The World of Christopher Marlowe

by David Riggs

  Frizer’s plea deserves to be taken seriously. Marlowe was no stranger to violence. But the story that the murderer and his accomplices devised in order to justify Frizer’s plea needs to be scrutinized more closely than it was at the inquest on 1 June. Frizer, Poley and Skerres testified that Marlowe was ‘lying in a bed in the room where they dined’. ‘[N]ear the bed and with the front part of his body towards the table’, Marlowe’s interlocutor Frizer sat ‘on a bench with his back towards the bed where the aforesaid Christopher Marlowe then lay’. Nicholas Skerres and Robert Poley sat

  on either side of the same Ingram so that the same Ingram Frizer could in no way flee, [and] thus it befell that the aforesaid Christopher Marlowe suddenly and of malice aforethought towards the aforesaid Ingram then and there maliciously unsheathed the dagger of the aforesaid Ingram which was visible at his back and with the same aforesaid dagger then and there maliciously gave the aforesaid Ingram two wounds on his head of the length of two inches & of the depth of a quarter of an inch …

  This is confusing. Since the scalp consists of skin and bone, Frizer’s wounds can hardly have been a quarter of an inch deep, nor does Coroner Danby say that Marlowe attacked his companion with the point of his knife. The deposition rather indicates that Marlowe (or someone) pummelled Frizer’s scalp with the hilt of his dagger. This was a common practice in Elizabethan brawls and it had a precise connotation. Pummelling meant that you intended to hurt, but not to kill your adversary. Had Marlowe wanted to kill Frizer, he would have stabbed him in the back of the neck. Frizer’s scalp wounds were the result of a beating rather than a stabbing.

  At this point, Danby continues,

  the aforesaid Ingram, in fear of being slain and sitting on the aforesaid bench between the aforesaid Nicolas Skerres and Robert Poley so that he was not able to withdraw in any way, in his own defence and to save his life then and there struggled with the aforesaid Christopher Marlowe to take back from him his aforesaid dagger, in which same affray the same Ingram could not withdraw further from the aforesaid Christopher Marlowe. And thus it befell in that affray that the said Ingram, in defence of life, and with the aforesaid dagger of the value of 12 pence, gave the aforesaid Christopher then and there a mortal wound above his right eye of the depth of two inches and of the breadth of one inch, of which same mortal wound the aforesaid Christopher Marlowe then and there instantly died.

  These allegations are more confusing still. The claim that Frizer killed Marlowe ‘to save his life’ falters on several counts. Pummelling was not taken to be life threatening – quite the contrary. If Frizer was so constrained ‘that he could not in any wise get away’, when and how did he gain the mobility to repossess his dagger and plunge it into Marlowe’s eye socket? Poley was obliged to keep the queen’s peace, but he and Skerres disappear from Danby’s narrative once the quarrel begins. Did they just sit there and watch? A keen-eyed modern director points out ‘that the incidents, as related, were not likely to have happened’. And even if they did happen, it is not Marlowe but Frizer, ramming the point of his dagger two full inches into his victim’s brain, who exhibits the intent to kill.

  Nevertheless, Coroner Danby and his jury found on 1 June that Frizer had acted in self-defence. Marlowe was buried at the parish church of St Nicholas, Deptford, on the same day. The entry in the parish register of burials reads: ‘Christopher Marlowe slain by Francis Frezer; the 1 of June’. The substitution of ‘Francis’ for ‘Ingram’ sufficed to conceal the murderer’s identity until 1925.

  Marlowe was killed just a few days after the queen’s command. Was this a coincidence? The facts surrounding Marlowe’s death suggest that Thomas Drury had it right: all the relevant evidence leads back to the Palace. The archival records describe a conflict between Marlowe and the court. The Privy Council ordered up the incriminating reports from Drury and Baines. They required Marlowe to report to the Palace every day. The dispute came to a head when Baines’s Note arrived at Greenwich and ended with the murder of Marlowe shortly thereafter. The ranking official at the scene of the crime was Lord Burghley’s man Robert Poley. The Queen’s Coroner promptly determined that Marlowe died in a quarrel over money. On 15 June, one of the queen’s clerks summoned Danby’s deposition to the Royal Court of Chancery, where it fell under the purview of Lord Keeper Puckering. Elizabeth pardoned Frizer just two weeks later, a remarkably brief interval for a capital offence committed within the verge.

