Heretic Queen (43 page)

Robert Persons became the Catholic strategist for a response to Burghley. With Richard Verstegan, his official in Antwerp, he drafted a reply with the catchy title
A Declaration of the True Causes of the great troubles, presupposed to be intended against the realm of England,
or
A Declaration
for short. While denying any close links with Spain,
A Declaration
was nonetheless printed with Philip II's money. When it was received by Anthony Bacon, the head of Essex's secret service, it came with a health warning: “a seditious vile book which … might be kept from any but such as were affected.”
21

*   *   *

As the war
of words between Jesuit interests and Burghley became hot, there were other pressing issues at home. Burghley, the ultimate statesman, had ensured that Cecil became his natural inheritor, as well as the man in charge of the bulk of Francis Walsingham's network of spies and informants.

This is precisely where the trouble began. By May 1593, Robert Cecil was the most powerful man in all England. Though Essex had been admitted as a privy councillor that February, Cecil's grip on government had already tightened. Walsingham's papers had been “stolen”—presumably confiscated by Cecil, who now ran Walsingham's spy network. His ability to smooth himself into place as Walsingham's natural successor has long made him the “presumed thief” of Walsingham's papers.
22
Effectively, Cecil was now prime minister, home secretary, and foreign minister. With Burghley increasingly infirm, Cecil oversaw his own remit as well as his father's and did both jobs extremely well. In no time at all, Elizabeth had promoted Cecil in her esteem from her “pigmy” to her “elf.”

This was the state of affairs in government when the theaters closed for most of 1592 due to a prolonged bout of plague. The economy shrank and times were hard. Shakespeare retired to his Stratford-upon-Avon home and wrote his two epic poems,
Venus and Adonis
followed by the
Rape of Lucrece,
both dedicated to Essex's young friend Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. Marlowe, too, hunted for a patron to supplement his lack of income from the stage. With years of outspokenness behind him and accusations of atheism common knowledge, Marlowe was unable to find paying work, other than for the government as an undercover agent.

To make matters more difficult for him, Henry Chettle's prefatory letter for a new pamphlet called
Kind-Heart's Dream
reopened the thorny issue of Marlowe's atheism, theoretically making him unfit as a playwright. Even Robert Greene's
The Groatsworth of Wit
had attacked both Marlowe and Shakespeare the preceding year. Shakespeare, now under the patronage of Southampton, received effusive apologies; Marlowe was only given insults as a diabolical atheist.
23

Marlowe, to lick his wounds, retired to the manor house of his erstwhile “handler” Thomas Walsingham, first cousin of Francis, who had just been released from prison for debt. In January 1593, Strange's Men performed Marlowe's last play,
The Massacre at Paris,
about the gruesome St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre.
24
The play was even more newsworthy in 1593, as Henry III had murdered Henry of Guise in 1589, then been assassinated himself only nine months later. Catholic France now had a Protestant king, Henry IV, formerly Henry of Navarre, who was still battling for his throne with English aid.

It was the “show it like it is” violence of
The Massacre
that struck the audiences dumb. Marlowe was confronting the religious violence of his times. Elizabethans evidently loved it, as it was Strange's Men's best earner of the short winter season. In early spring, plague struck again, the worst outbreak in thirty years. It would claim 8 percent of London's population—but Marlowe's expression of violence in
The Massacre
would soon threaten all London.

*   *   *

On February 17,
the remains of the separatist Roger Rippon were brought to the Cheapside home of Justice Richard Young. His coffin proclaimed that Rippon was the last of the seventeen great enemies “of God, the Archbishop of Canterbury, with the High Commissioners, have murdered in Newgate within these five years.” Archbishop Whitgift had indeed been incarcerating separatists—the more orthodox of the Puritan shades of gray—to Newgate for the previous two years. There they rotted, without trial, in Newgate's infamous “Limbo,” left to die.

John Penry, the Welsh pamphleteer and good friend of the printer Robert Waldegrave, was arrested on March 22. Separatist leaders Henry Barrow and John Greenwood were arrested the following day under the 1581 “Seditious Words” statute. What had once been a charge of blasphemy or heresy was now treason. They claimed they never intended the queen any harm. Only four days after Penry's arrest a new royal commission was created to hunt down Barrowists, Separatists, Catholic recusants, counterfeiters, vagrants, and anyone else who does “secretly adhere to our most capital Enemy the Bishop of Rome or otherwise do willfully deprave condemn or impugn the Divine Service and Sacraments.”
25
Alien religions and atheism were one and the same.

By April, libels began to appear threatening the city's stranger population, mostly Dutch and French Huguenot, who had been living peaceably for decades within London's walls. Cardinal William Allen's view was that Elizabeth was repopulating England with strangers “of the worst sort … to the great impoverishing of the inhabitants, and no small peril of the whole realm.”

Then, in May, a rhymester who called himself “Tamburlaine” after Marlowe's great play conflated the public hysteria against foreigners and Marlowe's great works with devastating results. Tamburlaine's verse is directed against foreigners, merchants, Machiavellians, and Jews and begins:

Your Machiavellian Merchant spoils the state,

Your usury doth leave us all for dead

Your artifex and craftsman works out fate,

And like the Jews, you eat us up as bread.

Twenty-six lines later, Tamburlaine finally gets to the point: “We'll cut your throats, in your temples praying.”

Elizabeth was extremely worried. At the weekly Privy Council meeting on May 11, she demanded Cecil call a halt to the sedition. The Dutch churchyard had been smeared with libels, as had the Huguenot church. He was ordered to put the Lord Mayor under pressure to discover the heart of this outrage and examine
anyone
who might be suspicious.

Meanwhile, Cecil ordered the arrest of one of his former unruly agents, Richard Cholmeley, who he suspected of involvement in a plot to kill the queen. When Cholmeley had gathered some sixty armed thugs to his side as Cecil's recusant-hunter, he had gone too far. Cholmeley's elder brother, Sir Hugh, had been a great friend of Cecil's, and Richard's behavior was proving threatening. By the time Cecil interrogated Cholmeley that May, the rogue agent had embraced atheism, and Christopher Marlowe. No wonder Burghley said, “I find the matter as in a labyrinth: easier to enter into it than to go out.”
26
When Cecil discovered that Cholmeley was associated with a new plot by the pope and Philip II, known as the Stanley Plot, which was already under way for another invasion of England through Scotland, the queen was informed. The date was May 26, 1593.

The playwright Thomas Kyd, onetime roommate and bedmate of Christopher Marlowe, had been arrested nearly two weeks earlier. Hidden among Kyd's papers were “vile heretical Conceits denying the deity of Jesus Christ.” Cecil ordered Kyd to be taken to Bridewell and tortured. Bridewell's most feared feature was something called “the scavenger's daughter”—an iron ring tightened by the turn of a screw that brings the head, feet, and hands together until they form a circle behind the victim's back. Kyd held out in “the scavenger's daughter” as long as he could before he denounced his friend Marlowe, saying that “it was his custom in table talk or otherwise, to jest at the divine scriptures, jibe at prayers, and strive in argument to frustrate and confute what hath been spoke or writ by prophets and such holy men.”
27

Cecil's network reacted in much the same way it had done when Walsingham was in charge. It set out to entrap the conspirators. Burghley was brought into the inner circle and needed little prompting about his previous dealings with Marlowe. The last time Burghley had seen the playwright had been fourteen months earlier, when he shielded Marlowe from a charge of high treason for counterfeiting. The hazy question of whether Marlowe was a single, double, or triple agent loomed unanswered.

At the end of the day, like Cholmeley, Marlowe had become a severe liability. Two days later the playwright was arrested at Thomas Walsingham's Kent home. By May 20, bail had been posted.
28
So long as Marlowe checked in on a daily basis with Cecil, he could remain at liberty. In the meantime, executions of other separatists began. John Penry was removed to Surrey, where he was hanged at five in the afternoon.

On May 30, Marlowe joined a small feast in a private dining room at the home of Eleanor Bull at Deptford, less than a mile from the royal palace of Greenwich. The other guests at the private feast were Ingram Frizer, an operative of Thomas Walsingham's and known swindler, and Nicholas Skerres and Robert Poley, both veteran operatives of Francis Walsingham's network. Christopher Marlowe, the most talented playwright of his day, was stabbed in the eye by Frizer and killed. Frizer walked free on the testimony of Skerres and Poley.

The warning to playwrights from the government was clear. No one was above the law.

 

TWENTY-FIVE

Elizabeth's Eminence Grise and the Final Battles for England

The Queen in all her robes had fallen the first day of the parliament … The King [James] did fall without harm, the French King [Henry IV] with a great bruise; which proves that some great planet in this configuration was precipitate. But God is gracious.

—Henry Howard to James VI, 1601

The world of the 1590s was a distinctly different place for Elizabeth's England. The war with Spain had been “hot” since 1585—ever since the queen had agreed to send Leicester at the head of an army to the Netherlands—but when Parma had taken Calais from the French, Henry IV, already financed by Elizabeth, needed more able men and supplies. Essex, who in Elizabeth's eyes was her ablest soldier, was sent with his “volunteers” to fight by Henry's side.

When Essex returned home from the siege of Rouen at the end of 1592, England was a plague-ridden country. The economy was suffering from a slowdown due to widespread death and illness. The exchequer was drained due to the prolonged war. For Elizabeth, the quickest and most efficient way to rebuild her dwindling financial resources was to send her adventurers to sea for plunder.

Raleigh and the Duke of Cumberland became the heroes of an action called the Islands Voyage of 1596, seizing the Portuguese carrack
Madre de Díos
and sailing her back to England. Its precious cargo of gold, spices, and gemstones had an estimated worth of £150,000.

The gossipy Venetian ambassador in Spain wrote in cipher to the doges that “never at any time in history has the West India fleet been so harried by the English … [than] at this present moment.”
1
Nothing could be further from the truth. Philip was planning another Armada.

*   *   *

What worried Essex,
however, was that England had fallen increasingly into the grasp of Robert Cecil. Only Robert and his father, Lord Burghley, shared the queen's overview of the world's affairs. Where his stepfather, Leicester, had been able to “pocket his pride,” Essex could not. He needed to be “in the know” at all times. At first, when Essex became a privy councillor in February 1593, he threw himself into his work in the vain hope that he could supplant Cecil and Burghley as the queen's chief adviser. He knew as well as the next person that Burghley's hourglass had little sand left to filter down.

Direct means having failed, Essex's own “secret service” seemed to be the best way to achieve his ends. Discovered Catholic plots were always a popular means to win Elizabeth's heart; so, on the slimmest of motives, the queen's physician Roderigo Lopez was accused of attempting to assassinate her in 1594. Lopez was a Marrano Jew, who had been converted forcibly to Catholicism before fleeing to England. Elizabeth found the allegations incredibly difficult to swallow at first, but in the end relented when Cecil joined Essex's voice against the hapless, and most probably innocent, Lopez. Elizabeth's physician would lose his life to Essex's great designs.

It was also an agent in Essex's pay who informed the earl in June 1592 that Ferdinando Stanley (the future Lord Strange), the patron of the actors Strange's Men, had been in contact with Cardinal William Allen and was a crypto-Catholic. Fifteen months later, a Lancashire man named Richard Hesketh brought Ferdinando a message from his exiled cousin Sir William Stanley asking him to help advance his “friends” overseas. Stanley wanted Ferdinando to press his claim to Elizabeth's throne and promised his Catholic army from the Low Countries to back him. Ferdinando immediately informed the authorities. Hesketh was hanged as a traitor.

Six months later, by now Lord Strange, Ferdinando fell ill, dying within forty-eight hours of “cruel pains … frequent vomitings of a dark colour, like rusty iron … that stained the silver Basins in such sort, that by no act they could possibly be brought again to their former brightness.” His body was said to run “with such corrupt and stinking humours that no man could in a long time come near the place of his burial.”
2
The government presumed he had been killed by some Jesuit connivance. Catholics presumed it was the government. Still others believed it was Bess of Hardwicke, protecting her granddaughter Arbella's claim to Elizabeth's throne. Hugh Owen, Sir William Stanley's coconspirator in the plot, wrote to Thomas Phelippes, Cecil's code breaker, to clear Essex of any culpability in the death of Lord Strange, thereby implicating him. Cecil would not forgive Essex for his meddling.