Who Killed Kit Marlowe?

by M. J. Trow

  Ralegh may have met Marlowe at Cambridge. There was trouble here in 1585 when one of Ralegh’s agents, Richard Browne, clashed with the university authorities over the cost of wine. Ralegh intervened personally, renegotiating his licence with the Queen and sacking the luckless Browne, who had already been imprisoned by the university’s Vice Chancellor. Riots had ensued over this clash between town and gown and Ralegh had to use all his considerable charm to smooth ruffled feathers. How he would have met Marlowe, who was not in Cambridge for much of that year, cannot be known, and we believe that the two probably became acquainted in London two years later. We know that Ralegh – and Shakespeare and Jonson – frequented the Mermaid Tavern in Bread Street and perhaps this was a haunt of Kit Marlowe’s too.

  In the context of Marlowe’s death, of the tragical history of Dr Faustus, of magi and ‘bugbears’ and ‘hobgoblins’, it is Ralegh’s and Marlowe’s connection with the School of Night that matters most. We do not know exactly who belonged to this group but we can make an informed guess. The exiled Jesuit Robert Parsons wrote in 1592

  of Sir Walter Ralegh who keeps a school of atheism much frequented with a certain necromantic astronomer as schoolmaster where no small number of young men of noble birth learn to deride the Old law of Moses and the New Law of our Saviour with ingenious quips and jests and the scholars taught among other things to spell ‘God’ backwards.

  Parsons accused Burghley of similar behaviour, the upright old man who carried a prayer book with him wherever he went. Many commentators, even at this distance of time, regard Parsons as ‘the enemy’ in an ideological sense and disregard his views as vitriolic propaganda. Clearly, he seemed to believe that Ralegh’s scholars were actually children or at least teenagers and that their lessons were pretty basic. The fact that Parsons was writing from France within a few months of Marlowe’s death indicates how widespread knowledge of Ralegh’s activities was, and makes nonsense of Kalbe’s assertion that Ralegh had Marlowe murdered to keep these very activities quiet.

  That Ralegh discussed philosophical matters best left alone in an age of rabid Christian bigotry is not contested by any of his biographers. In March 1594, ten months after Marlowe’s death, an ecclesiastic commission sat at Cerne Abbas in Dorset, a stone’s throw from Ralegh’s house at Sherborne. On the hillside overlooking the town loomed the Giant with his huge club and erect penis as an ancient monument to the god of fertility. It is likely that on the hilltop above the Giant’s head, still in Ralegh’s day, stood the maypole with its phallic/fertility associations that the Puritans would soon destroy. The ever-rabid Philip Stubbes had his views on this:

  This May pole (this stinking idol rather) is covered all over with flowers and herbs, bound round about with strings from the top to the bottom.... Then fall they to leap and dance about it, as the Heathen people did at the dedication of their idols, whereof this is the perfect pattern, or rather the thing itself.

  The hill was an appropriate setting for Ralegh to be accused of ‘atheism’ and bringing ‘the Godhead in question and the whole course of Scriptures.’ As in the vast majority of witchcraft accusations, there was a great deal of personal jealousy and malice in this. Ralegh had been a royal favourite, loaded with honours from the Queen; such men make enemies. The panel he faced were: Sir Ralph Horsey, deputy lieutenant of the county; John Williams, the sheriff of Dorset; Francis Hawley, vice-admiral of Dorset; Thomas, Lord Bindon and Dr Francis James. The first three were Ralegh men and the case of Ralegh’s atheism was officially dropped. The essence of the attack revolved around a casual after-dinner conversation at Sir George Trenchard’s house in nearby Wolverton within two months of Marlowe’s death. It is likely from this that Ralegh was teasing the rather po-faced vicar, Ralph Ironside of Winterbourne, when the churchman clearly could not explain what a man’s soul was. Aristotle had said that the soul was ens entium, a thing of things and Ironside’s version of this was that the thing was God. Ralegh, like Marlowe, a man of restless enquiry, wanted answers, not dogma and claptrap; and clearly the evening had rankled with Ironside and probably Mr Whittle of Fortnington, the other churchman present.

