The True Story of Mary Fitton

A. L. Rowse

We can now be certain who the Dark Lady, Shakespeare's mistress, was — Emilia Bassano, the musical and proud Italian girl, the discarded mistress of Lord Chamberlain Huns don, first cousin of Queen 'Elizabeth I and' head of Shakespeare's famous Company of players. It always was nonsense to think of Mary Fitton in the role; she wasn't dark at all, nor do dates or circumstances correspond.

But Mary Fitton's true story is quite fascinating — we know a great deal more of her than we do of most of Queen Elizabeth's maids of honour, if that is the word for it — they were apt to be frail creatures.

There is no mystery about Mary; she was not a frail creature, but a decidedly tough one; she survived a lifetime of scandal and trouble to be an old lady, who outlived family, husbands and her various lovers. She was a brazen hussy (as some thought) — or a woman made for love, more than usually capable of giving and receiving it — according to taste.

She was the daughter of a Cheshire knight of old family, Sir Edward Fitton, and his wife who was a bit of a Lancashire heiress. At Gawsworth — that attractive village with several ancient houses grouped around the mere — their old half-timbered Hall still stands. So does the monument to Sir Edward and his wife in the church, with the two little girls, Anne and Mary, kneeling piously at the foot.

Sir Edward used his friendship with Sir William Knollys, who was Comptroller of the Household to Queen Elizabeth, to secure for his younger daughter a much-coveted post as maid of honour. There was tremendous competition for this opening, for it could lead to a grand marriage, or at least a good catch. For Mary it led to a gamble — and social disaster.

Anne had been safely married at twelve to a boy of sixteen, John Newdigate, in whose family the letters have come down from which we can reconstruct the story.

Mary was seventeen when she got her chance at Court in 1595, and at first all went well. But there was an element of danger, with so vivacious and attractive, so temperamental, a girl. She was not dark but fair, fair complexion, brown hair, grey eyes, narrow pointed face, long, sexy nose. She had one of the Queen's horses to ride: a fine big bay, known as Bay Fitton. Her father's old friend, Sir William, promised to look after the girl. His father was a cousin of the Queen, and the Knollyses were tinged with Puritan ideas. Listen to Sir William's self-righteous language:

I will not fail to fulfil your desire in playing the Good Shepherd, and will to my power defend the innocent lamb from the wolvish cruelty and foxlike subtlety of the tame beasts of this place. ... I will with my counsel advise your fair daughter, with my true affection love her, and with my sword defend her if need be. Her innocency will deserve it and her virtue will challenge it at my hands. And I will be as careful of her welldoing as if I were her true father.

Alas, things did not fall out like that. The elderly gentleman fell in love with the girl in his charge. It was not the part of the Good Shepherd that he wished to play, nor the sword that he wished to take out of its scabbard. Though he spoke in parables, his intentions were plain: he wanted the girl, and to marry her. Unfortunately, he was himself married to a rich old dowager who obstinate

ly remained above ground. He wished her under it, and said so in no very polite language:

The fairest flowers of our gardens be blasted . . . mine in the leaf by the hoar frost. By reason of the continued frosts, my looking for any fruit of my garden is in vain — unless the old tree be cut down and a new graft of a good kind planted.

What a way to write of his wife! Thus he confided his hopes of Mary to her sister. Constantly in her company, in charge of these frisky young ladies in waiting he felt himself

cloyed with too much and yet ready to starve for hunger. My eyes see what I cannot attain to, my ears hear what I do scant believe, and my thoughts are carried with contrary conceits. My hopes are mixed with despair and my desire starved with expectation.

The hoity-toity young lady had gone off to bed without bidding him good night, he wrote querulously to her sister, and this had given him toothache, at least some kind of ache. But he would endure purgatory, if only he could reach his desired heaven at last. The obstacle of his old dowager had, however, no, intention of removing herself.

My constant desires no sooner bud by the heat of the morning sun but they are blasted by an untimely frost, so as in the midst of my best comforts I see nothing but dark despair. Continue, I earnestly entreat you, your prayer for my delivery.

It sounds a rather odd request from an upright Puritan, to write to his mistress's sister to pray for his delivery from the burden of his wife! However, we may be sure that Mary was only the mistress of his affections, and that she was playing him up, blowing now hot, now cold. 'Arrant coquette," the Victorian Lady Newdigate-Newdegate, of sister Anne's family, calls her.

Anne called on Sir William to be godfather to her baby, and to name the girl. He re turned: •

Imagine what name I love best, and that do I norni'nate. And if I might be as happy to be a father as a godfather... !

But that would never be until he was free and Mary was willing. . . . The child was, of course, called after her. Now Mary was blaming him for the melancholy into which his predicament was plunging him, and teasing him with having small regard for her. So far from that being true, she is" 'the only comfort of my heart."