  The court bureaucracy that confined Marlowe within the verge cannot be counted on to disclose the truth about what happened there. The fact that the official account trivializes the killing should provoke scepticism, not acquiescence. A sceptical reading of the coroner’s inquest restores explanatory power to the quarrel between Marlowe and the court. Queen Elizabeth paid Marlowe the fatal compliment of taking him seriously, as a political agent to be reckoned with.

  Within this network of sovereign power, the most conspicuous agent is Lord Treasurer Burghley. It was Burghley and his faction who had come to Marlowe’s rescue when he was accused of defecting to Rheims in 1587; Burghley who had interrogated, and then released, Marlowe and Baines upon their return from Flushing in 1592; and Burghley who oversaw the heresy hunt that brought Marlowe into harm’s way. Cholmeley was in the service of Burghley’s son Sir Robert Cecil during the months leading up to the spring of 1593 and gave a ‘very scandalous report’ of his employer to Drury. For his part, Cholmeley ‘repented him of nothing more than that he had not killed my Lord Treasurer with his own hands’.

  * * *

  The scribe who initially prepared the copy of Baines’s Note ‘as sent to her H[ighness]’ made a verbatim transcript of the original document. After the copyist had completed his work, Lord Keeper Puckering altered the text so as to put a new spin on Baines’s report. To begin with, Puckering changed the title so that it read ‘A note delivered on whitsun eve last of the most horrible blasphemies and damnable opinions uttered by Christopher Marly who within three days after came to a sudden and fearful end of his life’. Since Marlowe died on 30 May and Whitsun eve fell on 2 June, this chronology cannot be right. Puckering apparently confused 27 May, the Sunday before Whitsunday, with Whitsun eve: in which case, Marlowe died exactly ‘three days’ after the Note arrived at court.

  The queen’s command on seeing the articles of atheism (‘prosecute it to the full’) would make no sense if she were responding to a revised copy in which Marlowe had already been killed. Puckering did not set down to work until Marlowe had been dead for at least a week. By this time many members of the queen’s household and residents of Deptford knew what had happened. When Elizabeth signed Ingram Frizer’s pardon, before the month was out, she would see Danby’s inquest, including the date of Marlowe’s death. It is unlikely, then, that Puckering intended to hoodwink the queen with a doctored version of the original note. His revisions and deletions had the opposite effect: they extricated the queen from the machinations surrounding Marlowe’s death. With a few strokes of the pen, the royal actor became the detached viewer of a moral spectacle.

  The revised text of Baines’s Note is the earliest re-inscription of the killing within a providential narrative of crime and punishment. Puckering prepared it at a time when he was pressing Thomas Kyd for information about ‘Marlowe’s monstrous opinions’. The revised title suggested a cause and effect relationship between uttering the damnable opinions and the violent death that came in their wake. ‘[W]ithin three days after’ intimates the swiftness of divine vengeance; the ‘sudden and fearful end’ refigures the killing into an exemplary spectacle for God-fearing subjects. Within the body of the Note, Puckering systematically pruned away any incriminating matter that did not pertain to Marlowe’s quarrel with God. He excised the famous line about boys and tobacco, the references to John Poole and Newgate, Marlowe’s assertion that he had as good a right to coin as the queen, Baines’s offer to produce a witness and, most important, his recommendation that Marlowe’s mouth be stopped. Biographers have supposed
that Puckering scored over these passages in order to keep the queen in the dark. But if that were the case, surely he would not have preserved a text that had obviously been doctored; the relevant parts of the original Note are perfectly legible beneath the strokes that Puckering used to delete them.

  15.2 Double portrait of William and Robert Cecil.

  The revised Note gave the queen a whitewashed version of Marlowe’s death. The deleted passages all refer to criminal acts that did not involve blasphemy but nonetheless cried out for the state-sponsored punishment that Baines envisions in his final paragraph. The excision of this material concealed the quarrel between Marlowe and the court, while the revised title, with its horrid blasphemies and fearful end, revealed that the hand of divine correction had come down hard on the overreacher. Christopher Marlowe, the notorious blasphemer, was another spectacle in the theatre of God’s judgements. The irony here is that the playwright had written so brilliantly about the contrived spectacles of sin and damnation. Now Puckering, right on cue, played the hypocrite to Marlowe’s atheist ‘and let due praise be given / Neither to fate nor fortune, but to heaven’.

