, Cecil tried to stem Oxford’s expenditures – not because there was any great love between the two men but, rather, because Cecil’s daughter (and grand-daughters) were the unwitting victims of Oxford’s financial meltdown.

Let me be clear on this point, I have found no direct evidence in these records that estates belonging to the Oxford earldom were being systematically transferred to the Cecil family’s exchequer.  Furthermore, the surviving documents would seem to suggest that not only did Edward de Vere abdicate all responsibility for the management of his economic assets but he also thanked his father-in-law profusely for taking on this task on his behalf.  Let me quote what Oxford wrote to Cecil in January, 1576:

”for although to depart with land yowre Lordship hathe advised the contrarie and that yowre Lordship for the good affection yow beare vnto me could wishe it otherwise, I haue no other remedie.  I have no help but of myne owne, and mine is made to serue me, and myself not mine.”

New men like William Cecil were the obvious beneficiaries of the Elizabethan aristocrats’ financial nightmare, but – and this is the crucial point – there is no direct evidence that William Cecil himself manipulated Edward de Vere’s finances in such a way that he was siphoning de Vere’s old wealth into how own, new bank accounts.”

Lewis has thrown down a challenge to Shorts’ assertive claims and it is going to be very, very interesting to see how this matter would be resolved.  Clearly, all is not sweetness-and-light between the Shorts’ clique of “New Oxfordians” and the older scholars who are less attracted to their new historicism.

***

Willy’s AfterLife

Listening to Sefton Lewis’ demolition of Shorts’ claims of a conspiracy which had bankrupted himself and, simultaneously enriched William Cecil, Willy is fuming.

“I think that this poncey git, Sefton, is a most superficial student of our times.  He seems to think that the documents that William Cecil and his man, William Camden, stored at Hatfield House not only tell the truth but actually tell the whole truth.  I’m really looking forward to seeing how my man Neddy Shorts hits back at that geezer.”

Will and Henry looked over towards Bess to see how she deals with these claims and counter-claims.  Will, now feeling much more “at home” in Willy’s AfterLife, asked her directly, “What say you, Bess ?”

“As I said before, this is a tricky matter.  Before I give you my own remembrance of what transpired in those times, I would like to hear what that unruly fellow, Shorts, has to say about Will’s rising wealth.”

***

St John’s College,

Wednesday afternoon (continued)

Neddy Shorts takes in a deep breath, looking around the table.  He winds himself up and then throws himself into the second part of his summary remarks.

“OK.  Let’s turn our attention to the astonishing rise from rags to riches that characterized Will Shaksper’s economic history.

First of all, we need to clarify the social milieu that he came from.  Will’s father, John, was usually described to be a glover.  The son of a peasant, he was also a small-time grain-jobber, malt-trader, and wool-brogger.  He dabbled in trading other commodities, too.  In the late 1560s and into the 1570s, John Shaksper enjoyed a time of rising prosperity and it was during this period that he was elected to the role of alderman in the town government.  Then, in the later-middle 1570s, his fortune went south.  By the mid-1580s, he was a debtor who had been forced out of the local council and was living in something approaching penury.  Furthermore, his family was now at the most difficult stage of the life-cycle as only his two older boys – his sons Will and Gilbert – were contributing to the domestic budget; the others were all net claimants.  Then, in 1584, Will’s shotgun marriage to the pregnant Anne Hathaway threw all such modes of domestic economy into upheaval.  Two years later, Anne had twins.  The balance in the Shaksper household between hands and mouths – what social scientists call the “dependency ratio” – got much, much worse.

Yet, somehow, within a decade we learn from local documents that Will Shaksper was buying New Place, the second largest house in Stratford-Upon-Avon.  Within a few more years he had purchased a coat-of-arms for his family (in the name of his father).  After 1600 there are a number of references scattered throughout the local records that describe Will Shaksper making land purchases, leasing other property, investing in grain-market futures, and other actions that could only have been possible if Will Shaksper had a lot of ready money at his disposal.

Therefore, the economic history of the Stratford Shakspers was an act in four parts, as follows: first, from modest origins to local prominence between 1560 and 1575; second, from prominence to bankruptcy between 1575 and 1585; third, from bankruptcy to solvency in the following decade; and, finally, a continuous rise to the tip-top of the local wealth league in the last two decades of Will Shaksper’s life.  He died in 1616 and was the richest man in his little town.  The question we have to ask ourselves concerns that strange decade, 1585 to 1595, which comprise the famous “lost years” and the apparent emergence of the “upstart crow” in London.  How did Will Shaksper, the illiterate (or barely literate) glover’s son become wealthy enough to repair the economic damages of his father’s insolvency ?

Orthodox Stratfordians don’t pay much attention to this issue because it raises two further, embarrassing questions.  “Where did all this money come from ?” and “What did Will do to get his hands on this much money ?”  Their answers are, therefore, evasive or simply trivial.  First, let’s deal with the silliest line of their argument: Will Shaksper couldn’t have made significant sums of money from writing plays because the going rate – five pounds – was hardly enough to cover his living expenses in London, let alone to send money back home to Stratford.  The second kind of answer is far-fetched and can be traced back to the Restoration legend written down by The Reverend Dr Ward, who became vicar of Stratford-Upon-Avon in 1662.

Let me quote directly from Ward: Will Shaksper “frequented plays all his younger time….[he] supplied the stage with 2 plays every year, and for that had an allowance so large that he spent at a rate of L 1000 a year….”

This thousand pound annual “allowance” is sometimes mixed up with another story concerning Shaksper’s supposed friendship with the Earl of Southampton who, it is claimed, gave the Stratford glover’s son that sum of money to purchase a family coat-of-arms.  Needless to say, these stories are fabulous – i.e., fables.  But they have been repeated so often – in so many different constructions by so many different, gullible authorities – that they have the imprimatur of what we might call “ex cathedra wisdom”.  But, really, when we look at them more seriously they don’t even pass the giggle test.

However, if we add another element to this fable then we can see how the facts have been jumbled.  The fact I have in mind is the curious annual annuity that was paid directly to Edward de Vere, in four installments, directly out of the Queen’s discretionary funds.  Usually these funds were used to pay spies and informers – that’s how Walsingham’s espionage activities were underwritten and his network was paid.  But in one instance – just one instance ! – it was used to pay de Vere for his propaganda work.  Moreover, the amount paid directly to de Vere – one thousand pounds – is exactly the same as that which Ward claims was Shaksper’s “allowance”.

***

Bottom’s Up Tavern,

Stratford-Upon-Avon,

January 31, 1585

Inside the dark, dingy room, a lone man – .  It was John Shaksper, the glover – is sitting at a corner table nursing his mug.

The door opens, the hinges creak, and a shaft of light pierces the gloom.

“ ’Allo Toby, have you seen PaterJohn.  I’ve great news.”

“Aye, Will, he’s over there, in the far corner.  He’s been here for a fair few hours, getting sozzled again.”

Will nods towards the barman, and bounds off to his father’s table.

“Pater, what terrific news I have for you.  Anne has just been delivered of two fine babies – a boy and a girl.  She seems well and the babes are pink, like little piggies.”

“Oh my God !  Two more mouths to feed.  How are we going to survive ?  These past years have been difficult and now you have added four more mouths to sit at the family table.”

“Is that all you have to say ?”  Will’s joy collapses.  He is deflated, slumping into the chair beside his father.  The excitement of fatherhood is punctured by this short, sharp dose of reality.  In the gloom, the two men look down at the table.  After a short silence, Will speaks.

“Well, father, it’s a good thing that Gilbert and even little Richard are old enough to work at the bench.   With the three of us to assist you, we can make many more gloves than you could produce with only my assistance.”

