William Shakespeare of Preston Lancashire
I know the idea that William Shakespeare spent his so-called ‘lost years’ at Hoghton Tower in Preston - just up the road from where I’m writing this - doesn’t go down too well with some Shakespearean scholars, although they seem unable to come up with an alternative explanation as to why, just after the birth of his twins, the young Bill should suddenly walk out on his wife and disappear for seven years (seven years!), reappearing in London in1592 a fully accomplished, yet somewhat upstartish, playwright and poet. And I’m sure it wasn’t the noise of the kids keeping him awake at night that made him do it.
But go missing he did, or at least for those - especially strangers - who asked after him in those dark and dangerous times when Elizabeth I was becoming increasingly paranoid about her safety, especially, as she saw it, from an increasingly large and scheming bunch of Roman Catholics who wanted her dead. And let’s not forget that Shakespeare’s father, John, knew most of the men who would later metamorphose into Gunpowder Plotters who very nearly blew Elizabeth’s successor to kingdom come.
The information that has been passed down, initially from John Aubrey, and then again in 1937, when a Stratford antiques and book dealer by the name of Oliver Baker, brought the Aubrey story back into the light, is that the young William Shakespeare had to flee Stratford as a result of poaching deer on the Charlecote estate of Thomas Lucy and, through the good offices of one of his former school masters at Stratford, John Cottom (a Lancashire man), was given refuge at Hoghton Tower, the home of Thomas Hoghton, and given employment as a servant-cum-schoolteacher. Which seems to me to have been a rather extreme thing to have done just for the crime of poaching a deer, the punishment for which would probably have been a bit of a roughing-up by a couple of Lucy’s men, no more.
The point is you don’t send a son away - especially one who has twins on his hands - for seven years unless there’s a very good reason. And the reason is that Stratford was at heart a Roman Catholic town (a town that was also part of the Protestant diocese of Worcester), with John Shakespeare a recusant who, nevertheless, as an alderman of the town (and a man fearful for his neck) tried desperately to make the town appear on the surface (he even white-washed out the very Catholic wall paintings in the Guild Chapel) to be a good Protestant town.
