Who Killed Kit Marlowe?

by M. J. Trow

  with many other shall by good and honest witness be approved to be his opinions and Common Speeches, and that this Marlowe doth not only hould them himself, but almost into every Company he Cometh he persuades men to Atheism willing them not to be afeard of bugbeares and hobgoblins and utterly scorning both god and his ministers as I, Richard Baines will Justify and approve both by mine oath and the testimony of many honest men, and almost al men with whome he hath Conversed any time will testify the same, and as I think all men in Christianity ought to endeavour that the mouth of so dangerous a member may be stopped, he saith likewise that he hath quoted a number of Contrarieties oute of the Scripture which he hath given to some great men who in Convenient time shall be named. When these things shall be Called in question the witness shall be produced.

  The ‘bugbears and hobgoblins’ were childish creations of popular superstition. In 1584, the surprisingly modern Reginald Scot listed others in Discoverie of Witchcraft:

  They have so frayed [frightened] us with bull-beggars, spirits, witches, urchins, hags, elves, fairies, satyrs, pans, fauns, sylens, kit-with-the-canstick, centaurs, dwarfs, giants, imps, calears, conjurors, nymphs, changelings, Incubus, Robin Goodfellow, the spoorn, the mare, the man in the Oak, the hell-wain, the firedrake, the pickle, Tom Thumb, Hob Goblin, Tom Tumbler, Boneless and other such Bugs, that we are afraid of our own shadows.’

  Who were the men referred to in the Baines Note whom Marlowe had convinced with his views on the Scriptures? Ralegh says nothing of Marlowe in this context; neither does Hariot (even when asked directly at Cerne Abbas) or any other member of the School of Night. Perhaps they felt they owed a silence to a fellow seeker after the truth; perhaps they were alienated and afraid of his outspoken stand. There are only three possible names that have survived as Marlowe converts, and one of them is dubious. The first was Thomas Fineaux, of an old Canterbury family, whose gilded arms of the chevron and three eagles displayed still glints in the afternoon sunshine of Christchurch gate into the cathedral cloisters. Marlowe’s great-grandfather Richard had leased 20 acres of land from the Fineaux and Thomas was a scholar at the King’s School and at Corpus Christi. A legend of the college was that Fineaux was such a fan of the playwright that ‘he learned all Marlowe by heart’ and actually tried to raise the Devil a la Faustus in his rooms one night.

  Fineaux was born in 1574 in Hougham near Dover and went up to Bene’t’s College as a gentleman pensioner in the Easter term 1587, so that his time with Marlowe still in Cambridge would have been brief. It may be that the two had met before – the Fineaux owned property in Canterbury where Marlowe lived and in Dover where Marlowe’s family the Arthurs, hailed from. The information about Fineaux comes a little third hand, from Henry Oxinden, of Barham, Kent, who used to chat with Simon Aldrich of Canterbury whose family certainly knew the Marlowes. As with most walks of life in Tudor England, everybody seems to be related to everyone else, and the Aldrich family produced a Master of Bene’t’s in the early 1580s. Oxinden was writing some sixy years after the events he was describing:

  Mr Ald[rich] said that he [Fineaux] was a very good scholar, but would never have above one book at a time and when he was perfect in it, he would sell it away and buy another. He learned all Marlowe by heart and divers other books. Marlowe made him an atheist.

  No one records what happened to Fineaux or whether he dared continue to hold these heretical views after Marlowe’s death.

  The second possible person converted to atheism by Marlowe, although it is extremely unlikely, is Francis Kett. This odd man, who may well have been insane, was a Fellow of Bene’t’s between 1573 and 1580, so, rather like Fineaux and Marlowe but the other way around, one was coming as the other going and since Marlowe did not reach Cambridge until December 1580, it is unlikely that their paths crossed. It is perhaps no more than a coincidence that Kett was charged with heresy and burnt at Norwich in 1589. An eyewitness who saw him die wrote

  he went to the fire clothed in sackcloth and went leaping and dauncing. Being in the fire, above twenty times together, clapping his hands, he cried nothing but blessed bee God;...and so continued until the fire had consumed all his nether partes and until he was stifled with the smoke.

  The third – and a very important third in the context of Marlowe’s death – comes to us from the Baines Note. It is the last charge:

  That Ric Cholmley hath confessed that he was persuaded by Marlowe’s Reasons to become an Atheist.

  Richard Cholmeley (the spelling of his surname is as wildly varied as Marlowe’s) was a minor landowner from Cheshire. His elder brother Sir Hugh was a local functionary and clearly a keen Protestant. In 1584 he reported on Catholic relics being smuggled into his county in the form of martyrs’ bones and locks of hair purported to come from the head of the Virgin Mary. In the year of the armada, he was busy raising troops in Cheshire along with Ferdinando, Lord Strange, as Lord Lieutenant of the county. Despite their apparent loyalty to the Queen, many of these local families were dyed-in-the-wool Catholics who had never quite shaken off the taint of their failed insurrection during the northern rebellion of 1569.

  Cholmeley was in London in 1589, the year in which Kett died; a year in which Marlowe was at the height of his fame as a playwright, and he was involved in riots in the Strand. Most of what we know about Cholmeley comes from another vital document which helps explain Marlowe’s death; in 1593 someone wrote Remembrances against Ric: Cholmeley which not only gives us an idea of his involvement with Marlowe but points directly to Marlowe’s murderers too. It is clear from the Remembrances that Cholmeley worked for the government as an intelligencer, ‘employed by some of her Majesty’s Privy Council for the apprehension of papists and other dangerous men’. He also lined his own pockets ‘to take money of them and would let them pass in spite of the Council’. On 13 May 1591, a warrant was issued to John Slater, a Messenger of the Queen’s Chamber, to arrest Thomas Drury and two companions, one of whom was Chomeley. As we shall see, this was part of a wide net which ultimately caught Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe – and produced the Baines Note. Drury’s lodgings were searched and he was locked in the Marshalsea charged with ‘divers fond [sensitive] and great matters’, an exactly similar and vague accusation as that which led to Marlowe’s arrest two years later. In all this, Cholmeley seems to have been acting as Poley did in the Babington Plot. He was a projecter, an agent provocateur dropped into Catholic cells to flush them out. In letters Cholmeley wrote early in 1592 he was actively watching Robert Southwell, the Jesuit poet ‘that useth Mr. Cotton’s in Fleet Street and sometime...Dr Smith’s’. Cholmeley was proud of his personal acquaintance with Robert Cecil and probably Burghley, and records still survive which show him receiving payment – £6 13s 4d – for vague services rendered on or before 21 December 1591.

  An anonymous letter written to Mr. Justice Young early in 1593 backs up Baines’s belief that Marlowe had converted Cholmeley and echoes the Note itself. Cholmeley, says the letter, delighted

  to make a jest of the scripture, with these fearful, horrible and damnable speeches: that Jesus Christ was a bastard, St Mary a whore and the Angel Gabriel a bawd to the Holy Ghost; and that Christ was justly persecuted by the Jews for his own foolishness; that Moses was a juggler and Aaron a cozener [con artist] the one for his miracles to Pharaoh to prove there was a God and the other for taking the ear-rings of the Children of Israel to make a golden calf, with many other blasphemous speeches of the divine essence of God, which I fear to rehearse.

  Charles Nicholls rejects this letter because it smacks too much of the Baines Note. Yet, if the Baines information is actually Marlowe’s view and the letter’s accusations are correct on Cholmeley’s opinion, then the common source could still be Marlowe. In other words, Baines and Cholmeley both heard him say these things at his house in Norton Folgate, in the tap room of the Mermaid, at Durham House, Walter Ralegh’s London residence along the Thames, or anywhere else where Christopher Marlowe held court in what Thomas K
yd called his ‘table talk’.

  The rest of the evidence of Chomeley’s atheism leads us directly to the men who killed Marlowe.

  The plague hit London again in 1592. The disease, although there is still some doubt among medical historians today, was almost certainly the bubonic form caused by a virulent bacillus that found a convenient host in the flea ceratophyllus fasciatus which in turn lived in the fur of rattus rattus, the black rat. A city like London, at once overcrowded, unhygienic and a port, with all its opportunities for the importation of foreign disease, had all the classic requirements for the disease to flourish.

