4 - Marlowe and the Privy Council

Summary

WHAT THE PRIVY COUNCIL's CERTIFICATE SUGGESTS

The details of Marlowe's ‘good service’ to Elizabeth I (mentioned in the previous chapter) are unknown. A. L. Rowse and A. D. Wraight attach too much importance to the rumour that he went to Rheims, concluding that Francis Walsingham sent Marlowe to report on the goings-on at the semi-nary: almost all the other biographers are sceptical about this assumption. Marlowe's name appears nowhere in the diary of the English College. He may have taken an alias, but this would have been almost impossible to do and would have been dangerous, as scholars from Cambridge, including Samuel Kennet, Marlowe's former classmate at King's School in Canterbury, lived there at that time. Moreover, the president and staff of the seminary, who had learnt a lesson from the activities of Richard Baines and other dubious seminarians, were on the lookout for English spies.

In place of Walsingham, one of the leading candidates for Marlowe's patron has been Sir James Croft. According to the summary of the Privy Council minutes, the Councillors present on 29 June 1587 were Lord Burghley the Treasurer, John Whitgift the Archbishop of Canterbury, Chris-topher Hatton the Lord Chancellor, Henry Carey the Lord Chamberlain, and James Croft the Controller of the Household, all of whom urged the Cambridge University authorities to restore Marlowe's reputation. Austin K. Gray points out that these four of the five were pursuing a strategy that ran counter to Walsingham's belligerent foreign policy. Croft, who had concluded the peace with Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, was ‘the moving spirit behind it’, was steadfastly pro-Spanish, and was known to be in the pay of Philip II of Spain. Gray assumes that, ‘Inasmuch as Crofts and three of his colleagues in this policy endorse Marlowe's claim for an M.A., it is possible that he was employed on the peace-manoeuvres with Parma and went to the Netherlands’. Walsingham, who remained critical of the policy, ‘did not endorse the Privy Council document’.

This assumption sounds reasonable, but it contains several flaws. For one thing, it is doubtful whether Burghley, Whitgift, and Hatton aligned themselves with Croft's peace negotiations or coalesced into a single body against Walsingham. Burghley seems to have placed less confidence in the septuagenarian Croft than Elizabeth did.