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

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      Friends in high places can give you a pain in the neck, and Eleanor Bull’s connections were positively stratospheric. She was cousin to Blanche Parry, who was a close confidante of the Queen, and also related to Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s chief minister and the most powerful man in the land. She had an ear in court when she needed one, but was a servant of the court when her connections required it. They had made inconvenient demands of her before. But this time it was different. This time she had a dead poet on her hands.

      Widow Bull had a maxim: ‘A friend i’ th’ court is better than a penny in purse.’ She had said it to the poet that morning. In a later age she might well have embroidered the wisdom and had it framed, hanging above the fireplace. Her husband Richard, sub-bailiff at the local manor house, had died three years earlier, leaving her with some standing but little money. It was her friends in court who helped put the pennies in her purse; in return they called on her discretion and enlisted her hospitality. Mrs Bull ran what we would today call a ‘safe house’ and letter-drop, in Deptford Strand.

      History has dealt Eleanor Bull a double blow. It has turned her respectable, if somewhat clandestine establishment into a rowdy tavern, and it linked her name for ever with the death of the brilliant young poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe, who (as tradition would have it) was ‘killed in a drunken brawl over a bill in Deptford’. We now know that was not the case. Recent research suggests that Marlowe was murdered as a consequence of his involvement in the shady world of Elizabethan espionage and behind-the-scenes politicking. The subsequent obfuscation of the story was deliberate.

      Deptford, in 1593, was an ideal location for a safe house. It was within easy reach of London, and a convenient dock for ships that trafficked the Thames, to and from the open seas. Queen Elizabeth’s favourite residence, and a frequent meeting place of her cabinet, the Privy Council, was less than a mile down river at Greenwich. Two shipyards, one for the navy and one for merchant ships, filled the air with the smells of pitch and fresh-sawn timber as they churned out vessels to plunder Spanish treasure, explore the globe, and protect the realm. The Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Howard of Effingham, had a house on Deptford Green. Foreign musicians from the Queen’s consorts and the Chapel Royal choir lived in Deptford, as did the joiners, chandlers and ropemakers of the ship industry, cadets from the naval college at Trinity House, and a transient population of seamen … and spies. Sailors, travellers, foreigners and minor courtiers could mingle unheeded on the streets. English and French, German and Dutch might be heard around tables in taverns. Some 4,000 incomers arrived to live in Deptford in the l590s, and most of them descended on the lodging houses in the riverfront area known as Deptford Strand. Mrs Bull’s ‘victualling-house’ would not have stood out at all.

      She was used to taking in tired travellers from across the Channel – the ‘projectors’ and ‘intelligencers’ of the secret service network controlled by the Secretary of State, Sir Francis Walsingham, and after his death by Lord Burghley’s hunchback son, Sir Robert Cecil. She soothed spies ravaged by seasickness with her famous posset (milk and egg yolks ‘seethed on a fire’, poured from on high into a bowl of warm ale or sack, and with a little ‘ginger and synomon cast on’*), passed on letters and packages from one unnamed man to another, or waited quietly out of earshot while visitors spoke to men from court.

      Of the four men who arrived at Eleanor Bull’s on the morning of Wednesday, 30 May 1593, two were known to her. The poet had been coming in every morning at ‘the tenth hour before noon’ for the past ten days. No reason was given. He simply stayed for an ale, then left. She knew not to ask any questions. It was something to do with Sir Robert Cecil. She was to send Cecil a message ‘incontinent’ (immediately) if the poet did not appear. She didn’t like Sir Robert. An ambitious little bunch-backed toad, she thought, and had said as much to the poet. She was generally wise enough to keep such opinions to herself, but she had liked the poet, and he seemed to hold no high opinion of Sir Robert himself.

      She may well have heard of Christopher Marlowe before he started appearing daily on her doorstep. Just a few years earlier his play Tamburlaine had been the talk of London, even in respectable circles, and he had followed it with further successes. But then, in Elizabethan times, it was the theatre company not the playwright that took the credit, and a play’s title not its author that achieved renown. If the name Kit Marlowe was familiar to her, it was more likely that she had heard it murmured during quiet conversations under her own roof.

      The second man she knew better, though not always by the same name. Robert Poley was a frequent visitor – a university man with a flattering tongue; a king of smiles and a beguiler of women. ‘Sweet Robyn’ they called him. Lately, he was close with Sir Robert, and seemed to have some position of control. He frequently arrived to collect packages from other visitors, or (it seemed) to pass on instructions or make introductions. Often he had about him large amounts of good gold. In the past few months he had been travelling a lot to the Low Countries. Word slipped out about who was boarding which ship, even when coins closed lips and eyes. The other two men, she was to learn later, were Ingram Frizer and Nicholas Skeres. Of them she could say nothing, except that Skeres was most certainly not a gentleman.

      They had come at about ten o’clock. The poet and Frizer arrived together. Sweet Robyn and Skeres were there to meet them. She had given them a room apart, as asked. They talked ‘in quiet sort together’ most of the day, but this was not unusual. Eleanor Bull was accustomed to the hushed back-and-forth tones as agents imparted their information. She gave them a passable lunch: pottage, neat’s-tongue pie, a little cold lamb (‘goode from Easter to Whitsun’ – she had just made it, Whitsun in 1593 fell on the following Sunday), a ‘sallat’ of boiled onions served with vinegar, oil and pepper, capon with prunes, currants and dates, and as a treat ‘baken stagge’ (another May favourite, probably gained through one of her connections – there were royal hunting grounds at Lewisham and Blackheath).* That would customarily have been at eleven o’clock. Later they walked in her garden, staying there until six, when they came back to the same room for the supper she had laid out. Sweet Robyn took her aside to talk about the bill. She didn’t see the others come in.

      The poet Marlowe was resting when the supper was cleared. There was one bed in the room, against the wall. In front of it, Robert Poley and Ingram Frizer were seated playing ‘tables’ (backgammon). Skeres was drinking ale. Later, voices were raised and there were sounds of a scuffle; she was called in to the room. Frizer had two gashes on his head and the poet was dead. He had been stabbed above the eye, and his face was covered in blood. (The blade severed the internal carotid artery, and probably also caused an air embolism.) Sweet Robyn hastened to calm her. It was too late for a surgeon, and he didn’t call the watch. Instead, they waited for the coroner.

      It was thirty-six hours before a coroner came. Not the district man, but William Danby, ‘Coroner of the household of our … lady the Queen’. Normally, such a grand official wouldn’t be bothered for a minor stabbing, but Danby had jurisdiction ‘within the Verge’, defined as the area within a twelve-mile radius of the body of the sovereign. Eleanor Bull’s house was under a mile from the palace at Greenwich, and the Queen was in residence. At the trial, sixteen mostly local men made up the jury: gentlemen and yeomen, a couple of bakers, a grocer and the miller of Deptford. They were told how ‘malicious words’ were uttered between ‘Christopher Morley’ (Marlowe) and Ingram Frizer about the ‘payment of a sum of pence, that is, le recknynge’, and that Marlowe, who was lying down, ‘moved in anger’ against Frizer, who was sitting at the table with his back to the bed, with Poley and Skeres sitting on either side. Drawing Frizer’s dagger ‘which was at his back’, Marlowe attacked him from behind, wounding him twice on the head (‘two wounds … of the length of two inches & of the depth of a quarter of an inch’). In the struggle to retrieve his dagger (valued at l2d) Frizer stabbed Marlowe, causing a wound ‘over his right eye of the depth of two inches & of the width of one inch’, killing СКАЧАТЬ