John guffawed. “Your assistance !  Will, boy, this is serious.  Our business is in disarray, I’m being harried from pillar-to-post by creditors who want repayment and you have displayed no ability to stick to your last.  Even after you were married to Anne and little Susanna was just a bun-in-the-over, you couldn’t sit still.”

Will squirms in his chair, saying nothing.

“Why, boy, you’ve shown no inclination whatsoever to accept those burdens of adulthood you have brought upon yourself – and on our family.  Now, don’t get me wrong here.  Anne’s a good woman, she seems to be a fine wife to you, and a wonderful mother to your daughter, I’d warrant.  But she had only a little dowry and that’s now gone.”

John’s voice trembles, “I keep asking myself, “what are we going to do?”  Fortunately, the butcher isn’t demanding that we pay the whole of our debt to him. Toby, there, lets me run up a tab and I only have to pay Bottom something when I can.  But the fact remains that we are already spending much more than our business is bringing in.  We might be glovers but I’m buggered as to how can we come to grips with this shortfall.”

Will fidgets.  This is not the first time that his father had sat him down to tell him “the facts of life” but now the stakes have been raised.  He tries to make an answer, blurting out something about being more serious toward his obligations.

Wearily, John speaks again, “Will, that’s really not the point.  You are out-of-control.  You can’t control yourself and that’s just a fact.  We have to try to find a new way forward.  The trouble is that we owe money all over town.  We can’t expand our business by going back to wool-broggering or corn-jobbery because no one will give us credit.”

A shroud of silence now encircles the two men.

A few minutes later, the sound of drummers and pipers filters into the tavern from the marketplace.  Toby, the bar-man, says to no one in particular.

“It’s Lord Oxford and his players.”

Toby turns to the Shakspers,

“John, can you please watch the bar for me ?  I’ll be back in two ticks of a donkey’s tail.”

With that, he opens the door and goes out into the wintry sunshine.

Will resumes his fidgeting.  He desperately wants to go outside to be a part of the assembling crowd.  Sensing this, John stamps his foot,

“Will, boy, this is precisely the problem I have with you.  You can’t sit still, you can’t stick to your last.  The merest hint of amusement just completely distracts you.  If you leave the bench no work gets done, but if I make you stay then the work is done so shoddily that it were better it were not done.  What can we do ?”

“Father, isn’t Lord Oxford the great man whose family connection Nanny Arden used to prattle on about ?”

“Why, yes.  But what of it, boy ?”

“Well, maybe there’s some way we could ask him for help ?”

“Boy, that’s going to be hard to do since we have nothing to offer him in return.”

“But, Pater, that’s not completely true.  We have me ! What I mean to say is that perhaps I could work for him.”

“How ?  What can you do that would be of the faintest interest to a great man ?”

“I can juggle a bit, dance, sing, and make merry.  Isn’t that what actors do ?”

“Boy, that’s not quite what real actors do – as you know from Lord Oxford’s Men’s last visit, his actors are the best in London, specially selected by His Lordship himself.  Why they even act at the royal court, before the Queen herself.  You don’t seriously think that you could pass that kind of audition, do you ?”

Will’s momentary excitement passes.  He sinks back into his chair.

He is surprised when, after another short silence, his father begins to talk out loud, to himself.

“Bugger me.  The boy may be onto something here.  But the thing is, what can he offer to Lord Oxford’s Men ?”  Turning to Will, his voice is a bit lighter,

“Son, you might have just hit upon a very interesting idea but I don’t think that we should be too presumptuous.  We need to make sure of some details before we can sew up His Lordship.”  He turns to Will, speaking sharply,

“Will, boy, run back to the shop and bring me those black, kid gloves which I inlaid with those shiny stones which we retrieved from the river’s bank.  Do you know the pair I’m talking about ?”

“Yes, Pater.  They’re in a little box beside your end of the workbench” With that, he runs out of the tavern, across the market place, down Bridge Street, and turns into Henley Street.

A few minutes later, Will bursts back into the Bottom’s Up tavern, “I have them, Pater.  What do you want them for ?”

“Son, you have a lot to learn.  When Toby comes back, we’ll go outside and I will approach Lord Oxford.  I want you to follow me, a few paces behind, and say nothing.  Not a damned word from you.  Mark me, boy ! Just smile and bow deeply.”

***

St John’s College

Wednesday afternoon (continued)

Neddy Shorts has just finished the second part of his presentation, outlining what he believes to be the difficulties in establishing connections between Will Shaksper and the Earls of Oxford and Southampton.

It is now Ruby Hattenstone’s turn to speak in response.  Dr Hattenstone speaks with a strong Mancunian accent.  She had been born and raised in Smedley Lane, Salford, and went on to do her doctorate at Manchester University where her research was supervised by none other than Dr Sefton Lewis.  This is her first public presentation of the research she had done during her post-doctoral tenure as a Fellow of Sir John Rylands Library in Manchester.

“First and foremost, I am so very happy to have been invited to join this colloquium.  The papers from previous meetings have been a great encouragement to my research and, indeed, to the work of all those scholars who have found the Orthodox Stratfordian claims to be naïve in relation to the social fabric of Tudor Life.

Dr Shorts has presented us with some very cogent arguments concerning the gulf separating noblemen like Edward de Vere and Henry Wriothesley from a commoner like the plebeian Will Shaksper.  For us, living in democratic modern times, when there are certainly shadings of difference between classes but not chasms between them, the Elizabethan social scene remains a world apart.  Moreover, it was not just a matter that Oxford and Southampton were peers of the realm.  They were both a part of the inner circle of the court.  They were not, one might say, “ordinary noblemen”.

Perhaps the most famous example of this graded sense of hierarchy comes from the famous tiff between Edward de Vere and the not-yet-knighted Phillip Sidney, which occurred in September, 1579.  The spat between these two courtly peacocks was occasioned by Lord Oxford’s demand that Sidney quit the tennis court so that he could play.  Quite clearly, de Vere was pulling rank.  When Sidney demurred, Oxford insulted the younger man by calling him “Puppy”.  Sidney then lost his rag and was dragged away from the affray by his mates.  It could have sparked much wider street fighting, as was the case a few years later when the de Veres and the Knyvetts fought on several occasions in the streets of London.  It was just this kind of spontaneous violence that de Vere used so successfully in the street fighting scenes in Romeo and Juliet, which pitted the hot-bloods of the rival Montagues and Capulets.

In 1579, the tension was only resolved by the intervention of the Queen herself.  Fulke Greville went so far as to identify Oxford as “a peer of this Realm, born great, greater by alliance, and superlative in the Prince’s favour.”  Sidney was told, in no uncertain terms, that it was a “necessity in Princes to maintain their own creations, as degrees descending between the people’s licentiousness and the anointed sovereignty of Crowns”, and here we come to the gist of this quotation, “how the Gentleman’s neglect of the Nobility taught the peasant to insult both.”

I don’t believe I need to refresh your memories further, we all know about this event largely through the evidence of Fulke Greville, who was one of Sidney’s great friends.  So, like many tiffs in this age, one has to understand the deep context which animated the event because Sidney was, of course, the nephew of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester – Oxford’s chief rival for the Queen’s affections in the later part of the 1570s.  It is therefore quite obvious that our contemporary witness (Greville) was partisan.  But this elementary point usually gets short shrift from historians – and especially literary historians – those who use Greville’s evidence to traduce de Vere’s reputation.

