The machinations of Pouncet Grasp had not been without their due effect. His evil disposition was as great as his industry, and his very face and form, twisted and contorted as both were, proclaimed the mind of the man as plainly as if he had carried a window in his breast.
Few specimens of the human countenance presented indeed less of the divine about it than did that of the Stratford lawyer. The term ugly as sin might, in verity, have been applied to him, for, when he was hatching any particular piece of rascality, the working of his features gave him a diabolical look.
Not only had he succeeded in his design of weaving a web about Walter Arderne, and getting incarcerated within the walls of a prison for debt, but he even managed, by some strange underhand practice, to bring him under the suspicion of the Queen's council for treasonable matter. And yet, with all this malignancy of disposition, Grasp carried about him such an air of bonhommie that, until he was found out, he was seldom distrusted. After he had, by the most careful approaches, (like a spider securing a victim in his web, who is too powerful to be openly attacked), fairly enmeshed Walter Arderne, he turned his thoughts upon his old Stratford enemy, William Shakespeare, and, whose whereabout he now had little difficulty in discovering, since after the successful performance of Romeo and Juliet, the author's name was in the mouths of many.
Sir Thomas Lucy had departed only few days before for Stratford, or Grasp would immediately have sought him out, and, as he himself was also on the eve of returning to Warwickshire, together with his new client, in order to take immediate possession of the inheritance succeeded to, he resolved to delay till his arrival the discovery he had made.
Meanwhile, the situation of Arderne was sufficiently disagreeable. He was arrested for an enormous sum, and-when Sir Hugh Clopton sought to clear him of the difficulty, by making some great sacrifices, that good old man found, to his further dismay, that some secret foe had denounced his nephew as a conspirator against the life of the Queen.
In Elizabeth's reign, those persons of condition who came under suspicion and were confined within the walls of a prison found it no easy matter to clear themselves, and some, even in the higher ranks of the nobility, without any sustained charge but "for mere suspicion, were treated as if for surety," finding their graves in the dismal chambers of the Tower.
The news of the imprisonment of his early friend greatly troubled Shakespeare. He was just at this time contemplating a return to his native town, for now that he had so far achieved success, and felt within himself the power of future fame, the longing for home, added to the desire of once more embracing all he had dear there, he felt to be irresistible.
To leave London, however, without an effort to serve his early friend was impossible. He visited Arderne in his prison, and afterwards sought Lord Leicester in order to interest that noble in his favour.
The time was, however, somewhat out of joint for making a successful suit to Leicester at this moment. He was in one of those periodical fits of ill-temper which usually attacked him when his "high-reaching" schemes failed. He was out of favour with the Queen too, somewhat on the sudden, and so wide was the breach that, albeit he was seeking by some underhand contrivances to regain a place in her good graces, all his attempts were futile.
To explain this to our readers, we must remind them that after the services of Leicester at Tilbury, Elizabeth had created for the favourite the office of Lord Lieutenant of England and Ireland; an office which would have invested him with greater power than any sovereign of this country had ever ventured to bestow on a subject. The patent for this unprecedented dignity was actually made out, and only awaited the royal signature, when Burleigh and Hatton, by their earnest remonstrances, deterred Her Majesty from investing him with such power.