Sir William wrote, in the midst of Essex's final troubles with the Queen,that Mary

is now well and hath not been troubled with the mother (i.e. nerves) of a long time. I would God I might as lawfully make her a mother as you are ...

Meanwhile, Mary was having a gay time at Court, in favour with the Queen, and much noticed among her young ladies as the most spirited, taking the lead in the masks and dances the ageing Elizabeth delighted in. In June 1600 there was a strange new mask, danced by eight of them, each in cloth of silver," a mantle of carnation taffeta cast under the arm, and their hair about their shoulders curiously knotted and interlaced."

On June 16, 1600, there was a grand entertainment in Blackfriars for the marriage of Anne Russell, one of Mary's companions as maid of honour. The Queen graced it with her presence: this is the occasion portrayed in the famous picture of her dressed all in white as the Virgin she was, borne high in her litter like a painted idol by the nobles and gentlemen of the Court — Sir William would have been one. After supper there was a mask, danced by the Queen's ladies.

Mistress Fitton led. After they had done all their own ceremonies, these eight lady maskers chose eight ladies more to dance the measures. Mistress Fitton went to the Queen, and wooed her to dance. Her Majesty asked her what she was.

"Affection," she said. "Affection," said the Queen. "Affection is false.'

This is a reference to the heartache thg Queen was suffering from her sense of betrayal by Essex. Yet the gallant old girl rose and danced with Mary. June 1600. Mary had been at Court five years — and there was no marriage yet on the horizon for her. That month she would be twenty-two — more than high time for an Elizabethan lady to have got a husband. We have a portrait of her from this time. in all her Court finery: immense lace ruff and puffed sleeves, hooped farthingale and jewelled head-tire, very low neck-line as was usual to display her virgin-condition (as with the Queen herself), a miniature (perhaps by Hilliard?) placed over her heart. 1 descry no ' demure ' look upon her features, but one of sulky discontent, a sultry look in the eyes. What was she to do? Sir William was not even yet free of his encumbrance:

I live in doubt ever to enjoy the sweet fruit of my summer's harvest, My ground is covered with the bramble and the briar, which, until it be grubbed and cut up, there is no hope of good.

And yet again:

I must live in frost and snow, subject to blasts and all ill winds, and shall, I fear, never be so happy as to possess the fair flower of the summer's garden.

What a bore he was! And even worse that he could not offer her marriage, and to make her a mother lawfully — for he was a Puritan. Mary was clearly beginning to worry:

Her greatest fear is that, while the grass growet.h. the horse may starve. And she thinketh a bird al the bush is worth two in the hand -Sir William was so upset that he seems to have got the old proverb the wrong waY round. He kept preaching patience — "that will bring peace at the last." But the time was passing for that.

In this dilemma there were dazzling examples of how maids of honour had resolved it taking the bull by the horns. By risking everything, putting her ' honour ' on the throw, only a couple of years before, Eliza' beth Vernon had captured her man, the handsome but ambivalent Earl of Southampton the effeminate young Lord of Shakespeare s Sonnets. A few years before, another maid of honour, Elizabeth Throckmorton, had wrested the Queen's favourite, Sir Walter Raleigh, away to herself. What a catch, for.a dowerless girl! — Raleigh paid the penalty in his frustrated career.

The young man whom Mary fancied for herself was the Earl of Pembroke's heir, Lord Herbert, who would have been a great catch indeed — and Mary risked everything to catch him. In this year 1600 when they became very intimate together (years after Shakespeare's Sonnets, which have nothing to do With them), Lord Herbert was twenty, Mary tWenty-two.

Young Herbert — totally unlike Shakespeare's Southampton — was, as Clarendon aes-cribes him, "all his life immoderately givent Up to women." Ile was, by the way, present that night in Blackfriars, when Mary led the dance with the Queen. We learn later that 'during the time that the Earl of Pembroke favoured her she would put off her head-tire, tuck up her clothes, take a large white cloak and march as though she had been a man, to Meet the said Earl out of the Court." That high summer, it would seem in July, she became pregnant.

The whole question now was whether Herbert would make an honest woman of her — as Southampton and Raleigh had done with their maids of honour, if each with understandable reluctance. In January 1601 young Herbert succeeded as Earl of Pembroke. In Feb, ' ruary, the great little Secretary of State, Sir Robert Cecil, wrote to a crony from Court that "there is a misfortune befallen Mistress Fitton, for she is proved with child. The Earl of Pembroke, being examined, confesseth a fact but utterly renounceth all marriage."

The Queen was furious, as usual, at such happenings, and threatened, as usual, to send the offenders to the Tower. Actually she sent Pembroke to the Fleet prison, and committed Mary to the care of Lady Hawkins — widow of the great seaman — for her confinement. In March, Mary was delivered of a boy, who died.

