by M. J. Trow
We climb the tower, a tight, dark spiral of Purbeck marble. There are initials of eighteenth century bellringers carved into the stone and pigeons brood among the silent bells. Towards the top, where incendiary damage was done, the steps become cement and the interior brick. The beacon that guided ships around the sharp curve of the river has long gone. Below the flapping White Ensign of the Royal Navy (St Nicholas is the only church in the country to be allowed to fly this flag) the view is commanding.
To the north lies the busy, regenerated skyline of the Isle of Dogs, a monument to late Elizabethan money the second time around. To the south, the masts of Crystal Palace on Sydenham Hill catch the spring sunlight. To the west, the London Eye dwarfs any of the buildings that Marlowe would have known; and to the east, the gilded turrets of the Greenwich Observatory and Naval College stand on the site of Elizabeth’s great palace of Placentia.
Below the tower to the west lies Deptford Strand itself, hemmed in by Borthwick Street nearest the river, the delightfully named Twinkle Park and bisected by Benbow Street, after the admiral of the same name. The Strand is one big housing estate owned by the Greater London Council and called the Charlotte Turner Gardens. To the east, perhaps in the north-east corner of the churchyard, lie the mortal remains of Kit Marlowe, poet, scholar, playwright, spy, Machiavellian, atheist, homosexual, over-reacher – see him as you will. Less than a century after his death, he was given a huge amount of company. The church’s Plague Book of 1666 contains the names of nearly 1200 people from Deptford who lie buried in a plague pit on the same site.
Only Marlowe’s works live on. And the unanswered questions.
Deptford, 30 May 1593
Deptford Strand lay on the river to the south-west of the loop in the Thames and to the west of the Raven’s Bourne, a sluggish tributary of the greatest artery in the country. In the fourteenth century there was still a deep ford which gave the village its name and, as ‘Deepford’, it is still carved on the tomb of the shipbuilder Jonas Shish in St Nicholas churchyard. By the age of Elizabeth, a wooden bridge had replaced it to cope with the huge increase in traffic and trade.
As early as 1513, Deptford had been earmarked by Henry VIII to build his great shipyards. The Tudors were inveterate shipbuilders, with warships like the Great Harry and the Mary Rose riding the sea roads that guarded England. A ruined monastery near the church of St Nicholas was commandeered as a storehouse – the stowage – for the hemp, iron and timbers which were the raw materials of the Tudor navy.
Symonson’s A New Description of Kent, published in 1596, shows the spire of the church dwarfed by the royal estate beyond the Raven’s Bourne at Greenwich, one of the many Tudor palaces that dotted the countryside south of the Thames. Bought by Henry VII, much expanded by Henry VIII, Greenwich – Placentia – was one of the marvels of the age, eclipsed only by Nonsuch at Eltham. To the south of the Greenwich lands lay the bleak high ground of Black Heath, where Wat Tyler and his peasants had gathered in the ‘hurling time’ to begin their march on London in 1381. And further south still rolled the excellent hare-coursing country around Shooters’ Hill, where, legend has it, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn met the outlaw Robin Hood while hunting.
In the 1590s, the noise and bustle of the king’s shipyards would have been incessant during the day. Much British timber was considered inferior and Russian hardwood was imported from the Hanseatic League all the way from the Baltic to supplement the solid oak of Kent for the clinker-built pinnaces and the high-hulled caravels.
The parish records of St Nicholas tell us that nearly 4,000 new settlers had arrived to join the jostling throng of shipwrights, carpenters, rope and sailmakers and the courtier hangers-on from Placentia.
The earliest detailed map of Deptford was drawn in 1653. Various landowners are mentioned as having held land ‘since the rebellion’ (the Civil War) and the basic geographical layout of the area is not likely to have changed since Marlowe’s time.
To the west of the area trickled Deptford Creek, forming the boundary of parcels of land owned by the church and a Mr Browne, clearly the largest landowner in the parish. It was still, in the 1650s, meadowland and the roads across it designated ‘lanes’. There were two ‘great docks’ as well as the king’s yards with stone wharfs built between the lower, middle and upper water gates. To the east was the Tudor manor house owned by Sir Richard Browne in Elizabeth’s time and to the south the church and the lands of the Master, Wardens and Assistants of the Guild Fraternity or Brotherhood of the Most Glorious and Undivided Trinity and of St Clement – the future pilots of Trinity House and already in the 1590s, a long established mariners’ guild.