  Epilogue

  Giordano Bruno fell into the custody of the Roman Catholic Inquisition in May 1592. The charges against Bruno strongly resembled the allegations that made up the case against Christopher Marlowe. The Inquisitors accused Bruno of saying that men had existed before Adam and that Moses and Jesus had practiced magic. After Pope Clement VII condemned him as an ‘obstinate, stubborn, and impertinent heretic,’ Bruno was bound, gagged, and burned alive at the Campo di Fiore in Rome on 17 February 1600.

  Archbishop Whitgift’s short-lived inquisition of Spring 1593 soon came to a close. Richard Cholmeley was arrested on the evening of 29 June. As he was taken off to jail Cholmeley boasted, ‘I do know the law and can shift well enough,’ but things did not turn out that way. This is the last we hear of him and his gang.

  The informant Thomas Drury grew incensed that he never received any reward for his skilful detective work: ‘not a penny performed and a fine evasion made … and yet no reward, but all the credit pulled out of my mouth, and I robbed of all … no recompense no not a penny’. That summer, Drury wrote to Sir Anthony Bacon, the head of intelligence for the rival faction led by the Earl of Essex, in the hope of peddling his information about the Marlowe case and other ‘secrets’; but nothing came of his offer. Soon thereafter Drury complained to his patron Cecil that Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon had incarcerated him in the Marshalsea prison.

  The Lord Chamberlain accused Drury of ‘abusing him unto you [Cecil] as also for wicked speeches that I could say that I could make any Councillor a traitor’. In his ‘Remembrances’ of Richard Cholmeley, Drury quoted Cholmeley as saying ‘that he doth entirely hate the Lord Chamberlain and hath good cause to do so’, and as speaking ‘in general all evil of the Council; saying that they are all Atheists and Machiavellians’. Now Drury had fallen into the trap that put every Elizabethan spy at risk: Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon held him accountable for the seditious words he attributed to another. Drury duly reminded Cecil ‘that I told your Honour it was others’ practices and lies also, and not my own’. Cecil in turn secured his release from prison and sent him money. Two years later, Lord Burghley employed him to carry letters from France, but Drury’s plan to hazard his life in Her Majesty’s service had come to an end. By the turn of the century he had returned to his old trade of petty swindler and confidence man.

  Nicholas Skerres continued to work as a front man for usurers and extortionists. A police raid in 1595 found him and fourteen others at the house of ‘a most notable broker, to help young men to money upon all kinds of wares upon excessive loss’. After the Earl of Essex’s doomed uprising on 8 February 1601, Skerres was caught up in his old master’s downfall. That July, the Council ordered the transfer of Skerres from Newgate prison to Bridewell Palace, where political prisoners were tortured and forgotten. This is Nicholas Skerres’s last appearance in the annals of his times.

  Robert Poley carried on as a messenger for the secret service throughout the 1590s, with a brief hiatus in 1597. Ben Jonson later recalled that ‘two damned villains’ tried to entrap him while he was in jail. If Jonson was referring to his imprisonment at Newgate in 1597, the villains were Poley and the prison spy Henry Parrot. Jonson remembered Poley in his fine epigram ‘Inviting a Friend to Supper’. Imagining the easy flow of conversation between himself and his friend, Jonson adds ‘And we will have no Poley or Parrot by’ – no spies will eavesdrop on our intimate exchanges. Poley continued to be well paid for his services until he too fell out of favour. In 1600, he complained to Cecil about his lack of employment. Cecil decided that Poley had outlived his usefulness: his work was no longer up to standard. Nevertheless, Poley continued to supply information until 1601, when he too vanishes from the archives.

  A convicted thief named Richard Baines was sentenced to death on trumped-up charges in the autumn of 1594. Shortly after this Baines went to the gallows, two enterprising poets entered in the Stationer’s Register ‘A ballad entitled the woeful lamentation of Richard Baines, executed at Tyburn the 6th of December, 1594’. The woeful lamentation has disappeared, but its fleeting existence suggests that the hanged man had a story to tell. Perhaps Marlowe’s accuser received his comeuppance; more likely, though, he led an uneventful life in Lincolnshire, where the minister Richard Baines performed baptisms, weddings and funerals at All Saints Waltham until his death in 1610.

  Thomas Kyd never recovered from his hideous experience in the Bridewell. After being tortured and deprived of his patron, Kyd wrote to Puckering that he was ‘utterly undone without herein be somewhat done for my recovery’. The following winter, in the dedicatory epistle to his translation of Robert Garnier’s Cornelia, Kyd implored the nineteen-year-old Countess of Sussex to repair the defects of his work ‘with the regard of those so bitter times and privy broken passions that I endured in the writing it’. He promised the countess another translation by the following summer, but to no avail. Thomas Kyd was buried in London that August at the age of thirty-six. Like Lord Strange’s Men, who disbanded in the summer of 1593, he left scarcely a trace behind. Were it not for the passing reference in Thomas Heywood’s Apology for Actors, no one today would know that Kyd wrote The Spanish Tragedy, and was present, with Marlowe, at the creation of professional drama written in English blank verse.

  Kyd’s former patron Lord Strange remained an object of deep suspicion, despite the fact that he kept his distance from the conspirators. With the death of his father on 23 September 1593, Strange became the Earl of Derby and Lord Lieutenant of Lancashire and Cheshire. Unfortunately for him, these new titles only enhanced his attractions as a Catholic lightning rod. On 27 September the merchant and emissary Richard Hesketh delivered the earl a letter from Catholic conspirators in Prague, at the court of the emperor Rudolph II. The conspirators urged Strange to pursue his claim to the English crown, and support yet another takeover plot.

  Hesketh’s letter, which was given to him by a Mr Hickman in London, seems to have been a government plant. Hickman was not, as he claimed, an old servant of Strange’s father, but an agent of Cecil’s, who wanted to test the new earl’s loyalty to the Protestant side. Strange nibbled at the bait, interrogating Hesketh for nearly two weeks before turning him over to the authorities. This was evidently a bad idea. The following April, the earl suddenly contracted a mysterious, ravaging illness at his home in Cheshire. He blamed his fatal sickness on witchcraft. The medical examiner on the scene thought that he had been poisoned. The earl died on 16 April, just a few days after Hickman and his brother fled to the north.

  An ecclesiastical commission in Dorset investigated new rumours about Sir Walter Raleigh’s atheism over the course of that same Spring. Although the commissioners filed no charges, Raleigh’s reputation for blasphemy came back to haunt him. During Raleigh’s trail for treason a decade later, Chief Justice Popham reminded the defendant that he had been taxed b
y the world ‘with holding heathenish, blasphemous, atheistical, and profane opinions, which I do not like to repeat … but the authors and maintainers of such opinions cannot be suffered to live in any Christian commonwealth.’ Despite his masterly self-defense, Queen Elizabeth’s former favorite spent the next thirteen years imprisoned in the Tower of London.

  Ingram Frizer, the man who invited Marlowe to the feast and then murdered him, landed on his feet. The queen signed Frizer’s pardon on 28 June, just four weeks and a day after the killing. On 29 June, when the hapless Drew Woodleff borrowed £200 from Thomas Walsingham, Frizer was back in his master’s service. Ten years later, after King James I came to the throne and Sir Robert Cecil took charge of court politics, Frizer received many lucrative windfalls. These rewards came to him by way of Thomas Walsingham’s wife Audrey, a favourite of Cecil’s and of the new queen, Anne of Denmark. King James gave many leases of crown lands to Lady Walsingham, who farmed them out to Ingram Frizer. In at least one instance, Frizer received a lease worth £40 a year ‘for his own use’. At his estate in Eltham, Kent, Frizer settled into the routines of village life until his death in 1627.

  * * *

  As the murderer’s identity slipped into oblivion, his victim was scripted into a mythic confrontation between God and man. Thomas Beard’s influential Theatre of God’s Judgements fleshed out the skeletal narrative that appears in Puckering’s revision of Baines’s Note. Beard reported that Marlowe had declared ‘our Saviour to be but a deceiver and Moses to be a conjuror and seducer of the people, and the holy Bible to be but vain and idle stories’. The strange manner of his death thus became an unmistakable sign of divine intervention. As Marlowe attempted to stab his companion, the would-be victim ‘prevented him with catching his hand’ and drove the blasphemer’s dagger back into his own skull. ‘[H]erein did the justice of God most notably appear,’ Beard exulted, ‘in that he compelled his own hand which had written those blasphemies to be the instrument to punish him, and that in his brain, which had devised the same.’ If Marlowe’s life reeked of depravity, its exemplary conclusion proved irresistible. Beard hoped ‘that all the atheists in this realm’ would ‘by consideration of this example, either forsake their horrible impiety, or that they might in like manner come to destruction’.