Who Killed Kit Marlowe?

by M. J. Trow

  The lower ranks of Intelligencer would fit this bill. They were servants listening at keyholes, wandering around houses after dark. The Jesuit mission of 1580 that led to Edmund Campion’s death must have been monitored in this way; so was every detail of the plot by Guido Fawkes to eviscerate James I and his government with gunpowder. Beyond this broad, all-embracing term ‘servant’, which has always covered a multitude of sins, the actual Elizabethan spy came in all shapes and sizes.

  One of those shapes and one of those sizes was that of Christopher Marlowe.

  On 19 June 1587, a letter was sent by Elizabeth’s Privy Council to the University of Cambridge.

  Whereas it was reported that Christopher Morley was determined to have gone beyond the seas to Reames and there to remaine, Their lordships thought good to vertefie that he had no such intent, but that in all his accions he had behaved his self orderlie and discreetly wherebie he had done her Majestie good service & deserved to be rewarded for his faithfull dealinge: Their lordships request was that the rumour thereof should be allaied by all possible meanes, and that he should be furthered in the degree he was to take this next Commencement: Because it was not her majesties pleasure that anie one emploied as he had been in matters touching the benefit of his Countrie should be defamed by those that are ignorant in th’ offices he went about.

  It was signed by the Lord Archbishop, John Whitgift (who had replaced the disgraced Grindal in 1583); the Lord Chancellor, Christopher Hatton; the Lord Treasurer, Lord Burghley (formerly Sir William Cecil); the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Hunsdon; and Mr Comptroller, Sir James Crofts. Two of these men would have a direct hand in Marlowe’s death seven years later. Walsingham’s name is notable by its absence, although he had by now replaced Cecil as the Queen’s Principal Secretary.

  As we have seen, continuous residence was a prerequisite for all Cambridge scholars attaining their degrees. No doubt the Bene’t college authorities were still making the assumption that Marlowe intended a career in the Church. The fact is that if we study his movements between Easter 1584, when he obtained his first degree, and June 1587, when the Privy Council intervened on his behalf, Marlowe’s absences are both prolonged and striking. Where was he?

  In the three terms at Bene’t’s between 1580 and 1581, ‘Marlin’ received his allowance as a Parker scholar of twelve or thirteen shillings. In the four terms (the complete university year – and Marlowe’s second) the same figures applied. In the third term of 1582-3 there is a drop to six shillings, indicating only six weeks’ attendance out of a possible thirteen. In the first term of 1584-5, he only received three shillings; in the second, seven, the third, four and in the fifth, five. Infuriatingly, the records are missing for 1585-6, but his last two terms in 1586-7 again show a shortfall – nine shilling for the first term, five shillings and sixpence for the second. Marlowe’s first drop in attendance (1582-3) could be explained by illness, but the sums for the fifth year, 1584-5, after he had obtained his degree, clearly reflect a permanent change. If Marlowe was not in Cambridge, where was he? And if he was there, but merely did not bother to collect his shilling a week, why didn’t he?

  The only definite date we have to place Marlowe anywhere in the years between his Bachelor’s and Master of Arts degrees is one Sunday in November 1585. That day he was at home in Canterbury, or more specifically in the house of the widow Katherine Benchkyn in Stow Street. Marlowe’s signature appears as a witness to Benchkyn’s will, still preserved in the Canterbury archives, along with other witnesses including Jhan Marley (presumably the scholar’s father), Thomas Arthur (his uncle) and John Moore (a shoemaker who married Marlowe’s sister, Jane). The illiterate Katherine made her mark on the will and Marlowe’s presence was vital, in that she needed someone like him to tell her what the will contained. The records show that he read it ‘plainely and distinktly’.

  For the rest, we have only the veiled references from the Privy Council, but they are enough. Oddly, historian Charles Nicholl has misread them. He says that a careful reading of the Privy Council’s letter to Cambridge implies that it was merely rumour that Marlowe had ‘gone beyond the sea to Reames’, whereas in fact the emphasis is on the next phrase ‘and there to remain’. The earlier part of the sentence ‘was determined’ either shows Marlowe’s keenness to be of service or is merely Elizabethan speak for ‘was ordered’. There is little doubt that he went to Rheims and perhaps elsewhere on Walsingham’s business and that this explains at least sixteen months’ absence from Cambridge in the period 1580 to 1587, excluding a year (1585-6) for which there are no records. What took the young Dominus Merlin ‘beyond the seas’?

  Rheims lies between the Rivers Aisne and Marne in the rich, wine-growing area of Champagne. Six kings of France were crowned there and as such, Rheims assumed huge political and symbolic importance, greater than that of Paris, as the centre of French royal power. But it was not the city, nor the superb architecture of the cathedral, that Marlowe had gone to see. He had gone to the English college.

  The English Reformation from Henry VIII’s time had seen a steady exodus of Catholics from the country. Just as Huguenots and Flemings crossed to the Protestant tolerance of England, so discontented Catholics made the opposite journey to France. The English college was founded at Douai, to the north-west of Rheims, by the exiled William Allen in1568. Allen came of an old Catholic family in Rossall, Lancashire, and was educated at Oriel College, Oxford, before becoming principal at St Mary’s Hall in the reign of Mary. He refused to take the oath of supremacy demanded by Elizabeth in 1561 and went to Flanders. Never strong, he was home the following year with a wasting sickness but was back in the Low Countries by 1565. Receiving holy orders in Mechlin, he set up Douai first as a refuge for other exiled English Catholics and then as a seminary for Jesuit missionary work. The mission was nothing less than the reconquest of England for the old religion.

  The college took boys and young men aged between fourteen and twenty-five (which means that Marlowe met this criterion) and of respectable family (this was shakier, but his Cambridge degree would probably have sufficed). On joining, a scholar took the following oath – ‘I swear to Almighty God that I am ready and shall always be ready to receive holy orders, in His own good time, and I shall return to England for the salvation of souls, whenever it shall seem good to the superior of this college to order me to do so.’

  J.B. Black paints a grim picture of this seminary, the walls of its monastic cells hung with pictures of torture and excruciating death. Douai’s acolytes were to be soldiers of Christ, fighting to the death to lift the taint of apostatism from their former land. The fact that the Privy Council makes mention of Rheims (the English college had moved there in 1578) bears witness to their paranoia. The trickle of zealous Catholics fleeing increasing Puritanism had become a flood by then and the government was anxious to stop it.

  Allen himself professed to having no political axe to grind, but both Pope Pius V and Philip of Spain were patrons of the college and the exiles went on to found similar seminaries in Rome in 1579 (with Owen Lewis) and Valladolid in Spain ten years later. By 1582, Allen’s position had definitely acquired a political dimension and he worked with the Guise faction in France, the Pope and Mary, Queen of Scots against Elizabeth. Even before the launch of Campion’s and Parson’s crusade by Gregory XIII, there were, by Walsingham’s reckoning, at least a hundred seminary priests operating covertly in England.

  Life in Rheims was as tough as it had been at Douai, with fasting for two days a week. The Jesuits Edmund Campion and Cuthbert Mayne emanated from here, as, more crucially in the story of Marlowe’s death, did the poet Thomas Watson, with whom Marlowe was to share rooms in Norton Folgate, London. The English universities, despite their increasingly Puritan tendencies, proved a fertile breeding ground for students flocking to the seminary, and Walsingham was already watching with interest from 1571. We know that he sent agents to Douai with the intention of disrupting their programmes, sowing discord and possibly even ‘
turning’ the less ardent Catholics there. Alan Haynes lists Gilbert and William Giffard, Edward Grateley and Solomon Aldred among their number.

  If Marlowe was with these men in the mid to late 1580s, it would explain the grasp of military knowledge he was to show later in his play Tamburlaine; one of the priests sent from Rheims was John Savage, who had fought for Spain in the Low Countries between 1581 and 1583. He left the English college in August 1585, by which time Marlowe might have got there; in the fourth term of that year Marlowe was only present in Cambridge for five out of the fourteen weeks.

  Alan Haynes believes that Marlowe’s first assignment, however, was not to Rheims but to Paris. He would be, in Haynes’ phrase, ‘an unfamiliar face to the myriad watchers on the roads’. His Latin was first rate so that he could attend mass with impunity, read writs from Popes and cardinals, blend in. Assuming that Marlowe had learned reasonable French from the Huguenots in his native Canterbury (it was certainly not taught in the King’s school) he would have coped easily in Charles XII’s France. A stay in the French capital would explain the knowledge the future playwright displayed when he wrote his drama The Massacre at Paris. Haynes surmises that Marlowe’s work, spanning 1585 to 1586, would be to monitor the movements of the notorious Stafford and Lyly.

  Sir Edward Stafford became English ambassador in Paris in 1583. Described as wayward by various commentators, Stafford was Burghley’s man and a compulsive gambler. He greatly extended his scope of operations and placed intelligencers in various key households in Paris, probably selling Elizabeth’s secrets to feed his habit. Walsingham first sent Walter Williams to check on Stafford but after the ambassador got him drunk, Williams seems to have confessed all and the ruse failed. Perhaps Marlowe was a safer bet.

  Closer to the Cambridge scholar-turned-intelligencer was Stafford’s secretary William Lyly, whose younger brother had been at school in Canterbury with Marlowe. Lyly was summoned back to England by the Privy Council in the autumn of 1585 on suspicion of overly close contact with Catholic exiles in Paris like the Welshman Thomas Morgan. Lyly managed to wriggle out of their lordships’ interrogations and Walsingham let him go back to Paris in January 1586. He and Stafford were marked men, however, and Alan Haynes believes that it was Marlowe’s brief to monitor the espionage hot-bed that was Paris. If this is correct and the Privy Council’s reference to ‘good service and faithful dealing’ reflects this, then Marlowe was considerably higher up the intelligence ladder than is commonly thought. He was no mere letter-carrier, but a man who could be trusted to use wit and charm in the service of his country, pumping more gullible souls for information which could be vital to the safety of the realm.

  If Haynes’s assumption is right, it might seem an unlikely and anticlimactic move to send Marlowe from Paris to Rheims, but there may have been leads to follow and good reasons now lost to time. Walter Walsh, as early as 1903, wrote – ‘The seminary Colleges did not improve as the years went on. They became more and more political foes of the Queen and her Government and had to be treated accordingly.’

  One possible reason for Marlowe’s being sent to Rheims by Walsingham was to root out a Catholic agent working inside Cambridge University. In his first year at Bene’t’s, when the Jesuit mission was still in existence, Robert Parsons wrote to the Jesuit general Claudius Acquaviva at his headquarters in Rome:

  ... I have at length insinuated a certain priest into the very university, under the guise of a scholar or a gentleman commoner and have procured him help not far from the town. Within a few months he has sent over to Rheims seven very fit [appropriate] youths.’

  There were a number of local recusant families who might have helped the agent, but his identity remains unknown. Was he still in Cambridge four years later when Marlowe was recruited to the secret service? And was Marlowe’s task to pretend an adherence to Catholicism in order to infiltrate Rheims?

  Rheims was aware of the covert operations in its midst – ‘They resolved to begin another way of persecution, which was to put sedition among themselves, by sending over spies and traitors to kindle and foster the same.’ How successful Marlowe was in this context is impossible to know. He was certainly used abroad again, for example in Vlissingen (Flushing) in 1592, so it is unlikely that his cover was blown. On the other hand, from what we know about Marlowe’s personality, which was to emerge via his writing as much as in his behaviour, he was volatile, outspoken, high profile. Such men do not make good spies, even in the days of the less-than-good Queen Bess.

  Charles Nicholl does not accept that Marlowe went to Rheims at all and because of that he paints himself into a corner. He has to find reasons for Marlowe’s non-attendance in Cambridge in 1585-7 and floats the idea that he may have been engaged as a snoop for Walsingham in one or more of the great Catholic family houses, like that of the Earl of Northumberland at Petworth. It is true that he knew the ‘wizard Earl’ in the 1590s, but there is no evidence to make the link as early as this.

  Two problems remain about Marlowe’s entry into Walsingham’s service. The first is how his recruitment came about and who was responsible. We have seen already that the English universities were targets of both Catholic and Puritan dogma and infiltration. The average age of entry to Oxford and Cambridge, fourteen, meant that students were amenable to indoctrination. Moreover, there was an arrogance about some of these young men, whose fathers may have secretly followed the old religion and whose grandfathers certainly did. Many of them were clever, all of them were literate; some, like Marlowe, were brilliant. Such men could be highly dangerous and may have presented a positive threat to the stability of the State unless they were channelled, controlled, perhaps even bought by the great officers of that State. It was here that Walsingham came in. He had no direct links with Cambridge, but that was not necessary; indirect links he had in plenty.

  Alan Haynes believes (and does not cite his reasons) that it was William Waad who recruited Marlowe. Since Waad was Clerk to the Privy Council and later Lieutenant of the Tower and seems to have had no Cambridge connection, again this is unlikely. Most commentators plump for Thomas Walsingham as the most likely patron to introduce the future playwright into the shadowy world of espionage.

  Thomas Walsingham was second cousin to the Queen’s spymaster. A year older than Marlowe, Thomas followed his elder brother Guldeford into their cousin’s secret service as early as 1580 when he was only seventeen. He seems to have been a courier between London and the ambassador in Paris, Sir Henry Cobham. Nothing important would have been entrusted to a lad of that age; Marlowe was twenty-one before he was recruited. Walsingham was in France until 1584 and he undoubtedly gained the trust of those around him. He monitored the activities of James Beaton, the former Catholic Archbishop of Glasgow, then working, along with any other plotters, on behalf of the Queen of Scots. Cobham was obliged to remind Elizabeth’s penny-pinching government to pay the man for his services early that year.

  By the time Marlowe was recruited, Walsingham was back home in London. It may be that this indicates elevation in the secret service, but it may just be the acquisition of property that gave him a new found status. Either way, it places him nowhere near Cambridge in 1585, the year in which it is likely that Marlowe became a spy for Her Majesty.

  A more realistic bet would be Nicholas Faunt, known to be in Francis Walsingham’s service by 1590. He was an ex-scholar of Bene’t’s College and although he had gone down by the time Marlowe joined, may well have maintained links with his alma mater, looking out on Walsingham’s behalf for likely lads: such a one was Christopher Marlowe.

  The other imponderable about the poet/spy is the famous portrait – or rather portraits, because there are two. The frontispiece to The Works of Christopher Marlowe edited by Lt Colonel Francis Cunningham in 1889 shows a portrait of a good-looking young man with van Dyck beard and upward swept moustaches, a thatch of hair combed backwards and the obligatory earring of the Elizabethan rake. The Victorians, like us, wanted to see their heroes
and villains. In the absence of an authentic likeness, they simply invented a face. Whole generations of Victorians grew up blissfully believing that they knew exactly what Harthacanute and Edmund Ironside looked like because an engraver had been commissioned to fill a page. Then came 1953.

  In that year the Master’s Lodge at Corpus Christi was being refurbished for the arrival of the new master, Sir George Thomson. An undergraduate, passing debris piled in a corner, noticed a battered painting projecting from the rubble. It measured 24 inches by 18 and was painted on wood, rather than the more obvious canvas. Intrigued by the broken portrait of what appeared to be a young man in Elizabethan costume, the student took it to Dr J.P.T. Bury, the college librarian. A Mr. Edward Leigh photographed the portrait in the state in which it had been found and it was sent to the National Portrait Gallery, whose experts were able to confirm it as an authentic Elizabethan portrait. It was subsequently restored by a Mr Valence of the London art restorer W. Holder and Sons of Brook Street, who transformed the painting into living colour.

  It is likely that the portrait came from a panelled wall or possibly fireplace, hence the painting directly on wood. The fact that it was found in Corpus Christi indicates an association with that college and we know that Bene’t’s had such a collection of portraits, as evidenced by an 1884 catalogue of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. The portrait shows a man with arms folded, wearing a padded, slashed doublet of the type fashionable in the 1580s and a lawn web collar. Valence’s restoration has provided flying chestnut hair, brown eyes, a black doublet with orange slashes and ornate studded gilt buttons down the chest and along both sleeves. What has convinced most people that this is Marlowe (the first to propound the idea was the American researcher Calvin Hoffman in 1955) is the date painted in the portrait’s top left hand corner – ‘Anno Dmi [in the Year of Our Lord] 1585, Aetatis [lit. summers] suae 21’ – his age twenty one. At any time between February and December of 1585, this would fit Marlowe. The other inscription, below the date and again in Latin, is altogether more cryptic – Quod me Nutrit me Destruit – ‘that which feeds me destroys me’. If this is Marlowe, the phrase is extraordinarily prophetic. Evidence indicates that what fed him by 1585 was his pay in Walsingham’s service; indirectly it killed him too.