The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street (14 page)

Publishers, said the poet Michael Drayton, ‘are a company of base knaves whom I both scorn and kick at’, and perhaps there were times when Shakespeare thought the same.
⁵⁵
Ironically, it was the piratical Mr Jaggard who was one of the prime movers of the posthumous First Folio, and we might think he has thereby made amends for his earlier ‘boldness’ with Shakespeare’s name. The Folio includes eighteen previously unpublished plays - among them masterpieces like
Macbeth
,
Twelfth Night
and
The Tempest
- which might otherwise have been lost for ever.

PART THREE

The Mountjoys

HELENA:
Which is the Frenchman?
DIANA:
He - that with the plume.
All’s Well that Ends Well
, 3.5.77-8

9

Early years

W
e have an idea of Shakespeare’s habitat in these years in Cripplegate - the furnished room, the businesslike street, the neighbours whose faces he knew, the mansions split up into tenements, the little parish church with its peal of bells - but we have so far only a passing acquaintance with the most important figures in this landscape: the family he lived with. What is their story, and how does it come to intersect with Shakespeare’s?

Of the Mountjoys’ origins there is only fragmentary information. We know where Christopher Mountjoy was born but not when, and we know when Marie Mountjoy was born but not where.

In his act of ‘denization’ or naturalization (of which more later) Christopher is described as ‘a subject of the French King and born in the town of Cressey’.
¹
‘Cressey’ is presumably the English clerk’s spelling of Cr’cy. There is more than one Cr’cy in France, but most probably Mountjoy was from Cr’cy-en-Ponthieu. This is certainly the Cr’cy that Englishmen had heard of, being the site of the famous battle of 26 August 1346, when Edward III’s English archers routed the French army during the Hundred Years War. It lies in Picardie, in north-western France, in the fertile flat-lands of the lower Somme, which flows into the English Channel about 12 miles west of it. Mountjoy calls it a ‘town’ (or perhaps this is the clerk’s phrasing) but today it is little more than a large village, population about 1,500.

No record of the birth of Christophe Montjoi or Montjoie is to be found in the
registres d’état civil
for Cr’cy-en-Ponthieu, but the sixteenth-century registers are by no means complete.
²
For reasons I will give a little later it is likely he was born in the mid-1550s or early 1560s.

Various larger market-towns and trading centres were within easy reach of Cr’cy. The nearest was Abbeville, 10 miles away, but the most important one was Amiens, the regional capital of Picardie, famed for its Gothic cathedral (the largest in France) and its medieval water-gardens, Les Hortillonnages. Amiens was a centre for clothworking, part of that densely populated belt of northern France and Flanders which produced high-quality textiles: wool, cotton, silk and linen. In the 1593 ‘Return of Strangers’, a detailed listing of foreigners in London, there are twenty-five immigrants from Amiens, living in fourteen households. All of those whose employment is given are clothworkers - the majority are silk-weavers; there are also two ‘taffety-weavers’, a silk-winder and a silk-twister, a dyer and a bobbin-maker. Another nearby town was Arras, famous for those embroidered hangings. From here came more silk-weavers, two wool-combers and a feltmaker.
³

Christopher Mountjoy’s future trade of tiremaking is grounded in the textile industry of his native Picardie. He doubtless served an apprenticeship, though we do not know where or in what. The creation of a head-tire involved various craft skills, among them silk-twisting, threadmaking, wire-drawing and embroidery. It also involved wigmaking, and I note the name Montois or Montoyes - possibly a variation of Montjoie - in a seventeenth-century list of
maˆtres perruquiers
(master-wigmakers) in Amiens.
⁴

The name could be of Norman origin, connected with the town of Montjoie in La Manche. But William Arthur’s
Etymological Dictionary of Family and Christian Names
suggests a grander origin - that it may have been adopted by a French crusader, recalling a mountain near Jerusalem, which (according to that mysterious medieval globetrotter Sir John Mandeville) ‘men clepen Mount-Joye, for it gevethe joye to pilgrymes hertes, because that there men seen first Jerusalem’. Arthur also suggests a military connection, for in old French dictionaries ‘mont-joie’ is defined as ‘a heap of stones made by a French army, as a monument of victory’. Another authority tells us that ‘Montjoy St Denis!’ was ‘the French king’s war cry’.
⁵
Related to this, perhaps, is the fact that Montjoi(e) was from medieval times the title of the Chief Herald of France. These military and heraldic associations may suggest that Christopher Mountjoy was a descendant or offshoot of a family of substance.

In Shakespeare’s
Henry V
the French herald is indeed called ‘Montjoy’:

A tucket sounds. Montjoy approaches.
MONTJOY: You know me by my habit [uniform].
king: Well then, I know thee: what shall I know of thee?

king: What is thy name? I know thy quality.
MONTJOY: Montjoy.
king: Thou dost thy office fairly. (3.6.111-12, 135-7)

Some biographers have wondered about this, but as there is a purely historical reason for the name, it is hard to argue any in-joke reference to Christopher Mountjoy. There is also Shakespeare’s own statement that he first knew Mountjoy in about 1602, which makes it unlikely,
prima facie
, that he referred to him in a play performed three years earlier. On the other hand, it is possible to know
of
someone without having actually met them. It is in general worth remembering that Shakespeare’s statement in the Court of Requests refers only to his acquaintance with Christopher. He was not asked for, and did not volunteer, any information about how long he had known other members of the household - Marie Mountjoy, for instance.

One should not discount the presence of private allusions and in-jokes in Shakespeare. Plays like
Love’s Labour’s Lost
,
The Merry Wives
and
Twelfth Night
, all written for specific courtly or aristocratic audiences, are full of them. In this case it is just about possible that the ‘Montjoy’ of
Henry V
has some ulterior reference to the real Mr Mountjoy of Silver Street, but I doubt it. If it does, nothing much is made of it, though there was perhaps a titter at the Globe when Henry says to him, ‘Thou dost thy office fairly’ - a joke at the herald’s expense, in that to do one’s ‘office’ meant to go to the privy, often called the ‘house of office’.

We know nothing of the origins of Marie Mountjoy. She may have been Christopher’s childhood sweetheart in Picardie, or they may have met in London, in which case she could be from another part of France entirely. We do not even know for sure she was born in France - she could have been the daughter of French immigrants already settled in England.

What we do have is her approximate date of birth. According to her own statement, made to the astrologer-physician Simon Forman, she was thirty years old in November 1597. This useful precision is rendered less precise by her statement to the same doctor two weeks later that she was twenty-nine.
⁶
According to the laws of arithmetic at least one of these statements is false, and that one of them is false makes me wonder ungallantly if both might be slight understatements. The older of her two ages would mean she was born in 1567 or late 1566, and perhaps we might think the latter year more likely. She was thus two or three years younger than Shakespeare, and was in her mid-thirties when he became her lodger. It is worth bearing this in mind. In the biographies she is almost invariably called ‘Mrs Mountjoy’, which is correct and convenient, but which tends - especially in conjunction with the faintly comic overtones of ‘landlady’ - to give an older image of her than is right.

New evidence, shortly to be presented, shows that the Mountjoys were a married couple by 1582. Marie was then only fifteen or sixteen, so the marriage must have been quite recent (brides under fifteen are unusual at this time, though the legal minimum age was twelve).
⁷
They were by then living in London, so it is possible they were married there. The marriage registers of the French Church in London might have enlightened us, but they are lost - the earliest that survive date from 1600.

The approximate date of their marriage helps to define the otherwise unknown age of Christopher Mountjoy. As he was married by 1582 he must by then have completed his apprenticeship. The conventional age to be ‘freed’ of apprenticeship was twenty-one - this is variable, but I would say eighteen is a practical minimum age for a married craftsman. Mountjoy was born, therefore, no later than
c
. 1564, the same year as Shakespeare. He was probably older than this, but he cannot have been that much older, as his brother Noel was born in about 1582.
⁸
Allowing their mother a maximum child-bearing span of twenty-five years (and assuming Noel was not a half-brother, in which case the argument collapses) we could say speculatively that Christopher was born some time between
c
. 1557 and
c
. 1564. These are porous arguments, but I have the feeling that, like Marie, Christopher is probably rather younger than the inferred picture of him given in Shakespeare biographies. There is no real warrant for Schoenbaum calling him an ‘old man’ at the time of the lawsuit in 1612.

