A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

y no means at an end. Marlowe was due to appear in front of the Star Chamber, a kind of
Inquisition whose interests were political rather than religious.
Marlowe and his friends spent the day eating and drinking, and probably discussing the business of
spying - all four had been at some time employed by Walsingham. They may have walked along
the bank of the river, which would have been pleasantly green and open to the fields. Then they
went back to the room and did some more drinking. Around six in the evening, they decided to pay
the bill, and a dispute arose between Marlowe and a man called Ingram Frizer. According to the
evidence given at the inquest, Marlowe was lying on a bed, behind the other three, who were sitting
at the table. Marlowe grabbed Frizer’s dagger and slashed at his head, inflicting two wounds on the
scalp. The others then grappled with Marlowe to disarm him; Frizer got possession of the dagger,
and stabbed Marlowe above the right eye. It penetrated about two inches, and Marlowe died
instantly.
Many Marlowe scholars have raised doubts about this story. Marlowe’s wound would have been
consistent with a man who was attacked as he lay with his eyes closed. It would then have been
easy enough to inflict the scalp wounds on Frizer and concoct the story of the quarrel - Frizer was,
in fact, acquitted and taken back into Walsingham’s employment. And why should Marlowe have
been murdered? He was certainly something of a liability to his friends. Four years before, he had
been involved in a fight that ended in the murder of a man called Bradley. In the previous year he
had been arrested on a charge of coining - an extremely serious matter in the Elizabethan age, when
coining was regarded as petty treason, and the coiner could be hanged, drawn and quartered. He
escaped by pleading that it was merely an experiment ‘to see the goldsmith’s cunning’, and since
only one coin had been made, Burghley - Elizabeth’s chief adviser - decided to take a lenient view.
A week after Marlowe’s second arrest, an informer named William Baines prepared a document for
the queen ‘containing the opinion of Christopher Marlowe concerning his damnable opinions’,
which lists various heterodox opinions on religion - such as that Moses was a conjuror, that Jesus
deserved to be crucified, and that all Protestants were hypocritical asses. In another document,
Baines speaks of ‘the horrible blasphemies uttered by Christopher Marlowe’, and goes on to state
that ‘in every company he cometh he persuades men and women to Atheism, willing them not to be
afeard of bugbears and hobgoblins and utterly scorning both God and his ministers’.
Even fifty years earlier, such opinions would have been unthinkable. Frederick II, the ‘wonder of
the world’, is reported to have said that Jesus, Moses and Mahomet were imposters; but then, he
had the advantage of personal acquaintance with one particularly bigoted pope, as well as with
many Moslems. As Hugh Thomas pointed out in his Unfinished History of the World, he is the only
man reported to have held such views between 400 and 1400 A.D. Even men of classical culture -
like Petrarch - would never have dared to think such a thing. They took the existence of God and
the devil so completely for granted that it would have seemed a very poor gamble to harbour such
thoughts - after all, if hell really did exist, you might find yourself in it as a punishment for
doubting its existence. The undermining of the Catholic faith by Luther caused intellectual shock
waves all over Europe. It seemed that the unthinkable, the impossible, had happened. It was as if a
mountain had collapsed and revealed that it was made of painted cardboard. Even the efforts of
Ignatius Loyola and the Council of Trent made no real difference. Calvin and Bloody Mary could
go on burning as many heretics as they liked: Humpty Dumpty could never be put back together
again. We can see this new attitude of irreverence in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, where someone says:
‘Look, look, master, here comes two religious caterpillars.’