Roaring Boys (14 page)

Six days later, on 18 May, a warrant was issued for Marlowe’s arrest at Scadbury: ‘Warrant to Henry Maunder one of the Messengers of Her Majesty’s Chamber to repair to the house of 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. And in case of need to require aid.’ By this time poor Kyd had signed (as well as he could after having his limbs dislocated), the first of the two statements he was forced to make. It is a pathetic document in which he rakes together everything he had ever heard Marlowe say, drunk or sober, when ranting on of an evening in the tavern or holding forth backstage at the theatre. Marlowe had made jokes about the divine scriptures, mocked prayers, had argued against the holy writings of many of the prophets and other such men. He had said that St Paul was little better than a juggler, that the prodigal son’s portion was but four nobles which did not seem very much of an inheritance, that things deemed to have been done by Divine Power could just as well have been done by men and probably were. Most damning, and all too likely given Marlowe’s love of the outrageous, he was also alleged to have said that ‘John was Jesus’ Alexis. I cover it with reverence and trembling,’ adds Kyd, ‘that is that Christ did love him with an extraordinary love.’
⁵

The story of Marlowe’s last ten days of life is lit with a lurid glow. He was duly arrested and brought to London to appear before the Star Chamber, a fate feared by all. Which is when it all becomes distinctly odd. Not for Marlowe the rack in the bowels of Bridewell although the allegations made against him included both blasphemy and treason. ‘This day Christopher Marlowe of London, gentleman, being sent for by warrant from their Lordships, has entered his appearance accordingly for his Indemnity herein, and is commanded to give his daily attendance to their Lordships until he shall be licensed to the contrary.’ He was then released, in spite of the gravity of the charges, on his promise to return and sign in every morning. Ten days later he was dead in Deptford, ‘stab’t with a dagger’ through the eye, the received wisdom for several centuries being that it had come about following a quarrel in a tavern kept by a Mistress Eleanor Bull over who should pay the reckoning which, given his previous record, would not have caused any surprise.

That doubt was finally cast on the official version is due almost entirely to a brilliant piece of detective work carried out in 1925 by the American scholar, J.L. Hotson.
⁶
Following the inquest on his death, Marlowe was hastily buried in the churchyard of St Nicholas, Deptford, the name of his killer wrongly transcribed as ‘ffrancis archer’. Hotson, fascinated by the subject, was told of a tradition that Marlowe had in fact been killed by a man called ‘Ingram’ and so he began searching through documents of the period in the Public Record Office until he came across a reference to an Ingram Frizer in a deed relating to a property transfer. But when he turned his attention to more important documents, neither the inquisitions of post mortems nor the Assize Rolls yielded anything. Then it occurred to him to look under pardons for the relevant date and there he found a brief entry ‘granted to Ingram Frizer (sc. for homicide) in self-defence’. If this was what he was looking for then there had to be a cross-reference to an indictment or inquest but by then it was the end of the afternoon and the office was about to close. Fired with a desire to know if he was right and after a sleepless night, Hotson was outside the door when it opened the next morning, ready to follow every clue ‘until by examining every item listed under Kent, I found at length what I wanted. The Writ and Inquisition were preserved and legible.’

The document (in Latin) lists the names of the jury members called to Deptford on 1 June 1593 ‘upon the view of Christopher Morley [sic] there lying dead and slain’. There follows the version of events as given to the coroner: that Marlowe, accompanied by three men, Frizer, Nicholas Skeres and none other than Robert Poley, he of Babington Plot fame, had met in the room of a widow, Eleanor Bull, passed time together and later walked in the garden, then returned to the room for supper, during or after which Marlowe, without warning and following some angry words, had attacked Frizer, which could have happened – except that the description of the event simply does not make sense.

