The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street (17 page)

The wording is curious, as it is almost invariably the father who is named as the parent of a dead child, or if the mother is named she is specified as a widow. In the twenty years from 1593 to 1612 - the last decade of Elizabeth and the first of King James - there were buried at St Olave’s 172 children or minors: people young enough for their parentage to be identified in the burial entry. Marie Mountjoy’s child is one of only four instances where the mother is named without the explanation of widowhood. Of the others, two are definitely illegitimate children and the third probably is too. In the register of births, the pattern is even clearer. Out of several hundred baptismal entries only five name the mother, and in each case the wording shows that the child is illegitimate.
³⁷

The scribal conventions of the St Olave’s register seem to imply that the unbaptized baby buried in February 1596 was a child of Marie Mountjoy’s by someone other than her husband. It is not so easy to translate this into actuality. Why was the child not presented to the world as Christopher’s even if it was not? Does it mean Marie Mountjoy had a publicly acknowledged lover? I do not think the evidence is strong enough to be sure. It remains a rumour, a whisper of scandal in the faded pages of the old parish register - but it is not the only indication of a certain sexual raciness in the Mountjoy household.

12

Dr Forman’s casebook

W
e are prey to the randomness of historical evidence. Whole tracts of Marie Mountjoy’s life are lost to us; we scrabble around for a few fragments of data, but know nothing of importance about her. She marries young; she works for a tailor; she gives birth to two children, one of whom dies. These things were important to her, of course, but they do not individuate her. What kind of person was she? What did she look like? At this more personal level she is little more to us than she was to the tax-collector who inscribed her as ‘——Mongey’.

And then for a moment we catch sight of her - a chance moment of actuality, recorded and preserved. It is a Saturday evening in the late summer of 1597, and she is looking somewhat vexed as she searches in her purse. ‘In Silver Street Mary Mountioy of 30 years lost out of her purse in the street as she went the 10 of Septembris last between 7 & 8 at night a gold ring, a hoop ring & a French crown.’ A couple of months later, the valuables still missing, she took a course that to us seems quaint but which was then the height of fashion: she went down to Philpot Lane in Billingsgate to consult the ‘cunning-man’ Simon Forman - ‘Oracle Forman’, as Ben Jonson called him - one of whose specialities was the recovery of lost or stolen objects. It is from Dr Forman’s casebook, under the date 22 November 1597, that the brief account above is taken (see Plate 15).
³⁸

We can sympathize with her loss. A French crown, a coin which circulated widely in England, had a value of about 7 shillings - perhaps about £70 at today’s prices. Together with the two rings, one of gold and the other possibly set with precious stones, she was down, in our terms, by some hundreds of pounds. To this is now added the cost of Forman’s services. He typically charged 3s 4d for a ‘councell’ or consultation in his surgery. (A course of medical treatment was considerably more - up to £12 - but not applicable on this occasion.)
³⁹

A hoop ring (or ‘hop rynge’ in Forman’s spelling) was a single band, usually of gold or silver, and often with a romantic ‘posy’ or motto carved inside it. Such a ring Graziano unwisely parts with in
The Merchant of Venice
-

a hoop of gold, a paltry ring

That she [Nerissa] did give me, whose posy was
For all the world like cutler’s poetry
Upon a knife: ‘Love me and leave me not.’ (5.1.147-50)

Mr Stephen carries one in his purse, in Jonson’s
Every Man in his Humour
(1598) - a ‘jet ring Mistress Mary sent me’, with the posy, ‘Though fancy sleep, my love is deep’ - and sends her another in return, less felicitously inscribed, ‘The deeper the sweeter, I’ll be judged by St Peter’ (2.2.33-9).

Dr Forman duly performed the astrological calculations, or ‘figure casting’, for which he was being paid, and these can be seen in the entry in his casebook. The figure is a grid of twelve squares, each representing a part (or ‘house’) of the heavens; it is an ‘horary’ figure, based on the position of the planets at the precise hour of the consultation. A later astrologer, William Lilly, notes that Forman was particularly ‘judicious and fortunate’ in ‘horary questions (especially thefts)’, so it seems Mrs Mountjoy had chosen well. She witnesses Forman’s performance - almanacs and ephemerides, consultations and calculations, and perhaps some ‘winking or tooting through a sixpenny Jacob’s staff’ (as Nashe irreverently puts it - a ‘Jacob’s staff’ was a kind of sextant used by astrologers).
⁴⁰
In the diary of the law student John Manningham there is an anecdote about a man who lost his purse, and - much like Marie - ‘resorted unto’ a cunning-man to ‘helpe him to it by figur-casting’. In this case the astrologer performs a little ritual: ‘he caste a paper into the chaffing dishe of coales which he placed before them’ and told the customer ‘he should looke in the glasse to see the visage of him that had it [the purse]’. It turns out this is a prank - the wizard is a friend in disguise - but the procedure may be authentic. A real cunning-man, Abraham Savory (whose earlier career was as an actor), claimed he could find lost or stolen goods ‘with the help of a familiar spirit who appeared to him at night as a naked arm’.
⁴¹

Another method for finding lost goods was to make a talisman or sigil, as this:

To know wher a thinge is y
^t
is stolen

Take vergine waxe & write upon yt Jasper + Melchiser + Balthasar + & put yt under his head to whom the good parteyneth & he shall knowe in his sleape where the thinges is become.

This appears, oddly enough, in the diary of the theatrical impresario Philip Henslowe, among the box-office receipts and cash advances to needy authors which are the diary’s more customary contents. The note is from an undated section of the diary, but nearby folios have records from 1596. It is possible the instructions for this talisman were provided by Dr Forman himself, for in 1596 Henslowe consulted him about some goods stolen from his house.
⁴²
We may tentatively add a little sequel to Marie’s visit to Forman - the inscribing of words and letters on a little sigil of ‘virgin wax’, the placing of it under her pillow in her bedroom on Silver Street.

I do not want to add credulousness to our still-meagre list of attributes for Marie Mountjoy. Forman was consulted by Elizabethans of all walks of life (except the poorest, who could not afford his charges). His surviving casebooks, which cover nearly six years, record over 8,000 consultations.
⁴³
We may smugly call him a charlatan, but he was genuine in his beliefs - he was not, as many were, a deliberate trickster - and probably had genuine qualities as a healer. A self-taught man, he was hounded by the Royal College of Physicians as an unlicensed practitioner. He criticized their methods, disdaining diagnosis by ‘paltry pisse’ (urinoscopy) and advocating moderate use of blood-letting. He speaks defiantly of his efficacy - and his courage - in treating victims of London’s plague epidemics:

Then cam the plague in sixtie thre [1603]
Whence all theis Docters fled.
I staid to save the lives of many
That otherwise had bin ded.
⁴⁴

He was a small, ugly, pugnacious man with a ferocious sexual appetite, to which many women, both patients and otherwise, responded. Various liaisons and seductions are discreetly recorded in the casebooks, tuned like everything else to the ‘horary’ disposition of the planets. His codeword for sexual intercourse was ‘halek’, which according to Jonathan Bate ‘has lexical resemblances to the Greek for “to grind” and “to fish”, both Elizabethan slang for having sex’, but which John Bossy derives more straightforwardly from Greek
alektur
, ‘cock’.
⁴⁵

The
locus classicus
of Forman studies is still A. L. Rowse’s
Casebooks of Simon Forman
(1974). Though supplanted and sometimes corrected by later studies, it was the first to sample the rich, dense sociology of the casebooks, which were then little known (and which are still unpublished). It was Rowse who spotted the Mountjoy entries, which he announced in an article in
The Times
, ‘The Secrets of Shakespeare’s Landlady’, on 23 April 1973. His chief quarry in the casebooks, however, was Emilia Lanier, the Italian-Jewish musician’s daughter whom he proposed, for seemingly cogent reasons, as the ‘Dark Lady’ of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. But Rowse’s research was flawed by a certain magisterial carelessness, and it was soon pointed out that Forman had not actually described Emilia Lanier as ‘brown’ (dark), but as ‘brave’ (beautiful, with an overtone of showiness), and that he did not give her husband’s forename as William (which would tie in neatly with wordplay on ‘will’ in the Sonnets) but as Alfonso.
⁴⁶
There are also some misreadings in Rowse’s information on the Mountjoys. Forman resembles modern doctors in at least one respect - his handwriting can be very difficult to read.

