Shakespeare Adventure | Shakespeare Fellowship

More than four centuries ago there was another day of shock, fear, horror, anger and grief when Elizabethan England learned about the St. Bartholomew's Massacre that had begun during a holy pageant on the night of August 24, 1572. At least 10,000 French Protestants in Paris lost their lives, while the bloodbath of Huguenots spread into the provinces until the total number slain was estimated to be no fewer than 20,000 and possibly more than 100,000 victims.(1)

As Carolly Erickson writes, this was a holy war:

The religious warfare in France between Catholics and Protestants was unlike any European conflict since the age of the crusades. This was relentless slaughter, carried out by desperate men and women driven by inner conviction to annihilate, root and branch, all those who opposed them in matters of religious conscience. And nothing short of mass butchery would please the vengeful God who commanded the killing. (2)

Queen Elizabeth and her courtiers (among them the young Shakespeare, 22- year-old Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford) heard the news after returning to London at the end of her royal progress that summer. The entire Court of England, in a state of shock and disbelief as well as trepidation, went into a period of mourning. Only a few months earlier, on June 2, 1572, Oxford had been deeply affected by the execution of Norfolk, for which he held William Cecil, Lord Burghley, largely responsible (indeed the Duke's destruction was Cecil's triumph, serving to solidify his hold upon the Queen), and six weeks after the execution he became Lord Treasurer. Yet now, in early September, amid genuine alarm and patriotic fervor, the young earl was moved to communicate the warmest expressions of loyalty to his father-in-law. Oxford conveyed his true feelings "at white heat," as Eva Turner Clark puts it, "at a moment when his mind was filled with anxiety and apprehension." (3) For all he or anyone in the government knew, England might soon be under attack, with both Elizabeth and her chief minister as targets for assassination; and Oxford, having written to discuss certain business details, came to the natural close of his letter by telling Burghley, "I am to be governed and commanded at your Lordship's good devotion" - but then, as if unable to stop himself, he began all over again. What now came forth was a single flowing sentence running to more than 100 words of Shakespearean fluidity:

I would to God your Lordship would let me understand some of your news, which here doth ring dolefully in the ears of every man, of the murder of the Admiral of France, (4) and a number of noble men and worthy gentlemen and such as greatly have in their lifetimes honored the Q(ueen's) Majesty our mistress, on whose tragedies we have an number of French Aeneases (5) in this city, that tell of their own overthrows with tears falling from their eyes, a piteous thing to hear but a cruel and far more grievous thing we must deem it them to see. (6)

This sentence launched an unbroken paragraph of more than 500 words. It was by no means a "studied" composition, Clark notes, but the "natural outpouring of an anxious heart and mind." Here was the whirling rapidity of Edward de Vere's mind as he raced to keep up with his reaction to the tragic news. Next, referring in passing to young Alençon as "Monsieur," he framed the Bartholomew's massacre within an historical context by aptly comparing it to the murder of 8,000 French in Sicily three centuries earlier. That notorious bloodbath of the past, on the eve of Easter Monday, March 31, 1282, had also begun with a religious pageant:

All rumours here are but confused, of those troops that are escaped from Paris, and Rouen, where Monsieur hath also been and like a vesper Sicilianus, (7) as they say, that cruelty spreads all over France, whereof your L(ordship) is better advertised than we are.

With undisguised sincerity, Oxford expressed concern for the safety of both Burghley and Elizabeth, adding he knew about recent "practices" made against the chief minister's own life:

And sith the world is so full of treasons and vile instruments, daily to attempt new and unlooked-for things, good my Lord, I shall affectionately and heartily desire your L(ordship) to be careful both of yourself, and of her Majesty, that your friends may long enjoy you, and you them. I speak because I am not ignorant what practices have been made against your person lately. (8)

Young Oxford in this letter went on to acknowledge Cecil as the key figure behind Elizabeth's throne and even as the main architect of the English Reformation. The Lord Treasurer was "a block and a crossbar" in the way of the "papists" or Catholic traitors; the nation "hath depended on you a great while" and now all men's eyes were "on a sudden bent and fixed on you, as a singular hope and pillar (9) whereto the religion hath to lean." These were no sentiments from an "ill-conditioned" son-in-law, as he allowed contemporaries to view him; they represented impromptu and blazing declarations of his personal commitment to the state policies that Burghley was determining and directing. "I am one that count myself a follower of yours now in all fortunes," Oxford assured him, "and what shall hap to you, I count it hap to myself: or at least I will make myself a voluntary partaker of it." Offering his "zeal and affection" toward Cecil, he added that he had "builded my foundation" upon him "either to stand or to fall." From here onward he would "spend my blood and life" with the powerful Lord Treasurer, "so much have you made me yours."

Oxford, too, understood that his country was already at war. On September 22, 1572, he wrote another letter to Burghley, now expressing his desire "to show myself dutiful" to Elizabeth in some military capacity:

If there were any service to be done abroad, I had rather serve there than at home where yet some honor were to be got; if there be any setting forth to sea, to which service I bear most affection, I shall desire your L(ordship) to give me and get me that favour and credit, that I might make one. Which if there be no such intention, then I shall be most willing to be employed on the sea coasts, to be in a readiness with my countryman against any invasion. (10)

"Queen Elizabeth I was a woman in danger," writes historian Christopher Haigh. "From the beginning of her reign to the end, she faced plots and rumors of plots. Some of the conspiracies posed real threats to her throne and to her life." (11)

Among those threats had been the 1569 revolt of the northern Catholic earls, who had hoped for Elizabeth's removal and the crowning of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. This uprising by her own subjects so thoroughly terrified the Queen that she ordered fierce reprisals, with the result that 800 rebels were hanged. In reaction the Pope excommunicated the Queen in 1570, absolving English citizens from obedience to her - a virtual declaration of war by Rome - and in 1571 the Florentine banker Roberto Ridolphi schemed for a revolt to be raised by Norfolk, accompanied by a Spanish invasion, ending with the deposition of Elizabeth. Then came the terrible slaughter of French Protestants in 1572, sending its shock waves through England; and just as those of us in the early 21st century face moral, political and strategic decisions as a result of terrorist attacks, Elizabethans of the 16th century had to grapple with issues of retribution and vengeance:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous for- tune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles and,
By opposing, end them. (12)

It was no coincidence that little more than a year after the Bartholomew's massacre, on December 20, 1573, the Queen, at Burghley's urging, appointed Francis Walsingham as joint Secretary of State with Sir Thomas Smith.

"The best defense against terrorism is good, timely intelligence," The New York Times editorialized the day after the attack against the United States, and that was precisely Walsingham's reaction more than four centuries earlier. His response was to organize a Secret Service on so thorough a basis that knowledge of the most furtive designs of England's enemies might be freely at the command of his sovereign. "Knowledge is never too dear," he often reminded his fellow ministers, and to that end he practiced most of the arts that human ingenuity had devised in order to gain information. At one time his system of espionage included 53 private agents in foreign courts, as well as 18 spies who performed functions that could not be officially defined, and intelligence from all parts of England reached him every day. (13)

An antic disposition?

"Tell a lie and find the truth," Walsingham counseled his operatives, reciting a maxim that Hamlet followed by putting on his "antic disposition" and deliberately allowing all but his closest friends to misjudge his behavior and even to falsely conclude he was mentally unstable. (14) In other words, the Prince of Denmark had decided to serve his country by leading a double life.

Edward de Vere also suffered from frustrating inabilities to act as he might have wished (i.e. to serve in the military); and it may well be that in response he undertook to serve England in more ways and dimensions than most of us have suspected. Oxford, too, displayed an antic disposition that gave an impression of unpredictability and even instability; but all evidence shows that the Queen, despite her displays of temper and even her ill treatment of him, never doubted his underlying convictions and patriotic intentions. When Oxford bolted to the Continent in the summer of 1574, rousing alarm that he might have gone over to the side of Catholic refugees from the northern rebellion, both Burghley and Walsingham went out of their way to make clear that the earl's loyalty was assured.

Preparations for war

Over the rest of that decade, Oxford lent his support to Burghley and Elizabeth in regard to the French Match, knowing that Elizabeth's flirtation with Alençon was a grand deception calculated to give England time to prepare for war with Spain. He also found himself taking sides with Burghley against their common enemy, Leicester-who threw in his lot with the Puritan extremists and gained the friendship of zealous Walsingham, regardless of the fact that the spymaster continued as Cecil's subordinate.

