by David Riggs
When Baines denied this charge, Allen had him tortured. A letter to Sir Francis Walsingham dated 2 May reported that ‘Baines has had the strappado and is often tormented.’ The operator of the strappado tied Baines’s hands together behind his back and threw the rope across an overhanging beam. He then hoisted Baines up in the air, allowed him to fall a few feet and abruptly stopped him in mid-air, just before his feet touched the ground. This device dislocated Baines’s shoulders while positioning him for further torments, such as jerking the rope or adding weights to his feet.
Despite these afflictions, Baines held out for the better part of three months. On 12 May, Father Allen, apparently unconvinced of the prisoner’s guilt, referred to him as ‘Mr Baines, for whose troubles I am right sorry’. On 28 May, Allen wrote to Father Agazzari that Baines had been a spy at Rheims for several years. The next day, the Rector moved his captive to the town jail, where Baines sowed more disinformation. On 11 June, Allen thought that he had discovered the reason for Baines’s murderous hostility: the Rector had refused Baines’s requests for a transfer to Rome! Five weeks later, Allen mentioned Baines’s repeated assurances that he had been possessed by the devil; Father Allen was inclined to believe him.
Towards the middle of summer, Baines, now ‘the son of perdition’, finally gave Father Allen the oral confession that he wanted. The Rector shared his good news with Agazzari on 5 August:
Such is the goodness of God and the craft and diligence we used against him that he confessed to everything he was accused of. Thus we have every reason to hope that he will be unable to do whatever harm he intends and able to repent if he wishes it.
Although the captors’ ‘craft and diligence’ included the torments that they had inflicted on Baines, Allen suppressed this fact. The Rector’s Brief History of the Glorious Martyrdom of XII Reverend Priests (Rheims, 1582) attacked the Privy Council for using torture in the interrogation of seminary priests; he could scarcely acknowledge that he was employing the same methods. By now the ‘harm’ that Allen sought to prevent had already been done: Walsingham had gathered enough intelligence to prompt the Scottish Protestant Lords into action. With the encouragement of Queen Elizabeth, the Lords kidnapped King James in the Raid of Ruthven on 22 August. Lennox had lost his only substantial asset.
The issue of the seminarians’ ‘secret intentions’ against Queen Elizabeth crops up yet again in a revealing exchange at the end of Baines’s oral confession:
I said too the Queen of Scots would be beheaded, if I made public what I intended to say against her. And since we knew what could be said, he replied that it was nothing but that she had written to her priest and to her son, and had sought to bring Jesuits to Scotland. [italics added]
The interrogators’ abrupt appearance in this passage marks a moment of tacit collusion between the spy and his captors. Allen and his two assistants, if not ‘the whole seminary’, knew what could be said against the Queen of Scots; but they chose not to acknowledge what they knew, or commit it to paper, because of the Catholic myth that seminary priests stayed out of insurrectionary politics. Baines made the same choice for different reasons: he wanted to avoid the fate of the man who knew too much. Once again, the spy answered their unstated question (‘what did you intend to say against her?’) in the most innocuous terms: ‘it was nothing.’
Father Allen held the heretic in chains for another nine and a half months. This interval gave Baines ample time to repent while the Lennox plot dwindled away. On 20 October, Allen complained to Agazzari about the expense of keeping Baines in the town jail. In January 1583, the Protestant Lords finally banished Lennox from Scotland. The abject Duke had to beg Elizabeth for safe conduct through England on his way back to France. Father Allen mentioned on 14 April that Baines had been moved to a locked room in the seminary. A month later, on 13 May 1583, Baines penned a formal recantation of what he had said and done at Rheims. Baines’s written confession looks suspiciously like part of a plea bargain. The spy wanted his freedom; the Rector wanted a public document that put a Catholic spin on the whole affair.
The Confession of Richard Baines Priest and Late student of the College of Rheims, made after he was removed out of the common jail to his chamber has elements in common with the oral confession that Baines made the previous summer, but the tone and content have changed in key respects. Baines now cast himself in the role of a penitent papist. He substituted an anti-Protestant diatribe for his earlier attacks on the Catholic religion. He discarded his idea about ‘poisoning the communal well or soup’. He omitted any mention of being tortured, but was thankful that Christ had employed ‘my imprisonment and other my bodily afflictions’ to turn ‘my very sins and wickedness to the good of his honour and my salvation’. He swept his intelligence work under the rug, ‘for the matters were of no importance’, and suppressed all the details. Baines’s pretence that the devil ‘wholly occupied my heart’ made it easy for Allen to whitewash the seminarians’ own role in the Lennox plot. At the same time, The Confession put Catholics on notice that Richard Baines was not to be trusted with secrets. The Rector still referred to Baines as ‘our imprisoned priest’ on 30 May, but released him soon thereafter. Having been saved from sin, the son of perdition could go his own way. The Confession of Richard Baines went to the publisher on 1 July. Thomas Watson returned to England.
7.2 Richard Baines, incarcerated behind the first letter of his confession. From William Allen, A True Report of the Late Apprehension and Imprisonment of John Nichols … Whereunto is Added the satisfaction of certain, that of fear or frailty have lately fallen in England, 1583.
The Confession duly appeared in a collection of recantations by priests and fellow Catholics who had gone over to the Protestant side. Allen published the book at Rheims, but its small size (five inches by seven) and English-language format indicate that it was meant to be smuggled across the Channel. Marlowe’s first acquaintance with his future confederate and nemesis probably came in the form of these well-laundered recollections.
Lennox, the forgotten man, ‘died of a sickness contracted for displeasure’ on 26 May. King James remembered his first love for the rest of his life. During his final hours, Lennox wrote to James, promising to send the king ‘his embalmed heart’. James’s autobiographical poem, ‘A Metaphorical Invention of a Tragedy called the Phoenix’, likened his deceased lover to the phoenix, the legendary bird that comes back to life out of its own ashes. The mythical phoenix was sexless, but the king conceived of his phoenix as a female. James, the narrator, had loved this exquisite creature, but the ‘ravening fowls’ (read: Protestant Lords) pursued the phoenix ‘Till she betwixt my legs herself did cast’. James was heartbroken over the loss of his love, but his phoenix would one day rise from her ashes.
Marlowe too remembered Lennox. His tragedy of Edward II recalls the leading episodes of James’s love affair with Esme Stuart: the young king’s impetuous homosexual passion, the favourite’s giddy ascent to high office, the public scandal, the opposition of the hereditary peers, the kidnapping, the king’s replacement of his deceased favourite with new male companions and the king’s enduring loyalty to his first love. Edward II called the conventional, moralizing wisdom about the Lennox affair into question. Marlowe remembered the young monarch’s folly, but also, and above all, his exorbitant passion. Marlowe wrote Edward II about nine years after Lennox’s death, at a time when ‘he would persuade with men of quality to go unto the King of Scots’. Thomas Kyd testified that James’s court was where Marlowe ‘told me when I saw him last, he meant to be’.
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The expansion of the Jesuit mission to England, the mounting threat posed by Mary, Queen of Scots, and the outbreak of war with Spain in 1585 stimulated an acute demand for messengers, snoops and undercover agents. Spy work flourished in the nooks and crannies of the patronage system. Servants spied on and for their masters. Lesser courtiers passed their secrets along to greater ones, who used this intelligence to ingratiate themselves w
ith the queen. The mightiest Privy Councillors – Leicester, Burghley and Walsingham – all had their own private corps of informants. Giordano Bruno, the most eminent philosopher of the age, is said to have been Secretary Walsingham’s mole at the French Embassy. Queen Elizabeth took a major step towards creating a professional surveillance apparatus in 1581–82, when she authorized Walsingham to organize the first state-sponsored secret service in English history. The earliest official government expenditures came to £750 for 1582. Intelligence gathering was a major growth industry during Marlowe’s student years.
Oxford and Cambridge, where the student population included many recusants, closet papists and prospective converts to Rome, were major targets of the Jesuit mission. In September 1581 Father Persons informed Claudio Acquaviva, the Father General of the Jesuit order:
At Cambridge I have insinuated a certain priest into the very university, under the guise of a scholar or gentleman commoner, and have procured him help not far from the town. Within a few months he has sent over to Rheims seven very fit youths.
The charismatic Jasper Heywood SJ recruited fifty incoming seminarians in August 1583 alone. Allen recommended him to Agazzari as ‘a distinguished and prudent worker who has captured some large fish this year’. Secretary Walsingham, in turn, recruited his own student operatives for counter-intelligence work. The industrious Parker Scholars – quick-witted, needy and beholden to the Church of England – were just the kind of men the Secretary was looking for.
One case in point is Nicholas Faunt, who came from Canterbury, went to the King’s School and was among the first Scholars to attend Cambridge under Archbishop Parker’s bequest. Faunt’s college was Corpus Christi, where he took his BA in 1576, and where he lived in the room adjacent to the one that Marlowe would soon occupy. Faunt became a secretary in the employ of Sir Francis Walsingham. His turf was France. In the autumn of 1587, during one of Marlowe’s unexplained absences from Corpus Christi, Faunt was in Paris on a mission for Walsingham. While the factual record does not mention any meetings between Faunt and Marlowe, the ‘Cambridge connection’ to covert intelligence work was an enticing alternative for a young man in Marlowe’s circumstances. There was plenty of work for spies to do.
Although the Lennox plot had been effectively blocked, its sequel exposed grave shortcomings in the English secret service. Acting on a tip from ‘Fagot’, Walsingham’s mole in the French embassy, English agents arrested the Catholic conspirator Francis Throckmorton late in 1583. Under torture, Throckmorton confessed that the Duke of Guise, with the assistance of Catholics in the south of England, was preparing to land a full-scale army of invasion on the coast of Sussex. That was just the beginning. Walsingham soon discovered that the Queen of Scots maintained an extensive correspondence with her domestic and foreign allies, and actively supported what came to be known, misleadingly, as the Throckmorton plot. Pope Gregory XIII provided financial support and agreed to renew the bull of excommunication. Bernardino de Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador to England, put his resources at Guise’s disposal. Jesuit priests and missionaries supplied local intelligence, messengers and diplomatic couriers. The Duke’s men were in contact with Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, and Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland. The Catholic allies planned to invade England from both the north, via Lancashire, and the south; they calculated that all northern England, and many peers in the midlands, would come to their aid. The Duke’s agent Francis Throckmorton, a minor player in this league, was organizing Catholics in the south of England when he fell into Walsingham’s hands.
7.3 Queen Elizabeth I, ‘The Rainbow Portrait’. The Queen’s gown is embroidered with eyes and ears – emblems of surveillance.
These revelations came as a shock. Secretary Walsingham now realized that the conspiracy to depose Elizabeth had become vast, international and self-perpetuating. And worse was on the way. Until the 1580s, Elizabeth’s enemies had rejected the tactic of political assassination. Pope Pius V’s bull of 1570 excommunicated Elizabeth, but it did not authorize Catholics to murder her. In 1580, however, the Spanish governor of the Netherlands set a price on the head of Prince William of Orange. As a Protestant prince who defied Catholic Spain, William’s position was analogous to that of Queen Elizabeth, though the analogy is misleading. Since Spain claimed sovereignty over the Netherlands, there was precedent (however dubious) for the Spanish governor’s sentence against Prince William. This justification did not apply in the case of Queen Elizabeth, but that did not prevent her enemies from exploiting the analogy.
When asked whether it was lawful for Catholics to assassinate the Queen of England, Pope Gregory XIII replied that ‘he cannot but think well that the country should be freed by any means from oppression.’ In the midst of the Throckmorton plot, Elizabeth’s Gentleman Pensioner George Gifford, a trusted member of her household, swore to the Duke of Guise at Rheims that he would murder the queen for 800 crowns. Persons realized that the plot stretched the limits of clerical morality and asked Acquaviva, the Jesuit Father General, for his opinion of the Guise’s plan. Acquaviva had grave misgivings: ‘it will behove the Society to be very careful about becoming mixed up in that matter; it will be fitting rather for the Society to keep out of it, since it little becomes our Institute.’ Despite this excellent advice, Father Persons kept up his contacts with the mutinous Catholic underground.
The murder of Prince William of Orange in 1584 had an electrifying effect on English Protestants. Assuming that Catholic assassins would strike next at Elizabeth, Parliament retaliated with draconian measures. In the event of an attempt on the queen’s life, the new ‘Act for the Queen’s Surety’ (safety) mandated the death penalty not only for any would-be assassins, but also for any successor to the crown who knew about such a plot. By this standard, if Mary, Queen of Scots, was informed about a plan for Elizabeth’s removal (the Duke of Guise’s contract with George Gifford, for example), Mary’s life was forfeit. The Act for the Queen’s Surety gave Secretary Walsingham a powerful new weapon in his struggle with Catholic conspirators. Instead of merely defending Elizabeth, the Secretary and his agents could entrap her enemies into destroying themselves. The Act did not stipulate that the prospective killers had to be engaged in a substantial plot with a real chance of success, nor that Queen Mary had to understand what she was privy to; a make-believe plot would be fine. Nor did this strategy require Queen Elizabeth and her Council to cover their hands in blood. The entire process was perfectly legal.
After returning from Paris early in 1584, Thomas Walsingham assisted Sir Francis at his London headquarters on Seething Lane. In 1585, around the onset of Marlowe’s prolonged absences from Corpus Christi, Secretary Walsingham’s annual outlay for secret service work leapt from £750 to about £7,000 a year; the figure for 1586 was upwards of £12,000. Among his other duties, Thomas Walsingham acted as an intermediary between Sir Francis and field agents like the up-and-coming Robert Poley. This arrangement put the Kentishman Thomas Walsingham in an ideal position to recruit the Canterbury scholar Christopher Marlowe into the Secretary’s service, just when the need for new operatives was reaching its peak.
Robert Poley, the most ruthless and cunning of Secretary Walsingham’s agents, matriculated at Cambridge as a Sizar in 1568, in the same term as Richard Baines, but left without taking his degree, probably because he was a Catholic. Poley was married to ‘one Watson’s daughter’ by a seminary priest around 1582. The ceremony took place at the home of a tailor named Wood near Bow Lane, in Bishopsgate. Wood circulated Catholic books as a sideline. The Poleys’ first and only child, a girl named Anne, was baptized at St Helen’s Bishopsgate in August 1583. These facts make it likely that Watson and Poley were allied to one another as brothers-in-law, cousins by marriage, double agents in Secretary Walsingham’s employ or simply as members of the recusant community that lived in the parish. That same year, Poley petitioned Walsingham ‘to do her majesty and the state some special service’. He soon was made ‘prisoner in the Marshalsea
upon Mr Secretary’s commandment’.
The gloomy medieval fortress of the Marshalsea stood in Southwark, near the Thames. It was one of the chief places of detention and torture for Catholic priests. Poley lived well in prison. He had a chest containing £110 that he left with Joan Yeomans, the wife of a local cutler, for safekeeping. According to the jailer Richard Ede, Joan Yeomans ‘often had recourse unto him and had many fine banquets in his chamber’. Ede ‘found fault to it that he should make so merry with another man’s wife’. Poley’s own wife, one Watson’s daughter, ‘came to him many times but he would not abide that she should come at him’.
Poley spent the other part of his stint at the Marshalsea in ‘close’ confinement with Catholic prisoners, using Walsingham’s gold to purchase intelligence. He scraped acquaintance with a priest named Norris; he acquired various pro-Catholic pamphlets and initiated a correspondence with Charles Morgan, the principal agent of Mary, Queen of Scots, in Paris. Poley neglected to inform his employer about his progress, however, and Secretary Walsingham accused him of double-dealing. Poley later bragged that ‘although Mr Secretary used him very cruelly yet would he never confess it. And he said that he put Mr Secretary in that heat that he looked out of his Window and grinned like a dog.’ Walsingham’s exasperation is understandable. When Joan Yeoman’s husband William asked Poley how he could lie to Walsingham’s face, Poley replied that ‘it is no matter for I will swear & forswear my self rather than I will accuse my self to do any harm.’
Poley attended Thomas Watson’s friend Thomas Walsingham to Seething Lane for his ‘secret recourse to Mr Secretary’, but to no avail. Poley then wrote to Secretary Walsingham’s ally the Earl of Leicester, asking for a new assignment. In response to the charge that he had ‘not in these three or four years’ intent, endeavoured to discover some practice either foreign or at home against the state’, Poley replied that he was in a double bind: