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for this story, Ferdinando’s literary interests also extended to patronizing a company of players. From sometime in the 1580s onward, he served as a patron of Lord Strange’s Men, who by the early 1590s had the brilliant beginner William Shakespeare writing and acting for them. Ferdinando remained their patron until his death in April of 1594.
Speaking of which, one day, not just any day but the April Fool’s Day of 1594, at least according to an ancient manuscript in the British Library, an eerie peasant woman, seeming from her description to be one of the legion of local Lancashire witches, dared to speak to the great Earl Ferdinando as he was walking outside the most magnificent of his three local ancestral seats,12 Lathom Hall. The house was one of the most famous castles in all of England, rivaling any of the Queen’s own. In addition to its surrounding deer park, it featured two spacious courtyards and nine turreted towers furnished with ordnance and expert marksmen who were instructed to fire at will and shoot to kill. In the center stood the tallest and most fabled of these towers, the sky-reaching Eagle Tower. Slightly smaller but more intriguing was the mysterious Tower of Madness. The whole estate was surrounded by a stone wall two yards thick, and the wall was surrounded by a moat eight yards wide. If the witch was awed or intimidated by any of this, she did not let on to the earl or the companions who were strolling with him. (She had likely seen it every day of her life.) It was cold that day, and Ferdinando was probably wearing his heavy floor-length cape and his beloved tall black beaver hat when he met her outside the wall. Being Ferdinando, he almost certainly did not doff his hat to such a lowly person, woman or not.
The woman asked him if she could be permitted to lodge very near him for a while, in order that she might be able to quickly pass on the messages God was sending her on a daily basis about Ferdinando’s welfare. Ferdinando declined, audibly mumbling something about the damnable sin of blasphemy.
Four days later, the famously sturdy Ferdinando, who had experienced no previous illnesses in his life, suddenly began vomiting. The vomiting would not stop. The substance was filled with “rusty matter” and “fatty matter.” It stained the silver bowls into which it was retched,