If the example of Oxford’s spat with Sidney tells us anything about social relations in late Tudor England it is that the boundaries between hierarchical grades was strictly and fiercely protected, by orders given by the very highest authority.  This top-down system of social differentiation was not just believed to be man-made, it was also a central pillar of the inherited value system which stressed the near-divinity of monarchs.  Moreover, it was a system of stratified subordination that Shakespeare himself repeatedly endorsed – the most famous instance being Ulysses’ much-cited speech in Troilus and Cressida which tells us “what discord follows” the upsetting of order.  To an Elizabethan who believed in a divinely-ordered world, this would have been intolerable because,

“The heavens themselves, the planets, and this center,

Observe degree, priority, and place,

Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,

Office, and custom, in all line of order.”  (I, iii, 85-89)

The point I am drawing out from this example is that Elizabethan England was a graded hierarchy.  If Phillip Sidney, the nephew of the Earl of Leicester, could be smacked down so easily by one “superlative in the Prince’s favour” then it becomes deeply problematic how Will Shaksper could find himself in the company of such men.  What could a Stratford glover’s son offer to peers of the realm ?  how, indeed, could he find himself in their company ? for what reason could such men offer not just hospitality but also financial assistance to a commoner who was not much more than a peasant, once-removed ?  and it simply beggars belief to understand how such a lowly person could dedicate his first two published works to Southampton with such florid and deeply personal dedications ?

So, let us next move on to the famous “evidence” so beloved of Orthodox Stratfordians, the dedication from William Shakespeare to Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton  The author of  The Rape of Lucrece wrote:

“the love I dedicate to your lordship is without end …. The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, nor the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance.  What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours.”

This dedication is quite shockingly over-the-top.  It most assurely does not “observe degree, priority, and place”. Given the social hierarchy which operated in late Tudor England, it is astounding that a commoner – even an “upstart crow” – would put such claims in print.  Indeed, it’s astonishing that a printer would print it – or a censor would allow it to be printed for public consumption.

I’ve wracked my thesaurus to describe these acts of social aggrandizement – the closest I have been able to come to an appropriate word would be the Yiddish word that has now become a part of the English language – chutzpah.  That raises the stakes beyond mere impertinence to something more like “brazen insolence”.  In Elizabethan England, men and women had their tongues cut out for less.  In fact, words actually fail to convey the breathtaking audacity that inheres in the Orthodox Stratfordian suggestion that the relationship between the Stratford glover’s boy and the Third Earl of Southampton could not just be close but also publicized.  And, indeed, it is that element of publicity that makes their claims quite completely ridiculous.”

***

Willy’s AfterLife

“Dammit, She’s right !  Those “Orthodox Stratfordian” scholars don’t know their ass from their elbows, isn’t that right Will ?”

“Willy, I find this discussion just fascinating.  It’s really amazing that these “Orthodox Stratfordian” people are credited with having so much insight into the dramatic and poetic elements in your work but are absolutely obtuse when it comes to the social reality of LifeOnEarth.  Who would have expected someone like me – a bankrupt glover’s son from a sleepy provincial town – to gain connection with peers of the realm if I didn’t already have kinship ties with you ?  How could a commoner like me have ever amassed money without having connections ?  The cost of living in London was harsh and my family in Stratford-Upon-Avon had slid down into poverty.  Years earlier, I was taken from school and put to work in my father’s shop just before my eleventh birthday.”

Henry has been listening intently, saying nothing.  But now he interjects, “Another thing that they seem to mistake, my fortune was ransomed.  During my years of wardship, my estates were pillaged and, just like Willy, it was a matter of going through decades of legal actions to dis-entangle it from the fines and debts which were incurred in those years.  You knew all about that didn’t you, Bess ?”

“Yes, of course I knew about these matters in broad outline but I left the details to William Cecil.  He was my man for details.”

“Both Henry and I had first-hand knowledge of those “details” as you call them.  It ended up being a kind of debt peonage.  That’s incredibly ironic – seemingly implausible – since we were among the first families in your realm.”

“Willy, get real about this.  There was nothing ironic or implausible about any of this.  It was part of a considered strategy.  When I came to the throne in 1558, the time was not that far removed from the War of the Roses.  My title to the throne was contested by members of the old nobility and the old religion.  During my brother Edward’s brief reign the deleterious role that guys like you – the old feudal nobility – could play were starkly evident from the behaviour of the Seymours and Dudleys.  The Seymours had lost their heads already but why do you think I kept Robert Dudley so close to me ?  Our closeness had an element of love, as you know, but it was also something more for me – self-preservation.  Robert Dudley was an ambitious man-in-a-hurry.  I could maintain control over him through the carrot of feminine pleasure and the stick brandished by William Cecil.”

“I see – so you didn’t love Robert Dudley ?”

“Willy, you’re twisting my words.”

“What do you mean ?”

“I did love Robin and you and the others but it was not a simple, childish form of romanticized affection.  It was made up of several components; sexual need was always there for me and I had to be very circumspect in my choice of partner.  But also I wanted to be the object of male desire.  I might have been the daughter of a King but I was a woman and I, too, had certain needs.  William Cecil understood this and winked at my love-games.”

“His wife didn’t, though.”

“Of course not.  She was not only a puritan but also a prude.  Her religion was – how shall I say this ? – “bookish” whereas William’s was worldly.”

Henry glanced at Willy with a knowing look.  “She was a real harridan.  I knew that as soon as I was brought into that household as Cecil’s ward.  Mildred was always praying for what she called ‘your everlasting soul”.  I suppose she would be more-than-a-little surprised to discover what becomes of us after LifeOnEarth.”

“Henry, you are a blasphemous scoundrel.  You learned well from Willy.”

“Bess, you might want to say that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but I couldn’t possible comment on that.”

“That’s right – you’re a smart-ass, too.”

“You know, I was completely incredulous when William Cecil tried to marry off my daughter, Elizabeth, to Henry.  It was like that old wheeze – you know, history repeating itself first as tragedy and then as farce.”

“I hadn’t heard that one before.  But it was as plain as the nose on my face that Old William was adamant that I was going to be married off to your Elizabeth even though I had made it perfectly clear to anyone with eyes to see that my interests lay elsewhere.  Willy, you knew that, didn’t you ?”

“Of course I did.  From the moment I introduced you to Will, you were besotted.  He might have been a commoner but he did have ties to our family.  I don’t think, however, that those kind of protocols were important to a hot-blooded youngster.  You were not even fifteen before you found the way out of Cecil House, onto the side streets and into the Blue Boar.  Henry, you were a wild one.”

Bess gasps, “Willy, you’re one to talk about the wildness of youth.  I seem to recall that we had one hell of a time keeping you in check.”

“Yes, that’s true but my “wildness of youth” was all about kicking off the trammels of religious strictures and seeing more of the world than was encompassed in Cecil House and its strict regulation of pleasure.”

“I seem to remember that you were always at me, begging and then cajoling, wanting to go to war and win a kind of feudal glory.  It didn’t matter if that glory could be found by fighting the northern rebels with your uncle Sussex, or by flying off to the Low Countries a few years later.”

“Bess, you’re only partly right.  Of course, I was imbued with the ethic of chivalry and knighthood and romance but my flight to the Low Countries was for much more mundane reasons.  At that time – in 1571/2 – my marriage to Anne Cecil was one of the main considerations of her father’s policy.  Like Henry, twenty years later, I was reluctant to be drawn into his web for the rest of my life.  So, he knew that the quickest way to get my agreement was simple bribery – he used a carrot and a stick.  The carrot was a huge sack of gold that he had taken from the Spanish agent, de Gueras.”

Bess exploded, “What are you talking about, William Cecil would never conspire with the Habsburgs !  He was a loyal Englishman and a Protestant.”

“Bess, you forget.  Consider the context.  In August 1572, the French Catholics had slaughtered the Protestant Admiral de Coligny and thousands of his Protestant, co-religionists on St Bartholomew’s Day.  Leaving aside the morality of their actions – the rumours at the time said that ten thousand were put to the sword – it gave a radical new twist to the Habsburg/Valois power struggle.  The Spanish believed that in these circumstances they could get England on their side again, as had been the case in your sister’s time.  So, they approached William Cecil with bags of gold from their American mines.”