Frizer, we are expected to believe, was sitting on a bench between Skeres and Poley eating his supper when Marlowe suddenly wrenched Frizer’s own dagger ‘from his belt and cut him on the head’. The three men were sitting so close together on the bench that Frizer could not properly defend himself but, without moving from his seat, he somehow managed to grasp Marlowe’s dagger hand and, in pushing hand and arm away, inadvertently drove the dagger into Marlowe’s eye socket ‘. . . and so it befell in the affray that the said Ingram, in defence of his life, with the dagger aforesaid to the value of 12
d
[pence] gave the said Christopher then and there a mortal wound over his right eye to the depth of two inches and the width of one inch; of which mortal wound the aforesaid Christopher Morley then and there instantly died.’ The document is signed not by the ordinary Deptford coroner but by the Queen’s coroner, Sir William Danby. Whether the jurors believed that a man who had the freedom to move about could have been so stabbed by a man sitting on a bench in front of him trapped between two others, or had it made known to them that they had better appear to do so, they duly cleared Frizer of murder on the grounds of self-defence.

Immediately after his death a number of rumours circulated: that he was struck down by God for blaspheming in the street, that he had died in a quarrel over a lewd wench (somewhat unlikely), that he was killed in a street brawl, but soon the tale of the row over the reckoning became the accepted version. Until Hotson’s discovery the true identity of Marlowe’s killer was not known, nor were those of the other two members of the party present when apparently Marlowe and Frizer fought for their lives. But Poley, as we know, was a highly experienced agent in the secret service and Skeres, it turns out, a part-time agent who had worked with him in infiltrating the Babington Plot, while Ingram Frizer actually lived on the Scadbury estate and was used by Thomas Walsingham for work such as debt-collecting. Frizer had recently been involved in a court case in which he had defrauded a young man out of a substantial sum of money using a confidence trick worthy of one of today’s television rogues – a scam, by the by, for which for some unknown reason he was not punished. He had agreed to lend the young innocent a sum of money against an IOU, but when the lad arrived to collect the cash Frizer gave him only half of it and a bag of worthless old guns, telling him he could sell them to make up the rest. The lad, of course, discovered nobody wanted them and so found himself owing twice the amount he had actually been loaned by Frizer. It was at this stage that his mother stepped in and took Frizer to court.

As to the ‘tavern’ of legend, there is no record in Deptford of any tavern kept by a woman of the name of Eleanor Bull, although such records exist with regard to other inns and taverns in the area, and their landlords or landladies, during the same period. But it was never claimed during the inquest that the event took place in a tavern, only that Marlowe was killed in ‘a room in the house of a certain, Eleanor Bull, widow’. More recent research, in the run-up to the four hundredth anniversary of Marlowe’s death in 1993, revealed that there was indeed an Eleanor Bull living in Deptford and that she had friends in very high places, being related both to Blanche Parry, the Queen’s Chief Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber and Robert Cecil himself. The most logical explanation, given the work undertaken by Poley and Skeres, is that she ran what we would now describe as a ‘safe house’.
⁷

So, if the story of the tavern quarrel does not ring true and as we know that although Marlow, had been arrested he was out on bail, free to come and go as he pleased, why was he killed? His death still provokes far more questions than answers. Was he still working for the secret service? If not, and no one who has ever undertaken that kind of dark work ever escapes from it entirely, did he know too much and had somehow become a danger to those who were? Was it thought he might blurt out in drink details of that secret world of which he had once been part? Did he hold information that might have fingered others had he been brought to trial? There are a number of twentieth-century examples of notorious, heavy-drinking, homosexual, Cambridge-educated spies who even at that later date would have been open to blackmail. How much more vulnerable would a gay man in 1590s London be to such a threat when officially homosexuality was a capital offence, although a blind eye appears to have been taken so long as it was not too overt – at least where the nobility was concerned.

One idea put forward by Charles Nicholls in
The Reckoning
is that Marlowe, whose own hands were far from clean, was used as an unwitting agent by Essex in an attempt to destroy his rival, Ralegh. Another reason might be Marlowe’s involvement with Ralegh and the School of the Night and that Cecil, still insecure in his position as Acting Secretary to the Privy Council, saw Marlowe not only as a dangerous ex-spy but as a persuasive dramatist, exposing ignorant audiences to a whole range of new and deeply subversive ideas. Lastly, what part, if any, did Marlowe’s long-term patron and possible lover, Thomas Walsingham, play in the affair, since he was finally about to be married and regularly employed Frizer? One supposition is that while he might have had no direct hand in it, he felt it convenient to turn a blind eye to what had happened, taking Frizer back into his service after he had been pardoned.

