Who Killed Kit Marlowe?

by M. J. Trow

  After Leicester, the suitors were diplomatic projects and that meant the spectre of foreign domination. In Elizabeth’s age, with parliament a cypher and democracy non-existent, this was more likely. The first offer came from the ascetic Catholic fanatic, Philip II of Spain, Elizabeth’s former brother-in-law, who had spent a miserable fourteen months in England as Mary’s husband before returning to his curious monastic palace of the Escorial. The offer carried too many strings, not the least of which was that Elizabeth should return to the bosom of the Catholic Church, and she politely, persistently, refused. It would take twenty years for Philip’s dealing with Elizabeth to change from marriage proposal to war.

  Hot on the heels of Spain was Prince Erik of Sweden, although to be fair, the man had proposed to Elizabeth when she was a princess. Despite the ardent love-letters he sent her, the sticking place was that neither monarch was prepared to leave his or her country, so the ardour cooled. Elizabeth never took Sweden’s claim all that seriously but, as was her way, she kept Erik dangling for as long as politics deemed it expedient.

  Erik in fact was regarded as a genuine threat by the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand I, who offered, via the usual ambassadorial channels, either of his sons, the Archdukes Ferdinand and Charles. ‘For many thought,’ wrote Count von Helenstein in the spring of 1560, ‘that one of them would soon become consort of the Queen, and rule her and England.’ Elizabeth kept Archduke Charles guessing until the summer of 1570, by which time he was actively pursuing a Bavarian princess.

  In 1571, France entered the game. When the Queen was thirty-eight years old and dangerously near to the menopause, Catherine de Medici put forward her nineteen year old son, Henri, Duke of Anjou, as a possible suitor. There were strong political reasons in both English and French camps for this alliance to be made to work and even Leicester, whatever his personal feelings, saw it as the least of several possible evils. Feelers were put out in Paris under the watchful eye of the English ambassador – a man who would become central to the Marlowe case, Sir Francis Walsingham. In the event, time and politics moved on and the following year, Anjou’s brother François, Duke of Alençon, twenty years the Queen’s junior, was put forward by his redoubtable mother. Elizabeth kept this project going for six years, by which time she was forty-five. Things looked good. Elizabeth took to Jean de Simier, Alençon’s ambassador and referred to the duke as her ‘frog’. ‘I have very good hope,’ wrote Simier in the April of 1579, ‘but will wait to say more til the curtain is drawn, the candle out, and Monsieur [Alençon] in bed.’ He was right to be cautious; it was another example of Elizabeth playing the matrimonial game for political reasons, and the political moment was not right.

  The other great problem confronting Elizabeth was that of religion and this, unlike the marriage issue, was to involve Christopher Marlowe directly. Elizabeth had set up the Church of England in 1559 as a via media, a compromise between Catholics and Protestants. Like all compromises, it offered an often difficult tightrope for good men to walk and was bitterly attacked by the extremists on both sides.

  The Catholic assault on the church settlement was both the older and the more obvious. Decisions take by Elizabeth in convocation with her bishops cut no ice with men whose families had been diehard adherents of Rome for centuries. It may be that most ordinary people were ready to accept whatever state religion was thrown at them, but this did not apply to the fanatics. Elizabeth had been careful to minimize persecution, as this lent her and Protestantism an aura of tolerance and even popularity. It was Rome itself that cranked the bigotry up several notches on 25 February 1570 when Pope Pius V published his famous bull of excommunication. In Catholic eyes, Elizabeth was the daughter of the king’s whore, Anne Boleyn, and therefore illegitimate. She had no right to rule England, still less to make arbitrary pronouncements on spiritual matters, such as the government of the Church. Her claim to be ‘governor’ of the Church of England fooled no one; she ran it and was running it to Hell. The bull was an open incitement to rebellion. Good Catholics must obey Rome. That was unequivocal and there was no room for the fence-sitting in which too many English Catholics had indulged for the last eleven years. The ‘Jezebel of England’ must be resisted and the true path followed. Perhaps the bull was supposed to be timed as a rallying cry for the rebellion of the North, but given the communication problems of the age, the result was a failure.

  Briefly told, the north was discontented. Fuelled by their continued support for Elizabeth’s rival, Mary, Queen of Scots, great Catholic lords like the Earls of Westmorland and Northumberland (not to mention the Spanish ambassador) threatened a rising which threw the Queen and her Protestant Privy Councillors into a state of high alert. Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk (whose family had never left the ‘old religion’) was quick to distance himself from the half-baked scheme to murder most of the government and to place the imprisoned Queen of Scots on the throne of England. Even so, he went to the Tower and other Catholic lords, like Arundel and Pembroke, were placed under house arrest. An army was sent north under Lord Hunsdon, the Queen’s cousin, who sacked village after village with alarming zeal. By the late winter of 1570 (when Pius published his bull) as many as 750 had been executed, ‘the bodies to remain till they fall to pieces where they hang’, no doubt to encourage the others. Two hundred landowners had lost their estates and Norfolk was stripped of the highest order of chivalry in the land, the Garter.

  The failure of the northern rebellion and Elizabeth’s reaction to it proved two things. First, Catholicism and treason were becoming synonymous and second, the Queen pulled no punches unleashing the full terror of the state. On 8 July, when the Catholic John Felton fixed the Pope’s bull to the gate of the Bishop of London’s palace, he was arrested, tortured and executed. In the following year, Elizabeth passed an Act of Parliament (13 Eliz. cap.1) which made it a treasonable offence to refer to the Queen as a heretic, usurper, schismatic, tyrant or infidel. Later legislation would pass the death sentence on anyone implying that Elizabeth would even have a successor, much less guessing who it might be. The paraphernalia of the Church of Rome, such as rosaries and the Agnus Dei, symbols increasingly associated with idolatry and the Antichrist, were banned from importation. What was needed, if the Catholics were to regain lost ground, was a full blown Jesuit mission on Counter-Reformation lines; and that was provided in the summer before Christopher Marlowe went up to Cambridge.

  The newer – and more insidious – threat to the stability of Elizabeth’s fledgling Church was the rise of Puritanism. As early as December 1565, a hard core group centred on St. John’s College Cambridge, criticised the Queen for moving too slowly against popery. The monster of protest brought into being by the monk Martin Luther fifty years earlier had grown a hundred heads by the time the papacy launched a Counter-Reformation against it. In the German states in the 1520s and 1530s, it had led to open warfare between the two sides and physical attacks on clergy and their churches. In Elizabeth’s England, the adherents of the new fundamentalism followed the ascetic principles laid down by the Frenchman Jean Calvin in Geneva; Christ, not Elizabeth, was the governor of the Church. By the following year, the new fanaticism showed itself in a distinctly unholy row over church vestments. Criticism of the playing of organs in church services, kneeling at communion and the sign of the cross during baptism assumed second place to the fury evoked by the wearing of the surplice – ‘the livery of Antichrist’. In vain did the scholarly Matthew Parker, chosen by Elizabeth as her Archbishop of Canterbury, try to control the priesthood in his Book of Advertisements in 1566. Many clergy ignored it, including his own bishops, and some went so far as to undermine the essentially hierarchical nature of the Elizabethan Church and State by asserting that ‘all ministers must be equal’.

  From Cambridge came a Puritan leader whom J.B. Black describes as ‘the most dangerous man in the church’. His name was Thomas Cartwright, Fellow of Trinity College and a professor of divinity. As Cartwright used the evidence of the Bible
to argue that much church practice and belief was simply an accretion of medieval ritual, he was deprived of his living, first as professor, then as Fellow, and finally, by 1574, was driven to flee to Europe for his safety. The Puritans were making their mark, however. In 1571 and 1572, two Admonitions were submitted to parliament. The character of English Puritanism is highly complicated, but the broad change happening in this period was from Calvinism, with its depressing predestination, to Presbyterianism with its egalitarianism and opposition to bishops. By involving parliament, the Puritans were not only by-passing the Queen and her Privy Councillors, they were issuing a challenge to the Commons, itself becoming increasingly Puritan in its outlook and increasingly vocal as a group. Unknowingly, they were lighting the slow fuse that would lead to the Civil War and the execution of a king.