Burghley's objectives, simply put, were to stamp out Catholic practice in England, to kill Mary Stuart and to maintain diplomatic relations with France until the inevitable conflict with Spain could no longer be postponed.(15) While Oxford himself undoubtedly agreed with the overall need for better national security through espionage and military defense, his nobler sensibilities prevented him from supporting the drastic measures of persecution, torture and execution that Burghley and Walsingham apparently relished. Moreover, plunging into the publishing and theatrical worlds as a means of service, Edward de Vere also had to contend with mounting Puritan hostility and calls for restricting the very liberties upon which those worlds depended.

As the Queen and Burghley drew closer to challenging the Spanish giant, Oxford began to gather around himself the "university wits" recruited largely from Cambridge, of which Burghley was chancellor. Anthony Munday, whose career in espionage began in 1578 when he was sent to spy on English Catholic refugees in France and Italy, wrote the first of his dedications to Oxford soon afterward in 1579. (16) (It was evidently on Cecil's own advice (17) that Edward de Vere employed Munday as well as Thomas Churchyard, John Lyly and Ralph Lane, among others.) And in mid-1580, when Gabriel Harvey wrote to Spenser with his "rattling hexameters" (18) about Oxford as an Italianate Englishman, the Cambridge scholar was undoubtedly revealing more of the earl's doings than has been generally recognized:

In Courtly guiles a passing singular odd man,
For Gallants a brave Mirror, a Primrose of Honour,
A Diamond for nonce, a fellow peerless in England.
Not the like discourser for Tongue, and head to be found out,
Not the like resolute man for great and serious affairs,
Not the like Lynx to spy out secrets and privities of States. (19)

In effect, Harvey was describing Hamlet. He depicted Oxford as a man operating on two levels, for an unseen purpose. He viewed the earl humorously in terms of outward behavior, yet in the same breath he declared that in all England there was no sharper-eyed lynx or wildcat capable of uncovering secrets vital to the state. Oxford, he reported privately to Spenser, was a spy - a certain kind of undercover agent, involved in "great and serious affairs" - carrying out his mission while others misapprehended and underestimated him. The truth, as Harvey expressed it within the guise of satire, was not unlike Hamlet's declaration to his mother: "Make you to ravel all this matter out, that I essentially am not in madness, but mad in craft." (20)

Six months later, in December 1580, Oxford reported treasons against the state by his erstwhile Catholic associates. (21) Elizabeth in 1581 threw him into prison (ostensibly for having fathered Anne Vavasour's child), but Burghley and Walsingham worked to secure his speedy release. (22) In that year, Thomas Watson (future friend of Cambridge spy Christopher Marlowe) became associated with Walsingham; and Watson in 1582 began dedicating work to Oxford, (23) who was still enduring banishment from court.

And we might dare ask: Was Her Majesty's show of royal displeasure a means of maintaining his cover? Did she banish him only to protect him? Was the Queen putting on an "antic disposition" as well? Although the "eccentric" Edward de Vere undoubtedly had sincere affection for the Roman church and its rituals, had he really undergone a "conversion" to Catholicism? (24) Or had he instead lulled his Catholic associates into revealing their designs, knowing the price he would have to pay in terms of contemporary and even historical perceptions of him?

Payments for service rendered

Walsingham received his first regular allowance for Secret Service work in July 1582, when a Privy Seal Warrant granted him 750 pounds per year to be paid in quarterly installments. (25) The following year, when Elizabeth restored Oxford to favor at court, virtually at the same time she established the Queen's Company of actors at the suggestion of none other than Walsingham himself (a curious sudden interest in theater by the puritanical, busy spymaster); (26) and Oxford in 1584 apparently lent his secretary, John Lyly, as stage manager and coach for the new troupe. (27) Later that year, when the Bond of Association (28) was created to protect Elizabeth amid the growing military and civilian preparations for war, Oxford wrote to Burghley to rail at him for snooping into his affairs; and in the process, he reminded the Lord Treasurer: "I serve Her Majesty, and I am that I am." (29)