, But the Earl was not going to marry her, for all the pressure put upon him. He was banished from Court into the country, whence he wrote unrepentantly to Cecil that rural life Would turn him into a clown, and that he could not frame himself to turn JP. We have a Pathetic letter from Mary's father:

can say nothing of the Earl,. but my daughter is confident in her chance before God, and wisheth My Lord and she might but meet before indifferent limpartial] ones.

But poor Sir Edward-expected no good from the young man, who "in all this time hath not showed any kindness." Then

count my daughter as good a gentlewoman as my Lord is, thouih the dignity of honour be greater only in him which hath beguiled her, I fear — except my Lord's honesty be tle greater virtue.

It did not prove to be so, and Sir Edward had to take his daughter back home to Cheshire in some secrecy, and public disgrace. Evidently the Earl did not think her a good enough match. Three years later he made a great marriage to Lady Mary Talbot, daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury and a co-heiress to his vast estates. The lady was stunted and deformed, and gave him no chili dren: Clarendon wrote unkindly, "he paid Much too dear for his wife's fortune by taking her person into the bargain."

Mary Fitton. had played for the highest stake, and lost. No more Court grandeur for her, henceforth she was rusticated, to make a life as best she could in the country. The irrepressible Sir William pipes up once more, still not free to offer her marriage.

I must confess the harvest was overlong expected • . But the man of sin (Pembroke] having in the night sowed tares amongst the good corn, both the true husbandman was beguiled and the good ground was abused ... God knows I would refuse no penance to redeem what is lost.

It seemsthat Mary rejected his handicapped suit — "I may boldly say that Mary did not choose the better part." When at length free of his . encumbrance: he rushed straight into matrimony with. a girl of nine: teen, himself then being sixty-one. Mary

made a mistake, for Sir William lived on to become an Earl himself — one sees him on the very grand monument that fills the Knollys chapel •at Rotherfield, near Henley. She would have been a countess — of Banbury —if not of Pembroke.

What fortune was there now for Mary Fitton? A very rum one, we shall see. At a loose

end, unprovided for, still young, she came under the protection of a well-known commander, Vice-Admiral Sir Richard Leveson, whose bronze figure we see in the church of Wolverhampton, celebrating his part in the sea-actions of the time. (His marriage to the daughter of Lord Admiral Howard of Effing ham had turned out unfortunately; she became insane. So unable to re-marry, he had need of a woman to take her place.) Leveson died in 1605, leaving provision of £100 a year under private instructions from himself — for whom?

He had a close friend in the Cornish seacaptain, William Polwhele, who had served under Leveson abroad as captain of the Lion's Whelp. These gallant fellows seem to have shared an interest in Mary. The next we hear of her is that she is in disgrace again over the birth of a boy. In the winter of 1606-7, her mother, now widowed, is writing:

I take no joy to hear of your sister, nor of that boy. If it had pleased God, when I did bear her, that she and I had been burled, it had saved me from a great deal of sorrow and grief and her from shame — and such shame as never had Cheshire woman, worse now than ever. Write no more to me of her.

The women of the family were characteristically more censorious than the men, and seem to have taken against Captain Polwhele for making Mary 'at least a married woman: Lady Fitton wrote:

Polwhele is a very knave, and taketh the disgrace of his wife and all her friends to make the world think him worthy of her, and that she deserved no better.

Very grand Lady Frances Stanley, who as Countess of Bridgewater became the patron.ess of Milton's Comus, said that Mary was " the vilest woman under the sun."

They all thought that Polwhele was not a fit marriage for a Fitton; but in fact the Polwheles were as old a family as the Fittons, going back to the fourteenth century in Cornwall. The menfolk were kinder and recognised his friendliness. Old Francis Fitton, Mary's great-uncle, left him his best horse and equipment, "as a remembrance and token of my love for him.' Mary's marriage lasted only three years, for Polwhele died in 1610; leaving her with a son and a daughter. The property upon which they lived, Perton in Staffordshire, had, however, come from Sir Richard Leveson.

Through all these troubles Mary's sister remained faithful to her, and she seems always to have had a refuge open to her in beautiful Arbury of the Newdigates in Warwickshire. Anne, now herself a widow, had an elderly admirer in Francis Beaumont, who found an ally in Mary in pressing his suit. Francis was fond of Mary, too, who was evidently all for love — and the menfolk reciprocated:

I must entreat you when you see my counsellor to command my heartiest love unto her, and to tell

her that, though she be a married wife, yet I will take leave to love her for ever, while I carry within me a heart that can love.

From this we learn that Mary had found someone else to marry her, a Captain Loug.her, of a Pembrokeshire family. For when she died in 1647 — her second husband having died in 1636 — she had a little property there which she bequeathed to their daughter. I do not know if her son by Polwhele had children, but their daughter had. So that Mary Fitton left descendants, through the Gattacres and the Chernocks, when, an old lady in her seventieth year (like the great Queen she had served all those years ago), she was buried in the church at Gawsworth, where she had been baptised and where one sees her still as a girl upon her parents' tomb.