History Play: The Lives and After-life of Christopher Marlowe. Rodney Bolt
A similar arrangement existed for troupes of players moving around the Continent, where local notables or city fathers would provide them with written permission to proceed, and sometimes a promise of protection along the way. The passport issued to Will Ireland and his troupe still included Peeters’s name at the time when he was eating Marlin’s meals in Bene’t (see Appendix I). In an age with no photographs, it was simple enough for Kit, an accomplished linguist, to assume the persona of the Fleming, and head off on an expenses-paid adventure. Such flits happened. The players that ‘dyd anymate the boyes’ of the King’s School ‘to go abrode in the country to play playes contrary to lawe and good order’, lured them with promises of good earnings. A letter from one J. Beaulieu to William Trumbull, the English envoy at the court at Brussels, requested: ‘I send you a note of my Lord Deny for the finding of a certain youth of his, who hath been debauched from him by certain players, and is now with them at Brussels’. Kit, obviously, did not want to relinquish his scholarship, nor to travel with the players forever – hence his contrivance with Peeters and dissembling of college authorities – but it is clear that the twin lures of theatre and travel were irresistible to him, even at this stage.
The players were heading for Paris, in all likelihood following in the train of a diplomatic mission sent to discuss the marriage between Queen Elizabeth and François, Duke of Alençon (later Duke of Anjou), the Queen having just announced her intention of marrying the French prince. Whether or not she meant this is unclear, but she sent a reluctant representative, Sir Francis Walsingham, to Paris to negotiate the match. He was also charged with carefully putting together an Anglo-French treaty intended to muzzle Spanish aggression (this was the whole point of the proposed nuptials), and to divine the attitude of Anjou’s brother King Henri, without whose support the scheme would be worthless. Sir Francis was accompanied by his young second cousin Thomas, who was just a year older than Kit and was acting as a courier. Thomas Walsingham had in his company an Englishman called ‘Skeggs’, who Charles Nicholl convincingly surmises is none other than Nicholas Skeres, one of the fateful four who were in Eleanor Bull’s house in Deptford that day in May 1593. Also in the party was Thomas Watson, a young Catholic poet who had once been resident in Douai and who was also carrying messages for Sir Francis. Tom Watson and Kit were to become close friends and one day to end up in jail together. Kit and Tom Walsingham would become even closer. Many years later, when he was writing Meliboeus as an elegy to Sir Francis, Tom Watson would dedicate the poem to Thomas Walsingham, and recall with affection these days in Paris, when they were living ‘by the banks of the Seine’.
Espionage historian Gertrud Zelle has uncovered an account that gives us one brief flash of Kit and the two Thomases on their evening revels around town, consuming large quantities of wine, tucking in to wild boar (cheaper and more readily available than in England), capons with oranges (to them a novel combination) and mounds of bread (far more than was the customary back home), all the time Kit’s dazzling wit and facility with French easing the way.* The only other evidence indicating that Kit may have been in Paris is circumstantial: a story about an affair in the upper echelons of Parisian society was doing the rounds in the city’s taverns at the time, and it emerged many years later as the plot for Measure for Measure. The French scholar Georges Lambin uncovered the Parisian tale, and found that it is used in the play with barely disguised names: Angelo for Angenoust, Claudio for Claude Tonard, Varrius for de Vaux, and so on all the way down to one Ragosin, who appears as Ragozine the pirate.
After Kit had been in Paris just a few days, somebody – most likely Thomas Walsingham, but maybe Sir Francis himself – gave him the task of going to Rheims, to collect a ‘Note’. Rheims was the location of an English Catholic seminary, a honeypot for converts and between 1580 and 1587 believed to be the source of almost every plot against Elizabeth. The English College had been founded in Douai, in Flanders, in 1569, but had been forced to move to Rheims when Protestants took over the town in 1578. It soon became a focal point for English Catholics of all classes, a source of anti-Elizabethan pamphlets and banned devotional books (such as the Rheims Bible), and a training ground for missionaries – like the Jesuits who had arrived to garner converts in Cambridge, just as Kit was beginning his studies. There was, as Gray puts it, a ‘perpetual leakage’ of students from Cambridge to Rheims, which increased markedly after 1580. Robert Parsons, who like his associate Edmund Campion toured England luring youth to Rome, reported back to Claudius Acquavivia, the Superior General of the Jesuits, that: ‘At Cambridge I have at length insinuated a certain priest into the very university under the guise of a scholar or a gentleman commoner and have procured him help from a place not far from town; within a few months he has sent over to Rheims seven very fit youths.’ So Kit would have heard of Rheims. Maybe he rather wanted to go there himself, flirting with the views of Catholic rebels, as he slid back from ‘plain, sullen’ Puritanism. It may even have been the very reason he accompanied the players to Paris.
If Kit made friends in Paris, he made a lifelong enemy at Rheims. Richard Baines had been a gentleman pensioner at Christ’s College in Cambridge, and had later moved to Caius, a seedbed for young Catholics, before enrolling at the seminary in Rheims in 1578. By the time Kit arrived to collect the ‘Note’ from him, Baines was already a deacon and set for full ordination in a matter of weeks. But things were not as they seemed. Baines was spying for the English government. He was hobnobbing with his superiors, trying to find out secrets about the English College president Dr William Allen ‘and set[ting] them down in writing, with intent to give the note of the same to the [Privy] Council’. He was insinuating himself among younger students too, who (in a monastically austere, religiously fanatical environment) he thought ‘might easily be carried into discontentment’ and encouraged ‘to mislike of rule and discipline, and of subjection to their masters’. Not content with sniffing out secrets and stirring rebellion, he had a plan to kill off the entire college population by poisoning the well water. That sort of melodramatic gesture befitted him well. A fluttering, flattering ‘water-fly’,* he was also the ‘fawning spaniel’† who would obsequiously contradict himself as he stumbled along behind the prevailing opinion of a conversation. He was verbose, full of ‘pretty scoffs’ and ‘wicked words’ (though more so in speech than in the tittle-tattling ‘Notes’ he wrote), admitting that he ‘had a delight rather to fill [his] mouth and the auditors’ ears with dainty, delicate, nice and ridiculous terms and phrases, than with wholesome, sound and sacred doctrine’. Soft, rather than purposefully fat, he greedily desired ‘of more ease, wealth and … of more delicacy of diet and carnal delights than this place of banishment [Rheims] was like to yield …’, and he had an eye for a ‘well-looked boy’.
There was a vindictive streak, too, and in situations where he did not feel he was the weaker participant, he could be a bully. Charles Nicholl argues that it could very well be Richard Baines who is the ‘Mr Wanes’ in Paris in the spring of 1580, who ‘came unto one Henry Baily, a young youth, & demanded of him who was come of Rhemes and what their names were, having the boy in a corner of a chamber’. With his juniors he was also affected and boastful. This, where Kit was concerned, proved his downfall. Baines, who of necessity had to be reticent about his prowess for plotting, was bursting to tell the well-appointed young courier what he had been up to. Kit in turn told the college president, Dr William Allen. Just why he did this is not clear. Perhaps he had taken an instant dislike to Baines. Perhaps he did already have Catholic sympathies. It is also possible that this was the secret brief for Kit’s journey in the first place: Rheims conveniently focused anti-English government activity, and to have the college wiped out at a single sip by an egotistical maverick agent would not have been helpful to Sir Francis Walsingham. It is conceivable, too, that one of the Thomases was behind the exposure. We know that Thomas Watson had interests in both camps, as a Catholic in government service; and Thomas Walsingham had been involved in negotiations with Mary Stuart’s official ambassador in Paris.
As it turns out, Dr Allen already knew. In a letter to the Jesuit and college warden, Alfonso Agazzari, in May 1582, William Allen says Baines had been an explorator (spy) for four years – ever since his first admission. Allen bided his time, ‘unmasked’ the interloper some months after Kit’s visit, and locked him up for nearly a year. We know of Kit’s