  On 17 May 1575, while Christopher Marlowe was probably a commoner at the King’s School, Matthew Parker died. He had effectively been a pawn in Elizabeth’s game (as were many others among her subjects), given the impossible task of implementing the church settlement, often without her active support and equally often with opposition from influential courtiers like Robert Dudley. Parker’s replacement was Edmund Grindal, the former Archbishop of York, who quickly fell foul of the Queen over the ‘prophesyings’, a series of meetings of clergy who were turning more and more into forums for discussion and criticism. Elizabeth ordered them stopped and when Grindal refused, he was effectively dismissed. For the last six years of his life, his powers as the Primate of All England were severely curtailed.

  The on-going struggle between the rival denominations produced a chaotic number of shades of grey. If we take the Marlowes’ church of St George’s in Canterbury as an example, we have no idea what actual liturgical practices were followed when Christopher was baptised and John became churchwarden. Was the prayer book followed, or did the congregation sing psalms? Where was the communion table – ‘altarwise a yard distant from the wall’, or elsewhere? Did the priest wear his surplice at Kit’s christening? Did he use leavened or unleavened bread for communion? It was to settle these issues that Archbishop Parker wrote his Advertisements; but even under his nose, the priest of St George’s may have defied him.

  Throughout the years of crisis, the sword of Damocles over Elizabeth’s head took the form of her cousin, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. It is beyond the scope of this book to chronicle the Amazonian battle between these two, but inasmuch as Mary became the totem for Catholic hopes and directly or indirectly the hub of several plots, her life did indeed touch Kit Marlowe’s. The daughter of James V of Scotland by his second wife, she was born at Linlithgow in 1542. At a week old, she was Queen of Scotland and at the age of six was packed off to France in a marriage of convenience to the Dauphin, eldest son of the formidable Catherine de Medici. In the space of two years, she was the Queen of France and then widow of Francis II, returning to Scotland in 1561 to find her Catholic religion under mounting attack from John Knox and the Presbyterians. Knox was a Catholic turned Calvinist; his bigotry led to open warfare and backstairs murder.

  As with Elizabeth, there was a flurry of suitors for her hand. In the event, Mary married her cousin, Henry, Lord Darnley. Political intrigue and backstairs double-dealing saw an increasingly alienated Darnley involved in the murder of Mary’s Italian secretary, David Rizzio, at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh in 1566. Darnley himself was blown up in a house in Kirk o’ Field on Sunday 9 February 1567; with or without his wife’s connivance is uncertain. When Mary took the fatal step of marrying James Hepburn, the Protestant Earl of Bothwell, who probably organised Darnley’s murder and had certainly been her lover, the nobility of the Lowlands rose against her. Crossing to England after a series of reversals, Mary effectively became Elizabeth’s prisoner for the last twenty years of her life and the focus for any discontented or deranged Catholic throughout the entire period.

  Much of the work of Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s greatest Secretary of State, and that of Francis Walsingham, her spymaster, revolved around the carefully guarded movements of the Scottish Queen; they noted to whom she wrote and at whom she smiled. Their world, of intrigue, suspicion and forked-tongues, was one that Kit Marlowe would come to know soon enough.

  On the international stage, Europe was convulsed with the struggles of the Counter-Reformation and the birth-pangs of nationhood. In 1545, the Council of Trent had spearheaded a fighting comeback by the Catholic Church, reeling as it had been under the attacks of Luther, Zwingli, Melanchthon, Calvin and many more. The Index Prohibitorum was a list of banned books which good Catholics should not read; Henry VIII himself had been named Fidei Defensor (Defender of the Faith) for destroying Luther’s tracts. The Society of Jesus, founded by the Spanish ex-soldier Ignatius Loyola, in 1540, was an attempt to provide sound and simple rules by which good Catholics should live. Out of this order came the Jesuits, a fanatical band of missionary priests prepared to give their lives for Rome. Many of them would have to. The most odious product of the Counter-Reformation was the Holy Inquisition with its rack, its thumb-screws and its ‘Spanish Horse’, a triangle made of wood over which a man’s legs were stretched across a dull blade. There is no doubt that thousands perished in the middle to late years of the sixteenth century as the Roman Church clawed back some of the land lost to Protestantism.

  Because the Pope was an Italian prince, and because the Queen of England was also head of her Church, religion and politics went hand in hand. Philip II of Spain and Catherine de Medici of France were powerful, shrewd and ambitious rulers of their respective countries; they were also good Catholics. And across the Channel from them both lay the Protestant whore, an excommunicant whose lands could, at least in theory, be wrested from her by diplomacy or war.

  The years of crisis in which Christopher Marlowe grew up left their mark on England. The government, already rattled and without recourse to an organised police force or a standing army, was driven to paranoia by plots, real and imaginary. Bigotry and superstition went hand in hand too, along with religion and politics. How much of this affected the scholar of the King’s School with his Latin and his Greek, his grey fustian robes and his singing of the works of the Catholic recusant William Byrd, we cannot know.

  At Cambridge, all that would change.

  THREE

  BENE’T’S COLLEGE

  ...by profession, a scholler...

  Thomas Beard, Theatre of God’s Judgement (1597)

  W

  e do not know exactly how Christopher Marlowe got to Cambridge or how long the journey from Canterbury took. He left early in December 1580, probably crossing the Thames by ferry at Greenwich before finding the road north to Cambridge.

  It was an age of maps. The cartographer Christopher Saxton, himself probably Cambridge educated, was commissioned by the Queen to carry out, under the patronage of Thomas Seckford, Master of the Queen’s Requests, a survey of every county of England. By 1579, after four years’ work he had completed the monumental task with extraordinary accuracy. Had young Marlowe seen such an atlas, the first of its kind produced? Or did he merely trust to luck, rustic signposts and asking directions? In his portmanteau, he carried letters from Canterbury announcing him as Archbishop Parker Scholar, making for Corpus Christi.

  Oppidum Cantabrigia, the town of Cambridge, carefully engraved by Richard Lyne in 1574, straddled the Cam on its way to Huntingdon and the Fens. From the south, Marlowe would have walked along Trumpington Street and into the High Ward (today’s King’s Parade). There was no city wall like the one circling Canterbury and no barbican gates. Cambridge was small and lacked the status of Marlowe’s birthplace. Its castle, on high ground to the north, was already a ruin in 1580. Cambridge had probably been a Roman settlement, although no record survives of its name. Its oldest churches are pre-Conquest and it earned a royal charter in the twelfth century. The river brought wool from Norwich, wood and charcoal from the forests of the Midlands and seacoal from the north. In 1581 the university of Cambridge numbered a
n estimated 1,862 students and according to a contemporary report to parliament, ‘an hundred preachers at least, very worthy men.’

  The college of Corpus Christi, the body of Christ, lay between the churches of St Botolph and St Benedict (Bene’t). Lyne’s map shows walled gardens behind the college still labelled in 1574 Augustine Friars. The feast of Corpus Christi had been instituted by the Church in 1264 in honour of the Holy Eucharist, when Pope Urban IV decreed that the festival be kept on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday. By the fourteenth century, when the Cambridge college was founded, the feast was observed throughout Western Europe. It was marked with pageants and miracle or mystery plays of the guilds and this gives the clue to the founding of the college.

  Unique among ‘Oxbridge’ colleges, Corpus Christi was the creation of two town guilds, that of St Mary and Corpus Christi. St Mary’s was the older organisation, established between 1278 and 1285. It amalgamated with Corpus Christi in the late 1340s and planned a college of priests whose primary function would be to pray for members of the guilds. If cynics today dismiss this as buying a place in Heaven, it was considered an important element in Catholic medieval life; this world was simply a brief and relatively miserable precursor to something wonderful and perpetual in the next.

  The official founding date for the college was 1352 when the building began on what today is called Old Court. The entrance was a low archway from Bene’t Street leading into the quadrangle which housed Fellows and students, who shared rooms rather in the manner of guildsmen and their apprentices.