Who Killed Kit Marlowe?

by M. J. Trow

  The rest of it was a formality. Whatever happened to Marlowe’s belongings, his clothes, his books, his weapons, we do not know. They were probably hocked to the sailors of Deptford, who were now told that Mr Marlowe would not be taking any tide. His unfinished poem, Hero and Leander, which he may not have had room for or asked Walsingham to send on, lay where Marlowe had left it, at Scadbury, to be finished by his friend George Chapman.

  Marlowe himself was carried to the churchyard of St Nicholas in Deptford and buried on 1 June in an unmarked grave. The priest, Thomas Macander, wrote in the parish register

  Christopher Marlowe slaine by ffrancis ffrizer.

  He got it wrong.

  We do not know who, if anyone, attended the burial. It is highly unlikely that his family in Canterbury was informed and, even if his friends were, it is likely they stayed away. The news of Kyd’s arrest and Marlowe’s murder, albeit in a quarrel over ‘le recknynge’, caused the wiser ones to put two and two together. Only slowly did those friends on the literary scene drop veiled references to his passing – Shakespeare’s comments on ‘dead shepherd’ and ‘a great reckoning in a little room’; a little known poet called Thomas Edwards wrote

  Amyntas [Thomas Watson] and Leander’s gone.

  Oh, dear sons of stately kings.

  Blessed be your nimble throats

  That so amorously could sing.

  In 1598, dedicating Hero and Leander to Thomas Walsingham, Marlowe’s friend the stationer Edward Blount wrote

  We think not ourselves discharged of the duty we owe to our friend when we have brought the breathless body to the earth. For albeit the eye there taketh his ever-farewell of that beloved object, yet the impression of the man that hath been dear unto us, living an afterlife in our memory, there putteth us in mind of further obsequies due to the deceased.

  Perhaps this means that literally, Blount and Walsingham saw Marlowe buried and took part in any service the Reverend Macander cared to say over Christopher, the carrier of Christ, the scourge of God. Bearing in mind Walsingham’s part in all this, it could be construed as hypocrisy – ‘all Protestants are hypocritical asses’ – or it could be the last honour he did his protégé and friend.

  And Thomas Nashe may have come closer to the truth than he knew when he wrote of Marlowe in The Unfortunate Traveller, ‘His tongue and his invention were foreborn; what they thought they would confidently utter. Princes he spared not, that in the least point transgressed.’ Within what may be a record time, the Queen gave her pardon to Ingram Frizer. She had by this time been sent the Baines Note – ‘Copye of Marloes blasphemyes As sent to her H’ – together with various annotations by Burghley to make sure that she got the point; there must be no doubt about Marlowe’s guilt. If Frizer had killed a godly man, even in self-defence, he may have suffered for it; but to kill a self-confessed atheist could barely be called a crime at all.

  We therefore moved by piety have pardoned the same Ingram ffrizar the breach of our peace which pertains to us against the said Ingram for the death above mentioned and grant to him our firm peace....In testimony and witness the Queen at Kewe on the 28th day of June.

  Poley’s accomplice was a free man.

  ‘The cursed Cholmeley’, the only other man who knew the real views of the Council four, was arrested on the same day that Frizer received his pardon. With heavy irony, he came before Justice Richard Young, whom he had already libelled, and Young passed him ‘upstairs’ to Sir John Puckering, every inch a Cecil man. Cholmeley was imprisoned while the Council searched for the ‘sixty’ who were supposedly his team of rebels bent on the overthrow of the state.

  ‘I do know the law,’ .’Cholmeley told his interrogators, ‘and when it comes to pass I can shift well enough’.

  Despite odd attempts by followers of the Earl of Essex (never associated with atheism, but certainly by 1601, deeply seditious) to intercede on Cholmeley’s behalf, Cholmeley himself vanishes from history at the end of June 1593. How well he ‘shifted’ we cannot say, but it is our contention that he was too dangerous to be kept alive. He did not have the brilliance or the power to move men like Christopher Marlowe, but he knew too much. Mr. Topcliffe’s services were probably sought, because in the text of the Baines Note that was passed to the Queen, were the ominous words, probably in Burghley’s own handwriting ‘He is laid for’.

