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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 to the faith.

      Such were the political winds that were blowing as Kit Marlin trudged, through biting winter air from Saffron Walden, on the last leg of his journey to Cambridge. But Rome’s ‘wicked ways’ offered no allure to the conservative, puritanical, sixteen-year-old who arrived at Bene’t College – as Corpus Christi was then known – just after Christmas in 1580. It had been a long and arduous journey, and he immediately spent 1d on a meal, just enough for a little ale and a warming pottage (winter vegetables boiled with eggs, milk, saffron and a scraping of ginger) and perhaps, given the season, a mince pie made with mutton, beef suet, ‘various kinds of Spicery’ (nutmeg, mace cinnamon, depending on what could be afforded), orange and lemon peel, and perhaps a dash of ‘sack’ (sherry). His expenditure is recorded in the college buttery book, a patchily extant record of what students spent on food and drink, which together with the college account books give us an idea of Kit’s movements during his years at Cambridge.

      Just getting started at Bene’t was an expensive business. The account books record ‘Marlin’ as paying a heavy 3s 4d as an admission fee to the college, and he also had to find 4d for the college gatekeeper (followed by another 4d when he was officially admitted as a scholar). To make matters worse, Christopher Pashley, his predecessor as Canterbury scholar, was tardy in packing his bags, and it was not until May that Kit Marlin officially took up the scholarship and matriculated. Just how he survived during these expensive first months is unclear; no doubt he was admitted on the strength of the scholarship that was to come, but somebody seems to have been supporting him. Perhaps Sir Roger Manwood once again came to the rescue, ascertaining a well-made Latin epitaph from the clever young man who could already ‘make a verse’ better than his contemporaries.

      Kit joined the other two Canterbury scholars, Robert Thexton and Thomas Leugar, in a small chamber that had been converted from a ‘stoare house’ in the north-west corner of what is now Corpus Christi’s Old Court. He was a lanky youth, with the sort of shining, marble-white skin that seems visibly to tingle; and sparkling, sun-bright eyes, part flint, part green (a besotted elderly Fellow has left us a record).* We know from Stephen Gosson that even as a child Kit had a ‘sharp-provided wit’, and at Bene’t he impressed immediately with his ‘nimble mind’ and ‘retorts dextrous’. He also made a mark with his consumption of ale. Will Dukenfield, the malmsey-nosed tavern keeper of the Eagle & Childe (now the Eagle), two steps and a stumble from the Bene’t College gate, in his very old age remembered young Marlin as being addicted to ‘wine, women and watching [staying up all night]’ and ‘sitting at good ale, swilling and carousing’ all day long. Dukenfield’s recollection is itself no doubt ale-washed and subject to a certain lack of focus, so we cannot really be certain of its veracity, much less pinpoint it in time, and it should be noted that all this was reported by Dukenfield’s grandson many years after Marlowe and the flame-faced old tavern-keeper himself had died.†

      However, quite soon after arriving in Cambridge Kit’s puritanical carapace was starting to crack. Initially, part of his attraction to the university, and to Bene’t College especially, had been its Puritan reputation. Bene’t was pre-eminently a Puritan college. Dr Aldrich, the Master until just five years before Kit arrived, was a leading partisan supporting the Puritan Thomas Cartwright, who had famously clashed with Bishop Whitgift, and been deprived of the chair of Divinity. Robert Browne, the founder of the ‘Brownists’, the forerunners of Congregationalism, completed his degree there in 1576, and had preached without licence in St Benet’s church in 1580. The church, which doubled as a college chapel, was well within earshot of Kit’s room. He had swapped the noise of the St George’s great waking bell, for the regular toll of St Benet’s (cf. ‘The triplex, sir, is a good tripping measure; or the bells of Saint Bennet, sir, may put you in mind – one, two, three’, Twelfth Night V i 34–5).

      Kit held his scholarship for the full course of six years, to Masters degree level, rather than for the four-year bachelor of arts degree. (An MA ordinarily took seven years, which probably explains why he had to find some other sort of funding for the first few months.) Under the terms of Archbishop Parker’s scholarship, which aimed at staffing the established church, this meant that he had said that СКАЧАТЬ