Who Killed Kit Marlowe?

by M. J. Trow

  That Marlowe was homosexual – or at least bisexual – cannot seriously be doubted. Was it also a motive for his murder?

  On 18 February 1587, while Christopher Marlowe was probably still in Cambridge, Mary, the luckless Queen of Scots, went to her death at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire. Her cousin Elizabeth had agonized since the previous December over the death warrant which she alone could issue. The struggle between the queens had been going on for nearly thirty years and as long as Mary remained alive, as the Babington Plot and many like it had confirmed, she was a rallying point for discontented English Catholics stiffened by the bigotry of Rome.

  ‘Mr Dean,’ said Mary to the Dean of Peterborough, who was trying desperately to deliver the last rites to her in the castle’s great hall, ‘I shall die as I have lived, in the true and holy Catholic faith. All you can say to me on that score is but vain, and all your prayers, I think, can avail me but little.’ She prayed for all her subjects, both Scottish and English. She prayed for the soul of Elizabeth, who had brought her to this. And in her blood-red petticoat she knelt while the headsman swung his axe twice before the bald head rolled away from the auburn wig and the little lap-dog scampered away in terror from the dull thud and the seeping blood.

  Her body was stripped and all the queen’s clothes destroyed. There must be no relics of this martyr, those gruesome icons so beloved of the Catholic Church. The surgeons embalmed her body and on the orders of Francis Walsingham, it was placed in a lead-lined coffin, too strong for relic-hunters to break open.

  While the bells of London rang and cannon roared on the Artillery Grounds in Whitechapel, Elizabeth flew into one of those rages for which she was notorious. ‘Her countenance changed,’ wrote the chronicler William Camden, ‘her words faltered, and with excessive sorrow she was in manner astonished, insomuch as she gave herself over to grief.’ Her Privy Council fled to a man, knowing what would come. Walsingham hid at his home in Barn Elms and Burghley’s grovelling letters to his queen were returned unopened.

  While this grief was probably genuine and the result of thirty years’ angst, Catholics were unimpressed. Philip of Spain, who saw himself as some sort of distant protector of Mary, wrote, ‘It is very fine for the Queen of England now to give out that it was done without her wish, the contrary being so clearly the case.’ How much the execution was really a trigger to the ‘enterprise of England’ is difficult to say. Certainly by September, the Duke of Parma, Philip’s highly capable general in the Netherlands, had orders from his king to assemble a fleet of barges for the invasion of England.

  It is not known whether Marlowe, who was probably in London by this time, played any role in keeping Walsingham informed of these troop movements and logistical preparations. Events moved quickly in 1587. On 21 April Francis Drake famously ‘singed the king of Spain’s beard’ by sending his fireships into Cadiz to damage Parma’s fleet, under construction. Thirty galleons and tons of supplies were lost by the Spaniards, delaying the ‘enterprise of England’ for fourteen months.

  On land, however, the picture was less rosy. Leicester’s men, despite being reinforced with fresh levies, made no impact on Parma’s troops at all, even losing the important garrison town of Sluys on 25 July. By December, the disgraced Early returned home, to die a broken man at his house in Cornbury, Oxfordshire, the following September, probably of malaria.

  The campaign season of the next spring saw renewed vigour from Philip. Admiral Santa Cruz died from the typhus raging through the Spanish fleet and his replacement was the ‘many-syllabled’ Duke of Medina-Sedonia, who had clashed with Drake at Cadiz and just managed to save the town from total destruction. Medina-Sedonia was a brilliant administrator, but he had no naval experience and openly considered the invasion plan ill-conceived. The prospects in the summer of 1588 were not good: an inexperienced commander; a typhoid epidemic; a dubious welcome at best from English Catholics. The logistics of actually landing on England’s shores were a nightmare that never, of course, had to be faced.

  The Queen, on the other hand, was confronted by the most powerful enemy in Europe and a threat of the unthinkable – the invasion of England – which she had tried to avoid for thirty years. Lord Howard of Effingham, with his house at Deptford Green, had been appointed Lord High Admiral in December of the previous year, harbours were strengthened, old ships of the line refurbished and eleven new galleons built. Beacons were erected all along the south and east coasts as an early-warning system for the sighting of the Spanish fleet, which sailed down the Tagus on 20 May. Frantic talks held at Ostend between English and Spanish diplomats were proving fruitless. Howard of Effingham warned – ‘For the love of Jesus Christ, Madam, awake thoroughly and see the villainous treasons around you, against your Majesty and your realm, and draw your forces round about you like a mighty prince to defend you.’ Peace talks were abandoned and London prepared for war. Some commentators assume that Christopher Marlowe was among the 10,000 men ordered to arms in the capital and that may be so, but there is no evidence for it. Leicester’s headquarters were at Tilbury along the further reaches of the Thames and it was here the Queen famously appeared, in breast and back plate and riding a white horse, on 9 August and proclaimed

  I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too: and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare invade the borders of my realm....By your valour in the field, we shall shortly have a famous victory over these enemies of my God, of my kingdom and of my people.

  Were it not for the events that Elizabeth already knew had happened six days earlier, her 20,000 militiamen would have been no match for Parma’s battle-hardened veterans.

  On 3 August, the Armada, already lacking thirty-two of its ships because of squalls and bad navigation, was being driven by strong south westerlies up the English Channel, hotly pursued by Howard on board Walter Ralegh’s ship, renamed Ark Royal. The tight crescent formation of Medina-Sedonia’s fleet was broken up off the Isle of Wight by the four English squadrons commanded by Howard, Drake, Hawkins and Frobisher. Drake inflicted most damage and sent his fireships in again while the battered Spaniards anchored off Calais to recover three days later. Drake hit them again off Gravelines in an eight-hour sea fight and the bitter winds of the Channel did the rest. Of the 132 ships that had left Lisbon the previous May only 60 returned home; more than 11,000 men dead from thirst, hunger, drowning and battle. With a sense of irony not lost on those who loathed Elizabeth’s police state, Spanish survivors were hailed as heroes on the orders of Philip, while their victorious English counterparts were left to die from gangrene.

  The bells rang out and the whole country rejoiced. The Queen attended a service of thanksgiving at St Paul’s but not before she had been to a smaller one, at the church of St Nicholas in Deptford, entering through the ‘Armada gate’, just feet from where, five years later, anonymous sextons would bring the body of Kit Marlowe. ‘God blew His winds and they were scattered.’

  We next hear of Marlowe, now at the height of his fame in theatrical circles, in September 1589 in the infamous fight in Hog Lane. Thirty years later, Fynes Morrison had this to say of street-brawling:

  Of old, when [Englishmen] were fenced with bucklers [small, leather shields] as with a rapier, nothing was more common with them, than to fight about taking the right or left hand, or the wall, or upon any unpleasing countenance. Clashing of swords was then daily music in every street, and they did not only fight combats, but cared not to set upon their enemy upon advantages and unequal terms.

  Duelling in all European countries was a national pastime. An estimated four thousand members of the aristocracy and gentry died in duels in France alone between 1560 and 1610. The cause was inevitably a sneer or casual remark, taken as an insult by one of the parties involved. The result was always a clash of steel, a loss of blood and, all too often, death. In Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio taunts Benvolio:

 
Thou wilt quarrel with a man for cracking nuts, having no other reason but because thou has hazel eyes...Thou has quarreled with a man for coughing in the street because he hath wakened they dog that hath lain asleep in the sun.

  The fight between Marlowe and William Bradley in Hog Lane, off Bishopsgate Street in the parish of St Giles Without Cripplegate is important because it establishes Marlowe as a man of violence and quick temper, character defects seized upon by those who wanted the man dead in the early summer of 1593. The Middlesex Session Rolls for the period 9 September to 2 October 1589 confirm that Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Watson, both of Norton Folgate and styled ‘yeoman’ and ‘gentleman’ respectively were arrested by constables and committed to Newgate prison by the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Owen Hopton, on suspicion of murder.

  Norton Folgate was bisected by Bishopsgate Street midway between the open spaces of Spitalfields and ‘Fynnesburie Field’, where archery was practised. To the south, Moor Field was a tenter ground, where linens and wool were laid out to bleach in the sun. Hog Lane itself ran between Bishopsgate Street and Finsbury. Marlowe and Watson, most authorities presume, were either close neighbours or shared lodgings in one of these places, since both men probably had the money to rent somewhere quite substantial.

