Dem Bones

I now have a copy of The Last Days of Richard III by my History Press stable-mate, John Ashdown-Hill.  This was the book which led archaeologists to the car park in Leicester where Richard's remains were buried.  I'm looking forward to reading it, when I take a break from my research into Sir William Davenant.

Today, I came across this: A Bone to Pick with the Bard - Richard III was NOT a Hunchback.  It's a piece in the Independent which indicates that Richard "Crookback" did not have a crookback after all!

William Shakespeare appears to get the blame for the fact that we all thought he did.

Well, that's not entirely fair.  Shakespeare was a poet-playwright, not a historian.  And he had to make do with the information that was available to him.

The Tudor kings and queens were always slightly aware that their claim to the English throne was rather shaky.  Henry VII became king when he defeated Richard III in battle.  So, in typical Tudor style, they made up a pack of lies about Richard.  And because many historians are lazy and credulous, we all believed the lies.

The question, then, is this: did Shakespeare really believe the Tudor propaganda?  Or was he actually up to something much more subtle and clever when he portrayed Richard III with a hunchback and a club foot?

After all, Richard III wasn't the only king he seemingly maligned.  Historically speaking, Macbeth was one of the most successful and popular kings in medieval Scotland.  Macbeth's predecessor, King Duncan, was useless; Macbeth defeated him in battle and then ruled for 17 years, during which time he made a pilgrimage to Rome (only a king who knew that his country was safe would disappear overseas for two years).  So, once again, Shakespeare drew a portrait of a king that was wildly inaccurate.

Unless ...

Unless we accept that Shakespeare wasn't really writing about Macbeth but about a different Scottish king.  The one who, at that moment in time, occupied the English throne.  James I.

In Shakespeare's tragedy, written in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, Macbeth is a brave and steadfast lord who turns to the dark side - ambitious and greedy, he commits murders and goes paranoid.

There are very good reasons - some of them outlined in my book, Who Killed William Shakespeare? - to suspect that Shakespeare thought of James I in just these terms.  He was a promising monarch who broke his promises, choosing to become a veritable "Son of" [Gaelic - mac] Elizabeth, hence "Mac-beth".  King James had dropped heavy hints that England's Catholics would be allowed a degree of tolerance.  He then fell into the traps laid for him by his egregious secretary, Sir Robert Cecil (photo above), and colluded in the government fiction that was the Gunpowder Plot.  The treacherous slaying of King Duncan in the play was really Shakespeare's horrified reaction to the barbarous execution of Father Henry Garnet, SJ, the real target of the Cecil-masterminded "powder treason".

Which brings us back to Richard III.  So King Richard didn't have a hunchback after all.  But Sir Robert Cecil did.  A rhyme of the time described him thus:

Backed like a lute case
Bellied like a drum -
Like Jackanapes on horseback
Sits little Robin Thumb.

He was also known as the "Toad", and Robertus Diabolus - Robert the Devil.

The Cecil family claimed that Sir Robert (the second son of Elizabeth's chief minister, Lord Burghley) had been dropped on his head at birth.  He was certainly stunted and deformed, with a "crookback" and a splayed foot.  Queen Elizabeth called him her "elf", and so in Shakespeare's Richard III he became the "elvish, abortive, rooting hog", the evil "toad" who plots against and kills anybody who threatens to frustrate his ambitions.

It is, in all fairness, extremely simpleminded to imagine that Shakespeare was writing specifically about King Richard.  In reality, he was turning the Tudor propaganda into a weapon against the Court of Elizabeth I.  It was not Richard who was hunchbacked and splay-footed - it was her dangerous "elf", that inveterate and industrious plotter, Robert Cecil.

King James inherited the English throne on Elizabeth's death in 1603.  He also inherited the loathsome Robert Cecil, whom he repeatedly promoted.  And just as Shakespeare had transformed Robert Cecil, for his sins, into the diabolical Richard III, so he turned James I into the tyrannical butcher, Macbeth.

Of course, Shakespeare was so good at what he did that we all made the mistake of taking his words at face value.  But then, historians have been so inclined to swallow Protestant propaganda whole that nobody seems to have questioned Shakespeare's portrayals.  Perish the thought that our greatest wordsmith might have exposed the brutal corruption at the heart of the governments of Elizabeth I and James I! 

No, no, no - far better to assume that Shakespeare really was describing the historical Richard and Macbeth than to acknowledge who the real targets of his quill might have been.  Because that would require us to admit that dreadful people did dreadful things, ostensibly to turn England into a Protestant country, but really to make themselves incredibly rich.  And we really don't want to admit that, do we?

Ossian: Culture and Prejudice

It's taken me a while, but I've finally got round to researching the poems of Ossian.

"So what?" I hear you cry.  Well, each to his own.

Let me fill you in.

James Macpherson was born in the Scottish Highlands in 1736.  A native Gaelic speaker, he wasn't quite ten years old when the Jacobite rebellion under Bonnie Prince Charlie came to a terrible end at Culloden, not so very far from where Macpherson had grown up. 

There had been prominent rebels in his family - including Cluny Macpherson, who makes a colourful appearance in Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped.

James Macpherson was clever, quick-witted and well-educated.  In 1760, he published Fragments of Ancient Poetry - Collected in the Highlands of Scotland and Translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language.  These Fragments introduced the world to the ancient world of Fingal (Fionn mac Cumhail), his son Ossian and grandson Oscar (yes, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was named after him).  They were an instant success.

The Scottish literati then raised the funds for Macpherson to make a research trip to the Highlands and Islands with a view to collecting more scraps of traditional Gaelic verse, either orally or in manuscript form.  The result of this expedition was Fingal: An Ancient Epic Poem in Sixth Books.

Macpherson had made his name.  His Ossianic collections were the talk of Europe and beyond.  Thomas Jefferson considered them his favourite books; Napoleon Buonaparte never went into battle without a copy to hand, and Goethe was hugely inspired by the Gaelic epic.  Romanticism - the predominant aesthetic movement of the 19th century - owed a great deal to Macpherson's work.  Felix Mendelssohn made a sort of pilgrimage to the Western Isles after reading the Ossian poems, and was inspired to write his stirring Hebridean Overture, although sea-sickness had prevented him from viewing "Fingal's Cave" on Staffa.

But the English hated the Ossian poems.  Led by the bullish figure of Dr Samuel Johnson, the southern establishment poured scorn on Macpherson's efforts.  Johnson demanded that Macpherson reveal his sources and produce the Gaelic manuscripts from which he had drawn his translations.  As far as Dr Johnson was concerned, the whole thing was a hoax.  There were no historic manuscripts concerning Fingal.  Macpherson had made the whole thing up.

Not true.  There were mentions of Fingal and Ossian in historical manuscripts, and subsequent research has shown that Macpherson did indeed base his work on original, authentic Gaelic poetry.  And yet Macpherson - and Ossian - are little known today.  So one could say that Dr Johnson and his English crew succeeded.  They threw enough mud for some of it to stick.

