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Not Just the Tudors
Tudor True Crime: Murder of Christopher Marlowe
00:50:42
Who stabbed the famed playwright? And who planned it?
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- [00:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit with a historyhit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own recent two part series A World Torn, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward/subscribe.
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- [02:07]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb, and welcome to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Murder most foul, to cite a certain bard, has always attracted public fascination. In recent years, there's been an explosion in books, podcasts TV shows and films about true crime. Over the next four episodes of Not Just the Tudors, going to be delving into our archives to revisit some of the extraordinary true crimes that shook England in the early modern period, starting today with one that remains a cause of speculation more than 400 years after it occurred. On 30 May 1593 in Deptford, then outside of London, the 29 year old poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe was killed by a dagger pushed into his skull. The writer of Tamburlaine, Dr. Faustus and Edward II, among other plays, Christopher Marlowe was one of the greatest dramatists of the Elizabethan age. Often described as a tavern dispute or a fight over a bill, the details of his death and the questions surrounding it are both complex and startling. It's believed by many to be a case of murder, perhaps even one sanctioned by the Crown or those close to it. Here to discuss Marlowe's death and his life is Charles Nicoll, literary historian and author of books on Thomas Nash, Arthur Rambo, Leonardo da Vinci and William Shakespeare. His book the the Murder of Christopher Marlowe challenges many assumptions made about the nature and reason behind Marlow's death. And you may have heard him on this podcast before talking to me about true crime and the Elizabethan stage. I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and you're listening to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit.
- [04:40]
Anna Richardson
Charles welcome back to Not Just the Tudors. It's a great treat to have you on again and also to talk about this absolutely fascinating subject in your wonderful book.
- [04:49]
Charles Nicholl
It's a great pleasure to be back here, Susanna, and familiar terrain for me to cover once more, but it's always an exciting one and sometimes seems to have that aspect that the Kern brothers mentioned in one of their film noirs. The harder you look, the less you know. So I keep on revisiting the story and find more and more questions rather than answers.
- [05:11]
Anna Richardson
Well, that's absolutely tantalizing. Let's cut to the chase and start, as it were, with the end of Marlowe's life and the events of 30 May 1593. What brought Marlow to Deptford? Who was he meeting there?
- [05:25]
Charles Nicholl
We have a pretty good account of that meeting in the form of the coroner's inquest on Marlowe's murder, because it was during that meeting that Marlowe came to his sticky end. And so from that document, which is certainly a document that needs to be interrogated, but we'll stick with it for the moment we Learn that four men met up at a house in Deptford Strand, which was the waterfront area of Deptford, a small village in Kent, at that point. And those four men were Robert Pooley, Ingram Fraser, Nicholas Skeers and Christopher Marlowe. Christopher Marlowe is the only one that most people will have heard of, but those other three play a very important part in this story. They met up at 10 o' clock that morning, the morning of Wednesday 30th May 1593. I'll say straight away that it's often said that Marlow died in a tavern brawl, but there's no indication that the house was a tavern. If it were a tavern, the coroner would probably have given the name of its ensign. It would have been an address for him to put as the scene of the crime. It's only described as a house. We know the owner of the house was one Eleanor Bull, a widow, but she's not necessarily the shabby old ale house keeper of history or legend. So the word tavern is probably inaccurate, as there are only three people in the room with Marlow when he died. I don't think you can really call it a brawl as such either. So we can dispense straight away from the inquest and what it does or doesn't say that it wasn't really a tavern brawl. It was something rather more private than that. So these four men met up at ten o' clock in the morning, as the inquest describes it. They spent the day in conversation, they had lunch, they walked in the garden of the house, and then at about 6 o' clock in the evening, they came back into a room in the house. And it's important that the inquest says they were alone together, ever in that room, and they had supper. And then after the supper, according to the inquest, Milo was lying on a bed in the room, the other three were sitting in a row at the table with their backs to him. A rather strange choreography, let's say. But according to a later account, by someone who had quite good reason to know what he was talking about, they were playing at backgammon, or tables, as they called it. So we could perhaps imagine there's a game of backgammon, there's a throw of the dice and there's perhaps even some money going onto the table, these three men. But Marlow's lying on the bed behind them, and then someone comes in, perhaps Mrs. Bull, the owner of the house, perhaps a maid with the bill or reckoning. Now, of course, that's what gave rise to the idea it was a tavern, but it's much more probably a lodging house where food and drink was also served on a sort of private basis. And that Mrs. Bull was eking out a bit of extra income as a server of victuals. And as recounted in the inquest, the bill caused an argument about who should pay it. A quarrel arose, a squabble, and Marlowe jumps up off the bed, grabs Ingram Fraser's dagger from its sheath hanging down behind him from his belt, and gives him two blows with the hilt of the dagger on his head. That's at least the inference of the measurement of the wounds on Fryser's head, which were shallow slashes rather than stabs. This is a known form of attack when you don't actually want to stab someone, you hit them with the pommel of the dagger, and that's the meaning of the word, to pummel someone. In fact, in that struggle that ensued, Fraiser in some way twisted the dagger round or gained control of the dagger to the extent that he was able to thrust it at Marlow's face. And the blade went in through Marlow's right eye and penetrated into his brain at the depth of 2 inches. And as the coroner puts it in that affray, Christopher Marlowe then and there instantly died. That's the coroner's account as based on the witness reports or testimony. Though of course one says straight away, there are four men who went into that room. Three of them came out alive. Those three were the only people who actually knew what had happened. What we hear is their story told to the coroner and therefore given this very heir to it. It's in Latin. It's a coroner's inquisition post mortem. And it's forwarded to the courts who must determine whether the man who made the fatal thrust, Ingram Fryser, was guilty of murder, or as he was already, no doubt claiming to the coroner and as the coroner decided whether he did it in self defence.
- [09:53]
Anna Richardson
Okay, so a question before we interrogate that document little further. What do we know of these men? What do we know of their connection to Marlow and to each other?
- [10:05]
Charles Nicholl
As I've said, they are the only people on whom this story of what happened in that room depends. Who were these three men? The answer in one sentence would be they're a trio of absolute scoundrels. And indeed, as there are four of them that met up that morning, one might say they were a quartet of scoundrels. Because Marlowe, for all the beauties of his poetry and challenging, exciting ideas and even the flamboyance of his character was also a pretty underhand young man in many ways. I'll take them quickly in order. The man who made the fatal blow. Though let's note, only one dagger was used in that room. And that was Ingham Frizer's dagger. The story as told by him might be a good way of turning around a more obvious conclusion. That Fryser himself had stabbed Marlowe with his dagger. So Ingham Fryser, the man who struck the fatal blow with his twelvepenny dagger, as the coroner punctiliously values it, was a crooked businessman, let's call him is a phrase. He'd been up in the courts for extortion, for fraudulent dealings, for lending money at extravagant rates of interest. And he was also a servant, in that general word of someone who was a follower, an employee of Thomas Walsingham. The name Walsingham immediately rings bells. But he wasn't himself anyway, by this stage involved in the secret service which had been run by his elder cousin, Sir Francis Walsingham. But he was a young gentleman, not yet knighted, but soon to be knighted and a well off man. And he had been one of Marlowe's patrons. So there's a connection between Fryser and Marlowe immediately. They both serve the same well to do young man who lives in Chislehurst, Kent. And indeed Marlowe, we know, was staying at Thomas Walshingham's house just 10 days before his death. Frieser, as I say, was a man of dubious reputation in terms of his business dealings. And a very interesting document from 1598, that's five years after the case of Marlowe, finds him in conjunction with or in collusion with Nicholas Skeers. The second of the Deptford Four, as one might call them. And in that document it's complained against them that they did undermine and deceive a young gentleman who didn't know better, called Drew Woodliff. And wrapped him up in a very disadvantageous deal whereby he had to pay back £100 on what turned out to be a load of secondhand guns that he was given that weren't even worth 30. It was not a very serious crime. But it tells us Fryser and Skeers are a bit of a team. They work together and they work on the edge of, at the very least, and sometimes over the edge of the law, Skeers. I would also add two things of interest about skeers at the time, 1593. One is that he had some involvement in the intelligence services in a very low level, slightly dirty tricks level. And in fact is mentioned en passant in the entrapment or the events leading up to the arrest of Anthony Babington in the famous Babington plot of 1586 to put Mary Queen of Scots onto the throne. And the other thing about Skeers is that he is at this point a servant of the Earl of Essex, a very powerful and important and charismatic nobleman and favorite of the Queen. So we get dodgy business dealings, we get a hint of espionage and we get important political contacts. From the two of the three men that were with Marlowe. We come now to the third of the Deptford four, Robert Pooley. He's an Elizabethan spy, a career spy. He's been on the books of the government, in surveillance, in missions abroad, in the shabby role of prison informer. He's a bit of a jack of all trades within the espionage world and has risen by 1593 to be quite a senior figure employed by Sir Robert Cecil, the son of Lord Burley, who is one of the two figureheads of the secret services, or slightly rival evil secret services that emerged after the death of Sir Francis Walsham. So Pulley is a man who, as one who came across him, said, you must beware of him. He will beguile you either of your wife or of your life. A man of dangerous charm, a smooth talking operator. He's a very tricky customer. In fact, there's a case early in his career because of all these spies, he was used but never trusted by the spymasters. And so at one point in about 1584, he's actually interrogated by Sir Francis Walsham, who is a noted expert of the arts of interrogation. Walsingham knew how to draw out the truth from a suspect. And the account of this interrogation given by Pooley himself. So a bit of a brag, he said. He was so obstinate he refused to give any kind of ground to Sir Francis's hectoring interrogations. And he put Sir Francis into such a heat that he looked out of his window and grinned like a dog. Great description. Pooley has a great turn of phrase. We hear his voice from time to time in various statements of this sort and in various reports. In his style of speaking, he's at once rather bland. He answers a question in a convoluted way that doesn't quite answer it. Or he has this wonderful, rather throwaway, sardonic style. And we have other instances of Pooley under questioning. I mention this because one thinks that a man who could make Mr. Secretary Walsingham look out of his window and Grin like a dog in exasperation, Wouldn't perhaps find it that difficult to convince the coroner of a certain story they wish to tell about what had happened in that closed room at Deptford 36 hours before.
- [15:34]
Anna Richardson
So if you're saying very convincingly that the evidence of the inquest is just the word of the other men in the room, why has it so often been regarded as reliable?
