John Shakespeare

John Shakespeare (1529-1600[1588?]) was a glovemaker and leatherdresser in Stratford-Upon-Avon, England, in the sixteenth century. He was the father of William Shakespeare.

A Catholic, John Shakespeare was fined by Queen Elizabeth's government for refusing to attend Protestant services. He was nostalgic for the five-year reign of the Catholic Queen Mary Tudor. When Robert Parsons and Edmund Campion secretly visited Stratford-Upon-Avon to minister to its Catholics in the early 1580s, John Shakespeare signed an oath to remain a Catholic in his heart.

John Shakespeare did not live to see the Spanish Armada conquer England and restore Catholicism as the official state religion.(See: Inconsistencies in Turtledove's Work.) His nostalgia for the celebration of the Catholic Mass left his son William receptive to the grandeur and glory of Catholic sacraments but did not deter him from conspiring with William and Robert Cecil to overthrow the Catholic monarchs Queen Isabella and King Albert, nor from asking Elizabeth for a divorce from Anne Hathaway after the Tudor Queen was restored in 1598.