Who Killed Kit Marlowe?

by M. J. Trow

  The document which finally explains what happened to Kit Marlowe is among the Harleian manuscripts in the British Museum. It refers to an intelligencer called Richard Cholmeley whom we last saw inciting riots in the Strand in 1592 after the collapse of the Portingale expedition, a failed adventure involving the Earl of Essex. Like Marlowe, Cholmeley too was being watched and for much the same reason. Whoever the agent was who was shadowing him reported to Burghley. Cholmeley was no fool and was beginning to smell a rat, but the agent was able to confirm:

  Hia second course is to make a jest of the scripture with those fearful, horrible and damnable speeches, that Jesus Christ was a bastard, St Mary a whore and the Angel Gabriel a bawde to the holy ghoste and that Christ was justly persecuted by the Jewes for his own foolishness, that Moyses was a Juggler and Aaron a cosoner, the one for his miracles to Pharao to prove there was a god and the other for taking the earings of the children of Isreal to make a golden calfe with many other blasphemous speeches of the divine essence of God which I fear to rehearse [repeat]. This cursed Cholmeley hath sixty of his company and he is seldom from his fellows and therefore I beseech your worship have a special care of yourself in apprehending him for they be resolute murdering myndes.

  This is the stuff of paranoid conspiracy, but it got better:

  ...their practice is after Her Majesty’s decease to make a King among themselves and live according to their own laws and this saith Cholmeley will be done easily because they be and shortly will be by his and his fellows’ possessions as many their opinion is of any other religion.

  What had happened to Cholmeley? We know that he was a projector posing as a Catholic and a year before Marlowe’s death was prominent in bringing to book a man who was probably a genuine double agent, Thomas Drury. Drury did time in the Marshalsea as a result – he may have been the agent shadowing Cholmeley in the spring of 1593 and the author of the Remembrances against him. We also know that he was known to various members of the Queen’s inner circle. In 1592, Robert Beale, Francis Walsingham’s estwhile secretary, mentioned him in the context of undercover agents in a letter to a possible successor to Walsingham, Sir Edward Wootton - ‘...and first see you have a good warrant to deal in such causes, as Montague and Cholmeley had, saving themselves by special pardons...’. Montague was Anthony Browne, 1st Viscount, a well-known recusant, but it is unlikely that such a high profile character would himself be trusted with any espionage.

  The rest of what may be Drury’s remembrances against Cholmeley was even more bizarre. Much of his work, for Robert Cecil directly, involved the writing of Catholic propaganda – ‘That he made certain libellous verses in Commendation of papists and seminary priests very greatly inveighing against the state’ and that ‘he had a certain book...delivered him by Sir Robert Cecil of whom he giveth very scandalous report...’. The book was a Jesuit tract ‘printed at Paris’ and written by Robert Southwell. It was called An Epistle of Comfort. He touched on recent events – ‘That he saieth that William Parry was hanged, drawn and quartered but in jest, that he was a gross ass overreached by cunning and that in truth he now meant to kill the queen more than [Parry] had.’ He railed at ‘Mr Topcliffe’ (hardly surprising; the man was a sadist) but he was also vitriolic against Francis Drake and Justice Young ‘whom he saith he will couple up [hang] together because he hateth them alike’. After the Strand riots ‘he repented him of nothing more than that he had not killed my lord Treasurer with his own hands, that he could not have done God better service.’ He hated the Lord Chamberlain (Hunsdon) ‘and had good cause to do so’.

  And, in the context of Deptford,

  That he saieth and verily believeth that one Marlowe is able to show more sound reasons for Atheism than any divine in England is able to give to prove divinitie and that Marlowe told him that he hath read the Atheist lecture to Sir Walter Ralegh and others.

  What we have in Richard Cholmeley is an agent gone berserk. He was a maverick, a loose cannon. His behaviour was irrational, outspoken. Some of it was braggadocio, in that he claimed to be able to treat the Privy Council exactly as he liked and there was nothing they could do about it. Whether the sixty followers of like mind (he cites Henry Young, Jasper Borage and the Tipping brothers as four of them) who had plans to stage a coup on the death of Elizabeth ever really existed or were a figment of a madman’s imagination or a clever agent teasing a more gullible one (Drury), we cannot know. Drury himself was to feel Hunsdon’s wrath early in August 1593 when the Lord Chamberlain had him arrested, probably because he wanted to know what, if anything, Drury actually knew. ‘My Lord Chamberlain is too continually set against me,’ Drury wrote to Antony Bacon, the ‘golden lad’ projector now working for Essex, ‘His displeasure is everlasting and so is my misery.’

