Not a Tavern. Not a Brawl.
Kit Marlowe, Mrs Bull, and the Queen's nursemaid.
The first thing anyone will tell you about Kit Marlowe is “he died in a tavern brawl.” Setting up this Substack, I was disappointed to find I was two months too late to get the domain kitmarlowe.subsstack.com, and even more disappointed to see it has been named “Kit Marlowe’s Tavern Brawl.” Keep spreading that misinformation, whydontcha?
‘Kit Marlowe died in a tavern brawl” is one thing you will never catch me saying.
Because it wasn’t a tavern.
And it’s extremely unlikely that it was a brawl.
Not a Tavern
On 30th of May, 1593, four gentlemen (which is to say, men of that elevated social standing), gathered in Deptford, then a small village outside London.1 Kit Marlowe, Ingram Frizer, Robert Poley, and Nicholas Skeres “met together in a room in the house of a certain Eleanor Bull, widow”. They spent more than eight hours at Mrs Bull’s house according to the inquest, from 10am until well into the evening (they ate twice; at 6pm they came in from the garden for supper). The Latin wording just ahead of Eleanor Bull’s name is clear: domum cuiusdam means ‘someone's house’. Not taberna, a tavern.
Eleanor Bull was not a tavern keeper. She was a widowed gentlewoman, and extremely well-connected to the Court. She was a niece of Blanche Parry, the Queen’s most trusted lady-in-waiting.
The House of Blanche Parry’s Niece
Blanche Parry served Elizabeth from birth (as a nursemaid) until Parry’s death in 1590, when the queen was 57. With the Queen’s own mother, Anne Boleyn, being executed when she was only two and a half, Parry occupied a highly trusted, almost maternal position. Parry was the official Keeper of Elizabeth’s jewels from two years before her accession and became Chief Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber in 1565, controlling access to the Queen. There is evidence it was normal practice for parliamentary bills to be sent to the queen via Blanche Parry.2
For those interested in Pembroke connections, Parry’s aunt, Lady Troy, who was first married to a man named James Whitney, married on his death, William Herbert of Troy Parva, the illegitimate son of the Earl of Pembroke. It was Lady Troy who introduced Parry into court life (Richardson 2009, 1).
Parry’s relationship with Lord Burghley (William Cecil) may look slight on her family tree: her third cousin (Olive Parry) married a cousin of Burghley’s. But in their mutual service to the Queen, they would have had almost daily contact, and they were close. Burghley called Blanche “my cousin”; she called him “kinsman” and “my friend”. He drew up her two wills and was the chief executor of the second and final one.3
Eleanor Bull, the owner of the house where Kit Marlowe is said to have died, was this woman’s niece.4 In Mistress Blanche: Queen Elizabeth I’s Confidante, Ruth Elizabeth Richardson says that Bull was Parry’s great-niece. In the Parry family tree, she has not inserted parents for Eleanor Bull, claiming only that she is the granddaughter of Blanche Parry’s sister Sybil, and another James Whitney (likely a close relative of Lady Troy’s first husband).
But the will of this James Whitney clearly states that Eleanor Bull is his daughter. The apparent generation slip is due to Sybil being the youngest of the eight surviving Parry siblings and (seemingly) only having Eleanor in her late thirties. Blanche Parry was Eleanor Bull’s aunt.
Eleanor was orphaned by the time she was 14. Her birth year is estimated as 1550 and her father’s will was probated on 14 November 1564. He had already remarried, meaning that Eleanor’s mother must have predeceased him. Parry may well have taken a special interest in her orphaned niece, who would (until her marriage to Richard Bull in 1571) have needed support.
Eleanor Bull’s court connections have been known for more than twenty years. Charles Nicholl, in The Reckoning, described Mrs Bull’s House as a kind of government safe house; a stopping off point for intelligence agents travelling to and from the continent. Robert Poley appears to have arrived at the meeting from the continent; he was carrying letters from the Hague for the Queen, according to his payment notice the next month. So why do people continue to insist that Kit Marlowe died in a “tavern brawl”?
Not a Tavern Brawl
The main reason is habit. Tradition, even. “Tavern brawl” is a well-worn phrase that has been attached to Marlowe’s name for many decades. And it begins with one man’s reasonable but uninformed assumption.
The word “brawl” was seemingly first connected to Marlowe in his entry in the 1893 Dictionary of National Biography (DNB), written by Sir Sidney Lee. It’s an excellent biography for the time, encompassing all that was known about Marlowe’s life some 130 years ago. But it would be more than a quarter of a century before Leslie Hotson would find the inquest document that gives the full official account. Therefore Sidney Lee weighs up the various contemporary accounts of Marlowe’s death, not knowing which would prove accurate.
Francis Meres claimed in Palladis Tamia (1598) that Marlowe was
“stabbed to death by a bawdy serving-man, a rival of his in his lewd love.”
No setting is given, but “bawdy serving-man” might suggest a drinking establishment. Thomas Beard describes the self-defence move we find in the inquest fairly accurately but gives the setting as “the London streets” and has Marlowe attempting to stab his unnamed killer over a “grudge”. William Vaughan’s account in Golden Grove (1600) is the only one that tallies with the account that would later turn up in the inquest document, saying that it happened in Deptford and involved “one called Ingram”.5
Sir Sidney Lee doesn’t suggest the setting, but he assumes the condition, as well as the nature of the attack: the phrase he invents is “drunken brawl”.
Note that the scholars of 1893 do not know that Marlowe answered the warrant issued on May 18th and that he was reporting daily “to their Lordships” (the Privy Council) from May 20th. They do not have his killer’s name correctly (though Halliwell-Phillipps is on the scent).
Sir Sidney Lee says “drunken brawl,” but he doesn’t know whether the men involved were drunk. Did he get this from William Vaughan’s detail that Ingram Frizer had invited Marlowe for “a feast”? Or from an assumption that this kind of male-on-male violence is usually fuelled by alcohol? Whatever his thinking, his phrase “drunken brawl” has become “tavern brawl” and this misinformation has become very hard to dislodge.
Leslie Hotson was born two years after Marlowe’s DNB entry was published. It was he who discovered the inquest document in 1925, and once it was discovered, the location in Deptford Strand (as first given by William Vaughan in 1600) became clear: Mrs Bull’s House. Because “tavern brawl” had become established over the previous 30 years, most people went on assuming that the location was a tavern, making Mrs Bull a tavern keeper. But rather than solve all the mysteries of Marlowe’s demise, the discovery of the inquest document raised more questions.
Not a Brawl
The first problem was that the precise nature of the killing did not ring true. Brain surgeons said the injuries described would not cause death in the manner described. Attempts to act out the movements described in the document failed. Early objections to the plausibility of the inquest’s version of events were voiced by Eugenie de Kalb (1925), Samuel Tannenbaum (1926) and Ethel Seaton (1929). Marlowe’s biographer John Bakeless considered the document suspect (1942: 182-4). U.M. Ellis-Fermor noted among the playwright’s biographers ‘the prevailing impression that he was deliberately murdered’ (1927: 8), a view echoed sixty years later by William Empson (Empson and Jones, 1987: 63).
More recently, Charles Nicholl (1992) and David Riggs (2004) have joined those who believe the inquest document is a cover-up for Marlowe’s assassination. Those inclined to trust the official account and who are suspicious of the motives of those who wish to (in the words of Frederick S. Boas) “reverse the verdict in posterity’s court of appeal” include A.L.Rowse, Constance Brown Kuriyama and J. A. Downie. Nevertheless, a significant number of scholars have concluded that the verdict into Marlowe’s death was false, and that he was murdered rather than killed in self-defence.
Better Intelligence
The death has looked increasingly suspicious during the last thirty years, with the exploration of Marlowe's work as an intelligencer.6 It is now widely accepted, even by sceptics such as Downie, that Marlowe worked for the Elizabethan secret service from 1586/7, and that the problems he faced in 1592/3, including the Baines Note, the Dutch Church Libel and his arrest warrant, stemmed directly from his intelligence work.
The inquest document rests on the testimonies of three people fairly described as professional liars. Robert Poley was an intelligence agent, the ‘chief actor’ in the Babington Plot. Ben Jonson’s former tutor William Camden describes him as “very expert in dissembling”.7 Poley is on record as saying he has no objection to lying, even to the Secretary of State, Sir Francis Walsingham:
“I will swear and forswear myself, rather than I will accuse myself to do me any harm”.8
He was so adept a liar that Anthony Babington could not believe after his own arrest that it was Poley who had deceived him.9
Nicholas Skeres was an active intelligence agent during the Babington Plot. Whether he was still an agent in 1593 is uncertain (due to the secret nature of the business). But his deceptive skills were not in doubt. He and Ingram Frizer, Marlowe’s purported killer (and the gentleman servant of Marlowe’s patron, also a former intelligencer) were prosecuted as con men. Not long after the Deptford incident, both were in court answering a charge of trying to trick another gentleman out of his inheritance.10
There is no record of any other witnesses. Kuriyama suggests that others must have confirmed or provided elements of the coroner’s report, such as how the men spent their time, and their demeanour during the day. That malicious words were “publicly exchanged” also implies that other witnesses besides Poley, Frizer and Skeres overheard the fatal argument – though the argument may have been staged. Though Kuriyama surmises it is probable that “someone else was in the room when the attack occurred”, there is no evidence of this.11 The only confirmed witnesses are three men who specialized in deception.
Since “brawl” is the official version, and the official version is severely in doubt, this phrase, too, should be dropped for a more open verdict. You might fairly say that rather than “dying in a tavern brawl” Marlowe’s life “ended in mysterious circumstances in a probable government safe house” but I appreciate that is neither pithy nor satisfying. People tend to want facts, something that looks like certainty, rather than “we don’t really know.”
But we don’t really know. There are theories, and there is evidence we can rally to support our positions. There are many more complexities which I will explore bit by bit, including the possibility that the whole thing was a ruse, a set-up for Marlowe’s escape. Many have been here before me: I recommend Peter Farey’s comprehensive and prizewinning article on the subject.
In the meantime, let’s get rid of this “tavern” nonsense. Let’s correct that misconception whenever we hear it. And “brawl” too, if we can. Unless you think Poley, Skeres and Frizer should be trusted.
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In the Elizabethan era, “gentleman” denoted a status in the class system; that of a man “who is entitled to bear arms, though not ranking among the nobility” (Oxford English Dictionary, df. 1.a). One might be born a gentleman, earn it through gaining a Masters degree (Marlowe), or when of sufficient social standing, apply for a coat of arms (Shakespeare).
I am deeply grateful to Rachel Blackmore, author of Costanza, for this new information. Rachel is currently researching a novel about Eleanor Bull.
The reason for Vaughan’s accurate account will be explored in my next post.
Kendall, Roy, Christopher Marlowe and Richard Baines: Journeys through the Elizabethan Underground (2003) is particularly enlightening; The Reckoning is the other strong source. Park Honan’s Christopher Marlowe, Poet and Spy is something of a rehash.
Camden, William, Annales. The true and royall history of the famous empresse Elizabeth, queene of England, France and Ireland &c (1625), p.134. Ben Jonson knew about Poley too.
Nicholl, Charles, The Reckoning (1992), p.33
BL Lansdowne MS 49, f.25. For transcript see Nicholl (2002) p. 187.
Riggs, David, The World of Christopher Marlowe (2004), p.154 & p.133.
Kuriyama, Constance B, Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life (2002) pp. 138-140.
Fantastic Ros- I wasn’t aware to that depth of Eleanor’s family connections other than she was a niece of Blanche Parry (who left her 100 pounds in her will) and was somehow related to Burghley. (Her deceased husband had a job in government too but I don’t recall the details). My other thought was that given the Flushing incident the previous year Marlowe was likely STILL an ‘intelligencer’ in 1593 and all these men were therefore colleagues or ex colleagues. I greatly admire Charles Nichols as an author but reading his attempts to hammer the square peg of the facts and logical deductions stemming from those facts into the round hole of his Stratfordian primacy bias is extremely painful.
Next year is the centenary of Dr Hotson's discovery of the inquest report. Are we having a cake? It is 100 YEARS since the scurrilous 'tavern brawl' scenario was definitively put to rest by a detailed legal document. Oh, hang on. No it wasn't And it really pisses me off.