Who Killed Kit Marlowe?

by M. J. Trow

  With this knowledge, let us plug the gaps that belong to Marlowe’s last days. Burghley, Robert Cecil, Howard of Effingham, Hunsdon – who better to co-ordinate such a plan? A son and his father; a father -in-law and his son-in-law; four of the most powerful and Machiavellian men in the land, with limitless access to the machinery that brought dangerous opponents to their deaths. We cannot know whose idea it was, but we can see all four of them poring over plans in the Council Chamber when the others had gone home for the night, the curtains drawn, the candles guttering. It is deliciously tempting to point to the usual number of the Council – thirteen – as the number of the coven, with the horned god Burghley at their head. But there is no evidence for this. Four men had been singled out by Cholmeley; four men made the crucial decisions of May 1593. Burghley knew Marlowe as an agent of Walsingham’s. More recently he had employed him himself over the incident of the Dutch coining. He had personally interviewed him on his return from Vlissingen. He or Robert Cecil had sent Richard Baines to watch him and to report back. One of them had sent Robert Poley, too, back in the previous September, to Canterbury. And ‘sweet Robyn’ was a resourceful man. He understood from Burghley, whose man he was and whose wages he took, that Marlowe was unpredictable, dangerous even; he may have to be silenced. Is it too far-fetched to imagine Poley, with his glib tongue and smooth charm, engaging the tailor William Corkine in conversation and passing the man cash to ‘beat and berate’ Marlowe, to produce a duel? Poley knew Marlowe already, but he had never seen him in action. He wanted to know what he might be up against and the fight in Mercery Lane perhaps convinced him that Marlowe was too great a risk for him to tackle alone.

  Yet Poley was the obvious choice. He was tried and trusted, a man who could think on his feet. But he was abroad. Burghley would have sent word, perhaps, on 20 May, to fetch him home, covering the man’s back with the official paperwork that for the whole of May he was in her Majesty’s service and therefore given protection for whatever might happen. It was the same kind of ‘special pardon’ that Montague and Cholmeley had, according to Robert Beale’s advice to Sir Edward Wootton.

  Hunsdon may well have known Marlowe best through his son’s involvement with the School of Night. Did he suggest smearing the man’s reputation in order to arrest him in the first place in a way that would not arouse suspicion? So someone, perhaps Cholmeley, perhaps Drury, but some ‘discontented gentleman’, was persuaded to write racial taunts in bad verse running to fifty-three lines that he then stuck to the wall of the Dutch church in Broad Street. He larded it with mentions of Marlowe’s plays and signed it ‘Tamburlaine’. And was it Hunsdon who obtained from his son, George, the papers belonging to Marlowe which were slipped into the papers belonging to Kyd soon after the man’s arrest? If Robert Cecil owned underground Catholic propaganda like Robert Southwell’s Epistle to Comfort, why should Hunsdon not possess something similar? So Kyd was accused of writing the Dutch libel and the Council pretended to panic, sending men everywhere, knocking on shutters, smashing through doors. All the force of the police state was brought to bear.

  Kyd was an easy nut to crack. Burghley or Robert Cecil unleashed Topcliffe on him and a torrent of anti-Marlowe information flooded out. Even so, there was nothing to incriminate the Council, so Kyd could live. And Richard Baines was ordered to put in writing everything he had heard Marlowe say in his table talk – all of it, the blacker the better.

  By the time Kyd was in prison and the Privy Council had the Baines Note in their hands, the Council four had finalised their plans. It was now about 26 May and a venue had to be found for the killing to take place. Scadbury was out of the question. We believe that Thomas Walsingham knew from 18 May, when Henry Maunder came for Marlowe, what the score was. It is unlikely that Walsingham was told why; it is unlikely that Maunder knew. Walsingham was a patriot and an ambitious man. For all Marlowe was his friend and protégé, in an age like Elizabethan England such men were expendable. He may have agonised over it, but if the Privy Council said there were good reasons, this was probably enough. Even so, he would not countenance the outrage happening at his own door. The Council would have to find somewhere else for their dirty work.

  That somewhere else was probably suggested by Burghley, whose cousin, Eleanor Bull, had a house on Deptford Strand, across the green from that of Howard of Effingham, who knew it well. Deptford was ideal on three counts. First, it would provide the fiction that would get Marlowe there in the first place. It was a thriving port, with ships coming and going. From there, Marlowe could sail to the Low Countries, to France, to Scotland, to anywhere in the rapidly expanding world. Second, it was within three miles, let alone 12, of the Queen’s palace of Placentia; that placed it ‘within the verge’, in the jurisdiction, not of any old official, but of the Royal Coroner himself. And third, Eleanor Bull was related to Lord Burghley, the Lord Treasurer; to his son, Sir Robert; to John Dee, formerly the Queen’s magus. She could be trusted with what she needed to know concerning affairs of state. Her house doubled as an eating-place or Ordinary. She was told to expect certain visitors at the end of May.

  Probably on one of his visits to the Privy Council, someone suggested to Marlowe it was safest for him to go, to run, at least until the current mood of unease in the capital died down. The plague still raged; Marlowe was under suspicion; Kyd was in the Bridewell and nothing had been heard of him. Perhaps Marlowe talked the idea over at Scadbury – or perhaps Walsingham was part of the Cecil trap and suggested it himself.

  So it was that Marlowe arrived at Eleanor Bull’s on Wednesday 30 May. We need not doubt the time mentioned in Danby’s inquest – ‘about the tenth hour before noon’ would have given Marlowe time to report early to the council, at Whitehall. Deptford was three miles away, half an hour’s ride. Of course, he may not have visited at all that day, nor would the Council come looking for him, since they knew exactly where he was and why. Alternatively, if the Queen was actually at Greenwich that day (and we have no way of proving this after four hundred years) then elements of the Council may have been with her and that made Marlowe’s journey between Placentia and Deptford even more straightforward.

  Poley was probably waiting for him. We know that he left the Court, in the still peripatetic world of government then at Archbishop Whitgift’s house in Croydon, on 8 May. A warrant signed by Sir Thomas Heneage, Treasurer of the Queen’s Chamber, and a Cecil man through and through, has survived the ravages of time and is Poley’s passport to freedom over the Marlowe killing:

  ...for carrying of letters in post for Her Majesty’s special and secret affairs of great importance, from the Court at Croydon the viiith of May 1593 into the Low Countries to the town of the Hague in Holland, and for returning back again with letters of answer to the Court at Nonesuch the viiith of June 1593, being in Her Majesty’s Service all the aforesaid time.

  In the twenty-six extant records of payment made to Poley for his services to the government, only this one has the last sentence. It serves to exonerate Poley from what was about to happen; the Elizabethan equivalent of Ian Fleming’s famous ‘licensed to kill’.

  Poley was back at least nine days early. Had he transacted his business at the Hague? Had kind winds brought him home quicker across the Channel? Perhaps both, but mostly, Poley was home early because he had a job to do. Perhaps he was told why, but that again is unlikely. What Marlowe knew and what Cholmeley knew about their government masters must remain a secret. Like Thomas Walsingham, like Eleanor Bull, Poley was told that a job had to be done and that there were good reasons for it. But Poley could not work alone. He had already been sent to Canterbury, we believe, to fix a fight to see Marlowe in action. He knew perfectly well that the official line sent out by the Council with the warrants of arrest read ‘And in case of need to require aid’. The aid he chose was Nicholas Skeres and Ingram Frizer.

  Why these two? Judith Cook in the novel The Slicing Edge of Death conjectures that Cecil blackmailed these two into working with Poley. Skeres
had already been in trouble for ‘coney-catching’ and was one of those ‘masterless men’ whom the Elizabethan police state so feared. It is dangerous to allow fiction to intrude into history, although as we have seen in relation to the death of Marlowe, the Puritans did it happily enough. Marlowe probably knew Skeres anyway on the espionage circuit. There is no record of Frizer being involved in this context, but he did work for Thomas Walsingham and may have know Marlowe on that score. In any case, as is likely from the coney-catching incident on the gull Drew Woodlef a year later, it is reasonable to suppose that Skeres and Frizer were a team by May 1593; hire one and you hire the other.

  So the balance between these three now shifts. Rather than Frizer being the central character, attacked by a vicious, short-tempered Marlowe with Skeres and Poley the innocent and no doubt suitably alarmed bystanders, the focus is now Poley. Here was a man who lived by his wits, who mixed with low-life in London prisons and cut-throat agents in France and the Low Countries. We know he brought about the torture and death of Anthony Babington and his friends. All we know of Frizer is that he was a con-man.

  Marlowe would not have been alarmed to find Poley there. He was probably told to expect him, again perhaps by Walsingham. What has puzzled a number of commentators is why the four spent (if we accept Danby’s times) at least eight hours at Eleanor Bull’s house. Nicholl conjectures that Poley’s job was to pump Marlowe to find out how much he knew of the Ralegh-Essex rivalry. We believe he was simply waiting for the tide. We also contend that Marlowe was unarmed and do not doubt that it was actually Frizer’s dagger that killed him. Marlowe’s own weapons, his sword and dagger, would have been stored away on the ship waiting for the evening tide. Poley and Marlowe were old hands in the spying game – so, probably, was Skeres. They

  passed the time together and dined and after dinner were in quiet sort together there and walked in the garden belonging to the said house until the sixth hour after noon of the same day and then returned from the said garden to the room aforesaid and there together and in company supped.

  So runs Danby’s inquest and we have no reason to doubt that either.

  But from this point, only seven lines into the actual account of events, fiction takes over, the not altogether convincing collection of lies fabricated by an assassin and his two aides. The exact moves in the ‘little room’ we shall never know, but we believe it went something like this.

  Poley, using his own dagger, sheathed in the small of his back, made the first move. Marlowe perhaps saw it coming and all too aware that he was unarmed, had the quick wits and speed to grab Frizer’s dagger and fight Poley off, blade against blade. Skeres was in on the act now, two blades against Marlowe’s one. In the scuffle that followed, it was the unarmed Frizer who was hit, Marlowe striking him twice in rapid succession on the head. Bleeding and in pain, Frizer was out of the action for a while, but Marlowe was still outnumbered. Perhaps he disarmed Poley, sending his poignard clattering across the room. Somehow Poley was able to grab Marlowe’s weapon, or perhaps Skeres brought his man down and Marlowe dropped the knife.

  The fatal wound has long puzzled commentators. For all Nicholl’s contention that it was a recognised fencing blow; for all Curtis Breight’s belief in symmetrical reversal, that as Marlowe’s brain had committed treason against the state, so his brain must be destroyed, neither of these arguments makes much sense. In a knife fight, the biggest target is the torso. Slashing wounds might rip arm muscles to incapacitate a fighter, but the coup de grâce is aimed at the heart. The wound to the head, whether it was through the cranium or the eye socket, was the result of a blow delivered downwards. Marlowe was lying on his back, his arms pinioned by Skeres and probably Frizer, still able to use his weight to hold a man down. Poley threw himself on Marlowe, driving downwards in a desperate stab, before rolling clear of the body.

  The deed accomplished, the three had to invent a story that would fit all the facts, and the version they concocted was not perhaps as near as the Council four would have liked. If the fight happened along the lines above, there would be upset furniture, signs of violence. Frizer was hurt and it was Frizer’s dagger that had killed Marlowe. Eleanor Bull and her servants would have heard the scrape of furniture, the clash of steel, whatever shouts and curses may have left the mouths of any of the four men upstairs. The blasphemy which the Puritans attributed to Marlowe probably came from Frizer as Marlowe caught him with his own knife.

  Frizer, Skeres, Poley; all were men who, in their various walks of life, worked for money. What more natural then that the story they invented should be to do with money. ‘The reckoning’ – that would do it. Poley had been briefed that he would be cleared. All he had to do was stand his ground and the authorities would look after him. But it was Frizer’s head that was cut and Frizer’s dagger daubed with Marlowe’s blood; so they would have to adopt a slightly different plan.

  We do not know the mechanics of what happened next. Someone would have contacted the local constable, but the surviving records are silent on this. Frizer was taken into custody since ‘he neither fled nor withdrew himself’. He had no need to; Poley would have guaranteed his safety, along with whatever handout Poley gave him for a job done, if not done well. This could mean that Poley visited the coroner himself.

