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

the facts that he was another earl and that there was uncertainty about his soundness of religion. Counting for him, and outweighing the negatives, were the facts that Elizabeth adored him (or kept saying she did), that she knew (or kept saying she knew) that he also adored her and was totally loyal, and that she and the Cecils were not overly concerned about his possible Catholic sympathies because they had taken him from his parents when he was young and raised him at court, being careful to see that he got a strongly Church of England, strongly anti-Catholic education. And, if their intelligence about him as an adult in Lancashire was any good—which it was—they knew that he was in fact both a fierce Church of England man and a fierce anti-Catholic. (Private letters still exist between Ferdinando and his own father-confessor, Bishop Chaderton, in which he condemned both the English Catholics and those who were tolerant of them, especially his own father: “I am through with my father,” he wrote to Chaderton.¹¹) Elizabeth was right: he was firmly on the side of the Reformation—and he called it that himself.¹² Still, because Lancashire and Cheshire were so heavily Catholic, as the earl-apparent and then as the earl, Ferdinando had to present a public front of Catholic toleration whenever he could do so without sacrificing his own principles and beliefs, and this he did—grudgingly. The real truth of the matter seems to be that he could accurately have been called a “crypto-anti-Catholic,”(that is, pretending to be a Catholic sympathizer when he actually hated them) for he did not want all of the people in Lancashire, Cheshire, and the entire north—particularly all of the high-ranking Catholic royals and near-royals there, upon whom he depended for political support—to know how much he loved the Reformation and hated the Counter-Reformation.

The 1590s were a period of literal succession mania in England, and mania is probably the perfect word because of the literal meaning it carries of actual psychological disorder. This is exactly what it was: the one thing nobody could talk about was the one thing that was on everybody’s mind. The Queen was old, she was frail, and she was often reported to be ill. She must have been something of a fright with her painted white face, her blackened teeth, and her pink (or sometimes bright red) bejeweled wigs. Behind her back, in one of his many snits, Essex loudly hissed