  William Bradley was the son of an innkeeper of Gray’s Inn Lane, Holborn and he was slightly older than Marlowe, at twenty-six. The man owed a £14 debt to John Alleyn, another innkeeper who was the brother of the famous actor. In keeping with the litigious spirit of the age, Alleyn threatened to sue Bradley in the Court of Common Pleas, using his lawyer Hugh Swift. Bradley countered this by getting a friend, George Orrell, to beat Swift up if this action went ahead. Swift was the brother-in-law of Thomas Watson and by September 1580 a regular feud was going on between Bradley and Orrell on the one side and Swift, Alleyn and Watson on the other. Bradley was a known thug and was waiting for Watson in Hog Lane on the afternoon of the 18th.

  It was then that Marlowe arrived and Bradley attacked him as a friend of Watson. We do not have the exact details of the weapon(s) involved, but it is likely that swords were drawn. Early in the sixteenth century, a scientific system of fencing moves was developing. Swordmanship, like music, architecture, mathematics and astronomy, was regarded as part of a gentleman’s education. Despite an attempt by George Silver to champion an English school of broadsword fighting, the Italians dominated the art, as they did so much else, and Marlowe probably used a variant technique of that promulgated by Achille Marozzo in 1536 which included tripping, kicking and shoulder barging. Several authorities believe that it was the Hog Lane fight that influenced Shakespeare’s duel scene in Romeo and Juliet, even to the extent that the Stratford man may have witnessed it. Mercutio refers to Tybalt’s Spanish style of swordsmanship – ‘He fights as you sing prick-song, keeps time, distance, and proportion; rests me his minim rest, one, two, and the third in your bosom.’ In As You Like It, Touchstone describes the formality of the Italian style of picking a quarrel – first came the ‘retort courteous’, then the ‘quip modest’, the ‘reply churlish’, the ‘reproof valiant’, the ‘counter-check quarrelsome’, the ‘lie with circumstance’ and the ‘lie direct’. The point was that street-fighting was all about staying alive and the formal, highly stylized pirouettes of the later Italian, French and Spanish schools bore little relevance to that.

  Marlowe probably carried a swept-hilt rapier, the most common sword available in the 1580s, and he may have used a dagger or cloak as well to deflect Bradley’s blade. The fight, with thrust and parry (the lunge had probably not developed this early) continued up and down Hog Lane for some minutes before Thomas Watson arrived. According to testimony delivered later, Bradley shouted ‘Art thou now come? Then I will have a bout with thee’ and attacked Watson who was subsequently wounded. Marlowe bowed out and Watson, driven to the edge of a ditch at the northern end of the lane, desperately drove Bradley back and killed him. The coroner for Middlesex, John Chalkhill, duly noted the dead man’s wounds, six inches deep and one inch wide to the right side of his chest.

  In an uncanny precursor to Deptford, neither Marlowe nor Watson made any attempt to run, but calmly waited to be taken into custody, sure in the knowledge (unlike Deptford) that they had both acted in self-defence. The arresting officer was Stephen Wylde, a tailor from the area. The well-known characters of Dogberry and Verges in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing remain close to the truth. William Bullein had the measure of them; in 1573, he wrote:

  These are not only the constables with the watchmen in London, but also almost through this realm, most falsely abusing the time, coming very late to watch, sitting down in some common place of watching, wherein some falleth on sleep by the reason of the labour or much drinking before.

  For all the great jurist Edward Coke expected honesty, loyalty, knowledge and ability in his constables, it is unlikely that he actually got any of these. In 1616, a constable in Wiltshire reported (presumably via an intermediary): ‘I am unlearned, and by reason thereof am constrained to go two miles from my house to have the help of a scrivener to read such warrants as are sent to me.’ Constables were unpaid and untrained, doing their local duty out of some vestigial remainder of feudal service. The problem, as Bullein realized, was the criminality of Elizabethan society – ‘too little wages, too many serving-men, too many tippling-houses, too much idleness.’ Overnight in Newgate was enough for many men, although as we have seen, some spent their lives there. Some, like Robert Poley, were in and out of prisons on the Queen’s business. The prison where Marlowe and Watson waited was the second called Newgate, nicknamed ‘The Whit’ after Richard Whittington, the Lord Mayor of London who had left money for its building in his will. It was five storeys high with a condemned cell called ‘Limbo’, but it was the first such prison to reflect the social standing of its inmates, with a dining hall and airy rooms for those with the freedom of the City, subterranean caverns for the rest. The Blacke Dogge of Newgate published by Luke Hutton in 1600 described the hideous clattering of the prisoners’ chains as they begged richer inmates for food. The con worked systematically by the turnkeys in Newgate was that the prisoners were obliged to pay when fetters and leg-irons were fitted and when they were taken off.

