The World of Christopher Marlowe

by David Riggs

  Poole was one of the Catholic activists who maintained contact with their co-religionists on the Continent: ‘he said that he was taken [arrested] for a seminary priest’ and indiscreetly referred to one of them by name. Poole had smuggled the English cardinal Reginald Pole’s grandson out of Colchester. He was presently on the lookout for George Stransham, alias Potter, who took his BA at Cambridge in 1583 and then defected to Rheims. Poole funded his insurrectionary work through a counterfeiting scheme: ‘he had a man who coined half pence, and gave halfpennies to beggars, if they would change him larger money for halfpence.’ Poole operated in the grey area that encompassed insurrectionary Catholics, criminal entrepreneurs and other devisers of knavery. He spoke for have-nots of all denominations.

  Poole’s colloquy with Gunson breaks off with the counterfeiting scheme; with Marlowe, the conversation went a stage further. ‘Coining’ was a term of art that encompassed a host of illicit activities: clipping or shaving precious metal off existing coins; adulterating gold and silver with base metal; melting plate and turning it into coin; and alchemy, the transformation of base metal into gold. Counterfeiting simultaneously empowered the disobedient subjects who made the money and undermined the government that minted the coin of the realm. It was the crime of choice for individuals like Poole; you just needed ‘a man’ to do the dirty work.

  Poole was related by marriage to the Earl of Derby’s son Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, heir to the heavily Catholic earldom of Derby. Poole discussed Strange’s claim to the English throne. The execution of Mary, Queen of Scots transformed Lord Strange and Henry Percy, the Earl of Northumberland, into the main rallying points for Catholic conspirators. Sir William Stanley’s surrender of Deventer, coupled with the knowledge that his regiment of ‘Spanish Elizabethans’ were poised to join the next Armada and invade England, turned Sir William’s cousin Lord Strange into a prime target of Elizabethan intelligence-gatherers. Although not a papist himself – Strange was said to be ‘of no religion’ – he remained on good terms with his Catholic clients in Derby. He did prosecute local recusants and avoided contacts with emissaries from the Catholic exiles. Nevertheless, the Council subsequently intercepted, or perhaps manufactured, documents that linked Strange to a papist coup d’état.

  12.1 Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange.

  Closer to home, Lord Strange patronized a company of London actors, and numbered Thomas Kyd among his personal servants. At the time of Marlowe’s release, Strange’s Men were on the verge of replacing the Admiral’s Men as the acting company of choice for talented English playwrights. He had, in short, all the attributes of Marlowe’s ideal patron.

  Marlowe’s fellow prisoner represented a host of opportunities for a poor scholar in search of intelligence. In gathering information about Poole’s associates, Marlowe stood to gain in two ways: he could sell his discoveries to Watson’s friend Thomas Walsingham, or he could pursue relations with the rebel faction. Both options remained available to a skilled double agent. But he also stood to lose in two ways: if the agent neither succeeded in penetrating the other side, nor had any intelligence to sell, he fell into grave jeopardy. Counterfeiting was high treason.

  On 19 September, the coroner for Middlesex summoned a jury to examine William Bradley’s corpse and hear testimony. The jury exonerated Marlowe from the crime of killing Bradley and found that Watson had acted in self-defence. Marlowe was released on bail on 1 October. Richard Kitchen, one of the two ratepayers who posted Marlowe’s bail of £40, subsequently did legal work for Edward Alleyn’s father-in-law, Philip Henslowe. We can infer that the Alleyns arranged for Marlowe to be freed on bail. With the arrival of his two bondsmen, Marlowe became ‘generosus’, a gentleman. Watson remained in Newgate awaiting the next gaol delivery.

  On 3 December, Watson and Marlowe appeared in the Justice Hall at the Old Bailey, the criminal court in Newgate. The powerful group of judges included Chief Justice Anderson, from the Court of Common Pleas, and Sir Roger Manwood, who could well have known Marlowe from Canterbury. These were hanging judges when it came to religious dissenters; they were more inclined to be lenient in routine criminal cases, especially when the defendants had a powerful friend at court. During that same week, the Privy Council ordered Manwood to answer charges of bribery and fraud. The justices freed Marlowe and returned Watson to Newgate prison where he awaited the queen’s pardon. It arrived on 10 February 1590.

