Sir Robert Cecil was becoming desperate. In 1593, the climb to the secretaryship was still looking slippery. His bitter rival, the Earl of Essex, was now also a member of the Privy Council, and Sir Walter Ralegh, who might have put a check on Essex's rise as the Queen's favourite, had dramatically fallen from grace. Lord Burghley was old and ill, and so 'decayed in strength' that he at times could not write and was too weak to go to court. If he died before Sir Robert gained power, the battle would be half lost. If the Queen died without either appointing him Secretary or naming her successor, the path upwards would become even more perilous. Cecil needed to overcome her reservations, while at the same time keeping a hook on the belt of every possible contender for the succession. Considerable prowess would be needed, but this was, as Bacon had noted, the 'excellent wherryman, who, you know, looketh toward the bridge when he pulleth toward Westminster'.
If Cecil could prove his worth by uncovering a pretender to the throne, or an intrigue to kill the Queen, his way up would be assured. When he raided the Walsingham archives after Sir Francis's death, he had uncovered the structures of scheming behind the Babington plot. Could he similarly create a conspiracy to suit his purposes? It would have to be firmly based in fact, thoroughly feasible, with elements of undeniable evidence, but with an artificial twist in the tail to serve his ends.* Catholic conspirators were the obvious vehicles for such a scheme, and they had a ready-made, if reluctant, figurehead. Cecil decided to frame Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange. Such a plan had the added value of giving him a grip on the Stanleys, who were legitimate heirs to the throne. Just how he could effect this plan is suggested in an often overlooked series of articles by Christopher Devlin, in the Jesuit journal The Month. Lord Strange, Devlin argues, was a difficult customer, 'very aloof, very cautious, not giving anything away':
Supposing you had a mind like Cecil's, confronted with a man like Ferdinando, what would you do to bring him to heel? You cannot sift him openly, for - out of loyalty or malice - he may expose you. Yet sift him you must. Your only chance is to approach him by indirections and anonymously, in a way that can never be proved against you, and to get a hold over him by something very like blackmail.
Cecil needed someone to do his dirty work. His calculating gaze fell on Richard Hesketh in Prague. Hesketh's landlord there gives us a picture of him as 'a stout man, fifty years of age, clothed in yellow fustian with lace after the English manner'. He is 'yellow-haired', jovial and, it would seem, good-naturedly gullible, a canary-coloured satellite orbiting the alchemist Edward Kelley, one-time assistant to Dr Dee. (He is, though, no Osric or Malvolio. Yellow was a widely worn colour at the time, and lace here means braid - as in shoe lace - which was used as a trimming.) Hesketh's original contact with Kelley would have been through Dee. In 1581, when Hesketh was Agent (a half-diplomatic, half-commercial post) at Antwerp, Dee men tions him in his diary as 'my friend Richard Hesketh', commending him for his 'diligence in my affairs'.
Hesketh was possibly in Cecil's sights as early as August 1592, when Dee - who until then had appeared no great favourite of Lord Burghley - was suddenly sent a haunch of venison as a gift, and asked two nights in a row to dine with the aged Lord Treasurer, only to find himself badgered by Sir Robert over the buttered crawfish (simmered with white wine, mace, nutmeg and a little lemon peel, then tossed with butter - a Cecil favourite) about exiles in Bohemia. But Cecil is more likely to have heard the sort of information he was looking for direct from Edward Kelley.
Kelley, Cecil had discovered after his raid on the late Sir Francis Walsingham's archive, was a useful source of intelligence on the court at Prague. He was, according to an English visitor to Bohemia, 'fat and merry', with a limp, and long hair grown to cover the fact that his ears had been cropped as punishment for coining. Soon after arriving in Bohemia, Kelley achieved independent renown as a transmuter of metals - the appearance of gold in his crucible spread his fame throughout Europe. Stories were soon rife of the transmutation of coins, flagons and even a bedpan to gold (an example of the latter was reputedly presented to Elizabeth). There were rumours of a magic powder, one ounce of which would yield 272,330 ounces of gold. Kelley soon acquired a castle, two houses in Prague and country estates. Emperor Rudolph made him a baron of Bohemia, and Lord Burghley wrote regularly, begging him to return home 'to honour Her Majesty . . . with the fruits of such great knowledge as God hath given him' or at least to slip enough gold-making powder 'in some secret box' and send it to the Queen to help her 'defer her charges for this summer for her navy'. But Kelley would not budge, nor, of course, could the charlatan co-operate. He was enjoying himself and, as Devlin puts it, had no ears left to tingle. His celebrity grew. Devotees of Dr Dee deserted master for disciple, and in 1589 it was Dee who came limping home.
In the same year, Richard Hesketh was involved in a fracas in his native Lancashire which ended in the death of a local landowner. He fled before being arrested, and joined Edward Kelley in Prague - along with a rush of other English gold-diggers who hoped to profit from Kelley's magical powers, and certainly benefited from the glow of his international celebrity. But in 1591 Kelley fell foul of the Emperor Rudolph, and (even as Matthew Roydon was bringing him another letter from Lord Burghley) was thrown into jail. Deprived of his patron, Hesketh turned to the protection of an English Jesuit, Father Thomas Stephenson, and began to long for Lancashire and his comforting wife in Over Darwen.
Cecil, who was in secret correspondence with Kelley even while he was in jail, had found his man. Hesketh was, Devlin suggests, a carefully chosen dupe: 'A guilty man on other grounds he was simple and ignorant of political tensions in England, but he had connections both with occult circles in Prague and with Catholic exiles' - and, apart from his wife, no-one in England gave a straw about him. Cecil communicated that Hesketh should be allowed home to Lancashire, and provided with a passport that made clear he was freed from any charge of murder. Such pardons were not given gratis - though payment may be made unwittingly. Hesketh would be obliged to show this passport to the Lord Lieutenant of Lancashire, who was none other than the Earl of Derby, Lord Strange's father. On the way a letter would be planted on him which implicated Strange in a plan to depose the Queen. Addressed to Derby, the letter would purport to come from Prague, but would be drawn up by one Bartholomew Hickman (another fraud, and Dee's current skryer). It would be couched as a cryptic astrological prediction of the old order being eclipsed by the new - of the rise of the House of Stanley over the House of Tudor, of 'the bond cracked betwixt son and father'. Cecil's idea was that the old earl, who was an upright but timid man, would, as Devlin has it, be thrown 'into a mixture of the terrible plights of Gloucester in King Lear, I.ii, and York in Richard the Second, V.iii. He would be led to suspect his son, perhaps of designs against himself, certainly of designs against the throne.' Cautious and law-abiding he would then most likely consult the wise old counsellor Lord Burghley, and play into Sir Robert Cecil's hands; or he would trust his son, destroy the letter and say nothing. In either event, Cecil had fresh evidence carefully tucked away to produce at the opportune moment. In 1591 two renegade priests had revealed to him that they had been sent to England by the Jesuit Robert Parsons to 'seek entrance with my Lord Strange and cause Catholics to cast their eyes upon him'. They handed over a letter from Parsons, couched in the oblique terms of conspiracy, instructing them to reply to him thus:
Your cousin the baker is well inclined and glad to hear of you, and meaneth not to give over his pretence to the old bakehouse you know of, but rather to put the same in suit when his ability shall serve.
The informer-priests glossed this as: 'by baker and bakehouse is understood my Lord Strange and the title they would have him pretend when her Majesty dieth'. There is some doubt as to whether this letter was genuine, but whether or not it was a forgery, it served Cecil's purpose. At the time he had done nothing about it, but subtly kept it back for an occasion when it would be most useful to him - and that moment had presented itself. 'Beyond a doubt,' writes Devlin, 'the old Earl would have been scared rigid. From that time on, the heir of the house of Stanley would have been as wax under the Cecilian thumb.' And, one might add, a grateful monarch would have been more likely, if Strange were exposed, to reward Sir Robert's diligence with fitting promotion. Essex might finally be seen off, and the coveted secretaryship would at last be his.
Two impediments appeared that threatened Cecil's plans. One was Christofer Marlow (as he was now sometimes known), the other was the result of a curious twist of fate. The complex plot is more clearly viewed if we jump ahead a few months to see how it eventually worked out. Once Christofer Marlow was out of the way.
Some time in August 1593, three months after the incident in Eleanor Bull's house on Deptford Strand, 'William Hall' was dispatched to Prague, with a letter to Kelley from Lord Burghley. He was also carrying a message for Richard Hesketh, instructing him to leave for England. He may, too, have handed over Hesketh's passport, though it seems more likely that Hesketh picked up the document from Sir Robert Cecil, or from the Warden of Ports, Lord Cobham, when he arrived at one of the Cinque Ports in September. Hesketh made his way on foot to Canterbury, where at The Bell he engaged a former soldier, one Trumpeter Baylie, as fellow traveller and servant. Baylie's account of subsequent events chimes well with other evidence, and gives a reliable view of what happened over the next three weeks. The two followed the usual route through Rochester and Gravesend, then up river to London, where they spent two nights at St Paul's Wharf. Fearful of plague in London, they spent a further night in Hampstead, then another in The White Lion in Islington, where the reason for their dallying becomes evident. On the morning of their departure from The White Lion, Hesketh was given a letter to take 'from one Mr Hickman' to the Earl of Derby.
But Hesketh's first thoughts were for his wife - 'a painful housewife' with 'many children' - and on reaching Lancashire he crossed the high fells to Over Darwen to spend the weekend with his family. He set off the following Tuesday to deliver the letter and show his passport to Derby. By a sharp turn of fate, the old earl died that very day. The Earl is dead, long live the Earl. The letter Hickman had given Hesketh was handed over, as addressed, to the Earl of Derby - Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange. Unlike his cautious father, the bold Ferdinando took it straight to the Queen, claiming conspiracy against her in which he had no part. Hesketh was arrested, and was immediately visited in jail by Sir Robert Cecil.
Cecil was in danger of being hoist with his own petard, and needed to act quickly. It was essential that the Hickman letter should not come to light. He had a contingency plan. Hesketh had, some months before, been set up (perhaps thinking he was acting as Cecil's agent provocateur) through correspondence with the rebel Sir William Stanley and Cardinal Allen, the head of the Jesuit English College. The declarations he made there could now be turned against him. Cecil also had a copy of a letter to Hesketh from his former protector, Father Thomas Stephenson, mentioning the overthrow of the Queen. And indeed, Hesketh as instrument of Sir William Stanley, instructed to offer 'a hallowed crown' to Lord Strange, would become one of the official versions of the incident, in a (now discredited) report written by Lord Burghley six months after Hesketh's death.
Hesketh was artless, had a guilty conscience because of his involvement with Stanley and Cardinal Allen, and had no idea that the Hickman letter, not his link with Stanley, was the cause of his woes. Devlin portrays Hesketh as 'a dupe in a complicated scheme who had to suffer because the scheme had misfired', and shows how Cecil effectively kept the Hickman letter out of play, and excluded Ferdinando from proceedings. The new earl was 'really a witness in Hesketh's favour, since the only tangible evidence of Hesketh's communication with him was the Hickman letter'. There was no trial - a 'confession' was extracted from Hesketh, which meant he could speedily be executed without further inconvenience.
But knowledge of the Hickman connection meant the young earl remained a menace to Cecil even after Hesketh's death. Ferdinando, Earl of Derby, died just a few months later in April 1594 in mysterious circumstances (some blamed witchcraft, others said it was poison), spewing 'vomits . . . like soot or rusty iron, the substance gross and fatty, the quantity about seven pints, the smell not without some offence'. Just two weeks before the earl's illness, Bartholomew Hickman and his brother William had ridden north on a nag given them by their employer, Dr Dee.
So, in the end, Cecil's scheme ran horribly aground. It would be another two years before he was finally made Secretary. But in early 1593, as he deftly twined the strands of intrigue into a knotty plot, exposure of his perfidy would have been devastating. He kept his machinations hidden even from Lord Burghley. In the same way as Sir Francis Walsingham had quietly lifted his hands from the workings of the Babington plot, Cecil set about making himself invisible. Careful to avoid suspicion, he made sure his messages to Prague went under another guise. It was easy enough to slip secret letters to one of the couriers that Lord Burghley was regularly dispatching to beg Kelley to come home - Cecil was by now dealing with most of his ailing father's business. Like the book-keeper to a troupe of players he divided the 'parts' between his men, making sure no-one but himself knew the whole drama. Roydon carried his letters to Kelley, but he chose Oliver Laurens to communicate with Hesketh. Not wanting to be associated with a direct approach to Dr Dee, he asked Christofer Marlow, who was trusted in occult circles, to arrange the cryptic astrological prediction with Dee's scurrilous assistant Bartholomew Hickman. Robert Poley was involved in the contingency plan to implicate Hesketh as an instrument of Sir William Stanley and Cardinal Allen. Each role was kept meticulously separate.
But Kit, whose job as a dramatist was daily to 'devise fictions and knaveries', whose mind was adept at contriving a plot as the sum of its bit parts, could turn that process on its head, view the roles of the separate players in the affair and assemble them into a disturbing whole. The odd task Cecil had assigned him, to approach Hickman for an astrological chart, first aroused his curiosity. Perhaps, while visiting the 'Wizard Earl' Northumberland, he had heard of Dr Dee's summer dinners with the Cecils, when Dee was prodded for information on Prague. Kit remembered Roydon's quip that Cecil was looking for 'an empty purse with an empty purse', a simple gull with no money, among the exiles there. A chance remark of Oliver's, that Hesketh was a 'foolish mild man', led Kit to probe into what message his friend had carried to Bohemia. He had noticed the quick narrowing of Poley's eyes when Hesketh's name was mentioned. Separately, these moments were nothing but dust, spindrift. But like ink spray from a scratchy quill, once settled they seeped together to make a blot. Kit began to form an idea of what Cecil was up to, and it pushed him beyond the threshold of his good conscience.
Ferdinando Stanley, a friend and patron, was noble in the broadest sense: intelligent, cultured, generous and, Kit knew, innocent. Some critics see him as the model for the philosophical Ferdinand, King of Navarre in Love's Labour's Lost, with the Earl of Essex (whose opposition to the occult circles of Ralegh, Strange and Northumberland was well known) as the more sceptical Berowne. It was one thing to be a low-grade informer in his milieu, quite another to condone a scheme that would send him to the chopping-block, purely for another man's self-advancement. Kit had no hard proof, nor did he know if there was any real urgency in the affair. He did not even have a clear idea of what Cecil was plotting - though like Eleanor Bull he had an instinctive dislike of the man, and (as is evident in his plays) an astute sense of Machiavellian politicking, which focused his suspicions. It could all be pure fancy, but his misgivings were strong enough for him to decide to warn Lord Strange.
On 28 April Kit wrote to Ferdinando from Scadbury, where he was staying with Thomas Walsingham, safe from plague in London.* The letter contained a sonnet (a common enough communication to a patron of poets), indirectly alerting Strange to 'deep plots and delicate stratagems' practised against him in high places. Kit was cautious enough not to sign it, but included the olive-pit rosary that Bianca the Venetian courtesan had once made him, which Strange would have recognised as his talisman.
Cecil intercepted the letter. He did not recognise Bianca's well-sucked beads, though he had his suspicions about the author of the sonnet - and had them confirmed when someone more closely acquainted with Kit, possibly Dr Dee himself, identified the rosary. Few but Kit's trusted friends would have known of it, as carrying a rosary was illegal at the time. Just how the 'necklace of beads made of olive stones with a cross' then found its way into Dr Dee's cedar chest, to be discovered sixty years later by Robert Jones, a confectioner in Lombard Street, remains a mystery.
Cecil acted quickly. While Kit was staying at Scadbury he was unassailable. He had to be brought back to London. Cecil had him arrested. On 18 May the Privy Council issued 'A warrant to Henry Maunder, one of the Messengers of her Majesty's Chamber, to repaire to the house of Mr Thomas Walsingham in Kent, or to anie other place where he shall understand Christofer Marlow to be remayning, and by vertue thereof to apprehend and bring him to the Court in his companie.'
The arrest was not difficult to arrange. Kit's reputation as a wild malcontent, and his presence among the magi and blasphemers of what we now call the 'School of Night' - the doubters and questioners around Northumberland and Sir Walter Ralegh - made him an easy target. Cecil called in Richard Cholmeley, an unpleasant, vitriolic braggart, skilled at libel and entrapment, who seems at times to have been both pseudo-Catholic and fake atheist, skilled at inciting those about him to treason and blasphemy. Cecil had previously employed Cholmeley to pen 'certen libellious verses in commendation of papists and seminary priests', pro-Catholic 'libels' that could be used to provoke and entrap rebels. Cecil had even given him a copy of a Jesuit tract - Robert Southwell's Epistle of Comfort to direct his muse. He now set Cholmeley a similar task, based on the work of the most popular playwright of the day.
On the evening of 5 May, fifty-three lines of verse signed with the pseudonym 'Tamburlaine' mysteriously appeared fixed to the wall of the Dutch Churchyard in London. For centuries the full text was lost to us, but resurfaced in 1971 among a bundle of 'residual manuscripts' in the collection of Sir Thomas Phillips. The poem, written in Kit's trademark iambic pentameter, is a clumsy racist deprecation of foreigners and the economic ills they bring. Londoners at the time resented immigrants - mainly Protestant refugees from the Low Countries - who, they said, the Queen allowed to live in England 'in better case and more freedom than her own people'. The poem on the Dutch Churchyard wall complains that these are not refugees at all, but economic migrants 'counterfeiting religion for [their] flight', who are 'living far better than at [their] native home'. A vote in the House of Commons on 21 March to further extend immigrant merchants' privileges led to threats of militant action, and a flurry of 'libels' similar to the one on the wall of the Dutch Church. Sir Walter Ralegh demanded that rather than receiving government relief, immigrants should be sent home: 'Whereas it is pretended that for strangers it is against charity, against honour, against profit to expel them, in my opinion it is no matter of charity to relieve them . . . I see no reason that so much respect should be given unto them.' The mood on the streets was violent, and the Privy Council was growing edgy. On 22 April, just a week before Cecil intercepted Kit's letter to Lord Strange, the Council set up a special commission to investigate the authors of the inflammatory 'libels'. On 30 April, when Cecil was urgently casting around for a pretext to have Kit arrested, and thus extracted from the safety of Scadbury, he seized on the opportunity this commotion and paranoia afforded. Within five days the writing was, quite literally, on the wall.
The 'Dutch Church libel', secretly penned by Cholmeley, was not only more vituperative than the rest, but it threatened violence and ended with the dangerous claim that government officials were enriching themselves by their protection of foreign merchants, at the expense of Englishmen:
With Spanish gold, you all are infected
And with that gold our Nobles wink at feats.
Nobles, say I? Nay, men to be rejected,
Upstarts that enjoy the noblest seats
That wound their Country's breast for lucre's sake
And wrong our gracious Queen & Subjects good
By letting strangers make our hearts to ache
For which our swords are whet, to shed their blood . . .
That alone was enough to have the pursuivants banging on the door. Apart from the signature 'Tamburlaine', there were other clues to point a finger in Kit's direction, threads that connected to plays Londoners had recently seen - mention of Machiavelh and Jews that recall the opening of The Jew of Malta; a reference to the massacre at Paris; an allusion to such scenes of bloodletting as were famous from Titus Andronicus; and in the line 'We'll cut your throats, in your temples praying' an echo of I Henry VI: 'Within their chiefest temple I'll erect/A tomb' (II ii 12).
This was perhaps a little heavy-handed on Cecil's part. One would hardly have expected the author of such a libel to signal his identity so literally. But it at least turned minds in the direction Cecil required, and as always Cecil was working subtly, with a full quiver of contingencies. He was having to move quickly, yet at the same time keep his distance. There should be nothing directly to connect him to Kit's arrest. He engaged a minor agent, the fretful, querulous Thomas Drury, to draw up a report of 'Remembrances of Words & Matter against Ric: Cholmeley', which could in turn be used if necessary to incriminate Cholmeley (easy enough to do, given his loudmouthing among atheists). This move proved doubly effective, as one of the paragraphs of the 'Remembrances' alleges:
he saith & verily believeth that one Marlowe is able to show more sound reasons for atheism than any divine in England is able to give to prove divinity, 8c that Marlowe told him he hath read the atheist lecture to Sr Walter Ralegh & others.
Cecil, agonising in the Star Chamber as the Privy Council met in camera, subtly nudged the old men's deliberations towards the proclamation that of all the libels, it was the one 'set upon the wall of the Dutch Churchyard, that doth exceed the rest in lewdness'. On 11 May the Council issued a directive ordering officers to arrest all suspects, to 'search in any the chambers, studies, chests, or other like places, for all manner of writing and papers that may give you light for the discovery of the libellers', authorising them to torture their captives and 'by the extremity thereof draw them to discover their knowledge'. Here was a smack of the cold terror of the Regnum Cecilianum, a glimpse of what Charles Nicholl terms 'the raw tones of the Elizabethan police-state'.
