THE OVERWHELMING EVIDENCE that Francis Bacon Was Shakespeare
AND WHY THEY HID THE TRUE AUTHOR
THIS IS AN ABRIDGED VERSION OF THE ORIGINAL JUNE 6th ESSAY
The Shakespeare Authorship Controversy has raged for close to 200 years now over the question: Who really wrote the ‘Shakespeare’ plays? Answering that question is of utmost importance because the Shakespeare plays have somehow buried themselves deep into the subconscious of almost the entire world, exerting an incredible power and influence on society, becoming modern myths that exert an enormous influence at the level of our collective being- at the level of mythic language in the place where we tell stories.
The Shakespeare plays that were first performed at the Globe Theater were certainly meant to go global. The motto of the Globe Theater was “All The World’s A Stage”. As you know, that phrase wound up in a Shakespeare play.
Meanwhile the Mythic origin story of the plays, the story that they are the greatest poetry and drama the world has ever seen yet they were written by an unlettered rustic from the Midlands, has now been proven beyond any reasonable doubt to be an elaborate hoax. The hoax originated with the 1623 publication of the so-called First Folio, a collection of all the Shakespeare plays, 36 in total. The book’s introduction, the source of the hoax, featured extraordinary praise and poetic homage bestowed upon William Shakespeare from none other than the great Ben Jonson, playwright and friend of Francis Bacon. Jonson previously had never seen fit to mention Will’s writing at any time and barely ever mentioned it again. Meanwhile his published praise of Francis Bacon was also extraordinary and in fact, used the exact same words as his First Folio praise of Stratford Will. More on that below.
The 36 plays in The First Folio have nothing to do with the life of a small town, working class environment such as that which gave birth to William Shakespeare, and the plays never once even mention Will’s hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon. The life experience and environment of an Elizabethan working-class person barely appears in the plays at all. Instead the plays focus on the lives of famous and powerful royalty and the wealthy aristocracy, with heavy insider knowledge and remarkable and full of accurate detail about the sort of aristocratic lives to which William Shakespeare, son-of a butcher and a glover, a grain dealer, part-time actor, theater owner, real estate investor and money-lender would have had no access to in an era of very strict class division.
The facts also show that Shakepseare could barely handle a pen. No manuscripts of the plays or poems survive. There is no evidence he ever went to school. His children were illiterate. His parents were illiterate. He never wrote a letter and seems to have owned no books. Not one scrap of evidence, besides the fact that someone put his name on the plays, exists for him as a writer of 37 of the most famous plays ever written, all of them extremely dense with book learning, details of recent and ancient history, philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, military maneuvers and legal terms, along with references to the ancient writing of Plutarch and the plays of Sophocles and Seneca and and the poetry Ovid . Many of the known sources needed to write the plays were still untranslated and thus whoever wrote the plays would need to be fluent in Latin, Greek, Italian and French, with access to such rare books in an era before libraries existed.
Clearly Shakespeare was just a front man, and he appears to have been well paid for his role, purchasing a large house in Stratford-upon-Avon just a few years after his name first appeared on a published work, the poem Venus and Adonis in 1593.
This essay will show the overwhelming evidence, collected by hundreds of truth seekers for many decades now, that the philosopher of Science, statesman, lawyer, historian, garden and dress designer Lord Chancellor and Regent, explorer of the ancient myths- Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam, Viscount St. Alban, was secretly responsible for the Shakespeare plays and poems and also for creating the incredible hoax of the First Folio.
I know how much it sucks that the real author of the plays is a rich lawyer, a philosopher of technocracy, a spy and ass-kisser of Kings and Queens especially if you really like the Shakespeare as you are supposed to, since he’s revered in every single English department in America and England and frankly the world over. How much better it would be if the Bard was a wild and crazy untamed type like Marlowe or Oxford, or a simple rustic like William. Sorry! Yes, I know, it sucks.
This essay will explain why true author’s name needed to be kept hidden. The success of the plays depended on it.
THE EVIDENCE FOR BACON
The Promus Notebook
Just one single page of the Promus Notebook contains infinitely more evidence for Bacon as the author of the plays than exists for William of Stratford. Stratford Will left zero evidence in his own handwriting that connects him to the plays. Hundreds of pieces of hard evidence for Bacon in the Promus Notebook and elsewhere over zero pieces of hard evidence for Will equals infinity.
The Promus Notebook was found in the British Museum in the mid-1800s and it contains hundreds of phrases, written in Francis Bacon’s own hand, that are found in the Shakespeare plays, sometimes exactly word for word.
See “a fool’s bolt is soon shot” at bottom of page, in Francis Bacon’s handwriting. 👆That exact phrase appears in two Shakespeare plays. This is just one small example of correspondence between the Promus and the plays. There are hundreds more.
The existence of the Promus Notebook (1*) should be common knowledge amongst all Shakespeare fans, don’t you agree? For some reason it is not.
The evidence found in just the Promus Notebook, and Northumberland Manuscript described below, outweighs the evidence for all of the other candidates for authorship of the plays combined. Add together all the evidence for the lonely Earl Of Oxford or Christopher Marlowe, or Henry Neville or Thomas North, and incredibly, it will all pale next to these two examples, and these two pieces of hard evidence are only a very small fraction of the massive pile of evidence that ties Bacon to the plays. Strap in.
More Than One Writer Involved
One note before proceeding with the details of the Promus Notebook and the Northumberland Manuscript: It is clear that there was more than one writer involved in crafting the plays and sonnets. This is agreed to now by even the most ardent of mainstream ‘Stratfordian’ scholars. (Stratfordians are those who cling to the notion that Stratford Will Shakespeare wrote the plays. Anti-Stratfordians are those who, based on hard evidence and basic logic, understand that Stratford Will could not possibly have written the plays). The Shakespeare plays and their dense complexity as well as the elaborate nature of the Shakespeare hoax itself was a project spanning multiple decades and it required more than one person to pull it off. Knowledge of the Shakespeare project had to have gone to the top of the heavy, intense police state that was Tudor and Stuart London, where spying, espionage and intelligence reached levels previously undreamed of anywhere. (2*) Modern espionage was created right there and then under Regina Eliza, and keeping big secrets in London, perhaps even all of England, was impossible.
Bacon operated since the age of 15 at the center of British Intelligence, which at the time centered on his uncle William Cecil Lord Burleigh and Francis Walsingham, along with his brother Anthony and the powerful Earl of Essex. You may have noticed that eavesdropping and spying are a constant motif in the Shakepseare plays. Bacon had the skills and the position and the time required to pull off such an elaborate undertaking as the Shakespeare hoax, as well as the means. Queen Bess gave him a private estate on the Thames called Twickenham just across the river from Hampton Court Palace where she often stayed. Bacon had the the contacts and the operational capacity (he is known to have employed a group of writers he called “good pens’) the brainpower and the motive and determination borne of his obsession with empire (3*) to see such an operation through to completion.
The Shakespeare Project was a state secret.
Preliminary Evidence: For Bacon The Timelines Fit Exactly
Before we dive into the hard evidence let’s quickly examine the timeline: unlike other popular alternate authorship candidates such as DeVere or Marlowe, and now Thomas North and Henry Neville, and even William Shakespeare himself, the dates of Bacon’s lifespan perfectly fit the dates of the publishing of the Shakespeare plays and the printing of the all important First Folio in 1623. William Shakespeare of Stratford lived from 1564-1616. Lord Baron von Bacon lived from 1561-1626. All the other candidates mentioned are dead by 1604 except Henry Neville who died in 1615.
Although it’s rarely possible to date the plays with precision, (indeterminacy and ambiguity being a hallmark of the plays, the Shakespeare project and modern espionage itself) with various techniques a consensus has emerged that the plays were written from about 1588 until about 1612. This dating has developed over many decades, and there is good evidence for most of it. It’s possible that some of the plays were based on earlier plays never published, as many powerful aristocrats like the Earl of Leicester kept their own private acting companies.
The only serious challenge to this dating system comes from the Oxfordians, those highly dedicated souls who believe the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward DeVere wrote ALL the plays entirely on his own with his own team of writers, which is ludicrous because hard evidence shows many of the plays were written after Oxford died in 1604.
Francis Bacon was in London during all those years of playwriting and his official employment record for that period shows that he had plenty of free time to write the plays. He was a member of Parliament, but Parliament met for two or three weeks a year, tops. Bacon taught at Gray’s Inn law school but the work was very minimal. Law schools had 35 weeks of vacation a year. (7*) During all those years Bacon published only one book and officially wrote only a few short pieces, until 1605 when he published the important-to-the-history-of-Science The Advancement Of Learning.
Bacon did not begin to practice the law until just before he was made Solicitor General in 1607, at age 46 under the new King James I, who gave him his first real job. Bacon biographer James Spedding, compiler of Bacon’s collected 14 volume Collected Works wrote: “No trace of his professional practice in the courts can be found” (Vol. 1, p. 49). (Spedding was a Stratfordian man by the way, and expressed no interest in the Bacon as Shakespeare theory, yet he makes no attempt to show what Bacon was really doing all those years).
Thus for some 25 years Bacon was a free man, with orthodox scholars unsure of how he spent most of his time from 1581 when he graduated law school until 1607 when he was given the position of solicitor general, which accords perfectly with when the vast majority of the plays were composed. He was living in London at Gray’s Inn and also at Twickenham Park where he composed “merry tales”, as he wrote in a letter, mentioned below.
The First Folio and Ben Jonson
As for the assembling of the First Folio, the book that launched the Shakespeare Phenomenon, Bacon was again unemployed, having been famously relieved of all government duties as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor in 1621 due to a bribery scandal. The First Folio emerged two years later in 1623 using playwright Ben Jonson as a key component in creating the hoax of the reputation of Stratford Will as a writer.
Ben Jonson, the second best playwright of the day, a wizard of words and nobody’s fool, was heavily involved in the First Folio hoax and he happened to be a close friend of Bacon’s. Jonson created Shakespeare the man as a writer out of thin air by describing him after his death in the First Folio as the “sweet swan of Avon” with “little Latin and less Greek” yet a great playwright whose work was meant “for the ages”. Strange that Jonson never wrote Shakespeare a letter while he was alive, or even mentioned him once, anywhere, except to perhaps mock him obliquely in a play called Every man out of his Humour (1599). Jonson was a popular and great playwright, and he legitimized the First Folio hoax by putting his name front and center on it.
Ben Jonson subsequently left far more clues that Baron Verulam von Bacon was Shakespeare than he left evidence for Stratford Will, as we will see below.
The depth of the Bacon-Jonson relationship can be gauged from a verse written by Jonson to celebrate Bacon’s sixtieth birthday on 22 January 1621 in lines that as Spedding puts it, are ‘breathing of nothing but reverence and honour’. Jonson hails Bacon as a ‘happie Genius’ who stands ‘as if some Mysterie thou did’st’. (5*)
Ben Jonson was actually living in Bacon’s house in Gorhambury during the period just before the First Folio was published as ascertained by letters found and analyzed by Spedding. (6*)
The HARD Evidence That Bacon Wrote The Plays
The Promus Notebook: 600 entries in Bacon’s own hand that appear in the plays
The Promus of Formularies and Elegancies is a true smoking gun and proof of Bacon’s involvement of authorship of the plays. The Promus is a group of loose sheets called folios, now found together as a notebook, that was found in the mid-1800’s in the British Museum by James Spedding, the biographer, compiler and editor of the 14 volume The Works of Francis Bacon, published between 1857 and 1874, which is the standard reference for Bacon’s work. Here is a description of the notebook by some present day editors of a new edition of Bacon’s collected works:
“With the Promus of formularies and elegancies, we come to texts that Bacon had no intention of publishing, in print or otherwise. These are an assortment of his working papers, some of them no more than jottings from his reading, a few perhaps halfway to becoming rough drafts of more ambitious works. Surprisingly, they have been little studied.”
[Alan Stewart with Harriet Knight, eds., The Oxford Francis Bacon: Early Writings 1584-1596. (Oxford Clarendon Press, 2012), p. 507
]A fool's bolt is soon shot from The Promus Notebook also in Henry V Act 4, Scene 7
The Promus Notebook as it has come to be called, is labeled as MS. Harlein 7017 in the British Library, in Francis Bacon’s handwriting, contains sayings in Spanish, French, Italian and Greek that could be of use in his writing. ‘Promus’ means ‘storehouse’ in Latin and the pages comprise a writer's notebook of ideas to remember and use when writing. The long list includes sayings and phrases by Virgil, Seneca, Horace, Ovid and Terrence, ancient Roman poets and playwrights whose work is found in abundance in the Shakespeare plays.
The fact that Bacon wrote the entries has never been disputed and is affirmed by Spedding and paleographers (handwriting experts). There are 1,655 entries. An English woman named Constance Pott had the entire notebook printed in 1883 along with the parallels that she found between the notebook and the Shakespeare plays. Sir Edwin Durning Lawrence also printed it in 1911. Today you can find it on the internet. The notebook contains two dates - December 1594 to January 1596, (the dates being written on the pages) which is two years before a Shakespeare play was first published with attribution to Shakespeare.
A recent analysis of the Promus by N.B. Cockburn, a British lawyer, for his book The Bacon Shakespeare Question found 600 parallels between the Promus notebook and the Shakespeare plays, some of which are word for word identical. The 600 figure represents about half the number that early Baconian and founder of the Francis Bacon Society, Constance Pott found, N.B. Cockburn being a lawyer and all.
Here are just a few of them:
Promus ―All is well that ends well.
Title —-All’s Well That Ends Well
Promus ―To slay with a leaden sword.
Love’s Labour’s Lost Act 5, Scene 2 ―Wounds like a leaden sword.
Promus ―Things done cannot be undone.
Macbeth, Act 5, Scene I ―What‘s done cannot be undone.
Promus ―To stumble at the threshold.
3 Henry VI Act 4, Scene 7 ―Many men that stumble at the threshold.
Promus ―A Fool‘s bolt is soon shot.
Henry V Act 4, Scene 7 ―A Fool‘s bolt is soon shot.
Promus ―He stumbles who makes too much haste.
Romeo and Juliet Act 2, Scene 3 ―They stumble that run fast.
Promus ―Good wine needs no bush.
As You Like It Epilogue ―Good wine needs no bush.
Promus ―An ill wind that bloweth no man to good.
2 Henry IV Act 5, Scene 3 ―The ill wind that blows no man to good.
Promus ―Thought is free.
Twelfth Night Act 1, Scene 3 ―Thought is free.
The Tempest Act 3, Scene 2 ―Thought is free.
Promus ―He who has not patience has nothing.
Othello Act 2, Scene 3 ―How poor they are that have not patience.
Promus ―All that glisters is not gold.
The Merchant of Venice Act 2, Scene 7. ―All that glisters is not gold.
Promus ―Happy man, happy dole.
Merry Wives of Windsor Act 3, Scene 4 ―Happy man be his dole.
1 Henry IV Act 2, Scene 2 ―Happy man be his dole.
The Taming of the Shrew Act 1, Scene 1 ―Happy man be his dole.
The Winter’s Tale Act 1, Scene 2 ―Happy man be his dole.
Promus ―Seldom cometh the better.
Richard III Act 2, Scene 3 ―Seldom cometh the better.
Promus Chi semina spine non vada discalzo.
(He who sows thorns should not go barefoot.).
To mow down thorns that would annoy our foot 2 Henry VI: 3: 1
But O, the thorns we stand upon! The Winter's Tale: 4: 4
Promus 926 Nadar y nadar y ahogar a la orilla. (To swim and swim and drown close to the shore.)
’Tis double death to drown in ken of shore; The Rape of Lucrece: line 1114
Promus 669 The world runs on wheells.
Then may I set the world on wheels The Two Gentlemen of Verona: 3: 1
Promus 629 To cast beyond the moon.
I aim a mile beyond the moon. Titus Andronicus: 4: 3
Promus 648 For the moonshyne in the water. O vain petitioner, beg a greater matter.
Thou now requests but moonshine in the water. Love’s Labour’s Lost. 5: 2
Promus 661 Out of God’s blessing into the warme sunne.
Thou out of heaven’s benediction com’st To the warm sun. King Lear: 2: 2
Promus 259 Sit omnis homo velox ad audiendum tardus ad loquendum. Jam. i. 19. Let every man be swift to hear and slow to speak.
Give every man thine ear but few thy voice. Hamlet: 1: 3
Promus 562 Romanus sedendo vincit.-Er. Ad. 329. (See Isaiah xxx. 9: ‘The Roman conquers by sitting down’- i.e. by patience, scheming, or wearing out his adversary.)
LIEUTENANT:Sir, I beseech you, think you he’ll carry Rome?
