by M. J. Trow
Examined continually over a period of time by his Inquisitors, Bruno admitted to praising various heretic leaders, including Elizabeth. He was burnt ‘without effusion of blood’, rejecting at the last the crucifix they offered him. As Macdonnell says, ‘Bruno was guilty of heresy and apostasy; guilty of offences which in those days were capital; guilty in modern language of thinking freely; guilty of not being afraid to go into the light...’.
Several writers have dismissed the School of Night as misunderstood, which it was. They have pointed to the astronomy, botany and algebra of Hariot, the architecture and medicine of Percy and Warner and have seen the first struggling flickerings that would be fanned into a flame by the scientific revolution of the next century and the Age of Reason after that. They have found the after-dinner chats of Ralegh and Bruno fascinating in a patronising kind of way, noting how Bruno hated the evil-smelling mob and philistine Englishmen in general, appalled by the rudeness of the Thames watermen.
And these writers have consistently missed the point. A review of A History of Terror by Paul Newman reads, ‘Newman traces the secularisation of terror back to the sixteenth century, when homicide and conspiracy began to replace demons as objects of fear; just think how unscary the supernatural is in Shakespeare compared to the unfathomable evil of his human villains.’
Newman is both right and wrong. He is right in the sense that homicide and conspiracy haunt the Elizabethan era – the story of Kit Marlowe is about both. But he is wrong in that Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s contemporaries believed in demons in a way that we have forgotten.
To the sixteenth century, Giordano Bruno, John Florio, Walter Ralegh, Thomas Hariot, Henry Percy, Ferdinando Stanley and, not least, Christopher Marlowe, were all part of that dark world of magic which genuinely terrified them. That was why the mob ransacked John Dee’s house at Mortlake, that was why Thomas Hariot published nothing in his own lifetime and that, in an indirect way, was why someone wanted Kit Marlowe dead.
Of the leaders of the School of Night, Ferdinando, Lord Strange, by that time Early of Derby, died an agonising death from poisoning in April 1594. He was ‘siezed and tormented by vomitting matter of a dark rusty colour ....so violent and corroding that it stained the silver and irons in the chimney of his room.’ Poisoned by Catholics said some – yet he was a Catholic. Others said he was the victim of witchcraft. Henry Brooke, Baron Cobham, was accused of a plot to kill James I and place Arabella Stuart on the throne. At his trial and on the block facing execution he implicated Ralegh and this ‘turning king’s evidence’ was rewarded with life imprisonment. He died rejected by everyone on his way to Bath to take the waters, having been released on licence from prison to get there. Henry Percy, the ‘Wizard Earl’ was imprisoned by James I in 1606 over his alleged involvement in the Gunpowder Plot, and spent sixteen years there. Walter Ralegh, fingered by Brooke, faced the axe with cool disdain in 1618. And Giordano Bruno, supporting the ‘heretical’ ideas of fellow astronomer Copernicus, was imprisoned by the Inquisition in the year before Marlowe’s own death and spent eight years there before the Catholic Church burned him.
So were the enemies of the rabid State removed, the libertines, the free thinkers. That these men were merely curious and restless spirits was not acceptable in an age as totalitarian as anything produced in our own time.
And there was one other member of the School of night – the informer Richard Baines.
NINE
GOD’S JUDGEMENT
...See what a hooke the Lord put in the nostrils of this barkinge dogge.
Thomas Beard, The Theatre of God’s Judgements (1597)
A
lmost all of Marlowe’s biographers have quoted the infamous Baines Note, one of the four surviving documents that explain his death. Recent writers, however, have skated over Baines’ charges, either because they have convinced themselves that someone of Marlowe’s brilliance would not pen such puerile statements or because Baines was a liar, or both.
What convinces us that Baines was essentially telling the truth in his Note is the fifteenth charge:
That he [Marlowe] has as good a right to Coine as the Queene of England, and that he was acquainted with one Poole a prisoner in Newgate who hath great skill in mixture of metals and having learned some things of him he meant through help of a Cunninge stamp maker to Coin ffrench Crownes, pistolets and English shillings.
At first sight this entry makes no sense. Except that it is an example of potential treason in stating that Marlowe has as good a right as the Queen herself to mint money, it bears no relation to the atheistic comments that make up the rest of the Note. Thanks to the excellent detective work of Charles Nicholl, we now understand the context. Baines was certainly in this instance reporting what Marlowe said, but what Marlowe said was a cover for something else.
In January 1592, Marlowe was staying in Vlissingen, at the mouth of the River Scheldt in the Spanish Netherlands. The town itself was garrisoned by the English and its governor was Robert Sidney, younger brother of Philip, the ‘Astrophel’, whose death was still much lamented in court circles. Three prisoners from the jail were deported, in irons, on 26 January: Evan Flud, Gifford Gilbert, a goldsmith and ‘Christopher Marly, by his profession a scholar’. Flud is irrelevant to our story, but Gifford Gilbert is, confusingly, an anagram of one of Walsingham’s best known agents, Gilbert Gifford, working in France. The information concerning these men was conveyed in a letter from Sidney to Burghley and it contains another name we know:
The matter was revealed unto me the day after it was done, by one Ri: Baines whom also my ancient [old friend – David Lloyd] shall bring unto your lordship. He was their chamber-fellow and, fearing the success [of counterfeiting] made me acquainted withal.
Baines also told Sidney that Marlowe intended to defect to ‘the enemy or to Rome’. This is language we have heard before, in connection with the granting of Marlowe’s degree at Cambridge. Perhaps this time there was more to it. If Curtis Breight is correct about the Privy Council’s paranoia in running to having Marlowe watched towards the end of 1591, this would explain Baines’ presence at Marlowe’s elbow. It also gives us an insight into Marlowe’s contempt for Baines. It makes no sense for a man clearly once more on government business in the Low countries, possibly paid by the State and with another income from his writing, to resort to the highly dangerous game of coining. It was a dismal failure. Only one coin was produced, a Dutch shilling (not a coin, interestingly, which Baines refers to in the Note, although such currency was legal tender in England) and this was a very bad pewter copy which would have fooled no one.
Marlowe and Baines accused each other of the same thing. Each man claimed the other ‘induced’ the goldsmith and intended to go over to the enemy. ‘Coining’ was a hanging offence. In an age of symbol and talisman, defacing the Queen’s head was akin to striking the sovereign herself. Marlowe and Baines risked death.
It is likely that both men were interrogated by Burghley himself at the end of January. There is no record of this and no record of any subsequent trial, perhaps because Marlowe had the backing of Henry Percy, the ‘Wizard Earl’ and Ferdinando, Lord Strange. Perhaps Burghley knew exactly what Marlowe was really doing in Vlissingen and the interrogation took the form of a cosy chat. We can only speculate on what was said. But we believe the line taken to Baines was very different from that adopted in the case of Kit Marlowe. Baines’ other charges against Marlowe can now be seen in an altogether different light. If the ‘coining’ episode really happened (which it clearly did), then what of the rest? And the rest concern atheism.
The modern definition of atheism (from the Greek a meaning not, and theos, God) is ‘disbelief in the existence of God; godlessness’. As a thought system, it did not develop until the late eighteenth century and in Marlowe’s time had a broader connotation than its official definition today. Most Elizabethans used the term, as Green did of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, to mean immoral or corrupt or even nonconformist. Pure
atheism in its modern sense was rare, but it is not true that it did not exist or that it was confinded to intellectuals like the members of the School of Night. In this context, Keith Thomas argues that what we really have is deism, religion without revelation; in this context the soul is not immortal, Heaven and Hell are not real places and sometimes the extreme position is taken that Christ was just a man. On this basis, it is unfair to brand Walter Ralegh a deist, much less an atheist, because in his Treatise on the Soul, he clearly says ‘The soul liveth and abideth for ever after the body is dissolved.’ Unless we take the view that Ralegh was a liar and a supreme hypocrite (and there is no evidence for this throughout his life) then we can understand why the charges against him were dropped after the Cerne Abbas hearing in 1594.
In this context of atheism, English intellectuals followed the lead of humanists like Erasmus of Rotterdam and even more so of his Italian and French imitators. Marlowe himself expressed one view commonly held among the group in The Jew of Malta where the prologue, Machevill, says – ‘I count religion but a childish toy,/And hold there is no sin but ignorance.’ This was a shocking revelation to Christians and to Puritans in particular, who recognised at least seven sins that were deadly and a great many more as only slightly less lethal.
