Chapter 24
Michael and Hank
Draw Some Conclusions
I took the pages back from Hank and looked at her for some kind of reaction. She looked disappointed. “Is that all? There’s nothing in the journal after that?”
“I suppose he took his travelling satchel and got out of there as quickly as he could, leaving the journal behind. We know he eventually got back to England, but there’s nothing more in this account to tell us how.”
“But what about Julie? Did he even get a chance to say ‘Good-bye’ to her or anything?” Did he ever see her again?”
“If he did see Julie before he left, we have no record of it. He apparently left the diary at Ste Genevieve’s. From there, it found its way to the church of St Germain, where you found it. From what I’ve been able to find out about Henry Howard’s life, there is no record of his ever having returned to France. He did get to Italy, however, several years later. Maybe he was able to re-establish contact with Testagrossa (I mean, Bernardo) and Caterina. Who knows?”
“Damn! And it wasn’t the same England he left. There was a new Queen, for one thing.”
“Oh, Elisabeth was evidently quite impressed with him, at least with his writing. I think it’s entirely possible that, having seen some of his poems, she considered Henry’s gift worth cultivating. In fact, she took personal charge of his continuing education, and paid for him to go to King’s College, Cambridge to complete his Masters in 1564.”
Hank was rummaging through some additional notes. “How did he live, I wonder? His father’s lands had been confiscated years before, and there was always this business of Catholicism hanging over his head. I guess he needed to suck up to some powerful people, since he had no title, no lands and no regular source of income, other than what little he got from writing pamphlets and occasional hand-outs from relatives.”
On the coffee table directly in front of me, I had left my notes that I had taken at the British Library, shortly before leaving London. I picked up the last page, still trying to make sense of it all, and pushed it into Hank's hand. “Still, he seemed to have had a guardian angel. Even when his brother was arrested for conspiring to marry Mary, Queen of Scots, and Henry was thrown into prison as a co-conspirator, William Cecil secured his release, no doubt with the knowledge and consent of the Queen. He always managed to survive, even though his family kept falling into disrepute”
“Then there was the quarrel with Edward de Vere.” She turned her attention to the top of the page I had handed her. “What is this year? I can’t make out your handwriting.”
“1582. Something about treasonable correspondence and attendance at Catholic services, I think.”
I must have been frowning, at that point. There was something about that quarrel that didn’t sit right with me, and I suppose that Hank picked up on it, as well. But now, her blue eyes were flashing with a crazy kind of excitement. “Yet they couldn’t keep him in prison. You told me how he wrote directly to the Queen, and suddenly, all charges were dropped.”
I guess I started talking faster myself now, still trying to get the pieces of the puzzle to fit together. “I still can’t figure out why de Vere brought up these old charges in the first place. They didn’t stick when his brother got the axe, and they didn’t stick ten years later. Why did de Vere want Howard out of the way?”
Hank put two fingers to her lips, took in a breath and then blurted out what she was thinking. “You said Howard was hard up for money, at that time. What if de Verre were providing Howard with a regular income – in exchange for his writings? What if Howard’s cousin was beginning to realise what he had there and was looking for a way to publish them or sell them to one of the acting companies, as the case may be?”
“But there’s no record of any such payment.”
“Of course not! Howard knew he couldn’t sell anything that was the work of a suspected traitor or, worse yet, a crypto-Catholic. The transactions had to be secret, and that could have given de Verre the idea that he could re-sell them as his own and make a fortune that way.”
I was with her now. I could even finish her sentences. “And that’s why de Verre needed to have Howard out of the way, so he could not raise any fuss about authorship.’
“But it didn’t work,” chimed in Hank, finishing my sentence, in turn. “The Queen let Howard off the hook, and de Vere was forced to come up with another scheme. He could still share the revenues, because he knew very well that Howard was in no position to publish under his own name, and if we’re right about de Vere’s having paid for the rights to the work, he could very well have demanded to be in on the deal.”
I was on my feet. I couldn’t sit still. “And that’s how they came up with the idea of the player from Stratford!”
“Yes, at about that time, and for the next ten years or so, after having made some strategic contacts, Richard III and the other early plays began to make their appearance. They were well received by both the court and the public, and for another decade and a half Howard and de Verre rolled them out under the pen name: “William Shakespeare.”
I reached again for my files and pulled out a long list. I was reading and talking at the same time. “OK, but Howard’s reputation was eventually rehabilitated. I see here that he was very much in favour with James I – Yes... made Privy Councillor, Earl of Northampton, Baron Marhull, Order of the Garder and Lord Privy Seal, all in the first two years of James’ reign.”
“That was about the time that Macbeth appeared, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, exactly, in praise of the King, the descendant of Banquo, and look,” by now I was waving the list in Hank’s face. “He brought Ben Jonson (one of Shakespeare’s chief rivals) before the Privy Council in 1604 on a charge of ‘popery’ and treason for his play, Sejanus.”
“That’s a little bit like the pot calling the kettle black!”
“I guess he wanted to position himself above suspicion, but he also might have been taking a lesson from his cousin, de Verre, by denouncing a rival to get him out of the way.”
Hank looked up and furrowed her eyebrows. “There does seem to be a pattern here. He was definitely out for self-advancement.”
“And his fortunes just kept on rising. In 1609, he was elected High Stewart of the University of Oxford, and in 1610, the King granted him territory in Newfoundland, of all places. Maybe he was thinking of sea voyages to distant lands. It doesn’t appear that he ever went there, though. He was still in England in 1612, when he was made Chancellor of the University of Cambridge.”