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  Thomas Watson was the ideal role model for a younger poet who took an interest in secret service work. He dedicated his Latin translation of Sophocles’ Antigone to Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel and scion of the most prominent Catholic family in the country. Elizabeth had executed Arundel’s father for treason a decade previously and kept the son under close watch. When Arundel eventually did attempt to flee England in 1585, her spies prevented him from getting away; Howard spent the rest of his life imprisoned in the Tower of London. Watson moved on to Henry Percy, the Earl of Northumberland. He dedicated his English version of Concerning Waters and Fountains and his Latin translation of Coluthus’s Rape of Helen (1587) to the intellectual young earl. Percy had residual ties to the Catholic religion and, by some calculations, was seventh in the line of succession to the English throne. Elizabeth had imprisoned his father in the Tower of London, where he allegedly committed suicide in 1585. These facts meant that the new earl was another prime object of surveillance for Secretary Walsingham’s intelligence network. Arundel and Northumberland had no inkling that Watson belonged to that network. Even as he did covert intelligence work for Secretary Walsingham, Watson maintained the public profile of a Catholic recusant.

  Watson’s career brings the linkage between writing and spying into focus. Poetry and intelligence both involved the maintenance of client-patron relations. Poems and dedications enabled poets to enter households where secrets – the spy’s indispensable stock in trade – were to be found. In addressing Howard and Percy, Watson displays highly wrought artefacts to prospective patrons. The translations from Greek into Latin advertise the rarefied verbal skills that qualify him to serve in the retinue of a noble lord. He wants to be employed as a private secretary, diplomatic messenger, household tutor or maker of entertainments. Should Arundel like his work, ‘being quite blessed I shall be called your poet, becoming a familiar along with Jove’s Ganymede’. As ‘Corydon’, Watson could also convey Jove’s secrets to ‘Tityrus’, the code name for his shadow-patron Thomas Walsingham. Poets knew how to imply more than was said. Witness Watson’s allusion to Ganymede, which hints that he is sexually available should Arundel so desire; or his choice of Antigone, Sophocles’ great work on the rights of individual subjects.

  Watson wanted his readers to believe that he was a repository of secrets, a man who could do the work of a confidential clerk. The English Secretary (1586) defines this rapidly expanding sector of employment by harking back to the ‘secret’ that lurks in the root meaning of secretary: ‘by the very etymology of the word itself, both name and office in one, do conclude upon secrecy’. Watson’s dedication to Arundel further informed the earl (and anyone else with enough Latin to read it) that the poet had spent much of his adult life residing in Catholic seminaries and universities, where he presumably was privy to a raft of secrets. Pastoral poetry, Watson’s genre of choice, combined lyric simplicity with a multiplicity of allegorical meanings; the form enabled Elizabethan poets to ‘glance at greater matters’ beneath ‘the veil of homely persons’. None of this proves that Watson ever did convey any intelligence; or that his tepid, formulaic pastorals allude to anything more than a passing friendship with Thomas Walsingham. Indeed, most of the evidence that Watson was a secret agent appears in literary works published by himself, and looks suspiciously like a strategy of self-presentation.

  Throughout the 1580s, while Watson was cultivating prominent Catholics, he refrained from dedicating any books to the Walsinghams. His old companion Thomas Walsingham made an unlikely patron in any event. After
Thomas’s elder brother Edmund inherited his father’s estate in 1584, the younger Walsingham continued to eke out a modest livelihood working for the Secretary. The winter of 1590 found Thomas Walsingham in the Fleet prison, where he was incarcerated for defaulting on debts that amounted to 200 marks.

  By this time, though, Thomas Walsingham’s luck had taken an unforeseen turn for the better. When his brother Edmund, who had inherited all the family property, dropped dead late in 1589, Thomas purchased his pardon, settled his debts and proceeded from prison to his family’s ancestral manor house at Scadbury, in north Kent. Watson struck while the iron was hot. The publication of Meliboeus, Watson’s pastoral elegy on the death of Sir Francis Walsingham in 1590, openly proclaimed his ties to the Walsingham-Sidney faction. When Watson recalled his early friendship with Thomas Walsingham he cast himself as a singer of lyrics (‘Corydon’) and Thomas Walsingham (‘Tityrus’) as his appreciative companion. ‘Thy tunes have often pleased my ear of yore,’ Corydon recalls, ‘When milk-white swans did flock to hear thee sing, / Where Seine in Paris makes a double shore.’ Watson’s connection with the Walsinghams offered Marlowe an entrée into up-market Kentish patronage and the secret service.

  Although Watson operated in the genteel arena of book dedication and domestic service, he shared the dual loyalties of the double agent. Soon after his imprisonment, Watson entered the household of the prominent Catholic Sir William Cornwallis. Watson tutored the Cornwallis children and became an intimate friend of his patron’s daughter, at the same time that he kept an eye on Cornwallis for the Council. This arrangement put Watson in a doubly advantageous position. The continuing spectres of a second Spanish Armada, Parma’s army in the Netherlands, plots to assassinate the queen and rebellious papists at home meant that a Catholic monarchy in England remained a very real possibility throughout the late 1580s and early 1590s. Regardless of what happened, Marlowe’s friend had chosen the winning side.

  Professional spies like Watson’s neighbour and associate Robert Poley withheld their secrets from the public eye. When the Babington plot collapsed, Robert Poley stood his ground and went to the Tower with the other conspirators. After the government chose not to bring him to trial, Catholics realized at once that he was Secretary Walsingham’s creature. Even so, Sir Francis still had his doubts about Poley. ‘I do not find but that Poley hath dealt honestly with me,’ he confided to Phelippes, ‘yet I am loath to lay myself any way open to him.’ Poley’s sojourn in the Tower resembled his earlier stint in the Marshalsea, only on a grander scale. Keeper Hopton held him in ‘large’ rather than ‘close’ confinement. Poley had a servant, spent handsomely, received visits from his mistress Joan Yeomans and snooped on Catholic inmates. This sojourn provided ample opportunity for him to become acquainted with the Irish double agent Michael Moody and the Babington conspirator James Tipping, both of whom moved through the prison system in tandem with Poley. Catholics believed that Poley poisoned his fellow inmate, the venerable Bishop of Armagh. A deeply religious man and Irish patriot, Armagh never would have taken his own life, as so many of Elizabeth’s Catholic prisoners were alleged to have done. When it became clear that Poley’s cover was irretrievably blown, he left the Tower and became one of Secretary Walsingham’s couriers.

  Poley remained a dangerous man in his own right. After Secretary Walsingham procured his release from the Tower in the autumn of 1588, Poley went back to the Yeomans, where he turned Joan against her husband and tried to convert the household to Catholicism. He persuaded the Yeomans ‘that their marriage was not lawful because their religion was false’ (in contrast, one gathers, to Poley’s own marriage to one Watson’s daughter, which was unlawful because it was Catholic). A neighbour testified that Joan Yeomans had been ‘very zealous in her religion but since the said Poley used her company she is become a papist’. William Yeomans ‘made very great moan’ to the jailer Richard Ede, who counselled him to ‘put [Poley] away out of his house for he would beguile him either of his wife or of his life’.

  Joan was frightened of Poley. When the neighbour warned her that he was ‘a very bad fellow’, Joan replied that ‘she had dealt with him in matters of state as far as her life did extend, and therefore she was forced to use him well or else he would exclaim on her.’ Poley boasted that Secretary Walsingham ‘is more beholding unto me than I unto him, for there are further matters between him and me than all the world shall know of’. When Poley disclosed that Sir Francis had ‘the pox in his yard [venereal disease in his penis] the which he got of a lady in France’, William Yeomans saw his chance. He ‘rebuked him for those words and told him that he would make it known unto Mr Secretary’. Poley countered by having William Yeomans committed to the Marshalsea on the orders of the queen’s Vice-Chamberlain Thomas Heneage. By the time Ede procured Yeomans’s release, his wife had eloped with Poley. Two years later a secret agent noted that Poley ‘lieth in Shoreditch’.

