by David Riggs
In response to this intervention, the Commission arrested twenty-six sectarians on 4 March and set about interrogating them. The investigation widened in scope. The Puritan evangelist and pamphleteer John Penry was arrested on 22 March. A day later, the Separatist leaders Henry Barrow and John Greenwood, together with the printers who had published their work, were convicted of felony under the 1581 statute ‘Against Seditious words and rumours uttered against the Queens Most Excellent Majesty’. The statute against seditious words collapsed the old ecclesiastical crimes of heresy and blasphemy into the secular offence of treason. Barrow and Greenwood had written against the queen’s Church; therefore, they had attacked the queen. Barrow protested that ‘he acknowledged her Majesty’s supremacy, and that in this book written by him he intended not any hurt to Her Majesty’, but to no avail. The five men were sentenced to hang.
15.1 Archbishop Whitgift.
The High Commission’s crusade soon turned into the first all-out heresy hunt since the reign of Elizabeth’s sister Mary – and the last in English history. On 26 March, the queen created a new Royal Commission to hunt down, examine and punish Barrowists, Separatists, Catholic recusants, counterfeiters, vagrants and all who ‘secretly adhere to our most capital Enemy the Bishop of Rome or otherwise do willfully deprave condemn or impugn the Divine Service and Sacraments’. The queen’s Commission did not distinguish between alien religions and no religion, or atheism. Elizabethan church governance rested on the bare premise of outward conformity; the Commissioners incarcerated any parishioners who ‘refuse to repair to the Church to hear Divine service’, including many who held no religious beliefs at all.
During the latter half of April, when written libels threatening violence against Protestant immigrants from Holland and France appeared in the City, the investigation broadened in scope yet again. These placards challenged the queen’s authority to impose a Protestant consensus. She and Lord Treasurer Burghley looked to the immigrant congregations to strengthen the Protestant side in England. Viewing the same policy from the perspective of a Catholic exile, Cardinal Allen alleged that Elizabeth was repopulating England ‘with innumerable strangers of the worst sort of malefactors and sectaries, to the great impoverishing of the inhabitants, and no small peril of the whole realm’.
These xenophobic libels gave the queen and her Council fresh cause for concern. During the notorious Evil May Day uprising of 1517, a thousand boatmen and apprentices to various trades had spent the night looting the houses of London immigrants. Although the provenance of The Book of Sir Thomas More, a dramatization of the Evil May Day riot, remains uncertain, the evidence at hand indicates that the play was written in 1592–93 for Strange’s Men. Among the collaborative authors of Sir Thomas More, scholars have identified Hand D, the individual who penned the climactic scene in which More confronts an angry mob of apprentices, as that of Shakespeare. Hand D depicted the most volatile moment in the Evil May Day story. Yet the mob soon grows obedient in response to More’s eloquent defence of authority. The scene prefigures the powerfully persuasive speeches on ‘degree’ in Shakespeare’s Henry V, Troilus and Cressida and Coriolanus. Nevertheless, the uprising was deemed too sensitive a subject for public performance. Edmund Tilney, the queen’s Master of the Revels, heavily censored the authorial manuscript of Sir Thomas More and ordered the actors to ‘Leave out the insurrection wholly and the Cause thereof’.
Although the playhouses remained closed throughout the spring, the anti-immigrant propaganda now took a theatrical turn. On the night of 5 May, an anonymous rhymester who styled himself ‘Tamberlaine’ posted an unusually provocative ultimatum on the wall of the Dutch churchyard. Tamberlaine ventriloquized Marlowe’s Tamburlaine in order to stir up mob violence against the immigrant community. The agitator’s verses evoked his namesake’s notorious custom of slaughtering the inhabitants of a besieged town if they disobeyed his orders to evacuate. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine broadcast this message with coloured flags; his streetwise imitator used a wall poster. Like Marlowe’s Few of Malta, Tamberlaine conflates popular animosity towards strangers, Machiavellians, merchants and Jews:
Your Machiavellian Merchant spoils the state,
Your usury doth leave us all for dead
Your artifex and craftsman works our fate,
And like the Jews, you eat us up as bread.
Twenty-six lines later, at a particularly bloodthirsty moment (‘We’ll cut your throats, in your temples praying’), Tamberlaine again evoked Marlowe’s work: ‘Not paris massacre so much blood did spill / As we will do just vengeance on you all.’ Lord Strange’s Men had performed The Few of Malta and The Massacre at Paris to packed houses that January; Massacre, the last new play to enter the company’s repertory before the plague brought performances to a halt on 31 January, was the hit of the truncated winter season.
Tamberlaine caught the queen’s attention. At its weekly meeting on 11 May the Council conveyed her vexation to the Royal Commissioners. Among the recent spate of lewd and malicious libels set up within the City of London, they wrote,
there is some set upon the wall of the Dutch churchyard that doth exceed the rest in lewdness, and for the discovery of the author and publisher thereof her majesty’s pleasure is that some extraordinary pains and care be taken by the Commissioners appointed by the Lord Mayor for the examining such persons as may be in this case any way suspected …
This broad category had to include Christopher Marlowe, despite the lack of any evidence that he had composed the libel.
The Royal Commissioners arrested Marlowe’s former roommate Thomas Kyd the following day. Among Kyd’s papers the Commissioners found what they called ‘vile heretical Conceits denying the deity of Jesus Christ’ – in fact a transcript of Arian positions recorded in John Proctor’s Fall of the Late Arian. If suspects ‘shall refuse to confess the truth’, the Council’s letter of 11 May instructed the Commissioners to ‘put them to the torture in Bridewell, and by the extremity thereof to be used at such times and as often as you shall think fit, draw them to discover their knowledge concerning the said libels’.
Before its conversion, Bridewell Prison, at the intersection of the Rivers Thames and Fleet, had housed Cardinal Wolsey, King Henry VIII and the French embassy. Under Elizabeth the old red-brick palace became a workhouse for prostitutes and vagrants, and a holding prison for Separatists and Roman Catholics. Torture was usually reserved for the Catholics. The jailers frequently manacled their victims by the hands, and hung them with their feet just above the floor for hours at a time. The ‘extremity’ of the tortures in use at the Bridewell was called ‘the scavenger’s daughter’. It consisted ‘of an iron ring’ – tightened, one gathers, by turning a screw –‘which brings the head, feet and hands together until they form a circle’.
The Commissioners tortured Kyd, who, in the words of an endorsement inscribed on the transcript of the heretical conceits, ‘affirmeth’ that he had received this document ‘from Marlowe’, despite the fact that it is written in the italic hand used by scriveners such as Kyd. Kyd also could have told them that it was Marlowe’s custom ‘to jest at the divine scriptures [and] gibe at prayers’; or that ‘He would report St John to be our saviour Christ’s Alexis’. He subsequently wrote these and other allegations down in two letters to Thomas Puckering, Elizabeth’s Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal; he had small incentive to withhold them while he was being crushed alive at the Bridewell.
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At this point, the Privy Council took the investigation into its own hands. Sackville and Lord Keeper Puckering ordered the informant Thomas Drury to procure more intelligence relating to the case of Christopher Marlowe. Drury had been a Pensioner at Cambridge in the 1570s and knew Richard Baines, who ‘did use to resort unto me’. Drury’s main occupation was loan sharking; on the side, however, he had collected ‘diverse papers, letters, books, and writings importing the State’ until his partner, the extortionist Richard Cholmeley, informed on him to the Council. Drury la
nguished in the Marshalsea prison in Southwark from mid-1591 until the autumn of 1592, when Puckering asked Sackville to interview the prisoner. The Marshalsea was used for Catholics suspected of disloyalty; Puckering probably wanted to know if Drury had turned up any intelligence there. Sackville pressed Drury to set down in writing any information that might be ‘available to the state’ (that is, of avail, or efficacious, to the government), but Drury ‘was very loath to set down the particularities thereof in writing because it consisted in diverse attempts and industries of his own, whereof he meant to hazard his life for the service of her majesty and his country’. Drury’s reluctance to produce a written document is understandable given his prior conviction for possessing seditious papers; but he did give Sackville a deposition ‘touching the whole course of his doings’ before his arrest, when he was teamed up with Richard Cholmeley.
Cholmeley supplied the Council with information about recusants, while using the Council’s warrant to extort money from his victims: ‘he used he sayeth to take money of them & would let them pass in spite of the Council.’ His older brother Sir Hugh Cholmeley of Cheshire, an old Walsingham hand, had influence with Lord Burghley’s son and protégé, Sir Robert Cecil, who set the Cholmeley brothers loose on well-to-do Catholics. Richard Cholmeley proved an unruly agent. He vexed his employer Cecil, who did not want to be seen in public with him, by turning up at court after a successful operation. Sir Hugh apologized to Cecil and urged his patron to ‘pardon this ambitious infirmity in regard of diverse other good points I hope are in him’. Like Gilbert Gifford and Michael Moody, Cholmeley worked on the margin where state service intersected with double-dealing and sedition. Cholmeley’s margin grew exceedingly thin during the winter of 1593. On 19 March, the Council ordered ‘George Cobham, one of the Messengers of Her Majesty’s Chamber, to apprehend Richard Cholmeley and Richard Stronge and to bring them before their Lordships’. Cobham proved unable to carry out this order, perhaps because Cholmeley had now acquired a gang of sixty armed followers. On 13 May, just two days after Kyd was interrogated, the Council issued yet another warrant for Cholmeley’s arrest. This time they procured expert assistance; the moment had come for Thomas Drury to hazard his life in Her Majesty’s service.
In a cryptic letter written the following August, Drury informed the chief of intelligence for the Earl of Essex that he had performed three tasks between 10 May – when the City posted a reward of one hundred crowns for the identity of the Dutch Church libeller – and the day when Drury transmitted ‘the notablest and vilest articles of atheism’ to the queen’s Privy Council. To begin with, Drury visited ‘one Mr Baines and got the desired secret at his hand; for which the City of London promised … a hundred crowns’; in other words he extracted the identity of the Dutch Church libeller from Baines.
During his second batch of chores, Drury discovered a libel, a vile book ‘and a notable villain or two which are close prisoners and bad matters against them of an exceeding nature’. This inventory matches up quite closely with that of two unsigned spy’s reports – ‘Remembrances of words and matter against Richard Cholmeley’ and a follow-up note on the same subject – written around the same time. On the basis of these parallels, it is likely that the unnamed spy was Drury, who knew Cholmeley well and had a score to settle with him. The unnamed spy discovered that Cholmeley made libels, had a vile book and led a gang of sixty armed men. The vile book was
(as he [Cholmeley] sayeth) delivered him by Sir Robert Cecil of whom he giveth scandalous report That he should incite him to consider thereof and to frame verses and libels in commendation of constant Priests and virtuous Recusants, this book is in custody and is called an Epistle of Comfort and is printed at Paris.
Cecil had invited the recusant-hunter to join the other side, and write pro-Catholic propaganda along the lines of Father Southwell’s Epistle of Comfort. Drury further reported that Cholmeley ‘speaketh in general all evil of the Council; saying that they are all Atheists and Machiavellians’. Drury’s evil was Cholmeley’s good, for the rogue agent embraced atheism as a liberating idea. His mentor was Christopher Marlowe. According to Drury, Cholmeley ‘sayeth & verily believeth that one Marlowe is able to show more sound reasons for Atheism than any divine in England is able to give to prove divinity’. Marlowe reportedly told the gang-leader ‘that he hath read the Atheist lecture to Sir Walter Raleigh and others’. Baines’s ‘Note’ to the Privy Council , ‘the vilest articles of atheism’, would provide the substance of the lecture.
By way of conclusion, Cholmeley cited the notorious case of William Parry, the spy who plotted to kill Queen Elizabeth while she was riding in the park. Although Parry subsequently claimed that he was working on behalf of the queen, and meant to expose a conspiracy to assassinate her, he was summarily executed for treason. Cholmeley remarked that Parry ‘was hanged drawn & quartered but in Jest that he was a gross Ass overreached by Cunning’. The clerk’s handwriting leaves us guessing about the exact nature of Cholmeley’s intentions, but he clearly saw his own case as akin to that of his hapless predecessor: for ‘in truth he now [never?] meant to kill the Queen more than himself [Parry] had’.
An endorsement on the back of the ‘Remembrances’ includes the words ‘Heriots’, ‘Tippings ii’ and ‘Young taken and made an instrument to take the rest’. Raleigh’s client Hariot figures as one of the ‘others’ to whom Marlowe delivered the atheist lecture, perhaps when he read it to Raleigh himself. James Tipping was a Catholic insurrectionist who had been involved in the Babington conspiracy to assassinate Elizabeth in 1586. In 1592–93, he and his brother John joined forces with Henry Young in the ‘Stanley plot’. Their mission was to assassinate the queen. By May 1593, Young and probably the Tipping brothers had returned from France and made contact with Cholmeley. Thanks to Young’s subsequent co-operation, Cholmeley was a ‘close prisoner’ when Drury penned his retrospective account that August. In May, however, he was at large. Marlowe had fallen into dangerous company.
The Pope and the King of Spain, the pillars of the Catholic League, both supported the Stanley plot. Preparations for the projected invasion appeared to be well advanced. By 26 May, the queen had heard that ‘some Spanish shipping and men-of-war are to be sent into Scotland … to land men there to stir up her subjects to rebellion’.
The Stanley conspirators, as Phelippes had noted, ‘desire but an entrance while the intended execution is done upon the Queen’s person, upon which all their plans depend’. The time for the killing drew near.
Cholmeley’s curious assertion that ‘he now [or ‘never’] meant to kill the Queen more than’ Parry had raises basic questions about the gang leader’s motives. Before Cholmeley stepped into the role of an insurrectionist and queen-killer, his employer Sir Robert Cecil had ‘invited’ him to infiltrate the Roman Catholic underground. The appearance of Henry Young and the Tippings on the back of Drury’s ‘Remembrances’ indicates that Cholmeley had made considerable headway in reinventing himself as an incendiary assassin. Perhaps he had made too much headway. His mutinous band was the ideal decoy to entrap Young and the Tippings, who needed extra muscle in their own quarrel with the queen; but Cholmeley’s gang also had the capacity to incite real mayhem. Richard Cholmeley was the real-life counterpart of Jack Cade, the plebeian rabble-rouser in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI. Although nominally under the control of his aristocratic patron, Cade is a loose cannon fired by underclass delusions of grandeur. Cholmeley’s comparison of himself to William Parry registers his awareness of this dual identity: like his predecessor, he is both a government agent and rogue agent. At the moment he is perhaps more inclined to kill the queen than Parry was.
Shades of the Babington plot! Once again, the queen’s servants nurtured a conspiracy in order to entrap the conspirators. In this case, the Privy Council’s reach extended from Lord Treasurer Burghley to the veteran case officer Robert Poley in the Low Countries; to the double agent Michael Moody, who shuttled back and forth between Flushing and Brussels;
to Henry Young and the Tipping brothers in Brussels. Poley, Moody and James Tipping were old companions from the Tower. Richard Cholmeley’s contact with the Council was Burghley’s son, Sir Robert Cecil. Marlowe had come before Burghley fourteen months previously, to be tried for counterfeiting. At that point, Burghley shielded Marlowe from a credible charge of high treason. The Lord Treasurer would have expected something in return for his protection. Marlowe’s link with Burghley’s security apparatus gave him a legitimate motive for infiltrating Cholmeley’s gang. At the same time, his success in carrying out this mission exposed the atheist lecturer to the same question that had surfaced in 1587 and 1592: was Christopher Marlowe prepared to ‘go to the enemy’ in earnest?
When Drury tried to arrange a second meeting, where he could deliver Cholmeley to the Council, the gang leader held back and ‘sent two of his Companions to me to know if I would Join with him in familiarity and be one of their damnable Crew’. Cholmeley’s two companions elaborated on the crew’s plan to ‘draw her majesty’s subjects to be atheists’:
their practice is after her majesty’s Decease to make a King among themselves and live according to their own laws, and this sayeth Cholmeley will be done easily because they be and shortly will be by his and his fellows’ persuasions as many of their opinion as of any other religion.
The gang’s ‘opinion’ was atheism. As before, Cholmeley’s first line of attack ‘is to make slanderous reports of most noble peers and honourable Councillors’, accusing them of atheism, while his ‘second course is to make a Jest of Scripture’. The Marlowe jokes that Drury recorded (‘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’) recall Kyd’s allegations about Marlowe’s tendency to ‘jest at the divine scriptures’. They will show up again in Baines’s testimony about the playwright. Cholmeley’s two companions sound like converts; Marlowe’s jokes were their way of spreading the word.