Who Killed Kit Marlowe? Read online

  WHO KILLED KIT MARLOWE?

  A CONTRACT TO MURDER IN ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Who Killed Kit Marlowe?: A Contract to Murder in Elizabethan England

  PREFACE

  INTRODUCTIONTHE GLORIANA MYTH

  ONE | A DEATH IN DEPTFORD

  TWO | MERLIN’S RACE

  THREE | BENE’T’S COLLEGE

  FOUR | GOOD SERVICE ... & ... FAITHFULL DEALINGE

  FIVE | THE MUSE’S DARLING

  SIX | TOBACCO AND BOYS

  SEVEN | MACHEVILL

  EIGHT | THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE

  NINE | GOD’S JUDGEMENT

  TEN | PLOT AND COUNTERPLOT

  ELEVEN | A GREAT RECKONING

  Select | Bibliography

  WHO KILLED KIT MARLOWE?

  A CONTRACT TO MURDER IN ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND

  M. J. TROW &

  TALIESIN TROW

  COPYRIGHT © 2020 M.J. Trow & Taliesin Trow.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

  All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  www.blkdogpublishing.com

  The Marlowe Series

  Crème de la Crime

  Canongate Books

  Dark Entry

  Silent Court

  Witch Hammer

  Scorpions’ Nest

  Crimson Rose

  Traitor’s Storm

  Secret World

  Eleventh Hour

  Queen’s Progress

  Black Death

  The Reckoning

  PREFACE

  INTRODUCTION: THE GLORIANA MYTH

  ONE: A DEATH IN DEPTFORD

  TWO: MERLIN’S RACE

  THREE: BENE’T’S COLLEGE

  FOUR: GOOD SERVICE

  FIVE: THE MUSE’S DARLING

  SIX: TOBACCO AND BOYS

  SEVEN: MACHEVILL

  EIGHT: THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE

  NINE: GOD’S JUDGEMENT

  TEN: PLOT AND COUNTERPLOT

  ELEVEN: A GREAT RECKONING

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  PREFACE

  T

  he death of Christopher Marlowe is one of the great tragedies of literature. Briefly, he was the leading playwright of his day, producing a revolutionary new writing style – the iambic pentameter rhythm which fellow playwright Ben Jonson called his ‘mighty line’. Most text books will tell you that Marlowe was killed in a tavern brawl over a bill at Deptford in May 1593.

  When we look at the facts of the case however, we realize at once that it was murder and the whole thing a cover-up which has worked for over four hundred years. Kit Marlowe was not just a brilliant dramatist; he was an atheist, a homosexual and a spy – and any one of these could have got him killed.

  If you have chosen Who Killed Kit Marlowe? simply to find out more about this enigmatic man, then I hope you enjoy it. If you want to know more, why not dip into the detective series my wife and I have written? The books cover Marlowe’s life from his recruitment by the queen’s spymaster, Francis Walsingham at Cambridge to the moment he faces the three daggers of Robert Poley, Nicholas Skeres and Ingram Frizer at Eleanor Bell’s house in Deptford Strand on that fateful May evening.

  The series is packed with colourful characters: the queen’s magus, Dr John Dee; the charlatan wizard Simon Forman; the player king, Ned Sledd; the great actors Ned Alleyn and Richard Burbage. We meet the underworld of Elizabethan England, the lunatics chained to the walls in Bedlam. We meet the travelling actors of Lord Strange’s men and the bizarre world of Philip Henslowe’s Rose Theatre among the brothels of Southwark. Espionage, murder, double dealing and the plague stalk England. The galleons of Spain ride the high seas; everybody is gunning for the Jezebel of England, the queen herself.

  Yes, we take liberties in the series – it is fiction, after all; unlike Who Killed Kit Marlowe? which is rooted in fact. Did Kit Marlowe really have the singing voice of an angel? Did he really have conversations with Henslowe’s bear, Master Sackerson? Did witches really cavort naked under the moon at the ancient stones called the Rollrights? Who knows – but if you have come to this book after reading the series, you may well come to realize when you have finished it that truth is often stranger than fiction – even fiction with liberties well and truly taken.