  Now, the buck passed to Sir William Danby. We know very little about the man, except the vital fact that he was a personal friend of Burghley from the old days in the Inns of Court, but we do understand his office. The coroner or ‘crowner’ was a royal appointment (literally a substitute for the king and a reminder of the day when the monarch was not only the highest court in the realm, but physically sat as a judge) and was created in the twelfth century to collect and guard royal revenue. The deodand, the value of the object which led to a death (Frizer’s infamous 12d dagger) was technically forfeit to the king as was the entire estate of a felon guilty of murder. Originally, the coroner’s role was to catch criminals, extract confessions and confiscate goods. He also investigated all incidences of violent death.

  On 1 June, Danby’s jury met to decide the events of two days earlier – exactly where this meeting took place, we do not know. What we do know is that Danby was extremely keen to exert his royal authority over the case. He uses the phrase ‘within the verge’ three times, underlining the fact that this was no ordinary squabble over a bill. When Thomas Watson killed William Bradley in Hog Lane, that was also ‘within the verge’ (a radius of 12 miles from the person of the monarch) but the coroner in that case was the Middlesex country official, not Danby. Danby was necessary because Danby had to control events at the inquest itself. He too would have been briefed, possibly by his old friend Burghley, and told to find Frizer innocent; that he had acted in self-defence.

  Before the First World War, the coroner’s jury were to be ‘not less than twelve, nor more than twenty-three good and lawful men’. Their task was to identify the body (which actually none of them could do without the help of Poley, Skeres and Frizer) and to decide ‘how, when and where and by what means the deceased came by his death’. The normal procedure today is that all relevant witnesses would be called – Poley, Skeres, Frizer, Eleanor Bull, any servants in the house at the time. The coroner’s duty is to examine their evidence and write it down in the form of a deposition checked by the witnesses. The jury then decides their verdict, in this case ‘in the defence and saving of his own life’. As we have seen, the facts as presented by Poley, Skeres and Frizer make little sense, but then in the Regnum Cecilianum, they did not have to.

  We have no record of questions put to any witnesses, no cross-examination. And what of the jury? We know their names. Nicholas Draper was a gentleman, perhaps from Leigh, near Tonbridge; Wolstan Randall was of the same social class, from Deptford; William Curry lived in tenements in Deptford with a wharf and yard; George Halfepenny was a baker from Limehouse with tenements in Deptford; Henry Dobyns fits the same description; Henry Awger was a tenant in the local manor house of Sayes Court; Jame
s Batte was a husbandman from Lewisham; Giles ffeld was a grocer; John Baldwyn was a yeoman from Greenwich across the Raven’s Bourne. Of Adrian Walker, John Barber, Robert Baldwyn, Henry Bendin, Thomas Batte, Alexander Burrage and Edmund Goodcheape we know nothing. It is a sad indictment of his abilities that a researcher as diligent as Canterbury archivist William Urry could write in 1964:

  There is everything to show, in the identification of these men, that the jurors were good, solid, middle-class Englishmen, a group utterly unlike any kind of jury which might be suborned into giving a false verdict.

  This is to misunderstand the nature of the Elizabethan hierarchy and the extraordinary power of the Privy Council. As recently as 1921, Dr W. Aitchison Robertson in his scholarly Manual of Medical Jurisprudence wrote

  It is notorious that great discredit is sometimes thrown on the findings of the Coroner’s Court. This is due to the fact that the verdict is given by a body of men who are often in rural districts drawn from the illiterate classes.

  Danby’s jury comprised worthy small businessmen with some local status, but throw into the equation two factors and their integrity becomes irrelevant. First, William Danby had orders to find Frizer guilty only of a killing in self-defence and second, the second-named juror, Wolston Randall, held his houses and stables in Deptford on a lease from the Lord Admiral, Howard of Effingham. Both men were leaned on. Danby was a knight, and a servant of the Crown; Randall was the tenant of a local member of the Privy Council who also happened to be, after the Armada, a national hero. Could there really have been any other verdict?