Between c. 1572 and his execution in 1583, Edward Arden, a Catholic gentleman from Warwickshire, was involved in a lineage dispute with Ambrose and Robert Dudley, earls of Warwick and Leicester and two of the most powerful men in early modern England, over their shared ancestral claim to a Saxon known as Turchil. This article explores the significance of this dispute from a number of perspectives, including the ancestry of Edward Arden, the history of the Warwick and Leicester earldoms and Philip Sidney’s Defense of Leicester, in order to explore lineage as central to the prevailing ideology of power. It uses the clash between Arden and the Dudleys to present an environment in which Catholics were still part of the political mainstream and in which different political discourses led to conflict as well as consensus during the 1570s and early 1580s. Moreover, the article suggests that the activities of the heralds and the pedigrees they produced had a political function during this period which merits changing our approach to an underused manuscript source.

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This book puts William Shakespeare’s Stratford upbringing into significant historical context for the first time and provides new ways of thinking about Warwickshire and Elizabethan England. It uses new archival discoveries about three families: the Shakespeares, the brothers Ambrose and Robert Dudley, earls of Warwick and Leicester, and the Arden family headed by Edward Arden. It shows that as he grew up William Shakespeare was exposed to the Dudleys’ political, legal, historical, and genealogical claims for their authority in Warwickshire and Stratford, an assault on the county’s collective memory resisted by the Ardens and other gentry. As her proxies, the Dudleys established Elizabeth I’s Protestant regime in the west Midlands, culminating in Edward Arden’s destruction on false treason charges in 1583. By then the Shakespeares also had direct experience of the London government’s power in the localities. From 1569 Exchequer informers, backed by influential politicians at Court, accused William’s father John of illegal wool-dealing and usury. Contrary to previous claims that he had escaped these charges by 1572, new sources show how the Exchequer’s continuing demands undermined John’s credit rating by 1577, forcing his withdrawal from Stratford politics, and curtailing his business career in the early 1580s. In the fallout from Arden’s destruction the Elizabethan regime also punished the Shakespeares’ friends and neighbours, the Quineys for their alleged financial links to the traitorous Ardens, despite local knowledge to the contrary, confirming Shakespeare’s sceptical understanding of the realities of power that we find in his later plays.