By Gerald Therrien
For Act I of this series refer here.
Act 2 – Marlowe and Spenser
During this attempted alliance between France and England, we see the appearance of Jean Bodin in England. France’s ambassador to England, Michel de Castelnau had promoted the marriage of Francis Hercule with Elizabeth. When Francis visited England in 1581, he was accompanied by a leading member of the ‘politiques’, Jean Bodin. In 1576, Bodin had published his ‘Les Six Livres de la Republique’ and he rose to be President of the Third Estate in the French Parliament. He was part of those ‘Catholics’ who wanted Henry III “to unite his subjects … by all holy and legitimate means without war” and organized for a national council to resolve matters of religion, as opposed to the other ‘Catholics’ under the Duke of Guise who sought violent means to settle the religious question.
It was Castelnau who then brought Giordano Bruno to England in 1583-85 to attack the scholastics at the universities, and to educate certain university students in the art of epistemological warfare.
Perhaps, Marlowe was one of these fortunate university students, who would learn from Bodin and Bruno of the ongoing cultural and political war between the humanists (i.e. Platonists) and the scholastics (i.e. Aristotelians). [Because, without understanding this war between two bitterly opposed elites through three millennia of recorded history – ‘the secrets known only to the inner elite’ – then nothing can truly be known of history, and one can easily be led astray down the garden path of strangely-connected fictitious narratives.]
There are actual school records to show with certainty that Marlowe attended Cambridge University from 1580 until he graduated in 1587, and there is a very revealing letter, from June 1587, that was sent to Cambridge University, and signed by Queen Elizabeth’s councillors, including Archbishop of Canterbury Whitgift and Chancellor of the University, Lord Burghley.
Historians A.D. Wraight and Virginia Stern cited an excerpt of this letter in their book ‘In Search of Christopher Marlowe’:
“Whereas it was reported that Christopher Morley [Marlowe -ed] was determined to have gone beyond the seas to Reames and there to remaine, Their Lordships thought good to certefie that he had no such intent, but that in all his actions he had behaued him selfe orderlie and discreetlie to be rewarded for his faithfull dealinge: Their Lordships request was that the rumor thereof should be allaied by all possible meanes, and that he should be furthered in the degree he was to take this next Commencement: Because it was not her Majesties pleasure that anie one emploied as he had been in matters touching the benefitt of his Countrie should be defamed by those that are ignorant in th’ affairs he went about.”
Cambridge University was withholding Marlowe’s Master of Arts degree on suspicion that he had attended the Jesuit seminary at Rheims in France, during his lengthy absences from the university during the 1584-85 and the 1585-86 academic years, where it can be assumed from the reference to ‘benefit of his country’ that he was employed with gathering intelligence for the English secret service of the Secretary of State, Francis Walsingham.
Cambridge University was a major recruiting ground for such intelligence agents – to gather information and to deliver information to Queen Elizabeth’s minsters. Rheims was the location in France for an English seminary for those exiled English ‘Catholics’ to study, and to then secretly be sent back to England as missionaries. It was also a hotbed of rumored and actual plots against Elizabeth – to place Mary Stuart on the throne in order to restore ‘Catholicism’ in England. The seminary was financially supported by Philip of Spain and Pope Gregory XIII.
Marlowe may have posed as a traitor – a convert escaping from England and wishing to study with the Jesuits at Rheims, but evidence demonstrates that he was in fact sent as a patriot to gather any information concerning suspicious activities against Elizabeth. Marlowe was intelligent, with a Bachelor of Arts degree, was fluent in French, and was presumably destined to enter the church after his studies. He had all the right credentials, and as the letter attests, he was employed for ‘the benefit of his country’ and earned ‘her Majesty’s pleasure’. At that time a secret plot was begun at Rheims to assassinate Elizabeth, to foment a rebellion in the ensuing chaos that would coincide with a Spanish invasion and to place Mary Stuart on the English throne. Walsingham’s spies were able to uncover the plot and to decipher the letters of the conspirators and Mary. Fourteen of the conspirators were arrested, tried for treason and later executed. Mary was put on trial, found guilty and executed in February 1587.
The years-long planned invasion by the Spanish Armada (130 ships, with 6,000 sailors and 30,000 soldiers) was launched in 1588, leaving Lisbon in May and sailing to the English Channel, where in July the Spanish fleet met the 200 ships of the English navy under Admiral Charles Howard and the English ‘Seahawks’ – Francis Drake, John Hawkins and Martin Frobisher. The Armada wasn’t able to invade the island, and while running short of food and water, was forced to sail north around Scotland and Ireland where many ships were wrecked on the rocky shores, and only 67 ships and 10,000 soldiers were able to arrive back in Spain.
[Aside: Admiral Howard was also the patron of the playing company, known as the Admiral’s Men, where Marlowe was later to find employment.]
At the same time as the launch of the Armada in May 1588, the Duke of Guise staged an uprising in Paris, forcing Henry III to flee the city and to sign an edict to never conclude peace with the ‘heretics’ or to allow a ‘heretic’ to sit on the throne of France – thus excluding Henry Bourbon of Navarre from becoming king. However, in December the Duke of Guise and his brother Cardinal of Guise were assassinated by Henry III’s bodyguards, and the following August, Henry III himself was assassinated. France now became embroiled in a civil war over the succession – between Henry Bourbon of Navarre, backed by the Huguenots and England, or Cardinal Charles Bourbon, backed by the Guise’s League and Philip of Spain.
[Aside: at Henry Navarre’s wedding to Margaret Valois in 1572, Guise launched St. Batholomew’’s Day massacre.]
Elizabeth would agree to support Henry Navarre in the war against the Guise’s League, sending both money and troops – to Brittany under Norris, to Normandy under Willoughby, and to the siege of Rouen under Essex. Until July 1593, when Henry Navarre, in order to obtain a cease fire with the Guise League and to secure his reign, renounced Protestantism and converted to Catholicism, and Elizabeth then recalled all her forces from France. But would Henry IV continue to ally with Elizabeth in the war against the Hapsburgs of Spain? At this turning point, occurs the next chapter in the life of Christopher Marlowe, that leads towards his strange and mysterious ‘death’.
After his service for his country and his return to England (perhaps also maintaining his ‘double agent’ identity and perhaps returning as a ‘Jesuit spy’ sent back to England) and after finally graduating from Cambridge in 1587, Marlowe then went to London, where he would have become a part of the circle of poets and playwrights, and where he would receive payment for the manuscript of his play ‘Tamburlaine’ from the Lord Admiral’s Men, the actors troop of Admiral Howard.
Marlowe would go on to write other plays – ‘The Jew of Malta’, ‘Doctor Faustus’ and ‘Massacre at Paris’. But these plays were not published with his name as author until years later when they were then attributed to him – and when he was ‘supposedly’ dead, and so we may assume that he was the author.
‘The Jew of Malta’ may have been performed as early as 1592, but the first known publication wasn’t until 1633. ‘Doctor Faustus’ may have also been performed in 1592, but it was not published until 1604. ‘The Massacre at Paris’ was performed in January 1593, before the theatres were closed due to plague, but only an incomplete and undated text survives (without the name of an author).
While living in London, Marlowe was likely introduced to an intellectual society, called the ‘Areopagus’ that was formed by two good friends, Gabriel Harvey (a don at Cambridge when Marlowe was studying there) and Edmund Spenser (who had studied at Cambridge with Harvey), and it also included Sir Philip Sidney, and met at Leicester House, the house of the Earl of Leicester, Sidney’s uncle. The ‘Areopagus’experimented with different meters for English verse and with the invention of new words – such as jovial, idiom, conscious and many others.