  On 19 September, the inquest on Bradley took place and Coroner Chalkhill’s twelve-man jury decided that Watson had acted in self-defence. Marlowe was technically not charged with murder as he had withdrawn from the affray when Watson arrived to confront Bradley. He was therefore able to obtain bail while Watson was returned to Newgate to await the official closure of the case. Marlowe applied to Richard Kytchine, a lawyer of Clifford’s Inn and lantern-maker Humfrey Rowland of East Smithfield, who gave sureties of £20 each. He himself was bound over to the tune of £40 as long as he promised to attend the next court sessions, to be held on 3 December.

  It is noticeable that the coroner here was the Middlesex county official, despite the fact that Hog Lane, like Deptford, is within ‘the verge’, i.e., 12 miles of the Queen’s person, assuming that Elizabeth was at Placentia in Greenwich or Eltham, or Whitehall, or Nonsuch. There was no need for a royal coroner to attend the legal formalities following the killing of William Bradley, because there was no need, as yet, to cover anything up. That level of double-dealing would come later.

  Who were Marlowe’s sureties? Kytchine was a Yorkshireman who probably knew Marlowe personally, appearing for Philip Henslowe later. He frequented the Mermaid Tavern in Bread Street, where both Walter Ralegh and Ben Johnson drank. Rowland came from a lower rank altogether. A constable of the watch in East Smithfield, he seems to have made quite a living out of standing surety for people and even had two servants. Intriguingly, they were Dutchmen from Antwerp and described as ‘of no church’. One of the most polemic of the exiled Catholics in Antwerp was Richard Verstigan, whose real name was Richard Rowlands. Could he and the lantern-maker have been related?

  It may have been with some relief that Marlowe recognised, whe
n he appeared before the bench on 3 December, Sir Roger Manwood, now Chief Baron of the Exchequer, who had been the poet’s patron as a boy in Canterbury. For all Manwood was ‘the terror of the night-prowler’ with a fine reputation for dealing with felons, there really was no case to answer against Marlowe and he was released. When Manwood died in 1592, leaving ‘a one penny wheaten loaf every Wednesday and Sunday’ and ‘four cartloads of fuel’ as well as gowns and shoes for his tenants in his will, Marlowe wrote his epitaph in Latin:

  Because of his many virtues, Envy, spare this man alone. Do not vent your insolence on the ashes of him whose countenance awed so many thousands of mortals. So may your bones lie happily at rest, and may your fame outlive the memorials on your marble tomb, when the bloodless messenger of Pluto wounds you.

  It was in this year of 1589 when Marlowe crossed swords with Bradley and Manwood that Ingram Frizer was buying and selling property in Basingstoke. What of Nicholas Skeres? After his probable involvement in the Babington Plot, he disappears from the official scene for nearly three years, but by 1589 was one of the minions of the Earl of Essex.

  Robert Devereux was born two years after Marlowe in Netherwood, near Bromyard, Herefordshire. The eldest son of the 1st Earl, he emerged with an MA from Trinity College, Cambridge at fifteen and although the two men were technically contemporaries at colleges only a few hundred yards apart, it is unlikely that Marlowe would have mixed with a boy at once so junior to him in terms of age and so senior in terms of rank. By the time Marlowe obtained his MA and was working for Walsingham, Devereux was already a soldier with Leicester’s army in the Low Countries. He distinguished himself at Zutphen, and came home to ingratiate himself as one of the Queen’s new favourites. As Leicester’s stepson, he inevitably filled the man’s shoes after Dudley’s death in 1588.