by David Riggs
When Marlowe entered the queen’s service in his early twenties a covert civil war between Protestants and Catholics had been under way for most of his life. The main Catholic figurehead in this struggle was Queen Elizabeth’s cousin Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, the widow of the King of France and the mother of the future King James VI of Scotland. Mary fled to England in 1568, under suspicion of conniving in the murder of her husband; she soon took a leading role in Catholic plots to dethrone Elizabeth. The first sign of serious trouble was the Northern Rising of 1569. The papal bull Regnans in Excelsio, issued in 1570, excommunicated Queen Elizabeth ‘from the unity of the Body of Christ’, nullified her claim to the crown and absolved her subjects of any allegiance towards her. Indeed, Pope Pius V ordered the English nation not to obey Elizabeth, and threatened anyone who did with excommunication.
The plots surrounding Mary, Queen of Scots, shared a common scenario. A Catholic prince would lead an army into the north of England. Native Catholics would rally around the invader, rising up in rebellion against the queen. The papists would liberate Mary, Queen of Scots, whom Elizabeth kept under house arrest. Mary, the rightful claimant to the English crown, would then depose Elizabeth and reinstate Catholicism throughout the land. Depending on the cast of characters, Queen Mary might wed her rescuer, or another suitable consort, resolving the bloody overthrow in a suitably romantic fashion.
The Society of Jesus fortified the Catholic resistance with missionaries and martyrs. The Jesuit mission to reconvert England was ostensibly a religious, rather than a political, movement, but this distinction proved elusive in practice. Cuthbert Mayne, who belonged to the first pair of missionary priests, journeyed from the English seminary at Douai, in the Low Countries, to Cornwall in April 1576. Fourteen months later, Mayne was arrested and indicted for high treason. His worst offence was the possession of an innocuous papal bull that had already expired. The second judge at Mayne’s trial pointed out the flimsiness of the prosecution’s case, but the senior judge, Sir Roger Manwood, overruled him, deciding that ‘It is a trifle, but I, notwithstanding those who do not agree, give sentence.’ Manwood sentenced Mayne to be hanged, cut down before he was dead, ‘drawn’ (that is, disembowelled before his own eyes), chopped into quarters and beheaded. Although a national assembly of judges overturned Manwood’s sentence, the Privy Council upheld it, and Cuthbert Mayne was butchered alive. The Council further ordered that Mayne’s head and his four quarters be exhibited on posts in five Cornish towns.
Justice Manwood would prove more lenient when Marlowe and Thomas Watson came before him ‘on suspicion of murder’ twelve years later. Baron Manwood’s position as a well-connected nobleman in Kent, with a manor house at Hackington, near Canterbury, may account for his clemency towards Marlowe; or perhaps Sir Roger did not regard the killing of an obscure London innkeeper as a heinous crime. Marlowe’s Latin epitaph ‘On the Death of the Most Noble Gentleman Sir Roger Manwood, Lord Chief Justice of the Queen’s Exchequer’ singles out Judge Manwood’s remarkable capacity to instil terror: ‘Spirit of envy, crossed / By virtue, spare him, for he terrified / Thousands of men’ (8–10). Using the same logic in 1577, the Privy Council reckoned that Mayne’s dismembered corpse would be a terror to the papists. Cuthbert Mayne instead became a shining martyr and an inspiration to the papists. The syndrome is all too familiar. State-inflicted terror sparked a reciprocal cycle of mounting hostility between Catholics and Protestants. The brutal execution of the Jesuit poet and missionary Edmund Campion, who was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1581, failed to terrify his fellow leader Robert Persons. On the contrary, Father Persons became one of Elizabeth’s deadliest foes.
Thomas Watson was living in the English seminary at Douai during Mayne’s mission to England. Since the record of Watson’s arrival has vanished, we don’t know how long he was there. He hailed from the London parish of St Helen’s Bishopsgate, and won a scholarship at Winchester School, where he had studied alongside Henry Garnett, the future leader of the Jesuit mission to England. He attended Oxford in 1569–70 and then set out for the Continent at the age of fourteen. Watson spent the next seven and a half years studying law in Italy and France. He entered the English College at Douai towards the end of his tour. On 15 October 1576, six months after Cuthbert Mayne embarked for Cornwall, Watson departed for Paris. He returned to Douai in May, and remained there until Protestant forces under Prince William of Orange gained control of the city. On 6 August 1577, several Protestant townsmen pointedly asked the Catholic seminarians, ‘Were not all the Englishmen’s throats cut last night?’ Watson, not one for martyrdom, left for good the following day. After the Protestant governor of Douai evicted the entire English seminary in 1578, Father Allen led his beleaguered flock to their new home at Rheims.
Watson returned to London with a valuable commodity. He possessed just the kind of information – who was at the seminary, who came, who went – that the Privy Council was looking for. Watson now adopted the public stance of a resident Catholic who refused (hence the term ‘recusant’) to attend services in the Church of England. In June 1581 Thomas Watson of St Helen’s Bishopsgate surfaced on a list of ‘strangers that go not to church’. His appearance among foreigners who avoided Protestant services suggests that he was fraternizing with Catholics from the continent. In July, Watson dedicated his Latin translation of Sophocles’ Antigone, the book that launched his literary career, to Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel. Although nominally a Protestant, Howard headed the leading Catholic family in England. Watson also worked as a messenger for the Privy Council that summer, carrying dispatches from the English court to Secretary Francis Walsingham’s household in Paris. His new job brought him to within seventy miles of his friends and former colleagues who had moved from Douai to Rheims; now, however, Watson was employed by the other side.
The seminary at Rheims received protection and support from the Duke of Guise. The Duke, who would become the lurid villain of Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris, shamelessly used the English College to advance the political fortunes of his cousin Mary, Queen of Scots. Marlowe recalled this strategy in The Massacre, where the Duke’s mortal enemy asks
Did he not draw a sort of English priests
From Douai to the seminary at Rheims,
To hatch forth treason ‘gainst their natural Queen?
(xxi.105–8)
Indeed he did. Rheims now became the major launch point for plots against the monarchy and life of Elizabeth I. That is why someone informed the Privy Council upon hearing the rumour that Marlowe had defected to Rheims.
Richard Baines entered the seminary on 4 July 1579. Baines was a Cambridge man who matriculated from Christ’s College in 1568. An excellent student, he was placed fourth out of 120 in his BA class. From 1572 to 1576 Baines prepared for his MA at Caius College, the leading producer of seminary priests in Elizabethan Cambridge. Did Baines defect to Rheims for religious reasons? Or did the Privy Council send him there? Robert Persons believed that the Council had initially asked the King of France to expel the entire seminary and then, when that failed
they resolved to begin another way of persecution, which was to put sedition among ourselves, by sending over spies & traitors to kindle and foster the same such as was one Baines, who besides other ill offices, was to poison Doctor Allen … as himself confessed.
Father Allen’s deputy Humphrey Ely disagreed with Persons:
and in that you name Baines, I would you should know, he was not sent thither as a spy, but there in the Seminary he became a naughty spy, and was taken and punished there as a spy, by the uniform consent of all from the highest to the lowest …
Baines himself testified that he switched sides only in the midst of his corrosive ‘conversations about religion’ with the other seminarians. During these exchanges, he recalled, ‘there grew dissatisfaction with my present state and desire for a better fortune, which I thought myself certain of obtaining by setting off for England.’ But this story was extracted from Baines un
der torture and served his own interests at the time. A lapsed Catholic who confessed and repented stood a better chance of leaving Rheims alive than a confirmed heretic and professional spy did. A letter from an agent of Sir Francis Walsingham, the queen’s Principal Secretary, shows that Baines was in contact with Walsingham while living in the seminary. His story about ‘setting off for England’ in order to market his intelligence was a ruse. Father Allen concluded that Baines had been a spy throughout his time at Rheims. In a letter to Alphonso Agazzari SJ, Rector of the English College in Rome, Allen wrote that Baines had been sending messages to the Privy Council on a daily basis.
7.1 Sir Francis Walsingham, attributed to John de Critz the Elder.
Baines is a hard man to pin down. The most reliable account of his activities at Rheims is the oral confession that he dictated to Father Allen and two assistants about three months after his arrest in 1582. Allen never intended this Latin document to circulate in public, nor did it until an English translation appeared in 1994. To ensure accuracy, Baines’s interrogators doublechecked his testimony against the sworn statements of firsthand witnesses. Challenges appear within the transcript of his confession:
Concerning Purgatory, I said that there was no fire by which souls may be tortured but it was the worm of conscience. But a witness swore that he said this about Hell. (italics added)
Baines assailed his fellow seminarians with a scathing critique of the Catholic Church. He focused on Catholic doctrines that had been rejected by Protestants. Baines made fun of the rituals surrounding Holy Communion, the real presence of Christ’s body and blood in the consecrated bread and wine, Purgatory, clerical celibacy, the Papacy and prayers for the dead. He argued that ‘the same argument was valid against the sacrament [of Holy Communion] which the prophet made against idols.’ He frequently resorted to sarcasm, saying that the ‘mystical ceremonies’ of the Eucharist were ‘no more than pretty gestures performing which even a Turk would look holy’. He offered to ‘teach a new method of prayer – reciting the twenty-four letters of the alphabet’. On fasting days Baines was the voice of temptation: ‘Come, friend, what shall we eat tonight? Will we not have a meat pie?’
What adds strangeness and continuity to Baines’s confession are the echoes of this performance in the ‘Note Containing the opinion of one Christopher Marlowe Concerning his Damnable Judgement of Religion and scorn of God’s word’ that he prepared for the Privy Council in 1593. Although Baines affected shock at Marlowe’s blasphemies, he accused his victim of using the same tactics that he himself had employed in his ‘conversations about religion’. According to the Note, Marlowe said:
That if Christ would have instituted the sacrament with more Ceremonial Reverence it would have been had in more admiration, that it would have been much better being administered in a Tobacco pipe.
Having denied the existence of hellfire, Baines charged Marlowe with persuading men ‘not to be afeared of bugbears and hobgoblins’. Baines’s mockery of Catholic idolatry came full circle in Marlowe’s cynical preference for ‘the Papists because the service of god is performed with more ceremonies’. Baines’s reduction of prayer to the letters of the alphabet anticipates Kyd’s observation about Marlowe’s tendency to ‘gibe at prayers’.
Baines’s confession of 1582, his subsequent written recantation of 1583 and his Note of 1593 take the same approach to religion. In each case, the speaker’s logic leads from debunking questionable beliefs and practices to no religion at all. Baines describes this itinerary in the written recantation that he later set down in order to obtain his release: he ‘began to mock at the lesser points in religion, which is the high way to Infidelity, Heresy and Atheism, as to my great danger I have experience in mine own case’. Baines would later accuse Marlowe of doing the same thing. Marlowe jests with dubious points of the Scriptures and doctrine until ‘he persuades men to atheism … utterly scorning both god and his ministers.’ The similarities between Baines’s early self-portrait and his later depiction of Marlowe throw the accuser’s relationship to his victim into question. Was Baines an informant, a mentor or a ventriloquist?
The final part of Baines’s oral confession describes his evolution from religious to political licence. He told a young confidant about a scheme to murder Father Allen ‘by one bullet from a harquebus, which can be fired without making a noise’. He also said that the entire seminary could be liquidated ‘by poisoning the communal well or soup’. Baines was more tightlipped about his spy work. He confessed that he had
claimed to know the secret intentions of Allen, our President, his counsellors and the whole seminary against the Queen and her government. I was unwilling to divulge this information before reaching London. At this time I told a friend, whom I was keen to have as a companion on the journey, that the Queen’s Secretary would give us 3,000 crowns for revealing what goes on here. I knew of a new and more rigorous excommunication being requested for the Queen.
But he went on to deny that he really did know any secrets: ‘All this I put forward in order to convince my companion, rather than because I knew it to be true.’ Since Baines had said ‘all this’ before at least one witness, he had no choice but to admit as much. His final disclaimer rings false, however. Baines really did know Allen’s ‘secret intentions’, and had no intention of keeping his discovery secret until he reached England. By this time, if not before, he was in contact with Secretary Walsingham.
The backdrop of this cryptic exchange was the Lennox plot. Esme Stuart, the linchpin of the plot, was a male French cousin of Queen Mary’s only son, King James VI of Scotland. When Stuart visited Edinburgh late in 1579, the fourteen-year-old monarch fell madly in love with his charming guest. James showered Stuart with lands and offices; Stuart in turn converted to Protestantism at James’s request. By the winter of 1581, to quote the Spanish ambassador in London, Esme Stuart was governing the king ‘entirely and the whole country’; that summer, James made Stuart the Duke of Lennox. James had no inkling that the Duke of Guise had sent Esme Stuart to Edinburgh for the express purpose of establishing Catholic rule over Scotland. The Lennox plot called for the conversion of James to Catholicism followed by a papist coup d’état in Scotland, the invasion of England from the north, the liberation of Mary, Queen of Scots, and the reimposition of the Roman Catholic religion in England.
Sir Francis Walsingham suspected that such a plot was afoot and sought the details from his agents. That summer Secretary Walsingham led an embassy to France to negotiate the proposed marriage between Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Anjou. The best time for the Secretary and Baines to meet was during the summer vacation that fell between 8 May 1581, when Baines became a deacon, and 21 September, when he was ordained a priest. Sir Francis travelled to Paris at the end of July. His young Kentish cousin and protege Thomas Walsingham joined the Secretary there, as did a messenger named Watson, who carried correspondence to the English court. The messenger could conceivably be another Watson; but our Thomas Watson, Marlowe’s fellow poet and future companion, was in Paris that summer, bonding with Thomas Walsingham. Watson later wrote that he and young Walsingham both resided ‘by the waters of the Seine’ during this period, and whiled away the vacant hours talking about poetry.
Watson recorded his reminiscences in Latin pastoral eclogues, casting himself and Walsingham as two shepherds discoursing about art and song. Pastoral poetry, as the classically trained Watson well knew, was the genre that poets used to ‘glance at greater matters’ under ‘the veil of homely persons’. These two young men had more important things to discuss than sheep. Thomas Watson knew William Allen and many of the other seminarians at Rheims from his stint at Douai, where he had lived for at least nine months and probably longer. He was ideally placed to brief Thomas Walsingham and to debrief Richard Baines.
Father Baines celebrated his first mass on 4 October 1581. During the months that followed, the Lennox plot gained momentum. The Duke of Guise prepared to land a diversionary force on the coas
t of Sussex. Father Persons asked the Pope to name William Allen Bishop of Durham, in the expectation that Allen would rally Catholics in the north of England. From prison, Mary, Queen of Scots, urged King Philip II of Spain to take charge of the undertaking and strike while the iron was hot. In March 1582, Lennox drafted a set of operational plans and sent word that he was ready to carry out his part. Seminary priests were to provide logistical support. Giovanni Castelli, the Papal Nuncio of France, wrote to the Pope’s secretary of state that ‘the principal Catholics in England will be advised in time by their priests’ – ‘in time,’ he means, to support the forthcoming invasion. Father Allen played a key role in co-ordinating the entire operation. The Rector proudly informed Castelli that Queen Elizabeth showed more fear of the English College at Rheims than she did of France and Spain.
When Father Allen said that Baines had sent messages to the Privy Council every day, he doubtless had this period in mind. There is every reason to believe Baines’s boast about knowing ‘the secret intentions of Allen and the whole seminary against the Queen and her government’. He knew, for example, that the Queen of Scots took part in the plot. But he should have known better than to share his secrets with the young friend whom he wanted to have as a travelling companion. Just before a major gathering of the conspirators in April, Baines’s confidant tipped off Father Allen that Baines was a spy.