AUFIDIUS: All places yields to him ere he sits down Coriolanus: 4: 7
Promus 869 Riper than a mulberry
Now humble as the ripest mulberry Coriolanus: 3: 2
Promus Any one can manage a boat in calm weather.”
“When the sea was calm, all Show’d mastership in floating.” Coriolanus, iv. 1
Promus “To cure deafness is difficult.”
“Your tale, sir, would cure deafness.” The Tempest
Promus “Love me little; love me long.”
Love moderately ; long love doth so.” Romeo and Juliet, ii. 6
Promus “To live long, one must be patient.”
You are so fretful, you cannot live long.” 1 Henry IV., 3
Promus To drive out a nail with a nail
“One nail by strength drives out another.” Coriolanus iv 7
Promus “Consider the varying chances of war.”
“ Consider, sir, the chance of war; the day was yours by accident.” Cymbeline, v. 5
“ Now good or bad, tis but the chance of war.” Troilus and Cressida, Prologue
There are many many many more, some more glancing and suggestive but all clearly linked. This Promus Notebook appears to have been compile over the course on onlyone year. There were probably many more. Bacon had a reputation as a man who had read every book in England.
N.B. Cockburn, The Bacon Shakespeare Question, And The Promus
In an astonishing work of detailed scholarship, N.B. Cockburn patiently addresses the Shakespeare authorship question for over 700 pages. He refuses to use any ciphers or code-breaking to reveal secret messages form the plays that have made Baconians look very silly over the years. Cockburn sets up the argument for Bacon like a patient and brilliant lawyer, systematically and carefully building his case.
Get this book 👆
Cockburn finds a a single folio (page 112) of the Promus remarkably yielding multiple parallels together in Romeo and Juliet, which is much too elaborate to go into here. (The Bacon-Shakespeare Question, (NB Cockburn pg 518)
According to Cockburn, who gives Stratfordians every chance to explain themselves throughout the book, very few Stratfordians have addressed the Promus Notebook, and if they have, they have tried to belittle it, saying “there are parallels in the notebook with all the other playwrights as well” thereby admitting to the parallels in the Promus to Shakespeare, but never actually providing the parallels they see with other writers. Some Stratfordians say, well, ‘they were reading the same things’, or ‘Bacon was reading Shakespeare’! The problem is Romeo and Juliet wasn't in quarto form till 1599, but the Promus Notebook has dates in it of 1594 and 1595, around the time Romeo and Juliet was being written. The dates again add up perfectly .
SMOKING GUN 2: The Northumberland Manuscript
This next piece of evidence is mind blowing, and along with the Promus settles the fact that Francis Bacon was highly involved in the Shakespeare Hoax.
In 1867 a bundle of manuscripts was found in the Northumberland house, in Charing Cross London, not far from Bacon’s former family home at York House on the Strand. (Bacon had multiple residences. York House is where he was born and lived at various times until his fall from grace in 1621) The bundle of folded pages was covered by a folded page on which was written the the contents of the bundle, which were manuscripts of writings by Francis Bacon. Also included in the folder, according to the table of contents listed on the front were two Shakespeare plays, Richard II and Richard III.
The name William Shakespeare is found multiple times on the front cover and it is the earliest known example of his name in manuscript form! There is no dispute among the experts about the ownership of this folder- it belonged to Francis Bacon.
Incredibly, the name William Shakespeare appears right next to the name Francis Bacon on the cover, in one place even saying “ fffraauncis Bacon your William Shakespeare”! Case closed homie. Both names, Bacon’s and Shakespeare’s, are written multiple times on the contents sheet.
The Northumberland Manuscript Cover
The front cover page/contents page was used by scribes (Bacon kept a team of assistants he called “good pens’ in employment) as a writing pad to practice on and get the ink flowing from the quills. Above is a photo of the contents page, and below are two facsimiles showing more clearly what is on the page. The contents of the folder are various essays written by Bacon, one being a speech for the Earl of Essex. The two plays by William Shakespeare, Richard II and Richard III, were no longer in the folder, perhaps having been removed for the printer. Richard II and Richard III are two of the earliest plays published, as anonymous quartos, in 1597 which is the year to which the folder has been dated. Some of the contents found in the folder date back to 1584.
