Shakespeare's Wife

  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.

  Ale was as nutritious as plain water was dangerous; every housewife of substance was expected to be able to direct the long and cumbersome process to a good end-product. To make ale, malt is ground in a mill or ‘quern’ and then mixed with hot water in a mashing vat. A complex chain of sugars is released from the malt, which dissolves in the hot liquor to become wort. The wort is drawn off, leaving spent grains behind and put into a boiler with a convex bottom to be boiled for between one and two hours, until the solids coagulate and the ale clears. Then the liquid is sieved or ‘boulted’, the spent hops are strained out and wort poured into shallow tubs or trays to cool, before being run into a fermenting tun or ‘gyl’ and yeast or ‘barme’ added. When fermentation is complete the ale is racked and left to settle.

  All households of any size brewed their own ale, which was drunk in preference to water at all times of day. An establishment the size of New Place would have had a purpose-built brew house, with a double-bottomed mashing vat, a fermenting vat, a cooler, troughs and a mauling board, and a ‘boyling lead’. Ann’s eighty bushels of malt would have made ten hogsheads, that is about 600 gallons, of good ale and the same quantity of small beer. The good ale was made of two mashings of the same malt, and small beer from a third. Baking was inseparable from brewing, for barme from the process was used to raise the dough. The appearance of her husband’s name in the list of malt-makers is enough of itself to place Ann Shakespeare in the first rank of Stratford housewives, along with the likes of Bess Quiney. No one else by the name of Shakespeare held any corn or malt whatsoever.

  On 27 September 1598 the Corporation was obliged to issue a resolution to control alehouse-keepers who:

  thorough their unreasonably strong drink, to the increase of quarrelling, and other misdemeanours in their houses, and the farther and greater impoverishment of many poor men haunting the said houses, when their wives and children are in extremity of begging; and also for that most of the said tippling-houses are very dangerous for fire by reason of the straitness to lay fuel in.15

  As nobody carried money back and forth between London and Stratford, the matter was usually managed by raising money in London and paying it back in Stratford or vice versa, but trying to work such a system with Sir Edward Greville was a high-risk business. On 25 October 1598, extremely strapped for cash, Quiney wrote out in a fair hand a letter to Shakespeare:

  Loving countryman, I am bold of you as of a friend, craving your help with £30, upon Mr Bushell’s and my security, or Mr Mytton’s with me. Mr Rosswell is not come to London as yet and I have especial cause. You shall friend me much in helping me out of all the debts I owe in London, I thank God, and much quiet my mind, which would not be indebted. I am now towards the court in hope of answer for the despatch of my business. You shall lose neither credit nor money by me, the Lord willing, and now but persuade yourself so as I hope and you shall not need for fear but with all hearty thankfulness I will hold my time and content your friend, and if we bargain further you shall be the paymaster yourself. My time bids me hasten to an end an so I commit this to your care and hope of your help. I fear I shall not be back this night from the court. Haste! The Lord be with you and with us all. Amen. From the Bell in Carter Lane, the 25 October, 1598. Yours in all kindness.16

  This has been interpreted as evidence of a friendship between the two men, when in fact it is the opposite. The approach is tentative; there is no reliance whatsoever on mutual trust or a gentleman’s word. Instead sureties are offered, as if to a stranger, and two of them, Mytton and Rosswell, were henchmen of Greville’s. (The other was Quiney’s son-in-law.) In the event, though Quiney sealed the letter and addressed it, he decided not to send it. It remained among his papers where it is to this day. The tone of that letter to Shakespeare offers an absolute contrast to the warmth of the correspondence with his father and Abraham Sturley, both members of the puritan brotherhood. When Quiney communicated to Sturley his belief that he could raise cash from Shakespeare, Sturley replied on 4 November that he ‘would like of it as he could hear when and where and how’.17

