A Fine Madness by Alan Judd (best classic books TXT) 📕

I have said. It is easy for the young to be extreme in belief or love or hate, but less common to be gentle, which he always was with me despite his fiery reputation.

He was gentle with Mary, too, very gentle. I would say theirs was a particular friendship. I am sure he was fond of her, as I know she was of him. And, though it pains me to say it, I daresay she would have married him if he had asked. He had the gift of intimacy, to which women responded. But he seemed no more uxorious, as he himself put it, than he was possessive. His warmth and generosity were the other side of the coin of impatience and impetuosity. He came to our wedding and gave Mary a poem he had written, with sentiments so tender that she wept. I cannot recall it and have not seen it these many years but I am sure she has it somewhere. Later, when our first child was still-born, he came and sat with Mary. God has not blessed us with children, as you perhaps know, sir. Two others were still-born later. But that was after Christopher was dead.

No, I did not see him killed. I was not there. But, yes, it is true that I viewed the place where he was killed, the room. That was some time afterwards when I was tasked by Sir Robert Cecil with investigating the events, discreetly. As for what happened and how it came about, I can tell you only what others said. Since you seem to know the facts well enough I doubt I can add greatly to your knowledge. But if His Majesty wishes…

Very well. Christopher was killed on the thirtieth day of May in the year of our Lord 1593. It was a bad time to be in London. The warm weather brought with it the plague that claimed, if I remember rightly, some two thousand souls. Food and produce became scarce and there was much discontent among the poorer parts, as well as among apprentices and journeymen. They also resented the great numbers of Protestant traders who had fled from Catholic oppression in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Unruly mobs made the streets more dangerous than usual and Mary and I would have left the city for our properties in Essex or Yorkshire but that I needed employment to pay for their upkeep, Mr Secretary being almost three years dead.

At Easter the tension in the streets was increased by anonymous placards and notices threatening violence to foreigners. It was claimed they took business from our traders and had more rights from the Queen than the ordinary English. The Privy Council was alarmed and a secret commission was formed to discover the anonymous writers and printers who were fuelling these flames. Thanks to Sir Robert Cecil, William Waad and I were appointed to it. This was welcome new work and I remember saying to Mary that it justified our decision to remain in London during the plague.

Then, early in May, our task was made more urgent by the Dutch Church libel, which I believe I have mentioned already? It was a ballad threatening violence against strangers, nailed one night to the wall of the Dutch Church yard in Broad Street. Forgotten now like most great matters, it was a mighty concern at the time and our commission was ordered to find the culprits forthwith. The first and most obvious clues pointed to Christopher because the ballad was signed ‘Tamburlaine’, which of course reminded everyone of his play. The second clue was lines about the Machiavellian machinations of Jewish merchants, which echoed another of his plays, The Jew of Malta, performed only the previous year. Added to this, it was said that Christopher himself praised the political writings of Machiavelli. He never did to me but I can believe it – he relished uncomfortable realities, especially the realities of power. Yet other lines in the ballad referred to the St Bartholomew’s Eve massacre in Paris in terms that echoed Christopher’s most recent play, The Massacre at Paris, played earlier that same year to great acclaim. It showed Protestants being massacred in their churches by Catholic mobs and the ballad threatened that English mobs would do the same to foreigners in their churches in London. The Privy Council promised a reward of a hundred crowns to anyone who informed on the writers. Anyone refusing to talk could be put to the torture in Bridewell without further authorisation.

In fact, Christopher himself never became a suspect since the commission accepted that he would not have signed the ballad Tamburlaine or referred to his own plays unless he wanted to be discovered, in which case he would have used his own name. One or two on the commission wanted him listed as suspect anyway but William Waad and I carried the argument.

However, as I have told you already, another play-maker, Thomas Kyd, was arrested and put to the torture after being denounced by Richard Baines. He was the son of a printer and therefore, it was argued, knew how to put such leaflets together. I am afraid I went along with this, on the words of others. But as his torture progressed and he continued protesting his innocence, while blaming Christopher for the heretical papers found among his own, William Waad and I grew ever more doubtful and eventually persuaded the commission to release him. But not before he had suffered grievously.

The papers Kyd attributed to Christopher were three pages of a theological disputation in which the divinity of Christ was denied, arguing that He was wholly human and not at all divine. This – I am sure you will know, sir – is the Unitarian or Arian heresy, arguments for which had been published, examined and confuted many years before. But in those fevered times they were seen as atheistical and dangerous. Kyd defended himself by saying that Christopher’s papers must have been