John Churton Collins

The importance of how this all connects to the occult and the Illuminati can be appreciated by reading Fire in the Minds of Men by James Billington.

John Churton Collins.

In 1886, he wrote a book on Voltaire, and in 1908, he wrote yet another book on Voltaire.

As a lecturer who traveled to the US and Germany, the press always gave him great press coverage.

Grant White says finally that the idea of his having been clerk to an attorney has been blown to pieces.

It is altogether characteristic of Mr. Churton Collins that he, nevertheless, adopts this exploded myth.

That Shakespeare was in early life employed as a clerk in an attorney's office may be correct.

At Stratford there was by royal charter a court of record sitting every fortnight with six attorneys besides the town clerk belonging to it.

Of the attorney's clerk hypothesis, on the other hand, there is not the faintest vestige of a tradition.

It has been evolved out of the fertile imaginations of embarrassed Stratfordians, seeking for some explanation of the Stratford rustic's marvelous acquaintance with law and legal terms and legal life.

But Mr. Churton Collins has not the least hesitation in throwing over the tradition which has the warrant of antiquity and setting up in its stead this ridiculous invention, for which not only is there no shred of positive evidence, but which, as Lord Campbell and Lord Penzance point out, is really put out of court by the negative evidence, since no young man could have been at work in an attorney's office without being called upon continually to act as a witness, and in many other ways leaving traces of his work and name.

And as Mr. Edwards further points out, since the day when Lord Campbell's book was published between 40 and 50 years ago, every old deed or will, to say nothing of other legal papers, dated during the period of William Shakespeare's youth has been scrutinized over half a dozen shires, and not one signature of the young man has been found.