Why, though?  Why was it so important to Dr Johnson, and others like him, to undermine James Macpherson's achievements?

At the time, Gaelic society was in decline.  It has since been sentimentalised and fetishised, but first its roots had to be torn up and the culture pretty much destroyed.

The crowns of England and Scotland had been united in 1603 under James Stuart, the sixth King James of Scotland (but usually referred to as James I - his English designation).  It was not until 1707, though, that the Scots were bribed and bullied into accepting an Act of Union with England.  This was very much to England's benefit - it meant that France lost a valuable ally north of England's border - and very much to Scotland's disadvantage.  Indeed, the Union was detested on both sides of the English-Scottish border.

The last serious attempt to break up the Union, or to restore the Stuart line to the throne (if only in Scotland), came when Charles Edward Stuart landed with seven men in the Outer Hebrides.  It ended with the disaster at Culloden in 1746.  The English, under the "Butcher" Duke of Cumberland, a son of the reigning Hanoverian king, raped and massacred their way through the Highlands.  The wearing of Scottish dress (the tartan kilt) was banned, as was the possession of weapons.

Before too long, the time-honoured clan system was breaking down.  The clan chiefs were replaced by landlords, who held no sense of responsibility to the inhabitants of the Highlands.  Sheep were more profitable than people, and so houses were burned down, possessions confiscated, and thousands of men, women and children herded into overcrowded vessels to make long and painful journeys to the farthest flung corners of the Empire.  The Highlands became a wasteland, an exclusive playground for the very rich.

With the determined annihilation of Gaelic culture well and truly underway, Macpherson's publications were a bit of a problem.  They demonstrated that the culture of the Highlands (and, in particular, the west) was truly ancient.  Some even considered the Ossianic poems comparable with the works of Homer and Virgil.  It was as if, just as the English and their supporters in the Lowlands were systematically crushing Highland society, a Highlander had come along and shown that the Gaels had a culture and tradition which far surpassed anything that any Englishman could boast of.

To men like Dr Samuel Johnson, the Scots were primitives, a ragged bunch of scheming savages.  English racism - never very far from the surface - was making exaggerated and hysterical claims about Scots migrating en masse to London and taking jobs, houses and women (sound familiar?).  South of the border, words like "Scot" and "Scottish" were a form of abuse

Things worsened when John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, became the first Scottish prime minister of Great Britain.  Bute was a favourite of King George III (the "mad" one), but he bore the hated name of Stuart, and he was a Scot - so the English loathed him.  Macpherson had dedicated his Ossianic works to Lord Bute, which gave Englishmen like Dr Johnson another reason to attack Macpherson and his discoveries.

There is much that is magnificent in the Ossianic poems, even if Macpherson had embellished the original Gaelic verses he collected throughout the Highlands and Islands.  They give flashes of insight into a heroic society and glimpses of life at a time when Christianity was just beginning to establish itself (there are no Christian references in the poems).  What is more, they offer proof that the western seaboard of Scotland was home to a remarkable culture before the invading Angles and Saxons converged to form England.  They deserve to be better known.  No; more than that - they are part of the ancestral heritage of the British Isles, and it was a cultural atrocity on the part of the English to try to wipe them from the record and to impugn the reputation of the man who collected, translated and published them.

And there's more.  The Ossian poems give us an insight into the society of Arthur.  Yes, Arthur.  That Arthur - the one the English falsely insist on calling "King Arthur".

English prejudices run deep.  If they can't have Arthur all to themselves, then no one can.

The real, original, historical Arthur was a Scottish prince.  There never was an "English" King Arthur, and no evidence at all exists for an Arthur in the south.  He was a North Briton, and his world was the world of Fingal and Ossian and Oscar.

But just as English scholars refused to allow the Scots to have an ancient, heroic culture - refused even to let them have a language, or a home - so English commentators continue to tell lies about Arthur, if only to prevent the world from knowing that his father was King of the Scots.

One day - let us hope - the Ossianic poems will take their place alongside the native tales of Arthur and his heroes (which continually refer to "the North").  Macpherson will be honoured as he should be: as the man who preserved these traces of authentic tradition and was cruelly satirised and savagely lambasted for doing so.  The crimes committed against the culture and people of the Highlands will be fully recognised and acknowledged.  And it will be possible to investigate and celebrate the genuine Arthur of history, rather than the insipid legendary concoction foisted upon us by the propagandists of the south.

Remember, Remember

There are three kinds of history.

The first is popular history.  This is what people can just about remember - the easily-digested, overly-simplistic view of history which was so beautifully spoofed by Sellar and Yeatman in their hilarious "Memorable History of England", 1066 And All That.

According to the popular account, a fiendish proto-terrorist named Guy Fawkes had planned to blow up the Houses of Parliament on Tuesday, 5 November 1605, but was caught at the last minute.  He was found lurking in an underground cellar, poised to light the fuse.  His motive?  Well, he was a Catholic.

The problem with popular history is that it is almost invariably wrong.  Fortunately - for those who are interested - there is also real history.  Usually written by academics (some of whom enjoy a sort of celebrity status), real history is considerably more detailed, and often more interesting, than the Disney-esque popular version.

Real history teaches us, for example, that Guy Fawkes was not the key player in the Gunpowder Plot.  The ringleader was Robert Catesby, originally of Lapworth in Warwickshire.  Catesby had recruited several diehard Catholics with his proposal to blow up the Houses of Parliament (along with King James and Henry, Prince of Wales, and most of the government) as an act of revenge.  Numerous swingeing anti-Catholic laws had been passed by the Parliaments of Elizabeth I.  When she died in 1603, it was fervently hoped - and widely believed - that her successor, King James VI of Scotland, would be more tolerant.  James, however, demanded more anti-Catholic legislation, and so Catesby and his secretive band resolved to destroy him and to set up his young daughter, the Princess Elizabeth, as a puppet monarch.

There was no underground cellar.  Fawkes was caught, at a little after midnight on Tuesday, 5 November 1605, in a ground floor vault.  As a professional soldier, he had been chosen to guard the vault and to light the fuse when the time came.  But even though it is his image (or a fanciful idea thereof - he actually had reddish-brown hair) which smiles inscrutably at us from a million "Anonymous" masks, he was a fairly minor player in the great conspiracy.

Still, real history has its problems, in that it too often repeats what was previously said.  And there is a third kind of history.  I think of it as "secret" history.

If popular history tells us what everyone thinks happened, and real history tells us what did happen, then the secret history explores what was actually going on.

So, did a small band of Catholic fanatics plan to blow up the Parliament building during the State Opening of Parliament on 5 November 1605?  The answer is, yes and no.

Yes, in that several of the conspirators do seem to have willingly joined the plot with the aim of putting a violent end to the State's violence against them and their co-religionists.  We cannot explain the involvement of individuals such as John Grant of Snitterfield, near Stratford-upon-Avon, and his brothers-in-law, Robert and Thomas Wintour of Huddington in Worcestershire, unless we are prepared to accept that they really did plan to blow up the ultra-Protestant bigots of King James's Parliament.

