The account found here can be read in more detail in Shakespeare's Warwickshire Contemporaries by Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, Shakespeare Head Press, 1907, as published online at Google Book Search. It is also available in various formats through the Internet Archive.
John Somerville, born in 1560, was of a Warwickshire Catholic family. He married a daughter of Edward Arden, head of the large Catholic Arden family. As such, he was a "cousin" of Shakespeare. At this time, Walsingham and Burghley were at the height of their Catholic persecutions. There were spies everywhere, and being a Catholic was more dangerous than ever. Somerville had been primed by his friends and relatives to read Catholic tracts, branding Elizabeth a bastard and heretic. What Somerville lacked, however, that his romanticizing, conspiratorial friends did not, was the measure, common sense to keep such talk secret in an increasingly paranoid police state.
In late October, 1583, Somerville was driven to distraction by the various influences of friends, advisors and family, in the books that he was given to read and the gossip he overhead. He was a young man clearly distracted. In a fit of insanity he devised a plan to assassinate Elizabeth. When he revealed the plan to his family, they were aghast, and tried to calm him, but it was no use. He departed on the early morning of October 25 with a single servant (who soon fled), and began to make his way to London. On that night, in the village of Aynho-on-the-Hill, in his rented room, he must "...evidently have been talking aloud to himself in bed, and thus have attracted attention, for again his room became filled with startled auditors of his frenzied exclamations that he was going to London to shoot the Queen through with his dagg or pistol, that she was a serpent and a viper, and he hoped to see her head set upon a pole" (79).
The upshot was that he was arrested.
'No time seems to have been lost. A justice of the peace was summoned, he was apprehended, taken with much rough usage to Oxford, on Saturday, the 26th, and was committed to prison, where a preliminary examination was made of the sleepless and travel-worn youth, and he was sent on to London at once. On Sunday, the 27th, he was at Uxbridge. On Monday, the 28th, the articles for his formal examination were drawn up; Tuesday, the 29th, and Wednesday, the 30th, he spent in the Gatehouse prison ; Thursday, the 31st, he was examined again, and committed to the Tower. The dates I find noted at the side of his examinations, probably by Burghley. He seems to have been treated from the first as mad by his captors, and yet the full blame was awarded him, as if he were a sane, free agent" (79).
A pathetic, mad man has been captured and within days is being examined by the most powerful man in the State, Lord Burghley. Why? Because of his family connections. Threats to Elizabeth were taken very seriously. When the threats came from an Arden relation, they were doubly so. Edward Arden kept a priest disguised as a gardener. "He is also rumored to have sheltered members of Campion's mission" (Shakespeare, Michael Wood, p. 89). Arden was also the enemy of the the Queen's favorite, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester. In 1575 Arden had publicly insulted Dudley, and Dudley had never forgotten. Somerville's insane behavior gave him, through the government's paranoid anti-Catholicism, the chance to "crush Arden and his friend and relative Robert Throgmorton" (Wood, p. 89 - The Throgmortons were another great Catholic family).
Walsingham, his spies, agents, and other authorized government officials spread a dragnet across Warwickishire. Edward Arden, Francis and George Throgmorton, Arden's wife Mary, Somerville's wife (Arden's daughter) Margaret, and Somerville's sister were all arrested and imprisoned in the Tower. Many homes in Warwickshire were invaded and searched for evidence. (This may well have been the cause of John Shakespeare's concealment of his Catholic testament in the rafter's of the Henley Street residence).
It was difficult to find Arden guilty of anything, however. Secretary of the Privy Council Thomas Wilkes wrote to Walsingham:
" I have thought good never the les to signifie unto yr Honour that unless you can make Somerville, Arden, Hall the Priest, Somerville's wief and his syster to speke directly to those things which you desire to have discovered, that it will not be possible for us here to find out more than is found already, for that the Papists in this countye greatly do work uppon the advantage of clering their howses of all shews of suspition, and, therefore, onles you can charge them with mater from the mouths of your prisoners, looke not to wringe anythinge from them by finding mater of suspition in their howses" (p. 94).
Wilkes was advising, in his euphemistic manner, to use torture on the vicitims to get them to talk, because no direct evidence could be found. In any event, evidence or none, the government proceeded:
"John Somerville and his wife, his father-in-law and mother-in-law the Ardens, of Park Hall, Mr. Francis Arden, of Pedmore, and Hugh Hall, the priest, were indicted at Warwick on 2nd December as traitors, and Elizabeth Somerville, his sister, as abettor of treason.- All were tried in London. Somerville and Arden, Mrs. Arden, and the priest were condemned on the 16th December. On the 19th, John Somerville and his father-in-law were taken from the Tower to Newgate, in preparation for the execution next day, and were lodged in separate cells. Two hours later Somerville was found strangled, either by himself or by some friendly hand, and thus he escaped the horrors of a traitor's death. His head was set up on London Bridge ; but his body was buried in " the Moorfields, near to the Windmill." This Warwickshire traitor, first of the series, died at the age of twenty-three, leaving his baby girls homeless and destitute; for the Queen claimed his lands" (p. 80).
Somerville's madness was not denied by the State, but his death was fortunate compared with that of his father-in-law, the true target of the "investigations." He "...suffered the full penalty of the law with his usual high spirit, protesting to the last his innocence of anything save or being a Catholic" (p. 100). What was the full penalty of the law? For those unacquainted with this charming Elizabethan procedure, let me outline it: The condemned was drug on a hurdle from Newgate to the place of execution at Smithfield, where he was hung by the neck, but cut down alive. While still living, he was castrated, and then his belly was slit open and his entrails were pulled out and burned before his eyes. Finally, his heart was cut out, and then he was hacked limb from limb. All the while being observed by a crowd of onlookers.
Burghley, moved to defend the government's actions, published a propaganda pamphlet On the Execution of Justice in England. It was answered by Cardinal William Allen, exiled in Douai, in A true, sincere and modest defence of English Catholics that suffer for their faith both at home and abroad, against a false, seditions and slanderous libel entitled: "The execution of justice in England", which included a sketch of Arden and a detailed refutation of the charges against him. Allen castigated the "...shameful practices about the condemnation and making away of the worshipful, valiant, and innocent gentleman, M. Arden."
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