  Its cause was unknown in Marlowe’s day, but folk memories of its first deadly appearance in the 1350s still survived. Ashwell church, in Hertfordshire, still carries on its walls the tragic graffiti of that time – ‘wild, miserable, violent, the worst people alone survive to bear witness’. Conservative estimates talk of one third of the population dying in three years – that would be a death rate of 20 million today and although there was not to be a similar outbreak until the one that hit London in 1665, the terror and desolation of the plague experience were always in men’s minds. There was probably not a year of Marlowe’s life when the disease was not prevalent somewhere in England, but 1592 was an explosion year which saw 15,000 deaths in London, out of a population of perhaps 120,000. Various writers on Marlowe have made little of this, other than to mention that the theatres were temporarily closed as a result. There were those, of course, who believed that plays themselves were the cause of the disease. Others, especially the more rabid among Puritan and Catholic families, blamed the wrath of God for some sin that mankind had committed. The usual tendency was for Puritan to blame Catholic and vice versa. Allied to this was the notion that a foreign power might be responsible; in the 1590s that meant Spain was the most likely contender.

  In 1603 Thomas Dekker described what London was like in the last of the plague’s three visitations since 1572. The experience of 1592 would have been exactly similar. The engraving on the cover of his pamphlet shows Death as a skeleton attacking London (St Paul’s is depicted accurately with its spire missing after the storm of 1561) while, with true pathetic fallacy, forked lightning bursts from black clouds overhead. Coffins float in the Thames and among the heaps of corpses, armed soldiers are keeping scavenging refugees at bay with their pikes. Using military analogy, Dekker wrote

  The plague took sore pains for a breach, he laid about him cruelly ere he could get it, but at length he and his tyrranous band entered. His purple colours [referring to the painful buboes or swellings which were a symptom of the disease] were presently within the sound of Bow Bells advanced and joined to the Standard of the City. He marched even through Cheapside and the capital streets of Troynovant [New Troy, a poetic term for London]... Men, women and children dropped down before him: houses were rifled, streets ransacked, beautiful maidens thrown on their beds and ravished by sickness, rich men’s coffers broken open and shared amongst prodigal heirs and unthrifty servants...this intelligence runs current, that every house looked like St Bartholomew’s Hospital...lazarus lay groaning at every man’s door...I am amazed to remember what dead marches were made of three thousand trooping together: husbands, wives and children being led as ordinarily to one grave as if they had gone to one bed...yet went they (most bitterly)...with rue and wormwood stuffed into their ears and nostrils, looking like so many boars’ heads stuck with branches of rosemary, to be served for brain at Christmas...the price of flowers, herbs and garlands rose wonderfully....

  The plague may well have fanned the flames of witch hysteria, since what better example of maleficium could there be than the sudden, violent deaths of 15,000 people? Inevitably, with such a death-toll, there were some who profited, literally filling dead men’s shoes in the promotion stakes. Sextons’ and gravediggers’ wages rocketed. Those who could, left, risking the further spread of disease. As Dekker says, ‘for all your goldfinches [rich men] were fled to the woods’. One of these was likely to have been Kit Marlowe.

  We have no way of knowing whether the plague reached Norton Folgate. It was out of the City and less crowded than the banks of the river. The country is full of ‘God’s Providence Houses’ which marked the end of the plague’s run in urban areas. The disease could stop as quickly and randomly as it had started. Even so, the risk anywhere in London or its environs was great and it helps to explain why Marlowe was where he was at Scadbury, the home of his new patron, Thomas Walsingham, in 1593.

  We know, however, that he was still in London in May 1592 when the Middlesex Sessions records cite a ‘C. Marle, a gentleman of London’ as being bound over in the sum of £20 to keep the peace towards Allan Nicholls, Constable of Holywell Street, Shoreditch and Nicholas Helliott, sub-constable of the same. This is presumably our Marlowe. Styled ‘yeoman’ in 1589 at the time of the Hog Lane fight with Bradley, he is now ‘generosi’ (gentleman) reflecting the success of his plays and/or continuing employment from Burghley, now in Walsingham’s shoes as director of the secret service. No information is given as to the exact nature of Marlowe’s offence, but it may have been a drunken fracas involving the two name officers of the law. Neither do we know who stood surety for him this time; perhaps he stumped up the £20 himself. There was no Roger Manwood now to let him go with a stern warning; more seriously, there was no Francis Walsingham watching from the corridors of power.

  William Urry, as city archivist, focused on the smaller canvas of Canterbury and discovered that four months later the Plea Rolls of Canterbury Civil Court for 26 September 1592 relate to the fight between William Corkine, tailor and musician, and Christopher Morley, gentleman. The clash took place on the 15th of the month along Mercery Lane, close to the Bull’s Inn. It was near the home of George Amcell, a grocer related to the Marlowes by marriage. Both men were arrested when the fight, which possibly involved rapiers and daggers, was broken up by local constables.

  Ten days later a ‘narrative of plaint’ was submitted by Giles Winston, an attorney acting for Corkine who alleged assault by Marlowe. Marlowe countered the next day and the Grand Jury indictment threw the whole thing out. No blood had been shed and the two men were quickly reconciled. Twenty years later, either the same William Corkine or his son, an accomplished lute player, put music to the words of Marlowe’s poem Come, Live With Me, turning it into a successful ‘pop song’ of its day.

  Marlowe’s contention is that Corkine started the whole thing, that he had ‘beat, wounded and maltreated him’ to his ‘grave damage’. Most commentators mention the Mercery Lane fight as another example of Marlowe’s ungovernable temper and his over-ready use of a blade. And there we would leave it too, were it not for the fact that there was possibly a familiar face in the crowd that inevitably gathered to watch the clash. We know he was in Canterbury during that week and we believe he was there that day. His name was Robert Poley – ‘Sweet Robyn’.

  There are only two recorded performance of Edward II during Marlowe’s lifetime, both in the winter of 1592-3, one given during the traditional Twelfth Night festivities at Court. It was probably performed by Lord Pembroke’s Men (Marlowe was assiduously dedicating his poetry to the Countess of Pembroke by this time) and may well have been played in front of Burghley and Cecil, as likely guests of the Queen on this occasion.

  In that winter, Elizabeth was sixty years old. There could be no pretence any more that she would beget an heir and talk of marriage had stopped long ago. Some men’s eyes looked north to Scotland, where James VI was waiting in the wings. Catholics everywhere were in a state of excited anticipation – the Jezebel of England could not have long to live. The plague still raged, to the extent at least that when the Cambridge don and member of the Aeropagus circle, Gabriel Harvey, heard of Marlowe’s death, he assumed he had died from it.

  He and the Plague contended for the game;

  The haughty man extols his hideous thoughts,

  And gloriously insults upon poor souls...

  Th
e grand Disease disdain’d his toad conceit.

  And smiling at his Tamburlaine contempt,

  Sternly struck home the peremptory stroke.

  The government was under renewed pressure as the Puritan stranglehold on Church and State grew stronger. Problems in Ireland, which had long been a source of threat to Elizabeth’s government, were boiling over. In April 1593, only weeks before Marlowe’s death, Hugh Rose O’Donnell, Lord of Tyrconnell, sent James O’Hely, the Catholic Archbishop of Tuam, to negotiate with Philip of Spain. It was a nightmare vision that England had faced before and would again in the centuries ahead; the threat of an invasion from the Irish springboard, a war on two fronts. And in the midst of it all came the Dutch libel.

  We have seen how periods of trauma such as the outbreak of an inexplicable and incurable disease led to panic and at best unreasonable behaviour. So in April 1593, there was an outbreak of anti-European feeling aimed specifically at the ‘beastly brutes the Belgians’, the ‘fraudulent Father Frenchmen’ and the ‘faint-hearted Flemings’. Placards appeared at key places around London shortly before Easter Day, threatening the foreigners with violence from the London apprentices, a notoriously unruly bunch of teenagers who regularly beat people up with their clubs. They were the original ‘Roundheads’ of the Civil War period. What had particularly sparked their agitation was a vote in the Commons on 21 March which sought to extend the privileges of foreigners living in England. One of the most outspoken critics of this proposal was Walter Ralegh, who said, ‘I see no reason that so much respect should be given to them’.

  On Saturday 5 May another libel appeared, stuck on the wall of the Dutch churchyard in Broad Street. The whole of it is bad verse, fifty-three lines long and elements of it were familiar: