The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street (18 page)

It is only a fleeting reference, but this is a first hint of contact between Marie Mountjoy and Shakespeare: an intersection of circles. George Carey, 2nd Lord Hunsdon, was the patron of Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. His father had been their first patron, when the troupe was inaugurated in 1594; George inherited both the company and, in early 1597, the Chamberlainship (which was a relief to the players, as the interim Chamberlain, Lord Cobham, was no friend to the theatre). In March 1597 the company put on Shakespeare’s comedy
The Merry Wives of Windsor
, hastily written to celebrate Hunsdon’s forthcoming investiture as a Knight of the Garter. It was performed before the Queen, at Whitehall Palace - Hunsdon was her cousin (he was a great-nephew of Anne Boleyn) and a favourite. According to tradition, it was she who suggested the basic theme of the play: ‘Falstaff in love’.
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Lady Hunsdon would have been a guest of honour at this gala performance, and perhaps her servant Alice Floyd was somewhere in the audience as well.

Alice herself remains elusive. She does not feature in Hunsdon’s will, where the only female servant of Lady Hunsdon mentioned is ‘Teesye Purdue my wives Gentlewoman’.
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The surname is Welsh, a variant of Lloyd, and is also found as Fludd or Flood. Perhaps Marie knows her because she is a relative of Humphrey Fludd, the stepfather of their apprentice, Stephen Belott. Another Elizabethan clan was the Fludds of Bearstead, Kent. Sir Thomas Fludd was a wealthy civil servant; his son was the future philosopher Robert Fludd, currently a student at Oxford, and soon to be established as an astrologer-physician like Forman. The Jane Fludd who appears in Forman’s casebooks is Robert’s sister-in-law, a rather racy young lady. It is possible Alice was related to these Fludds, though she was not one of Sir Thomas’s three daughters.
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That Marie knew Lady Hunsdon’s servant Alice Floyd in 1597 does not, of course, mean that she also knew Lord Hunsdon’s servant William Shakespeare in that year. We do not quite get contact, but we are close. This briefly mentioned and otherwise unknown Alice brings the two protagonists of this story into proximity with one another, and suggests the kind of courtly theatrical context in which they might have met: the tirewoman and the playmaker, not so very different in status.

Just ten days later, on 1 December 1597, Mrs Mountjoy is back in Dr Forman’s consulting room. This time she has a rather different matter to discuss, for she thinks she might be pregnant. ‘Videtur esse gravid x xi hebdomadas,’ Forman writes - she seems to be ten or eleven weeks pregnant. He briskly notes her symptoms: ‘pains head side stomach . . . swimming in the head, weakness in the legs’. He thinks she will miscarry: ‘7 weeks more’ and then it will ‘come from’ her.
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Marie was accompanied by another woman who also ‘seems to be pregnant’ - Ellen Carrell or Carowle (Forman gives both spellings). The lay-out and wording of the entry shows that the two women were seen together - perhaps a precaution, given the Doctor’s goatish reputation. This friend of Marie Mountjoy’s leads us once again into the literary world of late Elizabethan London. In this year 1597 there appeared on the bookstalls a collection of love-lorn sonnets entitled
Laura: The Toyes of a Traveller
, by ‘R.T., gentleman’. The author was one Robert Tofte, a dilettante poet and translator who had travelled on the continent for some years. The poet bewails, in standard Petrarchan vein, the cruel indifference of his mistress, and he drops some teasing hints as to her identity. In a prefatory poem she is called ‘la bellissima sua signora E.C.’ - ‘for thee only’, he says, the ensuing sonnets ‘were devisde’. This beautiful ‘E.C.’ - an older married woman - is further identified in some heavily signalled word-play in Sonnet 33 of
Laura
, where his passion for her:

gainst all sense makes me of CARE and IL
More than of good and ComfoRT to have will.