Beyond the parameters of the School of Night, the charge of atheism was levied against George Gascoigne, Nicholas Bacon, John Caius and the Earl of Oxford. What is fascinating is that the taint of homosexuality also clung to one of them, the Earl of Oxford, and to the son of another, Anthony Bacon.
Gascoigne was born about 1525 in Cadington, Bedfordshire. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge and Gray’s Inn and sat for two years as MP for Bedfordshire as Elizabeth came to the throne. A notorious spender of money, he was disinherited by his father for his fecklessness and even marrying a rich widow could not save him. He fled to Holland in 1573 where he spent four years in the service of the Prince of Orange before being captured by a Spanish patrol and serving four months in a prison cell. On his release he came home, settled in Walthamstow and began to devote himself to poetry and philosophy, finding time to take part in Leicester’s famed festivities for the Queen at Kenilworth and Woodstock. His Jocasta was only the second tragedy to be written in blank verse (the first was Gorboduc in 1560) and Gascoigne wrote what is perhaps the first essay on poetry writing in the English language. He experimented with various poetic forms and out of this experimentation came the ideas which some called atheism. The fact that much of his work was, even in his own day, indescribably dull, may literally have saved his life.
John Caius was born in Norwich in 1510 and became a student at Gonville Hall, Cambridge in 1529 before taking up a fellowship there four years later. He studied medicine at Padua under the great Andreas Vesalius and lectured in London on anatomy until 1564. President of the College of Physicians nine times, he was doctor to all three of the royal children, Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth. In the first full year of Elizabeth’s reign, he was given a charter to enlarge Gonville and was allowed to add his name to it. As a medical man, and especially as an expert in anatomy, Caius was chancing his arm in religious terms. Vesalius himself, like da Vinci and other ‘universal men’ of the Renaissance, had to carry out dissections in secret lest he was discovered and accused by those who believed that the soul of man, which they thought resided in the head or the body cavity, was being destroyed. No doubt Caius conducted such experiments too, but what brought about the charge of atheism against him was, ironically, his devout Catholicism. He fell foul of his fellows and students over this at college. The students burned his mass vestments (a huge bone of contention in the 1560s) and he put the students into the stocks.
Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was born in 1550, the only son of the 16th earl whose title and estates he inherited on his father’s death in 1562. Two years later, he obtained a degree from St John’s, Cambridge and entered Gray’s Inn. Renowned, like Marlowe, for his hot temper, he killed a servant at Cecil House (he had been made William Cecil’s ward on his father’s death), but the Queen’s councillor was able to hush it up. In the early 1570s, by this time a royal favourite, dark and handsome in the Leicester mould, he had served with Sussex against the Catholic Scots, impressed in royal tournaments and married the newly ennobled Anne, Burghley’s daughter. In 1574, hot-headed as ever, he went to Flanders with Leicester’s army and had to be taken back by the Queen’s agents. The next two years brought whirlwind change. His travels in Padua, Venice, Florence and Sicily led to his adoption of Italian fashions and ways. More seriously, he came to believe that his new daughter, Elizabeth, was not actually his and quarrelled with the Burghleys, abandoning the Court and mixing with the literary set in London. Clashes over religion and the Queen’s proposed marriage to the French prince led to a near-duel with Philip Sidney, which the Queen intervened to ban.
By 1580, de Vere had formed his own theatrical troupe touring the provinces; the still unknown William Shakespeare may have seen their production at Stratford. Trouble and violence continued to dog him. In 1581 he did time in the Tower for his connection with Catholicism and it is likely that the vague charge of atheism came out of this, as it had with Caius. Wounded in a duel with Thomas Knyvet, uncle of his mistress, he was pardoned by the Queen in 1583 and effected a reconciliation with Burghley. Three years later, to seal his loyalty to Elizabeth, he presided over the trial of the Queen of Scots and in 1588 fitted out and served in a ship against the Armada.
With Oxford, we have accusations of atheism, however weak, perilously close to the throne. The man was, for all their on-off relationship, the son-in-law of the Lord Treasurer and brother-in-law of Robert Cecil, the two most powerful members of the Council. With Nicholas Bacon, it was even closer.
The father of Francis and Anthony, the ‘golden lads’, was born of a Suffolk family about 1510 and was educated at Marlowe’s college of Bene’t’s before being called to the Bar in 1533. Receiving monastic lands at the Dissolution, he was appointed attorney of the Court of Wards and Liveries. Despite his Protestantism, he kept this post during Mary’s reign and in 1558 on Elizabeth’s accession was made a Privy Councillor and Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. Bacon’s second wife was Anne Cooke, the sister of Mildred who had married Burghley and was Robert Cecil’s mother. Their two dazzling sons, Francis and Anthony, went to Trinity, Cambridge at the ages of thirteen and fifteen. Francis went on to become Lord Chancellor, probably the most truly brilliant mind of sixteenth-century England, while Anthony worked for Walsingham as an intelligencer.
It is difficult to know where the charge of atheism against Nicholas Bacon comes from, but it probably has to do with his early years under Mary. In contrast to those Protestants who resigned royal service or even left the country during her reign, Bacon stayed and prospered. Such behaviour was Machiavellian at best and atheistic in the sense of its amorality.
The Spanish ambassador estimated in 1617 that there were 900,000 atheists in England, but given the strained relations between those countries, this figure is hardly surprising and was probably plucked from thin air. Keith Thomas, however, gives graphic details from ordinary people, barely literate, who had no links with intellectuals, humanism or the School of Night. It would be fascinating to know whether Marlowe’s ‘blaspheming’ sister Ann could be counted among the godless in this context.
In 1597, Lady Monson, the wife of the naval commander Sir William, who served under Essex, consulted an astrologer because she could not sleep. ‘She had many ill thoughts and cogitations...she thinks the Devil doth tempt her to do evil to herself and she doubteth whether there is a God.’ Leaving aside the philosophical argument that if there is a devil, there must be a God, Lady Monson was clearly an unhappy person, made unhappier by the religious straitjacket of conventional thought of her day.
The Reformation produced extremist sects like the Anabaptists who believed that the soul slept until Judgement Day and this fitted dangerously well with a widely held Tudor belief that anci
ent heroes like King Arthur were merely sleeping somewhere against the day when their country had need of them. As early as 1573, churchmen in the diocese of Ely went on record as claiming that Hell was an allegorical, not a literal notion. In the same year Robert Master of Woodchurch, Kent, ‘denied that God made the sun, the moon, the earth, the water and that he denieth the resurrection of the dead.’ Thirty years earlier, in Dartford, Kent, a local had stated under oath that ‘the body of Christ which he received in the womb of the Virgin Mary did not ascend into Heaven nor is not in Heaven.’ The vicar of Tunstall in the mid-1550s believed that Christ did not, in fact, sit on the Lord’s right hand. In Norfolk in 1576 someone claimed that there were ‘divers[several] Christs’. He is referred to by the authorities as a ‘desperate fellow’ but whether this means his behaviour or his views is uncertain. Edward Kelly, the charlatan associate of John Dee, was notorious for his deistic views; and three years after Marlowe’s death a prisoner appeared before the Star Chamber having maintained that ‘Christ was no saviour and the gospel a fable’. Three years later the Bishop of Exeter was appalled to find that in his diocese it was a ‘matter very common to dispute whether there be a God or not’, and there were similar discussions in Bishop Bancroft’s London.
Although ideas like this were to increase in acceptance and extremity during the next century, ‘the world turned upside down’, their origins lay in the sixteenth, the century of the Reformation when men’s beliefs and orthodoxy were shaken for the first time. As Keith Thomas points out, the cases that he quotes above are probably the tip of the iceberg. Historian L. Stone has called the reign of Elizabeth ‘the age of greatest religious indifference before the twentieth century’. This diagnosis is unprovable, because most men kept quiet, fully aware of the penalties for heresy, blasphemy and atheism in all its forms. As C. Geertz wrote in 1966, ‘If the anthropological study of religious commitment is underdeveloped, the anthropological study of religious non-commitment is non-existent’.
