Who Killed Kit Marlowe?

by M. J. Trow

  One of the most accomplished was Richard Topcliffe, MP for Beverley in Yorkshire, who occasionally gave intelligence to Walsingham and was unofficially the Queen’s rack master when Thomas Norton died. The rack itself was not unfamiliar to ancient history and may have been used on Christians by the Romans. Topcliffe applied it to Catholics or indeed anybody, like Marlowe’s friend the playwright Thomas Kyd, sent to him by the Council. The rack, known in Elizabethan times as the Duke of Exeter’s daughter, was a wooden platform with pulleys which could slide its ends further apart, stretching the victim who was tied by wrist and ankle to it. The result, after excruciating pain, was the dislocation of hips and shoulder joints. Thumbscrews, which crushed fingers; the iron maiden, a coffin with internal spikes; strappado, straps to hang a man by his thumbs’ and Skeffington’s Gyves, a hoop tightened around the body, were all available to Topcliffe in the Marshalsea and the Clink, the notorious prisons south of the Thames in the liberty of Southward. The Jesuit priest, Edmund Campion, described how he felt after such experience – ‘Benumbed both of hand and foot, he likened himself to an elephant, which being down could not rise. When he could hold the bread he had to eat betwixt both his hands, he would compare himself to an ape.’ Topcliffe was a sadist and there is evidence that he exceeded his brief, both in the nature of his use of torture and in his outspoken comments on the Queen he nominally served. While torturing a priest called Thomas Pormont, he told him

  that he was so great and familiar with Her Majesty that he many times putteth his hands between her breasts and paps, and in her neck; that had not only seen her legs and knees, but feeleth them with his hands above her knees; that he hath felt her belly, and said unto Her Majesty that she had the softest belly of any womankind.

  Even though Pormont reported this to the Council, nothing was done (probably because of Pormont’s Catholicism). Lesser fry than Topcliffe were executed for suggesting who the Queen’s successor might be, much less for claiming that she was a sex object!

  Topcliffe’s work represents the dark side of the Privy Council, and the dark side of the Queen. The paranoia of the state is exposed here in all its terror. After the early seventeenth century, such cruelty would never be seen again in England, but it was part and parcel of the reign of Gloriana and the gentlemen of the Privy Council kept it that way.

  Smith and Elton are historians of the generation which believed that the Tudors behaved as they did due to circumstance. Henry VII had come to the throne by force after thirty years of civil war. His son tore apart the religious foundations of the State in order, essentially, to secure his dynasty. Opponents great and small faced the axe and the rope. All three of Henry’s children, especially Mary, permitted burnings in the name of God. But all this was against a background of foreign and papal threat. The Tudors had no police force; they had no standing army. Law and order, the essential prerequisite of any successful State, was notoriously difficult to maintain in their situation.

  It was an earlier generation altogether that talked of a ‘Tudor despotism’ and Elton, Smith, Neale, Bindoff and Dickens did their best to persuade us that this was wrong. Today, there is a tendency to swing back in that direction. Curtis C. Breight, in his fascinating Surveillance, Militarism and Drama in the Elizabethan Era puts forward a revisionist view which strikes us as altogether more realistic. It doubts A.G.R. Smith’s opinion that ‘Elizabethan government was government by consent’. Her parliament was in no sense democratic and decisions were taken not by a female dictator, but by a body of bigoted men jockeying for her favour and ultimately their own power.

  The ‘Gloriana’ myth of Elizabeth’s reign fabricates a ‘Golden Age’ only because it was a relatively settled period between the executions and burnings of the earlier Tudors and the convulsion of the Civil War. Aided by the blossoming of poetry, drama, the theatre, music, architecture and exciting adventures in the New World, the historians of yesterday saw this time as one of colossal achievement. And all of them were perfectly happy to go along with the nonsense that a would-be Elizabethan great, Kit Marlowe, died in a tavern brawl over a bill.

  We view the decade of Marlowe’s death in an altogether grimmer light. Earlier, ‘Gloriana’ historians have pointed out Elizabeth’s ageing, her unwillingness to cope with parliament or tackle the problems of her own succession or the monopolies tangle. Yet, there is also the question of famine levels, the abandonment of the Queen’s sailors after the Armada, and a huge increase, especially in the luckless county of Essex, of witch persecution. Curtis Breight argues convincingly that Elizabeth’s last years were marked by worsening class divisions and seething popular discontent in which local magistrates were struggling to stay afloat. He argues too, that the Privy Council was bent on control at any cost and uses the word Machiavellian frequently in this context.

  The lack of parties in a political sense in Elizabethan England meant that there was no true focus for an attack on the Queen and her government that was not launched from Rome or Rheims. The increasing outspokenness of MPs like Peter Wentworth, however, meant that the ‘answers answerless’ could not go on for ever. Elizabeth must change her outlook or die because her country was moving on without her, a prospect that only younger politicians like the Earl of Essex understood. It may be that Elizabeth herself was an irrelevance by the time of Marlowe’s death and power had actually slipped to a Regnum Cecilianum, the rule of the Cecils, because in 1591, Robert, Burghley’s deformed, clever son, was admitted to the Council.

  Pertinently to Marlowe and the whole secret service world he still inhabited in 1593, treason laws were extended (for example the Surety of the Queen’s Person Act in 1585), judicial torture was widely employed, house to house searches (like the one that led to Kyd’s arrest) and government-sponsored scare campaigns like the Dutch libels were all designed to browbeat and control the people. Executions reached eight hundred a year in the last years of the Queen’s reign.

  Who were these men to whom power was so vital? First, in the sense of his years in office and his undoubted loyalty to the Queen, was William Cecil, Lord Burghley. He had been with Elizabeth since the beginning, appointed by her on 20 November 1558 while the new queen was still living at Hatfield House, which was to become one of Robert Cecil’s principal residences in the years ahead. Thirty-eight years old to her twenty-five, Cecil was the perfect mix of solid protestant and worldly politician the Queen needed to pilot her through the turbulent seas of sixteenth-century government. Above all, perhaps, despite a certain political quick-footedness in the reigns of Edward VI and Mary, he was what passed in the period for an honest man:

  This judgement I have of you that you will not be corrupted with any manner of gift and that you will be faithful to the state and that without respect of my private will, you will give me that council that you think best.

  Cecil continued to do that for forty years, giving Elizabeth his advice, arguing with her politely in private, backing her always in public. They essentially thought alike, both advocating religious compromise (although he was probably more Protestant than his queen), both wanting to improve the country’s economy and both suspicious of foreign adventures. In the vexed questions of Elizabeth’s marriage and Elizabeth’s succession, Cecil got nowhere, but he was more successful in the issue of Mary, Queen of Scots, even though, as we have seen, he was banished from Court over it for a time. ‘I have found such torment with the Queen’s Majesty as an ague hath not in three fits so much abated.’ In religion he steered more of a via media than did Elizabeth. ‘He dissented,’ wrote a contemporary, ‘from papist and puritan, disliking the superstition of the one and the singularity of the other...’. As descendant David Cecil says, Burghley’s ‘was a public face and a public face is always a mask, hiding the inner man’. He had no friends, probably because he felt that the Queen’s Principal Secretary and later her Treasurer could not afford to have any. He had ‘no inward companion as great men commonly have, not did any other know his secrets; some noting it for a fau
lt, but most thinking it a praise and an instance of his wisdom. By trusting none with his secrets, none could reveal them.’

  So the private man is more difficult to find than the Privy Councillor, though he managed to keep the two quite separate. At home in Burghley, Northamptonshire or Theobalds in Hertfordshire, he ostentatiously laid down his staff and gown of office, especially at meal times with a ‘Lie thou there, Lord Treasurer’. He spoke French, Italian, Greek and Latin and carried a copy of Cicero in his pocket. He did not approve much of poetry or plays, in common with an increasing number of his contemporaries, but filled his houses with scholars and the sons of the aristocracy, like the future Lords Essex and Southampton, who were anxious to soak up culture at the great man’s knee. He was an avid collector of gold, coins and silver plate and had one of the finest collections of plants in the country, at a time when the science of botany was in its infancy. Bored by sport and the usual manly pursuits of Tudor gentlemen, his only exercise was gardening and riding the grounds of his houses on the back of a mule.