Along the Thames waterfront rode the Golden Hind, the spirit of the age in which Francis Drake had rounded the world. He had knelt on the tarred planking of his own ship to receive the Queen’s knighthood at Deptford in 1581. The Devon sailor owned land in the area and two of his descendants became vicars of St Nicholas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Lord Howard of Effingham, one of the greatest sailors of his age and a national hero in the year of the Armada (1588) owned a large house on Deptford Green and regularly attended services in St Nicholas Church.
Somewhere in the centre of this burgeoning, bustling community with its cosmopolitan shifting population and its cross-section of society, stood a rectangle of land bordered by trees and called Deptford Strand. And it was here, in the house of a widow, Eleanor Bull, that the poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe died early on a summer’s evening, Wednesday 30 May, in the thirty-fifth year of the reign of the queen he served and the 1,593rd of the Lord in whom he did not believe.
The mythology of the death of Christopher Marlowe continues to dog us despite eighty years of research and scholarship. We must peel away the legends that have grown up over the centuries. In their otherwise excellent screenplay of Shakespeare in Love (1998), writers Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard perpetuate the notion of the infamous tavern brawl. Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) falls in love with Viola de Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow) and pretends to be Christopher Marlowe to avoid the wrath of Viola’s fiancé, the psychotic Lord Wessex (Colin Firth). When he hears of the real Marlowe’s death, Shakespeare is naturally distraught, believing Wessex is the killer and the fault is his.
‘It’s true, Will,’ says the actor Ned Alleyn (Ben Affleck). ‘It was a tavern brawl ... Marlowe was attacked and got his own knife in the eye. A quarrel about the bill ...’
Christopher Marlowe’s stature today is greater than ever and Norman and Stoppard in their screenplay put these words into Shakespeare’s mouth. ‘Marlowe’s touch was in my Titus Andronicus and my Henry VI was a house built on his foundations ... I would exchange all my plays for all of his that will never come.’
There are those who contend today that Marlowe, had he lived, would have been far greater than Shakespeare. There are those who contend that he was Shakespeare, faking his own death at Deptford and churning out masterpiece after masterpiece for the oddly uninspiring Mr Shaxper from Stratford on the Avon.
We have to go back to the seventeenth century for the first fictionalised accounts of Marlowe’s death. In 1618, the rabid Puritan Edmund Rudierde published The Thunderbolt of God’s Wrath against Hard-Hearted and Stiffe-Necked Sinners. In Chapter 22, he wrote:
We read of one Marlin, a Cambridge Scholler, who was a Poet, and a filthy Play-maker, this wretch accounted that meeke servant of God Moses to be but a Conjurer, and our sweete Saviour but a seducer and a deceiver of the people. But harken yee braine-sicke and prophane Poets and Players that bewitch idle eares with foolish vanities; what fell upon this prophane wretch, having a quarrell against one whom he met in a streete in London and would have stabd him: But the partie perceiving his villainy prevented him with catching his hand, and turning his owne dagger into his braines, and so blaspheming and cursing, he yielded up his stinking breth: marke this yee Players, that live by making fooles laugh at sinne and wickedness.
Aside from Rudierde’s paranoia on the e
vils of actors and playwrights (both of them Hell’s agents to a dyed-in-the-wool Puritan) the notion of an open air killing – ‘in a street in London’ is peculiar and almost certainly a misreading of another source.
Eighteen years earlier, William Vaughan had produced a slightly more accurate version of events in The Golden Grove:
Not inferior to these was one Christopher Marlowe by profession a playmaker, who, as it is reported, about 7 yeares a-goe wrote a booke against the Trinitie; but see the effect of God’s justice; it so hapned that at Deptford, a little village about three miles distant from London, as he meant to stab with his poynard [dagger] one named Ingram, that had invited him thither to a feast, and was then playing at tables he quickly perceiving it, so avoided the thrust, that withall drawing out his dagger for his defence, hee stabd this Marlowe into the eye, in such sort, that his braines coming out at the daggers point, hee shortlie after dyed. Thus did God, the true executioner of divine justice, worke the ende of impious Atheists.
Two years before that and only five years after Marlowe’s death, Francis Meres, a Cambridge-educated contemporary, added details of his own in Palladia Tamia – ‘As the poet Lycophon was shot to death by a certain rival of his; so Christopher Marlow was stabd to death by a bawdy Serving man, a rival of his in his lewde love.’ It was this version which was expanded in 1691 by Anthony à Wood in Athenae Oxoniensis:
For it so fell out that he being deeply in love with a certain Woman, had for his Rival a bawdy serving-man, one rather fit to be a Pimp, than an ingenuous Amoretto as Marlo conceived himself to be. Whereupon Marlo taking it to be a high affront, rush’d in upon, to stab him, with his dagger: But the serving-man being very quick, so avoided the stroke, that withal catching hold of Marlo’s wrist, he stab’d his own dagger into his own head, in such sort, that notwithstanding all the means of surgery that could be wrought, he shortly after died of his Wound ...
The origin of all these versions seems to be Thomas Beard, another Puritan and the tutor of Oliver Cromwell, writing The Theatre of God’s Judgements in 1597.
Not inferior in any of the former [other targets of God’s vengeance] in Atheisme and impiety, and equall to all in maner of punishment was one of our own nation, of fresh and late memory, called Marlin, by profession a scholler, brought up from his youth in the University of Cambridge, but by practise a playmaker, and a Poet of scurrilitie, who by giving too large a swinge to his owne wit, and suffering his lust to have the full raines, fell (not without just desert) to that outrage and extremitie, that hee denied God and his sonne Christ, and not only in word blasphemed the trinitie, but also (as it is credibly reported) wrote books against it, affirming our Saviour to be but a deceiver and Moses to be but a conjurer and seducer of the people, and the holy Bible to be but vaine and idle stories, and all religion but a device of pollicie. But see what a hooke the Lord put in the nosthrils of this barking dogge: It so fell out, that in London streets as he purposed to stab one whom hee ought [owed] a grudge unto with his dagger, the other party perceiving so avoided the stroke, that withall catching hold of his wrest, he stabbed his owne dagger into his owne head, in such sort, that notwithstanding all means of surgerie that could be wrought, hee shortly after died thereof. The manner of his death being so terrible (for hee even cursed and blasphemed to his last gaspe, and together with his breath an oth flew out of his mouth) that it was not only a manifest sign of Gods judgement, but also an horrible and fearfull terrour to all that beheld him. But herein did the justice of God most notably appeare, in that hee compelled his owne hand which had written those blasphemies to be he instrument to punish him, and that in his braine, which had devised the same.
What can we learn of Marlowe’s death from the bigoted, abridged, lifted and paraphrased versions above? Only Vaughan cites Deptford as the murder scene – Rudierde happily copies Beard in placing the action in the open air – ‘London street’ becomes ‘a street in London’. The possibility here is that Beard, who very probably had the opportunity to talk to those involved, places widow Bull’s house in London Street, listed in the Subsidy Rolls (tax returns) for East Greenwich and only a few hundred yards west of the Raven’s Bourne, close enough, albeit in a different parish, to Deptford Strand.
Marlowe quarrelled with a man named Ingram, described as ‘a bawdy serving-man’ which is Elizabethan for a pimp. By introducing a ‘certain Woman’ into the picture, the crime becomes particularly low in early seventeenth century eyes and is both a typical Puritan example of contempt for sex and women in general and also leads us frustratingly in the wrong direction.
It is unclear whose knife was used in the attack; was it Marlowe’s own, as Rudierde and à Wood contend, or Ingram’s, as Vaughan claims? Beard is ambiguous on this point.
Did Marlowe die instantly? Rudierde has him blaspheming and cursing, as does Beard. Vaughan says he ‘shortly after dyed’ and à Wood implies at least that there was some medical attempt to save his life – ‘notwithstanding all the means of surgery that could be wrought’.
In the 1820s the antiquarian James Broughton unearthed crucial details from the parish records of St Nicholas, Deptford. In the Gentleman’s Magazine for January 1830, Broughton published the information that Christopher Marlowe was ‘slaine by Ffrancis Archer’ and another name has entered the litany of errors, embellishments and downright fiction. The mistake seems to have been that of the Reverend D. Jones, Minister of St Nicholas, in a careless transposition of the Elizabethan handwriting from his parish registers. The entry actually reads ‘Christopher Marlowe slain by Ffrancis Frizer sepultus [buried] 1. of June Anno Dom. 1593’. The entry is typical of the Elizabethan habit of mixing English with Latin, but the misreading of ‘F’ for ‘A’ in Frizer seems odd after getting it right on the previous line in ‘Ffrancis’. The incorrect Christian name remained a subject of controversy until Dr J Leslie Hotson arrived on the scene in the 1920s.
Research into the death of Marlowe is a time-chart of historical study in itself, Beard, Meres and Rudierde felt free to use the killing as an example of God’s wrath against atheists. For them, it was a morality tale, a caution against flying in the face of the true faith. Broughton, two centuries later, has no polemical axe to grind, but has the antiquarian’s obsession with the artefacts of the past, poring over the dusty archives of parish churches and asking himself the wrong questions. The renewed interest in Elizabethan dramatists in the nineteenth century – after Colley Cibber, Nahum Tate and David Garrick had tinkered to give Shakespeare’s tragedies happy endings! – led other writers to speculate on the Puritan half-truths. The poet Theodore Watts-Dunton described Marlowe’s killer as a villain. Charles Kingsley, Christian socialist, author and hypocrite, described him as a footman and Arthur Bayldon put him in the kitchens as a scullion.
‘Undoubtedly,’ wrote J. le Gay Brereton, ‘he brushed from Marlowe’s hose the mire of the London kennels and sponged from his doublet the stains of grease and sack.’
Another writer, Pinkerton, elaborated on the theme of the lady over whom Marlowe quarrelled with his rival, but he and the others who did so were all circumscribed by the obscenity laws and censorship of their century.
The Harvard scholar Leslie Hotson was looking for something else entirely in the Public Record in 1925. As an expert in literary convention, he knew that the first Elizabethans often referred to each other by their Christian names. So the unusual first name of ‘Ingram’ mentioned by Vaughan in 1600 as Marlowe’s killer leapt out at him from property documents called the Calendar of Close Rolls. The entry, however, referred to nothing more sinister than a property deal. In The Death of Christopher Marlowe, Hotson cannot hide his excitement on the research trail, nor the sense of despair at meeting brick walls. The Inquisitions Post Mortem told him precisely nothing. Neither did the records of the Court of Queen’s Bench, the supreme court in the Strand, London. And the local court records, the Rolls of Assize, for all their relevance to Kent in the South-Eastern Circuit had no mention of eithe
r Marlowe or Ingram. Hotson believed he might have missed something vital in the original documents within the infuriating curls and loops of the Tudor clerks.
In a flash of either brilliance or sheer exasperation, Hotson checked the Patent Rolls (privileges granted by the monarch) for 35 Elizabeth which related to pardons granted by the Queen in 1593. He found it:
Regina xxviij de Juni concessit Ingramo ffrisar perdonam de se defendo –
‘The Queen, on the 28th day of June granted a pardon to Ingram ffrisar in self defence.
This sent Hotson back to the Chancery Inquisitions Post Mortem he had already checked and at last the motley selection, covering some four centuries, yielded pure gold. The sequence of documents that Hotson found runs as follows; first comes the write a certiorari (from a high court to a lower court):
Elizabeth, by the grace of God of England, France and Ireland, Queen, Defender of the Faith etc. To our well-beloved William Danby, Gentleman, Coroner of our household, greeting. Wishing for certain causes to be certified upon an indictment made in your presence concerning the death of Christopher Morley, upon view of the body of the same Christopher, at Deptforde Strande in our County of Kent within the verge lying dead and slain, whence a certain Ingram ffrysar, late of London, Gentleman, is indicted (as by the record thence remaining with you it fully appears) slew the aforesaid Christopher in self-defence & not feloniously or of malice aforethought, so that in no other wise could he avoid his own death, or not: we command you to send the tenor of the indictment aforesaid with everything touching it and whatsoever names the parties aforesaid in that indictment are known by, to us in our Chancery under your seal distinctly and openly without delay & with this writ. Witness myself at Westminster on the 15th day of June in the year of our reign the thirty fifth.