And no, in that no explosion would have happened.  We do not know how much gunpowder had been stockpiled under the Peers' Chamber (the authorities came up with differing accounts), but we do know that the gunpowder which was returned from the Parliament Building to the Tower of London on 7 November was registered as "decayed".  Basically, its chemical ingredients had separated - a natural process, and one which meant that no amount of encouragement would have caused that gunpowder to go bang.

Besides which, the man responsible for the government's monopoly of gunpowder, and the supply kept in the Tower of London, was Sir George Carew, who had recently become Baron Carew of Clopton.  His new seat - Clopton House, one mile from Stratford-upon-Avon - was promptly let to one of the gunpowder plotters, the very man indeed who had been asked by Robert Catesby to acquire a large amount of gunpowder.  Doesn't that sound a bit odd?

What about the fact that William Parker, who had recently become the 4th Baron Mounteagle, had offered his services as a reformed Catholic to King James, and was then engaged on the king's Parliamentary business ... as well as spending time with Robert Catesby, trying to get the Jesuit Superior of the Province of England to condone mass murder.  Father Henry Garnet, the Jesuit Superior, was the ultimate victim of the foiled plot.  In fact, he could be described as the intended target - if the entire plot is looked at, not as a Catholic conspiracy, but as a government-backed false flag operation or 'black op' designed to compromise and damage the Jesuit mission in England.

And further to enrich Robert Cecil, the man who really ran the government.  He was a close friend of Sir George Carew's, and he made sure that all embarrassing references to William Parker, Lord Mounteagle, in the plotter's confessions were removed (Mounteagle was also handsomely rewarded for his dubious activities).  Cecil was also said - by reliable witnesses - to have allowed both Robert Catesby (the plot's supposed mastermind) and Thomas Percy (the plotter who invariably got things moving) into his house in the wee small hours via a back entrance.  The clear implication, and it is a credible one, being that Catesby and Percy, those twin pillars of the "powder treason", were Cecil's agents.

In Who Killed William Shakespeare? I explore Will Shakespeare's connections with the plot and the plotters, indicating that Shakespeare (as his own writings prove) was more aware than most of what had really been going on.  The devious Robert Cecil had recruited several lapsed Catholics or Catholic patsies - Catesby, Percy and Mounteagle being just three - and used them to entrap others, including the superior of the underground Jesuit mission.

There never would have been an explosion, because the plot was always going to be "exposed" in the nick of time.  Cecil and his agents had been aware of the plot (and, if Shakespeare is to be believed, had been actively directing the key plotters) for many months.  The whole thing was a set-up.

When Parliament finally reconvened, after the gunpowder scare, if passed an Act demanding the regular annual celebration of the king's deliverance from his enemies' malice on 5 November.  The Bonfire Night festivities - which are celebrated at this time every year - are, in fact, part of a 400-year old propaganda coup.  We are meant to celebrate the failure of a few jihadists to destroy parliamentary democracy, monarchical rule and the Church of England.  But as the plot was, in reality, more of a State intelligence operation than a terrorist conspiracy, what we are really commemorating is a cruel and cynical ploy to justify the horrendous persecution of Catholics.

That's what I mean by secret history.  You might think that you're celebrating Guy Fawkes' failed attempt to blow up Parliament.  You might be slightly better informed, and realise that there were several people involved, and that a surprising number of individuals (including priests) were brutally executed as a result of the "plot".

But if you read Who Killed William Shakespeare? you're more likely to realise that we were had.  The Gunpowder Plot was propaganda, pure and simple.  It was violent, bloody, and its effects were awful (if you happened to be Catholic).  But there was no threat at all to the king and his lords.

So what, you might ask, are we really celebrating when we remember, remember (as we were told to by the very Parliament which passed the merciless anti-Catholic laws) the "gunpowder treason and plot"?  A conspiracy that never really existed?  The public butchering of priests?

Guy Fawkes was a brave man, whether you approve of his beliefs or not.  And the men who set him up, betrayed him, tortured him and then executed him were among the worst liars this country has ever produced.

Enjoy the bonfires and the fireworks.  And if you must burn anyone in effigy, please make it Robert Cecil - the real villain of the piece.

The Dangerous Friendships of Princes

A few weeks back, I posted a short series of blogs examining the so-called Cobbe portrait and subjecting it to much the same detailed analysis as I carried out on the Beoley skull, the Darmstadt death mask and the familiar portraits of William Shakespeare in my runaway bestseller, Who Killed William Shakespeare?

Today, I had an email from a friend who just happens to have visited Hatchlands Park in Surrey recently, where the Cobbe portrait is on show along with a portrait of Shakespeare's noble patron, the third Earl of Southampton.  My friend remarked that he couldn't help noticing the strange bump or blister on the nose side of the left eye socket in the Cobbe portrait (which is said to be of Shakespeare).  Having read my book, he found this particular detail in the portrait "fascinating".

So I was reminded of the work that remains to be done on the Cobbe portrait.  Various features compare rather chillingly with the damage to the skull at Beoley Church, those features also showing up on the death mask, the Chandos Portrait, the Droeshout engraving and the Davenant Bust.  These correspondences would appear to indicate that the Cobbe portrait does indeed show an image of Shakespeare - one which was made posthumously, using the death mask as a model.

The image is that of a youngish man - not the middle-aged, semi-retired poet of the second decade of the 17th century, when the portrait is thought to have been painted.  This means that, though the portrait was almost certainly posthumous (witness the fatal head injuries), it presented Will Shakespeare as he had been quite a few years earlier.  Perhaps when, aged about 30, he had been friends with the Earl of Southampton.

The inscription at the top of the portrait reads Principum amicitas! - the 'Friendship of princes!'  The words come from one of the Odes of the Roman poet, Horace (Book 2, Ode 1: "To Pollio, Writing his History of the Civil Wars").  The opening verses of that Ode translate thus:

You're handling the Civil Wars, since Metellus
was Consul, the causes, mistakes, and methods,
Fortune's game, and the dangerous friendships
of princes, and the unatoned-for

bloodstains on various weapons:
a task that's filled with dangerous pitfalls,
so that you are walking over embers
that smoulder under treacherous ashes.

Now, if you've read Who Killed William Shakespeare? you'll know how relevant this verse is to Will Shakespeare.  He wrote about the "Civil Wars" and disturbances which had troubled the land ever since Henry VIII decided to tear England away from Rome.  In other words, he exposed the cruelty, the violence and the sickening oppression of the governments of Elizabeth I and James I in their efforts to destroy English Catholicism.  And for that, Shakespeare paid with his life.

Don't let the Muse of dark actions be long absent
from the theatre, continued Horace, writing to his friend Asinius Pollio, a Roman poet, playwright,literary critic and historian: soon, when you've finished covering
public events, reveal your great gifts
again in Athenian tragedy,
you famous defendant of troubled clients ...