  Our thanks go, in the reissue of Who Killed Kit Marlowe? to Ann Reed, who lovingly typed out the text, wrestling with all the oddities of spelling for which the Elizabethans were famous!

  INTRODUCTIONTHE GLORIANA MYTH

  ‘E

  lizabethan England,’ wrote J.B. Black in The Reign of Elizabeth (1959)

  was, in a very real sense, Elizabeth’s England. She it was who nursed it into being, and by her wisdom made possible its amazing development ... she inspired its patriotism, its pageantry, its heroism, stimulated its poetry and shaped its destiny.

  S.T. Bindoff was even more glowing in Tudor England (1950). Quoting Elizabeth’s last speech to her parliament in November 1601, he added,

  It was in such golden phrases of affectionate humility that the last of the Tudors wrote her epitaph, and the epitaph of her line, that line of statesmen-monarchs than whom, indeed, no wiser or mightier ever adorned the English throne, and of whom she herself, if she yielded perhaps to her grandfather in wisdom and to her father in might, was in the fullness of her genius the superb and matchless flower.

  At very worst, she was a queen adored by her courtiers, ruling with the assent of a compliant people.

  In 1964, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust set up an exhibition to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the birth of the playwright who has since become the Man of the Millennium. It followed his life down, as it were, a road in Elizabethan England, winding along the confines of the marquee built to house it, from the glove-maker’s son in Stratford to the position of pre-eminence he holds today.

  If we could take such a road through Elizabethan England beginning with the triumphal coronation on 15 January 1559, what sights would we see? The queen herself was twenty-five. ‘Her face,’ wrote an Italian visitor in the previous year, ‘is comely rather than handsome, but she is tall and well-formed with good skin, although swarthy; she has fine eyes and above all a beautiful hand.’ But some noted with alarm that the coronation in Westminster Abbey was in English rather than the customary Latin and the Bishop of Carlisle officiated, the Archbishop of York having refused to take part.

  By June, the first of many suitors pressing for her hand, Charles, Archduke of Austria, had already been turned down. Elizabeth was a handsome catch; eminently eligible as the ruler of a thriving and growing nation, she was wooed by ambassadors of many of Europe’s rulers, although she never met any of her contemporaries face to face, except Philip of Spain, her former brother-in-law.

  She loved music, dancing and hunting and people saw in her the female embodiment of her father, the ‘bluff king’ who had broken with Rome and destroyed the monasteries, leaving England friendless on the edge of a hostile Europe. She rode well, but only over the south of England. She spoke Latin, Greek, French and Spanish and preferred watered English beer to imported wine. She adored flattery and the gallants of her Court – Leicester, Essex, Raleigh – fluttered around her like moths to a flame. She may have slept with any one of them, but she would not make any man her Lord, because that would mean giving up the throne of England too. And as the road of her reign lengthened, the line between heart-centred flirtation and brain-centre
d politics grew impossibly blurred. It was part of the Queen’s great game.

  She hated making decisions. She hated extremism and the via media called the Church of England which she created in 1559 is a testament to that. But she reckoned without the bitterness and fanaticism of the Catholics who would continue to pose a danger to her and her religion for the rest of her long journey down the road. And without the paranoia of the Puritans who crowded along the road towards its end.

  While Scotland and Ireland erupted into rebellion, and Catholic hatred of the ‘English Jezebel’ focused on her cousin Mary, the Queen of Scots, Elizabeth danced with Leicester, marvelled at the fireworks reflected in the great artificial lake he built at Kenilworth and encouraged her privateers to attack Spanish silver convoys at sea.

  There were rebellions in the north, plots behind closed doors; nobody’s virtue was over-nice.

  If we first took our road through Elizabeth’s reign early in the morning, when the sun shone on Westminster Abbey as it did on all new and hopeful reigns, by midday the sky had darkened. The Pope excommunicated the Queen, giving good Catholics carte blanche to kill her. With no police force but the geriatric constables of the watch and no standing army but the tiny and ornate Household Guard, the Queen watched warily from the centre of the hive as her Council droned about her.

  A network of spies kept her government informed of any movement overseas. They lurked at doorways, submitted reports. Where there was no evidence of sedition, they invented it and untold numbers were sent to face the hangman by way of the ‘Duke of Exeter’s daughter’; the rack.

  We are struck today by the incestuous nature of Elizabethan England: at Court; in the royal palaces of Whitehall, Nonsuch, Placentia; in the shadowy corners of the Privy Council chamber; everywhere in the corridors of power, everyone was related to everyone else. Families held sway, zealously protecting their possessions, flattering the Queen in order to gain more and doing everything in their considerable power to pass them on to their sons.

  The mistress of ceremonial, Elizabeth’s ‘progresses’ across the south became legendary. Poets and playwrights flocked to pay her homage. The nobility vied with each other in their patronage of theatrical companies. They clashed together in foolhardy lance-passes in the tilt, which had already claimed the life of the King of France and laid that country open to civil war as a result. They wrestled for her attention and sulked on their country estates when they were ignored.

  ‘Are you then,’ the poet Thomas Dekker might have stopped us on the road to ask,

  travelling to the temple of Eliza? Even to her temple are my feeble limbs travelling. Some call her Pandora, some Gloriana, some Cynthia, some Belphoebe, some Astraea – all by several name to express several loves. Yet all those names make but one celestial body, as all loves meet to create but one soul. I am one of her own country, and we adore her by the name of Eliza.

  It is at the end of the road that this book pauses. It is mid-evening now, perhaps unseasonably cold for the end of May. Against the lapping waters of the mighty river, where the cormorants dip and the rigging creaks in its housing, can be heard a darker sound, a distant, tolling bell. There is plague in the city, creeping death. At the top of the tower of the church of St Nicholas in Deptford, the turrets of the Queen’s palace of Placentia pierce the sky, with the dark woods of the gathering night to the south. The Queen is old. Her teeth are black, her chest scrawny and pale. One by one her favourites and her friends are dying around her. Her country is writhing under war and rising taxation. No one feels safe on the roads any more, with night coming and a wind ruffling the waters to the east.

  It is about seven o’clock on the road. A Wednesday. There is a scream from a room overhead, from a house somewhere on Deptford Strand. Then an eerie silence.

  A man is dead. His name, though we never knew him, was Kit Marlowe ...

  ONE

  A DEATH IN DEPTFORD

  K

  it Marlowe spent the day at the widow Eleanor Bull’s house on Deptford Strand. He had arrived there at about ten in the morning. With him were Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley, all of whom gave their addresses as ‘late of London’. They passed time together, perhaps smoking, perhaps playing backgammon. After lunch, they walked in the garden, perhaps one of those intricate knot gardens made of herbs which the Elizabethans loved.

  What they talked about we do not know, but at about six, the four men went indoors again for supper. No one thought to mention what they ate; it was not relevant. And it must have been shortly after the meal that a quarrel broke out between Marlowe and Frizer, over who was to pay the bill for the day’s hospitality. Marlowe was lying on a bed. Frizer had his back to him, sitting wedged at a table with Poley on one side and Skeres on the other. Frizer’s dagger, as was the custom, was lying in its sheath in the small of his back. Given to sudden bursts of temper as Marlowe was, he grabbed it, slashing wildly at Frizer’s head, gashing him twice before Frizer could move. Hemmed in as he was by his friends. Frizer grappled with Marlowe and in the scuffle drove his own blade into Marlowe’s head, above the right eye.

  Death was instantaneous.

  Kit Marlowe was the greatest playwright of his age. His death at Deptford on 30 May 1593 was the greatest loss to literature that England has ever sustained. If it had not happened, there may never have been a William Shakespeare to become Man of the Millennium. The version of the man’s death you have just read is a modern re-telling of the official story, the inquest of Coroner William Danby before a sixteen-man jury held on 1 June. It has come down to us in the shorthand of history as a tavern brawl, a sordid clash over who paid the bill – ‘le recknynge’.

  Except that it did not happen that way. All of it was fiction, an elaborate fabrication to cover up the murder of Kit Marlowe. This book uncovers the reason why.