In 1579, Spenser anonymously published his ‘The Shepheardes Calender’, with Harvey as ‘Hobbinol’ and himself as ‘Colin Clouts’, as literary and political propaganda that presented the view of the circles around Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, and the proposed marriage of Elizabeth and Francis Hercule. [Note: the term ‘shepherd’ refers to a ‘poet’]
Spenser was sent to Ireland in 1580 (probably with the help of Leicester), as secretary to Lord Grey, the new Lord-Deputy of Ireland, and would become Clerk of Decrees and Recognizances, and later would be awarded 3000 acres and the castle at Kilcolman, from some of the confiscated property that the English had seized from one of the Irish lords. While living there, Spenser would continue to work on his projected twelve books of the ‘Faerie Queene’ and he had three books completed by autumn 1589, when Sir Walter Raleigh visited him. Raleigh had also been sent to Ireland, to help put down another rebellion, and he also was rewarded with some of the confiscated property, making Raleigh and Spenser sort of neighbours. (Raleigh and Spenser were both born in the same year and perhaps being the same age may have helped them to hit it off so well.)
Raleigh was so impressed with Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queen’ that he insisted that Spenser return to London with him, where Spenser was able to present his poem to the Queen, and by early 1590 those three books were published, with an elaborate dedication to Queen Elizabeth, 6 poems written by his friends and 17 sonnets written by Spenser.
The book opened with A Letter of the Author’s, a letter written by Edmund Spenser to Sir Walter Raleigh, ‘expounding his whole intention in the course of this work’ and his reason for his use of King Arthur.
“… The general end therefore of all the book is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline: which for that I conceived should be most plausible and pleasing, being coloured with an historical fiction, the which the most part of men delight to read, rather for variety of matter then for profit of the ensample, I chose the history of King Arthur, as most fit for the excellency of his person, being made famous by many men’s former works, and also furthest from the danger of envy, and suspicion of present time.”
Spenser then speaks of his debt to the Greek poet Homer:
“In which I have followed all the antique poets historical; first Homer, who in the persons of Agamemnon and Ulysses hath ensampled a good governor and a virtuous man, the one in his Iliad, the other in his Odyssey …”
Spenser is trying to use the method of Homer, that was explained to us by Strabo, in his Geography (1.2.9):
“Thus it is that our poet, though he sometimes employs fiction for the purposes of instruction, always gives the preference to truth; he makes use of what is false, merely tolerating it in order the more easily to lead and govern the multitude. As a man ‘binds with a golden verge bright silver’, so Homer, heightening by fiction actual occurrences, adorns and embellishes his subject; but his end is always the same as that of the historian, who relates nothing but facts. In this manner he undertook the narration of the Trojan war, gilding it with the beauties of fancy and the wanderings of Odysseus; but we shall never find Homer inventing an empty fable apart from the inculcation of truth.”
Spenser then shows us his realintention – that England could rediscover those virtues, that could transform a Prince Arthur into a King Arthur.
“I labour to portray in Arthur, before he was king, the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve private moral virtues as Aristotle hath devised; the which is the purpose of these first twelve books …So in the person of Prince Arthur I set forth magnificence in particular; which virtue, for that (according to Aristotle and the rest) it is the perfection of all the rest, and contains in it them all …”
[an entire book could be written here on the work of Spencer, Harvey, and the followers of the ‘Areopagus’ in developing the modern English language – especially the impact of ‘The Faerie Queene’ upon its readers.]
Spenser remained in London for more than a year, enjoying fame, making friends, and being awarded a yearly pension of £100. The treasurer protested that this sum was too much, to which the Queen said ‘then give him what is reason’. When Spenser’s promised pension wasn’t forthcoming, he wrote this poem and sent it to the Queen:
“I was promised on a time – to have reason for my rhyme;
From that time unto this season, I received nor rhyme nor reason.”
…whereupon the Queen immediately ordered his pension to be paid in full.
