[In the following essay, Martin proposes that the brief entrance of John Somerville in Henry VI, Part 3, reveals familial connections between Shakespeare and the Somerville family. Martin suggests that this connection may also indicate that Shakespeare had Catholic sympathies in spite of his Protestant Queen.]

Speculation about Shakespeare's Catholicism has always been bound up with questions of his plays' references to traditional doctrine, their portrayal of clergy and religious offices, and topical allusions to polemical works. While the plays certainly dramatize Catholic customs and beliefs, their presence sheds only circumstantial light on Shakespeare's personal views and must be weighed against a great deal of evidence of anti-Catholic sentiment. The use of confessional sources might reveal more, but few have been identified, the main one being Samuel Harsnet's Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603), echoed in King Lear. Since the Declaration satirizes Catholic exorcisms, it, too, occludes Shakespeare's beliefs. And the absence of topical references to contemporary English Catholics or implied sympathy for their hardships has seemed overall, even to pro-Catholic commentators, to represent a distancing or erasure of his purported religious upbringing.¹

An unnoticed allusion in 3 Henry VI with strong Catholic and personal associations, however, provides new evidence of Shakespeare's representation of sectarian interests. It occurs in the invented passage that opens 5.1, on the walls of Coventry, as Warwick awaits reinforcements prior to the battle of Barnet. Two messengers inform him that Oxford is marching from Dunsmore, southeast of Coventry, and that Montague is at Daintry (that is, Daventry), further to the southeast. A figure identified in the Folio text only as “Someruile” (TLN 2680) then enters to report that Clarence is two hours away at Southam, also south and a little east of Coventry but closer to Stratford-upon-Avon. Warwick hears an offstage drum and leaps to the conclusion that Clarence has already arrived:

WAR.
Then Clarence is at hand, I heare his Drumme.
SOMERU.
It is not his, my Lord, here Southam lyes:
The Drum your Honor heares, marcheth from Warwicke.
WAR.
Who should that be? belike vnlook'd for friends.
SOMERU.
They are at hand, and you shall quickly know.

(TLN 2685-89)²

It is not Clarence who enters, however, but King Edward and his supporters. Warwick's muddled sense of local geography and his dependence on others for accurate information foreshadow his overconfidence and tactical misjudgment. Somerville's pointed correction, in particular, anticipates Warwick's complete surprise at Clarence's deception later in the scene, when he switches loyalties back to the Yorkists. The whole moment's little excursion into Warwickshire place-names around Coventry and Stratford-upon-Avon stands out in a play in which local references and particularized spaces are relatively sparse. It delineates a zone of activity whose significance lies outside the historical narrative and, at the same time, invites readers or spectators to identify an absent figure with the underdetermined Somerville (whom Shakespeare, for dramatic purposes, had no need to name). Because this area was the playwright's home, the flurry of topographic markers functions as a personal memory-site, intertwining his own story with the enigmatic Somerville's.

Somerville's name was expanded to “Sir John” by Edward Capell, and virtually all editors have followed his lead. But this identification cannot be right because the historical Sir John lived too early to be connected with the events of 1471,³ and in any case no Somerville is mentioned by either Hall or Holinshed. W. H. Thomson identifies him as Sir Thomas Somerville (d. 1500) of Aston-Somerville, Gloucestershire.⁴ But this is also an unconvincing guess. If there is any historical figure intended to be represented by this character (although he too is unconnected with participation in the Wars of the Roses), it is Thomas Somerville of Warwickshire, a different branch of the same family. He settled at Edston near Bearley, northeast of Stratford, during the reign of Henry VII and died there in 1516. His direct descendant was John Somerville,⁵ who became notorious not long after Edmond Campion's trial and execution in 1581. The Somervilles were fervent Catholics. John had married Margaret, daughter of Edward Arden of Park Hall, whose family was also Catholic. They may have been Shakespeare's distant relations if Mary Arden's father, Robert of Wilmcote, was descended from one of the younger sons of the Park Hall Ardens.⁶ In 1583 John Somerville became mentally unstable, and on 25 October he was arrested on his way to London after publicly declaring his intention to assassinate Elizabeth.⁷ Under torture Somerville implicated his wife; his parents-in-law, Edward and Mary Arden; and a local priest named Hugh Hall, who went in disguise as the Ardens' gardener. John had evidently discussed his plans with these and other neighbors prior to setting out for London. The Privy Council employed Thomas Wilkes, Sir Thomas Lucy, and their agents to search for incriminating books and writings that would uncover the whole “‘plot’.”⁸ The Somervilles, Ardens, and Hall were indicted on 2 December, with many people serving at the trial who were well known to Shakespeare's family. But only John Somerville and Edward Arden were condemned. Their execution was set for the twentieth, and on the nineteenth they were transferred to Newgate. But within two hours of arriving, John Somerville was found strangled in his prison cell. He may have been mercifully killed by Catholic friends to escape the much more grisly horrors that awaited condemned traitors and which Edward Arden suffered the next day. Both Arden's and Somerville's heads were cut off and placed on London Bridge.⁹

The vicious methods used to extract information from the suspects and the flimsy legal grounds for trying Somerville and Arden caused an outcry, and not just among Catholics. Somerville had very clearly been insane and not responsible for his actions, while all the government's extensive searches and interrogations had failed to produce any evidence of Edward Arden's culpability. The government felt pressured into defending its actions, the main upshot of which was publication of Lord Burghley's The Execution of Iustice in England … against certeine stirrers of sedition. Burghley had actually begun writing this pamphlet to defend the government's position in the trial of Campion, two years earlier, which, like Somerville's, was based on dubious legal process and had elicited a stream of attacks. But when the book was published, Burghley dated its title page very precisely: 17 December 1583—the day after Somerville and Edward Arden's indictment. He thus apparently intended the pamphlet to do double duty, restating the case against Campion and the Jesuits but also rationalizing the trials of Somerville and Arden.¹⁰ In a passage denouncing the “forged catalogue” of martyred Catholics, Burghley explicitly refers to

a furious yong man of Warwickeshire, by name Someruile, to increase their Kalender of y^epopes martyrs, who of late was discouered and taken in his way, comming w^t a ful intent to haue killed her Maiestie. … The attempt not denied by y^e traitor himselfe, but confessed, and that he was moued thereto … by often reading of sundry seditious vile books lately published against her Maiestie. …¹¹

The Execution of Iustice was widely circulated and had an official profile.¹² It is reasonable to assume that one of the books Burghley refers to which allegedly inspired Somerville was A Treatise of Treasons Against Q. Elizabeth, and the Croune of England. Published in Louvain in January 1572/3, this pamphlet was issued anonymously but is now thought to have been written by John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, distinguished Scottish jurist and historian, Catholic polemicist, and ambassador of Mary, Queen of Scots. In the Burghley papers a list of “Traytorous and popish bookes intercepted [in 1584]” is headed by Leslie's Treatise of Treasons, twenty copies being itemized.¹³ This list was preceded by a royal proclamation issued on 28 September 1583 calling for all copies of the work to be destroyed. While the proclamation speaks only of seditious books in general, there is no question that Leslie's Treatise of Treasons was uppermost in the government's mind.¹⁴ A contemporary manuscript annotation in the Huntington Library copy of this proclamation identifies A Treatise of Treasons as the book particularly intended to be suppressed. It was clearly regarded as exceptionally dangerous, especially in the context of the Jesuit missions and new government measures against recusants in the early 1580s.

Somerville's connections with Burghley and Leslie take on added significance in the light of 3 Henry VI's several allusions to A Treatise of Treasons. A key passage occurs in variant lines of Richard of Gloucester's first soliloquy in 3.2. In the Folio text toward the end of his speech, Richard boasts:

Ile play the Orator as well as Nestor,
Deceiue more slyly then Vlisses could,
And like a Synon, take another Troy.
I can adde Colours to the Camelion,
Change shapes with Proteus, for aduantages,
And set the murtherous Macheuill to Schoole.

(TLN 1712-17)

In the 1595 octavo text The true Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke the mention of Nestor, Ulysses, and Sinon is absent, and the final line reads: “And set the aspiring Catalin to schoole” (sig. C8^v). The source of this reference has eluded modern editors, but in 1947 Lily B. Campbell identified it as deriving from Leslie's Treatise of Treasons, in which the terms Catiline and Machiauel occur interchangeably as terms of abuse for two of Elizabeth's most powerful ministers, Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper, and Burghley.¹⁵ Leslie portrays Bacon and Burghley as ambitious upstarts who have manipulated Elizabeth in order to destroy the old religion and to set up an atheistical ‘“Machiauellian State.”¹⁶ He elaborates his charges through the use of two historical analogies. One compares the present political “Tragedie” to the fall of Troy, in which Elizabeth's modern “Catilines” correspond to the Greeks Ulysses and Sinon.¹⁷ Like Shakespeare's Richard in 3 Henry VI, the latter has “a smooth tongue, an aspiring mind, a shamelesse face, no honour, litle honestie, and lesse conscience, and was a slie and suttle shifter.”¹⁸ Leslie's second and more interesting analogy parallels Bacon and Burghley's involvement in the handling of Mary, Queen of Scots, with the tyrannical persecutions of Richard III.¹⁹ In a sixteen-point sequence, which continues to use the terms Catiline and Machiauel freely, Leslie compares Richard's ruthless duplicity with the machinations of Bacon and Burghley. The latter skillfully deploy a bureaucratic smokescreen of letters, rumors, and official pronouncements, spinning them all to advantage in a series of public shows, like “actors … comme to the Stage to play bloody partes,” “[dazzling] the dimme sighted eies, [clawing] the itching eares, and [filling] the hungry mouthes of the babling multitude.”²⁰ Just as Richard's ultimate goal was to eradicate all Yorkist successors other than himself, Bacon and Burghley have allegedly “wrought and seduced” Elizabeth to keep her unmarried and have schemed to destroy every possible heir to “King Henry the eightes body and line.”²¹

Shakespeare's use of A Treatise of Treasons is important in several respects. That both versions of 3 Henry VI allude to it, yet in different ways, makes it highly likely that Shakespeare himself wrote both passages in Richard's soliloquy. In that case he must be at least partly responsible for the text underlying The true Tragedie, a play that for much of this century has been regarded as not written by Shakespeare because it is thought to be memorially reconstructed. The otherwise unusual comparison to “Catalin” in The true Tragedie also suggests that this more obscure but topically resonant label came first (that is, if the earlier report accurately reflects earlier writing) and that Shakespeare later distanced himself from its more distinct polemical resonances by substituting the dramatically stereotyped and popularly abusive term Machiauel in the Folio text. The latter's additional references to Sinon and Ulysses might continue to remind some spectators of Leslie's historical analogies, but they could also be understood simply as conventional classical comparisons.

To return to Somerville, Burghley's Execution of Iustice was answered by Cardinal Allen's A True, Sincere, and Modest Defense of English Catholics in 1584. Allen points out that Somerville was mentally unstable at the time of his actions, as Burghley himself implicitly admits. He also alleges that Somerville was murdered in his cell to prevent discovery of the deliberate entrapment of “the worshipful, valiant, and innocent gentleman Mr Arden.”²² In the same year responsibility for the specious trials of Somerville and Arden was also laid at the feet of the reviled earl of Leicester in The Copie of a Leter, Wryten by a Master of Arte of Cambrige, better known as Leycesters Commonwealth, which characterizes him as a Machiavel.²³ This work is traditionally ascribed to Campion's fellow Jesuit Robert Parsons.²⁴

In the context of the energetic circulation of these charges and countercharges surrounding the deaths of Somerville, Arden, and Campion, it seems certain that Elizabethan audiences watching 3 Henry VI could have connected the unhistorical and somewhat gratuitous appearance of the locally well-informed Somerville with his notorious later descendant, John, as well as his fellow victim, Edward Arden, both of whom were likely connected to the playwright's family. Shakespeare portrays Somerville in a surprisingly positive light, boldly correcting the mildly confused Warwick yet clearly loyal to the Lancastrian cause.²⁵ His superior perception also proves he is manifestly not a “furious” man. It is Warwick who in fact appears distracted. Given that Somerville plays no further role in this scene and is never referred to again, his underlying purpose seems to be to present a coded portrait that challenges the official verdict on his contemporary namesake. And if that is the case, Somerville represents a riposte to the government's unjust treatment of Shakespeare's recently disgraced Catholic relations (assuming a family connection) and perhaps to Burghley himself, with Shakespeare taking the same ideological position as Campion, Allen, and Parsons.²⁶ Somerville's links with Campion, alleged by Burghley and other government apologists, and his probable links with Leslie's Treatise likewise resonate with Richard's “Catalin” and “Macheuill” references earlier in 3.2. Together both allusions draw our attention to Shakespeare's “encryption” of a range of contemporary Catholic writers and viewpoints.²⁷ These allusions heighten the discursive immediacy of his political characters while preserving confessional resonances for certain Elizabethan spectators. If, as Richard Wilson observes, “Catholic resistance … [offers] a key to mysterious omissions from [Shakespeare's] curriculum vitae,”²⁸ the allusions to John Somerville and Bishop Leslie in 3 Henry VI may help to fill in some of these gaps.

Notes

1. See Peter Milward, SJ, Shakespeare's Religious Background (Bloomington and London: Indiana UP, 1973), 68-78; and Milward, The Catholicism of Shakespeare's Plays (Tokyo: The Renaissance Institute, Sophia U, 1997), 116 and 137.

2. All quotations of 3 Henry VI follow The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare, ed. Charlton Hinman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968) and are cited by Hinman's Through-Line Numbers. In The true Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke (London, 1595) the character is called “Summerfield” and his correction of Warwick is omitted (sig. E1^r); quotations from The true Tragedie are taken from Shakespeare's Plays in Quarto, ed. Michael J. B. Allen and Kenneth Muir (Berkeley: U of California P, 1981).

3. See C. C. Stopes, Shakespeare's Warwickshire Contemporaries (Stratford-upon-Avon: Stratford-upon-Avon Press, 1897), 83.

4. See W. H. Thomson, Shakespeare's Characters: A Historical Dictionary (New York: British Book Centre, 1951), 275.

5. See Stopes, 39ff.

6. See S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 15-16; and Mark Eccles, Shakespeare in Warwickshire (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1961), 12 and 79.

7. Somerville is alleged to have become impassioned after reading a book given to him by his sister Elizabeth, Of Prayer, and Meditation by Luis de Granada, translated into English by Richard Hopkins, published in 1582, and reissued many times. The dying Warwick's monologue in 3 Henry VI (5.2.23-28) seems to echo passages in de Granada's chapter “How filthie, and lothsome the bodie is after it is dead: And of the buryinge of it in the graue” (sigs. Cc1^v-Cc5^r). Shakespeare later recalled this chapter in the gravediggers' scene of Hamlet (5.1); see Harold Jenkins's Arden edition (London and New York: Methuen, 1982), 550-55.

8. Stopes, 46. The Council issued a warrant to Henry Rogers dated 20 November 1583 to search “‘sondrie houses and places for bookes and writinges dangerous to her Majestie and the State’” (quoted here from Stopes, 52). See also Eccles, 75.

9. See Stopes, 45-46 and 55; The Dictionary of National Biography, Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, eds. (New York: Macmillan; London: Smith, Elder, 1885-1901), s.v. “Somerville, John”; and E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), 2:300.

10. See Stopes, 58. Arden is not actually named, probably because there was no evidence or legal grounds against him; but he is clearly connoted by Burghley's remarks about Somerville (see below).

11. William Cecil, Baron Burghley, The Execution of Iustice in England … against certeine stirrers of sedition (London, 1583), sig. Diii^v; a printed marginal note reading “Iohn Someruile” appears in the margin.

12. See Robert M. Kingdon, ed., The Execution of Justice in England by William Cecil and A True, Sincere, and Modest Defense of English Catholics by William Allen (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP for The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1965), xvii-xviii. Copies of The Execution both in English and in translation were sent to English diplomats for presentation to foreign courts. Kingdon's edition is based on the second edition of Burghley's work, published in January 1584—the one consulted by Cardinal Allen. Earlier in The Execution a printed marginal note states “A conclusion that all the infamous bookes against the Queene & the Realme are false” (sig. Cii^v).

13. BL Lansdowne vol. 42, ch. 78, fol. 174. The entire list (without numbers of copies and somewhat altered) is reproduced in Stopes, 109.

14. It is worth getting a fuller sense of the rhetorical force of the government's position:

    … they haue lately caused … to be compiled, and printed in diuers languages, [seditious books] wherein theyr final intention appeareth to be to blaspheme, and as it were to accurse theyr natiue countrey, … condemnyng generally the whole pollicie of the present estate, as hauing no religion, nor pietie, nor iustice, nor order, no good ministers at al, either for diuine or humane causes: & yet to abuse such as are strangers to the state, they haue glosed some of theyr late libelled bookes with argumentes of discoueries of treasons, intended, as they do craftily alleage, by some special persons beyng counsaylers, agaynst her Maiestie, and the state of this crowne and Realme, with reprocheful tearmes of most notorious false assertions and allegations: bendyng theyr mallice moste specially agaynst two, who be certaynely knowen to haue alwayes ben moste studiously and faythfully careful of her Maiesties prosperous estate, and vertuous gouernment. … These cheefly, besyde theyr general reproouing of al other, hauyng charge in this gouernment, they studie by theyr venemous and lying bookes, to haue specially myslyked of her Maiestie, contrary to theyr manyfolde desertes, so approoued by long and manifest experience, whiche both her Maiestie, and al the rest of her good counsaylours and nobilitie, with other the states of the Realme, haue had, and dayly haue of the very same counsaylours, who also are the more to be allowed of her Maiestie, in that she seeth, and of her owne meere knowledge truely vnderstandeth, that al the perticuler matters wherewith the sayde libellers labour to charge the sayd counsaylours, as offences, be vtterly improbable & false, as in like maner generally, al others her Maiesties counsellours, ministers, and subiectes of vnderstandying, in euery degree, do repute, accept, & know the same to be. …

    (fol. 151)

    The proclamation concludes by charging “al manner of persons, to despise, reiect, and destroy suche bookes and libelles, whensoeuer they shal come to theyr handes, for the malitious slaunders and vntruethes conteyned in them, and that no man wyllyngly do bryng into this Realme, dispearse, dispose, or delyuer to any other, or keepe any of the sayde bookes or libelles without destroying [them] …” (A Booke Containing all svch Proclamations, As were Pvblished Dvring the Raigne of the late Queene Elizabeth, Collected together by … Humfrey Dyson, of the City of London Publique Notary [London, 1618], fol. 152).

15. See Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare's “Histories”: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1947), 322. Milward discusses Leslie's Treatise of Treasons but tries unconvincingly to relate it to Richard II and Troilus and Cressida; see Shakespeare's Religious Background, 186-90.

16. [John Leslie,] A Treatise of Treasons Against Q. Elizabeth, and the Croune of England … ([Paris,] 1572/3), sig. ã5^r.

17. Leslie, sigs. ẽ3^r-ẽ5^v; see also sig. L5^r.

18. Leslie, sig. ẽ4^v.

19. Leslie concludes his comparison: “hauing shewed the one [Richard of Gloucester] already to haue extirped the Issue and Line of king Edward the fourth, and the other now to tende to the rooting out of all Heires of your [Queen Elizabeth's] blood Roiall …” (sig. Q6^r). Compare this with the following exchange in The true Tragedie:

    GLO.

    Clarence, excuse me to the king my brother,

    I must to London on a serious matter. …

    CLA.

    About what, prethe tell me?

    GLO.

    The Tower man, the Tower, Ile root them out

    (sig. E5^r)

20. Leslie, sigs. R2^v-R3^v.

21. Leslie, sig. R3^v.

22. William Cardinal Allen, quoted here from Kingdon, ed., 108-9. In 1585 Nicholas Sander similarly charged that Arden had been executed “shamefully” (Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism (1585), trans. David Lewis [London: Burns and Oates, 1877], 322).

23. See Robert Parsons, The Copie of a Leter, Wryten by a Master of Arte of Cambrige (1584), ed. D. M. Rogers (Ilkley, Yorkshire, and London: The Scolar Press, 1974), 103 and passim. This letter also describes three previous reigns in which excessive favoritism of wicked counselors led to the king's downfall: those of Edward II, Richard II, and Henry VI (102-3).

24. Leycesters Commonwealth was partly modeled on Leslie's A Copie of a Letter Writen out of Scotland (ca. 1572).

25. On Shakespeare's sympathies with this house and county, see Richard Dutton, “Shakespeare and Lancaster,” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly] 49 (1998): 1-21.

26. Burghley has been thought to be satirized elsewhere in Shakespeare's works. Jonathan Bate has recently suggested that Sonnets 1, 2, and 3 may also poke fun at Burghley's failure to persuade the earl of Southampton to marry his granddaughter Bridget Vere in 1597—if Southampton is identified with “Mr W. H.”; see The Genius of Shakespeare (London: Picador, 1997), 49.

27. Gary Taylor argues that “it is a short step from Persons, Allen, Southwell, and Farin to Shakespeare” (“Forms of Opposition: Shakespeare and Middleton,” English Literary Renaissance 24 [1994]: 283-314, esp. 306).

28. Richard Wilson, “Shakespeare and the Jesuits,” Times Literary Supplement, 19 December 1997, p. 12.