Christopher Marlowe – Flight or Banishment? by Peter Farey

Although we Marlovians - almost by definition - share a belief that Marlowe's death was faked, there is rather less unanimity about just who was and who wasn't also involved in the deception. This paper sets out my own thoughts on the subject.

One thing needs to be cleared up straight away: there is no evidence that the Court of Star Chamber had shown any interest in Marlowe's doings. He was arrested on behalf of the Privy Council, appeared before the Privy Council, was released on his indemnity by the Privy Council, and commanded to report daily to the Privy Council until licensed to the contrary. Furthermore, the reports of his alleged wrong-doings seem to have gone only to Privy Council members. Although most of the meetings of the Council in the latter half of May 1593 were held in the Star Chamber at Westminster (rather than at Nonsuch, where the Queen and Court were), and although members of the Privy Council also served as members of the Court of Star Chamber, this court as such was not involved.

There can be little doubt, however, that Marlowe was in trouble. One may dismiss some of the individual accusations made by those informing against him as either inaccurate or exaggerated, but taken all together they paint a fairly clear picture of someone who had genuine atheistic beliefs (whatever that meant), who attempted to persuade others that these were right, and who had even written a book on atheism which he had used possibly more than once as the script of a lecture intended to persuade others to this opinion.

The main thrust of the campaign currently being pursued by Archbishop Whitgift was anti-presbyterian and anti-puritan, but we can still be fairly confident that he would have considered these activities no less deplorable than those of Barrow, Greenwood and Penry - all of whom were tried and executed around then for things they had written. And we may assume, I think, that on the Privy Council both he and Lord Keeper Puckering would have been pushing hard for similar action to be taken against Marlowe. Voices would surely have been raised in his defence too - by Lord Burghley, Lord Admiral Howard or Sir Robert Cecil perhaps - but if Marlowe was in trouble it was nevertheless primarily with the Privy Council itself.

If Marlowe had decided to escape inevitable punishment by faking his own death, therefore, his choosing of Thomas Walsingham to help him - as he clearly must have done given Walsingham’s links with everyone there - may seem a bit strange. Until only four years earlier Walsingham had been working as an important functionary in the intelligence network of his close relative Sir Francis Walsingham, the Queen's spymaster and until his death in 1590 a leading member of the Privy Council. This could be fairly easily explained away, of course, but if the two of them did join forces to fake the death some of their other decisions are rather harder to understand.

For example, if I had been engaged in a project intended to outwit the Privy Council I don't think I would have chosen a venue owned by someone related in some way to two of its members, as Eleanor Bull apparently was. Nor would I have chosen a location within the verge (i.e. within 12 miles of the Queen), which was therefore not only within the special jurisdiction of the Privy Council but would ensure that the one coroner in the country closely connected to the Privy Council, William Danby, would have to hold the inquest.

Similarly, one might question their choice of accomplices. In Nicholas Skeres we have someone who had served under the Earl of Essex for several years and only a month earlier as a witness before the Court of Star Chamber declared that the Earl (who would have attended in his capacity as a recently appointed Privy Council member) was his "Lord and Master."¹ Robert Poley was certainly employed directly by the Privy Council at this time, nearly all of his warrants being signed by Vice-Chamberlain Heneage on their behalf. In fact, of all the people involved in the attempt to escape the clutches of the Privy Council on that fateful day, Thomas Walsingham's servant Ingram Frizer seems to have been the only one not to have some connection with it!

No, what we really must infer from this is that at least one or more members of the Privy Council were involved in some way. But if so, who? The Council consisted of different factions, so whoever it was would have been putting their careers and possibly even their lives at risk should a member of one of the rival factions find out. There is a likelihood, as I have discussed here earlier,² that Nicholas Skeres's Star Chamber Court appearance a month earlier had put him out of favour with Essex, but this would have made him even more eager to ingratiate himself with the Earl. Could any of the others really trust him? And Robert Poley was widely known as duplicitous, Sir Francis Walsingham having even written that he was loath to "lay himself open" to him.³ A simple word from either of them directly or indirectly into the ear of Archbishop Whitgift could have been catastrophic for any Council member or members acting on their own. Would any of them have really been prepared to take such a risk on behalf of Christopher Marlowe, no matter how much "good service" he had done for Her Majesty in the past nor how potentially valuable his brilliance as a poet/dramatist might be? I think not.

For me, therefore, it really is very hard to believe that the death-faking was performed without there having been some sort of agreement at Privy Council level as Louis Ule first suggested.⁴ Unlike him, however, I see this as a compromise between the Cecils (mainly) on the one hand, who wanted him saved, and Whitgift and Puckering (mainly) on the other, who wanted him dead. The Queen's tacit approval would also be sought. He would be not only banished for life, but would become a "non-person" too. By their doing this he would be seen by the masses to have been struck down by God for his transgressions,⁵ but his undoubted genius would survive in a way that might prove useful to the state. I note that it was Whitgift and Puckering who, with Chief Justice Popham, actually signed John Penry's death warrant for that most unusual (but possibly essential) time of day, and that it was Puckering who changed the words on the Baines Note from "died a sudden and violent death" to the more equivocal "came to a sudden and fearful end of his life."⁶

Lord Burghley was apparently quite ill at this time, so it may also be worth noting that he nevertheless attended more Privy Council meetings than any other Privy Counsellor over this period, apparently not once missing any of the eleven meetings held between 11th May and 12th June. The 31st of May - between the "death" and the inquest - is particularly interesting, when at the Star Chamber in the morning he attended a Council meeting with Whitgift and Puckering (the opposition?) and one at Nonsuch in the afternoon with Essex, Hunsden, Heneage and Robert Cecil (the supporters?).

My conclusion is in fact that the whole Privy Council knew and, with varying degrees of conviction, agreed to it. As I see it, this is the only way in which the risk to anyone involved could be sufficiently reduced, unless they themselves spilt the beans! If it were discovered, it could be brushed aside as a Privy Council decision, and any alleged perjury excused on the basis of the inquest having in any case been null and void.⁷

Whitgift's going along with this might seem very strange at first, despite his above-mentioned role in the provision of John Penry's body at just the right time. Although I am usually reluctant to read hidden meanings into the texts, however, there is a passage in As You Like It (the play with so many apparent references to Marlowe) in which I cannot but believe the symbolism to be deliberate:

Under an old oak, whose boughs were mossed with age
And high top bald with dry antiquity,
A wretched, ragged man, o'ergrown with hair,
Lay sleeping on his back. About his neck
A green and gilded snake had wreathed itself,
Who with her head, nimble in threats, approached
The opening of his mouth. But suddenly
Seeing Orlando, it unlinked itself,
And with indented glides did slip away
Into a bush, under which bush's shade
A lioness, with udders all drawn dry,
Lay couching, head on ground, with catlike watch
When that the sleeping man should stir. For 'tis
The royal disposition of that beast
To prey on nothing that doth seem as dead.
(4.3.105-119)

I'm not sure why the snake (who doesn't appear in the original story) is female, but that it forms a noose around the man's neck and threatens to stop his mouth is surely meaningful. I understand that the basic colour of ecclesiastical vestments changes to green at Pentecost (i.e. when Marlowe "died") and stays green for the six months until Advent. That an Archbishop's vestments would have gilt trimmings goes without saying, especially someone as showily extravagant as Whitgift was.⁸ The identity of the lioness, who was male in the original story, with the royal disposition (and "udders all drawn dry"!) also seems clear. They are together on this, and Marlowe will be in no danger from either of them as long as he "doth seem as dead."

The publication of plays registered with the Stationers' Company at this time was subject to the approval of Whitgift or his colleague Bancroft. As You Like It was registered in 1600, but this was not converted into permission for it to be published until over twenty years later, and after the deaths of both the Queen and Whitgift. It therefore seems to me that this may well have been one of the reasons why.

Finally, it is worth saying that such a scenario would be far more likely to work in ensuring both Marlowe's accepting the "sentence" and his continued silence on the subject. With any other situation it would be just the fear of what might otherwise be done to him which would buy his obedience, whereas with this one the ultimately more powerful carrot of eventual forgiveness, return, and recognition could be promised, whether such an end was ever really on the cards or not.

The constant recurrence of such themes in Shakespeare’s later plays may well suggest that he at least still thought it was. Referring to Prospero’s epilogue to The Tempest, for example, Stephen Greenblatt wrote: "Why, if [Shakespeare] is implicated in the figure of his magician hero, might he feel compelled to plead for indulgence, as if he were asking to be pardoned for a crime he had committed?"⁹ Why indeed?

Peter Farey

© Peter Farey, July 2010  Burgess Sam Riley Deptford

Peter Farey, a founding member of the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society, is the 2007 recipient of the Calvin & Rose G. Hoffman Prize, administered annually by The King's School in Canterbury for a "distinguished publication on Christopher Marlowe." Himself no stranger to official subterfuge, Peter was based behind the Iron Curtain during the "cold war" (in BRIXMIS), observing and reporting on Soviet military activity in East Germany.

Click here to reach Peter's website.

¹Nicholl, Charles. 2002. The Reckoning. p.33.
²Farey, Peter. "Nicholas Skeres and the Earl of Essex." http://marlowe-shakespeare.blogspot.com/2009/09/nicholas-skeres-and-earl-of-essex-by.html
³Nicholl, p.160.
⁴Ule, Louis. 1995. Christopher Marlowe 1564-1607: A Biography. p.234. David More also suggested around this time that Marlowe had been "banished to death," probably by The Queen, Burghley and Essex.
⁵See for example William Vaughan’s 1599 Golden Grove, in which he wrote: "Thus did God, the true executioner of divine justice, work the end of impious atheists."
⁶Nicholl, pp.323-5. Trascripts of the two Baines Note versions can be found at http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey/baines2.htm and http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey/baines3.htm
⁷Farey, Peter. "Was Marlowe’s Inquest Void?" http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey/inquest.htm
⁸I am grateful to Michael Frohnsdorff, who suggested the Whitgift connection in The Marlowe Society Newsletter 18, Spring 2002, pp.31-33.
⁹Greenblatt, Stephen. 2004. Will in the World. pp.376-7.

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