Who Killed Kit Marlowe?

by M. J. Trow

  The work on Lucan was less contentious, as is evidence by its production in London in 1600 – ‘Lucan’s First Booke, translated line for line by Chr. Marlow at London, printed by P. Short and are to be sold by Walter Burre at the Signe of the Flower de Luce in Pauls’ Churchyard.’ Not even the Bishop of London could quarrel with the recounting of a Roman civil war between the colossi Pompey and Julius Caesar. The lines, however, were lifted time and time again by William Shakespeare in the years ahead:

  Strange sights appear’d, the angry threat’ning gods

  Filled both the earth and seas with prodigies;

  Great store of strange and unknown stars were seen

  Wandering about the North, and rings of fire

  Fly in the air, and dreadful bearded stars,

  And comets that presage the fall of kingdoms.

  There can be little doubt that Marlowe began his writing while still at Cambridge and that classical influences like Ovid had much to do with that. But darker works played on his mind and the reading of them and the living of them, as if he were an actor playing out a part and increasingly obsessed by it, were to bring Kit Marlowe to Deptford in the May of 1593. First came Machiavelli’s The Prince and Discourses which Gabriel Harvey found so offensive among the secret books of certain students.

  There was no English edition of any of the man’s works, but clearly Marlowe read them in the original Italian/Latin and they became the inspiration for the play The Jew of Malta. It has even been claimed that Marlowe was nicknamed ‘Machiavel’ by his contemporaries. Today, based essentially as it is on the realpolitik of the early sixteenth century and especially on the ruthless statecraft of Cesare Borgia, The Prince seems no more than a realistic manual for rulers of the time. Moralists in vast numbers and clergy in particular (beginning with Cardinal Reginald Pole in England) denounced Machiavelli not only as a cynic but as the very incarnation of evil. He was quite simply the Devil himself and the epithet ‘Old Nick’ was applied to him and anyone who read him, even though the epithet predated Machiavelli by nearly two centuries.

  Another influence was even more pernicious. The Dominican friar Giordano Bruno championed Copernicus, with his heretical views of the Heavens. Drummed out of his order for his unorthodoxy, Bruno travelled widely, arguably abandoning Christianity itself in 1576. He was in England between 1583 and 1585, while Marlowe was still in Cambridge, and was excommunicated by German Lutherans in 1587. He left in his wake in England a variety of tracts – The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast (Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante); The Heroic Frenzies (De Gli Eroici Fuori) and The Ash Wednesday Supper (Cena de le Generi). Most Englishmen were contemptuous of ‘that Italian didapper with a name longer than his body,’ but his influence on Marlowe and on Marlowe’s plays was immense. Since Bruno lectured at Oxford in 1583 and London the following year, it is conceivable that Marlowe heard him speak and may even have talked to him. Such men were considered mad, bad and dangerous to know.

  The hothouse climate of Cambridge in Marlowe’s day encouraged increasing freedom of thought and the out of joint times created their own anxieties. The Feast of Corpus Christi had been one of the great highlights of the Cambridge year, with its obvious overlay of mystic tradition. In the microcosmic world of Bene’t’s and its feast, the tragedy of the Reformation was played out on a small scale. The Protestant Commissioners of Edward VI abolished the feast in 1549; it was reintroduced in 1553 under Mary and abolished for ever under Elizabeth. Only the violent demonstrations by the people of the town forced the college authorities to revive it, but it was now a Name Day Feast and the deep, joyful religious significance was lost.

  The impact of Martin Luther’s apparently suicidal stand against the corruption of the Catholic Church was quickly felt in Cambridge as it was elsewhere in decaying Christendom. The Master of Bene’t’s, Dr. Nobys, remained a staunch Catholic, spending three years on a pilgrimage to Rome which had the blessing of the Bishop of Ely. His retirement in 1523 led to a relaxation of the old religion and something of an opening of the floodgates. Fervent Protestantism was beginning to replace fervent Catholicism and the mood was changing. William Sowode, Master in 1523-4 ‘a great favourer and fatherer of the truth in the dark days of King Henry VIII’ was followed by Edward Fowke, a keen ‘Gospeller’, and Richard Taverner, who translated the Bible into English in 1539. More ominously, and a reminder of the obsessions and bigotry of the times, Thomas Dusgate was burned for his faith in Exeter in 1531 and George Wishart at St Andrews in 1545. To claim that Bene’t’s was a centre of heresy would be to overstate the case, but the shock waves of the Reformation made the college and the university an exciting, even dangerous place to be in Marlowe’s day.