We will never know what prompted Marlowe to go all the way out to Deptford. Was he persuaded that he could be smuggled out of the country to the continent and so avoid standing trial and that he might well be able to return once things had cooled down? If so, what better person to suggest it than his old secret service colleague, Robert Poley, who regularly travelled as a courier between Deptford and Holland. If this was the case then Marlowe, shrewd as he was, might well have considered the possibility that he was walking into a trap but took the risk anyway since he had nothing to lose when a trial on either one of such serious charges could only lead to his death. Whatever the truth, Marlowe’s murder remains one of history’s most fascinating mysteries.

Meanwhile Kyd, unaware that Marlowe was dead, still languished in Bridewell. He made a second statement which adds little to the first except that in it he alleges Marlowe had once told him it was all one to him whether he served Elizabeth of England or James of Scotland, which leaves one wondering if he had undertaken a mission or missions to Edinburgh on behalf of the Crown. Certainly Robert Poley did. Again Kyd swears that he neither condoned blasphemy nor spoke treason. The authorities did not, however, have to rely entirely on Kyd for there is also the infamous ‘Note’ of the informer Richard Baines, who had been employed specifically to monitor Marlowe’s activities. It is a lengthy document which repeats information already given by Kyd along with additional material including ‘that one Ric Cholmley has confessed he was persuaded by Marlowe to become an Atheist’ (Cholmley was a spy who had been placed in Ralegh’s circle); that ‘the Indians and many authors of antiquity have assuredly written about 16,000 years ago’, whereas Adam ‘is proved to have lived within 6,000 years’; and, notoriously, ‘all that love not tobacco and boys are fools’.
⁸

On 28 June 1593 Frizer received his official pardon from the Queen, was released from prison and returned to Scadbury. Within a comparatively short time he was given a gift of lands and rents belonging to the Duchy of Lancaster and, in 1611, was made one of two certified assessors for Eltham and, something of a joke given his past history, an officer of various charities, being described as ‘one of sixteen good and lawful men of the county’.

A warrant for payment, made out to Poley and signed by the Vice Chamberlain at the Court on 9 June 1593 is for ‘carrying of letters on her Majesty’s special and secret affairs of great importance from the Court at Croydon on 8 May 1593 to the Low Countries to the town of The Hague in Holland and for returning back with letters of answer to the Court at Nonsuch on 8 June 1593
being in her Majesty’s service all throughout the aforesaid time
(my italics). But, as we know, Poley was already back in England on 30 May and at Eleanor Bull’s house in Deptford. Poley continued in the secret service until into the next century.

In March 1595 Nicholas Skeres was arrested at the house of a man called Williamson, who had testified against Robert Poley. He was imprisoned first in the Counter Prison to await further examination, then transferred to Newgate, and finally to Bridewell after which ‘he was never seen again. . .’. A man called Richard Baines, who may have been the informer, was hanged at Tyburn on 6 December 1594.

The last words on the previous twelve months and their aftermath must go to Thomas Nashe, so closely associated with Greene, Watson and Marlowe. He wrote his cycle of verses,
Summer’s Last Will and Testament
, at the end of 1593, although it was not published until eight years later. It is officially dedicated to the victims of ‘King Pest’ who had ruled so savagely for so long, but he must also have had in mind the friends who had died so recently:

Haste therefore each degree
To welcome destiny,
Heaven is our heritage
Earth but a player’s stage.
Mount we unto the sky.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord have mercy upon us

The deaths drew a line under the first creative surge of theatrical endeavour. With Greene, Marlowe and then Kyd now gone, alone in the spotlight, centre-stage, stands the single towering talent which was to dominate the English theatre then and for centuries to come: William Shakespeare.