  By the 1590s, however, the greatest statesman of Elizabeth’s reign was tired out. He took to carrying a book with him at all times so that he could keep himself awake by reading. His clever, scholarly wife, Mildred, who seems to have played no part in his political work but ran his household very efficiently, died in 1589. Now he often ate alone and increasingly worked from his bed, complaining sadly, ‘I am as lonely as an owl.’

  His temper shortened and he snapped more often in Council meetings. Already by 1591 he was grooming his second son, Robert, to follow him. And once again, Cecil ambition was under threat from another lusty young favourite. In the 1560s, it had been the headstrong Earl of Leicester; now it was his stepson, another hothead, Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex.

  It was in 1590 that Francis Walsingham, the Queen’s spymaster, died. The cause was purported to be a testicular tumour. Robert Southwell wrote to Richard Verstigen, staunch Catholics both, in December 1591:

  The Secretary Walsingham, a most violent persecutor of Catholics, died never so much as naming God in his last extremities...in the end, his urine came forth at his mouth and nose with so odious a stench that none could endure to come near him.

  This is Catholic claptrap. The ‘urine’ was pleural effusion, excess fluid from the lungs. What actually killed Walsingham was pneumonia.

  More of a Machiavellian than Burghley, his secret service was by now the envy of Europe. Philip of Spain was delighted with the news. In dispatches sent to him he read ‘Secretary Walsingham has just expired, at which there is great sorrow’, whereupon the king wrote in the margin, ‘There, yes, but is good news here!’ Walsingham had been the Queen’s Principal Secretary since 1573 and it was a huge job. Nicholas Faunt, the homosexual who may have recruited Marlowe to the secret service in Cambridge, wrote in 1592 that

  amongst all particular offices and places of charge in this state, there is none of more necessary use, nor subject to more cumber and variableness than is the office of principal secretary, by reason of the variety and uncertainty of his employment.

  Robert Beale, another civil servant, like Faunt with ideas above his station, also leapt into print the same year and openly criticised Walsingham now that the man was dead – ‘Burden not yourself with too many clerks or servants, as Sir Francis Walsingham did. Let your secret services be known to a few; the Lord Treasurer Burghley, being secretary, had not above two or three...’ And, of course, Lord Treasurer Burghley was still alive. It is no accident that these men let their views be known in 1592 because immediately after Walsingham’s death the post was vacant and Burghley himself filled it again pro tem while waiting for the Queen to accept young Robert’s maturity, which she finally did in 1596. More combative and altogether darker than Burghley, Walsingham had allied himself with Leicester in a pro-war faction in the Council, urging the Queen to take on Spain in a no-holds-barred contest for supremacy in Europe. How far he was influenced in this position is difficult to say and historians are divided over the sincerity of his views. Certainly, he appeared the most Machiavellian of all Elizabeth’s Privy Councillors and was not always as honest in his dealings with the Queen as she would have liked.

  Even so, there is the unwritten feeling in the relationship between Walsingham and Marlowe that, had the spymaster lived, his agent would have survived too. It was not to be. Ill for many years and without any of the cash benefits bestowed by Elizabeth on other members of the Council, he died so heavily in debt, it was said, that the burial had to be kept secret to evade his creditors. The debt should have been the Queen’s, for much of it was incurred in making Elizabeth and her realm safe.

  The poet Thomas Watson, who had known Walsingham since Paris in 1581, wrote an eclogue, Meliboeus, in the Secretary’s memory. In flowery Renaissance style, Watson himself was Corydon, Thomas Walsingham Titymus and Walsingham’s son-in-law Philip Sidney Astrophel, ‘by cruel Fates cut off before his day’. The Queen was portrayed as the huntress Diana and England, of course, was Arcadia, the mythic land of fauns and shepherds.

  Another member of the Council to have gone before Marlowe’s death was Sir Christopher Hatton. Of an old Northamptonshire family, Hatton was typical of the squirearchy of the day who attended St. Mary’s Hall, Oxford, but took no degree. His acquaintance with the law was slight (odd, as contemporaries remarked, in a future Lord Chancellor) as he spent only a few months in the Inner Temple – there is no record of his being called to the Bar. Tall, handsome and an excellent dancer, he was performing in a masque at the Temple attended by the Queen in 1561 and so impressed her by his gaillard that he was made a gentleman pensioner three years later. Impressive at the tilt, he was made Captain of the Queen’s Bodyguard and Gentleman of the Privy Chamber.

