by Susan Ronald
Paul’s Boys, the theater company of boy players of the cathedral, was dissolved in 1590, presumably for offenses similar to Marprelate. They only regrouped around 1600. Even Shakespeare had a brush early in his career with Tilney. When Shakespeare had been brought in as one of the “fixers” of the “stale” manuscript of the play Sir Thomas More, he soon discovered the sensibilities of the crown. The play remains officially anonymous to this day, though five playwrights seemingly comprise its authors. There were at least three sets of alterations, with the final and latest set believed to be one of the rare glimpses of William Shakespeare’s handwriting—Hand D.16 The problem with the play arose around the scene of the “ill May Day” of 1517 when Thomas More as Lord Chancellor refused to recognize Henry VIII’s position as head of England’s church while entertaining the Lord Mayor and the aldermen of London at his home. More is sympathetic and tragic throughout, since he had remained a figure of admiration in the public’s psyche. The sympathy of the playwrights, as always, remained with their audiences.17
With prohibitions following each proclamation against the playhouses and inns situated within London’s walls, it is little wonder that the entrepreneur impresarios like Philip Henslowe and Edward Alleyn took action. They decamped throughout the 1590s over the Thames River to that haunt of pleasure and vice, Southwark, which fell outside the Liberties of London. A large part of Southwark had been under the control of the bishop of Winchester for over half a century, and he happily derived much of his income from the brothels and the “Winchester Geese” (their prostitutes) within its boundaries. The words of Thomas Aquinas were often repeated to the bishop, that “prostitution in the towns is like the cesspool in the palace; take away the cesspool and the palace will become an unclean and evil-smelling place.”18
To avoid such a catastrophe, the church provided a ready solution. The Episcopal Court required “stewholders” (brothel-keepers) not to detain any woman who wished to give up her “craft” and to prohibit any married women or nuns from partaking of their establishments’ shelter. Further, whores could not solicit or “throw stones” at passersby to get custom. In this way, the bishop of Winchester’s conscience was assuaged. Local burghers could happily run the bishop’s businesses. The Thames wherry men were delighted with the increase in their trade, and the owners of the playhouses, Henslowe and his son-in-law Alleyn, joined in, finding brothel-keeping at least as profitable as the theater.19 Soon, Francis Langley planned to build the Swan theater on the Bankside, much to the objection of the powerless Lord Mayor. Even Elizabeth’s cousin Lord Hunsdon had taken on the farmed-out enterprise of the Paris Garden from the bishop of Winchester. While the Lord Mayor fulminated, sometimes more successfully than others, this happy solution ultimately provided us with the plays by Marlowe, his successor Shakespeare, and the flowering Renaissance of English theater.
* * *
There were other religious winds blowing against the theater and its players beside those of the Puritan aldermen in London. The Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth’s “Sweet Robin,” had died shortly after the failed Armada invasion in September 1588. Francis Walsingham followed in April 1590. William, Lord Burghley, was gnarled with arthritis and crippled by gout and old age. Though he remained her councillor until his death in August 1598, his voice in the affairs of state had become fainter. These pillars of Elizabeth’s Privy Council had deserted her to death and infirmity.
The new generation of councillors, advising or alternatively coercing Elizabeth, was brash, ambitious, and looking toward their personal futures. Leicester had brought forward his bright, beautiful stepson Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, as his proposed successor in the mid-1580s. Elizabeth undoubtedly saw a young Robert Dudley in Essex, and a past long forgotten. Where Essex relied on his charm, talent, and wit, Burghley’s chosen successor, his younger son, Robert Cecil, used his ambition, Machiavellian streak, and raw intellect in the service of the crown. Essex was born to a title and wealth; Cecil as the younger son was not. Walter Raleigh had come to court slightly before Essex and was one of the reasons for Leicester’s bringing his stepson into the limelight when he did. Though Raleigh had begun without a personal fortune to his name, Elizabeth had made him one of the wealthiest men in England and the largest landholder by far in Ireland. Francis Bacon, most likely the brightest of them all and Robert Cecil’s first cousin, had been barred from high office due to an unwise inaugural speech in Parliament, as much as by a lack of support from Burghley. Where Elizabeth had been adept in her younger days at keeping warring factions at bay, her royal will would be tested by the new dramatis personae.
If Essex represented Elizabeth’s heart, Cecil stood up for her steely will. He knew he was dwarfish and misshapen, as over 25 percent of all Tudor children were due to the poor diets of their mothers while pregnant. He knew he would never win any beauty contests as Essex could. Nor did he have Essex’s gift of verse-making. So Cecil made up for his lack of physical presence with a mind like a steel trap and a skill for oratory that would develop in the coming years.
Though Walsingham had died in April 1590, a year later, no one had been appointed to replace him. Essex had been spurned for the job. Not only had Elizabeth refused to consider him for Walsingham’s vacant position, but she refused to appoint him to the Privy Council. When Elizabeth visited Burghley’s home at Theobalds in May 1591, Cecil put on a not-too-subtle play for her in which a messenger delivered a dispatch for “Mr. Secretary Cecil.” Three months later, with a strong shove center stage from his father, Robert Cecil, aged only twenty-eight, became a privy councillor. Essex fumed that the “elf” had been singled out for this exceptional honor. Raleigh was livid, and perhaps it was this that threw him into the arms of Elizabeth Throckmorton that year.
Still, Burghley wasn’t dead yet. Nor was he quite ready to allow the baton of defender of the Elizabethan settlement to pass into the hands of his son. In October 1591 Burghley issued a royal proclamation “Establishing Commissions against Seminary Priests and Jesuits” as part of his Declaration of Great Troubles Pretended against the Realme by a number of Seminary priests and Jesuits. It was deliberately intended to accuse Philip of prolonging “the former violence and rigor of [his] malice” against England with renewed Armada threats.
Burghley, for once, wrote quite stirring words. He accused Philip, with the authority of the new Pope Gregory XIV “hanging at his girdle,” of practicing “with certain principal seditious heads, being unnatural subjects of our kingdom … to gather together with great labours upon his charges a multitude of dissolute young men, who have, partly for lack of living, partly for crimes committed, become fugitives, rebels, and traitors, and for whom there are in Rome and Spain and other places certain receptacles made to live in and there to be instructed in school points of sedition.”20
The new, and short-lived, Gregory XIV (Niccolò Sfondrati of Milan), was more concerned with the French wars of religion, which were not going well, despite his excommunication of the Protestant Henry IV. Nonetheless, both the pope and Philip were outraged by Burghley’s accusation that they were guilty of fomenting disloyalty to Elizabeth. Burghley knew better, though. He had already learned that they were actively seeking a suitable heir to the English throne—a topic of discussion long outlawed by the queen.
Robert Persons became the Catholic strategist for a response to Burghley. With Richard Verstegan, his official in Antwerp, he drafted a reply with the catchy title A Declaration of the True Causes of the great troubles, presupposed to be intended against the realm of England, or A Declaration for short. While denying any close links with Spain, A Declaration was nonetheless printed with Philip II’s money. When it was received by Anthony Bacon, the head of Essex’s secret service, it came with a health warning: “a seditious vile book which … might be kept from any but such as were affected.”21
* * *
As the war of words between Jesuit interests and Burghley became hot, there were other pressing issues at home. Burghley, t
he ultimate statesman, had ensured that Cecil became his natural inheritor, as well as the man in charge of the bulk of Francis Walsingham’s network of spies and informants.
This is precisely where the trouble began. By May 1593, Robert Cecil was the most powerful man in all England. Though Essex had been admitted as a privy councillor that February, Cecil’s grip on government had already tightened. Walsingham’s papers had been “stolen”—presumably confiscated by Cecil, who now ran Walsingham’s spy network. His ability to smooth himself into place as Walsingham’s natural successor has long made him the “presumed thief” of Walsingham’s papers.22 Effectively, Cecil was now prime minister, home secretary, and foreign minister. With Burghley increasingly infirm, Cecil oversaw his own remit as well as his father’s and did both jobs extremely well. In no time at all, Elizabeth had promoted Cecil in her esteem from her “pigmy” to her “elf.”
This was the state of affairs in government when the theaters closed for most of 1592 due to a prolonged bout of plague. The economy shrank and times were hard. Shakespeare retired to his Stratford-upon-Avon home and wrote his two epic poems, Venus and Adonis followed by the Rape of Lucrece, both dedicated to Essex’s young friend Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. Marlowe, too, hunted for a patron to supplement his lack of income from the stage. With years of outspokenness behind him and accusations of atheism common knowledge, Marlowe was unable to find paying work, other than for the government as an undercover agent.
To make matters more difficult for him, Henry Chettle’s prefatory letter for a new pamphlet called Kind-Heart’s Dream reopened the thorny issue of Marlowe’s atheism, theoretically making him unfit as a playwright. Even Robert Greene’s The Groatsworth of Wit had attacked both Marlowe and Shakespeare the preceding year. Shakespeare, now under the patronage of Southampton, received effusive apologies; Marlowe was only given insults as a diabolical atheist.23
Marlowe, to lick his wounds, retired to the manor house of his erstwhile “handler” Thomas Walsingham, first cousin of Francis, who had just been released from prison for debt. In January 1593, Strange’s Men performed Marlowe’s last play, The Massacre at Paris, about the gruesome St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.24 The play was even more newsworthy in 1593, as Henry III had murdered Henry of Guise in 1589, then been assassinated himself only nine months later. Catholic France now had a Protestant king, Henry IV, formerly Henry of Navarre, who was still battling for his throne with English aid.
It was the “show it like it is” violence of The Massacre that struck the audiences dumb. Marlowe was confronting the religious violence of his times. Elizabethans evidently loved it, as it was Strange’s Men’s best earner of the short winter season. In early spring, plague struck again, the worst outbreak in thirty years. It would claim 8 percent of London’s population—but Marlowe’s expression of violence in The Massacre would soon threaten all London.
* * *
On February 17, the remains of the separatist Roger Rippon were brought to the Cheapside home of Justice Richard Young. His coffin proclaimed that Rippon was the last of the seventeen great enemies “of God, the Archbishop of Canterbury, with the High Commissioners, have murdered in Newgate within these five years.” Archbishop Whitgift had indeed been incarcerating separatists—the more orthodox of the Puritan shades of gray—to Newgate for the previous two years. There they rotted, without trial, in Newgate’s infamous “Limbo,” left to die.
John Penry, the Welsh pamphleteer and good friend of the printer Robert Waldegrave, was arrested on March 22. Separatist leaders Henry Barrow and John Greenwood were arrested the following day under the 1581 “Seditious Words” statute. What had once been a charge of blasphemy or heresy was now treason. They claimed they never intended the queen any harm. Only four days after Penry’s arrest a new royal commission was created to hunt down Barrowists, Separatists, Catholic recusants, counterfeiters, vagrants, and anyone else who does “secretly adhere to our most capital Enemy the Bishop of Rome or otherwise do willfully deprave condemn or impugn the Divine Service and Sacraments.”25 Alien religions and atheism were one and the same.
By April, libels began to appear threatening the city’s stranger population, mostly Dutch and French Huguenot, who had been living peaceably for decades within London’s walls. Cardinal William Allen’s view was that Elizabeth was repopulating England with strangers “of the worst sort … to the great impoverishing of the inhabitants, and no small peril of the whole realm.”
Then, in May, a rhymester who called himself “Tamburlaine” after Marlowe’s great play conflated the public hysteria against foreigners and Marlowe’s great works with devastating results. Tamburlaine’s verse is directed against foreigners, merchants, Machiavellians, and Jews and begins:
Your Machiavellian Merchant spoils the state,
Your usury doth leave us all for dead
Your artifex and craftsman works out fate,
And like the Jews, you eat us up as bread.
Twenty-six lines later, Tamburlaine finally gets to the point: “We’ll cut your throats, in your temples praying.”
Elizabeth was extremely worried. At the weekly Privy Council meeting on May 11, she demanded Cecil call a halt to the sedition. The Dutch churchyard had been smeared with libels, as had the Huguenot church. He was ordered to put the Lord Mayor under pressure to discover the heart of this outrage and examine anyone who might be suspicious.
Meanwhile, Cecil ordered the arrest of one of his former unruly agents, Richard Cholmeley, who he suspected of involvement in a plot to kill the queen. When Cholmeley had gathered some sixty armed thugs to his side as Cecil’s recusant-hunter, he had gone too far. Cholmeley’s elder brother, Sir Hugh, had been a great friend of Cecil’s, and Richard’s behavior was proving threatening. By the time Cecil interrogated Cholmeley that May, the rogue agent had embraced atheism, and Christopher Marlowe. No wonder Burghley said, “I find the matter as in a labyrinth: easier to enter into it than to go out.”26 When Cecil discovered that Cholmeley was associated with a new plot by the pope and Philip II, known as the Stanley Plot, which was already under way for another invasion of England through Scotland, the queen was informed. The date was May 26, 1593.
The playwright Thomas Kyd, onetime roommate and bedmate of Christopher Marlowe, had been arrested nearly two weeks earlier. Hidden among Kyd’s papers were “vile heretical Conceits denying the deity of Jesus Christ.” Cecil ordered Kyd to be taken to Bridewell and tortured. Bridewell’s most feared feature was something called “the scavenger’s daughter”—an iron ring tightened by the turn of a screw that brings the head, feet, and hands together until they form a circle behind the victim’s back. Kyd held out in “the scavenger’s daughter” as long as he could before he denounced his friend Marlowe, saying that “it was his custom in table talk or otherwise, to jest at the divine scriptures, jibe at prayers, and strive in argument to frustrate and confute what hath been spoke or writ by prophets and such holy men.”27
Cecil’s network reacted in much the same way it had done when Walsingham was in charge. It set out to entrap the conspirators. Burghley was brought into the inner circle and needed little prompting about his previous dealings with Marlowe. The last time Burghley had seen the playwright had been fourteen months earlier, when he shielded Marlowe from a charge of high treason for counterfeiting. The hazy question of whether Marlowe was a single, double, or triple agent loomed unanswered.
At the end of the day, like Cholmeley, Marlowe had become a severe liability. Two days later the playwright was arrested at Thomas Walsingham’s Kent home. By May 20, bail had been posted.28 So long as Marlowe checked in on a daily basis with Cecil, he could remain at liberty. In the meantime, executions of other separatists began. John Penry was removed to Surrey, where he was hanged at five in the afternoon.
On May 30, Marlowe joined a small feast in a private dining room at the home of Eleanor Bull at Deptford, less than a mile from the royal palace of Greenwich. The other guests at the private
feast were Ingram Frizer, an operative of Thomas Walsingham’s and known swindler, and Nicholas Skerres and Robert Poley, both veteran operatives of Francis Walsingham’s network. Christopher Marlowe, the most talented playwright of his day, was stabbed in the eye by Frizer and killed. Frizer walked free on the testimony of Skerres and Poley.
The warning to playwrights from the government was clear. No one was above the law.
TWENTY-FIVE
Elizabeth’s Eminence Grise and the Final Battles for England
The Queen in all her robes had fallen the first day of the parliament … The King [James] did fall without harm, the French King [Henry IV] with a great bruise; which proves that some great planet in this configuration was precipitate. But God is gracious.
—Henry Howard to James VI, 1601
The world of the 1590s was a distinctly different place for Elizabeth’s England. The war with Spain had been “hot” since 1585—ever since the queen had agreed to send Leicester at the head of an army to the Netherlands—but when Parma had taken Calais from the French, Henry IV, already financed by Elizabeth, needed more able men and supplies. Essex, who in Elizabeth’s eyes was her ablest soldier, was sent with his “volunteers” to fight by Henry’s side.
When Essex returned home from the siege of Rouen at the end of 1592, England was a plague-ridden country. The economy was suffering from a slowdown due to widespread death and illness. The exchequer was drained due to the prolonged war. For Elizabeth, the quickest and most efficient way to rebuild her dwindling financial resources was to send her adventurers to sea for plunder.
Raleigh and the Duke of Cumberland became the heroes of an action called the Islands Voyage of 1596, seizing the Portuguese carrack Madre de Díos and sailing her back to England. Its precious cargo of gold, spices, and gemstones had an estimated worth of £150,000.