  So it is easy to dismiss Cholmeley as a crank and the lines ‘that he speaketh in general all evil of the Counsell, saying that they are all Atheists and Machiavellians, especially my Lord Admiral [Howard of Effingham]’ likewise. It is when Drury is more specific on that that we should stop and reconsider:

  Mr Cholmeley his manner of proceeding in scoring the Queen’s subjects is first to make slanderous reports of most noble peers and honourable counsellors, as the Lord Treasurer [Burghley], the Lord Chamberlain [Hunsdon], the Lord Admirall [Howard], Sir Robert Cecil, these saeith he have profound witness be sound Atheists and their lives and deeds show that they think their souls do end, vanish and perish with their bodies.

  Other commentators have ignored Cholmeley as a madman. His sixty rebels did not materialise, so they did not exist. He did not actually attempt to murder Burghley or the Queen, so the threats uttered in the Remembrances are just so much hot air. But what if some of Chomeley’s ravings were accurate? What if some of what Drury was reporting was actually true? The notion that the soul did not survive bodily death was indeed blasphemy and heresy in Elizabeth’s England. Walter Ralegh himself was careful to record that he did not accept that – the soul, said Ralegh and the Scriptures with one voice, was immortal. What if some members of the Queen’s Privy Council, the highest in the land, at times just feet away from her Majesty in the corridors of Whitehall Palace, really were atheists? The 1590s were troubled years. The plague was wreaking havoc in London; there were threats of new rebellion in Ireland; rumours of a Spanish alliance with Scottish Catholics; parliament grew restless; the Queen was old and more difficult to please with each passing week. Burghley too was losing his grasp, falling asleep in crucial meeting, snapping at subordinates and colleagues, desperate to keep the ambitious Essex out and his second son in. The last thing any of the Council wanted was for a whistle-blower to purse his lips.

  Such a one was Richard Cholmeley. Another was Kit Marlowe. Cholmeley knew and Marlowe knew. It has always been assumed that the reference in the Baines Note referred to members of the School of Night -’...he [Marlowe] saieth likewise that he hath quoted a number of contrarities out of the scripture which he hath given to some great men who in convenient time shall be named.’ In a way, this is correct, because one of these great men was the ‘heir of Hunsdon’, George Carey, whose father was the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain as well as her cousin. But Marlowe, through Baines was not talking about Ralegh and Percy and Strange as some experts have assumed. He was talking about Burghley and Cecil and Howard and Hunsdon, those four horsemen who would bring about Marlowe’s own apocalypse. The fact that none of them was actually a member of the School of Night is irrelevant. Marlowe had evidence against them, of their heretical and blasphemous views, which, being guarded men, they had kept, they thought, to themselves. Exactly how he found out we cannot know, but it is our guess that the weakest link was Carey. Through an over-honest disposition, or careless table-talk in his cups, he may have told Marlowe things he should not. The damage was done and as the winter of 1592-3 turned into spring, Marlowe was becoming ever more outrageous, as, in a different way, was Cholmeley.

  Was Marlowe ever a secret Catholic? Had he defected to the enemy? It is
unlikely, but he had gone over to an enemy of a different and all the more deadly sort. He had dared God out of his heaven, which today is commonplace. In his own day, it sealed his death warrant.

  Edward II was performed in January 1593, but we contend that Marlowe was already being watched before that, as a man with secret knowledge; a man not to be trusted. More pernicious than its overt homosexuality, Edward II was a political allegory. Edward of course was Elizabeth and the upstart Gaveston was Burghley and the Cecil clan. Richard Verstigan, the exiled Catholic writing from the safety of Antwerp, wrote in 1591:

  Cecill being the causer of the most enormous evils...is a traitor himself and the greatest that England ever nourished and far more noisome and pernicious to the realm than ever were the Spensers, Peter of Gaveston or any other that ever abused either Prince or people.

  Verstigan’s Declaration appeared in England in March 1592, his Advertisement five months later. Can his comments merely be dismissed as Catholic propaganda? In Marlowe’s play, both the king and Gaveston despise parliament and manipulate it; Elizabeth and Burghley were doing the same thing. Edward makes Gaveston Lord High Chamberlain, Chief Secretary and Earl of Cornwall. Elizabeth had made Burghley her Lord Treasurer and had raised no objections when he blithely took over Walsingham’s duties as Principal Secretary in 1590. The Keeper of the Seal may have been John Puckering, but men knew that the Cecils called the shots. Gaveston was given this power in Edward II; Burghley already had it. In the play, the nobility of England sit like old wives in agonies of indecision, unwilling to overthrow their king despite his squandering of his birthright. No one dares cross the new power in the land. So it was with the advent of the Cecils. The only man who dared try, the Earl of Essex, went to the block on 25 February 1601.

  Gaveston ignores the supplication of the poor. ‘And what art thou?’ ‘A soldier,’ comes the reply, ‘that hath served against the Scots.’ ‘Why,’ scoffs Gaveston, utterly unmoved by the man’s derelict state, ‘there are hospitals for such as you. I have no war and therefore, sir, be gone.’ Elizabeth herself left her gangrenous sailors to die after they had given her the greatest victory of her reign. Edward fights expensive wars in France and loses Normandy. Elizabeth’s war with Spain had no end in sight and in February 1592, that rising star the Earl of Essex was recalled from France where his little army was bolstering the cause of Henri IV against the powers of the Catholic League. While he was distributing knighthoods to twenty-four of his officers (which infuriated Elizabeth, whose right that was) his men were dying of disease around Rouen. And Ireland too was once again ripe for rebellion – in the play, Lancaster warns:

  Thy garrisons are beaten out of France,

  And lame and poor lie groaning at the gates;

  The wild O’Neill, with swarms of Irish kerns

  Lives uncontrolled within the English Pale.

  But it was the eventual overthrow of Gaveston and Edward that so worried the controllers of the Elizabethan police state. Curtis Breight describes Edward II as ‘a subversive fantasy of violence against the established order’ and the orchestrator of it was Marlowe. When Burghley reported in January 1593 that he was ‘much offended with the libels printed against him’, was he referring specifically to Edward II? In the play are lines – ‘Libels are cast against thee in the street/Ballads and rymes made of thy overthrow.’ But something had gone wrong; the play had slipped through the net of censorship which the Elizabethans had so carefully set up. The Stationers had missed it, even allowing the play into print in July 1593; so had Edmund Tillney, Master of the Revels. What could be done now? There were, Burghley perhaps noticed if he watched the performance of the play at Christmas 1592, three murderers in Edward II...

  The Massacre at Paris had likewise escaped the censor and it may be that its late publication date is a result of official government tinkering. We know that there was an earlier, longer version of which only a fragment remains. We know too that plays like Kyd’s Sir Thomas More were emasculated; others, like Jonson’s Isle of Dogs (1597) were destroyed and its author imprisoned. Even in its extant form, The Massacre was a golden opportunity for Marlowe to expose audiences to Catholic propaganda, denied them systematically since 1547. The fact that Marlowe refuses to take sides in the play shows his own disregard for denominational religion, but this was probably not how the Privy Council saw it. The play contains an elaborate series of assassinations, exposing for all to see the Machiavellian nature of statecraft. True, Marlowe could hide behind the fact that the events were taking place in a different country (France) and at a different time (the St Bartholomew’s Day slaughter) but few would be fooled by that. ‘Religion,’ scoffs the Duke of Guise, ‘O Diabole!’ linking the whole religious edifice of the sixteenth century with the theme of Protestants being, at best, in the Baines Note, ‘hypocriticall asses’. In The Massacre the message is the same as in Edward II: the state is evil, corrupt and merciless. It ignores wise counsel and honest men and commits murder on a massive scale to maintain itself in power. Could there be a clearer denunciation of the Machievellians who ran Elizabethan England?

  The Privy Council had, of course, been criticised before, but from the late 1580s something of a pattern was emerging and it was certainly on the increase. The Martin Marprelate tracts had hit out at the hierarchy of the Church in the year of the Armada. Two years later Certain Discourses Military by John Smythe, a contact of Burghley’s, was suppressed for its seditious content. Smythe himself was imprisoned in Colchester in 1596 for his opposition to the enforced raising of militias to meet another Spanish invasion scare. Even the normally apolitical Edmund Spenser had gone into print in 1591 with Mother Hubbard’s Tale in which he criticised Burghley:

  So did he good to none, to many ill,

  So did he all the kingdom rob and pill [steal],

  Yet none durst speak, nor none durst of him plaine,

  So great he was in grace, and riche through gaine.

  Perhaps because of his courtly connections, Spenser got away with it. Not so lucky Philip Stubbes; when he wrote a seditious article in 1579, his right hand was chopped off.

  The dilemma of the Privy Council, spearheaded by the Cecils, was how to deal with Marlowe. In his last two plays, the man was openly taunting them, challenging their authority. What would he do next? Those biographers who have found no conspiracy in Marlowe’s death have asked why he was not simply arrested and put on trial for treason. He was arrested, by the Queen’s Messenger Henry Maunder, on 18 May. The reason that we do not know the exact nature of the charges against him is that the Privy Council dared not frame them. They insisted that Marlowe report to them daily so that they could watch him and gain vital time to decide what to do. Probably early on in this period, a messenger was sent post-haste to the Low Countries, to find Robert Poley, there again on the Queen’s business. Had the Privy Council put Marlowe on trial, that would have meant interrogation in the Star Chamber, and the records of that court were public. If Marlowe blew his whistle on the atheism of the ‘Council four’, then it would have become public knowledge and even the Cecils would have difficulty in preventing that. The Queen herself would find out. And the Puritan Thomas Beard was nearer to the truth than he knew when he wrote

  I would to God (and I pray from my heart) that all Atheists in this realm, and in the world beside, would by the remembrance and consideration of this example, either forsake their horrible impiety, or that they might in like manner come to destruction: and so that abominable sin which so flourisheth amongst men of greatest name, might either be quite extinguished and rooted out, or at least smothered and kept under, that it durst not show its head any more in the world’s eye.

  Why not, then, simply arrest Marlowe and see that he died quietly in the darkest recesses of some jail? A number of Catholics had met their end this way, as well as more high-profile offenders like Somerville in 1583 and Northumberland in 1585. John Somerville was arrested in October 1583 in Warwickshire for threatening to shoot the Queen. He
‘hoped to see her head on a pole, for she was a serpent and a viper’. The story that he hanged himself in his cell in Newgate before he could come to trial fooled no one. We have already discussed the implausibility of the suicide (by pistol) of Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, in the Tower.

  With Marlowe, it would have to be different. It was right, as Baines said in his Note, that this ‘mouth should be stopped’ but with careful handling, the man could be a totem, a warning to others like the gibbets that creaked in the wind at lonely crossroads or the bloody heads that rotted on London Bridge. Marlowe, the scourge of God, must die. But those in the know who might be tempted to follow his example must know who had killed him. That alone would prevent them from asking the reason why. Knife the man in some anonymous back alley and once again, the message would not be heard; such a death could be the chance outcome of random street violence. It must be announced, obliquely but clearly, that Marlowe had somehow over-reached himself and suffered the fate of anyone who dared flout the might of the Cecils. That said, there was also a need to cover up the event. Honest souls, worthy men, if they existed in Elizabeth’s England, must believe that Marlowe’s death was innocent enough – and his own fault.

  Armed with this insight, we have to go further than Curtis Breight. He pointed the finger, accurately, at the Cecils in 1996, but does not provide a motive for murder. If Marlowe was simply, as Breight contends, a thorn in the Cecils’ side; if he was an increasingly outspoken critic of the system; even if Kyd’s ravings were true and Marlowe did indeed intend to follow Matthew Roydon north to Scotland; or go over to the Catholics where perhaps his heard had secretly lain all along; even if all this were so, there were a dozen conventional ways to stop him. It was Marlowe’s knowledge that made his end special. Because of what he knew about the Council, he had to be silenced in a very particular way. There had to be a reckoning.