Shakespeare's Wife (28 page)

If Whittington had not known Ann all her life, he would probably have described the money he had placed in her hands as in the hands of her husband, who would have been legally liable for it. In departing from custom, Whittington has provided us with a single scintilla of evidence that Ann Shakespeare was economically active in her own right. Even if the only money she had access to was her husband's income, Ann may have been empowered to lend and spend it as she thought fit, which would give the lie to those people who want to believe that Shakespeare's wife did not enjoy her husband's trust or respect. Not all wives enjoyed such freedom, but it was not at all uncommon. In
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Falstaff makes love to the married ladies because he believes that both of them have access to significant amounts of money. Mistress Ford, according to report, ‘has all the rule of her husband's purse; he hath a legion of angels' (I. iii.
49–50). She has the key to her husband's coffer (II. ii. 263) and Ford in his jealous fit fears that if she and Falstaff get together his coffers shall be ransacked (II. ii. 281). Mistress Page ‘bears the purse too: she is a region in Guiana, all gold and bounty' (I. iii. 64–5). What Whittington's will does not prove, or even suggest, is that Shakespeare ever left his family without enough to live on, so that Ann was forced to borrow.
³⁸
It seems more likely that Ann was, like many other women in a similar position, operating as a banker. ‘There be other Usurers which will not lend themselves but give leave to their wives and they play like hucksters, that is, every month a penny for a shilling…'
³⁹

Another court case relating to Ann's business dealings began in 1607 when Shakespeare sued a John Addenbrooke, seeking recovery of £6 plus damages. As far as we can tell the women who made and traded in malt and in money were usually single, either unmarried or widows, but as the dealings of married women were invariably subsumed within their husband's business activities, it may be that we have a very partial notion of women's economic activity at the turn of the sixteenth century. Even so, it seems very much more likely that it was Ann who wanted New Place, Ann who restored it and Ann who ran it than that it was Shakespeare. Perhaps it was her money that paid for it.

 

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

of hunger and disorder, introducing the villain of the piece, Sir Edward Greville, who contrived the foul murder of the Bailiff of Stratford, and Ann's friend and ally the young lawyer Thomas Greene

The prevailing notion of Shakespeare's Stratford is that it was a sleepy place of leafy lanes and picturesque half-timbered houses, neat and peaceful, a sort of Metroland before the event, a retirement village just waiting for Shakespeare to return and put his feet up. Nothing could be further from the truth. From the mid-1590s most Stratfordians struggled; the rich grew richer but the numbers of landless poor proliferated and even substantial citizens were menaced with destitution. The winter of 1596–7 saw the highest death-toll of the century, the cumulative effect of years of malnutrition.

The Corporation did its best to stem the tide of misery, but by all the indices, the frequency of violent death, of family breakdown, desertion and bastardy, of pauperisation and despair, the situation deteriorated. The puritan city fathers strove with might and main to keep a modicum of order as the gentry looked on, waiting for a moment of weakness. Elsewhere in Warwickshire the poor people had lost the struggle against their landlords before Ann Shakespeare was born; in the 1590s enclosures began to encroach upon the common lands near Stratford. Endless wrangling in the law courts spilled over into fighting in the streets.

The villages of Leicestershire, Northamptonshire and Warwickshire waged the fiercest struggle of all to defend their common fields and slender commons against enclosure in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and were the scene of the Midland Revolt of 1607.
¹

An already difficult situation was made more so by changes in local administration. After the death of the childless Earl of Warwick in 1590 the lordship of the Stratford manors fell vacant. The Corporation petitioned Lord Treasurer Burghley for the right to name Stratford's vicar and schoolmaster, and other privileges associated with the lordship, only to be forestalled.
²
Local landowner Edward Greville took out a patent in the names of two London scriveners, one of whom did a good deal of legal work for Greville's new patron, the Earl of Essex, and bought the lordship for himself. Greville is typical of the gentlemen described by a later town clerk of Stratford:

gentlemen were naturally enemies to Corporations and the truth whereof this Corporation hath experiently tasted: all their troubles and suits proceeding from distaste proudly and causelessly taken by neighbouring gentlemen who will be satisfied with no reasonable respects except such crouching observance as standeth not with the honour of a Corporation to perform…who make no other use of them but as they do of their stirrups to mount their horse, so to serve their times they will bestow a salute of them or some formal compliment when they have scorn in their hearts.
³

Properly managed, Edward Greville's estates, which extended from the Avon to the Stour, and included the substantial manors of Milcote, Weston, Welford, Coldicote and Sezincote, would have made him a very wealthy man, but he had no interest in improving them. He coveted the rich prizes that his fellow courtiers were winning with minimum effort or personal risk from patronage and speculation.