Let us assume, then, that the Cobbe portrait really does show us an image of Shakespeare, backdated (as it were) to the time when his patron was the Earl of Southampton.  The inscription chosen for the posthumous portrait refers to a Roman poet and playwright, a "famous defendant of troubled clients", who was playing with fire by writing a history of his violent times and thereby "walking over embers that smoulder under treacherous ashes."

These words came from the Roman poet Horace, who gets more mentions in my Who Killed William Shakespeare? than any other classical poet.  The reason for this is that Shakespeare seems to have been considered - by his contemporaries - as something of a modern Horace; a writer who was inclined to quote Horace a great deal and (like Horace) a genius who was mocked and satirised by a slavish underdog (if you've read my book, you'll know who I'm talking about).

The Principum amicitas! inscription therefore lends weight to the possibility that the Cobbe portrait shows us Shakespeare, since Will Shakespeare was seen as being like Horace, as well as being a "Roman" (i.e. Catholic) poet and playwright, like the recipient of Horace's Ode.

The inscription also carries a very dark hint.  The Ode refers to the "heavy" or "dangerous friendships of princes" (grauisque principum amicitas), which has a particularly poignant significance in the context of Shakespeare's death.  The silencing of William Shakespeare, that "famous defendant of troubled clients", was - I have argued - ordered by King James I, who had no wish to see the eloquent playwright championing the cause of the king's former favourite, Robert Carr, who was about to be tried for murder.

According to a tradition passed down by Shakespeare's godson - and probably his natural son - Sir William Davenant, Shakespeare had once received a friendly letter, written in the king's own hand.  And so the inscription on the portrait serves as a reminder that the friendships of princes could be destructive.  King James was in fact a weak and paranoid king, while Shakespeare was an outspoken critic of his murderous regime.  He wrote about the "civil wars" of the English Reformation - the causes, the mistakes, the methods, the unatoned-for bloodstains on various weapons ... it's all in his writings.  He also referred repeatedly to "Fortune" as a sort of perverse monarch, the capricious and vengeful spirit of the times.  He knew "Fortune's game" and, ultimately, he lost.

We might think of the Cobbe portrait as a sort of dreadful memento mori.  Perhaps it was a gift to the Earl of Southampton (commissioned by person or persons unknown) which, in itself, sought to explain the sudden death of the Earl's former poet-protege.

For if Southampton ever thought back to his youthful days, when he had William Shakespeare as his pet poet and playmate, and wondered why Will had been so suddenly silenced, the portrait would explain it all.

Shakespeare had been walking on hot coals, writing true histories which it was not safe to write.  And so he was, in the words of Ben Jonson, "stopped", before he could plead for any more "troubled clients".

How Conspiracies Work

Buoyed by the news that Who Killed William Shakespeare? has sold out its first print-run within two months of publication, I've been wondering what Shakespeare would think if he came back today.

At first glance, you'd imagine he'd be pretty chuffed.  Nearly 400 years on from his death in 1616, he is still far and away the leading figure in his chosen field.  No one comes near him.  Shakespeare is, without doubt, the most famous poet-playwright ever to have walked the planet.

He might find the internet exciting.  He would surely be impressed that the journey from Stratford to London can be done in two hours, as opposed to the two days it took on horseback.

But, to be honest, I think he would be appalled - and certainly very uncomfortable.  After all, it's one thing to be celebrated as the world's greatest dramatist and poet.  It's another thing altogether to be completely misremembered.

The Shakespeare industry is as busy as it ever was.  New books about Shakespeare appear all the time.  And most of them spout unadulterated rubbish about him.

There seem to be, essentially, two sides to the argument.  On the one hand, Will Shakespeare was a humble Warwickshire lad of extraordinary gifts - and, more than anything, humble and self-effacing; he went to London, made his fortune, wowed the Queen and then the King, and then he thought, "Ah well, I've had a good run, time to go home", and he sort of vanished.

The alternative argument goes something like this: That semi-transparent and quite frankly boring individual, better known for grain-dealing in Stratford, could never have been the universal genius who penned those marvellous comedies, histories and tragedies.  So somebody else must have done all the hard work.  William Shakespeare was just a frontman, a cardboard cut-out, undeservedly remembered as the greatest writer in the English language.

Both arguments are fundamentally flawed and - to put it bluntly - stupidly simplistic.  The latter arises from the former.  For as long as the academics, the Shakespeare experts and the tourism industry insist on selling us a see-through Shakespeare, a man who kept himself to himself and wrote entirely from his own imagination, steering well clear of the controversies of his day, there will always be those who cry "Foul!" and demand to know who the real William Shakespeare was.

And, if they happen to be of the all-aristocrats-are-excellent-and-infinitely-better-than-the-rest-of-us school (which dominates so much comment these days), they will insist that Shakespeare must have been an aristocrat - like the Earl of Oxford (who died while Shakespeare was still busily writing plays) or, more crazily, Queen Elizabeth I (ditto).

These are two extreme positions: Shakespeare was just an ordinary bloke, and Shakespeare must have been someone of high social standing.  They are the curse of Shakespeare studies.  Neither standpoint does any credit to William Shakespeare himself.

In a sense, what we are looking at is two sides of a conspiracy theory.  The first - and, apparently, the more innocuous - side claims that Shakespeare was just a patriotic middle-class Englishman; the second argues (quite rightly) that such a Shakespeare is a sham.  But, ultimately, both sides are wrong.

In Who Killed William Shakespeare? I examine the circumstances of Will's life and death.  It's been described as a conspiracy theory.  Which it isn't.  The real conspiracy theory continually pours out of Stratford and the cloisters of academe, fiercely countered by the fanatics who want to believe that somebody else altogether was the true genius.

Let us take a moment to consider the similarities between Shakespeare's lifetime and that of Arthur - the first historical Arthur on record, that is; not the silly and mythical King Arthur.

First of all, even though these two individuals lived a thousand years apart, their periods were subject to very similar strains.  In Arthur's day, a foreign religion (Christianity) was taking root at the same time as Germanic settlers were forcibly conquering much of southern Britain, beginning with the eastern side of the country.  In Shakespeare's day, a sort-of foreign religion (Protestantism) had entered the country from Germany, working its way across the land from the eastern counties.  One of the results of the spread of Protestantism was enormous social change.  The old gentry was almost entirely ruined, as Protestant parvenus stole fortunes and scrambled for precedence.

In other words, both in Arthur's day (late-6th century) and Shakespeare's day (late-16th century), a dangerous and disruptive movement was spreading across the country from the east and seeking to destroy and/or seize everything in its path.  The old religion (paganism, first; Catholicism, later) was under concerted and violent attack.  If you adhered to the old form faith and the social order which had obtained before the 'tempest' blew up, you were more or less doomed.

Both Arthur and Shakespeare stood for what could be called the 'true' Britain.  Arthur was no Christian, but there were Christians in his circle.  Shakespeare tried to pose as a Protestant, only to return to the faith of his forefathers when he saw just how vicious and corrupt the regime of Elizabeth I really was.  Neither of them was a fundamentalist, in any meaningful way; rather, they saw that what Britain needed was an end to the religious strife that covered a multitude of sins.  As Shakespeare had John of Gaunt say in Richard II:

"That England that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself."

I believe - and have offered evidence to support my belief - that both Arthur and Shakespeare were treacherously betrayed.  Murdered, to all intents and purposes.  Why?  Because both of them, in their different times, stood in the way of the triumph of Britain's enemies - the greedy, the self-serving, the corrupt, the dishonest, the over-zealous, the cruel and the depraved.

Now, here's where we enter the realms of conspiracy.  And the simple fact is that no conspiracy can succeed if (as is commonly supposed) it comprises just a handful of shady individuals.  Any conspiracy of that kind is likely to fail, or at least to be quickly exposed.

If it had been that simple - if, that is, the premature deaths of both Arthur and Shakespeare, had been brought about by just one or two fanatics - then we would have known the truth for some time.  But I would argue that such a scenario is pretty much the opposite of a conspiracy.

The real conspiracy requires many, many more people to engage in the cover-up.  It needs generations of commentators to collude in the crime.

In the case of Arthur, the treachery stemmed from the early Church - and, one could say, a particular religious establishment set up by one prominent churchman.  In the case of Shakespeare, the treachery stemmed partly from professional rivalry and partly from the paranoia that was loose at the court of King James.

Now, consider this: could future generations, wedded as they were to the cause of Christianity, acknowledge the role played by the early Church in the assassination of Arthur and the destruction of Britain?  Were there own beliefs not essentially the same as the beliefs which led to Arthur's death and the betrayal of Britain to her enemies?

And consider this of Shakespeare: the very people whose devious and bloody-minded behaviour was exposed in his plays ended up running the country.  Protestantism, which provided so many of these ogres with the excuse they needed to rob and slaughter their fellow countrymen, became the official religion of the land.  Future generations of scholars set out to prove that this was an inevitable and desirable process: it's what made Britain great.  And so, if Shakespeare had opposed this very kind of extremism, and his vocal opposition had led to his death, then it was absolutely necessary that the biography of William Shakespeare should be rewritten and the circumstances of his death ignored and forgotten.

The original conspiracies - the murders of Arthur and Shakespeare - required only a few determined and unscrupulous individuals to succeed.  Initially.  After that, though, huge numbers of likeminded people had to play along, to connive in the original crime, to become complicit in the cover-up (for reasons of faith and/or political expediency).  They became accessories after the fact.

It continues to this day.  There are still scholars who spout absolute gibberish about Arthur.  They steadfastly refuse to explore his northern roots.  They get unreasonably angry at the very suggestion that the first Arthur on record might have been the original Arthur.  Why?  Because they are colluding in the conspiracy that led to Arthur's death.  They are studying Arthur purely from the point-of-view of his enemies.  They are happy to continue the cover-up, because their mindsets and belief systems would have led them to participate in the original crime.

The same goes for Shakespeare.  His story is repeatedly written up by his enemies - even though they claim to love and admire him - because they harbour the same set of beliefs, ultimately, as the men who killed him (the one who wielded the weapon, the one who commissioned the crime, and the faction which kept it quiet).  So the conspiracy continues, perpetuated by the very character-type that was involved from the start.  Naturally, these academics cannot tell the truth about Shakespeare.  They might not have been there at the actual assassination, but they can continue to assassinate him by lying about his life, his works, his beliefs and covering up the harsh reality.

That's how conspiracies work.  If it were just a hugger-mugger huddle of plotters, their crimes would soon be exposed.  But it isn't.  It's an ongoing propaganda war.  Those who would have applauded and approved of the crime continue to cover for the criminals.  They misrepresent Arthur and Shakespeare and attack anyone who points to the realities of the time.

So Shakespeare, I believe, would find his visit to today's world a truly depressing experience.  His enemies triumphed.  They continue to tell his story, and to tell it all wrong.

And here's where we should take note.  Conspiracies can only prosper in a society, in a world, where there is sufficient fanaticism for the crimes to be covered up.  We don't all have to wield the knife - only to lie to ourselves and each other about what really happened.  And we do so because our belief systems are so horribly skewed.  We will justify atrocities because our blind prejudices assure us that they were justifiable.

Have you been on Facebook lately?  Read the below-the-line comments beneath any online newspaper story?  Fanaticism is flourishing.

Somewhere out there is today's Arthur, today's Shakespeare.  They will be betrayed and put to death.  And future generations will be none the wiser.  Because there are enough maniacs out there who will happily spread lies in support of their extremist positions.  And that's all that is needed for conspiracies to succeed.

Flodden Field, or: Arthur's Ghost (again)

Something big happened 500 years ago today.  The Kingdom of Scotland was at war with the Kingdom of England.  The armies met near Branxton in the English county of Northumberland.  The Scottish king, James IV (pictured), became the last British monarch to die in battle.  Apart from which, the losses - especially on the Scottish side - were enormous.

Towards the very end of The King Arthur Conspiracy I refer to this battle and, in particular, to a curious incident which took place beforehand.

James IV was probably the last Gaelic speaker to rule over Scotland.  Legends tell of him disguising himself in order to mingle with the ordinary citizens and find out what their lives were really like - something which William Shakespeare seems to have picked up on and reminded James VI of Scotland and I of England when he wrote Measure for Measure (the Duke in that play is clearly based on King James; Shakespeare apparently wanted to draw his sovereign's attention to what a popular monarch his predecessor had been).

The fourth King James of Scotland was also rather chivalrous.  This proved to be his downfall.  He gave King Henry VIII of England a couple of weeks notice that he was about to invade.  Which was very decent of him.  But it meant that the English were prepared.  The chivalry, it would seem, went only one way.

Just before he set out to meet his destiny on an English battlefield in 1513, James IV went to church in Linlithgow.  Sometime later, George Sinclair, professor of philosophy at the University of Glasgow, described what happened there.

The king was "at his Devotions" when an "Ancient Man came in, his Amber coloured Hair hanging down upon his Shoulders, his forehead high, and inclining to Baldness, his Garments of Azure colour, somewhat long, girded about with a Towel, or Table-Napkin, of a Comely and very Reverend Aspect."

The "Ancient Man" approached the king and addressed him thus:

"Sir, I am sent hither to entreat you, to delay your Expedition for this time, and to proceed no further in your intended journey: for if you do, you shall not prosper in your enterprise, nor any of your followers.  I am further charged to warn you, not to use the acquaintance, company, or counsel of women, as you tender your honour, life, and estate."

Naturally, the bystanders were intrigued by this person and many were eager to speak with him after the service.  But the "apparition" disappeared, "having in a manner vanished in their hands".

The "apparition" clearly cut a striking figure.  The description of the Ancient Man's hair seems authentic enough: the high forehead, "inclining to Baldness", with the hair flowing long at the back of the head, is instantly reminiscent of the Druidic tonsure, which was also adopted by the early Christians of the Celtic Church.  In contrast to the Roman tonsure of St Peter (the familiar shaved crown of the medieval monk), the Celts shaved their foreheads from ear to ear; the hair at the back of the head was allowed to grow long.

The lengthy "Azure" garments are also reminiscent of an early-5th century description of the Ancient Britons.  The court poet Claudian described a personified Britain as wearing the skin of some Caledonian [i.e. Scottish] beast, "her cheeks tattooed, and an azure cloak, rivalling the swell of ocean, sweeping to her feet".

So this phantom "Ancient Man" was ... well, pretty ancient, really.  And, as I suggest in my book on the original Arthur, he was possibly still trying to defend his homeland and his people against the English, just as Arthur himself had striven to hold back the tide of the Anglian advance.  Even his remarks about trusting women have a poignancy about them (Arthur, his comrades and his people, were ultimately ruined by the perfidy of a woman - namely, his wife).

We'll never know, of course.  But I do find it telling that the last Gaelic-speaking King of Scotland, and the last British monarch to die in battle, was warned by an "Ancient Man" not to put himself so recklessly in jeopardy.  A Gaelic-speaking war-lord who also died in battle, perhaps?  One who returned from the spirit world because the same fatal mistakes were about to be made?

But he was ignored.  And on 9 September 1513, King James's army of 30,000 Scots was routed at the Battle of Flodden Field.  The "rent surcoat of the King of Scots stained with blood" was sent to King Henry VIII as a trophy.

Nearly a thousand years had passed since Arthur fell victim to similar circumstances.  King James really should have heeded his ancestor.

Macbeth Died Today

He wasn't as bad as he's made out to be.

In fact, Macbethad son of Findlaech was one of Scotland's most successful kings.  He reigned for 17 years and was the first Scottish king to undertake a pilgrimage to Rome, 'scattering money like seed' on the way, which can only have meant that his kingdom was safe enough for him to absent himself from it for two years.

He did not murder his predecessor, King Duncan, in a treacherous bedroom incident.  Duncan was a useless king, defeated by Macbeth in open battle.

Seventeen years later, on 15 August 1057, Duncan's son Malcolm slew Macbeth in the battle of Lumphanan in Mar.  The 'Red King', as the Prophecy of Berchan described him, was buried on the Isle of Iona - or, as Shakespeare put it:

'Carried to Colmekill,
The sacred storehouse of his predecessors,
And guardian of their bones.'

The Prophecy of Berchan offers a wholly different view of Macbeth from the one we're used to:

The Red King will take the kingdom ... the ruddy-faced, yellow-haired, tall one, I shall be joyful in him.  Scotland will be brimful, in the west and in the east, during the reign of the furious Red One.

Which raises the question, why do we imagine him to have been a murderous tyrant?

Fiona Watson, in her 'True History' of Macbeth, suggests that it started with the Church.  For reasons to do with establishing the right of succession, the medieval Church chose to blacken Macbeth's name (it wouldn't be the first time, or the last, the Church rewrite history to suit its agenda).  But the blame should also lie at Shakespeare's door.

Although ... Shakespeare seldom, if ever, wrote history as History.  Take his famous portrayal of Richard III: it's hardly accurate, in strictly historical terms, but it served the purposes of Tudor propaganda, because in order to strengthen their rather dubious claim to the throne, the Tudors (Henry VII through Elizabeth I) found it expedient to misrepresent King Richard as a deformed monster.

If anything, though, Shakespeare's Richard 'Crookback' is more a portrait of Sir Robert Cecil, second son of William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, Lord Treasurer, chief minister and most trusted advisor to Queen Elizabeth I.  Robert Cecil matched Shakespeare's depiction of Richard III to a tee - he was stunted, dwarfish, hunchbacked and splay-footed:

Backed like a lute case,
Bellied like a drum,
Like jackanapes on horseback
Sits little Robin Thumb

in the words of a popular rhyme of the day.

Cecil also conformed to Shakespeare's presentation of Richard III's personality - feverishly industrious, devilishly devious, two-faced and dangerous, the younger Cecil fitted the description.  He was groomed by his father to take over as Elizabeth's most trusted secretary, and her successor became utterly dependent on him, much to the nation's distress.

That successor was, of course, King James VI of Scotland, who liked to trace his ancestry back to Macbeth's legendary companion, Banquo.

Shakespeare, however, recognised him as a true 'son' (Gaelic mac) of [Eliza]beth.  He was every bit as unprincipled and intolerant as Elizabeth had been, and after appealing to James's conscience in several pointed plays (Hamlet through to Othello), Shakespeare finally gave up on the Scottish monarch.

The last straw was the execution of Father Henry Garnet, superior of the Society of Jesus in England, in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot.  Shakespeare took this as the inspiration for the opening scenes of his Tragedy of Macbeth, with the saintly Garnet taking the role of King Duncan and James himself characterised as the once-noble Macbeth ('Son of Beth'), whose lust for power turned him into a 'bloody tyrant', a 'butcher' with 'hangman's hands'.

So Shakespeare's portrait of Macbeth had little to do with the original - who died on this day 956 years ago - and much to do with the reigning king, James I of England and VI of Scotland.

Time, you might say, for Macbeth to be rehabilitated - like King Richard III, in fact, who wasn't that bad either.

And while we're at it, maybe we should acknowledge that Shakespeare's historical characters weren't necessarily based on the originals, but on the dangerous, treacherous, self-serving and deceitful men of power of his own day.

(Plenty more on this, folks, in Who Killed William Shakespeare - get hold of your copy now, before everyone jumps on the bandwagon!!)

The Somerset Scandal

How timely is this?  Barely have I sent in the manuscript for Who Killed William Shakespeare to my editor at The History Press, than the BBC decides to show a programme which touches on a major historical scandal featured in the book!

Tomorrow evening (Wednesday, 9:00pm), BBC1 will screen an episode of "Who Do You Think You Are?" with Celia Imrie.  The popular actor discovers in the course of the programme that one of her ancestors was Frances Howard, Countess of Somerset (pictured here).

The scandal which engulfed Frances Howard, her husband Robert Carr, and the entire Court of King James I, was to prove fatal to William Shakespeare.

And what a scandal it was!  According to the official version, it involved adultery, poison, witchcraft and murder.  But this is somewhat typical of history, in that it is the tabloid version of events which tends to be remembered.  The reality is that a vicious and bitter power struggle was raging at the heart of King James's court, and Lady Frances was just one of the victims of that struggle.

On the one side of the power struggle were Frances Howard's relations and her husband, the handsome Robert Carr, a former favourite of the King.  On the other side were the forces of Puritan oppression: the Earl of Pembroke, his younger brother, the Earl of Montgomery, and the Archbishop of Canterbury.  This latter group also included Sir Fulke Greville, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Recorder of Stratford-upon-Avon, and Shakespeare's great rival, Ben Jonson.

At this distance in time, it is difficult to know just how bad Frances Howard was.  She had been married, at the age of 14, to the 3rd Earl of Essex.  This was in fact a political arrangement designed to protect the despicable Robert Cecil, an ally of Frances's father, who was widely blamed for the death of Essex's father.

