Who Killed Kit Marlowe?

by M. J. Trow

  We know nothing, either, about relationships within the family. A.L. Rowse, the doyen of Tudor experts forty years ago, refers to one of Marlowe’s sisters, Ann (not specifically listed in the parish records) as ‘blasphemous’, because she was punished for it. Blasphemy in the sixteenth century was a crime against man because it was a crime against God. When the boy was about a year old, his father emerges as something of a pious busybody. In a libel suit, he swore an oath ‘that divers tymes most sclanderouslie affirmed...that godwiff Chapman did owe unto hym the same Laurence [a mutual neighbour] two shillings...’. He also reported hearing the derogatory remark that Applegate, a local tailore, had ‘hadd his pleasure of godlyve Chapman’s daughter’.

  Did the pious churchwarden and his wife really give birth to a brood of heretics and freethinkers? It is unlikely, but perhaps it was not only the future poet’s Cambridge education which fitted him for the fatal outlook he had as a man. It is tempting too to try to fit the boy into that classic pattern promoting homosexuality – a female culture in which Katherine and her daughters dominated and John was merely the figurehead and breadwinner. We simply do not, after four hundred years, have the information.

  Babies slept in wooden cradles and older children shared beds whatever their ages and sex. Little Kit may have learned to walk around his father’s workshop with ‘hanging sleeves’ (reins) and wooden cages trundling on wooden wheels. His toys would have been rattles and teething rings of horn and wood, gravitating to drums and popguns. It is possible he played with ‘Bartholomew babies’, his sisters’ dolls. He would have been as familiar as we are with Tom Thumb, Little Jack Horner and Old Mother Hubbard.

  Most parents, especially fathers, in Elizabethan times, were strict. It was not until 1577 that Hugh Rhodes wrote his Boke of Nurture or Schole of Good Manners but he was merely embodying the standard behaviour of his day - ‘...nor let your children go whither they will, but know where they go...and when you hear them swear or curse, lie or fight, thou shalt sharply reprove them.’

  As the eldest son, however, it is certain that Kit would have learned, from a very early age, the cobbler’s trade. This was standard practice in all walks of life; for sons to follow their fathers. There was even believed to be biblical precedent for it in Christ the carpenter from Nazareth working at Joseph’s lathe. It took an exceptional child – a Shakespeare or a Marlowe – to break the mould; and what worked that exception was education.

  Literacy is a difficult skill to measure historically. The ownership of books was not necessarily a sign of a bibliophile – nabobs of the seventeenth century and the nouveau riche of any modern period buy them by the yard. When John Marlowe died in 1605, no book, not even a manuscript of one of his famous son’s plays, nor, perhaps tellingly, a Bible, is mentioned in his will. Conversely, John Gresshop, Master of the King’s School, Canterbury, who died in February 1579, left whole pages of books, together with their individual values. Virtually all of them were written in Latin or Greek, the languages of the scholar.

  We do not know if John or Katherine Marlowe could read or whether either of them had any burning zeal for education. What is likely, however, is that the shoemaker came into contact with all strata of society including the great and good of Canterbury, both by being a churchwarden and as a craftsman. The sixteenth century was the age of the patron. Skill, ability, brilliance even, counted for little without the support of some guiding spirit, someone with sufficient birth and the right connections to open doors. In the case of young Marlowe, that patron was Sir Roger Manwood, a fearsome Justice of the Peace who earned the name ‘scourge of the night-prowler’. He lived in the village of Hackington, two miles from the city’s West Gate and his sword and funerary helmet are still displayed in the city museum. His tomb in the village church of St Stephen shows him in the cap, ruff and fur-lined robes of a Baron of the Exchequer with the gilt collar of SSs and sealed knots around his shoulders. We know that the knight took an interest in young Marlowe as a teenager, but this protection may have been established earlier.

  There were three schools in Canterbury in the 1560s, two in Marlowe’s own parish of St George and a third in St Peter’s Street that was also the Hospital of St Thomas the Martyr. This was the largest of them and had been founded by Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1569 for twenty poor boys. No rolls have survived from any of these schools, but Parker’s foundation seems the most likely. Kit was five when the school was opened (most boys began their formal education at seven) and with the vagaries of the local economy following the collapse of the pilgrimage business, he certainly qualified as a poor boy.