“I never knew that for sure.  Robin had suggested something like that to me but I thought that he was just trying to get one over on William.”

“Of course, he would do that, wouldn’t he ?  But in this instance Dudley’s intelligence was spot-on correct, because William Cecil was stringing along de Gueras and, through him, the Spanish King Phillip.”

“What’s the point of this story, Willy ?”

“OK, let me get to that right now.  The money which de Gueras had agreed to pay Cecil was being kept in Antwerp, in the Spanish Netherlands.  But to get the money, Cecil had to make arrangements for someone else to collect it.  Now, here’s where I come in – he used the promise of that money to get me to supposedly flee.  Actually, I was going there to collect the fifteen thousand marks that he had promised to me when I reluctantly gave in and married his daughter.  That money was her dowry.  That was the carrot he dangled in front of me.”

“What was the stick ?”

“Henry, as you learned in your dealings with him, he was willing to manipulate Bess in order to try to get her to do his bidding.  It didn’t work in your case but you paid heavily for your resistance.  In my case, he threatened to talk against my projected tour of Italy, which is what I wanted more than anything else.  Since I was a youth and translated Ovid, the lure of Italy and antiquity was overwhelmingly strong.  So strong, in fact, that I was willing to agree to the marriage with Anne on the condition that he would urge Bess to grant me leave to travel abroad.  But, of course, it wasn’t so simple.  Nothing was ever simple with William Cecil.”

Bess nodded, “That’s right, he was a fine man for planning and looking out for details.”

Willy continued, “It wasn’t enough for William Cecil to use me to raise himself into the aristocracy.”

Will interrupted, “How did he do that ?”

“Oh, my boy, you are not so wise in the ways of the court.  Getting Anne married to me was only part of his plan because such a marriage could only take place if she were perceived to be my social equal and that meant that Bess had to elevate the Cecil family into the peerage.”

“I see.  But what else could he do to, as you said, control you with his stick.”

“Actually, he could do a lot.  He had arranged for me to jump through hoops to collect that dowry in the Low Countries but after that he still withheld his agreement about the Italy trip.  He said that he wanted to know that I would be survived by an heir of my body before I left the kingdom.  That dirty old man wanted me to impregnate his childish daughter !”

“But, Willy, she was your wife; you were married in 1571, but not until after you had run away and then been dragged, kicking and screaming, to the altar a few months later.”

“That business of being dragged to the altar, kicking and screaming as you just said, was a diversion – a front story.  And not the only one that was devised by William Cecil during my LifeOnEarth.  So, Bess, you’re right insofar as we were married according to the rites of the Church – and in your presence I seem to recall – but that marriage was not consummated because she was still a girl, if you understand what I’m telling you.”

“Don’t be silly, of course I know exactly what you’re saying.  But do you mean to tell me that three years after the marriage you had still not had your way with her ?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.  Right after the wedding ceremonies, I slipped away from their grasp.  It seemed that I had done what he wanted but, as is the case with all blackmailers, William Cecil was never satisfied.  He began to dangle the still-unpaid dowry in front of me.  When I had taken that matter in hand, he still kept his hooks in me saying that if I would just do my husbandly duty by his daughter then he would happily speak with you, Bess, on my behalf, concerning my trip to Italy.”

“Willy, now you’re confusing me.  All the arrangements for your trip were made before the end of the year in 1574 and, in fact, I remember that you left the next month, January of 1575.  It was still winter.”

“Yes, that’s quite correct so what’s confusing ?”

“Didn’t Anne give birth to your daughter, Elizabeth, in June 1575 ?  That’s what I was told.”

“I was also told that in letters from William Cecil which reached me when I was already on the continent.”

Will and Henry were now swinging their heads from side-to-side, like spectators at a tennis match.  Will spoke first,

“Willy, it’s hard for us to keep track of this matter but from what I understand, Lord Cecil would only arrange for your trip once you had gotten his daughter with child.  Isn’t that so ?”

“Quite so.  Anne and I had been thrust together in October, 1574, at Hampton Court.  But I seem to recall that I was too drunk to do the deed.  Yet, somehow, two months later she was taken ill with a ghastly case of what women call “morning sickness”.  This was not a secret but she made a miraculous recovery and, wouldn’t you know, the court was told that she had given birth to Elizabeth de Vere in June of the following year.  It seemed perfect.

But there was a fly-in-the-ointment.  Elizabeth de Vere was not baptized until three and one-half months later.  As we all know, babies were usually baptized immediately during our LifeOnEarth.  So, it was evident that these matters were not being conducted properly.  I only learned about this subterfuge later – much later, when I was returning to England after fifteen months abroad.  That was part of William Cecil’s front story – it made it seem quite reasonable to outsiders that I was cuckolded.  It was why it seemed to be clear why, when I came back, I was in a state of the very highest dudgeon.”

“I recall that you were angry, confused, and difficult upon your return but no one could make sense of your behaviour.”

“Bess, didn’t it seem obvious that I’d been cuckolded.  That was as plain as the fingers on my two hands,”

“So, Willy, what you’re telling me is that you did not father Anne’s child.”

“That’s not quite right, Bess.  You’re getting the appearance and the reality confused.  To make sense of what happened, ignore the stories about baby Elizabeth’s June birth and keep your eye on what William Cecil was orchestrating.  In the tiny world of the court, everyone was led to believe that  I might have gotten Anne pregnant during our stay at Hampton Court but I didn’t lay with her again after that.  Her December bout of sickness was a ruse – or maybe she did get pregnant and lost the baby.  Why would god-fearing puritans like Cecil and his womenfolk wait ten or twelve weeks to baptize the baby ?  It doesn’t add up.  But if Anne had the baby by another man then it does add up.  One thing is for sure, if I was with her it was only at Hampton Court in October.  Never afterwards.  So, you see why I made a very public issue of this time-table.  If Anne had my child then it must have been born in June; but if Anne’s child was only baptized in September then it would have seemed obvious to others that it could not have been my child.  These three lost months made it seem as if William Cecil was blackmailing me.  And it didn’t end there.”

“What more could he do ?”

“Henry, he was a man who could – and would – do anything to enhance his position and his family’s wealth.  You have to keep your eye on his situation when I returned to England after my eighteen months away.  His daughter had a daughter that I had disowned.  This would be considered scandalous.  Right, Bess ?”

“Of course, his reputation would have been sullied and he could no longer throw stones at Robert Dudley because he would now be living in a glass house.”

“That’s right.  This affair threatened to reveal his hypocrisy and that would undermine his best currency.  You all know what Gresham said about currency – bad money forces out the good.  Well, William Cecil’s reputation was his good currency.  This scandal threatened to reveal its sham.  So, he took the offensive.”

“How did he do that, Willy ?”

“For him it was easy, he sullied my reputation.  I was made to look like a cuckold and and that made me a fable of the world.”

Henry looked up, “I get it.  He did much the same thing with me.  At least he tried it on.”

Bess was taken aback, again. “What do you mean ?”

“When he tried to force me into that marriage for his own convenience with this same girl – the baby who grew up to be Elizabeth de Vere – he not only fined me two years’ income from my estates (which was said to have been five thousand pounds, or thereabouts) but his spies had alerted him to my friendship with Will.  This was in the early 1590s, and that was a time when the court was riven with factions.”

“Henry, I remember that time well.  Cecil’s puritans had just begun their onslaught on the freethinkers which resulted in the faked murder of Kit Marlowe.  They were turning their attention to the new, rising generation that was coalescing around Robert Devereux, Those were your pals, right ?”

