Forbidden History - Christopher Marlowe: Murder or Mystery?

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

Was famous playwright Christopher Marlowe the victim of a political conspiracy, or was his death a simple tavern brawl gone wrong? In this episode, we discuss the strange circumstances around his mysterious and untimely death. Cast List:  Tracy Borman: Royal Historian & Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces  Prof. Michael Green: Forensic Pathologist  Andrew Rose: Barrister & QC Dr. Susan Doran: Author & Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University  Ciaran O’Keefe: Criminal Psychologist Ros Barber: Author & Scholar Philippe Lacamp: Local Historian & Canterbury Resident Eric Meyers: Narrator  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. England, 1593. In a house just outside of London, Christopher Marlowe, England's most celebrated poet and playwright, came to an abrupt and violent end. From the London playhouses to the Elizabethan Secret Service,

Marlowe's intriguing and mysterious life has led many to question the official events on that fateful day. There are a lot of inconsistencies in the inquest document. And so something much more sinister, it sort, was taking place. Some say he died in a brawl. Judging by what we know about Marlowe's character that he was someone who could easily get involved

in quarrels and a brawl, it seems to me perfectly possible that that's what happened. happened on that occasion. You did not push me! We cannot detract the presence of alcohol. I wouldn't be surprised if you've got people sitting in a bar, arguing over a bill, that because of the alcohol, that they then become aggressive, and then that leads to murder.

Others thought that he was assassinated. The real story of Marlowe's death was altogether more dark. It may have been not just murder, but... assassination. He dies of, quote, a single stab wound above the eye. If by this they mean that he's been stabbed in the forehead, I'm afraid that doesn't work. If you stab somebody like that,

the knife's going to skate off, it's going to continue under the scalp but not penetrate, or just slide out and give you a slash wound. And there are those who believe that he faked his own death. No one has managed to... to come up with a really good theory for who would want to kill him and why and why it needed to be quite so elaborate. At the moment, I think the escape hypothesis is actually the strongest one. So what did happen to Christopher Marlowe? Canterbury, the birthplace of Christopher Marlowe, has a long theatrical tradition. As a young boy, Marlowe would have seen the local actors perform

in religious plays around the streets and courtyards of the town. Marlowe was born six years into the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, in a period known as the English Renaissance, where art, literature, and the theatre were all experiencing a great revival. Philippe La Kemp is a local historian and resident of Canterbury. One of the last physical links there is with Christopher Marlowe is called St George's Tower, and it's all that's left of a Norman church called St George's, where he was actually. baptized and we don't know when he was born because there's no records but we know it must have been only a few days before the 24th February because in those days people baptize

their children very quickly because they might not survive. As a poet, playwright and creator of English blank verse, Christopher Marlow was at the forefront of the Elizabethan dramatic Renaissance. An impressive rise for someone who can from relatively modest origins. He was the son of a shoemaker, so he came from very humble beginnings. Clearly from an early age he was recognized as a scholar. He had a great aptitude for learning

and won a scholarship to the King's School when he was 14. Marlow became a King scholar, one of 50 boys considered too poor to pay for their education, but endowed with great minds. While at the King's school, he studied Latin, religion, and learned about the arts. He did so well there that he was awarded a scholarship to Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, an early age of 16. Although he was best known for being a poet and playwright,

there was another less public side to his life, the murky world of Elizabethan espionage. Christopher de Marlow was a great poet and a great playwright. He was also a translator of Lassabwe. translator of Latin into English, and he may have been a government spa. When he was up at university, there are some myths about what he did and about some absences that he had from the college. In those days, you signified your presence in the college by your equivalent of the mess bill. In other words, the food you bought from the larder.

