Who Killed Kit Marlowe?

by M. J. Trow

  Frequently accompanying Elizabeth on her famous progresses and acquiring honorary MA degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge as a result, his most difficult duty was to act as gaoler to Mary, Queen of Scots intermittently during her long imprisonments in England. Knollys taught her to speak and write English and attempted, until Elizabeth ordered him to stop, to convert Mary to the Puritan faith. His wife was Catherine Carey, the sister of Henry, Baron Hunsdon, a fellow councillor; she was also first cousin to the Queen and she died in 1569 of an illness brought on, it was said, by her husband’s prolonged absence in the north.

  By far the most outspoken critic of the Queen, he distrusted her statesmanship, especially in the early years when Elizabeth responded to flattery and flirtatiousness. He wrote her stern letters, warning against such sycophants – ‘King Richard II’s men’ he called them – and told her to support the Dutch in the Spanish Netherlands, put the Scots followers of Mary in their place and sort out the English Catholics.

  In the 1580s Knollys was at the forefront of the movement against Catholicism, a prominent commissioner at the trials of the Jesuit Parry and the traitor Babington. In December 1581 he attended the execution of Edmund Campion and asked him on the scaffold if he renounced the Pope. Like most of the Council, he urged Mary’s execution on Elizabeth, but went further than his peers in rooting out heresy of all types. In September 1581 he begged Burghley and Leicester to suppress the ‘anabaptisticall [extreme Puritan] secretaries’ of the Family of Love, but turned more harshly still on Catholics. He accused John Whitgift, the Archbishop of Canterbury, of being over-zealous in his attempts to control the Puritans and despite the fact that the man had Calvinist leanings, charged him with ‘treading the highway to the Pope’. In 1586, Knollys demanded that all recusants should be exiled and all who married recusants should be excluded from office. In the year of the Armada he railed against the bishops, demanding that their power be curbed.

  Knollys may have been second rate to Burghley and Walsingham in terms of intellect and far less charismatic than Leicester or Essex, but his fanaticism knew few bounds. If he believed a tenth of the nineteen accusations made against Marlowe in the Baines Note, he would have hanged him out of hand. As it happened, other hands and other methods were found.

  Another kinsman of the Queen was Charles Howard, later Baron Howard of Effingham and Earl of Nottingham. He was both sponsor of the Admiral’s Men, for whom Marlowe wrote and Alleyn acted, and naval commander against the Armada. Like many Tudor acolytes from a Welsh family (his mother was Margaret Gamage of Coity, Glamorgan), he was given a post at Elizabeth’s Court as her cousin once removed and was made General of Horse under the Earl of Warwick in the suppression of the rebellion in the north in 1569. Having served at sea with his father in Mary’s reign, he commanded a naval squadron covering the Queen of Spain’s departure from Flanders the following year, which, according to the geographer Richard Hakluyt, ‘environed the Spanish fleet in most strange and warlike sort and enforced them to stoop gallant and to vail their bonnets for the Queen of England.’ Howard’s ascendancy to naval heights occurred in the year that Marlowe was recruited into the secret service. With the death of Edward de Clinton, Earl of Lincoln, Howard was made Lord High Admiral and by December 1587, as open war with Spain looked ever more imminent, he was made Lieutenant General and commander in chief of the navy ‘prepared to the seas against Spain’. His flagship was the 800 ton Ark Ralegh sold to the Queen by Walter Ralegh and renamed the Ark Royal.

  Ralegh was impressed with Howard. He found him ‘better advised than a great many malignant fools were that found fault with his demeanour’. And certainly in an age when commanders tended to regard their men as cannon fodder (Elizabeth included) Howard kept his fleet together at his own cost when the government wanted to break it up and he paid personally for doctors to deal with the typhus epidemic among his crews.

  The assumption was made later that the hero of the Armada was a secret Catholic, in that the Howards clung to the old religion throughout. He certainly did not give any hint of this in his lifetime; in fact, there is a lot of evidence for his working actively against them. He crossed them in the revolt of the north and collected evidence in the Babington Plot. Along with all others on the Privy Council, he urged the death of the Queen of Scots. In the State Papers for August 1598 is the sentence ‘The recusants say that they have but three enemies in England whom they fear, viz. The Lord Chief Justice [Sir John Popham], Sir Robert Cecil and the Lord High Admiral.’

  On the Council with Howard was another of the Queen’s cousins, Henry Carey, Baron Hunsdon. His father had been Esquire of the Body to Henry VIII and Carey, whose education is unknown, was knighted by Elizabeth on her accession and made Captain of the Gentlemen Pensioners. Prominent in court jousts in 1559 and 1560, he became a member of the Privy Council in 1561 and was involved in various state visits to France, conferring in the Queen’s name an honorary order of the Garter on Charles IX. Elizabeth was very fond of her cousin. When she thought she was dying in 1562 she let it be known that she wanted Hunsdon to run the Council, even though Burghley was Principal Secretary and Leicester her undoubted favourite. In the late 1560s he was appointed Governor of Berwick, a key town on the marches of Scotland. The revolt of the north at one point hinged on Berwick and Hunsdon defeated the rebels near Carlisle in February 1570.

  In the case of Thomas Percy, rebel Earl of Northumberland, it was different. Percy was handed over to Hunsdon by the Scots, but Hunsdon refused to hang him as was the plan and he tried to intercede with Burghley on the Earl’s behalf. That failed and Percy was hanged (the final insult for a nobleman, a felon’s death at the end of a rope), by John Forster at York in August.

  Hunsdon clearly hated his time in the north, keeping the Scots at bay and hanging thieves, as is evident from his extant letters to Walsingham asking to be allowed home, which are numerous. In 1582 he was made Lord Chamberlain of the Household, but refused to return to Berwick in 1583. Elizabeth was furious and threatened to have him replaced and ‘set him by his feet’.

  Active against the treasonable Henry Percy, Early of Northumberland, who shot himself in the Tower in 1585, he was also one of the commissioners at the trial of Mary, Queen of Scots. In Hunsdon’s case, however, while other Councillors hid from Elizabeth’s ultimate anger, he had the unenviable job of going north to placate the Scots. It did not help that Hunsdon disliked Mary’s son, the shifty James VI, and believed him quite capable of betraying Elizabeth.

  In the year of the Armada, Hunsdon was made Earl Marshal and commanded the troops at Tilbury when the Queen made her famous speech there. In the early 1590s he was commissioner for the trials of William Parry, Philip, Earl of Arundel, Sir John Perrot and Patrick O’Cullen, all victims of Elizabeth’s paranoid State.

  Hunsdon was a blunt man with few of the refinements of other courtiers. He kept himself aloof from the political infighting of the Council, although his prolonged absence in Berwick probably accounts for much of this. His one intellectual interest seems, like Burghley’s, to have been botany.

  By the 1590s, the old order of Elizabeth’s Privy Council was changing. Walsingham and Hatton were dead by 1591 and new, untried faces replaced them – Walter Mildmay, Thomas Randolph, James Crofts. So it was the perfect time for the old guard – Burghley, Knollys, Effingham and Hunsdon – to be assailed by the meteor that was Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex.

  Essex was Knollys’ grandson and Leicester’s stepson, but it was in the footsteps of the latter that he appeared at Court. Handsome, mercurial, athletic, brave, he was everything that the Queen looked for in a favourite. But Elizabeth was nearly sixty, her scrawny chest and thin face plastered with the white lead-based make-up fashionable in her day. With hindsight, Essex appears almost an irrelevance, the last in a long line of gentleman-adventurers who burned themselves out trying to outdazzle their rivals. The other irrelevance in political terms, though not in relationship to the Queen, was Walter Ralegh, ‘that great Lu
cifer’. The on-going struggle between these two has been blamed for Marlowe’s death, but it is not a motive for murder.

  A far more dangerous rival to them both was the second son of Lord Burghley, Robert Cecil, to the extent that Alison Plowden refers to the 1590s as ‘The War of the Two Roberts’, which would culminate in Essex’s execution in 1601. Burghley’s eldest son, Thomas, was a disappointment to him, without the old man’s intellect or devotion to duty. Robert, however, was another matter. Articulate and clever, he was an MP at eighteen, a student of law at Gray’s Inn and probably spent some time at St. John’s College, Cambridge, where the authorities were impressed by his ‘godly vigilance both at sermons and disputation’. About a year older than Marlowe, Cecil was infinitely more secretive than his father, but his aloofness was probably the result of his deformity. His exact height is not recorded, but was probably no more than 5 feet tall. The French called him ‘M. le Bossu’ (Mr Hunchback), Elizabeth (who never let an unpleasant nickname stand in her way), her ‘pygmy’, later softened to her ‘elf’ and in an extraordinary list of ten points which Burghley wrote by the way of advice to his son, he said ‘neither make choice [of a wife] of a dwarf or a fool; for by the one you shall beget a race of pygmies, the other will be thy continual disgrace...’.