  Here he would have learned to read and write, with a horn book dangling from his neck (paper was still far too expensive for mere school use) not only in his native tongue, for which there were yet no rules of spelling, grammar or punctuation, but also in Latin, the language of the law and the Church. The possession of these skills already marked Marlowe out as a cut above his parents and placed him on the first rung of the rickety ladder of success. The discipline in Tudor schools was severe by modern standards, although Roger Ascham, the tutor to Princess Elizabeth, wrote in 1570 that ‘children are sooner allured by love than driven by beating to attain good learning’.

  Marlowe was probably still at Parker’s school when the Queen visited in September 1573 ‘To see a fine lady upon a white horse’ was an ambition in a nursery rhyme taught to children in the twentieth century. Elizabeth was the last of the peripatetic monarchs, travelling with bells and music, pomp and splendour, so that her subjects would marvel and whisper and be overawed. No doubt the twenty scholars of St Thomas’s were given the day off to cheer their queen as she rode under her gilded canopy to Parker’s palace. The Archbishop was delighted with it all and wrote to Archbishop Grindal of York days later to tell him how well the visit had gone.

  The Queen, of course, was no stranger to Canterbury. In 1568 she had granted the use of part of the cathedral’s crypt to the Huguenots, as their own private chapel; it had been the chantry of the Edward, Black Prince, whose tomb still stands in the Cathedral. The Inquisition and the zeal of the Jesuits in particular had forced many Huguenots out of their native France and the Spanish Netherlands. Many sought refuge in the more tolerant Protestant states of northern Europe, including England. London was a natural target, but so too was Canterbury. The houses of the weavers still stand in their half-timbered magnificence along the banks of the Stour. The original eighteen families were growing rapidly during Marlowe’s boyhood – perhaps he learned his French from them. It was time for this casual education to be given a more direct focus and that focus was the King’s School.

  There had been a school at Canterbury since the founding of the cathedral by Augustine. The Reformation, however, had dislocated the educational, as well as the religious, political and economic life of the country. Henry VIII gave financial compensation to the displaced Catholic monks of Canterbury in the 1530s, but what they were allowed to teach and how they were allowed to teach it changed forever.

  The Tudors were generous school benefactors and Henry’s charter of 1541 paid for a master, an usher (deputy) and fifty scholars. They entered at the age of nine and left at fifteen, an important part of their role to sing treble in the cathedral choir. The scholars were defined in the statues of 1541 as ‘poor boys, both destitute of the help of friends, and endowed with minds apt for learning...and shall be sustained out of the funds of our church’.

  We do not know exactly when Marlowe joined the school. The only reference to him, as ‘Christopher Marley’, is at Lady Day (then 14 January) 1579 when he was nearly fifteen. Because of his age, the assumption has been made that he was a commoner (paying fees) before that date. John Marlowe seems to have been in funds in the mid-1570s, employing a maid and two apprentices; if this is so, then perhaps the Marlowes could afford the school’s fees. By this time John was acting as bondsman for couples seeking marriage licences; this would have been an additional source of inco
me. As a King’s scholar, Kit received a stipend of £1 8s 4d a year, as well as two and a half yards of cloth for a new academic gown each Christmas and ‘commons’ (food). The total value was perhaps £4 a year.

  The boy’s route each morning would have taken him along St George’s Street, past the yard of the huge Bull Inn that ran from Buttermarket to the High Street. For much of the year he would be up before dawn, perhaps leaping the puddles and dung around the Bullstake. He would have run (or like Shakespeare’s more famous schoolboy ‘with his satchel/And shining morning face, creeping like a snail’) along the narrow length of Sun Street, with its over-arching medieval buildings and its odd sliding wooden shutters, their runners still visible today. To his right would have been the heraldic magnificence of the Christchurch Gate, its stone traceries and painted shields bright with the colours of the cathedral and the Queen. He would have turned along Palace Street and right into the Mint Yard.

  As the cathedral bells chimed the hour, the usher, Robert Rose, took his junior scholars through the Prior Selingegate and the low arch of Dark Entry to the cloisters and the cathedral itself. There were prayers and a psalm sung by the choristers, Marlowe among them. Musicality was not only part of the school life, but a necessary qualification for the scholarship which Marlowe won to Cambridge. His brother, Thomas, also sang with the cathedral choir in his turn. Both boys, the younger Marlowe, certainly would have sung the Sacred Songs of Thomas Tallis and his pupil William Byrd, published in 1575; so impressed was the Queen with their music that they were granted a twenty-one year monopoly to print all the church music in the country. The oldest buildings in the school, with their Norman-arched staircase, Strangers Hall and Almonry Chapel, were all part of the medieval monastery, abandoned by the monks in Kit’s grandfather’s time.

  The King’s School laid down what was expected of its scholars. The rigid medieval timetable of the Trivium (grammar, logic and rhetoric) and the Quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy) was giving way, slowly, to a new learning. Latin prose and poetry were the order of the day, ‘practised in poetic tales, the familiar letters of learned men, and other literature of that sort’. This was followed in the Fifth Form by ‘translating the most Chaste Poets and the best Historians’. Perhaps it was their very chastity that drove Marlowe to translate the raunchier Ovid later in life! In the Sixth Form, debate was expected, preparing the future free thinker, no doubt, for his clashes with orthodoxy as an adult – ‘Horace, Cicero and other authors of that class’ were the daily diet. Intellectual competition was fierce and encouraged by both headmasters of Marlowe’s time, John Gresshop and Nicholas Goldsborough, who personally examined the boys every week.

  The long school day ended at 5pm and a closing service was held before the day’s lessons were recounted by way of homework until 7pm.

  Marlowe’s love of theatre may well have been sparked by the plays performed in the cathedral by the school each Christmas. These were ‘Tragedies, Comedyes and interludes’ but always in Latin or Greek. There is no direct evidence from the 1570s that they were performed, although the vogue for child actors and children’s companies was catching on in London in this decade. The impact of this form of drama on Marlowe may be less than some commentators imagine. After all, the future ‘Muses’ darling’ was to create a new form of theatre and the revolutionary rhythm of iambic pentameter – what Ben Jonson was to call ‘Marlowe’s mighty line’ – there is no evidence that he ever set foot on stage as an actor.

  Marlowe was a day boy, rubbing shoulders with sons of the gentry, and such distinctions still mattered in his time. William Urry lists eighty scholars contemporary with Marlowe, but the list for 1578-9 has only fifty-six names, itself a sign that the school was already growing beyond its 1541 scope. It is impossible now to know who were Marlowe’s friends, finding the mercurial Kit a fascinating companion, and who were his enemies, scornful perhaps of the cobbler’s son from the parish of St George. Marlowe himself is listed at number 50 at Ladyday, Midsummer and Michaelmas and William Urry has winkled out the names that had other links with the future poet. Henry Bromerick was a scholar in 1582 and followed Marlowe to Cambridge; Ralph Groves came from Henley-on-Thames and probably knew Marlowe’s future brother-in-law John Crawford; John Reynard who joined the school in 1582 became sizar (poor scholar) of Clare College, Cambridge in 1591; Matthew Parker, the grandson of the Archbishop, matriculated fellow-commoner of Marlowe’s future college of Corpus Christi and received over eleven hundred books from his grandfather’s library. Mungay (Christian name unknown) and John Parrett both had shoes made for them by John Marlowe. Most interesting of all, in the light of Marlowe’s murder and the reason for it, is Thomas Colwell, who became the first married Bishop of Salisbury and a friend of the enigmatic Walter Ralegh.

  The next – and in many ways the most important phase of Marlowe’s career, one that led indirectly to his death – was his winning of the Parker scholarship. Matthew Parker senior was Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, between 1544 and 1553. In his will, dated 5 April 1575, he added three new scholarships worth £3 6s 8d a year each, one of which was to be given to a scholar of the King’s School who was also Canterbury born and bred. There were certain requirements.

  All which schollers shall and must at the time of their election be so entered into the skill of song as that they shall at first sight solf and sing plaine song. And that they shal be of the best and aptest schollers well instructed in their grammer and if it may be such as can make a verse.

  It was Parker’s son John who singled out Marlowe for the award

  While Marlowe was spending his long days on the worn, polished oak benches at the King’s School, declaiming with the best of them in Latin and Greek, possibly still working on rare holy days for his shoemaker father or, according to Canterbury folklore, sweating as a pot boy in the Star Inn along St. Dunstan’s Street beyond the West Gate, the forces that would shape his end were already in being.

  Of Ingram Frizer, who, according to the official account of Coroner Danby, was so outrageously attacked by Marlowe in Widow Bull’s house on 30 May 1593, we know nothing, except that he was living in Basingstoke in the autumn of 1589, where he bought the Angel Inn for £120.

  Nicholas Skeres, present at Marlowe’s death, is better chronicled. He was born in London in March 1563, making him a year older than Marlowe. His father was a member of the guild of Merchant Taylors, a rich livery company, and the Skeres family, Nicholas, Audrey, Jerome and Nicholas junior, lived in the parish of Allhallows-the-Little, along the Ropery that ran parallel to the Thames between the wharfs of Dowgate and Ebbgate. The family originally came from Yorkshire and owned land there as well as in London and Surrey. The death of the paterfamilias in a Tudor household was a serious blow and when his father died in 1566 the boy perhaps had no strong hand to guide him. By the mid-1570s, as Marlowe probably entered the King’s School, Skeres was already in debt and had fallen into the clutches of the money lenders Richard Parradine and John Wolfall, the latter a skinner from Silver Street in the city. The life of petty crime and con-artistry known to the Elizabethan underworld as ‘coney-catching’ or ‘cosenage’ had an appeal to a shiftless young man who doubtless had a glib tongue and winning ways.

  Robert Poley, the third in the Deptford triumvirate of 1593, was probably born in the mid-1550s. The first record of him is as a sizar of Clare College, Cambridge in 1568 (preceding John Reynard from the King’s School, Canterbury). The poverty associated with sizars (they carried out menial tasks for richer students to earn their keep, the Tudor version of working their way through college) never quite left Poley. And such men, greedy, ambitious, lean and hungry, were often dangerous. Frizer, Skeres and Poley, although none of them yet knew it, were waiting in the wings.

  On the national stage, the years of Marlowe’s childhood were those described by historian J.B. Black as the years of crisis. The Queen had been on the throne for six years, assailed from all sides by the cares of state. />
  First there was the marriage question. Elizabeth herself had become queen on the death of her elder sister, Mary, who had suffered a long history of amenorrhoea (absence of periods, caused by any number of conditions) and heart disease. The official diagnosis was dropsy, her lungs filling with fluid as she lay, abandoned and bitter, in her chambers at St James’s Palace. Before her, Elizabeth’s younger brother, Edward, had reigned for six years, dying of tuberculosis at the age of fifteen. Elizabeth had, as she herself famously said, ‘the body of a weak and feeble woman’, a fact made obvious to all when she caught and nearly died from smallpox in October 1562. The likelihood of a woman coping as queen in her own right was slim. Before Mary (whose five-year reign was wracked with its re-conversion to Catholicism and some three hundred public burnings) the last queen of England had been the dubious Matilda, whom some had backed in a reckless civil war against the rightful king, Stephen, in the twelfth century. It was a man’s world, hence Henry VIII’s obsession with his ‘great matter’ (divorcing Catherine of Aragon) and his risking Hell and damnation to produce a son.

  For Elizabeth to marry was essential or the Tudor dynasty would die with her. The 1560s and ‘70s saw a variety of suitors come and go. Closest to her heart was Robert Dudley, the Master of Horse created by her Earl of Leicester. When the fever of smallpox gripped her at her palace of Hampton Court, she insisted that he be declared protector of the realm in the event of her death. The affair, which was undoubtedly sexual, was the talk of the Court. They danced the volta together, the rhythm and closeness of which were thought shocking to decency, especially between a queen and her subject. The death of Dudley’s wife, Amy Robsart, after falling from ‘a pair of stairs’ led to speculation and rumour. That, coupled with Dudley’s arrogance as obvious royal favourite, combined to bring Elizabeth to her senses and she dropped him, despite the fortune he spent entertaining her in sumptuous style to the tune of an estimated £3,000 a day at his castle at Kenilworth.