The Elizabethans (57 page)

Deptford was a small village near Greenwich, on the Surrey side of the Thames. It was the site of great shipyards and docks: the Royal Dock for the navy, as well as commercial docks for innumerable merchant ships, with all the attendant sheds and warehouses. In the 1590s it had become a ‘boom town’, with as many as 4,000 new residents.

Deptford was full of a wide variety of foreign visitors, as well as those fringe members of the court who could not find anywhere to live at nearby Greenwich – minor courtiers, officials, choir members of the Chapel Royal. Records tell us that a French trumpeter, Pierre Rossel, a German singer, Dente Natrige, and a Welsh chorister, Wenfayd Royce, all lodged at Deptford.
¹⁸
In this polyglot, floating population it was not surprising that there were also found secret agents.

Ingram Frizier was a shady businessman: on the make, arraigned in the Exchequer court of 1591, but by 1593 described as a ‘gentleman’. He was also a spy, and shared a spy-master – Thomas Walsingham – with Christopher Marlowe. Thomas was the young (Marlowe’s age) kinsman of Francis Walsingham. Skeres, one of the others present when Marlowe was killed, appears to have been a ‘fence’ for stolen property. He was part of the Essex circle and part of the military expedition to France in 1592 to assist Henri of Navarre. He was involved in the entrapment of the Babington Plot, and the Babington accomplices had met in the lodgings of Robert Poley, the fourth man in the room when Marlowe was killed. Poley had been a government agent for two decades. He went to Denmark, France, Scotland and the Netherlands. He lurked in prisons and eavesdropped on conversations. He was known as ‘the very genius of the Elizabethan underworld’. He tricked dozens of Catholics into indiscretion. Just back from the Low Countries, he was on government business that evening in Deptford.

It is not possible at this distance in time, and with three such rogues as the principal witnesses at the inquest, to reconstruct what, precisely, made Marlowe a potential object of embarrassment to the government. But knowing as we now do the background in sordid espionage, swindling and extortion in which his three Deptford companions moved, it is safe to suggest – more than to suggest, to state – that they were not gathered for a poetry-reading. Presumably (but it is a safe presumption) Poley, probably guided by Thomas Walsingham or Robert Cecil, wanted to have Marlowe’s assurance of silence, or collaboration, or perhaps he was asked to part with some letters. The men were together for
eight hours
at the Widow Bull’s house. Evidently, at some point, Marlowe lost his temper. Nothing unusual about that. In 1589 he was imprisoned after a sword-fight in Shoreditch, which had resulted in someone’s death. In 1592, again in Shoreditch, Marlowe had been bound over to keep the peace. A few months later he had fought a tailor named Cortine ‘with a staff and dagger’. He might well have drawn Frizier’s dagger, as he asserted, and Frizier might well have reacted in self-defence, when he stabbed Marlowe through the eye.

There is no doubt that Marlowe was employed as an anti-Catholic spy, and that some of those in English Intelligence feared that he would ‘go native’ or become ‘a practiser with them’. In the world of espionage, the double-agent becomes so accustomed to his duplicity that it is probably not even possible for himself, let alone his spy-masters on either side, to know where his loyalties lie. William Parry, hanged for treason in 1585 as a Catholic plotting against the government, maintained until his tearful end that he had been an agent provocateur working for the government.
¹⁹
Marlowe was enlisted into the secret service while still an undergraduate at Cambridge. As a double-agent, his work took him to the Low Countries and it was there in January 1592, the seventh year of the war, that he was arrested for ‘coining’ or counterfeiting money. A letter about it by the governor of Flushing – Sir Robert Sidney – to Lord Burghley only came to light in 1976. The forging of Dutch shillings was revealed by Richard Baines, a spy who worked behind enemy lines for Walsingham, posing as a seminarian and keen Romanist for years. The man accused with Marlowe, John Poole, was known to hold subversive Catholic views. The Low Countries were Robert Poley’s special area of intrigue and he knew all about Marlowe’s activities in Flushing, his letter-drops, his Catholic contacts – Poley was especially interested, at this time of Marlowe’s arrest, in a cell of Catholic plotters in Brussels. Accounts were also brought to Burghley about Marlowe’s association with the spy-poet Matthew Roydon. Reading these stray bits of surviving evidence from the Public Record Office we can reconstruct Marlowe’s life of spying and his involvement with the low-life world of crime.

Richard Baines was the author of the celebrated note, surviving in two manuscripts of the Harleian Collection in the British Library, that indicts ‘Christopher Marly concerning his damnable judgment of religion and scorn of God’s word’. This is the document that quotes Marlowe saying ‘that Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest’ . . . ‘that all the New Testament is filthily written’ . . . that ‘the sacrament . . . would have been much better being administered in a tobacco-pipe’. Similar charges to those against Marlowe were made against another spy, Richard Cholmeley – another hunter of ‘papists & other dangerous men’. An informer against Cholmeley came up with charges of amazing similarity to those that Baines brought against Marlowe: ‘That Jesus Christ was a bastard, St Mary a whore & the Angel Gabriel a bawd to the Holy Ghost’ and that ‘Moses was a juggler . . . for his miracles to Pharaoh to prove there was a God’ (Cholmeley). ‘That Moses was but a juggler . . . that it was an easy matter for Moses, being brought up in all the arts of the Egyptians, to abuse the Jews’ (Marlowe, quoted by Baines).

In both cases, the atheism was regarded as subversive not only of religion, but of the government. The spy who denounced Cholmeley claimed that there was a gang of sixty such atheists, determined ‘after her Majesty’s decease, to make a King among themselves, & live according to their own laws’. It would easily be accomplished, thought Cholmeley, because there were ‘as many of their opinion as of any other religion’.

Cholmeley was arrested on 28 June 1593, the very day that Ingram Frizier was pardoned for killing Marlowe. No one knows what happened to Cholmeley after he was taken off to prison, but it surely can be no coincidence that his recorded blasphemies are so similar in word and sentiment to Marlowe’s. If Nicholl’s (to me highly plausible) speculations are correct, all this ‘evidence’ was contrived to discredit Christopher Marlowe and, by association, Walter Raleigh. Nicholl’s contention is that Marlowe had been working for Robert Cecil, who kept him out of prosecution for the coinage scam in Flushing, but was increasingly embarrassed by his connection with this flamboyant and outspoken troublemaker. Sir John Puckering, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, was also, like Mr Secretary Robert Cecil, embarrassed by how much the government agent Marlowe
knew
, and by how much could be said against the government if rumours of Marlowe’s atheism spread.

‘If an unfortunate accident were at this stage to befall Christopher Marlowe, neither his prosecutor Sir John Puckering nor his protector Sir Robert Cecil would be much displeased,’ wrote Nicholl.
²⁰
He did not produce enough evidence to convict Robert Cecil in a court of law. But the cumulative effect of
The Reckoning
is to see a world of corruption and intrigue and government-sponsored torture and murder, which undoubtedly
did
exist. Presumably, Marlowe’s growing fame as a poet and a dramatist made him even more dangerous to the government. There can be no doubt that the death of this marvellous poet before he was thirty is one of the greatest calamities in the history of literature.

25

The Occult Philosophy

MARLOWE’S DEATH STILLED
the voice of a young poet of unexampled resonance. The poetry, and the plays, would presumably have continued to rival those of Shakespeare. Had he lived, the 1590s and the Jacobean age would have left behind an even more stupendous dramatic legacy. The decade saw an enormous growth in the popularity and quality of the theatre. James Burbage had created the first building of that name in the 1570s, thereby deliberately creating a Roman word for a Roman concept, probably based (Burbage was first a joiner and would have studied the rudiments of architectural theory) upon the ideas of Vitruvius, the first century bc Roman architect whose book
De architectura
had so deep an effect upon Palladio and the other architects of the Italian Renaissance. These ideas were not ‘random’. Their aesthetic was guided by notions about the world which to a modern mind might very likely seem bizarre, but which run through almost every aspect of Renaissance life – not merely its architecture, but also its poetry, its fashion sense, its politics. The Vitruvian theatre, for example, rested upon seven pillars, symbolising the ‘seven pillars of Wisdom’ of Solomon’s Temple.
¹
The shape and design of the building was conceived not simply to pack in as large an audience as possible, but actually, in a mystic-magical way, to stimulate memory. The philosopher Giulio Camillo, one of the most famous men of the Renaissance, constructed a wooden theatre in Venice that reflected the seven planets, with seven gangways or doors, and represented the universe expanding from First Causes through the stages of Creation. It is inconceivable that some such theories did not influence the design of the London theatres.

Visitors to the reconstructed Globe Theatre in London, a charming piece of fantasy, have an idea that they are seeing a re-creation of the very stage on which Shakespeare’s plays were first performed. They do not necessarily realise that what they are seeing is a bit of mystic geometry. We do not actually know in precise detail what Shakespeare’s Globe looked like. Much of what we know of Elizabethan theatre-design is based on one small sketch, made by John de Witt and copied by Arend van Buchell. The fact that he labels his sketch with classical terms –
proscaenivum
,
ingresus
,
orchestra
,
mimorum aedes
, and so on – shows that he was aware of the classical influences on the building.

Dr Johnson’s friend, Hester Thrale, was married to a rich brewer, Henry Thrale, who owned the land in Southwark that had housed the original Globe Theatre. She wrote:

For a long time, then – or I thought it such – my fate was bound up with the old Globe Theatre, upon the Bankside, Southwark; the alley it had occupied having been purchased and thrown down by Mr Thrale to make an opening before the windows of our dwelling house. When it lay desolate in a Hack heap of rubbish, my Mother, one day, in a joke, called it the ruins of Palmyra, and after that they laid it down in a grass plot . . . But there were really curious remains of the old Globe Playhouse, which though hexagonal in form was round within.
²

If you put a circle within a hexagon, you provide one of those spaces so beloved of the Renaissance, of an outstretched man within a square and a circle. The most famous of these survives in the notebooks of Leonardo, but we also find it as a frontispiece in a book by Dr Dee about the symbolic geometry of man’s relationship to the Cosmos. Within that circle-in-a-hexagon, the seven triangular apices would have provided the seven gangways of the auditorium.

The first Globe Theatre was built on Bankside in 1599, partly from materials salvaged from the demolished theatre. The builder was Peter Street, and so successful was he with this venture for the Lord Chamberlain’s company (for which Shakespeare wrote and acted) that he was employed by Philip Henslowe to build the Fortune Theatre in 1600. It was vast, the Globe. Its capacity might have been as great as 3,000–3,800 standing in the yard, and more than 2,000 in the three layers of covered galleries.
³

There have been those who doubted whether Mrs Thrale’s ‘Palmyra’ was really the old playhouse, rather than the remains of a tenement building.
⁴
But even if archaeology banished uncertainty, the work done by the great scholar of Renaissance thought, Frances Yates, remains invaluable, as a reminder to us of how different the Elizabethan mindset was from our own.

We have already encountered, in these pages, Dr Dee, the adept of occult philosophy, who was a pioneer of mathematics, and who cast the Queen’s horoscope. We have alluded to the baffled, insular, narrow grammarians of Oxford, who laughed to scorn the idea of a Copernican universe, with the revolving Sun as its centre, and the Earth – far from being the still centre of the universe – being on the move. When this was expounded to them by the visiting Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), George Abbott, later Archbishop of Canterbury, quipped, ‘in truth, it was his owne head which rather did run round, & his braines did not stand stil’.
⁵
Abbott was a deeply Calvinist, Puritan undergraduate at Balliol at the time of Bruno’s visit to the university in 1583. He disliked Bruno’s way of pronouncing Latin: ‘he had more boldly then wisely, got vp into the highest place of our best & most renowned schoole, stripping vp his sleeves like some Iugler, and telling vs much of
chentrum
&
chriculus
& circumferenchia (after the pronunciation of his Country language)’.
⁶

Giordano Bruno’s statue broods over the Campo dei Fiori in Rome on the site where he was burned alive at the stake by the Inquisition. The statue was erected in the nineteenth century with money raised from enthusiastic Italian liberals, non-believers and anti-papalists of varied lands, who saw Bruno as an early champion of their agnosticism or irreligion. Certainly Bruno can be profitably studied from varied standpoints, and he continues to attract a varied press. One book, published by a great academic press as recently as 1991, concludes with Bruno’s gruesome fate and signs off with the words ‘it served him right’, which at least lets us know where the author stands. Yet this author, evidently a modern adherent of Counter-Reformation papalism, John Bossy, failed to convince one reader at least that Bruno was the ‘mole’ in the French Embassy in London, code-named Fagot, who shopped poor Francis Throckmorton. Nevertheless, if you look for books about Bruno in the London Library you will have an energetic time, moving between Biography, Occult Science and
Spies
.