  The Privy Council let Thomas Kyd go, realising that he knew nothing that could hurt them. In pain, traumatised and deserted, he wrote his pleading first letter to Puckering, who would have shown it to Burghley or Cecil. And here was a final twist of the knife. Between his first and second letters, we believe that the Privy Council sent for Kyd. The second letter does not read like the first. Its content is different and it is unsigned. We believe that Kyd was forced to write this second version. There is nothing here of the man who also wrote The Spanish Tragedy. It backs up the Baines Note, it invents Marlowe’s treachery in defection to the king of Scots and above all, it makes Marlowe’s lightning attack on Frizer all the more probably – ‘he would suddenly take slight occasion to slyp out as I and many others in regard of his other rashness in attempting sudden pryvie injuries to men.’ It really is too pat. And their lordships of the Council filed it away, just in case anyone came along asking awkward questions about the death of Christopher Marlowe.

  And we believe that in Kyd’s first letter, when he was complaining to Puckering about the loss of his Lord, that he was not referring to Lord Strange. Whatever Strange’s precise position ideologically, he was a member of the School of Night, a pseudo-scientist and free-thinking intellectual who must already have been familiar with Marlowe’s views. He would not have been so horrified by Kyd’s supposed atheism as to disown him. But a man who would was Charles, Lord Howard of Effingham, patron of the actors’ company called The Lord Admiral’s Men. In the plague year of 1593-4 Ned Alleyn took the Admiral’s Men and Strange’s Men on the road as a combined troupe. If this troupe performed The Spanish Tragedy, then there is every likelihood that Kyd regarded him as his ‘Lord;. And Howard of Effingham, given the situation, would have been very anxious to ditch Kyd as soon as possible and distance himself from any taint of the atheism of which he himself was guilty. According to Jeffrey M. Bale, writing in the context of the death of Princess Diana in 1998:

  Very few notions generate as much intellectual resistance, hostility and derision within academic circles as a belief in the historical importance or efficacy of political conspiracies. Even when this belief is expressed in a very cautious manner, limited to specific and restricted contexts, supported by reliable evidence and hedged about with all sorts of qualifications, it still manages to transcend the boundaries of acceptable discourse and violate unspoken academic taboos.

  The idea that particular groups of people meet together secretly or in private to plan various courses of action, and that some of these plans actually exert significant influence on particular historical developments, is typically rejected out of hand and assumed to be the figment of paranoid imagination.

  The mere mention of the word ‘conspiracy’ seems to set off an internal alarm bell which causes scholars to close their minds....

  That Christopher Marlowe did not die in a futile squabble over a bill was demonstrated by J. Leslie Hotson over eighty years ago. That the myth still persists is testimony to the efficacy of Bale’s argument above. Yet who was better placed to engineer such a conspiracy? And how easy must it have been? Marlowe was a maverick, a rebel, a whistle-blower. He was a dangerous man ‘whose mouth must be stopped’. And in the corridors of power, men like Burghley and Cecil, Effingham and Hunsdon had all the apparatus of government to do just that. Key documents were carefully fabricated and preserved; witnesses were told what they saw; juries were nobbled. In the paranoia of the Elizabethan police state, great men bent the law to their own ends. There were many people who suffered as a result; Christopher Marlowe was only the most famous of them.

  Three murderers killed Edward II.
Three devils carried off the screaming Faustus. Three magi formed the scientific core of the School of Night – Hariot, Warner and Hues; ‘the infamous triplicity that denies the Trinity’. Of the three killers of Christopher Marlowe, Ingram Frizer became a tax assessor for his parish of Eltham, Kent in 1611. He was married with two daughters, were probably at the graveside when he was buried on 14 August 1627. Nicholas Skeres is last heard of being transferred under a Privy Council warrant to the Bridewell on 31 July 1601, his offence and his end unknown. Robert Poley, ‘sweet Robyn’, appears in government records for the last time in the same year, with recommendation that he be made a Yeoman of the Tower. Two successes out of three.

  And what of the Council four, those men who had so much to lose if Christopher Marlowe talked? Lord Burghley, with all the hypocrisy in his nature, yelled at Essex in 1596, ‘Men of blood shall not live out half their days.’ He was quoting from the prayer book the old humbug carried in his pocket. In the event, he did live out all his days and only at the end, terrified, like Robert Greene, of coming death, did he gasp the words, ‘Come, Lord Jesus, one drop of death.’ It was 5 August 1598. His son, Robert, made similar noises on his death-bed, in Marlborough on 24 May 1612. His enemies – and they were many – chanted a rhyme when the news reached London:

  Here lies, thrown for the worms to eat,

  Little bossive Robin that was so great.