The Grevilles were a law unto themselves. Edward's ancestor John Greville of Milcote was decidedly vicious. In the Acts of the Privy Council we read that on 26 October 1541,

Upon an information given that John Greville of Milcote in the County of Warwick should misuse his own daughter, and shot at one of his servants with a cross-bow, it was decreed that the said John Greville should be sent for to appear immediately before the Council.
⁴

Greville appeared, was bound over for a surety of £500 and required to appear before the court every day, while the crown prepared its case, but no witnesses could be persuaded to give evidence and the case was ultimately dismissed. Greville's grandfather, Sir Edward Greville, married one of the co-parcenary heiresses of William Willington, a Merchant of the Staple, who had greatly enriched himself by buying up land in Warwickshire, enclosing and depopulating the villages of Barcheston and Chelmscote. When Sir Edward died in 1562, his son Lodowick, who was only twenty-two, became the head of the family. After his ambitious marriage to Thomasine Petre, daughter of Sir William Petre, Greville pillaged his estates to lavish money on the building on his Milcote estate of a huge country mansion to be called Mount Greville, while his encroachments on the rights of his tenants resulted in a succession of Star Chamber suits. In March 1576 the Privy Council wrote to Sir Thomas Lucy, Thomas Smith and John Higford, desiring them to investigate the complaints of tenants of Wellford in Gloucesterhire against Greville.
⁵
In January 1579, after he knocked down Sir John Conway of Arrow in a London street and laid about him so fiercely with his sword that he was likely to have cut his legs off if he had not been dragged away by Conway's attendants, Greville spent some time in the Marshalsea.
⁶

The Edward Greville who became Lord of the Borough and of Old Stratford was Lodowick's second son, born in 1564. By 1588 Lodowick Greville's affairs were in such disarray that he devised a desperate plan to restore them. He had long coveted the assets of one of his wealthier tenants, Thomas Webb of Drayton, who had served him as steward. Greville invited the elderly Webb to spend Christmas with him at Sezincote, where he had him strangled in his bed by two of his servants, Thomas Smith alias Barber and Thomas Brock. He then had one of them impersonate Webb on the point of death, and dictate to the unsuspecting parson a will in Greville's favour. ‘One of the assassinates [Brock] being in his cups at Stratford, dropped out some words among his pot companions that it lay within his power to hang his master.'
⁷
For this indiscretion Greville had Smith drown Brock. When the body floated to the surface, the murder was discovered. Smith was arrested and revealed the whole conspiracy. On 6 November 1589, after ten months in the tower, Greville came to trial. He refused to speak, and
was subjected to the ‘peine forte et dure', that is to say, pressed to death, on 14 November. Because he had remained silent, his estates were not forfeit and twenty-four-year-old Edward was able to inherit.
⁸

According to Dugdale, when Edward was a boy, he shot an arrow straight up into the air which when it fell killed his elder brother, whereupon his father ‘made a jest of it telling him that it was the best shoot he had ever shot in his life'.
⁹
Apparently there is no foundation in truth for this tale, but it tells us more about the feelings the Greville family inspired in the countryside than mere documentary fact could have done. Greville had the right to present the vicar to the living of Holy Trinity, and he also claimed the right to be consulted in the choice of bailiff and the appointment of the collector of market tolls. Though the Corporation duly plied him with sack and venison, pears and walnuts, wine and cakes on all prescribed occasions, he found the aldermen insufficiently subordinate.
¹⁰
When Richard Quiney was elected to the post of bailiff in 1592, Greville refused his assent; it took a letter from the Recorder of Stratford, Greville's cousin Sir Fulke Greville, to remedy the situation.
¹¹
From 1597 when he was knighted by Essex, whom he had accompanied on the expedition to the Azores, he was Sir Edward Greville. Greville's career is comprehensible only if, as well as being endowed with an utter lack of principle, he had considerable personal charm. He wooed and won in marriage Joan Bromley, a younger daughter of Lord Chancellor Bromley and his wife Elizabeth, whose brother Sir John Fortescue was chancellor of the Exchequer. Greville pillaged his wealthy wife so efficiently that she was ultimately left with nothing but the clothes she stood up in.

The scarcity of food grain in 1597 prompted a royal proclamation forbidding the making of malt from Ladyday, 25 March, to Michaelmas, 29 September, so that there would be more grain on the market and prices could be kept down. The making of malt and brewing of ale was Stratford's chief industry. The Corporation drew up a petition to the chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir John Fortescue, Greville's wife's uncle, begging for an exemption. It is an extraordinary document:

In most humble wise beseeching your honour her Majesty's loyal servants your poor orators, the bailiff, aldermen and burgesses of her majesty's borough town of Stratford upon Avon in her Highness's county of
Warwickshire that, whereas in regard to the dearth of corn which by the Lord's hand is laid upon our land and upon our county more than many others, your honour have given commandment by your letters to the Justices of the Peace in our county to restrain malt-making generally, and, upon their sending the knowledge of your command and honour's pleasures therein we have bound our neighbours, that is to say, the citizens of Stratford entreating them not to transgress therein, which we know they are not able to endure, in that our town hath no other especial trade having thereby only, time beyond man's memory, lived by exercising the same, our houses fitted to no other uses, many servants among us hired only to that purpose and many only upon making malt for gentlemen and others maintained, besides our town wanting the help of commons to keep any cattle towards our sustenance, as all our neighbour towns have to their great comfort, neither is it a thoroughfare, and beside that we have endured great losses by two extreme fires which have mightily decayed our said town, having burnt in the thirty-sixth and thirty-seventh year of her Highness's reign a hundred and twenty dwelling houses, and consumed £12,000 and upwards in goods, the means whereof we have 400 people that live only upon relief at our doors in that our abilities cannot better provide for them.

The drafter of the petition, who was probably Richard Quiney, here seems to pause for breath, and a curious aside. Moreover many badgers inhabiting the woodland near us.
⁶
Then he rattles on:

Poor men with great charge of wives and children live by portage of our malt into other counties…all which will feel the want with us, that in consideration hereof it might please your Honour to enlarge us, with some toleration to your Honour's best beseeming and to leave the allowance unto us, adjoining Sir Edward Greville with us that it may the better appear we desire to satisfy that beseemeth our duties to you and our country and safeguard of our poor neighbours' estates whereunto we are also bound. And that it might please you also to give order to our Justices for the counties to restrain all farmers and husbandmen inhabiting in our county not to convert their own barley into malt as they have done and do to the great hindrance of all our markets and the utter spoil of our town…
¹²

While Richard Quiney was in London about the business of presenting the petition, his friend Abraham Sturley wrote to him often. He never mentions Ann Shakespeare, but in a letter of 24 January 1598 he makes a suggestion that may have originated with her.

It seemeth by him [Quiney's father, Adrian] that our countryman, master Shakespeare, is willing to disburse some money on some odd yard-land or other at Shottery or near about us. He thinketh it a very fit pattern to move him to deal in the matter of our tithes. By the instructions you can give him thereof and by the friends he can make therefore, we think it a far mark for him to shoot at and not impossible to hit. It obtained would advance him indeed and would do us much good.

Since the Act of Suppression, tithes were no longer collected from the faithful but were due to the secular authorities who rented out rather than farming the tithelands within their jurisdiction. The Corporation had rented the tithes to William Underhill, who did not pay the rent and had forfeited them. It now needed to rent them out again to raise capital for poor relief. As far as we can tell, Shakespeare made no move towards acquiring the tithelands at this stage; indeed, we might suspect that the person interested in acquiring yardland at Shottery at the beginning of 1598 was Ann, who was probably born there, rather than her husband.

Sturley's letter continues:

You shall understand that our neighbours are grown, with the wants they feel through the dearness of corn (which here is beyond all other countries that I can hear of dear and over dear), malcontent. They have assembled together in a great number, and travelled to Sir Thomas Lucy on Friday last to complain of our maltsters, on Sunday to Sir Fulke Greville, and Sir John Conway—I should have said, on Wednesday to Sir Edward Greville first.

The artisans of Stratford had walked to Milcote and back on 18 January, to Charlcote and back two days later, and made the round trip to Beauchamps Court and Arrow two days after that, to protest
the cost of grain. They probably heard nothing but fair words, if that, and returned in rebellious mood.

There is a meeting here expected tomorrow. The Lord knoweth to what end it will sort! Thomas West returning from the two knights of the woodland came home so full that he said to Master Baily that night, he hoped within a week to lead some of them in a halter, meaning the maltsters; and I hope, saith John Grannams, if God send my Lord of Essex down shortly, to see them hanged on gibbets at their own doors.
¹³

Public disorder on the streets of Stratford would have meant punitive sanctions for all concerned, particularly the Corporation for failing to keep the queen's peace. It would also have led to the defeat of Richard Quiney's petition and obliterated any possibility of the new charter that the Corporation had decided was necessary if the decay in the town's fortunes was to be repaired. On 25 January the High Sheriff of Warwickshire warned the Privy Council of increasing unrest in the countryside and requested that the price of malt be fixed, to prevent profiteering. The Privy Council declined to act. Instead, the bailiff and his officers set about binding over the citizens to refrain from making malt, and an inquiry was set up to identify the worst offenders. The result of the inquiry came down on 4 February 1598; in Chapel Street ward William Shakespeare was listed as holding ten quarters of malt.
¹⁴
In fact he was in London; the malt was Ann's business. Ann had been in New Place for little more than six months, but she was already holding ten quarters, that is, eighty bushels of malt. Of the thirteen householders listed in Chapel Street ward only two held more. Ann Shakespeare's activities would have been legal as long as she could demonstrate that the malt she held was needed for brewing ale for her own household.