That night the officers were in Shoreditch, hammering on the door not of Kit's lodgings, but to arrest his fellow writer and former chamber mate, Thomas Kyd. This was perhaps not quite what Cecil had planned - or possibly, as Nicholl suggests, the purpose of arresting Kyd was all along to incriminate Kit. In either event, while poor Kyd was suffering 'pains and undeserved tortures', all the time protesting his innocence, the officers began to rifle through some of the 'waste and idle papers' from the accumulated debris of his writer's lair. Cecil and Cholmeley had already been at work. The officers came across 'a fragment of a disputation', in neither Kyd's nor Kit's hand - a passage copied from an old theological text, The Fall of the Late Arian, which contained 'Vile heretical conceits denying the deity of Jesus Christ our Saviour'. Terrified at this sudden turn in events, and genuinely ignorant of the document, Kyd denied all knowledge of it and, as can be gathered from his later recounting of the incident, blurted to his interrogators that such an opinion had been 'affirmed by Marlowe to be his' and that the paper must have been 'shuffled with some of mine, unknown to me, by some occasion of our writing in one chamber two years since'. We must reserve judgement on a man who had not tidied up in two years. But Kyd's panicked accusations tallied with Kit's reputation. Cecil had his man. Within a few days Henry Maunder was on his way to Scadbury with the Privy Council warrant.
Ever careful, Cecil prepared yet another arrow to skewer the hapless Marlowe. He simply could not be too thorough. The man had to be silenced without the slightest hint of Cecil's involvement, and Kit's boisterous Shoreditch lifestyle provided the perfect material he needed to build up evidence against him. In conjunction with the peevish Thomas Drury, Cecil commissioned a former agent - one who had worked with Kit and known him for years - secretly to draw up a 'Note' similar to the 'Remembrances' Drury was penning about Cholmeley. It was to be an incriminating list of Kit's blasphemies, crimes and outrages. That task went to a delighted, vengeful Richard Baines.
On 20 May, two days after his arrest, Kit appeared briefly before the Privy Council, who recorded that: 'This daie Christofer Marley of London, gentleman, being sent for by warrant from their Lordships, hath entered his apparance accord inglie for his indemnity therein, and is commaunded to give his daily attendaunce on their Lordships untill he shalbe lycensed to the contrary.' This was the equivalent of a brief appearance in court to be granted bail. Kit was to report daily to the Council, but was otherwise free to go - in stark contrast to his erstwhile chamber-fellow Thomas Kyd, who had been imprisoned and tortured. As Nicholl writes: 'In the realities of Elizabethan politics, it was not innocence that kept a man out of jail, but influence.' As had happened after his arrest at Flushing, and years earlier when his Cambridge degree was threatened, someone very powerful had intervened on Kit's behalf. Kit's coercive protector on this occasion was none other than Sir Robert Cecil himself, acting with a subtleness that could 'set the murderous Machiavel to school'.
Cecil had arranged Kit's arrest purely to draw him out from under Walsingham's wing. On no account could he allow Kit voice to reveal his suspicions about the plot to frame Lord Strange, either under torture, or to the Council. Instead, he appeared to intercede on Kit's behalf- thus cleverly distancing himself from involvement in the arrest, and perhaps even blurring in Kit's mind the true reason he had been plucked from Scadbury. Kit, after all, did not know that his letter to Strange had been intercepted, and may not even have fully divined the nature of the plot. His arrest had come as a surprise.
Cecil kept Kit as far from Council members as he could. There is no record of 'Christofer Marley' even once giving 'his daily attendaunce on their Lordships', instead, he was required each morning at ten to make his presence known at the 'safe house' run by Eleanor Bull on Deptford Strand. The plague still ravaged London, so the village of Deptford - safe from disease, yet still within call of the Council at either Greenwich or Westminster - was a suitable location for Kit to keep his bond. Widow Bull, a 'cousin' of the Cecils, had been trusted with similar responsibilities before, and aroused no suspicion.
Cecil had long since decided that Kit would not be interrogated at all. His initial move, after engineering his arrest, had been to keep him out of the way of the Privy Council. The next, should he prove to know too much, was to put him out of the way entirely. Cecil was doubtless driven by a consuming fear that Kit might uncover his plot - but he seems also to have borne fierce malice against Marlowe, a deep hatred, spurred perhaps by Kit's popularity with Essex and his associaties.
