If the youthful Shakespeare was, as we have conjectured, surrounded by Catholic rebels — and was possibly at some stage a rebel himself — one can’t help but wonder what event or series of events caused him to turn the other cheek, to become the philosophically impartial “Gentle Will” of legend, whose works so exalted peace, order, and humility.
Mary and William woke to the sound of church bells. William rose, used the chamber pot, and looked out the small window of their room. It overlooked the courtyard where the players had played, now stone-cold in the dim morning light. The sky was ransacked with grey clouds on gray clouds. William couldn’t tell if the sun had risen or not. A murder of crows circled slowly up beyond the house’s western wing.
There was a knock at their door, and the pretty servant girl led them with a candle down a corridor to the great hall, gathering other guests as she went. The entire company from the night before, plus a few late arrivals, were soon assembled.
After a few moments, Robert Arden moved toward the back of the hall. “Come now,” he said, and extended his hands in supplication, “all ye faithful and beloved of our Lord and Savior, sweet Jesus, come ye and see ye and hear ye that to which our Sovereign, or those who serve her, would have you remain blind and deaf.”
Two servants pulled aside the large tapestry of the Arden family crest to reveal a wood-paneled wall. Another servant removed a single board from the paneling, behind which there was a single iron ring. Robert seized the ring and turned it once to the right then pushed, opening a door to a hidden corridor.
“Behold, you Lucys and Leicesters and Sir Francis Walsinghams! Here is naught but my wine cellar!” Everyone smiled grimly. Robert took a torch and led the way into the corridor. It soon ended in a flight of stairs, down which the company filed. At the bottom, William found himself in a wine cellar indeed, a small room with earthen walls and lined on three sides from the floor to the low ceiling with bottles of Rhenish and claret, sack and malmsey.
Today the wine cellar was not a wine cellar only, but also a chapel. The room was draped in tapestries depicting the Passion, and atop a low platform under a tapestry of St. George stood a simple table altar and a small ambry to hold the wine and wafers. Standing at the altar, wearing a priest’s robes, was a pale man with a mop of dark hair. William recognized him from somewhere . . . he had seen him, just recently. Was he at the evening meal? Robert Arden approached him, and when the priest turned in greeting William saw that he held a staff, a deacon’s crosier, at a certain angle, as if he were holding a rake — yes. It was the gardener. He genuflected, blessing the congregation. William’s mother crossed herself and knelt quickly with the others, and William belatedly did likewise.
The Mass began. William had been to enough Protestant services at Holy Trinity Church that he could recite the rites backward. Although John never attended, Mary took the children nearly every Sunday. William himself had stopped going a year or so ago, begging other work to be done. But he hadn’t been to a Catholic Mass in his memory. He only knew that it was reviled amongst the practitioners of the new faith as wicked, idolatrous, debauched. He wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Virgin sacrifice perhaps.
The service was the same.
Really, almost exactly, the same as the Anglican Mass William knew.
The priest sprinkled holy water. He sang a psalm in a beautiful tenor. It was Psalm 46, and though William was lost in the voice and didn’t follow all of even the simple church Latin, he noticed turbabitur, “shake,” and also something about the breaking of spears, or was it arms? William rubbed his shoulder. The psalm sang of nations at war and kingdoms falling. It sang of God and refuge.
As the service progressed, William stood at the moments he was used to standing, knelt when he was used to kneeling. He joined in singing the Alleluia, and his voice rang out louder than he expected it to in the small space. He noticed a few tiny — tiny — differences in the service, a word here and a word there, a prayer moved here, an extra saint mentioned there.
No virgins were sacrificed.
The reading of the Gospel was from Luke, and it was one of his favorites:
“I say unto you which hear,
Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you,
Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you.
And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloak forbid not to take thy coat also.”
William rose and opened his arms to heaven and said “Et cum spiritu tuo” on cue, and then at last it was the time for the Eucharist, and the priest of the Old Faith mixed water and wine just as the priest of the new faith at Holy Trinity mixed water and wine, and he recited the same words of Jesus at the Last Supper:
“This is my body, which is given for you. Do this for a commemoration of me. . . . This is the chalice, the new testament in my blood, which shall be shed for you. . . .”
The priest placed the bread in the wine and then . . . then he lifted the cup over his head.
That was different.
In the new faith, this raising of the cup over the head, the adoration of the Eucharist, was deemed idolatrous. It elevated the wine and the bread — relics, things — over the spirit of Christ. It might as well be a golden calf. Or a sacrificial virgin.
The priest lowered the cup. It had been raised for all of five seconds.
William sat in wonder and amazement that this, this was the foul service of the Church of Rome, for which priests were whipped, starved, racked, beheaded, hanged, and drawn and quartered. In the face of the pale priest he saw a vision of a millennium of priests and deacons, bishops and archbishops and popes: he saw the whole of bloody Christendom backward in time: from Gregory XIII who set off riots by changing the calendar with a word; to Pius V who excommunicated Elizabeth; to Urban II who began the Crusades; to Stephen VII, who exhumed his decomposing predecessor, dressed him in papal vestments, then tried and executed him; all the way back to Clement, to Peter, to Jesus himself. He saw all the hangings, dismemberments, and burnings, and all the countless smaller, inglorious deaths — with no crowds chanting or cheering or jeering, on battlefields and in sieges, from small wounds and pricks of the bowel, from dysentery, starvation, and shock — that had been wrought in the name of Him who had preached meekness, mercy, and unconditional love of thy enemy.
William wept.
Now the congregation moved to take Communion. One by one they stepped forward and knelt and put out their tongues and waited for the priest to slip forgiveness, everlasting life, and oneness with Father, Son, and Holy Ghost on their tongues.
William hesitated. He had been baptized; he could take Communion without fear of damnation. Mary held out her hand to him. In a second he thought: I can turn my back on the Church and deny the Eucharist; but must I then turn my back on the Word, and the words of Jesus — and what words, what perfect, beautiful words — “this is my blood of the new testament, which shall be shed for many unto remission of sins.”
As he shuffled forward in the queue, William didn’t know what he would do. Even as he knelt in front of the priest, he thought he might refuse to open his mouth, and yet here he was, kneeling —
But the priest withdrew the wafer. William looked up, thinking the priest had divined his innermost thoughts. But the priest wasn’t looking at him. He was looking beyond him, to the secret door. There was a sudden clamor and commotion on the stairs outside the hidden chapel, and the door burst open. It was the pretty servant girl. “My lord!” she blurted breathlessly.
The congregation turned to look at her, annoyed. There was a “sshh” or two.
“There are men crossing the lawn, my lord! Sir Thomas Lucy’s men, I’m told, and they are armed.”
Robert Arden moved quickly. “We must dissemble!”
There was a rush of activity. Some began to move the altar. The priest hurriedly took a wooden box from the ambry, tucked it under his arm, and turned, but he stepped sideways on the platform’s edge. He fell awkwardly, and William, the closest to him, instinctively reached out and caught him. “Benedicite,” the priest muttered, but when he tried to put weight on his right foot, he grunted in pain. Another man came to help William.
“Master Owen . . . my foot is lame, I fear,” the priest winced to the man.
“Come, to the priest hole. Quickly now.” Nicholas Owen took one of the priest’s arms on his shoulder, and William took the other. Owen led them to the far side of the wine cellar, past the servant girl, who hurriedly poured from a bottle of wine into cups that Robert Arden distributed to the anxious congregation.
Owen stopped in front of a tall wine rack, left the priest in William’s arms, and to William’s confusion, took down a bottle of wine himself. But he wasn’t drinking under stress. He reached behind the rack where the bottle had been, there was a faint click, and the rack swung silently on well-oiled hinges out from the wall.
’Tis a pretty rack, William thought.
Where the rack had been, Owen lifted a floorboard that was also cleverly fitted with hidden hinges. Beneath it, there was a small space with a chair, a table, some food, and a pitcher of ale.
“Help him down,” said Owen, and William squeezed down the hole into the hiding space, supporting the priest as Owen lowered him. A moment later, the vestments, sacred vessels, the ambry, and finally the altar itself, deftly folded up on hinges, were passed to William. But before he could clamber back out, there was a scuffle on the stairs outside, and Owen put a finger to his lips then quickly closed the floorboard and the trick wine rack, shutting William and the priest into utter darkness.
There was a bumping and scuffling above them. He could hear the muffled voice of Robert Arden. “For what cause, good sir, are we thus disturbed at our leisure?”
“Prattle not on with your lies, my Lord Arden,” said a sneering voice that William recognized instantly as that of Sir Thomas Lucy. “In the small hours of the night we arrested a member of your household, John Somerville, who was drunkenly shouting in the streets of Banbury that he had a pistol and planned to shoot the Queen through the head with it. We have been informed by this traitor that a popish Mass is to be held here upon this day, which under the law of the land is treason. And here we find, in a hidden church, a congregation of pretty papists indeed.”
“This room be neither hidden nor a church, my lord,” responded Arden. “It is but my wine cellar, the delights of which I am sharing with a few close and trusted guests of my household. We were of late discussing the merits of this sixty-four claret, which, though I fear past its prime, displays yet an earthy sweetness and puts me in mind of dark, ripe cherries. Will you taste?”
“Search the room,” said Sir Thomas Lucy.
William and the priest, side by side in the dark, did not move. There were scufflings and knockings, soundings and tappings, as Lucy and his men tried desperately to find the priest-hide ingeniously constructed by Nicholas Owen, who had built many holes, hovels, chambers, and garrets in Catholic noble houses all over England, behind chimneys, in columns, between walls, under floors, in ceilings, wainscoting, benches, and bookshelves, and no two alike, the better to confound the pursuivants.
And confound them they did. Though footsteps trod not two feet from William’s head, the floorboard didn’t open. As the trembling priest took William by the hand and squeezed it, William’s fingers brushed across the box that the priest clutched tightly in his hand.
The box. It was nearly the same size and shape, William thought, as the box back in their chamber. A box with a St. George’s cross on it. A remembrance from Thomas Cottom. Delivered by Robert Debdale.
William heard Thomas Lucy speak again. “Master Rogers, take them all to the great hall, and determine their names and parishes. You, Master Belch, take a party to search the rest of the house.” Overhead, a cacophony of footsteps moved away into the house. After a moment, William squeezed the priest’s hand and moved, slowly, toward the hinged floorboard. He could feel, in the dark, the priest silently imploring him not to move, to be quiet. William put an ear to the floorboard. He heard nothing in the room above, only a distant bump from somewhere far away in the house.
William considered. To emerge was to endanger the priest, and thus the entire company. To leave the box untended . . . who knew? It all depended on what was inside. Soil from the Holy Land? Ashes, the relics of a burned priest of France? A list of names of priests in England?
He would have to take the risk, to protect one and all: the priest, the box, family, and faith.
Disengaging silently from the priest’s grasping hand, he felt around above his head for a release mechanism. He found it, and after a quiet click, he could feel rather than hear the rack swing open. He nudged the hinged floorboard upward, slowly, slowly. Without looking back at the priest he emerged into the now empty wine cellar, and closed the floorboard and rack.
He heard muffled voices. He went silently up the stairs, carefully opened the hidden door, and peeked around the tapestry into the great hall. Henry Rogers and Sir Thomas Lucy were interrogating the company seated about the table. Mary Shakespeare sat calmly at one end, hands folded in front of her, answering the questions of Sir Thomas Lucy. “I do but visit my cousins Arden . . . as I do once a year in love and fealty.”
“And know you aught of this, Mistress Shakespeare?” Lucy held out to her a crumpled piece of paper. “Thy brat is oft seen prowling in my park, and this was nailed to my gate hard upon his last, uninvited sojourn there.” Even from across the room, William recognized the writing on the paper as his own hand: If ‘lousy’ is ‘Lucy,’ as some folk miscall it . . .
Mary took the paper, scanned it, and handed it back calmly. “Neither for scruple nor for art would my son write so ill a verse.”
William found himself straining forward to hear his mother — and nearly cried out when two other of Lucy’s men passed by within a foot of his nose, coming from the west wing of the house. They stepped around the table to present their information to Thomas Lucy, and because of the angle of the table Lucy and all his men were, for the moment, turned at least partly away from the tapestry. Mary, at the far end of the table, was facing William.
William took his opportunity. He poked his head a bit farther out, and Mary saw him. He made a motion with his eyes toward the east wing of the house.
Mary’s gaze glanced over him without stopping, and she gave a barely perceptible nod, then looked up at Lucy. “Why must my Lord Lucy persecute thus the Shakespeares?” She stood, and with growing agitation, her voice rising and her hands now trembling, said, “You take our honor, our livelihood, our very lands! You fine and surety us into poverty!! Our children may neither eat nor be educated, marry, it is too much!!!” And with that she rolled her eyes back in her head and went limp, as though fainting.
Lucy and his men lurched forward to catch her, and in their confusion William slipped out from behind the tapestry, along the wall, and back down the hall toward his and Mary’s room in the house’s as yet unsearched east wing. He slipped past the entrance to the rear courtyard garden, up the stairs, and into the room where he and Mary had slept.
He found the box where he’d left it, undisturbed. He picked it up and looked around for a hiding place. There was none. The box was too large, and the room too spare, to imagine hiding it here. He would have to make it back to the priest-hide. But now he heard the sound of footsteps coming down the hall toward him. Lucy’s men were beginning to search the east wing. He heard tables being overturned. He was trapped. He looked out the small window onto the courtyard below.
William had an idea. He picked up the chamber pot in the corner. It was unemptied. He moved to the chamber door and listened for the approaching search party. When, as best as he could guess from the commotion, they had reached the door to the rear courtyard at the bottom of the stairs, he stepped across the room and flung the entire pot out the window onto the pavement below. It shattered to pieces. He stepped back into shadow and watched, heart pounding, as Lucy’s men emerged into the courtyard in response to the sound. They looked at the broken crockery, then up and about wildly. One ran back inside and after a few seconds — during which William whispered to himself “please, please, please” — reemerged with Lucy and Rogers in tow. They looked at the shattered pot, and around the empty courtyard, and up toward the hall’s many windows. William took up the box again, turned for the door — and gasped to see a figure watching from the doorway: the pretty servant girl.
He looked at her helplessly, but she glanced at him, then at the box, then moved quickly toward the window, and as she did she plumped her breasts up revealingly in her bodice.
“Go!” she whispered.
As William ran out the door, he heard the girl yell down to the courtyard below, “I pray you pardon good my lords, my buttery fingers were unapt to my morning’s chore . . .” She was still talking, and Lucy’s men were gawking up toward her pillowy breasts, as William glided down the stairs and past the open courtyard door.
He slipped back into the great hall and Mary, now sitting calmly in her chair again, watched him noiselessly as he ducked behind the tapestry and back down into the cellar and the priest-hide. The priest again took William’s hand, and held it in silence for another two hours until the sounds of Lucy’s men in the house had died away and Nicholas Owen opened the hidden floorboard.
William, still clutching the box, helped the priest out of the hole. As the pretty servant girl tended to the priest’s sprained ankle, wrapping it expertly in strips of fabric torn from her skirts, William bowed to her.
“I prithee, most excellent and resourceful maid . . . what is thy name? For I would ever recall it as a badge of wit and beauty in equal measure.”
She looked at William and smiled. “My mother calls me many things, sir: shrewish and cursed, amongst other epithets less endearing. But my friends do call me Kate.”
The priest spoke to Robert Arden, gesturing to William. “My lord, is this young man known to you?”
Arden smiled a deep breath like a proud uncle. “This is my cousin William Shakespeare, son of Alderman John Shakespeare, of Stratford.”
“He is a stout lad. Bless you, my son,” the priest said with a benediction.
John Cottom gently took William aside, trying not to stare at the box under his arm. “William . . . if you are done saving priests from the rack and I know not what else, would you now deliver me the remembrance you bespoke?”
William and John Cottom found an empty room. Cottom righted a table that had been overturned in the ransacking, and William set down the locked mahogany box. “It was delivered to the New School in Stratford — by Robert Debdale, though at the time I knew him not,” said William.
Cottom looked at it, and reached out to touch the inlaid cross. Tears welled up in his eyes. He crossed himself. “From my brother, Thomas,” he said, softly. “Thank you. I thank you most heartily.”
“I fear there is no key,” William said.
“But there is,” said John Cottom; and he drew a key from a chain around his neck. “This was ever how my brother sent icons and relics from Rome. Key and lockbox, by separate paths. I received the key, but never until now the box. The key have I kept, as a memorial.”
William watched as Cottom inserted the key and clicked the lock open. He lifted the hinged lid. On top there was a handwritten note. Cottom picked it up. “It is in Latin,” he said. “I shall translate,” he added, managing despite his grief a rueful smile and a knowing look to William, his former remedial Latin pupil.
“My most dear brother John,” he read, “I send these in hopes that the blessings they confer will spread throughout England and buffet our cause. They are of great holiness and power, for they have been blessed by the Holy Father himself. In faith that you will see them well bestowed, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and the Blessed Virgin Mary, your loving brother, Thomas.”
Under the note was a piece of fine velvet. John Cottom peeked beneath it, then looked at William. “This remembrance you bring unto me shall be the salvation of many of the faithful.” He pulled back the velvet to show William the box’s contents: many stacks of thin, square crackers.
Communion wafers blessed by the Pope.
Cottom thought for a moment. “Methinks I know where these might best be used. Know you the church at Temple Grafton?”
“Ay. It is the very church where I am to be married, in one week’s time, to Anne Hathaway of Shottery.”
“I’faith!? I gladly hear of it. I thought you yet young and random in your affections, but you shall find marriage a comfort in troubled times. So, you will know the priest there, Father John Frith?”
“I know him yet by reputation only. A dotard, they say, who wastes his days in the healing of birds.”
“He is not so dotard as he puts on,” said Cottom. “Some priests hide in holes; he hides behind age and seeming madness. It is but an antic disposition he puts on to put off the pursuivants. In sooth, he is a great bulwark of the Old Faith, and many go to him for the old rites.”
Cottom folded the cloth back up, returned the note to its place, and locked the box. “You would do me a great favor if you would act the messenger one last time, and deliver this unto Father Frith, with my good wishes.” And he handed William the box.
William looked at the offered sacraments. He was no longer certain that the way of dissent, of spreading the Old Faith or any faith, was his path. But it was his mentor, John Cottom, whose wit and grace glimmered even now through his profound grief, who was asking.
“Ay,” William sighed, “for my teacher and master, and in recompense for my failure, despite all his efforts, in the higher learning of Latin, I will do so,” he said, and took the box and key.
As they rode out from Park Hall late that morning, Mary and William passed James Burbage’s troupe, loading their props and costumes onto a wagon. “Fare thee well, William Shaksper!” said Richard Burbage. “If ever you wish to become a player, seek us out. You would make a fine spear-carrier!” William waved.
Mary looked thoughtful for a moment. “Master Burbage . . . do you perchance play at weddings?”
James Burbage stepped forward. “Ay, my lady, and births and funerals, too; even conceptions, if it be your pleasure.”
William protested. “Mother, make not my wedding more of a spectacle — ”
But the mother of the groom wasn’t listening.
She continued to Burbage, “A comedy perhaps, of a young man who stumbles unwitting into wedlock, but makes the best of it.”
“In fact, we have lodged amongst our trunks and sides an Italian tale of two star-crossed lovers. As writ, ’tis tragedy, but we might freely adapt it to a more festive conclusion, and produce a merry nuptial entertainment.”
Mary jumped off the cart and huddled with Burbage, discussing scheduling and payment.