The capitalized letters spell out the surname ‘Careil’ and then his own initials ‘R.T.’. Her name is confirmed in Tofte’s follow-up,
Alba: The Months Mind of a Melancholy Lover
(1598), where a similar crossword-clue -

Then constant CARE not comfort I do crave
And (might I chuse) I CARE with L would have

- gives her surname as ‘Carel’. (The Elizabethans, I should add, loved this sort of
à clef
stuff.)
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Literary historians have sought in vain for Tofte’s mistress - W. C. Hazlitt thought her forename was ‘Euphemia’, but neglected to say why; Tofte’s Victorian editor, A. B. Grosart, thought she might be connected with Sir Edward Caryll of Bedstone, Sussex, but no suitably initialled female could be found. Here, surely, she is - Ellen Carrell, accompanying Marie Mountjoy to Dr Forman’s in December 1597. She has the right name; she is of the right sort of age (forty-two in 1597, according to Forman, some seven years older than her
cavaliere servente
Tofte); and she is in the right sort of social milieu. Tofte had spent three years in Europe, and his translations show him fluent both in French and Italian - he is one of those fashionably (or affectedly) continental Elizabethans who are guyed by satirists like Nashe. It would not be at all surprising if he and his ‘mistress’ knew the Mountjoys. Perhaps Ellen Carrell was one of their customers, as Alice Floyd and Lady Hunsdon may have been. Whether her pregnancy in December 1597 has also to do with Tofte cannot be known.

And if Marie’s friend is indeed Tofte’s muse, she swiftly brings us - as Alice Floyd did - to a contemporary performance of a Shakespearean comedy, for the chief reason why Tofte’s outpourings have not been long ago forgotten is that a sonnet in
Alba
contains the earliest-known allusion to
Love’s Labour’s Lost
:

Loves Labor Lost, I once did see
A play ycleped so, so called to my paine,
Which I to heare to my small joy did stay,
Giving attendance on my froward dame,
My misgiving mind presaging to me ill,
Yet was I drawne to see it gainst my will.

There is, of course, no guarantee that Tofte is reporting an actual occasion, but we can at least take it as another literary clue about his troublesome (‘froward’) mistress, Mrs Care-ill or Carrell. She is a playgoer, and a ‘pleasant conceited comedie by W. Shakespeare’ - as
Love’s Labours
is described in the 1598 quarto - is just the kind of play you might see her at.
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Tofte’s fondness for semi-cryptic identifications is found else-where - in one poem he puns on the name of his landlady, Mrs Goodall; in another he calls the poet Samuel Daniel ‘him that title beres of prophets twaine’ - but one that catches my eye is not a literary pun but a handwritten annotation in Tofte’s own copy of the 1561 folio edition of Chaucer. There, beneath the prologue to Chaucer’s
Testament of Love
, Tofte wrote: ‘In lode de la Madama Marie M—donzella bellessa et gentildonna’ (In praise of My Lady [or Madame?] Marie M—, damsel, beauty and gentlewoman).
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‘Damsel’ and ‘gentlewoman’ are hardly appropriate for her (if taken literally), but I am still tempted to wonder if the roving eye of Robert Tofte had alighted on Marie Mountjoy, the friend of Ellen Carrell. If so - and it is no more than an ‘if’ - we would learn for the first time that Marie was a ‘beauty’.

On 7 March 1598 Marie is back with Forman - her third and last visit, and one that would have required crossing the river to Lambeth, where Forman had moved at Christmas 1597, and where he lived till his death in 1611. She comes to ask if her husband will be sick: ‘Mrs Mountioy p [pro] marito suo Utrum egrotet.’
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Marie’s enthusiasm for the astrologer’s skills seems to have worked on her husband, for now ‘Mr Mountioy’ himself appears in the casebooks, twice, asking about his apprentice. The apprentice is not Stephen Belott but a young man called Ufranke de la Cole or Coles. The first entry, on 22 March, reads simply: ‘Mr Mountioy for his man qui abscurr’. The last word is a contraction of ‘abscurrit’ - Mountjoy’s question concerns an apprentice ‘who has absconded’. (Rowse tripped up here, misreading the Latin ‘qui abscurr’ as a name, ‘Gui Asture’, thus providing Mountjoy with an extra, fictitious French apprentice.) The second entry, a week later, tells us more: ‘Mr Mountioy for his man Ufranke de la Coles 1598 the 29 March. Qui abscurrit. He was in St Katherine’s and he came new [returned] unto Mountjoy’s house about the 29 March being Friday where he was taken & committed to prison.’
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It is not quite clear what the story is. Was Coles arrested because he had run away, thus breaking his indenture as an apprentice? Or had he run away in the first place to escape arrest for some other offence?

