by David Riggs
Although Cholmeley’s plan sounds naïvely optimistic, informed observers agreed with him about the spread of atheism in late Elizabethan England. The Protestant theologian Richard Greenham believed ‘That atheism in England is more to be feared than Popery’. Since atheists lacked any deep-seated loyalties to the Elizabethan establishment, they would have no moral inhibitions about turning upon it, should the occasion arise. The same logic informed Justice William Lambarde’s warning not to commission atheist militia in Kent, since ‘these Epicureans care not for the present estate’. The author of Anwick His Meditation shared Lambarde’s fears: ‘because the Papist’s religion is more pleasing unto the carnal senses of man, than the straight rules of God,’ Anwick reasoned, ‘There is no doubt but that they [the Atheists] will join with the Papists against the Protestants when any stir happeneth.’
The Catholic League’s embrace of assassination and genocide further confused the categories of zealous Catholic and closet atheist. Since the Catholic killers had been absolved by the Pope of any moral responsibility for their crimes, they shared the atheist’s reckless indifference to the divine sanctions of hell and damnation. The League’s policy had, moreover, proven effective. The murder of William of Orange in 1584 had nearly led to the Spanish takeover of the Netherlands. The potential for calamity was enormous – unless something was done to arrest the epidemic. The heresy hunt of 1593 was the official expression of this moral panic, just as Christopher Marlowe was to be its most prominent victim. The Dutch Church libel and the ‘Remembrances Against Richard Cholmeley’, both of which turned up in the course of these investigations, raised the spectre of an emergent alliance between atheists and Roman Catholic provocateurs. The common denominator that linked the libel to the ‘Remembrances’ was Christopher Marlowe. Cholmeley’s gang was small, but political assassins wielded an influence that was disproportionate to their numbers.
On 18 May, the Council ordered Henry Maunder, a Messenger of the Queen’s Chamber,
To repair to the house of Mr Thomas Walsingham in Kent, or to any other place where he shall understand Christopher Marlowe to be remaining, and by virtue hereof to apprehend and bring him to the court in his company.
Maunder arrested Marlowe within the next day or two. After posting bail on 20 May, the playwright was ‘commanded to give his daily attendance to their lordships, until he shall be licensed to the contrary’. This proviso obliged him to hover ‘within the verge’ of the court, a vicinity that extended twelve miles in every direction from the person of the sovereign. Since crimes committed within the verge fell under the special jurisdiction of the queen and her personal servants, the Council’s order also meant that Marlowe no longer enjoyed the protection of the common law courts. The order likewise prevented the Commissioners appointed on 26 March from examining him under torture; indeed, there is no evidence that anyone apart from the Council ever interrogated Marlowe at all. The Councillors continued to gather evidence relating to Marlowe.
Drury’s third task was to procure a transcript of ‘the notablest and vilest articles of atheism’ for Puckering and the Council. In the light of Drury’s previous errand to ‘one Mr Bains’ there is little doubt that these articles are identical to the ‘Note Containing the opinion of one Christopher Marly Concerning his Damnable Judgement of Religion, and scorn of God’s word’, signed by Richard Baines. Burghley had questioned Baines about Marlowe just sixteen months previously; the Lord Treasurer knew that Baines would testify against his old enemy. Drury delivered Baines’s note to the Council around 27 May. The note contains seventeen articles of atheism (mimicking the format of ecclesiastical pronouncements like the Thirty-Nine Articles), several of which elaborate on the jests mentioned by Kyd and Cholmeley. Here was the smoking gun, the ‘sound reasons for Atheism’ that Marlowe had expounded to Cholmeley and his gang.
Marlowe’s articles of atheism read like a fleshed-out version of Father Persons’ school of atheism, ‘wherein both Moses and our saviour, the old and the new Testament are jested at’. The atheist lecturer knows that ‘many Authors of antiquity have assuredly written of above 16 thousand years ago whereas Adam is proved to have lived within 6 thousand years.’ He has grasped the Machiavellian idea, also available from Polybius or Livy, that ancient priests and rulers invented supernatural powers to keep their subjects in awe. In his second letter to Puckering, Kyd accuses Marlowe of maintaining that ‘things esteemed to be done by divine power might have as well been done by observation of men’. Following Machiavelli’s lead, the lecturer brings this logic to bear on the Hebrew Bible: ‘it was an easy matter for Moses being brought up in all the arts of the Egyptians to abuse the Jews being a rude and gross people.’