  Ralegh believed that the soul, which was immortal, came from God with the first breath of life and gives biblical ‘evidence’ to prove it and yet his work disappoints on two levels. First, it shows him, despite his deserved reputation as a dazzling man of action and a noble spirit, very much a man of his times; unlike Marlowe, he did not have the nerve to challenge the Gospels. Second, his orthodoxy did not work and for the rest of his life that taint of atheism stuck, ensuring that he would never again reach the eminence he had at Court in the late 1580s.

  Accused with him at Cerne Abbas, and, unlike Ralegh, a genuine scientist, was Thomas Hariot. The contemporary of Galileo and Copernicus, he was probably more able and original than either. Without doubt he was the most gifted member of the School of Night and a close associate of Marlowe. Born in Oxford in 1560, he attended St Mary’s Hall as a commoner and in a life barely chronicled other than this, drifted to London, probably in 1581 and soon after met Ralegh. In 1585, he accompanied John White on his epic voyage to Virginia and made copious notes of the flora, fauna and constellations he saw.

  Hariot’s downfall in terms of posterity was that he did not publish his work. His telescope had a magnification of fifty times and he was the first astronomer to record Haley’s Comet when it appeared on 17 September 1607. His scientific appetite was enormous: optics, lunar appearance, the rainbow, mechanics, gravity, magnetism, geometry, hydrostatics, harmony and, of course, astronomy. He was virtually the creator of modern algebra.

  Anthony à Wood, admittedly a century later, said that Hariot ‘made a philosophical theology wherein he cast off the Old Testament’. At Cerne Abbas, three sub sectional questions were put to Hariot which had a direct bearing on Marlowe’s death:

  Whom do you know, or have heard to be suspected of Atheism or Apostacy? And in what manner do you know or have heard the same? And what other notice can you give thereof?

  Whom do you know, or have heard, that have argued or spoke against, or is doubting, the Being of any God? Or what or where God is? And to swear by God, adding if there be a God, or such like; and when and where was the same? And what other notice can you give of any such offender?

  Whom do you know or have heard that hath spoken against God His providence over the world? Or the world’s beginning or ending? Or of predestination, or of Heaven, or of Hell, or of the resurrection, in doubtful or contentious manner? And what other notice can you give of any such offender?

  It was the language of the Inquisition, the language of the witch-fever.

  Parson’s jibe against the School of Night refers to ‘young men of noble birth’, and three of those stand out. First, Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, the ‘Wizard Earl’, described by Lord Henry as one of three – ‘the infamous Triplicity that denies the Trinity’. Like Philip Sidney, who founded the intellectual circle Aeropagus, not dissimilar to the School of Night, Percy was one of the scholar-knights who littered Elizabethan England. An exact contemporary of Marlowe, he was a shy, introspective figure, perhaps because of his stammer, and he looks at us in resigned sadness from the two surviving portraits. The odder of the two was painted by the superb miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard, about two years after Marlowe’s death. It shows the melancholy Earl lying on his right side in an artificial grove of trees, a book and a pair of gloves beside him, a handkerchief in his hand. Dangling from a tree over his head is a globe (the moon?) and the single, in this context untranslatable, word TANTI.

  Percy’s family was legendary in the north and over centuries had acquired formidable powers, not to mention a huge private army, as the defenders of the border against Scots attacks. After 1569, when Henry was still a boy, his family fell from royal favour for their involvement in the revolt of the north. Thomas Percy, the Earl, took Durham and marched south with the intention of rescuing the Queen of Scots at Tetbury. The courage of his Cat
holic supporters failed and after months of evading capture in Scotland, he was executed at York in August 1570. Henry’s father, who succeeded to the title, was implicated in the Throckmorton Plot of 1583. He was found dead in his cell in the Tower on 21 June 1585, apparently the victim of suicide; since his chest contained three balls from a dag (pistol) this seems unlikely. The dag carried one shot only; reloading was slow and cumbersome.

  Like Hariot, the ‘wizard Earl’ had a voracious appetite for study and owned one of the largest libraries in the country. There were perhaps two thousand books at his country house at Petworth, Sussex. There was a bed in the room, four globes and a chest of mathematical instruments. He employed Hariot on the then excellent stipend of £100 a year, plus house and laboratory, and his own interests included: botany, architecture, politics, military science and fortification, chemistry, geometry, geography, medicine and poetry.

  Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, who would later become the Earl of Derby, was another of the noble ‘scientists’ of the School of Night. As another of the northern Earls, like Percy he was a closet Catholic. It has been suggested that Stanley was not Catholic, but since his brother Edward was officially noted as a ‘dangerous person’ in 1592 and his cousins William and Rowland were openly Catholic, together with several friends who had harboured the fugitive Jesuit Edmund Campion, this seems unlikely. Stanley was a patron of the arts and despite a thirst for knowledge almost as wide as Percy’s, put most of his energies into literature and the theatre. No mean poet himself, he was the patron of Lord Strange’s Men, a theatrical troupe first appearing in the early 1580s and amalgamating in 1590 with the Admiral’s Men to become the most brilliant company in the country. Will Kempe was their comedian and Richard Burbage their tragedian. Among the formidable range of writers sponsored by Strange were Thomas Nashe, Edmund Spenser, Robert Greene and Thomas Kyd. Since three of these men were friends of Marlowe, it is reasonable to assume that Strange was Marlowe’s patron too; certainly The Jew of Malta was in the company’s repertoire in 1591-2.

  The last noble member of the School of Night was Henry Brooke, 9th Baron Cobham, Warden of the Cinque Ports, another of those long-suffering servants of the Queen who spent years away from home in her service.

  Other members of this magic circle may have included Robert Hues, Walter Warner, George Carey, Matthew Roydon, Thomas Allen, George Peele, George Chapman and John Marston. Roydon, Peele and Chapman were friends of Marlowe’s on the literary scene, but there is little to connect them with the School of Night. The point is that, contrary to Parson’s accusation, the School was not a school at all, but an unofficial gentlemen’s club in which, quite possibly, social status was disregarded, so that shoemaker’s sons, such as Marlowe, could stand on equal terms with peers of the realm, men who were broad-minded enough to know genius when they saw it. These men would meet casually in each other’s houses in London and discuss all sorts of issues, both commonplace and taboo. This was the essence of the after-dinner conversation that led to the inquisition at Cerne Abba. It is perfectly likely then that Marlowe brought the odd friend occasionally, so that Peele, Roydon, Chapman, perhaps even Kyd and Marlowe’s last patron, Thomas Walsingham, joined the School as transitory guests. There is nothing we could produce in a court of law to link Marlowe with any certainty to the School of Night. His known links with Hariot, Ralegh and the poets, however, not to mention the charges of atheism brought against him by 1593, make his membership highly probable.

  Robert Hues was a graduate of Brasenose and Magdalen Hall, Oxford, who sailed, in the same ‘discovering’ capacity as Hariot, on Thomas Cavendish’s circumnavigation of the globe in 1586-8. He became tutor to Percy’s son and was employed on an annuity, as was Hariot. Since Hues was a close friend of Hariot and Peele, he must have known Marlowe as well. With Hariot and Warner, he was known jokingly as one of the ‘three magi’, although it is not certain whether Ralegh or Percy christened them thus.

  There is confusion over Warner. The surname comes from the sad, grovelling letter written by Thomas Kyd to Sir John Puckering after torture and as only the surname is used, it could be William the poet or Walter the alchemist. William was the protégé of George Carey, whose involvement in the School of Night is fascinating and central to our thesis concerning Marlowe’s death. Born in London and educated at Oxford, William was a lawyer who also wrote poetry, his first success being Pan his Syrinx Pipe in 1585. He translated Plautus and – like George Chapman working on his monumental Homer – produced the colossal history Albion’s England in fourteen syllable verse over a twenty-year period!

  Walter is another of the philosopher-magicians patronised by Percy and, like Hariot, lost out to later, better self-publicists His work on the circulation of the blood was probably appropriated in the years that would follow, by William Harvey, physician to Charles I. Warner’s left hand was deformed, a delicious opportunity for those convinced of the power of witchcraft – ‘he had only a stump with five warts upon it’ and ‘wore a cuff on it, like a pocket’ the inveterate gossip John Aubrey remembered.

  The most intriguing member of the School of Night from our point of view was George Carey. George Chapman went into print with Marlowe’s encouragement in The Shadow of Night in which he wrote a dedication to their mutual friend Matthew Roydon:

  When I remember my good Mat how joyfully oftentimes you have reported unto me, that most ingenious Darby [Stanley] deepe searching Northumberland [Percy] and sill-embracing heir of Hunsdon had most profitably entertained learning in themselves, to the vital warmth of freezing science, and to the admirable lustre of their true nobility, whose high-deserving virtues may cause me hereafter to strike fire out of darkness which the brightest Day shall envy for beauty.

  The ‘heir of Hunsdon’ was George Carey, son of Henry, Baron Hunsdon, who was Elizabeth’s Chamberlain and a member of the Privy Council. He matriculated fellow-commoner of Trinity College, Cambridge in May 1560 and served under his father in various diplomatic and military missions, including the revolt of the north. Here he was knighted by the Earl of Sussex and delighted the Queen by his challenge to personal combat with Lord Fleming at Dunbarton. Receiving lands and duties in equal measure, he was empowered in 1580 to use torture against the Jesuits of Campion’s mission who arrived in England that summer. In 1589 he was on an embassy to Scotland and in the year of Marlowe’s death was investigating, with Richard Young, Owen Edmondes, an Irishman placed in the Bridewell and charged with ‘treasonable practices’. As Captain-General of the Isle of Wight he reinforced Carisbrooke Castle in 1597-1600 against a projected invasion by Spain. It was Carey’s place among the cognoscenti of the School of Night that provides one of the most direct links to what happened at Deptford.

  All the philosophers of the group, including Marlowe, were influenced by John Florio and through him by John Dee and Giordano Bruno. Florio was a distinguished Italian at a time when the culture of the Renaissance elevated all things Italian and explains why so many of Shakespeare’s plays are set there. Roger Ascham, Elizabeth’s tutor when she was a girl, wrote in The Schoolmaster in 1570, ‘Time was, when Italy and Rome have been, to the great good of us that now live, the best breeders and bringers up of the worthiest men...that ever was in the world.’ Florio was born in London to Italian Protestant parents and by the mid-1570s was a languages tutor at Oxford. His first published work, First Fruits and A Perfect Induction to the English and Italian Tongues appeared in 1578. Second Fruits, containing 6,000 Italian proverbs, followed in 1591 and by this time he had both the Earls of Southampton and Pembroke as his patrons. He played host to Giordano Bruno during his stay in England in the mid-1580s.

  We have met ‘the Nolan’ (from Nolano in Naples) before and speculated that Marlowe may have made the journey from Cambridge to Oxford to hear him lecture. The Italian was described by the Inquisition court that tried him ‘of average height, with a chestnut beard, in age and appearance about 40’. Bruno’s writings have come down to us largely in the f
orm of philosophical dialogues, for example in La Cene de le Ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper) his characters Theophilo, Prudentio and Fulla (all Bruno, in fact) debate the earth’s movement at some length. Hariot in his scruffy, abandoned notes wrote ‘Nolanus de immenso mundi’ and was clearly enormously impressed by the man. Bruno believed that there was an infinite universe (immenso mundi) beyond the stars that Hariot could see with his telescope. He wrote

  The one infinite is perfect in simplicity of itself, absolutely, nor can ought be greater or better. This is the one Whole, God, universal Nature, occupying all space, of whom nought but infinity can give the perfect image or semblance.

  And in this ‘soul world’ in which he believed, Jesus Christ was just a man. This heresy would kill him.

  Sir John Macdonnell, ‘Sometime King’s Remembrancer’, wrote in 1927 that the sixteenth century was ‘a bad time for men who thought and spoke freely and it was a time which tempted bold spirits to do so’. It cannot be accidental that Marlowe gave the name Bruno to the rival pope in Faustus – the man who was infamous in England. The Nolan had said (at an address to the university of Oxford which Marlowe had perhaps heard) that he was ‘a wakener of sleeping minds, tamer of presumptuous and obstinate ignorance’. Bruno was a man after Marlowe’s own heart. Arrested in Venice on 23 May 1592, Bruno had to languish in jail for seven years before facing his execution.

  The most common method of prosecution by the Inquisition was to accept the word of an informer. And informing is precisely what Richard Baines was to do against Marlowe the following year, ably abetted by the cowardice of Thomas Kyd. Such informers remained anonymous as part of the system. There was no public trial, no production of defence witnesses, no opportunity to cross-examine prosecution witnesses, no right to a lawyer – in short, none of the panoply of modern justice.