  It is clear from portraits that Robert Cecil did not suffer from achondroplasia (dwarfism) with its obvious facial and other characteristics, and the family stories that he was dropped as a baby may well describe the accident that affected his pituitary development, restricting normal growth or damaging his spine in some way. The point was that Cecil was a diminutive freak in a world of men as tall as we are and the Elizabethans either laughed at such people or believed them evil. Cecil, like Shakespeare’s Richard III, ploughed a lonely furrow as a result.

  In an age of nepotism, it was natural that Burghley should want his boy on the Council with him and spent the 1580s giving advice and grooming him for eventual stardom. First came the selection of a wife, then the maintenance of a household, then the bringing up of children – the domestic side of life with which young Cecil would have to cope. In the context of European politics in general and of Marlowe in particular, Burghley was clearly very wary of Italy, with its Papal influence – ‘And suffer not thy sons to pass the Alps, for they shall learn nothing there but pride, blasphemy and atheism.’ Burghley was clearly thinking of his own eldest, Thomas, who got into expensive scrapes on the Continent.

  The eighth of his ten points touched on the situation as it was in the early 1590s:

  Towards thy superiors be humble, yet generous, with thine equals familiar, yet respective; towards thine inferiors show much humanity and some familiarity; as to bow the body, stretch forth the hand and to uncover the head,... The first prepares thy way to advancement, the second makes thee known for a man well bred; the third gains a good report which once got is easily kept...yet I advise thee not to affect or neglect popularity too much. Seek not to be Essex; shun to be Ralegh.

  By 1591, Cecil was already an experienced politician. He had spent two years in Paris on the Queen’s business and, despite having no actual brief, became central in the abortive peace negotiations with Spain on the eve of the Armada. He was knighted at his father’s house at Theobald’s in 1591 and became a member of the Privy Coucil in August of the same year.

  So began Curtis Breight’s Regnum Cecilianum, the formidable father and son act that would see off adventurers like Essex and Ralegh – and a writer of ‘scurillous poetrie’ called Kit Marlowe. The younger Cecil did not have the intellectual depth of his father, although he was fascinated by architecture, but he was the most Machiavellian of all the Council. His private life is a blank canvas and Cecil was at pains to keep it so. He believed, however, that politics was a game played for high stakes. Men were merely players on a board to be swept aside if necessary without regret and without a backward glance.

  EIGHT

  THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE

  Despair in God and trust in Belzebub. The Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe

  I

  n the same year that Cyril Tourneur wrote his play The Atheist’s Tragedy (1611), a new version of the Bible appeared. Authorised by the King, it replaced the earlier Geneva edition which James considered seditious. Fifty-four scholars had spent seven years working on this translation from the Hebrew and Greek. Their work had been monitored by a committee of twelve and finally Thomas Bilson and Miles Smith corrected the proofs to give it unity of style. Among the most famous words in the King James Bible were those of Exodus 22:18 – ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’

  James I was an expert on witchcraft, producing his Daemonologie four years after Marlowe’s death. It may be more than coincidence that two of the forbidden things in which Marlowe, according to Richard Baines at least, was involved – tobacco and the Black Arts – were points of obsession with James. The third forbidden thing – boys – was another obsession of the king, but in a different way.

  James had first-hand experience of witchcraft in 1591 in connection with the witches of Berwick. Intriguingly, Berwick, the vital fortress that guarded the Scots frontier, served as a centre for secret service activities north of the border. Robert Poley was there at the time of the witch hysteria. What brand of mayhem he added to the scene we can only guess. In the previous year, the Scots king was sailing home from Norway with his new bride of fourteen, Anne of Denmark. The unappealing young king, with his large head, rolling eyes and lolling tongue, wrote his bride-to-be passionate, if awful, poetry and married her in the old bishop’s palace at Oslo. Four black slaves died of pneumonia after dancing in the snow during the festivities and if James did not see anything portentous in that, he certainly did as his little fleet was buffeted in a sudden storm of Bass Rock, near Berwick. He saw hares, well known as witches’ familiars, standing on sieves as the waves overwhelmed them.

  Landing at Leith, James immediately organised a search in the Berwick area. The ability to raise storms was one of the notorious skills attributed to witches and James wanted names. One he was given was that of Francis Steward Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell, whose father, the lover and eventual husband of the Queen of Scots, had died insane in Denmark thirteen years earlier. At the church of St Andrew, James himself witnessed a witch’s sabbat in which ninety-four women, bare breasted and frenzied, danced with six wizards, all of whom took turns to kiss the arse of their goat-masked leader.

  In the sensational trial that followed in April 1591, a wizard named Richie Graham testified on oath that black masses were held regularly in North Berwick and that the instigator of a demonic plot on the life of the king was the 4th Earl of Bothwell. A round-up of the usual suspects produced Johanne Fane, tortured and burnt on Castle Hill, Gilly Duncan who had the power to heal the sick and Agnes Sampson, who was interrogated by the king himself. ‘She was fastened to the wall of her cell by a witch’s bridle, an iron instrument with four sharp prongs pressed against the tongue, and the two others against the cheeks. She was kept without sleep’. She was also stripped, her head and pubic hair shaved and her body searched, probably in James’s presence, for the devil’s mark. Agnes Sampson was a literate woman with an unblemished reputation and she was probably over sixty years old. Much of the evidence at the Berwick trial comes from her and it set the pattern, with hares on sieves, storms at sea, attempts on human life, naked cavorting in churchyards and desecration of all that was holy, for over a century of persecution throughout Britain.

  But the roots of the Black Art go back much further and they have a very definite bearing on the death of Christopher Marlowe.

  Many historians of the Reformation differentiate between Catholicism and Protestantism by referring to the former as ‘the old religion’. But there was another way, an older religion still which is usually translated today as Wicca. There is no doubt that English witchcraft was a deeply ingrained social phenomenon. Most villages had their cunning men or women who acted in an uns
cientific age as doctors, nurses and midwives. Much of their ‘magic’ was sympathetic and involved herbs with curative powers such as foxglove, with its digitalis, for heart conditions. Because such medicine or white witchcraft was hit and miss, failure was as common as success, but there were a thousand and one excuses a witch could give, just as the rare and expensive doctors of the day did. To the Church the solution was prayer and penance; to the white witch it might be a dead rat hung around the sufferer’s neck.

  What changed the relatively quiet acceptance of witchcraft was the Reformation. The spread of Lutheran and Calvinist ideas from Europe introduced an element of devil-worship almost wholly lacking in Britain in earlier centuries. Appalled by the unparalleled attack on its structures, its dogma, its buildings and its priests, the Catholic Church launched the Counter-Reformation from the 1540s, resorting to desperate measures to reclaim lost souls. It is no accident that the first statute against witchcraft was passed by Henry VIII’s parliament in 1542, two years after the creation of the Society of Jesus and three before the Council of Trent sat to co-ordinate anti-Protestant strategies. The revocation of this Act in 1547 meant that a second had to be introduced, this time by Elizabeth in the year before Marlowe was born. It was this legislation that demanded the death by hanging (as opposed to burning in Scotland and Europe) of witches, enchanters and sorcerers. In the years of the Jesuit mission spearheaded by Campion and Parsons a number of fugitive Catholic priests wandered the country carrying out exorcisms. The whole issue of demonic possession is missing from earlier English witchcraft, but the hysteria of the Reformation brought it in with a vengeance. Between October 1585 and June 1586, John Ballard and William Weston conducted a whirlwind campaign to root out the devil, pursued in their turn by Walsingham’s agents. One afflicted soul was a servant of Anthony Babington and the whole story was written up by Anthony Tyrell in The Book of Miracles. With this mind-bending and subversive subculture in existence, the Privy Council was never far behind. One eyewitness of an exorcism told Burghley that he had seen devils swimming like fishes under the skin of the possessed.