sister Mary Tudor, were suspected of Roman Catholic sympathies. There were many rumours surrounding the untimely death of Ferdinando Derby, who had been approached to lead an attempt to overthrow Queen Elizabeth, but had remained loyal to her. Due to the sudden and violent nature of his final illness, poisoning was widely suspected. Possibly because of the potential for military rebellion in alliance with Irish Roman Catholics, the 6th Earl was expressly forbidden by the Queen to take part in the Earl of Essex's campaign in Ireland. He, therefore, limited his involvement with national politics, devoting himself primarily to the management of his estates and his dominant position in local administration in Lancashire and Cheshire. In 1603 he became a member of the Privy Council of England. Queen Elizabeth granted Derby the Order of the Garter in 1601, while James VI and I appointed him Lord Chamberlain of Chester. A few years after the death of his wife, when Derby was "old and infirm, and desirous of withdrawing himself from the hurry and fatigue of life" he assigned his estates to his son James, retaining an annuity of £1,000. He bought a house by the River Dee just outside Chester, where he lived in retirement until his death on 29 September 1642. Shakespearean authorship question Derby is one of several individuals who have been claimed by proponents of the Shakespearean authorship question to be the true author of William Shakespeare's works. Derby's candidacy was first proposed in 1891 by the archivist James H. Greenstreet, who identified a pair of letters by the Jesuit spy George Fenner dating from 1599 in which he reported that Derby was unlikely to advance the Roman Catholic cause, as he was "busy penning plays for the common players." Greenstreet argued that the comic scenes in Love's Labour's Lost were influenced by a pageant of the Nine Worthies only ever performed in Derby's home town of Chester. Greenstreet attempted to develop his ideas in a second paper, but died suddenly in 1892, leaving his arguments incomplete. The theory was revived in The Silent Shakespeare (1915) by the American writer Robert Frazer, who concluded that "William Stanley was William Shakespeare". The idea was then taken up in France and was first advocated in scholarly detail when the Rabelais expert Abel Lefranc published his book, Sous le masque de William Shakespeare: William Stanley, VIe comte de Derby (1918).