  Not Robin Goodfellow or Robin Hood,

  But Robin th’encloser of Hatfield Wood,

  Who seemed as sent from Ugly Fate

  To spoil the Prince and rot the State,

  Owning a mind of dismal ends

  As trap for foes and tricks for friends.

  Howard of Effingham, heroic as ever, sacked Cadiz with the Earl of Essex in 1596 and was created Earl of Nottingham. Given total command of all land and sea forces, he died at Croydon on 14 December 1624, his memory untarnished, his secret with him in the grave. The last of them, Henry Carey, Baron Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain, died in July 1596. Today, most collections of potted biographies ignore him entirely.

  And Kit Marlowe? Today, he is once again ‘all fire and air’, ‘that pure elemental wit’ of the ‘mighty line’, the ‘dead shepherd’, ‘the Muses’ darling’. His ghost can be found, not just in the ‘churchyard of Paules’, but in cobbled Canterbury, scholastic Cambridge, roaring London or anywhere where men’s hearts and souls are free.

  Select

  Bibliography

  Abbott, Geoffrey. Rack, Rope and Red-Hot Pincers, London, Brockhampton Press, 1993

  Adair, John. Puritans, Stroud, Sutton, 1998

  Ahmed, Rollo. The Black Art, London, Arrow Books, 1971

  Anon. The Truth About Christopher Marlowe, The Marlowe Society, Canterbury, n.d.

  Bakeless, J. The Tragicall History of Christopher Marlowe, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1943.

  Breight, Curtis. Surveillance, Militarism and Drama in the Elizabethan Era, New York, St. Martins, 1996.

  Bindoff, S.T. Tudor England, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1950

  Black, J.B. The Reign of Elizabeth, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1959

  Bray, Alan. Homosexuality in Renaissance England, Brighton, Gay Men’s Press, 1982

  Brimacombe, Peter. All the Queen’s Men, Stroud, Sutton, 2000

  Cecil, David. The Cecils of Hatfield House, London, Cardinal, 1973

  Cooke, Judith. The Golden Age of the English Theatre, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1995

  Critchley, T.A. A History of Police in England and Wales, London, Constable, 1967

  Cunningham, Lt. Col. Francis. The Works of Marlowe, London, Chatto & Windus, 1889

  Dodd, A.H. Elizabethan England, London, BCA, 1973

  Duncan-Jones, Katherine. Sir Philip Sidney, Courtier Poet, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1991

  Elliott, J.H. Europe Divided, London, Collins, 1972

  Elton, G.R. (ed.). The Tudor Constitution, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1960.

  Gardner, Laurence. Bloodline of the Holy Grail, Element, 1996

  Gray, Henry F.R.S. Gray’s Anatomy, London, Robinson, 1994

  Halliday, F.E. Shakespeare, London, Thames & Hudson, 1961

  Haynes, Alan. The Elizabethan Secret Services, Stroud, Sutton, 1992

  Hotson, J. Leslie. The Death of Christopher Marlowe, London, Nonesuch, 1925

  Hussey, Maurice. The World of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, London, Heinemann, 1978

  Ingram, J.H. Marlowe and his Associates, London, 1904

  Irwin, Margaret. That Great Lucifer, London, Allison & Busby, 1998

  Kocher, Paul. Christopher Marlowe, Chapel Hill, N.C., University of North Carolina Press, 1947

  Kramer, H. and Sprenger, J. Malleus Maleficarum, tr. Montague Summers, London, Arrow, 1971

  Lacey, Robert. Sir Walter Ralegh, London, Cardinal, 1975

  Leach, Katherine. Sixteenth-Century Europe. London, Macmillan, 1980

  Levi, Peter. The Life and Times of William Shakespeare, London Macmillan, 1988

  Levin, Henry. Christopher Marlowe, the Over-Reacher, London, Faber, 1973

  MacDonell, Sir John. Historical Trials, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1927

  Macfarlane, Alan. Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970

  Mitchell, John. Who Wrote Shakespeare?, London, Thames & Hudson, 1999

  Morris, Christopher. The Tudors, London, Collins, 1968

  Nicholl, Charles. The Reckoning, London, Jonathon Cape, 1992

  Norman, Charles. The Muses’ Darling, London, Falcon Press, 1947

  O’Connor, Evangeline M. Who’s Who and What’s What in Shakespeare, Gramercy, 1978

  Plowden, Alison. Elizabeth Regina, Stroud, Sutton, 2000

  Porter, Roy. London: A Social History, London, Penguin, 1996

  Quennell, M. and C.H.B. A History of Everyday Things in England, London, Batsford, 1968

