History Play: The Lives and After-life of Christopher Marlowe. Rodney Bolt

History Play: The Lives and After-life of Christopher Marlowe - Rodney  Bolt


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in a different, unidentified hand, revealing that Oliver was taught Latin as a child by ‘the atheist Marloe’. If the Lucian indeed included The True History, then the boys at least had some fantasising fun during their after-hours lessons, as the book claims to describe a journey to the moon. Dr Rosine cites an account of Oliver taking Christopher to worship at a Huguenot chapel, and we find Christopher getting into trouble when he ‘solde his poyntes’ to a scrivener in exchange for teaching Oliver to write – ‘poyntes’ were tagged laces for tying doublet to hose. These were apparently special silver-tipped ones given to Christopher by Sir Roger Manwood. This account was in a copy of a deposition by the ever-litigious John Marlowe, though the case is surprisingly absent from Canterbury records.*

      Christopher spent just two years at The King’s School. In 1580 – not quite in the footsteps of Stephen Gosson, who had gone to Oxford – he was promised a scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. His voice as well as his learning had got him there. The scholarship, one in a long line established by Archbishop Parker, himself Master of Corpus Christi from 1544 to 1553, had been set out in the archbishop’s will and provided for a scholar of The King’s School who was Canterbury born and bred. It required that:

      . . . schollers shal and must at the time of their election be so entered into the skill of song as that they shall at first sight solf [sing to the sol-fa syllables] and sing plaine song. And they shalbe of the best and aptest schollers well instructed in their grammer and if it may be such as can make a verse.

      Young Christopher could do all that, and well. Even at the age of sixteen he could ‘make a verse’ better than the rest. With the scholarship, he had almost reached the peak of the first ‘high Pyramide’ he had set himself to scale, in a climb that had begun the day that Stephen Gosson had walked into John Marlowe’s shop to buy new shoes for school.

      Stephen’s life, however, had suddenly and radically changed course. He had failed to take his degree, had hived off to London to write plays, and now, suddenly, in the year before Marlowe went up to Cambridge, had done a complete about-face and published the Schoole of Abuse, one of the most vituperative anti-theatre diatribes of the time, railing on (once he had finished with the evils of plays and players) against the decay of the English spirit. According to Gosson’s Alchemist pamphlet, Marlowe was deeply affected by the book, and had, by the time he went up to university, become a Puritan. His friendship with Sam Kennet, who was about to embark upon his career as ‘the most terrible Puritan’ in the Tower, would seem to bear this out. But even if this is so, it was not a state of grace that was to last very long. The prods and tugs of Kit’s new fortune would propel him in alarming new directions. The boy who had thought: ‘That like I best that flies beyond my reach’ was about to stretch himself further than he had ever done before. In 1580 – the year in which earthquakes shook England, setting church bells pealing unaided, and a blazing star appeared in Pisces – Kit Marlin (as he had started to style himself) sloughed off Canterbury and set out for Cambridge.

       Une Histoire Inventée

      Sir Francis Walsingham, the English ambassador who had been so appalled by the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, was back in England by the time Kit left Canterbury, and an increasingly potent force in foreign affairs. Elizabeth had made him Secretary of State the year after the massacre and knighted him four years later. He had been involved with Lord Burghley’s spies for years. Now he himself was beginning to throw out the first strands of a net of espionage that he was to knot, weave and twitch for the rest of his life. A silent, labouring spider, he spun his web to snare his enemies and serve his Queen. It obsessed him. So much so that he sunk his personal fortune into it and died in poverty.

      Sir Francis was a thin man. He held himself straight, and his beard was perfectly clipped and combed. He had the sort of mouth that settles naturally into a slight downward curve, and eyes that seemed to show permanent, personal moral disapproval. His Queen called him her ‘Moor’, perhaps because of his reputation for scheming (attributed variously in Elizabethan times to Moors or Jews), coupled with his swarthy complexion and a fondness for wearing black. The historian William Camden labelled him ‘a sharp maintainer of the purer religion’, a fervent Protestant, if not a Puritan, who dedicated himself to the exposure of Catholic plots against the realm and believed ‘that devilish woman’ Mary, Queen of Scots, was a danger as long as she lived. Under the Catholic Mary Stuart he had fled England to study at the tolerant University of Padua, and was fluent in both Italian and French. In foreign affairs he was an ardent interventionist, advocating aggressively anti-Catholic policies. In this he was opposed to the conservative Lord Treasurer Lord Burghley, and by the Queen herself, who was unwilling to be drawn into a Protestant crusade that might unite Spain and France with Scotland, against her. But Elizabeth was certain of one thing about her ‘Moor’: only death would end his consuming loyalty. ‘Mr Secretary’ would adoringly, doggedly, dutifully perform her will, even if he disagreed. Disagreement was allowed. Sir Francis fearlessly argued his position, driving his monarch to outbursts of screaming fury, but, once a course was settled, he was a servant of the Queen, not an adviser.

      The issue that most exercised Elizabeth, Lord Burghley, Sir Francis and his fellow hawk, the Queen’s current favourite, the Earl of Leicester, was the situation in the Low Countries, then the main battleground between Protestantism and Catholicism in Europe. In 1572, the same year as the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the Protestant Dutch had seized part of their territories back from the occupying Spanish. After the Dutch Revolt, the northern provinces (roughly approximating to the Netherlands of today) had united in a Protestant bloc, while the southern part (much of which is now Belgium) was still controlled by Catholic Spain, which also ruled over much of Italy and had ambitions in France and England. Whilst the United Provinces in the north declared their independence, forces led by the Duke of Parma were conducting an increasingly successful reconquest of the Low Countries from the south. Walsingham and Leicester pressed for military intervention: in the Low Countries to help William of Orange against the Spanish, and in France to assist the Huguenots in their struggle against the pro-Spanish Guisards. If England did not help, reasoned the interventionists, this brought the prospect of direct Spanish invasion of the island even closer. The Queen demurred, and was supported in her reluctance by moderates, such as Lord Burghley, that ever-adroit, politically pliable kinsman of Eleanor Bull, a man who had served under both Catholic and Protestant queens, who carried a copy of Cicero and the Protestant Prayer Book in his pocket, but at home kept a certificate signed by the vicar of Wimbledon, proving he had attended Catholic mass under Mary, just in case.

      In 1578 Elizabeth had further complicated matters by entering into negotiations for marriage to François, Duke of Anjou, hoping, it seems, to ensure French help against the Spanish, and put a brake on those of her ministers pressurising for English involvement in the Low Countries. Though the duke was a Catholic, anti-Spanish feeling was feasibly strong enough for the French to be persuaded to aid the Dutch rebels, allowing England to side-step the conflict. In 1581, after some years of uncertainty, Elizabeth announced her intention to go ahead with the marriage. This horrified Walsingham, and caused alarm among the Protestant populace, who feared the consequences of a marriage to a Catholic prince (they had been down that road before with Mary I), and that England might become a satellite to a foreign Catholic power. So back home Elizabeth was having to prove her Protestant credentials. And the proof came in the persecution. Execution of Catholic priests began in 1577 and increased sharply from 1581. The Recusancy Act of 1581 upped penalties for absence from church services to £20 a month (about 500 times a workman’s daily wage).

      What was guaranteed to unite Burghley, Leicester and Walsingham was the belief that English Catholics were involved in an international popish plot to overthrow the Queen. There were indeed plots to kill Elizabeth, to assist foreign invasion, and to put Mary Queen of Scots on the throne. Catholicism became defiant, dangerous, extreme – and, perhaps just for those reasons, alluring to hot-headed young men. In the very year that Kit began at Cambridge, Jesuits from abroad had set up a network there to recruit students


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