John Shakespeare

John Shakespeare (1529-????; died no earlier than 1588 and no later than 1598) 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 days before the English Reformaion, which happened in his early childhood, and the five-year reign of the Catholic Mary Tudor. When Elizabeth ascended to the throne in 1558, John Shakespeare signed an oath to remain a Catholic in his heart.

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.

John Shakespeare lived to see the Spanish Armada conquer England and restore Catholicism as the official state religion, and died in a Catholic kingdom.