  The spy Richard Baines was sharing a room, and perhaps a bed, with Marlowe by the winter of 1591–92, though it remains unclear when the two men became acquainted. Baines returned to England after being released from the town jail at Rheims in 1583. Since at least one Londoner shared his name, Baines’s exact whereabouts for the next few years are hard to verify, but there is a credible paper trail. On 21 September 1586, a Catholic exile in France addressed a letter ‘To Monsieur Gerarde Burghet, a French gentleman in London’. Secretary Walsingham’s assistant Phelippes endorsed it ‘From Clitherow to Baines’. The sender was Father William Clitherow, who had been at Rheims with Richard Baines; the addressee Gerard Bourghet was either an alias used by Baines or the middleman who transmitted Clitherow’s letter to him.

  Clitherow wrote in a mixture of cipher and Latin, expressing himself in the oblique and allusive manner used by spies. The main part of his letter concerns a report that ‘Bourghet’ has been trying to arrange a marriage between Arabella Stuart and the Duke of Parma’s son. Since Arabella was a possible successor to Queen Elizabeth – assuming that she could ever be extracted from Elizabeth’s grasp – Bourghet, or Baines, was flirting with high-level conspiracy, though nothing came of it. Did Clitherow realize that Baines was on the receiving end of his letter? If so, the earlier Confessions of Richard Baines had failed to persuade at least one English Catholic that Baines was not to be trusted.

  Several months later, Richard Baines asked the lawyer William Ballard, of Southwell, Nottinghamshire, to help him become a parson ‘in some convenient place’. Although Baines described himself as ‘destitute of any stay of living’, he agreed to pay Ballard a bribe of £20 for his trouble. Ballard procured for Baines the rectorship of All Saints Church in the town of Waltham, in Lincolnshire, that spring. Had the spy come in from the cold?

  Given the likelihood that Richard Baines hailed from Southwell (a Thomas Baines of Southwell matriculated at Caius College the year after Richard’s graduation), the answer to this question is almost certainly yes. Still, there are problems with this story. The Richard Baines who signed the parish register at All Saints Waltham was not the same person as the man who signed Baines’s note about Marlowe: the signatures do not match up. How did Baines, who could scarcely afford a curate, tend to his flock during his sabbatical in Flushing with Marlowe? Why did the erstwhile rector prove so difficult to locate during the last weeks of Marlowe’s life? Richard Baines remains a hard man to pin down. William Ballard discovered this fact to his dismay: three years later, he was still trying to collect his £20.

  In 1588 Father (now Cardinal) Allen published a new, Latin text of Baines’s Confession. The second edition rehearsed the story of Baines’s journey into ‘atheism and no faith or religion’, reminding Catholics that he had obtained ‘various secrets … with the intention of communicating them presently to the English government’. As in 1583, Allen declined to say what these ‘secrets’ consisted of. He repeated Baines’s remark about liquidating the entire seminary, but omitted the poisoned soup that Baines would have used for this purpos
e. This detail did, however, find its way into The Jew of Malta, the new play that Marlowe was writing for Lord Strange’s Men.

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  Lord Strange had a long-standing interest in the theatre. At the age of nineteen he employed a company of tumblers who remained in his service until the holiday season of 1585–86, when ‘Mr Stanley’s Boys’ did ‘feats of activity before her majesty’. Thomas Kyd entered Strange’s service in 1587–88, around the time that his employer decided to patronize a newly formed company of adult actors. The nucleus of Strange’s Men was Thomas Heminges, who later prepared Shakespeare’s first folio, Thomas Pope, George Bryan and the celebrated comedian Will Kempe. Pope, Bryan and Kempe had been Leicester’s Men until the earl’s death in September 1588 compelled them to seek a new master. During the autumn of 1589, both Strange’s Men and the Admiral’s Men were staging plays at inn yards in the City of London. On 5 November, about a month before Marlowe’s release from Newgate, Sir John Harte, the Lord Mayor of London, sent for ‘the Lord Admiral’s and the Lord Strange’s players, to whom I specially gave in Charge and required them in her Majesty’s name to forbear playing’. The Admiral’s Men ‘very dutifully obeyed’ but Strange’s Men were ‘very Contemptuous’ and ‘went to the Cross keys [inn yard] and played that afternoon, to the great offence of the better sort’. The next morning, at the Lord Mayor’s court, Harte could have told them that he had Lord Burghley’s warrant for ‘for the stay of all plays within the City’. The two companies now sought houseroom in the suburbs, at the Theatre, which was still owned and managed by Richard Burbage.