Spenser would write ‘Colin Clouts Come Home Again’, a sort of autobiography of his trip to London, that he dedicated to Raleigh, and that would be published later in 1595. During that fruitful year spent in London, 1590, Spenser most probably would have met with some of his old school friends that he hasn’t seen in ten years since he went to Ireland, like Thomas Kyd and Gabriel Harvey, and with friends of the ‘Areopagus’, and he also would have met with the circle of poets and playwrights that met at the homes of Walter Ralegh, of Edward de Vere (Oxford), and of Henry Percy (Northumberland). Spenser MUST have met Marlowe during that London stay – Spenser had been a classmate with Kyd at Merchants Taylors’ School, and Kyd and Marlowe would share lodgings in 1591, the next year, perhaps being sponsored by the same patron.
Spenser would return to Ireland in the spring of 1591, but shortly afterwards, his wife Machalyas died, and he would marry Elizabeth Boyle. In 1594, he wrote ‘Amoretti’ – 88 sonnets dedicated to his love, for both his wives, and also for the goddess (the idea) of love. Spenser would return to London in 1595 to publish three more books of the ‘Faerie Queen’ but also to publishhis ‘Amoretti’, and the ‘Four Hymns’ – “poems that concern his Platonic conceptions of love and beauty” – that would both have direct effect in the writing of ‘Shakespeare’s sonnets’!
At the end of July 1592, Walter Raleigh was imprisoned, but no ‘official’ reason is ever given for it. It is assumed that it was because Raleigh had married one of the Queen’s privy chamber maids (Elizabeth Throckmorton) without her permission (a secret marriage that could no longer be hidden after the birth of their son in March). It is also assumed that it was because while on a naval expedition against the Spanish, Raleigh did not immediately obey the Queen’s order to return to London. But there is also a rather curious attack on Raleigh by the Jesuit, Robert Persons.
In October 1591, the Queen had issued a proclamation against the ‘Catholic’ plots against her, especially the Jesuits, and in March 1592, Persons had written a pamphlet in reply to that proclamation, that included the lines –
“Sir Walter Raleigh’s school of atheism by the way, and of the conjurer that is M[aster] thereof, and of the diligence used to get young gentlemen to this school, wherein both Moses and our Saviour, the Old Testament and New Testament are jested at, and the scholars taught among other things to spell God backwards”.
This Jesuit slander began the whisperings and rumours of Raleigh and of his ‘school’ as being ‘atheists’ – for the charge of atheism not only meant denying the existence of God, but also denying the sovereign’s God-given right to rule over the realm and its church. It would be this charge of atheism that was also used against Marlowe.
And there’s another aspect to it.
In 1584, Elizabeth had granted a royal charter to Raleigh to explore and to colonize any undiscovered lands between Newfoundland and Spanish Florida. In return, the crown was promised one-fifth of all the gold and silver that might be found or mined in the colony. Two opposing policies can be seen in England – one, to begin the colonization of America (at the Roanoke Colony in 1585), or two, to take part in the rape and pillage of the Americas by stealing some of the loot from the Spanish Empire (i.e. to form an ‘English Empire’).
These two overlapping tendencies – colonization or empire-building, would be at the center of political battles. Instead of developing colonies and a national navy, a piratical and privately-financed merchant marine would come to dominate England’s naval and trade policy. One wonders whether the Spanish armada’s 1588 invasion of England was timed to disrupt the establishment of that colony in America? Because, when a supply fleet was finally able to return three years later, the Roanoke Colony had disappeared and further plans were shelved.
[This continuing fight between colonization or empire-building is seen in the establishment of the British East India Company in 1600, but also the founding of the Virginia Company and the Plymouth Company later in 1606.]
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The revision of the true history of the Tudors is so delightful. Knowing the Venetian sabateurs and Jesuit assassins surrounded the throne, its a wonder we ever got Shakespeare at all.
This is very good and much appreciated. It verifies and expands upon my own research. Not only does it illuminate aspects of European history but it illuminates the history of the United States. There is a widely off track notion of early “American” settlers and explorers as poor downtrodden Immigrants. As Victims of religious persecution - the pure and guileless “Puritans”. Nothing could be further from the truth of the actual history. A great example of what needs to be taught to our kids and to each other.