Who Killed Kit Marlowe? Read online

  Given a portrait – more importantly, given a face – we cannot help speculating. Charles Nicholl gets the impression that the sitter was tall (or is merely that the proportions of the head and shoulders are wrong?), that the casual pose, with arms folded, is theatrical. And what, Nicholl wonders, is Marlowe hiding, both in the left hand hidden beneath his right arm and in the enigmatic half smile? When the hero of Josephine Tey’s brilliant detective novel The Daughter of Time begins his convalescence in hospital, he is haunted by an unknown face on a postcard:

  A judge? A Soldier? A prince? Someone used to great responsibility and responsible in his authority. Someone too conscientious. A worrier; perhaps a perfectionist. A man at ease in a large design, but anxious over details. A candidate for a gastric ulcer. Someone, too, who had suffered ill health as a child. He has that incommunicable, that indescribable look that childhood suffering leaves behind it; less positive than the look on the cripple’s face, but as inescapable...The slight fullness of the lower eyelid, like a child that has slept too heavily; the texture of the skin; the old-man look in a young face.

  Josephine Tey is describing Richard III, whom Marlowe’s contemporary Shakespeare credits with eleven murders. But Tey is cheating. Whereas her hero does not know the name until he turns the postcard, his creator does – and she is reading all the signs into Richard’s face that fit what we know about him. So does Nicholl. Marlowe is hiding something because Marlowe was a spy; Marlowe’s folded arms are theatrical because Marlowe was a budding playwright; Marlowe’s lips are pink and his hair rather feminine because Marlowe was homosexual. To be fair to Nicholl, he is describing the reproductions of the Corpus Christi portrait which vary enormously in colour tone. Even so, when facing the portrait itself in Marlowe’s old college, he finds the face pale and chalky, the outlook unhealthy and bookish because he knows that Marlowe was a scholar and increasingly, a maverick, whose ideas were becoming less healthy by the day.

  Can we stand back from what we know and evaluate the portrait from another angle? First, a comparison of the alleged Marlowe depiction with others of the time. De Critz’s painting of Francis Walsingham, from about the same year, shows the spymaster to the waist. His arms are by his side and he wears the short haircut and elegant moustaches expected of a middle-aged man. The symbolism (and the Elizabethan age was heavy on symbolism) is shown by the medallion of the Queen he is wearing; he is her servant and carries her portrait adoringly. Walter Ralegh, painted by ‘H’ in the year of the Armada, is also depicted to the waist. His earring, his expensive, flashy clothes, the pearl-encrusted cape almost concealing his sword-hilt, speak volumes for Elizabeth’s soldier/poet/explorer who may already have entered Marlowe’s circle of acquaintances by 1585. And William Cecil, made Lord Burghley by the Queen in 1571, has his right hand on a book and inks to emphasise his statesmanship; his left hovers near his sword-hilt as a man who will use violence if he has to. The eyes are grey and cold.

  Of twenty-five famous portraits of Elizabethan men who were Marlowe’s contemporaries, his is the only one with his arms folded. Animal behaviourist, Dr Desmond Morris, has identified seven different positions of arm folding. It is a position we adopt without consciously copying others. Marlowe’s is position four, the chest/chest clasp. Morris says that is is an example of auto-contact behaviour. The sitter in the Corpus Christi portrait is hugging himself subconsciously for comfort; he is also providing a barrier across his chest. Given that the pose may have been suggested by the painter and that neither he nor Marlowe would have the faintest notion of body language, we are really no further forward. Insist that the sitter is Marlowe, already in 1585 a covert agent, translator of disreputable Latin verse, perhaps attender of atheist lectures, and it all falls into place; here is a man with something to hide and he does not yet, at twenty-one have the suavity and experience of Burghley or Walsingham to conceal the fact.