  Matthew Parker, for all his toleration and his valiant attempts to bury the religious hatchet when Archbishop of Canterbury, was nevertheless a staunch Protestant. His two successors, Lawrence Moptyd (1553-7) and Dr Porie (1557-69) were probably just as staunch, but they were also shrewd politicians and flexible enough to allow the jettisoning of the two Fellows who refused to sign ‘Popish Articles’ in Mary’s reign. Under Porie matters seem to have worsened. A bitter hostility arose between moderate Anglicans, rabid Puritans and even a few covert Catholics. One of these was the President of the College, who fled to the English College at Douai to escape the flak.

  Porie’s successor as Master was the bigoted Thomas Aldrich, a radical Puritan who denounced the assailed Archbishop of Canterbury, his former patron Matthew Parker, as ‘Pope of Lambeth and Benet College’. Aldrich jumped before he was pushed by the college authorities, and was replaced by the relatively benign Dr Norgate, Master in Marlowe’s time.

  If the Masters of colleges fought each other and their Fellowes over doctrine and the whole claptrap of Indulgences, surplices and the allegiance (or lack of it) owed to the Bishop of Rome, the students were worse. To add to the normal loutish behaviour of the older scholars (and Marlowe probably belonged to this group, although there is no record of any punishment against him) in firing crossbows, guns and stonebows in the streets, excessive drinking and ‘taking tobacco’ in the taverns, they kept horses and greyhounds, hunted and coursed. And was it merely student high jinks when a group of scholars followed the Queen after her visit in 1564 as far as Hinchinbrooke, parodying the mass with a dog with the Eucharist wafer in its mouth and a ‘Bishop’ carrying and eating a lamb as he walked? Elizabeth was furious at the scorn with which religion was treated.

  Did Kit Marlow already show a similar contempt?

  What of the three men with Marlowe when he died? Of Ingram Frizer, the rest is still silence. We have no record of him until four years after Marlowe obtained his BA degree, when he was living in Basingstoke, buying and selling property.

  The increasingly shifty Nicholas Skeres is known to have been living in Furnivall’s Inn along High Holborn in the early 1580s. Furnivall’s was one of the Inns of Chancery. There was no university in London, but the growth of humanist education earlier in the sixteenth century had elevated the status of the non-classical professions, and this included the law. The Inns of Chancery were considered inferior to those of Court – Lincoln’s Inn, Gray’s, the Inner and Middle Temples – and Elizabeth’s reign saw their heyday. Each Inn housed up to a thousand students, described by the contemporary chronicler John Stow in 1598 as a ‘whole university...of students, practisers and pleaders, and judges of the laws of this realm’. The law was seen in those days as a good training for a life of public service in any capacity and the Tudor age was a litigious one (witness John Marlowe’s readiness to go to court to defend his rights in Canterbury). Yet its ‘practisers’ were often shady men, who knew how to use the law and bend it for their own ends.

  In January 1582, records show that Nicholas Skeres was involved with the poet, Matthew Roydon, a legal student from Thavies’ Inn up the road in Holborn. Roydon signed a bond to a local goldsmith for £40 and Skeres and his brother Jerome were co-signatories. In the year of Marlowe’s death, Skeres appea
red before the Court of Star Chamber on charges of money lending and this was clearly a lifelong habit of his. Another of Skeres’s contacts in the early 1580s was George Chapman, the university wit from Oxford, born near Hitchin, Hertfordshire. Both Roydon and Chapman were to become close friends of Marlowe when the free-thinking scholar came to London. Skeres was part of the web already.

  We first heard of Robert Poley as a sizar of Clare College, Cambridge in 1568, but by the early 1580s he had moved south to London and was considerably richer. The source of his new-found wealth is unknown, but it is likely that it was the same as Marlowe’s after 1585. He spent £40 refurbishing his lodgings and owned a chest of £110 of ‘good gold’. He married, probably in 1582 ‘one Watson’s daughter’ and the ceremony, carried out in a tailor’s house in Bow Lane, indicates that he was a Catholic. A daughter was born to the pair in August 1583 and she was christened Anne at St. Helen’s Church, Bishopsgate. Poley’s situation is typical of Catholics in Elizabeth’s England. Increasingly a minority, they could not practise their faith openly – hence the clandestine marriage, not in a church, but in the house of a seditious tailor named Wood, who was engaged in the dissemination of illegal, underground tracts imported from the Continent.

  By 1583, Poley was a ‘close prisoner’ in the Marshalsea. The prison south of the Thames in overcrowded Southwark ranked second only to the Tower as a place with a vicious reputation, and for that reason was twice attacked in the notorious risings of the later Middle Ages – Wat Tyler’s in 1381 and Jack Cade’s in 1450. There had been a riot and mass escape as recently as 1504 and the jerry-built premises were difficult to make secure. We do not know precisely why Poley was imprisoned here, but it may be that it was linked to the religious terrors of the time and the fact that he was committed by Elizabeth’s great spymaster, Francis Walsingham.

  By the mid-sixteenth century, the Marshalsea was increasingly used as a debtor’s prison, but it had other connotations too. It was here that anyone guilty of royal contempt was placed, the Earl Marshal after whom the prison was named being a great office in the ceremonial of the Court. It was also linked with religious prisoners. The deepest dungeon was known as Bonner’s Coal Hole, after the last Catholic Bishop of London, Edmund Bonner, who had himself narrowly escaped a dunking in molten lead from the Pope when he had tried to arrange Henry VIII’s divorce after Thomas Wolsey’s failure to do so. Bonner fell foul of Elizabeth in May 1559 when he refused to take the oath of supremacy. He died in his own ‘Coal Hole’ ten years later.

  In 1585 Robert Poley wrote a letter to Robert Dudley, Early of Leicester and formerly the Queen’s favourite, referring to ‘three years past determination to do her Majesty and the State some special service. It is possible that Walsingham, whose job it was to secure that State against any likely attack, put Poley in prison as a plant. His Catholicism would make him useful as an informer prior to his release on 10 May 1584. While in prison, Poley took up with Joan Yeomans, the wife of a London cutler, who may have been some sort of accomplice in the informing business. Poley bought his way out of trouble with Joan’s husband by presenting him with a silver bowl of double gilt.

  In the summer before Kit Marlowe went up to Cambridge, the Pope launched a crusade against England. It came in the form of two Jesuit priests, Edmund Campion and Robert Parsons. Educated at Christ’s Hospital and St John’s College, Oxford, Campion was forty in the summer of 1580 and despite being ordained an Anglican deacon eleven years earlier, went to Dublin to re-establish a university there. In his heart he probably never abandoned Catholicism and fled, under mounting scrutiny from the authorities, to the English College at Douai. He was in Bohemia when he became a member of the Society of Jesus in 1573. He was still Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Prague when the summons came through from Gregory XIII and he sailed for England. His saintliness and popularity kept him one step ahead of trouble throughout that summer and there were, no doubt, Catholic families prepared to hide him from Elizabeth’s inquisitorial officers.

  Parsons hailed from Nether Stowey in Somerset and was six years Campion’s junior. A Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, he fell foul of the increasingly Puritan elements in the university and was forced to retire in 1574. His actual conversion to Catholicism followed and he joined the Jesuits in 1575, taking holy orders three years later. His organisational skills were phenomenal and it was he, rather than the other-worldly Campion, who played Hell with the government’s attempts to catch the pair.

  Arriving in disguise at Dover, the two split up, each of them originally backed by a small team. Campion rode through Berkshire and Oxfordshire, then turned north to Lancashire and Yorkshire, soon the most wanted man in England with a price on his head. Parsons reached the Midlands before swinging west to Worcester and Gloucester. Both men celebrated mass and communion behind locked doors at dead of night. Their followers were a persecuted minority and they were forced to adopt the behaviour of conspirators. A Justice of the Peace from Lancashire wrote ‘this brood [Jesuit missionaries] will never be rooted out; it is impossible...to extirpate the papistical faith out of the land.’

  Even so, Elizabeth’s spies were everywhere and of the thirteen missionaries, only the ever resourceful Parsons escaped to the Continent. Campion, always touchingly naïve, could see no link between the attempted restoration of the old faith and aggressive European politics – ‘We are dead men to the world; we travelled only for souls; we touched neither state nor policy; we had no such commission.’

  They caught Campion in the July of 1581 and he was racked three times before they hanged him. He gave nothing away and impressed the Privy Council with his learning and gentleness. Because his joints were dislocated, his trial had had to be postponed. When it took place, at Westminster Hall, he was too weak to raise his hand to plead and two companions had to do it for him. The Council said ‘it was a pity he was a Papist’.

  The effects of the Jesuit mission on England were twofold. First, there was an upsurge of Catholicism throughout the 1580s which is difficult, because of the enforced secrecy of Catholics, to measure. This was exacerbated by the politics of the decade which saw the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots and the unleashing of two Armadas by Spain. Second, the government’s hysterical response to Campion’s and Parson’s campaign saw harsh laws imposed. Recusants (who refused to attend Anglican services) had previously paid a fine of one shilling for every Sunday missed; now it was a massive £20 a month. Saying the words of the Catholic mass cost 200 marks and a year in jail. Persistent offenders lost two thirds of their property. Uttering slander against the Queen – ‘that guilty woman of England’ as the Pope’s secretary called her – cost a man £200, the humiliation of the pillory and the loss of both of his ears. For a second offence he was hanged. In July 1583 three men were hanged at Bury St Edmunds for writing graffiti on the royal arms in the local church implying that Elizabeth was a Jezebel (prostitute). Anyone publishing a seditious book or even speculating on who would succeed the Queen was likely to be executed. Anyone converting another to Catholicism would die, along with their acolytes.

  It is clear from this legislation that the government believed that Catholicism and treachery went hand in hand. To follow Rome was to be a traitor and treason was a capital crime. Historians today remark on the lack of persecution – just over two hundred executions for religious reasons during Elizabeth’s reign. But that was not how Catholics saw it and papal propaganda portrayed England as Hell on earth. J.B. Black gets the balance right and paints a picture of the sixteenth century all too familiar to historians and observers of the twentieth: ‘Juries were biased, judges were convinced that every priest was a traitor and convictions were often obtained on evidence supplied by men of worthless character – renegades, spies and informers – who throve on their nefarious trade’.

  In 1583 Philip Stubbes underscored the rabidity of the age in The Anatomie of Abuses. It was a second edition, proving the popularity of his views, and in it he denounced football a
s a ‘bloody and murdering practice, rather than a fellowly sport’. He blamed it for an increase in ‘malice, rancour, hatred and envy’. Bowling alleys, to which even national heroes like Francis Drake were addicted, were a waste of ‘wit, time and money’. The phallic symbol of the Maypole, still in Marlowe’s day to be found on village greens the length and breadth of the country, was ‘a stinking idol’ that led to ‘whoredom and uncleanness’.

  In the winter of the year in which Christopher Marlowe obtained his degree, there was another plot against the Queen. Francis Throckmorton was the nephew of one of Elizabeth’s most distinguished ambassadors who had sided with the French Huguenots in their stand against the virulent Catholicism of Catherine de Medici. ‘Infamous pamphlets’ were found in his London home and he was tortured on the rack twice. At last he cracked and admitted that he was agent for the still-imprisoned Queen of Scots. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘I have disclosed the secrets of her who was the dearest thing to me in the world.’ Throckmorton told the authorities that four invasions had been planned, under the auspices of the Spanish ambassador, Bernardino de Mendoza. The idea was to whip English and Scots Catholics to fever pitch, rescue Mary and place her on the throne. Mendoza left England in disgrace and Throckmorton was hanged at Tyburn, then still a weathered oak on open heathland where Marble Arch now stands.

  This was the world, of bigotry, hysteria and paranoia into which Kit Marlowe was about to make his debut.

  Christopher Marlowe obtained his Bachelor of Arts degree on Palm Sunday 1584:

  Christopher Marlin petitions that the twelve completed terms in which he has followed the ordinary lectures (even if not wholly according to the forms of the statute) together with all the opponencies, responsions and other exercises required by royal statue, may suffice for him to take the examination.