Frances Howard and her first husband lived apart for the first three years of their marriage and then soon found that they were utterly incompatible.  Frances then fell in love with Robert Carr, a young Scot who was also the King's lover.  Strenuous efforts were made to ensure that Frances's marriage to Essex was annulled, so that she could marry Carr.

Robert Carr had a close friend called Thomas Overbury.  The two were seemingly inseparable.  Carr was nobody's idea of an intellectual, and he relied on Overbury's superior brain power.  Overbury, in turn, relied on Carr's relationship with King James for his own advancement.

Overbury grew intensely jealous when it became clear that his companion and meal-ticket, Robert Carr, had fallen hopelessly in love with Frances Howard.  Because it looked like Overbury would create difficulties over the matter of Frances's marriage annulment, King James personally ordered that Overbury should be locked up in the Tower of London.  After five months of imprisonment, Thomas Overbury was dead.

It was not until two years later that rumours began to circulate concerning Overbury's miserable death.  These rumours were exploited by the Puritan faction which was seeking to oust the crypto-Catholic Howards from King James's government.  Four "lesser" people were tried and executed for the supposed murder of Thomas Overbury before Lady Frances and her husband themselves stood trial.

In my forthcoming book on Shakespeare, I explain how this trumped-up scandal impacted on the life of Will Shakespeare, guaranteeing that he was "stopped", and how his illegitimate son was able to exact some sort of revenge upon those who had conspired against Shakespeare.

For now, it might well be worth watching tomorrow night's "Who Do You Think You Are?" in order to get a glimpse of Lady Frances Howard, the dazzlingly beautiful young noblewoman whose scandalous story robbed us of our greatest ever poet-dramatist.  And to admire the fact that these people, so distant from us in time, live on, in our own age, in the form of their descendants.

The Round Table

When a question was raised in an online King Arthur forum about whether "England has the original Round Table", I read a few of the replies and felt moved to respond.

Back in August, this blog mentioned the news that researchers from Glasgow University, working alongside local historians and archaeologists, had surveyed the King's Knot near Stirling Castle ("Stop Press: Round Table Discovery").  A "circular feature" under the turf of the central mound - see above - was revealed by geophysicists.

I added that to the online discussion about the existence of the Round Table.  The exchange of ideas, views and information continued, but only one person referred, in passing, to what I had written:

"there is the recent news about the Stirling 'circular feature' tho I'm not convinced."

So that's that, then.  Another minor distraction safely buried.

Except that this wasn't "recent news".  I'd pointed out in my post that the French poet Beroul, writing his romance of Tristan in about 1200, had located the Round Table firmly at Stirling.  The Fair Yseut sends her squire with a message for King Arthur and is told that Arthur "is seated on his throne.  You will see the Round Table which turns like the world; his household sits upon it."  The squire makes his way to Stirling, where he finds Arthur "on the dais where all the knights were seated."

That was written 800 years ago.  Hardly recent news.

In the fourteenth century, the Scottish poet John Barbour composed his poem The Brus about the Battle of Bannockburn, fought a short distance south of Stirling in 1314.  The defeated English king Edward II rode desperately to Stirling, seeking shelter in the castle, but he was turned away by the castle's governor.  Edward and his followers galloped off; as John Barbour wrote:

And besouth the Castle went they thone,
Rychte by the Round Tabill away.

In 1478, one William of Worcester wrote that "King Arthur kept the Round Table at Stirling Castle".  A generation later, Sir David Lindsay bade a fond farewell to Stirling's Castle Rock:

Adew, fair Snawdoun, with thy towris hie,
Thy Chapell-royal, park, and Tabyll Round ...

As late as the sixteenth century, it was reported that the thousand-year old traditions were still being honoured at Stirling: "in a sport called 'Knights of the Round Table', the Institutions of King Arthur were commemorated."

King James VI of Scotland was christened at Stirling Castle in December 1566.  He was heralded as the new Arthur who would one day unite the thrones of England and Scotland, thereby recreating the Britain which had been divided by the Anglo-Saxon conquest.  Intriguingly, when he acceded to the throne of England in 1603, King James insisted on having exactly 24 counsellors to advise him.  Twenty-four was also the number of the 'horsemen' of Arthur's Court - the legendary Knights of the Round Table.

The stepped earthworks surrounding the central mound of the King's Knot were added for the benefit of King James's son, Charles I.  It is the central mound itself, which is about fifteen metres in diameter, which appears to have been the original "dais" upon which Arthur and his noble war-band met.  And it is this central mound which, as the archaelogical surveys carried out this summer showed, was topped by a "circular feature".

The relevance of the mound was partly strategic.  The River Forth, which curls round the Castle Rock at Stirling, was effectively the boundary of Britain.  Just two safe crossing places, the Fords of Frew, immediately to the west of Stirling, allowed Pictish warriors from the north cross into Britain.  The defence of those fords was integral to the security of North Britain.  For a while, that task was entrusted to Arthur's father Aedan, the 'Prince of the Forth'.  For several years, from about 575 until 584, the task fell to the "emperor" Arthur.  He fought at least one of his battles at the Fords of Frew on the River Forth.

But I also suspect that the Round Table mound was important to Arthur and his close-knit war-band for another reason.  It was the burial mound of their mutual ancestor, Brychan of Manau.

Manau Gododdin was the contemporary name for Stirling, the Gododdin people being the tribesmen of Lothian.  Brychan of Manau almost certainly had his own version of the Round Table - a "family" of twenty-four "sons" - which was replicated by Arthur.  After his death, according to a manuscript in the British Library (Cognatio de Brachan), the mighty Brychan was buried "in the island which is called Ynysbrachan and which is next to Manau".

The Welsh word ynys can refer to an island or a river-meadow.  The meadow on which the King's Knot stands, beside the River Forth, was next to Manau - that is, it lay immediately beneath the volcanic crag-and-tail rock of Stirling.

Brychan's remains might not have stayed in the King's Knot burial mound.  There is some evidence that one of Arthur's companions, St Cadog, exhumed them and carried them to the site of his new monastery, a little further to the north, near Doune (St Cadog is commemorated at Kilmadock).  But prior to that, it seems likely that Arthur's legendary band of inter-related warrior-princes met at the grave of their forefather, Brychan of Manau, and held their councils of war in the field beside the Castle Rock, on the very edge of Britain.

Not convinced?  That's up to you.  But you can't call it "recent news".

A Lover's Complaint - continued

At the end of the last blogpost I promised to reveal the identity of the 'reverend man' who sat down on the Oxford riverbank and heard the confession of Jane Davenant, Will Shakespeare's adulterous lover.  And here he is (look left).

What's that you say?  That's not a man, it's a book.  Well, alarmingly enough, this book (which was put up for auction in 2007) is believed to be bound in his skin.  It was printed in 1606, the year in which the 'Father' in question - Henry Garnet - was hanged, drawn and quartered in London, a victim of the government's reponse to the Gunpowder Plot.

Will's poem, A Lover's Complaint, can be dated to 1605 or thereabouts.  Certainly, the events it recounts - the 'fickle maid full pale' talking quietly with a 'reverend man' on the bank of the River Thames (or Isis) in Oxford - can be traced back to the very end of August 1605.  King James and his Court had just spent three rather awkward days at Oxford.  They left in the afternoon of 30 August.  That same day, a party set out from Enfield Chase, north of London, making its way across the Midlands to North Wales.  The party, which was led by several prominent Jesuit priests and included at least one future Gunpowder Plotter, was heading to the shrine of St Winefride at Holywell in Flintshire.

St Winefride had been the patron saint of Will Shakespeare's father, John Shakespeare, as we know from a copy of a Jesuit last will and testament found hidden among the rafters of the Shakespeare Birthplace property in Stratford in 1757.

The route taken by the pilgrims led them across the country, through the Catholic backwaters of the English Midlands, where the Jesuits and their entourage stayed at the houses of men who were well-known to Will Shakespeare - men like John Grant of Snitterfield, Robert Catesby of Lapworth, and the three men who had taken up residence in Clopton House, just outside Stratford.  The pilgrims were dismayed by what they saw: concerted efforts to amass war-horses and weaponry in anticipation of an uprising.  Father Garnet, leading the pilgrimage, had heard that Catesby and others were planning an attack on the English State, but he had persuaded them to do nothing until he had received orders from his superiors on the Continent.  Sadly for Garnet and his friends, the conspirators proceeded with their plans, which came to grief at around midnight in the morning of 5 November 1605.

Amazingly, Will's poem A Lover's Complaint includes a brief biography of the 'reverend man' who came over to inquire the 'grounds and motive' of the middle-aged woman's distress as she wept and wailed on the Oxford riverbank.  As Shakespeare wrote:

A reverend man who grazed his cattle nigh,
Sometime a blusterer that the ruffle knew
Of court, of city, and had let go by
The swiftest hours observed as they flew,
Towards this afflicted fancy fastly drew,
And, privileged by age, desires to know
In brief the grounds and motives of her woe.

The afflicted maid addresses the 'reverend man' as 'Father'.  He was a priest.  But he was no ordinary priest: he was the Superior of the Society of Jesus in the province of England, and he had been on the run from the authorities for twenty years.

Father Henry Garnet was fifty years old when he sat down beside Will's lover.  He had been born in Derbyshire and won a scholarship to Winchester College, one of the last schools in England to have accepted the reforms imposed by the Protestant regime of Elizabeth I.  He had gained a reputation as a skilled debater and was praised for his 'modesty, urbanity, musical taste and quickness and solidity of parts'.  He had been, in short, a 'blusterer', a keen-witted and able debater.

After school, Garnet was apprenticed to a printer.  Richard Tottel ran his printshop in Temple Bar, London, and specialised in legal texts.  Garnet became his proof-reader, a 'corrector of the common law print', and among the regular visitors to Tottel's printshop were those leading figures in English law who would one day try Garnet for his life.  The young man had therefore come to know the 'ruffle' of the law courts and the city.

In 1575, at the age of twenty, Garnet travelled to Rome to train as a priest.  He was received into the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in September 1577, pledging his obedience directly to the Pope and undertaking to celebrate the Divine Office, otherwise known as the Liturgy of the Hours, which required the daily observance of the eight canonical hours of Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline.  He had let go by 'the swiftest hours observed as they flew'.

Father Henry Garnet had returned to England in secret in the summer of 1586.  Travelling with him was another Jesuit priest, Father Robert Southwell.  Distantly related to Shakespeare, Southwell would address a poem of his own to his 'worthy good cousin, Master W.S.', in which he criticised Shakespeare's choice of material.  Southwell insisted that Shakespeare should leave topics like Venus and Adonis alone and concentrate on more devotional poetry.  The poem in which Southwell reminded his 'worthy good cousin' Will Shakespeare of those who, out of fear of the authorities, denied their true faith was entitled St Peter's Complaint.

Will's A Lover's Complaint was his answer to Southwell's charges.  Southwell was arrested in 1592 and executed early in 1595.  Will left it until 1605, at the earliest, to respond to Southwell's St Peter's Complaint.  What prompted him to do so was the sight of Southwell's spiritual partner and brother in Christ, Father Henry Garnet, sitting beside his lover, Jane Davenant, and hearing her confession on the Oxford riverbank.  Garnet was on his way, we remember, to the shrine of the patron saint of Will Shakespeare's father, a saint who was associated, moreover, with childbirth (some years later, King James II would visit the same shrine to pray for a son; St Winefride duly responded, and the 'Old Pretender', James Francis Edward Stuart, was born approximately nine months later).

Father Robert Southwell had urged upon Shakespeare in his St Peter's Complaint the fact that 'well-wishing works no ill'.  Well-wishing was the Catholic practice of praying at sacred shrines and holy wells - this sort of activity had been banned by the Protestant authorities.  The action of Will's A Lover's Complaint took place in the midst of a 'well-wishing' pilgrimage to St Winefride's holy well.  As a stark, and rather threatening, reminder of this illegal activity, when the first part of A Lover's Complaint was published along with Will's sonnets in 1609, the cryptic dedication mischievously referred to the poet as a 'well-wishing adventurer'.

A Lover's Complaint relates part of the conversation which took place between Jane Davenant - wife of a respectable Oxford tavern-keeper, two months pregnant with Will's child - and Father Henry Garnet, Superior of the underground Jesuit mission in England, in Oxford at the end of August 1605.  Within months, the Gunpowder Plot would deal a shattering blow to the Jesuit mission and the cause of the embattled English Catholics.  Father Garnet would receive the news of the plot and its discovery at Coughton Court, just a few miles from Stratford-upon-Avon.  Instantly, he knew that he and his fellows were doomed.

His execution in May 1606 prompted Will Shakespeare to write Macbeth.

There are, of course, a whole host of questions to be answered: did Will Shakespeare personally summon one of the most wanted men in England to hear his lover's confession, and did he undertake to sponsor a 'well-wishing' pilgrimage to the shrine of his father's patron saint as penance for having got a married woman pregnant?  And, if so, how could he have escaped scrutiny by the authorities in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot (his rival and colleague Ben Jonson was summoned by the Privy Council, and many of Will's friends and neighbours in the Midlands were questioned, so why did Will Shakespeare avoid suspicion?)  And why, for so many years, have scholars insisted that the holy King Duncan whose assassination impels the tragedy of Macbeth was King James I of England, when it was James himself who was so eager to prove himself the successor to Queen Elizabeth (i.e. the 'son' - mac - of 'Beth') and whose willingness to see the gentle Father Garnet cruelly butchered turned him, in Will Shakespeare's eyes at least, into a 'butcher' with bloody hands?  In reality, Father Garnet was Will's inspiration for the murdered King Duncan, and Macbeth was a fierce denunciation of King James and his anti-Catholic policies.

The next blogpost will look at the issue of Will's affair with Jane Davenant and the boy born of their adulterous affair.