“That’s right, Willy.  I was a minor figure in that constellation but they thought that they could get at me by accusing me and Will of an un-natural friendship.  They did something similar with Bess’ doctor, Lopez – the Portuguese Jew.  He had been set up and there was a show trial.  The poor guy was just a patsy.  He was being used as a kind of stalking horse, to threaten the Cecil’s real rivals – the rising faction that saw in Essex a natural successor to his step-father, Leicester.”

Will muttered, “This is so complicated.  I never saw the half of it.”

“Of course you didn’t.  Bess was still basking in the glory of the defeated Armada – even if that was then five or six years in the past.  She had become just a figurehead.  The real players were the Cecils, father and son.  William Cecil didn’t get any joy from his attempt to reach the pinnacle through his daughter’s marriage with me but he got much more satisfaction and better results from promoting his little hunchbacked boy.”

“Robert was taking over more and more of the day-to-day business after the Armada.  William had wanted to resign in the middle of the crisis.  His daughter, Anne – my wife – had died in June and Mildred Cooke, his wife, had passed away in the previous year.  He grieved terribly for her.”

For once, Willy bit his tongue.  He kept himself from expressing his real sentiments about Mildred’s Cecil’s death.  Bess went on,

“1588 was an annus horribilus for all of us.”

“Bess, you’re half right.  William Cecil did move into the background.   He let his son do the dirty work.  Robert was good at that.  And he had taken control over a huge array of assets from Walsingham, too.  The little hunchbacked spider was even more cold-blooded and calculating than his father yet I always got on well with Robbie.  His older brother, Thomas, was something of an oddity in that household.  Tom Cecil was just a kind-hearted fellow which is probably why he was passed over in favour of his much, much younger brother Robert.”

“There’s no question about that, Willy.  But let’s hear a bit more from Henry about his encounters with the two Cecils and how they involved Will.”

“You know, of course, that I was forced to live in the Cecil household, under their governance, as a stipulation of the wardship arrangements.  What you don’t know – well, Will and Willy both know but Bess doesn’t know that I had found a way to get out of the grounds by way of a well-known exit over the back wall.   So, I spent my days drowsily being smacked by tutors and berated by Lord William himself.  But that was the price I had to pay for the nights on the town.”

“You boys had it much easier than me.  I was always chaperoned after my fun-and-games with Thomas Seymour.  In fact, the main reason I made Robin the Master of Horse was so that we could get away from prying eyes and be alone, together.  Oh, I’m sorry Henry, I’m taking over and not letting you talk.”

“Bess, I excuse you !  Even here, in Willy’s AfterLife, it’s hard to break one’s former habits.”

No one disagreed with that.  Henry went on,

“I met Will through Willy’s introduction.  Willy was always popping in at Cecil House to see his three daughters who had been living there even before their mother’s death.  Willy was himself ensconced with his band of merrymaking men at Fisher’s Folly, and Will was then a jack-of-all-trades with the Queen’s Men and a constant presence at Fisher’s Folly.  But, soon enough word got out to Cecil that I was cavorting with what he called “dis-respectable undesirables”.  By this he meant not just players and commoners but also Willy, for whom he had a deep distrust.  That turned into a more visceral dislike after Lady Anne died.  Thereafter, whenever Willy showed up unannounced at Cecil House, the old man nearly seized up in his choleric rage.  On more than one occasion I heard him tell servants that Willy was to be kept from his presence and he didn’t care what excuse they used to keep him away.”

“I suspected that.  Often I would see him and he would pretend I wasn’t there or that I couldn’t see him.”

“So to answer your earlier question, once Lord William’s spies had collected evidence about my nighttime gadabouts, he came down hard on me.  If I can recall correctly he said that I was just like my father, which took me aback since I was then under the impression that the late second Earl of Southampton was my father.  Even then, I knew that he had been an ally of Robert Dudley and therefore a rival of William Cecil.  His death a few years earlier was the ostensible reason why I was declared a ward of the crown and assigned to Lord William’s guardianship.  At that time I had no idea about my true paternity – or maternity, for that matter.  So, Lord William’s statement didn’t cause me much offence, just confusion.  In any event, he came down hard on me.  He said I would never amount to much as a scholar because I was lazy and too easily distracted by flimsy, worldly matters.  But, he said – and I will remember this so long as my mind continues to operate –

“Henry, you may be a heading to a bad end, but you are still a peer of this realm.  You are a man of substance.  But, now you are mine, I control you and I am going to make sure that you do my bidding.”

He was very angry when he spoke to me that day but he didn’t tell me what that control would entail.  So, I was sent away even more terrified and confused than when I had been ushered into his presence.”

“You were not even eighteen at that time, am I correct in that ?”

“That’s not quite right, Willy.  I was then only sixteen.  The second Earl of Southampton had died in 1581 when I was just eight years old.  I was shifted to Cecil House a short time afterwards.  A few years later, your wife and daughters came to live there and so they were like sisters to me.”

“Just as Lady Anne had been like a little sister to me, twenty-odd years earlier when I was in the same situation.”

“Despite this relationship – if we were like brother and sister then a marriage would have seemed incestuous – the old man was already plotting to marry us off to one another.  Of course, we knew nothing of his plans which made his announcement all the more shocking to me.”

Bess had been listening intently, but now she spoke, “When was that, Henry ?  When did William first announce this planned alliance ?”

“Let me see, his wife and daughter – Willy’s wife and Lady Elizabeth’s mother – had been dead and buried for almost two years.  That means it must have been in the late summer of 1590, when I was nearly seventeen and she was almost fifteen.  The very idea of marriage was impossible for me to accept.  It was not that I was unsympathetic to Lady Elizabeth but, rather, I was just wriggling free from the tight controls of Lord William’s guardianship and I wanted to explore this new-found freedom.”

“Henry, I know exactly what you mean.  The old man did exactly the same thing to me when he cajoled me into marrying his daughter.  He told me that it wasn’t supposed to be a love match – just a business alliance.  He said that he didn’t care whether or not I cared for her or she for me.  He wanted to get the deal done.”

“That’s almost word-for-word what he said to me.  But I didn’t want any part of marriage and – do you remember ? – I came to see you at Fisher’s Folly to get your advice.”

Bess burst out laughing, “That’s rich, that is !  Seeking out Willy for advice on matrimonial matters !”

Willy himself couldn’t hide his grin.  He was, perhaps, the last man in England that young Henry should have spoken to about this matter.  It was, after all, the girl who he had raised as his own daughter who was the pawn in this game.  And, of course, his own marriage had hardly been a great success.

Will, rather unexpectedly, chimed in with a joking voice, “You could have asked me ?  I knew all about youthful marriage.”

Henry looked somewhat upset, “Will, don’t you remember ?  I did ask you for your advice.  Hell, I asked anyone and everyone to give me advice.”

“You didn’t ask me.”

“Bess, I couldn’t ask you.  I didn’t know then that you were my natural mother.  And, besides, you had no experience of marriage, did you ?”

“Yes, I suppose that that’s so.”

“Robert Devereux was most helpful.  He told me to just say “no”.  He said that he had been advised by his step-father to never trust the Cecils, father or son.  He told me that they were always playing an angle and that no matter what happened, they always seemed to be holding the winning cards.”

“Why did that convince you ?”

“Bess, Robert told me that the Cecils would steal from my estate to line their own pockets, by fair means, or foul.  So when the old man fined me five thousand pounds for my “rebellion”, it only confirmed what Robert had told me would fall out.”

“You were so easy with money that you could let that amount just slip through your fingers ?”

“Bess, be sensible here.  Henry was not much more than a mere boy, he was Cecil’s ward so he had no control over his finances.  I know about that first-hand.  My own years of wardship were the beginning of financial disaster for me too.”

Will had been listening carefully.  He felt confident enough to speak his own mind.

“OK, I understand these matters better now that you’ve aired the dirty linen before me.  But let’s recall that we began to talk about this money-matter because those people at the meeting were sifting various theories about how I was able to amass sufficient capital to buy lands, titles, and other capital assets.  Clearly, I didn’t get anything from Henry because Henry had nothing to give.  Similarly, I didn’t get much more than room and board from Willy, either.  And, besides, by the time I began to be in the quids, Willy had already married again to Elizabeth Trentham, sold Fisher’s Folly, and moved to their new home in Hackney.”

Bess was more interested now, she turned to Will and asked a simple question, “So, how did you do it ?  How did you make so much money that you were able to repair your father’s fortune and also build your own ?”

“Bess, there’s no short answer to that because in the first six or seven years I was in London, I did anything to make a farthing.  I was desperate to send money back to Stratford   I had sworn an oath to my father that I would not dishonour him by simply running away with the circus.  I suppose, looking back at it now, I was in the right place at the right time. In the later 1580s, the theater was booming and there were lots of opportunities to make money from it, although the playwrights and actors rarely kept their earnings.  Most, like Kit Marlowe, spent wildly on drinks, on sexual entertainments, and on the most expensive clothing.  In fact, the guys who made money were the middle-men – like me,  We were the ones who brokered plays and rented costumes and put on shows and collected receipts and all those other things that meant that the show could go on, night after night, day after day.  We didn’t make a lot of money at any one time but, surely-by-God, it mounted up.”

“That’s right.  From the time you arrived in London with me and The Queen’s Men you were always on the lookout for new ways to fill your purse.” Turning to the others, Willy went on, “Will was so unlike me because money matters were largely beyond my patience and he was also so unlike the players who spent whatever they had in the stews.  The only men who came out of their theatrical careers with much to show for it – beyond their memories, if they didn’t obliterate them with booze – were the ones who viewed it as a business. For them, it was a way to make money.”

Henry chimed in next, “When I first met Will, he was already lifting himself up by his bootstraps.  He never drank much, never stood rounds for the party.  And he was always making himself busy with a new scheme.  Even then, in the year of the Armada, he was sending money back to Stratford.  He told me that whenever he could collect enough little coins to make up a gold sovereign, he did just that.  And then when he had five gold sovreigns, he arranged with one of his home-boys to take those coins back to his father in Stratford.”

“So, you were paying attention.  And here was me thinking that Henry only liked me because I had a pretty face and an easy manner.”

Henry got a bit flushed, but Will carried on with his story, “See !  Do you see what he’s saying ?  That’s the heart of the matter.  Men like Willy and Henry were born with silver spoons in their mouths.  For them, money was nothing.  They had only to snap their fingers and more would appear magically.  For me, it was different.  I had to scrimp and save.  Nothing came easy, nothing was taken for granted.  That was why I came to London in the first place – London was where the money was.  My family in Stratford was broke and I had brought four more mouths to feed at their table.

For a rustic like me, coming to London really was like finding streets paved with gold.  Compared to Stratford, making money in London was easy.  The big problem for most country immigrants was that they couldn’t keep their focus on the main reason for coming here – to make enough money to go back home in style.

I suppose that those academics we’ve been listening to would say something like “Will Shaksper was a member of the declining middle class. His sense of lost status made him more desperate to regain it.  A man with that sort of personality profile would sometimes rise above the odds and succeed, even though the deck was stacked against him.”  And, if they said that then they would be absolutely correct.  I left Stratford and came to London to make money.  When I had enough to go home again, I did just that,  By the later 1590s, I had amassed a comfortable competence, as we liked to say, and so I semi-retired from my London life.  Of course, I kept up my business connections with the Burbages as well as Francis Langley and his crew on the south bank.”

“Why didn’t you just return home and sever your London ties ?”

“Henry, once again you’re not seeing the forest for the trees.  London was the source of wealth for me.  Even after I went back to Stratford, I kept a good part of my capital in London because it turned over faster in the city, in the theatre, and in urban investments in property – grog shops and stews in Southwark –  than it could have done in a backwater like Stratford-Upon-Avon.  Turning my back on my London connections would have been a form of self-strangulation.  It would have been economic suicide.  And, besides, it was hard to stay down on the farm after I’d developed a taste for the bright lights of the big smoke.”

***

St, John’s College,

Wednesday afternoon

Ruby Hattenstone has finished her presentation and now it is time for Neddy Shorts to reply to her – and to Sefton Lewis.

Shorts, who is clearly relishing this opportunity to get his own back, brazenly clears his throat and begins,.

“You will all have seen that I was more than a little upset during Dr Lewis’ discussion of  what he called my “selective historiography”.  I won’t deny that.  But, equally, I think that his call for a strict policy of only allowing for interpretation based on the strictest evidential basis is, well, somewhat naïve.  Let me be perfectly clear about this, I was not arguing that Oxford’s assets were transferred directly into Cecil’s ledgers.  That would be a superficial argument yet it is the only kind of argument that Dr Lewis wants to consider.  I say this with the greatest respect, but we have to take into account not only the silences in the documentary record but also allow for the sneakiness of Cecil’s peculation.  He was not a foolish or careless man.  Indeed, quite the opposite.  So, if he was asset-stripping Oxford’s estates – and those belonging to other members of the old aristocracy – then he would not just change title so that they would be possessed in his own name.  It is not surprising that none of the assets Oxford sold turned up in Cecil’s accounts – but what about the accounts of Cecil’s subordinates ?

I would imagine that what we are witnessing – at several removes, mind you – was an elaborate shell game whereby Oxford’s assets would be shifted through the 16th-century equivalent of numbered accounts and bogus ownership arrangements.  And, I would further imagine that even if we could do the appropriate archival searches we would be stymied because the documentation would be vague and misleading or missing.  So, I think that the main point which needs to be kept in view is that in the 21^st century we have document shredders, in the 16^th century they had fireplaces.  It is a very, very misleading counsel of perfection to believe that after nearly five centuries we can locate the relevant documentation.  Therefore, what Dr Lewis calls an “absence of evidence” lies at the heart of our interpretation.  If we are going to engage in “conjectural history” – and I agree that we should – then I think we need to ask a complementary question: “Why is that evidence absent ?”

Asking ourselves to account for absent evidence is clearly risky business but it is also necessary to provide a sufficient explanation to explain the rise of Cecil’s wealth and the corresponding decline of Oxford’s.  And this leads us to ask a question that is at the heart of Professor Hattenstone’s analysis of the hierarchical organization of social life in Elizabethan England.  Exactly who was calling the shots ?  Was Elizabeth or William Cecil the acting CEO, in charge of daily affairs ?  My estimation is that Elizabeth gave Cecil wide scope to carry out her orders and that as long as he did what she wanted, he was left alone to get on with it.  Therefore, it was not so much a matter that she turned a blind-eye to his peculation as that she considered his peculation to be the cost of doing business.  Early modern monarchs expected their subordinates to grow rich at their expense but only because their organizational systems were insufficiently complex – and not staffed by middle-level bureaucrats or administrators – that they accepted what we would consider to be graft and corruption.  Peculation would be taken for granted, what the monarch wanted was results.  And William Cecil delivered Elizabeth Tudor with the results she wanted.

It is not the warrant of this session or, indeed, of our conference, to consider Elizabeth’s policy in dealing with her chief nobles but I would argue that she had a keen sense of danger with them.  Her grandfather had won the throne by battle, wresting it from Richard of Gloucester.  But if Richard was the last succeeding Yorkist,  that hardly meant that the realm was free from other aspirants.  So, the Tudor policy of taming their over-mighty subjects was a complex mix of bribery – an especially useful tactic in dealing with those who aristocrats with local power bases IF they were what used to be called “marcher lords”, residing a long way from London – and house arrest.  Keeping the nobility fawning in attendance was a typical method of the new monarchies of the Renaissance who tried to turn warriors into courtiers.  It’s relevant here to think about Norbert Elias’ argument about the civilizing process in post-feudal Europe.  It centralized power in the whims of the monarch and simultaneously emasculated the nobility in terms of the independence of their feudal powers.

Elizabeth Tudor used “new men” like Sir William Cecil and Sir Thomas Smith to keep her aristocrats in check.  These “new men” were from the lower and middling ranks of the landed classes – they were hardly penniless nobodies but, unlike aristocrats, they had no independent power bases and therefore could be used to do the monarch’s bidding.  The loyalty of men like Cecil was solely directed towards the Queen.  They were her “creatures”.  Elizabeth’s policy was thus a blend of contemporary modes of Renaissance governance and a personal memory of the deeply-contingent nature of the Tudors’ rise to power.  Therefore, if we want to understand why William Cecil became rich and Edward de Vere became poor then we have to understand Elizabeth’s political science in both its obvious and hidden methods.  Moreover, she ruled for forty-five years without an heir and that meant that she was always in jeopardy.  Who could be surprised if she cut corners in doing so ?

I think, therefore, that we need to look beyond the documented archival sources and use our own powers of conjecture to understand the historical context in which these people lived and operated.  To accept the strictures of Professor Lewis’ counsel of perfection is to see a tree and miss the moving forest.  And, we all know what happened to Macbeth when he mistook the movement occurring in Burnham Woods !”

With that, Neddy Shorts sits down.  He is pleased with his performance.  In fact, he is more than pleased.  He has just confounded the audience by making a controlled, disciplined, and brief rejoinder.  Shorts has been able to do so while calling Sefton Lewis not only naïve and superficial but also insensitive to the nature of the historical evidence.  And, what makes his satisfaction even more satisfying is that Sefton Lewis has seen the audience nodding in agreement while Neddy makes these points against him.

***

Stratford-Upon-Avon,

Shaksper house on Henley Street

January 30, 1585

Inside the dark, low-ceilinged room that served the family as a kitchen, dining room, and living room, several women are huddled around the fireplace.  They are stirring a big pot in which there is boiling water for washing the various linens.that had been used during the child-birthing earlier in the afternoon.

Upstairs, the cries of the newborn twins alternate with the groans of their mother who has been in labour for sixteen hours before they emerged into the world.  Beside the mother’s bed, two older women are stroking the new mother’s arms.  These older women are her mother-in-law, Anne Shaksper, and her step-mother, Joan Hathaway, who had been sent for in the early hours of the morning.  Joan had arrived from her home in the neighbouring village of Shottery just before dawn.  In late January, the sun was rising in the east as late as 8:30 but on a sunny day like this it is already light outside.

In the early afternoon, the sun is still shining when the twins’ father, Will Shaksper, the glover’s son, comes to see his wife and their newborn babies.  Now, he is leaving the women – all the women – to search for his own father.  Since the evening of  the previous day, Anne struggled with a very, very long labour.  Less than two years earlier, her first child’s birth had been difficult – her labour had been more than twenty-four hours – but this time she was having twins so that her second confinement has been not only difficult but also dangerous.  During her labour, there was a constant to-ing and fro-ing as a little battalion of women had been involved in the twins’ birthing.

Childbirthing is women’s work.  Joan Hathaway and Mary Shaksper, of course, had been in attendance and so, too, was the Shaksper’s neighbour, Judith Sadler, who had followed her own mother as the midwife in Stratford-Upon-Avon.  In total, ten women had played some role in the event – Joan, Mary, and Judith, the midwife as well as other neighbours who had been called upon to lend assistance in rinsing the bloody linens outside at the pump, while others boiled water and soaped the linens – scrubbing them on their washboards – before taking them down to the nearby riverside and rinsing them in the icy waters of the Avon.  Those washed cloths were then brought back to the Shaksper hom to be dried on racks beside the large, open fire.  Childbirth was a very labourious event for all concerned.

A few hours later, after the sun had set in the west and the darkness enveloped the Shaksper house, Will and his father, John, return back from their own celebration at the Bottom’s Up alehouse.  John is tipsy but in a cheery mood.  He hadn’t been so happy for a great many years, it seems as if the weight of his world has been lifted from his shoulders.

At first, when John comes into the house with Will and their neighbour Hamnet Sadler, the women think that the safe birth of the twins and Anne’s survival is the cause of his joviality.  He immediately bounds up the stairs to look in on his new grandchildren, who are now sleeping beside their mother in the second-best bed in the house.  Anne turns to him, “See, Pater John, it has been a very happy day for our family.”

“Woman, you don’t know the half of it !”

“What could be better than seeing their beautiful little babes, safely delivered ?”

“We’ll talk about that in a few minutes.  For now, it’s time to think on naming these two little ones.”  Then, speaking to no one in particular, he went on: “On the way back home, Will said to me that he and Anne have already asked Hamnet and Judith to stand for their babies when they are baptized.  And, in recognition of their god-parenthood, they will call their children after them.  That seems right to me.  What do you think, mother Mary ?”

“Pater John, you old grandfather, that suits me just fine.  Now tell me, what is the other news you have to share with us ?  So much news in one day – it almost seems like my head will start to spin so that I can take it in.”

“Where to begin ?  That’s a question, eh ?  I guess that the beginning is as good a place as any.”

Anne nods.  She is half-asleep from her exertions. In consideration of her evident exhaustion, Mary shuffles her husband out of the room.  As the older generation left, Will enters the room with little Susanna in his arms.  She had been kept downstairs and outside while the heavy work of childbirth was happening in the upstairs-bedroom.  Will closes the door so that he could be alone with his wife and their new babies.

John and Mary settle in the main room, at the long trestle-table.  They are joined there by the Sadlers and Joan Hathaway.  Their older children – nineteen year-old Gilbert, Joan who is now fifteen and thirteen year-old Anne, ten year-old Richard, and little Edmund who is just five and, so, only three years older than his neice – Will’s girl, Susanna – crowd into the room.  The little children know that they have been allowed in this gathering on sufferance and that any ructions would result in their being sent outside into the cold, dark night.  Pater John is not one to stand on ceremony when his authority is challenged by his children.  All of them had been taught to know their place.

On the big table in front of the fire, there is a large jug of Toby’s best bitter.  He has sent John and Will home with this gift only asking that when they toast the children’s bitth, they would remember him in the blessing.  John pours the beer into the waiting mugs – one each for the adults and another one for Will’s five siblings to share a sip each.  John rises from the bench to address the little crowd.

“Today, I think, will be marked by a radical change in our family’s fortune.  Not only are we blessed with two new babies to bring us happiness and the joys that children afford, but our Will has taken the first step towards becoming independent.”

Around the table and among the surrounding children, there is a stunned silence.  It was as if they were all asking themselves – “what does he mean by that ?”

John pauses to allow the surprise of his announcement to sink in to his listeners’ minds.  “What do I mean by that last statement – “Will’s first step towards independence.” ?  Let me tell you what we conjured up while we were having a jug of Toby’s best ale.  Outside, in the marketplace, a group of travelling players arrived in town and there was quite a sound of drums, pipes, and horns.  It was the Earl of Oxford’s players.  They had come here from Oxford and were going to stay for a few days at the Earl’s manor house in Billesley.  Now, this is important so listen closely.  Some of you who are old enough to remember Nanny Arden will recall that she used sit right over there, beside the fireplace.  She was forever going on about her family’s connection to the Earls of Oxford through her mother’s family line.  You see, a long time ago the noble Earls of Oxford had married a woman called Trussel who Nanny always claimed was one of her own distant relations.  Will had the idea of going forth and meeting this Earl – he’s number seventeen – but I soon put a stop to that.

