Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 51.djvu/378

 1589 he retaliated with pertinacity on a debtor named John Tompson. But in 1591 a creditor, Adrian Quiney, obtained a writ of distraint against him, and although in 1592 he attested inventories taken on the death of two neighbours, Ralph Shaw and Henry Field, father of the printer, he was on 25 Dec. of the same year ‘presented’ as a recusant for absenting himself from church. The commissioners reported that his absence was probably due to ‘fear of process for debt.’ He figures for the last time in the proceedings of the local court, in his customary rôle of defendant, in March 1595, and there is every indication that in that year he retired from trade, vanquished at every point. In January 1596–7 he conveyed a slip of land attached to his dwelling in Henley Street to one George Badger. There is a likelihood that the poet's wife fared, in the poet's absence, no better. The only contemporary mention made of her between her marriage in 1582 and her husband's death in 1616 is as the borrower at an unascertained date (doubtless before 1595) of forty shillings from Thomas Whittington, who had formerly been her father's shepherd. The money was unpaid when Whittington died in 1601, and he directed his executor to recover the sum from the poet and distribute it among the poor of Stratford (, ii. 186).

It was probably in 1596 that Shakespeare returned, after nearly eleven years' absence, to his native town, and worked a revolution in the affairs of his family. The prosecutions of his father in the local court then ceased. Thenceforth the poet's relations with Stratford were uninterrupted. He still resided in London for most of the year; but until the close of his professional career he paid the town at least one annual visit, and he was always formally described as ‘of Stratford-on-Avon, gentleman.’ He was no doubt there on 11 Aug. 1596, when his only son, Hamnet, was buried in the parish church; the boy was eleven and a half years old.

Two months later the bankrupt father, took a step, by way of regaining his prestige which must be assigned to his son's intervention. On 20 Oct. 1596 John Shakespeare applied for a coat-of-arms in consideration, it was stated in the first draft-grant, of the services of his ancestors to Henry VII, and of his having married Mary Arden. A second copy of the draft altered ‘ancestors’ to ‘grandfather.’ The application does not seem to have been persisted in (cf. Miscellanea Genealogica et Heraldica, 2nd ser. 1886, i. 109). A new grant was drafted by the college of arms three years later, when it was alleged that a coat-of-arms had been assigned to John while he was bailiff of Stratford. In the draft of 1599 greater emphasis was laid on the gentle descent of Shakespeare's mother, the arms of whose family her children were authorised to quarter with their own. But this draft, like the first, remained unconfirmed. The father's arms were described as ‘gold on a bend sable a spear of the first, the point steeled proper, and for his crest or cognisance, a falcon his wings displayed argent standing on a wreath of his colours supporting a spear gold steeled as aforesaid: set upon a helmet with mantels and tassels.’ In the margin of the first draft a pen sketch is given, with the motto ‘Non sanz droict;’ in the draft of 1599 the arms both of Shakespeare and of the Arden family are very roughly tricked (Herald and Genealogist, i. 510;, ii. 56, 60). Two copies of the draft of 1596 and one of that of 1599 are at the college of arms. Although no evidence survives to show that the poet used the arms personally, they are prominently displayed on his tomb; they appear on the seal and tomb of his elder daughter Susanna, impaled with those of her husband; and they were quartered by Thomas Nash, the first husband of the poet's granddaughter, Elizabeth Hall (, Genealogica Shakespeareana, p. 413).

In 1597 the poet took in his own person a more effective step in the way of rehabilitating himself and his family in the eyes of his fellow townsmen. On 4 May he purchased the largest house in the town, known as New Place. It had been built by Sir Hugh Clopton [q. v.] more than a century before, and seems to have fallen into a ruinous condition. But Shakespeare paid for it, with two barns and two gardens, the then substantial sum of 60l. Owing to the sudden death of the vendor, William Underhill, on 7 July 1597, the original transfer of the property was left at the time incomplete. Underhill's son Fulk died a felon, and he was succeeded in the family estates by his brother Hercules, who on coming of age, May 1602, completed in a new deed the transfer of New Place to Shakespeare (Notes and Queries, 8th ser. v. 478). On 4 Feb. 1597–8 Shakespeare was described as a householder in Chapel Street ward, in which New Place was situated, and as the owner of ten quarters of corn. The inventory was made owing to the presence of famine in the town, and very few inhabitants were credited with a larger holding. In the same year (1598) he procured stone for the repair