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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 part as an informer through a second letter, from Dr Allen to an unnamed priest.* What Allen knew, Baines could only suspect. He was certain Kit had a role in his exposure, but then he had also been indiscreet with a fellow seminarist to whom he offered untold wealth (quite unjustifiably, on behalf of Sir Francis Walsingham) to join him in his treachery. So he could not be sure who had caused his downfall. Nevertheless, in his lonely cell he had plenty of time to fuel his loathing. Years later, Kit would secretly mock him in The Jew of Malta, in which Barabas the Jew is said ‘to go about to poison wells’, succeeding (unlike Baines) in doing away with an entire nunnery: ‘Here’s a drench to poison a whole stable of Flanders mares: I’ll carry’t to the nuns with a powder.’ (The Jew of Malta III iv 113–14). There are also shades of Baines in Hamlet’s camp, contemptible Osric, the verbose courtier who presides as a referee over the rapier fight in which Hamlet dies – taking the name ‘Osric’ from an earlier play, A Knack to Know a Knave, which is something Baines most certainly did not display at the time. In his dank dungeon, with no proof of Kit’s hand in his predicament, Baines could only silently seethe.

      He was to have his revenge.

CHAPTER THREE

       Catch My Soul

      Kit was back in Cambridge by Michaelmas 1581. It had been a whirlwind tour of the Continent – just four or five weeks, much of the time would have been spent in transit, and at least part of this on horseback. The players had a wagon, but once Kit left them for Rheims, travelling by horse rather than walking was an expensive choice, which seems to indicate that (unless his time with the players had been especially lucrative) he was being funded by someone else.

      College life was surely dull by comparison, just a little less hard and humdrum than a day at St John’s College described by the preacher Thomas Lever in the 1550s:

      There be divers there which rise daily betwixte foure and five of the clocke in the morning, and from five until sixe of the clocke, use common prayer with an exhortacion of gods worde in a common chappell, and from sixe unto ten of the clocke use ever either private study or commune lectures. At ten of the clocke they go to dinner, whereas they be content with a penye piece of biefe amongest .iiii. having a fewe porage made of the brothe of the same biefe, with salt and otemell, and nothinge els.

      After this slender dinner they be either teachinge or learninge untill v. of the clocke in the evening, when as they have a supper not much better than their diner. Immediatelie after the whiche, they go either to reasoning in problemes or unto some other studye, until it be nine or tenne of the clocke, and there being without fire are faine to walk or runne up and downe halfe an houre, to gette a heate on their feete whan they go to bed.

      Lever was probably painting a heroically severe picture to impress his congregation. Kit didn’t have to run up and down to warm his feet before going to sleep, but he was cooped up with his fellow scholars – the senior Robert Thexton hogging the big bed, while he and Thomas Leugar slept on hard ‘truckle-beds’ that slid out from underneath, in a room that smelled of burning animal fat from the rushlights they worked by after dark. Though not quite as dissolute as the dramatist Robert Greene, who admitted to ‘consum[ing] the flower of my youth’ at Cambridge ‘amongst wags as lewd as myself’, Kit liked СКАЧАТЬ