Who Killed Kit Marlowe?

by M. J. Trow

  Your Machiavellian Merchant spoils the state,

  Your usury doth leave us all for dead.

  Your artifex and craftsman makes our fate,

  And like the Jews you eat us up as bread...

  Since words nor threats nor any other thing

  Can make you to avoid this certain ill,

  We’ll cut your throats, in your temples praying,

  Not Paris massacre so much blood did spill...

  Any one of these phrases alone would have passed unnoticed, but together they pointed at one man: ‘Machiavellian’, ‘The Jews’ who eat up all the bread, ‘Paris Massacre’. The Jew of Malta was performed at The Rose before the theatres closed in 1592; The Massacre at Paris, again at The Rose at the end of January 1593. And in case anyone was in any doubt as to the author, the libel was signed Tamburlaine.

  To imagine that Kit Marlowe put his mind to such rubbish is to forget he was the man he was. If Marlowe was anti-Dutch (and why should he be when he had spent several weeks/months of his life working in Vlissingen?); if he was racist (he, who had probably learned his French from the Huguenots who lived in his native city of Canterbury) he would have written his name on it, or written better poetry, or thought of a better way to conceal his authorship. There is no sign here of ‘the mighty line’ or the classical allusion or the clever quip. It is heavy-handed propaganda, not by Marlowe, but against him.

  The Privy Council was outraged and alarmed. On Thursday 10 May, they issued a proclamation offering 100 crowns reward for information on the libel’s authorship. And the Privy Council meant business – ‘you shall by authority hereof put [suspects] to the torture in Bridewell and by the extremity thereof draw them to discover their knowledge.’ The next day, among those arrested was Thomas Kyd.

  Kyd was probably arrested as a result of his co-authorship of a play called Sir Thomas More, which echoed a period of similar anti-foreign feeling in the City sixty years earlier. The Master of the Revels, Sir Edmumd Tillney, worked with the Stationers’ Company to censor anything potentially seditious. In the margin of a copy of Sir Thomas More he wrote ‘Leave out ye insurrection wholly and ye cause thereof...’ thereby castrating the play completely. The offending scene was rewritten, probably in January or February 1593, but someone in authority never forgot Kyd’s involvement.

  Richard Topcliffe went to work on him and broke him. Perhaps, like the supposedly treasonable Edward Peacham, Rector of Hinton St George in Somerset, he was – ‘racked before torture, in torture, between torture and after torture’. The author of The Spanish Tragedy was accused of being the author of the Dutch libel. His rooms were searched and a variety of papers discovered – ‘Vile hereticall conceipts denying the deity of Jhesus Christ our Saviour, found among the papers of Thos. Kydd, prisoner.’ In fact the ‘hereticall conceipts’, especially when compared with the Baines Note, were fairly mild, but we must remember that the Baines Note had yet to be delivered to the Privy Council. The writing, said Kyd, was Marlowe’s, part of a disputation involving Unitarianism, technically a heresy in that Christ was seen as a mere man – in other words asserting that the Resurrection never happened. It did not deny the existence of God, however, or even call into question his divinity. John Assheton, a parish priest, had been forced into print over his theory in 1549 and the official church attitude to it – The Fall of the Late Arian by John Proctor – was widely available. It may even be that the idea was considered sufficiently mild to have been read by Marlowe at the King’s School, Canterbury.

  But Kyd, terrified and in pain, did not leave it there. Although his written confirmation of charges against Marlowe was made after the man’s death at Deptford, there can be little doubt that he made it verbally under the pressure of Topcliffe’s thumbscrews or his rack. According to Kyd,

  It was [Marlowe’s] custom, in table talk or otherwise, to jest at the divine scriptures, jibe at prayers and strive in arguments to frustrate and confute what hath been spoke or writ by prophets and such holy men.

  In this version, it was St Paul, not Moses, whom Marlowe called a juggler. He added that if Kyd intended to write a poem about Paul’s famous conversion on the Damascus Road, he might just as well ‘go write a book of fast and loose [cozenage or con-tricks]’.

  It was enough for the Privy Council. On Friday 18 May, Henry Maunder, the Queen’s Messenger, was given an order:

  to repair to the house of Mr Tho Walsingham in Kent, or to any other place where he shall understand Christopher Marlowe to be remaining, and by virtue hereof to apprehend and bring him to the Court in his company. And in case of need require aid.

  By 1593, Thomas Walsingham was Marlowe’s principal patron and the playwright was staying at his country house of Scadbury, in Chiselhurst, working on a version of his poem about the classical lovers Hero and Leander. Scadbury has gone now; today part of a National Trust protected park, the estate once boasted a thousand acres and was visited by the Queen four years after Marlowe’s death. Walsingham’s house was a fourteenth-century fortified manor house with Tudor additions, but it still retained its moat and drawbridge. After the dangerous years of intelligence work and seditious plays and the blasphemous atheism of the School of Night, Marlowe had returned to Greek poetry, the stuff of his Cambridge years.

  Maunder shattered the idyll and Marlowe, giving him no trouble, reported to Whitehall where the Privy Council sat:

  This day Christopher Morley of London, being sent for warrant for their L[ordshi]ps, hath entered his appearance accordinglie for his Indemnity therein and is commanded to give him daily attendance on their L[ordshi]ps until hee shall be lycensed to the Contrary.

  There is nothing to tell us that Marlowe failed to keep his daily appointments. We do not know if he returned to Scadbury each day (it was a 24-mile round trip which on horseback would have filled most of the day) or whether he took temporary lodgings nearer to Whitehall.

  One thing is certain. On Wednesday 30 May, Christopher Marlowe went to Eleanor Bull’s house, on the Strand at Deptford.

  TEN

  PLOT AND COUNTERPLOT

  Plots have I laid; inductions dangerous...

  William Shakespeare, Richard III

  T

  here are several theories which have been put forward to explain Kit Marlowe’s death. In the holy trinity of homicide, motive is on a par with method and opportunity. In cases where the murderer is unknown, it becomes essential to establish a reason why the victim was killed and the list of possibilities is actually quite small. Criminologist F. Tennyson Jesse established in the 1940s that there are only six categories of motive – elimination, gain, revenge, jealousy, lust and conviction. Depending on the theory put forward to explain the killing at Deptford, any of the six fits the Marlowe case. Various commentators and theorists since Leslie Hotson in the 1920s have put forward their ideas. Before we record our findings of what really happened to Kit Marlowe, we must evaluate these.

  Sir William Danby’s Theory

  It may seem odd to call the coroner’s verdict a ‘theory’ to all, but J. Leslie Hotson proved as early as 1925 that we cannot take the official version as the truth or even as an approximation of it. Let us look again at Danby’s inquest. After listing the sixteen jurymen and giving us the date and place of events, Danby tells us that the body of ‘Christopher Morley, there lying dead and slain’ was viewed. We do not know exactly where this took place. Was it in situ, in the room of Eleanor Bull’s house where Marlowe was killed? Was it elsewhere in the house, perhaps in a coffin? Was it in the charnel house which may have stood in St Nicholas’ churchyard? Or in a back room of an inn in Butcher’s Row nearby? From the timescale, Marlowe had probably been dead for forty-eight hours before this viewing took place. In that time, rigor mortis would have come and gone. The stiffening of a body usually starts within five hours of death, so that by the early hours of Thursday 31 May, Marlowe’s muscles would have contracted, beginning with the eyelids and lower jaw. Total rigidity, depending on the temperature in
the room where the body was placed, would have been achieved after twelve hours. It would now, assuming the stabbing took place at seven in the evening, be seven o’clock on the Thursday morning. The body would have remained rigid, with signs of lividity in those areas next to a surface (a bed, a coffin base or floor) for a further twelve hours. This takes us to mid-evening on the 31st. By the early hours of the next day, the day of the inquest, Friday 1 June, all signs of rigor would have gone.

  The purpose of viewing the corpse was twofold: first, to ascertain that a crime had actually been committed; and, second, in the age-old belief that the wounds of a murder victim would bleed anew in the presence of his killer. We cannot assume that any of the three men with Marlowe on the Wednesday – Frizer, Poley and Skeres – was actually there at the inquest; in fact there is good evidence to show that they were not.

  Marlowe’s wounds were carefully measured – and this is the nearest thing to modern forensic science that the Elizabethans carried out. There was a gash ‘over his right eye of the depth of two inches and the width of one inch’. Someone, probably a doctor working for Danby, would have used a probe and the measurements fit exactly the dimension of the typical Elizabethan dagger, with its one inch wide blade. Some commentators have been puzzled by the inquest’s recording of the weapon’s worth – ‘with the dagger aforesaid of the value of 12d’ – but this was the deodand, the duty of the coroner to ascertain the cash value of all a murderer’s belongings. It is this which makes it likely that Frizer at least was not at the inquest, but still in his cell awaiting the outcome. The inquest report goes on, ‘but what goods or chattles, lands or tenements the said Ingram had at the time of the slaying aforesaid ...the said Jurors are totally ignorant’. Had Frizer been there, they could obviously have asked him.

  Today, Marlowe’s wounds would be crucial in ascertaining the exact manner of his death and expert witnesses would be called to give their words of wisdom. Most writers have assumed that the fatal thrust was into the eye socket, as the path of least resistance. There was even such an attack proscribed in the fencing manuals of the day. A former secretary to the society of Coroners, Gavin Thurston, went into print in the 1960s with his view that it was impossible to drive a dagger into the high frontal or supraciliary area of the skill, so that the orbit was the only possibility. In this Thurston is demonstrably wrong. He should have consulted the trial records of August Sangret, the Canadian soldier hanged for the so-called ‘wigwam murder’ of his girlfriend, Joan Wolfe, near Godalming in 1942. In a case that caught the public imagination, even in the middle of a war, Sangret first attacked Joan with an army-issue knife – considerably lighter and shorter than Frizer’s dagger – and made several circular holes in the front of her skull (circular because of the damaged blade tip). The skull itself was produced at the Old Bailey (the first time such a shocking exhibit was openly displayed in court) and one of the greatest pathologists in history, Keith Simpson, explained to the jury how the wounds had been inflicted.

  If a knife as relatively feeble as Sangret’s could pierce flesh, bone and brain, then certainly Frizer’s could. The outcome, however, would have been the same. The blade’s tip would have pierced major blood vessels, the cavernous sinus and the carotid artery. The cause of death would have been haemorrhage or perhaps an embolism caused by a sudden inrush of air with the blade. Either way, unconsciousness would have been instantaneous, death almost so, giving the lie to the rabid Puritans who had Marlowe screaming and spitting oaths and blasphemy in his death agony.

  The story of Frizer, Poley and Skeres, according to the inquest, was that after supper, an argument developed between Frizer and Marlowe about the bill, presumably for the day’s hospitality to be paid to Eleanor Bull. She had provided them with two meals, and the use of her house and garden and it was settlement time – ‘le recknynge’. Marlowe was lying on a bed (implying that the murder room in the Bull house was upstairs) and Frizer was sitting with his back to him, effectively pinned in by Poley on one side and Skeres on the other. Marlowe grabbed the dagger that Frizer carried in the small of his back and gave him two wounds to the head. These wounds were measured, probably when Frizer was in custody. Here the forensics are less sure – ‘two wounds on his head of the length of two inches and the depth of a quarter of an inch’. Does this mean that both wounds were identical in size? This strains credulity. Were they delivered in rapid succession or were they the result of a prolonged fight? Some commentators have suggested that the wounds Marlowe inflicted were with the pommel or hilt of the dagger, not the tip of the blade, and this is possible. But if Marlowe intended to kill Frizer (as believers in his short temper contend) he would have had ample opportunity to do so, Frizer being temporarily unarmed and with his back to him.

  Still unable to move because of Poley and Skeres, Frizer, according to the inquest, struggled with Marlowe ‘to get back from him his dagger’. And then ‘in defence of his life’ (the crucial words that would earn Frizer his pardon, and in record time, from the Queen) Frizer retaliated, giving Marlowe the fatal head wound.

  As Hotson realised when he found the records of Danby’s inquest in the 1920s, almost nothing about this makes sense. Laying aside for the moment the moral character of Frizer, Poley and Skeres, the only witnesses whose depositions seem to have been taken, nothing adds up. If we accept the Danby account, that Marlowe lost his temper over the payment of a bill, why did he not use his own dagger? Gentlemen carried these habitually in Elizabethan England. Where was Marlowe’s? And if he had hung it up somewhere, to sprawl on the bed, as a relaxing gentleman might indoors, why was Frizer still carrying his, equally relaxed duing a quiet day among friends?

  Even if Marlowe had grabbed the dagger, why did he not kill Frizer when he had the chance or hold the blade at his throat to make further struggling suicidal? We know nothing of the relative strengths and reflexes of the two, but the fact that Marlowe had fought two duels which we know about indicates that he was at least competent, and, as a younger man, should have been faster. Above all, if the Danby version is true, he had the element of surprise on his side.

  The oddest aspect, as Hotson pointed out over eighty years ago, is that Poley and Skeres seem totally inactive. They did not intervene, they did not try to stop the fight or encourage it. They did not even move to give Frizer a chance.

  The problem is that the inquest is far from a verbatim account of testimony. Today, everyone in the house on Deptford Strand would have been interviewed by the police, probably several times, and would probably be called to the inquest as a preliminary to a full blown trial. There is no record of Frizer, Poley or Skeres being questioned directly, still less Eleanor Bull or her servants. We are therefore left with a hopelessly partisan and inadequate account of events. In the absence of real forensic science, perhaps we could not have expected more.

  But two things cry out against the version being true. One is the notorious silence of Eleanor Bull. Having spent some time in the writing of this book in a sixteenth-century house complete with timber framing, we know how every sound carries. The Tudors built their houses from oak, as the hardest and most durable of English timber. The problem was that if oak was left to season it became too hard to cut with the saws at the disposal of sixteenth-century carpenters. So they used green wood, which expanded and contracted with the climate, and every sound on hollow floorboards was distinguishable. Eleanor Bull and her servants would have heard the raised voices from the upstairs room, the argument over the reckoning; they would have heard the scuffle as Marlowe and Frizer clashed; they would have heard Marlowe’s body thudding to the floor. Why was the widow Bull not called to testify in support of the Frizer/Poley/Skeres story? Was it merely, in the patrist society, that a woman’s testimony was considered at best, of less worth and at worst, irrelevant? We believe there was another answer.

  The second area of concern comes from the three wise monkeys whose story was actually so badly constructed: Frizer and Skeres, the coney-catchers, Poley t
he intelligencer. These were men who lived by their wits; their honesty must be called into question.

  What is so infuriating is that most books of a general nature which mention Marlowe, still print the nonsense that he died in a tavern brawl. Those offering more detail give the tired motive of the reckoning. The widow Bull would be appalled to see her house described as a tavern. But perhaps Messrs. Frizer, Poley and Skeres would take some comfort – their ruse, four centuries later, seems to have worked after all.

  The Sweet Robyn Theory

  The case of Derek Bentley, hanged in 1953 for a murder he did not commit, has rightly gone down as one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British legal history. Briefly told, nineteen-year-old Bentley and his sixteen-year-old accomplice, Christopher Craig, were interrupted in the course of attempted burglary, and as a result, Craig shot and killed a policeman, Sidney Miles. Even though Bentley was unarmed, offered no violence to the police and was under arrest at the time of the shooting, the law of the land demanded that he should hang under the rule of joint culpability. In 1998 the case of Derek Bentley was overturned by the Appeal Court after years of campaigning by the hanged man’s family. The grounds for this were that the trial judge, Lord Goddard, misdirected the jury and that vital evidence on Bentley’s intelligence and epilepsy were ruled inadmissible at the time, thus affecting the jury’s decision.

  What their Lordships of the Appeal Court said they could not do was to try to disentangle the varying accounts of the twenty minute ‘gun battle’ on the Croydon roof where Sidney Miles was killed. This we find unsatisfactory. Under English law in the twentieth century, a jury can only find a defendant guilty if there is no reasonable doubt about that guilt. The conflicting testimony in the Bentley case meant that there was considerable doubt. If the official response to Miles’s death is that we cannot with certainty work out what happened only fifty years ago, what chance to we have with Marlowe four hundred years ago?