Who Killed Kit Marlowe?

by M. J. Trow

  The university Grace Book, which still survives, lists him as ‘Dominus Marlyn’ second in a body of twelve from Corpus Christi and 199th out of a total of 231. To qualify, Marlowe must have spent four years at Bene’t’s, continuous residence being essential.

  The preliminary stage, of what today would be a purely written examination, was an oral disputation – ‘responsio’ – in the public schools against three students from other colleges. These debates took place in Latin and Marlowe had effectively to see off his opponents’ arguments in front of a ‘Moderator’ who was already a Master of Arts. There is a certain grim poetic prescience in all this – Marlowe defending himself against three ‘enemies’, exactly as he would try to do at Eleanor Bull’s house in Deptford nine years later.

  Marlowe’s written papers would have been taken in three days of the week before Ash Wednesday and he then proceeded to the oral questioning from Aristotle’s Prior Analytics and similar vivas over a two day period.

  Oddly, Corpus Christi’s Buttery books have the letter D (Dominus) written alongside Marlowe’s name the previous year. Perhaps his age (he was twenty by now) and his haughty manner caused this error. And it may be that the swagger and confidence emanated from someone else whom Marlowe had already met – the spymaster, Francis Walsingham.

  FOUR

  GOOD SERVICE ... & ... FAITHFULL DEALINGE

  ...In all his accions he had behaved him selfe orderlie and discreetlie whereby he had done her Majesty good service...

  Privy Council Minutes, 29 June 1587

  I

  an Fleming has a great deal to answer for. Mention the word ‘spy’ today and the image that leaps to mind is of the anti-hero, James Bond; cool, suave, shaken but never stirred. John le Carré, a far more realistic writer, has introduced us to George Smiley, a quiet, rather average-looking gentleman. Le Carré’s spy stories were born of the same Cold War paranoia that inspired Fleming, but they spawned grubby men in raincoats coming in from the cold.

  Recently, Tudor historians like David Starkey and literary experts like Curtis Breight have drawn strongly on the analogy of the post-1945 Cold War to explain the raison d’être of the Elizabethan government’s methods. Allowing for the obvious changes in technology, the basics of surveillance, intelligence gathering, assassination, even recruitment, are astonishingly similar and if the analogy makes sense to readers floundering in the alien world of Elizabethan England, then so be it.

  Historians have moved away recently from the notion that Elizabeth’s state was weak, with no police force other than the creaking Constables of the Watch provided by towns, and no army other than a decorative force of Yeoman Warders. Even so, the traditional means of raising men, the feudal levies, had largely collapsed by the late sixteenth century. When, in desperation, Charles I needed troops in 1642 to bring his rebellious parliament to heel, he had to rely on the ancient Commissions of Array and technically was not that successful.

  In the face of aggressive European politics, the English State was vulnerable. In the first decade of her reign, Elizabeth had been pronounced illegitimate by the Pope, who virtually declared open season on the ‘English Jezebel’. We have seen already that the plots against Elizabeth and the extremity of religious views, Catholic and Puritan, were real and dangerous. There was a need for the Queen and the stability of the realm to be protected and whereas this was the task of Secretary of State Cecil and the Queen’s Privy Council, increasingly from the 1570s that work devolved into the hands of one man, Francis Walsingham.

  Garrett Mattingly, the American scholar who so impressed European historians in the 1960s, is disparaging of Walsingham’s secret service. In The Defeat of the Spanish Armada he wrote:

  ...Sir Francis Walsingham built up for [the Queen’s] protection what some historians have described as ‘an omnipresent network of spies’; this impressive system of counter-espionage in England dwindles on inspection to a few underpaid agents of varying ability whose effects were supplemented by casual informers and correlated by a single clerk who also handled much of Walsingham’s ordinary correspondence – a system hardly larger or more efficient, except for the intelligence of its direction and the zeal of its volunteer aids, than that which every first-rate ambassador was expected to maintain for his own information, one which the governments of Florence or Venice would have smiled at as inadequate for the police of a single city.

  Mattingly is wrong. His caveats say it all. Even he cannot but be impressed by the cold cunning and ruthlessness of Walsingham himself; neither can he hide the fact that a crusading cause (be it against Catholicism or Spain) produced men who got results.