Cecil needed to find out just how much Kit had worked out about the Strange plot, and whom he had told. To do that he had briefly to become more visible and find an interrogator (and if necessary an assassin) that he could rely on, and one whom Kit would trust. There was only one real candidate Robert Poley, a man who had proved his worth at the heart of the Babington plot, one who was ruthless, who had risen under Cecil to the position of an operational chief, and who would be enticed by possibilities of advancement in the next phase of the Regnum Cecilianum. However, on 8 May, ten days before Kit's arrest, Lord Burghley had sent Poley with 'letters of great importance for Her Majesty's special service' to The Hague. Cecil had him recalled as quickly as he could, but it was not until late May that Poley returned. Cecil was waiting to brief him at Dover.
A corner was lifted on the Strange plot - just enough for Poley to see that although it was a set-up, it was, like the Babington affair and the ensnaring of Mary Queen of Scots, one obviously conducted for the national good (not, of course, anything to do with Sir Robert's personal advancement). Absolute discretion would be required of him. But Poley, Cecil knew, had been down this sort of road before, and proved himself a worthy fellow traveller. His co-operation, naturally, would find fit reward - not only gold, but high favour in Cecil's network. The poet Marlowe, Cecil pointed out, was proving an impediment that had to be eliminated. He was to die in a fight, after Poley had, under guise of friendship, divined the depth of his knowledge of the Strange plot. Poley would be a purger, not a murderer (and of course could himself easily be dispatched if he came to know too much). Besides, the death of a dramatist was of no great consequence. The debriefing and the death would take place at Eleanor Bull's house in Deptford. Widow Bull lived 'within the Verge', so Poley would be justified in calling the Queen's Coroner, rather than local constables or the district man, and was assured there would be no inconvenient questions at the inquest. There would be a brief spell in jail (but Poley had been there before, and the sojourn could be made comfortable enough) before a guaranteed royal pardon, on the grounds of self-defence.
It is tempting, in retrospect, for history to attach far greater significance to the murder in Deptford than is warranted. In the world of Elizabethan politicking and espionage such deaths, while not perhaps commonplace, were from the assassin's point of view perfunctory, and the violent end of a theatre man was (given the low-life milieu of the play-houses) unsurprising. To Sir Robert Cecil the bother at Deptford was just another snarl in the intricate imbroglio of politics. At this point in his life, Kit had written only a handful of plays, albeit ones that had given the companies that performed them some renown. Outside of a small circle of connoisseurs, his death would not have been seen as particularly important. As with film today, it was the actors and the titles of the dramas that attracted public fame. As a writer, Kit's celebrity was on a lower rung, and any ripples his removal caused could be easily managed.
Poley was wily enough not to turn Sir Robert down, but secretly he hesitated to see Marlowe's murder through. There are any number of reasons for this. It may be quite simply that he was honouring his promise to the dying Tom Watson to protect Kit. He certainly had a long working relationship with Thomas Walsingham, who had made a similar vow, and as he lived in the bohemian quarter of Shoreditch he may well have had friends and loyalties in Kit's milieu. Some biographers even posit that Kit and 'Sweet Robyn' were lovers. But the slippery Poley was a man of many faces and conflicting allegiances, who was quite possibly working to an agenda of his very own.
Quick-witted Robyn pointed out to Cecil that he would need assistance. He was no smooth assassin, and Marlowe was a younger man. He was familiar with Widow Bull's house - it would be possible to hold chat in private with the poet in the garden, or set the assassins to play at tables and pass the business about Strange out of their earshot. He knew men who would ask no questions. After leaving Sir Robert, Poley followed the usual route towards London, via Canterbury, and through Rochester and Gravesend. Then, instead of taking a boat up river, he slipped south to Scadbury, where he spent an afternoon 'in private conference' with Thomas Walsingham.
Three days later, just before ten o'clock in the morning on Wednesday, 30 May, he was in Deptford, at the house of Eleanor Bull, waiting for the poet Marlowe to arrive.
* For Cecil's motives see Troy Blonde's Scheming Cecil.
* The letter is quoted in Blonde, Scheming Cecil, p. 72.