- [15:47]
Charles Nicholl
I think one has to talk about the sort of river of hearsay that runs through history and runs towards us from the event. I think one also has to say that, of course, what's there in the coroner's inquest on that parchment in Latin, was unknown to the rest of us and to anyone outside a very small circle at the time. It's not a document that was circulated. There are no newspapers giving quotations from it. The events and the subsequent administration, as it were. The coroner's inquest, the process of the case in Chancery against Ingham Fraser, although the coroner had recommended that it was plea of self defence or a case of self defence and Fryser's pardon, all that's within the administrative, secretive world of the law courts. So nothing much is coming out from that document into the public. And, of course, thereafter it's lost in the sense that come 1925, a very brilliant archival ferret called Leslie Hodson tracks down on one or two hunches among the uncatalogued at that point. Bundles of Chancery court proceedings in the Public Record Office, the inquisition, post mortem. And it not only was an affair of some secrecy at the time, or anyway, an affair whose details would not be public, it was also wrapped up in all sorts of controversies and all sorts of dimensions of security, of the politics of espionage and so on, which we'll come onto. My reading of the whole thing tends towards being a conspiracy theory, but it's done within the context of an age of conspiracy. There's a slightly amusing aspect to this unknown nature of the facts, which is that one document that was known about immediately was the actual register of Marlowe's death at the local church, St Nicholas's Deptford. But on that burial entry, which is on the 1st of June, just after the coroner's inquest, Marlowe's body was buried. The inquest, by the way, was held at the site of the crime, Mrs. Bull's house at Deptford Strand, with the poet's body laid out on a table so that they could measure and display the wounds, and so on. So it's quite a scene, with 16 jurors and the coroner. And then Marlowe's body is taken to be buried. And the vicar writes in the burial register, buried 1 June, Christopher Marlowe slain by Francis Frizer. He gets the first name wrong. An innocent mistake, no doubt. Then about 200 years later, a Victorian scholar, noting the case happened at Deptford, writes to the then vicar of Deptford asking him if there's any mention of Marlowe's burial in the register. And the vicar goes to the register and there finds the entry. But he misreads from the difficult Elizabethan handwriting the second name and reads it as Archer rather than Fraser or Fraser. So he writes back to the scholar. Yes, it says he was killed by a man called Francis Archer. And for several decades thereafter, this by misadventure concocted name, he became the supposed killer of Christopher Marlowe. Call Francis Archer the poltergeist of misinformation because that's the kind of thing that's going to wreck your carefully constructed theories. Because Francis Archer disappeared the moment that Leslie Hodgson uncovered the actual coroner's inquest and found out that the man's name was in fact Ingram Frizer. It's said that Touchstone's line in Shakespeare's as yous like it refers glancingly to the death of Marlowe. That's a play written or anyway first performed about 1599. So six years after it, where Touchstone says it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room. Of course, Marlowe died in an argument over the reckoning in a little room in Deptford. That's a little teaser. That Shakespeare may have known something about it. People may well have known something about it. And other brief accounts did appear in print within a decade or so of the killing. But they tell us what the rumor was. But already it's rumor that he was killed in a knife fight. That it was a fight over a lewd love, as one of the gossipers says, possibly intending to mean homosexual tiff of some sort.
- [19:50]
Anna Richardson
So I want to go back and think about what might have led him to that. But I want to ask one more brief question about the events of that day, which is this. Why do you think that Ingram Frizer didn't flee after the act? Why was he so sure that he wouldn't be convicted of murder?
- [20:09]
Charles Nicholl
He stood his ground. You're right. They all stood their ground. I think he was a man who knew how to use the law because he'd appeared in law courts and he was a businessman of the sort who works at the edge of the law. I think, as I would interpret it, there's 36 hours between the killing and the inquest. It's a very short time in terms of history, but it's long enough for them to concoct a story together. One argument would be he stood, he ground because he had killed Marlowe in self defence. The other argument would be that if he hadn't killed him in self defence, he knew that they could spin that story. And there are things about the story they spin that don't quite hang together, to be honest. The choreography of the event. It's said that Fraiser, in his defence, could in no wise take flight from Mahler. In other words, he was hemmed in. Marlowe was attacking from behind. Fries hemmed in. Skeers and Pruli are either side of him. There's a struggle and the dagger gets forced round and thrust into Marlow's eyes. But what are Skeers and Pooley doing? They're still impeding Fraiser so that he can't get away from Marlowe, yet not in any way intervening. There's no way one can reconstruct the actual brief seconds. That is actually the nub of the thing. But I'd say Frieser didn't flee because he trusted to his position as a servant of Thomas Walsingham. Perhaps he trusted to the situation, he trusted to the law. He may even have known that there were people who were by no means sorry to learn that Marlowe was lying on the floor in Deptford with blood pouring out of his eye and his life gone. So all those. I think Fraiser felt he was safer or there was more future in facing the music than in running.
- [21:50]
Anna Richardson
So let's think a bit, then, about being a spy, because your book makes very clear the complexity, the contradictions in Marlowe's life. You describe there being a common thread of falsehood. Can you tell us a bit about Marlowe's role as a spy, as he's often described anyway, and what that term actually means in Elizabethan England and whether it was important for you to try and reconcile the Marlowe that history remembers and the one that appears in the evidence?
- [22:21]
Charles Nicholl
Yes, in a way, the two sort of fit together once you start thinking about them with any kind of continuity. The creator of fictions on the stage and the creator of fictions in an espionage operation, the COVID or the creation of character, the plotting that is common to both a playmaker and the espial or informer, or projector, as they were often called. He is not the first writer to have been mixed up in the spying business. I don't want to imply that he's a mastermind of espionage. Robert Pooley, his companion at Deptford, might warrant those terms. But Marlowe, I would say, was someone who first got into the game as if it were a kind of game. And he's a man who is excited by, as it were, the edge, the borders of the acceptable, by confronting conventionality, by challenging. So he's a young man at Cambridge. This is where it all starts. There are reasons for him to be attractive to the security services. There are reasons for him to be attracted to the idea of spying. A dangerous game, but one he thought would be exciting, one he thought would and indeed did prove to be a good copy for him. Look at a play like the Jew of Malta. It's full of that sort of Machiavellian twisting and turning and plotting of stereotypes that turn out to be empty and wrong in a way we would now call Barabbas in the Jew of Malta, someone who was radicalized by his experiences of antisemitism, a Jew whose bitterness of antisemitism turns him into a clutter of atrocities against the Christians. So Marlowe learns the raw end of politics by his work as an agent. The political context, of course, is that the government, as they would have seen it, was fighting the enemy within of Catholic loyalism. And to be an informer or a betrayer of confidences of a Catholic was a useful bit of pocket money. The first evidence of Marlowe as a bit part player in the intelligence game. And I probably wouldn't ever put him much higher than that, but he gets a pretty good endorsement in this from officialdom in 1587 when he's due to receive his degree. It suddenly appears as a problem with the degree because the authorities are planning to withhold it because of rumors that are circulating which have reached their ears. This is the Cambridge authorities that Marlow has been consorting with malcontent Catholics at the university, of which there certainly were some, that he has intended to go to Reims in northern France, where there was the English college or Catholic seminary where priests were trained up and sent back into England, and that he's therefore a dangerous and undesirable young man who they've got no intention of awarding his MA degree to. We know all this because we know the subsequent few days of that accusation was that Marlowe obtained from the Privy Council a letter which still survives, which basically says, whereas it was reported that this young man was determined to have gone beyond the seas to Reims, and there to remain their Lordships, the Privy Council thought it good to explain to the university authorities that he had no such intent, that in fact he had served Her Majesty and done her good service, that he deserved to be rewarded and not defamed for his faithful dealing, and that it was Their Lordship's wish that he should be furthered in the degree he was to take at this next commencement. So Marlowe obtained this warranty from the Privy Council. An agent who was consorting with dangerous Catholics, with subversives, with those in fact bent on at least converting lots of people to Catholicism, and at the most extreme, bent on assassinating the Queen in order to consort with people like that, as Marlowe was being accused of, you hopefully got a warranty, as they called it, from your masters, the Privy Council, Sir Francis Welsing, whoever it might be, to say that you're the Queen's man. Actually, you're not a subversive malcontent Catholic. You're a faithful operative getting information from the enemy. Marlow didn't seem to have this until retrospectively, but the Privy Council thought it was worth defending him, either to protect some operation that Marlow had been involved in, or just because he was a promising young man and it seemed right for them to exonerate him from the charges of being Malcolm Tent. Catholic.
- [26:50]
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, host of the Not Just the Tudors podcast. I want to tell you about a new podcast series, the mystic and the Mayor. As a historian, I'm fascinated by stories of witchcraft and magic for Centuries, accusations of sorcery have brought down even the most rich and powerful. But this isn't a story from the pages of distant history. In February 2024, in the glamorous French coastal town of Agde, a respected mayor was arrested for corruption. His defence? He claims he was bewitched by the town's beautiful clairvoyant.
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Anna Richardson
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- [29:08]
Anna Richardson
So this is fascinating because we have this instance here of the Privy Council standing in to protect him. Now, can we contrast that with Marlow's apprehension immediately before his death and his questioning by the Privy Council? I want to ask you what was going on there, particularly about his lack of arrest and charge. Please tell us what happened. Also, what was to be gained by requesting that Marlowe be released on bail but report daily to the council.
- [29:36]
Charles Nicholl
Exactly right. This is 10 days before what turns out to be his death. 20th of May, he appears before the Privy Council on charges that aren't specified, but we can pretty well gather what they are from looking back over a little period before that. He's not actually put in prison at that point, as though the things he's being charged with could certainly have led to that action. He's at liberty, but he has to report daily to the Council and there's mention of an indemnity. In other words, some bail money has been paid. So he's a suspect, yet he's been allowed to remain loose. But they're keeping an eye on him. And that's the circumstance when 10 days later he turns up at Deptford Strand meeting with Robert Pooley and the other two. The violent death of Marlowe at that meeting 10 days later and the apprehension of him by the Privy Council on 20 May. They would seem possibly to be related. Though in what way exactly they're related is going to be quite complicated. If the Privy Council wanted to get rid of Marlowe, they would simply have thrown him in prison and or hanged it. They were doing that to plenty of people at this time. It's a very fraught kind of time at a period of Uncertainty about the future because the succession question was still unresolved. No one knew who was going to take over when the aged queen did indeed die. There is this whole Catholic threat. There is also a stronger and stronger idea of threats within the society. And a young man like Marlow, who is what one might call within that context, a dissident writer. One who broadcasts totally unacceptable views about religion, heresies, blasphemies, unpleasant obscenities. It was claimed that he said Jesus Christ loved St. John and used him as the sinners of Sodoma. That Mary was a whore, the angel Gabriel was a pimp who brought the Holy Ghost of Mary and impregnated her. The New Testament was filthily written the Holy Sacrament. Would it be much better being administered in a tobacco pipe?
- [31:35]
Anna Richardson
Now, how much do we know that he said these things? You know, what's the truth of these claims?
- [31:39]
Charles Nicholl
It's a real tail chasing business that because the people that provide us and the authorities with the information that Marlowe said, these things are, well, part of that same dodgy world of informers and projectors and people who make a living out of criminalizing other people. People who make a living out of alerting the government to dangerous plots and sedition. And people who, in the absence of any hard evidence for such plots, are going to invent them. Marlowe's reputation as an atheist, a blasphemer, a heretic, and indeed as a homosexual. It depends on pretty low grade information or informers that produce information. These texts can be still read in the British Library. The Baynes note is the famous one which I was quoting from earlier. A list of 19 monstrous opinions, as Baynes calls them. And this was delivered to the authorities in that period just between the arrest of Marlowe and his liberty and his murder. 27th of May, the Baines note is handed into the authorities confirming what others had already been saying, that this Marlowe is a dangerous character. To go back to the arrest, the actual motive, cause of that arrest is undoubtedly the nailing up or posting up of seditious placards in the streets of London earlier in May. And these were particularly aimed against the immigrants. They were racist, anti immigrant and in the particular case of what's called the Dutch church libel because it was nailed up on the door of the Dutch church in Threadneedle Street. It was a doggerel poem threatening violence to the immigrants, the beastly Belgians and faint hearted French and Flemish and so on. And the thing about this document mailed up on the door of The Dutch church on the 5th of May is that it was signed Tamburlaine, the name of one of Marlowe's most famous heroes, of Tamburlaine the Great. The implication being that it was written and posted up by someone who admired. No one actually thought that Marlowe had written, but by someone who thought Marlow's message was to rise up and create riots in the street. A disturber of the peace. And Marlowe was definitely considered. Playmakers in general tended to be considered sort of disturbers of the peace, espousers of dangerous opinions who broadcast these opinions. That's one of the reasons why the Privy Council and the Lord Mayor were always so keen to close down the theaters. Not just because they were a place where pickpockets, prostitutes and plague infections tended to muster, but also because they were a conduit for what were not necessarily on stage. Dissident ideas. Because dissident ideas would get censored or get you into trouble. But the drift of plays was often to lead the audience to ask questions, to feel. That's an interesting train of thought. I'll pursue it myself. Marlowe's plays are very challenging, questioning plays. They upend the stereotypes which the audience came into the playhouse with and is unlikely to leave with, having been through the Marlowe mangle, as it were. So we're talking about rumour mills. But you could see the kind of interrogatory mentality that Marlowe has, and he brings Machiavelli onto the stage in the prologue of the Jew of Malta. I count religion but a childish toy and hold. There is no sin but ignorance, says Machiavel. That's the prologue of the Jew of Malta. That's a sort of Malovian stun grenade in itself. Machiavelli is more or less a banned author at this time. There's no English translation of Machiavelli until the 1640s is published. You could get hold of his books in Italian, which radically limited the number of people who'd be reading them. But he was a dangerous figure, Machiavelli, one who disbelieved in the received wisdoms of church and state and laid bare the realpolitik which lay behind politics. And the Jew of Malta is full of that real politit. None of the politicians who are in it are in the slightest bit laudable or attractive sort of characters. It's a stinging critique of Machiavellian sort of politics.
- [35:34]
Anna Richardson
So this is very interesting because the way that that is put across, of course, is plausible. Deniability it's the statement and then says so and says Machiavel. And obviously, we all know Machiavel says terrible things. Are you saying that you think that Marlowe was a religious and political subversive, or that he was being deliberately implicated as such?
- [35:56]
Charles Nicholl
I think you could probably hold both to be the case. One of the things that he was reported as saying by Richard Baynes, the informer, that the first beginning of religion was to keep men in awe. In other words, religion was a kind of, from the beginning, a sort of tool for keeping the populace under control.
- [36:12]
Anna Richardson
Opium of the masses, isn't it?
- [36:13]
Charles Nicholl
Exactly. And you could draw that inference from some of his plays, like the Jew Of Malta. You could certainly feel that was exactly the kind of style of Marlowe questioning temper and his departure from what was conventional and what was, as he would put it, rather timidly complacent about Elizabethan society, accepting the opium of religion, accepting the myths and legends and iconography of the Queen and the hierarchies and all the suppressions that went with it. So you can well believe that on a quite genuine level, he would have been that kind of critic, that kind of skeptic, or indeed one could even believe Marlowe liked to shock, and he liked to shock people by saying things like, the Virgin Mary, she was just a whore. Another thing he was charged with was being the owner of a heretical manuscript which broadcasts Arian heresy or Unitarian heresy, which was that Jesus Christ was a man, not a God, and that Trinity isn't a Trinity. There's a God, yes, and there's Christ, but Christ was a man. Reasonable enough sort of divergence in the story, we would think. But in those days, of course, to question the divinity of Christ, to question the Trinity, was regarded as heresy. But the means by which this tract was foisted on to Marlowe was again very dubious. Arrest of his former chamber fellow, Thomas Kidd. This is after the Dutch church libel. The Dutch church Libel appears on 5 May. A special commission is set up to find out who is behind these seditious placards. Included in that commission of the old spymasters henchmen, Thomas Phillips and others who are no strangers to the use of torture, etc. On the 11th of May, Thomas Kidd is arrested as a suspect of the authorship of the Dutch church libel. On 12 May, he's under torture in the Bridewell. And there's this document on which the torturers are written on the back of it. Vile heretical deceits denying the deity of Jesus Christ our Saviour found among the papers of Thomas Kidd, prisoner. And then there's a bit of a pause because the ink colour's a bit different. Then underneath it is written, which he affirmeth he had from Marlowe. So there's this document that Kidd himself says he's never seen before, which has been taken from Kidd's lodgings after some persuasion is applied to him. He says, yes, it must be Marlowe's, because Marlowe's a man who holds all sorts of really bad opinions. And if you'll please stop breaking my thumbs with that machine you're using, I'll tell you all about Marlowe. And then from Thomas Kidd comes those similar sorts of statements about what Marlowe said and what he believed, his monstrous opinions which cover much the same ground as the ones of Baynes. Perhaps they're true, perhaps they're just things that atheists were supposed to say. And we do have the Earl of Oxford, for instance, a very dubious character in himself. He was accused of being an atheist as well as being accused of being a pederast. And some of the things that were said about him use the same kind of language and the same kind of terminologies of blasphemous mentions of Mary and the Holy Ghost and general sort of rasping, offensive remarks. Those were the same sort of things were said of him. So in a way, we're either dealing with things that Marlowe really said, or we're dealing with the things that atheists were supposed to say. Because when atheists were being considered as bogeymen, then you get this suspiciously concerted period of a few weeks before Marlowe's death, where these are all being gathered up. There's three, actually, I've mentioned two. Thomas Kidd's deposition after torture in the Bridewell, Richard Baines's note, and there's another man called Richard Cholmondeley, who is probably actually the person who did write the Dutch church libel specifically in order to draw Marlowe into trouble. And this is a sort of concerted campaign, as I see it, a black propaganda, a smear campaign against Marlow. And there's probably a further dimension to this. I am going to start sounding like a conspiracy qanonist, but the man that's probably actually the proper full target isn't Marlowe, but a man who was much associated with Marlowe and who was a friend and patron of Marlowe's. And that's Sir Walter Raleigh, or Raleigh, against whom there were various moves at this time. He was actually in disgrace. A bit with the Queen. But there were plenty who wanted to make sure he didn't make a comeback. Among those was the Earl of Essex, who is the current favourite of the Queen. Raleigh, having lost his place for the impertinence of secretly marrying one of the Queen's maids of honour. And Thomas Phillips, who's one of the special commissioners looking into the Dutch church library and its causes, was his chief intelligence, assessor and operative. And Nicholas Skeers, who turns up at Deptford, is known to be, and this is again black and white documents. Skeers himself describes the Earl of Essex as his lord and master. So you can, as it were, work back from that meeting in Deptford to hire up political figures. Sir Robert Cecil, the employer of Robert Pooley, the Earl of Essex, the employer, in a probably no doubt a very deniable way, of Nicholas Skeers. Sir Walter Raleigh, the high up friend of Christopher Marlowe. And there are others who are pulling the strings in the background, like Thomas Phillips, who I briefly mentioned, an old spy operative from the Walsingham days. So my own feeling about that meeting at Deptford is that, yes, it's full of spies and scoundrels. It's a meeting that was engineered in order to talk with Marlowe. And indeed the inquest says that's what they were doing for about eight hours before the meeting ends in a scuffle death. They'd met at 10 o' clock and something happens after supper, which supper was at 6:00'. Clock. Those times are actually mentioned in the inquest. So it's eight hours. They weren't roistering. What were they doing? They were talking. What were they talking about? Marlow's liberty is obviously one thing that's on the agenda. Poole is the kind of man. He's in there shuffling the cards, making offers. I think the authorities wanted Marlow to admit to these dreadful blasphemies and then to give him the trade off of freedom or exile as opposed to a traitor's death by turning evidence against Raleigh.
- [42:19]
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- [42:46]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, host of the not just The Tudors Podcast I want to tell you about a new podcast series, the mystic and the Mayor. As a historian, I'm fascinated by stories of witchcraft and magic. For centuries, accusations of sorcery have brought down even the most rich and powerful. But this isn't a story from the pages of distant history. In February 2024, in the glamorous French coastal town of Agde, a respected mayor was arrested for corruption. His defence? He claims he was bewitched by the town's beautiful clairvoyant. The case has got it all. Phone calls from the Archangel Michael. Seances where the dead speak through the living. A mayor who believed he was receiving supernatural guidance. Hosted by the broadcaster Anna Richardson, the Mystic and the Mayor is a modern day tale of sorcery that could have come straight from the history books. The dark arts, it seems, are alive and well in the 21st century. Binge the whole series of the mystic and the Mayor on Wondry plus, through Apple podcasts, Spotify or in the Wondery app.
- [44:09]
Anna Richardson
So we have this chronology of these three moments where there's evidence, some obtained under torture, you've told us. Others, perhaps if it indeed one of them was the person who was responsible for the anti Dutch libel, perhaps doing it to save his own skin. We've got these bits of evidence prepared against Marlow in this short period of time in May, in the run up to his death, we've got this meeting in the room and depending on. And you've mentioned Raleigh and you use a fantastic phrase in the book, you say it was not innocence that kept a man out of jail, but influence. So what does that mean for our understanding of what's going on here? Has he been kept out of jail to this point because he's being protected somehow?
- [44:53]
Charles Nicholl
That is indeed my reading it, Susanna, because as I mentioned briefly with Sir Robert Cecil, one of the inheritors of the secret services at the death of Sir Francis Walsham, or the hopeful inheritor, somewhat in competition with the Earl of Essex who also ran spies. And some of those spies, Richard Baines for example, is possibly someone who had been used by Essex. But one doesn't want to get into possibilities, one wants to stick with the facts. There's another document which is probably connected with Marlowe's career as a secret servant. And that's when he's over in the Low Countries. Great conspiracy factory in the Low Countries. A lot of English Catholics over there hatching plots, trying to work out who might succeed Queen Elizabeth and be a friend to the Catholics. Among them a man called Lord Strange, who was also a page of the Playhouses and for whom Marlowe wrote the Jew of Malta and the Massacre at Paris. Marlowe's over there in the Low countries in early 1592 and he's arrested for counterfeiting money. Another item in the checklist of Marlow's career as well as various run ins with the police for failing to keep the peace and insulting police officers. There are these more serious charge. Counterfeiting or coining as they called it, was punishable by death. It was called petty treason. Not quite as serious as high treason, but you got executed for it. Mahler was deported from the low countries in January 1592. A letter that was sent over with him from Sir Robert Sidney, the governor of Flushing, the English governor of Flushing, which was a little English possession in the Low Countries at that time, says, I'm sending over with my ensign three prisoners. One of them is nothing to do with Marlin, this, but the other two are Christopher Marley, by his profession, a scholar and a goldsmith named Gifford Gilbert. And the two men had been taken in the act of counterfeiting money in a chamber in Flushing. And the man who was also there with them in the chamber, but who then informed the authorities against them was none other than Richard Baynes, who a year later will provide the damning list of Marlowe's heresies known as the Baynes Note. So in 1592, Marlowe's up to something in the Low Countries. And that something was almost certainly kind of missionary or operation organized by Sir Robert Cecil. There's many ways in which that can be not established without doubt, but which it's very plausible that Marlowe had at this point been working as an undercover agent for Sir Robert Cecil. And indeed the counterfeiting of money was no doubt to produce a whole load of cash that would gain him an entree into Catholic conspiratorial circles in Brussels and his connections with Lord Strange, which he was connected with as a playwright because throughout there's this running connection between his life as a writer and his rather more part time life as a government operative, as a dodgy young man who's useful to put into certain circumstances, who has a certain wit and cunning and might produce results. But when he doesn't produce results, when he in a sense gets arrested and sent back, when the spanner gets put in the works, then the operation is rather compromised. I think Marlowe was probably someone who Sir Robert Cecil, who was a member of the Privy Council and would probably have argued that Marlow should have Been not put in prison at that meeting of the Privy Council where Marlowe was under questioning. I think Marlowe was someone who Cecil might consider knew too much about his operations, about a rather unsuccessful operation. Cecil very conscious of his political standing, still a young man, a brilliant young man, but full of strange insecurities. He was physically disabled, for a start. He was something of a hunchback and was taunted in the unkind Elizabethan world, as the Queen called him, Elf. He was a man very conscious of his status and desiring to keep his status going upwards, which indeed it did. Very ruthless man in his way. So Marlowe was kept in play, I think, by Cecil when others would have wished him to be handed over to the torturer Topcliffe, just as Thomas Kidd had been. Thomas Kidd was happy to say anything about Barlow once he'd had a session at the Bridewell, which is a documented session of torture. Kidd refers to it in a later letter. We know he was imprisoned in the Bridewell on the 12th of May, and that's what he told the authorities. As a result, if Marlowe had been put under the torture, as those who'd set this whole scene up wished was the case, he would have told them anything that they wanted to hear about Sir Walter Raleigh, who himself always had a dubious reputation as someone who dabbled in the occult. Because of course, those who held forward thinking scientific interests were per se regarded as dangerous sort of strayers from the religious straight narrow.
- [49:21]
Anna Richardson
In other words, you're suggesting that the information that Marlowe may have held about Raleigh or about Cecil or Cecil and about that mission to the Low Countries was potentially valuable enough to keep him out of prison. So that if we look at the situation where we've got the evidence of Marlowe's atheism or heresy, depending on how you define it, plotted and released at clever intervals, creating this, as you say in your book, a case that might otherwise have been watertight. We've got this odd situation where what should have produced his incarceration is actually producing his continued freedom. And it's in that situation of continued freedom that he dies.
- [50:03]
Charles Nicholl
He's out on bail. He's ordered to report to the Privy Council daily. He probably had reported him that morning before he headed off to Deptford, where they met up at 10am he's been kept in play. He's not being let loose. So bye. Thanks. Sorry we troubled you. He's being kept in play. Everyone has got cards in their hand but doesn't know what other people are holding in their hand. Everyone Including Sir Robert Cecil, although he tends to know a lot more than most people do. Robert Pooley, who is Cecil's operative in the Low Countries and in this case as well, is actually brought back from the Low Countries. When he's paid his warrant, he says he's been in Her Majesty's service all the aforesaid time. When we know he'd already come back earlier when he was in Deptford, it implies he was still on Her Majesty's secret service. He's on. I think it's the 8th of June. He's paid for a mission which he went to Holland earlier in May, and he's paid on the 8th of June. And the warrant states, rather unusually, being in Her Majesty's service all that time. Yet we know, of course, that he was back in England by 30 May because he was there at Deptford. So in theory, he's covering himself there. I was involved in that rather nasty business at Deptford where Master Marlowe met a sticky end. But I was on Her Majesty's business all that time. It just covers him a little bit. And let's say everyone's wanting something to come out of this. There are those in the Privy Council who would like the destruction of Sir Walter Raleigh, which Marlow might still be useful to provide them with. There's Cecil. He wants things kept under wraps. He doesn't really want Marlowe put under torture because a man under torture might reveal all sorts of things that Cecil personally would rather he didn't. So 10 days later, after he's let out, and they know what he's up to because he's reporting every day, they've got tabs on him. They're just letting it play the way Sir Francis, the spymaster always said was the way to play these things. Let it run, see who's going to hang themselves. Or when they refuse to play the game, then consider the more drastic alternatives. And I'd say that's more or less the circumstance. We don't know what they were talking about for those eight hours, but I think at that point the options dwindled. As far as those in that room considered it, I would say, personally, I think that this is not something that's puppet strings from above. I think it's more what you call dirty tricks. Down at that level, that Marlowe and Pooley and Skeers and Fraser are at that level, they're the operatives that do the dirty work. They're the servants who must try and interpret what their masters want. And who are going to make decisions based on that. And I think that the turning on MARLOWE at around 8 o' clock that evening was that decision that was reached, for better or worse, probably by Pooley with Fryse and Skiers. I'd say that the inquest story sounds to me like what happened, except it was the other way around. It wasn't Ingram Frieser, who was pinioned between Skeers and Pooley so that he couldn't get away, but Marlowe. And the dagger wasn't wielded by Marlowe, but by the man whose dagger actually was Ingram Fryser. And the scratches on Fraiser's head weren't from Marlowe jumping on him from behind in an anger over the bill, but from a man struggling for his life and was about to have his life dispatched by a dagger being thrust through his eye and into his brain. So you just turn around the inquest story. There might even have been an argument about the bill as a way of getting everyone fired up. Suddenly Hooley was a very clever operator. Skier's a dirty tricks merchant. Fries would do anything for a bit of money or a bit of leverage. So I think Marlowe's liberty, as one would call it, on the 20th of May doesn't really alter the conspiracy aspect. In a way, it adds to it. The cards are still on the table. The cards are still being held by different people close to their chest. Those who want Marlowe out of the way by the end of that meeting in Deptford, I think I'd say that it was decided upon by those there, those who were inadvertent commas, working for Her Majesty or working for particular masters. It was decided on from both sides. No one would be very sorry if Christopher Marlowe didn't walk out alive from that room. Not the Earl of Essex, not Sir John Puckering and Thomas Phillips were the ones who were prosecuting him on the more legal side about his heresies. Not Sir Robert Cecil, who felt that he was probably a bit of a danger to be running around talking too much. So the decision was reached. Probably. Some people thought that it was a blunder, it was a rogue event within the confines of the secret world. But then, as Thomas Nash, Marlowe's close friend, the pamphleteer, wrote in the pamphlet that he was writing at the time, the Unfortunate Traveller, which he finished on 30 June 1593, it was butter word and a blow and Lord have mercy, he was gone. I always think that's a little seismic ripple of Marlowe's murder surfacing into Nash's text. There, of course, quite a lot of what I'm saying can't finally be proved.
- [55:03]
Anna Richardson
Well, thank you very much for talking through with us in such interesting detail this wonderful obviously always to the end theory. But there is a lot of plausibility in this theory of what happened in that great reckoning in a little room in Deptford. And those who want to dig deep into this story have got to pick up a copy of your book, the the Murder of Christopher Marlowe. Thank you so much for your time.
- [55:29]
Charles Nicholl
It's been a great pleasure to talk to you, Susanna, and always a great pleasure to air the story of Marlowe one more time.
- [55:39]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Next time on Not Just the Tudors, we'll be exploring one of the entire enduring mysteries of the reign of Elizabeth I, the mysterious fatal falling down a staircase by Amy Robsart Dudley, wife of Robert Dudley, the Queen's leading courtier and close friend. Was she pushed or did she throw herself down those stairs? Would her death clear the way for the Queen to marry Robert Dudley or preclude any possibility of it happening? We will find out. Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors From History Hit. And to my producer Rob Weinberg, we are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line and not just the Tudors historyhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode of next time on Not Just the Tutors from History Hit.
- [56:47]
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- [57:17]
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