  Hatton’s relationship with Elizabeth was very intimate and certainly the rumour was that they were lovers, which neither of them denied. However seriously we take Elizabeth’s famous determination to be wedded to England, Hatton was certainly her type. Historian David Starkey has expressed the opinion that Elizabeth was sexually abused as a teenager by her guardian, Thomas Seymour, Lord High Admiral and husband of Catherine Parr, Henry VIII’s last wife. Starkey maintains that Elizabeth fell for Seymour and ever after looked for a similar type – athletic, powerful, bearded – and this explains her attraction to Leicester, Hatton, Ralegh and even, though he was years younger, to Essex.

  Few other members of the Council (Hatton was made a Privy Councillor and Vice Chamberlain of the Household in 1577) had as many gifts lavished on him. Still dispensing church properties to her favourites, Elizabeth showered him with estates, including the country house at Audley End and the huge town house in London known as Ely Place. When it was customary for courtiers to receive annual gifts of silver to the weight of 50 to 100 ounces, Hatton never got less than four hundred! When he fell ill in 1573, she visited him daily and sent her own physician, Dr Julio, to Spa with him when he went there to convalesce. He wrote her sentimental letters:

  Would God I were with you but for one hour. My wits are overwrought with thoughts. I find myself amazed. Bear with me, my most dear sweet lady...love me, for I love you.

  She in turn called him her ‘mutton’, ‘bellwether’ and ‘pecora campi’, all of them bizarre references to grazing sheep! Perhaps because he had it all financially, perhaps because he really loved her, perhaps because he had no greater ambition, Hatton rarely became embroiled in the increasingly frequent clashes over policy within the Council. He did go so far as to beg Elizabeth, characteristically in tears, not to marry the Duke of Alençon, but this was probably as a result of personal jealousy rather than acute statesmanship. He also persuaded the Queen not to appoint Leicester Lieutenant-General of England at the time of the Armada, but this may have been for the same reason. Certainly when Walter Ralegh arrived on the scene, Hatton left the Court and sulked on one of his many estates.

  He seems to have had fairly strong Protestant convictions, perhaps on a par with Walsin
gham. As one of the commissioners at the trial of Anthony Babington and his co-conspirators in 1586, he savaged the Jesuit priest John Ballard – ‘Is this thy religio Catholica? [Catholic faith] Nay, rather it is diabolica. [Devil Worship].’ As Lord Chancellor from April 1587, Hatton’s legal pronouncements were not exactly earth-shattering. He liaised faithfully between Queen and parliament and it may be that his absence in the 1590s contributed to the increasing strain between these elements of government.

  An odd incident had occurred in October 1573 when John Hawkins, the sea captain, was stabbed by a Puritan fanatic named Burchet in a London street. The Puritan had mistaken Hawkins for Hatton (perhaps mishearing his name) and had launched his attack believing the future Privy Councillor to be ‘an enemy to the gospel’. Such a deranged sentiment was ignored at the time, but in the light of those members of the Council still ruling England in 1593, it has an odd echo of prophecy.

  Hatton died of kidney failure in November 1591, owing his queen £56,000. She fed him ‘cordial broths’ in his last days at his house in Ely Place.

  Sir Francis Knollys was easily the most rabid Puritan close to the Queen and she had to reprimand him for this more than once. He was Elizabeth’s cousin and part of that incestuous coterie who invariably hang around royalty. The family origins lay in trade, reflecting the ‘new men’ whom the Tudors promoted. Thomas Knollys had been Lord Mayor of London twice in the early fifteenth century and Francis’s grandfather had been a staunch supporter of both Henries. Francis became an MP in 1542, having spent some time at Oxford, probably at Magdalen, before being knighted by ‘Protector’ Somerset with the English army in Scotland. Like Hatton, he took part in tournaments but was more outspoken, especially in religious matters. Wisely in Germany during the reign of Mary, he returned to be made Chamberlain of the Household, Captain of Halberdiers and Privy Councillor in December 1558.