  Radford, Ken. Fire Burn, London, Guild Publishing, 1989

  Rattray Taylor, G. Sex in History, London, Thames & Hudson, 1968

  Rowse, A.L. William Shakespeare, London, Macmillan, 1963

  Rukesyer, Muriel. The Traces of Thomas Hariot, London, Gollancz, 1972

  Russell, Jeffrey B. A History of Witchcraft, London, Thames & Hudson, 1980

  Saint, Andrew and Darby, Gillian. The Chronicles of London, London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1994

  Salgado, Gamini. The Elizabethan Underworld, London, BCA, 1977

  Seligman, Kurt. The History of Magic, New York, Quality Paperbacks, 1997

  Smith, A.G.R. The Government of Elizabethan England, London, Edward Arnold, 1967

  Starkey, David. Elizabeth, Londdon, Chatto & Windus, 2000

  Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic, London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1971

  Tourneur, Cyril. The Atheist’s Tragedy, ed. Brian Morris and Rona Gill, London, A & C Black, 1989

  Turner, E.S. May it Please Your Lordship, London, Michael Joseph, 1971

  Walker, D.P. Spiritual and Demonic Magic, Stroud, Sutton, 2000

  Walsh, Walter. The Jesuits in Great Britain, London, Routledge, 1904

  Weir, Alison. Elizabeth the Queen, London, Pimlico, 1999

  Wheatley, Dennis. The Devil and All His Works, London, BCA, 1977

  Wilson, Jean. The Shakespeare Legacy, Stroud, Sutton, 1995

  Wilson, John Dover. Life in Shakespeare’s England, London, Penguin, 1911

  Wraight, A.D., and Stern, Virginia. In Search of Christopher Marlowe, Chichester, Adam Hart, 1993

  Zenner, Peter. The Shakespeare Invention, Bakewell, Country Books, 1999

  Other titles in the Kit Marlowe Mystery series that you may enjoy:

  Dark Entry

  Book 1

  First in the thrilling new Kit Marlowe historical mystery series - Cambridge, 1583. About to graduate from Corpus Christi, the young Christopher Marlowe spends his days studying and his nights carousing with old friends. But when one of them is discovered lying dead in his King's College
room, mouth open in a silent scream, Marlowe refuses to accept the official verdict of suicide. Calling on the help of his mentor, Sir Roger Manwood, Justice of the Peace, and the queen's magus, Dr John Dee, a poison expert, Marlowe sets out to prove that his friend was murdered.

  Silent Entry

  Book 2

  SECOND IN THE THRILLING new Kit Marlowe historical mystery series - November, 1583. Desperate not to let the Netherlands fall into the hands of Catholic Spain, the Queen’s spymaster orders Cambridge scholar and novice spy Christopher Marlowe to go there to assist its beleaguered leader, William the Silent. However, travelling in disguise as part of a troupe of Egyptian players, Marlowe encounters trouble at the home of Dr John Dee, one of their tricks ends in tragedy - and an arrest for murder . . .

  Witch Hammer

  Book 3

  CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE investigates a possible act of witchcraft in the third of this intriguing historical mystery series - July, 1585. Desperate to pursue his chosen career as a professional playwright, the young Christopher Marlowe abandons his Cambridge studies to join Lord Strange’s men, a group of travelling players. En route to perform at Oxford, the players are rehearsing amongst the famous Rollright Stones on the Warwickshire border when they are rudely interrupted by the discovery of the corpse of actor-manager Ned Sledd. Is it an act of witchcraft, a human sacrifice to mark the festival of Lammastide? Or is there a more personal reason? Kit Marlowe determines to find out.

  Scorpions’ Nest

  Book 4

  PLAYWRIGHT AND SPY Christopher Marlowe is sent to France to locate a convicted traitor to the English crown in this Elizabethan mystery.

  October, 1586. Known across London as a poet and playwright, Christopher “Kit” Marlowe, is also at the service of Sir Francis Walsingham, the queen’s spymaster. Now Walsingham has dispatched Kit to the English College in Rheims, France, where he suspects the Catholic traitor Matthew Baxter is hiding.