The lecturer contended that ‘Moses was but a Juggler and that one Heriots being Sir W. Raleigh’s man Can do more than he.’ Hariot, whose name also appears on the back of Drury’s ‘Remembrances’, had participated in Raleigh’s colony at Roanoke in Virginia, and then surveyed Raleigh’s estates in Ireland. Hariot could ‘do more than’ Moses because he had employed his understanding of European religious and symbolic systems to impose on the beliefs of credulous native Americans. His Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588) is one of the first works that uses native American subjects to test theories about the origins of European religion.
The lecturer mocks the New Testament in relentlessly materialistic terms, arguing
That Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest.
That he was the son of a Carpenter, and that if the Jews among whom he was born did Crucify him they best knew him and whence he Came. That Christ deserved better to die than Barabas and that the Jews made a good Choice, though Barabas were but a thief and a murderer.
Having argued that Judaism and Christianity consist of threadbare fictions, the lecturer expresses a preference for ‘the papists because the service of god is performed with more Ceremonies, as Elevation of the mass, organs, singing men, Shaven Crowns, etc.’
In the last part of the lecture, Marlowe proposes to ‘write a new religion’ based on ‘a more Excellent and Admirable method’. Baines illustrates Marlowe’s excellent new method with glosses on John 13:23 and Romans 13:1. Marlowe’s interpretation of the passage from John preserves the literal sense (‘Now there was one of his disciples [John], which leaned on his bosom, which Jesus loved’), but glosses it according to a logic of carnal desire: ‘St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom … he used him as the sinners of Sodoma.’ The new reading entails a new moral: ‘That all they that love not boys and tobacco are fools’. The moral precept brings Marlowe’s new religion into conflict with the law. Where the letter of Romans 13:1 requires obedience to the powers that be, the carnal interpreter argues that ‘Paul was a timorous fellow in bidding men to be subject to magistrates against his conscience.’ Marlowe took the Protestant belief in the inspired lay Bible reader to its blasphemous destination. Luther had foreseen this outcome when he warned that ‘The ungodly out of the Gospel do seek only a carnal freedom, and become worse thereby; therefore not the Gospel but the Law belongeth unto them.’ Marlowe’s new religion subverts the Gospel to undermine the law: since Paul had spoken out of fear, the lecturer ‘had as good a right to Coin as the Queen of England’. Baines’s reference to Marlowe’s apprenticeship in counterfeiting with ‘one Poole a prisoner in Newgate’ and his self-interested reprise of the Flushing episode suggest that he still needed his former confederate’s guilt to establish his own innocence. This time, however, Baines had a witness.
Since the Privy Council ordered up the testimony of Baines and Kyd, the two men with whom Marlowe had shared a room since leaving Corpus Christi, and commissioned Drury’s report about Marlowe’s disciple Richard Cholmeley, the question of who is speaking in these documents is unusually opaque. Baines is the hardest of Marlowe’s accusers to fathom, for he himself had played the part of the atheist lecturer at Rheims. Baines’s atheist diatribe has nothing like t
he conceptual range of Marlowe’s performance; but the older man, who confessed that he ‘most delighted in profane authors and the worst sort of them, such as either wrote against the truth or had the least taste of religion’, was superbly qualified to show Marlowe how to disseminate atheist teachings.
Marlowe ‘doth not only hold [these opinions] himself,’ Baines concluded, ‘but almost into every Company he Cometh he persuades men to Atheism, willing them not to be afeared of bugbears and hobgoblins, and utterly scorning both god and his ministers.’ Kyd corroborated these allegations: ‘[I]t was his custom’, he wrote, ‘in table talk or otherwise to jest at the divine scriptures, gibe at prayers, and strive in argument to frustrate & confute what hath been spoke or writ by prophets and such holy men.’ Raleigh’s absence from these eyewitness accounts is to be expected. Drury’s third-hand report that Marlowe gave Raleigh a lecture on atheism is plausible; but this intelligence led nowhere unless Raleigh went for the bait, which he was most unlikely to do in the wake of Father Persons’ public accusation on that count. Raleigh had listened to the Earl of Oxford’s atheist diatribe in 1580 and no one held it against him. Although biographers routinely assume that Marlowe was a follower and friend of Raleigh’s, there is no evidence that Sir Walter, a notoriously proud man, had an ongoing relationship with the poor scholar and popular playwright. Marlowe was said to have conversed with Raleigh’s man Hariot, not Raleigh himself. Indeed, the absence of hard evidence linking the playwright to Raleigh, Northumberland or Strange suggests that these aristocrats were prudent enough to keep Christopher Marlowe at a safe distance.
Was Marlowe a bona fide atheist? Or was he a government spy attempting to entrap men suspected of that crime – Raleigh, for instance, or Baines’s other ‘great men who in time shall be named’? Within the fluid, opportunistic world of the double agent, it is hard to imagine what sort of evidence could categorically exclude either alternative. Marlowe had joined the ranks of government agents ‘such as the Laws of the Realm esteemeth Traitors’. When such operatives threatened the security of the state that employed them, they became indistinguishable from traitors in earnest.
Although the extent of Marlowe’s atheism only becomes legible within the state security apparatus, its appearance there registers a larger crisis within sixteenth-century Protestantism. In making the fear of God the ultimate guarantor of belief, Calvin wagered that the Lord would never allow open atheism to go unpunished. The handful of ancient blasphemers who had dared God out of heaven (Caligula, Diagoras, Dionysius) were the exceptions that proved the rule: for, as Calvin put it, ‘no one trembled more miserably when any sign of God’s wrath manifested itself’ than they did. The anti-theatrical polemicist William Rankins explains why:
the mighty Jehova enkindled his wrath and sent worms to devour the guts of this Arius … And Dionisius Aropagita, for blaspheming the name of God, suddenly sank into the earth … The unhappy wife of Job, that willed him to curse God and die, with her children, and all the rest of her substance, was suddenly wasted and consumed …
Tamburlaine, Dr Faustus and now Marlowe himself called this axiom into question.
This was the climactic moment in Drury’s three weeks of intelligence gathering: ‘the notablest and vilest articles of Atheism … were delivered to her highness and command given by herself to prosecute it to the full.’ The ambiguous ‘prosecute’ hinted at legal proceedings. The recently enacted 1593 statute ‘to retain the Queen’s majesty’s subjects in their due obedience’ made it a crime ‘to maliciously move or persuade any other person whatsoever to forbear or abstain from coming to church to hear divine service’. But the harshest penalty for this offence was banishment. Baines testified that Marlowe sought passage to Spain or Rome. Marlowe himself took a keen interest in the court of James VI. Kyd testified that his former roommate
would persuade with men of quality to go unto the K[ing] of Scots whither I hear Royden is gone and where if he had lived he told me he meant to be.
This report is quite believable, especially in the light of the fact that Marlowe’s friend the poet Matthew Royden did migrate to Scotland, where he found a place in the household of James’s boon companion William Hamilton, Earl of Haddington. Kyd suggests that Marlowe was involved in promoting the Scottish succession, urging his well-placed acquaintances to side with James’s faction. Banishment would have been a bountiful recompense, not prosecution ‘to the full’.
The 1581 statute ‘Against seditious words and rumours uttered against the Queen’s most excellent majesty’ had more teeth. Anyone convicted of uttering ‘false and slanderous news or tales against the Queen’ was to ‘have both his ears cut off, except he pay £200 to the Queen’s use in the exchequer within two months’. Although Marlowe’s conviction would have been a foregone conclusion – there were no acquittals in Tudor state trials – defendants had the right to speak on their own behalf. Even Star Chamber proceedings were porous events. The Jesuit propaganda machine stood to gain a raft of sensational reportage from the trial of Christopher Marlowe for atheism. The recent executions of Barrow and Greenwood had provoked a public outcry. The Catholic intelligencer Richard Verstegan reported to Persons that ‘the officers durst not execute them by reason of the great multitude of Puritans there present insomuch that a present commotion was feared’. Nor was there any guarantee that removing Marlowe’s ears, the maximum penalty for blasphemous speech, would close his mouth. Baines’s concluding recommendation went straight to this point: ‘all men in Christianity ought to endeavour that the mouth of so dangerous a member may be stopped.’ With her exquisite sense of occasion, Queen Elizabeth gave the order to ‘prosecute it to the full’ just when Marlowe was ready to enter history as the overreacher, a wholesome caution for aspiring minds.
* * *
On 29 May, the Puritan John Penry was hastily removed from prison and dragged on a sledge to St Thomas a Watering, Surrey, where he was hanged at five in the afternoon. Despite the severity of the crackdown, the government wanted to keep a low public profile. The next day, Marlowe joined a small feast at the Deptford residence of Eleanor Bull. Bull’s husband Richard had been under-bailiff at the local manor house before his death in 1590. Her home stood ‘within the verge’, less than a mile from the royal court at Greenwich Palace. It fell under the jurisdiction of Elizabeth’s Lord High Steward rather than the local Justice of the Peace. Widow Bull had connections at court. Blanche Parry, who had been Chief Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber and the queen’s principal crony, called Bull her ‘cousin’, or intimate relation, and bequeathed her a legacy of £100 in 1591. Lord Burghley, another ‘cousin’ and legatee of Blanche Parry’s, drafted her will in his own hand. He knew who Eleanor Bull was and where she lived.
At Widow Bull’s, Marlowe met up with the swindler Ingram Frizer, his accomplice Nicholas Skerres and Robert Poley, who was now in Lord Burghley’s employ. Frizer and Skerres were clients of Thomas Walsingham. The minister William Vaughan, who had connections at court, wrote that ‘one Ingram had invited [Marlowe] thither to a feast’. During the spring of 1593, Frizer, Skerres and Walsingham were working in concert to defraud a young man named Drew Woodleff of his inheritance. Skerres was the front man (when the Council asked him that April what he did for a living, Skerres replied that he was an instrument to ‘draw young gentlemen into bonds’); Frizer and Walsingham were the bondsmen.
The initial entry in one of Poley’s code books summed up his current job description: ‘Queen’s Majesty her life’. Poley specialized in protecting Elizabeth from would-be assassins like Henry Young and the Tipping brothers. Skerres too had been in Her Majesty’s service. In the waning days of the Babington conspiracy, while Robert Poley was shuttling back and forth between his victim and Thomas Walsingham, Skerres had briefly appeared alongside Poley in the conspirators’ inner circle. Afterwards, Skerres had seen military service with Essex in France. Poley, Skerres and Frizer were used to operating in teams and had worked with one another before. They had pract
ical experience in manipulating the law; they knew how to fabricate a trial narrative and maintain it under interrogation. These were the special skills they brought with them to Deptford on 30 May.
In the words of Coroner Danby’s report, the four men ‘met together in a room’ at Eleanor Bull’s. The two names that leap to attention at this gathering are Robert Poley and Christopher Marlowe. Poley was a veteran secret service agent who dealt with threats to Queen Elizabeth’s security. Marlowe had recently been accused of preaching atheism, consorting with Her Majesty’s mortal enemies and proclaiming that ‘he had as good a right to coin as the Queen’. Poley and Marlowe had many things to talk about. Marlowe could claim that he was covertly acting on the queen’s behalf. Nevertheless, the suspect found himself in a tight spot. He wanted to go to Scotland – where Spanish men-of-war were reportedly on the verge of landing troops. Deptford was a familiar port of disembarkation for Scotland. Poley’s employers, the Privy Council, were holding Marlowe on a very tight leash. He still had to report to the Palace on a daily basis.
The four men ‘passed the time together’, walked in the garden ‘and in company dined’. The provision of food raises the question of whether or not the genteel Widow Bull operated a tavern or public house, a circumstance that would have opened her door to random witnesses. The only indication that such an establishment ever existed is the gathering on 30 May. The contact points for Eleanor Bull were Burghley and his servant Poley. The venue of a catered private party does, however, furnish a pretext for the coroner’s statement that Frizer and Marlowe ‘could not concur nor agree on the payment of the sum of pence, that is, le recknynge’ and fell into a quarrel. Frizer had invited Marlowe to a feast; now the host expected his guest to pay up. At the climax of the quarrel, Frizer plunged his dagger into Marlowe’s face, just above the right eye. The blade entered Marlowe’s brain, killing him instantly. Frizer pleaded self-defence.