Shakespeare and the Danvers-Long Feud

A new source for Romeo and Juliet?

A. L. Rowse

Dr Johnson was 'always inclined to believe that Shakespeare has more allusions to particular facts and persons than his readers commonly suppose'. This was very perspicacious of him; and now that we know so much more about Shakespeare's life and times, we can use that knowledge to illuminate his plays. As a practical man of the theatre, with keen box-office sense, he was ready to respond to what was in the news at the time. This was true of him from beginning to end of his career. With Henry VI he was responding to popular interest in Essex's campaign in Normandy in 1591 — so successfully that he went on to make a trilogy of it. Towards the end, The Tempest was inspired by the shipwreck of the Sea Venture on Bermuda, and the account of it that was sent back to Blackfriars — the tornado, total loss of the ship, not a life lost, etc. Similarly, a main theme of Ham- let is the question of the succession to the throne; that and the tragic career of Essex dominated the public mind in 1600-1.. All this is perfectly clear and well known, and yet the knowledge is rarely made use of by the Shakespeare Industry, conventional commentators on his work. Here is a new edition of Romeo and Juliet in the New Cambridge Shakespeare, edited by the leading textual scholar at Harvard, who writes to me regretting that

he had quite overlooked the circumstances that suggested to Shakespeare the theme of feud. Of course, he had ready to hand a literary source in the well-known Italian story englished by Arthur Brooke. What called Shakespeare's attention to it at that particular moment?

Quite clearly the sensation that was made by the feud between the Danvers family and the Longs in Wiltshire, which led to the killing of Henry Long, the son and heir of a leading family there, the pursuit of the two brothers responsible, Sir Charles and Sir Henry Danvers, to Henry of Navarre, now Henri IV, in France.

This was no mere local affair. The Danvers brothers were courtiers, friends of Essex and of Shakespeare's young patron, Southampton, their neighbour in the coun- try who helped them to make their get- away. The affair created any amount of trouble, and involved the highest person- ages. The State Papers are full of corres- pondence relating to it. The brothers were well received by Henri IV, and, both of them soldiers, good swordsmen, well con- nected and educated, served him in the field. It was over three years before they were pardoned; meanwhile, letters went to and fro, to Robert Cecil and the Queen, from visiting grandees and from the. King himself, interceding for them and putting their case. Perhaps in the end their mother,

Lady Danvers, made the most effective advocate — we shall see how.

The feud had been going on for some time and involved the retainers, in the usual way. There was no question but that the Longs' faction had killed a Danvers man, and then managed to get the culprit off at Assizes. Sir John Danvers, the head of his family, indicted one of the Longs' follow- ing for robbing a church. Sir Walter Long put up a man to indict 'Mr Danvers', a usual way of referring to a knight (as with `Mr W. H.'). It was generally held that Sir John was of a peaceable, 'even-tempered' disposition; but this was far from the case with his wife and two sons, who were bent on revenge.

On Friday 4 October 1594, the Danvers brothers gathered their following together and made for Corsham in Wiltshire. It may have been Justices' day, for there was a considerable party at dinner at Mr Cham- berlain's house: Sir Walter Long, Henry his son and heir, Anthony Mildmay and divers other J.P.'s and gentlemen. The Danvers party pressed into the house; there was a violent scene, and there must have been a scuffle — difficult to make out, naturally enough. Apparently Sir Charles, the elder brother, the shorter of the two, received a wound, for we hear of his saddle all bloody; then Sir Henry, the younger and taller, shot and killed Henry Long. John Aubrey, who was a Danvers

cousin, tells us that 'R. Wisdom and then lecturer and preached that day, and Henry Long expired in his arms.'

The brothers then made across country to Titchfield, to their friend, young South- ampton, for aid. He put them up at a lodge in his park from Saturday to Tuesday, while preparations were made by his ste- ward, Mr Dymoke, for their escape. A servant girl washed the brothers' shirts for them, one of them covered with blood; a stableman later gave evidence as to 'a maidenhair-coloured velvet saddle' all bloody. The brothers, with their atten- dants, were got over the water to Calshot Castle, while waiting for a boat to take them across the Channel to safety. Some years later, when Sir Charles was involved in Essex's rebellion, he deposed that he was persuaded into it by Southampton, to whom he had owed his life.

We need not go into the details of their escape, except for one very revealing piece of evidence. The hue and cry was up in all the country; when the Sheriff was passing over Itchen ferry in pursuit, 'one Florio an Italian, and one Drewell, a servant of the Earl of Southampton', threatened to throw the Sheriff overboard. Meanwhile, the young Earl had hurried off to London away from the scene. John Florio, later well known for his Italian dictionary and translations, was Southampton's tutor in the language and household servant — as such, well known to William Shakespeare, the Earl's poet.

It all made a shocking affair, the knights guilty of murder, and of treason for flying abroad, their property forfeited.

Their gentle old father died immediately after the disaster to his family — Aubrey tells us that 'his sons' sad accident brake his heart'. This was his wife's view too, though she was far from giving up — she took an active step to help her sons' cause. 'To obtain pardons for her sons she married Sir Edmund Carey, cousin-german to Queen Elizabeth, but kept him to hard meat.'

This is correct: Edmund Carey was a younger son of Lord Chamberlain Huns- don, patron of Shakespeare's Company and protector of Emilia Bassano, the Dark

Lady of the Company's actor-playwright. The more one knows of these things, the more they connect up, and the farther one sees into them. Young Carey had no provision for him from his father; marrying a rich widow offered a prospect for hum though for her — although she went te. Court to lay her suit before the Queen --It did not obtain results for some time.

She was herself a remarkable woman; daughter and co-heiress of the last 10u Latimer, with all the spirit of her famous Neville ancestors. Her sons got their fight' ing spirit from her, not from the father" Aubreycalls her 'an Italian'; he means that she had an Italian temperament (like Emi- lia Bassano!), `prodigous parts for . 3 woman . . she had Chaucer at her f111- gers' ends. A great politician [i.e. intri, guer]; great wit and spirit, but revengeful. We can see that from her letters to Robert Cecil, telling him not to begin the Henry Long's death, but to go back to til`" murder of Danvers' man, the open abuses to his chief officer, and the letters to her son Charles 'of such form as the heart of a man had rather die than endure'. Her husband had been killed with grief; so the Longs have had three lives for one, SI! John and two of his men.

I leave it to othqrs to make any compare sons there may be with the play: til spirited and vengeful Lady Capulet, out t° revenge her nephew; the more easy-Ong head of the Montagues, more peaceablY inclined. Most perceptive people have seen that there is more than a suggestion 111 Mercutio of Marlowe, who was killed ontY. the year before. I will only say that re writers write out of real experiences an what is going on around them, and Shakespeare was close to these sensational happenings through his association With Southampton, the friend — and, I suspect' rather more — of handsome young Hell Danvers (who never married). Moreover' what is the point of yet another convention' al edition of a single Shakespeare Pig' when we already have scores of there, many of them quite good and more t11311 sufficient? Lady Danvers lies under one of the nWsi beautiful of all Nicholas Stone's effigies, at Stow-Nine-Churches in Northampton: shire; instead of a rigid figure, she lie' there in rare free-flowing form as if asleep' (When I went to see her there just after the war, an American soldier had been cli,se°, vered with a crow-bar in the church!) 0;f Danvers were evidently connoisseurs; Henry, later made Earl of Danby, , gave the famous Botanical Garden beside Magdalen Bridge to Oxford. There you can see Lial bearded head over the baroque Port ,. designed by Nicholas Stone. Only ti,,' other day, at the Charles I Exhibition, We could see those features in one of the grandest of all Vandyke's state portraits brought from Leningrad; for it was one of the pictures sold from Sir Robert W.aI, pole's collection at Houghton to Catherine the Great, by his fool of a grandson, to Horace Walpole's proper disgust.