Deptford, 30 May 1593: the death of Christopher Marlowe

The Crown record of Christopher Marlowe’s death is short, complete, and signed. On Wednesday 30 May 1593, in a hired room at Mistress Eleanor Bull’s house at Deptford Strand, Marlowe and one Ingram Frizer fell into a quarrel over the bill. Marlowe seized Frizer’s own dagger from the scabbard at Frizer’s back, struck him twice on the head, and was killed when Frizer, pinned on the bench between two other men, struggled for the weapon and drove it into Marlowe’s right eye. A jury of sixteen Kentish men returned a verdict of homicide in self-defence. The Queen pardoned the killer twenty-eight days later.

The other three men in the room were all employees of the Elizabethan intelligence apparatus. Ingram Frizer was a servant and business agent of Thomas Walsingham, Marlowe’s patron and cousin of the recently deceased spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham. Nicholas Skeres had worked under Sir Francis in the 1586 Babington plot operation that destroyed Mary, Queen of Scots. Robert Poley had been the Crown’s agent provocateur at the centre of that same operation, befriending Anthony Babington for long enough to deliver him to the scaffold, and by May 1593 was a salaried Crown courier carrying confidential dispatches between The Hague and the English court. The Exchequer warrant of 8 June 1593 pays Poley for state service “from the Lowe Countreyes to the Court at Croyden” and certifies him “in her Majesties service all the aforesaid tyme.” That period covers 30 May.

That gap, between the official Crown finding of a chance quarrel and the documented identity of the three men present, is the case. It has been the case since the inquest itself was recovered, 332 years after the killing, by a Harvard scholar working through the bundles of Chancery Miscellanea in the Public Record Office in London on 22 February 1925.

The documented account

Christopher Marlowe was baptised at Canterbury on 26 February 1564, two months before Shakespeare, and took his BA at Corpus Christi, Cambridge, in 1584. In spring 1587 the University moved to withhold his MA on a rumour he had defected to the English Catholic seminary at Rheims. On 29 June 1587 the Privy Council intervened, certifying to Cambridge that Marlowe “had done her Majestie good service” and had been “emploied” in “matters touching the benefitt of his Countrie.” The MA was awarded. That minute is the documentary foundation for the modern consensus that by his early twenties Marlowe was working in some capacity for the Elizabethan state.

Between 1587 and 1593 he wrote Tamburlaine the Great, The Jew of Malta, Edward II, Doctor Faustus, The Massacre at Paris, and Dido, Queen of Carthage, and by late 1592 was the most successful playwright in London. He was also repeatedly in trouble in the record: bound over after a 1589 Hog Lane sword fight in which the poet Thomas Watson killed William Bradley, arrested at Flushing in January 1592 on a counterfeiting charge and shipped back to Lord Burghley, bound over again in Shoreditch that September.

May 1593 brought the collapse. On the night of 5 May, a verse libel of fifty-three lines threatening London’s Protestant refugee population and signed “Tamburlaine” was nailed to the wall of the Dutch Church in Broad Street. On 11 May the Privy Council ordered the arrest of those responsible and authorised the search of suspect lodgings, with powers including the use of torture. On 12 May the dramatist Thomas Kyd, who had shared a writing chamber with Marlowe two years earlier, was arrested. The searchers found in Kyd’s room a three-page heretical Arian tract denying the divinity of Christ. Under interrogation, and probably under torture, Kyd said the papers were Marlowe’s. On 18 May the Council issued a warrant for Marlowe’s arrest. On 20 May he presented himself before the Council at the Star Chamber. He was not committed. He was instructed to “give his daily attendance on their Lordships, until he shall be licensed to the contrary.” He was on bail.

Sitting alongside the Kyd material was the Baines Note. Two near-identical manuscript copies survive in the British Library, in Harleian MSS 6848 and 6853, headed a note on Marlowe’s “damnable judgment of Religion.” Its author was Richard Baines, a government informant who had himself been imprisoned for a Catholic plot at Rheims a decade earlier. The Note attributes to Marlowe eighteen articulated heresies, ending with Baines’s recommendation that “the mouth of so dangerous a member should be stopped.” One surviving copy is endorsed “Whitsun eve last,” which in 1593 fell three days after Marlowe’s death; Nicholl 2002 and Riggs 2004 place the underlying delivery in the week before 30 May, with the extant copies recopied for the Queen and Archbishop Whitgift in the days after the killing.

That is the situation in which Marlowe arrived at Deptford. He was at liberty on the Council’s terms, the subject of an active heresy file. Kyd was in the Bridewell.

He spent Wednesday 30 May 1593 in a hired room at the house of Mistress Eleanor Bull at Deptford Strand. Bull was a respectable widowed gentlewoman with court connections, niece of Blanche Parry, a longtime intimate of Queen Elizabeth I. Her house took in paying guests and served meals. It was not a public tavern; the loose secondary tradition that calls Deptford the scene of a tavern brawl is wrong on the venue. The other three men in the room were Frizer, Skeres, and Poley.

The inquest, returned 1 June 1593 by William Danby, Coroner of the Queen’s Household, and reproduced in Latin on the Patent Roll of 28 June 1593, narrates the day in administrative detail. The four men met at Mistress Bull’s at the tenth hour ante meridiem. They dined together, walked in the garden, returned and supped. After supper Marlowe and Frizer fell into a quarrel over “le recknynge,” the bill. Marlowe was lying on a bed. Frizer was sitting on a bench with his back to Marlowe, Skeres on one side of him and Poley on the other. Marlowe rose, drew Frizer’s own dagger from the scabbard at Frizer’s back, and struck Frizer twice on the head with the pommel, inflicting two wounds two inches long and a quarter-inch deep. Frizer, pinned between Skeres and Poley “so that he could in no wise take flight,” struggled with Marlowe for the dagger and, “in defence of his life,” drove the blade two inches deep above Marlowe’s right eye. The inquest states Marlowe died instantly.

The jury returned a verdict of homicide se defendendo, killing in self-defence. Frizer was committed to the Marshalsea pending the Queen’s pardon. The pardon, signed by the Queen and engrossed on the Patent Roll, was issued on Friday 28 June 1593, twenty-eight days after the killing. Frizer was released and returned to the service of Thomas Walsingham, in which he remained until his death in 1627.

Marlowe was buried on 1 June 1593, the same day as the inquest, in an unmarked grave in the churchyard of St Nicholas, Deptford. The parish register entry, in the hand of the parish clerk Thomas Macander, reads: “Christopher Marlow slaine by ffrancis ffrezer. the .1. of June.” The clerk has the killer’s first name wrong. The location within the churchyard is not known.

The inquest itself then disappeared. For 332 years the standard account of Marlowe’s death rested on Thomas Beard’s Theatre of God’s Judgements (1597), Francis Meres’s Palladis Tamia (1598), and William Vaughan’s Golden Grove (1600), none of which named Skeres or Poley, mentioned the Walsingham connection, or knew of the self-defence verdict. On 22 February 1925 the Harvard scholar J. Leslie Hotson, working in the Public Record Office, located the inquest in the Chancery Miscellanea bound to the Patent Roll of Frizer’s pardon. He published the find as The Death of Christopher Marlowe (Nonesuch Press, 1925). Every modern reading of the case proceeds from his recovery.

The evidence

The defensible evidence is documentary and falls into a small number of state archives.

The coroner’s inquest of 1 June 1593. William Danby, Coroner of the Queen’s Household, took jurisdiction because the killing fell within the twelve-mile “verge” of the royal court. The Latin original is held at The National Archives, Kew, as TNA C260/174, no. 27, bound to the Patent Roll. It is the only contemporaneous official narrative.

The Queen’s pardon to Ingram Frizer, 28 June 1593. Engrossed on the Patent Roll, TNA C66/1401, m. 4, reciting the inquest verdict of self-defence. The pardon was issued twenty-eight days after the killing. That speed is the institutional anomaly the modern case turns on. Contemporary practice ran considerably longer: the file had to move from the coroner to Chancery, the warrant to be drawn, and the Queen’s sign manual obtained. Twenty-eight days was extraordinary by the practice of the period.

The Privy Council Register, 29 June 1587 (TNA PC 2/14), summarising the Council’s certification to Cambridge that Marlowe “had done her Majestie good service.” The underlying letter is not extant; the Register’s summary is the basis for Marlowe’s documented work for the Crown.

The Privy Council Register, 11, 18, and 20 May 1593 (TNA PC 2/20), recording the Council’s response to the Dutch Church libel, the warrant for Marlowe’s arrest, and the order that he attend daily.

The Baines Note, BL Harleian MS 6848, ff. 185-186, with a fair copy at Harleian MS 6853.

The Thomas Kyd letters of 1593-94 to Sir John Puckering, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal (BL Harleian MS 6849), written after Kyd’s release from Bridewell and assigning the Arian tract found in his room to Marlowe. Kyd died, broken and impoverished, in December 1594.

The Exchequer warrant of 8 June 1593 for payment to Robert Poley for state messenger service from the Low Countries, certifying him in Crown service through 30 May.

The Babington plot state papers, 1586 (TNA SP 12/192-194), naming Skeres and Poley in the Walsingham operation against Mary, Queen of Scots.

The Drew Woodleff Chancery suit, 1598 (TNA C2/Eliz/W8/47), recording a 1593 confidence trick in which Frizer and Skeres extracted £60 from a young heir. The suit documents both men as working swindlers in the same period.

The parish register of St Nicholas, Deptford, burial entry of 1 June 1593.

The layered facts are firm. The killing happened. The verdict was self-defence. The pardon was issued in twenty-eight days. The three other men in the room were Frizer, a Walsingham servant; Skeres, a Walsingham intelligence employee documented in the 1586 Babington operation; and Poley, the Crown’s most experienced agent provocateur, then in salaried state service. None of the three was a disinterested witness, and the three of them were the only witnesses.

Hypotheses and open questions

Six readings have been pressed in the modern literature. Each is labelled. None is asserted as fact.

1. A chance quarrel, self-defence, as the inquest found. The position of the coroner’s verdict. Marlowe, in a foul temper from his bail status and the Baines pressure, attacked first with Frizer’s own dagger; Frizer, pinned on the bench, struggled for the weapon and killed him in defending himself. Constraints: the verdict rests on the testimony of three Crown intelligence employees with no other witnesses; the speed of the pardon was extraordinary; and the physical geometry of a pinned man driving a dagger two inches deep above an opponent’s eye has been called improbable by David Riggs (The World of Christopher Marlowe, 2004).

2. Political assassination to silence Marlowe before further interrogation. The position of Charles Nicholl in The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (1992; rev. 2002). Nicholl reads the killing as a court operation arising from the faction war between the Earl of Essex and the Cecils, in which Marlowe, an embarrassing intelligence asset whose interrogation under torture could be expected to produce more of the material Kyd had already produced, was killed to prevent the next round. Nicholl does not assert that any particular man in the room personally directed the killing; he reads it as a court operation in which Frizer was the instrument. Constraints: circumstantial alignment of motive, opportunity, and personnel; no documentary smoking gun has surfaced.

3. Assassination on the order, or with the protection, of Sir Walter Raleigh’s circle. A variant addressed in Nicholl. Marlowe was associated with Raleigh’s “School of Night,” the Baines Note alleged he had “read the Atheist lecture to Sr Walter Raleigh and others,” and Raleigh would face the Cerne Abbas commission for atheism in 1594. The motive in this reading is to remove a witness whose interrogation would compromise Raleigh. Constraints: no direct documentary evidence.

4. Faked death and clandestine exile. The “Marlovian” reading, longest-standing variant the Calvin Hoffman thesis of 1955, since revived by Peter Farey: the body at St Nicholas was not Marlowe’s, the Walsingham network extracted him to the Continent, and he continued to write as William Shakespeare. The inquest, pardon, parish register, and Exchequer warrants form a record consistent with a real death. No peer-reviewed Marlowe biographer holds the authorship thesis; Honan 2005, Riggs 2004, and Kuriyama 2002 treat it as not credible. It is named here for completeness and not adopted.

5. Mistaken-identity entrapment. A subset reading in some popular treatments: that Marlowe was lured to Deptford under the pretext of a Walsingham-network meeting that turned out to be the killing. Constraints: no documentary evidence beyond the suggestive geography.

6. A quarrel over Frizer’s cony-catching of Marlowe. A reading raised by Constance Brown Kuriyama in Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life (2002): the bill in dispute was not a dinner reckoning but Frizer’s standing financial entanglement with Marlowe, with Frizer, a documented swindler of young men, possibly cheating Marlowe out of a payment from Walsingham. Constraints: no documentary trace of a Marlowe-Frizer financial dispute survives.

What remains unknown

The killing happened. Marlowe is dead, buried 1 June 1593 at St Nicholas, Deptford, in an unmarked grave whose location was lost within a generation. The inquest verdict of self-defence is a Crown finding documented by the Queen’s own coroner. The three other men in the room were all employees of the Walsingham intelligence network, and the documentary record of their state service survives in state papers. The Queen’s pardon was issued in twenty-eight days. None of those points is in serious dispute.

What is in dispute is the relation between them. The inquest verdict is internally coherent and is the only contemporaneous official narrative. It is also the testimony of three Crown intelligence employees about the death of a fourth man, the man on bail before their Council on capital charges of atheism, given in the presence of no other witnesses. Nicholl’s political-assassination thesis fits the personnel and the timing without producing a document that says so. Riggs has called the geometry of the killing improbable without proving it impossible. Kuriyama’s cony-catch reading is consistent with what is known of Frizer and Skeres in 1593 without leaving a paper trail.

What remains unknown is whether the official finding is the true account of what happened in a hired room at Deptford Strand on the afternoon of 30 May 1593. The record sat in the Public Record Office for three hundred and thirty-two years before anyone read it. It has been read closely for the hundred years since. The case is partially explained and genuinely contested.

Deptford, 30 May 1593: the death of Christopher Marlowe

The documented account

The evidence

Hypotheses and open questions

What remains unknown

Sources

Primary

Secondary