  What can we learn from the face? Morris cannot help here, because the Corpus Christi face is placid, almost expressionless. The Chinese, however, believe that facial characteristics provide patterns and these patterns tell us a great deal about personality. The forehead is wide, believed by the Elizabethans as much as the Chinese to indicate cleverness, and the high hairline merely accentuates this. Again, it does not help. The sitter has ‘ideal’ eyebrows – ‘shiny, thick and rather lighter than the hair on the head’. The eyes, for most people the most riveting feature of any face, fit the Chinese description of ‘cow’, with large areas of white to either side of the iris. Such a man is thought to be innovative, although the ideas may be risky and he is stubborn, frank and forthright, his direct manner sometimes likely to offend. The fleshy nose, with its round tip, is associated with a disinterest in money, although if this portrait is Marlowe, he was spending it like water in 1585-6. The groove between nose and mouth, known to the Chinese as jen-chung, is accentuated in the Corpus Christi portrait by the moustache; it indicates in this case a period of conflict or uncertainty in childhood which has never quite gone away. The thicker lower lip indicates to the Chinese a man who is not to be fully trusted. Such people will try to reassure others with their ‘naturally good command of speech’. Many professional artists and entertainers have this type of mouth. The round cheeks of the sitter denote command of power to the Chinese and the weak, receding chin, whereas it can mean a personality not prone to exert itself unduly, can also indicate ‘a dramatic change of future’. We cannot see the sitter’s ears, teeth or face in profile, so other secrets must remain locked away.

  Does this apparent flight of fancy into eastern culture help us to identify Christopher Marlowe? Emphatically not, but if the Corpus Christi portrait is our man, then the Chinese secrets of his face are uncannily accurate in reflecting what we know of him. But there is a second potential portrait, and it predates the Corpus Christi find by nearly fifty years. The ‘Grafton’ portrait was discovered in February 1907 by Thomas Kay, who presented it to the John Rylands Library in Manchester. Before that it belonged to sisters called Ludgate whose family had been tenant farmers on the Grafton family estate in Northamptonshire. Grafton House became linked with royalty in the fifteenth century because it was here that Edward IV met Lady Elizabeth Gray (nee Wydeville), who subsequently became his queen. In Henry VIII’s reign, the house was a hunting lodge that doubled as a conference centre for visiting dignitaries. Elizabeth is known to have visited it in 1568 on the most northerly of her many wanderings.

  The portrait itself is believed to have been salvaged when troops of General Thomas Fairfax’s New Model Army sacked the Royalist house in December 1643 and it was probably spirited away for safe keeping in the old priest hole in the nearby house of Anthony Smith, from whom the Misses Ludgate were descended. There is no geographical link between that part of the Midlands and Marlowe. Although there are infuriating gaps in the man’s life during which he could have been anywhere, rural Northamptonshire seems an unlikely setting. Interestingly, however, the earliest published copy of his poem Hero and Leander begun by Christopher Marlowe and finished by George Chapman was found in the lumber room of Lamport Hall only 3 miles from Grafton Regis. The connection here is that John Isham, who once owned Lamport, was a Cambridge University man and collected first editions.

  What is fascinating, bearing in mind the on-going ‘Marlowe was Shakespeare’ nonsense, is that the Grafton portrait was put forward by Thomas Kay in 1907 as a putative painting of the man from Stratford which makes more sense geographically.

  The Grafton portrait has not yet been professionally retouched, but it has been damaged by amateur cleaning. Even so, the change of colour of eyes from dark brown (Corpus Christi) to grey (Grafton) might ring alarm bells for some people. The Grafton portrait is certainly strikingly similar in other respects. The collar and slashed doublet are very alike; the buttons almost identical. The painting is dated 1588, the year of the Armada, and it bears the Latin inscription ‘Ae suae 24’ (his age 24) which fits Marlowe of course as well as it fits Shakespear
e. The nose is very similar, as is the general appearance of the moustache. There is a certain likeness in the ‘cow’ eyes, but the lips are less impressive and the chin is stronger with a definite point. Allowing for the passage of three years, it is possible that certain features (hair, moustache, beard, clothes) would change, but not the shape of the face. What seems more likely to us is that the Grafton portrait is a copy of the Corpus Christi one by an inferior artist, one who used the chiaroscuro style of light and shade associated with Spanish and Italian painting. Perhaps on a whim he decided to update the sitter’s age and drop the tell-tale motto to avoid charges of forgery.