10

St Martin le Grand

T
he Mountjoys were French Protestants, or Huguenots, and their early years were clouded by the religious storms of the late sixteenth century.
⁹
Inspired by the teachings of John Calvin - himself from Picardie - the Protestant movement spread rapidly through France; by the early 1560s there were some 700 Calvinist churches in the country. Opposing this was the Catholic League, led by Henri, Duc de Guise, whose political programme is summed up by Christopher Marlowe: ‘There shall not a Huguenot breathe in France’ (
Massacre at Paris
, 1.5). Between these irreconcilable forces the Valois monarchs - Charles IX, known as
le roi morveux
(the ‘brat-king’), and his eccentric brother Henri III - vacillated feebly. Civil war broke out in 1562 and continued sporadically over thirty-five years, leaving the country scarred and bankrupt. In 1589 the Huguenot leader Henri of Navarre succeeded to the throne as Henri IV. He expediently converted to Catholicism - ‘Paris vaut bien une messe’ (‘Paris is worth a mass’) - and peace was achieved in 1598 with the Edict of Nantes, promising freedom of worship to the Huguenots.

During these decades of turmoil, thousands of Huguenots fled to England where they were officially welcomed - to begin with, at least - as Protestant friends in need. They came in the wake of terrible events, most notoriously the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of August 1572, orchestrated by the fanatical Guise and the ageing Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici - ‘Madame la Serpente’ - whose black-clad presence behind the throne contributes to the psychotic tone of these years. Some 2,000-3,000 died in Paris; the Seine was choked with bodies. Out in the provinces Guisard mobs and paramilitaries moved into Huguenot areas. The overall death-count is estimated at 60,000. In England this atrocity became a byword for Catholic ruthlessness, and did much to harden Elizabethan attitudes into the aggressive anti-Catholicism of the 1580s. Among the government hawks was the Secretary of State, Sir Francis Walsingham, who had been ambassador in Paris and had witnessed the bloodbath at first hand.
¹⁰

It is sometimes said rather loosely that Christopher Mountjoy came over to England at the time of the Massacre. This is possible but there is no evidence for it. It was a peak period of immigration - there were over 7,000 aliens in London in 1573, the highest number recorded in any of the sixteenth-century censuses - but there were other lesser peaks, and a continuous trickle between them.

Whatever the precise dates and details there is this hidden chapter of emigration in the Mountjoys’ story: a chapter of upheaval and trauma. They arrive in England as asylum-seekers, indeed as boat-people, crowded into one of the over-freighted little pinnaces and fishing-boats that brought the refugees across the Channel to the south-coast ports - Dover, Rye, Newhaven, Southampton. There they were processed by the immigration officers of the day - the ‘searchers’, whose job was to keep a ‘register of men’s names to & fro’
¹¹
- and given temporary billets. Some, hopeful of an early return, stayed on or near the coast. At Southampton a Huguenot church dedicated to St Julian (patron saint of hospitable welcome) was founded near the harbour. In Dover, seventy-eight Huguenot refugees are listed as resident in the early 1560s - twenty-five were widows; most of the men were tradesmen and craftsmen, but there were also three physicians, two preachers, two schoolmasters, two advocates, two esquires and a gardener. In Canterbury, a community of Walloons - French-speakers from Flanders - were given use of the under-croft of the cathedral, first as a weaving shed, then as a school, and finally as a church. In East Anglia the immigrants were mainly ‘Dutch folk’, refugees from the Spanish occupation of the Netherlands. The future pamphleteer Thomas Nashe saw them as a young boy in Lowestoft, and left a memory, unkindly phrased, of that ‘rabble rout of outlanders’ which the town had to ‘provant and victual’.
¹²