Incredibly, the name William Shakespeare appears right next to the name Francis Bacon on the cover, in one place even saying “ fffraauncis Bacon your William Shakespeare”! Dude, case closed. Both names, Bacon’s and Shakespeare’s, are written multiple times on the contents sheet.
The manuscript is today kept at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland, and is the property of the Duke of Northumberland. The Northumberland Dukes figure prominently in the Shakespeare plays, even serving as the heroes in Macbeth-it is the Earl of Northumberland who raises an army of Englishmen to invade Scotland and kill Macbeth.
Francis Bacon’s real father, the Earl of Leicester Robert Dudley, his father WAS THE Duke of Northumberland. Probably just a coincidence.
Northumberland Manuscript facsimile
The Northumberland Manuscript is the second smoking gun. The full implications of it are enormous. Very few Stratfordians have engaged with this piece of evidence as it is so damaging to their case.
The name Neville appears as does playwright Thomas Nashe. This video explores the Northumberland manuscript in depth.
Smoking Gun 3: First Performance Ever Of A Shakespeare Play
Was the “Comedy Of Errors” At Gray’s Inn
The first definite, documented performance of any Shakespeare play is the Comedy Of Errors and it took place at Gray’s Inn, the law school Bacon attended and where he kept a suite of rooms his entire life, during the “Christmas Revels” when Bacon was heavily involved in staging the entertainment. Gray’s Inn is still training barristers in the same location and sports a massive bronze of Baron Verulam in “The Walks”- the gardens that Verulam himself designed.
Back in Bacon’s day, Gray’s Inn held what were called the Christmas Revels each year. These were the ‘twelve days of Christmas’ and it was a party from December 25 to January 6, culminating in the all important Twelfth Night, a grand occasion for all of early modern London, a bit of a Saturnalia, and the very title of a Shakespeare play.
In 1594, Francis Bacon was heavily involved, if not in charge of the entertainment for the Revels that year, having been made a ‘bencher’ (meaning he served as a part-time administrator). That year Shakespeare’s Comedy Of Errors was performed. We know this from a document, published in 1688 entitled Gesta Grayorum. This is mainstream accepted Startfordian history. From the website “Shakespeare’s Globe” we read:
“We know about this early performance [Comedy Of Errors] because someone wrote an account of the Inn’s Christmas festivities of which the play formed a part. This tongue-in-cheek document, with the deliberately overblown title Gesta Grayorum (Latin for ‘The Deeds of Gray’), was later published…in 1688.”
Bacon’s involvement with writing the Gesta Grayorum is not in dispute, attested to by James Spedding, certainly a Stratfordian, the Victorian editor of Bacon’s collected works, with another attestation of Bacon’s involvment being prominent Shakespeare scholar E.K. Chambers.
Bacon was a part-time administrator at Gray’s Inn and engaged in helping to schedule and write the entertainment when the first ever documented performance of Shakespeare play took place. What a coincidence! It is thought that two Shakespeare plays were performed, the other one being Love’s Labor’s Lost, which has significant ties to Bacon, and appears to be written for initiates. (8*) These performances of the Shakespeare plays are the third smoking gun.
The Fourth Smoking Gun: Love’s Labor’s Lost
The comedy Love’s Labors Lost is strongly tied to Francis Bacon even more so than most of the other plays, and it comprises the fourth smoking gun for evidence of Bacon’s authorship.
What makes Love’s Labors Lost provably written by Bacon is that the names of four the principal characters in the play are found in Anthony Bacon’s passport, an occurrence which goes far beyond chance and serves as an in-joke for Anthony and his friends. Anthony was living with Francis at Gray’s Inn at the time of the 1594 Christmas Revels.
The four principle characters are named Longaville, Biron, Dumain,and Boyet. Anthony Bacon’s passport, housed in the British Museum, has four clear signatures- Longaville, Berowne Dumaine, and Boyet. Dates show the signatures were written between 1583 and 1592.
Anthony Bacon looms large in the story of his brother the great Baron Verulam and as well in preparing the hoax of Stratford Will. Anthony was a poet and a spy. Elizabethan Poetry as a means of espionage and a type of twilight communication has been studied by the CIA and James Jesus Angleton. (9*) Anthony was extremely close to his brother Francis as well as to the ill-fated Earl of Essex. The three had their own espionage network. Anthony died young, soon after the Earl of Essex lost his head, both exiting stage left in 1601.
