The Assassination of Shakespeare's Patron: Investigating the Deat ...

through surrogates, offered him. As the organizers and leaders of this investigative team, Elizabeth named Vice Chancellor Thomas Heneage, Master of the Rolls Thomas Egerton, and Carey. Heneage, who was the senior ranking member but old and sick, handed the job off to Egerton, who then formed a working subcommittee made up of himself, Carey, Secretary Golborne, and the earl’s private chaplain, William Leigh (the last two of whom had ridden full tilt to court from Lancashire to report the death).

At some point between the nineteenth and the twenty-second, Sir Edward Fitton, the sheriff of Lancashire, and other justices began to examine the witches around Lathom, as they had come under suspicion because of their reported earlier avid interest in the earl’s fortunes, beginning on April Fool’s Day. (In the decade from 1587 through 1597, prosecutions for witchcraft reached the highest point in all of English history; everybody believed in witches and witchcraft, and they believed especially in the power of the “Lancashire witches”—most of all in Lancashire, of course.¹⁰) One standard test administered to witch suspects was to demand that they swear oaths of innocence which must then be immediately followed by a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. It was an article of faith in Lancashire that no witch could successfully say the entire prayer after telling a lie under oath, even if she were provided with its text orally or in writing. Fitton reported that one witch could not say the line “Forgive us our trespasses,” even when she was repeatedly prompted by the justices. This woman is usually linked with the “Jane” who had asked Secretary Golborne if the earl had not yet lost the ability to urinate at precisely the same time, as was authoritatively reported, that he lost it. She was known in the community and would certainly have been a prime suspect if one were considering witchcraft as the cause of the earl’s death. She was then jailed. Her fate is not known, but in light of subsequent events, it can easily be imagined.

On 28 April, a Sunday, only sixteen days after the earl’s death, Sir George Carey wrote to some of his superiors in the investigation that “owing to a letter found by chance” at Lathom, he had determined that witches and their witchcraft were almost certainly the culprits, not poisoners.