After war with Spain had been officially declared, Burghley wrote to Walsingham on June 21, 1586, asking if he had had an opportunity to speak to the Queen on Oxford's behalf; (30) on June 23, 1586, the Star Chamber issued a wartime decree giving the government severe and rigid control over the printing press; (31) and on June 26, 1586, Elizabeth signed a Privy Seal Warrant granting Edward de Vere 1,000 pounds per year to be paid in quarterly installments-a grant strikingly similar to Walsingham's allowance for espionage and intelligence. "From the year 1586 until the Spanish Armada actually came in the midsummer of 1588," writes Conyers Read, "the English Government was in constant fear of attack from Philip of Spain." (32) Within those two years, the grants to Walsingham accordingly rose to a regular allowance of 2,000 pounds. This was "a large amount of money in the later sixteenth century," Read notes, adding:

The fact that Elizabeth, for all her cheese-paring, was willing to invest so much in secret service shows how important she conceived it to be. No doubt it was efficient. Elizabeth was the last person in the world to spend two thousand pounds unless she could see an adequate return. (33)

Surely this was also the Queen's attitude toward the funds she was paying Edward de Vere, who, after all, was receiving one-half the entire amount allocated to the head of the country's intelligence network at the height of wartime! It would seem obvious that Oxford had created and developed his own unique category of quasi-military work for the government ("I have done the state some service," Othello says, "and they know it."); (34) his annual grant was continued through the victory over the Armada and then all during the 1590s, when threats of new Spanish invasions persisted; and it was even continued into the next reign by King James, until Oxford's recorded death in 1604, the year when peace was finally concluded.

The policy of plays

The full scope of what Edward de Vere was delivering in return may have included much more than what has appeared on the surface. In any case, it certainly involved the writers to whom he gave patronage and employment as well as organization, motivation and guidance. Among these writers were Lyly and Thomas Nashe and Robert Greene, who all three contributed to the pamphlet war against extremist Puritan attacks from "Martin Marprelate." And Nashe, in Pierce Penilesse of 1592, undoubtedly gave us a vivid reflection of Oxford's own thinking about the value of chronicle plays of English history during wartime. In fact, he launched into this theme with words Oxford had used in his letter to Burghley of September 22, 1572. In the following, for example, echoes of Edward de Vere's language are italicized:

That state or kingdom that is in league with all the world, and hath no foreign sword to vex it, is not half so strong or confirmed to endure as that which lives every hour in fear of invasion. There is a certain waste of the people for whom there is no use, but war: and these men must have some employment still to cut them off . If they have no service abroad, they will make mutinies at home.

For such citizens, Nashe added:

It is very expedient they have some light toys to busy their heads withal, cast before them as bones to gnaw upon, which may keep them from having leisure to intermeddle with higher matters. To this effect, the policy (35) of Plays is very necessary, howsoever some shallow-brained censurers (not the deepest searchers into the secrets of government) mightily oppugne them.

In other words, theatrical entertainment tended to distract the Queen's subjects from civil war or rebellion against the crown; and this "policy" of plays was essential, no matter how much the Puritans and others wanted to curtail or banish stage productions. In his sarcastic way, Nashe was saying that such "shallow-brained" moralists seemed to have no clue that the government itself was secretly supporting these performances:

Nay, what if I prove Plays to be no extreme, but a rare exercise of virtue? First, for the subject of them (for the most part) is borrowed out of our English Chronicles, wherein our forefathers' valiant acts (that have lain long buried in rusty brass and worm-eaten books) are revived, and they themselves are razed from the Grave of Oblivion, and brought to plead their Honours in open presence.

Stage presentations such as Henry VI offered vivid lessons:

In Plays, all coosonages, all cunning drifts over-gilded with outward holiness, all stratagems of war, all the cankerworms that breed on the rust of peace, are most lively anatomized: they show the ill success of treason, the fall of hasty climbers, the wretched end of usurpers, the misery of civil dissension, and how just God is evermore in punishing of murder. And to prove every one of these allegations, could I propound the circumstances of this play and that play.

The subsequent legend that William Shakespeare had an allowance for writing plays enabling him to spend "at the rate of a thousand pounds a year" (37) turns out to be correct. And this same man, in his chronicle plays, was promoting his country's military and the need for patriotic loyalty, as he did in the closing lines of King John:

O, let us pay the time but needful woe,
Since it hath been beforehand with our griefs.
This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,
But when it first did help to wound itself.
Now these her Princes are come home again
Come the three corners of the world in arms
And we shall shock them! Nought shall make us rue
If England to itself do rest but true! (38)

His sentiments, along with concerns throughout his works about the need to balance military power and national security with justice and tolerance, are not unlike those being expressed today.

Footnotes:

1. William Plumer Fowler in Shakespeare Revealed in Oxford's Letters, 1986, reports the higher figures of 10,000 slain in Paris alone and 100,000 in both Paris and the provinces. Other estimates of the total vary from 20,000 to 50,000 and higher.

2. Carolly Erickson, The First Elizabeth, 1983, 269

3. Eva Turner Clark in Oxfordian Vistas, edited by Ruth Loyd Miller, 1975, 516

4. Admiral Coligny of France was murdered during the St. Bartholomew's massacre.

5. Aeneas, the hero of Vergil's great epic, is mentioned 28 times by Shakespeare. Nineteen of these occur in Troilus and Cressida.

6. All excerpts are from Fowler. The letter at hand is reprinted on pp. 54-56

7. Italics added. Anthony and Cleopatra, 4.14.8: "They are black vesper's pageants."

8. In the letter Oxford refers to Madder, or Mather, who apparently had conspired to murder members of the Privy Council, Burghley included, and to free Norfolk from the Tower. In this respect Oxford, who had hoped to rescue Norfolk, may have been deliberately distancing himself from such treachery.

9. Burghley as a pillar of the church. 2 Henry VI, 1.1.75: "Brave peers of England, pillars of state."

10. According to Fowler, 97, the singular "countryman" is correct.

11. Elizabeth I: Profiles in Power, Christopher Haigh, 1988-1998, 149

12. Hamlet, 3.1.65-68

13. Dictionary of National Biography on Walsingham

14. Hamlet, 1.5.194-197. The prince tells Horatio and Marcellus to reveal nothing of his true purposes no matter "how strange or odd so'er I bear myself."

15. William Cecil, the Power Behind Elizabeth, Alan Smith, 1935, 175

16. Munday dedicated A Mirror of Mutability to Oxford in 1579.

17. Oxfordian Vistas, Miller, 219

18. Thomas Nashe's phrase for Harvey's verses

19. The Mysterious William Shakespeare, Charlton Ogburn, Jr., 1984-1992, 630, italics added.

20. Hamlet, 3.4.208-210

21. Henry Howard, Charles Aundel and Francis Southwell

22. Letters about securing Oxford's liberty went back and forth between Burghley and Walsingham in July 1581, reported in Hidden Allusions, Eva Turner Clark, Miller edition, 493.

23. Hekatompathia of 1582

24. The Life of Elizabeth I, Alison Weir, 1998, 332. "The eccentric Oxford was also out of favour, having announced his conversion to the Roman faith."

25. Mr. Secretary Walsingham and the Policies of Queen Elizabeth, Conyers Read, 1978, Vol. 3, 370-371.

26. Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. VI, Part X, Chapter 4

27. The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, B. M. Ward, 1928, 271-274

28. The bond was formed in 1584 around a Protestant oath to take up arms on the Queen's behalf and destroy Mary of Scots if she became involved in any plot against Elizabeth.

29. Italics added. Oxford wrote to Burghley, Oct. 30, 1584, mentioning Lyly by name. "I am that I am" was God's description of himself to Moses; Sonnet 121: "No, I am that I am, and they that level at my abuses reckon up their own."

30. Hidden Allusions, Eva Turner Clark (Miller edition) 801.

31. The decree came after Elizabeth had empowered Archbishop Whitgift and the Privy Council to draw up new rules regarding printing.

32. Read, 299

33. Read, 371, both the quote and the grant figures

34. Othello, 5.2.339

35. Italics added.

36. Italics added. Oxford to Burghley, July 7, 1594.

37. Reverend John Ward, vicar of Stratford Parish, in his diary of 1661-1663 (published in 1839) wrote that Shakespeare "supplied the stage with two plays every year, and for that had an allowance so large that he spent at the rate of 1,000 pounds a year, as I have heard." The Reader's Encyclopedia of Shakespeare, edited by Oscar James Campbell (1966, 936). The vicar must have been puzzled, since he surely knew that an annual "allowance" or subsidy of that size could have come only from the government's royal treasury. (Nicholas Rowe in 1709 reported that the Earl of Southampton once gave Shakespeare "a thousand pounds to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to.")

38. King John, 5.7.110-118