  Mr Secretary Walsingham was born about 1530, at Chislehurst in Kent and was educated at King’s College, Cambridge. In terms of geography at least, his background is similar to Marlowe’s. He was a student at Gray’s Inn in 1552 and travelled extensively on the Continent during Mary’s reign, perhaps because his austere Protestantism jarred with the ethos of enforced Catholicism. It was here that he acquired a flair for languages which would make him indispensable to the Queen’s government and he returned home to England on the accession of Elizabeth, six years before Marlowe was born.

  Ambitious and zealous to serve, Walsingham’s way to the top was via William Cecil, appointed Secretary of State in the year of the accession. The Cecils were Northamptonshire gentry who had been elevated by Henry VIII. By 1552, William had inherited his father’s estates and was already an experience politician, having served as Custos Brevia in the last year of Henry’s reign, Master of Requests under Edward VI and Secretary to Protector Somerset by 1548. He was Secretary of State by 1550 and knighted the following year. Cecil’s unquestioning loyalty to Elizabeth (like Walsingham’s) is what has remained as our image of him, but under Mary, Cecil openly espoused her Catholicism while corresponding with the Protestant Princess Elizabeth. He had also put his name to a document that nominated Lady Jane Grey as Edward’s successor; yet despite his duplicity he was able to win the confidence of both ‘Bloody’ Mary and her sister. Above all what remains as Cecil’s legacy is what counts most in a great statesman – his ability to survive.

  In hitching his wagon to this particular star, Walsingham made a shrewd decision and made himself indispensable to both Cecil and the Queen in the part he played in exposing the Ridolfi Plot. Roberto di Ridofi was a Florentine adventurer who settled in London and schemed with the Catholic Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, to place Mary, Queen of Scots on the English throne. Walsingham’s methods were Machiavellian in the extreme. He encouraged his agents to befriend the plotters, stringing them along, giving them hope – and just enough rope to hang themselves. The enigmatic Robert Cecil, son of Sir William and a man central to Marlowe’s death, would use exactly the same methods in monitoring and exposing Robert Catesby’s Gunpowder Plot in 1605.

  By 1572, Walsingham was English ambassador in Paris, conducting the on-off ‘courtship’ of the Queen and ‘Monsieur’, the Duke of Anjou. While there he witnessed the massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve, which coloured his life for ever. Kit Marlowe would write a play on this event in later years, but at the time was still at one of the schools in Canterbury. Parisian bigotry, fanned by the Duc de Guise, spilled over into appalling violence in the streets of the French capital. Accounts of the incident vary, but the gist is that hundreds of Huguenots had gathered in the city on 19 August to cheer the wedding of the Protestant Henri of Navarre to Margaret de Medici, daughter of France’s redoubtable Regent. Some of the atrocities carried out by rabid Catholics under her orders were reported by Joan de Olaegui, secretary to the Spanish ambassador:

  On Sunday, Saint Bartholomew’s Day [24 August] at three o’clock in the morning, the alarm was rung; all the Parisians began killing the Huguenots of the town, breaking down the doors of the houses in which they lived and pillaging what they found within.

  [The Duc de] Guise, Anevale and Angouleme went to the Admiral’s house...they went up to his room and in the bed where he
was lying, the Duc de Guise shot him in the head with a pistol; then they took him and threw him naked out of the window into the courtyard ...

  The massacre lasted until the morning of Thursday 25th August ...

  Perhaps as many as 40,000 Protestants died in those bloody forty-eight hours and Walsingham, in an age before ambassadorial privilege, must have feared for his life. It gave him a lasting contempt for Catholics.

  In 1573, Walsingham returned to England to be made Secretary of State, a prominent member of the Privy Council and a force in the corridors of power. The portrait of Walsingham painted some twelve years later (the year in which he almost certainly employed Christopher Marlowe) by Johann de Critz the Elder, shows a careful, determined man whose eyes are as blank as he wants them to be. He wears a simple skull cap of black and the only signs of vanity are his magnificent lace ruff and the medallion with the Queen’s portrait dangling on his doublet. The chronicler William Camden called him ‘the most subtle searcher of hidden secrets’ and Elizabeth, mindful of his earlier swarthiness missing in the greying portrait of 1585, referred to him as her ‘Moor’. He was of the pro-war party, in marked contrast to Cecil, who urged caution. Catholic Spain was the enemy and this became more obvious as the 1570s unfolded. Walsingham’s daughter Frances was married to Sir Philip Sidney, the courtier poet and soldier who was the nephew of Elizabeth’s favourite, Leicester. Men like Walsingham were used to death and however honourable and patriotic their motives, they played the Machiavellian game of realpolitik to the hilt.

  What kind of secret service did the spymaster operate? Not for nothing is he referred to as its father. He largely financed it himself and worried about lack of money for the rest of his life, dying in debt in 1590. Typical of the parsimonious Elizabeth, she expected total loyalty and unremitting hard work from all her subjects, but was rarely willing to pay for it. Such payments as she did make are discreetly chronicled under vague Privy Seal amounts for unspecified purposes; in 1582 it was £750; three years later, when Marlowe was recruited, it was nearly £2,000. Over and above that Walsingham was expected to dig into his own purse.

  It was a less sophisticated world. News and intelligence gathering was slow, clumsy and unreliable. It was reported, sometimes in cryptic cypher, by men who were merely observers of affairs in key places. In Calais, the last gasp of the English occupation of France, the agent was Thomas Jeffries. In Venice, whose espionage network so impressed Garrett Mattingly, it was Stephen Paule. The extent of these observers was considerable. Thirteen towns in Catholic France had them. There were seven in the Low Countries, watching the desperate struggle of the Dutch against their Spanish overlords; five English agents operated out of Spain, although their position became less tenable as the 1580s wore on and Philip’s patience with his former sister-in-law ran out. Nine lived in German towns where Catholic and Protestant eyed each other across the great divide that Martin Luther had created. There were five in Italy, the country regarded by English intellectuals as the cradle of civilisation in Marlowe’s day, three in the United Provinces which would emerge as Holland in the next century and even three in the distant, but powerful, Ottoman Empire. The work of these men was vital, passing information to travellers on the high seas and the roads of Europe, but they were in no sense covert. It is highly likely that sometimes they were fed information by the governments in whose countries they operated.

  Working as Walsingham’s shadow in the troubled decade in which Marlowe obtained his Cambridge degree was Thomas Phelippes, described by Mary, Queen of Scots, whose downfall he engineered, as ‘a man of low stature, slender every way, dark, yellow-haired on the head, clear yellow-bearded, erred in the face with small pocks’. Like Walsingham, he spent time in Paris, probably around 1580, where he seems to have been trailing Thomas Morgan, the exiled Welshman who was working there on behalf of the Queen of Scots. Morgan was shrewd enough to know that Phelippes, like most men of his or any other age, had his price. In October 1585 he wrote. ‘...try him long and in small matters before you use him, being a severe Huguenot [Protestant] and all for that state, yet glorious and greedy of honour and profit...’.

  Phelippes’ real strength, however, lay as Walsingham’s code-breaker and in this context he was aided by Arthur Gregory who had a knack for ‘forcing the seal of a letter, yet so invisibly that it still appeareth a virgin to the exactest beholder’. Twenty years before Francis Bacon’s famous five element code based on aaaaa, aaaab, etc., agents were sending encrypted letters to each other, reporting the size and whereabouts of armies and navies and in particular, in England, the machinations of the Queen of Scots and those around her. The ‘Bible’ of ‘secret writing’ was De Furtivus Literarum Notis by Giovannie della Porta. Agents used invisible inks made from milk, urine, onion and lemon juice and if all this seems amateurish and rather juvenile today, it was simply the state of technology that precluded anything more sophisticated. The magus John Dee dabbled in cyphers, mostly to keep his demonic magic books a secret from the uninitiated. Elizabethan cyphers were largely of two types – transposition, with letters shuffled to make anagrams; or substitution, where numbers replaced letters entirely. In some cases, classical or astrological names were substituted for key players. Historian Alan Haynes cites a code in use in 1590 in which the Duke of Parma was Aries, Prince Maurice of Nassau, Gemini, and so on. Earlier in the 1580s a numerical substitution passed between Robert Bowes, ambassador in Scotland, and Walsingham. In this, Scotland was 70; James VI, 91; Elizabeth 32; Mary Queen of Scots 23. In keeping with the nature of espionage, new systems had continually to be found as old ones were cracked.

  Below Phelippes were more shadowy men, whose roles are uncertain. William Waad and Robert Beale were Clerks of the (Privy) Council, but their jobs were far more important than mere secretaries. Waad, whom Walter Ralegh described when the former was Lieutenant of the Tower of London, as ‘that beast’, grabbed incriminating papers that led directly to the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots and was directed to bring Morgan back from France in March 1585. Alan Haynes believes it was specifically Waad who recruited Marlowe. Beale, out of Walsingham’s service by 1592 but still bound to him as his brother-in-law, left advice on shaky agents – ‘Take heed they deal not double with you, and abuse you with toys and matters of their own invention. And for dealing with such as the laws of the real esteemeth traitors...beware.’ Beale too had worked with Walsingham in Paris and appears to have handled easier cyphers which Phelippes may have considered beneath him. Francis Milles emerges as a key figure in the exposure of the Babington Plot in 1586. We know virtually nothing about him and in that sense he is far more modern (and successful) a spymaster than most of his contemporaries. Nicholas Faunt was altogether more relevant to Marlowe in that he was a Corpus Christi man. Described by Walsingham as ‘very honest and discrete’, he was already working for him by the time Marlowe went up to Cambridge. In later years Faunt wrote a treatise on the post of Chief Secretary and seems to have been more Cecil’s man than Walsingham’s, Faunt having reservations about the increasing size of the spymaster’s bureaucracy. Like most of Walsingham’s key men, Faunt had served his apprenticeship in Paris where he had met Anthony Bacon among the ambassador’s entourage. The men remained friends for years, despite Faunt moving in on the Queen’s business to Germany, and then Padua. He was back in England, on Walsingham’s orders, by 1584.

  Beneath these men were spies on two levels. First, in terms of their value to the State and the payment they commanded, were the Projectors, agents provocateurs whose job it was to infiltrate conspiracies, pose as rabid Catholics or Puritans and manufacture plots out of thin air. William Cecil’s son Robert, who succeeded him as Chief Secretary, used the same tactic against the gunpowder plotters in 1605. These men, it is true, have a swagger about them that lends some credence to the spy fiction literature of our own time; one example must suffice.

  Anthony Standen was a Catholic from Surrey. His family were recusants, risking the increasing paranoia
of the Tudor State by taking a stand against the new religion. He had served the Queen of Scots before the murder of Lord Darnley in 1567 when he thought it safer to stay in France where he had been sent on a mission to King Charles IX. A will-o’-the-wisp to rank with the great agents in history, he maintained regular contact with the imprisoned Mary, while shifting his allegiance to Walsingham. Working from Florence, ostensibly on her behalf in 1582-5, he was providing the spymaster with intelligence that Walsingham was quite prepared to use, despite the fact that he never fully trusted him.

  Standen’s speciality was buying diplomats like Giovanni Figliazzi, Florentine ambassador to the Spanish Court. Another conquest was the brother of a servant of the Marquis of Santa Cruz, Spain’s Grand Admiral. These contacts cost Walsingham a staggering 300 crowns, a trifling sum as it turned out when the servant passed details of the Armada to Standen, giving England vital time to prepare. By 1588, again in Florence, he received a pardon from the Queen for his former Catholicism and a pension of £100 a year. Changing masters was Standen’s métier too, but perhaps he was not so wise when he opted for the Earl of Essex in the 1590s.

  Below the Projectors who made things happen were several layers of Intelligencers, the men who provided the raw material on which Walsingham and Phelippes could work. There were various levels of these - Edmund Yorke smuggled information out of France in a blood-stone which, when softened with water, yielded up its secrets; Nichola Berden traded information for the release of Catholics; Robert Poley we have met already.

  It is difficult to categorise the sort of men who became involved in espionage. Nicholas Berden wrote, two years after Marlowe obtained his degree, ‘Though I am a spy, which is a profession odious though necessary, I prosecute the same not for gain, but for the safety of my native country.’ It was taken for granted by true-blue Englishmen, Anglicans to a man, that no-one in the service of the Queen could be anything other than a patriot. But Berden was a hypocrite at best. He made large profits from his dealings and even the tiniest scrap of information came with a price tag. Typically, the Elizabethan agent was of middle to low status, perhaps a gentleman, but more likely a man without means, desperate to acquire some.