  We come back to the obvious question – is the Corpus Christi face that of Christopher Marlowe, Walsingham’s new man, in 1585? The 1884 Fitzwilliam Museum catalogue lists the following portraits from Corpus Christi – Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, Queen Mary, two of Matthew Parker, John Foxe, Robert Cecil, John Jegon and two anonymous portraits, both of men and dated ‘1579Aetatis suae 23’. If the Marlowe portrait came from the collection, originally it is presumed a wooden panel series decorating the Master’s Lodge at Corpus Christi, then he was in illustrious company. Thomas More was the Chancellor who defied Henry VIII over the supremacy issue in 1534. Tried for treason, he was executed in the following year, but his kindness, courage and moderation were already bywords long before he was canonized by the Catholic Church. Thomas Cromwell was more of a self-made man than More, rising from artisan stock in Putney to become Henry VIII’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Privy Seal and Vicar General. As principal architect of the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s, he earned the nickname malleus monarchorum (hammer of the monks) before incurring the king’s wrath over the disastrous marriage to Anne of Cleves. In 1540 he met the same fate as More. Queen Mary was, of course, Henry’s eldest child, by Catherine of Aragon. A zealous Catholic, she had attempted to stop the Protestant rot of the Reformation by marrying Philip II of Spain, champion of Catholicism throughout Europe, and by burning Protestants at East Smithfield. Matthew Parker’s portraits are easily explained. Probably still today the most eminent of the Masters of Corpus Christi, his endowments to the college ranked at Bene’t’s alongside his difficult time as Archbishop of Canterbury. John Foxe died in the year that Marlowe left Cambridge (1587). More controversial than Cromwell and less saintly than More, he clashed with Elizabeth over the wearing of the surplices for church services and his preferment reached a dead end as a result. His book of martyrs, chronicling the often grisly deaths of Protestants since the fourteenth century, was translated into English from Latin in 1563 and quickly established itself as a best seller, second only to the Bible. Robert Cecil is a man we shall meet again, because he had a central role in Marlowe’s death. If the portraits of both men did indeed hang in Dr Norgate’s Lodge at Bene’t’s simultaneously, there is a deep irony there, although Cecil, the deformed son of Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, was probably less than a year older than Marlowe and was not yet a central figure in politics. John Jegon was Master of Bene’t’s College between 1590 and 1603, brought in by Elizabeth personally to pull the place up by its bootstraps. Norgate’s Mastership and that of his successor, John Copcot, witnessed a sharp financial decline and Jegon was a troubleshooter appointed to stop the trend. He did this well and saw four new scholarships and several endowments created before taking up the post of Bishop of Norwich.

  Jegon and Parker have clear connections with Corpus Christi, but the others do not. Some biographers claim that Robert Cecil attended St John’s, Cambridge, and while others doubt it, no one claims he was a Bene’t’s man. There is no link at all with More, Cromwell, Fox or Queen Mary. So the paintings seem to be a fairly random collection of sixteenth-century portraits and we have no way of knowing who the anonymous men are.

  Did Marlowe, perhaps with a streak of personal vanity and pride, have his portrait painted when he could first afford to do so in 1585 and did he bequeath it to the college in 1587 or 1588, by which time he was a famous playwright? His subsequent death in dubious circumstances at Deptford and the burning of his overly erotic poetry in 1596-9 perhaps led to his portrait being taken down and ‘dumped’ prior to its accidental discovery in 1953. What this does not take into account is the nature of playwriting in Marlowe’s day, nor the character of John Copcot, Master when the portrait was presumably received. Playwrights, especially in the increasingly Puritan world of the late 1580s, were accounted worthless at best. For a young man of promise, a brilliant scholar destined for the Church, to squander his talents in this way would not have sat well with the Cambridge authorities, especially since they had clearly clashed with him over the granting of his Master’s degree. Copcot in particular, Master of Bene’t’s between 1587 and 1590, was a bookish pedant, to whom one of his friends addressed a letter, while he was still alive ‘to the ghost of John Copcot’. He was not the sort of libertarian soul who would appreciate a playwright’s talents however great, even if Copcot was an appointee of Lord Burghley, ultimately Marlowe’s boss as the Queen’s Secretary of State.

  All this leaves us with uncertainty. The balance of probability is that neither the Corpus Christi, nor the Grafton portrait is of Christopher Marlowe, yet there is something deep in all of us that needs a face with which to identify. We are drawn to Marlowe’s portrait. Reading again the inquest of Coroner William Danby, we are drawn in particular to the portrait’s right eye. It must surely be just the ravages of time that gave the unrestored Corpus Christi forehead a deep gash above the eyebrow.

  As in a play, Ingram Frizer still had to make his entrance on to the stage of history. It is two years after Marlowe left Cambridge that we first find him, wheeling and dealing in Basingstoke.

  Nicholas Skeres may have been part of Thomas Walsingham’s entourage as early as 1581 when the spymaster’s cousin was acting as courier to Henry Cobham, the English ambassador in Paris. In a letter to Francis Walsingham, Cobham referred to ‘another Englishman in his company, called Skeggs as I remember’. While this could be Skeres, equally, it could be someone else entirely. All we can be sure of is that he was definitely involved in espionage by 1586, the year of the Babington Plot. So too, was Robert Poley, who was working with Thomas Walsingham from 1584 in his house in Seething lane, London. Two of the men in Widow Bull’s house at Deptford Strand at the end of May 1593 had now met and were working, occasionally together, in the most dangerous business in the world.

  That dangerous business found a focus in Anthony Babington, a handsome squire a little older than Marlowe who came from a Catholic family in Derbyshire. He had spent time in Paris where he had met that fomenter of intrigue, the renegade Welshman Thomas Morgan, and he carried letters from him to Mary, Queen of Scots. By 1586, Mary had been Elizabeth’s prisoner for nineteen years and while she remained alive, she was the inevitable focus of Catholic plots. All commentators agree that the plots on the Monarch’s life – culminating in the best known of all, against Elizabeth’s successor James I in November 1605 – were engendered by boundless optimism, Dutch courage and not a little naïveté.

  By the summer of 1586, Babington was in regular negotiation with Father John Ballard, a Catholic convert unleashed on England with every intention of murdering the Queen as an act of God’s vengeance. Babington was to be the instrument, with a team of like-minded idealistic friends, and the Queen was to be hit while walking or riding in her coach. It says a great deal for Walsingham’s secret service – or very little for Babington’s security – that the spymaster knew of these plans by June and had Mary’s letters to Babington intercepted from her new place of house arrest, Tetbury Castle in Staffordshire. In that same month, Babington applied for a passport, either as a genuine means of escape if he believed that Walsingham was on to him, or as an alibi when he killed the Queen. The cost was a staggering £300 and the broker to arrange it was Walsingham’s man, Robert Poley.

  Poley’s job was to watch Babington, but he went further, organising three meetings between the cons
pirator and the spymaster, in which Walsingham pretended to want Babington as an agent provocateur. It was a cat and mouse game, but Babington was very definitely the mouse and he seems unaware of Walsingham’s duplicity. As the summer lengthened, Babington incriminated both himself and the Queen of Scots by writing openly to her of the murder plot. Walsingham’s code-breaker Thomas Phelippes intercepted the letter and, in translating it, drew in the margin for Walsingham’s grim sense of humour, a gallows. With touching naïveté, Babington asked Mary about Poley – ‘I would gladly understand what opinion you hold of one Robert Poley...I am private with the man and by means thereof know somewhat, but I suspect more.’ Unfortunately for Babington, he did not suspect enough.

  Ballard was sent to the Tower on 4 August and the other conspirators panicked. Mary herself was arrested while hunting five days later and her correspondence and private papers handed over to Walsingham. Her staff was changed as the start of the whole process of tightening a metaphoric noose around her neck. Babington was found hiding in the hamlet of St John’s Wood ten days after Ballard’s arrest. He had already written to Poley, still essentially trusting the man: