Enter Anne, Stage Left
Anyone familiar with Oxfordian reading of the Shake-speare canon knows Anne Cecil appears in many guises. She’s Desdemona, Ophelia, Helena – the virtuous lady wrongly suspected, the dutiful wife who failed to give her wayward husband an heir in a reasonable length of time. He didn’t help things by refusing to sleep with her.
The letter from Dr. Masters to Lord Burghley paints a picture of a distraught young woman unhappily pregnant and convinced her husband, away on his travels, would not accept the child as his. She knew him pretty well. I’m not sure if she was really asking for an abortion (with herbs?) or just wanting her body to return to its normal monthly cycle (she might have been in denial that she was really pregnant). In any event she seems to have been ill and the treatment sounds like it was enough to kill them both! The ever clever Lord Burghley countered the rumors this was not Edward’s child by spreading them even further in defense of his daughter’s honor and Edward returned with cuckoldry on his mind. He’d just been cast nearly naked on the English shore by pirates who had no more respect for him than those in Hamlet had for the Prince of Denmark. He was not in the mood.
At some point, to convince him he was really Elizabeth’s father, he was told he’d been “bed-tricked”. I imagine the scene might have gone something like this:
Anne: My Lord, don’t you remember that night when you were so drunk you could hardly get it………….(aside to Lord Burghley) Father, what am I supposed to say next?
Burghley hastily flips through the Bible looking for the story of Leah.
Polonius: (whispers) Ah, here’s something on the Virgin……no…..we can’t use that. Wherefore art my Decameron?
Edward, having read much of Lord Burghley’s 1700 volume library, may have had some serious doubts about this, but after five years of separation they reconcilled and lived more or less happily ever after until she died at 31.
The story showed up in The History and Topography of the County of Essex by Thomas Wright (1836), Vol. I. p. 516.
“According to this insane resolution, he (Oxford) not only forsook his lady’s bed, but sold and wasted the best part of his inheritance…. The father of the Lady Anne, by stratagem, contrived that her husband should, unknowingly, sleep with her, believing her to be another woman, and she bore a son to him, in consequence of this meeting.”
In Traditional Memoirs of the Reigns of Q. Elizabeth & King James I, Francis Osborne tells of a nobleman being so humiliatingly worsted in a quarrel he was
“. . . left nothing to testify his manhood but a beard and children, by that daughter of the last great Earl of Oxford, whose lady was brought to his Bed under the notion of his Mistress, and from such a virtuous deceit she (the Countess of Montgomery) is said to proceed.”
I’m not sure how the son got to be the daughter, but fool me once………Their only son died soon after birth in 1583.
Anne was far beneath Edward’s station and Edward may have had annulment on his mind. Oxford’s father, the 16th Earl, had arranged a marriage for him with one of the sisters of Henry Hastings, 3rd Earl of Huntingdon, but Earl John died suddenly soon after making his will. As it worked out, the chief “beneficiary” was Robert Dudley. Elizabeth elevated William Cecil (it’s good to be the queen) and this may have helped a bit, but Edward may have regarded Anne as a kid sister from their time together in Burghley’s household and not the great, passionate love of his life. Edward, who often signed his name with seven crowns until James ascended the throne, would have had a stonger claim through the earlier marriage arrangement.
Their early life at Wivenhoe seems to have been a case of Edward breaking loose after a wardship in which his every waking moment was structured while Anne wondered what she’d gotten herself into. They were childless after nearly four years of marriage. David Roper says Edward believed human gestation was a year (the stars were in their crystal spheres, too) and that’s why it couldn’t have been his child. In another version, he became enraged when he was told that the daughter had been born some 12 months after the last time he bedded Anne. But the whisperings of Rowland Yorke (and/or Lord Henry Howard), who reportedly banned Anne from the earl’s bedchamber, apparently Iagoed him to action. “I must let you understand this much: that is, until I can better satisfy or advertise myself of some mislikes, I am not determined, as touching my wife, to accompany her.”
Poor Anne must have known he had a mistress in order to go along with, or even be part of, the story. Did she have a Jackie Kennedy attitude about it or was she as deeply hurt as any innocent of our time would be?
I couldn’t find a portrait of Anne, but David Roper (in Proving Shakespeare) suggests her hand may be reaching from heaven (see above) to rescue Edward from his Attic love with Southampton.
I’ve been watching Branagh’s Hamlet on DVD, complete with Robin Williams dressed like the gatekeeper from the Wizard of Oz, and wonder if Kenneth Branagh (a closet doubter in denial, perhaps) was aware of how much he resembled this Hilliard miniature of Edward de Vere:
Any resemblance between the Hilliard of the young man with a hand, once thought to be of William of Stratford hanging on to his muse, and the identified miniature of de Vere is purely coincidental, of course.
I have no idea why anyone thought the young man with the hand was Shakespeare in the first place.
The hand (if hers) may be all we see of Anne Cecil, but we can wonder if she let someone console her. If her husband was the Bard he immortalized her and expressed deep regret over his shabby treatment of her following the affront to his honor (never mind he lived with a courtesan while in Italy). But, seriously, would you believe that bed-trick story?
If women could be fair and yet not fond,
Or that their love were firm not fickle, still,
I would not marvel that they make men bond,
By service long to purchase their good will;
But when I see how frail those creatures are,
I muse that men forget themselves so far.
To mark the choice they make, and how they change,
How oft from Phoebus do they flee to Pan,
Unsettled still like haggards wild they range,
These gentle birds that fly from man to man;
Who would not scorn and shake them from the fist
And let them fly fair fools which way they list.
Yet for disport we fawn and flatter both,
To pass the time when nothing else can please,
And train them to our lure with subtle oath,
Till, weary of their wiles, ourselves we ease;
And then we say when we their fancy try,
To play with fools, O what a fool was I. – Edward Oxenford
Lee said,
December 27, 2009 at 7:46 am
Professor Leslie Hotson, the guy who discovered the documents proving Marlowe had been killed by intelligencer, wrote a book Hilliard on Shakespeare arguing the impresa Man Clasping Hand With Cloud was William Shakespeare painted from life. His argument centered around the hand belonging to Apollo and the sitter being portrayed as Mercury. It’s a pretty tedious argument but not without its points. Hotson also tracked down a copy of the impresa made, supposedly, from the original. Unlike the original, now in the V&A, this copy, which had blue eyes, had not been scrapped and overpainted; therefore Hotson believed this copy proved that Shakespeare had blue eyes and not brown ones.
Hotson didn’t in anyway attach the Hilliard miniature with Stratford Willy (not to be confused with Boxcar Willy) only with the poet who wrote the works of Shakespeare. Hotson was of course a traditional scholar and not an Oxfordian; nevertheless his interpretation of the miniature fits Oxford perhaps even better than it does Stratford Bill.
librarylu said,
December 27, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Thanks, Lee. I knew Dr. Hotson made the identification but I didn’t know the details. I just found the book, used, at Amazon for the price of a hamburger and have placed it in my shopping cart along with one on Edward de Vere’s importance in Elizabethan literary circles.
At Art.com the portrait is “possibly of William Shakespeare”. I’m not finding a commoner in the bunch:
http://www.art.com/gallery/id–a8146/nicholas-hilliard-posters.htm
David Roper points out the young man is in mourning and the year is the year Anne died. The hand from the cloud looks feminine to me (I don’t think Apollo would have been caught dead in a cuff like that).
According to the V&A site:
“With its allegory of the symbolically linked hands and the mysterious motto, which still has not been satisfactorily explained, this miniature typifies the emblematic mystery encouraged by Queen Elizabeth I’s Accession Day ceremonial jousts. These great public tournaments centred around the Queen receiving the homage of her young knights, each of whom presented her with a shield bearing an impresa, a combination of picture and motto ‘borne by noble personages to notify some particular conceit of their own’. In much the same way, this miniature – uniting portrait, allegorical symbol and obscure motto – becomes a single statement of the ideals and allegiances of the sitter, to be shared only with those within his intimate circle. The clasped hands are a symbol of concord and plighted faith, here presumably between the stylish young courtier and his lady. Such complex messages on portraits would have been determined by discussions between the sitter and Nicholas Hilliard, the artist.”
I haven’t found anything about a tournament in 1588 (too busy wih the Armada?) but Edward was in one in 1584 in which “the knights dressed in queer costumes, some as savages, some like the natives of Ireland, etc.” I think it’s safe to assume the Stratford man wasn’t in it.
Rahul Gupta said,
March 4, 2012 at 12:02 pm
I’m assuming ‘wherefore art’ above is purely jocular but incongruous reference to ‘Romeo and Juliet’, since it doesn’t make sense in the context. ‘Wherefore’ means ‘why’, not ‘where’. Lord Burghley is more likely to have said ‘Where be..’