And there are several absences over his six and a half years at the college where there was no food purchased at all which means he wasn't there and some of these absences were six or seven months and this is something that fed the myth or perhaps not a myth that he was serving his queen Sir Francis Walsingham was the spy master Marlowe was one of his boys and that he was disappearing off into the low countries to foment possibly and insurrection over there. As head of England's Secret Service, Sir Francis Walsingham was a key figure in the English government,

in charge of ensuring the safety of his Queen and Country. Immediately after leaving Cambridge, he was in London, and we know that he had his first big hit that year with the play called Tamblane. It was extraordinarily successful, and he then followed it with other successful plays. Dr. Faustus, Edward II, the Jew of Malta. All of this time, we don't know what he was doing in terms of spying, because if he was going to be a successful intelligence agent, clearly it needed to be secretive.

But in January of 1592, he was arrested in the Netherlands. In what looks like some fairly dodgy business, he was arrested for counterfeiting coins, which was a potentially treasonous effect. But when he was sent back to Lord Burley, who was very probably his boss, because he wasn't put into prison, nothing happened to him. So we think he was actually on government business and he was trying to infiltrate a plot against the Queen's life.

Lord Burley was chief advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, and one of the most powerful men in England. Along with Francis Walsingham, he ran England's large network of spies throughout Europe. Marlowe himself was a little bit of a feisty individual and he had two or three occasions when he would have been hand up in the courts from what we would call today common assault.

It was obviously a man who was pretty much a genius, I think. I mean, judging by the blank verse that he wrote in his plays and the characterisation and plotting of the plays, he was also something, I think, of a brawler. What we do know about him shows him in unsupeakable. shows him in unsoverey company, and it also shows that he was guilty of a couple of breaches of the peace. It's said that he was an atheist, but some of the evidence for that has been challenged. It's also said that he was a homosexual, but that's based on a misunderstanding

of homosexuality and homoeroticism of the 16th century. So we can't be certain of that either. Marlow lived in an age when England was experiencing rising tensions between Protestants and Catholics, And it wasn't long before he got caught up in the religious conflict of the Times. Things started to go wrong for Marlowe in the beginning of May 1593. Somebody posted a poem up on the wall of a Dutch church in London. It was a poem in blank verse, which was Marlowe's recognized style. It mentioned three of his plays. It was signed Tamblaine, was the name of his most famous protagonist.

And it was advocating violence against immigrants. During the Elizabethan period, Protestant refugees from across Europe were routinely subjected to persecution and threats, often in the form of written pamphlets called libels. Thomas Kidd, a friend of Marlowe's, and fellow poet and playwright, was arrested on suspicion of being involved in writing the libel. His papers were seized, and in those papers were something that was referred to as vile heresy. critical conceits, which Thomas Kidd said were Marlowe's papers not his. Subsequently, there was a warrant issued for Marlowe's arrest, and he appeared before the Privy Council.

Ten days later, rather conveniently, Marlowe was dead. The official account of Marlowe's death states that he died from a single stab wound, which is killer claimed to have inflicted in self-defense. The official report on Marlowe's death said that he was killed in a single stab wound. in a drunken brawl in a pub in Deptford. The coroner's reports say that he went to a house in Deptford at 10 o'clock in the morning, and there he met some friends,

and all was well until after supper. They discussed the bill, or the reckoning, as it was called, and that there was a quarrel over the amount, and that he grabbed hold of a dagger, and in self-defense, one of his companions, the man called Frezia, killed him. The inquest document is very specific, about what happened.

Ingram Frieser was sitting between Robert Polly and Nicholas Skears. It says that Marlowe grabbed Fryzer's knife, which was at his back. Ingram Frieser somehow turned to the top of his body, wrestled with Marlowe, tried to wrestle his knife back. And in the process of doing so, stabbed Marlowe just above his right eye to a depth of two inches and one inch wide. And it says that Marlowe died instantly

from the wound he received. On the surface, it seems to be a plausible story. But after reviewing the evidence, what would a modern-day lawyer, pathologist and criminal psychologist, make of Marlowe's death? From royal tribunals to international murder cases, lawyer Andrew Rose has both defended and prosecuted at numerous criminal trials over his career.

Looking at the evidence as it stands, it would seem perfectly possible that, um, Marla was killed in the course of a brawl. We don't know how much each individual had to drink. They all seem to be rather strong characters, and these were rumbustious times. So it doesn't seem to be wholly implausible that there wasn't a defense of self-defense available to Freiser,

which was accepted by the jury of the day. But could something as small as a disagreement over the bill really escalate into a killing? During the inquest, Ingram Frieser entered a person. plea of self-defense. Should we simply accept his account that Marlowe's death was not premeditated? Is the murder intentional? That's another question. It might be an accidental murder because of the aggression, because of the fight. If it's intentional, then we need to look at something else that's going on, that it's not necessarily just the alcohol. One of the biggest obstacles in finding out

what really happened is the lack of impartial witnesses. The first task is to assess exactly what happened, which is probably very difficult to do. The amount of material available is going to be limited. A lot of it seems to derive from the coroner's report, and coroners in those days were appointed by the crown. They were answerable to the crown, and they were likely to behave in a way which would not cause any problems with the crown. Since the killing was deemed to have taken place within a 12-mile vicinity of the monarch,

the inquest was conducted by William Danby, the Queen's coroner. But in the Elizabethan period, Detford was part of the English county of Kent, and by law, a Kent County coroner should have been present. Denby, however, conducted the inquest on his own. The parties involved had some kind of links with government. And I don't think we would be 100% sure that he fulfilled his duty completely as a coroner, perhaps should do. The coroner's task is to investigate the cause of death, the how and the where and the why of the death, and of course to establish the identity of the deceased.

In this case, there was no doubt it was Christopher Marlowe. As to the other factors, of course, what was going through the coroner's mind in the way in which he was handling the case may well have affected the way in which questions were put. So to that extent, we have to study any documentation, I think, with great care. Christopher Marlow, according to the contemporary accounts, dies in a brawl in Deptford. He dies of, quotes, a single stab wound above the eye. In the course of my career, which spent 40 years,

I only saw two cases where a stab wound actually got through the skull, and they both got through the skull round the side here, the temporal region where the bone is very thin. If Marlow received a stab wound just below the forehead and through the orbit, it's possible that one of the major blood vessels in his brain could have been severed, causing internal bleeding. The brain is fairly tightly wrapped. up in the membranes which surround it. So literally only 25, 50 mills of blood, the equivalent

of a double shot of scotch, is going to be enough to cause the pressure on the brain to rise so quickly that he's going to die within a very short space of time. My feeling on Marlow is if what they meant is that it went through the sort of eyebrow region but below the bony ridge, yes, it could well have happened. Dr. Kieran O'Keefe is head of criminal psychology at Buckinghamshire New University. He studies and assesses the causes that lead people to criminal behavior, such as violence or murder. Simply because you've got an activity, a social activity, that takes place on a regular occasion where with the alcohol fueling the environment too, you've got people who will need to share

will need to show that they're more powerful than others. And if an argument develops over something as simple as a bill or a spilt drink, having gone through these stages of brutalisation and reflection, you would then decide, I'm not going to be the person to back down. And the only way that I can exert my power and aggression is by being completely violent to the person that's in front of me. Because then everybody else will see that I'm not somebody to be messed with. For what reason had Marlowe come to DeFord?

Why Marlowe was meeting with these companions at the inn, it just seemed like a normal social occasion. I think that's extremely unlikely. Marlowe was under high pressure at that time. He was being investigated by the Privy Council, a warrant had been out for his arrest. Thomas Kidd, who had been his roommate, was under investigation and had been arrested.

I think it's highly unlikely that he went out for a drink with the boys at that particular time. Something was definitely going on, and whatever was going on was hushed up. There are a lot of inconsistencies. As soon as the inquest document was found, which was in 1925, a doctor said that it was impossible

that Marlowe would have died instantly from the kind of wound that he was given. The other problem with the inquest document is that it rests on the testimony of three professional liars. All three men had questionable backgrounds. Both Nicholas Skears and Robert Polly were employed by the government as secret agents, while Ingram Frieser had a reputation as a confidence trickster, and was known to have swindled wealthy gentlemen out of money.

Robert Polly was a consummate liar. He's down in the history books of that time. William Camden, the Tudor Chronicle, called him a very expert Dissabler. We even have a letter from Robert Polly saying, I would swear and forswear myself, rather than I would do myself any harm. He's essentially saying there that he would lie to the Lord Treasurer, Lord Burleigh, rather than get himself into trouble. It seems plausible that Marlowe could have died in a brawl.

But with many unanswered questions and the involvement of shadowy Elizabethan figures, it's easy to see how alternative theories might have arisen, theories such as faking his own death. Dr. Ross Barber is an author and scholar who's researched the life and more importantly death of Christopher Marlowe. She believes that despite official accounts there is evidence to suggest that Marlowe may not have actually died in Detford.

It is possible that the answer to the Marlowe mystery is that he faked his death and went off to the continent. It isn't as ludicrous an idea as some people seem to think. Most people, if they know anything about Christopher Marlowe at all, they know that he was killed in a tavern brawl in Deptford. But Mrs. Bull's house wasn't a tavern. It was a government safe house, a stopping off point for agents going to and from the continent. Despite what many people believe, Eleanor Bull was not an innkeeper, but a well-to-do widow with family connections in government and the royal court. With Marlow facing possible execution for heresy, Could she have somehow been involved in helping him fake his own death?

He had a really good reason to want to escape. And escape was such a way that people wouldn't go looking for him. No one goes looking for a dead man. But if he did fake his death, how did he do it? Officially, Christopher Marlowe is buried in an unmarked grave in the churchyard of St. Nicholas in Detford. And for the coroner and jury to pronounce Marlowe dead at the scene, there would have to have been a body.

So if Marlowe isn't buried in Defford, who is? If it's not Christopher Marlowe who's buried here, then it is the Welsh Protestant martyr John Penry, who was executed at St. Thomas Watering, just three miles to the west of here, suddenly, very quickly, without notice to his family, on the 29th of May. John Penry was a Protestant preacher who was executed for treason the day before Marlowe's death. It's not known what happened to Penry's body, and it was never returned to his family. But what is known is that the body was under the care of the Queen's coroner, William Danby.

It was a very unusual time for a hanging. It was noted by Penry's biographers. He was taken away from his supper at 5 p.m. and hanged, and nobody was. knows where his body is. Coroner William Danby was a close friend of Lord Burley, Queen Elizabeth's right-hand man. Coincidentally, Lord Burley was reported to have employed Marlowe on several occasions as a spy.

This is where Deptford meets the Thames, and it would have been an ideal place to take off for the continent. We don't actually know why the meeting was arranged here at Mrs. Bull's house. There's no particular reason why they would not meet here to murder Marlowe or to have a fight with Marlowe, but it makes complete sense to meet here if he was going to take off if the attention was to go get on a ship, go up the Thames and disappear somewhere in Scotland or in Europe. Could Christopher Marlowe have faked his own death to evade prosecution?

It's a fascinating story of true, but what evidence is there to support this claim? Could Marlowe have used the body of a recent? He recently executed man to trick people into believing he was dead? There is an allegation that there was a substitution of the body of a recently hanged person. Obviously the people who would have been able to properly identify Marlowe would be people who knew Marlowe. Possibly some members of the jury did because the whole point of a jury originally was it was summoned from people who lived around about the place where the person died. died but even if the jury were simply looking at a body and being asked how did this fellow die they would have noticed if it was the body of a hank person their face

need not have been purple but the tongue would almost certainly have been protruding there would almost certainly have been a mark on the neck and I'm sure that one of the seven to 15 people there would have had sufficient now as to look at the neck and look at the body generally. So unless there's some degree of collusion, bribery connivance to effect concealment, I don't think that's a starter. If there was a body there with a cut above the right eye,

that was Marlow, thank you very much. I think the process of identifying a body in Marlowe's time would be very similar to the process today. Obviously, it would be on the part of those people who knew, and they would be called forward to say that the body that they saw was the person that they knew. And of course they could be asked about how well they knew him, if they only had a fleeting glimpse, or whether they were good friends or family, something of that sort.

