Note 79 — Chapter XVIII

— I think that Thomas Warde may have been born about the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign; for if he were married in 1579, and was, say, twenty-one years of age at the time of his marriage, this would fix his birth about the year 1558. Early marriages were characteristic of the period. Mounteagle, for example, was married before he was eighteen. The Ripon Registers begin in fairly regular course in 1587, though there are fragments from 1574, but not earlier. If Christopher Wright, the plotter, lived in Bondgate, Ripon, and had a child born to him in 1589 (the year after the Spanish Armada), he must, like Mounteagle, have been married when about eighteen years of age. These instances should be carefully noted by students of Shakespeare, inasmuch as they render the poet’s marriage with Anne Hathaway in 1582, when he was little more than eighteen and a-half years old, less startling. — See Sidney Lee’s “Life of Shakespeare,” p. 18 (Smith & Elder, 1898).

I should like also to add that I think there is a great deal in Halliwell-Phillips’ contention as to Shakespeare having made the “troth-plight.” — Concerning the “troth-plight” see Lawrence Vaux’s “Catechism,” Edited by T. G. Law, with a valuable historical preface (Chetham Soc). — Shakespeare’s “mentor” in the days of his youth was, most probably, some old Marian Priest, like Vaux, who was a former Warden of the Collegiate Church at Manchester, and with “the great Allen” and men like Vivian Haydock — see Gillow’s “Haydock Papers” (Burns & Oates) — retained Lancashire in its allegiance to Rome — so that “the jannock” Lancashire Catholics style their county, “God’s County” even unto this day.