The man at the heart of my Elizabethan murder mystery was a writer and an actor but was he also a spy?
William Shakespeare was a playwright, the world’s most famous in fact, and he was also an actor who appeared in his own plays and others. That is a matter of record. We also know that he was a businessman, a shareholder in a theatrical company and the Globe theatre and had investments in all manner of things, including land. He may even have been a money lender. But was he also a spy?
The premise of my new novel, ‘A Serpent In The Garden’, is that Will Shakespeare is called upon to investigate the mystery of a woman’s suspicious death, in exchange for patronage. He is still a young man at this point and has only written one play, Henry the 6th. That was a small success, but now Will is struggling to write that difficult second play, and the Earl of Southampton is dangling the promise of financial support in exchange for more than just poetry. His cousin is the first reported victim of an outbreak of plague that hit London in 1592, claiming thousands of lives, but the Earl does not believe it, and asks Will to find out what really happened to Lady Celia.
When the Queen’s spymaster, Robert Cecil, learns of this, he orders Will to spy on his new patron and report back to him. Will soon realises how dangerous it is to have two masters in Elizabethan England, especially when they are the most powerful men in the realm.
The plot of my book does draw upon the truth, though I am not claiming Shakespeare was a Tudor James Bond. Back then, he might very well have been called upon to report on people to powerful men at court, since many others were given similar tasks, whether they liked it or not. Shakespeare’s most famous patron was the young, handsome and very rich, Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton. Will dedicated sonnets to him, including ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘The Rape of Lucrece’, using such flowery prose some have suggested they must have been lovers, though flattering dedications to a patron were fully expected, no matter how chaste the relationship.
The Earl of Southampton had a very powerful enemy at Elizabeth’s court. Sir Robert Cecil took over the role of her principal advisor from his father, William and became spymaster for both Elizabeth and her successor, King James the 1st. He even uncovered the Gunpowder Plot. Back in Shakespeare’s time, he would have known that the Earl of Southampton, a lover of plays and poetry, was looking favourably on Will and might be about to give him patronage. Crucially, the Earl was also a Catholic in a Protestant land and suspected of conspiring against the Queen. Later, in 1601, he would join the Essex Rebellion against her, and be sentenced to life imprisonment, though he was eventually released by King James. Perhaps more importantly, the two men hated one another. Wriothesley was ward to Cecil’s father as a child, and they grew up together. Cecil was very short and had a curved back caused by scoliosis. He envied Southampton’s good looks, his vast fortune and, most galling of all, his ability to charm the Queen into becoming her favourite. Southampton also broke off his engagement to Cecil’s niece, humiliating her and, by extension, his family.
This was a time when plots against Elizabeth the 1st abounded. As a protestant Queen in a religiously divided nation, she was always a target. Catholics still saw her as the illegitimate child of an illegal second marriage, between Henry the 8th and Anne Boleyn. If they needed any further encouragement, the Pope himself declared, in an official Papal Bull to his faithful, that removing and even killing the Queen of England was no crime, since he had already excommunicated her. He was granting Elizabeth’s English Catholic subjects official permission to commit a regicide, blessed by God himself.
Cecil already had a network of spies everywhere, and he needed them to protect the Queen. Most notably, Christopher Marlowe is believed to have spied for him in the Lowlands, and he was a far more famous and successful playwright than Will Shakespeare at this point. It is usually accepted that Marlowe died in a ‘tavern brawl’ in 1593, but the building was not a tavern and the only other men there were his friends; Skeres, Frizer and Poley, all of whom had links to the criminal world and had worked for Robert Cecil. Poley even played a significant part in the downfall of Mary Queen of Scots, when he acted as a double agent during the Babington Plot of 1586. Significantly, Marlowe was about to be brought before the Privy Council, to be questioned about dangerous heretical writings that would have severely embarrassed Cecil, his former employer. How convenient that he was instead stabbed in the eye, by a supposed friend, just before he had the opportunity to discredit the Queen’s spymaster by association.
There is another interesting historical slant to this story. When Will Shakespeare left Stratford as a young man, he had little or no money. By 1592, he was an actor who had just been paid the sum of two pounds for his first play. Within a little over a year, he had somehow acquired the enormous sum of fifty pounds. Enough to become a shareholder in a new theatrical company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. No one knows how he did this. Many believe the money came from his patron, the Earl, but that is a lot to pay to have sonnets dedicated to you, hence the suspicion that Will might have been Southampton’s lover. In my book, Will hopes to get the money by risking his life to uncover the enormous secret linked to the suspicious death of Lady Celia.
Revealing anything more would be a spoiler and, like spies everywhere, I reserve the right to keep some secrets. But, if you would like to know what really happened to Celia, and how Will manages to narrowly avoid a gruesome death, at the hands of two of the most powerful men in the realm, you can find the answers between the pages of ‘A Serpent In The Garden’.
A Serpent in the Garden by Howard Linsey. (Canelo) Out Now
London, 1592. 28-year-old William Shakespeare is the rising man of English theatre. But plague has hit the capital, and the playhouses are to be shut. Livelihoods, and lives, are at stake. Lady Celia Vernon is one of the first to perish but did she really die of plague? Her cousin, the Earl of Southampton, orders Will to discover the truth in a London filled with conspirators, cutthroats and traitors. The Queen's spymaster, Robert Cecil, suspects the Earl of treason and orders Will to spy on him in return. Caught between two of the most powerful men in the kingdom, Will cannot possibly serve both masters, and could easily become the next victim of the killer he is trying to catch. With his future, safety and life on the line, Will uncovers a devastating secret, and changes the course of his, and the world’s destiny forever.
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