Edmund Campion. Tresham, who returned to the Catholic faith at the persuasions of Robert Persons in 1580, was married to Muriel Throckmorton, whose sister Mary was married to Edward Arden, the second cousin of Shakespeare’s mother. The sister of Sir Thomas Tresham, Mary Tresham, was married to William Vaux, 3rdBaron Vaux of Harrowden, whose daughters Eleanor and Anne sheltered the mission superior Henry Garnet.
Additionally, Sir John Southcote’s son John was a priest and professor of theology counted among the clerical friends surrounding Anthony Maria Browne, 2ndViscount Montague. Anthony Browne was the cousin of Henry Wriothesley, 3rdEarl of Southampton and Shakespeare’s literary patron. Furthermore, Edward Southcote (son of Sir John and brother of the cleric) was married to Elizabeth Seaborne, whose sister was married to Christopher Roper, 2ndBaron Teynham, of the staunchly Catholic Roper family. Christopher Roper’s sister was married to George Vaux, son of Lord William Vaux.
Shakespeare’s kinship ties to Sir Thomas Tresham through the Ardens would have given him access to the Southcote family and ultimately to the Floyd brothers, as well as to the band of Catholics organized upon the arrival of Persons and Campion in 1580, which likely included Thomas Pounde, cousin to the 2ndEarl of Southampton. His ties to the 3rdEarl of Southampton also would have given Shakespeare access to the Southcote family and to the Floyds. His ties to the Neville family would have given Shakespeare access to Southwell’s poems and to the Floyd brothers through the Waldegraves.
Literary naysayers will claim that such connections prove nothing about the religious loyalties of Shakespeare or his possible collaboration with the Jesuits. The answer, therefore, must be sought in the text.
A perusal of the poetry written by Edward de Vere, 17thEarl of Oxford, reveals it as bearing little resemblance to the work of Shakespeare. For example, Oxford’s rather pedestrian verses on love compared to a tennis game—“Whereas the heart at tennis plays and men to gaming fall,/Love is the Court, Hope is the House, and Favor serves the Ball”—pale artistically in comparison to such unparalleled lines from Shakespeare as, “This my hand will rather/The multitudinous seas incarnadine,/Making the green one red” (Macbeth 2.2.58-60).
Yet oddly, a distinct reality remains hidden behind the presence of Oxford, not in terms of authorship but of kinship. Not widely known is that the Catholic Earl of Oxford was a cousin of Robert Southwell, whose work contains substantially similar thought as that found in the canon of Shakespeare. Additionally, recent studies have shown the extraordinary breadth of identical words and phrases common to the writings of Shakespeare and Southwell.6The Jesuit was arrested under a 1585 law enacted during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I that aimed to eradicate Catholicism by making it treason for any English priest ordained overseas to return to the kingdom. While imprisoned, he was singled out for especially brutal torture over the course of three years before being executed in 1595.
At Padua in 1575, the Earl of Oxford, after receiving a license to travel abroad in January of that year, was known to have met with an associate of the future Jesuit mission leader Robert Persons named Luke Astlow, whose untimely death prevented his entry into the Society of Jesus; the Earl’s license was renewed in 1576.7These were the beginning years—1575 and 1576—of the landmark establishment (1579) of the English College in Rome as a training ground for English missionary priests; Robert Southwell left England in May of 1576 for a Catholic education abroad and entered the Jesuit school at Douai in June, a time when the spiritual fervor of the Catholic Reformation was sweeping across Europe. Subsequently in the late 1570s, the Earl of Oxford and Francis Southwell (a cousin of the Jesuit Robert Southwell and thus Oxford) formed the nucleus of a group of mostly Catholic nobles promoting a marital match between the Queen and France’s Duke of Anjou, in secret hopes of advancing the Catholic cause in England. The families of several of these nobles, including the powerful Howards and Arundells, had been brutalized by severe persecution and execution under the Tudor monarchs. As one example, the Arundell family of Cornwall suffered for its defense in 1577 of a young Catholic named Cuthbert Mayne—the first priest trained by the Jesuits at the English Catholic seminaries abroad to be executed in England—while Charles Arundell’s mother was the sister of the executed Catherine Howard, fifth wife of Henry VIII.
The pro-marriage group included such notables as Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, and his uncle Henry, Lord Howard; Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton; and John Manners, Earl of Rutland. Importantly, and in relation to Henry and John Floyd, the group included Henry, Lord Compton, whose son would become the Earl of Northampton. A sister of John and Henry Floyd married a Compton, making the two Jesuits uncles to a Henry, John, and Thomas Compton, according to state papers quoted in the records of the Jesuit historian Henry Foley.
After Henry, Lord Compton died in 1589, his widow, Anne Spencer (1555-1618), married Robert Sackville, 2ndEarl of Dorset (1561-1609); the relationship of the Comptons and the Sackvilles was further solidified when Sir Henry Compton (1584-1649), the son of Henry, Lord Compton and Anne Spencer, married Cicely Sackville, daughter of Robert Sackville. Robert Sackville had first been married to Margaret Howard, the daughter of Thomas Howard, the 4thDuke of Norfolk executed in 1572 for plotting to replace Queen Elizabeth with the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots as ruler of England. Margaret Sackville was the half sister of Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, son of the executed Thomas Howard by his first wife; Philip Howard died in the Tower of London in 1595 after a decade of imprisonment for his Catholicism. Upon Margaret Sackville’s death in 1591, Robert Southwell wrote a consolatory epistle for the incarcerated Philip Howard entitled The Triumphs Over Death, extolling the virtues of the pious Margaret. Shakespeare draws heavily from this prose work, especially with regard to Sonnet 126, as will be shown.
Importantly, the connection between the Compton and Sackville families creates a personal link tying Henry and John Floyd to Robert Southwell. Southwell himself was related by marriage to Margaret Sackville through the Audley family.
Furthermore, a Richard Floyd of Norwich in Norfolk married into the Hobart family of Norwich in 1513, according to genealogical records. Southwell biographer F.W. Brownlow reports that the Southwell family home at Horsham St. Faith, Robert’s birthplace, was sold in 1588 to Sir Henry Hobart at a time when Richard Southwell, the Jesuit’s father, was mired in financial difficulties. If Richard Floyd were indeed an ancestor of the Jesuits Henry and John Floyd, this would further establish a relationship, perhaps one of kinship, between the Floyds and Southwell.
Edward Floyd (died 1648), a Roman Catholic barrister and the apparent brother of John and Henry Floyd, served as a steward in Shropshire to Lord Chancellor Ellesmere (Sir Thomas Egerton, died 1617) and to Thomas Howard, 1st Earl of Suffolk (died 1626). The Earl of Suffolk was the son of the executed Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, and the brother of Margaret Sackville. (They were the children of the 4th Duke’s second wife, Margaret Audley.) As stated above, Henry, Lord Howard, the brother of the executed 4th Duke, was a member of the group of Catholic nobles seeking a marriage between the Queen and the French Duke. Importantly, these connections further establish a relationship between the Floyd brothers and the Howards, and ultimately tie the Floyds to the Jesuit Robert Southwell.
The marital negotiations involving Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Anjou eventually failed, and lobbying by Catholic nobles for Jesuit assistance in England—in addition to such calls by the Jesuit Robert Persons—served as the impetus for approval, in late 1579, by the Society of Jesus of the formal establishment of a Jesuit mission to England.8Oxford’s Catholicism was revealed to the monarchy, and he was forced to defect from the pro-marriage Catholic coalition, helping to dismantle the group. Yet Oxford’s kinship to Southwell presents a compelling case for a possible clandestine pro-Jesuit stance of the Earl and assistance to the mission. The Jesuit mission was officially launched in 1580, but it quickly devolved into extreme political controversy and brutal execution.
The Earl of Oxford was linked to Southwell by way of the Trussell family, a branch of which lived in Stratford-on-Avon. Susanna Shakespeare was married