Forman consulted the stars to locate lost objects, but would also have employed more terrestrial methods. We may suppose he asked Mrs Mountjoy something further of the circumstances, rather as a policeman or detective might do. Whom did she see around the time that the objects went missing? Was there anyone she suspected of stealing them? Some such questions, perhaps, lie behind an interesting list of three names written down by Forman immediately below the astrological symbols. They are:

Henri Wood in Colman Street
Alis Floyd w[ith] my Lady of Hunstdean
Margaret Browne that was her servant

Mr Wood of Coleman Street we will meet shortly, and find that Forman had good reason to note him down as a figure of importance in Marie’s life. For the moment it is the two women, not mentioned by Rowse, who interest me.

Margaret Browne’s relationship to Mrs Mountjoy is explained in Forman’s note: she was an ex-servant. She is doubtless the Margery Browne who was baptized at St Olave’s on 14 February 1574: a local girl. Beneath her name Forman scribbles a brief description: ‘a talle wentch freckled face’. One should resist hearing a pejorative overtone in the word ‘wench’; it simply meant a girl or young woman (Middle English
wenchel
, ‘child’). The interest of the description is its provenance - Forman is quoting, or at least summarizing, the words of Marie Mountjoy. In the Belott- Mountjoy suit we hear her only faintly and retrospectively: she died some years before the case came to court. Here the phrasing comes from her direct. She is there in Forman’s fusty consulting room, among the sinister trinketry of his trade; she speaks and he writes. If I want to summon up a sense of Marie I imagine her saying the word ‘freckled’ in a French accent.

The date of Margaret Browne’s birth encourages the possibility that she is also the ‘Mary Browne of 24 yeares’ who consulted Forman a few weeks later, on 27 December 1597. (The variant forename is quite normal - John Heminges’s daughter Margeret is called Mary in the marriage registers of St Mary Woolnoth; and Forman’s own grandmother appears indifferently in his writings as Marian and Margery.)
⁴⁷
This Mary Browne came to Forman because she thought she was pregnant. He notes, ‘She hath much gravell in her Reins & heat of the back, pains stomach; she supposeth herself with child.’

If this is indeed Mrs Mountjoy’s former servant, she was apparently having premarital sex, since Margery Browne of St Olave’s did not marry until November 1600, nearly three years later. Perhaps she and her future husband, who lived in neighbouring Aldersgate, were already lovers. Or perhaps - equally possibly - this tall, freckled maidservant had received, willingly or otherwise, the sexual attentions of the master of the house, Mr Mountjoy. There are other instances in the casebooks of serving girls pregnant by their master.
⁴⁸
As we have seen, Mountjoy would be ‘censured’ for exactly this, by the elders of the French Church - ‘[Il] fut censure’ . . . d’avoir eu 2 bastardes de sa servante.’ This refers to a much later liaison, when he was a widower: a different time and a different servant,
⁴⁹
but adding some colour to the possibility that the pregnant maid Margaret Browne was another of Mountjoy’s amorous accomplices or victims.

This is unsubstantiated tittle-tattle, just like the idea that Marie’s own baby, born and buried the previous year, was illegitimate. We are in search of facts but we listen also to the whispers - and this is the second such whisper suggestive of a certain sexual looseness in the Mountjoys’ marriage. The French Church elders also state that Mountjoy had been brought before a magistrate for his ‘lewd acts and adulteries’ (
paillardises & adultères
), but they do not say when. The word ‘adultery’ makes one wonder if this happened during Marie’s lifetime. Probably not - the context would connect it to his later relationship with the maid and the
bastardes
produced by it. But again it throws a questioning light back on to the Mountjoys’ marriage.

The other woman mentioned by Marie, ‘Alis Floyd with my Lady of Huntsdean’, adds a rather different frisson of interest. Alice Floyd is also a servant - that is the meaning of ‘with’ in this context - but she is a servant or follower of a very illustrious mistress. ‘Huntsdean’ is Forman’s spelling of Hunsdon, as found elsewhere in the casebooks - ‘my old Lord of Hunstdean that was Chamberlain’.
⁵⁰
In that case he was referring to the 1st Lord Hunsdon, Henry Carey, who was Lord Chamberlain until his death in 1596. But when he writes of Lady ‘Huntsdean’ in November 1597, he is referring to the wife of the 2nd Lord Hunsdon, George Carey. She was Elizabeth
n’e
Spenser, and was noted as a patroness of writers. Among those who sing her praises were Edmund Spenser, who claimed kinship with her; Thomas Nashe, who dedicated to her his religious pamphlet of 1593,
Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem
; and the musician John Dowland, whose
First Book of Songs and Ayres
- dedicated to Hunsdon, and published this year 1597 - refers to her ‘singular graces towards me’.
⁵¹