But evidentially, I would think the position is very much the same today. Is it possible that the witnesses and jury, who viewed the body, were somehow influenced into supporting the conspiracy? Interesting point to say about kind of the staging of Christopher Marlowe. of Christopher Marlow's death and whether a lie or deceit of that size will mean that people will believe it. At the time when this occurred, if there's any truth to that theory, there would have had to have been quite a few people involved in that for it to succeed. And undoubtedly, there would have had to have been bribery.

But ultimately, all you'd need is a few witnesses to it. A few witnesses to say, I saw Christopher Marlowe in a fight in that particular inn, and he died. he was killed, and then it can just spiral. And then if you've got, in addition to that, official announcements by coroners, by the government, then it can only fuel that. Tracy Borman is a historian. She believes that there may have been

a more sinister reason behind Marlowe's death. The death of Christopher Marlowe was one of the greatest unsolved mysteries. According to the official line, he was murdered in a pub brawl, an argument over the bill, broke out, they'd been drinking all day, and Marlowe was stabbed in the eye. He died instantly. But the real story was altogether darker than that.

Marlowe was under suspicion of treason, of heresy. It's possible that he was a spy for Sir Francis Walsingham, and almost certainly the real story of Marlowe's death was more to do with assassination than murder. If Marlowe was assassinated, who ordered it and why? Sir Walter Raleigh and Christopher Marlowe were great friends. They were both famous poets. They actually wrote poems to each other. And it's possible that Raleigh was somehow involved in the same treasonous activities

for which Marlowe was being investigated at the time of his death. So it's said that Raleigh might have had him murdered because his own guilt would have come to life. Sir Walter Raleigh was one of the most notable figures in Elizabeth in England. He was a poet, explorer, and a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I. But it was also said that he was an atheist. Exactly what Sir Walter Raleigh was afraid that would come to light is not clear. It may have been that like Marlowe, he shared his beliefs in heresy, that he was a blasphemer like Marlowe was believed to be,

or even an atheist, and that was punishable by death in the Elizabethan period. In 1592, Raleigh was accused of being the leader of a group known as the School of Atheism. It said that among its members were noted scientists, scholars, and Christopher Marlowe. Could Marlowe have been killed on the orders of Sir Walter Raleigh so that his own heresy would not be exposed? The situation which occurred in Marley's case, well, there's a suspicion that witnesses were robbed out. It does strike a court in modern times. We've only got to think of the Cray brothers and their activities in the 60s.

People of that sort, there's always been a temptation to make a way with witnesses who might cause you harm. But without any evidence, how could it be proven that Raleigh was behind Marlowe's murder? One of the ways of assessing these matters is to look and to use the old expression, quibono, to whom the benefit. Who is the person who is most likely to benefit from a crime of this sort? And in an investigation, that's usually the first port of call, to assess what had happened and to put somebody in the dark, if possible.

If Marlow did have evidence that Sir Walter Raleigh was a heretic, then Raleigh would have had good cause to be worried when Marlowe was arrested. Under torture, Marlowe could have revealed secrets leading to his own arrest. But there is no solid evidence that Raleigh had any involvement in Marlowe's death. Based on the given evidence, many experts see nothing wrong with the official account of Marlowe's death. On the face of it, a defense of self-defense, given that daggers were involved and all the rest of it, might still be plausible. Of course, these days would be a matter of of much closer investigation

and one would hope that the prosecuting authorities would not be under the same political pressure as the coroner was likely to have been at the time of Marlowe. It would be a much more thorough investigation, of course if darker consequences, darker possibilities emerged, that might make a big difference as to

the conduct of the prosecution. But in the absence of that, simple rumour in itself wouldn't be enough. There's evidence of a brawl. A man was clearly killed in that brawl and it was open to the person who had inflicted the fatal wound to say, I did this in self-defense. I was afraid for my life.

And Marlow's actions seemed to be consistent with his personality. Judging by what we know about Marlow's character that he was someone who could easily get involved in quarrels and a brawl, it seems to me perfectly possible that that's what happened on that occasion. Why he met with these companions is another story. He was at the time under investigation for atheism and possibly being suspected of interactions

with Roman Catholics, which were not on government service. So it's quite possible that he was meeting them with something related to that kind of accusation, possibly to carry out government business. But I don't think some of the conspiracy theories that have been put forward hold water. Christopher Marlow lived in turbulent times, and evidence seems to strongly support the theory that he was involved in espionage activities.

Marlowe was accused of atheism, and it would also be fair to assume that the reason for the meeting in Detford was most likely something to do with the charges he was facing. But Marlowe also had a volatile and violent side that had led him into altercations before. So what evidence are we left with? It's a fascinating story, and if true, it would be one of history's greatest ever disappearing acts. But to pull it off, it would have taken the involvement of high-up government officials. And while Marlowe would have had the motive to fake his own death, experts agree that there

is no solid evidence to prove this theory. I think on the available evidence, as far as Marley is concerned, we can rule out. a disappearance, some mysterious disappearance, the evidence seemed pretty conclusive that he was killed that night. How or why he was killed, of course, is another matter. Could Marlow have been killed on the orders of Sir Walter Raleigh to stop him, revealing that he too was an atheist? Even in modern times, it's not unheard of for witnesses to disappear or be killed, and there seems to be overwhelming proof that Marlow did in full. in fact, die in Defford.

I think the evidence for Marlowe's death is really very thin. The witnesses' accounts are suspect. On the other hand, we don't have anything else at all. Although many scholars and experts have cast doubt on the testimony of Ingram-Frieser, we do know that Marlow could at times be aggressive and volatile. So for him to become involved in an argument that escalated into violence would not be

out of character. It therefore seems that the official verdict stands, and he lost his life in a brawl that ended in tragedy. But over 400 years later, there are still many unanswered questions, some of which could only be answered by those present in Debtford on that fateful day. So what became of those people? In 1601, Nicholas Scarys was charged with treason for his part in a rebellion against Elizabeth I. He was found guilty. Robert Polly continued to serve in Her Majesty's Secret Service, frequently being used as a spy by Lord Burley after 1602. There is no record of what happened to Polly when and where he died remains a mystery. The coroner, William Danby, also had a mysterious fate. After filing the inquest reports

of Marlowe's death, the Queen's Carlin. a coroner, seems to have simply disappeared. While Ingram Frieser, the man responsible for Marlowe's death, received a full royal pardon for his part in the killing, he eventually became a parish tax assessor and lived out his years in respectability until his death in 1627. And what about Christopher Marlowe? It was a life cut tragically short, but even in death, Marlowe would go on to influence the likes of William Shakespeare and generations of writers to follow. And to this day,

he continues to be one of the most important poets and playwrights the world has ever seen. Unexplored catacombs buried beneath the city, a crumbling castle perched on a mountain peak, a top secret government bunker, a cursed mansion cloaked in legend. I'm Sasha Auerbach. Join me in Tom Ward every Wednesday and Sunday as we reveal the mysteries and histories behind these abandoned places and ask, where did everyone go? We'll hear from Sasha, who knows the history the best. In fact, there's a very famous book by a chap named Marcus Rediker called the Many-Headed Hydra, and he talks about pirate ships as an experiment in radical democracy.

And me, who knows nothing, erinautical scientists can't quite explain it. They say, we don't actually know how it gets up there. No, no, no. How it stays up? You're just not good at a science. No, there are explanations? There are explanations. It's just plain physics.

Brought to you by Like a Shot, makers of forbidden history. Search for Where Did Everyone Go on your favorite podcast platform.