I put a stop to that because I wanted to go and speak with the Earl myself.  And I did just that.”

A slight titter of recognition runs through the room – the seventeenth Earl of Oxford ?  and their father !  It seemed incredible.

“I know that you would all be surprised by that little tid-bit of news but please stay seated while I tell you what happened next.  OK ?”

Everyone in the room nods in unison.  This is astonishing because in the Shaksper household there is rarely acquiescence about anything.

John composes himself – no mean feat considering the amount of Toby’s bitter he has already drunk this day.  “Let me go on, then.  So, as I was saying, this Earl of Oxford is reputed to be our cousin.  And I approached him in a very dignified way, mind.  Although there were more than a dozen players in the Earl’s party there was no doubt concerning which one was the nobleman.  Everything we have heard about Edward de Vere is true – he is handsome and dresses like someone from another world.  I went right up to him, kneeled before him and asked if he would do me the honour of joining me and Will for a celebratory pint at Bottom’s Up.

The Earl looked at me in something like shock – who was I to approach such a man ?  But I immediately told him that today I am a grandfather of twins and that Will, who was standing behind me, is their father.  To be honest, the Earl was disarmed and immediately took hold of us and off we went to the alehouse.  When we got inside, it was clear that Lord Edward had been there before because he greeted Toby as a long-lost friend.

We sat down together, at my usual table in the corner. And then Toby brought us each a mug of his finest bitter.  The Earl is a great man with words and he proposed a toast to the health of our new babies.  Have you ever heard such a thing ?  This man knows the Queen and yet here he was with us celebrating the birth of Will’s twins.  Just think on it !  Will and I were gobsmacked that our little ruse had worked and we had been able to get into conversation with Lord Edward.”

At this point, Hamnet Sadler couldn’t stop himself from interrupting John’s meandering story.  “Yes, of course, we all knew that Nanny Arden had told this story on long winter’s evenings by the fireside but she was an old, old woman and no one paid her much heed, did they ?”

“Well, Hamnet, young Will remembers those stories and when he mentioned to me that Lord Edward is our kinsmen – though howsoever different in rank – he sparked an idea in my mind.  I said to Will, let’s see if there is any way we can apprentice you to his travelling band of brothers.  I had to keep Will’s gob shut and he agreed that we would approach Lord Edward and that he would keep silent.  Imagine that, Will Shaksper silent !  Would you believe that ?  But he was as good as his word.

However, knowing that Lord Edward is oftentimes staying at Billesley Manor, I thought it unwise to be too forward.  So, rather than broaching the subject of an apprenticeship at this time, I only made mention of our familial connections through the maternal grandmothers.  It was important to establish that we were – and are – kinsmen.  He’s a noble lord and for one such as him, family trees are important.  We might be the squirrels in his family tree but he knew that we belong in his company.

The next time Lord Edward comes into Stratford with his troupe of players then I will be bolder and ask him how we might be able to come to an apprenticeship agreement so that Will can satisfy his curiosity and he can bring some money into the house.  But, for now, that’s in the future.  I must say, our future is looking better to me now.  Twin grandchildren – aye, even a grandson to carry on the family name – and now the possibility of a future for Will, a better future than he could imagine at the glover’s bench or the mystery plays or the travelling pantomime shows.  Our Will might be able to rise in this world.”

“Oh,  Pater John, that would be a grand thing but would he have to leave his wife and little ones behind ?”

“Certainly, we have a large enough house and the girls can help Anne with the babies.  That will be good for them to learn to contribute to our family’s purse, even if indirectly.  Having responsibility is a great way of educating those girls so that they can become goodwives in their turn.  And, whatever Will is able to contribute in the way of money sent back from London – or wherever he travels – will be something of a bonus because he won’t be eating us out of house and home.  It all seems to me to be a solution for both Will and us.  And, if Will isn’t here in Stratford then Anne won’t be making any more babies.  We have enough babies now, don’t you think ?”

Everyone chuckled and then Hamnet Sadler proposes a toast to the health of his godchildren and the future wealth of the Shakspers.

***

St John’s College

Late Wednesday afternoon

The afternoon session is now over and the seminar is breaking up into smaller groups.  To everyone’s surprise, Sefton Lewis goes straight to Neddy Shorts, extends his right hand, and jovially slaps him on the shoulder with his left hand.

“Well done.  Keep them guessing.  I was anticipating some sort of ructions from you but your cool response caught me off-balance.”

“Thanks but what’s “ructions” ?  I’ve never heard that word before.”

“Oh, I seem to have forgotten myself and slipped into Manc-speak. “Ructions” in the Mancunian vocabulary is rather like a disturbance or even a fracas, but a fracas that stops short of outright violence.”

“That’s a great word, I will have to try to remember it.  Have you made any dinner plans yet ?  I’m going out with a couple of younger people that I met at last winter’s Bardo-Topia conference, in Toronto.  Like me, they’re suspicious of the ideological intentions which are behind the Orthodox Stratfordians’ agenda in pressing for William Shaksper’s authorship.  We’d be please if you joined us and we could perhaps raise some “ructions”.  Not bad, eh ?”

“Very good.  That’s exactly how my old dad would have used the word.  But, unfortunately, I can’t do dinner tonight although I am free tomorrow.  This evening I have a prior commitment with a former colleague who was awarded The Chair in Renaissance Studies here at Cambridge.  Local boy makes good, that sort of thing.  So, can we take a rain-check as you Americans like to say ?”

“Certainly, anyone else you think might want to join us for some “ructions” ?”

“I’ll ask around.  Who do you have lined up so far ?”

“My old pal, Cyril Hubert, who is going to talk about Marlowe and Oxford tomorrow is up for it.  He might have someone else in tow.  While we are talking, Sefton, I have to ask you a question.  You don’t mind if I call you by your first name do you ?”

“Of course not.  Everyone else does – it’s rather like my calling card.”

“Good.  I’ve never heard the name “Sefton” before, how did your parents come up with that moniker?”

“Ah, yes, “The Question”.  I can’t stop myself from having a small laugh at it, you know.  You see, “Sefton” was a very toney name which had some currency in the north-west of England in the 1930s – and even after the war when I was born.  There’s an old estate on the East Lancashire Road on the Manchester-side of Liverpool with that name.  My older brother would always kid me that I was named after the Sefton Park lay-bye on the side of the road.  He would claim that our parents must have stopped there for a quickie when I was conceived.  His little gibe used to disgust me but, as I’ve grown older and my parents – and my brother, too – have now passed on, I can’t tell it to anyone without chuckling.  But I only tell it to very special people, like you, Neddy.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“No, really, I meant that.  I’ve been an admirer of your work on the Tudor money trails since you first began to publish your thoughts about Oxford’s financial disaster.  But, like I said in my comments, there are real historiographical problems in pinning down what exactly was going on.  I am in no doubt that there was some major hanky-panky involving William Cecil but the available evidence can only be teased out so far.  That’s why I thought that your recourse to Carlo Ginzburg’s idea of “conjectural history” was very clever.  Of course, we can’t conjecture documents that no longer exist but we can conjecture why they don’t exist.”

“Right you are.  I hope that we can talk some more about this tomorrow night.”

“Oh, I’m sure we will.  And if you ply me with some really good claret then I might tell you even more and raise some ructions, too.”

“I’d second that.”

And, with that, Neddy goes off in search of his buddy, Cyril Hubert.

Sefton wanders over to the other side of the room where his former student, Ruby Hattenstone, is talking with several other young women who, like her, are at the Oxfordian colloquium for the first time.  Sefton likes to be all things to all people while Ruby still has a bit of a soft spot for her old supervisor and is always happy to get close to him.

***