  Quiney’s petition was successful and his expenses were eventually paid by the Exchequer. There is no mention in the extremely detailed account Quiney submitted of any loan from Shakespeare. At the Hall of 23 April 1600, the Corporation decided that, in view of the ongoing cash shortage, the sergeants were to have the toll corn they collected in lieu of wages.18 Greville considered the toll corn his to dispose of.19 Even as Quiney and others were trying to disentangle the legal situation but they were well aware that matters were coming to a head. It was at this point that Greville took it upon himself to enclose the most important of the town commons, the Bancroft. The Corporation reacted swiftly. On 21 January 1601, according to Greville’s complaint, the aldermen

  broke into the Bancroft, drove in horses, cows, oxen and pigs and ‘then and there did depasture, tread down and consume to the value of forty shillings; and forty willows did lop and the wood thereof (six loads to the value of six pounds) took and carried away’ and other enormities to him did do.20

  Next day they took away the toll corn as well.21 Greville had them arrested for riot and conveyed to the Marshalsea prison in London, where they were released immediately on bail. With the help of solicitor Thomas Greene, Quiney struggled to get access to Sir Edward Coke, the attorney general, but, despite bribing a clerk and a doorkeeper, he failed.22 The authorities were too preoccupied by the Essex Rising and no one of authority would make himself available to calm the storm in the Stratford teacup.

  Back home in Stratford, Quiney made a list of the people he could rely on to have the courage to oppose the lord of the manor. They were John Jeffries, the steward of Stratford, his father Adrian Quiney, Thomas Barber alias Dyer, Simon Biddle, the bellringer George Clemson, the beadle John Hemmings and Ann’s father-in-law John Shakespeare. The list being neither long nor impressive, the Quineys were pretty much on their own. Greville was suing the Corporation, for the toll corn and for the right to enclose the Bancroft. Fighting the action demanded money the Corporation did not have. A letter was written to Greville pointing out that the expenses of the suit would be far more than would ever be earned from the toll collection. Greville’s reply was pretty typical of the man:

  Sir Edward at our humble suit said he would have it if it cost £500 and if we tried it we must either try it in the Exchequer, where his uncle Fortescue was or if in the country before his uncle Anderson, said also to Thomas Samwell about his land which he would challenge, what jury in Warwickshire dares go against him, if he would contend with him.23

  The Corporation then elected none other than Richard Quiney as bailiff, and once again Greville refused his consent. Thomas Greene wrote to Quiney that the attorney general had agreed to act as counsel for Stratford, and that Greville’s consent to his election was not required, but it boded ill. Panicked, the Corporation begged Chief Justice Anderson to arbitrate and sent him a gift of sack
and claret, to no avail. Then the aldermen turned to Greville’s wife, giving her £20 to intercede on their behalf. She took the money and said that she ‘laboured and thought she should effect’ only to have her husband declare that his side ‘should win it by the sword’. Greville’s agent Robert Whitney wrote a threatening letter to Quiney, who had him bound over. The Corporation was not to know that by this time Greville was a desperate man; despite his braggadocio he had not £500 to his name. The next year he would be forced to sell Alveston Manor to Richard Lane, who was eventually obliged to sue him for non-payment of a bond of a thousand pounds. In 1610 he would sell the manor of Stratford to two speculators.24 Anthony Nash would sue him in 1615. Within a very few years Greville was to have no property left.

  The show-down, when it came, was terrible.

  On 3 May 1602 Richard Quiney spent the day supervising the sale and exchange of horses at the Stratford fair and entering each transaction in the toll book.25 That night he was making his nightly round of the town when he came upon some of Sir Edward Greville’s men who, having been drinking all day, had begun brawling. The following account was written by Thomas Greene in preparation for the eventual lawsuit.

  there came some of [Greville’s men] who being drunk fell to brawling in their host’s house where they drank and drew their daggers on the host. [It being] fair time the Bailiff was late abroad to see the town in order and coming by in that hurley-burley came into the house and commanded the peace to be kept but could not prevail and in his endeavour to stifle the brawl had his head grievously broken by one of [Greville’s] men whom neither [Greville] punished nor would suffer to be punished but with a show to turn them away and entertained again.26