A Fine Madness

by Alan Judd

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  To Kate, with thanks

  Neat Marlow bathed in the Thespian springs

  Had in him those braue translunary things,

  That the first Poets had, his raptures were,

  All ayre, and fire, which made his verses cleere,

  For that fine madnes still he did retaine,

  Which rightly should possesse a Poets braine.

  MICHAEL DRAYTON, ‘Of Poets & Poesie’

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  This novel draws on historical characters and events, principally on records of the death of Christopher Marlowe, on records of Sir Francis Walsingham’s secret service and on the life of Thomas Phelippes, Walsingham’s gifted decipherer. So far as is known, Phelippes and Marlowe never met; their relationship as described here and all the interactions between them are invented. The interrogation of Phelippes and the postscript are also invented, although much of what he describes happened and most of the people he mentions existed. There is no record of Marlowe having been involved in secret service to the extent portrayed, although there is documentary evidence and evidence by association that he engaged in some sort of confidential government work. Incidents such as fights he was involved in, his attempted coining and remarks made about him by contemporaries are, however, mostly based on record.

  Authoritative and comprehensive accounts of the world of the Elizabethan secret service and of Marlowe himself may be found in Stephen Alford’s The Watchers and Charles Nicholl’s The Reckoning.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Very well, sir, I hereby solemnly promise that I, Thomas Phelippes, under oath, will tell all I know of the man.

  But he has been dead these thirty years and I cannot be far from my own end. Nor is my memory what it was. And I am still amazed, sir, that you come to my cell with ale and provisions and kind words, saying that the King, King James himself, commands that I tell you all I knew of him, everything. Yet you do not tell me why His Majesty enquires after a forgotten poet and play-maker. Almost forgotten. I do not know what he wants to know. All I can offer is whatever scraps of memory are left and pray they will be fit for the royal table.

  However, I am grateful, sir, for what you bring and for your company. Hearing yesterday of the Court’s interest in me prompted the governor here to move me to these more comfortable quarters, with more coals and candles, as you see, as well as fresh paper, quills and ink. Which is no less than I need anyway when I have to labour at work which the government that imprisons me still demands. God knows how it pains my head and wearies my sight, yet I confess it gives some pleasure. My only pleasure here. Along with my wife, Mary – whom God preserve – mathematic has ever been my love, you see. Although I no longer decipher with that swift facility I once commanded, it is still my delight to puzzle out men’s hidden meanings.

  Yet I cannot promise to decipher Christopher Marlowe for you. He was a man I knew only in part. He never opened his heart to me, nor perhaps to any, but I now think he may have shown more of it than I had eyes to see or ears to hear in those days of our youth. Although often in company and with wide acquaintance, he was also a cat that walked alone, always with something withheld. I can think of no man who would have known him fully.

  And so I beg you assure His Majesty that, though I shall do my best, he must treat whatever I say as at once true and false. False not because Christopher did not spy for my master, Mr Secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham, nor because he did not die by the knife near the end of May 1593 in the old Queen’s reign, at the age of twenty-nine. No, the falsehood comes from that concentration on him which inevitably puts him at the centre of the story, which he never was. To ourselves, of course, we are always the heart of our own stories, but viewed from without our stories are but parts of other men’s stories, themselves but the suburbs of greater stories. If we are lucky – as I was then – we may have dwelt on the fringes of epics. But as individuals we are clods of mud dropped from the wheel of Fate, which carries us we know not where and leaves us where it pleases.

  That is as true of me, of course, as of him. And even of you, sir, if I may hazard, however exalted your position at Court, however much you now bask in the King’s favour. Although in my world, which Christopher briefly shared, I was close to the heart of affairs, it could all have happened without me. Sir Francis would have found some other man to decipher codes and assist him as I did, and events would still have fallen out as God ordained. Not that Christopher Marlowe would have agreed with that, having little time for God’s ordinances. In his world, the world of playhouses, players and poets, I had no part, of course. I thought it ungodly and unruly and, in any case, numbers, not words, were always my passion. You might discover more about him if you could find another player still living. But they never last long.

  I could begin with our first meeting when he was a callow scholar of Corpus Christi, Cambridge, aged about seventeen. Except that Christopher was never callow; he was always knowing, assessing, judging, even as a youth. I remember him then as neither short nor tall, with brown hair and eyes and just the beginnings of a beard. His face was unmarked and his voice low, a Kentish drawl, unlike his writings which as perhaps you know are high-flown and exclamatory, full of energy.

  But to begin at the beginning would mislead you because it would appear that my knowledge of him advanced incrementally, step by step over years, whereas that is not how we know people. We meet someone, we form an opinion and there they stay, pinned to the wall of memory unless illuminated by some new event or encounter, a flash of lightning which shows them from a different angle or facing another way. We think we know what they are but we know not what they may be. It was so with me and Christopher and it is true of ourselves, of all of us.

  Or I could start with his end, that flash of steel, last of several in his short life. When people still spoke of him that is what they wanted to hear about. Could that be His Majesty’s interest? No, of course, you cannot say. But if I started with his end it would mislead you by giving the impression that everything before was leading up to it, a causal chain, one thing leading to another. Indeed, in those days there were some who even suspected a conspiracy. I hope I can set His Majesty’s mind at rest on that. Truth and life are always more haphazard than we like to think. There was no determination in Christopher’s death, no series of causes, still less any plot or design, in my opinion. Yet, looking back on it now, it seems to me it was inevitable. Inevitable but not necessary, if you accept my distinction. It was in his character to die young and in a violent manner. He need not have, he could have chosen differently, but given what he made of himself he was destined to burn bright and be abruptly extinguished. It is impossible to imagine him fading away like the rest of us, unless we imagine him as someone quite different. Similarly, you could say of me that it was inevitable I should eke out my closing years in a little room in the King’s Bench prison, with its barred window and smoking candles and small coals. Inevitable that I should never burn bright, like him, but splutter long and slow, fading. But it was never necessary because I could have managed my life differently, I could have chosen differently, but that I did not, would not.

  Lust in age is a little fire in a dark field, wrote another poet, one I believe Christopher knew. It is true also of life in age, but he never lived long enough to see that. He bled out on Eleanor Bull’s floorboards in full combustion, the flames of life s
till roaring and leaping. He never knew decline, unlike me, and I cannot conceive how he would have lived with it. He would not have been Christopher if he had.

  So I shall start neither at his beginning nor his end but five or six years after we first had dealings with each other, which was when I began to realise he was not the straightforward young man I had taken him for. True, we had already shared dramatic times resulting from the actions of treasonous men, a few of them good men but misguided, almost all of them foolish, but some capable schemers of murderous intent. Christopher was very young then and our dealings were friendly but businesslike, though signs of his complexity were there, had I paused to notice. But I was busy and merely relieved that he took to our trade naturally, as if already familiar with its crooked byways and hidden places.

  Near the end of June 1587, after the Queen of Scots was executed, I was summoned to the house of my master, Mr Secretary Walsingham. Sir Francis was one of the two most powerful men of the kingdom, a man whom Queen Elizabeth always heeded although she never did love him as she loved her other faithful councillor, Lord Burghley. I think Mr Secretary was too stern and too dark for her to love him, dark not only in counsel but in hair, beard, eye and doublet. He always wore black, as devout men did, and in jest she would call him her Moor while he, also in jest but without smiling, would call himself an Ethiop. He rarely laughed; his humour was in his words. Her Majesty preferred men with a lighter touch, gallant, ready men who flattered and flirted, but Mr Secretary never flattered, not even the Queen. His wit was quiet and his humour dry, both were best savoured in retrospect. He was never one to set the table at a roar, being a forward Salvationist, a man of the Godly party. He spoke his mind as plainly to the Queen as to the meanest beggar. She had the wisdom to value that but she did not always like it.

  Mr Secretary lived with his wife and daughter on Seething Lane near the Tower in a large high house with a narrow front that concealed the extensive quarters hidden from the street. A house of many rooms, all dark-panelled and with so many unexpected doors, passages, steps and corners that I never felt I knew it all, though I visited often and even worked there on occasion. Sometimes Mr Secretary had prisoners lodged with him, special prisoners to whom he wanted to talk – or listen – at leisure. The house was so rambling that you never knew how many others were within. He could have lived grandly, building great houses like Lord Burghley and others at Court, but he was modest in all things. His house was like himself, of plain and modest demeanour, or front, with an interior of so many secret chambers that none could know them all. There was a fine garden at the back with a mulberry tree said to date from the reign of King John. Mr Secretary studied every plant with the same exactitude that he studied treacherous weeds in the realm. His other pleasures were hawking, music, painting and poetry, which he did much to cultivate and encourage but often out of sight, so that many who benefited from his patronage knew not whose teat had suckled them. It was at his instruction that the players’ company, the Queen’s Men, was founded.

  I think Queen Elizabeth never forgave him for having contrived that which she herself had willed, albeit reluctantly. That is, the execution of her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots. Sir Francis was deeper in that business than any other, as I know well through having been deep in it with him. Christopher was there or thereabouts, too, though not as deeply. But that was when he first showed himself willing to get his hands dirty.

  Mr Secretary was working in his house the day I was summoned, as he often did when not attending the Privy Council or required at Court with Her Majesty. The streets around Seething Lane being crowded and noxious, favourable for breeding the plague, I took a boat downriver from Whitehall where I was working on some Spanish letters that had recently fallen into our hands. The code was slow to yield, like chipping away at rock, and I was reluctant to break concentration. But the summons was delivered in person by Francis Mylles, Sir Francis’s private secretary and a good friend to me. I travelled alone, Francis having other business in Whitehall.

