Who Killed Kit Marlowe?

by M. J. Trow

  Farewell, sweet Robyn, if as I take thee, true to me. If not, adieu, omnium bipedum nequissimus [the worst thing on two feet]...the furnace is prepared wherein our faith must be tried. Farewell till we meet, which God knows when.

  Thine, how far thou knowest,

  Anthony Babington

  Seven years before Deptford, Robert Poley was already instrumental in killing a man.

  The bells rang out in thanks for the safe delivery of the Queen and the interrogations by her paranoid state officials began. The result was foregone. On 20 September the seven conspirators in the Babington Plot were dragged on sleds through the howling London mob from Tower Hill to the open square of St Giles in Holborn. At the express recommendation of the Privy Council, notably Burghley and Sir Christopher Hatton, the Queen’s Chancellor, the execution was to be gruesomely prolonged. Beginning with Ballard, already crippled by torture, they were to be hanged one by one until they lost consciousness, then cut down and their genitals hacked off and waved to the crowd in front of them before disembowelling. Babington, understandably, cracked, screaming, ‘Spare me, Lord Jesus!’ In the event, the Queen spared him, the worst at least, giving orders that the conspirators other than Ballard should be hanged until they were dead before the rest of the process continued. Lastly, Babington and his friends had their shoulder and hip joints sliced through before being pulled in four by horses.

  Poley was sent to the Tower on 18 August, part of the government’s round-up and an essential element of his cover. Astonishingly, he stayed in prison for nearly two years, re-establishing his old contacts with Joan Yeomans and continuing to inform Walsingham on the conversations of fellow-prisoners. His imprisonment was easy. Despite the Tower’s grim reputation as a place of murder and execution, money softened the burden and the cost of Poley’s ‘board’ has survived. He paid 5s to his keeper, 13s 4d for food and bed and 4s for fuel and candlelight. This is the sort of expenditure that may have come from Walsingham’s own pocket.

  The year 1585 was something of a watershed for England and her European neighbours. For over twenty years, Elizabeth had played a waiting game with the more powerful States of France and Spain but by the mid-1580s things had changed. There was increasing pressure on the Queen, from both Walsingham and the Earl of Leicester in the Council for involvement against both countries: in France to aid the Huguenots; and to aid the Dutch Protestants in their on-going revolt against Spanish overlordship in the Netherlands.

  Philip II likewise was under pressure from his advisers, notably Cristobal de Moura and Juan de Idiaquez, to take England in the name of Spain and the Counter-Reformation. Inexorably, if reluctantly, the former brother-and-sister-in-law were being pushed towards war. On 20 August, Elizabeth signed a treaty at her palace of Nonsuch in Surrey authorizing Leicester to land with an expeditionary force in the Netherlands to check the increasingly successful Spanish forces under Alexander Farnese, the Duke of Parma. Leicester’s tiny army, of 5,000 foot and 1,000 horse, would hardly stop the most powerful military force in Europe, but it was an irritation and it served to make a point.

  In the meantime, Francis Drake was unleashed on the Spanish treasure fleet, dipping through the tropics on their way from the mountains of silver in the Americas. Drake was a privateer, operating with government backing and with orders to loot and pillage as long as the lion’s share of the booty came home to Elizabeth. If things went wrong and Philip threatened war over these continuing insults, Elizabeth could always scream ‘pirate’ and wash her hands of Drake.

  The all-important port of Antwerp fell to the Spaniards in August and it was not until December that Leicester landed at Vlissingen. Bearing in mind that we know Marlowe was in the same town in 1592 and that the plays of his about to burst forth on the London stage are full of military allusions, some commentators have claimed that the poet-spy accompanied the Earl’s force. This seems unlikely, although we have no detailed knowledge of his movements after November when he read the will to Katherine Benchkyn in Canterbury. It simply makes little sense that an agent so useful to Walsingham should be trapped by the conventionalities of war. Marlowe was more useful as a free agent, moving as a civilian to Rheims and perhaps Paris on the Queen’s business.

  The Dutch Protestants were desperate. Their leader, the Prince of Orange, had been murdered the previous year and only four of the seventeen provinces held out against the renewed fury of the Spanish attack – Holland, Utrecht, Zeeland and Friesland were still free, but hardly united. Leicester, it quickly transpired, was neither general nor diplomat enough to handle the situation. He declared himself governor-general without the Queen’s permission and clashed with half the Dutch leaders. His very presence in the field made open war with Spain inevitable and to cap it all, the courtier-poet Sir Philip Sidney, the darling of the Court and country alike, died pointlessly at Zutphen in November 1586 because he had left off his cuisses (thigh armour) and was hit by a chance shot.

  The new Pope, Felice Peretti, who became Sixtus V in April 1585, also showed his impatience with England. An admirer in fact of Elizabeth and of the Protestant heir to the French throne, Henri of Navarre, and unhappy with the cloying domination of the Catholic League by Spain, he held off for as long as he could but the Babington Plot forced a long overdue decision from Elizabeth on the fate of her cousin Mary of Scots; it was that decision that spurred Sixtus to back the Spanish Admiral Santa Cruz’s ‘enterprise of England’.

  In the midst of all this rising tension, Christopher Marlowe went south, to London.

  FIVE

  THE MUSE’S DARLING

  ...by practice a playmaker and a poet of scurrilitie...

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

  W

  e know a great deal about Kit Marlowe’s London thanks to the keen observation of a contemporary, John Stow. A tailor from Cornhill, Stow had been publishing antiquarian works since 1560, but his Survey of London and Westminster, produced five years after Marlowe’s death, is the best. Stow was impelled by what he saw as the wanton destruction of a great city by greed and speculation. Tudor London, because of the Reformation, was the old religion’s graveyard. Great religious houses were derelict and decaying, street stalls and even theatres springing up in their Gothic shells. The city’s population, like that of the country generally, was growing. There was a frantic need to spread, to build, to occupy. And if none of this found favour with the Cornhill tailor, at least it pushed him into chronicling the movement with extraordinary, detail.

  What had dominated medieval London, physically as well as spiritually, was the Church. There were 199 spired churches in the pre-fire capital. The great monastic houses of the Friars, White, Grey and Black, were matched in size and splendour by the ‘inns’, the sprawling bishops’ palaces that ran from Westminster Abbey to the Tower. It was this ostentatious opulence that had contributed to the Reformation’s anti-clerical aspect in the eyes of most ordinary people. During the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, a fever of land speculation had broken out. Secular landlords queued up to buy the ex-church properties from the government. Noblemen such as the Earls of Southampton and Bedford built lavish houses on ecclesiastical sites – the place names alone now survive to bear witness, Southampton Row and Bedford Square among them. Elizabeth gave presents of some church properties to her favourites – Walter Ralegh graciously accepted the former ‘inn’ of the Bishop of Durham along the Strand from her. Few religious houses survived the 1530s and ‘40s and those that did focused on the public health role with was originally only part of their raison d’être – the hospitals of St Bartholomew at Smithfield, St Thomas south of the river and St Mary of Bethlehem at Bishopsgate.

  By the time Marlowe reached London, some time in 1587, three areas in the capital were expanding particularly rapidly. Population figures are elusive. Various foreigners visiting between the 1530s and 1550 guessed at between 70,000 and 185,000 inhabitants. The more rational and conservative estimates of social historians lik
e Roy Porter put the figure at the time of Marlowe’s birth at 85,000, one in fifteen of the entire population of England. Ten years after Marlowe’s death, the figure may have reached 140,000 within the medieval walls and another 40,000 in the suburbs.

  The City itself, first mapped by R. Aggas, a German cartographer in 1560, still retained its wall and was bounded by the river to the south and Moorfields to the north. To the west lay the old precincts of the Black Friars and to the east the Tower and the Hounds’ Ditch. Within these walls was all the chaos of one of the largest cities in the world. Roy Porter visualises how

  The City ... remained a mishmash, wealthy, middling and poor jostling wherever mazes of backyards and blind alleys led off main streets. Aldermen and a few aristocrats still lived within the walls; yet within spitting distance dwelt butchers, bakers and candle-stick makers with their stores and stables, fires and furnaces and rowdy apprentices under the eaves.

  The City was dominated in Marlowe’s day by the guilds, the exclusive companies of makers and sellers who doubled as chambers of commerce and nascent trade unions. The ‘Twelve Great’ – Clothmakers, Mercers, Grocers, Haberdashers, Fishmongers, Goldsmiths, Merchant Taylors, Ironmongers, Vintners, Salters, Drapers and Skinners – had their own coats of arms, liveries and ornate halls. They also provided half the City’s governing elite, the aldermen and councillors of the Common Council and Common Hall.

  To the west along the Strand, a more refined residential area was growing centred on the Queen’s palace at Whitehall. As we have noted, Elizabeth was the last of the peripatetic monarchs, but pressure of business and lack of cash combined to lessen these ‘progresses’ and increasingly as she got older she spent more time at Whitehall and Greenwich. The noble houses of Somerset, the Savoy and Durham fronted the river, with their private boat moorings for speed of travel. The church of St Martin’s was still just about in the fields to the north of Charing Cross and, south of that, ran the clerk-infested corridors of power at Whitehall – the Parliament House and Star Chamber. Here, too, were the Inns of Court, stretching along Fleet Street, spawning lawyers to deal with the ever-increasing tide of paperwork that characterised an increasingly literate society. The Fleet itself was still an open tributary of the Thames, ever more polluted and a growing source of infection in an already overcrowded city. Of the Inns of Court, the Middle Temple (1571) and the Staple (1581) were the newest buildings to have appeared in Marlowe’s time.

  This area, from the bend in the river at Scotland Yard north to Holborn Bar, was far more homogeneous than the old City. It was the first of the suburban ghettoes, populated by the professions and the new breed of men elevated by the Tudors to positions of responsibility and power.

  The third expansionist area of John Stow’s and Christopher Marlowe’s London was to the east and south, beyond the medieval construction of the City and its jurisdiction. These were the liberties; where land was cheaper, fields still a commonplace and regulations absent. Along Aldgate High Street grew the tenements and mean hovels detested by Stow – the ‘nurseries and seminary places of the begging poor that swarm within the City’. Beyond Bishopsgate, there were jerry-built cottages – ‘with alleys backward, of late time too much pestered with people (a great cause of infection)’. Out of the City to the east ran streets that followed the river’s course through the mud flats to Wapping. Here lived and worked the sailors and ‘marine men’ who also dominated Deptford further south and east with the growth of the royal shipyards. To the north-east ran the Ratcliffe Highway, to Shadwell and Stepney, then still villages surrounded by countryside. This area, Stow complained ‘bee pestered with buildings, with Cottages, with Allies, even up to White chappel church and almost halfe a myle beyond it ...’

  All these areas shared one thing – the growth in the importance of money and trade. The opening up of the New World led to exploration and merchants followed in its wake, tentatively at first, then in a torrent.

  The sense of growth, of power, of London as the new financial capital of the world, was crystallised in the official opening of Thomas Gresham’s Royal Exchange in 1570. Stow recorded it:

  In the year 1570, on the 23rd of January, the Queen’s Majesty attended with her nobility came from her house at the Strand called Somerset House and entered the City by Temple Bar, through Fleet Street, Cheap and so by the north side of the Bourse [Exchange] through Threadneedle Street to Sir Thomas Gresham’s in Bishopsgate Street, where she dined. After dinner Her Majesty, returning through Cornhill, entered the Bourse on the south side; and after that she had viewed every part thereof above the ground, especially the Pawn [enclosed gallery] which was richly furnished with all sorts of the finest wares in the City, she caused the same Bourse by an herald and a trumpet to be proclaimed the Royal Exchange, and so to be called from thenceforth and not otherwise.

  We do not know exactly when Marlowe left Cambridge, but it must have been before 10 November 1587 when, according to the Registrum Parvum, Bene’t’s College’s Order Book, a successor was elected to the Parker scholarship that Marlowe had vacated now that he had obtained his second degree. It is likely that the university authorities were glad to see the back of him. He had flouted their regulations by absenting himself and then getting no less an authority than the Queen’s Privy Council to intercede on his behalf. He had spent money ostentatiously in the college Buttery, arousing who knows what animosity among students and Fellows poorer by far. He may or may not have worn the flashy clothes of the Corpus Christi portrait, but if he did, this was another gesture of defiance to authority and orthodoxy and some, like Gabriel Harvey, perhaps, were aware of his dabbling in the dubious works of Machiavelli and Bruno, as well as the lascivious ones of Ovid. Like all Bene’t scholars, Marlowe had been destined for a career in the Church, but clearly that was not about to happen.

  From the north, Marlowe would have travelled, probably on horseback, to Saffron Walden and Bishop’s Stortford before riding through Epping Forest and on through Woodford and Leyton. Five years later, Frederick, Duke of Würtemberg, found himself on the same road – ‘we passed through a villainous boggy and wild country and several times missed our way because the country thereabout is little inhabited and is nearly a waste...’. He would have crossed the Hackney Marshes and ridden south-west through Shoreditch. His most probably point of entry to the City was through Bishopsgate and although there is no hard evidence we believe that his first lodgings were not far from here. Marlowe was a poet and a scholar – what more natural than that he should want to live near the heart of book-land? And that, in Marlowe’s day, meant the churchyard of St Paul’s. In one of the earliest publications of Marlowe’s translation of Lucan, Thomas Thorpe, published, wrote: ‘in memory of that pure elemental wit, Chr. Marlowe, whose ghost or genius is to be seen walk the churchyard in (at the least) three or four sheets.’ The heart of it all was the central aisle of the great church, known as Paul’s Walk. Forty years after Marlowe, John Earle in his Microcosmographie (1628) wrote:

  Paul’s walk is the land’s epitome, or you may call it the lesser isle of Great Britain. It is more than this the whole world’s map...jostling and turning. It is a heap of stones and men, with a vast confusion of languages, and were the steeple not sanctified, nothing liker Babel. The noise in it is like that of bees, a strange humming or buzz, mixed of walking, tongues and feet. It is a kind of still roar or loud whisper. It is the great exchange of all discourse, and no business whatsoever but is stirring and afoot. It is the synod of all pates politic, jointed and laid together in most serious posture and they are not half so busy at the parliament. It is the antic of tails to tails and backs to backs, and for wizards you need go no further than faces. It is the market of young lecturers, whom you may cheapen here at all rates and sizes. It is the general mint of all famous lies, which are here, like the legends of popery, first coined and stamped in the church. All inventions are emptied here, and not a few pockets...It is the other expense of the day, after plays, tavern and a bawdy-ho
use; and men still have some oaths left to swear here....The visitants are all men without exceptions...stale knights and captains out of service, men of long rapiers and breeches...and traffic for new....Of all such places it is least haunted with hob-goblins, for if a ghost would walk more, he could not.

  London was the heart of the book world. William Caxton had set up his first printing press at the sign of the Red Pale in Westminster Abbey as early as 1476. His foreman and successor, Wynken de Worde (Jan van Wynkyn), took over Caxton’s business and set up two presses, one at The Sun in Fleet Street, the first tentative beginnings of the newspaper capital; and the other in St Paul’s churchyard by 1509. St. Paul’s was probably the biggest church in the world, easily dominating the City skyline along with the Tower, even though the spire was destroyed by lightning in 1561 and the fire had affected part of the south aisle. This incident itself affords an early example of London journalism; within a week of the event, broadsheets describing the calamity were circulating all over the City.

  By the year that Marlowe went to London, there were twenty-five printers working in and around Paternoster Row (now Paternoster Square), where dozens of stationers (publishers) and booksellers sold their wares. The Company of Stationers established in 1557 gave them an effective monopoly of printing, which explains why Catholic and other ‘heretical’ texts had to be printed in secret or imported from Europe. Acceptable works – the Bible, Foxe’s Martyrs, moralistic fables – sold well. Ballads cost a penny, almanacs twopence, chap-books threepence. Marlowe’s friend the poet Thomas Nashe wrote Pierce Penniless in 1592 and described one of the regulars in the churchyard: