by M. J. Trow
It is possible that, by 1589, Robert Poley had met Christopher Marlowe. He may have married the poet Thomas Watson’s sister in 1582, but had left her for the on-off affair with Joan Yeomans two years later. We have no idea if the two men remained friends in this situation – it seems unlikely. But if they did, and he and Poley continued to meet up in the late 1580s, then what more natural than that the agent should meet his fellow lodger, fellow poet and fellow spy Kit Marlowe?
It was in 1589 that the fourth member of the cast assembled at Deptford made her appearance for the first time – Eleanor Bull. She was born Eleanor Whitney of a Herefordshire family from Whitney-on-Wye who were local gentry. Any image the Puritans have left of Marlowe’s death in a tavern run by a ‘doxy’ immediately disappears. Eleanor was, allowing for the patrism of the times, a woman of substance. And as if to prove it, she was left £100 by her cousin, Blanche Parry, in a will dated 1589. Another recipient of Blanche’s generosity was another cousin, William Cecil, Lord Burghley. Yet another, though dead before Blanche Parry, was Dr John Dee, the Queen’s magnus. That the woman who owned the house in which Kit Marlowe died should be related to these men is no mere coincidence.
Eleanor had married Richard Bull, sub-bailiff at Sayes Court, the manor house in Deptford, at the church of St Mary-le-Bow in October 1571. Bull’s superior was Sir George Howard, a kinsman of the Lord Admiral whose house stood on Deptford Green and who by 1589 was the destroyer of the Armada and a national hero.
Given all these interwoven connections, there could only be one house in the country where Kit Marlowe could have met his death.
SEVEN
MACHEVILL
And let them know that I am Machevill,
And weigh not men, and therefore not men’s words.
Admir’d I am of those that hate me most.
Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta
T
he Concise Oxford Dictionary defines Machiavelli as an ‘unscrupulous schemer; one who practises duplicity in statecraft’ and blames it all on the Florentine of the same name.
Niccolò Machiavelli was a political philosopher born in Florence in 1469. Rising rapidly to power after the overthrow of the monk Savonarola in 1498, he served as diplomat for fourteen years and mixed with the most powerful rulers of the High Renaissance – Julius II, the warrior pope who commissioned Michelangelo; Louis XII of France, ‘the father of the People’, who married Henry VIII’s sister, Mary; Cesare Borgia, captain-general of the papal armies; Maximilian I of Austria, who drove the Hungarians back from the gates of Vienna. Discredited, stripped of office and tortured by the Medici family who ruled Florence from 1512, Machiavelli spent the remainder of his life writing.
The fact that the Cambridge don Gabriel Harvey could find illicit readings of the man’s book to appalling speaks volumes for the hypocrisy of Elizabethan England. As Marlowe was to pronounce to his friends in the School of Night, ‘all Protestants are hypocritical asses’. Machiavellian realpolitik was practised by the Queen and her council, but everyone decried it, claiming they operated out of nationalism, love of sovereign or religious conviction. We find amoral attitudes to politics almost without exception among the great and good of Elizabethan England, especially in the statesmen who made up the Queen’s Privy Council, Walsingham, Burghley, Howard and the rest. It took a man of extraordinary courage – or recklessness – to tell it like it was; such a man was Kit Marlowe.
Robert Greene detested him – but then, Robert Greene detested nearly everybody. He was dying when he wrote A Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance in 1592. The work, bitter and carping and based on envy, is addressed in part to Marlowe – ‘To those Gentleman his Quondam [sometime] acquaintance, that spend their wits in making plaies, R.G wisheth a better exercise, and wisdome to prevent his extremeties.’ But Kit Marlowe loved extremities; he was a man continually pushing, always on the edge.
‘Wonder not,’ Greene seems to be writing directly to Marlowe,
(for with thee I will first begin) thou famous gracer of Tragedies, that Greene, who hath said with thee (like the fool in his heart) There is no God, should now give glorie unto his greatness... Why should thy excellent wit, his gift, bee so blinded, that thou shouldst give no glorie to the giver: Is it pestilent Machiavelian pollicy that thou hast studied? O peevish follie! What are his rules but mere confused mockeries, able to extirpate in small time the generation of mankind. For if Sic volo, sic iubeo [I will, so I will command] hold in those that are able to command: and if it be lawful Fas & Nefas [right or not] to do anything that is beneficial; only Tyrants should possess the earth, and they striving to exceeding tyranny, should each to other be a slaughterman; till the mightiest outliving all, one stroke were left for Death, that in one age man’s life should end.
This dog-eat-dog hypothesis was unthinkable to Greene, terrified by approaching death and anxious to be seen as a believer against the day. This was a far cry from his attitude earlier, when he wrote the transparently Machiavellian A Notable Discovery of Coosnage. It was equally unthinkable fifty years later, when the playwright Thomas Heywood penned Machiavel, as he lately appeared to his dear sons (1641) in which the Florentine is equated with all forms of sin and depravity.
The problem with works like The Prince is that once established – and misunderstood – they become a benchmark for someone to go further. That someone was Pietro Aretino, from Arezzo in Tuscany. He was the illegitimate child of a nobleman, Luigi Bacci. Writing pornography – in sonnet form, of course – at the age of sixteen, he was banished from his native town for writing satires on papal indulgences, and worked for a while as a book-binder in Perugia. In Rome, however, between 1517 and 1527, he attached himself to Pope Leo X by reason of his wit, writing skills and sheer brass neck. The sonetti lussuriosi continued, however, and he was dismissed. Quite undaunted by this setback, Aretino went on to become the confidant of Giovanni de Medici, of the same powerful family for whom Machiavelli had written, and of Francis I of France. At Venice in the 1530s he ingratiated himself via the local bishop with the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V who lavished presents on him. He is said to have died after falling off a stool, laughing at some joke! No doubt the Puritans would have seen this as God’s judgement.
Known as ‘the scourge of princes’, he was a blackmailer and intriguer in the sense in which the term ‘Machiavellian’ was used by men of the sixteenth century and it is to this that Greene alluded in A Groatsworth of Wit:
The brocher of this Diabolical Atheism is dead, and in his life had never the felicitie he aimed at: but as he began in craft, lived in fear and ended in despair Quam inscrutabilia sunt Dei indicia? [How impenetrable are the judgements of God?] this murderer of many brethren had his conscience seared like Caine; this betrayer of him that gave his life for him inherited the portion of Judas; this Apostate perished as ill as Julian [the anti-Christian Roman emperor]: and wilt thou, my friend, be his disciple?
In The Jew of Malta, Machevill speaks the prologue to the play:
Albeit the world think Machevill is dead,
Yet was his soul but flown beyond the Alps,
And now the Guise is dead, is come from France
To view this land and frolic with his friends.
To some perhaps my name is odious;
But such as love me, guard me from their tongues,
And let them know that I am Machevill,
And weigh not men, and therefore not men’s words.
Admir’d I am of those that hate me most.
Though some speak openly against my books
Yet will they read me, and therebye attain
To Peter’s chair;...
‘The Guise’ was Henri, the duke of the same name, who instigated the Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. He was assassinated in December 1588. Marlowe was actually being very careful in referring to ‘Peter’s chair’. The clear inference was that Machiavelli’s supporters were Catholic, and the duplicity of Catholics in England in the late 15
80s/early 1590s was well known. Similarly, the central character of Marlowe’s Jew, Barabas, who is clearly Machiavellian – ‘grace him as he deserves/And let him not be entertain’d the worse/Because he favours me’ – is also an outsider, more alien to England (the Maltese setting is irrelevant) than Catholics. Even his name was chosen with care; Barabas was the criminal released by the Roman Governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, in preference to Christ, who was executed. Perhaps even there, Marlowe the over-reacher was trying his luck; among the Gospel writers, John refers to Barabas as a robber, and Matthew a ‘notable prisoner’, but Mark and Luke contend that he was a rebel who had killed a man in an uprising against Jerusalem (which can only mean Roman authority, the power in the land).
Machevill does not reappear in the play, but we are left under no illusion that Barabas’s reprehensible behaviour is instigated by him. He, like Marlowe, was Machevill’s disciple:
As for myself, I walk abroad a-nights,
And kill sick people groaning under walls;
Sometimes I go about and poison wells;...
Being young, I studied physic [medicine] and began
To practise first upon the Italian;
There I enrich’d the priests with burials,
And always kept the sexton’s arms in use
With digging graves and ringing dead man’s knells.
But mass murder by poison and for the Hell of it, is not the end of Barabas/Machevill’s list of mayhem:
And after that, was I an engineer,
And in the wars ‘twixt France and Germany,
Under pretence of helping Charles the Fifth,
Slew friend and enemy with my stratagems.
Then after that was I an usuere,
And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting,
And tricks belonging unto brokery,
I fill’d the gaols with bankrouts in a year,
And with young orphans planted hospitals,
And every moon made some or other mad....
It has long been believed that Marlowe’s work is clearly discernible in Henry VI, one of the history plays in the Shakespeare canon. If this is true, then Marlowe may well have referred to Machevill already. Into the mouth of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, he puts the words
I’ll drown more sailors than the mermaid shall;
I’ll play the orator as well as Nestor,
Deceive more slyly than Ulysses could,
And, like a Sinon, take another Troy.
I can add colours to the chameleon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murderous Machevill to school.
Can I do this, and cannot get a crown?
Tut, were it further off, I’ll pluck it down.
One of the great problems for the Who Was Shakespeare? Industry is that there were no laws over copyright in his day. Shakespeare’s greatest genius lay in picking up other people’s trifles, even, in the case of Marlowe, the exact rhythm of his ‘mighty line’. And even though the author of Gloucester’s speech very likely went on to recreate the same character in Richard III, the list of the man’s dark doings are very similar to those of Barabas – two super-villains intent on doing the world harm. But whose villains are they? Shakespeare’s or Marlowe’s?
A careful study of the Machiavelli prologue in The Jew clearly shows a balance between the man’s supporters and opponents; those who see Marlowe himself in Machiavelli have overlooked this.
There is ample scope in Barabas’s asides, however, for Marlowe to malign Christians – he would rather be a hated Jew than a pitied Christian – ‘This offspring of Cain, this Jebusite/That never tasted of the Passover.’ Much of the play deals with racial slurs which were the currency of the time – ‘And thus are we on every side enrich’d./These are the blessings promis’d to the Jews’ and ‘To undo a Jew is charity and not sin.’ Certainly Barabas is a deeply unpleasant character and does not elicit our sympathy in the way that Shylock does. Some writers use this as an example of Shakespeare’s superior writing, but it is likely that Marlowe set out to create a double-dyed villain in Barabas. The Merchant is, after all, syled a comedy in the Shakespeare canon. So Barabas is prepared to lie, cheat, scheme and even poison his own daughter because she has betrayed him by becoming a Christian.
Marlowe’s contempt for Christianity is seen most clearly in the supposed conversion of Barabas and his man Ithamore, who promise to do penance and take the cross for the sins they have committed. In The Jew the fact that Jacomo the priest simply encourages the conversion to obtain Barabas’s gold underscores the duplicity and Machiavellianism of the Church. Again, by setting the play where he does and referring to the Catholic Church, Marlowe emerges as a patriot in an age when to be such could only be equated with Protestantism. Only if it was assumed that Marlowe was actually attacking the Anglican Church of Elizabeth was he sailing into dangerous waters.
In the context of Machiavellian realpolitik, historian A.G.R Smith sums up the role of Elizabeth herself admirably – ‘by her economy the Queen avoided bankruptcy; by her moderation, especially in religious matters, she avoided the possibility of civil war; by her conservative attitude to the European situation, she avoided reckless foreign adventures.’ We can be pedantic and point out the fact that she expected others to provide the cash she refused to supply – Walsingham paid his own spies and Drake had to attack Spanish silver convoys and give the lion’s share to her. Her half-hearted commitment in allowing Leicester such a meagre force to aid the Dutch achieved nothing militarily, yet still angered Spain and led to the unleashing of the Armada. But in essence Smith is right.
None of this happened by accident, however. It happened because under Elizabeth was a group of brilliant, dedicated men who watched her realm, her friends and her enemies very closely. They were all Machevills and three of them at least had a great deal to do with the murder of Christopher Marlowe.
The Privy Council was, in many ways, the forerunner of the Cabinet. It was small and followed the Queen around wherever she went so that action could be taken quickly, especially on vital questions relevant to the security of the realm. When the Queen was present at Whitehall, which she was increasingly by the 1590s, the Council met in a chamber across the corridor from hers. Equally important for our thesis is the fact that she rarely actually attended their meetings, content to let the daily business of state devolve on to their ample and highly capable shoulders.
Although there were technically twenty-two members of the Council, in the 1590s the number who actually attended on a regular basis was thirteen. The key decisions, however, were increasingly taken by as few as four. Easily the most powerful of the Council were: William Cecil, Lord Burghley, the Lord Treasure; Sir Francis Knollys, Elizabeth’s cousin and Vice-Chamberlain of her Household; Sir Francis Walsingham, Principal Secretary from 1573; Sir Christopher Hatton, Lord Chancellor from 1587; Howard of Effingham, Lord High Admiral; and Sir Robert Cecil, Burghley’s son, sworn in as late as 1591. Other officers of state, Sir John Fortescue, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir William Knollys, Comptroller of the Household and Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, took second place and their position on the Council was usually to back the others.
By the last decade of the Queen’s reign, this small, tightly knit advisory group was highly professional and enormously powerful. It is interesting, in a reign and a century riven by religious unrest, that there was only one churchman on the Council – John Whitgift, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The work of the Council is important to our understanding of what happened to Marlowe because in the days before his death he had been arrested and was bound over to report to them on a daily basis. The Council’s brief was huge – too huge, in fact, because constantly between 1575 and 1595, there are attempts to foist some of the work on to other, lesser authorities. Delegation did not come easily, partly no doubt because men used to wielding large amounts of power were loath to lose any of it; and partly because of th
e natural tendency, especially among wealthy and important Elizabethans, to go straight to the top to get matters sorted out. An example provided by A.G.R. Smith, on one typical day, 5 July 1574, makes the point. Fifteen different items were dealt with, from deciding the outcome of a private quarrel between two gentlemen, through forcing four maritime counties in the south to provide supplies for the navy, to promoting good relations with Scotland. Although all of it could be classified as ‘causes that concern her Majesty and the state of the realm’, increasingly business fell into two categories – private and public.
In the early years of the Queen’s reign, the Council met three times a week, on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. By the 1590s, however, it met virtually every day, often mornings and afternoons, which reflects the growing complexity of government and perhaps, too, an increasing reluctance on the now ageing Queen’s part to make decisions. Elizabeth’s famous ‘answers answerless’ were not merely reserved for her increasingly frustrated parliaments, but for everyone else she met.
G.R. Elton, doyen of Tudor historians of an earlier generation, contended that the Privy Council was not a court and had no judicial functions. This overstates the case. It could only impose fines on miscreants and this via the public proceedings in Star Chamber, but it was the only body in the country allowed, with nominal royal consent, to use torture. And it was not slow to engage the formidable instruments of the Inquisition and men who knew how to use them.