  Deptford, 30 May 2000

  Deptford Strand lies on the river, to the south-west of the loop in the Thames known as the Isle of Dogs. There were windmills there once, where the new glass-fronted regeneration of the Docklands now stands, the great winking monolith of Canary Wharf dwarfing the curious, spiky, web-like Dome.

  We walk along Deptford High Street, past African fabric shops and doner kebab houses, the new ethnic symbols of our late Elizabethan age. This was once Butt’s Lane that ran through fields. Further towards the river, the older buildings are still there, derelict Victorian terraces with gaping, glassless windows along Greek Street; the Harp of Erin pub. We face the ‘Private’ gates of Conroy’s Wharf where the royal docks stood in the days of bluff King Hal. Away to our right, along Evelyn Road, once stood the manor house of Sayes Court where the 1960s high-rise flats now cluster. Traditional ‘Pie and Mash’ shops proudly boasting their establishment in 1890 are a reminder of an older culture, but not old enough for us.

  Watergate Street is cobbled, a narrow cul-de-sac that leads to the river. The water is brown and sluggish, but cormorants bob here, as they did long ago. Fix your eyes on the lapping waters and years slip away and time stands still. Walk along Borthwick Street and you are struck by the dereliction of the area – an abandoned Mini and a burnt out caravan are the debris of a society struggling to rediscover itself. Huge adventure playgrounds where kids climb to find light among the high-rise buildings and plane trees provide oases of shade.

  Everything is dwarfed by the great derricks that swing beyond Deptford substation, like giant descendants of their smaller forebears that built the ships of Henry VIII’s navy. They are building Fairview’s Millennium Quay, the last of the gentrification projects that have transformed the greatest docks in the world.

  Deptford Green leads us to all that remains of Christopher Marlowe’s Deptford – the church of St Nicholas where he is buried. On either side of the gates the stone skulls known as Adam and Eve grin sightlessly at passers-by. They carried Marlowe’s body here on the night of 30 May 1593 before they buried him somewhere in the north-east corner of the churchyard by the Queen’s Gate wher
e Elizabeth had come to give thanks for the victory over the Armada five years before.

  There are large tombs in the churchyard, fine vaults of a bygone age, but these are Jacobean at best and none of them commemorates Kit Marlowe. His memorial is a modern plaque set into the wall with the usual and infuriatingly vague ‘On a spot near this place ...’

  The church is large and airy, almost square in shape, with wooden carvings by Grinling Gibbons, who worked in the dockyards in the days when the diarist John Evelyn lived at Sayes Court. The church is dedicated to the patron saint of sailors, but also, aptly in the case of Christopher Marlowe, of students and those in sudden danger. There was plenty of that in October 1940 when the incendiary bombs of Goering’s Luftwaffe destroyed the interior. Two years later, they destroyed the church of St George the Martyr in Canterbury too. One had seen the baptism of Christopher Marlowe; the other his funeral.

  There is nothing of Marlowe in the body of the church. The reredos is by Gibbons and the oak furniture imported from elsewhere and of a later date. The tombs are seventeenth century at the earliest; even the worn inscriptions on the stone near the altar are eighteenth century, the relics of a huge rebuilding programme paid for largely by the Honourable East India Company long before the Luftwaffe’s handiwork. The tower is fourteenth century, but its stones are whitewashed courtesy of the Reformation, and the royal arms nailed to it are of William and Mary – and a 1950s refurbishment at that. Everything is second hand, removed, copied. A modern lectern commemorates the aptly-named Richard Wyche, the Lollard vicar of Deptford and friend of John Wycliffe, burned for his heresy on Tower Hill in 1439. A modern plaque reads ‘To the immortal memory of Christopher Marlowe who met a tragic death near this spot on the 30th May 1593, this tablet erected in 1957 by the Association of the Men of Kent and Kentishmen to replace an earlier memorial unveiled by Sir Frank Benson [the Shakespearean actor-manager] on the 3rd June 1919 and destroyed by enemy action in 1940’. And below it is a quotation straight from Marlowe’s Faustus, ‘Cut is the branch that may have grown full straight’.