Kit Marlowe’s Death in Golden Grove

What did William Vaughan know, and how?

Mick Lobb / View of the mansion house - Gelli Aur Country Park. Wikimedia

Accounts of Marlowe’s death in the months and years immediately following 1593 were, in general, either cagey or inaccurate. Thomas Beard had him stabbed “in the London streets” by a man he was attacking over a “grudge” (1597); the self-defence aspect tallies with the inquest document though some details are clearly invented. Francis Meres had him stabbed at an unknown location by what sounds to modern ears like a gay waiter: “a bawdy Serving man, a rivall of his in his lewde love”. Thomas Nashe said cryptically that his friend “contemned” his life “in comparison of the liberty of speech,” giving no location or method as to the ending of it, but implying it happened as a result of Marlowe freely expressing his opinions.¹ This is not far off a modern understanding of the effects of the Baines Note, which Roy Kendall has described as “effectively the playwright’s death warrant.”²

Some seventy years later, when John Aubrey was writing the biographies gathered in Brief Lives, the rumours had become so garbled that the location had moved to modern-day Islington and the murderer was no less than Ben Jonson, who “killed Mr. Marlow, the Poet, on Bunhill, comeing from the Green-curtain play-house”. How this killing is meant to have happened is not given. Some of us might feel that metaphorically, Ben Jonson did indeed kill Marlowe, but I will leave that for another time.³ Perhaps Aubrey’s interviewee had muddled Marlowe with Gabriel Spencer, whom Ben Jonson most certainly killed.

Of all these accounts, we might give the account of Marlowe’s friend Nashe more weight than the opinion of outright enemies (Beard), strangers (Meres), and inaccurate gossipy biographers born 40 years after the incident (Aubrey). But none of these accounts accords very well with the official version, which lay undiscovered until 1925.

However, there is one account that does; a summary by William Vaughan in his book Golden Grove (1600).

"...it so hapned, that at Detford, a little village about three miles distant from London, as he meant to stab with his ponyard one named Ingram, that had invited him thither to a feast, and was then playing at tables, he quickely perceyving it, so avoyded the thrust, that withall drawing out his dagger for his defence, hee stabd this Marlow into the eye, in such sort, that his braines comming out at the daggers point, hee shortlie after dyed."

Only Vaughan’s account has the critical inquest detail that it was a stabbing into the eye. Only Vaughan’s account accurately names the location as Deptford. Only Vaughan’s account correctly names Marlowe’s killer, Ingram Frizer.⁴

Is Vaughan attempting to correct the record after the popular and sensationalized account in Thomas Beard’s In the Theatre of God’s Judgements? In other respects his use of the tale is similar; it appears in a section of the book where atheists are killed by God for their impiety. But his additional details given him extra authority.

So who was William Vaughan, and why was his account so accurate?

The title of the book in which this account appears, Golden Grove, helps us locate him; he was one of the Golden Grove Vaughans. The Vaughans were a huge Welsh family with strong royal connections. This particular branch of Vaughans had close ties to the Earls of Essex, the Devereux family. William’s father, Walter Vaughan, wore Essex livery and had been saved from ruin by the 1^st Earl of Essex, Walter Devereux, in 1585. William Vaughan’s older brother, John Vaughan (1577-1634), 1^st Earl of Carbury, served Robert Devereux, 2^nd Earl of Essex (and was ennobled by him).  This brother married Margarete Meyrick, daughter of Sir Gelly Meyrick, who was executed for his part in the Essex Rebellion in 1601.

The Essex theory of Marlowe’s death – put forward in the first edition of Charles Nicholl’s The Reckoning (1992) – was effectively destroyed by Paul Hammer in 1996.⁵ Even if you don’t agree with Hammer’s conclusions as to the circumstances of Marlowe’s demise, it is fair to say that the Essex faction was effectively absolved by his arguments. Nicholl removed the charge against Essex for The Reckoning’s second edition in 2002. And in fact there is some evidence underpinning the idea that Marlowe was on the pro-Essex side of things, which I will lay out in due course.

Though William Vaughan’s Essex allegiance is interesting, the answer to his exceptionally accurate knowledge is more likely to reside in his extended family’s connection to Eleanor Bull, owner of the house where the incident took place.

As discussed in the last post, contra this family tree, Eleanor Bull was actually Blanche Parry’s niece, not great-niece. Mrs Bull’s aunt Elizabeth was married to a Vaughan from the Tregunter branch; her aunt Jane possibly to another one. One of her first cousins, Joan, married a Bredwardine Vaughan. Another first cousin, Elizabeth, married a Porthamel Vaughan (and had a son, William Vaughan, who is not our author). So at least three branches of the Vaughan family are related by marriage to Eleanor Bull.

I have not yet discovered the connection between the Golden Grove Vaughans and the Vaughans on this simplified Parry family tree, but it nevertheless seems likely, given their prevalence, that it was a familial connection that led to William Vaughan of Golden Grove having the inside story on the incident at Deptford.⁶

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1. MCKERROW, R. B. (1958b) The Works of Thomas Nashe Vol 2, Oxford, Blackwell, p.265. Nashe’s use of the name Aretine for Marlowe is discussed at length by FEASEY, L. & FEASEY, E. (1949) ‘The Validity of the Baines Document’, Notes and Queries.

2. KENDALL, R. (2003) Christopher Marlowe and Richard Baines : Journeys through the Elizabethan Underground, Madison, N.J., Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, p.216.

3. M.L Stapleton gives a ‘respectable’ version in his interesting essay on Poetaster. STAPLETON, M. L. (2014), ‘Marlovian Residue in Jonson’s Poetaster’, EMLS, Special Issue 23: Christopher Marlowe: Identities, Traditions, Afterlives.

4. Marlowe’s 1893 century DNB entry carries what was then the scholarly consensus that his killer was named “Archer”

5. HAMMER, PAUL E. J. (1996) “A Reckoning Reframed: The ‘Murder’ of Christopher Marlowe Revisited.” English Literary Renaissance, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 225–42. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43447518.

6. I am committed to staying within accepted biographical bounds, but I find it fascinating that it is this same William Vaughan who, in 1602, writes to the Privy Council to physically describe someone in Spain who is using a version of Marlowe’s name as an alias.