Hank brought us back to the Shakespearean question. “I guess he was no longer hard up for money, then. So, if he was the author of those plays, why didn’t he publish them in his own name now that he was on his feet?”
“Well, I guess the persona of William Shakespeare, the playwright, was pretty well established in the public’s eye by then, and there was the ‘Overbury Case’.”
“What the hell was the ‘Overbury Case’?” Hank threw her papers down on the coffee table and put her hands on her hips.
“Sir Thomas Overbury was an enemy of the Howard family that our friend brought up on some flimsy charges that got him carted off to the Tower. Then, it seems, Howard intervened to have a friend of his appointed Lord Lieutenant of the Tower and report to him regularly on Overbury’s health.”
“That was thoughtful of him.”
“Yes, except that Overbury died there, people think from the effects of poison administered at the direction of Howard’s great niece.”
“The Queen of poison!”
“So there was the whiff of scandal hanging over Howard and his family to his final days. Anyway, the plays of Shakespeare were only printed individually in quarto format during his lifetime. The first collected folio was not until 1623, seven years after the death of William Shakespeare and nine years after the death of Henry Howard. “
“So they died within two years of each other?” said Hank thoughtfully.
“Yes, and the truth about the plays’ authorship may very well have died with them.”
“I’m still not convinced,” pouted Hank, always the sceptic. “We haven’t proven anything more than the de Vere people have.”
“There’s still the question of the sonnets,” I stared at her, as if I were holding an ace in my hand. “The sonnets were published in Howard’s life time, and Shakespeare’s, in 1609, to be exact, at the height of Howard’s favour with King James.”
“You’re about to tell me why that’s significant.”
“Yes, well they were published as Shakespeare’s sonnets, of course, but the dedication page, written by the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, contains a very interesting text.”
Hank reached for my notes on the table. “Show me,” she said impatiently. I pulled out a page from the pile and handed it to her. It was a clear facsimile of the original I had seen at the British Library. She read it carefully, out loud:
‘TO.THE.ONLIE.BEGETTER.OF
THESE.INSVING.SONNETS.
Mr.W.H. ALL.HAPPINESSE.
AND.THAT.ETERNITIE.
PROMISED.
BY.
OVR.EVERLIVING.POET.
WISHETH.
THE.WELL-WISHING.
ADVENTVRER.IN.
SETTING.
FORTH.
T.T.’
I looked over her shoulder at the page she was staring at so intently. “’T. T.’” is Thomas Thorpe, the publisher.”
“And…who the hell is ‘Mr.W.H.’?”
“Oh, there are any number theories about that. The candidates include: William Herbert, Henry Wriothesley (both of whom are ‘lords’ and not ‘Misters’), William Hall, William Harvey, and the list goes on.”
“But what do you think, Michael?” Her eyes were open wide and fixed on mine.
“Just possibly, …maybe I’m crazy, but… What if ‘W.H.’ actually stands for the Worthy Howard, a name about which the editor would be understandably ambiguous, while wishing, at the same time, to express his gratitude to the true and ‘only begetter of these ensuing sonnets’? “
“The real ‘William Shakespeare!’” Hank stood there, open mouthed, not knowing what to say.
“And while the immortal (Ever-Living) Shakespeare gave his name to these verses, it was Howard who was the actual true father (the one who did the ‘begetting’)!”
Hank was silent for several long minutes, thinking about what we had both just said. “If you publish these findings, you’ll stir up a maelstrom of controversy, you know.”
“Yes,” I answered. “I know.”
We both needed some fresh air. I suggested we go down to the Napoleon, a little restaurant on the corner that served the most delicious blueberry pie with Chantilly cream. We felt slightly intoxicated with the excitement of what we were now both sure had been an important discovery. We talked and laughed like a couple of teenagers on our first date. After wine, dessert and coffee, we talked sentimentally about the story that I had created from the little journal.
Hank patted her lip with the end of her napkin and leaned over the table. “Do you know what happened to the others? Did Bernardo and Caterina make it safely to Italy? Did Gaudin follow his Captain Montgomery and what became of him? Did Dormoy ever turn up?”
“No idea. Of course, we know what happened to Doctor Michel de Nostra Dame. He headed out of harm’s way, back to Province, where he was able to publish his prophesies without any imminent fear of harassment. There’s even a story that the Queen Mother arranged to meet him, when she was on progress in the south with her son, the boy king, Charles IX. She was still obsessed with the occult and wanted to hear good news about the survival of the dynasty. It appears that Nostradamus didn’t have anything good to say about anyone in the family, except for Henry of Navarre, who eventually brought an end to the Valois line and ushered in the Bourbons. Those were interesting times – turbulent, bloody, but interesting.”
All of a sudden, I looked at Hank, her eyes betraying the same curiosity I was feeling myself, and I blurted out: “How’d you like to take a trip with me to Italy. We’ll find the town where Testagrossa was born and look up parish records, anything that might tell us what happened to him, Caterina and the child.” I was sure she’d say “No”, but I’d win points for making the big move.
Hank’s eyes immediately widened at the idea. “Let’s DO it! There’s got to be more to this story!”
My mouth dropped open. I never considered the possibility that she might say “Yes.” Now I had to act as if it were the most natural thing in the world for two scholars to go on a research expedition together. “Yes, and we can look into finding out more about Gaudin and Dormoy, based on what Howard thought they were going to do. We might even be able to find out more about Howard himself.”
“Easy does it, big boy, I didn’t say I was willing to give up my day job for this.”
I tried to be as nonchalant and reassuring as I could. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll get you a sign for your book store that says ‘Gone Fishing’ in two languages. It’ll be an adventure!”
And so, our search continued for missing lives, the threads of which disappeared some 450 years ago.