  Mr Secretary’s servants knew me, of course, and I was shown into the small room overlooking the street where there was a table, three chairs and a Geneva Bible. Mr Secretary owned at least one other Bible as well as many books of navigation and exploration and a large map of all the counties of England. Indeed, in his private study he had a globe showing all the countries and oceans of the world. He had a passion to know things. ‘Knowledge is never too dearly bought,’ he would say when Lord Burghley protested that we paid our agents too well.

  After a while a girl came to fetch me. Like all Mr Secretary’s personal staff, in London and at his country house in Barn Elms, she wore clean white linen and a short blue jacket. She led me to another study at the back of the house, not the large one with the globe. This one overlooked the garden, its single window darkened by the mulberry tree. It was cooler here than in the front room where you could feel the heat of horses and people in the street.

  ‘If you please, sir, Thomas Phelippes, sir,’ said the girl.

  ‘Close the door behind you,’ said Mr Secretary.

  He was seated at a small desk end-on to the window and gestured me to the chair facing it. His face that day was even paler than usual, almost as white as his starched ruff. ‘God’s greetings, Thomas, I trust you are well?’

  ‘I am, sir, thank the Lord. I trust you are?’ He did not look it.

  He shook his head. ‘A martyr to the stone again. I have not been at Court or Council for a week, but by God’s grace it begins to ease now.’

  ‘I am glad to hear it.’

  He nodded and looked down at two papers on his desk. We sat in silence. I assumed he had more decryption for me since that was my main task in his employ, as well as my main pleasure. Had I not been able to serve Her Majesty in this way I should have been in the cloth and wool trade and in the custom house with my father.

  He looked up at me. ‘I wish you to take a letter to Cambridge, an urgent letter. You will leave today. It is for the vice-chancellor, Dr Copcot, and for the master of Corpus Christi College, Dr Norgate. I would normally send it by messenger but I wish you to be there to ensure it is read and understood by both. If they doubt or question it in any way you must tell them there will be consequences.’ He took the letter from a drawer in his desk. It was already sealed with the Privy Council seal. ‘In order that you may discuss it with them you should know its import. It concerns Christopher Marlowe, the boy from Canterbury who helped us with the arrest of Campion and again more recently with Babington and his friends. You were in regular contact with him. When did you see him last?’

  ‘Early this year, just before the trial of the Queen of Scots.’ Mr Secretary had been witness to that and I was permitted to attend in acknowledgement of my work in bringing it about. My most recent sighting of Christopher, however, was not in connection with that business but at a playhouse here in London. I rarely visited the playhouses and we did not speak because we had agreed to pretend in public that we had no connection. He did not want his earlier association with us known in his world. That suited us too. ‘A chance meeting only. We did not speak.’

  ‘Corpus Christi is refusing to award him his Master of Arts degree on the grounds that he has not fulfilled the residency requirements. The master, Dr Norgate, fears he has secretly visited the Catholic seminary in Rheims in order to infiltrate priests back into England to murder the Queen and her ministers and restore Papacy here. Or become a secret priest himself. As you know’ – Mr Secretary smiled very slightly, his lips parting just enough to show he still had teeth behind his black beard – ‘young Master Marlowe never went to Rheims but was working here and in Paris on our behalf, under your tutorship. That accounts for his absences last year but not for this year. Those recent absences he has spent writing plays and negotiating their performance in London. He intends the stage to be his trade and in fact left Cambridge in March, journeying back just now to receive his degree. He is still there. The Privy Council signed this
letter yesterday.’

  I could not conceive how Mr Secretary knew all this but I knew better than to ask. His sources of information were many and various and he would never reveal one to another without need.

  He laid his forefinger on the letter. ‘Today is Friday and the degree ceremony is on Tuesday. Before then the college and university must understand that Her Majesty will be greatly displeased should one of her loyal subjects be punished for service on her behalf.’ He took another paper from his desk, this time unsealed. ‘You should ensure that they read the letter together and you are of course at liberty to read it yourself when they have opened it. You should not hesitate to intervene if they argue or fail to grasp it, telling them you have my full authority to do so. Dr Copcot, I gather from Lord Burghley, should prove helpful; Dr Norgate may quibble. But you shall brook no quibbles.’ He handed me the second paper. ‘This is a copy of the Privy Council minute summarising the letter. Take it with you and study it so that you fully understand the letter before they discuss it.’

  I have that copy here, sir, among my papers. I shall read it to you.

  Whereas it was reported that Christopher Marlowe was determined to have gone beyond the seas to Reames and there to remaine Their Lordships thought good to certifie that he had no such intent, but that in all his accions he had behaued him selfe oderlie and discreetlie whereby he had done her Majestie good service, and deserued to be rewarded for his faithfull dealing: Their Lordships request was that the rumour thereof should be allaied by all possible means, and that he should be furthered in the degree he was to take at the next Commencement: Because it was not her Majestie’s pleasure that anie one employed as he had been in matters touching the benefit of his Countrie should be defamed by those that are ignorant of th’affaires he went about.