Coles may be related to Peter Coale, ‘picture-maker’, listed in the 1593 Return of Strangers. He was from Antwerp, but was French speaking, and a member of the French Church. He lived near by, in the parish of St Botolph’s, Aldersgate, and was himself in prison in 1593.
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Part of what makes Forman’s casebooks so vivid is the fact that they were written down live, on the spot,
currente calamo
. He asks, he listens, he observes, he writes. The words he writes are often formulaic - thus when a woman ‘supposeth herself with child’, a frequent formula, the phrase is Forman’s not hers - but nonetheless these entries in his casebooks are redolent of the physical presence of Marie Mountjoy as she explains to him the small dramas of her life and her body: the lost rings, the freckled wench, the swimming in her head, the ever-present possibility of pregnancy.

And then there are the revelations about her love-life. Beneath Forman’s brusque account of the missing valuables appears the name Henry Wood - a name volunteered by Marie. Was she visiting him on that September evening, when she lost those things from her purse ‘as she went’? It is not unlikely, for Wood himself soon makes an appearance in Forman’s casebooks, and one of his visits evokes a tremor of romance (see Plate 17) -

Mr Wood p [pro] Mari M
Vtrum gerit Amorem erga
alterum noc [nocte] 1598 the
20 march
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There is no doubt that this ‘Mari M’ is Marie Mountjoy. Mr Wood comes to Forman after dark (
nocte
, ‘at night’), and he asks ‘whether she bears love towards the other man’ - a question which immediately suggests his own romantic involvement with her, and his fear of a rival. One perceives the hint of a narrative. In December 1597 Marie fears she is pregnant, which Forman seems to confirm - she is ten or eleven weeks gone. He also predicts she will miscarry, and as there is no evidence of any child born to Marie in 1598 we might think he was right. A few months later her lover Henry is fretting that she no longer cares for him. Perhaps the alteration in her feelings was precipitated by this narrow escape from the personal and practical difficulties of an illicit pregnancy - possibly not her first. This is speculation, but that Marie had some kind of affair with Wood seems fairly certain from the wording of his query.

Henry Wood, as we learn from other entries in Forman’s casebooks - which concern affairs of business rather than the heart - was a ‘mercer’, by definition a general trader but in Elizabethan usage a trader in cloth. He was born on 18 August 1566, a punctilious piece of information (Forman usually only gives a querent’s age in years) which perhaps reflects a punctiliousness of Mr Wood’s. He was thus about the same age as Marie. He was himself married, so if there was an affair between them it was doubly duplicitous. The Woods lived down Swan Alley, a little sidestreet off Coleman Street too insignificant to appear on the Agas map or in Stow’s
Survay
. Coleman Street itself, running up from Cheapside to Moorgate, was an important street of well-to-do merchants’ houses. It could be reached from Marie’s house in about ten minutes, walking east along Addle Street and across Aldermanbury.

We learn a little of Henry Wood’s dealings in the import- export business. In early December 1597, while Marie worries about pregnancy, Wood sails to Amsterdam with two ‘hoys’ (small trading vessels), the
Paradise
and the
Griffin
. A few weeks later he is asking Forman if he will get a good price for his ‘Holland cloth’ in France. He also asks if he should buy a consignment of ‘bay salt’ (salt from the Bay of Biscay). In the summer of 1598 he has business problems: ‘It seemeth that his goods will be attached [confiscated].’ But perhaps the malaise is personal too - Forman divines, ‘Some great enemy will proffer him friendship but treachery will follow.’ Wood was a householder and a businessman, but not a very big fish: in the Coleman Street subsidy lists of 1599 he is assessed on goods valued at £3.
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Sometimes it is Mrs Wood who visits Forman, anxious for Henry’s safety on his trips abroad. On one occasion, she fears he has been ‘taken by the Dunkirkers’ - pirates in the English Channel. Forman reassures: ‘They away shall arrive safe, so shall himself also, & let him take heed & look well, and he shall pass very swiftly within these 3 days.’ And then there is a further twist, as Mrs Wood comes to ask Forman if she should ‘keep shop’ with Marie Mountjoy. ‘They may join,’ he opines, ‘but take heed they trust not out their wares much, or they shall have loss.’ We can surmise that the shop would combine the cloths imported by Henry Wood with the couturier skills - and perhaps the upmarket clientele - of the Mountjoy workshop. The relationship between Henry and Marie is thus commercial as well as carnal. Mrs Wood discusses a partnership with Marie, apparently unaware of any backstairs intrigue between Marie and her husband. Marie is a deceiver in this, though of course her relationship with Henry may now be over.