Note A — Chapter LXI

This phrase is used by Shakespeare in “Macbeth” (1606), I suggest, with indirect reference to the Gunpowder Plot, which Shakespeare must have followed with the most breathless, absorbing interest. For Norbrook was in Snitterfield, where his mother (Mary Arden) had property; while Coughton was the home of the Throckmortons, the Ardens’ relatives. Clopton House, where Ambrose Rookwood was living from Michaelmas, 1605, Lapworth, where John Wright resided from May, 1605, and where Christopher Wright and Marmaduke Ward visited him (all of which places were in that “garden of England,” Warwickshire), must have been as familiar to the poet almost as his own Stratford-on-Avon.

I find the name “Robert Arden,” of Pedmore, Worcestershire, 1¹⁄₂ miles from Stourbridge, down as “a popish recusant” for the year 1592, in the “Hatfield MS.,” part iv.